The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
compelled her to draw near and penetrate a region in which, gazing
thitherward questioningly from afar, she had divined the residence of
stern and intimate miseries, inalienable, unremittent, taking their
rise in an almost alarming distance of time and fundamentally of cause.
"You see, in plain English," he said, "I look at all such unhappy
beings from the inside, not, as the rest of you do, merely from the
out. I belong to them and they to me. It is not an altogether
flattering connection. Only recently, I am afraid, have I had the
honesty to acknowledge it! But, having once done so, it seems only
reasonable to look up the members of my unlucky family and take care of
them, and if possible put them through--not on the lines of a
charitable institution, which must inevitably be a rather mechanical,
stepmother kind of arrangement at best, but on the lines of family
affection, of personal friendship."
He paused a moment.
"Does that strike you as too unpractical and fantastic, contrary to
sound, philanthropic principle and practice?"
Honoria shook her head.
"It is based on a higher law than any of modern organised
philanthropy," she said, and her voice had a queer unsteadiness in it.
"It goes back to the Gospels--to the matter of giving your life for
your friend."
As she spoke, Honoria rose. She went across and stood at the window.
Furtively she dabbed her pocket handkerchief against her eyes.
"Well, after all, one must give one's life for something or other, you
know," Dickie remarked, "or the days would become a little too
intolerably dull, and then one might be tempted to make short work of
life altogether."
Honoria returned to her chair and sat down--this time not on the arm of
it but in ordinary conventional fashion. She faced Richard. He observed
that her eyelids were slightly swollen, slightly red. This gave an
extraordinary effect of gentleness to her expression.
"How do you find them--the members of your sad family?" she asked.
"Oh, in all sorts of ways and of places! Knott swears it is contrary to
reason, an interfering with the beneficent tendency of nature to kill
off the unfit. Yet he works like a horse to help me--even talks of
giving up his practice and moving to Farley Row, so as to be near the
headquarters of my establishment. The lease of a rather charming, old
house there fell in this year. Fortunately the tenant did not want to
renew, so I am having that made comfortable for them."
Richard smiled. A greater sense of well-being animated him. Out of the
world she had come, back into the world she would go again. Meanwhile
she was nobly fair to look upon, she was pure of heart, intercourse
with her made for the justification of high purposes and unselfish
experiment--so he thought.
"I am growing as keen on bagging a fine cripple as another man might on
bagging a fine tiger," he said. "The whole matter at bottom, I suspect,
turns on the instinct of sport.--Only the week before last I acquired a
rather terribly superior specimen. A lad of eighteen, a factory hand in
Westchurch. He was caught by some loose gearing and swept into the
machinery. What is left of him--if it survives, which it had much
better not, and I can't help hoping it will, he is such a plucky,
sweet-natured fellow--will require a nurse for the rest of its life. So
I am pushing on the work at Farley, that the home may be ready when we
get him out of hospital.--By the way, I must go to-morrow and stir up
the workmen. Do you care to come and see it all, if the afternoon is
fine and not too hot?"
And Honoria agreed. Nor did she shrink when Richard slipping out of his
chair picked up his crutches.--"I suppose it is about time to get ready
for the Grimshott function," he said.--She walked beside him to the
door, opened it and passed into the neutral-tinted, tapestry-hung
dining-room. There the young man waited a moment. He looked not at her
but straight before him.
"Honoria," he said suddenly, almost harshly, "you and Helen de
Vallorbes used to be great friends. For more than a year I have held no
communication with her, except through my lawyers. Can you tell me
anything about her?"
Miss St. Quentin hesitated.
"Nothing very direct--I heard from de Vallorbes about three months ago.
I don't think I am faithless--indeed I held on to her as long as I
could, Richard! I am not squeamish, and then I always prefer to stand
by the woman. But whatever de Vallorbes may have been, he pulled
himself together rather admirably from the time he went into the army.
He wanted to keep straight and to live respectably. And--I hate to say
so--but she treated him a little too flagrantly. And then--and
then----"
Honoria put her hands over her eyes and shook back her head angrily.
"It wasn't one man, Richard."
Dickie went white to the lips.
"I know that," he said.
He moved forward a few steps.
"Who is it now? Destournelle?"
"Oh no--no"--Honoria said. "Some Russian--from the extreme east--Kazan,
I think--prince, millionaire, drunken savage. But he adores her. He
squanders money upon her, surrounds her with barbaric state. This is de
Vallorbes' version of the affair. The scandal is open and notorious.
But she and her prince together have great power. Something will
eventually be arranged in the way of a marriage. She will not come
back."
CHAPTER IX
TELLING HOW LUDOVIC QUAYLE AND HONORIA ST. QUENTIN WATCHED THE TROUT
RISE IN THE LONG WATER
Some hour and a half later Miss St. Quentin passed down the flight of
stone steps, leading from the southern end of the terrace to the grass
slopes of the park. Arrived at the lowest step she gathered the skirt
of her dress up over one arm, thereby securing greater freedom of
movement, and displaying a straight length of pink and white petticoat.
Thus prepared she fared forth over the still smoking turf. The storm
had passed, but the atmosphere remained thick and humid. A certain
opulence of colour obtained in the landscape. The herbs in the grass,
wild-thyme, wild-balm, and star-flowered camomile, smelt strongly
aromatic as she trod them under foot, while the beds of bracken, dried
and yellowed by the drought, gave off a sharp, woody scent.
Usually, when thus alone and in contact with nature, such matters
claimed Honoria's whole attention, ministering to her love of
earth-lore and of Mother Earth--producing in her silent worship of
those primitive deities who at once preside over and inhabit the
waste-land and the tilth, the untamed forest and the pastures where
heavy-uddered, sweet-breathed cows lie in the deep, meadow grass, the
garden ground, all pleasant, orchard places, and the broad promise of
the waving crops. But this afternoon, although the colour, odour,
warmth, and all the many voices praising the refreshment of the rain,
were sensibly present to her, Honoria's thought failed to be engrossed
by them. For she was in process of worshipping younger and more
compassionate deities, sadder, because more human, ones, whose office
lies not with Nature in her eternal repose and fecundity but with man
in his eternal failure and unrest. Not august Ceres, giver of the
golden harvest-fields, or fierce Cybele, the goddess of the many paps,
but spare, brown-habited St. Francis, serving his brethren with
bleeding hands and feet, held empire over her meditations.--In
imagination she saw--saw with only too lively realisation of
detail--that eighteen-year-old lad, in the factory at Westchurch, drawn
up--all the unspent hopes and pleasures of his young manhood active in
him--by the loose gearing, into the merciless vortex of revolving
wheels, and there, without preparation, without pause of warning,
without any dignity of shouting multitude, of arena or of stake,
martyred--converted in a few horrible seconds from health and wholeness
into a formless lump of human waste. And up and down the land, as she
reflected, wherever the great systems of trade and labour, which build
up the mechanical and material prosperity of our day, go forward,
kindred things happen--let alone question of all those persons who are
born into the world already injured, or bearing the seeds of foul and
disfiguring diseases in their organs and their blood.--Verily Richard
Calmady's sad family was a rather terribly large one, well calculated
to maintain its numbers, even to increase! For neither the age of human
sacrifice nor of cannibalism is really over, nor is the practice of
these limited to savage peoples in distant lands or far-away isles of
the sea. They form the basis actually, though in differing of outward
aspect, of all existing civilisations, just as they formed the basis of
all past civilisations--a basis, moreover, perpetually recemented and
relaid. And, as she considered--being courageous and fair-minded--it
was inevitable that this should be so, unthinkable that it should be
otherwise, since it made, at least indirectly, for the prosperity of
the majority and development of the race.--Considering which--the
apparently cruel paradox and irony of it--Honoria swung down past the
scattered hawthorns, thick with ruddy fruit, across the fragrant herbs
and short, sweet turf, through the straggling fern-brakes, which
impeded her progress, plucking at her skirts, careless of the rich
colour and ample beauty outspread before her.
But soon, as a bird after describing far-ranging circles drops at last
upon the from at-first-determined spot, so her thought settled down,
with relief yet in a way unwillingly--and that not out of any lingering
repulsion, but rather from a certain proud modesty and self-respect--upon
Richard Calmady himself. Not only did he apprehend all this, far more
clearly, more intimately, than she could.--Had he not spoken of the
advantages of a certain blackness?--Honoria's vision became somewhat
indistinct.--But he set out to deal with it in a practical manner. And
in this connection she began to understand how it had come about that
through years of ingratitude and neglect, and of loose-living, on his
part, his mother could still remain patient, could endure, and
supremely love. For behind the obvious, the almost coarse, tragedy and
consequent appeal of the man's deformity, there was the further appeal
of something very admirable in the man himself, for the emergence and
due blossoming of which it would be very possible, very worth while,
for whoso once recognised its existence to wait. John Knott had been
right in his estimate of Richard. Ludovic Quayle had been right. Lady
Calmady had been right.--Honoria had begun to believe that, even before
Richard had come forth from his self-imposed seclusion, in the spring.
The belief had increased during her subsequent intercourse with him,
had been reinforced during her few days' visit at Whitsuntide. Yet,
until now, she had never freely and openly admitted it. She wondered
why? And then hastily she put such wondering from her. Again a certain
proud modesty held her back. She did not want to think of herself in
relation to him, or of him in relation to herself. She wished, for a
reason she refused to define, to exclude the personal element. Doing
that she could permit herself larger latitude of admiration. His
acknowledgment of fellowship with, and obligation of friendship
towards, all victims of physical disaster kindled her enthusiasm. She
perceived that it was contrary to the man's natural arrogance, natural
revolt against the humiliation put upon him--a rather superb
overcoming, in short, of nature by grace. Nor was it the outgrowth of
any morbid or sentimental emotion. It had no tincture of the hysteric
element. It took its rise in conviction and in experiment. For Richard,
though still young, struck her as remarkably mature. He had lived his
life, sinned his sins--she did not doubt that--suffered unusual