The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
westerly wind in her face, went to steady her nerves, and restore the
self-possession, courage of judgment, and clearness of thought, which
had been lacking to her during the past twenty-four hours. Nevertheless
she rode as through a but-newly-discovered country, familiar objects
displaying alien aspects, familiar phrases assuming unlooked-for
significance, a something challenging and fateful meeting her
everywhere. The whole future seemed to hang in the balance, and she
waited, dreading yet longing, to see the scale turn.
This afternoon the harvesters were carrying the corn. Red-painted
waggons, drawn by sleek, heavy-made cart-horses, crawled slowly across
the blond stubble. It was pretty to see the rusty-gold sheaves tossed
up from the shining prongs of the pitchforks on to the mountainous
load. Honoria and Richard watched this, a little minute, from the
grass-ride bordering the roadway beneath the elms. Next came the
high-lying moorland, beyond the lodges. The fine-leaved heath was thick
with red-purple blossom. Patches of dusky heather were frosted with
dainty pink. Spikes of genista and beds of needle-furze showed sharply
yellow, vividly green, and a fringe of blue campanula, with frail,
quivering bells, outlined all open spaces. The face of the land had
been washed by the rain. It shone with an inimitable cleanliness, as
though consciously happy in relief from all soil of dust. And it was
here, the open country stretching afar on all sides, that Dickie began
talking, not, as at first, in desultory fashion, but of matters nearly
pertaining and closely interesting to himself.
"You know," he said, as they walked the horses quietly, neck to neck,
along the moorland road, "I don't go in for system-making or for
reforms on any big scale. That doesn't come within my province. I must
leave that to politicians and to men who are in the push of the world.
I admire it. I rejoice in the hot-headed, narrow-brained, whole-hearted
agitator, who believes that his system adopted, his reform carried
through, the whole show will instantly be put straight. Such faith is
very touching."
"And the reformer has sometimes done some little good after all,"
Honoria commented.
"Of course he has!" Dickie agreed. "Only, as a rule, poor dear, he
can't be contented but that his special reform should be the final one,
that his system should be the universal panacea. And in point of fact
no reform is final this side of death, and no panacea is universal,
save that which the Maker of the Universe chooses to work out--is
working out now, if we could any way grasp it--through the slow course
of unnumbered ages. Let the reformer do all he can, but don't let him
turn sour because his pet reform, his pet system, sinks away and is
swallowed up in the great sea of things--sea of human progress, if you
like. Every system is bound to prove too small, every reform
ludicrously inadequate--be it never so radical--because material
conditions are perpetually changing, while man in his mental, emotional
and physical aspects remains always precisely the same."
They passed from the breezy upland into the high-banked lane which,
leading downwards, joins the great London and Portsmouth Road just
beyond Farley Row.
"And--and that is where I come in!" Richard said, turning a little
in the saddle and smiling sweet-temperedly, yet with a suggestion
of self-mockery, upon his companion. "Just because, in essential
respects, mankind remains--notwithstanding modifications of his
environment--substantially the same, from the era of the Pentateuch
to the era of the Rougon-Macquarts, there must always be a lot of
wreckage, of waste, and refuse humanity. The inauguration of each
new system, each new reform--religious, political, educational,
economic--practically they're all in the same boat--let alone the
inevitable breakdown or petering out of each, necessarily produces a
fresh crop of such waste and refuse material. And in that a man like
myself, who does not aspire to cure or to construct, but merely to
alleviate and to pick up the pieces, finds his chance."
And Honoria listened musing--approved, enthusiasm gaining her; yet
protested--since, even while she admired, she rebelled a little on his
account, and for his sake.
"But it is rather a hard life, surely Richard," she said, "which you
propose to yourself? Always the pieces, the thing broken and spoiled,
never the thing in its beauty, full of promise, and whole!"
"It is less hard for me than for most," he answered, "or should be so.
After all, I am to the manner born--a bit of human wreckage myself,
with which, but for the accident of wealth, things would have gone
pretty badly. I used to be horribly scared sometimes, as a small boy,
thinking to what uses I might be put if the kindly, golden rampart ever
gave."
He became silent. As for Honoria, she had neither courage to look at,
nor answer, him just then.
"And you see, I'm absolutely free," he added presently.--"I am alone,
always shall be so. If the life is hard, I ask no one to share it, so I
may make it what I like."
"Oh! no, no--you misunderstand, Richard! I didn't mean that," Honoria
cried quickly, half under her breath.
Again he looked at her, smiling.
"Didn't you? All the kinder of you," he said.
Thereupon regret, almost intolerable in its poignancy, invaded Miss St.
Quentin that she would have to go away, to go back to the world and all
the foolish obtaining fashions of it; that she would have to take that
preeminently well-cushioned and luxurious winter's journey to Cairo.
She longed inexpressibly to remain here, to assist in these experiments
made in the name of Holy Charity. She longed inexpressibly to---- And
there Honoria paused, even in thought. Yet she glanced at the young man
riding beside her--at the handsome profile, still and set in outline,
the suggestion--it was no more--of a scar running downward across the
left cheek, at the well-made, upright, broad-shouldered figure, and
then at the saddle, peaked, back and front, with oddly-shaped
appendages to it resembling old-fashioned holsters.--And, as yesterday
upon the bridge, the ache of a pain at once sweet and terrible laid
hold of her, making her queerly faint. The single street, sun-covered,
sleepy, empty save for a brewer's dray and tax-cart or two standing
before the solid Georgian portals of the White Lion Inn, for a
straggling tail of children bearing home small shoppings and jugs of
supper beer, for a flock of gray geese proceeding with suggestively
self-righteous demeanour along the very middle of the roadway and
lowering long necks to hiss defiance at the passer-by, and for an old
black retriever dozing peacefully beneath one of the rustling sycamores
in front of Josiah Appleyard, the saddler's shop--all these, as she
looked at them, became uncertain in outline, reeled before Honoria's
eyes. For the moment she experienced a difficulty in keeping steady in
the saddle. But the horses still walked quietly, neck to neck, their
shadows, and those of their riders growing longer, narrower,
outstretched before them as the sun declined in the west. All the
future hung in the balance, but the scale had not turned as yet.
Then Richard's voice took up its parable again.
"Perhaps it's a rather fraudulently comfortable doctrine, yet it does
strike one that the justification of disaster, in all its many forms,
is the opportunity it affords the individualist. He may use it for
self-aggrandisement, or for self-devotion--though I rather shy at so
showy a word as that last. However, the use he makes of it isn't the
point. What is the point, to my mind at least, is this--though it
doesn't sound magnificent, it hardly indeed sounds cleanly--that
whatever trade fails, whatever profession, thanks to the advance of
civilisation, becomes obsolete, that of the man with the dust-cart, of
the scavenger, of the sweeper, won't."
Once more Richard smiled upon his companion charmingly, yet with
something of self-mockery.
"And so, you see, having knocked about enough to grow careless of
niceties of prejudice, and to acquire immense admiration for any
vocation which promises permanence, I join hands with the dustman. In
the light of science, and in that of religion alike, nothing really is
common or unclean. And then--then, if you are outcasted in any case as
some of us are, it's a little too transparently cheap to be afraid of
soiling----" He broke off.--"Away there to the left, Honoria," he said.
"You see the house? The yellow-washed one, with the gables and tiled
roofs--there, back on the slope.--Bagshaw, the Bond Street poulterer,
had it for years. His lease ran out in the spring, and happily he
didn't care to renew. Had bought himself an up-to-date, villa residence
somewhere in the suburbs--Chistlehurst, I believe. So I took the place
over. It will do for a beginning--the small end of the wedge of my
scavenger's business. There are over five acres of garden and orchard,
and plenty of rooms on each floor, which gives good range for the
disabled to move about in--and the stairs, only one flight, are easy.
One has to think of these details. And--well, the house commands a
magnificent view of Clerke's Green, and the geese on it, than which
nothing clearly can be more exciting!"
The groom rode forward and opened the gate. Before the square,
outstanding porch Richard drew up.
"I should like to come in with you," he said. "But you see it's rather
a business getting off one's horse, and I can't very well manage the
stairs. So I'll wait about till you are ready. Don't hurry. I want you
to see all the arrangements, if it doesn't bore you, and make
suggestions. The carpenters are there, doing overtime. They'll let you
through if the caretaker's out."
Thus admonished, Miss St. Quentin dismounted and made her way into the
house. A broad passage led straight through it. The open door at the
farther end disclosed a vista of box-edged paths and flower-borders
where, in gay ranks, stood tall sunflowers, hollyhocks,
Michaelmas-daisies, and such like. Beyond was orchard, the round-headed
apple-trees, bright with polished fruit, rising from a carpet of grass.
The rooms, to left and right of the passage, were pleasantly sun-warmed
and mellow of aspect, the ceilings of them crossed by massive beams.
Honoria visited them, dutifully observant. She encountered the head
carpenter, an acquaintance and ally during those four years so great
part of which she had spent at Brockhurst. She talked with him, making
inquiries concerning wife, children and trade, incident to such a
meeting, her face very serious all the while, the skirt of her habit
gathered up in one hand, her gait a trifle stiff and measured owing to
her high riding-boots. But, though she acquitted herself in all
kindliness of conversation, though she conscientiously inspected each
separate apartment, and noted the cheerful comeliness of orchard and
garden, it must be owned all these remained singularly distant from her
actual emotion and thought. She was glad to be alone. She was glad to
be away from Richard Calmady, though zealously obedient to his wishes
in respect of this inspection. For his presence became increasingly
oppressive from the intensity of feeling it produced in her, and which
she was, at present, powerless to direct towards any reasonable and
definite end. This rendered her tongue-tied, and, as she fancied,
stupid. Her unreadiness mortified her. She, usually indifferent enough
to the impression she produced on others, was sensible of a keen desire
to appear at her best. She did in fact, so she believed, appear at her
worst, slow of understanding and of sympathy.--But then all the future
hung in the balance. The scale delayed to turn. And the strain of