The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
than not to possess oneself of it at all. If you are really hungry, you
know, you learn not to be too nice as to the ways and means of
acquiring sustenance."
"And you were really hungry?" Richard found himself saying, as he
feared rather blunderingly. But he wanted, so anxiously, the present to
remain the present--wanted to continue to watch her, and to hear her.
She turned his head. How then could he behave otherwise than with
stupidity?
"La! la!" she replied, laughing indulgently, and thereby enchanting him
still more; "what must your experience of life be if you suppose one
gets a full meal of divine loveliness every day in the week? For my
part, I am not troubled with any such celestial plethora, believe me. I
was ravening, I tell you, positively ravening."
"And your hunger is satisfied?" he asked, still as he feared
blunderingly, and with a queer inward movement of envy towards the wide
view she looked upon, and the glory of the sunset which dared touch her
hair.
"Satisfied?" she exclaimed. "Is one's hunger for the divinely lovely
ever satisfied? Just now I have stayed mine with the merest
mouthful--as one snatches a sandwich at a railway _buffet_. And
directly I must get into the train again, and go on with my noisy,
dusty, stifling journey. Ah! you are very fortunate to live in this
adorable and restful place; to see it in all its fine drama of changing
colour and season, year in and year out."
She dropped the end of her cigarette into a little sandy depression in
the turf, and drawing aside her silken skirts, trod out the red heart
of it neatly with her daintily shod foot. Just then the other lady, she
of the gray-green gown, came from within the shelter of the Temple, and
stood between the white pillars of the colonnade. Dick's grasp
tightened on the handle of the hunting-crop lying across his thigh.
"Am I so very fortunate?" he said, almost involuntarily.
His companion looked up, smiling, her eyes dwelling on his with a
strange effect of intimacy, wholly flattering, wholly, indeed,
distracting to common sense.
"Yes--you are fortunate," she answered, speaking slowly. "And some day,
Richard, I think you will come to know that."
Sudden comprehension, sudden recognition struck the young man--very
literally struck him a most unwelcome buffet.
"Oh! I see--I understand," he exclaimed, "you are my cousin--you are
Madame de Vallorbes."
For a moment his sense of disappointment was so keen, he was minded to
turn his horse and incontinently ride away. The misery of that episode
of his boyhood set its tooth very shrewdly in him even yet. It seemed
the most cruelly ironical turn of fate that this entrancing, this
altogether worshipful, stranger should prove to be one and the same as
the little dancer of long ago with blush-roses in her hat.
But though the colour deepened somewhat in the lady's cheeks, she did
not lower her eyes, nor did they lose their smiling importunity. A
little ardour, indeed, heightened the charm of her manner--an ardour of
delicate battle, as of one whose honour has been ever so slightly
touched.
"Certainly, I am your cousin, Helen de Vallorbes," she replied. "You
are not sorry for that, Richard, are you? At this moment I am
increasingly glad to be your cousin--though not perhaps so very
particularly glad to be Helen de Vallorbes." Then she added,
rapidly:--"We are here in England for a few weeks, my father and I.
Troublesome, distressing things had happened, and he perceived I needed
change. He brought me away. London proved a desert and a dust-heap.
There was no solace, no distraction from unpleasant thoughts to be
found there. So we telegraphed and came down last night to the kind
people at Newlands. Naturally my father wanted to see Aunt Katherine. I
desired to see her also, well understood, for I have heard so much of
her talent and her great beauty. But I knew they--the brother and
sister--would wish to speak of the past and find their happiness in
being very sad about it all. At our age--yours and mine--the sadness of
any past one may possess is a good deal too present with one still to
afford in the least consoling subject of conversation." Madame de
Vallorbes spoke with a certain vehemence. "Don't you think so,
Richard?" she demanded.
And Richard could but answer, very much out of his heart, that he did
indeed think so.
She observed him a moment, and then her tone softened. The colour
deepened yet more in her cheeks. She became at once prettily
embarrassed and prettily sincere.
"And then, to tell you quite the truth, I am a trifle afraid of Aunt
Katherine. I have always wanted to come here and to see you, but--it is
an absurd confession to make--I have been scared at the idea of meeting
Aunt Katherine, and that is the real reason why I made Honoria take
refuge with me in this lovely park of yours, instead of going on with
my father to the house. There is a legend, a thrice accursed legend in
our family,--my mother employs it even yet when she proposes to reduce
me to salutary depths of humility--that I came,--she brought me--here,
once, long ago, when I was a child, and that I was fiendishly naughty,
that I behaved odiously."
Madame de Vallorbes stretched out her hands, presenting the rosy palms
of them in the most engaging manner.
"But it can't--it can't be true," she protested. "Why, in the name of
all folly, let alone all common decency, should I behave odiously? It
is not like me. I love to please, I love to have people care for me.
And so I cannot but believe the legend is the malign invention of some
nurse or governess, whom, poor woman, I probably plagued handsomely
enough in her day, and who, in revenge, rigged up this detestable
scarecrow with which to frighten me. Then, moreover, I have not the
faintest recollection of the affair, and one generally has an only too
vivid memory of one's own sins. Surely, _mon cher cousin_, surely I am
innocent in your sight, as in my own? You do not remember the episode
either?"
Whereupon Dickie, looking down at her,--and still enchanted
notwithstanding his so sinister discovery, being first, and always a
gentleman, and secondly, though as yet unconsciously, a
lover,--proceeded to lie roundly. Lied, too, with a notable
cheerfulness, born as cheerfulness needs must be of every act of faith
and high generosity.
"I remember it? Of course not," he said. "So let the legend be
abolished henceforth and forevermore. Here, once and for all, Cousin
Helen, we combine to pull down and bury that scarecrow."
Madame de Vallorbes clapped her hands softly and laughed. And her
laughter, having the merit of being perfectly genuine--for the young
man very really pleased her fancy--was likewise very infectious.
Richard found himself laughing too, he knew not why, save that he was
glad of heart.
"And now that matter being satisfactorily disposed of, you will come to
Brockhurst often," he said. It seemed to him that a certain joyous
equality had been established between him and his divinity, both by his
repudiation of all former knowledge of her, and by their moment of
laughter. He began fearlessly to make her little offerings. "Do you
care about riding? I am afraid there is not much to amuse you at
Brockhurst; but there are always plenty of horses."
"And I adore horses."
"Do you care about racing? We've some rather pretty things in training
this year. I should like awfully to show them to you."
But here the conversation, just setting forth in so agreeable a
fashion, suffered interruption. For the other lady, she of the
gray-green gown, sauntered forward from the Temple. The carriage of her
head was gallant, her air nonchalant as ever; but her expression was
grave, and the delicate thinness of her face appeared a trifle
accentuated. She came up to Madame de Vallorbes and passed her hand
through the latter's arm caressingly.
"You know, really, Helen, we ought to go, if we are not to keep your
father and the carriage waiting."--Then she looked up with a certain
determined effort at Richard Calmady. "We promised to meet Mr. Ormiston
at the first park gate," she added in explanation. "That is nearly a
mile from here, isn't it?"
"About three-quarters--hardly that," he answered. Her eyes were not
brown, he perceived, but a clear, dim green, as the soft gloom in the
under-spaces of a grove of ilexes. They affected him as fearlessly
observant--eyes that could judge both men and things and could also
keep their own counsel.
"Will you give your mother Honoria St. Quentin's love, please," she
went on. "I stayed here with her for a couple of days the year before
last, while you were at Oxford. She was very good to me. Now, Helen,
come----"
"I shall see you again," Richard cried to the lady of the cigarette.
But his horse, which for some minutes had been increasingly fidgety,
backed away down the hillside, and he could not catch the purport of
her answer. To the lady of the gray-green gown and eyes he said nothing
at all.
CHAPTER IV
JULIUS MARCH BEARS TESTIMONY
"So you really wish me to ask them both to come, Richard?"
Lady Calmady stood on the tiger-skin before the Gun-Room hearth. Upon
the said hearth a merry, little fire of pine logs clicked and
chattered. Even here, on the dry upland, the night air had an edge to
it; while in the valleys there would be frost before morning, ripening
that same splendour of autumn foliage alike to greater glory and
swifter fall. And the snap in the air, working along with other
unwonted influences, made Katherine somewhat restless this evening. Her
eyes were dark with unspoken thought. Her voice had a ring in it. The
shimmering, black, satin dress and fine lace she wore gave a certain
magnificence to her appearance. Her whole being was vibrant. She was
rather dangerously alive. Her elder brother's unlooked-for advent had
awakened her strangely from the reserve and stately monotony of her
daily existence, had shaken even, for the moment, the completeness of
the dominion of her fixed idea. She ceased, for the moment, to sink the
whole of her personality in the maternal relationship. Memories of her
youth, passed amid the varied interests of society and of the literary
and political world of Paris and London, assailed her. All those other
Katherines, in short, whom she might have been, and who had seemed to
drop away from her, vanishing phantom-like before the uncompromising
realities of her husband's death and her child's birth, crowded about
her, importuning her with vague desires, vague regrets. The confines of
Brockhurst grew narrow, while all that which lay beyond them called to
her. She craved, almost unconsciously, a wider sphere of action. She
longed to obtain, and to lend a hand in the shaping of events and
making of history. Even the purest and most devoted among
women--possessing the doubtful blessing of a measure of intellect--are
subject to such vagrant heats, such uprisings of personal ambition,
specially during the dangerous decade when the nine-and-thirtieth year
is past.
Meanwhile Richard's answer to her question was unfortunately somewhat
over-long in coming, for the young man was sunk in meditation and
apparently oblivious of her presence. He leaned back in the long, low
armchair, his hands clasped behind his head, the embroidered rug drawn
about his waist, a venerable, yellow-edged, calf-bound volume lying
face downwards on his lap. While young Camp--young no longer, full of
years indeed beyond the allotted portion of his kind--reposed,
outstretched and snoring, on the all-too-wide space of rug and
chair-seat at his feet. And this indifference, both of man and dog,
grew irksome to Lady Calmady. She moved across the shining yellow and
black surface of the tiger-skin and straightened the bronzes of