The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
Vinedresser and Lazy Lad standing on the high chimneypiece.
"My dear, it grows late," she said. "Let us settle this matter. If your
uncle and cousin are to come, I must send a note over to Newlands
to-morrow before breakfast. Remember I have no choice in the matter. I
leave it entirely to you. Tell me seriously what you wish."
Richard stretched himself, turning his head in the hollow of his hands,
and shrugged his shoulders slightly.
"That is exactly what I would thank you so heartily to tell me," he
answered. "Do I, or don't I seriously wish it? I give you my word,
mother, I don't know."
"Oh; but, my dearest, that is folly! You must have inclination enough,
one way or the other, to come to a decision. I was careful not to
commit myself. It is still easy not to ask them without being guilty of
any discourtesy."
"It isn't that," Richard said. "It is simply that being anything but
heroic I am trying of two evils to choose the least. I should like to
have my uncle--and Helen here immensely. But if the visit wasn't a
success I should be proportionately disappointed and vexed. So is it
worth the risk? Disappointments are sufficiently abundant anyhow. Isn't
it slightly imbecile to run a wholly gratuitous risk of adding to their
number?"
Then the fixed idea began stealthily, yet surely, to reassert its
dominion; for there was a perceptible flavour of discouragement in the
young man's speech.
"Dickie, there is nothing wrong, is there,--nothing the matter,
to-night?"
"Oh, dear no, of course not!" he answered, half closing his eyes.
"Nothing in the world's the matter."
He unclasped his hands, leaned forward and patted the bulldog lying
across the rug at his feet. "At least nothing more than usual, nothing
more than the abiding something which always has been and always will
be the matter."
"Ah, my dear!" Katherine cried softly.
"I've just been reading Burton's Anatomy here," he went on bending
down, so that his face was hidden, while he pulled the dog's soft ears.
"He assures all--whom it may concern--that 'bodily imperfections do not
a whit blemish the soul or hinder the operations of it, but rather help
and much increase it.' There, Camp, poor old man, don't start--it's
nothing worse than me. I wonder if the elaborate pains which have been
taken through generations of your ancestors to breed you into your
existing and very royal hideousness--your flattened nose and perpetual
grin, for instance--do help and much increase the operations of your
soul!"
He looked up suddenly.
"What do you think, mother?"
"I think--think, my darling," she said, "that perhaps neither you nor I
are quite ourselves to-night."
"Oh, well I've had rather a beastly day!" Richard dropped back against
the chair cushions again, clasping his hands behind his head. "Or I've
seemed to have it, which comes practically to much the same thing. I
confess I have been rather hipped lately. I suppose it's the weather.
You're not really in a hurry, mother, are you? Come and sit down."
And obediently Katherine drew forward a chair and sat beside him. Those
uprisings of vagrant desire still struggled, combating the dominion of
the fixed idea. But the struggle grew faint and fainter. And then, for
a measurable time, Richard fell silent again while she waited. Verily
there is no sharper discipline for a woman's proud spirit, than that
administered, often quite unconsciously, by the man whom she loves.
"We gave a wretched girl six weeks to-day for robbing her mistress," he
remarked at last. "It was a flagrant case, so I suppose we were
justified. In fact I don't see how we could have done otherwise. But it
went against me awfully, all the same. She has a child to support. Jim
Gould got her into trouble and deserted her, like a cowardly, young
blackguard. However, it's easy to be righteous at another person's
expense. Perhaps I should have done the same in his place. I wonder if
I should?"--
"My dear, we need hardly discuss that point, I think," Lady Calmady
said.
Richard turned his head and smiled at her.
"Poor dear mother, do I bore you? But it is so comfortable to grumble.
I know it's selfish. It's a horrid bad habit, and you ought to blow me
up for it. But then, mother, take it all round, really I don't grumble
much, do I?"
"No, no!" Katherine said quickly. "Indeed, Dickie, you don't."
"I have been awfully afraid though, lately, that I do grumble more than
I imagine," he went on, straightening his head, while his handsome
profile showed clear cut against the dancing brightness of the
firelight. "But it's almost impossible always to carry something about
with you which--which you hate, and not let it infect your attitude of
mind and, in a degree, your speech. Twenty or thirty years hence it may
prove altogether sufficient and satisfactory to know"--his lips worked,
obliging him to enunciate his words carefully--"that bodily
imperfections do not a whit blemish the soul or hinder its
operations--are, in short, an added means of grace. Think of it! Isn't
it a nice, neat, little arrangement, sort of spiritual consolation
stakes! Only I'm afraid I'm some two or three decades on the near side
of that comfortable conclusion yet, and I find----"
Richard shifted his position, letting his arms drop along the chair
arms with a little thud. He smiled again, or at all events essayed to
do so.
"In fact, I find it's beastly difficult to care a hang about your soul,
one way or another, when you clearly perceive your body's making you
the laughing-stock of half the people--why, mother, sweet dear
mother,--what is it?"
For Lady Calmady's two hands had closed down on his hand, and she bowed
herself above them as though smitten with sharp pain.
"Pray don't be distressed," he went on. "I beg your pardon. I wasn't
thinking what I was saying, I'm an ass. It's nothing I tell you but the
weather. You're all a lot too good to me and indulge me too much, and I
grow soft, and then every trifle rubs me the wrong way. I'm a regular
spoilt child--I know it and a jolly good spanking is what I deserve.
Burton, here, declares that the autumnal, like the vernal, equinox
breeds hot humours and distempers in the blood. I believe we ought to
be bled, spring and fall, like our forefathers. Look here, mother,
don't take my grumbling to heart. I tell you I'm just a little hipped
from the weather. Let's send for dear old Knott and get him to drive
out the devil with his lancet? No, no, seriously, I tell you what we
will do. It'll be good for us both. I have arrived at a decision. We'll
have Uncle William and--Helen----"
Richard had spoken very rapidly, half ashamed, trying to soothe her. He
paused on the last word. He was conscious of a singular pleasure in
pronouncing it. The perfectly finished figure of his cousin,
outstanding against the wide, misty brightness of the sunset, the scent
of the wood and moorland, the haunting suggestion of glad secrets, even
that upcurling of blue cigarette smoke, rising as the smoke of
incense--with a difference--upon the clear evening air, above all that
silent flattery of intimate and fearless glances, those gay welcoming
gestures, that merry calling, as of birds in the tree-tops, from the
spirit of youth within him to the spirit of youth so visibly and
radiantly resident in her--all this rose up before Richard. He grew
reckless, though reckless of precisely what, innocent as he was, in
fact although mature in learning, he knew not as yet. Only he turned on
his mother a face at once eager and shy, coaxing her as when in his
long-ago baby-days he had implored some petty indulgence or the gift of
some coveted toy on which his little heart was set.
"Yes, let us have them," he said. "You know Helen is very charming. You
will admire her, mother. She is as clever as she can stick, one sees
that at a glance. And she is very much _grande dame_ too--and, oh,
well, she is a whole lot of charming things! And her coming would be a
wholesome breaking up of our ordinary ways of going on. We are usually
very contented--at least, I think so--you, and dear Julius, and I, but
perhaps we are getting into a bit of a rut. Helen's society might prove
an even more efficacious method of driving out my blue-devils than
Knott's lancet or a jolly good spanking."
He laughed quietly, patting Katherine's hand, but looking away.
"And there is no denying it would be a vastly more graceful one--don't
you think so?"
Thus were smouldering fires of personal ambition quenched in Lady
Calmady, as so often before. Richard's tenderness brought her to her
knees. She hugged, with an almost voluptuous movement of passion, that
half-rejected burden of maternity, gathering it close against her heart
once more. But, along with the rapture of self-surrender, came a
thousand familiar fears and anxieties. For she had looked into Dickie's
mind, as he spoke out his grumble, and had there perceived the
existence of much which she had dreaded and to the existence of which
she had striven to blind herself.
"My darling," she said, with a certain hesitation, "I will gladly have
them if you wish it--only you remember what happened long ago when
Helen was here last?"
"Yes, I know, I was afraid you would think of that. But you can put
that aside. Helen's not the smallest recollection of it. She told me so
this afternoon."
"Told you so?" Katherine repeated.
"Yes," he said. "It was awfully sweet of her. Evidently she'd been
bullied about her unseemly behaviour when she was small, till you, and
I, and Brockhurst, had been made into a perfect bugbear. She's quite
amusingly afraid of you still. But she's no notion what really
happened. Of course she can't have, or she could not have mentioned the
subject to me." Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Obviously it would
have been impossible."
There was a pause. Lady Calmady rose. The young man spoke with
conviction, yet her anxiety was not altogether allayed.
"Impossible," he repeated. "Pretty mother don't disquiet yourself.
Trust me. To tell you the truth I have felt to-day--is it very
foolish?--that I should like some one of my own age for a little while,
as--don't you know--a playfellow."
Katherine bent down and kissed him. But mother-love is not, even in its
most self-sacrificing expression, without torments of jealousy.
"My dear, you shall have your playfellow," she said, though conscious
of a tightening of the muscles of her beautiful throat. "Good-night.
Sleep well."
She went out, closing the door behind her. The perspective of the
dimly-lighted corridor, and the great hall beyond, struck her as rather
sadly lifeless and silent. What wonder, indeed, that Richard should ask
for a companion, for something young! Love made her selfish and
cowardly she feared. She should have thought of this before. She turned
back, again opening the Gun-Room door.
Richard had raised himself. He stood on the seat of the chair,
steadying himself by one hand on the chair-back, while with the other
he pulled the rug from beneath the sleepy bull-dog.
"Wake up, you lazy old beggar," he was saying. "Get down, can't you. I
want to go to bed, and you block the way, lying there in gross comfort,
snoring. Make yourself scarce, old man. If I'd your natural advantages
in the way of locomotion, I wouldn't be so slow of using them----"
He looked up, and slipped back into a sitting position hastily.
"Oh, mother, I thought you had gone!" he exclaimed, almost sharply.
And to Katherine, overstrung as she was, the words came as a rebuke.
"My dearest, I won't keep you," she said. "I only came back to ask you
about Honoria St. Quentin."
"What about her?"
"She is staying at Newlands--the two girls are friends, I believe. She
seemed to me a fine creature when last I saw her. She knows the world,