The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance

seeks and finds youth.--These unspoken and, as yet, unspeakable things were alone of real moment, making eyes lustrous and lips quick with tremulous, uncalled-for smiles irrespective of the purport of their speech. "Ah! but that's rather rough on poor dear Julius, you know," Dickie said. "I suppose you wanted to learn all----" "Learn?" she interrupted. "I wanted to feel. Don't you know there is only one way any woman worth the name ever really learns--through her emotions? Only the living feel. Such men as he, if they are sincere, are already dead. He would have made feeling impossible." A perceptible hush descended upon the room. Richard Calmady's hand usually was steady enough, but, in the silence, the pearls chattered against the table. He went rather pale and his face hardened. "And are you getting anything of that which you wanted, Helen?" he asked. "For sometimes in the last few days--since you have been here--I--I have wondered if perhaps we were not all like that--all dead----" "You mean do I get emotion, am I feeling?" she said. "Rest contented. Much is happening. Indeed I have doubted, during the last few days, since I have been here, whether I have ever known what it is to feel actually and seriously before." She sat down at right angles to him, resting her elbows upon the table, her chin upon her folded hands, leaning a little towards him. One of those pleasant heats swept over her, flushing her delicate skin, lending a certain effulgence to her beauty. The scent of roses long faded hung in the air. But here was a rose sweeter far than they. No white rose of paradise, it must be confessed. Rather like her immortal namesake, that classic Helen, was she _rosa mundi_, glowing with warmth and colour, rose-red rose altogether of this dear, naughty, lower world? "Richard," she said impulsively, "why don't you understand? Why do you underrate your own power? Don't you know that you are quite the most moving, the most attractive--well--cousin, a woman ever had?" She looked closely at him, her lips a little parted, her head thrown back. "Life is sweet, dear cousin. Reckon with yourself and with it, and live--live."--Then she put out her hand and held up the crystal between her face and his. "There," she went on, "tell me about this. I become indiscrete, thanks I suppose to your Brockhurst habit of putting back the clock, and speak with truly Elizabethan frankness. It belongs to semi-barbaric ages, doesn't it, this, to tell the true truth? Show me this. It seems rather fascinating." And Richard obeyed mechanically, pointing out to her the signs of the Zodiac, those of the planets, and other figures of occult significance engraved on the encircling, golden bands. Showed her how those same bands, turning on a pivot, formed a golden cradle, in which the crystal sphere reposed. He lifted it out from that cradle, moreover, and laid it in the softer cradle of her palm. And of necessity in the doing of all this, their heads--his and hers--were very near together, and their hands met. But they were very solemn all the while, solemn, eager, busy, as two babies revealing to each other the mysteries of a newly acquired toy. And it seemed to Madame de Vallorbes that all this was as pretty a bit of business as ever served to help forward such gay purposes as hers. She was pleased with herself too--for did she not feel very gentle, very sincere, really very innocent and good? "No, hold it so," Richard said, rounding her fingers carefully, that the tips of them might alone touch the surface of the crystal. "Now gaze into the heart of it steadily, fixing your will to see. Pictures will come presently, dimly at first, as in a mist. Then the mist will lift and you will read your own fortune and--perhaps--some other person's fate." "Have you ever read yours?" "Oh! mine's of a sort that needs no crystal to reveal it," he answered, with a queer drop in his voice. "It's written in rather indecently big letters and plain type. Always has been." Helen glanced at him. His words whipped up her sense of drama, fed her excitement. But she bent her eyes upon the crystal again, and the hush descended once more, disturbed only by that nervous tapping of rain. "I see nothing, nothing," she said presently. "And there is much I would give very much to see." "You must gaze with a simple intention." The young man's voice came curiously hoarse and broken. "Purify your mind of all desire." Helen did not raise her head. "Alas! if those are the conditions of revelation my chances of seeing are extremely limited. To purify one's mind of all desire is to commit emotional suicide. Of course I desire, all the while I desire. And equally, of course, you desire. Every one who is human and in their sober senses must do that. Absence of desire means idiotcy, or----" "Or what?" For an instant she looked up at him, a very devil of dainty malice in her expression, in the shrug of her shoulders too, beneath their fine laces and the affected sobriety of that same dull-blue, poplin gown. "Or priestly, saintly middle-age--from which may heaven in its mercy ever deliver us," she said. Richard shifted his position a little, gathering himself back from her so near neighbourhood--a fact of which the young lady was not unaware. "I'm not quite sure whether I echo your prayer," he said slowly. "I doubt whether that attitude, or one approximate to it, is not the safest and best for some of us." "Safest, no doubt." Madame de Vallorbes' eyes were bent on the crystal sphere again. "As it is safer to decline a duel, than go out and meet your man. Best? On that point you must permit me to hold my own opinion. The word best has many readings according to the connection in which it is employed. Personally I should always fight." "Whatever the odds?" "Whatever the odds."--And almost immediately Madame de Vallorbes uttered a little cry, curiously at variance with her bold words. "Something is moving inside the crystal, something is coming. I don't half like it, Richard. Perhaps we are tempting Providence. Yes, it moves, it moves, like mist rising off a river. It is poisonous. Some woman has looked into this before--a woman of my temperament--and read an evil fortune. I know it. Tell me quick, how did the crystal come here, to whom did it belong?" "To Mary Stuart--Mary, Queen of Scots," Dickie said. "Ah! unhappy woman, ill-omened woman. You should have told me that before and I would never have looked. Here take it, take it. Lock it up, hide it. Let no woman ever look in it again." As she spoke Helen crossed herself hastily, pushing the magic ball towards him. But, as though endowed with life and volition of its own--or was it merely that Dick's hand was even yet not quite of the steadiest?--it evaded his grasp, fell off the table edge and rolled, gleaming moonlike, far across the floor, away behind the pedestal of the bronze Pompeian Antinous, into the dusky shadow of those ghostly-waving, turquoise, satin curtains. With a sense of catastrophe upon her Helen had sprung to her feet.--Even now, standing in the peaceful warmth of the autumn sunshine, among the feeding pea-fowl, the remembrance of it caused her a little shiver. For at sight of that gleaming ball hurrying across the carpet, all the nervousness, the distrust of herself, the vague spiritual alarms, which had beset her on first entering the room, returned on her with tenfold force. The superstitious terrors of the convent-bred girl mastered the light-hearted scepticism of the woman of the world, and regions of sinister possibility seemed disclosing themselves around her. "Oh! how horrible! What does it mean?" she cried. And Richard answered cheerily, somewhat astonished at her agitation, trying to reassure her. "Mean? Nothing, except that I was abominably awkward and the crystal abominably slippery. What does it matter? We can find it again directly." Then, self-forgetful in the fulness of his longing to pacify her, Richard had pushed his chair back from the table, intending to go in search of the vagrant jewel. But the chair was high, and its make not of the most solid sort; and so he paused, instinctively calculating the amount of support it could be trusted to render him in his descent. And during that pause Helen had felt her heart stand still. She set her little teeth now, recalling it. For the extent of his deformity was fully apparent for once. And, apprehending that which he proposed to do, she was smitten by immense curiosity to realise the ultimate of the grotesque in respect of his appearance as he should move, walk, grope in the dimness over there after the lost crystal. But there are some indulgences which can be bought at too high a price, and along with the temptation to gratify her curiosity came an intensification of superstitious alarm. What if she had sinned, and trafficked with diabolic agencies, in trying to read the future? Payment of an actively disagreeable character might be exacted for that, and would not such payment risk disastrous augmentation if she gratified her curiosity thus further? Helen de Vallorbes became quite wonderfully prudent and humane. "No, no, don't bother about it, don't move, dear Richard," she cried. "Let me find it please. I saw exactly the direction in which it went." And to emphasise her speech, and keep the young man in his place, she laid her hands persuasively upon his shoulders. This brought her charming face, so pure in outline, set in its aureole of honey-coloured hair, very near to his, she looking down, he up. And in this position the two remained longer than was absolutely necessary, silent, quite still, while the air grew thick with the push of unspoken and as yet unspeakable matters, and Helen's hands resting upon his shoulders grew heavy, as the seconds passed, with languorous weight. "There are better things than crystals to read in, after all, Richard," she said at last. Then she lifted her hands almost brusquely and stepped back. "All the same it is stupid I should have to go away," she continued, speaking more to herself than to him. "I am happy here. And when I am happy it's easy to be good--and I like to be good." She crossed the room and passed behind the bronze Pompeian Antinous. Under the shadow of the curtains, in the angle of the bay, against the wainscot, Queen Mary's magic ball showed softly luminous. Helen could have believed that it watched her. She hesitated before stooping to pick it up and looked over her shoulder at Richard Calmady. His back was towards her, his chair close against the table again. He leaned forward on his elbows, his face buried in his hands. Something in the bowed head, in the set of the almost crouching figure reassured Madame de Vallorbes. She picked up the crystal without more ado, with, indeed, a certain flippancy of gesture. For she had received pleasing assurance that she had been frightened in the wrong place, and that the eternal laughter was very completely on her side after all. And just then a bell had rung in some distant quarter of the great house. Powell, incarnation of decent punctualities, had appeared. Whereupon the temperature fell to below normal from fever-heat. Drama, accentuations of sensibility, in short all the unspoken and unspeakable, withered as tropic foliage at a touch of frost. No doubt it was as well, Madame de Vallorbes reflected philosophically, since the really psychological moment was passed. There had been a dinner party last night, and---- But here the young lady's reminiscences broke off short. She gathered up her blue, poplin, scarlet-lined skirts, ran down the steps, scattering the pea-fowl to right and left, and hastened across the gravel.