The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
"Wait half a minute for me, dear Aunt Katherine," she cried. "Are you
going to the conservatories? I would so like to see them. May I go
too?"
Lady Calmady stood by the door in the high, red-brick wall. She wore a
white, lace scarf over her hair--turned up and back, dressed high, as
of old, though now somewhat gray upon the temples. The lace was tied
under her chin, framing her face. In her gray dress she looked as some
stately, yet gracious lady abbess might--a lady abbess who had known
love in all fulness, yet in all honour--a lady abbess painted, if such
happy chance could be, by the debonair and clean-hearted Reynolds. She
stood smiling, charmed--though a trifle unwillingly--by the brilliant
vision of the younger woman.
"Assuredly you may come with me, if it would amuse you," she said.
"I may? Then let me open that door for you. La! la! how it sticks. Last
night's rain must have swelled it;" and she wrestled unsuccessfully
with the lock.
"My dear, don't try any more," Katherine said. "You will tire yourself.
The exertion is too great for you. I will go back and call one of the
servants."
"No, no;" and regardless of her fine laces, and trinkets, and sables
Madame de Vallorbes put her shoulder against the resisting door and
fairly burst it open.
"See," she cried, breathless but triumphant, "I am very strong."
"You are very pretty," Katharine said, almost involuntarily.
The steeply-terraced kitchen gardens, neat box edgings, wide flower
borders in which a few clumps of chrysanthemum and Michaelmas daisy
still resisted the frost, ranged down to greenish brown ponds in the
valley bottom spotted with busy, quacking companies of white ducks.
Beyond was an ascending slope of thick wood, the topmost trees of which
showed bare against the sky line. All this was framed by the arch of
the door. Madame de Vallorbes glanced at it, while she pulled down the
soft waves of hair, which her late exertions had slightly disarranged,
over her right temple. Then she turned impulsively to Lady Calmady.
"Thank you, dear Aunt Katherine," she said. "I would so like you to
like me, you know."
"I should be rather unpardonably difficult to please, if I did not like
you, my dear," Lady Calmady answered. But she sighed as she spoke.
The two women moved away, side by side, down the path to the glistering
greenhouses. But Camp, who, missing Richard, had followed his mistress
out of the house for a leisurely morning potter, turned back sulkily
across the gravel homewards, his tail limp, his heavy head carried low.
His instincts were conservative, as has been already mentioned. He was
suspicious of newcomers. And whoever liked this particular newcomer,
Madame de Vallorbes, he was sorry to say--and on more than one occasion
he said it with quite inconvenient distinctness--he did not.
CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH DICKIE TRIES TO RIDE AWAY FROM HIS OWN SHADOW, WITH SUCH
SUCCESS AS MIGHT HAVE BEEN ANTICIPATED
That same morning Richard was up and out early. Fog had followed on the
evening's rain, and at sunrise still shrouded all the landscape.
"Let her ladyship know I breakfast at the stables and shan't be in
before luncheon," he had said to Powell while settling himself in the
saddle. Then, followed by a groom, he fared forth. The house vanished
phantom-like behind him, and the clang of the iron gates as they swung
to was muffled by the heavy atmosphere, while he rode on by invisible
ways across an invisible land, hemmed in, close-encompassed, passed
upon, by the chill, ashen whiteness of the fog.
And for the cold silence and blankness surrounding him Richard was
grateful. It was restful--after a grim fashion--and he welcomed rest,
having passed a but restless night. For Dickie had been the victim of
much travail of spirit. His imagination vexed him, pricking up
slumbering lusts of the flesh. His conscience vexed him likewise,
suggesting that his attitude had not been pure cousinly; and this
shamed him, since he was still singularly unspotted from the world,
noble modesties and decencies still paramount in him. He was keenly,
some might say mawkishly, sensible of the stain and dishonour of
turning, even involuntarily and passingly, covetous glances upon
another man's goods. In sensation and apprehension he had lived at
racing pace during the last few days. That hour in the Long Gallery
last night had been the climax. The gates of paradise had opened before
him. And, since opposites of necessity imply their opposites, the gates
of hell had opened likewise. It appeared to Dickie that the great
poets, and painters, and musicians, the great lovers even, had nothing
left to tell him--for he knew. Knew, moreover, that his Eden had come
to him with the angel of the fiery sword that "turneth every way"
standing at the threshold of it--knew, yet further, as he had never
known before, the immensity of the difficulties, disabilities,
humiliations, imposed on him by his deformity. Bitterly, nakedly, he
called his trouble by that offensive name. Then he straightened himself
in the saddle. Yes, welcome the cold weight against his chest, welcome
the silence, the blankness, the dead, ashen pallor of the fog!
But just where the tan ride, leading down across the road to the left
diverges from the main road, this source of negative consolation began
to fail him. For a draw of fresher air came from westward, causing the
blurred, wet branches to quiver and the pall of mist to gather, and
then break and melt under its wholesome breath, while the rays of the
laggard sun, clearing the edge of the fir forest, eastward, pierced it,
hastening its dissolution. Therefore it followed that by the time
Richard rode in under the stable archway, he found the great yard full
of noise and confused movement. The stable doors stood wide along one
side of the quadrangle. Stunted, boyish figures shambled hither and
thither, unwillingly deserting the remnants of half-eaten breakfasts,
among the iron mugs and platters of the long, deal tables of the
refectory. Chifney and Preiston--the head-lad--hurried them, shouting
orders, admonishing, inciting to greater rapidity of action. And the
boys were sulky. The thick morning had promoted hopes of an hour or two
of unwonted idleness. Now those poor, little hopes were summarily
blighted. Lazy, pinched with cold by the raw morning air, still a bit
hungry, sick even, or downright frightened, they must mount and
away--the long line of race-horses streaming, in single file, up the
hillside to the exercising ground--with as short delay as possible, or
Mr. Chifney and his ash stick would know the reason why.
There were elements of brutality in the scene from which Richard would,
oftentimes, have recoiled. To-day he was selfish, absorbed to the point
of callousness. If he remarked them at all, it was in bitter welcome,
as he had welcomed the chill and staring blankness of the fog. He was
indifferent to the fact that Chifney was harsh, the horses testy or
wicked, that the boys' noses were red, and that they blew their purple
fingers before laying hold of the reins in a vain attempt to promote
circulation. Dickie sat still as a statue in the midst of all the
turmoil, the handle of his crop resting on his thigh, his eyes hot from
sleeplessness and wild thoughts, his face hard as marble.--Unhappy?
Wasn't he unhappy too? Suffer? Well, let them suffer--within reasonable
limits. Suffering was the fundamental law of existence. They must bow
to the workings of it along with the rest.
But one wretched, little chap fairly blubbered. He had been kicked in
the stomach some three weeks earlier, and had been in hospital. This
was his first morning out. He had grown soft, and was light-headed, his
knees all of a shake. By means of voluminous threats Preiston got him
up. But he sat his horse all of a huddle, as limp as a half-empty sack
of chaff. Richard looked on feeling, not pity, but only irritation,
finally amounting to anger. The child's whole aspect and the sniveling
sounds he made were so hatefully ugly. It disgusted him.
"Here Chifney, leave that fellow at home," he said. "He's no good."
"He's malingering, Sir Richard. I know his sort. Give in to him now and
we shall have the same game, and worse, over again to-morrow."
"Very probably," Richard answered. "Only it is evident he has no more
hand and no more grip than a sick cat to-day. We shall have some mess
with him, and I'm not in the humour for a mess, so just leave him.
There boy, stop crying. Do you hear?" he added, wheeling round on the
small unfortunate. "Mr. Chifney'll give you another day off, and the
doctor will see you. Only if he reports you fit and you give the very
least trouble to-morrow, you'll be turned out of the stables there and
then. We've no use for shirkers. Do you understand?"
In spite of his irritation, the hardness of Richard's expression
relaxed as he finished speaking. The poor, little beggar was so
abject--too abject indeed for common decency, since he too, after all,
was human. Richard's own self-respect made it incumbent upon him to
lift the creature out of the pit of so absolutely unseemly a
degradation. He looked kindly at him, smiled, and promptly forgot all
about him. While to the boy it seemed that the gods had verily
descended in the likeness of men, and he would have bartered his
little, dirty, blear-eyed rudiment of a soul thenceforward for another
such a look from Richard Calmady.
Dickie promptly forgot the boy, yet some virtue must have been in the
episode for he began to feel better in himself. As the horses filed
away through the misty sunshine--Preiston riding beside the fourth or
fifth of the string, while Richard and Chifney brought up the rear, his
chestnut suiting its paces to the shorter stride of the trainer's
cob--the fever of the night cooled down in him. Half thankfully, half
amusedly, he perceived things begin to assume their normal relations.
He filled his lungs with the pure air, felt the sun-dazzle pleasant in
his eyes. He had run somewhat mad in the last twenty-four hours surely?
He was not such a fatuous ass as to have mistaken Helen's frank
_camaraderie_, her bright interest in things, her charming little ways
of showing cousinly regard, for some deeper, more personal feeling? She
had been divinely kind, but that was just her--just the outcome of her
delightful nature. She would go away on Friday--Saturday perhaps--he
rather hoped Saturday--and be just as divinely kind to other people.
And then he shook himself, feeling the languid weight of her hands on
his shoulders again. Would she--would--? For an instant he wanted to
get at, and incontinently brain, those other people. After which,
Richard mentally took himself by the throat and proceeded to choke the
folly out of himself. Yes, she would go back to all those other people,
back moreover to the Vicomte de Vallorbes--whom, by the way, it
occurred to him she so seldom mentioned. Well, we don't continually
talk about the people we love best, do we, to comparative strangers?
She would go back to her husband--her husband.--Richard repeated the
words over to himself sternly, trying to drive them home, to burn them
into his consciousness past all possibility of forgetting.
Anyhow, she had been wonderfully sweet and charming to him. She had
shown him--quite unconsciously, of course--what life might be for--for
somebody else. She had revealed to him--what indeed had she not
revealed! He remembered the spirit of expectation that possessed him
riding back through the autumn woods the day he first met her. The
expectation had been more than justified by the sequel. Only--only--and
then Dick became stern with himself again. For, she having,
unconsciously, done so much for him, was it not his first duty never to