The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
Madame de Vallorbes turned her head and looked at him with the
strangest expression.
"My metaphor was not out of place. Do you imagine horses are the only
animals a man drives, _mon beau cousin_? Some men drive the woman who
belongs to them, and that not with the lightest bit, I promise you. Nor
do they forget to tie blood-knots in the whip-lash when it suits them
to do so."
"What do you mean?" he asked abruptly.
"Merely that the letters, which so stupidly endangered my self-control
at luncheon, contained examples of that kind of driving."
"How--how damnable," the young man said between his teeth.
The red and purple trunks of the great fir trees reeled away to right
and left as the carriage swept forward down the long avenue. To
Richard's seeing they reeled away in disgust, even as did his thought
from the images which his companion's words suggested. While, to her
seeing, they reeled, smitten by the eternal laughter, the echoes of
which it stimulated her to hear.--"The drama develops," she said to
herself, half triumphant, half abashed. "And yet I am telling the
truth, it is all so--I hardly even doctor it."--For she had been
angered, genuinely and miserably angered, and had found that odious to
the point of letting feeling override diplomacy. There was subtle
pleasure in now turning her very lapse of self-control to her own
advantage. And then, this young man's heart was the finest,
purest-toned instrument upon which she had ever had the chance to play
as yet. She was ravished by the quality and range of the music it gave
forth. Madame de Vallorbes pressed her hands together within the warm
comfort of her sable muff, averted her face again, lest it should
betray the eager excitement that gained on her, and continued:--
"Yes, whip and rein and bit are hardly pretty in that connection, are
they? If you would willingly give your identity the slip at times, dear
cousin, I have considerably deeper cause to wish to part company with
mine! You, in any case, are morally and materially free. A whole class
of particularly irritating and base cares can never approach you. And
it was in connection with just such cares that I spoke of the
hatefulness of return journeys."
Helen paused, as one making an effort to maintain her equanimity.
"My letters recall me to Paris," she said, "where detestable scenes and
most ignoble anxieties await me."
"How soon must you go?"
"That is what I asked myself," she said, in the same quiet, even voice.
"I have not yet arrived at a decision, and so I asked you to bring me
out Dickie, this afternoon."--She looked up at him, smiling, lovely and
with a certain wistful dignity, wholly coercive. "Can you understand
that the orderly serenity of your splendid house became a little
oppressive? It offered too glaring a contrast to my own state of mind
and outlook. I fancied my brain would be clearer, my conclusions more
just, here out of doors, face to face with this half-savage nature."
"Ah, I know all that," Richard said. Had not the blankness of the fog
brought him help this very morning?--"I know it, but I wish you did not
know it too."
"I know many things better not known," Helen replied. Her conscience
pricked her. She thanked her stars confession had ceased with
enlargement from the convent-school, and was a thing of the past. "You
see, I want to decide just how long I dare stay--if you will keep me?"
"We will keep you," Richard said.
"You are very charming to me, Dick," she exclaimed impulsively,
sincerely, again slightly abashed. "How long can I stay, I wonder,
without making matters worse in the end, both for my father and for
myself? I am young, after all, and I suppose I am tough. The cuticle of
the soul--if souls can have a cuticle--like that of the body, thickens
under repeated blows. But my father is no longer young. He is terribly
sensitive where I am concerned. And he is inevitably drawn into the
whirlpool of my wretched affair sooner or later. On his account I
should be glad to defer the return journey as long----"
"But--but--I don't understand," Richard broke out, pity and deep
concern for her, a blind fury against a person, or persons, unknown,
getting the better of him. "Who on earth has the power to plague you
and make you miserable, or your father either?"
The young man's face was white, his eyes full of pain, full of a great
love, burning down on her. As once, long ago, Helen de Vallorbes could
have danced and clapped her hands in naughty glee. For her hunting had
prospered above her fondest hopes. She had much ado to stifle the
laughter which bubbled up in her pretty throat. She was in the humour
to pelt peacocks royally, had such pastime been possible. As it was,
she closed her eyes for a little minute and waited, biting the inside
of her lip. At last, she said slowly, almost solemnly:--
"Don't you know that for certain mistakes, and those usually the most
generous, there is no redress?"
"What do you mean?" he demanded.
"Mean?--the veriest commonplace in my own case," she answered. "Merely
an unhappy marriage. There are thousands such."
They had left the shadow of the fir woods now. The carriage crossed the
white-railed culvert--bridging the little stream that takes its rise
amid the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bog, and meanders down the
valley--and entered the oak plantation just inside the park gate.
Russet leaves in rustling, hurrying companies, fled up and away from
the rapidly turning wheels and quick horse hoofs. The sunshine was wan
and chill as the smile on a dead face. Lines of pale, lilac
cloud--shaped like those flights of cranes which decorate the oriental
cabinets of the Long Gallery--crossed the western sky above the bare
balsam poplars, the cluster of ancient half-timbered cottages at the
entrance to Sandyfield church lane, and the rise of the gray-brown
fallow beyond, where sheep moved, bleating plaintively, within a
wattled fold.
The scene, altogether familiar though it was, impressed itself on
Richard's mind just now, as one of paralysing melancholy. God help us,
what a stricken, famished world it is! Will you not always find sorrow
and misfortune seated at the root of things if, disregarding overlaying
prettiness of summer days, of green leaf and gay blossom, you dare draw
near, dig deep, look close? And can nothing, no one, escape the
blighting touch of that canker stationed at the very foundations of
being? Certainly it would seem not--Richard reasoned--listening to the
words of the radiant woman beside him, ordained, in right of her talent
and puissant grace, to be a queen and idol of men. For sadder than the
thin sunshine, bare trees and complaint of the hungry flock, was that
assured declaration that loveless and unlovely marriages--of which her
own was one--exist by the thousand, are, indeed, the veriest
commonplace!
These reflections held Richard, since he had been thinker and poet--in
his degree--since childhood; lover only during the brief space of these
last ten surprising days. Thus the general application claimed his
attention first. But hard on the heels of this followed the personal
application. For, as is the way of all true lovers, the universality of
the law under which it takes its rise mitigates, by most uncommonly
little, either the joy or sorrow of the particular case. Poignant
regret that she suffered, strong admiration that she bore suffering so
adherent with such lightness of demeanour--then, more dangerous than
these, a sense of added unlooked-for nearness to her, and a resultant
calling not merely of the spirit of youth in him to that same spirit
resident in her, but the deeper, more compelling, more sonorous call
from the knowledge of tragedy in him to that same terrible knowledge
now first made evident in her.--And here Richard's heart--in spite of
pity, in spite of tenderness which would have borne a hundred miseries
to save her five minutes' discomfort--sang _Te Deum_, and that lustily
enough! For by this revelation of the infelicity of her state, his
whole relation to, and duty towards her changed and took on a greater
freedom. To pour forth worship and offers of service at the feet of a
happy woman is at once an impertinence to her and a shame to yourself.
But to pour forth such worship, such offers of service, at the feet of
an unhappy woman--age-old sophistry, so often ruling the speech and
actions of men to their fatal undoing!--this is praiseworthy and
legitimate, a matter not of privilege merely, but of obligation to
whoso would claim to be truly chivalrous.
The perception of his larger liberty, and the consequences following
thereon, kept Richard silent till Sandyfield rectory, the
squat-towered, Georgian church and the black-headed, yew trees in the
close-packed churchyard adjoining, the neighbouring farm and its goodly
show of golden-gray wheat-ricks were left behind, and the carriage
entered on the flat, furze-dotted expanse of Sandyfield common. Flocks
of geese, arising from damp repose upon the ragged autumn turf, hissed
forth futile declarations of war. A gipsy caravan painted in staring
colours, and hung all over with heath-brooms and basket-chairs, caused
the horses to swerve. Parties of home-going school-children backed on
to the loose gravel at the roadside, bobbing curtsies or pulling
forelocks, staring at the young man and his companion, curious and half
afraid. For in the youthful, bucolic mind a mystery surrounded Richard
Calmady and his goings and comings, causing him to rank with crowned
heads, ghosts, the Book of Daniel, funerals, the Northern Lights, and
kindred matters of dread fascination. So wondering eyes pursued him
down the road.
And wondering eyes, as the minutes passed, glanced up at him from
beneath the sweeping plumes and becoming shadow of the cavalier's hat.
For his prolonged silence rendered Madame de Vallorbes anxious. Had she
spoken unadvisedly with her tongue? Had her words sounded crude and of
questionable delicacy? Given his antecedents and upbringing, Richard
was bound to hold the marriage tie in rather superstitious reverence,
and was likely to entertain slightly superannuated views regarding the
obligation of reticence in the discussion of family matters. She feared
she had reckoned insufficiently with all this in her eagerness,
forgetting subtle diplomacies. Her approach had lacked tact and
_finesse_. In dealing with an adversary of coarser fibre her attack
would have succeeded to admiration. But this man was refined and
sensitive to a fault, easily disgusted, narrowly critical in questions
of taste.
Therefore she glanced up at him again, trying to divine his thought,
her own mind in a tumult of opposing purposes and desires. And just as
the contemplation of her beauty had so deeply stirred him earlier this
same afternoon, so did the contemplation of his beauty now stir her. It
satisfied her artistic sense. Save that the nose was straighter and
shorter, the young man reminded her notably of a certain antique,
terracotta head of the young Alexander which she had once seen in a
museum at Munich, and which had left an ineffaceable impression upon
her memory. But, the face of the young Alexander beside her was of
nobler moral quality than that other--undebauched by feasts and
licentious pleasures as yet, masculine yet temperate, the sanctuary of
generous ambitions--merciless it might be, she fancied, but never base,
never weak. Thus was her artistic sense satisfied, morally as well as
physically. Her social sense was satisfied also. For the young man's
high-breeding could not be called in question. He held himself
remarkably well. She approved the cut of his clothes moreover, his sure
and easy handling of the spirited horses.
And then her eyes, following down the lines of the fur rug, received