The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
renewed assurance of the fact of his deformity--hidden as far as might
be, with decent pride, yet there, permanent and unalterable. This
worked upon her strongly. For, to her peculiar temperament, the
indissoluble union in one body of elements so noble and so monstrous,
of youthful vigour and abject helplessness, the grotesque in short,
supplied the last word of sensuous and dramatic attraction. As last
evening, in the Long Gallery, so now, she hugged herself, at once
frightened and fascinated, wrought upon by excitement as in the
presence of something akin to the supernatural, and altogether beyond
the confines of ordinary experience.
And to think that she had come so near holding this inimitable creature
in her hand, and by overhaste, or clumsiness of statement should lose
it! Madame de Vallorbes was wild with irritation, racked her brain for
means to recover her--as she feared--forfeited position. It would be
maddening did her mighty hunting prove but a barren pastime in the end.
And thereupon the little scar on her temple, deftly concealed under the
soft, bright hair, began to smart and throb. Ah! well, the hunting
should not prove quite barren anyhow, of that she was determined, for,
failing her late gay purpose, that small matter of long-deferred
revenge still remained in reserve. If she could not gratify one
passion, she would gratify quite another. For in this fair lady's mind
it was--perhaps unfortunately--but one step from the Eden bowers of
love to the waste places of vindictive hate.--"Yet I would rather be
good to him, far rather," she said to herself, with a movement of quite
pathetic sincerity.
But here, just at the entrance to the village street, an altogether
unconscious _deus ex machina_--destined at once to relieve Helen of
further anxiety, and commit poor Dickie to a course of action affecting
the whole of his subsequent career--presented itself in the shape of a
white-tented miller's waggon, which, with somnolent jingle of harness
bells and most admired deliberation, moved down the centre of the road.
A yellow-washed garden-wall on one side, the brook on the other, there
was not room for the phaeton to pass.
"Whistle," Richard commanded over his shoulder. And the wooden image
thereby galvanised into immediate activity whistled shrilly, but
without result as far as the waggon was concerned.
"The fellow's asleep. Go and tell him to pull out of the way."
Then, while the groom ran neatly forward in twinkling, white breeches
and flesh-coloured tops, Richard, bending towards her, as far as that
controling strap about his waist permitted, shifted the reins into his
right hand and laid his left upon Madame de Vallorbes' sable muff.
"Look here, Helen," he said, rather hoarsely, "I am indescribably
shocked at what you have just told me. I supposed it was all so
different with you. I'd no suspicion of this. And--and--if I may say
so, you've taught me a lesson which has gone home--steady
there--steady, good lass"--for the horses danced and snorted--"I don't
think I shall ever grumble much in future about troubles of my own,
having seen how splendidly you bear yours. Only I can't agree with you
no remedy is possible for generous mistakes. The world isn't quite so
badly made as all that. There is a remedy for every mistake except--a
few physical ones, which we euphuistically describe as visitations of
God.--Steady, steady there--wait a bit.--And I--I tell you I can't sit
down under this unhappiness of yours and just put up with it. Don't
think me a meddling fool, please. Something's got to be done. I know I
probably appear to you the last person in the world to be of use. And
yet I'm not sure about that. I have time--too much of it--and I'm not
quite an ass. And you--you must know, I think, there's nothing in
heaven or earth I would not do for you that I could----"
The miller hauled his slow-moving team aside, with beery-thick
objurgations and apologies. The groom swung himself up at the back of
the carriage again. The impatient horses, getting their heads, swung
away down Sandyfield Street--scattering a litter of merry, little,
black pigs and remonstrant fowls to right and left--past modest village
shop, and yellow-washed tavern, and red, lichen-stained cottage,
beneath the row of tall Lombardy poplars that raised their brown-gray
spires to the blue-gray of the autumn sky. Richard's left hand held the
reins again.
"Half confidences are no good," he said. "So, as you've trusted me thus
far, Helen, don't you think you will trust somewhat further? Be
explicit. Tell me the rest?"
And hearing him, seeing him just then, Madame de Vallorbes' heart
melted within her, and, to her own prodigious surprise, she had much
ado not to weep.
CHAPTER IX
WHICH TOUCHES INCIDENTALLY ON MATTERS OF FINANCE
As Richard had predicted the fog reappeared towards sun sunset. At
first, as a frail mist, through which the landscape looked colourless
and blurred. Later it rose, growing in density, until all objects
beyond a radius of some twenty paces were engulfed in its nothingness
and lost. Later still--while Helen de Vallorbes paid her visit at
Newlands--it grew denser yet, heavy, torpid, close yet cold, penetrated
by earthy odours as the atmosphere of a vault, oppressive to the
senses, baffling to sight and hearing alike. From out it, half-leafless
branches, like gaunt arms in tattered draperies, seemed to claw and
beckon at the passing carriage and its occupants. The silver mountings
of the harness showed in points and splashes of hard, shining white as
against the shifting, universal dead-whiteness of it, while the breath
from the horses' nostrils rose into it as defiant jets of steam, that
struggled momentarily with the opaque, all-enveloping vapour, only to
be absorbed and obliterated as light by darkness, or life by death.
The aspect presented by nature was sinister, had Richard Calmady been
sufficiently at leisure to observe it in detail. But, as he slowly
walked the horses up and down the quarter of a mile of woodland drive,
leading from the thatched lodge on the right of the Westchurch road to
the house, he was not at leisure. He had received enlightenment on many
subjects. He had acquired startling impressions, and he needed to place
these, to bring them into line with the general habit of his thought.
The majority of educated persons--so-called--think in words, words
often arbitrary and inaccurate enough, prolific mothers of mental
confusion. The minority, and those of by no means contemptible
intellectual calibre,--since the symbol must count for more than the
mere label,--think in images and pictures. Dickie belonged to the
minority. And it must be conceded that his mind now projected against
that shifting, impalpable background of fog, a series of pictures which
in their cynical pathos, their suggestions at once voluptuous and
degraded, were hardly unworthy of the great master, William Hogarth,
himself.
For Helen, in the reaction and relief caused by finding her relation to
Richard unimpaired, caused too by that joyous devilry resident in her
and constantly demanding an object on which to wreak its derision, had
by no means spared her lord and master, Angelo Luigi Francesco, Vicomte
de Vallorbes. And this only son of a thrifty, hard-bitten, Savoyard
banker-noble and a Neopolitan princess of easy morals and ancient
lineage, this Parisian _viveur_, his intrigues, his jealousies, his
practical ungodliness and underlying superstition, his outbursts of
temper, his shrewd economy in respect of others, and extensive personal
extravagance, offered fit theme, with aid of little romancing, for such
a discourse as it just now suited his very brilliant, young wife to
pronounce.
The said discourse opened in a low key, broken by pauses, by tactful
self-accusations, by questionings as to whether it were not more
merciful, more loyal, to leave this or that untold. But as she
proceeded, not only did Helen suffer the seductions of the fine art of
lying, but she really began to have some ado to keep her exuberant
sense of fun within due limits. For it proved so excessively
exhilarating to deal thus with Angelo Luigi Francesco! She had old
scores to settle. And had she not this very day received an odiously
disquieting letter from him, in which he not only made renewed
complaint of her poor, little miseries of debts and flirtations, but
once more threatened retaliation by a cutting-off of supplies? In
common justice did he not deserve villification? Therefore, partly out
of revenge, partly in self-justification, she proceeded with increasing
enthusiasm to show that to know M. de Vallorbes was a lamentably
liberal education in all civilised iniquities. With a hand, sure as it
was light, she dissected out the unhappy gentleman, and offered up his
mangled and bleeding reputation as tribute to her own so-perpetually
outraged moral sense and feminine delicacy, not to mention her
so-repeatedly and vilely wounded heart. And there really was truth--as
at each fresh flight of her imagination she did not fail to remind
herself--in all that which she said. Truth?--yes, just that misleading
sufficiency of it in which a lie thrives. For, as every artist "in this
kind" is aware, precisely as you would have the overgrowth of your
improvisation richly phenomenal and preposterous, must you be careful
to set the root of it in the honest soil of fact. To omit this
precaution is to court eventual detection and consequent confusion of
face.
As it was, Helen entered the house at Newlands, a house singularly
unused to psychological aberrations, in buoyant spirits, mischief
sitting in her discreetly downcast eyes, laughter perplexing her lips.
She had placed her cargo of provocation, of resentment, to such
excellent advantage! She was, moreover, slightly intoxicated by her own
eloquence. She was at peace with herself and all mankind, with de
Vallorbes even since his sins had afforded her so rare an opportunity.
And this occasioned her to congratulate herself on her own conspicuous
magnanimity. It is so exceedingly pleasing not only to know yourself
clever, but to believe yourself good! She would be charming to these
dear kind, rather dull people. Not that Honoria was dull, but she had
inconveniently austere notions of honour and loyalty at moments. And
then the solitary drive home with Richard Calmady lay ahead, full of
possible drama, full of, well, heaven knew what! Oh! how entrancing a
pastime is life!
But to Richard, walking the snorting and impatient horses slowly up and
down the woodland drive in the blear and sightless fog, life appeared
quite other than an entrancing pastime. The pictures projected by his
thought, and forming the medium of it, caused him black indignation and
revolt, desolated him, too, with a paralysing disgust of his own
disabilities. For poor Dick had declined somewhat in the last few
hours, it must be owned, from the celestial altitudes he had reached
before luncheon. Some part of his cousin's discourse had been
dangerously intimate in character, suggesting situations quite other
than platonic. To him there appeared a noble innocence in her treatment
of matters not usually spoken of. He had listened with a certain
reverent amazement. Only out of purity of mind could such speech come.
And yet an undeniable effect remained, and it was not altogether
elevating. Richard was no longer the young Sir Galahad of the noontide
of this eventful day. He was just simply a man--in a sensible degree
the animal man--loving a woman, hating that other man to whom she was
legally bound. Hating that other man, not only because he was unworthy
and failed to make her happy, but because he stood in his--Richard's--way.
Hating the man all the more fiercely because, whatever the uncomeliness