The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
of his moral constitution, he was physically very far from uncomely.
And so, along with nobler incitements to hatred, went the fiend envy,
which just now plucked at poor Dickie's vitals as the vulture at those
of the chained Titan of old. Whereupon he fell into a meditation
somewhat morbid. For, contemplating in pictured thought that other
man's bodily perfection, contemplating his property and victim,--the
fair modern Helen, who by her courage and her trials exercised so
potent a spell over his imagination,--Richard loathed his own maimed
body, maimed chances and opportunities, as he had never loathed them
before. How often since his childhood had some casual circumstance or
trivial accident brought the fact of his misfortune home to him,
causing him--as he at the moment supposed--to reckon, once and for all,
with the sum total of it! But as years passed and experience widened,
below each depth of this adhering misery another deep disclosed itself.
Would he never reach bottom? Would this inalienable disgrace continue
to show itself more restricting and impeding to his action, more
repulsive and contemptible to his fellow-men, through all the
succeeding stages and vicissitudes of his career, right to the very
close?
To her hosts Madame de Vallorbes appeared in her gayest and most
engaging humour. It was only a flying visit, she mustn't stay, Richard
was waiting for her. Only she felt she must just have two words with
Honoria. And say good-bye? Yes, ten thousand sorrows, it was good-bye.
She was recalled to Paris, home, and duty. She made an expressive
little grimace at Miss St. Quentin.
"Your husband will be"--began Mrs. Cathcart, in her large, gently
authoritative manner.
"Enchanted to see me, of course, dear Cousin Selina, or he would not
have required my return thus urgently. We may take that for said.
Meanwhile what strange sprigs of nobility flourish in the local soil
here."
And she proceeded to give an account of the Fallowfeild party at
luncheon more witty, perhaps, than veracious. Helen could be extremely
entertaining on occasion. She gave reins to her tongue, and it galloped
away with her in most surprising fashion.
"My dear, my dear," interrupted her hostess, "you are a little unkind
surely! My dear, you are a little flippant!"
But Madame de Vallorbes enveloped her in the most assuaging embrace.
"Let me laugh while I can, dearest Cousin Selina," she pleaded. "I have
had a delightful little holiday. Every one has been charming to me.
You, of course--but then you always are that. Your presence breathes
consolation. But Aunt Katherine has been charming too, and that, quite
between ourselves, was a little more than I anticipated. Now the
holiday draws to a close and pay-day looms large ahead. You know
nothing about such pay-days, thank heaven, dear Cousin Selina. They are
far from joyous inventions; and so"--the young lady spread abroad her
hands, palms upward, and shrugged her shoulders under their weight of
costly furs--"and so I laugh, don't you understand, I laugh!"
Miss St. Quentin's delicate, square-cut face wore an air of solicitude
as she followed her friend out of the room. There was a trace of
indolence in her slow, reflective speech, as in her long, swinging
stride--the indolence bred of unconscious strength rather than of
weakness, the leisureliness which goes with staying power both in the
moral and the physical domain.
"See here, Nellie," she said, "forgive brutal frankness, but which is
the real thing to-day--they're each delightful in their own way--the
tears or the laughter?"
"Both! oh, well-beloved seeker after truth," Madame de Vallorbes
answered. "There lies the value of the situation."
"Fresh worries?"
"No, no, the old, the accustomed, the well-accredited, the normal, the
stock ones--a husband and a financial crisis."
As she spoke Madame de Vallorbes fastened the buttons of her long
driving-coat. Miss St. Quentin knelt down and busied herself with the
lowest of these. Her tall, slender figure was doubled together. She
kept her head bent.
"I happen to have a pretty tidy balance just now," she remarked
parenthetically, and as though with a certain diffidence. "So you know,
if you are a bit hard up--why--it's all perfectly simple, Nellie, don't
you know."
For a perceptible space of time Madame de Vallorbes did not answer. A
grating of wheels on the gravel arrested her attention. She looked down
the long vista of ruddily lighted hall, with its glowing fire and
cheerful lamps to the open door, where, against the blear whiteness of
the fog, the mail-phaeton and its occupant showed vague, in outline and
in proportions almost gigantic against the thick, shifting atmosphere.
Miss St. Quentin raised her head, surprised at her companion's silence.
Helen de Vallorbes bent down, took the upturned face in both hands and
kissed the soft cheeks with effusion.
"You are adorable," she said. "But you are too generous. You shall lend
me nothing more. I believe I see my way. I can scrape through this
crisis."
Miss St. Quentin rose to her feet.
"All right," she said, smiling upon her friend from her superior height
with a delightful air of affection and apology. "I only wanted you just
to know, in case--don't you see. And--and--for the rest, how goes it
Helen? Are you turning all their poor heads at Brockhurst? You're
rather an upsetting being to let loose in an ordinary, respectable,
English country-house. A sort of _Mousquetaire au couvent_ the other
way about, don't you know. Are you making things fly generally?"
"I am making nothing fly," the other lady rejoined gaily. "I am as
inoffensive as a stained-glass saint in a chapel window. I am
absolutely angelic."
"That's worst of all," Honoria exclaimed, still smiling. "When you're
angelic you are most particularly deadly. For the preservation of local
innocents, somebody ought to go and hoist danger signals."
Miss St. Quentin, after just a moment's hesitation, followed her friend
through the warm, bright hall to the door. Then Helen de Vallorbes
turned to her.
"_Au revoir_, dearest Honoria," she said, "and the sooner the better.
Leave your shopgirls and distressed needlewomen, and all your other
good works for a still better one--namely for me. Come and reclaim, and
comfort, and support me for a while in Paris."
Again she kissed the soft cheek.
"I am as good as gold. I am just now actually mawkish with virtue," she
murmured, between the kisses.
Richard witnessed this exceedingly pretty leave-taking not without a
movement of impatience. The fog was thickening once more. It grew late.
He wished his cousin would get through with these amenities. Then,
moreover, he did not covet intercourse with Miss St. Quentin. He pulled
the fur rug aside with his left hand, holding reins and whip in his
right.
"I say, are you nearly ready?" he asked. "I don't want to bother you;
but really it's about time we were moving."
"I come, I come," Madame de Vallorbes cried, in answer. She put one
neatly-shod foot on the axle, and stepped up--Richard holding out his
hand to steady her. A sense, at once pleasurable and defiant, of
something akin to ownership, came over him as he did so. Just then his
attention was claimed by a voice addressing him from the further side
of the carriage. Honoria St. Quentin stood on the gravel close beside
him, bare-headed, in the clinging damp and chill of the fog.
"Give my love to Lady Calmady," she said. "I hope I shall see her again
some day. But, even if I never have the luck to do that, in a way it'll
make no real difference. I've written her name in my private calendar,
and shall always remember it."--She paused a moment. "We got rather
near each other somehow, I think. We didn't dawdle or beat about the
bush, but went straight along, passed the initial stages of
acquaintance in a few hours, and reached that point of friendship where
forgetting becomes impossible.
"My mother never forgets," Richard asserted, and there was, perhaps, a
slight edge to his tone. Looking down into the girl's pale,
finely-moulded face, meeting the glance of those steady, strangely
clear and observant eyes, he received an impression of something
uncompromisingly sincere and in a measure protective. This, for cause
unknown, he resented. Notwithstanding her high breeding. Miss St.
Quentin's attitude appeared to him a trifle intrusive just then.
"I am very sure of that--that your mother never forgets, I mean. One
knows, at once, one can trust her down to the ground and on to the end
of the ages."--Again she paused, as though rallying herself against a
disinclination for further speech. "All captivating women aren't made
on that pattern, unfortunately, you know, Sir Richard. A good many of
them it's wisest not to trust anything like down to the ground, or
longer than--well--the day before yesterday."
And without waiting for any reply to this cryptic utterance, she
stepped swiftly round behind the carriage again, waved her hand from
the door-step and then swung away, with lazy, long-limbed grace, past
the waiting men-servants and through to the ruddy brightness of the
hall.
Madame de Vallorbes settled herself back rather languidly in her place.
She was pricked by a sharp point of curiosity, regarding the tenor of
Miss St. Quentin's mysterious colloquy with Richard Calmady. She had
been able to catch but a word here and there, and these had been
provokingly suggestive. Had the well-beloved Honoria, in a moment of
overscrupulous conscientiousness permitted herself to hoist danger
signals? She wanted to know, for it was her business to haul such down
again with all possible despatch. She intended the barometer to
register set fair whatever the weather actually impending. Yet to
institute direct inquiries might be to invite suspicion. Helen,
therefore, declined upon diplomacy, upon the inverted sweetnesses
calculated nicely to mask an intention quite other than sweet. She
really held her friend in very warm affection. But Madame de Vallorbes
never confused secondary and primary issues. When you have a really big
deal on hand--and of the bigness of her present deal the last quarter
of an hour had brought her notably increased assurance--even the
dearest friend must stand clear and get very decidedly out of the way.
So, while the muffled thud of the horses' hoofs echoed up from the hard
gravel of the carriage drive through the thick atmosphere, and the bare
limbs of the trees clawed, as with lean arms clothed in tattered
draperies, at the passing carriage and its occupants, she contented
herself by observing:--
"I am grateful to you for driving me over, Richard. Honoria is very
perfect in her own way. It always does me good to see her. She's quite
unlike anybody else, isn't she?"
But Richard's eyes were fixed upon the blank wall of fog just ahead,
which, though always stable, always receded before the advancing
carriage. The effect of it was unpleasant somehow, holding, as it did
to his mind, suggestions of other things still more baffling and
impending, from which--though you might keep them at arm's
length--there was no permanent or actual escape. The question of Miss
St. Quentin's characteristics did not consequently greatly interest
him. He had arrived at conclusions. There was a matter of vital
importance on which he desired to speak to his cousin. But how to do
that? Richard was young and excellently modest. His whole purpose was
rather fiercely focused on speech. But he was diffident, fearing to
approach the subject which he had so much at heart clumsily and in a
tactless, tasteless manner.
"Miss St. Quentin? Oh yes!" he replied, rather absently. "I really know
next to nothing about her. And she seems merely to regard me as a