The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
vehicle of communication between herself and my mother. She sent her
messages just now--I hope to goodness I shan't forget to deliver them!
She and my mother appear to have fallen pretty considerably in love
with one another."
"Probably," Madame de Vallorbes said softly. An agreeable glow of
relief passed over her. She looked up at Richard with a delightful
effect of pensiveness from beneath the sweeping brim of her cavalier
hat.--"I can well believe Aunt Katherine would be attracted by her,"
she continued. "Honoria is quite a woman's woman. Men do not care very
much about her as a rule. There is a good deal of latent vanity
resident in the members of your sex, you know, Richard; and men are
usually conscious that Honoria does not care so very much about them.
They are quite right, she does not. I really believe when poor,
dreadful, old Lady Tobermory left her all that money Honoria's first
thought was that now she might embrace celibacy with a good conscience.
The St. Quentins are not precisely millionaires, you know. Her wealth
left her free to espouse the cause of womanhood at large. She is a
little bit Quixotic, dear thing, and given to tilting at windmills. She
wants to secure to working women a fair business basis--that is the
technical expression, I believe. And so she starts clubs, and forms
circles. She says women must be encouraged to combine and to agitate.
Whether they are capable of combining I do not pretend to say. These
high matters transcend my small wit. But, as I have often pointed out
to her, agitation is the natural attitude of every woman. It would seem
superfluous to encourage or inculcate that, for surely wherever two or
three petticoats are gathered together, there, as far as my experience
goes, is agitation of necessity in the midst of them."
Madame de Vallorbes leaned back with a little sigh and air of exquisite
resignation.
"All the same, the majority of women are unhappy enough, heaven knows!
If Honoria, or any other sweet, feminine Quixote, can find means to
lighten the burden of our lives, she has my very sincere thanks, well
understood."
Richard drew his whip across the backs of the trotting horses, making
them plunge forward against that blank, impalpable wall of
all-encircling, ever-receding, ever-present fog. The carriage had just
crossed the long, white-railed bridge, spanning the little river and
space of marsh on either side, and now entered Sandyfield Street. The
tops of the tall Lombardy poplars were lost in gloom. Now and again the
redness of a lighted cottage window, blurred and contorted in shape,
showed through the gray pall. Slow-moving, country figures, passing
vehicles, a herd of some eight or ten cows--preceded by a diabolic
looking billy-goat, and followed by a lad astride the hind-quarters of
a bare-backed donkey--grew out of pallid nothingness as the carriage
came abreast of them, and receded with mysterious rapidity into
nothingness again. The effect was curiously fantastic and unreal. And
as the minutes passed that effect of unreality gained upon Richard's
imagination, until now--as last evening in the stately solitude of the
Long Gallery--he became increasingly aware of the personality of his
companion, increasingly penetrated by the feeling of being alone with
that personality, as though the world, so strangely blotted out by
these dim, obliterating vapours, were indeed vacant of all human
interest, human purpose, human history, save that incarnate in this
fair woman and his own relation to her. She alone existed, concrete,
exquisite, sentient, amid the vague, shifting immensities of fog. She
alone mattered. Her near neighbourhood worked upon him strongly,
causing an excitement in him which at once hindered and demanded
speech.
Night began to close in in good earnest. Passing the broad, yellowish
glare streaming out from the rounded tap-room window of the Calmady
Arms, and passing from the end of the village street on to the open
common, the light had become so uncertain that Richard could no longer
see his companion's face clearly. This was almost a relief to him, so
that, mastering at once his diffidence and his excitement, he spoke.
"Look here, Helen," he said, "I have been thinking over all that you
told me. I don't want to dwell on subjects that must be very painful to
you, but I can't help thinking about them. It's not that I won't leave
them alone, but that they won't leave me. I don't want to presume upon
your confidence, or take too much upon myself. Only, don't you see, now
that I do know it's impossible to sit down under it all and let things
go on just the same.--You're not angry with me?"
The young man spoke very carefully and calmly, yet the tones of his
voice were heavily charged with feeling.
Madame de Vallorbes clasped her hands rather tightly within her sable
muff. Unconsciously she began to sway a little, just a very little, as
a person will sway in time to strains of stirring music. An excitement,
not mental merely but physical, invaded her. For she recognised that
she stood on the threshold of developments in this very notable drama.
Still she answered quietly, with a touch even of weariness.
"Ah! dear Richard, it is so friendly and charming of you to take my
infelicities thus to heart! But to what end, to what end, I ask you?
The conditions are fixed. Escape from them is impossible. I have made
my bed--made it most abominably uncomfortably, I admit, but that is not
to the point--and I must lie on it. There is no redress. There is
nothing to be done."
"Yes, there is this," he replied. "I know it is wretchedly inadequate,
it doesn't touch the root of the matter. Oh! it's miserably
inadequate--I should think I did know that! Only it might smooth the
surface a bit, perhaps, and put a stop to one source of annoyance.
Forgive me if I say what seems coarse or clumsy--but would not your
position be easier if, in regard to--to money, you were quite
independent of that--of your husband, I mean--M. de Vallorbes?"
For a moment the young lady remained very still, and stared very hard
at the fog. The most surprising visions arose before her. She had a
difficulty in repressing an exclamation.
"Ah! there now, I have blundered. I've hurt you. I've made you angry,"
Dickie cried impulsively.
"No, no, dear Richard," she answered, with admirable gentleness, "I am
not angry. Only what is the use of romancing?"
"I am not romancing. It is the simplest thing out, if you will but have
it so."
He hesitated a little. The horses were pulling, the fog was in his
throat thick and choking--or was it, perhaps, something more
unsubstantial and intangible even than fog? The spacious barns and
rickyards of the Church Farm were just visible on the right. In less
than five minutes more, at their present pace, the horses would reach
the first park gate. The young man felt he must give himself time. He
quieted the horses down into a walk.
"If I were your brother, Helen, I should save you all these sordid
money worries as a matter of course. You have no brother--so, don't you
see, I come next. It's a perfectly obvious arrangement. Just let me be
your banker," he said.
Madame de Vallorbes shut her pretty teeth together. She could have
danced, she could have sung aloud for very gaiety of heart. She had not
anticipated this turn to the situation; but it was a delicious one. It
had great practical merits. Her brain worked rapidly. Immediately those
practical merits ranged themselves before her in detail. But she would
play with it a little--both diplomacy and good taste, in which last she
was by no means deficient, required that.
"Ah! you forget, dear Richard," she said, "in your friendly zeal you
forget that, in our rank of life, there is one thing a woman cannot
accept from a man. To take money is to lay yourself open to slanderous
tongues, is to court scandal. Sooner or later it is known, the fact
leaks out. And however innocent the intention, however noble and honest
the giving, however grateful and honest the receiving, the world puts
but one construction upon such a transaction."
"The world's beastly evil-minded then," Richard said.
"So it is. But that is no news, Dickie dear," Madame de Vallorbes
answered. "Nor is it exactly to the point."
Inwardly she trembled a little. What if she had headed him off too
cleverly, and he should regard her argument as convincing, her refusal
as final? Her fears were by no means lessened by the young man's
protracted silence.
"No, I don't agree," he said at last. "I suppose there are always risks
to be run in securing anything at all worth securing, and it seems to
me, if you look at it all round, the risks in this case are very
slight. Only you--and M. de Vallorbes need know. I suppose he must. But
then, if you will pardon my saying so, after what you have told me I
can't imagine he is the sort of person who is likely to object very
much to an arrangement by which he would benefit, at least indirectly.
As for the world,"--Richard ceased to contemplate his horses. He tried
to speak lightly, while his eyes sought that dimly seen face at his
elbow. "Oh, well, hang the world, Helen! It's easy enough for me to say
so, I dare say, being but so slightly acquainted with it and the ways
of it. But the world can't be so wholly hide-bound and idiotic that it
denies the existence of exceptional cases. And this case, in some of
its bearings at all events, is wholly exceptional, I am--happy to
think."
"You are a very convincing special pleader, Richard," Madame de
Vallorbes said softly.
"Then you accept?" he rejoined exultantly. "You accept?"
The young lady could not quite control herself.
"Ah! if you only knew the prodigious relief it would be," she
exclaimed, with an outbreak of impatience. "It would make an
incalculable difference. And yet I do not see my way. I am in a cleft
stick. I dare not say Yes. And to say No----" Her sincerity was
unimpeachable at that moment. Her eyes actually filled with tears.
"Pah! I am ashamed of myself," she cried, "but to refuse is
distracting."
The gate of the outer park had been reached. The groom swung himself
down and ran forward, but confused by the growing darkness and the
thick atmosphere he fumbled for a time before finding the heavy latch.
The horses became somewhat restive, snorting and fidgeting.
"Steady there, steady, good lass," Richard said soothingly. Then he
turned again to his companion. "Believe me it's the very easiest thing
out to accept, if you'll only look at it all from the right point of
view, Helen."
Madame de Vallorbes withdrew her right hand from her muff and laid it,
almost timidly, upon the young man's arm.
"Do you know, you are wonderfully dear to me, Dick?" she said, and her
voice shook slightly. She was genuinely touched and moved. "No one has
ever been quite so dear to me before. It is a new experience. It takes
my breath away a little. It makes me regret some things I have done.
But it is a mistake to go back on what is past, don't you think so?
Therefore we will go forward. Tell me, expound. What is this so
agreeably reconciling point of view?"
But along with the touch of her hand, a great wave of emotion swept
over poor Richard, making his grasp on the reins very unsteady. The
sensations he had suffered last evening in the Long Gallery again
assailed him. The flesh had its word to say. Speech became difficult.
Meanwhile his agitation communicated itself strangely to the horses.
They sprang forward against that all-encircling, ever-present, yet
ever-receding, blank wall of fog, to which the overarching trees lent
an added gloom and mystery, as though some incarnate terror pursued
them. The gate clanged-to behind the carriage. The groom scrambled