The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
creature developed forces, presented aspects, in his present feverish
mood, with which she felt hardly equal to cope.
"Mother, I--I want to marry."
"I, too, have thought of that," she said.
"You don't consider that I am debarred from marriage?"
"Oh, no, no!" Katherine cried, a little sob in her voice.
He looked at her steadily, with those profoundly desolate eyes.
"It would not be wrong? It would not be otherwise than honourable?" he
asked.
If doubts arose within Katherine of the answer to that question, she
crushed them down passionately.
"No, my dearest, no," she declared. "It would not be wrong--it could
not, could not be so--if she loved you, and you loved whomsoever you
married."
"But I'm not in love--at least not in love with any person who can
become my wife. Yet that does not seem to me to matter very much. I
should be faithful, no fear, to any one who was good enough to marry
me. Enough of love would come, if only out of gratitude, towards the
woman who would accept me as--as I am--and forgive that--that which
cannot be helped."
Again trembling shook Katherine. So terribly much seemed to her at
stake just then! Silently she implored wisdom and clear-seeing might be
accorded her. She leaned a little forward, and taking his left hand
held it closely in both hers.
"Dearest, that is not all. Tell me all," she said, "or I cannot quite
follow your thought."
Richard flung his body sideways across the bed, and kissed her hands as
they held his. The hot colour rushed over his face and neck, up to the
roots of his close-cropped, curly hair. He spoke, lying thus upon his
chest, his face half buried in the sheet.
"I want to marry because--because I want a child--I want a son," he
said.
No words came to Katherine just then. But she disengaged one hand and
laid it upon the dear brown head, and waited in silence until the
violence of the young man's emotion had spent itself, until the broad,
muscular shoulders had ceased to heave and the strong, young hands to
grasp her wrist. Suddenly Richard recovered himself, sat up, rubbing
his hands across his eyes, laughing, but with a queer catch in his
voice.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I'm a fool, an awful fool. Hang Morabita
and her voice and the golden houses of the gods, and beastly, showy
omnipotence to which her voice carries one away! To talk
sense--mother--just brutal common sense. My fate is fixed, you know.
There's no earthly use in wriggling. I am condemned to live a cow's
life and die a cow's death. The pride of life may call, but I can't
answer. The great prizes are not for me. I'm too heavily handicapped. I
was looking at that young fellow, Decies, to-night and considering his
chances as against my own---- Oh! I know there's wealth in plenty. The
pasture's green enough to make many a man covet it, and the stall's
well bedded-down. I don't complain. Only mother, you know--I know.
Where's the use of denying that which we neither of us ever really
forget?--And then sometimes my blood takes fire. It did to-night. And
the splendour of living being denied me, I--I--am tempted to say a
Black Mass. One must take it out somehow. And I know I could go to the
devil as few men have ever gone, magnificently, detestably, with
subtleties and refinements of iniquity."
He laughed again a little. And, hearing him, his mother's heart stood
still.
"Verily, I have advantages," he continued. "There should be a
picturesqueness in my descent to hell which would go far to place my
name at the head of the list of those sinners who have achieved
immortality----"
"Richard! Richard!" Lady Calmady cried, "do you want to break my heart
quite?"
"No," he answered, simply. "I'd infinitely rather not break your heart.
I have no ambition to see my name in that devil's list except as an
uncommonly ironical sort of second best. But then we must make some
change, some radical change. At times, lately, I've felt as if I was a
caged wild beast--blinded, its claws cut, the bars of its cage soldered
and riveted, no hope of escape, and yet the vigour, the immense longing
for freedom and activity, there all the while."
Richard stretched himself.
"Poor beast, poor beast, poor beast!" he said, shaking his head and
smiling. "I tell you I get absurdly sentimental over it at times."
And then, happily, there came a momentary lapse in the entirety of his
egoism. He turned on his side and took Lady Calmady's hand again, and
fell to playing absently with her bracelets.
"You poor darling, how I torture you," he said. "And yet, now we've
once broken the ice and begun talking of all this, we're bound to talk
on to the finish--if finish there is. You see these few weeks in
London--I've enjoyed them--but still they've made me understand, more
than ever, all I've missed. Life calls, mother, do you see? And though
the beast is blind, and his claws are cut, and his cage bolted, yet,
when life calls, he must answer--must--or run mad--or die--do you see?"
"And you shall answer, my beloved. Never fear, you will answer,"
Katherine replied proudly.
Richard's hand closed hard upon hers.
"Thank you," he said. "You were made to be a mother of heroes, not of a
useless log like me.--And that's just why I want to be good. And to be
good I want a wife, that I may have that boy. I could keep straight for
him, mother, though I'm afraid I can't keep straight for myself, and
simply because it's right, much longer. I want him to have just all
that I am denied. I want him to restore the balance, both for you and
for me. I may have something of a career myself, perhaps, in politics
or something. It's possible, but that will come later, if it comes at
all. And then it would be for his sake. What I want first is the boy,
to give me an object and keep up my pluck, and keep me steady. I,
giving him life, shall find my life in him, be paid for my wretched
circumscribed existence by his goodly and complete one. He may be
clever or not--I'd rather, of course, he was not quite a dunce--but I
really don't very much mind, so long as he isn't an outrageous fool, if
he's only an entirely sound and healthy human animal."
Richard stretched himself upon the bed, straightened the sheet across
his chest, and clasped his hands under his head again. The desolation
had gone out of his eyes. He seemed to look afar into the future, and
therein see manly satisfaction and content. His voice was vibrant,
rising to a kind of chant.
"He shall run, and he shall swim, he shall fence, and he shall row," he
said. "He shall learn all gallant sports, as becomes an English
gentleman. And he shall ride,--not as I ride, God forbid! like a monkey
strapped on a dog at a fair, but as a centaur, as a young demigod. We
will set him, stark naked, on a bare-backed horse, and see that he's
clean-limbed, perfect, without spot or blemish, from head to heel."
And once more Katherine Calmady held her peace, somewhat amazed,
somewhat tremulous, since it seemed to her the young man was drawing a
cheque upon the future which might, only too probably, be dishonoured
and returned marked no account. For who dare say that this child would
ever come to the birth, or coming, what form it would bear? Yet, even
so, she rejoiced in her son and the high spirit he displayed, while the
instinct of romance which inspired his speech touched an answering
chord in, and uplifted, her.
By now the brief June night was nearly spent. The blind still creaked
against the open window sash, but the thud of horse-hoofs and beat of
passing footsteps had become infrequent, while the roar of the mighty
city had dwindled to a murmur, as of an ebbing tide upon a shallow,
sand-strewn beach. The after-light of the sunset, walking the horizon,
beneath the Pole star from west to east, broadened upward now towards
the zenith. Even here, in the heart of London, the day broke with a
spacious solemnity. Richard raised himself, and, sitting up, blew out
the candles placed on the table at the bedside.
"Mother," he said, "will you let in the morning?"
Lady Calmady was pale from her long vigil, and her unspoken, yet
searching, emotion. She appeared very tall, ghostlike even, in her
soft, white raiment, as she moved across and drew up the sucking blind.
Above the gray parapets of the houses, and the ranks of contorted
chimney-pots, the loveliness of the summer dawn grew wide. Warm amber
shaded through gradations of exquisite and nameless colour into blue.
While, across this last, lay horizontal lines of fringed,
semi-transparent, opalescent cloud. To Katherine those heavenly blue
interspaces spoke of peace, of the stilling of all strife, when the
tragic, yet superb, human story should at last be fully told and God be
all in all. She was very tired. The struggle was so prolonged. Her soul
cried out for rest. And then she reminded herself, almost sternly, that
the kingdom of God and the peace of it is no matter of time or of
place, but is within the devout believer, ever present, immediate,
possessing his or her soul, and by that soul in turn possessed. Just
then the sparrows, roosting in the garden of the square, awoke with
manifold and vociferous chirping and chattering. The voice from the bed
called to her.
"Mother," it said imperatively, "come to me. You are not angry at what
I have told you? You understand? You will find her for me?"
Lady Calmady turned away from the open window and the loveliness of the
summer dawn. She was less tired somehow. God was with her, so she could
not be otherwise than hopeful. Moreover, the world had proved itself
very kind towards her son. It would not deny him this last request,
surely?
"My dearest, I think I have found her already," Lady Calmady answered.
Yet, even as she spoke, she faltered a little, recognising the energy
and strength manifest in the young man's countenance, remembering his
late discourse, and the pent-up fires of his nature to which that
discourse had borne only too eloquent testimony. For who was a young
girl, but just out of the schoolroom, a girl in pretty, fresh
frocks--the last word of contemporary fashion,--whose baby face and
slow, wide-eyed gaze bore witness to her entire innocence of the great
primitive necessities, the rather brutal joys, the intimate vices, the
far-ranging intellectual questionings which rule and mould the action
of mankind,--who was she, indeed, to cope with a nature such as
Richard's?
"Mother, tell me, who is it?"
And instinctively Katherine fell to pleading. She sat down beside the
bed again and smoothed the sheet.
"You will be tender and loving to her, Dickie?" she said. "For she is
young and very gentle, and might easily be made afraid. You will not
forget what is due to your wife, to your bride, in your longing for a
child?"
"Who is it?" Richard demanded again.
"Ludovic's sister--little Lady Constance Quayle."
He drew in his breath sharply.
"Would she--would her people consent?" he said.
"I think so. Judging by appearances, I am almost sure they would
consent."
A long silence followed. Richard lay still, looking at the rosy flush
that broadened in the morning sky and touched the bosoms of those
delicate clouds with living, pulsating colour. And he flushed too, all
his being softened into a great tenderness, a great shyness, a quick
yet noble shame. For his whole attitude towards this question of
marriage changed strangely as it passed from the abstract, from regions
of vague purpose and desire, to the concrete, to the thought of a
maiden with name and local habitation, a maiden actual and accessible,
whose image he could recall, whose pretty looks and guileless speech he
knew.
"I almost wish she was not Ludovic's sister, though," he remarked
presently. "It is a great deal to ask."