The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
unnecessarily pessimistic. But I happened to see Lady Constance just
now, and I cannot pretend that she struck me as looking conspicuously
happy."
Lord Shotover flattened his shoulders against the back of the sofa,
expanding his chest and thrusting his hands still farther into his
pockets with a movement at once of anxiety and satisfaction.
"I don't believe she is," he asserted. "Upon my word you're right. I
don't believe she is. I doubted it from the first, and now I'm pretty
certain. Of course I know I'm a bad lot, Miss St. Quentin. I've been
very little but a confounded nuisance to my people ever since I was
born. They're all ten thousand times better than I am, and they're
doing what they honestly think right. All the same I believe they're
making a ghastly mistake. They're selling the poor, little girl against
her will, that's about the long and short of it."
He bowed himself together, looking at his companion from under his
eyebrows, and speaking with more seriousness than she had ever heard
him yet speak.
"I tell you it makes me a little sick sometimes to see what excellent,
well-meaning people will do with girls in respect of marriage. Oh, good
Lord! it just does! But then a high moral tone doesn't come quite
gracefully from me. I know that. I'm jolly well out of it. It's not for
me to preach. And so I thought for once I'd act--defy authority, risk
landing myself in a worse mess than ever, and give Decies his chance.
And I tell you he really is a charming chap, a gentleman, you know, and
a nice, clean-minded, decent fellow--not like me, not a bit. He's
awfully hard hit too, and would be as steady as old time for poor
little Con's sake if----"
"Ah! now I begin to comprehend," Honoria said.
"Yes, don't you see, it's a perfectly genuine, for-ever-and-ever-amen
sort of business."
Lord Shotover leaned back once more, and turned a wonderfully pleasant,
if not preeminently responsible, countenance upon his companion.
"I never went in for that kind of racket myself, Miss St. Quentin," he
continued. "Not being conspicuously faithful, I should only have made a
_fiasco_ of it. But I give you my word it touches me all the same when
I do run across it. I think it's awfully lucky for a man to be made
that way. And Decies is. So there seemed no help for it. I had to chuck
discretion, as I told you, and give him his chance."
He paused, and then asked with a somewhat humorous air of
self-depreciation:--"What do you think now, have I done more harm than
good, made confusion worse confounded, and played the fool generally?"
But again Honoria vouchsafed him no immediate reply. The meditative
mood still held her, and the present conversation offered much food for
meditation. Her companion's confession of faith in true love, if you
had the good fortune to be born that way, had startled her. That the
speaker enjoyed the reputation of being something of a profligate lent
singular point to that confession. She had not expected it from Lord
Shotover, of all men. And, as coming from him, the sentiment was in a
high degree arresting and interesting. Her own ideals, so far, had a
decidedly anti-matrimonial tendency, while being in love appeared to
her a much overrated, if not actively objectionable, condition.
Personally she hoped to escape all experience of it. Then her thought
traveled back to Lady Calmady,--the charm of her personality, her
sorrows, her splendid self-devotion, and to the object of that
devotion--namely, Richard Calmady, a being of strange contrasts, at
once maimed and beautiful, a being from whom she--Honoria--shrank in
instinctive repulsion, while unwillingly acknowledging that he
exercised a permanent and intimate fascination over her imagination.
She dwelt, in quick pity, too, upon the frightened, wide-eyed, childish
face recently seen rising from out its diaphanous cloud of tulle, the
prettiness of it heightened by fair wealth of summer roses and flash of
costly diamonds, and upon Mr. Decies, the whole-hearted, young soldier
lover, whose existence threatened such dangerous complications in
respect of the rest of this strangely assorted company. Finally her
meditative survey returned to its point of departure. In thought she
surveyed her present companion,--his undeniable excellence of sentiment
and clear-seeing, his admittedly defective conduct in matters ethical
and financial. Never before had she been at such close quarters with
living and immediate human drama, and, notwithstanding her detachment,
her lofty indifference and high-spirited theories, she found it
profoundly agitating. She was sensible of being in collision with
unknown and incalculable forces. Instinctively she rose from her place
on the sofa, and, moving to the open window, looked out into the night.
Below, the Park, now silent and deserted, slept peacefully, as any
expanse of remote country pasture and woodland, in the mildly radiant
moonlight. Here and there were blottings of dark shadow cast by the
clumps or avenues of trees. Here and there the timid, yellow flame of
gas lamps struggled to assert itself against the all-embracing silver
brightness. Here and there windows glowed warm, set in the pale,
glistering facades of the adjacent houses. A cool, light wind, hailing
from the direction of the unseen Serpentine, stirred the hanging
clusters of the pink geraniums that fell over the curved lip of the
stone vases, standing along the broad coping of the balcony, and gently
caressed the girl's bare arms and shoulders.
Seen under these unaccustomed conditions familiar objects assumed a
fantastic aspect. For the night is a mighty magician, with power to
render even the weighty brick and stone, even the hard, uncomprising
outlines of a monster, modern city, delicately elusive, mockingly
tentative and unsubstantial. Meanwhile, within, from all along the
vista of crowded and brilliantly illuminated rooms, came the subdued,
yet confused and insistent, sound of musical instruments, of many
voices, many footsteps, the hush of women's trailing garments, the rise
and fall of unceasing conversation. And to Honoria standing in this
quiet, dimly-seen place, the sense of that moonlit world without, and
this gas and candle-lit world within, increased the nameless agitation
which infected her. A haunting persuasion of the phantasmagoric
character of all sounds that saluted her ears, all sights that met her
eyes, possessed her. A vast uncertainty surrounded and pressed in on
her, while those questionings of appearances and actualities, of truth
and falsehood, right and wrong, justice and injustice, with which she
had played idly earlier in the evening, took on new and almost terrible
proportions, causing her intelligence, nay, her heart itself, to reach
out, as never before, in search of some sure rock and house of defense
against the disintegrating apprehension of universal instability and
illusion.
"Ah! it is all very difficult, difficult to the point of alarm!" she
exclaimed suddenly, turning to Lord Shotover and looking him straight
in the face, with an unself-consciousness and desire of support so
transparent, that that gentleman found himself at once delighted and
slightly abashed.
"Bless my soul, but Ludovic is a lucky devil!" he said to
himself.--"What's--what's so beastly difficult, Miss St. Quentin?" he
asked aloud. And the sound of his cheery voice recalled Honoria to the
normal aspects of existence with almost humorous velocity. She smiled
upon him.
"I really believe I don't quite know," she said. "Perhaps that the two
people, of whom we were speaking, really care for each other, and that
this engagement has come between them, and that you have chucked
discretion and given him his chance. Tell me, what sort of man is
he--strong enough to make the most of his chance when he's got it?"
But at that moment Lord Shotover stepped forward, adroitly planting
himself right in front of her and thus screening her from observation.
"By George!" he said under his breath, in tones of mingled amusement
and consternation, "he's making the most of his chance now Miss St.
Quentin, and that most uncommonly comprehensively, unless I'm very much
mistaken."
Her companion's tall person and the folds of a heavy curtain, while
screening Honoria from observation, also, in great measure, obscured
her view of the room. Yet not so completely but that she saw two
figures cross it, one black, one white, those of a man and a girl. They
were both speaking, the man apparently pleading, the girl protesting
and moving hurriedly, the while, as though in actual flight. She must
have been moving blindly, at random, for she stumbled against the
outstanding, gilded leg of a consol table, set against the further
wall, causing the ornaments on it to rattle. And so doing, she gave a
plaintive exclamation of alarm, perhaps even of physical pain. Hearing
which, that nameless agitation, that sense of collision with unknown
and incalculable forces, seized hold on Honoria again, while Lord
Shotover's features contracted and he turned his head sharply.
"By George!" he repeated under his breath.
But the girl recovered herself, and, followed by her companion,--he
still pleading, she still protesting,--passed by the further window on
to the balcony and out of sight. There followed a period of embarrassed
silence on the part of the usually voluble Shotover, while his pleasant
countenance expressed a certain half-humorous concern.
"Really, I'm awfully sorry," he said. "I'd not the slightest intention
of landing you in for the thick of the brown like this.".
"Or yourself either," she replied, smiling, though, with that sense of
nameless agitation still upon her, her heart beat rather quick.
"Well, perhaps not. Between ourselves, moral courage isn't my strong
point. There's nothing I funk like a row. I say, what shall we do?
Don't you think we'd better quietly clear out?"
But just then a sound caught Honoria's ear before which all vague
questions of ultimate truth and falsehood, right and wrong fled away.
Whatever might savour of illusion, here was something real and actual,
something pitiful, moreover, arousing the spirit of knight-errantry in
her, pushing her to lay lance in rest and go forth, reckless of
conventionalities, reckless even of considerations of justice, to the
succour of oppressed womanhood. What words the man, on the balcony
without, was saying she could not distinguish--whether cruel or kind,
but that the young girl was weeping, with the abandonment of
long-resisted tears, she could not doubt.
"No, no, listen Lord Shotover," she exclaimed authoritatively. "Don't
you hear? She is crying as if her poor heart would break. You must
stay. If I understand you rightly your sister has only got you to
depend on. Whatever happens you must stand by her and see her through."
"Oh! but, my dear Miss St. Quentin----" The young man's aspect was
entertaining. He looked at the floor, he looked at Honoria, he rubbed
the back of his neck with one hand as though there might be placed the
seat of fortitude. "You're inviting me to put my head into the
liveliest hornet's nest. What the deuce--excuse me--am I to say to her
and all the rest of them? Decies, even, mayn't quite understand my
interference and may resent it. I think it is very much safer, all
round, to let them--him and her--thrash it out between them, don't you
know. I say though, what a beastly thing it is to hear a woman cry! I
wish to goodness we'd never come into this confounded place and let
ourselves in for it."
As he spoke, Lord Shotover turned towards the door, meditating escape
in the direction of that brilliant vista of crowded rooms. But Honoria
St. Quentin, her enthusiasm once aroused, became inexorable. With her