The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
"You must not be here alone."
"Oh no! People will visit me, no doubt, animated by kindly wishes to
lessen my solitude," she answered, still smiling. Remembrance of
Honoria St. Quentin's letter came to her mind. Could it be that the
girl had some inkling of what was in store for her, and that this had
inspired the slight over-warmth of her protestations of
affection?--"Honoria would always be ready to come, should I ask her,"
she said.
All solicitude passed from Richard's expression, all softening from his
tone.
"By all means ask her. That would cap the climax, and round the irony
of the situation to admiration!"
"Indeed? Why?" Katherine inquired, painfully impressed by the renewed
bitterness of his manner.
"If you're fond of her that is convincingly sufficient. She and I have
never been very sympathetic, but that's a detail. I shall be gone.
Therefore pray have her, or anybody else you happen to fancy, so long
as you do have some one. You mustn't be here alone."
"Julius remains faithful through all chances and changes."
"But I imagine even Julius has sufficient social sense to perceive that
faithfulness may be a little out of place at this juncture. At least I
sincerely hope he'll perceive it, for otherwise he will have to be made
to do so--and that will be a nuisance."
"Dickie, Dickie, what are you implying?" Lady Calmady exclaimed. "By
what strange and unlovely thoughts are you possessed to-night?"
"I am learning to look at things as the average man of the world looks
at them, that's all," he said. "We have been too refined, you and I, to
be self-critical, with the consequence that we have allowed ourselves a
considerable degree of latitude in many directions. Julius' permanent
residence here ranks among the fine-fanciful disregardings of accepted
proprieties with which we have indulged ourselves. But spades are to be
called spades in future--at least by me. So, for the very same reason
that I go forth, like the average man of the world, to enjoy the
pleasures of sin for a season, do I object to Julius, or any other man,
being your guest during my absence, unless you have some woman of your
own position in life living here with you. The levels in social matters
have changed, once and for all. I have come to a sane mind and
renounced the eccentric subterfuges and paltry hypocrisies, by means of
which we have attempted, you and I, to keep disagreeable facts at bay.
Truth, naked and unabashable, is the only goddess I worship
henceforth."
He leaned forward, laying his hands upon the arms of his chair. His
manner was harsh still. But all coldness had departed from it, rather
did a white heat of passion consume him dreadful to witness.
"Yes, it is wisest to repeat that, so that, on your part, there may be
no excuse for any shadow of misapprehension. The levels have altered.
The old ones can never be restored. I want to have you grasp this,
mother--swallow it, digest it, so that it passes into fibre and tissue
of your every thought about me. For an acutely, unscientific, an
ingeniously unreasonable, idea obtains widely among respectable,
sentimental, so-called religious persons, regarding those who are the
victims of disfiguring accident, or, like myself, are physically
disgraced from birth. Because we have been deprived of our natural
rights, because we have so abominably little, we are expected to be
slavishly grateful for the contemptible pittance that we have. Because,
slothfully, by His neglect, or, wantonly, for His amusement, the
Creator has tortured us, maiming, distorting us up as a laughing-stock
before all man and womankind--because He has played a ghastly and
brutal practical joke on us, fixing the marks of low comedy in our
living flesh and bone--therefore we, forsooth, are to be more pious,
more clean-living, temperate, and discreet than the rest--to bow
amiably beneath the cross, gratefully to kiss the rod! Those
irregularities of conduct which are smiled at, and taken for granted,
in a man made after the normal, comely fashion, become a scandal in the
case of a poor, unhappy devil like me, at which good people hold up
their hands in horror. Faugh!--I tell you I'm sick of such cowardly
cant. A pretty example the Almighty's set me of justice and mercy!
Handsome encouragement He has given me to be virtuous and sober! Much I
have for which to praise His holy name! Arbitrarily, without excuse, or
faintest show of antecedent reason, He has elected to curse. And the
curse will cling forever and ever, till they lay me in a coffin nearly
half as short again as that of any other man, and leave the hideousness
of my deformity to be obliterated and purged at last--eaten away by the
worms in the dark."
Richard stretched out his hands, palms upward.
"And in return for all this shall I bless? No, indeed--no, thank you.
Not even towards God Almighty Himself will I play the part of
lick-spittle and sycophant. I have fine enough stuff in me, let alone
the energy begotten by the flagrance of His injustice, to take higher
grounds with Him than that. I will break what men hold to be His laws,
wherever and whenever I can--I will make hay of His so-called natural
and moral order, just as often as I get the chance. I will curse, and
again, curse back."
The speaker's voice was deep and resonant, filling the whole room. His
utterance deliberate and unshaken. His face dark with the malign beauty
of implacable hatred. Hearing him, seeing him thus, Katherine Calmady's
fortitude forsook her. She ceased to distinguish or discriminate.
Nature gave way. She knelt upon the floor before him, her hands
clasped, tears coursing down her cheeks. But of her attitude and aspect
she was unconscious.
"Oh, Richard, Richard!" she cried, "forgive me. Curse me, my dearest,
throw all the blame on me, my dearest--I accept it--not on God. Only
try, try to forgive! Forgive me for being your mother. Forgive me that
I ever loved and married. Forgive me the intolerable wrong which, all
unknowingly, I did you before your birth. I humble myself before you,
and with reason. For I am the cause, I, who would give my life for your
happiness, my blood for your healing, a thousand times. But through all
these years I have done my poor best to serve you and to make up. The
hypocrisies and subterfuges which you lash so scornfully--and rightly
perhaps--were the fruit of my overcare for you. Rail at me. I deserve
it. Perhaps I have been faithless, but only once or twice, and for a
moment. I was faithless towards you here, in the garden to-night. But
then I supposed you content. Ah! I hardly know what I say!--Only rail
at me, my beloved, not at God. And then try--try not to leave me in
anger. Try, before you go, to forgive!"
Richard had sunk back in his chair, his hands clasped under his head,
watching her. It gave him the strangest sensation to see his mother
kneeling before him thus. At first it shocked him almost to the point
of heated protest, as against a thing unpermissible and indecorous.
Then the devils of wounded pride, of anarchy, and of revolt asserting
themselves, he began to relish, to be appeased by, the unseemly sight.
Little Lady Constance Quayle, and all that of which she was the symbol,
had disappointed and escaped him. But here was a woman, worth a dozen
Constance Quayles, in beauty, in intellect, and in heart, prostrate
before him, imploring his clemency as the penitent implores the
absolution of the priest! An evil gladness took him that he had power
thus to subjugate so regal a creature. His gluttony of inflicting
pain--since he himself suffered--his gluttony of exercising
dominion--since he himself had been defied and defrauded--was in a
degree satisfied. His arrogance was at once reinforced and assuaged.
"It is absurd to speak of forgiveness," he said presently, and slowly,
"as it is absurd to speak of restitution. These are mere words, having
no real tally in fact. We appear to have volition, but actually and
essentially we are as leaves driven by the wind. Where it blindly
drives, there we blindly go. So it has been from the beginning. So it
always will be. In the last twenty-four hours there are many things I
have ceased to believe in, and among them, my dear mother, is human
responsibility."
He paused, and motioned Lady Calmady towards her chair with a certain
authority.
"Therefore calm yourself," he said. "Grieve as little as may be about
all this matter, and let us talk it over without further emotion."
He waited a brief space, giving her time to recover her composure, and
then continued coldly, with a careful abstention from any show of
feeling.
"Let us clear our minds of cant, and go forward knowing that there is
really neither good nor evil. For these--even as God Himself, whose
existence I treated from the anthro-pomorphic standpoint just now, so
as to supply myself with a target to shoot at, a windmill at which to
tilt, a row of ninepins set up for the mere satisfaction of knocking
them down again--these are plausible delusions invented by man, in the
vain effort to protect himself and his fellows from the profound sense
of loneliness, and impotence, which seizes on him if he catches so much
as a passing glimpse of the gross comedy of human aspiration, human
affection, briefly, human existence."
But, strive as he might, excitement gained on Richard once more, for
young blood is hot and gallops masterfully along the veins, specially
under the whip of real or imagined disgrace. He sat upright, grasping
the arms of his chair, and looking, not at his mother, but away into
the deep of the summer night.
"Perhaps my personal peculiarities confer on me unusually acute
perception of the inherent grossness of the human comedy. I propose to
take the lesson to heart. They teach me not to sacrifice the present to
the future, but to fling away ideals like so much waste paper, and just
take that which I can immediately get. They tell me to limit my
horizon, and go the common way of common, coarse-grained, sensual
man--in as far as that way is possible to me--and be of this world
worldly. And so, mother, I want you to understand that from this day
forth I turn over a new leaf, not only in thought, but in conduct. I am
going to have just all that my money and position, and even this vile
deformity--for, by God, I'll use that too--what people won't give for
love they'll give for curiosity--can bring me of pleasure and
notoriety. I am going to lay hold of life with these rather horribly
strong arms of mine"--he looked across at Lady Calmady with a sneering
smile.--"Strong?" he repeated, "strong as a young bull-ape's. I mean to
tear the very vitals out of living, to tear knowledge, excitement,
intoxication, out of it, making them, by right of conquest, my own. I
will compel existence to yield me all that it yields other men, and
more--because my senses are finer, my acquaintance with sorrow more
intimate, my quarrel with fortune more vital and more just. As I cannot
have a wife, I'll have mistresses. As I cannot have honest love, I'll
have gratified lust. I am not stupid. I shall not follow the beaten
track. My imagination has been stimulated into rather dangerous
activity by the pre-natal insult put upon me. And now that I have
emancipated myself, I propose to apply my imagination practically."
The young man flung himself back in his chair again.
"There ought to be startling results," he said, with gloomy exultation.
"Don't you think so, mother? There should be startling results."
Lady Calmady bowed herself together, putting her hands over her eyes.
Then raising her head, she managed to smile at him, though very sadly,
her sweet face drawn by exhaustion and marred by lately shed tears.
"Ah! yes, my dearest," she answered, "no doubt the results will be