The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
delicate, was obvious. And those tears appeared to lay the dust of so
many pleasant sins, and promise fertilisation of so heavy a crop of
virtue, that--by inevitable action of the law of contraries--the two
friends found it more than ever difficult to say farewell and part that
night.
Now looking back on all that, viewing it calmly in perspective, her
action and attitude struck Helen as somewhat imbecile. Prayer and
penitence have too often a tendency to kick the beam when fear ceases
to weight the balance. And so it followed that the lust of the flesh,
the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, presented themselves to her
as powers by no means contemptible, or unworthy of invocation, this
morning, while she sat at the luxuriously furnished breakfast-table
beneath the glistering dome of the airy pavilion and gazed out between
its slender columns, over the curving lines of the painted city and
glittering waters of the bay, to the cone of Vesuvius rising, in
imperial purple, against the azure sky. To-day, sign, as she noted, of
fine weather, omen, as she trusted, of good fortune, the smoke of its
everlasting burnings towered up and up into the translucent atmosphere,
and then drifted away--a gigantic, wedge-shaped pennon--towards Capri
and the open sea. And, beholding these things, out of simple, physical
well-being, fulness of bread, conviction of her own undiminished
beauty, and the merry devilry begotten of these, she fell to projecting
a second, a companion, one-act drama founded upon the life of the
Magdalene, but, this time, before the saint's conversion, at an
altogether earlier stage of her very instructive history. And this
drama she would not read to M. Destournelle--not a bit of it. In it he
should have neither part nor lot.--Registering which determination, she
shook her charming, honey-coloured head, holding up both hands with a
gesture of humorous and well-defined repudiation.
For, in truth, the day of M. Destournelle appeared, just now, to be
very effectually over. It had been reasonable enough to urge her
natural fears in journeying through a war-distracted land--although
guarded by Charles, most discreet and resourceful of English
men-servants, and Zelie Forestier, most capable of French
lady's-maids--as excuse for Paul Destournelle joining her at a wayside
station a short distance out of Paris and accompanying her south. _A la
guerre comme a la guerre._ A beautiful woman can hardly be too careful
of her person amid the many and primitive dangers which battle and
invasion let loose. De Vallorbes himself--detestably jealous though he
was--could hardly have objected to her thus securing effective
protection, had he been acquainted with the fact. That he was not so
acquainted was, of course, the veriest oversight. But, the frontier
once reached--the better part of three weeks had elapsed in the
reaching of it--and all danger of war and tumult past, both the
necessity and, to be frank, the entertainment of M. Destournelle's
presence became less convincing. Helen grew a trifle weary of his
transports, his suspicions, his _bel tete de Jesu souffrant_, his
insatiable literary and personal vanity. The charm, the excitement, of
the situation, began to wear rather threadbare, while the practical
inconveniences and restrictions it imposed increasingly disclosed
themselves. A lover, as Helen reflected, provided you see enough of
him, offers but small improvement upon a husband. He is liable to
become possessive and didactic, after the manner of the natural man. He
is liable to forget that the relation is permitted, not legalised--that
it exists on suffrance merely, and is therefore terminable at the will
of either party. The last days of that same southern journey had been
marked by misunderstandings and subsequent reconciliations, in an
ascending scale of acrimony and fervour on the part of her companion.
In Helen's case familiarity tended very rapidly to breed contempt. She
ceased to be in the least amused by these recurring agitations. At
Pisa, after a scene of a particularly excited nature, she lost all
patience, frankly told her admirer that she found him not a little
ridiculous, and requested him to remove himself, his grievances, and
his _bel tete de Jesu_ elsewhere. M. Destournelle took refuge in
nerves, threats of morphia, and his bedchamber,--in the chaste
seclusion of which apartment Helen left him, unvisited and unconsoled,
while, attended by her servants, she gaily resumed her journey.
An adorable sense of independence possessed her, of the charm of her
own society, of the absence of all external compelling or directing of
her movements--no circumscription of her liberty possible--the world
before her where to choose! Not only were privations, dismal hauntings
of siege and slaughter, left behind, and M. Destournelle, just now most
wearisome of lovers, left behind also, but de Vallorbes himself had,
for the time being, become a permissibly negligible quantity. The news
of more fighting, more bloodshed, had just reached her, though the
German armies were marching back to the now wholly German Rhine. For
upon unhappy Paris had come an hour of deeper humiliation than any
which could be procured by the action of foreign foes. She was a
kingdom divided against herself, a mother scandalously torn by her own
children. News had reached Helen too, news special and highly
commendatory of her husband, Angelo Luigi Francesco. Early in that
eventful struggle he had enlisted in the Garde Mobile, all the manhood
and honest sentiment resident in him stirred into fruitful activity by
the shame and peril of his adopted country. Now Helen learned he had
distinguished himself in the holding of Chatillon against the
insurgents, had been complimented by MacMahon upon his endurance and
resource, had been offered, and had accepted, a commission in the
regular army. Promotion was rapid during the later months of the war,
and probability pointed to the young man having started on a serious
military career.
"Well, let him both start and continue," Helen commented. "I am the
last person to be otherwise than delighted thereat. Just in proportion
as he is occupied he ceases to be inconvenient. If he succeeds--good.
If he is shot--good likewise. For him laurels and a hero's tomb. For me
crape and permanent emancipation. An agreeably romantic conclusion to a
profoundly unromantic marriage--fresh proof, were such needed, of the
truth of the immortal Dr. Pangloss' saying, that 'all is for the best
in this best of all possible worlds!'"
In such happy frame of mind did Madame de Vallorbes continue during her
visit to Florence and upon her onward way to Perugia. But there
self-admiration ceased to be all-sufficient for her. She needed to read
confirmation of that admiration in other eyes. And the gray Etruscan
city, uplifted on its star-shaped hill, offered her a somewhat grim
reception. Piercing winds swept across the Tiber valley from the still
snow-clad Apennines above Assisi. The austere, dark-walled,
lombard-gothic churches and palaces showed forbidding, merciless
almost, through the driving wet. Even in fair summer weather suspicion
of ancient and implacable terror lurks in the shadow of those cyclopean
gateways, and stalks over the unyielding, rock-hewn pavements of those
solemn mediaeval streets. There was an incalculable element in Perugia
which raised a certain anger in Helen. The place seemed to defy her and
make light of her pretensions. As during the siege of Paris, so now,
echoes of the eternal laughter saluted her ears, ironic in tone.
Nor was the society offered by the residents in the hotel,
weather-bound like herself, of a specially enlivening description. It
was composed almost exclusively of middle-aged English and American
ladies--widows and spinsters--of blameless morals and anxiously active
intelligence. They wrapped their lean forms in woolen shawls and
ill-cut jackets. They pervaded salon and corridors guide-book in hand.
They discoursed of Umbrian antiquities, Etruscan tombs, frescoes and
architecture. Having but little life in themselves, they tried, rather
vainly, to warm both hands at the fire of the life of the past. Among
them, Helen, in her vigorous and self-secure, though fine-drawn,
beauty, was about as much at home as a young panther in a hen-roost.
They admired, they vaguely feared, they greatly wondered at her. Had
one of those glorious young gallants, Baglioni or Oddi, clothed in
scarlet, winged, helmeted, sword on thigh, as Perugino has painted them
on the walls of the Sala del Cambio--very strangest union of sensuous
worldliness and radiant arch-angelic grace--had one of these
magnificent gentlemen ruffled into the hotel parlour, he could hardly
have startled the eyes, and perplexed the understanding, of the
virtuous and learned Anglo-Saxon and Transatlantic feminine beings
there assembled, more than did Madame de Vallorbes.
For all such sexless creatures, for the great company of women in whose
outlook man plays no immediate or active part, Helen had, in truth,
small respect. They appeared to her so absurdly inadequate, so
contemptibly divorced from the primary interests of existence. More
than once, in a spirit of mischievous malice, she was tempted to bid
the good ladies lay aside their Baedekers and Murrays, and increase
their knowledge of the Italian character and language by study of the
_Novelle_ of Bandello, or of certain merry tales to be found in the
pages of the _Decameron_. She had copies of both works in her
traveling-bag. She was prepared, moreover, to illustrate such ancient
saws by modern instances, for the truth of which last she could quite
honestly vouch. But on second thoughts she spared her victims. The
quarry was not worth the chase. What self-respecting panther can, after
all, go a-hunting in a hen-roost? So from the neighbourhood of their
unlovely clothes, questioning glances, and under-vitalised pursuit of
art and literature, she removed herself to her sitting-room up-stairs.
Charles should serve her meals there in future, for to sit at table
with these neuters, clothed in amorphous garments, came near upsetting
her digestion.
Meanwhile, as she watched the rain streaming down the panes of the big
windows, watched thin-legged, heavily-cloaked figures tacking,
wind-buffeted, across the gray-black street into the shelter of some
cavernous _port cochere_, it must be owned her spirits went very
sensibly down into her boots. Even the presence of the despised and
repudiated Destournelle would have been grateful to her. Remembrance of
all the less successful episodes of her career assaulted her. And in
that connection, of necessity, the thought of Brockhurst returned upon
her. For neither the affair of her childhood--that of the little dancer
with blush-roses in her hat--or the other affair--of now nearly four
years back--the intimate drama frustrated, within sight of its climax,
by intervention of Lady Calmady--could be counted otherwise than as
failures. It was strange how deep-seated was her discontent under this
head. As on Queen Mary's heart the word Calais, so on hers Brockhurst,
she sometimes thought, might be found written when she was dead. In the
last four years Richard had given her princely gifts. He had treated
her with a fine, old-world chivalry, as something sacred and apart. But
he rarely sought her society. He seemed, rather carefully, to elude her
pursuit. His name was not exactly a patent of discretion and rectitude
in these days, unfortunately. Still Helen found his care of her
reputation--as far as association of her name with his went--somewhat
exaggerated. She could hardly believe him to be indifferent to her, and
yet---- Oh! the whole matter was unsatisfactory, abominably