The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
hopelessly disfranchised human creatures. And the first sight of
Richard Calmady now, though she did not stop very certainly to analyse
the exact how and why of her increasing satisfaction, took its root in
this same craving for ascendency by means of the suffering and loss of
others. While, unconsciously, the fine flavour of her satisfaction was
heightened by the fact that the victim, now before her, was her equal
in birth, her superior in wealth, in intelligence and worldly station.
But as she drew nearer, Richard the while making no effort to go
forward and receive her, buoyant self-complacency and self-congratulation
suffered diminution. For, rehearsing this same meeting during those
rain-blotted days of waiting at Perugia, imagination had presented
Dickie as the inexperienced, tender-hearted, sweet-natured lad she had
known and beguiled at Brockhurst four years earlier. As has already
been stated her meetings with him, since then, had been brief and
infrequent. Now she perceived that imagination had played a silly trick
upon her. The boy she had left, the man who stood awaiting her so
calmly were, save in one distressing peculiarity, two widely different
persons. For in the interval Richard Calmady had eaten very freely of
the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that diet
had left its mark not only on his character, but on his appearance. He
had matured notably, all trace of ingenuous, boyish charm having
vanished. His skin, though darkened by recent seafaring, was
colourless. His features were at once finer and more pronounced than of
old--the bone of the face giving it a noticeable rigidity of outline,
index at once of indomitable will and irreproachable breeding. The
powerful jaw and strong muscular neck might have argued a measure of
brutality. But happily the young man's mouth had not coarsened. His
lips were compressed, relaxing rarely into the curves which, as a lad,
had rendered his smile so peculiarly engaging. Still there was no trace
of grossness in their form or expression. Hard living had, indeed, in
Richard's case, been matter of research rather than of appetite. The
intellectual part of him had never fallen wholly into bondage to the
animal. He explored the borders of the Forbidden hoping to find some
anodyne with which to assuage the ache of a vital discontent, rather
than by any compulsion of natural lewdness.
Much of this quick-witted Helen quickly apprehended. He was cleverer,
more serious, and mentally more distinguished, than she had supposed
him. And this, while opening up new sources of interest and pricking
her ambition of conquest, disclosed unforeseen difficulties in the way
of such conquest. Moreover, she was slightly staggered by the strength
and inscrutability of his countenance, the repose of his bearing and
manner. His eyes affected her oddly. They were cold and clear as some
frosty, winter's night, the pupils of them very small. They seemed to
see all things, yet tell nothing. They were as windows opening onto an
endless perspective of empty space. They at once challenged curiosity
and baffled inquiry. Helen's excitement deepened, and she was sensible
it needed all the subjective support, all the indirect flattery, with
which the fact of his deformity supplied her self-love to prevent her
standing in awe of him. As consequence her address was impulsive rather
than studied.
"Richard, I have had a detestable winter," she said. "It wore upon me.
It demoralised me. I was growing dull, superstitious even. I wanted to
get away, to put a long distance between myself and certain
experiences, certain memories. I wanted to hear another language. You
have always been sympathetic to me. It was natural, if a little
unconventional, to take refuge with you."
Madame de Vallorbes spoke with an unaccustomed and very seductive air
of apology, her face slightly flushed, her arms hanging straight at her
sides, the long, pink, tulle strings of the hat she carried in her left
hand trailing upon the black-and-white squares of the pavement.
"To do so seemed obvious in contemplation. I did not stop to consider
possible objections. But, in execution, the objections become hourly
more glaringly apparent. I want you to reassure me. Tell me I have not
dared too greatly in coming thus uninvited?"
"Of course not," he answered. "I hope you found the house comfortable
and everything prepared for you. The servants had their orders."
"I know, I know. That you should have provided against the possibility
of my coming some day moved me a little more than I care to tell
you."--Helen paused, looking upon him, and that look had in it a
delicate affinity to a caress. But the young man's manner, though
faultlessly courteous, was lacking in any hint of enthusiasm. Helen
could have imagined, and that angered her, something of irony in his
tone.
"Oh, there's no matter for thanks," he said. "The house was yours, will
be yours again. The least I can do, since you and de Vallorbes are good
enough to let me live in it meanwhile, is to beg you to make any use
you please of it. Indeed it is I, rather than you, who come uninvited
just now. I had not intended being back here for another month. But
there was a case of something suspiciously like cholera on board my
yacht at Constantinople, and it seemed wisest to get away to sea as
soon as possible. One of the firemen--oh, he's all right now! Still I
shall send him home to England. He's a married man--the only one I have
on board. A useful fellow, but he must go. I don't choose to take the
responsibility of creating the widow and the fatherless whenever one of
my crew chances to fall sick and depart into the unknown."
Richard talked on, very evidently for the mere sake of passing the
time. And all the while those eyes, which told nothing, dwelt quietly
upon Helen de Vallorbes until she became nervously impatient of their
scrutiny. For it was not at all thus that she had pictured and
rehearsed this meeting during those days of waiting at Perugia!
"We got in last night," he continued. "But I slept on board. I heard
you had just arrived, and I did not care to run the risk of disturbing
you after your journey."
"You are very considerate," Helen remarked.
She was surprised out of all readiness of speech. This new Richard
impressed her, but she resented his manner. He took her so very much
for granted. Admiration and homage were to her as her daily bread, and
that any man should fail to offer them caused her frank amazement. It
did more. It raised in her a longing to inflict pain. He might not
admire, but at least he should not remain indifferent. Therefore she
backed a couple of steps, so as to get a good view of Richard Calmady.
And, without any disguise of her purpose, took a comprehensive and
leisurely survey of his dwarfed and mutilated figure. While so doing
she pinned on her rose-trimmed hat, and twisted the long, tulle strings
of it about her throat.
"You have altered a good deal, Richard," she said reflectively.
"Probably," he answered. "I had a good deal to learn, being a very
thin-skinned young simpleton. In part, anyhow, I have learned it. And I
do my best practically to apply my knowledge. But if I have altered,
so, happily, have not you."
"I remain a simpleton?" she inquired, her irritation finding voice.
"You cannot very well remain that which you never have been. What you
do remain is--if I may say so--victoriously yourself, unspoiled,
unmodified by contact with that singularly stupid invention, society,
true to my earliest recollections of you even----" Richard shuffled
closer to the balustrade, threw his left arm across it, grasping the
outer edge of the broad coping,--"even in small details of dress."
He looked away over the immense and radiant prospect, and then up at
the radiant woman in her vesture of turquoise, pink, and gold.
And, so doing, for the first time his face relaxed, being lighted up by
a flickering, mocking smile. And something in his shuffling movements,
in the fine irony of his expression, pierced Helen with a sensation
hitherto unknown, broke up the absoluteness of her egotism, stirred her
blood. She forgot resentment in an absorbed and absorbing interest. The
ordinary man of the world she knew as thoroughly as her old shoe. Such
an one presented small field of discovery to her. But this man was
unique in person, and promised to be so in character also. Her
curiosity regarding him was profound. For the moment it sunk all
personal considerations, all humorous or angry criticism, either of her
own attitude towards him or of his attitude towards her. Silently she
came forward, sat down on the marble bench, close to where he stood,
and, turning sideways, leaned her elbows upon the top of the balustrade
beside him. She looked up now, rather than down at him, and it went
home to her, had nature spared him infliction of that hideous
deformity, what a superb creature physically he would have been! There
was a silence, Helen remaining intent, quiet, apprehension and
imagination sensibly upon the stretch.
At last Richard spoke abruptly.
"By the way, did you happen to observe the decorations of your room? Do
you like them?"
"Yes and no," she answered. "They struck me as rather wonderful, but
liable to induce dreams of Scylla and Charybdis, of the Fata Morgana,
and other inconvenient accidents of the deep. Fortunately I was too
tired last night to be excursive in fancy, or I might have slept badly.
You have gathered all the colours of the ocean and fixed them, somehow,
on those carpets and hangings and strangely frescoed walls."
"You saw that?"
"How could I fail to see it, since you kindly excuse me of being, or
ever having been, a simpleton?"--Helen spoke lightly, tenderly almost.
An overmastering desire to please had overtaken her. "You have employed
a certain wizardry in the furnishing of that room," she continued. "It
lays subtle influences upon one. What made you think of it?"
"A dream, an idea, which has stuck by me queerly, though all other fond
things of the sort were pitched overboard long ago. I suppose one is
bound to be illogical on one point, if only to prove to oneself the
absolutism of one's logic on all others. Thus do I, otherwise sane and
consistent realist, materialist, pessimist, cling to my one dream and
ideal--take it out, dandle it, nourish and cherish it, with weakly
sentimental faithfulness. To do so is ludicrous. But then my being here
at all, calmly considered, is ludicrous. And it, too, is among the
results of the one idea."
He paused, and Helen, leaning beside him, waited. The sunshine covered
them both. The sea wind was fresh in their faces. While the many voices
of Naples came up to them confused, strident, continuous, with
sometimes a bugle-call, sometimes a clang of hammers, or quick pulse of
stringed instruments, or jangle of church-bells, or long-drawn bellow
of a steamship clearing for sea, detaching itself from the universal
chorus. Capri, Ischia, Procida, floated, islands of amethyst, upon the
sapphire of the bay, and the smoke of Vesuvius rolled ceaselessly
upward.
"You see and hear and feel all this," Richard continued presently.
"Well, when I saw it for the first time I was pretty thoroughly out of
conceit with myself and all creation. I had been experimenting freely
in things not usually talked of in polite society. And I was abominably
sold, for I found the enjoyment such things procure is decidedly
overrated. Unmentionable matters, once fully explored, are just as
tedious and inadequate as those which supply the most unexceptionable
subjects of conversation. Moreover, in the process of exploration I had
touched a good deal of pitch, and, the simpleton being still
superfluously to the fore in me, I was squeamishly sensible of