The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
calmly past M. Destournelle down the wide, shallow steps, from the
solid shadow of the portico to the burning sun-glare of the piazza.
The young man's countenance went livid.
"Do you dare to pretend not to recognise me?" he literally gasped.
"On the contrary I recognise you perfectly."
"I have written to you repeatedly."
"You have--written to me with a ridiculous and odious persistence."
Madame de Vallorbes picked her steps. The pavement was uneven, the heat
great. Destournelle's hands twitched with agitation, yet he contrived
not only to replace his Panama hat, but opened his white umbrella as a
precaution against sunstroke. And this diverted, even while
exasperating, Helen. Measures to ensure personal safety were so
characteristic of Destournelle.
"And with what fault, I ask you, can you reproach me, save that of a
too absorbing, a too generous, adoration?"
"That fault in itself is very sufficient."
"Do you not reckon, then, in any degree, with the crime you are in
process of committing? Have you no sense of gratitude, of obligation?
Have you no regret for your own loss in leaving me?"
Helen drew aside to let a herd of goats pass. They jostled one another
impudently, carrying their inquisitive heads and short tails erect, at
right angles to the horizontal line of their narrow backs. They
bleated, as in impish mischief. Their little beards wagged. Their
little hoofs pattered on the stone, and the musky odour of them hung in
the burning air. Madame de Vallorbes put her handkerchief up to her
face, and over the edge of it she contemplated Paul Destournelle. Every
detail of his appearance was not only familiar, but associated in her
mind with some incident of his and her common past. Now the said
details asserted themselves, so it seemed to her, with an impertinence
of premeditated provocation.--The high, domed skull, the smooth,
prematurely-thin hair parted in the middle and waved over the ears. The
slightly raised eyebrows, and fatigued, red-lidded, and vain, though
handsome eyes. The straight, thin nose, and winged, open nostrils, so
perpetually a-quiver. The soft, sparse, forked beard which closely
followed the line of the lower jaw and pointed chin. The moustache,
lightly shading the upper lip, while wholly exposing the fretful and
rather sensuous mouth. The long, effeminate, and restless hands. The
tall, slight figure. The clothes, of a material and pattern fondly
supposed by their wearer to present the last word of English fashion in
relation to foreign travel, the colour of them accurately matched to
the pale, brown hair and beard.--So much for the detail of the young
man's appearance. As a whole, that appearance was elegant as only
French youth ventures to be elegant. Refinement enveloped Paul
Destournelle--refinement, over-sensitised and under-vitalised, as that
of a rare exotic forced into precocious blossoming by application of
some artificial horticultural process. And all this--elaborately
effective and seductive as long as one should happen to think so,
elaborately nauseous when one had ceased so to think--had long been
familiar to Helen to the point of satiety. She turned wicked, satiety
transmuting itself into active vindictiveness. How gladly would she
have torn this emasculated creature limb from limb, and flung the lot
of it among the refuse of the Neapolitan gutter!
But, from beneath the shade of his umbrella, the young man recommenced
his plaint.
"It is inconceivable that, knowing my cruel capacity for suffering, you
should be indifferent to my present situation," he asserted, half
violently, half fretfully. "The whole range of history would fail to
offer a case of parallel callousness. You, whose personality has
penetrated the recesses of my being! You, who are acquainted with the
infinite intricacy of my mental and emotional organisation! A touch
will endanger the harmony of that exquisite mechanism. The
interpenetration of the component parts of my being is too complete. I
exist, I receive sensations, I suffer, I rejoice, as a whole. And this
lays me open to universal, to incalculable, pain. Now my nerves are
shattered--intellectual, moral, physical anguish permeate in every
part. I rally my self-reverence, my nobility of soul. I make efforts.
By day I visit spots of natural beauty and objects of art. But these
refuse to gratify me. My thought is too turgid to receive the impress
of them. Concentration is impossible to me. Feverish agitation perverts
my imagination. My ideas are fugitive. I endure a chronic delirium.
This by day," he extended one hand with a despairing gesture, "but by
night----"
"Oh, I implore you," Helen interrupted, "spare me the description of
your nights! The subject is a hardly modest one. And then, at various
times, I have already heard so very much about them, those nights!"
Calmly she resumed her walk. The amazing vanity of the young man's
speech appeased her, in a measure, since it fed her contempt. Let him
sink himself beyond all hope of recovery, that was best. Let him go
down, down, in exposition of fatuous self-conceit. When he was low
enough, then she would kick him! Meanwhile her eyes, ever greedy of
incident and colour, registered the scene immediately submitted to
them. In the centre of the piazza, women--saffron and poppy-coloured
handkerchiefs tied round their dark heads--washed, with a fine
impartiality, soiled linen and vegetables in an iron trough, grated for
a third of its length, before a fountain of debased and flamboyant
design. Their voices were alternately shrill and gutteral. It was
perhaps as well not to understand too clearly all which they said. On
the left came a break in the high, painted house-fronts, off which in
places the plaster scaled, and from the windows of which protruded
miscellaneous samples of wearing apparel and bedding soliciting
much-needed purification by means of air and light. In the said break
was a low wall where coarse plants rooted, and atop of which lay some
half-dozen ragged youths, outstretched upon their stomachs, playing
cards. The least decrepit of the beggars, armed with Helen's largesse
of copper coin, had joined them from beneath the portico. Gambling,
seasoned by shouts, imprecations, blows, grew fast and furious. In the
steep roadway on the right a dray, loaded with barrels, creaked and
jolted upward. The wheels of it were solid discs of wood. The great,
mild-eyed, cream-coloured oxen strained, with slowly swinging heads,
under the heavy yoke. Scarlet, woolen bands and tassels adorned their
broad foreheads and wide-sweeping, black-tipped horns, and here and
there a scarlet drop their flanks, where the goad had pricked them too
shrewdly. And upon it all the unrelenting southern sun looked down, and
Helen de Vallorbes' unrelenting eyes looked forth. One of those quick
realisations of the inexhaustible excitement of living came to her. She
looked at the elegant young man walking beside her, apprised, measured,
him. She thought of Richard Calmady, self-imprisoned in the luxurious
villa, and of the possibilities of her, so far platonic, relation to
him. She glanced down at her own rustling skirts and daintily-shod feet
traveling over the hot stones, then at the noisy gamblers, then at the
women washing, with that consummate disregard of sanitation, food and
raiment together in the rusty iron trough by the fountain. The violent
contrasts, the violent lights and shadows, the violent diversities of
purpose and emotion, of rank, of health, of fortune and misfortune,
went to her head. Whatever the risks or dangers that excitement
remained inexhaustible. Nay, those very dangers and risks ministered to
its perpetual upflowing. It struck her she had been over-scrupulous,
weakly conscientious, in making confession and seeking absolution. Such
timid moralities do not really shape destiny, control or determine
human fate. The shouting, fighting youths there, with their filthy pack
of cards and few _centissimi_, sprawling in the unstinted sunshine,
were nearer the essential truth. They were the profound, because the
practical philosophers! Therefore let us gamble, gamble, gamble, be the
stake small or great, as long as the merest flicker of life, or
fraction of uttermost farthing, is left! And so, when Destournelle took
up his lament again, she listened to him, for the moment, with
remarkable lightness of heart.
"I appeal to you in the name of my as yet unwritten poems, my
masterpieces for which France, for which the whole brotherhood of
letters, so anxiously waits, to put a term to this appalling
chastisement!"
"Delicious!" said Helen, under her breath.
"Your classicism is the natural complement of my mediaevalism. The
elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the
too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence
which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced in
me the hint of frivolity which is necessary to procure action. Our
union was as that of high-noon and impenetrable night. I anticipated
extraordinary consequences."
"Marriage of a butterfly and a bat? Yes, the progeny should be
surprising, little animals certainly," commented Madame de Vallorbes.
"In deserting me you have rendered me impotent. That is a crime. It is
an atrocity. You assassinate my genius."
"Then, indeed, I have reason to congratulate myself on my ingenuity,"
she returned, "since I succeeded in the assassination of the
non-existent!"
"You, who have praised it a thousand times--you deny the existence of
my genius?" almost shrieked M. Destournelle. He was very much in
earnest, and in a very sorry case. His limbs twitched. He appeared on
the verge of an hysteric seizure. To plague him thus was a charmingly
pretty sport, but one safest carried on with closed doors--not in so
public a spot.
"I do not deny the existence of anything, save your right to make a
scene and render me ridiculous as you repeatedly did at Pisa."
"Then you must return to me."
"Oh! la, la!" cried Helen.
"That you should leave me and live in your cousin's house constitutes
an intolerable insult."
"And where, pray, would you have me live?" she retorted, her temper
rising, to the detriment of diplomacy. "In the street?"
"It appears to me the two localities are synonymous--morally."
Madame de Vallorbes drew up. Rage almost choked her. M. Destournelle's
words stung the more fiercely because the insinuation they contained
was not justified by fact. They brought home to her her non-success in
a certain direction. They called up visions of that unknown rival, to
whom--ah, how she hated the woman!--Richard Calmady's affections were,
as she feared, still wholly given. That her relation to him was
innocent, filled her with humiliation. First she turned to Zelie
Forestier, who had followed at a discreet distance across the piazza.
"Go on," she said, "down the street. Find a cab, a clean one. Wait in
it for me at the bottom of the hill."
Then she turned upon M. Destournelle.
"Your mind is so corrupt that you cannot conceive of an honest
friendship, even between near relations. You fill me with repulsion--I
measured the depth of your degeneracy at Pisa. That is why I left you.
I wanted to breathe in an uninfected atmosphere. My cousin is a person
of remarkable intellectual powers, of chivalrous ideals, and of
superior character. He has had great troubles. He is far from well. I
am watching over and nursing him."
The last statement trenched boldly on fiction. As she made it Madame de
Vallorbes moved forward, intending to follow the retreating Zelie down
the steep, narrow street. For a minute M. Destournelle paused to
recollect his ideas. Then he went quickly after her.
"Stay, I implore you," he said. "Yes, I own at Pisa I lost myself. The