The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
She looked up at Richard smiling, that same dainty naughtiness very
present.
"You observe I am eminently candid. I tell you exactly how my religion
affects me. I can only reach high-thinking through acts which are
external and concrete. In short, I am a born sacramentalist."
And Richard listened, interested and entertained. Yet, since that
strange blurring of fog still confused his vision and his judgment,
vaguely suspicious that he missed the main intent of her speech.
Suspicious as one who, listening to the clever patter of a conjurer,
detects in it the effort to distract attention from some difficult feat
of legerdemain, until that feat has passed from attempt merely into
accomplished fact.
"And, indirectly, that is where my heart-sickness comes in," she
continued, with a return to something of her former abstraction and
gloom. "I was coming away, coming back here--and I was very happy. It
is not often one can say that. And then--_pouf_---like that," she
brought her hands smartly together, "the charming bubble burst! For,
upon the very church steps, I met a man whom I have every cause to
hate."
As she spoke, the fog seemed to draw away, burnt up by the great,
flaming sun-god there. Richard's brain grew clear--clearer, indeed,
than in perfect health--and his still face grew more still than was,
even to it, quite natural.
"Well?" he asked, almost harshly.
And Helen, whose faith in her own diplomacy had momentarily suffered
eclipse, rejoiced. For the tone of his voice betrayed not disgust, but
anxiety. It stirred her as a foretaste of victory. And victory had
become a maddening necessity to her. Destournelle had forced her hand.
His natural infirmity of purpose relieved her of the fear he could work
her any great mischief. Yet his ingenuity, inspired by wounded vanity,
might prove beyond her calculations. It is not always safe to forecast
the future by experience of the past in relation to such a being as
Destournelle! Therefore it became of supreme importance, before that
gentleman had time further to obtrude himself, to bind Richard Calmady
by some speech, some act, from which there was no going back. And more
than just that. The sight of her ex-lover, though she now loathed
him--possibly just because she so loathed him--provoked passion in her.
It was as though only in a new intrigue could she rid herself of the
remembrance of the old intrigue which was now so detestable to her. She
craved to do him that deepest, most ultimate, despite. And passion
cried out in her. The sight of him, though she loathed him, had made
her utterly weary of chastity. All of which emotions--but held as
hounds in a leash, ready to be slipped when the psychological moment
arrived, and by no means to be slipped until the arrival of
it--dictated the tenor of her next speech.
"Well," she answered, with an air of half-angry sincerity altogether
convincing, "I really don't know that I am particularly proud of the
episode. I know I was careless, that I laid myself open to the
invidious comment, which is usually the reward of all disinterested
action. One learns to accept it as a matter of course. And you see Paul
Destournelle----"
"Oh, Destournelle!" Richard exclaimed.
"You have read him?"
"Every one has read him."
"And what do you think of him?"
"That his technique is as amazingly clever as his thought is amazingly
rotten."
"I know--I know," she said eagerly. "And that is just what induced me
to do all I could for him. If one could cut the canker away, give him
backbone and decency, while retaining that wonderful technique, one
would have a second and a greater Theophile Gautier."
Richard was looking full at her. His face had more colour, more
animation, than usual.
"If--yes--if," he returned. "But that same _if_ bulks mighty big to my
mind."
"I know," she repeated. "Yet it seemed to me worth the attempt. And
then, you understand,--who better?--that if one's own affairs are not
conspicuously happy, one has all the more longing the affairs of others
should be crowned with success. And this winter specially, among the
sordid miseries, disgraces, deprivations, of the siege, one was liable
to take refuge in an over-exalted altruism. It was difficult in so mad
a world not to indulge in personal eccentricity--to the neglect of due
worship of the great goddess Conventionality. With death in visible
form at every street corner, one's sense of humour, let alone one's
higher faculties, rebelled against the futility of such worship. So
many detestable sights and sounds were perpetually presented to
one--not to mention broth of abominable things daily for dinner--that
one turned, with thanksgiving, to beautiful form in art, to perfectly
felicitous words and phrases. The meaning of them mattered but little
just then. They freed one from the tyranny of more or less disgusting
fact. They satisfied eye and ear. One asked nothing more just
then--luckily, you will say, since the animal Destournelle has very
surely nothing more to give."
In speaking, Helen pushed her chair back, turning it sideways to the
table. Her speech was alive with varied and telling inflections. Her
smallest gesture had in it something descriptive and eloquent.
"And so I fell to encouraging the animal," she continued, almost
plaintively, yet with a note of veiled laughter in her voice.
"Reversing the order of Circe--Naples inclines one to classic
illustration, sometimes a little hackneyed--by the way, speaking of
Naples, look at the glory of it all just now, Richard!--I tried to
turn, not men to swine, but swine to men. And I failed, of course. The
gods know best. They never attempt metamorphosis on the ascending
scale! I let Destournelle come to see me frequently. The world advised
itself to talk. But, being rather bitterly secure of myself, I
disregarded that. If one is aware that one's heart was finally and long
ago disposed of, one ceases to think seriously of that side of things.
You must know all that well enough--witness the sea-born furnishings of
my bedroom up-stairs!"
For half a minute she paused. Richard made no comment.
"Hard words break no bones," she added lightly. "And so, to show how
much I despised all such censorious cackle, I allowed Destournelle to
travel south with me when I left Paris."
"You pushed neglect of the worship of conventionality rather far,"
Richard said.
Helen rose to her feet. Excitement gained on her, as always during one
of her delightful improvisations, her talented _viva voce_ improvements
on dry-as-dust fact. She laughed softly, biting her lip. More than one
hound had been slipped by now. They made good running. She stood by
Richard Calmady, looking down at him, covering him, so to speak, with
her eyes. The black mantilla no longer veiled her bright head. It had
fallen to the ground, and lay a dark blot upon the mellow fairness of
the tesselated pavement. White-robed, statuesque--yet not with the
severe grace of marble, but with that softer, more humanly seductive
grace of some figure of cunningly tinted ivory--she appeared, just
then, to gather up in herself all the poetry, the intense and vivid
light, the victorious vitality, of the clear, burning, southern noon.
"Ah, well, conventionality proved perfectly competent to avenge
herself!" she exclaimed. "The animal Destournelle took the average, the
banal view, as might have been anticipated. He had the insane
presumption to suppose it was himself, not his art, in which I was
interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my
equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I
meet him again, unashamed, actually claiming recognition. I repeated my
explanation with uncompromising lucidity----"
Richard moved restlessly in his chair, looking up almost sharply at
her.
"Waste of breath," he said. "No explanation is lucid if the hearer is
unwilling to accept it."
And then the two cousins, as though they had reached unexpectedly some
parting of the ways, calling for instant decision in respect of the
future direction of their journey, gazed upon one another
strangely--each half defiant of the other, each diligent to hide his
own and read the other's thought, each sensible of a crisis, each at
once hurried and arrested by suspicion of impending catastrophe, unless
this way be chosen that declined--though it seemed, in good truth, not
in their keeping, but in that of blind chance only that both selection
and rejection actually resided. And, in this strait, neither habit of
society, fine sword-play of diplomacy and tact, availed to help them.
For suddenly they had outpaced all that, and brought up amongst ancient
and secular springs of action and emotion before which civilisation is
powerless and the ready tongue of fashion dumb.
But even while he so gazed, in fateful suspense and indecision, the fog
came up again, chilling Richard Calmady's blood, oppressing his brain
as with an uprising of foul miasma, blurring his vision, so that
Helen's fair, downward-gazing face was distorted, rendered illusive and
vague. And, along with this, distressing restlessness took him,
compelling him to seek relief in change of posture and of place. He
could not stop to reckon with how that which he proposed to do might
strike an onlooker. His immediate sensations filled his whole horizon.
Silently he slipped down from his chair, stood a moment, supporting
himself with one hand on the edge of the table, and then moved forward
to that side of the pavilion which gave upon the garden. Here the
sunshine was hot upon the pavement, and upon the outer half of each
pale, slender column. Richard leant his shoulder against one of these,
grateful for the genial heat.
Since her first and somewhat inauspicious meeting with him in
childhood, Helen had never, close at hand, seen Richard Calmady walk
thus far. She stared, fascinated by that cruel spectacle. For the
instant transformation of the apparently tall, and conspicuously
well-favoured, courtly gentleman, just now sitting at table with her,
into the shuffling, long-armed, dwarfed and crippled creature was, at
first utterly incredible, then portentous, then, by virtue of its very
monstrosity, absorbing and, to her, adorable, whetting appetite as
veritable famine might. Chastity became to her more than ever absurd, a
culpable waste of her own loveliness, of sensation, of emotion, a sin
against those vernal influences working in this generous nature
surrounding her and working in her own blood. All the primitive
instinct of her womanhood called aloud in her that she must wed--must
wed. And the strident voice of the great, painted city coming up to
her, urgent, incessant, carried the same message, as did the radiant
sea, whose white lips kissed the indented coast-line as though pale and
hungry with love. While the man before her, by his very abnormality and
a certain secretness inevitable in that, heightened her passion. He was
to her of all living men most desirable, so that she must win him and
hold him, must see and know.
In a few steps, light as those of the little, rose-crowned dancer of
long ago, she followed him across the shining floor. There was a point
of north in the wind, adding exhilaration to the firm sunshine as ice
to rare wine. The scent of narcissus, magnolia, and lemon blossom was
everywhere. The cypresses yielded an aromatic, myrrh-like sweetness.
The uprising waters of the fountain, set in the central alley, swerved
southward, falling in a jeweled rain. Helen, in her spotless raiment,
came close and Richard Calmady turned to her. But his eyes no longer
questioned hers. They were as windows opening back on to empty space,
seeing all, yet telling nothing. His face had become still again and