The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
inscrutable, lightened only by that flickering, mocking smile. It
seemed as though the psychological moment were passed and social sense,
ordinary fashions of civilised intercourse, had not only come back but
come to stay.
"I think we will omit Destournelle from our talk in future," he said.
"As a subject of conversation I find he disagrees with me,
notwithstanding his felicity of style and his admirable technique. I
will give orders which, I hope, may help to protect you from annoyance
in future. In this delightful land, by wise exercise of just a little
bribery and corruption, it is still possible to make the unwelcome
alien prefer to seek health and entertainment elsewhere. Now, will you
like to go back to the house?"
The approach to the pavilion from the lower level of the garden was by
a carefully graded slope of Roman brick, set edgewise. At regular
intervals of about eighteen inches this was crossed--on the principle
of a gang-plank--by raised marble treads. Without waiting for his
cousin's reply, Richard started slowly down the slope. At the best of
times this descent for him demanded caution. Now his vision was again
so queerly blurred that he miscalculated the distance between the two
lowest treads, slipped and stumbled, lunging forward. Quick as a cat,
Madame de Vallorbes was behind him, her right hand grasping his right
elbow, her left hand under his left armpit.
"Ah! Dickie, Dickie, don't fall!" she cried, a sudden terror in her
voice.
Her muscles hardened like steel. It needed all her strength to support
him, for he was heavy, his body inert as that of one fainting. For a
moment his head rested against her bosom; and her breath came short,
sighing against his neck and cheek.
By sheer force of will Richard recovered his footing, disengaging
himself from her support, shuffling aside from her.
"A thousand thanks, Helen," he said.
Then he looked full at her, and she--untender though she was--perceived
that the perspective of space on which, as windows might, his eyes
seemed to open back, was not empty. It was peopled, crowded--even as
those steep, teeming byways of Naples--by undying, unforgetable misery,
humiliation, revolt.
"Yes, it is rather unpardonable to be--as I am--isn't it?" he said.
Adding hastily, yet with a certain courteous dignity:--"I am ashamed to
trouble you, to ask you--of all people--to run messages for me--but
would you go on to the house----"
"Dickie, why may not I help you?" she interrupted.
"Ah!" he said, "the answer to that lies away back in the beginning of
things. Even unlucky devils, such as myself, are not without a certain
respect for that which is fitting, for seemliness and etiquette. Send
one of my men please. I shall be very grateful to you--thanks."
And Helen de Vallorbes, her passion baulked and therefore more than
ever at white heat, swept up the paved alley, amid the sweet scents of
the garden, beneath the jeweled rain of the fountain, that point of
north in the wind dallying with her as in laughing challenge, making
her the more mad to have her way with Richard Calmady, yet knowing that
of the two--he and she--he was the stronger as yet.
CHAPTER VIII
IN WHICH HELEN DE VALLORBES LEARNS HER RIVAL'S NAME
"I hear Morabita sings, in _Ernani_, at the San Carlo on Friday night.
Do you care to go, Helen?"
The question, though asked casually, had, to the listener, the effect
of falling with a splash, as of a stone into a well, awakening
unexpected echoes, disturbing, rather harshly, the constrained silence
which had reigned during the earlier part of dinner.
All the long, hot afternoon, Madame de Vallorbes had been
alone--Richard invisible, shut persistently away in those rooms of the
_entresol_ into which, as yet, she had never succeeded in penetrating.
Richard had not proposed to her to do so. And it was part of that
praiseworthy discretion which she had agreed with herself to
practise--in her character of scrupulously unexacting guest--only to
accept invitations, never to issue them. How her cousin might occupy
himself, whom even he might receive, during the time spent in those
rooms, she did not know. And it was idle to inquire. Neither of her
servants, though skilful enough, as a rule, in the acquisition of
information, could, in this case, acquire any. And so it came about
that during those many still bright hours, following on her rather
agitated parting with Richard at midday, while she paced the noble
rooms of the first floor--once more taking note of their costly
furnishings and fine pictures, meeting her own restless image again and
again in their many mirrors--and later, near sundown, when she walked
the dry, brown pathways of the ilex and cypress grove, the wildest
suspicions of his possible doings assailed her. For she was constrained
to admit that, though she had spent a full week now under his roof, it
was but the veriest fringe, after all, of the young man's habits and
thought with which she was actually acquainted. And this not only
desperately intrigued her curiosity, but the apartness, behind which he
entrenched himself and his doings, was as a slight put upon her and
consequent source of sharp mortification. So to-day she ranged all
permitted spaces of the villa and its grounds softly, yet lithe,
watchful, fierce as a she-panther--her ears strained to hear, her eyes
to see, driven the while by jealousy of that nameless rival, to
remembrance of whom all the whole place was dedicated, and by baffled
passion, as with whips.
Nor did superstition fail to add its word of ill-omen at this juncture.
A carrion crow, long-legged, heavy of beak, alighting on the clustered
curls of the marble bust of Homer, startled her with vociferous
croakings. A long, narrow, many-jointed, blue-black, evil-looking
beetle crawled from among the rusty, fibrous, cypress roots across her
path. A funeral procession, priest and acolytes, with lighted tapers,
sitting within the glass-sided hearse at head and foot of the
flower-strewn coffin, wound slowly along the dusty, white
road--bordered by queer growth of prickly-pear and ragged, stunted
palm-trees--far below. She crossed herself, turning hurriedly away.
Yet, for an instant, Death, triumphant, hideous, inevitable, and all
the spiritual terror and physical disgust of it, grinned at her, its
fleshless face, as it seemed, close against her own. And alongside
Death--by some malign association of ideas and ugly antic of
profanity--she saw the _bel tete de Jesu_ of M. Paul Destournelle as
she had seen it this morning, he looking back, hat in hand, as he
plunged down the break-neck, Neapolitan side-street, with that impish,
bleating, goatlike laugh.
By the time the dinner-hour drew near she found her outlook in radical
need of reconstruction, and to that end bade Zelie dress her in the
crocus-yellow brocade, reserved for some emergency such as the present.
It was a gown, surely, to restore self-confidence and induce
self-respect! Fashioned fancifully, according to a picturesque,
seventeenth-century, Venetian model, the full sleeves and the
long-waisted bodice of it--this cut low, generously displaying her
shoulders and swell of her bosom--were draped with superb _guipure de
Flandres a brides frisees_ and strings of seed pearls. All trace of
ascetic simplicity had very certainly departed. Helen was
resplendent--strings of seed pearls twisted in her honey-coloured hair,
a clear red in her cheeks and hard brilliance in her eyes, bred of
eager jealous excitement. She had, indeed, reached a stage of feeling
in which the sight of Richard Calmady, the fact of his presence, worked
upon her to the extent of dangerous emotion. And now this statement of
his, and the question following it, caused the flame of the inward
fires tormenting her to leap high.
"Ah! Morabita!" she exclaimed. "What an age it is since I have heard
her sing, or thought about her! How is her voice lasting, Richard?"
"I really don't know," he answered, "and that is why I am rather
curious to hear her. There was literally nothing but a voice in her
case--no dramatic sense, nothing in the way of intelligence to fall
back on. On that account it interested me to watch her. She and her
voice had no essential relation to one another. Her talent was stuck
into her, as you might stick a pin into a cushion. She produced
glorious effects without a notion how she produced them, and gave
expression--and perfectly just expression--to emotions she had never
dreamed of. At the best of times singers are a feeble folk
intellectually, but, of all singers I have known, she was mentally the
very feeblest."
"No, perhaps she was not very wise," Helen put in, but quite mildly,
quite kindly.
"And so if the voice went, everything went. And that made one reflect
agreeably upon the remarkably haphazard methods employed by that which
we politely call Almighty God in His construction of our unhappy
selves. Design?--There's not a trace of design in the whole show.
Bodies, souls, gifts, superfluities, deficiencies, just pitched
together anyhow. The most bungling of human artists would blush to turn
out such work."
Richard spoke rapidly. He had refused course after course. And now the
food on his plate remained untasted. Seen in the soft light of the
shaded candles his face had a strange look of distraction upon it, as
though he too was restless with an intimate, deep-seated restlessness.
His skin was less colourless than usual, his manner less colourless
also. And this conferred a certain youthfulness on him, making him seem
nearer--so Helen thought--to the boy she had known at Brockhurst, than
to the man, whom lately, she had been so signally conscious that she
failed to know.
"No, I hope Morabita's voice remains to her," he continued. "Her
absolute nullity minus it is disagreeable to think of. And much as I
relish collecting telling examples of the fatuity of the Creator--she,
voiceless, would offer a supreme one--I would spare her that, poor
dear. For she was really rather charming to me at one time."
"So it was commonly reported," Helen remarked.
"Was it?" Richard said absently.
Though as a rule conspicuously abstemious, he had drunk rather freely
to-night, and that with an odd haste of thirst. Now he touched his
champagne tumbler, intimating to Bates, the house-steward--sometime the
Brockhurst under butler--that it should be refilled.
"I can't have seen Morabita for nearly three years," he went on. "And
my last recollections of her are unfortunate. She had sent me a box, in
Vienna it was I think, for the _Traviata_. She was fat then, or rather,
fatter. Stage furniture leaves something to desire in the way of
solidity. In the death scene the middle of the bed collapsed. Her
swan-song ceased abruptly. Her head and heels were in the air, and the
very largest rest of her upon the floor, bed and bedclothes standing
out in a frill all around. It was a sight discouraging to sentiment. I
judged it kinder not to go to supper with her after the performance
that night."
Richard paused, again drained his glass.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "what atrocious nonsense I am talking!"
"I think I rather enjoy it," Madame de Vallorbes answered. She looked
at the young man sideways, from under her delicate eyelids. He was
perfectly sober--of that there was no question. Yet he was less
inaccessible, somehow, than usual. She inclined to experiment.--"Only I
am sorry for Morabita in more ways than one, poor wretch. But then
perhaps I am just a little sorry for all those women whom you reject,
Richard."
"The women whom I reject?" he said harshly.
"Yes, whom you reject," Helen repeated.--Then she busied herself with a
small black fig, splitting it deftly open, disclosing the purple, and