The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
rose, and clear living greens of the flesh and innumerable seeds of it,
colours rich as those of a tropic sky at sunset.--"And there are so
many of those women it seems to me! I am coming to have a quite
pathetic fellowship for them." She buried her white teeth in the
softness of the fig.--"Not without reason, perhaps. It is idle to deny
that you are a pastmaster in the ungentle art of rejection. What have
you to say in self-defense, Dickie?"
"That talking nonsense appears to be highly infectious--and that it is
a disagreeably oppressive evening."
Helen de Vallorbes smiled upon him, glanced quickly over her shoulder
to assure herself the servants were no longer present--then spoke,
leaning across the corner of the table towards him, while her eyes
searched his with a certain daring provocation.
"Yes, I admit I have finished my fig. Dinner is over. And it is my
place to disappear according to custom."--She laid her rosy finger-tips
together, her elbows resting on the table. "But I am disinclined to
disappear. I have a number of things to say. Take that question of
going to the opera, for instance. Half Naples will be there, and I know
more than half Naples, and more than half Naples knows me. I do not
crave to run incontinently into the arms of any of de Vallorbes' many
relations. They were not conspicuously kind to me when I was here as a
girl and stood very much in need of kindness. So the question of going
to the San Carlo, you see, requires reflection. And then,"--her tone
softened to a most persuasive gentleness,--"then, the evenings are a
trifle long when one is alone and has nothing very satisfactory to
think about. And I have been worried to-day, detestably worried."--She
looked down at her finger-tips. Her expression became almost sombre.
"In any case I shall not plague you very much longer, Richard," she
said rather grandly. "I have determined to remove myself bag and
baggage. It is best, more dignified to do so. Reluctantly I own that.
Here have I no abiding city. I wish I had, perhaps, but I haven't.
Therefore it is useless, and worse than useless, to play at having one.
One must just face the truth."
She looked full at the young man, smiling at him, as though somehow
forgiving him a slight, an unkindness, a neglect.
"And so, just because to you it all matters so uncommonly little, let
us talk rather longer this evening."
She rose.
"I'll go on into the long drawing-room," she said. "The windows were
still open there when I came in to dinner. The room will be pleasantly
cool. You will come?"
And she moved away quietly, thoughtfully, opened the high double-doors,
left them open, and that without once looking back. Yet her hearing was
strained to catch the smallest sound above that which accompanied her,
namely, the rustling of her dress. Then a queer shiver ran all down her
spine and she set her teeth, for she perceived that halting, shuffling
footsteps had begun to follow those light and graceful footsteps of her
own.
"_Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute_," she said to herself. "I have
no fear for the rest."
Yet, crossing the near half of the great room, she sank down on a sofa,
thankful there was no farther to go. In the last few minutes she had
put forth more will-power, felt more deeply, than she had supposed. Her
knees gave under her. It was a relief to sit down.
The many candles in the cut-glass chandeliers, hanging from along the
centre of the painted ceiling, were lighted, filling the length and
breadth of the room with a bland, diffused radiance. It touched picture
and statue, tall mirror, rich curtain, polished woodwork of chair and
table, gleaming ebony and ivory cabinet. It touched Helen de Vallorbes'
bright head and the strings of pearls twisted in her hair, her white
neck, the swell of her bosom, and all that delicate wonder of
needlework--the Flanders' lace--trimming her bodice. It lay on her lap,
too, as she leaned back in the corner of the sofa, her hands pressed
down on either side her thighs--lay there bringing the pattern of her
brocaded dress into high relief. This was a design of pomegranates--leaves,
flowers, and fruit--and of trailing, peacock feathers, a couple of
shades lighter than the crocus-yellow ground. The light took the
over-threads and stayed in them.
The window stood wide open on to the balcony, the elaborately
wrought-ironwork of which--scroll and vase, plunging dolphin and
rampant sea-horse--detached itself from the opaque background of the
night. And in at the window came luscious scents from the garden below,
a chime of falling water, the music, faint and distant, in rising and
falling cadence of a marching military band. In at it also, and rising
superior to all these in imperativeness and purpose, came the voice of
Naples itself--no longer that of a city of toil and commerce, but that
of a city of pleasure, a city of licence, until such time as the dawn
should once again break, and the sun arise, driving back man and beast
alike to labour, the one from merry sinning, the other from hard-earned
sleep. And once again, but in clearer, more urgent, accents, the voice
of the city repeated its message to Helen de Vallorbes, calling aloud
to her to do even as it was doing, namely, to wed--to wed. And, hearing
it, understanding that message, for a little space shame took her, in
face both of its and her own shamelessness, so that she closed her
eyes, unable for the moment to look at Richard Calmady as he crossed
the great room in that bland and yet generous light. But, almost
immediately, his voice, cold and measured in tone, there close beside
her, claimed her attention.
"That which you said at dinner rather distresses me, Helen."
Then, shame or no shame, Madame de Vallorbes, of necessity, opened her
eyes. And, so doing, it needed all her self-control to repress a cry.
She forced her open hands down very hard on the mattress of the sofa.
For Richard leaned his back against the jamb of the open window, and
she saw his face and all his poor figure in profile. His left hand hung
straight at his side, the tips of his fingers only just not touching
the floor. And again, as at midday the spectacle of his deformity
worked upon her strangely.
"What of all that which I said at dinner distresses you?" she asked
gently, with sudden solicitude.
"You showed me that I have been a wretchedly negligent host."--In
speaking, the young man turned his head and looked at her, paused a
moment, almost startled by her resplendent aspect. Then he looked down
at his own stunted and defective limbs. His expression became very
grim. He raised his shoulders just perceptibly. "I reproach myself with
having allowed you to be so much alone. It must have been awfully dull
for you."
"It was a little dull," Helen said, still gently.
"I ought to have begged you to ask some of the people you know in
Naples to come here. It was stupid of me not to think of it. I need not
have seen them, neither need they have seen me."
He looked at her steadily again, as though trying to fix her image in
his memory.
"Yes, it was stupid of me," he repeated absently. "But I have got into
churlish, bachelor habits--that can hardly be helped, living alone, or
on board ship, as I do--and I have pretty well forgotten how to provide
adequately for the entertainment of a guest."
"Oh! I have had that which I wanted, that which I came for," Helen
answered, very charmingly,--"had it in part, at all events. Though I
could have put up with just a little more of it, Dickie, perhaps."
"I warned you, if you remember, that opportunities of amusement--as
that word is generally understood--would be limited."
"Amusement?" she exclaimed, with an almost tragic inflection of
contempt.
"Oh yes!" he said, "amusement is not to be despised. I'd give all I am
worth, half my time, to be amused--but that again, like hospitality, is
rather a lost art with me. You remember, I warned you life at the villa
in these days was not precisely hilarious."
Helen clapped her hands together.
"Ah! you are wilfully obtuse, you are wilfully, cruelly pigheaded!" she
cried. "Pardon me, dear Richard, but your attitude is enough to
exasperate a saint. And I am no saint as yet. I am still
human--radically, for my own peace of mind lamentably, human. I am only
too capable of being grieved, humiliated, hurt. But there, it is folly
to say such things to you! You are hopelessly insensible to all that.
So I take refuge in quoting your own words of this morning against
you--that no explanation is lucid if the hearer refuses to accept it."
"I am dull, no doubt, but honestly I fail to see how that remark of
mine can be held to apply in the present case."
"It applies quite desolatingly well!" Helen declared, with spirit. Then
her manner softened into a seductiveness of forgiveness once
again.--"And so, dear Richard, I am glad that I had already determined
to leave here to-morrow. It would have been a little too wretched to
arrive at that determination after this conversation. You must go alone
to hear your old flame, Morabita, sing. Only, if her voice is still as
sympathetic as of old, if it moves you from your present insensibility,
you may read remembrance of some aspects of my visit into the witchery
of it if you like. It may occur to you what those aspects really
meant."
Helen smiled upon him, leaning a little forward. Her eyes shone, as
though looking out through unshed tears.
"It's not exactly flattering to one's vanity to be compelled to depute
to another woman the making of such things clear. But it is too evident
I waste my time in attempting to make them clear myself. No explanation
is lucid, _et caetera_----"
Helen shook back her head with an extraordinary charm of half-defiant,
half-tearful laughter. She was playing a game, her whole intelligence
bent on the playing of it skilfully. Yet she was genuinely touched. She
was swayed by her very real emotion. She spoke from her heart, though
every word, every passing action, subserved her ultimate purpose in
regard to Richard Calmady.
"And, after all, one must retain some remnant of self-respect with
which to cover the nakedness of one's---- Oh yes! decidedly, Morabita's
voice had best do the rest."
Richard had moved from his station in the window. He stood at the far
end of the sofa, resting his hands on the gilded and carven arm of it.
Now the ungainliness of his deformity was hidden, and his height was
greater than that of his companion, obliging her to look up at him.
"I gave you my word, Helen," he said, "I have no notion what you are
driving at."
"Driving at, driving at?" she cried. "Why, the self-evident truth that
you are forcing me rather brutally to pay the full price of my weakness
in coming here, in permitting myself the indulgence of seeing you
again. You told me directly I arrived, with rather cynical frankness,
that I had not changed. That is quite true. What I was at Brockhurst,
four years ago, what I then felt, that I am and that I feel still. Oh!
you have nothing to reproach yourself with in defect of plain speaking,
or excess of amiable subterfuge! You hit out very straight from the
shoulder! Directly I arrived you also told me how you had devoted this
place--with which, after all, I am not wholly unconnected--to the cult,
to the ideal worship, of a woman whom you loved."
"So I have devoted it," Richard said.
"And yet I was weak enough to remain!"
The young man's face relaxed, but its expression remained enigmatic.
"And why not?" he asked.
"Because, in remaining, I have laid myself open to misconstruction, to
all manner of pains and penalties, not easy to be endured, to the
odious certainty of appearing contemptible in your estimation as well
as in my own."