The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance
Better, far better, be a sacramentalist like me and embrace the idea
through the act, than refuse the act in dread of imperiling the
dominion of the idea. You put the cart before the horse with a
vengeance, Dickie! There's such a thing as being so reverently-minded
towards your god that he ceases to be the very least profit or use to
you."
And again she heard that panting breath beside her. Again laughter
bubbled up in her fair throat, and her hands fell to weaving the soft,
outer darkness.
"You must perceive that it cannot end here and thus," she said
presently.
"Of course not," he answered. Then, after a moment's pause, he added
coldly enough:--"I foresaw that, so I gave orders yesterday that the
yacht was not to be laid up, but only to coal and provision, and
undergo some imperatively necessary repairs. She should be ready for
sea by the end of the week."
Helen turned sideways, and the bland light, from the room within,
touched her face now as well as her kneeling figure.
"And then, and then?" she demanded, almost violently.
"Then I shall go," Richard replied. "Where, I do not yet know, but as
far, anyhow, as the coal in the yacht's bunkers will drive her.
Distance is more important than locality just now. And I leave you here
at the villa, Helen. Do not regret that you came. I don't."
He too had turned to the light, which revealed his face ravaged and
aged by stress of emotion, revealed too the homelessness, as of empty
space, resident in his eyes.
"I shall be glad to remember the place pleases and speaks to you. It
has been rather a haven of rest to me during these last two years. You
would have had it at my death, in any case. You have it a little
sooner--that's all."
But Helen held out her arms.
"The villa, the villa," she cried, "what do I want with that! God in
heaven, are you utterly devoid of all sensibility, all heart? Or are
you afraid--afraid even yet, oh, very chicken-livered lover--that
behind the beauty of Naples you may find the filth? It is not so,
Dickie. It is not so, I tell you.--Look at me. What would you have
more? Surely, for any man, my love is good enough!"
And then hurriedly, with a rustling of silken skirts, hot with anger
from head to heel, she sprang to her feet.
Across the room one of the men-servants advanced.
"The carriage is at the door, sir," he said.
And Madame de Vallorbes' voice broke in with a singular lightness and
nonchalance:--
"Surely it is rather imprudent to go out again to-night? You told me,
at dinner, you were not well, that you had had a touch of fever."
She held out her hand, smiling serenely.
"Be advised," she said--"avoid malaria. I shall see you before I go
to-morrow? Yes--an afternoon train, I think. Good-night, we meet at
breakfast as usual."
She stepped in at the window, gathered up certain small properties--a
gold scent-bottle, one or two books, a blotting-case, as with a view to
final packing and departure. Just as she reached the door she heard
Richard say curtly:--
"Send the carriage round. I shall not want it to-night."
But even so Helen did not turn back. On the contrary, she ran, light of
foot as the little dancer, of long ago, with blush-roses in her hat,
through all the suite of rooms to her own sea-blue, sea-green
bedchamber, and there, sitting down before the toilet-table, greeted
her own radiant image in the glass. Her lips were very red. Her eyes
shone like pale stars on a windy night.
"Quick, quick, undress me, Zelie! Put me to bed. I am simply expiring
of fatigue," she said.
CHAPTER IX
CONCERNING THAT DAUGHTER OF CUPID AND PSYCHE WHOM MEN CALL VOLUPTAS
The furniture, though otherwise of the customary proportions, had all
been dwarfed. This had been achieved in some cases by ingenious design
in its construction, in others by the simple process of cutting down,
thus reducing table and chair, couch and bureau, in itself of whatever
grace of style, dignity of age, or fineness of workmanship, to an
equality of uncomely degradation in respect of height. The resultant
effect was of false perspective. Nor was this unpleasing effect
lessened by the proportions of the room itself. In common with all
those of the _entresol_, it was noticeably low in relation to its
length and width, while the stunted vaultings of its darkly-frescoed
ceiling produced an impression of heaviness rather than of space.
Bookcases, dwarfed as were all the other furnishings, lined the walls
to within about two feet of the spring of the said vaulting. Made of
red cedar and unpolished, the cornices and uprights of them were carved
with arabesques in high relief. An antique, Persian carpet, sombre in
colouring and of great value, covered the greater portion of the pale
pink and gray mosaic pavement of the floor. Thick, rusty-red,
Genoa-velvet curtains were drawn over each low, square window. A fire
of logs burned on the open hearth. And this notwithstanding the
unaccustomed warmth of the outside air, did but temper the chill
atmosphere of the room and serve to draw a faint aroma from the carven
cedar wood.
It was here, to his library,--carried down-stairs by his men-servants
as a helpless baby-child might be,--that Richard Calmady had come when
Helen de Vallorbes departed so blithely to her bedchamber. And it was
here he remained, though nearly two hours had elapsed since then,
finding sleep impossible.
For the wakefulness and unrest of rapidly breeding illness were upon
him. His senses and his will had been in very active conflict. Desire
had licked him, as with fiery tongues, driving him onward. Honour,
self-contempt in face of temptation to sensual indulgence, an
aspiration after somewhat stoic asceticism which had come to influence
his action of late, held him back. But now, here and alone, the
immediately provoking cause of passion removed, reaction against the
strain of all that had very sensibly set in. He felt strangely astray,
as though drifting at hazard upon the waters of an unquiet,
mist-blinded sea. He was conscious of a deep-seated preoccupation
regarding some matter, which he was alike unable to forget or to
define. Formless images perplexed his vision. Formless thoughts pursued
one another, as with the hurry of rumoured calamity, through his mind.
A desolating apprehension of things insufficiently developed, of the
inconclusive, the immature, the unattained, of things mutilated, things
unfinished, born out of due time and incomplete, oppressed his fancy.
Even the events of the last few hours, in which he had played so
considerable a part, took on a shadowy semblance, ceased to appeal to
him as realities, began to merge themselves in that all-pervading
apprehension of defectiveness, of that which is wanting, lopped off, so
to speak, and docked. It was to him as though all natural, common-sense
relations were in abeyance, as though his own, usually precise, mental
processes were divorced from reason and experience, had got out of
perspective, in short--even as this low, wide, cedar-scented library,
of which the vaulted ceiling seemed to approach unduly close to the
mosaic, marble floor, and all its dwarfed furnishings, its squat tables
and almost legless chairs, had got out of perspective.
The alternate purposeless energy and weariful weakness of fever, just
as the alternate dry flush and trembling chill of it, distressed him.
He had slipped on a smoking-coat, but even the weight of this thin,
silk garment seemed oppressive, although, now and again, he felt as
though around his middle he wore a belt of ice. Not without
considerable exertion he rolled forward a couch--wide, high-backed,
legless, mounted upon little wheels--to the vicinity of the fire. He
drew himself up on to it and rested among the piled-up cushions.
Perhaps, if he waited, exercising patience, sleep might mercifully
visit him and deliver him from this intolerable confusion of mind.
Deliver him, too, from that hideous apprehension of universal
mutilation, of maimed purposes, maimed happenings, of a world peopled
by beings maimed as he was himself, but after a more subtle and
intimate fashion, a fashion intellectual or moral rather than merely
physical, so that they had to him, just now, an added hatefulness of
specious lying, since to ordinary seeing they appeared whole, while
whole they truly and actually were not.
Sternly he tried to shake himself free of these morbid fancies, to
bring his imagination under control and force himself once again to
join hands with reality and common sense. And, to this end, he turned
his attention to the consideration of practical matters. He dwelt on
the details of the coaling and revictualing of his yacht, upon the
objective of the voyage upon which he proposed to start a few days
hence. He reviewed the letters which must be written and the
arrangements which must be made with a view to putting his cousin
legally in possession of the villa, the rent of which he proposed still
to pay to her husband. This suite of rooms he would retain for his own
use. That was necessary, obligatory. Yet, why must he retain it? He did
not propose to return and live here at any future time. This episode
was over--or rather, had it not simply failed of completion? Was it
not, like all the rest, maimed, lopped off ungainly, docked? Then,
where came in the obligation to reserve these rooms? He could not
remember. Yet he knew that he was compelled to do so, because--because----
And, once again, Richard's power of concentration broke down. Once
again his thought eluded him, becoming tangled, fugitive, not to be
grasped. While, like swarms of shrill squeaking bats disturbed in the
recesses of some age-old cavern by sudden intrusion of voices and of
lights, half-formed visions, half-formed ideas, once again, flapped
duskily about him, torturing in their multiplicity alike to his senses
and his brain. He fought with them, striving to beat them off in a
madness of disgust, half suffocated by the fanning of their foul and
stifling wings. Then, exhausted by the conflict, he stumbled and fell,
while they closed down on him. And he, losing consciousness, slept.
That unconsciousness lasted in point of fact but for a few minutes. Yet
to Richard those minutes were as years, as centuries. At length, still
heavy with dreamless slumber, he was aware of the stealthy turning of a
key in a lock. Little padding foot-falls, soft as those of some strong,
yet dainty, cat-creature crossed the carpet. A whisper of silk came
along with them, like the murmur of the breeze in an oak grove on a
clear, hot, summer noon, or the sibilant ripple of the sea upon spaces
of fine-ribbed, yellow sand. And the impression produced upon Richard
was delicious, as of one passing from a close room into the open air.
Confusion and exhaustion left him. Energy returned. The energy of
breeding fever merely, yet to him it appeared that of refreshment, of
renewed and abounding health. He was conscious, too, of a will outside
himself, acting upon his will--a will self-secure, impregnable, working
with triumphant daring towards a single end. It certainly was
unmaimed--in its present manifestation in any case. It told, and with
assurance, of completion, of attainment. Yielding himself to it, with
something of the recklessness a man yields himself to the poison which
yet promises relief, Richard opened his eyes.
Before him stood Helen de Vallorbes. In one hand she carried a little
lamp. In the other her high-heeled, cloth-of-gold slippers. Her feet
were bare. In the haste of the journey, from her bedchamber up-stairs
through the great rooms and down the marble stairs, the fronts of the
sea-blue, sea-green dressing-gown she wore had flown apart, thus
disclosing not only her delicate night-dress, but--since this last was