The History of Sir Richard Calmady Part 38

"I recognize the brilliancy of the conception, Louisa. It reflects credit upon your imagination and--your daring," he said presently. "But you won't be able to work it."

"Pray why not?" almost snapped Lady Louisa.

Mr. Quayle settled himself back in his corner again. His handsome face was all sweetness, indulgent though argumentative. He was nothing, clearly, unless reasonable.

"Personally, I am extremely fond of d.i.c.kie Calmady," he began. "I permit myself--honestly I do--moments of enthusiasm regarding him. I should esteem the woman lucky who married him. Yet I could imagine a prejudice might exist in some minds--minds of a less emanc.i.p.ated and finely comprehensive order than yours and my own of course--against such an alliance. Take my father's mind, for instance--and unhappily my father dotes on Connie. And he is more obstinate than nineteen dozen--well, I leave you to fill in the comparison mentally, Louisa. It might be slightly wanting in filial respect to put it into words."

Again he shook his head in pensive solemnity.

"I give you credit for prodigious push and tenacity, for a remarkable capacity of generalship, in short. Yet I cannot disguise from myself the certainty that you would never square my father."

"But suppose she wishes it herself. Papa would deny Connie nothing,"

the other objected. She was obliged to raise her voice to a point of shrillness, hardly compatible with the dignity of the n.o.ble house of Fallowfeild, _double_ with all the gold of all the Barkings, for the train was banging over the points and roaring between the platforms of a local junction. Mr. Quayle made a deprecating gesture, put his hands over his ears, and again gently shook his head, intimating that no person possessed either of nerves or self-respect could be expected to carry on a conversation under existing conditions. Lady Louisa desisted. But, as soon as the train pa.s.sed into the comparative quiet of the open country, she took up her parable again, and took it up in a tone of authority.

"Of course I admit there is something to get over. It would be ridiculous not to admit that. And I am always determined to be perfectly straightforward. I detest humbug of any kind. So I do not deny for a moment that there is something. Still it would be a very good marriage for Constance, a very good marriage, indeed. Even papa must acknowledge that. Money, position, age, everything of that kind, in its favour. One could not expect to have all that without some make-weight. I should not regret it, for I feel it might really be bad for Connie to have so much without some make-weight. And I remarked yesterday--I could not help remarking it--that she was very much occupied about Sir Richard Calmady."

"Connie is a little goose," Mr. Quayle permitted himself to remark, and for once there was quite a sour edge to his sweetness.

"Connie is not quick, she is not sensitive," his sister continued.

"And, really, under all the circ.u.mstances, that perhaps is just as well. But she is a good child, and would believe almost anything you told her. She has an affectionate and obedient disposition, and she never attempts to think for herself. I don't believe it would ever occur to her to object to his--his peculiarities, unless some mischievous person suggested it to her. And then, as I tell you, I remarked she was very much occupied about him."

Once again Mr. Quayle sought counsel of the landscape which once again had changed in character. For here civilisation began to trail her skirts very visibly, and the edges of those skirts were torn and frayed, notably unhandsome. The open moorland had given place to flat market-gardens and leafless orchards sloppy with wet. Innumerable cabbages, innumerable stunted, black-branched apple and pear trees, avenues of dilapidated pea and bean sticks, reeled away to right and left. The semi-suburban towns stretched forth long, rawly-red arms of ugly, little, jerry-built streets and terraces. Tall chimneys and unlovely gasometers--these last showing as collections of some monstrous sp.a.w.n--rose against the opaque sky, a sky rendered momentarily more opaque, dirtier and more dingy, by the ma.s.ses of London smoke hanging along the eastern horizon.

Usually Ludovic knew his own mind clearly enough. The atmosphere of it was very far from being hazy. Now that atmosphere bore annoying resemblance to the opacity obtaining overhead and along the eastern horizon. The young man's sympathies--or were they his prejudices?--had a convenient habit of ranging themselves immediately on one side or other of any question presenting itself to him. But in the present case they were mixed. They pulled both ways, and this vexed him. For he liked to suppose himself very ripe, cynical, and disillusioned, while, in good truth, sentiment had more than a word to say in most of his opinions and decisions. Now sentiment ruled him strongly and pushed him--but, unfortunately, in diametrically opposite directions. The sentiment of friendship compelled him hitherward. While another sentiment, which he refused to define--he recognised it as wholesome, yet he was a trifle ashamed of it--compelled him quite other-where. He took refuge in an adroit begging of the question.

"After all are you not committing the fundamental error of reckoning without your host, Louisa?" he inquired. "Connie may be a good deal occupied about Calmady, but thereby may only give further proof of her own silliness. I certainly discovered no particular sign of Calmady being occupied about Connie. He was very much more occupied about the fair cousin, Helen de Vallorbes, than about any one of us, my ill.u.s.trious self included, as far as I could see."

In her secret soul his hearer had to own this statement just. But she kept the owning to herself, and, with a rapidity upon which she could not help congratulating herself, inst.i.tuted a flanking movement.

"You hear all the gossip, Ludovic," she said. "Of course it is no good my asking Mr. Barking about that sort of thing. Even if he heard it he would not remember it. His mind is too much occupied. If a woman marries a man with large political interests she must just give herself to them generously. It is very interesting, and one feels, of course, one is helping to make history. But still one has to sacrifice something. I hear next to nothing of what is going on--the gossip, I mean. And so tell me, what do you hear about her, about Madame de Vallorbes?"

"At first hand only that which you must know perfectly well yourself, my dear Louisa. Didn't you sit opposite to her at luncheon, yesterday?--That she is a vastly good-looking and attractive woman."

"At second hand, then?"

"At second hand? Oh! at second hand I know various amiable little odds and ends such as are commonly reported by the uncharitable and censorious," Ludovic answered mildly. "Probably more than half of these little treasures are pure fiction, generated by envy, conceived by malice."

"Pray, Ludovic!" his sister exclaimed. But she recovered herself, and added:--"you may as well tell me all the same. I think, under the circ.u.mstances, it would be better for me to hear."

"You really wish to hear? Well, I give it you for what it is worth. I don't vouch for the truth of a single item. For all we can tell, nice, kind friends may be recounting kindred anecdotes of Alicia and the blameless Winterbotham, or even of you, Louisa, and Mr. Barking."

Mr. Quayle fixed a glance of surpa.s.sing graciousness upon his sister as he uttered these agreeable suggestions, and fervid curiosity alone enabled her to resist a rejoinder and to maintain a dignified silence.

"It is said--and this probably is true--that she never cared two straws for de Vallorbes, but was jockeyed in the marriage--just as you might jockey Constance, you know, Louisa--by her mother, who has the reputation of being a somewhat frisky matron with a keen eye to the main chance. She is not quite all, I understand, a tender heart could desire in the way of a parent. It is further said that _la belle Helene_ makes the dollars fly even more freely than did de Vallorbes in his best days, and he has the credit of having been something of a _viveur_. He knew not only his Paris, but his Baden-Baden, and his Naples, and various other warm corners where great and good men do commonly congregate. It is added that _la belle Helene_ already gives promise of being playful in other ways beside that of expenditure. And that de Vallorbes has been heard to lament openly that he is not a native of some enlightened country in which the divorce court charitably intervenes to sever overhard connubial knots. In short, it is rumoured that de Vallorbes is not a conspicuous example of the wildly happy husband."

"In short, she is not respec----"

But the young man held up his hands and cried out feelingly:--

"Don't, pray don't, my dear Louisa. Let us walk delicately as Agag--my father's morning ministrations to the maids again! For how, as I pointed out just now, do we know what insidious little tales may not be in circulation regarding yourself and those nearest and dearest to you?"

Ludovic Quayle turned his head and once again looked out of the window, his beautiful mouth visited by a slightly malicious smile. The train was sliding onward above crowded, sordid courts and narrow alleys, festering, as it seemed, with a very plague of poverty-stricken and unwholesome humanity. Here the line runs parallel to the river--sullen to-day, blotted with black floats and lines of grimy barges, which straining, smoke-vomiting steam-tugs towed slowly against a strong flowing tide. On the opposite bank the heavy ma.s.ses of the Abbey, the long decorated facade and towers of the Houses of Parliament, stood out ghostly and livid in a gleam of frail, unrelated sunshine against the murk of the smoky sky.

"I should have supposed Sir Richard Calmady was steady," Lady Louisa remarked, inconsequently and rather stiffly. Ludovic really was exasperating.

"Steady? Oh! perfectly. Poor, dear chap, he hasn't had much chance of being anything else as yet."

"Still, of course, Lady Calmady would prefer his being settled. Clearly it would be much better in every way. All things considered, he is certainly one of the people who should marry young. And Connie would be an excellent marriage for him, excellent--thoroughly suitable, better, really, than on the face of it he could hope for. Ludovic, just look out please and see if the carriage is here. Poc.o.c.k always loses her head at a terminus, and misses the men-servants. Yes, there is Frederic--with his back to the train, looking the wrong way, of course.

He really is too stupid."

Mr. Quayle, however, succeeded in attracting the footman's attention, and, a.s.sisted by that functionary and the lean and anxious Poc.o.c.k--her arms full of bags and umbrellas--conveyed his sister out of the railway carriage and into the waiting brougham. She graciously offered to put him down at his rooms, in St. James's Place, on her way to the Barking mansion in Albert Gate, but the young man declined that honour.

"Good-bye, Louisa," he said, leaning his elbows on the open window of the brougham and thereby presenting the back view of an irreproachably cut overcoat and trousers to the pa.s.sers-by. "I have to thank you for a most interesting and instructive journey. Your efforts to secure the prosperity of the family are wholly praiseworthy. I commend them. I have a profound respect for your generalship. Still, pauper though I am, I am willing to lay you a hundred to one in golden guineas that you will never square papa."

Subsequently the young man bestowed himself in a hansom, and rattled away in the wake of the Barking equipage down the objectionably steep hill which leads from the roar and turmoil of the station into the Waterloo Bridge road.

"I might have offered heavier odds," he said to himself, "for never, never will she square papa."

And, not without a light sense of shame, he was conscious that he made this reflection with a measure of relief.

CHAPTER XI

CONTAINING SAMPLES BOTH OF EARTHLY AND HEAVENLY LOVE

Katherine stood in the central s.p.a.ce of the great, state bedroom. It was just upon midnight, yet she still wore her jewels and her handsome, trailing, black, velvet dress. She was very tired. But that tiredness proceeded less from physical than mental weariness. This she recognised, and foresaw that weariness of this character was not likely to find relief and extinction within the shelter of the curtains of the stately bed, whereon the ancient Persian legend of the flight of the Hart through the tangled Forest of This Life was so deftly and quaintly embroidered. For, unhappily to-night, the leopard, Care, followed very close behind. And Katherine, taking the ancient legend as very literally descriptive of her existing state of mind feared that, should she undress and seek the shelter of the rose-lined curtains the leopard would seek it also, and, crouching at her feet, his evil yellow eyes would gaze into her own, wide open, all through that which remained of the night. The night, moreover, was very wild. A westerly gale, with now and again tumultuous violence of rain, rattled the many panes of the windows, wailed in every crevice of door and cas.e.m.e.nt, roared through the mile-long elm avenue below, and roared in the chimneys above. The Prince of the Power of the Air was let loose, and announced his presence as with the shout of battle. Sleep was out of the question under present conditions and in her present humour. Therefore Lady Calmady had dismissed Clara--now promoted to the dignified office of lady's-maid--and that bright-eyed and devoted waiting-woman had departed reluctant, almost in tears, protesting that:--"it was quite too bad, for her ladyship was being regularly worn out with all the talking and company. And she, for her part, should be heartily glad when the entertaining was over and they were all comfortably to themselves again."

Nor could Katherine honestly a.s.sert that she would be altogether sorry when the hour struck, to-morrow, for the departure of her guests. For it appeared to her that, notwithstanding the courtesy and affection of her brother and the triumphant charm of her niece, a spirit of unrest had entered Brockhurst along with their entry. Would that same spirit depart along with their departing? She questioned it. She was oppressed by a fear that that spirit of unrest had come to stay. And so it was that as she walked the length and breadth of the lofty, white-paneled room, for all the rage and fury of the storm without, she still heard the soft padding of Care, the leopard, close behind.

Then a singular desolation and sense of homelessness came upon Katherine. Turn where she would there seemed no comfort, no escape, no sure promise of eventual rest. Things human and material were emptied not of joy only, but of invitation to effort. For something had happened from which there was no going back. A fair woman from a far country had come and looked upon her son, with the inevitable result, that youth had called to youth. And though the fair woman in question, being already wedded wife,--Katherine was rather pathetically pure-minded,--could not in any dangerously practical manner steal away her son's heart, yet she would, only too probably, prepare that heart and awaken in it desires of subsequent stealing away on the part of some other fair woman, as yet unknown, whose heart d.i.c.kie would do his utmost to steal in exchange. And this filled her with anxiety and far-reaching fears, not only because it was bitter to have some woman other than herself hold the chief place in her son's affections, but because she--as John Knott, even as Ludovic Quayle, though from quite other causes--could not but apprehend possibilities of danger, even of disaster, surrounding all question of love and marriage in the strange and unusual case of Richard Calmady.

And thinking of these things, her sensibilities heightened and intensified by fatigue and circ.u.mstances of time and place, a certain feverishness possessed her. That bedchamber of many memories--exquisite and tragic--became intolerable to her. She opened the double doors and pa.s.sed into the Chapel-Room beyond, the light thrown by the tall wax candles set in silver branches upon her toilet-table, pa.s.sing with her through the widely open doors and faintly illuminating the near end of the great room. There was other subdued light in the room as well. For a glowing ma.s.s of coal and wood still remained in the bra.s.s basket upon the hearth, and the ruddy brightness of it touched the mouldings of the ceiling, glowed on the polished corners and carvings of tables, what-nots, and upon the mahogany frames of solid, Georgian sofas and chairs.

At first sight, notwithstanding the roaring of wind and ripping of rain without, there seemed offer of comfort in this calm and s.p.a.cious place, the atmosphere of it sweet with bowls of autumn violets and greenhouse-grown roses. Katherine sat down in Richard's low armchair and gazed into the crimson heart of the fire. She made a valiant effort to put away haunting fears, to resume her accustomed att.i.tude of stoicism, of tranquil, if slightly defiant, courage. But Care, the leopard, refused to be driven away. Surely, stealthily he had followed her out of her bedchamber and now crouched at her side, making his presence felt so that all illusion of comfort speedily fled. She knew that she was alone, consciously and bitterly alone, waking in the midst of the sleeping house. No footstep would echo up the stairs, hot to find her. No voice would call her name, in anxiety for her well-being or in desire. It seemed to Katherine that a desert lay outstretched about her on every hand, while she sat desolate with Care for her sole companion. She recognised that her existing isolation was, in a measure at all events, the natural consequence of her own fort.i.tude and ability. She had ruled with so strong and discreet a hand that the order she had established, the machinery she had set agoing, could now keep going without her. Hence her loneliness. And that loneliness as she sat by the dying fire, while the wind raved without, was dreadful to her, peopled with phantoms she dared not look upon. For, not only the accustomed burden of her motherhood was upon her, but that other unaccustomed burden of admitted middle-age. And this other burden, which it is appointed a woman shall bear while her heart often is still all too sadly young, dragged her down. The conviction pressed home on her that for her the splendid game was indeed over, and that, for very pride's sake, she must voluntarily stand aside and submit to rank herself with things grown obsolete, with fashions past and out of date.

Katherine rose to her feet, filled, for the moment, by an immense compa.s.sion for her own womanhood, by an overmastering longing for sympathy. She was so tired of the long struggle with sorrow, so tired of her own att.i.tude of sustained courage. And now, when surely a little respite and repose might have been granted her, it seemed that a new order of courage was demanded of her, a courage pa.s.sive rather than active, a courage of relinquishment and self-effacement. That was a little too much. For all her valiant spirit, she shrank away. She grew weak. She could not face it.

And so it happened that to-night--as once long ago, when poor Richard suffered his hour of mental and physical torment at the skilful, yet relentless hands of Dr. Knott, in the bedchamber near by--Katherine's anguish and revolt found expression in restless pacings, and those pacings brought her to the chapel door. It stood ajar. Before the altar the three hanging lamps showed each its tongue of crimson flame. A whiteness of flowers, set in golden vases upon the re-table, was just distinguishable. But the delicately carved spires and canopies of stalls, the fair pictured saints, and figure of the risen Christ--His wounded feet shining like pearls upon the azure floor of heaven--in the east window, were lost in soft, thick, all-pervading gloom. The place was curiously still, as though waiting silently, in solemn and strained expectation for the accomplishment of some mysterious visitation. And, all the while without, the gale flung itself wailing against the angles of the masonry, and the rain beat upon the gla.s.s of the high, narrow windows as with a pa.s.sion of despairing tears.

For some time Katherine waited in the doorway, a sombre figure in her trailing, velvet dress. The hushed stillness of the chapel, the confusion and clamour of the tempest, taken thus in connection, were very telling. They exercised a strong influence over her already somewhat exalted imagination. Could it be, she asked herself, that these typified the rest of the religious, and the unrest of the secular life? Julius March would interpret the contrast they afforded in some such manner no doubt. And what if Julius, after all, were right? What if, shutting G.o.d out of the heart, you also shut that heart out from all peaceful dwelling-places, leaving it homeless, at the mercy of every pa.s.sing storm? Katherine was bruised in spirit. The longing for some sure refuge, some abiding city was dominant in her. The needs of her soul, so long ignored and repudiated, a.s.serted themselves. Yes, what if Julius were right, and if content and happiness--the only happiness which has in it the grace of continuance--consisted in submission to, and glad acquiescence in, the will of G.o.d?

Thus did she muse, gazing questioningly at the whiteness of the altar flowers and those steady tongues of flame, hearing the silence, as of reverent waiting, which dwelt in the place. But, on the other hand, to give, in this her hour of weakness, that which she had refused in the hours of clear-seeing strength;--to let go, because she was alone and the unloveliness of age claimed her, that sense of bitter injury and injustice which she had hugged to her breast when young and still aware of her empire,--would not such action be contemptibly poor spirited?

She was no child to be humbled into confession by the rod, frightened into submission by the dark. To abase herself, in the hope of receiving spiritual consolation, appeared to her as an act of disloyalty to her dead love and her maimed and crippled son. She turned away with a rather superb lift of her beautiful head, and went back to her own bedchamber again. She hardened herself in opposition, putting the invitations of grace from her as she might have put those of temptation. She would yield to weakness, to feverish agitations and aimless longings, no more. Whether sleep elected to visit her or not, she would undress and seek her bed.

But hardly had she closed the door and, standing before her toilet-table, began to unclasp the pearls from her throat and bracelets from her wrists, than a sound, quite other than agreeable or rea.s.suring, saluted her ears from close by. It proceeded from the room next door, now unoccupied, since Richard, some five or six years ago, jealous of the dignity of his youth, had pet.i.tioned to be permitted to remove himself and his possessions to the suite of rooms immediately below. This comprised the Gun-Room, a bed and dressing-room, and a fourth room connecting with the offices, which came in handy for his valet. Since his decline upon this more commodious apartment, the old nursery had stood vacant. Katherine could not find it in her heart to touch it. It was furnished now as in d.i.c.kie's childish days, when, night and morning, she had visited it to make sure of her darling's health and safety.