The History of Sir Richard Calmady Part 55

He paused, and motioned Lady Calmady towards her chair with a certain authority.

"Therefore calm yourself," he said. "Grieve as little as may be about all this matter, and let us talk it over without further emotion."

He waited a brief s.p.a.ce, giving her time to recover her composure, and then continued coldly, with a careful abstention from any show of feeling.

"Let us clear our minds of cant, and go forward knowing that there is really neither good nor evil. For these--even as G.o.d Himself, whose existence I treated from the anthro-pomorphic standpoint just now, so as to supply myself with a target to shoot at, a windmill at which to tilt, a row of ninepins set up for the mere satisfaction of knocking them down again--these are plausible delusions invented by man, in the vain effort to protect himself and his fellows from the profound sense of loneliness, and impotence, which seizes on him if he catches so much as a pa.s.sing glimpse of the gross comedy of human aspiration, human affection, briefly, human existence."

But, strive as he might, excitement gained on Richard once more, for young blood is hot and gallops masterfully along the veins, specially under the whip of real or imagined disgrace. He sat upright, grasping the arms of his chair, and looking, not at his mother, but away into the deep of the summer night.

"Perhaps my personal peculiarities confer on me unusually acute perception of the inherent grossness of the human comedy. I propose to take the lesson to heart. They teach me not to sacrifice the present to the future, but to fling away ideals like so much waste paper, and just take that which I can immediately get. They tell me to limit my horizon, and go the common way of common, coa.r.s.e-grained, sensual man--in as far as that way is possible to me--and be of this world worldly. And so, mother, I want you to understand that from this day forth I turn over a new leaf, not only in thought, but in conduct. I am going to have just all that my money and position, and even this vile deformity--for, by G.o.d, I'll use that too--what people won't give for love they'll give for curiosity--can bring me of pleasure and notoriety. I am going to lay hold of life with these rather horribly strong arms of mine"--he looked across at Lady Calmady with a sneering smile.--"Strong?" he repeated, "strong as a young bull-ape's. I mean to tear the very vitals out of living, to tear knowledge, excitement, intoxication, out of it, making them, by right of conquest, my own. I will compel existence to yield me all that it yields other men, and more--because my senses are finer, my acquaintance with sorrow more intimate, my quarrel with fortune more vital and more just. As I cannot have a wife, I'll have mistresses. As I cannot have honest love, I'll have gratified l.u.s.t. I am not stupid. I shall not follow the beaten track. My imagination has been stimulated into rather dangerous activity by the pre-natal insult put upon me. And now that I have emanc.i.p.ated myself, I propose to apply my imagination practically."

The young man flung himself back in his chair again.

"There ought to be startling results," he said, with gloomy exultation.

"Don't you think so, mother? There should be startling results."

Lady Calmady bowed herself together, putting her hands over her eyes.

Then raising her head, she managed to smile at him, though very sadly, her sweet face drawn by exhaustion and marred by lately shed tears.

"Ah! yes, my dearest," she answered, "no doubt the results will be startling, but whether any sensible increase of happiness, either to yourself or others, will be counted among them is open to question."

Richard laughed bitterly.--"I shall have lived, anyhow," he rejoined.

"Worn out, not rusted and rotted out--which, according to our former fine-fanciful programme, seemed the only probable consummation of my unlucky existence."

His tone changed, becoming quietly businesslike and indifferent.

"I am entering horses for some of the French events, and I go through to Paris to-morrow to see various men there and make the necessary arrangements. I shall take Chifney with me for a few days. But the stables will not give you any trouble. He will have given all the orders."

"Very well," Katherine said mechanically.

"Later I shall go on to Baden-Baden."

Katharine rallied somewhat.

"Helen de Vallorbes is there," she said, not without a trace of her former pride.

"Certainly Helen de Vallorbes is there," he answered. "That is why I go. I want to see her. It is inconsistent, I admit, for Helen remains the one person gloriously untouched by the wreck of the former order of things. Pray let there be no misconception on that point. She belonged to the ideal order, she belongs to it still."

"Ah, my dear, my dear!" Katharine almost cried. His perversity hurt her a little too much so that the small, upspringing flame of decent pride was quenched.

"Yes," he went on, "there was my initial, my cardinal, mistake. For I was a traitor to all that was n.o.blest and best in me, when I persuaded myself, and weakly permitted you to persuade me, that a loveless marriage is better than a love in which marriage is impossible,--that Lady Constance Quayle, poor little soul, bought, paid for, and my admitted property, could fill Helen's place,--though Helen was--and I intend her to remain so, for I care for her enough to hold her honour as sacred as I do your own--forever inaccessible."

Lady Calmady staggered to her feet.

"That is enough, Richard," she said. "That is enough. If you have more to say, in pity leave it until to-morrow."

The young man looked at her strangely.

"You are ill, mother," he said.

"No, no, I am only broken-hearted," she replied. "And a broken heart, alas! never killed so healthy a body as mine. I shall survive this--and more perhaps. G.o.d knows. Do not vex yourself about me, d.i.c.kie.--Go, live your life as it seems fit to you. I have not the will, even had I the right, to restrain you. And meanwhile I will be the steward of your goods, as, long ago, when you were a child and belonged to me wholly.

You can trust me to be faithful and discreet, at least in financial and practical matters. If you ever need me, I will come even to the ends of the earth. And should the desire take you to return, here you will find me.--And so, good-bye, my darling. I am foolishly tired. I grow lightheaded, and dare not linger, lest in my weakness I say that which I afterwards regret."

She pa.s.sed to the door and went out, without looking back.

Left to himself Richard Calmady crossed to the writing-table, swung himself up into the revolving-chair, and remained there sorting and docketing papers far into the night. But once, stooping, with long-armed adroitness, to unlock the lowest drawer of the table, a madness of disgust towards the unsightliness of his own person seized on and tore him.

"Oh! G.o.d, G.o.d, G.o.d," he cried aloud, in the extremity of his pa.s.sion, "why hast Thou made me thus?"

And to that question, as yet, there was no answer, though it rang afar over the sleeping park, and up to the clear shining stars of the profound and peaceful summer night.

BOOK V

RAKE'S PROGRESS

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH THE READER IS COURTEOUSLY ENTREATED TO GROW OLDER BY THE s.p.a.cE OF SOME FOUR YEARS, AND TO SAIL SOUTHWARD HO! AWAY

The southeasterly wind came fresh across the bay from the crested range of the Monte Sant' Angelo. The blossoms of the Judas-trees, breaking from the smooth gray stems and branches--on which they perch so quaintly--fell in a red-mauve shower upon the slabs of the marble pavement, upon the mimic waves of the fountain basin, and upon the cl.u.s.tering curls, and truncated shoulders, of the bust of Homer standing in the shade of the grove of cypress and ilex which sheltered the square, high-lying hill-garden, at this hour of the morning, from the fierceness of the sun. They floated as far even as the semicircular steps of the pavilion on the extreme right--the leaded dome of which showed dark and livid on the one side, white and glistering on the other, against the immense and radiant panorama of mountain, sea, and sky.

The garden, its fountains, neatly clipped shrubs, and formal paved alleys, was backed by a large villa of the square, flat-roofed order common to southern Italy. The record of its age had recently suffered modification by application of a coat of stucco, of a colour intermediate between faint lemon-yellow and pearl-gray, and by the renovation of the fine arabesques--Pompeian in character--decorating the narrow inters.p.a.ces between its treble range of Venetian shutters.

Otherwise, the aspect of the Villa Vallorbes showed but small alteration since the year when, for a few socially historic weeks, the "glorious Lady Blessington," and her strangely a.s.sorted train, condescended to occupy it prior to taking up their residence at the Palazzo Belvedere near by. The walls were sufficiently ma.s.sive to withstand a siege. The windows of the ground floor, set in deeply-hewn ashlar work, were cross-barred as those of a prison. Above, the central windows and door of the entresol, opened on to a terrace of black and white marble, from which at either end a wide, shallow-stepped, curved stairway led down into the garden. The first floor consisted of a suite of n.o.ble rooms, each of whose lofty windows gave on to a balcony of wrought ironwork, very ornate in design. The topmost story, immediately below the painted frieze of the parapet, coincided in height and in detail with the entresol.

The villa was superbly situated upon an advancing spur of hill, so that, looking down from its balconies, looking out from between the pale and slender columns of the pavilion, the whole city of Naples lay revealed below.--Naples, that bewildering union of modern commerce and cla.s.sic a.s.sociation--its domes, its palms, its palaces, its crowded, hoa.r.s.e-shouting quays, its theatres and giant churches, its steep and filthy lanes black with shadow, its reeking markets, its broad, sun-scorched piazzas, its glittering, blue waters, its fringing forest of tall masts, and innumerable, close-packed hulls of oceangoing ships!

Naples, city of glaring contrasts--heaven of rascality, h.e.l.l of horses, unrivaled all the western world over for natural beauty, for spiritual and moral grossness! Naples, breeding, teeming, laughing, fighting, festering, city of music, city of fever and death! Naples, at once abominable and enchanting--city to which, spite of noise, stenches, cruelty and squalor, those will return, of necessity, and return again, whose imagination has once been taken captive in the meshes of her many-coloured net!

And among the captives of Naples, on the brilliant morning in question in the early spring of the year 1871, open-eared and open-eyed to its manifest and manifold incongruities, relishing alike the superficial beauty and underlying b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of it, was very certainly Helen de Vallorbes. Several years had elapsed since she had visited this fascinating locality, and she could congratulate herself upon conditions adapted to a more intimate and comprehensive acquaintance with its very various humours than she had ever enjoyed before. She had spent more than one winter here, it is true, immediately subsequent to her marriage. But she had then been required to a.s.sociate exclusively with the members of her husband's family, and to fill a definite position in the aristocratic society of the place. The tone of that society was not a little lax. Yet, being notably defective in the saving grace of humour--as to the feminine portion of it, at all events--its laxity proved sadly deficient in vital interest. The fair Neapolitans displayed as small intelligence in their intrigues as in their piety. In respect of both they remained ignorant, prejudiced, hopelessly conventional. Their n.o.ble ancestresses of the Renaissance understood and did these things better--so Helen reflected. She found herself both bored and irritated. She feared she had taken up her residence in southern Italy quite three centuries too late.

But all that was in the past--heaven be praised for it! Just now she was her own mistress, at liberty--thanks to the fortune of war--to comport herself as she pleased and obey any caprice that took her. The position was ideal in its freedom, while the intrinsic value of it was enhanced by contrast with recent disagreeable experiences. For the alarms and deprivations of the siege of Paris were but lately over. She had come through them unscathed in health and fortune. Yet they had left their mark. During those months of all-encompa.s.sing disappointment and disaster the eternal laughter--in which she trusted--had rung harshly sardonic, to the breaking down of self-confidence, and light-hearted, cynic philosophy. It scared her somewhat. It made her feel old. It chilled her with suspicion of the actuality of The Four Last Things--death and judgment, heaven and h.e.l.l. The power of a merry scepticism waxed faint amid the scream of sh.e.l.ls and long-drawn, murderous crackle of the _mitrailleuse_. Helen, indeed, became actively superst.i.tious, thereby falling low in her own self-esteem. She took to frequenting churches, and spending long, still days with the nuns, her former teachers, within the convent of the Sacre Coeur. Circ.u.mstances so worked upon her that she made her submission, and was solemnly and duly received back into the fold of the Church. She confessed ardently, yet with certain politic reservations. The priest, after all, is but human. It is only charitable to be considerate of his feelings--so she argued--and avoid overburdening his conscience, poor dear man, by blackening your own reputation too violently! The practice of religion was a help--truly it was, since it served to pa.s.s the time. And then, who could tell but that it might not prove really useful hereafter, as, when all is said and done, those dread Four Last Things will present themselves to the mind, in hours of depression with haunting pertinacity? It is clearly wise, then, to be on the safe side of Holy Church in these matters, accepting her own a.s.sertion that she is very certainly on the safe side of the Deity.

Yet, notwithstanding her pious exercises, Helen de Vallorbes found existing circ.u.mstances excessively disturbing and disquieting. She was filled with an immense self-pity. She feared her health was failing.

She became nervously sensible of her eight-and-twenty years, telling herself that her youth and the glory of it had departed. She wore black dresses, rolled bandages, pulled lint. Selecting Mary Magdalene as her special intercessor, she made a careful study of the life and legends of that saint. This proved stimulating to her imagination. She proceeded to write a little one-act drama concerning the holy woman's dealings, subsequent to her conversion, quite late in life in fact, with such as survived of her former lovers. The dialogue was very moving in parts. Helen read it aloud one bleak January evening, by the light of a single candle, to her friend M. Paul Destournelle, poet and novelist--with whom, just then, by her own desire, her relations were severely platonic--and they both wept. The application, though delicate, was obvious. And those tears appeared to lay the dust of so many pleasant sins, and promise fertilisation of so heavy a crop of virtue, that--by inevitable action of the law of contraries--the two friends found it more than ever difficult to say farewell and part that night.

Now looking back on all that, viewing it calmly in perspective, her action and att.i.tude struck Helen as somewhat imbecile. Prayer and penitence have too often a tendency to kick the beam when fear ceases to weight the balance. And so it followed that the l.u.s.t of the flesh, the l.u.s.t of the eye, and the pride of life, presented themselves to her as powers by no means contemptible, or unworthy of invocation, this morning, while she sat at the luxuriously furnished breakfast-table beneath the glistering dome of the airy pavilion and gazed out between its slender columns, over the curving lines of the painted city and glittering waters of the bay, to the cone of Vesuvius rising, in imperial purple, against the azure sky. To-day, sign, as she noted, of fine weather, omen, as she trusted, of good fortune, the smoke of its everlasting burnings towered up and up into the translucent atmosphere, and then drifted away--a gigantic, wedge-shaped pennon--towards Capri and the open sea. And, beholding these things, out of simple, physical well-being, fulness of bread, conviction of her own undiminished beauty, and the merry devilry begotten of these, she fell to projecting a second, a companion, one-act drama founded upon the life of the Magdalene, but, this time, before the saint's conversion, at an altogether earlier stage of her very instructive history. And this drama she would not read to M. Destournelle--not a bit of it. In it he should have neither part nor lot.--Registering which determination, she shook her charming, honey-coloured head, holding up both hands with a gesture of humorous and well-defined repudiation.

For, in truth, the day of M. Destournelle appeared, just now, to be very effectually over. It had been reasonable enough to urge her natural fears in journeying through a war-distracted land--although guarded by Charles, most discreet and resourceful of English men-servants, and Zelie Forestier, most capable of French lady's-maids--as excuse for Paul Destournelle joining her at a wayside station a short distance out of Paris and accompanying her south. _A la guerre comme a la guerre._ A beautiful woman can hardly be too careful of her person amid the many and primitive dangers which battle and invasion let loose. De Vallorbes himself--detestably jealous though he was--could hardly have objected to her thus securing effective protection, had he been acquainted with the fact. That he was not so acquainted was, of course, the veriest oversight. But, the frontier once reached--the better part of three weeks had elapsed in the reaching of it--and all danger of war and tumult past, both the necessity and, to be frank, the entertainment of M. Destournelle's presence became less convincing. Helen grew a trifle weary of his transports, his suspicions, his _bel tete de Jesu souffrant_, his insatiable literary and personal vanity. The charm, the excitement, of the situation, began to wear rather threadbare, while the practical inconveniences and restrictions it imposed increasingly disclosed themselves. A lover, as Helen reflected, provided you see enough of him, offers but small improvement upon a husband. He is liable to become possessive and didactic, after the manner of the natural man. He is liable to forget that the relation is permitted, not legalised--that it exists on suffrance merely, and is therefore terminable at the will of either party. The last days of that same southern journey had been marked by misunderstandings and subsequent reconciliations, in an ascending scale of acrimony and fervour on the part of her companion.

In Helen's case familiarity tended very rapidly to breed contempt. She ceased to be in the least amused by these recurring agitations. At Pisa, after a scene of a particularly excited nature, she lost all patience, frankly told her admirer that she found him not a little ridiculous, and requested him to remove himself, his grievances, and his _bel tete de Jesu_ elsewhere. M. Destournelle took refuge in nerves, threats of morphia, and his bedchamber,--in the chaste seclusion of which apartment Helen left him, unvisited and unconsoled, while, attended by her servants, she gaily resumed her journey.

An adorable sense of independence possessed her, of the charm of her own society, of the absence of all external compelling or directing of her movements--no circ.u.mscription of her liberty possible--the world before her where to choose! Not only were privations, dismal hauntings of siege and slaughter, left behind, and M. Destournelle, just now most wearisome of lovers, left behind also, but de Vallorbes himself had, for the time being, become a permissibly negligible quant.i.ty. The news of more fighting, more bloodshed, had just reached her, though the German armies were marching back to the now wholly German Rhine. For upon unhappy Paris had come an hour of deeper humiliation than any which could be procured by the action of foreign foes. She was a kingdom divided against herself, a mother scandalously torn by her own children. News had reached Helen too, news special and highly commendatory of her husband, Angelo Luigi Francesco. Early in that eventful struggle he had enlisted in the Garde Mobile, all the manhood and honest sentiment resident in him stirred into fruitful activity by the shame and peril of his adopted country. Now Helen learned he had distinguished himself in the holding of Chatillon against the insurgents, had been complimented by MacMahon upon his endurance and resource, had been offered, and had accepted, a commission in the regular army. Promotion was rapid during the later months of the war, and probability pointed to the young man having started on a serious military career.