The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance

Honoria crosses from the masculine, active atmosphere of the Chapel-Room into Lady Calmady’s silent bedchamber, where biblical figures on the Dutch-tiled hearth antick in the firelight. Katherine lies motionless in dove-coloured silk, her face attenuated, almost transparent, a copy of Thomas à Kempis and Richard’s curt weekly letters at her elbow. Honoria’s indignation at the wrongs of womanhood wars with her need for circumspection. Katherine wakes, briefly mistaking her for her son, and with playful apology confesses, on the strength of à Kempis, that she has grown selfish in her greed for Honoria’s companionship and begs the younger woman to depart and re-enter society. Honoria protests that she never truly cared for any person until she came to care for Katherine, and pleads with her to eat, rest, and consent to travel north to Ormiston in a fortnight. To break through her reserves, Honoria discloses that the old dog Camp, faithful attendant of Richard’s boyhood, had died three weeks earlier in the Gun-Room, after dragging himself toward the little staircase in a final effort to reach his mistress. Katherine weeps, and her long-sustained calm at last gives way. She agrees to go to Ormiston with Honoria a fortnight hence, opening the casement to let in the wind, conceding that her household must not be left desolate against her son’s eventual return.

CHAPTER VII – CHAPTER XI

The sequence opens in Naples at the Villa Vallorbes, where Sir Richard Calmady awaits his cousin Helen de Vallorbes for a delayed breakfast beneath the airy pavilion. Helen arrives in striking simplicity — a white woolen dress with a black lace mantilla — and her unusual gravity signals that a reckoning is at hand. Richard, already feverish and prone to unsettling sensations of blurred vision and creeping chill, finds his thoughts drawn back to Brockhurst, to a long-ago drive with Helen, and to a fog that had seemed to swallow his youth. The polished surface of their exchange conceals mounting psychological pressure; beneath it lies the unresolved matter of Paul Destournelle, the French poet whose shadow has followed Helen south from Paris. Helen, who met Destournelle on the church steps that very morning, confesses her long entanglement with the writer and his wounded vanity, using the confession to bind Richard before his rival can intercede. Richard counters with quiet irony, then, attempting the garden slope in his disabled body, missteps. Helen catches him, but he stiffly refuses her help and withdraws, asserting a pride that masks the shame of his deformity and a deeper, more personal desolation.

The following day, Helen spends in jealous agitation. Richard remains inaccessible, shut away in the dwarfed entresol rooms of the villa, and her curiosity curdles into mortification. She paces the noble rooms and walks the ilex grove beneath omens — a carrion crow, a black beetle, a funeral procession, the bleating laughter of Destournelle — each sharpening her sense of menace. She transforms herself for dinner into a resplendent crocus-yellow brocade trimmed with Flemish guipure and seed pearls, a costume of self-assertion against the nameless rival to whom Richard has dedicated the villa. The dinner conversation, ostensibly about the soprano Morabita’s appearance at the San Carlo, becomes a charged exchange. Helen confesses her jealousy, announces her intention to leave, and presses Richard about the woman he claims to love. Richard apologizes for his negligent hosting, but when Helen declares that the woman must surely be repelled by his proximity, he answers, with quiet irony, that perhaps she is here — and shuffles onto the balcony. Helen remains, savouring her triumph, yet beneath it a tremor of fear.

That night, in the cedar-scented, dwarfed library of the entresol, Richard broods in his fever until Helen comes to him barefoot, in a sea-blue dressing-gown, lamp in hand, offering herself as the sacrament of love. She does not leave until gray dawn, hurrying upstairs like a fear-driven ghost, and the household resumes as though nothing had occurred.

The following morning the rain descends upon Naples harbor, where Richard’s yacht Reprieve lies coaled and stripped of elegance. Amid the moral squalor of the port, Richard reads two devastating letters. The first, from Paul Auguste Destournelle, claims Helen as the inspiration of his genius and demands Richard either invite him to the villa or surrender his cousin. The second, from the Comte de Vallorbes himself, confides with ironic candor that Helen has long been serially unfaithful — Destournelle among her recent lovers — and entrusts her welfare to Richard, trusting his honor. The correspondence forces Richard to recognize that his own conduct constitutes a betrayal graver than any his deformity has inflicted: he has dishonored the cousin who trusted him. A third letter, from his mother Lady Calmady at Ormiston, tenders forgiveness and an open home, but Richard feels too branded to accept it. He composes a brief farewell to Helen, summons his valet Powell, and attempts to depart, only to be detained by a coal strike and the protests of Captain Vanstone, who urges him to seek a doctor. While stranded aboard, he learns that Helen has herself fled the villa with a French visitor — a final, sharp confirmation of his abandonment.

Richard nonetheless orders the carriage to the San Carlo, where he takes his rented box alone. Fever and shame have unsettled his perception: the tiers of the horseshoe become a vast honeycomb, the aristocratic occupants bright-hued larvae, the densely packed parterre an angry multitude of working bees whose corporate judgment he awaits as a cleansing force. He studies an opposite box where a woman of ivory and gold and a young man of dissolute aspect seem essential to the approaching event. Morabita’s voice rings through the house, and he hails it as prelude to catastrophe and deliverance.

At the close of the first act, Helen enters in her crocus-yellow brocade, with Paul Destournelle at her shoulder. Under the guise of an operatic interlude, she confronts Richard, accusing him of having seduced and then abandoned her. Destournelle, eyeing Richard’s crippled body, refuses him the dignity of a duel; a man of sensibility, he says, cannot meet an “abortion” with sword or pistol. He strikes Richard across the face with metal-buttoned gloves. Richard lunges at him but falls heavily, his forehead striking the lower step. Destournelle bends to examine him with a goatlike laugh, gives him a contemptuous kick, and asks Helen if she is sufficiently avenged. She replies that a little affair of honor dating from her childhood has at last been adjusted, thanks him, and departs. Richard loses consciousness. Darkness, silence, and rest follow — and with them the opening of Book VI, “The New Heaven and The New Earth,” signaling the turn from torment toward whatever reconciliation the new sequence may bring.