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.
第七章 – 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.
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