Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (16 page)

At this moment the timepiece which the brass seahorses on the mantelpiece supported between their wings and their tails, coolly pronounced that it was six. He thought: “The messenger should be here very soon. Dear God, what if he does not come, and all my plan has gone awry? I shall have all the dreariness of plotting afresh how to overthrow old Derrydown and capture the young rebels’ vote. And I am tired, I have had to travel so far since my birth, and I have all those debts to pay, oh God, oh God….” He perceived that on a sudden Harriet had formed a notion of rising, since she had slipped her little feet down on the ground, but he caught her back to him, crying, “Nay, you shall stay and tell me another of your fairy-tales!” But at once he started away from her. “My darling! What is it that torments you? I could not have conceived that any but a hunted beast could have so quick and desperate a heart-beat! Come, you must tell me what ails you!”

“’Tis nothing,” she faltered, “’tis nothing at all.”

“Nay, but there is something!” he insisted, “and it grieves me very deeply not to know it! For, as I tell you, you are so dear to me that it is as if our passion mysteriously made increase during the time we are apart!” He gave her a fierce, loving little shake. “You hurt me so greatly by not telling me!”

She moaned, “That I cannot do!”

“But why, my child?” he pressed her.

Not a word would she answer; and of a sudden a quiet and frightened gravity fell upon him. He was silent for a minute, and then said: “I think I know what is amiss. The occult gifts you possess have told you that something far from pleasant is going to happen to me; and since you are my loyal friend this distresses you. I understand it. But you need go to no pains to conceal from me what you have foreseen.” He paused to dry the sweat on his brow. “I am stout-hearted enough to look into the face of fate without perturbation, no matter what it shows me. So speak away.”

She began to rock about in his arms and laugh wildly though softly. “Oh, no!” she cried. “I cannot read the future! I have foreseen nothing of your fate!”

Grown ghastly, he persisted: “I assure you that you need not fear to speak. I have as much courage as most men. And—” he drew a deep breath, as those who fear they are about to swoon, “—I would like to know, so that I can make due preparation.”

“Ah, my poor love!” she lamented in a whispering shriek. “I tell you I cannot look an inch ahead of time! and that what has appalled me is not what is going to happen to you, but what has already happened!”

He recoiled from her in amazement. “What has already happened to me!” he exclaimed incredulously. “But nothing but good has happened to me, since I dare not say when!” And his mind shrugged its shoulders and said to him behind its hand, “Did you not remember that the poor pretty thing was always a little mad? This second sight of hers was but a bee in her bonnet, and you yourself would never have lent credit to it, were it not such an infernally hot day that you are bedevilled with fever.”

“Nothing but good!” sobbed Harriet, who had fished a handkerchief from her bosom and was turning it to a wet rag more expeditiously than could have been believed. “Do you call guilt, and shame, and treachery good things?”

“Guilt, and shame, and treachery!” he echoed. “But, Harriet, there is no need to use these names of my life!”

“Do not endeavour to dissemble,” she damply begged, “I have known all ever since I entered your hall, and perceived Disgrace standing on your stairs, true master of this house.”

He controlled his resentment because she was disordered in her intellects, and it was very hot, and he had always had a softness for her, and spoke with the restraint of an honest man sure of his honesty. “I can truthfully say, and I thank God I can do it, that there is no such wickedness in this house as you suspect Ah, Harriet! There are secrets of State that I can divulge to none before it is deemed time for all to know them. If my lips were not thus sealed, I might prove to you that such a stand is to be made for principle in this house, before sunset, as would lift you as far above your ordinary spirits as those suspicions you entertain of me have cast you below them. To-day of all days,” he said solemnly wagging his finger, “I can look into your eyes and avow that, whatever evil may be vexing you, it does not proceed from me. Perhaps,” he suggested indulgently, giving the poor dear’s supernatural inclination a sop, “there are bad men in the next house.”

“Oh, poor old Derrydown!” wept Harriet. “Poor infatuate Ladyday!”

He had dashed back to her and taken both her wrists.

“Who told you?”

“No one!” she sighed.

“Nay, you must tell me!” His grasp tightened.

“No one!” she sighed again; and in the faintest whisper stated. “It was my gift that informed me.”

“Your gift!” he shouted. He let go her wrists, throwing her from him so that the frail creature spun like a top and came to rest against the bookcase with her arms set wide along a shelf, looking very piteous. “Your gift,” he said, lowering his tones for fear of the lackeys, but still very furiously. “I remember now more about that gift. It was the heat and your damnable disguise of amiability that drove it out of my mind; and had that not happened you would not have found your way into my house. To give yourself consequence you claim to be able to pick the lock of my soul, and to bolster up this claim you patch together what gossip reaches your obscurity and what scribblers hint in their low sheets, and make wild guesses on it. So you practised on my marriage to Ginevra and spoiled it from the first. I never could attend upon her loveliness without feeling like a thief, and since I felt no pride in the relationship there was nothing to keep me from noticing she was an idiot. Now you hope to use the same creeping mystic ways to foul my public life. How did the rumour reach you? Speak!”

She did but mop her eyes.

“Ah, I have it!” he exclaimed. “It is Sir George who has been talking to you, is it not?”

“Oh, no!” she murmured, “Sir George has not spoken of you for a long time.”

He crossed the room and thrust his face close to her meekness. “And why not? He has not spoken of me for a long time—and why not? Oh, you need not tell me. These old men despise me because I have neither family nor future, and even pretend they cannot trust me! He would not talk of me to you, because he thinks ill of me, and is too gentlemanly to speak ill of a man to a woman who professes to be his friend. I am sure Sir George is full of such small points of honour,” he sneered, “and thinks himself most chivalrous because of them. But if he did not tell you, then who did?” He set his clenched fist to his temple and tried to pluck the name out of the category of things unknown by speculation. “But no one can have told you!” he groaned. “Have I not burned my lamp night after night contriving there shall be none of us in this enterprise who is not in the same box as all the rest, who stands to lose as much as his fellows by betrayal of our cause. I mean,” he explained stiffly and hastily, “that we are all good men and true, men of principle. No,” and for a space he was lost again in consideration—“you have not heard this by any natural means.” Shuddering, he drove the knowledge home into his heart; and admitted that he knew what he had known so long. “You have this gift you boast of, this infernal gift.”

She had turned aside from him because she could not bear the force of his rage full-face; and rubbed her cheek against a fine edition of Catullus as if it were a pillow, and she tired to death.

“Ay, but that is not enough wickedness for you!” he shouted. “For, look you, these things you say that I have done I have not done! By these supernatural arts you spy out the bare bones of my life, but with a wickedness more personal to yourself you clothe those bones with the rotten flesh of malign interpretation. Last time you saw that I was going to marry the Lady Ginevra. There was no harm in that. I had some natural qualities to match her own that made it not an utter squandering of her hand; and my behaviour throughout was pronounced by those who might most easily have resented it to be most gentlemanly. There could have been no fullness read into the business save by your mind that wanted to decry me. And so it is to-day. It is most true that I am engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow my elders; but I am not moved by any base or mercenary motive. I would be culpable only if I had withheld my support from those who, more truly than myself, are its promoters, for there is here something that must be done for the country’s sake. Listen, Harriet. Since you know so much you had better know all. I will be frank with you. I could not deny, nor would ever wish to do so, that I am beholden to Lord Derrydown and his family for a thousand benefits. But old men grow foolish, and the sons of great men are sometimes born so. Believe me, dear Harriet, the history of empires that have passed, as, please God, ours never shall, all show us that no year of famine nor visitation of the plague can do more hurt to the people than one fatuous counsellor. Therefore, if I allowed myself to be influenced by my personal feelings I should—” His voice was soaring with the most comfortable serenity, and he was thinking to himself as he spoke, “It is very fortunate that this is what I really believe”; and he stretched out explanatory arms as if he were presenting her with truth on a tray. It was into that encircled space there seemed to crash the rat-tat-tat from the knocker of the great front door. His arms stiffened and dropped, he forgot Harriet Hume, he said to himself, “That is the messenger!” The swelling passage of his life that should be heard over all the countries of the earth and linger in the ears of men long after his own sepulture, had now begun. This moment would not go from him; and everything about it was very clear, clearer, perhaps, than any other moment in his life. Almost he could see through the doors and passages on to his doorstep, where the messenger was waiting, the glint of bright metal on the boy’s tilted cap was all but present to his eyes. While utterly visible to the eyes of his spirit, and delectable as if they had been plaited of roses, were the thousand strings that had been cast about the marionette messenger’s neck to bring him where he was. What commendable shrewdness (though he should not say it) had held the other ends of those strings! Was it not clever of him that night, when the Government came so near defeat because of Derrydown’s speech at Uttoxeter and Saltoun’s lack of suppleness with the Press, to turn and see the narrowing eyes of Grindlay, and guess that his failure to get the War Office had done its work and he was now ready to revolt? And had not Grindlay carried himself with a marvellous discretion? He had so dissembled his rebel spirit that to the end he had gone about the old men’s houses, and had been able to pick up much. Why, he had ascertained beyond all doubt that Derrydown had committed the lapse on which they were to justify their splitting of the party for a reason concerning which he had sworn silence and would be therefore (being what he was) unable to defend himself. And nearly nothing had been done in words! Nearly nothing had been done in thoughts! It could therefore so trimly turn to anything one wished to consider it!

For very ecstasy he closed his eyes, snuffed in the wind of fortune, and puffed out his chest. He could taste success as if he had a piece of it in his mouth. As the tension of his ecstasy grew less he opened his eyes and looked into the face of Harriet Hume. If what she claimed was true, then the image of his enterprise which shone so clearly before his spiritual vision was shining before hers only with such diminution of brilliance as marks the difference between an object and its reflexion. And what she claimed was true.

He made a gesture towards her as if her mind were indeed a mirror and he could break it; and sent out a cry of hatred, which hurt his lungs and throat as it rushed upward from his bowels. That pain also he counted among the harms she had done him. Since there was blackness humming all about him he staggered to his chair and had laid his head down on his desk.

“But why,” his spirit asked itself, “is this more terrible than the other two discoveries she has made regarding me?”

Detestably, since he had not spoken aloud, she answered; “Because then you were outwitting women, and there has been such an immense deal of propaganda in favour of regarding this as a proof of high spirits in a gentleman, that it is neither here nor there. But now that you have turned against your own sex, where the obligation of honour is recognized, then perhaps things are going not so well with you.” Her voice grew fainter. “If it is so I would not be thought to blame you. In the composition of every truly female there is much of the poacher’s dog. We pick up the game our masters steal. To all you have done I consent in my soul.”

Then she said in a voice like the bleating of a newborn lamb, so small that he was not sure if she was speaking or if he was overhearing her thoughts, “And to-day is terrible because it has shown we are still concerned with one another. Each of us has always hoped that a stranger would come who would scatter holy water on the image of the other and lay it for ever, but time goes on, and that stranger does not come.”

He murmured, “Ay, so it is, so it is,” and the darkness round him became as absolute as if it were the womb, the grave.

He sat up sharply because he had heard one come into the room; and found that his butler stood beside him, holding out a letter on a tray. It was the letter. He could recognise the superscription. But he did not take it. It had become a toil and trouble to him.

But he could not send it away. That choice was not open to him. Summoning his rage to him he cried in his mind “Well, what do you want me to do? I must go on with my public duties, I suppose!” and rolled his eyes fiercely round the room, but did not find her. He snarled at the butler, “Where is the lady gone?” and the voice of those qualities which had till then protected him said within him, “This was no time to assert your mastership, he had caught you at a disadvantage, you should have won him over to your side by revealing that you were a pitiful and suffering man.” But it spoke with detachment as if it would not go to any pains to combat that wild portion of himself which replied, “Nothing is so important at this moment as my need for fury.” A bell seemed to toll in him, as if to mark the first of something.