Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (10 page)

“Indeed I am greatly to blame!” groaned Arnold Condorex, grinding his teeth, bowing his head, fairly rolling his eyes in penitence.

“Will you not be sensible and listen?” she begged him gaily. “Nay, do not think that I am being brave! You cannot conceive how soon I abandoned the business of weeping, and invoked that prudent side of me which I have had to cultivate, since I am but a poor girl with my way to make in the world. I was, you see, almost discreditably not without resources. Graceful I am, but nothing uncommon in my grace. I”—she sucked her thumb till she could find words—“I am a little less common than a china shepherdess, but I am not rare. You may see me on a hundred thousand mantelpieces, with my Leghorn hat and my tarlatan gown and my wide sash that show off my slenderness, and should it happen that the tall gentleman in very tight trousers at the other end of the mantelpiece fail to survive the touch of the new housemaid I am left alone for no longer time—than—lies—between—my—owner’s—visits—to—the—market—town—” her breath failed her for shame, and her thumb went back to her mouth.

“What are you trying to tell me, you little jade?” he asked, smiling rather wryly.

“I am trying to tell you, my dove,” she said, bracing herself to it, “that although I had been transported out of my soul by your endearing attributes, I had never destroyed my address-book. Its pages,” she remarked in an offhand manner, “were not blank.”

He knitted his brows as if he did not understand, and since he was no fool that can only have been because he did not wish to do so.

“You had hardly been gone more than two hours before I had spoken by telephone with a young man and given him permission to call on the following day and instruct me concerning the Polish Corridor, since some amiability of mine had inadvertently made him believe me profoundly interested in that subject, on which he was an expert. ’Twas the beginning of a delightful friendship. I wish you had known him. You would have liked him so much,” she said, in the disingenuous tones in which women urge sociability on those who are in the natural course of things unlikely to delight in each other’s company.

He looked at her quizzically.

She stepped backwards, blushing. Then bit her lip and said, “How well you know my quality! No, ’twas not as easy as that. I do not wonder you do not believe me. Yet what I say is true, I did not grieve for very long. I will tell you how it really happened that I found peace and you have no need to reproach yourself. I did not become tranquil nearly so rapidly as I have pretended. It might well have been that I had thrown myself into the arms of this young man with that violence which is for the soul the same form of suicide that leaping from a high balcony on to rocks is for the body; but instead I was very cool with him; you would not believe how cool I was. For after I had put down the telephone it occurred to me that I would not find it easy to sleep, and I remembered that that morning when I was combing my hair the manner in which I played the Hammerklavier Sonata had seemed most shameful, and I resolved to practise it. So I blew out the candles that I might rest my eyes, which were a trifle sore, and I sat down at my piano and played it over and over again, while the rising moon painted a black and silver pattern on my floor. After an hour or two I stopped, and there was nothing in my world save exaltation, for even as the black and silver pattern had stamped itself more brightly on the boards as the moon mounted the skies, so the pattern of the adagio had grown clearer and clearer in my mind as my comprehension had soared upward to its zenith, and now my finger-tips had no more to do than copy it. I have never felt more comfortable in my spirit. I had no thought of you until my Grimalkin mewed at my window, and to admit him I had need to face the garden where we had so lately walked together, and fallen out. But I was not confused. Gazing calmly on it, I said, ‘Do you not see that advancement is to him what music is to you? You would let no man come between you and the heavenly strains of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart. ’Tis factious, therefore, to feel aggrieved because he will not let a woman come between him and what he holds as not less sacred.’ I therefore felt no longer at a disadvantage, and it appeared incredible that I had intended to dedicate the night to tears. I went up to bed and slept a matter of nine hours. But before I did that, I remember, I stood for quite a time at the window, with my tired Grimalkin in my arms, while I watched the garden relax from the sharp brilliance of moonlight to the quaker shades of dawn, and thought of you as kindly as you could possibly have wished. Well, so it was!”

He was saying heartily, “Why, I am very glad, dear Harriet, that you took the matter so sensibly,” when her face, which had been looking up at him as fair and open-eyed as the golden rose he had sometimes seen her wear in her bodice, clouded with disappointment. “You do not believe me,” she wistfully exclaimed. Then suddenly a lightning flash ran through her frame and after jerking high her chin blazed from her eyes. “Ah, I see what it is! You do not want to believe me! Some part of you, unworthy of the rest, takes pride in having incommoded me, and will not permit the better part that loathes to think so accept my assurance. Oh, what perversity, to cling with love to the idea that you have inflicted pain! I will not have it so!” But her gaze, not less suddenly, grew soft. “Why, I perceive that all this time you have been torturing yourself regarding this small business! Again and again you have awakened in these most superfluous hours between two and four in the morning, and said to yourself, ‘I dealt ungraciously with Harriet Hume,’ and suffered a heartache. Oh, my poor sweetheart, my pet lamb, my honey-bird! And I perceive too, that when that heartache wore off as all heartaches do, you turned over and prepared to enjoy complete repose, but were prevented from that pleasure by fears that I must needs hate you for having used me so, and that I might raise my armies against you. ‘Dear God, there is Sir George,’ you have groaned; and thrashed about until dawn. Oh, my poor stricken deer, why do you look ashamed? That is a thought most natural to such as us who had to fight our way towards eminence through enemies. But I will put a finish to all this, I will not let you for another moment canker your mind with pride in phantom cruelties. Listen, while I make the proof!”

Uneasily he smiled, “I do not believe I shall be able to listen to it, for you are looking very pretty!”

She knew his praise of her was not without its viciousness, but her face remained as brilliant under its animation as a daisy under a dewdrop, she was so sure that all would go well when she had had her say. “You must know first,” she told him, “that you have greatly disguised from yourself the nature of the catastrophe that befell us in my garden; for which you need blame neither yourself nor your deeds, since it occurred for no other reason than that I had suddenly been granted the power to read your thoughts.”

Arnold Condorex burst into laughter, so extravagant that it cost him his balance. He would have staggered away from her, had she not clipped his cuff between her palm and her fingers. “Yes, I recall you had that curious fantasy!” he told her, choking with indulgent mirth.

“’Twas no fantasy,” she insisted mildly. “I had that power, and have not lost it. This very day has seen me exercise it unimpaired. Did you not see me, as I walked before you through these gardens, stop suddenly and tremble, like a fish caught up from its pond on a line? It was the hook of your own thoughts that had fastened in my back, so actually that I would not have been surprised had it torn the shoulders of my gown. I knew it was you that followed me, and I knew the thoughts that were running in your head. Come, tell me,” she coaxed, lifting to him a face as bright as a new penny with knowledge of her impending triumph, “did you not look at that pretty little cottage which stands among the lawns and guess that, being silly, I longed to live there in the sylvan way, making repasts of such nuts and berries as are to be found in Kensington Gardens? And did you not very handsomely wish you were the King, and could give me all I wish?”

Roughly he freed himself and stepped away from her crying, “I did not!” and then, seeing the game was up, said sullenly, “I did!” and, putting his hand to his head, querulously exclaimed: “But I cannot see what that proves!”

“Sweet,” she chirruped at his elbow, “hark at the important proof it makes! I am not so temperate in nature as I seem. There are those who have seen me skimming like the wind from some incident that had galled my pride, my hair streaming like a comet (allowing for the difference in colour) from my distracted head, my eyes rolling in frenzy, and my rigid fingers clapped over my ears. I must confess—without regret,” interpolated the little prig, “for I believe it has improved my renderings of Beethoven—that I am not immune from agony. Had I loved you as passionately and had you injured me as cruelly as you suppose, there was and is one figure in your thoughts who would instantly have transformed me to the tear-flecked Mænad I can sometimes be. Ah, my love, are you not fortunate in your affairs of the heart!”

There was a pause before he replied, “I do not understand you.”

Rapt in a vision, she was for the moment not attentive to him. “The intensity of your thought,” she trilled, “makes her visible to me as if we were walking skirt by skirt here on the pavement. I have made all manner of close observations on her. She has as small a hand and foot as mine, as finely arched an eyebrow and as shining an eye, and like me she has no reason to fear had she to take her turn in a gallery of antique statues. Only she is golden as the sovereign our fathers used, and thus beyond dispute outshines me; and she has that majesty I have always known I lack. But am I frenzied at the thought of her! No! Exquisite she is, and she is yours, and I rejoice!”

But Arnold Condorex, or so it seemed, was turning into stone. He repeated, “I do not understand you. You do not speak of anyone I know.”

“Why must you dissemble your happiness to me,” she cried tenderly, “when I mean so well? I will not tell a soul but my cat if you do not want it known. I only speak of it to assure you how very happy I am that you are going to be happy! For I saw all, dear Arnold. I saw the vision of the future which comes and goes at the back of your mind, sustaining you against all present tedium; of the six pearl-grey and soot-black pillars of St. George’s, Hanover Square, and how one day soon they shall be washed by a boiling surf of the mob that loves to see the gentry married; of the interior of that match-making building, that shall be incandescent with white flowers and crammed to the doors with persons of consequence; of yourself, standing so properly at the head of the aisle, no more and no less composed than is suitable for the moment; of her at whose coming all the doves swoop down, remembering that though they have for some time been associated with the Anglican Church they were at first the birds of Venus—”

No lark, shot down from the invisible niche in the skies where it had poised to sing its heart out, was more suddenly silenced than was Harriet then. With her mouth a little open, she stood staring before her at the Serpentine, which now looked very much the colour of a dead fish.

Till then these two had been very snug out there, in the Italian Garden, more snug than it would seem possible for two walking abroad in this world of sword-sharp airs, splinters of ice, and lawns grizzled like old men with rime. Because of a certain warmth their meeting had engendered in their hearts, it was as if a line of invisible bonfires were blazing on the stone flags and were making an alley of good temperature for them. But now those fires were dead. Nothing disguised from them that it was nearly Christmas of a winter that had been murderous to the poor, and that they were standing in the uncabined atmosphere with only a little haberdashery between it and their pelts. This was because another fire had died. Its hearth had been in Arnold Condorex’s breast, and in its time it might have been called loyalty, or gratitude, or nobility, but had now no need for a name, since it was ashes, and would presently be dispersed by the winds and be as if it had not been at all. For if he meant to marry Lord Sourdeline’s only daughter before he went to Ireland, why, then, he was a traitor; a double traitor, since she was betrothed to the only son of old Lord Derrydown.

Striking her bosom with her minute clenched hand, poor Harriet moaned, “I know all, yet I know it a second too late! ’Tis the artist’s special quality and defect!” Faltering, she turned towards the entrance of the enclosure.

Coldly he said, “Let me attend you to the gate.”

Walking beside her with dejected head, he supposed she knew
it
all; how he had heard from another like himself, who had a firm intention to rise in the world, and had told him with a trading gleam in his eye, that the far-famed golden Ginevra, whose beauty had been the astonishment of English earth since her seventeenth birthday, had fallen moonishly in love with him after having heard him deliver his speech on his first visit to the Fortress of Mondh, and had these three months kept his portrait under her pillow, where her betrothed’s had never been. She knew, too, he supposed, that the informer had made a winking claim of credibility for his story by saying how it had been garnered for him by his sister, who was employed in some mean capacity about Lord Sourdeline’s household. Oh, God! How resolutely the enterprise took on itself the form of a Hogarthian picture full of the colours of soiled linen, depicting a party of servants armed with weapons of the kitchen, spits and pokers and tongs still daubed with grease, creeping up a backstairs to the fine door of the library; where their master’s noble head would nod over a Latin book until they ran in to gag and rob him! And how infinitely low the informer had looked when he had gone on to say, his eye gleaming as if he had achieved some triumph of vendition in Petticoat Lane, that the Lady Ginevra was by no means as gifted in her intellects as in her person, being very gullible indeed, and that her father could deny her nothing! Hogarth again!