Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (4 page)

“Ah, let us not ever——!” she breathed.

Their trembling forbade them to finish their sentences; which was of no great moment, since that aspect of their situation was so far from unique. They clung together, attempting to regain their calm, until Harriet, rolling her eye over her lover’s shoulder towards her window and her garden, saw something she did not expect and gave a shrill scream.

“Look!” she cried, and pointed at what to him was nothing.

“My dear?” he asked.

“The shadow of the purple lilac is lying straight across the terrace!”

“These odd-job gardeners,” he jested, “have their lapses. They do not tie up shadows as they should.”

“But, my dear, that means it is evening!”

“Evening! It cannot be evening! It is perhaps late afternoon, it may be about half-past five.” He drew out the handsome watch the Duke had given him when he left the Ministry for the War Office and could not take his indefatigable secretary with him. “Why, it positively is twenty minutes past seven! But that is impossible! Why, how the time has flown!” They exchanged a glance of raillery. “I hope, my dear,” he said, putting his watch back in his pocket, “that you are not now going to play tricks with time. A man must have something to tell him where he is.”

“I do not see why,” she answered, but did not keep up the argument, for she had a little lost her spirits. “My love, if you have to go to Lord Downderry again this evening you must go on your way. I will never keep you from your duty. What’s that? You are remembering that he said to-night you need not come till ten? Oh, that is excellent.”

“And do you not call it excellent also, that other thing which is in my mind?” he asked. “Which is, that since your garden is pretty enough to be a worthy setting for your prettiness, I would like to walk with you there till I must go.”

“I will not disturb the classic relationship of the sexes to that degree,” replied Harriet. “Whatever gifts I may have, I will leave you to say aloud the flattering things you think of me, and will pretend to be surprised when I hear them. So I am amazed to hear that you wish to walk with me in my garden, and confused by the reason you give for it; and I would be obliged if you would hand me my shawl.”

She wound it about her till she had as little arm as a seal, and led the way down the steps into her garden, which was bloomy with deep shadows. At the first flower-bed she stooped to dismiss a weed from service, brushed the mould from her fingers with some distaste, and grumbled because the duties of a gardener could not be performed with a feather-duster. Then they took to the lawn and strolled up and down, keeping admirable step though he was so much taller, and being very pleased over little things. They paused at the wrought-iron gate which the Bridge Club that occupied the main wing of Blennerhassett House had set up, for the sake of ornament, in the middle of the fence dividing their share of the old garden from Harriet’s; and they enjoyed the long shadow, like a lyre with many strings, which it cast on the lawn behind it. By the crest some of its convolutions formed Arnold was able to tell from what demolished great house in the neighbourhood it came, and at that Harriet was able to tell him how clever he was. Then he gave her his arm very kindly, and they took another turn.

“We are as contented as old married people,” he said, after a silence.

“Much more so, I suppose,” she answered.

“You are saucy, Miss, you are saucy,” he rebuked her. “Are you not afraid to be as saucy in the very face of the refining influence of Nature? Are you not abashed by the elevating society of the birds, the flowers, the trees? And, by the way, those three trees at the end of your garden are exceedingly beautiful. I have often thought so, but I have never seen them look so splendid as to-night.”

Her eyes flashed on them. “You know them, of course? They are the Ladies Frances, Georgina, and Arabella Dudley. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted them. The result of his labours is in the National Gallery under the tide, ‘The Three Graces Decorating a Statue of Hymen.’”

He scrutinised them. The one on the left was low, and extended its branches up to the taller trees on the right as a kneeling woman might offer a gift to a woman standing beside her; and that taller tree seemed with its own branches to pass on what was given to the tallest tree, which was evidently of the order of those who take and do not give, for all its branches save that which took the gift stayed close to its trunk as folded arms to a body. There was also a suggestion of humanity in the way they stood on the turf with more than arboreal elegance, as if their roots had in their time been attentive to a dancing. master; and their leaves at this evening hour looked more like flowers than leaves, being crudely aureate where the sunset struck them and a deep blue where it did not, and not like real flowers either, but such fantasy-engendered blooms as nymphs might use.

“You are right,” he pronounced. “If it is not a secret of the household, may I ask how they came here?”

“It is a long story,” replied Harriet, “and in part almost improbable. They are here in consequence of a lamentable train of events that began on the evening of a day which—”

“Ah, you little liar,” he cried in delight, “are you well away on one of your fairy tales?”

“—of a day,” continued Harriet, “which by an interesting coincidence was the third birthday of the Lady Frances, the second of the Lady Georgina, and the first of the Lady Arabella. Their nurse had left them sleeping like three cherubs to go down to the servants’ hall for supper, and was sitting at ease over her meat when the slut she had left in charge came rushing into the room screeching and blubbering that though she had nodded over the fire for but an instant they had all been gone when she awakened. It would be useless and horrible to describe the events of that night. The mother of the infants went off in swoons like a minute-gun for the rest of the night; their father took a fowling-piece and bade the chaplain do what he could in his department of life while he himself beat the park with a party of keepers. All were reunited in what I would like for convenience to describe as a hopeless dawn, did I not fear that owing to a certain pictorial masterpiece of last century that phrase will confuse your mind with suggestions of a fishing-fleet. The mother embarked on one last and technically supreme swoon, and the father, whose feet were exceedingly wet, testily called on the chaplain to go on his knees again for one final precatory effort, when a cry from the garden brought them running to the windows. And there, on the lawn, lay the lost infants. They were sleeping peacefully and bore no sign of injury. The only singularity about their aspect was that their melon-like little contours were linked by a thick cable of flowers. But that, in the relief of finding them alive, seemed unimportant enough.

“But alas! it was far from unimportant. For from that hour onwards those three daughters of the nobility were never happy unless they bore with them some such garland as the one that had been found about their infant limbs that uncanny morning. When they were children this did not matter. It was considered an affecting proof of sensibility; and though nurses complained of the trouble it gave, there was in those days a superb excess of nurses. It became, however, increasingly inconvenient as they grew to womanhood. To begin with, it was not the thing; and their wretched mother went to the extremes of trouble and expense to travel all over the British Isles to places where they were holding garden fetes, where her daughters could appear before the eyes of eligible young men in circumstances that would make their eccentricity seem but a tasteful concession to the spirit of the occasion. Her task of concealment was made nearly impossible, however, by the inflexibility with which these young women held to their whim. They insisted on taking their garlands in to dinner with them; and what it did to the napes and neckerchiefs of the gentlemen (often heirs to large fortunes) who sat between them was to their father and mother a source of inexpressible grief and irritation. Moreover the affair was, to those who were in a position to be perfectly acquainted with it, of a very sinister complexion. For though the Ladies Frances, Georgiana, and Arabella frequently changed their ropes of flowers for others, being able to make new ones with such rapidity that it seemed as if unseen fingers must be aiding them, it was never because the old ones faded. Those preserved an undiminished freshness that was not natural; and, worse still, thrown down in any garden, instantly took root and became a dominant factor in the landscape. You have, when visiting the great houses of London, seen some flower-beds that by the brightness and variegation of their blooms struck marvel into your heart? You may be sure that in their time they had evoked an emotion far surpassing your own in the horror-stricken bosoms of the three girls’ unfortunate parents. Yet it was not in human nature for them to put an end to the evil by such drastic measures as may come into your mind; for though their daughters were among the greatest beauties in England so long as they laid hold of their garland, without it they were not above the common run of comeliness.

“Shall I stop, my love?” asked Harriet. “I am sure you are too wise for fairy-tales.”

He shook her arm as if he were a child and she his nurse, that had teased him by stopping when Cinderella entered the coach.

“At length, however, the powers that thus compromised the landed gentry of England by so unwholesome an association with magic defeated themselves. Three young noblemen of immense estates met the three girls at a garden fete in Wales where under the directions of an eccentric landowner enamoured of the romantic movement they were able to trapse about among brand-new Gothic ruins from dawn to dusk. Since the fete lasted for three days, their parents were able to bit and bridle these infatuations till they became good safe carriage-horses of honourable attachments. The betrothals were instantly announced, the marriages followed smoking-hot. At first the young women, who had been brought up in a proper state of innocence, received the news of their good fortune with indifference; but when they were instructed that there are certain occasions in a woman’s life when she cannot be accompanied by her two sisters bearing a rope of flowers, they looked at each other with the most sickly apprehension, which, indeed, was justified. For the full beauty of not one of them survived her honeymoon. Even on the wedding-morn it seemed to have waned. They were still handsome; but they were not, as they had often seemed when they trod the sward of parks in their floral panoply, immortal goddesses. Society was good-humoured towards them; but it was bruited abroad that they were disordered in their intellect by a lady who had been present at a mantua-maker’s,
when they were choosing ball-gowns, and heard them agree in complaining very mournfully that such and such a trimming was
not so durable as flowers.

“Their lives droned on. Since they had no special advantages as wives, their marriages followed the ordinary course, and it was not long before their husbands visited them only out of good manners to furnish them with a civil annual childbirth. The Lady Frances was alone, therefore, when round about her fortieth year, certain details of her image in the looking-glass suddenly struck her; and it was a soft-footed maid-servant entering her room (’twas in the town house in Portland Place) who found her weeping and uttering the extraordinary lament ‘For so simple a matter as a garland to let us grow like this!’ In a year’s time, Lady Georgiana came along to see her sister; and the soft-footed maid-servant found them sitting side by side before the mirror, their arms round each other’s waist, both weeping and uttering complaints of the same incomprehensible nature. In another year’s time, the Lady Georgiana came and brought her younger sister, whom she seemed to be tending as one who is familiar to a misfortune comforts another who is new to it. The soft-footed servant was none the wiser for this visit, since almost as soon as the three sisters confronted each other they burst into vigorous tears and more of these wild and nonsensical dirges, and Lady Frances ran across the room and opened the door; and without remarking on the circumstance that it knocked over the maidservant, who was in a sitting-position, thrust money into her hands and bade her send a boy to bring a barrow-load of flowers from Covent Garden on the instant.

“When the flowers were brought the three sisters were sitting in the midst of their children, whom they had sent for as suddenly as they had commanded the flowers. They were simultaneously weeping over them and uttering the most disparaging comments on them, which were not unjust, as indeed there was not a remarkable boy or girl among them, but which were expressed in oddly obscure terms. ‘Ah, had they but let us keep our garlands, our births would have been better!’ On the sight of the flowers, however, they grew solemn, though indeed these were nothing but a hodge-podge of what is a-blowing and a-growing in the month of June. They dismissed their children, and bade the maid-servant light all the tapers, as they had fine work to do. They were not heard to speak again, save by their husbands, who, happening to visit the house together that evening in course of making arrangements for a friend’s duel, thought it ill-mannered not to pass greetings with their wives, since they were under the same roof for once, and went up to Lady Frances’ room. As the three men knocked at the door they heard a crepitation of dismay, and nothing more. Jealousy, which can so strangely be aroused by the uncherished object, flamed up in all of them. They turned the handle without waiting for permission. The three women, white and rigid, stood facing them behind a table, from which a cable of peonies and poppies coiled to the floor. This was some feminine foolery, and their terrors no more than the respect that good wives pay their husbands. One of them prodded the flowery snake with his buckled shoe. ‘What is this, my dear?’ ‘It is for the children.’ Ah, shame! These are the last words recorded of the Ladies Frances, Georgiana, and Arabella Dudley, and they were not candid. See, their branches are stirred with confusion.