Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (5 page)

“Their husbands were the last to hear them speak. They were not the last to see them. That was left to the butler and the footmen, who, shortly before the dinner-gong should have sounded, looked up the staircase and saw their mistress and her sisters coming down, in greater beauty than they had been for many years, and carrying a cable of flowers unknown in this country, so thick that it must have taken days to weave. The lackeys say that not only did it seem their obvious duty to open the front door for the ladies; but that a power compelled them to it so that they could not have done other for a million pounds; and that in any case they could not have pursued them, for hardly had they seen the three figures changed to white translucency by the moonlight which was silvering the Grecian vistas of the street, when the front door shut of itself with a formidable clang and would not open again for half an hour. By that time, we know, all was over. The ladies had crossed the Park, had proceeded down the Brompton Road (’tis believed they had some thoughts of Knole or Penshurst) and on the outskirts of Chelsea were waylaid by a band of Mohocks, who, seeing their shining forms at a distance, set off at a run to make closer acquaintance. ’Tis from a written confession of one of them, that died within the week at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, his blood frozen by what he saw, that we know the truth: how the three ladies ran from the road to this very spot, which is my garden, which was then a patch of waste land between two cottages; how the Lady Arabella was forced to her knees by the violence of her terror, and the Lady Georgiana was abased nearly as low, but the Lady Frances—look, she is the tall one on the right—seemed upheld to perfect erectness by an invisible power. But of the nature of this power horrible revelation was made to the Mohocks, who shrunk back aghast (since they were pious lads except for their disposition towards robbery and rape) at her next action. For she cast out her arms in an attitude of prayer, but not to heaven! Nay, her hands and her eyes petitioned the ground on which she stood, and plainly were petitioning some force that had existence other than in her fancy. For while the Mohocks huddled together, attempting to recollect the Lord’s Prayer, there took place a transformation of the surrounding vegetation which must have been miraculous. The coltsfoot that had bloomed and died three months before, rose again; and their resurrected gold shone beside the shadowy mooniness of the daisies, which were the season’s proper wear, and the black flimsiness of poppies that had come before the corn. All the blossoms of the year were there in the darkness, and a patch of nettles at the Mohocks’ feet climbed in an instant till the white flowers looked them in the eye, ungenial as spearheads. The three ladies joined hands in the attitudes you see; they had been greatly praised for the poses in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ picture. The earth about them trembled, to a degree it swallowed them. When it gulped and stopped the remaining parts of them suffered an abrupt extension towards the stars, then knew the calm integrity of being trees. And there they stand.

“To rejoice with them would be easy, but it would not be right. For the thing was a cruel blow to the pride of their families. To this day, the Dudleys are as close as oysters about it. Ask Lord Dudley about it, and he will pretend no knowledge of it. Persist, and he will send for a policeman—” she dissolved into a gentle giggling.

“Well, it is a tale with a happy ending!” said Arnold; and they halted and looked up at the trees. “I would like to be a tree in your garden; and never make a fool of myself or get into mischief again,”

“You will not be a tree in my garden,” said Harriet, “but you will never make a fool of yourself or get into mischief. And now I have told you a fairy tale, and you must go home. Truly, it is time.”

“I will not be able to go home at all,” he told her, “unless you let me first walk with you three times up and three times down your long fine lawn. Do you know, Harriet, I have never been so sorry to leave anybody in my life, since I was a little boy and used to go to spend the afternoon with my old uncle who had been a soldier and fought with Roberts at Kandahar, and I would kick and scream and blubber when my mother came after tea to end our talks of bloodshed and rifles and Ashantis. You are as dear to me as if I had known you all my life, which I have not, and as exciting as if I had seen you for the first time this afternoon, which I have not either.”

Harriet squeezed his arm; and without saying a word to each other, but in very comfortable communion, they paced the lawn as he had desired. Evening, when she had begun her story, had rested upon the scene as bloom on the grape, but it had now assumed a more dominating part. The sky had been bleached of its daylight blue, and though it had not yet been invaded by the dark tone of night its translucent pallor was pricked here and there by a star to show that this would not be long delayed. In the garden each colour was yielding up its essence to the darkness. The upward-looking faces of the flowers were merely pale, and so too were the downward-looking faces of the leaves on the trees. The soil in the beds and the tree-trunks were merely night-coloured; and the lawn they trod showed that if grass had a ghost it would be the same greyish hue as, it is commonly accepted, are the ghosts of men. From each of Harriet’s windows leaned forth darkness, which held wide the gaping doors at the top of her blanched stone steps; and in the main wing of the house, though now a line of golden lights winked all the length of its ground floor, the same inhabitant looked forth from the windows of the upper storey in the shadow of the colossal pediment.

Suddenly Arnold Condorex burst out laughing. “Do you know,” he said, “that when you were telling that story I found myself believing it were true?”

“Do you know for certain it is not?” smiled Harriet. “I am glad it entertained you. Indeed, our time together has been very satisfactory, even to the very end. For are you not enjoying now a very pleasant sadness? I do not know anything more delightful than to be sad at this time of day.” She uttered an ejaculation of pleasure as from the line of golden lights there came the sound of music. “Exquisite! A waltz! And an indifferent one! My heart will presently melt.”

“Music? Do the inhabitants of Kensington then play bridge in time to music?” enquired Arnold.

“Oh, there is much done there other than bridge,” explained Harriet, showing signs of local patriotism, “and it is by no means attended by the inhabitants of Kensington alone. I hear the Blennerhassett is surpassed only by the Embassy as a magnet for fashion.”

“What!” exclaimed Arnold, coming to a standstill “Is that the Blennerhassett?”

“Does it surprise you so much,” she rallied him, “that a club which has its home in Blennerhassett House should be called the Blennerhassett?”

“It should not, certainly,” he admitted with a laugh, “but I have heard so often of the Blennerhassett, though I have never seen it, since I am as yet,” he said with some moodiness, his eyes resting on the golden lights, “the companion of the nobility only in their labours, not in their pleasures. And when one thinks of a focus of such pleasures, one does not think of it as adjoining one of one’s own quiet haunts.”

She looked at him sharply. “Does one not?” she said wistfully; and continued, as if to console him, “But to-night, however, the most elegant will not be there. What, have I confused you so that you have forgotten the day of the week? This is Saturday. The truly popular are now at varying distances from London: to take their situation at its most favourable; in the panelled bedrooms of great houses. Here there are only those who, happy enough in being born within the palisades of society, have not that further happiness of having been in any way blessed at birth. The females of this breed were begotten by fathers who do but smirk the chubbier when they find on the breakfast-table a letter from their bank managers, so certainly it is to report increase; and their mothers are knots in a far-flung net of creditable cousinships. But they are not beautiful enough, or they are more than plump enough, or their dancing is too gross a contradiction of the motion of the spheres, or their bridge is but a stumbling-block in the path of their neighbours. So at the moment they bear down on us, not radiant, but not disconsolate, for they have companions, albeit those are the males of their own sort…”

Speech dried on her lips. Her natural guardian angel, her own grace, forsook her suddenly. She staggered, tripped on a minute inequality, and would have fallen to the ground, had he not caught her in his arms. From the dead weight her almost weightless body had assumed, from the blue shadows that lay on her closed eyelids and round her lips, which remained parted as in horror, he perceived that some monstrous blow had felled her. But what the blow was, or who had struck it, he did not guess until she looked up into his face, and shuddered, and cast away his arms. Then he remembered, and understood.

She stood for a moment apart from him, rubbing her hands as if to wash away his touch and keeping her face away from him; then made an obvious effort to still her bosom, and turned back to him, offering to slip her arm in his with a kindliness that half his lost and miserable spirit hailed as the damned might hail a draught of water, while half of it tried to think of it meanly, as smugness, vanity, and joy at having put him in the wrong.

“You must make one more promenade with me,” she said, giving him a pallid smile, “for you promised yourself six journeys about the lawn, and you have made but five. Come!” and gently she forced her arm in his.

Poor Harriet’s house looked dreary as they walked. That was no wonder; for in the brief striking-match time it takes to think a thought there had been broomed out of its doors and windows a great deal of prettiness and happiness that till then had appeared to be part of its fittings. Till then it had seemed certain that there would never be need for Harriet to sit in darkness, since there were inscribed on the air of her apartment scenes which, shadows of memory though they must be, were so bright in their subject that they were as good as a couple of chandeliers. There had been that first time she had looked up from her piano and seen him standing outside the French windows at the top of the stone steps, holding a bouquet of roses he had purchased at the shop round the corner (he had wished to buy it from some more magnificent florist’s but did not know the etiquette of transportation) and looking sullen, because he dared not stare into the room and he was mortally afraid lest she should be closeted with some person of more consequence than himself. She had flipped at three joyous notes in the treble before she ran to open to him. There had been the moment when she had come downstairs after half an hour spent in making ten moons of her nails, and discovered him sitting at his ease by her hearth, toying with the long gloves which she had left on her piano. She had chided him for coming in with neither knock nor ring, and for laying his rough paws on the fine leather; but he had drawled that he would observe no ceremony with one who lived like a gipsy, half in her garden, and that she was a sloven to leave her gloves about, and a deceiver to call them gloves, since it was notorious that in Kensington there was a race of gazelles with a snake-like habit of casting their skins at certain seasons of year, and one such had in this room cast the covering of its fleet fore-ankles. “Ay!” he had said, and held up the strips of leather against the light. She had glowed to perceive that he was taking pleasure in little things about her even as she took pleasure in little things about him, such as the contrast at that very moment between the affected insolence of his lip and the shining brotherliness of his eye. That had been a good moment, and there had been better this very afternoon; but she could not recall those without the certainty of tears.

So she surely had been justified, poor Harriet, in thinking that at any time when her fire would not draw, when the fairy of the switch would not obey, she would have warmth, she would have light, simply by filling the air with these shapes that had once so glowingly occupied it. Alas! It would never be so now. What woman can bear to recall the most flattering moment of a love affair in which, time has revealed, she did but play the part of a maid who is kissed only because the mistress is not yet ready for the suitor? And there had been that in Arnold Condorex’s thought which offended against the order of nature, as it is comprehended by the hearts of females, almost as soon as they are aware that there is a different class of beings who wear blue bows upon their cot-covers instead of pink. From that beginning they know well that it is natural and just as the supersession of the spring by summer, that the less beautiful should be abandoned for the more beautiful. It is no good deploring it, nor, indeed, is it worth deploring. For spring dies, summer dies, autumn dies, winter dies, the year is gone, another is come; for youth passes, ripeness passes, age passes, a generation’s gone, another is come. All is ended in a general levelling. So secretly, whatever they may say aloud, they think a deserted wife who weeps a loss springing from the eclipse of her charms to be a fool who kicks against the pricks. But when they come across the reverse of the process and see a man leaving a beautiful woman for one less beautiful, not because his sight is deranged by love but because he thereby gains an end, then they feel such disgust as is excited in our males by the horrid habits of the Bulgars. Not thus is nature’s way. The skin, than which nothing is more loyal to nature, rises in gooseflesh.

She had felt therefore a general horror, as well as a personal anguish, when, his cold eyes turned towards the lights and music of the club, he wondered how soon he might chance on some undesired woman as she was describing, who could be quickly got and would be a stairway to better things. The plain daughter of a Privy Councillor had been his thought, which had expanded into a consideration of what ways he might use, did he meet such a dowd at Lady Derrydown’s tea on Thursday (for one never knows), to enjoy Harriet till the last safe moment and then disembarrass himself of her. No, she would never now be able to warm and light her rooms by recalling how they had been tender to each other.