Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (13 page)

“Oh, I will stay with you, my dear!” she cried impulsively, and clung on his arm again.

“That is a good girl,” he said, comfortably paddling along, “and she shall not have far to go either, for my house is number one hundred and twenty. Now, my love, you are surely not going to be tiresome again!” For once more she had come to a standstill.

“Nay, but—”

“What is it, my pest, my plague?”

“Why, ’tis my bag of cherries!” she confessed. “I cannot take them into your house. ’Twould offend the propriety of your menservants.”

“Never think of it,” he said stoutly. “We will take them in, we are no slaves.”

“Nay, my sweet,” she fluttered. “I cannot expose you to such inconvenience. See; I can bend down and feign to tie my shoe, and leave the bag between the railings of the house where we are standing, and no one will see us.”

“You shall not do anything of the sort,” he said solidly. “I have a mind to eat cherries with my tea, and I desire they shall be these same cherries that I have seen in this bag; which, my dear, you have carried so imprudently that there is a faint purple stain beneath your left bosom, that might well lead a passerby to conclude that you had stabbed yourself for love. Tell me, did you not buy these fruits at a barrow?”

“I did,” admitted Harriet. “But I chose a costermonger who looked a clean man, and had a clear blue eye.”

“I thought as much,” he announced with some satisfaction, “they are fruits of low origin. (That is a very cheap paper-bag.) Nevertheless, they look to be as excellent cherries as I have ever seen, just as this dusty trull on my arm, who has not flour-bagged her nose since dawn, and who eats fruit out of a bag as she walks down a most genteel throughfare, ay, and casts the stones in the gutter, is the most beautiful and the most kind female I have seen for years. But pray do not giggle any more just now, even though I have praised you, and you are naturally transported with delight, for we are at my house.”

“Is this your house?” breathed Harriet, looking upwards. “This one? With the fanlight that makes lace look heavy, though it is of iron? And the two rams’ heads by the door-posts, that look so gentle and so sly? To think that this is your house, which I have admired times out of number as I hurried by!”

“Ay, it is considered beautiful,” he said eagerly; and added, with more than a little timidity, “but I suppose you do not think it so beautiful as your music.”

“Why do you say that?” she cried. “It is just as beautiful as much good music and in much the same way!”

They stood looking up at the door in silence for a minute or two. “’Tis the true work of the Brothers Adam,” he explained at length; “within you will see that nothing in the house is left untouched by the prevailing harmony.” He thought to himself: “I could not have lived here had I not risen in the world,” and at that was pricked by the same stab of surprise as when, outside Boodles’, he had recognised that there was more than ignobility in his ambition. Suddenly he felt very tired, and wanted to go into his house and rest alone in Harriet’s company; and loathed to think that to get his wish he must first confront his butler and his footman who bore to one another (or so it seemed for the moment to his irritated mind) a resemblance in blankness contemptible in anything but boiled eggs. But he remembered that in his wallet he carried a latch-key that till then he had hardly ever used, and thus it was that, when he and Harriet softly closed the door behind them, there was nothing in the hall save its own beauty, and the motes dancing down the noble staircase.

“Oh, it goes far beyond all expectation!” she exclaimed. “The wrought-iron of those banisters grows like ivy! And not like common ivy either! Like that which twines the thyrsus of Apollo.”

“And note the door-head of the dining-room,” he urged in an undertone. “’Tis much admired. Its fellow is at Lansdowne House, though somewhat larger.” As he spoke he pulled off his hat and gloves, and threw them on a chair. “And look, my love—”

“Ah!” She was clinging to his arm with both her hands, staring with round eyes along the passage, up the staircase. Yet all that was doing was that his hat had rolled off the chair and made a clatter.

“Why, you sweet fool!” he whispered to her. It gave him a strange pleasure to stand there whispering to her although there was no real need for lowered voices. “Sometimes I think I derive no great good-fortune from standing where I do in the universe. But that position brings some advantages. (My dear, how pretty you are! How very pretty!) And one of them is that were ten serving men to spring upon us here in this hall, and I were carrying away that vase, and you had your frail arms about that mirror, it would still be they who had to go, and we who stayed. Is that not an advantage, my peerless one?”

In his manly desire to comfort her he was holding her in his arms a little too much, all things considered, after the fashion of a lover grasping his mistress; and she, with that disposition to insipid compliancy which was, perhaps, her greatest fault, was reclining there very much after the fashion of a mistress grasped by her lover.

“I know I am foolish,” she sighed.

“Foolish is not the word,” he said judicially. “You are a goose. Have you never asked Providence why it has pleased Him to afflict you in this manner?”

She giggled. Her cheek was but an inch from his shift-front. Since he poutered his breast like a pigeon, it was his fault they met, and it was she who broke away and (though she cast yet another glance up the staircase as if she saw an armed man descending it with sword prepared for flesh) cried out gaily: “And now for the rooms! They cannot be as fine as this!”

“They are far finer,” he answered, and led her along the passage to his little library. With his hand on the door-knob he paused, made comical eyebrows at her, and groaned, “Now am I utterly at your mercy! How I shall despond if you do not like it?”

When the door was opened she clapped her hands and trilled, “How could you dream I would not like it?”

“Because I love it,” he said sombrely, “and I am foolish about it as men are about the things they love.”

She ran about the room. Watching her, he exclaimed, as one who laments a loss, “How well you accord with it!” But being as rapt from personal things as if she attended to a musical affair, she did not listen and went chattering on, “Oh, this is the true suavity, the blandness which one pays for when one sits down to play the good music that was made before the Romantics came! There is such true observation of existence here! See, in that arch above the bookshelves in the alcove there, how he has remembered the arch of the sky above the plains! See how he decorates the curve of the arch with a golden border so that we think of the sun on its journey through the day; and how he then cuts the half-circle into twelve golden slices by a very orderly design, as if to say we must break the day into hours and gild each with beauty! And how the pilasters on each side of the shelves claim that if we constrict our lives by the sound and temperate exercise of the faculties, as the ancients showed us, we shall not be crushed by the sky, but shall support it so that it is the less likely to fall! ’Tis humbug, of course, for what he cared for was not the tonic moral quality of this method of regarding life but simply its comely effect, but how good it is! What vast imaginative references it makes! For does not that rounded end of the room seem like an altar to some austere god of Greece, and make all that is done here like a votive offering to him?”

He assured her, though she had forgotten he was there, “Ay, I have found it a great inspiration.”

She looked strangely at him. “In your political work?”

“What other?”

It seemed, though that was against reason, as if she were saddened by his answer. She looked away from him, and turned her eyes again, though with less concentration, on the beauties of the room. “And these plaster decorations on the panels! They are like the banisters, they seem to grow like vegetation. But these are more fine than ivy, they are like the most delicate creepers—”

Fondly he asked, “Does the creeper still swing low over your garden-wall?”

“Every Spring it does,” she nodded, “until three very personable young men come to cut it back. Often I have wondered who they were, and why the regular gardener did not do it. But now I know they were the Adam Brothers slipping through time for something they could use. There is much of this in-and-out work between the centuries—” but she was trembling so that she could not finish.

He scrutinised her, and saw that in the last few minutes her face had grown monstrously troubled, and had been drained of all her usual felicities of complexion; and he cried out in the liveliest self-reproach, “Curse it, I had forgotten that you are only a silly slut who has walked too far in the heat, and that I had brought you here to rest! Come, lie you down on my couch. Though I fear I am not giving you all the refreshment I hoped, for it seems to me that excessive light is the only property of this detestable day which is excluded from this house. I can all but see the tides of heat rocking against the walls. Come, my love, let me put a well-fed cushion beneath your head. Are you better now?” But her upward smile, though she nodded, was still some way from perfect serenity. “Ah, I have it!” he exclaimed. “You feel the need of tea. Is it not so? I had forgotten the dependence of your sex on tea!”

“Ah, yes!” breathed Harriet meekly, “you are always right! I am feeling the need of tea!”

“You see how well I understand you after all these years!” he told her proudly, tugging at the bell. “Now you will learn, my dear, how far it is from being true that in a house where ten servants are kept bells are answered ten times as quickly as in a house where there is but one of the breed; and while you are learning it you shall repose quietly on that couch while I sit down at my desk, and see if any important papers have come in my absence. For I will not disguise from you, dear Harriet, that there are great doings in this house to-day.”

As he sat down he blew a kiss to where she lay glowing under the shadow of the room like an odalisque under her veil; and he squared his brow over the pile of papers he had found, as if he believed them to be much more important than he thought it in the least degree likely that they would be. Yet was there one which for a minute made him forget her, and what he might make her think of him. It was a letter from the family that (he had been credibly informed) deserved the deepest sympathy for having been under the curse of two warring infatuations; not one but had used his first moment of freedom from his nurse’s arms to crawl towards an atlas, not one but had been instantly moved by his first and every subsequent sight of the sea to the agonising and dangerous upheavals of
mal de mer.
Whensoever he chanced to see the sight, so familiar to Londoners, of Thomas Cook and his sons riding down to their office in Ludgate Circus in the howdahs of elephants, wearing Egyptian sun-helmets, and commanding Maori attendants, on their way to enable others to enjoy the pleasures of foreign travel for which these poor trappings could give themselves only the most insubstantial compensation, he had always admired them for having turned to social uses a disappointment which might have crushed lesser men to the depths of misanthropy. A letter from them, therefore, made strong claims on his attention; and indeed he grew pale with the intensity of his interest as he read this one. It confessed in simple and manly language that Thomas Cook and his sons (even George, whose knowledge of the globe till now had been considered exhaustive, for he could differentiate between the towns in the United States named Springfield without a fault) had lately found themselves baffled by a certain problem.

Five or six times in the last few years travellers had requested them to arrange journeys to Mondh, but they had found themselves unable to encompass this successfully, even under the direction of the most experienced guides. (With what heartrending irony did the afflicted family express regret that they could not undertake the search themselves!) Application to the India Office had produced replies too official for comprehension by plain Cooks. But they had thought that since Mr. Condorex’s Speech concerning his Emotions on his First Visit to Mondh was not only an acknowledged masterpiece of English prose but was also within the sphere of children’s intelligence, being a favourite recitation on Empire Day, he could perhaps oblige them with more lucid directions.

Solemnly he gazed before him for a moment. Then with the austere benignity of one who yields a sacred torch to a younger hand, he laid aside the letter, to be dealt with by his secretary. Through such an episode had he risen; through such episodes must others rise.

His butler stood before him. In such tones he ordered, “Tea,” and wished he had had need to give a more exacting command in front of Harriet. “But she will come here again,” he thought to himself, turning a doting look on her across his desk, “I must see to it that she comes often. Sweet tender gosling! Was there ever anything so lacking in asperity save a dish of curds and whey? I wonder if she knows how seductively so simple a gown exhibits the perfection of her form. Why, she is looking very smug just now. If she were a little puss she would sit up and wash her face. It would be very agreeable, now I come to think of it, were women to perform their ablutions in the manner of cats. Even now the rounder taper of Harriet’s limbs might be pointing her black sandal to the ceiling while her sleek head bent to some recondite accomplishment of cleanliness. I fear I would not remain indifferent if it were so,—ah, she has changed her pose. Lying as she is now, with her delicate ankles crossed, and her hands disposed about her person as if to shield herself, is she not like one of the nymphs on my panels, abandoned yet not loose?”