Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy (20 page)

The tears ran fast down her face, though it remained calm as any marble. “Yet from eavesdropping on your thoughts last night, I know the core of your mind thinks otherwise.”

“You lie,” he said, “you read nothing in my thoughts but honesty.”

“Yet though my brows there beat the words that beat through yours,” she said, “and they were there:
Rampound has done far worse than this.”

He stood up slowly. “Now,” he pronounced in measured accents, “I know you for the reptile thing you are, who creeps into the houses of those who are rising in the world and injects them with phantasies that make them snap short their budding greatness. I will not deny those words have a certain evil magic. Hearing them disturbs me, I must admit it. Yet I never used them. Never in my life. Yet if I did, what then? This is
miching mallecho.
What do they signify?”

She shivered as if in superstitious awe. “Why, they have a dangerous cadence,” she said. “Do you not hear it? And as you said them you saw a felon’s cell and a felon in his hideous livery, and the one was Rampound’s residence and the other was Rampound had he not been lucky, and would be your residence and yourself, were you not as lucky in this business as he had been in his like venture. So it was plainly written on your mind.”

“You lie,” he told her, “oh, how you lie! You are a very wicked liar!” His eyes were set on the wall somewhere above her left shoulder, and one watching him would have thought there hung there a very hideous picture.

In a flat and hopeless tone she repeated,
“Rampound has done far worse than this.”

He screamed, “Why, I have said nothing else all evening!” and crashed down in a heap across his desk.

She went and stood beside him, tucking her hands into her bodice, as if her bosom felt a need to warm something and must use what material it could obtain.

After a long while he muttered, “Am I insane that I could so delude myself, and swear, and believe I swore truly, that I had never thought what I have been thinking over and over again those three days?”

In a mouse squeak she answered, “Nay, ’twas but an excessive development of the habit of negotiation which you have acquired during your political life, I am sure, my love, it is of no consequence.”

He said coldly into his hands: “That was a rhetorical question, and required no answer. I do not think it is of any use for you to comfort me. You cannot conceive how difficult a man finds it to be comforted by a woman who has just discovered to him that he is a cheat.”

He sat and stared over his clasped fingers for a time. “It makes your offence much greater, Harriet, that you are a pretty woman. A man very intensely dislikes to have his faults pointed out by a pretty woman. Such things should be done by the thick-ankled aunts of the world who still, whatever may happen in the particular debate, get the worst of it.”

The mob of creditors stood close round him now. Ginevra’s face, blindish-looking though her eyes were clear, as if she suffered from a severe cataract of the spirit, was so near that it seemed much larger than life-size. “I suppose you know,” he said, “that though you have saved me from disgrace you have left me without hope.”

There was silence. Then he asked. “Are you crying, Harriet?”

“Yes,” she mewed.

“That pleases me a little, for I am very cruel, and would like to hurt you. See how I trust you, for I tell you that, and ask you to kneel down beside me, and lay your cheek on my sleeve. Ay, like that. I knew you would obey me.”

After he had stared his full in front of him, “Now will you not be kind and take a glass of wine and a biscuit with me, to show you forgive me? There is no reason why you should, but, you see, I trust you. Look, they are all set out on that tray in the corner. There are soda-water, whiskey, lemonade, Madeira, port. None of them is paid for. Which will you have have?”

“I will take some port, if I may,” she murmured.

“Then get back to your sofa and I will pour it out,” he told her, and pulled her to him and squeezed her, as if he had been a ploughboy and she his doxy, and they had been sitting under a hedge. She rubbed against him in the way of a pleased cat, and nimbly had herself curled up on the cushions of the sofa when he came back with her glass. But she kept her eyes steadfastly on him, as if she could not be sure she were forgiven.

“You are no Christian,” he said, watching her while he poured out some wine for himself, “you are an animal, and cannot be saved. For you dip your lips to your glass as a cat dips its muzzle to a saucer, and do not raise your glass to your lips, as houseled ladies do.” He made himself a place on the sofa by her side, and sat flourishing his drink with one hand, while with the other he stroked her forearm. “You astonish me always with the perfection of your person!” he exclaimed. “How I should like to have a plaster cast of you in all your purity! How I should like to have it in my room, extended on a couch, so white and still! Why, your little hand is trembling, and too cold! Ah, my love, were you chilled to the exquisite bone while you waited under the lamp opposite this house?”

She smiled up at him and shook her head.

“But it must be so!” he cried remorsefully. “My darling, what have you not suffered for me!”

“Nay, you forget,” said Harriet, “it is the Spring.”

“So it is, so it is,” he assented. “I noted as much this evening, as I came down my stairs and was halted by a very agreeable scent of honeysuckle; although I am sure that as I drove along the Mall this afternoon there were no leaves on the trees.”

“Oh, there are no flowers yet save in the conservatories of the rich, and no leaves either. Yet,” said Harriet with assurance, “the Spring has come.”

“How can that be, foolish one?” he asked indulgently, putting his glass to his lips and his other hand on her waist.

“There is a wind that brings the Spring, however obdurate the leaves and flowers,” said Harriet, “and it has blown.”

“Why, you are right, my pet,” he agreed. “I remember how when one was coming home late from a party in the days of one’s youth, a wind would blow on one from the end of the street where the dawn was presently to be, and one’s young blood leapt to know that the winter was gone.” He held out his glass to her that she might sip from it, and motioned her to give him hers that he might exchange the courtesy. “You are the cosiest of company,” he told her, and passed his hand up and down the pipestem of her waist. “Ah, youth was good!” he sighed: and let himself muse as if his young days had been more pleasant than they were, and had been spent far more in Harriet’s society than was the case. He sipped his wine again, and said, “My love, this is a very strange, transparent, and bloodless contentment that comes on one in the condemned cell.”

At that she set down her glass and turned towards him, and put her arms about him and rubbed her face against his neck, making soft sounds such as a cat makes to its kitten.

“Oh, do not distress yourself,” he told her nonchalantly. “It were better, even as you calculated, that I feel this emotion than the thousand times sharper pang of disgrace. Or is it so? Have you done anything for my good by saving me? It may perhaps seem ungracious of me to mention these doubts, but I am now perfectly convinced that you are aware of them whether I tell them or not, so I might as well afford myself the relief of self-expression.” Turning his empty glass between his finger and thumb, he meditated for a while; then asked. “How do you account for this gift of yours?”

She answered timidly, “You yourself once explained that there was a mystical confusion of substance in us.”

“Oh, my lords and gentlemen,” he bayed in travesty of his own deep-mouthed platform manner, “what are we to think of a universe in which there is a mystical confusion of substance in opposites!” He laughed idly. “What an unseemly chaos!” He swung the wineglass round a few times more, and asked, “You would agree, would you not, my dear, that we are opposites?”

“Ay, we are opposites,” said Harriet, putting her hands under her cloak as if she feared they might be slapped. “But surely that is no great harm. There is the North, and there is the Southland there is no war between them.”

“They have their position, however,” he instructed her, “in extended space where there is room for everything. In the world of the spirit it is not the same. Look, I have spilt a drop of wine upon your gown!”

“It is of no consequence,” she said, “this was the gown’s last wearing.”

“I do not believe you,” he said, keeping his eye upon the spot, “you are too inveterately agreeable. I am sure it causes you trouble. Yet I cannot be sorry I have spilt it, it looks so pretty. How like a drop of blood it is, there below your breast! As I was saying, my love, there is no room in the world of spirits for opposites. It is as vast as the universe, but it is small as a pin-point. Believe me, it has room for only one will. There is not a particle of accommodation for opposites. I have been defeated, I perceive, not by Saltoun, nor by Allsouls, nor by Grindlay, nor even as the moralists would pretend, by myself, but by the odd and unstable Immortal who made us, and at the moments of our ingeminations forgot this important principle in the technique of creation. Well, well, the milk is spilt.” He glowered before him, and presently her fingers worked their way into his palm. “Why, how kind you are,” he said, “how amenable, how you cling! Will you not concede a little to your opposite and compromise with my principle of negotiation?”

Her eyes met his very tenderly, but she shook her head.

“No?” he pressed her. “Well, you are right. To concede to one’s opposite, in the most infinitesimal degree, is to die.”

She said in a low voice, “I have always felt it my one duty not to die.”

A silence fell and endured until a coal fell from the fire, and he exclaimed, “How long have we been sitting here? How long is it since those last words you spoke? I have a sense that my spirit has travelled a long distance in the time. I have the dry feeling at the back of my eyes that one gets when one has stayed up all night. I have been far away, I have resolved something massive, if I could but remember what it was. Why, my love, how blanched you have grown! And you are trembling! You are riding softly down the moments as a snowflake rides down the airs, white, oh, so white, and weightless as anything in this ponderous universe, and you are trembling, trembling, trembling! You are afraid. My love, what do you fear?”

She whispered, “Do you not know?”

“What you fear? I have no notion.” He recoiled from her steady gaze, and cried very piteously, “What, have I thought something I have already lied out of my knowledge? Need I unmask more children of my mind?”

She shook her head, and he sank back relieved. “I fear it is no use,” she said wearily. “I see I have done you no real service by coming here to-night.”

Putting his hands behind his head and lolling back on the cushions, he laughed. “Well, that is my trouble, and not yours! Go home, sweet little fool, and sleep, and rise refreshed, and make real troubles for yourself, by swaying your full skirts round your garden in the morning, so that the young man who takes his bath late in the house opposite is reminded of a rose; and by reminding another, in the afternoon when you spread these skirts behind your tea-equipage, of a dove that preens and coos; and by making yet a third man wait a long time in your drawing-room, while your sewing-maid pops her head round the door and says (the lying mopsy) you will not be above a minute more, and then swimming in with your white arms bare and a display of the lovely line which runs from your chin to your bosom, you will make him think as tenderly of swans on a lake as ever Leda did. Oh, you will have troubles of your own!”

Harriet had her lace rag at her eyes again. “Oh, I know well I have not yet come to the painful age of serenity, she sobbed, “but if I have been of no service to you, then the world is not good music.”

“I have not the slightest notion what you mean,” he said, “since the only usefulness I have ever seen in music is that it affords employment. But whatever you meant I am in a position to assure you that you are raising irrelevant matters. The world is but material created
to
afford the separate race of creditors scope to gratify their curious appetites; and from their point of view it is an excellent world. Upon my soul, I do not see how it could be better.” He rose to help her with the adjustment of her cloak, and after gave her a friendly hug. “You are a good girl for coming, and I am very grateful to you, and I wish this were an hour when I could send you home in one of my automobiles. For I would take some pride in showing you that, though I shall not have enough to buy myself a crust of bread when all is over, I have three as handsome automobiles as anyone could wish to see. Well, well, another time. How shall my butler telephone for a taxi. No? Ah, I presume the broomstick waits without. I would not keep you from it, indeed it excites some envy in me. What should I not give to step out of this house and rise up into the air, and rise, and rise, and rise, until I would not be able to tell my roof from any other. Yet I believe I would know it from any height, for the smoke it would wear as a feather in its. cap would be coloured the peculiar tint of burned bills, which might dye the product of other chimneys here and there, but never to the same degree. Well, there is no use dreaming. I must stay at home and face my ruin. Give me a farewell kiss, sweet enemy, who has at last proved to me that it is absolute.”

“Then will you not forgive me?” she whimpered, and raised doe’s eyes while proffering her mouth.