Читать книгу The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Volumes One and Two - Harriette Wilson - Страница 5

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I will not say in what particular year of his life the Duke of Argyle succeeded with me. Ladies scorn dates! Dates make ladies nervous and stories dry. Be it only known then, that it was just at the end of his Lorne shifts and his lawn shirts. It was at that critical period of his life, when his whole and sole possessions appeared to consist in three dozen of ragged lawn shirts, with embroidered collars, well fringed in his service; a threadbare suit of snuff colour, a little old hat with very little binding left, an old horse, an old groom, an old carriage, and an old chateau. It was to console himself for all this antiquity, I suppose, that he fixed upon so very young a mistress as myself. Thus, after having gone through all the routine of sighs, vows, and rural walks, he at last saw me blooming and safe in his dismal château in Argyle-street.

A late hour in the morning blushed to find us in the arms of each other, as Monk Lewis or somebody else says; but the morning was pale when compared with the red on my cheek when I, the very next day, acquainted Fred Lamb with my adventure!

Fred was absolutely dumb from astonishment, and half choked with rage and pride. I would not plead my poverty; for I conceived that common sense and common humanity ought to have made this a subject of attention and inquiry to him.

"You told me, he was, when he pleased, irresistible," said I.

"Yes, yes, yes," muttered Fred Lamb, between his closed teeth; "but a woman who loves a man is blind to the perfections of every other. No matter, no matter, I am glad it has happened. I wish you joy. I——"

"Did I ever tell you I was in love with you?" said I, interrupting him. "Indeed it was your vanity deceived you, not I. You caused me to lose Lord Craven's protection, and, therefore, loving no man at the time, having never loved any, to you I went. I should have felt the affection of a sister for you, but that you made no sacrifices, no single attempt to contribute to my comfort or happiness. I will be the mere instrument of pleasure to no man. He must make a friend and companion of me, or he will lose me."

Fred Lamb left me in madness and fury; but I knew him selfish, and that he could dine on every imagined luxury, and drink his champagne, without a thought or care whether I had bread and cheese to satisfy hunger. Then who, with love, first love! beating in their hearts, could think of Frederick Lamb?

I immediately changed my lodgings for a furnished house at the west end of the town, better calculated to receive my new lover, whose passion knew no bounds. He often told me how much more beautiful I was than he had ever expected to find me.

"I cannot," he wrote to me, during a short absence from town, "I cannot, for circumstances prevent my being entirely yours"—I fancied he alluded to his old flame, Lady W——, with whom, the world said he had been intriguing nineteen years, "but nothing can, nor shall, prevent my being, for ever, your friend, &c. &c. &c."

"If," thought I, "this man is not to be entirely mine, perhaps I shall not be entirely his." I could have been—but this nasty Lady W—— destroys half my illusion. He used to sit with her, in her box at the Opera, and wear a chain which I believed to be hers. He often came to me from the Opera, with just such a rose in his bosom as I had seen in hers. All this was a dead bore. One night I plucked the rose from his breast, another time I hid the chain, and all this to him seemed the effect of pure accident: for who, with pride, and youth, and beauty, would admit they were jealous?

One night, I am sure he will recollect that night, when he thought me mad, one night I say, I could not endure the idea of Lady W——. That night we were at Argyle House, and he really seemed most passionately fond of me. The idea suddenly crossed my mind that all the tenderness and passion he seemed to feel for me was shared between myself and Lady W——.

I could not bear it.

"I shall go home," I said, suddenly.

"Going home!" said the duke. "Why my dear little Harriette, you are walking in your sleep"; and he threw on his dressing-gown, and took hold of my hand.

"I am not asleep," said I; "but I will not stay here; I cannot. I would rather die:" and I burst into tears.

"My dear, dear Harriette," continued Argyle, in great alarm, "for God's sake, tell me what on earth I have done to offend you?"

"Nothing—nothing," said I, drying my tears. "I have but one favour to ask: let me alone, instead of persecuting me with all this show of tenderness."

"Gracious God!" said Argyle, "how you torment me! If," he proceeded, after pausing, "if you have ceased to love me—if—if you are disgusted——"

I was silent.

"Do speak! pray, pray!" said he.

His agitation astonished me. It almost stopped his breathing. "This man," thought I, "is either very nervous or he loves me just as I want to be loved." I had my hand on the door, to leave him. He took hold of me, and threw me from it with some violence; locked it and snatched the key out; took me in his arms and pressed me with almost savage violence against his breast.

"By heavens!" said he, "you shall not torture me so another moment."

This wildness frightened me. "He is going to kill me," thought I. I fixed my eyes on his face, to try and read my doom. Our eyes met, he pushed me gently from him, and burst into tears.

My jealousy was at an end, au moins pour le moment.

"I am not tired of you, dear Lorne," said I, kissing him eagerly. "How is it possible to be so? Dear Lorne, forgive me?"

Nothing was so bright nor so brilliant as Lorne's smile through a tear. In short, Lorne's expression of countenance, I say it now, when I neither esteem, nor love, nor like him, his expression, I say, is one of the finest things in nature.

Our reconciliation was completed, in the usual way.

The next morning, I was greatly surprised by a visit from my dear, lively sister Fanny, on her arrival from the country. Fanny was the most popular woman I ever met with. The most ill-natured and spiteful of her sex could never find it in their hearts to abuse one who, in their absence, warmly fought all their battles, whenever anybody complained of them where she was.

I often asked her why she defended, in society, certain unamiable persons.

"Merely because they are not here to defend themselves, and therefore it is two to one against them," said Fanny.

Fanny, as the Marquis of Hertford uniformly insisted, was the most beautiful of all our family. He was very desirous of having her portrait painted by Lawrence, to place it in his own apartment. "That laughing dark blue eye of hers," he would say, "is unusually beautiful." His lordship, by the bye, whatever people may say of the coldness of his heart, entertained a real friendship for poor Fanny; and proved it by every kind attention to her, during her last illness. He was the only man she admitted into her room to take leave of her before she died, although hundreds, and those of the first rank and character, were sincerely desirous of doing so. I remember Lord Yarmouth's last visit to Brompton, where my poor sister died after an illness of three weeks. "Can I, or my cook, do anything in the world to be useful to her?" said he. I repeated that it was all too late—that she would never desire anything more, and all I wanted for her was plenty of Eau de Cologne to wash her temples with; that being all she asked for. He did not send his groom for it; but galloped to town himself, and was back immediately. This was something for Lord Yarmouth.

But to proceed, Fanny was certainly very beautiful; she had led a most retired, steady life for seven years, and was the mother of three children at the death of their father, Mr. Woodcock, to whom Fanny would have been married could he have obtained a divorce from his wife. Everybody was mad about Fanny, and so they had been during Mr. Woodcock's life; but it was all in vain. Now there was a better chance for them perhaps.

Fanny and our new acquaintance Julia soon became sworn friends. Most people believed that we were three sisters. Many called us the Three Graces. It was a pity that there were only three Graces!—and that is the reason, I suppose, why my eldest sister Amy was cut out of this ring, and often surnamed one of the Furies. She was a fine dark woman too. Why she hated me all her life I cannot conceive; nor why she invariably tried to injure me in the opinion of all those who liked me, I know not: but I can easily divine why she made love to my favourites; for they were the handsomest she could find. It was Amy, my eldest sister, who had been the first to set us a bad example. We were all virtuous girls when Amy, one fine afternoon, left her father's house and sallied forth, like Don Quixote, in quest of adventures. The first person who addressed her was one Mr. Trench; a certain short-sighted, pedantic man, whom most people know about town. I believe she told him that she was running away from her father. All I know for certain is that, when Fanny and I discovered her abode, we went to visit her, and when we asked her what on earth had induced her to throw herself away on an entire stranger whom she had never seen before, her answer was, "I refused him the whole of the first day; had I done so the second he would have been in a fever."

Amy was really very funny, however spitefully disposed towards me. To be brief with her history. Trench put her to school again, from motives of virtue and economy. From that school she eloped with General Maddan.

Amy's virtue was something like the nine lives of a cat.

With General Maddan she, for several years, professed constancy; indeed I am not quite certain that she was otherwise. I never in my occasional visits saw anything suspicious except once, a pair of breeches!

It was one day when I went to call on her with my brother. General Maddan was not in town. She wanted to go to the Opera. The fit had only just seized her, at past nine o'clock. She begged me to make her brother's excuse at home as, she said, he must accompany her.

"What, in those dirty boots?" I asked.

"I have got both dress-stockings and breeches upstairs, of Maddan's," replied Amy; and I assisted at the boy's toilette.

In handing him the black pair of breeches, which Amy had presented me with, I saw marked, in Indian ink, what, being in the inside, had probably escaped her attention. It was simply the name of Proby.

"How came Lord Proby's black small-clothes here?" said I.

Amy snatched them out of my hand in a fury; and desired me to go out of the house. Au reste, she had often, at that time, three hundred pounds in her pocket at once, and poor Maddan had not a shilling. All this happened before I had left my home.

At the period I now write about I believe that Maddan was abroad, and Amy lived in York Place, where she used to give gay evening parties to half the fashionable men in town, after the Opera. She never came to me but from interested motives. Sometimes she forced herself into my private box, or teased me to make her known to the Duke of Argyle.

This year we three graces, as we were called, hired an opera box for the season together. Amy had another, near us, for herself and her host of beaux. Her suppers on Saturday nights were very gay. Julia and Fanny were always invited; but she was puzzled what to do with me. If I was present, at least half the men were on my side of the room; if I stayed away, so did all those who went only on my account.

This difficulty became a real privation to such men as delighted in us both together. Among these was Luttrell; everybody knows Luttrell; or if they do not, I will tell them more about him by-and-by. Luttrell, I say, undertook to draw up a little agreement, stating that, since public parties ought not to suffer from private differences, we were thereby requested to engage ourselves to bow to each other in all societies, going through the forms of good breeding even with more ceremony than if we had liked each other, on pain of being voted public nuisances, and private enemies to all wit and humour.

Signed with our hands and seals. …

"Now," said Fanny one day to Julia, soon after our first opera season had begun, "Harriette and I propose cutting you Mrs. Julia altogether, if you do not, this very evening, give us a full and true account of yourself, from the day you were born and the date thereof up to this hour."