Books with author HenryHarland

Excerpt:It was a Saturday evening in November, the air thick with darkness and a drizzling rain, the streets black and shining where lamplight fell upon the mud on the paths and the pools in the roadway, when I found my way to King's Cross on this small errand of kindness. King's Cross is a most unlovely purlieu at its best, which must be in the first dawn of a summer day, when the innocence of morning smiles along its squalid streets, and the people of the place, who cannot be so wretched as they look, are shut within their poor and furtive homes. On a foul November night nothing can be more miserable, more melancholy. One or two great thoroughfares were crowded with foot-passengers who bustled here and there about their Saturday marketings, under the light that flared from the shops and the stalls that lined the roadway. Spreading on every hand from these thoroughfares, with their noisy trafficking so dreadfully eager and small, was a maze of streets built to be "respectable" but now run down into the forlorn poverty which is all for concealment without any rational hope of success. It was to one of these that I was directed—a narrow silent little street of three-storey houses, with two families at least in every one of them.Arrived at No. 17, I was admitted by a child after long delay, and by her conducted to a room at the top of the house. No voice responded to the knock at the room door, and none to the announcement of the visitor's name; but before I entered I was aware of a sound which, though it was only what may be heard in the grill-room of any coffee-house at luncheon time, made me feel very guilty and ashamed. For the last ten minutes I had been gradually sinking under the fear of intrusion—of intrusion upon grief, and not less upon the wretched little secrets of poverty which pride is so fain to conceal; and now these splutterings of a frying-pan foundered me quite. What worse intrusion could there be than to come prying in upon the cooking of some poor little meal?

"The Signorino will take coffee?" old Marietta asked, as she set the fruit before him. Peter deliberated for a moment; then burned his ships. "Yes," he answered. "But in the garden, perhaps?" the little brown old woman suggested, with a persuasive flourish. "No," he corrected her, gently smiling, and shaking his head, "not perhaps—certainly." Her small, sharp old black Italian eyes twinkled, responsive. "The Signorino will find a rustic table, under the big willow-tree, at the water's edge," she informed him, with a good deal of gesture. "Shall I serve it there?" "Where you will. I leave myself entirely in your hands," he said. So he sat by the rustic table, on a rustic bench, under the willow, sipped his coffee, smoked his cigarette, and gazed in contemplation at the view. Of its kind, it was rather a striking view. In the immediate foreground—at his feet, indeed—there was the river, the narrow Aco, peacock-green, a dark file of poplars on either bank, rushing pell-mell away from the quiet waters of the lake. Then, just across the river, at his left, stretched the smooth lawns of the park of Ventirose, with glimpses of the many-pinnacled castle through the trees; and, beyond, undulating country, flourishing, friendly, a perspective of vineyards, cornfields, groves, and gardens, pointed by numberless white villas. At his right loomed the gaunt mass of the Gnisi, with its black forests, its bare crags, its foaming ascade, and the crenelated range of the Cornobastone; and finally, climax and cynosure, at the valley's end, Monte Sfiorito, its three snow-covered summits almost insubstantial-seeming, floating forms of luminous pink vapour, in the evening sunshine, against the intense blue of the sky. A familiar verse had come into Peter's mind, and kept running there obstinately. "Really," he said to himself, "feature for feature, down to the very 'cataract leaping in glory,' the scene might have been got up, apres coup, to illustrate it." And he began to repeat the beautiful hackneyed words, under his breath.... But about midway of the third line he was interrupted.

The Next TimeMRS. HIGHMORE'S errand this morning was odd enough to deserve commemoration : she came to ask me to write a notice of her great forthcoming work. Her great works have come forth so frequently without my assistance that I was sufficiently entitled, on this occasion, to open my eyes ; but what really made me stare was the ground on which her request reposed, and what leads me to record the incident is the train of memory lighted by that explanation. Poor Ray Limbert, while we talked, seemed to sit there between us : she reminded me that my acquaint ance with him had begun, eighteen years ago, with her having come in precisely as she came in this morning to bespeak my consideration for him. If she didn't know then how little my consideration was worth she is at least enlightened about its value to-day, and it is just in that knowledge that the drollery of her visit resides. As I hold up the torch to the dusky years—by which I mean as I cipher up with a pen that stumbles and stops the figured column of my reminiscences—I see that Limbert's public hour, or at least my small apprehension of it, is rounded by those two occasions. It wasy?«/j, with a little moralising flourish, that Mrs. Highmore seemed to trace to-day at the bottom of the page. " One of the most voluminous writers of the time," she has oftenrepeatedrepeated this sign ; but never, I dare say, in spite of her professional command of appropriate emotion, with an equal sense of that mystery and that sadness of things which, to people of imagination, generally hover over the close of human histories. This romance at any rate is bracketed by her early and her late appeal ; and when its melancholy protrusions had caught the declining light again from my half-hour's talk with her, I took a private vow to re cover, while that light still lingers, something of the delicate flush, to pick out, with a brief patience, the perplexing lesson.It was wonderful to observe how, for herself, Mrs. Highmore had already done so : she wouldn't have hesitated to announce to me what was the matter with Ralph Limbert, or at all events to give me a glimpse of the high admonition she had read in his career. There could have been no better proof of the vividness of this parable, which we were really in our pleasant sympathy quite at one about, than that Mrs. Highmore, of all hardened sinners, should have been converted. This indeed was not news to me : she impressed upon me that for the last ten years she had wanted to do something artistic, something as to which she was prepared not to care a rap whether or no it should sell. She brought home to me further that it had been mainly seeing what her brother-in-law did, and how he did it, that had wedded her to this perversity. As he didn't sell, dear soul, and as several persons, of whom I was one, thought ever so much of him for it, the fancy had taken her— taken her even quite early in her prolific course—of reaching, if only once, the same heroic eminence. She yearned to be, like Limbert, but of course only once, an exquisite failure. There was something a failure was, a failure in the market, that a success somehow wasn't. A success was as prosaic as a good dinner : there was nothing more to be said about it than that you had had it. Who but vulgar people, in such a case, made gloating remarksaboutabout the courses ? It was by such vulgar people, often, that a success was attested. It made, if you came to look at it, nothing but money ; that is it made so much that any other result showed small in comparison. A failure, now, could make—oh, with the aid of immense talent of course, for there were failures and failures —such a reputation ! She did me the honour—she had often done it—to intimate that what she meant by reputation was seeing me toss a flower. If it took a failure to catch a failure I was by my own admission well qualified to place the laurel. It was because she had made so much money and

Peter Marchdale, a young author, rents a villa in Lombardy for the summer. He discovers that his landlady is a young woman who he has admired from afar. She is the widow of an Italian duke who was extremely wealthy and Peter is devastated that he feels there is no future for him with the duchessa. However, the duchessa's uncle by marriage, Cardinal Udeschini comes to visit.