Shall I not one day remember thy Bower—
One day when all days are one day to me?
Thinking I stirred not and yet had the power,
Yearning—ah, God, if again it might be!
—The Song of the Bower.
This is a base betrayal of confidence, but the sin is Mrs. Hauksbee's and not mine.
If you remember a certain foolish tale called "The Education of Otis Yeere," you will not forget that Mrs. Mallowe laughed at the wrong time, which was a single, and at Mrs. Hauksbee, which was a double, offence. An experiment had gone wrong, and it seems that Mrs. Mallowe had said some quaint things about the experimentrix.
"I am not angry," said Mrs. Hauksbee, "and I admire Polly in spite of her evil counsels to me. But I shall wait—I shall wait, like the frog footman in Alice in Wonderland, and Providence will deliver Polly into my hands. It always does if you wait." And she departed to vex the soul of the "Hawley boy," who says that she is singularly "uninstruite and childlike." He got that first word out of a Ouida novel. I do not know what it means, but am prepared to make an affidavit before the Collector that it does not mean Mrs. Hauksbee.
Mrs. Hauksbee's ideas of waiting are very liberal. She told the "Hawley boy" that he dared not tell Mrs. Reiver that "she was an intellectual woman with a gift for attracting men," and she offered another man two waltzes if he would repeat the same thing in the same ears. But he said: "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes," which means "Mistrust all waltzes except those you get for legitimate asking."
The "Hawley boy" did as he was told because he believes in Mrs. Hauksbee. He was the instrument in the hand of a Higher Power, and he wore jharun coats, like "the scoriac rivers that roll their sulphurous torrents down Yahek, in the realms of the Boreal Pole," that made your temples throb when seen early in the morning. I will introduce him to you some day if all goes well. He is worth knowing.
Unpleasant things have already been written about Mrs. Reiver in other places.
She was a person without invention. She used to get her ideas from the men she captured, and this led to some eccentric changes of character. For a month or two she would act à la Madonna, and try Theo for a change if she fancied Theo's ways suited her beauty. Then she would attempt the dark and fiery Lilith, and so and so on, exactly as she had absorbed the new notion. But there was always Mrs. Reiver—hard, selfish, stupid Mrs. Reiver—at the back of each transformation. Mrs. Hauksbee christened her the Magic Lantern on account of this borrowed mutability. "It just depends upon the slide," said Mrs. Hauksbee. "The case is the only permanent thing in the exhibition. But that, thank Heaven, is getting old."