The room was full of scent, partly from the flowers outside, and partly
from the great jars of pot-pourri inside. The choice of odours was
what my lady piqued herself upon, saying nothing showed birth like a
keen susceptibility of smell. We never named musk in her presence, her
antipathy to it was so well understood through the household; her opinion
on the subject was believed to be, that no scent derived from an animal
could ever be of a sufficiently pure nature to give pleasure to any
person of good family, where, of course, the delicate perception of the
senses had been cultivated for generations. She would instance the way
in which sportsmen preserve the breed of dogs who have shown keen scent;
and how such gifts descend for generations amongst animals, who cannot
be supposed to have anything of ancestral pride, or hereditary fancies
about them. Musk, then, was never mentioned at Hanbury Court. No more
were bergamot or southernwood, although vegetable in their nature. She
considered these two latter as betraying a vulgar taste in the person
who chose to gather or wear them. She was sorry to notice sprigs of them
in the button-hole of any young man in whom she took an interest, either
because he was engaged to a servant of hers or otherwise, as he came out
of church on a Sunday afternoon. She was afraid that he liked coarse
pleasures; and I am not sure if she did not think that his preference for
these coarse sweetnesses did not imply a probability that he would take
to drinking. But she distinguished between vulgar and common. Violets,
pinks, and sweetbriar were common enough; roses and mignonette, for
those who had gardens, honeysuckle for those who walked along the bowery
lanes; but wearing them betrayed no vulgarity of taste; the queen upon
her throne might be glad to smell at a nosegay of the flowers. A beaupot
(as we call it) of pinks and roses freshly gathered was placed every
morning that they were in bloom on my lady’s own particular table. For
lasting vegetable odours she preferred lavender and sweet-woodruff to any
extract whatever. Lavender reminded her of old customs, she said, and of
homely cottage-gardens, and many a cottager made his offering to her of a
bundle of lavender. Sweet-woodruff, again, grew in wild, woodland places,
where the soil was fine and the air delicate; the poor children used to
go and gather it for her up in the woods on the higher lands; and for
this service she always rewarded them with bright new pennies, of which
my lord, her son, used to send her down a bagful fresh from the Mint in
London every February.
Attar of roses, again, she disliked. She said it reminded her of the
city and of merchants’ wives, over-rich, over-heavy in its perfume. And
lilies of the valley somehow fell under the same condemnation. They
were most graceful and elegant to look at (my lady was quite candid
about this), flower, leaf, and colour—everything was refined about them
but the smell. That was too strong. But the great hereditary faculty
on which my lady piqued herself, and with reason, for I never met with
any person who possessed it, was the power she had of perceiving the
delicious odour arising from a bed of strawberries in the late autumn,
when the leaves were all fading and dying. _Bacon’s Essays_ was one of
the few books that lay about in my lady’s room; and, if you took it
up and opened it carelessly, it was sure to fall apart at his “Essay
on Gardens.” “Listen,” her ladyship would say, “to what that great
philosopher and statesman says. ‘Next to that’—he is speaking of violets,
my dear—‘is the musk-rose—of which you will remember the great bush at
the corner of the south wall just by the Blue Drawing-room windows; that
is the old musk-rose, Shakespeare’s musk-rose, which is dying out through
the kingdom now. But to return to my Lord Bacon: ‘Then the strawberry
leaves, dying with a most cordial excellent smell.’ Now the Hanburys
can always smell this excellent cordial odour, and very delicious and
refreshing it is. You see, in Lord Bacon’s time there had not been so
many intermarriages between the court and the city as there have been
since the needy days of his Majesty Charles the Second; and altogether,
in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the great old families of England were
a distinct race, just as a cart-horse is one creature and very useful
in its place, and Childers or Eclipse is another creature, though both
are of the same species. So the old families have gifts and powers of
a different and higher class to what the other orders have. My dear,
remember that you try if you can smell the scent of dying strawberry
leaves in this next autumn. You have some of Ursula Hanbury’s blood in
you, and that gives you a chance.”
But when October came, I sniffed and sniffed, and all to no purpose; and
my lady—who had watched the little experiment rather anxiously—had to
give me up as a hybrid. I was mortified, I confess, and thought that it
was in some ostentation of her own powers that she ordered the gardener
to plant a border of strawberries on that side of the terrace that lay
under her windows.