← catalogue

A House-Party, Don Gesualdo, and A Rainy June

by Ouida · English · Gutenberg #32199 · 490,779 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of A House-Party, Don Gesualdo, and A Rainy June
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: A House-Party, Don Gesualdo, and A Rainy June

Author: Ouida


        
Release date: May 1, 2010 [eBook #32199]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32199

Credits: E-text prepared by David Edwards, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from scanned images of public domain material generously made available by the Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com/)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HOUSE-PARTY, DON GESUALDO, AND A RAINY JUNE ***


E-text prepared by David Edwards, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from scanned
images of public domain material generously made available by the Google
Books Library Project (http://books.google.com/)



Note: Images of the original pages are available through
      the the Google Books Library Project. See
      http://books.google.com/books?vid=OG3tBIK-KHsC&id


Transcriber's note:

      The oe-ligature is represented by [oe].





A HOUSE-PARTY

Don Gesualdo

and

A Rainy June

by

OUIDA

Author Of "Othmar," "Princess Napeaxine," "Under Two Flags," "Wanda,"
Etc., Etc.







Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott Company.
1902.




A HOUSE-PARTY.




CHAPTER I.


It is an August morning. It is an old English manor-house. There is a
breakfast-room hung with old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts;
it has oak furniture of the same period; it has leaded lattices with
stained glass in some of their frames, and the motto of the house in old
French, "J'ay bon vouloir," emblazoned there with the crest of a heron
resting in a crown. Thence, windows open on to a green, quaint, lovely
garden, which was laid out by Monsieur Beaumont when he planned the
gardens of Hampton Court. There are clipped yew-tree walks and arbors
and fantastic forms; there are stone terraces and steps like those of
Haddon, and there are peacocks which pace and perch upon them; there are
beds full of all the flowers which blossomed in the England of the
Stuarts, and birds dart and butterflies pass above them; there are huge
old trees, cedars, lime, hornbeam; beyond the gardens there are the
woods and grassy lawns of the home park.

The place is called Surrenden Court, and is one of the houses of George,
Earl of Usk,--his favorite house in what pastoral people call autumn,
and what he calls the shooting season.

Lord Usk is a well-made man of fifty, with a good-looking face, a little
spoilt by a permanent expression of irritability and impatience, which
is due to the state of his liver; his eyes are good-tempered, his mouth
is querulous; nature meant him for a very amiable man, but the
dinner-table has interfered with, and in a measure upset, the good
intentions of nature: it very often does. Dorothy, his wife, who is by
birth a Fitz-Charles, third daughter of the Duke of Derry, is a still
pretty woman of thirty-five or -six, inclined to an _embonpoint_ which
is the despair of herself and her maids; she has small features, a gay
expression, and very intelligent eyes; she does not look at all a great
lady, but she can be one when it is necessary. She prefers those merrier
moments in life in which it is not necessary. She and Lord Usk, then
Lord Surrenden, were greatly in love when they married; sixteen years
have gone by since then, and it now seems very odd to each of them that
they should ever have been so. They are not, however, bad friends, and
have even at the bottom of their hearts a lasting regard for each other.
This is saying much, as times go. When they are alone they quarrel
considerably; but then they are so seldom alone. They both consider this
disputatiousness the inevitable result of their respective relations.
They have three sons, very pretty boys and great pickles, and two young
and handsome daughters. The eldest son, Lord Surrenden, rejoices in the
names of Victor Albert Augustus George, and is generally known as Boom.

They are now at breakfast in the garden-chamber; the china is old
Chelsea, the silver is Queen Anne, the roses are old-fashioned
Jacqueminots and real cabbage roses. There is a pleasant scent from
flowers, coffee, cigarettes, and newly-mown grass. There is a litter of
many papers on the floor.

There is yet a fortnight before the shooting begins; Lord Usk feels that
those fifteen days will be intolerable; he repents a fit of fright and
economy in which he has sold his great Scotch moors and deer-forest to
an American capitalist; not having his own lands in Scotland any longer,
pride has kept him from accepting any of the many invitations of his
friends to go to them there for the Twelfth; but he has a keen dread of
the ensuing fifteen days without sport.

His wife has asked her own set; but he hates her set; he does not much
like his own; there is only Dulcia Waverley whom he does like, and Lady
Waverley will not come till the twentieth. He feels bored, hipped,
annoyed; he would like to strangle the American who has bought
Achnalorrie. Achnalorrie, having gone irrevocably out of his hands,
represents to him for the time being the one absolutely to be desired
spot upon earth. Good heavens! he thinks, can he have been such a fool
as to sell it?

When he was George Rochfort, a boy of much promise going up to Oxford
from Eton, he had a clever brain, a love of classics, and much
inclination to scholarly pursuits; but he gradually lost all these
tastes little by little, he could not very well have said how; and now
he never hardly opens a book, and he has drifted into that odd, English
habit of only counting time by the seasons for killing things. There is
nothing to kill just now except rabbits, which he scorns, so he falls
foul of his wife's list of people she has invited, which is lying,
temptingly provocative, of course, on the breakfast-table, scribbled in
pencil on a sheet of note-paper.

"Always the same thing!" he says, as he glances over it. "Always the
very worst lot you could get together, and there isn't one of the
husbands or one of the wives!"

"Of course there isn't," says Lady Usk, looking up from a Society
newspaper which told her that her friends were all where they were not,
and fitted all the caps of scandal on to all the wrong heads, and yet
from some mysterious reason gave her amusement on account of its very
blunders.

"I do think," he continues, "that nobody on earth ever had such
absolutely indecent house-parties as yours!"

"You always say these absurd things."

"I don't think they're absurd. Look at your list: everybody asks that he
may meet somebody whom he shouldn't meet!"

"What nonsense! As if they didn't all meet everywhere every day, and as
if it mattered!"

"It does matter."

He has not been a moral man himself, but at fifty he likes to _faire la
morale pour les autres_. When we are compelled to relinquish cakes and
ale ourselves, we begin honestly to believe them indigestible for
everybody; why should they be sold, or be made, at all?

"It does matter," he repeats. "Your people are too larky, much too
larky. You grow worse every year. You don't care a straw what's said
about 'em so long as they please you, and you let 'em carry on till
there's the devil to pay."

"They pay him,--I don't; and they like it."

"I know they like it, but I don't choose you should give 'em opportunity
for it."

"Oh, nonsense!"

"Not nonsense at all. This house is a kind of Agapemone, a sort of
Orleans Club."

"You ought not to be bored in it, then."

"One is always bored at one's own place. I tell you I don't like your
people. You ask everybody who wants to meet somebody else; and it's
never respectable. It's a joke at the clubs. Jack's always saying to his
Jill, 'We'll get Lady Usk to ask us together,' and they do. I say it's
indecent."

"But, my dear, if Jack sulks without his Jill, and if Jill's in bad form
without Jack, one must ask them together. I want people to like me and
to enjoy themselves."

"Enjoy themselves! That means flirting till all's blue with somebody
you'd hate if you'd married her."

"What does that matter, so long as they're amused?"

"What an immoral woman you are, Dolly! To hear you----"

"I only mean that I don't think it matters; you know it doesn't matter;
everybody's always doing it."

"If you'd only ask some of the women's husbands, some of the men's
wives----"

"I couldn't do that, dear. I want people to like my house!"

"Just as I say--you're so immoral."

"No, I'm not. Nobody ever pays a bill for me, except you."

"Enviable distinction! Pay! I think I do pay! Though why you can't keep
within your pin-money----"

"Pin-money means money to buy pins. I did buy two diamond pins with it
last year, eight hundred guineas each."

"You ought to buy clothes."

"Clothes! What an expression! I can't buy a child's frock even; it all
goes in little things, and all my own money too; wedding-presents,
christening-presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it's all
nonsense you're grumbling about my bills to Worth and Elise and Virot;
Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which it
describes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear and
make them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, and
their whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they had
tortoise-shell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs had
jewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is nothing new, though
you talk as if it were a crime and we'd invented it!"

Usk laughs a little crossly as she comes to the end of her breathless
sentences. "_Naso Magister eris_," he remarks, "might certainly be
inscribed over the chamber doors of all your friends!"

"I know you mean something odious. My friends are all charming people."

"I'll tell you what I do mean,--that I don't like the house made a joke
of in London; I'll shut it up and go abroad if the thing goes on. If a
scandal's begun in town in the season, it always comes down here to
carry on; if there are two people fond of each other when they shouldn't
be, you always ask 'em down here and make pets of 'em. As you're taking
to quoting Ovid, I may as well tell you that in his time the honest
women didn't do this sort of thing; they left it to the light-o'-loves
under the porticoes."

"I really don't know what I've done that I should be called an honest
woman! One would think you were speaking to the housemaids! I wish you'd
go and stay in somebody else's house: you always spoil things here."

"Very sorry. I like my own shooting. Three days here, three days there,
three days t'other place, and expected to leave the game behind you and
to say 'thanks' if your host gives you a few brace to take away with
you,--not for me, if I know it, while there's a bird in the covers at my
own places."

"I thought you were always bored at home?"

"Not when I'm shooting. I don't mind having the house full, either, only
I want you to get decenter people in it. Why, look at your
list!--they're all paired, like animals in the ark. Here's Lady Arthur
for Hugo Mountjoy, here's Iona and Madame de Caillac, here's Mrs. Curzon
for Lawrence, here's Dick Wootton and Mrs. Faversham, here's the Duke
and Lady Dolgelly, here's old Beaumanoir and Olive Dawlish. I say it's
absolutely indecent, when you know how all these people are talked
about!"

"If one waited for somebody not talked about, one would have an empty
house or fill it with old fogies. My dear George, haven't you ever seen
that advertisement about matches which will only light on their own
boxes? People in love are like those matches. If you ask the matches
without the boxes, or the boxes without the matches, you won't get
anything out of either."

"Ovid was born too early: he never knew this admirable illustration!"

"There's only one thing worse than inviting people without the people
they care about; it is to invite them with the people they're tired of:
I did that once last year. I asked Madame de Saumur and Gervase
together, and then found that they had broken with each other two months
before. That is the sort of blunder I do hate to make!"

"Well, nothing happened?"

"Of course nothing happened. Nobody ever shows anything. But it looks so
stupid in _me_: one is always expected to know----"

"What an increase to the responsibilities of a hostess! She must know
all the ins and outs of her acquaintances' unlawful affections as a
Prussian officer knows the French by-roads! How simple an affair it used
to be when the Victorian reign was young, and Lord and Lady So-and-So
and Mr. and Mrs. Nobody all came to stay for a week in twos and twos as
inevitably as we buy fancy pigeons in pairs!"

"You pretend to regret those days, but you know you'd be horribly bored
if you had always to go out with me."

"Politeness would require me to deny, but truthfulness would compel me
to assent."

"Of course it would. You don't want anybody with you who has heard all
your best stories a thousand times, and knows what your doctor has told
you not to eat; I don't want anybody who has seen how I look when I'm
ill, and knows where my false hair is put on. It is quite natural. By
the way, Boom says Ovid's ladies had perukes, too, as one of them put
her wig on upside down before him, and it chilled his feelings towards
her; it would chill most people's. I wonder if they made them well in
those days, and what they cost."

"I think you might have invited _some_ of the husbands."

"Oh, dear, no. Why? They're all staying somewhere else."

"And your friends are never jealous, I suppose; at least, never about
their husbands?"

"An agreeable woman is never jealous of anybody. She hasn't time to be.
It is only the women who can't amuse themselves who make that sort of
fuss."

"Are you an agreeable woman, my dear?"

"I have always been told so, by everybody except yourself."

Lord Usk rose and laughed as he lighted a cigar.

"Well, I won't have any scandal in the house. Mind that."

"You'd better put that up on a placard, as you have put 'No fees allowed
to the servants,' up in the hall."

"I'm sure I would with pleasure if I thought anybody would attend to it.
I don't like you're set, Dolly. That's the truth. I wish you'd drop
nine-tenths of 'em."

"My dear George, I wish you would mind your own business, to use a very
vulgar expression. Do I ever say anything when you talk nonsense in the
Lords, and when you give your political picnics and shout yourself
hoarse to the farmers who go away and vote against your man? Do I ever
say anything when you shoot pheasants which cost you a sovereign a head
for their corn, and stalk stags which cost you eighty pounds each for
their keep, and lose races with horses which cost you ten thousand a
year for their breeding and training? Do I ever say anything when you
think that people who are hungering for the whole of your land will be
either grateful or delighted because you take ten per cent. off their
rents? You know I don't. I think you ought to be allowed to ruin
yourself and accelerate the revolution in any absurd way which may seem
best to you. In return, pray let me manage my own house-parties and
choose my own acquaintances. It is not much to ask. What! are you gone
away? How exactly like a man, to go away when he gets the worst of the
argument!"

Lord Usk has gone into the gardens in a towering rage. He is a
gentleman: he will quarrel with his wife all day long, but he will
always stop short of swearing at her, and he feels that if he stays in
the room a moment longer he will swear: that allusion to the Scotch
stags is too much for humanity (with a liver) to endure. When
Achnalorrie is sold to that beastly American, to be twitted with what
stags used to cost! Certainly they had cost a great deal, and the
keepers had been bores, and the crofters had been nuisances, and there
had always been some disease or other among the birds, and he had never
cared as much as some men for deer-stalking; but still, as Achnalorrie
is irrevocably gone, the thirty-mile drive over the bleak hills, and the
ugly house on the stony strathside, and the blinding rains, and the
driving snows, and the swelling streams which the horses had to cross as
best they could, all seem unspeakably lovely to him and the sole things
worth living for: and then his wife has the heartlessness to twit him
with the cost of each stag!

"Women have no feeling," he growls, as he walks about the gardens. "If
they think they can make a point they'll make it, let it hurt you how it
may."

He strolls down between two high yew walls with his hands in his
pockets, and feels injured and aggrieved. He ought to be a very happy
person; he is still rich despite the troubles of the times, he has fine
estates, fair rents, handsome children, and a life of continual change,
and yet he is bored and doesn't like anything, and this peaceful, green
garden, with its innumerable memories and its delicious, dreamful
solitudes, says nothing at all to him. Is it his own fault or the fault
of his world? He doesn't know. He supposes it is the fault of his liver.
His father was always contented, and jolly as a sand-boy; but then in
his father's time there was no grouse-disease, no row about rents, no
wire fencing to lame your horses, no Ground Game Bill to corrupt your
farmers, no Leaseholder's Bills hanging over your London houses, no corn
imported from Arkansas and California, no Joe Chamberlain. When poor
Boom's turn comes, how will things be? Joe Chamberlain President,
perhaps, and Surrenden cut up into allotment-grounds.

He possesses two other very big places in adjacent counties, Orme Castle
and Denton Abbey, but they are ponderous, vast, gorgeous, ceremonious,
ugly: he detests both of them. Of Surrenden he is, on the contrary, as
fond as he can be of anything except the lost Achnalorrie and a little
cosey house that he has at Newmarket where the shadow of Lady Usk has
never fallen.

He hears the noise of wheels on gravel. It comes from the other side of
the house; it is his brake and his omnibus going down the avenue on
their way to the nearest railway-station, four miles off, to meet some
of his coming guests there. Well, there'll be nothing seen of them till
two o'clock at luncheon. They are all people he hates, or thinks he
hates, for that best of all possible reasons, that his wife likes them.
Why can't Dulcia Waverley come before the 20th? Lady Waverley always
amuses him, and agrees with him. It is so pleasant to be agreed with,
only when one's own people do so it makes one almost more angry than
when one is contradicted. When his wife agrees with him it leaves him
nothing to say. When Dulcia Waverley agrees with him it leaves him with
a soothing sense of being sympathized with and appreciated. Dulcia
Waverley always tells him that he might have been a great statesman if
he had chosen: as he always thinks so himself, the echo of his thoughts
is agreeable.

He sits down in one of the clipped-yew-tree arbors to light a new cigar
and smoke it peaceably. A peacock goes past him, drawing its beautiful
train over the smooth-shaven grass. A mavis is singing on a rose-bough.
The babble of a stream hidden under adjacent trees is pleasant on the
morning silence. He doesn't notice any of it; he thinks it odiously hot,
and what fools they were who clipped a yew-tree into the shape of a
periwig, and what a beast of a row that trout-stream makes. Why don't
they turn it, and send it farther from the house? He's got no money to
do anything, or he would have it done to-morrow.

A peacock begins to scream. The noise of a peacock cannot be said to be
melodious or soothing at any time.

"Why don't you wring that bird's neck?" he says savagely to a gardener's
boy who is gathering up fallen rose-leaves.

The boy gapes and touches his hair, his hat being already on the ground
in sign of respect. The peacocks have been at Surrenden ever since
Warren Hastings sent the first pair as a present to the Lady Usk of that
generation, and they are regarded with a superstitious admiration by all
the good Hampshire people who walk in the gardens of Surrenden or visit
them on the public day. The Surrenden peacocks are as sacred to the
neighborhood and the workpeople as ever was the green ibis in old Egypt.

"How long will they touch their caps or pull their forelocks to us?"
thinks Lord Usk; "though I don't see why they can reasonably object to
do it as long as we take off our hats to Wales and say 'Sir' to him."

This political problem suggests the coming elections to his mind: the
coming elections are a disagreeable subject for meditation: why wasn't
he born in his grandfather's time, when there were pocket boroughs as
handy and portable as snuff-boxes, and the county returned Lord Usk's
nominee as a matter of course without question?

"Well, and what good men they got in those days," he thinks, "Fox, and
Hervey, and Walpole, and Burke, and all the rest of 'em; fine orators,
clever ministers, members that did the nation honor; every great noble
sent up some fine fellow with breeding and brains; bunkum and bad logic
and dropped aspirates had no kind of chance to get into the House in
those days. Now, even when Boom's old enough to put up himself, I dare
say there'll be some biscuit-baker or some pin-maker sent down by the
Radical Caucus or the English Land League who'll make the poor devils
believe that the millennium's coming in with them, and leave Boom
nowhere!"

The prospect is so shocking that he throws his cigar-end at the peacocks
and gets up out of the evergreen periwig.

As he does so he comes, to his absolute amazement, face to face with his
friend Lord Brandolin.

Lord Brandolin is supposed by all the world, or at least that large
portion of it which is interested in his movements, to be at that moment
in the forest-recesses of Lahore.

"My dear George," says Lord Brandolin, in a very sweet voice, wholly
unlike the peacocks', "I venture to take you by surprise. I have left my
tub at Weymouth and come on foot across-country to you. It is most
unpardonable conduct, but I have always abused your friendship."

The master of Surrenden cannot find words of welcome warm enough to
satisfy himself. He is honestly delighted. Failing Dulcia Waverley,
nobody could have been so agreeable to him as Brandolin. For once a
proverb is justified, "a self-invited guest is thrice welcome." He is
for dragging his visitor in at once to breakfast, but Brandolin resists.
He has breakfasted on board his yacht; he could not eat again before
luncheon; he likes the open air, he wishes to sit in the periwig and
smoke.

"Do not let us disturb Lady Usk," he said. "I know châtelaines in the
country have a thousand and one things to do before luncheon, and I know
your house is full from gable to cellar."

"It will be by night," says the master of Surrenden, with disgust, "and
not a decent soul among 'em all."

"That is very sad for you," says Brandolin, with a twinkle in his
handsome eyes. He is not a handsome man, but he has beautiful eyes, a
patrician profile, and a look of extreme distinction; his expression is
a little cynical, but more amused; he is about forty years old, but
looks younger. He is not married, having by some miracle of good
fortune, or of personal dexterity, contrived to elude all the efforts
made for his capture. His barony is one of the oldest in England, and he
would not exchange it, were it possible, for a dukedom.

"Since when have you been so in love with decency, George?" he asks,
gravely.

Lord Usk laughs. "Well, you know I think one's own house should be
proper."

"No doubt," says Lord Brandolin, still more gravely. "To do one's
morality vicariously is always so agreeable. Is Lady Waverley not here?
She would save a hundred Sodoms, with a dozen Gomorrahs thrown in
gratis."

"I thought you were in India," says his host, who does not care to
pursue the subject of Lady Waverley's saintly qualifications for the
salvation of cities or men.

"I went to India, but it bored me. I liked it when I was twenty-four;
one likes so many things when one is twenty-four,--even champagne and a
cotillion. How's Boom?"

"Very well; gone to his cousins' in Suffolk. Sure you won't have
something to eat? They can bring it here in a minute if you like
out-of-doors best."

"Quite sure, thanks. What a lovely place this is! I haven't seen it for
years. I don't think there's another garden so beautiful in all England.
After the great dust-plains and the sweltering humid heats of India, all
this coolness and greenness are like Paradise."

Brandolin laughs languidly.

"Hot! you ungrateful, untravelled country squire! I should like to
fasten you to a life-buoy in the middle of the Red Sea. Why do
Englishmen perspire in every pore the moment the thermometer's above
zero in their own land, and yet stand the tropics better than any other
Europeans?"

"You know I've sold Achnalorrie?" says his host, _à propos de rien_, but
to him Achnalorrie seems _à propos_ of everything in creation.

Brandolin is surprised, but he does not show any surprise. "Ah! Quite
right, too. If we wished to please the Radicals we couldn't find any way
to please them and injure ourselves equal to our insane fashion of
keeping hundreds of square acres at an enormous cost, only that for a
few weeks in the summer we may do to death some of the most innocent and
graceful of God's creatures."

"That's just the bosh Dolly talks."

"Lady Usk is a wise politician, then. Let her train Boom for
his political life. I don't know which is the more utterly
indefensible,--our enormous Highland deer-slaughter or our imbecile
butchery of birds. They ought to have recorded the introduction of
battue-shooting into the British Isles by the Great and Good on the
Albert Memorial."

"One must shoot something."

"I never saw why. But 'something' honestly found by a setter in stubble,
and three thousand head of game between five guns in a morning, are very
different things. What did they give you for Achnalorrie?"

Usk discourses of Achnalorrie with breathless eloquence, as of a lover
eulogizing the charms of a mistress forever lost to him.

Brandolin listens with admirable patience, and affects to agree that the
vision of the American crawling on his stomach over soaking heather in a
thick fog for eight hours after a "stag of ten" is a vision of such
unspeakably enviable bliss that it must harrow the innermost soul of the
dispossessed lord of the soil.

"And yet, do you know," he says, in conclusion, "I am such a degenerate
mortal, such an unworthy 'son of a gun,' that I would actually sooner be
sitting in these lovely, sunny, shady gardens, where one expects to see
all Spenser's knights coming through the green shadows towards one, than
I would be the buyer of Achnalorrie, even in the third week of August?"

"You say so, but you don't mean it," says the seller of Achnalorrie.

"I never say what I don't mean," says Brandolin. "And I never cared
about Scotland."

The other smokes dejectedly, and refuses to be comforted.

"Lady Waverley isn't here?" asks Brandolin, with a certain significance.
Lady Waverley alone would have the power of making the torturing vision
of the American among the heather fade into the background of her host's
reflections.




CHAPTER II.


"Dolly is nasty about Achnalorrie," says Lord Usk, as they at last rise
and approach the house.

"Not logical if she objects to moors on political principles. But ladies
are seldom logical when they are as charming as Lady Usk."

"She never likes me to enjoy anything."

"I don't think you are quite just to her: you know I always tell you
so." (Brandolin remembers the sweetness with which Dorothy Usk invites
Lady Waverley season after season.) "You are a great grumbler, George. I
know grumbling is a Briton's privilege, provided for and secured to him
in Magna Charta; but still too great abuse of the privilege spoils
life."

"Nobody was ever so bothered as I am." Lord Usk regards himself
invariably with compassion as an ill-used man. "You always take
everything lightly; but then you aren't married, and I suppose you get
_some_ of your rents?"

"I have always been rather poor, but I don't mind it. So long as I
needn't shut up or let the old place, and can keep my boat afloat, I
don't much care about anything more. I've enough for myself."

"Ah, that's just it; but when one has no end of family expenses and four
great houses to keep up, and the counties looking to one for everything,
and the farmers, poor devils, ruined themselves, it's another matter. I
assure you if I hadn't made that sacrifice of Achnalorrie----"

Lady Usk coming out of the garden-room down the steps of one of the low
windows spares Brandolin the continuation of the lament. She looks
pretty; mindful of her years, she holds a rose-lined sun-umbrella over
her head; the lace and muslin of her breakfast-gown sweep the lawn
softly; she has her two daughters with her, the Ladies Alexandra and
Hermione, known as Dodo and Lilie. She welcomes Brandolin with mixed
feelings, though with unmixed suavity. She is glad to see him because he
amuses Usk, and is a person of wit and distinction whom everybody tries
to draw to their houses; but then he upsets all her nicely-balanced
combinations; there is nobody for him; he will be the "one out" when all
her people so nicely arranged and paired; and, as she is aware that he
is not a person to be reconciled to such isolation, he will dispossess
somebody else and cause probably those very dissensions and
complications from which it is always her effort to keep all her
house-parties free. However, there he is; and he is accustomed to be
welcomed and made much of wherever he goes. She can do no less.

Brandolin makes himself charming in return, and turns pretty compliments
to her and the children, which he can do honestly, for he has always
liked Dorothy Usk, and the two young girls are as agreeable objects of
contemplation as youth, good looks, fair skins, pretty frocks, open air,
much exercise, and an indescribable air of "breeding" can make them. An
English patrician child is one of the prettiest and most wholesome
things on the face of the earth.

He goes to play lawn tennis with them and their youngest brother Cecil,
called the Babe; and Lady Usk, under her rose-lined umbrella, sits as
umpire, while her lord saunters off disconsolately to an interview with
his steward. In these times those interviews are of an unbroken
melancholy, and always result in producing the conviction in his mind
that Great Britain cannot possibly last out another year. Without the
nobility and gentry what will she be? and they will all go to the lands
they've bought in America, if they're in luck, and if they aren't will
have to turn shoeblacks.

"But the new electorate won't have its shoes blacked,--won't even have
any shoes to black," suggests Mr. Lanyon, the land-steward, who began
life as an oppidan at Eton and captain of an Eight, but has been glad to
take refuge from the storm on the estates of his old Eton comrade, a
trust which he discharges with as much zeal as discretion, dwelling
contentedly in a rose-covered grange on the edge of the home-woods of
Surrenden. If Boom finds things at all in order when he comes into
possession, it will be wholly due to John Lanyon.

In one of the pauses of their game the tennis-players hear the brake and
the omnibus returning. None of those whom they bring will be visible
until luncheon at two o'clock.

"Have you anybody very nice, Lady Usk?" asks Brandolin of his hostess.

She hesitates; there are some women that he would call nice, but then
they each have their man. "I hardly know," she answers, vaguely. "You
don't like many people, if I remember----"

"All ladies, surely," says Brandolin, with due gravity.

"I'm sure you don't like Grandma Sophy," says the saucy Babe, sitting
cross-legged in front of him. He means the Dowager Duchess of Derry, a
very unpleasant person of strong principles, called by the profane
"Sophia, by the grace of God," because she ruled Ireland in a
viceroyalty of short duration and long-enduring mischief. She and
Brandolin do not agree, a fact which the Babe has seen and noted with
the all-seeing eyes of a petted boy who is too much in his mother's
drawing-rooms.

"I plead guilty to having offended her Grace Sophia," says Brandolin,
"but I conclude that Lady Usk's guests are not all like that most
admirable lady."

The Babe and his sisters laugh with much irreverent enjoyment; her Grace
is not more appreciated by her grandchildren than she was by Ireland.

"If I had known you were going to be so kind as to remember us, I would
have invited some of your friends," says his hostess, without coming to
the rescue of her august mother's name. "I am so sorry; but there is
nobody I think who will be very sympathetic to you. Besides, you know
them all already."

"And is that fatal to sympathy? What a cruel suggestion, dear Lady Usk!"

"Sympathy is best new, like a glove. It fits best; you don't see any
wrinkles in it for the first hour."

"What cynicism! Do you know that I am very fond of old gloves? But,
then, I never was a dandy----"

"Lord Brandolin will like Madame Sabaroff," says Dodo, a very _éveillé_
young lady of thirteen.

"Fair prophetess, why? And who is Madame Sabaroff? A second O. K., a
female Stepniak?"

"What are those?" says Dodo. "She is very handsome, and a princess in
her own right."

"She gave me two Ukraine ponies and a real droschky," says the Babe.

"And Boom a Circassian mare, all white, and each of us a set of Siberian
turquoises," says Lilie.

"Her virtues must be as many as her charms," says Brandolin.

"She is a lovely creature," adds Lady Usk, "but I don't think she is
your style at all; you like fast women who make you laugh."

"My tastes are catholic where your adorable sex is in question," says
Brandolin. "I am not sure that I do like fast women; they are painful to
one's vanity; they flirt with everybody."

Lady Usk smiles. "The season before last, I recollect----"

"Dearest lady, don't revert to pre-historic times. Nothing is so
disagreeable as to think this year of what we liked last year."

"It was Lady Leamington last year!" cries the terrible Babe.

Brandolin topples him over on the grass and hoists him up on his own
shoulders. "You precocious rascal! What will you be when you are
twenty?"

"Babe's future is a thing of horror to contemplate," says his mother,
smiling placidly.

"Who is Madame Sabaroff?" asks Brandolin, again, with a vague curiosity.

"A princess in her own right; a god-daughter of the Emperor's," says
Dodo. "She is so handsome, and her jewels--you never saw such jewels."

"Her father was Chancellor," adds her mother, "and her husband held some
very high place at court, I forget what."

"Held? Is he disgraced, then, or dead?"

"Oh, dead: that is what is so nice for her," says Dodo.

"Heartless Dodo!" says Brandolin. "Then if I marry you four years hence
I must kill myself to become endeared to you?"

"I should pity you indeed if you were to marry Dodo," says Dodo's
mother. "She has not a grain of any human feeling, except for her dog."

Dodo laughs. She likes to be called heartless; she thinks it is _chic_
and grown-up; she will weep over a lame puppy, a beaten horse, a dead
bird, but she is "hard as nails to humans," as her brother Boom phrases
it.

"Somebody will reign some day where the Skye reigns now over Dodo's
soul. Happy somebody!" says Brandolin. "I shall be too old to be that
somebody. Besides, Dodo will demand from fate an Adonis and a Cr[oe]sus
in one!"

Dodo smiles, showing her pretty white teeth; she likes the banter and
the flirtation with some of her father's friends. She feels quite old;
in four years' time her mother will present her, and she means to marry
directly after that.

"When does this Russian goddess who drops ponies and turquoises out of
the clouds arrive here?" asks Brandolin, as he picks up his racquet to
resume the game.

"She won't be here for three days," says Lady Usk.

"Then I fear I shall not see her."

"Oh, nonsense! You must stay all the month, at least."

"You are too good, but I have so many engagements."

"Engagements are made to be broken. I am sure George will not let you
go."

"We won't let you go," cries the Babe, dragging him off to the nets,
"and I'll drive you this afternoon, behind my ponies."

"I have gone through most perils that can confront a man, Babe, and I
shall be equal even to that," says Brandolin.

He is a great favorite with the children at Surrenden, where he has
always passed some weeks of most years ever since they can remember, or
he either, for he was a godson and ward of the late Lord Usk, and always
welcome there. His parents died in his infancy: even a long minority
failed to make him a rich man. He has, however, as he had said, enough
for his not extravagant desires, and is able to keep his old estate of
St. Hubert's Lea, in Warwickshire, unembarrassed. His chief pleasure has
been travelling and sailing, and he has travelled and sailed wherever a
horse or a dromedary, a schooner or a canoe, can penetrate. He has told
some of his travels in books so admirably written that, _mirabile
dictu_! they please both learned people and lazy people. They have
earned him a reputation beyond the drawing-rooms and clubs of his own
fashionable acquaintances. He has even considerable learning himself,
although he carries it so lightly that few people suspect it. He has had
a great many passions in his life, but they have none of them made any
very profound impression on him. When any one of them has grown tiresome
or seemed likely to enchain him more than he thought desirable, he has
always gone to Central Asia or the South Pole. The butterflies which he
has broken on his wheel have, however, been of that order which is not
crushed by abandonment, but mends itself easily and soars to new
spheres. He is incapable of harshness to either man or woman, and his
character has a warmth, a gayety, and a sincerity in it which endear him
inexpressibly to all his friends. His friendships have hitherto been
deeper and more enduring than his amours. He is, on the whole,
happy,--as happy as any thinking being can be in this world of anomalies
and purposeless pains.

"But then you always digest all you eat," Usk remarks to him, enviously.

"Put it the other way and be nearer the point," says Brandolin. "I
always eat what I can digest, and I always leave off with an appetite."

"I should be content if I could begin with one," says Usk.

Brandolin is indeed singularly abstemious in the pleasures of the table,
to which the good condition of his nerves and constitution may no doubt
be attributed. "I have found that eating is an almost entirely
unnecessary indulgence," he says in one of his books. "If an Arab can
ride, fight, kill lions, and slay Frenchmen on a mere handful of pulse
or of rice, why cannot we live on it too?" Whereat Usk wrote once on the
margin of the volume, in pencil, "Why should we?"

The author, seeing this one day, wrote also on the margin, "For the best
of all reasons: to do away with dyspepsia and with doctors, who keep
their carriages on our indigestion and make fifty thousand a year each
out of it."

Usk allowed that the reason was excellent; but then the renunciation
involved was too enormous.




CHAPTER III.


Let it not for an instant be supposed that the guests of Surrenden are
people looked in the least coldly or shyly on by society. Not they. They
go to drawing-rooms, which means nothing; they are invited to state
balls and state concerts, which means much. They are among the most
eminent leaders of that world of fashion which has of late
revolutionized taste, temper, and society in England. Mrs. Wentworth
Curzon sails a little near the wind, perhaps because she is careless,
and now and then Lady Dawlish has been "talked about," because she has a
vast number of debts and a lord who occasionally makes scenes; but, with
these exceptions, all these ladies are as safe on their pedestals as if
they were marble statues of chastity. That their tastes are studied and
their men asked to meet them everywhere is only a matter of delicate
attention, like the bouquets which the housekeeper sets out in their
bedrooms and the new novels which are laid on their writing-tables.

"I like my house to be pleasant," says Dorothy Usk, and she does not
look any further than that: as for people's affairs, she is not supposed
to know anything about them. She knows well enough that Iona would not
come to her unless she had asked the Marquise de Caillac, and she is
fully aware that Lawrence Hamilton would never bestow the cachet of his
illustrious presence on Surrenden unless Mrs. Wentworth Curzon brought
thither her _fourgons_, her maids, her collie dog, her famous emeralds,
and her no less famous fans. Of course she knows that, but she is not
supposed to know it. Nobody except her husband would be so ill-bred as
to suggest that she did know it; and if any of her people should ever by
any mischance forget their tact and stumble into the newspapers, or
become notorious by any other accident, she will drop them, and nobody
will be more surprised at the discovery of their naughtiness than
herself. Yet she is a kind woman, a virtuous woman, a very warm friend,
and not more insincere in her friendships than any one else; she is only
a hostess of the last lustre of the nineteenth century, a woman who
knows her London and follows it in all its amazing and illimitable
condonations as in its eccentric and exceptional severities.

The guests are numerous; they might even he said to be miscellaneous,
were it not that they all belonged to the same set. There is Dick
Wootton, who believes himself destined to play in the last years of the
nineteenth century the part played by Charles Greville in the earlier.
There is Lord Vanstone, an agreeable, eccentric, unsatisfactory
valetudinarian, who ought to have done great things with his life, but
has always been too indolent and had too bad health to carry out his
friends' very large expectations of him. There is the young Duke of
Whitby, good-natured and foolish, with a simple pleasant face and a very
shy manner. "If I had that ass's opportunities I'd make the world spin,"
says Wriothesley Ormond, who is a very poor and very witty member of
Parliament, and also, which he values more, the most popular member of
the Marlborough. There is Lord Iona, very handsome, very silent, very
much sought after and spoilt by women. There is Hugo Mountjoy, a pretty
young fellow in the Guards, with a big fortune and vague ideas that he
ought to "do something;" he is not sure what. There is Lawrence
Hamilton, who, as far as is possible in an age when men are clothed, but
do not dress, gives the law to St. James Street in matters of male
toilet. There is Sir Adolphus Beaumanoir, an ex-diplomatist, admirably
preserved, charmingly loquacious, and an unconscionable flirt, though he
is seventy. Each of these happy or unhappy beings has the lady invited
to meet him in whom his affections are supposed to be centred, for the
time being, in those tacit but potent relations which form so large a
portion of men's and women's lives in these days. It is this condonance
on the part of his wife which George Usk so entirely denounces, although
he would be very much astonished and very much annoyed if she made any
kind of objections to inviting Dulcia Waverley. Happily, there is no Act
of Parliament to compel any of us to be consistent, or where would
anybody be?

Lady Dolgelly, much older than himself, and with a _taille de
couturière_, as all her intimate friends delight to reveal, is supposed
to be indispensable to the existence of His Grace of Whitby; Lady
Leamington is not less necessary to the happiness of Wriothesley Ormond.
Mr. Wootton would be supposed incapable of cutting a single joke or
telling a single good story unless his spirits were sustained by the
presence of Mrs. Faversham, the prettiest brunette in the universe, for
whom Worth is supposed to make marvellous combinations of rose and gold,
of amber and violet, of deep orange and black, and of a wondrous yellow
like that of the daffodil, which no one dares to wear but herself. Mrs.
Wentworth Curzon is the momentary goddess of Lawrence Hamilton; and Lord
Iona, as far as he has ever opened his handsome mouth to say anything
"serious," has sworn himself the slave of Madame de Caillac. Sir
Adolphus has spread the ægis of his semi-paternal affection over the
light little head of that extravagant little beauty, Lady Dawlish;
whilst Hugo Mountjoy is similarly protected by the prescient wisdom and
the rare experience of his kindest of friends, Lady Arthur Audley.

Sir Hugo and several other gilded youths there present are all exact
patterns of one another, the typical young Englishman of the last years
of this curious century; the masher pure and simple; close-shaven,
close-cropped, faultlessly clothed, small of person, small of features,
stiff, pale, insignificant, polite, supercilious, indifferent;
occasionally amusing, but never by any chance original; much concerned
as to health, climate, and their own nerves; often talking of their
physicians, and flitting southward before cold weather like swallows,
though they have nothing whatever definite the matter with them.

These young men are all convinced that England is on the brink of ruin,
and they talk of it in the same tone with which they say that their
cigarette is out, or the wind is in the east. The Throne, the Church,
the Lords, and the Thirty-Nine Articles are all going down pell-mell
next week, and it is very shocking; nevertheless, there is no reason why
they should not be studious of their digestions and very anxious about
the parting of their hair.

It never occurs to them that they and their father's battue-shooting,
pigeon-shooting, absenteeism, clubism, and general preference for every
country except their own, may have had something to do with bringing
about this impending cataclysm. That all the grand old houses standing
empty, or let to strangers, among the rich Herefordshire pastures, the
green Warwickshire woods, the red Devon uplands, the wild Westmoreland
fells, may have also something to do with it, never occurs to them. That
while they are flirting at Aix, wintering at Pau, throwing comfits at
Rome, losing on the red at Monaco, touring in California, or yawning in
Berlin, the demagogue's agents are whispering to the smock-frocks in the
meadows, and pouring the gall of greed and hatred into the amber ale of
the village pothouse, never occurs to them. If any one suggests it, they
stare: "such a beastly climate, you know; nobody can stand it. Live in
the country? Oh, Lord! who could live in the country?"

And then they wonder that Mr. George has replaced Sir Roger de Coverley,
and that Joseph Chamberlain's voice is heard instead of Edmund Burke's.

Their host could kick them with a sensation of considerable
satisfaction. Their neatness, smallness, and self-complacency irritate
him excessively. The bloods of George the Fourth's time at least were
men,--so he says.

"You do these poor boys injustice," says Brandolin. "When they get out
in a desert, or are left to roast and die under the equator, they put
off all their affectations with their starched cambric, and are not
altogether unworthy of their great-grandfathers. Britons are still bad
ones to beat when the trial comes."

"They must leave their constitutions at their clubs, then, and their
nervous system in their hat-boxes," growls Usk. "If you are like those
namby-pamby fellows when you are twenty, Boom, I'll put a bullet through
your head myself," he says to his heir one morning, when that
good-looking and high-spirited boy has come back from Suffolk.

Boom laughs. He is a careless, high-spirited, extravagant lad, and he
does not at present lean towards the masher type. Gordon is in his head;
that is his idea of a man. The country had one hero in this century, and
betrayed him, and honors his betrayer; but the hearts of the boys beat
truer than that of the House of Commons and the New Electorate. They
remember Gordon, with a noble, headlong, quixotic wish to go and do
likewise. That one lonely figure standing out against the yellow light
of the desert may perhaps be as a pharos to the youth of his nation, and
save them from the shipwreck which is nigh.

"Curious type, the young fellows," says Brandolin, musingly. "I don't
think they will keep England what our fathers and grandfathers made it.
I don't think they will, even if Chamberlain and Company will let them,
which they certainly won't."

"Tell you what it is," says Usk, "it all comes of having second horses
hunting, and loaders behind you out shooting."

"You confound cause and effect. The race wouldn't have come to second
horses and men to load if it hadn't degenerated. Second horses and men
to load indicate in England just what pasties of nightingales' tongues,
and garlands of roses, indicated with the Romans,--effeminacy and
self-indulgence. The Huns and the Goths were knocking at their doors,
and Demos and the Débacle are knocking at ours. History repeats itself,
which is lamentable, for its amazing tendency to tell the same tale
again and again makes it a bore.

"I should like to know, by the way," he continues, "why English girls
get taller and taller, stronger and stronger, and are as the very palm
of the desert for vigor and force, whilst the English young man gets
smaller and smaller, slighter and slighter, and has the nerves of an old
maid and the habits of a valetudinarian. It is uncommonly droll; and, if
the disparity goes on increasing, the ladies will not only get the
franchise, but they will carry the male voter to the polling-place on
their shoulders."

"As the French women did their husbands out of some town that
surrendered in some war," said Boom, who was addicted to historical
illustration and never lost occasion to display it.

"They won't carry their _husbands_," murmurs Brandolin. "They'll drive
_them_, and carry somebody else."

"Will they have any husbands at all when they can do as they like?" says
Boom.

"Probably not," says Brandolin. "My dear boy, what an earthly paradise
awaits you when you shall be of mature age, and shall have seen us all
descend one by one into the tomb, with all our social prejudices and
antiquated ways!"

"I dare say he'll be a navvy in New Guinea by that time, and all his
acres here will be being let out by the state at a rack-rent which the
people will call free land," says the father, with a groan.

"Very possible, too," replies Brandolin.

The boy's eyes go thoughtfully towards the landscape beyond the windows,
the beautiful lawns, the smiling gardens, the rolling woods. A look of
resolution comes over his fair frank face.

"They shan't take our lands without a fight for it," he says, with a
flush on his cheeks.

"And the fight will be a fierce one," says Brandolin, with a sigh, "and
I am afraid it is in Mr. Gladstone's 'dim and distant future,'--that is
to say, very near at hand indeed."

"Well, I shall be ready," says the lad. Both his father and Brandolin
are silent, vaguely touched by the look of the gallant and gracious boy,
as he stands there with the sun in his brave blue eyes, and thinking of
the troubled time which will await his manhood in this green old
England, cursed by the spume of wordy demagogues, and hounded on to
envenomed hatreds and causeless discontents, that the professional
politician may fatten on her woes.

What will Boom live to see?

It will be a sorry day for the country when her wooded parks and stately
houses are numbered with the things that are no more.

Brandolin puts his arm over the boy's shoulder, and walks away with him
a little way under the deep boughs of yew.

"Look here, Boom," he says to him, "you won't care to be like those
fellows, but you don't know how hard it is to get out of the fashion of
one's set, to avoid going with the stream of one's contemporaries.
Nobody can say what will be the style of the 'best men' when you're of
age, but I'm much afraid it will still be the Masher. The Masher is not
very vicious, he is often cultured, he is a more harmless animal than he
tries to appear, but he is weak; and we are coming on times, or times
are coming on us, when an English gentleman will want to be very strong
if he is to hold his own and save his country from shame in her old age.
Don't be conventional. Scores of people who would be ashamed to seem
virtuous haven't courage to resist appearing vicious. Don't talk all
that odious slang which is ruining English. Don't get into that stupid
way of counting the days and seasons by steeple-chases,
coursing-meetings, flat-races, and the various different things to be
shot at. Sport is all very well in its place, but Squire Allworthy
beating the turnips with a brace of setters is a different figure to
Lord Newgold sending his hampers of pheasants to Leadenhall. Certainly,
Mr. Bradlaugh has no more right to make a misdemeanor of our
covert-shooting, and put the axe to our home woods, than we have to make
a misdemeanor of his shoes and stockings, or put an axe to his head. But
I think if of our own accord we centred our minds and spent our guineas
less on our preserves, we might be wiser, and if we grudged our woods
less to the hawk and the woodpecker and the owl and the jay, and all the
rest of their native population, we should be wiser still. I never see a
beast or a bird caught or dead in a keeper's trap but that I think to
myself that after all, if we ourselves are caught in the end between the
grinning jaws of anarchy, it will really be only partial justice on our
injustice. Only I fear that it won't better the birds and beasts very
much, even when we all go to prison for the crime of property, and
Bradlaugh will grub up their leafy haunts with a steam plough from
Chicago."




CHAPTER IV.


Meanwhile, let the country be going to the dogs as it may, Surrenden is
full of very gay people, and all its more or less well-matched doves are
cooing at Surrenden, whilst the legitimate partners of their existences
are diverting themselves in other scenes, Highland moors, German baths,
French châteaux, Channel yachting, or at other English country houses.
It is George Usk's opinion that the whole thing is immoral: he is by no
means a moral person himself. His wife, on the contrary, thinks that it
is the only way to have your house liked, and that nobody is supposed to
know anything, and that nothing of that sort matters; she is a woman who
on her own account has never done anything that she would in the least
mind having printed in the _Morning Post_ to-morrow.

"Strange contradiction!" muses Brandolin. "Here is George, who's
certainly no better than he should be, hallooing out for Dame Propriety,
and here's my lady, who's always run as straight as a crow flies, making
an Agapemone of her house to please her friends. To the pure all things
are pure, I suppose; but if purity can stand Mrs. Wentworth Curzon and
Lady Dawlish, I think I shall select my wife from among _les jolies
impures_."

However, he takes care audibly to hold up his hostess's opinions and
condemn her lord's.

"The poor little woman means well, and only likes to be popular," he
reflects; "and we are none of us so sure that we shan't want indulgence
some day."

Brandolin is very easy and elastic in his principles, as becomes a man
of the world; he is even considered by many of his friends a good deal
too lax in all his views; but in the depths of his soul there is a vague
dislike to similar looseness of principle in women. He may have been
glad enough to avail himself of the defect; that is another matter; he
does not like it, does not admire it: licentiousness in a woman seems to
him a fault in her taste; it is as if she wore fur slippers with her
court train. "Of course," he will say, apologetically, "this idea of
mine is born of the absurd English conventionality which sleeps in all
of us; nothing better; an Englishman is always conventional somewhere,
let him live as he will."

He himself is the most unconventional of beings, appalls his county,
terrifies his relations, and irrevocably offends the bishop of his
diocese; he has lived with Arabs, Bohemians, and wild men of the woods,
and believes that he has not such a thing as prejudice about him; yet at
the bottom of his soul there is this absurd feeling born of sheer
conventionality,--he cannot thoroughly like a light-minded woman.
Absurd, indeed, in the times in which his lot is cast! He is quite
ashamed of it.

Dorothy Usk does not favor the modern mode of having relays of guests
for two or three days; she thinks it makes a country house too like an
hotel. She wishes her people to be perfectly well assorted, and then to
stay with her at least a week, even two weeks or three weeks. People do
not often object: Orme, Denton, and Surrenden are all popular places,
and Surrenden is perhaps most popular of all.

"An ideal house," says Brandolin, who would not stay a day where he was
not as free as air.

"It's too much like an hotel," grumbles the master of it, "and an hotel
where the _table-d'hôte_ bell rings to deaf ears. Lord! I remember in my
poor mother's days everybody had to be down to breakfast at nine o'clock
every morning as regularly as if they were charity children, and the
whole lot of 'em were marched off to church on Sunday whether they liked
it or not. The villagers used to line the path across the fields to see
the great folks pass. Now it's as much as ever Dolly can do to get a
woman or two up in time to go with her. How things are changed, by Jove!
And it isn't so very long ago, either."

"The march of intellect, my dear George," says Brandolin; "neither _le
bon Dieu_ nor we are great folks any longer."

"Well, I think it's a pity," sighs Usk. "Everybody was happier then, and
jollier too, though we do tear about so to try and get amused."

"There is still nothing to prevent you going to sleep in the big pew if
it pleases you," replies Brandolin; "and Lawrence Hamilton always goes
that he may look at Mrs. Curzon's profile as she sings: she is really
saintly then. I think Sunday service is to Englishwomen what confession
is to Catholic ladies: it sweeps all the blots off the week's tablets.
It is convenient, if illogical."

"You are very irreligious," says his host, who is invariably orthodox
when orthodoxy doesn't interfere with anything.

"Not more so than most people," says Brandolin. "I have even felt
religious when I have been alone in the savannas or in the jungle. I
don't feel so in a wooden box covered with red velvet, with a curate
bawling in my ears about the hewing in pieces of Agag."

"That's nothing to do with it," says Usk: "we're bound to set an
example."

"That's why you doze in public, and Mrs. Curzon wears her big pearls, to
lead the school-children in the way they should go."

"That's nothing to do with it," repeats Lord Usk, somewhat crossly. He
has a comfortable if indistinct idea that he does something patriotic,
patriarchal, and highly praiseworthy in getting up an hour earlier than
usual one Sunday out of three, and putting on a tall hat, a frock-coat,
and a pair of new gloves, to attend the village church for morning
service when he is at Orme, Denton, or Surrenden in fine weather.

If he sleeps, what of that? There are curtains to the pew, and nobody
sees him except the Babe, who takes fiendish rapture in catching big
flies and releasing them from a careful little hand to alight on his
father's forehead or nose. The Babe would define the Sunday morning as a
horrid bore tempered by blue-bottles.

"What a curiously conventional mind is the English mind!" thinks
Brandolin, when he is alone. "Carlisle is right: the gig is its
standard. The gig is out of fashion as a vehicle, but the national mind
remains the same as in the age of gigs,--content with the outside of
things, clinging to the husk, to the shell, to the outward appearance,
and satisfied with these. My dear friend puts on his chimney-pot, then
takes it off and snores in his pew, and thinks that he has done
something holy which will sustain both Church and State, as he thinks
that he prays when he buries his face in his hat and creases his
trousers on a hassock! Mysterious consolations of the unfathomable human
breast!"




CHAPTER V.


A few new people have come by the brake, and make their appearance at
luncheon. More come by the five-o'clock train, and are visible at
six-o'clock tea, which is always to be had in the library any time
before seven: dinner at all the Usk houses is always at nine.
Brandolin's doctrines do not prevail with any of his acquaintances,
although he, unlike most professors, emphasizes them by example.

Among the people who come by the latter train are the famous Mr.
Wootton, a man very famous at London dinner-parties, and Lady Gundrede
Vansittart, whose dinners are the best in London.

"Where would those two people be if you brought the pulse and the rice
you recommend into fashion?" says their host to Brandolin. "Take 'em
away from the table, they'd be good for nothing. He wouldn't say 'Bo' to
a goose, and she wouldn't be worth leaving a card upon. Believe me, my
dear Guy, such _esprit_ as there is left in us is only brought out by
eating."

"I think you invert all your reasonings," says Brandolin. "Say rather,
that too much eating has destroyed all _esprit_. Don't we eat all day
long everywhere, or at least are expected to do so? You lament your
ruined digestion. It is impossible to digest when time is only counted
by what our beloved Yankees call square meals (why square I fail to
fathom), and for women it is worse than for us, because they eat such
quantities of sweet things we don't touch, and then the way they go in
for caviare bread-and-butter, and anchovy sandwiches, and all kinds of
rich cakes, and _deux doigts de Madère_ or glasses of kümmel at the
tea-hour,--it is frightful! I wonder they have any complexions at all
left, even with the assistance of all the '_secrets de Vénus_.'"

"You won't alter 'em, my dear fellow," replies Usk, "if you put yourself
out about it ever so much. If you were to marry a savage out of Formosa,
or an Esquimaux, she'd take kindly to the caviare and the kümmel before
a week was out, if you brought her to Europe. Why, look at dogs,--you
may keep 'em on biscuit and tripe if they live in the kennels, but if
they once come to the dining-room they'll turn their noses up at a
beef-steak if it isn't truffled!"

"Dogs, at least, stop short of the kümmel," says Brandolin; "but if you
were to put together the sherry, the dry champagne, the liqueurs at tea,
the brandy in the _chasse_ at dinner, which a fashionable woman takes in
the course of the day (not counting any pick-me-up that she may require
in her own room), the amount would be something enormous,--incredible!
You would not believe the number of women who have cured me of an
unhappy passion for them by letting me see what a lot they could drink."

"You will adore the Sabaroff, then. She never touches anything that I
see, except tea."

"Admirable person! I am ready to adore her. Tell me more about her. By
the way, who is she?"

"Oh, you must go to Dolly for biographies of her foreigners. I can't
keep even their names in my head."

"Foreigners! What an expression!" cries Dorothy Usk, in disdain. "Since
steam effaced frontiers, nobody but insular people like ourselves ever
use such a term. Nationalities are obliterated."

She is very fond of Xenia Sabaroff: she has a great many warm
attachments to women who help to make her house attractive.

"Nationalities are still discernible in different tobaccos," murmurs
Brandolin. "The Havana won't acknowledge an equal in the Cavour."

"Dolly don't know anything about her," continues Usk, clinging to the
subject.

"Oh, my dear!" cried his wife, shocked, "when she is the niece of the
great Chancellor and her mother was a Princess Dourtza."

"You don't know anything about her," repeats Usk, with that unpleasant
obstinacy characteristic of men when they talk to their wives. "You met
her in Vienna and took one of your crazes for her, and she may have sent
a score of lovers to Siberia, or deserve to go there herself, for
anything you can tell. One can never be sure of anything about
foreigners."

"How absurd you are, and how _insular_!" cries Dorothy Usk, again.
"'Foreigners!' As if there were any foreigners in these days, when
Europe is like one family!"

"A family which, like most families, squabbles and scratches pretty
often, then," says Usk,--which seems to his wife a reply too vulgar to
be worthy of contradiction. He is conscious that Xenia Sabaroff is a
very great lady, and that her quarterings, backed by descent and
alliance, are wholly irreproachable,--indeed, written in that _libro
d'oro_, the "Almanach de Gotha," for all who choose to read.

Her descent and her diamonds are alike immaculate, but her
character?--he is too old-fashioned a Briton not to think it very
probable that there is something _louche_ there.

Usk is a Russophobist, as becomes a true Tory. He has a rooted
impression that all Russians are spies when they are not swindlers; much
as in the early years of the century his grandsire had been positive
that all Frenchmen were assassins when they were not dancing-masters.
The White Czar has replaced the Petit Caporal, and the fur cap the
cocked hat, in the eyes of Englishmen of Usk's type, as an object of
dread and detestation. He would never be in the least surprised if it
turned out that the real object of Madame Sabaroff's visit to Surrenden
were to have possible opportunities to examine the facilities of
Weymouth as a landing-place for Cossacks out of Muscovite corvettes.

"Russians are tremendous swells at palaver," he says, with much
contempt, "gammon you no end if you like to believe 'em: they've always
some political dodge or other behind it all."

"I don't say she isn't an agreeable woman," he continues, now:
his admiration of Madame Sabaroff is much mitigated by his sense
that she has a rather derisive opinion of himself. "I don't say
she isn't an agreeable woman, but she gives me the idea of
artificiality,--insincerity,--mystery."

"Just because she's a Russian!" cries his wife, with disdain.

"My dear George," observes Brandolin, "there are preconceived ideas
about all nationalities. As a rule, they are completely false. The
received Continental idea is that an Englishman is a bluff, blunt,
unpleasant, opinionated person, very cross, very clean too it is true,
but on the strength of his tub and his constitution despising all the
rest of mankind. Now, how completely absurd such an opinion is! You
yourself are an example of the _suaviter in modo, fortiter in re_, of
which the true-blue Briton always gives so admirable an example."

Usk laughs, but sulkily; he has the impression that his beloved friend
is making fun of him, but he is not quite sure. He himself believes that
he is an ideal Englishman; Brandolin is only half or a quarter of one,
he does not shoot, wears furs in winter, only drinks very light Rhenish
wine, never goes to any church, and never cuts his hair very short.
Added to this, he has no fixed political opinion, except a general
impression that England and the world in general are going down-hill as
fast as they can, "tobogganing" as they say in Canada, at the rate of
fifty miles a minute, to land in the slough of Socialism and be picked
out of it by some military despot,--democracy invariably ending in
absolutism.

"What ridiculous rubbish!" says his wife. "You might as well say that
the _demoiselles-mannequins_ at Worth's or Rodrigue's are conspiring for
the Orleanists when they try on my clothes."

"They are conspiring for the ruin of your family," says Usk, with a
groan. "Whose purse can stand those Paris prices?"

"What an irrelevant remark!" cries Lady Usk. "You are always dragging
money-questions into everything."

"Those _faiseurs_, as you call 'em," continues Usk, unheeding, "are at
the root of half the misery of society. Women get into debt up to their
eyes for their toilets, and they don't care what abomination they do if
they get enough out of it to go on plunging. Hundred-guinea gowns soon
make up a pretty total when you change 'em three times a day."

"And if women are guys aren't the men furious?" asks his wife. "Even if
they try to economize, aren't they always taunted with being dowdies?
You none of you know anything about the cost of things, and you expect
everybody to be _bien mise_ on a halfpenny a day. When Boom saw me at
Ascot this year he stared at me, and whispered to me, 'Oh, I say,
mother! you've got the same bonnet on you had at the Oaks. I do hope the
other fellows won't notice it.' That is how he will speak to his wife
some day; and yet I dare say, like you, he will expect her to get her
bonnets from Virot at ten francs apiece!"

Lady Usk is angry and roused.

"Look at my poor little sister," she goes on. "What a life that brute
Mersey leads her about money! All those dreadfully plain girls to dress,
and nothing to do it on, and yet if they are not all well got up
wherever they go to, he swears he is ashamed to be seen with them. You
can't dress well, you can't do anything well, without spending money;
and if you haven't money you must get into debt. That is as clear as
that two and two are four. When ever do men remember their own
extravagances? You smoke ten cigars a day; your cigars cost a shilling
or eighteenpence each,--that is ten or fifteen shillings a day; five
pounds a week, not counting your cigarettes! Good heavens! five pounds a
week for sheer silly personal indulgence that your doctors tell you will
canker your tongue and dry up your gastric juice! At all events, our
toilets don't hurt our digestion; and what would the world look like if
women weren't well dressed in it? Your cigars benefit nobody, and only
make your teeth yellow."

"Well, in a year they cost about what one ball-gown does that's worn
twice."

"I always wear mine three times, even in London," says Dorothy Usk, with
conscious virtue. "But I don't see any sin in spending money. I think it
ought to be spent. But you are always dragging money-questions into
everything, and Boom says that the Latin person whom you and Lord
Brandolin are always quoting declares most sensibly that money should
always be regarded as a means, never as an end; and if it is to be a
means to anything, must not it be spent before it can become so?"

"That's neither here nor there," replies her lord; "and if Boom only
reads his classics upside down like that he'd better leave 'em alone."

"You are never content. Most men would be delighted if a boy read _at
all_."

"I don't know why, I'm sure," replies Usk, drearily. "Reading's going
out, you know; nobody'll read at all fifty years hence: poking about in
guinea-pigs' stomachs, and giving long names to insects out of the
coal-hole, is what they call education nowadays."

"Frederic Harrison has said very aptly," remarks Brandolin, who is
present at this conjugal colloquy, and seeks to make a diversion on it,
"that the boast of science is to send the Indian mails across seas and
deserts in nine days, but that science cannot put in those mail-bags a
single letter equal to Voltaire's or Sévigné's, and he doubts very much
that there is one."

"It's an ill bird that fouls its own nest," says Usk, grimly: "still,
I'm very glad if those scientific prigs fall out among themselves."

"I think some people write charming letters still," says Dorothy Usk.
"Of course when one is in a hurry--and one is almost always in a
hurry----"

"Hurry is fatal, Lady Usk," says Brandolin. "It destroys style, grace,
and harmony. It is the curse of our times. The most lovely thing in life
is leisure; and we call it progress to have killed it."

"Read this letter," says his hostess, giving him one which she holds in
her hand. "There is nothing private in it, and nothing wonderful, but
there is a grace in the expressions; whilst the English, for a
foreigner, is absolutely marvellous."

"I thought there were no foreigners?" says Usk. "I thought steam had
effaced nationalities?"

His wife does not deign to reply.

Brandolin has taken the letter with hesitation. "Do you really think I
may read it?"

"When I tell you to do so," says Dolly Usk, impatiently. "Besides, there
is nothing in it, only it is pretty."

Brandolin reads; it is on very thick paper, almost imperceptibly
scented, with a princess's crown embossed on it and a gold X.

     "It is very kind of you, dear Lady Usk, to have remembered a
     _solitaire_ like myself in the midst of your charming children and
     your many joys." ("My many annoyances, she means," interpolates
     Lady Usk.) "I will be with you, as you so amiably wish, next
     Tuesday or Wednesday. I am for the moment in Paris, having been
     this month at Aix, not that I have any aches or pains myself, but a
     friend of mine, Marie Woronszoff, has many, and tries to cure them
     by warm sunshine and the cold douches which her physicians
     prescribe. There are many pleasant people here; every one is
     supposed to be very ill and suffering agony, but every one laughs,
     flirts, plays, sits under the little tents under the trees, dances
     at the Casino, and eats a fair dinner as usual, so that if Pallida
     Mors be indeed among us she looks just like every one else. I came
     to Aix from my own place on the White Sea, and the gay groups, the
     bright alleys, the green embowered chalets, and the goatherds with
     their flocks which come tinkling their bells down the hill-sides in
     all directions, all seemed to me like an operetta of Offenbach's,
     spiritualized and washed with the pure daylight and the
     mountain-air, but still Offenbach. How are your children? Do they
     still care for me? That is very sweet of them. A day at their years
     is as long as a season at mine. Assure them of my unforgetting
     gratitude. I shall be pleased to be in England again, and, though I
     do not know Surrenden, my recollections of Orme tell me _d'avance_
     that I shall in any house of yours find the kindest of friends, the
     most sympathetic of companions. Say many things to your lord for
     me. I think he is only so discontented because the gods have been
     too good to him and given him too completely everything he can
     desire." ("That's all _she_ knows about it!" says Usk, _sotto
     voce_.) "_Au revoir_, dear Lady Usk. Receive the assurance of my
     highest consideration, and believe in my sincere regard. _Bien à
     vous._--XENIA P. SABAROFF."

"A very pretty letter," says Brandolin. "Many thanks." And he restores
it to its owner.

"Bunkum!" says Usk.

"Not a bit in the world," says his wife, with contempt and indignation.
"_She_ does not 'pose,' if you do!"

"My dear George," says Brandolin, "you are one of those thorough-going
Britons who always think that everybody who doesn't deal in disagreeable
remarks must be lying. Believe me, there are people who really see 'the
side that's next the sun,'--even in a crab-apple."

"And deuced irritating, too, they are," says Usk, with emphasis. "'What
a beastly bad day,' one says to 'em when it's pouring cats and dogs, and
they answer, 'Oh, yes, but rain was so wanted we must be thankful.'
That's the kind of answer that would make a saint swear."

"You are not a saint, and you swear on small provocation," replies
Brandolin. "To look at rain in that light argues true philosophy.
Unfortunately, philosophy is too often strained to bursting in our
climate, by having to contemplate rain destroying the crops. If we only
had rain when we wanted it, I think the most unreasonable among us would
view it with equanimity."

Rain is at that moment running down the painted panes of the Surrenden
casements, and driving across the lawns and terraces of the Surrenden
gardens. It makes Usk very cross: all the ensilage in the world will not
console him for ripening corn beaten down in all directions, and young
families of pheasants dying of cramp and pip in their ferny homes.

"Dig a big pit and cram your soaked grass into it: very well, I don't
say no," he growls. "But what about your mildewed wheat? And where
should we be if we had to undergo a blockade? I'm not against making
more pasture, grazing's all very well; but if there's a war big enough
to sweep the seas of the grain-ships that come to us from the Colonies
and the United States, where shall we be if we've nothing to eat but our
own beef and mutton? Beef and mutton are solid food, but I believe we
should all go mad on them if we'd no bread to eat too."

"I'm all for pasture," replies Brandolin; "and as the British Isles can
never, under any cultivation whatever, feed all their population, we may
as well dedicate ourselves to what is picturesque. I am fascinated by
Laveleye's portrait of England when she shall have turned grazier
exclusively: it is lovely: 'L'Angleterre redeviendra ce qu'elle était
sous les Tudors, un grand parc vert, parsemé d'ormes et de chênes, où
b[oe]ufs et moutons se promeneront dans des prairies sans limites.'"

"'Prairies sans limites?' when the land's to be all sliced up in little
bits between peasant proprietors!" says Usk.

"I don't think Laveleye believes in peasant proprietors, though he is a
professor of social economy."

"Social economy!" says Usk, with a groan. "Oh, I know that fool of a
word! In plain English, it means ruin all round, and fortune for a few
d----d manufacturers."

"The d----d manufacturer is the principal outcome of two thousand
centuries of Christianity, civilization, and culture. The result is not
perfectly satisfactory or encouraging, one must admit," says Brandolin,
as he reaches down a volume of eighteenth-century memoirs, and adds,
with entire irrelevancy to manufacturers or memoirs, "Is she really as
handsome as your children tell me?"

"Who?" asks Usk. "Oh, the Russian woman: yes, very good-looking. Yes,
she was here at Easter, and she turned their heads."

"Has she any lovers older than Babe?"

"She has left 'em in Russia if she has."

"A convenient distance to leave anything at: Italy and Russia are the
only countries remaining to us in which Messalina can still do her
little murders comfortably without any fuss being made."

"She isn't Messalina, at least I think not. But one never knows."

"No, one never knows till one tries," says Brandolin. And he wishes
vaguely that the Russian woman were already here. He is fond of
Surrenden, and fond of all its people, but he is a little, a very
little, bored. He sees that all Lady Usk's doves are paired, and he does
not wish to disturb their harmony, possibly because none of the feminine
doves attract him. But he cannot flirt forever with the children,
because the children are not very often visible, and without flirting
civilized life is dull, even for a man who is more easily consoled by
ancient authors off the library-shelves than most people can be.

This conversation occurs in the forenoon in Lady Usk's boudoir. In the
late afternoon in the library over their teacups the ladies talk of
Xenia Sabaroff. It is perceptible to Brandolin that they would prefer
that she should not arrive.

"Is she really so very good-looking?" he asks of Mrs. Wentworth Curzon.

"Oh, yes," replies that lady, with an accent of depreciation in her
tones. "Yes, she is very handsome; but too pale, and her eyes too large.
You know those Russian women are mere _paquets de nerfs_, shut up in
their rooms all day and smoking so incessantly: they have all that is
worst in the Oriental and Parisienne mixed together."

"How very sad!" says Brandolin. "I don't think I have known one, except
Princess Kraskawa: she went sleighing in all weathers, wore the frankest
of gingerbread wigs, and was always surrounded by about fifty
grandchildren."

Princess Kraskawa had been for many years ambassadress in London.

"Of course there are exceptions," says Nina Curzon; "but generally, you
know, they are very depraved, such inordinate gamblers, and so fond of
morphine, and always _maladives_."

"Ah," says Brandolin, pensively, "but the physical and moral perfection
of Englishwomen always makes them take too high a standard: poor
humanity toils hopelessly, and utterly exhausted, many miles behind
them."

"Don't talk nonsense," says Mrs. Curzon; "we are no better than our
neighbors, perhaps, but we are not afraid of the air, we don't heat our
houses to a thousand degrees above boiling-point, we don't gamble,--at
least not much,--and we don't talk every language under the sun except
our own, and yet not one of them grammatically."

"Decidedly," reflects Brandolin, "Lawrence must have looked too often at
Madame Sabaroff."

"Sabaroff is dead, isn't he?" he asked, aloud. "You know I have been out
of society for a year: the whole map of Europe gets altered in one's
absence."

"Sabaroff was shot in a duel four years ago," replies Mrs. Curzon,--"a
duel about her."

"What a fortunate woman! To get rid of a husband, and to get rid of him
in such interesting circumstances! _C'est le comble de bonheur!_"

"That depends. With her it resulted in her exile from court."

"Oh, to be sure; when Russians are naughty they are sent to live on
their estates, as riotous children are dismissed to the nursery. Was she
compromised, then?"

"Very much compromised; and both men were killed, for the adversary of
Sabaroff had been wounded mortally, when, with an immense effort, he
fired, and shot the prince through the lungs."

"A pretty little melodrama. Who was the opponent?"

"Count Lustoff, a colonel of the Guard. I wonder you did not hear of it:
it made a stir at the time."

"I may have heard: when one doesn't know the people concerned, no
massacre, even of the Innocents, makes any impression on one. And the
result was that the lady had to leave the imperial court?"

"Yes: they do draw a line _there_."

Brandolin laughs; it tickles his fancy to hear Mrs. Wentworth Curzon
condemning by implication the laxity of the court of St. James.

"They can't send _us_ to our estates," he replies, "the lands are so
small and the railways are so close. Else it would have a very good
effect if all our naughty people could be shut up inside their own
gates, with nobody to speak to but the steward and the rector. Can you
imagine anything that would more effectively contribute to correct
manners and morals? But how very desolate London would look!"

"You think everybody would be exiled inside his own ring-fence!"

"_Her_ own ring-fence,--well, nearly everybody. There would certainly be
no garden-parties at Marlborough House."

Mrs. Wentworth Curzon is not pleased; she is a star of the first
magnitude at Marlborough House.

"Why does she take this absent woman's character away?" thinks
Brandolin, with a sense of irritation. "I will trust the Babe's
instincts sooner than hers."

He does not know Xenia Sabaroff; but he admires the photograph of her
which stands on the boudoir table, and he likes the tone of the letter
written from Aix. With that spirit of contradiction which is inborn in
human nature, he is inclined to disbelieve all that Nina Curzon has told
him. Lustoff and Sabaroff probably both deserved their fates, and the
departure from the court of St. Petersburg might very possibly have been
voluntary. He has a vague feeling of tenderness for the original of the
photograph. It often happens to him to fall sentimentally and
ephemerally in love with some unknown woman whose portrait he has seen
or of whose charms he has heard. Sometimes he has avoided knowing these
in their actual life, lest he should disturb his ideals. He is an
imaginative man with a great amount of leisure in which to indulge his
fancies, and his knowledge of the world has not hardened his feelings or
dulled his fancy. There is something of the Montrose, of the Lord
Surrey, in him.

"To think of all one knows about that hussy," he muses, as he smokes a
cigar in his bedroom before dressing for dinner. By the uncomplimentary
epithet he means Mrs. Wentworth Curzon. "Such a good fellow as Fred
Curzon is, too, a man who might have been made anything of if she'd only
treated him decently. When he married her he adored the ground she
walked on, but before a week was out she began to fret him, and jar at
him, and break him in, as she called it; he was too poor for her, and
too slow for her, and too good for her, and she was vilely cruel to
him,--it's only women who can be cruel like that, she's had more lovers
than anybody living, and she's taken every one of 'em for money; nothing
but money. Old Melton gave her the Park-Lane House, and Glamorgan gave
her her emeralds, and Dartmoor paid her Paris bills for ten years, and
Riverston takes all her stable-expenses. Everything she does is done for
money; and if she puts any heart at all now into this thing with
Lawrence, it is only because she's getting older and so getting
jealous,--they always do as they get on,--and then she calls Russians
dissolute and depraved, good Lord!"

With which he casts aside his cigar, and resigns himself to his
servant's hands as the second gong sounds.




CHAPTER VI.


The very bachelor rooms at Surrenden are conducive to revery and
indolence, cosily comfortable and full of little attentions for the
guest's _bien-être_, among which there is a printed paper which is
always laid on the dressing-table in every room at this house: it
contains the latest telegrams of public news, which come every afternoon
from a London news-agency.

"I dare say to the political fellows they are delightful," reflects
Brandolin, as he glances down the lines, "but to me they unpleasantly
recall an uncomfortable world. I don't dine the worse, certainly, for
knowing that there is a revolution in Patagonia or an earthquake in
Bolivia, but neither do I dine the better for being told that the French
government is _destituant_ all moderate prefets in favor of immoderate
ones. It is very interesting, no doubt, but it doesn't interest me, and
I think the possession of these fresh scraps of prosaic news spoils
dinner-conversation."

Brandolin does not consider it conversation to say, "Have you seen
so-and-so?" or, "What a sad thing such-and-such is, isn't it!" He likes
persiflage, he likes banter, he likes argument, he likes antithesis, he
likes brilliancy, and the dinner-tables of the epoch seldom offer these
good things with their Metternich hock and Mouton Rothschild. He is fond
of talking himself, and he can be also a very good listener. If you
cannot give the _quid quo pro_ in hearing as in speaking, you may be
immensely clever, but you will be immediately pronounced a bore, like
Macaulay and Madame de Staël. Brandolin likes talking not for the sake
of showing himself off, but for the sake of being amused, of eliciting
the opinions and observing the minds of others, and he is convinced that
if the conversational art were cultured as it used to be in Bourbon
Paris, life would become more refined, more agreeable, more sympathetic,
and less given over to gross pleasures of the appetites.

"Children should be taught to talk," he observes one day to Lady Usk,
"and they should not be allowed to be slovenly in their speech any more
than in their dress. You would not let them enter your presence with
unbrushed hair, but you do let them use any bald, slangy, or
inappropriate words which come uppermost to them. There is so much in
the choice of words! A beautiful voice is a delicious thing, but it
avails little without the usage of apt and graceful phrases. Did you
ever hear Mrs. Norton sustain a discussion or relate an anecdote? It was
like listening to perfect phrasing in music. When she died, the art of
conversation died with her."

"We are always in such a hurry," says Lady Usk, which is her habitual
explanation of anything in which her generation is at fault. "And hurry
is always vulgar, you know, as you said the other day: it cannot help
itself."

"You are a purist, my dear Brandolin," says Lady Dolgelly, who hates
him.

"'Purity, daughter of sweet virtues mild!'" murmurs Brandolin. "Alas, my
dear ladies, I cannot hope that she dwells with _me_ in any form! When
she has a home in your own gentle breasts, who can hope that she would
ever take shelter in a man's?"

"How impertinent and how nasty he is!" thinks the lady; and she detests
him a little more cordially than before. There is not a very good
feeling towards him among any of the ladies at Surrenden: he does not
make love to them, he does not endeavor to alter existing arrangements
in his favor; it is generally felt that he would not care to do so. What
can you expect from a man who sits half his days in a library?

The Surrenden library is well stored, an elegant and lettered lord of
the eighteenth century having been a bibliophile. It is a charming room,
panelled with inlaid woods, and with a ceiling painted after Tiepolo;
the bookcases are built into the wall, so that the books look _chez
eux_, and are not mere lodgers or visitors; oriel windows look out on to
a portion of the garden laid out by Beaumont. One window has been cut
down to the ground, an anachronism and innovation indeed, somewhat
impairing the uniformity of the room. The present Lady Usk had it done,
but one forgives her the sacrilege when one feels how pleasant it is to
walk out from the mellow shadows of the library on to the smooth-shaven
grass and gather a rose with one hand whilst holding an
eighteenth-century author with the other.

It is in the smaller library adjacent, filled with modern volumes, that
five-o'clock tea is always to be had, with all the abundant demoralizing
abominations of caviare, kümmel, etc. It is a gay room, with
_dessus-des-portes_ after Watteau and every variety of couch and of
lounging-chair. "Reading made easy" somebody calls it. But there is
little reading done either in it or in the big library: Brandolin when
he goes there finds himself usually alone, and can commune as he chooses
with Latin philosophy and Gaulois wit.

"You _used_ to read, George?" he says to his host, in expostulation.

"Yes, I used,--ages ago," says Usk, with a yawn.

Brandolin looks at him with curiosity.

"I can understand a man who has never read," he replies, "but I cannot
understand a man losing the taste for reading if he has ever had it. One
can dwell contented in B[oe]otia if one has never been out of it, but to
go back to B[oe]otia after living in Attica----"

"It's one's life does it."

"What life? One has the life one wishes."

"That's the sort of thing a man says who hasn't married."

"My dear George, you cannot pretend your wife would prevent your reading
Latin and Greek, or even Sanscrit. I am sure she would much sooner you
read them than--well, than do other things you do do."

"I don't say she would prevent me," returns the lord of Surrenden, with
some crossness, "but it's the kind of life one gets into that kills all
that sort of thing in one. There is no time for it."

"I keep out of the life: why don't you?"

"There's no time for anything," says Usk, gloomily. "There's such heaps
of things to see to, and such numbers of places to go to, and then one
lives _au jour le jour_, and one gets into the swim and goes on, and
then there's the shooting, and when there isn't the shooting there's the
season, and the racing."

"I lead my own life," Brandolin remarks.

"Yes; but you don't mind being called eccentric."

"No; I don't mind it in the least. If they say nothing worse of me I am
grateful."

"But you couldn't do it if you had all my places, and all my houses, and
all my brothers, and all my family. You're a free agent. I declare that
all the time goes away with me in such a crowd of worries that I've
hardly a second to smoke a cigarette in, in any peace!"

Brandolin smiles.

A sixth part of most days his host passes leaning back in some
easy-chair with a cigar in his mouth, whether his venue be Surrenden,
Orme, Denton, the smoking-room of a club, or the house of a
friend,--whether London or the country. Usk's own view of himself is of
a man entirely devoted to, and sacrificed to, business, politics, the
management of his estates, and the million-and-one affairs which
perpetually assail him; but this is not the view which his friends take
of him.

When ever is the view that our friends take of us our view?

"Once a scholar always a scholar, it seems to me," says Brandolin. "I
could as soon live without air as without books." And he quotes
Cowley,--

    "Books should as business entertain the light."

"You don't continue the quotation," says Usk, with a smile.

"_Autres temps autres m[oe]urs_," says Brandolin. He laughs, and gets
up: it is four in the afternoon; the delicious green garden is lying
bathed in warm amber light; one of the peacocks is turning round slowly
with all his train displayed; he seems never to tire of turning round.

"How exactly that bird is like some politicians one could name!" says
Brandolin. "Do you know that this charming garden always reminds me of
St. Hubert's Lea,--our west garden, I mean? I think the same man must
have laid them out. Is it not Bulwer Lytton who says that so long as one
has a garden one always has one room which is roofed by heaven?"

"A heaven mitigated by gardeners' wages,--very considerably mitigated,"
says Usk.

"You are cynical, George, and your mind is running on pounds, shillings,
and pence,--an offence against Nature on such a day as this. There is
nothing so demoralizing as to think of money."

"To have debts and not to think of 'em is more so; and Boom----"

"Sell something of his that he likes very much, to pay his debts: that's
the only way I know of to check a boy at the onset. Your father did it
with me the very first time I owed twenty pounds; and he read me a
lesson I never forgot. I have been eternally obliged to him ever since."

"What did he sell?"

"My cob,--a cob I adored. I wept like a child, but he didn't see my
tears. What I saved up next half to trace out that cob and buy him back
at twice his value,--what I denied myself to make up the money,--nobody
would believe; and the beast wasn't easy to find: some dealer had taken
him over to Ireland."

"That could be done with you," says Usk, gloomily. "It would be no use
to do it with Boom: his mother would buy him some other horse the next
day. You've no chance to bring up a boy decently if he's got a mother!"

"The reverse is the received opinion of mankind," said Brandolin; "but I
believe there's something to be said for your view. No end of women have
no idea of bringing up their children, and when they ought to be ordered
a flogging they fondle them."

"Dolly does," says her husband. "What's a woman's notion of a horse?
That he must have slender legs, a coat like satin, and be fed on apples
and sugar: still, they saw his mouth till he half dislocates his neck,
and tear his ribs open with their spur. They're just as unreasonable
with their children."

"Who is _that_ woman?" says Brandolin, making a step across the window
and into the garden. "Now I am perfectly certain that is Madame
Sabaroff, without your saying so."

"Then I needn't say so," replies Usk. "I wonder when she came. They
didn't expect her till to-morrow."

They both look at a lady in one of the distant alleys walking between
the high green walls. She is dressed in some soft cream-colored stuff
with quantities of lace. She carries a sunshade of the same hue. She has
a tall cane in her other hand. On either side of her are the Ladies
Alexandra and Hermione, and before her gambols in his white sailor
clothes, with his blue silk stockings and his silver-buckled shoes, the
Babe.

"Decidedly the Sabaroff," says Usk. "Won't you come and speak to her?"

"With pleasure," says Brandolin. "Even if the Babe brains me with the
cane!"

He looks very well as he walks bareheaded over the grass and along the
green alley; he wears a loose brown velvet coat admirably made, and
brown breeches and stockings; his legs are as well made as his coat; the
sun shines on his curling hair; there is a _dégagé_, picturesque,
debonair, yet distinguished look about him, which pleases the eyes of
Xenia Sabaroff, as they watch him draw near.

"Who is that person with your father?" she asks. The children tell her,
all speaking at once.

She recognizes the name; she has heard of him often in the world, and
has read those books which praise solitude and a dinner of herbs. "I
doubt his having been alone very long, however," she reflects, as she
looks at him. A certain unlikeness in him to Englishmen in general, some
women who are fond of him fancifully trace to the fact that the first
Brandolin was a Venetian, who fled for his life from the Republic, and
made himself conspicuous and acceptable for his talents alike as a
lutist and a swordsman at the court of Henry the Second. "It can't
count, it's so very far away," he himself objects; but perhaps it does
count. Of all things ineffaceable, the marks of race are the most
indelible.

The Venetian Brandolin married the daughter of a Norman knight, and his
descendants became affectionate sons of England, and held their lands of
St. Hubert's Lea safely under the wars of the Roses, of the
Commonwealth, and of the Jacobites. They were always noticeable for
scholarly habits and artistic tastes, and in the time of George the
Second the Lord Brandolin of the period did much to enrich his family
mansion and diminish the family fortunes by his importations of Italian
sculptures and pictures and his patronage of Italian musicians. The
house at St. Hubert's Lea is very beautiful, but it requires much more
to keep it up than the present owner possesses. He is often urged to let
it, but he scouts the idea. "You might as well ask me to sell the
Brandolin portraits, like Charles Surface," he says, angrily, whenever
his more intimate friends venture on the suggestion. So the old house
stands in its warm-hued and casket-like loveliness, empty, save for his
occasional visits and the presence of many old and devoted servants.

"An interesting woman," he thinks now, as he exchanges with the Princess
Sabaroff the usual compliments and commonplaces of a presentation.
"Russians are always interesting: they are the only women about whom you
feel that you know very little; they are the only women who, in this
chatterbox of a generation _tout en dehors_ as it is, preserve some of
the vague charm of mystery; and what a charm that is!"

His reasons for admiring her are not those of the Babe and his sisters,
but he admires her almost as much as they. Brandolin, who in his remote
travels has seen a great deal of that simple nature which is so much
lauded by many people, has a great appreciation of well-dressed women,
and the Madame Sabaroff is admirably dressed, from her long loose
cream-colored gloves to her bronze shoes with their miniature diamond
clasps.

"Didn't I tell you?" whispers the Babe, climbing up behind Brandolin.

"Yes, you did," returned Brandolin, "and you were quite right; but it is
abominably bad manners to whisper, my dear Cecil."

The Babe subsides into silence with hot cheeks when anybody calls him
Cecil he is conscious that he has committed some flagrant offence.

"Those brats are always bothering you, princess," says their father.

"They are very kind to me," replies Xenia Sabaroff, in English which has
absolutely no foreign accent. "They make me feel at home! What a
charming place this is! I like it better than your castle--what is its
name?--where I had the pleasure to visit you at Easter."

"Orme. Oh, that's beastly,--a regular barn: obliged to go there just for
show, you know."

"Orme was built by Inigo Jones, and the ingratitude to fortune of its
owner is a constant temptation to Providence to deal in thunder-bolts,
or have matches left about by housemaids," says Brandolin.

"I think Lord Usk has not a contented mind," says Madame Sabaroff,
amused.

"Contented! By Jove, who should be, when England's going to the dogs as
fast as she can?"

"In every period of your history," says the princess, "your country is
always described as going headlong to ruin; and yet she has not gone
there yet, and she has not done ill."

"'Our constitution is established on a mere equipoise, with dark
precipices and deep waters all around it.' So said Burke," replies
Brandolin. "At the present moment everybody has forgotten the delicacy
of this nice equipoise, and one day or other it will lose its balance
and topple over into the deep waters, and be engulfed. Myself, I confess
I do not think that time is very distant."

"I hope it is; I am very much attached to England," replies the Princess
Xenia, gravely, "and to naughty English boys," she adds, passing her
hand over the shining locks of the Babe.

"She must be in love with an Englishman," thinks Brandolin, with the
one-sided construction which a man is always ready to place on the words
of a woman. "Must we go in-doors?" he asks, regretfully, as she is
moving towards the house. "It is so pleasant in these quaint green
arbors. To be under a roof on such a summer afternoon as this, is to fly
in the face of a merciful Creator with greater ingratitude than Usk's
ingratitude to Inigo Jones."

"But I have scarcely seen my hostess," says Madame Sabaroff;
nevertheless, she resigns herself to a seat in a yew-tree cut like a
helmet.

There are all manner of delightful old-fashioned flowers, such flowers
as Disraeli gave to the garden of Corisande, growing near in groups
encircled by clipped box-edging.

Those disciples of Pallas Athene who render the happy lives of the
Surrenden children occasionally a burden to them seize at that moment on
their prey and bear them off to the school-room. The Babe goes to his
doom sullenly; he would be tearful, only that were too unmanly.

"Why do you let those innocents be tortured, George?" asks Brandolin.

    "Books should, like business, entertain the day,"

replies Usk: "so you said, at least, just now. Their governesses are of
the same opinion."

"That is not the way to make them love books, to shut them up against
their wills on a summer afternoon."

"How will you educate your children when you have 'em, then?"

"He always gets out of any impersonal argument by putting some personal
question," complains Brandolin to Madame Sabaroff. "It is a common
device, but always an unworthy one. Because a system is very bad, it
does not follow that I alone of all men must be prepared with a better
one. I think if I had children I would not have them taught in that way
at all. I should get the wisest old man I could find, a Samuel Johnson
touched with a John Ruskin, and should tell him to make learning
delightful to them, and associated, as far as our detestable climate
would allow, with open-air studies in cowslip meadows and under hawthorn
hedges. If I had only read dear Horace at school, should I ever have
loved him as I do? No; my old tutor taught me to feel all the delight
and the sweet savor of him, roaming in the oak woods of my own old
place."

"I am devoutly thankful," says his host, "that Dorothy among her
caprices had never had the fancy you have, for a Dr. Johnson _doublé_
with a Ruskin, to correct my quotations, abuse my architecture, and make
prigs of the children."

"Prigs!" exclaims Brandolin. "Prigs! When did ever real scholarship and
love of nature make anything approaching to a prig? Science and
class-rooms make prigs, not Latin verse and cowslip meadows."

"That is true, I think," says the Princess Xenia, with her serious
smile.

"If they are beginning to agree with one another I shall be _de trop_,"
thinks Usk, who is very good-natured to his guests, and popular enough
with women not to be resigned to play what is vulgarly termed "second
fiddle" (though why an expression borrowed from the orchestra should be
vulgar it were hard to say). So he goes a few paces off to speak to a
gardener, and by degrees edges away towards the house, leaving Brandolin
and Madame Sabaroff to themselves in the green yew-helmet arbor.

Brandolin is in love with his subject, and does not abandon it.

"It is absurd," he continues, "the way in which children are made to
loathe all scholarship by its association with their own pains and
subjection. A child is made as a punishment to learn by rote fifty lines
of Virgil. Good heavens! It ought rather to be as a reward that he
should be allowed to open Virgil! To walk in all those delicious paths
of thought should be the highest pleasure that he could be brought to
know. To listen to the music of the poets should be at once his
privilege and his recompense. To be deprived of books should be, on the
contrary, his cruellest chastisement!"

"He would be a very exceptional child, surely," says Madame Sabaroff.

"I was not an exceptional child," he answers, "but that is how I was
brought up and how I felt."

"You had an exceptional training, then?"

"It ought not to be exceptional: that is just the mischief. Up to the
time I was seventeen, I was brought up at my own place (by my father's
directions, in his will) by a most true and reverent scholar, whom I
loved as Burke loved Shackleton. He died, God rest his soul, but the
good he left behind him lives after him: whatever grains of sense I have
shown, and whatever follies I have avoided, both what I am and what I am
not, are due to him, and it is to him that I owe the love of study which
has been the greatest consolation and the purest pleasure of my life.
That is why I pity so profoundly those poor Rochefort children, and the
tens of thousands like them, who are being educated by the commonplace,
flavorless, cramming system which people call education. It may be
education; it is not culture. What will the Babe always associate with
his Latin themes? Four walls, hated books, inky, aching fingers, and a
headache. Whereas I never look at a Latin line in a newspaper, be it one
ever so hackneyed, without pleasure, as at the face of an old friend,
and whenever I repeat to myself the words, I always smell the cowslips
and the lilac and the hawthorn of the spring mornings when I was a boy."

Xenia Sabaroff looked at him with some little wonder and more approval.

"My dear lord," she says seriously, "I think in your enthusiasm you
forget one thing, that there is ground on which good seed falls and
brings forth flowers and fruit, and there is other ground on which the
same seed, be it strewn every so thickly, lies always barren. Without
underrating the influences of your tutor, I must believe that had you
been educated at an English public school, or even in a French Lycée,
you would still have become a scholar, still have loved your books."

"Alas, madame," says Brandolin, with a little sigh, "perhaps I have only
been what Matthew Arnold calls a 'foiled circuitous wanderer' in the
orbit of life!"

"I imagine that you have not very often been foiled," replies the lady,
with a smile, "and wandering has a great deal to be said in its favor,
especially for a man. Women are happiest, perhaps, at anchor."

"Women used to be: not our women. _Nous avons changé tout cela._ I have
bored you too much with myself and my opinions."

"No, you interest me," says his companion with a serious serenity which
deprives the words of all sound of flattery or encouragement. "I have
long admired your writings," she adds, and Brandolin colors a little
with gratification. The same kind of phrase is said to him on an average
five hundred times a year, and his usual emotion is either ennui or
irritation. The admiration of fools is folly, and humiliates him. But
the admiration of so lovely a woman as Xenia Sabaroff would lay a
flattering unction to the soul of any man, even if she were absolutely
mindless; and she gives him the impression that she has a good deal of
mind, and one out of the common order.

"My writings have no other merit," he says, after the expression of his
sense of the honor she does him, "than being absolutely the chronicle of
what I have seen and what I have thought; and I think they are expressed
in tolerably pure English, though that is claiming a great deal in these
times; for since John Newman laid down the pen there is scarcely a
living Briton who can write his own tongue with eloquence and purity."

"I think it must be very nice to leave off wandering if one has a home,"
replies Madame Sabaroff, with a slight sigh, which gave him the
impression that, though no doubt she had many houses, she had no home.
"Where is your place that you spoke of just now?--the place where you
learned to love Horace?"

Brandolin is always pleased to speak of St. Hubert's Lea. He has a great
love for it and for the traditions of his race, which makes many people
accuse him of great family pride, though, as has been well said _á
propos_ of a greater man than Brandolin, it is rather that sentiment
which the Romans defined as piety. When he talks of his old home he
grows eloquent, unreserved, cordial; and he describes with an artist's
touch its antiquities, its landscapes, and its old-world and sylvan
charms.

"It must be charming to care for any place so much as that," says his
companion, after hearing him with interest.

"I think one cares more for places than for people," he replies.

"Sometimes one cares for neither," says Xenia Sabaroff, with a tone
which in a less lovely woman would have been morose.

"One must suffice very thoroughly to one's self in such a case?"

"Oh, not necessarily."

At that moment there is a little bustle under a very big cedar near at
hand; servants are bringing out folding tables, folding chairs, a silver
camp-kettle, cakes, fruit, cream, liqueurs, sandwiches, wines, all those
items of an afternoon tea on which Brandolin has animadverted with so
much disgust in the library an hour before. Lady Usk has chosen to take
these murderous compounds out of doors in the west garden. She herself
comes out of the house with a train of her guests around her.

"Adieu to rational conversation," says Brandolin, as he rises with
regret from his seat under the evergreen helmet.

Xenia Sabaroff is pleased at the expression. She is too handsome for men
often to speak to her rationally: they usually plunge headlong into
attempts at homage and flattery, of which she is nauseated.




CHAPTER VII.


"How do you like Lord Brandolin?" says Lady Usk, when she can say so
unobserved.

"I like him very much," replies Madame Sabaroff. "He is what one would
expect him to be from his books; and that is so agreeable,--and so
rare."

Dorothy Usk is not pleased. She does not want her Russian ph[oe]nix to
admire Brandolin. She has arranged an alliance in her own mind between
the Princess Sabaroff and her own cousin Alan, Lord Gervase, whom she is
daily expecting at Surrenden. Gervase is a man of some note in diplomacy
and society; she is proud of him, she is attached to him, she desires to
see him ultimately fill all offices of state that the ambition of an
Englishman can aspire to; and Xenia Sabaroff is so enormously rich, as
well as so unusually handsome. It would be a perfectly ideal union; and,
desiring it infinitely, the mistress of Surrenden, with that tact which
distinguishes her, has never named Lord Gervase to the Princess Sabaroff
nor the Princess Sabaroff to Lord Gervase. He is to be at Surrenden in a
week's time. Now she vaguely wishes that Brandolin had not these eight
days' start of him. But then Brandolin, she knows, will only flirt; that
is to say, if the Russian lady allow him to do so: he is an
unconscionable flirt, and never means anything by his tenderest
speeches. Brandolin, she knows, is not a person who will ever marry; he
has lost scores of the most admirable opportunities, and rejected the
fairest and best-filled hands that have been offered to him. To the
orderly mind of Lady Usk, he represents an Ishmael forever wandering in
wild woods, outside the pale of general civilization. She can never see
why people make such a fuss with him. She does not say so, because it is
the fashion to make the fuss, and she never goes against a fashion. A
very moral woman herself, she is only as charitable and elastic as she
is to naughty people because such charity and elasticity is the mark of
good society in the present day. Without it, she would be neither
popular nor well bred; and she would sooner die than fail in being
either.

"Why don't you ever marry, Lord Brandolin?" asks Dorothy Usk. "Why have
you never married?"

"Because he's much too sensible," growls her husband, but adds, with
infinite compassion, "He'll have to, some day, or the name will die
out."

"Yes, I shall have to, some day, to use your very grammatical
expression," assents Brandolin. "I don't wish the name to die out, and
there's nobody to come after me except the Southesk-Vanes, who detest me
as I detest them."

"Well, then, why not make some marriage at once?" says Lady Usk. "I know
so many charming----"

Brandolin arrests the sentence with a deprecatory gesture, "Dear Lady
Usk, _please_! I like you so much, I wouldn't for worlds have you mixed
up in anything which would probably, or at least very possibly, make me
so much dislike you in the years to come."

Usk gives a laugh of much enjoyment.

His wife is slightly annoyed. She does not like this sort of jesting.

"You said a moment ago that you must marry!" she observes, with some
impatience.

"Oh, there is no positive 'must' about it," says Brandolin, dubiously.
"The name doesn't matter greatly, after all; it is only that I don't
like the place to go to the Southesk-Vanes: they are my cousins, heaven
knows how many times removed; they have most horrible politics, and they
are such dreadfully prosaic people that I am sure they will destroy my
gardens, poison my Indian beasts, strangle my African birds, turn my old
servants adrift, and make the country round hideous with high farming."

"Marry, then, and put an end to anything so dreadful," says Dorothy Usk.

Brandolin gets up and walks about the room. It is a dilemma which has
often been present to his mind in various epochs of his existence.

"You see, my dear people," he says, with affectionate confidence, "the
real truth of the matter is this. A good woman is an admirable creation
of Providence, for certain uses in her generation; but she is tiresome.
A naughty woman is delightful; but then she is, if you marry her,
compromising. Which am I to take of the two? I should be bored to death
by what Renan calls _la femme pure_, and against _la femme tarée_ as a
wife I have a prejudice. The woman who would amuse me I would not marry
if I could, and as, if I were bored, I should leave my wife entirely,
and go to the Equator or the Pole, it would not be honest in me to
sacrifice a virgin to the mere demands of my family pride."

Lady Usk feels shocked, but she does not like to show it, because it is
so old-fashioned and prudish and _arriéré_ nowadays to be shocked at
anything.

"I have thought about it very often, I assure you," continues Brandolin,
"and sometimes I have really thought that I would marry a high-caste
Hindoo woman. They are very beautiful, and their forms far more
exquisite than any European's, wholly uncramped as they are by any
stays, and accustomed to spend so many hours on all kinds of arts for
the embellishment of the skin."

"I don't think, you know," Lady Usk interposes, hastily, to repress more
reminiscences, "that you need be afraid of the young girls of our time
being innocent: they are _éveillées_ enough, heaven knows, and
experienced enough in all conscience."

"Oh, but that is odious," says Brandolin, with disgust. "The girls of
the day are horrible; nothing is unknown to them; they smoke, they
gamble, they flirt without decency or grace, their one idea is to marry
for sake of a position which will let them go as wild as they choose,
and for the sake of heaps of money which will sustain their
unconscionable extravagance. Lord deliver me from any of them! I would
sooner see St. Hubert's Lea cut up into allotment-grounds than save it
from the Southesk-Vanes by marrying a _débutante_ with her mind fixed on
establishing herself, and her youthful memories already full of
dead-and-gone flirtations. No! let me wait for Dodo, if you will give me
permission to educate her."

"Dodo will never be educated out of flirting; she is born for it," says
her father, "and she will be a handful when she gets into society. I am
afraid you would return her to us and sigh for your high-caste Hindoo."

"Pray, how would you educate her? what is missing in her present
education?" asks Lady Usk, somewhat piqued at what he implies.

"I would let her see a great deal more of her mother than she is allowed
to do," says Brandolin: "where could she take a better model?" he adds,
with a bow of much grace.

Her mother is not sure whether she ought to be flattered or offended.
Brandolin has a way of mingling graceful compliments and implied censure
with so much skill and intricacy that to disentangle them is difficult
for those whom he would at once flatter and rebuff. "One never quite
knows what he means," she thinks, irritably. "I do believe he intends to
imply that I neglect my children!"

Brandolin seems to her an unpleasant man, eccentric, discourteous, and
immoral. She cannot imagine what George or the world sees to admire and
like so much in him.

"Lord Brandolin actually declares that black women have much better
figures than we have," she says, an hour later, to Leila Faversham.

"Black women!" exclaims that lady, in unspeakable horror.

"Well, Hindoos: it is the same thing," says Lady Usk with that ignorance
of her Indian fellow-subjects which is characteristic of English
society, from the highest strata to the lowest.

"Oh, he is always so odd, you know," says Mrs. Faversham, as of a person
whom it is hopeless even to discuss. Brandolin is indeed so odd that he
has never perceived her own attractions. What can seem odder to a pretty
woman than that?

Leila Faversham tells Lady Dawlish ten minutes later that Brandolin has
confessed that he only likes black women. "Isn't it horrid? He actually
has numbers of them down in Warwickshire, just as he keeps the Indian
animals and the African birds."

"How very shocking!" says Lady Dawlish. "But I dare say it is very
economical: they only eat a spoonful of rice and wear a yard of calico,
you know, and, as he is poor, that must suit him."

Lady Dawlish tells this fact to Nina Curzon, adding various
embellishments of her fancy; Mrs. Curzon thinks the notion new and
amusing; she writes of it that morning to a journal of society which she
occasionally honors with news of her world, not from want of the
editor's fee, but from the amusement it affords her to destroy the
characters of her acquaintances. The journal will immediately, she
knows, produce a mysterious but sensational paragraph regarding the
black women in Warwickshire, or some article headed "An Hereditary
Legislature at Home." Brandolin is a person whom it is perfectly safe to
libel: he is very indolent, very contemptuous, and he never by any
chance reads a newspaper.

"An extremely interesting woman," muses Brandolin that evening, as he
dresses for dinner. "Interesting, and moreover with something original,
something mysterious and suggestive, in her. Despite Lady Usk, there is
a difference still in different nationalities. I could still swear to an
Englishwoman anywhere, if I only saw the back of her head and her
shoulders. No Englishwoman could have the delicious languor of Madame
Sabaroff's movements."

She interests him; he decides to stay on at Surrenden.

When he sees her at dinner he is still more favorably impressed.

Her figure is superb, and her sleeveless gown shows the beauty of her
bust and arms; she has a flat band of diamonds worn between the elbow
and the shoulder of the right arm. The effect is singular, but good.

"It is to show that she has the muscle above the elbow," says old Sir
Adolphus, who is learned in sculpture and anatomy. "You know, not one
woman in ten thousand has it; and for want of it their arms fall in
above the elbow. I have heard sculptors say so a hundred times. She has
it, and so she wears that flat bracelet to emphasize the fact."

Brandolin feels annoyed. There is no reason in life why he should object
to Madame Sabaroff having any number of affectations and vanities, or
why he should mind hearing this handsome old _viveur_ discuss them; but
he is annoyed by both facts.

There is not a plain woman among the guests of Surrenden: some are even
far beyond the average of good looks, and all have that _chic_ which
lends in itself a kind of beauty to the woman of the world. But the
handsomest of them all, Nina Curzon herself, pales beside the beautiful
pallor of the Russian lady, contrasted as it is with the splendor of her
jewels, the red rose of her lips, and the darkness of her eyelashes and
eyes.

At dinner, Xenia Sabaroff does not speak much: she has a dreamy look,
almost a fatigued one.

Brandolin is opposite to her: as there are no ornaments or flowers on
the table higher than eight inches, he can contemplate her at his
leisure across the field of shed rose-leaves which is between them.
Finding that she is so silent, he talks in his best fashion, in his most
reckless, antithetical, picturesque manner: he perceives he gains her
attention, though he never directly addresses her.

He also makes Mr. Wootton furious. Mr. Wootton has half a dozen good
stories untold. His method of getting good stories is ingenious: he
procures obscure but clever memoirs, French and English, which are
wholly forgotten, alters their most piquant anecdotes a little, and fits
them on to living and famous personages; the result is admirable, and
has earned him his great reputation as a _raconteur_ of contemporary
scandal. He has six delicious things ready now, and he cannot find a
moment in which he can lead up to and place any one of them.

"Brandolin is so amusing when he likes," says Lady Arthur Audley,
incautiously, to this suppressed and sullen victim.

"A monologist! a monologist!" replies Mr. Wootton, with a deprecatory
accent.

Lady Arthur is silenced, for she has not the slightest idea what a
monologist is. She fancies it means some kind of a sect like the
Mormons, and Brandolin is so odd that he may possibly belong to a sect,
or may have founded one, like Laurence Oliphant. She remembers the black
women that they talked of, and does not like to ask, being a sensitive
person, very delicate-minded, and perfectly proper, except her one
little affair with Sir Hugo, which everybody says is most creditable to
her, Arthur Audley being the scamp that he is.

Dinner over, Brandolin finds a pleasant seat on a low chair behind the
bigger chair on which Madame Sabaroff is reclining; other men devoted to
other women look longingly at her, some approach; Brandolin comprehends
why she is not beloved in her generation by her own sex.

After a time she is induced to sing; she has a very sweet voice, of
great power, with much pathos in it; she sings volkslieder of her own
country, strange yearning wistful songs, full of the vague mystical
melancholy of the Russian peasant. She ceases abruptly, and walks back
to her seat; her diamonds gleam in the light like so many eyes of fire.
Brandolin has listened in silence, conscious of a troubled pleasure
within himself, which is invariably the herald of one of those
attachments which have so often at once embellished and disturbed his
existence.

Like all romantic people, his heart is much younger than his years. It
has not been scarred by any one of those tragic passions which, like
fire on a hill-side, wither up all green things, so that not a blade of
grass will grow where it has passed. He has usually found love only the
most agreeable of pastimes. He has always wondered why anybody allowed
it to tear their life to tatters, as a bad actor tears a fine piece of
blank verse. An uncle of his possessed an Aphrodite in Paphian marble
which had been dug up in a vineyard at Luna, and a work of great beauty
of the second period of Greek art. A lover of pleasure, but withal a
philosopher, his uncle treasured and adored this statue, and whenever he
felt that any living woman was getting more power over him than he
liked, he compared her in his mind with the Luna Venus, and found that
the human creature's defects outbalanced her charms, and thus reduced
the potency of the latter to more reasonable dimensions.

Instead of his uncle's Luna goddess, Brandolin keeps in some remote and
sealed-up nook of his mind a certain ideal; now and then he remembers
it, takes it out and looks at it, and it has usually served with him at
such moments the purpose which the Luna marble served with his uncle.

As he saunters towards the smoking-room with his hands in the pockets of
a loose velvet jacket, he summons this useful resident of his brain,
intending to banish with it the remembrance, the too enervating
remembrance, of Xenia Sabaroff. But, to his surprise, they seem very
like one another, and their features blend confusedly into one.

"And I know nothing at all about this lady, except that she has a voice
like Albani's, big jewels, and a Russian name!" he thinks, with some
derision of himself. The smokers do not find him amusing, while his
companions seem to him insufferably tiresome. He hears the echo of
Madame Sabaroff's grave, low, melodious voice, and is not in temper for
the somewhat _scabreux_ jests of the smoking-room. He thinks that it is
all very well for boys to like that sort of salacious talk, but it seems
to him intolerably absurd that men of his own age, and older, should
find any kind of savor in it.

They tease him about the black women, moreover, and for once he is not
easy enough to be good-tempered and indifferent. He answers
contemptuously and irritably, and of course all his friends suppose,
which they had not supposed before, that there is, after all, some truth
in Mrs. Curzon's anecdote.

"What stupid stories that old _blagueur_ Wootton has told in the
smoking-room, and what beastly ones Fred Ormond has related! and all as
if they were something new, too! as if the one weren't taken out of the
manuscripts at Bute House, and the other out of last week's 'Figaro'! If
men won't be original, or can't be, why don't they hold their tongues?"

"What fools we are to sit shut up with gas-lights and tobacco on such a
night as this!--a night for Lorenzo and Jessica, for Romeo and Juliet,"
he thinks, as he stands awhile at the open window of his own bedroom.

It is three o'clock: there is a faint suggestive light which means the
dawn, young birds are twittering, there is a delicious scent of green
leaves, of full-blown roses, of dewy mosses; the air is damp and warm,
he can hear the feet of blackbirds scraping and turning over the mould
and the grass; it is dark, yet he can distinguish the masses of the
great woods beyond the gardens, the outlines of the trees near his
casement, the shape of the clouds as they move slowly southward. He
wonders in what part of the old house, whose fantastic roofs and turrets
and gargoyles and ivy-colored buttresses are hidden in the dusk of the
summer night, they have given the Princess Sabaroff her chamber. He
remains some time at the open window, and goes to his bed as the dawn
grows rosy.

"Lord Brandolin is in a very bad temper," says Mr. Wootton, when the
smoking-room door has closed on the object of his detestation; then he
pauses, and adds, significantly, "The Brandolins, you know, were always
a little--just a little--clever family, very clever, but we all know to
what great wits are sadly often allied. And this man has never done
anything, with all his talent and opportunities; never done anything at
all!"

"He has written first-rate books," says Usk, angrily, always ready to
defend a friend in absence.

"Oh, books!" says "Mr. Wootton, with bland but unutterable disdain. Mr.
Wootton is a critic of books, and therefore naturally despises them.

"What would you have him do?" growls Usk, pugnaciously.

Mr. Wootton stretches his legs out, and gazes with abstracted air at the
ceiling. "Public life," he murmurs. "Public life is the only possible
career for an Englishman of position. But it demands sacrifices; it
demands sacrifices."

"You mean that one has to marry?" says the young Duke of Queenstown,
timidly.

Mr. Wootton smiles on him loftily. "Marry? yes, undoubtedly; and avoid
scandals afterwards; avoid, beyond all, those connections which lend
such a charm to existence, but are so apt to get into the newspapers."

There is a general laugh.

Mr. Wootton has not intended to make them laugh, and he resumes, with
stateliness, as though they had not interrupted him. "The country
expects those sacrifices: no man succeeds in public life in England who
does not make them."

"Melbourne, Palmerston, Sidney Herbert?" murmurs one rebellious hearer.

Mr. Wootton waves him aside as he would do an importunate fly. "Not to
touch on living persons, I would select Lord Althorp as the model of the
public leader most suited to this country. It would not suit Lord
Brandolin to lead the blameless life of Lord Althorp. It would not suit
him even to pretend to lead it. I doubt if he could even look the part,
if he tried. The English are a peculiar people; they always mix public
and private life together. Lord Beaconsfield remarked to me once----"

And Mr. Wootton tells a story of Disraeli, a very good story, only he
has taken it out of the journals of the Président des Brosses and
fathered it on to Disraeli. But M. le Président des Brosses is an author
seldom read now, and nobody knows; if they did, nobody would care.

"Public opinion," he resumes, "is irresistible in England; and if it
once turn against a man, were he Messiah himself, he could do nothing.
It is not an intelligent public opinion: it confuses public and private
qualifications. A man may be a great statesman and yet dislike his wife
and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero and yet may have an
unseemly passion or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not
understand this. It invariably overlooks the man's greatness, and only
sees the lady or the tailor who compromises him. It thinks--unhappily or
happily, as you please to consider--that genius should keep the whole
ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them."

Mr. Wootton here knocks a little ash off his cigar, and smiles like a
man who has said something neatly.

"It is the first time I ever heard you compliment genius," murmurs
Lawrence Hamilton.

"In Italy," pursues Mr. Wootton, "not very long ago a minister was
accused of buying a piano out of the public funds for his mistress.
Neither the piano nor the mistress hurt the gentleman in public
estimation in that soft and accommodating clime. But that piano, though
he might have paid for it with own money, would have ruined an English
politician. Though it had been the very smallest cottage piano
conceivable, it would have buried him forever under it if it had got
talked about; he would never have explained it away, or made it even
contingently endurable to the nation. You may, if you are a public man
in England, commit every conceivable blunder, add millions to the
national debt, eat your own words every evening in debate, and plunge
the country into an abyss of unmeasured and unmeasurable revolution, and
they will still have confidence in you if you read the lessons in church
and walk home with your wife; but if it is ever rumored that you admire
your neighbor's wife, down you go forever. And yet," continues Mr.
Wootton, pensively, "people _do_ admire their neighbor's wife in
England, and it seems a venial offence when one compares it with the
desertion of Gordon, or the encouragement of a hydra-headed greed for
the rich man's goods."

With which Mr. Wootton yawns, rises, and also declares his intention to
go to bed.

The young duke follows him and walks by his side down the corridor. He
is not at all like Disraeli's young duke: he is awkward, shy, and dull,
he is neither amiable nor distinguished, but he has a painstaking wish
in him to do well by his country, which is almost noble in a person who
has been toadied, indulged, and tempted in all ways and on all sides
ever since his cradle days. It is the disinterested patriotism which has
been so largely the excellence and honor of the English nobility, and
which is only possible in men of position so high that they are raised
by it from birth above all vulgar covetousness or pecuniary needs.

"Do you really think?" says the duke, timidly, for he is very afraid of
Henry Wootton,--"do you really think that to have any influence on
English public life it is necessary--necessary--to keep so very
straight, as regards women, I mean, you know?"

"It is most necessary to _appear_ to keep very straight," replies Mr.
Wootton. The two things are obviously different to the meanest capacity.

The young man sighs.

"And to have that--that--appearance, one must be married?"

"Indisputably. Marriage is as necessary to respectability in any great
position as a brougham to a doctor, or a butler to a bishop," replies
the elder, smiling compassionately at the wick of his candle. He does
not care a straw about the duke: he has no daughters to marry, and Mr.
Wootton's social eminence is far beyond the power of dukes or princes to
make or mend.

"But," stammers his Grace of Queenstown, growing red, yet burning with a
desire for instruction, "but don't you think a--a connection with--with
any lady of one's own rank is quite safe, quite sure not to cause
scandal?"

Mr. Wootton balances his candlestick carefully on one finger, pauses in
his walk, and looks hard at his questioner.

"That would depend entirely upon the lady's temper," replies this wise
monitor of youth.

They are words of wisdom so profound that they sink deep into the soul
of his pupil, and fill him with a consternated sadness and perplexity.
The temper of Lady Dawlish is a known quantity, and the quality of it is
alarming. Lady Dawlish is not young, she is good-looking, and she has
debts. Lord Dawlish has indeed hitherto let her pay her debts in any way
she chose, being occupied enough with paying such of his own as he
cannot by any dexterity avoid; but there is no knowing what he may do
any day out of caprice or ill nature, and, although he will never obtain
a divorce, he may try for one, which will equally effectually convulse
the duke's county and the cathedral city which is situated in its
centre. His own affair with Lady Dawlish is, he firmly believes, known
to no human being save themselves and their confidential servants: he
little dreams that it has been the gossip of all London until London
grew tired of it; he is indeed aware that everybody invited them in the
kindest manner together, but he attributed this coincidence to her tact
in the management of her set and choice of her own engagements.

The human mind is like the ostrich: its own projects serve to it the
purpose which sand plays to the ostrich: comfortably buried in them, it
defies the scrutiny of mankind; wrapped in its own absorbing passions,
it leaves its hansom before a lady's hall door, or leaves its coroneted
handkerchief on a bachelor's couch, and never dreams that the world is
looking on round the corner or through the keyhole. Human nature the
moment it is interested becomes blind. Therefore the duke has put his
question in good faith.

He would abhor any kind of scandal. He is devoted to his mother, who is
a pious and very proper person; he has a conscientious sense of his own
vast duties and responsibilities; he would feel most uncomfortable if he
thought people were talking grossly of him in his own county; and he has
a horror of Lord Dawlish, noisy, insolent, coarse, a gambler and a rake.

Arrived at his bedroom door, Mr. Wootten is touched vaguely with a kind
feeling towards his humble interrogator, or with some other sentiment
less kindly, it may be. He pauses, looks straight before him at the wick
of his candle, and speaks with that oracular air so becoming to him
which many ungrateful people are known to loathe.

"That kind of connections are invariably dangerous; invariably," he
remarks. "They have their uses, I admit, they have their uses: they
mould a man's manners when he is young, they enable him to acquire great
insight into female character, they keep him out of the lower sorts of
entanglements, and they are useful in restraining him from premature
marriage. But they are perilous if allowed to last too long. If
permitted to claim privileges, rights, usurpations, they are apt to
become irksome and compromising, especially if the lady be no longer
young. When a woman is no longer young there is a desperate
_acharnement_ in her tenacity about a last passion which is like that of
the mariner clinging to a spar in the midst of a gusty sea. It is not
easy for the spar to disengage itself. On the whole, therefore, women of
rank are perhaps best avoided in this sense. Passions are safest which
can be terminated by the cheque-book. The cheque-book is not always
indeed refused by great ladies,--when they are in debt,--but a
cheque-book is an unpleasant witness in the law courts. However, as I
said before, all depends on the lady's temper: no woman who has a bad
temper is ever truly discreet. Good-night to your Grace." And Mr.
Wootton, with his candle, disappears within his door-way.

He smiles a little blandly as his man undresses him. Five years before,
Lady Dawlish offended him at a house-party at Sandringham, taking a
fiendish pleasure in capping all his best stories and tracing the
sources of all his epigrams. In that inaccessible but indelible
note-book, his memory, he has written her name down as that of one to
whom he has a debt to pay. "_Je lui ai donné du fil à retordre_," he
thinks, as he drops into his first doze.




CHAPTER VIII.


"Alan is really coming to day!" says Dorothy Usk to her lord, with
pleasure, a few days later, looking up from a telegram.

"How you excite yourself!" says Usk, with rude disdain. "What can you
see to care about? He is a pretentious humbug, if ever there was one!"

"George!" She regards him with horror and amaze. Is he wholly out of his
mind? Her cousin is Lady Usk's ideal of what an English gentleman should
be. _He_ does not keep black women down in Warwickshire.

"A pretentious humbug," repeats Usk. He likes to ticket his relations
and connections with well-chosen descriptions. "All good looks and soft
sawder. Women like that sort of thing----"

"Of course we like good manners, though they are not your weakness,"
interrupts his wife, with acerbity. "Alan has the manners of a man who
respects women: that may seem very tame to you and your friend
Brandolin, but in these days it has at least the charm of novelty."

"Respects women!" Usk is unable to restrain his hilarity. "My dear
Dolly, you're not a chicken: you can't mean that you don't know that
Gervase----"

"I know that he is well-bred. You were so once, but it is a very long
time ago," replies his wife, with cutting sententiousness, and with that
unkind reply she leaves him. As if she did not understand men better
than he, she thinks, contemptuously. He may understand dogs and horses,
and deer and partridges, but about human nature he knows no more than
the old man at the lodge gates.

"Surely she can't be soft on Gervase herself?" her husband reflects,
with a sensation of amusement; "it would be too funny, after running so
straight all these years, and just as her daughters are growing up; but
they often are like that."

He is not sure whether the idea diverts or irritates him, but he knows
that he has always detested Gervase, such a coxcomb and such a humbug as
the fellow is!

"Respect women, good Lord!" ejaculates Usk in his solitude.

"To be sure," adds that honest gentleman in his own mind, "there are
very few of 'em who would thank you to respect 'em nowadays."

"Gervase will be here by dinner," he says in the course of the day to
Princess Sabaroff.

"Indeed," she replies, with indifference. "Who is he?"

"A friend of my wife's; at least, a cousin. I thought you might know
him; he was some time in Russia."

"No,"--and there is a coldness in the negative disproportioned to so
simple a denial,--"I do not think so. I do not remember such a name. Who
is he?"

"A person who is expected to be great in foreign affairs some day or
other," says Brandolin. "He will have one qualification rare in an
English foreign minister,--daily growing rarer, thanks to the
imbecilities of examinations: he knows how to bow and he knows what to
say."

"A friend of yours?"

"Oh, no; an acquaintance. He thinks very ill of me."

"Why?"

"Because I do nothing for my country. He thinks he does a great deal
when he has fomented a quarrel or received a decoration."

"That is not generous. The world owes much to diplomatists: it will know
how much in a few years, when it will be governed by clerks controlled
by telephones."

"That is true: I stand corrected. But Gervase and I have few sympathies:
none, indeed, except politically, and even there we differ,--his is the
Toryism of Peel, mine is the Toryism of the late Lord Derby: there are
leagues between the two."

"I know: the one is opportunism; the other is optimate-ism."

"Perhaps," says Brandolin, with a smile, and thinks, meantime, "She
knows something about him. What is it?"

"Does she know Gervase, despite her denial?" he wonders. He has an
impression that she does. There was a look of recognition in her eyes
when she gave that vague bland gesture in answer to her host. All
trifles in her interest him, as they always do interest a man in a woman
whom he admires and is not sure that he understands; and Gervase he is
aware has been a good deal in Russia.

He himself has known the subject of their discourse ever since they were
boys, and had that sort of intimacy with him which exists between men
who live in the same sets and belong to the same clubs. But to him
Gervase seems a _petit-maître_, a _poseur_, a man artificial,
conventional, ambitious in small things, and to Gervase he himself seems
much as he does to Lady Usk, a perverse and lawless Bohemian, only saved
from the outer darkness by the fact of his aristocratic birth.

Meanwhile, in her own room, Xenia Sabaroff is pursuing her own
reflections whilst her maid disrobes her.

"It will be better to see him once and for all," she muses. "I cannot go
on forever avoiding him in every city in Europe. Very likely he will not
even remember my face or my name."

She feels a strong temptation to invent some plausible reason and break
off her visit to Surrenden; but she is a courageous woman, and flight is
repugnant to her. More than once of late she has avoided a meeting which
is disagreeable to her, by some abrupt change of her own plans or
reversal of her own engagements. To continue to do this seems weakness.
Indeed, to do it at all seems too great a flattery to the person
avoided. What is painful is best encountered without procrastination. It
is the old question of grasping the nettle.

A haughty flush passes over her face at her own reflections. After all,
to have any emotion at all about it, pleasurable or painful, is
humiliation. She is a proud woman, as well as a courageous one. There
are memories associated with this coming guest which are bitter and
hateful.

Women like Mrs. Wentworth Curzon carry such memories lightly, or rather
do not carry them at all, but bury them by scores, pell-mell, one on the
top of another, like old letters, and forget all about their interment;
but she is different from them.

It has not been difficult for her to avoid meeting Lord Gervase; he is
one of those persons whose movements are known and chronicled; but she
is conscious that the time is come when she can no longer escape doing
so, except by such an abrupt departure that it would seem to herself too
great a weakness, and be to him too great a flattery, for such a step to
enter for an instant into the category of possibilities. It is, she
reflects, or it should be, a matter to her of absolute indifference to
see again a person whom she has not seen for seven years.

Yet she is conscious of a sense of pain and excitation as her woman puts
on her a maize satin tea-gown covered with point d'Alençon at five
o'clock the next day, and she knows that when she goes down to the room
in a few minutes Gervase, who was to arrive by the afternoon train, will
in all probability be present there.

Every one is in-doors that day, for a fine summer rain is falling
without, and has been falling since noon. All the house-party are in the
library, and the children are there also; the windows are open, and the
sweet smell from the damp gardens and wet grass fills the air.

Every one is laughing and talking; Usk is drinking a glass of kümmel,
and Brandolin is playing with the dog; conversing with Nina Curzon and
the mistress of the house, and standing in front of them, is a tall fair
man irreproachable in _tenue_ and extremely distinguished in appearance.
He is Lord Gervase. His back is towards the door, and he does not see or
hear her enter, but as the Babe rushes towards her, toppling over a
stool and treading mercilessly on the trains of tea-gowns in the wind of
his going, the noise made by the child makes him turn his head, and an
expression of recognition mingled with amazement passes over his usually
impassive features.

"Is that not Princess Sabaroff?" he asks of his hostess, with a certain
breathless astonishment betrayed in his voice.

Lady Usk assents. "One of my dearest friends," she adds. "I think you
don't know her? I will present you in a moment. She is as clever as she
is beautiful. The children adore her. Look at Babe."

The Babe has dragged his princess to a couch and climbed up on it
himself, kneeling half on her lap and half off it, with no respect for
the maize satin, whilst his impatient little feet beat the devil's tatoo
among the point d'Alençon.

"My dear Babe, do not be such a monopolist," says Brandolin, as he
approaches with a cup of tea and a wafer of caviare bread-and-butter.
"Your shoes have seventeenth-century buckles, it is true, yet still they
are scarcely _bibelots_ to be wrapped up in a lady's dress."

The Babe grins saucily, tossing his hair out of his eyes; but, with
unwonted obedience, he disentangles his feet with some care out of the
lace.

Xenia Sabaroff does not take as much notice of him as usual. She is
reserved and preoccupied. Brandolin, like the child, fails in awakening
her interest or attention. She has seated herself almost with her back
to where Gervase is standing, but every now and then she looks half
round, as by an irresistible unconscious impulse of curiosity.

Brandolin notes the gesture, as her actions have an interest for him
which grows daily in its fascination. "There is Dorothy Usk's
Ph[oe]nix," he says to her, in a low tone, when the Babe has scampered
off after bon-bons: he indicates Gervase with a glance. Her eyebrows
contract slightly, as in some displeasure or constraint.

"Lady Usk is very soon satisfied," she replies, coldly. "Her own
amiability makes her see perfection everywhere."

"It is a quality we cannot value too highly in so imperfect a world. It
is better than seeing everything _en noir_, surely?" says Brandolin. "If
we make people what we think them, as optimists say, it is best to be
optimistic."

"I dislike optimism," she says, curtly. "It is absurd and untrue. Our
Dostoievsky is a wiser novelist than your Dickens. One must believe
something," she says.

"It is pretty for a woman to think so," says Brandolin, "but myself I
have never seen why. I may hope, I may wish, I may regret, I may--if I
am very sanguine--even expect; but believe--no!"

"Perhaps I should like to believe in a woman," he adds, more softly,
with that inflection of his voice which has always had at all events the
effect of making women believe in him.

Madame Sabaroff is not so easily touched as many. She pauses a moment,
then says, with a certain weariness, "Anybody who can believe can love:
that is nothing new."

"What would be new? To love and disbelieve in what we love? It would be
very painful."

"It would be a test," says his companion.

Then she drops the subject decidedly, by approaching the other ladies.
Brandolin has a faint sense of discomfiture and sadness: he is
accustomed to very facile conquests; and yet he is not a coxcomb, like
Lawrence Hamilton; he did not precisely anticipate one here, but habit
is second nature, and it has been his habit to succeed with women with
rapidity and ease. That sense of mystery which there is also for him in
the Princess Xenia oppresses whilst it allures him. He is English enough
to think that he dislikes mystery, yet as an element of romance it has
always an irresistible fascination for romantic temperaments.

Gervase meanwhile has sunk into a chair by the side of Nina Curzon, and
is saying, in a whisper, "Who is that lady? The one with her back to us,
to whom Lord Brandolin is so _empressé_? I thought that I knew all the
Usks' people."

"Look in your Russian memories, and you will probably find that you know
her too," replies Mrs. Curzon.

"Oh, she is Russian?" says Gervase, then adds, negligently, "I think,
now you tell me that, I have seen her before. Is she not the Princess
Sabaroff?"

"Why did you pretend not to know her?" thinks Nina Curzon as she
answers, "Yes, that is her name. You must have met her in Petersburg."

"Petersburg is very dim in my memories," he replies, evasively. "Its
baccarat is what made the deepest impression on my remembrance and my
fortunes. Now I think of it, however, I recollect her quite well: her
husband was Anatole Sabaroff, and Lustoff shot him in a duel about her?
Am I right?"

"So charming for her!" says Nina Curzon. "Englishwomen never have
anything happen for them picturesque like that: our men always die of
indigestion, or going after a fox."

"It is very curious."

"What is? Dyspepsia? Hunting?"

"How one comes across people."

"'After long years,'" quotes Mrs. Curzon, with mock romance in her
tones. "Generally, I think," she adds, with a little yawn, "we can never
get rid of our people, the world is so small, and there is really only
one set in it that is decent, so we can't ever get out of it. It must
have been very nice in Romeo and Juliet's days, when a little drive to
Mantua took you into realms wholly inaccessible to your Verona
acquaintances. Nowadays, if you run away from anybody in London you are
sure to run against them in Yeddo or Yucatan."

"Constancy made easy, like the three R's," says Gervase. "Unfortunately,
despite our improved facilities, we are not constant."

"He means to imply that he threw over the Sabaroff," thinks Mrs. Curzon;
"but he is such a boaster of his _bonnes fortunes_ that one can never
know whether he is lying."

"Pray let me make you known to Madame Sabaroff," says Lady Usk to him, a
little later. "She is such a very dear friend of mine, and I see you
have been looking at her ever since she entered the room."

"She is a very handsome person: any one would look at her," replies her
cousin. Were he not so perfectly well-bred and impassive, it might
almost be said that the suggested presentation fills him with some vague
nervousness.

Nina Curzon watches him inquisitively as he is led up and presented to
Madame Sabaroff.

"I think I have had the honor before now, in Petersburg," murmurs
Gervase. She looks at him very coldly.

"I think not," she replies. The words are of the simplest, but _c'est le
ton qui fait la musique_, and, for the solitary time in his existence,
Lord Gervase is embarrassed.

Brandolin, playing with the colley dog near at hand, listens and
observes.

Lady Usk is not so observant. "It is a long time since he was in
Russia," she says to her friend, "I dare say you have forgotten. His
father was alive, and his name was Baird then, you know."

Xenia Sabaroff makes a little polite gesture expressive of entire
indifference to the change in these titles. With an action which would
be rude in any woman less high-bred, she turns away her head and speaks
to Brandolin, ignoring the acquaintance and the presence of Gervase.

Across the good-natured and busy brain of her hostess there flashes an
electric and odious thought: is it possible that Usk may be right, and
that there may be something wrong, after all, in this her latest and
most adored friend? She feels that she will die of suffocated curiosity
if she do not speedily get her cousin alone and learn all he has ever
known or heard of the Princess Sabaroff.

"A snub direct!" whispers Lawrence Hamilton to Mr. Wootton.

"Or a cut direct: which?" says that far-sighted gentleman.

"Anyhow, it's delightful to see him let in for it," reflects Usk, who
has also observed the incident from where he stands by the liqueurs.

Gervase, who has never been known to be at a loss in any position,
however difficult, colors and looks at once annoyed and confused. He
stands before Xenia Sabaroff for a few moments hesitating and
irresolute, conscious that every one is looking at him; then he takes
refuge with Lady Dawlish, whom he detests, because she is the nearest
person to him.

"Madame Sabaroff is eclipsing the black women," says that lady.

"What black women?" asks Gervase, very inattentive and bored. She tells
him the story of the Hindoo harem, and he hears no word of it.

"Brandolin is always so odd," he says, indifferently, watching the hand
of Xenia Sabaroff as it rests on the shoulder of the Babe, who is
leaning against her knees gazing at her adoringly.

Gervase is angered; irritated, interested, and mortified all at once. He
has never been in an absurd position before, and he is aware that he was
in one a moment ago, and that the whole house-party of Surrenden Court
saw him in it. "What a fool Dolly was not to tell me she was here!" he
thinks, forgetting that his cousin and hostess has not the remotest
suspicion that he and the Princess Xenia have ever met each other
before.

"Seven years!" he thinks. "Good heavens! what an eternity! And she is
handsomer than she was then; very handsome; wonderfully handsome."

He looks at her all the while from under his half-closed eyelids, whilst
he talks he knows not what kind of rubbish to Lady Dawlish.

Xenia Sabaroff does not once look his way. The moment which she had
dreaded has passed, and it has made no impression whatever upon her: her
indifference reconciles her to herself. Is it possible, she wonders,
that she ever loved, or ever thought that she loved, this man?

"Why will you always treat me as a stranger, Madame Sabaroff?" murmurs
Gervase to her that night when for a moment he is alone near her, while
the cotillion overture commences.

"You are a stranger--to me," replies Xenia Sabaroff; and as she speaks
she looks full at him.

He colors with discomfiture. "Because in the due course of nature I have
succeeded to my father's title, you seem to consider that I have changed
my whole identity," he says, with great irritation.

She is silent; she looks down on the white ostrich-feathers of her fan.
He is vaguely encouraged by that silence. "Strangers! That is surely a
very cold and cruel word between those who once were friends?"

The direct appeal to her makes her look up once more, with great
_hauteur_ in the coldness of her face.

"Sir, I think when people have forgotten that each other exist, it is as
though they had never met. They are perhaps something more distant still
than strangers, for to strangers friendship in the future is possible;
but those who have been separated by oblivion on the one hand and by
contempt on the other are parted as surely and eternally as though death
had divided them."

Gervase gathers some solace from the very strength of the words. She
would not, he thinks, feel so strongly unless she felt more than he
allows: he gazes at her with feigned humility and unfeigned admiration
and regret.

"If Madame Sabaroff," he murmurs, "can doubt her own powers of
compelling remembrance, she is the one person on earth only who can do
so."

She is stung to anger.

"I am really at loss to decide whether you are intentionally insolent or
unintentionally insincere. You are possibly both."

"I am neither. I am only a man who passionately and uselessly rebels
against his fate."

"Who regrets his own actions, you mean to say. That is nothing
uncommon."

"Well, who regrets the past, if you will put it so, and who would atone
for it would you allow him."

"Atone! Do you suppose that you owe me reparation? It is I who owe you
thanks for a momentary oblivion which did me immeasurable service."

"That is a very harsh doctrine. The Princess Xenia whom I knew was
neither so stern nor so sceptical."

"The Princess Xenia whom you knew was a child, a foolish child; she is
dead, quite as much dead as though she were under so many solid square
feet of Baltic ice. Put her from your thoughts: you will never awake
her."

Then she rises and leaves him and goes out of the ball-room.

Throughout that evening he does not venture to approach her again, and
he endeavors to throw himself with some show of warmth into a flirtation
with Nina Curzon.

"Why did you pretend not to know her?" says Mrs. Curzon to him.

He smiles, the fatuous smile with which a man ingeniously expresses what
he would be thought a brute to put into words.

"She does not deign to know me--now," he says, modestly, and to the
experienced comprehension of Nina Curzon the words, although so modest,
tell her as much as the loudest boast could do.




CHAPTER IX.


Gervase saunters in to his hostess's boudoir the next morning, availing
himself of the privilege accorded to that distant relationship which it
pleases them both to raise into an intimate cousinship. It is a charming
boudoir, style Louis Quinze, with the walls hung with flowered silk of
that epoch, and the dado made of fans which belonged to the same period.
Lady Usk writes here at a little secrétaire painted by Fragonard, and
uses an inkstand said to have belonged to Madame de Parabère, made in
the shape of a silver shell driven by a gold Cupidon; yet, despite the
frivolity of these associations, she contrives to get through a vast
mass of business at this fragile table, and has one of the soundest
heads for affairs in all England. Gervase sits down and makes himself
agreeable, and relates to her many little episodes of his recent
experiences.

She is used to be the confidante of her men; she is young enough to make
a friend who is attractive to them, and old enough to lend herself _de
bon c[oe]ur_ to the recital of their attachments to other women. Very
often she gives them very good advice, but she does not obtrude it
unseasonably. "An awfully nice woman all round," is the general verdict
of her visitants to the boudoir. She does not seek to be more than that
to them.

Gervase does not make any confidences: he only tells her things which
amuse her and reveal much about her acquaintances, nothing about
himself. He smokes some of her favorite cigarettes, praises some new
china, suggests an alteration in the arrangement of the fans, and makes
critical discourses _à propos_ of her collection of snuff-boxes.

When he is going away, he lingers a moment intently looking at a
patch-box of vernis Martin, and says, with studied carelessness, "Dolly,
tell me, when did you make the acquaintance of Madame Sabaroff?"

"Last year, at Cannes: why do you want to know? She came and stayed with
us at Orme last Easter. Is she not perfectly charming?"

"Very good-looking," says Gervase, absently. "You don't know anything
about her, then?"

"Know?" repeats his hostess. "What should I know? What everybody does, I
suppose. I met her first at the Duchesse de Luynes'. You can't possibly
mean that there can be anything--anything----"

"Oh, no," replies Gervase; but it produces on his questioner the same
effect as if he had said, "Oh, yes."

"How odious men are! such scandal-mongers," says Lady Usk, angrily.
"Talk of _our_ 'damning with faint praise' There is nothing comparable
to the way in which a man destroys a woman's reputation just by raising
his eyebrows or twisting his moustache."

"I have no moustache to twist, and am sure there is no reputation which
I wish to destroy," says her cousin.

"Then why do you ask me where I made her acquaintance?"

"My dear Dolly! Surely the most innocent and general sort of question
ever on the lips of any human being!"

"Possibly; not in the way you said it, however; and when one knows that
you were a great deal in Russia, it suggests five hundred things,--five
thousand things: and of course one knows he was shot in a duel about
her, and I believe people have talked."

"I have never helped them to talk. When do they not talk?"

And beyond this she cannot prevail upon him to go: he pretends that the
Princess Sabaroff is beyond all possibility of any approach of calumny,
but the protestation produces on her the impression that he could tell
her a great deal wholly to the contrary if he chose.

"She certainly was staying with Madame de Luynes," she insists.

"Who ever said the lady might not stay with the Archbishop of
Canterbury?" replies Gervase.

She is irritated and vexed.

Xenia Sabaroff is her idol of the moment, and if her idol were proved
human she would be very angry. She reflects that she will have Dodo and
the children kept more strictly in the school-room, and not let them
wander about over the park as they do with their Russian friend most
mornings.

"One can never be too careful with children of that age," she muses,
"and they are terribly _éveillées_ already."

Dorothy Usk's friendships, though very ardent, are like most friendships
which exist in society: they are apt to blow about with every breeze.
She is cordial, kind, and in her way sincere; but she is what her
husband characterizes as "weathercocky."

Who is not "weathercocky" in the world?

Although so tolerant in appearance of naughty people, because it is the
fashion to be so, and not to be so looks priggish and dowdy and odd, she
never at the bottom of her heart likes her naughty people. She has run
very straight herself, as her lord would express it; she has been always
much too busy to have time or inclination to be tempted "off the rails,"
and she has little patience with women who have gone off them; only she
never says so, because it would look so goody-goody and stupid, and for
fear of looking so she even manages to stifle in her own breast her own
antipathy to Dulcia Waverley.

There have been very many martyrs to the sense that they ought to smile
at virtue when they hate it, but Dorothy Usk's martyrdom is of a
precisely opposite kind: she forces herself to seem to approve the
reverse of virtue whilst she detests it. Anything is better, in her
creed, than looking odd; and nowadays you do look so odd and so
old-fashioned if you make a fuss about anything. Still, in her heart of
hearts she feels excessively vexed, because it is quite apparent to her
that Gervase knows something very much to the disadvantage of her new
acquaintance.

"George will be so delighted if he finds out that Madame Sabaroff is
like all those horrid women he is so fond of," she reflects. "I shall
never hear the last of it from him. It will be a standing joke for him
the whole of his life."

Certainly Madame Sabaroff is letting Brandolin carry on with her more
than is altogether proper. True, they are people who may marry each
other if they please, but Brandolin is not a man who marries, and his
attentions are never likely to take that form. He probably pays so much
court to Madame Sabaroff because he has heard that of her which leads
him to suppose that his efforts may be _couronné_, as French
vaudevillists say, without any thought of marriage.

Lady Usk has always known that he is horribly unprincipled,--more so
than even men of his world usually are. That bantering tone of his is
odious, she thinks; and he always has it, even on the gravest subjects.

"What's the row, my lady? You look ruffled!" inquires Usk, coming into
her boudoir with a sheaf of half-opened letters in his hand.

"There are always things to annoy one," she answers, vaguely.

"It is an arrangement of a prudential Providence to prevent our
affections being set on this world," replies Usk, piously.

His wife's only comment on this religious declaration is an impatient
twist to the tail of her Maltese dog.

Usk proceeds to turn over to her such letters as bore him; they are
countable by dozens; the two or three which interest him have been read
in the gun-room and put away in an inside pocket.

"Mr. Bruce could attend to all these," she says, looking with some
disgust at the correspondence. Bruce is his secretary.

"He always blunders," says Usk.

"Then change him," says his wife; nevertheless she is pleased at the
compliment implied to herself.

"All secretaries are fools," says Usk, impartially.

"Even secretaries of state," says Mr. Wootton, who has the _entrée_ of
the boudoir, and saunters in at that moment. "I have some news this
morning," he adds: "Coltsfoot marries Miss Hoard."

"Never!" exclaims Dorothy Usk.

"Perfectly true," says Mr. Wootton. "Both of them staying at Dunrobin,
and engagement publicly announced."

Lord Coltsfoot is heir to a dukedom; Miss Hoard is the result in bullion
of iron-works.

"Never!" reiterates Lady Usk. "It is impossible that he can do such a
horrible thing! Why, she has one shoulder higher than the other, and red
eyes!"

"There are six millions paid down," replies Mr. Wootton, sententiously.

"What the deuce will Mrs. Donnington say?" asks Usk.

"One never announces any marriage," remarks Mr. Wootton, "but there is a
universal outcry about what will some lady, married long ago to somebody
else, say to it. Curious result of supposed monogamy!"

"It is quite disgusting!" says Lady Usk. "Some of those new people are
presentable, but she isn't; and Coltsfoot is so good-looking and so
young."

"It is what the French call an '_alliance très comme il faut_,'" says
Usk, from sheer spirit of contradiction. "The dukedom is as full of
holes as an old tin pot; she tinkers it up with her iron and gold; and I
bet you that your friend Worth will manage to cut Lady Coltsfoot's gowns
so that one shoulder higher than the other will become all the rage next
season."

"Of course you set no store on such a simple thing as happiness," says
his wife, with acerbity.

"Happiness? Lord, my dear! Happiness was buried with Strephon and Chloe
centuries ago! We are amused or bored, we are successful or
unsuccessful, we are popular or unpopular, we are somebody or we are
nobody, but we are never either happy or miserable."

"People who have a heart are still both!"

"A heart! You mean spoons!"

"What a hideous expression! Strephon and Chloe never used that."

"When we have an unfortunate passion now," remarks Mr. Wootton, "we go
to Carlsbad. It's only an affair of the liver."

"Or the nerves," suggests Usk. "Flirtation is the proper thing:
flirtation never hurts anybody: it's like puff-paste, seltzer water, and
Turkish cigarettes."

"Puff-paste may bring on an indigestion when one's too old to eat it!"

"There! Didn't I tell you so? She is always saying something about my
age. A man is the age that he feels."

"No, a woman is the age that she looks. If you will quote things, quote
them properly."

"The age that she looks? That's so very variable. She's twenty when she
enters a ball-room at midnight, she's fifty when she comes out at
sunrise; she's sixteen when she goes to meet somebody at Hurlingham,
she's sixty when she scolds her maid and has a scene with her husband!"

Lady Usk interrupts him with vivacity: "And he? Pray, isn't he
five-and-twenty when he's in Paris alone, and five-and-ninety when he's
grumbling at home?"

"Because he's bored at home! Youth is, after all, only good spirits. If
you laugh you are young, but your wife don't make you laugh; you pay her
bills, and go with her to a state ball, and sit opposite to her at
dinner, and when you catch a cold she is always there to say, 'My dear,
didn't I tell you so?' but I defy any man living to recall any hour of
his existence in which his wife ever made him laugh!"

"And yet you wanted me to ask married people together."

"Because I wanted it all to be highly proper and deadly dull. Surrenden
has got a sort of reputation of being a kind of Orleans Club."

"And yet you complain of being bored in it!"

"One is always bored in one's own house! One can never take in to dinner
the person one likes."

"You make up to yourself for the deprivation after dinner!"

"My lady's very ruffled to-day," says Usk to Mr. Wootton. "I don't know
which of her doves has turned out a fighting-cock."

"That reminds me," observes Mr. Wootton. "I wanted to ask you, did you
know that Gervase, when he was Lord Baird, was very much _au mieux_ with
Madame Sabaroff? I remember hearing long ago from Russians----"

Lady Usk interrupts the great man angrily: "Very much _au mieux_! What
barbarous polygot language for a great critic like you! Must you have
the assistance of bad grammar in two tongues to take away my friend's
reputation?"

Lord Usk chuckles. "Reputations aren't taken away so easily; they're
very hardy plants nowadays, and will stand a good deal of bad weather."

Mr. Wootton is shocked. "Oh, Lady Usk! Reputation! You couldn't think I
meant to imply of any guest of yours--only, you know, he was secretary
in Petersburg when he was Lord Baird, and so----"

"Well, it doesn't follow that he is the lover of every woman in
Petersburg!"

Mr. Wootton is infinitely distressed. "Oh, indeed I didn't mean anything
of that sort."

"You did mean everything of that sort," murmurs his hostess.

"But, you see, he admired her very much, was constantly with her, and
yesterday I saw they didn't speak to each other, so I was curious to
know what could be the reason."

"I believe she didn't recognize him."

Mr. Wootton smiles. "Oh, ladies have such prodigious powers of
oblivion--and remembrance!"

"Yes," observes Usk, with complacency: "the storms of memory sometimes
sink into them as if they were sponges, and sometimes glide off them as
if they were ducks. It is just as they find it convenient. But Madame
Sabaroff can't have been more than a child when Gervase was in Russia."

Mr. Wootton smiles again significantly. "She was married."

"To a brute!" cries Dorothy Usk.

"All husbands," says Lord Usk, with a chuckle, "are brutes, and all
wives are angels. _C'est imprimé!_"

"I hope no one will ever call me an angel! I should know at once that I
was a bore!"

"No danger, my lady: you've no wings on your shoulders, and you've salt
on your tongue."

"I'm sure you mean to be odiously rude, but to my taste it's a great
compliment."

"My dear Alan," says Dorothy Usk, having got him at a disadvantage in
her boudoir one-quarter of an hour after luncheon, "what has there been
between you and the Princess Sabaroff? Everybody feels there is
something. It is in the air. Indeed, everybody is talking about it. Pray
tell me. I am dying to know."

Gervase is silent.

"Everybody in the house is sure of it," continues his hostess. "They
don't say so, of course, but they think so. Nina Curzon, who is
_mauvaise langue_, pretends even that she knows all the circumstances;
and it would seem that they are not very nice circumstances. I really
cannot consent to go on in the dark any longer."

"Ask the lady," replies Gervase, stiffly.

"I certainly shall do nothing so ill-bred. You are a man, you are a
relation of mine, and I can say things to you I couldn't possibly say to
a stranger, which Madame Sabaroff is quite to me. If you won't answer, I
shall only suppose that you paid court to her and were 'spun,' as the
boys say at the examinations."

"Not at all," says Gervase, haughtily.

"Then tell me the story."

He hesitates. "I don't know whether you will think very well of me if I
tell you the truth."

"That you may be sure I shall not. No man ever behaves well where women
are in the question."

"My dear Dolly, what unkind exaggeration! If I tell you anything, you
will be sure not to repeat what I say? Madame Sabaroff considers me a
stranger to her: I am bound to accept her decision on such a point."

"You knew her in Russia?"

"Yes; when I was there she was the new beauty at the court. She had been
married a year or less to Paul Sabaroff. I had the honor of her
friendship at that time; if she withdraws it now I must acquiesce."

"Oh!"

Lady Usk gives a little sound between a snort and a sigh.

She is annoyed. The gossipers are right, then. She is sorry the children
have been so much with their friend, and she is infuriated at the idea
of her husband's triumph over her credulity.

"Oh, pray don't think--don't think for a moment----" murmurs Gervase;
but his cousin understands that it is the conventional compulsory
expostulation which every man who is well-bred is bound to make on such
subjects.

"She must have been very young then?" she says, beating impatiently on
her blotting-book with her gold pen.

"Very young; but such a husband as Paul Sabaroff made is--well, a more
than liberal education to any woman, however young. She was sixteen, I
think, and very lovely; though she is perhaps handsomer now. I had the
honor of her confidence: she was unhappy and _incomprise_; her father
had given her hand in discharge of a debt at cards; Sabaroff was a
gambler and a brute; at the end of the second winter season he had a
violent fit of jealousy, and sent her to his estate on the White
Sea----"

"Jealousy of you?"

Gervase bowed.

"Where she was kept in a state of surveillance scarcely better than
absolute imprisonment. I did all manner of crazy and romantic things to
endeavor to see her; and once or twice I succeeded; but he had
discovered letters of mine, and made her captivity more rigorous than
ever. I myself was ordered on the special mission to Spain,--you
remember,--and I left Russia with a broken heart. From that time to this
I have never seen her."

"But your broken heart has continued to do its daily work?"

"It is a figure of speech. I adored her, and the husband was a brute.
When Lustoff shot him he only rid the world of a brute. You have seen
that broad bracelet she wears above the right elbow? People always talk
so about it. She wears it to hide where Sabaroff broke her arm one night
in his violence: the marks of it are there forever."

Lady Usk is silent: she is divided between her natural compassion and
sympathy, which are very easily roused, and her irritation at
discovering that her new favorite is what Usk would call "just like all
the rest of them."

"You perceive," he added, "that, as the princess chooses wholly to
ignore the past, it is not for me to recall it. I am obliged to accept
her decision, however much I must suffer from it."

"Suffer!" echoes his cousin. "After her husband's death you never took
the trouble to cross Europe to see her."

"She had never answered my letters," says Gervase, but he feels that the
excuse is a frail one. And how, he thinks, angrily, should a good woman
like his cousin, who has never flirted in her life and never done
anything which might not have been printed in the daily papers,
understand a man's inevitable inconstancy?

"I assure you that I have never loved any woman as I loved her," he
continues.

"Then you are another proof, if one were wanted, that men have died and
worms have eaten them, but not for----"

"I did not die, certainly," Gervase says, much irritated; "but I
suffered greatly, whether you choose to believe it or not."

"I am not inclined to believe it," replies his hostess. "It is not your
style."

"I wrote to her a great many times."

He pauses.

Lady Usk fills up the pause. "And she answered you?" she inquires.

"N-no," replies Gervase, unwilling to confess such an affront to him.
"She did not write. Prudence, I suppose; or perhaps she might be too
closely watched, or her letters might be stopped: who can say?"

"Nobody but herself, clearly. Well?"

"I was sent to Madrid; and I heard nothing of her except that Sabaroff
was shot in a duel about her with Lustoff; but that was two years
afterwards."

"And when he was shot why did you not in due course go to the White Sea,
or wherever she was, and offer yourself?"

"The truth is, I had become acquainted with a Spanish lady----"

"A great many Spanish ladies, no doubt! What a half-hearted Lothario!"

"Not at all. Only just at that time----"

"Manillas, mandolines, balconies, bull-fights, high mass, and moonlight
had the supremacy! My dear Alan, tell your story how you will, you can't
make yourself heroic."

"I have not the smallest pretension to do so," says Gervase, very much
annoyed. "I have no heroism. I leave it to Lord Brandolin, who has been
shipwrecked five hundred times, I believe, and ridden as many
dromedaries over unknown sand-plains as Gordon----"

"As you don't care in the least for her, why should you care if his
shipwrecks and his dromedaries interest her? We don't know that they do;
but----"

"How little sympathy you have!"

"George says I have always a great deal too much. What do you want me to
sympathize with? According to your own story, you 'loved and rode away;'
at least, took a through-ticket across Europe, as Lovelace has to do in
these prosaic days. If you did not go back to Russia when you might have
gone back, _à qui la faute_? Nobody's but your own and the nameless
Spanish lady or ladies'!"

"You are very perverse."

"It is you who are, or who were, perverse. According to your own story,
you adored a woman when she was unattainable; when she became attainable
you did not even take the trouble to get into a railway-carriage: you
were otherwise amused. What romantic element is there in such a tale as
yours to excite the smallest fragment of interest? To judge you out of
your own mouth, you seem to me to have behaved with most uninteresting
inconstancy."

"It was four years, and she had never answered my letters."

"Really a reason to make you esteem her infinitely more than if she had
answered them. My dear Alan, you were a flirt, and you forgot as flirts
forget: why should one pity you for being so easily consoled? You ought
to be infinitely grateful that Madame Sabaroff did not send you reams of
reproaches, and telegraph you compromising messages which would have got
you into trouble in Downing Street. The thing died a natural death; you
did not care to keep it alive: why are you now all lamentations over its
grave? I really do not follow the course of your emotions,--if you feel
any emotion: I thought you never did. Madame Sabaroff has never been a
person difficult to follow or to find; the fashionable intelligence of
the newspapers would at any time have enabled you to know where she was;
you never had inclination or remembrance enough to make you curious to
see her again, and then when you come across her in a country house you
think yourself very ill used because she does not all at once fall into
your arms. You couldn't possibly care about her, since you never tried
to see her all those years!"

Dorothy Usk is really annoyed.

She is not a person who has a high standard of humanity at any time, and
she knows men thoroughly, and they have no chance of being heroes in her
sight. But she likes a man to be a man, and to be an ardent lover if he
be a lover at all, and her favorite cousin seems to her to wear a poor
aspect in this page of his autobiography.

"Pray, did you know that she is as rich as she is?" she asks, with some
sharpness in her tone.

Gervase colors a little, being conscious that his response cannot
increase his cousin's sympathies with him.

"No. Is she rich? Paul Sabaroff was poor. He had gambled away nearly
everything. Your children have a great deal of _blague_ about her
riches; but I suppose it is all nonsense."

"Not nonsense at all. Two years ago some silver was discovered on a bit
of rough land which belonged to her, somewhere beyond the Urals, I
think, and she is enormously rich,--will be richer every year, they
say."

"Indeed!"

He tries to look indifferent, but his cousin's penetrating eyes seem to
him to be reading his very soul.

"How dreadfully sorry he must be that he didn't leave Madrid!" she
thinks, and aloud says, irritably, "Why on earth didn't you try to renew
things with her all these three years?"

"I imagined that I had forgotten her."

"Well, so you had,--completely forgotten her, till you saw her here."

"On my honor, she is the only woman I have ever really loved."

"Oh, men always say that of somebody or another, generally of the most
impossible people. George always declares that the only woman he ever
really loved was a pastry-cook when he was at Christ-church."

"Dear Dorothy, don't joke. I assure you I am thoroughly in earnest."

"She certainly has forgotten you."

She knows that for him to be convinced of this is the surest way to
revive a died-out passion.

"Who knows? She would be indifferent in that case, and polite: as it is,
she is cold, even rude."

"That may be resentment."

"Resentment means remembrance."

"Oh, not always."

"Then she has a number of my letters."

"So you said; you cannot be so very sure she has kept them. Other people
may have written her the same sort of letters, or more admirable letters
still: how can you tell?"

He colors angrily. "She is not a _femme légère_."

"She is receiving a great deal of attention now from Lord Brandolin, and
she does not seem to dislike it. They say he writes exquisite letters to
women he is fond of; I don't know myself, because I have never had
anything more interesting from him than notes about dinners or visits;
but they say so. They even say that his deserted ladies forgive his
desertions because he writes his farewells so divinely."

"Lord Brandolin's epistolary accomplishments do not interest me in the
least. Everybody knows what he is with women." He pauses a moment, then
adds, with some hesitation,--

"Dear Dorothy, you know her very well. Don't you think you could find
out for me, and tell me----"

"What?"

"Well, what she thinks or does not think; in a word, how I stand with
her."

"No,--oh, no, my dear Alan; I couldn't attempt anything of that
sort,--in my own house, too: it would seem so horribly rude. Besides, I
am not in the least--not the very least--intimate with her. I think her
charming, we are _bonnes connaiassances_, the children adore her; but I
have never said anything intimate to her in my life,--never."

"But you have so much tact."

"The more tact I have, the less likely shall I be to recall to her what
she is evidently perfectly determined to ignore. You can do it yourself
if you want it done. You are not usually shy."

Gervase gets up impatiently, and walks about in the narrow limits of the
boudoir, to the peril of the Sèvres and Saxe.

"But women have a hundred indirect ways of finding out everything: you
might discover perfectly well, if you chose, whether--whether she feels
anger or any other sentiment; whether--whether, in a word, it would be
prudent to recall the past to her."

Lady Usk shakes her head with energy, stirring all its pretty blonde
curls, real and false. "_Entre l'arbre et l'écorce ne mettez pas le
doigt._ That is sound advice which I have heard given at the Français."

"That is said of not interfering between married people."

"It is generally true of people who wish, or may not wish, to marry. And
I suppose, Alan, that when you speak in my house of renewing
your--your--relations with the Princess Sabaroff, you do not mean that
you have any object less serious than _le bon motif_?"

Gervase is amused, although he is disconcerted and irritated.

"Come, Dorothy, your guests are not always so very serious, are they? I
never knew you so prim before."

Then she in turn feels angry. She always steadily adheres to the
convenient fiction that she knows nothing whatever of the amorous
filaments which bind her guests together in pairs, as turtle-doves might
be tied together by blue ribbons.

"If you only desire to reawake the sentiments of Madame Sabaroff in your
favor that you may again make sport of them, you must excuse me if I say
that I cannot assist your efforts, and that I sincerely hope they will
not be successful," she says, with dignity and distance.

"Do you suppose his are any better than mine?" asks Gervase, irritably,
as he waves his hand towards the window which looks on the west gardens.
Between the yew- and cedar-trees, at some distance from the house,
Brandolin is walking beside Xenia Sabaroff: his manner is interested and
deferential; she moves with slow and graceful steps down the grassy
paths, listening with apparent willingness, her head is uncovered, she
carries a large sunshade opened over it made of white lace and pale-rose
silk, she has a cluster of Duchess of Sutherland roses in her hand. They
are really only speaking of recent French poets, but those who look at
them cannot divine that.

"He is not my cousin, and he does not solicit my assistance," says
Dorothy Usk, seeing the figures in her garden with some displeasure.
"_Je ne fais pas la police pour les autres_; but if he asked me what you
asked me, I should give him the same answer that I give to you."

"He is probably independent of any assistance," says Gervase, with
irritable irony.

"Probably," says his hostess, who is very skilful at fanning faint
flame. "He is not a man whom I like myself, but many women--most women,
I believe--think him irresistible."

Thereon she leaves him, without any more sympathy or solace, to go and
receive some county people who have come to call, and who converse
principally about prize poultry.

"_Comme elles sont assommées avec leurs poules!_" says the Marquise de
Caillac, who chances to be present at this infliction, and gazes in
stupefaction at a dowager duchess who has driven over from twenty miles
off, who wears very thick boots, her own thin gray hair, water-proof
tweed clothing, and a hat tied under her double chin with black strings.
"_Un paquet!_" murmurs Madame de Caillac; "_un véritable paquet!_"

"_C'est la vertu anglaise, un peu démodée_," says Lord Iona, with a
yawn.

Gervase stays on as well as Brandolin, somewhat bored, very much
_énervé_, but fascinated, too, by the presence of his Russian Ariadne,
and stung by the sight of Brandolin's attentions to her into such a
strong sense of revived passion that he means what he says when he
declares to his cousin that the wife of Sabaroff was the only woman he
has ever really loved. Her manner to him also, not cold enough to be
complimentary, but entirely indifferent, never troubled, never moved in
any way by his vicinity or by his direct allusions to the past, is such
as irritates, piques, attracts, and magnetizes him. It seems to him
incredible that any woman can ignore him so utterly. If she only seemed
afraid of him, agitated in any way, even adversely, he could understand
what was passing in her mind; but he cannot even flatter himself that
she does this: she treats him with just such perfect indifference as she
shows to the Duke of Queenstown or Hugo Mandeville or any one of the
gilded youths there present. If he could once see a wistful memory in
her glance, once see a flush of color on her face at his approach, it is
probable that his vanity would be satisfied and his interest cease as
quickly as it has revived; but he never does see anything of this sort,
and, by the rule of contradiction, his desire to see it increases. And
he wonders uneasily what she has done with his letters.




CHAPTER X.


Lord Gervase was eight years younger when he wrote those letters than he
is now, and he has unpleasant recollections of unpleasant passages in
them which would compromise him in his career, or at least get him
horribly talked about, were they ever made sport of in the world. Where
are his letters? Has Madame Sabaroff kept them? He longs to ask her, but
he dare not.

He does not say to his cousin that he has more than once endeavored to
hint to Xenia Sabaroff that it would be sweet to him to recall the past,
would she permit it. But he has elicited no response. She has evaded
without directly avoiding him. She is no longer the impressionable shy
girl whom he knew in Russia, weighted with an unhappy fate, and rather
alarmed by the very successes of her own beauty than flattered by them.
She is a woman of the world, who knows her own value and her own power
to charm, and has acquired the talent which the world teaches, of
reading the minds of others without revealing her own. _Saule pleureur!_
the Petersburg court ladies had used to call her in those early times
when the tears had started to her eyes so quickly; but no one ever sees
tears in her eyes now.

Gervase is profoundly troubled to find how much genuine emotion the
presence of a woman whose existence he had long forgotten has power to
excite in him. He does not like emotion of any kind; and in all his
affairs of the heart he is accustomed to make others suffer, not
himself. Vanity and wounded vanity enter so largely into the influences
moulding human life, that it is very possible, if the sight of him had
had power to disturb her, the renewal of association with her would have
left him unmoved. But, as it is, he has been piqued, mortified, excited,
ad attracted; and the admiration which Brandolin and Lawrence Hamilton
and other men plainly show of her is the sharpest spur to memory and to
desire.

Whenever he has remembered Xenia Sabaroff, at such rare times as he has
heard her name mentioned in the world, he has thought of her
complacently as dwelling in the solitudes of Baltic forests, entirely
devoted to his memory. Women who are entirely devoted to their memory
men seldom trouble themselves to seek out; but to see her courted,
sought, and desired, more handsome than ever, and apparently wholly
indifferent to himself, is a shock to his self-esteem, and galvanism to
his dead wishes and slumbering recollections. He begins to perceive that
he would have done better not to forget her quite so quickly.

Meanwhile, all the guests at Surrenden, guided by a hint from Nina
Curzon, begin to see a quantity of things which do not exist, and to
exert their minds in endeavoring to remember a vast deal which they
never heard with regard to both himself and her. No one knows anything
or has a shadow of fact to go on, but this is an insignificant detail
which does not tie their tongues in the least. Nina Curzon has invention
enough to supply any _lacunæ_, and in this instance her imagination is
stimulated by a double jealousy: she is jealous of Lawrence Hamilton,
whom she is inclined to dismiss, and she is jealous of Brandolin, whom
she is inclined to appropriate.

Twenty-four hours have not elapsed since the arrival of Gervase, before
she has given a dozen people the intimate conviction that she knows all
about him and the Princess Sabaroff, and that there is something very
dreadful in it,--much worse than in the usual history of such relations.
Everything is possible in Russia, she says, and has a way of saying this
which suggests unfathomable abysses of license and crime.

No one has the slightest idea what she means, but no one will be behind
any other in conjecturing; and there rises about the unconscious figure
of Xenia Sabaroff a haze of vague suggested indistinct suspicion, like
the smoke of the blue fires which hide the form of the Evil One on the
stage in operas. Brandolin perceives it, and is deeply irritated.

"What is it to me?" he says to himself, but says so in vain.

Fragments of these ingenious conjectures and imaginary recollections
come to his ear and annoy him intensely,--annoy him the more because his
swift intuitions and unerring perceptions have told him from his own
observation that Xenia Sabaroff does not see in Gervase altogether a
stranger, though she has greeted him as such. Certain things are said
which he would like to resent, but he is powerless to do so.

His days have been delightful to him before the arrival of this other
man at Surrenden; now they are troubled and embittered. Yet he is not
inclined to break off his visit abruptly and go to Scotland, Germany, or
Norway, as might be wisest. He is in love with Xenia Sabaroff in a
manner which surprises himself. He thought he had outlived that sort of
boyish and imaginative passion. But she has a great power over his fancy
and his senses, and she is more like his earliest ideal of a woman than
any one he has ever met.

"Absurd that I should have an ideal at all at my age!" he thinks to
himself; but, as there are some who are never accompanied by that
ethereal attendant even in youth, so there are some whom it never leaves
till they reach their graves.

Therefore when he hears these vague, floating, disagreeable jests, he
suffers acutely, and finds himself in the position which is perhaps most
painful of all to any man who is a gentleman, that of being compelled to
sit silent and hear a woman he longs to protect lightly spoken of,
because he has no right to defend her, and would indeed only compromise
her more if he attempted her defence.

People do not venture to say much before Usk, because he is her host and
might resent it, but nevertheless he too hears also something, and
thinks to himself, "Didn't I tell Dolly foreigners are never any better
than they should be?"

But Dulcia Waverley is here, and her languid and touching ways, her
delicate health, and her soft sympathies have an indescribable sorcery
for him at all times, so that he thinks but very little since her
arrival of anything else. Usk likes women who believe devoutly that he
might have been a great politician if he had chosen, and who also
believe in his ruined digestion: no one affects both these beliefs so
intensely as Lady Waverley, and when she tells him that he could have
solved the Irish question in half an hour had he taken office, or that
no one could understand his constitution except a German doctor in a
bath in the Böhmerwald, whither she goes herself every autumn, she does,
altogether and absolutely, anything she chooses with him.

His wife sees that quite well, and dislikes it, but it might be so much
worse, she reflects: it might be a woman out of society, or a public
singer, or an American adventuress: so she is reasonable, and always
makes _bonne mine_ to Dulcia Waverley, with her nerves, her cures, and
her angelic smiles. After all, it does not much matter, she thinks, if
they like to go and drink nasty waters together and poison themselves
with sulphur, iron, and potassium. It is one of the odd
nineteenth-century ways of playing Antony and Cleopatra.

Notwithstanding the absorption of his thoughts, Usk, however, one day
spares a moment from Lady Waverley and his own liver, to put together
words dropped by different people then under his own roof, to ponder
upon them, and finally to interrogate his wife.

"Did you know that people say they used to carry on together?" he asks,
without preamble.

"Who?" asks the lady of Surrenden, sharply.

"Madame Sabaroff and Gervase," he growls. "It'd be odd if they hadn't,
as they've come to this house!"

"Of course I knew they were friends; but there was never anything
between them in the vulgar sense which you would imply renders them
eligible for my house," replies Dorothy Usk, with the severity of a
woman whose conscience is clear, and the tranquillity of a woman who is
telling a falsehood.

Usk stares at her. "Well, if you knew it, you rode a dark horse, then,
when you asked her here?"

"Your expressions are incoherent," returns his wife. "If I wished two
people to meet when both were free, who had had a certain sympathy for
each other when honor kept them apart, there is nothing very culpable in
it? What is your objection?"

"Oh, Lord, I've no objection: I don't care a straw," says her lord, with
a very moody expression. "But Brandolin will, I suspect: she's certainly
encouraged him. I think you might have shown us your cards."

"Lord Brandolin is certainly old enough to take care of himself in
affairs of the heart, and experienced enough, too, if one is to believe
all one hears," replies his wife. "What can he care, either, for a
person he has known a few days? Whereas the attachment of Gervase to her
is of very long date and most romantic origin. He has loved her
hopelessly for eight years."

Usk gives a grim guffaw. "The constancy has had many interludes, I
suspect! Now I see why you took such a craze for the lady; but you might
have said what you were after to me, at any rate. I could have hinted to
Brandolin how the land lay, and he wouldn't have walked with his eyes
shut into her net."

"Her 'net'? She is as cold as ice to him!" replies his wife, with
disgust; "and, were she otherwise, the loves of your friend are soon
consoled. He writes a letter, takes a voyage, and throws his memories
overboard. Alan's temperament is far more serious."

"If by serious you mean selfish, I agree with you. There isn't such
another d----d egotist anywhere under the sun." And, much out of temper,
Usk flings himself out of the room and goes to Lady Waverley, who is
lying on a sofa in the small library. She has a headache, but her smile
is sweet, her hand cool, her atmosphere soothing and delightful, with
the blinds down and an odor of attar of roses.

If any one were to tell Dolly Usk that she had been making up fibs on
this occasion, she would be mortally offended and surprised. She would
reply that she had only been _brodant un peu_,--putting the thing as it
ought to be put, as it must be put, if Gervase is to obtain the hand of
Xenia Sabaroff, and if nobody is to know anything which ought not to be
known. Indeed, she has pondered so much on this manner of putting it,
that she has almost ended in believing that her version of the story is
the true one.

"Brandolin's feelings, indeed!" she thinks, with great contempt. "As if
any pain he might feel, if he did feel any, would not be due and fitting
retribution upon him for the horrid life he has led, and the way he has
played fast and loose with women. He can go back to his Hindoos, whose
figures are so superior to any European's! But George is always so
absurd about his friends."

Whereon, being in an irritated and unkind mood, she desires the servant,
who just then announces the visit of the rector of the parish, to show
that reverend person into the small library, where she knows that Dulcia
Waverley is trying to get rid of her headache. It is very seldom that
she is unwise enough to indulge in this kind of domestic vengeance; but
at this moment it seems sweet to her.

The unfortunate and innocent rector finds the lord of Surrenden
monosyllabic and impolite, but Lady Waverley, woman-like, is wholly
equal to the occasion, and in her sweet low voice discourses of village
choirs, and village readings, and village medicines and morals, with
such divine patience and feminine adaptability that the go

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/32199