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, suchespritas 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 allesprit. 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, anddeux doigts de Madèreor 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 thechasseat 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 howinsular!" 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 thatlibro 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 somethinglouchethere.
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 thesuaviter 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 thedemoiselles-mannequinsat 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."
"Thosefaiseurs, 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 bebien miseon 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 readat 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 asolitairelike 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 med'avancethat 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 allsheknows 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."
"It is very kind of you, dear Lady Usk, to have remembered asolitairelike 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 med'avancethat 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 allsheknows 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. "Shedoes 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 merepaquets 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 alwaysmaladives."
"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 linethere."
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 sendusto 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!"
"Herown 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.
The very bachelor rooms at Surrenden are conducive to revery and indolence, cosily comfortable and full of little attentions for the guest'sbien-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 isdestituantall 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 thequid quo proin 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 withmein 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 lookchez 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, withdessus-des-portesafter 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.
"Youusedto 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 livesau 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."
"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 isthatwoman?" 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 adégagé, 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 generationtout en dehorsas 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,"
"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. Johnsondoubléwith 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 bede 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 saidá proposof 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.
"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 callsla femme pure, and againstla femme taréeas 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 andarriérénowadays 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 areéveilléesenough, 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 adébutantewith 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 oldviveurdiscuss 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 thatchicwhich 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 araconteurof 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 somewhatscabreuxjests 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 oldblagueurWootton 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."