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, "peopledoadmire 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 toappearto 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 desperateacharnementin 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.
"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.Hedoes 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 apetit-maître, aposeur, 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 intenueand 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 scarcelybibelotsto 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 everythingen 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 soempressé? 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 hisbonnes fortunesthat 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, butc'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 greathauteurin 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.
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 herselfde bon c[oe]urto 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 discoursesà proposof 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 ofour'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 terriblyéveilléesalready."
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 becouronné, 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 theentréeof 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 muchau mieuxwith Madame Sabaroff? I remember hearing long ago from Russians——"
Lady Usk interrupts the great man angrily: "Very muchau 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 ismauvaise 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 andincomprise; 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 ofblagueabout 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 afemme 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 arebonnes 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 thanle 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 muchénervé, 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.
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 anylacunæ, 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 makesbonne mineto 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.