If any one were to tell Dolly Usk that she had been making up fibs on this occasion, she would be mortally offended and surprised. She would reply that she had only beenbrodant un peu,—putting the thing as it ought to be put, as it must be put, if Gervase is to obtain the hand of Xenia Sabaroff, and if nobody is to know anything which ought not to be known. Indeed, she has pondered so much on this manner of putting it, that she has almost ended in believing that her version of the story is the true one.
"Brandolin's feelings, indeed!" she thinks, with great contempt. "As if any pain he might feel, if he did feel any, would not be due and fitting retribution upon him for the horrid life he has led, and the way he has played fast and loose with women. He can go back to his Hindoos, whose figures are so superior to any European's! But George is always so absurd about his friends."
Whereon, being in an irritated and unkind mood, she desires the servant, who just then announces the visit of the rector of the parish, to show that reverend person into the small library, where she knows that Dulcia Waverley is trying to get rid of her headache. It is very seldom that she is unwise enough to indulge in this kind of domestic vengeance; but at this moment it seems sweet to her.
The unfortunate and innocent rector finds the lord of Surrenden monosyllabic and impolite, but Lady Waverley, woman-like, is wholly equal to the occasion, and in her sweet low voice discourses of village choirs, and village readings, and village medicines and morals, with such divine patience and feminine adaptability that the good man dismisses from his mind as impossible what he had certainly fancied he saw in the moment when the library door opened before him.
If ever there was purity incarnate, Dulcia Waverley looks it, with her white gown, her Madonna-like hair, her dewy pensive eyes, and her appealing smile. She suggests the portraits in the Keepsakes and Forget-me-Nots of fifty years ago; she has always about her the faint old-fashioned perfume of attar of roses, and she wears her soft fair hair in Raphaelite bands which in any other woman would look absurd; but her experience has told her that, despite all change in modes and manners, the surest weapons to subdue strong men are still those old-fashioned charms of fragility and of apparent helplessness which made Othello weep when his bridal moon was young above the Venetian waters. Only if she had ever spoken candidly all she knows, which she never by any chance does, she would say that to succeed thus with Othello, or with any other male creature, you must be, under all your apparent weakness, tenacious as a magnet and cold as steel. Therein lies the secret of all power: the velvet glove and the iron hand may be an old saying, but it is a truth never old.
The conclusion which she had drawn from Gervase and his fragmentary story has seriously annoyed and shocked his cousin, but on reflection she decides to adhere to her invariable rule of ignoring all that is equivocal in it, and treating it accordingly.
No one has ever heard Lady Usk admit that there is the slightest impropriety in the relations of any of her guests: it is one of those fictions like the convenient fictions of the law, which are so useful that every one agrees not to dispute their acceptance. She will never know a person who is really compromised. Therefore, if there be any soil on the wings of her doves, she shuts her eyes to it so long as those of the world are shut. She has the agreeable power of never seeing but what she wishes to see: so, although for the moment she has been uncomfortably shocked, she recovers her composure rapidly, and persuades herself that Gervase merely spoke of a passing attachment, perfectly pure. Why should he not marry the object of it? To the mind of Dorothy Usk that would make everything right. Things may have been wrong once, but that is nobody's business. Xenia Sabaroff is a charming and beautiful woman, and the silver-mine beyond the Urals is a very real thing. Lady Usk is not a mercenary, she is even a generous woman; but when English fortunes are so embarrassed as they are in this day, with Socialists at the roots and a Jacquerie tearing at the fruits of them, any solid fortune situated out of England would be of great use to any Englishman occupying a great position.
"We shall all of us have to live abroad before long," she reflects, with visions of Hodge chopping down her palms for firewood and Sally smashing the porcelain in her model dairy.
No doubt the relations of her cousin and her guest have not been always what they ought to have been; but she does not wish to think of this, and she will not think of it: by-gones are always best buried. The people who manage to be happy are those who understand the art of burying them and use plenty of quicklime.
During the twenty years which have elapsed since her presentation, Dolly Usk has had a very varied experience of men and women, and has continually been solicited to interfere in their love-affairs, or has even interfered without being solicited. She likes the feeling of being adiva ex machinato her friends, and, though she has so decidedly refused Gervase her assistance to discover the state of Xenia Sabaroff's feelings towards him, she begins in her own mind immediately to cast about for some indirect means of learning it, and arranges in her own fancy the whole story as it will sound prettiest and most proper, if she be ever called on to relate it to the world.
She has a talent at putting such stories so nicely in order that anything which may be objectionable in them is altogether invisible, as a cleverfaiseurwill so arrange old laces on a court train that the darns and stains in them are wholly hidden away. She likes exercising her ingenuity in this way; and, although the narrative given her by Gervase has certainly seemed to her objectionable, and one which places the hero of it in an unpleasant light, it may with tact be turned so as to show nothing but what is interesting. And to this end she also begins to drop little hints, little phrases suggestive of that virtue of blameless and long constancy with which it is necessary to invest her cousin Alan, if he is to be made a centre of romance. She even essays these very delicately on the ear of Xenia Sabaroff; but they are met with so absolute a lack of response, so discouraging and cold an absence of all understanding, that she cannot continue to try them in that direction.
"If that odious Brandolin were not here!" she thinks, irritably.
The attentions of Brandolin are very marked to the Princess Sabaroff, and are characterized by that carelessness of comment and that color of romance which have always marked his interest in any woman. He is not a rivalà plaisanter, she knows; but then she knows, too, that he never is serious in these matters. When she first hears the story of Gervase, she heartily wishes that there were any pretence to get rid of Xenia Sabaroff, and hastily wonders what excuse she could make to break up her Surrenden circle. But on reflection she desires as strongly to retain her there; and, as there is to be a child's costume ball on the occasion of the Babe's birthday a fortnight hence, she makes the children entreat their friend to stay for it, and adds her own solicitation to theirs. Madame Sabaroff hesitates, is inclined to refuse, but at length acquiesces.
Unfortunately, Usk, who always to his wife's mind represents the bull in the china-shop with regard to any of her delicate and intricate combinations, insists that Brandolin shall not leave either. So the situation remains unchanged, though many guests come and go, some staying two days, some three or four.
Xenia Sabaroff has seen and suffered enough to make her not lightly won or easily impressed. She knows enough of the world to know her own value in it, and she has measured the brutality and the inconsistency which may lie under the most polished exterior.
"I am not old yet in years," she says, once, "but I am very old in some things. I have no illusions."
"When there is a frost in spring the field-flowers die," says Brandolin, softly, "but they come again."
"In the fields, perhaps," replies Xenia Sabaroff.
"And in the human heart," says Brandolin.
He longs to ask her what have been the relations between her and Gervase which people seem so sure have existed once; he longs to know whether it was the brutality of her husband, or the infidelity of any lover, which has taught her so early the instability of human happiness.
But he hesitates before any demand, however veiled or delicate, upon her confidence. He has known her such a little while, and he is conscious that she is not afemme facile. It is her greatest fascination for him: though he is credited with holding women lightly, he is a man whose theories of what they ought to be are high and difficult to realize. Each day that he sees her at Surrenden tends to convince him more and more that she does realize them, despite the calumnies which are set floating round her name.
One day, among several new arrivals, a countryman of hers comes down from London, where, being momentarilychargé-d'affairesof the Russian Legation, he has been cursing the heat, the dust, the deserted squares, the empty clubs, the ugly parks, and rushing out of town whenever he can for twenty-four hours, as he now comes to Surrenden from Saturday to Monday. "Comme un calicot! Comme un calicot!" he says, piteously. Such are the miseries of the diplomatic service.
He kisses the hand of Madame Sabaroff with ardor and reverence: he has known her in her own country. A gleam of amusement comes into his half-shut gray eyes as he recognizes Gervase.
The next morning is Sunday. Usk and Dulcia Waverley are at church, with the children and Lady Usk and Nina Curzon.
Brandolin strays into the small library, takes down a book, and stretches himself on a couch. He half expects that Madame Sabaroff will come down before luncheon and also seek a book, as she did last Sunday. He lights a cigarette and waits, lazily watching the peacocks drawing their trains over the velvety turf without. It is a lovely dewy morning, very fresh and fragrant after rains in the night. He thinks he will persuade her to go for a walk: there is a charming walk near, under deep trees by a little brown brook, full of forget-me-nots.
He hears a step, and looks up: he does not see her, but the Russian secretary, Gregor Litroff, always called "Toffy" by his female friends in England.
"Dieu de Dieu!What an institution your English Sunday is!" says Litroff, with a yawn. "I looked out of my window an hour ago, and beheld Usk in a tall hat, with his little boy on one side and miladi Waverley on the other, solemnly going to church. How droll! He would not do it in London."
"It is not more ridiculous to go to church in a tall hat than to prostrate yourself and kiss a wooden cross, as you would do if you were at home," says Brandolin, contemptuously, eying the intruder with irritation.
"That may be," says the secretary, good-humoredly. "We do it from habit, to set an example, not to make a fuss. So, I suppose, does he."
"Precisely," says Brandolin, wondering how he shall get rid of this man.
"And he takes Lady Waverley for an example, too?" asks Litroff, with a laugh.
"Religion enjoins us," replies Brandolin, curtly, "to offer what we have most precious to the Lord."
The secretary laughs again.
"That is very good," he says, with enjoyment.
Mr. Wootton comes in at that instant. He has been away, but has returned: the cooks at Surrenden are admirable. Brandolin sees his hopes of atête-à-têteand a walk in the home wood fading farther and farther from view. Mr. Wootton has several telegram-papers in his hand.
"All bad news, from all the departments," he remarks.
"There is nothing but bad news," says Brandolin. "It is painful to die by driblets. We shall all be glad when we have got the thing over,—seen Windsor burnt, London sacked, Ireland admitted to the American Union, and Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone crowned at Westminster."
Mr. Wootton coughs: he does not like unseemly jests, nor to have the gravity and exclusiveness of the private intelligence he receives doubted. He turns to Litroff, talks of Russian politics, and brings the conversation round to the Princess Sabaroff.
Brandolin, appearing absorbed in his book, lies on his couch wondering whether he should meet her anywhere about the gardens if he went out. He listens angrily when he hears her name.
"Was she ever talked about?" asks Mr. Wootton, searching the book-shelves.
"What charming woman is not?" returns Litroff, gallantly.
"My dear count," replies Mr. Wootton, with grave rebuke, "we have thousands of noble wives and mothers in England before whom Satan himself would be obliged to bow in reverence."
"Ah, truly," says Litroff: "so have we, I dare say: I have never asked."
"No doubt you have," says Mr. Wootton, kindly. "The virtue of its women is the great safeguard of a nation."
"One understands why England is losing her nice equipoise, then, now," murmurs Brandolin.
Mr. Wootton disregards him.
"But Madame Sabaroffwastalked about, I think,—unjustly, no doubt?" he insists.
Mr. Wootton always insists.
"Ach!" says Litroff, apologetically, "Sabaroff was such a great brute. It was very natural——"
"What was natural?"
"That she should console herself."
"Ah! she did console herself?"
Litroff smiles. "Ask Lord Gervase: he was Lord Baird at that time. We all expected he would have married her when Sabaroff was shot."
"But it was Lustoff who shot Sabaroff in a duel about her?"
"Not about her. Lustoff quarrelled with him about a gambling affair, not about her at all, though people have said so. Lord Baird—Gervase—was, I am certain, her first lover, and has been her only one, as yet."
Brandolin flings his book with some violence on the floor, gets up, and walks to the window. Mr. Wootton looks after him.
"No one could blame her," says Litroff, who is a good-natured man. "She was married when she was scarcely sixteen to a brute; she was immensely admired; she was alone in the midst of a society both loose and brilliant; Gervase laid siege to her sans trêve, and she was hardly more than a child."
"Where there is no principle early implanted," begins Mr. Wootton——
But Litroff is not patient under preaching. "My dear sir," he says, impatiently, "principle (of that kind) is more easily implanted in plain women than in handsomer ones. Madame Sabaroff is a proud woman, which comes to nearly the same thing as a high-principled one. She has lived like a saint since Sabaroff was shot, and if she take up matters with her early lover again it will only be, I imagine, this time,pour le bon motif. Anyhow, I don't see why we should blame her for the past, when the present shows us such an admirable and edifying spectacle as miladi Waverley and miladi Usk going to sit in church with George Usk between them!"
Whereon the Russian secretary takes a "Figaro" off the newspaper-table, and rudely opens it and flourishes it between Mr. Wootton and himself, in sign that the conversation is ended.
Mr. Wootton has never been so treated in his life.
Brandolin walks down the opening between the glass doors into the garden. He paces impatiently the green shady walks where he has seen her on other mornings than this. It is lovely weather, and the innumerable roses fill the warm moist air with fragrance. There is a sea-breeze blowing from the sea-coast some thirty miles away; his schooner is in harbor there; he thinks that it would be wisest to go to it and sail away again for as many thousand miles as he has just left behind him. Xenia Sabaroff has a great and growing influence over him, and he does not wish her to exercise it and increase it if this thing be true: perhaps, after all, she may be that kind of sorceress of which Mary Stuart is the eternal type,—cold only that others may burn,reculant pour mieux sauter, exquisitely feminine only to be more dangerously powerful. He does not wish to play therôleof Chastelard, or of Douglas, or of Henry Darnley. He is stung to the quick by what he has heard said.
It is not new: since the arrival of Gervase the same thing has been hinted more or less clearly, more or less obscurely, within his hearing more than once; but the matter-of-fact words of Litroff have given the tale a kind of circumstantiality and substance which the vague uncertain suggestions of others did not do. Litroff has, obviously, no feeling against her; he even speaks of her with reluctance and admiration: therefore his testimony has a truthfulness about it which would be lacking in any mere malicious scandal.
It is intensely painful to him to believe, or even to admit to himself as possible, that it may be thus true. She seems to him a very queen among women: all the romance of his temperament clothes her with ideal qualities. He walks on unconsciously till he has left the west garden and entered the wood which joins it, and the grassy seats made underneath the boughs. As he goes, his heart thrills, his pulse quickens: he sees Madame Sabaroff. She is seated on one of the turf banks, reading, the dog of the house at her feet. He has almost walked on to her before he has perceived her.
"I beg your pardon," he murmurs, and pauses, undecided whether to go or stay.
She looks at him a little surprised at the ceremony of his manner.
"For what do you beg my pardon? You are as free of the wood as I," she replies, with a smile. "I promised the children to keep their dogs quiet, and to await them here as they return from their church."
"You are too good to the children," says Brandolin, still with restraint. Her eyes open with increased surprise. She has never seen his manner, usually so easy, nonchalant, and unstudied, altered before.
"He must have heard bad news," she thinks, but says nothing, and keeps her book open.
Brandolin stands near, silent and absorbed. He is musing what worlds he would give, if he had them, to know whether the story is true! He longs passionately to ask her in plain words, but it would be too brutal and too rude; he has not known her long enough to be able to presume to do so.
He watches the sunshine fall through the larch boughs on to her hands in their long loose gloves and touch the pearls which she always wears at her throat.
"How very much he is unlike himself!" she thinks; she misses his spontaneous and picturesque eloquence, his warmabandonof manner, his caressing deference of tone. At that moment there is a gleam of white between the trees, a sound of voices in the distance.
The family party are returning from church. The dogs jump up and wag their tails and bark their welcome. The Babe is dashing on in advance. There is an end of their brieftête-à-tête; he passionately regrets the loss of it, though he is not sure of what he would have said in it.
"Always together!" says Dulcia Waverley, in a whisper, to Usk, as she sees them. "Does he know that he succeeds Lord Gervase, do you think?"
"How should I know?" says Usk; "and Dolly says there was nothing between her and Gervase,—nothing; at least it was all in honor, as the French say."
"Oh, of course," agrees Lady Waverley, with her plaintive eyes gazing dreamily down the aisle of larch-trees. The children have run on to Madame Sabaroff.
"Where is Alan?" thinks Dolly Usk, angrily, on seeing Brandolin.
Gervase, who is not an early riser, is then taking his coffee in bed as twelve strikes. He detests an English Sunday: although at Surrenden it is disguised as much as possible to look like any other day, still there is a Sunday feeling in the air, and Usk does not like people to play cards on Sundays: it is his way of being virtuous vicariously.
"Primitive Christianity," says Brandolin, touching the white feathers of Dodo's hat and the white lace on her short skirts.
"We only go to sleep," replies the child, disconsolately. "We might just as well go to sleep at home; and it is so hot in that pew, with all that red cloth!"
"My love!" says Dulcia Waverley, scandalized.
"Lady Waverley don't go to sleep!" cries the Babe, in his terribly clear little voice. "She was writing in her hymn-book and showing it to papa."
No one appears to hear this indiscreet remark except Dodo, who laughs somewhat rudely.
"I was trying to remember the hymn of Faber's 'Longing for God,'" says Lady Waverley, who is never known to be at a loss. "The last verse escapes me. Can any one recall it? It is so lamentable that sectarianism prevents those hymns from being used in Protestant churches."
But no one there present is religious enough or poetic enough to help her to the missing lines.
"There is so little religious feeling anywhere in England," she remarks, with a sigh.
"It's the confounded levelling that destroys it," says Usk, echoing the sigh.
"They speak of Faber," says Madame Sabaroff. "The most beautiful and touching of all his verses are those which express the universal sorrow of the world."
And in her low, grave, melodious voice she repeats a few of the lines of the poem:
"The sea, unmated creature, tired and lone,Makes on its desolate sands eternal moan.Lakes on the calmest days are ever throbbingUpon their pebbly shores with petulant sobbing."The beasts of burden linger on their wayLike slaves, who will not speak when they obey;Their eyes, whene'er their looks to us they raise,With something of reproachful patience gaze."Labor itself is but a sorrowful song,The protest of the weak against the strong;Over rough waters, and in obstinate fields,And from dark mines, the same sad sound it yields."
"The sea, unmated creature, tired and lone,Makes on its desolate sands eternal moan.Lakes on the calmest days are ever throbbingUpon their pebbly shores with petulant sobbing.
"The beasts of burden linger on their wayLike slaves, who will not speak when they obey;Their eyes, whene'er their looks to us they raise,With something of reproachful patience gaze.
"Labor itself is but a sorrowful song,The protest of the weak against the strong;Over rough waters, and in obstinate fields,And from dark mines, the same sad sound it yields."
She is addressing Brandolin as she recites them; they are a little behind the others.
He does not reply, but looks at her with an expression in his eyes which astonishes and troubles her. He is thinking, as the music of her tones stirs his innermost soul, that he can believe no evil of her, will believe none,—no, though the very angels of heaven were to cry out against her.
"Where were you all this morning?" asks Lady Usk of her cousin, after luncheon.
"I never get up early," returns Gervase. "You know that."
"Brandolin was in the home wood with Madame Sabaroff as we returned from church," remarks Dolly Usk. "They were together under a larch-tree. They looked as if they were on the brink of a quarrel or at the end of one: either may be an interestingrapprochement."
"I dare say they were only discussing some poet. They are always discussing some poet."
"Then they had fallen out over the poet. Poets are dangerous themes. Or perhaps she had been showing him your letters, if, as you seem to think, she carries them about with her everywhere like a reliquary."
"I never presumed to imagine that she had preserved them for a day."
"Oh, yes, you did. You had a vision of her weeping over them in secret every night, until you saw her here and found her as unlike adélaisséas a woman can be."
"Certainly she does not look that. Possibly, if Dido could have been dressed by Worth and Rodrigues, had diamonds as big as plovers' eggs, and been adored by Lord Brandolin, she would never have perished in despair.Autres temps autres m[oe]urs."
He speaks with sullen and scornful bitterness: his handsome face is momentarily flushed.
Dorothy Usk looks at him with inquisitiveness: she has never known him fail to rely on his own attractions before. "You are unusually modest," she replies. "Certainly, in our days, if Æneas does not come back, we take somebody else; sometimes we do that even if he does come back."
Gervase is moodily silent.
"I never knew you 'funk a fence' before!" says his cousin to him, sarcastically.
"I have tried to say something to her," replies Gervase, moodily, "but she gives me no hearing, no occasion."
"I should have thought you were used well enough to make both for yourself," returns his cousin, with curt sympathy. "You have always been 'master of yourself, though women sigh,'—a paraphrase of Pope at your service."
Gervase smiled, conscious of his past successes and willing to acknowledge them.
"But you see she does not sigh!" he murmurs, with a sense that the admission is not flattering to his ownamour-propre.
"You have lost the power to make her sigh, do you mean?"
"I make no impression on her at all. I am utterly unable to imagine her feelings, her sentiments,—how much she would acknowledge, how much she would ignore."
"That is a confession of great helplessness! I should never have believed that you would be baffled by any woman, above all by a woman who once loved you."
"It is not easy to make a fire out of ashes."
"Not if the ashes are quite cold, certainly; but if a spark remains in them, the fire soon comes again."
He is silent: the apparent indifference of a person whom he believed to be living out her life in solitude, occupied only with his memory, annoys and mortifies him. He has never doubted his own power to write his name indelibly on the hearts of women.
"Perhaps she wishes to marry Brandolin?" suggests Dorothy Usk.
"Pshaw!" says Lord Gervase.
"Why pshaw?" repeats his cousin, persistently. "He would not be a man to my taste, and he hates marriage, and he has a set of Hindoos at St. Hubert's Lea, which would require as much cleaning as the Augean stable; but I dare say she doesn't know anything about them, and he may be persuading her that he thinks marriage opens the doors of Paradise: men can so easily pretend that sort of thing! A great many men have wanted to marry her, I believe, since she came back into the world after her seclusion. George declares that Brandolin is quite serious."
"Preposterous!" replies Lord Gervase.
"Really, I don't see that," replies his judicious cousin. "A great many women have wanted to marryhim, though one wonders why. Indeed, I have heard some of them declare that he is wholly irresistible when he chooses."
"With Hindoos, perhaps," says Gervase.
"With our own women," says his cousin. "Lady Mary Jardine died of a broken heart because he wouldn't look at her."
"Pray spare me the roll-call of his victims," says Lord Gervase, irritably: he is passionately jealous of Brandolin. He himself had forgotten Xenia Sabaroff, and forgotten all his obligations to her, when she had been, as he always had believed, within reach of his hand if he stretched it out; but viewed as a woman whom other men wooed and another man might win, she has become to him intensely to be desired and to be disputed. He has been a spoiled child of fortune and of the drawing-rooms all his years, and the slightest opposition is intolerable to him.
"I have no doubt," continues Dorothy Usk, gently, continuing her embroidery of a South Kensington design of lilies and palm-leaves, "that if he were aware you had a prior claim, if he thought or knew that you had ever enjoyed her sympathy, he would immediately withdraw and leave the field: he is a very proud man, with all his carelessness, and would not, I think, care to be second to anybody in the affections of a woman whom he seriously sought."
"What do you mean?" asks Gervase, abruptly, pausing in his walk to and fro the boudoir.
"Only what I say," she answers. "If you wish toéloignerBrandolin, give him some idea of the truth."
Gervase laughs a little.
"On my honor," he thinks, with some bitterness, "for sheer uncompromising meanness there is nothing comparable to the suggestions which a woman will make to you!"
"I couldn't do that," he says, aloud. "What would he think of me?"
"My dear Alan," replies Dorothy Usk, impatiently, getting her silks in a tangle, "when a man has behaved to any woman as you, by your own account, have behaved to Madame Sabaroff, I think it is a little late in the day to pretend to much elevation of feeling."
"You do not understand——"
"I have always found," says his cousin, impatiently searching for shades of silk which she does not see, "that whenever we presume to pronounce an opinion on any man's conduct and think ill of it we are always told that we don't understand anything. When we flatter the man, or compliment him on his conduct, there is no end to the marvellous powers of our penetration, the fineness of our instincts, the accuracy of our intuitions."
Gervase does not hear: his thoughts are elsewhere: he is thinking of Xenia Sabaroff as he saw her first in the Salle des Palmiers in the Winter Palace,—a mere girl, a mere child, startled and made nervous by the admiration she excited and the homage she received, under the brutality of her husband, the raillery of her friends; but that time is long ago, very long, as the life of women counts, and Xenia Sabaroff is now perfect mistress of her own emotions, if emotions she ever feels. Gervase cannot for one moment tell whether the past is tenderly remembered by her, is utterly forgotten, or is only recalled to be touched and dismissed without regret. He is a vain man, but vanity has no power to reassure him here.
In the warm afternoon of the next day the children are in the school-room, supposed to be preparing their lessons for the morrow; but the German governess, who is alone as guardian of order in the temple of intellect, has fallen asleep, with flies buzzing about her blonde hair, and her blue spectacles pushed up on her forehead, and Dodo has taken advantage of the fact to go and lean out of one of the windows, whilst her sister draws a caricature of the sleeping virgin from Deutschland, and the Babe slips away from his books to a mechanical Punch, which, contraband in the school-room, is far dearer to him than his Gradus and rule of three.
Dodo, with her hands thrust among her abundant locks, lolls with half her body in the air, and, by twisting her neck almost to dislocation, manages to see round an ivy-grown buttress of the east wall, and to espy people who are getting on their horses at the south doors of the building.
"They are going out riding and I am shut up here!" she groans. "Oh, what a while it takes one to grow up!"
"Who are going to ride?" asks Lilie, too fascinated by her drawing to leave it.
"Lots of them," replies Dodo, who speaks four languages, and her own worst of all. "All of them, pretty nearly. Mamma's on Pepper, and Lady Waverley's got Bopeep,—she's always nervous, you know. I can't see very much, 'cause of the ivy. Oh, there's the princess on Satan,—nobody else could ride Satan; Lord Brandolin's put her up, and now he's riding by her. They're gone now,—and papa's stopping behind them all to do something to Bopeep's girths." Whereat the dutiful Dodo laughs rudely, as she laughed coming home from church.
The sound of the horses' hoofs going farther away down the avenue comes through the stillness, as her voice and her laughter cease.
"What a shame to be shut up here just because one isn't old!" she groans, as she listens enviously. The sun is pouring liquid gold through the ivy-leaves, the air is hot and fragrant, gardeners are watering the flower-beds below, and the sweet, moist scent comes up to Dodo's nostrils and makes her writhe with longing to get out; not that she is by any means ardently devoted to nature, but she loves life, movement, gayety, and she dearly loves showing off her figure on her pony and being flirted with by her father's friends.
"I am sure Lord Brandolin is in love with her, awfully in love," she says, as she peers into the distance, where the black form of Satan is just visible through far-off oak-boughs.
"With whom?" asks Lilie, getting up from her caricature to lean also out over the ivy.
"Xenia," says Dodo. She is very proud of calling her friend Xenia. "Take care Goggles don't wake, or she'll see what you've been doing."
The lady from Deutschland was always known to them by this endearing epithet.
"I don't care," says Lilie, kicking her bronze boots in the air. "Do you think she'll marry Lord Brandolin?"
"Who? Goggles?"
"The idea!" They laugh deliciously.
"You say he's in love with Xenia. If they're in love they will marry," says Lilie, pensively.
"No, they won't: people who are in love never marry," replies Dodo.
"What do they do, then?" inquires the younger sister.
"They marry somebody else, and ask the one they like to go and stay with them. It is much better," she adds. "It is what I shall do."
"Why is it better? It's a roundabout way," objects Lilie. "I shouldn't care to marry at all," she adds, "only one can't ever be Mistress of the Robes if one doesn't."
"Oh, everybody marries, of course; only some muff it, and don't get all they want by it," replies the cynic Dodo.
"Et l'amour, Miladi Alexandra?" says the French governess, entering at that moment. "Où donc mettez-vous l'amour?"
"Nous ne sommes pas des bourgeoises," returns Dodo, very haughtily.
The Babe, sitting astride on a chair, trying to mend his mechanical Punch, who screamed and beat his wifeabsolument comme la nature, as the French governess said, before he was broken, hears the discourse of his sisters and muses on it. He is very fond of Brandolin, and he adores his princess: he would like them to live together, and he would go and see them without his sisters, who tease him, and without Boom, who lords it over him. Into his busy and precocious little brain there enters the resolution topousser la machine, as his governess would call it.
The Babe has a vast idea of his own resources in the way of speech and invention, and he has his mother's tendencies to interfere with other people's affairs, and is quite of an opinion that if he had the management of most things he should better them. He has broken his Parisian Punch in his endeavor to make it say more words than it could say, but this slight accident does not affect his own admiration and belief in his own powers, any more than to have brought a great and prosperous empire within measurable distance of civil war affects a statesman's conviction that he is the only person who can rule that empire. The Babe, like Mr. Gladstone, is in his own eyes infallible. Like the astute diplomatist he is, he waits for a good opportunity; he is always where the ladies are, and his sharp little wits have been preternaturally quickened in that atmosphere of what the French call "l'odeur féminine."
He has to wait some days for his occasion. The frank and friendly intercourse which existed at first between Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff is altered: they are never alone, and the pleasant discussions on poets and poetry, on philosophers and follies, in the gardens in the forenoon are discontinued, neither could very well say why, but the presence of Gervase chills and oppresses both of them and keeps them apart. She has the burden of memory, he the burden of suspicion; and suspicion is a thing so hateful and intolerable to the nature of Brandolin that it makes him miserable to feel himself guilty of it.
But one morning the Babe coaxes her out to go with him to his garden,—a floral republic, where a cabbage comes up cheek by jowl with a gloxinia, and plants are plucked up by the roots to see if they are growing aright. The Babe's system of horticulture is to dig intently for ten minutes in all directions, to make himself very red in the face, and then to call Dick, Tom, or Harry, any under-gardener who may be near, and say, "Here, do it, will you?" Nevertheless, he retains the belief that he is the creator and cultivator of this his garden, as M. Grévy believes that he is the chief person in the French Republic; and he takes Madame Sabaroff to admire it.
"It would look better if it were a little more in order," she permits herself to observe.
"Oh, that's their fault," says the Babe, just as M. Grévy would say of disorder in the Chambers, the Babe meaning Dick, Tom, or Harry, as the President would mean Clémenceau, Rochefort, or M. de Mun.
"My dear Babe, how exactly you are like the Head of a Department!" says Brandolin, who has followed them out of the house and comes up behind them. "According to the Head of a Department, it is never the head that is at fault, always the understrappers. May I inquire since when it has become the fashion to set sunflowers with their heads downward?"
"I wanted to see if the roots would turn after the sun," says the Babe, and regards his explanation as triumphant.
"And they only die! How perverse of them! You would become a second Newton, if your destiny were not already cast, to dazzle the world by a blending of Beau Brummel and Sir Joseph Paxton."
The Babe looks a little cross; he does not like to be laughed at before his princess. He has got his opportunity, but it vexes him; he has an impression that his companions will soon drift into forgetting both him and his garden. Since the approach of Brandolin the latter has said nothing.
The children's gardens are in a rather wild and distant part of the grounds of Surrenden. It is noon; most people staying in the house are still in their own rooms; it is solitary, sunny, still; a thrush is singing in a jessamine thicket, there is no other sound except that of a gardener's broom sweeping on the other side of the laurel hedge.
The Babe feels that it is now or never for hiscoup de maître.
He plucks a rose, the best one he has, and offers it to Madame Sabaroff, who accepts it gratefully, though it is considerably earwig-eaten, and puts it in her corsage.
The eyes of Brandolin follow it wistfully.
The Babe glances at them alternately from under his hair, then his small features assume an expression of cherubic innocence and unconsciousness. The mostrusélittle rogue in the whole kingdom, he knows how to make himself look like a perfect reproduction of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Artlessness or Infancy. He gazes up in Xenia Sabaroff's face with angelic simplicity admirably assumed.
"When you marry him," says the Babe, pointing to Brandolin, with admirably affectednaïveté, "you will let me hold up your train, won't you? I always hold up my friends' trains when they marry. I have a page's dress, Louis something or other, and a sword, and a velvet cap with a badge and a feather: I always look very well."
"Oh, what an odiouspetit-maîtreyou will be when you are a man, my dear Babe!" says Xenia Sabaroff.
She does not take any notice of his opening words, but a flush of color comes over her face and passes as quickly as it came.
"Petit-maître,—what is that?" says the Babe. "But you will let me, won't you? And don't marry him till the autumn, or even the winter, because the velvet makes me so hot when the day is hot, and the dress wouldn't look nice made in thin things."
"Could I only add my prayer to his," murmurs Brandolin, "and hope that in the autumn——"
Xenia Sabaroff looks at him with a strange gaze: it is penetrating, dreamy, wistful, inquiring.
"We jest as the child jests," she says, abruptly, and walks onward.
"I do not jest," says Brandolin.
The Babe glances at them under his thick eyelashes, and, being afine mouche, only innocent in appearance, he runs off after a butterfly. He has not been brought up in a feminine atmosphere ofpoudre de rizandlait d'iriswithout learning discretion.
"The Babe is a better courtier than gardener," says Xenia Sabaroff, as she shakes a green aphis out of her rose: her tone is careless, but her voice is not quite under her command, and has a little tremor in it.
Brandolin looks at her with impassioned eyes: he has grown very pale.
"It is no jest with me," he says, under his breath. "I would give you my life if you would take it?"
The last words have the accent of an interrogation, of an appeal.
"That is to say a great deal," replies Xenia Sabaroff: she is startled, astonished, troubled; she was not expecting any such entire avowal.
"Many men must have said as much to you who have more to recommend them than I. Say something to me: what will you say?"
She does not immediately reply; she looks on the ground, and absently traces patterns on the path with the end of her long walking-stick.
"Do you know," she says, at last, after a silence which seems to him endless, "do you know that there are people who believe that I have been thedélaisséeof Lord Gervase? They do not phrase it so roughly, but that is what they say."
Brandolin's very lips are white, but his voice does not falter for one moment as he answers, "They will not say it in my hearing."
"And, knowing that they say it, you would still offer me your name?"
"I do so."
"And you would ask me nothing save what I choose to tell you?"
The sunny air seems to turn round with him for an instant: his brain grows dizzy; his heart contracts with a sickening pain; but in the next moment a great wave of strong and perfect faith in the woman he cares for lifts his soul up on it, as a sea-wave lifts a drowning man to land.
"You shall tell me nothing save what you choose," he says, clearly and very tenderly. "I have perfect faith in you. Had I less than that, I would not ask you to be my wife."
She looks at him with astonishment and with wondering admiration.
"Yet you know so little of me!" she murmurs, in amaze.
"I love you," says Brandolin; then he kisses her hand with great reverence.
The tears which she had thought driven from her eyes forever, rise in them now.
"You are very noble," she replies, and leaves her hand for an instant within his.
The Babe, who has been watching from behind a tuft of laurel, can control his impatience no longer, but comes out of his ambush and runs towards them, regardless of how undesired he may be.
"Dodo says that women never marry anybody they love," he says, breathlessly; "but that is not true, is it, and you will let me carry your train?"
"Hush, my dear," says Xenia Sabaroff, laying her hand on the child's shoulder, while there is a sound in her voice which subdues to silence even the audacious spirit of the Babe.
"Give me time to think," she says, in a low tone to Brandolin; and then, with her hand still on the little boy's shoulder, she turns away from him and walks slowly towards the house.
The child walks silently and shyly beside her, his happy vanity troubled for once by the sense that he has made some mistake, and that there are some few things still in the universe which he does not quite entirely understand.
"You are not angry?" he asks her, at last, with a vague terror in his gay and impudent little soul.
"Angry with you?" says Xenia Sabaroff. "My dear child, no. I am perhaps angry with myself,—myself of many years ago."
The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame Sabaroff,—nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.
Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. He is fully aware that he has done a rash, perhaps an utterly unwise, thing in putting his future into the hands of a woman of whom he knows so little, and has, perhaps, the right to suspect so much. Yet he does not repent.
He does not see her again before dinner. She does not come into the library at the tea-hour; there is a large dinner that night; county people are there, as well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid woman, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, who thinks him the most absent-minded and unpleasant person she has ever known, and wonders how he has got his reputation as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even see Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the dinner, from the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and thinks what an idiotic thing the habits of society have made of human life.
When he is fairly at rare intervals goaded into speech, he utters paradoxes, and suggests views so startling that the wife of the Lord-Lieutenant is scandalized, and thinks the lunacy laws are defective if they cannot include and incarcerate him. She feels sure that the rumor about the Hindoo women at St. Hubert's Lea is entirely true.
After dinner he is free to approach the lady of his thoughts, but he endeavors in vain to tell from her face what answer he will receive, what time and meditation may have done or undone for him. She avoids the interrogation of his eyes, and is surrounded by other men as usual.
The evening seems to him intolerably long and intolerably tedious. It is, however, for others very gay. There is an improvised dance, ending in an impromptu cotillion, and following on an act of a comic opera given with admirable spirit by Lady Dawlish, Mrs. Curzon, and some of the younger men. Every one is amused, but the hours seem very slow to him: Gervase scarcely leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his chivalrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no shadow of doubt to steal over him, feels the odious whispers he has heard and the outspoken words of Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, he realizes that it is possible, do what he may, that they may haunt him so all his life. A man may be always master of his acts, but scarcely always of his thoughts.
"But I will never ask her one syllable," he thinks, "and I will marry her to-morrow if she chooses."
But will she choose?
He is far from sure. He pleases her intelligence; he possesses her friendship; but whether he has the slightest power to touch her heart he does not know. If he loved her less than he does he would be more confident.
As the interminable hours wear away, and the noise and absurdities of the cotillion are at their height, she, who never dances anywhere, drops her fan, and he is before the others in restoring it to her. As she takes it, she says, in a low voice, "Be in the small library at eleven to-morrow."
Soon after she leaves the ball-room altogether, and goes to her bedchamber.
Brandolin goes to his before the cotillion is over, but he sleeps very little. He longs for the morrow, and yet he dreads it. "Quand même," he murmurs, as from his bed he sees the white dawn over the dark masses of the Surrenden woods. Tell him what she may, he thinks, he will give her his life if she will take it. He is madly in love, no doubt; but there is something nobler and purer than the madness of love, than the mere violent instincts of passion, in his loyalty to her. Before anything he cherishes the honor of his name and race, and he is willing, blindfold, to trust her with it.
That morning it seems to him as if the hours would never pass, though they are few until the clocks strike eleven. The house is still, almost every one is asleep, for the cotillion, successful as only unpremeditated things ever are, had lasted till the sun was high and the dew on the grass of the garden was dry.
With a thickly-beating heart, nervous and eager as though he were a boy of sixteen seeking his first love-tryst, he enters the small library far before the hour, and waits for her there, pacing to and fro the floor. The room is full of memories of her: here they have talked on rainy days and have strolled out on to the lawns on fine ones; there is the chair which she likes best, and there the volume she had taken down yesterday; could it be only ten days since standing here he had seen her first in the distance with the children? Only ten days! It seems to him ten years, ten centuries.
The morning is very still, a fine soft rain is falling, wet jessamine-flowers tap against the panes of the closed windows, a great apprehension seems to make his very heart stand still.
As the clock points to the hour she enters the room.
She is very pale, and wears a morning gown of white plush, which trails behind her in a silver shadow. He kisses her hands passionately, but she draws them away.
"Wait a little," she says, gently. "Wait till you know—whatever there is to know."
"I want to know but one thing."
She smiles a little sadly.
"Oh, you think so now because you are in love with me. But in time to come, when that is passed, you will not be so easily content. If"—she hesitates a moment—"if there is to be any community between our lives, you must be quite satisfied as to my past. It is your right to be so satisfied; and were you not so, some time or other we should both be wretched."
His eyes flash with joy.
"Then——" he begins breathlessly.
"Oh! how like a man that is!" she says, sadly. "To think but of the one thing, of the one present moment, and to be ready to give all the future in pawn for it! Wait to hear everything. And first of all I must tell you that Lord Gervase also last night asked me to marry him."
"And you!"
"I shall not marry Lord Gervase. But I will not disguise from you that once I would have done so gladly, had I been free to do it."
Brandolin is silent: he changes color.
"I bade him come here for my answer," she continues. "He will be here in a few minutes. I wish you to remain in the large library, so that you may hear all that I say to him."
"I cannot do that. I cannot play the part of eavesdropper."
"You will play that part, or any other that I ask you, if you love me," she says, with a touch of imperiousness.
"Do you not see," she goes on, with more gentleness, "that if our lives are to be passed near each other (I do not say that they are, but you seem to wish it), you must first of all be convinced of the truth of all I tell you? If one doubt, one suspicion, remain, you will, in time, become unable to banish it. It would grow and grow until you were mastered by it. You believe in what I tell you now; but how long would you believe after marriage?"
"I want no proof: I only want your word. Nay, I do not even want that. I will ask you nothing. I swear that I will never ask you anything."
"That is very beautiful; and I am sure that you mean it now. But it could not last. You are a very proud man; you aregentilhomme de race. It would in time become intolerable to you if you believed that any one living man had any title to point a finger of scorn at you. You have a right to know what my relations were with Lord Gervase: it is necessary for all the peace of our future that you should know everything,—know that there is nothing more left for you to know. You can only be convinced of that if you yourself hear what I say to him. Go; and wait there."
Brandolin hesitates. To listen unseen is a part which seems very cowardly to him, and yet she is right, no doubt; all the peace of the future may depend on it. He is ready to pledge himself blindly in the dark in all ways, but he knows that she, in forbidding him to do so, speaks the word of wisdom, of foresight, and of truth.
"Go," she repeats. "Men have a thousand ways of proving the truth of whatever they say; we have none, or next to none. If you refuse me this, the sole poor evidence that I can produce, I will never be to you anything that you now wish. Never; that I swear to you."
He hesitates, and looks at her with a long inquiring regard. Then he bows, and goes.
After all, she is within her rights. She has no other means to show him with any proof what this man whose name is so odiously entangled with her own has, or has not, been to her.
The house is still quite silent, and no one is likely to come into those rooms until much later. Every syllable said in the small library can be heard in any part of the larger one. He stands in the embrasure of one of the windows, the velvet curtains making a screen behind him. He seems to wait for hours; in reality only five minutes have passed when he hears the door of the great library open, and Gervase passes quickly through the apartment without seeing him, and goes on into the one where she awaits his coming.
"Are you really risen so early?" she says, with a sarcastic coldness in her voice. "I remembered afterwards that it was too cruel to name to you any hour before noon."
"You are unkind," he answers. "To hear what I hope to hear, you may be sure that I would have gone through much greater trials than even rising with the lark, had you commanded it."
His words are light, but his accent is tender and appealing.
"What do you hope to hear?" she asks, abruptly. The question embarrasses him and sounds cold.
"I hope to hear that you pardon me the past and will deign to crown my future."
"I pardon you the past, certainly. With neither your present nor your future have I anything to do."
"You say that very cruelly,—so cruelly that it makes your forgiveness more unkind than your hatred would be."
"I intend no unkindness. I merely wish to express indifference. Perhaps I am even mistaken in saying that I entirely forgive you. When I remember that you once possessed any influence over me, I scarcely do forgive you, for I am forced to despise myself."
"Those are very hard words! Perhaps in the past I was unworthy of having known and loved you; but if you will believe in my regret, and allow me occasion to atone, you shall never repent of your indulgence. Pray hear me out, Xenia——"
"You cannot call me by that name. It is for my friends: you are not numbered among them."
"I would be much more than your friend. If you will be my wife."
"It is too late," she replies, and her voice is as cold as ice.
"Why too late? We have all the best of our lives unspent before us."
"When I say too late, I mean that if you had said as much to me after the death of Prince Sabaroff I should have accepted your hand, and I should have spent the whole remainder of my existence in repenting that I had done so; for I should soon have fathomed the shallowness of your character, the artificiality and poverty of your sentiments, the falseness of your mind, and I should speedily have hated both myself and you."
"You are not merciful, madame!"
He is bitterly humbled and passionately incensed.
"Were you merciful?" she asks him, with the sound of a great anger, carefully controlled, vibrating in her voice. "I was a child, taken out of a country convent, and married as ignorantly as a bird is trapped. I had rank, and I was burdened by it. I was in a great world, a great court, and I was terrified by them. The man I had been given to was a gambler, a drunkard, and a brute. He treated me in private as he had treated the women captured in Turkestan or sold as slaves in Persia. You knew that: you were his intimate associate. You used your opportunities to interest me and win your way into my confidence. I had no one in the whole world that I could trust. I did trust you."
She pauses a moment.
Gervase does not dare reply.
"You were so gentle, so considerate, so full of sympathy; I thought you a very angel. A girl of sixteen or seventeen sees the face of St. John in the first Faust who finds his way into her shut soul! You made me care for you; I do not deny it. But why did I care? Because I saw in you the image of a thousand things you were not. Because I imagined that my own fanciful ideal existed in you, and you had the ability to foster the illusion."
"But why recall all this?" he says, entreatingly. "Perhaps I was unworthy of your innocent attachment, of your exalted imaginations; I dare not say that I was not; but now that I meet you again, now that I care for you ten thousand—ten million times more——"
"What is that to me?" she says, with almost insolent coldness. "It was not I who loved you, but a child who knew no better, and whose heart was so bleeding from the tortures of another man that the first hand which soothed it could take it as one takes a wounded bird! But when my eyes opened to your drift and your desires, when I saw that you were no better than other men, that you tried to tempt me to the lowest forms of intrigue under cover of your friendship with my husband, then, child though I was, I saw you as you were, and I hid myself from you! You thought that Sabaroff exiled me from his jealousy of you to the northern estates; but it was not so. I entreated him to let me leave Petersburg, and he had grown tired of torturing me and let me go."
"You blame me for being merely human. I loved you not better but not worse than men do love."
"I blame you for having been insincere, treacherous, dishonest. You approached me under cover of the most delicate and forbearing sympathy and reverence, and you only wore those masks to cover the vulgar designs of a most commonplace Lothario. Of course, now I know that one must not play with fire unless one is willing to be burned. I did not know it then. I was a stupid, unhappy, trembling child, full of poetic fancies, and alone in a dissolute crowd. When you could not make me what you wished to make me, I seemed very tame and useless to you. You turned to more facile women, no doubt, and you left Russia."
"I left Russia under orders; and I wrote to you. I wrote to you repeatedly. You never answered."
"No; I had no wish to answer you. I had seen you as you were, and the veil had fallen from my eyes. I burnt your letters as they came to me. But after the death of Prince Sabaroff you were careful to write no more."
Gervase colors hotly; there is an accent in the words which makes them strike him like whips.
"If you had written to me after that," she continues, "perhaps I should have answered you; perhaps not: I cannot tell. When you knew that I was set free you were silent; you stayed away, I know not where. I never saw you again; I never heard from you again. Now I thank you for your neglect and oblivion, but at the time I confess that it made me suffer. I was very young still, and romantic. For a while I expected every month which melted the snow would bring you back. So much I admit, though it will flatter you."
It does not flatter him as she says it; rather it wounds him. He has a hateful sense of his own impotency to stir her one hand's breadth, to breathe one spark of warmth into those ashes gone cold forever.
"I do not think," she continues, "that I ever loved you in the sense that women can love; but you had the power to make me suffer, to feel your oblivion, to remember you when you had forgotten me. When I went into the world again I heard of your successes with others, and gradually I came to see you in your true light, and, almost, the drunken brutality of Prince Sabaroff seemed to me a manlier thing than your half-hearted and shallow erotics had been. Now, when we meet again by pure hazard in the same country house, you do me the honor to offer me your hand after eight years. I can only say, as I have said before, that it is seven years too late!"
"Too late, only because Lord Brandolin now is everything to you."
"Lord Brandolin may possibly be something to me in the future. But, if Lord Brandolin did not exist, if no other living man existed, be sure that it would make no difference to me—or to you."
"Is that your last word?"
"Yes."
Pale and agitated as no other woman had ever seen him, Gervase bows low and leaves her abruptly, pushing open one of the glass doors on to the garden and closing it with a clash behind him.
Xenia Sabaroff goes towards the large library, her silvery train catching the lights and shadows as she goes.
Brandolin meets her with his hands outstretched.
"You are content, then?" she asks.
"I am more than content,—if I may be allowed to atone to you for all that you have suffered."
His own eyes are dim as he speaks.
"But you know that the world will always say that he was my lover?"
"I do not think that the world will say it—of my wife; but, if it do, I, at least, shall not be troubled."
"You have a great nature," she says, with deep emotion.
Brandolin smiles. "Oh, I cannot claim so much as that; but I have a great love."
"I'm awfully glad that prig's got spun," says George Usk, as Gervase receives a telegram from the Foreign Office which requires his departure from Surrenden at four o'clock that afternoon.
"Spun! What imagination!" says his wife, very angrily. "Who should have spun him, pray will you tell me?"
"We shall never hear it in so many words," says Usk, with a grim complacency, "but I'll swear, if I die for it, that he's asked your Russian friend to marry him and that she's said she won't. Very wise of her, too. Especially if, as you imply, they carried on together years ago: he'd be eternally throwing it in her teeth: he's what the Yanks call a 'tarnation mean cuss.'"
"I never implied anything of the sort," answers the lady of Surrenden, with great decorum and dignity. "I never suppose that all my friends are all they ought to be, whateveryoursmay leave to be desired. If he were attached long ago to Madame Sabaroff, it is neither your affair nor mine. It may possibly concern Lord Brandolin, if he have the intentions which you attribute to him."
"Brandolin can take care of himself," says Usk, carelessly. "He knows the time of day as well as anybody, and I don't know why you should be rough on it, my lady: it will be positively refreshing if anybody marries after one of your house-parties; they generally only get divorced after them."
"The Waverleys are very good friends still, I believe," says Dorothy Usk, coldly.
The reply seems irrelevant, but to the ear of George Usk it carries considerable relevancy.
He laughs a little nervously. "Oh, yes: so are we, aren't we?"
"Certainly," says the mistress of Surrenden.
At the first Drawing-room this year, the admired of all eyes, and the centre of all comment, is the Lady Brandolin.