E-text prepared by David Edwards, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from scanned
images of public domain material generously made available by the Google
Books Library Project (http://books.google.com/)
Note: Images of the original pages are available through
the the Google Books Library Project. See
http://books.google.com/books?vid=OG3tBIK-KHsC&id
Transcriber's note:
The oe-ligature is represented by [oe].
A HOUSE-PARTY
Don Gesualdo
and
A Rainy June
by
OUIDA
Author Of "Othmar," "Princess Napeaxine," "Under Two Flags," "Wanda,"
Etc., Etc.
Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott Company.
1902.
A HOUSE-PARTY.
CHAPTER I.
It is an August morning. It is an old English manor-house. There is a
breakfast-room hung with old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts;
it has oak furniture of the same period; it has leaded lattices with
stained glass in some of their frames, and the motto of the house in old
French, "J'ay bon vouloir," emblazoned there with the crest of a heron
resting in a crown. Thence, windows open on to a green, quaint, lovely
garden, which was laid out by Monsieur Beaumont when he planned the
gardens of Hampton Court. There are clipped yew-tree walks and arbors
and fantastic forms; there are stone terraces and steps like those of
Haddon, and there are peacocks which pace and perch upon them; there are
beds full of all the flowers which blossomed in the England of the
Stuarts, and birds dart and butterflies pass above them; there are huge
old trees, cedars, lime, hornbeam; beyond the gardens there are the
woods and grassy lawns of the home park.
The place is called Surrenden Court, and is one of the houses of George,
Earl of Usk,--his favorite house in what pastoral people call autumn,
and what he calls the shooting season.
Lord Usk is a well-made man of fifty, with a good-looking face, a little
spoilt by a permanent expression of irritability and impatience, which
is due to the state of his liver; his eyes are good-tempered, his mouth
is querulous; nature meant him for a very amiable man, but the
dinner-table has interfered with, and in a measure upset, the good
intentions of nature: it very often does. Dorothy, his wife, who is by
birth a Fitz-Charles, third daughter of the Duke of Derry, is a still
pretty woman of thirty-five or -six, inclined to an _embonpoint_ which
is the despair of herself and her maids; she has small features, a gay
expression, and very intelligent eyes; she does not look at all a great
lady, but she can be one when it is necessary. She prefers those merrier
moments in life in which it is not necessary. She and Lord Usk, then
Lord Surrenden, were greatly in love when they married; sixteen years
have gone by since then, and it now seems very odd to each of them that
they should ever have been so. They are not, however, bad friends, and
have even at the bottom of their hearts a lasting regard for each other.
This is saying much, as times go. When they are alone they quarrel
considerably; but then they are so seldom alone. They both consider this
disputatiousness the inevitable result of their respective relations.
They have three sons, very pretty boys and great pickles, and two young
and handsome daughters. The eldest son, Lord Surrenden, rejoices in the
names of Victor Albert Augustus George, and is generally known as Boom.
They are now at breakfast in the garden-chamber; the china is old
Chelsea, the silver is Queen Anne, the roses are old-fashioned
Jacqueminots and real cabbage roses. There is a pleasant scent from
flowers, coffee, cigarettes, and newly-mown grass. There is a litter of
many papers on the floor.
There is yet a fortnight before the shooting begins; Lord Usk feels that
those fifteen days will be intolerable; he repents a fit of fright and
economy in which he has sold his great Scotch moors and deer-forest to
an American capitalist; not having his own lands in Scotland any longer,
pride has kept him from accepting any of the many invitations of his
friends to go to them there for the Twelfth; but he has a keen dread of
the ensuing fifteen days without sport.
His wife has asked her own set; but he hates her set; he does not much
like his own; there is only Dulcia Waverley whom he does like, and Lady
Waverley will not come till the twentieth. He feels bored, hipped,
annoyed; he would like to strangle the American who has bought
Achnalorrie. Achnalorrie, having gone irrevocably out of his hands,
represents to him for the time being the one absolutely to be desired
spot upon earth. Good heavens! he thinks, can he have been such a fool
as to sell it?
When he was George Rochfort, a boy of much promise going up to Oxford
from Eton, he had a clever brain, a love of classics, and much
inclination to scholarly pursuits; but he gradually lost all these
tastes little by little, he could not very well have said how; and now
he never hardly opens a book, and he has drifted into that odd, English
habit of only counting time by the seasons for killing things. There is
nothing to kill just now except rabbits, which he scorns, so he falls
foul of his wife's list of people she has invited, which is lying,
temptingly provocative, of course, on the breakfast-table, scribbled in
pencil on a sheet of note-paper.
"Always the same thing!" he says, as he glances over it. "Always the
very worst lot you could get together, and there isn't one of the
husbands or one of the wives!"
"Of course there isn't," says Lady Usk, looking up from a Society
newspaper which told her that her friends were all where they were not,
and fitted all the caps of scandal on to all the wrong heads, and yet
from some mysterious reason gave her amusement on account of its very
blunders.
"I do think," he continues, "that nobody on earth ever had such
absolutely indecent house-parties as yours!"
"You always say these absurd things."
"I don't think they're absurd. Look at your list: everybody asks that he
may meet somebody whom he shouldn't meet!"
"What nonsense! As if they didn't all meet everywhere every day, and as
if it mattered!"
"It does matter."
He has not been a moral man himself, but at fifty he likes to _faire la
morale pour les autres_. When we are compelled to relinquish cakes and
ale ourselves, we begin honestly to believe them indigestible for
everybody; why should they be sold, or be made, at all?
"It does matter," he repeats. "Your people are too larky, much too
larky. You grow worse every year. You don't care a straw what's said
about 'em so long as they please you, and you let 'em carry on till
there's the devil to pay."
"They pay him,--I don't; and they like it."
"I know they like it, but I don't choose you should give 'em opportunity
for it."
"Oh, nonsense!"
"Not nonsense at all. This house is a kind of Agapemone, a sort of
Orleans Club."
"You ought not to be bored in it, then."
"One is always bored at one's own place. I tell you I don't like your
people. You ask everybody who wants to meet somebody else; and it's
never respectable. It's a joke at the clubs. Jack's always saying to his
Jill, 'We'll get Lady Usk to ask us together,' and they do. I say it's
indecent."
"But, my dear, if Jack sulks without his Jill, and if Jill's in bad form
without Jack, one must ask them together. I want people to like me and
to enjoy themselves."
"Enjoy themselves! That means flirting till all's blue with somebody
you'd hate if you'd married her."
"What does that matter, so long as they're amused?"
"What an immoral woman you are, Dolly! To hear you----"
"I only mean that I don't think it matters; you know it doesn't matter;
everybody's always doing it."
"If you'd only ask some of the women's husbands, some of the men's
wives----"
"I couldn't do that, dear. I want people to like my house!"
"Just as I say--you're so immoral."
"No, I'm not. Nobody ever pays a bill for me, except you."
"Enviable distinction! Pay! I think I do pay! Though why you can't keep
within your pin-money----"
"Pin-money means money to buy pins. I did buy two diamond pins with it
last year, eight hundred guineas each."
"You ought to buy clothes."
"Clothes! What an expression! I can't buy a child's frock even; it all
goes in little things, and all my own money too; wedding-presents,
christening-presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it's all
nonsense you're grumbling about my bills to Worth and Elise and Virot;
Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which it
describes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear and
make them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, and
their whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they had
tortoise-shell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs had
jewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is nothing new, though
you talk as if it were a crime and we'd invented it!"
Usk laughs a little crossly as she comes to the end of her breathless
sentences. "_Naso Magister eris_," he remarks, "might certainly be
inscribed over the chamber doors of all your friends!"
"I know you mean something odious. My friends are all charming people."
"I'll tell you what I do mean,--that I don't like the house made a joke
of in London; I'll shut it up and go abroad if the thing goes on. If a
scandal's begun in town in the season, it always comes down here to
carry on; if there are two people fond of each other when they shouldn't
be, you always ask 'em down here and make pets of 'em. As you're taking
to quoting Ovid, I may as well tell you that in his time the honest
women didn't do this sort of thing; they left it to the light-o'-loves
under the porticoes."
"I really don't know what I've done that I should be called an honest
woman! One would think you were speaking to the housemaids! I wish you'd
go and stay in somebody else's house: you always spoil things here."
"Very sorry. I like my own shooting. Three days here, three days there,
three days t'other place, and expected to leave the game behind you and
to say 'thanks' if your host gives you a few brace to take away with
you,--not for me, if I know it, while there's a bird in the covers at my
own places."
"I thought you were always bored at home?"
"Not when I'm shooting. I don't mind having the house full, either, only
I want you to get decenter people in it. Why, look at your
list!--they're all paired, like animals in the ark. Here's Lady Arthur
for Hugo Mountjoy, here's Iona and Madame de Caillac, here's Mrs. Curzon
for Lawrence, here's Dick Wootton and Mrs. Faversham, here's the Duke
and Lady Dolgelly, here's old Beaumanoir and Olive Dawlish. I say it's
absolutely indecent, when you know how all these people are talked
about!"
"If one waited for somebody not talked about, one would have an empty
house or fill it with old fogies. My dear George, haven't you ever seen
that advertisement about matches which will only light on their own
boxes? People in love are like those matches. If you ask the matches
without the boxes, or the boxes without the matches, you won't get
anything out of either."
"Ovid was born too early: he never knew this admirable illustration!"
"There's only one thing worse than inviting people without the people
they care about; it is to invite them with the people they're tired of:
I did that once last year. I asked Madame de Saumur and Gervase
together, and then found that they had broken with each other two months
before. That is the sort of blunder I do hate to make!"
"Well, nothing happened?"
"Of course nothing happened. Nobody ever shows anything. But it looks so
stupid in _me_: one is always expected to know----"
"What an increase to the responsibilities of a hostess! She must know
all the ins and outs of her acquaintances' unlawful affections as a
Prussian officer knows the French by-roads! How simple an affair it used
to be when the Victorian reign was young, and Lord and Lady So-and-So
and Mr. and Mrs. Nobody all came to stay for a week in twos and twos as
inevitably as we buy fancy pigeons in pairs!"
"You pretend to regret those days, but you know you'd be horribly bored
if you had always to go out with me."
"Politeness would require me to deny, but truthfulness would compel me
to assent."
"Of course it would. You don't want anybody with you who has heard all
your best stories a thousand times, and knows what your doctor has told
you not to eat; I don't want anybody who has seen how I look when I'm
ill, and knows where my false hair is put on. It is quite natural. By
the way, Boom says Ovid's ladies had perukes, too, as one of them put
her wig on upside down before him, and it chilled his feelings towards
her; it would chill most people's. I wonder if they made them well in
those days, and what they cost."
"I think you might have invited _some_ of the husbands."
"Oh, dear, no. Why? They're all staying somewhere else."
"And your friends are never jealous, I suppose; at least, never about
their husbands?"
"An agreeable woman is never jealous of anybody. She hasn't time to be.
It is only the women who can't amuse themselves who make that sort of
fuss."
"Are you an agreeable woman, my dear?"
"I have always been told so, by everybody except yourself."
Lord Usk rose and laughed as he lighted a cigar.
"Well, I won't have any scandal in the house. Mind that."
"You'd better put that up on a placard, as you have put 'No fees allowed
to the servants,' up in the hall."
"I'm sure I would with pleasure if I thought anybody would attend to it.
I don't like you're set, Dolly. That's the truth. I wish you'd drop
nine-tenths of 'em."
"My dear George, I wish you would mind your own business, to use a very
vulgar expression. Do I ever say anything when you talk nonsense in the
Lords, and when you give your political picnics and shout yourself
hoarse to the farmers who go away and vote against your man? Do I ever
say anything when you shoot pheasants which cost you a sovereign a head
for their corn, and stalk stags which cost you eighty pounds each for
their keep, and lose races with horses which cost you ten thousand a
year for their breeding and training? Do I ever say anything when you
think that people who are hungering for the whole of your land will be
either grateful or delighted because you take ten per cent. off their
rents? You know I don't. I think you ought to be allowed to ruin
yourself and accelerate the revolution in any absurd way which may seem
best to you. In return, pray let me manage my own house-parties and
choose my own acquaintances. It is not much to ask. What! are you gone
away? How exactly like a man, to go away when he gets the worst of the
argument!"
Lord Usk has gone into the gardens in a towering rage. He is a
gentleman: he will quarrel with his wife all day long, but he will
always stop short of swearing at her, and he feels that if he stays in
the room a moment longer he will swear: that allusion to the Scotch
stags is too much for humanity (with a liver) to endure. When
Achnalorrie is sold to that beastly American, to be twitted with what
stags used to cost! Certainly they had cost a great deal, and the
keepers had been bores, and the crofters had been nuisances, and there
had always been some disease or other among the birds, and he had never
cared as much as some men for deer-stalking; but still, as Achnalorrie
is irrevocably gone, the thirty-mile drive over the bleak hills, and the
ugly house on the stony strathside, and the blinding rains, and the
driving snows, and the swelling streams which the horses had to cross as
best they could, all seem unspeakably lovely to him and the sole things
worth living for: and then his wife has the heartlessness to twit him
with the cost of each stag!
"Women have no feeling," he growls, as he walks about the gardens. "If
they think they can make a point they'll make it, let it hurt you how it
may."
He strolls down between two high yew walls with his hands in his
pockets, and feels injured and aggrieved. He ought to be a very happy
person; he is still rich despite the troubles of the times, he has fine
estates, fair rents, handsome children, and a life of continual change,
and yet he is bored and doesn't like anything, and this peaceful, green
garden, with its innumerable memories and its delicious, dreamful
solitudes, says nothing at all to him. Is it his own fault or the fault
of his world? He doesn't know. He supposes it is the fault of his liver.
His father was always contented, and jolly as a sand-boy; but then in
his father's time there was no grouse-disease, no row about rents, no
wire fencing to lame your horses, no Ground Game Bill to corrupt your
farmers, no Leaseholder's Bills hanging over your London houses, no corn
imported from Arkansas and California, no Joe Chamberlain. When poor
Boom's turn comes, how will things be? Joe Chamberlain President,
perhaps, and Surrenden cut up into allotment-grounds.
He possesses two other very big places in adjacent counties, Orme Castle
and Denton Abbey, but they are ponderous, vast, gorgeous, ceremonious,
ugly: he detests both of them. Of Surrenden he is, on the contrary, as
fond as he can be of anything except the lost Achnalorrie and a little
cosey house that he has at Newmarket where the shadow of Lady Usk has
never fallen.
He hears the noise of wheels on gravel. It comes from the other side of
the house; it is his brake and his omnibus going down the avenue on
their way to the nearest railway-station, four miles off, to meet some
of his coming guests there. Well, there'll be nothing seen of them till
two o'clock at luncheon. They are all people he hates, or thinks he
hates, for that best of all possible reasons, that his wife likes them.
Why can't Dulcia Waverley come before the 20th? Lady Waverley always
amuses him, and agrees with him. It is so pleasant to be agreed with,
only when one's own people do so it makes one almost more angry than
when one is contradicted. When his wife agrees with him it leaves him
nothing to say. When Dulcia Waverley agrees with him it leaves him with
a soothing sense of being sympathized with and appreciated. Dulcia
Waverley always tells him that he might have been a great statesman if
he had chosen: as he always thinks so himself, the echo of his thoughts
is agreeable.
He sits down in one of the clipped-yew-tree arbors to light a new cigar
and smoke it peaceably. A peacock goes past him, drawing its beautiful
train over the smooth-shaven grass. A mavis is singing on a rose-bough.
The babble of a stream hidden under adjacent trees is pleasant on the
morning silence. He doesn't notice any of it; he thinks it odiously hot,
and what fools they were who clipped a yew-tree into the shape of a
periwig, and what a beast of a row that trout-stream makes. Why don't
they turn it, and send it farther from the house? He's got no money to
do anything, or he would have it done to-morrow.
A peacock begins to scream. The noise of a peacock cannot be said to be
melodious or soothing at any time.
"Why don't you wring that bird's neck?" he says savagely to a gardener's
boy who is gathering up fallen rose-leaves.
The boy gapes and touches his hair, his hat being already on the ground
in sign of respect. The peacocks have been at Surrenden ever since
Warren Hastings sent the first pair as a present to the Lady Usk of that
generation, and they are regarded with a superstitious admiration by all
the good Hampshire people who walk in the gardens of Surrenden or visit
them on the public day. The Surrenden peacocks are as sacred to the
neighborhood and the workpeople as ever was the green ibis in old Egypt.
"How long will they touch their caps or pull their forelocks to us?"
thinks Lord Usk; "though I don't see why they can reasonably object to
do it as long as we take off our hats to Wales and say 'Sir' to him."
This political problem suggests the coming elections to his mind: the
coming elections are a disagreeable subject for meditation: why wasn't
he born in his grandfather's time, when there were pocket boroughs as
handy and portable as snuff-boxes, and the county returned Lord Usk's
nominee as a matter of course without question?
"Well, and what good men they got in those days," he thinks, "Fox, and
Hervey, and Walpole, and Burke, and all the rest of 'em; fine orators,
clever ministers, members that did the nation honor; every great noble
sent up some fine fellow with breeding and brains; bunkum and bad logic
and dropped aspirates had no kind of chance to get into the House in
those days. Now, even when Boom's old enough to put up himself, I dare
say there'll be some biscuit-baker or some pin-maker sent down by the
Radical Caucus or the English Land League who'll make the poor devils
believe that the millennium's coming in with them, and leave Boom
nowhere!"
The prospect is so shocking that he throws his cigar-end at the peacocks
and gets up out of the evergreen periwig.
As he does so he comes, to his absolute amazement, face to face with his
friend Lord Brandolin.
Lord Brandolin is supposed by all the world, or at least that large
portion of it which is interested in his movements, to be at that moment
in the forest-recesses of Lahore.
"My dear George," says Lord Brandolin, in a very sweet voice, wholly
unlike the peacocks', "I venture to take you by surprise. I have left my
tub at Weymouth and come on foot across-country to you. It is most
unpardonable conduct, but I have always abused your friendship."
The master of Surrenden cannot find words of welcome warm enough to
satisfy himself. He is honestly delighted. Failing Dulcia Waverley,
nobody could have been so agreeable to him as Brandolin. For once a
proverb is justified, "a self-invited guest is thrice welcome." He is
for dragging his visitor in at once to breakfast, but Brandolin resists.
He has breakfasted on board his yacht; he could not eat again before
luncheon; he likes the open air, he wishes to sit in the periwig and
smoke.
"Do not let us disturb Lady Usk," he said. "I know chatelaines in the
country have a thousand and one things to do before luncheon, and I know
your house is full from gable to cellar."
"It will be by night," says the master of Surrenden, with disgust, "and
not a decent soul among 'em all."
"That is very sad for you," says Brandolin, with a twinkle in his
handsome eyes. He is not a handsome man, but he has beautiful eyes, a
patrician profile, and a look of extreme distinction; his expression is
a little cynical, but more amused; he is about forty years old, but
looks younger. He is not married, having by some miracle of good
fortune, or of personal dexterity, contrived to elude all the efforts
made for his capture. His barony is one of the oldest in England, and he
would not exchange it, were it possible, for a dukedom.
"Since when have you been so in love with decency, George?" he asks,
gravely.
Lord Usk laughs. "Well, you know I think one's own house should be
proper."
"No doubt," says Lord Brandolin, still more gravely. "To do one's
morality vicariously is always so agreeable. Is Lady Waverley not here?
She would save a hundred Sodoms, with a dozen Gomorrahs thrown in
gratis."
"I thought you were in India," says his host, who does not care to
pursue the subject of Lady Waverley's saintly qualifications for the
salvation of cities or men.
"I went to India, but it bored me. I liked it when I was twenty-four;
one likes so many things when one is twenty-four,--even champagne and a
cotillion. How's Boom?"
"Very well; gone to his cousins' in Suffolk. Sure you won't have
something to eat? They can bring it here in a minute if you like
out-of-doors best."
"Quite sure, thanks. What a lovely place this is! I haven't seen it for
years. I don't think there's another garden so beautiful in all England.
After the great dust-plains and the sweltering humid heats of India, all
this coolness and greenness are like Paradise."
Brandolin laughs languidly.
"Hot! you ungrateful, untravelled country squire! I should like to
fasten you to a life-buoy in the middle of the Red Sea. Why do
Englishmen perspire in every pore the moment the thermometer's above
zero in their own land, and yet stand the tropics better than any other
Europeans?"
"You know I've sold Achnalorrie?" says his host, _a propos de rien_, but
to him Achnalorrie seems _a propos_ of everything in creation.
Brandolin is surprised, but he does not show any surprise. "Ah! Quite
right, too. If we wished to please the Radicals we couldn't find any way
to please them and injure ourselves equal to our insane fashion of
keeping hundreds of square acres at an enormous cost, only that for a
few weeks in the summer we may do to death some of the most innocent and
graceful of God's creatures."
"That's just the bosh Dolly talks."
"Lady Usk is a wise politician, then. Let her train Boom for
his political life. I don't know which is the more utterly
indefensible,--our enormous Highland deer-slaughter or our imbecile
butchery of birds. They ought to have recorded the introduction of
battue-shooting into the British Isles by the Great and Good on the
Albert Memorial."
"One must shoot something."
"I never saw why. But 'something' honestly found by a setter in stubble,
and three thousand head of game between five guns in a morning, are very
different things. What did they give you for Achnalorrie?"
Usk discourses of Achnalorrie with breathless eloquence, as of a lover
eulogizing the charms of a mistress forever lost to him.
Brandolin listens with admirable patience, and affects to agree that the
vision of the American crawling on his stomach over soaking heather in a
thick fog for eight hours after a "stag of ten" is a vision of such
unspeakably enviable bliss that it must harrow the innermost soul of the
dispossessed lord of the soil.
"And yet, do you know," he says, in conclusion, "I am such a degenerate
mortal, such an unworthy 'son of a gun,' that I would actually sooner be
sitting in these lovely, sunny, shady gardens, where one expects to see
all Spenser's knights coming through the green shadows towards one, than
I would be the buyer of Achnalorrie, even in the third week of August?"
"You say so, but you don't mean it," says the seller of Achnalorrie.
"I never say what I don't mean," says Brandolin. "And I never cared
about Scotland."
The other smokes dejectedly, and refuses to be comforted.
"Lady Waverley isn't here?" asks Brandolin, with a certain significance.
Lady Waverley alone would have the power of making the torturing vision
of the American among the heather fade into the background of her host's
reflections.