"Dolly is nasty about Achnalorrie," says Lord Usk, as they at last rise
and approach the house.
"Not logical if she objects to moors on political principles. But ladies
are seldom logical when they are as charming as Lady Usk."
"She never likes me to enjoy anything."
"I don't think you are quite just to her: you know I always tell you
so." (Brandolin remembers the sweetness with which Dorothy Usk invites
Lady Waverley season after season.) "You are a great grumbler, George. I
know grumbling is a Briton's privilege, provided for and secured to him
in Magna Charta; but still too great abuse of the privilege spoils
life."
"Nobody was ever so bothered as I am." Lord Usk regards himself
invariably with compassion as an ill-used man. "You always take
everything lightly; but then you aren't married, and I suppose you get
_some_ of your rents?"
"I have always been rather poor, but I don't mind it. So long as I
needn't shut up or let the old place, and can keep my boat afloat, I
don't much care about anything more. I've enough for myself."
"Ah, that's just it; but when one has no end of family expenses and four
great houses to keep up, and the counties looking to one for everything,
and the farmers, poor devils, ruined themselves, it's another matter. I
assure you if I hadn't made that sacrifice of Achnalorrie----"
Lady Usk coming out of the garden-room down the steps of one of the low
windows spares Brandolin the continuation of the lament. She looks
pretty; mindful of her years, she holds a rose-lined sun-umbrella over
her head; the lace and muslin of her breakfast-gown sweep the lawn
softly; she has her two daughters with her, the Ladies Alexandra and
Hermione, known as Dodo and Lilie. She welcomes Brandolin with mixed
feelings, though with unmixed suavity. She is glad to see him because he
amuses Usk, and is a person of wit and distinction whom everybody tries
to draw to their houses; but then he upsets all her nicely-balanced
combinations; there is nobody for him; he will be the "one out" when all
her people so nicely arranged and paired; and, as she is aware that he
is not a person to be reconciled to such isolation, he will dispossess
somebody else and cause probably those very dissensions and
complications from which it is always her effort to keep all her
house-parties free. However, there he is; and he is accustomed to be
welcomed and made much of wherever he goes. She can do no less.
Brandolin makes himself charming in return, and turns pretty compliments
to her and the children, which he can do honestly, for he has always
liked Dorothy Usk, and the two young girls are as agreeable objects of
contemplation as youth, good looks, fair skins, pretty frocks, open air,
much exercise, and an indescribable air of "breeding" can make them. An
English patrician child is one of the prettiest and most wholesome
things on the face of the earth.
He goes to play lawn tennis with them and their youngest brother Cecil,
called the Babe; and Lady Usk, under her rose-lined umbrella, sits as
umpire, while her lord saunters off disconsolately to an interview with
his steward. In these times those interviews are of an unbroken
melancholy, and always result in producing the conviction in his mind
that Great Britain cannot possibly last out another year. Without the
nobility and gentry what will she be? and they will all go to the lands
they've bought in America, if they're in luck, and if they aren't will
have to turn shoeblacks.
"But the new electorate won't have its shoes blacked,--won't even have
any shoes to black," suggests Mr. Lanyon, the land-steward, who began
life as an oppidan at Eton and captain of an Eight, but has been glad to
take refuge from the storm on the estates of his old Eton comrade, a
trust which he discharges with as much zeal as discretion, dwelling
contentedly in a rose-covered grange on the edge of the home-woods of
Surrenden. If Boom finds things at all in order when he comes into
possession, it will be wholly due to John Lanyon.
In one of the pauses of their game the tennis-players hear the brake and
the omnibus returning. None of those whom they bring will be visible
until luncheon at two o'clock.
"Have you anybody very nice, Lady Usk?" asks Brandolin of his hostess.
She hesitates; there are some women that he would call nice, but then
they each have their man. "I hardly know," she answers, vaguely. "You
don't like many people, if I remember----"
"All ladies, surely," says Brandolin, with due gravity.
"I'm sure you don't like Grandma Sophy," says the saucy Babe, sitting
cross-legged in front of him. He means the Dowager Duchess of Derry, a
very unpleasant person of strong principles, called by the profane
"Sophia, by the grace of God," because she ruled Ireland in a
viceroyalty of short duration and long-enduring mischief. She and
Brandolin do not agree, a fact which the Babe has seen and noted with
the all-seeing eyes of a petted boy who is too much in his mother's
drawing-rooms.
"I plead guilty to having offended her Grace Sophia," says Brandolin,
"but I conclude that Lady Usk's guests are not all like that most
admirable lady."
The Babe and his sisters laugh with much irreverent enjoyment; her Grace
is not more appreciated by her grandchildren than she was by Ireland.
"If I had known you were going to be so kind as to remember us, I would
have invited some of your friends," says his hostess, without coming to
the rescue of her august mother's name. "I am so sorry; but there is
nobody I think who will be very sympathetic to you. Besides, you know
them all already."
"And is that fatal to sympathy? What a cruel suggestion, dear Lady Usk!"
"Sympathy is best new, like a glove. It fits best; you don't see any
wrinkles in it for the first hour."
"What cynicism! Do you know that I am very fond of old gloves? But,
then, I never was a dandy----"
"Lord Brandolin will like Madame Sabaroff," says Dodo, a very _eveille_
young lady of thirteen.
"Fair prophetess, why? And who is Madame Sabaroff? A second O. K., a
female Stepniak?"
"What are those?" says Dodo. "She is very handsome, and a princess in
her own right."
"She gave me two Ukraine ponies and a real droschky," says the Babe.
"And Boom a Circassian mare, all white, and each of us a set of Siberian
turquoises," says Lilie.
"Her virtues must be as many as her charms," says Brandolin.
"She is a lovely creature," adds Lady Usk, "but I don't think she is
your style at all; you like fast women who make you laugh."
"My tastes are catholic where your adorable sex is in question," says
Brandolin. "I am not sure that I do like fast women; they are painful to
one's vanity; they flirt with everybody."
Lady Usk smiles. "The season before last, I recollect----"
"Dearest lady, don't revert to pre-historic times. Nothing is so
disagreeable as to think this year of what we liked last year."
"It was Lady Leamington last year!" cries the terrible Babe.
Brandolin topples him over on the grass and hoists him up on his own
shoulders. "You precocious rascal! What will you be when you are
twenty?"
"Babe's future is a thing of horror to contemplate," says his mother,
smiling placidly.
"Who is Madame Sabaroff?" asks Brandolin, again, with a vague curiosity.
"A princess in her own right; a god-daughter of the Emperor's," says
Dodo. "She is so handsome, and her jewels--you never saw such jewels."
"Her father was Chancellor," adds her mother, "and her husband held some
very high place at court, I forget what."
"Held? Is he disgraced, then, or dead?"
"Oh, dead: that is what is so nice for her," says Dodo.
"Heartless Dodo!" says Brandolin. "Then if I marry you four years hence
I must kill myself to become endeared to you?"
"I should pity you indeed if you were to marry Dodo," says Dodo's
mother. "She has not a grain of any human feeling, except for her dog."
Dodo laughs. She likes to be called heartless; she thinks it is _chic_
and grown-up; she will weep over a lame puppy, a beaten horse, a dead
bird, but she is "hard as nails to humans," as her brother Boom phrases
it.
"Somebody will reign some day where the Skye reigns now over Dodo's
soul. Happy somebody!" says Brandolin. "I shall be too old to be that
somebody. Besides, Dodo will demand from fate an Adonis and a Cr[oe]sus
in one!"
Dodo smiles, showing her pretty white teeth; she likes the banter and
the flirtation with some of her father's friends. She feels quite old;
in four years' time her mother will present her, and she means to marry
directly after that.
"When does this Russian goddess who drops ponies and turquoises out of
the clouds arrive here?" asks Brandolin, as he picks up his racquet to
resume the game.
"She won't be here for three days," says Lady Usk.
"Then I fear I shall not see her."
"Oh, nonsense! You must stay all the month, at least."
"You are too good, but I have so many engagements."
"Engagements are made to be broken. I am sure George will not let you
go."
"We won't let you go," cries the Babe, dragging him off to the nets,
"and I'll drive you this afternoon, behind my ponies."
"I have gone through most perils that can confront a man, Babe, and I
shall be equal even to that," says Brandolin.
He is a great favorite with the children at Surrenden, where he has
always passed some weeks of most years ever since they can remember, or
he either, for he was a godson and ward of the late Lord Usk, and always
welcome there. His parents died in his infancy: even a long minority
failed to make him a rich man. He has, however, as he had said, enough
for his not extravagant desires, and is able to keep his old estate of
St. Hubert's Lea, in Warwickshire, unembarrassed. His chief pleasure has
been travelling and sailing, and he has travelled and sailed wherever a
horse or a dromedary, a schooner or a canoe, can penetrate. He has told
some of his travels in books so admirably written that, _mirabile
dictu_! they please both learned people and lazy people. They have
earned him a reputation beyond the drawing-rooms and clubs of his own
fashionable acquaintances. He has even considerable learning himself,
although he carries it so lightly that few people suspect it. He has had
a great many passions in his life, but they have none of them made any
very profound impression on him. When any one of them has grown tiresome
or seemed likely to enchain him more than he thought desirable, he has
always gone to Central Asia or the South Pole. The butterflies which he
has broken on his wheel have, however, been of that order which is not
crushed by abandonment, but mends itself easily and soars to new
spheres. He is incapable of harshness to either man or woman, and his
character has a warmth, a gayety, and a sincerity in it which endear him
inexpressibly to all his friends. His friendships have hitherto been
deeper and more enduring than his amours. He is, on the whole,
happy,--as happy as any thinking being can be in this world of anomalies
and purposeless pains.
"But then you always digest all you eat," Usk remarks to him, enviously.
"Put it the other way and be nearer the point," says Brandolin. "I
always eat what I can digest, and I always leave off with an appetite."
"I should be content if I could begin with one," says Usk.
Brandolin is indeed singularly abstemious in the pleasures of the table,
to which the good condition of his nerves and constitution may no doubt
be attributed. "I have found that eating is an almost entirely
unnecessary indulgence," he says in one of his books. "If an Arab can
ride, fight, kill lions, and slay Frenchmen on a mere handful of pulse
or of rice, why cannot we live on it too?" Whereat Usk wrote once on the
margin of the volume, in pencil, "Why should we?"
The author, seeing this one day, wrote also on the margin, "For the best
of all reasons: to do away with dyspepsia and with doctors, who keep
their carriages on our indigestion and make fifty thousand a year each
out of it."
Usk allowed that the reason was excellent; but then the renunciation
involved was too enormous.