Meanwhile, let the country be going to the dogs as it may, Surrenden is
full of very gay people, and all its more or less well-matched doves are
cooing at Surrenden, whilst the legitimate partners of their existences
are diverting themselves in other scenes, Highland moors, German baths,
French chateaux, Channel yachting, or at other English country houses.
It is George Usk's opinion that the whole thing is immoral: he is by no
means a moral person himself. His wife, on the contrary, thinks that it
is the only way to have your house liked, and that nobody is supposed to
know anything, and that nothing of that sort matters; she is a woman who
on her own account has never done anything that she would in the least
mind having printed in the _Morning Post_ to-morrow.
"Strange contradiction!" muses Brandolin. "Here is George, who's
certainly no better than he should be, hallooing out for Dame Propriety,
and here's my lady, who's always run as straight as a crow flies, making
an Agapemone of her house to please her friends. To the pure all things
are pure, I suppose; but if purity can stand Mrs. Wentworth Curzon and
Lady Dawlish, I think I shall select my wife from among _les jolies
impures_."
However, he takes care audibly to hold up his hostess's opinions and
condemn her lord's.
"The poor little woman means well, and only likes to be popular," he
reflects; "and we are none of us so sure that we shan't want indulgence
some day."
Brandolin is very easy and elastic in his principles, as becomes a man
of the world; he is even considered by many of his friends a good deal
too lax in all his views; but in the depths of his soul there is a vague
dislike to similar looseness of principle in women. He may have been
glad enough to avail himself of the defect; that is another matter; he
does not like it, does not admire it: licentiousness in a woman seems to
him a fault in her taste; it is as if she wore fur slippers with her
court train. "Of course," he will say, apologetically, "this idea of
mine is born of the absurd English conventionality which sleeps in all
of us; nothing better; an Englishman is always conventional somewhere,
let him live as he will."
He himself is the most unconventional of beings, appalls his county,
terrifies his relations, and irrevocably offends the bishop of his
diocese; he has lived with Arabs, Bohemians, and wild men of the woods,
and believes that he has not such a thing as prejudice about him; yet at
the bottom of his soul there is this absurd feeling born of sheer
conventionality,--he cannot thoroughly like a light-minded woman.
Absurd, indeed, in the times in which his lot is cast! He is quite
ashamed of it.
Dorothy Usk does not favor the modern mode of having relays of guests
for two or three days; she thinks it makes a country house too like an
hotel. She wishes her people to be perfectly well assorted, and then to
stay with her at least a week, even two weeks or three weeks. People do
not often object: Orme, Denton, and Surrenden are all popular places,
and Surrenden is perhaps most popular of all.
"An ideal house," says Brandolin, who would not stay a day where he was
not as free as air.
"It's too much like an hotel," grumbles the master of it, "and an hotel
where the _table-d'hote_ bell rings to deaf ears. Lord! I remember in my
poor mother's days everybody had to be down to breakfast at nine o'clock
every morning as regularly as if they were charity children, and the
whole lot of 'em were marched off to church on Sunday whether they liked
it or not. The villagers used to line the path across the fields to see
the great folks pass. Now it's as much as ever Dolly can do to get a
woman or two up in time to go with her. How things are changed, by Jove!
And it isn't so very long ago, either."
"The march of intellect, my dear George," says Brandolin; "neither _le
bon Dieu_ nor we are great folks any longer."
"Well, I think it's a pity," sighs Usk. "Everybody was happier then, and
jollier too, though we do tear about so to try and get amused."
"There is still nothing to prevent you going to sleep in the big pew if
it pleases you," replies Brandolin; "and Lawrence Hamilton always goes
that he may look at Mrs. Curzon's profile as she sings: she is really
saintly then. I think Sunday service is to Englishwomen what confession
is to Catholic ladies: it sweeps all the blots off the week's tablets.
It is convenient, if illogical."
"You are very irreligious," says his host, who is invariably orthodox
when orthodoxy doesn't interfere with anything.
"Not more so than most people," says Brandolin. "I have even felt
religious when I have been alone in the savannas or in the jungle. I
don't feel so in a wooden box covered with red velvet, with a curate
bawling in my ears about the hewing in pieces of Agag."
"That's nothing to do with it," says Usk: "we're bound to set an
example."
"That's why you doze in public, and Mrs. Curzon wears her big pearls, to
lead the school-children in the way they should go."
"That's nothing to do with it," repeats Lord Usk, somewhat crossly. He
has a comfortable if indistinct idea that he does something patriotic,
patriarchal, and highly praiseworthy in getting up an hour earlier than
usual one Sunday out of three, and putting on a tall hat, a frock-coat,
and a pair of new gloves, to attend the village church for morning
service when he is at Orme, Denton, or Surrenden in fine weather.
If he sleeps, what of that? There are curtains to the pew, and nobody
sees him except the Babe, who takes fiendish rapture in catching big
flies and releasing them from a careful little hand to alight on his
father's forehead or nose. The Babe would define the Sunday morning as a
horrid bore tempered by blue-bottles.
"What a curiously conventional mind is the English mind!" thinks
Brandolin, when he is alone. "Carlisle is right: the gig is its
standard. The gig is out of fashion as a vehicle, but the national mind
remains the same as in the age of gigs,--content with the outside of
things, clinging to the husk, to the shell, to the outward appearance,
and satisfied with these. My dear friend puts on his chimney-pot, then
takes it off and snores in his pew, and thinks that he has done
something holy which will sustain both Church and State, as he thinks
that he prays when he buries his face in his hat and creases his
trousers on a hassock! Mysterious consolations of the unfathomable human
breast!"