A few new people have come by the brake, and make their appearance at
luncheon. More come by the five-o'clock train, and are visible at
six-o'clock tea, which is always to be had in the library any time
before seven: dinner at all the Usk houses is always at nine.
Brandolin's doctrines do not prevail with any of his acquaintances,
although he, unlike most professors, emphasizes them by example.
Among the people who come by the latter train are the famous Mr.
Wootton, a man very famous at London dinner-parties, and Lady Gundrede
Vansittart, whose dinners are the best in London.
"Where would those two people be if you brought the pulse and the rice
you recommend into fashion?" says their host to Brandolin. "Take 'em
away from the table, they'd be good for nothing. He wouldn't say 'Bo' to
a goose, and she wouldn't be worth leaving a card upon. Believe me, my
dear Guy, such _esprit_ as there is left in us is only brought out by
eating."
"I think you invert all your reasonings," says Brandolin. "Say rather,
that too much eating has destroyed all _esprit_. Don't we eat all day
long everywhere, or at least are expected to do so? You lament your
ruined digestion. It is impossible to digest when time is only counted
by what our beloved Yankees call square meals (why square I fail to
fathom), and for women it is worse than for us, because they eat such
quantities of sweet things we don't touch, and then the way they go in
for caviare bread-and-butter, and anchovy sandwiches, and all kinds of
rich cakes, and _deux doigts de Madere_ or glasses of kuemmel at the
tea-hour,--it is frightful! I wonder they have any complexions at all
left, even with the assistance of all the '_secrets de Venus_.'"
"You won't alter 'em, my dear fellow," replies Usk, "if you put yourself
out about it ever so much. If you were to marry a savage out of Formosa,
or an Esquimaux, she'd take kindly to the caviare and the kuemmel before
a week was out, if you brought her to Europe. Why, look at dogs,--you
may keep 'em on biscuit and tripe if they live in the kennels, but if
they once come to the dining-room they'll turn their noses up at a
beef-steak if it isn't truffled!"
"Dogs, at least, stop short of the kuemmel," says Brandolin; "but if you
were to put together the sherry, the dry champagne, the liqueurs at tea,
the brandy in the _chasse_ at dinner, which a fashionable woman takes in
the course of the day (not counting any pick-me-up that she may require
in her own room), the amount would be something enormous,--incredible!
You would not believe the number of women who have cured me of an
unhappy passion for them by letting me see what a lot they could drink."
"You will adore the Sabaroff, then. She never touches anything that I
see, except tea."
"Admirable person! I am ready to adore her. Tell me more about her. By
the way, who is she?"
"Oh, you must go to Dolly for biographies of her foreigners. I can't
keep even their names in my head."
"Foreigners! What an expression!" cries Dorothy Usk, in disdain. "Since
steam effaced frontiers, nobody but insular people like ourselves ever
use such a term. Nationalities are obliterated."
She is very fond of Xenia Sabaroff: she has a great many warm
attachments to women who help to make her house attractive.
"Nationalities are still discernible in different tobaccos," murmurs
Brandolin. "The Havana won't acknowledge an equal in the Cavour."
"Dolly don't know anything about her," continues Usk, clinging to the
subject.
"Oh, my dear!" cried his wife, shocked, "when she is the niece of the
great Chancellor and her mother was a Princess Dourtza."
"You don't know anything about her," repeats Usk, with that unpleasant
obstinacy characteristic of men when they talk to their wives. "You met
her in Vienna and took one of your crazes for her, and she may have sent
a score of lovers to Siberia, or deserve to go there herself, for
anything you can tell. One can never be sure of anything about
foreigners."
"How absurd you are, and how _insular_!" cries Dorothy Usk, again.
"'Foreigners!' As if there were any foreigners in these days, when
Europe is like one family!"
"A family which, like most families, squabbles and scratches pretty
often, then," says Usk,--which seems to his wife a reply too vulgar to
be worthy of contradiction. He is conscious that Xenia Sabaroff is a
very great lady, and that her quarterings, backed by descent and
alliance, are wholly irreproachable,--indeed, written in that _libro
d'oro_, the "Almanach de Gotha," for all who choose to read.
Her descent and her diamonds are alike immaculate, but her
character?--he is too old-fashioned a Briton not to think it very
probable that there is something _louche_ there.
Usk is a Russophobist, as becomes a true Tory. He has a rooted
impression that all Russians are spies when they are not swindlers; much
as in the early years of the century his grandsire had been positive
that all Frenchmen were assassins when they were not dancing-masters.
The White Czar has replaced the Petit Caporal, and the fur cap the
cocked hat, in the eyes of Englishmen of Usk's type, as an object of
dread and detestation. He would never be in the least surprised if it
turned out that the real object of Madame Sabaroff's visit to Surrenden
were to have possible opportunities to examine the facilities of
Weymouth as a landing-place for Cossacks out of Muscovite corvettes.
"Russians are tremendous swells at palaver," he says, with much
contempt, "gammon you no end if you like to believe 'em: they've always
some political dodge or other behind it all."
"I don't say she isn't an agreeable woman," he continues, now:
his admiration of Madame Sabaroff is much mitigated by his sense
that she has a rather derisive opinion of himself. "I don't say
she isn't an agreeable woman, but she gives me the idea of
artificiality,--insincerity,--mystery."
"Just because she's a Russian!" cries his wife, with disdain.
"My dear George," observes Brandolin, "there are preconceived ideas
about all nationalities. As a rule, they are completely false. The
received Continental idea is that an Englishman is a bluff, blunt,
unpleasant, opinionated person, very cross, very clean too it is true,
but on the strength of his tub and his constitution despising all the
rest of mankind. Now, how completely absurd such an opinion is! You
yourself are an example of the _suaviter in modo, fortiter in re_, of
which the true-blue Briton always gives so admirable an example."
Usk laughs, but sulkily; he has the impression that his beloved friend
is making fun of him, but he is not quite sure. He himself believes that
he is an ideal Englishman; Brandolin is only half or a quarter of one,
he does not shoot, wears furs in winter, only drinks very light Rhenish
wine, never goes to any church, and never cuts his hair very short.
Added to this, he has no fixed political opinion, except a general
impression that England and the world in general are going down-hill as
fast as they can, "tobogganing" as they say in Canada, at the rate of
fifty miles a minute, to land in the slough of Socialism and be picked
out of it by some military despot,--democracy invariably ending in
absolutism.
"What ridiculous rubbish!" says his wife. "You might as well say that
the _demoiselles-mannequins_ at Worth's or Rodrigue's are conspiring for
the Orleanists when they try on my clothes."
"They are conspiring for the ruin of your family," says Usk, with a
groan. "Whose purse can stand those Paris prices?"
"What an irrelevant remark!" cries Lady Usk. "You are always dragging
money-questions into everything."
"Those _faiseurs_, as you call 'em," continues Usk, unheeding, "are at
the root of half the misery of society. Women get into debt up to their
eyes for their toilets, and they don't care what abomination they do if
they get enough out of it to go on plunging. Hundred-guinea gowns soon
make up a pretty total when you change 'em three times a day."
"And if women are guys aren't the men furious?" asks his wife. "Even if
they try to economize, aren't they always taunted with being dowdies?
You none of you know anything about the cost of things, and you expect
everybody to be _bien mise_ on a halfpenny a day. When Boom saw me at
Ascot this year he stared at me, and whispered to me, 'Oh, I say,
mother! you've got the same bonnet on you had at the Oaks. I do hope the
other fellows won't notice it.' That is how he will speak to his wife
some day; and yet I dare say, like you, he will expect her to get her
bonnets from Virot at ten francs apiece!"
Lady Usk is angry and roused.
"Look at my poor little sister," she goes on. "What a life that brute
Mersey leads her about money! All those dreadfully plain girls to dress,
and nothing to do it on, and yet if they are not all well got up
wherever they go to, he swears he is ashamed to be seen with them. You
can't dress well, you can't do anything well, without spending money;
and if you haven't money you must get into debt. That is as clear as
that two and two are four. When ever do men remember their own
extravagances? You smoke ten cigars a day; your cigars cost a shilling
or eighteenpence each,--that is ten or fifteen shillings a day; five
pounds a week, not counting your cigarettes! Good heavens! five pounds a
week for sheer silly personal indulgence that your doctors tell you will
canker your tongue and dry up your gastric juice! At all events, our
toilets don't hurt our digestion; and what would the world look like if
women weren't well dressed in it? Your cigars benefit nobody, and only
make your teeth yellow."
"Well, in a year they cost about what one ball-gown does that's worn
twice."
"I always wear mine three times, even in London," says Dorothy Usk, with
conscious virtue. "But I don't see any sin in spending money. I think it
ought to be spent. But you are always dragging money-questions into
everything, and Boom says that the Latin person whom you and Lord
Brandolin are always quoting declares most sensibly that money should
always be regarded as a means, never as an end; and if it is to be a
means to anything, must not it be spent before it can become so?"
"That's neither here nor there," replies her lord; "and if Boom only
reads his classics upside down like that he'd better leave 'em alone."
"You are never content. Most men would be delighted if a boy read _at
all_."
"I don't know why, I'm sure," replies Usk, drearily. "Reading's going
out, you know; nobody'll read at all fifty years hence: poking about in
guinea-pigs' stomachs, and giving long names to insects out of the
coal-hole, is what they call education nowadays."
"Frederic Harrison has said very aptly," remarks Brandolin, who is
present at this conjugal colloquy, and seeks to make a diversion on it,
"that the boast of science is to send the Indian mails across seas and
deserts in nine days, but that science cannot put in those mail-bags a
single letter equal to Voltaire's or Sevigne's, and he doubts very much
that there is one."
"It's an ill bird that fouls its own nest," says Usk, grimly: "still,
I'm very glad if those scientific prigs fall out among themselves."
"I think some people write charming letters still," says Dorothy Usk.
"Of course when one is in a hurry--and one is almost always in a
hurry----"
"Hurry is fatal, Lady Usk," says Brandolin. "It destroys style, grace,
and harmony. It is the curse of our times. The most lovely thing in life
is leisure; and we call it progress to have killed it."
"Read this letter," says his hostess, giving him one which she holds in
her hand. "There is nothing private in it, and nothing wonderful, but
there is a grace in the expressions; whilst the English, for a
foreigner, is absolutely marvellous."
"I thought there were no foreigners?" says Usk. "I thought steam had
effaced nationalities?"
His wife does not deign to reply.
Brandolin has taken the letter with hesitation. "Do you really think I
may read it?"
"When I tell you to do so," says Dolly Usk, impatiently. "Besides, there
is nothing in it, only it is pretty."
Brandolin reads; it is on very thick paper, almost imperceptibly
scented, with a princess's crown embossed on it and a gold X.
"It is very kind of you, dear Lady Usk, to have remembered a
_solitaire_ like myself in the midst of your charming children and
your many joys." ("My many annoyances, she means," interpolates
Lady Usk.) "I will be with you, as you so amiably wish, next
Tuesday or Wednesday. I am for the moment in Paris, having been
this month at Aix, not that I have any aches or pains myself, but a
friend of mine, Marie Woronszoff, has many, and tries to cure them
by warm sunshine and the cold douches which her physicians
prescribe. There are many pleasant people here; every one is
supposed to be very ill and suffering agony, but every one laughs,
flirts, plays, sits under the little tents under the trees, dances
at the Casino, and eats a fair dinner as usual, so that if Pallida
Mors be indeed among us she looks just like every one else. I came
to Aix from my own place on the White Sea, and the gay groups, the
bright alleys, the green embowered chalets, and the goatherds with
their flocks which come tinkling their bells down the hill-sides in
all directions, all seemed to me like an operetta of Offenbach's,
spiritualized and washed with the pure daylight and the
mountain-air, but still Offenbach. How are your children? Do they
still care for me? That is very sweet of them. A day at their years
is as long as a season at mine. Assure them of my unforgetting
gratitude. I shall be pleased to be in England again, and, though I
do not know Surrenden, my recollections of Orme tell me _d'avance_
that I shall in any house of yours find the kindest of friends, the
most sympathetic of companions. Say many things to your lord for
me. I think he is only so discontented because the gods have been
too good to him and given him too completely everything he can
desire." ("That's all _she_ knows about it!" says Usk, _sotto
voce_.) "_Au revoir_, dear Lady Usk. Receive the assurance of my
highest consideration, and believe in my sincere regard. _Bien a
vous._--XENIA P. SABAROFF."
"A very pretty letter," says Brandolin. "Many thanks." And he restores
it to its owner.
"Bunkum!" says Usk.
"Not a bit in the world," says his wife, with contempt and indignation.
"_She_ does not 'pose,' if you do!"
"My dear George," says Brandolin, "you are one of those thorough-going
Britons who always think that everybody who doesn't deal in disagreeable
remarks must be lying. Believe me, there are people who really see 'the
side that's next the sun,'--even in a crab-apple."
"And deuced irritating, too, they are," says Usk, with emphasis. "'What
a beastly bad day,' one says to 'em when it's pouring cats and dogs, and
they answer, 'Oh, yes, but rain was so wanted we must be thankful.'
That's the kind of answer that would make a saint swear."
"You are not a saint, and you swear on small provocation," replies
Brandolin. "To look at rain in that light argues true philosophy.
Unfortunately, philosophy is too often strained to bursting in our
climate, by having to contemplate rain destroying the crops. If we only
had rain when we wanted it, I think the most unreasonable among us would
view it with equanimity."
Rain is at that moment running down the painted panes of the Surrenden
casements, and driving across the lawns and terraces of the Surrenden
gardens. It makes Usk very cross: all the ensilage in the world will not
console him for ripening corn beaten down in all directions, and young
families of pheasants dying of cramp and pip in their ferny homes.
"Dig a big pit and cram your soaked grass into it: very well, I don't
say no," he growls. "But what about your mildewed wheat? And where
should we be if we had to undergo a blockade? I'm not against making
more pasture, grazing's all very well; but if there's a war big enough
to sweep the seas of the grain-ships that come to us from the Colonies
and the United States, where shall we be if we've nothing to eat but our
own beef and mutton? Beef and mutton are solid food, but I believe we
should all go mad on them if we'd no bread to eat too."
"I'm all for pasture," replies Brandolin; "and as the British Isles can
never, under any cultivation whatever, feed all their population, we may
as well dedicate ourselves to what is picturesque. I am fascinated by
Laveleye's portrait of England when she shall have turned grazier
exclusively: it is lovely: 'L'Angleterre redeviendra ce qu'elle etait
sous les Tudors, un grand parc vert, parseme d'ormes et de chenes, ou
b[oe]ufs et moutons se promeneront dans des prairies sans limites.'"
"'Prairies sans limites?' when the land's to be all sliced up in little
bits between peasant proprietors!" says Usk.
"I don't think Laveleye believes in peasant proprietors, though he is a
professor of social economy."
"Social economy!" says Usk, with a groan. "Oh, I know that fool of a
word! In plain English, it means ruin all round, and fortune for a few
d----d manufacturers."
"The d----d manufacturer is the principal outcome of two thousand
centuries of Christianity, civilization, and culture. The result is not
perfectly satisfactory or encouraging, one must admit," says Brandolin,
as he reaches down a volume of eighteenth-century memoirs, and adds,
with entire irrelevancy to manufacturers or memoirs, "Is she really as
handsome as your children tell me?"
"Who?" asks Usk. "Oh, the Russian woman: yes, very good-looking. Yes,
she was here at Easter, and she turned their heads."
"Has she any lovers older than Babe?"
"She has left 'em in Russia if she has."
"A convenient distance to leave anything at: Italy and Russia are the
only countries remaining to us in which Messalina can still do her
little murders comfortably without any fuss being made."
"She isn't Messalina, at least I think not. But one never knows."
"No, one never knows till one tries," says Brandolin. And he wishes
vaguely that the Russian woman were already here. He is fond of
Surrenden, and fond of all its people, but he is a little, a very
little, bored. He sees that all Lady Usk's doves are paired, and he does
not wish to disturb their harmony, possibly because none of the feminine
doves attract him. But he cannot flirt forever with the children,
because the children are not very often visible, and without flirting
civilized life is dull, even for a man who is more easily consoled by
ancient authors off the library-shelves than most people can be.
This conversation occurs in the forenoon in Lady Usk's boudoir. In the
late afternoon in the library over their teacups the ladies talk of
Xenia Sabaroff. It is perceptible to Brandolin that they would prefer
that she should not arrive.
"Is she really so very good-looking?" he asks of Mrs. Wentworth Curzon.
"Oh, yes," replies that lady, with an accent of depreciation in her
tones. "Yes, she is very handsome; but too pale, and her eyes too large.
You know those Russian women are mere _paquets de nerfs_, shut up in
their rooms all day and smoking so incessantly: they have all that is
worst in the Oriental and Parisienne mixed together."
"How very sad!" says Brandolin. "I don't think I have known one, except
Princess Kraskawa: she went sleighing in all weathers, wore the frankest
of gingerbread wigs, and was always surrounded by about fifty
grandchildren."
Princess Kraskawa had been for many years ambassadress in London.
"Of course there are exceptions," says Nina Curzon; "but generally, you
know, they are very depraved, such inordinate gamblers, and so fond of
morphine, and always _maladives_."
"Ah," says Brandolin, pensively, "but the physical and moral perfection
of Englishwomen always makes them take too high a standard: poor
humanity toils hopelessly, and utterly exhausted, many miles behind
them."
"Don't talk nonsense," says Mrs. Curzon; "we are no better than our
neighbors, perhaps, but we are not afraid of the air, we don't heat our
houses to a thousand degrees above boiling-point, we don't gamble,--at
least not much,--and we don't talk every language under the sun except
our own, and yet not one of them grammatically."
"Decidedly," reflects Brandolin, "Lawrence must have looked too often at
Madame Sabaroff."
"Sabaroff is dead, isn't he?" he asked, aloud. "You know I have been out
of society for a year: the whole map of Europe gets altered in one's
absence."
"Sabaroff was shot in a duel four years ago," replies Mrs. Curzon,--"a
duel about her."
"What a fortunate woman! To get rid of a husband, and to get rid of him
in such interesting circumstances! _C'est le comble de bonheur!_"
"That depends. With her it resulted in her exile from court."
"Oh, to be sure; when Russians are naughty they are sent to live on
their estates, as riotous children are dismissed to the nursery. Was she
compromised, then?"
"Very much compromised; and both men were killed, for the adversary of
Sabaroff had been wounded mortally, when, with an immense effort, he
fired, and shot the prince through the lungs."
"A pretty little melodrama. Who was the opponent?"
"Count Lustoff, a colonel of the Guard. I wonder you did not hear of it:
it made a stir at the time."
"I may have heard: when one doesn't know the people concerned, no
massacre, even of the Innocents, makes any impression on one. And the
result was that the lady had to leave the imperial court?"
"Yes: they do draw a line _there_."
Brandolin laughs; it tickles his fancy to hear Mrs. Wentworth Curzon
condemning by implication the laxity of the court of St. James.
"They can't send _us_ to our estates," he replies, "the lands are so
small and the railways are so close. Else it would have a very good
effect if all our naughty people could be shut up inside their own
gates, with nobody to speak to but the steward and the rector. Can you
imagine anything that would more effectively contribute to correct
manners and morals? But how very desolate London would look!"
"You think everybody would be exiled inside his own ring-fence!"
"_Her_ own ring-fence,--well, nearly everybody. There would certainly be
no garden-parties at Marlborough House."
Mrs. Wentworth Curzon is not pleased; she is a star of the first
magnitude at Marlborough House.
"Why does she take this absent woman's character away?" thinks
Brandolin, with a sense of irritation. "I will trust the Babe's
instincts sooner than hers."
He does not know Xenia Sabaroff; but he admires the photograph of her
which stands on the boudoir table, and he likes the tone of the letter
written from Aix. With that spirit of contradiction which is inborn in
human nature, he is inclined to disbelieve all that Nina Curzon has told
him. Lustoff and Sabaroff probably both deserved their fates, and the
departure from the court of St. Petersburg might very possibly have been
voluntary. He has a vague feeling of tenderness for the original of the
photograph. It often happens to him to fall sentimentally and
ephemerally in love with some unknown woman whose portrait he has seen
or of whose charms he has heard. Sometimes he has avoided knowing these
in their actual life, lest he should disturb his ideals. He is an
imaginative man with a great amount of leisure in which to indulge his
fancies, and his knowledge of the world has not hardened his feelings or
dulled his fancy. There is something of the Montrose, of the Lord
Surrey, in him.
"To think of all one knows about that hussy," he muses, as he smokes a
cigar in his bedroom before dressing for dinner. By the uncomplimentary
epithet he means Mrs. Wentworth Curzon. "Such a good fellow as Fred
Curzon is, too, a man who might have been made anything of if she'd only
treated him decently. When he married her he adored the ground she
walked on, but before a week was out she began to fret him, and jar at
him, and break him in, as she called it; he was too poor for her, and
too slow for her, and too good for her, and she was vilely cruel to
him,--it's only women who can be cruel like that, she's had more lovers
than anybody living, and she's taken every one of 'em for money; nothing
but money. Old Melton gave her the Park-Lane House, and Glamorgan gave
her her emeralds, and Dartmoor paid her Paris bills for ten years, and
Riverston takes all her stable-expenses. Everything she does is done for
money; and if she puts any heart at all now into this thing with
Lawrence, it is only because she's getting older and so getting
jealous,--they always do as they get on,--and then she calls Russians
dissolute and depraved, good Lord!"
With which he casts aside his cigar, and resigns himself to his
servant's hands as the second gong sounds.