The very bachelor rooms at Surrenden are conducive to revery and
indolence, cosily comfortable and full of little attentions for the
guest's _bien-etre_, among which there is a printed paper which is
always laid on the dressing-table in every room at this house: it
contains the latest telegrams of public news, which come every afternoon
from a London news-agency.
"I dare say to the political fellows they are delightful," reflects
Brandolin, as he glances down the lines, "but to me they unpleasantly
recall an uncomfortable world. I don't dine the worse, certainly, for
knowing that there is a revolution in Patagonia or an earthquake in
Bolivia, but neither do I dine the better for being told that the French
government is _destituant_ all moderate prefets in favor of immoderate
ones. It is very interesting, no doubt, but it doesn't interest me, and
I think the possession of these fresh scraps of prosaic news spoils
dinner-conversation."
Brandolin does not consider it conversation to say, "Have you seen
so-and-so?" or, "What a sad thing such-and-such is, isn't it!" He likes
persiflage, he likes banter, he likes argument, he likes antithesis, he
likes brilliancy, and the dinner-tables of the epoch seldom offer these
good things with their Metternich hock and Mouton Rothschild. He is fond
of talking himself, and he can be also a very good listener. If you
cannot give the _quid quo pro_ in hearing as in speaking, you may be
immensely clever, but you will be immediately pronounced a bore, like
Macaulay and Madame de Stael. Brandolin likes talking not for the sake
of showing himself off, but for the sake of being amused, of eliciting
the opinions and observing the minds of others, and he is convinced that
if the conversational art were cultured as it used to be in Bourbon
Paris, life would become more refined, more agreeable, more sympathetic,
and less given over to gross pleasures of the appetites.
"Children should be taught to talk," he observes one day to Lady Usk,
"and they should not be allowed to be slovenly in their speech any more
than in their dress. You would not let them enter your presence with
unbrushed hair, but you do let them use any bald, slangy, or
inappropriate words which come uppermost to them. There is so much in
the choice of words! A beautiful voice is a delicious thing, but it
avails little without the usage of apt and graceful phrases. Did you
ever hear Mrs. Norton sustain a discussion or relate an anecdote? It was
like listening to perfect phrasing in music. When she died, the art of
conversation died with her."
"We are always in such a hurry," says Lady Usk, which is her habitual
explanation of anything in which her generation is at fault. "And hurry
is always vulgar, you know, as you said the other day: it cannot help
itself."
"You are a purist, my dear Brandolin," says Lady Dolgelly, who hates
him.
"'Purity, daughter of sweet virtues mild!'" murmurs Brandolin. "Alas, my
dear ladies, I cannot hope that she dwells with _me_ in any form! When
she has a home in your own gentle breasts, who can hope that she would
ever take shelter in a man's?"
"How impertinent and how nasty he is!" thinks the lady; and she detests
him a little more cordially than before. There is not a very good
feeling towards him among any of the ladies at Surrenden: he does not
make love to them, he does not endeavor to alter existing arrangements
in his favor; it is generally felt that he would not care to do so. What
can you expect from a man who sits half his days in a library?
The Surrenden library is well stored, an elegant and lettered lord of
the eighteenth century having been a bibliophile. It is a charming room,
panelled with inlaid woods, and with a ceiling painted after Tiepolo;
the bookcases are built into the wall, so that the books look _chez
eux_, and are not mere lodgers or visitors; oriel windows look out on to
a portion of the garden laid out by Beaumont. One window has been cut
down to the ground, an anachronism and innovation indeed, somewhat
impairing the uniformity of the room. The present Lady Usk had it done,
but one forgives her the sacrilege when one feels how pleasant it is to
walk out from the mellow shadows of the library on to the smooth-shaven
grass and gather a rose with one hand whilst holding an
eighteenth-century author with the other.
It is in the smaller library adjacent, filled with modern volumes, that
five-o'clock tea is always to be had, with all the abundant demoralizing
abominations of caviare, kuemmel, etc. It is a gay room, with
_dessus-des-portes_ after Watteau and every variety of couch and of
lounging-chair. "Reading made easy" somebody calls it. But there is
little reading done either in it or in the big library: Brandolin when
he goes there finds himself usually alone, and can commune as he chooses
with Latin philosophy and Gaulois wit.
"You _used_ to read, George?" he says to his host, in expostulation.
"Yes, I used,--ages ago," says Usk, with a yawn.
Brandolin looks at him with curiosity.
"I can understand a man who has never read," he replies, "but I cannot
understand a man losing the taste for reading if he has ever had it. One
can dwell contented in B[oe]otia if one has never been out of it, but to
go back to B[oe]otia after living in Attica----"
"It's one's life does it."
"What life? One has the life one wishes."
"That's the sort of thing a man says who hasn't married."
"My dear George, you cannot pretend your wife would prevent your reading
Latin and Greek, or even Sanscrit. I am sure she would much sooner you
read them than--well, than do other things you do do."
"I don't say she would prevent me," returns the lord of Surrenden, with
some crossness, "but it's the kind of life one gets into that kills all
that sort of thing in one. There is no time for it."
"I keep out of the life: why don't you?"
"There's no time for anything," says Usk, gloomily. "There's such heaps
of things to see to, and such numbers of places to go to, and then one
lives _au jour le jour_, and one gets into the swim and goes on, and
then there's the shooting, and when there isn't the shooting there's the
season, and the racing."
"I lead my own life," Brandolin remarks.
"Yes; but you don't mind being called eccentric."
"No; I don't mind it in the least. If they say nothing worse of me I am
grateful."
"But you couldn't do it if you had all my places, and all my houses, and
all my brothers, and all my family. You're a free agent. I declare that
all the time goes away with me in such a crowd of worries that I've
hardly a second to smoke a cigarette in, in any peace!"
Brandolin smiles.
A sixth part of most days his host passes leaning back in some
easy-chair with a cigar in his mouth, whether his venue be Surrenden,
Orme, Denton, the smoking-room of a club, or the house of a
friend,--whether London or the country. Usk's own view of himself is of
a man entirely devoted to, and sacrificed to, business, politics, the
management of his estates, and the million-and-one affairs which
perpetually assail him; but this is not the view which his friends take
of him.
When ever is the view that our friends take of us our view?
"Once a scholar always a scholar, it seems to me," says Brandolin. "I
could as soon live without air as without books." And he quotes
Cowley,--
"Books should as business entertain the light."
"You don't continue the quotation," says Usk, with a smile.
"_Autres temps autres m[oe]urs_," says Brandolin. He laughs, and gets
up: it is four in the afternoon; the delicious green garden is lying
bathed in warm amber light; one of the peacocks is turning round slowly
with all his train displayed; he seems never to tire of turning round.
"How exactly that bird is like some politicians one could name!" says
Brandolin. "Do you know that this charming garden always reminds me of
St. Hubert's Lea,--our west garden, I mean? I think the same man must
have laid them out. Is it not Bulwer Lytton who says that so long as one
has a garden one always has one room which is roofed by heaven?"
"A heaven mitigated by gardeners' wages,--very considerably mitigated,"
says Usk.
"You are cynical, George, and your mind is running on pounds, shillings,
and pence,--an offence against Nature on such a day as this. There is
nothing so demoralizing as to think of money."
"To have debts and not to think of 'em is more so; and Boom----"
"Sell something of his that he likes very much, to pay his debts: that's
the only way I know of to check a boy at the onset. Your father did it
with me the very first time I owed twenty pounds; and he read me a
lesson I never forgot. I have been eternally obliged to him ever since."
"What did he sell?"
"My cob,--a cob I adored. I wept like a child, but he didn't see my
tears. What I saved up next half to trace out that cob and buy him back
at twice his value,--what I denied myself to make up the money,--nobody
would believe; and the beast wasn't easy to find: some dealer had taken
him over to Ireland."
"That could be done with you," says Usk, gloomily. "It would be no use
to do it with Boom: his mother would buy him some other horse the next
day. You've no chance to bring up a boy decently if he's got a mother!"
"The reverse is the received opinion of mankind," said Brandolin; "but I
believe there's something to be said for your view. No end of women have
no idea of bringing up their children, and when they ought to be ordered
a flogging they fondle them."
"Dolly does," says her husband. "What's a woman's notion of a horse?
That he must have slender legs, a coat like satin, and be fed on apples
and sugar: still, they saw his mouth till he half dislocates his neck,
and tear his ribs open with their spur. They're just as unreasonable
with their children."
"Who is _that_ woman?" says Brandolin, making a step across the window
and into the garden. "Now I am perfectly certain that is Madame
Sabaroff, without your saying so."
"Then I needn't say so," replies Usk. "I wonder when she came. They
didn't expect her till to-morrow."
They both look at a lady in one of the distant alleys walking between
the high green walls. She is dressed in some soft cream-colored stuff
with quantities of lace. She carries a sunshade of the same hue. She has
a tall cane in her other hand. On either side of her are the Ladies
Alexandra and Hermione, and before her gambols in his white sailor
clothes, with his blue silk stockings and his silver-buckled shoes, the
Babe.
"Decidedly the Sabaroff," says Usk. "Won't you come and speak to her?"
"With pleasure," says Brandolin. "Even if the Babe brains me with the
cane!"
He looks very well as he walks bareheaded over the grass and along the
green alley; he wears a loose brown velvet coat admirably made, and
brown breeches and stockings; his legs are as well made as his coat; the
sun shines on his curling hair; there is a _degage_, picturesque,
debonair, yet distinguished look about him, which pleases the eyes of
Xenia Sabaroff, as they watch him draw near.
"Who is that person with your father?" she asks. The children tell her,
all speaking at once.
She recognizes the name; she has heard of him often in the world, and
has read those books which praise solitude and a dinner of herbs. "I
doubt his having been alone very long, however," she reflects, as she
looks at him. A certain unlikeness in him to Englishmen in general, some
women who are fond of him fancifully trace to the fact that the first
Brandolin was a Venetian, who fled for his life from the Republic, and
made himself conspicuous and acceptable for his talents alike as a
lutist and a swordsman at the court of Henry the Second. "It can't
count, it's so very far away," he himself objects; but perhaps it does
count. Of all things ineffaceable, the marks of race are the most
indelible.
The Venetian Brandolin married the daughter of a Norman knight, and his
descendants became affectionate sons of England, and held their lands of
St. Hubert's Lea safely under the wars of the Roses, of the
Commonwealth, and of the Jacobites. They were always noticeable for
scholarly habits and artistic tastes, and in the time of George the
Second the Lord Brandolin of the period did much to enrich his family
mansion and diminish the family fortunes by his importations of Italian
sculptures and pictures and his patronage of Italian musicians. The
house at St. Hubert's Lea is very beautiful, but it requires much more
to keep it up than the present owner possesses. He is often urged to let
it, but he scouts the idea. "You might as well ask me to sell the
Brandolin portraits, like Charles Surface," he says, angrily, whenever
his more intimate friends venture on the suggestion. So the old house
stands in its warm-hued and casket-like loveliness, empty, save for his
occasional visits and the presence of many old and devoted servants.
"An interesting woman," he thinks now, as he exchanges with the Princess
Sabaroff the usual compliments and commonplaces of a presentation.
"Russians are always interesting: they are the only women about whom you
feel that you know very little; they are the only women who, in this
chatterbox of a generation _tout en dehors_ as it is, preserve some of
the vague charm of mystery; and what a charm that is!"
His reasons for admiring her are not those of the Babe and his sisters,
but he admires her almost as much as they. Brandolin, who in his remote
travels has seen a great deal of that simple nature which is so much
lauded by many people, has a great appreciation of well-dressed women,
and the Madame Sabaroff is admirably dressed, from her long loose
cream-colored gloves to her bronze shoes with their miniature diamond
clasps.
"Didn't I tell you?" whispers the Babe, climbing up behind Brandolin.
"Yes, you did," returned Brandolin, "and you were quite right; but it is
abominably bad manners to whisper, my dear Cecil."
The Babe subsides into silence with hot cheeks when anybody calls him
Cecil he is conscious that he has committed some flagrant offence.
"Those brats are always bothering you, princess," says their father.
"They are very kind to me," replies Xenia Sabaroff, in English which has
absolutely no foreign accent. "They make me feel at home! What a
charming place this is! I like it better than your castle--what is its
name?--where I had the pleasure to visit you at Easter."
"Orme. Oh, that's beastly,--a regular barn: obliged to go there just for
show, you know."
"Orme was built by Inigo Jones, and the ingratitude to fortune of its
owner is a constant temptation to Providence to deal in thunder-bolts,
or have matches left about by housemaids," says Brandolin.
"I think Lord Usk has not a contented mind," says Madame Sabaroff,
amused.
"Contented! By Jove, who should be, when England's going to the dogs as
fast as she can?"
"In every period of your history," says the princess, "your country is
always described as going headlong to ruin; and yet she has not gone
there yet, and she has not done ill."
"'Our constitution is established on a mere equipoise, with dark
precipices and deep waters all around it.' So said Burke," replies
Brandolin. "At the present moment everybody has forgotten the delicacy
of this nice equipoise, and one day or other it will lose its balance
and topple over into the deep waters, and be engulfed. Myself, I confess
I do not think that time is very distant."
"I hope it is; I am very much attached to England," replies the Princess
Xenia, gravely, "and to naughty English boys," she adds, passing her
hand over the shining locks of the Babe.
"She must be in love with an Englishman," thinks Brandolin, with the
one-sided construction which a man is always ready to place on the words
of a woman. "Must we go in-doors?" he asks, regretfully, as she is
moving towards the house. "It is so pleasant in these quaint green
arbors. To be under a roof on such a summer afternoon as this, is to fly
in the face of a merciful Creator with greater ingratitude than Usk's
ingratitude to Inigo Jones."
"But I have scarcely seen my hostess," says Madame Sabaroff;
nevertheless, she resigns herself to a seat in a yew-tree cut like a
helmet.
There are all manner of delightful old-fashioned flowers, such flowers
as Disraeli gave to the garden of Corisande, growing near in groups
encircled by clipped box-edging.
Those disciples of Pallas Athene who render the happy lives of the
Surrenden children occasionally a burden to them seize at that moment on
their prey and bear them off to the school-room. The Babe goes to his
doom sullenly; he would be tearful, only that were too unmanly.
"Why do you let those innocents be tortured, George?" asks Brandolin.
"Books should, like business, entertain the day,"
replies Usk: "so you said, at least, just now. Their governesses are of
the same opinion."
"That is not the way to make them love books, to shut them up against
their wills on a summer afternoon."
"How will you educate your children when you have 'em, then?"
"He always gets out of any impersonal argument by putting some personal
question," complains Brandolin to Madame Sabaroff. "It is a common
device, but always an unworthy one. Because a system is very bad, it
does not follow that I alone of all men must be prepared with a better
one. I think if I had children I would not have them taught in that way
at all. I should get the wisest old man I could find, a Samuel Johnson
touched with a John Ruskin, and should tell him to make learning
delightful to them, and associated, as far as our detestable climate
would allow, with open-air studies in cowslip meadows and under hawthorn
hedges. If I had only read dear Horace at school, should I ever have
loved him as I do? No; my old tutor taught me to feel all the delight
and the sweet savor of him, roaming in the oak woods of my own old
place."
"I am devoutly thankful," says his host, "that Dorothy among her
caprices had never had the fancy you have, for a Dr. Johnson _double_
with a Ruskin, to correct my quotations, abuse my architecture, and make
prigs of the children."
"Prigs!" exclaims Brandolin. "Prigs! When did ever real scholarship and
love of nature make anything approaching to a prig? Science and
class-rooms make prigs, not Latin verse and cowslip meadows."
"That is true, I think," says the Princess Xenia, with her serious
smile.
"If they are beginning to agree with one another I shall be _de trop_,"
thinks Usk, who is very good-natured to his guests, and popular enough
with women not to be resigned to play what is vulgarly termed "second
fiddle" (though why an expression borrowed from the orchestra should be
vulgar it were hard to say). So he goes a few paces off to speak to a
gardener, and by degrees edges away towards the house, leaving Brandolin
and Madame Sabaroff to themselves in the green yew-helmet arbor.
Brandolin is in love with his subject, and does not abandon it.
"It is absurd," he continues, "the way in which children are made to
loathe all scholarship by its association with their own pains and
subjection. A child is made as a punishment to learn by rote fifty lines
of Virgil. Good heavens! It ought rather to be as a reward that he
should be allowed to open Virgil! To walk in all those delicious paths
of thought should be the highest pleasure that he could be brought to
know. To listen to the music of the poets should be at once his
privilege and his recompense. To be deprived of books should be, on the
contrary, his cruellest chastisement!"
"He would be a very exceptional child, surely," says Madame Sabaroff.
"I was not an exceptional child," he answers, "but that is how I was
brought up and how I felt."
"You had an exceptional training, then?"
"It ought not to be exceptional: that is just the mischief. Up to the
time I was seventeen, I was brought up at my own place (by my father's
directions, in his will) by a most true and reverent scholar, whom I
loved as Burke loved Shackleton. He died, God rest his soul, but the
good he left behind him lives after him: whatever grains of sense I have
shown, and whatever follies I have avoided, both what I am and what I am
not, are due to him, and it is to him that I owe the love of study which
has been the greatest consolation and the purest pleasure of my life.
That is why I pity so profoundly those poor Rochefort children, and the
tens of thousands like them, who are being educated by the commonplace,
flavorless, cramming system which people call education. It may be
education; it is not culture. What will the Babe always associate with
his Latin themes? Four walls, hated books, inky, aching fingers, and a
headache. Whereas I never look at a Latin line in a newspaper, be it one
ever so hackneyed, without pleasure, as at the face of an old friend,
and whenever I repeat to myself the words, I always smell the cowslips
and the lilac and the hawthorn of the spring mornings when I was a boy."
Xenia Sabaroff looked at him with some little wonder and more approval.
"My dear lord," she says seriously, "I think in your enthusiasm you
forget one thing, that there is ground on which good seed falls and
brings forth flowers and fruit, and there is other ground on which the
same seed, be it strewn every so thickly, lies always barren. Without
underrating the influences of your tutor, I must believe that had you
been educated at an English public school, or even in a French Lycee,
you would still have become a scholar, still have loved your books."
"Alas, madame," says Brandolin, with a little sigh, "perhaps I have only
been what Matthew Arnold calls a 'foiled circuitous wanderer' in the
orbit of life!"
"I imagine that you have not very often been foiled," replies the lady,
with a smile, "and wandering has a great deal to be said in its favor,
especially for a man. Women are happiest, perhaps, at anchor."
"Women used to be: not our women. _Nous avons change tout cela._ I have
bored you too much with myself and my opinions."
"No, you interest me," says his companion with a serious serenity which
deprives the words of all sound of flattery or encouragement. "I have
long admired your writings," she adds, and Brandolin colors a little
with gratification. The same kind of phrase is said to him on an average
five hundred times a year, and his usual emotion is either ennui or
irritation. The admiration of fools is folly, and humiliates him. But
the admiration of so lovely a woman as Xenia Sabaroff would lay a
flattering unction to the soul of any man, even if she were absolutely
mindless; and she gives him the impression that she has a good deal of
mind, and one out of the common order.
"My writings have no other merit," he says, after the expression of his
sense of the honor she does him, "than being absolutely the chronicle of
what I have seen and what I have thought; and I think they are expressed
in tolerably pure English, though that is claiming a great deal in these
times; for since John Newman laid down the pen there is scarcely a
living Briton who can write his own tongue with eloquence and purity."
"I think it must be very nice to leave off wandering if one has a home,"
replies Madame Sabaroff, with a slight sigh, which gave him the
impression that, though no doubt she had many houses, she had no home.
"Where is your place that you spoke of just now?--the place where you
learned to love Horace?"
Brandolin is always pleased to speak of St. Hubert's Lea. He has a great
love for it and for the traditions of his race, which makes many people
accuse him of great family pride, though, as has been well said _a
propos_ of a greater man than Brandolin, it is rather that sentiment
which the Romans defined as piety. When he talks of his old home he
grows eloquent, unreserved, cordial; and he describes with an artist's
touch its antiquities, its landscapes, and its old-world and sylvan
charms.
"It must be charming to care for any place so much as that," says his
companion, after hearing him with interest.
"I think one cares more for places than for people," he replies.
"Sometimes one cares for neither," says Xenia Sabaroff, with a tone
which in a less lovely woman would have been morose.
"One must suffice very thoroughly to one's self in such a case?"
"Oh, not necessarily."
At that moment there is a little bustle under a very big cedar near at
hand; servants are bringing out folding tables, folding chairs, a silver
camp-kettle, cakes, fruit, cream, liqueurs, sandwiches, wines, all those
items of an afternoon tea on which Brandolin has animadverted with so
much disgust in the library an hour before. Lady Usk has chosen to take
these murderous compounds out of doors in the west garden. She herself
comes out of the house with a train of her guests around her.
"Adieu to rational conversation," says Brandolin, as he rises with
regret from his seat under the evergreen helmet.
Xenia Sabaroff is pleased at the expression. She is too handsome for men
often to speak to her rationally: they usually plunge headlong into
attempts at homage and flattery, of which she is nauseated.