"How do you like Lord Brandolin?" says Lady Usk, when she can say so
unobserved.
"I like him very much," replies Madame Sabaroff. "He is what one would
expect him to be from his books; and that is so agreeable,--and so
rare."
Dorothy Usk is not pleased. She does not want her Russian ph[oe]nix to
admire Brandolin. She has arranged an alliance in her own mind between
the Princess Sabaroff and her own cousin Alan, Lord Gervase, whom she is
daily expecting at Surrenden. Gervase is a man of some note in diplomacy
and society; she is proud of him, she is attached to him, she desires to
see him ultimately fill all offices of state that the ambition of an
Englishman can aspire to; and Xenia Sabaroff is so enormously rich, as
well as so unusually handsome. It would be a perfectly ideal union; and,
desiring it infinitely, the mistress of Surrenden, with that tact which
distinguishes her, has never named Lord Gervase to the Princess Sabaroff
nor the Princess Sabaroff to Lord Gervase. He is to be at Surrenden in a
week's time. Now she vaguely wishes that Brandolin had not these eight
days' start of him. But then Brandolin, she knows, will only flirt; that
is to say, if the Russian lady allow him to do so: he is an
unconscionable flirt, and never means anything by his tenderest
speeches. Brandolin, she knows, is not a person who will ever marry; he
has lost scores of the most admirable opportunities, and rejected the
fairest and best-filled hands that have been offered to him. To the
orderly mind of Lady Usk, he represents an Ishmael forever wandering in
wild woods, outside the pale of general civilization. She can never see
why people make such a fuss with him. She does not say so, because it is
the fashion to make the fuss, and she never goes against a fashion. A
very moral woman herself, she is only as charitable and elastic as she
is to naughty people because such charity and elasticity is the mark of
good society in the present day. Without it, she would be neither
popular nor well bred; and she would sooner die than fail in being
either.
"Why don't you ever marry, Lord Brandolin?" asks Dorothy Usk. "Why have
you never married?"
"Because he's much too sensible," growls her husband, but adds, with
infinite compassion, "He'll have to, some day, or the name will die
out."
"Yes, I shall have to, some day, to use your very grammatical
expression," assents Brandolin. "I don't wish the name to die out, and
there's nobody to come after me except the Southesk-Vanes, who detest me
as I detest them."
"Well, then, why not make some marriage at once?" says Lady Usk. "I know
so many charming----"
Brandolin arrests the sentence with a deprecatory gesture, "Dear Lady
Usk, _please_! I like you so much, I wouldn't for worlds have you mixed
up in anything which would probably, or at least very possibly, make me
so much dislike you in the years to come."
Usk gives a laugh of much enjoyment.
His wife is slightly annoyed. She does not like this sort of jesting.
"You said a moment ago that you must marry!" she observes, with some
impatience.
"Oh, there is no positive 'must' about it," says Brandolin, dubiously.
"The name doesn't matter greatly, after all; it is only that I don't
like the place to go to the Southesk-Vanes: they are my cousins, heaven
knows how many times removed; they have most horrible politics, and they
are such dreadfully prosaic people that I am sure they will destroy my
gardens, poison my Indian beasts, strangle my African birds, turn my old
servants adrift, and make the country round hideous with high farming."
"Marry, then, and put an end to anything so dreadful," says Dorothy Usk.
Brandolin gets up and walks about the room. It is a dilemma which has
often been present to his mind in various epochs of his existence.
"You see, my dear people," he says, with affectionate confidence, "the
real truth of the matter is this. A good woman is an admirable creation
of Providence, for certain uses in her generation; but she is tiresome.
A naughty woman is delightful; but then she is, if you marry her,
compromising. Which am I to take of the two? I should be bored to death
by what Renan calls _la femme pure_, and against _la femme taree_ as a
wife I have a prejudice. The woman who would amuse me I would not marry
if I could, and as, if I were bored, I should leave my wife entirely,
and go to the Equator or the Pole, it would not be honest in me to
sacrifice a virgin to the mere demands of my family pride."
Lady Usk feels shocked, but she does not like to show it, because it is
so old-fashioned and prudish and _arriere_ nowadays to be shocked at
anything.
"I have thought about it very often, I assure you," continues Brandolin,
"and sometimes I have really thought that I would marry a high-caste
Hindoo woman. They are very beautiful, and their forms far more
exquisite than any European's, wholly uncramped as they are by any
stays, and accustomed to spend so many hours on all kinds of arts for
the embellishment of the skin."
"I don't think, you know," Lady Usk interposes, hastily, to repress more
reminiscences, "that you need be afraid of the young girls of our time
being innocent: they are _eveillees_ enough, heaven knows, and
experienced enough in all conscience."
"Oh, but that is odious," says Brandolin, with disgust. "The girls of
the day are horrible; nothing is unknown to them; they smoke, they
gamble, they flirt without decency or grace, their one idea is to marry
for sake of a position which will let them go as wild as they choose,
and for the sake of heaps of money which will sustain their
unconscionable extravagance. Lord deliver me from any of them! I would
sooner see St. Hubert's Lea cut up into allotment-grounds than save it
from the Southesk-Vanes by marrying a _debutante_ with her mind fixed on
establishing herself, and her youthful memories already full of
dead-and-gone flirtations. No! let me wait for Dodo, if you will give me
permission to educate her."
"Dodo will never be educated out of flirting; she is born for it," says
her father, "and she will be a handful when she gets into society. I am
afraid you would return her to us and sigh for your high-caste Hindoo."
"Pray, how would you educate her? what is missing in her present
education?" asks Lady Usk, somewhat piqued at what he implies.
"I would let her see a great deal more of her mother than she is allowed
to do," says Brandolin: "where could she take a better model?" he adds,
with a bow of much grace.
Her mother is not sure whether she ought to be flattered or offended.
Brandolin has a way of mingling graceful compliments and implied censure
with so much skill and intricacy that to disentangle them is difficult
for those whom he would at once flatter and rebuff. "One never quite
knows what he means," she thinks, irritably. "I do believe he intends to
imply that I neglect my children!"
Brandolin seems to her an unpleasant man, eccentric, discourteous, and
immoral. She cannot imagine what George or the world sees to admire and
like so much in him.
"Lord Brandolin actually declares that black women have much better
figures than we have," she says, an hour later, to Leila Faversham.
"Black women!" exclaims that lady, in unspeakable horror.
"Well, Hindoos: it is the same thing," says Lady Usk with that ignorance
of her Indian fellow-subjects which is characteristic of English
society, from the highest strata to the lowest.
"Oh, he is always so odd, you know," says Mrs. Faversham, as of a person
whom it is hopeless even to discuss. Brandolin is indeed so odd that he
has never perceived her own attractions. What can seem odder to a pretty
woman than that?
Leila Faversham tells Lady Dawlish ten minutes later that Brandolin has
confessed that he only likes black women. "Isn't it horrid? He actually
has numbers of them down in Warwickshire, just as he keeps the Indian
animals and the African birds."
"How very shocking!" says Lady Dawlish. "But I dare say it is very
economical: they only eat a spoonful of rice and wear a yard of calico,
you know, and, as he is poor, that must suit him."
Lady Dawlish tells this fact to Nina Curzon, adding various
embellishments of her fancy; Mrs. Curzon thinks the notion new and
amusing; she writes of it that morning to a journal of society which she
occasionally honors with news of her world, not from want of the
editor's fee, but from the amusement it affords her to destroy the
characters of her acquaintances. The journal will immediately, she
knows, produce a mysterious but sensational paragraph regarding the
black women in Warwickshire, or some article headed "An Hereditary
Legislature at Home." Brandolin is a person whom it is perfectly safe to
libel: he is very indolent, very contemptuous, and he never by any
chance reads a newspaper.
"An extremely interesting woman," muses Brandolin that evening, as he
dresses for dinner. "Interesting, and moreover with something original,
something mysterious and suggestive, in her. Despite Lady Usk, there is
a difference still in different nationalities. I could still swear to an
Englishwoman anywhere, if I only saw the back of her head and her
shoulders. No Englishwoman could have the delicious languor of Madame
Sabaroff's movements."
She interests him; he decides to stay on at Surrenden.
When he sees her at dinner he is still more favorably impressed.
Her figure is superb, and her sleeveless gown shows the beauty of her
bust and arms; she has a flat band of diamonds worn between the elbow
and the shoulder of the right arm. The effect is singular, but good.
"It is to show that she has the muscle above the elbow," says old Sir
Adolphus, who is learned in sculpture and anatomy. "You know, not one
woman in ten thousand has it; and for want of it their arms fall in
above the elbow. I have heard sculptors say so a hundred times. She has
it, and so she wears that flat bracelet to emphasize the fact."
Brandolin feels annoyed. There is no reason in life why he should object
to Madame Sabaroff having any number of affectations and vanities, or
why he should mind hearing this handsome old _viveur_ discuss them; but
he is annoyed by both facts.
There is not a plain woman among the guests of Surrenden: some are even
far beyond the average of good looks, and all have that _chic_ which
lends in itself a kind of beauty to the woman of the world. But the
handsomest of them all, Nina Curzon herself, pales beside the beautiful
pallor of the Russian lady, contrasted as it is with the splendor of her
jewels, the red rose of her lips, and the darkness of her eyelashes and
eyes.
At dinner, Xenia Sabaroff does not speak much: she has a dreamy look,
almost a fatigued one.
Brandolin is opposite to her: as there are no ornaments or flowers on
the table higher than eight inches, he can contemplate her at his
leisure across the field of shed rose-leaves which is between them.
Finding that she is so silent, he talks in his best fashion, in his most
reckless, antithetical, picturesque manner: he perceives he gains her
attention, though he never directly addresses her.
He also makes Mr. Wootton furious. Mr. Wootton has half a dozen good
stories untold. His method of getting good stories is ingenious: he
procures obscure but clever memoirs, French and English, which are
wholly forgotten, alters their most piquant anecdotes a little, and fits
them on to living and famous personages; the result is admirable, and
has earned him his great reputation as a _raconteur_ of contemporary
scandal. He has six delicious things ready now, and he cannot find a
moment in which he can lead up to and place any one of them.
"Brandolin is so amusing when he likes," says Lady Arthur Audley,
incautiously, to this suppressed and sullen victim.
"A monologist! a monologist!" replies Mr. Wootton, with a deprecatory
accent.
Lady Arthur is silenced, for she has not the slightest idea what a
monologist is. She fancies it means some kind of a sect like the
Mormons, and Brandolin is so odd that he may possibly belong to a sect,
or may have founded one, like Laurence Oliphant. She remembers the black
women that they talked of, and does not like to ask, being a sensitive
person, very delicate-minded, and perfectly proper, except her one
little affair with Sir Hugo, which everybody says is most creditable to
her, Arthur Audley being the scamp that he is.
Dinner over, Brandolin finds a pleasant seat on a low chair behind the
bigger chair on which Madame Sabaroff is reclining; other men devoted to
other women look longingly at her, some approach; Brandolin comprehends
why she is not beloved in her generation by her own sex.
After a time she is induced to sing; she has a very sweet voice, of
great power, with much pathos in it; she sings volkslieder of her own
country, strange yearning wistful songs, full of the vague mystical
melancholy of the Russian peasant. She ceases abruptly, and walks back
to her seat; her diamonds gleam in the light like so many eyes of fire.
Brandolin has listened in silence, conscious of a troubled pleasure
within himself, which is invariably the herald of one of those
attachments which have so often at once embellished and disturbed his
existence.
Like all romantic people, his heart is much younger than his years. It
has not been scarred by any one of those tragic passions which, like
fire on a hill-side, wither up all green things, so that not a blade of
grass will grow where it has passed. He has usually found love only the
most agreeable of pastimes. He has always wondered why anybody allowed
it to tear their life to tatters, as a bad actor tears a fine piece of
blank verse. An uncle of his possessed an Aphrodite in Paphian marble
which had been dug up in a vineyard at Luna, and a work of great beauty
of the second period of Greek art. A lover of pleasure, but withal a
philosopher, his uncle treasured and adored this statue, and whenever he
felt that any living woman was getting more power over him than he
liked, he compared her in his mind with the Luna Venus, and found that
the human creature's defects outbalanced her charms, and thus reduced
the potency of the latter to more reasonable dimensions.
Instead of his uncle's Luna goddess, Brandolin keeps in some remote and
sealed-up nook of his mind a certain ideal; now and then he remembers
it, takes it out and looks at it, and it has usually served with him at
such moments the purpose which the Luna marble served with his uncle.
As he saunters towards the smoking-room with his hands in the pockets of
a loose velvet jacket, he summons this useful resident of his brain,
intending to banish with it the remembrance, the too enervating
remembrance, of Xenia Sabaroff. But, to his surprise, they seem very
like one another, and their features blend confusedly into one.
"And I know nothing at all about this lady, except that she has a voice
like Albani's, big jewels, and a Russian name!" he thinks, with some
derision of himself. The smokers do not find him amusing, while his
companions seem to him insufferably tiresome. He hears the echo of
Madame Sabaroff's grave, low, melodious voice, and is not in temper for
the somewhat _scabreux_ jests of the smoking-room. He thinks that it is
all very well for boys to like that sort of salacious talk, but it seems
to him intolerably absurd that men of his own age, and older, should
find any kind of savor in it.
They tease him about the black women, moreover, and for once he is not
easy enough to be good-tempered and indifferent. He answers
contemptuously and irritably, and of course all his friends suppose,
which they had not supposed before, that there is, after all, some truth
in Mrs. Curzon's anecdote.
"What stupid stories that old _blagueur_ Wootton has told in the
smoking-room, and what beastly ones Fred Ormond has related! and all as
if they were something new, too! as if the one weren't taken out of the
manuscripts at Bute House, and the other out of last week's 'Figaro'! If
men won't be original, or can't be, why don't they hold their tongues?"
"What fools we are to sit shut up with gas-lights and tobacco on such a
night as this!--a night for Lorenzo and Jessica, for Romeo and Juliet,"
he thinks, as he stands awhile at the open window of his own bedroom.
It is three o'clock: there is a faint suggestive light which means the
dawn, young birds are twittering, there is a delicious scent of green
leaves, of full-blown roses, of dewy mosses; the air is damp and warm,
he can hear the feet of blackbirds scraping and turning over the mould
and the grass; it is dark, yet he can distinguish the masses of the
great woods beyond the gardens, the outlines of the trees near his
casement, the shape of the clouds as they move slowly southward. He
wonders in what part of the old house, whose fantastic roofs and turrets
and gargoyles and ivy-colored buttresses are hidden in the dusk of the
summer night, they have given the Princess Sabaroff her chamber. He
remains some time at the open window, and goes to his bed as the dawn
grows rosy.
"Lord Brandolin is in a very bad temper," says Mr. Wootton, when the
smoking-room door has closed on the object of his detestation; then he
pauses, and adds, significantly, "The Brandolins, you know, were always
a little--just a little--clever family, very clever, but we all know to
what great wits are sadly often allied. And this man has never done
anything, with all his talent and opportunities; never done anything at
all!"
"He has written first-rate books," says Usk, angrily, always ready to
defend a friend in absence.
"Oh, books!" says "Mr. Wootton, with bland but unutterable disdain. Mr.
Wootton is a critic of books, and therefore naturally despises them.
"What would you have him do?" growls Usk, pugnaciously.
Mr. Wootton stretches his legs out, and gazes with abstracted air at the
ceiling. "Public life," he murmurs. "Public life is the only possible
career for an Englishman of position. But it demands sacrifices; it
demands sacrifices."
"You mean that one has to marry?" says the young Duke of Queenstown,
timidly.
Mr. Wootton smiles on him loftily. "Marry? yes, undoubtedly; and avoid
scandals afterwards; avoid, beyond all, those connections which lend
such a charm to existence, but are so apt to get into the newspapers."
There is a general laugh.
Mr. Wootton has not intended to make them laugh, and he resumes, with
stateliness, as though they had not interrupted him. "The country
expects those sacrifices: no man succeeds in public life in England who
does not make them."
"Melbourne, Palmerston, Sidney Herbert?" murmurs one rebellious hearer.
Mr. Wootton waves him aside as he would do an importunate fly. "Not to
touch on living persons, I would select Lord Althorp as the model of the
public leader most suited to this country. It would not suit Lord
Brandolin to lead the blameless life of Lord Althorp. It would not suit
him even to pretend to lead it. I doubt if he could even look the part,
if he tried. The English are a peculiar people; they always mix public
and private life together. Lord Beaconsfield remarked to me once----"
And Mr. Wootton tells a story of Disraeli, a very good story, only he
has taken it out of the journals of the President des Brosses and
fathered it on to Disraeli. But M. le President des Brosses is an author
seldom read now, and nobody knows; if they did, nobody would care.
"Public opinion," he resumes, "is irresistible in England; and if it
once turn against a man, were he Messiah himself, he could do nothing.
It is not an intelligent public opinion: it confuses public and private
qualifications. A man may be a great statesman and yet dislike his wife
and like somebody else's. A man may be a great hero and yet may have an
unseemly passion or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not
understand this. It invariably overlooks the man's greatness, and only
sees the lady or the tailor who compromises him. It thinks--unhappily or
happily, as you please to consider--that genius should keep the whole
ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them."
Mr. Wootton here knocks a little ash off his cigar, and smiles like a
man who has said something neatly.
"It is the first time I ever heard you compliment genius," murmurs
Lawrence Hamilton.
"In Italy," pursues Mr. Wootton, "not very long ago a minister was
accused of buying a piano out of the public funds for his mistress.
Neither the piano nor the mistress hurt the gentleman in public
estimation in that soft and accommodating clime. But that piano, though
he might have paid for it with own money, would have ruined an English
politician. Though it had been the very smallest cottage piano
conceivable, it would have buried him forever under it if it had got
talked about; he would never have explained it away, or made it even
contingently endurable to the nation. You may, if you are a public man
in England, commit every conceivable blunder, add millions to the
national debt, eat your own words every evening in debate, and plunge
the country into an abyss of unmeasured and unmeasurable revolution, and
they will still have confidence in you if you read the lessons in church
and walk home with your wife; but if it is ever rumored that you admire
your neighbor's wife, down you go forever. And yet," continues Mr.
Wootton, pensively, "people _do_ admire their neighbor's wife in
England, and it seems a venial offence when one compares it with the
desertion of Gordon, or the encouragement of a hydra-headed greed for
the rich man's goods."
With which Mr. Wootton yawns, rises, and also declares his intention to
go to bed.
The young duke follows him and walks by his side down the corridor. He
is not at all like Disraeli's young duke: he is awkward, shy, and dull,
he is neither amiable nor distinguished, but he has a painstaking wish
in him to do well by his country, which is almost noble in a person who
has been toadied, indulged, and tempted in all ways and on all sides
ever since his cradle days. It is the disinterested patriotism which has
been so largely the excellence and honor of the English nobility, and
which is only possible in men of position so high that they are raised
by it from birth above all vulgar covetousness or pecuniary needs.
"Do you really think?" says the duke, timidly, for he is very afraid of
Henry Wootton,--"do you really think that to have any influence on
English public life it is necessary--necessary--to keep so very
straight, as regards women, I mean, you know?"
"It is most necessary to _appear_ to keep very straight," replies Mr.
Wootton. The two things are obviously different to the meanest capacity.
The young man sighs.
"And to have that--that--appearance, one must be married?"
"Indisputably. Marriage is as necessary to respectability in any great
position as a brougham to a doctor, or a butler to a bishop," replies
the elder, smiling compassionately at the wick of his candle. He does
not care a straw about the duke: he has no daughters to marry, and Mr.
Wootton's social eminence is far beyond the power of dukes or princes to
make or mend.
"But," stammers his Grace of Queenstown, growing red, yet burning with a
desire for instruction, "but don't you think a--a connection with--with
any lady of one's own rank is quite safe, quite sure not to cause
scandal?"
Mr. Wootton balances his candlestick carefully on one finger, pauses in
his walk, and looks hard at his questioner.
"That would depend entirely upon the lady's temper," replies this wise
monitor of youth.
They are words of wisdom so profound that they sink deep into the soul
of his pupil, and fill him with a consternated sadness and perplexity.
The temper of Lady Dawlish is a known quantity, and the quality of it is
alarming. Lady Dawlish is not young, she is good-looking, and she has
debts. Lord Dawlish has indeed hitherto let her pay her debts in any way
she chose, being occupied enough with paying such of his own as he
cannot by any dexterity avoid; but there is no knowing what he may do
any day out of caprice or ill nature, and, although he will never obtain
a divorce, he may try for one, which will equally effectually convulse
the duke's county and the cathedral city which is situated in its
centre. His own affair with Lady Dawlish is, he firmly believes, known
to no human being save themselves and their confidential servants: he
little dreams that it has been the gossip of all London until London
grew tired of it; he is indeed aware that everybody invited them in the
kindest manner together, but he attributed this coincidence to her tact
in the management of her set and choice of her own engagements.
The human mind is like the ostrich: its own projects serve to it the
purpose which sand plays to the ostrich: comfortably buried in them, it
defies the scrutiny of mankind; wrapped in its own absorbing passions,
it leaves its hansom before a lady's hall door, or leaves its coroneted
handkerchief on a bachelor's couch, and never dreams that the world is
looking on round the corner or through the keyhole. Human nature the
moment it is interested becomes blind. Therefore the duke has put his
question in good faith.
He would abhor any kind of scandal. He is devoted to his mother, who is
a pious and very proper person; he has a conscientious sense of his own
vast duties and responsibilities; he would feel most uncomfortable if he
thought people were talking grossly of him in his own county; and he has
a horror of Lord Dawlish, noisy, insolent, coarse, a gambler and a rake.
Arrived at his bedroom door, Mr. Wootten is touched vaguely with a kind
feeling towards his humble interrogator, or with some other sentiment
less kindly, it may be. He pauses, looks straight before him at the wick
of his candle, and speaks with that oracular air so becoming to him
which many ungrateful people are known to loathe.
"That kind of connections are invariably dangerous; invariably," he
remarks. "They have their uses, I admit, they have their uses: they
mould a man's manners when he is young, they enable him to acquire great
insight into female character, they keep him out of the lower sorts of
entanglements, and they are useful in restraining him from premature
marriage. But they are perilous if allowed to last too long. If
permitted to claim privileges, rights, usurpations, they are apt to
become irksome and compromising, especially if the lady be no longer
young. When a woman is no longer young there is a desperate
_acharnement_ in her tenacity about a last passion which is like that of
the mariner clinging to a spar in the midst of a gusty sea. It is not
easy for the spar to disengage itself. On the whole, therefore, women of
rank are perhaps best avoided in this sense. Passions are safest which
can be terminated by the cheque-book. The cheque-book is not always
indeed refused by great ladies,--when they are in debt,--but a
cheque-book is an unpleasant witness in the law courts. However, as I
said before, all depends on the lady's temper: no woman who has a bad
temper is ever truly discreet. Good-night to your Grace." And Mr.
Wootton, with his candle, disappears within his door-way.
He smiles a little blandly as his man undresses him. Five years before,
Lady Dawlish offended him at a house-party at Sandringham, taking a
fiendish pleasure in capping all his best stories and tracing the
sources of all his epigrams. In that inaccessible but indelible
note-book, his memory, he has written her name down as that of one to
whom he has a debt to pay. "_Je lui ai donne du fil a retordre_," he
thinks, as he drops into his first doze.