Lord Gervase was eight years younger when he wrote those letters than he
is now, and he has unpleasant recollections of unpleasant passages in
them which would compromise him in his career, or at least get him
horribly talked about, were they ever made sport of in the world. Where
are his letters? Has Madame Sabaroff kept them? He longs to ask her, but
he dare not.
He does not say to his cousin that he has more than once endeavored to
hint to Xenia Sabaroff that it would be sweet to him to recall the past,
would she permit it. But he has elicited no response. She has evaded
without directly avoiding him. She is no longer the impressionable shy
girl whom he knew in Russia, weighted with an unhappy fate, and rather
alarmed by the very successes of her own beauty than flattered by them.
She is a woman of the world, who knows her own value and her own power
to charm, and has acquired the talent which the world teaches, of
reading the minds of others without revealing her own. _Saule pleureur!_
the Petersburg court ladies had used to call her in those early times
when the tears had started to her eyes so quickly; but no one ever sees
tears in her eyes now.
Gervase is profoundly troubled to find how much genuine emotion the
presence of a woman whose existence he had long forgotten has power to
excite in him. He does not like emotion of any kind; and in all his
affairs of the heart he is accustomed to make others suffer, not
himself. Vanity and wounded vanity enter so largely into the influences
moulding human life, that it is very possible, if the sight of him had
had power to disturb her, the renewal of association with her would have
left him unmoved. But, as it is, he has been piqued, mortified, excited,
ad attracted; and the admiration which Brandolin and Lawrence Hamilton
and other men plainly show of her is the sharpest spur to memory and to
desire.
Whenever he has remembered Xenia Sabaroff, at such rare times as he has
heard her name mentioned in the world, he has thought of her
complacently as dwelling in the solitudes of Baltic forests, entirely
devoted to his memory. Women who are entirely devoted to their memory
men seldom trouble themselves to seek out; but to see her courted,
sought, and desired, more handsome than ever, and apparently wholly
indifferent to himself, is a shock to his self-esteem, and galvanism to
his dead wishes and slumbering recollections. He begins to perceive that
he would have done better not to forget her quite so quickly.
Meanwhile, all the guests at Surrenden, guided by a hint from Nina
Curzon, begin to see a quantity of things which do not exist, and to
exert their minds in endeavoring to remember a vast deal which they
never heard with regard to both himself and her. No one knows anything
or has a shadow of fact to go on, but this is an insignificant detail
which does not tie their tongues in the least. Nina Curzon has invention
enough to supply any _lacunae_, and in this instance her imagination is
stimulated by a double jealousy: she is jealous of Lawrence Hamilton,
whom she is inclined to dismiss, and she is jealous of Brandolin, whom
she is inclined to appropriate.
Twenty-four hours have not elapsed since the arrival of Gervase, before
she has given a dozen people the intimate conviction that she knows all
about him and the Princess Sabaroff, and that there is something very
dreadful in it,--much worse than in the usual history of such relations.
Everything is possible in Russia, she says, and has a way of saying this
which suggests unfathomable abysses of license and crime.
No one has the slightest idea what she means, but no one will be behind
any other in conjecturing; and there rises about the unconscious figure
of Xenia Sabaroff a haze of vague suggested indistinct suspicion, like
the smoke of the blue fires which hide the form of the Evil One on the
stage in operas. Brandolin perceives it, and is deeply irritated.
"What is it to me?" he says to himself, but says so in vain.
Fragments of these ingenious conjectures and imaginary recollections
come to his ear and annoy him intensely,--annoy him the more because his
swift intuitions and unerring perceptions have told him from his own
observation that Xenia Sabaroff does not see in Gervase altogether a
stranger, though she has greeted him as such. Certain things are said
which he would like to resent, but he is powerless to do so.
His days have been delightful to him before the arrival of this other
man at Surrenden; now they are troubled and embittered. Yet he is not
inclined to break off his visit abruptly and go to Scotland, Germany, or
Norway, as might be wisest. He is in love with Xenia Sabaroff in a
manner which surprises himself. He thought he had outlived that sort of
boyish and imaginative passion. But she has a great power over his fancy
and his senses, and she is more like his earliest ideal of a woman than
any one he has ever met.
"Absurd that I should have an ideal at all at my age!" he thinks to
himself; but, as there are some who are never accompanied by that
ethereal attendant even in youth, so there are some whom it never leaves
till they reach their graves.
Therefore when he hears these vague, floating, disagreeable jests, he
suffers acutely, and finds himself in the position which is perhaps most
painful of all to any man who is a gentleman, that of being compelled to
sit silent and hear a woman he longs to protect lightly spoken of,
because he has no right to defend her, and would indeed only compromise
her more if he attempted her defence.
People do not venture to say much before Usk, because he is her host and
might resent it, but nevertheless he too hears also something, and
thinks to himself, "Didn't I tell Dolly foreigners are never any better
than they should be?"
But Dulcia Waverley is here, and her languid and touching ways, her
delicate health, and her soft sympathies have an indescribable sorcery
for him at all times, so that he thinks but very little since her
arrival of anything else. Usk likes women who believe devoutly that he
might have been a great politician if he had chosen, and who also
believe in his ruined digestion: no one affects both these beliefs so
intensely as Lady Waverley, and when she tells him that he could have
solved the Irish question in half an hour had he taken office, or that
no one could understand his constitution except a German doctor in a
bath in the Boehmerwald, whither she goes herself every autumn, she does,
altogether and absolutely, anything she chooses with him.
His wife sees that quite well, and dislikes it, but it might be so much
worse, she reflects: it might be a woman out of society, or a public
singer, or an American adventuress: so she is reasonable, and always
makes _bonne mine_ to Dulcia Waverley, with her nerves, her cures, and
her angelic smiles. After all, it does not much matter, she thinks, if
they like to go and drink nasty waters together and poison themselves
with sulphur, iron, and potassium. It is one of the odd
nineteenth-century ways of playing Antony and Cleopatra.
Notwithstanding the absorption of his thoughts, Usk, however, one day
spares a moment from Lady Waverley and his own liver, to put together
words dropped by different people then under his own roof, to ponder
upon them, and finally to interrogate his wife.
"Did you know that people say they used to carry on together?" he asks,
without preamble.
"Who?" asks the lady of Surrenden, sharply.
"Madame Sabaroff and Gervase," he growls. "It'd be odd if they hadn't,
as they've come to this house!"
"Of course I knew they were friends; but there was never anything
between them in the vulgar sense which you would imply renders them
eligible for my house," replies Dorothy Usk, with the severity of a
woman whose conscience is clear, and the tranquillity of a woman who is
telling a falsehood.
Usk stares at her. "Well, if you knew it, you rode a dark horse, then,
when you asked her here?"
"Your expressions are incoherent," returns his wife. "If I wished two
people to meet when both were free, who had had a certain sympathy for
each other when honor kept them apart, there is nothing very culpable in
it? What is your objection?"
"Oh, Lord, I've no objection: I don't care a straw," says her lord, with
a very moody expression. "But Brandolin will, I suspect: she's certainly
encouraged him. I think you might have shown us your cards."
"Lord Brandolin is certainly old enough to take care of himself in
affairs of the heart, and experienced enough, too, if one is to believe
all one hears," replies his wife. "What can he care, either, for a
person he has known a few days? Whereas the attachment of Gervase to her
is of very long date and most romantic origin. He has loved her
hopelessly for eight years."
Usk gives a grim guffaw. "The constancy has had many interludes, I
suspect! Now I see why you took such a craze for the lady; but you might
have said what you were after to me, at any rate. I could have hinted to
Brandolin how the land lay, and he wouldn't have walked with his eyes
shut into her net."
"Her 'net'? She is as cold as ice to him!" replies his wife, with
disgust; "and, were she otherwise, the loves of your friend are soon
consoled. He writes a letter, takes a voyage, and throws his memories
overboard. Alan's temperament is far more serious."
"If by serious you mean selfish, I agree with you. There isn't such
another d----d egotist anywhere under the sun." And, much out of temper,
Usk flings himself out of the room and goes to Lady Waverley, who is
lying on a sofa in the small library. She has a headache, but her smile
is sweet, her hand cool, her atmosphere soothing and delightful, with
the blinds down and an odor of attar of roses.
If any one were to tell Dolly Usk that she had been making up fibs on
this occasion, she would be mortally offended and surprised. She would
reply that she had only been _brodant un peu_,--putting the thing as it
ought to be put, as it must be put, if Gervase is to obtain the hand of
Xenia Sabaroff, and if nobody is to know anything which ought not to be
known. Indeed, she has pondered so much on this manner of putting it,
that she has almost ended in believing that her version of the story is
the true one.
"Brandolin's feelings, indeed!" she thinks, with great contempt. "As if
any pain he might feel, if he did feel any, would not be due and fitting
retribution upon him for the horrid life he has led, and the way he has
played fast and loose with women. He can go back to his Hindoos, whose
figures are so superior to any European's! But George is always so
absurd about his friends."
Whereon, being in an irritated and unkind mood, she desires the servant,
who just then announces the visit of the rector of the parish, to show
that reverend person into the small library, where she knows that Dulcia
Waverley is trying to get rid of her headache. It is very seldom that
she is unwise enough to indulge in this kind of domestic vengeance; but
at this moment it seems sweet to her.
The unfortunate and innocent rector finds the lord of Surrenden
monosyllabic and impolite, but Lady Waverley, woman-like, is wholly
equal to the occasion, and in her sweet low voice discourses of village
choirs, and village readings, and village medicines and morals, with
such divine patience and feminine adaptability that the good man
dismisses from his mind as impossible what he had certainly fancied he
saw in the moment when the library door opened before him.
If ever there was purity incarnate, Dulcia Waverley looks it, with her
white gown, her Madonna-like hair, her dewy pensive eyes, and her
appealing smile. She suggests the portraits in the Keepsakes and
Forget-me-Nots of fifty years ago; she has always about her the faint
old-fashioned perfume of attar of roses, and she wears her soft fair
hair in Raphaelite bands which in any other woman would look absurd; but
her experience has told her that, despite all change in modes and
manners, the surest weapons to subdue strong men are still those
old-fashioned charms of fragility and of apparent helplessness which
made Othello weep when his bridal moon was young above the Venetian
waters. Only if she had ever spoken candidly all she knows, which she
never by any chance does, she would say that to succeed thus with
Othello, or with any other male creature, you must be, under all your
apparent weakness, tenacious as a magnet and cold as steel. Therein lies
the secret of all power: the velvet glove and the iron hand may be an
old saying, but it is a truth never old.
The conclusion which she had drawn from Gervase and his fragmentary
story has seriously annoyed and shocked his cousin, but on reflection
she decides to adhere to her invariable rule of ignoring all that is
equivocal in it, and treating it accordingly.
No one has ever heard Lady Usk admit that there is the slightest
impropriety in the relations of any of her guests: it is one of those
fictions like the convenient fictions of the law, which are so useful
that every one agrees not to dispute their acceptance. She will never
know a person who is really compromised. Therefore, if there be any soil
on the wings of her doves, she shuts her eyes to it so long as those of
the world are shut. She has the agreeable power of never seeing but what
she wishes to see: so, although for the moment she has been
uncomfortably shocked, she recovers her composure rapidly, and persuades
herself that Gervase merely spoke of a passing attachment, perfectly
pure. Why should he not marry the object of it? To the mind of Dorothy
Usk that would make everything right. Things may have been wrong once,
but that is nobody's business. Xenia Sabaroff is a charming and
beautiful woman, and the silver-mine beyond the Urals is a very real
thing. Lady Usk is not a mercenary, she is even a generous woman; but
when English fortunes are so embarrassed as they are in this day, with
Socialists at the roots and a Jacquerie tearing at the fruits of them,
any solid fortune situated out of England would be of great use to any
Englishman occupying a great position.
"We shall all of us have to live abroad before long," she reflects, with
visions of Hodge chopping down her palms for firewood and Sally smashing
the porcelain in her model dairy.
No doubt the relations of her cousin and her guest have not been always
what they ought to have been; but she does not wish to think of this,
and she will not think of it: by-gones are always best buried. The
people who manage to be happy are those who understand the art of
burying them and use plenty of quicklime.
During the twenty years which have elapsed since her presentation, Dolly
Usk has had a very varied experience of men and women, and has
continually been solicited to interfere in their love-affairs, or has
even interfered without being solicited. She likes the feeling of being
a _diva ex machina_ to her friends, and, though she has so decidedly
refused Gervase her assistance to discover the state of Xenia Sabaroff's
feelings towards him, she begins in her own mind immediately to cast
about for some indirect means of learning it, and arranges in her own
fancy the whole story as it will sound prettiest and most proper, if she
be ever called on to relate it to the world.
She has a talent at putting such stories so nicely in order that
anything which may be objectionable in them is altogether invisible, as
a clever _faiseur_ will so arrange old laces on a court train that the
darns and stains in them are wholly hidden away. She likes exercising
her ingenuity in this way; and, although the narrative given her by
Gervase has certainly seemed to her objectionable, and one which places
the hero of it in an unpleasant light, it may with tact be turned so as
to show nothing but what is interesting. And to this end she also begins
to drop little hints, little phrases suggestive of that virtue of
blameless and long constancy with which it is necessary to invest her
cousin Alan, if he is to be made a centre of romance. She even essays
these very delicately on the ear of Xenia Sabaroff; but they are met
with so absolute a lack of response, so discouraging and cold an absence
of all understanding, that she cannot continue to try them in that
direction.
"If that odious Brandolin were not here!" she thinks, irritably.
The attentions of Brandolin are very marked to the Princess Sabaroff,
and are characterized by that carelessness of comment and that color of
romance which have always marked his interest in any woman. He is not a
rival _a plaisanter_, she knows; but then she knows, too, that he never
is serious in these matters. When she first hears the story of Gervase,
she heartily wishes that there were any pretence to get rid of Xenia
Sabaroff, and hastily wonders what excuse she could make to break up her
Surrenden circle. But on reflection she desires as strongly to retain
her there; and, as there is to be a child's costume ball on the occasion
of the Babe's birthday a fortnight hence, she makes the children entreat
their friend to stay for it, and adds her own solicitation to theirs.
Madame Sabaroff hesitates, is inclined to refuse, but at length
acquiesces.
Unfortunately, Usk, who always to his wife's mind represents the bull in
the china-shop with regard to any of her delicate and intricate
combinations, insists that Brandolin shall not leave either. So the
situation remains unchanged, though many guests come and go, some
staying two days, some three or four.
Xenia Sabaroff has seen and suffered enough to make her not lightly won
or easily impressed. She knows enough of the world to know her own value
in it, and she has measured the brutality and the inconsistency which
may lie under the most polished exterior.
"I am not old yet in years," she says, once, "but I am very old in some
things. I have no illusions."
"When there is a frost in spring the field-flowers die," says Brandolin,
softly, "but they come again."
"In the fields, perhaps," replies Xenia Sabaroff.
"And in the human heart," says Brandolin.
He longs to ask her what have been the relations between her and Gervase
which people seem so sure have existed once; he longs to know whether it
was the brutality of her husband, or the infidelity of any lover, which
has taught her so early the instability of human happiness.
But he hesitates before any demand, however veiled or delicate, upon her
confidence. He has known her such a little while, and he is conscious
that she is not a _femme facile_. It is her greatest fascination for
him: though he is credited with holding women lightly, he is a man whose
theories of what they ought to be are high and difficult to realize.
Each day that he sees her at Surrenden tends to convince him more and
more that she does realize them, despite the calumnies which are set
floating round her name.
One day, among several new arrivals, a countryman of hers comes down
from London, where, being momentarily _charge-d'affaires_ of the Russian
Legation, he has been cursing the heat, the dust, the deserted squares,
the empty clubs, the ugly parks, and rushing out of town whenever he can
for twenty-four hours, as he now comes to Surrenden from Saturday to
Monday. "_Comme un calicot! Comme un calicot!_" he says, piteously. Such
are the miseries of the diplomatic service.
He kisses the hand of Madame Sabaroff with ardor and reverence: he has
known her in her own country. A gleam of amusement comes into his
half-shut gray eyes as he recognizes Gervase.
The next morning is Sunday. Usk and Dulcia Waverley are at church, with
the children and Lady Usk and Nina Curzon.
Brandolin strays into the small library, takes down a book, and
stretches himself on a couch. He half expects that Madame Sabaroff will
come down before luncheon and also seek a book, as she did last Sunday.
He lights a cigarette and waits, lazily watching the peacocks drawing
their trains over the velvety turf without. It is a lovely dewy morning,
very fresh and fragrant after rains in the night. He thinks he will
persuade her to go for a walk: there is a charming walk near, under deep
trees by a little brown brook, full of forget-me-nots.
He hears a step, and looks up: he does not see her, but the Russian
secretary, Gregor Litroff, always called "Toffy" by his female friends
in England.
"_Dieu de Dieu!_ What an institution your English Sunday is!" says
Litroff, with a yawn. "I looked out of my window an hour ago, and beheld
Usk in a tall hat, with his little boy on one side and miladi Waverley
on the other, solemnly going to church. How droll! He would not do it in
London."
"It is not more ridiculous to go to church in a tall hat than to
prostrate yourself and kiss a wooden cross, as you would do if you were
at home," says Brandolin, contemptuously, eying the intruder with
irritation.
"That may be," says the secretary, good-humoredly. "We do it from habit,
to set an example, not to make a fuss. So, I suppose, does he."
"Precisely," says Brandolin, wondering how he shall get rid of this man.
"And he takes Lady Waverley for an example, too?" asks Litroff, with a
laugh.
"Religion enjoins us," replies Brandolin, curtly, "to offer what we have
most precious to the Lord."
The secretary laughs again.
"That is very good," he says, with enjoyment.
Mr. Wootton comes in at that instant. He has been away, but has
returned: the cooks at Surrenden are admirable. Brandolin sees his hopes
of a _tete-a-tete_ and a walk in the home wood fading farther and
farther from view. Mr. Wootton has several telegram-papers in his hand.
"All bad news, from all the departments," he remarks.
"There is nothing but bad news," says Brandolin. "It is painful to die
by driblets. We shall all be glad when we have got the thing over,--seen
Windsor burnt, London sacked, Ireland admitted to the American Union,
and Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone crowned at Westminster."
Mr. Wootton coughs: he does not like unseemly jests, nor to have the
gravity and exclusiveness of the private intelligence he receives
doubted. He turns to Litroff, talks of Russian politics, and brings the
conversation round to the Princess Sabaroff.
Brandolin, appearing absorbed in his book, lies on his couch wondering
whether he should meet her anywhere about the gardens if he went out. He
listens angrily when he hears her name.
"Was she ever talked about?" asks Mr. Wootton, searching the
book-shelves.
"What charming woman is not?" returns Litroff, gallantly.
"My dear count," replies Mr. Wootton, with grave rebuke, "we have
thousands of noble wives and mothers in England before whom Satan
himself would be obliged to bow in reverence."
"Ah, truly," says Litroff: "so have we, I dare say: I have never asked."
"No doubt you have," says Mr. Wootton, kindly. "The virtue of its women
is the great safeguard of a nation."
"One understands why England is losing her nice equipoise, then, now,"
murmurs Brandolin.
Mr. Wootton disregards him.
"But Madame Sabaroff _was_ talked about, I think,--unjustly, no doubt?"
he insists.
Mr. Wootton always insists.
"Ach!" says Litroff, apologetically, "Sabaroff was such a great brute.
It was very natural----"
"What was natural?"
"That she should console herself."
"Ah! she did console herself?"
Litroff smiles. "Ask Lord Gervase: he was Lord Baird at that time. We
all expected he would have married her when Sabaroff was shot."
"But it was Lustoff who shot Sabaroff in a duel about her?"
"Not about her. Lustoff quarrelled with him about a gambling affair, not
about her at all, though people have said so. Lord Baird--Gervase--was,
I am certain, her first lover, and has been her only one, as yet."
Brandolin flings his book with some violence on the floor, gets up, and
walks to the window. Mr. Wootton looks after him.
"No one could blame her," says Litroff, who is a good-natured man. "She
was married when she was scarcely sixteen to a brute; she was immensely
admired; she was alone in the midst of a society both loose and
brilliant; Gervase laid siege to her sans treve, and she was hardly more
than a child."
"Where there is no principle early implanted," begins Mr. Wootton----
But Litroff is not patient under preaching. "My dear sir," he says,
impatiently, "principle (of that kind) is more easily implanted in plain
women than in handsomer ones. Madame Sabaroff is a proud woman, which
comes to nearly the same thing as a high-principled one. She has lived
like a saint since Sabaroff was shot, and if she take up matters with
her early lover again it will only be, I imagine, this time, _pour le
bon motif_. Anyhow, I don't see why we should blame her for the past,
when the present shows us such an admirable and edifying spectacle as
miladi Waverley and miladi Usk going to sit in church with George Usk
between them!"
Whereon the Russian secretary takes a "Figaro" off the newspaper-table,
and rudely opens it and flourishes it between Mr. Wootton and himself,
in sign that the conversation is ended.
Mr. Wootton has never been so treated in his life.