Brandolin walks down the opening between the glass doors into the
garden. He paces impatiently the green shady walks where he has seen her
on other mornings than this. It is lovely weather, and the innumerable
roses fill the warm moist air with fragrance. There is a sea-breeze
blowing from the sea-coast some thirty miles away; his schooner is in
harbor there; he thinks that it would be wisest to go to it and sail
away again for as many thousand miles as he has just left behind him.
Xenia Sabaroff has a great and growing influence over him, and he does
not wish her to exercise it and increase it if this thing be true:
perhaps, after all, she may be that kind of sorceress of which Mary
Stuart is the eternal type,--cold only that others may burn, _reculant
pour mieux sauter_, exquisitely feminine only to be more dangerously
powerful. He does not wish to play the _role_ of Chastelard, or of
Douglas, or of Henry Darnley. He is stung to the quick by what he has
heard said.
It is not new: since the arrival of Gervase the same thing has been
hinted more or less clearly, more or less obscurely, within his hearing
more than once; but the matter-of-fact words of Litroff have given the
tale a kind of circumstantiality and substance which the vague uncertain
suggestions of others did not do. Litroff has, obviously, no feeling
against her; he even speaks of her with reluctance and admiration:
therefore his testimony has a truthfulness about it which would be
lacking in any mere malicious scandal.
It is intensely painful to him to believe, or even to admit to himself
as possible, that it may be thus true. She seems to him a very queen
among women: all the romance of his temperament clothes her with ideal
qualities. He walks on unconsciously till he has left the west garden
and entered the wood which joins it, and the grassy seats made
underneath the boughs. As he goes, his heart thrills, his pulse
quickens: he sees Madame Sabaroff. She is seated on one of the turf
banks, reading, the dog of the house at her feet. He has almost walked
on to her before he has perceived her.
"I beg your pardon," he murmurs, and pauses, undecided whether to go or
stay.
She looks at him a little surprised at the ceremony of his manner.
"For what do you beg my pardon? You are as free of the wood as I," she
replies, with a smile. "I promised the children to keep their dogs
quiet, and to await them here as they return from their church."
"You are too good to the children," says Brandolin, still with
restraint. Her eyes open with increased surprise. She has never seen his
manner, usually so easy, nonchalant, and unstudied, altered before.
"He must have heard bad news," she thinks, but says nothing, and keeps
her book open.
Brandolin stands near, silent and absorbed. He is musing what worlds he
would give, if he had them, to know whether the story is true! He longs
passionately to ask her in plain words, but it would be too brutal and
too rude; he has not known her long enough to be able to presume to do
so.
He watches the sunshine fall through the larch boughs on to her hands in
their long loose gloves and touch the pearls which she always wears at
her throat.
"How very much he is unlike himself!" she thinks; she misses his
spontaneous and picturesque eloquence, his warm _abandon_ of manner, his
caressing deference of tone. At that moment there is a gleam of white
between the trees, a sound of voices in the distance.
The family party are returning from church. The dogs jump up and wag
their tails and bark their welcome. The Babe is dashing on in advance.
There is an end of their brief _tete-a-tete_; he passionately regrets
the loss of it, though he is not sure of what he would have said in it.
"Always together!" says Dulcia Waverley, in a whisper, to Usk, as she
sees them. "Does he know that he succeeds Lord Gervase, do you think?"
"How should I know?" says Usk; "and Dolly says there was nothing between
her and Gervase,--nothing; at least it was all in honor, as the French
say."
"Oh, of course," agrees Lady Waverley, with her plaintive eyes gazing
dreamily down the aisle of larch-trees. The children have run on to
Madame Sabaroff.
"Where is Alan?" thinks Dolly Usk, angrily, on seeing Brandolin.
Gervase, who is not an early riser, is then taking his coffee in bed as
twelve strikes. He detests an English Sunday: although at Surrenden it
is disguised as much as possible to look like any other day, still there
is a Sunday feeling in the air, and Usk does not like people to play
cards on Sundays: it is his way of being virtuous vicariously.
"Primitive Christianity," says Brandolin, touching the white feathers of
Dodo's hat and the white lace on her short skirts.
"We only go to sleep," replies the child, disconsolately. "We might just
as well go to sleep at home; and it is so hot in that pew, with all that
red cloth!"
"My love!" says Dulcia Waverley, scandalized.
"Lady Waverley don't go to sleep!" cries the Babe, in his terribly clear
little voice. "She was writing in her hymn-book and showing it to papa."
No one appears to hear this indiscreet remark except Dodo, who laughs
somewhat rudely.
"I was trying to remember the hymn of Faber's 'Longing for God,'" says
Lady Waverley, who is never known to be at a loss. "The last verse
escapes me. Can any one recall it? It is so lamentable that sectarianism
prevents those hymns from being used in Protestant churches."
But no one there present is religious enough or poetic enough to help
her to the missing lines.
"There is so little religious feeling anywhere in England," she remarks,
with a sigh.
"It's the confounded levelling that destroys it," says Usk, echoing the
sigh.
"They speak of Faber," says Madame Sabaroff. "The most beautiful and
touching of all his verses are those which express the universal sorrow
of the world."
And in her low, grave, melodious voice she repeats a few of the lines of
the poem:
"The sea, unmated creature, tired and lone,
Makes on its desolate sands eternal moan.
Lakes on the calmest days are ever throbbing
Upon their pebbly shores with petulant sobbing.
"The beasts of burden linger on their way
Like slaves, who will not speak when they obey;
Their eyes, whene'er their looks to us they raise,
With something of reproachful patience gaze.
"Labor itself is but a sorrowful song,
The protest of the weak against the strong;
Over rough waters, and in obstinate fields,
And from dark mines, the same sad sound it yields."
She is addressing Brandolin as she recites them; they are a little
behind the others.
He does not reply, but looks at her with an expression in his eyes which
astonishes and troubles her. He is thinking, as the music of her tones
stirs his innermost soul, that he can believe no evil of her, will
believe none,--no, though the very angels of heaven were to cry out
against her.