"Where were you all this morning?" asks Lady Usk of her cousin, after
luncheon.
"I never get up early," returns Gervase. "You know that."
"Brandolin was in the home wood with Madame Sabaroff as we returned from
church," remarks Dolly Usk. "They were together under a larch-tree. They
looked as if they were on the brink of a quarrel or at the end of one:
either may be an interesting _rapprochement_."
"I dare say they were only discussing some poet. They are always
discussing some poet."
"Then they had fallen out over the poet. Poets are dangerous themes. Or
perhaps she had been showing him your letters, if, as you seem to think,
she carries them about with her everywhere like a reliquary."
"I never presumed to imagine that she had preserved them for a day."
"Oh, yes, you did. You had a vision of her weeping over them in secret
every night, until you saw her here and found her as unlike a _delaisse_
as a woman can be."
"Certainly she does not look that. Possibly, if Dido could have been
dressed by Worth and Rodrigues, had diamonds as big as plovers' eggs,
and been adored by Lord Brandolin, she would never have perished in
despair. _Autres temps autres m[oe]urs._"
He speaks with sullen and scornful bitterness: his handsome face is
momentarily flushed.
Dorothy Usk looks at him with inquisitiveness: she has never known him
fail to rely on his own attractions before. "You are unusually modest,"
she replies. "Certainly, in our days, if Aeneas does not come back, we
take somebody else; sometimes we do that even if he does come back."
Gervase is moodily silent.
"I never knew you 'funk a fence' before!" says his cousin to him,
sarcastically.
"I have tried to say something to her," replies Gervase, moodily, "but
she gives me no hearing, no occasion."
"I should have thought you were used well enough to make both for
yourself," returns his cousin, with curt sympathy. "You have always been
'master of yourself, though women sigh,'--a paraphrase of Pope at your
service."
Gervase smiled, conscious of his past successes and willing to
acknowledge them.
"But you see she does not sigh!" he murmurs, with a sense that the
admission is not flattering to his own _amour-propre_.
"You have lost the power to make her sigh, do you mean?"
"I make no impression on her at all. I am utterly unable to imagine her
feelings, her sentiments,--how much she would acknowledge, how much she
would ignore."
"That is a confession of great helplessness! I should never have
believed that you would be baffled by any woman, above all by a woman
who once loved you."
"It is not easy to make a fire out of ashes."
"Not if the ashes are quite cold, certainly; but if a spark remains in
them, the fire soon comes again."
He is silent: the apparent indifference of a person whom he believed to
be living out her life in solitude, occupied only with his memory,
annoys and mortifies him. He has never doubted his own power to write
his name indelibly on the hearts of women.
"Perhaps she wishes to marry Brandolin?" suggests Dorothy Usk.
"Pshaw!" says Lord Gervase.
"Why pshaw?" repeats his cousin, persistently. "He would not be a man to
my taste, and he hates marriage, and he has a set of Hindoos at St.
Hubert's Lea, which would require as much cleaning as the Augean stable;
but I dare say she doesn't know anything about them, and he may be
persuading her that he thinks marriage opens the doors of Paradise: men
can so easily pretend that sort of thing! A great many men have wanted
to marry her, I believe, since she came back into the world after her
seclusion. George declares that Brandolin is quite serious."
"Preposterous!" replies Lord Gervase.
"Really, I don't see that," replies his judicious cousin. "A great many
women have wanted to marry _him_, though one wonders why. Indeed, I have
heard some of them declare that he is wholly irresistible when he
chooses."
"With Hindoos, perhaps," says Gervase.
"With our own women," says his cousin. "Lady Mary Jardine died of a
broken heart because he wouldn't look at her."
"Pray spare me the roll-call of his victims," says Lord Gervase,
irritably: he is passionately jealous of Brandolin. He himself had
forgotten Xenia Sabaroff, and forgotten all his obligations to her, when
she had been, as he always had believed, within reach of his hand if he
stretched it out; but viewed as a woman whom other men wooed and another
man might win, she has become to him intensely to be desired and to be
disputed. He has been a spoiled child of fortune and of the
drawing-rooms all his years, and the slightest opposition is intolerable
to him.
"I have no doubt," continues Dorothy Usk, gently, continuing her
embroidery of a South Kensington design of lilies and palm-leaves, "that
if he were aware you had a prior claim, if he thought or knew that you
had ever enjoyed her sympathy, he would immediately withdraw and leave
the field: he is a very proud man, with all his carelessness, and would
not, I think, care to be second to anybody in the affections of a woman
whom he seriously sought."
"What do you mean?" asks Gervase, abruptly, pausing in his walk to and
fro the boudoir.
"Only what I say," she answers. "If you wish to _eloigner_ Brandolin,
give him some idea of the truth."
Gervase laughs a little.
"On my honor," he thinks, with some bitterness, "for sheer
uncompromising meanness there is nothing comparable to the suggestions
which a woman will make to you!"
"I couldn't do that," he says, aloud. "What would he think of me?"
"My dear Alan," replies Dorothy Usk, impatiently, getting her silks in a
tangle, "when a man has behaved to any woman as you, by your own
account, have behaved to Madame Sabaroff, I think it is a little late in
the day to pretend to much elevation of feeling."
"You do not understand----"
"I have always found," says his cousin, impatiently searching for shades
of silk which she does not see, "that whenever we presume to pronounce
an opinion on any man's conduct and think ill of it we are always told
that we don't understand anything. When we flatter the man, or
compliment him on his conduct, there is no end to the marvellous powers
of our penetration, the fineness of our instincts, the accuracy of our
intuitions."
Gervase does not hear: his thoughts are elsewhere: he is thinking of
Xenia Sabaroff as he saw her first in the Salle des Palmiers in the
Winter Palace,--a mere girl, a mere child, startled and made nervous by
the admiration she excited and the homage she received, under the
brutality of her husband, the raillery of her friends; but that time is
long ago, very long, as the life of women counts, and Xenia Sabaroff is
now perfect mistress of her own emotions, if emotions she ever feels.
Gervase cannot for one moment tell whether the past is tenderly
remembered by her, is utterly forgotten, or is only recalled to be
touched and dismissed without regret. He is a vain man, but vanity has
no power to reassure him here.
In the warm afternoon of the next day the children are in the
school-room, supposed to be preparing their lessons for the morrow; but
the German governess, who is alone as guardian of order in the temple of
intellect, has fallen asleep, with flies buzzing about her blonde hair,
and her blue spectacles pushed up on her forehead, and Dodo has taken
advantage of the fact to go and lean out of one of the windows, whilst
her sister draws a caricature of the sleeping virgin from Deutschland,
and the Babe slips away from his books to a mechanical Punch, which,
contraband in the school-room, is far dearer to him than his Gradus and
rule of three.
Dodo, with her hands thrust among her abundant locks, lolls with half
her body in the air, and, by twisting her neck almost to dislocation,
manages to see round an ivy-grown buttress of the east wall, and to espy
people who are getting on their horses at the south doors of the
building.
"They are going out riding and I am shut up here!" she groans. "Oh, what
a while it takes one to grow up!"
"Who are going to ride?" asks Lilie, too fascinated by her drawing to
leave it.
"Lots of them," replies Dodo, who speaks four languages, and her own
worst of all. "All of them, pretty nearly. Mamma's on Pepper, and Lady
Waverley's got Bopeep,--she's always nervous, you know. I can't see very
much, 'cause of the ivy. Oh, there's the princess on Satan,--nobody else
could ride Satan; Lord Brandolin's put her up, and now he's riding by
her. They're gone now,--and papa's stopping behind them all to do
something to Bopeep's girths." Whereat the dutiful Dodo laughs rudely,
as she laughed coming home from church.
The sound of the horses' hoofs going farther away down the avenue comes
through the stillness, as her voice and her laughter cease.
"What a shame to be shut up here just because one isn't old!" she
groans, as she listens enviously. The sun is pouring liquid gold through
the ivy-leaves, the air is hot and fragrant, gardeners are watering the
flower-beds below, and the sweet, moist scent comes up to Dodo's
nostrils and makes her writhe with longing to get out; not that she is
by any means ardently devoted to nature, but she loves life, movement,
gayety, and she dearly loves showing off her figure on her pony and
being flirted with by her father's friends.
"I am sure Lord Brandolin is in love with her, awfully in love," she
says, as she peers into the distance, where the black form of Satan is
just visible through far-off oak-boughs.
"With whom?" asks Lilie, getting up from her caricature to lean also out
over the ivy.
"Xenia," says Dodo. She is very proud of calling her friend Xenia. "Take
care Goggles don't wake, or she'll see what you've been doing."
The lady from Deutschland was always known to them by this endearing
epithet.
"I don't care," says Lilie, kicking her bronze boots in the air. "Do you
think she'll marry Lord Brandolin?"
"Who? Goggles?"
"The idea!" They laugh deliciously.
"You say he's in love with Xenia. If they're in love they will marry,"
says Lilie, pensively.
"No, they won't: people who are in love never marry," replies Dodo.
"What do they do, then?" inquires the younger sister.
"They marry somebody else, and ask the one they like to go and stay with
them. It is much better," she adds. "It is what I shall do."
"Why is it better? It's a roundabout way," objects Lilie. "I shouldn't
care to marry at all," she adds, "only one can't ever be Mistress of the
Robes if one doesn't."
"Oh, everybody marries, of course; only some muff it, and don't get all
they want by it," replies the cynic Dodo.
"_Et l'amour, Miladi Alexandra?_" says the French governess, entering at
that moment. "_Ou donc mettez-vous l'amour?_"
"_Nous ne sommes pas des bourgeoises_," returns Dodo, very haughtily.
The Babe, sitting astride on a chair, trying to mend his mechanical
Punch, who screamed and beat his wife _absolument comme la nature_, as
the French governess said, before he was broken, hears the discourse of
his sisters and muses on it. He is very fond of Brandolin, and he adores
his princess: he would like them to live together, and he would go and
see them without his sisters, who tease him, and without Boom, who lords
it over him. Into his busy and precocious little brain there enters the
resolution to _pousser la machine_, as his governess would call it.
The Babe has a vast idea of his own resources in the way of speech and
invention, and he has his mother's tendencies to interfere with other
people's affairs, and is quite of an opinion that if he had the
management of most things he should better them. He has broken his
Parisian Punch in his endeavor to make it say more words than it could
say, but this slight accident does not affect his own admiration and
belief in his own powers, any more than to have brought a great and
prosperous empire within measurable distance of civil war affects a
statesman's conviction that he is the only person who can rule that
empire. The Babe, like Mr. Gladstone, is in his own eyes infallible.
Like the astute diplomatist he is, he waits for a good opportunity; he
is always where the ladies are, and his sharp little wits have been
preternaturally quickened in that atmosphere of what the French call
"_l'odeur feminine_."
He has to wait some days for his occasion. The frank and friendly
intercourse which existed at first between Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff
is altered: they are never alone, and the pleasant discussions on poets
and poetry, on philosophers and follies, in the gardens in the forenoon
are discontinued, neither could very well say why, but the presence of
Gervase chills and oppresses both of them and keeps them apart. She has
the burden of memory, he the burden of suspicion; and suspicion is a
thing so hateful and intolerable to the nature of Brandolin that it
makes him miserable to feel himself guilty of it.
But one morning the Babe coaxes her out to go with him to his garden,--a
floral republic, where a cabbage comes up cheek by jowl with a gloxinia,
and plants are plucked up by the roots to see if they are growing
aright. The Babe's system of horticulture is to dig intently for ten
minutes in all directions, to make himself very red in the face, and
then to call Dick, Tom, or Harry, any under-gardener who may be near,
and say, "Here, do it, will you?" Nevertheless, he retains the belief
that he is the creator and cultivator of this his garden, as M. Grevy
believes that he is the chief person in the French Republic; and he
takes Madame Sabaroff to admire it.
"It would look better if it were a little more in order," she permits
herself to observe.
"Oh, that's their fault," says the Babe, just as M. Grevy would say of
disorder in the Chambers, the Babe meaning Dick, Tom, or Harry, as the
President would mean Clemenceau, Rochefort, or M. de Mun.
"My dear Babe, how exactly you are like the Head of a Department!" says
Brandolin, who has followed them out of the house and comes up behind
them. "According to the Head of a Department, it is never the head that
is at fault, always the understrappers. May I inquire since when it has
become the fashion to set sunflowers with their heads downward?"
"I wanted to see if the roots would turn after the sun," says the Babe,
and regards his explanation as triumphant.
"And they only die! How perverse of them! You would become a second
Newton, if your destiny were not already cast, to dazzle the world by a
blending of Beau Brummel and Sir Joseph Paxton."
The Babe looks a little cross; he does not like to be laughed at before
his princess. He has got his opportunity, but it vexes him; he has an
impression that his companions will soon drift into forgetting both him
and his garden. Since the approach of Brandolin the latter has said
nothing.
The children's gardens are in a rather wild and distant part of the
grounds of Surrenden. It is noon; most people staying in the house are
still in their own rooms; it is solitary, sunny, still; a thrush is
singing in a jessamine thicket, there is no other sound except that of a
gardener's broom sweeping on the other side of the laurel hedge.
The Babe feels that it is now or never for his _coup de maitre_.
He plucks a rose, the best one he has, and offers it to Madame Sabaroff,
who accepts it gratefully, though it is considerably earwig-eaten, and
puts it in her corsage.
The eyes of Brandolin follow it wistfully.
The Babe glances at them alternately from under his hair, then his small
features assume an expression of cherubic innocence and unconsciousness.
The most _ruse_ little rogue in the whole kingdom, he knows how to make
himself look like a perfect reproduction of Sir Joshua Reynolds's
Artlessness or Infancy. He gazes up in Xenia Sabaroff's face with
angelic simplicity admirably assumed.
"When you marry him," says the Babe, pointing to Brandolin, with
admirably affected _naivete_, "you will let me hold up your train, won't
you? I always hold up my friends' trains when they marry. I have a
page's dress, Louis something or other, and a sword, and a velvet cap
with a badge and a feather: I always look very well."
"Oh, what an odious _petit-maitre_ you will be when you are a man, my
dear Babe!" says Xenia Sabaroff.
She does not take any notice of his opening words, but a flush of color
comes over her face and passes as quickly as it came.
"_Petit-maitre_,--what is that?" says the Babe. "But you will let me,
won't you? And don't marry him till the autumn, or even the winter,
because the velvet makes me so hot when the day is hot, and the dress
wouldn't look nice made in thin things."
"Could I only add my prayer to his," murmurs Brandolin, "and hope that
in the autumn----"
Xenia Sabaroff looks at him with a strange gaze: it is penetrating,
dreamy, wistful, inquiring.
"We jest as the child jests," she says, abruptly, and walks onward.
"I do not jest," says Brandolin.
The Babe glances at them under his thick eyelashes, and, being a _fine
mouche_, only innocent in appearance, he runs off after a butterfly. He
has not been brought up in a feminine atmosphere of _poudre de riz_ and
_lait d'iris_ without learning discretion.