A House-Party Part 13

"The Princess Xenia whom you knew was a child, a foolish child; she is dead, quite as much dead as though she were under so many solid square feet of Baltic ice. Put her from your thoughts: you will never awake her."

Then she rises and leaves him and goes out of the ball-room.

Throughout that evening he does not venture to approach her again, and he endeavors to throw himself with some show of warmth into a flirtation with Nina Curzon.

"Why did you pretend not to know her?" says Mrs. Curzon to him.

He smiles, the fatuous smile with which a man ingeniously expresses what he would be thought a brute to put into words.

"She does not deign to know me--now," he says, modestly, and to the experienced comprehension of Nina Curzon the words, although so modest, tell her as much as the loudest boast could do.

CHAPTER IX.

Gervase saunters in to his hostess's boudoir the next morning, availing himself of the privilege accorded to that distant relationship which it pleases them both to raise into an intimate cousinship. It is a charming boudoir, style Louis Quinze, with the walls hung with flowered silk of that epoch, and the dado made of fans which belonged to the same period.

Lady Usk writes here at a little secretaire painted by Fragonard, and uses an inkstand said to have belonged to Madame de Parabere, made in the shape of a silver sh.e.l.l driven by a gold Cupidon; yet, despite the frivolity of these a.s.sociations, she contrives to get through a vast ma.s.s of business at this fragile table, and has one of the soundest heads for affairs in all England. Gervase sits down and makes himself agreeable, and relates to her many little episodes of his recent experiences.

She is used to be the confidante of her men; she is young enough to make a friend who is attractive to them, and old enough to lend herself _de bon c[oe]ur_ to the recital of their attachments to other women. Very often she gives them very good advice, but she does not obtrude it unseasonably. "An awfully nice woman all round," is the general verdict of her visitants to the boudoir. She does not seek to be more than that to them.

Gervase does not make any confidences: he only tells her things which amuse her and reveal much about her acquaintances, nothing about himself. He smokes some of her favorite cigarettes, praises some new china, suggests an alteration in the arrangement of the fans, and makes critical discourses _a propos_ of her collection of snuff-boxes.

When he is going away, he lingers a moment intently looking at a patch-box of vernis Martin, and says, with studied carelessness, "Dolly, tell me, when did you make the acquaintance of Madame Sabaroff?"

"Last year, at Cannes: why do you want to know? She came and stayed with us at Orme last Easter. Is she not perfectly charming?"

"Very good-looking," says Gervase, absently. "You don't know anything about her, then?"

"Know?" repeats his hostess. "What should I know? What everybody does, I suppose. I met her first at the d.u.c.h.esse de Luynes'. You can't possibly mean that there can be anything--anything----"

"Oh, no," replies Gervase; but it produces on his questioner the same effect as if he had said, "Oh, yes."

"How odious men are! such scandal-mongers," says Lady Usk, angrily.

"Talk of _our_ 'd.a.m.ning with faint praise' There is nothing comparable to the way in which a man destroys a woman's reputation just by raising his eyebrows or twisting his moustache."

"I have no moustache to twist, and am sure there is no reputation which I wish to destroy," says her cousin.

"Then why do you ask me where I made her acquaintance?"

"My dear Dolly! Surely the most innocent and general sort of question ever on the lips of any human being!"

"Possibly; not in the way you said it, however; and when one knows that you were a great deal in Russia, it suggests five hundred things,--five thousand things: and of course one knows he was shot in a duel about her, and I believe people have talked."

"I have never helped them to talk. When do they not talk?"

And beyond this she cannot prevail upon him to go: he pretends that the Princess Sabaroff is beyond all possibility of any approach of calumny, but the protestation produces on her the impression that he could tell her a great deal wholly to the contrary if he chose.

"She certainly was staying with Madame de Luynes," she insists.

"Who ever said the lady might not stay with the Archbishop of Canterbury?" replies Gervase.

She is irritated and vexed.

Xenia Sabaroff is her idol of the moment, and if her idol were proved human she would be very angry. She reflects that she will have Dodo and the children kept more strictly in the school-room, and not let them wander about over the park as they do with their Russian friend most mornings.

"One can never be too careful with children of that age," she muses, "and they are terribly _eveillees_ already."

Dorothy Usk's friendships, though very ardent, are like most friendships which exist in society: they are apt to blow about with every breeze.

She is cordial, kind, and in her way sincere; but she is what her husband characterizes as "weatherc.o.c.ky."

Who is not "weatherc.o.c.ky" in the world?

Although so tolerant in appearance of naughty people, because it is the fashion to be so, and not to be so looks priggish and dowdy and odd, she never at the bottom of her heart likes her naughty people. She has run very straight herself, as her lord would express it; she has been always much too busy to have time or inclination to be tempted "off the rails,"

and she has little patience with women who have gone off them; only she never says so, because it would look so goody-goody and stupid, and for fear of looking so she even manages to stifle in her own breast her own antipathy to Dulcia Waverley.

There have been very many martyrs to the sense that they ought to smile at virtue when they hate it, but Dorothy Usk's martyrdom is of a precisely opposite kind: she forces herself to seem to approve the reverse of virtue whilst she detests it. Anything is better, in her creed, than looking odd; and nowadays you do look so odd and so old-fashioned if you make a fuss about anything. Still, in her heart of hearts she feels excessively vexed, because it is quite apparent to her that Gervase knows something very much to the disadvantage of her new acquaintance.

"George will be so delighted if he finds out that Madame Sabaroff is like all those horrid women he is so fond of," she reflects. "I shall never hear the last of it from him. It will be a standing joke for him the whole of his life."

Certainly Madame Sabaroff is letting Brandolin carry on with her more than is altogether proper. True, they are people who may marry each other if they please, but Brandolin is not a man who marries, and his attentions are never likely to take that form. He probably pays so much court to Madame Sabaroff because he has heard that of her which leads him to suppose that his efforts may be _couronne_, as French vaudevillists say, without any thought of marriage.

Lady Usk has always known that he is horribly unprincipled,--more so than even men of his world usually are. That bantering tone of his is odious, she thinks; and he always has it, even on the gravest subjects.

"What's the row, my lady? You look ruffled!" inquires Usk, coming into her boudoir with a sheaf of half-opened letters in his hand.

"There are always things to annoy one," she answers, vaguely.

"It is an arrangement of a prudential Providence to prevent our affections being set on this world," replies Usk, piously.

His wife's only comment on this religious declaration is an impatient twist to the tail of her Maltese dog.

Usk proceeds to turn over to her such letters as bore him; they are countable by dozens; the two or three which interest him have been read in the gun-room and put away in an inside pocket.

"Mr. Bruce could attend to all these," she says, looking with some disgust at the correspondence. Bruce is his secretary.

"He always blunders," says Usk.

"Then change him," says his wife; nevertheless she is pleased at the compliment implied to herself.

"All secretaries are fools," says Usk, impartially.

"Even secretaries of state," says Mr. Wootton, who has the _entree_ of the boudoir, and saunters in at that moment. "I have some news this morning," he adds: "Coltsfoot marries Miss h.o.a.rd."

"Never!" exclaims Dorothy Usk.

"Perfectly true," says Mr. Wootton. "Both of them staying at Dunrobin, and engagement publicly announced."