A House-Party Part 14

Lord Coltsfoot is heir to a dukedom; Miss h.o.a.rd is the result in bullion of iron-works.

"Never!" reiterates Lady Usk. "It is impossible that he can do such a horrible thing! Why, she has one shoulder higher than the other, and red eyes!"

"There are six millions paid down," replies Mr. Wootton, sententiously.

"What the deuce will Mrs. Donnington say?" asks Usk.

"One never announces any marriage," remarks Mr. Wootton, "but there is a universal outcry about what will some lady, married long ago to somebody else, say to it. Curious result of supposed monogamy!"

"It is quite disgusting!" says Lady Usk. "Some of those new people are presentable, but she isn't; and Coltsfoot is so good-looking and so young."

"It is what the French call an '_alliance tres comme il faut_,'" says Usk, from sheer spirit of contradiction. "The dukedom is as full of holes as an old tin pot; she tinkers it up with her iron and gold; and I bet you that your friend Worth will manage to cut Lady Coltsfoot's gowns so that one shoulder higher than the other will become all the rage next season."

"Of course you set no store on such a simple thing as happiness," says his wife, with acerbity.

"Happiness? Lord, my dear! Happiness was buried with Strephon and Chloe centuries ago! We are amused or bored, we are successful or unsuccessful, we are popular or unpopular, we are somebody or we are n.o.body, but we are never either happy or miserable."

"People who have a heart are still both!"

"A heart! You mean spoons!"

"What a hideous expression! Strephon and Chloe never used that."

"When we have an unfortunate pa.s.sion now," remarks Mr. Wootton, "we go to Carlsbad. It's only an affair of the liver."

"Or the nerves," suggests Usk. "Flirtation is the proper thing: flirtation never hurts anybody: it's like puff-paste, seltzer water, and Turkish cigarettes."

"Puff-paste may bring on an indigestion when one's too old to eat it!"

"There! Didn't I tell you so? She is always saying something about my age. A man is the age that he feels."

"No, a woman is the age that she looks. If you will quote things, quote them properly."

"The age that she looks? That's so very variable. She's twenty when she enters a ball-room at midnight, she's fifty when she comes out at sunrise; she's sixteen when she goes to meet somebody at Hurlingham, she's sixty when she scolds her maid and has a scene with her husband!"

Lady Usk interrupts him with vivacity: "And he? Pray, isn't he five-and-twenty when he's in Paris alone, and five-and-ninety when he's grumbling at home?"

"Because he's bored at home! Youth is, after all, only good spirits. If you laugh you are young, but your wife don't make you laugh; you pay her bills, and go with her to a state ball, and sit opposite to her at dinner, and when you catch a cold she is always there to say, 'My dear, didn't I tell you so?' but I defy any man living to recall any hour of his existence in which his wife ever made him laugh!"

"And yet you wanted me to ask married people together."

"Because I wanted it all to be highly proper and deadly dull. Surrenden has got a sort of reputation of being a kind of Orleans Club."

"And yet you complain of being bored in it!"

"One is always bored in one's own house! One can never take in to dinner the person one likes."

"You make up to yourself for the deprivation after dinner!"

"My lady's very ruffled to-day," says Usk to Mr. Wootton. "I don't know which of her doves has turned out a fighting-c.o.c.k."

"That reminds me," observes Mr. Wootton. "I wanted to ask you, did you know that Gervase, when he was Lord Baird, was very much _au mieux_ with Madame Sabaroff? I remember hearing long ago from Russians----"

Lady Usk interrupts the great man angrily: "Very much _au mieux_! What barbarous polygot language for a great critic like you! Must you have the a.s.sistance of bad grammar in two tongues to take away my friend's reputation?"

Lord Usk chuckles. "Reputations aren't taken away so easily; they're very hardy plants nowadays, and will stand a good deal of bad weather."

Mr. Wootton is shocked. "Oh, Lady Usk! Reputation! You couldn't think I meant to imply of any guest of yours--only, you know, he was secretary in Petersburg when he was Lord Baird, and so----"

"Well, it doesn't follow that he is the lover of every woman in Petersburg!"

Mr. Wootton is infinitely distressed. "Oh, indeed I didn't mean anything of that sort."

"You did mean everything of that sort," murmurs his hostess.

"But, you see, he admired her very much, was constantly with her, and yesterday I saw they didn't speak to each other, so I was curious to know what could be the reason."

"I believe she didn't recognize him."

Mr. Wootton smiles. "Oh, ladies have such prodigious powers of oblivion--and remembrance!"

"Yes," observes Usk, with complacency: "the storms of memory sometimes sink into them as if they were sponges, and sometimes glide off them as if they were ducks. It is just as they find it convenient. But Madame Sabaroff can't have been more than a child when Gervase was in Russia."

Mr. Wootton smiles again significantly. "She was married."

"To a brute!" cries Dorothy Usk.

"All husbands," says Lord Usk, with a chuckle, "are brutes, and all wives are angels. _C'est imprime!_"

"I hope no one will ever call me an angel! I should know at once that I was a bore!"

"No danger, my lady: you've no wings on your shoulders, and you've salt on your tongue."

"I'm sure you mean to be odiously rude, but to my taste it's a great compliment."

"My dear Alan," says Dorothy Usk, having got him at a disadvantage in her boudoir one-quarter of an hour after luncheon, "what has there been between you and the Princess Sabaroff? Everybody feels there is something. It is in the air. Indeed, everybody is talking about it. Pray tell me. I am dying to know."

Gervase is silent.

"Everybody in the house is sure of it," continues his hostess. "They don't say so, of course, but they think so. Nina Curzon, who is _mauvaise langue_, pretends even that she knows all the circ.u.mstances; and it would seem that they are not very nice circ.u.mstances. I really cannot consent to go on in the dark any longer."

"Ask the lady," replies Gervase, stiffly.

"I certainly shall do nothing so ill-bred. You are a man, you are a relation of mine, and I can say things to you I couldn't possibly say to a stranger, which Madame Sabaroff is quite to me. If you won't answer, I shall only suppose that you paid court to her and were 'spun,' as the boys say at the examinations."

"Not at all," says Gervase, haughtily.

"Then tell me the story."