A House-Party Part 17

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 quant.i.ty 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 pa.s.sion. 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 const.i.tution except a German doctor in a bath in the Bohmerwald, 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 pota.s.sium. 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 n.o.body 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 Oth.e.l.lo 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 Oth.e.l.lo, 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.body'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 embarra.s.sed 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 a.s.sistance 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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.