A House-Party Part 21

"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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sumed.

"When you marry him," says the Babe, pointing to Brandolin, with admirably affected _navete_, "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 _pet.i.t-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 pa.s.ses as quickly as it came.

"_Pet.i.t-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 b.u.t.terfly. He has not been brought up in a feminine atmosphere of _poudre de riz_ and _lait d'iris_ without learning discretion.

CHAPTER XIII.

"The Babe is a better courtier than gardener," says Xenia Sabaroff, as she shakes a green aphis out of her rose: her tone is careless, but her voice is not quite under her command, and has a little tremor in it.

Brandolin looks at her with impa.s.sioned eyes: he has grown very pale.

"It is no jest with me," he says, under his breath. "I would give you my life if you would take it?"

The last words have the accent of an interrogation, of an appeal.

"That is to say a great deal," replies Xenia Sabaroff: she is startled, astonished, troubled; she was not expecting any such entire avowal.

"Many men must have said as much to you who have more to recommend them than I. Say something to me: what will you say?"

She does not immediately reply; she looks on the ground, and absently traces patterns on the path with the end of her long walking-stick.

"Do you know," she says, at last, after a silence which seems to him endless, "do you know that there are people who believe that I have been the _delaissee_ of Lord Gervase? They do not phrase it so roughly, but that is what they say."

Brandolin's very lips are white, but his voice does not falter for one moment as he answers, "They will not say it in my hearing."

"And, knowing that they say it, you would still offer me your name?"

"I do so."

"And you would ask me nothing save what I choose to tell you?"

The sunny air seems to turn round with him for an instant: his brain grows dizzy; his heart contracts with a sickening pain; but in the next moment a great wave of strong and perfect faith in the woman he cares for lifts his soul up on it, as a sea-wave lifts a drowning man to land.

"You shall tell me nothing save what you choose," he says, clearly and very tenderly. "I have perfect faith in you. Had I less than that, I would not ask you to be my wife."

She looks at him with astonishment and with wondering admiration.

"Yet you know so little of me!" she murmurs, in amaze.

"I love you," says Brandolin; then he kisses her hand with great reverence.

The tears which she had thought driven from her eyes forever, rise in them now.

"You are very n.o.ble," she replies, and leaves her hand for an instant within his.

The Babe, who has been watching from behind a tuft of laurel, can control his impatience no longer, but comes out of his ambush and runs towards them, regardless of how undesired he may be.

"Dodo says that women never marry anybody they love," he says, breathlessly; "but that is not true, is it, and you will let me carry your train?"

"Hush, my dear," says Xenia Sabaroff, laying her hand on the child's shoulder, while there is a sound in her voice which subdues to silence even the audacious spirit of the Babe.

"Give me time to think," she says, in a low tone to Brandolin; and then, with her hand still on the little boy's shoulder, she turns away from him and walks slowly towards the house.

The child walks silently and shyly beside her, his happy vanity troubled for once by the sense that he has made some mistake, and that there are some few things still in the universe which he does not quite entirely understand.

"You are not angry?" he asks her, at last, with a vague terror in his gay and impudent little soul.

"Angry with you?" says Xenia Sabaroff. "My dear child, no. I am perhaps angry with myself,--myself of many years ago."

The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame Sabaroff,--nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.

Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. He is fully aware that he has done a rash, perhaps an utterly unwise, thing in putting his future into the hands of a woman of whom he knows so little, and has, perhaps, the right to suspect so much. Yet he does not repent.

He does not see her again before dinner. She does not come into the library at the tea-hour; there is a large dinner that night; county people are there, as well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid woman, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, who thinks him the most absent-minded and unpleasant person she has ever known, and wonders how he has got his reputation as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even see Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the dinner, from the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and thinks what an idiotic thing the habits of society have made of human life.