A House-Party Part 4

"They won't carry their _husbands_," murmurs Brandolin. "They'll drive _them_, and carry somebody else."

"Will they have any husbands at all when they can do as they like?" says Boom.

"Probably not," says Brandolin. "My dear boy, what an earthly paradise awaits you when you shall be of mature age, and shall have seen us all descend one by one into the tomb, with all our social prejudices and antiquated ways!"

"I dare say he'll be a navvy in New Guinea by that time, and all his acres here will be being let out by the state at a rack-rent which the people will call free land," says the father, with a groan.

"Very possible, too," replies Brandolin.

The boy's eyes go thoughtfully towards the landscape beyond the windows, the beautiful lawns, the smiling gardens, the rolling woods. A look of resolution comes over his fair frank face.

"They shan't take our lands without a fight for it," he says, with a flush on his cheeks.

"And the fight will be a fierce one," says Brandolin, with a sigh, "and I am afraid it is in Mr. Gladstone's 'dim and distant future,'--that is to say, very near at hand indeed."

"Well, I shall be ready," says the lad. Both his father and Brandolin are silent, vaguely touched by the look of the gallant and gracious boy, as he stands there with the sun in his brave blue eyes, and thinking of the troubled time which will await his manhood in this green old England, cursed by the spume of wordy demagogues, and hounded on to envenomed hatreds and causeless discontents, that the professional politician may fatten on her woes.

What will Boom live to see?

It will be a sorry day for the country when her wooded parks and stately houses are numbered with the things that are no more.

Brandolin puts his arm over the boy's shoulder, and walks away with him a little way under the deep boughs of yew.

"Look here, Boom," he says to him, "you won't care to be like those fellows, but you don't know how hard it is to get out of the fashion of one's set, to avoid going with the stream of one's contemporaries.

n.o.body can say what will be the style of the 'best men' when you're of age, but I'm much afraid it will still be the Masher. The Masher is not very vicious, he is often cultured, he is a more harmless animal than he tries to appear, but he is weak; and we are coming on times, or times are coming on us, when an English gentleman will want to be very strong if he is to hold his own and save his country from shame in her old age.

Don't be conventional. Scores of people who would be ashamed to seem virtuous haven't courage to resist appearing vicious. Don't talk all that odious slang which is ruining English. Don't get into that stupid way of counting the days and seasons by steeple-chases, coursing-meetings, flat-races, and the various different things to be shot at. Sport is all very well in its place, but Squire Allworthy beating the turnips with a brace of setters is a different figure to Lord Newgold sending his hampers of pheasants to Leadenhall. Certainly, Mr. Bradlaugh has no more right to make a misdemeanor of our covert-shooting, and put the axe to our home woods, than we have to make a misdemeanor of his shoes and stockings, or put an axe to his head. But I think if of our own accord we centred our minds and spent our guineas less on our preserves, we might be wiser, and if we grudged our woods less to the hawk and the woodp.e.c.k.e.r and the owl and the jay, and all the rest of their native population, we should be wiser still. I never see a beast or a bird caught or dead in a keeper's trap but that I think to myself that after all, if we ourselves are caught in the end between the grinning jaws of anarchy, it will really be only partial justice on our injustice. Only I fear that it won't better the birds and beasts very much, even when we all go to prison for the crime of property, and Bradlaugh will grub up their leafy haunts with a steam plough from Chicago."

CHAPTER IV.

Meanwhile, let the country be going to the dogs as it may, Surrenden is full of very gay people, and all its more or less well-matched doves are cooing at Surrenden, whilst the legitimate partners of their existences are diverting themselves in other scenes, Highland moors, German baths, French chateaux, Channel yachting, or at other English country houses.

It is George Usk's opinion that the whole thing is immoral: he is by no means a moral person himself. His wife, on the contrary, thinks that it is the only way to have your house liked, and that n.o.body is supposed to know anything, and that nothing of that sort matters; she is a woman who on her own account has never done anything that she would in the least mind having printed in the _Morning Post_ to-morrow.

"Strange contradiction!" muses Brandolin. "Here is George, who's certainly no better than he should be, hallooing out for Dame Propriety, and here's my lady, who's always run as straight as a crow flies, making an Agapemone of her house to please her friends. To the pure all things are pure, I suppose; but if purity can stand Mrs. Wentworth Curzon and Lady Dawlish, I think I shall select my wife from among _les jolies impures_."

However, he takes care audibly to hold up his hostess's opinions and condemn her lord's.

"The poor little woman means well, and only likes to be popular," he reflects; "and we are none of us so sure that we shan't want indulgence some day."

Brandolin is very easy and elastic in his principles, as becomes a man of the world; he is even considered by many of his friends a good deal too lax in all his views; but in the depths of his soul there is a vague dislike to similar looseness of principle in women. He may have been glad enough to avail himself of the defect; that is another matter; he does not like it, does not admire it: licentiousness in a woman seems to him a fault in her taste; it is as if she wore fur slippers with her court train. "Of course," he will say, apologetically, "this idea of mine is born of the absurd English conventionality which sleeps in all of us; nothing better; an Englishman is always conventional somewhere, let him live as he will."

He himself is the most unconventional of beings, appalls his county, terrifies his relations, and irrevocably offends the bishop of his diocese; he has lived with Arabs, Bohemians, and wild men of the woods, and believes that he has not such a thing as prejudice about him; yet at the bottom of his soul there is this absurd feeling born of sheer conventionality,--he cannot thoroughly like a light-minded woman.

Absurd, indeed, in the times in which his lot is cast! He is quite ashamed of it.

Dorothy Usk does not favor the modern mode of having relays of guests for two or three days; she thinks it makes a country house too like an hotel. She wishes her people to be perfectly well a.s.sorted, and then to stay with her at least a week, even two weeks or three weeks. People do not often object: Orme, Denton, and Surrenden are all popular places, and Surrenden is perhaps most popular of all.

"An ideal house," says Brandolin, who would not stay a day where he was not as free as air.

"It's too much like an hotel," grumbles the master of it, "and an hotel where the _table-d'hote_ bell rings to deaf ears. Lord! I remember in my poor mother's days everybody had to be down to breakfast at nine o'clock every morning as regularly as if they were charity children, and the whole lot of 'em were marched off to church on Sunday whether they liked it or not. The villagers used to line the path across the fields to see the great folks pa.s.s. Now it's as much as ever Dolly can do to get a woman or two up in time to go with her. How things are changed, by Jove!

And it isn't so very long ago, either."

"The march of intellect, my dear George," says Brandolin; "neither _le bon Dieu_ nor we are great folks any longer."

"Well, I think it's a pity," sighs Usk. "Everybody was happier then, and jollier too, though we do tear about so to try and get amused."

"There is still nothing to prevent you going to sleep in the big pew if it pleases you," replies Brandolin; "and Lawrence Hamilton always goes that he may look at Mrs. Curzon's profile as she sings: she is really saintly then. I think Sunday service is to Englishwomen what confession is to Catholic ladies: it sweeps all the blots off the week's tablets.

It is convenient, if illogical."

"You are very irreligious," says his host, who is invariably orthodox when orthodoxy doesn't interfere with anything.

"Not more so than most people," says Brandolin. "I have even felt religious when I have been alone in the savannas or in the jungle. I don't feel so in a wooden box covered with red velvet, with a curate bawling in my ears about the hewing in pieces of Agag."

"That's nothing to do with it," says Usk: "we're bound to set an example."

"That's why you doze in public, and Mrs. Curzon wears her big pearls, to lead the school-children in the way they should go."

"That's nothing to do with it," repeats Lord Usk, somewhat crossly. He has a comfortable if indistinct idea that he does something patriotic, patriarchal, and highly praiseworthy in getting up an hour earlier than usual one Sunday out of three, and putting on a tall hat, a frock-coat, and a pair of new gloves, to attend the village church for morning service when he is at Orme, Denton, or Surrenden in fine weather.

If he sleeps, what of that? There are curtains to the pew, and n.o.body sees him except the Babe, who takes fiendish rapture in catching big flies and releasing them from a careful little hand to alight on his father's forehead or nose. The Babe would define the Sunday morning as a horrid bore tempered by blue-bottles.

"What a curiously conventional mind is the English mind!" thinks Brandolin, when he is alone. "Carlisle is right: the gig is its standard. The gig is out of fashion as a vehicle, but the national mind remains the same as in the age of gigs,--content with the outside of things, clinging to the husk, to the sh.e.l.l, to the outward appearance, and satisfied with these. My dear friend puts on his chimney-pot, then takes it off and snores in his pew, and thinks that he has done something holy which will sustain both Church and State, as he thinks that he prays when he buries his face in his hat and creases his trousers on a ha.s.sock! Mysterious consolations of the unfathomable human breast!"

CHAPTER V.

A few new people have come by the brake, and make their appearance at luncheon. More come by the five-o'clock train, and are visible at six-o'clock tea, which is always to be had in the library any time before seven: dinner at all the Usk houses is always at nine.

Brandolin's doctrines do not prevail with any of his acquaintances, although he, unlike most professors, emphasizes them by example.

Among the people who come by the latter train are the famous Mr.

Wootton, a man very famous at London dinner-parties, and Lady Gundrede Vansittart, whose dinners are the best in London.

"Where would those two people be if you brought the pulse and the rice you recommend into fashion?" says their host to Brandolin. "Take 'em away from the table, they'd be good for nothing. He wouldn't say 'Bo' to a goose, and she wouldn't be worth leaving a card upon. Believe me, my dear Guy, such _esprit_ as there is left in us is only brought out by eating."

"I think you invert all your reasonings," says Brandolin. "Say rather, that too much eating has destroyed all _esprit_. Don't we eat all day long everywhere, or at least are expected to do so? You lament your ruined digestion. It is impossible to digest when time is only counted by what our beloved Yankees call square meals (why square I fail to fathom), and for women it is worse than for us, because they eat such quant.i.ties of sweet things we don't touch, and then the way they go in for caviare bread-and-b.u.t.ter, and anchovy sandwiches, and all kinds of rich cakes, and _deux doigts de Madere_ or gla.s.ses of k.u.mmel at the tea-hour,--it is frightful! I wonder they have any complexions at all left, even with the a.s.sistance of all the '_secrets de Venus_.'"

"You won't alter 'em, my dear fellow," replies Usk, "if you put yourself out about it ever so much. If you were to marry a savage out of Formosa, or an Esquimaux, she'd take kindly to the caviare and the k.u.mmel before a week was out, if you brought her to Europe. Why, look at dogs,--you may keep 'em on biscuit and tripe if they live in the kennels, but if they once come to the dining-room they'll turn their noses up at a beef-steak if it isn't truffled!"

"Dogs, at least, stop short of the k.u.mmel," says Brandolin; "but if you were to put together the sherry, the dry champagne, the liqueurs at tea, the brandy in the _cha.s.se_ at dinner, which a fashionable woman takes in the course of the day (not counting any pick-me-up that she may require in her own room), the amount would be something enormous,--incredible!

You would not believe the number of women who have cured me of an unhappy pa.s.sion for them by letting me see what a lot they could drink."

"You will adore the Sabaroff, then. She never touches anything that I see, except tea."

"Admirable person! I am ready to adore her. Tell me more about her. By the way, who is she?"