A House-Party Part 11

"George!" She regards him with horror and amaze. Is he wholly out of his mind? Her cousin is Lady Usk's ideal of what an English gentleman should be. _He_ does not keep black women down in Warwicks.h.i.+re.

"A pretentious humbug," repeats Usk. He likes to ticket his relations and connections with well-chosen descriptions. "All good looks and soft sawder. Women like that sort of thing----"

"Of course we like good manners, though they are not your weakness,"

interrupts his wife, with acerbity. "Alan has the manners of a man who respects women: that may seem very tame to you and your friend Brandolin, but in these days it has at least the charm of novelty."

"Respects women!" Usk is unable to restrain his hilarity. "My dear Dolly, you're not a chicken: you can't mean that you don't know that Gervase----"

"I know that he is well-bred. You were so once, but it is a very long time ago," replies his wife, with cutting sententiousness, and with that unkind reply she leaves him. As if she did not understand men better than he, she thinks, contemptuously. He may understand dogs and horses, and deer and partridges, but about human nature he knows no more than the old man at the lodge gates.

"Surely she can't be soft on Gervase herself?" her husband reflects, with a sensation of amus.e.m.e.nt; "it would be too funny, after running so straight all these years, and just as her daughters are growing up; but they often are like that."

He is not sure whether the idea diverts or irritates him, but he knows that he has always detested Gervase, such a c.o.xcomb and such a humbug as the fellow is!

"Respect women, good Lord!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es Usk in his solitude.

"To be sure," adds that honest gentleman in his own mind, "there are very few of 'em who would thank you to respect 'em nowadays."

"Gervase will be here by dinner," he says in the course of the day to Princess Sabaroff.

"Indeed," she replies, with indifference. "Who is he?"

"A friend of my wife's; at least, a cousin. I thought you might know him; he was some time in Russia."

"No,"--and there is a coldness in the negative disproportioned to so simple a denial,--"I do not think so. I do not remember such a name. Who is he?"

"A person who is expected to be great in foreign affairs some day or other," says Brandolin. "He will have one qualification rare in an English foreign minister,--daily growing rarer, thanks to the imbecilities of examinations: he knows how to bow and he knows what to say."

"A friend of yours?"

"Oh, no; an acquaintance. He thinks very ill of me."

"Why?"

"Because I do nothing for my country. He thinks he does a great deal when he has fomented a quarrel or received a decoration."

"That is not generous. The world owes much to diplomatists: it will know how much in a few years, when it will be governed by clerks controlled by telephones."

"That is true: I stand corrected. But Gervase and I have few sympathies: none, indeed, except politically, and even there we differ,--his is the Toryism of Peel, mine is the Toryism of the late Lord Derby: there are leagues between the two."

"I know: the one is opportunism; the other is optimate-ism."

"Perhaps," says Brandolin, with a smile, and thinks, meantime, "She knows something about him. What is it?"

"Does she know Gervase, despite her denial?" he wonders. He has an impression that she does. There was a look of recognition in her eyes when she gave that vague bland gesture in answer to her host. All trifles in her interest him, as they always do interest a man in a woman whom he admires and is not sure that he understands; and Gervase he is aware has been a good deal in Russia.

He himself has known the subject of their discourse ever since they were boys, and had that sort of intimacy with him which exists between men who live in the same sets and belong to the same clubs. But to him Gervase seems a _pet.i.t-maitre_, a _poseur_, a man artificial, conventional, ambitious in small things, and to Gervase he himself seems much as he does to Lady Usk, a perverse and lawless Bohemian, only saved from the outer darkness by the fact of his aristocratic birth.

Meanwhile, in her own room, Xenia Sabaroff is pursuing her own reflections whilst her maid disrobes her.

"It will be better to see him once and for all," she muses. "I cannot go on forever avoiding him in every city in Europe. Very likely he will not even remember my face or my name."

She feels a strong temptation to invent some plausible reason and break off her visit to Surrenden; but she is a courageous woman, and flight is repugnant to her. More than once of late she has avoided a meeting which is disagreeable to her, by some abrupt change of her own plans or reversal of her own engagements. To continue to do this seems weakness.

Indeed, to do it at all seems too great a flattery to the person avoided. What is painful is best encountered without procrastination. It is the old question of grasping the nettle.

A haughty flush pa.s.ses over her face at her own reflections. After all, to have any emotion at all about it, pleasurable or painful, is humiliation. She is a proud woman, as well as a courageous one. There are memories a.s.sociated with this coming guest which are bitter and hateful.

Women like Mrs. Wentworth Curzon carry such memories lightly, or rather do not carry them at all, but bury them by scores, pell-mell, one on the top of another, like old letters, and forget all about their interment; but she is different from them.

It has not been difficult for her to avoid meeting Lord Gervase; he is one of those persons whose movements are known and chronicled; but she is conscious that the time is come when she can no longer escape doing so, except by such an abrupt departure that it would seem to herself too great a weakness, and be to him too great a flattery, for such a step to enter for an instant into the category of possibilities. It is, she reflects, or it should be, a matter to her of absolute indifference to see again a person whom she has not seen for seven years.

Yet she is conscious of a sense of pain and excitation as her woman puts on her a maize satin tea-gown covered with point d'Alencon at five o'clock the next day, and she knows that when she goes down to the room in a few minutes Gervase, who was to arrive by the afternoon train, will in all probability be present there.

Every one is in-doors that day, for a fine summer rain is falling without, and has been falling since noon. All the house-party are in the library, and the children are there also; the windows are open, and the sweet smell from the damp gardens and wet gra.s.s fills the air.

Every one is laughing and talking; Usk is drinking a gla.s.s of k.u.mmel, and Brandolin is playing with the dog; conversing with Nina Curzon and the mistress of the house, and standing in front of them, is a tall fair man irreproachable in _tenue_ and extremely distinguished in appearance.

He is Lord Gervase. His back is towards the door, and he does not see or hear her enter, but as the Babe rushes towards her, toppling over a stool and treading mercilessly on the trains of tea-gowns in the wind of his going, the noise made by the child makes him turn his head, and an expression of recognition mingled with amazement pa.s.ses over his usually impa.s.sive features.

"Is that not Princess Sabaroff?" he asks of his hostess, with a certain breathless astonishment betrayed in his voice.

Lady Usk a.s.sents. "One of my dearest friends," she adds. "I think you don't know her? I will present you in a moment. She is as clever as she is beautiful. The children adore her. Look at Babe."

The Babe has dragged his princess to a couch and climbed up on it himself, kneeling half on her lap and half off it, with no respect for the maize satin, whilst his impatient little feet beat the devil's tatoo among the point d'Alencon.

"My dear Babe, do not be such a monopolist," says Brandolin, as he approaches with a cup of tea and a wafer of caviare bread-and-b.u.t.ter.

"Your shoes have seventeenth-century buckles, it is true, yet still they are scarcely _bibelots_ to be wrapped up in a lady's dress."

The Babe grins saucily, tossing his hair out of his eyes; but, with unwonted obedience, he disentangles his feet with some care out of the lace.

Xenia Sabaroff does not take as much notice of him as usual. She is reserved and preoccupied. Brandolin, like the child, fails in awakening her interest or attention. She has seated herself almost with her back to where Gervase is standing, but every now and then she looks half round, as by an irresistible unconscious impulse of curiosity.

Brandolin notes the gesture, as her actions have an interest for him which grows daily in its fascination. "There is Dorothy Usk's Ph[oe]nix," he says to her, in a low tone, when the Babe has scampered off after bon-bons: he indicates Gervase with a glance. Her eyebrows contract slightly, as in some displeasure or constraint.

"Lady Usk is very soon satisfied," she replies, coldly. "Her own amiability makes her see perfection everywhere."

"It is a quality we cannot value too highly in so imperfect a world. It is better than seeing everything _en noir_, surely?" says Brandolin. "If we make people what we think them, as optimists say, it is best to be optimistic."

"I dislike optimism," she says, curtly. "It is absurd and untrue. Our Dostoievsky is a wiser novelist than your d.i.c.kens. One must believe something," she says.

"It is pretty for a woman to think so," says Brandolin, "but myself I have never seen why. I may hope, I may wish, I may regret, I may--if I am very sanguine--even expect; but believe--no!"

"Perhaps I should like to believe in a woman," he adds, more softly, with that inflection of his voice which has always had at all events the effect of making women believe in him.

Madame Sabaroff is not so easily touched as many. She pauses a moment, then says, with a certain weariness, "Anybody who can believe can love: that is nothing new."

"What would be new? To love and disbelieve in what we love? It would be very painful."

"It would be a test," says his companion.