A House-Party Part 16

"Indeed!"

He tries to look indifferent, but his cousin's penetrating eyes seem to him to be reading his very soul.

"How dreadfully sorry he must be that he didn't leave Madrid!" she thinks, and aloud says, irritably, "Why on earth didn't you try to renew things with her all these three years?"

"I imagined that I had forgotten her."

"Well, so you had,--completely forgotten her, till you saw her here."

"On my honor, she is the only woman I have ever really loved."

"Oh, men always say that of somebody or another, generally of the most impossible people. George always declares that the only woman he ever really loved was a pastry-cook when he was at Christ-church."

"Dear Dorothy, don't joke. I a.s.sure you I am thoroughly in earnest."

"She certainly has forgotten you."

She knows that for him to be convinced of this is the surest way to revive a died-out pa.s.sion.

"Who knows? She would be indifferent in that case, and polite: as it is, she is cold, even rude."

"That may be resentment."

"Resentment means remembrance."

"Oh, not always."

"Then she has a number of my letters."

"So you said; you cannot be so very sure she has kept them. Other people may have written her the same sort of letters, or more admirable letters still: how can you tell?"

He colors angrily. "She is not a _femme legere_."

"She is receiving a great deal of attention now from Lord Brandolin, and she does not seem to dislike it. They say he writes exquisite letters to women he is fond of; I don't know myself, because I have never had anything more interesting from him than notes about dinners or visits; but they say so. They even say that his deserted ladies forgive his desertions because he writes his farewells so divinely."

"Lord Brandolin's epistolary accomplishments do not interest me in the least. Everybody knows what he is with women." He pauses a moment, then adds, with some hesitation,--

"Dear Dorothy, you know her very well. Don't you think you could find out for me, and tell me----"

"What?"

"Well, what she thinks or does not think; in a word, how I stand with her."

"No,--oh, no, my dear Alan; I couldn't attempt anything of that sort,--in my own house, too: it would seem so horribly rude. Besides, I am not in the least--not the very least--intimate with her. I think her charming, we are _bonnes connaia.s.sances_, the children adore her; but I have never said anything intimate to her in my life,--never."

"But you have so much tact."

"The more tact I have, the less likely shall I be to recall to her what she is evidently perfectly determined to ignore. You can do it yourself if you want it done. You are not usually shy."

Gervase gets up impatiently, and walks about in the narrow limits of the boudoir, to the peril of the Sevres and Saxe.

"But women have a hundred indirect ways of finding out everything: you might discover perfectly well, if you chose, whether--whether she feels anger or any other sentiment; whether--whether, in a word, it would be prudent to recall the past to her."

Lady Usk shakes her head with energy, stirring all its pretty blonde curls, real and false. "_Entre l'arbre et l'ecorce ne mettez pas le doigt._ That is sound advice which I have heard given at the Francais."

"That is said of not interfering between married people."

"It is generally true of people who wish, or may not wish, to marry. And I suppose, Alan, that when you speak in my house of renewing your--your--relations with the Princess Sabaroff, you do not mean that you have any object less serious than _le bon motif_?"

Gervase is amused, although he is disconcerted and irritated.

"Come, Dorothy, your guests are not always so very serious, are they? I never knew you so prim before."

Then she in turn feels angry. She always steadily adheres to the convenient fiction that she knows nothing whatever of the amorous filaments which bind her guests together in pairs, as turtle-doves might be tied together by blue ribbons.

"If you only desire to reawake the sentiments of Madame Sabaroff in your favor that you may again make sport of them, you must excuse me if I say that I cannot a.s.sist your efforts, and that I sincerely hope they will not be successful," she says, with dignity and distance.

"Do you suppose his are any better than mine?" asks Gervase, irritably, as he waves his hand towards the window which looks on the west gardens.

Between the yew- and cedar-trees, at some distance from the house, Brandolin is walking beside Xenia Sabaroff: his manner is interested and deferential; she moves with slow and graceful steps down the gra.s.sy paths, listening with apparent willingness, her head is uncovered, she carries a large sunshade opened over it made of white lace and pale-rose silk, she has a cl.u.s.ter of d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland roses in her hand. They are really only speaking of recent French poets, but those who look at them cannot divine that.

"He is not my cousin, and he does not solicit my a.s.sistance," says Dorothy Usk, seeing the figures in her garden with some displeasure.

"_Je ne fais pas la police pour les autres_; but if he asked me what you asked me, I should give him the same answer that I give to you."

"He is probably independent of any a.s.sistance," says Gervase, with irritable irony.

"Probably," says his hostess, who is very skilful at fanning faint flame. "He is not a man whom I like myself, but many women--most women, I believe--think him irresistible."

Thereon she leaves him, without any more sympathy or solace, to go and receive some county people who have come to call, and who converse princ.i.p.ally about prize poultry.

"_Comme elles sont a.s.sommees avec leurs poules!_" says the Marquise de Caillac, who chances to be present at this infliction, and gazes in stupefaction at a dowager d.u.c.h.ess who has driven over from twenty miles off, who wears very thick boots, her own thin gray hair, water-proof tweed clothing, and a hat tied under her double chin with black strings.

"_Un paquet!_" murmurs Madame de Caillac; "_un veritable paquet!_"

"_C'est la vertu anglaise, un peu demodee_," says Lord Iona, with a yawn.

Gervase stays on as well as Brandolin, somewhat bored, very much _enerve_, but fascinated, too, by the presence of his Russian Ariadne, and stung by the sight of Brandolin's attentions to her into such a strong sense of revived pa.s.sion that he means what he says when he declares to his cousin that the wife of Sabaroff was the only woman he has ever really loved. Her manner to him also, not cold enough to be complimentary, but entirely indifferent, never troubled, never moved in any way by his vicinity or by his direct allusions to the past, is such as irritates, piques, attracts, and magnetizes him. It seems to him incredible that any woman can ignore him so utterly. If she only seemed afraid of him, agitated in any way, even adversely, he could understand what was pa.s.sing in her mind; but he cannot even flatter himself that she does this: she treats him with just such perfect indifference as she shows to the Duke of Queenstown or Hugo Mandeville or any one of the gilded youths there present. If he could once see a wistful memory in her glance, once see a flush of color on her face at his approach, it is probable that his vanity would be satisfied and his interest cease as quickly as it has revived; but he never does see anything of this sort, and, by the rule of contradiction, his desire to see it increases. And he wonders uneasily what she has done with his letters.

CHAPTER X.

Lord Gervase was eight years younger when he wrote those letters than he is now, and he has unpleasant recollections of unpleasant pa.s.sages in them which would compromise him in his career, or at least get him horribly talked about, were they ever made sport of in the world. Where are his letters? Has Madame Sabaroff kept them? He longs to ask her, but he dare not.

He does not say to his cousin that he has more than once endeavored to hint to Xenia Sabaroff that it would be sweet to him to recall the past, would she permit it. But he has elicited no response. She has evaded without directly avoiding him. She is no longer the impressionable shy girl whom he knew in Russia, weighted with an unhappy fate, and rather alarmed by the very successes of her own beauty than flattered by them.

She is a woman of the world, who knows her own value and her own power to charm, and has acquired the talent which the world teaches, of reading the minds of others without revealing her own. _Saule pleureur!_ the Petersburg court ladies had used to call her in those early times when the tears had started to her eyes so quickly; but no one ever sees tears in her eyes now.

Gervase is profoundly troubled to find how much genuine emotion the presence of a woman whose existence he had long forgotten has power to excite in him. He does not like emotion of any kind; and in all his affairs of the heart he is accustomed to make others suffer, not himself. Vanity and wounded vanity enter so largely into the influences moulding human life, that it is very possible, if the sight of him had had power to disturb her, the renewal of a.s.sociation with her would have left him unmoved. But, as it is, he has been piqued, mortified, excited, ad attracted; and the admiration which Brandolin and Lawrence Hamilton and other men plainly show of her is the sharpest spur to memory and to desire.