A House-Party Part 20

"Not if the ashes are quite cold, certainly; but if a spark remains in them, the fire soon comes again."

He is silent: the apparent indifference of a person whom he believed to be living out her life in solitude, occupied only with his memory, annoys and mortifies him. He has never doubted his own power to write his name indelibly on the hearts of women.

"Perhaps she wishes to marry Brandolin?" suggests Dorothy Usk.

"Pshaw!" says Lord Gervase.

"Why pshaw?" repeats his cousin, persistently. "He would not be a man to my taste, and he hates marriage, and he has a set of Hindoos at St.

Hubert's Lea, which would require as much cleaning as the Augean stable; but I dare say she doesn't know anything about them, and he may be persuading her that he thinks marriage opens the doors of Paradise: men can so easily pretend that sort of thing! A great many men have wanted to marry her, I believe, since she came back into the world after her seclusion. George declares that Brandolin is quite serious."

"Preposterous!" replies Lord Gervase.

"Really, I don't see that," replies his judicious cousin. "A great many women have wanted to marry _him_, though one wonders why. Indeed, I have heard some of them declare that he is wholly irresistible when he chooses."

"With Hindoos, perhaps," says Gervase.

"With our own women," says his cousin. "Lady Mary Jardine died of a broken heart because he wouldn't look at her."

"Pray spare me the roll-call of his victims," says Lord Gervase, irritably: he is pa.s.sionately jealous of Brandolin. He himself had forgotten Xenia Sabaroff, and forgotten all his obligations to her, when she had been, as he always had believed, within reach of his hand if he stretched it out; but viewed as a woman whom other men wooed and another man might win, she has become to him intensely to be desired and to be disputed. He has been a spoiled child of fortune and of the drawing-rooms all his years, and the slightest opposition is intolerable to him.

"I have no doubt," continues Dorothy Usk, gently, continuing her embroidery of a South Kensington design of lilies and palm-leaves, "that if he were aware you had a prior claim, if he thought or knew that you had ever enjoyed her sympathy, he would immediately withdraw and leave the field: he is a very proud man, with all his carelessness, and would not, I think, care to be second to anybody in the affections of a woman whom he seriously sought."

"What do you mean?" asks Gervase, abruptly, pausing in his walk to and fro the boudoir.

"Only what I say," she answers. "If you wish to _eloigner_ Brandolin, give him some idea of the truth."

Gervase laughs a little.

"On my honor," he thinks, with some bitterness, "for sheer uncompromising meanness there is nothing comparable to the suggestions which a woman will make to you!"

"I couldn't do that," he says, aloud. "What would he think of me?"

"My dear Alan," replies Dorothy Usk, impatiently, getting her silks in a tangle, "when a man has behaved to any woman as you, by your own account, have behaved to Madame Sabaroff, I think it is a little late in the day to pretend to much elevation of feeling."

"You do not understand----"

"I have always found," says his cousin, impatiently searching for shades of silk which she does not see, "that whenever we presume to p.r.o.nounce an opinion on any man's conduct and think ill of it we are always told that we don't understand anything. When we flatter the man, or compliment him on his conduct, there is no end to the marvellous powers of our penetration, the fineness of our instincts, the accuracy of our intuitions."

Gervase does not hear: his thoughts are elsewhere: he is thinking of Xenia Sabaroff as he saw her first in the Salle des Palmiers in the Winter Palace,--a mere girl, a mere child, startled and made nervous by the admiration she excited and the homage she received, under the brutality of her husband, the raillery of her friends; but that time is long ago, very long, as the life of women counts, and Xenia Sabaroff is now perfect mistress of her own emotions, if emotions she ever feels.

Gervase cannot for one moment tell whether the past is tenderly remembered by her, is utterly forgotten, or is only recalled to be touched and dismissed without regret. He is a vain man, but vanity has no power to rea.s.sure him here.

In the warm afternoon of the next day the children are in the school-room, supposed to be preparing their lessons for the morrow; but the German governess, who is alone as guardian of order in the temple of intellect, has fallen asleep, with flies buzzing about her blonde hair, and her blue spectacles pushed up on her forehead, and Dodo has taken advantage of the fact to go and lean out of one of the windows, whilst her sister draws a caricature of the sleeping virgin from Deutschland, and the Babe slips away from his books to a mechanical Punch, which, contraband in the school-room, is far dearer to him than his Gradus and rule of three.

Dodo, with her hands thrust among her abundant locks, lolls with half her body in the air, and, by twisting her neck almost to dislocation, manages to see round an ivy-grown b.u.t.tress of the east wall, and to espy people who are getting on their horses at the south doors of the building.

"They are going out riding and I am shut up here!" she groans. "Oh, what a while it takes one to grow up!"

"Who are going to ride?" asks Lilie, too fascinated by her drawing to leave it.

"Lots of them," replies Dodo, who speaks four languages, and her own worst of all. "All of them, pretty nearly. Mamma's on Pepper, and Lady Waverley's got Bopeep,--she's always nervous, you know. I can't see very much, 'cause of the ivy. Oh, there's the princess on Satan,--n.o.body else could ride Satan; Lord Brandolin's put her up, and now he's riding by her. They're gone now,--and papa's stopping behind them all to do something to Bopeep's girths." Whereat the dutiful Dodo laughs rudely, as she laughed coming home from church.

The sound of the horses' hoofs going farther away down the avenue comes through the stillness, as her voice and her laughter cease.

"What a shame to be shut up here just because one isn't old!" she groans, as she listens enviously. The sun is pouring liquid gold through the ivy-leaves, the air is hot and fragrant, gardeners are watering the flower-beds below, and the sweet, moist scent comes up to Dodo's nostrils and makes her writhe with longing to get out; not that she is by any means ardently devoted to nature, but she loves life, movement, gayety, and she dearly loves showing off her figure on her pony and being flirted with by her father's friends.

"I am sure Lord Brandolin is in love with her, awfully in love," she says, as she peers into the distance, where the black form of Satan is just visible through far-off oak-boughs.

"With whom?" asks Lilie, getting up from her caricature to lean also out over the ivy.

"Xenia," says Dodo. She is very proud of calling her friend Xenia. "Take care Goggles don't wake, or she'll see what you've been doing."

The lady from Deutschland was always known to them by this endearing epithet.

"I don't care," says Lilie, kicking her bronze boots in the air. "Do you think she'll marry Lord Brandolin?"

"Who? Goggles?"

"The idea!" They laugh deliciously.

"You say he's in love with Xenia. If they're in love they will marry,"

says Lilie, pensively.

"No, they won't: people who are in love never marry," replies Dodo.

"What do they do, then?" inquires the younger sister.

"They marry somebody else, and ask the one they like to go and stay with them. It is much better," she adds. "It is what I shall do."

"Why is it better? It's a roundabout way," objects Lilie. "I shouldn't care to marry at all," she adds, "only one can't ever be Mistress of the Robes if one doesn't."

"Oh, everybody marries, of course; only some m.u.f.f it, and don't get all they want by it," replies the cynic Dodo.

"_Et l'amour, Miladi Alexandra?_" says the French governess, entering at that moment. "_Ou donc mettez-vous l'amour?_"

"_Nous ne sommes pas des bourgeoises_," returns Dodo, very haughtily.

The Babe, sitting astride on a chair, trying to mend his mechanical Punch, who screamed and beat his wife _absolument comme la nature_, as the French governess said, before he was broken, hears the discourse of his sisters and muses on it. He is very fond of Brandolin, and he adores his princess: he would like them to live together, and he would go and see them without his sisters, who tease him, and without Boom, who lords it over him. Into his busy and precocious little brain there enters the resolution to _pousser la machine_, as his governess would call it.

The Babe has a vast idea of his own resources in the way of speech and invention, and he has his mother's tendencies to interfere with other people's affairs, and is quite of an opinion that if he had the management of most things he should better them. He has broken his Parisian Punch in his endeavor to make it say more words than it could say, but this slight accident does not affect his own admiration and belief in his own powers, any more than to have brought a great and prosperous empire within measurable distance of civil war affects a statesman's conviction that he is the only person who can rule that empire. The Babe, like Mr. Gladstone, is in his own eyes infallible.

Like the astute diplomatist he is, he waits for a good opportunity; he is always where the ladies are, and his sharp little wits have been preternaturally quickened in that atmosphere of what the French call "_l'odeur feminine_."

He has to wait some days for his occasion. The frank and friendly intercourse which existed at first between Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff is altered: they are never alone, and the pleasant discussions on poets and poetry, on philosophers and follies, in the gardens in the forenoon are discontinued, neither could very well say why, but the presence of Gervase chills and oppresses both of them and keeps them apart. She has the burden of memory, he the burden of suspicion; and suspicion is a thing so hateful and intolerable to the nature of Brandolin that it makes him miserable to feel himself guilty of it.

But one morning the Babe coaxes her out to go with him to his garden,--a floral republic, where a cabbage comes up cheek by jowl with a gloxinia, and plants are plucked up by the roots to see if they are growing aright. The Babe's system of horticulture is to dig intently for ten minutes in all directions, to make himself very red in the face, and then to call d.i.c.k, Tom, or Harry, any under-gardener who may be near, and say, "Here, do it, will you?" Nevertheless, he retains the belief that he is the creator and cultivator of this his garden, as M. Grevy believes that he is the chief person in the French Republic; and he takes Madame Sabaroff to admire it.

"It would look better if it were a little more in order," she permits herself to observe.

"Oh, that's their fault," says the Babe, just as M. Grevy would say of disorder in the Chambers, the Babe meaning d.i.c.k, Tom, or Harry, as the President would mean Clemenceau, Rochefort, or M. de Mun.