A House-Party Part 6

"Dig a big pit and cram your soaked gra.s.s into it: very well, I don't say no," he growls. "But what about your mildewed wheat? And where should we be if we had to undergo a blockade? I'm not against making more pasture, grazing's all very well; but if there's a war big enough to sweep the seas of the grain-s.h.i.+ps that come to us from the Colonies and the United States, where shall we be if we've nothing to eat but our own beef and mutton? Beef and mutton are solid food, but I believe we should all go mad on them if we'd no bread to eat too."

"I'm all for pasture," replies Brandolin; "and as the British Isles can never, under any cultivation whatever, feed all their population, we may as well dedicate ourselves to what is picturesque. I am fascinated by Laveleye's portrait of England when she shall have turned grazier exclusively: it is lovely: 'L'Angleterre redeviendra ce qu'elle etait sous les Tudors, un grand parc vert, pa.r.s.eme d'ormes et de chenes, ou b[oe]ufs et moutons se promeneront dans des prairies sans limites.'"

"'Prairies sans limites?' when the land's to be all sliced up in little bits between peasant proprietors!" says Usk.

"I don't think Laveleye believes in peasant proprietors, though he is a professor of social economy."

"Social economy!" says Usk, with a groan. "Oh, I know that fool of a word! In plain English, it means ruin all round, and fortune for a few d----d manufacturers."

"The d----d manufacturer is the princ.i.p.al outcome of two thousand centuries of Christianity, civilization, and culture. The result is not perfectly satisfactory or encouraging, one must admit," says Brandolin, as he reaches down a volume of eighteenth-century memoirs, and adds, with entire irrelevancy to manufacturers or memoirs, "Is she really as handsome as your children tell me?"

"Who?" asks Usk. "Oh, the Russian woman: yes, very good-looking. Yes, she was here at Easter, and she turned their heads."

"Has she any lovers older than Babe?"

"She has left 'em in Russia if she has."

"A convenient distance to leave anything at: Italy and Russia are the only countries remaining to us in which Messalina can still do her little murders comfortably without any fuss being made."

"She isn't Messalina, at least I think not. But one never knows."

"No, one never knows till one tries," says Brandolin. And he wishes vaguely that the Russian woman were already here. He is fond of Surrenden, and fond of all its people, but he is a little, a very little, bored. He sees that all Lady Usk's doves are paired, and he does not wish to disturb their harmony, possibly because none of the feminine doves attract him. But he cannot flirt forever with the children, because the children are not very often visible, and without flirting civilized life is dull, even for a man who is more easily consoled by ancient authors off the library-shelves than most people can be.

This conversation occurs in the forenoon in Lady Usk's boudoir. In the late afternoon in the library over their teacups the ladies talk of Xenia Sabaroff. It is perceptible to Brandolin that they would prefer that she should not arrive.

"Is she really so very good-looking?" he asks of Mrs. Wentworth Curzon.

"Oh, yes," replies that lady, with an accent of depreciation in her tones. "Yes, she is very handsome; but too pale, and her eyes too large.

You know those Russian women are mere _paquets de nerfs_, shut up in their rooms all day and smoking so incessantly: they have all that is worst in the Oriental and Parisienne mixed together."

"How very sad!" says Brandolin. "I don't think I have known one, except Princess Kraskawa: she went sleighing in all weathers, wore the frankest of gingerbread wigs, and was always surrounded by about fifty grandchildren."

Princess Kraskawa had been for many years amba.s.sadress in London.

"Of course there are exceptions," says Nina Curzon; "but generally, you know, they are very depraved, such inordinate gamblers, and so fond of morphine, and always _maladives_."

"Ah," says Brandolin, pensively, "but the physical and moral perfection of Englishwomen always makes them take too high a standard: poor humanity toils hopelessly, and utterly exhausted, many miles behind them."

"Don't talk nonsense," says Mrs. Curzon; "we are no better than our neighbors, perhaps, but we are not afraid of the air, we don't heat our houses to a thousand degrees above boiling-point, we don't gamble,--at least not much,--and we don't talk every language under the sun except our own, and yet not one of them grammatically."

"Decidedly," reflects Brandolin, "Lawrence must have looked too often at Madame Sabaroff."

"Sabaroff is dead, isn't he?" he asked, aloud. "You know I have been out of society for a year: the whole map of Europe gets altered in one's absence."

"Sabaroff was shot in a duel four years ago," replies Mrs. Curzon,--"a duel about her."

"What a fortunate woman! To get rid of a husband, and to get rid of him in such interesting circ.u.mstances! _C'est le comble de bonheur!_"

"That depends. With her it resulted in her exile from court."

"Oh, to be sure; when Russians are naughty they are sent to live on their estates, as riotous children are dismissed to the nursery. Was she compromised, then?"

"Very much compromised; and both men were killed, for the adversary of Sabaroff had been wounded mortally, when, with an immense effort, he fired, and shot the prince through the lungs."

"A pretty little melodrama. Who was the opponent?"

"Count l.u.s.toff, a colonel of the Guard. I wonder you did not hear of it: it made a stir at the time."

"I may have heard: when one doesn't know the people concerned, no ma.s.sacre, even of the Innocents, makes any impression on one. And the result was that the lady had to leave the imperial court?"

"Yes: they do draw a line _there_."

Brandolin laughs; it tickles his fancy to hear Mrs. Wentworth Curzon condemning by implication the laxity of the court of St. James.

"They can't send _us_ to our estates," he replies, "the lands are so small and the railways are so close. Else it would have a very good effect if all our naughty people could be shut up inside their own gates, with n.o.body to speak to but the steward and the rector. Can you imagine anything that would more effectively contribute to correct manners and morals? But how very desolate London would look!"

"You think everybody would be exiled inside his own ring-fence!"

"_Her_ own ring-fence,--well, nearly everybody. There would certainly be no garden-parties at Marlborough House."

Mrs. Wentworth Curzon is not pleased; she is a star of the first magnitude at Marlborough House.

"Why does she take this absent woman's character away?" thinks Brandolin, with a sense of irritation. "I will trust the Babe's instincts sooner than hers."

He does not know Xenia Sabaroff; but he admires the photograph of her which stands on the boudoir table, and he likes the tone of the letter written from Aix. With that spirit of contradiction which is inborn in human nature, he is inclined to disbelieve all that Nina Curzon has told him. l.u.s.toff and Sabaroff probably both deserved their fates, and the departure from the court of St. Petersburg might very possibly have been voluntary. He has a vague feeling of tenderness for the original of the photograph. It often happens to him to fall sentimentally and ephemerally in love with some unknown woman whose portrait he has seen or of whose charms he has heard. Sometimes he has avoided knowing these in their actual life, lest he should disturb his ideals. He is an imaginative man with a great amount of leisure in which to indulge his fancies, and his knowledge of the world has not hardened his feelings or dulled his fancy. There is something of the Montrose, of the Lord Surrey, in him.

"To think of all one knows about that hussy," he muses, as he smokes a cigar in his bedroom before dressing for dinner. By the uncomplimentary epithet he means Mrs. Wentworth Curzon. "Such a good fellow as Fred Curzon is, too, a man who might have been made anything of if she'd only treated him decently. When he married her he adored the ground she walked on, but before a week was out she began to fret him, and jar at him, and break him in, as she called it; he was too poor for her, and too slow for her, and too good for her, and she was vilely cruel to him,--it's only women who can be cruel like that, she's had more lovers than anybody living, and she's taken every one of 'em for money; nothing but money. Old Melton gave her the Park-Lane House, and Glamorgan gave her her emeralds, and Dartmoor paid her Paris bills for ten years, and Riverston takes all her stable-expenses. Everything she does is done for money; and if she puts any heart at all now into this thing with Lawrence, it is only because she's getting older and so getting jealous,--they always do as they get on,--and then she calls Russians dissolute and depraved, good Lord!"

With which he casts aside his cigar, and resigns himself to his servant's hands as the second gong sounds.

CHAPTER VI.

The very bachelor rooms at Surrenden are conducive to revery and indolence, cosily comfortable and full of little attentions for the guest's _bien-etre_, among which there is a printed paper which is always laid on the dressing-table in every room at this house: it contains the latest telegrams of public news, which come every afternoon from a London news-agency.

"I dare say to the political fellows they are delightful," reflects Brandolin, as he glances down the lines, "but to me they unpleasantly recall an uncomfortable world. I don't dine the worse, certainly, for knowing that there is a revolution in Patagonia or an earthquake in Bolivia, but neither do I dine the better for being told that the French government is _dest.i.tuant_ all moderate prefets in favor of immoderate ones. It is very interesting, no doubt, but it doesn't interest me, and I think the possession of these fresh sc.r.a.ps of prosaic news spoils dinner-conversation."

Brandolin does not consider it conversation to say, "Have you seen so-and-so?" or, "What a sad thing such-and-such is, isn't it!" He likes persiflage, he likes banter, he likes argument, he likes ant.i.thesis, he likes brilliancy, and the dinner-tables of the epoch seldom offer these good things with their Metternich hock and Mouton Rothschild. He is fond of talking himself, and he can be also a very good listener. If you cannot give the _quid quo pro_ in hearing as in speaking, you may be immensely clever, but you will be immediately p.r.o.nounced a bore, like Macaulay and Madame de Stael. Brandolin likes talking not for the sake of showing himself off, but for the sake of being amused, of eliciting the opinions and observing the minds of others, and he is convinced that if the conversational art were cultured as it used to be in Bourbon Paris, life would become more refined, more agreeable, more sympathetic, and less given over to gross pleasures of the appet.i.tes.

"Children should be taught to talk," he observes one day to Lady Usk, "and they should not be allowed to be slovenly in their speech any more than in their dress. You would not let them enter your presence with unbrushed hair, but you do let them use any bald, slangy, or inappropriate words which come uppermost to them. There is so much in the choice of words! A beautiful voice is a delicious thing, but it avails little without the usage of apt and graceful phrases. Did you ever hear Mrs. Norton sustain a discussion or relate an anecdote? It was like listening to perfect phrasing in music. When she died, the art of conversation died with her."

"We are always in such a hurry," says Lady Usk, which is her habitual explanation of anything in which her generation is at fault. "And hurry is always vulgar, you know, as you said the other day: it cannot help itself."

"You are a purist, my dear Brandolin," says Lady Dolgelly, who hates him.