A House-Party Part 7

"'Purity, daughter of sweet virtues mild!'" murmurs Brandolin. "Alas, my dear ladies, I cannot hope that she dwells with _me_ in any form! When she has a home in your own gentle b.r.e.a.s.t.s, who can hope that she would ever take shelter in a man's?"

"How impertinent and how nasty he is!" thinks the lady; and she detests him a little more cordially than before. There is not a very good feeling towards him among any of the ladies at Surrenden: he does not make love to them, he does not endeavor to alter existing arrangements in his favor; it is generally felt that he would not care to do so. What can you expect from a man who sits half his days in a library?

The Surrenden library is well stored, an elegant and lettered lord of the eighteenth century having been a bibliophile. It is a charming room, panelled with inlaid woods, and with a ceiling painted after Tiepolo; the bookcases are built into the wall, so that the books look _chez eux_, and are not mere lodgers or visitors; oriel windows look out on to a portion of the garden laid out by Beaumont. One window has been cut down to the ground, an anachronism and innovation indeed, somewhat impairing the uniformity of the room. The present Lady Usk had it done, but one forgives her the sacrilege when one feels how pleasant it is to walk out from the mellow shadows of the library on to the smooth-shaven gra.s.s and gather a rose with one hand whilst holding an eighteenth-century author with the other.

It is in the smaller library adjacent, filled with modern volumes, that five-o'clock tea is always to be had, with all the abundant demoralizing abominations of caviare, k.u.mmel, etc. It is a gay room, with _dessus-des-portes_ after Watteau and every variety of couch and of lounging-chair. "Reading made easy" somebody calls it. But there is little reading done either in it or in the big library: Brandolin when he goes there finds himself usually alone, and can commune as he chooses with Latin philosophy and Gaulois wit.

"You _used_ to read, George?" he says to his host, in expostulation.

"Yes, I used,--ages ago," says Usk, with a yawn.

Brandolin looks at him with curiosity.

"I can understand a man who has never read," he replies, "but I cannot understand a man losing the taste for reading if he has ever had it. One can dwell contented in B[oe]otia if one has never been out of it, but to go back to B[oe]otia after living in Attica----"

"It's one's life does it."

"What life? One has the life one wishes."

"That's the sort of thing a man says who hasn't married."

"My dear George, you cannot pretend your wife would prevent your reading Latin and Greek, or even Sanscrit. I am sure she would much sooner you read them than--well, than do other things you do do."

"I don't say she would prevent me," returns the lord of Surrenden, with some crossness, "but it's the kind of life one gets into that kills all that sort of thing in one. There is no time for it."

"I keep out of the life: why don't you?"

"There's no time for anything," says Usk, gloomily. "There's such heaps of things to see to, and such numbers of places to go to, and then one lives _au jour le jour_, and one gets into the swim and goes on, and then there's the shooting, and when there isn't the shooting there's the season, and the racing."

"I lead my own life," Brandolin remarks.

"Yes; but you don't mind being called eccentric."

"No; I don't mind it in the least. If they say nothing worse of me I am grateful."

"But you couldn't do it if you had all my places, and all my houses, and all my brothers, and all my family. You're a free agent. I declare that all the time goes away with me in such a crowd of worries that I've hardly a second to smoke a cigarette in, in any peace!"

Brandolin smiles.

A sixth part of most days his host pa.s.ses leaning back in some easy-chair with a cigar in his mouth, whether his venue be Surrenden, Orme, Denton, the smoking-room of a club, or the house of a friend,--whether London or the country. Usk's own view of himself is of a man entirely devoted to, and sacrificed to, business, politics, the management of his estates, and the million-and-one affairs which perpetually a.s.sail him; but this is not the view which his friends take of him.

When ever is the view that our friends take of us our view?

"Once a scholar always a scholar, it seems to me," says Brandolin. "I could as soon live without air as without books." And he quotes Cowley,--

"Books should as business entertain the light."

"You don't continue the quotation," says Usk, with a smile.

"_Autres temps autres m[oe]urs_," says Brandolin. He laughs, and gets up: it is four in the afternoon; the delicious green garden is lying bathed in warm amber light; one of the peac.o.c.ks is turning round slowly with all his train displayed; he seems never to tire of turning round.

"How exactly that bird is like some politicians one could name!" says Brandolin. "Do you know that this charming garden always reminds me of St. Hubert's Lea,--our west garden, I mean? I think the same man must have laid them out. Is it not Bulwer Lytton who says that so long as one has a garden one always has one room which is roofed by heaven?"

"A heaven mitigated by gardeners' wages,--very considerably mitigated,"

says Usk.

"You are cynical, George, and your mind is running on pounds, s.h.i.+llings, and pence,--an offence against Nature on such a day as this. There is nothing so demoralizing as to think of money."

"To have debts and not to think of 'em is more so; and Boom----"

"Sell something of his that he likes very much, to pay his debts: that's the only way I know of to check a boy at the onset. Your father did it with me the very first time I owed twenty pounds; and he read me a lesson I never forgot. I have been eternally obliged to him ever since."

"What did he sell?"

"My cob,--a cob I adored. I wept like a child, but he didn't see my tears. What I saved up next half to trace out that cob and buy him back at twice his value,--what I denied myself to make up the money,--n.o.body would believe; and the beast wasn't easy to find: some dealer had taken him over to Ireland."

"That could be done with you," says Usk, gloomily. "It would be no use to do it with Boom: his mother would buy him some other horse the next day. You've no chance to bring up a boy decently if he's got a mother!"

"The reverse is the received opinion of mankind," said Brandolin; "but I believe there's something to be said for your view. No end of women have no idea of bringing up their children, and when they ought to be ordered a flogging they fondle them."

"Dolly does," says her husband. "What's a woman's notion of a horse?

That he must have slender legs, a coat like satin, and be fed on apples and sugar: still, they saw his mouth till he half dislocates his neck, and tear his ribs open with their spur. They're just as unreasonable with their children."

"Who is _that_ woman?" says Brandolin, making a step across the window and into the garden. "Now I am perfectly certain that is Madame Sabaroff, without your saying so."

"Then I needn't say so," replies Usk. "I wonder when she came. They didn't expect her till to-morrow."

They both look at a lady in one of the distant alleys walking between the high green walls. She is dressed in some soft cream-colored stuff with quant.i.ties of lace. She carries a sunshade of the same hue. She has a tall cane in her other hand. On either side of her are the Ladies Alexandra and Hermione, and before her gambols in his white sailor clothes, with his blue silk stockings and his silver-buckled shoes, the Babe.

"Decidedly the Sabaroff," says Usk. "Won't you come and speak to her?"

"With pleasure," says Brandolin. "Even if the Babe brains me with the cane!"

He looks very well as he walks bareheaded over the gra.s.s and along the green alley; he wears a loose brown velvet coat admirably made, and brown breeches and stockings; his legs are as well made as his coat; the sun s.h.i.+nes on his curling hair; there is a _degage_, picturesque, debonair, yet distinguished look about him, which pleases the eyes of Xenia Sabaroff, as they watch him draw near.

"Who is that person with your father?" she asks. The children tell her, all speaking at once.

She recognizes the name; she has heard of him often in the world, and has read those books which praise solitude and a dinner of herbs. "I doubt his having been alone very long, however," she reflects, as she looks at him. A certain unlikeness in him to Englishmen in general, some women who are fond of him fancifully trace to the fact that the first Brandolin was a Venetian, who fled for his life from the Republic, and made himself conspicuous and acceptable for his talents alike as a lutist and a swordsman at the court of Henry the Second. "It can't count, it's so very far away," he himself objects; but perhaps it does count. Of all things ineffaceable, the marks of race are the most indelible.

The Venetian Brandolin married the daughter of a Norman knight, and his descendants became affectionate sons of England, and held their lands of St. Hubert's Lea safely under the wars of the Roses, of the Commonwealth, and of the Jacobites. They were always noticeable for scholarly habits and artistic tastes, and in the time of George the Second the Lord Brandolin of the period did much to enrich his family mansion and diminish the family fortunes by his importations of Italian sculptures and pictures and his patronage of Italian musicians. The house at St. Hubert's Lea is very beautiful, but it requires much more to keep it up than the present owner possesses. He is often urged to let it, but he scouts the idea. "You might as well ask me to sell the Brandolin portraits, like Charles Surface," he says, angrily, whenever his more intimate friends venture on the suggestion. So the old house stands in its warm-hued and casket-like loveliness, empty, save for his occasional visits and the presence of many old and devoted servants.

"An interesting woman," he thinks now, as he exchanges with the Princess Sabaroff the usual compliments and commonplaces of a presentation.

"Russians are always interesting: they are the only women about whom you feel that you know very little; they are the only women who, in this chatterbox of a generation _tout en dehors_ as it is, preserve some of the vague charm of mystery; and what a charm that is!"

His reasons for admiring her are not those of the Babe and his sisters, but he admires her almost as much as they. Brandolin, who in his remote travels has seen a great deal of that simple nature which is so much lauded by many people, has a great appreciation of well-dressed women, and the Madame Sabaroff is admirably dressed, from her long loose cream-colored gloves to her bronze shoes with their miniature diamond clasps.

"Didn't I tell you?" whispers the Babe, climbing up behind Brandolin.

"Yes, you did," returned Brandolin, "and you were quite right; but it is abominably bad manners to whisper, my dear Cecil."