A House-Party Part 9

CHAPTER VII.

"How do you like Lord Brandolin?" says Lady Usk, when she can say so un.o.bserved.

"I like him very much," replies Madame Sabaroff. "He is what one would expect him to be from his books; and that is so agreeable,--and so rare."

Dorothy Usk is not pleased. She does not want her Russian ph[oe]nix to admire Brandolin. She has arranged an alliance in her own mind between the Princess Sabaroff and her own cousin Alan, Lord Gervase, whom she is daily expecting at Surrenden. Gervase is a man of some note in diplomacy and society; she is proud of him, she is attached to him, she desires to see him ultimately fill all offices of state that the ambition of an Englishman can aspire to; and Xenia Sabaroff is so enormously rich, as well as so unusually handsome. It would be a perfectly ideal union; and, desiring it infinitely, the mistress of Surrenden, with that tact which distinguishes her, has never named Lord Gervase to the Princess Sabaroff nor the Princess Sabaroff to Lord Gervase. He is to be at Surrenden in a week's time. Now she vaguely wishes that Brandolin had not these eight days' start of him. But then Brandolin, she knows, will only flirt; that is to say, if the Russian lady allow him to do so: he is an unconscionable flirt, and never means anything by his tenderest speeches. Brandolin, she knows, is not a person who will ever marry; he has lost scores of the most admirable opportunities, and rejected the fairest and best-filled hands that have been offered to him. To the orderly mind of Lady Usk, he represents an Ishmael forever wandering in wild woods, outside the pale of general civilization. She can never see why people make such a fuss with him. She does not say so, because it is the fas.h.i.+on to make the fuss, and she never goes against a fas.h.i.+on. A very moral woman herself, she is only as charitable and elastic as she is to naughty people because such charity and elasticity is the mark of good society in the present day. Without it, she would be neither popular nor well bred; and she would sooner die than fail in being either.

"Why don't you ever marry, Lord Brandolin?" asks Dorothy Usk. "Why have you never married?"

"Because he's much too sensible," growls her husband, but adds, with infinite compa.s.sion, "He'll have to, some day, or the name will die out."

"Yes, I shall have to, some day, to use your very grammatical expression," a.s.sents Brandolin. "I don't wish the name to die out, and there's n.o.body to come after me except the Southesk-Vanes, who detest me as I detest them."

"Well, then, why not make some marriage at once?" says Lady Usk. "I know so many charming----"

Brandolin arrests the sentence with a deprecatory gesture, "Dear Lady Usk, _please_! I like you so much, I wouldn't for worlds have you mixed up in anything which would probably, or at least very possibly, make me so much dislike you in the years to come."

Usk gives a laugh of much enjoyment.

His wife is slightly annoyed. She does not like this sort of jesting.

"You said a moment ago that you must marry!" she observes, with some impatience.

"Oh, there is no positive 'must' about it," says Brandolin, dubiously.

"The name doesn't matter greatly, after all; it is only that I don't like the place to go to the Southesk-Vanes: they are my cousins, heaven knows how many times removed; they have most horrible politics, and they are such dreadfully prosaic people that I am sure they will destroy my gardens, poison my Indian beasts, strangle my African birds, turn my old servants adrift, and make the country round hideous with high farming."

"Marry, then, and put an end to anything so dreadful," says Dorothy Usk.

Brandolin gets up and walks about the room. It is a dilemma which has often been present to his mind in various epochs of his existence.

"You see, my dear people," he says, with affectionate confidence, "the real truth of the matter is this. A good woman is an admirable creation of Providence, for certain uses in her generation; but she is tiresome.

A naughty woman is delightful; but then she is, if you marry her, compromising. Which am I to take of the two? I should be bored to death by what Renan calls _la femme pure_, and against _la femme taree_ as a wife I have a prejudice. The woman who would amuse me I would not marry if I could, and as, if I were bored, I should leave my wife entirely, and go to the Equator or the Pole, it would not be honest in me to sacrifice a virgin to the mere demands of my family pride."

Lady Usk feels shocked, but she does not like to show it, because it is so old-fas.h.i.+oned and prudish and _arriere_ nowadays to be shocked at anything.

"I have thought about it very often, I a.s.sure you," continues Brandolin, "and sometimes I have really thought that I would marry a high-caste Hindoo woman. They are very beautiful, and their forms far more exquisite than any European's, wholly uncramped as they are by any stays, and accustomed to spend so many hours on all kinds of arts for the embellishment of the skin."

"I don't think, you know," Lady Usk interposes, hastily, to repress more reminiscences, "that you need be afraid of the young girls of our time being innocent: they are _eveillees_ enough, heaven knows, and experienced enough in all conscience."

"Oh, but that is odious," says Brandolin, with disgust. "The girls of the day are horrible; nothing is unknown to them; they smoke, they gamble, they flirt without decency or grace, their one idea is to marry for sake of a position which will let them go as wild as they choose, and for the sake of heaps of money which will sustain their unconscionable extravagance. Lord deliver me from any of them! I would sooner see St. Hubert's Lea cut up into allotment-grounds than save it from the Southesk-Vanes by marrying a _debutante_ with her mind fixed on establis.h.i.+ng herself, and her youthful memories already full of dead-and-gone flirtations. No! let me wait for Dodo, if you will give me permission to educate her."

"Dodo will never be educated out of flirting; she is born for it," says her father, "and she will be a handful when she gets into society. I am afraid you would return her to us and sigh for your high-caste Hindoo."

"Pray, how would you educate her? what is missing in her present education?" asks Lady Usk, somewhat piqued at what he implies.

"I would let her see a great deal more of her mother than she is allowed to do," says Brandolin: "where could she take a better model?" he adds, with a bow of much grace.

Her mother is not sure whether she ought to be flattered or offended.

Brandolin has a way of mingling graceful compliments and implied censure with so much skill and intricacy that to disentangle them is difficult for those whom he would at once flatter and rebuff. "One never quite knows what he means," she thinks, irritably. "I do believe he intends to imply that I neglect my children!"

Brandolin seems to her an unpleasant man, eccentric, discourteous, and immoral. She cannot imagine what George or the world sees to admire and like so much in him.

"Lord Brandolin actually declares that black women have much better figures than we have," she says, an hour later, to Leila Faversham.

"Black women!" exclaims that lady, in unspeakable horror.

"Well, Hindoos: it is the same thing," says Lady Usk with that ignorance of her Indian fellow-subjects which is characteristic of English society, from the highest strata to the lowest.

"Oh, he is always so odd, you know," says Mrs. Faversham, as of a person whom it is hopeless even to discuss. Brandolin is indeed so odd that he has never perceived her own attractions. What can seem odder to a pretty woman than that?

Leila Faversham tells Lady Dawlish ten minutes later that Brandolin has confessed that he only likes black women. "Isn't it horrid? He actually has numbers of them down in Warwicks.h.i.+re, just as he keeps the Indian animals and the African birds."

"How very shocking!" says Lady Dawlish. "But I dare say it is very economical: they only eat a spoonful of rice and wear a yard of calico, you know, and, as he is poor, that must suit him."

Lady Dawlish tells this fact to Nina Curzon, adding various embellishments of her fancy; Mrs. Curzon thinks the notion new and amusing; she writes of it that morning to a journal of society which she occasionally honors with news of her world, not from want of the editor's fee, but from the amus.e.m.e.nt it affords her to destroy the characters of her acquaintances. The journal will immediately, she knows, produce a mysterious but sensational paragraph regarding the black women in Warwicks.h.i.+re, or some article headed "An Hereditary Legislature at Home." Brandolin is a person whom it is perfectly safe to libel: he is very indolent, very contemptuous, and he never by any chance reads a newspaper.

"An extremely interesting woman," muses Brandolin that evening, as he dresses for dinner. "Interesting, and moreover with something original, something mysterious and suggestive, in her. Despite Lady Usk, there is a difference still in different nationalities. I could still swear to an Englishwoman anywhere, if I only saw the back of her head and her shoulders. No Englishwoman could have the delicious languor of Madame Sabaroff's movements."

She interests him; he decides to stay on at Surrenden.

When he sees her at dinner he is still more favorably impressed.

Her figure is superb, and her sleeveless gown shows the beauty of her bust and arms; she has a flat band of diamonds worn between the elbow and the shoulder of the right arm. The effect is singular, but good.

"It is to show that she has the muscle above the elbow," says old Sir Adolphus, who is learned in sculpture and anatomy. "You know, not one woman in ten thousand has it; and for want of it their arms fall in above the elbow. I have heard sculptors say so a hundred times. She has it, and so she wears that flat bracelet to emphasize the fact."

Brandolin feels annoyed. There is no reason in life why he should object to Madame Sabaroff having any number of affectations and vanities, or why he should mind hearing this handsome old _viveur_ discuss them; but he is annoyed by both facts.

There is not a plain woman among the guests of Surrenden: some are even far beyond the average of good looks, and all have that _chic_ which lends in itself a kind of beauty to the woman of the world. But the handsomest of them all, Nina Curzon herself, pales beside the beautiful pallor of the Russian lady, contrasted as it is with the splendor of her jewels, the red rose of her lips, and the darkness of her eyelashes and eyes.

At dinner, Xenia Sabaroff does not speak much: she has a dreamy look, almost a fatigued one.

Brandolin is opposite to her: as there are no ornaments or flowers on the table higher than eight inches, he can contemplate her at his leisure across the field of shed rose-leaves which is between them.

Finding that she is so silent, he talks in his best fas.h.i.+on, in his most reckless, ant.i.thetical, picturesque manner: he perceives he gains her attention, though he never directly addresses her.

He also makes Mr. Wootton furious. Mr. Wootton has half a dozen good stories untold. His method of getting good stories is ingenious: he procures obscure but clever memoirs, French and English, which are wholly forgotten, alters their most piquant anecdotes a little, and fits them on to living and famous personages; the result is admirable, and has earned him his great reputation as a _raconteur_ of contemporary scandal. He has six delicious things ready now, and he cannot find a moment in which he can lead up to and place any one of them.

"Brandolin is so amusing when he likes," says Lady Arthur Audley, incautiously, to this suppressed and sullen victim.

"A monologist! a monologist!" replies Mr. Wootton, with a deprecatory accent.

Lady Arthur is silenced, for she has not the slightest idea what a monologist is. She fancies it means some kind of a sect like the Mormons, and Brandolin is so odd that he may possibly belong to a sect, or may have founded one, like Laurence Oliphant. She remembers the black women that they talked of, and does not like to ask, being a sensitive person, very delicate-minded, and perfectly proper, except her one little affair with Sir Hugo, which everybody says is most creditable to her, Arthur Audley being the scamp that he is.

Dinner over, Brandolin finds a pleasant seat on a low chair behind the bigger chair on which Madame Sabaroff is reclining; other men devoted to other women look longingly at her, some approach; Brandolin comprehends why she is not beloved in her generation by her own s.e.x.

After a time she is induced to sing; she has a very sweet voice, of great power, with much pathos in it; she sings volkslieder of her own country, strange yearning wistful songs, full of the vague mystical melancholy of the Russian peasant. She ceases abruptly, and walks back to her seat; her diamonds gleam in the light like so many eyes of fire.