by Ouida
“I couldn’t do that, dear. I want people to like my house!”
“Just as I say — you’re so immoral.”
“No, I’m not. Nobody ever pays a bill for me, except you.”
“Enviable distinction! Pay! I think I do pay! Though why you can’t keep within your pin-money — —”
“Pin-money means money to buy pins. I did buy two diamond pins with it last year, eight hundred guineas each.”
“You ought to buy clothes.”
“Clothes! What an expression! I can’t buy a child’s frock even; it all goes in little things, and all my own money too; wedding-presents, christening-presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it’s all nonsense you’re grumbling about my bills to Worth and Elise and Virot; Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which it describes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear and make them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, and their whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they had tortoise-shell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs had jewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is nothing new, though you talk as if it were a crime and we’d invented it!”
Usk laughs a little crossly as she comes to the end of her breathless sentences. “Naso Magister eris,” he remarks, “might certainly be inscribed over the chamber doors of all your friends!”
“I know you mean something odious. My friends are all charming people.”
“I’ll tell you what I do mean, — that I don’t like the house made a joke of in London; I’ll shut it up and go abroad if the thing goes on. If a scandal’s begun in town in the season, it always comes down here to carry on; if there are two people fond of each other when they shouldn’t be, you always ask ’em down here and make pets of ’em. As you’re taking to quoting Ovid, I may as well tell you that in his time the honest women didn’t do this sort of thing; they left it to the light-o’-loves under the porticoes.”
“I really don’t know what I’ve done that I should be called an honest woman! One would think you were speaking to the housemaids! I wish you’d go and stay in somebody else’s house: you always spoil things here.”
“Very sorry. I like my own shooting. Three days here, three days there, three days t’other place, and expected to leave the game behind you and to say ‘thanks’ if your host gives you a few brace to take away with you, — not for me, if I know it, while there’s a bird in the covers at my own places.”
“I thought you were always bored at home?”
“Not when I’m shooting. I don’t mind having the house full, either, only I want you to get decenter people in it. Why, look at your list! — they’re all paired, like animals in the ark. Here’s Lady Arthur for Hugo Mountjoy, here’s Iona and Madame de Caillac, here’s Mrs. Curzon for Lawrence, here’s Dick Wootton and Mrs. Faversham, here’s the Duke and Lady Dolgelly, here’s old Beaumanoir and Olive Dawlish. I say it’s absolutely indecent, when you know how all these people are talked about!”
“If one waited for somebody not talked about, one would have an empty house or fill it with old fogies. My dear George, haven’t you ever seen that advertisement about matches which will only light on their own boxes? People in love are like those matches. If you ask the matches without the boxes, or the boxes without the matches, you won’t get anything out of either.”
“Ovid was born too early: he never knew this admirable illustration!”
“There’s only one thing worse than inviting people without the people they care about; it is to invite them with the people they’re tired of: I did that once last year. I asked Madame de Saumur and Gervase together, and then found that they had broken with each other two months before. That is the sort of blunder I do hate to make!”
“Well, nothing happened?”
“Of course nothing happened. Nobody ever shows anything. But it looks so stupid in me: one is always expected to know — —”
“What an increase to the responsibilities of a hostess! She must know all the ins and outs of her acquaintances’ unlawful affections as a Prussian officer knows the French by-roads! How simple an affair it used to be when the Victorian reign was young, and Lord and Lady So-and-So and Mr. and Mrs. Nobody all came to stay for a week in twos and twos as inevitably as we buy fancy pigeons in pairs!”
“You pretend to regret those days, but you know you’d be horribly bored if you had always to go out with me.”
“Politeness would require me to deny, but truthfulness would compel me to assent.”
“Of course it would. You don’t want anybody with you who has heard all your best stories a thousand times, and knows what your doctor has told you not to eat; I don’t want anybody who has seen how I look when I’m ill, and knows where my false hair is put on. It is quite natural. By the way, Boom says Ovid’s ladies had perukes, too, as one of them put her wig on upside down before him, and it chilled his feelings towards her; it would chill most people’s. I wonder if they made them well in those days, and what they cost.”
“I think you might have invited some of the husbands.”
“Oh, dear, no. Why? They’re all staying somewhere else.”
“And your friends are never jealous, I suppose; at least, never about their husbands?”
“An agreeable woman is never jealous of anybody. She hasn’t time to be. It is only the women who can’t amuse themselves who make that sort of fuss.”
“Are you an agreeable woman, my dear?”
“I have always been told so, by everybody except yourself.”
Lord Usk rose and laughed as he lighted a cigar.
“Well, I won’t have any scandal in the house. Mind that.”
“You’d better put that up on a placard, as you have put ‘No fees allowed to the servants,’ up in the hall.”
“I’m sure I would with pleasure if I thought anybody would attend to it. I don’t like you’re set, Dolly. That’s the truth. I wish you’d drop nine-tenths of ’em.”
“My dear George, I wish you would mind your own business, to use a very vulgar expression. Do I ever say anything when you talk nonsense in the Lords, and when you give your political picnics and shout yourself hoarse to the farmers who go away and vote against your man? Do I ever say anything when you shoot pheasants which cost you a sovereign a head for their corn, and stalk stags which cost you eighty pounds each for their keep, and lose races with horses which cost you ten thousand a year for their breeding and training? Do I ever say anything when you think that people who are hungering for the whole of your land will be either grateful or delighted because you take ten per cent. off their rents? You know I don’t. I think you ought to be allowed to ruin yourself and accelerate the revolution in any absurd way which may seem best to you. In return, pray let me manage my own house-parties and choose my own acquaintances. It is not much to ask. What! are you gone away? How exactly like a man, to go away when he gets the worst of the argument!”
Lord Usk has gone into the gardens in a towering rage. He is a gentleman: he will quarrel with his wife all day long, but he will always stop short of swearing at her, and he feels that if he stays in the room a moment longer he will swear: that allusion to the Scotch stags is too much for humanity (with a liver) to endure. When Achnalorrie is sold to that beastly American, to be twitted with what stags used to cost! Certainly they had cost a great deal, and the keepers had been bores, and the crofters had been nuisances, and there had always been some disease or other among the birds, and he had never cared as much as some men for deer-stalking; but still, as Achnalorrie is irrevocably gone, the thirty-mile drive over the bleak hills, and the ugly house on the stony strathside, and the blinding rains, and the driving snows, and the swelling streams which the horses had to cross as best they could, all seem unspeakably lovely to him and the sole things worth living for: and then his wife has the heartlessness to twit him with the cost of each stag!
“Women have no feeling,” he growls, as he walks about the gardens. “If
they think they can make a point they’ll make it, let it hurt you how it may.”
He strolls down between two high yew walls with his hands in his pockets, and feels injured and aggrieved. He ought to be a very happy person; he is still rich despite the troubles of the times, he has fine estates, fair rents, handsome children, and a life of continual change, and yet he is bored and doesn’t like anything, and this peaceful, green garden, with its innumerable memories and its delicious, dreamful solitudes, says nothing at all to him. Is it his own fault or the fault of his world? He doesn’t know. He supposes it is the fault of his liver. His father was always contented, and jolly as a sand-boy; but then in his father’s time there was no grouse-disease, no row about rents, no wire fencing to lame your horses, no Ground Game Bill to corrupt your farmers, no Leaseholder’s Bills hanging over your London houses, no corn imported from Arkansas and California, no Joe Chamberlain. When poor Boom’s turn comes, how will things be? Joe Chamberlain President, perhaps, and Surrenden cut up into allotment-grounds.
He possesses two other very big places in adjacent counties, Orme Castle and Denton Abbey, but they are ponderous, vast, gorgeous, ceremonious, ugly: he detests both of them. Of Surrenden he is, on the contrary, as fond as he can be of anything except the lost Achnalorrie and a little cosey house that he has at Newmarket where the shadow of Lady Usk has never fallen.
He hears the noise of wheels on gravel. It comes from the other side of the house; it is his brake and his omnibus going down the avenue on their way to the nearest railway-station, four miles off, to meet some of his coming guests there. Well, there’ll be nothing seen of them till two o’clock at luncheon. They are all people he hates, or thinks he hates, for that best of all possible reasons, that his wife likes them. Why can’t Dulcia Waverley come before the 20th? Lady Waverley always amuses him, and agrees with him. It is so pleasant to be agreed with, only when one’s own people do so it makes one almost more angry than when one is contradicted. When his wife agrees with him it leaves him nothing to say. When Dulcia Waverley agrees with him it leaves him with a soothing sense of being sympathized with and appreciated. Dulcia Waverley always tells him that he might have been a great statesman if he had chosen: as he always thinks so himself, the echo of his thoughts is agreeable.
He sits down in one of the clipped-yew-tree arbors to light a new cigar and smoke it peaceably. A peacock goes past him, drawing its beautiful train over the smooth-shaven grass. A mavis is singing on a rose-bough. The babble of a stream hidden under adjacent trees is pleasant on the morning silence. He doesn’t notice any of it; he thinks it odiously hot, and what fools they were who clipped a yew-tree into the shape of a periwig, and what a beast of a row that trout-stream makes. Why don’t they turn it, and send it farther from the house? He’s got no money to do anything, or he would have it done to-morrow.
A peacock begins to scream. The noise of a peacock cannot be said to be melodious or soothing at any time.
“Why don’t you wring that bird’s neck?” he says savagely to a gardener’s boy who is gathering up fallen rose-leaves.
The boy gapes and touches his hair, his hat being already on the ground in sign of respect. The peacocks have been at Surrenden ever since Warren Hastings sent the first pair as a present to the Lady Usk of that generation, and they are regarded with a superstitious admiration by all the good Hampshire people who walk in the gardens of Surrenden or visit them on the public day. The Surrenden peacocks are as sacred to the neighborhood and the workpeople as ever was the green ibis in old Egypt.
“How long will they touch their caps or pull their forelocks to us?” thinks Lord Usk; “though I don’t see why they can reasonably object to do it as long as we take off our hats to Wales and say ‘Sir’ to him.”
This political problem suggests the coming elections to his mind: the coming elections are a disagreeable subject for meditation: why wasn’t he born in his grandfather’s time, when there were pocket boroughs as handy and portable as snuff-boxes, and the county returned Lord Usk’s nominee as a matter of course without question?
“Well, and what good men they got in those days,” he thinks, “Fox, and Hervey, and Walpole, and Burke, and all the rest of ’em; fine orators, clever ministers, members that did the nation honor; every great noble sent up some fine fellow with breeding and brains; bunkum and bad logic and dropped aspirates had no kind of chance to get into the House in those days. Now, even when Boom’s old enough to put up himself, I dare say there’ll be some biscuit-baker or some pin-maker sent down by the Radical Caucus or the English Land League who’ll make the poor devils believe that the millennium’s coming in with them, and leave Boom nowhere!”
The prospect is so shocking that he throws his cigar-end at the peacocks and gets up out of the evergreen periwig.
As he does so he comes, to his absolute amazement, face to face with his friend Lord Brandolin.
Lord Brandolin is supposed by all the world, or at least that large portion of it which is interested in his movements, to be at that moment in the forest-recesses of Lahore.
“My dear George,” says Lord Brandolin, in a very sweet voice, wholly unlike the peacocks’, “I venture to take you by surprise. I have left my tub at Weymouth and come on foot across-country to you. It is most unpardonable conduct, but I have always abused your friendship.”
The master of Surrenden cannot find words of welcome warm enough to satisfy himself. He is honestly delighted. Failing Dulcia Waverley, nobody could have been so agreeable to him as Brandolin. For once a proverb is justified, “a self-invited guest is thrice welcome.” He is for dragging his visitor in at once to breakfast, but Brandolin resists. He has breakfasted on board his yacht; he could not eat again before luncheon; he likes the open air, he wishes to sit in the periwig and smoke.
“Do not let us disturb Lady Usk,” he said. “I know châtelaines in the country have a thousand and one things to do before luncheon, and I know your house is full from gable to cellar.”
“It will be by night,” says the master of Surrenden, with disgust, “and not a decent soul among ’em all.”
“That is very sad for you,” says Brandolin, with a twinkle in his handsome eyes. He is not a handsome man, but he has beautiful eyes, a patrician profile, and a look of extreme distinction; his expression is a little cynical, but more amused; he is about forty years old, but looks younger. He is not married, having by some miracle of good fortune, or of personal dexterity, contrived to elude all the efforts made for his capture. His barony is one of the oldest in England, and he would not exchange it, were it possible, for a dukedom.
“Since when have you been so in love with decency, George?” he asks, gravely.
Lord Usk laughs. “Well, you know I think one’s own house should be proper.”
“No doubt,” says Lord Brandolin, still more gravely. “To do one’s morality vicariously is always so agreeable. Is Lady Waverley not here? She would save a hundred Sodoms, with a dozen Gomorrahs thrown in gratis.”
“I thought you were in India,” says his host, who does not care to pursue the subject of Lady Waverley’s saintly qualifications for the salvation of cities or men.
“I went to India, but it bored me. I liked it when I was twenty-four; one likes so many things when one is twenty-four, — even champagne and a cotillion. How’s Boom?”
“Very well; gone to his cousins’ in Suffolk. Sure you won’t have something to eat? They can bring it here in a minute if you like out-of-doors best.”
“Quite sure, thanks. What a lovely place this is! I haven’t seen it for years. I don’t think there’s another garden so beautiful in all England. After the great dust-plains and the sweltering humid heats of India, all this coolness and greenness are like Paradise.”
Brandolin laughs languidly.
“Hot! you ungrateful, untravelled country squire! I should like to fasten you to a life-buoy in the middle of the Red Sea. Why do Englishmen perspire in every pore the moment the thermometer’s a
bove zero in their own land, and yet stand the tropics better than any other Europeans?”
“You know I’ve sold Achnalorrie?” says his host, à propos de rien, but to him Achnalorrie seems à propos of everything in creation.
Brandolin is surprised, but he does not show any surprise. “Ah! Quite right, too. If we wished to please the Radicals we couldn’t find any way to please them and injure ourselves equal to our insane fashion of keeping hundreds of square acres at an enormous cost, only that for a few weeks in the summer we may do to death some of the most innocent and graceful of God’s creatures.”
“That’s just the bosh Dolly talks.”
“Lady Usk is a wise politician, then. Let her train Boom for his political life. I don’t know which is the more utterly indefensible, — our enormous Highland deer-slaughter or our imbecile butchery of birds. They ought to have recorded the introduction of battue-shooting into the British Isles by the Great and Good on the Albert Memorial.”
“One must shoot something.”
“I never saw why. But ‘something’ honestly found by a setter in stubble, and three thousand head of game between five guns in a morning, are very different things. What did they give you for Achnalorrie?”
Usk discourses of Achnalorrie with breathless eloquence, as of a lover eulogizing the charms of a mistress forever lost to him.
Brandolin listens with admirable patience, and affects to agree that the vision of the American crawling on his stomach over soaking heather in a thick fog for eight hours after a “stag of ten” is a vision of such unspeakably enviable bliss that it must harrow the innermost soul of the dispossessed lord of the soil.
“And yet, do you know,” he says, in conclusion, “I am such a degenerate mortal, such an unworthy ‘son of a gun,’ that I would actually sooner be sitting in these lovely, sunny, shady gardens, where one expects to see all Spenser’s knights coming through the green shadows towards one, than I would be the buyer of Achnalorrie, even in the third week of August?”