by Ouida
“She must be in love with an Englishman,” thinks Brandolin, with the one-sided construction which a man is always ready to place on the words of a woman. “Must we go in-doors?” he asks, regretfully, as she is moving towards the house. “It is so pleasant in these quaint green arbors. To be under a roof on such a summer afternoon as this, is to fly in the face of a merciful Creator with greater ingratitude than Usk’s ingratitude to Inigo Jones.”
“But I have scarcely seen my hostess,” says Madame Sabaroff; nevertheless, she resigns herself to a seat in a yew-tree cut like a helmet.
There are all manner of delightful old-fashioned flowers, such flowers as Disraeli gave to the garden of Corisande, growing near in groups encircled by clipped box-edging.
Those disciples of Pallas Athene who render the happy lives of the Surrenden children occasionally a burden to them seize at that moment on their prey and bear them off to the school-room. The Babe goes to his doom sullenly; he would be tearful, only that were too unmanly.
“Why do you let those innocents be tortured, George?” asks Brandolin.
“Books should, like business, entertain the day,”
replies Usk: “so you said, at least, just now. Their governesses are of the same opinion.”
“That is not the way to make them love books, to shut them up against their wills on a summer afternoon.”
“How will you educate your children when you have ’em, then?”
“He always gets out of any impersonal argument by putting some personal question,” complains Brandolin to Madame Sabaroff. “It is a common device, but always an unworthy one. Because a system is very bad, it does not follow that I alone of all men must be prepared with a better one. I think if I had children I would not have them taught in that way at all. I should get the wisest old man I could find, a Samuel Johnson touched with a John Ruskin, and should tell him to make learning delightful to them, and associated, as far as our detestable climate would allow, with open-air studies in cowslip meadows and under hawthorn hedges. If I had only read dear Horace at school, should I ever have loved him as I do? No; my old tutor taught me to feel all the delight and the sweet savor of him, roaming in the oak woods of my own old place.”
“I am devoutly thankful,” says his host, “that Dorothy among her caprices had never had the fancy you have, for a Dr. Johnson doublé with a Ruskin, to correct my quotations, abuse my architecture, and make prigs of the children.”
“Prigs!” exclaims Brandolin. “Prigs! When did ever real scholarship and love of nature make anything approaching to a prig? Science and class-rooms make prigs, not Latin verse and cowslip meadows.”
“That is true, I think,” says the Princess Xenia, with her serious smile.
“If they are beginning to agree with one another I shall be de trop,” thinks Usk, who is very good-natured to his guests, and popular enough with women not to be resigned to play what is vulgarly termed “second fiddle” (though why an expression borrowed from the orchestra should be vulgar it were hard to say). So he goes a few paces off to speak to a gardener, and by degrees edges away towards the house, leaving Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff to themselves in the green yew-helmet arbor.
Brandolin is in love with his subject, and does not abandon it.
“It is absurd,” he continues, “the way in which children are made to loathe all scholarship by its association with their own pains and subjection. A child is made as a punishment to learn by rote fifty lines of Virgil. Good heavens! It ought rather to be as a reward that he should be allowed to open Virgil! To walk in all those delicious paths of thought should be the highest pleasure that he could be brought to know. To listen to the music of the poets should be at once his privilege and his recompense. To be deprived of books should be, on the contrary, his cruellest chastisement!”
“He would be a very exceptional child, surely,” says Madame Sabaroff.
“I was not an exceptional child,” he answers, “but that is how I was brought up and how I felt.”
“You had an exceptional training, then?”
“It ought not to be exceptional: that is just the mischief. Up to the time I was seventeen, I was brought up at my own place (by my father’s directions, in his will) by a most true and reverent scholar, whom I loved as Burke loved Shackleton. He died, God rest his soul, but the good he left behind him lives after him: whatever grains of sense I have shown, and whatever follies I have avoided, both what I am and what I am not, are due to him, and it is to him that I owe the love of study which has been the greatest consolation and the purest pleasure of my life. That is why I pity so profoundly those poor Rochefort children, and the tens of thousands like them, who are being educated by the commonplace, flavorless, cramming system which people call education. It may be education; it is not culture. What will the Babe always associate with his Latin themes? Four walls, hated books, inky, aching fingers, and a headache. Whereas I never look at a Latin line in a newspaper, be it one ever so hackneyed, without pleasure, as at the face of an old friend, and whenever I repeat to myself the words, I always smell the cowslips and the lilac and the hawthorn of the spring mornings when I was a boy.”
Xenia Sabaroff looked at him with some little wonder and more approval.
“My dear lord,” she says seriously, “I think in your enthusiasm you forget one thing, that there is ground on which good seed falls and brings forth flowers and fruit, and there is other ground on which the same seed, be it strewn every so thickly, lies always barren. Without underrating the influences of your tutor, I must believe that had you been educated at an English public school, or even in a French Lycée, you would still have become a scholar, still have loved your books.”
“Alas, madame,” says Brandolin, with a little sigh, “perhaps I have only been what Matthew Arnold calls a ‘foiled circuitous wanderer’ in the orbit of life!”
“I imagine that you have not very often been foiled,” replies the lady, with a smile, “and wandering has a great deal to be said in its favor, especially for a man. Women are happiest, perhaps, at anchor.”
“Women used to be: not our women. Nous avons changé tout cela. I have bored you too much with myself and my opinions.”
“No, you interest me,” says his companion with a serious serenity which deprives the words of all sound of flattery or encouragement. “I have long admired your writings,” she adds, and Brandolin colors a little with gratification. The same kind of phrase is said to him on an average five hundred times a year, and his usual emotion is either ennui or irritation. The admiration of fools is folly, and humiliates him. But the admiration of so lovely a woman as Xenia Sabaroff would lay a flattering unction to the soul of any man, even if she were absolutely mindless; and she gives him the impression that she has a good deal of mind, and one out of the common order.
“My writings have no other merit,” he says, after the expression of his sense of the honor she does him, “than being absolutely the chronicle of what I have seen and what I have thought; and I think they are expressed in tolerably pure English, though that is claiming a great deal in these times; for since John Newman laid down the pen there is scarcely a living Briton who can write his own tongue with eloquence and purity.”
“I think it must be very nice to leave off wandering if one has a home,” replies Madame Sabaroff, with a slight sigh, which gave him the impression that, though no doubt she had many houses, she had no home. “Where is your place that you spoke of just now? — the place where you learned to love Horace?”
Brandolin is always pleased to speak of St. Hubert’s Lea. He has a great love for it and for the traditions of his race, which makes many people accuse him of great family pride, though, as has been well said á propos of a greater man than Brandolin, it is rather that sentiment which the Romans defined as piety. When he talks of his old home he grows eloquent, unreserved, cordial; and he describes with an artist’s touch its antiquities, its landscapes, and its old-world and sylvan charms.
�
��It must be charming to care for any place so much as that,” says his companion, after hearing him with interest.
“I think one cares more for places than for people,” he replies.
“Sometimes one cares for neither,” says Xenia Sabaroff, with a tone which in a less lovely woman would have been morose.
“One must suffice very thoroughly to one’s self in such a case?”
“Oh, not necessarily.”
At that moment there is a little bustle under a very big cedar near at hand; servants are bringing out folding tables, folding chairs, a silver camp-kettle, cakes, fruit, cream, liqueurs, sandwiches, wines, all those items of an afternoon tea on which Brandolin has animadverted with so much disgust in the library an hour before. Lady Usk has chosen to take these murderous compounds out of doors in the west garden. She herself comes out of the house with a train of her guests around her.
“Adieu to rational conversation,” says Brandolin, as he rises with regret from his seat under the evergreen helmet.
Xenia Sabaroff is pleased at the expression. She is too handsome for men often to speak to her rationally: they usually plunge headlong into attempts at homage and flattery, of which she is nauseated.
CHAPTER VII.
“How do you like Lord Brandolin?” says Lady Usk, when she can say so unobserved.
“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 fashion to make the fuss, and she never goes against a fashion. 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 compassion, “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,” assents Brandolin. “I don’t wish the name to die out, and there’s nobody 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 tarée 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-fashioned and prudish and arriéré nowadays to be shocked at anything.
“I have thought about it very often, I assure 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 éveillées 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 débutante with her mind fixed on establishing 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 ad
mire 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 Warwickshire, 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 amusement 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 Warwickshire, 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.”