by Ouida
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 fashion, in his most reckless, antithetical, 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 sex.
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. Brandolin has listened in silence, conscious of a troubled pleasure within himself, which is invariably the herald of one of those attachments which have so often at once embellished and disturbed his existence.
Like all romantic people, his heart is much younger than his years. It has not been scarred by any one of those tragic passions which, like fire on a hill-side, wither up all green things, so that not a blade of grass will grow where it has passed. He has usually found love only the most agreeable of pastimes. He has always wondered why anybody allowed it to tear their life to tatters, as a bad actor tears a fine piece of blank verse. An uncle of his possessed an Aphrodite in Paphian marble which had been dug up in a vineyard at Luna, and a work of great beauty of the second period of Greek art. A lover of pleasure, but withal a philosopher, his uncle treasured and adored this statue, and whenever he felt that any living woman was getting more power over him than he liked, he compared her in his mind with the Luna Venus, and found that the human creature’s defects outbalanced her charms, and thus reduced the potency of the latter to more reasonable dimensions.
Instead of his uncle’s Luna goddess, Brandolin keeps in some remote and sealed-up nook of his mind a certain ideal; now and then he remembers it, takes it out and looks at it, and it has usually served with him at such moments the purpose which the Luna marble served with his uncle.
As he saunters towards the smoking-room with his hands in the pockets of a loose velvet jacket, he summons this useful resident of his brain, intending to banish with it the remembrance, the too enervating remembrance, of Xenia Sabaroff. But, to his surprise, they seem very like one another, and their features blend confusedly into one.
“And I know nothing at all about this lady, except that she has a voice like Albani’s, big jewels, and a Russian name!” he thinks, with some derision of himself. The smokers do not find him amusing, while his companions seem to him insufferably tiresome. He hears the echo of Madame Sabaroff’s grave, low, melodious voice, and is not in temper for the somewhat scabreux jests of the smoking-room. He thinks that it is all very well for boys to like that sort of salacious talk, but it seems to him intolerably absurd that men of his own age, and older, should find any kind of savor in it.
They tease him about the black women, moreover, and for once he is not easy enough to be good-tempered and indifferent. He answers contemptuously and irritably, and of course all his friends suppose, which they had not supposed before, that there is, after all, some truth in Mrs. Curzon’s anecdote.
“What stupid stories that old blagueur Wootton has told in the smoking-room, and what beastly ones Fred Ormond has related! and all as if they were something new, too! as if the one weren’t taken out of the manuscripts at Bute House, and the other out of last week’s ‘Figaro’! If men won’t be original, or can’t be, why don’t they hold their tongues?”
“What fools we are to sit shut up with gas-lights and tobacco on such a night as this! — a night for Lorenzo and Jessica, for Romeo and Juliet,” he thinks, as he stands awhile at the open window of his own bedroom.
It is three o’clock: there is a faint suggestive light which means the dawn, young birds are twittering, there is a delicious scent of green leaves, of full-blown roses, of dewy mosses; the air is damp and warm, he can hear the feet of blackbirds scraping and turning over the mould and the grass; it is dark, yet he can distinguish the masses of the great woods beyond the gardens, the outlines of the trees near his casement, the shape of the clouds as they move slowly southward. He wonders in what part of the old house, whose fantastic roofs and turrets and gargoyles and ivy-colored buttresses are hidden in the dusk of the summer night, they have given the Princess Sabaroff her chamber. He remains some time at the open window, and goes to his bed as the dawn grows rosy.
“Lord Brandolin is in a very bad temper,” says Mr. Wootton, when the smoking-room door has closed on the object of his detestation; then he pauses, and adds, significantly, “The Brandolins, you know, were always a little — just a little — clever family, very clever, but we all know to what great wits are sadly often allied. And this man has never done anything, with all his talent and opportunities; never done anything at all!”
“He has written first-rate books,” says Usk, angrily, always ready to defend a friend in absence.
“Oh, books!” says “Mr. Wootton, with bland but unutterable disdain. Mr. Wootton is a critic of books, and therefore naturally despises th
em.
“What would you have him do?” growls Usk, pugnaciously.
Mr. Wootton stretches his legs out, and gazes with abstracted air at the ceiling. “Public life,” he murmurs. “Public life is the only possible career for an Englishman of position. But it demands sacrifices; it demands sacrifices.”
“You mean that one has to marry?” says the young Duke of Queenstown, timidly.
Mr. Wootton smiles on him loftily. “Marry? yes, undoubtedly; and avoid scandals afterwards; avoid, beyond all, those connections which lend such a charm to existence, but are so apt to get into the newspapers.”
There is a general laugh.
Mr. Wootton has not intended to make them laugh, and he resumes, with stateliness, as though they had not interrupted him. “The country expects those sacrifices: no man succeeds in public life in England who does not make them.”
“Melbourne, Palmerston, Sidney Herbert?” murmurs one rebellious hearer.
Mr. Wootton waves him aside as he would do an importunate fly. “Not to touch on living persons, I would select Lord Althorp as the model of the public leader most suited to this country. It would not suit Lord Brandolin to lead the blameless life of Lord Althorp. It would not suit him even to pretend to lead it. I doubt if he could even look the part, if he tried. The English are a peculiar people; they always mix public and private life together. Lord Beaconsfield remarked to me once — —”
And Mr. Wootton tells a story of Disraeli, a very good story, only he has taken it out of the journals of the Président des Brosses and fathered it on to Disraeli. But M. le Président des Brosses is an author seldom read now, and nobody knows; if they did, nobody would care.
“Public opinion,” he resumes, “is irresistible in England; and if it once turn against a man, were he Messiah himself, he could do nothing. It is not an intelligent public opinion: it confuses public and private qualifications. A man may be a great statesman and yet dislike his wife and like somebody else’s. A man may be a great hero and yet may have an unseemly passion or an unpaid tailor. But the British public does not understand this. It invariably overlooks the man’s greatness, and only sees the lady or the tailor who compromises him. It thinks — unhappily or happily, as you please to consider — that genius should keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is conspicuous for breaking them.”
Mr. Wootton here knocks a little ash off his cigar, and smiles like a man who has said something neatly.
“It is the first time I ever heard you compliment genius,” murmurs Lawrence Hamilton.
“In Italy,” pursues Mr. Wootton, “not very long ago a minister was accused of buying a piano out of the public funds for his mistress. Neither the piano nor the mistress hurt the gentleman in public estimation in that soft and accommodating clime. But that piano, though he might have paid for it with own money, would have ruined an English politician. Though it had been the very smallest cottage piano conceivable, it would have buried him forever under it if it had got talked about; he would never have explained it away, or made it even contingently endurable to the nation. You may, if you are a public man in England, commit every conceivable blunder, add millions to the national debt, eat your own words every evening in debate, and plunge the country into an abyss of unmeasured and unmeasurable revolution, and they will still have confidence in you if you read the lessons in church and walk home with your wife; but if it is ever rumored that you admire your neighbor’s wife, down you go forever. And yet,” continues Mr. Wootton, pensively, “people do admire their neighbor’s wife in England, and it seems a venial offence when one compares it with the desertion of Gordon, or the encouragement of a hydra-headed greed for the rich man’s goods.”
With which Mr. Wootton yawns, rises, and also declares his intention to go to bed.
The young duke follows him and walks by his side down the corridor. He is not at all like Disraeli’s young duke: he is awkward, shy, and dull, he is neither amiable nor distinguished, but he has a painstaking wish in him to do well by his country, which is almost noble in a person who has been toadied, indulged, and tempted in all ways and on all sides ever since his cradle days. It is the disinterested patriotism which has been so largely the excellence and honor of the English nobility, and which is only possible in men of position so high that they are raised by it from birth above all vulgar covetousness or pecuniary needs.
“Do you really think?” says the duke, timidly, for he is very afraid of Henry Wootton,— “do you really think that to have any influence on English public life it is necessary — necessary — to keep so very straight, as regards women, I mean, you know?”
“It is most necessary to appear to keep very straight,” replies Mr. Wootton. The two things are obviously different to the meanest capacity.
The young man sighs.
“And to have that — that — appearance, one must be married?”
“Indisputably. Marriage is as necessary to respectability in any great position as a brougham to a doctor, or a butler to a bishop,” replies the elder, smiling compassionately at the wick of his candle. He does not care a straw about the duke: he has no daughters to marry, and Mr. Wootton’s social eminence is far beyond the power of dukes or princes to make or mend.
“But,” stammers his Grace of Queenstown, growing red, yet burning with a desire for instruction, “but don’t you think a — a connection with — with any lady of one’s own rank is quite safe, quite sure not to cause scandal?”
Mr. Wootton balances his candlestick carefully on one finger, pauses in his walk, and looks hard at his questioner.
“That would depend entirely upon the lady’s temper,” replies this wise monitor of youth.
They are words of wisdom so profound that they sink deep into the soul of his pupil, and fill him with a consternated sadness and perplexity. The temper of Lady Dawlish is a known quantity, and the quality of it is alarming. Lady Dawlish is not young, she is good-looking, and she has debts. Lord Dawlish has indeed hitherto let her pay her debts in any way she chose, being occupied enough with paying such of his own as he cannot by any dexterity avoid; but there is no knowing what he may do any day out of caprice or ill nature, and, although he will never obtain a divorce, he may try for one, which will equally effectually convulse the duke’s county and the cathedral city which is situated in its centre. His own affair with Lady Dawlish is, he firmly believes, known to no human being save themselves and their confidential servants: he little dreams that it has been the gossip of all London until London grew tired of it; he is indeed aware that everybody invited them in the kindest manner together, but he attributed this coincidence to her tact in the management of her set and choice of her own engagements.
The human mind is like the ostrich: its own projects serve to it the purpose which sand plays to the ostrich: comfortably buried in them, it defies the scrutiny of mankind; wrapped in its own absorbing passions, it leaves its hansom before a lady’s hall door, or leaves its coroneted handkerchief on a bachelor’s couch, and never dreams that the world is looking on round the corner or through the keyhole. Human nature the moment it is interested becomes blind. Therefore the duke has put his question in good faith.
He would abhor any kind of scandal. He is devoted to his mother, who is a pious and very proper person; he has a conscientious sense of his own vast duties and responsibilities; he would feel most uncomfortable if he thought people were talking grossly of him in his own county; and he has a horror of Lord Dawlish, noisy, insolent, coarse, a gambler and a rake.
Arrived at his bedroom door, Mr. Wootten is touched vaguely with a kind feeling towards his humble interrogator, or with some other sentiment less kindly, it may be. He pauses, looks straight before him at the wick of his candle, and speaks with that oracular air so becoming to him which many ungrateful people are known to loathe.
“That kind of connections are invariably dangerous; invariably,” he remarks. “They have their uses, I admit, they have their uses: they mould a man’s manners
when he is young, they enable him to acquire great insight into female character, they keep him out of the lower sorts of entanglements, and they are useful in restraining him from premature marriage. But they are perilous if allowed to last too long. If permitted to claim privileges, rights, usurpations, they are apt to become irksome and compromising, especially if the lady be no longer young. When a woman is no longer young there is a desperate acharnement in her tenacity about a last passion which is like that of the mariner clinging to a spar in the midst of a gusty sea. It is not easy for the spar to disengage itself. On the whole, therefore, women of rank are perhaps best avoided in this sense. Passions are safest which can be terminated by the cheque-book. The cheque-book is not always indeed refused by great ladies, — when they are in debt, — but a cheque-book is an unpleasant witness in the law courts. However, as I said before, all depends on the lady’s temper: no woman who has a bad temper is ever truly discreet. Good-night to your Grace.” And Mr. Wootton, with his candle, disappears within his door-way.
He smiles a little blandly as his man undresses him. Five years before, Lady Dawlish offended him at a house-party at Sandringham, taking a fiendish pleasure in capping all his best stories and tracing the sources of all his epigrams. In that inaccessible but indelible note-book, his memory, he has written her name down as that of one to whom he has a debt to pay. “Je lui ai donné du fil à retordre,” he thinks, as he drops into his first doze.
CHAPTER VIII.
“Alan is really coming to day!” says Dorothy Usk to her lord, with pleasure, a few days later, looking up from a telegram.
“How you excite yourself!” says Usk, with rude disdain. “What can you see to care about? He is a pretentious humbug, if ever there was one!”