by Ouida
“George!” She regards him with horror and amaze. Is he wholly out of his mind? Her cousin is Lady Usk’s ideal of what an English gentleman should be. He does not keep black women down in Warwickshire.
“A pretentious humbug,” repeats Usk. He likes to ticket his relations and connections with well-chosen descriptions. “All good looks and soft sawder. Women like that sort of thing — —”
“Of course we like good manners, though they are not your weakness,” interrupts his wife, with acerbity. “Alan has the manners of a man who respects women: that may seem very tame to you and your friend Brandolin, but in these days it has at least the charm of novelty.”
“Respects women!” Usk is unable to restrain his hilarity. “My dear Dolly, you’re not a chicken: you can’t mean that you don’t know that Gervase — —”
“I know that he is well-bred. You were so once, but it is a very long time ago,” replies his wife, with cutting sententiousness, and with that unkind reply she leaves him. As if she did not understand men better than he, she thinks, contemptuously. He may understand dogs and horses, and deer and partridges, but about human nature he knows no more than the old man at the lodge gates.
“Surely she can’t be soft on Gervase herself?” her husband reflects, with a sensation of amusement; “it would be too funny, after running so straight all these years, and just as her daughters are growing up; but they often are like that.”
He is not sure whether the idea diverts or irritates him, but he knows that he has always detested Gervase, such a coxcomb and such a humbug as the fellow is!
“Respect women, good Lord!” ejaculates Usk in his solitude.
“To be sure,” adds that honest gentleman in his own mind, “there are very few of ’em who would thank you to respect ’em nowadays.”
“Gervase will be here by dinner,” he says in the course of the day to Princess Sabaroff.
“Indeed,” she replies, with indifference. “Who is he?”
“A friend of my wife’s; at least, a cousin. I thought you might know him; he was some time in Russia.”
“No,” — and there is a coldness in the negative disproportioned to so simple a denial,— “I do not think so. I do not remember such a name. Who is he?”
“A person who is expected to be great in foreign affairs some day or other,” says Brandolin. “He will have one qualification rare in an English foreign minister, — daily growing rarer, thanks to the imbecilities of examinations: he knows how to bow and he knows what to say.”
“A friend of yours?”
“Oh, no; an acquaintance. He thinks very ill of me.”
“Why?”
“Because I do nothing for my country. He thinks he does a great deal when he has fomented a quarrel or received a decoration.”
“That is not generous. The world owes much to diplomatists: it will know how much in a few years, when it will be governed by clerks controlled by telephones.”
“That is true: I stand corrected. But Gervase and I have few sympathies: none, indeed, except politically, and even there we differ, — his is the Toryism of Peel, mine is the Toryism of the late Lord Derby: there are leagues between the two.”
“I know: the one is opportunism; the other is optimate-ism.”
“Perhaps,” says Brandolin, with a smile, and thinks, meantime, “She knows something about him. What is it?”
“Does she know Gervase, despite her denial?” he wonders. He has an impression that she does. There was a look of recognition in her eyes when she gave that vague bland gesture in answer to her host. All trifles in her interest him, as they always do interest a man in a woman whom he admires and is not sure that he understands; and Gervase he is aware has been a good deal in Russia.
He himself has known the subject of their discourse ever since they were boys, and had that sort of intimacy with him which exists between men who live in the same sets and belong to the same clubs. But to him Gervase seems a petit-maître, a poseur, a man artificial, conventional, ambitious in small things, and to Gervase he himself seems much as he does to Lady Usk, a perverse and lawless Bohemian, only saved from the outer darkness by the fact of his aristocratic birth.
Meanwhile, in her own room, Xenia Sabaroff is pursuing her own reflections whilst her maid disrobes her.
“It will be better to see him once and for all,” she muses. “I cannot go on forever avoiding him in every city in Europe. Very likely he will not even remember my face or my name.”
She feels a strong temptation to invent some plausible reason and break off her visit to Surrenden; but she is a courageous woman, and flight is repugnant to her. More than once of late she has avoided a meeting which is disagreeable to her, by some abrupt change of her own plans or reversal of her own engagements. To continue to do this seems weakness. Indeed, to do it at all seems too great a flattery to the person avoided. What is painful is best encountered without procrastination. It is the old question of grasping the nettle.
A haughty flush passes over her face at her own reflections. After all, to have any emotion at all about it, pleasurable or painful, is humiliation. She is a proud woman, as well as a courageous one. There are memories associated with this coming guest which are bitter and hateful.
Women like Mrs. Wentworth Curzon carry such memories lightly, or rather do not carry them at all, but bury them by scores, pell-mell, one on the top of another, like old letters, and forget all about their interment; but she is different from them.
It has not been difficult for her to avoid meeting Lord Gervase; he is one of those persons whose movements are known and chronicled; but she is conscious that the time is come when she can no longer escape doing so, except by such an abrupt departure that it would seem to herself too great a weakness, and be to him too great a flattery, for such a step to enter for an instant into the category of possibilities. It is, she reflects, or it should be, a matter to her of absolute indifference to see again a person whom she has not seen for seven years.
Yet she is conscious of a sense of pain and excitation as her woman puts on her a maize satin tea-gown covered with point d’Alençon at five o’clock the next day, and she knows that when she goes down to the room in a few minutes Gervase, who was to arrive by the afternoon train, will in all probability be present there.
Every one is in-doors that day, for a fine summer rain is falling without, and has been falling since noon. All the house-party are in the library, and the children are there also; the windows are open, and the sweet smell from the damp gardens and wet grass fills the air.
Every one is laughing and talking; Usk is drinking a glass of kümmel, and Brandolin is playing with the dog; conversing with Nina Curzon and the mistress of the house, and standing in front of them, is a tall fair man irreproachable in tenue and extremely distinguished in appearance. He is Lord Gervase. His back is towards the door, and he does not see or hear her enter, but as the Babe rushes towards her, toppling over a stool and treading mercilessly on the trains of tea-gowns in the wind of his going, the noise made by the child makes him turn his head, and an expression of recognition mingled with amazement passes over his usually impassive features.
“Is that not Princess Sabaroff?” he asks of his hostess, with a certain breathless astonishment betrayed in his voice.
Lady Usk assents. “One of my dearest friends,” she adds. “I think you don’t know her? I will present you in a moment. She is as clever as she is beautiful. The children adore her. Look at Babe.”
The Babe has dragged his princess to a couch and climbed up on it himself, kneeling half on her lap and half off it, with no respect for the maize satin, whilst his impatient little feet beat the devil’s tatoo among the point d’Alençon.
“My dear Babe, do not be such a monopolist,” says Brandolin, as he approaches with a cup of tea and a wafer of caviare bread-and-butter. “Your shoes have seventeenth-century buckles, it is true, yet still they are scarcely bibelots to be wrapped up in a lady’s dress.”
Xenia Sabaroff does not take as much notice of him as usual. She is reserved and preoccupied. Brandolin, like the child, fails in awakening her interest or attention. She has seated herself almost with her back to where Gervase is standing, but every now and then she looks half round, as by an irresistible unconscious impulse of curiosity.
Brandolin notes the gesture, as her actions have an interest for him which grows daily in its fascination. “There is Dorothy Usk’s Ph[oe]nix,” he says to her, in a low tone, when the Babe has scampered off after bon-bons: he indicates Gervase with a glance. Her eyebrows contract slightly, as in some displeasure or constraint.
“Lady Usk is very soon satisfied,” she replies, coldly. “Her own amiability makes her see perfection everywhere.”
“It is a quality we cannot value too highly in so imperfect a world. It is better than seeing everything en noir, surely?” says Brandolin. “If we make people what we think them, as optimists say, it is best to be optimistic.”
“I dislike optimism,” she says, curtly. “It is absurd and untrue. Our Dostoievsky is a wiser novelist than your Dickens. One must believe something,” she says.
“It is pretty for a woman to think so,” says Brandolin, “but myself I have never seen why. I may hope, I may wish, I may regret, I may — if I am very sanguine — even expect; but believe — no!”
“Perhaps I should like to believe in a woman,” he adds, more softly, with that inflection of his voice which has always had at all events the effect of making women believe in him.
Madame Sabaroff is not so easily touched as many. She pauses a moment, then says, with a certain weariness, “Anybody who can believe can love: that is nothing new.”
“What would be new? To love and disbelieve in what we love? It would be very painful.”
“It would be a test,” says his companion.
Then she drops the subject decidedly, by approaching the other ladies. Brandolin has a faint sense of discomfiture and sadness: he is accustomed to very facile conquests; and yet he is not a coxcomb, like Lawrence Hamilton; he did not precisely anticipate one here, but habit is second nature, and it has been his habit to succeed with women with rapidity and ease. That sense of mystery which there is also for him in the Princess Xenia oppresses whilst it allures him. He is English enough to think that he dislikes mystery, yet as an element of romance it has always an irresistible fascination for romantic temperaments.
Gervase meanwhile has sunk into a chair by the side of Nina Curzon, and is saying, in a whisper, “Who is that lady? The one with her back to us, to whom Lord Brandolin is so empressé? I thought that I knew all the Usks’ people.”
“Look in your Russian memories, and you will probably find that you know her too,” replies Mrs. Curzon.
“Oh, she is Russian?” says Gervase, then adds, negligently, “I think, now you tell me that, I have seen her before. Is she not the Princess Sabaroff?”
“Why did you pretend not to know her?” thinks Nina Curzon as she answers, “Yes, that is her name. You must have met her in Petersburg.”
“Petersburg is very dim in my memories,” he replies, evasively. “Its baccarat is what made the deepest impression on my remembrance and my fortunes. Now I think of it, however, I recollect her quite well: her husband was Anatole Sabaroff, and Lustoff shot him in a duel about her? Am I right?”
“So charming for her!” says Nina Curzon. “Englishwomen never have anything happen for them picturesque like that: our men always die of indigestion, or going after a fox.”
“It is very curious.”
“What is? Dyspepsia? Hunting?”
“How one comes across people.”
“‘After long years,’” quotes Mrs. Curzon, with mock romance in her tones. “Generally, I think,” she adds, with a little yawn, “we can never get rid of our people, the world is so small, and there is really only one set in it that is decent, so we can’t ever get out of it. It must have been very nice in Romeo and Juliet’s days, when a little drive to Mantua took you into realms wholly inaccessible to your Verona acquaintances. Nowadays, if you run away from anybody in London you are sure to run against them in Yeddo or Yucatan.”
“Constancy made easy, like the three R’s,” says Gervase. “Unfortunately, despite our improved facilities, we are not constant.”
“He means to imply that he threw over the Sabaroff,” thinks Mrs. Curzon; “but he is such a boaster of his bonnes fortunes that one can never know whether he is lying.”
“Pray let me make you known to Madame Sabaroff,” says Lady Usk to him, a little later. “She is such a very dear friend of mine, and I see you have been looking at her ever since she entered the room.”
“She is a very handsome person: any one would look at her,” replies her cousin. Were he not so perfectly well-bred and impassive, it might almost be said that the suggested presentation fills him with some vague nervousness.
Nina Curzon watches him inquisitively as he is led up and presented to Madame Sabaroff.
“I think I have had the honor before now, in Petersburg,” murmurs Gervase. She looks at him very coldly.
“I think not,” she replies. The words are of the simplest, but c’est le ton qui fait la musique, and, for the solitary time in his existence, Lord Gervase is embarrassed.
Brandolin, playing with the colley dog near at hand, listens and observes.
Lady Usk is not so observant. “It is a long time since he was in Russia,” she says to her friend, “I dare say you have forgotten. His father was alive, and his name was Baird then, you know.”
Xenia Sabaroff makes a little polite gesture expressive of entire indifference to the change in these titles. With an action which would be rude in any woman less high-bred, she turns away her head and speaks to Brandolin, ignoring the acquaintance and the presence of Gervase.
Across the good-natured and busy brain of her hostess there flashes an electric and odious thought: is it possible that Usk may be right, and that there may be something wrong, after all, in this her latest and most adored friend? She feels that she will die of suffocated curiosity if she do not speedily get her cousin alone and learn all he has ever known or heard of the Princess Sabaroff.
“A snub direct!” whispers Lawrence Hamilton to Mr. Wootton.
“Or a cut direct: which?” says that far-sighted gentleman.
“Anyhow, it’s delightful to see him let in for it,” reflects Usk, who has also observed the incident from where he stands by the liqueurs.
Gervase, who has never been known to be at a loss in any position, however difficult, colors and looks at once annoyed and confused. He stands before Xenia Sabaroff for a few moments hesitating and irresolute, conscious that every one is looking at him; then he takes refuge with Lady Dawlish, whom he detests, because she is the nearest person to him.
“Madame Sabaroff is eclipsing the black women,” says that lady.
“What black women?” asks Gervase, very inattentive and bored. She tells him the story of the Hindoo harem, and he hears no word of it.
“Brandolin is always so odd,” he says, indifferently, watching the hand of Xenia Sabaroff as it rests on the shoulder of the Babe, who is leaning against her knees gazing at her adoringly.
Gervase is angered; irritated, interested, and mortified all at once. He has never been in an absurd position before, and he is aware that he was in one a moment ago, and that the whole house-party of Surrenden Court saw him in it. “What a fool Dolly was not to tell me she was here!” he thinks, forgetting that his cousin and hostess has not the remotest suspicion that he and the Princess Xenia have ever met each other before.
“Seven years!” he thinks. “Good heavens! what an eternity! And she is handsomer than she was then; very handsome; wonderfully handsome.”
He looks at her all the while from under his half-closed eyelids,
whilst he talks he knows not what kind of rubbish to Lady Dawlish.
Xenia Sabaroff does not once look his way. The moment which she had dreaded has passed, and it has made no impression whatever upon her: her indifference reconciles her to herself. Is it possible, she wonders, that she ever loved, or ever thought that she loved, this man?
“Why will you always treat me as a stranger, Madame Sabaroff?” murmurs Gervase to her that night when for a moment he is alone near her, while the cotillion overture commences.
“You are a stranger — to me,” replies Xenia Sabaroff; and as she speaks she looks full at him.
He colors with discomfiture. “Because in the due course of nature I have succeeded to my father’s title, you seem to consider that I have changed my whole identity,” he says, with great irritation.
She is silent; she looks down on the white ostrich-feathers of her fan. He is vaguely encouraged by that silence. “Strangers! That is surely a very cold and cruel word between those who once were friends?”
The direct appeal to her makes her look up once more, with great hauteur in the coldness of her face.
“Sir, I think when people have forgotten that each other exist, it is as though they had never met. They are perhaps something more distant still than strangers, for to strangers friendship in the future is possible; but those who have been separated by oblivion on the one hand and by contempt on the other are parted as surely and eternally as though death had divided them.”
Gervase gathers some solace from the very strength of the words. She would not, he thinks, feel so strongly unless she felt more than he allows: he gazes at her with feigned humility and unfeigned admiration and regret.
“If Madame Sabaroff,” he murmurs, “can doubt her own powers of compelling remembrance, she is the one person on earth only who can do so.”
She is stung to anger.
“I am really at loss to decide whether you are intentionally insolent or unintentionally insincere. You are possibly both.”
“I am neither. I am only a man who passionately and uselessly rebels against his fate.”