by Ouida
“Who regrets his own actions, you mean to say. That is nothing uncommon.”
“Well, who regrets the past, if you will put it so, and who would atone for it would you allow him.”
“Atone! Do you suppose that you owe me reparation? It is I who owe you thanks for a momentary oblivion which did me immeasurable service.”
“That is a very harsh doctrine. The Princess Xenia whom I knew was neither so stern nor so sceptical.”
“The Princess Xenia whom you knew was a child, a foolish child; she is dead, quite as much dead as though she were under so many solid square feet of Baltic ice. Put her from your thoughts: you will never awake her.”
Then she rises and leaves him and goes out of the ball-room.
Throughout that evening he does not venture to approach her again, and he endeavors to throw himself with some show of warmth into a flirtation with Nina Curzon.
“Why did you pretend not to know her?” says Mrs. Curzon to him.
He smiles, the fatuous smile with which a man ingeniously expresses what he would be thought a brute to put into words.
“She does not deign to know me — now,” he says, modestly, and to the experienced comprehension of Nina Curzon the words, although so modest, tell her as much as the loudest boast could do.
CHAPTER IX.
Gervase saunters in to his hostess’s boudoir the next morning, availing himself of the privilege accorded to that distant relationship which it pleases them both to raise into an intimate cousinship. It is a charming boudoir, style Louis Quinze, with the walls hung with flowered silk of that epoch, and the dado made of fans which belonged to the same period. Lady Usk writes here at a little secrétaire painted by Fragonard, and uses an inkstand said to have belonged to Madame de Parabère, made in the shape of a silver shell driven by a gold Cupidon; yet, despite the frivolity of these associations, she contrives to get through a vast mass of business at this fragile table, and has one of the soundest heads for affairs in all England. Gervase sits down and makes himself agreeable, and relates to her many little episodes of his recent experiences.
She is used to be the confidante of her men; she is young enough to make a friend who is attractive to them, and old enough to lend herself de bon c[oe]ur to the recital of their attachments to other women. Very often she gives them very good advice, but she does not obtrude it unseasonably. “An awfully nice woman all round,” is the general verdict of her visitants to the boudoir. She does not seek to be more than that to them.
Gervase does not make any confidences: he only tells her things which amuse her and reveal much about her acquaintances, nothing about himself. He smokes some of her favorite cigarettes, praises some new china, suggests an alteration in the arrangement of the fans, and makes critical discourses à propos of her collection of snuff-boxes.
When he is going away, he lingers a moment intently looking at a patch-box of vernis Martin, and says, with studied carelessness, “Dolly, tell me, when did you make the acquaintance of Madame Sabaroff?”
“Last year, at Cannes: why do you want to know? She came and stayed with us at Orme last Easter. Is she not perfectly charming?”
“Very good-looking,” says Gervase, absently. “You don’t know anything about her, then?”
“Know?” repeats his hostess. “What should I know? What everybody does, I suppose. I met her first at the Duchesse de Luynes’. You can’t possibly mean that there can be anything — anything — —”
“Oh, no,” replies Gervase; but it produces on his questioner the same effect as if he had said, “Oh, yes.”
“How odious men are! such scandal-mongers,” says Lady Usk, angrily. “Talk of our ‘damning with faint praise’ There is nothing comparable to the way in which a man destroys a woman’s reputation just by raising his eyebrows or twisting his moustache.”
“I have no moustache to twist, and am sure there is no reputation which I wish to destroy,” says her cousin.
“Then why do you ask me where I made her acquaintance?”
“My dear Dolly! Surely the most innocent and general sort of question ever on the lips of any human being!”
“Possibly; not in the way you said it, however; and when one knows that you were a great deal in Russia, it suggests five hundred things, — five thousand things: and of course one knows he was shot in a duel about her, and I believe people have talked.”
“I have never helped them to talk. When do they not talk?”
And beyond this she cannot prevail upon him to go: he pretends that the Princess Sabaroff is beyond all possibility of any approach of calumny, but the protestation produces on her the impression that he could tell her a great deal wholly to the contrary if he chose.
“She certainly was staying with Madame de Luynes,” she insists.
“Who ever said the lady might not stay with the Archbishop of Canterbury?” replies Gervase.
She is irritated and vexed.
Xenia Sabaroff is her idol of the moment, and if her idol were proved human she would be very angry. She reflects that she will have Dodo and the children kept more strictly in the school-room, and not let them wander about over the park as they do with their Russian friend most mornings.
“One can never be too careful with children of that age,” she muses, “and they are terribly éveillées already.”
Dorothy Usk’s friendships, though very ardent, are like most friendships which exist in society: they are apt to blow about with every breeze. She is cordial, kind, and in her way sincere; but she is what her husband characterizes as “weathercocky.”
Who is not “weathercocky” in the world?
Although so tolerant in appearance of naughty people, because it is the fashion to be so, and not to be so looks priggish and dowdy and odd, she never at the bottom of her heart likes her naughty people. She has run very straight herself, as her lord would express it; she has been always much too busy to have time or inclination to be tempted “off the rails,” and she has little patience with women who have gone off them; only she never says so, because it would look so goody-goody and stupid, and for fear of looking so she even manages to stifle in her own breast her own antipathy to Dulcia Waverley.
There have been very many martyrs to the sense that they ought to smile at virtue when they hate it, but Dorothy Usk’s martyrdom is of a precisely opposite kind: she forces herself to seem to approve the reverse of virtue whilst she detests it. Anything is better, in her creed, than looking odd; and nowadays you do look so odd and so old-fashioned if you make a fuss about anything. Still, in her heart of hearts she feels excessively vexed, because it is quite apparent to her that Gervase knows something very much to the disadvantage of her new acquaintance.
“George will be so delighted if he finds out that Madame Sabaroff is like all those horrid women he is so fond of,” she reflects. “I shall never hear the last of it from him. It will be a standing joke for him the whole of his life.”
Certainly Madame Sabaroff is letting Brandolin carry on with her more than is altogether proper. True, they are people who may marry each other if they please, but Brandolin is not a man who marries, and his attentions are never likely to take that form. He probably pays so much court to Madame Sabaroff because he has heard that of her which leads him to suppose that his efforts may be couronné, as French vaudevillists say, without any thought of marriage.
Lady Usk has always known that he is horribly unprincipled, — more so than even men of his world usually are. That bantering tone of his is odious, she thinks; and he always has it, even on the gravest subjects.
“What’s the row, my lady? You look ruffled!” inquires Usk, coming into her boudoir with a sheaf of half-opened letters in his hand.
“There are always things to annoy one,” she answers, vaguely.
“It is an arrangement of a prudential Providence to prevent our affections being set on this world,” replies Usk, piously.
His wife’s only comment on this religious declaration i
s an impatient twist to the tail of her Maltese dog.
Usk proceeds to turn over to her such letters as bore him; they are countable by dozens; the two or three which interest him have been read in the gun-room and put away in an inside pocket.
“Mr. Bruce could attend to all these,” she says, looking with some disgust at the correspondence. Bruce is his secretary.
“He always blunders,” says Usk.
“Then change him,” says his wife; nevertheless she is pleased at the compliment implied to herself.
“All secretaries are fools,” says Usk, impartially.
“Even secretaries of state,” says Mr. Wootton, who has the entrée of the boudoir, and saunters in at that moment. “I have some news this morning,” he adds: “Coltsfoot marries Miss Hoard.”
“Never!” exclaims Dorothy Usk.
“Perfectly true,” says Mr. Wootton. “Both of them staying at Dunrobin, and engagement publicly announced.”
Lord Coltsfoot is heir to a dukedom; Miss Hoard is the result in bullion of iron-works.
“Never!” reiterates Lady Usk. “It is impossible that he can do such a horrible thing! Why, she has one shoulder higher than the other, and red eyes!”
“There are six millions paid down,” replies Mr. Wootton, sententiously.
“What the deuce will Mrs. Donnington say?” asks Usk.
“One never announces any marriage,” remarks Mr. Wootton, “but there is a universal outcry about what will some lady, married long ago to somebody else, say to it. Curious result of supposed monogamy!”
“It is quite disgusting!” says Lady Usk. “Some of those new people are presentable, but she isn’t; and Coltsfoot is so good-looking and so young.”
“It is what the French call an ‘alliance très comme il faut,’” says Usk, from sheer spirit of contradiction. “The dukedom is as full of holes as an old tin pot; she tinkers it up with her iron and gold; and I bet you that your friend Worth will manage to cut Lady Coltsfoot’s gowns so that one shoulder higher than the other will become all the rage next season.”
“Of course you set no store on such a simple thing as happiness,” says his wife, with acerbity.
“Happiness? Lord, my dear! Happiness was buried with Strephon and Chloe centuries ago! We are amused or bored, we are successful or unsuccessful, we are popular or unpopular, we are somebody or we are nobody, but we are never either happy or miserable.”
“People who have a heart are still both!”
“A heart! You mean spoons!”
“What a hideous expression! Strephon and Chloe never used that.”
“When we have an unfortunate passion now,” remarks Mr. Wootton, “we go to Carlsbad. It’s only an affair of the liver.”
“Or the nerves,” suggests Usk. “Flirtation is the proper thing: flirtation never hurts anybody: it’s like puff-paste, seltzer water, and Turkish cigarettes.”
“Puff-paste may bring on an indigestion when one’s too old to eat it!”
“There! Didn’t I tell you so? She is always saying something about my age. A man is the age that he feels.”
“No, a woman is the age that she looks. If you will quote things, quote them properly.”
“The age that she looks? That’s so very variable. She’s twenty when she enters a ball-room at midnight, she’s fifty when she comes out at sunrise; she’s sixteen when she goes to meet somebody at Hurlingham, she’s sixty when she scolds her maid and has a scene with her husband!”
Lady Usk interrupts him with vivacity: “And he? Pray, isn’t he five-and-twenty when he’s in Paris alone, and five-and-ninety when he’s grumbling at home?”
“Because he’s bored at home! Youth is, after all, only good spirits. If you laugh you are young, but your wife don’t make you laugh; you pay her bills, and go with her to a state ball, and sit opposite to her at dinner, and when you catch a cold she is always there to say, ‘My dear, didn’t I tell you so?’ but I defy any man living to recall any hour of his existence in which his wife ever made him laugh!”
“And yet you wanted me to ask married people together.”
“Because I wanted it all to be highly proper and deadly dull. Surrenden has got a sort of reputation of being a kind of Orleans Club.”
“And yet you complain of being bored in it!”
“One is always bored in one’s own house! One can never take in to dinner the person one likes.”
“You make up to yourself for the deprivation after dinner!”
“My lady’s very ruffled to-day,” says Usk to Mr. Wootton. “I don’t know which of her doves has turned out a fighting-cock.”
“That reminds me,” observes Mr. Wootton. “I wanted to ask you, did you know that Gervase, when he was Lord Baird, was very much au mieux with Madame Sabaroff? I remember hearing long ago from Russians — —”
Lady Usk interrupts the great man angrily: “Very much au mieux! What barbarous polygot language for a great critic like you! Must you have the assistance of bad grammar in two tongues to take away my friend’s reputation?”
Lord Usk chuckles. “Reputations aren’t taken away so easily; they’re very hardy plants nowadays, and will stand a good deal of bad weather.”
Mr. Wootton is shocked. “Oh, Lady Usk! Reputation! You couldn’t think I meant to imply of any guest of yours — only, you know, he was secretary in Petersburg when he was Lord Baird, and so — —”
“Well, it doesn’t follow that he is the lover of every woman in Petersburg!”
Mr. Wootton is infinitely distressed. “Oh, indeed I didn’t mean anything of that sort.”
“You did mean everything of that sort,” murmurs his hostess.
“But, you see, he admired her very much, was constantly with her, and yesterday I saw they didn’t speak to each other, so I was curious to know what could be the reason.”
“I believe she didn’t recognize him.”
Mr. Wootton smiles. “Oh, ladies have such prodigious powers of oblivion — and remembrance!”
“Yes,” observes Usk, with complacency: “the storms of memory sometimes sink into them as if they were sponges, and sometimes glide off them as if they were ducks. It is just as they find it convenient. But Madame Sabaroff can’t have been more than a child when Gervase was in Russia.”
Mr. Wootton smiles again significantly. “She was married.”
“To a brute!” cries Dorothy Usk.
“All husbands,” says Lord Usk, with a chuckle, “are brutes, and all wives are angels. C’est imprimé!”
“I hope no one will ever call me an angel! I should know at once that I was a bore!”
“No danger, my lady: you’ve no wings on your shoulders, and you’ve salt on your tongue.”
“I’m sure you mean to be odiously rude, but to my taste it’s a great compliment.”
“My dear Alan,” says Dorothy Usk, having got him at a disadvantage in her boudoir one-quarter of an hour after luncheon, “what has there been between you and the Princess Sabaroff? Everybody feels there is something. It is in the air. Indeed, everybody is talking about it. Pray tell me. I am dying to know.”
Gervase is silent.
“Everybody in the house is sure of it,” continues his hostess. “They don’t say so, of course, but they think so. Nina Curzon, who is mauvaise langue, pretends even that she knows all the circumstances; and it would seem that they are not very nice circumstances. I really cannot consent to go on in the dark any longer.”
“Ask the lady,” replies Gervase, stiffly.
“I certainly shall do nothing so ill-bred. You are a man, you are a relation of mine, and I can say things to you I couldn’t possibly say to a stranger, which Madame Sabaroff is quite to me. If you won’t answer, I shall only suppose that you paid court to her and were ‘spun,’ as the boys say at the examinations.”
“Not at all,” says Gervase, haughtily.
“Then tell me the story.”
He hesitates. “I don’t know whether you will think very well
of me if I tell you the truth.”
“That you may be sure I shall not. No man ever behaves well where women are in the question.”
“My dear Dolly, what unkind exaggeration! If I tell you anything, you will be sure not to repeat what I say? Madame Sabaroff considers me a stranger to her: I am bound to accept her decision on such a point.”
“You knew her in Russia?”
“Yes; when I was there she was the new beauty at the court. She had been married a year or less to Paul Sabaroff. I had the honor of her friendship at that time; if she withdraws it now I must acquiesce.”
“Oh!”
Lady Usk gives a little sound between a snort and a sigh.
She is annoyed. The gossipers are right, then. She is sorry the children have been so much with their friend, and she is infuriated at the idea of her husband’s triumph over her credulity.
“Oh, pray don’t think — don’t think for a moment — —” murmurs Gervase; but his cousin understands that it is the conventional compulsory expostulation which every man who is well-bred is bound to make on such subjects.
“She must have been very young then?” she says, beating impatiently on her blotting-book with her gold pen.
“Very young; but such a husband as Paul Sabaroff made is — well, a more than liberal education to any woman, however young. She was sixteen, I think, and very lovely; though she is perhaps handsomer now. I had the honor of her confidence: she was unhappy and incomprise; her father had given her hand in discharge of a debt at cards; Sabaroff was a gambler and a brute; at the end of the second winter season he had a violent fit of jealousy, and sent her to his estate on the White Sea — —”
“Jealousy of you?”
Gervase bowed.
“Where she was kept in a state of surveillance scarcely better than absolute imprisonment. I did all manner of crazy and romantic things to endeavor to see her; and once or twice I succeeded; but he had discovered letters of mine, and made her captivity more rigorous than ever. I myself was ordered on the special mission to Spain, — you remember, — and I left Russia with a broken heart. From that time to this I have never seen her.”