by Ouida
“But your broken heart has continued to do its daily work?”
“It is a figure of speech. I adored her, and the husband was a brute. When Lustoff shot him he only rid the world of a brute. You have seen that broad bracelet she wears above the right elbow? People always talk so about it. She wears it to hide where Sabaroff broke her arm one night in his violence: the marks of it are there forever.”
Lady Usk is silent: she is divided between her natural compassion and sympathy, which are very easily roused, and her irritation at discovering that her new favorite is what Usk would call “just like all the rest of them.”
“You perceive,” he added, “that, as the princess chooses wholly to ignore the past, it is not for me to recall it. I am obliged to accept her decision, however much I must suffer from it.”
“Suffer!” echoes his cousin. “After her husband’s death you never took the trouble to cross Europe to see her.”
“She had never answered my letters,” says Gervase, but he feels that the excuse is a frail one. And how, he thinks, angrily, should a good woman like his cousin, who has never flirted in her life and never done anything which might not have been printed in the daily papers, understand a man’s inevitable inconstancy?
“I assure you that I have never loved any woman as I loved her,” he continues.
“Then you are another proof, if one were wanted, that men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for — —”
“I did not die, certainly,” Gervase says, much irritated; “but I suffered greatly, whether you choose to believe it or not.”
“I am not inclined to believe it,” replies his hostess. “It is not your style.”
“I wrote to her a great many times.”
He pauses.
Lady Usk fills up the pause. “And she answered you?” she inquires.
“N-no,” replies Gervase, unwilling to confess such an affront to him. “She did not write. Prudence, I suppose; or perhaps she might be too closely watched, or her letters might be stopped: who can say?”
“Nobody but herself, clearly. Well?”
“I was sent to Madrid; and I heard nothing of her except that Sabaroff was shot in a duel about her with Lustoff; but that was two years afterwards.”
“And when he was shot why did you not in due course go to the White Sea, or wherever she was, and offer yourself?”
“The truth is, I had become acquainted with a Spanish lady — —”
“A great many Spanish ladies, no doubt! What a half-hearted Lothario!”
“Not at all. Only just at that time — —”
“Manillas, mandolines, balconies, bull-fights, high mass, and moonlight had the supremacy! My dear Alan, tell your story how you will, you can’t make yourself heroic.”
“I have not the smallest pretension to do so,” says Gervase, very much annoyed. “I have no heroism. I leave it to Lord Brandolin, who has been shipwrecked five hundred times, I believe, and ridden as many dromedaries over unknown sand-plains as Gordon — —”
“As you don’t care in the least for her, why should you care if his shipwrecks and his dromedaries interest her? We don’t know that they do; but — —”
“How little sympathy you have!”
“George says I have always a great deal too much. What do you want me to sympathize with? According to your own story, you ‘loved and rode away;’ at least, took a through-ticket across Europe, as Lovelace has to do in these prosaic days. If you did not go back to Russia when you might have gone back, à qui la faute? Nobody’s but your own and the nameless Spanish lady or ladies’!”
“You are very perverse.”
“It is you who are, or who were, perverse. According to your own story, you adored a woman when she was unattainable; when she became attainable you did not even take the trouble to get into a railway-carriage: you were otherwise amused. What romantic element is there in such a tale as yours to excite the smallest fragment of interest? To judge you out of your own mouth, you seem to me to have behaved with most uninteresting inconstancy.”
“It was four years, and she had never answered my letters.”
“Really a reason to make you esteem her infinitely more than if she had answered them. My dear Alan, you were a flirt, and you forgot as flirts forget: why should one pity you for being so easily consoled? You ought to be infinitely grateful that Madame Sabaroff did not send you reams of reproaches, and telegraph you compromising messages which would have got you into trouble in Downing Street. The thing died a natural death; you did not care to keep it alive: why are you now all lamentations over its grave? I really do not follow the course of your emotions, — if you feel any emotion: I thought you never did. Madame Sabaroff has never been a person difficult to follow or to find; the fashionable intelligence of the newspapers would at any time have enabled you to know where she was; you never had inclination or remembrance enough to make you curious to see her again, and then when you come across her in a country house you think yourself very ill used because she does not all at once fall into your arms. You couldn’t possibly care about her, since you never tried to see her all those years!”
Dorothy Usk is really annoyed.
She is not a person who has a high standard of humanity at any time, and she knows men thoroughly, and they have no chance of being heroes in her sight. But she likes a man to be a man, and to be an ardent lover if he be a lover at all, and her favorite cousin seems to her to wear a poor aspect in this page of his autobiography.
“Pray, did you know that she is as rich as she is?” she asks, with some sharpness in her tone.
Gervase colors a little, being conscious that his response cannot increase his cousin’s sympathies with him.
“No. Is she rich? Paul Sabaroff was poor. He had gambled away nearly everything. Your children have a great deal of blague about her riches; but I suppose it is all nonsense.”
“Not nonsense at all. Two years ago some silver was discovered on a bit of rough land which belonged to her, somewhere beyond the Urals, I think, and she is enormously rich, — will be richer every year, they say.”
“Indeed!”
He tries to look indifferent, but his cousin’s penetrating eyes seem to him to be reading his very soul.
“How dreadfully sorry he must be that he didn’t leave Madrid!” she thinks, and aloud says, irritably, “Why on earth didn’t you try to renew things with her all these three years?”
“I imagined that I had forgotten her.”
“Well, so you had, — completely forgotten her, till you saw her here.”
“On my honor, she is the only woman I have ever really loved.”
“Oh, men always say that of somebody or another, generally of the most impossible people. George always declares that the only woman he ever really loved was a pastry-cook when he was at Christ-church.”
“Dear Dorothy, don’t joke. I assure you I am thoroughly in earnest.”
“She certainly has forgotten you.”
She knows that for him to be convinced of this is the surest way to revive a died-out passion.
“Who knows? She would be indifferent in that case, and polite: as it is, she is cold, even rude.”
“That may be resentment.”
“Resentment means remembrance.”
“Oh, not always.”
“Then she has a number of my letters.”
“So you said; you cannot be so very sure she has kept them. Other people may have written her the same sort of letters, or more admirable letters still: how can you tell?”
He colors angrily. “She is not a femme légère.”
“She is receiving a great deal of attention now from Lord Brandolin, and she does not seem to dislike it. They say he writes exquisite letters to women he is fond of; I don’t know myself, because I have never had anything more interesting from him than notes about dinners or visits; but they say so. They even say that his deserted ladies forgive his desertions because he writes his farewells so
divinely.”
“Lord Brandolin’s epistolary accomplishments do not interest me in the least. Everybody knows what he is with women.” He pauses a moment, then adds, with some hesitation, —
“Dear Dorothy, you know her very well. Don’t you think you could find out for me, and tell me — —”
“What?”
“Well, what she thinks or does not think; in a word, how I stand with her.”
“No, — oh, no, my dear Alan; I couldn’t attempt anything of that sort, — in my own house, too: it would seem so horribly rude. Besides, I am not in the least — not the very least — intimate with her. I think her charming, we are bonnes connaiassances, the children adore her; but I have never said anything intimate to her in my life, — never.”
“But you have so much tact.”
“The more tact I have, the less likely shall I be to recall to her what she is evidently perfectly determined to ignore. You can do it yourself if you want it done. You are not usually shy.”
Gervase gets up impatiently, and walks about in the narrow limits of the boudoir, to the peril of the Sèvres and Saxe.
“But women have a hundred indirect ways of finding out everything: you might discover perfectly well, if you chose, whether — whether she feels anger or any other sentiment; whether — whether, in a word, it would be prudent to recall the past to her.”
Lady Usk shakes her head with energy, stirring all its pretty blonde curls, real and false. “Entre l’arbre et l’écorce ne mettez pas le doigt. That is sound advice which I have heard given at the Français.”
“That is said of not interfering between married people.”
“It is generally true of people who wish, or may not wish, to marry. And I suppose, Alan, that when you speak in my house of renewing your — your — relations with the Princess Sabaroff, you do not mean that you have any object less serious than le bon motif?”
Gervase is amused, although he is disconcerted and irritated.
“Come, Dorothy, your guests are not always so very serious, are they? I never knew you so prim before.”
Then she in turn feels angry. She always steadily adheres to the convenient fiction that she knows nothing whatever of the amorous filaments which bind her guests together in pairs, as turtle-doves might be tied together by blue ribbons.
“If you only desire to reawake the sentiments of Madame Sabaroff in your favor that you may again make sport of them, you must excuse me if I say that I cannot assist your efforts, and that I sincerely hope they will not be successful,” she says, with dignity and distance.
“Do you suppose his are any better than mine?” asks Gervase, irritably, as he waves his hand towards the window which looks on the west gardens. Between the yew- and cedar-trees, at some distance from the house, Brandolin is walking beside Xenia Sabaroff: his manner is interested and deferential; she moves with slow and graceful steps down the grassy paths, listening with apparent willingness, her head is uncovered, she carries a large sunshade opened over it made of white lace and pale-rose silk, she has a cluster of Duchess of Sutherland roses in her hand. They are really only speaking of recent French poets, but those who look at them cannot divine that.
“He is not my cousin, and he does not solicit my assistance,” says Dorothy Usk, seeing the figures in her garden with some displeasure. “Je ne fais pas la police pour les autres; but if he asked me what you asked me, I should give him the same answer that I give to you.”
“He is probably independent of any assistance,” says Gervase, with irritable irony.
“Probably,” says his hostess, who is very skilful at fanning faint flame. “He is not a man whom I like myself, but many women — most women, I believe — think him irresistible.”
Thereon she leaves him, without any more sympathy or solace, to go and receive some county people who have come to call, and who converse principally about prize poultry.
“Comme elles sont assommées avec leurs poules!” says the Marquise de Caillac, who chances to be present at this infliction, and gazes in stupefaction at a dowager duchess who has driven over from twenty miles off, who wears very thick boots, her own thin gray hair, water-proof tweed clothing, and a hat tied under her double chin with black strings. “Un paquet!” murmurs Madame de Caillac; “un véritable paquet!”
“C’est la vertu anglaise, un peu démodée,” says Lord Iona, with a yawn.
Gervase stays on as well as Brandolin, somewhat bored, very much énervé, but fascinated, too, by the presence of his Russian Ariadne, and stung by the sight of Brandolin’s attentions to her into such a strong sense of revived passion that he means what he says when he declares to his cousin that the wife of Sabaroff was the only woman he has ever really loved. Her manner to him also, not cold enough to be complimentary, but entirely indifferent, never troubled, never moved in any way by his vicinity or by his direct allusions to the past, is such as irritates, piques, attracts, and magnetizes him. It seems to him incredible that any woman can ignore him so utterly. If she only seemed afraid of him, agitated in any way, even adversely, he could understand what was passing in her mind; but he cannot even flatter himself that she does this: she treats him with just such perfect indifference as she shows to the Duke of Queenstown or Hugo Mandeville or any one of the gilded youths there present. If he could once see a wistful memory in her glance, once see a flush of color on her face at his approach, it is probable that his vanity would be satisfied and his interest cease as quickly as it has revived; but he never does see anything of this sort, and, by the rule of contradiction, his desire to see it increases. And he wonders uneasily what she has done with his letters.
CHAPTER X.
Lord Gervase was eight years younger when he wrote those letters than he is now, and he has unpleasant recollections of unpleasant passages in them which would compromise him in his career, or at least get him horribly talked about, were they ever made sport of in the world. Where are his letters? Has Madame Sabaroff kept them? He longs to ask her, but he dare not.
He does not say to his cousin that he has more than once endeavored to hint to Xenia Sabaroff that it would be sweet to him to recall the past, would she permit it. But he has elicited no response. She has evaded without directly avoiding him. She is no longer the impressionable shy girl whom he knew in Russia, weighted with an unhappy fate, and rather alarmed by the very successes of her own beauty than flattered by them. She is a woman of the world, who knows her own value and her own power to charm, and has acquired the talent which the world teaches, of reading the minds of others without revealing her own. Saule pleureur! the Petersburg court ladies had used to call her in those early times when the tears had started to her eyes so quickly; but no one ever sees tears in her eyes now.
Gervase is profoundly troubled to find how much genuine emotion the presence of a woman whose existence he had long forgotten has power to excite in him. He does not like emotion of any kind; and in all his affairs of the heart he is accustomed to make others suffer, not himself. Vanity and wounded vanity enter so largely into the influences moulding human life, that it is very possible, if the sight of him had had power to disturb her, the renewal of association with her would have left him unmoved. But, as it is, he has been piqued, mortified, excited, ad attracted; and the admiration which Brandolin and Lawrence Hamilton and other men plainly show of her is the sharpest spur to memory and to desire.
Whenever he has remembered Xenia Sabaroff, at such rare times as he has heard her name mentioned in the world, he has thought of her complacently as dwelling in the solitudes of Baltic forests, entirely devoted to his memory. Women who are entirely devoted to their memory men seldom trouble themselves to seek out; but to see her courted, sought, and desired, more handsome than ever, and apparently wholly indifferent to himself, is a shock to his self-esteem, and galvanism to his dead wishes and slumbering recollections. He begins to perceive that he would have done better not to forget her quite so quickly.
Meanwhile, all the guests at
Surrenden, guided by a hint from Nina Curzon, begin to see a quantity of things which do not exist, and to exert their minds in endeavoring to remember a vast deal which they never heard with regard to both himself and her. No one knows anything or has a shadow of fact to go on, but this is an insignificant detail which does not tie their tongues in the least. Nina Curzon has invention enough to supply any lacunæ, and in this instance her imagination is stimulated by a double jealousy: she is jealous of Lawrence Hamilton, whom she is inclined to dismiss, and she is jealous of Brandolin, whom she is inclined to appropriate.
Twenty-four hours have not elapsed since the arrival of Gervase, before she has given a dozen people the intimate conviction that she knows all about him and the Princess Sabaroff, and that there is something very dreadful in it, — much worse than in the usual history of such relations. Everything is possible in Russia, she says, and has a way of saying this which suggests unfathomable abysses of license and crime.
No one has the slightest idea what she means, but no one will be behind any other in conjecturing; and there rises about the unconscious figure of Xenia Sabaroff a haze of vague suggested indistinct suspicion, like the smoke of the blue fires which hide the form of the Evil One on the stage in operas. Brandolin perceives it, and is deeply irritated.
“What is it to me?” he says to himself, but says so in vain.
Fragments of these ingenious conjectures and imaginary recollections come to his ear and annoy him intensely, — annoy him the more because his swift intuitions and unerring perceptions have told him from his own observation that Xenia Sabaroff does not see in Gervase altogether a stranger, though she has greeted him as such. Certain things are said which he would like to resent, but he is powerless to do so.
His days have been delightful to him before the arrival of this other man at Surrenden; now they are troubled and embittered. Yet he is not inclined to break off his visit abruptly and go to Scotland, Germany, or Norway, as might be wisest. He is in love with Xenia Sabaroff in a manner which surprises himself. He thought he had outlived that sort of boyish and imaginative passion. But she has a great power over his fancy and his senses, and she is more like his earliest ideal of a woman than any one he has ever met.