Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “But it was Lustoff who shot Sabaroff in a duel about her?”

  “Not about her. Lustoff quarrelled with him about a gambling affair, not about her at all, though people have said so. Lord Baird — Gervase — was, I am certain, her first lover, and has been her only one, as yet.”

  Brandolin flings his book with some violence on the floor, gets up, and walks to the window. Mr. Wootton looks after him.

  “No one could blame her,” says Litroff, who is a good-natured man. “She was married when she was scarcely sixteen to a brute; she was immensely admired; she was alone in the midst of a society both loose and brilliant; Gervase laid siege to her sans trêve, and she was hardly more than a child.”

  “Where there is no principle early implanted,” begins Mr. Wootton ——

  But Litroff is not patient under preaching. “My dear sir,” he says, impatiently, “principle (of that kind) is more easily implanted in plain women than in handsomer ones. Madame Sabaroff is a proud woman, which comes to nearly the same thing as a high-principled one. She has lived like a saint since Sabaroff was shot, and if she take up matters with her early lover again it will only be, I imagine, this time, pour le bon motif. Anyhow, I don’t see why we should blame her for the past, when the present shows us such an admirable and edifying spectacle as miladi Waverley and miladi Usk going to sit in church with George Usk between them!”

  Whereon the Russian secretary takes a “Figaro” off the newspaper-table, and rudely opens it and flourishes it between Mr. Wootton and himself, in sign that the conversation is ended.

  Mr. Wootton has never been so treated in his life.

  CHAPTER XI.

  Brandolin walks down the opening between the glass doors into the garden. He paces impatiently the green shady walks where he has seen her on other mornings than this. It is lovely weather, and the innumerable roses fill the warm moist air with fragrance. There is a sea-breeze blowing from the sea-coast some thirty miles away; his schooner is in harbor there; he thinks that it would be wisest to go to it and sail away again for as many thousand miles as he has just left behind him. Xenia Sabaroff has a great and growing influence over him, and he does not wish her to exercise it and increase it if this thing be true: perhaps, after all, she may be that kind of sorceress of which Mary Stuart is the eternal type, — cold only that others may burn, reculant pour mieux sauter, exquisitely feminine only to be more dangerously powerful. He does not wish to play the rôle of Chastelard, or of Douglas, or of Henry Darnley. He is stung to the quick by what he has heard said.

  It is not new: since the arrival of Gervase the same thing has been hinted more or less clearly, more or less obscurely, within his hearing more than once; but the matter-of-fact words of Litroff have given the tale a kind of circumstantiality and substance which the vague uncertain suggestions of others did not do. Litroff has, obviously, no feeling against her; he even speaks of her with reluctance and admiration: therefore his testimony has a truthfulness about it which would be lacking in any mere malicious scandal.

  It is intensely painful to him to believe, or even to admit to himself as possible, that it may be thus true. She seems to him a very queen among women: all the romance of his temperament clothes her with ideal qualities. He walks on unconsciously till he has left the west garden and entered the wood which joins it, and the grassy seats made underneath the boughs. As he goes, his heart thrills, his pulse quickens: he sees Madame Sabaroff. She is seated on one of the turf banks, reading, the dog of the house at her feet. He has almost walked on to her before he has perceived her.

  “I beg your pardon,” he murmurs, and pauses, undecided whether to go or stay.

  She looks at him a little surprised at the ceremony of his manner.

  “For what do you beg my pardon? You are as free of the wood as I,” she replies, with a smile. “I promised the children to keep their dogs quiet, and to await them here as they return from their church.”

  “You are too good to the children,” says Brandolin, still with restraint. Her eyes open with increased surprise. She has never seen his manner, usually so easy, nonchalant, and unstudied, altered before.

  “He must have heard bad news,” she thinks, but says nothing, and keeps her book open.

  Brandolin stands near, silent and absorbed. He is musing what worlds he would give, if he had them, to know whether the story is true! He longs passionately to ask her in plain words, but it would be too brutal and too rude; he has not known her long enough to be able to presume to do so.

  He watches the sunshine fall through the larch boughs on to her hands in their long loose gloves and touch the pearls which she always wears at her throat.

  “How very much he is unlike himself!” she thinks; she misses his spontaneous and picturesque eloquence, his warm abandon of manner, his caressing deference of tone. At that moment there is a gleam of white between the trees, a sound of voices in the distance.

  The family party are returning from church. The dogs jump up and wag their tails and bark their welcome. The Babe is dashing on in advance. There is an end of their brief tête-à-tête; he passionately regrets the loss of it, though he is not sure of what he would have said in it.

  “Always together!” says Dulcia Waverley, in a whisper, to Usk, as she sees them. “Does he know that he succeeds Lord Gervase, do you think?”

  “How should I know?” says Usk; “and Dolly says there was nothing between her and Gervase, — nothing; at least it was all in honor, as the French say.”

  “Oh, of course,” agrees Lady Waverley, with her plaintive eyes gazing dreamily down the aisle of larch-trees. The children have run on to Madame Sabaroff.

  “Where is Alan?” thinks Dolly Usk, angrily, on seeing Brandolin.

  Gervase, who is not an early riser, is then taking his coffee in bed as twelve strikes. He detests an English Sunday: although at Surrenden it is disguised as much as possible to look like any other day, still there is a Sunday feeling in the air, and Usk does not like people to play cards on Sundays: it is his way of being virtuous vicariously.

  “Primitive Christianity,” says Brandolin, touching the white feathers of Dodo’s hat and the white lace on her short skirts.

  “We only go to sleep,” replies the child, disconsolately. “We might just as well go to sleep at home; and it is so hot in that pew, with all that red cloth!”

  “My love!” says Dulcia Waverley, scandalized.

  “Lady Waverley don’t go to sleep!” cries the Babe, in his terribly clear little voice. “She was writing in her hymn-book and showing it to papa.”

  No one appears to hear this indiscreet remark except Dodo, who laughs somewhat rudely.

  “I was trying to remember the hymn of Faber’s ‘Longing for God,’” says Lady Waverley, who is never known to be at a loss. “The last verse escapes me. Can any one recall it? It is so lamentable that sectarianism prevents those hymns from being used in Protestant churches.”

  But no one there present is religious enough or poetic enough to help her to the missing lines.

  “There is so little religious feeling anywhere in England,” she remarks, with a sigh.

  “It’s the confounded levelling that destroys it,” says Usk, echoing the sigh.

  “They speak of Faber,” says Madame Sabaroff. “The most beautiful and touching of all his verses are those which express the universal sorrow of the world.”

  And in her low, grave, melodious voice she repeats a few of the lines of the poem:

  “The sea, unmated creature, tired and lone, Makes on its desolate sands eternal moan. Lakes on the calmest days are ever throbbing Upon their pebbly shores with petulant sobbing.

  “The beasts of burden linger on their way Like slaves, who will not speak when they obey; Their eyes, whene’er their looks to us they raise, With something of reproachful patience gaze.

  “Labor itself is but a sorrowful song, The protest of the weak against the strong; Over rough waters, and in obstinate fields, And from dark mines,
the same sad sound it yields.”

  She is addressing Brandolin as she recites them; they are a little behind the others.

  He does not reply, but looks at her with an expression in his eyes which astonishes and troubles her. He is thinking, as the music of her tones stirs his innermost soul, that he can believe no evil of her, will believe none, — no, though the very angels of heaven were to cry out against her.

  CHAPTER XII.

  “Where were you all this morning?” asks Lady Usk of her cousin, after luncheon.

  “I never get up early,” returns Gervase. “You know that.”

  “Brandolin was in the home wood with Madame Sabaroff as we returned from church,” remarks Dolly Usk. “They were together under a larch-tree. They looked as if they were on the brink of a quarrel or at the end of one: either may be an interesting rapprochement.”

  “I dare say they were only discussing some poet. They are always discussing some poet.”

  “Then they had fallen out over the poet. Poets are dangerous themes. Or perhaps she had been showing him your letters, if, as you seem to think, she carries them about with her everywhere like a reliquary.”

  “I never presumed to imagine that she had preserved them for a day.”

  “Oh, yes, you did. You had a vision of her weeping over them in secret every night, until you saw her here and found her as unlike a délaissé as a woman can be.”

  “Certainly she does not look that. Possibly, if Dido could have been dressed by Worth and Rodrigues, had diamonds as big as plovers’ eggs, and been adored by Lord Brandolin, she would never have perished in despair. Autres temps autres m[oe]urs.”

  He speaks with sullen and scornful bitterness: his handsome face is momentarily flushed.

  Dorothy Usk looks at him with inquisitiveness: she has never known him fail to rely on his own attractions before. “You are unusually modest,” she replies. “Certainly, in our days, if Æneas does not come back, we take somebody else; sometimes we do that even if he does come back.”

  Gervase is moodily silent.

  “I never knew you ‘funk a fence’ before!” says his cousin to him, sarcastically.

  “I have tried to say something to her,” replies Gervase, moodily, “but she gives me no hearing, no occasion.”

  “I should have thought you were used well enough to make both for yourself,” returns his cousin, with curt sympathy. “You have always been ‘master of yourself, though women sigh,’ — a paraphrase of Pope at your service.”

  Gervase smiled, conscious of his past successes and willing to acknowledge them.

  “But you see she does not sigh!” he murmurs, with a sense that the admission is not flattering to his own amour-propre.

  “You have lost the power to make her sigh, do you mean?”

  “I make no impression on her at all. I am utterly unable to imagine her feelings, her sentiments, — how much she would acknowledge, how much she would ignore.”

  “That is a confession of great helplessness! I should never have believed that you would be baffled by any woman, above all by a woman who once loved you.”

  “It is not easy to make a fire out of ashes.”

  “Not if the ashes are quite cold, certainly; but if a spark remains in them, the fire soon comes again.”

  He is silent: the apparent indifference of a person whom he believed to be living out her life in solitude, occupied only with his memory, annoys and mortifies him. He has never doubted his own power to write his name indelibly on the hearts of women.

  “Perhaps she wishes to marry Brandolin?” suggests Dorothy Usk.

  “Pshaw!” says Lord Gervase.

  “Why pshaw?” repeats his cousin, persistently. “He would not be a man to my taste, and he hates marriage, and he has a set of Hindoos at St. Hubert’s Lea, which would require as much cleaning as the Augean stable; but I dare say she doesn’t know anything about them, and he may be persuading her that he thinks marriage opens the doors of Paradise: men can so easily pretend that sort of thing! A great many men have wanted to marry her, I believe, since she came back into the world after her seclusion. George declares that Brandolin is quite serious.”

  “Preposterous!” replies Lord Gervase.

  “Really, I don’t see that,” replies his judicious cousin. “A great many women have wanted to marry him, though one wonders why. Indeed, I have heard some of them declare that he is wholly irresistible when he chooses.”

  “With Hindoos, perhaps,” says Gervase.

  “With our own women,” says his cousin. “Lady Mary Jardine died of a broken heart because he wouldn’t look at her.”

  “Pray spare me the roll-call of his victims,” says Lord Gervase, irritably: he is passionately jealous of Brandolin. He himself had forgotten Xenia Sabaroff, and forgotten all his obligations to her, when she had been, as he always had believed, within reach of his hand if he stretched it out; but viewed as a woman whom other men wooed and another man might win, she has become to him intensely to be desired and to be disputed. He has been a spoiled child of fortune and of the drawing-rooms all his years, and the slightest opposition is intolerable to him.

  “I have no doubt,” continues Dorothy Usk, gently, continuing her embroidery of a South Kensington design of lilies and palm-leaves, “that if he were aware you had a prior claim, if he thought or knew that you had ever enjoyed her sympathy, he would immediately withdraw and leave the field: he is a very proud man, with all his carelessness, and would not, I think, care to be second to anybody in the affections of a woman whom he seriously sought.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Gervase, abruptly, pausing in his walk to and fro the boudoir.

  “Only what I say,” she answers. “If you wish to éloigner Brandolin, give him some idea of the truth.”

  Gervase laughs a little.

  “On my honor,” he thinks, with some bitterness, “for sheer uncompromising meanness there is nothing comparable to the suggestions which a woman will make to you!”

  “I couldn’t do that,” he says, aloud. “What would he think of me?”

  “My dear Alan,” replies Dorothy Usk, impatiently, getting her silks in a tangle, “when a man has behaved to any woman as you, by your own account, have behaved to Madame Sabaroff, I think it is a little late in the day to pretend to much elevation of feeling.”

  “You do not understand — —”

  “I have always found,” says his cousin, impatiently searching for shades of silk which she does not see, “that whenever we presume to pronounce an opinion on any man’s conduct and think ill of it we are always told that we don’t understand anything. When we flatter the man, or compliment him on his conduct, there is no end to the marvellous powers of our penetration, the fineness of our instincts, the accuracy of our intuitions.”

  Gervase does not hear: his thoughts are elsewhere: he is thinking of Xenia Sabaroff as he saw her first in the Salle des Palmiers in the Winter Palace, — a mere girl, a mere child, startled and made nervous by the admiration she excited and the homage she received, under the brutality of her husband, the raillery of her friends; but that time is long ago, very long, as the life of women counts, and Xenia Sabaroff is now perfect mistress of her own emotions, if emotions she ever feels. Gervase cannot for one moment tell whether the past is tenderly remembered by her, is utterly forgotten, or is only recalled to be touched and dismissed without regret. He is a vain man, but vanity has no power to reassure him here.

  In the warm afternoon of the next day the children are in the school-room, supposed to be preparing their lessons for the morrow; but the German governess, who is alone as guardian of order in the temple of intellect, has fallen asleep, with flies buzzing about her blonde hair, and her blue spectacles pushed up on her forehead, and Dodo has taken advantage of the fact to go and lean out of one of the windows, whilst her sister draws a caricature of the sleeping virgin from Deutschland, and the Babe slips away from his books to a mechanical Punch, which, contraband in the school-
room, is far dearer to him than his Gradus and rule of three.

  Dodo, with her hands thrust among her abundant locks, lolls with half her body in the air, and, by twisting her neck almost to dislocation, manages to see round an ivy-grown buttress of the east wall, and to espy people who are getting on their horses at the south doors of the building.

  “They are going out riding and I am shut up here!” she groans. “Oh, what a while it takes one to grow up!”

  “Who are going to ride?” asks Lilie, too fascinated by her drawing to leave it.

  “Lots of them,” replies Dodo, who speaks four languages, and her own worst of all. “All of them, pretty nearly. Mamma’s on Pepper, and Lady Waverley’s got Bopeep, — she’s always nervous, you know. I can’t see very much, ‘cause of the ivy. Oh, there’s the princess on Satan, — nobody else could ride Satan; Lord Brandolin’s put her up, and now he’s riding by her. They’re gone now, — and papa’s stopping behind them all to do something to Bopeep’s girths.” Whereat the dutiful Dodo laughs rudely, as she laughed coming home from church.

  The sound of the horses’ hoofs going farther away down the avenue comes through the stillness, as her voice and her laughter cease.

  “What a shame to be shut up here just because one isn’t old!” she groans, as she listens enviously. The sun is pouring liquid gold through the ivy-leaves, the air is hot and fragrant, gardeners are watering the flower-beds below, and the sweet, moist scent comes up to Dodo’s nostrils and makes her writhe with longing to get out; not that she is by any means ardently devoted to nature, but she loves life, movement, gayety, and she dearly loves showing off her figure on her pony and being flirted with by her father’s friends.

  “I am sure Lord Brandolin is in love with her, awfully in love,” she says, as she peers into the distance, where the black form of Satan is just visible through far-off oak-boughs.

  “With whom?” asks Lilie, getting up from her caricature to lean also out over the ivy.

  “Xenia,” says Dodo. She is very proud of calling her friend Xenia. “Take care Goggles don’t wake, or she’ll see what you’ve been doing.”