by Ouida
The lady from Deutschland was always known to them by this endearing epithet.
“I don’t care,” says Lilie, kicking her bronze boots in the air. “Do you think she’ll marry Lord Brandolin?”
“Who? Goggles?”
“The idea!” They laugh deliciously.
“You say he’s in love with Xenia. If they’re in love they will marry,” says Lilie, pensively.
“No, they won’t: people who are in love never marry,” replies Dodo.
“What do they do, then?” inquires the younger sister.
“They marry somebody else, and ask the one they like to go and stay with them. It is much better,” she adds. “It is what I shall do.”
“Why is it better? It’s a roundabout way,” objects Lilie. “I shouldn’t care to marry at all,” she adds, “only one can’t ever be Mistress of the Robes if one doesn’t.”
“Oh, everybody marries, of course; only some muff it, and don’t get all they want by it,” replies the cynic Dodo.
“Et l’amour, Miladi Alexandra?” says the French governess, entering at that moment. “Où donc mettez-vous l’amour?”
“Nous ne sommes pas des bourgeoises,” returns Dodo, very haughtily.
The Babe, sitting astride on a chair, trying to mend his mechanical Punch, who screamed and beat his wife absolument comme la nature, as the French governess said, before he was broken, hears the discourse of his sisters and muses on it. He is very fond of Brandolin, and he adores his princess: he would like them to live together, and he would go and see them without his sisters, who tease him, and without Boom, who lords it over him. Into his busy and precocious little brain there enters the resolution to pousser la machine, as his governess would call it.
The Babe has a vast idea of his own resources in the way of speech and invention, and he has his mother’s tendencies to interfere with other people’s affairs, and is quite of an opinion that if he had the management of most things he should better them. He has broken his Parisian Punch in his endeavor to make it say more words than it could say, but this slight accident does not affect his own admiration and belief in his own powers, any more than to have brought a great and prosperous empire within measurable distance of civil war affects a statesman’s conviction that he is the only person who can rule that empire. The Babe, like Mr. Gladstone, is in his own eyes infallible. Like the astute diplomatist he is, he waits for a good opportunity; he is always where the ladies are, and his sharp little wits have been preternaturally quickened in that atmosphere of what the French call “l’odeur féminine.”
He has to wait some days for his occasion. The frank and friendly intercourse which existed at first between Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff is altered: they are never alone, and the pleasant discussions on poets and poetry, on philosophers and follies, in the gardens in the forenoon are discontinued, neither could very well say why, but the presence of Gervase chills and oppresses both of them and keeps them apart. She has the burden of memory, he the burden of suspicion; and suspicion is a thing so hateful and intolerable to the nature of Brandolin that it makes him miserable to feel himself guilty of it.
But one morning the Babe coaxes her out to go with him to his garden, — a floral republic, where a cabbage comes up cheek by jowl with a gloxinia, and plants are plucked up by the roots to see if they are growing aright. The Babe’s system of horticulture is to dig intently for ten minutes in all directions, to make himself very red in the face, and then to call Dick, Tom, or Harry, any under-gardener who may be near, and say, “Here, do it, will you?” Nevertheless, he retains the belief that he is the creator and cultivator of this his garden, as M. Grévy believes that he is the chief person in the French Republic; and he takes Madame Sabaroff to admire it.
“It would look better if it were a little more in order,” she permits herself to observe.
“Oh, that’s their fault,” says the Babe, just as M. Grévy would say of disorder in the Chambers, the Babe meaning Dick, Tom, or Harry, as the President would mean Clémenceau, Rochefort, or M. de Mun.
“My dear Babe, how exactly you are like the Head of a Department!” says Brandolin, who has followed them out of the house and comes up behind them. “According to the Head of a Department, it is never the head that is at fault, always the understrappers. May I inquire since when it has become the fashion to set sunflowers with their heads downward?”
“I wanted to see if the roots would turn after the sun,” says the Babe, and regards his explanation as triumphant.
“And they only die! How perverse of them! You would become a second Newton, if your destiny were not already cast, to dazzle the world by a blending of Beau Brummel and Sir Joseph Paxton.”
The Babe looks a little cross; he does not like to be laughed at before his princess. He has got his opportunity, but it vexes him; he has an impression that his companions will soon drift into forgetting both him and his garden. Since the approach of Brandolin the latter has said nothing.
The children’s gardens are in a rather wild and distant part of the grounds of Surrenden. It is noon; most people staying in the house are still in their own rooms; it is solitary, sunny, still; a thrush is singing in a jessamine thicket, there is no other sound except that of a gardener’s broom sweeping on the other side of the laurel hedge.
The Babe feels that it is now or never for his coup de maître.
He plucks a rose, the best one he has, and offers it to Madame Sabaroff, who accepts it gratefully, though it is considerably earwig-eaten, and puts it in her corsage.
The eyes of Brandolin follow it wistfully.
The Babe glances at them alternately from under his hair, then his small features assume an expression of cherubic innocence and unconsciousness. The most rusé little rogue in the whole kingdom, he knows how to make himself look like a perfect reproduction of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Artlessness or Infancy. He gazes up in Xenia Sabaroff’s face with angelic simplicity admirably assumed.
“When you marry him,” says the Babe, pointing to Brandolin, with admirably affected naïveté, “you will let me hold up your train, won’t you? I always hold up my friends’ trains when they marry. I have a page’s dress, Louis something or other, and a sword, and a velvet cap with a badge and a feather: I always look very well.”
“Oh, what an odious petit-maître you will be when you are a man, my dear Babe!” says Xenia Sabaroff.
She does not take any notice of his opening words, but a flush of color comes over her face and passes as quickly as it came.
“Petit-maître, — what is that?” says the Babe. “But you will let me, won’t you? And don’t marry him till the autumn, or even the winter, because the velvet makes me so hot when the day is hot, and the dress wouldn’t look nice made in thin things.”
“Could I only add my prayer to his,” murmurs Brandolin, “and hope that in the autumn — —”
Xenia Sabaroff looks at him with a strange gaze: it is penetrating, dreamy, wistful, inquiring.
“We jest as the child jests,” she says, abruptly, and walks onward.
“I do not jest,” says Brandolin.
The Babe glances at them under his thick eyelashes, and, being a fine mouche, only innocent in appearance, he runs off after a butterfly. He has not been brought up in a feminine atmosphere of poudre de riz and lait d’iris without learning discretion.
CHAPTER XIII.
“The Babe is a better courtier than gardener,” says Xenia Sabaroff, as she shakes a green aphis out of her rose: her tone is careless, but her voice is not quite under her command, and has a little tremor in it.
Brandolin looks at her with impassioned eyes: he has grown very pale.
“It is no jest with me,” he says, under his breath. “I would give you my life if you would take it?”
The last words have the accent of an interrogation, of an appeal.
“That is to say a great deal,” replies Xenia Sabaroff: she is startled, astonished, troubled; she was not expecting any suc
h entire avowal.
“Many men must have said as much to you who have more to recommend them than I. Say something to me: what will you say?”
She does not immediately reply; she looks on the ground, and absently traces patterns on the path with the end of her long walking-stick.
“Do you know,” she says, at last, after a silence which seems to him endless, “do you know that there are people who believe that I have been the délaissée of Lord Gervase? They do not phrase it so roughly, but that is what they say.”
Brandolin’s very lips are white, but his voice does not falter for one moment as he answers, “They will not say it in my hearing.”
“And, knowing that they say it, you would still offer me your name?”
“I do so.”
“And you would ask me nothing save what I choose to tell you?”
The sunny air seems to turn round with him for an instant: his brain grows dizzy; his heart contracts with a sickening pain; but in the next moment a great wave of strong and perfect faith in the woman he cares for lifts his soul up on it, as a sea-wave lifts a drowning man to land.
“You shall tell me nothing save what you choose,” he says, clearly and very tenderly. “I have perfect faith in you. Had I less than that, I would not ask you to be my wife.”
She looks at him with astonishment and with wondering admiration.
“Yet you know so little of me!” she murmurs, in amaze.
“I love you,” says Brandolin; then he kisses her hand with great reverence.
The tears which she had thought driven from her eyes forever, rise in them now.
“You are very noble,” she replies, and leaves her hand for an instant within his.
The Babe, who has been watching from behind a tuft of laurel, can control his impatience no longer, but comes out of his ambush and runs towards them, regardless of how undesired he may be.
“Dodo says that women never marry anybody they love,” he says, breathlessly; “but that is not true, is it, and you will let me carry your train?”
“Hush, my dear,” says Xenia Sabaroff, laying her hand on the child’s shoulder, while there is a sound in her voice which subdues to silence even the audacious spirit of the Babe.
“Give me time to think,” she says, in a low tone to Brandolin; and then, with her hand still on the little boy’s shoulder, she turns away from him and walks slowly towards the house.
The child walks silently and shyly beside her, his happy vanity troubled for once by the sense that he has made some mistake, and that there are some few things still in the universe which he does not quite entirely understand.
“You are not angry?” he asks her, at last, with a vague terror in his gay and impudent little soul.
“Angry with you?” says Xenia Sabaroff. “My dear child, no. I am perhaps angry with myself, — myself of many years ago.”
The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame Sabaroff, — nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.
Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. He is fully aware that he has done a rash, perhaps an utterly unwise, thing in putting his future into the hands of a woman of whom he knows so little, and has, perhaps, the right to suspect so much. Yet he does not repent.
He does not see her again before dinner. She does not come into the library at the tea-hour; there is a large dinner that night; county people are there, as well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid woman, wife of the Lord-Lieutenant, who thinks him the most absent-minded and unpleasant person she has ever known, and wonders how he has got his reputation as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even see Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the dinner, from the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and thinks what an idiotic thing the habits of society have made of human life.
When he is fairly at rare intervals goaded into speech, he utters paradoxes, and suggests views so startling that the wife of the Lord-Lieutenant is scandalized, and thinks the lunacy laws are defective if they cannot include and incarcerate him. She feels sure that the rumor about the Hindoo women at St. Hubert’s Lea is entirely true.
After dinner he is free to approach the lady of his thoughts, but he endeavors in vain to tell from her face what answer he will receive, what time and meditation may have done or undone for him. She avoids the interrogation of his eyes, and is surrounded by other men as usual.
The evening seems to him intolerably long and intolerably tedious. It is, however, for others very gay. There is an improvised dance, ending in an impromptu cotillion, and following on an act of a comic opera given with admirable spirit by Lady Dawlish, Mrs. Curzon, and some of the younger men. Every one is amused, but the hours seem very slow to him: Gervase scarcely leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his chivalrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no shadow of doubt to steal over him, feels the odious whispers he has heard and the outspoken words of Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, he realizes that it is possible, do what he may, that they may haunt him so all his life. A man may be always master of his acts, but scarcely always of his thoughts.
“But I will never ask her one syllable,” he thinks, “and I will marry her to-morrow if she chooses.”
But will she choose?
He is far from sure. He pleases her intelligence; he possesses her friendship; but whether he has the slightest power to touch her heart he does not know. If he loved her less than he does he would be more confident.
As the interminable hours wear away, and the noise and absurdities of the cotillion are at their height, she, who never dances anywhere, drops her fan, and he is before the others in restoring it to her. As she takes it, she says, in a low voice, “Be in the small library at eleven to-morrow.”
Soon after she leaves the ball-room altogether, and goes to her bedchamber.
Brandolin goes to his before the cotillion is over, but he sleeps very little. He longs for the morrow, and yet he dreads it. “Quand même,” he murmurs, as from his bed he sees the white dawn over the dark masses of the Surrenden woods. Tell him what she may, he thinks, he will give her his life if she will take it. He is madly in love, no doubt; but there is something nobler and purer than the madness of love, than the mere violent instincts of passion, in his loyalty to her. Before anything he cherishes the honor of his name and race, and he is willing, blindfold, to trust her with it.
That morning it seems to him as if the hours would never pass, though they are few until the clocks strike eleven. The house is still, almost every one is asleep, for the cotillion, successful as only unpremeditated things ever are, had lasted till the sun was high and the dew on the grass of the garden was dry.
With a thickly-beating heart, nervous and eager as though he were a boy of sixteen seeking his first love-tryst, he enters the small library far before the hour, and waits for her there, pacing to and fro the floor. The room is full of memories of her: here they have talked on rainy days and have strolled out on to the lawns on fine ones; there is the chair which she likes best, and there the volume she had taken down yesterday; could it be only ten days since standing here he had seen her first in the distance with the children? Only ten days! It seems to him ten years, ten centuries.
The morning is very still, a fine soft rain is falling, wet jessamine-flowers tap against the panes of the closed windows, a great apprehension seems to make his very heart stand still.
As the clock points to the hour she enters the room.
She is very pale, and wears a morning gown of white plush, which trails behind her in a silver shadow. He kisses her hands passionately, but she draws
them away.
“Wait a little,” she says, gently. “Wait till you know — whatever there is to know.”
“I want to know but one thing.”
She smiles a little sadly.
“Oh, you think so now because you are in love with me. But in time to come, when that is passed, you will not be so easily content. If” — she hesitates a moment— “if there is to be any community between our lives, you must be quite satisfied as to my past. It is your right to be so satisfied; and were you not so, some time or other we should both be wretched.”
His eyes flash with joy.
“Then — —” he begins breathlessly.
“Oh! how like a man that is!” she says, sadly. “To think but of the one thing, of the one present moment, and to be ready to give all the future in pawn for it! Wait to hear everything. And first of all I must tell you that Lord Gervase also last night asked me to marry him.”
“And you!”
“I shall not marry Lord Gervase. But I will not disguise from you that once I would have done so gladly, had I been free to do it.”
Brandolin is silent: he changes color.
“I bade him come here for my answer,” she continues. “He will be here in a few minutes. I wish you to remain in the large library, so that you may hear all that I say to him.”
“I cannot do that. I cannot play the part of eavesdropper.”
“You will play that part, or any other that I ask you, if you love me,” she says, with a touch of imperiousness.
“Do you not see,” she goes on, with more gentleness, “that if our lives are to be passed near each other (I do not say that they are, but you seem to wish it), you must first of all be convinced of the truth of all I tell you? If one doubt, one suspicion, remain, you will, in time, become unable to banish it. It would grow and grow until you were mastered by it. You believe in what I tell you now; but how long would you believe after marriage?”
“I want no proof: I only want your word. Nay, I do not even want that. I will ask you nothing. I swear that I will never ask you anything.”