"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."

"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.

"Absurd that I should have an ideal at all at my age!" he thinks to himself; but, as there are some who are never accompanied by that ethereal attendant even in youth, so there are some whom it never leaves till they reach their graves.

Therefore when he hears these vague, floating, disagreeable jests, he suffers acutely, and finds himself in the position which is perhaps most painful of all to any man who is a gentleman, that of being compelled to sit silent and hear a woman he longs to protect lightly spoken of, because he has no right to defend her, and would indeed only compromise her more if he attempted her defence.

People do not venture to say much before Usk, because he is her host and might resent it, but nevertheless he too hears also something, and thinks to himself, "Didn't I tell Dolly foreigners are never any better than they should be?"

But Dulcia Waverley is here, and her languid and touching ways, her delicate health, and her soft sympathies have an indescribable sorcery for him at all times, so that he thinks but very little since her arrival of anything else. Usk likes women who believe devoutly that he might have been a great politician if he had chosen, and who also believe in his ruined digestion: no one affects both these beliefs so intensely as Lady Waverley, and when she tells him that he could have solved the Irish question in half an hour had he taken office, or that no one could understand his constitution except a German doctor in a bath in the Böhmerwald, whither she goes herself every autumn, she does, altogether and absolutely, anything she chooses with him.

His wife sees that quite well, and dislikes it, but it might be so much worse, she reflects: it might be a woman out of society, or a public singer, or an American adventuress: so she is reasonable, and always makes bonne mine to Dulcia Waverley, with her nerves, her cures, and her angelic smiles. After all, it does not much matter, she thinks, if they like to go and drink nasty waters together and poison themselves with sulphur, iron, and potassium. It is one of the odd nineteenth-century ways of playing Antony and Cleopatra.

Notwithstanding the absorption of his thoughts, Usk, however, one day spares a moment from Lady Waverley and his own liver, to put together words dropped by different people then under his own roof, to ponder upon them, and finally to interrogate his wife.

"Did you know that people say they used to carry on together?" he asks, without preamble.

"Who?" asks the lady of Surrenden, sharply.

"Madame Sabaroff and Gervase," he growls. "It'd be odd if they hadn't, as they've come to this house!"

"Of course I knew they were friends; but there was never anything between them in the vulgar sense which you would imply renders them eligible for my house," replies Dorothy Usk, with the severity of a woman whose conscience is clear, and the tranquillity of a woman who is telling a falsehood.

Usk stares at her. "Well, if you knew it, you rode a dark horse, then, when you asked her here?"

"Your expressions are incoherent," returns his wife. "If I wished two people to meet when both were free, who had had a certain sympathy for each other when honor kept them apart, there is nothing very culpable in it? What is your objection?"

"Oh, Lord, I've no objection: I don't care a straw," says her lord, with a very moody expression. "But Brandolin will, I suspect: she's certainly encouraged him. I think you might have shown us your cards."

"Lord Brandolin is certainly old enough to take care of himself in affairs of the heart, and experienced enough, too, if one is to believe all one hears," replies his wife. "What can he care, either, for a person he has known a few days? Whereas the attachment of Gervase to her is of very long date and most romantic origin. He has loved her hopelessly for eight years."

Usk gives a grim guffaw. "The constancy has had many interludes, I suspect! Now I see why you took such a craze for the lady; but you might have said what you were after to me, at any rate. I could have hinted to Brandolin how the land lay, and he wouldn't have walked with his eyes shut into her net."

"Her 'net'? She is as cold as ice to him!" replies his wife, with disgust; "and, were she otherwise, the loves of your friend are soon consoled. He writes a letter, takes a voyage, and throws his memories overboard. Alan's temperament is far more serious."

"If by serious you mean selfish, I agree with you. There isn't such another d–d egotist anywhere under the sun." And, much out of temper, Usk flings himself out of the room and goes to Lady Waverley, who is lying on a sofa in the small library. She has a headache, but her smile is sweet, her hand cool, her atmosphere soothing and delightful, with the blinds down and an odor of attar of roses.

If any one were to tell Dolly Usk that she had been making up fibs on this occasion, she would be mortally offended and surprised. She would reply that she had only been brodant un peu,—putting the thing as it ought to be put, as it must be put, if Gervase is to obtain the hand of Xenia Sabaroff, and if nobody is to know anything which ought not to be known. Indeed, she has pondered so much on this manner of putting it, that she has almost ended in believing that her version of the story is the true one.

"Brandolin's feelings, indeed!" she thinks, with great contempt. "As if any pain he might feel, if he did feel any, would not be due and fitting retribution upon him for the horrid life he has led, and the way he has played fast and loose with women. He can go back to his Hindoos, whose figures are so superior to any European's! But George is always so absurd about his friends."

Whereon, being in an irritated and unkind mood, she desires the servant, who just then announces the visit of the rector of the parish, to show that reverend person into the small library, where she knows that Dulcia Waverley is trying to get rid of her headache. It is very seldom that she is unwise enough to indulge in this kind of domestic vengeance; but at this moment it seems sweet to her.