"I plead guilty to having offended her Grace Sophia," says Brandolin, "but I conclude that Lady Usk's guests are not all like that most admirable lady."
The Babe and his sisters laugh with much irreverent enjoyment; her Grace is not more appreciated by her grandchildren than she was by Ireland.
"If I had known you were going to be so kind as to remember us, I would have invited some of your friends," says his hostess, without coming to the rescue of her august mother's name. "I am so sorry; but there is nobody I think who will be very sympathetic to you. Besides, you know them all already."
"And is that fatal to sympathy? What a cruel suggestion, dear Lady Usk!"
"Sympathy is best new, like a glove. It fits best; you don't see any wrinkles in it for the first hour."
"What cynicism! Do you know that I am very fond of old gloves? But, then, I never was a dandy"
"Lord Brandolin will like Madame Sabaroff," says Dodo, a very éveillé young lady of thirteen.
"Fair prophetess, why? And who is Madame Sabaroff? A second O. K., a female Stepniak?"
"What are those?" says Dodo. "She is very handsome, and a princess in her own right."
"She gave me two Ukraine ponies and a real droschky," says the Babe.
"And Boom a Circassian mare, all white, and each of us a set of Siberian turquoises," says Lilie.
"Her virtues must be as many as her charms," says Brandolin.
"She is a lovely creature," adds Lady Usk, "but I don't think she is your style at all; you like fast women who make you laugh."
"My tastes are catholic where your adorable sex is in question," says Brandolin. "I am not sure that I do like fast women; they are painful to one's vanity; they flirt with everybody."
Lady Usk smiles. "The season before last, I recollect"
"Dearest lady, don't revert to pre-historic times. Nothing is so disagreeable as to think this year of what we liked last year."
"It was Lady Leamington last year!" cries the terrible Babe.
Brandolin topples him over on the grass and hoists him up on his own shoulders. "You precocious rascal! What will you be when you are twenty?"
"Babe's future is a thing of horror to contemplate," says his mother, smiling placidly.
"Who is Madame Sabaroff?" asks Brandolin, again, with a vague curiosity.
"A princess in her own right; a god-daughter of the Emperor's," says Dodo. "She is so handsome, and her jewelsyou never saw such jewels."
"Her father was Chancellor," adds her mother, "and her husband held some very high place at court, I forget what."
"Held? Is he disgraced, then, or dead?"
"Oh, dead: that is what is so nice for her," says Dodo.
"Heartless Dodo!" says Brandolin. "Then if I marry you four years hence I must kill myself to become endeared to you?"
"I should pity you indeed if you were to marry Dodo," says Dodo's mother. "She has not a grain of any human feeling, except for her dog."
Dodo laughs. She likes to be called heartless; she thinks it is chic and grown-up; she will weep over a lame puppy, a beaten horse, a dead bird, but she is "hard as nails to humans," as her brother Boom phrases it.
"Somebody will reign some day where the Skye reigns now over Dodo's soul. Happy somebody!" says Brandolin. "I shall be too old to be that somebody. Besides, Dodo will demand from fate an Adonis and a Cr[oe]sus in one!"
Dodo smiles, showing her pretty white teeth; she likes the banter and the flirtation with some of her father's friends. She feels quite old; in four years' time her mother will present her, and she means to marry directly after that.
"When does this Russian goddess who drops ponies and turquoises out of the clouds arrive here?" asks Brandolin, as he picks up his racquet to resume the game.
"She won't be here for three days," says Lady Usk.
"Then I fear I shall not see her."
"Oh, nonsense! You must stay all the month, at least."
"You are too good, but I have so many engagements."
"Engagements are made to be broken. I am sure George will not let you go."
"We won't let you go," cries the Babe, dragging him off to the nets, "and I'll drive you this afternoon, behind my ponies."
"I have gone through most perils that can confront a man, Babe, and I shall be equal even to that," says Brandolin.
He is a great favorite with the children at Surrenden, where he has always passed some weeks of most years ever since they can remember, or he either, for he was a godson and ward of the late Lord Usk, and always welcome there. His parents died in his infancy: even a long minority failed to make him a rich man. He has, however, as he had said, enough for his not extravagant desires, and is able to keep his old estate of St. Hubert's Lea, in Warwickshire, unembarrassed. His chief pleasure has been travelling and sailing, and he has travelled and sailed wherever a horse or a dromedary, a schooner or a canoe, can penetrate. He has told some of his travels in books so admirably written that, mirabile dictu! they please both learned people and lazy people. They have earned him a reputation beyond the drawing-rooms and clubs of his own fashionable acquaintances. He has even considerable learning himself, although he carries it so lightly that few people suspect it. He has had a great many passions in his life, but they have none of them made any very profound impression on him. When any one of them has grown tiresome or seemed likely to enchain him more than he thought desirable, he has always gone to Central Asia or the South Pole. The butterflies which he has broken on his wheel have, however, been of that order which is not crushed by abandonment, but mends itself easily and soars to new spheres. He is incapable of harshness to either man or woman, and his character has a warmth, a gayety, and a sincerity in it which endear him inexpressibly to all his friends. His friendships have hitherto been deeper and more enduring than his amours. He is, on the whole, happy,as happy as any thinking being can be in this world of anomalies and purposeless pains.
"But then you always digest all you eat," Usk remarks to him, enviously.
"Put it the other way and be nearer the point," says Brandolin. "I always eat what I can digest, and I always leave off with an appetite."
"I should be content if I could begin with one," says Usk.
Brandolin is indeed singularly abstemious in the pleasures of the table, to which the good condition of his nerves and constitution may no doubt be attributed. "I have found that eating is an almost entirely unnecessary indulgence," he says in one of his books. "If an Arab can ride, fight, kill lions, and slay Frenchmen on a mere handful of pulse or of rice, why cannot we live on it too?" Whereat Usk wrote once on the margin of the volume, in pencil, "Why should we?"
The author, seeing this one day, wrote also on the margin, "For the best of all reasons: to do away with dyspepsia and with doctors, who keep their carriages on our indigestion and make fifty thousand a year each out of it."
Usk allowed that the reason was excellent; but then the renunciation involved was too enormous.
CHAPTER III
Let it not for an instant be supposed that the guests of Surrenden are people looked in the least coldly or shyly on by society. Not they. They go to drawing-rooms, which means nothing; they are invited to state balls and state concerts, which means much. They are among the most eminent leaders of that world of fashion which has of late revolutionized taste, temper, and society in England. Mrs. Wentworth Curzon sails a little near the wind, perhaps because she is careless, and now and then Lady Dawlish has been "talked about," because she has a vast number of debts and a lord who occasionally makes scenes; but, with these exceptions, all these ladies are as safe on their pedestals as if they were marble statues of chastity. That their tastes are studied and their men asked to meet them everywhere is only a matter of delicate attention, like the bouquets which the housekeeper sets out in their bedrooms and the new novels which are laid on their writing-tables.
"I like my house to be pleasant," says Dorothy Usk, and she does not look any further than that: as for people's affairs, she is not supposed to know anything about them. She knows well enough that Iona would not come to her unless she had asked the Marquise de Caillac, and she is fully aware that Lawrence Hamilton would never bestow the cachet of his illustrious presence on Surrenden unless Mrs. Wentworth Curzon brought thither her fourgons, her maids, her collie dog, her famous emeralds, and her no less famous fans. Of course she knows that, but she is not supposed to know it. Nobody except her husband would be so ill-bred as to suggest that she did know it; and if any of her people should ever by any mischance forget their tact and stumble into the newspapers, or become notorious by any other accident, she will drop them, and nobody will be more surprised at the discovery of their naughtiness than herself. Yet she is a kind woman, a virtuous woman, a very warm friend, and not more insincere in her friendships than any one else; she is only a hostess of the last lustre of the nineteenth century, a woman who knows her London and follows it in all its amazing and illimitable condonations as in its eccentric and exceptional severities.
The guests are numerous; they might even he said to be miscellaneous, were it not that they all belonged to the same set. There is Dick Wootton, who believes himself destined to play in the last years of the nineteenth century the part played by Charles Greville in the earlier. There is Lord Vanstone, an agreeable, eccentric, unsatisfactory valetudinarian, who ought to have done great things with his life, but has always been too indolent and had too bad health to carry out his friends' very large expectations of him. There is the young Duke of Whitby, good-natured and foolish, with a simple pleasant face and a very shy manner. "If I had that ass's opportunities I'd make the world spin," says Wriothesley Ormond, who is a very poor and very witty member of Parliament, and also, which he values more, the most popular member of the Marlborough. There is Lord Iona, very handsome, very silent, very much sought after and spoilt by women. There is Hugo Mountjoy, a pretty young fellow in the Guards, with a big fortune and vague ideas that he ought to "do something;" he is not sure what. There is Lawrence Hamilton, who, as far as is possible in an age when men are clothed, but do not dress, gives the law to St. James Street in matters of male toilet. There is Sir Adolphus Beaumanoir, an ex-diplomatist, admirably preserved, charmingly loquacious, and an unconscionable flirt, though he is seventy. Each of these happy or unhappy beings has the lady invited to meet him in whom his affections are supposed to be centred, for the time being, in those tacit but potent relations which form so large a portion of men's and women's lives in these days. It is this condonance on the part of his wife which George Usk so entirely denounces, although he would be very much astonished and very much annoyed if she made any kind of objections to inviting Dulcia Waverley. Happily, there is no Act of Parliament to compel any of us to be consistent, or where would anybody be?
Lady Dolgelly, much older than himself, and with a taille de couturière, as all her intimate friends delight to reveal, is supposed to be indispensable to the existence of His Grace of Whitby; Lady Leamington is not less necessary to the happiness of Wriothesley Ormond. Mr. Wootton would be supposed incapable of cutting a single joke or telling a single good story unless his spirits were sustained by the presence of Mrs. Faversham, the prettiest brunette in the universe, for whom Worth is supposed to make marvellous combinations of rose and gold, of amber and violet, of deep orange and black, and of a wondrous yellow like that of the daffodil, which no one dares to wear but herself. Mrs. Wentworth Curzon is the momentary goddess of Lawrence Hamilton; and Lord Iona, as far as he has ever opened his handsome mouth to say anything "serious," has sworn himself the slave of Madame de Caillac. Sir Adolphus has spread the ægis of his semi-paternal affection over the light little head of that extravagant little beauty, Lady Dawlish; whilst Hugo Mountjoy is similarly protected by the prescient wisdom and the rare experience of his kindest of friends, Lady Arthur Audley.
Sir Hugo and several other gilded youths there present are all exact patterns of one another, the typical young Englishman of the last years of this curious century; the masher pure and simple; close-shaven, close-cropped, faultlessly clothed, small of person, small of features, stiff, pale, insignificant, polite, supercilious, indifferent; occasionally amusing, but never by any chance original; much concerned as to health, climate, and their own nerves; often talking of their physicians, and flitting southward before cold weather like swallows, though they have nothing whatever definite the matter with them.
These young men are all convinced that England is on the brink of ruin, and they talk of it in the same tone with which they say that their cigarette is out, or the wind is in the east. The Throne, the Church, the Lords, and the Thirty-Nine Articles are all going down pell-mell next week, and it is very shocking; nevertheless, there is no reason why they should not be studious of their digestions and very anxious about the parting of their hair.
It never occurs to them that they and their father's battue-shooting, pigeon-shooting, absenteeism, clubism, and general preference for every country except their own, may have had something to do with bringing about this impending cataclysm. That all the grand old houses standing empty, or let to strangers, among the rich Herefordshire pastures, the green Warwickshire woods, the red Devon uplands, the wild Westmoreland fells, may have also something to do with it, never occurs to them. That while they are flirting at Aix, wintering at Pau, throwing comfits at Rome, losing on the red at Monaco, touring in California, or yawning in Berlin, the demagogue's agents are whispering to the smock-frocks in the meadows, and pouring the gall of greed and hatred into the amber ale of the village pothouse, never occurs to them. If any one suggests it, they stare: "such a beastly climate, you know; nobody can stand it. Live in the country? Oh, Lord! who could live in the country?"
And then they wonder that Mr. George has replaced Sir Roger de Coverley, and that Joseph Chamberlain's voice is heard instead of Edmund Burke's.
Their host could kick them with a sensation of considerable satisfaction. Their neatness, smallness, and self-complacency irritate him excessively. The bloods of George the Fourth's time at least were men,so he says.
"You do these poor boys injustice," says Brandolin. "When they get out in a desert, or are left to roast and die under the equator, they put off all their affectations with their starched cambric, and are not altogether unworthy of their great-grandfathers. Britons are still bad ones to beat when the trial comes."
"They must leave their constitutions at their clubs, then, and their nervous system in their hat-boxes," growls Usk. "If you are like those namby-pamby fellows when you are twenty, Boom, I'll put a bullet through your head myself," he says to his heir one morning, when that good-looking and high-spirited boy has come back from Suffolk.
Boom laughs. He is a careless, high-spirited, extravagant lad, and he does not at present lean towards the masher type. Gordon is in his head; that is his idea of a man. The country had one hero in this century, and betrayed him, and honors his betrayer; but the hearts of the boys beat truer than that of the House of Commons and the New Electorate. They remember Gordon, with a noble, headlong, quixotic wish to go and do likewise. That one lonely figure standing out against the yellow light of the desert may perhaps be as a pharos to the youth of his nation, and save them from the shipwreck which is nigh.