A House-Party, Don Gesualdo, and A Rainy June

"I dare say he'll be a navvy in New Guinea by that time, and all his acres here will be being let out by the state at a rack-rent which the people will call free land," says the father, with a groan.

"Very possible, too," replies Brandolin.

The boy's eyes go thoughtfully towards the landscape beyond the windows, the beautiful lawns, the smiling gardens, the rolling woods. A look of resolution comes over his fair frank face.

"They shan't take our lands without a fight for it," he says, with a flush on his cheeks.

"And the fight will be a fierce one," says Brandolin, with a sigh, "and I am afraid it is in Mr. Gladstone's 'dim and distant future,'—that is to say, very near at hand indeed."

"Well, I shall be ready," says the lad. Both his father and Brandolin are silent, vaguely touched by the look of the gallant and gracious boy, as he stands there with the sun in his brave blue eyes, and thinking of the troubled time which will await his manhood in this green old England, cursed by the spume of wordy demagogues, and hounded on to envenomed hatreds and causeless discontents, that the professional politician may fatten on her woes.

What will Boom live to see?

It will be a sorry day for the country when her wooded parks and stately houses are numbered with the things that are no more.

Brandolin puts his arm over the boy's shoulder, and walks away with him a little way under the deep boughs of yew.

"Look here, Boom," he says to him, "you won't care to be like those fellows, but you don't know how hard it is to get out of the fashion of one's set, to avoid going with the stream of one's contemporaries. Nobody can say what will be the style of the 'best men' when you're of age, but I'm much afraid it will still be the Masher. The Masher is not very vicious, he is often cultured, he is a more harmless animal than he tries to appear, but he is weak; and we are coming on times, or times are coming on us, when an English gentleman will want to be very strong if he is to hold his own and save his country from shame in her old age. Don't be conventional. Scores of people who would be ashamed to seem virtuous haven't courage to resist appearing vicious. Don't talk all that odious slang which is ruining English. Don't get into that stupid way of counting the days and seasons by steeple-chases, coursing-meetings, flat-races, and the various different things to be shot at. Sport is all very well in its place, but Squire Allworthy beating the turnips with a brace of setters is a different figure to Lord Newgold sending his hampers of pheasants to Leadenhall. Certainly, Mr. Bradlaugh has no more right to make a misdemeanor of our covert-shooting, and put the axe to our home woods, than we have to make a misdemeanor of his shoes and stockings, or put an axe to his head. But I think if of our own accord we centred our minds and spent our guineas less on our preserves, we might be wiser, and if we grudged our woods less to the hawk and the woodpecker and the owl and the jay, and all the rest of their native population, we should be wiser still. I never see a beast or a bird caught or dead in a keeper's trap but that I think to myself that after all, if we ourselves are caught in the end between the grinning jaws of anarchy, it will really be only partial justice on our injustice. Only I fear that it won't better the birds and beasts very much, even when we all go to prison for the crime of property, and Bradlaugh will grub up their leafy haunts with a steam plough from Chicago."

CHAPTER IV

Meanwhile, let the country be going to the dogs as it may, Surrenden is full of very gay people, and all its more or less well-matched doves are cooing at Surrenden, whilst the legitimate partners of their existences are diverting themselves in other scenes, Highland moors, German baths, French châteaux, Channel yachting, or at other English country houses. It is George Usk's opinion that the whole thing is immoral: he is by no means a moral person himself. His wife, on the contrary, thinks that it is the only way to have your house liked, and that nobody is supposed to know anything, and that nothing of that sort matters; she is a woman who on her own account has never done anything that she would in the least mind having printed in the Morning Post to-morrow.

"Strange contradiction!" muses Brandolin. "Here is George, who's certainly no better than he should be, hallooing out for Dame Propriety, and here's my lady, who's always run as straight as a crow flies, making an Agapemone of her house to please her friends. To the pure all things are pure, I suppose; but if purity can stand Mrs. Wentworth Curzon and Lady Dawlish, I think I shall select my wife from among les jolies impures."

However, he takes care audibly to hold up his hostess's opinions and condemn her lord's.

"The poor little woman means well, and only likes to be popular," he reflects; "and we are none of us so sure that we shan't want indulgence some day."

Brandolin is very easy and elastic in his principles, as becomes a man of the world; he is even considered by many of his friends a good deal too lax in all his views; but in the depths of his soul there is a vague dislike to similar looseness of principle in women. He may have been glad enough to avail himself of the defect; that is another matter; he does not like it, does not admire it: licentiousness in a woman seems to him a fault in her taste; it is as if she wore fur slippers with her court train. "Of course," he will say, apologetically, "this idea of mine is born of the absurd English conventionality which sleeps in all of us; nothing better; an Englishman is always conventional somewhere, let him live as he will."

He himself is the most unconventional of beings, appalls his county, terrifies his relations, and irrevocably offends the bishop of his diocese; he has lived with Arabs, Bohemians, and wild men of the woods, and believes that he has not such a thing as prejudice about him; yet at the bottom of his soul there is this absurd feeling born of sheer conventionality,—he cannot thoroughly like a light-minded woman. Absurd, indeed, in the times in which his lot is cast! He is quite ashamed of it.

Dorothy Usk does not favor the modern mode of having relays of guests for two or three days; she thinks it makes a country house too like an hotel. She wishes her people to be perfectly well assorted, and then to stay with her at least a week, even two weeks or three weeks. People do not often object: Orme, Denton, and Surrenden are all popular places, and Surrenden is perhaps most popular of all.

"An ideal house," says Brandolin, who would not stay a day where he was not as free as air.

"It's too much like an hotel," grumbles the master of it, "and an hotel where the table-d'hôte bell rings to deaf ears. Lord! I remember in my poor mother's days everybody had to be down to breakfast at nine o'clock every morning as regularly as if they were charity children, and the whole lot of 'em were marched off to church on Sunday whether they liked it or not. The villagers used to line the path across the fields to see the great folks pass. Now it's as much as ever Dolly can do to get a woman or two up in time to go with her. How things are changed, by Jove! And it isn't so very long ago, either."

"The march of intellect, my dear George," says Brandolin; "neither le bon Dieu nor we are great folks any longer."

"Well, I think it's a pity," sighs Usk. "Everybody was happier then, and jollier too, though we do tear about so to try and get amused."

"There is still nothing to prevent you going to sleep in the big pew if it pleases you," replies Brandolin; "and Lawrence Hamilton always goes that he may look at Mrs. Curzon's profile as she sings: she is really saintly then. I think Sunday service is to Englishwomen what confession is to Catholic ladies: it sweeps all the blots off the week's tablets. It is convenient, if illogical."

"You are very irreligious," says his host, who is invariably orthodox when orthodoxy doesn't interfere with anything.

"Not more so than most people," says Brandolin. "I have even felt religious when I have been alone in the savannas or in the jungle. I don't feel so in a wooden box covered with red velvet, with a curate bawling in my ears about the hewing in pieces of Agag."

"That's nothing to do with it," says Usk: "we're bound to set an example."

"That's why you doze in public, and Mrs. Curzon wears her big pearls, to lead the school-children in the way they should go."

"That's nothing to do with it," repeats Lord Usk, somewhat crossly. He has a comfortable if indistinct idea that he does something patriotic, patriarchal, and highly praiseworthy in getting up an hour earlier than usual one Sunday out of three, and putting on a tall hat, a frock-coat, and a pair of new gloves, to attend the village church for morning service when he is at Orme, Denton, or Surrenden in fine weather.

If he sleeps, what of that? There are curtains to the pew, and nobody sees him except the Babe, who takes fiendish rapture in catching big flies and releasing them from a careful little hand to alight on his father's forehead or nose. The Babe would define the Sunday morning as a horrid bore tempered by blue-bottles.

"What a curiously conventional mind is the English mind!" thinks Brandolin, when he is alone. "Carlisle is right: the gig is its standard. The gig is out of fashion as a vehicle, but the national mind remains the same as in the age of gigs,—content with the outside of things, clinging to the husk, to the shell, to the outward appearance, and satisfied with these. My dear friend puts on his chimney-pot, then takes it off and snores in his pew, and thinks that he has done something holy which will sustain both Church and State, as he thinks that he prays when he buries his face in his hat and creases his trousers on a hassock! Mysterious consolations of the unfathomable human breast!"

CHAPTER V

A few new people have come by the brake, and make their appearance at luncheon. More come by the five-o'clock train, and are visible at six-o'clock tea, which is always to be had in the library any time before seven: dinner at all the Usk houses is always at nine. Brandolin's doctrines do not prevail with any of his acquaintances, although he, unlike most professors, emphasizes them by example.

Among the people who come by the latter train are the famous Mr. Wootton, a man very famous at London dinner-parties, and Lady Gundrede Vansittart, whose dinners are the best in London.

"Where would those two people be if you brought the pulse and the rice you recommend into fashion?" says their host to Brandolin. "Take 'em away from the table, they'd be good for nothing. He wouldn't say 'Bo' to a goose, and she wouldn't be worth leaving a card upon. Believe me, my dear Guy, such esprit as there is left in us is only brought out by eating."

"I think you invert all your reasonings," says Brandolin. "Say rather, that too much eating has destroyed all esprit. Don't we eat all day long everywhere, or at least are expected to do so? You lament your ruined digestion. It is impossible to digest when time is only counted by what our beloved Yankees call square meals (why square I fail to fathom), and for women it is worse than for us, because they eat such quantities of sweet things we don't touch, and then the way they go in for caviare bread-and-butter, and anchovy sandwiches, and all kinds of rich cakes, and deux doigts de Madère or glasses of kümmel at the tea-hour,—it is frightful! I wonder they have any complexions at all left, even with the assistance of all the 'secrets de Vénus.'"

"You won't alter 'em, my dear fellow," replies Usk, "if you put yourself out about it ever so much. If you were to marry a savage out of Formosa, or an Esquimaux, she'd take kindly to the caviare and the kümmel before a week was out, if you brought her to Europe. Why, look at dogs,—you may keep 'em on biscuit and tripe if they live in the kennels, but if they once come to the dining-room they'll turn their noses up at a beef-steak if it isn't truffled!"

"Dogs, at least, stop short of the kümmel," says Brandolin; "but if you were to put together the sherry, the dry champagne, the liqueurs at tea, the brandy in the chasse at dinner, which a fashionable woman takes in the course of the day (not counting any pick-me-up that she may require in her own room), the amount would be something enormous,—incredible! You would not believe the number of women who have cured me of an unhappy passion for them by letting me see what a lot they could drink."

"You will adore the Sabaroff, then. She never touches anything that I see, except tea."

"Admirable person! I am ready to adore her. Tell me more about her. By the way, who is she?"

"Oh, you must go to Dolly for biographies of her foreigners. I can't keep even their names in my head."

"Foreigners! What an expression!" cries Dorothy Usk, in disdain. "Since steam effaced frontiers, nobody but insular people like ourselves ever use such a term. Nationalities are obliterated."

She is very fond of Xenia Sabaroff: she has a great many warm attachments to women who help to make her house attractive.

"Nationalities are still discernible in different tobaccos," murmurs Brandolin. "The Havana won't acknowledge an equal in the Cavour."

"Dolly don't know anything about her," continues Usk, clinging to the subject.

"Oh, my dear!" cried his wife, shocked, "when she is the niece of the great Chancellor and her mother was a Princess Dourtza."

"You don't know anything about her," repeats Usk, with that unpleasant obstinacy characteristic of men when they talk to their wives. "You met her in Vienna and took one of your crazes for her, and she may have sent a score of lovers to Siberia, or deserve to go there herself, for anything you can tell. One can never be sure of anything about foreigners."

"How absurd you are, and how insular!" cries Dorothy Usk, again. "'Foreigners!' As if there were any foreigners in these days, when Europe is like one family!"

"A family which, like most families, squabbles and scratches pretty often, then," says Usk,—which seems to his wife a reply too vulgar to be worthy of contradiction. He is conscious that Xenia Sabaroff is a very great lady, and that her quarterings, backed by descent and alliance, are wholly irreproachable,—indeed, written in that libro d'oro, the "Almanach de Gotha," for all who choose to read.

Her descent and her diamonds are alike immaculate, but her character?—he is too old-fashioned a Briton not to think it very probable that there is something louche there.

Usk is a Russophobist, as becomes a true Tory. He has a rooted impression that all Russians are spies when they are not swindlers; much as in the early years of the century his grandsire had been positive that all Frenchmen were assassins when they were not dancing-masters. The White Czar has replaced the Petit Caporal, and the fur cap the cocked hat, in the eyes of Englishmen of Usk's type, as an object of dread and detestation. He would never be in the least surprised if it turned out that the real object of Madame Sabaroff's visit to Surrenden were to have possible opportunities to examine the facilities of Weymouth as a landing-place for Cossacks out of Muscovite corvettes.

"Russians are tremendous swells at palaver," he says, with much contempt, "gammon you no end if you like to believe 'em: they've always some political dodge or other behind it all."

"I don't say she isn't an agreeable woman," he continues, now: his admiration of Madame Sabaroff is much mitigated by his sense that she has a rather derisive opinion of himself. "I don't say she isn't an agreeable woman, but she gives me the idea of artificiality,—insincerity,—mystery."

"Just because she's a Russian!" cries his wife, with disdain.

"My dear George," observes Brandolin, "there are preconceived ideas about all nationalities. As a rule, they are completely false. The received Continental idea is that an Englishman is a bluff, blunt, unpleasant, opinionated person, very cross, very clean too it is true, but on the strength of his tub and his constitution despising all the rest of mankind. Now, how completely absurd such an opinion is! You yourself are an example of the suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, of which the true-blue Briton always gives so admirable an example."

Usk laughs, but sulkily; he has the impression that his beloved friend is making fun of him, but he is not quite sure. He himself believes that he is an ideal Englishman; Brandolin is only half or a quarter of one, he does not shoot, wears furs in winter, only drinks very light Rhenish wine, never goes to any church, and never cuts his hair very short. Added to this, he has no fixed political opinion, except a general impression that England and the world in general are going down-hill as fast as they can, "tobogganing" as they say in Canada, at the rate of fifty miles a minute, to land in the slough of Socialism and be picked out of it by some military despot,—democracy invariably ending in absolutism.

"What ridiculous rubbish!" says his wife. "You might as well say that the demoiselles-mannequins at Worth's or Rodrigue's are conspiring for the Orleanists when they try on my clothes."

"They are conspiring for the ruin of your family," says Usk, with a groan. "Whose purse can stand those Paris prices?"

"What an irrelevant remark!" cries Lady Usk. "You are always dragging money-questions into everything."

"Those faiseurs, as you call 'em," continues Usk, unheeding, "are at the root of half the misery of society. Women get into debt up to their eyes for their toilets, and they don't care what abomination they do if they get enough out of it to go on plunging. Hundred-guinea gowns soon make up a pretty total when you change 'em three times a day."

"And if women are guys aren't the men furious?" asks his wife. "Even if they try to economize, aren't they always taunted with being dowdies? You none of you know anything about the cost of things, and you expect everybody to be bien mise on a halfpenny a day. When Boom saw me at Ascot this year he stared at me, and whispered to me, 'Oh, I say, mother! you've got the same bonnet on you had at the Oaks. I do hope the other fellows won't notice it.' That is how he will speak to his wife some day; and yet I dare say, like you, he will expect her to get her bonnets from Virot at ten francs apiece!"

Lady Usk is angry and roused.

"Look at my poor little sister," she goes on. "What a life that brute Mersey leads her about money! All those dreadfully plain girls to dress, and nothing to do it on, and yet if they are not all well got up wherever they go to, he swears he is ashamed to be seen with them. You can't dress well, you can't do anything well, without spending money; and if you haven't money you must get into debt. That is as clear as that two and two are four. When ever do men remember their own extravagances? You smoke ten cigars a day; your cigars cost a shilling or eighteenpence each,—that is ten or fifteen shillings a day; five pounds a week, not counting your cigarettes! Good heavens! five pounds a week for sheer silly personal indulgence that your doctors tell you will canker your tongue and dry up your gastric juice! At all events, our toilets don't hurt our digestion; and what would the world look like if women weren't well dressed in it? Your cigars benefit nobody, and only make your teeth yellow."

"Well, in a year they cost about what one ball-gown does that's worn twice."

"I always wear mine three times, even in London," says Dorothy Usk, with conscious virtue. "But I don't see any sin in spending money. I think it ought to be spent. But you are always dragging money-questions into everything, and Boom says that the Latin person whom you and Lord Brandolin are always quoting declares most sensibly that money should always be regarded as a means, never as an end; and if it is to be a means to anything, must not it be spent before it can become so?"

"That's neither here nor there," replies her lord; "and if Boom only reads his classics upside down like that he'd better leave 'em alone."

"You are never content. Most men would be delighted if a boy read at all."

"I don't know why, I'm sure," replies Usk, drearily. "Reading's going out, you know; nobody'll read at all fifty years hence: poking about in guinea-pigs' stomachs, and giving long names to insects out of the coal-hole, is what they call education nowadays."

"Frederic Harrison has said very aptly," remarks Brandolin, who is present at this conjugal colloquy, and seeks to make a diversion on it, "that the boast of science is to send the Indian mails across seas and deserts in nine days, but that science cannot put in those mail-bags a single letter equal to Voltaire's or Sévigné's, and he doubts very much that there is one."

"It's an ill bird that fouls its own nest," says Usk, grimly: "still, I'm very glad if those scientific prigs fall out among themselves."

"I think some people write charming letters still," says Dorothy Usk. "Of course when one is in a hurry—and one is almost always in a hurry–"

"Hurry is fatal, Lady Usk," says Brandolin. "It destroys style, grace, and harmony. It is the curse of our times. The most lovely thing in life is leisure; and we call it progress to have killed it."

"Read this letter," says his hostess, giving him one which she holds in her hand. "There is nothing private in it, and nothing wonderful, but there is a grace in the expressions; whilst the English, for a foreigner, is absolutely marvellous."

"I thought there were no foreigners?" says Usk. "I thought steam had effaced nationalities?"

His wife does not deign to reply.

Brandolin has taken the letter with hesitation. "Do you really think I may read it?"

"When I tell you to do so," says Dolly Usk, impatiently. "Besides, there is nothing in it, only it is pretty."

Brandolin reads; it is on very thick paper, almost imperceptibly scented, with a princess's crown embossed on it and a gold X.

"It is very kind of you, dear Lady Usk, to have remembered a solitaire like myself in the midst of your charming children and your many joys." ("My many annoyances, she means," interpolates Lady Usk.) "I will be with you, as you so amiably wish, next Tuesday or Wednesday. I am for the moment in Paris, having been this month at Aix, not that I have any aches or pains myself, but a friend of mine, Marie Woronszoff, has many, and tries to cure them by warm sunshine and the cold douches which her physicians prescribe. There are many pleasant people here; every one is supposed to be very ill and suffering agony, but every one laughs, flirts, plays, sits under the little tents under the trees, dances at the Casino, and eats a fair dinner as usual, so that if Pallida Mors be indeed among us she looks just like every one else. I came to Aix from my own place on the White Sea, and the gay groups, the bright alleys, the green embowered chalets, and the goatherds with their flocks which come tinkling their bells down the hill-sides in all directions, all seemed to me like an operetta of Offenbach's, spiritualized and washed with the pure daylight and the mountain-air, but still Offenbach. How are your children? Do they still care for me? That is very sweet of them. A day at their years is as long as a season at mine. Assure them of my unforgetting gratitude. I shall be pleased to be in England again, and, though I do not know Surrenden, my recollections of Orme tell me d'avance that I shall in any house of yours find the kindest of friends, the most sympathetic of companions. Say many things to your lord for me. I think he is only so discontented because the gods have been too good to him and given him too completely everything he can desire." ("That's all she knows about it!" says Usk, sotto voce.) "Au revoir, dear Lady Usk. Receive the assurance of my highest consideration, and believe in my sincere regard. Bien à vous.—Xenia P. Sabaroff."

"A very pretty letter," says Brandolin. "Many thanks." And he restores it to its owner.

"Bunkum!" says Usk.

"Not a bit in the world," says his wife, with contempt and indignation. "She does not 'pose,' if you do!"