A House-Party Part 19

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 pa.s.sionately 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 das.h.i.+ng on in advance.

There is an end of their brief _tete-a-tete_; he pa.s.sionately 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 G.o.d,'" 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 sh.o.r.es 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 _delaisse_ 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 aeneas 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."