"What did he sell?"
"My cob,a cob I adored. I wept like a child, but he didn't see my tears. What I saved up next half to trace out that cob and buy him back at twice his value,what I denied myself to make up the money,nobody would believe; and the beast wasn't easy to find: some dealer had taken him over to Ireland."
"That could be done with you," says Usk, gloomily. "It would be no use to do it with Boom: his mother would buy him some other horse the next day. You've no chance to bring up a boy decently if he's got a mother!"
"The reverse is the received opinion of mankind," said Brandolin; "but I believe there's something to be said for your view. No end of women have no idea of bringing up their children, and when they ought to be ordered a flogging they fondle them."
"Dolly does," says her husband. "What's a woman's notion of a horse? That he must have slender legs, a coat like satin, and be fed on apples and sugar: still, they saw his mouth till he half dislocates his neck, and tear his ribs open with their spur. They're just as unreasonable with their children."
"Who is that woman?" says Brandolin, making a step across the window and into the garden. "Now I am perfectly certain that is Madame Sabaroff, without your saying so."
"Then I needn't say so," replies Usk. "I wonder when she came. They didn't expect her till to-morrow."
They both look at a lady in one of the distant alleys walking between the high green walls. She is dressed in some soft cream-colored stuff with quantities of lace. She carries a sunshade of the same hue. She has a tall cane in her other hand. On either side of her are the Ladies Alexandra and Hermione, and before her gambols in his white sailor clothes, with his blue silk stockings and his silver-buckled shoes, the Babe.
"Decidedly the Sabaroff," says Usk. "Won't you come and speak to her?"
"With pleasure," says Brandolin. "Even if the Babe brains me with the cane!"
He looks very well as he walks bareheaded over the grass and along the green alley; he wears a loose brown velvet coat admirably made, and brown breeches and stockings; his legs are as well made as his coat; the sun shines on his curling hair; there is a dégagé, picturesque, debonair, yet distinguished look about him, which pleases the eyes of Xenia Sabaroff, as they watch him draw near.
"Who is that person with your father?" she asks. The children tell her, all speaking at once.
She recognizes the name; she has heard of him often in the world, and has read those books which praise solitude and a dinner of herbs. "I doubt his having been alone very long, however," she reflects, as she looks at him. A certain unlikeness in him to Englishmen in general, some women who are fond of him fancifully trace to the fact that the first Brandolin was a Venetian, who fled for his life from the Republic, and made himself conspicuous and acceptable for his talents alike as a lutist and a swordsman at the court of Henry the Second. "It can't count, it's so very far away," he himself objects; but perhaps it does count. Of all things ineffaceable, the marks of race are the most indelible.
The Venetian Brandolin married the daughter of a Norman knight, and his descendants became affectionate sons of England, and held their lands of St. Hubert's Lea safely under the wars of the Roses, of the Commonwealth, and of the Jacobites. They were always noticeable for scholarly habits and artistic tastes, and in the time of George the Second the Lord Brandolin of the period did much to enrich his family mansion and diminish the family fortunes by his importations of Italian sculptures and pictures and his patronage of Italian musicians. The house at St. Hubert's Lea is very beautiful, but it requires much more to keep it up than the present owner possesses. He is often urged to let it, but he scouts the idea. "You might as well ask me to sell the Brandolin portraits, like Charles Surface," he says, angrily, whenever his more intimate friends venture on the suggestion. So the old house stands in its warm-hued and casket-like loveliness, empty, save for his occasional visits and the presence of many old and devoted servants.
"An interesting woman," he thinks now, as he exchanges with the Princess Sabaroff the usual compliments and commonplaces of a presentation. "Russians are always interesting: they are the only women about whom you feel that you know very little; they are the only women who, in this chatterbox of a generation tout en dehors as it is, preserve some of the vague charm of mystery; and what a charm that is!"
His reasons for admiring her are not those of the Babe and his sisters, but he admires her almost as much as they. Brandolin, who in his remote travels has seen a great deal of that simple nature which is so much lauded by many people, has a great appreciation of well-dressed women, and the Madame Sabaroff is admirably dressed, from her long loose cream-colored gloves to her bronze shoes with their miniature diamond clasps.
"Didn't I tell you?" whispers the Babe, climbing up behind Brandolin.
"Yes, you did," returned Brandolin, "and you were quite right; but it is abominably bad manners to whisper, my dear Cecil."
The Babe subsides into silence with hot cheeks when anybody calls him Cecil he is conscious that he has committed some flagrant offence.
"Those brats are always bothering you, princess," says their father.
"They are very kind to me," replies Xenia Sabaroff, in English which has absolutely no foreign accent. "They make me feel at home! What a charming place this is! I like it better than your castlewhat is its name?where I had the pleasure to visit you at Easter."
"Orme. Oh, that's beastly,a regular barn: obliged to go there just for show, you know."
"Orme was built by Inigo Jones, and the ingratitude to fortune of its owner is a constant temptation to Providence to deal in thunder-bolts, or have matches left about by housemaids," says Brandolin.
"I think Lord Usk has not a contented mind," says Madame Sabaroff, amused.
"Contented! By Jove, who should be, when England's going to the dogs as fast as she can?"
"In every period of your history," says the princess, "your country is always described as going headlong to ruin; and yet she has not gone there yet, and she has not done ill."
"'Our constitution is established on a mere equipoise, with dark precipices and deep waters all around it.' So said Burke," replies Brandolin. "At the present moment everybody has forgotten the delicacy of this nice equipoise, and one day or other it will lose its balance and topple over into the deep waters, and be engulfed. Myself, I confess I do not think that time is very distant."
"I hope it is; I am very much attached to England," replies the Princess Xenia, gravely, "and to naughty English boys," she adds, passing her hand over the shining locks of the Babe.
"She must be in love with an Englishman," thinks Brandolin, with the one-sided construction which a man is always ready to place on the words of a woman. "Must we go in-doors?" he asks, regretfully, as she is moving towards the house. "It is so pleasant in these quaint green arbors. To be under a roof on such a summer afternoon as this, is to fly in the face of a merciful Creator with greater ingratitude than Usk's ingratitude to Inigo Jones."
"But I have scarcely seen my hostess," says Madame Sabaroff; nevertheless, she resigns herself to a seat in a yew-tree cut like a helmet.
There are all manner of delightful old-fashioned flowers, such flowers as Disraeli gave to the garden of Corisande, growing near in groups encircled by clipped box-edging.
Those disciples of Pallas Athene who render the happy lives of the Surrenden children occasionally a burden to them seize at that moment on their prey and bear them off to the school-room. The Babe goes to his doom sullenly; he would be tearful, only that were too unmanly.