"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 castle—what 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.
"Why do you let those innocents be tortured, George?" asks Brandolin.
"Books should, like business, entertain the day,"
replies Usk: "so you said, at least, just now. Their governesses are of the same opinion."
"That is not the way to make them love books, to shut them up against their wills on a summer afternoon."
"How will you educate your children when you have 'em, then?"
"He always gets out of any impersonal argument by putting some personal question," complains Brandolin to Madame Sabaroff. "It is a common device, but always an unworthy one. Because a system is very bad, it does not follow that I alone of all men must be prepared with a better one. I think if I had children I would not have them taught in that way at all. I should get the wisest old man I could find, a Samuel Johnson touched with a John Ruskin, and should tell him to make learning delightful to them, and associated, as far as our detestable climate would allow, with open-air studies in cowslip meadows and under hawthorn hedges. If I had only read dear Horace at school, should I ever have loved him as I do? No; my old tutor taught me to feel all the delight and the sweet savor of him, roaming in the oak woods of my own old place."
"I am devoutly thankful," says his host, "that Dorothy among her caprices had never had the fancy you have, for a Dr. Johnson doublé with a Ruskin, to correct my quotations, abuse my architecture, and make prigs of the children."
"Prigs!" exclaims Brandolin. "Prigs! When did ever real scholarship and love of nature make anything approaching to a prig? Science and class-rooms make prigs, not Latin verse and cowslip meadows."
"That is true, I think," says the Princess Xenia, with her serious smile.
"If they are beginning to agree with one another I shall be de trop," thinks Usk, who is very good-natured to his guests, and popular enough with women not to be resigned to play what is vulgarly termed "second fiddle" (though why an expression borrowed from the orchestra should be vulgar it were hard to say). So he goes a few paces off to speak to a gardener, and by degrees edges away towards the house, leaving Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff to themselves in the green yew-helmet arbor.
Brandolin is