“Oh! It works both ways undoubtedly! Behold me, who spend neatly the half of every year over here. Besides, not being me, or an Irishman, I presume it isn’t your intention to become an absentee landlord?”
“No, naturally not, but I do not think Laurence likes Russia. She does not complain, you understand, but I cannot help noticing—”
“I believe you, my boy,” commented Salvières, inwardly. And then as the pause threatened to draw to an embarrassing length, he quietly remarked: “She’ll get used to the change after a while, never fear. Women are eminently adaptable, and, given the merely nominal duties she will encounter, and the enormous advantages that will counterbalance these, you ought not to worry yourself about the result!”
“But that is just the devil of it!” Basil exclaimed. “She does not understand those duties you are pleased to call nominal, but are as a matter of fact very serious. She’s afraid—I honestly believe—of the people! You see, she has heard all her life in England that we Russians are a bloodthirsty, violent race, capable of any evil; so what will you? Poor child, the isolation, perhaps even the ‘grandeur’ of her new position, are weighing upon her!”
“Nonsense! Who’s afraid?” Salvières said, with some irritation. “She, the daughter of a line of sailors and soldiers, the granddaughter of that old fire-eater, Admiral Seton, the ‘Orror of the Horient—as they nicknamed him at Alexandria! Bah! Try and make some one else believe that!”
“Physically afraid, of course not! Morally afraid, yes!” asserted Basil, straightening himself. “We are having some little trouble over at Tverna just now, as you know; a mere trifle not worthy of serious consideration; but, strangely enough, it makes her nervous. She has not caught on since our arrival there. Imagine, she considered it quite improper when old General Hiltròw knelt on the threshold of the drawing-room and kissed her hands in greeting, awaiting the kiss on the brow that is customary here, though I had warned her of all these things. The people all and sundry were ready enough to prostrate themselves at her feet, but”—he hesitated, cleared his throat, and glanced appealingly at his relative—“but,” he continued, seeing Salvières raise his shoulders ever so slightly, “but she drew away from them—no, I don’t quite mean that—rather she showed her—her indifference—a little too plainly. For instance, she takes no interest in the sick, the ailing, the unhappy; she never sets foot in an isba; she has handed over the key of the pharmacy to the housekeeper, a thing never heard of in mother’s time; and when the land-steward or the staròstá come in quest of remedies, delicacies, or any of the many comforts we always provide, she sends them word that she does not know what they want—which is true enough, of course—and that they must not bother her.”
“You should teach her to do better!” Salvières hazarded.
“But—my dear fellow,” Basil began, “I am not inclined to make her life here a misery.”
“Then don’t complain,” was the cool rejoinder. “Let her have her head; bid her amuse herself in her own way, encourage her to see and receive people of her own choice, and thereby obtain peace—that most desirable of possessions!”
“It is not everybody’s privilege, after all, to know by instinct how to treat the lower classes,” Basil said, irritably, “or to become popular, and to find the secret of assuring a number of unprepossessing and almost total strangers that one remembers them individually and perfectly!”