"C'est la vertu anglaise, un peu démodée," says Lord Iona, with a yawn.
Gervase stays on as well as Brandolin, somewhat bored, very much énervé, but fascinated, too, by the presence of his Russian Ariadne, and stung by the sight of Brandolin's attentions to her into such a strong sense of revived passion that he means what he says when he declares to his cousin that the wife of Sabaroff was the only woman he has ever really loved. Her manner to him also, not cold enough to be complimentary, but entirely indifferent, never troubled, never moved in any way by his vicinity or by his direct allusions to the past, is such as irritates, piques, attracts, and magnetizes him. It seems to him incredible that any woman can ignore him so utterly. If she only seemed afraid of him, agitated in any way, even adversely, he could understand what was passing in her mind; but he cannot even flatter himself that she does this: she treats him with just such perfect indifference as she shows to the Duke of Queenstown or Hugo Mandeville or any one of the gilded youths there present. If he could once see a wistful memory in her glance, once see a flush of color on her face at his approach, it is probable that his vanity would be satisfied and his interest cease as quickly as it has revived; but he never does see anything of this sort, and, by the rule of contradiction, his desire to see it increases. And he wonders uneasily what she has done with his letters.
CHAPTER X.
Lord Gervase was eight years younger when he wrote those letters than he is now, and he has unpleasant recollections of unpleasant passages in them which would compromise him in his career, or at least get him horribly talked about, were they ever made sport of in the world. Where are his letters? Has Madame Sabaroff kept them? He longs to ask her, but he dare not.
He does not say to his cousin that he has more than once endeavored to hint to Xenia Sabaroff that it would be sweet to him to recall the past, would she permit it. But he has elicited no response. She has evaded without directly avoiding him. She is no longer the impressionable shy girl whom he knew in Russia, weighted with an unhappy fate, and rather alarmed by the very successes of her own beauty than flattered by them. She is a woman of the world, who knows her own value and her own power to charm, and has acquired the talent which the world teaches, of reading the minds of others without revealing her own. Saule pleureur! the Petersburg court ladies had used to call her in those early times when the tears had started to her eyes so quickly; but no one ever sees tears in her eyes now.
Gervase is profoundly troubled to find how much genuine emotion the presence of a woman whose existence he had long forgotten has power to excite in him. He does not like emotion of any kind; and in all his affairs of the heart he is accustomed to make others suffer, not himself. Vanity and wounded vanity enter so largely into the influences moulding human life, that it is very possible, if the sight of him had had power to disturb her, the renewal of association with her would have left him unmoved. But, as it is, he has been piqued, mortified, excited, ad attracted; and the admiration which Brandolin and Lawrence Hamilton and other men plainly show of her is the sharpest spur to memory and to desire.
Whenever he has remembered Xenia Sabaroff, at such rare times as he has heard her name mentioned in the world, he has thought of her complacently as dwelling in the solitudes of Baltic forests, entirely devoted to his memory. Women who are entirely devoted to their memory men seldom trouble themselves to seek out; but to see her courted, sought, and desired, more handsome than ever, and apparently wholly indifferent to himself, is a shock to his self-esteem, and galvanism to his dead wishes and slumbering recollections. He begins to perceive that he would have done better not to forget her quite so quickly.
Meanwhile, all the guests at Surrenden, guided by a hint from Nina Curzon, begin to see a quantity of things which do not exist, and to exert their minds in endeavoring to remember a vast deal which they never heard with regard to both himself and her. No one knows anything or has a shadow of fact to go on, but this is an insignificant detail which does not tie their tongues in the least. Nina Curzon has invention enough to supply any lacunæ, and in this instance her imagination is stimulated by a double jealousy: she is jealous of Lawrence Hamilton, whom she is inclined to dismiss, and she is jealous of Brandolin, whom she is inclined to appropriate.
Twenty-four hours have not elapsed since the arrival of Gervase, before she has given a dozen people the intimate conviction that she knows all about him and the Princess Sabaroff, and that there is something very dreadful in it,—much worse than in the usual history of such relations. Everything is possible in Russia, she says, and has a way of saying this which suggests unfathomable abysses of license and crime.