No one has the slightest idea what she means, but no one will be behind any other in conjecturing; and there rises about the unconscious figure of Xenia Sabaroff a haze of vague suggested indistinct suspicion, like the smoke of the blue fires which hide the form of the Evil One on the stage in operas. Brandolin perceives it, and is deeply irritated.
"What is it to me?" he says to himself, but says so in vain.
Fragments of these ingenious conjectures and imaginary recollections come to his ear and annoy him intensely,—annoy him the more because his swift intuitions and unerring perceptions have told him from his own observation that Xenia Sabaroff does not see in Gervase altogether a stranger, though she has greeted him as such. Certain things are said which he would like to resent, but he is powerless to do so.
His days have been delightful to him before the arrival of this other man at Surrenden; now they are troubled and embittered. Yet he is not inclined to break off his visit abruptly and go to Scotland, Germany, or Norway, as might be wisest. He is in love with Xenia Sabaroff in a manner which surprises himself. He thought he had outlived that sort of boyish and imaginative passion. But she has a great power over his fancy and his senses, and she is more like his earliest ideal of a woman than any one he has ever met.
"Absurd that I should have an ideal at all at my age!" he thinks to himself; but, as there are some who are never accompanied by that ethereal attendant even in youth, so there are some whom it never leaves till they reach their graves.
Therefore when he hears these vague, floating, disagreeable jests, he suffers acutely, and finds himself in the position which is perhaps most painful of all to any man who is a gentleman, that of being compelled to sit silent and hear a woman he longs to protect lightly spoken of, because he has no right to defend her, and would indeed only compromise her more if he attempted her defence.
People do not venture to say much before Usk, because he is her host and might resent it, but nevertheless he too hears also something, and thinks to himself, "Didn't I tell Dolly foreigners are never any better than they should be?"
But Dulcia Waverley is here, and her languid and touching ways, her delicate health, and her soft sympathies have an indescribable sorcery for him at all times, so that he thinks but very little since her arrival of anything else. Usk likes women who believe devoutly that he might have been a great politician if he had chosen, and who also believe in his ruined digestion: no one affects both these beliefs so intensely as Lady Waverley, and when she tells him that he could have solved the Irish question in half an hour had he taken office, or that no one could understand his constitution except a German doctor in a bath in the Böhmerwald, whither she goes herself every autumn, she does, altogether and absolutely, anything she chooses with him.
His wife sees that quite well, and dislikes it, but it might be so much worse, she reflects: it might be a woman out of society, or a public singer, or an American adventuress: so she is reasonable, and always makes bonne mine to Dulcia Waverley, with her nerves, her cures, and her angelic smiles. After all, it does not much matter, she thinks, if they like to go and drink nasty waters together and poison themselves with sulphur, iron, and potassium. It is one of the odd nineteenth-century ways of playing Antony and Cleopatra.
Notwithstanding the absorption of his thoughts, Usk, however, one day spares a moment from Lady Waverley and his own liver, to put together words dropped by different people then under his own roof, to ponder upon them, and finally to interrogate his wife.