"If by serious you mean selfish, I agree with you. There isn't such another d——d egotist anywhere under the sun." And, much out of temper, Usk flings himself out of the room and goes to Lady Waverley, who is lying on a sofa in the small library. She has a headache, but her smile is sweet, her hand cool, her atmosphere soothing and delightful, with the blinds down and an odor of attar of roses.
If any one were to tell Dolly Usk that she had been making up fibs on this occasion, she would be mortally offended and surprised. She would reply that she had only been brodant un peu,—putting the thing as it ought to be put, as it must be put, if Gervase is to obtain the hand of Xenia Sabaroff, and if nobody is to know anything which ought not to be known. Indeed, she has pondered so much on this manner of putting it, that she has almost ended in believing that her version of the story is the true one.
"Brandolin's feelings, indeed!" she thinks, with great contempt. "As if any pain he might feel, if he did feel any, would not be due and fitting retribution upon him for the horrid life he has led, and the way he has played fast and loose with women. He can go back to his Hindoos, whose figures are so superior to any European's! But George is always so absurd about his friends."
Whereon, being in an irritated and unkind mood, she desires the servant, who just then announces the visit of the rector of the parish, to show that reverend person into the small library, where she knows that Dulcia Waverley is trying to get rid of her headache. It is very seldom that she is unwise enough to indulge in this kind of domestic vengeance; but at this moment it seems sweet to her.
The unfortunate and innocent rector finds the lord of Surrenden monosyllabic and impolite, but Lady Waverley, woman-like, is wholly equal to the occasion, and in her sweet low voice discourses of village choirs, and village readings, and village medicines and morals, with such divine patience and feminine adaptability that the good man dismisses from his mind as impossible what he had certainly fancied he saw in the moment when the library door opened before him.
If ever there was purity incarnate, Dulcia Waverley looks it, with her white gown, her Madonna-like hair, her dewy pensive eyes, and her appealing smile. She suggests the portraits in the Keepsakes and Forget-me-Nots of fifty years ago; she has always about her the faint old-fashioned perfume of attar of roses, and she wears her soft fair hair in Raphaelite bands which in any other woman would look absurd; but her experience has told her that, despite all change in modes and manners, the surest weapons to subdue strong men are still those old-fashioned charms of fragility and of apparent helplessness which made Othello weep when his bridal moon was young above the Venetian waters. Only if she had ever spoken candidly all she knows, which she never by any chance does, she would say that to succeed thus with Othello, or with any other male creature, you must be, under all your apparent weakness, tenacious as a magnet and cold as steel. Therein lies the secret of all power: the velvet glove and the iron hand may be an old saying, but it is a truth never old.
The conclusion which she had drawn from Gervase and his fragmentary story has seriously annoyed and shocked his cousin, but on reflection she decides to adhere to her invariable rule of ignoring all that is equivocal in it, and treating it accordingly.
No one has ever heard Lady Usk admit that there is the slightest impropriety in the relations of any of her guests: it is one of those fictions like the convenient fictions of the law, which are so useful that every one agrees not to dispute their acceptance. She will never know a person who is really compromised. Therefore, if there be any soil on the wings of her doves, she shuts her eyes to it so long as those of the world are shut. She has the agreeable power of never seeing but what she wishes to see: so, although for the moment she has been uncomfortably shocked, she recovers her composure rapidly, and persuades herself that Gervase merely spoke of a passing attachment, perfectly pure. Why should he not marry the object of it? To the mind of Dorothy Usk that would make everything right. Things may have been wrong once, but that is nobody's business. Xenia Sabaroff is a charming and beautiful woman, and the silver-mine beyond the Urals is a very real thing. Lady Usk is not a mercenary, she is even a generous woman; but when English fortunes are so embarrassed as they are in this day, with Socialists at the roots and a Jacquerie tearing at the fruits of them, any solid fortune situated out of England would be of great use to any Englishman occupying a great position.
"We shall all of us have to live abroad before long," she reflects, with visions of Hodge chopping down her palms for firewood and Sally smashing the porcelain in her model dairy.
No doubt the relations of her cousin and her guest have not been always what they ought to have been; but she does not wish to think of this, and she will not think of it: by-gones are always best buried. The people who manage to be happy are those who understand the art of burying them and use plenty of quicklime.