Part 15 (1/2)
He hesitates. ”I don't know whether you will think very well of me if I tell you the truth.”
”That you may be sure I shall not. No man ever behaves well where women are in the question.”
”My dear Dolly, what unkind exaggeration! If I tell you anything, you will be sure not to repeat what I say? Madame Sabaroff considers me a stranger to her: I am bound to accept her decision on such a point.”
”You knew her in Russia?”
”Yes; when I was there she was the new beauty at the court. She had been married a year or less to Paul Sabaroff. I had the honor of her friends.h.i.+p at that time; if she withdraws it now I must acquiesce.”
”Oh!”
Lady Usk gives a little sound between a snort and a sigh.
She is annoyed. The gossipers are right, then. She is sorry the children have been so much with their friend, and she is infuriated at the idea of her husband's triumph over her credulity.
”Oh, pray don't think--don't think for a moment----” murmurs Gervase; but his cousin understands that it is the conventional compulsory expostulation which every man who is well-bred is bound to make on such subjects.
”She must have been very young then?” she says, beating impatiently on her blotting-book with her gold pen.
”Very young; but such a husband as Paul Sabaroff made is--well, a more than liberal education to any woman, however young. She was sixteen, I think, and very lovely; though she is perhaps handsomer now. I had the honor of her confidence: she was unhappy and _incomprise_; her father had given her hand in discharge of a debt at cards; Sabaroff was a gambler and a brute; at the end of the second winter season he had a violent fit of jealousy, and sent her to his estate on the White Sea----”
”Jealousy of you?”
Gervase bowed.
”Where she was kept in a state of surveillance scarcely better than absolute imprisonment. I did all manner of crazy and romantic things to endeavor to see her; and once or twice I succeeded; but he had discovered letters of mine, and made her captivity more rigorous than ever. I myself was ordered on the special mission to Spain,--you remember,--and I left Russia with a broken heart. From that time to this I have never seen her.”
”But your broken heart has continued to do its daily work?”
”It is a figure of speech. I adored her, and the husband was a brute.
When l.u.s.toff shot him he only rid the world of a brute. You have seen that broad bracelet she wears above the right elbow? People always talk so about it. She wears it to hide where Sabaroff broke her arm one night in his violence: the marks of it are there forever.”
Lady Usk is silent: she is divided between her natural compa.s.sion and sympathy, which are very easily roused, and her irritation at discovering that her new favorite is what Usk would call ”just like all the rest of them.”
”You perceive,” he added, ”that, as the princess chooses wholly to ignore the past, it is not for me to recall it. I am obliged to accept her decision, however much I must suffer from it.”
”Suffer!” echoes his cousin. ”After her husband's death you never took the trouble to cross Europe to see her.”
”She had never answered my letters,” says Gervase, but he feels that the excuse is a frail one. And how, he thinks, angrily, should a good woman like his cousin, who has never flirted in her life and never done anything which might not have been printed in the daily papers, understand a man's inevitable inconstancy?
”I a.s.sure you that I have never loved any woman as I loved her,” he continues.
”Then you are another proof, if one were wanted, that men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for----”
”I did not die, certainly,” Gervase says, much irritated; ”but I suffered greatly, whether you choose to believe it or not.”
”I am not inclined to believe it,” replies his hostess. ”It is not your style.”
”I wrote to her a great many times.”
He pauses.