Brandolin

“ Usk discourses of Achnalorrie with breathless eloquence, as of a lover eulogizing the charms of a mistress forever lost to him.
Brandolin listens with admirable patience, and affects to agree that the vision of the American crawling on his stomach over soaking heather in a thick fog for eight hours after a "stag of ten" is a vision of such unspeakably enviable bliss that it must harrow the innermost soul of the dispossessed lord of the soil. ”

“ A certain unlikeness in him to Englishmen in general, some women who are fond of him fancifully trace to the fact that the first Brandolin was a Venetian, who fled for his life from the Republic, and made himself conspicuous and acceptable for his talents alike as a lutist and a swordsman at the court of Henry the Second. "It can't count, it's so very far away," he himself objects; but perhaps it does count. Of all things ineffaceable, the marks of race are the most indelible. ”

“ Brandolin has listened in silence, conscious of a troubled pleasure within himself, which is invariably the herald of one of those attachments which have so often at once embellished and disturbed his existence.
Like all romantic people, his heart is much younger than his years. It has not been scarred by any one of those tragic passions which, like fire on a hill-side, wither up all green things, so that not a blade of grass will grow where it has passed. He has usually found love only the most agreeable of pastimes. ”

“ The master of Surrenden cannot find words of welcome warm enough to satisfy himself. He is honestly delighted. Failing Dulcia Waverley, nobody could have been so agreeable to him as Brandolin. For once a proverb is justified, "a self-invited guest is thrice welcome." He is for dragging his visitor in at once to breakfast, but Brandolin resists. He has breakfasted on board his yacht; he could not eat again before luncheon; he likes the open air, he wishes to sit in the periwig and smoke.
"Do not let us disturb Lady Usk," he said. ”

“ So he goes a few paces off to speak to a gardener, and by degrees edges away towards the house, leaving Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff to themselves in the green yew-helmet arbor.
Brandolin is in love with his subject, and does not abandon it.
"It is absurd," he continues, "the way in which children are made to loathe all scholarship by its association with their own pains and subjection. A child is made as a punishment to learn by rote fifty lines of Virgil. ”

“ Xenia Sabaroff does not take as much notice of him as usual. She is reserved and preoccupied. Brandolin, like the child, fails in awakening her interest or attention. She has seated herself almost with her back to where Gervase is standing, but every now and then she looks half round, as by an irresistible unconscious impulse of curiosity. ”

“ He has got his opportunity, but it vexes him; he has an impression that his companions will soon drift into forgetting both him and his garden. Since the approach of Brandolin the latter has said nothing.
The children's gardens are in a rather wild and distant part of the grounds of Surrenden. It is noon; most people staying in the house are still in their own rooms; it is solitary, sunny, still; a thrush is singing in a jessamine thicket, there is no other sound except that of a gardener's broom sweeping on the other side of the laurel hedge. ”

“ Lady Usk coming out of the garden-room down the steps of one of the low windows spares Brandolin the continuation of the lament. She looks pretty; mindful of her years, she holds a rose-lined sun-umbrella over her head; the lace and muslin of her breakfast-gown sweep the lawn softly; she has her two daughters with her, the Ladies Alexandra and Hermione, known as Dodo and Lilie. She welcomes Brandolin with mixed feelings, though with unmixed suavity. She is glad to see him because he amuses Usk, and is a person of wit and distinction whom everybody tries to draw to their houses ”

“ Brandolin has a way of mingling graceful compliments and implied censure with so much skill and intricacy that to disentangle them is difficult for those whom he would at once flatter and rebuff. "One never quite knows what he means," she thinks, irritably. ”

“ Brandolin, who in his remote travels has seen a great deal of that simple nature which is so much lauded by many people, has a great appreciation of well-dressed women, and the Madame Sabaroff is admirably dressed, from her long loose cream-colored gloves to her bronze shoes with their miniature diamond clasps. ”

“ The attentions of Brandolin are very marked to the Princess Sabaroff, and are characterized by that carelessness of comment and that color of romance which have always marked his interest in any woman. He is not a rival à plaisanter, she knows; but then she knows, too, that he never is serious in these matters. When she first hears the story of Gervase, she heartily wishes that there were any pretence to get rid of Xenia Sabaroff, and hastily wonders what excuse she could make to break up her Surrenden circle. ”

“ Brandolin arrests the sentence with a deprecatory gesture, "Dear Lady Usk, please! I like you so much, I wouldn't for worlds have you mixed up in anything which would probably, or at least very possibly, make me so much dislike you in the years to come."
Usk gives a laugh of much enjoyment. ”

“ Certainly Madame Sabaroff is letting Brandolin carry on with her more than is altogether proper. True, they are people who may marry each other if they please, but Brandolin is not a man who marries, and his attentions are never likely to take that form. He probably pays so much court to Madame Sabaroff because he has heard that of her which leads him to suppose that his efforts may be couronné, as French vaudevillists say, without any thought of marriage.
Lady Usk has always known that he is horribly unprincipled,—more so than even men of his world usually are. ”

“ Brandolin notes the gesture, as her actions have an interest for him which grows daily in its fascination. "There is Dorothy Usk's Ph [oe] nix," he says to her, in a low tone, when the Babe has scampered off after bon-bons: he indicates Gervase with a glance. Her eyebrows contract slightly, as in some displeasure or constraint.
"Lady Usk is very soon satisfied," she replies, coldly. "Her own amiability makes her see perfection everywhere."
"It is a quality we cannot value too highly in so imperfect a world. It is better than seeing everything en noir, surely?" says Brandolin. ”

“ The Babe, sitting astride on a chair, trying to mend his mechanical Punch, who screamed and beat his wife absolument comme la nature, as the French governess said, before he was broken, hears the discourse of his sisters and muses on it. He is very fond of Brandolin, and he adores his princess: he would like them to live together, and he would go and see them without his sisters, who tease him, and without Boom, who lords it over him. ”

“ At that moment there is a little bustle under a very big cedar near at hand; servants are bringing out folding tables, folding chairs, a silver camp-kettle, cakes, fruit, cream, liqueurs, sandwiches, wines, all those items of an afternoon tea on which Brandolin has animadverted with so much disgust in the library an hour before. ”

“ Brandolin goes to his before the cotillion is over, but he sleeps very little. He longs for the morrow, and yet he dreads it. "Quand même," he murmurs, as from his bed he sees the white dawn over the dark masses of the Surrenden woods. Tell him what she may, he thinks, he will give her his life if she will take it. He is madly in love, no doubt; but there is something nobler and purer than the madness of love, than the mere violent instincts of passion, in his loyalty to her. Before anything he cherishes the honor of his name and race, and he is willing, blindfold, to trust her with it. ”

“ Brandolin has a faint sense of discomfiture and sadness: he is accustomed to very facile conquests; and yet he is not a coxcomb, like Lawrence Hamilton; he did not precisely anticipate one here, but habit is second nature, and it has been his habit to succeed with women with rapidity and ease. That sense of mystery which there is also for him in the Princess Xenia oppresses whilst it allures him. He is English enough to think that he dislikes mystery, yet as an element of romance it has always an irresistible fascination for romantic temperaments. ”

“ With an action which would be rude in any woman less high-bred, she turns away her head and speaks to Brandolin, ignoring the acquaintance and the presence of Gervase.
Across the good-natured and busy brain of her hostess there flashes an electric and odious thought: is it possible that Usk may be right, and that there may be something wrong, after all, in this her latest and most adored friend? She feels that she will die of suffocated curiosity if she do not speedily get her cousin alone and learn all he has ever known or heard of the Princess Sabaroff. ”

“ Every one is amused, but the hours seem very slow to him: Gervase scarcely leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his chivalrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no shadow of doubt to steal over him, feels the odious whispers he has heard and the outspoken words of Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, he realizes that it is possible, do what he may, that they may haunt him so all his life. A man may be always master of his acts, but scarcely always of his thoughts. ”

“ At dinner, Xenia Sabaroff does not speak much: she has a dreamy look, almost a fatigued one.
Brandolin is opposite to her: as there are no ornaments or flowers on the table higher than eight inches, he can contemplate her at his leisure across the field of shed rose-leaves which is between them. Finding that she is so silent, he talks in his best fashion, in his most reckless, antithetical, picturesque manner: he perceives he gains her attention, though he never directly addresses her.
He also makes Mr. Wootton furious. Mr. Wootton has half a dozen good stories untold. ”

“ Brandolin, she knows, is not a person who will ever marry; he has lost scores of the most admirable opportunities, and rejected the fairest and best-filled hands that have been offered to him. To the orderly mind of Lady Usk, he represents an Ishmael forever wandering in wild woods, outside the pale of general civilization. She can never see why people make such a fuss with him. She does not say so, because it is the fashion to make the fuss, and she never goes against a fashion. ”

“ Faversham, as of a person whom it is hopeless even to discuss. Brandolin is indeed so odd that he has never perceived her own attractions. What can seem odder to a pretty woman than that?
Leila Faversham tells Lady Dawlish ten minutes later that Brandolin has confessed that he only likes black women. "Isn't it horrid? He actually has numbers of them down in Warwickshire, just as he keeps the Indian animals and the African birds." ”

“ 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 ”

“ Every one is laughing and talking; Usk is drinking a glass of kümmel, and Brandolin is playing with the dog; conversing with Nina Curzon and the mistress of the house, and standing in front of them, is a tall fair man irreproachable in tenue and extremely distinguished in appearance. He is Lord Gervase. ”

“ Brandolin is surprised, but he does not show any surprise. "Ah! Quite right, too. If we wished to please the Radicals we couldn't find any way to please them and injure ourselves equal to our insane fashion of keeping hundreds of square acres at an enormous cost, only that for a few weeks in the summer we may do to death some of the most innocent and graceful of God's creatures."
"That's just the bosh Dolly talks."
"Lady Usk is a wise politician, then. Let her train Boom for his political life. ”

“ Brandolin gets up and walks about the room. It is a dilemma which has often been present to his mind in various epochs of his existence.
"You see, my dear people," he says, with affectionate confidence, "the real truth of the matter is this. A good woman is an admirable creation of Providence, for certain uses in her generation; but she is tiresome. A naughty woman is delightful ”

“ Brandolin is indeed singularly abstemious in the pleasures of the table, to which the good condition of his nerves and constitution may no doubt be attributed. "I have found that eating is an almost entirely unnecessary indulgence," he says in one of his books. "If an Arab can ride, fight, kill lions, and slay Frenchmen on a mere handful of pulse or of rice, why cannot we live on it too?" Whereat Usk wrote once on the margin of the volume, in pencil, "Why should we?" ”

“ The Babe is silent: he does not venture to ask any more, and he has a humiliating feeling that he is not first in the thoughts of Madame Sabaroff,—nay, that, though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon his shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten him.
Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her great charm for him consists in the power she possesses of compelling him to control his impulses. He walks away by himself through the green shadows of the boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. ”