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A HOUSE-PARTY

Don Gesualdo

and

A Rainy June

by

OUIDA

Author Of "Othmar," "Princess Napeaxine," "Under Two Flags," "Wanda,"
Etc., Etc.







Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott Company.
1902.




A HOUSE-PARTY.




CHAPTER I.


It is an August morning. It is an old English manor-house. There is a
breakfast-room hung with old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts;
it has oak furniture of the same period; it has leaded lattices with
stained glass in some of their frames, and the motto of the house in old
French, "J'ay bon vouloir," emblazoned there with the crest of a heron
resting in a crown. Thence, windows open on to a green, quaint, lovely
garden, which was laid out by Monsieur Beaumont when he planned the
gardens of Hampton Court. There are clipped yew-tree walks and arbors
and fantastic forms; there are stone terraces and steps like those of
Haddon, and there are peacocks which pace and perch upon them; there are
beds full of all the flowers which blossomed in the England of the
Stuarts, and birds dart and butterflies pass above them; there are huge
old trees, cedars, lime, hornbeam; beyond the gardens there are the
woods and grassy lawns of the home park.

The place is called Surrenden Court, and is one of the houses of George,
Earl of Usk,--his favorite house in what pastoral people call autumn,
and what he calls the shooting season.

Lord Usk is a well-made man of fifty, with a good-looking face, a little
spoilt by a permanent expression of irritability and impatience, which
is due to the state of his liver; his eyes are good-tempered, his mouth
is querulous; nature meant him for a very amiable man, but the
dinner-table has interfered with, and in a measure upset, the good
intentions of nature: it very often does. Dorothy, his wife, who is by
birth a Fitz-Charles, third daughter of the Duke of Derry, is a still
pretty woman of thirty-five or -six, inclined to an _embonpoint_ which
is the despair of herself and her maids; she has small features, a gay
expression, and very intelligent eyes; she does not look at all a great
lady, but she can be one when it is necessary. She prefers those merrier
moments in life in which it is not necessary. She and Lord Usk, then
Lord Surrenden, were greatly in love when they married; sixteen years
have gone by since then, and it now seems very odd to each of them that
they should ever have been so. They are not, however, bad friends, and
have even at the bottom of their hearts a lasting regard for each other.
This is saying much, as times go. When they are alone they quarrel
considerably; but then they are so seldom alone. They both consider this
disputatiousness the inevitable result of their respective relations.
They have three sons, very pretty boys and great pickles, and two young
and handsome daughters. The eldest son, Lord Surrenden, rejoices in the
names of Victor Albert Augustus George, and is generally known as Boom.

They are now at breakfast in the garden-chamber; the china is old
Chelsea, the silver is Queen Anne, the roses are old-fashioned
Jacqueminots and real cabbage roses. There is a pleasant scent from
flowers, coffee, cigarettes, and newly-mown grass. There is a litter of
many papers on the floor.

There is yet a fortnight before the shooting begins; Lord Usk feels that
those fifteen days will be intolerable; he repents a fit of fright and
economy in which he has sold his great Scotch moors and deer-forest to
an American capitalist; not having his own lands in Scotland any longer,
pride has kept him from accepting any of the many invitations of his
friends to go to them there for the Twelfth; but he has a keen dread of
the ensuing fifteen days without sport.

His wife has asked her own set; but he hates her set; he does not much
like his own; there is only Dulcia Waverley whom he does like, and Lady
Waverley will not come till the twentieth. He feels bored, hipped,
annoyed; he would like to strangle the American who has bought
Achnalorrie. Achnalorrie,