it was four o’clock on a misty and dark afternoon of the month of march in london.
the reception-rooms of a fine house facing grosvenor gate were all lighted by the last modern perfection of rose-shaded electricity. they were rooms of unusually admirable proportions and size for the city in which they were situated, and were decorated and filled with all that modern resources, both in art and in wealth, can obtain.
harrenden house, as it was called, had been designed for a rich and eccentric duke of that name, and occupied by him for a few years, at the end of which time he had tired of it, had carried all its treasures elsewhere, and put it up for sale; it had remained unsold and unlet for a very long period, the price asked being too large even for millionaires. at last, in the autumn of the previous year, it had been taken by a person who was much more than a millionaire, though he had been born in a workhouse and had begun life as a cow-boy.
the great mansion had nothing whatever of the parvenu about it except its new owner. its interior had been arranged in perfect taste by an unerring master’s hand. the square hall had ancient italian tapestries, italian marbles, italian mosaics, all of genuine age and extreme beauty, whilst from its domed cupola a mellowed light streamed down through painted glass of the fifteenth century, taken from the private chapel of a flemish castle.
the two-winged staircase, broad and massive, had balustrades of oak which had once been the choir railings of a cathedral in karinthia, the silver lamps which hung above these stairs had once illumined religious services in the kremlin, and above the central balustrade leaned, lovely as adolescence, a nude youth with a hawk on his wrist—the work of clodion.
the rest of the mansion was in the same proportions[17] and perfection. no false note jarred on its harmonies, no doubtful thing intruded a coarse or common chord. the household were not pushed away into dark cell-like corners, but had comfortable and airy sleeping-chambers. it was a palace fit for a queen of loves; it was a home made for a young cæsar in the first flush of his dreams of cleopatra. and it belonged actually to william massarene, late of kerosene city, north dakota, u. s. a., miner, miller, meat salesman, cattle exporter, railway contractor, owner of gambling-saloons, and opium dens for the heathen chinee, and one of the richest and hardiest-headed men in either hemisphere.
nothing was wanting which money could buy—tapestries, ivories, marbles, bronzes, porcelains, potteries, orchids, palms, roses, silks, satins, and velvets, were all there in profusion. powdered lackeys lolled in the anteroom, dignified men in black stole noiselessly over carpets soft and elastic as moss; in the tea-room the china was sèvres of 1770, and the water boiled in what had once been a gold water-vase of leo x.; in the delicious little oval boudoir the walls were entirely covered with old saxe plates, and saxe shepherds and shepherdesses made groups in all the corners, while a watteau formed the ceiling; and yet, amidst these gay and smiling porcelain people of meissen, who were a century and a half old, and yet kept the roses on their cheeks and the laugh on their lips, margaret massarene, the mistress of it all, sat in solitary state and melancholy meditation; a heavy hopelessness staring in her pale grey eyes, a dreary dejection expressed in the loose clasp of her fat hands folded on her knee, the fingers now and then beating a nervous tattoo. what use was it to have the most beautiful dwelling-house in all london if no one ever beheld its beauties from one week’s end to another? what use was it to have a regiment of polished and disdainful servants if there were no visitors of rank for them to receive?
many things are hard in this world; but nothing is harder than to be ready to prostrate yourself, and be forbidden to do it; to be ready to eat the bitter pastry which is called humble pie, and yet find no table at which so much even as this will be offered you. the great world[18] did not affront them; it did worse, it did not seem to know they existed.
“take a big town-house; buy a big country place; ask people; the rest will all follow of itself,” had said their counsellor and confidant at the baths of homburg. they had bought the town-house, and the country place, but as yet they had found no people to invite to either of them; and not a soul had as yet called at the magnificent mansion by gloucester gate, although for fifteen days and more its porter had sat behind open gates; gates of bronze and gold with the massarene arms, which the herald’s college had lately furnished, emblazoned above on their scroll-work awaiting the coronet which a grateful nation and a benign sovereign would, no doubt, ere many years should have passed, add to them.
people of course there were by hundreds and thousands, who would have been only too glad to be bidden to their doors; but they were people of that common clay with which the massarenes had finished for ever and aye.
there were many families, rich, if not as rich as themselves, and living in splendor on clapham common, near epping forest, or out by sydenham and dulwich, who would have willingly been intimate with mrs. massarene as their husbands were with hers in the city. she would have been content with their fine houses, their good dinners, their solid wealth, their cordial company. she would have been much more at ease in their suburban villas amidst their homelier comforts, hearing and sharing their candid boastfulness of their rise in life. but these were not the acquaintances which her husband desired. he did not want commerce, however enriched; he wanted the great world, or what now represents it, the smart world; and he intended to have that or none.
and lady kenilworth, their homburg friend, had written a tiny three-cornered note ten days before, with a mouse in silver on its paper, which said: “i am in town and am coming to see you. jack and boo send love,” and on this familiar epistle they had built up an eiffel tower of prodigious hope and expectation. but ten days and more had passed and their correspondent had not yet fulfilled her promise.
[19]therefore, amidst all the beauty and splendor of it, the mistress of the house sat, pale, sullen, despondent, melancholy. she had sat thus for fifteen days—ever since parliament had met—and it was all in vain, in vain. the gold urn bubbled, the shepherds smiled, the orchids bloomed, the men in black and the men in powder waited in vain, and the splendid and spacious mansion warmed itself, lighted itself, perfumed itself in vain. nobody came.
she had dropped all her old friends and the new ones were faithless and few.
she had been forced by her lord and master to cease her acquaintance with the wives of aldermen and city magnates and magistrates; good-natured wealthy women, who had been willing to make her one of themselves; and the desired successors, the women of the world, were only conspicuous by their absence.
she was dressed admirably by a great authority on clothes; but the dull venetian red, embroidered with gold thread and slashed with tawny color, was suited to a vittoria accrombona, to a lucrezia borgia, and did not suit at all the large loose form and the pallid insignificant features of their present wearer.
when the head cutter of the great paris house which had turned out that magnificent gown had ventured to suggest to its chief that such attire was thrown away on such a face and figure as these, that oracle had answered with withering contempt, “rien ne va aux gens de leur espèce, excepté leur tablier d’ouvrière. et le tablier on ne veut plus porter!”
his scorn was unutterable for all “gens de leur espèce,” but he did what he could for them; he let them have exquisite attire and sent them very long bills. it was not his fault if they never knew how to wear their clothes; he could not teach them that secret, which only comes by the magic of nature and breeding. the present wearer of his beautiful venetian red and gold gown was laced in until she could scarcely breathe; her fat hands were covered with beautiful rings; her grey hair had been washed with gold-colored dye; her broad big feet, which had stood so many years before cooking stoves and washtubs, were[20] encased in venetian red hose of silk and black satin shoes with gold buckles; her maid had assured her that she looked like a picture but she felt like a guy, and was made nervous by the medusa-like gaze of the men in black who occasionally flitted across her boudoir to attend to a lamp, contract the valve of the calorifère, or lay the afternoon papers cut and aired by her chair.
“if only they wouldn’t look at me so!” she thought, piteously. what must they think of her, sitting alone like this, day after day, week after week, when the dreary two hours’ drive in the park was over, behind the high-stepping horses, which were the envy of all beholders, but to their owners seemed strange, terrible and dangerous creatures.
london was full, not with the suffocating fullness indeed of july, but with the comparative animation which comes into the street with the meeting of parliament.
but not a soul had passed those gates as yet, at least not one as human souls had of late become classified in the estimation of the dwellers within them.
the beautiful rooms seemed to yawn like persons whose mind and whose time are vacant. the men in black and the men in powder yawned also, and bore upon their faces the visible expression of that depression and discontent which were in their bosoms at the sense, ever increasing in them, that every additional day in the house of people whom nobody knew, robbed them of caste, injured their prestige, and ruined their future.
the mistress of the palace only did not yawn because she was too agitated, too nervous and disappointed and unhappy to be capable of such a minor suffering a ennui; she was not dull because she was strung up to a high state of anxious expectation, gradually subsiding, as day after day went on, to a complete despair.
they had done all that could be done in the way of getting into society; they had neglected no means, shunned no humiliation, spared no expense, refused no subscription, avoided no insult which could possibly, directly or indirectly, have helped them to enter its charmed circle, and yet nothing had succeeded. nobody came, nobody at least out of that mystic and magic sphere[21] into which they pined and slaved to force or to insinuate themselves; not one of those, the dust of whose feet they were ready to kiss, would come up the staircase under the smiling gaze of clodion’s young falconer.
but on this second day of the month of march, when the clocks showed five of the afternoon, there was a slight movement perceptible in the rooms of which the suite was visible from the door of the boudoir. the groom of the chambers, a slender, solemn, erect personage, by name winter, came forward with a shade of genuine respect for the first time shown in his expression and demeanor.
“lady kenilworth asks if you receive, madam?”
“why, lord, man! ain’t i in o’ purpose?” said his mistress, in her agitation and surprise reverting to her natural vernacular; whilst she rose in vast excitement and unspeakable trepidation, and tumbled against a stool in her nervousness.
“i was sure that i should find you at home, so i followed on the heels of your man,” said a sweet, silvery, impertinent voice, as the fair young mother of jack and boo entered the boudoir, looking at everything about her in a bird-like way, and with an eye-glass which she did not want lifted to the bridge of her small and delicate nose.
“so kind—so kind—so honored,” murmured mrs. massarene with bewilderment and enthusiasm, her pale, flaccid cheeks warm with pleasure, and her voice tremulous with timidity.
“not at all,” murmured lady kenilworth absently and vaguely, occupied with her inspection of the objects round her. she seated herself on a low chair, and let her glance wander over the walls, the ceiling, the meissen china, the watteau ceiling, and her hostess’s gown.
“how’s your dear little children, ma’am?” said mrs. massarene humbly.
“oh, they’re all right, thanks,” said their mother carelessly, her head thrown back as she gazed up at the watteau. “it seems very well done,” she said at last. “who did it for you? the bond street people?”
“did what?” said her hostess falteringly, drawing in her breath with a sudden little gasp to prevent herself from saying “my lady.”
[22]“the whole thing,” explained her guest, pointing with the handle of her eye-glass toward the vista of the rooms.
“the—the—house?” said mrs. massarene hesitatingly, still not understanding. “we bought it—that is, mr. massarene bought it—and prince kristof of karstein was so good as to see to the decorations and the furniture. the duke had left a-many fixtures.”
“prin and kris?” repeated lady kenilworth, hearing imperfectly through indifference to the subject and attention to the old saxe around her. “i never heard of them. are they a london firm?”
“prince kristof of karstein,” repeated mrs. massarene, distressed to find the name misunderstood. “he is a great friend of ours. i think your ladyship saw him with us in paris last autumn.”
lady kenilworth opened wide her pretty, innocent, impertinent, forget-me-not colored eyes.
“what, old khris? khris kar? did he do it all for you? oh, i must run about and look at it all, if he did it!” she said, as she jumped from her seat, and, without any premiss or permission, began a tour of the rooms, sweeping swiftly from one thing to another, lingering momentarily here and there, agile and restless as a squirrel, yet soft in movement as a swan. she did run about, flitting from one room to another, studying, appraising, censuring, admiring, all in a rapid and cursory way, but with that familiarity with what she saw, and that accurate eye for what was good in it, which the mistress of all these excellent and beautiful things would live to the end of her years without acquiring.
she put up her eye-glass at the pictures, fingered the tapestries, turned the porcelains upside down to see their marks, flitted from one thing to another, knew every orchid and odontoglossum by its seven-leagued name, and only looked disapproval before a mantegna exceedingly archaic and black, and a pietro di cortona ceiling which seemed to her florid and doubtful.
she went from reception-rooms to library, dining-room, conservatories, with drawing-rooms, morning-rooms, studies, bedchambers, galleries, bath-rooms, as swift as a swallow and as keen of glance as a falcon, touching a[23] stuff, eyeing a bit of china, taking up a bibelot, with just the same pretty pecking action as a chaffinch has in an orchard, or a pigeon in a bean-field. everything was really admirable and genuine. all the while she paid not the slightest attention to the owner of the house, who followed her anxiously and humbly, not daring to ask a question, and panting in her tight corset at the speed of her going, but basking in the sense of her visitor’s rank as a cat basks in the light and warmth of a coal fire and a fur-lined basket.
not a syllable did lady kenilworth deign to cast to her in her breathless scamper through the house. she had some solid knowledge of value in matters of art, and she begrudged these delicious things to the woman with the face like a large unbaked loaf and the fat big hands, as her four-year-old boo had begrudged the gold box.
“really they say there is a providence above us, but i can’t think there is, when i am pestered to death by bills, and this creature owns harrenden house;” she thought, with those doubts as to the existence of a deity which always assail people when deity is, as it were, in the betting against them. she had read an article that morning by jules simon, in which he argued that if the anarchists could be only persuaded to believe in a future life they would turn their bombs into bottles of kid reviver and cheerfully black the boots of the bourgeoisie. but she felt herself that there was something utterly wrong in a scheme of creation which could bestow harrenden house on a margaret massarene, and in a divine judge who could look on at such discrepancies of property without disapproval.
she scarcely said a syllable in her breathless progress over the building; although the unhappy mistress of harrenden house pined in trembling for her verdict, as a poor captain of a company longs for a word from some great general inspecting his quarters. but when she had finished her tour of inspection, and consented to take a cup of tea and a caviare biscuit in the tea-room where the leo the tenth urn was purring, and mr. winter and two of his subordinates were looking on in benign condescension, she said brusquely:
[24]“eh bien, il ne vous a pas volé.”
mrs. massarene had not the most remote idea of what she meant, but smiled vaguely, and anxiously, hoping the phrase meant praise.
“he’s given you the value of your money,” lady kenilworth explained. “it’s the finest house in london, and nearly everything in it is good. the mantegna is rubbish, as i told you, and if i had been asked i shouldn’t have put up that pietro di cortona. what did khris make you pay for it?”
“i don’t know, i am sure, ma’am,” replied the mistress of the mantegna meekly. “william—mr. massarene—never tells me the figure of anything.”
“the cortona was painted last year in the avenue de villiers, i suspect,” continued lady kenilworth. “but all the rest, or nearly all, is admirable.”
“it’s a very grand house,” replied its mistress meekly; “but it’s mighty lonesome-like to be in it, with no company. if all the great folks you promised, my lady——”
“i never promised, i never do promise,” said her visitor sharply. “i can’t take people by their petticoats and coat-tails and drag them up your stairs. you must get yourself known for something; then they’ll come. what? oh, i have no idea. something. a cook; or a wine; or a surprise. people like surprises under their dinner napkins. or a speciality, any speciality. i knew a person who entirely got into society by white hares; civet de lièvre, you know; but white, siberian.”
mrs. massarene gasped. she had a feeling then she was being talked to in sanscrit or welsh and expected to understand it. why white hares should be better than brown hares she could not imagine. nobody ate the fur.
“but you was so good as to say when we were in paris, ma’am——”
“never remind me of anything i said. i can’t endure it! i believe you want to get in the swim, don’t you?”
“please, i don’t quite understand, ma’am.”
her visitor was silently finishing nibbling at a caviare biscuit and reflecting what a goose she had been to go to egypt instead of utilizing this massarene vein. she must certainly, she thought, do all she could for these people.
[25]“you’re catholic, aren’t you?” she said abruptly.
the horror of an ulster woman spread itself over the flaccid and pallid clay in which the features of her hostess were moulded.
“oh no, my lady, we were never romans,” she said, so aghast that she was carried out of herself into the phraseology of her earlier years. “we were never romans. how could you think it of us?”
“it would be better for you if you were,” said lady kenilworth unfeelingly and irreverently. “catholics are chic; and then all the great catholic families push a convert unanimously. they’d get a sweep to all the best houses if he only went often enough to the oratory.”
“we’ve always been loyal people,” murmured mrs. massarene piteously; “always orange as orange could be.”
“loyalty’s nothing,” said lady kenilworth, contemptuously eyeing the beautiful gold urn with the envious appreciation of a dealer’s glance. “loyalty don’t ‘take the cake.’ nobody is afraid of it. it’s all fear now that we go by——”
“and gain,” she was about to add but checked the words unuttered.
“i wish you were catholic,” she said instead. “it would make everything so much smoother for you. i suppose you couldn’t change? they’d make it very easy for you.”
margaret massarene gasped. life had unfolded many possibilities to her of which she had never dreamed; but never such a possibility as this.
“couldn’t you?” said her guest sharply. “after all, it’s nothing to do. the archbishop would see to it all for you. they make it very easy where there is plenty of money.”
“i don’t think i could, my lady; it would be eternal punishment for me in the world to come,” said mrs. massarene faintly, whilst her groom of the chambers restrained a violent inclination to box her on the ears for the vulgarity of her two last words.
he had been long trained in the necessary art of banishing from his countenance every ray of expression, every[26] shadow of indication that he overheard what was said around him, but nature for once prevailed over training; deep and unutterable disgust was spoken on his bland yet austere features. eternal punishment! did the creature think that harrenden house was a methody chapel?
as for lady kenilworth, she went into a long and joyous peal of laughter; laughed till the tears brimmed over in her pretty ingenuous turquoise-colored eyes.
“oh, my good woman,” she said, as soon as she could speak, good-humoredly and contemptuously, “you don’t mean to say that you believe in eternal punishment? what is the use of getting old khris to furnish for you and ask me to show you the way about, if you weigh yourself down with such an old-fashioned funny packful of antiquated ideas as that? you must not say such things really; you will never get on amongst us if you do.”
the countenance of margaret massarene grew piteous to behold; she was a feeble woman, but obstinate; she was ready to sell her soul to “get on,” but the ghastly terrors inculcated to her in her childhood were too strongly embedded in her timid and apprehensive nature to leave her a free agent.
“anything else, ma’am—anything else,” she murmured wretchedly. “but not romanism, not papistry. you don’t know what it means to me, you don’t indeed.”
lady kenilworth shrugged her shoulders and got up from the tea-table.
“i always said,” she observed slightingly, “that the orange people were the real difficulty in ireland. there would never have been any trouble without them.”
“but you are not a papist yourself, my lady?” asked mrs. massarene with trembling accents.
“oh, i? no,” said the pretty young woman with the same contemptuous and indifferent tone. “we can’t change. we must stick to the mast—fall with the colors—die in the breach—all that kind of thing. we can’t turn and twist about. but you new people can, and you are geese if you don’t. you want to get in the swim. well, if you’re wise you’ll take the first swimming-belt that you can get. but do just as you like, it does not[27] matter to me. i am afraid i must go now, i have half a hundred things to do.”
she glanced at the watch in her bracelet and drew up her feather boa to her throat. tears rose to the pale gray eyes of her hostess.
“pray don’t be offended with me, my lady,” she said timidly. “i hoped, i thought, perhaps you’d be so very kind and condescending as to tell me what to do; things bewilder me, and nobody comes. couldn’t you spare me a minute more in the boudoir yonder? where these men won’t hear us,” she added in a whisper.
she could not emulate her guest’s patrician indifference to the presence of the men in black; it seemed to her quite frightful to discuss religious and social matters beneath the stony glare of mr. winter and his colleagues. but lady kenilworth could not share or indulge such sentiments, nor would she consent to take any such precautions.
she seated herself where she had been before by the tea-table, her eyes always fascinated by the leo the tenth urn. she took a bonbon and nibbled it prettily, as a squirrel may nibble a filbert.
“tell me what you want,” she said bluntly; she was often blunt, but she was always graceful.
margaret massarene glanced uneasily at winter and his subordinates, and wished that she could have dared to order them out of earshot, as she would have done with a red-armed and red-haired maid-of-all-work who had marked her first stage on the steep slopes of “gentility.”
“you told us at homburg, my lady——” she began timidly.
“don’t say ‘my lady,’ whatever you do.”
“i beg your pardon, my—yes, ma’am—no ma’am—i beg pardon—you were so good as to tell william and me at the baths that you would help us to get on in london if we took a big house and bought that place in woldshire. we’ve done both them things, but we don’t get on; nobody comes nigh us here nor there.”
she heaved a heart-broken sigh which lifted and depressed the gold embroideries on her ample bosom.
lady kenilworth smiled unsympathetically.
[28]“what can you expect, my good woman?” she murmured. “people don’t call on people whom they don’t know; and you don’t know anybody except my husband and old khris and myself.”
it was only too true. mrs. massarene sighed.
“but i thought as how your la—, as how you would be so very, very good as to——”
“i am not a bear-leader,” said lady kenilworth with hauteur. mrs. massarene was as helpless and as flurried as a fish landed on a grassy bank with a barbed hook through its gills. there was a long and to her a torturing silence. the water hissed gently, like a purring cat, in the vase of leo the tenth, and mouse kenilworth looked at it as a woman of egypt may have gazed at a statue of pascht.
it seemed a visible symbol of the immense wealth of these massarene people, of all the advantages which she herself might derive therefrom, of the unwisdom of allowing their tutelage to lapse into other hands than theirs. if she did not launch them on the tide of fashion others would do so, and others would gain by it all that she would lose by not doing it. she was a woman well-born and well-bred, and proud by temperament and by habit, and the part she was moved to play was disagreeable to her, even odious. but it was yet one which in a way allured her, which drew her by her necessities against her will; and the golden water-vase seemed to say to her with the voice of a deity, “gold is the only power left in life.” she herself commanded all other charms and sorceries; but she did not command that.
she was silent some moments whilst the pale eyes of her hostess watched her piteously and pleadingly.
she felt that she had made a mistake, but she did not know what it was nor how to rectify it.
“i beg pardon, ma’am,” she said humbly; “i understood you to say as how you would introduce me to your family and friends in town and in the country. i didn’t mean any offence—indeed, indeed, i didn’t.”
“and none is taken,” said lady kenilworth graciously, thinking to herself, “one must suit oneself to one’s company.[29] that’s how they talk, i believe, in the servants’ hall, where she ought to be.”
aloud she continued:
“you see, whatever one says at homburg, or indeed anywhere at all out of england, does not count in england: that is understood everywhere by everybody.”
“really,” murmured mrs. massarene, confused and crestfallen: for it had been on the faith of this fair lady’s promises and predictions in the past summer that harrenden house and vale royal had been purchased.
“of course,” said lady kenilworth rather tartly, still looking at the gold water-vase, which exercised a strange fascination over her, as if it were a fetish which she was compelled, nolens volens, to worship. “only imagine what a mob we should have round us at home if everyone we were civil to in nice and florence and homburg and ostend, and all the other places, could take us seriously and expect to be invited by us here. it would be frightful.”
margaret massarene sighed: existence seemed to her complicated and difficult to an extent which she could never have credited in the days when she had carried her milking-pails to and from the rich grass meadows of her old home in ulster. in those remote and simple days “i’ll be glad to see you” meant “i shall be glad,” and when you ate out of your neighbor’s potato bowl, your neighbor had a natural right to eat in return out of yours—a right never disavowed. but in the great world these rules of veracity and reciprocity seemed unknown. lady kenilworth sat lost in thought some moments, playing with the ends of her feather boa and thinking whether the game were worth the candle. it would be such a dreadful bore!
then there came before her mind’s eyes the sum total of many unpaid bills, and the vision of that infinite sweetness which lies in renewed and unlimited credit.
“you want to be lancée?” she said at last in her brusque yet graceful manner suddenly, as she withdrew her gaze from the tea-table, “well, sometimes to succeed socially is very easy and sometimes it is very difficult—for new people very difficult. society is always uncertain.[30] it acts on no fixed principles. it keeps out a. and lets in b., and couldn’t possibly say why it does either. your money alone won’t help you. there are such swarms of rich persons, and everybody who gets rich wants the same thing. you are, i believe, enormously rich, but there are a good many enormously rich. the world is in a queer state; ninety out of a hundred have nothing but debts, the other ten are gorged on money, gorged; it is very queer. something is wrong. the sense of proportion has gone out of life altogether. you want, you say, to know people. well, i can let you see them; you can come and meet them at my house; but i can’t make them take you up if they won’t do it.”
mrs. massarene sighed. she dared not say so, but she thought—of what use had been all the sums flung away at this lovely lady’s bidding in the previous autumn?
“it is no use to waste time on the idiot,” reflected her visitor. “she don’t understand a word one says, and she thinks they can buy society as if it were a penny bun. old billy’s sharper; i wonder he had not the sense to divorce her in the states, or wherever they come from.”
“where’s your man?” she said impatiently.
“william’s in the city, my lady,” answered mrs. massarene proudly. “william, ma’am, is very much thought of in the city.”
“he’s on lots of things, i suppose?”
after some moments’ puzzled reflection his wife replied, “meaning boards, ma’am? yes, he is. they seem they can’t do without him. william had always a wonderful head for business.”
“ah!” said lady kenilworth. “he must put cocky on some good things. my husband, you know. everything is done by companies nowadays. even the derby favorite is owned by a syndicate. tell him to put lord kenilworth on all his good things, and not to mind if he’s unpunctual. lord kenilworth never can understand why half-past two isn’t the same hour as twelve.”
“that won’t do in business, my lady,” said mrs. massarene boldly, for here she was sure of her ground. “five minutes late writes ruin sometimes.”
“does it indeed? i suppose that’s what makes it so[31] fetching. i am sure it would do cocky worlds of good; wake him up; give him things to think of.”
“is my lord a business man, ma’am?” said mrs. massarene, with great doubt in her tone.
“oh, they all are now, you know. cocky’s very lazy, but he’s very clever.”
“my lord don’t want to be clever; he’ll be duke,” said mrs. massarene, intending no sarcasm. “i can’t think, ma’am, as your noble husband would like to toil and moil in the city.”
“no—no; but to be on things, you know,” answered her visitor vaguely. “you send mr. massarene to me and we’ll talk about it. he mustn’t mind if lord kenilworth only gives his name and never shows.”
mrs. massarene’s was a slow brain and a dull one, but she was not really stupid; in some matters she was shrewd, and she began dimly to perceive what was expected of her and her william, and what quid pro quo would be demanded by this lovely lady who had the keys of society if she used any of these keys in their favor; she had had glimmerings of this before, but it had never presented itself before her so clearly as now. she had sense enough, however, to keep the discovery to herself. “i’ll tell mr. massarene, ma’am,” she said meekly, “and i know he’ll be very proud to wait on you. shall it be to-morrow?”
“yes; to-morrow, before luncheon. about half-past twelve.”
“i won’t forget, ma’am.”
“and i’ll come and dine with you next week. i’ll bring some people, my sisters; they won’t mind, carrie certainly won’t. lady wisbeach, you know. what day? oh, i don’t know. i must go home and look at my book. i think there is something of no importance that i can throw over next week.”
“and how many will be there at dinner, ma’am,” asked mrs. massarene, feeling hot all over, as she would have expressed it, at the prospect of this banquet.
“oh, well, i can’t say. i’ll see who will come. you have a very good chef, haven’t you? if not i could get you van holstein’s. you know when people are well fed once they’ll come to be fed again, and they tell others.”
[32]“just like fowls,” murmured mrs. massarene, her mind reverting to the poultry yard of her youth, with the hens running over and upsetting each other in their haste to get to the meal-pan.
she was sensible of an awakening interest of a warmer tinge in the manner of her protectress, since the subject of good things in the city had been broached.
“you mustn’t want to go too fast at once,” continued that fair lady. “it’s like cycling. you’ll wobble about and get a good many falls at first. but you’ve begun well. you’ve a beautiful house, and you have my cousin’s place, in the heart of a hunting county. several of the county people have asked me about the purchaser of vale royal, and i have always said something nice about you both. you know i have been four months on the nile, and one sees the whole world there; such a climate as this is to return to after egypt! why weren’t you in egypt? oh, i forgot; your man’s member for limehouse, isn’t he? i wonder the party hasn’t done more for you. but, you see, money alone, unless there is tact—— well, i dare say i can’t make you understand if i talk till doomsday; i have two or three people the night after to-morrow. i will send you a card. and, by the way, you had better tell khris to call on me if he be in town. i will talk over with him what we can do for you.”
mr. winter, standing within earshot, at a discreet distance, to all appearance as bereft of sight and hearing, and impervious as a statue to all sight and sounds, lost not a syllable uttered by lady kenilworth, and approved of all. “it is clever of her,” he thought, “to be ready to go halves in the spoils with that old prince. meet him half way, she does; mighty clever that; she’ll cut his claws and draw his teeth. she’s a lady of the right sort, she is. if she weren’t quite so clever she’d have him jealous of him and have made an enemy of him at the onset.”
his employer meantime was exhausting her somewhat limited vocabulary in agitated thanks and protestations of undying gratitude which lady kenilworth nipped in the bud by giving her two fingers chillily and hurrying away, her farewell glance being cast at the golden water-vase.
[33]“khris a house decorator and i a tout! how very dreadful it is! but hard times make strange trades,” thought the young mother of jack and boo, as she sank down on the soft seat of her little brougham, and was borne swiftly away to other houses, as the lamps begun to shine through the foggy evening air.
