“ronnie,” said mouse to her elder brother one morning, “i don’t think i’ve ever told you about those new people to whom gerald sold vale royal——”
“to whom you sold vale royal,” said lord hurstmanceaux with curt significance.
she colored; she did not like her brother’s rough and blunt ways of putting things, though it was a courcy habit into which she herself lapsed in cynical and imprudent moments.
she let the subject pass, however, and continued as if she had not heard the correction.
“they are such fun; you can’t imagine how delightful they are; and they have made harrenden house a paradise. when i came from cairo they were already in it. old prince khris had done it all.”
“there are a good many such dollar-lined paradises in london,” said hurstmanceaux. “i’d rather you didn’t go into them. but, of course, you do as you like.”
“of course i do! old khris arranged the house for them.”
hurstmanceaux laughed.
“khris and you! they will be warm people indeed if they have even a paire pour le soif left for themselves between you two. poor devils! i think i’ll go and give them the lay of the course.”
“my dear ronnie! how absurd you are. if anybody heard you they might think you were in earnest.”
hurstmanceaux looked at his sister with a shrewd, appreciative scorn in his eyes.
“they might,” he said gravely. “i am usually in earnest, my dear.”
“i know you are and it is a horrid thing to be,” she replied with petulance. “earnest people are always such bores.” then, remembering that she would not produce[56] the effect she desired by abusing him, she changed her tone.
“dearest ronald, these persons are coming here to-morrow night. let me present them to you; and if you would but say a good word for them in the world——”
he was silent.
“i think, you know,” she murmured softly, “that as they bought gerald’s place they naturally rather look to us all to make things pleasant for them.”
hurstmanceaux put the white small ringed finger off his coat with a gesture which had sternness in it.
“my dear child, you are delilah to all men born of adam; but not to me, not to me, my child, because you are my sister. the lord be praised for his mercies! if you had not been my sister i should have had no strength against you probably. as it is, i won’t keep bad company, my dear, even to please you.”
“bad company! they are most estimable people.”
“i am happy to hear so, since you let them in here.”
“but everybody is going to know them.”
“then why should you care about my knowing them too?”
“that is just——” began his sister, and paused, scanning the little mouse embroidered on her handkerchief.
“take your eyes off that bit of gossamer and look at me,” said hurstmanceaux severely. “you do this kind of thing. cocky does it. you make gerald do it. but i’ll be damned, my dear, if you make me.”
she was mute, distressed, irritated, not seeing very well what to say or resent.
“get up a firm with old khris,” continued her brother; “khris and kenilworth; it will run very nicely and take the town like wildfire; i am convinced that it will; but hurstmanceaux as ‘co.’—no thank you.”
“you don’t even hear me,” said his sister rather piteously.
“i know all you’re going to say,” he replied. “you mean to float these people, and you’ll do it. you’ll get ’em to state concerts, and you’ll get ’em to marlborough house garden-parties, and you’ll get ’em to political houses, and you’ll ram ’em down all our throats, and take[57] the princes to dine with ’em; i know all that; it’s always the same programme; and the he-beast will get a baronetcy, and the she-beast will get to hatfield, and you’ll run them just as barnum used to run his giants and dwarfs, and you’ll make a pot by it as barnum did. only leave me out of the thing, if you please.”
“why shouldn’t you be the sleeping partner?” said his sister jestingly, but with a side glance of her lovely eyes which had a timid and keen interrogation in it. “nobody’d be the wiser, and your word has such weight.”
“don’t make that sort of suggestion, my dear, even in joke. gerald has helped you; i am not gerald. you’ve made him dance to your tune through a lot of mud, but you won’t make me. there are enough of the family in this shabby kind of business as it is.”
“oh, ronald!——”
“you see, sourisette,” he added, “you are always telling me that i wear my clothes too long; you’ve often seen me in an old coat, in a shockingly old coat; but you never saw me in an ill-cut one. well, i like my acquaintances to be like my clothes. they may be out at elbows, but i must have ’em well cut.”
lady kenilworth gazed at her pocket-handkerchief for a few minutes in disturbed silence.
“is that the tone you mean to take about my new people?” she asked at last.
“my dearest sourisette, i don’t take any tone. these richards from the northwest are nothing to me. you are taking them up, and getting carrie to take them up, because you mean to get lots of good things out of them. no one can possibly know ‘a bull-dozing boss’ from north dakota for any other reason than to plunder him.”
“oh, ronald! what coarse and odious things you say!”
her exclamation was beseeching and indignant; a little flush of color went over her fair cheeks. “you shouldn’t be so hard upon one,” she added. “some poet has said that poverty gives us strange bed-fellows.”
“we need never lie down on the bed; we can lie in our own straw.”
[58]“but if we have used up all our straw?”
“then we can go out of doors and sleep à la belle étoile.”
“and the rural constable will pass by with his lanthorn, and wake us up, and run us in! oh, my dear ronald, you don’t know what it is to want a sovereign every moment. you’re unmarried, and you shoot with a keeper’s gun, and you yacht in an old wooden tub, and you lounge about all over the world with your places shut up, and your town-house let; what can you tell, what can you dream, of the straits cocky and i are put to every single minute of our lives?”
“because you won’t pull up and lead sensible lives,” said hurstmanceaux. “you must always be in the swim, always at the most ruinously expensive places. can’t you exist without tearing over europe and bits of africa every year? did our forefathers want cairene winters? couldn’t they fish and shoot, and dance and flirt, without norway and the riviera? wasn’t their own county town enough for them? weren’t their lungs capable of breathing without biskra? weren’t they quite as good sportsmen as we are with only their fowling-pieces? quite as fine ladies as you are, though they saw to their still-rooms?”
“their women look very nice in the romneys and reynolds,” said mouse. “but you might as well ask why we don’t go from derby to bath in a coach-and-six. autre temps autre moeurs. there is nothing else to be said. would you yourself use your grandfather’s gun? why should i see to my still-room?
“i do wish,” she continued, “that you would talk about what you understand. i will send you the bill for the children’s boots and shoes, just to show you what it costs one merely to have them properly shod.”
“poor little souls!” said hurstmanceaux, with his smile which people called cynical. “i don’t think they are the heaviest of your expenses. i believe you could live with the whole lot of them in a cottage at broadstairs or herne bay all the year round for about what your hunting mares cost you in one season.”
“don’t be an ass, ronald,” said his sister crossly;[59] “what is the use of talking of things that nobody can do, any more than they can wear their fustian clothes or wooden shoes? you will know what i mean some day when you’re married. we are worse off than the match-sellers, than the crossing-sweepers. they can do as they like, but we can’t.”
“life isn’t all skittles and swipes,” observed hurstmanceaux. “you always seem to think it is.”
but she, disregarding him, went on in her wrath:
“it is a thousand times worse to be poor in our world than to be beggars on the high road. if they keep in with the police they’re all right, but our police are all round us every minute of our lives, spying to see if we have a man less in the anterooms, a hoof less in the stables, if we have the same gown on, or the same houses open; if we’ve given up any club, any habit, any moors, any shooting; if the prince talks as much to us as usual, or the princess asks us to drive with her; if we go away for the winter to shut up a place, or make lungs an excuse for getting away to avoid scotland; they are eternally staring, commenting, annotating, whispering over all we do; we can never get away from them; and we daren’t retrench a halfpenny’s worth, because if we did, the tradespeople would think we were ruined and all the pack would be down on us.”
“there is some truth in that, my poor mouse, i must allow,” said her brother with a shade of unwilling sympathy in his tone. “but it’s a beggarly rotten system to live your lives out on, and i think broadstairs would be the better part, if you could only make up your mind to it. it would be only one effort instead of a series of efforts, and the cheap trippers wouldn’t be worse than the mastodons; at least you wouldn’t have to do so much for them.”
“massarenes,” said his sister with an impatient dive for the silver poker, and another dive with it at the fire. “the name isn’t such a bad name. it might have been healy, it might have been murphy.”
“it might have even been biggar,” replied hurstmanceaux, amused. “possibilities in the ways of horror are infinite when we once begin opening our doors to people[60] whom nobody knows. practically, there need be no end to it.”
mouse, leaning softly against her brother, with her hand caressing the lapel of his coat, said sweetly and insidiously:
“there is an only daughter, ronald—an only child.”
“indeed!”
“she will be an immense heiress,” sighed his sister. “everybody will be after her.”
“everybody bar one,” said her brother.
“and why bar one?”
his face darkened. “don’t talk nonsense!” he said curtly. “i don’t like you when you are impertinent. it is a pity cocky ever saw you; the massarene alliance would have suited him down to the ground.”
“she would have been millions of miles too good for him!” said cocky’s wife, with boundless contempt. “they don’t want merely rank; they want character.”
“my dear mouse,” said hurstmanceaux, “the other day a young fellow went into a café in paris, had a good soup, fish, and roti, and three cups of coffee. an unfeeling landlord arrested him as he was about to go off without paying. the people in the streets pitied him, on the whole, but they thought the three cups of coffee too much. ‘ca c’est trop fort de café,’ said a workman in a blouse to me. in a similar manner, allow me to remark that if your new friends, in addition to the smart dinner of rank, require the strong coffee of character, they are too exacting. the people in the streets won’t let them have both.”
lady kenilworth felt very angry at this impudent anecdote, and pulled to pieces some narcissus standing near her in an old china bowl.
“the analogy don’t run on all fours,” she said petulantly. “my people can pay. you have a right to anything if you only pay enough for it.”
“most things—not everything quite,” said her brother indolently, as he took up his hat and cane and whistled his collie dog, who was playing with the blenheims. “not everything quite—yet,” he repeated, as if the declaration refreshed him. “you have not the smallest[61] effect upon me, and you will not present your protégés to me—remember that, once for all. adieu!”
then he touched her lightly and affectionately on her fair hair, shook himself like a dog who has been in dirty water, and left her.
mouse, who was not a patient or resigned woman by nature, flashed a furious glance after him from the soft shade of her dark eyelashes, and her white teeth gnawed restlessly and angrily the red and lovely under-lip beneath them. he could have done so much if he would! his opinion was always listened to, and his recommendation was so rarely given that it always carried great weight. he would have told her that they were so respected precisely because he did not do such things as this which she wanted him to do.
he was a very tall and extremely handsome man, with a debonnair and careless aspect, and a distinguished way of wearing his clothes which made their frequent shabbiness look ultra chic. the courcy beauty had been a thing of note for many generations, and he had as full a share of it as his sister, whom he strongly resembled. he was fourteen years older than she, and she had long been accustomed to regard him as the head of her house, for he had succeeded to the earldom when a schoolboy, and she had never known her father. he had tried his best to alter the ways of the kenilworth establishment, but he had failed. if he talked seriously to his sister, it always ended in his paying some bill; if he talked seriously to his brother-in-law, it always ended in his being asked to settle some affair about an actress or a dispute in a pot-house. they both used him—used him incessantly; but they never attended to his counsels or his censure. they both considered that as he was unmarried, spent little, and was esteemed stingy, they really only did him a service in making him “bleed” occasionally.
“he’s such a close-fisted prig,” said lord kenilworth, and his wife always agreed to the opinion.
“ronnie is a bore,” she said, “he is always asking questions. if anybody wants to do any good they should do it with their eyes shut, and their mouths shut; a kindness is no kindness at all if it is made the occasion for an[62] inquisitorial sermon. ronnie does not often refuse one in the end, but he is always asking why and how and what, and wanting to go to the bottom of the thing, and it is never anything that concerns him. if he would just do what one wants and say nothing, it would be so much nicer, so much more delicate; i cannot endure indelicacy.”
the kenilworths, like many other wedded people, had no common bond whatever, except when they were united against somebody else; they bickered, sneered, and quarreled whenever they were by any rare chance alone, but when it was a question of attacking any third person their solidarity was admirable. hurstmanceaux seemed to them both to have been created by nature and law to be of use to them, to carry them over troublesome places, and to lend them the ægis of his unblemished name; but of any gratitude to him neither ever dreamed; it always seemed to them that he did next to nothing for them, though if the little folks upstairs had roast mutton and sago pudding, and if the servants in stanhope street got their wages with any regularity, it was usually wholly due to his intervention.
he had succeeded to heavily encumbered estates, and the years of his minority, though they had done something, had not done much toward lessening the burden which lay on the title, and he had always been a poor man. but now, when he was nearing forty years of age, he could say that he was a free one.
to obtain such freedom it had required much self-denial and philosophy, and he had incurred much abuse in his family and out of it, and, as he was by nature careless and generous, the restraint upon his inclinations had been at times irksome and well-nigh unendurable. but he had adhered to the plan of retrenchment which he had cut out for himself, and it had been successful in releasing him from all obligations without selling a rood of land on any estate, or cutting any more timber than was necessary to the health of the woods themselves. he was called “the miser” commonly amongst his own people; but he did not mind the nickname; he kept his hands clean and his name high, which was more than do all his contemporaries and compeers.
[63]when he had left his sister this morning, and had got as far as the head of the staircase, his heart misgave him. poor mousie, had he been too rough on her? did she really want money? he turned back and entered the little room again where lady kenilworth was sitting before the hearth, her elbow on her knee, her cheek on her hand, her blue eyes gazing absently on the fire.
he came up to her and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“my dear sourisette! are you troubled about money?”
“you know i always am, ronnie,” she said impatiently. “it is chronic with us; it always will be; even when the poodle goes to glory it will be hardly any better. you know that.”
the poodle was the irreverent nickname given to the duke of otterbourne by his eldest son and that son’s wife, on account of his fleecy-white hair and his bland ceremonious manners of the old school, at which they saw fit to laugh irreverently.
“my poor child! if you have no more solid resource than to decant poodle’s demise your prospects look blue; i always tell you so. poodle means living and loving on into the twentieth century, never doubt that.”
“i don’t doubt it,” said mouse very angrily. “he will always do everything which can by any possibility most annoy us.”
“but are you in any especial difficulty at this moment, sourisette?” asked her brother in a very kind and tender tone intended to invite her confidence.
“what is especial with other people is chronic with me,” she replied pettishly. “my worries and miseries are as eternal as poodle’s youth and courtships.”
“but do you want money—well, more than usual?”
“i always want it,” replied mouse. “everybody always wants it, except you.”
“i know you always say that. i want it very much just now. but if it’s anything for the children——”
“you are a model uncle out of a fairy book! no; it is not for the mites; they get their bread and milk and mutton chops—as yet. it is, it is—well, if you really care to know, these people are horribly rude and pressing, and[64] i haven’t even a hundred pounds to throw them as a sop.”
she leaned back toward her writing-table which stood beside the hearth, and, tossing its litter of paper to and fro, took from the chaos a letter from a famous firm of bond street tradesmen, and gave it to her brother.
“as he is in the mood he may as well pay something,” she thought. “it would be a pity not to bleed the miser when one can.”
lord hurstmanceaux ran his eyes quickly over the letter, and a pained look passed over his face, an expression of annoyance and regret.
she was kenilworth’s wife, and had been long out of her brother’s guardianship, but it hurt him to think that she exposed herself to these insults, these importunities, these humiliations.
“my dear clare, why will you lay yourself open to be addressed in this manner?” he said gravely, and when he called her clare she knew that he was very greatly displeased. “why will you not pull your life together into some degree of order? why descend to the level on which it is possible for your tradesmen to write to you in such terms as these?”
lady kenilworth, who was the most caline and coaxing of women when she chose, as she could be the most autocratic and brusque when she was with people she despised, rose, looked up in her brother’s face, and stroked the lappet of his coat with her pretty slender hand sparkling with its many rings.
“write me a little check, ronnie,” she said, “and don’t put my name; make it payable to bearer.”
he shook his head.
“little checks or big checks, mousie, don’t find their way to your tradesmen. you have played me that trick more than once; i will go to these people myself and pay them the whole account; but——”
“oh, don’t pay them the whole!” said mouse uneasily. “that would be great waste of money. if you can really spare me as much as this give it to me; i will find a thousand better uses for it than——”
“paying a bill? i dare say. sheridan was of your[65] opinion; and when he was dying they sold his bed from under him.”
“they won’t sell mine, because my brother will be by my bedside,” said mouse with a sunny yet plaintive smile in her forget-me-not like eyes.
“don’t trust too much to that, my dear; i am mortal, and a good many years older than you,” he answered gravely as he folded up the bond street tradesmen’s threatening letter and put it in his coat pocket.
“you had better write a check for me, ronald, indeed,” said his sister coaxingly; “it will look odd if you pay this, or if your people pay it, and i could do a great deal with all that money.”
“you would do everything except pay the account! i don’t think you would do much with the riches of all the world except run through them,” said hurstmanceaux curtly, and taking no notice of the appeal. past experience had taught him that money which passed through his sister’s fingers had a knack of never reaching its destination. “i won’t compromise you,” he added; “don’t be afraid, and i shall tell them that they have lost your custom.”
“you need not say that,” said mouse uneasily; she was very fond of this particular bond street shop, and what was the use of paying an account if you did not avail yourself of the advantage so gained by opening another one instantly?
“i certainly shall say it,” said hurstmanceaux decidedly; and he once more left the room. mouse looked after him with regret and uneasiness; regret that she had turned his generous impulse to such small account, and uneasiness lest he should suspect more of her affairs than it would be well for him to learn.
“he is a good fellow sometimes, but so stiff-necked and mule-headed,” she thought, as she hastily calculated in her rapidly working brain how much percentage she might have got off the bond street account if she had dealt with the matter herself. she was extravagant, but she was very keen about money at the same time, at once prodigal and parsimonious, which is a more general combination than most people suppose.
[66]hurstmanceaux looked back at her rather wistfully from between the cream-colored, rose-embroidered curtains of the doorway. it was on his lips to ask her not to pursue her patronage of harrenden house; but as he had just promised to do her a service he could not seem to dictate to her an obedience as a return payment to him. he went away in silence.
“besides, whatever she were to promise she would always do as she liked,” he reflected: previous experiences having told him that neither threats nor persuasions ever had the slightest effect upon his sister’s actions.
as he went out of the vestibule into the street, he passed a tall, very good-looking young man who was about to enter, and who nodded to him familiarly as one brother may nod to another. hurstmanceaux said a curt good-day without a smile. the other man passed in without the preliminary of enquiring whether the lady of the house was at home, and the footman of the antechamber took off his great coat and laid his hat and cane on the table as a matter of course: a person who had known no better might have concluded that the visitor was kenilworth himself. but to kenny, as they called him behind his back, the anteroom lackeys were much less attentive than they were to this young man.
“my real brother-in-law,” said hurstmanceaux to himself, with a vexed frown upon his brows and a little laugh which people would have called cynical upon his lips. he did not love kenilworth, but young lord brancepeth he abhorred.
