a young woman, dressed in white cambric, with the deep shade of a magnolia grove cast upon her as she sat on the marble steps of an oriental garden, read of these brilliant festivities in various english journals whose office it is to chronicle such matters; and as she read she frowned, and as she frowned she sighed. “oh, the waste, the folly, the disgrace!” she murmured as she pushed the newspapers away from her. for she had peculiar views of her own, and had little or nothing in common with her generation or with her procreators. she looked very like her bust by dalou as she thrust the offending journals off her lap.
“i am a déclassée,” she said to herself as she sat amongst the rhododendrons and the monkeys. “all they have spent on me cannot make me anything more. they should have left me in the place which they occupied when i was born. i would sooner go out as a common servant any day than be forced to witness their ignominy and live in their suffocating wealth, to see the laugh in the eyes of the people they toady, and overhear the ridicule of those who crowd to their supper-table. if he would only disown me—cut me off with a shilling!”
“what’s the matter, my dear? bad news from england? parents ill?” said a mellow and cheerful voice, as the temporary owner of terrace and magnolia grove, lord framlingham, came out of the house and across the rough grass, accompanied by his two inseparable companions, his cigarette and his skye-terrier.
she picked up one of the newspapers and pointed to a paragraph in it.
“they must be the laugh of london!”
“oh, my dear, you don’t know london,” said her host as he read. “they will be the idols of london, the very buddha of solid gold that its smart people most delight[127] to adore. look at the whole thing as a comedy, my child, and you will enjoy it.”
“i once spoke to a clown’s wife at a circus,” said katherine massarene. “while the clown was making the audience scream with laughter, she was crying. ‘i can’t help crying,’ she said, ‘to see my man make a butt and a guy of himself. he’s nabbut a tomfool to them, but he’s my man to me.’ i am as foolish as the clown’s wife.”
“i can’t admit the analogy,” said her host. “i think you take the thing too seriously. your people’s position is a common one enough in our days. when anybody has made a heap of money they are never happy till they get a mob of smart beggars to crowd round ’em and pick their pockets. how would smart society go on unless there were these feeders for it to fatten on? if i were your father i should keep my money in my pocket and snap my fingers at smart society. but then, you see, i know what smart society is and he doesn’t.”
“but why should he want to know? he is not made for it. it only laughs at him.”
“oh, pardon me, i am sure it does more than laugh; i am sure it plunders him as well. i only hope that he will know when to cry ‘stop, thief!’ for if he doesn’t all his millions will go into the maw of his fine friends.”
katherine massarene sighed.
“my father will never lose except when he chooses to do so. if they use him, he uses them. it is a quid pro quo. it is a question of barter. but that is what is so disgraceful about it.”
“i have said,” replied her host, “i think if i were an intelligent man who had made a pot of money by my own exertions, as mr. massarene has done, that i should not care a damn (excuse the word) for all the fine folks in creation. certainly i should not care to waste my money upon them. but the fact is that all these new men do care for that and that alone. they appear wholly to underrate themselves and their own accomplishment, and care only to be rooked by a set of idle loungers with handles to their names. it is not they who will ever destroy the upper house.”
[128]“no,” said his guest bitterly. “an earl can see and say that the days of the upper house are numbered, but my father regards it as the holy of holies because he means to seat himself in its gilded chamber.”
“it’s joe chamberlain’s reason too,” said framlingham with a chuckle. “when we make peers of the tradesmen, my dear, we know what we are about; we are soldering our own leaking pot.”
“solder it with other men’s smelted gold? you had better break it up honestly as a thing which has had its day and is done with.”
“poor old pot! perhaps it would be better to bury it for good and all on runnymede island. but i think you exaggerate a little—i must say you exaggerate. and you totally ignore a fact which has been put on record by every english sociologist and historian, that it has been its frank admission to its ranks of novi homines which has kept the english aristocracy vigorous and popular.”
she gave a scornful gesture of denial.
“it is the novi homines who have degraded the english aristocracy. pardon me if i contradict you. mr. mallock has written very kind and possibly very just things of your nobility, but he has forgotten to satirize its most shameful infirmity, its moral scrofula—its incessant and unblushing prostration of itself before wealth quà wealth. it likes hothouse pines and can no longer afford to keep them for its own eating. it can only grow them for sale and eat them at the tables of those who buy them.”
“that is very severe!”
“who would be less severe who had seen anything at all of paris, of london, of nice, of biarritz, of any place where modern society disports itself?”
framlingham laughed.
“my dear miss massarene, you delight me beyond expression, but i can imagine that you are, to a parent who adores princes and means to die a peer, rather—rather—forgive a vulgar word—rather a handful.”
“my father has purchased a place called vale royal,” continued katherine. “you know it? well, he wishes to be there plus royaliste que le roi. in the leases he gives to his farmers they are bound over to pay £40 for every[129] pheasant killed or maimed on their ground. is it not out-heroding herod? he cares nothing for such trumpery sport himself; he has killed grizzlies and negroes and train-lifters; he would care nothing to fire at a flock of frightened hand-fed birds; but he wishes to tempt princes and lords to his coverts and to see the bags made on his estate cited in newspapers. who set him that base example? princes and lords themselves.”
“no estates would be kept up but for the game,” said her host, rather feebly as he felt.
“what satire can be so withering as such a statement? there is then no love of hereditary lands, no sense of woodland beauty, no interest in fur or feather without slaughter attached to them, no tenderness for tradition and for nature? nothing, nothing whatever, of such pride in and affection for the soil itself as shakspeare felt, who only owned a little rural freehold? who can condemn you as utterly as you condemn yourselves?”
“i think we are rather useful sometimes,” he said humbly.
“oh, very! you vote against marriage with a deceased wife’s sister and maintain the game laws!
“i am not ashamed of my parents’ origin, lord framlingham, i assure you,” she added after a pause. “i am ashamed that they are ashamed of it.”
“i understand, my dear, and i sympathize, though i suppose not many people would do either. you see, we all have our crosses. my daughters have to endure the misery of a conspicuous rank with wholly inadequate means—a more trying position than you can imagine.”
“i should not mind that.”
“oh, yes, you would. it is humiliation at every turn. it is to be checked in every generous impulse, to spend half your time in efforts to make a five-pound note do the work of ten sovereigns; it is to wear your george and garter over a ragged shirt, and knock your diamond tiara against the roof of a hackney cab. i know what i am talking about, my dear, as most unhappy english land-owners do in this year of grace. i know that there is no misery so accursed as the combination of high place and narrow means. i came out here to relieve the strain a[130] little. it was worse for the women than for me. you, my dear, are a high-mettled pony which kicks at carrying the money-bags. but my poor girls are high-mettled ponies which sweat under the halter and the cobble. that’s a good deal worse. you’ll have to buy a fine name with your big dower. but they will have to take what offers first, for they must go to their husbands portionless, or nearly so. and we were thanes in alfred’s time, my dear, and we fought for harold tooth and nail, and we were at runnymede, and at bosworth, and at tewkesbury, and all the rest of it, and our name is as old as the very hills round the wrekin; and that, you see, is what an ancient lineage is worth in these days. your father has the better part.”
katherine shook her head.
“and honor?” she said in a low tone.
lord framlingham laughed grimly.
“when one is in debt to one’s banker and one’s tradesmen, and has to let one’s place to a sugar-baker, the less said about honor the better. i wish i were a monkey—don’t you wish you were one? they get such fun out of each other’s tails, and it must be such a jolly life swinging on branches and living on fruits. and if you like ancient lineage look at theirs!”
she smiled, but her heart was heavy. she knew that she could not alter her fate, and she loathed it.
“do not misunderstand me,” she said, with a passing flush coming on her face. “do not think me more stoical or philosophical than i am. it is probably pride not humility which makes me suffer so much from my sense of my parents’ present position. if i had been born in your class, in your world, i should probably have been odiously arrogant.”
“i do not think you could be ‘odiously’ anything, my dear,” said lord framlingham with a smile.
“oh, yes, i can; i know it, i feel it, i regret it, and yet i cannot help it. when i am in their world, to which we have no right, to which we shall be only welcomed for reasons as discreditable to ourselves as to those who welcome us, i know that i offend everyone, and that i afflict, surprise and disappoint, my parents; but i cannot be otherwise;[131] it is all i can do to keep in unspoken the bitter truths which rise to my lips.”
“the amari aliquid was never enclosed in a fairer crystal sphere,” said her host gallantly.
“i never would have left my mother,” she added, “but i could do nothing. i was only the helpless spectator of a kind of effort which is in my sight the most ignoble, the most foolish of all, the endeavor to appear what one is not, and never can be.”
“you take it too much to heart,” said her companion. “you do not make allowance for the times. your people are only doing what every person who has made money does on a small scale or a big scale, according to their means. mr. massarene is immensely rich, and so his aspirations are very large too.”
“aspirations! to get on in society, to have great persons to dinner, to represent in parliament the interest of a constituency he had never heard of a year ago, to get a title, though my brothers are all dead, to entertain troops of people who scarcely know his name and have hardly the decency to pretend to know it, do you call that aspiration? it is more like degradation. why cannot he remain in obscurity spending his vast fortune for the good of others instead of squandering it on idle people, impudent people, worthless people, people to whom he is a jest, a by-word and a jeer?”
“my dear young lady, money is power,” said lord framlingham. “it is nothing new that it should be so; but in other ages, it was subordinate to many greater powers than itself. now it is practically supreme; it is practically alone. aristocracy in its true sense exists no longer. war in its modern form is wholly a question of supply. the victory will go to who can pay most and longest. the religious orders, once so absolute, are now timid anachronisms quaking before secular governments. science, which cannot move a step without funds, goes cap in hand to the rich. art has perished nearly. what is left of it does the same thing as science. the pope, who ought to be a purely spiritual power, is mendicant and begs like belisarius. what remains? nothing except trade, and trade cannot oppose wealth, because it lives[132] solely through it. for this reason, money, mere money, with no other qualities or attractions behind it, is omnipotent now as it never was before in the history of the world. it is not one person or set of persons who is responsible for this. it is the tendency of the age, an age which is essentially mercenary and is very little else! in politics, as in war and in science, there is no moving a step without money and much money. the least corrupt election costs a large outlay. royalty recognizing that money is stronger than itself, courts men of money, borrows from them, and puts out in foreign stocks where it borrows as a reserve fund against exile. you see there is no power left which can, or dare, attempt to oppose the undisputed sway of money. a great evil, you say? no doubt.”
she sighed; she recognized the truth of all he said; but she loathed the fact she was compelled by her reason to acknowledge.
“‘when she’s convinced against her will
she’s of the same opinion still,’”
quoted framlingham. “come, my dear, let’s go and have a game of tennis.”
katherine massarene, whose future was a subject of lively speculation to many, was now twenty-one years old; she looked much more than that then, and twenty years hence will probably look no older. at five years of age, notwithstanding her poor mother’s tears and prayers, she had been sent to the care of a gentlewoman in england, who lived at eastbourne and received only half a dozen children to educate, with two of her own. the lady had been recommended to william massarene by the english minister at washington; and the influence of that gentleman had been exercised in persuading her to consent to receive against her rules a little ignorant obscure brat from dakota.
“make her happy and keep her well, ma’am, for she’s all we’ve got,” wrote her poor mother.
“make her english, ma’am, and fit to hold her head with the highest, for she’ll mean gold,” wrote her father.
the lady disliked excessively accepting a charge[133] which was alien to her habits and might injure the tone of her house; but she was under obligations to the english minister, and reluctantly consented to take into her home this one little girl who had great astonished unwinking eyes like an owl’s, and who said to her with a dreadful nasal accent: “don’t grin when i speak, or i’ll hit yer.”
for twelve years she remained under this lady’s care, being trained in all exercises of the mind and body, and becoming a calm cold high-bred girl who looked as if she had a thousand years behind her of old nobility and gracious memories. of her parents she saw nothing, and only heard that they were extremely rich. but the orthography of her mother’s letters, and the style of her father’s few lines, always made her uneasy, and the recollections of life in dakota were not as absolutely obliterated as her parents desired. but of those she never spoke; she divined what was expected of her. those recollections became increasingly painful as with increasing perception she could construe them by induction.
when in her eighteenth year her parents came for the first time to england, she could only see in them strangers, and strangers who, alas! had nothing of that attraction which bridges the distance between age and youth. if what she felt on meeting them was an agony of disappointment and a sense of shame, more acute because it was shut close in her own breast, they were themselves not less chagrined. when they first saw her, her parents both thought that she did not give them great results for the vast sums they had spent on her, and that really they would have turned her out smarter if they had had her brought up in new york. the art of gilding gold and painting lilies is at its perihelion in the empire city. he especially was disappointed in her at first; he had expected her to make more show, to have more color, to be more swagger, as the slang words ran; this tall, proud, slender young woman, who wore generally black or grey in the day, and white in the evening, and put on no jewelry of any kind, seemed to him to give him poor value for the many thousand of dollars he had spent on her. he had intended her to be ultra fashionable, ultra chic, always in[134] the swim, always in the first flight; on race-courses, on yacht decks, on the box seat of drags, at aristocratic river clubs, at exclusive and crowded little suppers after theatres.
“i wanted a gal of fashion, not a school-marm!” he said with much disgust, when the lady who had brought her up told him that she was the finest hellenist of her sex.
he did not know what a hellenist was, but he understood that it was something connected with teaching. what he wanted was something very showy, very sensational, very superfine. but katherine did not like fashionable life at all. a very little of it wearied her. she did not like a man to lean his elbows on a little, round, tête-à-tête supper-table, and stare at her, with his eyes within six inches of her necklace, and his champagne and cigar-scented breath hot in her face; and she did not think the situation made more agreeable by the fact that the starer was illustrious. she infinitely preferred to be alone in the music-room with her violin and harmonium, or in the library comparing jowett’s dialogues with the original. it is easy to understand that she was a great disappointment to her father, though a sort of sullen pride in her was wrung out of him when he saw how indifferent she appeared to the great folks he adored, yet at the same time how at home she seemed in the mystic arena of that society which made him shake in his shoes, strong, hard, shrewd man though he was.
except the archduke who insisted on becoming a skipper of a timber-brig, so infuriating and insensate a flying in the face of a fair fate had never been known. katherine massarene for her part did not enter, or try to enter into his feelings, as no doubt it should have been her filial duty to do. she had some of his stubbornness, and a pride of her own kind which made her unyielding. her numerous teachers, male and female, had all found her of unusual intelligence and she had studied the classics with ardor and thoroughness. she could say extremely caustic and witty things, but she generally was merciful and forbore to say them. she had a vast reserve of sound and unusual knowledge, but she endeavored to conceal it, disliking[135] all display, and being by nature very modest. as, little by little, she began gradually to understand the position of her parents, she suffered from it acutely. if she could, with a clear conscience, have done so, she would have liked to renounce all their wealth and grandeur and earn her own living, which she could have earned very well as a musician, or a professor of history or dead languages.
she said so once to her father, on his arrival in england, and the rage of the taciturn, ruthless man was so terrible that her mother on her knees entreated her never to allude to such an idea.
“you are all we have left,” she said, weeping. “your brothers and sisters all died in that horrible west. you are the sole one he has to look to for bearing his name and glorifying his money. you are heir and heiress both, kathleen. has he slaved and spared and laid by thirty years and more only that the sole begot of his loins shall disgrace him as a menial?”
“rise up, my dear mother; we will not speak of it again,” said katherine, a mere schoolgirl then of seventeen. “we might discuss and argue for ever, neither my father nor you would ever see these things as i see them.”
and with great self-control, most rare in one of her age, she renounced her dreams of independence and never did allude again in any way to them.
she soon perceived that whatever chance she might have had of influencing her mother, she had none whatever of moving her father: if she had stood in his way, he would have brushed her aside, or trampled her down; he had not made his money to lose the enjoyment of it for the quips and cranks of a crotchety child.
her indifference to all which fascinated and awed himself compelled his reluctant respect, and the serene hauteur of her habitual manner made him feel awkward and insignificant in her presence. he was in some respects, when he pitted himself against her, compelled unwillingly to acknowledge that she was the stronger of the two. she had hurt him enough by the mere accident of her sex. he never forgave her that she had lived whilst her brothers had died. he had no affection for her, and[136] only a sullen unwilling respect, which was rung out of him by seeing her ease in that world where he was uneasy and her familiarity with those great persons before whom he was always himself dumb and frightened and distressed.
so far, at least, the money spent on her had not been wasted, it had made her one of them. for this he held her in respect, but she could not move him a hair’s breadth from his ambitions or his methods of pursuing them.
these methods were to her more refined taste and more penetrating vision absurd and odious. she knew that the great world would use him, rook him, feed on him, but would always laugh at him and never see in him anything except a snob. she knew that every invitation given to him or accepted from him, every house-party which he was allowed to gather, or allowed to join, every good club which he was put up for, every great man who consented to dine with him, were all paid for by him at enormous cost, indirectly indeed but none the less extravagantly. she knew that he would in all likelihood live to do all he had aspired to do; to get into the commons, perhaps to get into the cabinet, to receive royalty, to shake hands with princes of the blood, even perhaps to die a peer. but she knew that all this would be done by purchase, by giving money, by lending money, by spending money largely and asking no questions, by doing for the impoverished great what madame de sevigné called manuring the ground.
to her taste, success and rank procured in such a manner left you precisely where you were before its purchase. she knew that to a society which you only enter on sufferance you remain always practically outside on the door-mat; and she did not understand that to the soul of the snob even the dust of the door-mat is sweet. she did not understand either that in her father’s case the door-mat was but one of the preliminary stages of the triumphant career which he had mapped out in his brain when he had first put one dollar on another in dakota.
she early perceived that her parents looked to her for assistance in their ambitions, but she was obdurate in giving them none; they called her undutiful, and undutiful she might be; but she felt that she would rather[137] be guilty of any offence whatever than become degraded and servile. so extreme was her resistance on this point that one evening it brought an open rupture with her father, and that exile to india of which mrs. massarene had not told all the truth when exhibiting dalont’s bust of her daughter.
the winter before their acquaintance with lady kenilworth the massarenes had been at cannes and monte carlo, following that smart world of which they still vainly pined to enter the arena. they had not as yet found their guide, philosopher, and friend in the fair mother of jack and boo, and william massarene was beginning to fear that gold was not the all-potent solvent he had believed it. but a very high personage, whose notice would have had power to lift them at once into the empyrean was also at cannes at that period, and the white-rose skin and admirable form of katherine massarene attracted him, and he desired that she should be presented to him. very unwillingly, very coldly, she had submitted to her fate at a public ball to which she had been taken. the great gentleman asked her to waltz. neither his age nor his figure were suited to the dance, but women were nevertheless enchanted to be embraced by him in its giddy gyrations. katherine excused herself and said that she did not waltz.
the great gentleman was annoyed but attracted; he sat out the dance by her side on a couch in a little shady corner under palm trees such as he especially favored. but he made very little way with her; she was chilly, reserved, respectful. “take your respect to the devil,” thought the misunderstood prince.
“why are you so very unkind to me, miss massarene?” he said in a joking fashion, which would have convulsed with joy every other women in those rooms.
“there can be no question of unkindness from me to yourself, sir,” she replied more distantly still, and she looked him straight in the eyes: he was not used to being looked at thus.
he had drunk more wine than was good for him; he tried to take her hand, his breath was hot upon her shoulder.
[138]“i’ll dine with your father if you ask me,” he murmured.
a whole world of suggestion was in the simple phrase.
katherine massarene drew her hand away.
“sir,” she said very distinctly; “my father was a cowherd and my mother a dairy-woman. i do not know why you should do them the honor to dine with them, sir, merely because they earned money in america!”
her companion had never received such a “facer” in all his fifty years of life. like his own speech it suggested innumerable things. he grew very red and his glassy eyes became very sullen.
he was silent for a few moments. then he rose and offered her his arm.
“allow me to take you back to your chaperon,” he said in glacial accents which she infinitely preferred to his familiarity.
“what have you done to him?” said that lady as he left her with a ceremonious bow.
“i have told him a truth,” said katherine indifferently. “i suppose it is too strong diet for him. he is not used to it!”
“i should think not indeed!” said the lady, much disturbed. “what can you have said?”
“he will probably tell people,” said katherine. “if he do not, i shall not.”
he did, not very wisely, tell two of his boon companions that same night as they sat smoking with him.
of course the story ran about the riviera next day from monaco to hyères, taking protean forms, and changing with every tongue that told it.
one of its versions, one of the most accurate, reached the ears of william massarene.
his nickname in the states had been “blasted blizzard,” and his temper was such as corresponded with the name. his wrath was terrible. from his point of view it was justified. his wife, trembling like a leaf in a hurricane, was paralyzed with fear. his daughter remained calm. she did not for an instant admit that she was at fault, although she regretted that any cause for anger should arise between her and her parents.
[139]“you shall apologize!” he swore a dozen times.
“i shall certainly never do that,” said katherine with contemptuous composure.
“you shall apologize in public!”
“neither in public, nor in private.”
“you shall go on your knees to him, if i flog you on to them!” yelled mr. massarene.
“my dear father, pray keep within the laws of that ‘good society’ into which you have been so anxious to enter,” she said, with a delicate scorn, which he felt through all his tough hide like the tingling strokes of the whip with which he threatened her.
“cannot you understand, mother?” she said wistfully. “surely you must see, must feel, the insult that it was?”
“oh, my dear, don’t appeal to me!” said her mother with a sob. “great folks aren’t like other folks; and your father must know best.”
“how dare you turn to your fool of a mother!” he yelled. “is it she whose dollars have dressed you fine, and cockered you up amongst blood-fillies all these years?”
“i regret that i have cost you so much. but if you will allow me, i will relieve you of my presence and maintain myself,” she said, with a tranquillity which made her father’s rage choke him as though he were on the point of apoplexy.
“did i bring you up amongst duchesses’ daughters that you might disgrace me?” he cried, with a foul oath.
from his point of view it was hard on him, unjust, a very abomination of providence. there were four hundred young women in london, four thousand in great britain, who would have asked nothing better than to be beautifully dressed, to have abundance of pocket-money, to ride thoroughbred hacks in the park, to pay court to great people, and to make themselves agreeable and popular in society. there was not, indeed, one young woman in ten millions who would have quarrelled with such a fate; and that extraordinary and solitary exception was his daughter. it was not wonderful, it was scarcely even blamable, that william massarene was beside himself with chagrin and rage.
[140]a thousand other men had daughters who asked nothing better than to be allowed to spend money, and be made love to by princes, and wear smart frocks, and push themselves into smart society; and he had this rara avis, this abnormal, unnatural, incredible phenomenon to whom all these things, which were the very salt of life to other women, were only as dust and ashes!
what punishment could he give her? what other threats could he make her? it was useless to threaten with being turned out of doors a person who asked nothing better than to be set free to work for her livelihood. if he had hinted at such a punishment, she would have taken him at his word, would have put on her simplest gown, and would have gone to the nearest railway-station.
he thundered at her; he hurled at her blasphemous words, which had used to make the blood of miners and navvies turn cold when the “bull-dozing boss” used such to them; he swore by all heavenly and infernal powers that he would drag her on her knees to the offended gentleman. but he made no impression whatever on her. she ceased to reply. but she gave no sign of any emotion, either timorous or repentant; she was altogether unmoved. say what he would he could not intimidate her, and the force of his fury spent itself in time, beaten by passive resistance.
the upshot of the stormy scene was, that he exiled her from his world by allowing her to accept an invitation to pass a year in india with some school friends, who were daughters of a nobleman who had recently accepted the governorship of one of the presidencies in india.
the decision cost her mother many tears, but it was the mildest ultimatum to which william massarene could be brought. he only saw in his daughter a person who might have secured to him the one supreme honor for which his soul pined, and who had not done so, out of some squeamish, insolent, democratic, intolerable self-assertion. in sending her to pass a year in the family of lord framlingham, he not only removed her from his own sight, but placed her where he not unnaturally supposed that she would be surrounded by conservative and aristocratic influences. framlingham, however, though it had[141] suited his pocket to accept his appointment, was a revolutionary at heart, and railed incessantly at the existence of his own order and his own privileges. he had heard of the discomfiture of the great personage, and chuckled over it, and welcomed the heroine of that rebuff with great cordiality to his marble palace, looking through the golden stems of palm-groves on to the indian ocean, where he was a funny incongruous figure himself, in his checked tweed clothes, with his red english face, his shining bald head, his eye-glass screwed into his left eye, and his clean-shaven lips shut close on a big cigar.
“did so right, miss massarene, did so right,” he said warmly to her, soon after her arrival. “mustn’t say so, you know, as i’m one of her majesty’s servants, but i’m always deuced glad when any royalty gets a facer. those people, you know, are like preserved meats in a tin case which has had all the air pumped out of it. they never get a chance of hearing the truth, nor of knowing what they look like to people who aren’t snobs. almost everybody is a snob, you see. i should like to write a new ‘book of snobs.’ the species has grown a good deal since thackeray’s days. it has developed like orchids or prize vegetables.”
framlingham, although an unpoetic-looking occupant of a marble palace in rose-gardens of the gorgeous east, was a person of delicate perceptions, high intelligence, and cultured mind. he took a great liking to this young woman, who quarreled with a lot which all the world envied her, and he pressed her to remain with his family when the year had passed; and she obtained permission to do so. her mother was yearning for her return, but her father would willingly never have seen her face again. he was not a man who forgave.
she was thinking of the scene with her father as she sat on the marble steps in the governor’s gardens, in the deep shade of a magnolia grove, absently listening to the chatter of the monkeys overhead. she felt that she had been in the right. she burned with shame whenever she remembered the eyes of the great gentleman luring upon her as he said, “i’ll dine with your father, if you ask me.”
[142]and her father had not seen the meaning in those words; or had seen it, but would willingly have purchased the honor even at that price!
she felt as if she could never go back to that life in england, at monte carlo, at homburg. if only they would allow her to make her own career here in this ancient and romantic land as a teacher, as a nurse, as an artist, as anything. if only they would not oblige her to return to the yoke of that inane humiliating tedious routine which they thought honor and the world called pleasure!
she had by that day’s mail received from her mother some cuttings from a society journal, descriptive of the glories of harrenden house and vale royal, and containing an account of the dinner-party which the grand duchess had ordered and honored. these brilliant paragraphs had filled her with pain and disgust.
“we are getting on fast, my dear child,” wrote her mother, “and it’s time as you came back, for people are always asking after you, and i’d like to see you well married, and i’m sure you look more of a lady than many of them.”
she knew very well what kind of marriage she would alone be allowed to make; marriage which would give her some high place in return for an abyss of debt filled up, which would purchase for her entry into some great family who would receive her for sake of what she would bring to clear off mortgages, and save the sale of timber, and enable some titled fool to go on keeping his racing-stud.
“never! never!” she said to herself; her father might disinherit her if he pleased, but he should never make her marry so.
the same temper was in her which had made her say as a small child: “if you grin when i speak i’ll hit yer.” the temper was softened by courtesy, by culture, by self-control, by polished habit; but it was there, proud, imperious and indomitable.
l’échine souple of the snob and the courtier was wanting in her. “you might have swallowed your ancestor’s sword,” said one of her girl playmates once to her; and[143] she thought bitterly, “my father’s ‘shooting-irons’ are the only substitute for ancestral steel that i know!”
but yet she bore herself as though she had all the barons of runnymede behind her; and she could not bend or cringe. “i don’t know how the devil she comes by it, but she is certainly thoroughbred,” thought her host. “who knows what grace of geraldines, or strength of hamiltons, or charm of sheridans, may have filtered into the veins of some ancestor of hers in the long, long ago?”
