“elle a du chic; elle a positivement du chic,” said the duchesse d’avit to her friends, in her great astonishment at the appearance and manner of the daughter of the house.
“it’s easy to look chic when one’s got as good a figure as she has,” said one of the other ladies, rather crossly. “she does look like a well-bred person, i admit, but i dare say the cloven foot will show in some way or another.”
they all watched for it with curiosity, so far at least as they troubled themselves to notice her at all. but they failed to perceive it. they found that she rode extremely well, and played wonderfully well too, but no one got on with her. she was extraordinarily silent, and they could not divine that she held her tongue so obstinately because she feared every moment that some stinging word would escape her.
the week seemed to her a year. she could not see the comedy of the thing as framlingham had advised her to do. she could only resent helplessly, censure mutely, despise unavailingly, and suffer secretly. she might have been some doomed queen, passing from the prison to the scaffold; and all the incessant chatter and laughter around her awoke no echo in her; it always sounded to her derisive, a mockery of the absurdity of william massarene masquerading as a country gentleman. she had read a good deal of philosophy, but she could not practice any. the only tolerable moments of the day or night to her were when she was alone in her own rooms with a stray rough large dog of nondescript breed she had found and adopted.
“if you must have a filthy beast of that kind, why don’t you buy a decent bred one?” said her father. “they price ’em as high as a thousand guineas at the shows.”
[188]“a dog who will sell for a thousand guineas,” she replied, “will never want friends as long as the world is of its present complexion.”
william massarene swore an ugly oath.
“why will you rile your father in that way?” said margaret massarene, as he left the room. “you know gold’s his god. and let me tell you, my dear, that if ye’d ever known what ’tis to want it, ye’d tell a different tale. you’ve never had to want nor to wait for naught, for when ye was little i never stinted ye. your brothers had died of the hard life, and you’d come late when i could do more for ye. your father’s a great man, my dear, and you should respect him, if there be failings as ye would change in him.”
“no doubt you are right, mother,” said her daughter humbly.
perhaps, she thought, she was too unmindful of all that they had done for her. but, oh, if they had only left her to teach their letters to little rough children in the back woods, or play the harmonium in some little iron church buried in the pine gloom of some clearing!
“you must stay in my rooms,” she said to the dog, “and only go out with me and never chase the deer, nor go into the covers, for you are in a civilized country which prides itself on its progress and piety, and whose men of light and leading slaughter harmless creatures for pleasure every season of the year. you are a mongrel, they say, poor boy? well, i believe you are. but ‘hath not a jew eyes?’ has not a mongrel nerves to wince, and a heart to ache, and a body to feel cold and pain and hunger, and a fond soul to love somebody, if there be only somebody to love him?”
and the dog looked at her with his pathetic golden-brown eyes and understood, and was comforted.
katherine massarene, in her ignorance of the manifold wheels within wheels of a temperament and character like that of her father’s most honored guest, thought that at least lady kenilworth showed some decent feeling in not being accompanied by lord brancepeth.
in point of fact she had not brought harry because she retained a vivid recollection of his expressed desire to be allowed to ally himself with the heiress of vale royal.[189] besides, harry, like greater men, had substitutes, and one of them had come down with her; a very agreeable and accomplished foreign diplomatist whose wife was remaining at sandringham, a gentleman who would have been able to add many chapters to the psychologie de l’amour, who considered that brevity was the soul of love as of wit; and who had a good-humored contempt for harry, such as very clever persons who are also amiable feel for other persons not very clever whom they are outwitting with discretion and amusement.
“pauvre garçon! il prend la chose en bon père de famille,” he said once, looking at harry carrying little gerry on his shoulders, with jack clinging to his coat-pockets, in the park at staghurst.
the gentleman preferred episodes which could be enjoyed like cigarettes, but, in this to cigarettes superior, leave no ash nor even a bit of burnt paper behind them. this distinguished representative of a great power was met by mr. massarene early one morning, when he went to see if the heating-apparatus in the corridor was duly at the proper degree of caloric in the long tapestry-hung gallery which led to the bird rooms, and led nowhere else. he was so unpleasantly astonished at the meeting that he stared open-mouthed at the elegant form of this gentleman, who, after a rapid glance round, which told him that to conceal himself was impossible, sauntered on calmly till he was close to his host, who kept the knob of an open valve in his hand.
“i hear you have some wonderful battersea and chelsea in there, monsieur,” he said with his soft meridional accent. “miladi kenilworth kindly offered to show it to me, but her maid says she is gone in the garden.”
mr. massarene, to whom the words were somewhat unintelligible from their foreign pronunciation, only heard distinctly battersea and chelsea, names to him only suggestive of primrose habitations and political gatherings. he repeated the words mechanically and apologetically.
“faïence,” said the diplomatist in explanation; “china birds, very rare, very old, very curious.”
mr. massarene’s countenance cleared a little. “oh, yes i believe there is some old china in that apartment. i[190] could take your excellency in to see it if lady kenilworth has gone out; did her maid say that she had?”
though the ambassador’s countenance was trained to express nothing it did express for an instant a lively alarm.
“oh, some other time, on some other occasion,” he said hurriedly. “it would not do at all to go into a lady’s chambers in her absence.”
mr. massarene felt that he had committed a solecism in proposing such a thing. yet to his homely mind it seemed a still greater offence to go into her chamber when she was present.
he was perplexed, and uncertain of his ground, and intimidated by the rank and aspect of this notable foreigner; but he looked with an odd expression in his eyes at the dressing-gown of old-gold silk lined with pale rose plush in which the slender person of the visitor to the china birds was arrayed. it might be the custom for dilettanti to pay early morning visits in this kind of attire to see works of art, but he did not think that it was so. he was oppressed, amazed, annoyed, what his guest in the dressing-gown would have called ombrageux, and two conflicting feelings were at work within him: one a sombre jealousy and the other that offended sense of outraged propriety natural to the class to which he belonged.
but he was not sure of his ground, he scarcely dared to realize what he suspected, and he was afraid of this grand gentleman, who, on arrival, had offered him the tips of two fingers and had said that the day was cold, and had from that moment completely forgotten his existence, so that the urbanity and familiarity of this address in the corridor roused suspicion as well as embarrassment in his breast. to think that his house should be used to shelter improper dalliance awakened all the puritan element in his protestant breast, whilst as well as his outraged morality there arose in him a different, a more personal, feeling of wrath, vexation, and impatient envy; ridiculous, he knew, but unconquerable. but the diplomatist did not wait for him to disentangle his sentiments, nor did he offer any reason for the untimely hour of his own artistic ardor of investigation.
“au revoir, mon bon,” he said carelessly, and sauntered[191] on till he reached the door at the other end of the gallery and vanished.
mr. massarene shut the valve of the heating-apparatus, and sighed; it was probably the first time in his unsentimental existence that he had ever sighed. how many things he had still to learn!
“don’t you keep a plumber, billy?” said mouse very sharply, later in the day; “don’t you keep a plumber? what do you potter about the pipes yourself for? you woke me this morning opening and shutting those valves in the gallery.”
he muttered his regrets. he was about to say that a distinguished guest had told him that she was already out in the gardens at the time of his inspection of the heating-apparatus; but he perceived that he was on slippery ground, and he held his tongue, observing meekly that he was very afraid of fires, that servants were a bad lot, not to be trusted, and that it was through their negligence that overheated flues burned down half the country houses in england. but he saw that she was deeply and inexplicably displeased.
as for the diplomatist, he was, of course, sufficiently trained in diplomacy to give no signs of displeasure; but in his secret soul he was extremely worried by his meeting with his host in the corridor, for though lady kenilworth was a lovely woman, and a very seductive one, yet to be the temporary substitute of that excellent young guardsman who carried her children pick-a-back had its dangers for an eminent person whom a public scandal would ruin. he wished her and the china birds and his own dressing-gown at the devil. he had no fancy for a cigarette which would burn the fingers which held it; some unimportant telegrams were brought to him an hour later, and he made believe that one of them was important and took his departure before dinner for london.
“your excellency will not see the china birds?” said william massarene quietly and drily, with a finesse which astonished the hearer as he accompanied his departing guest to the carriage. their eyes met. they understood each other.
“it will be an excuse to return to your amiable hospitalities,”[192] said the eminent person with a charming smile and an adorable salutation.
“l’ours saurait mordre,” he thought, as he leaned back in the bear’s warm little station-brougham.
the departure annoyed mouse unspeakably. he was only an episode; but, as an episode should be, amusing and interesting. he was a man of many brilliant bonnes fortunes, and the stories he had told her of women she hated were beyond measure diverting. she treated her host more cruelly than ever; and had never felt so irritated at the sight of his short squat figure, and his broad rough hands, and his splay feet in his varnished shoes.
mr. massarene was much exercised in his mind as to his idol. he could not get the diplomatist in the elegant dressing-gown out of his mind; and he also heard on all sides that the handsome fool, of whom he had purchased blair airon, was undoubtedly considered as “best friend” of the lady who had been the intermediary in that sale. these, and various similar facts, left him no peace in his private reflections, and tormented him the more because he did not venture to unburden his wrath to the fair cause of it. he had been a virtuous man all his life; he had had no time to be otherwise; he had been so busy eighteen hours out of the twenty-four making money that the other six he had spent in eating like a hungry hound, and sleeping like a tired dray-horse. vice had always represented itself to him as waste of precious time and waste of precious dollars. his rare concessions to it had been grudging and hurried, like his attendance at church.
his discovery disturbed him exceedingly, not only because he was a very moral man who considered that immorality ought to be punished (he had once even made one of a body of moral citizens who, in a township of the west, had stripped and beaten a local guinevere and tarred and feathered her lancelot), but he was also visited by that bluest of blue devils who had never paid him a visit in his life before—jealousy.
she knew it very well, and it diverted her, though it appeared to her as preposterous as if her pad-groom had been jealous. but he, who did not exactly know what ailed him, suffered alternately from the irritation and the[193] depression common to all those in whose breasts the green-eyed monster has found a throne.
“billy, come and talk to me,” said his enslaver the last evening of her visit. mr. massarene obeyed, fascinated out of any will of his own, and in love with his own degradation as fakirs with their torture. she saw his struggles and tortures, which seemed to her as preposterous in him as they would have seemed in a stableman or a street-sweeper. but though she had no patience with them she turned them to account.
she was sitting in a very low long chair in a nook of one of the drawing-rooms amongst flowers; she wore a black lace gown with immense transparent sleeves, and some strings of pearls were wound round her throat; her skin looked fairer than ever, her eyes bluer, her hair lovelier. he took meekly the low seat she assigned to him, though it had no rest for his back, and gazed at her, remembering despite himself the chelsea and battersea birds and the connoisseur who had wished to see, or had seen, them. he was not deceived by her for a moment, but he was hypnotized.
“there is something i want you to do, billy,” she added very candidly—she was always candid in manner. mr. massarene murmured that she had only to command and he only to obey.
“that is very nice of you, but there are other people in it,” she replied. he waited mutely to hear more. she sent some cigarette smoke across his eyes. “i mean you to marry your daughter to my brother.”
he was silent.
the thought was not new to his own mind; he had felt sure that she would desire it; but to himself it presented no attractions; he did not understand the antiquity and purity of the courcy blood, and his own ambitions for his heiress ranged in much loftier spheres.
“why don’t you answer?” said mouse, beginning to feel offence. “i should have thought you would have been overjoyed.”
“they don’t know each other,” he objected feebly.
“what has that to do with it? when you and i settle a thing that thing has to be done. ronnie and your[194] daughter were made in heaven for each other; they are both awfully stiff, intensely disagreeable, and preëminently virtuous. there’d be no more cakes and ale in our world if those two could reform it.”
mr. massarene was still mute; he did not at all know what to say; at last he asked humbly if lord hurstmanceaux had said anything on the subject.
“i haven’t consulted him,” she replied, this time with genuine candor. “i never consult people when i am acting for their good, and my brother never talks unless he lectures somebody. this thing has to be done, billy. you know when i say a thing i mean it.”
“but you laugh at my daughter,” he said with hesitation.
“oh, i laugh at everybody,” said mouse. “people are made to be laughed at. there’s something ridiculous in everyone if you only look for it. your daughter seems ridiculous to me because she gives herself goody-goody airs, which nobody has nowadays; she looks as if she were always doing penance for your ill-gotten riches.”
this shaft hit the gold of fact so neatly in the eye that william massarene colored angrily under his dull skin. but his rage was against his daughter rather than against his tormentor. why could not katherine look and act like other young women of her time?
“yes, i know,” said mouse, answering his unspoken reflections. “it must be very annoying to have a perpetual monitress in one’s own daughter, and of course you couldn’t make your millions with clean hands; nobody can; but society gives you lots of soap and water after you’ve made them, so what does it matter? besides, a daughter shouldn’t look as if she were always saying, ‘out, damned spot,’ as ellen terry does. however, that is just the kind of thing that will please ronald. he will think it such an admirable spirit in her to despise your ill-gotten gold.”
“perhaps he would not require a dowry of dirty money with her, then?” said mr. massarene, allowing for one instant the natural sarcastic shrewdness in him to escape.
mouse was for the moment discomfited; she had never[195] seen this unpleasant side of him before. then, with her most insolent audacity, she blew some cigarette smoke over to where he sat.
“my dear billy, perhaps ronald would dispense with a dowry if he liked her well enough; he is fool enough for anything. but you wouldn’t save a penny by that—i should take it all over as commission!”
mr. massarene was dumb from astonishment. he had known many sharp dealers in the far west, but nobody who had ever for coolness equalled his fair friend and patroness.
he slapped his hand on his knee with vulgar effusion in his mingled feelings of amazement and admiration.
“well, my lady, damn me if there’s many boys in bowery who could afford to give points to you!”
she laughed. of course it was only a joke; but the joke made her feel for the moment a little insecure and uncomfortable, as you might feel if you found a packet of dynamite in your sandwich-case.
“of course the marriage would be a very good thing for ronald,” said his sorceress, with her frankest accents—her frankness was one of her chief weapons—“but it would be good for you too, billy. it would place you. there are people who jib at you still, you know; when once you were one of us, they wouldn’t dare.”
mr. massarene was silent. he thought if there were still people who jibbed at him, he had paid very dearly for the patronage of this fair sponsor. he was beginning to feel his feet a little on his new ground and to be a little less easily led about; but at the same time he was as much in love as a cold-blooded, circumspect, puritan-minded man could be, and she dazzled his sight and his senses and led him whither she would. he made a faint endeavor to assert his independence.
“lord hurstmanceaux has never even condescended to know me. it seems odd he should be anxious to enter my family.”
“enter your family!” echoed mouse, with a laugh of derision which brought the blood into his puffy pale cheeks. “oh, my good billy, don’t try on those grandiose phrases! i never said he wanted anything of the[196] kind; i said i mean you to give him your daughter, and you know when i mean a thing i have it done.”
mr. massarene was cowed; he felt an awkward, ignorant, vulgar booby under the flashing fires of her contemptuous eyes. there was nothing left in him of the stolid self-assurance and self-admiration with which he had spoken at the public meeting a few days earlier. before the mocking presence of his enchantress he felt only a stupid, illiterate, helpless booby and boor. he felt that men respected his riches; he felt that mouse kenilworth only meant to annex them.
“my daughter is not an easy person to control,” he said with hesitation, “and i think she and you don’t hit it off, my lady, do you?”
“no,” said his guest shortly; “but that don’t matter. there’s no law that i know of to love one’s brother’s wife. anyhow, that’s what i mean you to do with her. of course, my brother is a poor man, you know that; but that is no consequence to you. what you want is an assured position, and alliance with us will poser you. ronnie’s word has great weight in society.”
“but lord hurstmanceaux have never given me even good day, not even when he’s seen me in your own house, my lady.”
“don’t say ‘my lady.’ can’t you break yourself of it? of course, he’ll have to speak to you if he marries your daughter. i must get you all asked to some country house where he goes; the thing will come of itself. i’ll think it over and tell you where i send him.”
she spoke as if she were telling her major-domo how many people she expected to dinner.
mr. massarene naturally concluded that hurstmanceaux himself was in the plot. he did not dare to object further, and temporized by dropping the subject.
“but—but,” he said with a timid attempt to obtain a quid pro quo, “would you do one little thing to oblige me; would you—would you—not play, not gamble, any more in my houses?”
he was intensely frightened when he had said it, but he felt that it might injure him with his coveted constituency[197] if it were known that there was roulette, real roulette, in his drawing-rooms.
her eyes grew of a steely coldness, of an electric luminance, and seemed to transfix him as with barbed arrows. she threw away the end of her cigarette as she got out of her chair with that graceful abruptness peculiar to her. “i told you the other night, billy, where i am the house is mine. an irishman said something like that i believe about the head of the table. ronnie don’t play. he’ll do the policeman for you when he marries your daughter. meanwhile, just let me alone, my good man, or you’ll be sorry.”
wherewith she carried her elegant person and her trailing black laces to the other end of the room where fabian delkass, the fashionable salon-singer, was tuning his great spanish guitar and softly warbling fragments of lassen.
mouse knew nothing about music and cared as little, but ditties softly warbled by a very good-looking tenor have attractions outside the science of melody; she could appreciate the talent of delkass, because he never sung a note under twenty guineas each warble. she had sent him down to vale royal, she had arranged that he should receive ten times as much there as his usual terms for such country house engagements; in return delkass, who was beau garçon and very courteous to pretty women, would be sure to sing something charming at her own afternoons in london for nothing at all.
she despised artists as a mere flock of sheep; silly edible obscure creatures; but as she ate a mutton cutlet for luncheon when it was very well cooked, so she nibbled at an artist now and then, when he was very much the fashion.
if she were obliged to have recourse to these expedients it was not her fault; it was the fault of her father-in-law, who was so miserably stingy, and of her settlements which were so miserable, and of society which compels anybody who is in it to live in a certain way. why did providence (a vague personage in whom she as vaguely believed) put you where you were obliged every day to do quantities of things which cost money unless that arbiter of fate supplied you with the necessary means?
