when he went downstairs he summoned the major-domo into the library on the ground floor, where cocky’s sporting literature still strewed the tables.

“mason, her grace leaves this house on the first of july,” he said to that functionary.

“very good, my lord,” said mason, with impassable countenance.

“you see, mason,” continued ronald, “the duchess is of course in a very altered position; if the duke had lived——”

“quite so, my lord,” said mason, who thought: “bless us and save us! if he had, everything would have gone in the smelting-pot.”

“her establishment will be much diminished; i am afraid she will be obliged to relinquish your services and those of others.”

“oh, my lord,” said mason with a respectful little gesture which implied that persons like himself were always in demand at all seasons, and that the loss would be her grace’s, not his.

“well, you will see that everything is packed up that belongs to the family, and you will see that the house is put in due order to be given up to its owners on the last day of the month; for your wages and those of the others you will go to the late duke’s lawyers.”

mr. mason’s face clouded haughtily at the word wages, but he was a good-hearted man—he did not openly resent.

“i beg pardon, my lord,” he said with hesitation, “but does her grace know she leaves the house?”

“yes,” said ronald. “that is, she knows she must leave it.”

“and do you think she will, my lord?”

“she must!”

mason shook his head.

[300]“the duchess never does what is not agreeable to her, my lord.”

“she must leave it; and you must see that preparations are duly made, so that she cannot remain in it.”

mr. mason coughed slightly.

“my lord, i have heard that there are tenants in ireland who will not go out till the thatch is set afire over their heads, and even then let themselves and their pigs be burnt rather than give up possession. i mean no disrespect, my lord, when i venture to say that my lady—i mean her grace—is very much of that kind of temper, my lord.”

“i know she is,” said hurstmanceaux. “that is why i speak to you on this matter. go out of the house she must.”

“of course i will do my best, my lord,” said mason in a dubious tone; he knew if her grace did not choose anything to be packed up nothing would be.

at that moment cecile, the head maid, entered; she was a tall, supercilious, conceited-looking swiss woman of forty.

“if you please, my lord,” she said, looking impudently in ronald’s face, “her grace would be glad to know when you mean to go out of the house, as her grace is waiting to come downstairs.”

hurstmanceaux turned his back on her.

“you have received my orders, mason. the landlord resumes possession here on the last day of the month.”

then he went into the hall and out of the house door.

“quel ours!” said cecile, with her nose in the air. she liked gentlemen like the foreign diplomatist who had gone to see the battersea birds.

mr. mason shook his head in a melancholy manner.

“i think we had better all of us leave,” he said gloomily. “the miser’s got the purse-strings now and the duchess aren’t anywhere.”

“moi, j’ resterai,” said the swiss woman. “she does hit one with the hairbrush sometimes and pretty hard too, but she is first-rate fun, and always leaves her letters about, and never knows what she has or she hasn’t. take my word for it, mr. mason, she will always live in clover.”

[301]“i dare say she will,” said the more virtuous mason. “but it won’t be correct, now cocky’s gone; and myself i shall give her the go-by.”

their mistress meanwhile was walking up and down her morning-room, a prey to many torturing and conflicting thoughts. she knew that she had done an unwise and an ill-bred thing in sending that message by cecile to her brother, but her rage had outstripped her prudence. ronald was the best friend she had, and she had proved it a thousand times; but an ungovernable hatred seethed within her against him. he and harry—she did not know which she hated the more, which of the two had insulted her the more infamously. a woman may lose all title to respect, but that is no reason why she does not retain every pretension to it.

nothing could ever have persuaded her that she had lost her right to have everyone hold her in the highest esteem. nevertheless, she had sense enough to be aware that she was in a very odious position, and that she might very easily be in one which would be absolute disgrace, one which would place her on the level with those poor simpletons whom she had always scorned so immeasurably, women who had lost their natural position and were nowhere at home, and could only get received at florence tea-tables and homburg picnics and monaco supper parties. she had always thought that she would sooner die than be put in the basket with the pêches à quinze series. for she was intensely proud, and had made many a poor woman who had been compromised feel the weight of her disdain and the sting of her cruelty. she always intended to enjoy herself, to do exactly whatever she pleased, but she never intended to lose her right to present boo ten years hence at the drawing-room. people who did lose their place were idiots. so she had always thought, but at the present moment she was obliged to feel that she might very easily lose her place herself.

beaumont had frightened her, but he had not frightened her so intensely as had her brother; and, as he had given her six months’ time, she had with her usual happy insouciance almost dismissed the peril from her mind. but she knew her brother’s character and she knew that he[302] would send the men from the bank at the time fixed as punctually as the clock would strike eleven. and then from the bank he would send the jewels to hunt and roskell, and that admirable imitation of the roc’s egg, which would deceive the unaided eye of anyone, would be detected in its falseness by their acids or their wheels or whatever the things were with which jewelers tested diamonds. and then he, despite his unsuspicious stupidity, would know, without any further proof, that she had pawned or sold the original.

“i am at home to no one,” she said to her footman, and continued to walk up and down the room in nervous agitation.

she had several engagements, such engagements as her mourning allowed, but she ignored them all; she could not see anyone until she could find out some way of exit from this hideous labyrinth of trouble.

suddenly it flashed upon her mind that, do what she would, she could not get the diamond in time for monday morning. it was in paris. if she went to paris without the money she would be no nearer to it; and besides, her sudden departure would at once awaken the suspicions of jack’s guardians. she must not only find the large sum of money needed, but she must also find someone who would go to paris and bring the stone back before monday forenoon.

there were many men who were devoted to her, but as she ran over their names in her mind she could think of no one whose adoration, whether expectant or retrospective, would be equal to such a strain on it as that; nor everyone to whom she could quite safely trust her secret.

there are very pretty theories and ideals about the honor of men of the world, but she knew such men down to the ground, as she would have phrased it, and she had few illusions about their honor. she knew that when they are in love with one woman they show up to that one all the others who have preceded her in their affections. harry, indeed, she might have trusted; but she had broken with him, and even if she had not done so, he could no more have raised a seventh part of the money than he could have uprooted st. james’s palace. he was[303] stone broke, as he said himself. her little travelling timepiece, which stood on her writing-table, seemed to sway over the seconds and minutes with a fiendish rapidity. half an hour had gone by since her brother had left her, and she was no nearer a solution to her torturing difficulties. other women would have weakened and compromised themselves by running to some female confidant, but she had none; with her own sisters she was always on the terms of an armed neutrality and in female friends she had never seen any object or savor. as soon as a woman was intimate with you she only tried to take your men away from you; she never gave any woman the opportunity to do so.

another quarter of an hour passed by; she heard her horses stamping on the stones beneath the windows; she heard the children scamper down the staircase on their way to their afternoon walk in the park; she heard people drive up and drive away as they were met by the inexorable “not at home” of the good-looking youth in powder and black shoulder-knots who opened the hall door.

how horrible! she thought, oh, how horrible! this might be the very last day on which anybody would call on her! for she knew well enough that the offence she had committed was one which, once made public, would close to her the only world for which she cared. “and yet i really meant no harm,” she thought. “i thought the thing was mine or would be. why did that odious poodle lend it me? so treacherous! why did he not explain to me that it was a ‘chattel’? what is a chattel? why did beaumont advance the money upon it? he was much more to blame than i am, because of course he knew the law.”

in that she was perhaps not wrong, for though the world may blame only the borrower, the lender is not seldom the wickeder of the two.

tired out with her ceaseless pacing to and fro over the carpet, her nerve gave way, and for almost the first time in her life she burst into tears, bitter, hysterical, cruel tears, the tears which disfigure and age the woman who sheds them. the blenheims, infinitely distressed, jumped on her lap and endeavored to console her; rubbing their[304] little red and white heads against her cheeks. their caresses touched her in her loneliness. “we hated cocky, you and i,” she said to them; “but i wish to heaven he had never died.” with all her keen enjoyment of life she really understood in that hour of torture how it was that women driven at bay killed themselves to escape detection and condemnation. she did not mean to kill herself because she was a woman of many resources and had her beautiful face and form, and loved life; but she felt that she would rather kill herself than meet ronald’s eyes if he learned that the indian diamond had been changed and pawned. and know it he must as soon as hunt and roskell’s assayer tested the stones. beaumont had told her honestly that the imitation would deceive anyone, even a jeweler, unless it were tested; but that tested it would of course fly in pieces and confess itself a fraud.

she had only forty-three hours before the messenger from the bank would come. whatever she did had to be done before the stones were consigned to him, for after they were out of her possession she would not be safe for a moment. at all costs she must get back the roc’s egg from beaumont or be a ruined, disgraced, miserable woman. true, she felt sure that her brother and the ormes would not expose her to the world. they would scrape the money together at all costs, and redeem the jewel, and observe secrecy on the whole abominable affair; but she would be in their power for ever; they would be able to punish her in any way they chose, and their punishment would certainly take the form of exiling her from everything which made life worth living.

the old churchman, lord augustus, was hardly more than a lay figure, but alberic, she knew, looked on her with all the disdain and dislike of a refined and religious man, for one whom he condemned in all her ways and whom he considered had made his brother and his father dupes from the first day of her marriage. and ronald would be but the more bitterly inflexible because he would consider that her near relationship to himself compelled him in honor to the uttermost severity in judgment and action; he would consider that he could not show to her the indulgence he might have shown to a stranger.

[305]her fit of weeping exhausted itself by its own violence, and as she glanced at her face in the glass she was horrified to see her red and swollen eyelids and her complexion smudged and dulled like a pastel which some ignorant servant has dusted.

“nothing on earth is worth the loss of one’s beauty,” she said to herself, and she went upstairs and, without summoning her maid, washed her face with rosewater and ran a comb through her hair; the blenheims sitting on either side of her, critical of processes with which they were familiar.

as she sat before her toilet-table and its oval silver-framed swinging mirror, her eyes fell by chance on a glove box made of tortoise shell and gold, with two gold amorini playing with a fawn on its lid.

“billy!” she said suddenly, half aloud.

william massarene had given her the box when she had betted gloves with him at the previous year’s goodwood races.

“billy!” she said again under her breath.

yes, there was billy; the only person in the whole world who could do for her what she wanted without feeling it.

she would have to tell him, to make him understand the urgency of it, some portion of the truth; the blood rushed over her face with the repulsion of pride. tell her necessities to the man she bullied and despised! she sat with her eyes fixed on the two gold cupids thinking how she could put the story so that she would not be lowered in his eyes. it was a difficult and embarrassing test of her ingenuity, for not only had she to get the money out of him but she must get him to send or to go to paris by that evening’s train. she had pillaged massarene without shame or compunction. she had made him “bleed” without stint. she had made him do a thousand follies, costly to himself but useful to her, like the purchases of blair airon and vale royal. she had rooked him without mercy, considering that she did him an honor in noticing him at all. but, by some contradiction, or some instinct of pride or of decency, she shrank at the idea of actually borrowing money from him—of actually being indebted to him for a great service.

[306]in all lesser transactions with him she had considered him her debtor for her patronage; but to make him do this, to make him pay beaumont and restore her the indian stone, would be to become his debtor. there was no shirking the fact. would she ever be able to bully and insult him afterwards? yes, why not? he was a cad, a snob, a horror; such men were only made to be trodden on and have their ears boxed.

she decided that it did not matter what a low-bred brute like him knew or thought, and that since providence had given her a rich idiot into her hands it would be worse than folly not to use his resources. anything, anything, was better than to let the imitation jewel go to hunt and roskell for inevitable detection. and there were now only forty-three hours in which to act.

he was in town she knew. he was in town because she was in town, and because the house was sitting. where should she see him?

to send for him to her residence might cause some story to get about; to go to harrenden house was still more compromising unless she began by a visit to his wife, which would be round about and cause delay; she knew he might very possibly be at the commons—new members are always very assiduous in their attendance—and he was at that time serving on a royal commission on some agricultural difficulty. she had herself dressed, feeling that cecile looked curiously at her, and telling the woman to take the dogs in kensington gardens, she went to her carriage which had been waiting two hours.

“to palace yard!” she said to her footman: the horses, irritated in temper and with their mouths and necks in pain from their long penance in their bearing-reins, flew thither with the speed of the wind.

she sent for mr. massarene, who was, the doorkeeper said, in the house. after a few moments he came out to her with the deferential haste of an enamored man, which sat ill on his broad squat figure and his iron-grey, elderly, respectable, tradesmanlike aspect.

“i want to speak to you a moment,” she said as he came and stood by the carriage. “can you give me a cup of tea on the terrace?”

[307]“certainly, certainly!” he stammered, confused by a dual sentiment—the charm of her presence and the fear that it would look odd to be seen with her. “the committee i am on has just ended its sitting,” he added with the pride which he felt in his functions. “i shall be delighted if i can be of any use.”

“there is no one there now, is there?” she asked, sensible as he was that her appearance in such a public place would look very strange.

“no one, or next to no one. no one of your friends, certainly. a few radical members.”

“they don’t matter,” she said, and went with him through the house to the terrace.

he gave her a seat and ordered tea. he was dazzled and intimidated as he always was by her presence, but he was conscious that her beguilements always ended in some advantage for herself, so that he was less flattered than he would otherwise have been by her sudden appeal to him.

it was a grey day, the river was in fog, but the air was windless and mild.

she threw back her veil and the pale light fell on the brightness of her hair, and the beauty of her face enhanced by the frame of crape. the traces of her weeping had passed away, leaving her face softer and whiter than usual with a tremor on the mouth like that of a little child who has been scolded.

william massarene’s observant eyes read those signs. “she’s in some real sharp trouble this time, i reckon,” he said to himself.

he was a man who had never known pity, but he did feel sorry for her.

she made the mistake of judging him from the exterior. because he was afraid of her and of her friends, because he did not know how to bow, because he made ludicrous mistakes in language and manner, because he crumbled his bread on the dinner-cloth, and never used his finger-glass, she imagined him to be a fool.

she did not understand that if he let himself be robbed he did so with a purpose and not out of feebleness. she did not understand that, although he was hypnotized by[308] her because he was under the influence of a woman for the first time, there was always alive underneath his obedience the sharp, keen, brutal selfishness which had made him the great man he was.

“what is the trouble, my lady?” he said, leaning forward, his hands on his knees in his usual attitude. “why, lord, you’re no more made for trouble than a white cockatoo’s for mud and rain.”

there was not a soul on the terrace; the attendant who had brought the tea-tray had retired; there was the scream and roar of a steam-tug coming up the river in the fog, and a factory bell on the opposite shore was clanging loudly: she thought she should hear those two sounds in her ears as long as ever she should live.

she knew that there was no time to lose, that the moments were tearing along like sleuth-hounds, that she must tell him now or never, must get his help or be ruined.

she was of high physical courage; she had slid from the back of a rearing horse; she had never lost her nerve on a yacht-deck in a storm, when men were washed overboard like chickens; she had been perfectly cool and self-possessed one awful night on a highland mountain when she and her whole party had lost their way for twelve hours of snow-drift and hurricane; but now, for the first time in her life, she was nerveless, and felt her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth and her spirit fail her.

“come, keep up your pecker,” said mr. massarene in what he meant to be a kindly encouragement. “come, tell me what the matter is, my pretty one.”

she started like a doe past whose side a bullet whistles as the odious familiarity struck her ear—the familiarity which she did not dare to resent, the familiarity which told her how much the expression of her face must have confessed already. with dilated nostrils, through which her breath came and went rapidly and in short pulsations, she plunged midmost into her story: the story as arranged and decorated and trimmed by her own intelligent skill, wherein she was plainly the victim of circumstance, of her own ignorance, of a tradesman’s deceitfulness, and of her relatives’ cruelty and harshness. the old duke, she averred, had given her the jewels; but it seemed there[309] was nothing to show that he had done so, and her brother and brothers-in-law were so inconceivably base as to doubt her word for it, and to claim them for the heir as “real estate.” no woman, she thought, had ever been so brutally treated in the whole history of the world.

she spoke at first hesitatingly and with visible embarrassment, but she grew more at her ease as she got her story well in hand, and she became eloquent in the description of her wrongs.

william massarene followed her narrative attentively and without interruption, leaning a little forward with his hands on his knee and glancing round to see that no one was in sight to wonder at his flattering but compromising tête-à-tête. he was magnetized by her voice, dazzled by her eyes, but what she spoke of was a matter of business and he was beyond all else a man of business. business was his own domain. on that he was master; in that it was not in the power of anyone to cheat him. his sharp perception quickly understood her position, disentangled facts from fiction, and comprehended in what danger she was placed. he did not let her see that he knew she was glossing over and changing the circumstances; but he did know it, and stripped the false from the true in his own reflections as surely as he had shifted gold from quartz in his days in the gold-fields. he could have turned her narrative inside out and rent it to pieces in a second, but he forbore to do so, and appeared to accept her version of the matter as she presented it to him.

“but what made you take the jewels to this beaumont?” he asked her as she paused.

“i wanted money,” she said sullenly.

“was it before you knew me?”

“just before.”

“and you asked nobody’s advice?”

“no.”

the ghost of a grim smile flitted over his face: certainly for consummate folly he thought these great folks beat anything in all creation.

“oh, don’t laugh at one, billy,” she said with genuine mortification and shame in her voice. “you don’t know what it is to want money as we do.”

[310]he looked at her indulgently.

“i dare say it’s hard on you. you have to keep up all that swagger on nothing. well, as i understand the matter, you must have these diamonds before monday forenoon, eh?”

“yes,” she said shortly, with a catch in her breath; she felt by the change in his tone how far she had descended from her pedestal by her confession. “oh, the brute!” she thought passionately; “how i should love to strangle him and fling him into the thames pea-soup!”

“what is it you want me to do?” he asked, whilst he knew without asking; but he liked “to keep her nose to the grindstone”; he was but paying in fair coin the innumerable insults she had passed on him, the countless awkward and painful moments she had entailed on him.

she took up all her courage and trusted to the magic of her influence over him.

“i want you to go over to paris and get them for me. i dare say you could get them for half price. beaumont would be afraid of you.”

his face did not reveal his thoughts; his dull grey eyes stared at her fixedly.

“what was the sum you had from him?”

“three hundred thousand francs; but then there is the cast of the false stones to add to that and the interest.”

she spoke the truth in this, for she knew that it would be no use to do otherwise.

“and what did you sign for?”

“i can’t remember.”

william massarene laughed, a short, rasping, grim sound, like the chuckle of the big woodpecker.

“beaumont has a very good reputation,” she added. “he never cheats. he was once a gentleman, they say.”

“and gentlefolks never cheat, do they, my lady!”

“oh, billy, don’t mock at me,” she cried with genuine distress. “i am in horrible trouble. i have told you everything because you are my friend. will you do this thing or won’t you?”

“how will you pay me if i do?”

“pay you!”

[311]in her heart of hearts she knew that she had not the remotest intention of ever paying him.

“how will you pay me if i do?” he repeated. a look came into his eyes as they stared on her which might have warned her that he was not a man who would go for ever unpaid. she was silent; she really did not know what to say. she knew that she hated him horribly. but she had no other chance.

he enjoyed her discomfiture.

“you’ll pay me somehow, i reckon,” he said, after leaving her in torture for a few moments. “well, i’ll do this thing for you. i’ll go to paris to-night. send me a line from you authorizing me to treat for you with this jeweler. i’ll get back to-morrow evening. you’ll be at your house by ten o’clock, and i’ll come there straight from cannon street. mind you’re alone.”

the rough authority of the sentences chilled her to the bone; she realized that he was no more her timid obedient slave, but her master, and a master with a whip. something in the expression of his face made her sick with fear. but there was no other means, no other saviour; if she offended him, if she rejected the aid she had asked for, the false stones would go to hunt and roskell, and her brother and brothers-in-law would know everything.

“you’d better go now,” said william massarene, reading in her mind as if it were a book. “this aren’t a place to talk secrets; and pull your veil down, for you look out of sorts, my dear!”

a shudder of rage passed through her as she heard his words. oh, how she hated herself that she had been such an imbecile as to drift into a position in which this wretched cad could dare speak to her as he would speak to a mill-hand in milwaukee.

oh, heavens! how dreadful it was, she thought, to loathe and despise a man, and yet to be obliged to use him! it was all her brother’s fault, who had placed her in such an odious and agonizing position! it seemed as if the whole of humanity, dead and living, were in conspiracy against her!

“look here, my dear,” said mr. massarene in a low tone, as they crossed the speaker’s court, “i’ll send you[312] round to your house in an hour a line or two that you’ll sign. mere matter of form, but must be done, or i can’t treat with your jeweler. sign it, put it in a sealed envelope, and send it back by the bearer. when i get it, i’ll take the club train at nine o’clock. to-morrow’s sunday. there’s nothing odd in going out of town on sunday.”

“very well,” she said faintly; for it had never occurred to her mind that billy would be business-like with herself. she was used to people who, whether they had little or much, never stooped to marchander. nobody had ever asked her to sign anything before, except beaumont.

“what do you want a signature for?” she said impatiently. “can’t you forget you sold sausages?”

she was looking at a brougham entering the courtyard, and not at the face of william massarene; had she seen it, careless as she was, she might have been alarmed.

he did not reply.

as he put her in her carriage, she said, with anxiety:

“you won’t tell anybody, will you?”

william massarene smiled grimly.

“a man who sold sausages don’t come to be what i am by telling people what he does. telling aren’t my habit, your grace. go straight home and wait for my messenger.”

she was not used to remembering that her servants existed, but she was for once nervously conscious that the footman holding open the carriage-door heard these words, and must wonder at them. oh, what a path of thorns she had entered upon, all because providence, or the ormes, or ronnie, or whatever it was, had made life so difficult for her!

she did go straight home, for she was conscious that she could not afford to miss massarene’s messenger, who arrived punctually within the hour.

she glanced feverishly at what he had sent her; a few lines printed in typewriting, so that his own handwriting did not appear; it seemed to her inoffensive; it authorized him to pay beaumont the money for her, and get back the otterbourne jewels; it further stated that when he should have completed the transaction, she would be his debtor[313] for the sum of twelve thousand pounds sterling. this last clause she did not like. it alarmed her. for an instant a flash of good sense came across her mind and suggested to her that it would be a thousand times better to send for ronald, even for any of the ormes, and confess her position to one of them, than to put herself in the power of this man whom she had cheated, fooled, derided, ridiculed, and ordered about under the whip of her contemptuous words. her relatives would save her from all exposure, at whatever painful cost to themselves. but her vanity and her stubbornness rejected the whispers of common sense. she detested alberic orme, and her feeling toward her brother was now little less virulent. “no!” she said to herself, “rather than confess myself and humiliate myself to either of them, i would die like sarah bernhardt in ixeile!” but she forgot that there are worse things than death.

after hesitating for ten minutes, and looking down with disgust on this paper, which looked so vulgar with its big type-written words, she decided with a reckless plunge into the unknown to sign it, and scrawled at the bottom of the lines the name which she wrote so seldom, clare otterbourne. with similar haste she thrust it into an envelope, sealed and sent it down to massarene’s messenger.

she cried bitterly when it was irrevocably gone from her, but she felt that she could do no less than she had done; everybody took such dreadful advantage of poor cocky’s death!

“i shall treat the beast worse than ever,” she thought, as her sobs ceased gradually. “poignez vilain il vous oindra.”

she had always beaten her vilain, and he had always submitted and cowed before her. she believed that he would do so as long as he lived.

for this satirical, intelligent, and fin-de-siècle creature, so quick to see and ridicule the follies and frailties of other creatures, did not in the very faintest degree understand the stuff of which william massarene was made.

meantime, he was travelling toward dover in the club train with the type-written paper safe in his inner breast-pocket. this errand pleased him.