if *'-j ^^.v H'&:r .?1VI v.^ f«^ B L i; >< P L E Y LIBRARY ^ THE MA8SA11ENES THE MASSAEENES a movci r> By OUIDA^ ^,,^J, NEW EDITION LONDON Sampson Low, Marston and Company LUHTEh 5t. ©ujistan's l^ousf, jFrtter ?Lane, E.C LONDON: ] rRINTEl) BY W.ILLTAM CLOWES AND SONS, Limited, • STAWrORD STREET AND CHAEING CROSS. C/JJ l^ Md''ered : " Yesterday my sister got me to go to complines at the Oratory. It was some swell saint or another, and some of the cracks were singing there. This woman was close to where I was. She was all in black, and seemed very much * gone ' on the service ; her eyes got full of tears at part of it. AVell, I don't mind telling you she fetched me so that I asked the Due d'Arcy to see my sister safe home, and I followed the lady with the eyes. She got into a little dark coufe, and my hansom bowled after it. I ran her to earth at a private hotel — quite solemn sort of place called Brown's — and there they told me she was the Countess zu Lynar. " THE MASSARENE8. 67 " Countess zu Lynar ! then one can soon see wlio she is," said Mouse, as she went and got an *Almauach de Gotha' of the year from her writing-table. *' Oh, I looked there last night," said Brancepeth ; " she isn't there ; but the porter told me she used to be the wife of that awfully rich banker Vanderlin." Mouse looked up, astonished and momentarily interested. " Are you quite sure ? " " Positive." *' Then she can't be young now," said Lady Kenilworth, with relief and satisfaction. " Oh, yes, she is ; at least, quite young enough," said Brancepeth vaguely. " Oh, I know all about her ! " continued his friend. " She is not in society. We stand a good deal in London, but at present we don't receive divorced women." Brancepeth laughed softly with vast amusement, and did not offer any explanation of his laughter. " Such eyes ! " he murmured dreamily. ** Oh, Lord, such eyes ! " " My dear Harry," said Mouse, with cold dignity, " pray spare me your lyrics, and go and write them in the porter's book at the private hotel. You could probably approach the lady without the formula of introduction; a bouquet would do it for you." Brancepeth shook his head mournfully. " Not that sort," he said gloomily. " And you needn't be in such a wax about it, Mouse ; she's gone back to the Continent this morning. They told me so at the hotel just now." " And you did not go to Dover instead of coming here ? " said his friend sarcastically. " I am amazed that old ac- quaintance had such a hold remaining on you as to make you resist the seductions of the tidal train." " You can be nasty about it if you like," said the hand- some youth with sullen resignation. " You make the mistake which all women make. You fly at a man when he tells you the truth; and then you are astonished another time that he tells you a lie. If there'd been anything in it, of course I shouldn't have told you any- thing." F 2 68 tHE MASSABENE^. " An admirable confession. I shall remember it anotber time." " Women always make fellows lie. You bite our noses off if we ever happen to tell a word of truth ! " " But it breaks my heart to think that you even see that other women exist, Harry ! " " Oh, bother ! " said Brancepeth roughly. " Don't be a fool, Mousie. You see other men exist fast enough your- self." She was silent. She was conscious that she did do so. Happily for the preservation of peace, there was at that moment announced Prince Khristof of Karstein. " Her father," murmured Mousie in a swift whisper, but Brancepeth was too obtuse to understand ; he only stared, conscious that he had missed a tip. Prince Khristof was a bland, gracious person who had been very fair in youth and early manhood, and still pre- served a delicate clear complexion and eyes as blue and serene as Clare Kenilworth's ; his hair was white and silken, his form slender and stately, his carriage elegant; and, alas ! there was not a good club in all the world into which he could take his charming presence. When the century was young he had been born the seventh son of a then reigning duke in a small principality of green pasture and glacier-fed stream, and pretty towns like magnified toys, and many square leagues of resinous-scented pine forest. The century had seen the principality absorbed, the duke- dom mediatised, the towns ruined, and the pine woods leased to Jewish banks. As in many other cases the gain of the empire had been the ruin of the province. Prince Khristofs eldest brother still abode in his toy-city, and hats were lifted as he passed, but he reigned no more ; and Prince Khristof himself, who had been a Colonel of Cuirassiers in his cradle, and at ten years old had seen a sentinel flogged for omitting to carry arms when he had passed, was glad to furnish a mansion for Mr. Massarene, and take forty per cent, from the decorators and dealers who, under his patronage, furnished the admirable Clodion and the other rareties, beauties, and luxuries to the adorn- ment of Harrenden House. He felt it hard that when he had permitted his daughter TEE MAS3ABENES. 69 to marry into la, haute finance, the misalliance had so little profited himself that he was driven to such expedients. But so it was ; and though the descent had been gradual, it had been one which ended in Avernus, and royal and patrician society had shut all its great gates upon him, leaving him only its side entrances and back staircases. The man who could remember when he had been a child in his nurse's arms, seeing guards carry arms to salute him as he was borne past them suffered acutely from his degradation ; but he was beyond all things a philosopher, and thought that fine tobaccos and delicate wines soothe, if they do not cure, many wounds, even when you can only enjoy such things at the expense of your inferiors. " This old beggar ought to know," thought Brancepeth, who was occupied with his new idea, and to whom Germans meant every nationality from Schleswig-Holstein to Mol- davia; and he addressed the newcomer point-blank. " Do you know a Countess Lynar, sir ? " " I know a great many Lynar s," replied the Prince. " It is a very general name. Can you add anything more definite? " " She's the woman whom that Jew fellow, Vanderlin, divorced," replied Brancepeth. The Prince smiled and coughed. "Olga zu Lynar? I know her — yes. She is my only daughter. Vanderlin is a banker, but he is not a Jew." Brancepeth grew very red. " I — I — beg you ten thousand pardons," he muttered. " I didn't know, you know ; I am always blundering." " There is nothing to pardon," said Prince Khris sweetly. " Englishmen are so insular. They never know anything about their neighbours across the water. It is perfectly well known everywhere out of England that my daughter was — separated — from Vanderlin, but that you, my Lord Brancepeth, should not know it is tout ce quil y a de plus natureir " He takes it uncommonly coolly," thought Brancepeth, still under the spell of his astonishment, and still distressed as an Englishman always is, at having made a stupid mistake and wounded an acquaintance. " But is she married again ? " he asked anxiously, " How does she come to be Lynar ? " ^ 70 THE MA8SABENE8. " Dear youth, you are not discreet," thought the Prince, as he replied frankly that her mother had been a Countess Lynar, and that his daughter had taken her mother's name, he was himself never very sure why ; but she was always a little self-willed and fanciful : she was a woman ; femme, tres femme ! When she had married into la haute finance she had of course forfeited her place in the * Hof-Kalendar.' " But her maiden name is there." He turned over the leaves of the *Almanach de Gotha' and pointed to the entry of the birth of his daughter the Countess Olga Marie Valeria. "Why does she call herself Countess Lynar? said Brancepeth with curiosity, conscious of his own bad manners. Prince Khris pointed to the page : " It was her mother's name, you see ; and more than that, in the property which my daughter possesses there is a little Schloss Lynar, hardly more than a ruin, hidden under woods in Swabia which gives that title to whoever owns it. Were you to purchase it you would have the right to write yourself Graf zu Lynar." "I would rather own the lady than the castle," said Brancepeth, too stupid and too careless to note the deepen- ing offence in the eyes of Mouse. Prince Khris smiled meaningly. " The lady might give you the more trouble of the two." " How he hates her ! " thought Brancepeth. " I suppose she keeps a tight rein on the property." Brancepeth's experiences, which had been extensive in range though brief in years, had told him that these family dislikes and disagreements usually had their root in the auri sacra fames ; and the fact was well known all over Europe that this serene, courtly, distinguished-looking gentleman, whose name was recorded in the *Hof-Kalen- dar,' lived very nearly, if not entirely, by his wits. High play is one thing ; cheating is another ; if you ruin yourself it is your own affair, but if you try to ruin others by unfair means it is the affair of your neighbours. Prince Khristofs mind was so made that he had never been able to perceive or comprehend the difference ; of late years the meaning of that difference had been enforced on him disagreeably. TEE MA8SARENES, 71 " I suspect he is the devil and all to have anything to do with at close quarters," reflected Brancepeth," who was a very cautious young man. " And what a mess he's made of his life, good Lord ! with all his cleverness and position ; why, a decent croupier's a ten thousand times better fellow ; he'll rook you like winking if he can get you down at ecarte^ "And she came over here to see you, I suppose," he inquired, still curious. " Scarcely," said the Prince, with a fleeting smile. *' Would you — wouldn't you give me a word of introduc- tion ? " said Brancepeth hurriedly and conscious of his own temerity. " To my daughter ? " said the Prince blandly. " My dear lord, I should of course be delighted to do so — delighted ; but I am not on speaking terms with her. I don't call on her myself. How can I send anybody else to call ? " "What did you quarrel about?" asked Harry bluntly. " Who was right ? " Prince Khris looked at him with amusement ; it was so droll to find people who asked questions like children instead of finding out things quietly for themselves. To his finer and more philosophic intelligence such a primitive matter as right could not seriously afi'ect anything. He thought the young Englishman a fool, an impertinent and dense fool ; but he was never impatient of fools, they were too useful to him in the long run. What wise man would be able to play ecavte unless there were fools with whom to play it ? " Of course the divorce was all Vanderlin's fault ! " said Brancepeth with clumsy curiosity. " It is always the man's fault in such cases. That is well known." Prince Khris smiled as he spoke ; there was something sardonic and suggestive about the smile which made it almost a grin, and which seemed singularly ugly to Brance- peth, considering that the person concerned was the grinner's only daughter. No one could more completely or more cruelly have expressed the speaker's conviction that Yan- derlin was entirely blameless in this matter. Mouse listened in extreme irritation; it seemed to be beyond even her Harry's usual obtuseness to continue the 72 TEE MASSABENES. theme of a woman's indiscretions to that woman's own father. Besides, she hated women who were divorced : they made it so diflScult and unpleasant for the wiser members of their sex. " My daughter seems to have impressed you, Lord Brance- peth," continued the Prince. " Where is it that you have seen her ? " " At the Oratory," said Bracepeth, " and in the street. She is so awfully fetching, you know." " She is a woman who makes people look at her," replied Prince Khristof indifferently. " Did you hear her sing at the Oratory ? She has a voice ! ah, such a voice ! the most flexible and wonderful contralto. She could have made her fortune on the stage." " No ; she didn't sing," said Brancepeth, greatly interested. " She seemed to pray no end, and she cried. But she cried so beautifully. Not as most of them do who make such figures of themselves. But the tears just brimming in her eyes and falling, like the what d'ye call 'em, you know, the Magdalens in the picture galleries." The Prince laughed outright. "For felicitous allusion your Englishman has never an equal," he thought, whilst he said aloud : " My dear lord, what did I tell you? Olga is /emme, tres femme. If I wanted to weep I should not go to the Oratory myself. But a woman does go. It is a consolation to her to be admired and pitied, and I have no doubt she observed that you did both." " She didn't even see me," said the younger man, on whose not over-sensitive nerves something in the elder's tone grated. " Her father don't do much to save her character,'* he thought. " It's an ill bird fouls its own nest." Meanwhile Mouse had listened with scarcely concealed impatience to all these questions and answers. She sat apparently engrossed in the pages of the *Almanach de Gotha,' but in reality losing nothing of her friend's interro- gations and implications. At last, out of patience, she closed the little red book and said imperiously to Brance- peth : " Surely it is time you went on guard ? Have you any THE MASSARENES, 73 idea what time it is? Besides, if you don't mind my saying so, I want to talk about something to the Prince before I go for my drive." " I aren't on guard to-day ; but I'll go, of course, if you want me to go," murmured Brancepeth sulkily, raising his lazy long limbs out of his comfortable resting-place with a sense of regret, for he would willingly have gone on talking about the lady of the Oratory for another hour. " Such a dear good boy, bat always wanting in tact," said Lady Kenilworth, as the door of the morning-room closed on him. "Wanting in reason too. To talk of another woman when he is in the presence of Lady Kenilworth ! What obtuseness ! what blindness," said Prince Khris with graceful gallantry. " But Englishmen are always like that. They go all round the world and see nothing but their own umbrellas ; they keep on their hats in St. Peter's, and set up their kodaks at the Taj Mahal. I have always said that a people who could conquer India and yet clothe their Viceroy in a red cloth tunic, are a people without percep- tion. They travel, but they remain islanders. Their minds are enfolded in their bath-towels and sanitary flannels. They do not see beyond the rim of their tubs. But I believe you did me the honour to wish to speak to me ? I need not say that if there be the smallest thing in which I can be of service you command my devotion." Mouse sat dreamily and irritably opening and shutting the 'Almanach de Gotha.' Prince Khristof wore a wholly altered aspect to her now that she saw him as the father of a woman whom Harry admired and had followed. " Do you know — such is my insularity — that I never knew you had a daughter or had had a wife ? " she said abruptly, as she pushed the book away. " Dear Madam ! you surely have not sent for me to speak of these two ladies ? " he said, picking up the little red book. " My deceased wife's name is here, if you chose to look for it ; my daughter's is not, because she exiled her- self into la haute finance. I once had the entire collection of this Almanach since its beginning in 1760. If we want to see how despicably modern editions fall below the standard of all work of the last centurywiothing will show 74 TEE MASSABENE8. lis that fact more completely and conclusively than this Almanach. Contrast the commonplace portraits of to-day's Gotha with the exquisite designs of the eighteenth-century Icalendars." "Yes," said Mouse shortly: "yes, no doubt. You are ahvays right in matters of art. My dear Prince, how very admirably you have housed those people at Harrenden House. If only the birds were worthy the nest." " Ah-ha ! It was for this, was it, that you wanted to see me ? " he thought, as he said aloud : " I suggested — I merely suggested. I am delighted the result meets your approval. They are excellent people, those good Massarenes. Yon remember that I told you so in Paris. Des tons gens ; de tres Ions gens. A little uncouth, but the world likes what is simple and fresh." She looked at him to see if he could really say all this with a serious countenance ; she saw that he could ; his handsome fair features were without the ghost of a smile, and his whole expression was grave, sincere, attuned to admiring candour. "If he takes it like that I had best take it so too," thought Mouse, who was aware that she was but a mere beginner and baby beside him in the delicate arts of dis- simulation. But Nature had made her proud, inclined to be blunt and sarcastic, and occasionally unwisely inclined to frankness ; she looked him straight in the eyes now, and said : " But you and I are going to do our duty to our fellow- Christians, and polish them, aren't we ? I was quite straight with you about the purchase of Vale Koyal ; but you weren't so straight with me about Harrenden House. Don't you think, Prince, we can do our friends more good if we are friends ourselves ? Quarrelling is always a mistake." He bowed and smiled. His smooth delicate features expressed neither annoyance nor pleasure, neither wonder nor surprise. " I am always Lady Kenil worth's devoted servant," he said graciously, with the air of a suzerain accepting homage. " I am sorry you think that I should have consulted you about the town^use," he added. " It did not occur to TEE MASSABENES. 75 me ; you were in Egypt. I never offend or forget tliose who wish me well — of that you may be sure. It was amusing to arrange that house, and one could be of so much use to artists and other deserving people of talent." ]\rouse laughed, rather rudely, and her laughter brought a slight angry flush to the cheek of Prince Khris. He had both noble and royal blood in his veins, and at the sound of that derisive little laugh he could have strangled her with pleasure. By an odd contradiction, Lady Kenilworth offended him by precisely that same kind of bluntness and nakedness of speech with which her brother had offended herself. The delicate euphemisms which she expected to have used to please herself seemed to her altogether ridiculous when they were required by another person. " Englishwomen are always so coarse," he thought ; " they never understand veiled phrases. They will call their spade a spade. There is no need to do so, whether you are digging a grave with it or digging for gold ; it can always be a drawing-room fire-shovel for other people, whatever work it may accomplish. " Yes, you are quite right, dear lady," he added, after a slight pause. " The task is not a light one ; we will divide ^^■^ its difficulties. I have experience that you have not yet ^^ gained ; you have influence that I have — alas ! — lost. Let us take counsel together. Our friends the Massarenes are good people — excellent people ; it is a pleasure to guide them in the way they should go." He remained with her half-an-hour, and only left her when it was announced that her carriage was waiting below. He kissed her hand with all the reverential grace which a fine gentleman can lend to his farewell ; but as he descended the staircase and went into the street, he swore under his breath. " There is no devil like a blonde devil ! " he thought. " Mouse they call her ! A rat ! a rat ! with teeth as sharp as nails and claws which can cling like a flying bat's ! It is little use for the world to have made woman all these thousands of years ; she remains just what she was in Eve's time, in Eriphyle's time — always the same — always pur- chasable, always venal, always avaricious ! Ah ! why was this rodent not my daughter ? We would have made the 76 THE MASSARENES. world our oyster, and no one should have known the taste of an oyster but ourselves ! " Whilst he passed along Stanhope Street into the Park his own daughter was standing in a room of a secluded and aristocratic hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain, where she had arrived that morning. She was dressed in black, with three strings of pearls round her throat ; they were the pearls she had worn on her ill-fated marriage day. She was a woman of singular beauty ; the kind of beauty which resists sorrow and time, and ennobles even the mask of death. With her was one of her cousins, Ernst von Karstein, the only one of her family who had been faithful to her through good and evil report, who had loved her always, before her marriage and after it ; but who had always known that he could look for no response from her. " You are always well, Olga," he was saying now. " What amulet have you ? " " I imagine," she answered, " that my talisman consists in absolute indifference as to whether I be ill or well." " That is a blasphemy," said her companion. " No one can be indifferent to health. Ill-health intensifies every other evil and saps the roots of every enjoyment." " Yet to lie on a sick bed, at peace with man and God, and surrounded by those we love, would that be so sad a fate?" " You speak of what you know nothing about ; you are never ill ! You grow morbid, Olga. You live like a nun. You see no one. The finest mind cannot resist the morbid influences of constant solitude. Whoever your Pope is, you should ask his dispensation from such vows." " The law has been my Pope, and has set me free of all vows. I live thus because I do not care to live otherwise." " I should have thought you too proud a woman to accept excommunication in this submissive way." She smiled a little. '' Proud ? I ? The daugliter of Kristof of Karstein, and the divorced wife of Adrian Yanderlin ? " '* Curse them both ! " said her cousin under his breath. *' You have been in London ? " he said aloud. " A wcelr, yes : my father's affairs, as usual." TEi: massahenes. 17 " You never see him ? " " Never. See the man who ruined my life ! " " But you have no proof of that ? " She smiled again very sadly. " A crime which can be proved is half undone. He was too wary to be traced in all these schemes of infamy." " Yet you befriend him ? " "Befriend ? That is not the word. I spend my mother's money on him for her sake. One saves him at least from public disgrace. But he games away all he gets, and continues to live in the way you know." "I do not think you should waste your substance on him. Keep it for yourself, and return to the world." " On sufferance, as a decJasce? Never ! " "As my wife. I have said so many times. I never change, Olga." She held out her hand to him with a noble and grateful gesture. "You are always faithful. You alone. I thank you. But you must leave me to my fate, dear Ernst. It is not in your power to change it." " It would be in my power if you gave me the man- date." " But it is that which I cannot do ; which I shall never do." "Because you still love the man who repudiated and disgraced you ! " She shrank a little. " One cannot love and unlove at will," she said simply. " It is very generous of you to be ready to give the shield of your unblemished honour to a dishonoured woman. But were I ungenerous, unworthy enough, to accept such a sacrifice I should but make you and make myself more unhappy than we now are. All the feeling which is still alive in me lives only for the memory of the past." Her cousin turned away and paced the room to hide the pain he felt. He had loved her through good and evil report, had remained unmarried for her sake, and was ready now to accept all obloquy, censure, and dis- credit for her sake." " Go, my dear Ernst," she said very gpntly; " go, and 78 THE MASSABENES. forget me. You might as well love a buried corpse as love a woman with such a fate as mine." "My love should have power to magnetise the corpse into fresh life ! " She shook her head. "It would be impossible. Were it possible, what use would be a galvanised corpse ? An unnatural unreal thing which would drop back into the dust of deatli." He did not reply; he endeavoured to control his emotion. " My dear Olga," he said, when he could do so, " allow me to say one thing to you without causing you offence. Unknown to yourself, I think you cherish an illusion which can only cause you unhappiness. You think and speak as if your division from Adrian Vanderlin were but some quarrel, some mistake, which explanation, mediation, or time could clear away. You forget that you are entire strangers to each other ; worse than strangers, because there is an irrevocable chasm between you." She did not reply ; an expression of intense suffering came into her eyes, but she restrained any outward utterance of it. "It hurts me to say these harsh things to you," he continued. "I would so much sooner encourage you in your sentiment. But to what end should I do so? You are a woman of deep and passionate feeling. You do not forget; you do not change; your little boy's grave is to you wl it Bethlehem was to the Early Cliristians ; Vanderlin is to you what Ulysses was to Penelope. You never seem to realise that this past to which you cling is a wholly dead thing, no more to be imbued again with the breath of life than the body of your poor child, or the marble which lies over him. It is intolerable that a woman as young, as lovely, as rich, as admired, and^ as admirable as you are should pass your years in obscurity, fettered to a pack of useless memories like a living person to a corpse. I have told you so often ; I shall never cease to tell you so. What do you expect ? What do you hope ? What do you desire ? " "Nothing." The w^ord was cold, incisive, harsh; he tortured her, but she did not giyQ any sign of pain except THE MASSABENES, 79 by the nervous gesture with which her fingers closed on the strings of pearls at her throat as if they were a collier de force v/hich compressed and suffocated her. "No one lives without desires or ends of some kind however absurd or unattainable they may be," he said with truth. " I think you deceive yourself. I think that, Avithout your being sensible of it, you brood so much over the past because you fancy vaguely that you will evolve some kind of future out of it, as necromancers used to stare into a crystal until they saw the future suggested on its surface. The crystal gave them nothing but what their own imagination supplied. So it is with you. Your imagination makes you see in Yanderlin a man who does not exist and never existed ; and it also makes you fancy possible some kind of reconciliation or friendship which is as totally impossible as if you and he were both in your coffins." She had turned from the window and walked to and fro the room, unwilling that he should see the emotion which his blunt speech awakened in her. There was a certain truth in them which she could not v/holly deny and of which she was ashamed. " Do not let us speak of these things. It is useless," she said with impatience. " You do not understand ; you are a man ; how can you comprehend all that there is ineffaceable, unforgetable, for a woman, in four years of the tenderest and closest union ? Nothing can destroy it for her. For a man it is a mere episode more or less agreeable, more or less tenacious in its hold on him ; but to her " She stopped abruptly : her companion looked at her with admiration and compassion mingled in equal parts, and he smiled slightly. " My dear Olga ! Once in a hundred years a woman is born who takes such a view as you do of love and life. They are dear to poets, and furnish the themes of the most moving dramas. But they are women who invariably end miser- ably, either in a cloister like Heloise, or in a tomb like Juliet, or simply and more prosaically with tubercles on their lungs at Hyeres or the Canaries. You know the world, or you used to know it. You must be aware that there are millions of women who in your place would have 80 TH^ MASSAREl^ES. consoled themselves long ago. I want you to see the unwisdom and the uselessness of such self-sacrifice. I want you to resume your place in the world. I want yoQ to realise that life is like the earth : there is the winter, more or less long, no doubt, but afterwards there is the spring. You know that poem of Sully Prudhomme, in which he imagines that all the plants agree to refrain from bearing flowers a whole year. But that year has never been seen in fact. The poem is wrong artistically and scientifically. " Of the earth, yes ; but in the human soul there are many spots stricken with barrenness for ever." " But not at your age ? " " What has age to do with it ? " He sighed ; he felt the use of argument, the futility of entreaty. " Are you not too proud a woman," he said at length, " to sit in the dust, with ashes on your head, smitten to the ground by an unjust sentence ? " " I have told you. All my pride is dead ; not for a year, like Sully Prudhomme's flowers, but for ever." " And you forgive the man who killed it ? " The blood mantled in her face. "That is a question I cannot allow, even to you, dear Ernst." He was silenced. " And you are going back to the owls and the bitterns of Schloss Lynar f " he asked, as he took his leave of her half-an-hour later. "What a life for you, that Swabian solitude ! " " The bitterns and owls are very good company, and at least they never ofiend me." " Let me be as fortunate ! " he said with a sigh. " I may return to-morrow." " Yes, I do not leave until evening ! " When he had left her she remained lost in the sadness of her own useless thoughts for some moments ; then she put on a long black cloak, a veil which hid her features, and went out into the street, saying nothing to the two servants who travelled with her or to the servants of the hotel. She crossed the Seine by the bridge of Henri Quatre, her elegance of form and her height making some of the TEE MA8SARENE8. 81 passers-by pause and stare, wondering who she could be, alone, on foot, and so closely veiled. One man followed and accosted her, but he did not dare persevere. She went straight on her way to the Eue de Eivoli, for she had known Paris well, and loved it as we love a place which has been the seat of our happiness. It was near the end of a grey and chilly day; the lights were glittering everywhere, and the animation of a great and popular thoroughfare was at its height. The noise of traffic and the haste of crowds made her ears ache with sound, so used as she now was to the absolute silence of her Swabian solitude — a silence only broken by the rush of wind or water. She approached a very large and stately building which looked like a palace blent with a prison; it was the French house of business of the great Paris and Berlin financiers, Yanderlin et Cie. She walked towards it and past it, very slowly, whilst its electric lamps shed their rays upon her. She passed it and turned, and passed it and turned again, and as often as she could do so without attracting attention from the throngs or from the police. There was a mingling of daylight and lamplight ; above head cumuli clouds were driven before a north wind. She v/aited on a mere chance — the chance of seeing one whom she had not seen for eight years pass out of a small private door to his carriage. She knew his hours, his habits; probably, she thought, they had not changed. She was rewarded, if it could be called reward. xVs she passed the facade for the eighth time, and those on guard before the building began to watch her sus- piciously, she saw a tall man come out of that private door- way and cross the pavement to a coui^e waiting by the curb- stone. In a moment he had entered it ; the door had closed on him, the horses had started down the Eue de Eivoli. She had seen the man who had repudiated and dis- honoured her ; the only man she had ever loved ; the fathei of her dead boy. " Does he ever remember ? " she wondered as she turned away, and was lost amongst the crowds in the falling night. G 82 TEE MASSARENES, CHAPTEK VIII. " If you get into a bad set, I tell you frankly I shall never help you out of it. A bad set is a bog — a hopeless bo^ ; you flounder on in it until you sink. Can't you understand ? If you are going to be taken up by this kind of people, don't ask me to do any more for you ; that's all. I don't want to be unkind, but it must be one thing or another. I cannot come here if I am likely to meet persons whom I won't know. Anybody would say the same." She spoke with severity, as to a chidden child, as she lighted a cigarette and put it between her rose-leaf lips. She was in the boudoir of Harrenden House, and Margaret Massarene listened in humble and dejected silence to the rebuke. The bone of contention was represented by two visiting cards, on which were printed respectively Lady Mary Altringham and Lady Linlithgow: the bearers of those names had just been turned away from the gate below by order of the fair censor, and the mistress of Harrenden House, being a primitive person, to whom a want of hospitality appeared a crime, was swallowing her tears under difficulty. " But surely these ladies are high and all that, ma'am ? " she pleaded piteously in her ignorance. " They were born if you mean that," replied Mouse with great impatience. " Lady Mary was a Fitz-Frederick and the Linlithgow was a Knotts-Buller. But they are nowhere. They have put themselves out of court. No one worth thinking of knows them. They can do you no good, and they can do you a great deal of harm." Mrs. Massarene puckered up in her fingers the fine cambric of her handkerchief. " But I know Lady IMary, ma'am ! " THE MASSABENES. 83 " Drop her, then." " What have she done, ma'am ? " " Oh, lots of things ; gone wrong stupidly, turned the county against her; her boy's tutor, and a young artist who went down to paint the ballroom, and all that kind of silly public sort of thing ; people don't speak to her even in the hunting-field. She can't show herself at Court. The girls were presented by their grandmother. She is com- pletely taree — completely ! " The portrait was somewhat heavily loaded with colours, but she knew that her hearer would not be impressed by semi-tones or monochrome, and she really could not have Lady Mary coming and going at Harrenden House. " As for the other woman," she added, " there is nothing actually against her, but she is bad form. They are as poor as Job and riddled with debts ; they have even been glad to let their eldest daughter marry the banker of their own county borough ! " To her humble companion, to whom not so very long before a banker's clerk had seemed a functionary to be addressed as Sir, and viewed with deep respect, this social error did not carry a deep dye of iniquity. But she aban- doned Lady Linlithgow ; for the other culprit she ventured to plead. "Lady Mary was so very kind to my child," she murmured timidly. " When Kathleen was at school, before we came over. Lady Mary's own daughters " " What has that to do with it ? I tell you her daughters go out with their grandmother. You know nothing of all these things. You must do as you are told. You remember your blunder about my aunt Courcy ? " This reminiscence was a whip of nettles which always lay ready to her monitress's hand, and the monitress used it with great effect. But such a blunder still seemed natural to her ; Mrs. Cecil Courcy was a commoner, and these ladies who had just been turned from her gates were titled people. Why was the one at the apex of fashion, and the others " nowhere," as her monitress expressed it. She hinted timidly at this singular discrepancy, so unin- telligible to the socially untutored mind. "How is it possible to make you understand?" said G 2 84 THE MASSARENES, Mouse, lighting a second cigarette before the first was half consumed, after the wasteful manner of female smokers. " Eank by itself is nothing at all ; at least, well, yes, of course, it is something ; but when people have got on the wrong side of the post, they are of no use socially to any- body. It isn't what you do; it is how you do it. You know there is an old adage : * Some mustn't look in at a church door, and others may steal all the church plate.' It is always so in this world. Lady Mary's muffed her life, as the boys say. I daresay there are worse women ; but there isn't one so stupid in all the three kingdoms. Who goes driving all alone with a tutor? Who makes a pet of a little two-sous Belgian fresco painter ? Who gets herself talked about with the attorney of her own town ? Nobody who has a grain of sense. These are things which put a woman out of society at once and for ever. I must beg you to try and understand one most essential fact. There are people extremely well-born who are shady, and there are others come from heaven knows where who are chic. It is due to tact more than anything else. Tact is, after all, the master of the ceremonies of life. It isn't Burke or Debrett Avho can tell you who to know, and who to avoid. There is no Court Circular published which can show you where the ice won't bear you, and where it will ; whom you may only know out of England and whom you may safely know in it. There are no hard-and-fast rules about the thing. If you haven't been born to that kind of knowledge you must grope about till you pick it up. I am very much afraid you will never pick it up. You will never know a princess without her gilt coach and six ; you will never recognise an empress in a waterproof and goloshes; and you will never grasp the fact that supreme, inexorable, and omnipotent Fashion may be a little pale shabby creature like my aunt Courcy, who pinches and screws about a groschen, but who can make or mar people in society just as she pleases." Margaret Massarene winced. She had seen Mrs. Cecil Courcy that very day in the Park driving with the Queen of Denmark, who was on a visit to Marlborough House. All these niceties of shade confused her utterly. " Society's just like Aspinall's Enamels," she thought in her bewilder-^ TEE MAS8ARENES. 85 ment ; and if you wanted a plain yellow, you were confused by a score of gradations varying from palest lemon to deepest orange ; there were no plain yellows any more. " But IVe always been told that if one's pile's big, real big, one can always go anywhere ? " she ventured to say, unconscious of the cynical character of her remark. " You can go to Court here, if that's your ideal. You do go," replied her teacher with a slighting accent of contempt which sounded like high treason to the mind of the Ulster loyalist ; " but it don't follow you can get in elsewhere. It just depends on lots of chances. Some people never get into the world at all, merely because they don't spend their money cleverly at the onset." " Perhaps they spare at the spigot and pour out at the bung-hole, my lady," said Mrs. Massarene in homely metaphor. " There's a many has that fault, I have it myself. It's all I can do still to hold myself from saving the candle- ends." " Good heavens ! Do you really mean it ? " "I do, indeed, ma'am," said the mistress of Harrenden House. **When I see them beautiful wax-lights, just burned an inch or two, and going to be taken away by them wiisteful servants " Her companion laughed, infinitely diverted. " But it's all electric light here ! " "Not in the bedrooms. I wouldn't have the uncanny thing in the bedrooms. You see, my lady," she added timidly in confidential whispers, " William should have led me up to all this grandeur gradual. But he didn't. He always said, * We'll scrape on this side and dash on the other.' So till we come over to be gentlefolks, I had to cook and sweep, and pinch and spare, and toil and moil, and I can't get out of the habit. On the child he always spent ; but on naught else not a cent till we came to Europe." "Ah ! by the way, this daughter," said Mouse, suddenly roused to the perception that there was an unknown factor in the lives of these humble people. " Where is she ? I have never seen her. She is out, I think ? " Over the pallid, puffy, sorrowful face of the poor harassed aspirant to smart society there came a momentary bright- ness. S6 TBE MASSABENE8. " Yes, ma'am ; she's what you call * out ' ; I presented her myself," said Mrs. Massarene with pride. " But where is she now ? " " Kathleen — Katherine — is in India, my lady." " Good gracious ! Why ? " "Well, she's great friends with the Marquis of Fram- lingham's daughters," said Mrs. Massarene, feeling sure this time she was safe. " What ! Sherry and Bitters ? " cried Lady Kenilworth. Sherry and Bitters was the nickname which his caustic but ever courteous wit had earned for Lord Framlingham in that London world which he had left for an Indian pre- sidency. She was vexed with herself for not having thought sooner of asking for this daughter and taking her under her own wing. Mrs. Massarene was bewildered by the exclamation ; but she was sure of her ground this time, and was not alarmed. " Lord and Lady Framlingham, ma'am," she repeated with zest. " It's cruel hard on me to lose her for so long, but as they're such grand folks one couldn't in reason object." " Grand folks ! " repeated her visitor with amusement. " Poor dear souls ! how amused they'd be. They'd have been sold up if they hadn't gone out ; she hated going, said she'd rather live on a crust in England, but he jumped at the appointment ; he'd a whole yelling pack of Jews on him ; it s quieted them of course ; and he's let Saxe-Durham for the term. You'd better tell your husband not to lend him any money, for he never pays, he can't pay ; he's sure to get your daughter to ask." " Lord's sakes, my lady ! " murmured Margaret Massarene. Life became altogether inexplicable to her ; if a gentleman who was a marquis, and governor of a province twice as big as France, they said, were not everything he ought to be, where could excellence and solvency be looked for? vertu, oil vas-tu te nicherl she would have said had she ever heard of the line. " But they are very — very — good people, are they not, ma'am ? " she asked pathetically. " Oh, dear, yes ; slie is much too ugly to be anything else, and he's a very good fellow though he does make himself hated with his sharp tougue. He's like that monarch, you TEE MASSABENES. 87 know, wlio never did a wise thing and never said a siliy one. He's awfully clever, but tie can't keep his head above water. But why on earth did you let your daughter go for so long ? They'll get marrying her to one of their boys ; they've no end of them." She was not pleased that the young woman was staying with Lord Framlingham ; he was a very clever and sarcastic person who might supply his guest with inconvenient and premature knowledge of English society in general and of Cocky and herself in particular. Mrs. Massarene smoothed down her beautiful gown with a nervous worried gesture. " Oh, ma'am, Katherine's very discreet, and by her letters all she seems to be thinking about is the white temples and the black men." " There are no black men in India, and you'd have done much better to keep her at home," said her visitor sharplv. " What is she like ? " She intended this young woman for her brother Eonald, whatever she might be like. Maternal pride made jMrs. IVFassarene's inexpressive and common-place face for once eloquent and not ordinary : its troubled and dreary expression of chronic bewilderment lightened and changed ; her wide mouth smiled, her colour- less eyes grew almost bright. " If you'll honour me, ma'am, by stepping this way," she said with alacrity as she rose. " Horses step — people don't," said Lady Kenilworth, unkindly, as she accompanied the person whose instructress and tormentor she was, into a smaller room in which, set as it were upon an altar, a white marble bust stood on a plinth of jasper with a fence of hothouse flowers around it ; hanging on the wall behind it was a portrait. liady Kenil- worth looked critically at both bust and portrait. She was surprised to find them what they were. "A classic face, and clever," she said to the anxious mother. " Are they at all like ? The bust's Dalou's, isn't it ? And the portrait " " They are both the image of her, ma'am," said Mrs. Massarene, with great triumph in the effect which they produced. " But the marble pleases me best." 88 THE MASSARJSNE8. Lady Kenilworth was still looking at them critically tlirough her double eye-glass. She was thinking that the original of that straight and somewhat severe profile was perhaps as well in India until Prince Khris and she had tired of the Massarene vein. On the other hand, unless the girl came home, she could not be married to Hurst- manceaux. "Your daughter isii tfaeile, is she?" she asked abruptly. " What, ma'am ? " asked the mother, gazing with tears in her eyes, delicious tears, at the bust which would have passed as an Athene or a Clio. " Well, not easy to deal with — not easy to make believe things ; likes her own way, don't she ? " " Well, ma'am," said Mrs. Massarene doubtfully, " sweet- tempered she is, and forgetful of self to a fault, and I wouldn't lay blame to her as obstinate. But if you mean as how she can be firm, well, she can ; and if you mean as how she can have opinions, well, she have." Lady Kenilworth laughed, but she was vexed. " That's what I do mean. Nobody has that straight profile for nothing ; where did she get it ? " " Lord, ma'am, however should I know," said the mother meekly. " She don't take after either of us, that's a fact. The children pick up their own looks in heaven, I think, for often nobody can account for 'em on earth. Look at your own little dears ; what black eyes they all have, and you and my lord so fair. I met them in the Park this morning, my lady. Would you let them come and see me some day?" Lady Kenilworth, to her own extreme amazement and annoyance, felt herself colour as the straightforward gaze of this common woman looked in sincerity and in ignorance at her. " The children shall certainly come to see you if you wish," she said. " But they are naughty little people. They will bother you horribly. And pray, my dear woman, don't say * my lady,' you set all my nerves on edge." Mrs. Massarene humbly excused herself. " It comes natural," she said with a sigh ; " I was dairymaid at the Hall. William can't bear me to say I was, but I don't see as it matters." THE MASSARENES. 89 " William is right," said Lady Kenilworth with a glance at the bust, *'aiid I am sure your daughter will say so too." Mrs. Massarene shook her head. " Kathleen is quite the other way, ma'am. She says we can't be quality, and why should we pretend to ; she angers her father terrible ; to tell you the truth, she angers him so terrible that it was for that reason I gave in about this long visit to India." " She is not of her time then," said Lady Kenil worth. " I am afraid she gets those ideas from Framlingham. He is a downright Kadical." " I don't know where she gets tliem," said Mrs. Massarene drearily. " William always said the only comfort about a girl was that a girl couldn't spite you in politics as a boy might ; but if her ideas aren't politics, and the worst sort of politics, I don't know what is ; and when you've kept a daughter ten years and more at school where nobody else goes as isn't titled, it's a cross as one doesn't look for to have her turned out a Eepublican." Lady Kenilworth laughed with genuine mirth, which showed all her pretty teeth, white and even and pointed like a puppy's. " Is she a Eepublican ? Well, that is a popular creed enough now. I am not sure it wouldn't get you on better than being on our side. The Kadicals do such a lot for their people, and do it seriously without a grimace. We always " — " put our tongue in our cheek while we do it," she was about to add, when a sense of the imprudence of her confession arrested her utterance of it. *' I do wonder, you know, that you belong to us," she hastened to add with that air of candour which so often stood her in good stead ; " you would have found Hawarden easier of access than Hatfield." Margaret Massarene stared. " But William's principles, ma'am," she murmured, " Church and State and Property ; William says them three stand or fall together." " And he will hold them all up on his shoulders like a Caryatide," said Lady Kenilworth, with her most winning smile. Mrs. Massarene smiled too, blankly, because she did not 90 TEE MAS9ARENES. understand, but gratefully, because sbe felt that a compli- ment was intended. " I can't think, though, that it is wise of him to allow this visit. I think it is exceedingly ill-advised to let her be away from you so long," said her visitor, still gazing through her eye-glass at Dalou's bust, and reflecting as she gazed : " The young woman must be odious, but she is good-looking and Konnie shall marry her. You don't know my brother ? " she said, apparently abruptly, but in her own mind following out her thoughts. " Meaning Lord Hurstmansceaux ? No, ma'am, we haven't that honour." " We call it Hur'sceaux, please." " Oh, indeed ! As you say O'borne for Otterbourne, and Kers'ham for Kesterholme. Might I ask why those names are cut about so, ma'am ? " " Usage ! Why do we say Gore for Gower, and Sellenger for St. Leger ? " " Kebecca Gower was postmistress at Kilrathy when I was a girl," said Mrs. Massarene reflectively. " But Lord ! if anybody had clipped her down to Gore their letters would have all gone in the swill-tub ! " " You see, we have not the privilege of acquaintance with the postmistress of Kilrathy ! Well, I must try and bring my brother to see yon. But he is like your daughter ; he is not facile. Like all those reactionary sort of people, he thinks nobody good enough to know. I never can induce him to make a new acquaintance. But perhaps if he sees this Dalou " With a pretty smile she left the un- finished sentence to sink into the mind of Katherine Massarene's mother. That simple and candid personage answered the unspoken thought. " We've had a many asking for Kathleen's hand, ma'am," she said very stupidly. " But neither she or William are easy to please in that way. He looks so high as naught but kings would satisfy him, and she — well, I don't know what she wants, I'm sure, and I don't think she knows herself." " Perhaps she's in love with Framlingham ! " cried her companion with a disagreeable little laugh ; for she was provoked at her unplayed cards being discerned by a person of such limited intelligence. TEE MASSABENES. 91 " A married man, ma'am ! " cried Mrs. Massarene, with a countenance so pallid from horror that Lady Kenilworth laughed as heartily as if she were hearing Yvette Guilbert sing. " Oh, my good woman, how much you have got to learn ! " she cried gaily. Mrs. Massarene patted her gown a little irritably, but she dared not resent; though it seemed to her that, after all her William had done for this lovely young lady, it was hard to be called by her a good woman. "I'll never learn to break the Holy Commandments, ma'am," she said in a tone of offence. " Oh, you dear droll creature ! " cried her visitor, more and more amused. "But let us go over your lists," she said sharply, realising that she was wasting valuable time on this goose. " They will want no end of weeding. I will not meet any- body who is not in my own set. You'll get the right people if you don't mix them with the wrong." With her Uttle gold pencil as a stiletto she set to work mercilessly on her work of expurgation and execution. Mrs. Massarene looked on helpless but agitated ; a sense of wrath was stirring in her mild bosom, but she dared not show it. "To be called a good woman!" she thought. "Just as I'd speak to the match-seller at the corner of a street ! " The lists thus weeded with such pitiless surgery pro- duced very brilliant gatherings at Harrenden House, and the falconer of Clodion saw nearly all that was fairest and noblest pass up the grand staircase which he guarded. Margaret Massarene, standing till she was ready to drop at the entrance of her reception-rooms, felt her head swim under her tiara as she heard the great names announced by Winters. The Massarene pile had been touched by the magic wand which could transform it into fashion. To go to Harrenden House became the amusement of the great and the ambition of all lesser folks. Not to go to Harrenden House became soon a confession that you were nobody yourself. " Tenez la dragee haute ! " said their guide, philosopher, and friend ; 92 THE MA8SABENES. and she made them very exclusive indeed, and would let no one snub them or laugh at them except herself. " On my soul, she do give worth for her money ! " thought William Massarene ; and he was pleased to feel that he had not been fooled even when he had bought a barren Scotch estate and compromised his credit in the City by putting a consumptive little sot on the Board of a bank. " Why don't you bespeak the Massarene young woman for me, Mouse ? " said Brancepeth in the boudoir of Stanhope Street, when he heard of the bust of Dalou and the portrait of Orchardson. " How exactly like a man ! " said his friend, blue fire flashing from her eyes. " A little while ago you were mad about the Countess Lynar ! " " It's uncommon like a man to get a pot of money when he can ! " said Brancepeth with amusement. *•' If you did your duty by me, you'd bespeak me those loaves and fishes ; you do what you like with the bloomin' cad." " I would sooner see you dead than married ! " "I be bound you would," muttered the young man. " Lord, that's the sort of thing women call love ! " " Men's love is so disinterested, we know ! " said Mouse with withering contempt. " You want the young woman for Bonnie," continued Brancepeth. *' That's your little game. But he won't take your tip." '* Why not?" " 'Cos he's the cussedest crank in all Judee ! Let Konnie please himself and get me the Massarene doHars. I'll give you half I get ; and I sha'n't know whether she's a snub liose or a straight one." Mouse coloured with anger. There are things when however necessary it may be to do them, cannot be spoken of without offence. *' How odiously coarse you grow," she observed with severity. " Oh, bother ! you call a spada a spade fast enough some- times. How you do make me think of my old granny Luce ! " " In what do I resemble your old granny Luce ? " Brancepeth was mute. To repeat what his maternal TEE MA88ABENES. 93 grandmother had said would not pour oil on troubled waters. What the very free-spoken and sharp-tongued old Lady Luce had said was this, when Brancepeth was still in the sixth form at Eton : " You're such a pretty boy, Harry, the women-folks will be after you like wasps after treacle ; take my advice, what- ever you do steer clear of the married ones. A married woman always has such a lot of trumps up her sleeve. She sticks like a burr : you can pay off a wench, but you can't pay off her ; and if her fancy-man tries to get away she calls in her husband and there's the devil and all to pay. Don't you forget that, Harry." But he had forgotten it. ** I think I'll go up and see the little beggars," he said, to make a diversion ; and he slipped away before she could stop him and went up, four stairs at a time, to the nurseries. There he was extremely popular and much beloved, especi- ally by Jack ; and there he was perfectly happy, being a young man of simple tastes, limited intelligence, and affec- tionate disposition. He was in the midst of an uproarious game of romps tliere one day, when Cocky looked in from the doorway with an odd little smile. " What a good paterfamilias you'll be, Harry, when your time comes ! " he said, with a look which made poor Harry colour to the roots of his hair. The head-nurse intervened by calling to order noisy, laughing little Jack. " Don't you see your dear papa at the door, Lord Kester- holme ? " said that discreet woman. This day there was no Cocky in the doorway ; but the blindman's buff was early in its merry course interrupted by a message from Lady Kenilworth requesting his presence downstairs. " Oh, Lord, what a pity ! " said Brancepeth, as he pulled the handkerchief off his eyes, swung Jack up above his head, and then kissed him a dozen times. "I wasn't doing any harm," he said sulkily, as he re- entered the presence of Jack's mother. " Yes, you were," she said coldly. " I cannot allow you to be upstairs with the children so long and so constantly. 94 THE MA8SABENES, Their women must think it very odd ; they will talk. No other of my husband's friends enters the nurseries. You must have something to do at the barracks, or the clubs, or the stables, or somewhere. Go and do it." Brancepeth hung his head. He understood what his punishment would be if he dreamed of marrying the Massarene heiress or any other person whatsoever. Not to see the children any more except as any other of " Cockj^'s friends " saw them ! He was tender-hearted and weak in will ; she cowed him and ruled him with a rod of iron. " Lord, how right my grandmother Luce was ! " thought the poor fellow as he went down Stanhope Street meekly, feeling in remembrance the touch of Jack's soft, fresh, rosy lips. ( 95 ) CHAPTER IX. Some time before Easter cards had been issued for a Costume Ball at Otterbourne House, temy. Charles II., to be given immediately after Easter. The Duke occasionally lent the mansion to his daughter-in-law for sucfi entertain- ments, never very willingly, for he had always to defray himself the cost of them, and he greatly disliked many members of her set. But he recognised a certain right in his eldest son's wife to have the house sometimes, though he did not concede that it went so far as for her to inhabit it. Those little dark-eyed children running about Otter- bourne House, and Harry Brancepeth going in and out of it continually — " Not whilst I live,' said the Duke to himself. After him, Cocky must do as he chose. Cocky would probably let it, or sell it at once for a monster hotel. ' She arranged her ball greatly to her satisfaction in every detail before she went down for the Easter recess. But there was one thing which had been difficult. That was, to persuade the Duke, who always insisted on revising her list for parties given at his houses, whether in town or country, to allow that of Massarene to remain on it. He inquired who the Massarenes were ; and did not inquire only of herself, but of others. He was most decidedly opposed to the presence of such people at Otterbourne House. But Blair Airon was not yet definitely purchased, and it had been given to her to understand that unless the gates of Otter- bourne House unclosed, that purchase never might be ratified. All her ingenuity, all her cajolery, all her infinite skill in the manipulation of the minds and wills of men failed absolutely for a long time with the old Duke. He would not have a man come from God knew where — well, from the State of Dakota, that was equally indefinite — 96 TEE MASSARENES, brought within his doors ; and everything she could think of to say only rooted him more firmly in his prejudices. " Odious, insolent, ill-natured, pigheaded, spiteful, out-of- date old wretch ! " exclaimed Mouse, as she read a note from him, and cast it across the room to her husband. " The Pater ? Oh, I say, choose your language," said Cocky. In his shrivelled heart, dry and sere as a last year's leaf, if there was one remnant of regard and respect left, it was for his father. Besides, like most men, he always disagreed with anything his wife said. He read the note in a glance. " Won't swallow man from Dakota," he said, under a smile. " Well, I wouldn't have swallowed him if he hadn't greased my throat so well." " Hush ! " " Who's to hear ? Dogs don't blab, bless 'em ! " *•' I dislike to hear such things said, even in jest." Cocky chuckled. " What do you bother the Pater about him for ? I've sv/allowed him ; society's swallowed him ; all the royal folks have swallowed him. Why can't you leave the JPater in peace ? " " Why ? why ? Because it is absolutely necessary that the Massarenes should be seen at Otterbourne House — seen at my ball ! The refusal is an insult to me ! Your father is a hundred years out of date. The country is practically a republic ; we shall all have our lands taken from us before long and parcelled out to Jack and Jill. It is ridiculous to be stiff-necked about knowing people. All stiffness of that sort went out when the Hanoverian line came in. What's half the peerage? Titled tradesmen. They have got Eichemont. Could your father afford Kichemont ? There's only one aristocracy now left ; it's IMoney. When I have been getting them everywhere, and everybody so kind about it, what shall I look to people when I don't have them at my own ball? Your father has no consideration for me; he never has. Put it as a personal favour to myself, and you see what he answers — within a week of the ball ! " Cocky listened quietly, because it was diverting to see his wife so displeased and to hear her so incoherent. He liked her to be "in a wax"; he hated to think things THE MASSABENES. 97 went as smoothly as they usually did go with her ; but he saw the gravity of the dilemma. If Otterbourne would not have the Massarenes, then he and she would be like the farm-girl of fable — ^^ Adieu, veau vache, cochons, canvee!" There might even ensue inquiries from high places, and rebuffs which even the talent of Eichemont would not avert. Cocky, to whom the talent of Eichemont was agreeable (he lunched and dined whenever he chose at Harrenden House), and more agreeable the master of Eichemont (who accepted his signature as if it were Eothschild's), saw that this was one of those exceptional occasions on which he would do better for himself to side with the mother of the four little poppets upstairs. "I'll see Pater about the thing if you're so set on it," he said, with unusual amiability. " Can you do anything ? " she said doubtfully and sullenly. " Well, I don't know. I'll tell him Billy's reforming me — making an honest man of me in Fleet Street, and that he'll damage me if he shuts his doors on the beggars. Perhaps he'll believe it, perhaps he won't ; I'll try." • *' I've sent them their cards ; tell him so." " That wouldn't move him a jot ; but when I do the eldest son rather well, and make believe to see the errors of my ways, I can get a thing or two out of the Poodle sometimes. After all " After all, thought Cocky, there had been days, though it seemed odd enough to think so now, when he had been a clean and pretty little child jumping up on to his father's knee. The Duke thought of those far-away days oftener than he did, and Cocky was never ashamed to ex]ploiter the remembrance to base ends. " Go at once, then," said his wife ungraciously. Cocky nodded. But when he had reached the door he looked back between the curtains, a rather diabolic grin upon his thin fair features. " I won't tell Pater you sold Blair Airon instead of selling Black Hazel. Ain't I magnanimous ? " He disappeared, whilst the Blenheims barked shrilly at his memory. Cocky turned into his own den and strength- ened his courage with an *• eye-opener " of the strongest species; then he took his way to his father's mausiun u 98 THE MASSABESES. looking on St. James's Park — a beautiful and majestic house built by Christopher Wren, and coveted ardently by an hotel company. As he spun along the streets in a hansom, for Cocky never went a yard on foot if he could help it, he changed his intended tactics ; the reformation dodge would not do ; the Duke, who could on occasion be disagreeably keen- sighted, would inevitably discover beneath it accepted bills and unworthy obligations. " I'll touch him up in his loyalty," he thought. " The Poodle's a Cavalier in his creeds." He found the Duke at home with a slight touch of gout in his left foot. " I suppose he comes for money," thought Otterbourne, for Cocky did not cross his threshold once in three months. But Cocky made it soon apparent that his motive was more disinterested. " You wrote a very sharp note to my wife just now," he said. " It has worried her." The Duke looked at him with sarcastic incredulity. " Are you going to pose as your wife's champion ? It is late in the day." " No, I ain't," said Cocky. " Do you mind my lighting up, Pater?" Otterbourne indicated with a gesture that when everything was painful to him an unpleasant trifle did not matter. Cocky lit his cigar. "You won't let her invite these new people, the Massarenes ? " " Most decidedly not. Is it necessary to inquire ? " " Well, you see, you put her in a hole." " Your language is not mine ; but I conclude you mean that I inconvenience her. I regret it if it be so, but I cannot say otherwise." " Why did you object to the people ? " " I might more pertinently inquire why did you know them ? " " Everybody does." " Everybody does — through you, or rather through your wife. At least, so I have heard." " Oh, we run *em, yes." Otterbourne's silence was eloquent TilE MASSAitENE^. 99 " You see it's just that," Cocky pursued with engaging frankness. " When the town's taken 'em on our word it will be such a slap in the face to her if you won't let 'em into your house. We must take Willis's Kooms or some place instead of giving the ball here, but that will make people talk." " And cost you money," said the Duke wdth significance. "And there's another thing, you know. Ees gone to 'em through us. Mouse persuaded him. He'll be rough on us if he hears you set up your back ; there might be an awful rumpus ; it might be unpleasant for him — the papers would magnify the thing.'* " You seem to make a mountain out of a molehill," said the Duke with suspicion and impatience. " Go to Willis's Kooms. You can ask any number of shoeblacks there that you please." " You don't see the thing as it is. You'll get her into trouble with the Prince, and give the Press a lot of brick- bats to shy at him : I know you'd regret that. I shouldn't have come to bother you if I didn't think the thing of some importance. After all you can't reasonably exclude a man received at Court." " My bootmaker goes to Court, and my stationer. Very worthy persons, but they don't dine with me." " But Massarene won't dine with you : we only want him to come to the ball ; and it's her ball and it's not yours." " The house is mine as yet," said the Duke stiffly. ^ " And will be yours twenty years after I'm tucked up ; I'm dead broke — legs and lungs." " You have ruined yourself. This was so obvious that Cocky did not notice it. " Come, Pater, do give in ; don't get us in a row with the Prince ; when he's accepted these people to please us it would enrage him awfully if he learned you wouldn't let 'em in. He'd asked you about it, of course, or have you asked by somebody." " And if he asks why I do let them in ? " " He won't do that ; he goes there." The Duke was silent. He sighed. He could not mend the manners or the men of a time which was out of tune with him. H 2 100 WEE MASSABENES. But Cocky's argument had weight. He was of all things kind and chivalrous, and would have no more caused a scandal or a scene than he would have set fire to St. James's Palace, next door to him. He reflected on the matter ; saw clearly how ugly it was, look at it how you would, and at last conceded permission to let the new people come on the condition, however, that they should not be introduced to himself. "I am too old," he said, " to digest American cheese." His daughter-in-law, who did not care in the least for this stipulation, went gaily to luncheon at Harrenden House, and interested herself graciously about their cos- tumes, which were a source of great anxiety to both of them. " May I wear my dimonds ? " asked Mrs. Massarene ; her diamonds were a great resource and support to her in society. " Oh, the more diamonds the better ? " said Mouse. " Of course you'll go as somebody's grandmother, a Hyde perhaps ? You need only telegraph to your people in Paris the epoch ; they'll know exactly what to send you ; they know your age and appearance." Margaret Massarene was not pleased, and felt that persons of high rank could be most unpleasantly rude. " What time is it ? " asked her lord, who had not rightly understood. " Charles the Second's. Do you know who Charles the Second was ? " asked Mouse with a malicious little laugh. "Him as had his head took off? " asked Mr. Massarene. Her laugh became a melodious scream of delight. " Oh, you are too delightful ! There were no standards in your young days, were there, Billy ? " He reddened angrily under his thick dull skin ; he was ashamed of his blunder, and he hated to be called Billy, even by those lovely lips. Finally it was decided that he should go as Titus Oates, and should get his dress from Paris, and should learn to say, " Lard." ''Eemember, the man is not to speak to me, not to approach me," said Otterbourne to his daughter-in-law on the day of the ball, when she had come to give a glance at the completed decorations. ! *' Oh, he quite understands that," she replied. " I have THE MA88ABENE3. 101 told him you dislike strange men, as some people are afraid of strange dogs." She laughed gaily as she spoke. " You might have told him," said the Duke drily, " that there are old-fashioned persons who think that their acquaintance should be kept as clean as their hands." " That he wouldn't understand," replied Mouse. " What makes you protect such people ? " " Oh, I don't know ! In other ages everybody had a pet jester; now everybody has a pet parvenu. One runs bim; it's great fun." The Duke was silent. " You know," she continued, " he bought Vale Eoyal of Gerald. Surely all the family ou^ht to be rather nice to him?" " You surprise me," replied the Duke. " I sold Seeton Pastures to a grazier last year; but the obligation to be * nice ' to the purchaser was not in the contract. The sale of Vale Koyal was a great disgrace to Eoxhall, for his affairs were by no means in such a state as to necessitate or excuse it. But whether his loss or his gain, the sale is certainly his affair ; and no one else's." " Oh, you look at things so — so — stiffly," said his daughter- in-law. " We don't, you know." *'I am aware that you do not," said Otterbourne with significance ; and dropped the subject. When Clare Courcy, lovely as a dream, had been first married to his son, the Duke, fascinated out of his better judgment, had admired and been inclined to love his daughter-in-law. Even now he could not be wholly insensible always to the witchery of the prettiest woman in England. He knew her worthlessness ; he was aware that his son, bad as he had been before, had become ten times worse in every way since his marriage; he could never see the little black-eyed, fair-haired cherubs of the Kenilworth nurseries without a sigh and a curse in his own thoughts ; but she at certain moments fascinated him still. " I may send the bills in to Masters, I suppose ? " she asked. Colonel Masters was the Duke's agent, a silent, con- scientious ex-soldier entirely insensible to her own attrac- tions. 102 TEE MASSARENES. " Certainly. He has my authority to discharge them ail. You seem to me to have been more extravagant than usual in your orders." He looked around him as he spoke ; they were standing in a long gallery at the head of the grand staircase. Flowers — flowers — flowers, met the eye in every direction, and the various devices which held the electric lights were concealed on the walls by millions of roses and orchids. "I suppose it is an old-fashioned idea," said Otterbourne ; " but I think a gentleman's house should be thought good enough for his friends, even for his future sovereigns, without all this dressing-up and disguising. Modern fashions are extremely snobbish." " They certainly are ; there I quite agree with you," said his daughter-in-law, and meant what she said. " A fine house like this wants no dressing-up. But we must do as other people do, or look odd." " Or you think you must," said the Duke, viewing with small pleasure a suit of Damascene armour which an ancestor had worn before Acre and Antioch, wreathed and smothered with long trails made of the united blossoms of cattleya and tigredia, whilst within its open visor two golden orioles sat upon a nest. " Do you think that in good taste ? " he said, pointing to it. " No ; execrable. Nothing done in our time is ever other- wise," said Mouse with unusual sincerity. '* We are never merry, and we are never sorry ; so we heap up flowers to make believe for us at our dances and our burials. You are quite right. Pater, in the abstract. But, you see, we can't live in the abstract. We must do as others do." " I should have thought the only true privilege of birth was to set us free of that obligation," said Otterbourne, to whom his noble old palace looked on these occasions very much like the sweep who was muffled up in evergreens as Jack-in-the-Green on May-day in the little old-world country town which clustered under the hills of his big place, Staghurst Castle. " Of course he is right enough," she thought, as she drove away. " The house would be ten thousand times better left to itself, and we are all as vulgar as it is possible to be. TEE MASSARENES. 103 We have lost the secret of elegance — we have only got display. Why couldn't he give me a blank cheque, instead of making me send in the bills to Masters ? He is such a screw ! He wants to save all he can for his precious 'Beric." Alberic Orme was the Duke's second son ; he was in Orders, was a scholar of high degree, held one of his father's livings, had married the daughter of a rural dean, and was the especial object of the ridicule, derision, and suspicion of Cocky and his wife. Judging Lord Alberic by themselves, they attributed to him and his hostile influence every one of the Duke's acts which was disagreeable to them. He was the one of his family nearest to the heart and to the ear of the Duke ; the other two being officers, both somewhat spendthrift and troublesome, and his daughters Imving married early and being little with him. To be dressed up like a tomfool, and prate like a poll parrot, as he phrased it in his own thoughts, was unutterably odious to William Massarene, but he was powerless under his enslaver's orders. When the Easter recess was passed and the great night came, he appeared as Titus Gates, looking and feeling very ridiculous with his stout bowed legs in black silk stockings and ruffled breeches ; but, after all, it was not worse than Court dress, and it had procured him admittance to Otterbourne House. " Mind, the man is not to speak to me ; not here, nor anywhere, ever at any time," said the Duke to his daughter- in-law, nervously and apprehensively. "No, he never shall," she promised ; but she knew that nobody who would see him there would be aware of the stipulation. She had got him to Otterbourne House and had fulfilled one of the clauses of the unwritten contract by which Blair Airon was sold. The ball was a great pageant and a great success ; and she, as the most exquisite of Nell Gwynnes, with all her lovely natural hair curling over her shoulders, was very kind to Titus Oates, guided his squat stiff unaccustomed limbs through the mazes of one quadrille, and even snatched a few moments to present him to some great people ; and as her father-in-law made but a brief appearance in the 104 THE MASSARENE8. rooms and only spoke with the royal personages present and two or three of his intimate friends, she found little difficulty in avoiding the introduction to him of the " man from Dakota." "Another time, another time," she said vaguely, and William Massarene was dazzled and quieted. Cocky was present for half-an-hour, looking a shaky, consumptive, but not inelegant Grammont, for his figure was slender and his features were good. He was infinitely diverted by the sight of William Massarene. " Passes muster, don't he, when he don't open his mouth ? " he said to Hurstmanceaux. '' Lord, what an ugly mug he's got! But the women are always asking for his photo. Ha-ha ! we've got it in Stanhope Street large as life. Pater won't let him be taken up to him, and you won't know him either. You're both wrong. He's thoroughly respectable, and he's got a lot of my paper." And Cocky, leaving his brother-in-law furious, sneaked off to find the buffets. It was a very splendid and gorgeous scene in the great house which Wren had designed, and many a famous painter had decorated. Margaret Massarene gazed at it as she sat in solitary state, blazing with diamonds and admirably attired in black velvet and white satin, with that due regard to her age which it had so wounded her to hear suggested. No one noticed her, no one remembered her ; but some very stately dowagers near her glanced at her now and then with an expression which made her wish that she were back again in Dakota by her oil-stove and her linen-wringer. " 'Tis a mighty pretty sight," she thought as she sat and looked on; "and William's dancing is a thing I never did think to see in all my days. But these women look as if they'd like to duck me in a pond." Carrie Wisbeach, who was genuinely good-natured, observed her neglected and isolated aspect, and called to her side a fresh-coloured pleasant-looking person, old, but hale and bright-eyed, who had taken with success the name of Samuel Pepys. " Daddy, let me take you up to the Massarene woman," she whispered. " She's so dreadfully disconsolate, and they give extraordinarily good dinners." THE MAS8ABENE8. 105 He looked and made a little wry face. " They've got Von Holstein's cook," slie added per- suasively. "Keally? Eichemont ? " " Yes, Eichemont ; and tlie best cellar now in London. Come, make yourself pleasant ! " " Eonnie won't know 'em," said the gentleman, glancing down the rooms to where Hurstmanceaux stood, looking very handsome but extremely bored, wearing the dress which a Courcy had worn when ambassador for Charles to the French Court. " Eonnie ! " said Lady Wisbeach. " If Eonnie's fads were attended to we should know nobody except our own families. Come along ! " He reluctantly submitted, deriving courage as he went from the memories of Von Holstein's chef. The dowagers looked unutterable reproach at Carrie Wisbeach as she murmured the inarticulate formula which presented Mr. Gwyllian of Lostwithiel to Mrs. Massarene. " Pretty sight, isn't it ? " he said, as he sank back on cushions beside her. " A beautiful sight," said Margaret, with unction, " and one as I never thought to see, sir." He stared and laughed. " Unsophisticated soul ! " he thought. ** Why has cruel fate brought you amongst us? Tell me," he murmured, " is it true that you have Von Holstein's cook ? " If she had, he would wait and take her to the supper- tables ; if she had not, he would at once leave her to her fate. " Meaning the German Ambassador's, sir ? " she replied. " Yes, we have." " Ah ! " He decided to take her to supper. " But I can't say as we like him." "What?" It was like hearing anybody say they did not like Dante, or Jean de Eeszke, or truffles, or comet- claret. " No, sir, we don't," she answered ; " he doesn't cook himself at all." " Of course he doesn't ! You might as well say that a pianist should make the piano he plays on, and shoot an 106 THE MASSABENES. elephant to get ivory for his keys ! Kichemont — it is Bichemont whom you have ? — is a surpassing artist." " 'Tis easy to be an artist, sir, if you set a lot of people working and send up their work in your name," said Margaret Massarene. " He don't do naught all day— the under-cooks gay so — and he gets more'n a thousand guineas a year ; and he called Mr. Massarene an imbecile because he wouldn't cat snails ! Now I put it to you, sir, what's the use of being able to pay for the fat of the land if you're to put up with hodmedods out of the hedges ? " Gwyllian laughed so delightedly that the two terrible dowagers turned to glance at him with a Medusan frown. " After all," he thought, " one does get a great deal more fun out of this kind of people than one ever gets out of one's own." And he took her in to supper, and made him- self exceedingly pleasant. He was one of those wise persons who if they cannot be pleasant with others are nothing at all. Under the gentle exhilaration produced by a little spark- ling wine, Mrs. Massarene amused him infinitely, and he cleverly extracted from her more about life in Dakota than th© rest of London had learned in a year ; he was even made acquainted with the oil-stove and the linen-wringer. " What a nice kind man 1 How interested he do seem ! '* she thought, poor creature, unconscious that the oil-stove and the linen-wringer would make the diversion of a dozen dinner-tables, manipulated with that skill at mimicry which was one of Daddy Gwyllian's social attractions. Her husband saw her from a distance, and divined that she w^as being " drawn " ; but he was powerless. He was in waiting on an aunt of Lady Kenilworth, a very high and mighty person with aquiline features and an immense appetite. His wife's garrulous stupidity and her clumsy ingenuousness made him hate her with a hate which deepened every day. Why had he hung such a millstone round his neck when he had been a farm-lad in County Down? Her good and kindly qualities, her natural sincerity, simplicity, and good nature were all homely instincts, no more wanted in her new life than a pail of fresh milk was wanted at one of the grand dinners at Harrenden House, TEE MAS8ABENES. 107 Once she had gone back to Kilrathy, the place of her birth, and revisited the pastures, the woods, the streams, which she had known in girlhood. The big house in the midst of the grass lands was shut up ; bad times had told there as in so many other places in the land ; the family she had served was abroad, impoverished, alienated, and all but forgotten. But nothing else was changed. The same great trees spread their vast shadows above the grass ; the same footpaths ran through the meadows ; the same kind of herds fed lazily, hock deep in clover, the rain shining on their sleek sides, their breath odorous on the misty air ; the same kind of birds sang above her head. Every step of the way was familiar to her : here was the stile where she had listened first to William's wooing ; there the footbridge which she had crossed every market day; here the black hazel coppice where she had once lost a silver sixpence ; there the old oak stump where the red cow had been suddenly taken with labour pains ; the rich long grass, the soft grey rain, the noisy frogs in the marsh, the brimming river with the trout up-leaping amongst the sword rush and the dock leaves — all these and a thousand other familiar things were just as they had been five-and- thirty years before ; but none of the people guessed that the lonely lady so richly dressed, walking silently through the water meadows, had once been Margaret Hogan. She did not dare make herself known to any of them ; she stole into the churchyard and sat by her parents' graves in the dusk, and gathered a few daisies off the nameless mounds, and stole away again feeling ashamed as of some overt act. She saw a barelegged girl going home with the cattle, a switch in her hand and a gleam of sunset light coming through the rain-clouds and touching her red hair and her red kirtle ; and in an odd breathless, sense- less kind of ingratitude to fate, she wished that her Kathleen — Katherine — were that cow-girl, threading that fragrant twilit path with the gentle kine lowing about her, and a little calf nibbling at a bunch of clover in her hand. " 'Twas a good life when all was said," she murmured, a good life, washed by the dews, freshened with the winds, sweetened by the flowers. She left s^ banknote at the poor- 108 THE MASBABENES, -^ box of tlie little church, and returned to her grandeur and greatness, bearing in memory for many a day that pleasant sound of the cattle chewing the wet grasses in the dusk, smelling in memory for many a day the honey scent of the cowslips in the wide pastures by the river. Those memories were shut up in her heart in secret ; she would not have dared to speak of them to her husband, or her daughter, but they were there, as the withered daisies were in the secret drawer of her dressing-case ; and they kept a little corner of feeling alive in her poor puffed-out, stiffened, overstretched soul, so over-weighted with its cares and honours. It seemed wonderful to her that she should be a grand rich lady going to Court and wearing diamonds. Through all these years through which the millions had been ac- cumulating she had not been allowed to know of their accumulation, or permitted to cease from privations and incessant labour. More than a quarter of a century had been to her a period of toil quite as severe in one way as the life as a dairy girl had been here in another way. Often and often in the bitter winters and scorching summers of the North- West she had thought as of a lost paradise of these peaceful pastures, where no greater anxiety had bur- dened her than to keep her cows in health and have her milking praised. It was a fine thing to be a fine lady ; yes, no doubt she was very proud of her new station in the world. But still, these white satin corsets of Paris which laced her in so tightly were less easy than the cotton jacket and the frieze cloak ; her hands laden with rings or imprisoned in gloves could not do the nimble work which they had been used to do ; and the unconcealed contempt of the " smart society " in which she lived had not the warmth and comfort which had been in the jokes and the tears of the farm-girls when a cow upset the milk she had given or the boys came home fresh from a fair. It was all much grander of course in this life, but ease was wanting. " My dear Eonnie ! Those new folk your sister's running are too delicious for anything." said Daddy Gwyllian to Hurstmanceaux in the smoking-room. " I took the woman into supper, and on my soul I never laughed more at the THE MA88ABJSNES. 109 Coquelins ! I'm going to dine there on Sunday ; they've got Kichemont." " More shame for you, Daddy ! " said Hurstmanceaux. " I never thought you'd worship the golden calf." " Well, rich people are pleasant to know," said Daddy Gwyllian. "They're comfortable; like these easy-chairs. Borrow of 'em? No, 'tisn't that. I never borrowed, or wanted to borrow, half-a-crown in my life. But they're indirectly so useful. And they're pleasant. You can turn lots of things on to them. You can get lots of fun out of them. You can do such a deal for your friends with them. Kich people are like well-filled luncheon-baskets ; they make the journey with 'em mighty pleasant. The wine's dry and the game-pie's good, and the peaches are hot- house, and it's all as it should be and no bother." " I travel on cold tea," said Hurstmanceaux with dry significance. " Oh, lord, my dear Eonnie, I know you do ! " said Gwyllian. " But I can't stomach cold tea, and a good many other people can't either. Now your poor folks are cold tea and my rich folks are dry sherry. Economy's a damned ugly thing, you know, at its best. When I go down to shoot with poor folks I know they put me in a cold room and expect my servant to clean my gun. The wealth of my neighbour means my own comfort. The want of means of my friend means my own want of hien- etre when I go to see him. Naturally I don't go. Equally naturally I do go where I am sure to get all I want. I don't want any bills backed, but I do want a warm house, a dry wine, and a good cook. The very good cooks only go nowadays to the very rich people ; that is, to the roture, I dined at a royal palace last month execrably; I was ill afterwards for twenty-four hours. I know one of the chamberlains very well ; I got to the bottom of this horrible mystery ; the king pays so much a head for his dinners, wine included ! I fled from that capital. The royal dynasty is very ancient, very chivalrous, very heroic, but I prefer the Massarenes." " I dare say you are right," said Hurstmanceaux bitterly. ^* The adoration of new wealth is not so much snobbism as selfishness." no TEE MASSARENES, " It is not snobbism at all in us," said Gwyllian ; " the snobbism is on their side. They kiss our boots when we kick 'em. Why should'nt we kick 'em if they like it ? " " I don't blame your kicking them for a moment. I blame your legs being under their dinner-tables while you do it." " That's a matter of opinion," said Daddy. " * Je p-ends mon lien oil je le irouve,' and if there's a good cook in a house I go there." " There are good cooks at the clubs." " Passable. But when I dine at a club I have to pay for my dinner," said Gwyllian with a chuckle. " I don't borrow money, but I like to save it. I should not pay a guinea for a peach, but a couple of guinea peaches taste uncommon good when somebody else provides 'em." " What a beast you make yourself out, Daddy ! " " I'm a man of my time, dear boy," said Gwyllian, as he opened a silver cigarette-case which a pretty woman had won at a bazaar raffle and given to him. Daddy was popular with both the sexes. Everybody liked him, though nobody could tell why they did so. He was one of those men who do nothing all their lives except run to and fro society like dogs in a fair. He was of ancient descent, and had enough to live on, as a bachelor, without, as he had averred, ever wanting to borrow half-a- crown of anybody. He had a little nest of three rooms in Albemarle Street, full of pretty things which had all been given him, chiefly by ladies, and he was seen in London, in Paris, in Homburg, in Cowes, in Cannes, in Monaco, in Biarritz, at the height of their respective seasons, with unvarying regularity : farther afield he did not go often ; he liked to have his familiar world about him. He was now an old man, and to the younger generation seemed patriarchal ; he had been called Daddy for more years than anybody could remember. But he was healthy and strong, for he had always taken care of himself; he could shoot with the best of them still, and could sit up all night and look fresh and rosy after his shower-bath in the morning. "You young uns have no stamina," he said once to Brancepeth when he found that young man measuring the "'^'~ ■ TBB MASSABENES. Ill drops of his digitalis. " It is the way you were brought up. In my time we were fed on bread and milk, and rice- pudding, and wore low frocks till we were eight or nine, and never even saw what the grown-up folks ate. You were all of you muffled up to your chins in the nurseries, and got at by the doctors, and plied with wine and raw meat, and told that you had livers and lungs and diges- tions before you could toddle, and given claret and what not at luncheon, and made old men of you before you were boys. Dilatation of the heart, have you got ? Hypertrophy, eh ? Lord bless my soul, you shouldn't know you've got a heart, except as a figure of speech, when you swear it away to a woman." Everybody listened to Daddy even in an age which never listens : he was so obviously always right ; he had so evi- dently found out the secret of an evergreen vitality ; he was so sagaciously and unaffectedly devoted to himself ; his selfishness was just tempered by that amount of good nature, when it cost him nothing, which makes a person popular ; he was naturally good-natured, and serviahle and kindly when to be so caused him no difficulty ; he would even take a little trouble for people when he liked them, and he liked a great many. On the whole, he was a happy and very sensible creature, and if his existence was one long egotism and inutility — if he were really of no more value than a snail on a cabbage-leaf — if the alpha and omega of existence were comprised for him in his own comfort, he was at least pleasant to look at and to listen to, which cannot always be said of persons of great utility. Daddy, moreover, though a very prudent creature, did patch up some quarrels, prevent some scandals, remove some misunderstandings amongst his numerous acquaint- ances, but it was because he liked smooth waters around his own little barque ; life ought to be comfortable, he thought ; it was short, it was bothered, it was subject to unforeseen accident, and it was made precarious by draughts, fogs, model stoves, runaway horses, and orange peel on the pavement ; but as far as it could be kept so, it ought to be comfortable. All his philosophy centred in that ; and it was a philosophy which carried him along without friction* 112 TEE MASSABENES. If Daddy Gwyllian never borrowed, he also never lent half-a-crown ; but he got other people to lend it to other people, and this is the next most attractive social qualifi- cation which endears us to our friends. To real necessity he was occasionally very serviceable indeed, so long as it did not put its empty hand in his own Eockets ; but on the distresses of fine ladies and gentlemen e was exceedingly severe. Why couldn't everybody keep straight as he himself had always kept ? "Why do you bother about Cocky and your sister? " he said to Hurstmanceaux, whom he had known from a child, as they sat alone in the ducal smoking-room. " If Cocky and your sister had a million a year to-morrow they'd want a million and a half when the year ended. There are people like that : you can't alter 'em. Their receptivity is always greater than what they receive. Their maw's bigger than the biggest morsel you can put into it. Don't strip yourself for them. You might as well go without your bath for fear the Thames should run dry." Daddy was so fond of pretty women (platonically) that he generally forgave them all their sins, which was the easier because they were not sins against himself. But Lady Kenilworth, though he admired her, he did not like her ; he gave her a little sly pat whenever he could. She yawned when he talked, which nobody else ever did, and once, when they were staying at the same country house, when he had offered to ride with her, she had told him in plain terms that she didn't care for old men in the saddle or out of it. It was not in human nature to forget and forgive such a reply, even though you were the best-natured man in the world. He could not do her much harm, for Mouse was at that height of beauty, fashion and renown at which a person is absolutely unassailable; but when he could breathe on the mirror of her charms and dull it, he did so ; when he could slip a little stone under the smoothly rolling wheel of her life's triumphal chariot, he did so. It was but rarely. She was a very popular person. Her elastic spirit, her beauty, her grace, her untiring readiness for pleasure, all made her welcome in society ; her very insolence THE MASSARENEa. 118 was charming, and her word was law on matters of fashion. She was often unkind, often malicious, always selfish, always cruel, but these qualities served to intimidate and added to her potency. People trembled for her verdict and supplicated for her presence. Whether she were leading the cotillon or the first flight, whether she were forming a costume quadrille or bringing down a rocketter, she was equally admirable ; and although she excelled in masculine sports she had the tact always to remain exquisitely feminine in appearance and style. She had also had the tact and the good luck always to preserve her position. She had always done what she liked, but she had always done it in such a way that it had never injured her. 114 TEE MASSABENES, CHAPTER X. A WEEK 01 two later Hurstmanceaux saw a paragraph in tho morning papers which made him throw them hastily aside, leave his breakfast unfinished, and go to his sister's house in Stanhope Street. Her ladyship was in her bath. " Say I shall return in half-an-hour. I come on an urgent matter." Leaving that message with her servants he went to walk away the time in Hyde Park. It was a fine and breezy morning, but Hurstmanceaux, who always hated the town, saw no beauty in the budding elms, or the cycling women, or even in Jack or Boo, who were trotting along on their little black Shetlands. AVhen the time was up he waited restlessly another half-hour in his sister's boudoir, where he felt and looked like a St. Bernard dog shut up in a pen at a show. She at last made her appearance, looking charming, with her hair scarcely dry gathered loosely up with a turquoise- studded comb and a morning-gown of cloudy lace and chiffon floating about her — a modern Aphrodite. " You have made your husband a director in the City," said Hurstmanceaux without preface, almost before she had entered the room. She was prepared for the attack and smiled, rather impertinently. " What does it matter to you, Ponnie ? " " A director of a bank ! " " 'Tisn't your bank, is it ? " " A director of a bank ! " he repeated. It seemed to him so monstrous, so shocking that he had no words left. " They won't let him into the strong-room," said Cooky's M ife. " It may be rather absurd ; but it isn't more absurd THE MASSARENE8. 115 than numbers of other things — than your being asked to be a mayor, for instance." "If I had accepted, I should not have disgraced the mayoralty." "Cocky won't disgraee anything. They'll look after him." "Who did it?" " Is that your business, dear Eonnie ? " *^ Oh, of course, it was that miserable cad from Dakota whom you forced through the gates of Otterbourne House ! " " If you know, why ask ? " " What an insult to us all ! What a position to put us in ! When everybody's seen the man at your ball where we all were " His indignation and emotion checked his utterance. His sister laughed a little, but she was bored and annoyed. What business was it of his? Why could she not be let alone to arrange these little matters to her own convenience in any ingenious way she chose ? " How could you make the Duke appear to play such a part?" said Hurstmanceaux. "He is the soul of honour and of proper pride. What have you made him look like ? It is the kind of thing that is a disgrace to the country ! It is the kind of thing that makes the whole peerage ridiculous and contemptible. Imagine what the Eadical press will say ! Such scandalous jobbery justifies the worst accusations." "' Don't read the Eadical newspapers then. I shall read them, because they will be so deliciously funny. They are always so amusing about Cocky." "You have singular notions of amusement. I do not share them." "I know you don't. You are always on stilts. You never see the comedy of Cocky." " I do not see the comedy of what is disreputable and dishonourable. His father will be most cruelly distressed." "He should give us more money then. We must do what we can to keep ourselves ; Poodle never helps us. Well — hardly ever." Hurstmanceaux emitted a sound very like a big dog's growl, I 2 116 TEE MASSARENE8. " Otterbourne has been endlessly good to you. It is no use for him or anybody else to fill a sieve with water." " Why don't he give us the house ? We are obliged to pay fifteen hundred a year for this nutshell, while he lives all alone in that huge place." "Why should he not live in his own house? What decent gentleman would have Cocky under his roof? " "You have no kind of feeling, Bonnie. I ought^to have Otterbourne House. I have always said so. I can't give a ball here. Not even a little dance. Poodle might keep his own apartments, those he uses on the ground floor there, but we ought to have all the rest." " He allowed you to have that ball there the other night, and all the cost of it fell on him." " That is a great deal for him to do certainly ! To lend us the house once in a season when it is our right to live in it altogether ! " " He does not think so." " No ! Horrid selfish old man ! Pretending to be young, too, with his flossy white hair and his absurd flirtations. Would you believe that he even made difficulties about our keeping our horses at his mews ! " "He probably knew that it meant his paying the forage bills. The Duke is most generous and kind, and I think you ought to be more grateful to him than you are." " Oh, rubbish ! " said Mouse, infinitely bored. " People who hate you to amuse yourself, who want you to live on a halfpenny a day, and who say something disagreeable when- ever they open their lips, are always considered to be good to one. There is only one really good-natured thing that we ever wanted Poodle to do, and that was to let us live in Otterbourne House; and he has always refused. I am certain he will go on living for twenty years merely to keep us out of it ! " " Don't wish him in his grave. As soon as your husband gets Otterbourne House he will sell it to make an hotel. A company has already spoken to him." " Isn't it in the entail r " "Perhaps. I cannot say. Ask your lawyer. But I know that an hotel company has made overtures to him for purchase or lease in event of the Duke's death — may it TEE MASSABENES, 117 be many a day distant ! He is an honest gentleman, and you and your husband and your cursed cad out of Dakota nave made him look to English society as if he were capable of having sold the honour of entrance to his house for a mess of pottage for his son's thirsty maw." " My dear Konald, how you excite yourself ! Really there is no reason." Hurstmanceaux looked at her very wistfully. " Can't you see the dishonour of what you've done ? " he said impatiently. " You coax and persecute Otterbourne until he allows you to take those new people to his house, and then you let the cad you take there make your husband a director of a bank of which the man is chairman ! Can't you see to what comment you expose us all? Of what wretched manoeuvring you make us all look guilty ? Have you no perception, no conscience, no common decency ? If Cocky were another kind of man than he is, such a thing would look a job. But being what he is, the transaction is something still more infamous." She listened, so much amused, that she really could scarcely feel angry. '* My dear Ronald," she said very impertinently, " you have a morality altogether of your own ; it is so extremely old-fashioned that you can't expect anybody to make them- selves ridiculous by adopting it. As for * a job,' isn't the whole of government a job ? When you've cleaned out Downing Street it will be time to bring your brooms in here." At that moment Cocky put his head in between the door curtains and nodded to Hurstmanceaux. " She's made me a guinea-pig, Ronnie," he said, with his little thin laugh. "Didn't think I should take to business, did you? Have you seen the papers ? Lord, they're such fun ! I've bought ten copies of Truth." His wife laughed. "It's no use reading Tridli to Ronnie. He's no sense of fun ; he never had." " I have some sense of shame," replied Hurstmanceaux, looking with loathing on his brother-in-law's thin, colour- less, grinning face. " It is an old-fashioned thing ; but if this wretched little cur were not too feeble for a man to 118 TEE MASSARENES. touch, I would teach him some respect for it with a huntinjy-crop." Then he pushed past Cocky, who was still between the door-curtains, and went downstairs to take his way to Otterbourne House. Cocky hxughed shrilly and gleefully. ** Jove ! what a wax he's in,' said Cocky, greatly diverted. " J ust as if he didn't know us by this time ! " " He is always so absurd," replied Mouse. " He has no common-sense and no perception." "He ought to go about in chain armour," said Cocky, picking up Truth and reading for the fourth time, with infinite relish, the description of himself as an " Hereditary Legislator in Mincing Lane." "I am not a hereditary legislator yet," he said as he read. "As I don't get the halfpence, why should I get the kicks ? That's what I said to the mob in the Park. Break the Pater's windows, don't break mine. I'm plain John Orme, without a shilling to bless myself with, and the beggars cheered me ! They'll cheer you for any rot if they're only in the mood for it ; and if they aren't in the mood, you might talk like Moses and Mahomet, they'd bawl you down — oh, get out you little beasts, damn you ! " This objurgation was addressed to the Blenheims, who, suddenly becoming aware of his presence, made for his trousers with that conviction that his immediate destruction would be a public service, which they shared with the editor of Truth. Hurstmanceaux walked through the streets and felt his ears tingle as he heard the newsboys shouting the names of newspapers. His sister had said rightly; he was not a man of his time ; he was impetuous in action, warm in feeling, sen- sitive in honour; he had nothing of the cynical morality, the apathetic indifference, the cool opportunism of modern men of his age. He was no philosopher, and he could not bring himself to smile at an unprincipled action. He felt as ashamed as though he were himself at fault, as he entered the Duke's apartments in Otterbourne House. Hurstmanceaux and the Duke had much regard for each other, but their conversation was usually somewhat guarded TEE MASSABENES, 119 and reserved, for the one could not say all he thought of Otterbourne*s son, and the other could not say all he thought of Konald's sister. There were many subjects on which they mutually preserved silence. But this appoint- ment of Kenilworth seemed so monstrous to both that it broke the reserve between them. They each felt to owe the other an apology. " My dear Konald," said the Duke, holding out his hand, " I know why you have come. I thank you." " I dare not offer any plea in her defence," replied Hurst- manceaux huskily ; " I can only tell you how grieved I aiu that your constant kindness and forbearance to my sister should meet with so base a requital." The Duke sighed. " I am bound in honour to remember that the basest of men is her husband — and my son ! " They were both silent. The morning papers were lying on a table by the Duke's side, amongst them the green cover of Truth. " That is no excuse for her," said her brother at length. " This thing is of her devising much more than it is his." " There are women who are a moral phylloxera," replied Otterbourne. "They corrupt all they touch. But in fair- ness to her I must say that it was chiefly my son who persuaded me to let this man Massarene into my house. They made me an accomplice in a job ! Perhaps," the Duke added with a sad smile, " the world knows me well enough to give me credit for having been an unconscious accomplice — for having been a fool, not a knave ! " To these two honest gentlemen the matter was one of excruciating pain, and of what seemed to them both intolerable humiliation. But society, though it laughed loudly for five minutes over the article on a hereditary legislator, forgot it five minutes later, and was not shocked ; it is too well-used in these days to similar transactions between an impoverished nobility, with unpaid rents and ruinous death-duties, and a new-born plutocracy creeping upward on its swollen belly like the serpent of Scripture. 120 THE MASSARENE8. CHAPTEK XL A YOUNG woman, dressed in white cambric, witli 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 dedassee,'' 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. 1 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 ! " 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, notwith- standing 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 recom- mended to William Massarene by the English minister at Washington ; and the influence of that gentleman had TEE MASSAHENES. 121 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 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 odd 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 ortho- graphy 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 disappoint- ment 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 colour, to be more 122 THE MASSABENES. 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 jewellery of any kind, seemed to him to give him poor value for the many thousands of dollars he had spent on her. He had intended her to be ultra fashionable, ultra cMc, always in the swim, always in the first flight ; on racecourses, 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 I " 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, tete-a-tete 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 under- stand 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 slie 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 ardour THE MAS8ABENES, 123 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 endeavoured to conceal it, disliking 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 ? " " Kise 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 insignifi- cant in her presence. He was in some respects, when he pitted himself against her, compelled unwillingly to acknow- ledge that she was the stronger of the two. She had hurt 124 THE MASSARENE8. 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 only a sullen, unwilling respect, which was wrung 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, in- directly 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 Sevigne 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 under- stand 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 THE MASSABENES. 125 giving them none; they called her undatiful, and un- dntiful she might be ; but she felt that she would rather 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 Dalou's bust of her daughter. The winter before their acquaintance with Lady Kenil- worth the Massarenes had been at Cannes and Monte Carlo, following that smart world of which they then 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 was 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 favoured. But he made very little way with her; she was chilly, reserved, respectful. "Take your respect to the devil," thought the misunderstood admirer " Why are you so very unkind to me, Miss Massarene ? " he said in a joking fashion, which would have convulsed with joy every other woman 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. 126 TEE MA8SABENES. " 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 honour to dine with them, sir, merely because they earned money in America ! " Her companion had never received such a " facer " in all Ills 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 dis- turbed. " 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 Eiviera next day from IMonaco to Hyeres, taking protean forms, and changing with every tongue that told it. One of its versions, one of the most accurate, reached the ears of \\'illiaui JMassarene. His nickname in the States had been " Blasted Blizzard," and bis temper was such as corresponded Avith the name. His wrath was terrible. From his point of view it was justified. His wife, trembling like a leaf in a hurricane, was paralysed 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. " You shall apologise ! " he swore a dozen times. TEE MAS8ABENES. 127 "I shall certainly never do that," said Katherino with contemptuous composure. " You shall apologise 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 yon 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. A thousand other men had daughters who asked nothing better than to be allowed to spend money, and be made 128 TEE MAS8ARENE8. love to by princes, and wear smart frocks, and push them- selves into smart society ; and he had this rara avisj 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 ofiended gentleman. But he made no impression whatever on her. She ceased to reply; 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 ])ass a year in India with some school friends, who were (laughters 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. lie only saw in his daughter a person who might have secured to him the one supreme honour 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 Fram- lingham, ho 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 in- fluences. Framlingham, however, though it had 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 dis- THE MASSARENES. 129 comfiture 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 cul- tured mind. He took a great liking to this young woman, who quarrelled with a lot which all the world envied her, and he pressed her to reraain 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 the 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." And her father had not seen the meaning in those words; or had seen it, but would willingly have purchased the honour 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 K 130 THE MAkSABENES, allow her to make her own career here in this ancient and romantic land as a teacher, as a nurse, as an artist, as any- thing ! If only they would not oblige her to return to the yoke of that inane humiliatina; tedious routine which they thought honour 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 Yale Koyal, and containing an account of the dinner-party which the Grand Duchess had ordered and honoured. 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 polislicd habit; but it was there, proud, imperious and indomitable. L'echine 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 she thought bitterly, " My father's ' shooting-irons ' are my only substitute for ancestral steel ! " liut 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, TEE MASSABENES, 131 or charm of Sheridans, may have filtered into the veins of some ancestor of hers in the long, long ago ? " " 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 now 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 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 thev use him, he uses them. It is a quid pro K 2 132 THE MASSABJSNE8. 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." "No," said his guest bitterly. "You 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 Kunnymede 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 liomines which has kept the English aristocracy vigorous and popular." She gave a scornful gesture of denial. " It is the novi liomines who have degraded the English aristocracy. Pardon me if I contradict you. Mr. Mallock lias written very kind and possibly very just things of your nobility, but he has forgotten to satirise its most shameful infirmity, its moral scrofula, — its incessant and unblushing prostration of itself before wealth qua wealth. It likes hot- house 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 ! " tHE MASSAHENJES. 188 '* Who would be less severe who had seen anytmng 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 ex- pression, 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 Koyal," 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 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 wood- land 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 Fram- lingham, I assure you," she added after a pause. "I am ashamed that they are ashamed of it." "I understand, my dear, and I sympathise, 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." 134 THE MASSABENE8. " I sliould not mind that." "Ob, yes, you would. It is humiliation at every turn. It is to be checkerl 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 coronet 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 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 Eunny- mede, 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 honour ? " she said in a low tone. Lord Framlingham laughed grimly. " When one is in debt to one's banker and one's trades- men, and has to let one's place to a sugar-baker, the lesf said about honour 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 THE MASSARENEtS. 135 my parents' present position. If I had been bom 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 wo 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 ; 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. 1 was only the helpless spectator of a kind of effort which is in my sight the most ignoble, tlie most foolish of all, the endeavour 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 Fram- lingham. " 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 336 THE MA8SARENES. 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 anachro- nisms 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 Beli- sarius. What remains? Nothing except trade, and trade cannot oppose wealth, because it lives 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 recognising that money is stronger than itself, courts men of money, borrows from them, and puts out in foreign stocks what 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 recognised the truth of all he said ; but she loathed the fact she was compelled by her reason to acknowledge. " ' When slie's convinced against her will She's of the same opinion still,'" quoted Framlingliam. " Come, my dear, let's go and have a i2:ame of tennis." ( 137 ) CHAPTER XII. In the March and early April of the next year there was very bad weather in England : snow, sleet and storm, killing sheep, starving cattle, delaying railway-trains, and covering mosses in the woodland nooks where the primrose roots were getting ready their buds for sacrifice at West- minster in the drollest form of hero-worship which a generation bereft of any sense of humour ever invented. The moors were vast unbroken plains of virginal white- ness, and the woods looked black against a steely sky as Hurstmanceaux got into the express which had been signalled by telegram to stop for him at the little station outside the park of a country house at which he had been staying in the North Riding. The engine snorted, hissed and flung up steam and fire into the chilly air as he hastened across the platform. He got quickly into the carriage indicated to him by his servant, pushing his dog before him, and the train had moved off before he saw that there was a lady in the compartment, to whom he lifted his Glengarry cap with a word of apology for the presence of his collie. " I am very fond of dogs," said the lady with a smile, and the collie smelt the hem of her gown and the fur of her cloak witli approval. " Thanks ! " said his master, and, as he looked at her, thought how "well-groomed," in his own vernacular, she was. She did not belong to the county he felt sure. He had never seen her before, and he knew all the Ridings well. She was plainly dressed in dark cloth; but the sables lining her cloak were of the finest; her gloves were of perfect fit and texture; her buttoned velvet boots were admirably made ; she had a little velvet toque on a shapely 138 THE MASSABENES. head ; she had an air of great distinction and simplicity combined. She resumed the perusal of her book, and he unfolded a morning paper. The train swung on its way at great speed. The dog, Ossian, lay down in the middle of the carriage. The glass of the windows was silvered with hoar-frost; nothing was to be seen out of them of the country through which they were being hnrried. The snow fell continually ; there was no wind. Ossian, waking out of his nap and yawning, much bored, ])egan the conversation by laying his muzzle on the lady's knees. " Pray forgive him ! " said his master. " There is nothing to forgive. What a beauty he is ! " " He is as good as he looks. But perhaps he ought to apologise for being here." "Why?" " Well, really, I do not know why; but it is expected that a dog's owner should say so." "Only when he writes to the Times,'" said the lady, amused. " In point of fact, it is I who am in the wrong place, for this is a smoking-carriage." Ossian having thus broken the ice between them they continued to talk, of the weather, of the news of the day, of the book she had brought with her, of dogs in general, and of the collie in particular. They were neither of them very talkative by tempera- ment, or disposed to be communicative usually, but they got on very well together. He shifted his seat to the corner in front of her, and they continued to skim over a variety of subjects, harmoniously and agreeably to both, as the train glided over the frozen ground, scattering the fine white powder of the snow in front of it. " How fast it snows ! " said the lady rather anxiously, trying to rub the pane of glass nearest her clear with her handkerchief. "Were you ever blocked up by a snowstorm?" asked Hurstmanceaux. "I have been — once in Scotland and once in Canada. It is a disagreeable experience." "It must be, indeed. I hope there will be no chance of that to-day ? " TEE MASSABENES. 139 " Oh, no ; men will have kept the line clear, no doubt ! " As he spoke the train slackened its speed, moved with a jerking and dragging sonnd for some time, and a little while later stopped still with a great noise of rushing steam, and a jar which shook tlie carriage violently and flung Ossian against one of the doors. The lady turned pale, but she did not move or scream ; she looked a mute inquiry. " I suppose they have failed to keep the line clear," he said, in answer to the glance. " Allow me to look out a moment." He let down a window and leaned out of it ; but the air was so dense with steam and snow that he could not see a yard before him. " Is it an accident ? " she said. "I do not think so. I imagine we have run into a snow drift, nothing more." The noise of the steam rushing out of the engine, and the shouts of officials calling to each other, almost drowned his voice. He took his railway-key out of his pocket and opened the door. " I will go and see what it is, and return in a moment," he said to her, signing to Ossian to remain in the carriage, and leaving the door open. She did not attempt to detain or to follow him. " That is a thoroughbred woman," he said to himself. He did return in a few minutes, and brought word that they had stuck fast in the snow. The engine-driver had slackened speed in time to avoid an accident, but they might be detained for hours ; the telegraph wires were all down through the weight of the snow. " It is extremely disagreeable, but it is not dangerous," he said to reassure her. " We shall be quittes pour la peur. We shall probably have time to get dreadfully keen about eating, and have nothing to eat. England is such a small place: one never thinks of 'stoking' when one travels in it." " My poor maid ! " she said anxiously. " I am afraid she must be very frightened, wherever she is." "Can I look for her?" " You are very kind, but how should you know her ? I will get out myself." 140 THE MASSARENES, " It may be as well to get out. You would be warmei- if you stayed in the carriage, but there is the chance that a train may come up behind and run into ours, thougli men have gone down the line with lamps." She had nothing with her except her book and a bouquet of violets. Closely followed by Ossian, he accompanied her along the line, looking into each compartment to find her maid. There were many people, both in the train and out of it, talking confusedly, suggesting this, that, and the other; the air was full of fog and snow; the engine, snorting and smoking, stood with its brazen breast pushed against the high white hillocks. When they found the maid, a grey elderly person, she was in a panic of terror, which made her perfectly useless. She was shaking from head to foot, and repeating dis- connected Scriptural texts ; she resisted all her mistress's requests and entreaties to her to descend ; she said she wished to meet her God where she was. " If there be any thieves in the train," said Hurstman- ceaux to the lady, " they will have an easy time with your jewel-box." " I do not wear jewels," said his fellow-traveller curtly. He looked at her in some surprise. Her tone had asperity in it. " Were you going up to town, may I ask ? " he ventured to inquire. " No," she answered. " Only from one country house to another." He wished he knew what country houses they were, but he could not ask that. She argued with her maid very patiently and with great kindness, but made no impression. " Poor Danvers ! She is out of her mind with fear. What shall I do ? " she said, appealing to him as though they had been old acquaintances. " Are you afraid of a long walk ? " «No." " Will you come with me, then ? I know the country. The nearest town is four miles away. I am going there to send help. Will yoii like to come ? " She did not immediately reply. TEE MASSABENES. 141 "May I present myself?" he added. "I am Lord Hurstmanceaux." She looked up quickly. " Indeed ? You are very like your sister," " Which one ? I have several." " Lady Kenilworth." He laughed. " That is a great compliment. She is the beautv of the family. Do you know her ? " ^ "Not I; but my people do. I have seen her, of course. She is one of the beauties of England." The tone was rather repellant ; by no means cordial. " Well, we must not lose daylight," said Eonald. " Will you come? The snow is firm, and it will be fair cross- country walking. You will be less chilled than staying liere in inaction,; and it is not more than four miles to the town by short cuts which I know." She hesitated. '' But my poor woman ? To leave her here alone " "I will tell my servant to stay and look after her. She will join you in the town, and you will continue your journey. I think you had better come with me. I must go myself, anyhow, for no- one else knows the country. I have hunted and ridden over it scores of times, and I know every bush and briar." " I will come," she said, without any further hesitation. " You are a good walker ? " he said a little anxiously. She laughed a little. " Oh, yes ; I shall not break down ancl cast my shoes." "Come along, then. It soon grows dark in these early spring days. Oar Aprils are considerably worse than our Novembers." " He is rather too familiar," she thought ; but she per- ceived that it was his natural manner, which, when he was not irritated, or sarcastic, or— as he frequently was— silent, had great frankness and simplicity in it. "It is an odd thing to do," she continued to say to herself, "to walk across country in the snow with a man one does not know. But he is certainly Lord Hurstman- ceaux by his resemblance to his sister, and it will be better to walk than to sit still in a raihvay-carriage, with the 142 THE MASSARENE8, chance of being frozen into bronchitis or smashed by an express train." And she took her way across the bleak, blank pastures which stretched around the scene of the accident, with little frozen brooks and ditches and sunken fences dividing them, and no trees or hedges to relieve the tedium of the level landscape, since scientific agriculture ruled supreme. " How well she carries herself," thought Hurstmanceaux. Who can she possibly be, that I do not know her by sight ? And her people know Mouse and not me ! " The snow was hard, and afforded good footing. ^ She crossed the ditches and little streams as easily and with as much elasticity as Ossian did, and went on her way quickly and with energy, carrying her bouquet of violets close up to her mouth to keep out the biting wind. She asked him the name of the town to which they were going, and if they would be able to telegraph thence. " I fear the wires will be damaged there, too," he answered. " It is called Greater Thorpe. There is Lesser Thorpe, St. Mary's Thorpe, Monk's Thorpe, Dane's Thorpe — the two latter charming names suggestive of the past. You would see the spire of Greater Thorpe from here if it were a clear day, or what does duty in England as a clear day." " One's greatest want in England is distance," she answered. " I was in India a little while ago. What an atmosphere ! It is heaven only to live in it." " Yes, the light is wonderful." "So golden and so pure. To think that the English dare to defile it with factory smoke ! " " That is on a piece with all we do there." " How vulgar, how fussy, how common the conquerors look beside the conquered ! Go into a bank, a counting- house, a police-station, and see the calm, stately, proud, reposeful natives in their flowing robes, bullied and sworn at by some smug, sandy-haired, snub-nosed official in a checked suit and a pot hat ! One wishes for a second and successful mutiny." " It must be admitted we are neither pliant nor pictur- esque. The Kussians, when they succeed us, will at least * compose ' better. In what part of India were you ? " TEE MASSABENES. 143 She told him, adding, "I have left with extreme regret." "You were in the Framlino^hams' Presidency; did vou know them?" ^ ' J " I was on a visit to them." " If she would only say who she is ! " thought Konald, as a gust of wind blew them apart and sent the snow spray into their faces ; he felt sure that she belonged to his world and that she was married ; she had a composure of tone and manner which made her seem much older than her features looked. He was lost in admiration of the beauty of her feet as the wind lifted her skirts, or as she lifted herself over the ditches in a spring as easy as the dog's. " You enjoy this rough walk," he said shortly to her. "I think I do," she answered. "But I should enjoy it more if I were sure I could telegraph from this Greater Thorpe." " You wish to reassure your people ? " "I do." ^ " If she would only say who they are ! " he thought, but she did not. They could only converse when the wind lulled, which was not very often ; it blew straight in their faces over the bare level land, and he had some trouble in recognising the landmarks in the white obliteration of the always featureless ^ landscape, and in avoiding the barbed wire fencing which had many a day cost him many an angry oath as he had hunted over those jmstures. " I used to be a good deal in this country," he said, as they at last left the wide level fields for a high road, and which was less exposed to the wind. " 1 used to hunt with the Yale of Thorpe hounds. I do not hunt anywhere now ; {ind I have nothing now to bring me into the county since my cousin, Lord Roxhall, sold his place." "YaleKoyal?" " Yes ? Do you know it ? " " I have seen it." "A fine old place, the biggest beeches in England, and a herd of wild cattle equal to the Chillingham. I only wish one of the red bulls would gore the wretched cad who has bought it, or perhaps in strict justice the bulls ought first to have gored Koxhall." 144 THE MABSABENES. She did not reply ; she was walking as easily and quickly as ever, though it was the fourth mile, and the cold of the bleak sunless day grew more intense as the hours wore away. " Vale Eoyal was given by Henry the Second to the Eox- halls of that time," he continued. "My cousin wanted money, it is true ; but not so desperately that he need have done so vile a thing. He was led into it. The man who has bought it is a brute from the North-Western States ; made his fortune in all kinds of foul ways, drinking-shops, gambling-saloons, cattle-trading, opium-dealing, cheating poor devils who landed with a little money and went to him for advice and concessions ; an unspeakable rascal, who after thirty years' infamy out there pulls himself together, praises God for all His mercies, and comes back to this country to go to church, sit in Parliament, wear a tall hat, and buy English society and English estates. Don't you agree Avith me that it is utterly disgraceful ? " She held her violets higher up to her face so that he saw nothing but her eyes, which were looking down the long straight white road which stretched out before them into a grey haze of fogs. " I quite agree with you," she said in very clear and incisive tones. " I think it utterly disgraceful. But the disgrace is as much to the bought as the buyer." " Certainly," said Hurstmanceaux with great warmth. " A society is utterly rotten and ruined when such a fungus as this can take root in it. That I have always maintained. ' Tell me whom you know and I will tell you what you are,' is as true when said of society as when it is said of an individual. Certainly society only knows this man, this Massarene, in a perfunctory supercilious way, and only gives him the kind of nod which is the equivalent of a kick ; but it does know him ; it drinks his wines and eats his dinners ; it nods to him, it elects him, it leaves cards on him ; it lets him look ridiculous in white breeches and a gilded coat at St. James's, and it makes him pay through the nose for all its amiabilities and tolerations. It is an infamy ! " She looked straight before her down the road and did not reply. 'TEti: MAB8AliENEB. 145 " Yoti said you agreed with me ? " said Hurstmaticeaux, Surprised at her silence. " I agree with you entirely.'* But there was a chillness in her tone which suggested to him that, however completely she shared his opinions, the subject was disagreeable to her. " She can't belong to that class herself, she is thorough- bred down to the gi^und," he thought, as he said aloud, " I am afraid you are tired. The cold is beginning to tell on you." " No ; I am not at all cold," she answered, holding up nearer to her the poor violets shrivelling in the frost. " What has come over her, I wonder ? " he said to himself. " She was so frank and natural and pleasant, and now she is chilly and stiff, and scarcely opens her lipSo It is since I spoke of Vale Eoyal. But she said she agreed with me. Perhaps she knows Gerald, and is fond of him. But he could hardly know anybody intimately whom I have never seen, or never heard of, at the least." " Yet there is this to be said. You blame this person," she added in a low but clear tone as she walked on, looking straight before her. "But you admit that your world is more contemptible than he. What obliged Lord Eoxhall to live m such a manner that he was forced to sell his old estate? Are not nearly all of you tradesmen and horse dealers and speculators ? Who fill the markets with game, the wharfs with coal, the shows with fat cattle and brood- mares ? Who breed herds of Shetland ponies to sell them to the oruel work of the mines ? Who destroy all the wild- bird life of three kingdoms, that the slaughter of the battues may be wholesale and the pheasants sent in thousands to Leadenhall? Your own order, your own order. What has it done, what does it ever do, to make it so superior to the man from Dakota ? " Hurstmanceaux listened in extreme astonishment. He could not understand the scorn and suppressed vehemence with which her words vibrated. He was silent because, in his own mind, he found the indictment a just one. But his aristocratic temper was in conflict with his intellectual judgment. " What have the English aristocracy brought into fashion ? L 146 TEE MASSARENE8. What do the) uphold by example and precept ? " she con- tinued. " Their life is one course of reckless folly ; the summer is wasted in crowded London houses, varied by race-meetings and pigeon-shooting ; the autumn and winter are spent in the incessant slaughtering of birds and beasts ; their beautiful country houses are only visited at intervals, when they are as crowded as a booth at a fair. What kind of example do they set to * the man from Dakota ' ? What do they suggest to him of self-denial, of culture, of true grace and courtesy, of contempt for ill-gotten riches ? They crowd around him as poultry around a feeding-pan ! The whole thing is discreditable. But perhaps the most shameful part in it is not his ! " Hurstmanceaux was silent. He thought of Cocky and his sister, and he felt his blood tingle under the lash of her stinging words. " My own withers are unwrung," he said at last with a smile. *' I don't do those things. My estates are extremely unproductive, and I live, for the chief part of the year, on one of them — Faldon." " It is on the sea, I think ? " " Yes ; on the coast of Waterford." " Do you cut your timber ? " " I do not." " Do you preserve ? " " For sport ? No. Wild life has a happy tirae of it, I assure you, with me." " I am glad to hear any Englishman say so." " Are we such a set of barbarians ? " " Yes, you are very barbarous ; much more so than the Hindoos whom you have conquered. Com]3are the sim- plicity of their diet, the purity of their arts, the beauty of their costume and their architecture, with a Lord Mayor's feast, a Koyal Academy show, a Manchester Canal, a Forth Bridge, a team of cyclists, a London woman's gown! Barbarians! — barbarians indeed, worse than any Goth or Vandal ! — the nation which destroyed Delhi ! '* •' She must surely be a Kussian," thought Hurstman- ceaux. "They often speak English with an admirable fluency. But why, if bo, should Vale Koyal affect her BO singularly ? " THE MA^SAllENES. 147 He was not impressionable in these ways; but his new acquaintance attracted him extremely. He admired her, and her voice charmed him like music. At that moment Ossian, perceiving in a distant field some sheep feeding on swedes in the snow, could not resist his hereditary instinct of shepherding them, and caused his master some trouble, as the sheep entirely mistook the collie's good intentions and fled away in all directions. The lady watched the scene, standing still under a pollarded willow. When order was restored and they walked on again, she asked him what had made him give up hunting ; in herseK she regretted her late eloquence, and wished her companion to forget it. "Well, I have never told anybody," he answered, and paused. Then he went on, in a rather embarrassed manner, nerved by the confidence which his unknown companion roused in him : " I was one day in my own woods at Faldon sketching ; hounds were out, but 1 was not with them. I was sitting in the bracken quite hidden by it, and an old dog-fox slouched by me ; his tail drooped, he was dead beat, he could scarcely drag himself along ; he had a bad gash in his side from a stake or something ; he went up to an old hollow oak, and out of it came his vixen and three little cubs; and they welcomed him, I assure you, just as his family might welcome a man going home after a hard cam- paign, and the vixen fell to licking the gash in his side, and the cubs frolicked around her. I never had the heart to hurt a fox again. Hares I never did hunt; it is bar- barous work. But that fox, too, set me thinking. He cared for his earth and his wife just like any good cit. going home in the tram to Peckham Kise or Brixton. I stopped there till dark to make sure the pack didn't come after him. It was the last run of that season. I never let them draw Faldon coverts again." " You did very right," she said in her soft grave voice. "I wish more men would pause |nd think like that." The wind rose and blew some more fine snow powder over them and in their faces. L 2 148 THE MASSAitENEB. "It is half-past two o'clock," he said, looking at his watch, " I am sure you must miss your luncheon." " I should like a cup of tea," she answered. " How much farther is it to Thorpe?" "About three-quarters of a mile. We shall get there before dark. But I fear the Thorpe tea will not be up to your standard. However, they will give you a good fire at the Bell Inn." "The Bell Inn! It sounds like Charles Dickens and Washington Irving." " Yes ; but there is no longer the abundance and the comfort of the old coaching-days ; country inns, now, like most other things, hardly pay their own expenses." " I am afraid I prefer the wayside station on the edge of the Indian jungle, with ripe bananas brought to me on a cocoa-nut leaf, and the monkeys looking down for a share from the reed roofs." "So do I," he said, thinking that she looked pale and fatigued. " But for our sins we are in Woldshire, and we shall have to put up with coal fires and beefsteaks." She looked alarmed. " Surely I shall not have to stay there ? " " That will depend on what state the roads and the lines are in ; the snow is less thick about here. Where are you going to ? Of course, horses cannot stir out in this frost." She avoided the direct question. " Oh, well, it is an adventure ; one must not complain. If I can get my poor woman to the town I will support its indifferent accommodation." " We will do the best we can, but the Thorpe mind is slow and uninventive. The rural brain in England is apt to be clogged with beer. Fortunately, however, whatever be its density, it always retains its perception of the value of shillings and sovereigns. We will try that gentle stimu- lant so appreciated in politics, so especially appreciated since bribery was made a crime." They had now come near enough to the town to perceive in the haze the square shoulders of its roofs and the tower of its famous church, all blurred and blotted by the fog like a too-much-washed water-colour drawing. She did not TEE MASSARENES. 149 seem to be tired, but she had lost her elasticity of move- ment; her eyes looked straight ahead, and no longer turned to meet his own frankly as they had done before. She seemed to wish to be silent, so he let the conversation drop, and walked on beside her mutely, as the straggling suburbs of a country town began to show themselves in the more frequent cottages, in the occasional alehouse, and in the presence of people in the roads, and in the small wayside gardens where they were scraping and sweeping clear little paths from the gates to the doors. Some of these, recog- nising him, touched their hats; he spoke to the most capable-looking, told them briefly of the accident, and sent them on to the station-master, whilst he took his companion to the Bell Inn, an old house which had been a busy and prosperous place in the posting and coaching times of which he had spoken. It stood in the centre of a market- place, which was alive and noisy with country folks once a week, but was now a desolate and well nigh empty place filled with wind and driven snow. " If you will rest here ten minutes," he said to her, •* I will come back as soon as I have seen the authorities and heard what they propose to do, and I will tell you if the lines are safe and the wires in working order. I am afraid you will find it very rough and uncomfortable, but they are lighting the fire and the landlady is a good soul; my cousins used to come and have some of her soup on hunting mornings ; you will like her, I think." He held open the door of the only sitting-room, and as she passed within bowed very low to her and went out into the street again. As he reached the middle of the market-place he heard his name spoken, and, turning at the sound, saw her to his surprise coming towards him from the entrance of the inn. He went back a few steps to meet her. She was very pale still, and there was a pride which was almost aggressive in her attitude as she stood still on the slippery trodden stones and faced him. "Pray do not come back to me," she said coldly. "I can have all I need here till my woman can join me. But there is something I ought to tell you, and I ought also to thank you for all your good nature and courtesy." 150 THE MASSABENE8. She paused a moment whilst he looked at her in silence and surprise. She was evidently speaking under the influence of some strong and personal feeling. " It is to Yale Koyal that I am going," she added with a visible effort. " I am Katherine Massarene." The blood leapt up into Hurstmanceaux's face; he was dumb with amazement and regret ; he forgot utterly that he was standing bareheaded in a snowy sloppy market-place with a dozen yokels staring and grinning about the gates of the inn yard. He drew a very long breath. ^ "I beg your pardon," he said gravely and with great humility. " I am shocked " "You have no need to be so," she replied, "I quite agreed with your views. But I cannot alter my father, nor you your world." She stroked the uplifted head of Ossian and turned to go back to the door of the Bell Inn,. He strode after her and reached her side. " I am extremely sorry," he murmured. " I am shocked at my gross indiscretion. I cannot look for your forgiveness. But pray do let me beg of you to take off those pretty velvet boots at once, and let the woman rub your feet with spirits of some sort, failing eau de Cologne. I wish I had thought to take your dressing-bag from your maid." " Thanks." She looked at him a moment as she said the word, and he thought there were tears in her large serious eyes. Then she went inside the old posting-house and he saw her no more. " That cad's daughter, heavens and earth ! " he said to himself as he brushed the men aside and hastened across the market-place. ^e scarcely knew what he said to the frightened station- master and the obsequious mayor, and the bustling town clerk, and all the good people who crowded to welcome a live lord and hear of a railway accident. He was intensely surprised, disproportionately irritated, and sincerely vexed with himself for having spoken so incautiously. He knew that every one of his words must have cut like a knife into the sensitive nerves of this woman whom he had admired and who had looked to him so thoroughbred TEE MASSARENES. 151 He had felt more attracted to her than he had ever felt to any stranger, and to receive this shock of disillusion left him colder than he had been all day in the mists and the snow. Suddenly it flashed across his memory that she must be the heiress whom Mouse had desired him to marry. Suspicion awoke in him. He had not known her, but it was very possible she had known him when he had entered the railway carriage ; she had spoken of his likeness to his sister. Her avoidance of any hint as to who she was or whither she was going appeared to him to suggest design. Why had she not disclosed her name until the very last moment ? Though a poor man, for his rank, he had been a great deal run after by women on account of his physical beauty, and he was wary and suspicious where women were in question. She had caught him off his guard and he repented it. If she were in truth William Massarene's daughter she probably knew the share which his sister had so largely taken in the sales of Vale Eoyal and Blair Airon ; and in the persuasion of society to accept the purchasers. He did not know the details of his sister's diplomacy, but he guessed enough of them for him to burn with shame at the mere conjecture. When his own kith and kin were foremost in this disgraceful traffic what could his own condemnation of it look like — hypocrisy, affectation, subterfuge ? What had possessed him to talk of such subjects on a public road to a stranger. He never by any chance " gave himself away." Why had he done so this day merely because he had felt as if he had known for years a woman who had beautiful feet in fur-rimmed boots and a big bouquet of violets ? He was furious at his own folly, and he had told her that story of the fox too, which he had buried so closely in his own breast as men like him do secrete all their best im- pulses and emotions of which they are more ashamed than of any of their sins and vices ! He had never been so incensed and troubled about a trifle in his whole life ; and all the high breeding in him made him feel the keenest regret to have so cruelly mortified a woman about her own father and her own position. 152 TEE MASSABENES. \ To a gentleman the knowledge that he has insulted a \ person who cannot punish him for it is a very dreadful I thing. j He had said no more than he meant, no more than he ■ felt, and nothing which he would have retracted ; but he i was extremely sorry that he had said it to the daughter of ; the man Massarene. To the man himself he would have had the greatest pleasure in saying it. "What was I about to walk across country with a stranofcr and talk so indiscreetlv to her ? " he asked himself in self-reproach as sincere as it was useless. \ She asked herself the same question as she dried her snow- wet clothes before the fire of the Bell Inn, and offered all the notes and gold in her purse to have an old post- ! chaise got ready at once, and the shoes of two horses | roughed. \ ( 153 ) CHAPTER XIII. When slie reached Vale Royal, wliicli she did late that night, after a dreary and dangerous drive of fourteen miles, at a walking pace, over frozen roads, she told her parents of the detention of the train by the snow-drift, but she did not tell them of her meeting with Lady Kenilworth's brother. She was tired and chilled, and went at once to a hot bath and her bed, whither her mother brought her a cup of boiling milk with two spoonsful of Cognac in it. " It ought by rights to be milked on to the brandy," said that good lady. "But that can't be done here, though there are half a score of beautiful Alderneys standing on the Home farm only just to supply the house — and such a dairy, my dear ! Chiny the walls is, and marble the floors. Only I don't hold with their method of churning, and the wenches are much too fine. I showed 'em how to turn out butter one day, and I heard 'em say as I come away that my proper place was the kitchen ! Well, good-night, my dearie ; sleep well." " Good-night, dear mother," said Katherine with unusual tenderness, for she was not demonstrative, and her parents to her were almost strangers. "It is not her fault," she thought, "if we are upstarts and interlopers in this place which Henry the Second gave the Roxhalls." Then her great fatigue conquered her and, the brandied milk aiding, she fell sound asleep and slept dreamlessly until the chimes of the clock tower sounded eleven in the still, sunny, frosty, noonday air. Then she awoke with the sense of something odiously painful having happened, and, as she saw the withered bouquet of violets, which she had told her maid to leave, 154 THE MASSARENES. with her gloves and her muff on a table near, she remem- bered, and the words of Hurstmanceaux came back on her mind with poignant mortification in their memories. " How right he was ! Oh, how right he was ! But how merciless ! " she thought, as she looked through the panes of the oriel window of her chamber out on to the white and silent park. She saw the huge old oaks, the grand old yews, the distant mere frozen over, the deer crossing the snow in the distance to be fed. The bells of a church unseen were chiming musically. In the ivy beneath her windows two robins were singing in friendly rivalry. Above- head was a pale soft sky of faintest blue. In the air there was frost. It was all charming, homelike, stately, simple ; it would have delighted her if — if — if — there were so many " ifs " she felt sick and weary at the mere thought of them, and the innocent tranquillity of the scene jarred on all her nerves with pain. It was late in the morning before she could summon strength to go downstairs, where she found her mother lunching alone in the Tudor dining-hall ; her father had gone away early in a sledge to attend political meetings in an adjacent county, and the large house party invited was not due for two weeks. " Who are coming, mother ? " she asked. " Oh, my dear, I never know ; I scarce know who they are when I see 'em," replied the present mistress of Vale Koyal. " Lady Kenilworth has arranged it all. She brings her friends." Katherine coloured at the name. " As she would go to the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo, or the Sanatorium at Hot Springs ! " she said bitterly. " Well, I don't know about that. She'd have to pay for 'em in those places," said Mrs. Massarene serious!}^, not intending any sarcasm. " Don't you eat nothing, my dear ? " asked her mother anxiously. "I can't say as India have made you fat, Kathleen." She smiled involuntarily. " Surely you do not wish me to be fat, mother ? " " Well, no, not exactly. But I'd like to see you enjoy your food." TEE MAS8ABENES. 155 " Did she go through the form of showing you her list ? " '^No, my dear, she didn't. Your father knows who is coming. I did say to her as how I Avished she'd bring her children — they are such little ducks — but she gave a little scoffing laugh and didn't even reply." " How can you tolerate her ! You should turn her out of the house ! " " Oh, my dear Kathleen," said Mrs. Massarene in an awed tone. " We've owed everything to her. If it hadn't been for her I believe we shouldn't have known a soul worth speaking of to this day. That old Khris (though he's a real prince) is somehow down on his luck and can't get anybody anywhere. You've made fine friends, to be sure, but they didn't cotton to us ; and your Lady Mary — whom you've just come from — they say, isn't what she should be." "IsLady Kenilworth?" " Lord, she must be, my dear ! Why she comes on here from Sandringham ! She's at the very tip-top of the tree. She stays at Windsor and she sits next the Queen at the Braemar gathering. What more could you have? And though she does bite my nose off and treat me like dirt I can't help being took by her ; there's something about her carries you off your feet like ; I don't know what to call it." " Fascination." " Well, yes ; I suppose you'd say so. It's a kind of power in her, and grace and beauty and cruelty all mixed up in her, as 'tis in a pretty young cat. Your father's that wrapped up in her he sits staring like an owl when she's in the room, and I believe if she told him to hop on one leg round the Houses of Parliament he'd do it to please her." " Does he not see how ridiculous she makes him ? " " My dear," said Mrs. Massarene with solemnity, *' a man never thinks he is ridiculous. He says to himself, ' I'm a man,' and he gets a queer sort of comfort out of that as a baby does out of sucking its thumb." Katherine smiled absently. " Does Lady Kenilworth ever speak of her brother — her eldest brother, Lord Hurstmanceaux ? " she said in an embarrassed tone, which her mother did not observe. " Yes ; she says he's a bear. She's brought her brothers- 156 THE MASSARENES, in-law, and a good many of her relations, her * people,' as she calls 'em, but her own brothers, none of 'em, ever." " This place belonged to her cousin." " Did it ? I never knew anything about it. William came in one day and said: *I've bought a place in the shires. Go down there this afternoon.' That was all. I was struck all of a heap when I saw it. And the house- Ivceper, who had stayed on to go over the inventory, drew herself up when she met me, stiff as stiff, and said to me, 'I shall be glad if you will release me of my charge, madam. I have always lived with gentlefolks.' Those were her very words, Kathleen. A fine set-up, glum-looking woman she v/as, dressed in black watered silk, and she went off the next morning, though we had offered her double her price to remain under us. That's just, you know, what Gregson, the courier, said once ; or rather, he said he wouldn't live with gentlefolks because they was always out o' pocket." Katherine moved restlessly : words rose to her lips which she repressed. " And when I go in the village," continued her mother, " there's nothing but black looks and shut doors, and the very geese on the little common screech at me. The rector's civil, of course, because he's an eye to the main chance, but he's the only one ; and I'm afeard it's mostly because he wants your father to give him a peal of bells. They seem to think your father should pay the National Debt!" Katherine sighed. " Poor mother ! Que de couleuvres on vous fait avaler 1 " "Don't talk French, Kathleen, I can't abide it," said Mrs. Massarene with unusual acerbity. " When we first set foot in Kerosene City, a few planks on the mud as 'twas then, a little nasty Frenchman had an eating shop next ours and he undersold me in everything, and made dishes out of nothing, and such pastry — light as love ! My best was lead beside it." She continued to recall the culinary feats of her Gallic rival, whose superiority had filled her with a Gallophobia deathless and pitiless as that of Francesco Crispi ; and her daughter's thoughts wandered away from her to the low- lying white fields round Greater Thorpe, and to the remem- THll MASSAREI^EB. 157 brance of the dark blue eyes wbich bad met ber own so frankly through the misty air. "Would you mind very much, mother," she said at length, "if I did not appear while these people are here? I could go to Lady Mary's or to Brighton." Mrs. Massarene was startled and alarmed. " Oh, my dearie, no ! Not on any account. Your father would never forgive it. You have been so much away ; it has angered him so. And as for your views and your reasons he'd never see them, my dear, no more than a blind man can see a church clock. Pray don't dream of it, child. People say it is so odd you went to India. They will think you have some skin-disease, or are light in your head, unless you are seen now at home." Katherine sighed again. "I think you do not understand," she said in a low, grave voice. " I utterly disapprove, I utterly abhor, the course which my father takes. I think his objects contemptible and his means to attain them loathsome. If you only knew what they look to persons of breeding and honour ! Society laughs at him whilst it uses him and robs him. He is not a gentleman. He never will be one. A complacent premier may get him a knightage, a baronetage, a peerage ; and a sovereign as complacent may let him kiss her hand. But nothing of that will make him a gentleman. He will never be one if he live to be a hundred or if he live to entertain emperors. I cannot alter his actions. I cannot open his eyes. I have perhaps no right to speak thus of him. But I cannot help it. I despise the whole miserable ignominious farce. I cannot bear to be forced to remain a spectator of it. This place is Lord Koxhall's. All the money in the ^vorld cannot make it ours. We are aliens and intruders. All the people whom Lady Kenilworth will bring here next week will go away to ridicule us, plebeians as we are masquerading in fine clothes and ancient houses." " My dear ! my dear ! " cried her mother in great trepida- tion. " You make me all in a cold tremble to hear you. All you say is gospel truth, and I've felt it many a time, or like to it, myself. But it is no manner of use to say it. Your father thinks he's a great man, and nobody'll put him out of conceit of himself ; it's true that as he made his pile 158 THE MASSARENES, he's the right to the spending of it. Don't you talk of going away, Kathleen. You are the only creature I have to look to, for I know full well that I'm only a stone in your father's path and a thorn in his flesh. I can't kill myself to pleasure him, for 't would be fire everlasting, but^ I know I'm no use to him now. I was of use on the other side, and he knew it then, though I can't call to mind one grateful word as ever he said to me ; but he knew it, and wouldn't have got along as fast as he did without me ; and nobody kept ledgers better than me, nor scrubbed a kitchen table whiter. That's neither here nor there now, however; and I'm in his way now with fine folks; and look like 'em I never shall. But you, my dear, you do look like 'em, and talk like 'em, and carry yourself like 'em. I would call you like an empress, only I saw an empress once, and she was a little old hodmedod of a woman in a Shetland shawl, and she was cheapening shells on the beach at Blanken- berge; and you are grand and stately, and fine as a lily on its stalk. I want them to see what you look like, my dear ; and they won't laugh at you, that's certain. As for the house, it's been paid for, so I don't see how you can say it's Lord Koxhali's still. He can't eat his cake and have it." " And my dear Kathleen," she continued, changing the subject with great agitation, " they say you mustn't know Lady Mary ; she, she, she isn't respectable. There is some- thing about her boy's tutor and about a painter, a house painter, even, they say." Katherine Massarene coloured. " Dear mother, I know Lady Mary is not all she might be. She is light and foolish. But when you sent me to that Eastbourne school, a little frightened, stupid, miserable child, who could not even speak grammatically, Lady Mary noticed me when she came to see Enid and May (her own daughters), and told them to be kind to me, and asked me to spend the holidays with them ; and they were kind, most kind, and never laughed at me, and took pains to tell me how to be- have and how to speak ; and I assure you, my dear mother, that Lady Mary might be the worst woman under the sun I should never admit it, and I should always be grateful to her for her goodness to me when I was friendless and THE MASSARENES. 159 common and ridiculous — a little vulgar chit who called you* Ma/" Mrs. Massarene was divided between wrath and emotion. " I am sure you were a well-brought-up child from your cradle, and pretty-behaved if ever there were one," she said with offence. " And I dare say she knew as how your father'd made his pile, and had an eye on it." " Oh no, oh no," said Katherine with warmth and scorn. " Lady Mary is not like that, nor any of her people ; they are generous and careless, and never calculate ; they are not like your Kenilworths and Karsteins. She is a very thoroughbred woman, and to her novi hoinines are novi homines, however gilded may be their stucco pedestals." Happily the phrase was incomprehensible to her hearer, who merely replied obstinately : " Well, they tell me she's ill spoke of, and I can't have you mixed up with any as is ; but if she was kind to you, my dear, and I mind me well you always wrote about her as being such, I'll do anything to help her in reason. You know, my dear," she added, lowering her voice, for the utterance was treasonable, " I have found out as how all them great folks are all hollow inside, as one may say. They live uncommon smart, and whisk about all the year round, but they're all of 'em in Queer Street, living by their wits, as one may say ; now I be bound your Lady Mary is so too, because she's a duke's daughter, and her husband came into the country with King Canute, him as washed his feet in the sea — at least the book says so — and anything she'd like done in the way of money I'd be delighted to do, since she was good to you " "Oh, my dear mother," cried Katherine, half amused and half incensed, " pray put that sort of thing out of your mind altogether. Lady Mary has everything she wants, and if she had not she would die sooner than say so. And indeed they are quite rich. Not what my father would call so probably, but enough so for a county family which dates, as you rightly observe, from Knutt." Mrs. Massarene sighed heavily ; she was bewildered but she was obstinate. " Di'monds then ? '* she said tentatively. ** !N"one of them ever have enough di'monds. One might send her a stand- 160 TEE MASBAttENEb. up thing for her head in di'raonds — fcira I think they call it ; and say as how we are most grateful all of us, but you can't be intimate because virtue's more than rank." Katherine rose with strong effort controlling the deep anger and the irresistible laughter which moved her. *'We will talk of these things another time, dear," she said after a moment. " Lady Mary will not be in London this season after Whitsuntide. Enid and May go out this year with their grandmother. Lady Chillingham." " That's just what she said," cried her mother in triumph. " She said Lady Mary couldn't show her nose at Court even to present her own girls ! " "Who said so?" " Lady Kenilworth." " Lady Kenilworth a moralist ! I fear she could give my poor Lady Mary a good many points " "What do you mean? Lady Kenilworth knows the world." " That no one doubts. And I dare say slie would take the tiara, my dear mother." " I don't understand you, and you have a very rude way of speaking." " Forgive me, dear ! " said her daughter with grace and penitence. "I do not like your guide, philosopher and friend, though she is one of the prettiest women I ever saw in my life." " Well, you can't say slie doesn't go to Court," cried Mrs. Massarene in triumph. ''I am quite sure she will go to Court all her life," replied Katherine Massarene — an answer on which her mother pondered darkly in silence. It must be meant for praise, it could not be meant for blame ; and yet there was a tone in the speaker's voice, a way of saying this apparently acquiescent and complimentary phrase, which troubled its hearer. " Her answer's for all the world like a pail of fine milk spoilt by the cow having ate garlic," thought Mrs. Massa- rene, her mind reverting to happy homely days in the dairy and the pastures with Blossom and Bee and Buttercup, where Courts were realms unknown. Katherine was silent. THE MASSABENEB. 161 She felt the absolute impossibility of inducing her mother to make any stand against the way of life which to herself was so abhorrent; or even to make her comprehend the suffering it was to her finer and more sensitive nature. Her mother disliked the life because it worried her and made her feel foolish and incapable, but she could not reach any conception of the torture and degradation which it appeared to Katherine, If she had possessed any power, any in- fluence, if she had been able to return in kind the insolence she winced under, and the patronage she so bitterly re- sented, things would have seemed different to her ; but she could do nothing, she could only remain the passive though indignant spectator of what she abhorred. To her the position was false, contemptible, infamous, everything which Hurstmanceaux had called it; and she was compelled to appear a voluntary sharer in and accessory to it. The house, beautiful, ancient, interesting as it was, seemed to her only a hateful prison — a prison in which she was every day set in a pillory. All the underlings of the gardens, the stables, the Home farm, the preserves, showed the contempt which they felt for these unwelcome successors of the Koxhall family. "One would think one had not paid a single penny for the place," said Mrs. Massarene, who, when she asked the head gardener at what rate he sold his fresias, was met by the curt reply, " We don't sell no flowers here, mum. Lord Eoxhall never allowed it." " But, my good man," said his present mistress, " Lord Koxhall's gone for ever and aye; he's naught to do with the place any more, and to keep all these miles of glass without making a profit out of them is a thing I couldn't hold with anyhow. Nobody's so much money that they can afford waste, Mr. Simpson ; and what we don't want ourselves must be sold." "That must be as you choose, mum," said the head gardener doggedly. "You'll suit yourself and I'll suit myself. I've lived with gentlefolk and I hain't lived with traders." At the same moment Mr. Winter, who had of course brought down his household, was saying to the head keeper : " Yes, it does turn one's stomach to stay with these shoe- M 162 THE MASSABENES. blacks. It's the social democracy, that's what it is. But the old families they're all run to seed like your Koxhalls ; they expect one to put up with double-bedded rooms and African sherries. I am one as always stands up for the aristocracy, but their cellars aren't what they were nor their tables neither. That's why they're always dining theirselves with the sweeps and the shoeblacks." In happy ignorance that his groom of the chambers was describing him as a sweep and a shoeblack, William Mas- sarene, with a marquis, a bishop, and a lord-lieutenant awaiting him, was driving to address a political meeting in the chief town of South Woldshire. When he got up on his dog-cart, correctly attired in the garb and the gaiters of a squire of high degree, and drove over to quarter sessions, he felt as if he had been a justice of the peace and the master of Yale Eoyal all his life. He really handled horses very well ; his driving was somewhat too ilashy and reckless for English taste, but the animal liad never been foaled which he would not have been able to break in, he who had ridden bronchos bare-backed, and raced blue grass trotters, and this power stood him in good stead in such a horsy county as Woldshire. The snow was gone and the weather was open. There was the prospect of political changes in the air, and, in the event of a general election, his chiefs of party desired that he should represent his county instead of continuing member for that unsound and uncertain metropolitan division, which he did actually represent. To feel the way and introduce him politically in the county before there should be any question of his being put up for it, those Avho were interested in the matter had got up a gathering of local notabilities on a foreign question of the moment, which was supposed, as all foreign questions always are, to involve the entire existence of England. He had been told what to say on these questions, and although it seemed to him "awful rot," like everything inculcated by his leaders, he said it obediently, and refreshed himself afterwards by some personal statements. Amongst men, on public matters he always showed to advantage. He was common, ignorant, absurd, very often ; but he was a man, a man who could hold his own and had a head on his THE MAS8ARENE8. 163 shoulders. That mcistery of fiite which had made him what he was gave meaning to his dull features, and light to his dull eyes. No one, as modern existence is constituted, could separate him altogether from the weight of his ruth- less will, and the greatness of his accomplished purpose ; he stood on a solid basis of acquired gold. Before a fine lady he shook in his shoes, and before a prince he trembled ; but at a mass-meeting he was still the terrible, the formidable, the indomitable, " bull-dozing boss " of Kerosene City. His stout hands gripped the rail in front of him, while their veins stood out like cords, and his rough rasping voice made its way through the wintry air of England, as it had done through a blizzard on the plains of Dakota. " I've been a working-man myself, gentlemen," he said, amidst vociferous cheers, " and if I'm a rich man to-day it's been by my own hand and my own head as I've become so. I've come home to die " (a voice in the crowd : " You'll live a hundred years ! "), '* but before I die I want to do what good I can to my country and my fellow-country- men." (Vociferous cheers.) " Blood's thicker than water, gentlemen ' ' The applause here was so deafening that he was forced to pause ; this phrase never fails to raise a tempest of admira- tion, probably because no one can ever possibly say what it is intended to mean. " I honour the institutions of my country, gentlemen," ho continued, " and I am proud to take my humble share in holding them steady through stormy weather. I have lived for over thirty years, gentlemen, in a land where the in- stitutions are republican, and I wish to speak of that great republic with the sincere respect I feel. But a republican form of government would be wholly unfitted for Great Britain." " Why so ? " asked a voice in the crowd. Mr. Massarene did not feel called on to answer so indis- creet a question; he continued as though no one had spoken. " The foundations of her greatness lie embedded in the past, and are inseparably allied with her institutions. The courage, hoaour and patriotism of her nobility" (the marquis with a gratified expression played with his watch-chain), " the devotion, purity, and self-sacrifice of her church " (the M 2 164 TEE MASSABENES. prelate patted the black silk band on his stomach and purred gently like a cat), "the examples of high virtue and wisdom which have adorned her throne" (the lord- lieutenant looked ecstatic and adoring, as a pilgrim of Lourdes before the shrine) — "all these, gentlemen, have made her what she is, the idol of her sons, the terror of her foes, the bulwark at once of religious faith and of religious freedom. The great glory of our country, sirs, is that poor and rich are equal before the law " (" Yah ! " from a rude man below), "and that the roughest, most friendless lad may by probity and industry reach her highest honours. I myself left Queenstown, gentlemen, a young fellow with three pounds in my pocket and a change of clothes in a bundle, and that I have the honour of addressing you here to-day is due to the fact that I toiled honestly from morning till night for more than thirty years in exile. It was the hope of coming back, sirs, and settling on my native soil, which kept the heart up in me through hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, and such toil as here you know nothing about. I was a poor working lad, gentlemen, with three pounds in my pocket, and yet here I stand to-day the equal of prince and peer, who by honesty and economy, and incessant toil, has come to put his legs under the same mahogany with the highest of the land" (the marquis frowned, the bishop fidgeted, the lord-lieutenant coughed, but Mr. Massarene was emhalU, and heeded not these hints of disapprobation). " What do you want with republican institutions, my friends, when under a monarchy the doors of wealth and honour open wide to the labouring man who has had sense and self-denial enough to work his way upward ? " (" They open to a golden key, damn your jaw ! " cried a vulgar being in the mob below.) "You talk of golden keys, sir — the only key to success is the key of character. Before I give my hand, sir, whether to prince or pauper, I ask — what is his character ? " " Dear me, dear me, this is very irrelevant," murmured the lord-lieutenant, much distressed. " Damned inconvenient," murmured the marquis with a chuckle. The bishop folded his hands and looked rapt and pious. But the mayor of the borough, with desperation^ plucked at the orator's coat-tails. TEE MAS8ABENE8. 165 *' Order, order," he murmured with a clever adaptation of parliamentary procedure ; and Mr. Massarene, whose ear was quick, and who was proud of his knowledge of the by-words of the benches, understood that he was irrelevant and on ticklish grounds, and brought forward a racy American anecdote with ready presence of mind and extreme success ; whilst the crowd below roared with loud and delighted laughter. The gentlemen at his elbow breathed again. There had been, in a ducal house of the countryside, a very grave scandal a few months earlier; a scandal which had become town-talk, and even been dragged into the law courts. It would never do to have the yokels told that "character" was a patrician or political sine qua non. On the whole the speech was a very popular one ; the new owner of Vale Koyal was welcomed. Too egotistic in places, and too unpolished in others, it was vigorous, strong, and appealed forcibly to the mob by its picture of a herds- man with three pounds in his pocket become a capitalist and a patron of princes. To his own immediate and aristocratic supporters its effect was less inspiriting. He gave them distinctly to understand the quid pro quo which he gave and expected. "If he don't get what he wants from our side he'll rat as sure as he lives," thought the lord-lieutenant ; and the mayor thought to himself that it would really have been better to have left the metropolitan division its member ungrudged. " What a fearful person," said the lord-lieutenant, a tall slender man with fair hair turning grey, and a patrician face, blank and dreary in expression, through many years of conflict between a great name and a narrow income. " His speech was quite Kadical. I really did not know how to sit still and hear it," whispered the bishop in a tone of awe and horror. The marquis lighted a cigar. "Never mind that. It took with the yokels. He'll vote straight for us. He wants a peerage." " The Kadicals would give him a peerage." "Of course. But Kadical peerages are like Qladstoiie 166 THE MASSABENES, claret — unpleasantly cheap. Besides, our man loves smart folks— the Liberals are dowdy ; our^ man loves ' proputty/ and the Liberals are always nibbling into it like mice into cheese. Besides, Mouse Kenilworth's godmother to this beast ; she has put him in the way he should go." " I wish she would write his speeches for him,'* said the bishop. " Took with the yokels, took with the yokels," repeated the marquis. "Ain't that what speeches are made for? People who can read don't want to be bawled at. Man will do very well, and we shall have him in the Lords ; he'll call himself Lord Yale Eoyal, I suppose — ha! ha! — poor Koxhall ! " The lord-lieutenant, who could not accept the social earthquake with the serenity of his friend, shivered, and went to his carriage. "I shall go and ask our new man for some money," murmured the bishop, whose carriage was not quite ready. The marquis grinned. "Nothing like a cleric for tliinking of the main chance ! " lie said to himself. The bishop hesitated a few moments, looked up at the steps of the hotel, then hastened across the market-place as rapidly as his portly paunch and tight ecclesiastical shoes permitted. Mr. Massarene was standing on the top of the step with three of his supporters. The churchman took from his pocket a roll of thick vellum-like paper, evidently a memorial or a subscription-list. " For the rood-screen," he murmured. ** A transcendent work of art. And the restoration of the chauntry. Dear Mr. Massarene, with your admirable principles, I am sure we may count on your support ? " AVilliam Massarene, with his gold pencil case between his thick finger and thumb, added his name to the list on the vellum-like scroll. The lord-lieutenant was on that list for twenty guineas ; Lord Koxhall for ten guineas. William Massarene wrote himself down for two hundred guineas. " Back the Church for never forgetting to do business," said the marquis with a chuckle to himself; and he too mounted the hotel steps as his ecclesiastical friend de- THE MASSABENES. 167 scended them, after warmly and blandly pressing the candidate's hand and inviting him to dinner at the episcopal palace. " Booking a front seat in heaven, Mr. Massarene ? " he cried out in his good-humoured contemptuous voice. " Well, come, do something for earth too. You haven't subscribed to the Thorpe Valley Hounds. Got to do it, you know. Hope you're sound about Pug." The marquis had been master of the pack for a dozen years. " I'm no sportsman,'* said his victim, who had no notion who or what Pug was. **But if it's the custom in the county " " Of course it's the custom of the county ! Eoxhall, poor fellow, was a staunch friend to us. You mustn't be other- wise. We'll draw Yale Koyal coverts for cubs next October. Mind you're sound about Pug." " May I ask what Lord Koxhall subscribed ? " " Fifty guineas," said the M.F.H. truthfully. Mr. Massarene planted his legs a little further apart and thrust out his stomach. " I'll give four fifties to the dogs," he said with grandeur. " The dogs ! " ejaculated the marquis ; but he restrained his emotions and grasped his new subscriber's hand cordially. " The Kennels and the Cathedral got the same measure," he thought with amusement, as he nodded good-humouredly to the crowd below and entered the hotel to get a nip of something warm. " Deuced clever of the Bishop ; I shouldn't have thought of making the cad * part.' What an eye the saints always have on the money-bags," he thought as he drank some rum-punch. But, being a cheery person who took the world as he found it, he said to his wife when he got home that day : " Go and call at Yale Koyal, Anne ; the man's a very good fellow. No nonsense about his origin. Told us all he began life with three pounds in his pocket. Don't like going to see 'em in Koxhall's place ? Oh, Lord, my dear, that's sentiment. If Eoxhall hadn't sold the place they couldn't have bought it, could they ? " 108 THE MAS8ARENE8, " But why sliould v»'g know them ? " said the lady, who was unwilling to accord lier countenance to new people. " Because he's promised two hundred guineas to the ' dogs,' " said the marquis with a chuckle, " and because he's a pillar of the Tory Democracy, my dear ! " " Tory Democracy ? A contradiction in terms ! " said the lady. " You might as well say Angelic Anarchy ! " " Vie shall come to that, too," said her spouse. ( 169 ) CHAPTER XIV. The snow was gone, but it was still cold and unpleasant weather when the ruler of Mr. Massarene's fate, accompanied by a score or more intimate acquaintances who had been persuaded to patronise " Billy," arrived in the dusk at Vale Boyal with an enormous amount of luggage and a regiment of body-servants and maids. " You needn't have come to meet us. I know my way about here better than you do," was the ungracious salutation with which the host, who had gone himself to the station, was met by the object of his veneration. She seldom flattered him now ; she had got him well in hand ; it was no longer necessary to do violence to her nature ; when one likes the use of the spur one does not humour one's horse with sugar ; she thought the spur and the whip salutary for him, and employed them with scant mercy. She mounted as lightly as a young cat to the box of the four-in-hand break, took the reins, and drove her mesmerised, trembling yet enchanted victim through the dusky lanes and over the muddy roads which were familiar to her, the lights of the lamps flashing, and the chatter and laughter of the other occupants of the break bringing the labouring people out of their cottages, as the lady whom they knew so well flew by them in the twilight. " Seems kind o' heartless like in Lady Kenny to go to the great house now the poor lord's in it no more ; him her own cousin and all," said a young woman to her husband who was only a hedger and ditcher, but a shrewd observer in his way, and who replied, as he looked after the four white- stockinged bays : " Lady Kenny aren't one to cry for spilt milk ; she knows where her bread is buttered. Lord, gal, 'twas she made Koxhall sell, and I'll take my oath as I stands here that most o' the blunt went in her pocket," 17(> TEE MASSABENES. ■ All the people for forty miles round were of the same opinion, and owed her a grudge for it. Koxhall had been a very popular landlord and employer ; his tenantry and labouring folks mourned for him, and despised the new man who stood on his hearthstone. Quite indifferent, however, to the voces popiili she drove safely through the familiar gates and up the mile-long avenue as night descended, and went into the library, looking very handsome with her blue eyes almost black, and her fair face bright and rosy, from the chilly high winds of the bleak April evening. She pulled off her sealskins and threw them to one of her attendant gentlemen, and then walked forward to the warmth of the great Elizabethan fireplace. " Well, my dear woman, how do you like it ? " she said good-humouredly to Margaret Massarene, as she drew off her gloves and took a cup of tea before the hearth where a stately fire was burning for its beauty's sake : the great room was heated by hot-water pipes. Margaret Massarene was in that dual state of trepi- dation, anxiety, offence, and bewilderment into which the notice of her monitress invariably plunged her. She mur- mured some inarticulate words, and glanced timidly at the bevy of strangers. But Mouse did not take the trouble to introduce her friends to their hostess ; some of them were already acquainted with her, but some were not : all with equal and unceremonious readiness ignored her presence, and descended on the tea-cups and muffins and caviare sandwiches with the unanimity of a flock of rooks settling down on to a field mined with wire-worms. " Always had tea in here in Gerald's^time," said one of the men, staring about him to see if there was any alteration made in the room. " I don't think you know my daughter," Mrs. Massarene summed courage to murmur, with a nervous glance towards Katherine, who stood at the other end of the wide chimney- piece, a noble piece of fine oak carving with huge silver dogs of the Stuart period, and the Roxhall arms in bold bosses above it. Mouse, looking extremely like her brother, flashed her sapphire eyes like a search-light over the face and figure of the person in whom she had by instinct divined an antagonist, and desired to find a sister-in-law. TEE MASSABENES, 171 " So glad," she murmured vaguely, as she put down her cup, and held out her hand with a composite grace all her own, at once charmingly amiable and intolerably insolent. Katherine merely made her a low curtsey, and did not put out her hand in return. "How's Sherry and Bitters?" asked Lady Kenil worth, marking but ignoring the rudeness. "Amusing creature, isn't he ? Bored to death, I suppose, in India ? " " It would be difficult, I think, for the most stupid person to be bored in India," replied Katherine briefly. "Lord Framlingham is not stupid." Lady Kenil worth stared. Then she laughed, as it was so very comical to find Billy's daughter such a person as this. *' I saw from that bust of Dalou's that she wouldn't be facile" she reflected. " Looks as if she thought pumpkins of herself ; if she's cheeky to me it will be the worse for her." Katherine was very cold, very pale, very still ; the men did not get on with her, and soon abandoned the attempt to do so. The ladies, after staring hard, scarcely noticed her or her mother, but chattered amongst themselves like sparrows on a house-roof after rain. With swelling heart she felt their gaze fixed on her ; two of them put up their eye-glasses. She wore a plain silver-coloured woollen gown, but their experienced eye recognised the cut of a famous faiseur, and the natural lines of her form were unusually perfect. " Tres Men mise ; tres simple, mats tres Men'' said a Parisienne, Duchesse de Saint-Avit, quite audibly, gazing at her as if she were some curious piece of carving like the fireplace. " Elle n'est pas mal die tout J' returned a foreign diplomatist quite audibly also, as though he were in the stalls of a theatre. " Sullen, is she ? " thought Mouse, toasting one of her pretty feet on the fender. " Gives herself airs, does she ? That's old Fram's doing, I expect." Ignoring her as an unknown quantity, to be seen to at leisure and annihilated if needful, she turned to her host, who was standing awkwardly behind the brilliant throng. 172 THE MA88ARENES, *' Got my telegram about the Bird rooms ? " she said sharply. She would have spoken more civilly to an hotel- keeper. The Bird rooms were a set of three rooms, bed, dressing, and sitting-room ; their walls painted with birds and flowers on a pale-blue ground, their silk hangings and furniture of corresponding colour and design ; and many birds in Chelsea and Battersea, majolica, terra de pipa, and other china and pottery, on the tables and cabinets. She did not care a straw about the birds ; but they were the warmest, cosiest rooms in the house facing full south, and were detached from observation in a manner which was agreeable and convenient ; and she had sent a brief dispatch that morning to com- mand their reservation for herself. Country houses are always selected with regard to their conveniences for innocent and unobserved intercourse. The Bird rooms were duly assigned to her, and Mr. Massarene himself had walked through them that morning to make sure that they were thoroughly warmed, that the writing table was properly furnished, and that the rarest flowers had been gathered for the vases on the table ; he with eagerness assured her that her word had been law. " I hope you haven't altered anything there ? " she said, taking up her gloves. " It's very absurd, you know, to put Turkish screens and lamps in an old Tudor room like this. They've smartened the place up," she said to her friends, looking about her. " That open-work cedar-wood screen wasn't across that door in Gerald's time, nor those great bronze lamps hanging over there. Where'd you get them, Billy ? They look like Santa Sophia." But she did not listen to Billy's reply. She was looking at the mulberry-coloured velvet curtains which replaced in the windows the somewhat shabby and frayed hangings of her cousin's reign. "I wish I had come here last year," she said to her discomfited host. "You should have touched nothing. A place like this doesn't want Bond Street emptied into it. I don't know what Gerald would say. He'd be dreadfully angry." Mr. Massarene thought that Lord Eoxhall had parted with his right to be angry ; but he dared not say so. He tME MASSABENUS. 173 thtirmured that lie was sorry ; whatever there might be that was not suitable should be removed. " Can't you see how wrong it all is ? " asked his tyrant impatiently. He regretfully confessed his utter inability to see it ; was grieved they were incorrect ; they should be moved to- morrow. *' Lady Kenilworth is a purist," said his daughter in clear cold tones. " New people who come into old houses are of necessity eclectic." Her father frowned. He did not know what eclectic meant, but he supposed it meant something vulgar. His guest stared : if Billy's daughter were cheeky like this it would be necessary, she thought, to take her down a peg or two. But she was forced to confess to herself that the daughter of the house did not look like a person whom it would be easy to take down, either one peg or many. " Would you like to go to your rooms, ma'am?" murmured her hostess, when the tea had been drunk and the chatter had ceased for a minute and the sound of the first dinner- gong boomed through the house. "My dear woman," replied Mouse, "I know the place better than you do! But, really, if I shall find Pekin mandarins on oak banisters, and Minton plaques on Tudor panels, I shall not have strength to go up the staircase ! " " What do she mean ? " murmured Margaret Massarene. "She means to be insolent," replied her dauo^hter, and the reply was not in a very low tone. But Lady Kenilworth was or pretended to be out of hearing, going out of the library with two of her especial friends and calling on others to come with her and see what the vandals had done : the gong was booming loudly. William Massarene was inexpressibly mortified ; the more keenly so because if he had listened to Prince Khris two years before he would not have had Bond Street and the Kue de Eivoli emptied into a beautiful, hoary, sombre, old Tudor house. Mouse felt no qualms whatever at seeing the new people in the old house. She had been unable to understand why Koxhall would not himself come with her. But some 174 THE MASSARENES, people were so whimsical and faddish and sentimental. They spoiled their own lives and botliered those of others. She thought it was good fun to see William Massarene in the old Tudor dining-hall and his wife in the beautiful oval Italian drawing-room. Roxhall would not have seen the fun of it, but men are so slow to catch a joke. " They are so deliciously ridiculous and incongruous ! " she said to one of her companions. She had bi'ought a " rattling good lot " with hfer ; smart women and cheery men who could ride to hounds all day and play bac' all night, or run twenty miles to see an otter- worry and be as " fresh as paint " next morning ; people with blue blood in their veins, and good old names, and much personal beauty and strength, much natural health and intelligence; but who by choice led a kind of life beside which that of an ape is intellectual and that of an amoeba is useful; people who were very good-natured and horribly cruel, who could no more live without excite- ment than without cigarettes, who were never still unless their doctor gave them morphia, who went to Iceland for a fortnight and to Africa for a month; who never dined in their own homes except when they gave a dinner-party, who could not endure solitude for ten minutes, who went anywhere to be amused, who read nothing except telegrams, and who had only two cares in life — money and their livers. They came down to Vale Royal to be amused, to eat well, to chatter amongst themselves as if they were on a desert island, to carry on their flirtations, their meetings, their intrigues, and to arrange the pastimes of their days and nights precisely as they pleased without the slightest reference to those who entertained them. " What would you like to do to-morrow ? " their host had ventured to say to one of them, and the guest had replied, " Oh, pray don't bother ; we're going somewhere, but I forget where." They had brought a roulette wheel with them, and cards and counters ; for their leader knew by experience that the evenings without such resources were apt to be dull at Vale Royal. William Massarene, indeed, had pro- vided forms of entertainment such as were unattainable by the limited means of the Roxhall family. He had caused TEE MASSARENES. 175 admirable musicians, good singers, even a choice little troupe of foreign comedians, to be brought down for this famous ^Yeek in which the azure eyes of his divinity smiled upon him under his own roof-tree. But there was one diversion which she considered superior in its attractions to anything which tenors and sopranos, viols and violins, or even Palais Royal players, could give her, and that diversion she took without asking the permission of anybody. There was a withdrawing-room at Vale Boyal which was always known as the Italian Room because some Yenetian artist, of no great fame but of much graceful talent, had painted ceiling and walls, as was proven by old entries in account books of the years 1640-50, contained in the muniment- room of the Roxhalls. On the third night after their arrival, wher. they were all in this Italian room, after a short per- formance by the Parisian comedians, a long table of ebony and ivory was unceremoniously cleared of the various objects of art which had been placed on it, and the roulette- wheel was enthroned there instead by the hands of Lady Kenilworth herself, and the little ball was set off on its momentous gyrations. She was looking more than ever like a lovely flower, with a turquoise collar round her throat, and real forget- me-nots fastened by diamonds in her hair. For some minutes William Massarene, who had slept through the French comedy, and was still drowsy, did not become sensible of what was taking place in his drawing-room. But when the shouts and laughter of the merry gamblers reached his ear and he realised with difficulty what was taking place, a heavy frown, such as Kerosene City had learned to dread, stole on his brows, and a startled horror opened wide his eyes. Play ! Play under his roof ! All his Protestant and Puritan soul awoke. A large portion of his earliest gains had been made by the miners and navvies and cowboys who had gathered to stake their dollars in the back den of his shop in Kerosene City ; and later on he had made millions by his ownership of private iiells in larger towns of the United States ; and the very thought of gambling was odious to him because he felt that ^these were portions of his past on which no light must ever 176 'THE MASSAHENES. sliine. He felt that he owed it to the conscience which he had acquired with his London clothes and his English horses to prohibit all kinds of play, however innocent, in his own drawing-rooms. He crossed the room and, nervously- approaching the leader of the band, ventured to murmur close to her ivory shoulder : " You never said you meant to play, Lady Kenilworth. I can't have any play — I can't indeed — in my house." His tone was timid and imploring. He was frightened at his own temerity, and grew grey with terror as he spoke. She turned her head and transfixed him with the imperious challenge of her glance. " What are you talking about, my good man ? " she said in her clearest and unkindest tone. " It is not youi: house when I'm in it." " But I can't allow play," he murmured, with a gasp. " It's against my principles." " Don't talk rot, Billy ! " she cried with impatience. "Who cares about your principles? Keep them for the hustings." Then she turned the ivory shoulder on him again, and, amidst the vociferous laughter of the circle of players, AVilliam Massarene, feeling that he had made a fool of himself, hastily and humbly retreated. The merriment pealed in louder ecstasy up to the beauti- ful painted ceiling, as she cried after the retreating figure : " You go to bed, Billy — go to bed ! Or we sha'n't let you dine with us to-morrow night ! " " You're rather rough on the poor beast, Lady Kenny," said one of the players who was next her. "Billy's like a Cairo donkey — he must feel the goad and be gagged," replied Mouse, sweeping her counters together with a rapacious grace like a hawk's circling flight. Then the little ball ran about in its momentous gyra- tions, and the counters changed hands, and the game went on all the giddier, all the merrier, because " Billy thought it improper." Katheriue rose from her seat by the pianoforte and came to her father's side. Indignation shone in her lustrous eyes, while a flash of pain, of shame, and of anger burned on her cheeks. TEE MA8SABENE8. 177 " Father, oh, father ! " she said in a low, intense murmur, " send them away ! They insult you every hour, every moment ! Why do you endure it ? Turn them all out to- morrow morning ! " " Mind your own business ! Do I want any lessons from you, damn you?" said Massarene, in a sullen whisper, more infuriated by her perspicuity than by the facts on which her appeal to him were based. His daughter shrank a little, like a high-spirited animal unjustly beaten — not from fear, but from wounded pride and mute disgust. She went back to the pianoforte and opened the book of " Lohengrin." He threw himself heavily into an armchair, and took up an album of Caran d'Ache drawings and bent over it, not seeing a line of the sketches, and not being able to read a line of the jests appended to tJiem. All he saw was that lovely figure down there at the roulette-table, with the forget-me-nots in her glittering hair and at her snowy bosom, and the turquoise collar round her throat. "Billy!" No one had ever called him Billy since the time when he had been a cowboy, getting up in the dark in bitter winter mornings to pitchfork the dung out of the stalls, and chop the great swedes and mangolds, and break the ice in the drinking-trough. Never in all her life had his wife ever dared to call him Billy. He knew the name made him ridiculous ; he knew that he was the object of all that ringing laughter ; he knew that he was made absurd, contemptible, odious ; but he would not allow his daughter, nor would he allow any other person, to say so. He was hypnotised by that fair patrician who threw the mud in his face ; the mud smelt as sweet to him as roses. It was only her pretty, airy, nonchalant way — the way she had de par la grace de Dieu which became her so well, which was part and parcel of her, which was a mark of grace, like her delicate nostrils and her arched instep. When she had tired of her roulette, it irritated her extremely to see the large gorgeous form of Mrs. Massarene dozing on a couch and waking up with difficulty from dreams, no doubt, of cowslip meadows and patient cows whisking their tails over the dew ; and the erect figure of N 178 THE MASSABENES. her daughter sitting beside the grand piano and turning over the leaves of musical scores. " Why don't you send your women to bed, Billy ? " she said to him very crossly. "It fidgets one to see them eternally sitting there like the Horse Guards in their saddles at Whitehall. Politeness ? Oh, is it meant for politeness ? Well, I will give them a dispensation, then. Do tell them to go to bed ; I am sure good creatures like those have lots of prayers to say before they go to by-bye ! " "Why don't you and your mother go to your rooms? We are all of us very late people," she said, directly, as she passed Katherine Massarene. "You are my parents' guest. Lady Kenil worth ; I endeavour not to forget it," was the reply. " What does she mean by that ? " her guest wondered ; she thought she meant some covert rebuke. She did not at all like the steady contemptuous gaze of this young woman's tranquil eyes. " Oh, my dear, how dreadfully old-fashioned and formal you are ! " she cried, with an impatient little laugh ; and the (laughter of the house thought her familiarity more odious than her rudeness. She perceived the impression she made on the young woman whom she meant to marry Konald. " You see, I feel quite at home here," she added by way of explanation. " Of course, you know it was my cousin's house." " I wonder you like to come to it," said Katherine as she paused. " It must be painful to see it in the hands of strangers, and those strangers common people." "How droll you are!" cried Mouse, with another little laugh. " I am sure we shall be great friends when v/e come to know each other well." Katherine was silent ; and Mouse, slightly disconcerted, bade her a brief good-night, and took her own way to the Bird rooms. For once in her life she had met a person whom she did not understand. " Konald shall marry her, but I shall always hate her," she thought, as she went to the Bird rooms. "However, everybody always hates their sisters-in-law, whoever they may be." The young woman seemed intolerably insolent to her: THE MASJSABENES. 179 so cold, so grave, so visibly disapproving herself; it was quite insupportable to have Billy's daughter giving herself grand airs like a tragedian at the Franjais. But for her intention to make Konald marry the Massarene fortune she would have expressed her surprise and offence in unequivocal terms. " Eeally, these new people are too absurd," she thought, as her maid disrobed her whilst the chimes of the clock tower rung in the fourth hour of the morning. " Too infinitely absurd. They must know that we don't come to their houses to see them ; and yet they will stay in their drawing-rooms like so many figures of Tussaud. It is really too obtuse and ridiculous." She was, however, too sleepy to reflect longer on their stolid obstinacy, or to decide how she should on the morrow best teach them their place. N 2 180 THE MASSABENES, CHAPTEE XV. " Elle a du elm ; elle a positiveirient du cliic^^ said the Ducliesse 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 cliiG ^vhen one's got as good a figure as she has," said one of the other ladies, rather crossly. " She does loolz 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 ^Villiam Massarene mas- querading as a country gentleman. She had read a good deal of philosophy, but she could not practise 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." THE MASSABENE&. 181 " A dog who will sell for a thousand guineas," she replied, *' will never want friends as long as the w^orld 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 hen 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 churcli 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 civilised 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, 1 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 himger, 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 honoured 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 Eoyal. Besides, Harry, like p-reater men, had substitutes, and one 182 THE MASSARENES. 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 Psyehologie de V Amour, who considered that brevity was the soul of love as of wit ; and who had a good-humoured contempt for Harry, sucli as very clever persons who are also amiable feel for other persons not very clever whom they are outwitting with discretion and amusement. " Fauvre gargon ! il prencl la chose en hon pere de fa^nille," 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 unin- telligible from their foreign pronunciation, only heard distinctly Battersea and Chelsea, names to him only sug- gestive of Primrose Habitations and political gatherings. He repeated the words mechanically and apologetically. " Faience," 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 could take your Excellency in to see it if Lady Kenilworth has e-one out ; did her maid say that she had ? " THE MABSARENES. 183 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 i)ay 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 omhrageux, 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 realise what he suspected, and he was afraid of this grand gentleman, who, on arrival, had offered him the tips of two lingers 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 mused 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 Protes- tant 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 ardour of investi- gation. " Au revoivy mon Ion'' he said carelessly, and sauntered on till he reached the door at the other end of the gallery and vanished. 184 TEt: MASSAamES. Mr. Massarene shut the valve of the heating-apparatus, and sighed ; it was probably the first time in his unsenti- mental 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? AVhat 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 over-heated flues burned down half the country houses in England. But he saw that she was deeply and inex- plicably 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 guards- man 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 hos- pitalities," said the eminent person with a charming smile and an adorable salutation. TSE MASSABENE8. 185 " Vours 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 tonnes 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 im- morality 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 depres- sion common to all those in whose breasts the green-eyed monster has found a throne. 186 THE MASSARENES. " 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 degra- dation 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 hypnotised. " 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 tQ 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 Jieiress 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. Konnie and your daughter were made in heaven for each other; they are both awfully stiff, intensely disagreeable, and pre-eminently THE MASSABENE8, 187 virtuous. There'd be no more cakes and ale in our world if those two could reform it." Mr. Massarene was still mute ; Ke did not at all know what to say ; at last he asked humbly if Lord Ilurstman- ceaux had said anything on the subject. "I haven't consulted him," she replied, this time with genuine candour. " 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 hesita- tion. "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 ahvays doing penance for your ill-gotten riches." This shaft hit the gold of fact so neatly in the eye that William Massarene coloured 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 Konald. 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 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 188 THE MABSABENES. dowry if lie 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 tjou !" She laughed. Of course it was only a joke ; but the joke made her feel for the moment a little insecure and uncom- fortable, 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 Konald," 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 endeavour 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 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 TEE MASSABENES, 189 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 foser you. Bonnie's word has great weight in society." "But Lord Hurstmanceaux has 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 temporised by dropping the subject. " But — but," he said with a timid attempt to obtain a quid fro 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 if it were known that there was roulette, real roulette, in his drawing-rooms. Her eyes grew of a steely coldness, of an electric lumi- nance, and seemed to transfix him as with barbed arrows. She threw away the end of her cigarette as she got out of 190 THE MASSARENE8, 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. Konnie 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 appre- ciate the talent of Delkass, because he never sang a note under twenty guineas each warble. She had sent him down to Vale Koyal, 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 heau gargon 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 lun- cheon 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 comj^els 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 ? THE MASSARENES. 191 CHAPTER XVI. There was an old friend of liis motlier to whom Rurst- manceaux was much attached, a Mrs. iiaby of Bedlowes, with w^hom he invariably spent a few days at Whitsuntide. Bedlowes was a romantic and historic old manor in Hamp- shire, famous for its gigantic yew-trees, and a bowling-green on which Charles the First had played. To this elderly lady Mouse frankly unfolded her budget of matrimonial projects; and Mrs. Eaby, who shared the prejudices of Hurstmanceaux against novi homines, but was persuaded to conquer them for the general good, consented to allow the Massarenes to be presented to her at a Marlborough House party, and graciously invited them to go to her for a couple of days in Whitsun week. When the time came jMr. Massarene, who was told nothing, but surmised that this was the place at which the meeting with Hurstmanceaux v.as arranged, took his daughter down to this historic and romantic old house ; it had belonged to John of Gaunt, and had sheltered in the centuries of its existence many noble and unfortunate personages, the traditions of whose sojourn did not agree with the visit of " Blasted Blizzard " to its stately guest-chambers and its tapestried halls. Mrs. Eaby was a person genial, kind-hearted, and of great simplicity of manner and taste, who pleased Katheriuo and did not alarm her father; indeed he thought, irreve- rentially, to himself, '' Blast me if she don't look like an old New England Shaker sempstress," for the chatelaine of Bedlowes wore her own grey hair in the fashion of the year '40, had plain black gowns made by her women, and a very simple and homely manner. There was a large party assembled, of notable and interestiug people, amongst whom William Massarene was as a false note in a Beethoven 192 TEE MASSARENE8. renderiDg. But society, even the best society, has grown used to such false notes, and does not mind them. There is the ring of gold in the discord. Daddy Gwyllian, who was there — as where was he not ? — said to his hostess, who was his cousin, as were ninety-nine out of every hundred persons : " Why, bless us and save us, my dear Adela, have you been brought to recognise the new man from North Dakota ? I thought you were the last Tory stronghold still left standing in the country ? Do you mean you have capitu- lated to Harrenden House ? " Mrs. Eaby's sweet temper was a little ruffled. " The man is a sound Tory," she said pettishly. " If I have him here I have a very good reason for doing so." Daddy drew back a step and stared at her in mock amazement. " Everybody who has him anywhere has a very good reason for doing so. But do you mean to say, Adela, that tjou want to get on a Company, or sell a spavined racer, or weed your gallery of dubious Holbeins or spurious Romneys at a profit, or get useful hints as to Canadian or Pacific booms ? " Mrs. Raby laughed. "No, I don't want to do any of those things. I want Ronald to have a chance to admire his daughter." Daddy laughed his inward chuckling laughter; and indulged in a prolonged whistle. " Well, my dear Adela, you won't want a commission for bringing the match about as most of 'em would do. But I think I know who'd get a pretty high one if it ever came off. Lady Kenny set you on, of course ? " His hostess, who did not like the phrase "set on" as applied to herself, replied stiffly : "It would be a good thing in many ways. She is charming. She could not look more thoroughbred if she were an archduchess, and you know he is very poor despite all his self-denial. I would not for worlds," she continued with warmth, " be privy to any marriage in which either the man or the woman were sacrificed for mere money. But if they should like each other there could be no harm done but a great deal of good ; and you know that any woman who marries Ronnie will have a heart of gold in her keeping." TEE MA6SABENES. 193 Daddy nodded. " Eonnie's all right. But he's a horse you may lead to the water ; he aren't a horse you can make drink. When is he coming ? " "To-night. You know he is the most punctual and faithful of persons. He has spent the Whitsun-week with me ever since his first year at Eton." Daddy chuckled. "Lord, it will be a rare sight when he finds out what you've let him in for! His sister has been hammering at him for two years to make him know those people." " ' It is well to begin with a little aversion,' " quoted Mrs. Kaby. " Don't say anything to him, pray ; you would spoil it all." " I never say anything indiscreet," replied Daddy, with truth. "But he'll twig it for himself in a jiffy; Bonnie's real sharp." "What odious vulgarisms!" said Mrs. Baby. "You grow very vulgar. Daddy." "Must keep pace with the times," replied Daddy: " secret of keeping young, as Bulwer says somewhere. It's kind of you to give me this little bit of comedy. Why on earth do people go to nasty draughty theatres and get cricks in their neck when they have society all around 'em to make *em laugh ? " It was the tea-hour on the following day when Hurstman- ceaux arrived. Everyone was in the library, a Ir^ng, fine room M'orthy of the volumes it enshrined, of which many were rare and all well-chosen. Daddy, comfortably en- sconced in a corner, with a cup in his hand and some hot buttered scone at his elbow, waited for the coming scene. The library was dimly lighted by the descending sun, which itself was dim. He saw that Hurstmanceanx did not on his entry perceive the Massarenes, and stood by Mrs. Baby's chair for some minutes talking with her and greeting old friends; but he also saw, which surprised him, that Katherine Massarene, who was at some distance from that table and seated at another, changed countenance visibly and rose as if to leave the room, then sat down again with a pained and startled expression on her face. "She aren't in the game," thought Daddy. "But why o 194 TEE MASSAEENES. the deuce does she look like that because he's come into the room ? " Mr. Massarene drew near his daughter and whispered to her : " That man just come in is Hurstmanceaux ; Mrs. Eaby'll bring him up to us. Be civil." Daddy was too far off to hear the words, but he guessed what they were ; he saw that Katherine looked distressed, annoyed, perplexed, and began hurriedly to talk with the people round her. " She knows what they're after, and she don't like it," thought Daddy. He could not tell that in her ears and in her memory were resounding the scornful sentences, the withering sarcasms, which had been spoken to her in the walk over the frozen fields to Great Thorpe. After a time, while Daddy watched them from his snug corner, Mrs. Eaby rose and put her hand on Hurstman- ceaux's arm. "Let me present you to some friends of Clare's whom I think you don't know as yet," she murmured softly ; and ere he could be aware of what was being done with him, he was led off to Katherine and her father. Daddy watched the arrival of the unsuspecting chief actor with that lively interest which he always felt in his own amusement. He had no kind of sympathy with such prejudices as Konald's ; he would himself have dined with a sweep if the sweep could have given him something unusually good to eat ; but he liked prejudices in others as an element of human comedy which frequently produced the most diverting situations. "He's the toughest fellow in creation," he thought. " They'll no more change him than they'll make an ironclad into a lady's slipper." Eonald, although the most easy-going and unconventional of men in intimacy, had the coldness and the stiffness of the English man of rank when he was annoyed or felt himself outwitted. He was perfectly correct in his manner, but that manner was glacial as he realised the trap which had been laid in his path ; he looked eight feet in height as he bent his head in recognition of Katherine Massarene and her father. She was as cold as himself, and Mr. Massarene was divided between a feeling of great embarrassment and a desire to TEE MASSABENES. 195 propitiate a person whom he saw was not easy to win over by any means. In his difficulty he said the worst thing he could have said : "I hope, Lord Hurstmanceaux," he stammered, pro- nouncing correctly the name as society pronounced it, Hurceaux — "I venture to hope we shall be friends; your sister, Lady Kenilworth, wishes it so much." " My sister's friends are seldom mine," replied Eonald with extreme incivility ; then, fearing he might be thought to imply — as he did — something to her prejudice, added in icy accents, " I mean that her set is not mine." " Indeed ! Is that so, sir ? " said Mr. Massarene, surprised ; for the mystery of " Sets " was still unmastered by him, he only understood Classes. " The Prince is coming to stay with me at Yale Koyal," he added ; " might I hope that you too ?" "I am not in the Prince's set," said Hurstmanceaux curtly, and seeming to the eyes of Mr. Massarene to become ten feet in height. The reply was altogether beyond him. " Not in the Prince's set," he thought to himself ; " what on earth can the fellow mean ? " " Don't you go to Court, my lord ? " he said aloud in his bewilderment. Konald's severity relaxed despite himself; he laughed outright. Katherine stood by, indignant, ashamed, frozen by humiliation and anger into a statue. At last, in despera- tion, she turned to her father : " Lord Hurstmanceaux would hardly care to come to us at his cousin's place. He must have shot there many seasons. I think Mrs. Kaby is looking for you. Someone has arrived." Mr. Massarene hurried towards his hostess and her tea- table ; with a chilly inclination of the head his daughter followed him, and left Hurstmanceaux to his own reflections. The foremost of these was, that it was a pity so thorough- bred-looking a woman had such an unutterable brute for a sire. The second was that he had been guilty himself of discourtesy and incivility towards a lady to whom he already owed some apology. But he was extremely angry at the snare which had been spread for him in this innocent old house of Bedlowes. o 2 196 THE MASSARENES. He stayed three days in the same house with them, because he had no decent pretext to hasten his departure, but he avoided all chance of increased acquaintance as he would have avoided the bubonic plague in his travels through Thibet. " He's only a second-class earl and gives himself such airs as that ! " said Mr. Massarene, in great displeasure, to his daughter when he could speak to her unheard. " What do you mean by a second-class earl ? It is an expression unknown in * Burke,' " asked his daughter in her coldest accents. Mr. Massarene explained that he meant an earl who had very little money, whose chief estates were in Ireland, and who was not a knight of any Order or anything of that decorative kind. " And he said that he doesn't even go to Court," he ended as a climax. " He said nothing of the kind," replied Katheriue. " He said he was not in the Prince's set, which means — well, which means — never mind what it means. As for his rank, it is a very old creation ; at least, very old for England ; the Courcys of Faldon go back to the Conqueror." Mr. Massarene looked sharply at his daughter. "I thought you didn't like the man ? " " I neither like nor dislike him. I do not know him." Then as this seemed to her sensitive conscience some- thing approaching to an untruth, she added : *' I met Lord Hurstmanceaux as I came to Vale Royal in the train that snowy day, but that can scarcely be called an acquaintance. I think you had better not ask him there, if you will allow me to say so, for he seemed much irritated at his cousin's sale of the place to you." " The damned starched puppy ! What is the sale to liim? Roxhall's old enough to know his own business, eh?" muttered Mr. Massarene, as he thought to himself that the pet project of Lady Kenilworth would not be easy of realization. It was certainly not farther advanced by her careful arrangement of the visit to Bedlowes. " Why did you set up your back like that, Eonnie ? " said Daddy to him in the evening. " Man is a beast, but girl is good form." " I have not a word to say against her," replied Hurst- THE MASSARENJEIS, 197 manceaiix. " But as it is impossible to know lier without knowing her father, I relinquish the pleasure of doing so." " Buckram ! " said Daddy. *' 'Tisn't worn nowadays. Even soldiers don't have stocks any longer." "It is not buckram. It is common decency. That infernal cad is living in Gerald's house." " Well, that is Gerald's fault, I suppose, for selling it. You art) wrong, Konnie — quite wrong. Miss Massarene is well-bred enough to get her father accepted. In point of fact he is accepted ; he goes everywhere." " She is very distinguished-looking. But I don't know what that has to do with it," said Hurstmanceaux in his stiffest and crossest manner. " As for your seeing him anywhere, you won't see him at Faldon. I wish Mrs. Baby had told me of her intentions ; I should not have come here. I have avoided these people everywhere for two years." " People don't send a list of their guests on approval except to Koyalty. They'd never fill their houses if they did. Miss Massarene knows your sentiments, don't she? Her back was up as well as yours." " Certainly she knows them. I have never made a secret of them. Who could suppose that at Bedlowes of all places one would come across that cad ? " Daddy yawned and shut his eyes. "I think you know," he said drowsily, "that as your sister has run 'em you ought to back 'em. Must back one's own stable ! " " My sister's stable is not mine," replied Hurstmanceaux. quickly. " She runs her dark uns wholly on her own responsibility." " Of course, of course," said Daddy. " But the young woman's fit for any stables. How she came by it I don't know, but she's uncommonly well-bred." "She appears so," said Konald. "But she must dree her weird. She can no more escape the penalty of being her father's daughter than a hangman's daughter can escape hers." It was not a liberal sentiment, but it was one which seemed perfectly natural and just to the views which he took of life. 198 TEE MASSABENES. He was deeply angry with his sister and Mrs. Kaby. It seemed to him a monstrously barefaced piece of intrigue to have brought him and the Massarenes under the same roof. He did not think Katherine herself privy to it ; there had been surprise and trouble as well as embarrassment in her eyes when he had been led up to her ; but he was sure that her father had been in the plot. He spoke in his usual tone ; not loud, but not very low. He had his back turned to a grand piano of Erard's which stood in a recess ; but Daddy Gwyllian had his face turned to it, and he could see through his sleepy eyes that Katherine Massarene, who with some men around her was at that moment approaching the instrument, had, though at some distance, heard the last part of this speech regarding the hangman's daughter. He was certain that she had done so by a flush which rose over her face and a momentary pause which she made. In another instant she had reached the Erard and seated herself by it. If she had felt any emotion it did not make her touch less clear, her memory less perfect, as she played through the grand passages of Beethoven's Sonata in E flat. Daddy did not hear the sonata ; he was away in the land of dreams, comfortably hidden behind a huge African palm- tree, his placid round face looking as innocent as a babe's in his slumber ; even his curiosity could not keep him awake any longer. Hurstmanceaux, who loved and understood good music, listened charmed despite himself ; but when the last chords thrilled through the air he did not join the group which gathered round her, but walked away to another of the drawing-rooms. From the distance he could see her as she sat at the Eianoforte receiving the compliments of the men about her ; ut the expression of her countenance was proud, cold and bored. She had looked very difierent on the Woldshire highroad and in the market-place of the little town. He felt sorry for her ; there was something in her bearing, in her manner, in her countenance, so far superior to her parentage and position. She looked like the last scion of some great unfortunate race rather than the heiress of new ill-gotten millions. TEE MASSARENES. 199 " Ou frenez-vous ce ton qui rC aiopartient qua vous ? " lie thought; and he acquitted her of any conspiracy in the cross-country walk, any complicity in his sister's manoeuvre to make her meet him at Bedlowes. She was undoubtedly a victim of circumstances — a square-cut ivory peg which was ill fitted to the round gilded hole into which it was forced. He did not for a moment doubt the sincerity of her dislike to her position; his own nature was one which enabled him to understand the revolt of hers. " But she must dree her weird," he thought again. " Why are you so uncivil to that charming person who renders Beethoven so perfectly ? " said his hostess to him that evening. " There is no harm in the charming person, but there is a great deal in her antecedents," replied Hurstmanceaux very coldly. " Oh, * antecedents,' my dear Konnie ! Who can look at them ? Koyalty itself disregards them when — when " " When there's money enough ! I am not bound to follow the example of Eoyalty." " You did what was unworthy of you, my dear old friend," he added. " Of course Mouse egged you on ; but you should know what Mouse is by this time." " Indeed she meant no harm in this instance. She knows that you want money." " I do not want money. I have not got very much at my command : that is another matter." " But the boys are such a drag on you ? " " Oh, no, they are fine fellows ; they interest me, and they do very much what I tell them." " You are a good man, Konald, but you are obstinate and prejudiced." " On a les defauts de ses qualites. I am not sure that I can boast any especial qualites, but I do know this, that I would be shot to-morrow rather than shake hands with a low brute who comes from God knows where with probably untold crimes upon his conscience." Mrs. Kaby shuddered and gave a nervous glance to the far distance where Mr. Massarene was playing whist. She was a delicate aged woman, and the idea of entertaining an undetected criminal was extremely painful to her. 200 THE MAS8ARENES. " He does look very like Cruickshank's burglars in Oliver Twist,'' she thought, regarding the round bullet head and Camus nose of her guest as he scowled down on the cards which he held; he was losing, and losing to the Principal of an Oxford College, whilst a Cabinet Minister was his (very inefficient) partner ; but Mr. Massarene did not like losing — even at half-crown points and in the best company. He had not had much practice at whist ; but he possessed a mathematical brain, and grasped its combina- tions admirably ; and he would have made his inferior hand do the work of a good one if the Cabinet Minister had not been an ass, but had been able to second him. " They put men in the Government here," he thought, " who over yonder we should not think had brains enough to drive a sweet-stuff barrow on a plank walk." For despite the deference which he really felt for the world into which he had entered, he could not help the shrewd good sense in him boiling up sometimes into a savage contempt. To his rough strong temper and his unscrupulous keenness the gentlemen who were now his companions in life did seem very poor creatures. " H I ever get into the Cabinet I'll show them the time of day," he thought very often. There was no reason why he should not get into the Cabinet as he had once got into the House. He was made of the solid metal, and the plebeian respectability, with which patrician conservatism, trembling in its shoes for its own existence, is delighted to ally itself; and knew that he would make a very good minister of the type which works hard, pleases the public, is always mentioned with praise by the Press of the Party, and lends itself to the illustration of admirable public- dinner speeches in praise of the Constitution, and of that constitutional bulwark the Middle Class. He was a very shrewd man and he had the golden gift of silence. He knew his shortcomings better than his wife knew hers, and so concealed his ambitions more successfully. Nobody could " draw " him. Men in the smoking-room of his own or other houses often tried after dinner to make him " give himself away," but they never succeeded. He was never warmed by wine or friendship into indiscreet reminiscences or revelations. TEE MASSARENES. 201 Moreover in business he was facile princeps ; no one could beat him in the supreme knowledge of money or how to make it. And indeed the thorough knowledge of and capacity for business does carry its own weight with it in an age in which the Mercurius of mart and change is chief of all the gods. In society he was a heavy, awkward, common-looking man, who did not know what to do with his hands, and always sat on the edge of his chair, with his legs very wide apart. But in a club-room, a committee-room, a board- room, a bank parlour, anywhere where there was question of the sowing and reaping of gold, he was a totally different person ; he was at his ease, on his ground, master of his subject and of his hearers ; his hands rested on his knees with a firm grip, his words were trenchant, convincing, logical ; and on his pallid, fleshy, expressionless face there came a look, very hard, very unmerciful, very cunning, but a look of intelligence and power, and of entire command of his object. The mind showed through the envelope of flesh. It was a money-making mind, a harsh astute grasping mind, a mean ignoble greedy mind, but it was a master mind in its way, and as such impressed itself on all those who encountered it on its field of combat. And the men that came into contact with him knew that he had been a day labourer who had, entirely by his own ability and industry, become the possessor of a colossal fortune, and all men respect this successful self-help, and few inquire if the self-help have been made with clean hands. He was what is called an essentially worthy man, and he was an essentially modern product of modern energies. He had no perceivable sins, he conformed to all religious observances, he had always kept on the right side of the law, he never made a jest, and he never lost a shilling. As a husband he was faithful, as a father exemplary, as a Chris- tian devout, and as a citizen blameless. If thousands of people had cursed him, if tens of thousands of workmen had sweated for him, if hundreds of thousands of cattle had perished for him, if gambling hells and drinking shops and opium-dens had enriched him, if rotten ships and starved crews, and poisonous trades and famished families had helDed to make the splendours of Harrenden House and 202 TEE MASSARENES. the glories of Yale Eoyal, these facts did not matter to either society or Christianity, and were mere personal details into which nobody could enter. William Massarene was one of those persons who are the pillars of the great middle class and the sources of that healthy plebeian blood from which a decaying patriciate is recruited. " I stand by all as upholds property," he said one day to Lord Greatrex, the great Conservative leader. " The Northern Farmer has said it before you," murmured that gentleman. " The creed is sound and simple, if not popular." Massarene dared not swear in such a presence, but he thought, " Damn popularity ! " He did not want to be popular. He despised the people : which was very natural, for he had come from them. He liked to drive behind his sleek high-bred carriage-horses and see the crowd part in the Strand or on the Embank- ment, and women and children scurry and stumble to make way for his progress ; it made him realise the vast distance which now separated himself from the common multitude. He would have liked, if it had been possible, to knock down half-a-dozen of the rabble as a sign of his superiority. But he was in a country full of policemen and prejudices, and so he had to show his superiority in another manner. One morning, when he was driving to a meeting in the City with a member of parliament, who was a noted philan- thropist, in his brougham, his high-stepping bays did knock down an old woman, lame and very poorly clad. William Massarene held all women in slight esteem, but old women were in his estimate wholly useless and obnoxious ; he would have put them all at forty years old in lethal chambers. When cattle were past bearing they went to the shambles, eh ? But, having a philanthropist beside him, and two police- men at his carriage-door, he busied himself about this maimed old female, had her put in a cab, told his footman to go on the box with her, and ordered his card to be given to the authorities of the nearest hospital. " Say I will provide for her for life," he said to his servant rather loudly. The people in the street cheered him. TEE MAS8ARENE8. 203 \ " That's a real gemman ! " said a baker's boy. ^ ^ j William Massarene threw the discerning lad a shilling. \ "Dear friend," said the religious philanthropist with : emotion, " how glad I am to see that your immense pros- j perity has not driven out the warmth of human sympathy j from your heart." Massarene was sorely tempted to put his tongue in his - cheek, but as he saw that the philanthropist's face was quite j grave he kept his own equally serious. \ " You've an uncommon lot of barebacked poor for a ! Christian country, sir," he said in return — a reply which somewhat disconcerted the philanthropist. 204 TEE MASSAUENES, CHAPTEE XVII. In the autumn of tlie year the general election took place, and Southwoldshire returned William Massarene, whilst Limehouse selected a labour member to represent its in- terests. His majority was smaller than the Carlton agent had calculated and the Conservative press prophesied, but that made little impression on him, though it disappointed his party. A large portion of the country-folks would not hear of the newcomer, who had turned out the Koxhalls. " He's no more nor us, that chap, and an uncommon ugly jowl he've got," said one old gaffer to another, as they munched their noonday snack under the hedge which they had been cutting down into the hideousness demanded by high farming, or behind which they had been drenching the mosses and lichens of old apple-trees with a solution of lime and sublimate of iron, as scientific experts advise. He took with the yokels to a certain extent, as the marquis had said, but not in those districts where the Koxhalls were beloved, and where the labourers liked a gentleman and knew one when they saw him. Moreover, the clergy of the county backed him to a man, and that lost him many votes from the rustic population. " Passon knows which side his bread be buttered," said the old gaffers; and even the influence of Lady Kenilworth and other Primrose Dames, who came down to canvass for him, and who did not scruple to plead and to promise every- thing possible and impossible, could not turn them to the side espoused by the Established Church. " My cousin Koxhall begs you to plump for his friend," she assured them ; but the gaffers smelt the lie, and were not to be caught by chaff. They were corrupted by political bunkum, weakened in their marrow by a tawdry and TEE MASSABENES. 205 trumpery civilisation, bewildered by the multitude of their teachers and flatterers, but they were still the descendants in direct line of the bowmen of Cressy and the king's troopers of Naseby, and they knew good blood when they saw it, and did not like the look of the gold-man from Ameriky. However, by the aid of that man in the moon, whose occult and untraceable influence determines all political elections all the world over, these loyal and sturdy rustics were put in the minority, and the clergy and the county- people crowded them out at the polls. " Lord save us ! How they dawdle over matters here ! " thought the successful candidate. " In Dakota I'd just have run in thirty thousand miners, and the trick 'd been done." He almost, for an instant, regretted that he had forsaken the congenial country of mug-wamps and roarbacks, where the ten-dollar bill could satisfactorily circulate and settle everything, as the power of the purse should do. He was with difficulty restrained from exercising those feudal rights which he conceived were his through the possession of Vale Koyal, and giving notice to quit to everybody on his estate who had voted against him. ** If my hands had voted against me in the States," he said, with his blackest frown, " they'd hev known a hotter hole than hell." " Yes, Billy, but we are not in the States," said his fair guide, philosopher and friend, "and there are 'dfew people here who can't be bousfht, and mustn't be bullied." " One don't meet that sort in society, nor see 'em in church," he growled under his breath. "Perhaps you don't," she replied, not well pleased. " But they are not a quantite negligeaUe. I mean, you mustn't set their backs up and their tongues wagging. ^ don't know what the Carlton wouldn't do to you if you turned out the lowest Tommy Trot of them all from one of your cottages, because he voted against you. On the contrary, it is to that particular Tommy Trot wdio voted against you that you must send coals and blankets at Christmas, and port wine and beef-tea when he gets fever." He muttered that he couldn't do more than that for the Tommy Trots who had voted for him. 206 THE MASSARENES. " Of course you can't," she answered. " And for them you may do less." William Massarene pondered silently on this reply, and came to the conclusion that if political life in England was much less corrupt than in the States — as they all said — it was certainly, also, much more complicated. On the whole, he had preferred Limehouse to Southwoldshire ; the London mechanics had understood him with a wink, and their stomachs had not " riz " at bribery direct or indirect. " My vote's my owd, ain't it ? " one rivet-maker there had said to him. *' Well, I can do what I like with my own, can't I ? I can wallup my old 'ooman, and my brats, and my dawg, and I can sell my vote, that's flat. Yah ! — hand the blunt over, old un." That was a practical politician, with whom he had rejoiced to make a deal. But these rural electors, who turned him out of their hovels, and chalked up on their walls " Eoxhalls for us ; not no Yankees," were so abhorrent to his feelings as a county magnate and a future peer that he would have seen them all dead of fen fever with pleasure, and would not have sent them a single drop of port wine, however much Lady Kenny and the Carlton had counselled it. But she and the Carlton between them contrived to restrain him from any public or compromising expression of his feelings, and although there was some talk of a peti- tion against his return being made, it never went farther than words, and when the new Parliament assembled, William Massarene represented in it one of the most aristocratic counties in England, which had been repre- sented by some Koxhall's nominee ever since George the Third had ascended the throne. " One of the infamous results of that inexcusable sale," said Hurstmanceaux, in the smoking-room of the Marlborough. The remark was reported to a lady who did not love Eoxhall, and who caused it to be reported in turn to him at the French watering-place where he was curing his body and fretting his soul. "Bonnie might guess who was under the sale," he thought, "who had the gilt off the gingerbread." His cousin Mouse had always done what she chose with him. THE MA88ARENE8, 207 Their families knew it, his wife knew it, his county knew it. He was in other ways a clever and high-spirited man, but she made him a fool, a coward, a tool, a laughing-stock. It seemed to him that Konnie might know that and excuse him. " Well, Billy, how do you get on in the House ? " asked Lady Kenilworth one evcming after Whitsuntide when she had been dining with him. Mr. Massarene did not immediately reply. " Billy " was always a very hard raorsel for him to swallow. "I hear they're very pleased with you," she added graciously. " Indeed, my lady ? " " Don't say * my lady.' Surely you might have left that off by this time. ' Yes, you get on there they say. It is very difficult you know." She Avas not pleased that he had become politically successful ; she knew that it would make him more inde- pendent of her, and that he would now find many to " show him the way ".with whom Cocky could not compete. She was driven to rely for her influence on his admiration of her, which bored her to extinction but which was a fulcrum she could not neglect. Then there was that odious cat, as she called his daughter, though Katherine Massarene had very little that was feline in her. The presence of Katherine Massarene was as unpleasant to her as the presence in a card-room of a very calm and intelligent player, who is not playing but looking on with an eye- glass in his eye, is to the man who is cheating at bac'. "Why couldn't that young woman stay in India and marry one of Framlingham's household ? " she thought with great irritation, and William Massarene himself began to think the same ; his daughter frequently made him feel uncomfortable when her glance dwelt on him where he sat beside Lady Kenilworth at a race or a ball or an opera ; he felt like a boy detected in trying to climb a pear-tree. " Damn it all, if I ever get the pears, I've paid precious high for 'em," he thought; all the same his daughter's calm, contemplative, contemptuous glance made him feel that at his age he had no business to be tempted by such Bweet forbidden fruit. 208 THE MASSARENES, " What do you watch me for so ? " he said savagely one day. " I was not aware that I did," she replied, and was quite truthful in the reply. "You are terrible unfilial, my dear!" cried Mrs. Mas- sarene. " What tens of thousands there is as would give their souls to be in your shoes." "Possibly," said Katherine with fatigue. The opinions she had expressed to Lord Framlingham in India were still hers, unaltered, indeed strengthened, by all which she had seen in English society since her return to her parents' house. She often thought of the walk across the frozen fields to Greater Thorpe, and when once or twice she saw Hurst- manceaux when riding, or at the opera, she felt a sense of shame burn in her heart and warm her cheeks which it required all her serenity and self-control to restrain from outward evidence. " The hangman's daughter ! " she said to herself, recalling the speech she had overheard at Bedlowes. "Oh, how right he was ! " When he saw her he bowed to her gravely and courteously, but never attempted to approach her. " My dear child, if you rile your father he won t leave you nothing," said Margaret Massarene, in her emotion forgetting the syntax of her new sphere. " So be it," said Katherine ; "but why do you speak of him as so sure to die before me ? He is a very strong man and he is only fifty-seven." ''My dear," whispered her mother in sepulchral tones, " 'tis true he's a very strong man, but the cooking '11 kill him before his time, to say nothing of other things. Look ye, Kathleen, a man works like a horse and toils like an ox all the best of his years, just beef and bread and bacon and beer, and them only taken in snacks, just to keep the body going. Then all at once, when he's made his pile, he says, says he, * Now I'll stuff,' and he eats like ten princes rolled in one and drinks in proportion, because he's made his money and why shouldn't he spend it ? And he forgets as he's a liver, and he forgets as he ain't as young as he used to be, and he forgets as the fatted hog would die of fat if the butcher didn't stick him first." i'EE MASSARENE8. 209 With which homely illustration she sighed heavily and patted her smart gown in a melancholy reverie. ''I dare say you are right," said her daughter. *''But if my father were temperate by force of will so very long, is it not strange that temperance should not have become his habit, too strong a habit to be ever broken ? " Her mother shook her head. "I don't suppose, my dear, you've watched pigs in the sties, and out; I have. They'll put up with bran when they must, but lord, if they get out amongst the clams and the yams, twist their tails as you will they'll ne'er leave off. When a man's made his pile he's just like a pig in a sweet potato patch." With which apologue she sighed again and rose to go and dress for her daily drive behind those immensely tall and always-prancing horses, who always seemed to her as the winged beasts of the Apocalypse. " And as for temperance," she said as she paused in the doorway, ** well, my dear, 'tisn't temperate as I'd call any man out West. Your father could drink deep like the rest ; but he had always a very strong head ; a very strong head indeed, my dear." Was his strong head being turned by Lady Kenilworth ? his daughter wondered. Would the brain which had never gro>vn dizzy over the poisoned drinks and the delirious speculations of America be whirled out of its orbit by that which is the most intoxicating thing in all creation — a lovely woman who is also a woman of the world? She believed that Lady Kenilworth would do precisely what she pleased with him. Did not she and her roulette wheel reign in triumph even in the arcana of Harrenden House ? As far as a woman who is essentially honourable, candid, and sinf^le-minded can follow the moves and read the mind of one who is entirely without those qualities, she under- stood the character and the circumstances of her father's Venus victrix. She had asked Framlingham what his opinion was of her, and he had answered : " I never say anything but good of a woman, my dear; but if I had the choice between seeing one of my sons enamoured of her, or shot by his own hand, I should choose the revolver, as less prejudicial to his reputation than the lady." 210 THE MA8SAEENES, She was very sensible that her position as the daughter of the house did not permit her in any way to show her own disapprobation of one of its favoured guests. She knew also that nothing she could have said or have done would have ever moved her father a hair's breadth. She remained strictly passive and neutral, but to all the ad- vances of Hurstmanceaux's sister she was adamant; and now and then a caustic hint or phrase escaped her ; usually when she saw her mother treated with unconcealed contempt by the lady of her father's idolatry. "I am going on to the Duchess of Parminster's reception; are you ? said Mrs. Massarene one evening, satisfied that this time, at least, she was saying the right thing. " Old Par's Zoo ? Not if I know it," said Jlouse, in her brusquest tone, and, turning her shoulder on her unfortunate interlocutor, resumed her interrupted flirtation. " There is no play at the Parminsters ! " said Katherine Massarene in a tone, low, but so clear that Mouse reddened angrily, and several persons near smiled indiscreetly, despite themselves. Mrs. Massarene went crestfallen to her carriage. If a duchess, daughter, wife, and mother of dukes, was not a distinguished acquaintance, who was? And if a party gathered together to meet princes could be called a menagerie, where was salvation to be found ? She was a meek woman, used to endure bullying with patience, but now and then her bile would rise, as she expressed it, under the insolence of that lovely lady who yet exercised over her the fascination of the brilliant- coated snake for the humble barndoor hen. She resented, but she dared not rebel. She went to the assembly at Parminster House sorely exercised in her mind and vaguely wondering what could be amiss with a courtly crowd, in which the first person she saw was her future sovereign, who had dined there. *' Well, he comes because there are certain dishes they do so remarkably well in this house," said Daddy Gwyllian, of whom she asked for information, as he took her to have an ice. •* But Lady Kenny wouldn't trouble herself to show here ; it's not her style ; it's deadly respectable. You see she's too young to bore herself at present for the sake of a sauce." TEE MA88ABENES. 211 Mrs. Massarene sighed and reflected that the study of society was a service which required to be learned very young. Mouse felt herself read and understood by Billy's daughter, and she did not like it. When she dined at Harrenden House or made them give a ball there, the evenings were spoiled to her by the sense that those large, calm, dark-violet eyes of the young woman of the house were upon her and all her doings. Who would ever have supposed that such a cockatrice's egg of irony and insolence could have been laid and hatched in such a nest of respectful subserviency as was Harrenden House ? The air, the manner, the style, even the glance of this young woman were odious to her; the idea of Billy's daughter daring to be cold and distant to herself, and pretending to be a gentlewoman in her own right ! What possible business had a young woman, so born, to arched insteps, beautiful hands, and a low melodious voice ? The thing was preposterous ! " Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred," her natural sphere the still-room or the laundry, how could she venture to carry herself with dignity at a Drawing-room, and answer patronage with cold disdain ? " I really think," she reflected, " that she must be a natural daughter of Framlingham's, whom he has got the Massarenes to adopt. She has just his caustic way of saying things, and it would account for her going to India." This fable seemed so satisfactory to her that she whispered it to one or two persons, who in turn whispered it to two or three others, till it became generally whispered and be- lieved, and was indeed only not heard by the persons whom it immediately concerned, and who alone could have disproved it. "But if she's old Billy's heiress, it don't matter a pin whose daughter she was ? " said Brancepeth, with admirable common sense, the kind of common sense which is a conspicuous trait of youth at the end of this century. And it was the general sentiment. This story came to the ears of Hurstmanceaux. " Who told you ? " he said to the lady who prattled it to him. p 2 212 THE MASSABENES. " Mouse," the lady hastened to say. " It is because it came from her that I believed it." He went to his sister. " I hear you are the originator of a story that Miss Mas- sarene is the daughter of Framlingham. What authority have you for such a statement ? " She laughed a little. " Oh, I don't know ! I think so " " You think so. Is that all ? " " Well, yes, I suppose it is. But I am quite sure of it." " On what grounds ? " '' Grounds ? What do you mean ? It is my idea " *' Ah ! it is your idea. And for such ideas, when they are spoken or written, there is a legal phraseology and a legal punishment." She looked at him startled, but amused. *• What can you possibly mean ? One can say anything one pleases." " If it be not libel. This is. You will do well to contradict the report you have set afloat." " Goodness, Konald ! How odd you are ! You won't even know these people. What can it matter to you whether they are talked of or not ? " " It matters nothing to me. But it matters much to me that you should invent and circulate falsehoods, and try to injure by them an entirely blameless person." " Meaning Katherine Massarene ? " " Certainly, meaning Miss Massarene." She laughed, much diverted. " Are you changing your mind about her ? " " In no way. But she is a person who conducts herself admirably in a most difficult and odious position, and I do not choose to allow you to circulate inventions which may ultimately injure her extremely. You will remember that some time ago I made you retract a calumny ; I shall act in the same way now unless you, of your accord, can completely withdraw this tale you have set about." She was silent. She remembered how unpleasant he had been when she had fabricated a pretty web of falsehoods concerning one of TEE MA8SARENE8. 213 her acquaintances, actually forcing her to apologise to all the people concerned. " I can't imagine why you should care," she said sullenly. "To care for abstract justice is quite unintelligible to you," he answered. "It is to most people. Will you retract this lie or will you not ? " " You make a storm in a teacup. What will you do if I don't?" " I shall tell your friend Mr. Massarene how you return his hospitalities, and I shall make you confess your inventions." " How horrid you are, Eonald ! " she said, while her lips quivered, partly with fear and partly with rage. "You won't look at the young woman, and yet you set your back up like this. Oh, of course I can tell people that I was only joking. Bat it will be very disagreeable." " You should bridle your tongue," said Hurstmanceaux sternly, surprised himself to feel with what extreme irrita- tion this story of hers had awakened in him. He could not and would not know Massarene's heiress, but he admired her conduct in society ; he admired most of all what others condemned in her, the contemptuous coldness and indifference of her manner, her brief replies, some- times so cutting and caustic, her avoidance of all those whose high position made them sought by her parents, the unwavering coldness with which she resented all court paid to her. When he watched her in the world, he felt inclined to applaud as he would have applauded a fine innings at Lord's or a hard-won race on the Thames. It seemed to him monstrous that his sister, because her matrimonial schemes had failed, should pursue with slander anyone so innocent and so much to be praised. William Massarene was in no haste to marry his daughter. His vanity would have impelled him to give her an unusual dower if she had married, and he did not care to cut so huge a slice out of his capital. Moreover, his ambitions, growing by what they fed on, became inordinate. No alliance seemed to him great enough. Besides, he thought often, the old woman might go to glory, and he might marry again and have sons. To his 214 TEE MASSABENES. strength of purpose and yastness of reach the future — his future — seemed illimitable. She received a homage which nauseated, a flattery which disgusted, her. She knew that she was seen through the golden haze of her father's reputation for wealth. *'If I were deaf, or blind, or crooked," she thought, " if I were diseased, or imbecile, or mutilated, there would not be one the less ready to worship and wed me out of all these throngs of wooers." And very often her brief words cut them like a lash, and in her eyes, which were the hue of the darkest purple of a pansy, there came a flash of scorn whose cause those around her were too self-complacent to attribute aright. She had but one pleasure — that of bringing together great artists, and causing Harrenden House to be renowned for something better than the usual display and expendi- ture of " new " houses. She had difficulty in making her father pay the singers and musicians as she wished them to be paid, for he who would give two guineas a bottle for a rare Comet-wine, or waste many thousands of pounds in receiving a sporting prince at Yale Koyal, grudged their fees to what he contemptuously called "professionals." But when he saw how greatly these musical entertainments " took on," and how much they did to raise the tone of his house, he gave her large credit and discretion, and the reputation for tho weekly chamber-music at Harrenden House soon attracted to it those choicer souls whom millions and Eichemont could not alone have drawn there. Sometimes she wished she could invite that lover of music who had listened to the sonata in B flat at Bedlowes. She would sooner have seen him there than his sister, who showed for an hour at these concerts, and then took herself off to some gayer form of entertainment. " It is intensely classic and correct, but deadly dull," said Lady Kenil worth, although she was, on occasion, a musical composer herself, and wrote little songs which, with many corrections and additions from Delkase and other salon singers and fashionable pianists, passed muster and were published as her own. Once, to please her, Massarene bade his daughter have TEE MA88ABENE8, 215 one of these ballads sung at the next Harrenden House concert. "My dear father, get someone else to manage these things," she answered. " Or let us give them up altogether. But bad amateur music I will not have sung or played whilst I am responsible for the selection." She was quite resolute on the point, and, as he did not wish concerts which were so admired to be abandoned, he could not please his idol in this matter. "She says your songs ain't good enow, my lady," he announced grimly, with that relish in annoying her which occasionally overcame his submissiveness, at such times as he remembered the diplomatist and the Bird rooms, or saw a bevy of men round her as she donned her evening cloak. The announcement did not lessen the impatient aversion which she felt for his heiress. " Are you afraid of your own daughter, Billy ? " she asked very contemptuously. "I ain't afraid of nobody," said Mr. Massarene ; and there was an ugly look for a moment on his face. " What an odious man he was ! " she thought. " What a lout, what a bore, and, no doubt, what a bully too where he could be so ! " Sometimes a gleam of good sense made her afraid of him ; afraid of all the obligations which she was under to him ; afraid of some future reprisal he might take for all her insolence. But she was utterly careless and extremely imprudent, and she dismissed the fear as soon as it assailed her. "You don't marry your daughter, Billy," she said one day. "It was very provoking that the affair with my brother went off as it did." "It was never on that I am aware on," said William Massarene stiffly, with a look like that of a displeased bull on his face. " Well, no, of course it wasn't. Eonald wouldn't know you. I'm afraid, my good Billy, there'll be people who won't know you to the very end of your days." He looked more displeased still, but he was accustomed to bear her insolences patiently. 216 TEE MASSABENES. " Every man has his price, they say," he answered dog- gedly. " Seems as I haven't hit on Lord Hurstmanceaux's." He did not venture to say to her that he was delighted her project had failed. " What funny things you say, Billy," cried Mouse, with a peal of her enchanting laughter. He was charmed, and began to believe himself a wit. "I'm coming to hear j'OU to-night," she added. He had been asked to speak on the Early Closing Bill ; ihe bill was originally a Conservative measure, and so the Conservative party was obliged to support it in its Radical dress. The prospect made him nervous, but he was a man who knew how to control his nerves ; and he had that solid sense of his own powers which when it is allied to good sense is the surest of all support. Moveover, I^Iouse knew exactly how to flatter whilst she bullied him ; to flatter him enough, to make him happy, never enough to make herself ridiculous, or her kind words cheap. " It's darned rot," thought William Massarene. " All this here kind of thing is socialism in disguise. The public is treated like a child, and an idiot child. If it wants shops open late, it'll pay traders to keep 'em open, and if it wants 'em shut early, it won't pay traders to keep 'em open. That's all about it, I reckon. 'Tis one of them things that should be left to the public. A trader don't want to sit twiddling his thumbs, and why in hell's name should the Government force him to twiddle his thumbs ? " But this simple common-sense view of the case was not the one taken by the persons he had to support, and so he prepared a very neat speech which argued the case from the opposite point of view to his own. " Awful rot," he thought, as he jotted down the heads of it. " But this old country takes the cake for rot." Naturally, he did not care a straw which way the votes went ; the time had long gone by when he had kept a shop, and even the time when he had owned many shops with dummy names over their doors and dummy proprietors returned in the census ; and whether Islington, and Netting Hill, and Camden Town, and Bethnal Green burned gas till midnight, or shut up at twilight, did not matter the least to him. THE MAS8ARENES, 217 She had pro]3hesied his success in the House, and he soon justified her prophecy. He spoke on questions of home-legislation, and spoke well, in short but telling sentences without nervousness, but with apparent modesty ; to be sure, there was the drawback of his accent, which was at once plebeian and Yankee, but of this he was himself unconscious, and the time is passed when the House of Commons exacted either education or elegance ; it has heard so many dialects and dropped aspirates within the last twenty years that its ear has grown deaf to such offences. What he had to say seemed to him, in its matter, very poor trash, but he said it well ; and a sense that this stout, uncouth, unpleasant person would be a tower of strength in their ranks spread itself downward from their chief throughout all the ranks of the Conservative party, and made them feel that they had better not call him Billy too often. He was too sagacious a man to be tempted to speak on subjects out of his range of special knowledge ; on those of which he had such knowledge, stocks, mining, railways, or finance, he spoke rarely, but with admirable practical astuteness ; the House saw that he was an authority not to be despised. In smart society he was embarrassed and ill at ease and conscious of his own deficiencies ; but with men on public matters, he was neither daunted or dazzled. He had a very poor opinion of the House of Commons, whether as a talking-shop or a manager of public business, and he felt nothing of the awe which is popularly supposed to be inspired in all new members by the sight of the Speaker's Mace. He had quickly taken the measure of the Assembly, and he was not afraid of it. He thought it a very poor affair ; wasting all its time in jaw, and timidly endeavouring to conciliate the masses, which, to his knowledge, were best governed with a stock-whip and a six-shooter. But he was too shrewd to let his private opinion leak out ; and he contented himself with making both sides of the House feel that a man had come amongst them who, if they liked to listen to him, could teach them the time of day on all subjects which concerned practical politics and the business side of government. 218 THE MA8SABENES, The Irish members loathed him because he had turned his back on Ireland and joined the Unionists. But on the rest of the House the impression he made was favourable. After all, a politician who has Kichemont at the head of his kitchen, and gives you the great wines of comet years, is a superior companion on the benches to the Nonconformist schoolmaster, the hungry barrister, or the professor full of crotchets, whom Northern England or Eastern London sends to St. Stephen's. " Eeally, Billy, you got on very well," said Mouse, who had come to the speaker's box to hear him ; that little box is much more comfortable than the Lady's Gallery. '* 'Twas all soft sawder," said Mr. Massarene, with grim contempt. She was standing in the corridor twisting a lace wrap round her head, and he had come upstairs after the division to receive her congratulations and take her orders. " What I'd like to teach 'em is how to do the business of this 'ere House. Why, if any private business was carried on for half a year as the business of the nation's done by these gentlemen, there'd be an almighty smash such as somebody'd go in the docks for " " Tell the House so," said Mouse, much diverted. He puffed out his cheeks, which was his equivalent for a smile. " Guess, my lady, 'tain't the place for truth-telling." " You should have gone to the other side." He shook his head. " Not me, my lady. What do the Radicals say to me ? This is what they say : * My good fellow, you've earned five shillin's by sweatin' all day; hand it over here, will ye? We want to buy beer and beefsteaks for Tom, Dick, and Harry, who've been sittin' loafin' on a wall over there while you was workin'.' No Radicals for me if I know it." "You are very delightful, Billy," said his patroness, *'and you may come with us to supper at the Papillons Club. I'm dreadfully hungry, though I have only been * loafin" behind a grating. I've made rendezvous there with Carrie." He obeyed the permission of his enchantress ; and meekly ate some oysters and drank some champagne in TEE MASSABENES. 219 company with her and a dozen of her gayest associates ; it occurred to no one of them to pay the bill, and the head waiter took it discreetly to the master of Harrenden House when no one else was looking. The Papillons was a new and very fashionable supper club, much resorted to after the opera, the theatres, and parliamentary debates. He felt that it was a place too full of gaiety, frivolity, and youth to be a meet place for a member of parliament and a Croesus of his age and his ambitions. He thought suppers apoplectical, champagnes even hruf, very poor stuff, and English oysters ridiculous ; nevertheless, he went, and was rewarded by seeing his enchantress toss the liliputian bivalves down her rosy throat and turn her shoulder on him as she had done on his wife. To be sure, he had the privilege of paying the bill, a privilege which he found the English aristocracy always willing to concede to him. " There'll always be people too proud to know me, will there ? " he thought, as he drove homeward ; " but I guess there'll never be people too proud to let me pay for 'em." 220 TBE MASSABENES, CHAPTER XYIII. The giddy months frolicked away like youths and maidens dancing on a golden ground on one of Puvis de Chavanne's friezes. Flirting, laughing, gaming, waltzing, shooting, hunting, driving, dressing — above all dressing — the seasons succeeded each other with breathless rapidity for Mouse Kenilworth, and hundreds of fair women like her. Money grew scarcer, credit grew rarer, Billy became less easy to bleed, Harry seemed to grow duller and less good- looking, cabmen became shyer still of Cocky, and the old duke more unwilling to sign and sell ; but she still all the same enjoyed herself, still carried high her golden head, and still crammed forty-eight hours into every twenty-four. Occasionally she did a little philanthropy ; inaugurated a railway line, visited some silk mills, or laid the stone of a church. The silver barrow she received made a pretty flower-stand, the pieces of silk offered to her were also useful in their way, and when she had opened a church she felt she had a dispensation for months from attending church-services. Only Egypt she could not manage this year. Egypt is a pastime which requires a good deal of ready money, and she had to console herself with hunting in the Midlands and shooting rocketters in the damp English woods ; she did not really care about shooting, but she found zest in it because Ronald and the old duke hafced the idea of women killing things, and even Brancepeth disapproved it. She went down again more than once to Vale Royal and went out with the hounds to whose maintenance her host had subscribed so liberally. But in February a long black frost sent hunters to their straw and riders up to town, and she opened her house in Stanhope Street as the session THE MASSABENES. 221 Opened at Westminster. She had the children up also ; partly because she was really fond of them, partly because children jposer you, and touch the heart and the purse-strings of your relatives. She disliked the town in winter ; she wanted to be in Cairo or at Monte Carlo or Kome ; but, being in London, she made the best of it and took her graceful person to any place where she thought she could be amused. There are many dinners in London when the frost binds the country in its iron bonds and the horses champ and fret in their stalls, and the herons starve by the frozen streams, and the dead kingfishers lie like crumpled heaps of broken iris-flowers on the cruel ice of their native ponds. " Has Billy run dry ? " asked her lord one day when their financial difficulties w^ere pressing more hardly than usual, and an unpaid cabman had threatened Bow Street. " No," said Mouse curtly. " But the young woman is always there. She's as sharp as a needle." " Why didn't you splice her to Eonnie ? " " He won't even look at her." " How exactly like him ! " said Cocky. " If there's a thing he might do to oblige one he always kicks at it." Hurstmanceaux always seemed to them odiously unfeeling and huffy ; nevertheless, as they always did in their troubles, they sent to him to come and speak to them one day when their creditors had been more offensive than usual. He was so rarely in town that they agreed it was only prudent to take advantage of his being there for a week or two on account of evidence he had to give before a House of Lords Committee on an Irish land question. What Daddy Gwyllian had said once in the smoking- room at Otterbourne House, and had more than once since then repeated, dwelt in Hurstmanceaux's memory, and made him doubt whether it was indeed worth while to go on impoverishing himself for people who had neither gratitude nor scruple. After all, if the Duke of Otterbourne's eldest son went into the Bankruptcy Court, it was the Duke of Otterbourne's affair. It would be cruelly hard on Otterbourne, who was himself one of the most upright, honourable and conscientious of 222 TEE MAS8ARENE8. gentlemen. But it would be still harder on himself, Hurst- manceaux, after his long self-denial and self-sacrifice to find himself in Queer Street for sake of his brother-in-la\y, a brother-in-law whom he considered, in his own forcible language, not fit to be touched with a pair of tongs. If they would only retire awhile and retrench they could pull themselves together. Cocky had an estate in the west of Ireland, entirely unsaleable for the best of reasons that nobody would buy it, but which Hurstmanceaux considered a very heaven upon earth, for its views of land and sea were sublime, and its myrtle and bay thickets, its pine and cork woods, had almost the beauty of Cintra with the vast billows of the Atlantic rolling on the rocky shores at their feet. _ If they would go to this place, called Black Hazel, and live there for a few years, their aflairs would come round, and Mouse would be taken out of that vicious circle of unending expenditure and compromising expedient in which women of the world turn like squirrels in a cage. To the innocence of this simple masculine mind it seemed quite possible that if such a course were suggested to her she would follow it. She was fond of the children ; Black Hazel would be a paradise for them ; she liked sport — Black Hazel offered quail, woodcock, blackcock, teal in abundance, and both fresh water and deep-sea fishing to any extent. He enumerated its attractions enthusiastically to himself as if he were an auctioneer endeavouring to sell the estate, and, with the naivete of an honest man, imagined that after all his sister could only need to have her duty clearly shown her to do it. " The finest thoroughbred mare will chew dry reeds when she finds she can't get hay or oats," he thought, his mind reverting to his memories of the Egyptian campaign, which he had shared in as an amateur. The brother of Lady Kenil worth should have known that women of the world are more " kittle cattle " than even blood-mares ; but he did not realise this. He knew that she was unreasonable, wildly extravagant, very selfish, and so accustomed to have her own way that she thought the stars would pause in their courses to please her ; but still, even she would stop short of absolute social suicide, he thought. TEE MAS8ABENE8. 223 So when next he received a note from his sister asking him to come to her on a matter of importance, which always with her meant money, he took his way to the conference determined to tell her frankly that the retreat to the west of Ireland was the only possible refuge for her, and to keep well in his memory the sensible warning and counsel of Daddy Gwyllian. When he got to the house in Stanhope Street he found Cocky waiting to see him before he went out. This fact alone was ominous and extremely disagreeable to him, the presence of Cocky, in his wife's morning-room, invariably indicating not only that money was wanted, which was chronic, but that some more than usually unpleasant dilemma had to be met. Cocky's paper was all over the place, as he would have expressed it ; and very often in hands so disreputable that its rescue was a matter as compromising as it was costly. When he was walking about amongst the china and the trinkets, and the flowers and the lacquer work, with his thin pale aquiline profile against the light, and the Blen- heims barking furiously at him as they invariably did, his presence was the certain sign of something impending which might get with most odious prominence into the newspapers. " If he's forged anybody's name, I hope to heaven that it's only mine," thought Hurstmanceaux : he always ex- pected Cocky to come to forgery sooner or later. In point of fact. Cocky had come to it very early in his career, as early as his Eton days, when he had been ducked in the river by the comrade with whose name he had taken such liberties. With his hands in his trouser pockets and his little frail person flitting amongst the chinoiseries and the heaths and orchids, he peered up at this moment at Hurstman- ceaux where he stood on the hearth, very tall, very stern, very unsympathetic, and absolutely silent. " What a glum brute he is," Cocky thought of the man to whom he had owed his own social salvation a score of times. " What an uncommon nasty thing human nature must be that it must always look so deuced unpleasant whenever it finds anybody in trouble." 224 tHE MASSAMEl^ES. Cocky was of opinion that it was the first duty of other men to pick himself out of the mud whenever he got into it, and that it should not only be the duty of his neighbours but their pleasure. "Such a hard-hearted brute is Konnie," he thought. " Only lives for himself and don't spend sixpence a day. I do hate selfishness and stinginess." The Blenheims at this instant scampered into the room, and flew at his ankles with that strong disapproval of him which they never failed to show. " Oh Lord, you little beasts ! " he cried, as their shrill voices rent the air. Hurstmanceaux looked on in grim approval of the dogs' discrimination, whilst his brother-in-law wasted kicks in all directions, the Blenheims avoiding them with the happiest dexterity and returning undaunted to the charge. The entrance of their mistress effected a diversion in the warfare and relaxed the contemptuous sternness of her brother's face. " So kind of you, dear Konnie," she said sweetly as she came up to him softly and brought a sense of fragrance and freshness, like a dewy rose, as she came straight from her bath and its opponax soap and eau de verveine. "They've torn my trousers," said Cocky, looking down at the marks of their small sharp teeth upon frayed cloth. "You know they dislike you," said his wife coldly. " Why do you provoke them ? " " Hang it all, I'm their master," murmured Cocky, eying his ankles ruefully. " Oh, dear no, you are not," said Mouse very uncivilly ; " I never taught them to think so for a moment." '' If you only sent for me to hear you quarrel over the ownership of the Blenheims " said Hurstmanceaux. He was angry ; he had to attend a Koyal Commission at two o'clock, and he wanted to be instead on the river, watching the practice of the Eton eight of which his youngest brother was captain. And here he was, shut up at half-past twelve with two bickering people and two barking lap-dogs, with the prospect of hearing for an hour of debts and difficulties which he had neither the power nor the will to meet or dissipate. " Pray let me hear the worst tBE MASSARENES. ^^5 at once," lie added. " Is it the Old Bailey, or only the Bankruptcy Court, that Cocky is going to show himself in this time to an admiring society ? " His sister looked at him and saw that he was not in a pleasant mood ; but she did not mind his moods, they always ended in giving her what she wanted. He was an in- trinsically generous and compassionate man, and such tempers are always kindly to their own hurt. " Damned ungrateful fellow he is ! " reflected Cocky. " As if there wasn't one Court that he ought to bless me for never going into." But he said nothing aloud, and left the recital of their difficulties to his wife. She plunged immediately into the narrative of their woes and needs, the Blenheims, reduced to silence through want of breath, sitting with their tongues out and their heads on one side, listening attentively as though they were two auditors in bankruptcy. Hurstmanceaux listened also in an unsympathetic silence which to his companions seemed to bode no good to them- selves. There was nothing new in the relation ; debts have seven-leagued boots, as every one knows, and people who spend a few thousands every year in railway journeys, but do not pay their tailor, shoemaker, and greengrocer, realise this with unpleasant frequency. Then there were debts of honour in all directions, these being the only form of honour which was left to the delinquents as Hurstmanceaux thought, but charitably forebode to say. He looked at his sister whilst she spoke, admiring her appearance whilst he scarcely attended to her words because he knew their import beforehand so painfully well. What a terribly expensive animal was a modern woman of the world ! As costly as an ironclad and as complicated as a theatrophone. The loveliest product of an entirely artificial state, but the most ruinous, and the most irritating to those whom she ruined. He told himself that Daddy Gwyllian had been entirely right. And he hardened his heart against this beautiful apparition which with dewy lips, perfumed hair, and a delicious suggestion of a nymph fresh from a waterbrook, stood before him in that charming attitude of contrition and <4 226 TEE MAS8ABENE8. candour with whicli from her nursery days he had always known her tell her very largest lies. " So all the dirt you've eaten hasn't done you any good," he said curtly, after some minutes of silence. " What can you possibly mean ? " said Mouse. Cocky chuckled feebly. He knew what his brother-in- law meant. " We can't bleed Billy every day," he murmured in an explanatory tone. " You seem to think you can bleed your father and myself whenever you please," said Hurstmanceaux in his most incisive tones. " Lord, what else is one's family for ? " said Cocky candidly. His wife looked with impatience at the clock, for she had appointments which were agreeable. " Keally, I think we've told you everything," she said to her brother. " It is not nice of you to insult us in our troubles, but I am sure you mean to help us in the end, don't you, Eonnie ? " *' I am extremely sorry," said Hurstmanceaux. " But it is wholly out of my power to help you this time. Your debts are enormous. The only possible chance for you is to give up London life, and life in the world altogether, and go and retrench in the country. Why not at Black Hazel ? It would be admirable for the children ; and your creditors, if they knew you were really economising, could probably be induced to wait. I see no other prospect possible." " Don't be a fool, Eonald," said his sister curtly, throwing her handkerchief rolled in a ball to the dogs. Her husband stared through his eye-glass. " Ah — er — I thought you would make some practical suggestion ; some- thing feasible, you know ! " Hurstmanceaux frowned. " So I do. When people are in your position they always withdraw to their Black Hazel or whatever their retreat is called. They don't go on living in the world. Black Hazel is a delightful place. It will be much better than a second floor in Florence, or a boarding-house in Dresden, which many people come to who are in your plight." TEE MAS8ABENE8, 227 His sister looked at her watch. " My dear Konald, I have no more time to spare you," she said rather insolently. "And if you can suggest nothing more sensible than a second floor in Florence, or a bog in Ireland, I shall lose little by not hearing anything more that you may have to say." "I have given you my opinion and my advice," said Hurstmanceaux stiffly. "You can live at Black Hazel tolerably well, and in a way becoming your position ; the air is very fine and the children will thrive admirably. But if you persist in continuing your present rate of expenditure " His sister opened the door and disappeared, calling the Blenheims with her. "Lord, excuse me, Konnie, but why do you talk that rot ? " said her husband, peering up through his glasses at his brother-in-law. " What on earth is the use of going on in that way to her ? Out o' London ? Down in the west of Ireland ? Your sister and me ? Oh, Lord ! " The idea of his exile from " life " so tickled his fancy that he laughed till he choked himself. " Black Hazel ! Mouse and I and her chicks at Black Hazel ! Oh, good Lord, Konnie ! You won't beat that if you try for a week o' Sundays ! " He chuckled feebly but merrily. " What is there to laugh at ? " said Hurstmanceaux. " Is the Bankruptcy Court more agreeable than a country place which is your own and where you will be your own master ? " But Gocky continued to laugh convulsively, holding his side and coughing. From his great height Hurstmanceaux looked down in scorn on the speaker. " Pray," he said coldly, " do you ever ask how your wife gets the ready money she has to carry on with ? " Kenilworth shook his head. " Not I. Mutual what-do-ye-call-it and non-interference is the only sound basis for domestic peace." He spoke with an efjpression of implicit seriousness and good faith; only his left eye winked knowingly, as if he Q 2 228 TEE MASSAMENES. had said something very amusing indeed. Hurstmanceaux wondered if it would be within decent manners to kick one's brother-in-law on his own hearth. . "You are an unutterable scoundrel, Cocky," he said, with an effort mastering his impulse to use acts instead of words. Kenil worth remained unmoved. *•' That's libel. A beak would fine you a fiver for it," he said placidly. " Do you happen to have got a fiver about " Go and ask Brancepeth for one," said Hurstmanceaux, white with rage. " Oh, Lord ! " said the other innocently. " I've had Ms last ages ago. He is a very poor devil is Harry, a very poor devil, else we shouldn't be in this strait." Hurstmanceaux approached him so closely that Cocky, whose nerves were siiaken by much absinthe and angostura, trembled. " I would sooner my sister were on the pavement of the Hay market than that she were the wife of such a cur as you." Cocky breathed more freely. "That is a very exaggerated remark," he murmured. " You are so very stagy, my dear Konald, so very stagy. You should have lived a century or two ago." " I am ashamed to be of the same generation as yourself," said Hurstmanceaux sternly. " Great heavens, man ! You come of a good stock ; you will be chief of a great house ; your father is a gentleman in every fibre of his being ; how can you endure to live as you do with your very name a byword for the cabmen in the street ? There is not a servant in your house, not a match-seller on your area steps, not a stable-boy in your mews, who does not kiK)w the dishonour which you alone affect to ignore ! She is my sister, I am ashamed to say ; but I can do nothing with her so long as you, her husband, condone and countenance what she does. You have every power; I have none. Take her to Black Hazel, sacrifice yourself for sake of your children, shut yourself up there, try and lead a cleanly life and make her lead an honest one. Cease to be the TEE MASSABENES. 229 miserable thing you are — a diseased maggot living on putrefaction ? " Kenilworth listened imperturbably. To be likened to a diseased maggot did not distress Mm ; it slightly diverted him in its appositeness. "The children ? " he said softly and slowly. " You really think I ought to consider those children ? " His pale, expressionless grey eyes, becoming suddenly full of unutterable depth of expression, looked up into his brother-in-law's and said volumes without words. Hurstmanceaux grew red to the roots of his bright curly hair. After all, the woman spoken of, if this man's wife, was his own sister, his favourite sister, the little one whom he had carried about in his arms when a boy, up and down the tapestried galleries and the oak staircases of the dear old house at Faldon. Kenilworth saw that emotion and despised it, but thought he would profit by it and do a bit of dignity. " My dear Konnie," he said almost seriously, " if I had married another sort of woman than your sister Clare, I might have become a different sort of man. It is not likely ; still, it is possible. But, you may believe me, if she had married the best man under heaven, she would have been just exactly what she is. Sages and angels wouldn't alter her. Don't you fret yourself about us. We aren't worth it — I grant that. We are of our time, and we shall get along somehow. Ta-ta, Ronnie ; you are a good boy. Be grateful that I am what 1 am ; if I were like you, vieux jeu, what a bother I should have made for our respective families long ago in the D. C." And with a low complacent chuckle at having got the best of the argument, he dived under his seat for his hat, glanced at the clock, and, with an apologetic gesture of two fingers, left Hurstmanceaux alone in the morning-room with the chinoiseries and nipponiseries. " Now his conscience will work and make him miserable," he thought, as he went across the hall with satisfaction. " After all, I said the truth, and he knows it is the truth. She is his sister, and she's as bad a lot as there is in London, and he'll feel he owes me something, and he'll come down 230 TEE MAS8ABENE8. handsomely, stingy old bloke though he is. What duffers those sentiment men always are to be sure. How neat I handled him. Gad, if he didn't blush like a girl ! " And Cocky stepped lightly down Park Lane to Hamilton Place and entered the Bachelors' Club, "fancying himself very much," as he would have expressed it; and quite aware that his strategy would end sooner or later in an interview more or less agreeable to his interests between his own lawyers and those of his brother-in-law. THE MABSABENES, 231 CHAPTEK XIX. It was another wet and chilly Easter in another year, and the town had just begun to fill after the recess, when one morning after luncheon the good Duke of Otterbourne, as his county called him, riding down the Kensington road, was thrown from his horse, between whose forelegs a bicycle had staggered and fallen. The boy on the bicycle was but scarcely bruised ; the Duke was carried insensible to the nearest pharmacy and never rallied. By four o'clock he was dead ; and many persons, men and women, old and young, gentle and simple, felt their eyes wet as the news of his death circulated through the Park and streets. His daughter-in-law heard of it as she drove in at Hyde Park Corner ; a man she knew stopped her carriage and broke the intelligence to her as gently as he could. She was shocked for a moment; then she thought to herself: " We ghall have Otterbourne House now, and I suppose there'll be money, at least for a time." Then, as she always studied appearances, she went home decorously and busied herself telegraphing to his family and her own. The body of the old duke had been already taken to Otterbourne House and laid on his bed in those modest rooms opening on the gardens, to which she had so often desired to limit him. His features were calm and wore a look of peace ; his neck had been broken in the fall ; it was thought probable that he had suffered nothing, not even a passing pang. Whilst telegrams were being sent all over England, and it grew dusk, she came, clothed in black, and knelt by the low bed, weeping. She always did what was right in small things, and at any moment some member of her family or his might enter the room. Meanwhile messengers of all degrees, servants, grooms, commissionaires, telegraph boys, were rushing to and fro over the metropolis 232 THE MASSAEENES. and its environs in their vain search for the Earl of Kenil- worth. No one had any idea where Cocky was. No one had seen him for two days ; his absence was of so slight an account that even his valet never took any heed of it ; it was surmised that he was in congenial society. She was thinking as she knelt of the alterations she would make in the house ; the gardens were old-fashioned and would have to be laid out afresh ; the circular entrance-hall should be made a ])atio like Frederic Leighton's and have a glass dome ; the picture-gallery sadly wanted weeding, and the process of weeding might be made lucrative to the weeder, for dealers would buy anything out of Otterbourne House with their eyes shut ; the small oval room painted by Angelica Kauffman should be her boudoir. " I shan't need to bore myself with Billy," she thought : the duke had not been a rich man and had been impoverished by his sacrifices to assist Cocky; but still things would be very different to the hand-to-mouth life which they led, and which drove her to support the nuisance of Harrenden House and Vale Koyal, and similar expedients. The Duchess of Otterbourne would, she reckoned, have a free hand at least for a time ; and they would probably be able to sell lots of things despite the entail. Alberic Orme arrived that night from his country vicarage ; he was white, haggard, inexpressibly grieved ; he had loved his father dearly. " Where is my brother ? " he asked her. The two younger sons were away — the one with his ship, the other with his troop — in the Indian Ocean and at the Cape. " Cocky ? " said Cooky's wife. " Oh, they are looking for him. They will find him — in some pot-house ! " And so they did on the following morning. When messengers in hot haste went flying over London to find his son, and telegrams were being despatched to the lamented duke's country seats and county towns, Cocky was drinking gin and playing poker with half-a-dozen persons, more congenial than distinguished, at a little riverside inn near Marlow, where he had been spending three days lost to the world, but dear at least to the hearts of Eadical journalists. When at last he was found, and the fatal THE MASSABJENE8, 233 accident to his father communicated to him, Cocky, who, however drunk he might be, never became a fool, pulled himself together, comprehended the position, and put all the money lying about in his pocket. ^ " Damned if they'll dare ask a duke for it ! " he said to himself with a chuckle, and walked quite steadily to the carriage which had come for him, not casting even a look at his late companions, male or female, who were too awed and astonished, as well as too befumed with various drinks to stop him or even to speak to him. " I'll have a rattling good time now," he thought, as he drove to the Marlow station. " And I'll divorce her ; Lord, what a joke it'll be ! Perhaps they won't give it me ; I dare say they won't give it me; there's a marplot called the Queen's Proctor ; they'll talk of collusion, and she'll bring counter-charges, and all the rest of it ; but we'll have the fun all the same, and she won't be able to show her face at Court. They're so damned particular at Court about the people who are found out ! So is society : she'll be drummed out of society. Lord, what fun it will be ! " Better even than gin and poker and music-hall singers and shady bookmakers in a village on the Thames. Whilst his father had lived that fun had been always peremptorily forbidden to him. ''Whatever your wife may have done or shall do, you have forfeited all title to resent it," the old duke had always said to him ; " and I will not have my name be- spattered with your filth in public." Wholly unconscious of the dark designs he carried in his sodden but sharp little brains, his wife was almost civil to him when he came into her presence, sobered by the fresh air he had breathed on his return from Marlow. She restrained the Blenheims from attacks on his trousers, and did not make any inquiries as to why he had been missing for fifty-six hours. He was Cocky, he would always be Cocky, the most wretched little scamp in creation ; still he was indisputably Seventh Duke of Otterbourne, and had considerable power to make himself disagreeable. Out of his presence she enjoyed rapturously the vitupera- tion which society papers and the Radical press poured 234 TEE MASSABENES. upon him now that he had really become an hereditary legislator. '' They are too funny for anything," she said, tossing a handful of them to Brancepeth. "They must have had detectives after him every hour of his life. How on earth do they know all they do ? " " It's easy enough to know about a man who don't pay his cabman and borrows sovereigns of his valet," replied Brancepeth with equanimity, picking up the scattered news sheets. . ^^ "Well, he won't want to borrow sovereigns now, remarked his wife. " Won't he ? " said her friend, with worlds of significance in the simple words. " Oh, Lord, if he ever gets to heaven he'll pawn 8t. Peter's key ! " "But there'll be lots of money, won't there? And the roc's Qgg will be mine, won't it?" she asked, for her knowledge of such matters was vague. " Ask your solicitor," said Brancepeth. The remains of the late duke were talvcn down to Stag- hurst, his principal place, a vast mansion and a vaster park in a south-west county, his sons and daughters accom- panying the corpse ; his daughter-in-law went also, taking with her Jack and Gerry ; in small things she always did what looked well. If you pay in halfpence in that way the world pays you back in guineas. The funeral took place on the following morning, on a very disagreeable day, with sleet and rain and wind ; and the family vault and monuments were in a churchyard which lay fully exposed to the blasts from the east, with great yews overshadowing it and sepulchral figures by Chantrey and Nollekens and Koubiliac, looking grim and grey in the foggy air. The late duke had many sincere mourners, for he had inspired many warm friendships in his own world, and respect and regard in all classes. Moreover, the large number of persons who in various ways were connected with, or dependent on, the Duke of Otterbourne could not but view with terror the advent to that title of the small, frail, hectic little man, who had so cynical a smile in his pale eves and so shocking a reputation in the country. TEE MASSABENE8. 235 Gossip, too, had not spared that lovely lady in her graceful crape garments, and the beautiful little boys, whose rosy cheeks were a little less bright than usual, as she led them under the darkling yews and the sombre, weird sculptures of the tombs. The people assembled there, especially the tenantry, peasantry, and servants, all felt that the reign of kindness, straightforwardness, and dignity was over, and that the future before them was one clouded and threatening. " His new Grace do look a mighty poor chap," said one old labourer to another. " And they do say as his blood's all brandy, and none o' the young uns is his own." " Hold yer gab, Garge, or they'll hev ye in the lock-up," said his more prudent spouse. But what the old man said audibly many there present thought. The ceremony was dreary and tedious ; Jack and Gerry were cold and frightened, and everyone else was bored ; the clergy alone were, as usual, in all their swelling glory and fussy supremacy, headed by the late duke's brother, Augustus Orme, who was Bishop of Hunwich and Walton-on-the-Naze. After the funeral, and reading of the will, the local magnates of county and church dispersed, and everyone else returned to London by the four o'clock express except Cocky and his wife. He was chilly, feverish, sleepy, and disinclined to leave the house, and she wanted to look over the collection of historical laces which had belonged to her mother-in-law, which had never seen the light for many years, Otterbourne having always jealously guarded them as the most sacred heirloom. They could not be sold now, but they might be used, in various ways ; at the least they would adorn Drawing-room costumes ; there was, she knew, a manteau de cour which had belonged to Henriette d'Angle- terre. She was very fond of lace, and she was still more fond of little mauvais tours ; she did not forget or forgive many words and acts of the late duke ; it was one of those unkind small revenges which were to her pampered taste as cayenne pepper or chutney is to a jaded palate, to unlock the dead lady's Italian cabinets and Indian boxes and sandal-wood coffers, and to play havoc with the Spanish point, the English point, the Venetian point, the Chantilly, the Flemish, the Dutch, kerchiefs and collars and aprons 236 THE MASSARENES. and flounces and edgings, all fine and rare, many marked with the arms or badges of famous houses or royal wearers of a vanished time. The poetic interest of the collection was nothing at all to the present duchess ; what mattered to her was the value of it in money, though she could not sell it, and the effect it would have if she wore any of it. She did not herself like old lace, it always looked yellow and dingy ; but other people did and envied it, and it would all look very nice at some Loan Collection, and make her friends most agreeably jealous. She passed the afternoon hours over it, and in ransacking all the little drawers and boxes in the various cabinets of what had been the favourite sitting-room of the late duchess. Otterbourne, though he had often given his wife cause for jealousy, had been profoundly attached to her and had kept this room untouched, even unentered, excG^pt to be swept, dusted, and aired. l^louse knew this well enough — she had often been irritated at this room being locked against her ; but her knowledge did not prevent her pillaging it any more than the sanctity of a church or a mosque to its pious devotees prevents soldiers from sacking and firing it. She had nothing to do, this rainy, chilly, dull day, and the examination of her mother-in-law's relics and treasures served to pass the time ; her second maid aided her, a sagacious and discreet young woman, who knew when to use her eyes and when to close them. The poor dead duchess's room was the cosiest and cheeriest in the whole huge building of Staghurst, which was an immense, uninteresting, last-century house built by Bonnani, and with a fire burning on its long-cold hearth, and a dozen wax-candles lighted in its silver sconces, it was a warm, comfortable, pleasant place for a chilly evening. She had a nice succulent little dinner served there, and when she had done full justice to it returned to her examination of the Japanese cabinets and the Indian boxes and the sandal- wood coffers. What sentimental creatures men are, she thought, seeing a bouquet of flowers, which had been dead five-and-twenty years, still left untouched in their porcelain bowl, in which the water had long been dry. If ever there was a male tEE MASSAttENES. 237 flirt, poor Poodle had been one, and yet he had cherished such a solemn ciilte for his dead wife that he had kept her morning-room like a temple for a quarter of a century ! It seemed to her very droll. The little boys came to bid her good-night, and she gave them some marrons glaces and kissed them and sent them away. She was impatient to go on with her examination of her late mother-in-law's possessions before anyone could interrupt her, for she did not know at all who had the legal right to them. Jack's brilliant eyes under their long lashes roved over the room and espied the suggestive confusion of it. " She's been lootin'," he thought. He knew what looting was ; Harry had told him. " P'rhaps these was looted too," he thought, gazing down on his handful of Paris chestnuts. He was a very honest little man; he was honest by nature, and Harry had made him so on principle ; he had never seen his friend " dedful angy " save once, when he, Jack, had taken a large, sweet, crescent-shaped cake off a stall in the Promenade des Sept Heures at Spa. His mother had no such qualms ; she continued her investigations. There were things which w^ould have touched some women. There were the love-letters of Otterbourne, then Lord Kenilworth, ardent, tender, and graceful, tied up with faded ribbon. There were innocent little notes written by Cocky in a big round hand between pencilled lines beginning " my darling mama." There were baby shoes in pale blue kid and pale pink satin, of which the little wearers had died in infancy. There were diaries, very simple, very brief, not always perfectly well spelt, but always full of affectionate records and entreating prayers of which her husband and her children were the objects. But these things did not move the present occupier of the title and of the room ; she pitched them all into a heap with no very gentle touch and cast the heap upon the fire. Old rubbish was best burned ! Just as she had done so and was assailed by an unpleasant misgiving that somebody might make a row about the destruction of these things (for everybody was so foolish 238 THE MASSARENEB, and sentimental), she heard the voice of Cocky's body- servant speaking at the door to her maid, and the maid approached her with a rather astonished face. " If you please, your Grace, his Grace is unwell : could you go to his room a moment, madam ? " " Go to his room ? " She was as astonished as her maid. Cocky must be very ill indeed if she were summoned to him. His chronic maladies, due to brandies and sodas and insomnia, were never even named to her. He had certainly coughed and shivered at the funeral that forenoon, and in the train the day before, but then he so often did this no one attached any importance to a little more of it or a little less. This time, however, poor Cocky, over whom Providence (or the powers of darkness) did not watch as they ought to have done, had caught something worse than a cold, standing without a hat so long in that biting March morning, in a damp and windy country churchyard, and without a drop of anything inside him, as he pathetically remarked. In the evening he was so unwell with shivering, difficulty of breathing, and pains in his head and limbs, that he could not even drink liqueurs and enjoy the newspaper attacks upon himself in his own rooms, but had to go to bed at ten o'clock, which he had certainly never done since his early boyhood. " Most unlucky beast in all creation I am," he muttered as he shivered between the sheets. " Just got the ribbons between my fingers and ten to one the coach'll land in a ditch ; ditch we must all end in, eh ? Worms and winding sheet and all ; even Mouse'll come to that some time. Here, you, get me some more brandy and don't stand staring, you fool." But his valet was no fool, and instead of bringing the brandy went to another wing of the house for the doctor, who had always lived in it for many years as attendant on the deceased duke. The doctor found the new duke in a very sad state of health, with some fever and a hacking cough, which threat- ened to become pleuro-pneumonia and would try the slender amount of strength which the sick man possessed very dangerously ; he advised that the duchess should be told. TEE MASSABENES, 239 So she was told, and came across the great house looking like a Burne-Jones in her long black robes, with the fairness of her skin and hair dazzling in their contrast to iier garb of woe. " Is it anything serious ? " she said, in an awed voice, for she was really shocked by his appearance, and did not want him to die at this moment of his succession. " It's skull and cross-bones business ; that's what it is," said her husband with a groan. " Eascally east wind did it. Don't come here ; you can't do me any good." A famous London physician, who had probably killed more people than any other doctor living, and was esteemed proportionately, was summoned by telegraph ; and by the sick man's own desire the chief solicitor of the county to^svQ, who had been legal adviser and agent to the late duke, was sent for, to return in all haste to Staghurst and take down his instructions. Left alone with this person on his arrival, Cocky, who had scarcely any voice left, whispered to him : " Would it keep 'em out of the succession if I declare they aren't my children ? " The solicitor hesitated ; he felt his own position a most delicate and embarrassing one. "Your Grace must not entertain such suspicions," he said, with some confusion. " The duchess enjoys the esteem and respect of every " " Stow your gab ! " hissed Cocky. " All I want to know is — if I made a formal declaration, would it stand ? " "No, sir — it would not." The lawyer thought the dying man's mind wandered, being himself a country person to whose ears the gossip of smart society did not come. " Oh, your Grace, you must not think of such a thing," he added, greatly embarrassed. " Dear me, dear me, I do not know what to say, sir." " Would it keep her brats out ? " said Cocky, as savagely as his failing breath allowed. The lawyer shook his head. " No, your Grace — it would not. Whatever may have happened, sir, you have condoned, you see. Of course, I am not for a moment supposing that there are any grounds " '* Stow that bosh ! " said his client, as savagely as his 240 TEE MASSARENES. weakness allowed. " If I could have divorced her all these years, and didn't ? If I said so now ? " The lawyer shook his head again. " It would not stand, sir." " Why not ? " asked Cocky. " Children born in wedlock must be legitimate heirs, your Grace," the lawyer said, very decidedly, to pierce through the muddled senses of the dying client. " Wedlock, eh ? — wedlock ? " repeated Cocky with a chuckle which ended in a convulsive cough. The word tickled his fancy mightily, though Mr. Curton could not imagine what he had said which was ludicrous. " Wedlock ! " echoed Cocky ; " you won't beat that, Curton, in a brace of years ! " " The word is good law and good English, sir," said the solicitor, a little offended. " I repeat, after so many years of wedlock you could not leave a posthumous charge of the kind behind you. It might be mere pique and malice on your part. No Court would ratify it. It would only make a dreadful scandal, sir, because, I presume. Lord Alberio would endeavour to uphold your declaration, since he is next in succession after your Grace's sons." An angry flash came into Cooky's sunken, colourless eyes. *'Beric? Gad! I'd forgot that. So he would. I'd rather little Jack came after me. He's a good plucked one ; bit his lips not to squeal when I pinched him. And I don't dislike poor Harry. He's a good fellow, and she got over him." A fit of coughing stopped his revelations, to which the discreet lawyer turned a deaf ear. He was an excellent person who lived in a large, square, white house, with shrub- beries, and a carriage-drive, and a page in buttons ; to him marriage was marriage, and a duke and duchess were one and indivisable : when such people got into law courts he was sincerely sorry that they did not respect themselves as greatly as he respected them ; he knew that the gentleman, too, who now lay dying had been in many discreditable straits, for be had himself been frequently called in to assist in getting the delinquent out of them ; but a duke was a duke, Otterbourne was Otterbourne, in the eyes of the good and conservative attorney, and he had a deaf ear which he could turn very usefully when needed. TEE MASSARENES. 241 To assist in making such a terrible hotch-potcli of scandal, as would be made by any posthumous repudiation, might have tempted a London Old Bailey practitioner, but it did not tempt for an instant this respectable rural devotee of Themis. Cocky was silent for some time, breathing hard and deliberating what he would do. Almost more than his wife he hated his brother Alberic, who had always been the beloved of his father. He raised himself, at last, feebly on his pillows. " Look here, Curton," he said, with gasping effort, " you make my will, and be quick about it, for I'm dead beat. I can't touch much, I know, but where I can do anything, make it as deuced unpleasant for her as you can ; and renew the — the — what d'ye call it — settlement for the jewels, so that she'll have to give 'em up; renew it just as it stood in my father's and grandfather's wills, will you ? And look here, Curton : I appoint as guardians my brother-in-law and my uncle Augustus." Mr. Curton inclined his head in approval. ''Lord Hurstmanceaux and the Bishop of Dunwich? Your Grace could not make a more admirable selection. The highest principle " Cocky chuckled with a sound very like the death-rattle. " I choose Konnie 'cause he's so damned conscientious, he can't refuse, and he'll hate it so ; and I choose old Augustus 'cause he came down once when I was a shaver at Eton and never tipped me, and gave me a beastly book called ' The Christian Year.' Make it all as deuced annoyin' to both of 'em as you can. Lord, what a pother they'll find all my affairs in — that's a comfort." And it was a genuine tonic and cordial to him to think how, after his decease, all his sins and embarrassments would continue to circle like mosquitoes around the heads of his trustees and executors. " Beric will hate being left out," he murmured ; on the whole he was getting considerable fun out of this ante- mortem duty. But it was a bore to die, an awful bore, just when he had come into things and could do what he liked ; he moved restlessly and uneasily on his bed while the lawyer wrote out the clauses of the testament, hastenin<2^ as 242 TEE MASSARENE8. much as he could, for he saw that every breath might be his client's last. When the witnesses were called in, oxygen was given to the dying man, and he rallied enough to sit up in his servant's arms and sign " Otterbourne " legibly, in that clear handwriting which he had learned at Eton, and which had signed so much " bad paper." " I couldn't do much, but I've done what I could," he said feebly, as the pen fell from his fingers. "To be and smiled. The cool audacity of her manner and commands diverted him. He perceived that she had no intention of paying him. *' The cocotte has never been born," he thought, " who could hold a candle to a great lady for impudence." If she had asked him to sit down he still would have refrained from troubling her ; but she said no syllable that was civil ; she continued to look at her creditor with haughty impatience. "Be quick about what you have to say then," she re- marked; ''I can only stay a few moments here; I am going to church." A creditor, if deftly treated as a Buddha of power and sanctity, may be disarmed, for, although a creditor, he is human. But if he be *' cheeked" and treated as of no importance he is naturally moved to use his thunderbolt and assert his godhead. Beaumont sat down without invita- tion or permission, and she, to show her digust at such familiarity, rose and remained standing. '* Madame," he said very politely, " have you forgotten the paper which you signed ? " She was silent, darting azure lightning on him from her eyes. She did not distinctly remember what she had signed. She had not very clearly understood it at the time of signing ; it had been all done in such a hurry, and the cab had been waiting for her in the rain, and she had wanted to get back to the Bristol unseen and dress for a dinner at the English Embassy, and the time to do so had been very short. Certainly she remembered writing her name; but the words above her name she did not recall ; it was more than four years ago. Beaumont saw that she had forgotten. *' I warned you of the importance of what you signed," he said politely. ** If you desire now to read it over " " Is that what I signed ? " she said eagerly ; she thought it would not be difficult to get it away from him ; he looked very weak and small, and must, she thought, be seventy if he were a day. Beaumont smiled, ** It is a copy." 262 TEE MAS8ABENES. Her face clouded ; she took it with an impatient gesture and read its clauses. The lines were few, but they clearly- stated that she was the sole and lawful owuer of the diamond and transferred it to the keeping of the jeweller until such time as he should be repaid in full, capital and interest. " Well, madame ? " said Beaumont, having waited for five long minutes, during which she stood looking out of the window, her foot irritably beating on the carpet. " What is there to say ? " she replied bluntly, her brain was less clear than usual. " I can't pay you, if that's what you want." Beaumont raised his eyebrows. " I conclude I have the honour of being your Grace's first creditor, or you would have learnt by painful experience that it is not well to be impolite to creditors. The situation is changed since you signed that little memorandum. I was content to wait whilst the good Duke of Otterbourne was living : but he is dead, and I am indisposed to wait, and if you cannot pay me I must see who will." " You beast ! " muttered Mouse between her pearl-like teeth. " 1 do not think I am a beast," said Beaumont meekly. " At least, not more so than most men. I took you at your word, madame, and it appears that your word was — was not entirely to be depended upon. It appears that the jewel is an heirloom ; it goes to your little boy under settlement in trust. So I am informed by those competent to know." She stood with her profile turned towards him, and continued to look out of th© window at the house opposite. " If it is my son's you can't claim it," she said sullenly. " You knew well enough at the time it wasn't mine. You only pretended to believe that it was. You did an illegal thing when you lent me the money ; and you know you can't go into any Court about it. My husband was alive then ; my signature was not worth a farthing, you know that!" Beaumont gazed at her in admiration for her boldness, in compassion for her temerity and want of worldly wisdom. " I have done business sometimes, madame, in Paris," he said softly, "with persons of your sex who are not con- TEE MASSABENJSS. 263 sidered, there, pure enough to sit beside you in the tribune at Chantilly, or at the Institute, or at the Chambers. But amongst those horizontales I never knew one quite of your force. Je vous enfais mes compliments.'* Angry blood flew into the fair cheeks of his debtor ; her blue eyes flashed like stormy summer skies; her hand clenched till her rings cut into the skin. " You dare to insult me because my lord is dead ! " Cocky in memory really appeared to her, at this moment, as a very tower of strength. Beaumont made a little gesture of smiling protestation. "Oh, madame, if your lord were living he would not make much difference to me in this matter, or to any action of your creditors. But he would certainly have apprehended the situation more quickly than you do." " You are an insolent ! " She would have reached to touch the button of the electric bell, but Beaumont interposed. ''Do not make a scandal, duchesse; I shall not, if you do not press me too far. I am not your enemy. I never expose women if I can help it. Nature made them dis- honest ; jewels and money are to them what cherries and apples are to schoolboys. That is why they are so much better shut up in harems. However, I came for strict business ; let us limit ourselves to it. You say I cannot go into a tribunal. You have relied upon that fact. But it is a rotten staff to lean on ; it is not a fact. I both can and will go into any number of tribunals about this matter. They may nonsuit me. I may, perhaps, lose both the diamond and the money ; but I have plenty of money and no children, and it will amuse me, madame, to see you cross-examined. It will not amuse you." She stared flxedly at the windows of the opposite house, and observed, as people do observe extraneous matters in moments of horrible agitation, that the lace curtains to them were very soiled. Her heart heaved under the crape fiehu of her bodice, and he saw that it was only by great effort that she controlled herself from some bodily assault upon him. "What a godsend for the illustrated press such a trial would be !" he continued, in quiet, amused tones. " But it 264 TEE MAB8ABENE8, would be disagreeable to you, because those papers disfigure so the pretty people whom they pretend to represent." " You would never dare to go to law ! " she interrupted in a hoarse, fierce voice. "You would not dare! You would be punished yourself ! " " I should be punished, possibly, by losing the money. They would nonsuit me, but I think they would make you pay my costs. But as I have said, I do not mind losing the money ; I have a good deal and no children, and I am old " " Well, then, why make this hideous fuss ? " Beaumont smiled. " Why not make you, madame, a free gift of the money and the interest ? Allez done ! You ought to be too proud to dream of taking a present from a tradesman. If 1 were a young man I might — on conditions — but I am old, and a beautiful woman is not much more to me than an ugly one, alas! Besides, you have been very rude, duchesse. No one should be so rude as that who does not stand on a solid bank balance." She turned her head over her shoulder and flashed a scathing glance upon him. "How much longer are you going to prose on in this way ? I want to go out." Beaumont shook his head. "You will not learn wisdom? You are wrong, madame. Twist a tiger's tail, laugh at an anarchist, and put nitro-glycerine in your dressing-bag, but never, ah, never be rude to anyone who has you in his power." " In your power ? I ? In yours ? You are mad." " Oh, no ; I am entirely sane. Saner than you, madame ; for you do not seem to understand that you have done a very ugly thing, a vulgar thing even ; what is called in English, I believe, a first-class misdemeanour, for you obtained a very large sum by false representation." She changed colour ; she was intelligent and she did see her conduct in the light in which twelve London jurymen would be likely to see it, and also in the shape in which the Kadical press would be certain to present it to their public. Beaumont relented a little. A man may be too old to fully appreciate beauty, but he is always kinder to a pretty TEE MAS8ABENES. 265 woman tlian to a plain one. Moreover he had no real inclination to figure in the law courts himself, though to punish her he was prepared to take her into them. " Is it possible, madame," he said with hesitation, *' that all the great people you belong to cannot arrange this small matter for you without forcing me to go to extremes ? The magnificent English aristocracy." "The magnificent English aristocracy," she repeated with unspeakable scorn, " who are coal-owners, corn-factors, horse-dealers, game-vendors, shop-owners, tradesmen, every man Jack of them, are most of them bankrupt tradesmen, my good Beaumont! They are obliged to ally themselves with tradesmen who aren't bankrupt — like you — to keep their heads above water. The great families with whom I am allied, as you expressed it, couldn't, I believe, amongst them all raise a thousand guineas in solid coin." "But you came to me for twelve thousand," thought Beaumont; aloud he merely said, "But monsieur your brother ? Surely he " A shiver ran over her from head to foot. She would rather, she thought, face the Middlesex jury than tell this tale to Eonald. " My brother has all the copy-book virtues," she answered sharply. " He would sell his shirt to pay you if you told him this story, but if he hasn't got a shirt ? " " You speak figuratively, I presume ? " " Figuratively ? I mean what I say. Well, of course he's got shirts to his back ; but that is pretty well all he has got. And he is guardian to the boy, to all the children." " I understand." He saw in what a position Hurstmanceaux would be placed between his duty to his wards and his sentiment for his sister if the knowledge of what had been done with the roc's egg came before him. " But if he be a poor man it would be of no use to worry him," thought Beaumont, who was keenly practical, and who, in this matter, merely wanted to get his money back, and to be safely out of what he knew was not a very creditable position for himself, since the family would naturally argue that he should not have taken Lady Kenilworth's unsupported word in a matter of so much importance. 266 TEE MA8SABENES. " Every one knows the high character of Lord Hurstman- ceaux," he said, to gain time for his own reflections. Mouse repressed a rude exchimation ; she was so utterly sick of Bonnie's character. A brother who had known how to do all the things that Cocky had used to do, and would have put her up to doing them, would have been so much more useful at the moment. She felt that she had not drunk at the fountain of knowledge during her husband's lifetime as she ought to have done. For a person who was not ham- pered by scruples she was most blamably ignorant about the ins and outs and hooks and crooks of left-handed financing. Beaumont waited in polite silence. He was not a hard or harsh man and he was not insensible to the purity of her profile as she stood sideways against the window; he saw that she was genuinely alarmed and genuinely power- less ; the folded crape which went crossways over her bosom heaved with her deep-drawn, hurried breathing. " Have you no friend ? " he said at last very softly and with a world of meaning in the tone. She changed countenance; she could not pretend to misunderstand his meaning. " Friends have more sympathy than relatives," he added in the same meditative manner. " It is true, madame, that your dilemma is not in itself interesting ; it resembles too much actions which receive unlovely names when in a lower class than yours, still a beautiful woman can always persuade the weaker sense to be blind to her errors; at least until those errors have been proclaimed in print, so that all who run may read them." He took a natural and not a very malignant vengeance in his words, but to her he seemed a very Mephistopheles torturing her with every refined devilry. And she was insulted and she could not resent! She could not ring for her servants and have this man turned into the street. The twelve thousand pounds had melted like morning mist. She could scarcely remember what they had gone for; but the bitter insult remained, would remain, she thought, with her for ever. He rose and stood before her. " Well ? " he said gently. TEE MA8SARENES. 267 " You have a right to your money, I suppose," she said sullenly between her set teeth. " I have no notion on earth how to get you a farthing, but if you will wait a month and not speak to my brother in the interval, I will — I will see what I can do.*' Beaumont bowed. "I will wait six months and I will speak to no one. But if at the end of six months I do not receive all, I shall speak, with pain, madame, but inevitably not to your brother but to the world." " I understand," she said haughtily. " You will do your worst. Well, never enter my presence again, that is all ; and leave it now this moment." Beaumont smiled with admiration and regret combined. ** You are very unwise, madame. If you had not been rude to me I would have accorded you a year. Mais on chasse de race'' She knew that it was unwise to be so insolent, but she could not have made herself polite to him to save her life. He punished her for having tricked him, and flouted her. He was a very rich man, and she had offended him. She saw her mistake, but she would not have resisted re- peating it if he had come back into the room. Women always bring temper into business, and that is why they fail in it so frequently, for those who do not bring temper bring sentiment, and the one is as ruinous as the other. She had a rapid imagination; she saw before her the crowded court, the witness-box where prevarication was of no use, all her dearest friends with their lorgnons lifted, the bench of the scribbling reporters, the correspondents of the illustrated papers making their sketches furtively and staring at her as she had stared at people in causes celebres ; she saw it all, even the portraits of herself which would appear in those woodcuts of artistic journals which would make Helen's self hideous and Athene's self grotesque. She saw it all — all the huge headings in the posters and papers, all the staring eyes, all the commiserating censure, all the discreet veiled enjoyment of her acquaintances, all the rancid, acrid virulence of the rejoicing Kadical press. She imagined that Beaumont would not get his money easily because she knew something about the risks run by 268 TEE MA88ABENE8. those wlio lend on an imperfect title, as to minors or to women ; but she had seen in his regard that he would not mind losing any amount of money if he had his revenge on her in putting her into court. Actually, Beaumont was by no means a revengeful, nor even a hard man, and a very little diplomacy would have made him favourable to her. She hated him more intensely than she had ever hated anyone. For in the first place he had done her a favour, and in the second place she had done him a wrong— a mixture which naturally produces the strongest hatred. She knew that, despite his courtesy, she had nothing more to hope from him ; that he would have his money back again, or he would make the transaction public. Public sympathy would be entirely with him against herself. Even that, however, seemed to her less horrible than the fact that Konald would know what she had done. At the bottom of her heart she was not very brave ; she could hector and bully, and command, and she had that share in the physical courage of her race which took her unflinching over a bullfinch in the shires. But she had not the moral courage which would allow that punishment was just and bear it calmly. It was probable that Eonald and her brothers-in-law would never let the matter come to a trial, that they would get the money together between them somehow, though they were all as poor as Job ; but to have the matter brought before these prejudiced persons seemed to her worse than the law court itself. Eonald she dreaded, the Ormes she detested, and her sisters' husbands she thought the most odious prigs in the world ; to come before a family council of this sort would be more unsupportable than the law court itself, which would at least contain an element of excitement, and in which her personal appear- ance would be sure to rouse some feeling in her favour. To that personal fascination her brother and her brothers-in- law were at all times insensible. " Some women have men belonging to them who are of some use," she thought bitterly, " but all the men I have anything to do with are paupers and prigs. What is a family made for if it is not to pull one through awkward places, and follow one with a second horse ? " THE MASSAEENE8, 2G9 She hated her family fiercely. It seemed to her that it was all their fault that she had been placed in such a dreadful dilemma. If there was one thing more sure than another, she knew that it was the dead certainty that every- body in her world were as poor as rats, unless they were men of business who did not properly belong to that world at all. It was wonderful how soon you come to the end of a man's resources ! No one knew that better than herself. As for the bigwigs who look so swell and imposing to the classes which know nothing about them, she was but too well aware of the carking cares, the burdened lands, the desperate devices which sustained their magnificent appearances as the rotten timbers of a doomed ship may support a gilded figure-head. "By the time Jack's thirty years old the whole rotten thing will be gone like a smashed e^g'' she thought, with a certain pleasure in reflecting that all the wearisome and impertinent precautions which Jack's guardians took to shelter his interests would be of no avail for him in the lono- run against the rapidly rising tide of English socialism. 270 iEE MASSAREItEH CHAPTEK XXII. She remained in London May and June. Of course it was deadly dull, but people came to dine with her ; she could dine with her very intimate friends ; and men were in and out all day long from the Commons and the club and the guard-rooms ; and she made a lovely picture in her floating crape garments, cut a little low round the throat en hebe, to show its white and slender beauty. Everyone felt bound to do their best to console her, and the task was a pleasant one even to her own sex, for her house, in a subdued discreet manner, was always full of agreeable persons, and softly buzzing with the latest news. When she drove in the park with her whole equipage turned into mourning, she had one or other of her golden- haired children always with her, and the spectacle was one which especially touched the policemen at the crossings, the old apple-women at the corners, the working men eating their bread and cheese on the benches, and all that good- natured, credulous, purblind throng which creates popular opinion. " Our public men don't make up enough," she thought, seeing the effect which she had on the multitude. " Napo- leon's white horse and Boulanger's black one did half their business for them. The public should always be governed through its eyes and its appetites ; our leaders of it appeal to its mind — a non-existent entity." Black was very becoming to her. It is the surest of consolations to have a dazzlingly fair skin which crape adorns. Still death in the house is always tiresome ; there are so many pleasant things which we cannot do. On the whole she thought it would have been better if Cocky had lived some little time longer. fHB MAS8ABENE8. 271 Cocky^s death had happened at an awkward moment. The London season was irrevocably lost to her. All her new gowns must remain shut up in their cases. There was nowhere in the known world (of society) where she could by any possibility dance and laugh and flirt and play cards, and go to races, and do theatres, and sup at restaurants, and generally amuse herself for the next six months. She did not care for conventionality, but there are things which no well-bred person can do ; observances which the mere usage of the world enforces as it does the wearing of clothes, or of shoes and stockings. She was wholly unconscious of the benevolent intentions which Cocky had entertained towards her ; she had never dreamed that he would think of causing a cause ceTehre in connection with her. She wished devoutly that he had lived for a year or two after his succession. The tutelage of Eonald was a prospect which appalled her. She knew that Konald, however generous with his own, would be a very dragon in defence of his ward's possessions; and the little duke's minority would be an exceedingly long one. ^ From all power she had herself been carefully and mercilessly excluded by all the provisions alike of her husband and of his father. The terms of the wills had been sufficiently explained to her to leave her no doubt in that respect. Her courage was high and her carelessness was great ; but both quailed at the idea of many matters which would inevitably now come under her brother's eyes. Cocky had been a bore ; but you could always shut Cooky's eyes and his mouth too if you had a twenty-pound note to give him ; and he was never in the least degree curious whence it came. Cocky had had many defects, but he had been at times a very convenient person ; she had wished him dead very often, but now that he was really dead she was rather sorry. She could not now even take any of that lace away from Staghurst ; it would all be locked up again to wait twenty years for Jack's wife. She was not in the least afraid of doing wrong, but she was keenly afraid of being found out, and especially of being found out by her brother. She knew very well that Konald's 272 THE MASSABENES. toleration of her and affection for her were entirely based on the fact that she had in a great degree always succeeded in blindfolding him. He knew her to be reckless, imprudent, and madly ex- travagant, but he thought her innocent in other ways, and compromised by her husband. Oh, the support that Cocky had been! She did feel genuine sorrow for his loss. To lose your scapegoat, your standing apology, your excuse for everything, is worse than to lose your jewel-box, especially when it has only paste copies of your jewels in it. She would really have liked to have had Cocky survive a few years as Diike of Otterbourne. They would not have had much money, but they would have had such quantities of credit that their want of actual money would scarcely have been felt. They would have sold everything which settlement would have allowed them to sell, and very probably found means even to break the entail. She was wholly unaware that the very first use he would have made of his accession would have been to drag her into the glare of that transpontine melodrama which is played in the Court of Probate and Divorce. In the glare of his dying eyes she had indeed recognised hatred, but she had not known that such hatred would have taken its worst vengeance on her had he lived. She did not know that fate, often so favourable to her, had never done her so kind a turn as when it had made him catch that cold at his father's grave in the bitter east winds of the March morning. He had been something to complain of, to fret about, to quarrel with ; at his door she could lay any responsibility she chose, and he had been often useful in a great strait through the ingenuity and unscrupulousness of his devices. Then she had cordially detested him, and that sentiment alone had something exhilarating about it like a glass of bitters. And yet again it had been the existence of Cocky which had made Harry interesting. Now that it could become quite proper for her to annex Harry, in the manner dear to Mrs. Grundy, he lost a great deal of his attraction. He fell suddenly in value like a depreciated currency. After the first moments of awe which the presence of THE MAB8AJRENE8. 273 death causes to the most indifferent person, her first reflection had been that she could now marry him. But her second and wiser was that it would be ridiculous to do anything of the kind. Poor Harry was as poor as the traditional church mouse. The little he had ever been worth had been squeezed out of him by Cocky and herself. She wanted money, an endless amount of money. Women of the world want money as orchids want moisture. They cannot live except with their feet ankle deep in a Pactolus. Money, or its equivalent credit, is the necessity of their existence. Her existence, hitherto, however brilliant on the surface, had been little better than a series of shifty expedients. She had danced her shawl dance on the brink of exposure and bankruptcy. What was the use of marrying a man with whom the same, or still worse, embarrassments would have perpetually to be endured ? At no time had she been ready to throw herself away on Harry. She had been for several years fonder of him than she had ever supposed herself capable of being of anyone. When he had showed the least inclination for any other woman, her sentiment for him had become violent and ferocious in its sense of wronged ownership. But to marry him would be, she knew — she had always known — a grotesque mistake. It would be one of those follies which are never forgiven by Fate. Harry was no more meant for marriage, she thought, as she sat alone in her morning room, than that wheelbarrow was meant for use. It was a charming wheel- barrow in satin, scarlet, and green, with gilded wheels and handles ; filled with cherries, plums, currants, and straw- berries made by the first bonbon-makers of Paris, and sent at Easter, the week before the old duke died. One might just as well roll that barrow over the stones to Co vent Garden market, as think of marriage with Harry. If she had been rich she would not have married again at all ; men were crotchety, worrying bores whenever you saw much of them, but to go on like this under Konald's and the Ormes's tutelage, and next to nothing to amuso herself with, was wholly out of the question. A vindictive dislike rose up in her against Jack. He was everything and she was nothing. This absurd rosy- T 274 THE MAS8ARENES. faced monkey w^s lord of all ; this little cuiiy-lieaded imp in his man-o'-war suit was owner of everything and she of nothing, or of next to nothing ; she felt an unreasonable and most unjust impatience at the very sight of his round laughing face and his sunny Correggio curls ; and he avoided her as a puppy avoids a person who kicks it or scowls at it. ** Can't mammy be nasty ? Oh, can't she ! " he said to his confidant Earry, who frowned and answered: *' It's blackguard of her if she's nasty to you^ Harry himself was dull. On due consideration of his position he had felt no doubt whatever that he would have to marry Jack's mother. Cocky had been his best friend ; had Cocky's duration of life depended on him the Seventh Duke of Otterbourne would have seen a green old age. " Bother it all," thought the poor fellow, "and I must say something about it to her, I suppose. Oh, damn it ! It's telling a man in Newgate that he must settle the day for his own hanging ! " His world supposed him still to be very much in love with Jack's mother, but the prospect of being wedded to her appalled him. "My granny always said she would end in doing it," he thought, recalling the prophetic wisdom of the aged Lady Luce. Men as a rule are not remarkable for tact, especially in personal matters which touch on the affections, and he had less of that valuable instinct than most people. Un- aware that the lady of his destiny had mentally weighed him in the balance with the satin wheelbarrow, and found him wanting, like the wheelbarrow, in solidity, he was tor- mented by the feeling that he ought to speak to her on the subject and the indefinable reluctance which held him back from doing so. The position of a man who has to marry a lady with whom his name has long been associated before his world can never be agreeable. He is conscious of paying over again in gold for what he has long ago bought with paper. He is aware that lookers-on laugh in their sleeve. It requires the heaux resies of a veritable passion, the perennial charm of an undying sympathy, to make the most THE MASSARENES. 275 loyal of lovers accept without flinching so conspicuous and questionable a position. To her, it is triumph as to the master builder when the gilded vane crowns the giddy height of the steeple. She shows that she has kept her man well in hand, and ridden him with science to the finish. Besides, the shyest of women always likes what compromises and compliments her. But the masculine mind is differently constituted; it sincerely dislikes being talked about, it still more dislikes to be laughed at, and when it is English, it is, on matters of the affections, uncommonly shy. The necessity of broaching this delicate matter weighed heavily on Brancepeth's spirits ; he did not know how to set about it, and he felt that it was at once ungracious to her to delay and unfeeling to poor buried Cocky to hasten the necessary avowal. He was always thankful when he found other people with her, and equally thankful that her respect for appearances had caused her to relax her demands on his attendance and affection ever since her return from the interments at Staghurst. One day, however, some six weeks after Cocky's disappearance from a world of poker and pick-me-ups, Brancepeth found himself alone with the fair mourner to whom crape was so infinitely becoming. To this poor fellow, in whose breast the primitive feelings of human nature were planted too deeply for the ways of his world to have uprooted them, the idea of having the children with him, in his own house, seeing them every day and watching them grow up, was one which consoled him for being forced to sacrifice his liberty. Of course, they would always be Cocky's children to the world and in ' Burke,' but if he were their mother's husband nobody would think it odd if he made much of them, and took them to ride in the Kow, or went with them to see a pantomime, or hired a houseboat for them, and taught them how to scull ; simple joys which smiled at him from the future. Their mother would always be what she always had been. JHe had no illusions about her ; he would have to give her her head whether he liked it or not ; but the children — Harry saw himself living very properly, as a married man, in a little house off the Park, and getting every now and then **a day out" with Jack on the river. He would leave the T 2 276 THE 3IASSABENES. Guards, lie reflected, and pull himself together; he had next to nothing of his own left, but some day or other he would be Lord Inversay, and then, though it would always be a beggarly business, for the estates were mortgaged to their last sod of grass, he would try to make things run as straight as he could for sake of these merry little men who were Cooky's children. Occupied with such innocent and purifying thoughts, he had arrived in Stanhope Street. It was a soft grey day in early June, and her room was a bower of lilac, heliotrope, and tea-roses. The Blenheims were quiet, for Cocky annoyed them no more. The tempered light fell through silk blinds on to the charming figure of their lady, as she lay back on a long low chair, her black robes falling softly about her as if she were some Blessed Damozel, or Lady of Tears, of Kossetti's or Burne- Jones's. Only between her lips was a cigarette and on her knee was a volume of Gyp's. Harry, good soul, was not awake to the incongruity; he only thought how awfully fetching she was, and yet he groaned in spirit. But after a few preliminary nothings, with much the same desperate and unpleasant resolve as that with which he had gone up to be birched at Eton, he opened his lips and spoke. "I say," he murmured with timidity — "I say, dear, I have wanted to ask you ever since — I suppose — I mean, of course, I understand, now you are free you will want me to — wish me to — I mean we shall have to get married, sha'n't we, when the year's out ? " When these words had escaped him he was sensible that they were not complimentary, that they were not at all what he ought to have said, and a vague sensation of fright stole over him and he felt himself turn pale. Into the blue eyes of Mouse that terrible lightning flashed which had withered up his courage very often as flame licks up dry grass. Then her sense of humour was stronger than her sense of offence ; she took her cigarette out of her mouth and laughed with a genuine peal of musical laughter which was not affected. He stared at her, relieved, but in his turn offended. After all, he thought, it was not every man who would have ridden so straight up to the fence of duty and taken it so gallantly. " Mj dear Harry," sh© said, rather slightingly, when hei- TEE MASSABENJES. 277 mirth had subsided, '* I have had to listen to many declara- tions in my time, but — but I never had one so eloquent, so delicate, so opportune as yours. Pray will you tell me why I should be supposed to want to marry you, as you chivalrously express it ? " " It's usual," he answered sulkily, not daring to express the astonishment with which her tone and manner filled him. "What is usual?" she asked, looking straight at him with serene imperturbable coolness and entire refusal to meet him half way by any kind of comprehension. " Well, it iSf you know that," he replied, looking down on the carpet. " Usual for a woman to marry again seven weeks after her husband's death ? I never heard so. I believe there is a country where a widow does marry all her husband's brothers one after another, as fast as she can, but that country is not England." She put her cigarette back into her mouth again. He looked at her apprehensively and shyly as Jack did very often from under his long lashes. He was puzzled and he was humiliated. He had brought himself up with a rush to do what he thought honour and all the rest of it re- quired of him, and his self-sacrifice was not even appreciated but derided. " I thought, of course, you'd desire it on account of the children," he said stupidly, insanely, for he should have known that truths like this cannot be told to women with any possibility of pardon to the teller of them. She looked at him with an admirably imitated astonish- ment. *' For the children ? For Cooky's children ? I am really unable to guess why." " Oh, damnation ! " The rude word escaped him despite himself ; he rose and walked to and fro across the room trying to keep down the very unreasonable passion which burned within him. " Pray sit down — or go out," said Mouse calmly, and she lighted a fresh cigarette at the little silver lighter. Brancepeth's eyes filled with tears. He was wounded and uunerved. The amazing impudence of woman which always so completely outstrips and eclipses the uttermost 278 2!e^ MASSARENES, audacity of man, stunned his feebler and tenderer organisa- tion. She was really still fond of him, though his savour, as of forbidden fruit, was gone, and the stupid veracity and naivete of his character irritated and bored her. "My dear Harry, don't be so upset," she said in a kinder tone. " There are things which should never be said. Walls have ears. The Chinese are quite right. If a thing is not to be told do not tell it. It is quite natural you should like Cooky's children since you were such friends with him and me; but you sometimes make too much fuss with them, especially in the nurseries. Children are so soon spoilt."^ Brancepeth looked at her from under his sleepy eyelids with something near akin to contempt. "The doors are shut," he said sullenly, "and there's nobody on the balconies. Can't we speak without bosh for once ? The poor devil's dead. Can't ayc let his name alone ? He was a bad lot, certainly, but we didn't try to make him better. He wasn't a fool ; he must have known, you know " She roused herself from her reclining attitude, and her fair features were very set and stern. "He is dead, as you observe. Ordinary intelligence would therefore suggest that it does not in the least matter what he did know and what he didn't know. Being dead he yet speaketh, cannot happily be said of Cocky. He has tormented me by setting Eonnie over me and the children, but that is the only annoyance he had the wit to inflict." " Konnie'll do his duty." " Of course he will. People always do their duty when it consists in being disagreeable to others." " Answer me, Mouse," said Brancepeth, bringing his walk to an end immediately in front of her. " I want to know, you know. Shall we marry or not ? Don't beat about the bush. Say ' yes ' or ' no.' " She blew some perfumed smoke in the air, then, in a very chilly and cutting tone, replied : " Most distinctly : no." " And why not ? " said Brancepeth, feeling an irrational offence, although a moment before he had dreaded receiving an affirmative answer. "My dear Harry, we are both as poor as church mice. TBE MAS8ARENEB. 279 If you can't pay your own tailors, how would you pay mine ? " " We should get along somehow." " Oh, thanks ! I have had nearly ten years of * getting along somehow,' and it is an extremely uncomfortable and crablike mode of moving. I hope to have no more of it. It takes it out of one. I shall marry again, of course. But I shall marry money." He, still standing in front of her, gazed down on her gloomily. Certainly he had been keenly and nervously apprehensive that she would expect to marry him — would insist on marrying J dm; but now that she so decidedly refused to do so the matter took another aspect in his eyes. A vague sullen sense of offended and repudiated ownership rose up in him; it is a sentiment extremely tenacious, unreasonable, and aggressive, whether it be agrarian or amorous. He did not say anything ; words were not very abundant with him, but he continued to look down on her gloomily. Marry money ! And the man with money would have all this charming fair beauty of hers, and would have Jack and the others in his nurseries : and he himself — where would he be ? Done with ; rubbed off the slate ; struck out of the running ; allowed to do a theatre with her now and then perhaps, and see Jack and the others on their ponies in the ride of a morning — where was the good of Cocky having died? He wished with all his soul that Cocky had not died. Things had been so comfortable with poor old Cocky. He was accustomed to consider himself as a part of her property ; for nearly ten years she had disposed of his time, his circumstance, and his resources ; he had always been at her beck and call, and the nurseries had been his recom- pense ; he was stunned to be flung off in this way like any stranger. She saw that he was angry, more angry than he knew. She guessed all the various feelings which were at work within him ; they were clearer to her than to himself. She was fond of him; she did not wish to lose him entirely; there was nobody else she liked so much, nobody else so extremely good-looking. She administered an opiate after the severe wound she had given. 280 TEE MASaABENES, " You goose ! " she said softly, whilst her blue eyes smiled caressingly upon him. " You are too terribly tragic to-day. Do look at things in their right form, dear ; you must see that, however much we might like it, we can't possibly afford to marry each other. We might as well want to drive a team of giraffes down Piccadilly. We have nothing to marry upon, and we are both of us people who require a good deal. Besides, society will expect us to marry, and for that reason alone I wouldn't. It would be de me donner dans le tort I shall marry somebody extremely rich. I don't know who yet, but somebody, I promise you, who shall be nice to you, dear ; just as nice as poor Cocky was, and somebody who won't be always wanting five pounds as Cocky was, but, on the contrary, will be able to lend five hundred if you wish for it." The future she so delicately suggested seemed to her so seductive that she expected it to fully satisfy her companion. But he saw it in another and a less favourable aspect. His handsome face grew dark as a thunder-cloud, and his teeth shut tightly together. He stood before her, staring down on her. " The devil take you and all your soft speeches ! " he said, through his clenched teeth. "You are an out and out bad woman. That's what you are. If you weren't their motlier I would " His voice choked in his throat. He turned quickly, took up his hat and cane from the chair he had left them on, and went out of the room without looking behind him. He closed the door roughly and ran down the staircase. A youthful philosopher in powder and black shoulder- knots, who was on duty at the head of the stairs, looked after his retreating figure with placid derision. " She's wanting him to be spliced to her and he won't hear of it," thought the youth ; but even philosophers in powder, whose Portico is the vestibule of a fashionable London house, sometimes err in their conclusions. Fury, as though it were the drug ci^rare, held her motion- less and speechless as she heard the door close behind her self-emancipated slave. The common coarse language of the streets used to her ! She could not believe her ears. Her rage stifled her. She could scarcely breathe. The TEE MASSABENJES 281 Blenheims were frightened at her expression, and went under a sofa. She took the satin wheelbarrow — she did not know why, except that it was associated in her thoughts with him — and she broke it, and tore it, and flung its contents all over the room, and trampled on the gilded wheel and handles till they were mere glittering splinters and shivers. That exercise of violence did her good, the blood ceased to buzz in her ears, her nerves grew calmer ; she would willingly have killed someone or something, but even this destruction of a toy did her good, it was better than nothing, it relaxed the tension of her nerves. It had allowed her a little of that violent physical action which is the instinct of even civilised human nature when it is offended or outraged. When she was a little calmer and could reflect, she thought she would tell his commanding officer, and demand his punishment; she thought she would tell the Prince of Wales, and entreat his exclusion from Marlborough House and Sandringham ; she thought she would tell the editor of Truth, and Beg him to have a paragraph about it. Then, as she grew calmer still, she became aware that she could tell nobody at all anything whatever. If the world knew that Harry had used bad words to her, the world would immediately ask what tether had been given to Harry that he had ever so greatly dared. " The coward, the coward ! " she said, in her teeth. " He knows I can't even have him thrashed by another man." His crime against her seemed to her monstrous. It was indeed of the kind which no woman forgives. It was the cruellest of all insults, one which was based upon fact. To her own idea she had very delicately and good-naturedly intimated to her friend that she would arrange her future so that their relation should be as undisturbed as in the past. If that did not merit a man's gratitude, what did ? Yet, instead of thanks, he had spoken to her as she had not supposed women were spoken to outside the Haymarket or the Rat Mort. She never admitted to herself that she did wrong ; much less had she ever permitted anyone else to hint that she did so. A bad woman ! Ladies like herself can no more conceive such a phrase being uged to describe them than a 282 TEE MA8SABENE8, winner of the Oaks could imagine herself between a coster- monger's shafts. All that they do is ticketed under pretty or pleasant names on the shelves of their memories ; tact, friendship, amusement, sympathy, convenience, amiability, health, one or other of these nice-sounding words labels every one of their motives or actions. To class themselves with " bad people " never enters their minds for a moment ; Messalina would certainly never have dreamed of being classed with the horizontales of the Suburra. What made it worse was that she was still fond of him, though he often bored her. She would have given ten years of life to have had his face under her foot and to have stamped it into blurred ugliness as she had stamped the wheelbarrow into atoms. But these fierce simple pleasures, alas ! are only allowed to the women of the Haymarket and the Eat Mort. She had done incalculable harm to Harry; she had worried, enslaved, and tormented the best years of his life ; she had impoverished him utterly, she had stripped him of the little he had ever possessed, she had driven him into debt which would hang about his neck like a millstone to the day of his death ; she had turned a simple and honest nature into devious and secret ways ; she had made him lie, and laughed at him when he had been ashamed of lying ; she had done him a world of harm, and in return he had only said five little rude words to her. But his offence seemed to her so enormous, that if she had possessed the power she would have had him beaten with rods or roasted at a slow fire. That she had been his worst enemy she would never have admitted for one instant, never have supposed that anyone could think it. She considered that she had made him supremely happy during a very long period, that if she had ever given him cause for jealousy he had never known it, which is all that a well-bred man should expect; and that he had enjoyed the supreme felicity of being associated in her home life, of knowing all her worries and annoyances, and of being allowed to make an ass of himself in the nurseries in a simili-domestic fashion which was just suited to his simple tastes as a simili-bronze of a classic statuette is suited to the narrow purse of a tourist. His ingratitude seemed to her so vile, so enormous, that the immensity of her own wrongs made THE MASSABENE8, 283 her submit to bear them in silence out of admiration of her own magnanimity and the serenity of her own certitude that she would avenge herself somehow or other to the smallest iota. She rang the bell, which was answered by a colleague of the young philosopher in powder of the anteroom. " The dogs have torn up this bonbon thing," she said, pointing to the wreck of the ruined wheelbarrow. *' Take it away, and bring me some luncheon in here ; only a quail and some plover eggs, and some claret ; order the carriage for three o'clock." She felt exhausted from the extreme violence of her anger and the infamy of the affront she had received ; and were Phedre or Dido or Cleopatra living on the brink of the twentieth century no one of them would any day go without her luncheon. They would know that their emotions " took it out " of them, that their nervous system was in danger when their affections are disturbed; they would know all about neurasthenia and marasma, and however angry or unhappy for Hippolytus, for ^neas, or for Anthony, would remember that they were organisms very easily put out of order, machines which require very regular nutrition; they would be fully conscious of the important functions of their livers, and would regulate their passions so as not to interfere with their digestions. 284 TEE MASSABENEa. CHAPTER XXIII. When she had ended her repast with two hot-house nectarines, her brother was announced, to her great vexa- tion. She never saw Ronnie very willingly and now less willingly than ever, for his position with regard to her and her children was one which could not have made him a 'persona grata even had he been less outspoken and un- compromising than he was. At the present moment ho was especially unwelcome to her ; but as he had come upstairs disregarding the servants' endeavours to induce him to wait while they inquired their mistress's pleasure, he had entered the room before she had quite finished her second nectarine, and it was impossible to order him to go away as he came. He had come on business. There was a great deal of business concerning little Jack's succession, the many bnrdens already laid thereon, and the various projects which were in consideration for turning to the best account the long minority. Then there were her own jointure, her own rights and claims, her own debts. The views which he had been afforded from time to time of hers and Cooky's affairs had been but partial ; nothing had ever been completely divulged to him, neither Cocky nor she could ever tell the exact truth — it was not in them. Therefore, although Hurstmanceaux had known a good deal of their embarrassments he had not known many matters which now appalled him when they came before him in the dry, cold prose of legal fact, and he had not spared his sister the complete expression of his supreme amazement and supreme disgust. Their interviews were therefore neither gay nor cordial, and she did not assume a contentment which she was so far TEE MASSABENE8. 285 from feeling, as his entrance made the claret seem corked and the nectarine seem sour. After the statement of the especial piece of legal business which had brought him there that morning, the letting on a long lease of the dower-house at Staghurst, for which her signature was necessary, Hurstmanceaux, standing on the hearth in the same attitude he had assumed when he had recommended Black Hazel, said very simply and very curtly to her : " You let the dower-house instead of living in it. Will you tell me where you do mean to live ? " She frowned; she hated direct questions, they were so ill-bred. ** Live ? " she repeated. " Oh, I don't know at all. Of course I shall be a good deal here " ** By here do you mean in this house ? " " I dare say — I don't know; I have not thought about it." " You had better think. The rent of this house is fifteen hundred a year. Happily it was only taken by the year. I have told them it will not be required next year." " Very officious of you ! " she said with a chilly smile. " I have a right to Otterbourne House." " Not the smallest right." " That is absurd." " It is law." ** Is it true you have let it to Mannheim ? " ** Quite true." Mannheim was the ambassador of the Eussian Emperor. " All these things are no concern of yours," said Hurst- manceaux gravely. "Pray give your attention to what does concern you. Your jointure is a narrow one. Out of it you should, surrender two thousand a year for twenty years to pay off your personal debts. How can you keep on any London house on what will be left to you? Of course the children live with you, and bring you in some- thing, but very little, for there is next to nothing at present ; the charges on the estate are so heavy, as we demonstrated to you the other day. What will you do if you can't break yourself in to some sort of economy and sacrifice ? " She deigned no reply. She had really none ready. 286 TEE MASSARENES. She was only intensely, bitterly, furiously angry. If she could not live in the way she liked she did not care to live at all. She was very pale, with the pallor of deep anger ; her lips were white and her blue eyes dark and flashing. How she hated everybody ! How above all she hated that little dead beast who had left her tied hand and foot like this ! " Surely you must see," her brother said with pain, " that in the position in which I stand towards you I must be more strict with you, my sister, than it might be necessary to be with a stranger ? " " How exactly like your priggish humbug ! " she cried furiously, " nobody else would take such a view. What is the use of connections if they don't make things smooth ? " " I am well aware that it is the only purpose of my own existence in your eyes," said Hurstmanceaux ; *'you have taught me that long ago. But I am afraid you will find others less indulgent than I have been, and I am sorry to say, whether you understand it or not, I cannot myself be indulgent to you at the expense of your sons." She gave an impatient gesture. "You always get on your moral hobbyhorse," she said insolently. "I believe there was never such a prig in all creation. I wish you would go away. You are wasting for me all this fine morning." There was silence between them. Hurstmanceaux broke it by a question he was half afraid to put. " I have to apologise for asking you, but I should be glad to know — I suppose you mean to marry Brancepeth ? " She threw back her head and looked at him with dis- tended nostrils breathing defiance. " Pray why should I marry Lord Brancepeth ? " Hurstmanceaux hesitated; he was astonished and em- barrassed. " Well, everybody expects you to do so ; it would be natural and proper that you should ; it is the only thing you can do to — to " He paused ; he had never spoken to her of Brancepeth, it hurt him to do so ; he grew red with embarrassment for her. He could not have used any words which could have stung, infuriated and embittered her more than these un- TEE MAS8ABENE8. 287 fortunate and far too candid phrases. Coming after the scene of an hour before, they were like petroleum poured on a leaping flame. "Lord Brancepeth did me the honour to offer me his hand a few minutes ago ; I refused it," she said between her teeth. "I am entirely at a loss to know why you and 'everybody' consider that I ought to marry a penniless guardsman who has nothing to recommend him but a handsome face." " By heaven ! That's cool." Hurstmanceaux, as he muttered the involuntary words, stared down on her too astonished to say more, too com- pletely stupefied and taken aback to be aware of the in- delicacy of his own astonishment. "Have you any more suggestions to make?" she said with her utmost insolence. "Unhappily, I have to speak to you about a very un- pleasant thing," said Hurstmanceaux and paused. " You never speak of anything that is not unpleasant by any chance," said his sister. *' Pray unburden yourself" " Well then," said Hurstmanceaux, not softened by her manner, " briefly, I must ask you to be so good as to give up the family jewels out of your keeping; the bank will send for them by our orders on Monday." She was prepared for the question. " I have always had the use of them," she replied very calmly, " precedent makes possession." ^ " No, it does not. The late duke never gave you by signature, nor before witnesses, any interest in them or any right of user. He let you wear them as he might have lent me a horse, but the horse having been lent to me would not have become mine through that loan. The jewels are tied up by settlement, and go with the real estate. Your husband renewed that settlement on his deathbed and the jewels go to Jack with the rest of the real estate. Do I make myself clear ? " "The little beast!" said Jack's mother between her teeth. "I do not know why you should call your child bad names. He is your child, there can be no doubt about that. Failing Jack, his brother succeeds. It is not Jack 288 THE MA8SABENE8, personally who causes you this annoyance, it is the settle- ment under his father and grandfather's will. It would be just the same if you had no sons and if Lord Alberic succeeded." Mouse gave a fierce, nervous, impatient gesture. " Why was I allowed to have the jewels, then, at all if I am to be made ridiculous by having them taken away from me ? " " It would have been better if you had not had them, no doubt. But the duke was always good-natured and in- dulgent, and your husband was of course perfectly aware that the jewels were protected by settlement ; he renewed the settlement on his deathbed. Besides, the great Indian diamond is not an ordinary jewel — it is a fortune in itself." She was prepared for this or some similar remark and did not flinch. " It is precisely that which is so annoying," she replied. "That jewel is so conspicuous; to appear without it at a Drawing-room or any function of any importance would be absurd — odious. Surely some way can be found to leave me the usage of them until the boy's majority ? " " No way at all," said Hurstmanceaux sternly. " They will go to Coutts's, and stay there until his majority. By the way, where are they now ? " " In my jewel-safe," she answered sullenly. " What imprudence ! " "IthasaChubb'slock." " Why did you not keep them at the bank ? Nobody wears such jewels as these every evening." " I wear them very often." Something aggressive in her tone aroused her brother. *'You will not wear them any more," he said harshly. " You must learn to realise that they do not belong to you." " I shall dispute that fact before the court." « What court ? " " I do not know yet, but some court — some court which sees to such things." " Pray be reasonable. You have not an inch of ground to stand on ; there is the settlement renewed every genera- tion ; the jewels are chattels and the chattels are devised to the heir ; they go with the dukedom." THE MASSARENES. 289 " I shall see Mr. Gregge." "Tray do. Mr. Gregge is not a very scrupulous man, but he is a man of sense, and he will not tell you to run your head against a stone wall." " If he do not do his duty, I shall employ someone else." " No decent attorney in the three kingdoms would take up such a case. You have no more title to the Otterbourne jewels than the woman selling primroses at the corner of the street." " So you say." " It is not what I say, it is what the law says ; what the dead men's wills say; what the Lord Chancellor himself would say if he were asked. You are a person accustomed to do whatever you like and to bewitch any man who approaches you, but you will find there are some things stronger than yourself, and one of them is the common law of England, which in this instance is dead against you." With these words he rose. Then, with one of those audacious inspirations which might have made her a great general had she been a man, she added between her teeth : " Perhaps you would like to see them and convince your- self of their safety? Will you come to my room? The safe is screwed to its stand." She spoke without apprehension because she knew that the false diamonds would defy detection by any one except an expert. Hurstmanceaux was reassured by the frankness of the offer. " No, oh, no ! " he said less coldly. " I will of course take your word for it that they are all there." " You are really too confiding," said his sister very con- temptuously. She rose also with tightened teeth, dilated nostrils, flashing eyes. " Your conduct is infamous ! To insult your own sister ! " *' There is no insult," said Hurstmanceaux. " An honest woman would not want to be asked twice to give up what is not her own." " Out of my presence ! " she cried with a shrill sound in her voice like that of the wind as it rises in storm. "With pleasure," said her brother very coldly. "To- morrow is Sunday. On Monday at ten o'clock in the 290 TEE MASSABENES. morning they will come from the bank for the jewels, and you will consult your own interests best by giving them up without more of this folly; we shall have them valued afresh by Hunt and Koskell, for values change with time." " Out of my presence, and never dare to enter it again so long as you live ! " she said with fury, whilst she twisted her handkerchief between her hands as though it were Jack's little throat that she was strangling. Hurstmanceaux shrugged his shoulders, bowed to her slightly, and went out of the room. To a more suspicious man the impression that she had some worse motive for her opposition than a mere vain reluctance to part with these ornaments would have sug- gested itself; but he was not suspicious, and he knew that women of her type would sell their souls to be smarter than their neighbours. " Cocky only put me in his will," he thought ruefully, " because he knew that I was up to her tricks, and should put the curb on her for the boy's sake." He did his duty loyally; but the doing of it was ex- tremely disagreeable to him. He could not help being fond of her ; he never could wholly forget the time when she had been a little, saucy, lovely, bewitching child, resting her golden curls on his shoulder when ne went home from Eton or Oxford. TEE MASSABENES, 291 CHAPTER XXIV. When he went down-stairs 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 w^ages 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." V 2 292 TEE MA8SARENES. '^ And do you think she will, my lord ? " "She must!" Mason shook his head. " 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 dis- respect, 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 any- thing 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 Konald'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 down-stairs." 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 I " 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." "Mo^, / resterai/* said the Swiss woman. "She does hit one with the hairbrush sometimes and pretty hard too. THE MASSAEENES, 293 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." "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. Eonald 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 a level with those poor simpletons -whom she had always scorned so immeasurably, women who had lost their natural position and w^ere 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 loeclies a 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 w^as 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 294 TEE MASSABENES. 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 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 Koskell, and that admirable imitation of the roc's e^g, 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 jewellers 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 every one to whom she could quite safely trust her secret. There are very pretty theories and ideals about the honour 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 honour. 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 TEE MASSAEENES, 295 with Lim, 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 stone broke, as lie 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 savour. 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 inexor- able " 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, 296 THE MASSABENES. the tears which disfigure and age the woman wl^o siioms them. The Blenheims, infinitely distressed, jumped on her lap ^ and endeavoured to console her; rubbing their 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 ; hut she felt that she would rather kill herself than meet Konald's eyes if he learned that the Indian diamond had been changed and pawned. And know it he must as soon as Hunt and Koskell's assayer tested the stones. Beaumont had told her honestly that the imitation would deceive anyone, even a jeweller, unless it were tested ; but that when 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 W'Ould 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 Konald would be but the more bitterly inflexible because he would consider that her near relationship to himself compelled him in honour TEE MASSARENES. 297 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. 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 up-stairs 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 oyer her face with the repulsion of pride. Tell her neces- sities 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 in- genuity, 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^ Koyal. She had rooked him without mercy, con- sidering that she did him an honour in noticing him at all. But, by some contradiction, or some instinct of pride or of 298 TEE MAB8ABENE8. decency, she shrank at the idea of actually borrowing money from him — of actually being indebted to him for a great service. 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 Eoskell 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 G-ardens, 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 door-keeper said, in the House. After a few moments he came out to her with the deferential haste of an enamoured man, which sat ill on his broad squat figure and his iron-grey, elderly, respectable, tradesmanlike aspect. THE MASSARENE8. 299 " I want to speak to you a moment," slie said as he came and stood by the carriage. *' Can you give me a cup of tea on the terrace ? " " 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 Eadical 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 mis- takes 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 300 THE MA8SAEENES. lie did so with a purpose and not out of feebleness. She did not understand that, although he was hypnotised by 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 ; slie 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 snowdrift 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 THE MASSABENES. 801 relatives' cruelty and harshness. The old duke, she averred, had given her the jewels ; but it seemed there 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 embarrass- ment, 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 tete-a-tete. He was magnetised 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 302 THE MASSABENES. mortification and shame in lier voice. "You don't know what it is to want money as we do." 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 innumer- able 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 got 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 rejiutation," 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 ? " THE MASSABENES, 803 "Pay you!" 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 authorising me to treat for you with this jeweller. 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 realised that he was no more her timid obedient slave, but her master, and a master with a whip. Some- thing 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 Eoskell, 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 millhand 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 agonising 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, 304 THE MASSABENES. as they crossed the Speaker's Court, " I'll send you 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 jeweller. 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." " Yery 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 im- patiently. " 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 Konnie, or whatever it was, had made life so difiScult 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 authorised 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 for the sum of twelve thousand pounds sterling. This last clause she did not like. It alarmed her. For an instant a THE MASSABENES. 805 flash of good sense came across her mind and suggested to her that it would be a thousand times better to send for Eonald, 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 stub- bornness rejected the whispers of common sense. She detested Alberic Orme, and her feeling towards her brother was now little less virulent. " JSTo ! " she said to herself, " rather than confess myself and humiliate myself to either of them, I would die like Sarah Bernhardt in Ixeih ! " 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, then sealed and sent it down to Massarene's messenger. She cried bitterly when it v»as irrevocably gone from her, but she felt that she could do no less than she had done ; everybody took such dreadful advantage of poor Cooky's death ! *' I shall treat the beast worse than ever," she thought, as her sobs ceased gradually. " Foignez vilain, il voiis oindra" She had always beaten her vilain, and he had always sub- mitted and cowed before her. She believed that he would do so as long as he lived. For this satirical, intelligent, tm& jin-cle-siede 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 towards Dover in the club train with the type-written paper safe in his inner breast- pocket. His errand pleased him. 306 TEE MASSABENE8. CHAPTEE XXV. Clake had never known great anxiety before. She had had many worries, many troublesome moments, when she wanted money, but never such a weight of care as this. There had always been Cocky, on to whose shoulders she had been able to throw the blame of everything; and whose in- genuity had frequently (for a consideration) been of exceeding use to her. Now she was alone, without even the solace of having Harry to quarrel with and upbraid ; and she had put herself and her secret and her signature into the hands of William Massarene. When she thought of it she felt as if a rush of ice-cold wind passed over her. It was Sunday. She went to a fashionable church and took Boo with her, looking a picture of childish loveliness in the crape frock, and her big black hat and her little black silk legs displayed far above the knee. "Mammy's got a lot o' bills to pay," said Boo at the schoolroom dinner. " How d'you know ? " asked Jack. " 'Cos she prayed such a deal," said his sister. " She flopped down on her knees and I think she cried." "There must be bills then," said Jack seriously. **0r p'rhaps," he added, " 'twas only the church. Churches is always sorrowful." " I don't mind 'em," said Boo. " There's a lot o' fun in people's bonnets. I drawed two or three bonnets in my Prayer Book." Their mother was, indeed, as Boo's observant eyes had discovered, greatly disturbed and apprehensive. Through- out the service of the fashionable church she was absorbed in one thought : would Billy play her false ? Would he, if he were true to her, be in time ? Might not Beaumont be THE MASSARENES. 507 av/ajr from Paris for the Sunday, like so 'many Parisian tradesmen; lie had a country house, she knew, at Compiegne. What would happen to her if, when the men from Coutts's came, she had not the veritable diamonds to give ? Exposure, complete and inevitable, must follow; when the jewels should be brought to valuation Hurstmanceaux and the Ormes must at least know the truth, and that seemed to her worse than to be pilloried, as people were of old, and stoned by the multitude. She thought she could trust " Billy " ; she felt that a hard-headed man of business would not go over to Paris on so grave an errand and leave it undone ; but she could not be sure, a thousand things might happen. Channel steamers never do get wrecked, but the one in which he crossed might do so ; the train might come to grief ; Paris might be in revolution ; Paris made revolutions as rapidly as it made omelettes for breakfast. She was not naturally imaginative, but in this tension of terror her fancy con- jured up innumerable horrors [as she apparently kneeled in prayer. When she came home she shut herself up in her bedroom, said she had a headache and took a little chloral. As she lay on her sofa, with a handkerchief over her eyes, she heard the children trundling down the staircase to go for their afternoon drive ; they always were driven somewhere into the country on Sunday afternoons to avoid the crowds and noise of the parks. She heard Jack's voice shouting a negro melody as he jumped down three stairs at a time. She got up despite her headache and her chloral, opened her door which led on to the stairs, and caught the little sinnei as he passed her by his blouse. " How can you let the duke disgrace himself so ? " she said sternly to the governess. " The very boys in the street respect the seventh day." Then, still with her fair hand closed fast on the blouse, she said to the wearer of it : "I am shocked at you. Jack ! Go up-stairs to your room and stay there. You do not go out to-day." The great tears brimmed up in Jack's eyes, but he would not cry ; he looked at her with a fixed reproachful, indignant look, very like Brancepeth. X 12 308 TEE MAS8ARENES, The governess and the nurses all pleaded for him ; every one in the household loved Jack as they hated Boo. But it was in vain ; his mother was in that kind of mood when every woman must have a victim, and he was all that offered to her. He was taken up-stairs to be locked in his chamber by a sympathetic under-nurse, who whispered con- solation. Boo, half vexed half pleased, called after him with much self-righteousness : " 1 tolled you never to sing those naughty songs. Didn't I tell you. Jack ? " Jack did not reply or look round ; he went manfully onwards and upwards to his doom. His mother retired to her own repose, whilst Boo, with the two other little boys, descended down to the entrance-hall. She was glad to think of Jack shut up in solitude and fretting his heart out this fine, clear, rainless afternoon in May. The governess and the head-nurse whispered together in the landau as to the duchess's strange unkindness to her eldest son. Boo, who never lost a word of their whispering, when she sat between them, turned up her pretty nose : " Mammy don't like Jack 'cos he's got everything ; she's got to give him her jewels." For Boo, unseen and forgotten, had been sitting in the next room, playing with her big doll which talked, whilst the scene concerning the jewels had taken place between her mother and her uncle. Boo enjoyed anything which bothered Mammy. Only Boo was of opinion that the jewels ought to be her own, not Jack's. Meantime poor Jack, crying his heart out on his bed, thought, " Whatever good is it being a duke ? Two of 'em have had to die one after the other, and I've got to be shut up here. And how mean it was of Boo to crow over me. Boo's so like Mammy. I wish there were no women and no girls." At that moment the sympathetic under-nurse brought him two peaches and a raspberry ice, which she had begged for from the kitchen, and Jack kissed her and thought better of her sex. " I wish all women were dead 'cept you, Harriet," he said tenderly. " Oh, your Grace, don't say that," said Harriet. " But it was to bv^ sure cruel unkind of your mamma." TEE MASSARENES. 309 " I hate Mammy," said Jack with a deep drawn breath. " She took away my Punch, and she's sent away Harry." " Oh, your Grace, don't let yourself blame your mamma," said the good nursemaid. " But for sure it is hard to be shut up here on a bright breezy day. But eat your peaches, dear, 'twill all be the same to-morrow." " But you're shut up too, Harriet," said Jack, regaiding her thoughtfully. " Law, yes, sir, I never hardly gets an hour out." " But you'd like to go out ? " " Yes, sir ; but them as is above me, you see, don't think of that." Jack ceased munching his peach and looked at her gravely. " I think that's very wrong. When I'm a man, Harriet, everybody shall have hours out." " You dear little soul," thought Harriet, " you think so now, but when you're a man I dessay you'll be like all the others, and think only of yourself." " No, Harriet," said Jack, solemnly divining her thoughts, " no, I sha'n't forget." The solace of having hurt Jack only momentarily diverted his mother from her torturing thoughts for a brief space of time. Her mind returned in fretting and feverish anxiety to the mission on which William Massarene had gone. Two or three intimate friends were coming to dine with her at eight o'clock. She wrote a few hasty words and put them off on the score of her headache ; they were intimate friends, and what is intimacy worth if it does not enable us to sacrifice our intimates to ourselves? The notes sent, she went to sleep and slept fitfully for some hours. She really felt ill, for she was so unused to severe mental dis- turbance that it affected her physical health. She would have liked to send for her physician, but she was afraid he would perceive that she had something on her mind. She saw in the mirror that she did not look like herself. She was so unused to being alone, that solitude was in itself an illness to her. She had no resource of any kind; everything bored her except the life she was used to lead. She could never imagine why people read books or wrote them. Even the newspapers she liad never read, 310 TEL MASSABENEB. except when they had had something about herselt or Cocky. William Massarene had said, " Mind you are alone," and she felt that it would be the height of imprudence to have any of her friends with her when he should make his appearance at ten o'clock. She took a bowl of hot soup, a little claret, and a little fruit, and felt better. She had herself arrayed in a tea-gown of crape, with loose floating sleeves and a long train which trailed after her; it was very becoming ; her hair was loosely wound round her head, and a high jet comb was stuck in it. She went down and into her boudoir. It was eight o'clock. She had forgotten Jack. Lights shaded with big butterfly shades were burning low. The room was full of the scent of lilies of the valley. It was a nest for human nightingales. And she had to wait for an odious brute out of Dakota, who had got her signature for twelve thousand pounds ! How disgracefully inappropriate to the boudoir and to herself ! There were several rings at the door-bell which echoed through the hall below ; but no one came for her. She felt it was a blessing that Harry could not come ; he had been used to racing up the stairs when he heard she was unwell, and forcing his entry by right of usage. And yet in a way she missed Harry. She had always been able to make him believe anything. Ten o'clock struck at last. She shivered when she heard it. If the man did not come, what on earth would she do in the morning ? She almost resolved to take the jewel- safe and go out of England. Certainly neither Konald nor the Ormes would pursue her as a common thief. But after a moment's consideration she knew that to do this would be useless. They would find her wherever she went, and her life would be ruined. No, she reflected, there was nothing but to trust to Billy. She had always had immeasurable power over him, and moved him about like a pawn at chess. She did not doubt that she would always be able to do the same. Ce que femme vent I was her gospel. She belonged to a world in which the grace and charm of women are still very dominant features; but William Massarene belonged to one in which woman was repre- eented by a round 0, except in as far as she was wanted TEE MASSABENES. 311 for child-bearing and household work. In her latest trans- action with him she had confided in him as if he had been a gentleman ; she had ignored what she knew so well, that he was but a low brute varnished by money. She expected him to behave as a gentleman would have done in similar circumstances, forgetting that he had neither blood nor breeding in him. She watched the movements of the hands of the little timepiece with intense anxiety. The tidal train arrived in Cannon Street at half-past nine. He might have been here by ten. It was twenty minutes past ten when the bell down-stairs rang loudly. It was he ! A few moments later a man-servant ushered him into her presence; she had given orders that they should do so immediately on his arrival. He was hot from his journey and dusty, and had some of the smoke of funnel and engine upon him ; he had never been more unlovely: he had his hat on his head as he entered and his overcoat on his shoulders ; he took both off slowly as a man does in whose eyes good clothes are precious, and she watched them with her nerves strung to the highest pitch, yet her intense agitation not excluding a vivid anger at his want of ceremony. His coat carefully laid on a chair, and his gloves on the top of it, he came and sat down before her, square, solid, hard as a piece of old Roman masonry. " Well ? " she said breathlessly. How cruel it was to keep her in such suspense ! " It's all right, my lady," he replied briefly. She raised herself on her couch, animation and colour returning to her face, light to her eyes, warmth to her face. " Oh, that is very good of you ! " she exclaimed. " I am very grateful, indeed I am." William Massarene laughed a little, deep down in his throat. "Gratitude don't wash, my dear. I never took a red cent of it in change for any goods of mine." " But I am grateful," she said, disconcerted and vaguely distressed. "It was very good of you. What have you done with them ? Where are they ? " He took a large packet out of his inuer breast-pocket, 312 THE MASSARENES, " I had the tiara dismounted because 'twas safer to carry it so. You'll know how to put it together, I guess." With a scream of relief and delight she sprang up and seized the packet, tears of joy welling up into her eyes. " Verify 'em," said Massarene, and she undid the parcel and saw once more the great dazzling egg diamond and all its lesser luminaries. He watched her as a big tom-cat on the tiles with gloating eyes may watch some white graceful feline form walking amongst roses in a garden. " Verify 'em," he repeated — " count 'em." "I have, I have," she said in her ecstacy. "They are the Otterbourne diamonds just as I gave them to Beaumont. Oh, my dear good man, how can I thank you ? " He did not answer ; he breathed so loudly and heavily that she thought he was going to have a fit, and she could not but wish that he might have one. Like a child with a toy she took the jewels and began fitting them together to make the ornament she had so often worn. "Oh, how can I ever be seen without them! ^It is so monstrous, so brutal to shut them up at Coutts' unseen for all those years ! " As soon as she had escaped from one danger she, woman- like, bewailed another afSiction. " How did you get over Beaumont," she asked : " was he disagreeable about me ? " " No ; like a man of sense he was glad to get his money^ and asked no questions whence it came. Here is his receipt. ' He held it before her, but he did not let it go out of his hands. She saw that Beaumont had received of William Massarene, on behalf of the Duchess of Otterbourne, the sum of three hundred thousand francs jplus interest. A painful flush rose over her face as she saw that, and she realised more distinctly what she had done. " How can I ever repay you ? " she murmured. William Massarene's thin tight-shut ^ lips smiled, not ao-reeably. He put the receipt back in his breast-pocket. °"' And my signature ? " she said timidly, the first time in all her life that timidity had ever assailed her. Then he smiled outright. "I ain't Billy the scorned no more, am I, my dear? Where's your cheek, my lady ? " THE MASSABENES. 313 Mouse, bending over the tiara which she was building up, turned sick at his tone. She dared not resent it. She was vaguely but intensely alarmed, and she was aware that this man, so long her butt and jest, was her master. He sat with his hands still on his knees and with a horrible leer on his dull eyes, gazing at her as a fox might look at a silver pheasant from which nothing divided him. He had always succeeded in everything, and now he had succeeded in getting quid pro quo for all he had endured and expended for her. As far as his sluggish passions could be aroused they were excited for her ; she had aroused in him one of those passions of mature years which are more slow yet more brutal than those of youth. But stronger still than this was his grim pleasure in her humiliation, in her silence, in her subserviency. And what a fool she was, despite all her fine airs, and cool wit, and sovereign disdain ! He continued to gaze at her fixedly, the veins swelling like cords on his forehead, his stertorous breath as loud as the gasp of an engine, his small grey eyes grown red and shining luridly. " My signature ? " she repeated in an unsteady voice. " You've got the jewels, my beauty. You can't have no more." "Then it is not generosity!" said Mouse passionately, and very unwarily betraying her unfounded hopes. "No, my dear," he answered, "I never said 'twas." Then he put his two big knotted yellow hands one on each knee, and looked at her mercilessly. " Think I'll take ray payment now, or else the di'monds," he said, with a vile chuckle. She felt his odious grasp on her bare arms and his loathsome breath on her cheek. " Don't cry out, my beauty, or you'll lose your di'monds," he said, with his lips on her shell-like ear. " You've got to be fond of Billy now I " 314 TEE MASBABENES, CHAPTER XXVI. On the morrow, at tlie appointed hour, the real Otterboiirne jewels were consigned to the representatives of the Otter- bourne bankers, and Hnrstmanceaux, like all kind-hearted persons, now that he had got his own way, felt sorry he had been obliged to enforce it, especially as he heard that his sister was unwell, and could see no one. " Poor little Sourisette," he thought remorsefully. "Perhaps I am too hard on her. She had a beast of a husband. She is more to be pitied than blamed." Always ready to forgive, he called in Stanhope Street more than once, but she refused to see him. The children told him she was unwell and invisible. Boo came flying down the staircase between the palms and poinsettias in all the glee which to be the bearer of an unpleasant message naturally afforded her. " Mammy says she won't see you ever any more, uncle Ronald," said this miniature woman, with much con- temptuous dignity. " She would lilce, if you please, that you shouldn't speak to her even in the street." Boo felt very important, standing in the middle of the hall, in her crape frock, with her black silk legs, and her golden cascade of hair on her shoulders, as she delivered herself of this message, and pursed up her lips like two red geranium buds. " Tell your mother that her desires shall be obeyed," said Hnrstmanceaux, and he turned and went out, followed by the saucy echoes of Boo's triumphant laugh. She never liked her uncle Ronald; she was very pleased to see such a big, tall, grown-up man go away in dis- coinfiture. THE MASSARENES. 315 " You should have said it kinder, Boo," murmured Jack, from above on the staircase. " Why ? " said Boo, with her chin in the air. " He don't ever give us anything, at least, hardly ever." " Oh, yes, he does," said Jack, with remonstrance. " And slie^s cruel nasty. She's took away the Punch, and sent away Harry." He did not much like his uncle Konald, but he was sorry for him now that he, too, was dismissed. Hurstmanceaux was sad at heart as he walked down Great Stanhope Street into the Park ; he was full of com- punction for having, as he imagined, wronged his sister about the jewels, and he was deeply wounded by the un- forgiving ingratitude of her feeling towards himself. He had made many sacrifices to her in the past, and although a generous temper does not count its gifts, he could not but feel that he received poor reward for a devotion to her interests which had impoverished him to a degree he could ill support. The day was bright and breezy, the flowers blazed with colour, the season was at its height, everyone and everything around him was gay ; but he him- self felt that cheerless depression of spirit which is born in us of the ingratitude of those we cherish. Katherine Massarene passed him, driving herself a pair of roan ponies. She thought how weary and grave he looked, so unlike the man who had laughed and talked with her as they had gone together over the snowy pastures and the frozen ditches of the hunting country more than two years before. " It's really flying in the face of Providence, Eonnie, not to marry the Massarene heiress," said Daddy Gwyllian, that evening, in the stalls at Covent Garden, letting fall his lorgnon, after a prolonged examination of the Massa- rene box. " I never knew that Providence kept a Bureau de Mar- riage," replied Hurstmanceaux, "and I do not see what right you have to speak of that lady as if she were a filly without a bidder at Tattersall's." "Without a bidder! Lord, no! She refuses 'em, they say, fifty a week. But you know, Konnie, you do fetch women uncommonly ; look what scores of 'em have been in love with you." 316 TEE MASSARENES. "If they have, I am sure it has benefited them very little, and myself not at all," replied Hurstmanceaux, very ungraciously. "She keeps a circular printed — a stamped form of re- fusal," said Daddy Gwyllian with glee. " Sends 'em out in batches. Have a mind to propose to her myself, just for the fun of getting a circular." " Your wit is as admirable as your invention is original," said Hurstmanceaux, with much impatience, glancing, de- spite himself, at the box on the grand tier, where the classic profile and white shoulders of Katherine Massarene were visible beside the large, gorgeous, and much-jewelled person of her mother. Margaret Massarene disliked the opera-house. What she called the " noise " always reminded her of the braying of bands and the rattling of shots on a day of political excitement in Kerosene City. But she was not displeased to sit in that blaze of light with her di'monds on her ample bosom, and feel that she was as great a lady as any other there ; and she was proud and pleased to see the number of high and mighty gentlemen who came to make their bow in her box, and with whom Katherine " talked music " in the most recondite and artistic fashion. " That's the Duchess's brother down there," she whispered, as she turned her lorgnon on Hurstmanceaux, " It is," replied Katherine. " Why don't he come up here like the rest ? " she asked. " He's the best looking of them all." " He has never left his card on you," answered her daughter. " It would be very bad manners indeed if he came here." " And why hain't he left his card ? I'm sure we've done enough for his sister." " He probably does not feel that any gratitude is obliga- tory on him. He probably does not approve of her accept- ing favours from strangers." " Then he's born a century out of his time," said Mrs. Massarene, with the acuteness which occasionally flashed up in her. " In these days, my dear, everybody takes all they can lay their hands on " "Hush! said Katherine, as Jean de Keszke came on to the stage. TEE MABBABENE8. 317 Margaret Massarene would have preferred a companion who would have worn big pearls, and had some colour in her gown, and who would have talked all through "the music," and would have made a sign with a flower or a fan to that handsome man down there to come up with Daddy Gwyllian and chat with them. " Why didn't my lord come up with ye ? " she asked, as Daddy did appear. " His lordship's music mad, ma'am," replied Daddy, who delighted in adopting her style ; " never misses a season at Bayreuth, or a premiere of Saint-Saens's." " He's never left a card, and 'tis rude," said Mrs. Massa- rene. " We know all his sisters and brothers-in-law." "It is rude, madam," assented Daddy, "but men don't go often where they're liable to meet their own families." " That's a heathen sentiment," said Mrs. Massarene severely. " Only human nature," said Daddy cheerfully. " Human nature is much the same, dear lady, whether heathen, Chinee, or Christian." " Ye don't know much about the Chinese, sir," said Mrs. Massarene. " They're that wrapped up in their families that they're always agoin' to their graves ; not like the folks here, who poke a dead person into the earth and give orders to a florist, and then thinks of 'em never no more. The Chinese pray to their dead ; 'tis very touching, though it may be an offence to Deity." " I imagine, ma'am, their sensibilities are not blunted by death duties," said Daddy rather crossly ; he disliked being corrected, and he disliked being taken au pied de la lettre : it is highly inconvenient to anyone who has the reputation of a humourists 318 THE MASMBm^S, CHAPTEE XXVII. Brancepeth, like Hurstmanceaux, was sincerely unliappy through Clare, for a woman whom men love much, despite her faults and caprices, has an almost unlimited power of worrying and of torturing their less complex and more kindly natures. The breaking of a habit is always painful, and he had an affectionate soul. To have the door of Stanhope Street shut in his face hurt him as it hurts a kind-hearted St. Bernard dog to be shut out of an ac- customed house and left to pine on the area pavement. She swept past him in her carriage with a distant bow which cut him to the quick. Pride kept him from calling at her residence, but he could not help haunting the street to see the little black forms and golden heads of the children trotting off on their noonday walk, or Jack, in solitary manhood, riding with his groom. There was no one to whom he could appeal. Her sister, Carrie Wisbeach, the only one of her family who had ever liked him, had been three months away on a yachting journey round the world; and he felt, without ever hearing it said, that her people and her set approved the conduct of the Duchess of Otterbourne in having broken with him ; they approved her more than if she had married him. " Mammy's took away my Punch, Harry — the beautiful Punch you giv'd me," said Jack, in woebegone accents ; it had been a real Punch, show box, puppets, a Toby that squeaked, and a set of pandean pipes — a delicious toy with which Jack could make believe to be " the man in the street " to his great ecstacy. "She says I'm a little beast 'cos I have everythin'. What have I got ? She's even tooked away the Punch. TEE MASSABENES. 819 I haven't got anything," said the poor little man with tragic intensity. " Taken away the Punch ? Oh, lord ! That is real mean," said Brancepeth, with his face growing very dark. "Merely because I gave it you? What devils women are ! " " I always tolled you, Harry," said Jack solemnly. ** I always tolled you that mammy could be nasty. You've set her back up, that's what you've done." Jack was sitting astride of an Exmoor pony with his left hand resting on the crupper, and his face turned full on his friend in melancholy reproach. Harry was on the pedestrians' side of the rails and had stopped the rider under a tree in full fresh leaf. This was the only way now in which he could see the children, when they were out walking or riding, and he managed to waylay them. The nursery doors were closed against him, and he felt his exile as bitterly as the cast-out Peri of the poem. "You should have put up with mammy," said Jack, with the superiority of a sage, " 'cos you can't come to us now she's angry with you. And when she's angry once, it lasts a long long while, for ever, and ever, and ever." His tone was very impressive ; he spoke as if he had a hundred years' experience behind him; and his big soft black eyes had tears in them ; he missed his Harry. " You dear little beggar ! " said Brancepeth tenderly, but glancing apprehensively at the groom on the off-side. " Don't fidget your pony's mouth. Jack ; keep your bridle hand quiet, low down and quiet." " That's the little Duke," said some work-people walking past, and smiled good-naturedly. " What a little love ! " said some ladies. "You've got Tom Tit, Jack, and you'd better gallop him," said Brancepeth, nervously conscious of the open ears of the stolid and wooden-faced groom. "Don't let his Grace hustle his pony ; there can't be a worse habit," he said to that functionary. " Never hustle your cattle. Jack, do you understand ? Off with you, dear ! I want to see how you go." He watched the/ pretty figure of the boy as Tom Tit skurried over the tan with his undocked tail switching the 320 TEE MASSARENE8. ground, and his sturdy, shaggy little head pulling wilfully at the bridle. " Took his Punch away ! Good lord ! What out-and- out brutes women are," he thought, as he leaned over the rail under the green leaves in the sunshine. But his heart was heavy and his conscience ill at ease, and he envied Hurstmanceaux the power he had over these children and their future. " Harry's been hard hit over the Oaks," said one of his friends, staring after him, to another as they passed. " Never saw him look so blue in all his days." " No ; he's got to marry Lady Kenny, I suspect," said another of his friends, using the title by which she had been known to the town so long. " If I go on as I am doing now, what shall I be when that dear little beggar's a man?" he thought. He felt that he would be a very poor example for the child he loved. He felt that Jack, who loved him in return, would get no good from him, but might be led into much evil. " I'll try and pull up," he said to himself. " If I'm alive twenty years hence, I should like those little chaps to be the better not the worse through knowing me." He sighed as he thought so, and then he laughed at himself for being in such a mood. They were Cooky's sons, of course ! Why should he bother about them ? His laugh was bitter, but his heart was heavy. Clare had used up all the best years of his life, and beggared him to boot, and he had no more power over her than if he had been the crossing-sweeper yonder in St. George's Place, Harry was not very wise, and the ways of his life had not been prudent, but a seriousness and sadness which he had never known came over him as he watched the Exmoor pony till it was out of sight, and then walked on by himself in the opposite direction towards Apsley House. The next week he had a long interview with his father, and another with his Colonel, and in a week or two more he sent in his papers. " I shall never alter the pace here," he said to his father, who, much relieved that he did not hear Harry was going to marry the Duchess of Otterbourne, said, cordially ; " No THE MASSABENE8. 821 my dear boy, we can't get out of the swill till we're clear of the stye ! " By which elegant metaphor he meant life in London. It was growing hot and close in Mayfair and Belgravia, and Jack went for his last ride in the Park one sultry misty morning when the sky was like a grey woollen blanket, and the Serpentine resembled a dull steel mirror as it reflected the forms of the ill-fed and melancholy water-birds. Tom Tit and Jack were going down on the morrow with the rest of the juvenile household to the country. Their mother was already away from London. Jack was worrying his mind with wondering how he should see his favourite friend in the country. In other years Harry had generally been where they were, that is to say, when they accompanied their mother to Homburg, or Carlsbad, or Cowes, or Staghurst, or Scotland. But Jack was uncomfortably and dimly conscious that those pleasant days were over and were not likely to be renewed. It is hard at his age to have to look back to the past with regret. But Jack felt that nothing in his present was likely to be so agreeable as those merry days when his mother and Harry had been such good friends. It was very warm, heavy weather ; even Tom Tit had not much scamper in him, and his rider let him amble slowly along whilst he himself pushed his sailor hat to the extreme back of his head and yawned, opening his rosy mouth as wide as it would go. " Men don't yawn in their saddles, Jack," said a voice, Avhich was music in his ears. " Oh ! " he cried, with delight. He was on the north side uf the Park, no one was near, and Brancepeth was walking where he had no business to be, as he was on foot. Jlo came up to the cliild and greeted him, then turned to the groom : "I want to speak to the Duke a minute or two. You will wait here," he said, as he slipped a gold piece into the man's hand. " Jump off, Jack, and come with me." Jack needed no second bidding. The groom, with the sovereign in his whip-haii;], made no opposition, and Harry walked away with the boy across the grass^ talking to him as they went of horsemanship y 322 THE MASSABENEB. and all its etiquette, while Jack's face, gay and rosy in its happiness, was turned upward with adoring eyes. "I thought I shouldn't see you again, Harry," he said, as he trotted along by his friend's side. " We're all going into the country to-morroAV." " With your mother ? " asked Brancepeth. " No ; mammy's at Ems. Boo's so cross 'cos she's got to stay with us. She won't play at anything." " When did your mother go ? " " Day before yesterday." Brancepeth sighed. " And she didn't leave 'ny money, and she didn't leave any orders for us, and the servants went away, and there was nothin' to eat, and the scullery-maid she came upstairs, and said : * You duckies, I'll buy you chops if I go without a new hat,' and nurse said she was an imperent jade, and we didn't get 'ny chops, and somebody sent to uncle Bonnie, and he came and gived money, and I told him of the scullery-maid, and he gived her half a sovereign, and said, * You're a good girl,' and that I heard, aud we and the dogs and horses go down this afternoon." Jack drew a long breath after his eloquence, and added, " Harriet is gone down into Essex to see her mother, who's dyin', or shed have bought the chops." There were very few persons on the north side of the Park, and they went on across the grass until they had got out of sight of the groom, and came up to an elm tree with a circular bench round its roots. " Let's sit down a moment. Jack," said Harry. " It will be a long time perhaps before I see you again." " Why ? " said Jack, in alarm. " Are you Cfoing to Ems?" "No, dear — I am not going to Ems," said Brancepeth sadly, looking down at the boy's face, with the golden nimbus of its ruffled hair and the black circle of the sailor hat framing the hair as in an ebon frame. There was no one near. The great elm trunk was behind them like a wall, and its branches above them like a roof. How far away they seemed, those pleasant summers when, as the London season ended, he and she had planned their TEE MASSABENES. 323 meetings at this bath or at the other, and Cocky, pliant, philosophic Cocky, had said always opportunely : " You'll come too, won't you, Harry ? Filthy feeding and beastly waters, but they set one on one's le^s ae^ain somehow or other." The distant sound of the traffic in the road beyond the railings was like the muttering of an angry but distant sea. A white butterfly floated above the heat-scorched turf. Jack's two little sunburnt hands were clasped on one of his own ; he looked longingly and wistfully down on the child's face and form as we look on what we cherish and may never see again. "Jack," said Brancepeth suddenly, "if you were never to see me any more after to-day would you remember me ? " Jack's face had on it the distressed perplexed wonder with which children feel their hearts stirred by appeals which they very dimly understand ; his eyes were sufi'used, his forehead frowned. " Of course I should," he said almost crossly. " Eeally ? " said Brancepeth very wistfully. "Yes," said Jack very solemnly; then he burst out crying. *' What do you say such things for ? " he said between his sobs. " Where's you going ? " " You dear little beggar," said Harry, much moved him- self, as he put his arm round the child's shoulders and drew him closer. " I'm not sure I'm going anywhere, but I may go a long way, and I mayn't come back. Don't cry. Listen. If you grow up without seeing me try and be a good man. JSTot such a beast as men are nowadays. Not such a fool as I am; a mere horse-riding, card-playing, dawdling, gaping, well-groomed tomfool. Keep out of the accursed London life. Don't mind what women say. Tell the truth. Keep straight. Live on your land, if any land's left when you're of age. There are a ^t of things I want to say to you, but I don't know how to say 'em, and you're too little, you wouldn't understand. But don't do as I've done, that's all; and make yourself as like your uncle Ronnie as you can." Y 2 324 THE MASSABENES. CHAPTER XXVIII. Katherine Massakene noticed that her father paired early in the season and was ordered by his physician to take the waters of Ems. But she made no remark on the fact, and her mother said, quite unsuspiciously, to her husband on his departure, " If you see the Duchess there, William, give her my love. She was looking worried and worn when she left." She was always fascinated by that lovely apparition which had seemed to her so splendid an incarnation of aristocracy and grace, delicious insolence and incomparable sorcery. " Them German waters are wonderful curers," she said to lier daughter. " They're good for the Duchess's nerves, and your father's rheumatics." Katherine said nothing. Was her mother as simple as she seemed ? she wondered. Herself, in her own despite, she felt a curious reluctant pity for Hurstmanceaux's sister ; yueh pity as she might have felt if she had seen a lithe young jaguar crushed by the hirsute strength of a baboon. The jaguar is itself cruel, stealthy, pitiless, but still — the duel is unequal, and is decided by sheer brutal savage force. *SSomehow or other," she thought, "my father has frightened her and cowed her ; she looks as racing marcs do when they come in off the trotting piste, with their strained eyes and their nervous trembling.' She felt a vague desire to warn the victim of her father's character, of his pitiless cruelty, of his unutterable brutality ; but she knew that it would be unfilial to do so, and would be probably an act useless, misunderstood, and attributed to some selfish motive. She knew the world well enough to be SLwuYG that, whatever we may do to serve another, we are always suspected of serving our own interests. THE MASSARENES, 325 To her it was evident that the saucy and thievish rodent had run once too often and once too near the claws and teeth of the tom-cat, who had let her gambol before him only to seize her and crunch her at leisure. She came very close towards the truth in her observations and deduc- tions, but she shut her suspicions up in her own breast, and said nothing to anyone, being used to live without confidantes and to put a padlock on her lips. " Who would ever have thought Sourisette would be so depressed by her little beast of a husband's death ? " said the friends who saw her at Ems that summer, one to another. They found her extremely altered ; she was nervous, pale, had lost her spirits, and shut herself up a great deal, alleging her mourning. "Mouse as la veuve inconsolable is too droll," said hei world ; but when it became known that the guardians and executors had taken away the Otterbourne jewels, including the roc's eggy and locked them up, never to be unlocked until Jack should attain his majority, her female friends argued that it was no wonder she felt such an insult. " It is not an insult. It is the law. The trustees are obliged to do it; the little Duke's a minor," explained their male relatives. But to the female mind this kind of explanation always appears as trivial as it is impertinent. The general impression was given in society that Hurst- manceaux was very harsh to his sister, and that his unkind- ness was the cause of her loss of spirits and change of habits ; moreover, it was said that it was he who had insisted on her rupture with Brancepeth. Altogether she was pitied and admired, for her conduct had been quite admirable ever since the day that her wreath of forget-me-nots had been placed on poor Cocky 's grave, almost side by side with Lily Larking's harp of calla lilies. No one noticed that when she went on from Ems to Homburg, William Massarene went there also a few days later, whilst his wife and daughter remained at Yale Eoyal ; no one except the courtly diplomatist of the silk dressing- fown, who was at Homburg too, and who observed that she id not bully " Billy " as she had done in the days of the Bird rooms, and that when " Billy " approached her there came into her eyes a flash of hate, a gleam of fear and 326 TEE MASSARENES. loathing. Also that whatever he proposed in the way of walking, driving, or dining, she acquiesced in with a certain siillenness but with unusual docility. If ever in his sturdy life William Massarene had been shy, he was so when the gaze of this accomplished person met his own. But whatever the minister observed, and any conclusions he might draw from his observations, he kept to himself, having in his career learned that there is no proverb truer than that of Varhre et Vecorce. He was bland and charming both to Tours et Vagneau, as he called them. Fauvre agneau! She had gambolled too carelessly and skipped too nearly to the hairy arms of the ponderous bear ! The diplomatist felt thankful that he could look calmly as a spectator at the struggle. He was prudent by nature and by habit, and beyond all women who were ever created his own personal reputation and his own personal ambitions were dear to him. Equally circumspect, Massarene, as he took great care not to compromise himself, did not compromise her, except in the inductions of such very fine and accomplished observers as this diplomatist, of whom there are few left in the hurry and hurly-burly of modern society. If the whole of his constituency had been watching him, he could not have been more careful. A man has not been President of the Band of Purity and the White Eiband Association in an American township without learning how to keep his neighbours' noses out of his own whiskey and candy stores. But he was an ever-present horror in her life. He could subdue her with a glance of his colourless, dull eyes. She no longer dragged him behind in the dust of her chariot ; she was dragged in the dust behind his. She was tortured by the ever harrowing dread that others would notice the change. She had even lost the spirits and the nerve to invent fictions to account for such a change to her friends. She let things drift in apathy and disgust and fear. From Homburg he let her go on to Carlsbad, where he did not show himself, and thence on a visit to a sister of hers who had married a Magyar magnate, where she was for a while in peace, since there certainly her tyrant could not go. Her children were meantime still at Whiteleaf, a ducal THE MASSARENES. 327 property, of wliich Alberic Orme held the living, where they and the Blenheims had a healthier, if less brilliant, life than had been their portion when with her. She had no anxiety about them. She knew that their uncle Konnie would see to all that was necessary for them. She hated his conscientiousness bitterly, but she trusted to it as to a staff which would never break. The vast domain of Staghurst had already been let to an Indian maharajah. Otterbourne House had been leased to the representative of a great Power. All other houses and estates were similarly disposed of, and the strictest measures were being taken to make the little Duke's minority fruitful. The dreadful debaucheries of Cocky had impoverished his father woefully, and the entail had been eaten into as the eastern coast of England is being gnawed away by the sea. But the long minority would do much to restore the fallen fortunes of the great dukedom, and a strict economy was inaugurated. Her own jointure was of course paid regularly to her; but it seemed to her brother that it must be utterly in- sufficient to afford her means to live as she chose to live. A great disquietude and alarm always weighed on him about her, but she had chosen to quarrel with him. He could not sue for reconciliation when he was in the right. Hurstmanceaux was as tender-hearted as he was proud, and if she had made any sign of contrition or affection he would have forgiven all her insolence and have gone to her at once. But she had shut the door in his face ; she had insulted him by the lips of lier little daughter. He could not make any advances to her. For her own part she was relieved not to see him. Something might have transpired to excite his suspicions ; he might have noticed the altered tone of William Massarene, or he might have interrogated her as to her ways and means, and found her replies unsatisfactory. He was much better away, and she made no sign to him. Her movements he heard of from his other sisters, and from the columns of the Morning Post, In the late autumn he saw that she was staying at Vale Koyal ; the Christmas recess she passed with Carrie Wis- beach ; the new year saw her in a suite of rooms at the Residential Hotel facing Hyde Park. 328 THE MASBABENES. " How does slie get the ready money ? " lie said to Lady Wisbeach, who had come from her journey round the globe as though she had only been down to Greenwich. *^ Oh, a woman alone, you know, with only a maid," said that loyal lady carelessly, " a woman alone needn't spend more than a sparrow. It isn't as if she had the children. And then in mourning, and hardly going out except to quiet little things " Hurstmanceaux did not find the explanation very satis- factory. " Do you think she regrets that man ? " he said, after a pause. '^Whatman?" " Lord Brancepeth." " Oh, no," said Carrie Wisbeach. " My dear Ronnie, where do you live ? Who regrets things when they have been on all that while ? " He was silent ; he felt that his sisters were far beyond him in the knowledge of life. " You might as well talk of regretting a worn-out shoe," said Lady Wisbeach, with some impatience. '' Surely you admit she should have married him ? " " I ? " cried his sister with amazement. " I implored her not to marry him. She w^ould have been mad if she had married him. She would not marry him when — when she was wild about him. She married Cocky. She did quite right. The Inversays are utterly ruined. The old people have nothing. The very little he ever had came from his grandmother, old Lady Luce, and that little was — was — well, was got rid of in a year or two. Besides, nothing is so stupid — such a want of sense and savoir faire — as to marry a person who has been talked about in connection with you. It is foolish. It confirms things. It makes people laugh. Of course if you get a very great position by it, it's a different thing. But even in that case I should always say to a woman — at least to a young woman — don't ! " " Why especially to a young woman ? " "My dear Ronnie, you are really too stupid for any- thing ! If a woman isn't young she isn't likely to have many offers of marriage, is she ? " " I see," replied Hurstmanceaux, and felt once more that TEE MAB8ARENE8. 329 beside the worldly wisdom of his sisters he was indeed a novice. "You live in the country till you forget everything," said Lady Wisbeach. During the visits of the Duchess of Otterbourne to Vale Koyal her hostess saw a great change in her. " That pretty creature isn't what she was, William," she said to her husband. " She don't cheek you as she used to do, and she seems quite down in the dumps. Surely it can't be that she's fretting on account of the death of that little drunkard ? " William Massarene did not look at his wife as he an- swered: "'Tiswant of dollars frets her, my good woman. That's a disease as ages these young uns fast. Thorough- bred mares want gilded oats." " Deary me ! What's the use of being a duchess if you don't get gilded oats ? '* said his wife. She was troubled by the idea of anyone so exalted being brought so low as to want money. Being tender-hearted she redoubled her attentions to her guest, but being tactless she mingled with them a familiarity for which their object would willingly have murdered her, and which she resented all the more bitterly because she was forced to conceal her resentment. He had got far beyond all social need of her now. His position was secure in the county, in the country, in the w^orld. Men knew what he was worth both in millions and in mind, and they feared him. He did not scruple to treat them like dirt, as he expressed it, and it was they who wanted him now, they who had to sue for his good offices and bear his snubs. For some few people like Hurstmanceaux he was still only a cad sitting on a pile of money-bags ; but these were so very few that they did not count, and he could very well do without them. All the pick of the Tory party came to Yale Koyal, shot his pheasants and partriages, drank his rare wines, asked his opinion, and shook his hand. If out of his hearing they still called him a blackguard American, they were now extremely civil to his face, and when he wanted them he had only to whistle. It pleased his love of dominion and his sense of successful effort. He felt that all these noble people, pretty people, fastidious people, all these political 330 THE MASSARENES. chiefs and swell notabilities and leaders of Parliament and of fashion, were as so many comedians, all playing for liim. He hated them for a great many reasons : for their polished accents, for their way of bowing, for the ease with which they wore their clothes, for the trick they had of looking well-bred even in shabby gowns or old shooting-coats. But he despised them ; he could afford to despise them, and they could not afford to despise him. When he thought of this he passed his tongue over his lips with a relishing gesture, like a dog who has been eating a beefsteak. With the world, as with the Duchess of Otterbourne, he had ceased to be suppliant — he had become master ; and he had always been a hard master, he had always thought that the best argument was a long strip of cowhide. " Oh, you brute — you unutterable brute ! If a look could kill you, you would fall dead where you stand ! " thought Mouse one day as she looked from one of the windows of the Bird room, and saw his short broad figure, with the squat legs cased in the gaiters of a country gentleman and the country gentleman's round felt hat on his stubbly iron- grey hair, as he went over the turf with his back to her, having on his left the lord-lieutenant of the county, and on his right the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, each of them bending their tall forms affably and listening to him with deference. But looks cannot kill ; and he continued to walk on across the sunlight and shadow over the grass, and she continued to watch him from the upper windows, convulsed with a deadly loathing impotent rage against him, such as Marie Antoinette must have felt for the gaoler of the Conciergerie. There were men who loved her to insanity ; even in the weary, shallow, indifferent, modern world there are still women who inspire insane if short-lived passions, and she was of those women ; but she could not appeal to any one of these men since appeal would entail confession ; and confession to one would mean exposure to all, for she knew that her tyrant would be merciless if she freed herself from him, or he would not keep her signatures as he did keep them. Skilled in male human nature, and the manage- TEE MAS8ARENES, 331 ment of it, though she was, she had no experience to guide her in dealing with Massarene, because all the men amongst whom she had lived had been gentlemen ; and the way of treating women of the gentlemen and the cad is as different as their way of shooting. A man capable of acting as Massarene did could not have been met with in her world. " It is all our own fault," she thought. " Why do we let these boors and brutes in at our gates because they have got their sacks of bullion on their backs ? " And as she always blamed somebody for the issue of her own errors, she thought with detestation of Cocky coming up to her under the trees at Homburg, and telling her to make the acquaintance of the Massarenes. Happily for her William Massarene was too cautious, too busy, and too ambitious a man to lose much of his time in torturing her. He delighted in her hatred, her helpless- ness, her servitude, but she was only a toy to him ; his gigantic schemes of self-advancement, and his many financial enterprises, engrossed him much more, and he would not have risked his social position by a scandal for all the beautiful women in creation. He supplied her with the money she wanted, but he made her beg, and he made her sign, for every penny of it. It was fine sport ! Her own people attributed the change in her to her rupture with Brancepeth ; and, in himself, Hurstmanceaux did so also. But it was a subject on which he could know nothing since the scene she had with him concerning her late friend, and he could only suppose that, like many another woman, she sorrowed for the loss of what she had refused to keep. He knew that she stayed a good deal with the folks at Yale Koyal, but his penetration did not go farther than to conclude that she did so because it saved her expense. He saw nothing of her personally in the autumn and winter following Cooky's death ; his unavoid- able communications with her on business were made by letter. Sometimes he wondered how she and the lady with whom he had walked to Greater Thorpe got on together ; he did not think that they could suit each other ; but he saw little of the one and nothing at all of the other. Of William Massarene he of course saw nothing either ; 332 TEE MASSARENES, so that the curt and insolent tone which Massarene at times now allowed himself to use to one whose humble slave he had once been was unknown to him ; if he had heard it and resented it, the " bull-dozing boss " would have cast the truth in his teeth, and, grinning, have awaited his reception of it, for courage had never been lacking to the man who for thirty years had lield his own against the hatred of the whole Central States. This terror lest he should thus tell the truth to her brother haunted her night and day. She did not think there was much fear, because she knew that he held his social position as dear as life itself, and he would be well aware that Hurstmanceaux would destroy it at a blow. Still she could not be sure, for she knew that temper sometimes hurries the wisest and most ambitious man into irrevocable indiscretion. She had herself lost absolutely all power over the man who had been so blindly her slave. Their positions had wholly changed. It was she who shrank from his glance ; it was he who ordered and was obeyed. She, who had no acquaintance with pain, suffered as never before would she have believed it possible to suffer. Humiliation, terror, abhorrence, self- contempt, were all united to an a^ony of apprehension with regard to the future. She would easily have made a second marriage, but her tyrant forbade her any such issue from her difficulties. She had never before supposed that it would ever be possible for her to be miserable in London, but she was s(^ now ; the dull, cold, bleak weather aiding her depression, and the mourning which she had still to wear seeming to her indeed the very livery of gloom. A whole hothouse of flowers emptied into her room could not make opaque yellow fog supportable, and the sight of William Massarene driving past her windows or coming up the staircase anything less than torture. How she envied those women of ruder ages who could hire bravoes for a quick cold steel to rid them of what they loathed. She hated him so intensely that there were even times when she looked wistfully in at the gunsmiths' shops in Piccadilly. But she lived in a world in which all strong passions TEE MASSARENE8. 333 seemed farcical, and the ridicule of the thing restrained her from buying a revolver, A tragedy with Billy as the slain ! She laughed a hollow little laugh of misery and scorn as she threw herself back in her brougham and ceased to look at the little ivory mounted weapons so temptingly displayed by the gunsmiths. She had insight enough to perceive that his adoration of her was a thing dead and gone for ever ; she saw that the only dregs of it which remained with him were love of hurting her, of mortifying her, of ordering her about as though she were a factory wench in one of his cotton-mills in North Dakota. Fortunately for her his prudence saved her from any display of this tyranny in public ; but in private he treated her as a tanner of the lie de France might have treated a young duchess of the Faubourg when it only needed a sign to the mob for the axe to fall and the pikes to be twisted in the perfumed hair. She had no will of her own ; she dared not dispose of her time for a week ; she had to know what he permitted and what he forbade. " She's a morsel for a king," he would say to himself, passing his tongue over his lips. Still he had become very indifferent to her, except that his power of humiliating her was always agreeable and stimulating to him. " You've found out as Billy ain't a fool, haven't you, my beauty," he said a hundred times to her. '' Billy's been one too many for you, eh ? " And at such moments if a revolver had been near her she would have shot him dead. The harassing torment of her compulsory submission to him made her look worn, anxious, thin. " Surely I am not losing my beauty," she thought with horror, as she looked at herself in the mirrors, and each day she was obliged to have a little more recourse to the aids of art. She knew well enough that however brilliant may be artificial loveliness, it is never quite the same as the radiance of that natural beauty which can affront the drenching rain of a hunting-field or the scorching sun on a yacht deck, or, most difficult to bear of all, the clear light of early day after a ball. Oh, how she hated everyone ! Cocky in his grave, and Beaumont in his shop, and JRonald \\\io had brought all this 334 THE MASSARENES. misery upon her, and Brancepetli who had taken her at her word ; and — oh, how bitterly and with what deadly hatred ! — this coarse, common, hideous creature who said to her in his brutal derision : " Billy's been one too many for you, eh, my dear ? " He had put this thoroughbred trotter into the harness of his homely waggon, and it never ceased to please him to watch her jib, and start, and tremble, and pant, as he flogged her along the stony road of subservience to his will and desires. The more intensely she dreaded and loathed him the more entirely did he enjoy his revenge. It had cost him a great deal of money, but he did not grudge the money. The sport was rare. " Stow that, my pretty," he said to her when he saw her receiving as if she liked it the attentions of some man who might very well be in earnest and desire to persuade her to a second marriage. " Stow that, my pretty. You aren't a-going to wed with nobody — Billy's here." Her disgust, her indignation, her helpless revolt, were all infinitely diverting to him ; he let her free herself a moment, only to pull her up with a jerk and remind her that he was her master. She felt that as long as he lived he would never let her escape him. " Perhaps I'll marry you myself if the old woman goes to glory," he said with a grin. " Don't you count on it though, my dear ; I may see somebody else and disappoint you ! " His position was too dear to him for any jeopardy of it to be risked for any other consideration on earth. It was to his own fear for himself that she owed such partial relief from him as she obtained, such comparative liberty as his jealous vengeance permitted ; such formal politeness as he showed her in society. He was afraid she might make a confession to Hurstmanceaux if he pressed her too hard, and this feeling alone kept his tyrannies within certain bounds, and compelled him to treat her with courtesy before the world. But the low-bred ruffianism which was his true inner man showed itself frequently in private. Once he wiped his dusty boots on the hem of her gown. " A duchess's £i-ock makes a nice door-mat," he said with THE MASSABENES. 335 relish. "Don't you squeal, my pretty, or damn me if I don't wipe 'em with your hair next." She knew that he would do as he said. He kept her in perpetual slavery also for him in the world ; he made her serve his interests with all her rela- tives and friends ; he sometimes exacted what was not only difficult but almost impossible, and she had to get it done somehow or other. His ambitions grew with what they fed on, and he became arrogant, critical, overbearing in his expectations. " I mean to die a lord and a cabinet minister," he said, with a sense that death could only be his obedient valet like the Conservative party. " If wishes could kill you, you would fall dead where you stand," she thought; but she dared not say so, and she devoured her hatred and her humiliation in silence. " You aren't so young as you w^ere, my beauty," he said one day oat of doors, staring ruthlessly at her. "Billy don't agree with you, eh ? Keep worrying the curb, don't you ? Pull as hard as you will, you won't get your head. You're between my shafts, and you must just go quiet over the stones at my pace, my lady fair." The stones were very sharp, and this road was apparently without an end. She grew thin, she looked harassed and hectic, she contracted a nervous way of glancing back over her shoulder to see if he were within earshot, even when she knew that he was a hundred miles away. One day when he was with her one of her many admirers sent her a large gilded gondola-shaped basket filled with Palestine lilies and La France roses. " AVho sent these ? " he growled, and he pulled the card off it and read the nan.e. It was a great name. " What's this mean, eh ? " he said as he showed her the card. " It means nothing at all," she said, with that tremor^ in her which was partly impotent rage and chiefly genuine fear ; and added, with a little nervous laugh, " We have no language of flowers like the Orientals." " Eh ? " said Massarene, who did not understand — " mean nothing, do they ? That's one of your damned lies. Now ye hearken to me, my lady. Him as sent 'em 's so deep in piy debt that he'd hev to turn crossin'-sweeper if I held 336 THE MASSARENES. up my little finger. Now I won't liev my debtors come I gallivantin' to my sweetheart. Mind that. Make him keep his distance or it'll be worse for him and for you. You j know Billy by this time." ] Then he kicked over the gilded gondola and trampled ' the beautiful flowers under his big feet. j Her nerves gave way under the sickening nausea of the j scene. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed aloud, j her tortured pride of race and of womanhood writhing like | some delicate animal in a steel trap. ) William Massarene stood and watched her, his thumbs in i the armholes of his coat, his legs wide apart, his yellow j teeth showing in a broad grin. It was rare sport. It had cost him an almighty pile of dollars, but it was rare sport. He felt that after his long career of hard work and self- denial he had earned the right to some such fun and feast i as this. THE MASSARENES. 337 CHAPTER XXIX. With the next season Billy allowed her to accept the loan of her sister Carrie's house in town ; that lady having gone on a little trip to Japan. She hated the Wisbeach house, which was dark, ugly, and situated in the dreary district of Portman Square. Carrie Wisbeach, who was but little in town, and was a sportswoman renowned in more lands than her own, had little heed of all the artistic and graceful luxuries with which her younger sister had always required to be surrounded, and had left her husband's old London house very much as his grandparents had made it. Mouse detested it unspeakably, but it was roomy and a good way off Harrenden House, and she put up with it, trusting that she would be almost always out of it. For her tyrant favoured rather than discouraged her perpetual appearance in society ; it prevented people talking, and in society alone could she favour his interests social and political. She was still altered ; she had still that harassed appre- hensive glance backward over her shoulder ; but she was familiarised with her captivity, and had learned to make bricks without straw for her bondmaster without too plainly betraying to others the marks of the sand and the clay in which she was forced to kneel. Ever since her first season she had done whatever she had pleased, and amused herself in any manner she desired. But she had never got into trouble, never been com- promised, never felt her position shake beneath her. A woman, young and popular, who has great connections behind her, can, if she have tact and skill, easily avoid being injured by scandal. If she knows how to conciliate opinion by certain concessions, she can enjoy herself as 338 TEE MASSABENES. tliorouglily as any young cat gambolling about a dairy; and no one will seriously interfere with her. Society had certainly " talked " ; but when a woman has a brother like Hurstmanceaux, and a father-in-law like the good Duke of Otterbourne, and many other male relatives high-spirited and innumerable, people do not talk very incautiously or very loudly. Now through "Billy," for the first time, she saw her position jeopardised. That low-bred creature, whom she had made fetch and carry, and wince and tremble at her whim and pleasure, had now the power to make her, if he chose, in the eyes of the world, that miserable, contemptible, and despicable creature, a/emwe taree. Sometimes, too, a more tragic, a more sickening, fear assailed her, when she thought of the possibility of her tyrant telling the truth, in boastfulness or in revenge, to her brother. It was not likely, but it was always possible ; for she saw that in William Massarene, at times, temper — the savage, uncontrolled temper of the low-born man— got the better of good sense, of caution, and even of ambition. She could never be sure that it might not do so some day in her case, and that for the ruffianly relish of dragging the pride of the head of the House of Courcy in the dust, he might not throw to the devil all his cherished triumphs, all his hardly-bought distinctions. Happily for her Hurstmanceaux was almost always in the country, or on the sea, and the sight of liim in London streets seldom tempted the fiend to rise in her gaoler. Meanwhile the London season came on and ran its course with its usual plethora of pleasure and politics, its interludes of Easter and AVhitsuntide weeks, and its comings and goings of people, who could not live without running to Kome, flying to Biskra, shipping over to New York, and taking a breathless scamper to Thibet. Katherine Massarene came up to town in the spring, sorely against her will, and she went through the routine which was so wearisome to her, and rejected many offers of the hands and hearts of gentlemen with whom she had exchanged half-a-dozen sentences at a dinner-party or riding down Kotten Eow. "Lord, child, what do you want that you're so par- THE MABSABENES. 339 ticular?" said her mother, who did not approve this incessant and ruthless dismissal of suitors. *' I want nothing and no one. I want to be let alone," replied her daughter. *' As for the life of London, I abhor it, I am asphyxiated in it." Suitors who might fairly have expected her to appreciate them solicited her suffrage in vain ; she did not give them a thought, she abhorred them— everyone. She only longed to get away from it all and have finished for ever with the pomp, the pretension, the oppressive effort which seemed to her parents the very marrow of life. " Mr. Mallock calls this the best society of Europe," she thought again. " If it be so, why does it all come to us to be fed ? " Had she possessed the disposal of her father's fortune she would not have fed it. Being obliged to stand by and see it fed, in such apparent acquiescence as silence confers, she lost all appetite herself for the banquet of life. Such slight cutting phrases as she permitted herself to speak were repeated with embittered and exaggerated em- phasis in London houses until London society grew horribly afraid of her. But it concealed its fear and wreathed in smiles its resentment, being sincerely desirous of obtaining the hand of the satirist for one of its sons. More than once the Press announced her betrothal to some great personage, but on the following morning was always forced to retract the statement as a snail draws in its horns. To her mother it seemed heathenish and unnatural that a young woman should not wish to be " settled " ; she thought the mischief came from the education Katherine had received, reading books that had even a different alphabet. "You want all the hideous vulgarity of a fashionable wedding, my dear mother," said Katherine. "If ever I should marry I assure you I shall wear a white cotton gown and go alone to some remote village church." " My dear, how can you say such things ? It is quite shocking to hear you," said the mistress of Harrenden House, infinitely distressed. " Pray set your mind at ease," said her daughter. " I shall never marry, for the best of all reasons that no man whom I could respect would ever marry me." z 2 340 TEE MABSARENES. " Not respect yo ! IIow can you say such things ? You're the daughter of one of the richest men in the whole worid, and he'll be noble as well, he says, afore he goes to Kingdom Come." The younger woman lifted her head, like a forest-doe wlio hears the crack of a carter's whip. " To belong to the Peerage is not necessarily to belong to the nobility ; and you may belong to the nobility with- out being included in the Peerage. Sir Edward Coke laid down that law. Surely, my dear mother, you cannot for a moment pretend that if my father be given a peerage he will become noble ? " Katherine Massarene knew that she might as well have spoken to the Clodion on the staircase, as said these reason- able things to her mother ; but now and then she could not Avholly keep back the expression of the scorn of her father's ambitions which moved her — ambitions, in her eyes, so puerile and so poor. "Who was Edward Coke?" said Mrs. Massarene sullenly. " The greatest lawyer England has ever seen. The greatest exponent of Common Law." "Well, then, I think he might have known better than to deny as his sovereign can make a gentleman of anybody if so be she choose," said her mother doggedly. " You might as well say that the sovereign can cure the king's evil ! " " Well, they say she can ? " " Oh, my dear mother ! Can you live in the world and keep such superstitions ? " " You've no belief in you ! " " I at least believe enough in true nobility to hold that it is a gift of race and breeding beyond purchase, and un-creatable by any formula." " If the Queen makes your father a lord, a lord he will be with the best of them." " She can make him a lord ; she cannot make him either noble or gentle. His nobility will be a lie, as his armorial bearings are already." " That's a cruel thing to say, Kathleen ! " " It is the truth." " Why do I try to reason with her ? '* she thought. " One THE MASSABENES, 341 might as well try to persuade the stone supporters on the gateway ? " But Margaret Massarene, although she would not allow it, did, in her own mind, think that her man was soaring too high in his aspirations. To look up where he meant to rise to, made her feel giddy and afraid. " They'll never give it to ye, William," his wife ventured timidly to say one day, by " it " meaning his peerage. He smiled grimly. " Why not ? 'Cause I ain't a Kadical turncoat ? 'Cause I ain't a Birmingham sweater ? 'Cause I ain't a Hebrew broker ? They'll give it me, old woman, or I'll know the reason why. You'll be ^ my Lady,' if you live." He devoutly hoped she would not live ; but if she did live, she should be Lady Cottesdale. He had decided on his title, which he intended to take from a little property that he had purchased in the Midlands, and he had already ordered a dinner-service of gold plate, with a coronet on all its pieces, which was to be a work of art, and would take some years to finish. Before it would be ready for him he would be ready for it, with his baron's crown to put on everything, from the great gates to the foot-baths. Any man who is very rich can become an English peer if he has kept clear of scandals and dabbled a little in public life. And who was richer than he ? Nobody this side the herring-pond. The Conservatives were in office. The Mying Boats of the fair, to which he had once ir- reverently compared the two political parties, had made their see-sawing journey, and the one was temporarily up and the other temporarily down. The owner of Yale Koyal was beginning to make them feel that they would lose him if they did not please him, and that they could not afford to lose him. He had a forty-horse power of making himself dangerous and disagreeable. "A very dreadful person," said Lord Greatrex always, when in the bosom of his family ; but he knew that it was precisely this kind of person who must be conciliated and retained by a Prime Minister on the eve of the twentieth century. A chief of government has only a certain quantity of good things in his gift, and ho does not waste them on 312 THE MASSABENE8. those who, being neglected, will not avenge themselves. William Massarene worried the heads of his party ex- tremely ; they were well aware that if he did not get what he wanted from them, he would rat and make terms with the enemy. Governments are accustomed to John Snob, whom nothing will pacify, except to become Lord Yere de Vere ; but John Snob is never beloved by them. William Massarene did not care whether they loved him or hated him. The time had long passed when a " How do ? " in the Lobby from one of them could thrill him with pleasure and pride ; or a careless nod in the dusk on the Terrace send him to dinner with a joyously-beating heart. He could corner the gentlemen of the Carlton as easily as he had cornered a company in other days in Dakota. You could not buy society as you bought a corporation or a department in the States ; the matter required more dressing up and glossing over. Still, the principle of purchase remained the same, and Massarene recuperated himself for what he spent so largely in Belgravia by his commercial successes and financial fame in the City. In the freemasonry of business he had been at once recognised in the City as a Grand Master. Many a London gold broker, railway contractor, and bank chairman felt himself a mere child, a mere neophyte, when this silent, squat, keen-eyed man from the North-West came down into the precincts of Mincing Lane and Threadneedle Street. In the City he knew his power, and made it felt. He united the American rapidity, daring, and instinct in busi- ness with the Englishman's coldness, reserve, and prudence. The union was irresistible. He had quaked and crouched before fine ladies ; but when he met the directors of the Bank of England he felt like Napoleon at Tilsit. He was a magnate in the City, whilst he was still a neophyte in the great world. But his ambitions were of another kind than those which the City gratifies. They were social and political, llo meant to die a Cabinet Minister and a Peer. Ho went to Walmer one Easter and looked at the portraits of the Wardens. '-Guess mine'] I hang there one day," he said to himself. Everything in his new life was still, in reality, most uncomfortable to him ; the very clothes he had to wear TEE MASSARENE8, 343 were tight and oppressive ; he had to drink hocks and clarets, when he longed for gin and beer; he had to eat salmis and releves when he hungered for bread and cheese and salted pork ; he longed to spit on his own carpets, and dared not ; he was in awe of his own servants ; he was awkward and ill at ease in his own houses ; he quailed before the contemptuous eye of his own secretary ; and lie could not read the bill of fare of his own dinners ; and yet, though he pined to be once more in his shirt-sleeves, with a clay pipe in his mouth and a glass of hot grog at his elbow, he was happy in his misery, for he "had arrived." JN'ot arrived at the apex as yet ; but in full view of it, and within an ace of planting his flag on the summit. And so in all probability he would have done in the opening years of the new century but for one of those small, very small, mistakes, which upset the chariot of successful life as the loose rivet, the weak plank, the uncovered valve destroys the stately steamship, the colossal scaffolding, the rushing and thundering steam-engine. One day in the autumn of the year the American Consul- General in London received a letter from his "great country " which, although ill-spelt, ill-writ, and signed by a poor working man, startled his secretary so considerably by its contents that he brought the epistle direct to his chief for instructions. This letter ran thus : — " 'Onoured 'Xcellence, tlieers a-living in London toivn a man as is callt Willum Massarene ; 'e ivas hioiun in this 'ere township «s Blasted Blizzard. B. B. made a Ug file an went 'ovie, and they says as 'es a swell an Mngs an lords mess ivt him. That's neither 'ere nor theer. But theer's a fore fellar arsts me to writ this, 'cos he hev hisself no larnin, an' 'e hev worht many a year on Massarene's line — Kerosene, Issoura, and Chicago Main Trunk — an he's a platelayer an hev alius bin 'onest an' ' ard-worhin' , an' 'ad his left arm cut hoff two summers ago hy a goods-train, and hev arsJct for 'Elf an got no 'Elf 'cos 'e he a 7ion-TJnio7i man, and the Line say as hoiv 'twas 'is own fault 'cos 'e 'ad gone to sleef on the metals. Now this 'ere man, sir — name as is Rohert Airley, native o' Haddington, N.B. — says as 'oiv he 'ud he a rich un now hut 344 IHE MASSAEENES. 'e mecl a mistek: 'e sold a claim to a hit o' ground as \id tin ill it to tJiis 'ere Massarene tvhe7i he was young an starving an 'is ivife in fains o labour. Bohert Airley 'e saij he found some simrldes stiching to roots o' grass, an didn't Jcnow wot 'tivas, an show it to Massarene, who was thin Mppen a drink and play saloon in Kerosene, and Massarene bought his claim to the land for thirty dollars and ever arterwards dared Bobert to jyyove it, and prove ho coiddnt, but says as how 'tis God Amighty's truth as he owned the tin and sold 'is rights un- be-hnown as I tell ye. Bein' alius very pore he couldn't git away from Kerosene, and went on Main Trunk as plate-layer, an noiv he arsks yer 'Onour to see Blasted Blizzard and tell 'im as 'ow 'e can work no more and 'e must he purvided for. I tvritt this for 'im 'cos Bobert cavJt writt 'isself an I be your ' Onour s 'umble servant, "George Mathers, '^Lamp-cleaner on K.I.G. Line.. " Written in engine-house. '' Native o* Sudbury, Suffolk, England, and out in this damned country soreagen his will. Direct Bobert Airley, Post- office, Kerosene City, North Dakota, U.S.A." The Consul-General read this letter twice through very carefully, for its spelling and its blots made it difficult of comprehension. It did not astonish him, for he knew a good deal about the antecedents of the owner of Harrenden House and Vale Eoyal. He had never alluded to them in English society, because if American consuls once began to tell what they know, society in Europe would be decimated at once. The letter did not astonish him but it made him very uncomfortable. He was a person of amiable disposition and he felt that it would be unkind to wholly neglect so pitiful and just an appeal. Yet to address the owner of Harrenden House and Vale Koyal on such a subject was an extremely unpleasant task, one which he was not dis- posed for a moment to accept. To tell Solomon in all his glory that he had kept a drink and play saloon, and cheated about a placer-claim, demanded a degree of audacity which is not required by governments from those excellent public THE MASSABENJSS. 34.5 servants who sit in consular offices and in chancelleries to indite reports which are to be pigeon-holed unread, an