It was four o’clock on a misty and dark afternoon of the month of March
in London.
The reception-rooms of a fine house facing Grosvenor Gate were all
lighted by the last modern perfection of rose-shaded electricity. They
were rooms of unusually admirable proportions and size for the city in
which they were situated, and were decorated and filled with all that
modern resources, both in art and in wealth, can obtain.
Harrenden House, as it was called, had been designed for a rich and
eccentric duke of that name, and occupied by him for a few years, at
the end of which time he had tired of it, had carried all its treasures
elsewhere, and put it up for sale; it had remained unsold and unlet
for a very long period, the price asked being too large even for
millionaires. At last, in the autumn of the previous year, it had been
taken by a person who was much more than a millionaire, though he had
been born in a workhouse and had begun life as a cow-boy.
The great mansion had nothing whatever of the _parvenu_ about it except
its new owner. Its interior had been arranged in perfect taste by an
unerring master’s hand. The square hall had ancient Italian tapestries,
Italian marbles, Italian mosaics, all of genuine age and extreme
beauty, whilst from its domed cupola a mellowed light streamed down
through painted glass of the fifteenth century, taken from the private
chapel of a Flemish castle.
The two-winged staircase, broad and massive, had balustrades of oak
which had once been the choir railings of a cathedral in Karinthia, the
silver lamps which hung above these stairs had once illumined religious
services in the Kremlin, and above the central balustrade leaned,
lovely as adolescence, a nude youth with a hawk on his wrist--the work
of Clodion.
The rest of the mansion was in the same proportions and perfection. No
false note jarred on its harmonies, no doubtful thing intruded a coarse
or common chord. The household were not pushed away into dark cell-like
corners, but had comfortable and airy sleeping-chambers. It was a
palace fit for a Queen of Loves; it was a home made for a young Cæsar
in the first flush of his dreams of Cleopatra. And it belonged actually
to William Massarene, late of Kerosene City, North Dakota, U. S. A.,
miner, miller, meat salesman, cattle exporter, railway contractor,
owner of gambling-saloons, and opium dens for the heathen Chinee, and
one of the richest and hardiest-headed men in either hemisphere.
Nothing was wanting which money could buy--tapestries, ivories,
marbles, bronzes, porcelains, potteries, orchids, palms, roses, silks,
satins, and velvets, were all there in profusion. Powdered lackeys
lolled in the anteroom, dignified men in black stole noiselessly over
carpets soft and elastic as moss; in the tea-room the china was Sèvres
of 1770, and the water boiled in what had once been a gold water-vase
of Leo X.; in the delicious little oval boudoir the walls were entirely
covered with old Saxe plates, and Saxe shepherds and shepherdesses made
groups in all the corners, while a Watteau formed the ceiling; and yet,
amidst these gay and smiling porcelain people of Meissen, who were a
century and a half old, and yet kept the roses on their cheeks and the
laugh on their lips, Margaret Massarene, the mistress of it all, sat in
solitary state and melancholy meditation; a heavy hopelessness staring
in her pale grey eyes, a dreary dejection expressed in the loose
clasp of her fat hands folded on her knee, the fingers now and then
beating a nervous tattoo. What use was it to have the most beautiful
dwelling-house in all London if no one ever beheld its beauties from
one week’s end to another? What use was it to have a regiment of
polished and disdainful servants if there were no visitors of rank for
them to receive?
Many things are hard in this world; but nothing is harder than to be
ready to prostrate yourself, and be forbidden to do it; to be ready to
eat the bitter pastry which is called humble pie, and yet find no table
at which so much even as this will be offered you. The great world did
not affront them; it did worse, it did not seem to know they existed.
“Take a big town-house; buy a big country place; ask people; the rest
will all follow of itself,” had said their counsellor and confidant at
the baths of Homburg. They had bought the town-house, and the country
place, but as yet they had found no people to invite to either of
them; and not a soul had as yet called at the magnificent mansion by
Gloucester Gate, although for fifteen days and more its porter had sat
behind open gates; gates of bronze and gold with the Massarene arms,
which the Herald’s College had lately furnished, emblazoned above on
their scroll-work awaiting the coronet which a grateful nation and a
benign Sovereign would, no doubt, ere many years should have passed,
add to them.
People of course there were by hundreds and thousands, who would have
been only too glad to be bidden to their doors; but they were people of
that common clay with which the Massarenes had finished for ever and
aye.
There were many families, rich, if not as rich as themselves, and
living in splendor on Clapham Common, near Epping Forest, or out by
Sydenham and Dulwich, who would have willingly been intimate with Mrs.
Massarene as their husbands were with hers in the city. She would have
been content with their fine houses, their good dinners, their solid
wealth, their cordial company. She would have been much more at ease
in their suburban villas amidst their homelier comforts, hearing and
sharing their candid boastfulness of their rise in life. But these
were not the acquaintances which her husband desired. He did not want
commerce, however enriched; he wanted the great world, or what now
represents it, the smart world; and he intended to have that or none.
And Lady Kenilworth, their Homburg friend, had written a tiny
three-cornered note ten days before, with a mouse in silver on its
paper, which said: “I am in town and am coming to see you. Jack and Boo
send love,” and on this familiar epistle they had built up an Eiffel
Tower of prodigious hope and expectation. But ten days and more had
passed and their correspondent had not yet fulfilled her promise.
Therefore, amidst all the beauty and splendor of it, the mistress of
the house sat, pale, sullen, despondent, melancholy. She had sat thus
for fifteen days--ever since Parliament had met--and it was all in
vain, in vain. The gold urn bubbled, the shepherds smiled, the orchids
bloomed, the men in black and the men in powder waited in vain, and the
splendid and spacious mansion warmed itself, lighted itself, perfumed
itself in vain. Nobody came.
She had dropped all her old friends and the new ones were faithless and
few.
She had been forced by her lord and master to cease her acquaintance
with the wives of aldermen and city magnates and magistrates;
good-natured wealthy women, who had been willing to make her one of
themselves; and the desired successors, the women of the world, were
only conspicuous by their absence.
She was dressed admirably by a great authority on clothes; but the
dull Venetian red, embroidered with gold thread and slashed with tawny
color, was suited to a Vittoria Accrombona, to a Lucrezia Borgia, and
did not suit at all the large loose form and the pallid insignificant
features of their present wearer.
When the head cutter of the great Paris house which had turned out that
magnificent gown had ventured to suggest to its chief that such attire
was thrown away on such a face and figure as these, that Oracle had
answered with withering contempt, “_Rien ne va aux gens de leur espèce,
excepté leur tablier d’ouvrière. Et le tablier on ne veut plus porter!_”
His scorn was unutterable for all “_gens de leur espèce_,” but he did
what he could for them; he let them have exquisite attire and sent them
very long bills. It was not his fault if they never knew how to wear
their clothes; he could not teach them that secret, which only comes by
the magic of nature and breeding. The present wearer of his beautiful
Venetian red and gold gown was laced in until she could scarcely
breathe; her fat hands were covered with beautiful rings; her grey hair
had been washed with gold-colored dye; her broad big feet, which had
stood so many years before cooking stoves and washtubs, were encased
in Venetian red hose of silk and black satin shoes with gold buckles;
her maid had assured her that she looked like a picture but she felt
like a guy, and was made nervous by the Medusa-like gaze of the men in
black who occasionally flitted across her boudoir to attend to a lamp,
contract the valve of the _calorifère_, or lay the afternoon papers cut
and aired by her chair.
“If only they wouldn’t look at me so!” she thought, piteously. What
must they think of her, sitting alone like this, day after day, week
after week, when the dreary two hours’ drive in the Park was over,
behind the high-stepping horses, which were the envy of all beholders,
but to their owners seemed strange, terrible and dangerous creatures.
London was full, not with the suffocating fullness indeed of July, but
with the comparative animation which comes into the street with the
meeting of Parliament.
But not a soul had passed those gates as yet, at least not one as human
souls had of late become classified in the estimation of the dwellers
within them.
The beautiful rooms seemed to yawn like persons whose mind and whose
time are vacant. The men in black and the men in powder yawned also,
and bore upon their faces the visible expression of that depression and
discontent which were in their bosoms at the sense, ever increasing
in them, that every additional day in the house of people whom nobody
knew, robbed them of caste, injured their prestige, and ruined their
future.
The mistress of the palace only did not yawn because she was too
agitated, too nervous and disappointed and unhappy to be capable of
such a minor suffering a _ennui_; she was not dull because she was
strung up to a high state of anxious expectation, gradually subsiding,
as day after day went on, to a complete despair.
They had done all that could be done in the way of getting into
society; they had neglected no means, shunned no humiliation, spared
no expense, refused no subscription, avoided no insult which could
possibly, directly or indirectly, have helped them to enter its charmed
circle, and yet nothing had succeeded. Nobody came, nobody at least out
of that mystic and magic sphere into which they pined and slaved to
force or to insinuate themselves; not one of those, the dust of whose
feet they were ready to kiss, would come up the staircase under the
smiling gaze of Clodion’s young falconer.
But on this second day of the month of March, when the clocks showed
five of the afternoon, there was a slight movement perceptible in the
rooms of which the suite was visible from the door of the boudoir. The
groom of the chambers, a slender, solemn, erect personage, by name
Winter, came forward with a shade of genuine respect for the first time
shown in his expression and demeanor.
“Lady Kenilworth asks if you receive, madam?”
“Why, lord, man! ain’t I in o’ purpose?” said his mistress, in her
agitation and surprise reverting to her natural vernacular; whilst
she rose in vast excitement and unspeakable trepidation, and tumbled
against a stool in her nervousness.
“I was sure that I should find you at home, so I followed on the heels
of your man,” said a sweet, silvery, impertinent voice, as the fair
young mother of Jack and Boo entered the boudoir, looking at everything
about her in a bird-like way, and with an eye-glass which she did not
want lifted to the bridge of her small and delicate nose.
“So kind--so kind--so honored,” murmured Mrs. Massarene with
bewilderment and enthusiasm, her pale, flaccid cheeks warm with
pleasure, and her voice tremulous with timidity.
“Not at all,” murmured Lady Kenilworth absently and vaguely, occupied
with her inspection of the objects round her. She seated herself on a
low chair, and let her glance wander over the walls, the ceiling, the
Meissen china, the Watteau ceiling, and her hostess’s gown.
“How’s your dear little children, ma’am?” said Mrs. Massarene humbly.
“Oh, they’re all right, thanks,” said their mother carelessly, her head
thrown back as she gazed up at the Watteau. “It seems very well done,”
she said at last. “Who did it for you? The Bond Street people?”
“Did what?” said her hostess falteringly, drawing in her breath with a
sudden little gasp to prevent herself from saying “my lady.”
“The whole thing,” explained her guest, pointing with the handle of her
eye-glass toward the vista of the rooms.
“The--the--house?” said Mrs. Massarene hesitatingly, still not
understanding. “We bought it--that is, Mr. Massarene bought it--and
Prince Kristof of Karstein was so good as to see to the decorations and
the furniture. The duke had left a-many fixtures.”
“Prin and Kris?” repeated Lady Kenilworth, hearing imperfectly through
indifference to the subject and attention to the old Saxe around her.
“I never heard of them. Are they a London firm?”
“Prince Kristof of Karstein,” repeated Mrs. Massarene, distressed to
find the name misunderstood. “He is a great friend of ours. I think
your ladyship saw him with us in Paris last autumn.”
Lady Kenilworth opened wide her pretty, innocent, impertinent,
forget-me-not colored eyes.
“What, old Khris? Khris Kar? Did he do it all for you? Oh, I must
run about and look at it all, if he did it!” she said, as she jumped
from her seat, and, without any premiss or permission, began a tour
of the rooms, sweeping swiftly from one thing to another, lingering
momentarily here and there, agile and restless as a squirrel, yet soft
in movement as a swan. She did run about, flitting from one room to
another, studying, appraising, censuring, admiring, all in a rapid and
cursory way, but with that familiarity with what she saw, and that
accurate eye for what was good in it, which the mistress of all these
excellent and beautiful things would live to the end of her years
without acquiring.
She put up her eye-glass at the pictures, fingered the tapestries,
turned the porcelains upside down to see their marks, flitted from
one thing to another, knew every orchid and odontoglossum by its
seven-leagued name, and only looked disapproval before a Mantegna
exceedingly archaic and black, and a Pietro di Cortona ceiling which
seemed to her florid and doubtful.
She went from reception-rooms to library, dining-room, conservatories,
with drawing-rooms, morning-rooms, studies, bedchambers, galleries,
bath-rooms, as swift as a swallow and as keen of glance as a falcon,
touching a stuff, eyeing a bit of china, taking up a bibelot, with
just the same pretty pecking action as a chaffinch has in an orchard,
or a pigeon in a bean-field. Everything was really admirable and
genuine. All the while she paid not the slightest attention to the
owner of the house, who followed her anxiously and humbly, not daring
to ask a question, and panting in her tight corset at the speed of her
going, but basking in the sense of her visitor’s rank as a cat basks in
the light and warmth of a coal fire and a fur-lined basket.
Not a syllable did Lady Kenilworth deign to cast to her in her
breathless scamper through the house. She had some solid knowledge
of value in matters of art, and she begrudged these delicious things
to the woman with the face like a large unbaked loaf and the fat big
hands, as her four-year-old Boo had begrudged the gold box.
“Really they say there is a Providence above us, but I can’t think
there is, when I am pestered to death by bills, and this creature owns
Harrenden House;” she thought, with those doubts as to the existence
of a deity which always assail people when deity is, as it were, in
the betting against them. She had read an article that morning by
Jules Simon, in which he argued that if the anarchists could be only
persuaded to believe in a future life they would turn their bombs
into bottles of kid reviver and cheerfully black the boots of the
bourgeoisie. But she felt herself that there was something utterly
wrong in a scheme of creation which could bestow Harrenden House on a
Margaret Massarene, and in a Divine Judge who could look on at such
discrepancies of property without disapproval.
She scarcely said a syllable in her breathless progress over the
building; although the unhappy mistress of Harrenden House pined in
trembling for her verdict, as a poor captain of a company longs for a
word from some great general inspecting his quarters. But when she had
finished her tour of inspection, and consented to take a cup of tea
and a caviare biscuit in the tea-room where the Leo the Tenth urn was
purring, and Mr. Winter and two of his subordinates were looking on in
benign condescension, she said brusquely:
“_Eh bien, il ne vous a pas volé._”
Mrs. Massarene had not the most remote idea of what she meant, but
smiled vaguely, and anxiously, hoping the phrase meant praise.
“He’s given you the value of your money,” Lady Kenilworth explained.
“It’s the finest house in London, and nearly everything in it is good.
The Mantegna is rubbish, as I told you, and if I had been asked I
shouldn’t have put up that Pietro di Cortona. What did Khris make you
pay for it?”
“I don’t know, I am sure, ma’am,” replied the mistress of the Mantegna
meekly. “William--Mr. Massarene--never tells me the figure of anything.”
“The Cortona was painted last year in the Avenue de Villiers, I
suspect,” continued Lady Kenilworth. “But all the rest, or nearly all,
is admirable.”
“It’s a very grand house,” replied its mistress meekly; “but it’s
mighty lonesome-like to be in it, with no company. If all the great
folks you promised, my lady----”
“I never promised, I never do promise,” said her visitor sharply.
“I can’t take people by their petticoats and coat-tails and drag
them up your stairs. You must get yourself known for something; then
they’ll come. What? Oh, I have no idea. Something. A cook; or a wine;
or a surprise. People like surprises under their dinner napkins.
Or a speciality, any speciality. I knew a person who entirely got
into society by white hares; _civet de lièvre_, you know; but white,
Siberian.”
Mrs. Massarene gasped. She had a feeling then she was being talked to
in Sanscrit or Welsh and expected to understand it. Why white hares
should be better than brown hares she could not imagine. Nobody ate the
fur.
“But you was so good as to say when we were in Paris, ma’am----”
“Never remind me of anything I said. I can’t endure it! I believe you
want to get in the swim, don’t you?”
“Please, I don’t quite understand, ma’am.”
Her visitor was silently finishing nibbling at a caviare biscuit
and reflecting what a goose she had been to go to Egypt instead of
utilizing this Massarene vein. She must certainly, she thought, do all
she could for these people.
“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” she said abruptly.
The horror of an Ulster woman spread itself over the flaccid and pallid
clay in which the features of her hostess were moulded.
“Oh no, my lady, we were never Romans,” she said, so aghast that she
was carried out of herself into the phraseology of her earlier years.
“We were never Romans. How could you think it of us?”
“It would be better for you if you were,” said Lady Kenilworth
unfeelingly and irreverently. “Catholics are _chic_; and then all the
great Catholic families push a convert unanimously. They’d get a sweep
to all the best houses if he only went often enough to the Oratory.”
“We’ve always been loyal people,” murmured Mrs. Massarene piteously;
“always Orange as Orange could be.”
“Loyalty’s nothing,” said Lady Kenilworth, contemptuously eyeing the
beautiful gold urn with the envious appreciation of a dealer’s glance.
“Loyalty don’t ‘take the cake.’ Nobody is afraid of it. It’s all fear
now that we go by----”
“And gain,” she was about to add but checked the words unuttered.
“I wish you were Catholic,” she said instead. “It would make everything
so much smoother for you. I suppose you couldn’t change? They’d make it
very easy for you.”
Margaret Massarene gasped. Life had unfolded many possibilities to her
of which she had never dreamed; but never such a possibility as this.
“Couldn’t you?” said her guest sharply. “After all, it’s nothing to
do. The Archbishop would see to it all for you. They make it very easy
where there is plenty of money.”
“I don’t think I could, my lady; it would be eternal punishment for me
in the world to come,” said Mrs. Massarene faintly, whilst her groom of
the chambers restrained a violent inclination to box her on the ears
for the vulgarity of her two last words.
He had been long trained in the necessary art of banishing from his
countenance every ray of expression, every shadow of indication that
he overheard what was said around him, but nature for once prevailed
over training; deep and unutterable disgust was spoken on his bland
yet austere features. Eternal punishment! did the creature think that
Harrenden House was a Methody chapel?
As for Lady Kenilworth, she went into a long and joyous peal of
laughter; laughed till the tears brimmed over in her pretty ingenuous
turquoise-colored eyes.
“Oh, my good woman,” she said, as soon as she could speak,
good-humoredly and contemptuously, “you don’t mean to say that you
believe in eternal punishment? What is the use of getting old Khris
to furnish for you and ask me to show you the way about, if you weigh
yourself down with such an old-fashioned funny packful of antiquated
ideas as that? You must not say such things really; you will never get
on amongst us if you do.”
The countenance of Margaret Massarene grew piteous to behold; she was
a feeble woman, but obstinate; she was ready to sell her soul to “get
on,” but the ghastly terrors inculcated to her in her childhood were
too strongly embedded in her timid and apprehensive nature to leave her
a free agent.
“Anything else, ma’am--anything else,” she murmured wretchedly. “But
not Romanism, not Papistry. You don’t know what it means to me, you
don’t indeed.”
Lady Kenilworth shrugged her shoulders and got up from the tea-table.
“I always said,” she observed slightingly, “that the Orange people were
the real difficulty in Ireland. There would never have been any trouble
without them.”
“But you are not a Papist yourself, my lady?” asked Mrs. Massarene with
trembling accents.
“Oh, I? no,” said the pretty young woman with the same contemptuous and
indifferent tone. “We can’t change. We must stick to the mast--fall
with the colors--die in the breach--all that kind of thing. We can’t
turn and twist about. But you new people can, and you are geese if you
don’t. You want to get in the swim. Well, if you’re wise you’ll take
the first swimming-belt that you can get. But do just as you like,
it does not matter to me. I am afraid I must go now, I have half a
hundred things to do.”
She glanced at the watch in her bracelet and drew up her feather boa to
her throat. Tears rose to the pale gray eyes of her hostess.
“Pray don’t be offended with me, my lady,” she said timidly. “I hoped,
I thought, perhaps you’d be so very kind and condescending as to tell
me what to do; things bewilder me, and nobody comes. Couldn’t you spare
me a minute more in the boudoir yonder? where these men won’t hear us,”
she added in a whisper.
She could not emulate her guest’s patrician indifference to the
presence of the men in black; it seemed to her quite frightful to
discuss religious and social matters beneath the stony glare of
Mr. Winter and his colleagues. But Lady Kenilworth could not share
or indulge such sentiments, nor would she consent to take any such
precautions.
She seated herself where she had been before by the tea-table, her
eyes always fascinated by the Leo the Tenth urn. She took a bonbon and
nibbled it prettily, as a squirrel may nibble a filbert.
“Tell me what you want,” she said bluntly; she was often blunt, but she
was always graceful.
Margaret Massarene glanced uneasily at Winter and his subordinates, and
wished that she could have dared to order them out of earshot, as she
would have done with a red-armed and red-haired maid-of-all-work who
had marked her first stage on the steep slopes of “gentility.”
“You told us at Homburg, my lady----” she began timidly.
“Don’t say ‘my lady,’ whatever you do.”
“I beg your pardon, my--yes, ma’am--no ma’am--I beg pardon--you were
so good as to tell William and me at the baths that you would help us
to get on in London if we took a big house and bought that place in
Woldshire. We’ve done both them things, but we don’t get on; nobody
comes nigh us here nor there.”
She heaved a heart-broken sigh which lifted and depressed the gold
embroideries on her ample bosom.
Lady Kenilworth smiled unsympathetically.
“What can you expect, my good woman?” she murmured. “People don’t call
on people whom they don’t know; and you don’t know anybody except my
husband and old Khris and myself.”
It was only too true. Mrs. Massarene sighed.
“But I thought as how your la--, as how you would be so very, very good
as to----”
“I am not a bear-leader,” said Lady Kenilworth with hauteur. Mrs.
Massarene was as helpless and as flurried as a fish landed on a grassy
bank with a barbed hook through its gills. There was a long and to her
a torturing silence. The water hissed gently, like a purring cat, in
the vase of Leo the Tenth, and Mouse Kenilworth looked at it as a woman
of Egypt may have gazed at a statue of Pascht.
It seemed a visible symbol of the immense wealth of these Massarene
people, of all the advantages which she herself might derive therefrom,
of the unwisdom of allowing their tutelage to lapse into other hands
than theirs. If she did not launch them on the tide of fashion others
would do so, and others would gain by it all that she would lose by
not doing it. She was a woman well-born and well-bred, and proud by
temperament and by habit, and the part she was moved to play was
disagreeable to her, even odious. But it was yet one which in a way
allured her, which drew her by her necessities against her will; and
the golden water-vase seemed to say to her with the voice of a deity,
“Gold is the only power left in life.” She herself commanded all other
charms and sorceries; but she did not command that.
She was silent some moments whilst the pale eyes of her hostess watched
her piteously and pleadingly.
She felt that she had made a mistake, but she did not know what it was
nor how to rectify it.
“I beg pardon, ma’am,” she said humbly; “I understood you to say as how
you would introduce me to your family and friends in town and in the
country. I didn’t mean any offence--indeed, indeed, I didn’t.”
“And none is taken,” said Lady Kenilworth graciously, thinking to
herself, “One must suit oneself to one’s company. That’s how they
talk, I believe, in the servants’ hall, where she ought to be.”
Aloud she continued:
“You see, whatever one says at Homburg, or indeed anywhere at all out
of England, does not count _in_ England: that is understood everywhere
by everybody.”
“Really,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, confused and crestfallen: for it had
been on the faith of this fair lady’s promises and predictions in the
past summer that Harrenden House and Vale Royal had been purchased.
“Of course,” said Lady Kenilworth rather tartly, still looking at the
gold water-vase, which exercised a strange fascination over her, as if
it were a fetish which she was compelled, _nolens volens_, to worship.
“Only imagine what a mob we should have round us at home if everyone we
were civil to in Nice and Florence and Homburg and Ostend, and all the
other places, could take us seriously and expect to be invited by us
_here_. It would be frightful.”
Margaret Massarene sighed: existence seemed to her complicated and
difficult to an extent which she could never have credited in the days
when she had carried her milking-pails to and from the rich grass
meadows of her old home in Ulster. In those remote and simple days
“I’ll be glad to see you” meant “I shall be glad,” and when you ate out
of your neighbor’s potato bowl, your neighbor had a natural right to
eat in return out of yours--a right never disavowed. But in the great
world these rules of veracity and reciprocity seemed unknown. Lady
Kenilworth sat lost in thought some moments, playing with the ends of
her feather boa and thinking whether the game were worth the candle. It
would be such a dreadful bore!
Then there came before her mind’s eyes the sum total of many unpaid
bills, and the vision of that infinite sweetness which lies in renewed
and unlimited credit.
“You want to be _lancée_?” she said at last in her brusque yet graceful
manner suddenly, as she withdrew her gaze from the tea-table, “Well,
sometimes to succeed socially is very easy and sometimes it is very
difficult--for new people very difficult. Society is always uncertain.
It acts on no fixed principles. It keeps out A. and lets in B., and
couldn’t possibly say why it does either. Your money alone won’t help
you. There are such swarms of rich persons, and everybody who gets rich
wants the same thing. You are, I believe, enormously rich, but there
are a good many enormously rich. The world is in a queer state; ninety
out of a hundred have nothing but debts, the other ten are gorged on
money, gorged; it is very queer. Something is wrong. The sense of
proportion has gone out of life altogether. You want, you say, to know
people. Well, I can let you see them; you can come and meet them at my
house; but I can’t make them take you up if they won’t do it.”
Mrs. Massarene sighed. She dared not say so, but she thought--of what
use had been all the sums flung away at this lovely lady’s bidding in
the previous autumn?
“It is no use to waste time on the idiot,” reflected her visitor. “She
don’t understand a word one says, and she thinks they can buy Society
as if it were a penny bun. Old Billy’s sharper; I wonder he had not the
sense to divorce her in the States, or wherever they come from.”
“Where’s your man?” she said impatiently.
“William’s in the City, my lady,” answered Mrs. Massarene proudly.
“William, ma’am, is very much thought of in the City.”
“He’s on lots of things, I suppose?”
After some moments’ puzzled reflection his wife replied, “Meaning
Boards, ma’am? Yes, he is. They seem they can’t do without him. William
had always a wonderful head for business.”
“Ah!” said Lady Kenilworth. “He must put Cocky on some good things. My
husband, you know. Everything is done by companies nowadays. Even the
Derby favorite is owned by a syndicate. Tell him to put Lord Kenilworth
on all his good things, and not to mind if he’s unpunctual. Lord
Kenilworth never can understand why half-past two isn’t the same hour
as twelve.”
“That won’t do in business, my lady,” said Mrs. Massarene boldly,
for here she was sure of her ground. “Five minutes late writes ruin
sometimes.”
“Does it indeed? I suppose that’s what makes it so fetching. I am sure
it would do Cocky worlds of good; wake him up; give him things to think
of.”
“Is my lord a business man, ma’am?” said Mrs. Massarene, with great
doubt in her tone.
“Oh, they all are now, you know. Cocky’s very lazy, but he’s very
clever.”
“My lord don’t want to be clever; he’ll be duke,” said Mrs. Massarene,
intending no sarcasm. “I can’t think, ma’am, as your noble husband
would like to toil and moil in the City.”
“No--no; but to be on things, you know,” answered her visitor vaguely.
“You send Mr. Massarene to me and we’ll talk about it. He mustn’t mind
if Lord Kenilworth only gives his name and never shows.”
Mrs. Massarene’s was a slow brain and a dull one, but she was not
really stupid; in some matters she was shrewd, and she began dimly to
perceive what was expected of her and her William, and what _quid pro
quo_ would be demanded by this lovely lady who had the keys of society
if she used any of these keys in their favor; she had had glimmerings
of this before, but it had never presented itself before her so clearly
as now. She had sense enough, however, to keep the discovery to
herself. “I’ll tell Mr. Massarene, ma’am,” she said meekly, “and I know
he’ll be very proud to wait on you. Shall it be to-morrow?”
“Yes; to-morrow, before luncheon. About half-past twelve.”
“I won’t forget, ma’am.”
“And I’ll come and dine with you next week. I’ll bring some people, my
sisters; they won’t mind, Carrie certainly won’t. Lady Wisbeach, you
know. What day? Oh, I don’t know. I must go home and look at my book.
I think there is something of no importance that I can throw over next
week.”
“And how many will be there at dinner, ma’am,” asked Mrs. Massarene,
feeling hot all over, as she would have expressed it, at the prospect
of this banquet.
“Oh, well, I can’t say. I’ll see who will come. You have a very good
_chef_, haven’t you? If not I could get you Van Holstein’s. You know
when people are well fed once they’ll come to be fed again, and they
tell others.”
“Just like fowls,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, her mind reverting to the
poultry yard of her youth, with the hens running over and upsetting
each other in their haste to get to the meal-pan.
She was sensible of an awakening interest of a warmer tinge in the
manner of her protectress, since the subject of good things in the City
had been broached.
“You mustn’t want to go too fast at once,” continued that fair lady.
“It’s like cycling. You’ll wobble about and get a good many falls at
first. But you’ve begun well. You’ve a beautiful house, and you have
my cousin’s place, in the heart of a hunting county. Several of the
county people have asked me about the purchaser of Vale Royal, and I
have always said something nice about you both. You know I have been
four months on the Nile, and one sees the whole world there; such a
climate as this is to return to after Egypt! Why weren’t you in Egypt?
Oh, I forgot; your man’s member for Limehouse, isn’t he? I wonder the
party hasn’t done more for you. But, you see, money alone, unless there
is tact---- Well, I dare say I can’t make you understand if I talk till
doomsday; I have two or three people the night after to-morrow. I will
send you a card. And, by the way, you had better tell Khris to call on
me if he be in town. I will talk over with him what we can do for you.”
Mr. Winter, standing within earshot, at a discreet distance, to
all appearance as bereft of sight and hearing, and impervious as a
statue to all sight and sounds, lost not a syllable uttered by Lady
Kenilworth, and approved of all. “It is clever of her,” he thought, “to
be ready to go halves in the spoils with that old prince. Meet him half
way, she does; mighty clever that; she’ll cut his claws and draw his
teeth. She’s a lady of the right sort, she is. If she weren’t quite so
clever she’d have him jealous of him and have made an enemy of him at
the onset.”
His employer meantime was exhausting her somewhat limited vocabulary
in agitated thanks and protestations of undying gratitude which Lady
Kenilworth nipped in the bud by giving her two fingers chillily and
hurrying away, her farewell glance being cast at the golden water-vase.
“Khris a house decorator and I a tout! How very dreadful it is! But
hard times make strange trades,” thought the young mother of Jack and
Boo, as she sank down on the soft seat of her little brougham, and was
borne swiftly away to other houses, as the lamps begun to shine through
the foggy evening air.