“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 bog; you flounder on in it
till 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 roseleaf 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 consor, 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 Mary, ma’am!”
“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 completely
_tarée_--completely!”
The portrait was somewhat heavily loaded with colors, 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 abandoned 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 unintelligible to
the socially untutored mind.
“How is it possible to make you understand?” said Mouse, lighting a
second cigarette before the first was half consumed, after the wasteful
manner of female smokers. “Rank 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 anybody.
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 dare say 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 who 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 recognize 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
bewilderment; 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 I’ve 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 wasteful 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 brightness.
“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 Framlingham’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 presidency. 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 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? _O vertu où vas-tu te nicher?_ 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; _she_ is much too ugly to be anything else, and he’s
a very good fellow though he does make himself hated with his sharp
tongue. He’s like that monarch, you know, who never did a wise thing
and never said a silly one. He’s awfully clever, but he 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 sharply. “What is she like?”
She intended this young woman for her brother Ronald, whatever she
might be like.
Maternal pride made Mrs. Massarene’s inexpressive and commonplace face
for once eloquent and not ordinary: its troubled and dreary expression
of chronic bewilderment lighted and changed; her wide mouth smiled, her
colorless eyes grew almost bright.
“If you’ll honor 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.
Lady Kenilworth 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.”
Lady Kenilworth was still looking at them critically through 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 Hurstmanceaux.
“Your daughter isn’t _facile_, 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 color 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.”
“William is right,” said Lady Kenilworth with a glance at the bust,
“and 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 Kenilworth. “I am afraid she
gets those ideas from Framlingham. He is a downright Radical.”
“I don’t know where she gets them,” 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 Republican.”
Lady Kenilworth laughed with genuine mirth, which showed all her pretty
teeth, white, and even and pointed like a puppy’s.
“Is she a Republican? 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
Radicals 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 candor 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 understand, but
gratefully, because she felt that a compliment 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 Ronnie shall marry her. You don’t know my
brother?” she said, apparently abruptly, but in her own mind following
out her thoughts.
“Meaning Lord Hurstmanceaux? No, ma’am, we haven’t that honor.”
“We call it Hur’sceaux, please.”
“Oh, indeed! As you say O’borne for Otterbourne, and Kers’ham for
Kersterholme. 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?”
“Rebecca 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
you. 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 unfinished 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.
“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, realizing that she
was wasting valuable time on this goose. “They will want no end of
weeding. I will not meet anybody who is not in my own set. You’ll get
the right people if you don’t mix them with the wrong.”
With her little 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 produced 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 dragée haute!_” said their guide, philosopher, and
friend; 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 Ronnie,” 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 Ronnie please himself
and get me the Massarene dollars. I’ll give you half I get; and I
sha’n’t know whether she’s a snub nose or a straight one.”
Mouse colored 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 spade a spade fast enough sometimes. 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 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, whatever 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, especially by Jack; and there he was perfectly
happy, being a young man of simple tastes, limited intelligence, and
affectionate disposition.
He was in the midst of an uproarious game of romps there 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 color 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 Kersholm?” 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 reëntered 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. 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
“Cocky’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.