A young woman, dressed in white cambric, with 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 _déclassée_,” 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. I 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!”
“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 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 they use
him, he uses them. It is a _quid pro 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. “An earl 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 Runnymede 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 homines_ which has kept the
English aristocracy vigorous and popular.”
She gave a scornful gesture of denial.
“It is the _novi homines_ who have degraded the English aristocracy.
Pardon me if I contradict you. Mr. Mallock has written very kind and
possibly very just things of your nobility, but he has forgotten to
satirize its most shameful infirmity, its moral scrofula--its incessant
and unblushing prostration of itself before wealth _quà_ wealth. It
likes hothouse 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!”
“Who would be less severe who had seen anything 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 expression, 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 Royal,” 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 woodland 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 Framlingham, I assure
you,” she added after a pause. “I am ashamed that they are ashamed of
it.”
“I understand, my dear, and I sympathize, 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.”
“I should not mind that.”
“Oh, yes, you would. It is humiliation at every turn. It is to be
checked 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 diamond
tiara 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 Runnymede, 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 honor?” she said in a low tone.
Lord Framlingham laughed grimly.
“When one is in debt to one’s banker and one’s tradesmen, and has to
let one’s place to a sugar-baker, the less said about honor 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 my parents’ present position. If I had been born 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 we 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. I was only the helpless spectator of a kind of effort which is
in my sight the most ignoble, the most foolish of all, the endeavor 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 Framlingham. “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 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 anachronisms 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 Belisarius. 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 recognizing
that money is stronger than itself, courts men of money, borrows from
them, and puts out in foreign stocks where 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 recognized the truth of all he said; but she loathed
the fact she was compelled by her reason to acknowledge.
“‘When she’s convinced against her will
She’s of the same opinion still,’”
quoted Framlingham. “Come, my dear, let’s go and have a game of tennis.”
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, notwithstanding 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 recommended to William Massarene by the
English minister at Washington; and the influence of that gentleman
had 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 one 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 orthography 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 disappointment 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 color, to be
more 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 jewelry of any kind, seemed to him to give him
poor value for the many thousand of dollars he had spent on her. He had
intended her to be ultra fashionable, ultra chic, always in the swim,
always in the first flight; on race-courses, 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!” 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, _tête-à-tête_
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
understand 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 she 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 ardor 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 endeavored 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?”
“Rise 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 insignificant in her presence. He was in some
respects, when he pitted himself against her, compelled unwillingly
to acknowledge that she was the stronger of the two. She had hurt 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 rung 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, indirectly 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 Sevigné
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 understand 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 giving them none; they called
her undutiful, and undutiful 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
Dalont’s bust of her daughter.
The winter before their acquaintance with Lady Kenilworth the
Massarenes had been at Cannes and Monte Carlo, following that smart
world of which they still 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
were 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 favored. But he made very little way with her; she was
chilly, reserved, respectful. “Take your respect to the devil,” thought
the misunderstood prince.
“Why are you so very unkind to me, Miss Massarene?” he said in a joking
fashion, which would have convulsed with joy every other women 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.
“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 honor to dine
with them, sir, merely because they earned money in America!”
Her companion had never received such a “facer” in all his 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 disturbed. “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 Riviera next day from Monaco to
Hyères, taking protean forms, and changing with every tongue that told
it.
One of its versions, one of the most accurate, reached the ears of
William Massarene.
His nickname in the States had been “Blasted Blizzard,” and his temper
was such as corresponded with the name. His wrath was terrible. From
his point of view it was justified. His wife, trembling like a leaf
in a hurricane, was paralyzed 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 apologize!” he swore a dozen times.
“I shall certainly never do that,” said Katherine with contemptuous
composure.
“You shall apologize 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 you 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 love to by princes, and wear
smart frocks, and push themselves into smart society; and he had this
_rara avis_, 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 offended gentleman. But
he made no impression whatever on her. She ceased to reply. But 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 pass a year in India with
some school friends, who were daughters 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. He only saw in
his daughter a person who might have secured to him the one supreme
honor 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 Framlingham, he 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
influences. 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 discomfiture 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 cultured mind. He took a great
liking to this young woman, who quarreled with a lot which all the
world envied her, and he pressed her to remain 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 a 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 honor 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 allow her to make her
own career here in this ancient and romantic land as a teacher, as a
nurse, as an artist, as anything. If only they would not oblige her to
return to the yoke of that inane humiliating tedious routine which they
thought honor 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
Vale Royal, and containing an account of the dinner-party which the
Grand Duchess had ordered and honored. 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 polished habit; but it was
there, proud, imperious and indomitable.
_L’échine 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 the only substitute for ancestral steel that I
know!”
But 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, or
charm of Sheridans, may have filtered into the veins of some ancestor
of hers in the long, long ago?”