When she reached Vale Royal, which she did late that night, after a
dreary and dangerous drive of fourteen miles, at a walking pace, over
frozen roads, she told her parents of the detention of the train by
the snow-drift, but she did not tell them of her meeting with Lady
Kenilworth’s brother.
She was tired and chilled, and went at once to a hot bath and her bed,
whither her mother brought her a cup of boiling milk with two spoonsful
of Cognac in it.
“It ought by rights to be milked on to the brandy,” said that good
lady. “But that can’t be done here, though there are half a score of
beautiful Alderneys standing on the Home farm only just to supply
the house--and such a dairy, my dear! Chiny the walls is, and marble
the floors. Only I don’t hold with their method of churning, and the
wenches are much too fine. I showed ’em how to turn out butter one
day, and I heard ’em say as I come away that my proper place was the
kitchen! Well, good-night, my dearie; sleep well.”
“Good-night, dear mother,” said Katherine with unusual tenderness, for
she was not demonstrative, and her parents to her were almost strangers.
“It is not her fault,” she thought, “if we are upstarts and interlopers
in this place which Henry the Second gave the Roxhalls.”
Then her great fatigue conquered her and, the brandied milk aiding, she
fell sound asleep and slept dreamlessly until the chimes of the clock
tower sounded eleven in the still, sunny, frosty, noonday air.
Then she awoke with the sense of something odiously painful having
happened, and, as she saw the withered bouquet of violets, which she
had told her maid to leave, with her gloves and her muff on a table
near, she remembered, and the words of Hurstmanceaux came back on her
mind with poignant mortification in their memories.
“How right he was! Oh, how right he was! But how merciless!” she
thought, as she looked through the panes of the oriel window of her
chamber out on to the white and silent park. She saw the huge old oaks,
the grand old views, the distant mere frozen over, the deer crossing
the snow in the distance to be fed. The bells of a church unseen were
chiming musically. In the ivy beneath her windows two robins were
singing in friendly rivalry. Above-head was a pale soft sky of faintest
blue. In the air there was frost. It was all charming, homelike,
stately, simple; it would have delighted her if--if--if--there was so
many “ifs” she felt sick and weary at the mere thought of them, and the
innocent tranquillity of the scene jarred on all her nerves with pain.
It was late in the morning before she could summon strength to go
downstairs, where she found her mother lunching alone in the Tudor
dining-hall; her father had gone away early in a sledge to attend
political meetings in an adjacent county, and the large house-party
invited was not due for two weeks.
“Who are coming, mother?” she asked.
“Oh, my dear, I never know; I scarce know who they are when I see
’em,” replied the present mistress of Vale Royal. “Lady Kenilworth has
arranged it all. She brings her friends.”
Katherine colored at the name.
“As she would go to the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo, or the
Sanatorium at Hot Springs!” she said bitterly.
“Well, I don’t know about that. She’d have to pay for ’em in those
places,” said Mrs. Massarene seriously, not intending any sarcasm.
“Don’t you eat nothing, my dear?” asked her mother anxiously. “I can’t
say as India have made you fat, Kathleen.”
She smiled involuntarily.
“Surely you do not wish me to be fat, mother?”
“Well, no, not exactly. But I’d like to see you enjoy your food.”
“Did she go through the form of showing you her list?”
“No, my dear, she didn’t. Your father knows who is coming. I did say
to her as how I wished she’d bring her children--they are such little
ducks--but she gave a little scoffing laugh and didn’t even reply.”
“How can you tolerate her! You should turn her out of the house!”
“Oh, my dear Kathleen,” said Mrs. Massarene in an awed tone. “We’ve
owed everything to her. If it hadn’t been for her I believe we
shouldn’t have known a soul worth speaking of to this day. That old
Khris (though he’s a real prince) is somehow down on his luck and
can’t get anybody anywhere. You’ve made fine friends, to be sure, but
they didn’t cotton to us; and your Lady Mary--whom you’ve just come
from--they say, isn’t what she should be.”
“Is Lady Kenilworth?”
“Lord, she must be, my dear! Why she comes on here from Sandringham!
She’s at the very tiptop of the tree. She stays at Windsor and she sits
next the Queen at the Braemar gathering. What more could you have? And
though she does bite my nose off and treat me like dirt I can’t help
being took by her; there’s something about her carries you off your
feet like; I don’t know what to call it.”
“Fascination.”
“Well, yes; I suppose you’d say so. It’s a kind of power in her, and
grace and beauty and cruelty all mixed up in her, as ’tis in a pretty
young cat. Your father’s that wrapped up in her he sits staring like an
owl when she’s in the room, and I believe if she told him to hop on one
leg round the Houses of Parliament he’d do it to please her.”
“Does he not see how ridiculous she makes him?”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Massarene with solemnity, “a man never thinks he
is ridiculous. He says to himself, ‘I’m a _man_,’ and he gets a queer
sort of comfort out of that as a baby does out of sucking its thumb.”
Katherine smiled absently.
“Does Lady Kenilworth ever speak of her brother--her eldest brother,
Lord Hurstmanceaux?” she said in an embarrassed tone, which her mother
did not observe.
“Yes; she says he’s a bear. She’s brought her brothers-in-law, and a
good many of her relations, her ‘people,’ as she calls ’em, but her own
brothers, none of ’em, ever.”
“This place belonged to her cousin.”
“Did it? I never knew anything about it. William came in one day
and said: ‘I’ve bought a place in the shires. Go down there this
afternoon.’ That was all. I was struck all of a heap when I saw it.
And the housekeeper, who had stayed on to go over the inventory, drew
herself up when she met me, stiff as stiff, and said to me, ‘I shall be
glad if you will release me of my charge, madam. I have always lived
with gentlefolks.’ Those were her very words, Kathleen. A fine set-up,
glum-looking woman she was, dressed in black watered silk, and she went
off the next morning, though we had offered her double her price to
remain under us. That’s just, you know, what Gregson, the courier, said
once; or rather, _he_ said he wouldn’t live with gentlefolks because
they was always out o’ pocket.”
Katherine moved restlessly: words rose to her lips which she repressed.
“And when I go in the village,” continued her mother, “there’s nothing
but black looks and shut doors, and the very geese on the little common
screech at me. The rector’s civil, of course, because he’s an eye to
the main chance, but he’s the only one; and I’m afeard it’s mostly
because he wants your father to give him a peal of bells. They seem to
think your father should pay the National Debt!”
Katherine sighed.
“Poor mother! _Que de couleuvres on vous fait avaler!_”
“Don’t talk French, Kathleen, I can’t abide it,” said Mrs. Massarene
with unusual acerbity. “When we first set foot in Kerosene City, a few
planks on the mud as ’twas then, a little nasty Frenchman had an eating
shop next ours and he undersold me in everything, and made dishes out
of nothing, and such pastry--light as love! My best was lead beside it.”
She continued to recall the culinary feats of her Gallic rival, whose
superiority had filled her with a Gallophobia deathless and pitiless
as that of Francesco Crispi; and her daughter’s thoughts wandered away
from her to the low-lying white fields round Greater Thrope, and to
the remembrance of the dark blue eyes which had met her own so frankly
through the misty air.
“Would you mind very much, mother,” she said at length, “if I did not
appear while these people are here? I could go to Lady Mary’s or to
Brighton.”
Mrs. Massarene was startled and alarmed.
“Oh, my dearie, no! Not on any account. Your father would never forgive
it. You have been so much away; it has angered him so. And as for your
views and your reasons he’d never see them, my dear, no more than a
blind man can see a church clock. Pray don’t dream of it, child. People
say it is so odd you went to India. They will think you have some
skin-disease, or are light in your head, unless you are seen now at
home.”
Katherine sighed again.
“I think you do not understand,” she said in a low, grave voice.
“I utterly disapprove, I utterly abhor, the course which my father
takes. I think his objects contemptible and his means to attain them
loathsome. If you only knew what they look to persons of breeding and
honor! Society laughs at him whilst it uses him and rules him. He is
not a gentleman. He never will be one. A complacent premier may get him
a knightage, a baronetage, a peerage; and a sovereign as complacent may
let him kiss her hand. But nothing of that will make him a gentleman.
He will never be one if he lived to be a hundred or if he live to
entertain emperors. I cannot alter his actions. I cannot open his
eyes. I have perhaps no right to speak thus of him. But I cannot help
it. I despise the whole miserable ignominious farce. I cannot bear to
be forced to remain a spectator of it. This place is Lord Roxhall’s.
All the money in the world cannot make it ours. We are aliens and
intruders. All the people whom Lady Kenilworth will bring here next
week will go away to ridicule us, plebeians as we are masquerading in
fine clothes and ancient houses.”
“My dear! my dear!” cried her mother in great trepidation. “You make
me all in a cold tremble to hear you. All you say is gospel truth, and
I’ve felt it many a time, or like to it, myself. But it is no manner
of use to say it. Your father thinks he’s a great man, and nobody’ll
put him out of conceit of himself; it’s true that as he made his pile
he’s the right to the spending of it. Don’t you talk of going away,
Kathleen. You are the only creature I have to look to, for I know
full well that I’m only a stone in your father’s path and a thorn
in his flesh. I can’t kill myself to pleasure him, for ’twould be
fire everlasting, but I know I’m no use to him now. I was of use on
the other side, and he knew it then, though I can’t call to mind one
grateful word as ever he said to me; but he knew it, and wouldn’t have
got along as fast as he did without me; and nobody kept ledgers better
than me, nor scrubbed a kitchen table whiter. That’s neither here nor
there now, however; and I’m in his way now with fine folks; and look
like ’em I never shall. But you, my dear, you do look like ’em, and
talk like ’em, and carry yourself like ’em. I would call you like an
empress, only I saw an empress once, and she was a little old hodmedod
of a woman in a Shetland shawl, and she was cheapening shells on the
beach at Blankenberge; and you are grand and stately, and fine as a
lily on its stalk. I want them to see what you look like, my dear; and
they won’t laugh at _you_, that’s certain. As for the house, it’s been
paid for, so I don’t see how you can say it’s Lord Roxhall’s still. He
can’t eat his cake and have it.
“And my dear Kathleen,” she continued, changing the subject with great
agitation, “they say you mustn’t know Lady Mary; she, she, she isn’t
respectable. There is something about her boy’s tutor and about a
painter, a house painter, even, they say.”
Katherine Massarene colored. “Dear mother, I know Lady Mary is not all
she might be. She is light and foolish. But when you sent me to that
Brighton school, a little frightened, stupid, miserable child, who
could not even speak grammatically, Lady Mary noticed me when she came
to see Enid and May (her own daughters), and told them to be kind to
me, and asked me to spend the holidays with them; and they were kind,
most kind, and never laughed at me, and took pains to tell me how to
behave and how to speak; and I assure you, my dear mother, that Lady
Mary might be the worst woman under the sun I should never admit it,
and I should always be grateful to her for her goodness to me when I
was friendless and common and ridiculous--a little vulgar chit who
called you ‘Ma.’”
Mrs. Massarene was divided between wrath and emotion.
“I am sure you were a well-brought-up child from your cradle, and
pretty-behaved if ever there were one,” she said with offence. “And I
dare say she knew as how your father’d made his pile, and had an eye on
it.”
“Oh no, oh no,” said Katherine with warmth and scorn. “Lady Mary is
not like that, nor any of her people; they are generous and careless,
and never calculate; they are not like your Kenilworths and Karsteins.
She is a very thoroughbred woman, and to her _novi homines_ are _novi
homines_, however gilded may be their stucco pedestals.”
Happily the phrase was incomprehensible to her hearer, who merely
replied obstinately: “Well, they tell me she’s ill spoke of, and I
can’t have you mixed up with any as is; but if she was kind to you,
my dear, and I mind me well you always wrote about her as being such,
I’ll do anything to help her in reason. You know, my dear,” she added,
lowering her voice, for the utterance was treasonable, “I have found
out as how all them great folks are all hollow inside, as one may say.
They live uncommon smart, and whisk about all the year round, but
they’re all of ’em in Queer Street, living by their wits, as one may
say; now I be bound your Lady Mary is so too, because she’s a duke’s
daughter, and her husband came into the country with King Canute, him
as washed his feet in the sea--at least the book says so--and anything
she’d like done in the way of money I’d be delighted to do, since she
was good to you----”
“Oh, my dear mother,” cried Katherine, half amused and half incensed,
“pray put that sort of thing out of your mind altogether. Lady Mary has
everything she wants, and if she had not she would die sooner than say
so. And indeed they are quite rich. Not what my father would call so
probably, but enough so for a county family which dates, as you rightly
observe, from Knutt.”
Mrs. Massarene sighed heavily; she was bewildered but she was
obstinate.
“Di’monds then?” she said tentatively. “None of them ever have
enough di’monds. One might send her a standup thing for her head
in di’monds--tira I think they call it; and say as how we are most
grateful all of us, but you can’t be intimate because virtue’s more
than rank.”
Katherine rose with strong effort controlling the deep anger and the
irresistible laughter which moved her.
“We will talk of these things another time, dear,” she said after a
moment. “Lady Mary will not be in London this season after Whitsuntide.
Enid and May go out this year with their grandmother, Lady Chillingham.”
“That’s just what she said,” cried her mother in triumph. “She said
Lady Mary couldn’t show her nose at Court even to present her own
girls!”
“Who said so?”
“Lady Kenilworth.”
“Lady Kenilworth a purist! I fear she could give my poor Lady Mary a
good many points----”
“What do you mean? Lady Kenilworth knows the world.”
“That no one doubts. And I dare say _she_ would take the tiara, my dear
mother.”
“I don’t understand you, and you have a very rude way of speaking.”
“Forgive me, dear!” said her daughter with grace and penitence. “I do
not like your guide, philosopher and friend, though she is one of the
prettiest women I ever saw in my life.”
“Well, you can’t say _she_ doesn’t go to Court,” cried Mrs. Massarene
in triumph.
“I am quite sure she will go to Court all her life,” replied Katherine
Massarene--an answer on which her mother pondered darkly in silence.
It must be meant for praise, it could not be meant for blame; and
yet there was a tone in the speaker’s voice, a way of saying this
apparently acquiescent and complimentary phrase, which troubled its
hearer.
“Her answer’s for all the world like a pail of fine milk spoilt by the
cow having ate garlic,” thought Mrs. Massarene, her mind reverting to
happy homely days in the dairy and the pastures with Blossom and Bee
and Buttercup, where Courts were realms unknown.
Katherine was silent.
She felt the absolute impossibility of inducing her mother to make
any stand against the way of life which to herself was so abhorrent;
or even to make her comprehend the suffering it was to her finer and
more sensitive nature. Her mother disliked the life because it worried
her and made her feel foolish and incapable, but she could not reach
any conception of the torture and degradation which it appeared to
Katherine. If she had possessed any power, any influence, if she had
been able to return in kind the insolence she winced under, and the
patronage she so bitterly resented, things would have seemed different
to her; but she could do nothing, she could only remain the passive
though indignant spectator of what she abhorred.
To her the position was false, contemptible, infamous, everything
which Hurstmanceaux had called it; and she was compelled to appear a
voluntary sharer in and accessory to it. The house, beautiful, ancient,
interesting as it was, seemed to her only a hateful prison--a prison in
which she was every day set in a pillory.
All the underlings of the gardens, the stables, the Home farm, the
preserves, showed the contempt which they felt for these unwelcome
successors of the Roxhall family.
“One would think one had not paid a single penny for the place,” said
Mrs. Massarene, who, when she asked the head gardener at what rate he
sold his fresias, was met by the curt reply, “We don’t sell no flowers
here, mum. Lord Roxhall never allowed it.”
“But, my good man,” said his present mistress, “Lord Roxhall’s gone
for ever and aye; he’s naught to do with the place any more, and to
keep all these miles of glass without making a profit out of them is
a thing I couldn’t hold with anyhow. Nobody’s so much money that they
can afford waste, Mr. Simpson; and what we don’t want ourselves must be
sold.”
“That must be as you choose, mum,” said the head gardener doggedly.
“You’ll suit yourself and I’ll suit _my_self. I’ve lived with
gentlefolk and I hain’t lived with traders.”
At the same moment Mr. Winter, who had of course brought down his
household, was saying to the head keeper:
“Yes, it does turn one’s stomach to stay with these shoeblacks. It’s
the social democracy, that’s what it is. But the old families they’re
all run to seed like your Roxhall’s; they expect one to put up with
double-bedded rooms and African sherrys. I am one as always stands up
for the aristocracy, but their cellars aren’t what they were nor their
tables neither. That’s why they’re always dining theirselves with the
sweeps and the shoeblacks.”
In happy ignorance that his groom of the chambers was describing him as
a sweep and a shoeblack, William Massarene, with a marquis, a bishop,
and a lord-lieutenant awaiting him, was driving to address a political
meeting in the chief town of South Woldshire.
When he got up on his dog-cart, correctly attired in the garb and the
gaiters of a squire of high degree, and drove over to quarter sessions,
he felt as if he had been a justice of the peace and the master of Vale
Royal all his life. He really handled horses very well; his driving was
somewhat too flashy and reckless for English taste, but the animal had
never been foaled which he would not have been able to break in; he who
had ridden bronchos barebacked, and raced blue grass trotters, and this
power stood him in good stead in such a horsy county as Woldshire.
The snow was gone and the weather was open. There was the prospect
of political changes in the air, and, in the event of a general
election, his chiefs of party desired that he should represent his
county instead of continuing member for that unsound and uncertain
metropolitan division, which he did actually represent. To feel the
way and introduce him politically in the borough before there should
be any question of his being put up for it, those who were interested
in the matter had got up a gathering of county notabilities on a
foreign question of the moment, which was supposed, as all foreign
questions always are, to involve the entire existence of England.
He had been told what to say on these questions, and although it
seemed to him “awful rot,” like everything inculcated by his leaders,
he said it obediently, and refreshed himself afterwards by some
personal statements. Amongst men, on public matters he always showed
to advantage. He was common, ignorant, absurd, very often; but he was
a man, a man who could hold his own and had a head on his shoulders.
That mastery of fate which had made him what he was gave meaning to his
dull features, and light to his dull eyes. No one, as modern existence
is constituted, could separate him altogether from the weight of his
ruthless will, and the greatness of his accomplished purpose; he stood
on a solid basis of acquired gold. Before a fine lady he shook in his
shoes, and before a prince he trembled; but at a mass-meeting he was
still the terrible, the formidable, the indomitable, “bull-dozing boss”
of Kerosene City. His stout hands gripped the rail in front of him,
while their veins stood out like cords, and his rough rasping voice
made its way through the wintry air of England, as it had done through
a blizzard on the plains of the West.
“I’ve been a workingman myself, gentlemen,” he said, amidst vociferous
cheers, “and if I’m a rich man to-day it’s been by my own hand and my
own head as I’ve become so. I’ve come home to die” (a voice in the
crowd: “You’ll live a hundred years!”), “but before I die I want to do
what good I can to my country and my fellow-countrymen.” (Vociferous
cheers.) “Blood’s thicker than water, gentlemen----”
The applause here was so deafening that he was forced to pause; this
phrase never fails to raise a tempest of admiration, probably because
no one can ever possibly say what it is intended to mean.
“I know the institutions of my country, gentlemen,” he continued, “and
I am proud to take my humble share in holding them steady through
stormy weather. I have lived for over thirty years, gentlemen, in a
land where the institutions are republican, and I wish to speak of that
great republic with the sincere respect I feel. But a republican form
of government would be wholly unfitted for Great Britain.”
“Why so?” asked a voice in the crowd.
Mr. Massarene did not feel called on to answer so indiscreet a
question; he continued as though no one had spoken.
“The foundations of her greatness lie embedded in the past, and are
inseparably allied with her institutions. The courage, honor and
patriotism of her nobility” (the marquis with a gratified expression
played with his watch-chain), “the devotion, purity, and self-sacrifice
of her church” (the prelate patted the black silk band on his stomach
and purred gently like a cat), “the examples of high virtue and wisdom
which have adorned her throne” (the lord-lieutenant looked ecstatic
and adoring, as a pilgrim of Lourdes before the shrine)--“all these,
gentlemen, have made her what she is, the idol of her sons, the terror
of her foes, the bulwark at once of religious faith and of religious
freedom. The great glory of our country, sirs, is that poor and rich
are equal before the law” (“Yah!” from a rude man below), “and that
the roughest, most friendless lad may by probity and industry reach
her highest honors. I myself left Queenstown, gentlemen, a young
fellow with three pounds in my pocket and a change of clothes in a
bundle, and that I have the honor of addressing you here to-day is
due to the fact that I toiled honestly from morning till night for
more than thirty years in exile. It was the hope of coming back, sirs,
and settling on my native soil, which kept the heart up in me through
hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, and such toil as here you know
nothing about. I was a poor working lad, gentlemen, with three pounds
in my pocket, and yet here I stand to-day the equal of prince and
peer” (the marquis frowned, the bishop fidgetted, the lord-lieutenant
coughed, but Mr. Massarene was _emballé_, and heeded not these hints
of disapprobation). “What do you want with republican institutions, my
friends, when under a monarchy the doors of wealth and honor open wide
to the laboring man who has had sense and self-denial enough to work
his way upward?” (“They open to a golden key, damn your jaw!” cried
a vulgar being in the mob below.) “who by honesty and economy, and
incessant toil, has come to put his legs under the same mahogany with
the highest of the land. You talk of golden keys, sir--the only key to
success is the key of character. Before I give my hand, sir, whether to
prince or pauper, I ask--what is his character?”
“Dear me, dear me, this is very irrelevant,” murmured the
lord-lieutenant, much distressed.
“Damned inconvenient,” murmured the marquis with a chuckle. The bishop
folded his hands and looked rapt and pious. But the mayor of the
borough, with desperation, plucked at the orator’s coat-tails.
“Order, order,” he murmured with a clever adaptation of parliamentary
procedure; and Mr. Massarene, whose ear was quick, and who was proud of
his knowledge of the by-words of the benches, understood that he was
irrelevant and on ticklish grounds, and brought forward a racy American
anecdote with ready presence of mind and extreme success; whilst the
crowd below roared with loud and delighted laughter. The gentlemen
at his elbow breathed again. There had been, in a ducal house of the
countryside, a very grave scandal a few months earlier; a scandal
which had become town-talk, and even been dragged into the law courts.
It would never do to have the yokels told their “character” was a
patrician or political _sine qua non_.
On the whole the speech was a very popular one; the new owner of Vale
Royal was welcomed. Too egotistic in places, and too unpolished in
others, it was vigorous, strong, and appealed forcibly to the mob by
its picture of a herdsman with three pounds in his pocket become a
capitalist and a patron of princes.
To his own immediate and aristocratic supporters its effect was less
inspiriting. He gave them distinctly to understand the _quid pro quo_
which he gave and expected.
“If he don’t get what he wants from our side he’ll rat as sure as he
lives,” thought the lord-lieutenant; and the mayor thought to himself
that it would really have been better to have left the metropolitan
division its member ungrudged.
“What a fearful person,” said the lord-lieutenant, a tall slender man
with fair hair turning grey, and a patrician face, blank and dreary in
expression, though many years of conflict between a great name and a
narrow income.
“His speech was quite Radical. I really did not know how to sit still
and hear it,” whispered the bishop in a tone of awe and horror.
The marquis lighted a cigar. “Never mind that. It took with the yokels.
He’ll vote straight for us. He wants a peerage.”
“Gladstone would give him a peerage.”
“Of course. But Gladstone’s peerages are like Gladstone
claret--unpleasantly cheap. Besides, our man loves smart folks--the
liberals are dowdy; our man loves ‘proputty,’ like the northern farmer,
and the liberals are always nibbling into it like mice into cheese.
Besides, Mouse Kenilworth’s godmother to this beast; she has put him in
the way he should go.”
“I wish she would write his speeches for him,” said the bishop.
“Took with the yokels, took with the yokels,” repeated the marquis.
“Ain’t that what speeches are made for? People who can read don’t want
to be bawled at. Man will do very well, and we shall have him in the
Lords; he’ll call himself Lord Vale Royal, I suppose--ha! ha!--poor
Roxhall!”
The lord-lieutenant, who could not accept the social earthquake with
the serenity of his friend, shivered, and went to his carriage.
“I shall go and ask our candidate for some money,” murmured the bishop,
whose carriage was not quite ready.
The marquis grinned. “Nothing like a cleric for thinking of the main
chance!” he said to himself.
The bishop hesitated a few moments, looked up at the steps of the
hotel, and hastened across the market-place as rapidly as his portly
paunch and tight ecclesiastical shoes permitted. Mr. Massarene was
standing on the top of the step with three of his supporters. The
churchman took from his pocket a roll of thick vellum-like paper,
evidently a memorial or a subscription-list.
“For the rood-screen,” he murmured. “A transcendent work of art.
And the restoration of the chauntry. Dear Mr. Massarene, with your
admirable principles, I am sure we may count on your support?”
William Massarene, with his gold pencil case between his thick finger
and thumb, added his name to the list on the vellum-like scroll.
The lord-lieutenant was on that list for twenty guineas; Lord Roxhall
for ten guineas. William Massarene wrote himself down for two hundred
guineas.
“Back the Church for never forgetting to do business,” said the marquis
with a chuckle to himself; and he too mounted the hotel steps as his
ecclesiastical friend descended them, after warmly and blandly pressing
the candidate’s hand and inviting him to dinner at the episcopal palace.
“Booking a front seat in heaven, Mr. Massarene?” he cried out in his
good-humored contemptuous voice. “Well, come, do something for earth
too. You haven’t subscribed to the Thorpe Valley Hounds. Got to do it,
you know. Hope you’re sound about Pug.”
The marquis had been master of the pack for a dozen years.
“I’m no sportsman,” said his victim, who had no notion who or what Pug
was. “But if it’s the custom in the county----”
“Of course it’s the custom of the county! Roxhall, poor fellow, was a
staunch friend to us. You mustn’t be otherwise. We’ll draw Vale Royal
coverts for cubs next October. Mind you’re sound about Pug.”
“May I ask what Lord Roxhall subscribed?”
“Fifty guineas,” said the M. F. H. truthfully.
Mr. Massarene planted his legs a little further apart and thrust out
his stomach.
“I’ll give four fifties to the dogs,” he said with grandeur.
“The dogs!” ejaculated the marquis; but he restrained his emotions and
grasped his new subscriber’s hand cordially.
“The Kennels and the Cathedral got the same measure,” he thought with
amusement, as he nodded good-humoredly to the crowd below and entered
the hotel to get a nip of something warm.
“Deuced clever of the Bishop; I shouldn’t have thought of making the
cad ‘part.’ What an eye the saints always have on the money-bags,” he
thought as he drank some rum-punch.
But, being a cheery person who took the world as he found it, he said
to his wife when he got home that day: “Go and call at Vale Royal,
Anne; the man’s a very good fellow. No nonsense about his origin. Told
us all he began life with three pounds in his pocket. Don’t like going
to see ’em in Roxhall’s place? Oh, Lord, my dear, that’s sentiment. If
Roxhall hadn’t sold the place they couldn’t have bought it, could they?”
“But why should we know them?” said the lady, who was unwilling to
accord her countenance to new people.
“Because he’s promised two hundred guineas to the ‘dogs,’” said
the marquis with a chuckle, “and because he’s a pillar of the Tory
Democracy, my dear!”
“Tory Democracy? A contradiction in terms!” said the lady. “You might
as well say Angelic Anarchy!”
“We shall come to that, too,” said her spouse.