The snow was gone, but it was still cold and unpleasant weather when
the ruler of Mr. Massarene’s fate, accompanied by a score or more
intimate acquaintances who had been persuaded to patronize “Billy,”
arrived in the dusk at Vale Royal with an enormous amount of luggage
and a regiment of body-servants and maids.
“You needn’t have come to meet us. I know my way about here better than
you do,” was the ungracious salutation with which the host, who had
gone himself to the station, was met by the object of his veneration.
She never flattered him now; she had got him well in hand; it was no
longer necessary to do violence to her nature; when one likes the use
of the spur one does not humor one’s horse with sugar; she thought the
spur and the whip salutary for him, and employed them with scant mercy.
She mounted as lightly as a young cat to the box of the four-in-hand
break, took the reins, and drove her mesmerized, trembling yet
enchanted victim through the dusky lanes and over the muddy roads which
were familiar to her, the lights of the lamps flashing, and the chatter
and laughter of the other occupants of the break bringing the laboring
people out of their cottages, as the lady whom they knew so well flew
by them in the twilight.
“Seems kind o’ heartless like in Lady Kenny to go to the great house
now the poor lord’s in it no more; him her own cousin and all,” said
a young woman to her husband who was only a hedger and ditcher, but a
shrewd observer in his way, and who replied, as he looked after the
four white-stockinged bays: “Lady Kenny aren’t one to cry for spilt
milk; she knows where her bread is buttered. Lord, gal, ’twas she made
Roxhall sell, and I’ll take my oath as I stands here that most o’ the
blunt went in her pocket.”
All the people for forty miles round were of the same opinion, and owed
her a grudge for it. Roxhall had been a very popular landlord and
employer; his tenantry and laboring folks mourned for him, and despised
the new man who stood on his hearthstone. Quite indifferent, however,
to the _voces populi_ she drove safely through the familiar gates and
up the mile-long avenue as night descended, and went into the library,
looking very handsome with her blue eyes almost black, and her fair
face bright and rosy, from the chilly high winds of the bleak April
evening.
She pulled off her sealskins and threw them to one of her attendant
gentlemen, and then walked forward to the warmth of the great
Elizabethan fireplace. “Well, my dear woman, how do you like it?”
she said good-humoredly to Margaret Massarene, as she drew off her
gloves and took a cup of tea before the hearth where a stately fire
was burning for its beauty’s sake: the great room was heated by hot
water pipes. Margaret Massarene was in that dual state of trepidation,
anxiety, offence, and bewilderment into which the notice of her
monitress invariably plunged her. She murmured some inarticulate words,
and glanced timidly at the bevy of strangers. But Mouse did not take
the trouble to introduce her friends to their hostess; some of them
were already acquainted with her, but some were not: all with equal
and unceremonious readiness ignored her presence, and descended on the
teacups and muffins and caviare sandwiches with the unanimity of a
flock of rooks settling down on to a field mined with wire worms.
“Always had tea in here in Gerald’s time,” said one of the men, staring
about him to see if there was any alteration made in the room.
“I don’t think you know my daughter,” Mrs. Massarene summed courage to
murmur, with a nervous glance toward Katherine, who stood at the other
end of the wide chimney-piece, a noble piece of fine oak carving with
huge silver dogs of the Stuart period, and the Roxhall arms in bold
bosses above it.
Mouse, looking extremely like her brother, flashed her sapphire eyes
like a search light over the face and figure of the person in whom
she had by instinct divined an antagonist, and desired to find a
sister-in-law.
“So glad,” she murmured vaguely, as she put down her cup, and held out
her hand with a composite grace all her own, at once charmingly amiable
and intolerably insolent.
Katherine merely made her a low curtsey, and did not put out her hand
in return.
“How’s Sherry and Bitters?” asked Lady Kenilworth, marking but ignoring
the rudeness. “Amusing creature, isn’t he? Bored to death, I suppose,
in India?”
“It would be difficult, I think, for the most stupid person to be bored
in India,” replied Katherine briefly. “Lord Framlingham is not stupid.”
Lady Kenilworth stared. Then she laughed, as it was so very comical to
find Billy’s daughter such a person as this.
“I saw from that bust of Dalou’s that she wouldn’t be _facile_,” she
reflected. “Looks as if she thought pumpkins of herself; if she’s
cheeky to me it will be the worse for her.”
Katherine was very cold, very pale, very still; the men did not get
on with her, and soon abandoned the attempt to do so. The ladies,
after staring hard, scarcely noticed her or her mother, but chattered
amongst themselves like sparrows on a house roof after rain. With
swelling heart she felt their gaze fixed on her; two of them put up
their eyeglasses. She wore a plain silver-colored woolen gown, but
their experienced eye recognized the cut of a famous _faiseur_, and the
natural lines of her form were unusually perfect.
“_Très bien mise; très simple, mais très bien_,” said a Parisienne,
Duchesse de Saint-Avit, quite audibly, gazing at her as if she were
some curious piece of carving like the fireplace.
“_Elle n’est pas mal du tout_,” returned a foreign diplomatist quite
audibly also, as though he were in the stalls of a theatre.
“Sullen, is she?” thought Mouse, toasting one of her pretty feet on
the fender. “Gives herself airs, does she? That’s old Fram’s doing, I
expect.”
Ignoring her as an unknown quantity, to be seen to at leisure and
annihilated if needful, she turned to her host, who was standing
awkwardly behind the brilliant throng. “Got my telegram about the Bird
rooms?” she said sharply. She would have spoken more civilly to an
hotel-keeper.
The Bird rooms were a set of three rooms, bed, dressing, and
sitting-room; their walls painted with birds and flowers on a pale-blue
ground, their silk hangings and furniture of corresponding color and
design; and many birds in Chelsea and Battersea, majolica, terra de
pipa, and other china and pottery, on the tables and cabinets. She
did not care a straw about the birds; but they were the warmest,
cosiest rooms in the house facing full south, and were detached from
observation in a manner which was agreeable and convenient; and she
had sent a brief dispatch that morning to command their reservation
for herself. Country houses are always selected with regard to their
conveniences for innocent and unobserved intercourse.
The Bird rooms were duly assigned to her, and Mr. Massarene himself had
walked through them that morning to make sure that they were thoroughly
warmed, that the writing-table was properly furnished, and that the
rarest flowers had been gathered for the vases on the table; he with
eagerness assured her that her word had been law.
“I hope you haven’t altered anything _there_?” she said, taking up her
gloves. “It’s very absurd, you know, to put Turkish screens and lamps
in an old Tudor room like this. They’ve smartened the place up,” she
said to her friends, looking about her. “That open work cedar wood
screen wasn’t across that door in Gerald’s time, nor those great bronze
lamps hanging over there. Where’d you get them, Billy? They look like
Santa Sophia.”
But she did not listen to Billy’s reply. She was looking at the
mulberry-colored velvet curtains which replaced in the windows the
somewhat shabby and frayed hangings of her cousin’s reign.
“I wish I had come here last year,” she said to her discomfited host.
“You should have touched nothing. A place like this doesn’t want Bond
Street emptied into it. I don’t know what Gerald would say. He’d be
dreadfully angry.”
Mr. Massarene thought that Lord Roxhall had parted with his right to be
angry; but he dared not say so. He murmured that he was sorry; whatever
there might be that was not suitable should be removed.
“Can’t you see how wrong it all is?” asked his tyrant impatiently.
He regretfully confessed his utter inability to see it; was grieved
they were incorrect; they should be moved to-morrow.
“Lady Kenilworth is a purist,” said his daughter in clear cold tones.
“New people who come into old houses are of necessity eclectic.”
Her father frowned. He did not know what eclectic meant, but he
supposed it meant something vulgar. His guest stared: if Billy’s
daughter were cheeky like this it would be necessary, she thought, to
take her down a peg or two. But she was forced to confess to herself
that the daughter of the house did not look like a person whom it would
be easy to take down, either one peg or many.
“Would you like to go to your rooms, ma’am?” murmured her hostess, when
the tea had been drunk and the chatter had ceased for a minute and the
sound of the first dinner-gong boomed through the house.
“My dear woman,” replied Mouse, “I know the place better than you do!
But, really, if I shall find Pekin mandarins on oak banisters, and
Minton plaques on Tudor panels, I shall not have strength to go up the
staircase!”
“What _do_ she mean?” murmured Margaret Massarene.
“She means to be insolent,” replied her daughter, and the reply was not
in a very low tone. But Lady Kenilworth was or pretended to be out of
hearing, going out of the library with two of her special friends and
calling on others to come with her and see what the vandals had done:
the gong was booming loudly.
William Massarene was inexpressibly mortified; the more keenly so
because if he had listened to Prince Khris two years before he
would not have had Bond Street and the Rue de Rivoli emptied into a
beautiful, hoary, sombre, old Tudor house.
Mouse felt no qualms whatever at seeing the new people in the old
house. She had been unable to understand why Roxhall would not himself
come with her. But some people were so whimsical and faddish and
sentimental. They spoiled their own lives and bothered those of others.
She thought it was good fun to see William Massarene in the old Tudor
dining-hall and his wife in the beautiful oval Italian drawing-room.
Roxhall would not have seen the fun of it, but men are so slow to catch
a joke.
“They are so deliciously ridiculous and incongruous!” she said to one
of her companions.
She had brought a “rattling good lot” with her; smart women and cheery
men who could ride to hounds all day and play bac’ all night, or run
twenty miles to see an otter-worry and be as “fresh as paint” next
morning; people with blue blood in their veins, and good old names,
and much personal beauty and strength, and much natural health and
intelligence; but who by choice led a kind of life beside which that of
an ape is intellectual and that of an amœba is useful; people who were
very good-natured and horribly cruel, who could no more live without
excitement than without cigarettes, who were never still unless their
doctor gave them morphia, who went to Iceland for a fortnight and to
Africa for a month; who never dined in their own homes except when they
gave a dinner-party, who could not endure solitude for ten minutes, who
went anywhere to be amused, who read nothing except telegrams, and who
had only two cares in life--money and their livers.
They came down to Vale Royal to be amused, to eat well, to chatter
amongst themselves as if they were on a desert island, to carry on
their flirtations, their meetings, their intrigues, and to arrange the
pastimes of their days and nights precisely as they pleased without the
slightest reference to those who entertained them.
“What would you like to do to-morrow?” their host had ventured to say
to one of them, and the guest had replied, “Oh, pray don’t bother;
we’re going somewhere, but I forget where.”
They had brought a roulette-wheel with them, and cards and counters;
for their leader knew by experience that the evenings without such
resources were apt to be dull at Vale Royal. William Massarene, indeed,
had provided forms of entertainment such as were unattainable by the
limited means of the Roxhall family. He had caused admirable musicians,
good singers, even a choice little troupe of foreign comedians, to
be brought down for this famous week in which the azure eyes of his
divinity smiled upon him under his own roof-tree. But there was one
diversion which she considered superior in its attractions to anything
which tenors and sopranos, viols and violins, or even Palais Royal
players, could give her, and that diversion she took without asking
the permission of anybody. There was a with-drawing-room at Vale Royal
which was always known as the Italian Room because some Venetian
artist, of no great fame but of much graceful talent, had painted
ceiling and walls, as was proven by old entries in account books of the
years 1640-50, contained in the muniment-room of the Roxhalls. On the
third night after their arrival, when they were all in this Italian
room, after a short performance by the Parisian comedians, a long
table of ebony and ivory was unceremoniously cleared of the various
objects of art which had been placed on it, and the roulette-wheel was
enthroned there instead by the hands of Lady Kenilworth herself, and
the little ball was set off on its momentous gyrations.
She was looking more than ever like a lovely flower, with a turquoise
collar round her throat, and real forget-me-nots fastened by diamonds
in her hair. For some minutes William Massarene, who had slept through
the French comedy, and was still drowsy, did not become sensible of
what was taking place in his drawing-room. But when the shouts and
laughter of the merry gamblers reached his ear and he realized with
difficulty what was taking place, a heavy frown, such as Kerosene City
had learned to dread, stole on his brows, and a startled horror opened
wide his eyes.
Play! Play under his roof!
All his Protestant and Puritan soul awoke. A large portion of his
earliest gains had been made by the miners and navvies and cowboys
who had gathered to stake their dollars in the back den of his shop
in Kerosene City; and later on he had made millions by his ownership
of private hells in larger towns of the United States; and the very
thought of gambling was odious to him because he felt that these were
portions of his past on which no light must ever shine. He felt that
he owed it to the conscience which he had acquired with his London
clothes and his English horses to prohibit all kinds of play, however
innocent, in his own drawing-rooms. He crossed the room and, nervously
approaching the leader of the band, ventured to murmur close to her
ivory shoulder: “You never said you meant to play, Lady Kenilworth. I
can’t have any play--I can’t indeed--in my house.”
His tone was timid and imploring. He was frightened at his own
temerity, and grew grey with terror as he spoke. She turned her head
and transfixed him with the imperious challenge of her glance.
“What are you talking about, my good man?” she said in her clearest and
unkindest tone. “It is not your house when I’m in it.”
“But I can’t allow play,” he murmured, with a gasp. “It’s against my
principles.”
“Don’t talk rot, Billy!” she cried with impatience. “Who cares about
your principles? Keep them for the hustings.”
Then she turned the ivory shoulder on him again, and, amidst the
vociferous laughter of the circle of players, William Massarene,
feeling that he had made a fool of himself, hastily and humbly
retreated.
The merriment pealed in louder ecstasy up to the beautiful painted
ceiling, as she cried after the retreating figure: “You go to bed,
Billy--go to bed! Or we sha’n’t let you dine with us to-morrow night!”
“You’re rather rough on the poor beast, Lady Kenny,” said one of the
players who was next her.
“Billy’s like a Cairo donkey--he must feel the goad and be gagged,”
replied Mouse, sweeping her counters together with a rapacious grace
like a hawk’s circling flight.
Then the little ball ran about in its momentous gyrations, and the
counters changed hands, and the game went on all the giddier, all the
merrier, because “Billy thought it improper.”
Katherine rose from her seat by the pianoforte and came to her
father’s side. Indignation shone in her lustrous eyes, while a flash of
pain, of shame, and of anger burned on her cheeks.
“Father, oh, father!” she said in a low, intense murmur, “send them
away! They insult you every hour, every moment! Why do you endure it?
Turn them all out to-morrow morning!”
“Mind your own business! Do I want any lessons from you, damn you?”
said Massarene, in a sullen whisper, more infuriated by her perspicuity
than by the facts on which her appeal to him was based.
His daughter shrank a little, like a high-spirited animal unjustly
beaten--not from fear, but from wounded pride and mute disgust. She
went back to the pianoforte and opened the book of “Lohengrin.”
He threw himself heavily into an armchair, and took up an album of
Caran d’Ache drawings and bent over it, not seeing a line of the
sketches, and not being able to read a line of the jests appended
to them. All he saw was that lovely figure down there at the
roulette-table, with the forget-me-nots in her glittering hair and at
her snowy bosom, and the turquoise collar round her throat.
“Billy!”
No one had ever called him Billy since the time when he had been a
cow-boy, getting up in the dark in bitter winter mornings to pitchfork
the dung out of the stalls, and chop the great swedes and mangolds,
and break the ice in the drinking-trough. Never in all her life
had his wife ever dared to call him Billy. He knew the name made
him ridiculous; he knew that he was the object of all that ringing
laughter; he knew that he was made absurd, contemptible, odious; but
he would not allow his daughter, nor would he allow any other person,
to say so. He was hypnotized by that fair patrician who threw the mud
in his face; the mud smelt as sweet to him as roses. It was only her
pretty, airy, nonchalant way--the way she had de _par la grâce de Dieu_
which became her so well, which was part and parcel of her, which was a
mark of grace, like her delicate nostrils and her arched instep.
When she had tired of her roulette, it irritated her extremely to
see the large gorgeous form of Mrs. Massarene dozing on a couch and
waking up with difficulty from dreams, no doubt, of cowslip meadows and
patient cows whisking their tails over the dew; and the erect figure of
her daughter sitting beside the grand piano and turning over the leaves
of musical scores.
“Why don’t you send your women to bed, Billy?” she said to him very
crossly. “It fidgets one to see them eternally sitting there like the
Horse Guards in their saddles at Whitehall. Politeness? Oh, is it meant
for politeness? Well, I will give them a dispensation, then. Do tell
them to go to bed; I am sure good creatures like those have lots of
prayers to say before they go to by-bye!”
“Why don’t you and your mother go to your rooms? We are all of us very
late people,” she said, directly, as she passed Katherine Massarene.
“You are my parents’ guest, Lady Kenilworth; I endeavor not to forget
it,” was the reply.
“What does she mean by that?” her guest wondered; she thought she meant
some covert rebuke. She did not at all like the steady contemptuous
gaze of this young woman’s tranquil eyes.
“Oh, my dear, how dreadfully old-fashioned and formal you are!” she
cried, with an impatient little laugh; and the daughter of the house
thought her familiarity more odious than her rudeness. She perceived
the impression she made on the young woman whom she meant to marry
Ronald.
“You see, I feel quite at home here,” she added by way of explanation.
“Of course, you know it was my cousin’s house.”
“I wonder you like to come to it,” said Katherine as she paused.
“It must be painful to see it in the hands of strangers, and those
strangers common people.”
“How droll you are!” cried Mouse, with another little laugh. “I am sure
we shall be great friends when we come to know each other well.”
Katherine was silent; and Mouse, slightly disconcerted, bade her a
brief good-night, and took her own way to the Bird rooms. For once in
her life she had met a person whom she did not understand.
“Ronald shall marry her, but I shall always hate her,” she thought,
as she went to the Bird rooms. “However, everybody always hates their
sisters-in-law, whoever they may be.”
The young woman seemed intolerably insolent to her: so cold, so
grave, so visibly disapproving herself; it was quite insupportable
to have Billy’s daughter giving herself grand airs like a tragedian
at the Français. But for her intention to make Ronald marry the
Massarene fortune she would have expressed her surprise and offence in
unequivocal terms.
“Really, these new people are too absurd,” she thought, as her maid
disrobed her whilst the chimes of the clock tower rung in the fourth
hour of the morning. “Too infinitely absurd. They must know that we
don’t come to their houses to see them; and yet they will stay in their
drawing-rooms like so many figures of Tussaud. It is really too obtuse
and ridiculous.”
She was, however, too sleepy to reflect longer on their stolid
obstinacy, or to decide how she should on the morrow best teach them
their place.