In the autumn of the year the general election took place, and
Southwoldshire returned William Massarene, whilst Limehouse selected a
labor member to represent its interests. His majority was smaller than
the Carlton agent had calculated and the Conservative press prophesied,
but that made little impression on him, though it disappointed his
party. A large portion of the country-folks would not hear of the
newcomer, who had turned out the Roxhalls. “He’s no more nor us, that
chap, and an uncommon ugly jowl he’ve got,” said one old gaffer to
another, as they munched their noonday snack under the hedge which they
had been cutting down into the hideousness demanded by high farming,
or behind which they had been drenching the mosses and lichens of
old apple-trees with a solution of lime and sublimate of iron, as
scientific experts advise.
He took with the yokels to a certain extent, as the marquis had said,
but not in those districts where the Roxhalls were beloved, and
where the laborers liked a gentleman and knew one when they saw him.
Moreover, the clergy of the county backed him to a man, and that lost
him many votes from the rustic population. “Passon knows which side
his bread be buttered,” said the old gaffers; and even the influence
of Lady Kenilworth and other Primrose Dames, who came down to canvass
for him, and who did not scruple to plead and to promise everything
possible and impossible, could turn them to the side espoused by the
Established Church.
“My cousin Roxhall begs you to plump for his friend,” she assured them;
but the gaffers smelt the lie, and were not to be caught by chaff.
They were corrupted by political bunkum, weakened in their marrow by a
tawdry and trumpery civilization, bewildered by the multitude of their
teachers and flatterers, but they were still the descendants in direct
line of the bowmen of Cressy and the king’s troopers of Naseby, and
they knew good blood when they saw it, and did not like the look of the
gold man from Ameriky.
However, by the aid of that man in the moon, whose occult and
untraceable influence determines all political elections all the world
over, these loyal and sturdy rustics were put in the minority, and the
clergy and the county people crowded them out at the polls.
“Lord save us! How they dawdle over matters here!” thought the
successful candidate. “In Dakota I’d just have run in thirty thousand
miners, and the trick’d been done.” He almost, for an instant,
regretted that he had forsaken the congenial country of mug-wamps and
roar-backs, where the ten-dollar bill could satisfactorily circulate
and settle everything, as the power of the purse should do. He was
with difficulty restrained from exercising those feudal rights which
he conceived were his through the possession of Vale Royal, and giving
notice to quit to everybody on his estate who had voted against him.
“If my hands had voted against me in the States,” he said, with his
blackest frown, “they’d hev known a hotter hole than hell.”
“Yes, Billy, but we are not in the States,” said his fair guide,
philosopher and friend, “and there _are_ a _few_ people here who can’t
be bought, and mustn’t be bullied.”
“One don’t meet that sort in society, nor see ’em in church,” he
growled under his breath.
“Perhaps you don’t,” she replied, not well pleased. “But they are not
a _quantité négligéable_. I mean, you mustn’t set their backs up and
their tongues wagging. I don’t know what the Carlton wouldn’t do to you
if you turned out the lowest Tommy Trot of them all from one of your
cottages, because he voted against you. On the contrary, it is to that
particular Tommy Trot who voted against you that you must send coals
and blankets at Christmas, and port wine and beef tea when he gets
fever.”
He muttered that he couldn’t do more than that for the Tommy Trots who
had voted for him.
“Of course you can’t,” she answered. “And for them you may do less.”
William Massarene pondered silently on this reply, and came to the
conclusion that if political life in England was much less corrupt
than in the States--as they all said--it was certainly, also, much
more complicated. On the whole, he had preferred Limehouse to
Southwoldshire; the London mechanics had understood him with a wink,
and their stomachs had not “riz” at bribery direct or indirect.
“My vote’s my own, ain’t it?” one rivet maker there had said to him.
“Well, I can do what I like with my own, can’t I? I can wallup my old
’ooman, and my brats, and my dawg, and I can sell my vote, that’s flat.
Yah!--hand the blunt over, old un.”
That was a practical politician, with whom he had rejoiced to make a
deal. But these rural electors, who turned him out of their hovels, and
chalked up on their walls “Roxhalls for us; not no Yankees,” were so
abhorrent to his feelings as a county magnate and a future peer that
he would have seen them all dead of fen fever with pleasure, and would
not have sent them a single drop of port wine, however much Lady Kenny
and the Carlton had counseled it. But she and the Carlton between them
contrived to restrain him from any public or compromising expression of
his feelings, and although there was some talk of a petition against
his return being made, it never went farther than words, and when the
new Parliament assembled, William Massarene represented in it one of
the most aristocratic counties in England, which had been represented
by some Roxhall’s nominee ever since George the Third had ascended the
throne.
“One of the infamous results of that inexcusable sale,” said
Hurstmanceaux, in the smoking-room of the Marlborough.
The remark was reported to a lady who did not love Roxhall, and who
caused it to be reported in turn to him at the French watering-place
where he was curing his body and fretting his soul.
“Ronnie might guess who was under the sale,” he thought, “who had the
gilt off the gingerbread.” His cousin Mouse had always done what she
chose with him. Their families knew it, his wife knew it, his county
knew it. He was in other ways a clever and high-spirited man, but she
made him a fool, a coward, a tool, a laughing-stock. It seemed to him
that Ronnie might know that and excuse him.
“Well, Billy, how do you get on in the House?” asked Lady Kenilworth
one evening after Whitsuntide when she had been dining with him.
Mr. Massarene did not immediately reply. “Billy” was always a very hard
morsel for him to swallow.
“I hear they’re very pleased with you,” she added graciously.
“Indeed, my lady?”
“Don’t say ‘my lady.’ Surely you might have left that off by this time.
Yes, you get on there they say. It is very difficult you know.”
She was not pleased that he had become politically successful; she
knew that it would make him more independent of her, and that he would
now find many to “show him the way” with whom Cocky could not compete.
She was driven to rely for her influence on his admiration of her,
which bored her to extinction but which was a fulcrum she could not
neglect. Then there was that odious cat, as she called his daughter,
though Katherine Massarene had very little that was feline in her.
The presence of Katherine Massarene was as unpleasant to her as the
presence in a card-room of a very calm and intelligent player, who is
not playing but looking on with an eye-glass in his eye, is to the man
who is cheating at bac’.
“Why couldn’t that young woman stay in India and marry one of
Framlingham’s household?” she thought with great irritation, and
William Massarene himself began to think the same; his daughter
frequently made him feel uncomfortable when her glance dwelt on him
where he sat beside Lady Kenilworth at a race or a ball or an opera; he
felt like a boy detected in trying to climb a pear-tree.
“Damn it all, if I ever get the pears, I’ve paid precious high for
’em,” he thought; all the same his daughter’s calm, contemplative,
contemptuous glance made him feel that at his age he had no business to
be tempted by such sweet forbidden fruit.
“What do you watch me for so?” he said savagely one day. “I was not
aware that I did,” she replied, and was quite truthful in the reply.
“You are terrible unfilial, my dear!” cried Mrs. Massarene. “What tens
of thousands there is as would give their souls to be in your shoes.”
“Possibly,” said Katherine with fatigue. The opinions she had expressed
to Lord Framlingham in India were still hers, unaltered, indeed
strengthened, by all which she had seen in English society since her
return to her parents’ house.
She often thought of the walk across the frozen fields to Greater
Thrope, and when once or twice she saw Hurstmanceaux when riding, or
at the opera, she felt a sense of shame burn in her heart and warm her
cheeks which it required all her serenity and self-control to restrain
from outward evidence.
“The hangman’s daughter!” she said to herself, recalling the speech she
had overheard at Bedlowes. “Oh, how right he was!”
When he saw her he bowed to her gravely and courteously, but never
attempted to approach her.
“My dear child, if you rile your father he won’t leave you nothing,”
said Margaret Massarene, in her emotion forgetting the syntax of her
new sphere.
“So be it,” said Katherine; “but why do you speak of him as so sure to
die before me? He is a very strong man and he is only fifty-seven.”
“My dear,” whispered her mother in sepulchral tones, “’tis true he’s a
very strong man, but the cooking’ll kill him before his time, to say
nothing of other things. Look ye, Kathleen, a man works like a horse
and lives like an ox all the best of his years, just beef and bread and
bacon and beer, and them only taken in snacks, just to keep the body
going. Then all at once, when he’s made his pile, he says, says he,
‘Now I’ll stuff,’ and he eats like ten princes rolled in one and drinks
in proportion, because he’s made his money and why shouldn’t he spend
it? And he forgets as he’s a liver, and he forgets as he ain’t as young
as he used to be, and he forgets as the fatted hog would die of fat if
the butcher didn’t stick him first.”
With which homely illustration she sighed heavily and patted her smart
gown in a melancholy reverie.
“I dare say you are right,” said her daughter. “But if my father
were temperate by force of will so very long, is it not strange that
temperance should not have become his habit, too strong a habit to be
ever broken?”
Her mother shook her head.
“I don’t suppose, my dear, you’ve watched pigs in the styes and out;
I have. They’ll put up with bran when they must, but lord, if they
get out amongst the clams and the yams, twist their tails as you will
they’ll ne’er leave off. When a man’s made his pile he’s just like a
pig in a sweet potato patch.”
With which apologue she sighed again and rose to go and dress for her
daily drive behind those immensely tall and always-prancing horses, who
always seemed to her as the winged beasts of the Apocalypse.
“And as for temperance,” she said as she paused in the doorway, “well,
my dear, ’tisn’t temperate as I’d call any man out West. Your father
could drink deep like the rest; but he had always a very strong head; a
very strong head indeed, my dear.”
Was his strong head being turned by Lady Kenilworth? his daughter
wondered. Would the brain which had never grown dizzy over the poisoned
drinks and the delirious speculations of America be whirled out of its
orbit by that which is the most intoxicating thing in all creation--a
lovely woman who is also a woman of the world? She believed that Lady
Kenilworth would do precisely what she pleased with him. Did not she
and her roulette-wheel reign in triumph even in the arcana of Harrenden
House? As far as a woman who is essentially honorable, candid, and
single-minded can follow the moves and read the mind of one who is
entirely without those qualities, she understood the character and
the circumstances of her father’s _veneris victrix_. She had asked
Framlingham what his opinion was of her and he had answered: “I never
say anything but good of a woman, my dear; but if I had the choice
between seeing one of my sons enamored of her, or shot by his own hand,
I should choose the revolver, as less prejudicial to his reputation
than the lady.”
She was very sensible that her position as the daughter of the house
did not permit her in any way to show her own disapprobation of one
of its favored guests. She knew also that nothing she could have said
or have done would have ever moved her father a hair’s breadth. She
remained strictly passive and neutral, but to all the advances of
Hurstmanceaux’s sister she was adamant; and now and then a caustic hint
or phrase escaped her; usually when she saw her mother treated with
unconcealed contempt by the lady of her father’s idolatry.
“I am going on to the Duchess of Parminster’s reception; are you?” said
Mrs. Massarene one evening, satisfied that this time, at least, she was
saying the right thing.
“Old Par’s Zoo? Not if I know it,” said Mouse, in her brusquest tone,
and, turning her shoulder on her unfortunate interlocutor, resumed her
interrupted flirtation.
“There is no play at the Parminsters,” said Katherine Massarene in
a tone, low, but so clear that Mouse reddened angrily, and several
persons near smiled indiscreetly, despite themselves.
Mrs. Massarene went crestfallen to her carriage.
If a duchess, daughter, wife, and mother of dukes, was not a
distinguished acquaintance, who was? And if a party gathered together
to meet princes could be called a menagerie, where was salvation to be
found? She was a meek woman, used to endure bullying with patience,
but now and then her bile would rise, as she expressed it, under
the insolence of that lovely lady who yet exercised over her the
fascination of the brilliant-coated snake for the humble barndoor hen.
She resented, but she dare not rebel. She went to the assembly at
Parminster House sorely exercised in her mind and vaguely wondering
what could be amiss with a courtly crowd, in which the first person she
saw was her future sovereign, who had dined there.
“Well, _he_ comes because there are certain dishes they do so
remarkably well in this house,” said Daddy Gwyllian, of whom she
asked for information, as he took her to have an ice. “But Lady Kenny
wouldn’t trouble herself to show here; it’s not her style; it’s deadly
respectable. You see she’s too young to bore herself at present for
the sake of a sauce.”
Mrs. Massarene sighed and reflected that the study of society was a
service which required to be learned very young.
Mouse felt herself read and understood by Billy’s daughter, and she did
not like it. When she dined at Harrenden House or made them give a ball
there, the evenings were spoiled to her by the sense that those large,
calm, dark violet eyes of the young woman of the house were upon her
and all her doings.
Who would ever have supposed that such a cockatrice’s egg of irony and
insolence could have been laid and hatched in such a nest of respectful
subserviency as was Harrenden House?
The air, the manner, the style, even the glance of this young woman
were odious to her; the idea of Billy’s daughter daring to be cold
and distant to herself, and pretending to be a gentlewoman in her own
right! What possible business had a young woman, so born, to arched
insteps, beautiful hands, and a low melodious voice? The thing was
preposterous! “Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred,” her natural sphere
the still-room or the laundry, how could she venture to carry herself
with dignity at a Drawing-room, and answer patronage with cold disdain?
“I really think,” she reflected, “that she must be a natural daughter
of Framlingham’s, whom he has got the Massarenes to adopt. She has just
his caustic way of saying things, and it would account for her going to
India.”
This fable seemed so satisfactory to her that she whispered it to one
or two persons, who in turn whispered it to two or three others, till
it became generally whispered and believed, and was indeed only not
heard by the persons whom it immediately concerned, and who alone could
have disproved it.
“But if she’s old Billy’s heiress, it don’t matter a pin whose daughter
she was?” said Brancepeth, with admirable common sense, the kind of
common sense which is a conspicuous trait of youth at the end of this
century.
And it was the general sentiment.
This story came to the ears of Hurstmanceaux.
“Who told you?” he said to the lady who prattled it to him.
“Mouse,” the lady hastened to say. “It is because it came from her that
I believed it.”
He went to his sister.
“I hear you are the originator of a story that Miss Massarene is the
daughter of Framlingham. What authority have you for such a statement?”
She laughed a little.
“Oh, I don’t know! I think so----”
“You think so. Is that all?”
“Well, yes, I suppose it is. But I am quite sure of it.”
“On what grounds?”
“Grounds? What do you mean? It is my idea----”
“Ah! it is your idea. And for such ideas, when they are spoken or
written, there is a legal phraseology and a legal punishment.”
She looked at him startled, but amused.
“What can you possibly mean? One can say anything one pleases.”
“If it be not libel. This is. You will do well to contradict the report
you have set afloat.”
“Goodness, Ronald! How odd you are! You won’t even know these people.
What can it matter to you whether they are talked of or not?”
“It matters nothing to me. But it matters much to me that you should
invent and circulate falsehoods, and try to injure by them an entirely
blameless person.”
“Meaning Katherine Massarene?”
“Certainly, meaning Miss Massarene.”
She laughed, much diverted.
“Are you changing your mind about her?”
“In no way. But she is a person who conducts herself admirably in a
most difficult and odious position, and I do not choose to allow you
to circulate inventions which may ultimately injure her extremely. You
will remember that some time ago I made you retract a calumny; I shall
act in the same way now unless you, of your accord, can completely
withdraw this tale you have set about.”
She was silent.
She remembered how unpleasant he had been when she had fabricated a
pretty web of falsehoods concerning one of her acquaintances, actually
forcing her to apologize to all the people concerned.
“I can’t imagine why you should care,” she said sullenly.
“To care for abstract justice is quite unintelligible to you,” he
answered. “It is to most people. Will you retract this lie or will you
not?”
“You make a storm in a teacup. What will you do if I don’t?”
“I shall tell your friend Mr. Massarene how you return his
hospitalities, and I shall make you confess your inventions.”
“How horrid you are, Ronald!” she said, while her lips quivered, partly
with fear and partly with rage. “You won’t look at the young woman, and
yet you set your back up like this. Oh, of course I can tell people
that I was only joking. But it will be very disagreeable.”
“You should bridle your tongue,” said Hurstmanceaux sternly, surprised
himself to feel with what extreme irritation this story of hers had
awakened in him. He could not and would not know Massarene’s heiress,
but he admired her conduct in society; he admired most of all what
others condemned in her, the contemptuous coldness and indifference
of her manner, her brief replies, sometimes so cutting and caustic,
her avoidance of all those whose high position made them sought by her
parents, the unwavering coldness with which she resented all court paid
to her.
When he watched her in the world, he felt inclined to applaud as he
would have applauded a fine innings at Lord’s or a hard-won race on
the Thames. It seemed to him monstrous that his sister, because her
matrimonial schemes had failed, should pursue with slander anyone so
innocent and so much to be praised.
William Massarene was in no haste to marry his daughter. His vanity
would have impelled him to give her an unusual dower if she had
married, and he did not care to cut so huge a slice out of his
capital. Moreover, his ambitions, growing by what they fed on, became
inordinate. No alliance seemed to him great enough.
Besides, he thought often, the old woman might go to glory, and
he might marry again and have sons. To his strength of purpose and
vastness of reach the future--his future--seemed illimitable.
She received a homage which nauseated, a flattery which disgusted, her.
She knew that she was seen through the golden haze of her father’s
reputation for wealth. “If I were deaf, or blind, or crooked,” she
thought, “if I were diseased, or imbecile, or mutilated, there would
not be one the less ready to worship and wed me out of all these
throngs of wooers.” And very often her brief words cut them like a
lash, and in her eyes, which were the hue of the darkest purple of a
pansy, there came a flash of scorn whose cause those around her were
too self-complacent to attribute aright.
She had but one pleasure--that of bringing together great artists,
and causing Harrenden House to be renowned for something better than
the usual display and expenditure of “new” houses. She had difficulty
in making her father pay the singers and musicians as she wished them
to be paid, for he who would give two guineas a bottle for a rare
Comet-wine, or waste many thousands of pounds in receiving a sporting
prince at Vale Royal, grudged their fees to what he contemptuously
called “professionals.” But when he saw how greatly these musical
entertainments “took on,” and how much they did to raise the tone of
his house, he gave her large credit and discretion, and the reputation
for the weekly chamber-music at Harrenden House soon attracted to it
those choicer souls whom millions and Richemont could not alone have
drawn there.
Sometimes she wished she could invite that lover of music who had
listened to the sonata in B flat at Bedlowes. She would sooner have
seen him there than his sister, who showed for an hour at these
concerts, and then took herself off to some gayer form of entertainment.
“It is intensely classic and correct, but deadly dull,” said Lady
Kenilworth, although she was, on occasion, a musical composer herself,
and wrote little songs which, with many corrections and additions from
Delkass and other salon-singers and fashionable pianists, passed muster
and were published as her own.
Once, to please her, Massarene bade his daughter have one of these
ballads sung at the next Harrenden House concert.
“My dear father, get someone else to manage these things,” she
answered. “Or let us give them up altogether. But bad amateur music I
will not have sung or played whilst I am responsible for the selection.”
She was quite resolute on the point, and, as he did not wish concerts
which were so admired to be abandoned, he could not please his idol in
this matter.
“She says your songs ain’t good enow, my lady,” he announced grimly,
with that relish in annoying her which occasionally overcame his
submissiveness, at such times as he remembered the diplomatist and the
Bird rooms, or saw a bevy of men round her as she donned her evening
cloak.
The announcement did not lessen the impatient aversion which she felt
for his heiress.
“Are you afraid of your own daughter, Billy?” she asked very
contemptuously.
“I ain’t afraid of nobody,” said Mr. Massarene; and there was an ugly
look for a moment on his face.
“What an odious man he was!” she thought. “What a lout, what a bore,
and, no doubt, what a bully too where he could be so!”
Sometimes a gleam of good sense made her afraid of him; afraid of all
the obligations which she was under to him; afraid of some future
reprisal he might take for all her insolence. But she was utterly
careless and extremely imprudent, and she dismissed the fear as soon as
it assailed her.
“You don’t marry your daughter, Billy,” she said one day. “It was very
provoking that the affair with my brother went off as it did.”
“It was never on that I am aware of,” said William Massarene stiffly,
with a look like that of a displeased bull on his face.
“Well, no, of course it wasn’t. Ronald wouldn’t know you. I’m afraid,
my good Billy, there’ll be people who won’t know you to the very end of
your day.”
He looked more displeased still, but he was accustomed to bear her
insolence patiently.
“Every man has his price, they say,” he answered doggedly. “Seems as I
haven’t hit on Lord Hurstmanceaux’s.”
He did not venture to say to her that he was delighted her project had
failed.
“What funny things you say, Billy,” cried Mouse, with a peal of her
enchanting laughter.
He was charmed, and began to believe himself a wit.
“I’m coming to hear you to-night,” she added.
He had been asked to speak on the Early Closing Bill; the bill was
originally a Conservative measure, and so the Conservative party was
obliged to support it in its Radical dress. The prospect made him
nervous, but he was a man who knew how to control his nerves; and he
had that solid sense of his own powers which when it is allied to good
sense is the surest of all support. Moreover, Mouse knew exactly how
to flatter whilst she bullied him; to flatter him enough, to make him
happy, never enough to make herself ridiculous, or her kind words cheap.
“It’s darned rot,” thought William Massarene. “All this here kind of
thing is socialism in disguise. The public is treated like a child,
and an idiot child. If it wants shops open late, it’ll pay traders to
keep ’em open, and if it wants ’em shut early, it won’t pay traders to
keep ’em open. That’s all about it I reckon. ’Tis one of them things
that should be left to the public. A trader don’t want to sit twiddling
his thumbs, and why in hell’s name should the Government force him to
twiddle his thumbs?”
But this simple common-sense view of the case was not the one taken by
the persons he had to support, and so he prepared a very neat speech
which argued the case from the opposite point of view to his own.
“Awful rot,” he thought, as he jotted down the heads of it. “But this
old country takes the cake for rot.”
Naturally, he did not care a straw which way the votes went; the time
had long gone by when he had kept a shop, and even the time when he
had owned many shops with dummy names over their doors and dummy
proprietors returned in the census; and whether Islington, and Notting
Hill, and Camden Town, and Bethnal Green burned gas till midnight, or
shut up at twilight, did not matter the least to him.
She had prophesied his success in the House, and he soon justified her
prophecy. He spoke on questions of home-legislation, and spoke well,
in short but telling sentences without nervousness, but with apparent
modesty; to be sure, there was the drawback of his accent, which was at
once plebeian and Yankee, but of this he was himself unconscious, and
the time is passed when the House of Commons exacted either education
or elegance; it has heard so many dialects and dropped aspirates within
the last twenty years that its ear has grown deaf to such offences.
What he had to say seemed to him, in its matter, very poor trash, but
he said it well; and a sense that this stout, uncouth, unpleasant
person would be a tower of strength in their ranks spread itself
downward from their chief throughout all the ranks of the Conservative
party, and made them feel that they had better not call him Billy too
often.
He was too sagacious a man to be tempted to speak on subjects out
of his range of special knowledge; on those of which he had such
knowledge, stocks, mining, railways, or finance, he spoke rarely,
but with admirable practical astuteness; the House saw that he was
an authority not to be despised. In smart society he was embarrassed
and ill at ease and conscious of his own deficiencies; but with men
on public matters, he was neither daunted nor dazzled. He had a very
poor opinion of the House of Commons, whether as a talking-shop or a
manager of public business, and he felt nothing of the awe which is
popularly supposed to be inspired in all new members by the sight of
the Speaker’s Mace.
He had quickly taken the measure of the Assembly, and he was not afraid
of it. He thought it a very poor affair; wasting all its time in
jaw, and timidly endeavoring to conciliate the masses, which, to his
knowledge, were best governed with a stock-whip and a six-shooter. But
he was too shrewd to let his private opinion leak out; and he contented
himself with making both sides of the House feel that a man had come
amongst them who, if they liked to listen to them, could teach them the
time of day on all subjects which concerned practical politics and the
business side of government.
The Irish members loathed him because he had turned his back on Ireland
instead of consecrating his millions to leagues and dynamite. But on
the rest of the House the impression he made was favorable. After all,
a politician who has Richemont at the head of his kitchen, and gives
you the great wines of comet years, is a superior companion on the
benches to the Nonconformist schoolmaster, the hungry barrister, or the
professor full of crotchets, whom Northern England or Eastern London
sends to St. Stephen’s.
“Really, Billy, you got on very well,” said Mouse, who had come to the
speaker’s box to hear him; that little box is much more comfortable
than the Lady’s Gallery.
“’Twas all soft sawder,” said Mr. Massarene, with grim contempt.
She was standing in the corridor twisting a lace wrap round her
head, and he had come upstairs after the division to receive her
congratulations and take her orders.
“What I’d like to teach ’em is how to do the business of this ’ere
House. Why, if any private business was carried on for half a year as
the business of the nation’s done by these gentlemen, there’d be an
almighty smash such as somebody’d go in the docks for----”
“Tell the House so,” said Mouse, much diverted.
He puffed out his cheeks, which was his equivalent for a smile.
“Guess, my lady, ’tain’t the place for truth-telling.”
“You should have gone to the other side.”
He shook his head.
“Not me, my lady. What do the Radicals say to me? This is what they
say: ‘My good fellow, you’ve earned five shillin’s by sweatin’ all day;
hand it over here, will ye. We want to buy beer and beefsteaks for Tom,
Dick, and Harry, who’ve been sittin’ loafin’ on a wall over there while
you was workin’.’ No Radicals for me if I know it.”
“You are very delightful, Billy,” said his patroness, “and you may come
with us to supper at the Papillons Club. I’m dreadfully hungry, though
I have only been ‘loafin’’ behind a grating. I’ve made rendezvous
there with Carrie.”
He obeyed the permission of his enchantress; and meekly ate some
oysters and drank some champagne in company with her and a dozen of her
gayest associates; it occurred to no one of them to pay the bill, and
the head waiter took it discreetly to the master of Harrenden House
when no one else was looking.
The Papillons was a new and very fashionable supper club, much resorted
to after the opera, the theatres, and parliamentary debates.
He felt that it was a place too full of gaiety, frivolity, and youth
to be a meet place for a member of parliament and a Crœsus of his age
and his ambitions. He thought suppers apoplectical, champagnes, even
_brùt_, very poor stuff, and English oysters ridiculous; nevertheless,
he went, and was rewarded by seeing his enchantress toss the liliputian
bivalves down her rosy throat and turn her shoulder on him as she had
done on his wife.
To be sure, he had the privilege of paying the bill, a privilege which
he found the English aristocracy always willing to concede to him.
“There’ll always be people too proud to know me, will there?” he
thought, as he drove homeward; “but I guess there’ll never be people
too proud to let me pay for ’em.”