Delphi collected works o.., p.755
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 755
“If only they wouldn’t look at me so!” she thought, piteously. What must they think of her, sitting alone like this, day after day, week after week, when the dreary two hours’ drive in the Park was over, behind the high-stepping horses, which were the envy of all beholders, but to their owners seemed strange, terrible and dangerous creatures.
London was full, not with the suffocating fullness indeed of July, but with the comparative animation which comes into the street with the meeting of Parliament.
But not a soul had passed those gates as yet, at least not one as human souls had of late become classified in the estimation of the dwellers within them.
The beautiful rooms seemed to yawn like persons whose mind and whose time are vacant. The men in black and the men in powder yawned also, and bore upon their faces the visible expression of that depression and discontent which were in their bosoms at the sense, ever increasing in them, that every additional day in the house of people whom nobody knew, robbed them of caste, injured their prestige, and ruined their future.
The mistress of the palace only did not yawn because she was too agitated, too nervous and disappointed and unhappy to be capable of such a minor suffering a ennui; she was not dull because she was strung up to a high state of anxious expectation, gradually subsiding, as day after day went on, to a complete despair.
They had done all that could be done in the way of getting into society; they had neglected no means, shunned no humiliation, spared no expense, refused no subscription, avoided no insult which could possibly, directly or indirectly, have helped them to enter its charmed circle, and yet nothing had succeeded. Nobody came, nobody at least out of that mystic and magic sphere into which they pined and slaved to force or to insinuate themselves; not one of those, the dust of whose feet they were ready to kiss, would come up the staircase under the smiling gaze of Clodion’s young falconer.
But on this second day of the month of March, when the clocks showed five of the afternoon, there was a slight movement perceptible in the rooms of which the suite was visible from the door of the boudoir. The groom of the chambers, a slender, solemn, erect personage, by name Winter, came forward with a shade of genuine respect for the first time shown in his expression and demeanor.
“Lady Kenilworth asks if you receive, madam?”
“Why, lord, man! ain’t I in o’ purpose?” said his mistress, in her agitation and surprise reverting to her natural vernacular; whilst she rose in vast excitement and unspeakable trepidation, and tumbled against a stool in her nervousness.
“I was sure that I should find you at home, so I followed on the heels of your man,” said a sweet, silvery, impertinent voice, as the fair young mother of Jack and Boo entered the boudoir, looking at everything about her in a bird-like way, and with an eye-glass which she did not want lifted to the bridge of her small and delicate nose.
“So kind — so kind — so honored,” murmured Mrs. Massarene with bewilderment and enthusiasm, her pale, flaccid cheeks warm with pleasure, and her voice tremulous with timidity.
“Not at all,” murmured Lady Kenilworth absently and vaguely, occupied with her inspection of the objects round her. She seated herself on a low chair, and let her glance wander over the walls, the ceiling, the Meissen china, the Watteau ceiling, and her hostess’s gown.
“How’s your dear little children, ma’am?” said Mrs. Massarene humbly.
“Oh, they’re all right, thanks,” said their mother carelessly, her head thrown back as she gazed up at the Watteau. “It seems very well done,” she said at last. “Who did it for you? The Bond Street people?”
“Did what?” said her hostess falteringly, drawing in her breath with a sudden little gasp to prevent herself from saying “my lady.”
“The whole thing,” explained her guest, pointing with the handle of her eye-glass toward the vista of the rooms.
“The — the — house?” said Mrs. Massarene hesitatingly, still not understanding. “We bought it — that is, Mr. Massarene bought it — and Prince Kristof of Karstein was so good as to see to the decorations and the furniture. The duke had left a-many fixtures.”
“Prin and Kris?” repeated Lady Kenilworth, hearing imperfectly through indifference to the subject and attention to the old Saxe around her. “I never heard of them. Are they a London firm?”
“Prince Kristof of Karstein,” repeated Mrs. Massarene, distressed to find the name misunderstood. “He is a great friend of ours. I think your ladyship saw him with us in Paris last autumn.”
Lady Kenilworth opened wide her pretty, innocent, impertinent, forget-me-not colored eyes.
“What, old Khris? Khris Kar? Did he do it all for you? Oh, I must run about and look at it all, if he did it!” she said, as she jumped from her seat, and, without any premiss or permission, began a tour of the rooms, sweeping swiftly from one thing to another, lingering momentarily here and there, agile and restless as a squirrel, yet soft in movement as a swan. She did run about, flitting from one room to another, studying, appraising, censuring, admiring, all in a rapid and cursory way, but with that familiarity with what she saw, and that accurate eye for what was good in it, which the mistress of all these excellent and beautiful things would live to the end of her years without acquiring.
She put up her eye-glass at the pictures, fingered the tapestries, turned the porcelains upside down to see their marks, flitted from one thing to another, knew every orchid and odontoglossum by its seven-leagued name, and only looked disapproval before a Mantegna exceedingly archaic and black, and a Pietro di Cortona ceiling which seemed to her florid and doubtful.
She went from reception-rooms to library, dining-room, conservatories, with drawing-rooms, morning-rooms, studies, bedchambers, galleries, bath-rooms, as swift as a swallow and as keen of glance as a falcon, touching a stuff, eyeing a bit of china, taking up a bibelot, with just the same pretty pecking action as a chaffinch has in an orchard, or a pigeon in a bean-field. Everything was really admirable and genuine. All the while she paid not the slightest attention to the owner of the house, who followed her anxiously and humbly, not daring to ask a question, and panting in her tight corset at the speed of her going, but basking in the sense of her visitor’s rank as a cat basks in the light and warmth of a coal fire and a fur-lined basket.
Not a syllable did Lady Kenilworth deign to cast to her in her breathless scamper through the house. She had some solid knowledge of value in matters of art, and she begrudged these delicious things to the woman with the face like a large unbaked loaf and the fat big hands, as her four-year-old Boo had begrudged the gold box.
“Really they say there is a Providence above us, but I can’t think there is, when I am pestered to death by bills, and this creature owns Harrenden House;” she thought, with those doubts as to the existence of a deity which always assail people when deity is, as it were, in the betting against them. She had read an article that morning by Jules Simon, in which he argued that if the anarchists could be only persuaded to believe in a future life they would turn their bombs into bottles of kid reviver and cheerfully black the boots of the bourgeoisie. But she felt herself that there was something utterly wrong in a scheme of creation which could bestow Harrenden House on a Margaret Massarene, and in a Divine Judge who could look on at such discrepancies of property without disapproval.
She scarcely said a syllable in her breathless progress over the building; although the unhappy mistress of Harrenden House pined in trembling for her verdict, as a poor captain of a company longs for a word from some great general inspecting his quarters. But when she had finished her tour of inspection, and consented to take a cup of tea and a caviare biscuit in the tea-room where the Leo the Tenth urn was purring, and Mr. Winter and two of his subordinates were looking on in benign condescension, she said brusquely:
“Eh bien, il ne vous a pas volé.”
Mrs. Massarene had not the most remote idea of what she meant, but smiled vaguely, and anxiously, hoping the phrase meant praise.
“He’s given you the value of your money,” Lady Kenilworth explained. “It’s the finest house in London, and nearly everything in it is good. The Mantegna is rubbish, as I told you, and if I had been asked I shouldn’t have put up that Pietro di Cortona. What did Khris make you pay for it?”
“I don’t know, I am sure, ma’am,” replied the mistress of the Mantegna meekly. “William — Mr. Massarene — never tells me the figure of anything.”
“The Cortona was painted last year in the Avenue de Villiers, I suspect,” continued Lady Kenilworth. “But all the rest, or nearly all, is admirable.”
“It’s a very grand house,” replied its mistress meekly; “but it’s mighty lonesome-like to be in it, with no company. If all the great folks you promised, my lady — —”
“I never promised, I never do promise,” said her visitor sharply. “I can’t take people by their petticoats and coat-tails and drag them up your stairs. You must get yourself known for something; then they’ll come. What? Oh, I have no idea. Something. A cook; or a wine; or a surprise. People like surprises under their dinner napkins. Or a speciality, any speciality. I knew a person who entirely got into society by white hares; civet de lièvre, you know; but white, Siberian.”
Mrs. Massarene gasped. She had a feeling then she was being talked to in Sanscrit or Welsh and expected to understand it. Why white hares should be better than brown hares she could not imagine. Nobody ate the fur.
“But you was so good as to say when we were in Paris, ma’am — —”
“Never remind me of anything I said. I can’t endure it! I believe you want to get in the swim, don’t you?”
“Please, I don’t quite understand, ma’am.”
Her visitor was silently finishing nibbling at a caviare biscuit and reflecting what a goose she had been to go to Egypt instead of utilizing this Massarene vein. She must certainly, she thought, do all she could for these people.
“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” she said abruptly.
The horror of an Ulster woman spread itself over the flaccid and pallid clay in which the features of her hostess were moulded.
“Oh no, my lady, we were never Romans,” she said, so aghast that she was carried out of herself into the phraseology of her earlier years. “We were never Romans. How could you think it of us?”
“It would be better for you if you were,” said Lady Kenilworth unfeelingly and irreverently. “Catholics are chic; and then all the great Catholic families push a convert unanimously. They’d get a sweep to all the best houses if he only went often enough to the Oratory.”
“We’ve always been loyal people,” murmured Mrs. Massarene piteously; “always Orange as Orange could be.”
“Loyalty’s nothing,” said Lady Kenilworth, contemptuously eyeing the beautiful gold urn with the envious appreciation of a dealer’s glance. “Loyalty don’t ‘take the cake.’ Nobody is afraid of it. It’s all fear now that we go by — —”
“And gain,” she was about to add but checked the words unuttered.
“I wish you were Catholic,” she said instead. “It would make everything so much smoother for you. I suppose you couldn’t change? They’d make it very easy for you.”
Margaret Massarene gasped. Life had unfolded many possibilities to her of which she had never dreamed; but never such a possibility as this.
“Couldn’t you?” said her guest sharply. “After all, it’s nothing to do. The Archbishop would see to it all for you. They make it very easy where there is plenty of money.”
“I don’t think I could, my lady; it would be eternal punishment for me in the world to come,” said Mrs. Massarene faintly, whilst her groom of the chambers restrained a violent inclination to box her on the ears for the vulgarity of her two last words.
He had been long trained in the necessary art of banishing from his countenance every ray of expression, every shadow of indication that he overheard what was said around him, but nature for once prevailed over training; deep and unutterable disgust was spoken on his bland yet austere features. Eternal punishment! did the creature think that Harrenden House was a Methody chapel?
As for Lady Kenilworth, she went into a long and joyous peal of laughter; laughed till the tears brimmed over in her pretty ingenuous turquoise-colored eyes.
“Oh, my good woman,” she said, as soon as she could speak, good-humoredly and contemptuously, “you don’t mean to say that you believe in eternal punishment? What is the use of getting old Khris to furnish for you and ask me to show you the way about, if you weigh yourself down with such an old-fashioned funny packful of antiquated ideas as that? You must not say such things really; you will never get on amongst us if you do.”
The countenance of Margaret Massarene grew piteous to behold; she was a feeble woman, but obstinate; she was ready to sell her soul to “get on,” but the ghastly terrors inculcated to her in her childhood were too strongly embedded in her timid and apprehensive nature to leave her a free agent.
“Anything else, ma’am — anything else,” she murmured wretchedly. “But not Romanism, not Papistry. You don’t know what it means to me, you don’t indeed.”
Lady Kenilworth shrugged her shoulders and got up from the tea-table.
“I always said,” she observed slightingly, “that the Orange people were the real difficulty in Ireland. There would never have been any trouble without them.”
“But you are not a Papist yourself, my lady?” asked Mrs. Massarene with trembling accents.
“Oh, I? no,” said the pretty young woman with the same contemptuous and indifferent tone. “We can’t change. We must stick to the mast — fall with the colors — die in the breach — all that kind of thing. We can’t turn and twist about. But you new people can, and you are geese if you don’t. You want to get in the swim. Well, if you’re wise you’ll take the first swimming-belt that you can get. But do just as you like, it does not matter to me. I am afraid I must go now, I have half a hundred things to do.”
She glanced at the watch in her bracelet and drew up her feather boa to her throat. Tears rose to the pale gray eyes of her hostess.
“Pray don’t be offended with me, my lady,” she said timidly. “I hoped, I thought, perhaps you’d be so very kind and condescending as to tell me what to do; things bewilder me, and nobody comes. Couldn’t you spare me a minute more in the boudoir yonder? where these men won’t hear us,” she added in a whisper.
She could not emulate her guest’s patrician indifference to the presence of the men in black; it seemed to her quite frightful to discuss religious and social matters beneath the stony glare of Mr. Winter and his colleagues. But Lady Kenilworth could not share or indulge such sentiments, nor would she consent to take any such precautions.
She seated herself where she had been before by the tea-table, her eyes always fascinated by the Leo the Tenth urn. She took a bonbon and nibbled it prettily, as a squirrel may nibble a filbert.
“Tell me what you want,” she said bluntly; she was often blunt, but she was always graceful.
Margaret Massarene glanced uneasily at Winter and his subordinates, and wished that she could have dared to order them out of earshot, as she would have done with a red-armed and red-haired maid-of-all-work who had marked her first stage on the steep slopes of “gentility.”
“You told us at Homburg, my lady — —” she began timidly.
“Don’t say ‘my lady,’ whatever you do.”
“I beg your pardon, my — yes, ma’am — no ma’am — I beg pardon — you were so good as to tell William and me at the baths that you would help us to get on in London if we took a big house and bought that place in Woldshire. We’ve done both them things, but we don’t get on; nobody comes nigh us here nor there.”
She heaved a heart-broken sigh which lifted and depressed the gold embroideries on her ample bosom.
Lady Kenilworth smiled unsympathetically.
“What can you expect, my good woman?” she murmured. “People don’t call on people whom they don’t know; and you don’t know anybody except my husband and old Khris and myself.”
It was only too true. Mrs. Massarene sighed.
“But I thought as how your la — , as how you would be so very, very good as to — —”
“I am not a bear-leader,” said Lady Kenilworth with hauteur. Mrs. Massarene was as helpless and as flurried as a fish landed on a grassy bank with a barbed hook through its gills. There was a long and to her a torturing silence. The water hissed gently, like a purring cat, in the vase of Leo the Tenth, and Mouse Kenilworth looked at it as a woman of Egypt may have gazed at a statue of Pascht.
It seemed a visible symbol of the immense wealth of these Massarene people, of all the advantages which she herself might derive therefrom, of the unwisdom of allowing their tutelage to lapse into other hands than theirs. If she did not launch them on the tide of fashion others would do so, and others would gain by it all that she would lose by not doing it. She was a woman well-born and well-bred, and proud by temperament and by habit, and the part she was moved to play was disagreeable to her, even odious. But it was yet one which in a way allured her, which drew her by her necessities against her will; and the golden water-vase seemed to say to her with the voice of a deity, “Gold is the only power left in life.” She herself commanded all other charms and sorceries; but she did not command that.
She was silent some moments whilst the pale eyes of her hostess watched her piteously and pleadingly.
She felt that she had made a mistake, but she did not know what it was nor how to rectify it.
“I beg pardon, ma’am,” she said humbly; “I understood you to say as how you would introduce me to your family and friends in town and in the country. I didn’t mean any offence — indeed, indeed, I didn’t.”
