Delphi collected works o.., p.756
Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated), page 756
“And none is taken,” said Lady Kenilworth graciously, thinking to herself, “One must suit oneself to one’s company. That’s how they talk, I believe, in the servants’ hall, where she ought to be.”
Aloud she continued:
“You see, whatever one says at Homburg, or indeed anywhere at all out of England, does not count in England: that is understood everywhere by everybody.”
“Really,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, confused and crestfallen: for it had been on the faith of this fair lady’s promises and predictions in the past summer that Harrenden House and Vale Royal had been purchased.
“Of course,” said Lady Kenilworth rather tartly, still looking at the gold water-vase, which exercised a strange fascination over her, as if it were a fetish which she was compelled, nolens volens, to worship. “Only imagine what a mob we should have round us at home if everyone we were civil to in Nice and Florence and Homburg and Ostend, and all the other places, could take us seriously and expect to be invited by us here. It would be frightful.”
Margaret Massarene sighed: existence seemed to her complicated and difficult to an extent which she could never have credited in the days when she had carried her milking-pails to and from the rich grass meadows of her old home in Ulster. In those remote and simple days “I’ll be glad to see you” meant “I shall be glad,” and when you ate out of your neighbor’s potato bowl, your neighbor had a natural right to eat in return out of yours — a right never disavowed. But in the great world these rules of veracity and reciprocity seemed unknown. Lady Kenilworth sat lost in thought some moments, playing with the ends of her feather boa and thinking whether the game were worth the candle. It would be such a dreadful bore!
Then there came before her mind’s eyes the sum total of many unpaid bills, and the vision of that infinite sweetness which lies in renewed and unlimited credit.
“You want to be lancée?” she said at last in her brusque yet graceful manner suddenly, as she withdrew her gaze from the tea-table, “Well, sometimes to succeed socially is very easy and sometimes it is very difficult — for new people very difficult. Society is always uncertain. It acts on no fixed principles. It keeps out A. and lets in B., and couldn’t possibly say why it does either. Your money alone won’t help you. There are such swarms of rich persons, and everybody who gets rich wants the same thing. You are, I believe, enormously rich, but there are a good many enormously rich. The world is in a queer state; ninety out of a hundred have nothing but debts, the other ten are gorged on money, gorged; it is very queer. Something is wrong. The sense of proportion has gone out of life altogether. You want, you say, to know people. Well, I can let you see them; you can come and meet them at my house; but I can’t make them take you up if they won’t do it.”
Mrs. Massarene sighed. She dared not say so, but she thought — of what use had been all the sums flung away at this lovely lady’s bidding in the previous autumn?
“It is no use to waste time on the idiot,” reflected her visitor. “She don’t understand a word one says, and she thinks they can buy Society as if it were a penny bun. Old Billy’s sharper; I wonder he had not the sense to divorce her in the States, or wherever they come from.”
“Where’s your man?” she said impatiently.
“William’s in the City, my lady,” answered Mrs. Massarene proudly. “William, ma’am, is very much thought of in the City.”
“He’s on lots of things, I suppose?”
After some moments’ puzzled reflection his wife replied, “Meaning Boards, ma’am? Yes, he is. They seem they can’t do without him. William had always a wonderful head for business.”
“Ah!” said Lady Kenilworth. “He must put Cocky on some good things. My husband, you know. Everything is done by companies nowadays. Even the Derby favorite is owned by a syndicate. Tell him to put Lord Kenilworth on all his good things, and not to mind if he’s unpunctual. Lord Kenilworth never can understand why half-past two isn’t the same hour as twelve.”
“That won’t do in business, my lady,” said Mrs. Massarene boldly, for here she was sure of her ground. “Five minutes late writes ruin sometimes.”
“Does it indeed? I suppose that’s what makes it so fetching. I am sure it would do Cocky worlds of good; wake him up; give him things to think of.”
“Is my lord a business man, ma’am?” said Mrs. Massarene, with great doubt in her tone.
“Oh, they all are now, you know. Cocky’s very lazy, but he’s very clever.”
“My lord don’t want to be clever; he’ll be duke,” said Mrs. Massarene, intending no sarcasm. “I can’t think, ma’am, as your noble husband would like to toil and moil in the City.”
“No — no; but to be on things, you know,” answered her visitor vaguely. “You send Mr. Massarene to me and we’ll talk about it. He mustn’t mind if Lord Kenilworth only gives his name and never shows.”
Mrs. Massarene’s was a slow brain and a dull one, but she was not really stupid; in some matters she was shrewd, and she began dimly to perceive what was expected of her and her William, and what quid pro quo would be demanded by this lovely lady who had the keys of society if she used any of these keys in their favor; she had had glimmerings of this before, but it had never presented itself before her so clearly as now. She had sense enough, however, to keep the discovery to herself. “I’ll tell Mr. Massarene, ma’am,” she said meekly, “and I know he’ll be very proud to wait on you. Shall it be to-morrow?”
“Yes; to-morrow, before luncheon. About half-past twelve.”
“I won’t forget, ma’am.”
“And I’ll come and dine with you next week. I’ll bring some people, my sisters; they won’t mind, Carrie certainly won’t. Lady Wisbeach, you know. What day? Oh, I don’t know. I must go home and look at my book. I think there is something of no importance that I can throw over next week.”
“And how many will be there at dinner, ma’am,” asked Mrs. Massarene, feeling hot all over, as she would have expressed it, at the prospect of this banquet.
“Oh, well, I can’t say. I’ll see who will come. You have a very good chef, haven’t you? If not I could get you Van Holstein’s. You know when people are well fed once they’ll come to be fed again, and they tell others.”
“Just like fowls,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, her mind reverting to the poultry yard of her youth, with the hens running over and upsetting each other in their haste to get to the meal-pan.
She was sensible of an awakening interest of a warmer tinge in the manner of her protectress, since the subject of good things in the City had been broached.
“You mustn’t want to go too fast at once,” continued that fair lady. “It’s like cycling. You’ll wobble about and get a good many falls at first. But you’ve begun well. You’ve a beautiful house, and you have my cousin’s place, in the heart of a hunting county. Several of the county people have asked me about the purchaser of Vale Royal, and I have always said something nice about you both. You know I have been four months on the Nile, and one sees the whole world there; such a climate as this is to return to after Egypt! Why weren’t you in Egypt? Oh, I forgot; your man’s member for Limehouse, isn’t he? I wonder the party hasn’t done more for you. But, you see, money alone, unless there is tact —— Well, I dare say I can’t make you understand if I talk till doomsday; I have two or three people the night after to-morrow. I will send you a card. And, by the way, you had better tell Khris to call on me if he be in town. I will talk over with him what we can do for you.”
Mr. Winter, standing within earshot, at a discreet distance, to all appearance as bereft of sight and hearing, and impervious as a statue to all sight and sounds, lost not a syllable uttered by Lady Kenilworth, and approved of all. “It is clever of her,” he thought, “to be ready to go halves in the spoils with that old prince. Meet him half way, she does; mighty clever that; she’ll cut his claws and draw his teeth. She’s a lady of the right sort, she is. If she weren’t quite so clever she’d have him jealous of him and have made an enemy of him at the onset.”
His employer meantime was exhausting her somewhat limited vocabulary in agitated thanks and protestations of undying gratitude which Lady Kenilworth nipped in the bud by giving her two fingers chillily and hurrying away, her farewell glance being cast at the golden water-vase.
“Khris a house decorator and I a tout! How very dreadful it is! But hard times make strange trades,” thought the young mother of Jack and Boo, as she sank down on the soft seat of her little brougham, and was borne swiftly away to other houses, as the lamps begun to shine through the foggy evening air.
CHAPTER III.
MRS. MASSARENE HAD conducted her visitor with great obsequiousness to the head of the staircase, and would have gone down the stairs with her had not Lady Kenilworth prevented such a demonstration.
“My dear creature, pray don’t! One only does that for royalty,” she had said, while a repressed grin was visible through the impassive masks of all the footmen’s faces where they stood above and below.
“How ever is one to know what’s right and what’s wrong,” thought the mistress of Harrenden House, resting her hands for a moment upon the carved rail of the balustrade, and eyeing nervously the naked boy of Clodion. That statue was very terrible to her; “To set a lad without any scrap o’ clothes on a-beckoning with a bird to everybody as come upstairs, I can’t think as it’s decent or proper,” she said constantly to her husband. But a master hand had indicated the top of the staircase as the proper place for that nude young falconer to stand, in all his mingled realism and idealization; therefore, no one could be bold enough to move him elsewhere, and he leaned airily against the old choir-carving, and wore a fawn-like smile as he tossed his hawk above his head and stretched his hand outward as though to beckon the crowds, which would not come, up that silent stair.
But the crowds were coming now!
For where Lady Kenilworth pointed, the world would surely follow; and the heart of simple Margaret Massarene, late Margaret Hogan, dairymaid of Kilrathy, County Down, beat high in her breast under the red and gold of her gorgeous bodice. “It’s mighty hard work being a lady,” she thought, “but since I’ve got to be one, I’d like to go the whole hog, and show Kathleen when she comes back to us that we are as smart gentlefolks as any of her friends.”
When Mr. Massarene came home to dinner that evening, his wife felt that she had great news to give him.
“I think she’ll take us up, William,” she said, almost under her breath. “But I think she’ll want a lot of palm-grease.”
She was a simple woman, of coarse views and expressions.
“Whatever my lady wants she shall have,” reflected her husband, but his heavy brows frowned; for he was a man who did not like even the wife of his bosom to see into his intentions, and if he were going to buy his way into that society where his shooting-irons were of no use to him, he did not care for even the “old ‘ooman” to know it.
But the next day, at one o’clock precisely, he presented himself at the house in Stanhope Street which the Kenilworths honored by residence. He looked like an eminently respectable grazier or cheesemonger clothed in the best that money could buy; a hat, which was oppressively lustrous and new, was carried in his hand with a pair of new gloves. In his shirt-sleeves and butcher-boots, with a brace of revolvers in his belt, as he had sworn at his platelayers, or his diggers, or his puddlers, in the hard bright light of the Dakotan sun, he had been a formidable and manly figure in keeping with the giant rocks, and the seething streams, and the rough boulder-strewn roads of the country round him. But standing in the hall of a London house, clad in London clothes made by the first tailors, he looked clumsy and absurd, and he knew it. He was a stolid, sensible, and very bold man; when a railway train in the early days of the Pacific road had been “held up” by a native gang, those desperate robbers had found more than their match in him, and the whole convoy, with the million odd dollars he was carrying in his breast-pocket, had been saved by his own ready and pitiless courage. But as he mounted the staircase in Stanhope Street his knees shook and his tongue clove to his teeth; he felt what actors describe as stage fright.
Lady Kenilworth had deigned to know him at Homburg, had put him in the way of buying Vale Royal of her cousin Roxhall, had dined more than once at his expense with a noisy gay party who scarcely said good-day to him, and likewise at his expense had picnicked in the woods and drunk much more of the best Rhenish wines than were good for them; and on a smooth stretch of green sward under the pines, that lovely lady had imitated the dancing of Nini-Patte-en-l’air of the Eden Theatre, until the “few last sad grey hairs” upon his head had stood erect in scandalized amazement. She had also dined and supped at his expense several times with various friends of her own in Paris, in the November following on the July at Homburg; and she had let him take boxes for her at the operas and theatres, and had generally used his purse without seeming to see that it was open for her. But he had exchanged very few words with her (though he had already through her inspiration spent a good deal of money), and his stout, squat figure shook like a leaf as he was ushered into her presence, while her two Blenheims flew at his trousers with a fugue of barks.
What a dazzling vision she was, as she smiled on him across the flower-filled and perfumed space which divided them! She had smiled like that when she had first spoken to him of buying Vale Royal in the early days of his acquaintance with her. William Massarene was no fool, and he knew that he would have to pay its full price for that enchanting smile, but though he was not its dupe he was its victim. He was nervous as he had never been when he had heard the order, “Hands up!” in the solitude of a mountain gorge at midnight amongst the Rockies.
The smile was encouraging, but the rest of the attitude was serene, almost severe, as pure as a Virgin in a tryptich of Van der Goes; she was at work on some embroidery; she had Boo on a stool at her feet; she looked an exquisite picture of youthful maternity; he could scarcely believe that he had seen her cutting those mad capers on the sward of the German forest, or heard her scream with laughter at the supper-table of Bignon’s.
Boo got up on her little black-stockinged legs, ran to him, and looked at him from under her golden cloud of hair.
“What has oo brought me?” said the true child of modernity.
“Do you remember the sweeties at the Baths, my lovely darling?” stammered Mr. Massarene, immensely touched and gratified at the child’s recollection of him, and full of remorse that he had not rifled Regent Street.
“Boo always remembers her friends,” said Boo’s mother very pleasantly, as she delivered him from the Blenheims, and made him seat himself beside her.
“Old fat man’s come as was at Ombo; but he didn’t bring nothin’ for us,” said Boo to Jack at the nursery dinner ten minutes later. “Mammy’s goin’ to get somethin’ ‘cos she was so civil to him.”
“Oo’re always thinkin’ of gettin’, Boo,” said Jack, with his rosy mouth full of mashed potato.
“What’s the use o’ peoples else?” said his sister solemnly, picking up the roast mutton which her nurse had cut up into little dice on her plate.
Jack pondered awhile upon this question.
“I likes peoples ‘cos I like ’em,” he replied at last.
“You’re a boy!” returned his sister with withering contempt.
A week later, Boo’s mother, with a very gay and hilarious round dozen of friends, including her eldest sister, Lady Wisbeach, dined at Harrenden House, and the gentleman known as Harry took in Mrs. Massarene.
Two weeks later the Massarenes breakfasted in Stanhope Street expressly to meet an imperial grand duchess who at that time was running about London; and the grand duchess was very smiling and good-natured, and chattered volubly, and invited herself to dinner at Harrenden House.
“They do tell me,” she said graciously, “that you have such a wonderful Clodion.”
Three weeks later William Massarene allowed himself to be led into the purchase of a great Scotch estate of moor, seashore, and morass, in the extreme northwest of Scotland, which had come to Brancepeth through his late maternal grandmother, and which had been always considered as absolutely unsaleable on account of certain conditions attached to its purchase, and of the fact that it had been for many years ill-preserved and its sport ruined, the deer having been destroyed by crofters.
Brancepeth, who was primitive and simple in many of his ideas, had demurred to the transaction.
“This beggar don’t know anything about sport,” he said to the intermediary, Mouse; “‘cause he’s buying a deer forest he takes for granted he’ll find deer. ’Tisn’t fair, you know. One ought to tell him that he’ll get no more stalking there than he’d get on Woolwich Common.”
“Why should you tell him anything?” said his friend. “He can ask a factor, can’t he?”
“Well, but it would only be honest, you know.”
“You are odiously ungrateful,” said Mouse with much heat. “I might have made the man buy Black Alder of us, and I chose to get him to buy your place instead.”
Brancepeth made a droll face very like what Jack would make when he kept in a naughty word for fear of his nurse. He thought to himself that the fair lady who was rating him knew very well that her share in the purchase-money of Black Alder, which belonged to her lord, would have been remarkably small, whilst her share of that of Blair Airon — but there are some retorts a man who is a gentleman cannot make, however obvious and merited they may be.
“Get him to buy ’em both,” he said, tossing cakes to the Blenheims. “You do what you like with the cad; turn him round your little finger. One’s just as much a white elephant as t’other, and it’s no use knowing sweeps unless you make ’em clean your chimneys.”
“Mr. Massarene is not a cad or a sweep,” said his friend in a tone of reproof. “He is a very clever man of business.”
