Read Ebook: The Massarenes by Ouida

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Ebook has 4276 lines and 201357 words, and 86 pages

"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."

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.

"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?"

"We've always been loyal people," murmured Mrs. Massarene piteously; "always Orange as Orange could be."

"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."

"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.

"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."

"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:

"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.

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.

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."

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