The Masterfolk

by Haldane Macfall

So, for three several months, the summer shone gaily upon the town, and passed away over the edge of the world in happy fashion enough.

And Betty grew to some affection for the kindly rough man who was the clumsy lord of this elaborate house. And out of her liking grew an anxious and increasing fearfulness for the girls.

The rude father, hoping to polish diamonds, had sent the two girls to a smart school at Brighton; and they, for lack of association with his frank honesty of act and speech at home, and rebuffed by the dull stupidity of a dowdy mother who scarcely ever left her own room, and finding themselves balked by the discipline of school, had fallen into the realizing of their desires by crooked ways. Of their father’s qualities and open candour, of his frankness of statement, they had only kept an outward semblance that was little better than rudeness and bad manners, but it deceived their father and his blunt honest friends; it was thereby the more dangerous cloak for their intriguing and questionable habits. They had gone to school vulgar and tolerably honest; they had come back with some outward veneer of manners, with much swaggering disdain, the aping of masterfulness, a display of the lordly habit, and with souls utterly corrupt. They had gone to school with rough affection for their father; they had come back filled with critical contempt for him, ashamed of him, and at heart afraid of him—dreading that he should discover that they were afraid of him and ashamed of him. The desires of their full red lips were without discipline, and fretted at restraint; and they fed their desires unstintingly and gave encouragement to every whim. They knew enough of the world to recognise at a glance that Betty was above them by habit and by breeding; they soon knew, by results, that her appearance with them anywhere gave them distinction. Their utter lack of all sense of honour embarrassed Betty at every turn. They lied like drudges; and, with the conceit of the weak, they affected an arrogance which they mistook for the habit of the master class, not seeing that they were wholly devoid of the courage which makes fearlessness of the truth the pronounced habit of the master class.

Betty, watching their father with keen eyes, saw that he, too, was strangely baffled.

He, poor man, looking to their old glad affection for him, which had been their girlish return for his large love of them, found instead, upon his hearth, that there were two critical young women in possession; realized that his rough endearments were coldly received.

He thought, as usual, that the fault was in his own manners.

The house, ordered by these girls in a spirit of lavish extravagance, reeked of wealth.

The young women, innocent of that courtesy to servants which makes of service an honourable act, were at constant and undignified bickering and war with those beneath them; and as they held always the winning card of dismissal, they never realized that the sullen obedience of the world below stairs was as insulting as open insolence; they still less realized that these sullen flunkies took revenge in spoliation, and that what remained of deference was a mockery and covert contempt. So it came about that the sneaks amongst the servants held the lower quarters of the house in their hands.

The young women now began to have social aspirations. They had a vague idea that there was some strange pleasure to be got in the mixing with and being seen with those who but gave them chill encouragement to friendship. But as it so chanced, their ambition for they knew not quite what, was fed by the sudden eagerness of women of high social position to trespass on the broad pages and in the social gossip of the columns of the widely read newspaper which Pompey Malahide held at his beck and will—a newspaper which diffused raucous opinions and created the thoughts of millions throughout the country. The girls found themselves courted. Their arrogance grew, and their strut and swagger increased. Malahide dined at great houses.

With the master-will of Doome to advise him, Malahide now found his position still further strengthened by the alliance with and friendship of his boy Horace, who had left Harrow and was going up to Oxford. His baffled affection for his girls turned to a passionate pride in his handsome son; and the boy, frank, honest, golden, gay, debonair, returned the old man’s affection, drilled him in the subtleties with gentleness, and watched over his father like a father.