The morning papers were lying on a table by the duke’s side, amongst them the green cover of Truth.
“That is no excuse for her,” said her brother at length. “This thing is of her devising much more than it is his.”
“There are women who are a moral phylloxera,” replied Otterbourne. “They corrupt all they touch. But in fairness to her I must say that it was chiefly my son who persuaded me to let this man Massarene into my house. They made me an accomplice in a job! Perhaps,” the duke added with a sad smile, “the world knows me well enough to give me credit for having been an unconscious accomplice—for having been a fool, not a knave!”
To these two honest gentlemen the matter was one of excruciating pain, and of what seemed to them both intolerable humiliation. But society, though it laughed loudly for five minutes over the article on an hereditary legislator, forgot it five minutes later, and was not shocked: it is too well-used in these days to similar transactions between an impoverished nobility, with unpaid rents and ruinous death-duties, and a new-born plutocracy creeping upward on its swollen belly like the serpent of Scripture.
CHAPTER XI.
A young woman, dressed in white cambric, with the deep shade of a magnolia grove cast upon her as she sat on the marble steps of an Oriental garden, read of these brilliant festivities in various English journals whose office it is to chronicle such matters; and as she read she frowned, and as she frowned she sighed. “Oh, the waste, the folly, the disgrace!” she murmured as she pushed the newspapers away from her. For she had peculiar views of her own, and had little or nothing in common with her generation or with her procreators. She looked very like her bust by Dalou as she thrust the offending journals off her lap.
“I am a déclassée,” she said to herself as she sat amongst the rhododendrons and the monkeys. “All they have spent on me cannot make me anything more. They should have left me in the place which they occupied when I was born. I would sooner go out as a common servant any day than be forced to witness their ignominy and live in their suffocating wealth, to see the laugh in the eyes of the people they toady, and overhear the ridicule of those who crowd to their supper-table. If he would only disown me—cut me off with a shilling!”
“What’s the matter, my dear? Bad news from England? Parents ill?” said a mellow and cheerful voice, as the temporary owner of terrace and magnolia grove, Lord Framlingham, came out of the house and across the rough grass, accompanied by his two inseparable companions, his cigarette and his skye-terrier.
She picked up one of the newspapers and pointed to a paragraph in it.
“They must be the laugh of London!”