The Massarenes

by Ouida

“I wanted a gal of fashion, not a school-marm!” he said with much disgust, when the lady who had brought her up told him that she was the finest Hellenist of her sex.

He did not know what a Hellenist was, but he understood that it was something connected with teaching. What he wanted was something very showy, very sensational, very superfine. But Katherine did not like fashionable life at all. A very little of it wearied her. She did not like a man to lean his elbows on a little, round, tête-à-tête supper-table, and stare at her, with his eyes within six inches of her necklace, and his champagne and cigar-scented breath hot in her face; and she did not think the situation made more agreeable by the fact that the starer was illustrious. She infinitely preferred to be alone in the music-room with her violin and harmonium, or in the library comparing Jowett’s Dialogues with the original. It is easy to understand that she was a great disappointment to her father, though a sort of sullen pride in her was wrung out of him when he saw how indifferent she appeared to the great folks he adored, yet at the same time how at home she seemed in the mystic arena of that society which made him shake in his shoes, strong, hard, shrewd man though he was.

Except the archduke who insisted on becoming a skipper of a timber-brig, so infuriating and insensate a flying in the face of a fair fate had never been known. Katherine Massarene for her part did not enter, or try to enter into his feelings, as no doubt it should have been her filial duty to do. She had some of his stubbornness, and a pride of her own kind which made her unyielding. Her numerous teachers, male and female, had all found her of unusual intelligence and she had studied the classics with ardor and thoroughness. She could say extremely caustic and witty things, but she generally was merciful and forbore to say them. She had a vast reserve of sound and unusual knowledge, but she endeavored to conceal it, disliking all display, and being by nature very modest. As, little by little, she began gradually to understand the position of her parents, she suffered from it acutely. If she could, with a clear conscience, have done so, she would have liked to renounce all their wealth and grandeur and earn her own living, which she could have earned very well as a musician, or a professor of history or dead languages.

She said so once to her father, on his arrival in England, and the rage of the taciturn, ruthless man was so terrible that her mother on her knees entreated her never to allude to such an idea.

“You are all we have left,” she said, weeping. “Your brothers and sisters all died in that horrible West. You are the sole one he has to look to for bearing his name and glorifying his money. You are heir and heiress both, Kathleen. Has he slaved and spared and laid by thirty years and more only that the sole begot of his loins shall disgrace him as a menial?”

“Rise up, my dear mother; we will not speak of it again,” said Katherine, a mere schoolgirl then of seventeen. “We might discuss and argue for ever, neither my father nor you would ever see these things as I see them.”

And with great self-control, most rare in one of her age, she renounced her dreams of independence and never did allude again in any way to them.

She soon perceived that whatever chance she might have had of influencing her mother, she had none whatever of moving her father: if she had stood in his way, he would have brushed her aside, or trampled her down; he had not made his money to lose the enjoyment of it for the quips and cranks of a crotchety child.

Her indifference to all which fascinated and awed himself compelled his reluctant respect, and the serene hauteur of her habitual manner made him feel awkward and insignificant in her presence. He was in some respects, when he pitted himself against her, compelled unwillingly to acknowledge that she was the stronger of the two. She had hurt him enough by the mere accident of her sex. He never forgave her that she had lived whilst her brothers had died. He had no affection for her, and only a sullen unwilling respect, which was rung out of him by seeing her ease in that world where he was uneasy and her familiarity with those great persons before whom he was always himself dumb and frightened and distressed.

So far, at least, the money spent on her had not been wasted, it had made her one of them. For this he held her in respect, but she could not move him a hair’s breadth from his ambitions or his methods of pursuing them.