Katherine was silent.
She felt the absolute impossibility of inducing her mother to make any stand against the way of life which to herself was so abhorrent; or even to make her comprehend the suffering it was to her finer and more sensitive nature. Her mother disliked the life because it worried her and made her feel foolish and incapable, but she could not reach any conception of the torture and degradation which it appeared to Katherine. If she had possessed any power, any influence, if she had been able to return in kind the insolence she winced under, and the patronage she so bitterly resented, things would have seemed different to her; but she could do nothing, she could only remain the passive though indignant spectator of what she abhorred.
To her the position was false, contemptible, infamous, everything which Hurstmanceaux had called it; and she was compelled to appear a voluntary sharer in and accessory to it. The house, beautiful, ancient, interesting as it was, seemed to her only a hateful prison—a prison in which she was every day set in a pillory.
All the underlings of the gardens, the stables, the Home farm, the preserves, showed the contempt which they felt for these unwelcome successors of the Roxhall family.
“One would think one had not paid a single penny for the place,” said Mrs. Massarene, who, when she asked the head gardener at what rate he sold his fresias, was met by the curt reply, “We don’t sell no flowers here, mum. Lord Roxhall never allowed it.”
“But, my good man,” said his present mistress, “Lord Roxhall’s gone for ever and aye; he’s naught to do with the place any more, and to keep all these miles of glass without making a profit out of them is a thing I couldn’t hold with anyhow. Nobody’s so much money that they can afford waste, Mr. Simpson; and what we don’t want ourselves must be sold.”
“That must be as you choose, mum,” said the head gardener doggedly. “You’ll suit yourself and I’ll suit myself. I’ve lived with gentlefolk and I hain’t lived with traders.”
At the same moment Mr. Winter, who had of course brought down his household, was saying to the head keeper:
“Yes, it does turn one’s stomach to stay with these shoeblacks. It’s the social democracy, that’s what it is. But the old families they’re all run to seed like your Roxhall’s; they expect one to put up with double-bedded rooms and African sherrys. I am one as always stands up for the aristocracy, but their cellars aren’t what they were nor their tables neither. That’s why they’re always dining theirselves with the sweeps and the shoeblacks.”
In happy ignorance that his groom of the chambers was describing him as a sweep and a shoeblack, William Massarene, with a marquis, a bishop, and a lord-lieutenant awaiting him, was driving to address a political meeting in the chief town of South Woldshire.