The great mansion had nothing whatever of the parvenu about it except its new owner. Its interior had been arranged in perfect taste by an unerring master’s hand. The square hall had ancient Italian tapestries, Italian marbles, Italian mosaics, all of genuine age and extreme beauty, whilst from its domed cupola a mellowed light streamed down through painted glass of the fifteenth century, taken from the private chapel of a Flemish castle.
The two-winged staircase, broad and massive, had balustrades of oak which had once been the choir railings of a cathedral in Karinthia, the silver lamps which hung above these stairs had once illumined religious services in the Kremlin, and above the central balustrade leaned, lovely as adolescence, a nude youth with a hawk on his wrist—the work of Clodion.
The rest of the mansion was in the same proportions and perfection. No false note jarred on its harmonies, no doubtful thing intruded a coarse or common chord. The household were not pushed away into dark cell-like corners, but had comfortable and airy sleeping-chambers. It was a palace fit for a Queen of Loves; it was a home made for a young Cæsar in the first flush of his dreams of Cleopatra. And it belonged actually to William Massarene, late of Kerosene City, North Dakota, U. S. A., miner, miller, meat salesman, cattle exporter, railway contractor, owner of gambling-saloons, and opium dens for the heathen Chinee, and one of the richest and hardiest-headed men in either hemisphere.
Nothing was wanting which money could buy—tapestries, ivories, marbles, bronzes, porcelains, potteries, orchids, palms, roses, silks, satins, and velvets, were all there in profusion. Powdered lackeys lolled in the anteroom, dignified men in black stole noiselessly over carpets soft and elastic as moss; in the tea-room the china was Sèvres of 1770, and the water boiled in what had once been a gold water-vase of Leo X.; in the delicious little oval boudoir the walls were entirely covered with old Saxe plates, and Saxe shepherds and shepherdesses made groups in all the corners, while a Watteau formed the ceiling; and yet, amidst these gay and smiling porcelain people of Meissen, who were a century and a half old, and yet kept the roses on their cheeks and the laugh on their lips, Margaret Massarene, the mistress of it all, sat in solitary state and melancholy meditation; a heavy hopelessness staring in her pale grey eyes, a dreary dejection expressed in the loose clasp of her fat hands folded on her knee, the fingers now and then beating a nervous tattoo. What use was it to have the most beautiful dwelling-house in all London if no one ever beheld its beauties from one week’s end to another? What use was it to have a regiment of polished and disdainful servants if there were no visitors of rank for them to receive?
Many things are hard in this world; but nothing is harder than to be ready to prostrate yourself, and be forbidden to do it; to be ready to eat the bitter pastry which is called humble pie, and yet find no table at which so much even as this will be offered you. The great world did not affront them; it did worse, it did not seem to know they existed.
“Take a big town-house; buy a big country place; ask people; the rest will all follow of itself,” had said their counsellor and confidant at the baths of Homburg. They had bought the town-house, and the country place, but as yet they had found no people to invite to either of them; and not a soul had as yet called at the magnificent mansion by Gloucester Gate, although for fifteen days and more its porter had sat behind open gates; gates of bronze and gold with the Massarene arms, which the Herald’s College had lately furnished, emblazoned above on their scroll-work awaiting the coronet which a grateful nation and a benign Sovereign would, no doubt, ere many years should have passed, add to them.
People of course there were by hundreds and thousands, who would have been only too glad to be bidden to their doors; but they were people of that common clay with which the Massarenes had finished for ever and aye.
There were many families, rich, if not as rich as themselves, and living in splendor on Clapham Common, near Epping Forest, or out by Sydenham and Dulwich, who would have willingly been intimate with Mrs. Massarene as their husbands were with hers in the city. She would have been content with their fine houses, their good dinners, their solid wealth, their cordial company. She would have been much more at ease in their suburban villas amidst their homelier comforts, hearing and sharing their candid boastfulness of their rise in life. But these were not the acquaintances which her husband desired. He did not want commerce, however enriched; he wanted the great world, or what now represents it, the smart world; and he intended to have that or none.
And Lady Kenilworth, their Homburg friend, had written a tiny three-cornered note ten days before, with a mouse in silver on its paper, which said: “I am in town and am coming to see you. Jack and Boo send love,” and on this familiar epistle they had built up an Eiffel Tower of prodigious hope and expectation. But ten days and more had passed and their correspondent had not yet fulfilled her promise.
Therefore, amidst all the beauty and splendor of it, the mistress of the house sat, pale, sullen, despondent, melancholy. She had sat thus for fifteen days—ever since Parliament had met—and it was all in vain, in vain. The gold urn bubbled, the shepherds smiled, the orchids bloomed, the men in black and the men in powder waited in vain, and the splendid and spacious mansion warmed itself, lighted itself, perfumed itself in vain. Nobody came.