William Massarene was inexpressibly mortified; the more keenly so because if he had listened to Prince Khris two years before he would not have had Bond Street and the Rue de Rivoli emptied into a beautiful, hoary, sombre, old Tudor house.
Mouse felt no qualms whatever at seeing the new people in the old house. She had been unable to understand why Roxhall would not himself come with her. But some people were so whimsical and faddish and sentimental. They spoiled their own lives and bothered those of others. She thought it was good fun to see William Massarene in the old Tudor dining-hall and his wife in the beautiful oval Italian drawing-room. Roxhall would not have seen the fun of it, but men are so slow to catch a joke.
“They are so deliciously ridiculous and incongruous!” she said to one of her companions.
She had brought a “rattling good lot” with her; smart women and cheery men who could ride to hounds all day and play bac’ all night, or run twenty miles to see an otter-worry and be as “fresh as paint” next morning; people with blue blood in their veins, and good old names, and much personal beauty and strength, and much natural health and intelligence; but who by choice led a kind of life beside which that of an ape is intellectual and that of an amœba is useful; people who were very good-natured and horribly cruel, who could no more live without excitement than without cigarettes, who were never still unless their doctor gave them morphia, who went to Iceland for a fortnight and to Africa for a month; who never dined in their own homes except when they gave a dinner-party, who could not endure solitude for ten minutes, who went anywhere to be amused, who read nothing except telegrams, and who had only two cares in life—money and their livers.
They came down to Vale Royal to be amused, to eat well, to chatter amongst themselves as if they were on a desert island, to carry on their flirtations, their meetings, their intrigues, and to arrange the pastimes of their days and nights precisely as they pleased without the slightest reference to those who entertained them.
“What would you like to do to-morrow?” their host had ventured to say to one of them, and the guest had replied, “Oh, pray don’t bother; we’re going somewhere, but I forget where.”
They had brought a roulette-wheel with them, and cards and counters; for their leader knew by experience that the evenings without such resources were apt to be dull at Vale Royal. William Massarene, indeed, had provided forms of entertainment such as were unattainable by the limited means of the Roxhall family. He had caused admirable musicians, good singers, even a choice little troupe of foreign comedians, to be brought down for this famous week in which the azure eyes of his divinity smiled upon him under his own roof-tree. But there was one diversion which she considered superior in its attractions to anything which tenors and sopranos, viols and violins, or even Palais Royal players, could give her, and that diversion she took without asking the permission of anybody. There was a with-drawing-room at Vale Royal which was always known as the Italian Room because some Venetian artist, of no great fame but of much graceful talent, had painted ceiling and walls, as was proven by old entries in account books of the years 1640-50, contained in the muniment-room of the Roxhalls. On the third night after their arrival, when they were all in this Italian room, after a short performance by the Parisian comedians, a long table of ebony and ivory was unceremoniously cleared of the various objects of art which had been placed on it, and the roulette-wheel was enthroned there instead by the hands of Lady Kenilworth herself, and the little ball was set off on its momentous gyrations.
She was looking more than ever like a lovely flower, with a turquoise collar round her throat, and real forget-me-nots fastened by diamonds in her hair. For some minutes William Massarene, who had slept through the French comedy, and was still drowsy, did not become sensible of what was taking place in his drawing-room. But when the shouts and laughter of the merry gamblers reached his ear and he realized with difficulty what was taking place, a heavy frown, such as Kerosene City had learned to dread, stole on his brows, and a startled horror opened wide his eyes.
Play! Play under his roof!
All his Protestant and Puritan soul awoke. A large portion of his earliest gains had been made by the miners and navvies and cowboys who had gathered to stake their dollars in the back den of his shop in Kerosene City; and later on he had made millions by his ownership of private hells in larger towns of the United States; and the very thought of gambling was odious to him because he felt that these were portions of his past on which no light must ever shine. He felt that he owed it to the conscience which he had acquired with his London clothes and his English horses to prohibit all kinds of play, however innocent, in his own drawing-rooms. He crossed the room and, nervously approaching the leader of the band, ventured to murmur close to her ivory shoulder: “You never said you meant to play, Lady Kenilworth. I can’t have any play—I can’t indeed—in my house.”