“Father, oh, father!” she said in a low, intense murmur, “send them away! They insult you every hour, every moment! Why do you endure it? Turn them all out to-morrow morning!”
“Mind your own business! Do I want any lessons from you, damn you?” said Massarene, in a sullen whisper, more infuriated by her perspicuity than by the facts on which her appeal to him was based.
His daughter shrank a little, like a high-spirited animal unjustly beaten—not from fear, but from wounded pride and mute disgust. She went back to the pianoforte and opened the book of “Lohengrin.”
He threw himself heavily into an armchair, and took up an album of Caran d’Ache drawings and bent over it, not seeing a line of the sketches, and not being able to read a line of the jests appended to them. All he saw was that lovely figure down there at the roulette-table, with the forget-me-nots in her glittering hair and at her snowy bosom, and the turquoise collar round her throat.
“Billy!”
No one had ever called him Billy since the time when he had been a cow-boy, getting up in the dark in bitter winter mornings to pitchfork the dung out of the stalls, and chop the great swedes and mangolds, and break the ice in the drinking-trough. Never in all her life had his wife ever dared to call him Billy. He knew the name made him ridiculous; he knew that he was the object of all that ringing laughter; he knew that he was made absurd, contemptible, odious; but he would not allow his daughter, nor would he allow any other person, to say so. He was hypnotized by that fair patrician who threw the mud in his face; the mud smelt as sweet to him as roses. It was only her pretty, airy, nonchalant way—the way she had de par la grâce de Dieu which became her so well, which was part and parcel of her, which was a mark of grace, like her delicate nostrils and her arched instep.
When she had tired of her roulette, it irritated her extremely to see the large gorgeous form of Mrs. Massarene dozing on a couch and waking up with difficulty from dreams, no doubt, of cowslip meadows and patient cows whisking their tails over the dew; and the erect figure of her daughter sitting beside the grand piano and turning over the leaves of musical scores.
“Why don’t you send your women to bed, Billy?” she said to him very crossly. “It fidgets one to see them eternally sitting there like the Horse Guards in their saddles at Whitehall. Politeness? Oh, is it meant for politeness? Well, I will give them a dispensation, then. Do tell them to go to bed; I am sure good creatures like those have lots of prayers to say before they go to by-bye!”
“Why don’t you and your mother go to your rooms? We are all of us very late people,” she said, directly, as she passed Katherine Massarene.
“You are my parents’ guest, Lady Kenilworth; I endeavor not to forget it,” was the reply.