The Massarenes

by Ouida

As for the diplomatist, he was, of course, sufficiently trained in diplomacy to give no signs of displeasure; but in his secret soul he was extremely worried by his meeting with his host in the corridor, for though Lady Kenilworth was a lovely woman, and a very seductive one, yet to be the temporary substitute of that excellent young guardsman who carried her children pick-a-back had its dangers for an eminent person whom a public scandal would ruin. He wished her and the china birds and his own dressing-gown at the devil. He had no fancy for a cigarette which would burn the fingers which held it; some unimportant telegrams were brought to him an hour later, and he made believe that one of them was important and took his departure before dinner for London.

“Your Excellency will not see the china birds?” said William Massarene quietly and drily, with a finesse which astonished the hearer as he accompanied his departing guest to the carriage. Their eyes met. They understood each other.

“It will be an excuse to return to your amiable hospitalities,” said the eminent person with a charming smile and an adorable salutation.

“L’ours saurait mordre,” he thought, as he leaned back in the bear’s warm little station-brougham.

The departure annoyed Mouse unspeakably. He was only an episode; but, as an episode should be, amusing and interesting. He was a man of many brilliant bonnes fortunes, and the stories he had told her of women she hated were beyond measure diverting. She treated her host more cruelly than ever; and had never felt so irritated at the sight of his short squat figure, and his broad rough hands, and his splay feet in his varnished shoes.

Mr. Massarene was much exercised in his mind as to his idol. He could not get the diplomatist in the elegant dressing-gown out of his mind; and he also heard on all sides that the handsome fool, of whom he had purchased Blair Airon, was undoubtedly considered as “best friend” of the lady who had been the intermediary in that sale. These, and various similar facts, left him no peace in his private reflections, and tormented him the more because he did not venture to unburden his wrath to the fair cause of it. He had been a virtuous man all his life; he had had no time to be otherwise; he had been so busy eighteen hours out of the twenty-four making money that the other six he had spent in eating like a hungry hound, and sleeping like a tired dray-horse. Vice had always represented itself to him as waste of precious time and waste of precious dollars. His rare concessions to it had been grudging and hurried, like his attendance at church.

His discovery disturbed him exceedingly, not only because he was a very moral man who considered that immorality ought to be punished (he had once even made one of a body of moral citizens who, in a township of the West, had stripped and beaten a local Guinevere and tarred and feathered her Lancelot), but he was also visited by that bluest of blue devils who had never paid him a visit in his life before—jealousy.

She knew it very well, and it diverted her, though it appeared to her as preposterous as if her pad-groom had been jealous. But he, who did not exactly know what ailed him, suffered alternately from the irritation and the depression common to all those in whose breasts the green-eyed monster has found a throne.

“Billy, come and talk to me,” said his enslaver the last evening of her visit. Mr. Massarene obeyed, fascinated out of any will of his own, and in love with his own degradation as fakirs with their torture. She saw his struggles and tortures, which seemed to her as preposterous in him as they would have seemed in a stableman or a street-sweeper. But though she had no patience with them she turned them to account.

She was sitting in a very low long chair in a nook of one of the drawing-rooms amongst flowers; she wore a black lace gown with immense transparent sleeves, and some strings of pearls were wound round her throat; her skin looked fairer than ever, her eyes bluer, her hair lovelier. He took meekly the low seat she assigned to him, though it had no rest for his back, and gazed at her, remembering despite himself the Chelsea and Battersea birds and the connoisseur who had wished to see, or had seen, them. He was not deceived by her for a moment, but he was hypnotized.