Mr. Massarene naturally concluded that Hurstmanceaux himself was in the plot. He did not dare to object further, and temporized by dropping the subject.
“But—but,” he said with a timid attempt to obtain a quid pro quo, “would you do one little thing to oblige me; would you—would you—not play, not gamble, any more in my houses?”
He was intensely frightened when he had said it, but he felt that it might injure him with his coveted constituency if it were known that there was roulette, real roulette, in his drawing-rooms.
Her eyes grew of a steely coldness, of an electric luminance, and seemed to transfix him as with barbed arrows. She threw away the end of her cigarette as she got out of her chair with that graceful abruptness peculiar to her. “I told you the other night, Billy, where I am the house is mine. An Irishman said something like that I believe about the head of the table. Ronnie don’t play. He’ll do the policeman for you when he marries your daughter. Meanwhile, just let me alone, my good man, or you’ll be sorry.”
Wherewith she carried her elegant person and her trailing black laces to the other end of the room where Fabian Delkass, the fashionable salon-singer, was tuning his great Spanish guitar and softly warbling fragments of Lassen.
Mouse knew nothing about music and cared as little, but ditties softly warbled by a very good-looking tenor have attractions outside the science of melody; she could appreciate the talent of Delkass, because he never sung a note under twenty guineas each warble. She had sent him down to Vale Royal, she had arranged that he should receive ten times as much there as his usual terms for such country house engagements; in return Delkass, who was beau garçon and very courteous to pretty women, would be sure to sing something charming at her own afternoons in London for nothing at all.
She despised artists as a mere flock of sheep; silly edible obscure creatures; but as she ate a mutton cutlet for luncheon when it was very well cooked, so she nibbled at an artist now and then, when he was very much the fashion.
If she were obliged to have recourse to these expedients it was not her fault; it was the fault of her father-in-law, who was so miserably stingy, and of her settlements which were so miserable, and of society which compels anybody who is in it to live in a certain way. Why did Providence (a vague personage in whom she as vaguely believed) put you where you were obliged every day to do quantities of things which cost money unless that arbiter of fate supplied you with the necessary means?
CHAPTER XVI.
There was an old friend of his mother to whom Hurstmanceaux was much attached, a Mrs. Raby of Bedlowes, with whom he invariably spent a few days at Whitsuntide. Bedlowes was a romantic and historic old manor in Hampshire, famous for its gigantic yew-trees, and a bowling-green on which Charles the First had played. To this elderly lady Mouse frankly unfolded her budget of matrimonial projects; and Mrs. Raby, who shared the prejudices of Hurstmanceaux against novi homines, but was persuaded to conquer them for the general good, consented to allow the Massarenes to be presented to her at a Marlborough House party, and graciously invited them to go to her for a couple of days in Whitsun week. When the time came Mr. Massarene, who was told nothing, but surmised that this was the place at which the meeting with Hurstmanceaux was arranged, took his daughter down to this historic and romantic old house; it had belonged to John of Gaunt, and had sheltered in the centuries of its existence many noble and unfortunate personages, the traditions of whose sojourn did not agree with the visit of “Blasted Blizzard” to its stately guest-chambers and its tapestried halls.