“One of the infamous results of that inexcusable sale,” said Hurstmanceaux, in the smoking-room of the Marlborough.
The remark was reported to a lady who did not love Roxhall, and who caused it to be reported in turn to him at the French watering-place where he was curing his body and fretting his soul.
“Ronnie might guess who was under the sale,” he thought, “who had the gilt off the gingerbread.” His cousin Mouse had always done what she chose with him. Their families knew it, his wife knew it, his county knew it. He was in other ways a clever and high-spirited man, but she made him a fool, a coward, a tool, a laughing-stock. It seemed to him that Ronnie might know that and excuse him.
“Well, Billy, how do you get on in the House?” asked Lady Kenilworth one evening after Whitsuntide when she had been dining with him.
Mr. Massarene did not immediately reply. “Billy” was always a very hard morsel for him to swallow.
“I hear they’re very pleased with you,” she added graciously.
“Indeed, my lady?”
“Don’t say ‘my lady.’ Surely you might have left that off by this time. Yes, you get on there they say. It is very difficult you know.”
She was not pleased that he had become politically successful; she knew that it would make him more independent of her, and that he would now find many to “show him the way” with whom Cocky could not compete. She was driven to rely for her influence on his admiration of her, which bored her to extinction but which was a fulcrum she could not neglect. Then there was that odious cat, as she called his daughter, though Katherine Massarene had very little that was feline in her. The presence of Katherine Massarene was as unpleasant to her as the presence in a card-room of a very calm and intelligent player, who is not playing but looking on with an eye-glass in his eye, is to the man who is cheating at bac’.
“Why couldn’t that young woman stay in India and marry one of Framlingham’s household?” she thought with great irritation, and William Massarene himself began to think the same; his daughter frequently made him feel uncomfortable when her glance dwelt on him where he sat beside Lady Kenilworth at a race or a ball or an opera; he felt like a boy detected in trying to climb a pear-tree.