“I shall tell your friend Mr. Massarene how you return his hospitalities, and I shall make you confess your inventions.”
“How horrid you are, Ronald!” she said, while her lips quivered, partly with fear and partly with rage. “You won’t look at the young woman, and yet you set your back up like this. Oh, of course I can tell people that I was only joking. But it will be very disagreeable.”
“You should bridle your tongue,” said Hurstmanceaux sternly, surprised himself to feel with what extreme irritation this story of hers had awakened in him. He could not and would not know Massarene’s heiress, but he admired her conduct in society; he admired most of all what others condemned in her, the contemptuous coldness and indifference of her manner, her brief replies, sometimes so cutting and caustic, her avoidance of all those whose high position made them sought by her parents, the unwavering coldness with which she resented all court paid to her.
When he watched her in the world, he felt inclined to applaud as he would have applauded a fine innings at Lord’s or a hard-won race on the Thames. It seemed to him monstrous that his sister, because her matrimonial schemes had failed, should pursue with slander anyone so innocent and so much to be praised.
William Massarene was in no haste to marry his daughter. His vanity would have impelled him to give her an unusual dower if she had married, and he did not care to cut so huge a slice out of his capital. Moreover, his ambitions, growing by what they fed on, became inordinate. No alliance seemed to him great enough.
Besides, he thought often, the old woman might go to glory, and he might marry again and have sons. To his strength of purpose and vastness of reach the future—his future—seemed illimitable.
She received a homage which nauseated, a flattery which disgusted, her. She knew that she was seen through the golden haze of her father’s reputation for wealth. “If I were deaf, or blind, or crooked,” she thought, “if I were diseased, or imbecile, or mutilated, there would not be one the less ready to worship and wed me out of all these throngs of wooers.” And very often her brief words cut them like a lash, and in her eyes, which were the hue of the darkest purple of a pansy, there came a flash of scorn whose cause those around her were too self-complacent to attribute aright.
She had but one pleasure—that of bringing together great artists, and causing Harrenden House to be renowned for something better than the usual display and expenditure of “new” houses. She had difficulty in making her father pay the singers and musicians as she wished them to be paid, for he who would give two guineas a bottle for a rare Comet-wine, or waste many thousands of pounds in receiving a sporting prince at Vale Royal, grudged their fees to what he contemptuously called “professionals.” But when he saw how greatly these musical entertainments “took on,” and how much they did to raise the tone of his house, he gave her large credit and discretion, and the reputation for the weekly chamber-music at Harrenden House soon attracted to it those choicer souls whom millions and Richemont could not alone have drawn there.
Sometimes she wished she could invite that lover of music who had listened to the sonata in B flat at Bedlowes. She would sooner have seen him there than his sister, who showed for an hour at these concerts, and then took herself off to some gayer form of entertainment.
“It is intensely classic and correct, but deadly dull,” said Lady Kenilworth, although she was, on occasion, a musical composer herself, and wrote little songs which, with many corrections and additions from Delkass and other salon-singers and fashionable pianists, passed muster and were published as her own.