“I wish you were Catholic,” she said instead. “It would make everything so much smoother for you. I suppose you couldn’t change? They’d make it very easy for you.”
Margaret Massarene gasped. Life had unfolded many possibilities to her of which she had never dreamed; but never such a possibility as this.
“Couldn’t you?” said her guest sharply. “After all, it’s nothing to do. The Archbishop would see to it all for you. They make it very easy where there is plenty of money.”
“I don’t think I could, my lady; it would be eternal punishment for me in the world to come,” said Mrs. Massarene faintly, whilst her groom of the chambers restrained a violent inclination to box her on the ears for the vulgarity of her two last words.
He had been long trained in the necessary art of banishing from his countenance every ray of expression, every shadow of indication that he overheard what was said around him, but nature for once prevailed over training; deep and unutterable disgust was spoken on his bland yet austere features. Eternal punishment! did the creature think that Harrenden House was a Methody chapel?
As for Lady Kenilworth, she went into a long and joyous peal of laughter; laughed till the tears brimmed over in her pretty ingenuous turquoise-colored eyes.
“Oh, my good woman,” she said, as soon as she could speak, good-humoredly and contemptuously, “you don’t mean to say that you believe in eternal punishment? What is the use of getting old Khris to furnish for you and ask me to show you the way about, if you weigh yourself down with such an old-fashioned funny packful of antiquated ideas as that? You must not say such things really; you will never get on amongst us if you do.”
The countenance of Margaret Massarene grew piteous to behold; she was a feeble woman, but obstinate; she was ready to sell her soul to “get on,” but the ghastly terrors inculcated to her in her childhood were too strongly embedded in her timid and apprehensive nature to leave her a free agent.
“Anything else, ma’am—anything else,” she murmured wretchedly. “But not Romanism, not Papistry. You don’t know what it means to me, you don’t indeed.”
Lady Kenilworth shrugged her shoulders and got up from the tea-table.