She had a rapid imagination; she saw before her the crowded court, the witness-box where prevarication was of no use, all her dearest friends with their lorgnons lifted, the bench of the scribbling reporters, the correspondents of the illustrated papers making their sketches furtively and staring at her as she had stared at people in causes célèbres; she saw it all, even the portraits of herself which would appear in those woodcuts of artistic journals which would make Helen’s self hideous and Athene’s self grotesque.
She saw it all—all the huge headings in the posters and papers, all the staring eyes, all the commiserating censure, all the discreet veiled enjoyment of her acquaintances, all the rancid acrid virulence of the rejoicing Radical press.
She imagined that Beaumont would not get his money easily because she knew something about the risks run by those who lend on an imperfect title, as to minors or to women; but she had seen in his regard that he would not mind losing any amount of money if he had his revenge on her in putting her into court.
Actually, Beaumont was by no means a revengeful, nor even a hard man, and a very little diplomacy would have made him favorable to her.
She hated him more intensely than she had ever hated anyone. For in the first place he had done her a favor, and in the second place she had done him a wrong—a mixture which naturally produces the strongest hatred. She knew that, despite his courtesy, she had nothing more to hope from him; that he would have his money back again, or he would make the transaction public.
Public sympathy would be entirely with him against herself. Even that, however, seemed to her less horrible than the fact that Ronald would know what she had done. At the bottom of her heart she was not very brave; she could hector and bully, and command, and she had that share in the physical courage of her race which took her unflinching over a bullfinch in the shires. But she had not the moral courage which would allow that punishment was just and bear it calmly. It was probable that Ronald and her brothers-in-law would never let the matter come to a trial, that they would get the money between them together somehow, though they were all as poor as Job; but to have the matter brought before these prejudiced persons seemed to her worse than the law court itself. Ronald she dreaded, the Ormes she detested, and her sisters’ husbands she thought the most odious prigs in the world; to come before a family council of this sort would be more unsupportable than the law court itself, which would at least contain an element of excitement, and in which her personal appearance would be sure to rouse some feeling in her favor. To that personal fascination her brother and her brothers-in-law were at all times insensible.
“Some women have men belonging to them who are of some use,” she thought bitterly, “but all the men I have anything to do with are paupers and prigs. What is a family made for if it is not to pull one through awkward places, and follow one with a second horse?”
She hated her family fiercely. It seemed to her that it was all their fault that she had been placed in such a dreadful dilemma. If there was one thing more sure than another, she knew that it was the dead certainty that everybody in her world were as poor as rats, unless they were men of business who did not properly belong to that world at all. It was wonderful how soon you come to the end of a man’s resources! No one knew that better than herself. As for the bigwigs who look so swell and imposing to the classes which know nothing about them, she was but too well aware of the carking cares, the burdened lands, the desperate devices which sustained their magnificent appearances as the rotten timbers of a doomed ship may support a gilded figure-head.
“By the time Jack’s thirty years old the whole rotten thing will be gone like a smashed egg,” she thought, with a certain pleasure in reflecting that all the wearisome and impertinent precautions which Jack’s guardians took to shelter his interests would be of no avail for him in the long run against the rapidly rising tide of English socialism.