“Don’t say ‘my lady,’ whatever you do.”
“I beg your pardon, my—yes, ma’am—no ma’am—I beg pardon—you were so good as to tell William and me at the baths that you would help us to get on in London if we took a big house and bought that place in Woldshire. We’ve done both them things, but we don’t get on; nobody comes nigh us here nor there.”
She heaved a heart-broken sigh which lifted and depressed the gold embroideries on her ample bosom.
Lady Kenilworth smiled unsympathetically.
“What can you expect, my good woman?” she murmured. “People don’t call on people whom they don’t know; and you don’t know anybody except my husband and old Khris and myself.”
It was only too true. Mrs. Massarene sighed.
“But I thought as how your la—, as how you would be so very, very good as to——”
“I am not a bear-leader,” said Lady Kenilworth with hauteur. Mrs. Massarene was as helpless and as flurried as a fish landed on a grassy bank with a barbed hook through its gills. There was a long and to her a torturing silence. The water hissed gently, like a purring cat, in the vase of Leo the Tenth, and Mouse Kenilworth looked at it as a woman of Egypt may have gazed at a statue of Pascht.
It seemed a visible symbol of the immense wealth of these Massarene people, of all the advantages which she herself might derive therefrom, of the unwisdom of allowing their tutelage to lapse into other hands than theirs. If she did not launch them on the tide of fashion others would do so, and others would gain by it all that she would lose by not doing it. She was a woman well-born and well-bred, and proud by temperament and by habit, and the part she was moved to play was disagreeable to her, even odious. But it was yet one which in a way allured her, which drew her by her necessities against her will; and the golden water-vase seemed to say to her with the voice of a deity, “Gold is the only power left in life.” She herself commanded all other charms and sorceries; but she did not command that.
She was silent some moments whilst the pale eyes of her hostess watched her piteously and pleadingly.