The Massarenes

by Ouida

She was not in the least afraid of doing wrong, but she was keenly afraid of being found out, and especially of being found out by her brother. She knew very well that Ronald’s toleration of her and affection for her were entirely based on the fact that she had in a great degree always succeeded in blindfolding him.

He knew her to be reckless, imprudent, and madly extravagant, but he thought her innocent in other ways, and compromised by her husband.

Oh, the support that Cocky had been! She did feel genuine sorrow for his loss. To lose your scapegoat, your standing apology, your excuse for everything, is worse than to lose your jewel-box, especially when it has only paste copies of your jewels in it. She would really have liked to have had Cocky survive a few years as Duke of Otterbourne. They would not have had much money, but they would have had such quantities of credit that their want of actual money would scarcely have been felt. They would have sold everything which settlement would have allowed them to sell, and very probably found means even to break the entail.

She was wholly unaware that the very first use he would have made of his accession would have been to drag her into the glare of that transpontine melodrama which is played in the Court of Probate and Divorce. In the glare of his dying eyes she had indeed recognized hatred, but she had not known that such hatred would have taken its worst vengeance on her had he lived.

She did not know that fate, often so favorable to her, had never done her so kind a turn as when it had made him catch that cold at his father’s grave in the bitter east winds of the March morning. He had been something to complain of, to fret about, to quarrel with; at his door she could lay any responsibility she chose, and he had been often useful in a great strait through the ingenuity and unscrupulousness of his devices. Then she had cordially detested him, and that sentiment alone had something exhilarating about it like a glass of bitters.

And yet again it had been the existence of Cocky which had made Harry interesting. Now that it could become quite proper for her to annex Harry, in the manner dear to Mrs. Grundy, he lost a great deal of his attraction. He fell suddenly in value like a depreciated currency.

After the first moments of awe which the presence of death causes to the most indifferent person, her first reflection had been that she could now marry him.

But her second and wiser was that it would be ridiculous to do anything of the kind. Poor Harry was as poor as the traditional church mouse. The little he had ever been worth had been squeezed out of him by Cocky and herself. She wanted money, an endless amount of money. Women of the world want money as orchids want moisture. They cannot live except with their feet ankle deep in a pactolus. Money, or its equivalent credit, is the necessity of their existence. Her existence, hitherto, however brilliant on the surface, had been little better than a series of shifty expedients. She had danced her shawl dance on the brink of exposure and bankruptcy. What was the use of marrying a man with whom the same, or still worse, embarrassments would have perpetually to be endured?

At no time had she been ready to throw herself away on Harry. She had been for several years fonder of him than she had ever supposed herself capable of being of anyone. When he had showed the least inclination for any other woman, her sentiment for him had become violent and ferocious in its sense of wronged ownership. But to marry him would be, she knew—she had always known—a grotesque mistake.

It would be one of those follies which are never forgiven by Fate. Harry was no more meant for marriage, she thought, as she sat alone in her morning-room, than that wheelbarrow was meant for use. It was a charming wheelbarrow in satin, scarlet, and green, with gilded wheels and handles; filled with cherries, plumbs, currants, and strawberries made by the first bonbon-makers of Paris, and sent at Easter, the week before the old duke died. One might just as well roll that barrow over the stones to Covent Garden market, as think of marriage with Harry.