The Massarenes

by Ouida

She had several engagements, such engagements as her mourning allowed, but she ignored them all; she could not see anyone until she could find out some way of exit from this hideous labyrinth of trouble.

Suddenly it flashed upon her mind that, do what she would, she could not get the diamond in time for Monday morning. It was in Paris. If she went to Paris without the money she would be no nearer to it; and besides, her sudden departure would at once awaken the suspicions of Jack’s guardians. She must not only find the large sum of money needed, but she must also find someone who would go to Paris and bring the stone back before Monday forenoon.

There were many men who were devoted to her, but as she ran over their names in her mind she could think of no one whose adoration, whether expectant or retrospective, would be equal to such a strain on it as that; nor everyone to whom she could quite safely trust her secret.

There are very pretty theories and ideals about the honor of men of the world, but she knew such men down to the ground, as she would have phrased it, and she had few illusions about their honor. She knew that when they are in love with one woman they show up to that one all the others who have preceded her in their affections. Harry, indeed, she might have trusted; but she had broken with him, and even if she had not done so, he could no more have raised a seventh part of the money than he could have uprooted St. James’s Palace. He was stone broke, as he said himself. Her little travelling timepiece, which stood on her writing-table, seemed to sway over the seconds and minutes with a fiendish rapidity. Half an hour had gone by since her brother had left her, and she was no nearer a solution to her torturing difficulties. Other women would have weakened and compromised themselves by running to some female confidant, but she had none; with her own sisters she was always on the terms of an armed neutrality and in female friends she had never seen any object or savor. As soon as a woman was intimate with you she only tried to take your men away from you; she never gave any woman the opportunity to do so.

Another quarter of an hour passed by; she heard her horses stamping on the stones beneath the windows; she heard the children scamper down the staircase on their way to their afternoon walk in the park; she heard people drive up and drive away as they were met by the inexorable “Not at home” of the good-looking youth in powder and black shoulder-knots who opened the hall door.

How horrible! she thought, oh, how horrible! This might be the very last day on which anybody would call on her! For she knew well enough that the offence she had committed was one which, once made public, would close to her the only world for which she cared. “And yet I really meant no harm,” she thought. “I thought the thing was mine or would be. Why did that odious Poodle lend it me? So treacherous! Why did he not explain to me that it was a ‘chattel’? What is a chattel? Why did Beaumont advance the money upon it? He was much more to blame than I am, because of course he knew the law.”

In that she was perhaps not wrong, for though the world may blame only the borrower, the lender is not seldom the wickeder of the two.

Tired out with her ceaseless pacing to and fro over the carpet, her nerve gave way, and for almost the first time in her life she burst into tears, bitter, hysterical, cruel tears, the tears which disfigure and age the woman who sheds them. The Blenheims, infinitely distressed, jumped on her lap and endeavored to console her; rubbing their little red and white heads against her cheeks. Their caresses touched her in her loneliness. “We hated Cocky, you and I,” she said to them; “but I wish to heaven he had never died.” With all her keen enjoyment of life she really understood in that hour of torture how it was that women driven at bay killed themselves to escape detection and condemnation. She did not mean to kill herself because she was a woman of many resources and had her beautiful face and form, and loved life; but she felt that she would rather kill herself than meet Ronald’s eyes if he learned that the Indian diamond had been changed and pawned. And know it he must as soon as Hunt and Roskell’s assayer tested the stones. Beaumont had told her honestly that the imitation would deceive anyone, even a jeweler, unless it were tested; but that tested it would of course fly in pieces and confess itself a fraud.

She had only forty-three hours before the messenger from the bank would come. Whatever she did had to be done before the stones were consigned to him, for after they were out of her possession she would not be safe for a moment. At all costs she must get back the roc’s egg from Beaumont or be a ruined, disgraced, miserable woman. True, she felt sure that her brother and the Ormes would not expose her to the world. They would scrape the money together at all costs, and redeem the jewel, and observe secrecy on the whole abominable affair; but she would be in their power for ever; they would be able to punish her in any way they chose, and their punishment would certainly take the form of exiling her from everything which made life worth living.

The old churchman, Lord Augustus, was hardly more than a lay figure, but Alberic, she knew, looked on her with all the disdain and dislike of a refined and religious man, for one whom he condemned in all her ways and whom he considered had made his brother and his father dupes from the first day of her marriage. And Ronald would be but the more bitterly inflexible because he would consider that her near relationship to himself compelled him in honor to the uttermost severity in judgment and action; he would consider that he could not show to her the indulgence he might have shown to a stranger.