“Somehow or other,” she thought, “my father has frightened her and cowed her; she looks as racing mares do when they come in off the trotting piste, with their strained eyes and their nervous trembling.”
She felt a vague desire to warn the victim of her father’s character, of his pitiless cruelty, of his unutterable brutality; but she knew that it would be unfilial to do so, and would be probably an act useless, misunderstood, and attributed to some selfish motive. She knew the world well enough to be aware that, whatever we may do to serve another, we are always suspected of serving our own interests.
To her it was evident that the saucy and thievish rodent had run once too often and once too near the claws and teeth of the tom-cat, who had let her gambol before him only to seize her and crunch her at leisure. She came very close toward the truth in her observations and deductions, but she shut her suspicions up in her own breast, and said nothing to anyone, being used to live without confidantes and to put a padlock on her lips.
“Who would ever have thought Sourisette would be so depressed by her little beast of a husband’s death?” said the friends who saw her at Ems that summer, one to another. They found her extremely altered; she was nervous, pale, had lost her spirits, and shut herself up a great deal, alleging her mourning.
“Mouse as la veuve inconsolable is too droll,” said her world; but when it became known that the guardians and executors had taken away the Otterbourne jewels, including the roc’s egg, and locked them up, never to be unlocked until Jack should attain his majority, her female friends argued that it was no wonder she felt such an insult.
“It is not an insult. It is the law. The trustees are obliged to do it; the little Duke’s a minor,” explained their male relatives. But to the female mind this kind of explanation always appears as trivial as it is impertinent. The general impression was given in society that Hurstmanceaux was very harsh to his sister, and that his unkindness was the cause of her loss of spirits and change of habits; moreover, it was said that it was he who had insisted on her rupture with Brancepeth.
Altogether she was pitied and admired, for her conduct had been quite admirable ever since the day that her wreath of forget-me-nots had been placed on poor Cocky’s grave, almost side by side with Lily Larking’s harp of calla lilies.
No one noticed that when she went on from Ems to Homburg, William Massarene went there also a few days later, whilst his wife and daughter remained at Vale Royal; no one except the courtly diplomatist of the silk dressing-gown, who was at Homburg too, and who observed that she did not bully “Billy” as she had done in the days of the Bird rooms, and that when “Billy” approached her there came into her eyes a flash of hate, a gleam of fear and loathing. Also that whatever he proposed in the way of walking, driving, or dining, she acquiesced in with a certain sullenness but with unusual docility.
If ever in his sturdy life William Massarene had been shy, he was so when the gaze of this accomplished person met his own. But whatever the minister observed, and any conclusions he might draw from his observations, he kept to himself, having in his career learned that there is no proverb truer than that of l’arbre et l’écorce. He was bland and charming both to l’ours et l’agneau, as he called them. Pauvre agneau! She had gambolled too carelessly and skipped too nearly the hairy arms of the ponderous bear! The diplomatist felt thankful that he could look calmly as a spectator at the struggle. He was prudent by nature and by habit, and beyond all women who were ever created his own personal reputation and his own personal ambitions were dear to him.
Equally circumspect, Massarene, as he took great care not to compromise himself, did not compromise her, except in the inductions of such very fine and accomplished observers as this diplomatist, of whom there are few left in the hurry and hurly-burly of modern society. If the whole of his constituency had been watching him, he could not have been more careful. A man has not been President of the Band of Purity and the White Riband Association in an American township without learning how to keep his neighbors’ noses out of his own whiskey and candy stores.