For where Lady Kenilworth pointed, the world would surely follow; and the heart of simple Margaret Massarene, late Margaret Hogan, dairymaid of Kilrathy, County Down, beat high in her breast under the red and gold of her gorgeous bodice. “It’s mighty hard work being a lady,” she thought, “but since I’ve got to be one, I’d like to go the whole hog, and show Kathleen when she comes back to us that we are as smart gentlefolks as any of her friends.”
When Mr. Massarene came home to dinner that evening, his wife felt that she had great news to give him.
“I think she’ll take us up, William,” she said, almost under her breath. “But I think she’ll want a lot of palm-grease.”
She was a simple woman, of coarse views and expressions.
“Whatever my lady wants she shall have,” reflected her husband, but his heavy brows frowned; for he was a man who did not like even the wife of his bosom to see into his intentions, and if he were going to buy his way into that society where his shooting-irons were of no use to him, he did not care for even the “old ’ooman” to know it.
But the next day, at one o’clock precisely, he presented himself at the house in Stanhope Street which the Kenilworths honored by residence. He looked like an eminently respectable grazier or cheesemonger clothed in the best that money could buy; a hat, which was oppressively lustrous and new, was carried in his hand with a pair of new gloves. In his shirt-sleeves and butcher-boots, with a brace of revolvers in his belt, as he had sworn at his platelayers, or his diggers, or his puddlers, in the hard bright light of the Dakotan sun, he had been a formidable and manly figure in keeping with the giant rocks, and the seething streams, and the rough boulder-strewn roads of the country round him. But standing in the hall of a London house, clad in London clothes made by the first tailors, he looked clumsy and absurd, and he knew it. He was a stolid, sensible, and very bold man; when a railway train in the early days of the Pacific road had been “held up” by a native gang, those desperate robbers had found more than their match in him, and the whole convoy, with the million odd dollars he was carrying in his breast-pocket, had been saved by his own ready and pitiless courage. But as he mounted the staircase in Stanhope Street his knees shook and his tongue clove to his teeth; he felt what actors describe as stage fright.
Lady Kenilworth had deigned to know him at Homburg, had put him in the way of buying Vale Royal of her cousin Roxhall, had dined more than once at his expense with a noisy gay party who scarcely said good-day to him, and likewise at his expense had picnicked in the woods and drunk much more of the best Rhenish wines than were good for them; and on a smooth stretch of green sward under the pines, that lovely lady had imitated the dancing of Nini-Patte-en-l’air of the Eden Theatre, until the “few last sad grey hairs” upon his head had stood erect in scandalized amazement. She had also dined and supped at his expense several times with various friends of her own in Paris, in the November following on the July at Homburg; and she had let him take boxes for her at the operas and theatres, and had generally used his purse without seeming to see that it was open for her. But he had exchanged very few words with her (though he had already through her inspiration spent a good deal of money), and his stout, squat figure shook like a leaf as he was ushered into her presence, while her two Blenheims flew at his trousers with a fugue of barks.
What a dazzling vision she was, as she smiled on him across the flower-filled and perfumed space which divided them! She had smiled like that when she had first spoken to him of buying Vale Royal in the early days of his acquaintance with her. William Massarene was no fool, and he knew that he would have to pay its full price for that enchanting smile, but though he was not its dupe he was its victim. He was nervous as he had never been when he had heard the order, “Hands up!” in the solitude of a mountain gorge at midnight amongst the Rockies.
The smile was encouraging, but the rest of the attitude was serene, almost severe, as pure as a Virgin in a tryptich of Van der Goes; she was at work on some embroidery; she had Boo on a stool at her feet; she looked an exquisite picture of youthful maternity; he could scarcely believe that he had seen her cutting those mad capers on the sward of the German forest, or heard her scream with laughter at the supper-table of Bignon’s.
Boo got up on her little black-stockinged legs, ran to him, and looked at him from under her golden cloud of hair.