The Massarenes

by Ouida

“Oh, you brute—you unutterable brute! If a look could kill you, you would fall dead where you stand!” thought Mouse one day as she looked from one of the windows of the Bird room, and saw his short broad figure, with the squat legs cased in the gaiters of a country gentleman and the country gentleman’s round felt hat on his stubbly iron-grey hair, as he went over the turf with his back to her, having on his left the lord-lieutenant of the county, and on his right the Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, each of them bending their tall forms affably and listening to him with deference.

But looks cannot kill; and he continued to walk on across the sunlight and shadow over the grass, and she continued to watch him from the upper windows, convulsed with a deadly loathing impotent rage against him, such as Marie Antoinette must have felt for the gaoler of the Concièrgerie.

There were men who loved her to insanity; even in the weary, shallow, indifferent, modern world there are still women who inspire insane if short-lived passions, and she was of those women; but she could not appeal to any one of these men since appeal would entail confession; and confession to one would mean exposure to all, for she knew that her tyrant would be merciless if she freed herself from him, or he would not keep her signatures as he did keep them. Skilled in male human nature, and the management of it, though she was, she had no experience to guide her in dealing with Massarene, because all the men amongst whom she had lived had been gentlemen; and the way of treating women of the gentlemen and the cad is as different as their way of shooting. A man capable of acting as Massarene did could not have been met with in her world.

“It is all our own fault,” she thought. “Why do we let these boors and brutes in at our gates because they have got their sacks of bullion on their backs?” And as she always blamed somebody for the issue of her own errors, she thought with detestation of Cocky coming up to her under the trees at Homburg, and telling her to make the acquaintance of the Massarenes.

Happily for her William Massarene was too cautious, too busy, and too ambitious a man to lose much of his time in torturing her. He delighted in her hatred, her helplessness, her servitude, but she was only a toy to him; his gigantic schemes of self-advancement, and his many financial enterprises, engrossed him much more, and he would not have risked his social position by a scandal for all the beautiful women in creation. He supplied her with the money she wanted, but he made her beg, and he made her sign, for every penny of it. It was fine sport!

Her own people attributed the change in her to her rupture with Brancepeth; and, in himself, Hurstmanceaux did so also. But it was a subject on which he could know nothing since the scene she had with him concerning her late friend, and he could only suppose that like many another woman she sorrowed for the loss of what she had refused to keep. He knew that she stayed a good deal with the folks at Vale Royal, but his penetration did not go farther than to conclude that she did so because it saved her expense. He saw nothing of her personally in the autumn and winter following Cocky’s death; his unavoidable communications with her on business were made by letter. Sometimes he wondered how she and the lady with whom he had walked to Greater Thorpe got on together; he did not think that they could suit each other; but he saw little of the one and nothing at all of the other.

Of William Massarene he of course saw nothing either; so that the curt and insolent tone which Massarene at times now allowed himself to use to one whose humble slave he had once been was unknown to him; if he had heard it and resented it, the “bull-dozing boss” would have cast the truth in his teeth, and, grinning, have awaited his reception of it, for courage had never been lacking to the man who for thirty years had held his own against the hatred of the whole Central States.

This terror lest he should thus tell the truth to her brother haunted her night and day. She did not think there was much fear because she knew that he held his social position as dear as life itself, and he would be well aware that Hurstmanceaux would destroy it at a blow. Still she could not be sure, for she knew that temper sometimes hurries the wisest and most ambitious man into irrevocable indiscretion.

She had herself lost absolutely all power over the man who had been so blindly her slave. Their positions had wholly changed. It was she who shrank from his glance; it was he who ordered and was obeyed. She, who had no acquaintance with pain, suffered as never before would she have believed it possible to suffer. Humiliation, terror, abhorrence, self-contempt, were all united to an agony of apprehension with regard to the future. She would easily have made a second marriage, but her tyrant forbade her any such issue from her difficulties.

She had never before supposed that it would ever be possible for her to be miserable in London, but she was so now; the dull cold bleak weather aiding her depression, and the mourning which she had still to wear seeming to her indeed the very livery of gloom.