Then he kicked over the gilded gondola and trampled the beautiful flowers under his big feet.
Her nerves gave way under the sickening nausea of the scene. She buried her face in her hands and sobbed aloud, her tortured pride of race and of womanhood writhing like some delicate animal in a steel trap.
William Massarene stood and watched her, his thumbs in the armholes of his coat, his legs wide apart, his yellow teeth showing in a broad grin. It was rare sport. It had cost him an almighty pile of dollars, but it was rare sport. He felt that after his long career of hard work and self-denial he had earned the right to some such fun and feast as this.
CHAPTER XXIX.
With the next season he allowed her to accept the loan of her sister Carrie’s house in town; that lady having gone on a little trip to Japan. She hated the Wisbeach house, which was dark, ugly, and situated in the dreary district of Portman Square. Carrie Wisbeach, who was but little in town, and was a sportswoman renowned in more lands than her own, had little heed of all the artistic and graceful luxuries with which her younger sister had always required to be surrounded, and had left her husband’s old London house very much as his grandparents had made it.
Mouse detested it unspeakably, but it was roomy and a good way off Harrenden House, and she put up with it, trusting that she would be almost always out of it. For her tyrant favored rather than discouraged her perpetual appearance in society; it prevented people talking, and in society alone could she favor his interests social and political.
She was still altered; she had still that harassed apprehensive glance backward over her shoulder; but she was familiarized with her captivity, and had learned to make bricks without straw for her bondmaster without too plainly betraying to others the marks of the sand and the clay in which she was forced to kneel.
Ever since her first season she had done whatever she had pleased, and amused herself in any manner she desired. But she had never got into trouble, never been compromised, never felt her position shake beneath her. A woman, young and popular, who has great connections behind her, can, if she have tact and skill, easily avoid being injured by scandal. If she knows how to conciliate opinion by certain concessions, she can enjoy herself as thoroughly as any young cat gambolling about a dairy; and no one will seriously interfere with her. Society had certainly “talked”; but when a woman has a brother like Hurstmanceaux, and a father-in-law like the good Duke of Otterbourne, and many other male relatives high-spirited and innumerable, people do not talk very incautiously or very loudly.
Now through “Billy,” for the first time, she saw her position jeopardized. That low-bred creature, whom she had made fetch and carry, and wince and tremble at her whim and pleasure, had now the power to make her, if he chose, in the eyes of the world, that miserable, contemptible, and despicable creature, a femme tarée.
Sometimes, too, a more tragic, a more sickening, fear assailed her, when she thought of the possibility of her tyrant telling the truth, in boastfulness or in revenge, to her brother. It was not likely, but it was always possible; for she saw that in William Massarene, at times, temper—the savage, uncontrolled temper of the low-born man—got the better of good sense, of caution, and even of ambition. She could never be sure that it might not do so some day in her case, and that for the ruffianly relish of dragging the pride of the head of the House of Courcy in the dust, he might not throw to the devil all his cherished triumphs, all his hardly-bought distinctions.