The Massarenes

by Ouida

For two miles and more the roads had been lined by rural folks waiting respectfully for the pageant to pass by; but as they drew near Vale Royal and entered on what had been Roxhall’s lands, all the cottages which they passed were shut up; not a man, woman, or child was visible in the little gardens or in the fields beyond.

“I suppose the cottagers are all gone on to the churchyard,” said a plump rector in one of the carriages, as he looked out of his window.

The town clerk, who was beside him, said in a whisper: “You won’t see a man-jack of Roxhall’s old tenants or peasantry show their noses to-day. They neither forget nor forgive.”

“How very un-Christian!” said the plump rector, with a sigh.

“Fidelity’s its own religion,” said the town clerk, who had been born on a farm on Roxhall’s land, and had hated to see the old homesteads and the familiar fields pass to the man from Dakota.

He was a true prophet. None of the peasantry or of the tenantry were visible on the roads or at the church of Vale Royal, which was within the park gates and surrounded by yew-trees and holly hedges; they were loyal to their lost lord. Princes and nobles and ministers might truckle to the wealth of the dead man, but these men of the soil were faithful to the old owners of the soil. They despised the newcomer, living or dead.

The bishop of the diocese was awaiting the body, surrounded by minor clergy, in the little, dusky, venerable church, with its square Saxon tower and its moss-grown tombstones standing about it in the long grass (like those of Staghurst and of many an English God’s-acre) under the yews, which were of vast size and unknown age. The coffin of William Massarene was placed in the middle of the aisle, as Carnot’s in the Panthéon, and the wreaths were heaped round it in the grotesque and odious manner dear to the close of the most vulgar of all centuries. One of them, made of gloxinias, rose and white, had the card of the Duchess of Otterbourne attached to it. The sun shone mild and serene; the birds sang above the black figures of the mourners; the voice of the venerable prelate droned on like a bumble-bee buzzing on a window-pane; selections from Weber in E flat were played and vocalized with exquisite taste by admirable artistes; all the gentlemen present stood bareheaded and solemn of countenance, trying to look affected and only succeeding in looking bored. The daughter of the dead man assisted at the ceremony with revolted taste and aching heart. To her it was one long sickening penance, painfully ludicrous in its mockery and hypocrisy and folly. Every word of the burial service sounded on her ear like the laughter of some demon. Her father’s life had been a long black crime, none the less, but the greater because one of those crimes which are not punished but rewarded by men; and he was bidden to enter into the joy of his Lord!

“Kathleen may say what she likes, but that pretty creature has shown a deal of heart,” thought Margaret Massarene, kneeling under her overwhelming masses of crape before the heaps of gummed and nailed and wired flowers which were considered emblematic of the Christian religion and her lost William’s soul. The pretty creature represented by the garland of gloxinias had written her a most affecting and even affectionate note on the previous evening, saying how grieved she was that a touch of bronchitis kept her confined to her room, as it prevented her attendance at the committal to earth of the remains of her kind and valued friend. That note Margaret Massarene had not shown to her daughter, but had wept over it and shut it up in her dressing-box.

“Kathleen’s that hard,” she had thought, as the crowds of South Woldshire were thinking it, “she wouldn’t be made to believe in the Duchess’s sorrow if the angels descended from the clouds to swear to it!”

Outside the church there were two brakes filled with wreaths from less distinguished givers piled one on another, as if they were garbage; for these there had been no room in the church. The savages who carry scalps and weapons to a dead chief’s grave are considerably in advance of fin-de-siècle England in sense of fitness and consistency in funeral rites.