“What?” It was like hearing anybody say they did not like Dante, or Jean de Reszké, or truffles, or comet-claret.
“No, sir, we don’t,” she answered; “he doesn’t cook himself at all.”
“Of course he doesn’t! You might as well say that a pianist should make the piano he plays on, and shoot an elephant to get ivory for his keys! Richemont—it is Richemont whom you have?—is a surpassing artist.”
“’Tis easy to be an artist, sir, if you set a lot of people working and send up their work in your name,” said Margaret Massarene. “He don’t do naught all day—the under-cooks say so—and he gets more’n a thousand guineas a year; and he called Mr. Massarene an imbecile because he wouldn’t eat snails! Now I put it to you, sir, what’s the use of being able to pay for the fat of the land if you’re to put up with hodmedods out of the hedges?”
Gwyllian laughed so delightedly that the two terrible dowagers turned to glance at him with a Medusan frown.
“After all,” he thought, “one does get a great deal more fun out of this kind of people than one ever gets out of one’s own.” And he took her in to supper, and made himself exceedingly pleasant. He was one of those wise persons who if they cannot be pleasant with others are nothing at all.
Under the gentle exhilaration produced by a little sparkling wine, Mrs. Massarene amused him infinitely, and he cleverly extracted from her more about life in Dakota than the rest of London had learned in a year; he was even made acquainted with the oil-stove and the linen-wringer.
“What a nice kind man! How interested he do seem!” she thought, poor creature, unconscious that the oil-stove and the linen-wringer would make the diversion of a dozen dinner-tables, manipulated with that skill at mimicry which was one of Daddy Gwyllian’s social attractions.
Her husband saw her from a distance, and divined that she was being “drawn”; but he was powerless. He was in waiting on an aunt of Lady Kenilworth’s, a very high and mighty person with aquiline features and an immense appetite. It was her garrulous stupidity and her clumsy ingenuousness which made him hate her with a hate which deepened every day. Why had he hung such a millstone round his neck when he had been a farm-lad in County Down? Her good and kindly qualities, her natural sincerity, simplicity, and good nature were all homely instincts, no more wanted in her new life than a pail of fresh milk was wanted at one of the grand dinners at Harrenden House.
Once she had gone back to Kilrathy, the place of her birth, and revisited the pastures, the woods, the streams, which she had known in girlhood. The big house in the midst of the green lands was shut up; bad times had told there as in so many other places in the land; the family she had served was abroad, impoverished, alienated, and all but forgotten. But nothing else was changed. The same great trees spread their vast shadows above the grass; the same footpaths ran through the meadows; the same kind of herds fed lazily, hock deep in clover, the rain shining on their sleek sides, their breath odorous on the misty air; the same kind of birds sang above her head. Every step of the way was familiar to her: here was the stile where she had listened first to William’s wooing; there the footbridge which she had crossed every market day; here the black hazel coppice where she had once lost a silver sixpence; there the old oak stump where the red cow had been suddenly taken with labor pains; the rich long grass, the soft grey rain, the noisy frogs in the marsh, the brimming river with the trout up-leaping amongst the sword rush and the dock leaves—all these and a thousand other familiar things were just as they had been five-and-thirty years before; but none of the people guessed that the lonely lady so richly dressed, walking silently through the water meadows, had once been Margaret Hogan. She did not dare make herself known to any of them; she stole into the churchyard and sat by her parents’ graves in the dusk, and gathered a few daisies off the nameless mounds, and stole away again feeling ashamed as of some overt act. She saw a barelegged girl going home with the cattle, a switch in her hand and a gleam of sunset light coming through the rain-clouds and touching her red hair and her red kirtle; and in an odd breathless, senseless kind of ingratitude to fate, she wished that her Kathleen—Katherine—were that cow-girl, threading that fragrant twilit path with the gentle kine lowing about her, and a little calf nibbling at a bunch of clover in her hand.