THE MASSARENES

THE
MASSARENES

BY
OUIDA
AUTHOR OF “UNDER TWO FLAGS,” “SYRLIN”

NEW YORK
R. F. FENNO & COMPANY
112 FIFTH AVENUE

London: SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & CO.

Copyright, 1897
BY
R. F. FENNO & COMPANY

TO
A BELOVED FRIEND,
THE LADY HOWARD OF GLOSSOP.
(WINIFRED MARY DE LISLE.)

NOTICE.

In case it may be supposed that the African episode in this book was suggested by recent events in the Transvaal, I desire to state that it was written four years before the Jameson raid occurred.

Ouida.

THE MASSARENES.

CHAPTER I.

“Mouse,” said her husband to Lady Kenilworth, one morning at Homburg, “do you see that large pale woman over there, with a face like a crumpled whitey-brown paper bag?”

Lady Kenilworth looked.

“Yes,” she said, impatiently. “Yes. Well?—what?—why?”

“Well, she rolls—she absolutely rolls—wallows—biggest pile ever made out West.”

His wife looked again with a little more attention at the large figure of a lady, superbly clothed, who sat alone under a tree, and had that desolate air of “not being in it” which betrays the unelect.

“Nobody discovered her? Nobody taken her up?” she asked, still looking through her eye-glass.

“Well, old Khris a little; but Khris can’t get anybody on now. He does ’em more harm than good. He’s dead broke.”

His wife smiled.

“They must be new, indeed, if they don’t know that. Would they be rich enough to buy Vale Royal of Gerald?”

“Lord, yes; rich enough to buy a hundred Gerrys and Vales Royal. I know it for a fact from men in the City: they are astonishing—biggest income in the United States, after Vanderbilt and Pullman.”

“American, then?”

“No; made their ‘stiff’ there, and come home to spend it.”

“Name?”

“Massarene. Cotton to her if you can. There’s money to be made.”

“Hush! somebody will hear.”

Her lord chuckled.

“Does anybody know these dear souls and their kind for any other reason than the flimsy? She’s looking your way. You’ll have to introduce yourself, for she don’t know anybody here. Make Boo fall down and break her nose in front of her.”

Boo was a four-year-old angel with lovely black eyes and bright yellow hair, the second child of the Kenilworth family. Accompanied by one of her nurses, she was playing near them, with a big rosy bladder tied to a string.

“I don’t think the matter so difficult that Boo’s nose need be sacrificed. At what hotel is this person staying?”

“At ours.”

“Oh! Then the thing’s very easy.”

She nodded and dismissed him. She was on fairly good terms with her husband, and would make common cause with him when it suited her; but she could not stand much of his society. She took another prolonged stare through her eye-glass at the large pale woman, so splendidly attired, sitting in solitude under the tree, then rose and walked away in her graceful and nonchalant fashion, with her knot of young men around her. She was followed by the dreary envious gaze of the lonely lady whose countenance had been likened to a large whitey-brown paper bag.

“If one could but get to know her all the rest would come easy,” thought that solitary and unhappy outsider, looking longingly after that pliant and perfect figure with its incomparable air of youth, of sovereignty, and of indifference. What was the use of having an income second only to Vanderbilt’s and Pullman’s?

There are things which cannot be purchased. Manner is chief amongst them.

Margaret Massarene was very lonely indeed, as she sat under the big tree watching the gay, many-colored, animated crowd amongst which there was not a creature with whom she had even a bowing acquaintance. Her lord and master, of whom she stood in much awe, was away on business in Frankfort; her daughter, her only living child, was in India; she was here because it was the proper place for an aspirant to society to be in at that season; but of all this multitude of royal people, titled people, pretty people, idle people, who thronged the alleys and crowded the hotels, she did not know a single creature. She envied her own maid who had many acquaintances with other maids and couriers and smart German sergeants and corporals of cavalry.

On the previous day she had made also a fatal mistake. As she had crossed the hall of her own hotel, she had seen a fair small woman, insignificantly dressed, in a deer-stalker’s hat and a gray ulster, who was arguing with the cashier about an item in her bill which she refused to pay: so many kreutzer for ice; ice was always given gratis, she averred; and she occupied the whole window of the cashier’s bureau as she spoke, having laid down an umbrella, a packet of newspapers, and a mackintosh on the shelf. Indignant at being made to wait by such a shabby little person, Mrs. Massarene pushed her aside. “Folks as has to count pence shouldn’t come to grand hotels,” she muttered, with more reason than politeness, elbowing away the shabby fair woman.

The shabby fair woman turned round and stared, then laughed: the cashier and the clerk were confounded, and lost their presence of mind. To the shabby fair woman a man in plain clothes, obviously her servant, approached, and bowing low said, “If you please, madam, his Imperial Majesty is at the door.” And the lady who quarreled with a clerk for half a kreutzer went out of the hall, and mounted besides a gentleman who was driving himself; one of those gentlemen to whom all the world doff their hats, yet who, by a singular contradiction, are always guarded by policemen.

The Massarene courier, who was always hovering near his mistress in the vain effort to preserve her from wrongdoing, took her aside.

“It’s Mrs. Cecil Courcy, madam,” he murmured. “There’s nobody so chic as Mrs. Cecil Courcy. She’s hand and glove with all them royalties. Pinching and screwing—oh yes, that she do—but then you see, madam, she can do it.”

“You won’t tell your master, Gregson?” said Mrs. Massarene in an agony of penitence.

Gregson winced at the word “master,” but he answered sincerely, “No, madam; I won’t tell Mr. Massarene. But if you think that because they’re high they’re large, you’re very much mistaken. Lord, ma’am, they’ll pocket the marrons glacés at the table d’hôte and take the matches away from their bedrooms, but then, you see, ma’am, them as are swagger can do them things. Mrs. Cecil Courcy might steal the spoons if she’d a mind to do it!”

Mrs. Massarene gasped. A great name covering a multitude of small thefts appalled her simple mind.

“You can’t mean it, Gregson?” she said with breathless amaze.

“Indeed, madam, I do,” said the courier, “and that’s why, madam, I won’t ever go into service with gentlefolks. They’ve got such a lot to keep up, and so precious little to do it with, that they’re obliged to pinch and to screw and get three sixpences out of a shilling, as I tell you, madam.”

Mrs. Massarene was sad and silent. It was painful to hear one’s own courier say that he would never take service with “gentlefolk.” One never likes to see oneself as others see us.

The poignant horror of that moment as she had seen the imperial wheels flash and rotate through the flying dust was still fresh in her mind, and should have prevented her from ever trusting to her own judgment or forming that judgment from mere appearances. She could still hear the echo of the mocking voice of that prince whom Kenilworth had described as “dead broke” saying to her, as he had said more than once in England: “Not often do you make a mistake; ah no, not often, my very dear madam, not often; but when you do make one—eh bien, vous la faites belle!”

Mrs. Massarene sighed heavily as she sat alone under her tree, her large hands folded on her lap; the lessons of society seemed to her of an overwhelming difficulty and intricacy. How could she possibly have guessed that the great Mrs. Cecil Courcy, who gave tea and bread-and-butter to kings and sang duets with their consorts, was a little shabby, pale-faced being in a deer-stalker’s hat and a worn gray ulster who had disputed in propriâ personâ at the cashier’s office the charge of half a kreutzer on her bill for some iced water?

As she was thinking these melancholy thoughts and meditating on the isolation of her greatness, a big rose-colored bladder struck her a sharp blow on the cheek; and at her involuntary cry of pain and surprise a little child’s voice said pleadingly, “Oh! begs ’oo pardon—vewy muss!”

The rosebud face of Lady Kenilworth’s little daughter was at her knee, and its prettiness and penitence touched to the quick her warm maternal heart.

“My little dear, ’tis nothing at all,” she said, stooping to kiss the child under its white lace coalscuttle bonnet. Boo submitted to the caress, though she longed to rub the place kissed by the stranger.

“It didn’t hurt ’oo, did it?” she asked solicitously, and then she added in a whisper, “Has ’oo dot any sweeties?”

For she saw that the lady was kind, and thought her pretty, and in her four-year-old mind decided to utilize the situation. As it chanced, Mrs. Massarene, being fond of “sweeties” herself, had some caramels in a gold bonbon-box, and she pressed them, box and all, into the little hands in their tiny tan gloves.

Boo’s beautiful sleepy black eyes grew wide-awake with pleasure.

“Dat’s a real dold box,” she said, with the fine instincts proper to one who will have her womanhood in the twentieth century. And slipping it in her little bosom she ran off with it to regain her nurse.

Her mother was walking past at the moment with the King of Greece on one side of her, and the Duc d’Orléans on the other; wise little Boo kept aloof with her prize. But she knew not, or forgot, that her mother’s eyes were as the optic organs of the fly which can see all round at once, and possess twelve thousand facets.

Ten minutes later, when the king had gone to drink his glasses of water and Prince Gamelle had gone to breakfast, Lady Kenilworth, leading her sulky and unwilling Boo by the hand, approached the tree where the lone lady sat. “You have been too kind to my naughty little girl,” she said with her sweetest smile. “She must not keep this bonbonnière; the contents are more than enough for a careless little trot who knocks people about with her balloon.”

Mrs. Massarene, agitated almost out of speech and sense at the sight of this radiant apparition which spoke with such condescension to her, stammered thanks, excuses, protestations in an unintelligible hotchpot of confused phrases; and let the gold box fall neglected to the ground.

“The dear pretty baby,” she said entreatingly. “Oh, pray, ma’am, oh, pray, my lady, do let her have it, such a trifle as it is!”

“No, indeed I cannot,” said Lady Kenilworth firmly, but still with her most winning smile, and she added with that graceful abruptness natural to her, “Do tell me, I am not quite sure, but wasn’t it you who snubbed Phyllis Courcy so delightfully at the hotel bureau yesterday morning?”

Mrs. Massarene’s pallid face became purple.

“Oh, my lady,” she said faintly, “I shall never get over it, such a mistake as I made! When Mr. Massarene comes to hear of it he’ll be ready to kill me——”

“It was quite delightful,” said Lady Kenilworth with decision. “Nobody ever dares pull her up for her cheese-paring ways. We were all enchanted. She is a detestable cat, and if she hadn’t that mezzo-soprano voice she wouldn’t be petted and cossetted at Balmoral and Berlin and Bernsdorff as she is. She is my aunt by marriage, but I hate her.”

“Dear me, my lady,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, doubtful if her ears could hear aright. “I was ready to sink into my shoes,” she added, “when I saw her drive away with the Emperor.”

Lady Kenilworth laughed, a genuine laugh which meant a great number of things, unexplained to her auditor. Then she nodded; a little pleasant familiar nod of farewell.

“We shall meet again. We are at the same hotel. Thanks so much for your kindness to my naughty pet.”

And with the enchanting smile she used when she wanted to turn people’s heads she nodded again, and went on her way, dragging the reluctant Boo away from the tree and the golden box.

When she consigned her little daughter to the nurse, Boo’s big black eyes looked up at her in eloquent reproach. The big black eyes said what the baby lips did not dare to say: “I did what you told me; I hit the lady very cleverly as if it was accident, and then you wouldn’t let me have the pretty box, and you called me naughty!”

Later, in the nursery, Boo poured out her sorrows to her brother Jack, who exactly resembled herself with his yellow hair, his big dark eyes, and his rosebud of a mouth.

“She telled me to hit the old ’ooman, and then she said I was naughty ’cos I did it, and she tooked away my dold box!”

“Never mind, Boo. Mammy always lets one in for it. What’d you tell her of the box for? Don’t never tell mammy nothin’,” said Jack in the superior wisdom of the masculine sex and ten months greater age.

Boo sobbed afresh.

“I didn’t tell her. She seed it through my frock.”

Jack kissed her.

“Let’s find old woman, Boo, if we can get out all by ’selves, and we’ll ask her for the box.”

Boo’s face cleared.

“And we’ll tell her mammy telled me to hit her!”

Jack’s cherub face grew grave.

“N-n-no. We won’t do that, Boo. Mammy’s a bad ’un to split on.”

Jack had once overheard this said on the staircase by Lord Kenilworth, and his own experiences had convinced him of the truth of it. “Mammy can be cruel nasty,” he added, with great solemnity of aspect and many painful personal recollections.

Mrs. Massarene had remained under the tree digesting the water she had drunk, and the memory of the blunder she had made with regard to Mrs. Courcy. She ought to have known that there is nothing more perilous than to judge by appearances, for this is a fact to be learned in kitchens as well as palaces. But she had not known it, and by not knowing it had offended a person who went en intime to Balmoral, and Berlin, and Bernsdorff!

Half an hour later, when she slowly and sorrowfully walked back through the gardens of her hotel, to go in to luncheon, two bright cherubic apparitions came toward her over the grass.

Walking demurely hand-in-hand, looking the pictures of innocent infancy, Jack and Boo, having had their twelve o’clock dinner, dedicated their united genius to the finding and besieging of the old fat woman.

“How’s ’oo do?” said Boo very affably, whilst her brother, leaving her the initiative, pulled his sky-blue Tam o’ Shanter cap off his golden curls with his best possible manner.

Their victim was enchanted by their overtures, and forgot that she was hungry, as these radiant little Gainsborough figures blocked her path. They were welcome to her as children, but as living portions of the peerage they were divinities.

“What’s your name, my pretty dears?” she said, much flattered and embarrassed. “You’re Lord Kersterholme, aren’t you, sir?”

“I’m Kers’ham, ’ess. But I’m Jack,” said the boy with the big black eyes and the yellow locks, cut short over his forehead and falling long on his shoulders.

“And your dear little sister, she’s Lady Beatrix Orme?” said Mrs. Massarene, who had read their names and dates of birth a score of times in her ‘Burke.’

“She’s Boo,” said Jack.

Boo herself stood with her little nose and chin in the air, and her mouth pursed contemptuously. She was ready to discharge herself of scathing ironies on the personal appearance of the questioner, but she resisted the impulse because to indulge it might endanger the restoration of the gold box.

“I am sure you are very fond of your pretty mamma, my dears?” said Mrs. Massarene, wondering why they thus honored her by standing in her path.

Boo shut up her rosy mouth and her big eyes till they were three straight lines of cruel scorn, and was silent.

Jack hesitated.

“We’re very fond of Harry,” he said, by way of compromise, and as in allusion to a substitute.

“Who is Harry?” asked Mr. Massarene, surprised.

The children were puzzled. Who was Harry?

They were used to seeing him perpetually, to playing with him, to teasing him, to getting everything they wanted out of him; but, as to who he was, of that they had never thought.

“He’s in the Guards,” said Jack at last. “The Guards that have the white tails on their heads, you know, and ride down Portland Place of a morning.”

“He belongs to mammy,” said Boo, by way of additional identification; she was a lovely little fresh dewdrop of childhood only just four years old, but she had a sparkle of malice and meaning in her tone and her eyes, of which her brother was innocent.

“Oh, indeed,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, more and more embarrassed; for ought she knew, it might be the habit for ladies in the great world to have an officer of the Guards attached to their service.

Jack looked critically at the strange lady. “Don’t ’oo know people?” he asked; this poor old fat woman seemed to him very forlorn and friendless.

“I don’t know many people as yet, my lord,” murmured their victim humbly.

“Is ’oo a cook or a nurse?” said Jack, with his head on one side, surveying her with puzzled compassion.

“My dear little sir!” cried Mrs. Massarene, horrified. “Why, gracious me! I’m a lady.”

Jack burst out laughing. “Oh, no, ’oo isn’t,” he said decidedly. “Ladies don’t say they’s ladies.”

Boo twitched his hand to remind him of the ultimate object of their mission.

Mrs. Massarene had never more cruelly felt how utterly she was “nobody” at her first Drawing-room, than she felt it now under the merciless eyes of these chicks.

Boo pulled Jack’s sleeve. “She won’t give us nothin’ else if ’oo tease her,” she whispered in his rosy ear.

Jack shook her off. “P’r’aps we’re rude,” he said remorsefully to his victim. “We’s sorry if we’ve vexed ’oo.”

“And does ’oo want the little box mammy gived back to ’oo?” said Boo desperately, perceiving that her brother would never attack this main question.

Over the plain broad flat face of the poor plebian there passed a gleam of intelligence, and a shadow of disappointment. It was only for sake of the golden box that these little angels had smilingly blocked her road!

She brought out the bonbonnière at once from her pocket. “Pray take it and keep it, my little lady,” she said to Boo, who required no second bidding; and after a moment’s hesitation Mrs. Massarene took out of her purse a new Napoleon. “Would you please, my lord,” she murmured, pushing the bright coin into Jack’s fingers.

Jack colored. He was tempted to take the money; he had spent his last money two days before, and the Napoleon would buy a little cannon for which his heart pined; a real cannon which would load with real little shells. But something indefinite in his mind shrank from taking a stranger’s money. He put his hands behind his back. “Thanks, very much,” he said resolutely, “but please, no; I’d rather not.”

She pressed it on him warmly, but he was obstinate. “No, thanks,” he said twice. “’Oo’s very kind,” he added courteously. “But I don’t know ’oo, and I’d rather not.” And he adhered to his refusal. He could not have put his sentiment into words, but he had a temper which his sister had not.

“’Oo’s very kind,” he said again, to soften his refusal.

“’Oo’s very kind,” repeated Boo sarcastically, with a little grin and a mocking curtsey, “and Jack’s a great big goose. Ta-ta!”

She pulled her brother away, being afraid of the arrival of governess, nurse, or somebody who might yet again snatch the gold box away from her.

“Why didn’t ’oo take the money, Jack?” she said, as they ran hand-in-hand down the path.

“I don’t know,” said Jack truthfully. “Somethin’ inside me told me not.”

Their forsaken admirer looked after them wistfully. “Fine feathers don’t make a fine bird o’ me,” she thought sorrowfully. “Even those babies see I ain’t a lady. I always told William as how it wouldn’t be no use. I dare say in time they’ll come to us for sake of what they’ll get, but they won’t never think us aught except the rinsins of the biler.”

Lord Kenilworth had been looking idly out of a window of the hotel across the evergreens after his breakfast of brandy and seltzer and had seen the little scene in the garden and chuckled as he saw.

“Shrewd little beggars, gettin’ things out of the fat old woman,” he thought with approval. “How like they look to their mother; and what a blessing it is there’s never any doubts as to the maternity of anybody!”

He, although not a student of ‘Burke’ like Mrs. Massarene, had opened that majestic volume once on a rainy day in the library of a country house, and had looked at his own family record in it, and had seen, underneath his own title and his father’s, the names of four little children:—

Sons:

(1) John Cecil Victor, Lord Kersterholme.

(2) Gerald George.

(3) Francis Lionel Desmond Edward.

Daughter:

Beatrix Cicely.

“Dear little duckies!” he had murmured, biting a cigarette. “Sweet little babes! Precious little poppets! Damn ’em the whole blooming lot!”

But he had been quite alone when he had said this: for a man who drank so much as he did he was always remarkably discreet. What he drank did not make him garrulous; it made him suspicious and mute. No one had ever known him allow a word to escape his lips which he would, being sober, have regretted to have said. How many abstemious persons amongst us can boast as much?

CHAPTER II.

It was four o’clock on a misty and dark afternoon of the month of March in London.

The reception-rooms of a fine house facing Grosvenor Gate were all lighted by the last modern perfection of rose-shaded electricity. They were rooms of unusually admirable proportions and size for the city in which they were situated, and were decorated and filled with all that modern resources, both in art and in wealth, can obtain.

Harrenden House, as it was called, had been designed for a rich and eccentric duke of that name, and occupied by him for a few years, at the end of which time he had tired of it, had carried all its treasures elsewhere, and put it up for sale; it had remained unsold and unlet for a very long period, the price asked being too large even for millionaires. At last, in the autumn of the previous year, it had been taken by a person who was much more than a millionaire, though he had been born in a workhouse and had begun life as a cow-boy.

The great mansion had nothing whatever of the parvenu about it except its new owner. Its interior had been arranged in perfect taste by an unerring master’s hand. The square hall had ancient Italian tapestries, Italian marbles, Italian mosaics, all of genuine age and extreme beauty, whilst from its domed cupola a mellowed light streamed down through painted glass of the fifteenth century, taken from the private chapel of a Flemish castle.

The two-winged staircase, broad and massive, had balustrades of oak which had once been the choir railings of a cathedral in Karinthia, the silver lamps which hung above these stairs had once illumined religious services in the Kremlin, and above the central balustrade leaned, lovely as adolescence, a nude youth with a hawk on his wrist—the work of Clodion.

The rest of the mansion was in the same proportions and perfection. No false note jarred on its harmonies, no doubtful thing intruded a coarse or common chord. The household were not pushed away into dark cell-like corners, but had comfortable and airy sleeping-chambers. It was a palace fit for a Queen of Loves; it was a home made for a young Cæsar in the first flush of his dreams of Cleopatra. And it belonged actually to William Massarene, late of Kerosene City, North Dakota, U. S. A., miner, miller, meat salesman, cattle exporter, railway contractor, owner of gambling-saloons, and opium dens for the heathen Chinee, and one of the richest and hardiest-headed men in either hemisphere.

Nothing was wanting which money could buy—tapestries, ivories, marbles, bronzes, porcelains, potteries, orchids, palms, roses, silks, satins, and velvets, were all there in profusion. Powdered lackeys lolled in the anteroom, dignified men in black stole noiselessly over carpets soft and elastic as moss; in the tea-room the china was Sèvres of 1770, and the water boiled in what had once been a gold water-vase of Leo X.; in the delicious little oval boudoir the walls were entirely covered with old Saxe plates, and Saxe shepherds and shepherdesses made groups in all the corners, while a Watteau formed the ceiling; and yet, amidst these gay and smiling porcelain people of Meissen, who were a century and a half old, and yet kept the roses on their cheeks and the laugh on their lips, Margaret Massarene, the mistress of it all, sat in solitary state and melancholy meditation; a heavy hopelessness staring in her pale grey eyes, a dreary dejection expressed in the loose clasp of her fat hands folded on her knee, the fingers now and then beating a nervous tattoo. What use was it to have the most beautiful dwelling-house in all London if no one ever beheld its beauties from one week’s end to another? What use was it to have a regiment of polished and disdainful servants if there were no visitors of rank for them to receive?

Many things are hard in this world; but nothing is harder than to be ready to prostrate yourself, and be forbidden to do it; to be ready to eat the bitter pastry which is called humble pie, and yet find no table at which so much even as this will be offered you. The great world did not affront them; it did worse, it did not seem to know they existed.

“Take a big town-house; buy a big country place; ask people; the rest will all follow of itself,” had said their counsellor and confidant at the baths of Homburg. They had bought the town-house, and the country place, but as yet they had found no people to invite to either of them; and not a soul had as yet called at the magnificent mansion by Gloucester Gate, although for fifteen days and more its porter had sat behind open gates; gates of bronze and gold with the Massarene arms, which the Herald’s College had lately furnished, emblazoned above on their scroll-work awaiting the coronet which a grateful nation and a benign Sovereign would, no doubt, ere many years should have passed, add to them.

People of course there were by hundreds and thousands, who would have been only too glad to be bidden to their doors; but they were people of that common clay with which the Massarenes had finished for ever and aye.

There were many families, rich, if not as rich as themselves, and living in splendor on Clapham Common, near Epping Forest, or out by Sydenham and Dulwich, who would have willingly been intimate with Mrs. Massarene as their husbands were with hers in the city. She would have been content with their fine houses, their good dinners, their solid wealth, their cordial company. She would have been much more at ease in their suburban villas amidst their homelier comforts, hearing and sharing their candid boastfulness of their rise in life. But these were not the acquaintances which her husband desired. He did not want commerce, however enriched; he wanted the great world, or what now represents it, the smart world; and he intended to have that or none.

And Lady Kenilworth, their Homburg friend, had written a tiny three-cornered note ten days before, with a mouse in silver on its paper, which said: “I am in town and am coming to see you. Jack and Boo send love,” and on this familiar epistle they had built up an Eiffel Tower of prodigious hope and expectation. But ten days and more had passed and their correspondent had not yet fulfilled her promise.

Therefore, amidst all the beauty and splendor of it, the mistress of the house sat, pale, sullen, despondent, melancholy. She had sat thus for fifteen days—ever since Parliament had met—and it was all in vain, in vain. The gold urn bubbled, the shepherds smiled, the orchids bloomed, the men in black and the men in powder waited in vain, and the splendid and spacious mansion warmed itself, lighted itself, perfumed itself in vain. Nobody came.

She had dropped all her old friends and the new ones were faithless and few.

She had been forced by her lord and master to cease her acquaintance with the wives of aldermen and city magnates and magistrates; good-natured wealthy women, who had been willing to make her one of themselves; and the desired successors, the women of the world, were only conspicuous by their absence.

She was dressed admirably by a great authority on clothes; but the dull Venetian red, embroidered with gold thread and slashed with tawny color, was suited to a Vittoria Accrombona, to a Lucrezia Borgia, and did not suit at all the large loose form and the pallid insignificant features of their present wearer.

When the head cutter of the great Paris house which had turned out that magnificent gown had ventured to suggest to its chief that such attire was thrown away on such a face and figure as these, that Oracle had answered with withering contempt, “Rien ne va aux gens de leur espèce, excepté leur tablier d’ouvrière. Et le tablier on ne veut plus porter!”

His scorn was unutterable for all “gens de leur espèce,” but he did what he could for them; he let them have exquisite attire and sent them very long bills. It was not his fault if they never knew how to wear their clothes; he could not teach them that secret, which only comes by the magic of nature and breeding. The present wearer of his beautiful Venetian red and gold gown was laced in until she could scarcely breathe; her fat hands were covered with beautiful rings; her grey hair had been washed with gold-colored dye; her broad big feet, which had stood so many years before cooking stoves and washtubs, were encased in Venetian red hose of silk and black satin shoes with gold buckles; her maid had assured her that she looked like a picture but she felt like a guy, and was made nervous by the Medusa-like gaze of the men in black who occasionally flitted across her boudoir to attend to a lamp, contract the valve of the calorifère, or lay the afternoon papers cut and aired by her chair.

“If only they wouldn’t look at me so!” she thought, piteously. What must they think of her, sitting alone like this, day after day, week after week, when the dreary two hours’ drive in the Park was over, behind the high-stepping horses, which were the envy of all beholders, but to their owners seemed strange, terrible and dangerous creatures.

London was full, not with the suffocating fullness indeed of July, but with the comparative animation which comes into the street with the meeting of Parliament.

But not a soul had passed those gates as yet, at least not one as human souls had of late become classified in the estimation of the dwellers within them.

The beautiful rooms seemed to yawn like persons whose mind and whose time are vacant. The men in black and the men in powder yawned also, and bore upon their faces the visible expression of that depression and discontent which were in their bosoms at the sense, ever increasing in them, that every additional day in the house of people whom nobody knew, robbed them of caste, injured their prestige, and ruined their future.

The mistress of the palace only did not yawn because she was too agitated, too nervous and disappointed and unhappy to be capable of such a minor suffering a ennui; she was not dull because she was strung up to a high state of anxious expectation, gradually subsiding, as day after day went on, to a complete despair.

They had done all that could be done in the way of getting into society; they had neglected no means, shunned no humiliation, spared no expense, refused no subscription, avoided no insult which could possibly, directly or indirectly, have helped them to enter its charmed circle, and yet nothing had succeeded. Nobody came, nobody at least out of that mystic and magic sphere into which they pined and slaved to force or to insinuate themselves; not one of those, the dust of whose feet they were ready to kiss, would come up the staircase under the smiling gaze of Clodion’s young falconer.

But on this second day of the month of March, when the clocks showed five of the afternoon, there was a slight movement perceptible in the rooms of which the suite was visible from the door of the boudoir. The groom of the chambers, a slender, solemn, erect personage, by name Winter, came forward with a shade of genuine respect for the first time shown in his expression and demeanor.

“Lady Kenilworth asks if you receive, madam?”

“Why, lord, man! ain’t I in o’ purpose?” said his mistress, in her agitation and surprise reverting to her natural vernacular; whilst she rose in vast excitement and unspeakable trepidation, and tumbled against a stool in her nervousness.

“I was sure that I should find you at home, so I followed on the heels of your man,” said a sweet, silvery, impertinent voice, as the fair young mother of Jack and Boo entered the boudoir, looking at everything about her in a bird-like way, and with an eye-glass which she did not want lifted to the bridge of her small and delicate nose.

“So kind—so kind—so honored,” murmured Mrs. Massarene with bewilderment and enthusiasm, her pale, flaccid cheeks warm with pleasure, and her voice tremulous with timidity.

“Not at all,” murmured Lady Kenilworth absently and vaguely, occupied with her inspection of the objects round her. She seated herself on a low chair, and let her glance wander over the walls, the ceiling, the Meissen china, the Watteau ceiling, and her hostess’s gown.

“How’s your dear little children, ma’am?” said Mrs. Massarene humbly.

“Oh, they’re all right, thanks,” said their mother carelessly, her head thrown back as she gazed up at the Watteau. “It seems very well done,” she said at last. “Who did it for you? The Bond Street people?”

“Did what?” said her hostess falteringly, drawing in her breath with a sudden little gasp to prevent herself from saying “my lady.”

“The whole thing,” explained her guest, pointing with the handle of her eye-glass toward the vista of the rooms.

“The—the—house?” said Mrs. Massarene hesitatingly, still not understanding. “We bought it—that is, Mr. Massarene bought it—and Prince Kristof of Karstein was so good as to see to the decorations and the furniture. The duke had left a-many fixtures.”

“Prin and Kris?” repeated Lady Kenilworth, hearing imperfectly through indifference to the subject and attention to the old Saxe around her. “I never heard of them. Are they a London firm?”

“Prince Kristof of Karstein,” repeated Mrs. Massarene, distressed to find the name misunderstood. “He is a great friend of ours. I think your ladyship saw him with us in Paris last autumn.”

Lady Kenilworth opened wide her pretty, innocent, impertinent, forget-me-not colored eyes.

“What, old Khris? Khris Kar? Did he do it all for you? Oh, I must run about and look at it all, if he did it!” she said, as she jumped from her seat, and, without any premiss or permission, began a tour of the rooms, sweeping swiftly from one thing to another, lingering momentarily here and there, agile and restless as a squirrel, yet soft in movement as a swan. She did run about, flitting from one room to another, studying, appraising, censuring, admiring, all in a rapid and cursory way, but with that familiarity with what she saw, and that accurate eye for what was good in it, which the mistress of all these excellent and beautiful things would live to the end of her years without acquiring.

She put up her eye-glass at the pictures, fingered the tapestries, turned the porcelains upside down to see their marks, flitted from one thing to another, knew every orchid and odontoglossum by its seven-leagued name, and only looked disapproval before a Mantegna exceedingly archaic and black, and a Pietro di Cortona ceiling which seemed to her florid and doubtful.

She went from reception-rooms to library, dining-room, conservatories, with drawing-rooms, morning-rooms, studies, bedchambers, galleries, bath-rooms, as swift as a swallow and as keen of glance as a falcon, touching a stuff, eyeing a bit of china, taking up a bibelot, with just the same pretty pecking action as a chaffinch has in an orchard, or a pigeon in a bean-field. Everything was really admirable and genuine. All the while she paid not the slightest attention to the owner of the house, who followed her anxiously and humbly, not daring to ask a question, and panting in her tight corset at the speed of her going, but basking in the sense of her visitor’s rank as a cat basks in the light and warmth of a coal fire and a fur-lined basket.

Not a syllable did Lady Kenilworth deign to cast to her in her breathless scamper through the house. She had some solid knowledge of value in matters of art, and she begrudged these delicious things to the woman with the face like a large unbaked loaf and the fat big hands, as her four-year-old Boo had begrudged the gold box.

“Really they say there is a Providence above us, but I can’t think there is, when I am pestered to death by bills, and this creature owns Harrenden House;” she thought, with those doubts as to the existence of a deity which always assail people when deity is, as it were, in the betting against them. She had read an article that morning by Jules Simon, in which he argued that if the anarchists could be only persuaded to believe in a future life they would turn their bombs into bottles of kid reviver and cheerfully black the boots of the bourgeoisie. But she felt herself that there was something utterly wrong in a scheme of creation which could bestow Harrenden House on a Margaret Massarene, and in a Divine Judge who could look on at such discrepancies of property without disapproval.

She scarcely said a syllable in her breathless progress over the building; although the unhappy mistress of Harrenden House pined in trembling for her verdict, as a poor captain of a company longs for a word from some great general inspecting his quarters. But when she had finished her tour of inspection, and consented to take a cup of tea and a caviare biscuit in the tea-room where the Leo the Tenth urn was purring, and Mr. Winter and two of his subordinates were looking on in benign condescension, she said brusquely:

“Eh bien, il ne vous a pas volé.”

Mrs. Massarene had not the most remote idea of what she meant, but smiled vaguely, and anxiously, hoping the phrase meant praise.

“He’s given you the value of your money,” Lady Kenilworth explained. “It’s the finest house in London, and nearly everything in it is good. The Mantegna is rubbish, as I told you, and if I had been asked I shouldn’t have put up that Pietro di Cortona. What did Khris make you pay for it?”

“I don’t know, I am sure, ma’am,” replied the mistress of the Mantegna meekly. “William—Mr. Massarene—never tells me the figure of anything.”

“The Cortona was painted last year in the Avenue de Villiers, I suspect,” continued Lady Kenilworth. “But all the rest, or nearly all, is admirable.”

“It’s a very grand house,” replied its mistress meekly; “but it’s mighty lonesome-like to be in it, with no company. If all the great folks you promised, my lady——”

“I never promised, I never do promise,” said her visitor sharply. “I can’t take people by their petticoats and coat-tails and drag them up your stairs. You must get yourself known for something; then they’ll come. What? Oh, I have no idea. Something. A cook; or a wine; or a surprise. People like surprises under their dinner napkins. Or a speciality, any speciality. I knew a person who entirely got into society by white hares; civet de lièvre, you know; but white, Siberian.”

Mrs. Massarene gasped. She had a feeling then she was being talked to in Sanscrit or Welsh and expected to understand it. Why white hares should be better than brown hares she could not imagine. Nobody ate the fur.

“But you was so good as to say when we were in Paris, ma’am——”

“Never remind me of anything I said. I can’t endure it! I believe you want to get in the swim, don’t you?”

“Please, I don’t quite understand, ma’am.”

Her visitor was silently finishing nibbling at a caviare biscuit and reflecting what a goose she had been to go to Egypt instead of utilizing this Massarene vein. She must certainly, she thought, do all she could for these people.

“You’re Catholic, aren’t you?” she said abruptly.

The horror of an Ulster woman spread itself over the flaccid and pallid clay in which the features of her hostess were moulded.

“Oh no, my lady, we were never Romans,” she said, so aghast that she was carried out of herself into the phraseology of her earlier years. “We were never Romans. How could you think it of us?”

“It would be better for you if you were,” said Lady Kenilworth unfeelingly and irreverently. “Catholics are chic; and then all the great Catholic families push a convert unanimously. They’d get a sweep to all the best houses if he only went often enough to the Oratory.”

“We’ve always been loyal people,” murmured Mrs. Massarene piteously; “always Orange as Orange could be.”

“Loyalty’s nothing,” said Lady Kenilworth, contemptuously eyeing the beautiful gold urn with the envious appreciation of a dealer’s glance. “Loyalty don’t ‘take the cake.’ Nobody is afraid of it. It’s all fear now that we go by——”

“And gain,” she was about to add but checked the words unuttered.

“I wish you were Catholic,” she said instead. “It would make everything so much smoother for you. I suppose you couldn’t change? They’d make it very easy for you.”

Margaret Massarene gasped. Life had unfolded many possibilities to her of which she had never dreamed; but never such a possibility as this.

“Couldn’t you?” said her guest sharply. “After all, it’s nothing to do. The Archbishop would see to it all for you. They make it very easy where there is plenty of money.”

“I don’t think I could, my lady; it would be eternal punishment for me in the world to come,” said Mrs. Massarene faintly, whilst her groom of the chambers restrained a violent inclination to box her on the ears for the vulgarity of her two last words.

He had been long trained in the necessary art of banishing from his countenance every ray of expression, every shadow of indication that he overheard what was said around him, but nature for once prevailed over training; deep and unutterable disgust was spoken on his bland yet austere features. Eternal punishment! did the creature think that Harrenden House was a Methody chapel?

As for Lady Kenilworth, she went into a long and joyous peal of laughter; laughed till the tears brimmed over in her pretty ingenuous turquoise-colored eyes.

“Oh, my good woman,” she said, as soon as she could speak, good-humoredly and contemptuously, “you don’t mean to say that you believe in eternal punishment? What is the use of getting old Khris to furnish for you and ask me to show you the way about, if you weigh yourself down with such an old-fashioned funny packful of antiquated ideas as that? You must not say such things really; you will never get on amongst us if you do.”

The countenance of Margaret Massarene grew piteous to behold; she was a feeble woman, but obstinate; she was ready to sell her soul to “get on,” but the ghastly terrors inculcated to her in her childhood were too strongly embedded in her timid and apprehensive nature to leave her a free agent.

“Anything else, ma’am—anything else,” she murmured wretchedly. “But not Romanism, not Papistry. You don’t know what it means to me, you don’t indeed.”

Lady Kenilworth shrugged her shoulders and got up from the tea-table.

“I always said,” she observed slightingly, “that the Orange people were the real difficulty in Ireland. There would never have been any trouble without them.”

“But you are not a Papist yourself, my lady?” asked Mrs. Massarene with trembling accents.

“Oh, I? no,” said the pretty young woman with the same contemptuous and indifferent tone. “We can’t change. We must stick to the mast—fall with the colors—die in the breach—all that kind of thing. We can’t turn and twist about. But you new people can, and you are geese if you don’t. You want to get in the swim. Well, if you’re wise you’ll take the first swimming-belt that you can get. But do just as you like, it does not matter to me. I am afraid I must go now, I have half a hundred things to do.”

She glanced at the watch in her bracelet and drew up her feather boa to her throat. Tears rose to the pale gray eyes of her hostess.

“Pray don’t be offended with me, my lady,” she said timidly. “I hoped, I thought, perhaps you’d be so very kind and condescending as to tell me what to do; things bewilder me, and nobody comes. Couldn’t you spare me a minute more in the boudoir yonder? where these men won’t hear us,” she added in a whisper.

She could not emulate her guest’s patrician indifference to the presence of the men in black; it seemed to her quite frightful to discuss religious and social matters beneath the stony glare of Mr. Winter and his colleagues. But Lady Kenilworth could not share or indulge such sentiments, nor would she consent to take any such precautions.

She seated herself where she had been before by the tea-table, her eyes always fascinated by the Leo the Tenth urn. She took a bonbon and nibbled it prettily, as a squirrel may nibble a filbert.

“Tell me what you want,” she said bluntly; she was often blunt, but she was always graceful.

Margaret Massarene glanced uneasily at Winter and his subordinates, and wished that she could have dared to order them out of earshot, as she would have done with a red-armed and red-haired maid-of-all-work who had marked her first stage on the steep slopes of “gentility.”

“You told us at Homburg, my lady——” she began timidly.

“Don’t say ‘my lady,’ whatever you do.”

“I beg your pardon, my—yes, ma’am—no ma’am—I beg pardon—you were so good as to tell William and me at the baths that you would help us to get on in London if we took a big house and bought that place in Woldshire. We’ve done both them things, but we don’t get on; nobody comes nigh us here nor there.”

She heaved a heart-broken sigh which lifted and depressed the gold embroideries on her ample bosom.

Lady Kenilworth smiled unsympathetically.

“What can you expect, my good woman?” she murmured. “People don’t call on people whom they don’t know; and you don’t know anybody except my husband and old Khris and myself.”

It was only too true. Mrs. Massarene sighed.

“But I thought as how your la—, as how you would be so very, very good as to——”

“I am not a bear-leader,” said Lady Kenilworth with hauteur. Mrs. Massarene was as helpless and as flurried as a fish landed on a grassy bank with a barbed hook through its gills. There was a long and to her a torturing silence. The water hissed gently, like a purring cat, in the vase of Leo the Tenth, and Mouse Kenilworth looked at it as a woman of Egypt may have gazed at a statue of Pascht.

It seemed a visible symbol of the immense wealth of these Massarene people, of all the advantages which she herself might derive therefrom, of the unwisdom of allowing their tutelage to lapse into other hands than theirs. If she did not launch them on the tide of fashion others would do so, and others would gain by it all that she would lose by not doing it. She was a woman well-born and well-bred, and proud by temperament and by habit, and the part she was moved to play was disagreeable to her, even odious. But it was yet one which in a way allured her, which drew her by her necessities against her will; and the golden water-vase seemed to say to her with the voice of a deity, “Gold is the only power left in life.” She herself commanded all other charms and sorceries; but she did not command that.

She was silent some moments whilst the pale eyes of her hostess watched her piteously and pleadingly.

She felt that she had made a mistake, but she did not know what it was nor how to rectify it.

“I beg pardon, ma’am,” she said humbly; “I understood you to say as how you would introduce me to your family and friends in town and in the country. I didn’t mean any offence—indeed, indeed, I didn’t.”

“And none is taken,” said Lady Kenilworth graciously, thinking to herself, “One must suit oneself to one’s company. That’s how they talk, I believe, in the servants’ hall, where she ought to be.”

Aloud she continued:

“You see, whatever one says at Homburg, or indeed anywhere at all out of England, does not count in England: that is understood everywhere by everybody.”

“Really,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, confused and crestfallen: for it had been on the faith of this fair lady’s promises and predictions in the past summer that Harrenden House and Vale Royal had been purchased.

“Of course,” said Lady Kenilworth rather tartly, still looking at the gold water-vase, which exercised a strange fascination over her, as if it were a fetish which she was compelled, nolens volens, to worship. “Only imagine what a mob we should have round us at home if everyone we were civil to in Nice and Florence and Homburg and Ostend, and all the other places, could take us seriously and expect to be invited by us here. It would be frightful.”

Margaret Massarene sighed: existence seemed to her complicated and difficult to an extent which she could never have credited in the days when she had carried her milking-pails to and from the rich grass meadows of her old home in Ulster. In those remote and simple days “I’ll be glad to see you” meant “I shall be glad,” and when you ate out of your neighbor’s potato bowl, your neighbor had a natural right to eat in return out of yours—a right never disavowed. But in the great world these rules of veracity and reciprocity seemed unknown. Lady Kenilworth sat lost in thought some moments, playing with the ends of her feather boa and thinking whether the game were worth the candle. It would be such a dreadful bore!

Then there came before her mind’s eyes the sum total of many unpaid bills, and the vision of that infinite sweetness which lies in renewed and unlimited credit.

“You want to be lancée?” she said at last in her brusque yet graceful manner suddenly, as she withdrew her gaze from the tea-table, “Well, sometimes to succeed socially is very easy and sometimes it is very difficult—for new people very difficult. Society is always uncertain. It acts on no fixed principles. It keeps out A. and lets in B., and couldn’t possibly say why it does either. Your money alone won’t help you. There are such swarms of rich persons, and everybody who gets rich wants the same thing. You are, I believe, enormously rich, but there are a good many enormously rich. The world is in a queer state; ninety out of a hundred have nothing but debts, the other ten are gorged on money, gorged; it is very queer. Something is wrong. The sense of proportion has gone out of life altogether. You want, you say, to know people. Well, I can let you see them; you can come and meet them at my house; but I can’t make them take you up if they won’t do it.”

Mrs. Massarene sighed. She dared not say so, but she thought—of what use had been all the sums flung away at this lovely lady’s bidding in the previous autumn?

“It is no use to waste time on the idiot,” reflected her visitor. “She don’t understand a word one says, and she thinks they can buy Society as if it were a penny bun. Old Billy’s sharper; I wonder he had not the sense to divorce her in the States, or wherever they come from.”

“Where’s your man?” she said impatiently.

“William’s in the City, my lady,” answered Mrs. Massarene proudly. “William, ma’am, is very much thought of in the City.”

“He’s on lots of things, I suppose?”

After some moments’ puzzled reflection his wife replied, “Meaning Boards, ma’am? Yes, he is. They seem they can’t do without him. William had always a wonderful head for business.”

“Ah!” said Lady Kenilworth. “He must put Cocky on some good things. My husband, you know. Everything is done by companies nowadays. Even the Derby favorite is owned by a syndicate. Tell him to put Lord Kenilworth on all his good things, and not to mind if he’s unpunctual. Lord Kenilworth never can understand why half-past two isn’t the same hour as twelve.”

“That won’t do in business, my lady,” said Mrs. Massarene boldly, for here she was sure of her ground. “Five minutes late writes ruin sometimes.”

“Does it indeed? I suppose that’s what makes it so fetching. I am sure it would do Cocky worlds of good; wake him up; give him things to think of.”

“Is my lord a business man, ma’am?” said Mrs. Massarene, with great doubt in her tone.

“Oh, they all are now, you know. Cocky’s very lazy, but he’s very clever.”

“My lord don’t want to be clever; he’ll be duke,” said Mrs. Massarene, intending no sarcasm. “I can’t think, ma’am, as your noble husband would like to toil and moil in the City.”

“No—no; but to be on things, you know,” answered her visitor vaguely. “You send Mr. Massarene to me and we’ll talk about it. He mustn’t mind if Lord Kenilworth only gives his name and never shows.”

Mrs. Massarene’s was a slow brain and a dull one, but she was not really stupid; in some matters she was shrewd, and she began dimly to perceive what was expected of her and her William, and what quid pro quo would be demanded by this lovely lady who had the keys of society if she used any of these keys in their favor; she had had glimmerings of this before, but it had never presented itself before her so clearly as now. She had sense enough, however, to keep the discovery to herself. “I’ll tell Mr. Massarene, ma’am,” she said meekly, “and I know he’ll be very proud to wait on you. Shall it be to-morrow?”

“Yes; to-morrow, before luncheon. About half-past twelve.”

“I won’t forget, ma’am.”

“And I’ll come and dine with you next week. I’ll bring some people, my sisters; they won’t mind, Carrie certainly won’t. Lady Wisbeach, you know. What day? Oh, I don’t know. I must go home and look at my book. I think there is something of no importance that I can throw over next week.”

“And how many will be there at dinner, ma’am,” asked Mrs. Massarene, feeling hot all over, as she would have expressed it, at the prospect of this banquet.

“Oh, well, I can’t say. I’ll see who will come. You have a very good chef, haven’t you? If not I could get you Van Holstein’s. You know when people are well fed once they’ll come to be fed again, and they tell others.”

“Just like fowls,” murmured Mrs. Massarene, her mind reverting to the poultry yard of her youth, with the hens running over and upsetting each other in their haste to get to the meal-pan.

She was sensible of an awakening interest of a warmer tinge in the manner of her protectress, since the subject of good things in the City had been broached.

“You mustn’t want to go too fast at once,” continued that fair lady. “It’s like cycling. You’ll wobble about and get a good many falls at first. But you’ve begun well. You’ve a beautiful house, and you have my cousin’s place, in the heart of a hunting county. Several of the county people have asked me about the purchaser of Vale Royal, and I have always said something nice about you both. You know I have been four months on the Nile, and one sees the whole world there; such a climate as this is to return to after Egypt! Why weren’t you in Egypt? Oh, I forgot; your man’s member for Limehouse, isn’t he? I wonder the party hasn’t done more for you. But, you see, money alone, unless there is tact—— Well, I dare say I can’t make you understand if I talk till doomsday; I have two or three people the night after to-morrow. I will send you a card. And, by the way, you had better tell Khris to call on me if he be in town. I will talk over with him what we can do for you.”

Mr. Winter, standing within earshot, at a discreet distance, to all appearance as bereft of sight and hearing, and impervious as a statue to all sight and sounds, lost not a syllable uttered by Lady Kenilworth, and approved of all. “It is clever of her,” he thought, “to be ready to go halves in the spoils with that old prince. Meet him half way, she does; mighty clever that; she’ll cut his claws and draw his teeth. She’s a lady of the right sort, she is. If she weren’t quite so clever she’d have him jealous of him and have made an enemy of him at the onset.”

His employer meantime was exhausting her somewhat limited vocabulary in agitated thanks and protestations of undying gratitude which Lady Kenilworth nipped in the bud by giving her two fingers chillily and hurrying away, her farewell glance being cast at the golden water-vase.

“Khris a house decorator and I a tout! How very dreadful it is! But hard times make strange trades,” thought the young mother of Jack and Boo, as she sank down on the soft seat of her little brougham, and was borne swiftly away to other houses, as the lamps begun to shine through the foggy evening air.

CHAPTER III.

Mrs. Massarene had conducted her visitor with great obsequiousness to the head of the staircase, and would have gone down the stairs with her had not Lady Kenilworth prevented such a demonstration.

“My dear creature, pray don’t! One only does that for royalty,” she had said, while a repressed grin was visible through the impassive masks of all the footmen’s faces where they stood above and below.

“How ever is one to know what’s right and what’s wrong,” thought the mistress of Harrenden House, resting her hands for a moment upon the carved rail of the balustrade, and eyeing nervously the naked boy of Clodion. That statue was very terrible to her; “To set a lad without any scrap o’ clothes on a-beckoning with a bird to everybody as come upstairs, I can’t think as it’s decent or proper,” she said constantly to her husband. But a master hand had indicated the top of the staircase as the proper place for that nude young falconer to stand, in all his mingled realism and idealization; therefore, no one could be bold enough to move him elsewhere, and he leaned airily against the old choir-carving, and wore a fawn-like smile as he tossed his hawk above his head and stretched his hand outward as though to beckon the crowds, which would not come, up that silent stair.

But the crowds were coming now!

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.

“What has oo brought me?” said the true child of modernity.

“Do you remember the sweeties at the Baths, my lovely darling?” stammered Mr. Massarene, immensely touched and gratified at the child’s recollection of him, and full of remorse that he had not rifled Regent Street.

“Boo always remembers her friends,” said Boo’s mother very pleasantly, as she delivered him from the Blenheims, and made him seat himself beside her.

“Old fat man’s come as was at Ombo; but he didn’t bring nothin’ for us,” said Boo to Jack at the nursery dinner ten minutes later. “Mammy’s goin’ to get somethin’ ’cos she was so civil to him.”

“Oo’re always thinkin’ of gettin’, Boo,” said Jack, with his rosy mouth full of mashed potato.

“What’s the use o’ peoples else?” said his sister solemnly, picking up the roast mutton which her nurse had cut up into little dice on her plate.

Jack pondered awhile upon this question.

“I likes peoples ’cos I like ’em,” he replied at last.

“You’re a boy!” returned his sister with withering contempt.

A week later, Boo’s mother, with a very gay and hilarious round dozen of friends, including her eldest sister, Lady Wisbeach, dined at Harrenden House, and the gentleman known as Harry took in Mrs. Massarene.

Two weeks later the Massarenes breakfasted in Stanhope Street expressly to meet an imperial grand duchess who at that time was running about London; and the grand duchess was very smiling and good-natured, and chattered volubly, and invited herself to dinner at Harrenden House.

“They do tell me,” she said graciously, “that you have such a wonderful Clodion.”

Three weeks later William Massarene allowed himself to be led into the purchase of a great Scotch estate of moor, seashore, and morass, in the extreme northwest of Scotland, which had come to Brancepeth through his late maternal grandmother, and which had been always considered as absolutely unsaleable on account of certain conditions attached to its purchase, and of the fact that it had been for many years ill-preserved and its sport ruined, the deer having been destroyed by crofters.

Brancepeth, who was primitive and simple in many of his ideas, had demurred to the transaction.

“This beggar don’t know anything about sport,” he said to the intermediary, Mouse; “’cause he’s buying a deer forest he takes for granted he’ll find deer. ’Tisn’t fair, you know. One ought to tell him that he’ll get no more stalking there than he’d get on Woolwich Common.”

“Why should you tell him anything?” said his friend. “He can ask a factor, can’t he?”

“Well, but it would only be honest, you know.”

“You are odiously ungrateful,” said Mouse with much heat. “I might have made the man buy Black Alder of us, and I chose to get him to buy your place instead.”

Brancepeth made a droll face very like what Jack would make when he kept in a naughty word for fear of his nurse. He thought to himself that the fair lady who was rating him knew very well that her share in the purchase-money of Black Alder, which belonged to her lord, would have been remarkably small, whilst her share of that of Blair Airon—but there are some retorts a man who is a gentleman cannot make, however obvious and merited they may be.

“Get him to buy ’em both,” he said, tossing cakes to the Blenheims. “You do what you like with the cad; turn him round your little finger. One’s just as much a white elephant as t’other, and it’s no use knowing sweeps unless you make ’em clean your chimneys.”

“Mr. Massarene is not a cad or a sweep,” said his friend in a tone of reproof. “He is a very clever man of business.”

“He must be to have to think of buying Blair Airon!”

“Probably he will make it productive. Or if he wants big game he’ll import it from the Rockies, or—or—from somewhere. What he wants is Scottish land; well, the land is there, isn’t it?”

She invariably glossed over to herself these transactions which she knew very well were discreditable, and she was always extremely angry with those who failed to keep up the glamour of fiction in which she arrayed them. Conscience she had not, in the full sense of the word, but she had certain instincts of breeding which made some of her own actions disagreeable to her, and only supportable if they were disguised, as a courtly chemist silvered for her the tonic pills which as courtly a physician prescribed when she, who could ride all day and dance all night, desired her nervous system to be found in jeopardy.

“He buys with his eyes open. No one has misrepresented anything,” she added calmly. “He can send an army of factors to look at the estate if he pleases. Pray don’t be a fool, Harry; and when your bread is buttered for you don’t quarrel with it.”

Harry did as he was bid.

His principles were not very fine, or very strong, but they were the instincts of a gentleman. They were smothered under the unscrupulousness of a woman who had influence over him, as so many of the best feelings and qualities of men often are. Blair Airon was sold to William Massarene; and at the same period many tradesmen in Paris and London who dealt in toilettes, perfumes, jewelry, fans and lingerie were agreeably surprised by receiving large instalments of what was due to them from their customer, Lady Kenilworth. To what better use could barren rocks, and dreary sands, and a dull rambling old house, which dated from James IV. and stood in the full teeth of the north wind facing the Orkneys, have possibly been put than to be thus transmuted into gossamer body linen, and petticoats covered with real lace, and exquisite essences, and fairy-like shoes, with jewels worked into their kid, and court trains, with hand-woven embroideries in gold and silver on their velvet?

If William Massarene discovered that he had bought a white elephant he never said so to anyone, and no one ventured to say so to him. All new men have a mania for buying Scotch shootings, and if there was little or nothing to shoot at Blair Airon the fact served for a laugh at the clubs when the purchaser was not present. The purchaser, however, knew well that there were no deer, and that there was scarce fur or feather on the barren soil; he had not bought without first “prospecting”; he was too old a hand at such matters. But he had turned a deaf ear to those in his interests who had drawn his attention to the fact, and he had signed and sealed the transfer of the estate to himself without a protest.

Nobody in North Dakota it is true could ever have cheated him out of a red deer or a red cent, but then nobody in North Dakota had ever held that magic key to the entrance of good society which he so ardently coveted. He was prepared to pay very liberally to obtain that key. He was far from generous by nature, but he could be generous to extravagance when it suited him to be so.

William Massarene was a short, broad, heavily-built man, like his wife in feature, and having, like her, a muddy-pale complexion which the Sierra suns had had no force to warm and the cold blasts of the North Pacific no power to bleach. His close-shut, thin, long lips, his square jaw, and his intent gray eyes, showed, however, in his countenance, a degree of volition and of intelligence which were his portion alone, and with which hers had no likeness. He was a silent, and seemed a dull, man; but he had a clear brain and a ruthless will, and he had in its full strength that genius for making money which is independent of education and scornful of culture, yet is the only original offspring of that modern life in which education is an institution and culture is a creed.

When he had been only eighteen years of age he had married Margaret Hogan, because she was a stout strong hard-working wench, and had at once taken a steerage ticket to New York.

When he reached the United States he had gone straightway to the new settlements in North Dakota, where cities consisted of plank-walks and shingle-roof shanties, and where the inhabitants of those cities were rougher and ruder even than himself. He had scent for wealth as a thirsty steer for distant water-springs, and he said to himself: “I won’t leave off till I’m second to Jay Gould.”

He began very modestly by employing himself as a pig-sticker and opening a pork shop in a town called Kerosene. His wife made and fried sausages to perfection. The shop became a popular resort, and, in the back room, miners, diggers, cattlemen, and all the roughs for miles around came to eat sausages, and found drinks, hot as flame, and play ad libitum. Sometimes they staked nuggets, and lost them.

William Massarene never played, he only watched the gamblers, and when they wanted money lent it to them, or if they sold a nugget bought it. They were a wild lot who cared neither for man nor devil; but he knew how to keep them in order with his cold grey eyes and his good six-shooter. Many swore that they would kill him or rob him; but nobody ever did either, though several tried to do both.

His wife was liked; hard-worked as she was she found time to do a good turn to sick neighbors unknown to him; and more than one rough fellow spared him because she had been kind to his kids or had brought some broth to his girl. The sausage-shop in dreary, dirty, plank-made Kerosene City was the foundation of his fortune.

How the place had stunk and how it had reeked with tobacco stench and echoed with foul outcries and the blows and shots of ruined and reckless men! Margaret Massarene often dreamt of it, and when she did so dream, woke, bathed in sweat, and filled with nameless terror.

Her husband never dreamed, except when wide-awake and of his own glories.

Kerosene City had long outgrown its infancy of planks and shingles, and had expanded into a huge town crammed with factories, and tall houses, tramways and elevators and churches, sky-scraping roofs, electric railways, chemical works, fire-belching foundries, hissing, screaming, vomiting machinery, and all the many joys of modern and American civilization.

But Kerosene City, most of it Mr. Massarene’s property, was but an item in the Massarene property. He had been in many trades and many speculations; he owned railway plant and cattle ranches and steam-boats and grain-depots, and docks and tramways and manufactories, and men and women and children labored for him day and night by thousands harder than the Israelites toiled for the Pharaohs.

Everything turned to gold that he touched. He bought for little with prodigious insight and sold for much with the same intuition. No foolish scruples hampered his acquisitiveness, no weak-minded compassion ever arrested him on any road which led to his own advantage. He had never been known to relent or to regret, to give except in ostentation, or to stir a step unless self-interest suggested and self-recompense awaited it. Herbert Spencer has said that kindness and courtesy are indispensable to success: William Massarene knew better than that philosopher. He had lived amongst men, and not amongst books. In the land of his adoption his fellows feared him as they feared no one else; his few short hard words cut them like the knotted lash of an overseer’s whip. He was dreaded, obeyed, hated: that was all the feeling he cared to excite.

Whilst he remained in that country he never lived like a man of any means; he never spent a dollar on personal ease or comfort; but it was known far and wide that after Vanderbilt and Pullman the biggest pile in the States was his; his wife alone did not know it.

To the day that she sailed past Sandy Hook on her way home Margaret Massarene had never ceased to work hard and to save any red cent she could. She knew nothing of his business, of his ambitions, of his hoarded wealth; when he took a first-class cabin on a Cunard steamer and bade her get a sealskin cloak for the voyage and buy herself a handsome outfit, she was astounded.

“We’ll come back great folks and buy out the old ’uns,” he had said to her thirty-five years earlier, as they had meekly set down their bundles and umbrellas amongst the steerage passengers of the emigrant ship and seen the shores of Ireland fade from their sight as the day had waned. All through the thirty-five years which he had spent on alien soil he had never forgotten his object; he had lived miserably, saving and screwing, paring and hoarding, happy in the knowledge that his “pile” grew and grew and grew, a little bigger, a little broader, with every day which dawned; and when it was big enough and broad enough for him to sit on it, monarch of all which he might choose to survey, he said to his wife: “Marg’ret, woman, it’s time to shut up the store. We’ll be going home, I’m thinkin’, and buyin’ the old ’uns out. I said as I’d do it, didn’t I, five-and-thirty year agone?”

And his wife, being only a woman and therefore foolish, burst out crying and threw her apron over her head.

“But the dear old folk they be dead, William; and dead be my poor babies too!”

Then her William smiled; a very rare thing to see was a smile on his tight straight lips.

“’Tisn’t those old folks I’m meanin’—and ye’ve your daughter surely to comfort ye; we’ll marry her to a lord duke.”

Margaret Massarene had dried her tears knowing that weeping would not bring her back her old parents whose bones lay under the rich grass in Kilrathy, nor her little lost boys who had been killed—two in a blizzard on the cruel central plains, and one in a forest fire by a rushing herd of terrified cattle. She had dried her tears, bought her sealskins and velvets as she was bidden to do, and come eastward with her lord in all the pomp and plenty which can be purchased on a first-class ocean steamer, and when the distant line of the low green shores of Cork became visible to her, she had turned round the rings on her large fingers and patted the heavy bracelets on her wrists to make sure that both were real, and said in her own heart if only the old people had been living, if only her three boys had been there beside her, if only she could go once more a buxom girl in a cotton frock through the sweet wet grass with her milking stool! But William Massarene, as he looked at the low green shores, had no such fond and futile regrets; he set his legs wide apart and crossed his hands on the handle of his stick and said only to himself, with a pride which was fairly legitimate if its sources were foul—

“I did as I said I’d do; I’ve come back as I said I’d come back.”

For him, the herdsman who had tramped to and fro the pastures in the falling rain, carrying a newly-dropped calf after its mother, or driving a heifer to meet the butcher’s knife, had been dead and gone for five-and-thirty years; there was only alive now William Massarene, millionaire ten times over, who had the power of the purse in his pocket and meant to buy Great Britain and Ireland with it.

As yet, he had, in his own ambitious sense of the words, failed to buy them. He remained one of the obscure rich, who are unknown to fame and to princes. It was not for lack of expenditure that he had hitherto failed to gratify his social ambitions. He had not understood how to set about the matter; he had been timid and awkward; his wife had been a drag on him, and his daughter, on whom he had counted for the best of assistance, had declined to accept the office which he assigned to her. He had lost time, missed occasions, failed to advance to his goal in a manner which intensely irritated a man who had never before this been foiled or baulked in any of his plans. He had learned that the great world was not a drinking den, to be entered by “bluff,” with a nugget in one hand and a revolver in the other; and in this stage of chagrin and disappointment, Lady Kenilworth held out her hand to him. He had done all that he knew how to do. He had been returned for a metropolitan division and elected to the Carlton. He and his wife had been presented at Court almost as soon as they had arrived in England. They had been invited to a few political houses. They had gone where everybody went in summer, winter, spring, and autumn. His subscriptions were many and large. His financial value was recognized by Conservative leaders. But there he remained. He was an outsider, and in this period of perplexity, disappointment, and futile aspirations to the “smart world,” Lady Kenilworth, the high priestess of smartness, held out her hand to him.

CHAPTER IV.

Lady Kenilworth was the prettiest woman in England; her family, the Courcys of Faldon, was renowned for physical charms, and she was the loveliest of them all, exactly reproducing a famous Romney which portrayed the features of her great great grandmother.

She had eyes like forget-me-nots, a brilliantly fair skin, a purely classic profile, a mass of sunny shining hair, which needed no arts to brighten or to ripple it, and a carriage, which for airy grace and supreme distinction, had its equal nowhere among her contemporaries. Her baptismal name of Clare had been almost entirely abandoned by her relatives and friends, and she was always called by them Mouse, a nickname given her in nursery days when she pillaged her elder sisters’ bonbons and made raids on the early strawberry beds, and which had gained in the course of time many variations, such as Sourisette, Petit Rat, Topinetta, Fine-ears, Liebe Mus, and any other derivative which came to the lips of her associates.

She had a mouse painted on the panels of her village cart, stamped in silver on her note paper, mounted in gold on her riding whip, cut in chrysoprase as a charm, and made of diamonds as a locket; and many and various were the forms in which the little rodent was offered to her by her adorers on New Year’s Day and at Easter. She had, indeed, so identified herself with the nickname, that when she signed her name in a royal album, or to a ceremonious letter, she had great difficulty in remembering to write herself down Clare Kenilworth.

When she had been brought out at eighteen years old, she had been the idol of the season; people had stood on chairs and benches in the Park to see her drive to her first Drawing-room. It was not only her physical charms which were great, but her manner, her scornful grace, her airy hauteur, and the mixture in her expression of daredevil audacity and childlike innocence, were fascinations all her own. The way she wore her clothes, the way she moved, the things she said, the challenge of her sapphire eyes, were all enchanting and indescribable. She “fetched the town” as soon as she was out in an amazing manner; and it was thought that she had thrown away her chances in an astonishing degree when it was known that she had accepted the hand of a little mauvais sujet, known as Cocky to all London and half Europe, who passed his time in the lowest company he could find, and was without stamina, principles, or credit. But she knew what she was about, and without giving any explanation to her people, she dismissed the best men, and decided to select the worst she could find; the worst, at least, physically and morally.

True, he always looked a gentleman, even when he was soaked in brandy and gin as the wick of a tea-kettle is soaked in spirits of wine. Cocky’s hands, Cocky’s profile, Cocky’s slow soft voice, had always proclaimed his race, even whilst he chaffed a cabman whom he could not pay.

True, he was by courtesy Earl of Kenilworth, and would certainly be, if he outlived his father, Duke of Otterbourne; but then he was besides that and beyond that to all his world—Cocky, and a more disreputable little sinner than Cocky it would have been hard to find in the peerage or out of it.

But Cocky “suited her book”; and to the horror of her own family and the amazement of his, this radiant débutante selected as her partner for life this little drunkard, who had one lung already gone and who formed the whipping-boy and stalking-horse of every Radical newspaper in Great Britain.

At a garden party on the river Lord Kenilworth showed himself for once in decent society, and unfuddled by pick-me-ups and eye-openers. He walked alone with the beauty of the year under an elm avenue by the waterside, and this was their conversation:

“You won’t expect much of me?” he said, with his glass in his eye, looking vaguely down the river. “My wretched health, you know; er—there’s one good thing about it for you—I may kick over the bucket any day; one lung gone, you know.”

“Yes,” replied his companion; “I’ve always heard so. But you’ll let me hang on my own hook, drive my own team, won’t you?”

Cocky nodded. He perfectly understood the allegorical phrases.

“Oh, Lord, yes,” he made answer. “I’m a very easy-going fellow. Take my own way and let other people take theirs.”

“I warn you I shall take mine,” said the young beauty—she looked him full in the eyes. Cocky’s own pale, drowsy eyes looked back into hers with so cynical a smile in them that for once she was disconcerted.

“Lord, what’ll that matter to me?” he responded candidly. “I only marry to make the Pater come down with the flimsy. We shall have to agree over financial questions, you and I, that’s all. Most married people only meet over the accounts, you know.”

The young lady laughed.

“Very well, then. If you see it in that sensible light, we’ll say it’s concluded.”

Cocky had a gleam of conscience in his brandy-soaked soul. “You might do better, you know,” he said slowly. “You’re awfully fetching and you’re very young, and I’m—well, I’m a bad lot—and—and wretched health, you know.”

“I know; but you suit me,” said his companion with brevity. “I shall have the jewels, sha’n’t I?”

“Yes; I’ve spoken to the Pater; he’ll let you have ’em.”

“Tôpe là donc!” she said frankly, and she held out her pretty gloved right hand. Cocky respectfully kissed the tips of her fingers. Then he grinned.

“Let’s go and ask the Pater’s blessing! He’s over there with the Princess.”

“The devil take her if she hasn’t got some card up her sleeve that she don’t show me,” he thought as he continued to walk on beside her. “But she’s awfully fetching, and she’ll be great fun, and the Pater will think I’m reforming, and he’ll come down with the blunt, and what a wax Beric’ll be in!”

Beric was his next brother, Alberic Orme.

Meantime the lovely and youthful creature, who brushed the grass with her bronze kid boots beside him, pursued similar reflections.

“He don’t look as if he’d live a year; and he’s too far gone to bother me much, and such a crétin as that Harry won’t mind, and the vulture’s egg is worth a little worry.”

Her relatives, and especially her eldest brother, were horrified by her decision; but their persuasions and their entreaties were as ineffectual as their condemnation.

“He will let me do as I like, and I shall have the vulture’s egg,” she invariably answered. The vulture’s egg was a great diamond, so called, which, while it had been in the possession of each succeeding Duchess of Otterbourne, had rendered her the envied of all her sex. One of the family, present at the battle of Plassy, as a volunteer, had taken it from the turban of a native prince whom he had slain. It was a yellow diamond of great size and effulgence; and if she married Cocky she could, she hoped, wear it at once, as his mother had been dead many years.

“You marry that little wretch for the sake of that looted jewel!” said her brother Hurstmanceaux, furious.

“Many people don’t marry anything half as nice as a jewel,” she replied calmly, and she persisted and did give her hand to the sickly little man with a classic profile and a ruined constitution, of whom his own father was ashamed.

Cocky was a slight, pale, feminine-looking person, with very light eyes, which were usually without any expression at all in them, but now and then at rare intervals could flash with a steely sharpness. His wife knew those electric flashes of those colorless orbs, and was as afraid of them as it was possible to the intrepid nature of a Courcy of Faldon to be ever afraid.

Cocky, however, possessed some excellent qualities. Other men were garrulous and confidential after drinking; but the more Cocky drank the more wary and the more silent he became. The tacit compact they made on that day of their betrothal, when they had walked beside the Thames together, was never broken on her side or his. They never interfered with each other, and they were at times almost cordial allies when it was a question of playing into each other’s hands against some detested third person, or of deriving some mutual advantage from some mutual concessions.

He usually let her have her own way as she had stipulated, for it was the easiest and most profitable way for himself.

He was very lazy and wholly unscrupulous. Many thousands of pounds of good money had been spent on his education; tutors of the best intellect and the best morals had trained him from seven to twenty-one: his father, though a vain man, was of immaculate honor; every kind of inducement and pressure was put on him to be a worthy representative of a noble name; and nature had given him plenty of brains. Yet, so pigheaded is human nature, or so faulty is the English system of patrician education, that Cocky, for all practical result to his bringing up, might have been reared in a taproom and have matriculated in a thieves’ quarter.

“Queer, monstrous queer,” thought his father often, with an agony of irritation and regret. “Train a child in the way he should go and hang me if he won’t go just t’other way to spite you.”

Cocky was a very old child at the time of his marriage; he was thirty-seven years of age, with his thin, fair hair turning very grey, and one lung nearly gone as he had declared; but he did not evince the slightest desire to reform, and he took money in all ways, good, bad, and indifferent, in which it offered itself to him.

“What a man to leave behind one!” thought Otterbourne very often, with real shame and sorrow at his heart.

He was himself a very good man, and a gentleman to the marrow of his bones; his vanities were harmless, and his little airs of youth were not ridiculous because he was still very handsome and well preserved.

By what horrible fatality, he often asked himself, was Cocky the heir of his dukedom? He had three other sons, all men of admirable conduct and health, both moral and physical. By what extraordinary irony and brutality of fate had his eldest son, who had enjoyed every possible benefit from early training and good influences, become what he was? His wife had been a saint, and, for the first ten years of his life Cocky had been as pretty and promising a boy as ever rejoiced the heart of parents.

She had given birth to the four charming little children whose names were recorded in Burke, and who were admired by all the women they met when they toddled along the sunny side of the Park, or drove in their basket carriage behind their two sleek donkeys with Jack holding the reins and a groom walking at the asses’ heads.

They were pretty babies, dear little men and women, with big black eyes and golden masses of hair, and skins as soft and as fair as blush-roses; she was fond of them but they could not have much space in her life, it had been already so very full when they had come into it. She had never a moment to herself unless it were the time of meditation which her bath gave her, or the minutes in which, alone in her little brougham, she rushed from one house to another.

Cocky went about with his wife quite often enough to set a good example. Not into society indeed, Cocky had a society of his own to which he was faithful, but he was always there when wanted—in the London house, in the country houses, in the Paris hotel, at the German bath—he was always there in the background, a shadowy presence letting himself in and out with noiseless and discreet footsteps, a permanent sanction and indisputable guarantee that all was as it should be, and that Lady Kenilworth, with the big diamond of his House on her fair bosom, could attend a Drawing-room or a State ball whenever she chose. He really kept his part of the compact with a loyalty which better men might have not shown, for better men would not have had his inducements or his patience to do so.

Their financial embarrassments were chronic, but never interfered with their expenditure. Money was always got somehow for anything that they really wished to do. They were at all places in their due season, and their own houses never saw them except when there was a house-party to be entertained, or a royal visit to be received. True Cocky on such occasions was usually indisposed and unseen, but that fact did not greatly matter to anyone. It was an understood thing in society that he had motor ataxy, a very capricious disease as everyone knows; putting you in purgatory one day and letting you sup with ballet-girls the next. And Cocky had this useful faculty of the well-born and naturally well-bred man that he could, when he chose, pull himself out of the slough, remember his manners, and behave as became his race. But it bored him excruciatingly, and the effort was brief.

The marriage, on a whole, if they had not been continually in difficulties about money, might fairly have been called as happy as most marriages are. When they quarreled it was in private, and when they combined they were dangerous to their families.

She knew that she was never likely ever again to find anyone quite so reasonable, quite so useful as he.

He had, immediately on their marriage, been on very good terms with her friend Harry; and when there was later on question of other friends beside Harry he did not feel half so much irritation at the fact as did Harry himself.

He had learned what card it had been which she had kept up her sleeve when she had spoken with such apparent frankness as she had walked along the grass path by the Thames. But he had never made a fuss about it. He really thought Harry a very good fellow though “deuced poor, deuced poor,” he said sometimes shaking his head.

Harry, too, was useful and unobtrusive, always ready to get theatre stalls, or make up a supper party, or row the stablemen if the horses got out of form, or go on beforehand to see the right rooms were taken at Homburg or Biarritz, or Nice. A good-natured fellow, too, was Harry; sort of fellow who would pawn his last shirt for you if he liked you. Cocky always nodded to him, and used his cigar-case, and sauntered with him for appearance sake down Pall Mall or Piccadilly in the most amicable manner possible.

Cocky was a nursery nickname which had gone with him to Eton, and from Eton into the world, and Kenny was an abbreviation of his courtesy title which was unfortunately in use even amongst the cabmen, policemen, crossing-sweepers, and match-sellers of that district of Mayfair where he dwelt whilst awaiting the inheritance of Otterbourne House.

“Jump in, boy,” said the driver of a hansom to a telegraph lad, who had hailed him at the same time as Lord Kenilworth. “Jump in, a growler’s good enough for Kenny. He wants to get slow over the ground to give my lady time with her fancy-man.”

There was something about him which made all manly men, of whatever class, from cabdrivers to his own brothers and brother-in-law, perpetually desire to kick him. He knew that men wished to kick him; and he did not try to kick them in return. He wore his degradation smilingly, as if it were an Order.

“That is the utterly hopeless thing about him,” said his father once.

The Ormes had always been great people—true, staunch, polished gentlemen, holding a great stake in the country, and holding it worthily, riding straight, and living honorably. By what caprice of chance, what irony of fate, had this stalwart and high-principled race produced such a depraved and degenerate being as Cocky?

“There must be something very wrong in our social system that so many of our men of position are no sounder than rotten apples,” the duke said once to a person, who replied that there were black sheep in all countries. “Yes, but our black sheep are labeled prize rams,” replied Otterbourne.

The four little children in the nurseries did not give him much consolation. The gossip of society hung over them like a cloud in his sight, and there were none of those dark sleepy eyes in his family portraits at Staghurst.

“There are no black-eyed Ormes in our family portraits,” he said once to his eldest son; and Cocky’s face wore for an instant a droll expression, and his left eye winked. But it was only for an instant.

“There’s a legend,” he said, rolling a cigarette; “Richard Orme married a gipsy in William Rufus’s time. Lord, who shall say to where the brats throw back?”

“Who indeed?” said the duke with a significance which penetrated even the Cognac-sodden brains of his heir.

But the legend did really exist, and when the children’s mother heard of the gipsy of William Rufus’s time she thought the legend a very interesting one and very useful.

But who could blame Cocky’s wife for anything? Besides, the duke was of that old English temper, now grown so rare, which thought dishonor carried into a law court was only made much worse by the process, and was painfully conscious that Kenilworth, although he looked like a gentleman, spoke like one, moved like one, and wore his clothes like one, was in many sorrowful respects a cad. But a clever cad! Yes, Cocky was clever by nature, if not by study; that was perhaps the very worst part of the whole matter. He could play the fool—did play it almost perpetually—but he had not been born a fool.

There was not even that excuse for him.

He was a man of considerable intelligence, whom indolence, depravity, and disinclination to take trouble had made approach very nearly to an idiot. But, as his mind had odd nooks and corners in it, which contained out-of-the-way scraps of learning sometimes profound, so his character had, occasionally, spasms in it of resolve and of volition, which showed that he might have been a different person to the mere nonentity and lounger that he was, if he had been forced to work for his living. As it was he was the butt of his friends, the torture of his father, the ridicule of his wife, and the favorite whipping-boy of the press and public, when they wanted indirectly to slate a prince or directly to pillory an order. As a gun loaded to the muzzle, which could at any moment be discharged with deadly effect at the Upper House, he was unspeakably dear to the Radicals.

One day, in a Hyde Park meeting met to howl against the Lords, Cocky, who was riding his cob down the road past the Achilles, heard his own name spoken, and his fitness for an hereditary legislator irreverently denied. He stopped to listen, putting his glass in his eye to see his adversaries.

“My good people, you are all wrong,” he called to them at a pause in the oration. “I’m a commoner. Plain John Orme, without a shilling to bless myself with. Don’t suppose I shall ever live to get into the Lords. The Pater’s lungs are much sounder than mine, and his politics too; for he’d trounce you all round, and give each of you a horse-drench.”

So oddly constituted are mobs, that this one laughed and cheered him for the speech, and Cocky, much diverted, got off his cob in Hamilton Place, at the Batchelor’s Club, and went to refresh his throat with a glass of brandy.

It was his sole appearance in public life.

“Told ’em you’d give each of ’em a horse-drench,” he said with a faint chuckle, the next time he saw his father.

“Thanks,” said Otterbourne; “and if they break my windows the next time they’re out, will you pay for the glazier?”

“Never pay for anything,” said Cocky, solemnly and truthfully. And it was probably the only truthful word that he had spoken for many years.

CHAPTER V.

“Ronnie,” said Mouse to her elder brother one morning, “I don’t think I’ve ever told you about those new people to whom Gerald sold Vale Royal——”

“To whom you sold Vale Royal,” said Lord Hurstmanceaux with curt significance.

She colored; she did not like her brother’s rough and blunt ways of putting things, though it was a Courcy habit into which she herself lapsed in cynical and imprudent moments.

She let the subject pass, however, and continued as if she had not heard the correction.

“They are such fun; you can’t imagine how delightful they are; and they have made Harrenden House a paradise. When I came from Cairo they were already in it. Old Prince Khris had done it all.”

“There are a good many such dollar-lined paradises in London,” said Hurstmanceaux. “I’d rather you didn’t go into them. But, of course, you do as you like.”

“Of course I do! Old Khris arranged the house for them.”

Hurstmanceaux laughed.

“Khris and you! They will be warm people indeed if they have even a paire pour le soif left for themselves between you two. Poor devils! I think I’ll go and give them the lay of the course.”

“My dear Ronnie! How absurd you are. If anybody heard you they might think you were in earnest.”

Hurstmanceaux looked at his sister with a shrewd, appreciative scorn in his eyes.

“They might,” he said gravely. “I am usually in earnest, my dear.”

“I know you are and it is a horrid thing to be,” she replied with petulance. “Earnest people are always such bores.” Then, remembering that she would not produce the effect she desired by abusing him, she changed her tone.

“Dearest Ronald, these persons are coming here to-morrow night. Let me present them to you; and if you would but say a good word for them in the world——”

He was silent.

“I think, you know,” she murmured softly, “that as they bought Gerald’s place they naturally rather look to us all to make things pleasant for them.”

Hurstmanceaux put the white small ringed finger off his coat with a gesture which had sternness in it.

“My dear child, you are Delilah to all men born of Adam; but not to me, not to me, my child, because you are my sister. The Lord be praised for His mercies! If you had not been my sister I should have had no strength against you probably. As it is, I won’t keep bad company, my dear, even to please you.”

“Bad company! They are most estimable people.”

“I am happy to hear so, since you let them in here.”

“But everybody is going to know them.”

“Then why should you care about my knowing them too?”

“That is just——” began his sister, and paused, scanning the little mouse embroidered on her handkerchief.

“Take your eyes off that bit of gossamer and look at me,” said Hurstmanceaux severely. “You do this kind of thing. Cocky does it. You make Gerald do it. But I’ll be damned, my dear, if you make me.”

She was mute, distressed, irritated, not seeing very well what to say or resent.

“Get up a firm with old Khris,” continued her brother; “Khris and Kenilworth; it will run very nicely and take the town like wildfire; I am convinced that it will; but Hurstmanceaux as ‘Co.’—no thank you.”

“You don’t even hear me,” said his sister rather piteously.

“I know all you’re going to say,” he replied. “You mean to float these people, and you’ll do it. You’ll get ’em to State concerts, and you’ll get ’em to Marlborough House garden-parties, and you’ll get ’em to political houses, and you’ll ram ’em down all our throats, and take the princes to dine with ’em; I know all that; it’s always the same programme; and the he-beast will get a baronetcy, and the she-beast will get to Hatfield, and you’ll run them just as Barnum used to run his giants and dwarfs, and you’ll make a pot by it as Barnum did. Only leave me out of the thing, if you please.”

“Why shouldn’t you be the sleeping partner?” said his sister jestingly, but with a side glance of her lovely eyes which had a timid and keen interrogation in it. “Nobody’d be the wiser, and your word has such weight.”

“Don’t make that sort of suggestion, my dear, even in joke. Gerald has helped you; I am not Gerald. You’ve made him dance to your tune through a lot of mud, but you won’t make me. There are enough of the family in this shabby kind of business as it is.”

“Oh, Ronald!——”

“You see, Sourisette,” he added, “you are always telling me that I wear my clothes too long; you’ve often seen me in an old coat, in a shockingly old coat; but you never saw me in an ill-cut one. Well, I like my acquaintances to be like my clothes. They may be out at elbows, but I must have ’em well cut.”

Lady Kenilworth gazed at her pocket-handkerchief for a few minutes in disturbed silence.

“Is that the tone you mean to take about my new people?” she asked at last.

“My dearest Sourisette, I don’t take any tone. These richards from the Northwest are nothing to me. You are taking them up, and getting Carrie to take them up, because you mean to get lots of good things out of them. No one can possibly know ‘a bull-dozing boss’ from North Dakota for any other reason than to plunder him.”

“Oh, Ronald! What coarse and odious things you say!”

Her exclamation was beseeching and indignant; a little flush of color went over her fair cheeks. “You shouldn’t be so hard upon one,” she added. “Some poet has said that poverty gives us strange bed-fellows.”

“We need never lie down on the bed; we can lie in our own straw.”

“But if we have used up all our straw?”

“Then we can go out of doors and sleep à la belle étoile.”

“And the rural constable will pass by with his lanthorn, and wake us up, and run us in! Oh, my dear Ronald, you don’t know what it is to want a sovereign every moment. You’re unmarried, and you shoot with a keeper’s gun, and you yacht in an old wooden tub, and you lounge about all over the world with your places shut up, and your town-house let; what can you tell, what can you dream, of the straits Cocky and I are put to every single minute of our lives?”

“Because you won’t pull up and lead sensible lives,” said Hurstmanceaux. “You must always be in the swim, always at the most ruinously expensive places. Can’t you exist without tearing over Europe and bits of Africa every year? Did our forefathers want Cairene winters? Couldn’t they fish and shoot, and dance and flirt, without Norway and the Riviera? Wasn’t their own county town enough for them? Weren’t their lungs capable of breathing without Biskra? Weren’t they quite as good sportsmen as we are with only their fowling-pieces? Quite as fine ladies as you are, though they saw to their still-rooms?”

“Their women look very nice in the Romneys and Reynolds,” said Mouse. “But you might as well ask why we don’t go from Derby to Bath in a coach-and-six. Autre temps autre moeurs. There is nothing else to be said. Would you yourself use your grandfather’s gun? Why should I see to my still-room?

“I do wish,” she continued, “that you would talk about what you understand. I will send you the bill for the children’s boots and shoes, just to show you what it costs one merely to have them properly shod.”

“Poor little souls!” said Hurstmanceaux, with his smile which people called cynical. “I don’t think they are the heaviest of your expenses. I believe you could live with the whole lot of them in a cottage at Broadstairs or Herne Bay all the year round for about what your hunting mares cost you in one season.”

“Don’t be an ass, Ronald,” said his sister crossly; “what is the use of talking of things that nobody can do, any more than they can wear their fustian clothes or wooden shoes? You will know what I mean some day when you’re married. We are worse off than the match-sellers, than the crossing-sweepers. They can do as they like, but we can’t.”

“Life isn’t all skittles and swipes,” observed Hurstmanceaux. “You always seem to think it is.”

But she, disregarding him, went on in her wrath:

“It is a thousand times worse to be poor in our world than to be beggars on the high road. If they keep in with the police they’re all right, but our police are all round us every minute of our lives, spying to see if we have a man less in the anterooms, a hoof less in the stables, if we have the same gown on, or the same houses open; if we’ve given up any club, any habit, any moors, any shooting; if the prince talks as much to us as usual, or the princess asks us to drive with her; if we go away for the winter to shut up a place, or make lungs an excuse for getting away to avoid Scotland; they are eternally staring, commenting, annotating, whispering over all we do; we can never get away from them; and we daren’t retrench a halfpenny’s worth, because if we did, the tradespeople would think we were ruined and all the pack would be down on us.”

“There is some truth in that, my poor Mouse, I must allow,” said her brother with a shade of unwilling sympathy in his tone. “But it’s a beggarly rotten system to live your lives out on, and I think Broadstairs would be the better part, if you could only make up your mind to it. It would be only one effort instead of a series of efforts, and the cheap trippers wouldn’t be worse than the Mastodons; at least you wouldn’t have to do so much for them.”

“Massarenes,” said his sister with an impatient dive for the silver poker, and another dive with it at the fire. “The name isn’t such a bad name. It might have been Healy, it might have been Murphy.”

“It might have even been Biggar,” replied Hurstmanceaux, amused. “Possibilities in the ways of horror are infinite when we once begin opening our doors to people whom nobody knows. Practically, there need be no end to it.”

Mouse, leaning softly against her brother, with her hand caressing the lapel of his coat, said sweetly and insidiously:

“There is an only daughter, Ronald—an only child.”

“Indeed!”

“She will be an immense heiress,” sighed his sister. “Everybody will be after her.”

“Everybody bar one,” said her brother.

“And why bar one?”

His face darkened. “Don’t talk nonsense!” he said curtly. “I don’t like you when you are impertinent. It is a pity Cocky ever saw you; the Massarene alliance would have suited him down to the ground.”

“She would have been millions of miles too good for him!” said Cocky’s wife, with boundless contempt. “They don’t want merely rank; they want character.”

“My dear Mouse,” said Hurstmanceaux, “the other day a young fellow went into a café in Paris, had a good soup, fish, and roti, and three cups of coffee. An unfeeling landlord arrested him as he was about to go off without paying. The people in the streets pitied him, on the whole, but they thought the three cups of coffee too much. ‘Ca c’est trop fort de café,’ said a workman in a blouse to me. In a similar manner, allow me to remark that if your new friends, in addition to the smart dinner of rank, require the strong coffee of character, they are too exacting. The people in the streets won’t let them have both.”

Lady Kenilworth felt very angry at this impudent anecdote, and pulled to pieces some narcissus standing near her in an old china bowl.

“The analogy don’t run on all fours,” she said petulantly. “My people can pay. You have a right to anything if you only pay enough for it.”

“Most things—not everything quite,” said her brother indolently, as he took up his hat and cane and whistled his collie dog, who was playing with the Blenheims. “Not everything quite—yet,” he repeated, as if the declaration refreshed him. “You have not the smallest effect upon me, and you will not present your protégés to me—remember that, once for all. Adieu!”

Then he touched her lightly and affectionately on her fair hair, shook himself like a dog who has been in dirty water, and left her.

Mouse, who was not a patient or resigned woman by nature, flashed a furious glance after him from the soft shade of her dark eyelashes, and her white teeth gnawed restlessly and angrily the red and lovely under-lip beneath them. He could have done so much if he would! His opinion was always listened to, and his recommendation was so rarely given that it always carried great weight. He would have told her that they were so respected precisely because he did not do such things as this which she wanted him to do.

He was a very tall and extremely handsome man, with a debonnair and careless aspect, and a distinguished way of wearing his clothes which made their frequent shabbiness look ultra chic. The Courcy beauty had been a thing of note for many generations, and he had as full a share of it as his sister, whom he strongly resembled. He was fourteen years older than she, and she had long been accustomed to regard him as the head of her House, for he had succeeded to the earldom when a schoolboy, and she had never known her father. He had tried his best to alter the ways of the Kenilworth establishment, but he had failed. If he talked seriously to his sister, it always ended in his paying some bill; if he talked seriously to his brother-in-law, it always ended in his being asked to settle some affair about an actress or a dispute in a pot-house. They both used him—used him incessantly; but they never attended to his counsels or his censure. They both considered that as he was unmarried, spent little, and was esteemed stingy, they really only did him a service in making him “bleed” occasionally.

“He’s such a close-fisted prig,” said Lord Kenilworth, and his wife always agreed to the opinion.

“Ronnie is a bore,” she said, “he is always asking questions. If anybody wants to do any good they should do it with their eyes shut, and their mouths shut; a kindness is no kindness at all if it is made the occasion for an inquisitorial sermon. Ronnie does not often refuse one in the end, but he is always asking why and how and what, and wanting to go to the bottom of the thing, and it is never anything that concerns him. If he would just do what one wants and say nothing, it would be so much nicer, so much more delicate; I cannot endure indelicacy.”

The Kenilworths, like many other wedded people, had no common bond whatever, except when they were united against somebody else; they bickered, sneered, and quarreled whenever they were by any rare chance alone, but when it was a question of attacking any third person their solidarity was admirable. Hurstmanceaux seemed to them both to have been created by nature and law to be of use to them, to carry them over troublesome places, and to lend them the ægis of his unblemished name; but of any gratitude to him neither ever dreamed; it always seemed to them that he did next to nothing for them, though if the little folks upstairs had roast mutton and sago pudding, and if the servants in Stanhope Street got their wages with any regularity, it was usually wholly due to his intervention.

He had succeeded to heavily encumbered estates, and the years of his minority, though they had done something, had not done much toward lessening the burden which lay on the title, and he had always been a poor man. But now, when he was nearing forty years of age, he could say that he was a free one.

To obtain such freedom it had required much self-denial and philosophy, and he had incurred much abuse in his family and out of it, and, as he was by nature careless and generous, the restraint upon his inclinations had been at times irksome and well-nigh unendurable. But he had adhered to the plan of retrenchment which he had cut out for himself, and it had been successful in releasing him from all obligations without selling a rood of land on any estate, or cutting any more timber than was necessary to the health of the woods themselves. He was called “the miser” commonly amongst his own people; but he did not mind the nickname; he kept his hands clean and his name high, which was more than do all his contemporaries and compeers.

When he had left his sister this morning, and had got as far as the head of the staircase, his heart misgave him. Poor Mousie, had he been too rough on her? Did she really want money? He turned back and entered the little room again where Lady Kenilworth was sitting before the hearth, her elbow on her knee, her cheek on her hand, her blue eyes gazing absently on the fire.

He came up to her and laid his hand on her shoulder.

“My dear Sourisette! Are you troubled about money?”

“You know I always am, Ronnie,” she said impatiently. “It is chronic with us; it always will be; even when the Poodle goes to glory it will be hardly any better. You know that.”

The Poodle was the irreverent nickname given to the Duke of Otterbourne by his eldest son and that son’s wife, on account of his fleecy-white hair and his bland ceremonious manners of the old school, at which they saw fit to laugh irreverently.

“My poor child! If you have no more solid resource than to decant Poodle’s demise your prospects look blue; I always tell you so. Poodle means living and loving on into the twentieth century, never doubt that.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Mouse very angrily. “He will always do everything which can by any possibility most annoy us.”

“But are you in any especial difficulty at this moment, Sourisette?” asked her brother in a very kind and tender tone intended to invite her confidence.

“What is especial with other people is chronic with me,” she replied pettishly. “My worries and miseries are as eternal as Poodle’s youth and courtships.”

“But do you want money—well, more than usual?”

“I always want it,” replied Mouse. “Everybody always wants it, except you.”

“I know you always say that. I want it very much just now. But if it’s anything for the children——”

“You are a model uncle out of a fairy book! No; it is not for the mites; they get their bread and milk and mutton chops—as yet. It is, it is—well, if you really care to know, these people are horribly rude and pressing, and I haven’t even a hundred pounds to throw them as a sop.”

She leaned back toward her writing-table which stood beside the hearth, and, tossing its litter of paper to and fro, took from the chaos a letter from a famous firm of Bond Street tradesmen, and gave it to her brother.

“As he is in the mood he may as well pay something,” she thought. “It would be a pity not to bleed the miser when one can.”

Lord Hurstmanceaux ran his eyes quickly over the letter, and a pained look passed over his face, an expression of annoyance and regret.

She was Kenilworth’s wife, and had been long out of her brother’s guardianship, but it hurt him to think that she exposed herself to these insults, these importunities, these humiliations.

“My dear Clare, why will you lay yourself open to be addressed in this manner?” he said gravely, and when he called her Clare she knew that he was very greatly displeased. “Why will you not pull your life together into some degree of order? Why descend to the level on which it is possible for your tradesmen to write to you in such terms as these?”

Lady Kenilworth, who was the most caline and coaxing of women when she chose, as she could be the most autocratic and brusque when she was with people she despised, rose, looked up in her brother’s face, and stroked the lappet of his coat with her pretty slender hand sparkling with its many rings.

“Write me a little check, Ronnie,” she said, “and don’t put my name; make it payable to bearer.”

He shook his head.

“Little checks or big checks, Mousie, don’t find their way to your tradesmen. You have played me that trick more than once; I will go to these people myself and pay them the whole account; but——”

“Oh, don’t pay them the whole!” said Mouse uneasily. “That would be great waste of money. If you can really spare me as much as this give it to me; I will find a thousand better uses for it than——”

“Paying a bill? I dare say. Sheridan was of your opinion; and when he was dying they sold his bed from under him.”

“They won’t sell mine, because my brother will be by my bedside,” said Mouse with a sunny yet plaintive smile in her forget-me-not like eyes.

“Don’t trust too much to that, my dear; I am mortal, and a good many years older than you,” he answered gravely as he folded up the Bond Street tradesmen’s threatening letter and put it in his coat pocket.

“You had better write a check for me, Ronald, indeed,” said his sister coaxingly; “it will look odd if you pay this, or if your people pay it, and I could do a great deal with all that money.”

“You would do everything except pay the account! I don’t think you would do much with the riches of all the world except run through them,” said Hurstmanceaux curtly, and taking no notice of the appeal. Past experience had taught him that money which passed through his sister’s fingers had a knack of never reaching its destination. “I won’t compromise you,” he added; “don’t be afraid, and I shall tell them that they have lost your custom.”

“You need not say that,” said Mouse uneasily; she was very fond of this particular Bond Street shop, and what was the use of paying an account if you did not avail yourself of the advantage so gained by opening another one instantly?

“I certainly shall say it,” said Hurstmanceaux decidedly; and he once more left the room. Mouse looked after him with regret and uneasiness; regret that she had turned his generous impulse to such small account, and uneasiness lest he should suspect more of her affairs than it would be well for him to learn.

“He is a good fellow sometimes, but so stiff-necked and mule-headed,” she thought, as she hastily calculated in her rapidly working brain how much percentage she might have got off the Bond Street account if she had dealt with the matter herself. She was extravagant, but she was very keen about money at the same time, at once prodigal and parsimonious, which is a more general combination than most people suppose.

Hurstmanceaux looked back at her rather wistfully from between the cream-colored, rose-embroidered curtains of the doorway. It was on his lips to ask her not to pursue her patronage of Harrenden House; but as he had just promised to do her a service he could not seem to dictate to her an obedience as a return payment to him. He went away in silence.

“Besides, whatever she were to promise she would always do as she liked,” he reflected: previous experiences having told him that neither threats nor persuasions ever had the slightest effect upon his sister’s actions.

As he went out of the vestibule into the street, he passed a tall, very good-looking young man who was about to enter, and who nodded to him familiarly as one brother may nod to another. Hurstmanceaux said a curt good-day without a smile. The other man passed in without the preliminary of enquiring whether the lady of the house was at home, and the footman of the antechamber took off his great coat and laid his hat and cane on the table as a matter of course: a person who had known no better might have concluded that the visitor was Kenilworth himself. But to Kenny, as they called him behind his back, the anteroom lackeys were much less attentive than they were to this young man.

“My real brother-in-law,” said Hurstmanceaux to himself, with a vexed frown upon his brows and a little laugh which people would have called cynical upon his lips. He did not love Kenilworth, but young Lord Brancepeth he abhorred.

CHAPTER VI.

“I met the Miser: how has he been to-day? Rating you, eh?” said Lord Brancepeth when he had been ten minutes or more ensconced in the cosiest corner by the boudoir fire. He was a very well-featured and well-built young man, with a dark oval face, pensive brows, and great dreamy dark brown eyes; his physiognomy, which was poetic and melancholy, did not accord with his conversation, which was slipshod and slangy, or his life which was idiotic, after the manner of his generation.

Mouse was standing behind him leaning over his shoulder to look at an ancient British coin newly attached to his watch-chain; her own eyes were soft with a fullness of admiration which would have been doubtless delightful to him if he had not been so terribly used to it.

“The Miser was out of humor as usual,” she replied; “Ronald should really live amongst some primitive sect of Shakers or Quakers, or Ranters or Roarers, whatever they are called: he has all the early Christian virtues, and he thinks nobody should live upon credit.”

“He certainly shouldn’t live amongst us,” said Brancepeth, with a self-satisfied laugh, as if chronic debt were a source of especial felicitation. “How he hates me, by the way, Mousie.”

“You are not a primitive virtue,” said his friend, with her hands lying lightly on his shoulders, and her breath stirring like a soft balmy south wind amongst his close curling dark hair.

Brancepeth had ceased to be a worshipper: and he had ceased even to like being the worshipped, but habit is second nature, and it was his habit to be wherever Lady Kenilworth was, and that kind of habit becomes second nature to lazy and good-hearted men.

He was a young man who was so constantly, almost universally, adored that it bored him, and he often reflected that he should never be lastingly attached except to a woman who should detest him. He had not found that woman at the date at which he was allowing his friend Mouse to hang over his shoulder and admire the ancient British coin. He always told people that he was very fond of Cocky. Cocky and he were constantly to be seen walking together, or driving together, or playing games together, outdoors and indoors; they were even sometimes seen together in the nursery of those charming little blonde-haired, black-eyed children who were taught by their nurses to pray for Cocky as papa.

“The Miser will marry some day,” said Brancepeth now, “and then he won’t be so easy to bleed.”

“I am sure he will never marry. Alan is sure he never will.” Alan was her second brother.

“Stuff!” said Brancepeth. “Alan will be out in his calculations.”

“You will marry some day, too, I am sure, Harry,” whispered Mouse, as she leaned over his chair; her tone was the tone of a woman who says what she does not think to enjoy the pleasure of being told that what she says is absurd and impossible.

Brancepeth gave a little laugh, and kissed the hand which was resting on the back of his chair.

“When Cocky goes to glory,” he answered.

“Cocky!” said Cocky’s wife with fierce contempt. “He will never die. Men like him never do die. They drink like ducks and never show it. They eat like pigs and never feel it. They cut their own throats every hour and are all the better for it. They destroy their livers, their lungs, their stomachs and their brains, and live on just as if they had all four in perfection. Nothing ever hurts them though their blood is brandy, their flesh is absinthe, and their minds are a sink emptied into a bladder. They look like cripples and like corpses; but they never die. The hard-working railway men die, the hard-working curates die, the pretty little children die, the men who do good all day long and have thousands weeping for them, they die; but men like Cocky live and like to live, and if by any chance they ever fall ill, they get well just because everybody is passionately wishing them dead!”

She spoke with unusual intensity of expression, her transparent nostrils dilated, her red lips curled, her turquoise eyes gleamed and glittered; Brancepeth looked at her in alarm.

“On my word, Sourisette,” he murmured, “when you look like that you frighten a fellow. I wouldn’t be in Cocky’s shoes, not for a kingdom.”

“I thought you were longing to replace Cocky?”

“Well, yes, of course, yes,” said Brancepeth. “Only you positively alarm me when you talk like this. I’m not such an over-and-above correct-living fellow myself, and Cocky isn’t so out-and-out bad as all that, you know. After all, he’s got some excuse.”

“Some excuse!” she repeated, her delicate complexion flushing red. “Some excuse! You—you, Harry—you dare to say that to me?”

“Well, it’s the truth,” murmured Brancepeth sulkily. “And don’t make me a scene, Mouse; my nerves can’t stand it; I’m taking cocaine and I ought to keep quiet, I ought indeed.”

“Why do you take cocaine?” asked Lady Kenilworth, changing to inquietude and interrogating his countenance anxiously.

“All sorts of reasons,” said her friend, sulkily still. “Oh, yes, I look well enough, I dare say; people often look well when they are half dead. Don’t make me scenes, Topinetta; I can’t bear them.”

“I never make you scenes, darling; not even when you give me reason!”

“Humph!” said Brancepeth, very doubtfully, “when do I give you reason? There never was anybody who stood your bullying as I stand it.”

“Bullying! Oh, Harry!”

“Yes, bullying. Cocky don’t stand it; he licks you; I cave in.”

With those unpoetic words Lord Brancepeth laid his poetic head back on the cushions of his chair, and closed his eyelids till their long thick lashes rested on his cheeks, with an air of martyrdom and exhaustion. She looked at him anxiously.

“You really do not look well, love,” she whispered, as she hung over his chair. “It is—is it—that you care for any other woman? I would rather know the truth, Harry.”

“Women be hanged,” said Brancepeth with a sigh, his eyes still closed. “It’s the cocaine; cures a fellow, you know, but kills him. That’s what all the new medicines do.”

CHAPTER VII.

“By the way,” said the young man, still with his eyes closed, and indisposed to follow his companion’s lead into the domain of sentiment, “I saw the most beautiful woman last night that I ever saw in my life—the most glorious creature! Such eyes! you can’t imagine such eyes!”

“What color?” asked Mouse, with a glance at her own eyes in an adjacent mirror and a displeased severity on her mouth.

“Black—black as night! At least, you know, perhaps they weren’t really black; they were like that stone—what do you call it—opal? No; onyx—yes, onyx. Such a woman! I’m a bad ’un to please, but, on my honor——”

“You are very enthusiastic!” said Mouse, with the lines of her lips more scornful and displeased. “Where did you see this miracle?”

Brancepeth smiled.

“Lord, how soon they are jealous!” he thought. “Take fire like tow!”

Aloud he answered:

“Yesterday my sister got me to go to complines at the Oratory. It was some swell saint or another, and some of the cracks were singing there. This woman was close to where I was. She was all in black, and seemed very much ‘gone’ on the service; her eyes got full of tears at part of it. Well, I don’t mind telling you she fetched me so that I asked the Duc d’Arcy to see my sister safe home, and I followed the lady with the eyes. She got into a little dark coupé, and my hansom bowled after it. I ran her to earth at a private hotel—quite solemn sort of place called Brown’s—and there they told she was the Countess zu Lynar.”

“Countess zu Lynar! then one can soon see who she is,” said Mouse, as she went and got an Almanac de Gotha of the year from her writing-table.

“Oh, I looked there last night,” said Brancepeth; “she isn’t there; but the porter told me she used to be the wife of that awfully rich banker Vanderlin.”

Mouse looked up, astonished and momentarily interested.

“Are you quite sure?”

“Positive.”

“Then she can’t be young now,” said Lady Kenilworth, with relief and satisfaction.

“Oh, yes, she is; at least, quite young enough,” said Brancepeth vaguely.

“Oh, I know all about her!” continued his friend. “She is not in society. We stand a good deal in London, but at present we don’t receive divorced women.”

Brancepeth laughed softly with vast amusement, and did not offer any explanation of his laughter.

“Such eyes!” he murmured dreamily. His friend was silent. After a while—“Oh, Lord, such eyes!”

“My dear Harry,” said Mouse, with cold dignity, “pray spare me your lyrics, and go and write them in the porter’s book at the private hotel. You could probably approach the lady without the formula of introduction; a bouquet would do it for you.”

Brancepeth shook his head mournfully.

“Not that sort,” he said gloomily. “And you needn’t be in such a wax about it, Mouse; she’s gone back to the Continent this morning. They told me so at the hotel just now.”

“And you did not go to Dover instead of coming here?” said his friend sarcastically. “I am amazed that old acquaintance had such a hold remaining on you as to make you resist the seductions of the tidal train.”

“You can be nasty about it if you like,” said the handsome youth with sullen resignation. “You make the mistake which all women make. You fly at a man when he tells you the truth; and then you are astonished another time that he tells you a lie. If there’d been anything in it, of course I shouldn’t have told you anything.”

“An admirable confession. I shall remember it another time.”

“Women always make fellows lie. You bite our noses off if we ever happen to tell a word of truth!”

“But it breaks my heart to think that you even see that other women exist, Harry!”

“Oh, bother!” said Brancepeth roughly. “Don’t be a fool, Mousie. You see other men exist fast enough yourself.”

She was silent. She was conscious that she did do so. Happily for the preservation of peace, there was at that moment announced Prince Khristof of Karstein.

“Her father,” murmured Mousie in a swift whisper, but Brancepeth was too obtuse to understand; he only stared, conscious that he had missed a tip.

Prince Khristof was a bland, gracious person who had been very fair in youth and early manhood, and still preserved a delicate clear complexion and eyes as blue and serene as Clare Kenilworth’s; his hair was white and silken, his form slender and stately, his carriage elegant; and, alas! there was not a good club in all the world into which he could take his charming presence. When the century was young he had been born the seventh son of a then reigning duke in a small principality of green pasture and glacier-fed stream, and pretty towns like magnified toys, and many square leagues of resinous scented pine forest. The century had seen the principality absorbed, the dukedom mediatized, the towns ruined, and the pine-woods leased to Javish banks. As in many other cases the gain of the empire had been the ruin of the province. Prince Khristof’s eldest brother still abode in his toy-city, and hats were lifted as he passed, but he reigned no more; and Prince Khristof himself, who had been a Colonel of Cuirassiers in his cradle, and at ten years old had seen a sentinel flogged for omitting to carry arms when he had passed, was glad to furnish a mansion for Mr. Massarene, and take forty per cent. from the decorators and dealers, who under his patronage furnished the admirable Clodion and the other rarities, beauties, and luxuries, to the adornment of Harrenden House.

He felt it hard that when he had permitted his daughter to marry into finance the misalliance had so little profited himself that he was driven to such expedients. But so it was; and though the descent had been gradual, it had been one which ended in Avernus, and royal and patrician society had shut all its great gates upon him, leaving him only its side entrances and back staircases. The man who could remember when he had been a child in his nurse’s arms, seeing guards carry arms to salute him as he was borne past them suffered acutely from his degradation: but he was beyond all things a philosopher, and thought that fine tobaccos and delicate wines soothe, if they do not cure, many wounds, even when you can only enjoy such things at the expense of your inferiors.

“This old beggar ought to know,” thought Brancepeth, occupied with his new idea and to whom Germans meant every nationality from Schleswig-Holstein to Moldavia; and he addressed the newcomer point-blank.

“Do you know a Countess Lynar, sir?”

“I know a great many Lynars,” replied the Prince. “It is a very general name. Can you add anything more definite?”

“She’s the woman whom that Jew fellow, Vanderlin, divorced,” replied Brancepeth.

The Prince smiled and coughed.

“Olga zu Lynar? I know her—yes. She is my only daughter. Vanderlin is a banker, but he is not a Jew.”

Brancepeth grew very red.

“I—I—beg you ten thousand pardons,” he muttered. “I didn’t know, you know; I am always blundering.”

“There is nothing to pardon,” said Prince Khris sweetly. “Englishmen are so insular. They never know anything about their neighbors across the water. It is perfectly well known everywhere out of England that my daughter was—separated—from Vanderlin, but that you, my Lord Brancepeth, should not know it is tout ce qu’il y a de plus naturel.”

“He takes it uncommonly coolly,” thought Brancepeth, still under the spell of his astonishment, and still distressed as an Englishman always is at having made a stupid mistake and wounded an acquaintance.

“But is she married again?” he asked anxiously. “How does she come to be Lynar?”

“Dear youth, you are not discreet,” thought the Prince, as he replied frankly that her mother had been a Countess Lynar, and that his daughter had taken her mother’s name, he was himself never very sure why; but she was always a little self-willed and fanciful, she was a woman; femme très femme! When she had married into la haute finance she had of course forfeited her place in the Hof-Kalendar.

“But her maiden name is there.” He turned over the leaves of the Almanac de Gotha and pointed to the entry of the birth of his daughter the Countess Olga Marie Valeria.

“Why does she call herself Countess Lynar?” said Brancepeth with curiosity, conscious of his own bad manners. Prince Khris pointed to the page:

“It was her mother’s name, you see; and more than that, in the property which my daughter possesses there is a little Schloss Lynar, hardly more than a ruin, hidden under woods in Swabia which gives that title to whoever owns it. Were you to purchase it you would have the right to write yourself Graf zu Lynar.”

“I would rather own the lady than the castle,” said Brancepeth, too stupid and too careless to note the deepening offence in the eyes of Mouse.

Prince Khris smiled meaningly.

“The lady might give you the more trouble of the two.”

“How he hates her!” thought Brancepeth. “I suppose she keeps a tight rein on the property.”

Brancepeth’s experiences, which had been extensive in range though brief in years, had told him that these family dislikes and disagreements usually had their root in the auri sacra fames; and the fact was well known all over Europe that this serene, courtly, distinguished-looking gentleman, whose name was recorded in the Hof-Kalendar, lived very nearly, if not entirely, by his wits.

High play is one thing; cheating is another; if you ruin yourself it is your own affair, but if you try to ruin others by unfair means it is the affair of your neighbors. Prince Khristof’s mind was so made that he had never been able to perceive or comprehend the difference; of late years the meaning of that difference had been enforced on him disagreeably.

“I suspect he is the devil and all to have anything to do with at close quarters,” reflected Brancepeth, who was a very cautious young man. “And what a mess he’s made of his life, good Lord, with all his cleverness and position; why, a decent croupier’s a ten thousand times better fellow; he’ll rook you like winking if he can get you down at écarté.”

“And she came over here to see you, I suppose,” inquired Brancepeth, still curious.

“Scarcely,” said the Prince with a fleeting smile.

“Would you—wouldn’t you give me a word of introduction?” said Brancepeth hurriedly and conscious of his own temerity.

“To my daughter?” said the Prince blandly. “My dear lord, I should of course be delighted to do so—delighted; but I am not on speaking terms with her. I don’t call on her myself. How can I send anybody else to call?”

“What did you quarrel about?” asked Harry bluntly. “Who was right?”

Prince Khris looked at him with amusement; it was so droll to find people who asked questions like children instead of finding out things quietly for themselves. To his finer and more philosophic intelligence such a primitive question as right could not seriously affect anything. He thought the young Englishman a fool, an impertinent and dense fool; but he was never impatient of fools, they were too useful to him in the long run. What wise man would be able to play écarté unless there were fools with whom to play it?

“Of course the divorce was all Vanderlin’s fault!” said Brancepeth with clumsy curiosity.

“It is always the man’s fault in such cases. That is well known.”

Prince Khris smiled as he spoke; there was something sardonic and suggestive about the smile which made it almost a grin, and which seemed singularly ugly to Brancepeth considering that the person concerned was the grinner’s only daughter. No one could more completely or more cruelly have expressed the speaker’s conviction that Vanderlin was entirely blameless in this matter.

Mouse listened in extreme irritation; it seemed to be beyond even her Harry’s usual obtuseness to continue the theme of a woman’s indiscretions to that woman’s own father. Besides, she hated women who were divorced: they made it so difficult and unpleasant for the wiser members of their sex.

“My daughter seems to have impressed you, Lord Brancepeth,” continued the Prince. “Where is it that you have seen her?”

“At the Oratory,” said Brancepeth, “and in the street. She is so awfully fetching, you know.”

“She is a woman who makes people look at her,” replied Prince Khristof indifferently. “Did you hear her sing at the Oratory? She has a voice! ah, such a voice! the most flexible mezzo-soprano. She could have made her fortune on the stage.”

“No. She didn’t sing,” said Brancepeth, greatly interested. “She seemed to pray no end, and she cried. But she cried so beautifully. Not as most of them do who make such figures of themselves. But the tears just brimming in her eyes and falling, like the what d’ye call ’em, you know, the Magdalens in the picture galleries.”

The Prince laughed outright.

“For felicitous allusion your Englishman has never an equal,” he thought, whilst he said aloud: “My dear lord, what did I tell you? Olga is femme, très femme. If I wanted to weep I should not go to the Oratory myself. But a woman does go. It is a consolation to her to be admired and pitied, and I have no doubt she observed that you did both.”

“She didn’t even see me,” said the younger man, on whose not oversensitive nerves something in the elder’s tone grated.

“Her father don’t do much to save her character,” he thought. “It’s an ill bird fouls its own nest.”

Meanwhile Mouse had listened with scarcely concealed impatience to all these questions and answers. She sat apparently engrossed in the pages of the Almanac de Gotha, but in reality losing nothing of her friend’s interrogations and implications. At last, out of patience, she closed the little red book and said imperiously to Brancepeth:

“Surely it is time you went on guard? Have you any idea what time it is? Besides, if you don’t mind my saying so, I want to talk about something to the Prince before I go for my drive.”

“I aren’t on guard to-day; but I’ll go, of course, if you want me to go,” murmured Brancepeth sulkily, raising his lazy long limbs out of his comfortable resting-place with a sense of regret, for he would willingly have gone on talking about the lady of the Oratory for another hour.

“Such a dear good boy, but always wanting in tact,” said Lady Kenilworth, as the door of the morning-room closed on him.

“Wanting in reason too. To talk of another woman when he is in the presence of Lady Kenilworth! What obtuseness! what blindness,” said Prince Khris with graceful gallantry. “But Englishmen are always like that. They go all round the world and see nothing but their own umbrellas; they keep on their hats in St. Peter’s, and set up their kodaks at the Taj Mahal. I have always said that a people who could conquer India and yet clothe their Viceroy in a red cloth tunic, are a people without perception. They travel, but they remain islanders. Their minds are enfolded in their bath-towels and sanitary flannels. They do not see beyond the rim of their tubs. But I believe you did me the honor to wish to speak to me? I need not say that if there be the smallest thing in which I can be of service you command my devotion.”

Mouse sat dreamily and irritably opening and shutting the Almanac de Gotha. Prince Khristof wore a wholly altered aspect to her now that she saw him as the father of a woman whom Harry admired and had followed.

“Do you know—such is my insularity—that I never knew you had a daughter or had had a wife?” she said abruptly, as she pushed the book away.

“Dear Madame! you surely have not sent for me to speak of these two ladies?” he said, picking up the little red book. “My deceased wife’s name is here, if you chose to look for it; my daughter’s is not, because she exiled herself into the haute finance. I once had the entire collection of this Almanac since its beginning in 1760. If we want to see how despicably modern editions fall below the standard of all work of the last century, nothing will show us that fact more completely and conclusively than this Almanac. Contrast the commonplace portraits of to-day’s Gotha with the exquisite designs of the eighteenth century kalendars.”

“Yes,” said Mouse shortly: “yes, no doubt. You are always right in matters of art. My dear Prince, how very admirably you have housed those people at Harrenden House. If only the birds were worthy the nest.”

“Ah-ha! It was for this, was it, that you wanted to see me?” he thought, as he said aloud: “I suggested—I merely suggested. I am delighted the result meets your approval. They are excellent people, those good Massarenes. You remember that I told you so in Paris. Des bons gens; de très bons gens. A little uncouth, but the world likes what is simple and fresh.”

She looked at him to see if he could really say all this with a serious countenance; she saw that he could; his handsome fair features were without the ghost of a smile and his whole expression was grave, sincere, attuned to admiring candor.

“If he takes it like that I had best take it so too,” thought Mouse, who was aware that she was but a mere beginner and baby beside him in the delicate arts of dissimulation. But Nature had made her proud, inclined to be blunt and sarcastic, and occasionally unwisely inclined to frankness; she looked him straight in the eyes now, and said:

“But you and I are going to do our duty to our fellow Christians, and polish them, aren’t we? I was quite straight with you about the purchase of Vale Royal; but you weren’t so straight with me about Harrenden House. Don’t you think, Prince, we can do our friends more good if we are friends ourselves? Quarreling is always a mistake.”

He bowed and smiled. His smooth delicate features expressed neither annoyance nor pleasure, neither wonder nor surprise.

“I am always Lady Kenilworth’s devoted servant,” he said graciously, with the air of a suzerain accepting homage. “I am sorry you think that I should have consulted you about the town-house,” he added. “It did not occur to me; you were in Egypt. I never offend or forget those who wish me well—of that you may be sure. It was amusing to arrange that house, and one could be of so much use to artists and other deserving people of talent.”

Mouse laughed, rather rudely, and her laughter brought a slight angry flush to the cheek of Prince Khris. He had both noble and royal blood in his veins, and at the sound of that derisive little laugh he could have strangled her with pleasure. By an odd contradiction, Lady Kenilworth offended him by precisely that same kind of bluntness and nakedness of speech with which her brother had offended herself. The delicate euphemisms which she expected to have used to please herself seemed to her altogether ridiculous when they were required by another person.

“Englishwomen are always so coarse,” he thought; “they never understand veiled phrases. They will call their spade a spade. There is no need to do so, whether you are digging a grave with it or digging for gold; it can always be a drawing-room fire-shovel for other people, whatever work it may accomplish.

“Yes, you are quite right, dear lady,” he added, after a slight pause. “The task is not a light one; we will divide its difficulties. I have experience that you have not yet gained; you have influence that I have—alas!—lost. Let us take counsel together. Our friends the Massarenes are good people—excellent people; it is a pleasure to guide them in the way they should go.”

He remained with her half an hour, and only left her when it was announced that her carriage was waiting below. He kissed her hand with all the reverential grace which a fine gentleman can lend to his farewell; but as he descended the staircase and went into the street, he swore under his breath.

“There is no devil like a blonde devil!” he thought. “Mouse they call her! A rat! a rat! with teeth as sharp as nails and claws which can cling like a flying bat’s! It is little use for the world to have made woman all these thousands of years; she remains just what she was in Eve’s time, in Eriphyle’s time—always the same—always purchasable, always venal, always avaricious! Ah! why was this rodent not my daughter? We would have made the world our oyster, and no one should have known the taste of an oyster but ourselves!”

Whilst he passed along Stanhope Street into the Park his own daughter was standing in a room of a secluded and aristocratic hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain, where she had arrived that morning.

She was dressed in black, with three strings of pearls round her throat; they were the pearls she had worn on her ill-fated marriage-day. She was a woman of singular beauty; the kind of beauty which resists sorrow and time, and ennobles even the mask of death.

With her was one of her cousins, Ernst von Karstein, the only one of her family who had been faithful to her through good and evil report, who had loved her always, before her marriage and after it; but who had always known that he could look for no response from her.

“You are always well, Olga,” he was saying now. “What amulet have you?”

“I imagine,” she answered, “that my talisman consists in absolute indifference as to whether I be ill or well.”

“That is a blasphemy,” said her companion. “No one can be indifferent to health. Ill-health intensifies every other evil and saps the roots of every enjoyment.”

“Yet to lie on a sick bed, at peace with man and God, and surrounded by those we love, would that be so sad a fate?”

“You speak of what you know nothing about; you are never ill! You grow morbid, Olga. You live like a nun. You see no one. The finest mind cannot resist the morbid influences of constant solitude. Whoever your Pope is, you should ask his dispensation from such vows.”

“The law has been my Pope, and has set me free of all vows. I live thus because I do not care to live otherwise.”

“I should have thought you too proud a woman to accept excommunication in this submissive way.”

She smiled a little.

“Proud? I? The daughter of Khristof of Karstein, and the divorced wife of Adrian Vanderlin?”

“Curse them both!” said her cousin under his breath.

“You have been in London?” he said aloud.

“A week, yes: my father’s affairs, as usual.”

“You never see him?”

“Never. See the man who ruined my life!”

“But you have no proof of that?”

She smiled again very sadly.

“A crime which can be proved is half undone. He was too wary to be traced in all these schemes of infamy.”

“Yet you befriend him?”

“Befriend? That is not the word. I spend my mother’s money on him for her sake. One saves him at least from public disgrace. But he games away all he gets, and continues to live in the way you know.”

“I do not think you should waste your substance on him. Keep it for yourself, and return to the world.”

“On sufferance, as a declasée? Never!”

“As my wife. I have said so many times. I never change, Olga.”

She held out her hand to him with a noble and grateful gesture.

“You are always faithful. You alone. I thank you. But you must leave me to my fate, dear Ernst. It is not in your power to change it.”

“It would be in my power if you gave me the mandate.”

“But it is that which I cannot do; which I shall never do.”

“Because you still love the man who repudiated and disgraced you!”

She shrank a little as at a blow.

“One cannot love and unlove at will,” she said simply. “It is very generous of you to be ready to give the shield of your umblemished honor to a dishonored woman. But were I ungenerous, unworthy enough, to accept such a sacrifice I should but make you and make myself more unhappy than we now are. All the feeling which is still alive in me lives only for the memory of the past.”

Her cousin turned away and paced the room to hide the pain he felt. He had loved her through good and evil report, had remained unmarried for her sake, and was ready now to accept all obloquy, censure and discredit for her sake.

“Go, my dear Ernst,” she said very gently; “go, and forget me. You might as well love a buried corpse as love a woman with such a fate as mine.”

“My love should have power to magnetize the corpse into fresh life!”

She shook her head.

“It would be impossible. Were it possible, what use would be a galvanized corpse? An unnatural unreal thing which would drop back into the dust of death.”

He did not reply; he endeavored to control his emotion.

“My dear Olga,” he said, when he could do so, “allow me to say one thing to you without causing you offence. Unknown to yourself, I think you cherish an illusion which can only cause you unhappiness. You think and speak as if your division from Adrian Vanderlin were but some quarrel, some mistake, which explanation, mediation, or time could clear away. You forget that you are entire strangers to each other; worse than strangers, because there is an irrevocable chasm between you.”

She did not reply; an expression of intense suffering came into her eyes, but she restrained any outward utterance of it.

“It hurts me to say these harsh things to you,” he continued. “I would so much sooner encourage you in your sentiment. But to what end should I do so? You are a woman of deep and passionate feeling. You do not forget; you do not change; your little boy’s grave is to you what Bethlehem was to the Early Christians; Vanderlin is to you what Ulysses was to Penelope. You never seem to realize that this past to which you cling is a wholly dead thing, no more to be imbued again with the breath of life than the body of your poor child, or the marble which lies over him. It is intolerable that a woman as young, as lovely, as rich, as admired and as admirable as you are should pass your years in obscurity fettered to a pack of useless memories like a living person, to a corpse. I have told you so often; I shall never cease to tell you so. What do you expect? What do you hope? What do you desire?”

“Nothing.” The word was cold, incisive, harsh; he tortured her but she did not give any sign of pain except by the nervous gesture with which her fingers closed on the strings of pearls at her throat as if they were a collier de force which compressed and suffocated her.

“No one lives without desires or ends of some kind however absurd or unattainable they may be,” he said with truth. “I think you deceive yourself. I think that, without your being sensible of it, you brood so much over the past because you fancy vaguely that you will evolve some kind of future out of it, as necromancers used to stare into a crystal until they saw the future suggested on its surface. The crystal gave them nothing but what their own imagination supplied. So it is with you. Your imagination makes you see in Vanderlin a man who does not exist and never existed; and it also makes you fancy possible some kind of reconciliation or friendship which is as totally impossible as if you and he were both in your coffins.”

She had turned from the window and walked to and fro the room, unwilling that he should see the emotion which his blunt speech awakened in her. There was a certain truth in them which she could not wholly deny and of which she was ashamed.

“Do not let us speak of these things. It is useless,” she said with impatience. “You do not understand; you are a man; how can you comprehend all that there is ineffaceable, unforgetable, for a woman in four years of the tenderest and closest union? Nothing can destroy it for her. For a man it is a mere episode more or less agreeable, more or less tenacious in its hold on him; but to her——.”

She stopped abruptly: her companion looked at her with admiration and compassion mingled in equal parts, and he smiled slightly.

“My dear Olga! Once in a hundred years a woman is born who takes such a view as you do of love and life. They are dear to poets, and furnish the themes of the most moving dramas. But they are women who invariably end miserably, either in a cloister like Heloise, or in a tomb like Juliet, or simply and more prosaically with tubercles on their lungs at Hyères or the Canaries. You know the world, or you used to know it. You must be aware that there are millions of women who in your place would have consoled themselves long ago. I want you to see the unwisdom and the uselessness of such self-sacrifice. I want you to resume your place in the world. I want you to realize that life is like the earth: there is the winter, more or less long, no doubt, but afterward there is the spring. You know that poem of Sully Prudhomme, in which he imagines that all the plants agree to refrain from bearing flowers a whole year. But that year has never been seen in fact. The poem is wrong artistically and scientifically.”

“Of the earth, yes; but in the human soul there are many spots stricken with barrenness for ever.”

“But not at your age?”

“What has age to do with it?”

He sighed; he felt the use of argument, the futility of entreaty.

“Are you not too proud a woman,” he said at length, “to sit in the dust, with ashes on your head, smitten to the ground by an unjust sentence?”

“I have told you. All my pride is dead; not for a year like Sully Prudhomme’s flowers, but for ever.”

“And you forgive the man who killed it?”

The blood mantled in her face.

“That is a question I cannot allow, even to you, dear Ernst.”

He was silenced.

“And you are going back to the owls and the bitterns of Schloss Lynar?” he asked, as he took his leave of her half an hour later. “What a life for you, that Swabian solitude!”

“The bitterns and owls are very good company, and at least they never offend me.”

“Let me be as fortunate!” he said with a sigh. “I may return to-morrow.”

“Yes, I do not leave until evening!”

When he had left her she remained lost in the sadness of her own useless thoughts for some moments; then she put on a long black cloak, a veil which hid her features, and went out in the street, saying nothing to the two servants who traveled with her or to the servant of the hotel. She went out into the street and crossed the Seine by the bridge of Henri Quatre, her elegance of form and her height making some of the passers-by pause and stare, wondering who she could be, alone, on foot, and so closely veiled. One man followed and accosted her, but he did not dare persevere.

She went straight on her way to the Rue de Rivoli, for she had known Paris well, and loved it as we love a place which has been the seat of our happiness. It was near the end of a grey and chilly day; the lights were glittering everywhere, and the animation of a great and popular thoroughfare was at its height. The noise of traffic and the haste of crowds made her ears ache with sound, so used as she now was to the absolute silence of her Swabian solitude; a silence only broken by the rush of wind or water. She approached a very large and stately building which looked like a palace blent with a prison; it was the French house of business of the great Paris and Berlin financiers, Vanderlin et Cie.

She walked toward it and past it, very slowly, whilst its electric lamps shed their rays upon her.

She passed it and turned, and passed it and turned again, and as often as she could do so without attracting attention from the throngs or from the police. There was a mingling of daylight and lamplight; above-head cumuli clouds were driven before a north wind. She waited on a mere chance; the chance of seeing one whom she had not seen for eight years pass out of a small private door to his carriage. She knew his hours, his habits; probably, she thought, they had not changed.

She was rewarded, if it could be called reward.

As she passed the façade for the eighth time, and those on guard before the building began to watch her suspiciously, she saw a tall man come out of that private doorway and cross the pavement to a coupé waiting by the curbstone. In a moment he had entered it; the door had closed on him, the horses had started down the Rue de Rivoli.

She had seen the man who had repudiated and dishonored her; the only man she had ever loved; the father of her dead boy.

“Does he ever remember?” she wondered as she turned away, and was lost amongst the crowds in the falling night.

CHAPTER VIII.

“If you get into a bad set, I tell you frankly I shall never help you out of it. A bad set is a bog; a hopeless bog; you flounder on in it till you sink. Can’t you understand? If you are going to be taken up by this kind of people, don’t ask me to do any more for you. That’s all. I don’t want to be unkind, but it must be one thing or another. I cannot come here if I am likely to meet persons whom I won’t know. Anybody would say the same.”

She spoke with severity, as to a chidden child, as she lighted a cigarette and put it between her roseleaf lips. She was in the boudoir of Harrenden House, and Margaret Massarene listened in humble and dejected silence to the rebuke. The bone of contention was represented by two visiting cards, on which were printed respectively Lady Mary Altringham and Lady Linlithgow: the bearers of those names had just been turned away from the gate below by order of the fair consor, and the mistress of Harrenden House, being a primitive person, to whom a want of hospitality appeared a crime, was swallowing her tears under difficulty.

“But surely these ladies are high and all that, ma’am?” she pleaded piteously in her ignorance.

“They were born if you mean that,” replied Mouse with great impatience. “Lady Mary was a Fitz-Frederick and the Linlithgow was a Knotts-Buller. But they are nowhere. They have put themselves out of court. No one worth thinking of knows them. They can do you no good, and they can do you a great deal of harm.”

Mrs. Massarene puckered up in her fingers the fine cambric of her handkerchief.

“But I know Lady Mary, ma’am!”

“Drop her, then.”

“What have she done, ma’am?”

“Oh, lots of things; gone wrong stupidly, turned the county against her; her boy’s tutor, and a young artist who went down to paint the ballroom, and all that kind of silly public sort of thing; people don’t speak to her even in the hunting-field. She can’t show herself at Court. The girls were presented by their grandmother. She is completely tarée—completely!”

The portrait was somewhat heavily loaded with colors, but she knew that her hearer would not be impressed by semi-tones or monochrome, and she really could not have Lady Mary coming and going at Harrenden House.

“As for the other woman,” she added, “there is nothing actually against her, but she is bad form. They are as poor as Job and riddled with debts; they have even been glad to let their eldest daughter marry the banker of their own county borough!”

To her humble companion, to whom not so very long before a banker’s clerk had seemed a functionary to be addressed as Sir, and viewed with deep respect, this social error did not carry a deep dye of iniquity. But she abandoned Lady Linlithgow; for the other culprit she ventured to plead.

“Lady Mary was so very kind to my child,” she murmured timidly. “When Kathleen was at school, before we came over, Lady Mary’s own daughters——”

“What has that to do with it? I tell you her daughters go out with their grandmother. You know nothing of all these things. You must do as you are told. You remember your blunder about my aunt Courcy?”

This reminiscence was a whip of nettles which always lay ready to her monitress’s hand, and the monitress used it with great effect. But such a blunder still seemed natural to her; Mrs. Cecil Courcy was a commoner, and these ladies who had just been turned from her gates were titled people. Why was the one at the apex of fashion, and the others “nowhere,” as her monitress expressed it.

She hinted timidly at this singular discrepancy, so unintelligible to the socially untutored mind.

“How is it possible to make you understand?” said Mouse, lighting a second cigarette before the first was half consumed, after the wasteful manner of female smokers. “Rank by itself is nothing at all; at least, well, yes, of course, it is something; but when people have got on the wrong side of the post, they are of no use socially to anybody. It isn’t what you do; it is how you do it. You know there is an old adage: ‘Some mustn’t look in at a church door, and others may steal all the church plate.’ It is always so in this world. Lady Mary’s muffed her life, as the boys say. I dare say there are worse women; but there isn’t one so stupid in all the three kingdoms. Who goes driving all alone with a tutor? Who makes a pet of a little two-sous Belgian fresco painter? Who gets herself talked about with the attorney of her own town? Nobody who has a grain of sense. These are things which put a woman out of society at once and for ever. I must beg you to try and understand one most essential fact. There are people extremely well-born who are shady, and there are others come from heaven knows where who are chic. It is due to tact more than anything else. Tact is, after all, the master of the ceremonies of life. It isn’t Burke or Debrett who can tell you who to know, and who to avoid. There is no Court Circular published which can show you where the ice won’t bear you, and where it will, whom you may only know out of England and whom you may safely know in it. There are no hard and fast rules about the thing. If you haven’t been born to that kind of knowledge you must grope about till you pick it up. I am very much afraid you will never pick it up. You will never know a princess without her gilt coach-and-six; you will never recognize an empress in a waterproof and goloshes; and you will never grasp the fact that supreme, inexorable, and omnipotent Fashion may be a little pale shabby creature like my aunt Courcy, who pinches and screws about a groschen, but who can make or mar people in society just as she pleases.”

Margaret Massarene winced. She had seen Mrs. Cecil Courcy that very day in the park driving with the Queen of Denmark, who was on a visit to Marlborough House. All these niceties of shade confused her utterly. “Society’s just like Aspinall’s Enamels,” she thought in her bewilderment; and if you wanted a plain yellow, you were confused by a score of gradations varying from palest lemon to deepest orange: there were no plain yellows any more.

“But I’ve always been told that if one’s pile’s big, real big, one can always go anywhere?” she ventured to say, unconscious of the cynical character of her remark.

“You can go to Court here, if that’s your ideal. You do go,” replied her teacher with a slighting accent of contempt which sounded like high treason to the mind of the Ulster loyalist; “but it don’t follow you can get in elsewhere. It just depends on lots of chances. Some people never get into the world at all; merely because they don’t spend their money cleverly at the onset.”

“Perhaps they spare at the spigot and pour out at the bung-hole, my lady,” said Mrs. Massarene in homely metaphor. “There’s a-many has that fault, I have it myself. It’s all I can do still to hold myself from saving the candle-ends.”

“Good heavens! Do you really mean it?”

“I do, indeed, ma’am,” said the mistress of Harrenden House. “When I see them beautiful wax-lights, just burned an inch or two, and going to be taken away by them wasteful servants——”

Her companion laughed, infinitely diverted.

“But it’s all electric light here!”

“Not in the bedrooms. I wouldn’t have the uncanny thing in the bedrooms. You see, my lady,” she added timidly in confidential whispers, “William should have led me up to all this grandeur gradual. But he didn’t. He always said, ‘We’ll scrape on this side and dash on the other.’ So till we come over to be gentlefolks, I had to cook and sweep, and pinch and spare, and toil and moil, and I can’t get out of the habit. On the child he always spent; but on naught else not a cent till we came to Europe.”

“Ah, by the way, this daughter,” said Mouse, suddenly roused to the perception that there was an unknown factor in the lives of these humble people. “Where is she? I have never seen her. She is out, I think?”

Over the pallid, puffy, sorrowful face of the poor harassed aspirant to smart society there came a momentary brightness.

“Yes, ma’am; she’s what you call ‘out’; I presented her myself,” said Mrs. Massarene with pride.

“But where is she now?”

“Kathleen—Katherine—is in India, my lady.”

“Good gracious! Why?”

“Well, she’s great friends with the Marquis of Framlingham’s daughters,” said Mrs. Massarene, feeling sure this time she was safe.

“What! Sherry and Bitters?” cried Lady Kenilworth. Sherry and Bitters was the nickname which his caustic but ever courteous wit had earned for Lord Framlingham in that London world which he had left for an Indian presidency. She was vexed with herself for not having thought sooner of asking for this daughter and taking her under her own wing.

Mrs. Massarene was bewildered by the exclamation; but she was sure of her ground this time, and was not alarmed. “Lord and Lady Framlingham, ma’am,” she repeated with zest. “It’s cruel hard on me to lose her for so long, but as they’re such grand folks one couldn’t in reason object.”

“Grand folks?” repeated her visitor with amusement. “Poor dear souls! how amused they be. They’d have been sold up if they hadn’t gone out; she hated going, said she’d rather live on a crust in England, but he jumped at the appointment; he’d a whole yelling pack of Jews on him; it’s quieted them of course; and he’s let Saxe-Durham for the term. You’d better tell your husband not to lend him any money, for he never pays, he can’t pay; he’s sure to get your daughter to ask.”

“Lord’s sakes, my lady!” murmured Margaret Massarene: life became altogether inexplicable to her; if a gentleman who was a marquis, and governor of a province twice as big as France, they said, were not everything he ought to be, where could excellence and solvency be looked for? O vertu où vas-tu te nicher? she would have said had she ever heard of the line.

“But they are very—very—good people, are they not, ma’am?” she asked pathetically.

“Oh, dear, yes; she is much too ugly to be anything else, and he’s a very good fellow though he does make himself hated with his sharp tongue. He’s like that monarch, you know, who never did a wise thing and never said a silly one. He’s awfully clever, but he can’t keep his head above water. But why on earth did you let your daughter go for so long? They’ll get marrying her to one of their boys; they’ve no end of them.”

She was not pleased that the young woman was staying with Lord Framlingham; he was a very clever and sarcastic person who might supply his guest with inconvenient and premature knowledge of English society in general and of Cocky and herself in particular.

Mrs. Massarene smoothed down her beautiful gown with a nervous worried gesture.

“Oh, ma’am, Katherine’s very discreet, and by her letters all she seems to be thinking about is the white temples and the black men.”

“There are no black men in India, and you’d have done much better to keep her at home,” said her visitor sharply. “What is she like?”

She intended this young woman for her brother Ronald, whatever she might be like.

Maternal pride made Mrs. Massarene’s inexpressive and commonplace face for once eloquent and not ordinary: its troubled and dreary expression of chronic bewilderment lighted and changed; her wide mouth smiled, her colorless eyes grew almost bright.

“If you’ll honor me, ma’am, by stepping this way,” she said with alacrity as she rose.

“Horses step—people don’t,” said Lady Kenilworth, unkindly, as she accompanied the person whose instructress and tormentor she was, into a smaller room in which, set as it were upon an altar, a white marble bust stood on a plinth of jasper with a fence of hothouse flowers around it; hanging on the wall behind it was a portrait. Lady Kenilworth looked critically at both bust and portrait. She was surprised to find them what they were.

“A classic face, and clever,” she said to the anxious mother. “Are they at all like? The bust’s Dalou’s, isn’t it? And the portrait——”

“They are both the image of her, ma’am,” said Mrs. Massarene, with great triumph in the effect which they produced. “But the marble pleases me best.”

Lady Kenilworth was still looking at them critically through her double eye-glass. She was thinking that the original of that straight and somewhat severe profile was perhaps as well in India until Prince Khris and she had tired of the Massarene vein. On the other hand, unless the girl came home, she could not be married to Hurstmanceaux.

“Your daughter isn’t facile, is she?” she asked abruptly.

“What, ma’am?” asked the mother, gazing with tears in her eyes, delicious tears, at the bust which would have passed as an Athene or a Clio.

“Well, not easy to deal with—not easy to make believe things; likes her own way, don’t she?”

“Well, ma’am,” said Mrs. Massarene doubtfully, “sweet-tempered she is, and forgetful of self to a fault, and I wouldn’t lay blame to her as obstinate. But if you mean as how she can be firm, well, she can; and if you mean as how she can have opinions, well, she have.”

Lady Kenilworth laughed, but she was vexed.

“That’s what I do mean. Nobody has that straight profile for nothing; where did she get it?”

“Lord, ma’am, however should I know,” said the mother meekly. “She don’t take after either of us, that’s a fact. The children pick up their own looks in heaven, I think, for often nobody can account for ’em on earth. Look at your own little dears; what black eyes they all have, and you and my lord so fair. I met them in the Park this morning, my lady. Would you let them come and see me some day?”

Lady Kenilworth, to her own extreme amazement and annoyance, felt herself color as the straightforward gaze of this common woman looked in sincerity and in ignorance at her.

“The children shall certainly come to see you if you wish,” she said. “But they are naughty little people. They will bother you horribly. And pray, my dear woman, don’t say ‘My lady,’ you set all my nerves on edge.”

Mrs. Massarene humbly excused herself. “It comes natural,” she said with a sigh; “I was dairymaid at the Hall. William can’t bear me to say I was, but I don’t see as it matters.”

“William is right,” said Lady Kenilworth with a glance at the bust, “and I am sure your daughter will say so too.”

Mrs. Massarene shook her head. “Kathleen is quite the other way, ma’am. She says we can’t be quality, and why should we pretend to; she angers her father terrible; to tell you the truth, she angers him so terrible that it was for that reason I gave in about this long visit to India.”

“She is not of her time then,” said Lady Kenilworth. “I am afraid she gets those ideas from Framlingham. He is a downright Radical.”

“I don’t know where she gets them,” said Mrs. Massarene drearily. “William always said the only comfort about a girl was that a girl couldn’t spite you in politics as a boy might; but if her ideas aren’t politics, and the worst sort of politics, I don’t know what is, and when you’ve kept a daughter ten years and more at school where nobody else goes as isn’t titled, it’s a cross as one doesn’t look for to have her turned out a Republican.”

Lady Kenilworth laughed with genuine mirth, which showed all her pretty teeth, white, and even and pointed like a puppy’s.

“Is she a Republican? Well, that is a popular creed enough now. I am not sure it wouldn’t get you on better than being on our side. The Radicals do such a lot for their people, and do it seriously without a grimace. We always”—“put our tongue in our cheek while we do it,” she was about to add, when a sense of the imprudence of her confession arrested her utterance of it. “I do wonder, you know, that you belong to us,” she hastened to add with that air of candor which so often stood her in good stead; “you would have found Hawarden easier of access than Hatfield.”

Margaret Massarene stared.

“But William’s principles, ma’am,” she murmured, “Church and State and Property; William says them three stand or fall together.”

“And he will hold them all up on his shoulders like a Caryatide,” said Lady Kenilworth, with her most winning smile.

Mrs. Massarene smiled too, blankly, because she did not understand, but gratefully, because she felt that a compliment was intended.

“I can’t think, though, that it is wise of him to allow this visit. I think it is exceedingly ill-advised to let her be away from you so long,” said her visitor, still gazing through her eye-glass at Dalou’s bust, and reflecting as she gazed: “The young woman must be odious, but she is good-looking and Ronnie shall marry her. You don’t know my brother?” she said, apparently abruptly, but in her own mind following out her thoughts.

“Meaning Lord Hurstmanceaux? No, ma’am, we haven’t that honor.”

“We call it Hur’sceaux, please.”

“Oh, indeed! As you say O’borne for Otterbourne, and Kers’ham for Kersterholme. Might I ask why those names are cut about so, ma’am?”

“Usage! Why do we say Gore for Gower, and Sellenger for St. Leger?”

“Rebecca Gower was postmistress at Kilrathy when I was a girl,” said Mrs. Massarene reflectively. “But Lord! if anybody had clipped her down to Gore their letters would have all gone in the swill-tub!”

“You see, we have not the privilege of acquaintance with the postmistress of Kilrathy! Well, I must try and bring my brother to see you. But he is like your daughter; he is not facile. Like all those reactionary sort of people, he thinks nobody good enough to know. I never can induce him to make a new acquaintance. But perhaps if he sees this Dalou——” With a pretty smile she left the unfinished sentence to sink into the mind of Katherine Massarene’s mother. That simple and candid personage answered the unspoken thought.

“We’ve had a-many asking for Kathleen’s hand, ma’am,” she said very stupidly. “But neither she or William are easy to please in that way. He looks so high as naught but kings would satisfy him, and she—well, I don’t know what she wants, I’m sure, and I don’t think she knows herself.”

“Perhaps she’s in love with Framlingham!” cried her companion with a disagreeable little laugh, for she was provoked at her unplayed cards being discerned by a person of such limited intelligence.

“A married man, ma’am!” cried Mrs. Massarene, with a countenance so pallid from horror that Lady Kenilworth laughed as heartily as if she were hearing Yvette Guilbert sing.

“Oh, my good woman, how much you have got to learn!” she cried gaily.

Mrs. Massarene patted her gown a little irritably, but she dared not resent; though it seemed to her that, after all her William had done for this lovely young lady, it was hard to be called by her a good woman.

“I’ll never learn to break the Holy Commandments, ma’am,” she said in a tone of offence.

“Oh, you dear droll creature!” cried her visitor, more and more amused.

“But let us go over your lists,” she said sharply, realizing that she was wasting valuable time on this goose. “They will want no end of weeding. I will not meet anybody who is not in my own set. You’ll get the right people if you don’t mix them with the wrong.”

With her little gold pencil as a stiletto she set to work mercilessly on her work of expurgation and execution.

Mrs. Massarene looked on helpless but agitated; a sense of wrath was stirring in her mild bosom, but she dared not show it.

“To be called a good woman!” she thought. “Just as I’d speak to the match-seller at the corner of a street!”

The lists thus weeded with such pitiless surgery produced very brilliant gatherings at Harrenden House, and the falconer of Clodion saw nearly all that was fairest and noblest pass up the grand staircase which he guarded.

Margaret Massarene, standing till she was ready to drop at the entrance of her reception-rooms, felt her head swim under her tiara as she heard the great names announced by Winters.

The Massarene pile had been touched by the magic wand which could transform it into fashion. To go to Harrenden House became the amusement of the great and the ambition of all lesser folks. Not to go to Harrenden House became soon a confession that you were nobody yourself. “Tenez la dragée haute!” said their guide, philosopher, and friend; and she made them very exclusive indeed, and would let no one snub them or laugh at them except herself.

“On my soul, she do give worth for her money!” thought William Massarene; and he was pleased to feel that he had not been fooled even when he had bought a barren Scotch estate and compromised his credit in the City by putting a consumptive little sot on the Board of a bank.

“Why don’t you bespeak the Massarene young woman for me, Mouse?” said Brancepeth in the boudoir of Stanhope Street, when he heard of the bust of Dalou and the portrait of Orchardson.

“How exactly like a man!” said his friend, blue fire flashing from her eyes. “A little while ago you were mad about the Countess Lynar!”

“It’s uncommon like a man to get a pot of money when he can!” said Brancepeth with amusement. “If you did your duty by me, you’d bespeak me those loaves and fishes; you do what you like with the bloomin’ cad.”

“I would sooner see you dead than married!”

“I be bound you would,” muttered the young man. “Lord, that’s the sort of thing women call love!”

“Men’s love is so disinterested, we know!” said Mouse with withering contempt.

“You want the young woman for Ronnie,” continued Brancepeth. “That’s your little game. But he won’t take your tip.”

“Why not?”

“’Cos he’s the cussedest crank in all Judee! Let Ronnie please himself and get me the Massarene dollars. I’ll give you half I get; and I sha’n’t know whether she’s a snub nose or a straight one.”

Mouse colored with anger. There are things when however necessary it may be to do them, cannot be spoken of without offence.

“How odiously coarse you grow,” she observed with severity.

“Oh, bother! you call a spade a spade fast enough sometimes. How you do make me think of my old granny Luce!”

“In what do I resemble your old granny Luce?”

Brancepeth was mute. To repeat what his maternal grandmother had said would not pour oil on troubled waters. What the very free-spoken and sharp-tongued old Lady Luce had said was this, when Brancepeth was still in the sixth form at Eton:

“You’re such a pretty boy, Harry, the women-folks will be after you like wasps after treacle; take my advice, whatever you do steer clear of the married ones. A married woman always has such a lot of trumps up her sleeve. She sticks like a burr: you can pay off a wench, but you can’t pay off her; and if her fancy-man tries to get away she calls in her husband and there’s the devil and all to pay. Don’t you forget that, Harry.”

But he had forgotten it.

“I think I’ll go up and see the little beggars,” he said, to make a diversion; and he slipped away before she could stop him and went up, four stairs at a time, to the nurseries. There he was extremely popular and much beloved, especially by Jack; and there he was perfectly happy, being a young man of simple tastes, limited intelligence, and affectionate disposition.

He was in the midst of an uproarious game of romps there one day, when Cocky looked in from the doorway with an odd little smile.

“What a good paterfamilias you’ll be, Harry, when your time comes!” he said, with a look which made poor Harry color to the roots of his hair.

The head nurse intervened by calling to order noisy, laughing little Jack.

“Don’t you see your dear papa at the door, Lord Kersholm?” said that discreet woman.

This day there was no Cocky in the doorway; but the blindman’s buff was early in its merry course interrupted by a message from Lady Kenilworth requesting his presence downstairs.

“Oh, Lord, what a pity!” said Brancepeth, as he pulled the handkerchief off his eyes, swung Jack up above his head, and then kissed him a dozen times.

“I wasn’t doing any harm,” he said sulkily, as he reëntered the presence of Jack’s mother.

“Yes, you were,” she said coldly. “I cannot allow you to be upstairs with the children so long and so constantly. Their women must think it very odd; they will talk. No other of my husband’s friends enters the nurseries. You must have something to do at the barracks, or the clubs, or the stables, or somewhere. Go and do it.”

Brancepeth hung his head. He understood what his punishment would be if he dreamed of marrying the Massarene heiress or any other person whatsoever. Not to see the children any more except as any other of “Cocky’s friends” saw them! He was tender-hearted and weak in will; she cowed him and ruled him with a rod of iron. “Lord, how right my grandmother Luce was!” thought the poor fellow as he went down Stanhope Street meekly, feeling in remembrance the touch of Jack’s soft, fresh, rosy lips.

CHAPTER IX.

Some time before Easter cards had been issued for a Costume Ball at Otterbourne House, temp. Charles II., to be given immediately after Easter. The Duke occasionally lent the mansion to his daughter-in-law for such entertainments, never very willingly, for he had always to defray himself the cost of them, and he greatly disliked many members of her set. But he recognized a certain right in his eldest son’s wife to have the house sometimes, though he did not concede that it went so far as for her to inhabit it. Those little dark-eyed children running about Otterbourne House, and Harry Brancepeth going in and out of it continually—“Not whilst I live,” said the Duke to himself. After him, Cocky must do as he chose. Cocky would probably let it, or sell it at once for a monster hotel.

She arranged her ball greatly to her satisfaction in every detail before she went down for the Easter recess. But there was one thing which had been difficult. That was, to persuade the Duke, who always insisted on revising her list for parties given at his houses, whether in town or country, to allow that of Massarene to remain on it. He inquired who the Massarenes were; and did not inquire only of herself, but of others. He was most decidedly opposed to the presence of such people at Otterbourne House. But Blair Airon was not yet definitely purchased, and it had been given to her to understand that unless the gates of Otterbourne House unclosed, that purchase never might be ratified. All her ingenuity, all her cajolery, all her infinite skill in the manipulation of the minds and wills of men, failed absolutely for a long time with the old Duke. He would not have a man come from God knew where—well, from the State of Dakota, that was equally indefinite—brought within his doors; and everything she could think of to say only rooted him more firmly in his prejudices.

“Odious, insolent, ill-natured, pigheaded, spiteful, out-of-date old wretch!” exclaimed Mouse, as she read a note from him, and cast it across the room to her husband.

“The Pater? Oh, I say, choose your language,” said Cocky.

In his shrivelled heart, dry and sere as a last year’s leaf, if there was one remnant of regard and respect left, it was for his father. Besides, like most men, he always disagreed with anything his wife said. He read the note in a glance.

“Won’t swallow man from Dakota,” he said, under a smile. “Well, I wouldn’t have swallowed him if he hadn’t greased my throat so well.”

“Hush!”

“Who’s to hear? Dogs don’t blab, bless ’em!”

“I dislike to hear such things said, even in jest.”

Cocky chuckled.

“What do you bother the pater about him for? I’ve swallowed him; society’s swallowed him; all the royal folks have swallowed him. Why can’t you leave the pater in peace?”

“Why? Why? Because it is absolutely necessary that the Massarenes should be seen at Otterbourne House—seen at my ball! The refusal is an insult to me! Your father is a hundred years out of date. The country is practically a republic; we shall all have our lands taken from us before long and parcelled out to Jack and Jill. It is ridiculous to be stiff-necked about knowing people. All stiffness of that sort went out when the Hanoverian line came in. What’s half the peerage? Titled tradesmen. They have got Richemont. Could your father afford Richemont? There’s only one aristocracy now left; it’s Money. When I have been getting them everywhere, and everybody so kind about it, what shall I look to people when I don’t have them at my own ball? Your father has no consideration for me; he never has. Put it as a personal favor to myself, and you see what he answers—within a week of the ball!”

Cocky listened quietly, because it was diverting to see his wife so displeased and to hear her so incoherent. He liked her to be “in a wax”; he hated to think things went as smoothly as they usually did go with her; but he saw the gravity of the dilemma. If Otterbourne would not have the Massarenes, then he and she would be like the farm-girl of fable—“Adieu, veau vache cochons canvée!” There might even ensue inquiries from high places, and rebuffs which even the talent of Richemont would not avert. Cocky, to whom the talent of Richemont was agreeable (he lunched and dined whenever he chose at Harrenden House), and more agreeable the master of Richemont (who accepted his signature as if it were Rothschild’s), saw that this was one of those exceptional occasions on which he would do better for himself to side with the mother of the four little poppets upstairs.

“I’ll see pater about the thing if you’re so set on it,” he said, with unusual amiability.

“Can you do anything?” she said doubtfully and sullenly.

“Well, I don’t know. I’ll tell him Billy’s reforming me—making an honest man of me in Fleet Street, and that he’ll damage me if he shuts his doors on the beggars. Perhaps he’ll believe it, perhaps he won’t; I’ll try.”

“I’ve sent them their cards; tell him so.”

“That wouldn’t move him a jot; but when I do the eldest son rather well, and make believe to see the errors of my ways, I can get a thing or two out of Poodle—sometimes. After all——”

After all, thought Cocky, there had been days, though it seemed odd enough to think so now, when he had been a clean and pretty little child jumping up on to his father’s knee. The duke thought of those far-away days oftener than he did, and Cocky was never ashamed to exploiter the remembrance to base ends.

“Go at once, then,” said his wife ungraciously.

Cocky nodded. But when he had reached the door he looked back between the curtains, a rather diabolic grin upon his thin fair features.

“I won’t tell pater you sold Blair Airon instead of selling Black Hazel. Ain’t I magnanimous?”

He disappeared, whilst the Blenheims barked shrilly at his memory. Cocky turned into his own den and strengthened his courage with an “eye-opener” of the strongest species; then he took his way to his father’s mansion looking on St. James’s Park—a beautiful and majestic house built by Christopher Wren, and coveted ardently by an hotel company.

As he spun along the streets in a hansom, for Cocky never went a yard on foot if he could help it, he changed his intended tactics; the reformation dodge would not do; the duke, who could on occasion be disagreeably keen-sighted, would inevitably discover beneath it accepted bills and unworthy obligations.

“I’ll touch him up in his loyalty,” he thought. “The Poodle’s a Cavalier in his creeds.”

He found the duke at home with a slight touch of gout in his left foot. “I suppose he comes for money,” thought Otterbourne, for Cocky did not cross his threshold once in three months. But Cocky made it soon apparent that his motive was more disinterested.

“You wrote a very sharp note to my wife just now,” he said. “It has worried her.”

The duke looked at him with sarcastic incredulity.

“Are you going to pose as your wife’s champion? It is late in the day.”

“No, I ain’t,” said Cocky. “Do you mind my lighting up, Pater?”

Otterbourne indicated with a gesture that when anything was painful to him an unpleasant trifle did not matter. Cocky lit his cigar.

“You won’t let her invite these new people, the Massarenes?”

“Most decidedly not. Is it necessary to inquire?”

“Well, you see, you put her in a hole.”

“Your language is not mine; but I conclude you mean that I inconvenience her. I regret it if it be so, but I cannot say otherwise.”

“Why did you object to the people?”

“I might more pertinently inquire why did you know them?”

“Everybody does.”

“Everybody does—through you, or rather through your wife. At least, so I have heard.”

“Oh, we run ’em, yes.”

Otterbourne’s silence was eloquent.

“You see it’s just that,” Cocky pursued with engaging frankness. “When the town’s taken ’em on our word it will be such a slap in the face to her if you won’t let ’em into your house. We must take Willis’s Rooms or some place instead of giving the ball here, but that will make people talk.”

“And cost you money,” said the duke with significance.

“And there’s another thing, you know. He’s gone to ’em through us. Mouse persuaded him. He’ll be rough on us if he hears you set up your back; there might be an awful rumpus; it might be unpleasant for him—the papers would magnify the thing.”

“You seem to make a mountain out of a molehill,” said the duke with suspicion and impatience. “Go to Willis’s Rooms. You can ask any number of shoeblacks there that you please.”

“You don’t see the thing as it is. You’ll get her into trouble with the Prince, and give the Press a lot of brick-bats to shy at him: I know you’d regret that. I shouldn’t have come to bother you if I didn’t think the thing of some importance. After all you can’t reasonably exclude a man received at Court.”

“My bootmaker goes to Court, and my stationer. Very worthy persons, but they don’t dine with me.”

“But Massarene won’t dine with you: we only want him to come to the ball; and it’s her ball and it’s not yours.”

“The house is mine as yet,” said the duke stiffly.

“And will be yours twenty years after I’m tucked up; I’m dead broke—legs and lungs.”

“You have ruined yourself.”

This was so obvious that Cocky did not notice it.

“Come, Pater, do give in; don’t get us in a row with the Prince; when he’s accepted these people to please us it would enrage him awfully if he learned you wouldn’t let ’em in. He’d ask you about it, of course, or have you asked by somebody.”

“And if he asks why I do let them in?”

“He won’t do that; he goes there.”

The duke was silent. He sighed. He could not mend the manners or the men of a time which was out of tune with him.

But Cocky’s argument had weight. He was of all things kind and chivalrous, and would have no more caused a scandal or a scene than he would have set fire to St. James’s Palace next door to him. He reflected on the matter; saw clearly how ugly it was, look at it how you would, and at last conceded permission to let the new people come on the condition, however, that they should not be introduced to himself. “I am too old,” he said, “to digest American cheese.”

His daughter-in-law, who did not care in the least for this stipulation, went gaily to luncheon at Harrenden House, and interested herself graciously about their costumes, which were a source of great anxiety to both of them.

“May I wear my diamonds?” asked Mrs. Massarene; her diamonds were a great resource and support to her in society.

“Oh, the more diamonds the better?” said Mouse. “Of course you’ll go as somebody’s grandmother, a Hyde perhaps? You need only telegraph to your people in Paris the epoch; they’ll know exactly what to send you; they know your age and appearance.”

Margaret Massarene was not pleased, and felt that persons of high rank could be most unpleasantly rude.

“What time is it?” asked her lord, who had not rightly understood.

“Charles the Second’s. Do you know who Charles the Second was?” asked Mouse with a malicious little laugh.

“Him as had his head took off?” asked Mr. Massarene.

Her laugh became a melodious scream of delight.

“Oh, you are too delightful! There were no standards in your young days, were there, Billy?”

He reddened angrily under his thick dull skin; he was ashamed of his blunder, and he hated to be called Billy, even by those lovely lips.

Finally it was decided that he should go as Titus Oates, and should get his dress from Paris, and should learn to say, “O Lard.”

“Remember, the man is not to speak to me, not to approach me,” said Otterbourne to his daughter-in-law on the day of the ball, when she had come to give a glance at the completed decorations.

“Oh, he quite understands that,” she replied. “I have told him you dislike strange men, as some people are afraid of strange dogs.”

She laughed gaily as she spoke.

“You might have told him,” said the duke drily, “that there are old-fashioned persons who think that their acquaintance should be kept as clean as their hands.”

“That he wouldn’t understand,” replied Mouse.

“What makes you protect such people?”

“Oh! I don’t know! In other ages everybody had a pet jester; now everybody has a pet parvenu. One runs him; it’s great fun.”

The duke was silent.

“You know,” she continued, “he bought Vale Royal of Gerald. Surely all the family ought to be rather nice to him?”

“You surprise me,” replied the duke. “I sold Seeton Pastures to a grazier last year; but the obligation to be ‘nice’ to the purchaser was not in the contract. The sale of Vale Royal was a great disgrace to Roxhall, for his affairs were by no means in such a state as to necessitate or excuse it. But whether his loss or his gain, the sale is certainly his affair; and no one else’s.”

“Oh, you look at things so—so—stiffly,” said his daughter-in-law. “We don’t, you know.”

“I am aware that you do not,” said Otterbourne with significance; and dropped the subject.

When Clare Courcy, lovely as a dream, had been first married to his son, the duke, fascinated out of his better judgment, had admired and been inclined to love his daughter-in-law. Even now he could not be wholly insensible always to the witchery of the prettiest woman in England. He knew her worthlessness; he was aware that his son, bad as he had been before, had become ten times worse in every way since his marriage; he could never see the little black-eyed, fair-haired cherubs of the Kenilworth nurseries without a sigh and a curse in his own thoughts; but she at certain moments fascinated him still.

“I may send the bills in to Masters, I suppose?” she asked. Colonel Masters was the duke’s agent, a silent, conscientious ex-soldier entirely insensible to her own attractions.

“Certainly. He has my authority to discharge them all. You seem to me to have been more extravagant than usual in your orders.”

He looked around him as he spoke; they were standing in a long gallery at the head of the grand staircase. Flowers—flowers—flowers, met the eye in every direction, and the various devices which held the electric lights were concealed on the walls by millions of roses and orchids.

“I suppose it is an old-fashioned idea,” said Otterbourne; “but I think a gentleman’s house should be thought good enough for his friends, even for his future sovereigns, without all this dressing-up and disguising. Modern fashions are extremely snobbish.”

“They certainly are; there I quite agree with you,” said his daughter-in-law, and meant what she said. “A fine house like this wants no dressing-up. But we must do as other people do, or look odd.”

“Or you think you must,” said the duke, viewing with small pleasure a suit of Damascene armor which an ancestor had worn before Acre and Antioch, wreathed and smothered with long trails made of the united blossoms of cattleya and tigredia, whilst within its open vizor two golden orioles sat upon a nest.

“Do you think that in good taste?” he said, pointing to it.

“No; execrable. Nothing done in time is ever otherwise,” said Mouse with unusual sincerity. “We are never merry, and we are never sorry; so we heap up flowers to make believe for us at our dances and our burials. You are quite right, Pater, in the abstract. But, you see, we can’t live in the abstract. We must do as others do.”

“I should have thought the only true privilege of birth was to set us free of that obligation,” said Otterbourne, to whom his noble old palace looked on these occasions very much like the sweep who was muffled up in evergreens as Jack-in-the-Green on May-day in the little old-world country town which clustered under the hills of his big place, Staghurst Castle.

“Of course he is right enough,” she thought, as she drove away. “The house would be ten thousand times better left to itself, and we are all as vulgar as it is possible to be. We have lost the secret of elegance—we have only got display. Why couldn’t he give me a blank check, instead of making me send in the bills to Masters? He is such a screw! He wants to save all he can for his precious ’Beric.”

Alberic Orme was the duke’s second son; he was in Orders, was a scholar of high degree, held one of his father’s livings, had married the daughter of a rural dean, and was the especial object of the ridicule, derision, and suspicion of Cocky and his wife.

Judging Lord Alberic by themselves, they attributed to him and his hostile influence every one of the duke’s acts which was disagreeable to them. He was the one of his family nearest to the heart and to the ear of the duke; the other two being officers in cavalry regiments, both somewhat spendthrifts and troublesome, and his daughters having married early and being little with him.

To be dressed up like a tomfool, and prate like a poll parrot, as he phrased it in his own thoughts, was unutterably odious to William Massarene, but he was powerless under his enslaver’s orders. When the Easter recess was passed and the great night came, he appeared as Titus Oates, looking and feeling very ridiculous with his stout bowed legs in black silk stockings and ruffled breeches; but, after all, it was not worse than Court dress, and it had procured him admittance to Otterbourne House.

“Mind, the man is not to speak to me; not here, nor anywhere even at any time,” said the duke to his daughter-in-law, nervously and apprehensively.

“No, he never shall,” she promised; but she knew that nobody who would see him there would be aware of the stipulation.

She had got him to Otterbourne House and had fulfilled one of the clauses of the unwritten contract by which Blair Airon was sold.

The ball was a great pageant and a great success; and she, as the most exquisite of Nell Gwynnes, with all her lovely natural hair curling over her shoulders, was very kind to Titus Oates, guided his squat stiff unaccustomed limbs through the mazes of one quadrille, and even snatched a few moments to present him to some great people; and as her father-in-law made but a brief appearance in the rooms and only spoke with the royal personages present and two or three of his intimate friends, she found little difficulty in avoiding the introduction to him of the “man from Dakota.”

“Another time, another time,” she said vaguely, and William Massarene was dazzled and quieted.

Cocky was present for half an hour, looking a shaky, consumptive, but not inelegant Grammont, for his figure was slender and his features were good. He was infinitely diverted by the sight of William Massarene.

“Passes muster, don’t he, when he don’t open his mouth?” he said to Hurstmanceaux. “Lord, what an ugly mug he’s got! But the women are always asking for his photo. Haha! we’ve got it in Stanhope Street large as life. Pater won’t let him be taken up to him, and you won’t know him either. You’re both wrong. He’s thoroughly respectable, and he’s got a lot of my paper.”

And Cocky, leaving his brother-in-law furious, sneaked off to find the buffets.

It was a very splendid and gorgeous scene in the great house which Wren had designed, and many a famous painter had decorated. Margaret Massarene gazed at it as she sat in solitary state, blazing with diamonds and admirably attired in black velvet and white satin, with that due regard to her age which it had so wounded her to hear suggested. No one noticed her, no one remembered her; but some very stately dowagers near her glanced at her now and then with an expression which made her wish that she were back again in Dakota by her oil-stove and her linen-wringer.

“’Tis a mighty pretty sight,” thought Margaret Massarene as she sat and looked on; “and William’s dancing is a thing I never did think to see in all my days. But these women look as if they’d like to duck me in a pond.”

Carrie Wisbeach, who was genuinely good-natured, observed her neglected and isolated aspect, and called to her side a fresh-colored pleasant-looking person, old, but hale and bright-eyed, who had taken with success the name of Samuel Pepys.

“Daddy, let me take you up to the Massarene woman,” she whispered. “She’s so dreadfully disconsolate, and they give extraordinarily good dinners.”

He looked and made a little wry face.

“They’ve got Von Holstein’s cook,” she added persuasively.

“Really? Richemont?”

“Yes, Richemont; and the best cellar now in London. Come, make yourself pleasant!”

“Ronnie won’t know ’em,” said the gentleman, glancing down the rooms to where Hurstmanceaux stood, looking very handsome but extremely bored, wearing the dress which a Courcy had worn when ambassador for Charles to the French Court.

“Ronnie!” said Lady Wisbeach. “If Ronnie’s fads were attended to we should know nobody except our own families. Come along!”

He reluctantly submitted, deriving courage as he went from the memories of Von Holstein’s chefs. Her aunts looked unutterable reproach at Carrie Wisbeach as she murmured the inarticulate formula which presented Mr. Gwyllian of Lostwithiel to Mrs. Massarene.

“Pretty sight, isn’t it?” he said, as he sank back on cushions beside her.

“A beautiful sight,” said Margaret, with unction, “and one as I never thought to see, sir.”

He stared and laughed.

“Unsophisticated soul!” he thought. “Why has cruel fate brought you amongst us? Tell me,” he murmured, “is it true that you have Von Holstein’s cook?”

If she had, he would wait and take her to the supper-tables; if she had not, he would at once leave her to her fate.

“Meaning the German Ambassador’s, sir?” she replied. “Yes, we have.”

“Ah!” He decided to take her to supper.

“But I can’t say as we like him.”

“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.

“’Twas a good life when all was said,” she murmured, a good life, washed by the dews, freshened with the winds, sweetened by the flowers. She left a bank note at the poor-box of the little church, and returned to her grandeur and greatness, bearing in memory for many a day that pleasant sound of the cattle chewing the wet grasses in the dusk, smelling in memory for many a day the honey scent of the cowslips in the wide pastures by the river. Those memories were shut up in her heart in secret; she would not have dared to speak of them to her husband, or her daughter, but they were there, as the withered daisies were in the secret drawer of her dressing-case; and they kept a little corner of feeling alive in her poor puffed-out stiffened overstretched soul, so overweighted with its cares and honors.

It seemed wonderful to her that she should be a grand rich lady going to Court and wearing diamonds. Through all these years through which the millions had been accumulating she had not been allowed to know of their accumulation, or permitted to cease from privations and incessant labor. More than a quarter of a century had been to her a period of toil quite as severe in one way as the life as a dairy-girl had been here in another way. Often and often in the bitter winters and scorching summers of the Northwest she had thought as of a lost paradise of these peaceful pastures, where no greater anxiety had burdened her than to keep her cows in health and have her milking praised.

It was a fine thing to be a fine lady; yes, no doubt she was very proud of her new station in the world. But still, these white satin corsets of Paris which laced her in so tightly were less easy than the cotton jacket and the frieze coat; her hands laden with rings or imprisoned in gloves could not do the nimble work which they had been used to do; and the unconcealed contempt of the “smart society” in which she lived had not the warmth and comfort which had been in the jokes and the tears of the farm-girls when a cow upset the milk she had given or the boys came home fresh from a fair. It was all much grander of course in this, but ease was wanting.

“My dear Ronnie! Those new folk your sister’s running are too delicious for anything,” said Daddy Gwyllian to Hurstmanceaux in the smoking-room. “I took the woman into supper, and on my soul I never laughed more at the Coquelins! I’m going to dine there on Sunday; they’ve got Richemont.”

“More shame for you, Daddy!” said Hurstmanceaux. “I never thought you’d worship the golden calf.”

“Well, rich people are pleasant to know,” said Daddy Gwyllian. “They’re comfortable; like these easy chairs. Borrow of ’em? No, ’tisn’t that. I never borrowed, or wanted to borrow, half-a-crown in my life. But they’re indirectly so useful. And they’re pleasant. You can turn lots of things on to them. You can get lots of fun out of them. You can do such a deal for your friends with them. Rich people are like well-filled luncheon-baskets; they make the journey with ’em mighty pleasant. The wine’s dry and the game-pie’s good, and the peaches are hothouse, and it’s all as it should be and no bother.”

“I travel on cold tea,” said Hurstmanceaux with dry significance.

“Oh, lord, my dear Ronnie, I know you do,” said Gwyllian. “But I can’t stomach cold tea, and a good many other people can’t either. Now your poor folks are cold tea and my rich folks are dry sherry. Economy’s a damned ugly thing, you know, at its best. When I go down to shoot with poor folks I know they put me in a cold room and expect my servant to clean my gun. The wealth of my neighbor means my own comfort. The want of means of my friend means my own want of bien-être when I go to see him. Naturally I don’t go. Equally naturally I do go where I am sure to get all I want. I don’t want any bills backed, but I do want a warm house, a dry wine, and a good cook. The very good cooks only go nowadays to the very rich people; that is to the rôture. I dined at a royal palace last month execrably; I was ill afterwards for twenty-four hours. I know one of the chamberlains very well; I got to the bottom of this horrible mystery; the king pays so much a head for his dinners, wine included! I fled from that capital. The royal dynasty is very ancient, very chivalrous, very heroic, but I prefer the Massarenes.”

“I dare say you are right,” said Hurstmanceaux bitterly. “The adoration of new wealth is not so much snobbism as selfishness.”

“It is not snobbism at all in us,” said Gwyllian, “the snobbism is on their side. They kiss our boots when we kick ’em. Why shouldn’t we kick ’em if they like it?”

“I don’t blame your kicking them for a moment. I blame your legs being under their dinner-tables while you do it.”

“That’s a matter of opinion,” said Daddy. “‘Je prends mon bien où je le trouve,’ and if there’s a good cook in a house I go there.”

“There are good cooks at the Clubs.”

“Passable. But when I dine at a club I have to pay for my dinner,” said Gwyllian with a chuckle. “I don’t borrow money, but I like to save it. I should not pay a guinea for a peach, but a couple of guinea peaches taste uncommon good when somebody else provides ’em.”

“What a beast you make yourself out, Daddy!”

“I’m a man of my time, dear boy,” said Gwyllian, as he opened a silver cigarette-case which a pretty woman had won at a bazaar raffle and given to him.

Daddy was popular with both the sexes. Everybody liked him, though nobody could tell why they did so.

He was one of those men who do nothing all their lives except run to and fro society like dogs in a fair. He was of ancient descent, and had enough to live on, as a bachelor, without, as he had averred, ever wanting to borrow half-a-crown of anybody. He had a little nest of three rooms in Albemarle Street, full of pretty things which had all been given him chiefly by ladies, and he was seen in London, in Paris, in Homburg, in Cowes, in Cannes, in Monaco, in Biarritz, at the height of their respective seasons with unvarying regularity: farther afield he did not go often; he liked to have his familiar world about him.

He was now an old man, and to the younger generation seemed patriarchal; he had been called Daddy for more years than anybody could remember. But he was healthy and strong, for he had always taken care of himself; he could shoot with the best of them still, and could sit up all night and look fresh and rosy after his shower-bath in the morning.

“You young ’uns have no stamina,” he said once to Brancepeth when he found that young man measuring the drops of his digitalis. “It is the way you were brought up. In my time we were fed on bread and milk, and rice-pudding, and wore low frocks till we were eight or nine, and never even saw what the grown-up folks ate. You were all of you muffled up to your chins in the nurseries, and got at by the doctors, and plied with wine and raw meat, and told that you had livers and lungs and digestions before you could toddle, and given claret and what not at luncheon, and made old men of you before you were boys. Dilitation of the heart, have you got? Hypertrophy, eh? Lord bless my soul, you shouldn’t know you’ve got a heart, except as a figure of speech, when you swear it away to a woman.”

Everybody listened to Daddy even in an age which never listens: he was so obviously always right; he had so evidently found out the secret of an evergreen vitality; he was so sagaciously and unaffectedly devoted to himself, his selfishness was just tempered by that amount of good nature, when it cost him nothing, which makes a person popular; he was naturally good-natured and serviable and kindly when to be so caused him no difficulty; he would even take a little trouble for people when he liked them, and he liked a great many. On the whole, he was a happy and very sensible creature, and if his existence was one long egotism and inutility—if he were really of no more value than a snail on a cabbage-leaf—if the alpha and omega of existence were comprised for him in his own comfort, he was at least pleasant to look at and to listen to, which cannot always be said of persons of great utility. Daddy, moreover, though a very prudent creature, did patch up some quarrels, prevent some scandals, remove some misunderstandings amongst his numerous acquaintances, but it was because he liked smooth waters around his own little barque; life ought to be comfortable, he thought; it was short, it was bothered, it was subject to unforeseen accident, and it was made precarious by draughts, fogs, model stoves, runaway horses, and orange peel on the pavement; but as far as it could be kept so, it ought to be comfortable. All his philosophy centred in that; and it was a philosophy which carried him along without friction.

If Daddy Gwyllian never borrowed, he also never lent half-a-crown; but he got other people to lend it to other people, and this is the next most attractive social qualification which endears us to our friends.

To real necessity he was occasionally very serviceable indeed, so long as it did not put its empty hand in his own pockets; but on the distresses of fine ladies and gentlemen he was exceedingly severe.

Why couldn’t everybody keep straight as he himself had always kept?

“Why do you bother about Cocky and your sister?” he said to Hurstmanceaux, whom he had known from a child, as they sat alone in the ducal smoking-room. “If Cocky and your sister had a million a year to-morrow they’d want a million and a half when the year ended. There are people like that: you can’t alter ’em. Their receptivity is always greater than what they receive. Their maw’s bigger than the biggest morsel you can put into it. Don’t strip yourself for them. You might as well go without your bath for fear the Thames should run dry.”

Daddy was so fond of pretty women (platonically) that he generally forgave them all their sins, which was the easier because they were not sins against himself. But Lady Kenilworth, though he admired her, he did not like her; he gave her a little sly pat whenever he could.

She yawned when he talked, which nobody else ever did, and once, when they were staying at the same country house, when he had offered to ride with her, she had told him in plain terms that she didn’t care for old men in the saddle or out of it.

It was not in human nature to forget and forgive such a reply, even though you were the best natured man in the world. He could not do her much harm, for Mouse was at that height of beauty, fashion and renown at which a person is absolutely unassailable; but when he could breathe on the mirror of her charms and dull it, he did so; when he could slip a little stone under the smoothly-rolling wheel of her life’s triumphal chariot, he did so. It was but rarely. She was a very popular person. Her elastic spirit, her beauty, her grace, her untiring readiness for pleasure, all made her welcome in society; her very insolence was charming, and her word was law on matters of fashion. She was often unkind, often malicious, always selfish, always cruel, but these qualities served to intimidate and added to her potency. People trembled for her verdict and supplicated for her presence. Whether she were leading the cotillon or the first flight, whether she was forming a costume quadrille or bringing down a rocksetter, she was equally admirable, and although she excelled in masculine sports she had the tact always to remain exquisitely feminine in appearance and style. She had had also the tact and the good luck always to preserve her position. She had always done what she liked, but she had always done it in such a way that it had never injured her.

CHAPTER X.

A week or two later Hurstmanceaux saw a paragraph in the morning papers which made him throw them hastily aside, leave his breakfast unfinished, and go to his sister’s house in Stanhope Street. Her ladyship was in her bath. “Say I shall return in half an hour. I come on an urgent matter.” Leaving that message with her servants he went to walk away the time in the Park. It was a fine and breezy morning, but Hurstmanceaux, who always hated the town, saw no beauty in the budding elms, or the cycling women, or even in Jack or Boo, who were trotting along on their little black Shetlands. When the time was up he waited restlessly another half hour in his sister’s boudoir, where he felt and looked like a St. Bernard dog shut up in a pen at a show.

She at last made her appearance, looking charming, with her hair scarce dry gathered loosely up with a turquoise-studded comb and a morning-gown of cloudy lace and chiffon floating about her; a modern Aphrodite.

“You have made your husband a director in the City,” said Hurstmanceaux without preface, almost before she had entered the room.

She was prepared for the attack and smiled, rather impertinently.

“What does it matter to you, Ronnie?”

“A director of a bank!”

“’Tisn’t your bank, is it?”

“A director of a bank!” he repeated. It seemed to him so monstrous, so shocking that he had no words left.

“They won’t let him into the strong-room,” said Cocky’s wife. “It may be rather absurd; but it isn’t more absurd than numbers of other things—than your being asked to be a mayor, for instance.”

“If I had accepted I should not have disgraced the mayoralty.”

“Cocky won’t disgrace anything. They’ll look after him.”

“Who did it?”

“Is that your business, dear Ronnie?”

“Oh, of course, it was that miserable cad from Dakota, whom you forced through the gates of Otterbourne House.”

“If you know, why ask?”

“What an insult to us all! What a position to put us in! When everybody’s seen the man at your ball where we all were——!”

His indignation and emotion checked his utterance.

His sister laughed a little, but she was bored and annoyed. What business was it of his? Why could she not be let alone to arrange these little matters to her own convenience in any ingenious way she chose?

“How could you make the duke appear to play such a part?” said Hurstmanceaux. “He is the soul of honor and of proper pride. What have you made him look like? It is the kind of thing that is a disgrace to the country! It is the kind of thing that makes the whole peerage ridiculous and contemptible. Imagine what the Radical press will say! Such scandalous jobbery justifies the worst accusations.”

“Don’t read the Radical newspapers then. I shall read them, because they will be so deliciously funny. They are always so amusing about Cocky.”

“You have singular notions of amusement. I do not share them.”