Ouida

“ When Katherine Massarene closed her mother’s eyes she felt both regret and remorse. Why had she not had patience and penetration enough to do justice to the unrecognized loyalty and affection in that existence of which he had only seen the envelope of flesh, only despised the narrowness and ignorance? She knew that she had never loved her mother; she felt that she must have often, very often, caused her pain and humiliation. She had persistently gazed at her mother’s foolishness and commonness; she had never tried to be just to her better qualities. ”

“ You admit that your world is more contemptible than he. What obliged Lord Roxhall to live in such a manner that he was forced to sell his old estate? Are not nearly all of you tradesmen and horse-dealers and speculators? Who fill the markets with game, the wharfs with coal, the shows with fat cattle and brood-mares? Who breed herds of Shetland ponies to sell them to the cruel work of the mines? Who destroy all the wild-bird life of three kingdoms, that the slaughter of the battues may be wholesale and the pheasants sent in thousands to Leadenhall? ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Duchess of Otterbourne, like the Colonial Office, was much shocked and displeased. It was odious to have all London talking of Harry; it would, she knew, make people remember his relations with herself.
When a woman has ordered a man out of her life she prefers him to efface himself from other people’s lives. Harry had effaced himself and gone docily into oblivion, which was quite right, but that now from that nether world he should have sent a clarion blast echoing over the seas, as if he were one of Wagner’s heroes, was distinctly irritating. ”

“ Mouse murmured. “How can the ruling of a judge undo what is done, efface what is written on the heart, or make the past a tabula rasa? You think me an impertinent, tiresome person, I am sure, but I must say to you how glad, how very glad I should be, if I could ever prove to you that you wronged the Countess zu Lynar.”
“Why do you speak of such things?” said Vanderlin, his self-control momentarily deserting him. “Does one put out the light of one’s life, of one’s soul, on mere suspicion? You do not know what you are saying. You torture me. You will make me forget myself. ”

“ He could not and would not know Massarene’s heiress, but he admired her conduct in society; he admired most of all what others condemned in her, the contemptuous coldness and indifference of her manner, her brief replies, sometimes so cutting and caustic, her avoidance of all those whose high position made them sought by her parents, the unwavering coldness with which she resented all court paid to her.
When he watched her in the world, he felt inclined to applaud as he would have applauded a fine innings at Lord’s or a hard-won race on the Thames. ”

“ He knew if he drove through Kerosene City next month the whole population of it would turn out in his honor; the governor of the State, the mayor of the town, the sheriff of the county, the members it sent to Congress, its senators, its solicitors, its merchants, its manufacturers, its hotel-keepers, its white men and its black men, would all be in the streets to cheer and welcome him, to feast and flatter him, to hang out the Union Jack and the star-spangled banner side by side in the oily, sooty, reeking air from the ten-storied houses and the towering factories. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had dealt with men so that they were always legally in the wrong: for moral right he cared nothing. To his heiress all his wealth seemed blood-stained and accursed. She seemed to herself blood-stained in keeping or using it. Some part might possibly have been gained by industry, frugality, and self-denial; but the main portion of it had been built up on the ruin of others. In any case she would have felt thus, but the words of Hurstmanceaux had been like electric light shed on a dark place where murdered bodies lie. His scorn cut her to the heart. ”

“ Did a wretched railway hand dare to write this to a colossus of finance whose brain was shrewder and whose pile was bigger than those of any man on the Corporation of London? William Massarene felt as a Burmese Buddha, hung with gold and jewels, may be supposed to feel when a Cook’s tourist pokes at him with the brass ferule of an umbrella.
On a man of breeding the insults of inferiors fall without power to wound; but to a man of low origin and enormous pretension they are the most intolerable of offences. ”

“ Between her and her father there had always been in life an impassable gulf; death could not bridge that gulf.
“Am I made of stone?” she said to herself in remorse; but it was of no use; she felt horror, but sorrow she could not feel. She was too sincere to pretend it to herself or others. She seemed to her mother, to the household, to the official persons who came in contact with her, unnaturally chill and silent; they thought it the coldness of indifference.
The grief of Margaret Massarene was violent and genuine, but its safety-valve was in its hysterical garrulity. ”

“ Why cannot he remain in obscurity spending his vast fortune for the good of others instead of squandering it on idle people, impudent people, worthless people, people to whom he is a jest, a by-word and a jeer?”
“My dear young lady, money is power,” said Lord Framlingham. “It is nothing new that it should be so; but in other ages, it was subordinate to many greater powers than itself. Now it is practically supreme; it is practically alone. Aristocracy in its true sense exists no longer. War in its modern form is wholly a question of supply. The victory will go to who can pay most and longest. ”

“ We are all of us very late people,” she said, directly, as she passed Katherine Massarene.
“You are my parents’ guest, Lady Kenilworth; I endeavor not to forget it,” was the reply.
“What does she mean by that?” her guest wondered; she thought she meant some covert rebuke. She did not at all like the steady contemptuous gaze of this young woman’s tranquil eyes.
“Oh, my dear, how dreadfully old-fashioned and formal you are!” she cried, with an impatient little laugh; and the daughter of the house thought her familiarity more odious than her rudeness. ”

“ Marry money!
And the man with money would have all this charming fair beauty of hers, and would have Jack and the others in his nurseries: and he himself—where would he be? Done with; rubbed off the slate; struck out of the running; allowed to do a theatre with her now and then perhaps, and see Jack and the others on their ponies in the ride of a morning—where was the good of Cocky having died? He wished with all his soul that Cocky had not died. Things had been so comfortable with poor old Cocky. ”

“ The news of her father’s end at Monte Carlo had intensified the melancholy of her thoughts. She had always hoped whilst he lived that some revelation, some atonement, might come from him.
He was dead; and death carries with it its own depression, its own hopelessness. Death in her father’s case seemed to her intensified in horror, because it was the end of a base, valueless, miserable life. It filled her with the same sort of despair which Hurstmanceaux had felt on hearing that Cocky was dying at Staghurst. ”

“ Cocky breathed more freely.
“That is a very exaggerated remark,” he murmured. “You are so very stagy, my dear Ronald, so very stagy. You should have lived a century or two ago.”
“I am ashamed to be of the same generation as yourself,” said Hurstmanceaux sternly. “Great heavens, man! You come of a good stock; you will be chief of a great house; your father is a gentleman in every fibre of his being; how can you endure to live as you do with your very name a by-word for the cabmen in the street? ”

“ For she was very proud of him now he was gone and lying under his marble slab in the Roxhall’s crypt; he had stuck a knife in her, as it were, but she did not complain of the wound; he had been the “bull-dozing boss” to the last and he had had a right to be it.
The natural bitterness she felt did not turn against him, but against her daughter.
“You’ll marry very high now,” murmured Margaret Massarene. “Lord! There’s nothing you may not get if you wish it.”
“I shall never marry,” said Katherine; and through her memory passed the simile of the hangman’s daughter. ”

“ This was how all men of honor and honesty must regard the career of William Massarene; if the world in general had not done so it was only because the world is corrupt and venal itself and always open to purchase; the world it may roughly be said does not quarrel with its bread and butter. But what Hurstmanceaux felt was, she knew, that which every person of high principle would feel with regard to the vast ill-gotten wealth which she had inherited. She did not even quarrel with the patrician temper which had insulted herself ”