Page:The Smart Set (Volume 1).djvu/446

114 always in black silk, and who drops a respectful curtsey so often—the stately housekeeper will tell you that a deal may be found out from a blotting-book. She herself has never thought that the young mistress was any better than she should be, though the master (poor, unsuspecting gentleman!) dotes on her, and is as blind as blind. So the housekeeper eagerly scans her ladyship's blotting-book (she owes this to the honor of the family she has served forty year and more); she even holds it up to the looking-glass. And who can doubt that the lady's guilt is now made as plain as the nose on your face?

The hero of the English story-book is a poor creature. Sometimes he is a foolish and garrulous old woman, sometimes a crabbed spinster, but most often he is a sulky brute who will balk unless he has the most careful management. Even the lady-novelist—for it is she who manages things here—even the lady-novelist realizes that she cannot do much for him. But her heroine needs an establishment; she has already gone off considerably in her looks, and so the lady-novelist patches the hero up a little here and tinkers him a little there, and over all puts on a coat of whitewash, which she fondly hopes is thick enough to last until he is married. Then she makes someone speak of him as a fine figure of a man. But, after he is safely married, she washes her hands of him with almost indecent haste, for she knows that she can no longer keep up appearances. And who can blame her? Does anyone believe that he said all of those nice things to the heroine? No; those are what he ought to have said; they are what the lady-novelist would have said had she been in his place. The lady-novelist doesn't believe that he said them, and, moreover, she knows that we do not believe it, either. We even have our doubts about the magnificent half-hoop of diamonds which she says he gave to the heroine.

Once in a while a decent sort of chap is allowed to engage himself to the heroine, but he is not permitted to marry her. He is called away on urgent business; he is entrusted with an errand of such delicacy that no one else can do it, or his old uncle, who brought him up, dies, and he is obliged to follow the poor old man to the churchyard as chief mourner. Then the lady-novelist gets up an awful shipwreck, or such a railway collision as has not been known for years, and whoever else escapes, he doesn't. All of the heroine's friends and relations then tell her that poor Reggie was a good fellow, but that he wasn't the husband for her. What she needs is a strong man—a man to whom she can look up; somebody (they mean) who will swear like a trooper when the coffee is cold, who will talk to her as if she were a fool, and order her about as he would a servant, and roar "Peace, woman!" if she ventures to open her mouth. "Masterful" is what the lady-novelist calls him, and the heroine needs a husband who is a masterful kind of man.

Sometimes, after a few years of happy married life, the sulky br—, I mean the masterful man, dies; he meets with an accident in the hunting-field, or his favorite mare, Black Bess, is obliging enough to throw him and break his neck when he is riding home from the county town some moonlight night, although she has never been known to do such a thing before. But no one professes to be sorry except the widow. She puts on a widow's cap and raises a morsel of lace and cambric to her eyes, and tells everybody how hard it is for a poor, weak woman to be deprived of her protector. Nobody, however, is deceived for a moment. Everybody knows that now she will refurnish the house or go to the Riviera for the Winter, and enjoy herself rarely, while her male relatives openly say that she will have a mint of money, and now she can marry that cousin she used to be fond of—lucky beggar!

The heroine who knows something which she won't tell, abounds in the world of the English story-book. She is found in some other places, also,