Test Bank for Principles of Electronic

1.
Communication Systems 4th Edition
Frenzel 0073373850 9780073373850

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communication-systems-4th-edition-frenzel-0073373850-
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A sine wave carrier can be modulated by varying its amplitude, frequency, or phase shift.

TRUE

Blooms: 2. Understand
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Easy
Section: 05.01 Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Subtopic: Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

2.
Impressing an information signal on a carrier by changing its frequency produces AM.

FALSE

Blooms: 2. Understand
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Medium
Section: 05.01 Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Subtopic: Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

3.
In FM, the carrier amplitude remains constant and the carrier frequency is changed by the modulating signal.

5-1
Copyright © 2016 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of
McGraw-Hill Education.
TRUE

Blooms: 2. Understand
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Hard
Section: 05.01 Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Subtopic: Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

4.
The frequency of the modulating signal determines the frequency deviation rate.

TRUE
Blooms: 1. Remember
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Hard
Section: 05.01 Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Subtopic: Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

5-2
Copyright © 2016 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of
McGraw-Hill Education.
5.
Frequency-shift keying is widely used in the transmission of binary data in digital cell phones.

TRUE

Blooms: 2. Understand
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Medium
Section: 05.02 Principles of Phase Modulation
Subtopic: Principles of Phase Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

6.
When the amount of phase shift of a constant-frequency carrier is varied in accordance with a modulating signal,
the resulting output is a phase modulation signal.

TRUE

Blooms: 1. Remember
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Hard
Section: 05.02 Principles of Phase Modulation
Subtopic: Principles of Phase Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

7.
The maximum frequency deviation produced by a phase modulator occurs when the modulating signal is
changing at its slowest rate.

FALSE

Blooms: 2. Understand
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Easy
Section: 05.01 Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Subtopic: Basic Principles of Frequency Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

8.
In FM, the frequency deviation is indirectly proportional to the amplitude of the modulating signal.

FALSE
Blooms: 1. Remember
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Medium
Section: 05.02 Principles of Phase Modulation
Subtopic: Principles of Phase Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

5-3
Copyright © 2016 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of
McGraw-Hill Education.
9.
In PM, the carrier frequency deviation is proportional to both the modulating frequency and the amplitude.

TRUE

Blooms: 1. Remember
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Hard
Section: 05.02 Principles of Phase Modulation
Subtopic: Principles of Phase Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

10.
PM is made compatible with FM by passing the intelligence signal through a high-pass RC network.

FALSE

Blooms: 1. Remember
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Medium
Section: 05.02 Principles of Phase Modulation
Subtopic: Principles of Phase Modulation
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

11.
The process of phase-modulating a carrier with binary data is called

A.
frequency-shift keying

B.
multiplexing

C.
carrier phasing

D.
phase-shift keying

Blooms: 2. Understand
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Easy
Section: 05.03 Modulation Index and Sidebands
Subtopic: Modulation Index and Sidebands
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

5-4
Copyright © 2016 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of
McGraw-Hill Education.
12.
Any modulation process produces

A.
carriers

B.
sidebands

C.
noise

D.
amplification

Blooms: 2. Understand
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Easy
Section: 05.03 Modulation Index and Sidebands
Subtopic: Modulation Index and Sidebands
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

13.
The ratio of the frequency deviation to the modulating frequency is known as the

A.

deviation factor

B.
frequency-shift keying

C.
modulation index

D.
ratio of modulation

Blooms: 1. Remember
Chapter: 05 Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation
Difficulty: Medium
Section: 05.03 Modulation Index and Sidebands
Subtopic: Modulation Index and Sidebands
Topic: Fundamentals of Frequency Modulation

5-5
Copyright © 2016 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution without the prior written consent of
McGraw-Hill Education.
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“I have sent to my women servants to bring you cloaks,” said the owner
of the château as he came down the steps to meet her, unconscious of the
comedy which had been acted for him. “It was very venturesome,” he
added, “to come in a rowing-boat with no one to aid you.”
“It was very stupid of me not to examine the condition of the boat,” she
replied. “As for danger there was none. I kept close to land, and my child
and I swim like fish.”
“So I have seen; but the Mediterranean, if only a salt-water lake as some
say, can be a very turbulent one.”
At that moment his servants came, bringing wraps in which they
hastened to enfold the lady and her little girl, who were beginning to feel
really chilly. They went up to the house, over whose façade the
appreciative eyes of Mouse ranged enviously.
“Pray consider everything here at your disposal,” he said courteously.
“My housekeeper will take you upstairs, and if you will allow me to
advise you, you will go to bed. Meantime, can I send to inform your
people?”
She thanked him gracefully, not too warmly, and gave him her address in
Cannes.
“If you could get my maid over with some clothes I should be glad,” she
said, as she went up the staircase looking, as no other woman would
have looked, lovely despite the thick wraps and the soaked hair.
“But you have not told me your name?”
“Duchess of Otterbourne,” she called back to him, whilst she went up the
stairs followed by Boo, who by this time had grown cold and equally
cross.
She was taken into a beautiful bedchamber of the Louis Quinze style,
with silver dogs on the hearth where a wood fire already blazed.
“It was really very well done,” she thought with self-complacency. “I
only hope to goodness Boo will not take cold. That man must be
Vanderlin himself. He is more good-looking than I expected; and for an
anchorite he is civil.”
“They’re silver,” said Boo, surveying the andirons, whilst two maids
were rubbing dry her rosy limbs. “So’s the mirror,” she added as she
looked around her after drinking a cup of hot milk; after which she
allowed herself to be put to bed and soon fell fast asleep.
Her mother sat by the fire wrapped in blankets and eider-down.
Even to Boo’s busy and suspicious intelligence it did not occur that the
plug had been pulled out on purpose. The little secret was quite safe in
her mother’s own brain.
“This is a very nice house,” said Boo with condescension to the owner of
it when, three hours later, the maid and the clothes having arrived from
Cannes, they went downstairs with no trace in either of their late
immersion in salt water, and saw their host in his library.
“I am honored by your approval,” said Vanderlin.
“Boo is a great connoisseur,” said her mother.
Vanderlin was a tall and slender man, with a handsome face, spoiled by
melancholy and fatigue; his eyes were dreamy and gentle, his manner
was grave and gave the impression that his thoughts were not greatly in
what he was saying; he at all times spoke little.
He smiled at the child indulgently. “I hope she has felt no ill effects,” he
said to her mother. “Nor yourself?”
“They took too good care of us,” replied Mouse. “It is so very kind of
you to have been so hospitable to two drowned rats.”
“I am happy to have been of use.” He said it with perfect politeness, but
the tone suggested to her that he would be grateful if she went away and
left him to his solitude.
The indifference stimulated her vanity.
“You have not told me who you are,” she said with that abruptness which
in her was graceful. “But I think I know. You are Baron Vanderlin.”
He assented.
“Why do you not see people?” she asked brusquely. “Why do you shut
yourself up all alone in this beautiful place?”
“I come here for rest.”
“But even in Paris or London or Berlin you shun society?”
“I do not care for it.”
“What a pity!”
“Do you think so?”
“Certainly I do. No one should live alone who is not old and blind and
poor.”
He smiled slightly.
“If one were old and blind and poor, one would be probably left alone,
malgré soi.”
“Ah, you are a pessimist! I am not. I think the world very delightful and
people very good.”
“Your experiences have been fortunate—and brief.”
He looked vaguely round the room as if he looked for somebody to take
her away.
Boo, who had been examining the library, came up to him with a little
agate Cupid, a paper weight; the Cupid had gold wings and quiver, and
was a delicate work of art. “It’s pretty,” she said; “will you let me have
it?”
“Pray keep it,” said Vanderlin. Her mother scolded her and protested, she
was indeed considerably annoyed at the child’s effrontery; but Boo kept
tight hold on the Cupid.
“Gentleman don’t want it,” she said. “He’s too old for toys.”
He laughed. He had not laughed for a long time.
“Have you any children?” asked Boo.
“No, my dear.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“They are treasures not accorded to all.”
“Treasure is great anxiety, whether it is your kind of treasure or mine, M.
Vanderlin,” said Boo’s mother. “You have been very kind to this naughty
little girl; and we have trespassed too long on your hospitality. Yet, if it
wouldn’t bore you too much, I should so like to see something of the
house before I go. I have often wished to enter as I sallied past it or
drove through your olive woods.”
He assented to her wish with a reluctance which she ignored; and he
showed her over the chief part of his château, which contained much
which was beautiful and rare. Boo, wishing for everything she saw but
warned by her mother’s eyes not to ask for anything more, went jumping
and running through the rooms, her hat in her hand and the light on her
golden head.
“You have several children, I think,” said Vanderlin to her mother.
“Four,” replied Mouse; and she felt that she would have preferred for this
hermit to know nothing about her by reputation.
“Are they all with you?”
“No; they are little boys; their guardians have more to do with them than
I.”
There was a sadness in her tone which made him look at her with a
certain interest.
“Law is very hard on women,” she added. “Especially as regards their
offspring.”
She was, to men of serious temper, most interesting in her maternal
feeling, and it was genuine in a sense though used with artifice.
Vanderlin looked at her with less indifference and unwillingness, but she
made little way in his intimacy; he remained distant in his courtesy, and
as she drove away with baskets of roses for herself and of fruit for her
little daughter she felt discontentedly that she had gone through the
trouble of her invention, and spent the money which the lost boat would
cost, for small purpose.
Boo turned and looked back at the turrets of the château already distant
above its woods.
“That’s a nice man,” she said decidedly. “Won’t you marry him,
mammy?”
Her mother colored at such unexpected divination of her own projects.
“What odious things you say, Boo,” she answered; “and how odiously
you behaved, asking for things in that bare-faced way. I have told you
fifty times never to ask.”
“I shouldn’t have got it else,” replied Boo, calmly and unmoved, taking
the Cupid out of the pocket of her fur paletôt, and contemplating it with
satisfaction. She had improved in the science of looting since the day
when her mother had made her give back the gold box to Mrs.
Massarene.
As the carriage drove along the sea-road Vanderlin returned to the
solitude of his library.
It had been unwelcome to him to be obliged to entertain them, and yet
now that they were gone he momentarily missed them, the gay bright
presence of the child and the graceful nonchalance in speech and
movement of the woman. It was years since either child or woman had
been in the rooms of Les Mouettes.
The days passed and brought her no recompense whatever for her self-
inflicted immersion in the cold January waves. The boat had been found
and restored to its owner, so it did not cost her very much. But the sense
of failure irritated her exceedingly. Boo importuned her several times to
return to the château of the silver dogs, but only encountered a sharp
reprimand and was scolded for effrontery. The Cupid had been taken
away from her and found its home in her mother’s dispatch-box till it
was sent as a wedding-gift to somebody who was being married in the
fog in Belgravia. Boo resented the injustice bitterly and meditated
compensation or revenge. More than once she was on the point of
starting by herself for Les Mouettes, but it was far off, her feet would not
take her there, and she could not get away in a boat because her
governess or her maid was always after her. “If I could only get there
alone he’d give me a lot of things,” she thought; she could see the
promontory on which it stood some five miles off to westward. But she
had to stay in Cannes, and be walked out by her women, and play stupid
games with little Muscovite princesses, pale and peevish, and little
German countesses, rustic and rosy. Mammy took little notice of her.
“She’s always nasty when she’s got no money,” reflected Boo.
Boo knew that there was a scarcity of money.
One day, as she was walking with her governess, which she hated, she
saw two gentlemen on the other side of a myrtle hedge. She kissed her
hand to one of them and rushed headlong to where a break in the hedge
enabled her to join them.
“Good morning!” she cried, rapturously throwing her arms about
Vanderlin. He looked down at her, surprised at such a welcome.
“Is it you, my little friend? How is your mother?”
“Why haven’t you been to see us?” asked Boo.
He smiled.
“I am remiss in those matters. I need education.”
“I’ll tell you what to do,” said Boo. “I know what people ought to do.
Come and see mammy now.”
“Not now, my dear. I have other engagements.”
Boo’s brows knit together.
“People break engagements when I tell them,” she said with hauteur.
“Mine are business engagements.”
“Come!” she said with a stamp of one small foot.
“No, my dear, I will call on you at three if you wish it so much.”
“That is a rude way to speak.”
“I am not a courtier, my dear. Run away now. I am occupied. I will call
on you at three.”
Boo was forced to be content with this compromise; she looked after him
as he walked on with his companion, a prime minister.
“He’s made of millions,” she said to her governess, and her little face
had a reverential look upon it.
Her mother was at home at three o’clock in the pretty room with its
windows opening on to a flower-filled balcony which cost so much in
the first hotel in Cannes. She was reading, and Boo, at a table, was
dabbling with some water-color paints, when he who was “made of
millions” entered, being faithful to his word.
“Your little daughter reminded me that I have been to blame in not
earlier doing myself this honor,” he said as he bent over her hand: she
thought that he did not look either honored or enthusiastic.
She had a vague sense of hostility to her in him which stimulated her
interest and her intentions.
“You owed no duty to two shipwrecked waifs whom you entertained
only too amiably,” she said with a charming smile. “I am surprised that
you have given us a thought.”
He had scarcely given her a thought, but he could not tell her so.
He remained with her half an hour, talking in a somewhat absent manner
of French literature and of German music.
“What’ll you give me, mammy?” said Boo when he had taken his leave,
as she dropped down at her mother’s feet.
“Give you? What do you mean?” said Mouse, who was irritated that he
had not invited her to his château.
“What’ll you give me, mammy?” repeated Boo; and her upraised saucy
imperious eyes said plainly, “Reward me for bringing the person you
wanted or I shall tell him you’ve sent his Cupid—my Cupid—as a
wedding-present to Daisy Ffiennes.”
“I will give you a kiss first,” said Mouse with apparent ignorance of the
meaning of the upraised eyes, “and then I will give you a drive. Run
away.”
To Boo the recompense seemed small besides the greatness of the
service rendered. But her short years of life had been long enough to
convince her that people were not grateful.
“Man’s made of millions,” she said dreamily when she was seated by her
mother’s side in the victoria and Vanderlin, driving a pair of horses on
his homeward way, passed them.
“I believe he is,” said her mother. “But his millions are nothing to us.”
Boo turned her head away that she might grin unrepressed, showing all
her pretty teeth to an eucalyptus tree on the road.
Her mother did not like Vanderlin. His grave abstracted manner, his
visible indifference to herself, his somewhat ceremonious words bored
her, chilled her; she felt in his presence very much as she did when in
church.
But she intended him to marry her. She fancied he was weak and
unintelligent; she thought she would do as she liked with him and the
millions which were undoubtedly his. On his part he would benefit, for
he wanted rousing and being reconciled to the world. What was the use
of the millions if there were nobody to spend them? She knew that no
one could distance her in the art of making money fly about and diffuse
itself.
She would much sooner have married Wuffie.
Wuffie was His Serene Highness Prince Woffram of Karstein-
Lowenthal; he was twenty-four years old, very good-looking, very
mirthful and pleasure-loving, very popular and sociable; he was
extremely in love with her, and would have given her all he possessed
with rapture. But, alas! that all was represented by a rank which was
negotiable in the marriage market, and bills which were not negotiable
anywhere. He was a fourth son, and his parents were so poor that Daddy
Gwyllian declared he knew for a fact that, when they were dining alone,
they had the Volkzeitung outspread for a tablecloth to save their palatial
damask. Wuffie was charming, but matrimonially he was impossible.
Wuffie was then at Cannes, floating himself in the best society, as
penniless princes of his Fatherland alone can do. She liked him; she had
even more than liking for him, but she kept him at a respectful distance,
for he did not accord with the grave intentions with which she had swum
toward the terraces of Les Mouettes. In racing parlance, she did not dare
put her money on him for any big event.
“Why am I out in the cold, darling?” he asked sorrowfully of Boo, who
was always consulted by her mother’s admirers as an unfailing aneroid.
Boo shook her head and pursed up her lips.
“Why?” insisted the poor prince. “You know everything, Boo.”
This appeal to her omniscience prevailed.
“You’re very pretty, Wuffie,” she said, caressing his golden hair, which
was as bright as her own. “You’re very pretty, and you’re great fun. But
you know, poor, poor Wuffie, you haven’t got a pfennig to spend.”
“Come and see, Boo,” said Wuffie, stung by such a statement into mad
expenditure, which resulted in the purchase for Boo of a toy opera-
house, with orchestra, costumes, and personages complete, which had,
for three days, been the object of her ardent desires in a shop window in
Nice.
“I’ll sing all the parts myself,” she said rapturously.
“You must give the tenor’s to me,” said the purchaser of it, with a double
meaning.
“Tenors is always spitted,” said Boo solemnly. “They’re always spitted
—or poisoned.”
Her mother passed some days in perplexed meditation. She felt that all
the charms of her ever-irresistible sorcery would be thrown away on the
owner of that delicious sea-palace, and that, as matters now stood, there
was not a shadow of reason for the threat of Prince Khristof to be put
into execution. But she was tenacious, and did not like to acknowledge
herself beaten. She could not readily believe that Vanderlin was so
different to other men that he could in the end remain wholly
uninfluenced by her. The great difficulty was to approach him, for she
felt that she had already committed herself to more than was wise or was
delicate in her advances to him in his solitude. She cast about her for
some deus ex machina that she could set in motion, and decided on the
old Austrian Archduke.
The Archduke was an old man in years, but not in temperament, and he
was highly sensible of her attractions; she did very much as she pleased
with him, and he, sternest of martinets and harshest of commanding
officers, was like a ball of feathers in her hands. With great adroitness,
and the magnetism which every charming woman exercises, she so
interested him by her descriptions of Les Mouettes, that he was inspired
by a desire of seeing the place for himself, and was induced to overcome
both his well-bred dislike to intruding on a recluse, and his imperial
reluctance to cross the threshold of a man not noble. In the end, so well
did she know how to turn men and things to her own purposes, that,
despite the mutual reluctance of both the guest and the host, Vanderlin
did, taken at a disadvantage one day, when he met them all three
together, invite the old general to breakfast, and invited also herself and
her little girl, and the invitations were promptly accepted. It was
impossible to be more perfectly courteous than Vanderlin was on the
occasion, or to show more urbanity and tact than he did in his reception
of them; but even she, who could easily persuade herself of most things
which she wished to believe, could not fail to see that the entertainment
was a weariness to him—a concession, and an unwilling one, to the
wishes of an aged prince with whom his banking-house had, for many
years, had relations.
No one was ever, she thought, so gracefully courteous and so
impenetrably indifferent as her host was. The child alone seemed to
interest him; and Boo, who had taken her cue unbidden from her mother,
was charming, subdued, almost shy, and wholly bewitching. She had a
genuine respect for the man made of millions.
The Archduke, after the luncheon, tired by his perambulations over the
large house, and having eaten and drunk largely, fell asleep on a sofa
with some miniatures, which he was looking at, lying on his knees; he
was sunk in the heavy slumber of age and defective digestion. Not to
disturb him, Vanderlin and she conversed in low tones at some distance
from him, whilst the gentleman of his household, who had accompanied
him, discreetly played a noiseless game of ball with Boo on the terrace
outside the windows.
She, who was greatly daring, thought that now or never was the moment
to find out what her host’s feelings were toward the woman whom he
had divorced. It was difficult, and she knew that it was shockingly ill-
bred to invade the privacy of such a subject, but she felt that it was the
only way to get even with Khris Kar.
They were in a room consecrated to the portraits of women—a collection
made by Vanderlin’s father—chiefly portraits of the eighteenth century,
some oils, some pastels, some crayons, and most of them French work,
except a Romney or two and several Conway miniatures. She had
looked, admired, criticised them with that superficial knowledge of the
technique and jargon of art which is so easily acquired in the world by
people to whom art, quâ art, is absolutely indifferent. She said the right
thing in the right place, displaying culture and accurate criticism, and
looking, as she always did, like a brilliant Romney herself, very simply
attired with a white gown, a blue ribbon round her waist, and a straw hat,
covered with forget-me-nots, on her hair.
The room was in shade and silence, full of sweetness from great china
bowls of lilies of the valley; the old man slept on with his chin on his
chest; the sound of the sea and the smothered ripple of childish laughter
came from without. Now or never, she thought, and turned to Vanderlin.
“What an exquisite place this is! What a pity you are all alone in it.”
“Solitude has its compensations, if not its distractions,” he answered; he
was profoundly distrustful of her simple, natural, friendly manner, which
seemed to him more dangerous than any other; he believed it to be
assumed on purpose to put him off his guard. He thought the Circe who
now endeavored to beguile him one of the loveliest women he had ever
seen, and he felt convinced that she was also one of the most dangerous.
But she aroused neither interest nor curiosity in him, though his mind
acknowledged her potent charms.
“Do you never regret?” she asked abruptly.
“Who can outlive youth without regret?” he replied. He was hostile to
her in his mind. He felt her charm, but he resented her approaches. He
could not but perceive her desire to draw him into confidential
conversation, and the reserve which was natural to him increased in
proportion to her persistent endeavor to overcome it.
In herself, she was irritated and discouraged; but she concealed both
feelings, and summoned all her courage.
“Is there a portrait of your wife here?” she asked abruptly, turning and
facing him.
He grew pale to his lips, and an expression of intense pain passed over
his countenance.
“Madame,” he said very coldly, “that lady’s name must not be mentioned
to me.”
“Oh, you know, I am a very impertinent person!” she answered lightly.
“Perhaps you will say I am a very ill-bred one. But her story has always
had a fascination for me. They say she is such a very beautiful person.”
He said nothing; he retained his composure with difficulty; this
audacious stranger probed a wound which he would not have allowed his
most intimate friend to touch.
“I know her father very well,” she continued, disregarding the visible
offence and suffering with which he heard her; “he has sometimes
spoken of her to me. He is not very scrupulous. Don’t you think there
may have been some misunderstanding, some misrepresentation, some
intentional mischief?”
Vanderlin, with increasing difficulty, controlled his anger and his
emotion.
“I do not discuss these matters,” he said with great chillness. “Allow me,
madame, to remind you that the privilege of your acquaintance is to me a
very recent honor.”
“And you think me very intrusive and insupportable? Oh! I quite
understand that. But I have heard things—and it seems a pity—you are
not old enough to mope all by yourself like this; and if there was any
mistake?”
“There was none.”
He said it between his teeth; the recollections she evoked were fraught
for him with intolerable torture, and he could have taken this intruder by
her shoulders and thrust her out of his presence if he had not been
restrained by the habits and self-command of a man of the world.
“But she ruins your life. You do not forget her?” said his unwelcome
visitant.
“I shall not replace her, madame,” replied Vanderlin curtly, weary of the
cross-examination, and wondering, half divining, what the scope of it
might be.
“Ah, there you are so right!” 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. Be silent, I tell you; be
silent!”
She looked at him, very sweetly, without offence.
“I understand. You love this woman still. She was the mother of your
dead child. I understand—oh! so completely! Well, if ever I can prove to
you that I am right and you are wrong, I shall be very glad, for I am quite
sure that you will never care for any other person. It may seem to you
very impertinent, but I have an idea—an idea—— Never mind, if there
be any grounds for it, time will show.”
“You speak very strangely, madame,” said Vanderlin, agitated to a degree
which it was hard for him to conceal, yet extremely suspicious of her
motives.
“I dare say I do,” she answered without offence, “for I know nothing
whatever, and I conjecture a great deal; very feminine that, you will say.
Hush! the Archduke is stirring.”
At that moment the Archduke awoke from his slumber, astonished to
find himself where he was, and looking round for his missing gentleman.
Vanderlin hastened, of course, to his side, and the tête-à-tête was over,
but it had lasted long enough for her to be certain that it would be as easy
to raise the sunken galleys of Carthage from the violet seas beyond the
windows as to revive passion in the heart of her host.
She hastened to leave him and go out on to the terrace to tell Boo to be
quiet, for she had, as she had truly said, no knowledge whatever, and
merely some vague impressions suggested by the visit and the warning
of Prince Khris. But she had gleaned two certainties from her
conversation with Vanderlin—one, that he had never ceased to regret his
divorced wife, the other that it would be as much use to woo a marble
statue as to attempt to fascinate this man, whose heart was buried in the
deep sea grave of a shipwrecked passion. She had read of such passions,
and seen them represented on the stage, but she had never before
believed in their existence. Now that she did believe in them, such a
waste of opportunities seemed to her supremely idiotic. The idea of a
financier, a man of the world, a Crœsus of Paris and Berlin, sitting down
to weep for the broken jug of spilt milk, for the shattered basket of eggs,
like the farm-girl in the fable! What could be sillier or less remunerative?
But she remembered she had often heard that the cleverest men in public
business were always the greatest fools in private life.
She drove away in the radiance of the late afternoon in the Archduke’s
carriage, Boo sitting opposite to her holding disconsolately a bouquet of
orchids, of which the rarity did not compensate to her for not having got
anything else.
“What a pity that man does not marry again,” said the old gentleman, as
they passed through the olive and ilex woods of the park.
“I believe he is in love with his lost wife,” said Mouse.
“Very possibly,” replied the Archduke. “I remember her as a young girl;
her beauty was quite extraordinary; it was her misfortune, for it was the
cause of his jealousy.”
“Jealous! That serene impassive man?”
“The serenity is acquired, and the impassiveness is an armor. He is a
person of strong passions and deep affections. He adored his wife, and I
have always supposed that his susceptibilities were played upon by some
Iago.”
“But what Iago? And why?”
“Her father, perhaps, and out of spite. But I really know nothing,” said
the Archduke, recollecting himself, the good wines of Les Mouettes
having loosened his tongue to unusual loquacity.
“He didn’t give me anything to-day!” said Boo woefully from the front
seat; she was unrewarded for her painful goodness, for her sweetly-
imitated shyness, for the self-denial with which she had held her tongue,
and bored herself to play ball noiselessly with that stout, bald, florid
aide-de-camp.
The Archduke laughed.
“Giving is a delightful privilege,” he said; “but when we know that all
the world is expecting us to give, the pastime palls. Adrian Vanderlin has
felt that from the time he was in his nursery. You must allow me to
remedy his omission in this instance, my charming little friend.”
Mouse went home sorely out of temper; it seemed to her quite monstrous
that two persons, like this man and Billy’s daughter, should each have
had command given them of a vast fortune by which they were each only
bored, whilst she who would have spent such a fortune so well, and with
so much enjoyment, was left a victim to the most sordid anxieties. There
was certainly something wrong in the construction of the universe. She
felt almost disposed to be a socialist.
As she went up the staircase of her hotel she was roused from her
meditations by Boo’s voice, which was saying plaintively again, “He
didn’t give me anything to-day!”
“I am very glad he did not,” said her mother. “You are a greedy,
shameless, gobbling little cat.”
“You’re the cat and I’m your kitten,” thought her young daughter, but
Boo, saucy and bold as she was, never dared to be impudent to her
mother.
When they had left him Vanderlin went up to his bedchamber, unlocked
a drawer in a cabinet, and took out of it two portraits, one of his divorced
wife, the other of her dead child.
He looked at them long with slow, hot tears welling up into his eyes.
He would have given all the millions which men envied him to have had
the child playing at his side, and the mother with her hand in his.
A sorrow of the affections may not affect the health, the strength, the
mind, the occupations, or the general life of a man, but it embitters it as a
single drop of wormwood can embitter the whole clearness and
brightness of a bowl of pure water; the bowl may be of silver, may be of
gold, but the water in it is spoilt for ever; and he who must drink from it
envies the peasant the wooden cup which he fills and refills at a purling
stream.
 CHAPTER XL.
P K of Karstein was at Monte Carlo playing continuously,
losing almost always, living in a miserable lodging over a small shop,
and devoting, to that blind goddess with a thousand hands who is called
Play, his clothes, his sustenance, his last rings and shirt studs. He did this
every winter, and every spring he was supplied afresh through his
daughter’s means, and went to Spa or Luchon and did the same. From
Germany he was banned.
One day at the Casino he saw the Duchess of Otterbourne stretching out
her slender hand between a Jew broker and a Paris cocotte to put some
gold upon the red.
“Ah! blonde devil! blonde devil!” he thought to himself, and wished he
might see her lose her last farthing and crawl under a hedge to drink her
last dose of morphia. But this he knew he was not likely to see, nor
anyone else, for she was not the kind of person who kills herself, and at
play she generally won, for she kept quite cool at it and never let it run
away with her judgment.
He hated her intensely; he had never liked her, but when she had shut
Harrenden House to him, she had excited and merited his most bitter
detestation. She had not played fair, and Prince Khris, though he might
cheat, abhorred being cheated; he felt it an insult to his intelligence. He
had discovered the Massarenes before she had done so; they had been his
placer-claim, his treasure isle, his silver mine; she had come after him
and profited and plundered. This he might have pardoned if she had kept
faith with him and gone shares. But she had acted treacherously. She had
mined the ground under his feet. She had taught these ignorant people to
know him as he was. She had made them understand that they must drop
him, shake him off; that to be seen with him did them social harm, not
good. She had annexed them and made them hers; she had created a
monopoly in them for herself. She had taken them with her into spheres
the entrance into which had long been forfeited by himself. And all this
had been done so skilfully, with so much coolness and acumen, that he
had been powerless to oppose it. The dinners of Harrenden House had
become to him things of the past; the Clodion falconer which he had
found for them saw him no more pass up their staircase; they were
ungrateful like all low-bred people, and she triumphed.
“The blonde devil! the blonde devil!” he said with a curse.
But for her they would in all likelihood have remained unknown to
immaculate society, and would to the end of time have believed in
himself as a semi-royal divinity, knowing nothing of the stains on his
purples, nothing of the cankered breast which rotted under the ribbons of
his orders.
She had not been so clever as the groom of the chamber at Harrenden
House had thought her; she had not gone shares fairly with her
predecessor in the exploitation of the Massarene vein.
She had made an enemy of him. She thought his enmity was of no
consequence because he was a person wholly discredited and despised,
but in this she was greatly mistaken; because water is muddy it is not
therefore incapable of drowning you.
Khris Kar, who was a person of extreme intelligence, guessed all her
motives and all her modes of action, and divined exactly all she said
against him.
It is always a dangerous and difficult thing to “drop people,” and neither
the master nor the mistress of Harrenden House had tact and experience
enough to do it in the least offensive manner. Indeed, Massarene himself
enjoyed doing it offensively; it made him feel a greater swell than ever to
be able to be rude and slighting to a person of the original rank of Prince
Khris. It afflicted the tenderer heart of his wife, but she did not dare to
disobey orders, and despite his rage the old prince could not be otherwise
than amused to note the elaborate devices with which she shifted her
parasol so as not to see him in the Park, and fumbled with her
handkerchief or her fan as he approached at a concert or a theatre to
avoid offering him her hand.
He read his fair foe’s tactics in the stiff and frightened manner of the
Massarenes toward him; he saw that they had been warned he was a bird
of prey, that they were afraid to say anything to his face, and could only
clumsily draw away from him. He was used to this treatment from his
equals, but in these low creatures it stung him painfully; he felt like a
disabled hawk having its eyes pecked out by a crow. As he watched, as
time went on, the upward progress of these people into that higher world
for ever closed to himself, he knew that she had done for them what he
had lost all power of doing for them or for anyone. He acknowledged her
superiority, but her treachery he intended to repay at the earliest
opportunity. One does not pull a ferret out of a rabbit-burrow without
being bitten.
As it chanced there came into his hands a weekly journal published at
Nice which contained such items of social intelligence as it was thought
would interest the visitors to the Riviera, and amongst these was a
paragraph which spoke of the boating accident to the Duchess of
Otterbourne and the coolness and courage displayed by that lady; it
mentioned that the accident had happened off the terraces of the
Mouettes. As he read, he thought he saw between the lines; he suspected
the accident was one of design; he suspected the rescue of the child by
her mother was a brilliant coup de théâtre, done with intention to arouse
the interest of a solitary.
He made a few careful discreet inquiries; he found that Vanderlin had
been to see her at her hotel; he learned that the circumstances of the fair
swimmer were embarrassed, which did not surprise him; he heard some
gossiper laugh and say that she was intending to marry the great banker;
he saw as completely into her mind and soul as if he had been
Mephistopheles.
He promised himself that she should not succeed.
Some remorseful regret occasionally stirred in him when he thought of
his daughter’s lonely life, and when he remembered the passionate love
which had been ruptured when she and Vanderlin had parted. He was a
bad old man with a shrivelled heart and a numbed conscience, but he was
human.
Mouse was at that time especially irritated and depressed. There had
come to Cannes that week a young beauty, a mere child, but of extreme
loveliness and wonderful coloring, very much what Boo would be in a
few more years. This young girl, an Austrian just married to a Russian
thrice her age, had turned all heads and occupied all tongues at Cannes,
and Mouse, for the first time in her life, had the uncomfortable sensation
of being eclipsed, of being rather out of it, as she would have said, in her
own phraseology.
It was a dull and unpleasant feeling which filled her with resentment, and
made her stare into her mirror with an anxiety and uncertainty wholly
new to her.
She was in this kind of mood when Prince Khris walked up the steps of
her hotel.
She had come in from driving, fretful and disposed to think that life was
more trouble than it was worth, when they brought her a card, and said
the gentleman who owned it was waiting downstairs.
“Khris Kar! What can he possibly want with me?” she wondered. She
was disposed to let him remain downstairs, and she was in no mood for
visitors, especially those who could be of no possible use or amusement
to her.
Then she reflected that she had not behaved very well to him, that he had
at one time been very intimate at Harrenden House, and also that he had
been the father-in-law, at all events for a few years, of the master of Les
Mouettes.
“Show him up,” she said irritably to her servant. In another minute the
old man entered, frailer, thinner, with the gold dye on his hair more
visible, but bland and polished as before, and with the same keen, intent
gleam in his pale-blue eyes. She welcomed him sweetly, suppressing a
yawn, and seemed as if it were the most natural thing in the world to
receive a man against whom society had long closed all its doors.
Who could tell what old Khris might know? She was well aware that she
had ousted him out of Harrenden House.
“You are not looking well, Prince,” she said with solicitude, offering him
her little silver tray of cigarettes.
“Old age, old age!” said Prince Khris airily, as he took a cigarette and
lighted it. “How happy are you, Duchess, who are in all the wonder-
blossoming of your youth!”
“That is a nasty one,” thought Mouse, for she knew that when your
children are growing up speeches of this kind have a sub-acid flavor
which it is intended should be distinctly tasted by you.
He settled himself comfortably in the lounging-chair he occupied, and
blew the perfumed smoke into the air.
“I am especially fortunate to find you alone,” he said. “May I at once
mention the purport of my visit, for I know how rare it is to be favored
by a tête-à-tête with you when one is, alas, old and uninteresting!”
“Pray say anything you like,” she replied, the sweetness beginning to go
out of her manner and the softness out of her voice, for she felt that
whatever his purpose might be it was not amiable.
“Allow me, then,” said the old man very suavely, “to ask you if it be true
what people say in these places—that you intend to marry my ex-son-in-
law, Adrian Vanderlin?”
She was silent from astonishment and annoyance. She did not want to
have the keen eyes of this old gambler watching her cards.
“There is not the smallest authority for such a statement,” she answered
with hauteur, “and I think you might phrase your inquiry more
courteously.”
He smiled and made a little gesture with the cigarette, indicative of
apology or derision, as she chose to take it.
“Why should not either or both of them marry again?” she asked, her
anxiety on the matter getting the better of her prudence and good taste.
“Dear lady,” replied Prince Khris, “it seems incredible to properly
constituted minds, but there are actually persons so disposed by nature
that they only love once! It is a lamentable limitation of what was
intended to be our most agreeable and varied pastime; but so it is. You
know there are some persons who take everything seriously, and drink
sparkling Moselle with a long face.”
“Perhaps they will re-marry each other? It is not against the law, I
believe.”
“No; it is not against the law, probably because no lawmakers ever
thought such a case possible.”
“How he dislikes them both!” she thought. “Perhaps because they didn’t
give him enough money, or perhaps because they are maintaining him
now.”
It seemed to her experienced mind that you would naturally hate
anybody who maintained you.
“I heard of a boat upset beneath the terraces of Les Mouettes, of an
intrepid sauvetage of your lovely little girl on your own fair shoulders,”
murmured Prince Khris. “I hope the master of the château was grateful,
but I doubt it; men of business are sceptical rather than impressionable. I
hope you took no cold?”
“None whatever,” said Mouse crossly and curtly, for she felt herself
dévinée, and this sensation is never soothing to the nerves.
“I am charmed to hear it. But is it true that you have an intention to
render still richer than he is the singularly ungrateful person who is
called the Christian Rothschild?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said sullenly; “and I don’t know
what this man, Christian or Jew, can matter to you. He divorced your
daughter.”
It was more than a rude thing, it was an ill-bred thing to say, and she
knew that it was so; but her temper got the better of her prudence, as it
had done in her interview with Beaumont.
Prince Khris remained unmoved.
“That is matter of history,” he said serenely. “The man, as you call him
(who is unquestionably a Christian), may have been touched by that
heroic spectacle of a modern Aphrodite battling with the waves. No
doubt it was intended that he should be touched. All that I wish to say,
dear Duchess, is this, that if the report be true that you intend to marry
him—and it may be, for millionaires are the only men worth marrying—
I merely venture to say that I—well, in a word, I should prevent it. That
is all.”
She stared at him in unaffected amazement, and her anger was as real as
her surprise.
“How dare you say such things to me?” she said in great offence. “You
would venture to imply that the boat was upset on purpose!”
He laughed a little softly.
“The unaided à propos is rarely of occurrence in this life. But perhaps M.
Vanderlin was impressed by the accident; men of finance are sometimes
children in matters outside their counting-houses. However, all I desired,
Duchess, is to intimate to you that if you have any intention of marrying
the man who, as you remarked, divorced my daughter, I shall not permit
the marriage to take place.”
“How can you prevent it?”
“That is my affair. Rest assured only that I can and that I shall.”
She was silent, intensely irritated and uncertain how to treat him; she
was aware that there was something ludicrous and undignified in her
position; she could not allege that Vanderlin had any intention to marry
her; she had been taken off her guard and placed in a position of absurd
embarrassment.
What could this old man mean? He was too keen and experienced a
person to menace what he had not the ability to carry out. Had he known
anything of her relations with Massarene?
She knew that he had a long score against her to pay off, that he must
hate her and would make her feel its hatred if he could; but he was not a
man to indulge in unprofitable rancor.
She said between her teeth: “Do you suppose, if I wished to marry any
man, I shouldn’t do it?”
“It is impossible to say,” murmured Prince Khris. “There are some
persons so perverted that they do not like new-mown hay or early
strawberries. There may be also persons so dead to beauty and to virtue
that they do not appreciate the exquisite qualities of the Duchess of
Otterbourne.”
“You old wretch!” she thought, with difficulty controlling herself from
ordering him out of the room. “I had not the remotest intention of
annexing your ci-devant son-in-law,” she said aloud; “but as you have
put the idea in my head, perhaps I shall do it.”
“Are you sure it is I who put it there?” said Prince Khris, smiling. “Then
allow me to take it out again. I do not intend you to marry Adrian
Vanderlin.”
“What business would it be of yours if I did? He disgraced your daughter
before all Europe.”
His face remained impassive. “You cannot wonder, then, if only out of
vengeance I shall deny him the paradise of your embrace! Be my motive
what it will, dear lady, take this for certain: I shall not allow you to carry
out your present scheme.”
“Sir!” Anger flashed from her sapphire eyes, her voice was stifled by
rage. Her “scheme”!—as if she were an intriguing horizontale, a
nameless adventuress!
He laid down the cigarette which he had appreciated and finished.
“Remember,” he said serenely—“I can say that to Vanderlin which will
prevent him from marrying you or any other woman.”
“I shall tell him that is your boast.”
“You can tell him if you like. He will not believe you, and he certainly
will not question me.”
“But what could his marriage, were there any question of it, matter to
you?” Her curiosity got the better of her rage.
“That is my affair,” he replied. “To be quite frank with you, it does not
matter to me in the least, but I do not intend you to step into my
daughter’s place. She is my daughter, though many years have passed
since I saw her; and you, madame, shall not sit where she sat, love where
she loved, sleep where she slept; you shall not do her that injury. A
sentimentalism, you think. No, I am not sentimental, though I come of
the land of Werther. But a few years ago you did me a bad turn when I
was weak enough to trust you, and I do not forget easily. I can prevent
you from reaching the Canaan of Vanderlin’s wealth, and I intend to do
so. I know what you would do; you would entice him with exquisite
skill, and it is possible that you would make him your dupe; in finance he
is clever, but in the affections he is a child. Well, take warning; let him
alone, for if you attempt to succeed with him, I shall intervene. That is
all. I have told you to desist because I am not desirous of approaching
the man who, as you observed, dishonored my daughter before all
Europe. But if you do not listen to good counsels I shall do so, for I
repeat I do not intend you ever to reach the Canaan of his riches.”
Then, without waiting for any reply from her, he rose, bowed with the
courtly grace which to the last distinguished him, and left her presence
walking with that feebleness which infirmity and years entailed, but with
a pleased smile upon his face and as much alacrity as he could command,
for he was in his haste to return to the tables of Monte Carlo.
She remained in a sort of stupor, staring at the smoked-out cigarette
which he had left behind him on the ash tray.
She had been so utterly astonished, humiliated, and disgusted that she
had not had presence of mind enough to charge him with having brought
about his daughter’s ruin by his own intrigues and falsehoods.
Unfortunately too she knew so little, so very little, only what the
Archduke Franz had hinted to her, and with that weak weapon of mere
conjecture she could not have discomfited so skilled and accomplished a
master of fence as was Prince Khristopher of Karstein.
How she wished, oh! how she wished that she had let him have his fair
share of the spoils of Harrenden House! There are few things more
utterly painful than to have done mean, ungenerous, and dishonorable
acts, and find them all like a nest of vipers torpid from cold which have
been warmed on your hearth and uncurl and hiss at you.
“My greatuncle came to call on you!” said young Prince Woffram with
astonishment and curiosity. “I saw him in the hall; I don’t speak to him,
you know—we none of us do. But I felt sorry——”
“So do I whenever I see him,” said Mouse in her frankest and sweetest
manner. “I have always stood by him, you know. He is so courtly and
charming and now so old. It is horribly cruel, I think, to shut one’s doors
on a man of that age. He may have been all they say—I suppose he has
—but his sins must have been over before we were born, and when
anybody is so old as that I, for one, really cannot be unkind.”
What an angel she was! thought the young grandnephew of Prince Khris;
an angel of modern make, with wings of chiffon, which would not
perhaps stand a shower of rain or a buffet of wind, but still an angel!
 CHAPTER XLI.
“L ! my dear Ronnie,” exclaimed Daddy Gwyllian, “what poor short-
sighted creatures we are with all our worldly wisdom! To think that I
ever advised you to do such a thing! Lord! I might have ruined you!”
His astonishment and repentance were so extreme and sincere that
Hurstmanceaux was bewildered.
“What did you ever advise me to do,” he asked, “that would have ruined
me?”
“I told you to marry her.”
“To marry whom?”
“Massarene’s daughter.”
Hurstmanceaux’s face changed. “I believe you did,” he said stiffly. “I am
glad you see the impropriety of telling a poor man to marry a rich
woman.”
“But she isn’t a rich woman!” cried the poor matchmaker in almost a
shriek of remorse. “I might have led you to your ruin. She has gone and
given it all away!”
Hurstmanceaux turned quickly to him with animation.
“What do you say? Given what away? Her father’s fortune?”
“Read that,” said Gwyllian. “Oh, Lord, that fools should ever have
money, and sensible folks be worn into their graves for want of it!”
What he gave Ronald to read was a column in a leading journal of Paris
and New York; an article adorned by a woodcut which was labelled a
portrait of Katherine Massarene, and resembled her as much as it did a
Burmese idol or a face on a door-knocker. The article, which was long,
abounded in large capital letters and startling italics. Its hyperbolic and
hysterical language, being translated into the language of sober sense,
stated that the daughter of the “bull-dozing boss,” so well known in the
States as William Massarene, having inherited the whole of his vast
wealth, had come over to America incognita, had spent some months in
the study of life as seen in the city of Kerosene, and the adjacent
townships and provinces, and having made herself intimately acquainted
with the people and the institutions, had divided two-thirds of her
inheritance between those who had shared in any way in the making of
that wealth, or whose descendants were in want.
She had devoted another large portion of it to the creation of various
asylums and institutions and provision for human and animal needs in
both Great Britain and Ireland, whilst the valuable remainder had been
divided amongst many poor families of County Down. The journal said,
in conclusion, that she had purchased an annuity for her mother, which
would give that lady double the annual income allotted to her under
William Massarene’s will; and that for herself she had kept nothing, not a
red cent. The editor added a personal note stating that Miss Massarene
had certainly made no provision for her own maintenance, since she had
forgotten to endow a lunatic asylum!
The column closed with the total in plain figures of the enormous
property which had been thus broken up and distributed. Hurstmanceaux
read it in silence from the first line to the last; then in silence returned it
to Daddy Gwyllian.
“Isn’t it heaven’s mercy you didn’t marry her!” cried Daddy. “To be sure
you would have prevented this. She must be stark staring mad, you
know; the paper hints as much.”
“If she had consulted the Seven Sages and the Four Evangelists, she
could not have been advised by them to act more wisely or more well,”
replied Hurstmanceaux with emphasis. “Good-bye, Daddy. Leave off
match-making, or you may burn your fingers at it.”
He went away without more comment, and Daddy stood staring after
him with round, wide-open eyes. Was it possible that anybody lived who
could consider such a course of action praiseworthy or sane?
“But Ronnie was always as mad as a hatter himself,” he thought
sorrowfully as he buttonholed another friend, and displayed his Parisian-
American paper.
“Ah, yes—frightful insanity!” said the newcomer. “I’ve just seen it in
Truth. It was wired. Enough to make old Billy get up out of his grave,
don’t you think? Sic transit gloria mundi.”
“Damned socialistic thing to do,” said a third who joined them and who
also had seen Truth. “Horrible bad example! If property isn’t inviolate to
your heirs, where are you? If there isn’t solidarity amongst the holders of
property, what can keep back the nationalization of property?”
No one could say what would.
“This is what comes of young women reading Herbert Spencer and
Goldwin Smith,” said a fourth.
“These men are not communists,” said the previous speaker. “This lady’s
act is rank communism.”
“Can’t one do what one likes with one’s own?” asked another.
“Certainly not,” replied the gentleman who dreaded the nationalization
of property. “We should first consider the effect of what we do on the
world at large. This young woman (I never liked her) has said practically
to the many millions of operatives all the world over that capital is a
crime.”
“Capital, acquired as Billy’s was, is uncommonly near a crime,”
murmured the first speaker.
“Capital by its mere consolidation becomes purified,” said the other
angrily, “as carbon becomes by crystallization a diamond. This young
woman has practically told every beggar throughout both hemispheres
that he has a right to grind the diamonds into dust.”
“I always thought her plain,” said a more frivolous listener.
“Fine eyes, fine figure, but plain,” said another, “and she was always so
rude to the Prince.”
“Rude to everybody, and always looked bored,” said a person whose
hand she had rejected.
“Subversive,” said the upholder of property. “Very odd: her father was so
sound in all his views.”
“I think Billy’ll wake and walk!” said the gentleman who had before
expressed this opinion; “all his pile split up into match wood!”
Daddy Gwyllian felt so vexed that he left them discussing the matter and
went home. Why could not Ronnie have made himself agreeable to her
before this horrible socialistic idea had come into her head, and so have
held all that marvellously solid fortune together? It made him quite sad
to think of these millions of good money frittered away in asylums and
refuges and the dirty hands of a lot of hungry people.
Even Harrenden House was sold, they said, just as it stood, with all its
admirable works of art, and the beckoning falconer of Clodion at the
head of the staircase.
At the same moment the Duchess of Otterbourne was also reading this
article in the Paris-New York journal. She thought it a hoax; a yarn spun
by some mischievous spinner of sensational stories. When she heard
however from all sides that it was true, she felt a kind of relief.
“Nobody will know her now,” she thought. “So she won’t be able to talk.
It is really enough to wake that brute in his grave. I always considered
her odious, but I should never have supposed she was mad.”
“What do you think of it?” she asked Vanderlin, whom she met the day
she had read of this amazing piece of folly. He had not heard of it: she
described the salient features of the narrative.
“I know nothing of the lady or of the sources of the fortune she has
broken up,” he replied, “so I cannot judge. But if she wishes to be at
peace she has acted very wisely for herself.”
Mouse heard with an impatience which she could not conceal.
“Do you mean,” she asked point-blank, “that you would like to lose your
fortune?”
“One must never say those things aloud, madame,” he replied. “For the
boutade of a discontented moment may be repeated in print by these Paul
Prys of the Press as the serious conviction of a lifetime.”
“How I loathe your diplomatic answers!” she thought, much irritated at
her perpetual failure to entice him out of his habitual reserve. “One can’t
talk at all unless one says what one thinks,” she answered impatiently.
He smiled slightly again.
“I should rather have supposed that the chief necessity in social
intercourse was to successfully repress one’s sincerity: is it not so?”
“You are a very tantalizing person to talk to!” she said with a chagrin
which was real.
“Why insist on talking to me then?” thought Vanderlin, and he let the
conversation drop; it was too personal for his taste.
Her verdict, more or less softened, was the verdict of the world in
general on Katherine Massarene’s action.
The action was insane, and to English and American society offensive.
The world considered it had warmed an adder in its breast. Everybody
had known her only because of her money, and now she had stripped
herself of her money, and would expect to know them just the same!
Besides, what a shocking example! Ought big brewers, instead of
ascending to the celestial regions of the Upper House, to strip themselves
of their capital and build inebriate asylums? Ought big bankers, instead
of going to court and marrying dukes’ daughters, to live on bread and
cheese, and give their millions in pensions and bonuses? Ought big
manufacturers, instead of receiving baronetcies, and having princes at
their shooting parties, to go in sackcloth and ashes, and spend all their
profits in making the deadly trades healthy? Were all the titled railway
directors to pull off their Bath ribbons, and melt down the silver spades
with which they had cut the sods of new lines, in order to give all they
possess to maimed stokers, or dazed signalmen, or passengers who had
lost their legs or their arms in accidents?
Forbid it, heaven!
Society shook on its very foundations. Never had there been set
precedent fraught with such disastrous example. It was something worse
than socialism; they could not give it a name. Socialism knocked you
down and picked your pocket: but this act of hers was a voluntary eating
of dust. She, who had supposed that she would be able to do what she
choose with her inheritance unremarked, was astonished at the storm of
indignation raised by the intolerable example she was considered to have
set. American capitalists were as furious as English aristocracy and
plutocracy, and the chief organs of the American press asked her if she
could seriously suppose that anybody would take the trouble to put
money together if they had to give it away as soon as they got it?
The publicity and hostility roused in two nations by an act which she had
endeavored to make as private as possible disconcerted her exceedingly,
and the encomiums she received from anonymous correspondents were
not more welcome.
What most annoyed her were the political deductions and accusations
which were roused by her action and roared around it. She was claimed
by the Collectivists, praised by the Positivists, seized by the Socialists,
and admired by the Anarchists. She was supposed to belong to every
new creed to which the latter years of the nineteenth century has given
birth, and such creeds are multitudinous as ants’ eggs in an ant-hill. A
ton weight of subversive literature and another ton weight of begging
letters were sent to her, and she was requested to forward funds for a
monument to Jesus Ravachol and Harmodius-Caserio.
The Fabian philosophers wept with joy over her; but the upholders of
property said that nothing more profoundly immoral than this dispersion
of wealth had ever been accomplished since Propriété Nationale was
written on the façade of the Tuileries. Tolstoi dedicated a work to her;
Cuvallotti wrote her an ode; Brunetière consecrated an article to her, Mr.
Mallock stigmatized her action as the most immoral of the age, whilst
Auberon Herbert considered it the most admirable instance of high
spirited individualism; Mr. Gladstone wrote a beautiful epistle on a
postcard, and Mr. Swinburne a poem in which her charity was likened to
the sea in a score of magnificent imageries and rolling hexameters.
She was overwhelmed with shame at her position and was only sustained
in the pillory of such publicity by the knowledge that the world forgets
and discards as rapidly as it adores and enthrones. She felt that she
deserved as little the praises of those who lauded her generosity as she
did the censure of others who blamed her for subversive designs and
example. Her strongest motive power had been the desire to atone, in
such measure as possible, for the evil her father had done, and to rid
herself of an overwhelming burden. Deep down in her soul, too, scarcely
acknowledged to herself, was the desire that the Duchess of
Otterbourne’s brother should know that, if she could not understand the
finer gradations of honor as old races can do, she yet had nothing of that
mercenary passion which a woman of his own race showed so
unblushingly.
She longed, with more force than she had ever wished for anything, that
Hurstmanceaux should be justified in that higher appreciation of her
which his letter had expressed.
“Why should I care what that man thinks?” she had asked herself as the
steamship glided over the moonlit waters of the Atlantic. “I shall never
speak to him again as long as our lives last.”
But she did care.
This result of her acts annoyed, harassed, and depressed her, for she was
afraid that in trying to do well she had only done ill. “But our path is so
steep and our light is so dim,” she thought, “we can only go where it