Katherine Massarene was coming down the staircase under the smiling
gaze of Clodion’s falconer, dressed for the evening and about to dine
out, when she heard the shot, muffled as it was by the sounds of the
traffic; in another moment she heard a great outcry and understood that
something unusual must have taken place; she descended the stairs more
quickly, and was crossing the hall when the inner and outer doors were
thrown open, and the servants within hurried up to her.
“Don’t go, madam! Don’t look!”
“What has happened?” she said to them. “An accident? To whom? Tell me
at once.”
“Mr. Massarene’s murdered, madam,” said a young footman, who had hated
his employer and relished the telling of the tale. “Don’t look, madam;
they’re bringing him in.”
She put them aside and went to the open doors. There she met the body
of her father, which was carried across the threshold by four men,
his arms hanging down, his head leaning toward one shoulder; behind,
in the bright electric light, were curious lookers-on, thrust back by
constables. And above, on the head of the staircase, the falconer of
Clodion looked down and smiled at the vanity of human ambitions.
Throughout fashionable London people were dressing for dinner, or were
sitting at dinner-tables, or were driving to dinner-parties, when the
strange rumor ran through the streets and spread from mouth to mouth,
and was whispered in ghostly speed through the telephonic tubes of
club-houses, that William Massarene had been shot as he had alighted
from his carriage at the gate of Harrenden House.
“There _is_ a God above us!” said Lord Greatrex to his nephew.
To him it was an immense relief; it was as though an octopus had loosed
its tentacles.
But as the news ran through the town, and was received at first with
incredulity and then with consternation, a keen anxiety succeeded to
astonishment in the breasts of many--so many of these great people owed
him money!
He was assassinated at eight of the clock. By ten in the evening
newspapers were issued with the startling intelligence printed in large
type. The journals sold by millions; people snatched them from each
other’s hands and read them in the streets, in the cabs and carriages,
under the noses of the horses, in the lobby and on the terrace of St.
Stephen’s.
He had what answers in modern cities to the Triumph of the Romans. The
town talked solely of his end.
That evening the Duchess of Otterbourne was dining _en intime_ with a
familiar friend at a house in Cadogan Square. They were all congenial
and pleasant acquaintances at the little banquet, and after it they sat
down to play poker, a game which makes up in excitement what it lacks
in intellectuality.
Cadogan Square is somewhat distant from those central haunts where
news first circulates, and the poker-players were uninterrupted by the
intelligence of the tragedy which was being discussed all around the
Parliament House and in the great clubs of the West. They neither heard
it by telephone, or by the shouting of newsboys, and when at midnight a
young nephew of the hostess, who was also a member of the Conservative
party, came into the drawing-room he saw at a glance that the tidings
he had brought with him had not been forestalled.
“Oh, I say!” he cried, as he came up behind his aunt’s chair. “Oh, I
say! Such a piece of news! Who do you think has been shot?”
The players went on with their game unheeding.
“Don’t bother, Dick!” said the lady of the house. “Who cares who’s
shot?”
“Somebody in Ireland, of course,” said another lady, with impatience,
“Somebody at the Castle?”
“Oh, but I say, Duchess,” said the young man, staring at her from
behind his aunt’s chair, which was opposite to hers, “it’s your friend,
you know. The fellow that bought Roxhall’s place. The member for South
Woldshire, that you are so fond of. He’s been shot dead as he got out
of his brougham. It was telephoned to the House as we were all coming
away for dinner.”
Mouse was standing up to draw a card; she dropped down on her chair as
if she too had been shot; her knees shook under her, she gasped for
breath. The shock was one of joy, not of grief; but it was so violent
that it seemed to take her very life away in the immense relief.
“Dear me, I’m sorry,” murmured the young man, greatly surprised. “Had
no idea you cottoned to the cad so much.”
All eyes were turned on her.
“Shot? When? Where? Who shot him?” she said, in quick short gasps of
broken speech.
No one had ever seen her strongly moved before.
“Who, nobody knows. But he was shot dead as a door-nail at his own gate
this evening.”
“How deeply she must be in debt to him!” thought her hostess, while she
laughed and scolded her nephew for coming to disturb them with such
eerie tales.
Mouse recovered herself in a few moments, and as soon as she could
steady her voice asked again, as the others were asking, “Who told you?
Are you sure?”
The young man answered, rather sulkily, that he was quite sure;
everybody was talking of it in the House; it was attributed to the
anarchists.
“They are good for something, then,” said the hostess.
“Don’t,” said Mouse, conscious that she must account for the emotion
she had shown. “Please don’t, Pussie. He was a rough, common,
ridiculous man, but he was very kind in his way, really kind, to poor
Cocky and to me.”
“Oh, my dear, what a liar you are!” thought her friend.
“Are you sure he is dead?” Mouse asked of the young member again. “He
might be only wounded, and not dead, you know.”
“Dead as a door-nail,” answered the youthful legislator, resenting the
doubt thrown on his news. “He was shot through the heart from behind.
He died before they could carry him into the house.”
Mouse drew a deep sigh of contentment which sounded like one of regret.
“Who did it?”
“They don’t know. Nobody saw how it was done.”
“He must have had numbers of enemies.”
“Oh, no doubt.”
“Who will have all his money?” asked the lady of the house.
“His daughter, of course,” said her nephew. “It will be a lucky dog who
marries her.”
“Try and be that dog,” said the lady. “And now don’t you think we’ve
chanted Mr. Massarene’s requiem long enough? He wasn’t an attractive
person. Let us play again.”
But her guests did not accept her invitation; they were all more or
less excited by the news. Who could tell what scandals might not come
to the surface when the dead man’s papers were unsealed? Meantime they
made as much scandal as they could themselves--raking up old stories,
computing how much this, that, or the other owed him, whose debts of
honor he had paid, and what personages, crowned and uncrowned, were in
his hands.
“What tremendous sport his daughter will have,” said one of the ladies.
“If I were she I should bring all the bigwigs into court for principal
and interest. But she doesn’t look as if she liked fun.”
Mouse was on thorns as she listened. For the first time in her life
people seemed to her odiously heartless. This event mattered so
enormously to her that she wondered the earth did not stand still. For
the first time in her life she felt the chill of that indifference in
others which is at times so hard to bear. Her hostess, who was one
of the many pretty women who kissed and caressed her, and hated her,
watched her with suspicious amusement. “I never saw Sourisette so upset
in her life,” she thought. “Did the man pay her an annuity of twenty
thousand a year which dies with him?”
It appeared to her that nothing less than some great pecuniary loss
could possibly thus affect the nerves of her friend.
Mouse went away from the card-party early.
“One would think the dead cad had held a lot of her ‘bad paper,’” said
the lady with a cruel little laugh, as she returned from embracing her
guest affectionately on the head of the staircase.
“I dare say he did,” answered her nephew. “I wonder what he’ll cut up
for? Twelve million sterling, they say, not counting the house and the
estates.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that,” said his aunt. “However rich he might be
when he came over, Mouse has had the running of him, you know, ever
since!”
The friend of whom she spoke thus kindly, as she drove the distance
which separated Cadogan Square from Portman Square, heard the shouting
of the newspaper vendors: “Murder of Mr. Massarene! Assassination of
the Member for South Woldshire! Awful crime by anarchists at Gloucester
Gate! Member of Parliament shot dead! Millionaire murdered on his own
doorstep! Murder! Murder! Murder!”
There was still immense excitement in the streets. The papers were
being sold as fast as they could be supplied. Men of all classes
stopped under street lamps or before the blaze of shop windows to read
the news. William Massarene had the apotheosis which he would have
desired. All London was in agitation at the news of his death. There
could scarcely have been more interest displayed if a German army had
landed at Southsea or a French flotilla bombarded Dover. The crime was
a sensational one; the mystery enshrouding it added to its tragedy; and
the victim had that power over the modern mind which only capitalists
now hold.
The horror which was in the atmosphere was in herself, and yet what an
ecstasy of relief came with it!
When she reached her sister’s house she hurried up the stairs and shut
herself in her bedchamber, dismissing her maid for the moment. She
walked up and down the room in breathless excitation. She longed, oh!
how she longed, to see the brute lying dead! How she would have liked
to take a knife and cut and slash the lifeless body, and box the deaf
ears, and strike the soundless mouth. She understood how people in
revolution had sated their hatred in the mutilation and the outrage of
dead men and women. She would have liked to tear his corpse limb from
limb and fling his flesh to starving hounds.
Who was the assassin? How she would have rewarded him had it been in
her power for that straight, sure, deadly shot! She would have had him
fed from gold and silver, and clad in purple and fine linen for all the
rest of his days. She would have kissed the barrel of the revolver that
had done the deed, she would have cradled the weapon between her white
breasts, like a sucking child!
No one, she thought, had ever hated another human being as she had
hated William Massarene.
And who could tell whether she was wholly freed from him by his death?
Was it such entire release as she had thought?
She shuddered as she remembered that he had never given her back her
own receipt about Beaumont, or Beaumont’s to him. He had kept them
no doubt locked in his iron safe as witnesses against her. There, of
course, his lawyers or executors would find them, and they would pass
into his daughter’s possession with all other documents eventually.
There was, possibly, the hope that he might have provided for their
transmission to herself, but she did not think so; it would not be
in keeping with his brutality and his greed to have provided for her
safety after his decease. If he had not left those signatures to
herself they would be inevitably discovered by his men of business,
and be made public as a part of monies due to him. All the unutterable
torment which she had sold herself to the Minotaur to escape would
again be her portion. She would be at Katherine Massarene’s mercy!
For she had no doubt that his daughter would inherit the whole of his
wealth, and with his wealth his hold over his debtors. She knew little
or nothing of business, but she knew that she, like all the princes and
lords who had been his debtors, would see her financial relations with
him exposed to the light of day; unless he had had mercy enough in him
to provide for her safety, which was not probable.
She passed the hours miserably, though having summoned her women she
had taken her bath and had tried to sleep.
She could get no rest even from chloral. When some
semi-unconsciousness came over her she saw in her dreams the ghost
of Massarene with a smile upon his face. “Here I am again!” his
shade said, like a clown in a pantomime. “Here I am again, my pretty
one!”--and he laid his icy grip on her and grinned at her with
fleshless skeleton jaws.
Early in the morning she was awakened from a late and heavy slumber by
the cries of the newspaper boys passing down the street and shouting,
as their precursors had done on the previous evening: “Murder of a
Member of Parliament! Assassination by an Anarchist! Awful crime at the
gates of Harrenden House!”
Then it was true, and not a nightmare, which the day could dissipate!
She felt torn in two between relief and apprehension; with her
breakfast they brought her the morning papers, which announced the
ghastly event in large capital letters. There were no details given
because there were none to give; the papers said that there was great
activity at Scotland Yard, but at present nothing had transpired to
account for the crime.
Later in the day she drove to Harrenden House and left two cards for
the widow and the daughter.
On that for Margaret Massarene she had written:
“My whole heart is with you. So shocked and grieved for the loss of my
good friend.”
“That’s very sweet of her!” said Mrs. Massarene with tremulous lips and
red eyelids.
Katherine Massarene took the cards and tore them in two.
“Why do you do that, Kathleen?” said her mother between her sobs. “Your
poor dear father was always so good to her. ’Tis only pretty of her to
sorrow for him.”
Katherine did not reply.
The man who killed him was not discovered. No one had noticed the lean
bent dark figure which had mingled with the crowd behind Harrenden
House.
“But, oh! for certain sure ’twas one of the many as he wronged,”
said his wife, with the tears running down her pale cheeks. “I allus
thought, though I didn’t dare to say so, that this was how your father
would end some day, my dear. He always thought as he was God Almighty,
did your poor father, my dear, and he never gave a back glance, as
’twere, to the tens and hundreds and thousands as he’d ruined.”
Katherine Massarene, very calm, very grave, listened and did not
dissent. “What he might have done!” she murmured. “Oh, what he might
have done!--how much good, how much kindness!--what blessings might
have gone with him to his grave!”
She had felt a great shock, a great horror, at the fate of her father,
but she could not feel sorrow, such as the affections feel at death. It
was unspeakably terrible that he should have died like this, without
a moment of preparation, without a single word or glance to reconcile
him with the humanity which he had outraged, but this was all that she
could feel. 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. She suffered extremely,
for she had loved her husband despite his brutality, and had honored
him despite all his faults. She had always believed in him with a
pathetic devotion which no ill-treatment changed.
“He was a great man, was William,” she said again and again between her
convulsive sobs, as she sat by the bed on which his body had been laid
after the autopsy. “He was a great man, and God knows what heights he
wouldn’t have riz to if he’d lived a few years longer. For he’d took
the measure of ’em all. He said he’d die a peer, and he would have died
a peer if this cruel bullet hadn’t cut him down like a bison on the
plains. Lord, to think of all he had gone through by flood and by fire,
in storm and in quarrel, by the hand of God and by the hand of man;
and when he comes here to enjoy his own and get his just reward, he is
struck just like any poor Texan steer pithed in the slaughter place!
The ways o’ the Almighty are past finding out indeed.”
Then she took his dead hand between both her own and held it tenderly
and kissed it.
His princes and his lords, his fine ladies and fair favorites, were all
far away from him now; he was all her own in his dead loneliness; her
own man as he had been when they had walked across the green fields of
Kilrathy on their marriage-day, with all their worldly goods put up in
a bundle hung upon a stick. In her grief and her despair there was a
thrill of jealous joy; he was once again all her own as he had been on
that soft wet midsummer morning when they had walked through the grass
man and wife.