“We’ll give him the grandest buryin’ that money can get,” she said to
her daughter.
Katherine could not oppose her wishes, alien as they were to her own
tastes and desires. She felt that the wish would have been also her
father’s. The tragic suddenness of his end had startled and impressed
London society; the evidences of sympathy and condolence were
innumerable and seemed sincere; very many were extremely grieved that
the hospitalities of Harrenden House had ceased in the height of the
season; and the more personal and secret anxieties in those who were
his debtors found natural expression in delicate attentions which took
much of the sting of her bereavement out of his wife’s heart. A very
great personage even called himself, and pressed her hand, and murmured
his regret.
“You can’t say as your father ain’t honored in his end,” she said
reproachfully to her daughter.
Katherine was silent. Everything that passed was sickeningly, odiously,
intolerably offensive to her. The week which followed on his death,
during which he was, as it were, lying in state, seemed to her as
though it were ten years in length. When it came to a close, the
body in its bier (a triple coffin of lead and oak and silver) was
taken by rail from London into the southern portion of the county
which he had represented, and solemnly deposited at the station of
that rural capital town where he had once written down the sum of
his subscriptions to the church and to “the dogs.” A very imposing
gathering of county notables and borough dignitaries, of noblemen
and gentlemen and municipal councilmen and clerical luminaries,
were all assembled at the station ready to do him the last honors
in their power, and sincerely affected by his loss, for the sad and
general conviction was that, without his patronage as a fulcrum, the
short-route railway would never now be made.
The blinds were drawn down in the houses of his supporters, and the
bells of the churches tolled mournfully as the dismal procession wended
on its way through the old-fashioned streets. There were eight black
horses harnessed to the hearse with black plumes at their ears and long
black velvet housings, and equerries in black walking at their heads,
and carriages innumerable followed in slow and stately measure the
leading equipages of the Sheriff, the Lord-Lieutenant, and the Mayor,
who was a Viscount.
“A prince couldn’t be buried more beautiful,” murmured his widow,
as she followed in a mourning-carriage with four black horses. She
derived a strange consolation from this pageantry; it made her feel
as if she were doing all she could for his soul, and as if she were
keeping her marriage vows righteously. She was pleased, too, to see the
drawn blinds, the closed shops, the steady, silent, respectful country
crowds, the flag which hung half-mast high on the keep of the ancient
town-castle.
“They could scarce do more if ’twas a royal prince. ’Tis consoling
to see such respect and such lamentation,” she murmured, looking out
furtively from the handkerchief in which her face appeared buried.
The part of her character which had taken pleasure in the great folk
and the great houses, and the great successes of their English life,
thrilled with pride to think that her “man,” her own man, with whom she
had toiled and moiled so many, many years, was being honored in his
obsequies thus. Even English Royalty was represented at the funeral
by a small slim young gentleman with an eye-glass, who belonged to
the Household and brought with him an enormous wreath of gardenia and
Bermuda lilies.
Her daughter, whose eyes were dry, and who had no handkerchief even
in her hand, did not answer, but she thought: “The respect and the
lamentation are bought like the crape and the horses’ plumes, like the
lies on the silver coffin-plate and the stolen place in the Roxhall
crypt!”
“That darter o’ Massarene’s a hard woman,” said a cooper of the town to
a wheelwright. “Not a drop o’ water in her eye for her pore murdered
dad.”
“One don’t pipe one’s eye when one comes into a fortun’,” said the
wheelwright, winking his own. “And such a fortun’! For my part I
respect her; she don’t pretend nought.”
“No, she don’t pretend. But one likes to see a little ’uman feelin’,”
said the more tender-hearted cooper, watching the tails of the black
horses sweep the stones of the High Street. That was the general public
sentiment in Woldshire against Katherine Massarene. She was a hard
young woman. The county foresaw that she would draw her purse-strings
very tight, and be but of little use to it. “A hard young woman,” they
all thought, as they saw her straight delicate profile, like a fine
ivory intaglio, through the glass of her equipage.
It was a fine day in early summer and the sun shone on the green
cornfields, the sheep in the meadows, the cows under the pollards, the
whirling sails of windmills, the tall yellow flags in the ditches,
the hamlets dotting the level lands, the village children climbing on
stiles to see the pageant pass.
Katherine looked out at the simple landscape and the soft dim blue of
the sky, and felt sick at heart.
“Am I a monster,” she thought, “that I can feel no common ordinary
sorrow, no common natural regret even, nothing but a burning
humiliation?”
The solemn and stately procession went on its way decorously and
tediously, along the country roads which separated the county town from
the park of Vale Royal. Everybody in the carriages which one by one
followed the widow’s were excruciatingly bored; but they all wore long
faces, and conversed under their breath of the Goodwood meeting, of the
prospect of the hay harvest, of quarter sessions, of pigeon matches, of
drainage, of ensilage, and of the promise of the young broods in the
coverts.
“I think death is made more of a nuisance than it need be really,” said
the slender young gentleman who represented Royalty to the _Custos
Rotulorum_ who replied with a groan, “Oh, Lord, yes! If one could only
smoke!”
For two miles and more the roads had been lined by rural folks waiting
respectfully for the pageant to pass by; but as they drew near Vale
Royal and entered on what had been Roxhall’s lands, all the cottages
which they passed were shut up; not a man, woman, or child was visible
in the little gardens or in the fields beyond.
“I suppose the cottagers are all gone on to the churchyard,” said a
plump rector in one of the carriages, as he looked out of his window.
The town clerk, who was beside him, said in a whisper: “You won’t see a
man-jack of Roxhall’s old tenants or peasantry show their noses to-day.
They neither forget nor forgive.”
“How very un-Christian!” said the plump rector, with a sigh.
“Fidelity’s its own religion,” said the town clerk, who had been born
on a farm on Roxhall’s land, and had hated to see the old homesteads
and the familiar fields pass to the man from Dakota.
He was a true prophet. None of the peasantry or of the tenantry were
visible on the roads or at the church of Vale Royal, which was within
the park gates and surrounded by yew-trees and holly hedges; they
were loyal to their lost lord. Princes and nobles and ministers might
truckle to the wealth of the dead man, but these men of the soil were
faithful to the old owners of the soil. They despised the newcomer,
living or dead.
The bishop of the diocese was awaiting the body, surrounded by minor
clergy, in the little, dusky, venerable church, with its square Saxon
tower and its moss-grown tombstones standing about it in the long grass
(like those of Staghurst and of many an English God’s-acre) under the
yews, which were of vast size and unknown age. The coffin of William
Massarene was placed in the middle of the aisle, as Carnot’s in the
Panthéon, and the wreaths were heaped round it in the grotesque and
odious manner dear to the close of the most vulgar of all centuries.
One of them, made of gloxinias, rose and white, had the card of the
Duchess of Otterbourne attached to it. The sun shone mild and serene;
the birds sang above the black figures of the mourners; the voice
of the venerable prelate droned on like a bumble-bee buzzing on a
window-pane; selections from Weber in E flat were played and vocalized
with exquisite taste by admirable artistes; all the gentlemen present
stood bareheaded and solemn of countenance, trying to look affected and
only succeeding in looking bored. The daughter of the dead man assisted
at the ceremony with revolted taste and aching heart. To her it was
one long sickening penance, painfully ludicrous in its mockery and
hypocrisy and folly. Every word of the burial service sounded on her
ear like the laughter of some demon. Her father’s life had been a long
black crime, none the less, but the greater because one of those crimes
which are not punished but rewarded by men; and he was bidden to enter
into the joy of his Lord!
“Kathleen may say what she likes, but that pretty creature has shown
a deal of heart,” thought Margaret Massarene, kneeling under her
overwhelming masses of crape before the heaps of gummed and nailed
and wired flowers which were considered emblematic of the Christian
religion and her lost William’s soul. The pretty creature represented
by the garland of gloxinias had written her a most affecting and even
affectionate note on the previous evening, saying how grieved she
was that a touch of bronchitis kept her confined to her room, as it
prevented her attendance at the committal to earth of the remains
of her kind and valued friend. That note Margaret Massarene had not
shown to her daughter, but had wept over it and shut it up in her
dressing-box.
“Kathleen’s that hard,” she had thought, as the crowds of South
Woldshire were thinking it, “she wouldn’t be made to believe in the
Duchess’s sorrow if the angels descended from the clouds to swear to
it!”
Outside the church there were two brakes filled with wreaths from less
distinguished givers piled one on another, as if they were garbage;
for these there had been no room in the church. The savages who carry
scalps and weapons to a dead chief’s grave are considerably in advance
of _fin-de-siècle_ England in sense of fitness and consistency in
funeral rites.
From the church, when the burial service was over, the body was borne
to a mausoleum of granite, gloomy, dark and solemn, which had been
the place of sepulchre of the Roxhall family for many centuries. The
building above ground was of the eighteenth century, but the crypt
beneath it was as old as the days of the great oak in the park which
was called King Alfred’s. Its subterranean vaults were spacious and
spread far under arched ceilings, supported by short Doric pillars;
here there were many knights lying in effigy on their tombs; many
shields hung to the columns, many banners drooping in the gloom; here
an ancient, gallant, chivalrous race had placed its dead in their last
rest for a thousand years. The latest made grave was a little child’s,
a three-year-old daughter of Roxhall’s, with a white marble lily carved
on the marble above her, for her name had been Lillias, and she had
died from a fall. The coffin of William Massarene was placed beside
this little child’s.
The keeper of a gambling den lay with the fair children, the pure
women, and the brave men of an honored race.
To Katherine the desecration of the place seemed blasphemous.
How could Roxhall have sold the very graves of his race? She thought
of his cousin Hurstmanceaux; _he_ would have died sooner. As the choir
sang the _Benedictus_ of Gounod, and the sweet spiritual melodies
warbled softly over the still open vault, she felt sick with the satire
and the derision of the whole scene. The Lord-Lieutenant, who stood on
her right, looked at her with anxiety.
“Do you feel faint?” he asked. “Is it too much for you? Ladies should
not go through such trying ceremonies.”
“I am quite well, thanks,” she replied coldly; and he too thought what
an uncivil and unfeeling person she was.
“I suppose she is not sure to inherit, and so is worried,” thought
the gentleman; he could imagine no other possible motive for so much
coldness and so much evidently painful emotion.
“Well, ’tis all over,” thought the dead man’s widow. “But ’tis strange
to think as so masterful a man as poor dear William is gone where he
won’t never have his own way any more!”
Her ideas of a future state were vague, but so far as they were
formulated, they always represented immortal life to her as a kind of
perpetual Sunday school, with much music and considerable discipline.
She felt that William would be very uncomfortable with such limited
opportunities for “making deals” and swinging his stock-whip, as it
were, around him. She was a devoutly religious woman, but her common
sense made her piety a difficult matter, as common sense is apt to do
to many pious persons. She could not bring her mind into any actual
conception of her dead husband as powerless to assert his will, or gone
whither his banking-books would be useless to buy him a warm place.
When the service was over and the bishop had spoken some beautiful
impressive words, during the delivery of which everyone present looked
rapt and divided between ecstasy and anguish (Katherine alone having
her usual expression of reserve and indifference), all the mourners
and officials flocked across the park to the great house to enjoy, in
their several places, according to their rank, the magnificent luncheon
which was destined to be the last effort of Richemont in the Massarene
service.
Katherine and her mother were, during the banqueting, closeted with
the solicitors and administrators to hear the reading of the will. The
executors were two solid and sagacious city magnates, for in business
matters the testator had only trusted business-men.
His daughter was undisturbed; she felt quite certain that he would
have disinherited her. He would, she felt sure, have disposed of his
millions in some splendid, public, and sensational way. His widow was
visibly nervous and anxious.
“I never saw an inch into his mind in this matter,” she thought. “’Tis
quite likely as he’ll cut us both off with a shilling.”
To dispute his will, whatever it might be, never occurred as possible
to one who had been his obedient slave nigh forty years.
She listened in strained and painful attention as she sat in the
library with her daughter, and the great London solicitor, who had been
the person chiefly trusted by Massarene, opened the momentous document
and laid it before him, and, resting his hand upon it, said to the two
women:
“My dear ladies, there is no later will than that made ten years
ago, which, with your permission, I will now proceed to read to you.
It is to be presumed that the deceased always remained in the same
dispositions of mind and feeling, since he has never even added a
codicil to this document.”
With that preamble he turned toward the light and read aloud a
testament of much simplicity considering the enormous fortune of
which it disposed. It left everything unreservedly to his only child,
Katherine Massarene, and provided only that she should pay to her
mother the annual sum of a thousand pounds a year. It left nothing
whatever directly to his wife, not even jewels, and with the exception
of a few bequests to hospitals and executors, provided for nothing
else than the transmission of his entire property to his daughter, for
her own absolute and unrestricted possession on the attainment of her
majority: that age she had now passed by four years.
The envied inheritor of this envied and enormous wealth showed no
emotion which they could construe into either surprise or exultation;
her features might have been of marble for any change they displayed.
An immense consternation paralyzed her. She had hoped that the dislike
her father had conceived for her, and the disappointment she had caused
him, would have led to his leaving away from her some very large
portion of his wealth. She would not have been surprised, and she would
have been infinitely relieved, if he had left her nothing at all. That
she could by any possibility become sole mistress of this immense
property which was so loathsome to her had never for a moment occurred
to her. Royal legatees, public institutions, churches, endowments,
asylums, any one of the many means by which the dead glorify their
memory and purchase a brief respite from the cruelty of oblivion,
would, she had imagined, have preceded her in her father’s bequests.
She had forgotten the fact that to such men as William Massarene the
continuation of their own blood in alliance with their wealth is
absolutely necessary to their ambition. For that reason, although he
had often thought of leaving his fortune to the Prince of Wales, or to
the Nation, he had never actually brought himself to revoke the will
in his only living child’s favor.
Her mother sat still for a moment, a deep purple flush covering her big
and pallid face. Then for the solitary time in all her life she rose
with dignity to the exigency of a trying hour.
“Gentlemen,” she said, in a firm voice to those present, “what is my
child’s is the same as though ’twere mine, and she is learned and a
true lady, and she’ll grace all she gets. But my husband should hev
thought twice before he put such a slight upon me, his partner for nigh
forty year, who worked with him in cold and heat, in mud and sweat,
in hunger and in sorrow. Still the pile was his own to do as he liked
with, and never think, gentlemen, as I dream o’ putting forward any
contrary claim.”
The gentlemen present heard in respectful silence. The fat, homely,
vulgar woman was transfigured by the noble endurance of a great wrong.
On reflection men deride such sentiments, but their first impulse is to
respect them and to salute them with respect. First thoughts are often
best.
Katherine looked at her with deep sorrow in her eyes; but she sat quite
still with no expression on her face, at least, none that the men
present could construe.
The lawyers and executors timidly began to offer their congratulations;
they were afraid of this stately, cold, mute, young woman, who gave
no sign either of exultation or of mourning; it seemed to them, as
it always seemed to everyone, as if she could not possibly bear any
relation to the dead millionaire.
She stopped their felicitations with a gesture, and rose.
“You will excuse me, sirs, if I cannot converse with you, and if I
leave you now. After to-day I shall be always at your disposition for
any business that may require me. Meantime, consider this house yours.
Come, my dear mother.”
She took her mother’s hand and forced her to rise; then made a low
formal curtsey to the men present and passed out of the room, leading
her mother with her.
“Well, I never,” said one of the city gentlemen.
“She knows the time o’ day,” said the other.
“I think she’ll be near,” said the country lawyer.
“She’s mighty grand and distant,” said the first speaker.
The London solicitor said nothing. He admired her. But he felt that she
would not be an easy client if she left the affairs in his hands. She
would want to know the why and the wherefore of everything. No man of
law likes that.
Katherine, when she was alone with her mother in her own rooms, bent
down and kissed Mrs. Massarene’s pale face.
“Oh, my dear mother, what a shame to you, what an injustice and insult!
Oh, if I had only known what he had done when he was living! Why would
you never let me speak to him of his will?”
Her voice shook with deep-rooted anger and exceeding pain. She was
indignant to be made the instrument of her mother’s humiliation.
“My dear, you wouldn’t have altered him,” said her mother, between her
sobs. “He wished to lay me low, and he’s done it. But he was a great
man, was poor William, all the same. It’s a bitter pill to swallow,”
she continued, between her sobs, “and I don’t deserve it from him, for
I toiled day and night for him, and with him, when neither of us had
more than the clothes we stood up in, and ’twas just what I made by
washing and cooking as kept us on our legs for the first year in that
blackguard township. Of course I was in the way of late years. He would
have liked to take a young wife with a great name, and have sons and
that like. ’Twas only natural, perhaps; I was but a clog upon him. But
he forgot all the early years we toiled together.”
“It is an infamy! His will is the greatest crime of an abominable
life!” said Katherine, with deep wrath shining in her eyes and
quivering on her lips.
“Hush! He was your father,” said his wife. “And he was a great man;
there’s excuse for men as is great--they can’t be tied down like common
folks.”
Then, poor soul, she leaned her head on her hands and wept bitterly.
This will, so short and simple in comparison with the enormous wealth
it disposed of, had been the only one signed amongst the various
testaments he had caused to be written. It had been made on his arrival
in England when Katherine had been fourteen years old, when his
ambitions had all centred in her, and on her head he had in imagination
seen resting the circlet of some ducal coronet or princely crown.
Moreover he had always loathed the thought of death; to this man of
iron strength and constant success the idea of something which was
stronger than himself, and which would put an end to his success, was
horrible.
The slight to his wife he would always have caused: he could not
forgive her for not having died long before in Kerosene City. He went
as near to hatred of her as a man of sluggish blood, and superstitious
respect for custom and conventionality, could allow himself to do. She
was a great burden, a drawback and disfigurement; she was stupid and
tactless; she had no powers of assimilation; and in all her grandeur
and glory she remained the Margaret Hogan of Kilrathy. He paid her
out for her persistency in living on and being as incongruous in his
fine houses as a dish of pigs’ trotters would have been at one of his
dinners for Royal Highnesses.
She had toiled hard with and for him in the Northwest; she had laid
the first modest foundations on which he had subsequently been able to
raise his golden temple; and for that very reason he detested her and
cut her off with a meagre legacy, and recalled to her that her jewels
even had been only lent to her, never given.
Philosophers and psychologists when they reason on human nature do not
realize the enormous place which pure spite occupies in its motives and
actions.
All the use she had been to him, all her industry, patience, affection,
and self-denial had all counted for nothing with him; she was a blot on
his greatness, a ridiculous figure in his houses, and her existence had
stood in the way of his marrying some fair young virgin of noble race
who might have given him an heir, and let him cut off his daughter with
a shilling. He did not therefore make a new will, because he could not
make up his mind to disinherit his only living representative; besides
that, he felt that he had at least another score of years to live; and
probably he would have reached his fourscore and ten and died an earl,
as he intended to do, had not the bullet of Robert Airley cut short his
career.
But the vengeance of a poor Scotch workingman had put an end to all,
and his wife had survived him and was sobbing into her handkerchief
whilst his daughter became sole inheritrix of his millions and estates.
He had made many other dispositions of his property, but as these
others were all unsigned they were worth nothing at all in the sight of
the law. His daughter was the richest woman in Great Britain, and all
those whose offers of marriage had been rejected by her cursed her with
the heartiest unanimity.
Meanwhile she herself felt as though an avalanche had fallen on her and
overwhelmed her.
“That creature has got everything!” said the Duchess of Otterbourne,
as she read the synopsis of the will in the newspapers. “Oh, why did
Ronnie not make himself pleasant and marry her!” The soiled linen which
she was conscious of having piled up against herself in the dead man’s
hand would at least have been washed _en famille_!
By the solicitor’s and executors’ request, Katherine who seemed to all
who surrounded her the most favored mortal under the sun went to London
on the day following the funeral. Her mother would not go with her.
“I’ll never set foot in that house no more,” she said; its gilded
gates and marble staircase with the smiling nude boy of Clodion had
become hateful to her. She was not physically ill, but she was nervous,
depressed, cried for hours, and wished incessantly that she had never
left the dairy and the pastures of Kilrathy. “I’m Humpty Dumpty tumbled
off the wall,” she said more than once. “All the king’s horses and all
the king’s men won’t put me together again.”
“Oh, it is shameful, shameful!” said Katherine between her teeth. “And
to make me the instrument to wound you! What cynical cruelty!”
She implored her mother to resist the will, to dispute it in court; to
claim a proper share of a fortune which she had largely contributed to
gain.
But her mother would not hear of such a thing. “I ain’t going to put
good gold and silver in attorneys’ pockets,” she said resolutely.
“I wouldn’t bring William’s will into litigation, no, not if I was
starvin’ on the streets. He was a great man when all’s said and done,
and it won’t be me as dishonors him.” 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.
She felt crushed to earth with the weight of this loathsome
inheritance. It was odious to her as blood-money. Where could she go,
what could she do, to escape from the world, which would see in her a
golden idol whilst to herself only the clay feet standing in mud would
be visible?
Outside Harrenden House there was the incessant movement of the
London season at its perihelion; the gaiety, the haste, the press,
the excitement, the display of a capital in its most crowded hour.
Within all was gloom, silence, mournings. Only the boy of Clodion still
laughed.
The weary work of examination, verification, classification, began;
all the wearisome formalities which follow on the death of a rich man.
The executors, the solicitors, and the household all alike felt awe
and dread of the new owner of the fortune. Her silence seemed to them
unnatural. She was always at the command of the men of business, and
she was always perfectly courteous to every one, but they were afraid
of her. She broke all the seals herself in the presence of those who
had a right to be with her, and examined, herself alone, all the mass
of documents left by her father. She had a presentiment that there
must be much left behind him that would dishonor his memory, and
disgrace still more grossly his debtors. She despised from the depths
of her soul all those illustrious persons whose names figured on the
secret ledgers with their Bramah locks which he had kept as rigidly
as he had used to keep his books in Kerosene City when it was but an
embryo township. But she wished to screen them from the publicity with
which it was in her power to ruin them all; and shortly afterwards
several great persons were at once infinitely relieved, embarrassed,
and humiliated by having their obligations returned to them.
Strangely as it seemed to her, almost one of the first things she
saw in a drawer of her father’s bureau was an envelope with the
superscription:--
“To be sent to the Earl of Hurstmanceaux immediately on my demise.
W. M.”
It was a small envelope and thin.
It seemed odd to her that her father should have left a missive for
a man with whom he had no acquaintance and from whom he had received
only insults. But she concluded that the communication must regard the
affairs of Hurstmanceaux’s sister. She gave the letter at once to a
confidential servant to be taken to Hurstmanceaux’s London address.
In half an hour the servant returned.
“His lordship has rooms in Bruton Street, madam; but he is out of town,
they do not know where. He is yachting in the north of Ireland, they
think; I left the letter to be given as soon as he arrives.”
“Quite right,” said Katherine; but she felt afraid that she ought to
have sent it through some surer channel; by the superscription it
was probably of importance, and no doubt treated of the Duchess of
Otterbourne’s affairs. She thought, too late, that it would have been
wiser to have sent it to Faldon Castle, where she remembered he had
said that he passed most part of the year.
In the same afternoon she received a note on black-edged paper with a
duchess’s coronet on the envelope. It said:
“DEAR MISS MASSARENE.--_I could not tell you how grieved I have been
at the appalling tragedy. I have thought so much of you in your
bereavement, and of your poor mother. If I had not suffered from
bronchitis I should have come in person to the funeral. I hope your
mother received my note? It is all so dreadful and sudden one cannot
realize it. Did my kind good friend leave no letter or message for
me? You know how I trusted him in all my affairs, and the loss of his
experience and his advice is to me an immeasurable misfortune. He was
so wonderfully clever, and so willing to counsel and to aid! His loss
can never be made up to any of us. In sincere sympathy I remain_,
“_Ever yours affectionately_,
“CLARE OTTERBOURNE.”
Katherine read the note twice over. She profoundly mistrusted the
writer. It read very naturally, very unaffectedly; but it was wholly
impossible that the writer could be sincere.
She was about to reply and say that her father had left a letter for
Hurstmanceaux; but on second thoughts she doubted if she had a right
to do so; the matter belonged to the person to whom the letter was
addressed, who would tell his sister of its contents or not, as he
chose.
She wrote, instead, a few brief polite distant words saying that she
had as yet found no communication for the Duchess amongst her father’s
papers, and thanking her for her expressions of sorrow and sympathy.
“Why should she expect any remembrance from him?” she wondered. “Did
she expect to be named in his will?”
She felt regret that Hurstmanceaux was out of town. She thought his
sister quite capable of going to Bruton Street and intercepting the
letter if she got wind of it. Perhaps, she thought, there was money
in it; it had borne a large seal, bearing the newly-found arms of the
Massarenes.
“Did my father ever speak to you of the Duchess of Otterbourne?” she
asked his solicitor that afternoon.
“Never!” said the lawyer, with a passing smile.
“Did you ever hear that he helped her in monetary affairs?”
“No,” said the solicitor, with the same demure suggestive smile
hovering on his lips. “But everyone knows that Mr. Massarene was a
great admirer of that lady.”
Katherine asked him no more. She lighted a match and burnt the
sympathetic little note.
Meanwhile her own note was like lead on the heart of its recipient,
who had made sure that some message, some bequest, would come to
her from William Massarene. She knew the man so little, despite her
intelligence and worldly wisdom, that she had actually believed that he
might provide for the restoration to her, at his death, of her own and
Beaumont’s signatures, or would leave her some assurance that they were
destroyed. As it was, in the absence of any indication, she could not
tell that they might not at any moment be found by his daughter or his
executors. Every moment of these weeks was a torture to her. She could
not sleep an hour at night without anodynes.
It was now the beginning of July: the height of the season. She had to
act in pastoral plays, keep stalls at bazaars, go to garden-parties,
dinner-parties, marriages, _déjeuners_, flower-shows, Primrose
gatherings, and be seen once at least at a Drawing-room. She did not
dare give in, or go away, or pretend to be ill, because she was afraid
that the world might suspect that she was worried by the consequences
of Massarene’s death. These days during which she knew that his
heiress must be searching amongst his papers, reading his memoranda,
and sorting his correspondence, were the most horrible of her life.
She felt stretched on a rack from morning till night. Outwardly she
was lovely, impertinent, careless, gay, as ever, and people wondered
whom she would marry; but her mental life was one of the most restless
conjecture, the most agonized dread.
As the days became weeks, and she heard nothing of any discovery made
at Harrenden House, she began to grow quieter, she began to feel
reassured. The signatures no doubt had been burnt. She persuaded
herself that they had certainly been burnt. She did not dream that
Beaumont’s receipt and the type-written lines she herself had signed
had been enclosed, without a word, in the sealed letter which was lying
awaiting her brother at his rooms in Bruton street.
The same night that he had returned from Paris, William Massarene, who
never left till to-morrow that which should be done to-day, had put
them in that envelope, had addressed and sealed them. “Now if I die my
lady will remember me,” he had thought. “She’ll wish she hadn’t called
me Billy, and told me lies about the Bird rooms.”
In his own way at that time he was fiercely in love with her; but
his passion did not make him forget or forgive. It was a posthumous
vengeance which he thus arranged; but it was a diabolical and ingenious
one.
Every week from that night until the night before his murder he had
looked at that letter and thought, with an inward chuckle, that if he
fell down in a fit, or died of a carriage accident, his retaliation
was safely arranged to smite her when he should be in his grave. In a
rough vague way he believed in a God above him. Most successful persons
do. But he did not choose to leave his revenge to the hands of deity.
“Always load your rifle yourself,” was his maxim in death as in life.
He knew that her brother was the one person on earth whom she feared.
And the shell he thus filled to burst after his death would hit hard
Hurstmanceaux himself, that damnable swell who would not speak to him
even in a street or a club-house, and who had refused his heiress’s
hand before it was actually offered to him! “My lord’ll sing small when
he learns as his sister was saved from a criminal charge by Billy’s
dirty dollars,” he had thought as he had prepared that envelope which
his heiress now found in the hush and gloom of Harrenden House. He
might have made his vengeance still more cruel. He might have left
arrows still more barbed behind him to rankle in the breast of that
proud man, of that penniless peer, who would never know him. But he
had always attached great importance to reputation for chastity; he
felt ashamed to admit in his mature years that he too had felt the
temptation of a fair face and of a lovely form. He did not like to
confess, even posthumously, his own frailties.
So he had only enclosed her signature and Beaumont’s. They spoke for
themselves. They were enough; they would leave to himself the glory of
a generous action, and to her the shame of a mean one.