The season was dying hard. Lady Leominster's ball, at the great old
house at Fulham, was the last flash of an expiring fire. The Houses
of Parliament had closed their historic doors. The walls of the Royal
Academy had been stripped of their masterpieces, and empty themselves,
looked down upon dusty emptiness. All the best theatres were shut;
London was practically empty. The few thousand lingerers in a
wilderness of deserted streets bewailed the inanity of the daily Press.
There was nothing in the morning papers; and the evening papers were
worse, since they were obliged to echo the morning nothingness.
The people who never read books were longing for something startling in
those indispensable papers, were it even a declaration of war. Suddenly
their longing was satisfied. The morning papers were devoured with
eagerness. The evening paper was waited for with feverish expectancy.
All of a sudden the great army of the brainless found themselves with
something to think about, something to talk about, something upon which
to build up hypotheses, to which, once built, they adhered with a
fierce persistency.
There had been a murder. A murder in the heart of London, in one of the
fine houses of the West End; not one of the finest, for, after all,
spacious and splendid as the house might be, it was not like Berkeley
or Devonshire, Lansdowne or Stafford. It was only one in a row of
spacious houses, the house of a foreign financier, a man who dealt in
millions, and who was himself the owner of millions.
Mario Provana had been murdered in his own house--shot through the
heart by an unknown assassin, who had done his work well enough
to leave no clue to his identity. Speculation might rove at will,
theory and hypothesis might run riot. Here was endless talk for
dinner-tables--inexhaustible copy for the newspaper.
A man of great wealth, of exalted position in the world of
finance--finance, not commerce. Here was no dealer in commodities, no
manufacturer of cocoa, or sugar, or reels of cotton, but a man who
dealt in the world's wealth, and could make peace or war by opening or
closing his money-bags.
People who had never seen the great man's face in the flesh were just
as keenly interested in the circumstances of his death as the people
who had dined at his table and had known him as intimately as such
men ever are known. A rough print of his photograph was in every
halfpenny paper, and the likeness of his beautiful young wife was
travestied in some of them. Pictures of the house in Portland Place,
front and back view, were in all the papers. Columns of picturesque
reporting described the man and the house, the beautiful young
wife, the sumptuous furniture, the numerous household, the splendid
entertainments which had made the house famous for the last six or
seven years.
And for the murdered man himself, no details were omitted. Interviews
were invented, in which, during the last year, Signor Provana had
expounded his opinions and views of that sphere of life in which he
exercised so vast an influence--his ideas political, his tastes in art
and literature, music, and the drama. Minute descriptions of his person
were given in the same glowing style. The picturesque reporter made
the dead man alive again for the million readers who were panting for
details that would help them to strengthen their own pet theory or to
crush an opponent.
Thousands of sensation-hunters went to Portland Place to look at the
house that held that dreadful mystery of a life untimely cut short
by the hand of a murderer. Loafers stood on the pavement and gazed
and gazed, as if their hungry eyes would have pierced dead walls and
darkened windows. The loafers knew that the house was in charge of the
police, and that a vigilant watch was being kept there. They wondered
whether the lovely young wife was in the house. They pictured her
weeping alone in one of those darkened rooms; yet were inclined to
think that her friends would have insisted on her leaving that house of
gloom, and would have carried her off to some less terrible place for
rest and comfort.
The first idea was the correct one. Vera was lying in that spacious
bed-chamber behind three windows on the second floor, where ivy-leaved
geraniums were falling in showers of pale pink blossom from the
flower-boxes. She was lying on the vast Italian bed, lying like a stone
figure, while Susan Amphlett sat by the bed, and wept and sighed,
with intervals of vague, consoling speech, till, finding that speech
elicited no reply, and indeed seemed unheard, she had at last, in sheer
vacuity of mind, to take refuge in the first book within reach of her
hand.
It was one among many small volumes on a table by the bed--Omar Kháyyam.
"Oh, what a dreary book," thought Susie, who was beginning to feel her
office of consoler something of a burden.
She had hated entering that dreadful house, as she always called it
in her thoughts, since she had heard of the murder; and now to be
sitting there in that deadly silence, in that grey light from shrouded
windows, to be sitting there with the knowledge that only a little
way off, in another darkened room at the back of the dreadful house,
there lay death in its most appalling form, was a kind of martyrdom
for which Susie was unprepared, and which she was not constituted to
suffer calmly or lightly. As she had hated old age, so, with a deeper
hate, she hated death. To hear of it, to be forced to think of it, was
agonising; and to visualise the horror lying so near her, a murdered
man in his bloodstained shroud, made her start up from her easy chair
and begin to roam about the room in restlessness and fear.
She lifted the edge of a blind and peered into the street.
The sight of the people staring up at the house was comforting. They
were alive. There were people standing in the road, looking up with
widened eyes, so absorbed in what they saw, or wanted to see, that they
ran a risk of sudden annihilation from a motor-car, and skipped off to
the opposite pavement, there to content themselves with a more distant
view.
"There never was such a murder," Susie said to herself. "I think every
soul in town must have come to look at this horrid house since eleven
o'clock this morning."
It was now past three, in a dull, sultry afternoon. Susie spent all
the intervening hours in the silent room in the dreadful house. She
was sorry for her friend; but she was still more sorry for herself.
All those hours of silent horror, without any luncheon, and no good
done! What was the use of sitting by the bed where a woman lay dumb and
motionless, unconsoled by affectionate murmurs from a bosom friend,
apparently unconscious that the friend was there.
Lady Susan called in Hanover Square on her way home, and ordered a
black frock, lustreless silk that would stand alone, with a shimmer
of sequins flashing through crêpe: not this week's fashion, nor
last week's, but the fashion of the week after next. The style that
was coming; not the style that had come. This was her one agreeable
half-hour in all that dismal day.
"I may be dining with Vera next week, and it will be only kind to wear
mourning," Susan told herself, as she ordered the gown.