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.
[378]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[379] 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.
[380]“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[381] 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.
[382]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[383] 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,[384] 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[385] 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.
