“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.
[387]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.”
[388]“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[389] 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[390] 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[391] 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[392] 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:
[393]“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,[394] 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.
[395]“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[396] 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,[397] 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.
[398]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[399] 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:
[400]“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.”
[401]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[402] 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.
