katherine massarene was as unhappy as it is possible for a person to be who has no personal crime on their conscience, and has all their personal wants supplied. she was incessantly haunted by the sense of her father’s wickedness. true he had never gone to windward of the law; he had never done anything which would have enabled the law to call him to account. but his actions seemed to her all the worse because of that cold-blooded caution which had kept him carefully justified legally in all which he did. his own advancement had always been his governing purpose; and he had been too shrewd to imperil this by any excess in overreaching others, such as might have made him liable to law. he had dealt with men so that they were always legally in the wrong: for moral right he cared nothing. to his heiress all his wealth seemed blood-stained and accursed. she seemed to herself blood-stained in keeping or using it. some part might possibly have been gained by industry, frugality, and self-denial; but the main portion of it had been built up on the ruin of others. in any case she would have felt thus, but the words of hurstmanceaux had been like electric light shed on a dark place where murdered bodies lie. his scorn cut her to the heart. she did not resent it; she admired it; but it cut her to the quick.
this was how all men of honor and honesty must regard the career of william massarene; if the world in general had not done so it was only because the world is corrupt and venal itself and always open to purchase; the world it may roughly be said does not quarrel with its bread and butter. but what hurstmanceaux felt was, she knew, that which every person of high principle would feel with regard to the vast ill-gotten wealth which she had inherited. she did not even quarrel with the patrician temper which had insulted herself; it was so much better and worthier than the general disposition of the times to condone anything to wealth.
[437]she suffered under it, but she did not resent it. individually, to herself, it was unjust; but she could not expect him to know that or to believe in it.
it did not help her on her difficult road; but it made her see only one issue to it.
this she saw clearly.
she walked slowly one day through the wood which was a portion of the little property; between the pine stems the grey water of the channel was seen, dreamy, misty, and dull in a sunless day. some colliers and a fishing-lugger with dingy canvas were drifting slowly through the windless air, under the low clouds. her thoughts were not with the landscape, and she paced absently the path, strewn with fir-needles, which led to the cliff. she was roused by a little dog bustling gaily through the underwood and jumping upon her in recognition, whilst her own dog, whom she called argus, immediately investigated the stranger’s credentials. a moment or two later pleasant cherry tones, which she had last heard on the deck of the steamer leaving indian shores, reached her ear. “hello, miss massarene! whisky knows old friends. how are you, my dear? i was coming up to your house.”
she turned and saw lord framlingham, with great pleasure: she had heard that he was in england for a few weeks, but had scarcely hoped to meet him unless she went up to town for the purpose.
“did you really come down here only to see me? that is very good of you,” she said gratefully.
“the goodness is to myself. besides, i could not show my face to my girls if i went back without having a chat with you. no thanks. i have lunched. if you are going for a walk, whisky and i will go with you.
“is this big rough fellow yours?” he added, looking at argus. “i dare say he’s very devoted, but i can’t say much for his breeding.”
katherine laughed slightly. “how like an englishman! why are ‘humans’ the only animals in whom you do not exact breeding?”
they went on through the woods talking of his family, who had remained in india, and of the political matters[438] which had brought him home for a personal conference with the home government. when they came out on to the head of the cliff they sat down in sight of the sea.
“how homelike it all looks! that brown lugger, those leaden clouds, that rainy distance.”
he was silent a minute or two, touched to the vague sadness of the exile. then he turned to her.
“now tell me of yourself; i have thought much of you since your father’s death. it was a frightful end.”
“it was.”
“do you remember our long talk under the magnolias? how little we thought then that his ambitions would so soon be over! you don’t look well. it must have been a great shock.”
she gave a gesture of assent.
“and you are sole mistress of everything?”
“yes.”
“that is an immense burden.”
“yes.”
“you must get someone to bear it with you. pardon me, but i am as interested in your future as if you were one of my daughters. i saw something in a society paper about you this morning. i devoutly hope it is true.”
“what was it?”
“that you were about to marry lord hurstmanceaux.”
“what!”
she rose from her seat as if a snake had bitten her, her colorless skin grew red as a rose, her eyes blazed with an indignation for which her companion was puzzled to account. “whoever dare—whoever dare——” she said breathlessly.
framlingham was astonished. “come, come, my dear; there’s nothing in the report to put your back up like that. i don’t know him personally, but i have always heard that he is a very fine fellow—poor—but that wouldn’t matter to you; on my word, i don’t think you could possibly do better. you might get much higher rank, of course, but then you don’t care about rank. pray be seated and calm yourself.”
“how could such a falsehood possibly be put in print?” she said nervously.
[439]“you might be more astonished if you saw a truth in print,” said framlingham with a chuckle. “so it’s no foundation, eh? do you know him?”
“slightly. he called on me on business a few weeks since. but he is the very last person on earth of whom a statement of that kind could ever possibly be true.”
“humph!” said framlingham, and he threw a dead stick for whisky to fetch.
“his sister played fast and loose with your father’s money, didn’t she?” he asked.
“i would prefer not to speak of her.”
“all right,” said framlingham rather disappointed. “but because you don’t like the sister that is no reason to refuse the brother. i have always heard that she is a thorn in his side.”
“there could be no question of refusal or acceptance,” said katherine, exceedingly annoyed. “lord hurstmanceaux and i scarcely know each other; and there is no one who more thoroughly despises myself and my origin than he does.”
framlingham was very astonished, and sent whisky after another stick.
“he can scarcely have told you so?” he said. “hie—good dog—bring it!”
“he has told me so in most unmistakable terms. pray don’t think that i blame him for a moment; but you will understand that, knowing this, such a report as you speak of in the papers is incomprehensible to me and most odious.”
“necessarily,” said framlingham, as he looked at her with his keen sagacious grey eyes and thought to himself, “it is well to begin with a little aversion. he may be odious to her, but i doubt if he is indifferent.”
katherine was silent; the momentary color had faded out of her face; her gaze followed the grimy canvas of the collier as it sailed slowly to westward.
“well, i’m sorry,” said her friend, as he patted his skye-terrier. “he’s a good man, and i should like to know you were in the hands of a good man, my dear. you will have all the royal and noble blackguards in europe after you, and you have nobody i think to advise[440] you, except your lawyers, who are all very well in their way, but——”
katherine smiled a little, rather scornfully.
“the royal and noble people cannot marry me by force, and i should suppose they will understand a plain ‘no’ if they don’t often hear one. besides, if i do what i meditate i shall soon lose all attraction for them.”
“good lord, what’s that? you alarm me. i remember you expressed very revolutionary ideas in india.”
“i will tell you after dinner. you will dine with us, won’t you, and stay a day or two?”
“i will dine with pleasure, and sleep the night. but i must be back in town by the first morning train. i have to go down to windsor at noon. what on earth can you be thinking of doing? buying a kingdom in the south seas, or finishing the panama?”
“something that you will perhaps think quite as eccentric. let us talk of other things. the day is a real english day to welcome you, so dim, so sad, so still; the weather you sigh for in india.”
“yes,” said framlingham, falling in with her mood. “one thinks of lytton’s verses:
“‘wandering lonely, over seas,
at shut of day, in unfamiliar land,
what time the serious light is on the leas,
to me there comes a sighing after ease
much wanted, and an aching wish to stand
knee-deep in english grass, and have at hand
a little churchyard cool, with native trees
and grassy mounds, thick laced with osier-bands,
wherein to rest at last, nor farther stray.
so, sad of heart, muse i at shut of day,
on safe and quiet england, till thought ails
with inward groanings deep for meadows grey,
grey copses, cool with twilight, shady dales,
home-gardens, full of rest, where never may
come loud intrusion, and what chiefly fails
my sick desire, old friendships fled away.
i am much vexed with loss. kind memory, lay
my head upon thy lap and tell me tales.’
“he was a very young man when he wrote these lines,” said framlingham, “and the only criticism i would offer, is, that i should prefer ‘close’ of day to ‘shut’ of day. what say you?”
[441]after dinner that evening, when mrs. massarene had retired to her room not to offend a governor, who was spoken of as a future governor-general, by the sight of her nodding and dozing, katherine turned to her guest and said briefly—
“i will tell you now what my wishes are, and what my one doubt is.”
“i am all attention,” said framlingham, lifting the sleepy whisky on to his knee.
“i have found out,” she continued, “that the money got together by my late father was nearly all gained in bad ways, cruel ways, dishonest ways.”
“that does not surprise me,” said framlingham. “most self-made men are made by questionable means. go on.”
“if he had his deserts he would have been spurned by everyone,” said katherine, whose voice shook and was very low. “i have reason to believe that the man who killed him had been cheated by him out of a tin mine. i traced that man. he was driven wild by want. his blood is on us and on the money.”
“i thought no one knew who killed massarene?”
“no one does know. i found letters. i traced their writer. there would be no use in publicity. his case was not worse than that of others. but he was miserable and alone. he took his revenge. at least i believe so. i have gone through all my father’s documents, and ledgers, and records. his whole life was one course of selfish, merciless, unprincipled gain. his earlier economies were made out of the navvies, and miners, and squatters who frequented a low gambling den which he kept in what was then the small township of kerosene. all his money is accursed. it is all blood-money. i cannot spend a sixpence of it without shame.”
she spoke still in low tones and gently, but with intense though restrained feeling.
framlingham scarcely knew what to say. he had no doubt that she was perfectly right as to the sources of her father’s wealth, and he was sorry that she had been able to arrive at such knowledge.
“these are your views,” he said as she paused. “now let me hear your projects.”
[442]“they can be told in very few words,” she replied. “i desire—i think i may say i intend to free myself of the whole burden of the inheritance. alas! i cannot undo its curse.”
“you mean to beggar yourself!” exclaimed her companion in amaze and consternation.
“if you call it so. i must leave my mother her yearly income which is given her under the will; but i can do as i please with all the rest, and i shall restore it as far as possible to those from whom he gained it. of course few of his victims will be traceable; but some may be, so at all events the money shall go back to the poor from whom it was drained.”
framlingham stared at her in silent stupefaction.
“you cannot be serious,” he said at last.
“i am sorry you look at it in that way. i thought i should have had your sympathy.”
“my sympathy!”
“certainly. you are a man of honor.”
framlingham was silent.
“cannot you pity my dishonor?” she said in the same hushed, grave tones.
“my dear girl,” said her friend, “i pity acutely what you feel, and i can imagine nothing more painful to a sensitive nature than such a discovery as you have made. but you may have exaggerated your censure and your conclusions. the age we live in is lenient to such deeds when they are successful. your father was a rude man dwelling in rough society. you must not judge him by the standard of your own high ethics. as for what you propose to do, it is simply madness.”
“i am sorry you take that view.”
“how can i take any other? what man or woman of the world would take any other? you hold a magnificent position. you have the means of leading a life of extreme usefulness and beauty. you can marry and have children to whom your property can pass. if it has been defiled at its source, it will be purified in passing through your hands. foul water going through a porcelain filter comes out clear. you are not responsible for what your father did. his crimes, if he committed any, lie buried[443] with him. neither god nor man can call you to account for them.”
“i call myself.”
“this is midsummer madness in midwinter! if you put your project into execution, you would be rooked, robbed, ruined on every side, and you would raise a hornet’s nest of swindlers around you. no one would be grateful to you. all would turn you into ridicule and environ you with intrigue. my dear, you have had aladdin’s lamp given to you. for heaven’s sake use it for your own happiness and that of others. do not break it because there is a flaw in the glass. there is your mother also to be considered,” he added after a pause. “what right have you to cause her such change of circumstance, such possible mortification as your abandonment of your inheritance would bring with it?”
“in that perhaps you may be right,” said katherine wearily, “but in that only, and perhaps not even in that. you speak with the view of the world, and wisely no doubt. but i am sorry you see it so. i should have hoped you would have understood me better.”
he strove to turn her and to argue with her for more than two hours, but he failed to bring home his own convictions to her mind.
“marry, marry, marry!” he said. “it is the only cure for distempered dreams.”
“i shall not marry,” replied katherine, “and i do not dream. what i have said to you are facts. what i mean to do is expiation.”
framlingham shook his head.
“when a woman is once started on the road of self-sacrifice, an eighty-horse power would not hold her back from pursuing it. good-night, my dear.”
he went up the staircase to his own room, and when there opened one of the windows and looked out; the night was dark, but he could hear the swell of the sea, and the homely smell of wet grass, of rotting leaves, of falling rain, was agreeable to him because it was that of the country of his birth.
“what she wants to do is really very fine and very honorable,” he thought. “it is midsummer madness, but[444] most honorable sentiments are. it is a pity that one’s worldly wisdom obliges one to throw cold water on such a scheme.”
the next morning, very early, he went back to town.
he left an additional sense of depression and uncertainty behind him in katherine’s mind. he had not altered her opinion, but he had increased her perplexities. if this was how a sagacious and experienced man of the world looked at her project, it was possible that there were obstacles in the way of its accomplishment which escaped her own sight. she had expected to have framlingham’s comprehension and concurrence, for in india he had felt so much sympathy with her revolt against her father’s wealth. the worldly wisdom which he esteemed it his duty to preach chilled her with its egotism and its coldness. there was only one person living who would have understood her scruples and desires, and to that one person she would certainly never speak again.
there had been a wall between them before this mendacious report of which framlingham had spoken; since that report there was an abyss. she felt that if she met hurstmanceaux on a public road, they would by tacit mutual consent pass each other without visible recognition.
had her mother not been living, she would have had no hesitation in going straight to the end she had in view. but her mother constituted a duty of another and opposite kind.
the rights of his wife had been almost entirely ignored by william massarene; but her daughter could not ignore them morally, if the law would have allowed her (as it did) to do so legally. more than once she attempted to approach the subject, and was arrested by her own natural reserve, and by the slow comprehension to take a hint of her mother.
moreover, the memory of william massarene was quite different to what his presence had been to the wife, whom his last testament had insulted. with his coffin in the roxhall crypt, all his offences had been buried in her eyes; a man to whose funeral princes had sent wreaths and a silver stick could not in her sight be other than[445] assoilzied. her heart was much warmer than her mind was strong, and she was accessible to those charms of social greatness to which her daughter was wholly invulnerable. she had suffered in the great world, but she had liked it.
“would you mind being poor again?” katherine asked her once, tentatively.
margaret massarene was unpleasantly startled.
“there aren’t anything wrong about the money, is there?” she said anxiously. “i’m always afraid, now your dear father aren’t here, to hold it all together.”
“oh, it is all solid enough!” replied katherine, with some bitterness. “i merely asked you, would you dislike being poor if you were so?”
“well, my dear,” replied mrs. massarene, crossing her hands on her lap, “i can’t say as i should like it. when i went over to kilrathy i did wish as how i’d stayed milkin’ all my days. but that’s neither here nor there, and the past is spilled milk as nobody can lap up, not even a cat. but, to be honest with ye, i think there’s a good deal of pleasantness about money, and living well, and being warm in winter and cool in summer, and seein’ everybody hat in hand as ’twere. no, my dear, i shouldn’t like to be poor; and you wouldn’t either, if you’d ever known what ’twas.”
katherine was silent. she had not expected any other answer, yet she was disappointed.
“but,” she said, after a few moments—“but, my dear mother, i think you know, i think you must know, that this vast amount of money and possessions which we inherit——”
“which you inherit,” said mrs. massarene with a little asperity. “i’m struck out——”
“you or i, it is the same thing,” said katherine. “you must know, i think, that—that—it was not very creditably gained. you must, i suppose, have known many things and many details of my father’s life in kerosene; of his early life, at any rate; of the foundations of his wealth.”
“perhaps i did and perhaps i didn’t,” said her mother rather sullenly. “your good father never consulted me,[446] my dear, and if i’d put myself forward he’d have locked me up in the coal cellar, and left me there.”
“no doubt he never consulted you,” said katherine. “but it is impossible that living with him, and working for him as you have often told me you did, you can have been wholly ignorant of the beginning of his rise to wealth. you must know very much of the ways by which he first acquired it.”
her mother was moved by divided feelings, of which, however, vexation was the chief. she was embarrassed because she was a very honest woman; but at the same time her buried lord was purified and exalted in her eyes. had not a bishop laid him in his grave?
“’tis neither here nor there what i may have known, or leastways may have guessed,” she said sullenly and with some offence. “your father never did nothing as the police could have laid hold of—never!”
“oh, mother!” cried katherine. “is that your standard of morality, of virtue?”
the indignation in her voice increased her mother’s annoyance.
“i don’t see, anyhow,” she said very angrily, “that it is the place of a daughter to try and rake up things against her father. william was in a new country, where the morals is new, and maybe he did like his neighbors. but the first people in the old country thought much of him. he’d hev died a lord if he’d lived a year more. the prince sent a wreath and a gentleman. when he’s laid in his grave with all that pomp and honor, what for do you, his own child, go and try to throw mud on his coffin? i think it shame of you, kathleen; and if that’s all your fine eddication has taught you, well ’twas money ill spent, and you’d better look at the fifth commandment.”
with a sigh her daughter rose and walked through the veranda into the gardens beyond, and thence into the pine-woods. she felt the utter impossibility of ever bringing her mother’s mind into any unison with her own. it was wholly useless to attempt to reach and touch a chord which did not exist. if she pursued the course which she thought right, she must do so in spite of her mother, and alone in her choice.
[447]margaret massarene loved her daughter, but she thought katherine was a “crank.” she could see no reason why they should not both of them enjoy the good things poor william had left behind him.
she was a good and honest woman; but in kerosene city the moral feelings lose their sensitiveness, and she could not follow katherine’s reasonings; she considered them high-flown, and a pack of nonsense. “as for fortunes being made honest,” said margaret massarene to herself, “’tis a pack of stuff to dream of it. you can’t no more make a big fortune with clean hands than you can stack a dung heap.”
but when the fortune, however accumulated, was made, it seemed to her flying in the face of an all-seeing providence to quarrel with it, and to “climb down.” whoever did climb down if they could help it?
“you would not like to visit america, mother?” katherine said to her a few days later.
margaret massarene gasped.
“america? the states?”
“the states, yes—dakota.”
“ropes shouldn’t drag me,” replied her mother with unusual firmness. “oh, lord! the food served all higgledy-piggledy, sour and sweet all running amuck; the trains a-peering in at your sixth floor window; the men hanging on to hooks in the crowd of the cars; the spittle all over the place; the rush and the crush and the pother never still. go back there? no; you should kill me first!”
she was roused to unusual self-assertion and emphasis.
“only for a visit,” said katherine timidly.
“and what for—for a visit?” repeated mrs. massarene. “now i’ve got back, i’ll stay where i am. many and many a night i’ve lain awake in that hell; for hell ’tis, with the railways a-shrieking and rumbling past the windows, and the furnace chimneys a-bellowing fire and smoke, and the whistles a-screaming, and the pistons a-thumping; and i’ve thought of the old home and cried till i was blind, and said to myself, if ever a good god let me go back, i’d stay at home if i swept the streets for a living. i don’t fly in the face of providence, katherine.”
[448]“but your home was in ulster!”
“you don’t want to be throwing that in my teeth. i wasn’t brought up a fine english lady like you. but europe’s europe and the states is the states; and i won’t cross that grey, wild water again; no, not if you kill me!”
“of course, my dear mother, you shall do as you wish.”
“oh, you’re very soft-spoken, but you’re that obstinate! what do you want with the states? you’re so mighty pitiful of the poor—almost a socialist, as one may say. well, i can tell you there’s harder lines there between rich and poor than there is in these old countries, and more hatred too. there aren’t nowhere,” continued margaret massarene, her pale face growing warm, “where the luxury’s more overdone, and the selfishness crueller, and the spending of money wickeder, than in the states. nowhere on earth where the black man is loathed and the poor white is scorned as they are in that canting ‘free’ country!”
katherine sighed.
“so i have always understood. but it only makes it a greater duty.”
“what a greater duty?”
katherine hesitated.
“to go there. to see for oneself. to try and restore what one can.”
“duty never lies at home, my dear, we know,” said mrs. massarene with sarcastic acerbity. “i suppose you’ll write to me once a month; and if anything happens to me while you’re away, you’ll give orders as they’ll lay me by your poor dear father, whom you’re ashamed on.”
her daughter felt that her path of duty, whether at home or abroad, was one which it was not easy to discern in the gloaming of a finite humanity, through the tangled brush-wood of conflicting demands and principles.
“won’t you, can’t you understand, mother?” she said, with a wistful supplication in her voice.
“no,” replied her mother sternly. “i could hev understood if you’d held your head high, and married high, and had a lot of nice little children; but a freak as will[449] make you the laughing-stock of all the respectable newspapers on this side and the other, i don’t understand and don’t want to understand; and ’tis an insult to poor william in his grave.”
“i’m not speaking for myself, my dear,” she added; “it’s very good of you not to hev put me in the workhouse.”
katherine felt that, though duty may be bracing and fortifying, it strongly resembles a cold salt bath when the thermometer is below zero.
she spent many solitary hours walking in the little wood which led to the sea, or sitting where she had sat with framlingham, thinking over the immense task which lay before her, and wondering how it was best to execute it. she searched her heart relentlessly for any selfish or unworthy motive which might lurk in it. all alone under the pine trees as she was, she felt herself flush with consciousness as she asked herself: was she moved by any personal desire? she felt that she would be glad to vindicate herself in the eyes of hurstmanceaux—to force him to acknowledge that one basely born might act well and with honor. she longed to show him that she could shake off the ill-gotten wealth which he despised and which the world adored. something of this might move her—so much her conscience compelled her to admit—but with perfect honesty she could also feel that, had she never seen him, she would none the less have desired to undo, as far as should be in her power, the evil which her father had done to the poor and helpless.
again, was she wronging her mother? was she leaving the real duty, which lay close at hand, for the imaginary duty, which lay far away? she knew that many a dreamer did so; that many an enthusiast left his own garden to weed and drought, whilst he went to sow in strange lands. she held in horror the religion which taught that the soul should be saved, however the hearth and home were deserted.
these days of indecision and mental conflict were days of infinite pain, for her own nature was resolute and not wavering, and to such a temper irresolution seems a form of cowardice. moreover she, who had read widely and[450] thought deeply, knew that it is easier to move the mountains or to arrest the tides than it is to do any real good to the mass of mankind. she had none of the illusions of the socialist, none of the distorted idealism of revolutionists and philanthropists; she was not sustained by any erroneous idolatry of humanity; she did not expect the seed she would sow to bring forth any fruit which would change the face of nature; but the impulse to cast from her the wealth acquired by fraud, by violence, and by usury, was too strong in her for her to be able to resist it.
she knew that what she wished to do was fraught with innumerable difficulties, and that might, unless well done, cause more evil than good. she had hoped to find in framlingham some guidance, some help; but she saw that she must rely on no one but herself. it saddened her to know that it was so, but it did not entirely discourage her. conscience is a lamp which burns low in the press of the world, but lights clearly enough the path of the solitary.
in the autumn of that year, sixteen months after the death of william massarene, she sailed from southampton for that dread northwest, which remained in the memories of her earliest childhood as a place of horror, whose summer meant sandstorms, and drought, and sunstroke, and the whirling of the mad tornado, and the scorching billows of the forest fires, and winter meant the pall of snow on hill and plain, the driving of the dreadful blizzard, the lowing of starved cattle, the mourning of famished wolves, the shapeless heaps upon the ice which were the bodies of frozen travelers and foundered caravans.
it was terrible to her to return there, and behold all which she must see there; but it was more terrible to her to remain possessor of the millions which had been acquired in that hell.
“why can that young woman be gone to america?” said daddy gwyllian.
“gone to look after her property, i presume,” said hurstmanceaux, whom he addressed.
“it is a joli denier to look after. that cad was second only to vanderbilt and pullman.”
“why will you always talk about money, daddy? it is a very vulgar habit.”
[451]“money’s like robust health,” said daddy. “vulgar if you like, but deuced comfortable to those who have got it.”
hurstmanceaux, as he walked down pall mall a few moments later, felt irrationally disappointed that she had gone to america. no doubt she had gone to look after her property there, but he did not think that the person he had seen, with her large, dark, calm eyes and her stately grace, ought to care whether those millions of acres and billions of dollars diminished or increased. if her attitude and expressions in his presence had been real, and not affected, she could not care. he regretted that he had written that letter to her from cowes. it had been written from his heart on a generous impulse; and he knew life well enough to know that our generous impulses are the costliest of all our indulgences.
when he thought also of all which she might know—which she certainly must suspect—of the sister whom he had loved so well, he suffered as only a man of tender heart and sensitive honor can suffer when wounded in his family pride and his natural affections.
