there was no one in london of the world which had been william massarene’s highest heaven. the august sun shone on the flower-beds of the parks in all their glory, and the poor forgotten plants which drooped in the balconies before shuttered windows, and the cats, forgotten also, mewed vainly in closed kitchens and behind iron railings, and the dogs, abandoned to servants and grooms, moped sadly in stable or basement yards, or, straying out into the streets and mews, were lassoed by the police or coaxed to their doom by the agents of experimental institutes. katherine massarene, all alone, stayed on at harrenden house, absorbed in the enormous work of examining her late father’s papers. her mother remained in the country, whither katherine went from saturday to monday to see her. but all the other days of the week the inheritress of mr. massarene’s wealth spent in tracing the sources of that poisoned and blood-stained pactolus.
he, like many another successful and masterful man, had never taken death into account, or he would have destroyed many of those written witnesses against him. as it was, he had kept everything, partly from the sense of power which it gave him to do so, partly from the prudent sharpness of a business man which made him never lose a letter, however insignificant, or destroy a signature, however unneeded. she could not understand all the meaning of these papers, but she understood much: enough to make her heart sick with shame, frozen with horror. she had always known, vaguely, that his fortunes had been obtained mainly through crimes which in the successful man society has agreed to let pass as virtues; but she could now name, measure, analyze those crimes and see them in all their entity, as drops of blood are seen under a microscope.
thus she became acquainted with all the steps which had conducted him from the straw of the cattle-shed to[404] the carpets of harrenden house. that small study, in which he had kept locked all his ledgers, folios, banking-books, and documents of every kind, seemed like a very charnel-house to its new visitant. she had read very widely; she had thought a great deal; and to her clear and cultured intelligence the true aims and objects of her father’s life seemed as sordid and miserable as those of the ragged men whom she had seen in her childhood greedily washing river sand in tin pannikins in the hope of finding some gleam of gold, and ready to murder their bosom friend to secure a grain of the coveted metal.
among those papers was the letter written by the suffolk emigrant for robert airley. she read it, and it flashed across her mind that robert airley had come to england and had killed her father. there was nothing to suggest it, nothing to prove it; but she had no more doubt of it than if she had heard the confession of the assassin. she telegraphed to kerosene city to inquire where robert airley was. it was telegraphed back to her that he had sailed for liverpool on the 30th of may: her father had been shot on the night of the 17th of june: she had no doubt after this that her inference had been correct. and it had not been murder, but justice! justice red-handed and rude—the lex talionis, but justice nevertheless.
through suggestions from the american police, and massarene’s manager, the same suspicions were entertained by scotland yard. but robert airley was lost sight of on his arrival in london, and, as the woman of the eating-house held her peace and kept her own counsel, he remained untraced.
she said nothing of what she found and thought to her mother, and lived on in that state of isolated reflection and regret which can only be supported by those who are strong in character and independent of sympathy, but from which even they suffer greatly. she did not try to trace robert airley. when she heard that he was suspected of the crime but could not be found, she was relieved to think that he was lost to sight; his seizure and trial would have been agony to her. the horror of her discoveries and the shame of them filled her with a feeling[405] as of personal guilt. she looked worn, unwell, aged; she had nothing in her regard, in her manner, in her thoughts, of the sense of freedom and power which all would have expected her to feel in such an accession to immense wealth, in entire liberty. she had no one to whom she could speak of anything which she felt. lord framlingham was in india, and he was the only person to whom she could have confided something of her anxieties, her shame, her uncertainty what to do and how to bear the burden laid upon her. she knew that she must carry all her knowledge shut up in her own breast as long as she lived. it lay like a stone upon her, as did the inheritance of all this ill-gotten wealth.
one day, when she was as usual in the little study poring over an old ledger, one of the servants brought her a card. on it was printed, “earl of hurstmanceaux.” she was surprised, much surprised, but she remembered the letter her father had addressed to him. she hesitated some moments: if he came on his sister’s business could he not go to the lawyer?
“ask lord hurstmanceaux to be so good as to see the solicitors,” she said to the servant, who returned in a few minutes with the reply that lord hurstmanceaux desired the favor of a personal interview.
“show him into the library then,” she said, much surprised. “i will come to him there.”
she put back the ledger in its place, closed the case which held it, and left the room, locking the door with that safety-key which had never quitted her father’s watch-chain in his lifetime, and which she carried now always on hers.
she did not go to her room to see how she looked, as most women would have done; she did not even glance at one of the mirrors in the rooms through which she passed. she went as she was, looking very white, very worn, very stern in her close black gown, to the other end of the house where the library was.
hurstmanceaux was standing in the middle of the room; the light from one of the windows shone on his fair hair. she saw that he too was very pale and appeared distressed and embarrassed.
[406]“you wished to see me, lord hurstmanceaux,” she said coldly. “would not the solicitors have done equally well?”
“no,” said hurstmanceaux—his voice was harsh and unsteady. “i venture to beg of you not to make my errand known to your solicitors.”
she was silent; she sat down and motioned to him to do the same, but he remained standing.
“you sent me a letter from your late father—mr. massarene?” he said—his voice seemed strangled in his throat.
“i enclosed one some time ago, yes.”
“i have only now received it. i have been away yachting. nothing was forwarded.” his words came with difficulty; he spoke like a man to whom what he is obliged to say is torture.
“it does not concern me,” she said coldly. “i have no wish to know what it contained.”
“you must know,” said ronald. “it contained a signature of my sister of otterbourne, who, it appears from another paper enclosed with it, owed to your father the enormous sum of twelve thousand pounds.”
katherine was silent: she thought that probably the duchess of otterbourne had owed very much more than that to her father.
hurstmanceaux breathed heavily: he was overwhelmed with shame at what he was forced to say.
“apparently,” he continued, “she owed this amount to beaumont, the jeweler in the rue de la paix. your father sent me beaumont’s receipt to him, and my sister’s acknowledgment of her debt to him, for the payment to beaumont. she is now in norway with the bassenthwaites; but the two signatures make the matter quite clear. there is no necessity for any inquiry.”
he paused, struggling with an emotion which he feared would get the better of his manhood.
katherine saw that, and it affected her keenly.
“he sent you those signatures!” she said, as a sense of her father’s cruelty dawned on her. “what a brutal, what an infamous thing to do! what a message from the grave!”
[407]“mr. massarene was quite within his rights,” said ronald stiffly: “wholly within them. as my sister’s husband is dead, i am the person to whom her creditors should apply. i blame him for lending her such a sum, without my knowledge, in his lifetime. it is impossible to say to you what i suffer in finding her—in finding her——”
his voice broke down; for an instant he walked away to the window nearest him, and looked out in silence.
katherine did not reply.
she was thinking of the many times, in her father’s private account books, in which lady kenilworth’s name was written, the many slips in the old check-books in which there was also written, in her father’s hand: “drawn self: passed to lady k.”
what could she say? it seemed to her nothing, yet she felt acute sorrow for this proud, sensitive, honorable gentleman, who had the cruel humiliation of such a discovery and such a confession, after all his pride, his scorn, and his avoidance of her and of her parents.
in another moment he turned back from the window and walked toward her.
“i came to ask you, if you can, not to let your men of business know of this,” he said more calmly. “i do not think there is any necessity for them to know. i regret unspeakably that i cannot repay this sum at once, but i am a poor man. in a month’s time i hope to be able to do so. meanwhile, if you can keep my sister’s wretched secret, i shall be very grateful to you.”
katherine rose and looked at him, with some indignation and much sympathy shining in her large dark eyes.
“do you think, because i am his daughter, that i have neither decency nor honor? do not take this matter so deeply to heart. if my father lent the duchess money, she was, on her part, of great use to him. he owed his social position almost entirely to her assistance. i grieve more than i can say that he should have stabbed you from his grave like this. nor can i imagine why he did so, unless to avenge himself for your persistent refusal to be acquainted with us; a mean motive, indeed, if it was his motive. pray believe me, lord hurstmanceaux. your[408] sister’s name is safe for ever with me; and as for repaying this money, do not think of it. the debt is not yours.”
“of my payment of it there must be no dispute,” said ronald quickly. “it was a strictly business matter. your father was a business man. i would not ask even a day’s delay were i not forced. i thank you for your promise of silence; it is more than i have deserved.”
he tried to put the matter on a business footing, to endeavor to treat his sister’s receipt of money from massarene as though it had been a mere affair of agreement and mutual interest; but he was too frank to play a part, and he was conscious that he showed the shame, the disgust, the loathing which he felt for the false position of a woman so near to him.
“do not speak of money to me,” said katherine, with an intensity of feeling which surprised him. “i have passed nearly every day since my father’s death in seeing how the riches he loved were put together. i loathe so utterly all he has left to me, that i envy every work-girl who sews for daily bread in her garret. you said rightly on the road in woldshire that such a fortune as ours is only amassed by wickedness, and cruelty, and fraud. if i could cast it from me as a toad its skin, i would not pause a moment before i did so, and fled from it for ever.”
she was carried out of herself by the forces of feeling, which, for an instant, broke down her reserve, and hurried her into eloquent and unstudied speech.
hurstmanceaux, at any other time, would have been moved to sympathy with her; but now he was too absorbed in his own humiliation and pain to have any perception of hers.
“you will soon get reconciled to your burden, madam,” he said, with a slight and bitter smile. “do not fear. the world will help you to get rid of it. allow me once more to thank you for your promise of silence. i am conscious that both i and she are unworthy of your clemency.”
katherine’s soul shrank within her. she felt all the recoil, the embarrassment, the revulsion of feeling of a reserved nature, which has unbent and revealed itself, and finds its expansion unresponded to and misunderstood.[409] she felt that he did not believe in what she had said in the least.
“you have not heard your sister’s defence,” she said, after a pause.
“my sister’s fables? i do not want to hear them. her signature speaks for her. besides, i can have the whole facts of the transaction from the jeweler. no ingenuity of hers can ever explain them away.”
“you are very harsh.”
“i am far from harsh. and of my harshness or my mildness you cannot be the judge.”
“why not?”
“because you are the daughter of a man who knew nothing of honor, or of its exactions, and that instinct is not acquired in a single generation.”
“have twenty-three generations of nobility bequeathed it to your sister?” was the retort which sprang to her lips, but she generously and valorously kept it unspoken.
her white skin flushed hotly and painfully at the insult, which was to her what a blow would have been to a man.
she did not resent, but she suffered intensely. what he had said was so completely the reflection of her own feelings that it seemed to burn itself into her brain like a branding-iron.
oh, to have come of some stainless and valiant race, with traditions of a past great and pure! what she would have given for that heritage of barren honor, which would have been, in her keeping, virgin and puissant, as a kingdom guarded against every foe!
for an instant she was tempted to go and unlock the drawer in which all the memoranda of his sister’s other debts were lying, and put them before him and say: “did a thousand years of nobility teach honor and honesty to her?” but she resisted the temptation.
he was humiliated and embittered, and this insolence of his speech was, she thought, to be forgiven to him. she said nothing in protest or defence; but there was that in her expression which touched him to repentance for his utterance. he felt that she had deserved better at his hands, though he could not bend his pride to say so.
he was silent some moments, so was she—a silence of[410] pain and of embarrassment. at length, with a great effort, he forced himself to say to her:
“i should not have said that. i beg your pardon. it was offensive.”
she made a slight inclination of the head, as if to accept the apology.
“you said what is generally true, i believe. but there may be exceptions.”
his apology could not efface the impression of his speech, which seemed like vitriol thrown in her face. the impression of pain which his speech left on her was so poignant that she felt as if it would never pass away.
he was violently and bitterly prejudiced against her; he was incapable of being just to her; she seemed to him steeped in the villainy of all that ill-gotten gold in which she had her being; but he could not but acknowledge the dignity and simplicity of her attitude under insult, and he was conscious that he had insulted her grossly. after all, the disgrace of his sister was no fault of hers.
she might be wholly in earnest when she said that she abhorred the wealth of which she was the sole possessor. he was tempted to believe that she was entirely sincere; but she was the daughter of william massarene. she was anathema maranatha.
she bowed to suggest to him that his interview had lasted long enough.
“good-day to you,” she said coldly.
“good-day,” repeated hurstmanceaux. “in a month’s time you will hear from me. meanwhile, forget if you can.”
then he left the library.
she remained standing beside the heavy table laden with choice octavos and the reviews of the month.
she had been tempted out of her habitual silence, and had opened a little window into her heart. and she regretted that she had done so, as, alas! we always do; for there is nothing which we regret so bitterly, and pay for so heavily, as the confidence we give. she was vexed with herself, also, that she had dismissed him so soon and so abruptly, that she had not endeavored to atone for that brutal action after death, that cruel legacy which her father had left in vengeance. she felt that he would pay[411] the money back, if to do so he had to sell every rood of land he possessed, and she hated herself for having sent him, however innocently on her part, that barbed legacy of the dead. she understood how deep a wound it must have given to a man of the principles, the temperament, and the pride of hurstmanceaux.
“but he is unjust to me—unjust and hard!” she said half aloud, in her solitude.
meanwhile he, who had only returned to london an hour previously, took the tidal train to paris, where he went forthwith to beaumont.
“what would you, milord?” said beaumont the following morning. “madame la duchesse sent that old, fat, common man to pay in her name, and he paid. it was no matter to me who paid. i wanted my money back. yes; i lent it on the big jewel and the others. illegal! oh, ta-ta-ta, milord! of course all dealings with those pretty married ladies are great risks. we know that in business. that is why i was anxious to get back my money. if i had not had it, i should have gone to law. perhaps my title to it was unsound, as you say. perhaps it was. but madame, votre sœur, had had the money from me—she could not have denied that in a law court—and great families do not like scandals which touch them. ah, no, milord! noblesse oblige we know!”
and beaumont smiled softly, with a very sweet, sub-ironic, inflection of the voice, as he sat handling some uncut stones in his bureau which looked on the garden.
from him hurstmanceaux obtained the certainty of what he had suspected from the moment that he had received massarene’s posthumous letter: that his sister had not had the otterbourne jewels in her possession when he had asked her for them.
heaven and earth! the duplicity of women!—he thought as he passed along the sunny paris streets with a heart as heavy as lead in his breast. his sister, his blue-eyed sourisette, his favorite from her nursery days, was no better than a thief! no better than any wretched woman of the streets whose souteneur might strike him with a knife in the gloaming that evening!
from beaumont’s he went to boussod et valadon’s,[412] and after an interview with that famous firm, returned to his favorite place of faldon, where he had a small collection of old flemish and dutch pictures brought together in the previous century by his great-grandfather. they were not in the entail, and he had always been at liberty to sell them, but he had never been tempted to do so, for he was attached to the paintings and he liked to see them hanging in the oval room with a north light, where they had been for over a hundred years. he abhorred selling things, all his economies had been effected without selling anything: only by refraining from buying, which is an unpopular method. dilettanti and dealers had all alike hinted to him that those pictures were worth a great deal, and that it was a pity to keep them in a secluded country place on the edge of the atlantic. but he had always turned a deaf ear to such suggestions.
now, he said to himself, the pictures must go. he had nothing else in his possession which would fetch a tenth part of his sister’s debt to william massarene. he was even afraid that the pictures would fail to realize the whole amount. but he asked for that amount and after some demur the price was accepted, the pictures were well known, and the money would be paid down, on their delivery in ireland, to the agent of the great paris house.
it was a matter easily concluded; but one which cut him to the quick.
however rapidly and privately it had been arranged the facts of the sale would not, he knew, be kept out of the newspapers. paragraphs would appear in all the social and artistic journals to the effect that lord hurstmanceaux had sold his dutch and flemish collections of petits maîtres.
every misfortune is nowadays doubled and trebled by the publicity given to it in the press, which turns the knife in our wounds and pours petroleum on our burning roof-tree. he would also be unable to explain to his friends why he sold them. he would appear like any other of the spendthrifts and idiots who sent to the hammer their libraries and pictures. no pressure would ever have forced him to make such a sale for his own pleasures or his own necessities.
[413]to a sensitive and proud man the comment which it would excite was worse to endure than all the blows of adversity.
“so you have sold your pictures after all!” a thousand tongues would say to him; and society would say that ronnie had become like other people at last.
they are so silly, so unutterably silly, those flippant sneers of our acquaintances, and yet they irritate and wound like mosquitos.
but he accepted these inevitable consequences and he went to faldon, and saw them packed with his own eyes, and with his own hands placed in its wooden case with tender care a little flaxen-haired maiden spinning, of mieris, which when he had been a child he had always called the portrait of his wife.
it was a cruel sacrifice to an unworthy object when the pictures went from their places, and the red sunset light coming over the atlantic billows shone on the blank walls from which they had been torn.
truly have the rosny spoken of the semi-humanité des choses! the sympathetic companionship which we feel in those cherished things of our homes, wound as they are about the roots of our fondest memories, of our longest associations.
two days later katherine massarene received a check on coutts’s, signed hurstmanceaux, for the amount which her father had paid the jeweler plus the interest at five per cent. for two years.
it was enclosed with the compliments of the sender. a week later she saw in an art journal the announcement of the sale, to the paris dealers, of the dutch and flemish collection of faldon castle.
it seemed to her as if her father’s spirit rose from the tomb in malignant power for evil.
she put the check in one of the iron safes in the little study and turned the key on it.
he might send her the money in what way he would. he could not make her take it. but she had forgotten that this stubbornness might equal, and even exceed her own.
