The Massarenes

by Ouida

The letter was signed as that to the Consul had been, and Massarene read it from the first line to the last.

He had two secretaries at this time, young men of good family and university education, of whom he stood in perpetual awe; but he never allowed these youths to see his correspondence until it had been examined by himself. He received too many letters menacing and injurious, containing too many references to his past existence, for the bland and supercilious young gentlemen to be trusted with their perusal. Therefore the letter from the two railway men in North Dakota came direct into his own hands as he sat in his library before a table covered with papers and blue books, and surrounded by well-filled book-shelves off which he never removed a volume. When he had read it his face was terrible to behold. One of his footmen coming in to look at the fire was frightened at its black savage terrible scowl. It is hard for any man to find his past always rising up like Banquo’s ghost against him; to William Massarene it was insupportable.

He had a long memory; he never forgot a face or a name. He remembered all about Robert Airley the moment his eyes fell on the letter. It was thirty years before that the Lowland Scotch emigrant, who had none of the proverbial canniness of his race, but was a simple and trustful lad of some twenty-four years old, had come into Kerosene City, one of a wagon-full of weary folks; there were no railways then within a thousand miles. But he did not trust only to memory. He had brought with him to England all his old ledgers, account books, folios of every kind filling many cases, and all now filed, docketed, and arranged in locked cases in a small study of which he kept the key on his watch-chain. He went to this little room now, and, with the precise and orderly recollection for which his brain was conspicuous, went straight to the books which referred to the tenth year of his residence in Dakota. It took him some forty minutes to find the entry which he required, but he did find it.

“Paid Robert Airley the sum of one dollar for specimens of tin ore.” “Paid Robert Airley the sum of thirty dollars for his claim at Penamunic.” The transaction was perfectly legitimate and legal. Appended were the receipts of the said Airley and the deed which transferred the land. Twenty-nine years had gone by and the ink had rusted and the paper grown yellow, but the record was there.

The fool had sold his bit of prairie land out and out and the tin under the soil of it. He had done it with his eyes open. Who could complain of free contract?

To Robert Airley it had seemed a poor bit of soil, good for naught in husbandry, and his young wife had been ailing and her first delivery at hand; and he had been glad to get the dollars to buy her what she wanted. Many men were in the settlement who could have told him not to sell his placer-claim for a mess of pottage, but there was no one who cared to go against Blasted Blizzard, and, in new townships where shooting-irons are arguments, men mind their own business.

William Massarene locked up the ledger and the case containing it, and went back to his library. He then sat down and wrote a cypher telegram to his manager in Kerosene City: “Tell platelayer Airley he won’t get a red cent from me. Accident was due to his own carelessness.”

He wrote this because he was in a towering rage at the manner in which he had been addressed. Perhaps at some other moment, or if addressed more humbly, he might have bought off these men as he had previously bought off others; but this letter had come to him in an hour when he was filled with vainglory and self-satisfaction. Only the previous day he had been at a banquet given him by the Conservatives of the county he represented. His blood was still warm, his vanity still fermenting like yeast, at the memory of the compliments paid to him by the great personages present; the praises of his glorious self-made position, the homage offered to him in the name of Great Britain. The Leader of the House had given him to understand that when there was next any vacancy or change he would be offered a place in the administration; the great county folks at the county banquet had heaped adulation upon him, for they wanted him to make a new short-route railway line to London; the Times newspaper had had a leader consecrated to himself and to his admirable promise as a future chief in the political world. And in such a moment of supreme distinction a platelayer and a lamp-cleaner dared to write to him that he had been always a “blackgud”!

Acute as his mind was, and vast as had been the sums which he had expended in shipping his own and his wife’s people to Australia, so as not to be annoyed by their demands or vicinity, he should have been willing to spend the insignificant sum which would have pensioned and quieted Robert Airley; he should also have given something to the Suffolk lamp-cleaner and thanked him; both men would have praised him in the city where his fortune had been first made. But the wrath which was in him for once clouded his keen perception; he would not have given either of the poor devils a crust of bread to save their life or his own.

The survival of the strongest was the law of nature; he had heard a sociologist say so. Even beasts in the woods followed that rule; the bison and the opossum and the jaguar and the bear deferred to that law. How should men defy or dare to demur to it?