They knew, too, very well that he would exact his full price, that they would have to give him office in some small way at some future time, that they would have to put him on the next batch of new baronets, and that eventually he would have to be hoisted into the Lords in company with the brewers and iron-masters, and wool-staplers and chemists, who now adorn the Upper Chamber.
They knew that if they did not please him to the fullest measure of his demands, he would rat without scruple; and there are so many questions in this immediate day about which it is so easy for a man to have a sudden awakening of conscience if he is not obtaining all he wants in the shape he wishes. They knew that, and they hated the thought of it, but they could not afford to alienate and offend him. He had not only money, he had a sledge-hammer power in him, and in a marvellously short time had got his grasp on the attention of the House. He was a common man, a vulgar man, an uneducated man; but he was a man of great ability and absolute unscrupulousness such as no government or opposition can afford in these days to despise.
All the ambitions which he had brought with him from the Northwest were certain of fruition if he lived.
Of death he had no fear; his physician told him that his heart was sound, his lungs were sound, and that he had no tendency to gout or any other malady.
At eight o’clock as he drove home to dinner he felt very content with himself as he rested his short squab figure and massive shoulders against the soft cushions of his brougham. The Whip had consulted him, the Premier had complimented him; the great person who headed a committee of which he was a member had thanked him for his industry and assistance. On the whole, he was on excellent terms with himself. He had done what he had come home to do. He had made himself a power in the land. Even with that merciless rodent who had eaten so far into his fortune he was even now; he was her master now. She was horribly, cruelly, unspeakably afraid of him. He kept her nose to the grindstone, in his own phraseology, mercilessly and with brutal relish. He paid her off for every one of her insults, for every one of her jests, for every one of the moments in which she had called him Billy. He had no feeling for her left except delight in her humiliation, he gloried in her shrinking hatred of him, in her abject fear. If she wanted to marry again—ah!—he chuckled in his grimmest mirth when he thought of the pull-up he would give to this thoroughbred mare if she tried to cut any capers. She should die in a garret abroad, and whistle for her fine friends and her lovers in vain!
Yes, all went well with him. Everybody was afraid of him all round. It was the triumph which he had always craved. They might hate him as much as they liked provided only they feared him, and let him go step by step, step by step, over their silly heads up his golden ladder.
“I said I’d do it and I’ve done it,” he said to himself, with his hands clasped on his broad belly and his long tight lips puffed out with a smile of content.
The carriage stopped at that moment before the open gates; he seldom drove through the gates when alone, for he felt some unacknowledged fear of his carriage-horses when driven by such butter-fingered fools as he considered English coachmen to be, and he preferred to alight in the street. The white brilliancy of the electric lamps of the courtyard was streaming out into the dusky misty night.
He got out of the brougham slowly, for he was a heavy man, his figure plainly visible in the bright light from the open portals, his footman obsequiously aiding him, and the wide-open entrance of the great house glowing with light in front of him. A dark figure unperceived came out of the shadow and drew close to him; there was a flash, a report, and the joys and ambitions of William Massarene were ended for ever and aye.
He fell forward on the marble steps of his great mansion, stone dead, with a bullet through his heart.