“’Tis too good for him, the brute! Too short and too sweet!” thought Robert Airley as he turned away, unseen by anyone, and mingled with the traffic behind the dead man’s house.
The vengeance he had taken seemed to him a poor thing after all.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Katherine Massarene was coming down the staircase under the smiling gaze of Clodion’s falconer, dressed for the evening and about to dine out, when she heard the shot, muffled as it was by the sounds of the traffic; in another moment she heard a great outcry and understood that something unusual must have taken place; she descended the stairs more quickly, and was crossing the hall when the inner and outer doors were thrown open, and the servants within hurried up to her.
“Don’t go, madam! Don’t look!”
“What has happened?” she said to them. “An accident? To whom? Tell me at once.”
“Mr. Massarene’s murdered, madam,” said a young footman, who had hated his employer and relished the telling of the tale. “Don’t look, madam; they’re bringing him in.”
She put them aside and went to the open doors. There she met the body of her father, which was carried across the threshold by four men, his arms hanging down, his head leaning toward one shoulder; behind, in the bright electric light, were curious lookers-on, thrust back by constables. And above, on the head of the staircase, the falconer of Clodion looked down and smiled at the vanity of human ambitions.
Throughout fashionable London people were dressing for dinner, or were sitting at dinner-tables, or were driving to dinner-parties, when the strange rumor ran through the streets and spread from mouth to mouth, and was whispered in ghostly speed through the telephonic tubes of club-houses, that William Massarene had been shot as he had alighted from his carriage at the gate of Harrenden House.
“There is a God above us!” said Lord Greatrex to his nephew.