Katherine and her mother were, during the banqueting, closeted with the solicitors and administrators to hear the reading of the will. The executors were two solid and sagacious city magnates, for in business matters the testator had only trusted business-men.
His daughter was undisturbed; she felt quite certain that he would have disinherited her. He would, she felt sure, have disposed of his millions in some splendid, public, and sensational way. His widow was visibly nervous and anxious.
“I never saw an inch into his mind in this matter,” she thought. “’Tis quite likely as he’ll cut us both off with a shilling.”
To dispute his will, whatever it might be, never occurred as possible to one who had been his obedient slave nigh forty years.
She listened in strained and painful attention as she sat in the library with her daughter, and the great London solicitor, who had been the person chiefly trusted by Massarene, opened the momentous document and laid it before him, and, resting his hand upon it, said to the two women:
“My dear ladies, there is no later will than that made ten years ago, which, with your permission, I will now proceed to read to you. It is to be presumed that the deceased always remained in the same dispositions of mind and feeling, since he has never even added a codicil to this document.”
With that preamble he turned toward the light and read aloud a testament of much simplicity considering the enormous fortune of which it disposed. It left everything unreservedly to his only child, Katherine Massarene, and provided only that she should pay to her mother the annual sum of a thousand pounds a year. It left nothing whatever directly to his wife, not even jewels, and with the exception of a few bequests to hospitals and executors, provided for nothing else than the transmission of his entire property to his daughter, for her own absolute and unrestricted possession on the attainment of her majority: that age she had now passed by four years.
The envied inheritor of this envied and enormous wealth showed no emotion which they could construe into either surprise or exultation; her features might have been of marble for any change they displayed. An immense consternation paralyzed her. She had hoped that the dislike her father had conceived for her, and the disappointment she had caused him, would have led to his leaving away from her some very large portion of his wealth. She would not have been surprised, and she would have been infinitely relieved, if he had left her nothing at all. That she could by any possibility become sole mistress of this immense property which was so loathsome to her had never for a moment occurred to her. Royal legatees, public institutions, churches, endowments, asylums, any one of the many means by which the dead glorify their memory and purchase a brief respite from the cruelty of oblivion, would, she had imagined, have preceded her in her father’s bequests.
She had forgotten the fact that to such men as William Massarene the continuation of their own blood in alliance with their wealth is absolutely necessary to their ambition. For that reason, although he had often thought of leaving his fortune to the Prince of Wales, or to the Nation, he had never actually brought himself to revoke the will in his only living child’s favor.
Her mother sat still for a moment, a deep purple flush covering her big and pallid face. Then for the solitary time in all her life she rose with dignity to the exigency of a trying hour.