The Massarenes

by Ouida

This will, so short and simple in comparison with the enormous wealth it disposed of, had been the only one signed amongst the various testaments he had caused to be written. It had been made on his arrival in England when Katherine had been fourteen years old, when his ambitions had all centred in her, and on her head he had in imagination seen resting the circlet of some ducal coronet or princely crown.

Moreover he had always loathed the thought of death; to this man of iron strength and constant success the idea of something which was stronger than himself, and which would put an end to his success, was horrible.

The slight to his wife he would always have caused: he could not forgive her for not having died long before in Kerosene City. He went as near to hatred of her as a man of sluggish blood, and superstitious respect for custom and conventionality, could allow himself to do. She was a great burden, a drawback and disfigurement; she was stupid and tactless; she had no powers of assimilation; and in all her grandeur and glory she remained the Margaret Hogan of Kilrathy. He paid her out for her persistency in living on and being as incongruous in his fine houses as a dish of pigs’ trotters would have been at one of his dinners for Royal Highnesses.

She had toiled hard with and for him in the Northwest; she had laid the first modest foundations on which he had subsequently been able to raise his golden temple; and for that very reason he detested her and cut her off with a meagre legacy, and recalled to her that her jewels even had been only lent to her, never given.

Philosophers and psychologists when they reason on human nature do not realize the enormous place which pure spite occupies in its motives and actions.

All the use she had been to him, all her industry, patience, affection, and self-denial had all counted for nothing with him; she was a blot on his greatness, a ridiculous figure in his houses, and her existence had stood in the way of his marrying some fair young virgin of noble race who might have given him an heir, and let him cut off his daughter with a shilling. He did not therefore make a new will, because he could not make up his mind to disinherit his only living representative; besides that, he felt that he had at least another score of years to live; and probably he would have reached his fourscore and ten and died an earl, as he intended to do, had not the bullet of Robert Airley cut short his career.

But the vengeance of a poor Scotch workingman had put an end to all, and his wife had survived him and was sobbing into her handkerchief whilst his daughter became sole inheritrix of his millions and estates.

He had made many other dispositions of his property, but as these others were all unsigned they were worth nothing at all in the sight of the law. His daughter was the richest woman in Great Britain, and all those whose offers of marriage had been rejected by her cursed her with the heartiest unanimity.

Meanwhile she herself felt as though an avalanche had fallen on her and overwhelmed her.

“That creature has got everything!” said the Duchess of Otterbourne, as she read the synopsis of the will in the newspapers. “Oh, why did Ronnie not make himself pleasant and marry her!” The soiled linen which she was conscious of having piled up against herself in the dead man’s hand would at least have been washed en famille!