The weary work of examination, verification, classification, began; all the wearisome formalities which follow on the death of a rich man. The executors, the solicitors, and the household all alike felt awe and dread of the new owner of the fortune. Her silence seemed to them unnatural. She was always at the command of the men of business, and she was always perfectly courteous to every one, but they were afraid of her. She broke all the seals herself in the presence of those who had a right to be with her, and examined, herself alone, all the mass of documents left by her father. She had a presentiment that there must be much left behind him that would dishonor his memory, and disgrace still more grossly his debtors. She despised from the depths of her soul all those illustrious persons whose names figured on the secret ledgers with their Bramah locks which he had kept as rigidly as he had used to keep his books in Kerosene City when it was but an embryo township. But she wished to screen them from the publicity with which it was in her power to ruin them all; and shortly afterwards several great persons were at once infinitely relieved, embarrassed, and humiliated by having their obligations returned to them.
Strangely as it seemed to her, almost one of the first things she saw in a drawer of her father’s bureau was an envelope with the superscription:—
“To be sent to the Earl of Hurstmanceaux immediately on my demise. W. M.”
It was a small envelope and thin.
It seemed odd to her that her father should have left a missive for a man with whom he had no acquaintance and from whom he had received only insults. But she concluded that the communication must regard the affairs of Hurstmanceaux’s sister. She gave the letter at once to a confidential servant to be taken to Hurstmanceaux’s London address.
In half an hour the servant returned.
“His lordship has rooms in Bruton Street, madam; but he is out of town, they do not know where. He is yachting in the north of Ireland, they think; I left the letter to be given as soon as he arrives.”
“Quite right,” said Katherine; but she felt afraid that she ought to have sent it through some surer channel; by the superscription it was probably of importance, and no doubt treated of the Duchess of Otterbourne’s affairs. She thought, too late, that it would have been wiser to have sent it to Faldon Castle, where she remembered he had said that he passed most part of the year.
In the same afternoon she received a note on black-edged paper with a duchess’s coronet on the envelope. It said:
“Dear Miss Massarene.—I could not tell you how grieved I have been at the appalling tragedy. I have thought so much of you in your bereavement, and of your poor mother. If I had not suffered from bronchitis I should have come in person to the funeral. I hope your mother received my note? It is all so dreadful and sudden one cannot realize it. Did my kind good friend leave no letter or message for me? You know how I trusted him in all my affairs, and the loss of his experience and his advice is to me an immeasurable misfortune. He was so wonderfully clever, and so willing to counsel and to aid! His loss can never be made up to any of us. In sincere sympathy I remain,