The Massarenes

by Ouida

There was no one in London of the world which had been William Massarene’s highest heaven. The August sun shone on the flower-beds of the parks in all their glory, and the poor forgotten plants which drooped in the balconies before shuttered windows, and the cats, forgotten also, mewed vainly in closed kitchens and behind iron railings, and the dogs, abandoned to servants and grooms, moped sadly in stable or basement yards, or, straying out into the streets and mews, were lassoed by the police or coaxed to their doom by the agents of experimental institutes. Katherine Massarene, all alone, stayed on at Harrenden House, absorbed in the enormous work of examining her late father’s papers. Her mother remained in the country, whither Katherine went from Saturday to Monday to see her. But all the other days of the week the inheritress of Mr. Massarene’s wealth spent in tracing the sources of that poisoned and blood-stained Pactolus.

He, like many another successful and masterful man, had never taken death into account, or he would have destroyed many of those written witnesses against him. As it was, he had kept everything, partly from the sense of power which it gave him to do so, partly from the prudent sharpness of a business man which made him never lose a letter, however insignificant, or destroy a signature, however unneeded. She could not understand all the meaning of these papers, but she understood much: enough to make her heart sick with shame, frozen with horror. She had always known, vaguely, that his fortunes had been obtained mainly through crimes which in the successful man society has agreed to let pass as virtues; but she could now name, measure, analyze those crimes and see them in all their entity, as drops of blood are seen under a microscope.

Thus she became acquainted with all the steps which had conducted him from the straw of the cattle-shed to the carpets of Harrenden House. That small study, in which he had kept locked all his ledgers, folios, banking-books, and documents of every kind, seemed like a very charnel-house to its new visitant. She had read very widely; she had thought a great deal; and to her clear and cultured intelligence the true aims and objects of her father’s life seemed as sordid and miserable as those of the ragged men whom she had seen in her childhood greedily washing river sand in tin pannikins in the hope of finding some gleam of gold, and ready to murder their bosom friend to secure a grain of the coveted metal.

Among those papers was the letter written by the Suffolk emigrant for Robert Airley. She read it, and it flashed across her mind that Robert Airley had come to England and had killed her father. There was nothing to suggest it, nothing to prove it; but she had no more doubt of it than if she had heard the confession of the assassin. She telegraphed to Kerosene City to inquire where Robert Airley was. It was telegraphed back to her that he had sailed for Liverpool on the 30th of May: her father had been shot on the night of the 17th of June: she had no doubt after this that her inference had been correct. And it had not been murder, but justice! Justice red-handed and rude—the lex talionis, but justice nevertheless.

Through suggestions from the American police, and Massarene’s manager, the same suspicions were entertained by Scotland Yard. But Robert Airley was lost sight of on his arrival in London, and, as the woman of the eating-house held her peace and kept her own counsel, he remained untraced.

She said nothing of what she found and thought to her mother, and lived on in that state of isolated reflection and regret which can only be supported by those who are strong in character and independent of sympathy, but from which even they suffer greatly. She did not try to trace Robert Airley. When she heard that he was suspected of the crime but could not be found, she was relieved to think that he was lost to sight; his seizure and trial would have been agony to her. The horror of her discoveries and the shame of them filled her with a feeling as of personal guilt. She looked worn, unwell, aged; she had nothing in her regard, in her manner, in her thoughts, of the sense of freedom and power which all would have expected her to feel in such an accession to immense wealth, in entire liberty. She had no one to whom she could speak of anything which she felt. Lord Framlingham was in India, and he was the only person to whom she could have confided something of her anxieties, her shame, her uncertainty what to do and how to bear the burden laid upon her. She knew that she must carry all her knowledge shut up in her own breast as long as she lived. It lay like a stone upon her, as did the inheritance of all this ill-gotten wealth.

One day, when she was as usual in the little study poring over an old ledger, one of the servants brought her a card. On it was printed, “Earl of Hurstmanceaux.” She was surprised, much surprised, but she remembered the letter her father had addressed to him. She hesitated some moments: if he came on his sister’s business could he not go to the lawyer?

“Ask Lord Hurstmanceaux to be so good as to see the solicitors,” she said to the servant, who returned in a few minutes with the reply that Lord Hurstmanceaux desired the favor of a personal interview.

“Show him into the library then,” she said, much surprised. “I will come to him there.”

She put back the ledger in its place, closed the case which held it, and left the room, locking the door with that safety-key which had never quitted her father’s watch-chain in his lifetime, and which she carried now always on hers.