A New Nero: a realistic romance

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FRED. W. MAY, The Stores, Calcutta. USED IN THE EOYAL NUESEEIES. .4 NEW NERO. PROEM. The huge building looked so peaceful as Fanshawe drew near it, that for a few moments he found himself scarcelyable to realise it was a madhouse. Shaped somewhat fancifully of red brick, with a marked accent of Gothic .structure and ornamentation, it rose from an immense lawn shaded by clusters of hardy trees and bearing below "its numberless windows flower-beds in radiant bloom. The day was a perfect one in early September ; cool winds made silvery tumults in the abundant leafage, and a sky filmed with the most delicate azure haze, wore only a few pearly hints of cloud. Drawing still nearer, the young man perceived that there were signs of life on the charminglawn, and seemingly of a very wholesome sort. To the right stretched a croquet-ground, where a group of men and women were placidly enjoying a game, and while he observed their skilled efforts with mallets and balls, a light peal of laughter made him turn his eyes toward the opposite wing of the imposing pile.

Here he perceived the erected nets that told unmistakably of tennis, with players on either side of them wielding bacs in evident hearty earnest. All this proved a source of consternation, and yet he suddenly reminded himself that to stand and stare made hardly a graceful beginning for his inquisitive and exploiting visit. He had come to find his uncle, Dr. Theobald, a resident physician at the asylum, and presently he had proceeded along the broad central path to the spacious doorway, and gained admission. He had to wait for some little time in a small side chamber off the great, clean-cut, marble-paved hall. The institution was a famous one, radically reconstructed of late on its former site, and teeming with foreign improve ments. It rose from a vast meadowy sweep of country in the interior of a New England State.

Chapter I

This is the autobiography of a man who saw between himself and a large fortune seven human lives, and who resolved, with cold deliberation, to murder his way slowly and surely past them all, until the fortune became his own. It is no merely lurid tale of vulgar assassination. It is rather one which exhibits crime, I should say, in the light of a subtle and picturesque art, like that of the lapidary, the silversmith, or the painter on ivory. It attempts to point no moral, and yet an august and pregnant moral is manifest at its end. The Mountstuarts of Devonshire belong to one of the oldest families in England. Nearly all my carly life was passed in a charming yet unpretentious home just over looking those delightful downs which in turn survey the scintillant waters of the Channel. My father died when I was very young, and I have only the dimmest recollection of him.

My mother was a fair, tall woman, with no beauty to speak of, but a strongly patrician bearing. She had been the daughter of a poor Irish ears and had married my father, as I afterward learned, with the expectation of having him succeed to great wealth. But of this hereafter. As a young boy, I recall myself caring for play and sport, while somewhat disdaining study. I had a sister, named Gladys, who was very fond of me, who was three years older than I, and who petted and caressed me with warm extrava gance. Between myself and my tutors she would often genially intercede. I am sure that they did not find me stupid, though they often chid me for laziness and inatten tion. One day, having returned from a romp with some playmates (how distinctly I remember this day !), I took up a volume of Euclid with reluctance and disgust, feeling that I must master two or three of its initial propositions for the morrow.

Algebra had hitherto been the one study which attracted me. But on a sudden, Euclid produced in me a distinct captivation. I mastered my lesson so well that, next day, my teacher was delighted. The whole ratioci native scheme of the work appealed to me thenceforward with striking clearness. Some sort of door seemed to have been opened in my mind. Reason, for the first time, vividly woke within my brain, and by the light it shed I seemed to gaze with new eyes upon all other forms of intellectual pursuit. My tutors praised me to my mother, who smiled approval upon me with her faded, chilly lips. But my sister Gladys overwhelmed me with kisses and gratula tions. The kisses I never returned, and the gratulations I accepted as if they had been an offering not less common place than my dinner or my weekly pocket-money.

I recollect that Gladys at this time was a beautiful young girl, blonde like her mother, and with eyes full of liquid amber lights. Earlier than most boys make their advent thither I was sent to Eton. But before I had been many months on the banks of the historic Thames, and in sight of stately Windsor, the news of my sister's sudden illness called me once more to my Devonshire home. I reached it to find that Gladys had just died of a heart trouble wholly unforeseen and fear fully acute. Looking upon her white, still, virginal face, I realised for the first time the meaning of death. My mother stood Lbeside me while I gazed at my sister, and I saw that her eyes were streaming with tears. I wondered how she could weep like that. Then I recollected that it was because of love. For myself, I could not have shed a tear if untold rewards had been promised me.

I pictured my mother, lying lifeless and inert, just as Gladys lay. Could I weep for her ? No, came the inward answer. Could I weep for any one who should thus pass into nullity ? No, no. And then, in those hours of what we call household grief, it became plain to me that I had never felt the most shadowy impulse of sentiment or affection for any one with whom thus far I had been brought into contact. Would I ever feel such impulse ? In asking myself this question I seemed to knock at the door of my own heart, and to receive a hollow yet confirmative echo. Was I then what the world would call an anomaly, an abnormal creation, a flesh-and-blood monster ? By degrees I became convinced that this was thoroughly true. If the world knew me as I knew myself it would shrink from me as one, in a psychic sense, leprous.

For co-existent with this coldness I discovered that my nature was impregnated by a strange ethical torpor. The closer that I examined my whole inward being, the more positive I grew that everything like moral sympathy had been denied me. Fear of the contempt of my fellow-creatures alone kept me from doing what must have soiled my repute. Not that I failed to understand how society is only held together by an observance of duteous and restrictive laws. My scientific and " agnostic " reading had taught me that. In some other age it is possible that I might have been devoutly orthodox, with a conscience that would have made me miserable if I had wounded a fly. But I chanced to be one of those whom the onward march of rationalistic thought maims rather than strengthens. Right for the sake of right had no appeal to me.

As I lost faith in the existence of a conscious Deity, with powers alike of punishment and reward, T began to regard life as the most empty and aimless of travesties. I cannot explain this effect, I can only record if. Doubtless, however, my final discountenance of all religion merely meant the ultimate stimulus toward that course of callous egotism which I was fated so unswervingly to pursue. There are some men, I am well aware, in whom the destruction of world-worn creeds can produce a splendid spiritual expansion. Virtue becomes an even more stringent obligation with them because they can now hold it as the product of their own volition, their individual prompt ings of mingled expediency and wisdom. But I was cast in a different mould. In me the haters of freethought would have found a monumental example of its harms.

But now, looking back on my unparalleled career, I cannot allow that they would have fairly judged. All push of progress is partially destructive. Its chariot-wheels move forward to new goals, but in so moving they crush. I was one of those whom the doctrines of what I firmly believe advancement and enlightenment, had not helped but hindered. People liked me ; I was indeed popular. I often passed as a person of much heart and feeling. By the time I had left Eton and entered Cambridge I found that I had made numerous friends, Cunning enabled me to mimic emotions by which I was never visited — pity, charity, generosity, affection, kindliness. Withal, I had what is termed an even temperament ; amiable smiles and glances were natural to me, and bursts of ill-humour never marred my manners. Behind all this lay within my soul, as it were, a frigid polar tract of egotism and ambition.

I was secretly very jealous of certain associates whose prospects brightly outcoloured my own. It seemed to me that money was the chief desirable object of attainment ; I wanted a large fortune more than any other conceivable thing. Fame and honour struck me as ridiculous ; they took such an enormous amount of effort in the gaining of them, and when the gain arrived one was often ready for one's grave. In college I was thought brilliant, and secured credit for more ability than I put forth. All studies came easy to me, and I often won dered at the dulness of my co-disciples. But I was lazy, having that voluptuously indolent streak which is so apt to accompany great selfishness. Personally, as I well knew, my attractions increased. Of just the proper height, with symmetric build, delicate hands and feet, and a face full of intelligence and charm, I one day intently studied myself in the mirror of my bedchamber at Cambridge, and con cluded that my physical gifts, added to the vantage of excellent birth, should enable me to make an important marriage.

Not long afterward, while I was at home during one of my vacations, this idea was openly seconded by my mother. But already it had grown nauseous to me. All the winsome young women whom I met pleased me more or less alike. But marriage pointed to a distressing captivity. I craved riches without marrying to secure them, and the fact of this longing had begun to irk me with a conception of how impracticable were its foundations. For surely it mated ill with the lazy and pleasure-loving trend to which I have just referred. "No," I now said to my mother. "The plan of selling myself to a woman for so many pounds per annum doesn't suit me at all." My mother looked at me fixedly for a moment with her dimmed eyes. I felt certain that she knew me better than did any other living being ; but at the same time I felt equally certain that her knowledge of me was partial and vague.

" It often crosses my mind, Harold, that you will not fall in love. And yet it's absurd to prophesy about matters like these. On the other hand, you might marry very comfort ably by selecting some young heiress who cared a great deal for you. I have known happy marriages where the love was all on one side. In such cases, of course, there must be constancy, and, indeed, a certain loyalty from the one who receives passion but gives none in return." " Admirable arrangement," I laughed. " But doubtless I should prove both inconstant and disloyal. By the way," I here pursued, " was your marriage with my father one of sentiment or convenience ? You've never told me." My mother drew herself up for an instant, and in a way that made me comprehend just why Lady Ida Mountstuart had been so frequently called a supercilious woman.

But her manner soon softened again ; since the death of Gladys her proud moods had grown more and more rare. " It was a marriage of both sentiment and convenience, Harold. I was very fond of your father, but I could not shut my eyes to the fact of his heirship to a half-million of pounds." "A half-million of pounds ! " " That is the fortune now held by your uncle, Malcolm Mountstuart, of Graydon Hall, Derbyshire." " My father's brother," I said. " But he has children, and so has my other uncle, Cecil Mountstuart, at Cleeve Lodge, in Essex." " True. Both are now widowers and with children that are almost grown up ; but when I married your father, the third of the three brothers, they were both unmarried." " Ah, yes," came my reply. " I remember your telling me that they married sisters." " Yes.

It was a great coup of that famous London match maker, Lady Huntingdon. She had two girls left on her hands, nearly dowerless and with not a ray of good looks. Nobody dreamed any longer that the Mountstuart brothers meant to marry. Your father's health was excellent then, and between himself and this pair of confirmed bachelors an interval of over ten years existed. Everything pointed to but one result. Those marriages dealt us a bitter blow." " Is Uncle Malcolm's fortune entailed ? " I presently asked. " No." " But his son, Egerton, will get it all, I suppose ? " "Oh, yes." " And if young Egerton were to die without marrying " " It would go to his sister, Blanche, naturally." " And if anything should happen to Blanche, the next heir would be old Uncle Cecil. And after him that queer little hunchback cousin of mine, Angus.

And if Angus were to go, it would fall to the elder of those twins — or perhaps Angus would divide it equally between Edna and Olive, considering that there is no entail, and the family would all be extinct — all, that is, except — except — my self " " Harold ! " exclaimed my mother, as if startled by the fall, dreamy and half audible, that my voice had taken, " what on earth are you saying ? " "Nothing," I returned. Then I laughed, and gave my head a careless toss. " It's hard luck to have seven people stand between you and half a million pounds." " Envy is an idle pursuit, Harold. No earthly good ever comes of it." " Oh, I was not envying any one." " Were you not ? I am glad of that. We must accept destiny. To do otherwise is to beat the air." " Yes," I answered, " you're right, beyond the faintest doubt."

" Seven," I kept thinking, nevertheless. The numeral haunted me. " Seven, seven." It rang in my brain for days, for weeks. I had no idea why it did so. Envy was, of course, a kind of reason^ after all. But was there any other ? Envy and avarice are near kindred. Oh, yes, I was avaricious, too. But even the greed which I felt for that fortune, snatched from me by fate, did not explain another mood of secret and darksome rumination. What was that mood ? It crept over me at times, as a fog creeps over a landscape. And just as we will now and then see in the rolling volumes of such vapour fantastic shapes, or similitudes of shapes, I would now and then find myself staring at a Visage, shadowy and yet appalling real. Still, it did not appal me over-greatly. It failed, in any acute sense, to start a single nerve.

I stared on, so to speak, month after month, more fascinated than repelled, more diverted than shocked. And slowly it became plain to me that a certain inner chamber of the soul had been made ready, as with grim hospitality, for some sort of unnameable guest. If I trembled at all, it was with expectation, not fear. On the hearthstone of that mystic chamber I kindled with steady hand my noxious little blaze of welcome, and within its four sombre walls I lit no less calmly my drow_>y but baleful lamp.

Chapter II

In the same year that I was graduated from Cambridge my mother died, after a brief illness. I was already possessed of a thousand pounds a year, besides the small estate in Devonshire called Dyandotte. My mother's death now gave me a thousand pounds more of income. Considering that I had a marked leaning toward scholarly and scientific pursuits, my financial status was now thought highly comfortable. But only those who knew me best were aware of my love for luxury and sine living. Excess, dissipation, was repul sive to me, but daintiness and splendour were deeply valued. I longed to own a superb library ; the collection of books at Dyandotte was both limited and inferior. I had a taste for modish equipages and a stable handsomely stocked ; in these respects my old home was poverty itself. I craved the elegances of sumptuous furniture, silverware, glassware, upholstery, and all that makes an abode pleasing both to dwell in one's self and to exhibit with furtive pride for the admiration of others.

I yearned for a house in London, where I could pass the season when I chose, and I wanted it to be a mansion noble as any in Grosvenor Square or Port land Place. I loved precious stones, and had acquired a rather remarkable knowledge of them. I had a sensuous passion for flowers, and would have delighted in cultivating the choicest exotics to which artifice could lend its most persuasive tropic heats. And here I must beg the reader to pardon me for this exposition of a pagan voluptuousness at which I have already more than hinted. The digression now made is founded upon no desire to excuse my subsequent acts, but rather to place them properly against that background except for whose accessories they cannot be viewed with the impartial fairness that all our human acts deserve, whether vile or saintly, beneficent or corrupt.

Music had almost from babyhood enticed me, and I was now a passably good performer on the piano and violin. Of the latter instrument I was indeed a warm devotee if not an actual master. I found myself envying the King of Bavaria because of what he had done for Wagner, whose genius I adored. But music, profoundly as it stirred me, meant an intellectual and not a spiritual thirst. I had read what that terrible arch-doubter, Schopenhauer, says about it, and for myself, as for him, its richest and subtlest eloquence conveyed one constant message of irony and despair. In all its countless rhythms and cadences it was always an expression of our own empty and futile mortality, of the mere masque of shades that we could so justly be called, of that soulless and mysterious will-to-live, which for ever creates, protects, and perpetuates, though blindly and dumbly, unconscious that she does either.

Music would speak to me half in tones of tragedy, half in tones of splendid materialism. Since it could tell me nothing of another world, it would often tell me delicious and tempting things of this. There are several bars in one of Beethoven's sonatas that I could never play or hear played without feeling near me the palpable presence of a certain type of womanhood, and being conscious that a peculiar fleshly odour, mixed with that of dishevelled hair, floated to my nostrils. Though I would not have dared openly to say so, the character of Nero had always been to me one that teemed with sinister charm. I loved to read of his boundless wealth, and the imperial laxity with which he spent it. The account of his having smothered a bevy of fellow-banqueters by a sudden rain of roses from the ceiling, always made my blood tingle.

For poetry alone, of all the arts, I had not a gleam of regard. Both in classic and modern tongues I failed to reap from it the slightest enjoyment. Straight along, from Homer to Tennyson, it was contemptible and absurd. A great deal of it was like the merest jargon to me ; the emotion, the enthusiasm, the rapture, the sublimity, was to my thinking so much buncombe and tirade. Milton, when I could understand him (for the instant words were metrically arranged they had the trick of baffling my comprehension), amused me with the pungency of a parody ; I found myself calling his Satan a pompous poser and his Gabriel a peri phrastic bore. Even Shakespeare struck me as tedious, though some of his characters, like lago and a few others, affected me far beyond the rest. Hamlet I abhorred for his vacillation and assumed madness, Macbeth for his supersti tion, cowardice, and weakness of resolve.

I instance my unreceptive condition with regard to poetry because I hold it, in these confessions, an important item of disclosure. Even before my twentieth year I had too heedfully analysed the forces of my own intelligence not to admit that here was a woeful discrepancy, a vacuous deficit, since poetry, as I could clearly apprehend without feeling it, is by necessity king ofthe arts, at once combining what is bGsfc in each and reigning over them all by the right of this comprehensive kinship. For a number of months after my mother's death I lived quietly at Dyandotte. Here I fitted up a laboratory, know ing well that chemical pursuits and experiments would al (rays be dear to me, as indeed was almost every other branch of science. I purchased some fine electrical instru ments too, and some optical ones of equal worth.

For a time I assured myself that to live here in the drowsy and yet salubrious air of dear old Devon, seeking for new reve lations from the chill yet not churlish lips of that one oracle whose answers I credited, would be to garner more actual gain than any which worldly and social distinction could bestow. Confident of making certain precious discoveries as the years flowed on, why should I not find in the cult of pure knowledge a gratification for those lusts and longings of an egotism which I had now learned to be colossal ? By degrees all other desires would crumble into the ashes of their previous ardour, and I would reach that stage of experience when one marvels at the vanished strength of purposes which long ago have perished. But this mood was fated not to last. I had always been on friendly terms with the families of both my uncles.

These had come in conclave to my mother's funeral, and before departing from Dyandotte the head of either house had cordially invited me to visit them. Since then Uncle Malcolm had written me two or three urgent invitations to stay with him at Graydon Hall, and at last I determined A. that a sojourn there should mark, as it were, my re emergence into the live and active world. I had seen this beautiful country-seat several times before, but the amplitude of its magnificent park and the majesty of its Norman edifice, many-turreted and wide-sweeping, had never so strongly impressed me as now. The autumn day on which I arrived at Graydon was bland and sunny, but nob' more so than the greetings which I received from its three principal inmates. And here within doors, what blended grandeur and ease !

We often hear of the perfection to which life has been brought in the best English country houses. Malcolm Mountstuart passed his days in this ancestral home not merely like a nabob, but like a man of infinite sense as well. There was no over-opulence of gorgeous trappings, but there was everywhere faultless comfort, convenience, and taste. Quite a large house party had already assembled, and among these were three or four of the loveliest girls in England. I admired them excessively ; the lights and shades on their delicate faces, the movements of their shapely bodies, the melody of their modulated voices — all this woke in me genuine delight. But there it ended : these charming creatures had no power to weave over me that one spell, which has for centuries been called divine. The fever and transport of passion I could comprehend ; the meaning of love wholly baffled me.

My cousin, Egerton, now at Oxford, was a shy, awkward lad, immensely courted because of his prospects, and bearing ill the onus of importance which had befallen him. Blanche. still a mere slip of a girl, was slender and somewhat sallow, with languorous manners and a tendency, as I soon con cluded, to strike sentimental attitudes. The rest of the company were people of fashion, or of note in the political world — altogether a most briliant assemblage, high-bred, impertinent, indolent, and perhaps more than a trifle wicked. The enchantment of the whole noble interior wrought upon me with telling emphasis. Gay and amusing as I appeared, no one in that great house, full of pleasure-loving people, dreamed that I nourished the dark project >7. now had taken hold of me. The dreams of a philosophic life at Dyandotte had become permanently shattered.

This lordly dwelling, I decided, might within a relatively brief time become my own. Even while I sat among the guests there at Graydon, with a laugh or a jest on my lips, I was thinking of how I could push my way, by consummate and infernal tact, toward the mastership of this grand possession. The course of action which I intended to employ now occupied many reflective hours. I coolly meditated upon my list of victims. They were seven : ist, My uncle, Malcolm Mountstuart. 2nd. His son, Egerton. 3rd. His daughter, Blanche. 4th. His brother, Cecil Mountstuart. 5th. Angus, son of the preceding. 6th and 7th. The twin sisters of Angus, Edna and Olive. I am aware that merciful people will pronounce any such purpose, entering the mind of a man reared in codes of modern culture and habituated to the decrees of modern civilisation and refinement, insanity pure and simple.

But this charge, whether potential or actual, I absolutely deny. Contemporary annals of society bristle with records of crime. I could quote hundreds of cases where assassination has been deliberately performed. None of these, if you choose, is so audaciously and abominably flagrant as my own. But wherever we can find evidence of a murder that has been coldly plotted and carefully carried out, there, I insist, is the semblance of that larger iniquity into which I chose to plunge. Of course I admit that all homicidal instinct is, in a way, insanity. But so long as the would-be murderer feels, as I felt, that his destructive impulse can be controlled at will, the enormous potency of heredity and of physiological lesion must be alone blamed for his misdeed. In that sense I would most gladly grant that all crime is of insane origin.

Change the brain of a Guiteau by almost inappreciable degrees, and it might become the brain of a patriot or a saint. This point of view is my only vantage-ground of justification. And yet I desire no such palliative. It must already have clearly been understood by the reader of these reckless and uncompromising memoirs that I state fact and disdain self-excuse. What I was, I was. To declare that I could help being what I was is to drop a plummet within the mighty mystery of so-called free-will. And who of all the greatest thinkers has ever yet been able to tell us that we are free agents, untrammelled by the tyrannous cause-and effect which means but a series of links backward from to-day through countless phases of earthly existence? My uncle Malcolm was a man of the world, and a very attractive one.

To murder him would be difficult, chiefly because of his admirable health. At home in Dyandotte I had poisons that would work quickly. But there is a great deal of nonsense talked about poisons whose track is undiscoverable. Uncle Malcolm must undoubtedly be my stepping-stone, my beginning. But I had not the vaguest intention of becoming a bungling assassin. On the con trary, I meant to make myself a phenomenally adroit one. My uncle was also a man of pleasure, with many follies and few graver faults. An indulgent father, a warm and generous friend, easily moved to charity, though often for getful of others' needs until reminded of them, he had the kind of character which creates popularity, if it does not waken esteem. Surely in killing him I could not help feel ing that there were many whom the world could more easily have spared.