“And did you tell any of them the whole truth?”
“Only Wickley. I couldn’t give his secret away to anybody else. But I told him everything. Whether it consoled the poor devil or not I don’t know, but I assured him he was simply the instrument selected by Fate to rid the world of an unspeakable blackguard.”
The Man Who Married Too Often
by Roy Vickers
If the Marchioness of Roucester and Jarrow had been an educated woman she might have been alive today. And so, of course, might the Marquis. But it was not through her lack of education that she was caught. The crime, as a crime, was wholly successful and it was only discovered inadvertently by the Department of Dead Ends. The tragic truth is that if she had known only as much law as the ordinary middle-class woman knows she would never have committed murder.
In spite of the crude melodrama of her life and death — ideal stuff for newspaper headlines in normal circumstances — she never “made the front page.” This was because she was arrested two days after England had gone to war with Germany, with the result that she got about ten lines in two of the London papers.
She married the Marquis on May 5th, 1901, when she was twenty-three. It was a manipulated marriage and the manipulator was her own mother — an altogether objectionable person who let lodgings at Brighton, and indulged in various other activities with which we need not distress ourselves. But — curiously enough, as we are talking of a murderess — they distressed Molly Webster very much indeed.
The name Webster, by the way, is quite arbitrary, though Molly acquired legal right to it through the fact that she had used it all her life. She did not know who her father was; nor, one is bound to believe, did her mother.
Early in her life something seems to have weaned Molly from the influence of her mother. We need not be mystical about it. At various times the house would tend to fill itself with respectable people. There was an elderly artist, the late Trelawney Samson, who painted Molly when she was a lovely little thing of five. He remained her friend throughout childhood and must have taught her a great deal, though he could not eradicate an unexpected tendency to be much too careful with small sums of money. Probably from him she derived her love of respectability which later became an obsession.
Presumably through Samson’s influence, she was sent to the local High School where for a time she was a model pupil. Except for one mention of her parsimonious tendencies she earned consistently good reports and won three prizes, each for arithmetic. The record of a dull little plodder — until we suddenly find that in her second year in the upper school and actually on her fifteenth birthday she was expelled for striking a mistress.
For three years she tried various jobs, beginning with domestic service. She had a number of situations, leaving each of her own accord, and in each case being given an excellent character. There was a brief period in various shops, including, of all things, an undertaker’s.
The next we hear of her is at twenty-two, making fairly regular appearances in provincial music-halls. She was a good-looking girl but not a ravishing beauty, being too tall and bony for her generation. Her photographs are disappointing, though one can detect a certain grace and beauty that must have been appealing. We must infer that her physical lure lay in her vitality, which was considerable. Both before and after marriage she had a number of ardent admirers — none of whom, we may believe, ever touched her lips.
On the halls she was able to support herself without her mother’s assistance and to dress quite reasonably. All those who knew her at this time have agreed that she led a life of almost puritanical respectability. In those days puritanism was not a helpful quality in a comedienne. Her strong line was Cockney characterization, but she never allowed the slightest risquerie in her songs or her patter.
At the end of April 1901 she had an engagement in her home town — at the then newly opened Hippodrome. Here an unknown admirer sent her an elaborate bouquet and, as was her custom, she sent it back.
On the following night, immediately after her turn, the manager brought two men to her dressing-room. One was an elderly man with white hair, bear-leader to the second man, who was thirty-one but behaved as if he were sixteen.
The elder man was a Colonel Boyce. He introduced the younger as “Mr. Stranack.” Because there were two of them, one of them white-headed, Molly was reasonably polite.
The next day they turned up at her lodgings in Station Road. The younger man, it appeared, was very smitten and the Colonel was giving him disinterested moral support.
For some reason Molly seems to have made investigations. She found that the names were genuine — as far as they went; that Stranack’s full name was Charles Augustus Jean Marie Stranack and that when he was not paying court to comediennes he was more commonly known as the Marquis of Roucester and Jarrow.
This knowledge seems to have produced in Molly the same kind of violent storm that had changed the smug little pupil into the apache who had smashed her mistress’ jaw. We may say that by the same storm the puritan temperament was blown out like a candle. In fact, she went to her mother, whom she had not seen for seven years, and positively asked for a helping hand.
“All right, dearie! I’ll help you. You shall have your chance in life no matter what happens to me.”
Under instructions Molly separated the young Marquis from the Colonel and enticed him to her mother’s house. The details become a trifle coarse, for they were stage-managed by her mother — from the moment when the young man entered the house to the moment when a shabby lawyer was put on to blackmail him.
The Marquis succumbed to threats and nine days later married Molly at the Brighton registrar’s office.
After the ceremony Molly came to herself — the rather queer self that she had created out of the half-understood teachings of the artist and her own violent reactions from her mother’s mode of life. One imagines her looking round a little vaguely to see where this temperamental leap in the dark had landed her. There was, among other things, her husband.
In the whirl of what we may by courtesy call her engagement, she had had little time to make his acquaintance. She now found that she had tied herself to an amiable, irresponsible, reasonably good-looking young man, with the mental outlook of a schoolboy who has broken bounds. She extracted his history, which was an uninspiring affair. He seemed to be uncertain whether he had any relations but fancied that a man who had been awfully nice to him was his second cousin. He had spent a short time at Oxford and a still shorter time in the Army, after which his father had handed him over to Colonel Boyce.
After his father’s death, some nine years previously, the Colonel had taken him, she gathered, first to Paris and Vienna, then to Canada and later to the East, and they had had a perfectly gorgeous time. He had never been to the House of Lords — he even inclined to the belief that it was an Elective Assembly — and but rarely visited the family estate at Roucester in Gloucester.
The Marquis bore curiously little resentment for the means by which he had been married. It is even possible that he regarded the whole thing as the more or less normal procedure; for his conception of sexual morality was, as will presently be seen, elementary. Moreover, under the Colonel’s tutelage his social experience had been almost limited to chance acquaintances in hotels.
Molly let him take her to Paris for the honeymoon, where she made the discovery that her husband was infatuated with her. It is unlikely that she was at all deeply stirred in response; but if she was not, it is quite certain that the Marquis never knew it. To her, marriage was a new job and she did it well. Paradoxical as it may sound, Molly was, in many respects, an excellent wife.