in the following autumn margaret massarene caught cold. it was a slight ailment at first, and if she had been the woman she had been in north dakota she would have soon thrown off the chill. but she had experienced in her own person the perils with which she had once said her william was menaced—her love of the good things of the table had affected her liver and her digestive organs. she had never stinted herself, as she had expressed it; indeed, she had overeaten herself continually ever since that first wondrous day when her man had said to her: “the pile’s made, old woman; we’ll go home and spend it.”
all the guinea-fowls, and pheasants, and oysters, and turtle, and anchovies, and capons, and grouse, and prawns, and whitebait which had been immolated on the altar of her appetite, had their posthumous vengeance. richemont, who had loathed her, had helped with his exquisite inventions to hasten her undoing. she was naturally very strong and of good constitution, but the incessant eating which prevails in england, and which kills nine-tenths of its gentle people, had been too much for her. annual visits to german baths, to carlsbad, and to vichy had warded off the evil, but could not wholly avert it. when she got cold, the over-tasked liver and the failing gastric juices struck work; the lungs were already feeble; and before a month was over, after she had felt a chill as she came from church, she was declared by her attendant physicians to be beyond their aid.
she had always been a meek and patient woman, accepting whatever came to her, the bitter with the sweet, and she did not rebel now, though the loss of life was hard to her.
“just when i was in the straw-yard, as it were. comfortable, like an old horse as is past work and has had a good owner, not as many on ’em has,” she murmured. it seemed an unkind disposition of providence. “but[564] there! we don’t know what’s best for us!” she said, with that submissive obedience to the frown of fate which she had shown so long to the scowl of william massarene. her daughter was more sad than she.
“if i had only really loved her once for five minutes!” she thought. but she had not. she had never felt a single thrill of those affections of which the world is, or affects to be, so full.
she was devotion itself in attendance on her mother—watched by her night and day, and addressed her with exquisite gentleness. but it was pity, sorrow, compassion, regret, all other kind and tender emotions which moved her, but amongst them there was no love. all the other gods will come if called, but not love in any of his guises.
“don’t ye try to feign what you don’t feel,” said margaret massarene. “you’ve no feigning in you, my dear, and why should you try? you was took away from me when you were a little thing of five, and you was always kept away to be made a lady of (and that they did). it stood to reason, as when you see me all them years after, you couldn’t have no feeling for me. i was nought to you but a stranger, and i saw as my way of talk hurt you.”
katherine wept, leaning her head down on her mother’s broad, pallid hand.
“don’t ye fret, kathleen! why should you fret?” said the sick woman. “you have nothin’ to blame yourself for—toward me, at any rate. i did think as ’twas your duty to respect your father more in his life, and to keep his great work together when he was gone. but there! you’d your own way of lookin’ at things, and you’re not to be blamed for that.”
then her weak voice failed her, and she lay looking out, through the branches of an acacia-tree beyond the window, to the silvery line of the sea.
“i did according to my light, mother,” said katherine in a whisper. “i may have been in error.”
“ay, my dear,” said margaret; “that’s what all you clever, eddicated people do. you make a law for yourselves, and then you say you follow it!”
it might be so.
[565]what had seemed the voice of conscience might have been the voice of vanity. she could not tell. perhaps this poor, simple, vulgar woman had been more in the right than she.
some hours passed; one physician remained in the house, another came and went; nothing was to be done. the human machine was worn out; it had been ill-fed too long and then over-fed; its delicate and intricate mechanism rebelled, waxed feeble, gave way altogether.
“i’d hev liked another ten years of it,” she said regretfully. “’twas a holiday like, the nice easy life. and you won’t ever know, my dear, how hard i worked—over there.”
then she cried feebly but sadly, thinking of those wearing and cruel days in dakota, in burning heat and freezing cold, when she had worked so hard, and of this pleasant “lady’s life” which she had now to leave, which had come too late to do much more than cause her such regret. katherine’s head was bowed down upon the bed.
“and you had no reward!”
“oh, yes, my dear, i had my reward! don’t ever go for to say otherwise! i see your father a great man and shaken by the hand by princes and honored by everybody—except you.” then her mind wandered a little, and she said many things about her man’s renown, and his virtues, and his attainments, and the height to which he had risen. “princes at his own table,” she murmured. “in his life and his death they honored him. look at his grave, piled up with flowers—nothin’ in the abbey ever grander.”
once she raised herself on her elbow and took hold of her daughter’s arm.
“look you, child—divorce is as easy got out there as berries in the fields in summer; a rich man can put away his wife like an old glove, and he never did that—never! i was an eyesore to him, but he kept me by him, and he had me dressed and served like a queen. he was a god-fearing man, was william.”
all her memory was of him, of the brute who had scarcely ever thrown her a kind word in all the forty years that she had dwelt beside him.
[566]“he was a great man, a very great man, was your father,” she repeated. “he’d have died a peer, and i dare say a minister too, if that shot hadn’t killed him on his threshold.”
her mind was little with her living daughter beside her; it was almost entirely with the dead man who, when they had both been young, had stepped out beside her through the green grass of kilrathy to conquer the world—and had done it.
“he was a great man, was william,” she said as she closed her eyes. she looked at her worn fingers, on which the flesh hung in folds, and turned the plain brass wedding ring feebly round and round; the ring that was now covered by a diamond guard.
“’twas a fine mornin’ as he put it there,” she murmured. “the sun was shinin’ and the dew sparklin’, and i mind me of a little tit as sat on a wild bit o’ sweetbriar against the church door. ’tis a sweet feelin’, kathleen, when ye gives yerself for a man for good. but ye don’t care about them feelin’s. you’re too high and too cold.”
“oh, not cold! oh, mother—no, not cold!”
“well, you’re somethin’ as comes to the same thing,” said margaret wearily, and lay still. the light of the intellect must always seem cold as arctic light to those who only know the mellow warmth of the sunshine of the heart.
her daughter remained leaning against the bed upon her knees. she felt as if so much atonement were due from her, and yet——? perhaps she should have remembered more the excuse which lay in society for the faults of her father.
society says to the successful man: “you have done well and wisely; you have thought of yourself alone from your cradle.” society offers the premium of its flattery and its rewards to the man who succeeds, without regard to the means he has employed. provided he avoids scandals which become public, there would be obvious impertinence in any investigation into his methods. society is only occupied with the results. when he succeeds his qualities become virtues, as when a vine bears fruit the chemicals which it has absorbed during its culture[567] become grapes. public subscriptions will become accreditated to him as divine charities; if he write his name down for a large sum at a banquet at which a royal duke or a lord mayor presides, to enrich a hospital or endow an asylum, he need fear no demands as to how he has gained his vast capital. the man who succeeds knows that his sins will be ignored because he has acquired greatly, as hers were forgiven to mary magdalene because she had loved greatly. can we blame a man because his morality is not higher than that of the world in general? “get money, honestly if you can, but get money,” says society, and when he has got it, if it has been got in quantities sufficiently large, sovereigns and princes will visit him and require nothing more from him than the fact and proof of its possession. her father had not created the worship of the golden calf; he had only availed himself of it; he had only set up the animal in his own kailyard and opened his gates.
great qualities he had undoubtedly possessed; if they were not lovable or altruistic, or such as pleased the strict moralist or the poetic philanthropist, they were such as are alone appreciated in an age which would send the nazarene to a treadmill and the stagyrite to a maison centrale if they were living now.
had she done wrong not to value them more? no; she could not think so.
“he was a great man, my dear, and he had a right to do as he liked with his own,” her mother murmured again, faithful to the last, like a dog, to the hand which, though it had struck her many a brutal blow, had been her master’s.
“he was a great man, was william,” she said again; and then her mind wandered away to the green wet pastures of kilrathy, and she thought she was a dairy-girl again with bare feet and kilted skirt, and she called the cows to the milking: “come, my pretties, come—blossom and bell and buttercup. come; ’tis time.” then her hands moved feebly, as though they pulled the udders, and she smiled a little and would have laughed, but she had no strength. “i’m home again,” she murmured; and then life left her.
