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 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.
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.
“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
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.