“I’m very anxious,” answered Mrs. Lauderdale, not noticing what her daughter had said. “He has talked in his sleep all night. He talks of nothing but the money. Of course, it’s incoherent, and I can’t make out half of what he says. It’s all the worse. I’m afraid his brain will be seriously affected if this goes on much longer.”
“Mother—hasn’t every one got some great passion like that, locked up inside of them, and trying to get out?”
Katharine looked up as she asked the question. Neither she nor her mother thought of those months of insane envy, which had almost separated them in heart forever.
“I never did,” said Mrs. Lauderdale, innocently. “I never cared for anything like that.”
“I have,” said Katharine. “I do. It’s just like my caring for Jack. You might as well try to face an express train as to stand in the way of it. I know just how papa feels—now. Only with him it’s money. He’ll upset the whole world to have it, as I’d turn the universe inside out rather than lose Jack. I suppose that’s the meaning of the word passion—I’m beginning to understand it.”
“It sounds much more like the meaning of sin,” observed Mrs. Lauderdale. “I don’t mean in your case, dear. Love’s quite another thing. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said it at all.”
CHAPTER XXXIV.
Even Alexander Junior, more than preoccupied by his hopes and fears in regard to the will, was profoundly shocked by the news of Walter Crowdie’s sudden death. Doctor Routh, as a friend of the family, took it upon himself to notify all the relations of what had taken place in the night, for during the first hours Hester had been incapable of any thought. He had undertaken to inform Hester’s mother, and he wrote to the Lauderdales and the Ralstons at once, in order that they might not learn the news from the papers and accidentally.
No one of the family had ever liked poor Crowdie, but all of them had been fond of Hester at one period or another of her life, though she had never seemed to possess the power of keeping upon terms of intimacy with more than one of them at a time, and never with any for very long. The fact that the loss was hers softened every judgment of the man who was gone, and in the first anxiety which every one felt to show a sympathy which was genuine, Alexander Junior was perhaps the only one who remembered that Mr. Allen was coming at eleven o’clock to open the document which had been found, before the eyes of the whole family. With a delicacy which might be attributed to the implacability of circumstances, but for which he was afterwards willing to take more credit than he got, he sent a message down town, explaining what had happened, and putting off the meeting until the afternoon. Alexander spent his morning in making sure that every one could be present, except Mrs. Bright. Hamilton would represent his mother and sister.
It seemed heartless to Katharine that no one—not even Hamilton Bright himself—should have suggested putting off the reading of the paper at least until the next day, and once more the ruthlessness of humanity was thrust upon her so that she could not help seeing it. It was true, she admitted, that in reality Crowdie had been the husband of a very distant cousin, and in theory neither the Lauderdales nor the Ralstons would be expected to suspend a curiosity which concerned the fate of a colossal fortune, for the matter of a death which hardly touched them. Yet Katharine thought that in practice people might show some feeling in such a case. What she saw was that the first shock was real and startling, but that half an hour after hearing the news her father and mother were discussing Crowdie’s character with about as much consideration as though he had been a dead Chinaman, or a foreign prime minister. She registered another bit of strong evidence against the efficacy of professed religion, and shut herself up in her room for the morning, for the mere satisfaction of being alone and of asking herself what she had really thought of Crowdie.