“That’s very sweet of her!” said Mrs. Massarene with tremulous lips and red eyelids.
Katherine Massarene took the cards and tore them in two.
“Why do you do that, Kathleen?” said her mother between her sobs. “Your poor dear father was always so good to her. ’Tis only pretty of her to sorrow for him.”
Katherine did not reply.
The man who killed him was not discovered. No one had noticed the lean bent dark figure which had mingled with the crowd behind Harrenden House.
“But, oh! for certain sure ’twas one of the many as he wronged,” said his wife, with the tears running down her pale cheeks. “I allus thought, though I didn’t dare to say so, that this was how your father would end some day, my dear. He always thought as he was God Almighty, did your poor father, my dear, and he never gave a back glance, as ’twere, to the tens and hundreds and thousands as he’d ruined.”
Katherine Massarene, very calm, very grave, listened and did not dissent. “What he might have done!” she murmured. “Oh, what he might have done!—how much good, how much kindness!—what blessings might have gone with him to his grave!”
She had felt a great shock, a great horror, at the fate of her father, but she could not feel sorrow, such as the affections feel at death. It was unspeakably terrible that he should have died like this, without a moment of preparation, without a single word or glance to reconcile him with the humanity which he had outraged, but this was all that she could feel. Between her and her father there had always been in life an impassable gulf; death could not bridge that gulf.
“Am I made of stone?” she said to herself in remorse; but it was of no use; she felt horror, but sorrow she could not feel. She was too sincere to pretend it to herself or others. She seemed to her mother, to the household, to the official persons who came in contact with her, unnaturally chill and silent; they thought it the coldness of indifference.
The grief of Margaret Massarene was violent and genuine, but its safety-valve was in its hysterical garrulity. She suffered extremely, for she had loved her husband despite his brutality, and had honored him despite all his faults. She had always believed in him with a pathetic devotion which no ill-treatment changed.