“I think she’ll be near,” said the country lawyer.
“She’s mighty grand and distant,” said the first speaker.
The London solicitor said nothing. He admired her. But he felt that she would not be an easy client if she left the affairs in his hands. She would want to know the why and the wherefore of everything. No man of law likes that.
Katherine, when she was alone with her mother in her own rooms, bent down and kissed Mrs. Massarene’s pale face.
“Oh, my dear mother, what a shame to you, what an injustice and insult! Oh, if I had only known what he had done when he was living! Why would you never let me speak to him of his will?”
Her voice shook with deep-rooted anger and exceeding pain. She was indignant to be made the instrument of her mother’s humiliation.
“My dear, you wouldn’t have altered him,” said her mother, between her sobs. “He wished to lay me low, and he’s done it. But he was a great man, was poor William, all the same. It’s a bitter pill to swallow,” she continued, between her sobs, “and I don’t deserve it from him, for I toiled day and night for him, and with him, when neither of us had more than the clothes we stood up in, and ’twas just what I made by washing and cooking as kept us on our legs for the first year in that blackguard township. Of course I was in the way of late years. He would have liked to take a young wife with a great name, and have sons and that like. ’Twas only natural, perhaps; I was but a clog upon him. But he forgot all the early years we toiled together.”
“It is an infamy! His will is the greatest crime of an abominable life!” said Katherine, with deep wrath shining in her eyes and quivering on her lips.
“Hush! He was your father,” said his wife. “And he was a great man; there’s excuse for men as is great—they can’t be tied down like common folks.”
Then, poor soul, she leaned her head on her hands and wept bitterly.