By the solicitor’s and executors’ request, Katherine who seemed to all who surrounded her the most favored mortal under the sun went to London on the day following the funeral. Her mother would not go with her.
“I’ll never set foot in that house no more,” she said; its gilded gates and marble staircase with the smiling nude boy of Clodion had become hateful to her. She was not physically ill, but she was nervous, depressed, cried for hours, and wished incessantly that she had never left the dairy and the pastures of Kilrathy. “I’m Humpty Dumpty tumbled off the wall,” she said more than once. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t put me together again.”
“Oh, it is shameful, shameful!” said Katherine between her teeth. “And to make me the instrument to wound you! What cynical cruelty!”
She implored her mother to resist the will, to dispute it in court; to claim a proper share of a fortune which she had largely contributed to gain.
But her mother would not hear of such a thing. “I ain’t going to put good gold and silver in attorneys’ pockets,” she said resolutely. “I wouldn’t bring William’s will into litigation, no, not if I was starvin’ on the streets. He was a great man when all’s said and done, and it won’t be me as dishonors him.” For she was very proud of him now he was gone and lying under his marble slab in the Roxhall’s crypt; he had stuck a knife in her, as it were, but she did not complain of the wound; he had been the “bull-dozing boss” to the last and he had had a right to be it.
The natural bitterness she felt did not turn against him, but against her daughter.
“You’ll marry very high now,” murmured Margaret Massarene. “Lord! There’s nothing you may not get if you wish it.”
“I shall never marry,” said Katherine; and through her memory passed the simile of the hangman’s daughter.
She felt crushed to earth with the weight of this loathsome inheritance. It was odious to her as blood-money. Where could she go, what could she do, to escape from the world, which would see in her a golden idol whilst to herself only the clay feet standing in mud would be visible?
Outside Harrenden House there was the incessant movement of the London season at its perihelion; the gaiety, the haste, the press, the excitement, the display of a capital in its most crowded hour. Within all was gloom, silence, mournings. Only the boy of Clodion still laughed.