He went up the staircase to his own room, and when there opened one of the windows and looked out; the night was dark, but he could hear the swell of the sea, and the homely smell of wet grass, of rotting leaves, of falling rain, was agreeable to him because it was that of the country of his birth.
“What she wants to do is really very fine and very honorable,” he thought. “It is midsummer madness, but most honorable sentiments are. It is a pity that one’s worldly wisdom obliges one to throw cold water on such a scheme.”
The next morning, very early, he went back to town.
He left an additional sense of depression and uncertainty behind him in Katherine’s mind. He had not altered her opinion, but he had increased her perplexities. If this was how a sagacious and experienced man of the world looked at her project, it was possible that there were obstacles in the way of its accomplishment which escaped her own sight. She had expected to have Framlingham’s comprehension and concurrence, for in India he had felt so much sympathy with her revolt against her father’s wealth. The worldly wisdom which he esteemed it his duty to preach chilled her with its egotism and its coldness. There was only one person living who would have understood her scruples and desires, and to that one person she would certainly never speak again.
There had been a wall between them before this mendacious report of which Framlingham had spoken; since that report there was an abyss. She felt that if she met Hurstmanceaux on a public road, they would by tacit mutual consent pass each other without visible recognition.
Had her mother not been living, she would have had no hesitation in going straight to the end she had in view. But her mother constituted a duty of another and opposite kind.
The rights of his wife had been almost entirely ignored by William Massarene; but her daughter could not ignore them morally, if the law would have allowed her (as it did) to do so legally. More than once she attempted to approach the subject, and was arrested by her own natural reserve, and by the slow comprehension to take a hint of her mother.
Moreover, the memory of William Massarene was quite different to what his presence had been to the wife, whom his last testament had insulted. With his coffin in the Roxhall crypt, all his offences had been buried in her eyes; a man to whose funeral princes had sent wreaths and a silver stick could not in her sight be other than assoilzied. Her heart was much warmer than her mind was strong, and she was accessible to those charms of social greatness to which her daughter was wholly invulnerable. She had suffered in the great world, but she had liked it.
“Would you mind being poor again?” Katherine asked her once, tentatively.
Margaret Massarene was unpleasantly startled.