“Why should I care what that man thinks?” she had asked herself as the steamship glided over the moonlit waters of the Atlantic. “I shall never speak to him again as long as our lives last.”
But she did care.
This result of her acts annoyed, harassed, and depressed her, for she was afraid that in trying to do well she had only done ill. “But our path is so steep and our light is so dim,” she thought, “we can only go where it seems right to us to go, and if we fail in our aims we must not mind failure if our intent was good.
“‘’Tis not in mortals to command success.’”
But her heart was sometimes heavy, and she felt the want of sympathy and comprehension.
Only one message soothed and reassured her: it was a telegram from Framlingham.
“Now the thing is done, I may venture to tell you that I both approve and admire what I considered it my duty theoretically to oppose.”
It was the only sympathy she received. From her mother, although she had met no active opposition, she felt that she had no forgiveness because she had no comprehension.
“You’ve done what you chose, and I hope you’ll never regret it. You’ve your poor father’s dogged will, and your poor father’s hard heart,” said Margaret Massarene, very unkindly, on the day that her daughter landed at Southampton.
If she had had an attack of diphtheria or had broken her arm no one would have been kinder and more devoted than her mother; but, for the sorrows of the soul, the maladies of the mind, the nervousness of conscience, her mother had no compassion, because she had no comprehension. To such troubles as those of Katherine least of all; because to the practical views of Margaret Massarene it seemed that her daughter was moon-struck, nothing less; just like poor Ophelia, for whom she had wept at the Lyceum. To be sure Katherine was not at all strange in her ways: she dressed like other people, walked, ate, spoke, and behaved like other people; but she could not be altogether in her proper mind to give away right and left all the fruits of poor William’s many years of toil and of self-denial. The pile might have been got together by questionable means, but that was not for William’s heiress to think or to judge; she had nothing to do but to be grateful. Her mother watched anxiously for straws in her hair and rosemary “that’s for remembrance” in her hand.