Yet she was almost reconciled to her daughter’s acts by this uproar over them.
“Well!” she said with a certain dogged satisfaction—“well, Kathleen, you meant to degrade your father, and to spite him, and to undo all he’d done, and to drag his memory through the mud; but it’s all turned to his honor and glory. ’Tis of him they must think when they talk of you.”
But in the middle of the night, after this utterance, Katherine was awakened by the entrance into her chamber of her mother, who came up to the side of her bed in silence.
“Are you ill?” said Katherine, starting up from her pillow.
“No, my dear,” said Mrs. Massarene, sitting down heavily on a low chair and putting aside the volumes which were upon its cushions. “No, my dear, but I couldn’t let the night go on without telling you, my dear, as how you’re right and I’m wrong, and I beg your pardon for my temper, and the lies I told ye.”
“Oh, mother, pray don’t!” said her daughter infinitely distressed. “I’m sure you never said anything which you did not think it your duty to say.”
“Well, my dear, we dress up many bad passions and vanities as duty, but that’s neither here nor there,” said Margaret Massarene, a white, cumbrous, shapeless figure enveloped in Chuddah shawls. “I’ve been wrong to be out of temper with you, and to deny to you as your father’s money was ill got. Ill got it was; and all the princes and nobles in the world can’t alter that, though it did seem to me as how they did when I see ’em all a-kneeling and a-sighing round his coffin. Ill got it was, and may be you’ve done well to get rid of it, though most folks will call it a pack of stuff to scatter away millions as if ye were scattering barley to chicks. No; hear me out; I shouldn’t hev done this thing myself, and I think ’twould hev been better to do it more gradual like and less high falutin, for it has set all the world gossiping and grubbing in the past; but ’tis done, and I won’t let it be a bone of contention between you and me.”
“I thank you very much,” said Katherine humbly, the tears rising to her eyes.
“There aren’t anything to thank me for,” said her mother. “I’m an ignorant body and you’re a learned fine lady—a ‘blue stocking,’ as people say; and your ways of looking at things I can’t follow. I suppose you’ve found ’em in your Greek books. But when I told ye I didn’t know as your poor father’s pile was ill got I told you a lie; for many and many’s the night I’ve been kep’ awake thinkin’ o’ the poor souls as he’d turned out of house and home. He was a hard man—smart, as they say over there: and he bought the lawyers right and left, and nobody ever did nought to him—till that man shot him at Gloucester Gate.”
“Mother,” said Katherine in a hushed voice, “I have learned who that man was. Did ever you know Robert Airley?”