Margaret Massarene reflected a minute or two.
“Yes, my dear. I mind him well: a long, thin man, soft-spoken and harmless, with a pretty young wife; they came from the North. Your father bought his bit o’ land, his ‘placer-claim,’ as they say out there, and found tin on it, and ’tis now in full work is that lode—’tis called the Penamunic mine.”
“I know,” said Katherine, and she told her mother how she had learned the request of Robert Airley and what she believed to have been his errand to England.
Her mother listened without surprise.
“I mind him well,” she said again. “He must have been driven desperate indeed, for he was a gentle soul and wouldn’t hev hurt a fly when I knew him. I always thought, my dear, as how your father would lose his life through some of those he’d injured; but he’d never no fear himself. He was a great man in many ways, Katherine.”
“As modern life measures greatness,” said Katherine.
Margaret Massarene was crying noiselessly.
“’Tis so dreadful to think as he got his death through one he wronged,” she murmured between her sobs.
“Yes, mother,” said Katherine gravely; “and that is why I told you all the money was blood-money and I could not keep it. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps you are right that I should have done this thing more gradually, more wisely, more secretly, but I acted for the best. I felt as if a curse were on me so long as I did nothing in atonement.”
“I won’t say no more against it, my dear,” said Margaret Massarene with a heavy sense of resignation. “But you haven’t left yourself a jointure even, and who will ever marry you now?”