Jack’s fair face grew almost stern.
“I will never go to her,” he said with more decision than could have been expected from his years.
“Make no rash vows, my boy,” said Ronald. “But as regards your appearance at this marriage it is not necessary; I think you are right not to go.”
“I would not go if they dragged me with ropes through the sea from Dublin Bay to Calais,” said Jack; “and up the Seine,” he added with a geographical afterthought.
“She killed him, and she has forgotten him,” thought her son as he went out with his dogs into the bare March avenues of the park. Jack did not forget.
So it came to pass that at the brilliant wedding celebrated at the English and German embassies, and attended by many great persons of royal and noble families, there was not present either the eldest brother or the eldest son of the lady who became H.S.H. Princess Woffram of Karstein-Lowenthal.
CHAPTER XLVI.
In the following autumn Margaret Massarene caught cold. It was a slight ailment at first, and if she had been the woman she had been in North Dakota she would have soon thrown off the chill. But she had experienced in her own person the perils with which she had once said her William was menaced—her love of the good things of the table had affected her liver and her digestive organs. She had never stinted herself, as she had expressed it; indeed, she had overeaten herself continually ever since that first wondrous day when her man had said to her: “The pile’s made, old woman; we’ll go home and spend it.”
All the guinea-fowls, and pheasants, and oysters, and turtle, and anchovies, and capons, and grouse, and prawns, and whitebait which had been immolated on the altar of her appetite, had their posthumous vengeance. Richemont, who had loathed her, had helped with his exquisite inventions to hasten her undoing. She was naturally very strong and of good constitution, but the incessant eating which prevails in England, and which kills nine-tenths of its gentle people, had been too much for her. Annual visits to German baths, to Carlsbad, and to Vichy had warded off the evil, but could not wholly avert it. When she got cold, the over-tasked liver and the failing gastric juices struck work; the lungs were already feeble; and before a month was over, after she had felt a chill as she came from church, she was declared by her attendant physicians to be beyond their aid.
She had always been a meek and patient woman, accepting whatever came to her, the bitter with the sweet, and she did not rebel now, though the loss of life was hard to her.