“Just when I was in the straw-yard, as it were. Comfortable, like an old horse as is past work and has had a good owner, not as many on ’em has,” she murmured. It seemed an unkind disposition of Providence. “But there! we don’t know what’s best for us!” she said, with that submissive obedience to the frown of fate which she had shown so long to the scowl of William Massarene. Her daughter was more sad than she.
“If I had only really loved her once for five minutes!” she thought. But she had not. She had never felt a single thrill of those affections of which the world is, or affects to be, so full.
She was devotion itself in attendance on her mother—watched by her night and day, and addressed her with exquisite gentleness. But it was pity, sorrow, compassion, regret, all other kind and tender emotions which moved her, but amongst them there was no love. All the other gods will come if called, but not love in any of his guises.
“Don’t ye try to feign what you don’t feel,” said Margaret Massarene. “You’ve no feigning in you, my dear, and why should you try? You was took away from me when you were a little thing of five, and you was always kept away to be made a lady of (and that they did). It stood to reason, as when you see me all them years after, you couldn’t have no feeling for me. I was nought to you but a stranger, and I saw as my way of talk hurt you.”
Katherine wept, leaning her head down on her mother’s broad, pallid hand.
“Don’t ye fret, Kathleen! Why should you fret?” said the sick woman. “You have nothin’ to blame yourself for—toward me, at any rate. I did think as ’twas your duty to respect your father more in his life, and to keep his great work together when he was gone. But there! you’d your own way of lookin’ at things, and you’re not to be blamed for that.”
Then her weak voice failed her, and she lay looking out, through the branches of an acacia-tree beyond the window, to the silvery line of the sea.
“I did according to my light, mother,” said Katherine in a whisper. “I may have been in error.”
“Ay, my dear,” said Margaret; “that’s what all you clever, eddicated people do. You make a law for yourselves, and then you say you follow it!”
It might be so.