What had seemed the voice of conscience might have been the voice of vanity. She could not tell. Perhaps this poor, simple, vulgar woman had been more in the right than she.
Some hours passed; one physician remained in the house, another came and went; nothing was to be done. The human machine was worn out; it had been ill-fed too long and then over-fed; its delicate and intricate mechanism rebelled, waxed feeble, gave way altogether.
“I’d hev liked another ten years of it,” she said regretfully. “’Twas a holiday like, the nice easy life. And you won’t ever know, my dear, how hard I worked—over there.”
Then she cried feebly but sadly, thinking of those wearing and cruel days in Dakota, in burning heat and freezing cold, when she had worked so hard, and of this pleasant “lady’s life” which she had now to leave, which had come too late to do much more than cause her such regret. Katherine’s head was bowed down upon the bed.
“And you had no reward!”
“Oh, yes, my dear, I had my reward! Don’t ever go for to say otherwise! I see your father a great man and shaken by the hand by princes and honored by everybody—except you.” Then her mind wandered a little, and she said many things about her man’s renown, and his virtues, and his attainments, and the height to which he had risen. “Princes at his own table,” she murmured. “In his life and his death they honored him. Look at his grave, piled up with flowers—nothin’ in the Abbey ever grander.”
Once she raised herself on her elbow and took hold of her daughter’s arm.
“Look you, child—divorce is as easy got out there as berries in the fields in summer; a rich man can put away his wife like an old glove, and he never did that—never! I was an eyesore to him, but he kept me by him, and he had me dressed and served like a queen. He was a God-fearing man, was William.”
All her memory was of him, of the brute who had scarcely ever thrown her a kind word in all the forty years that she had dwelt beside him.
“He was a great man, a very great man, was your father,” she repeated. “He’d have died a peer, and I dare say a minister too, if that shot hadn’t killed him on his threshold.”