When Katherine Massarene closed her mother’s eyes she felt both regret and remorse. Why had she not had patience and penetration enough to do justice to the unrecognized loyalty and affection in that existence of which he had only seen the envelope of flesh, only despised the narrowness and ignorance? She knew that she had never loved her mother; she felt that she must have often, very often, caused her pain and humiliation. She had persistently gazed at her mother’s foolishness and commonness; she had never tried to be just to her better qualities.
Fine temperaments are always cruelly open to such self-reproach; she never ceased to blame her own heartlessness, and when she followed her only relative to the grave she said to herself, with exaggerated self-censure, that she had rolled more than one stone to her mother’s cairn.
She had indeed been indulgent, submissive, kind beyond that which many would have thought incumbent upon her, but she forgot that she had been so; she only remembered her own lack of feeling, her own intolerance and antagonism, her own contemptuous isolation; all which had seemed as cold as Greenland ice to the poor dead woman.
As regarded her own future she had made no plans. She would have liked to take charge of the children’s orphanage which she had founded in her mother’s name in County Down; but she thought to do so would look as if she had been making a refuge for herself in creating the institution. She wished to gain her own living, without favor, simply by means of her head or her hands. She inclined toward music; she was enough of an artist to make her mark in it; but the publicity necessitated would, she knew, be very distasteful to her. For the moment she decided nothing, but when she had buried her mother in the crypt of Vale Royal, according to her last request, she returned to the house at Bournemouth to pass there the few months during which it was still her own. The Roxhalls had entreated her to remain with them, but she felt an imperative longing for solitude.
“You are much too young to live alone,” said Roxhall to her.
“I feel a hundred years old,” she answered.
A great weight of what seemed to her unending regret lay like lead on her life. She was the more unhappy because happiness had been offered to her, and she had been obliged to refuse it, or had thought herself to be so obliged. It would have been happiness, great and wondrous happiness, but she tried not to think of it, lest the memory of what might have been should entirely unnerve her for the combat of her life to come. For one thing she was thankful—people had by this time quite ceased to talk about her. Only a few old friends like the Framlinghams and Lady Mary Altringham wrote to her. Nothing is easier than to drop out of people’s recollection if you wish it; nor is it difficult if you don’t.
She was a great deal on the sea and by the sea, and passed much of her time when on shore in the pine-wood which belonged to the grounds. It was sheltered, and no one ever intruded there; and to Argus it was a sylvan paradise.
A day or two after her mother’s funeral she was seated on the same bench where Framlingham and Hurstmanceaux had found her in an earlier time. She was reading a letter from one of the poor people whom she had raised from grinding misery in the States. It was a true and tender letter, none the less welcome because ill-writ and ill-spelt. Sometimes these rude letters have more eloquence in them than lies in Bossuet or John Newman.
She read it twice, being touched by it, then laid it down on the bench and looked out seaward.