Mrs. Plausaby, weak and vain though she was, was full of natural
affection. Her love for Albert was checked a little by her feeling that
there was no perfect sympathy between him and her. But upon Katy she had
lavished all her mother's love. People are apt to think that a love which
is not intelligent is not real; there could be no greater mistake. And
the very smallness of the area covered by Mrs. Plausaby's mind made her
grief for Kate all the more passionate. Katy occupied Albert's mind
jointly with Miss Minorkey, with ambition, with benevolence, with
science, with literature, and with the great Philanthropinum that was to
be built and to revolutionize the world by helping it on toward its
"goal." But the interests that shared Mrs. Plausaby's thoughts along with
Katy were very few. Of Albert she thought, and of her husband. But she
gave the chief place to Katy and her own appearance. And so when the blow
had come it was a severe one. At midnight, Albert went back to try to
comfort his mother, and received patiently all her weeping upbraidings
of him for letting his sister go in the boat, he might have known it was
not safe. And then he hastened back again to the water, and watched the
men in the boat still dragging without result. Everybody on the shore
knew just where the "Lady of the Lake" had capsized, and if accurate
information, plentifully given, could have helped to find the bodies, it
would soon have been accomplished. The only difficulty was that this
accurate information was very conflicting, no two of the positive
eye-witnesses being able to agree. So there was much shouting along
shore, and many directions given, but all the searching for a long time
proved vain. All the shouting people hushed their shouting, and spoke in
whispers whenever Albert came near. To most men there is nothing more
reverend than grief. At half-past two o'clock, the man who held the rope
felt a strange thrill, a sense of having touched one of the bodies. He
drew up his drag, and one of the hooks held a piece of a black silk cape.
When three or four more essays had been made, the body itself was brought
to the surface, and the boat turned toward the shore. There was no more
shouting of directions now, not a single loud word was spoken, the
oarsman rowed with a steady funereal rhythm, while Ben Towle, who had
held the drag-rope, now held half out of water the recovered corpse.
Albert leaned forward anxiously to see the face of Katy, but it was Jane
Downing, the girl who was drowned first. Her father took the body in his
arms, drew it out on shore, and wept over it in a quiet fashion for a
while. Then strong and friendly neighbors lifted it, and bore it before
him to his house, while the man followed in a dumb grief.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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