Chapter 2

Swinging along the road outside the park, the half-formed plan to visit the overseer left him, and purposeless he climbed the hill to Chestnut Ridge. Something in the occasion of his home-coming after a two years' absence--his mother's reference to his marriage, his remembrances of Anne Lennox--had brought back to his face its habitual expression of sadness. And more than he would have acknowledged was a disquietude caused by his instant resentment of the existence of Dermott McDermott. Never in his life had he felt more strongly the need for companionship. He had been loved by many women. He had never been believed in by any.

Passionate, proud, intolerant, full of prejudice, conscious by twenty-six years' experience of a most magnetic power with women, he came to the edge of the far wood as lawless a man, in as lawless a mood, as the Carolinas had ever seen--a locality where lawless men have not been wanting.

Suddenly, through the twilight, he heard a voice--a woman's voice--singing, and by instinct he knew that the singer was alone and conscious of nothing save the song.

At the top of the rise, under a group of beeches, with both arms stretched along a bar fence, a girl stood, the black of her hair in silhouette against the gold of the sky. He noted the slender grace of her body as she leaned backward, and listened to her voice, Heaven-given, vibrant, caressing--_juste_, as the French have it--singing an old song.

He had heard it hundreds of times cheapened by lack of temperament, lack of voice, lack of taste; but as he listened, though little versed in music, he knew that it was a great voice that sang it and a great personality which interpreted it. With the song still trembling through the silence the singer turned toward him, and, man of the world and many loves as he had been, an unknown feeling came at sight of her.

A flower of a girl--"of fire and dew," delicate features, nose tip-tilted, a chin firmly modelled under the rounded flesh, and eyes bright with the wonder and pride of life. She wore a short-waisted black frock, scant of skirt and cut away at the neck. It was in this same frock that the Sargent picture of her was painted--but that was years afterward; and although she was motionless, one knew from her slender figure and arched feet that she moved with fire and spirit. Her hair was very dark, though red showed through it in a strong light, and her cheeks had the dusky pink of an October peach. But it was the eyes that held and allowed no forgetting; Ravenel always held they were violet, and Josef, who saw her every day for years, spoke them gray; but Dermott McDermott was firm as to their being blue until the day she visited him about the railroad business, when he afterward described them "as black as chaos," adding a word or two about her deil's temper as well. The truth was that the color of them changed with her emotions, but the wistfulness of them remained ever the same. Dermott, in some lines he wrote of her in Paris, described them as "corn-flowers in a mist filled with the poetry and passion of a great and misunderstood people," and though "over-poetic," as he himself said afterward, "the thought was none so bad."

Suddenly the languor seemed to leave her, and she stood alert, chin drawn in, hands clasped before her, and began the recitative to the "_Ah! Fors e lui_." Twice she stopped abruptly, taking a tone a second time, listening as she did so, her head, birdlike, on one side with a concentrated attention. After the last low note, which was round and low like an organ tone, she resumed her old position with arms outstretched upon the fence.

As Frank came up the path their eyes met, and he removed his hat, holding it at his side, as one who did not intend to resume it. Standing thus, he bore himself, if one might use the word of a man, with a certain sweetness, an entire seeming self-forgetfulness, as though the one to whom he spoke occupied his entire thought.

"It is Miss Dulany?" he inquired, with a smile which seemed to ask pardon for his temerity.

"I am Katrine Dulany," the girl answered, gravely, for the readjustment from the music and the silence was not easily made.

"I was fortunate enough to hear you sing. It almost made me forget to say that I am Mr. Ravenel."

"I know," Katrine answered. "The plantation has expected your coming."

A silence followed, during which, with no embarrassment, she retained her position, waiting for him to pass. The indifference of it pleased him.

"I was going to see your father at the lodge. The roads are unfamiliar, and the path, after two years' absence, a bit lonely." The sadness which accompanied the words was honest, but it seemed for some more personal sorrow than it was.

"My father is not well," Katrine said, hastily. "I am afraid you cannot see him, Mr. Ravenel. May I ask him to go to you to-morrow instead?" There was entreaty in her voice, and Frank knew the truth on an instant.

"I cannot have you carrying messages for me."

"Seeing that I offered myself"--she suggested, with a smile.

"--is no reason that I should trespass on your kindness, so I shall carry my message myself." This quite firmly.

"I will sing again if you stay." She looked at him through her long lashes without turning her head. "You see," she added, "I have made up my mind."

"It's a premium on discourtesy," he answered, "but I yield."

Near the place where she stood there was a fallen log, and he seated himself upon it, placing his hat on the ground as though for a continued stay, regarding her curiously.

She was the daughter of his drunken overseer, a child in years, yet she showed neither embarrassment nor eagerness; indeed, she conveyed to him the impression that it was profoundly equal to her whether he went or stayed.

"Tell me," he said, "before you sing, where have you studied?"

"I?" she laughed, but the laugh was not all mirthful. "In Paris, in London, in Rome, in New York." There was bitterness in her tone. "I am a _gamin_ of the world, monsieur."

"Tell me," he repeated, insistently.

She made no response, but stood, with her profile toward him, looking into the sunset.

"Won't you tell me?" he asked again, his tone more intimate than before.

"Ah, why should I?" And then, with a sudden veering: "After all, there is little to tell. I was born in Paris of poor--but Irish--parents." She smiled as she spoke. "My mother was a great singer, whose name I will not call. She married my father; left him and me. I do not remember her. Since her death my father has been a spent man. We have wandered from place to place. When he found work I was sent to some convent near by. The Sisters have taught me. For three months I studied with Barili. I have sung in the churches. Finally, Mr. McDermott, on the next plantation, met us in New York, recommended my father for this work, and we came here."

She turned from him as she ended the telling. "What shall I sing?" she asked.

"'The Serenade.'"

"Schubert's?"

"There is but one."

"It is difficult without the accompaniments but I will try:

"'All the stars keep watch in heaven While I sing to thee, And the night for love was given-- Darling, come to me-- Darling, come to me!'"

She ended, her hands clasped before her, her lithe figure, by God-given instinct for song, leaned forward, and Francis Ravenel was conscious that the passion in the voice had nothing to do with his presence; that it was the music alone of which she thought, and for the first time in his life he touched the edge of the knowledge that _a great gift sets its owner as a thing apart_.

"Sometime," he said, "when you have become famous, and all the world is singing your praises, I shall say, 'Once she sang for me alone, at twilight, under the beeches, in a far land,' and the people will take off their hats to me, as to one who has had much honor."

He smiled as he spoke. It was the smile or the praise of the song, or a cause too subtle to name, that changed her. She had already seemed an indifferent woman, a great artist, a careless _Bohémienne_ in her speech; but for the next change he was unprepared: it was a pleading child with wistful eyes who seated herself beside him, not remotely through any self-consciousness, but near to him, where speech could be conveniently exchanged.

"Mr. Ravenel," she began, "I had thought to keep it from you, but you are different--the _most_ different person I ever saw." A dimple came in her cheek as she smiled. "And so I am going to tell you everything." She made a little outward gesture of the hands, as though casting discretion to the wind. "My father drinks. It began with his great sorrow. It is not all the time, but frequently. I had hoped that down here he would be better. He is not, and you will have to get another overseer. It is not just to you to have my father in charge. Only I think that perhaps such times as he is himself some work might be found for him. It is so peaceful here; I do not want to go away."

"You shall not go away."

The words were spoken quietly, but for the first time in her life Katrine Dulany felt there was some one of great power to whom she could turn for help, and her woman heart thrilled at the words.

"You mustn't feel about it as you do, either," Frank continued. "The time has gone by for thinking of your father's trouble as anything except a disease--a disease which very frequently can be cured."

"Ah!" she cried, "do you think it would be possible?"

"I have known many cases. Is your father good to you?" he asked, abruptly.

"Sick or well, with money or without, he is the kindest father in the world. Save in one way, it is always _for_ me he thinks."

Her hand lay on the log. It was small and white, and she was very beautiful. Frank had seldom resisted temptation. This one he did not even try to resist, and he placed his hand over hers.

"Katrine," he said, "I am not a particularly good man, but the gods have willed that we meet--meet in strange moods and a strange way. I am a better man to-night than I have ever been in my life. It's the music, maybe, or the fringed gentian, or the whippoorwills." There was love-making in every tone of his voice. "Whatever it is, it makes me want to help you. May I? Will you trust me?"

She turned her hand upward, as a child might have done, to clasp his, looking him full in the eyes as she did so.

"Utterly," she said.

"I have not always been considered trustworthy," he explained, lightly.

"People may not have understood you." There was a sweet explaining in her voice.

"Which may have been, on the whole, fortunate for me," he answered, with a curious smile.

"Don't," she said--"don't talk of yourself like that. I know you are good, good, _good!_"

"Thank you," and again there came to him the throb in the throat he had felt when their eyes first met. "Believe me," he said, "I shall always try to be--to you," and as he spoke he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

A noise startled him. Some one was approaching with uncertain footsteps and a shuffling gait, and at the sound the girl's face turned crimson.

"Katrine, little Katrine, where are you?" a voice cried, thickly and uncertainly, as a man came from under the gloom of the trees. There was not a moment's hesitation. The child rose and put her arms around the figure with a divine, womanly gesture, as though to shield him and his infirmities from the whole world. It was the action of one ashamed to be ashamed.

"Daddy," she said, laying her head against his shoulder, "this is Mr. Ravenel!"

III

A KINDNESS WITH MIXED MOTIVES

In the walk home through the gloom of the night Frank Ravenel thought of many things not hitherto considered in his philosophy. The women whom he had known had presented few complexities to him. That he should be giving a second thought to Katrine Dulany seemed humorous; but the more he resolved to put her from his thoughts the more vivid the memory of her became. He recalled his emotion when their eyes first met, and the remembrance brought again the tightening of the throat which he had on the hilltop. He could feel the clinging pressure of the slender hand, could hear again the voice like a caress, and her words, "You are good--good--good!" kept repeating themselves somewhere in the recesses of his brain to the tune of an old song.

"Good!" he ejaculated. "God, if she only knew!"

He had stated to his mother at the outset of the walk that he had no plans; but in reality his summer had been fairly well arranged before his return, lacking only a few set dates to fill the time till October. The party at Ravenel would be over in a fortnight, and then--the thought of another woman who loved him and a certain husband yachting on the Mediterranean crossed his mind for an instant with annoyance and a little shame.

The girl on the hill had had a more disturbing effect than any one that ever came into his life before. Looking down the vista of probable events, he saw nothing but trouble for her if he remained at Ravenel--saw it as reasonably and as logically as though he were contemplating the temptation of another. An affair with the daughter of his overseer, a very young person, was a manifest impossibility for him, Francis Ravenel; his pride and such honor as he had where women were concerned forbade it. But even as he reached this decision the voice of gold came back to him:

"And the night for love was given-- Darling, come to me!"

How she could love a man! He recalled her gesture when she said: "I will tell you everything"! The glance through the lashes--"I've a fancy for my own way"! the forgetting of his presence for the song-singing and the sunset, coming back to talk with him; a pleading child!

By the lake he paused, and, looking into the moonlit water, came to his conclusions sanely enough. He would see her no more. There would be many people for the next fortnight to occupy his time; the coming folks were interesting. Anne Lennox would be there; the time would pass; he would leave Ravenel; but as he dropped asleep a voice seemed to call to him through the pines, and he knew he would not go.

The next morning before coffee he wrote to Dr. Johnston, the great specialist in alcoholic diseases, urging him to come to Ravenel at his earliest convenience. "There is a man to be helped," he wrote, "and neither money nor brains are to be spared in the helping."

Through the breakfast the memory of Katrine was vividly with him. He recalled, with the approval of an aristocrat in taste, the daintiness of her movements, the delicacy of her hands as they lay open on the fence, even her indifference to him, to him, who was in no wise accustomed to indifference in women.

At twilight he went to the Chestnut Ridge, but Katrine was not there, nor did she come. The following day he went again with a similar resulting. The third day he saw her about noon on the river-bank, and she waved her hand to him in a cavalier fashion, disappearing into a small copse of dogwood, not to reappear. The thing had become amusing.

During this time he saw neither Dermott McDermott nor the new overseer, whom he learned was at Marlton on affairs concerning a sawmill.

The fourth day after his meeting with Katrine a message from the great doctor gave him the dignity of a mission, and he rode to the old lodge to show her the letter, which said that Dr. Johnston would be at Ravenel soon.

There was eagerness in his gait and eyes as he mounted his horse, and as he rode down the carriageway standing in his stirrups, waving his cap to his mother with a "Tallyho to the hounds," he had never looked handsomer nor had more of an air of carrying all before him, as was right, she thought, for a Ravenel.

The old gate-lodge on the Ravenel place stands on the north branch of the road which leads to Three Poplar Inn. It is built of pale-colored English brick and gray stones, and runs upward to the height of two stories, with broad doorways and wide windows peeping through ivy which covers the place from foundation to roof.

Frank remembered it as a drear-looking, lonesome place during the occupancy of the former incumbent. Instead, he found a reclaimed garden; hedges of laurel, trim and straight; old-fashioned flowers, snowballs, gillybells, great pink-and-white peonies; and over the front on trellises, by the gate and doorway, scrambles of scarlet roses against the green and the ivied walls.

In the doorway Nora O'Grady, a short, wide woman of fifty or thereabout, was singing at a spinning-wheel. She had a kind, yellow face with high cheek-bones, and dark eyes which seemed darker by reason of the snowy hair showing under a mob cap. Her chin was square and pointed upward like old Mother Hubbard's, and she could talk of batter-cakes or home rule with humorous volubility, and smoke a pipe with the manner of a condescending duchess.

She had, as Frank found afterward, an excellent gift at anecdote, but a clipping pronunciation of English by reason of having spoken nothing but the Erse until she was grown. Added to this was an entirely illogical ignorance of certain well-known words, and Katrine told him later that once when Nora was asked if the dinner was postponed, she answered: "It was pork."

For fifteen years this strange old creature and her boy Barney had followed the seesawing fortunes of the Dulanys, accompanying their gypsy-like sojournings with great loyalty and joyousness.

She rose from her spinning as Ravenel approached.

"Is Miss Katrine at home?" he inquired.

Nora dropped a courtesy, and with the tail of her eye observed, labelled, and docketed Francis Ravenel.

"Will your lordship be seated," she said. "Miss Katrine will be back in a minute. She's gone to ask after Miranda's baby. Nothin' seems able to stop her from regardin' the naygurs as human beings. If 'twere not that I know she'd be here immejit I'd go afther her mysel', and not keep your lordship waitin'."

She motioned him to a wide settle on the porch with an alert hospitality. In her heart she preferred Dermott McDermott to all possible suitors for Katrine, but if this was another jo, as the Scotch say, so much the better, for one might urge the other on, she thought, with primitive sagacity.

"Would ye have a drop of Scotch?" she asked, and upon Francis declining she reseated herself at her wheel, "with his permission," as she put it, delighted, Celtlike, at the chance for conversation. "Ye're perhaps," she says, with some humor, "like the man in the old, old tale when a friend asked him to take a drink. He said he couldn't for three reasons. First, he'd promised his mother he never would drink; second, his doctor had tould him he mustn't drink; and, third, he'd just had a drink."

Frank laughed back at the merry old woman as she sat at the whirring wheel, her accustomed eyes scarcely glancing at the work in her scrutiny of him.

"Dulany's not at home this day. I'm sorry," she went on. "He's off about the sawmill of that triflin' Shehan man. Did ye hear that about his telegraph, Mr. Ravenel? No? It's a funny tale. Ye know that old mill of yours ain't worth more than a few hunder dollars. But Dulany saw an advertisement for a new kind of machinery, and he wrote the firm to ask them what it would cost to have it put in. They sint back the word: tin thousand dollars, and would he plaze lit thim know immejit if it was wanted. He didn't wait to write. He telegraphed:

"'If a man had ten thousand dollars, what in hell would he want with a sawmill?'"

Frank laughed aloud again, uncomprehending the fact that the shrewd little woman was deliberately holding him with her tales till Katrine returned.

Inside the house he heard a note, struck suddenly, and repeated over and over in a voice little above a whisper.

"She's come in the other way. I'll tell her your lordship's wantin' her," said Nora O'Grady, disappearing.

He looked about him in great content. Things seemed so much as he desired them to be--the roses, the old furniture, the spinning-wheel, the coiffed peasant woman--that he waited for Katrine's coming, fearing that she should be less beautiful than he remembered her.

With some surprise he heard a laugh (he had not thought of her as a girl who laughed) so merry, so infectious that he found himself wondering what caused it as the girl herself came through the doorway to greet him, her rose face radiant, her eyes shining, her hand outstretched.

She was more loveworthy, more imperious, than he remembered her, a thing which bewildered him as he thought of her entreating smile, and her wistful and approving eyes.

She wore white, so simply made as to have something statuesque about the lines of the gown, and cut from the throat to show the poise of the head and the curls at the back of the neck.

"I could scarcely believe Nora when she said it was you. Father is at Marlton. I was so lonely. It is good of you to come, even if only on business. You are riding?" she asked, regarding his clothes.

"Yes," he answered. "I am going to the world's end."

"You will be sorry," she returned, quickly. "I have been there. Carolina is better. Stay here!"

She seated herself beside him on the settle as she spoke, and the odor of the red rose she wore at her breast came to him with the words.

He had taken off his hat and leaned his bare brown head against the high back of the bench.

"You see," he began, his eyelids drawn together in his own way, his eyes fastened upon some remote distance, "I, too, have been lonely. The only companionable person within hundreds of miles has refused me her society. I have been driven, as it were, to the world's end."

"Do you mean me?" Katrine asked, smiling, and looking at him with eyes full of surprise.

"It is perhaps Nora to whom I refer," he suggested, whimsically.

"She is not always companionable--Nora," Katrine returned; "and to-day she is not pleased with me, so I like her less than usual. She purposed to cook nettles in the potatoes, and I remonstrated, and--I have not absented myself from your society," she said, abruptly breaking her talk after a woman's way.

"Then why didn't you watch the sunset from the Chestnut Ridge last night and the night before and the night before that?" he asked.

"Why didn't I watch the sunset from the Chestnut Ridge?" she repeated after him, as though not understanding; and then, with a slow, steady smile, looking straight in his eyes, "The thought never occurred to me," she said.

No studied coquetry could have piqued him as this simple statement, which he felt to be the plain truth. He had taken three long walks on the off-chance of meeting a girl who apparently had forgotten his existence, and although the thought was humorous it stirred in him a determination to make his existence a remembered thing to her.

"But, if I had known," she explained, and the selflessness and sweetness of her as she spoke touched him strangely--"if I had thought you wanted to talk to me, I should have been glad to come."

Fortunately there remained to him a dignified explanation of his suggestion.

"I thought you might come, not so much to see the sunsets as in the hope of seeing me. I promised to help you when I could. I thought you might be interested to know that I had kept my promise. If any one can help your father it is Dr. Johnston." He gave the letter to her as he spoke. "He is coming to Ravenel to-morrow."

In an instant her face softened; her eyes became suffused by a soft, warm light, and she looked up at him through a sudden mist of tears.

"The interview must be arranged," he went on. But Katrine interrupted him: