Chapter 6

As she lay face downward, her body convulsed with weeping, it was ordered that Dermott McDermott should take a short cut through that part of the grounds to the boat-landing, on one of his lightning-like trips to foreign parts. He had just encountered Frank riding like the wind, his face haggard and drawn, and at the sight of Katrine's distress he drew conclusions, with rage and a dancing madness in his eye.

"If ye've hurt her, Frank Ravenel, if I find when I come back ye've hurt her, you'll answer to me for it! God! _how_ you will answer to me!" he cried.

* * * * *

There is this about life: that frequently when we think the worst has happened it is but the forerunner of worse to come.

As Katrine lay tossed by misery and shame, Nora O'Grady, with her kilted linsey-woolsey skirt turned up, her white kerchief loosened over her bosom, and her brogans twinkling in her haste, came running along the road, her face twitching with sorrow. Ever and anon in her speed she dried her eyes on her apron and a moan escaped her.

"Poor heart!" she repeated. "Poor heart, she's enough to bear without this coming to her the now!"

But pushing the branches aside, she spoke in simulated anger to Katrine, a pretence which showed well the peculiar delicacy of her class. It was not for the like of her, she reasoned, to know the truth regarding Miss Katrine's relation with Mr. Ravenel; and yet she knew as accurately as if the scene of the morning had taken place before her. With clear, wise eyes she had dreaded such an ending the summer long. Nothing, she reasoned, could further hurt Katrine's pride than to have it known her love had been slighted, or to offer sympathy, no matter how hiddenly. And so she feigned well an anger she was far from feeling, in an intentional misunderstanding.

Looking down at the prostrate figure, she began, in a shrill voice:

"Honestly to God, Miss Katrine, ye'll hear another word of this! Crying like a child in the middle of a lot of damp stickers because ye can't have music as ye like! Just throw yourself round on this wet ground a bit more an' mayhap He'll take away the voice He's given ye already! Perhaps it's because ye cry for nothing that there's been something sent ye to cry for!" And here her thought of suitable conduct was lost in real grief.

"Ah, Miss Katrine! Miss Katrine! Your father," her voice broke and went up in a wail, "your father's come home to ye--"

Katrine, who had arisen, stood with tear-stained face regarding her. "He is--?" She could not go on with the question, but Nora answered it without its being finished.

"He has not been drinking. Oh, Miss Katrine, he's past that! Can't ye understand? The hand of God's upon him! He's called away, Miss Katrine. Ye should have seen him as he crawled to the doorway and fell on it. I got him to his own seat by the window, and he's wanting you, Miss Katrine, he's wanting you sore! So I come, in part to tell you, but more to have ye prepare yerself for the change in him, for his end's in sight!"

Although she was trembling from head to foot and had grown ashen pale, Katrine spoke calmly.

"He came alone?"

Nora shook her head in the affirmative.

"It seems, Miss Katrine, that there was some organic trouble; that the great specialist, whose name is gone from me, warned him not to try the cure. He said the other disease was too far along. But your father wanted to be himself again. It was for you he wanted it. It was the disgrace he was to you that was on his mind always."

"Ah!" she cried, "there was still enough of the old pride in him for that! We must pretend not to understand that he is ill, we must try just to seem glad that he is back home with us again."

When Katrine entered the room where her father sat, she found him, as Nora had said, by the window, his head thrown back, his eyes closed; nor did he open them at her coming, though by a poor movement of the hands he made her understand his knowledge of her presence.

"Little Katrine," he said, while two great tears welled from under the closed lids. "Little Bother-the-House! I have come back to you. There is no one can help me except you."

Katrine made a swift movement to be near him. Kneeling, she drew his poor, sorrowing head to her breast, and in the twilight these two, the one so old and weak and loving, the other so young and desolate and brave, clung to each other, blinded by the vision of the separation so soon to be.

In nearly every crisis of life there comes some twist in affairs which seems to turn the screws harder or sets them to making one flinch in a new and unexpected place. In Katrine's case it was a turn which made life so unbearable that there were times when she would be forced to bite her lips and set her teeth to keep back a moan, while for hours at a time Patrick Dulany iterated and reiterated the kindness, the thoughtfulness, the goodness to him of Francis Ravenel.

"There was never a day, Katrine, while I was at the hospital, that I had not a letter from him. Money was spent for me like water. The doctor told me he had orders to spare nothing. Ay, there's not another man in the world who would do for a stranger what Mr. Ravenel tried to do for me. And sometimes he'd write drolly, you know his way, that he'd seen ye somewhere, riding, mayhap, or in the garden, or had heard a note of your music as he rode by; and the home feeling would come back to me, and I'd take heart again."

XI

KATRINE IS LEFT ALONE

In the ten days before her father's death nothing seemed spared Katrine. The hopeless life of the man was recounted to her hour by hour, interspersed with the rereadings of Frank's letters, and, most of all, with remorse at the desolate place he had prepared for her when he had gone.

"But ye'll have a friend in Mr. Ravenel," he told her, earnestly. "One who will help you, Katrine, and ye need have no fear to take his help. He is one who has a high thought for women and would never betray a trust. It's a great comfort to me to know ye've him, Katrine."

On the day before the end his grief was bitter to hear.

"My little wee lassie," he sobbed, "I'm leaving ye alone with nothing; none to shield you, none to care, but just one friend. I'm going out, and it's good I'm going. I would always have held you back, always have been a drag to your name--for ye'll make a name! It's in you, as it was in her." He stopped speaking, but after a little space began, with a crooning, the glorious "Ah, Patria Mia," and it seemed to Katrine as though her heart would stop beating in her sorrow, for she knew it was her unknown mother of whom he thought.

"Ah," he whispered, at length, wiping his brow, "the music's gone from me. In the whole matter with your mother, Katrine, I was at fault. I was jealous of her gift, of the love she had for it, and made her life miserable by my demandings." He placed his hand tenderly on her head as he spoke. "Katrine," he said, solemnly, "with those we love it's never enough to forgive and forget. One must forgive and try to _understand_. To forget and forgive. Ah, Katrine, time helps us there! It does almost all of the work, so it's little credit we need take either for the forgiving or forgetting. But to try to understand! When those we love have hurt us or injured us, to study why it was done: what inherited weakness in them, what fault of their environment brought it about, to study to understand, that's the real Christianity."

In the starry watches of the night, wide-eyed and grief-shaken, Katrine took the lesson to heart both for father and lover; learned it with heart and head as well; saw the disarming of criticism, the tolerance, the selflessness which it would bring, and knew that it was good.

But, she demanded of herself, was she large-souled enough to acquire such tolerance toward Francis Ravenel? Leaning on the window-ledge, looking into the clouded darkness of the night, awaiting the hour to give her father the potion that for a time relieved his pain, she went over tenderly, bit by bit, the summer that had passed, that flower-scented, love-illumined summer for which she felt she was to pay with the happiness of a lifetime.

She lived again her first meeting with Frank under the beeches; the recklessness of her own mood because of her father's drinking; Frank's lonesomeness at his home-coming; the touching of hands on the old log; the sympathy between them from the first, and at the end asked herself, honestly, who was most to blame. She had done wrong to permit him to kiss her the night under the pine-tree, but she would not have foregone the memory of it for all the world had to offer.

On the last day about noon the pain left her father, and toward evening he asked to be helped to his old place by the window, that he might see the sun go down behind the mountains. "There's a letter of Mr. Ravenel's I'd like you to see, Katrine," he said, motioning her to bring him the carefully treasured bundle of Frank's writings.

After assisting him to find the desired letter, she sat at his feet with a white face and fixed eyes as he read:

"I met Katrine to-day on the river-bank. She was well and beautiful and happy. It makes me want to be a better man every time I see her. I want to help to make her life happy--" The hand which held the letter suddenly dropped lifeless.

"Father!" she cried. And again: "Oh, father, can you leave me like this?" And as the truth came to her that she was alone, Nature was merciful, and she fell unconscious by her father's body, with Frank's letters lying scattered around her on the floor.

After her father's burial there followed the collapse which comes so frequently to those women who have the power to bear great trials in silence.

In the small, white bed, with vines reddening around the window and shining into the room, Katrine lay, day after day, with the pallor of death on her face and a horrible nausea of life, but with a merciful benumbing of the power to suffer further. For more than a fortnight she lay, worn out with the task of living, with a Heaven-sent indifference to trouble past or to come.

But with the return of strength the problem of daily living was to be solved. The little stock of money which she and Nora had between them was used for the last sad needs of her father, and with Dermott McDermott away she knew no one to whom she could turn.

"Don't you be minding troubles like these, though, Miss Katrine," Nora sympathized. "Niver ye mind a bit! Ye're wanting to go away, and we'll find the money to go. We've some bits of trinkets, an old watch or two, and I'm a good hand at a bargain. And we'll not want to carry the furniture on our backs like turtles, either. I know a woman in Marlton whose heart's been set on the old sideboard for months back. We'll go slow, Miss Katrine, but with your voice we've no great cause for worry, my lamb. Look at the thing with sense, and trust to Nora; she'll manage it all. And in a few weeks we'll be off to New York, that wicked old place that I'm far from denyin' I like fine."

On the day before this departure there fell an event, small in itself, yet so momentous in its outcome that in the story of Katrine it cannot remain untold.

Sad and wide-eyed, she was sitting in her black frock, huddled close to the big pine-tree at the foot of the garden, when Barney O'Grady, the son of Nora, came out of the beech woods. He had been crying, and at sight of Katrine he threw himself on the grass, breaking into a passion of tears, and clutching at her skirt as a child might have done.

"Barney!" Katrine cried. "Barney, dear, what's your trouble?" and she put a soft hand on the boy's tousled red hair.

"Mother's going to leave me here," he said, "and I want to go. I hate it, hate it, hate it, here all alone! I want to go! I want to go!" he moaned.

"Is it the money?" Katrine asked.

"Yes," the boy answered, "there's not enough for us all. And I'm to stay with Mr. McDermott till I earn enough to come. And I want to go _now_."

"But if you should get in New York, what would you do?" Katrine demanded.

"Newspaper work," was the answer. "I've the gift for it," he explained, with an assured vanity, between his sobs.

She had known such lonesomeness and understood it, yet, with all the willingness in the world to help the boy, she had not one penny which she might call her own. Nora kept everything, and she reasoned if Nora had made up her mind that Barney was to stay in North Carolina the chances were heavy that there he would remain.

But the boy continued to sob appealingly, and Katrine, who had that real intelligence which no sooner sees a desired end than it finds a way to accomplish it, put her sorrow aside for practical thinking.

She reviewed her possessions rapidly, remembering, with a throb of pain, some carved gold beads she had worn when "she found herself," at the age of three. They had always seemed part of her, and, though no one had told her, she knew they had belonged to her dead mother, "who went away." But she felt little hesitation in giving them, if some one were to be helped by the sacrifice.

"Wait, Barney," she cried, "here, where Nora can't see you! I'll be back in a moment! They're just some old beads," she said, apologetically, with a splendid dissimulation, as she gave them to the boy. "But old Mrs. Quinby, at Marlton, tried to buy them of Nora once when they were being mended. Offer them for sale now. And, Barney," she went on, "if you could reconcile it to your conscience to keep it from your mother that I've given them to you; if you could with no lying, and yet without telling the truth--" She hesitated.

"Ye needn't worry, Miss Katrine," he answered, drying his eyes on his sleeve. "It's been betwixt and between the truth with her all my life. But if the time ever comes when I can serve ye--" He choked. "Ah!" he cried, "words are poor things! But ye'll see!" And with this he was gone at a breakneck run down the Swamp Hollow toward the Marlton road.

And the strangeness is that Katrine's hidden gift of old beads to a half-grown Irish boy, in the woods of North Carolina, should wreck a Metropolitan "first night," shake the money-market of two continents, and change the destinies of many lives.

XII

THE REAL FRANCIS RAVENEL

On the afternoon of the day upon which Frank said good-bye to Katrine he took the evening train North. It was his intention to see Ravenel no more for a long time, certainly not while the Dulanys remained. He was afraid of himself, for there came to him at every thought of the affair a glow of admiration at the words Katrine had thrown back at him:

_"It could never have been like that. I should have died first."_

He had given her up, but the fight was not finished, and the struggle went on constantly. In the silences of the night it was upon him again, gripping him with a pain around the heart. The most unexpected happenings would bring remembrances of her. The appealing gaze of an Irish newsboy, or a hand-organ grinding out the "Ah! che la morte," which brought back the half-lighted piano and Katrine's singing in the twilight; the dreariest; most sordid details of existence reminded him, who needed no reminding, of the time that he himself had decreed should be no more.

For three days he endured Bar Harbor before he fled to the Canadian woods with no companion save a guide. He gave his address to none save his mother, and for six weeks tramped until his body ached for rest; rowed the sombre lakes for exhaustion and peace of mind, cursing the fact that he was a Ravenel, and knowing full well that his conduct was both foolish and illogical.

At the first stop for letters he found one from his mother, which disturbed him more than any letter of hers had ever done before. She wrote:

DEAREST LADDY,--I am writing in much haste and some perturbation of mind for your advice. Last night, at the Desmonds', Nick van Rensselaer came to me after dinner for a chat. I knew he had something upon his mind when he wasted his time talking to a woman.

And what do you think it was? The most astounding, impossible, quixotic, unlanguageable thing in the world! He wants to send Katrine Dulany abroad to study. He wants it to be done in my name, however, so that it will in nowise compromise her, and wishes to have all the credit of the kindness given to me. He says he does not want to be known in the matter at all; that the girl can regard the money as a loan, and return it to him if she becomes a great singer, of which resulting he seems to have no doubt.

You see the part I shall be forced to take in the affair. I have asked him for a few days to consider the proposition, and am writing you for advice.

When are you coming? Every one is asking about you.

Lovingly always, MOTHER.

Lying on his back watching the crooked blue spots of the sky through the tree-tops of a Canadian forest, Francis read this letter over and over, and as he did so it seemed strange to him that he had not thought to help Katrine in this way himself. If she ever found out that he had done so she would probably never forgive him, but there were ways, he reasoned, to arrange it so that she could never find out.

His decision being made, he acted upon it immediately, and that night two letters, one addressed:

MONSIEUR PAUL ROGALLE, de Rogalle, Dupont et Cie, Paris, France,

and another:

M. JOSEF, Faubourg Saint Honoré,

were mailed by him at the neighboring posting-place of Pont du Coeur.

The morning after the writing of these letters Frank started farther north, and heard nothing of the outside world for more than a month. At North Point he found a bundle of letters, two from his mother, and another from Doctor Johnston, enclosing the note which Katrine had written him after her father's death.

He opened the doctor's first, and at sight of the enclosure his heart, in the homely old phrase, came to his throat.

It was a sad letter, thanking the doctor for all he had tried to do, speaking of her father's suffering at some length, parsimonious of detail concerning her own life or future plans.

It was ten o'clock in the hunting-hutch. The night outside was starless, the lamps flickered irregularly, the guides lay heavily asleep in their blankets on beds of pine boughs in the corner. It was a strange place for the birth of a man's soul, but as Frank Ravenel read the letter a tenderness, a selfless tenderness, for the sad little writer of it came to him. He had already protected her from himself--"somewhat late," he confessed, with bitterness, and there had been some effort "not to do the worst." But the feeling that held him as he read was different from any he had had before. He dwelt on her lonesomeness in the world: the long nights she must have passed alone watching the coming of death. Unspeakable tenderness brought a sob to his throat and a pain over his heart, as though suffering from a blow. The remembrance of her on the wind-blown hill came back to him; the scarlet handkerchief waved against the blue of the sky, and the brave call over the brown grass: "_Don't think of me!_ Good-bye!" It seemed in some way to have been a cry of victory.

He went to the door of the tent straining his eyes into the blackness. Alone in the great woods with the night noises, under the silent stars, things took on a different value. What was he compared to her?

Stripped of family and wealth, how would each measure before a judging world. "She was so"--he hesitated in his mind for a word--"she was so _square_," he said to himself. Wave after wave of pity swept over him as memory brought back to him her vividness, the fervid speech, the humor, the touch of her. He closed his eyes for a moment, she was in his arms, there came the odor of her dusky hair, and for the first time in his life he was a man.

"Grègoire!" he called to the sleeping guide.

"Oui, monsieur."

"The distance to the nearest railroad?"

"By land--it is sixty miles, m'sieu."

"By the lakes?"

"It is much shorter, but of an extreme dangerousness."

"We will go by the lakes."

"When, m'sieur?"

"To-night, Grègoire!"

XIII

DERMOTT'S INTERVIEW WITH FRANK AT THE TREVOY

In three days Frank reached New York, where he found mail at the club: from the South; from the Western mines; from women inviting him; as well as five or six messages by wire or mail from one Philip de Peyster, soliciting an immediate interview. Even in his perturbed and planless state these repeated demands made an impression on Frank, and in the morning he telephoned that he was at the Trevoy for the day, and would be pleased to see Mr. de Peyster at his convenience, suggesting the luncheon-hour as a time when both might be free.

Having received no response to his message, at two o'clock he entered the dining-room of the Trevoy alone. After ordering, he sat looking indifferently from one group to another, and noted, with surprise, that Dermott McDermott, with his back toward him, was at the next table lunching with a number of men, who seemed, to Frank's quick eye, bent on conciliation.

There was nothing in the Irishman's appearance to suggest the man of fashion whom Frank had known in Carolina. His clothes were of rough tweed, he wore an unpicturesque derby hat, and he had the unconsciousness of self which comes from intense occupation with great affairs.

Francis listened to the jolly laugh, the quick evasion, the masterful voice, leading, cajoling; he knew the men were wanting something from McDermott, and realized, as they did not, that it was something the Irishman had determined not to give.

It was of Frank's own home they were speaking, disconnectedly, and in a strange jargon: of Loon Mountain, Way-Home River, road-beds, cost of production, capitalization, bridges.

As he sat wondering at them, their concentration, their unity of thought, their enthusiasm, by one of those throws of fate, which go far toward the making of our lives, Dermott's voice came to him clear and scornful.

"I have heard much, I might say overmuch, recently, of family and ancestors, and have sometimes wondered what those boasted ancestors might think were they permitted to see the ineffective descendants who bear their names with neither achievement nor distinction. Now take my own case. My family was well and bitterly known in Ireland as far back as the ninth century. And at the end it availed only enough money to get me through college and over to America. But I've done some things, and with the conceit of the self-made man I'm fond of mentioning them. Directly or indirectly, five thousand people depend on me for daily bread. It's helped the world that I've lived. It's not what a man is born to, I ask. Family? To hell with family! The question is: What have you done?"

If the words had been spoken directly to him, they could not have stung Frank more than they did. What had he done? It was Katrine's question, and he recalled the lovable, vibrant little figure on the lodge steps demanding of him if he had no desire to work, no wish to take part in the great constructive affairs of men.

The group at the next table rose with an approval of Dermott's final words, and, cigars lighted, were going their several ways, when the Irishman turned and, apparently seeing Frank for the first time, came toward him with a smile, hand outstretched.

"It's good to see you again, Ravenel!" he cried. "If you're alone I'll smoke at your table for a minute or two." He waved a farewell to the men who awaited him. It was a farewell as well as a dismissal. "You've heard the news of Dulany, I suppose?"

"Only a few days ago. I have been fishing in the Canadian woods. I can scarcely say how sorry I am."