Chapter 8

In silence Frank held the same belief, though he reasoned that McDermott's European trip could be well explained by his affection for Katrine; and so the thought of Dermott away from New York disturbed him far more than it did Philip de Peyster, but for very different reasons.

It was at Bar Harbor that he received the first letter from Katrine, in accordance with the compact that she should write her benefactor once a month. The letter had been forwarded from his Paris bankers, enclosed with business letters in a great envelope.

With a throbbing heart he opened it. She had touched it; it had been near her; one of those small, soft hands, with the dimples at the base of the fingers, had penned the strange, small writing:

DEAR UNKNOWN ONE,--There is little to tell. I go every day to Josef. He thinks it possible I may become a great singer.

I wonder about you, and feel something like Pip in "Great Expectations," only I know how good and great you must be. Isn't it fine to be like a fairy princess, who can do anything for people she chooses? And to have the heart to help--ah, that is the best of all!

In my mind, for we Irish imagine always, I have made you a stately lady, perhaps not very strong, who is much alone and has had a great sorrow, who helps the world because it is good to help. So every month I will send you letters of what I do and dream to do. If you are alone much, it may amuse you to read of my queer life here in Paris. If my letters bore you, you will not have to read them. I want only to show that I appreciate your help and your interest in me. To know Josef is the greatest thing, save one, that has come to my life. He gives me little slips of writing to pin up in my room to learn by heart. The last one read:

"What is it that enables one to live through the dead calm which succeeds a passionate desolation? Good work and hard work. The way to live well is to work well."

Ever gratefully yours, KATRINE DULANY.

Another letter came in the same mail, which Frank read with a distaste for the writer of it, for the affair that made such a letter possible. It was from another woman, but something in the fervent little soul beyond the seas called to him, to the best in him, and he tore the other note to pieces and wrote a line or two in answer which closed an affair before it was well begun.

For two months he had carried a letter which he had written to Katrine during the first week of his mother's illness. He took it from his pocket and read it over now, wondering if it were wise to send it:

"I heard of your great sorrow sixty miles from a railroad in the Canadian woods. I started that night to see if I could help you. To speak truth, Katrine, I don't know why I started to come to you, except that I could not stay away.

"In New York I met McDermott, who told me you had sailed to study with Josef. This did not change my plans in the least. But there came the question of that land on the other side of the river which detained me for several days, and then my mother's dangerous illness.

"I have been with her constantly since--the crisis is past, but she is still too ill for me to leave her. I am coming to you just as soon as I can. And I am going to ask you to forgive me, to take me and make whatever you can out of my worthless self. Whatever of good there is in me has come through you. You have given me belief in purity and selflessness and hope of achievement.

"Don't remember me as I was; don't do that, Little One; only as I hope to be; as I hope you will help me to be. I am coming for your answer the first minute I can get away.

"FRANCIS RAVENEL."

There had been many reasons for not sending this letter: his mother's illness; his sudden plunge into business; but underneath all was the fear, which grew larger day by day, that he might receive from Katrine the rebuff which his conduct toward her so richly merited.

Uncertainly he held the letter, reviewing one of the curious turns that life had taken in giving Katrine an ally in his mother.

On one of his week-end visits to Bar Harbor, where Mrs. Ravenel was still staying, her old gayety had led her one evening to the teasing subject of his marrying. He was standing by the open casement, looking into the twilight over the sea, when he answered her, and he could not hide the break in his voice as he spoke. "I have the misfortune to love the wrong woman, mother!"

"Frank!" The cry of alarm and tenderness and protest touched him strangely.

"Yes," he went on, "and it's a hard fight."

She came near, putting her hand tenderly on his cheek. "Ah," she said, "my boy, my boy!"

He drew her to him, and for the minute he seemed, indeed, a boy again, coming to this sure haven of comfort, to the place where he had never been criticised or told that he was wrong. "Yes, lady mother, I'm hard hit. I fell in love with one whom I didn't think it square to the family to marry. We have never made mis-alliances, in this country or the other. I believed, and I believe still, that a man owes it to his descendants, to the furthest generation, to marry for them. I believed, and I believe still, that marriage is far less a matter of personal inclination than most people consider it to be. I believe that when a man marries a woman he does not marry her alone, but all of her ancestors, and that he may expect to see the maternal grandfathers appearing again in his own grandchildren."

"Certainly, dear," Mrs. Ravenel acquiesced, in a tone which indicated there could be but one opinion on such a subject.

"You know how firmly I have believed this always, mother!"

She pressed his hand for reply.

"I told her that I could never marry her. But the thing was too strong for me--I went away from the place where she was. Oh," he cried, in a heat of self-abasing, "I grow cold when I think what a cad I was! I hurt her so! But I did, too late, what I thought was right, what I had been trained to do."

Far into the night, lying sleepless, with his hands folded under his head, there came a light tap at his door, and he knew his mother had come to him. She wore a rose-colored dressing-gown, and at sight of it he remembered, with tenderness, how she had always longed "to be beautiful to him."

Kneeling by the bed, she put her gentle arms around his neck, laying her soft cheek against his own. And the way everything in life falls down before mother-love could surely never be shown better than in her talk with him, in which she renounced almost every inherited belief to try to make life happier for him.

"Onliest One!" she said. It was her baby name for him.

"Yes, Miss Cora," he answered. They were the first words, learned from the negroes, that his childhood lips had ever formed.

"I couldn't sleep. You remember how I never could bear to see you suffer. I seem to go mad, to lose all self-control if you are not happy. And I came to tell you that it isn't true, that talk about marriage. I know it. I knew it when I taught you all the foolishness about family and position, and helped you to have the pride of Lucifer. Ah," she cried, "I suffered enough to know it isn't true! There is just one thing on earth that makes marriage endurable: a great and overmastering love. Marriage is the one thing about which for the good of the race, for the good of the race," she repeated, "we have a right to be divinely selfish."

"Perhaps it's true, mother mine, but the knowledge comes too late."

"No, it hasn't, boy!" she answered. "It hasn't. If I were a man and wanted a woman, I wouldn't let her wishes interfere in the matter. I would carry her off, if necessary. It was a good, old-time way--that!" she cried, earnestly.

"Mother! Mother! Mother!" Frank remonstrated, with a laugh, though with tears in his eyes.

"And you will have her if you want her; for you are so beautiful and dear and sweet, no woman could help loving you."

And with this biased assurance he fell asleep, as she sat by his bedside with her hand on his cheek.

XVII

MCDERMOTT VISITS HIS FRENCH COUSIN

It was true that Dermott's sudden departure for Europe had troubled Frank. But it would have disturbed him more had he known the truth, for McDermott was not only bent upon seeing Katrine, but was stirring another trouble for Frank, a trouble which McDermott felt had already slept too long.

The week before the Irishman sailed (it was the very day upon which he decided, with a laugh to himself, to give up the railroad fight and allow the new company to build the road on the Ravenel land) he wrote his French cousin, the Countess de Nemours, thus:

BEAUTIFUL LADY WITHOUT MERCY,--I am writing in a perturbed state of mind, for I think I shall get for you a great fortune. You do not answer my letters, though I have written at the lowest estimate ten thousand times. I want the date of your first marriage securely stated in written evidence; also the dates of the birth and death of the child. I want every scrap of paper which you have, concerning that sad affair of thirty years ago, ready for me when I arrive in Paris two weeks from to-day.

There is a little girl over there studying music in whom I want you to interest yourself. Her name is Katrine Dulany. She is with Josef.

Yours of the Shamrock, DERMOTT MCDERMOTT.

The Countess de Nemours' house in Paris stood in the centre of the street of the Two Repentant Magdalens. An iron door in a griffoned arch opened into a sunny court-yard, where peacocks strutted by an old fountain, and a black poodle, who was both a thief and a miser, snarled at the passers-by.

On the right of the entrance, in a kind of sentry-box, Quantrelle the Red acted as _concierge_. He was a man above the peasant class, ridiculously long and spare, with an unbroken record for thirty years of drunkenness and quarrelling. His narrow head was covered with irregular tufts of scarlet hair, and in his forehead were heavy furrows which curved down over the nose and waved upward and back to the temple. His eyebrows were red tufts standing fiercely out over his little red-brown eyes, and his nose, long, lean, and absurdly pointed, seemed peering at his great teeth, yellowed by much smoking of cigarettes. He added to his charms an attire intentionally bizarre, for he dressed himself, so to speak, in character. And with these natural and achieved drawbacks to his appearance he had the temper of a wasp, so that it was small wonder that questionings were rife as to the reason of his retention, his _overpaid_ retention, in the De Nemours' household. He had a wit of his own, had Quantrelle. Frequently his pleasing fancy led him to admit visitors when he knew Madame de Nemours to be absent, and, after conducting them by some circuitous route to unexpected rooms, he would leave them waiting until discovered by any chance domestic who happened by. And when they were ushered forth to the street he would follow them with a torrent of shrill apology, retiring, in a paroxysm of silent laughter, behind the shutters of his little box. Why Madame de Nemours endured his vagaries was indeed strange, for she was one who demanded of every other domestic something of an over-obsequiousness in service. It was a well-known fact, however, that he held an assured position in the household, and that the Countess only smiled at his grimaces and drinking, rewarding him with frequent gifts and holidays in the country.

On the morning of Dermott's coming, Quantrelle the Red sat in his little house peering out, monkeylike, expectantly, at the passers-by, and craning his long neck to keep a constant eye on the corner around which the Irishman was to arrive. As the brougham drew up to the curb the Red One sprang to his feet, threw the iron doors wide apart, and stood bowing double as McDermott entered.

"Ah, my Quantrelle!" he cried, gayly, at sight of the thin grotesqueness. "Still in your old place; still taking care of madame!"

"Till the end," was the answer, with a serious note in the voice.

"You have not changed much in the three years since I saw you last," Dermott said, inspecting him closely.

"Nor you, monsieur," Quantrelle answered. "In fact, you have changed little since twelve years ago, when I hid you and young Monsieur de Chevanne on top of my box here, after some escapade, to keep you both from the police." He scrutinized McDermott closely as he spoke. "And it's not the money (which I know well you will give me anyhow) which makes me say you are more beautiful than ever, monsieur. The same elegant pallor; the same pursuit in the eye! Had I had your looks"; he made a clucking sound in his cheek with his tongue; "and your clothes! Always the blacks and grays and very elegant! They are not my colors," he drew himself to his straightest to exhibit his maroon coat and trousers and wide green cravat with an assumed satisfaction; "but each has his own style," he finished.

McDermott laughed. "You are sober, Quantrelle!"

"Distressingly so, monsieur!"

"And if I give you money you would use it for--" McDermott paused.

"Charity, monsieur," the Red One answered, his eyes drooped religiously. He took the gold coin which Dermott gave him, tossed it into the sunshine, and slipped it into his pocket with a bow. "You will notice, I honor your integrity by not biting it to see if it be counterfeit."

"Knowing your character, it is indeed a compliment," McDermott said. "Au revoir, my Quantrelle!"

"Au revoir, Monsieur l'Irlandais!"

And Dermott passed.

Inside he found the Countess waiting in the drawing-room, and she greeted him with hands outstretched, kissing him on both cheeks in the French fashion. Afterward she stood regarding him with a slow, sweet smile, which came from one of the kindest hearts in the world.

"And this," she said, in a beautiful, quiet, warm voice, "is the Irish cousin who has not been to see me for so very long!"

Although past fifty, she was tall and slight, with the grace of a girl. Her hair, white and soft and wavy, was worn high in a style quite her own; her skin was pink and white as a child's; her blue eyes shone with tenderness, and they had a merry, dancing light in them continually. Her face was of a delicate oval, with a nose slender, beautifully modelled, and exceptionally high between the eyes. She wore a green-white dress of cloth individual in its cut and very plain, with an old silver belt and brooch to match. Her hands, fragile and beautiful as shells, were ringless.

"It seems so perfectly flat to say that I am glad to see you, doesn't it?" she asked, as Dermott smiled down at her.

"I like it just the same," he answered.

"When did you get in?" she inquired.

"I came over from Havre yesterday. I was busy with some English folk about a mine, or I would have tried to see you last evening."

"And you will stay--" She paused.

"Ten days at most."

"Ah!" she said. "That's horrid! You will miss so many pleasant things! A Bernhardt first night for one."

"I'm a horny-handed son of toil, beautiful cousin," he answered, "and I have come on business only."

There was a pause, which Dermott felt the Countess was waiting for him to break.

"Patricia," he said, a beautiful consideration for her in his voice, "I want to spare you in every way I can in reviewing the bitter business of your early marriage. I have written you only what was absolutely necessary for you to know. I discovered by accident that your first husband left quite an estate. If you were his wife and had a living child at the time of his death, and if these facts can be established, this property belongs to you. You have not as much money as you should have. I shall get his estate for you--if I can."

"About the records?" she inquired.

"If you have them ready I shall go over to Tours to-morrow to make a search for the sister of the priest."

"Dermott, dear," the Countess said, putting her hand on his shoulder affectionately, "you are not going to make trouble for any one, are you?"

"Am I not?" he answered, with a short laugh. "Am I not?"

She took a bundle of papers, which she had evidently prepared for him, from a desk which stood between the windows, but made no motion to give them to him.

"It's all so far in the past," she said, "no one can ever know what I suffered. But I want no one else to suffer in order that I may have what you term my rights."

"Patricia," Dermott answered, gravely, "the thing is all a bit in the air as yet. Your first marriage will be difficult to establish. The French law requires such absolute proof that I may not be able to obtain it. Now, don't let us discuss the matter further, nor worry that kind heart of yours." He patted her head affectionately as he spoke.

In the years past she had known him well enough to remember his moods, and she gave him the papers in silence.

"About Mademoiselle Dulany," she continued. "Since your letter, I have made inquiries concerning her. I shall be glad to know her, for her own sake as well as yours."

"I'm going to ask a great favor of you for her, Patricia," he answered. "You live in this great house alone. It would be better to have more people about you. I want you to see much of her, for I am hoping that some day she may be my wife."

He spoke the last word tenderly, a bit wistfully.

"Ah, Dermott," she cried, "I had no idea! I shall be so glad to do anything I can! Why couldn't she come and stay with me?"

"That is like you," he answered, gratefully; "but such things can never be arranged happily. They must grow. Wait until you meet her. I am to see her to-night. I will bring her to you to-morrow, if I may."

"It is arranged, this marriage?" she asked, delighted at a bit of romance.

"Not in the least," he answered, concisely.

"But she loves you?"

"On the contrary," he said, quietly, "she loves another."

"And you are hoping--" The Countess hesitated.

"Not hoping," Dermott answered, "determined."

"How old is she?"

"Nearly nineteen, and Irish."

"Irish girls are hard to change."

"But you loved your second husband, did you not?" Dermott inquired.

"I hope I was a good wife," the Countess answered, evasively, adding, "But you remember our own Tom Moore!"

"'The wild freshness of morning--'?"

Dermott stood looking into the fire, his eyes drooped, his face saddened.

"But there is something else to remember as well," Madame de Nemours said, touching him on the shoulder and looking up at him admiringly. "The half-gods go when the gods arrive. And you have everything in your favor. You are so great a man and such a charming fellow, Dermott!"

* * * * *

On the following day Katrine came alone to see Madame de Nemours, Dermott having concluded wisely that his presence would be but a drawback to any quick acquaintance between the two.

"I am Katrine," the girl answered, in response to the Countess' query. "Mr. McDermott has been so kind as to send me to you."

"It came about in this way," the Countess explained, drawing Katrine to a couch and still keeping her hand. "There was a time when I knew Dermott, my cousin, very well. That was in Ireland, before he became the great man he now is. Since that time we have written to each other always, for he has been kind enough to give me his friendship. He came yesterday. I was sad, and told him of my lonesomeness. It is best, is it not, to be quite frank when two people are meeting as you and I are doing? In spite of all this," and here she made a slight gesture to include her luxurious surroundings, "I am quite a poor woman. And so when I told Dermott that I was lonesome in this great house, with none but servants, no companions, he spoke to me of you. He was quite practical. He said that you spent much money as you were living. He told me of your great beauty and your greater voice. I became very much interested in you, and we arranged for this talk. Now that I have seen you, I want you to come and live with me very much, _very_ much." She was so charming in her kindness, this great lady! "But you may not desire it. The situation is awkward for me." She smiled here, and a humorous light danced in her eyes, for with all her graciousness she was quite certain of her charm. "And so we will leave you to think it over and tell Mr. McDermott, who will in turn tell the decision to me. That will save my vanity from being hurt openly in case you do not come."

Impulsively, Katrine clasped both the Countess' hands in hers.

"I want to come very much," she said. "There was never any one with whom I would rather be. I know now that you are the lady of whom Monsieur Josef spoke to me once. 'Ach!' he said, you know his way, 'she is the greatest lady in the world! It is not what she _does_, but what she _is_ so beautifully.'"

As Katrine spoke with the earnestness of voice and manner always her own, the Countess leaned forward suddenly with a startled look.

"Who is it that you remind me of?" she cried, drawing her, black brows together. "If I could only think! Who is it that you remind me of?"

XVIII

KATRINE MEETS ANNE LENNOX

During McDermott's ten days' stay in Paris, Katrine saw him constantly. The evening after her first visit to the Countess he received with a gay air of irresponsibility the news that she was to take up her residence with Madame de Nemours, and though he personally assisted in the establishing of herself and Nora in the queer old house, it was with the manner of one in no way responsible for what was going forward.

Some sunny rooms on the third floor were given her, a great piano was enthroned in a bright corner, gay flowers bloomed against the faded tapestry, and the Countess urged her to choose from many pictures the ones she desired for intimate friends.

She knew that McDermott visited Josef to speak of her, and that he returned delighted with the visit; but in all of his attentions there seemed even to the watchful eyes of the Countess more brotherly kindness than the solicitude of a lover. On the night before his return to the States he had a long talk with Madame de Nemours. His visit to Tours had resulted in nothing, and it was with some depression of spirits that he was making his farewells.

But the Countess was too much occupied with her new protégé to be downcast over any mythical inheritance in America, and as she stood under the lamps in the doorway bidding him farewell, she said, with girlish enthusiasm: "Don't you think about it any more. I have enough to live on nicely. And as for that glorious Katrine, I'll deave her ears with your name! No praises. Ah, I'm too old and wise for that! It will be this way. 'It's a pity,' I'll say, 'that Dermott is not better-looking,' and she'll answer, 'Sure he's one of the handsomest men in the world.' And the next day, 'How unfortunate he is so niggardly?' 'Niggardly!' she'll cry. 'He gives away everything he has. He's the soul of generosity!' Ah, trust me!" the Countess ended. "She shall persuade herself there's none other like you. And there's not!" she cried, kissing her hand to him as he went down the steps.

Within the week after McDermott's leaving Paris there occurred two events, seemingly remote from Katrine's existence, which later wrought the greatest changes in her life.