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:
"Ah! It will be easy enough. Father is as anxious as I am to be himself
again. You do not know daddy, Mr. Ravenel," she explained, a proud
loyalty in her tone. "He has not been himself before you; but in Paris,
in Dublin, he was welcomed everywhere; his wit was the keenest, with
never an edge that hurt; his stories the brightest, and always of the
kind that made you love the people of whom they were told. He will be
home to-night. Will the doctor come here? I want to tell him
_everything_, and then, when he has seen father, you can tell me what to
do. You see, I haven't thanked you yet," she said, abruptly.
"To know that you are pleased is enough. Besides, I have, on some few
occasions, drifted into doing a kind act for the act's sake," he said;
adding: "Not often, it's true, but occasionally."
"You have made me, oh, so happy, and hopeful--as I have never been
before in all my life. It seems like one of the fairy stories in which
one's wishes all come true."
"And if it were given you to have whatever you wished, what would you
ask for, Katrine?"
"To have father well. And then," her face became illuminated, "to study
with Josef."
"Josef?" He repeated the great name interrogatively.
"You have not heard of him?" she asked, incredulously.
He made a sign in the negative.
"He is the greatest teacher in the world," she explained, as though
there could be no doubting.
"Which is perhaps the reason I have never heard of him," he answered,
with a smile. "From your enthusiasm I am led to judge it is music which
he teaches."
"Yes," she answered; "but he teaches more than that. I knew a girl in
Paris who studied with him. She was quite intricate and self-seeking
when she began. And in six months he had changed her whole nature. She
became elemental and direct, and," she put her hands together and threw
them apart with the gesture which he knew so well, "and splendid! Like
Shakespeare's women!" she finished.
"Gracious Heaven, hear!" said Frank. "And does this miracle-worker live
uncrowned?"
"Ah, don't!" she said, her sincerity and enthusiasm reproving his
scoffing tone. "You see"--there was sweetness and an apologetic note in
her voice as she continued--"I believe in him so much it hurts to have
you speak so. Josef says that when woman developed to the point of
needing more education, there was nothing ready to give her except the
same thing they gave men; that because certain studies had been proven
all right for them they were given ready-made to women, and they didn't
fit. He believes women should be trained to develop the thing we call
their instinct. He says it's the psychic force which must in the end
rule the world. One of the girls in Paris said 'he stretched your
soul.'"
"I shall not permit you to go to him," Frank interrupted, gravely.
She regarded him, a question in her glance. "Why?" she asked.
"Because if your soul was any larger, Katrine, there would be no room
for it here below. It crowds the earth a little as it is. No," he
finished, with conviction, "you shall never go to study with Josef.
Music is all right. But that soul-stretching"--he smiled at this
phrase--"that would be all wrong for you. I want you exactly as you
are."