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.
The first of these was the alarming illness of Quantrelle the Red. After
a day of peculiarly unbearable conduct on his part, the other domestics
in the house had revolted, and late in the evening turned him out to
pass the night in his fireless sentry-box. For ten days after this
occurrence he hovered between life and death with an inflammation of the
lungs, during which period the De Nemours' household learned his real
power, for the Countess flew into a paroxysm of rage at his treatment,
discharged the cook and one of the upper maids, harangued the others,
sent for the best doctors in Paris, and herself assisted in the nursing,
taking little sleep or nourishment until the old fellow was well on his
way to recovery.
During all of this turmoil Katrine went quietly back and forth to her
lessons, in no way questioning the conduct of the Countess, for she
understood to the full that human hearts form attachments by no rule.
One evening during Quantrelle's convalescence, when the Countess was her
sunny self again, she offered, unasked, an explanation of her seemingly
singular conduct.
"Little person," she said, putting her hand on Katrine's shoulder, "you
mustn't judge too harshly my Irish temper. It was gratitude to
Quantrelle which made me act as I did. There were two years of my life
when I should have died but for him."
It was an amazing statement, and Katrine's face showed her astonishment.
"When I was sixteen," Madame de Nemours continued, "I was sent to a
convent school at Tours. Quantrelle's father was gate-keeper there, and
let me pass out the night I went to be married. I was only a child." The
Countess covered her face with both hands, as though to shut out some
horrid sight. "He was an American, a Protestant, and my father cursed
me. Two years after the marriage my husband deserted me. Perhaps," she
paused in her story, "perhaps Dermott has told you this?"
"He has never spoken of it to me," said Katrine.
"After my baby came," Madame de Nemours continued, "I was alone with
poverty and ill health, and for two years, _two years_," she repeated,
impressively, "Quantrelle, a long, thin-legged, red-haired boy, kept me
alive with the money he could earn and the scant assistance his mother
could lend him. It was eleven years later, four years after my baby's
death and my father's forgiveness, that I married the Count. Katrine,
darling, I gave him a great affection and entire devotion, but my heart
died with the first love. To have that first year over! Ah, there was
never another like him! You could never know, Katrine, how different he
was from others."
"It was long ago?" Katrine asked.
"Thirty years. Dermott has recently been demanding papers of me. It
seems there may be some property in America belonging to my first
husband which he can claim for me."
A premonition of the truth came to Katrine at the sound of Dermott's
name.
"And your first husband's name?" she inquired. "Will it pain you to tell
it?"
"Not at all," the Countess answered, with a sad smile. "It was Francis
Ravenel."
The sound of the name itself brought no shock to Katrine. She seemed to
have heard it before it was spoken, but she made no sign.
She knew it was Frank's father of whom Madame de Nemours spoke, and the
tales of him in North Carolina had more than prepared her for wild
doings in his student days. It seemed strange, however, that Frank had
never spoken of an early marriage of his father. But the more she
thought of it, the firmer became her belief that he had never known it.
It was not until the gray of the following morning that she comprehended
to the full the weighty significance of Madame de Nemours' early
marriage, and saw clearly the significance of Dermott's stay in
Carolina, with the direful resulting that might come to Frank from the
Irishman's investigations there.
"If Frank's father married in America, with a wife and child living in
France--" But here Katrine stopped in her thinking, putting the idea
from her mind as one too horrid to entertain.
The second apparently disconnected event which led by a circuitous route
to the death of Madame de Nemours, as well as to the discovery of that
missing witness for whom McDermott long had searched, was announced
quietly by the Countess herself one morning of the following May.
Looking up from the Paris _Herald_, she said to Katrine, "I see that
Anne Lennox has leased the old Latour Place in the Boulevard Haussmann
for an indefinite period."
The three months following the coming of Mrs. Lennox made no change in
their lives whatever. Katrine was aware that Madame de Nemours and Anne
exchanged visits of courtesy, each missing the other, but early in July
she went with the Countess and Josef to Brittany and spent the summer in
work, the world forgetting and by the world forgot.
And the divine days with Josef by the sea! His wisdom, his temper, his
splendid intolerance, his prophetic imaginings, as he stormed at the
imbecility of his kind!
"It's this damned idea of realism that's killing art!" he shrieked one
day, on the rocks at Concarneau. "Who wants things natural? If Jones and
Smith could be taught by reiterating life as it is, the race of fools
would soon become extinct. My neighbor loves his neighbor's wife, and
they go off together and there is murder done. Does the reading of this
in book or paper stop my going off with the woman I love if I have the
chance? Not a whit! Art must raise one's ideals. It's the only thing
that helps you, me, any one!"
Or, again, and this was at twilight, waiting under the old crucifix for
the herring-boats to come in: "Anybody with eyesight can imitate the
_actual_. The _real_! What has the creative mind to do with that? It is
not one great and innocent-minded girl you are to represent in
Marguerite, it is _all_ girlhood in its innocence and surrender."
And another time, on the way home from Pont-Aven:
"Women of detail, women who indulge themselves in soul-wearying
repetition of the little affairs of life, have driven more men to
perdition than all the Delilahs ever created."
And Katrine and he laughed together at his anathema, and went forward
into a dusky French twilight, singing as they went.
Around her room she pinned the written slips which he gave at every
lesson, Scripture which seemed perverted to uses other than its own:
"He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.
"Live with Goethe's Faust--learn it. You will understand Gounod's
better.
"All art comes from the same kind of nature. If you didn't sing
yours, you would paint it, carve it, write it, play it out; for, if
it is in you to create something artistic, nothing human can stop
your doing it.
"There are no mute, inglorious Miltons. Every one who has the
qualifications for success succeeds."
As time passed the letters to her unknown benefactor became more and
more intimate in tone by reason of her race and youth. No answer ever
coming to any of them, it was as though her thoughts were written and
cast into the eternal silence.
Upon the second anniversary of her farewell to Francis Ravenel, which
was soon after her return from Brittany to Paris, she took from the
depths of an old trunk the mementos of that time which seemed to her so
far away. Such trifling things: a pine cross tied with blue ribbon; a
grass ring which he had made for her once in the barley-field; a note or
two; a book of collected poems, marked. Trifling things, indeed! but her
heart throbbed with the sense of his presence as she held them in her
hands.
In the next room Nora was clattering some tea things, making the plain,
homely bustle that frequently keeps one sane. Out-of-doors it was one of
Paris' divine gray days, with pinks and lavenders showing in the
shadows; but neither the in-door noise nor the outside beauty held her.
She was back in the Carolinas with her first love; there was the odor of
pine and honeysuckle in the Paris air, a harvest moon in the sky.
"To forgive and forget and understand."
On the impulse of the moment she decided to write her story to the
unknown with no names, telling the pain which haunted her always; the
pain which she felt would be hers until the end. Having finished the
narrative, she concluded:
"I am trying to make it very clear to you. You have been, you are,
so kind. But I want you to know about me exactly as I am. The world
would say that this man did not treat me well. He had faults; he
had ignorances; we are none of us perfect; he was not a great man.
But he was just as I would have him."
And, womanlike, she added a postscript:
"You send me too much money. Lessons in fencing, dancing,
languages, music, cost a great deal. I have not been spending it
all, although I have been helping an art student, who has almost
starved himself to death in a room built on a roof, painting by
candle-light.
"P.P.S.--Also a girl who tried to drown herself because she cannot
sing, but she writes beautifully. I will send you one of her poems,
to show you she is worth helping.
[Illustration]
"P.P.P.S.--Also a very poor rag-picker with, I think, twelve
children. He looks even worse than this."
The routine of her life having been thoroughly established the preceding
winter, she fell easily again into the old lines. Every day she lunched
with Madame de Nemours. Sometimes, when engagements left them both free,
they dined together in quite a stately manner in the high, old tapestry
room, and once in a fortnight she was bidden to dinner with friends of
this great lady--Bartand, the dramatist; President Arnot; or Prince
Cassini, with his terrible vitality and schemes for universal
betterment.
One morning she was disturbed at her studies by a card from the
Countess, saying that Mrs. Lennox was below and wished to see her. She
had grown accustomed to the desire of strangers to be presented to her,
for, as Dermott had told her, the news of her voice was already
newspaper copy. In the drawing-room she found Madame de Nemours by the
window talking animatedly, in her pleasant, low voice, to a lady, young
and vivacious, wearing aggressive mourning.
"And this," the stranger cried, in a high, strong, musical voice, coming
forward, "is the Miss Dulany of whom I have been hearing such wonderful
things?" She waited for no response. "I have just been telling the
Countess that I almost met you at Ravenel House, in Carolina, over two
years ago. There was a house-party, and you refused to come."
Katrine flushed and turned pale again suddenly, as she realized that
this was the Mrs. Lennox whom, by current gossip, Frank was to marry,
and she lived over again in an instant, it seemed, the morning when she
had met them riding together by the ford at Ravenel.
"I was ill, I remember," Katrine explained, recovering herself;
"unfortunately ill, since I was prevented from meeting you." There was
both consideration and compliment in her tone.
"Everything has changed a great deal since then," Mrs. Lennox went on,
"with me as well as with others. I lost my mother the following winter,"
she glanced at her mourning as she spoke, "and Mrs. Ravenel has been
back to the old place but once, for a few weeks only. Mr. Ravenel (you
remember Mr. Ravenel?) has gone in for all sorts of things since then.
Nobody knows what came over him. Frank had never been one to tie himself
down, but he is a regular New York business man now. He buys mines and
sells them, and railroads and things." She laughed pleasantly. "It lacks
definiteness, I can see. And Nick van Rensselaer! I have just been
telling the Countess of him."
"I do not know Mr. van Rensselaer," said Katrine.
"What!" Mrs. Lennox cried, with amazement. "I thought you met him at
Ravenel! I understood he heard you sing there, and it was because of it
that he wanted to send you abroad to study."
"If it be Mr. van Rensselaer who has been so kind to me, I do not know
it," Katrine answered, in no small degree annoyed by this enforced
intimacy. "I have never seen him nor heard his name before in my life."
If Mrs. Lennox noted Katrine's manner she was in nowise deterred by it
from going deeper into the subject.
"Mrs. Ravenel told me," she continued, with excitement in her voice,
"that Nick van Rensselaer came to her at Bar Harbor, and asked the use
of her name if he furnished the means to send you abroad to study. He
said that he was especially anxious to remain unknown in the matter.
Mrs. Ravenel told me afterward that you had declined the offer because
of having inherited a fortune yourself. But, of course, I thought you
must have met him; in fact, I remember that Frank said he thought so,
too. By-the-way," she went on, rising to go, "he is coming over soon;
Mr. Ravenel, I mean." She looked conscious for a second, as though
preferring to keep something back, and then finished: "He will, of
course, call while he is here?"
"He may be so kind," Katrine answered, suavely.
"Good-bye," Mrs. Lennox said, holding out a slim, black-gloved hand
first to the Countess and then to Katrine. "I hope your studies will let
you come to me soon. I hear you are to make your début in the spring."