"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 gra.s.s, breaking into a pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sured 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 Honore,
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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s: "_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.
"Gregoire!" he called to the sleeping guide.
"Oui, monsieur."
"The distance to the nearest railroad?"