Katrine Part 18

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 cas.e.m.e.nt, 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 a.s.surance 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 sc.r.a.p 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 peac.o.c.ks strutted by an old fountain, and a black poodle, who was both a thief and a miser, snarled at the pa.s.sers-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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sers-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 a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sed.

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 sh.e.l.ls, 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.