Katrine Part 20

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 a.s.sisted 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 protege 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 n.i.g.g.ardly?'

'n.i.g.g.ardly!' 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sisted 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sistance 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 d.a.m.ned 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 repet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"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 Ca.s.sini, with his terrible vitality and schemes for universal betterment.