III

A KINDNESS WITH MIXED MOTIVES

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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "G.o.d, 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 pa.s.s; 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 inc.u.mbent. Instead, he found a reclaimed garden; hedges of laurel, trim and straight; old-fashioned flowers, s...o...b..a.l.l.s, 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 d.u.c.h.ess.

She had, as Frank found afterward, an excellent gift at anecdote, but a clipping p.r.o.nunciation 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 h.e.l.l 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.