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In the ten days before her father's death nothing seemed spared Katrine. The hopeless life of the man was recounted to her hour by hour, interspersed with the rereadings of Frank's letters, and, most of all, with remorse at the desolate place he had prepared for her when he had gone.
"But ye'll have a friend in Mr. Ravenel," he told her, earnestly. "One who will help you, Katrine, and ye need have no fear to take his help. He is one who has a high thought for women and would never betray a trust. It's a great comfort to me to know ye've him, Katrine."
On the day before the end his grief was bitter to hear.
"My little wee lassie," he sobbed, "I'm leaving ye alone with nothing; none to shield you, none to care, but just one friend. I'm going out, and it's good I'm going. I would always have held you back, always have been a drag to your name—for ye'll make a name! It's in you, as it was in her." He stopped speaking, but after a little space began, with a crooning, the glorious "Ah, Patria Mia," and it seemed to Katrine as though her heart would stop beating in her sorrow, for she knew it was her unknown mother of whom he thought.
"Ah," he whispered, at length, wiping his brow, "the music's gone from me. In the whole matter with your mother, Katrine, I was at fault. I was jealous of her gift, of the love she had for it, and made her life miserable by my demandings." He placed his hand tenderly on her head as he spoke. "Katrine," he said, solemnly, "with those we love it's never enough to forgive and forget. One must forgive and try to understand . To forget and forgive. Ah, Katrine, time helps us there! It does almost all of the work, so it's little credit we need take either for the forgiving or forgetting. But to try to understand! When those we love have hurt us or injured us, to study why it was done: what inherited weakness in them, what fault of their environment brought it about, to study to understand, that's the real Christianity."
In the starry watches of the night, wide-eyed and grief-shaken, Katrine took the lesson to heart both for father and lover; learned it with heart and head as well; saw the disarming of criticism, the tolerance, the selflessness which it would bring, and knew that it was good.
But, she demanded of herself, was she large-souled enough to acquire such tolerance toward Francis Ravenel? Leaning on the window-ledge, looking into the clouded darkness of the night, awaiting the hour to give her father the potion that for a time relieved his pain, she went over tenderly, bit by bit, the summer that had passed, that flower-scented, love-illumined summer for which she felt she was to pay with the happiness of a lifetime.
She lived again her first meeting with Frank under the beeches; the recklessness of her own mood because of her father's drinking; Frank's lonesomeness at his home-coming; the touching of hands on the old log; the sympathy between them from the first, and at the end asked herself, honestly, who was most to blame. She had done wrong to permit him to kiss her the night under the pine-tree, but she would not have foregone the memory of it for all the world had to offer.
On the last day about noon the pain left her father, and toward evening he asked to be helped to his old place by the window, that he might see the sun go down behind the mountains. "There's a letter of Mr. Ravenel's I'd like you to see, Katrine," he said, motioning her to bring him the carefully treasured bundle of Frank's writings.
After assisting him to find the desired letter, she sat at his feet with a white face and fixed eyes as he read:
"I met Katrine to-day on the river-bank. She was well and beautiful and happy. It makes me want to be a better man every time I see her. I want to help to make her life happy—" The hand which held the letter suddenly dropped lifeless.
"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 grass, breaking into a passion 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 assured 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.