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After his mother's recovery Frank went back to New York immediately, keen to arrange the railroad matters and get the actual work started. In the first interview with De Peyster, however, he found that Dermott McDermott was far from being out of the reckoning.
"It is rumored," said De Peyster, "that he is trying to elect himself president of N.C. & T. road. If he succeeds he can control the traffic in Carolina to such an extent that our line would be a failure, even if built."
"Then," returned Frank, and any one who loved him would have gloried at the set of his mouth and chin as he spoke, "he mustn't be allowed to be president of the N.C. & T. We must buy up the proxies."
Before the end of the week, however, they were surprised again by the news that McDermott had refused to consider the presidency of the N.C. & T. road, even if tendered him, and had given out that he would sail for Europe within a fortnight for an indefinite stay.
"But," De Peyster ended, as he repeated the news to Frank, "if you think he's whipped you don't know him! I'm more anxious over this last move than if he stayed right here and fought us openly. There is more to it than we know."
In silence Frank held the same belief, though he reasoned that McDermott's European trip could be well explained by his affection for Katrine; and so the thought of Dermott away from New York disturbed him far more than it did Philip de Peyster, but for very different reasons.
It was at Bar Harbor that he received the first letter from Katrine, in accordance with the compact that she should write her benefactor once a month. The letter had been forwarded from his Paris bankers, enclosed with business letters in a great envelope.
With a throbbing heart he opened it. She had touched it; it had been near her; one of those small, soft hands, with the dimples at the base of the fingers, had penned the strange, small writing:
DEAR UNKNOWN ONE,—There is little to tell. I go every day to Josef. He thinks it possible I may become a great singer.
I wonder about you, and feel something like Pip in "Great Expectations," only I know how good and great you must be. Isn't it fine to be like a fairy princess, who can do anything for people she chooses? And to have the heart to help—ah, that is the best of all!
In my mind, for we Irish imagine always, I have made you a stately lady, perhaps not very strong, who is much alone and has had a great sorrow, who helps the world because it is good to help. So every month I will send you letters of what I do and dream to do. If you are alone much, it may amuse you to read of my queer life here in Paris. If my letters bore you, you will not have to read them. I want only to show that I appreciate your help and your interest in me. To know Josef is the greatest thing, save one, that has come to my life. He gives me little slips of writing to pin up in my room to learn by heart. The last one read:
"What is it that enables one to live through the dead calm which succeeds a passionate desolation? Good work and hard work. The way to live well is to work well."
Another letter came in the same mail, which Frank read with a distaste for the writer of it, for the affair that made such a letter possible. It was from another woman, but something in the fervent little soul beyond the seas called to him, to the best in him, and he tore the other note to pieces and wrote a line or two in answer which closed an affair before it was well begun.
For two months he had carried a letter which he had written to Katrine during the first week of his mother's illness. He took it from his pocket and read it over now, wondering if it were wise to send it:
"I heard of your great sorrow sixty miles from a railroad in the Canadian woods. I started that night to see if I could help you. To speak truth, Katrine, I don't know why I started to come to you, except that I could not stay away.
"In New York I met McDermott, who told me you had sailed to study with Josef. This did not change my plans in the least. But there came the question of that land on the other side of the river which detained me for several days, and then my mother's dangerous illness.
"I have been with her constantly since—the crisis is past, but she is still too ill for me to leave her. I am coming to you just as soon as I can. And I am going to ask you to forgive me, to take me and make whatever you can out of my worthless self. Whatever of good there is in me has come through you. You have given me belief in purity and selflessness and hope of achievement.
"Don't remember me as I was; don't do that, Little One; only as I hope to be; as I hope you will help me to be. I am coming for your answer the first minute I can get away.
There had been many reasons for not sending this letter: his mother's illness; his sudden plunge into business; but underneath all was the fear, which grew larger day by day, that he might receive from Katrine the rebuff which his conduct toward her so richly merited.
Uncertainly he held the letter, reviewing one of the curious turns that life had taken in giving Katrine an ally in his mother.
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 casement, 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 assurance he fell asleep, as she sat by his bedside with her hand on his cheek.
