XVIII

KATRINE MEETS ANNE LENNOX

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 assisted 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 protégé 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 niggardly?' 'Niggardly!' 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 pass 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 assisted 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 gratitude 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 pass 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 assistance 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 damned 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 repetition 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:

As time passed 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 grass 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:

And, womanlike, she added a postscript:

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 Cassini, with his terrible vitality and schemes for universal betterment.

One morning she was disturbed at her studies by a card from the Countess, saying that Mrs. Lennox was below and wished to see her. She had grown accustomed to the desire of strangers to be presented to her, for, as Dermott had told her, the news of her voice was already newspaper copy. In the drawing-room she found Madame de Nemours by the window talking animatedly, in her pleasant, low voice, to a lady, young and vivacious, wearing aggressive mourning.

"And this," the stranger cried, in a high, strong, musical voice, coming forward, "is the Miss Dulany of whom I have been hearing such wonderful things?" She waited for no response. "I have just been telling the Countess that I almost met you at Ravenel House, in Carolina, over two years ago. There was a house-party, and you refused to come."

Katrine flushed and turned pale again suddenly, as she realized that this was the Mrs. Lennox whom, by current gossip, Frank was to marry, and she lived over again in an instant, it seemed, the morning when she had met them riding together by the ford at Ravenel.

"I was ill, I remember," Katrine explained, recovering herself; "unfortunately ill, since I was prevented from meeting you." There was both consideration and compliment in her tone.

"Everything has changed a great deal since then," Mrs. Lennox went on, "with me as well as with others. I lost my mother the following winter," she glanced at her mourning as she spoke, "and Mrs. Ravenel has been back to the old place but once, for a few weeks only. Mr. Ravenel (you remember Mr. Ravenel?) has gone in for all sorts of things since then. Nobody knows what came over him. Frank had never been one to tie himself down, but he is a regular New York business man now. He buys mines and sells them, and railroads and things." She laughed pleasantly. "It lacks definiteness, I can see. And Nick van Rensselaer! I have just been telling the Countess of him."

"I do not know Mr. van Rensselaer," said Katrine.

"What!" Mrs. Lennox cried, with amazement. "I thought you met him at Ravenel! I understood he heard you sing there, and it was because of it that he wanted to send you abroad to study."

"If it be Mr. van Rensselaer who has been so kind to me, I do not know it," Katrine answered, in no small degree annoyed by this enforced intimacy. "I have never seen him nor heard his name before in my life."

If Mrs. Lennox noted Katrine's manner she was in nowise deterred by it from going deeper into the subject.

"Mrs. Ravenel told me," she continued, with excitement in her voice, "that Nick van Rensselaer came to her at Bar Harbor, and asked the use of her name if he furnished the means to send you abroad to study. He said that he was especially anxious to remain unknown in the matter. Mrs. Ravenel told me afterward that you had declined the offer because of having inherited a fortune yourself. But, of course, I thought you must have met him; in fact, I remember that Frank said he thought so, too. By-the-way," she went on, rising to go, "he is coming over soon; Mr. Ravenel, I mean." She looked conscious for a second, as though preferring to keep something back, and then finished: "He will, of course, call while he is here?"

"He may be so kind," Katrine answered, suavely.

"Good-bye," Mrs. Lennox said, holding out a slim, black-gloved hand first to the Countess and then to Katrine. "I hope your studies will let you come to me soon. I hear you are to make your début in the spring."

Katrine laughed. "That will be as Josef says."

"Good-bye again."

After Mrs. Lennox had left the room, Katrine and the Countess looked at each other with questioning in the eyes of each.

"You lived at a place called Ravenel," Madame de Nemours asked, "and never told me?"

"I did not think the name one you would care to hear," Katrine answered.

"Ah, you so sweet thing!" the Countess cried, impulsively, putting her hand on the girl's cheek. "You were right. There are probably thousands of Ravenels in America unconnected with my unfortunate life."

But Katrine, who had had her own surprises in the interview, inquired, "Why did Mrs. Lennox, who is very beautiful, very wealthy, and of the monde, take so much trouble to come here to tell me of a Mr. van Rensselaer?"

"I didn't think she came for that alone," answered the Countess. "I thought she wanted you to know that Monsieur Ravenel was coming over to visit her."

Naturally, a marked change in Katrine's attitude toward her unknown benefactor followed this talk with Anne Lennox. She had become accustomed to think of "The Dear Unknown" as a lady, old and beneficent. The new idea was startling. Thinking it over, she became convinced of the extreme unlikelihood that two people should have become so greatly interested in her voice at exactly the same time, and her conclusions led to believing that Mrs. Lennox had probably given her a true version of the affair. But if Nicholas van Rensselaer were her patron, instead of some white-haired old lady down in Leeds or Kent or Surrey, as she had imagined, her last letter must inevitably have told him, who had spent so much time in North Carolina, of her love for Francis Ravenel.

The obviously honest thing to do was to write to Mr. van Rensselaer immediately, to let him know that without effort or curiosity on her part his identity had been revealed to her.

Her letter to him was short to abruptness. She stated briefly the manner in which the information had come to her as well as her regret that his wish to remain unknown had been thwarted. She hoped that her voice would fulfill all the promise he thought it gave two years back; referred to the personal nature of her last letter; spoke of her desire to repay in full the money part of her obligation to him, realizing that the kind thought could never be repaid in this world, and signed herself his "grateful Katrine Dulany."

In a fortnight the answer came:

And it was a curious thing to note that this letter, caused by the chatter of Anne Lennox, was the direct cause of Katrine's next meeting with Frank, a meeting which, but for this correspondence which led to an acquaintance with the Van Rensselaers, might never have taken place.

One evening, shortly after the receipt of this letter, Madame de Nemours told Katrine a piece of news for which she was not unprepared.

"By-the-way," she said, "Mrs. Lennox was here to-day. Mr. Ravenel is expected in Paris to-morrow. I have asked a party to dine with them on Friday."

Katrine had just said good-night to the Countess, and was standing in the doorway, candle in hand, with the light shining full on her face, as Madame de Nemours spoke; but she received the news with no change of face, no tremor of an eyelid. She felt it a loyalty to old love that the Countess should be forever unable to recognize in Frank the man whom they had discussed so often, namelessly; and of whom Madame de Nemours had such a slighting opinion. The strangest thing of all was that she had for this man's coming; this man for whose presence she had longed day and night for two years; the remembrance of whose words could thrill her and bring tears to her eyes or a smile to her lips; that for this man's coming, she had no thought save regret that he was to come, and determination not to meet him.

"I want to be sent away, Illustrious Master," she said, the following afternoon, to Josef, when the lesson was over, and they stood together looking at the sun going down over the gray mist of the Paris roofs. "I am not well, and there is some one coming to Madame de Nemours' on Friday whom I do not wish to meet."

Josef looked at her quickly.

"Mademoiselle Silence," he said, "I, who read voices as others read a printed page, understand. You had better see him."

Katrine flushed crimson, but changed suddenly to such a whiteness that Josef thought she would have fallen.

"Forgive me," he said, tenderly, putting his hand on her shoulder. "I am the surgeon with the knife, but my work is almost done. Let me tell you something. You have worked as I have never seen any one work before. I have not praised much, but I have seen. Ah, I know! Tones, little, big, staccato, breath, breath, breath! Over, and yet again over. And the thinking a tone, which is the hardest of all. And the acting—to conceive what a character's voice should be; to understand that the timbre of Carmen's voice would not be that of Marguerite's; that the soul of the voice must change for each character. To slave, to slave, to slave, and suffer as you have done into the third year, is it not? None other can know the value of it all as I know it, and at the end what has the master done for you? Meet this man and you will find out. It is for my reward I am asking, for I, too, have done something."

Katrine took the hand of the great teacher and kissed it lovingly.

"Something?" she said. "You have done all."

"Not all; a part, a very little part," he returned. "But meet the man, my child, and you will see how much has been done by both of us. On Saturday morning you will come to me. You will say, 'Prophetic man, I am ashamed through all my being to have loved so slight a thing.' You will find you have outgrown him, and he will have only the weight of the Santa Claus, which children painlessly outgrow. And ever after you will have toward him a kindly mother-feeling, for that is woman's way toward their first loves."

Katrine shook her head. "I do not want to forget."

"No," said Josef, "you never have wanted to forget, and that has made it hard for me. You have a strange creed of your own. But sometimes, when I know beyond words that I have received a 'wireless' message from you over the roof-tops, I begin to believe you dangerous, Katrine Dulany. But your belief of 'mind-curing' people into being better has the seed of truth in it which makes so many new creeds dangerous. You can make yourself so great by fine thinking that the people who come in contact with you understand and are uplifted."

"It is a thing more subtle, Greatness!" Katrine answered.

"It is not a thing more subtle, Obstinacy!" he returned, with a laugh. "However, have your way! You are ordered, to Fontainebleau to-morrow. Your voice is in rags, shall I say? You will stay for two weeks at the house of Madame Lomard. You will lie in the open and breathe much. And so, good-bye to you!"

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