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When Mrs. Ravenel and Katrine entered Frank's apartments they found Dr. Johnston by the window of the sitting-room, and, with no spoken word, Katrine knew he had been waiting for her to come. His face bespoke more than professional anxiety; it bore a look of sorrow and the dread of losing a dear friend.
According Katrine but a scant nod of recognition, he crossed to the door of the sleeping-room, and, after looking in, made a gesture, stealthy and cautious, for Katrine to enter.
The room was dark save for a night light. Frank's face was turned toward her, his eyes closed. One hand, helpless, unutterably appealing, lay outside the white cover, and at sight of him thus it seemed her heart would break.
With a swift movement she knelt beside the bed, waiting to take the poor, tired head upon her breast. As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw his lips tremble.
"Dear," she said.
There was silence, and then: "It is worth all—it is worth all—for this," he whispered. "Touch me, Katrine!"
And she laid her cheek on his.
"Katrine?"
"Yes, dear."
"You will stay? I will try to sleep now if you will touch me. Katrine, you will not slip away?"
"I shall stay until you are quite well, beloved."
At three in the morning he awoke with a shiver. "Where are you?" he called. "Where are you, Katrine?"
"Here," she answered, laying a hand on his cheek.
"Ah, thank God!"
It was over a month before Mrs. Ravenel and Katrine were able to take Frank south, where he longed to be. The St. Petersburg engagement was cancelled, and the Metropolitan manager, angry at Katrine's forgetfulness to notify him that she could not sing the night Mrs. Ravenel had come for her, made many caustic newspaper criticisms. But both events seemed entirely unimportant to her, for Frank's paralysis, which the doctors had believed but a temporary affair, did not leave him as soon as had been hoped.
There was a splendid Celtic recklessness in the way she surrendered everything for him, a generosity which Mrs. Ravenel saw with commending eyes, believing it, by some strange mother-reasoning, to be but just. But Frank was far from taking the same attitude in the matter. Almost the first day he was able to be wheeled on the great piazza in the sunshine he spoke to Katrine of the time she must soon leave, to keep the St. Petersburg engagements.
"I have no St. Petersburg engagements," she explained, briefly. "I cancelled them."
He sat with closed eyes, but she saw the tears between the lids as he spoke. "I have not had the courage to tell you," he said, at length, slowly, "before, but all that McDermott said is true, Katrine."
"Indeed!" Words could not explain the tone. She might have received news of the Andaman Islanders as carelessly.
"You know what it means to me!" he said, after a silence.
"I know what you think it means to you," she answered.
"It means that I have and am nothing. When I think of mother—" He looked at Katrine, with her radiant beauty, as she reached upward for an early rose. "And your friend McDermott," he went on, "has done a strange thing. This morning I opened my mail for the first time since my illness. In it I found a letter from him, saying that it could be proven that my father had never made an early marriage, and that Quantrelle was a great liar. I don't understand it. I saw Quantrelle myself, as well as his brother, when I was in France. There is not a doubt the marriage was an entirely legal one, not the shadow of a doubt. Ah," he cried, "Katrine, it seems to kill me when I think of it!"
"Francis Ravenel," she cried, the old smile on her face as she came toward him and placed her hand caressingly on his cheek, "you told me once, not long ago, to ask you to marry me. I do."
"Do what?"
"Ask you to marry me."
"And I refuse," he said, firmly. "I will not be married through pity."
"Oh, very well." She seated herself on some cushions on the top step, humming softly, as though his words were of no moment whatever.
"You don't think I mean it, do you?" he demanded, at length.
She made no answer whatever.
"Katrine," he said, at length.
"Yes."
"What are you thinking of?"
"I've gone away," she answered. "I was not being treated very well, and so I went away. I'm over in my Dreaming Land, My Own Country."
"Ah, come back to me!" he cried.
"Very well," she said, obligingly, though she made no movement toward him. "I've been rebuilding the old lodge, in my thoughts, for Josef. It will be such a wonderful place for him to rest in! He will want the first floor made into one room. And Nora and I will come there in the summer-time, when we're not singing. Perhaps you will come to visit us sometime, Mr. Ravenel!" she said, politely.
"Katrine, Katrine!" he pleaded. "It would be so unfair to you."
"Nonsense," she returned, shortly. There was surely never anything kinder or better in the world than this belittling of the whole matter.
"And I may never be strong again—"
"Then I can have my own way more," she laughed.
"And your voice—"
"Beloved," she said, gravely, "I can never give up my singing. Don't think me vain when I say I sing too well to make it right for me to give it up. I don't believe that anybody who does a thing well, who has the real gift, can give it up. But that I shall never have to sing for money is a great happiness for me. I can sing for the poorer folk, for the ones who really feel. Ah," she cried, "I've plans of my own, Josef and I! And the study and the pain were to teach me how unimportant all things are in this world save only love."
"Katrine! Katrine!" he cried, "you must help me to be square to you!" He raised his hand, feeble from illness, in the manner of one who takes an oath. "I solemnly swear that I will never do you the injustice —"
"Don't!" she cried, springing quickly to her feet and catching the upraised hand quickly to her breast. "Don't!" Adding quickly, with a laugh, "It's dreadful to commit perjury!"
Their hands were still clasped as Mrs. Ravenel came out to join them. In the lavender gown, with her fair face smiling, and carrying a work-bag of the interminable knitting in one hand, she did not look in the least the emissary of fate she really was.
"Mr. de Peyster has sent some letters, Frank. He writes me that none of them are of importance, but that you may care to look them over. And they made me think of a great envelope of papers which I had meant to send to you before you were taken ill. I found it just after you had been looking up all those family affairs, before you went abroad! I put them with my knitting, and naturally forgot. Your father gave it to me, oh, so many years ago! and I put it in the cedar chest." She gave the papers to Frank, talking in a gay, unimportant manner as she did so. "Isn't that curious on the outside?" she demanded. "' To be opened in case my will is ever disputed. ' Now, who did your father think would ever dispute his will? I had been a faithful and," she laughed, "more or less obedient wife for many years. And you were too small to dispute anything except matters with your tutor. Don't look them over now, dearest, they may worry you!"
Frank took the envelope with an inexplicable feeling of hope. That his mother had forgotten important papers did not surprise him in the least. She had once taken a mortgage held by his father and pasted it over a place in a chimney where it smoked. She said herself that her temperament was not one for affairs.
A quick exchange of glances passed between Frank and Katrine as he excused himself to go to his room for rest, and then, alone at twilight, he broke the seal upon the confession of that Francis who had preceded him. To his utter confounding, he discovered in the envelope a certificate of legal marriage between Francis Ravenel and Patricia McDermott, duly witnessed and sealed. Wrapped with several letters which had been exchanged between them was a detailed account of the unfortunate affair in his father's crooked writing, and inside of all a bill of divorce, which had been obtained in Illinois previous to the elder Ravenel's marriage with the beautiful Julie D'Hauteville, of New Orleans.
As Frank read the history of the boyish folly he felt that little excusing was needed for his dead father, for the early marriage seemed but an escapade of a spoiled and self-indulgent boy with a headstrong and sentimental girl, neither of whom had taken a thought for the future.
"My wife renounced her faith to marry me [his father wrote]. The first year of our marriage, which was a legal one only, was one of great unhappiness, for at heart Patricia remained a Catholic still. She was depressed, suspicious, afraid of the future. Recriminations and quarrels were constant between us. Finally, I went to America with no farewell to my wife, to acquaint my father with my foolish act, and to ask him to make some suitable provision for us. Immediately following my departure, I discovered, my wife re-entered the Catholic Church. Soon afterward I heard that her father had extended his forgiveness, and that she had been welcomed back by her kinfolk in Ireland. Hearing nothing from her whatever, with the procrastination which was ever one of my great faults, I put off doing anything about the annulment of the marriage until the father of Quantrelle le Rouge wrote me that he had heard of her death as well as that of the child. But before my marriage to Mademoiselle D'Hauteville, I took the precaution to obtain a divorce quietly in Illinois. Even if Patricia were living and should marry again, I knew she needed no protection to make the marriage a valid one, as her Church had never recognized that she was married to me, the ceremony having been performed by a Protestant."
Frank laid aside the papers, and, with his head thrown back and his eyes closed, sat in the gathering darkness thinking, with neither continuity nor result, of that strange life—current which, the family history claimed, connected him backward to the song-making minstrels of the time of Charlemagne; to the gallant lovers in the time of the Stuarts; to the self-indulgent and magnetic Ravenels of North Carolina.
What had they done? Dermott's question came back to him again and again, and through the depression into which this thinking was leading him he heard Katrine singing softly on the piazza underneath his window.
Like a child he rose and went to her. She was standing by one of the great white columns looking into the shadowy pine-trees as he came. He did not touch her. He had such fear of breaking utterly before her that he said, with forced quietude of voice:
"I've changed my mind about marrying you, Katrine." In spite of his effort to be calm, his voice broke into something like a sob as he spoke her name.
"Yes," she said, realizing what the import of the papers must have been.
After he had told Katrine the important fact in his father's statement, there came to him with a sudden suspicion of the truth the remembrance of Dermott's letter, in which the Irishman had stated that whatever documents he had held concerning the early marriage of the elder Ravenel had been burned.
Taking the letter from his pocket, he gave it to Katrine, who read it in the fading light and returned it wordlessly. She had turned her face away that Frank might not see the glow of admiration she felt for that Irish Dermott whom Frank could never understand.
"What do you think of the letter, Katrine?" Frank asked. "I fail utterly to understand it. Dermott knew, when he wrote it, that my father had made that early marriage. It had been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt even to me. I feel sure that he knew nothing of a divorce or he would have mentioned it."
"I think," Katrine said, softly, "that Dermott told a story. You remember"—her voice broke a little—"you discovered long ago he didn't always tell the truth."
"And you think, then," Frank insisted, "that when McDermott wrote this letter," he made a motion with it as he spoke, "he still believed that my father and mother were never legally married?"
"He believed just that," Katrine answered. "He told me so the day he wrote the letter."
"But why did he write me what he believed to be an untruth? Why did he burn papers which he must have believed to be valuable evidence?"
"It's a way of his," Katrine answered, vaguely.
"Katrine," Frank cried, "there is more to this! Why did McDermott do this thing for me?"
"He told me he would help you."
"When?"
"The day I went down to Wall Street to ask him to stop the attack on your firm, when you were so ill. It was the day I told him that I loved you."
"And loving you himself, as he has always done, he did this for me?"
She made a sign of acquiescence.
"Ah!" he cried, the glow of enthusiasm in his eyes. "I have never understood the man, but, before God, I honor and reverence him for what he did. There is much of the hero in this strange Dermott McDermott."
"I have known that always," Katrine answered.
"And still you prefer to marry me?"
She was standing at a little distance from him, and as their eyes met she nodded her curly head quickly, as a child might have done.
"Ah," he cried, opening his arms to her, "come to me, come to me, you divine little soul! I'm not worthy, but God knows how I will try to be!"
And a little later: "It is cold for you here," he said. "Shall we go in, Mrs. Francis Ravenel?"