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When Frank came out on the porch the next morning at Ravenel, he found Patrick Dulany waiting on horse by the main steps. It was the first time the two men had met in daylight, and with the keenest interest Mr. Ravenel inspected his strange overseer; for in the week since his return he had heard much of his wit and his ability.
He found him to be a large man with a broad face tanned to the hue of a mulatto. His eyes were light blue with the fulness under them of people who have gift in speech. His silver hair, of which he had a great quantity, set strangely around his dark face, falling low over a brow markedly intellectual. But it was the mouth and chin at which Ravenel most wondered, for their lines were strong, the lips full and finely chiselled, showing, one could have sworn, high birth and great resolution.
His clothes were of tweed, with a riding-cap far back on his head, and he rode with an excellent seat. Upon seeing Mr. Ravenel he dismounted, removed his cap, and advanced with outstretched hand, in the manner of one welcoming home an old friend.
"Twas the sawmill business that kept me from seeing you sooner, Mr. Ravenel," he began. "But Katrine's been telling me of you, with some worry, I think, in her gentle soul for fear that you may not understand our friend McDermott."
Francis replied with a comprehending smile.
"Now that I've seen ye," said Dulany, "I know you'll understand. He has a peculiarity of nature. He likes to arrange certain unimportant details of life that they may sound better in the telling. But one has a small knowledge of human nature if he discount McDermott because of this. In Ireland his name is a household word. He's here to-day, gone to-morrow. He works like a galley-slave; his word is as good as his bond when given in honor. And 'tis for others he works always. Generous, he gives all, all, all! his work, his brain, the money it earns, everything! His is a great soul, a very great soul. There's not a man in America, barring the President, who has his personal power. Quietly, his name unworded in the newspapers, he holds Tammany in his hand. I can't tell you how enthusiastic I am about him! Mines, politics, Wall Street, he's into them all, a million ideas a minute! Helps the chap that's down. He helps every one with whom he comes in contact. He has helped me."
His sadness of tone introduced the next statement better than words could have done.
"Mr. Ravenel," he said, "I have a confession to make to you. I drink." He looked Frank squarely in the face as he spoke, with no flinching. "Ye may have heard it from one or another since ye've been back. It's been a habit of mine for some time. I was not myself the other evening when I met you on the hill. The worst of it is," and he spoke the words brightly and bravely, "I've no excuse for it, if there can be found an excusing for such a habit. The thing is growing upon me in this solitude. I try, God alone knows how I try, for Katrine's sake, to resist; but only those who have fought the thing can realize what its temptations are. However, I've been thinking that if I drink too much, or fail to suit you, it might make it easier for you to tell me to go, if you knew it would be better for me that I went."
"I am hoping that you will not find it necessary to go, Mr. Dulany. The plantation has never been in better shape."
"And I'm glad to hear you say that, sir," was the answer. "Well"—hopefully—"things may change for the better in me, and so, good-day," and spurring his horse he was off at a gallop down the broad road, and Ravenel stood listening to the horse's hoofs clatter over the bridge, strike the soft road under the pines, and die away in silence before he turned into the bridle-path which led to the stables.
And a strange thing occurred but a few minutes after this interview, when Frank made his daily visit to the stables. One of the head grooms explained a horse's lameness to him as due to a bad place in the road near the north gate which, he finished, would probably not be mended until Mr. Dulany was over "his coming attack."
"Is he drinking again?" Ravenel asked.
"For three days past," the groom answered.
Francis made no comment whatever, but the next day he discovered the man's suspicions justified, and the third, as he rode to Marlton, he saw Katrine, a pale-faced, desolate little figure, sitting on the garden bench, her head in her hands, the picture of despair. About five o'clock Jerry drove to the station for Dr. Johnston, and the same evening after the dinner Nora O'Grady's son, a red-haired, unkempt boy of seventeen, brought a short letter from Katrine, asking that the doctor be sent as soon as possible.
"Mr. Dulany is drinking?" Frank said, interrogatively, to the youth.
"Something fierce," was the laconic answer.
"Is he better this evening?"
"Worse. Heart's actin' up," the boy responded.
At the end of the week, after three days spent with the Dulanys, at the old lodge, Dr. Johnston and Francis sat together at the dinner-table at Ravenel. Mrs. Ravenel had left them, and the great doctor, in the admirably restrained and cautious language of the scientific mind, gave his findings in the case, as it were.
"Mr. Dulany's habits," the great doctor began, "I should say, after such superficial investigation as I have been able to make, may be cured. One thing I have noted with pleasure. He has lost none of his mental integrity. He is capable of the truth concerning himself. Generally those given to the alcoholic habit deny everything or secrete everything concerning it when sober. Sometimes they are sentimental over it, given to self-pity, with even a certain desire for dramatic effects in the statements about themselves. Dulany is still, so far as I can judge, honest. To-day he told me the history of himself, with a gay humor in the telling. He is a descendant, it seems, of the great and the gifted. There are lawless loves behind him, a picturesque ancestry, artistic and, on the wrong side of the blanket, aristocratic as well."
"It is the ancestry of genius," Francis answered.
"It is the ancestry of Katrine Dulany," Dr. Johnston returned, looking at Frank with an untranslatable smile.
A silence fell between them, broken at length by the doctor. "I have decided to take Mr. Dulany to New York with me. I shall keep him near me as long as is necessary. If there is no organic trouble, of which I have some fear, the case will be simple enough, if there is the desire in him to help me. He was keen to have his daughter go with him, but I told him frankly it was better that she should not go. He leans too much on her. He must strengthen his own will; he must learn to rely on himself."
As the doctor spoke it was not of Patrick Dulany that Francis thought, but of Katrine. The people were coming on the twenty-seventh; it was now but the seventeenth. He would have her to himself for ten days, ten days of those caressing eyes, of the charming voice and open adulation, and then? He closed his eyes to whatever lay beyond. He would go away to keep his engagements and forget. He always had forgotten; he would, he thought, be able always to forget.
And the ten days were his; days on the river fishing by the Indian Rocks, or drifting with the current under the dogwoods' white, open faces down to the falls; days with lunches in the rose-garden, and Abt and Schubert songs under the pines at twilight, when their hands touched in the exchange of a flower or a book and lingered in the touching; when their eyes had learned the answering of each other with no spoken word. And the question and answer were the same in the Garden of Eden, before man and woman made their first great mistake and did the thing that was intended for them to do.
For Frank this companionship was unutterably sweet. He enjoyed the small and unimportant events of their intercourse; the way Katrine would save flowers for him to wear, pinning them in his coat with a flushed cheek, or read, with an ecstasy of appreciation, a line from some great writer, marking a meaning he had never found, or laugh at his old riding-clothes, his Southern prejudices, saying once: "To a man of the world like myself, these ideas seem trivial."
On one of these ten precious days the lawyers at Marlton telephoned him to obtain an interview. The business was important, and he started immediately for a conference with them. By the fence opening into the main road from the lodge he found Katrine, in her high-waisted black frock, looking out between the bars of the great swinging gate, with a radiance about her, an inconsequential joy such as he had never seen before in any human being. She had a letter tucked in her breast, and at sight of him she touched it.
"He is getting better, better, better, and the doctor writes he may be quite himself again," she said, with no salutation whatever, her face a wonder to behold.
"I am rejoiced more than I can say, Katrine," he answered.
"You have been so good," she replied, gratefully.
"Thank you," he said, gravely, and though the words were trivial the manner gave them significance.
"Were you coming to call on me?" Katrine inquired.
Frank shook his head. "The lawyers at Marlton are waiting for me."
"Stay with me," she said, opening her hand and showing some nuts, as though they might be an inducement to remain. "It's lonesome. I've finished practising. Stay with me!"
"Duty calls," he answered, looking down at her.
"Put your fingers in your ears! If you once listen to her, you can never hear any other thing in life." She folded her arms on one of the bars of the gate, resting her chin upon them, as she looked up at him. "If you will stay with me," she hesitated, searching her mind for further inducements, "I'll tell you tales of Killybegs and the Black Bradley Brothers, who hid their sister in the 'pocheen' barrel"—she waited a minute—"and of the wedding of Peggy Menalis on the old sea-wall."
He shook his head.
"And I'll sing you a funny little song that ends like this":
She sang the tones out sweet and true as a bird. "Is she calling still?" she asked.
"Who?" Frank asked, not following.
"Duty," she answered; and as she spoke she shut her eyes tight and drew the lids together.
"Somehow, I don't hear her so plainly as I did," he returned, with a laugh.
There was another pause, filled by a glance which made his heart throb.
"And if you stayed," she went on, at length, "I could tell you how nice you are."
Frank smiled. "I don't hear her at all now—that Duty person," he said, gayly.
"You are," she hesitated, "a very nice man."
He kept his eyes averted.
"One of the nicest I have ever known."
He fastened his eyes on the Chestnut Ridge.
"The nicest of all," she said, almost in a whisper, her eyes brimming over with laughter.
At the words he sprang to the ground and stood beside her.
"And Duty?" she asked.
"I don't know whether it's Duty or not, but something tells me that there's nothing in all the world of any importance except to stay with you," he answered.
But with his acquiescence there came the veering in her moods for which he had already learned to watch.
"Where were you going?" she asked.
"The lawyers telephoned for me from Marlton."
"They are waiting for you?"
"Yes."
"And you are going to keep them waiting because I asked you to stay?"
"Them or the whole world," he answered.
"King Francis," she said, with a courtesy, "must do no wrong. Here is a flower—a horrible one, it is true, but the only one I have. Wear it, and go to the lawyer men and think of me. Perhaps—this evening—" she hesitated.
"May I come," he said, "early?"
On the evening of the twenty-sixth they sat on the mahogany settle together, in a moonless night, the lilacs and honeysuckle a-bloom around them.
"All those people are coming to-morrow. I wish they were in some other place," he ended, inadequately considering the vehemence of his tone. "Do you, Katrine?" he asked.
She did not answer him.
"Do you, Katrine?" he repeated, insistently.
There was no response.
"Do you wish that we had these ten happy days to live over? Do you wish that they might come again? Will you miss me?"
She turned toward him with a wistful look, letting her eyes rest in his as she spoke. "I am sorry it is over. I shall miss you more than I can say."
"Thank you." And then, with a mixture of whimsicality and earnestness he continued: "Do you remember the talk we had the other day of Josef?"
"Yes."
"When you told me he believed women to have some undeveloped psychic power which, with study, could be developed to revolutionize the world?"
"I didn't say it so clearly as that, but that is what he means."
"Do you believe it, Katrine?"
"I don't know, Mr. Ravenel."
"Do you believe that if you tried to help me, even if I were far away, you could?"
"Again I don't know, Mr. Ravenel."
"I do," he said, in the tone of one thoroughly convinced. "I have been thinking it over, and have come to the conclusion that Josef is right. You could make me do anything, Katrine. Will you try? In these days to come, when I am away with all those people, will you keep me from temptation?"
She hesitated for a minute, not knowing whether he was jesting or not.
"Believe me," she said, at length, "I will try."