Katrine | Page 6

the cotton spread its
green tufts miles and miles away to a sunlit horizon.
Swinging along the road outside the park, the half-formed plan to visit
the overseer left him, and purposeless he climbed the hill to Chestnut
Ridge. Something in the occasion of his home-coming after a two
years' absence--his mother's reference to his marriage, his
remembrances of Anne Lennox--had brought back to his face its
habitual expression of sadness. And more than he would have
acknowledged was a disquietude caused by his instant resentment of
the existence of Dermott McDermott. Never in his life had he felt more
strongly the need for companionship. He had been loved by many
women. He had never been believed in by any.
Passionate, proud, intolerant, full of prejudice, conscious by twenty-six
years' experience of a most magnetic power with women, he came to
the edge of the far wood as lawless a man, in as lawless a mood, as the
Carolinas had ever seen--a locality where lawless men have not been
wanting.
Suddenly, through the twilight, he heard a voice--a woman's
voice--singing, and by instinct he knew that the singer was alone and
conscious of nothing save the song.
At the top of the rise, under a group of beeches, with both arms
stretched along a bar fence, a girl stood, the black of her hair in

silhouette against the gold of the sky. He noted the slender grace of her
body as she leaned backward, and listened to her voice, Heaven-given,
vibrant, caressing--juste, as the French have it--singing an old song.
He had heard it hundreds of times cheapened by lack of temperament,
lack of voice, lack of taste; but as he listened, though little versed in
music, he knew that it was a great voice that sang it and a great
personality which interpreted it. With the song still trembling through
the silence the singer turned toward him, and, man of the world and
many loves as he had been, an unknown feeling came at sight of her.
A flower of a girl--"of fire and dew," delicate features, nose tip-tilted, a
chin firmly modelled under the rounded flesh, and eyes bright with the
wonder and pride of life. She wore a short-waisted black frock, scant of
skirt and cut away at the neck. It was in this same frock that the Sargent
picture of her was painted--but that was years afterward; and although
she was motionless, one knew from her slender figure and arched feet
that she moved with fire and spirit. Her hair was very dark, though red
showed through it in a strong light, and her cheeks had the dusky pink
of an October peach. But it was the eyes that held and allowed no
forgetting; Ravenel always held they were violet, and Josef, who saw
her every day for years, spoke them gray; but Dermott McDermott was
firm as to their being blue until the day she visited him about the
railroad business, when he afterward described them "as black as
chaos," adding a word or two about her deil's temper as well. The truth
was that the color of them changed with her emotions, but the
wistfulness of them remained ever the same. Dermott, in some lines he
wrote of her in Paris, described them as "corn-flowers in a mist filled
with the poetry and passion of a great and misunderstood people," and
though "over-poetic," as he himself said afterward, "the thought was
none so bad."
Suddenly the languor seemed to leave her, and she stood alert, chin
drawn in, hands clasped before her, and began the recitative to the "Ah!
Fors e lui." Twice she stopped abruptly, taking a tone a second time,
listening as she did so, her head, birdlike, on one side with a
concentrated attention. After the last low note, which was round and

low like an organ tone, she resumed her old position with arms
outstretched upon the fence.
As Frank came up the path their eyes met, and he removed his hat,
holding it at his side, as one who did not intend to resume it. Standing
thus, he bore himself, if one might use the word of a man, with a
certain sweetness, an entire seeming self-forgetfulness, as though the
one to whom he spoke occupied his entire thought.
"It is Miss Dulany?" he inquired, with a smile which seemed to ask
pardon for his temerity.
"I am Katrine Dulany," the girl answered, gravely, for the readjustment
from the music and the silence was not easily made.
"I was fortunate enough to hear you sing. It almost made me forget to
say that I am Mr. Ravenel."
"I know," Katrine answered. "The plantation has expected your
coming."
A silence followed, during which, with no embarrassment, she retained
her position, waiting for