Katrine | Page 9

Francis Ravenel; his pride and such honor as he had where women
were concerned forbade it. But even as he reached this decision the
voice of gold came back to him:
"And the night for love was given-- Darling, come to me!"

How she could love a man! He recalled her gesture when she said: "I
will tell you everything"! The glance through the lashes--"I've a fancy
for my own way"! the forgetting of his presence for the song-singing
and the sunset, coming back to talk with him; a pleading child!
By the lake he paused, and, looking into the moonlit water, came to his
conclusions sanely enough. He would see her no more. There would be
many people for the next fortnight to occupy his time; the coming folks
were interesting. Anne Lennox would be there; the time would pass; he
would leave Ravenel; but as he dropped asleep a voice seemed to call
to him through the pines, and he knew he would not go.
The next morning before coffee he wrote to Dr. Johnston, the great
specialist in alcoholic diseases, urging him to come to Ravenel at his
earliest convenience. "There is a man to be helped," he wrote, "and
neither money nor brains are to be spared in the helping."
Through the breakfast the memory of Katrine was vividly with him. He
recalled, with the approval of an aristocrat in taste, the daintiness of her
movements, the delicacy of her hands as they lay open on the fence,
even her indifference to him, to him, who was in no wise accustomed
to indifference in women.
At twilight he went to the Chestnut Ridge, but Katrine was not there,
nor did she come. The following day he went again with a similar
resulting. The third day he saw her about noon on the river-bank, and
she waved her hand to him in a cavalier fashion, disappearing into a
small copse of dogwood, not to reappear. The thing had become
amusing.
During this time he saw neither Dermott McDermott nor the new
overseer, whom he learned was at Marlton on affairs concerning a
sawmill.
The fourth day after his meeting with Katrine a message from the great
doctor gave him the dignity of a mission, and he rode to the old lodge
to show her the letter, which said that Dr. Johnston would be at
Ravenel soon.

There was eagerness in his gait and eyes as he mounted his horse, and
as he rode down the carriageway standing in his stirrups, waving his
cap to his mother with a "Tallyho to the hounds," he had never looked
handsomer nor had more of an air of carrying all before him, as was
right, she thought, for a Ravenel.
The old gate-lodge on the Ravenel place stands on the north branch of
the road which leads to Three Poplar Inn. It is built of pale-colored
English brick and gray stones, and runs upward to the height of two
stories, with broad doorways and wide windows peeping through ivy
which covers the place from foundation to roof.
Frank remembered it as a drear-looking, lonesome place during the
occupancy of the former incumbent. Instead, he found a reclaimed
garden; hedges of laurel, trim and straight; old-fashioned flowers,
snowballs, gillybells, great pink-and-white peonies; and over the front
on trellises, by the gate and doorway, scrambles of scarlet roses against
the green and the ivied walls.
In the doorway Nora O'Grady, a short, wide woman of fifty or
thereabout, was singing at a spinning-wheel. She had a kind, yellow
face with high cheek-bones, and dark eyes which seemed darker by
reason of the snowy hair showing under a mob cap. Her chin was
square and pointed upward like old Mother Hubbard's, and she could
talk of batter-cakes or home rule with humorous volubility, and smoke
a pipe with the manner of a condescending duchess.
She had, as Frank found afterward, an excellent gift at anecdote, but a
clipping pronunciation of English by reason of having spoken nothing
but the Erse until she was grown. Added to this was an entirely illogical
ignorance of certain well-known words, and Katrine told him later that
once when Nora was asked if the dinner was postponed, she answered:
"It was pork."
For fifteen years this strange old creature and her boy Barney had
followed the seesawing fortunes of the Dulanys, accompanying their
gypsy-like sojournings with great loyalty and joyousness.

She rose from her spinning as Ravenel approached.
"Is Miss Katrine at home?" he inquired.
Nora dropped a courtesy, and with the tail of her eye observed, labelled,
and docketed Francis Ravenel.
"Will your lordship be seated," she said. "Miss Katrine will be back in
a minute. She's gone to ask after Miranda's baby. Nothin' seems able to
stop her from regardin'