Katrine. Elinor Macartney Lane
Читать онлайн книгу.
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' the naygurs as human beings. If 'twere not that I know she'd be here immejit I'd go afther her mysel', and not keep your lordship waitin'."
She motioned him to a wide settle on the porch with an alert hospitality. In her heart she preferred Dermott McDermott to all possible suitors for Katrine, but if this was another jo, as the Scotch say, so much the better, for one might urge the other on, she thought, with primitive sagacity.
"Would ye have a drop of Scotch?" she asked, and upon Francis declining she reseated herself at her wheel, "with his permission," as she put it, delighted, Celtlike, at the chance for conversation. "Ye're perhaps," she says, with some humor, "like the man in the old, old tale when a friend asked him to take a drink. He said he couldn't for three reasons. First, he'd promised his mother he never would drink; second, his doctor had tould him he mustn't drink; and, third, he'd just had a drink."
Frank laughed back at the merry old woman as she sat at the whirring wheel, her accustomed eyes scarcely glancing at the work in her scrutiny of him.
"Dulany's not at home this day. I'm sorry," she went on. "He's off about the sawmill of that triflin' Shehan man. Did ye hear that about his telegraph, Mr. Ravenel? No? It's a funny tale. Ye know that old mill of yours ain't worth more than a few hunder dollars. But Dulany saw an advertisement for a new kind of machinery, and he wrote the firm to ask them what it would cost to have it put in. They sint back the word: tin thousand dollars, and would he plaze lit thim know immejit if it was wanted. He didn't wait to write. He telegraphed:
"'If a man had ten thousand dollars, what in hell would he want with a sawmill?'"
Frank laughed aloud again, uncomprehending the fact that the shrewd little woman was deliberately holding him with her tales till Katrine returned.
Inside the house he heard a note, struck suddenly, and repeated over and over in a voice little above a whisper.
"She's come in the other way. I'll tell her your lordship's wantin' her," said Nora O'Grady, disappearing.
He looked about him in great content. Things seemed so much as he desired them to be—the roses, the old furniture, the spinning-wheel, the coiffed peasant woman—that he waited for Katrine's coming, fearing that she should be less beautiful than he remembered her.
With some surprise he heard a laugh (he had not thought of her as a girl who laughed) so merry, so infectious that he found himself wondering what caused it as the girl herself came through the doorway to greet him, her rose face radiant, her eyes shining, her hand outstretched.
She was more loveworthy, more imperious, than he remembered her, a thing which bewildered him as he thought of her entreating smile, and her wistful and approving eyes.
She wore white, so simply made as to have something statuesque about the lines of the gown, and cut from the throat to show the poise of the head and the curls at the back of the neck.
"I could scarcely believe Nora when she said it was you. Father is at Marlton. I was so lonely. It is good of you to come, even if only on business. You are riding?" she asked, regarding his clothes.
"Yes," he answered. "I am going to the world's end."
"You will be sorry," she returned, quickly. "I have been there. Carolina is better. Stay here!"
She seated herself beside him on the settle as she spoke, and the odor of the red rose she wore at her breast came to him with the words.
He had taken off his hat and leaned his bare brown head against the high back of the bench.
"You see," he began, his eyelids drawn together in his own way, his eyes fastened upon some remote distance, "I, too, have been lonely. The only companionable person within hundreds of miles has refused me her society. I have been driven, as it were, to the world's end."
"Do you mean me?" Katrine asked, smiling, and looking at him with eyes full of surprise.
"It is perhaps Nora to whom I refer," he suggested, whimsically.
"She is not always companionable—Nora," Katrine returned; "and to-day she is not pleased with me, so I like her less than usual. She purposed to cook nettles in the potatoes, and I remonstrated, and—I have not absented myself from your society," she said, abruptly breaking her talk after a woman's way.
"Then why didn't you watch the sunset from the Chestnut Ridge last night and the night before and the night before that?" he asked.
"Why didn't I watch the sunset from the Chestnut Ridge?" she repeated after him, as though not understanding; and then, with a slow, steady smile, looking straight in his eyes, "The thought never occurred to me," she said.
No studied coquetry could have piqued him as this simple statement, which he felt to be the plain truth. He had taken three long walks on the off-chance of meeting a girl who apparently had forgotten his existence, and although the thought was humorous it stirred in him a determination to make his existence a remembered thing to her.
"But, if I had known," she explained, and the selflessness and sweetness of her as she spoke touched him strangely—"if I had thought you wanted to talk to me, I should have been glad to come."
Fortunately there remained to him a dignified explanation of his suggestion.
"I thought you might come, not so much to see the sunsets as in the hope of seeing me. I promised to help you when I could. I thought you might be interested to know that I had kept my promise. If any one can help your father it is Dr. Johnston." He gave the letter to her as he spoke. "He is coming to Ravenel to-morrow."
In an instant her face softened; her eyes became suffused by a soft, warm light, and she looked up at him through a sudden mist of tears.
"The interview must be arranged," he went on. But Katrine interrupted him:
"Ah! It will be easy enough. Father is as anxious as I am to be himself again. You do not know daddy, Mr. Ravenel," she explained, a proud loyalty in her tone. "He has not been himself before you; but in Paris, in Dublin, he was welcomed everywhere; his wit was the keenest, with never an edge that hurt; his stories the brightest, and always of the kind that made you love the people of whom they were told. He will be home to-night. Will the doctor come here? I want to tell him everything, and then, when he has seen father, you can tell me what to do. You see, I haven't thanked you yet," she said, abruptly.