CHAPTER IX.
"Doctor McCall recognizes the Book-house, just as I did, as the right background for communion like ours," Miss Muller said complacently to Kitty a week later. "He meets me here every day."
"Yes," said Catharine with a perplexed look. She had no special instincts or intuitions, but her eyes were as keen and observant as a lynx's. He came, she saw, to the Book-house every day. But had he no other purpose than to meet Maria?
"I did not know that McCall affected scholarship," said Mr. Muller tartly the next day. "He tells me that he has a peach-farm to manage. August is no time to loiter away, poring over old books. Just the peach season."
"No," Kitty replied demurely. But her face wore again the puzzled look. She began to watch Doctor McCall. He really knew but little, she saw, of rare books: his reading of them was a mere pretence. He was neither a lazy nor a morbid man: what pleasure could he have in neglecting his work day after day, sitting alone in the dusky old shop as if held there by some enchantment? Kitty knew that she herself had nothing to do with it: she appeared to be no more in his way than a tame dog would be, and, after the first annoyance which she gave him, was really little more noticed. But there is a certain sense of home-snugness and comfort in the presence of tame dogs and of women like Kitty: one cannot be long in the room with either without throwing them a kind word or petting them in some way. Doctor McCall was just the man to fall into such a habit. Down on the farm, his cattle, his hands, even the neighbors with whom he argued on politics, could all have testified to his easy, large good-humor.
"Oh, we are the best of friends," he said indifferently when Maria found Kitty chattering to him once, very much as she did to old Peter. But when Miss Muller, who had no petty jealousies, enlarged on the singular beauty of her eyes and some good points in her shape, he did not respond. "I never could talk of a woman as if she were a horse," he said. "And this little girl seems to me unusually human."
"There's really nothing in her, though. Poor William! He is marrying eyes, I tell him. It's a pitiable marriage!"
"Yes, it is," said Doctor McCall gravely.
After that he neglected the old books sometimes to talk to Kitty. He thought she was such an immature, thoughtless creature that she would not notice that the subject he chose was always the same—her daily life, with old Peter for her chum and confidant.
"Mr. Guinness, then, has had no companion but you?" he said one day, after a searching inspection of her face.
"No, nobody but me," quite forgetful, as she and Peter were too apt to be, that her mother was alive.
"And has had none for years?"
"Not since his son died. Hugh Guinness is dead, you know."
Doctor McCall was looking thoughtfully at the floor. He rose presently and took up his hat: "The old man cannot have been unhappy with such love as you could give him. No man could."
Kitty was sitting, as usual, on a low stool pasting labels on some dog-eared books: as long as McCall stood looking at her round cheeks and double chin she pasted on, apparently unconscious that he was there, but when he turned away she watched him shrewdly as he went uneasily up and down the shop, and finally, with a curt good-bye, turned out of the door. As the stout figure passed through the low branches of the walnuts her gray eyes began to shine. Her Mystery was nearly solved.
Dropping paste and books in a heap, she ran after him, taking a short cut through the currant bushes, so that when he passed on the outer side of the garden fence there she was quietly waiting, her head and face darkly framed by a thick creeper.
"Well?" smiling down, amused, as he might to a playful kitten.
"Doctor McCall," in the queer formal fashion that was Kitty's own, "I should be glad if you would come back this evening. Without Maria. I have some business—that is, a plan of mine. Well, it is a certain thing that—"
"That you wish to consult me about?" after waiting for her to finish.
"Yes, that's it," nodding energetically.
"Very well." He stood looking at her arm on the fence, and the face resting with its chin upon it. McCall, of all men, hated a scene, and he had an uneasy consciousness that he had just betrayed unexplained feeling in the house, and was therefore glad to slip back to commonplaces. Besides, Kitty was exactly the kind of woman whom all men feel an insane desire to help at first sight. "You have a plan, eh? and you want advice, not knowing much about business?"
There was not the least necessity for him to say this, having asked it before. But he did it, and waited to hear Kitty say yes again, and waited still, before he lifted his hat and said good-bye, to see the shadow of a waving branch creep over her white chin and lose itself in her neck. Most men would have done the same, just as they would stop to whistle a laugh from a fat, pretty baby on the street, and then go on, leaving it behind. The last thing in the world to consult on their business, or to ask for help or comfort when trouble met them, or death.
Miss Muller spent the whole day at the Book-house, but Doctor McCall did not come, as she expected. As evening approached she began to shiver, and had premonitory symptoms of clairvoyance, and went home at last, to Kitty's relief. A slow drizzling rain set in: the damp fogs that belong to that river-bottom walled in the house and hung flat over the walnuts like a roof. Catharine had made her own corner of the Book-shop snug and cheerful. The space was wide, the light soft and bright. She placed her own chair by the table, Peter's not far from it. She meant to produce a great effect on this man to-night, to change the whole current of his life, without having the help of either love or even friendship. Unconsciously she planned to bring him close to her, though very likely she had never heard of personal magnetism, or any of the curious secrets political speakers or actors or revivalists could have told her of the deadening effects of distance and empty benches.
Then Kitty, in her room overhead, looked at herself in the glass, arrayed in a soft cashmere, in color blue, still farther toned down, by certain softer fringes and loops, into the very ideal garb for a man's type of "yielding, lovely woman." It was one of the sacred wedding-dresses.
"Maria could never look like this," tying a lace handkerchief about her neck, pulling the soft rings of hair looser about her ears, setting her head on one side, and half shutting her eyes to see the thick and curly lashes.
There was no danger of interruption. Maria was safely lodged in the Water-cure House, and the very idea of Mr. Muller's glossy black shoes and dainty brown umbrella venturing out in the rain made Kitty laugh.
"The dear, good soul is finical as a cat," with the good-natured indulgence of a mother for a child. Suddenly she stopped, stared at herself in the glass. "Why, he is my husband!" she said, speaking to the blushing, blue-robed figure as to another person. Then she hastily unbuttoned, unlooped the pretty dress, threw it off, putting on her usual gray wrapper and knotting her hair more tightly back than ever in a comb. "He has been very good to me—very good to me," her chin trembling a good deal.
Then she went down to meet Doctor McCall, who that moment came into the Book-shop, stopping at the door to take off and shake his oilskin coat.
"It is a wet night," she said, just as though he were a stranger. She did not know what else to say or what he answered as she went about, trimming the lamp, dragging out a chair for him, closing the window curtains. Both McCall and Catharine were ordinary people, accustomed to keep up a good flow of talk on ordinary subjects, the weather or any joke or gossip that was nearest to them. There had been no passages of love or hate between them to account for her forced formality, her trembling and flushing, and urgent almost angry wish to remind him that she was Mr. Muller's affianced wife. She felt this with a new contempt for herself.
As for Doctor McCall, he leaned comfortably back in his arm-chair and dried his legs at the grate filled with red-hot coals, while he listened to the soft rustle of her skirts as she moved noiselessly about him. It is the peculiarity of women like Kitty, to whom Nature has denied the governing power of ideas or great personal beauty or magnetism, such as she gave to Miss Muller, that there is a certain impalpable force and attraction in their most petty actions and words, to which men yield. Miss Muller could have watched Kitty all day dragging chairs and trimming lamps, unmoved farther than to pronounce her little better than an idiot. But Peter, Muller or John McCall could not look at her for five minutes without classing her with Cordelia and Desdemona and all the other sweet fools for whom men have died, and whom the world yet keeps sacred in pathetic memory. Some day too, when Catharine should be a mother—though giving to her older children, little more than to the baby on her breast, soft touches and gentle words—she would bind them to her as no other kind, of mother could do—by such bonds that until they were gray-haired no power should be like hers. Miss Muller neither saw nor foresaw such things. But Doctor McCall did. "If I had had such a mother I should not have been what I am," he thought. It was a curious fancy to have about a young girl. But she seemed to embody all the womanliness that had been lacking in his life. Of course she was nothing to him. She was to be that prig Muller's wife, and he was quite satisfied that she should be. If he married, Maria Muller would be his wife. Yet, oddly enough, he felt to-night, for the first time, the necessity that Maria should know how marriage was barred out from him, and felt, for the first time, too, a maddening anger that it was so barred. However, Doctor McCall was never meant by Nature for a solitary man housed alone with morbid thoughts: he was the stuff out of which useful citizens are made—John Andersons of husbands, doting, gullible fathers.
Remembering the bar in his life, his skeleton, ghost or whatever it was, he was only moved to get up and stretch himself, saying, "I've stayed in Berrytown too long. When you have told me your plan, I'll say good-bye to you, Miss Vogdes, and this old house. I shall be off to-morrow."
Kitty had just caught a moth in the flame of the candle. She carried it to the window. "You will come back soon, of course?" her back still toward him.
"No, I think not. I am neglecting my business. And I, of all men in the world, have least right to loiter about this old house, to look in on its home-life or on you."
Kitty gave him a sharp glance, as though some sudden emergency was clear before her which her tact failed to meet. She was folding the bits of muslin at which she had been sewing in a basket: she finished slowly, put the basket away, and sat down at the table, with her elbow on it and her chin on her hand, her gray eyes suggesting a deeper and unspoken meaning to her words: "But for my plan?"
"Ah! to be sure! You want advice?" seating himself comfortably. Her confusion was a pretty thing to watch, the red creeping up her neck into her face, blotting out its delicate tints, the uncertain glances, the full bitten lip. Doctor McCall quite forgot his own trouble in the keen pleasure of the sight.
"Perhaps—You do not quite understand my position here? Mr. Guinness is not my own father."
"No, I knew that."
"But you cannot know what he has been to me: I never knew until the last few days."
"Why within these few days, Miss Vogdes?"
"Because I saw you and Maria: I saw what love was. I began to think about it. I never have loved anybody but him," she went on headlong, utterly blind to all inferences. "There's a thing I can do for him, Doctor McCall, before I marry Mr. Muller, and I must do it. It will make his old age happier than any other part of his life has been."
McCall nodded, leaning forward. It was nothing but an imprudent girl dragging out her secrets before a stranger; nothing but a heated face, wet eyes, a sweet milky breath; but no tragedy he had ever seen on the stage had moved him so uncontrollably—no, not any crisis in his own life—with such delicious, inexplicable emotion.
"Well, what is it you can do?" after waiting for her to go on.
There was a moment's silence.
"My father," said Kitty, "had once a great trouble. It has made an old man of him before his time. I find that I can take it from him." She looked up at him with this. Now, there was a certain shrewd penetration under the softness of Kitty's eyes. Noting it, McCall instantly lost sight of her beauty and tears. He returned her look coolly.
"What was his trouble?"
"Mr. Guinness had a son. He has believed him to be dead for years: I know that he is not dead."
Doctor McCall waited, with her eyes still upon him. "Well?" he said, attentive.
"And then," pushing back the table and rising, "when I heard that, I meant to go and find Hugh Guinness, and bring him back to his father."
Whatever this matter might be to her hearer, it was the most real thing in life to Catharine, and putting it into words gave it a sudden new force. She felt that she ought to hold her tongue, but she could not. She only knew that the lighted room, the beating of the rain without, the watchful guarded face on the other side of the table, shook and frightened and angered her unaccountably.
"You should not laugh at me," she said. "This is the first work I ever set myself to do. It is better than nursing three hundred children."
"I am not laughing at you, God knows! But this Guinness, if he be alive, remains away voluntarily. There must be a reason for that. You do not consider."
"I do not care to consider. Is the man a log or a stone? If I found him," crossing the room in her heat until she stood beside him—"if I brought him to the old house and to his father? Why, look at this!" dragging open the drawer and taking out the broken gun and rod. "See what he has kept for years—all that was left him of his boy! Look, at that single hair! If Hugh Guinness stood where you do, and touched these things as you are touching them, could he turn his back on the old man?"
Now, Doctor McCall did not touch gun nor cap nor hair, but he bent over the table, looking at them as if he were looking at the dead. He seemed to have forgotten that Kitty was there.
At last he stood upright: "Poor little chap!" with a laugh. "There seemed to be no reason, when he went gunning and fishing like other boys, why he should not stand here to-day with as fair a chance for happiness as any other man. Did there? Just a trifling block laid in his way, a push down hill, and no force could ever drag him up again."
Kitty, her eyes on his, stood silent. Do what he would, he could not shake off her eyes: they wrenched the truth from him, "I knew this man Guinness once," he said.
She nodded: "Yes, I know you did."
"Sit down beside me here, and I will tell you what kind of man he was."
But she did not sit down. An unaccountable terror or timidity seemed to have paralyzed her. She looked aside—everywhere but in his face: "I wanted you to tell me how to reach him, how to touch him: I know what manner of man he is."
"You have heard from your mother? A mixed Border Pike and Mephistopheles, eh? The devil and his victim rolled into one?" He shifted his heavy body uneasily, glancing toward the door. Chief among the graver secret emotions which she had roused in him was the momentary annoyance of not knowing how to deal with this chicken-hearted little girl before him, scared, but on fire from head to foot.
Kitty was quite confident. If it had been Maria Muller who had thus set herself to tamper with a man's life, she would have done it trembling, with fear and self-distrust. She had brains which could feel and react against the passions she evoked, and were competent to warn her of the peril of her work. But as for Kitty—
Here was Hugh Guinness before her, a Cain with the curse of God upon him. It was clearly her business to bring him back again to his father, and afterward convert him into a member of the church, if possible. She went about the work with as little doubt as if it had been the making of a pudding.
But she was shy, tender, womanly withal. Doctor McCall laughed as he looked down at her, and spoke deliberately, as though giving his opinion of a patient to another physician. "I'll tell you honestly my opinion of Hugh Guinness. He was, first of all, a thoroughly ordinary, commonplace man, with neither great virtues nor great vices, nor force of any kind. If he had had that, he could have recovered himself when he began to fall. But he did not recover himself."
"What drove him down in the first place?"
He hesitated: "I suppose that his home and religion became hateful to him. Boys have unreasonable prejudices at times."
"And then, in despair—"
"Despair? Nonsense! Now don't figure to yourself a romantic Hotspur of a fellow rushing into hell because heaven's gate was shut on him. At nineteen Hugh Guinness drank and fought and gambled, as other ill-managed boys do to work off the rank fever of blood. Unfortunately—" he stopped, and then added in a lower voice, quickly, "he made a mistake while the fever was on him which was irretrievable."
"A mistake?" Kitty was always of an inquiring turn of mind, but now she felt as if her curiosity was more than she could bear, while she stood, her eyes passing over the burly figure in summer clothes and the high-featured, pleasant face with its close-cut moustache. What dreadful secret was hid behind this good-humored, every-day propriety of linen duck, friendly eyes and reddish moustache over a mouth that often smiled? You might meet their like any day upon the streets. Was it a murder? At best some crime, perhaps, which had sent him to the penitentiary. Or—and church taught Kitty shuddered as a vague remembrance of the "unpardonable sin" rose before her like an actual horror. Whatever it was, it stood between herself and him, keeping them apart for ever.
"Irretrievable?" she said. It was only curiosity, she knew, but her voice sounded oddly far off to herself, the room was hazy, her whole body seemed to shrink together.
"What can it matter to you? You belong to another man, Miss Vogdes." She lifted herself erect. Doctor McCall was speaking more loudly than usual and looking keenly into her face.
"I know: I shall be Mr. Muller's wife. Of course, I recollect. But you—this Hugh Guinness is my father's son," stammered Kitty, her face very white. "I had some interest in him."
"Yes, that's true. He is, as you say, in some sort a brother of yours." He took her hand for the first time, looking down at her face with some meaning in his own, inexplicable, very likely, to himself, though the thoughts in Kitty's shallow brain were clear enough to him. "You are tired of standing," seating her gently in Peter's chair. A thick lock of hair had fallen over her face: he put out his hand to remove it, but drew back quickly. "We have talked too long, Miss Vogdes," in a brisk, cheerful tone. "Some other time, perhaps, we can return to this question of Hugh Guinness. That is," with a certain significance of manner, "if it be one in which Mr. Muller wishes you to take an interest." Nodding good-humoredly to her, he buttoned on his oilskin cape and went out into the rain without another word. He pulled off his cap outside to let the rain and wind reach his head, drawing a long breath as if to get rid of some foul air and heat.