For now, when her father awoke from one of his many naps, he would turn to her with: "Have I slept long, Kate?" or "We'll be going in to lunch soon, I suppose, daughter?" or "Will it be very long now before we reach our destination?"
It was reached at dawn of an early autumn day, and they drove ten miles into the pine woods. The scented silence took them. They were at "God's green caravansarie," and the rancor that had poisoned their hearts was gone. They turned toward each other in common trust, father and daughter, forgiving, if not all forgetting, the hurt and angry years.
"It really was your cousin who brought it about," Kate wrote Honora. "He reminded me that I was fortunate to have a father. You see, I hadn't realized it! Oh, Honora, what a queer girl I am--always having to think things out! Always making myself miserable in trying to be happy! Always going wrong in striving to be right! I should think the gods would make Olympus ring laughing at me! I once wrote your cousin that women of my sort were worn out with their struggle to reconcile their convictions and their instincts. And that's true. That's what is making them so restless and so strange and tumultuous. But of course I can't think it their fault--merely their destiny. Something is happening to them, but neither they nor any one else can quite tell what it is."
Dr. Barrington was broken, no question about that. Even the stimulation of the incomparable air of those Northern woods could not charge him with vitality. He lay wrapped in blankets, on the bed improvised for him beneath the trees, or before the leaping fire in the inn, with the odors of the burning pine about him, and he let time slip by as it would.
The people at the inn thought they never had seen a more devoted daughter than his. She sat beside him while he slept; she read or talked to him softly when he awakened; she was at hand with some light but sustaining refreshment whenever he seemed depressed or too relaxed. But there were certain things which the inn people could not make out. The sick man had the air of having forgiven this fine girl for something. He received her service like one who had the right to expect it. He was tender and he was happy, but he was, after all, the dominator. Nor could they quite make out the girl, who smiled at his demands,--which were sometimes incessant,--and who obeyed with the perfect patience of the strong. They did not know that if he had once been an active tyrant, he was now a supine one. As he had been unable, for all of his intelligence, to perceive the meaning of justice from the old angle, so he was equally unable to get it from his present point of view. He had been harsh with his daughter in the old days; so much he would have admitted. That he would have frustrated her completely, absorbed and wasted her power, he could not perceive. He did not surmise that he was now doing in an amiable fashion what he hitherto had tried to do in a masterful and insolent one. He did not realize that the tyranny of the weak is a more destructive thing when levelled at the generous than the tyranny of the strong.
Had he been interrupted in mid-career--in those days when his surgery was sure and bold--to care for a feeble and complaining wife, he would have thought himself egregiously abused. That Kate, whose mail each day exceeded by many times that which he had received in his most influential years, whose correspondence was with persons with whom he could not at any time have held communication, should be taken from her active duties appeared to him as nothing. He was a sick father. His daughter attended him in love and dutifulness. He was at peace--and he knew she was doing her duty. It really did not occur to him that she or any one else could have looked at the matter in a different light, or that any loving expression of regret was due her. Such sacrifices were expected of women. They were not expected of men, although men sometimes magnificently performed them.
To tell the truth, no such idea occurred to Kate either. She was as happy as her father. At last, in circumstances sad enough, she had reached a degree of understanding with him. She had no thought for the inconvenience under which she worked. She was more than willing to sit till past the middle of the night answering her letters, postponing her engagements, sustaining her humbler and more unhappy friends--those who were under practical parole to her--with her encouragement, and always, day by day, extending the idea of the Bureau of Children. For daily it took shape; daily the system of organization became more apparent to her. She wrote to Ray McCrea about it; she wrote to Karl Wander on the same subject. It seemed to suffice or almost to suffice her. It kept her from anticipating the details of the melancholy drama which was now being enacted before her eyes.
For her father was passing. His weakness increased, and his attitude toward life became one of gentle indifference. He was homesick for his wife, too. Though he had seemed to take so little satisfaction in her society, and had not scrupled when she was alive to show the contempt he felt for her opinions, now he liked to talk of her. He had made a great outcry against sentiment all of his life, but in his weakness he found his chief consolation in it. He had been a materialist, denying immortality for the soul, but now he reverted to the phrases of pious men of the past generation.
"I shall be seeing your mother soon, Kate," he would say wistfully, holding his daughter's hand. Kate was involuntarily touched by such words, but she was ashamed for him, too. Where was all his hard-won, bravely flaunted infidelity? Where his scientific outlook?