But mystery where Great Aunt Katherine was concerned was no new thing to Kate. Whenever she thought about Aunt Katherine at all it was always to wonder. Why should her mother be estranged so entirely from her only living relative, this aunt for whom she had been named, and who had been a second mother to her after her own mother had died, when she was a very little girl? Kate could never understand that situation. Katherine was so peculiarly gentle and forgiving and lovable! How could any one stay angry with her?
Last year, when Kate was fourteen, Katherine had tried to explain things to her a little. She had said then that Great Aunt Katherine’s money was the cause of the feud. Only it was not the usual trouble that money makes in families. It was not that Aunt Katherine was selfish or proud. It was—oh, absurdity—that she was over-generous! She expected to force her generosity on her family whether they wanted it or not. It had begun with Kate’s Grandfather Frazier. He and Great Aunt Katherine were half-brother and sister. When Katherine was about Kate’s age now, Grandfather Frazier had failed in business and the very same month Great Aunt Katherine had inherited a fortune from an uncle on her mother’s side. Until that turn of fortune’s wheel Aunt Katherine had been a school teacher living with her half-brother and giving her spare time to mothering her namesake niece. When she woke up one morning to find herself a wealthy—a very wealthy—woman, she immediately decreed that her brother should share the good fortune with her just as she had for so long shared his home with him and his child. But Grandfather Frazier’s pride forbade him to acquiesce in that. The uncle was not his uncle, and it was not only his pride but his sense of propriety that influenced him in his firm decision not to accept one cent from Aunt Katherine. All that he would allow her to do to help his financial situation was to buy the house from him in which they were living so that with the money he might pay his debts. Thereafter he insisted that she was his landlady and he made a fetish until the month of his death of being on time with the absurdly small rent.
Aunt Katherine had built herself a large and mansionlike house on part of the land that went with her brother’s little house. And since he distinctly limited her in the things she might do for his daughter, she adopted, suddenly and to every one’s amazement, a poor young boy, with no background whatever, who had been brought up in a “Home,” and who at the time of her discovering him was working in a factory. She prepared him herself for college, sent him to Harvard, and thrust him, almost head first, into the “younger set” in Oakdale. He had married Gloria, a beautiful young Bostonian but with no especial “connections.” That was all that Kate knew of him, except for this late knowledge that he had a daughter.
Kate could understand her grandfather’s pride, dimly. But her mother’s case was not so clear to her, not quite. Her mother had married a rising young diplomat, a man of supposedly some wealth and assuredly fine ancestry. But on his death, not long after Kate’s birth, it was discovered that there was not a cent to which the young widowed mother could lay claim. Katherine had never explained to Kate how this had happened. She hardly knew herself perhaps, because the processes of Wall Street were a maze to her. Almost gleefully, Aunt Katherine had seized upon this opportunity to offer her niece a home with her and a substantial allowance so that she might feel independent in that home. Katherine had refused point blank. And Aunt Katherine, now very sensitive on the subject of rejected generosities, had made a clean break with her namesake, washed her hands, and dropped her out of her life, much as one might drop a thistle that had pricked too unreasonably.
Katherine, determined to earn her own and her little daughter’s way, had obtained an instructorship here at Ashland College, worked hard and happily ever since, and gloried in her independence.
The whole reason for this choice of poverty and hard work Katherine had not told Kate. But she had hinted that there was a very deep reason and one that justified her. Sometime, perhaps, she would disclose it. Meanwhile, Kate gave all this little thought, and was only brooding over it now because of the letter in her hand.
After a minute she said firmly, “If Great Aunt Katherine thinks I’m going to leave you here alone on this deserted hill-top for a whole month of our precious vacation, she has a surprise in store. Shall we write or wire our regrets, Mother?”
“We’d better write,” Katherine answered, getting up suddenly and beginning in an unusually energetic way to pull up weeds from the lily-of-the-valley bed under the window. “I shall write that Saturday is too soon, for there must be some preparation on our part for such a visit. By next Tuesday, though, I should think you could be ready.”
Kate turned her head to follow her mother with amazed eyes. “You don’t mean I’m to go, Mother?”
“Yes, I want you to go. I want you very much to go. Aunt Katherine apparently needs you. I think, though, she must be drawing on her imagination a bit as to the loneliness of Oakdale for Elsie, especially since she herself says there will be parties and good times for you. You can’t have parties without young people! Even so, her saying she needs you makes our acceptance not only dignified but imperative.”