Katherine Lauderdale; Vol. 2 of 2

by F. Marion Crawford

She turned into Madison Avenue as soon as she could, for the sake of the quiet. The morning sun shone full in her eyes as she began to make her way southwards, and she was glad of the warmth, for she felt cold and inwardly chilled in mind and body. She had walked far, but she still walked on, disliking the thought of being penned in with a dozen or more of unsympathizing individuals for twenty minutes in a horse-car. Moreover, she instinctively wished to tire herself, as though to bring down her bodily energy to the low ebb at which her mental activity seemed to be stagnating. Strong people will understand that desire to balance mind and body.

She was quite convinced that her uncle was right. The more she turned the whole situation over, the clearer what he had said became to her. The only escape was to accept the money which he was willing to give her—for the honour of the family. But if neither she nor John would take that, there was no alternative but for John to go to work in the ordinary way, and show that he could be steady for at least a year. That seemed a very long time—as long as a year can seem to a girl of nineteen, which is saying much.

Katharine had seen such glorious visions for that year, too, that the darkness of the future was a tangible horror now that they were fading away. The memory of a dream can be as vivid as the recollection of a reality. The something which John was to find to do had presented itself to her mind as a sort of idyllic existence somewhere out of the world, in which there should be woods and brooks and breezes, and a convenient town not far away, where things could be got, and a cottage quite unlike other cottages, and a good deal of shooting and fishing and riding, with an amount of responsibility for all these things equal in money to six or seven thousand dollars a year, out of which Katharine was sure that she could save a small fortune in a few years. It had not been quite clear to her why the responsibility was to be worth so much in actual coin of the Republic, but people certainly succeeded very quickly in the West. Besides, she was quite ready to give up all the luxuries and amusements of social existence—much more ready to do so than John Ralston, if she had known the truth.

It must not be believed that she was utterly visionary and unpractical, because she had taken this rose-coloured view of the life uncle Robert was to provide for her and her husband. There are probably a great many young women in the Eastern cities who imagine just such things to be quite possible, and quite within the power and gift of a millionaire, in the American sense of that word, which implies the possession of more than one million, and more often refers in actual use to income than merely to capital. In Paris, a man who has twenty thousand dollars a year is called a millionaire. In New York a man with that income is but just beyond the level of the estimable society poor, and within the ranks of the ‘fairly well-off.’ The great fortunes being really as fabulous as those in fairy tales, it is not surprising that the possession of them should be supposed to bring with it an almost fabulous power in all directions. Men like Robert Lauderdale, the administration of whose estates requires a machinery not unlike that of a small nation’s treasury, are thought to have in their gift all sorts of remunerative positions, for which the principal qualifications are an unlimited capacity for enjoying the fresh air and some talent for fishing. As a matter of fact, though so much richer than ordinary men, they are so much poorer than all except the very small nations that they cannot support so many idlers.

Katharine knew a good deal about life in New York and its possibilities, but very little of what could be done elsewhere. She was perfectly well aware of the truth of all that her uncle had told her concerning the requirements for business or the law, for she had heard such matters discussed often enough. In her own city she was practical, for she understood her surroundings as well as any young girl could. It was because she understood them that she dreamed of getting out of them as soon as practicable, and of beginning that vaguely active and remunerative existence which, for her, lay west of Illinois and anywhere beyond that, even to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. John Ralston himself knew very little about it, but he had rightly judged its mythical nature when he had told her that Robert Lauderdale would do nothing for him.

The sun warmed Katharine as she walked down Madison Avenue, but everything was black—felt black, she would have said, had she thought aloud. Ralston would not turn upon her and say, ‘I told you so,’ because he loved her, but she could see the expression of his face as she looked forward to the interview. He would nod his head slowly and say nothing. The corners of his mouth would be drawn down for a moment and his eyelids would contract a little while he looked away from her. He would think the matter over during about half a minute, and then, with a look of determination, he would say that he would try what uncle Robert proposed. He would not say anything against the plan of keeping the marriage a secret, now that old Lauderdale knew of it, for he would see at once that there was absolutely nothing else to be done. They had gone over the possibilities so often—there was not one which they had not carefully considered. It was all so hopelessly against them still, in spite of the one great effort Katharine had made that morning.

She walked more slowly after she had passed the high level above the railway, where it runs out of the city under ground from the central station. As she came nearer to the neighbourhood in which John lived, she felt for the first time in her life that she did not wish to meet him. Though she did not admit to herself that she feared to tell him the result of her conversation with her uncle, and though she had no intention of going to his mother’s house and asking for him, her pace slackened at the mere idea of being nearer to him.

Then she realized what she was doing, and with a bitter little smile of contempt at her own weakness she walked on more briskly. She had often read in books of that sudden change in the aspect of the outer world which disappointment brings, but she had never quite believed in it before. She realized it now. There was no light in anything. The faces of the people who passed her looked dead and uninteresting. Every house looked as though a funeral procession might at any moment file out of its door. The very pavement, drying in patches in the sunshine, felt cold and unsympathetic under her feet.

She began to wonder what she had better do,—whether she should write John Ralston a long letter, explaining everything, or whether she should write him a short one, merely saying that the news was unfavourable—‘unfavourable’ sounded better than ‘bad’ or ‘disappointing,’ she thought—and asking him to come and see her in the afternoon. The latter course seemed preferable, and had, moreover, the advantage of involving fewer practical difficulties, for her command over her mother tongue was by no means very great when subjected to the test of black and white, though in conversation it was quite equal to her requirements on most occasions. She could even entirely avoid the use of slang, by making a determined effort, for her father detested it, and her mother’s conversational weaknesses were Southern and of a different type. But on paper she was never sure of being quite right. Punctuation was a department which she affected to despise, but which she inwardly feared, and when alone she admitted that there were words which she seemed to spell not as they were spelled in books—‘parallel,’ for instance, ‘psychology’ and ‘responsibility.’ She avoided those words, which were not very necessary to her, but with a disagreeable suspicion that there might be others. Had ‘develop’ an ‘e’ at the end of it, or had it not? She could never remember, and the dictionary lived in her grandfather’s den, at some distance from her own room. The difficulties of writing a long letter to John Ralston, whose mother had taught him his English before it could be taught him all wrong at a fashionable school, rose before her eyes with absurd force, and she decided forthwith to send for Ralston in the afternoon.

Having come to a preliminary conclusion, life seemed momentarily a little easier. She turned out of her way into Fourth Avenue, took a horse-car, got transferred to a Christopher Street one, and in the course of time got out at the corner of Clinton Place. She wrote the shortest possible note to John Ralston, went out again, bought a special delivery stamp and took the letter up to the Thirteenth Street Post-Office—instead of dropping it into an ordinary letter-box. She did everything, in short, to make the message reach its destination as quickly as possible without employing a messenger.