Katherine Lauderdale; Vol. 2 of 2

by F. Marion Crawford

He knew that an explanation was inevitable. Oddly enough, though he now had by far the best of the situation, he did not wish that the explanatory interview might come so soon. Perhaps he did not wish for it at all. With Katharine love was alive again, working and suffering. With him there was no response, where love had been. In its place there was an unformulated longing to be left alone for a time, not to be forced to realize how utterly he had been distrusted and abandoned when he had most needed faith and support. There was an unwilling and unjust comparison of Katharine with his mother, too, which presented itself constantly. Losing the sense of values and forgetting how his mother had denied his word of honour, he remembered only that her disbelief had lasted but an hour, and that hour seemed now but an insignificant moment. She had done so much, too, and at once. He recalled, amid the noise and laughter, the clinking of the things on the little tray she had brought up for him and set down outside his door—a foolish detail, but one of those which strike fast little roots as soon as the seed has fallen. The reaction, too, after all he had gone through, was coming at last and was telling even on his wiry organization. Most men would have broken down already. He wished that he might be spared the necessity of Katharine’s explanation—that she would write to him, and that he might read in peace and ponder at his leisure—and answer at his discretion. Yet he knew very well that the situation must be cleared up at once. He regretted having given Katharine but that one word in answer to her appeal—for he did not wish to seem even more unforgiving than he felt.

“I’ll come as soon as possible,” he said, turning to her. “I’ll come now, if you like.”

It would have been a satisfaction to have it over at once. But Katharine shook her head.

“You must stay with the men—but—thank you, Jack.”

Her voice was very sweet and low. At that moment Ruth Van De Water nodded to her brother, and in an instant all the sixteen chairs were pushed back simultaneously, and the laughter died away in the rustle of soft skirts and the moving of two and thirty slippered feet on the thick carpet.

“No!” cried Miss Van De Water, looking over her shoulder with a little laugh at the man next to her, who offered his arm in the European fashion. “We don’t want you—we’re not in Washington—we’re going to talk about you, and we want to be by ourselves. Stay and smoke your cigars—but not forever, you know,” she added, and laughed again, a silvery, girlish laugh.

Ralston stood back and watched the fair young girls and women as they filed out. After all, there was not one that could compare with Katharine—whether he loved her, or not, he added mentally.

When the men were alone, they gathered round him under a great cloud of smoke over their little cups of coffee and their tiny liqueur glasses of many colours. He had always been more popular than he had been willing to think, which was the reason why so much had been forgiven him. He had assuredly done nothing heroic on the present occasion, unless his manly effort to fight against his taste for drinking was heroic. If it was, the majority of the seven other men did not think of it nor care. But he did not deserve such very great credit even for that, perhaps, for there was that strain of asceticism in him which makes such things easier for some people than for others. Most of them, being young, envied and admired him for having stood up to a champion prize-fighter in fair combat, heavily handicapped as he had been, and for having reached his antagonist once, at least, before he went down. A good deal of the enthusiasm young men occasionally express for one of themselves rests on a similar basis, and yet is not to be altogether despised on that account.

John warmed to something almost approaching to geniality, in the midst of so much good-will, in spite of his many troubles and of the painful interview which was imminent. When Van De Water dropped the end of his cigar and suggested that they should go into the drawing-room and not waste the evening in doing badly what they could do well at their clubs from morning till night, John would have been willing to stay a little longer. He was very tired. Three or four glasses of wine would have warmed him and revived him earlier, but he had not broken down in his resolution yet—and coffee and cigars were not bad substitutes, after all. The chair was comfortable, it was warm and the lights were soft. He rose rather regretfully and followed the other men through the house to join the ladies.

Without hesitation, since it had to be done, he went up to Katharine at once. She had managed to keep a little apart from the rest, and in the changing of places and positions which followed the entrance of the men, she backed by degrees towards a corner in which there were two vacant easy chairs, one on each side of a little table covered with bits of rare old silver-work, and half shielded from the rest of the room by the end of a grand piano. It would have been too remote a seat for two persons who wished to flirt unnoticed, but Katharine knew perfectly well that most of her friends believed her to be engaged to marry John Ralston, and was quite sure of being left to talk with him in peace if she chose to sit down with him in a corner.