Kildares of Storm Part 13

"The Governor! Well? Well?"

"He said--it was a personal letter, you understand, nothing official. He said that he had always entertained grave doubts as to the justice of father's sentence, and that if I could secure the signature of certain men in the State, he would be glad to consider a pet.i.tion for pardon."

In the house, James Thorpe, waiting for Mrs. Kildare's return, after some time became aware that he was not the only person in the room not dancing. A girl in apple-green sat, with a rather fixed smile on her lips, watching three of the young men teaching Jacqueline a new step, while Percival Channing produced upon the piano a tune too recent for the resources of the graphophone. It occurred to him that Jemima's party might leave something to be desired on the part of its instigator. He crossed the room.

Jemima withdrew her eyes from the dancers with an effort. She had evidently forgotten his existence. "But what have you done with mother?"

she demanded. "I thought you were having such a nice time with her all to yourself."

He explained.

"Oh, Philip, of course! Mother does spoil Philip dreadfully, poor fellow! She was a great friend of his mother's, you know, and his father is--but of course you know about his father. Phil simply worships mother, and I think she likes it. Any woman does," said Jemima, with the air of elderly wisdom which always amused Professor Thorpe. "Still, it's too bad of her to go off with him to-night, when I'd promised you a whole evening with her alone."

He winced. He was beginning to realize that evenings alone profited him no more than evenings in company.

"Since you've broken your promise," he said severely, "I think you will have to make me some reparation. This new dancing, now"--he mastered a certain trepidation--"it looks easy, if unbeautiful. Do you think you could teach it to me?"

She rose with alacrity. "Of course I could! I always learn things much quicker than Jacky. You see it's taking three of them to teach her--two to dance for her and one to dance with her--and I know the steps already. Professor Jim," she said irrelevantly, with a faint sigh, "do you think it pays to be clever?"

If Mrs. Kildare had noticed, she would have been more than a little astonished by the vision of shy and awkward James Thorpe, one of the leading psychologists of the country, capering nimbly in a lady's chamber under the guidance of her eldest child. But she did not notice.

"Do you know what this means?" she said, after a long silence. "It means that we have won, my dear. The very judge who tried him!"

Philip nodded, without speaking.

Her hand groped for his and clung to it. As the sisters of Lazarus must have felt when he who was dead came to them out of the tomb in his cere-cloths, so these two felt now. After seventeen years, the thing they had vainly hoped and striven for was about to be granted--not justice (it was too late for that), but mercy, freedom. And after seventeen years, what was a man to do with freedom?

"I am--frightened, a little," Philip said at last, turning to her. "What am I to do with father?"

"You are to bring him straight to me. No, I will go with you and bring him home myself."

"_Home?_ To Basil Kildare's house?"

She lifted her head, "What matter whose house? We shall be married at once."

He said in a low voice, "Have you forgotten--the will?"

"Forgotten it?" she laughed. "Do you think that likely? Why do you suppose I have worked as I have, scheming, saving, paring corners--done my own selling and buying and overseeing, driven my men and myself to the limit of endurance, got for myself the reputation of a female Shylock? Because I like that sort of thing? Because I enjoy making money? No, my dear. When I rob my girls of their inheritance, as rob them I must, I shall be able to give them each a little fortune to take its place. I am a rich woman now, aside from the Storm property. Basil Kildare had the right, perhaps, to do as he chose with his property.

Thank G.o.d he cannot lay a finger on mine!"

She stared out straight in the direction of the little cornfield graveyard, as if defying some ghostly presence there to do its worst.

Philip lifted the hand he held to his lips. When he spoke there was trouble in his voice. "Do you think that when my father hears the terms of Kildare's will, he will consent to such a sacrifice?"

She turned on him sharply. "He does not know about the will, and he must not, certainly until after we are married. Who would tell him--you, Philip?" Her eyes met his. "Philip! What do you mean?"

"Suppose," he said very low, "it were a matter of my conscience?"

"Then I ask you not to listen to your conscience, but to me!" She put her hands on his shoulders. "If, as you say, you owe me anything--if you value my friendship--if you love me, Philip--promise that you will never tell your father!"

It was a great temptation through which he pa.s.sed at that moment; a temptation all the more subtle in that he could tell himself truly it was for her sake he hesitated. One word to Jacques Benoix, and the thing he dreaded, the thing suddenly so near, would never come to pa.s.s.

"Don't you know it will hurt you to give up Storm?" His voice was hoa.r.s.e. "It has been your life so long. You love the land, every stick and stone of it."

"And every twig and gra.s.s-blade. But," she said quietly, "I love Jacques more. Promise, dear."

He promised.

The silence fell again. Across Kate's face a moonbeam strayed and rested, and the young man sitting in the shadow a little behind her could not take his eyes away. He had the strange feeling that he was looking for the last time on the woman he loved, who belonged now irrevocably to his father. It was a glowing face, with eyes as lovely, and lips as tremulous, as those of a dreaming bride. Before Philip she made no attempt to conceal her thoughts. They had been confidantes too long.

It came to him that his father must be a remarkable man to have held through years of absence such a love as this.

"I wish I knew him better," he said, thinking aloud. "To me he is almost a stranger."

"A stranger!" She smiled incredulously. "I should think you would find it difficult to write those long weekly letters of yours to a 'stranger.'"

Philip had never found it difficult, because from the first the subject of those letters had been herself.

At the last meeting between Jacques and his son, the man in his extremity had turned to the boy for aid, pleading with the terrified, bewildered little fellow as if with a man who understood. And Philip, already old beyond his years, born with the instinct of the priest and confessor, had understood.

"You will tell me of her?" Jacques had pleaded. "I have no friend but you, boy. You will take care of her? You will write me how she does?"

Philip had not failed his father. Every detail of Kate's life was known to the man in prison, her comings and goings, her daily habits, her work, her successes and failures, the very color of the gowns she wore.

There had been from the first a sort of glamour about her, to the imagination of a lonely, dreaming boy. Even at fourteen he had been a little in love with Kate Kildare, as a page may be in love with a queen.

With the pa.s.sing years, more of Philip's self than he knew had crept into those weekly letters to his father; so that if Jacques Benoix was a stranger to him now, he was no stranger to his father.

"It is queer, though," he mused, still thinking aloud. "Often as I write to him, he rarely answers. Once a year, on my birthday, and again at Christmas. It is as if he wanted me to forget him!"

"I think he does," she said. "That is why he never writes to me at all.

I have had only one letter, begging me never to come there, nor to allow you to come there. He even asked me not to write to him, and I have not written. But--forget Jacques!" She smiled proudly. "He does not know us, does he? Nor himself. Why, there is not a man or woman in the county who has forgotten him!"

Philip was staring at her in amaze. "You mean to say that _you_ never hear from him, either, and that you have never seen him--?"

Her face paled. "Yes, I have seen him. Once. There were convicts working on one of the roads near Frankfort. I spoke to them as I pa.s.sed--men in that dress always interest me now. One of them did not answer me, did not even lift his head to look at me. I looked more closely--"

"It was he?"

She nodded. "Working on the road like a common laborer, a negro! Oh, I went to the warden about it myself. I railed at him, asked him how he dared put such a man at that work, a gentleman. He heard me through patiently enough--after all, what business was it of mine? When I finished, he explained that he had put Jacques on the road at his own request, granted as a reward for help during an epidemic in the prison.

Jacques had chosen it."

"Chosen it! Why?"

"Because it was out of doors, beyond the walls. Because he wanted to see the sky, and trees, and birds. He always loved birds...."

She felt Philip shaking, and with a gesture of infinite tenderness, drew his head down on her shoulder.