Kildares of Storm Part 14

"He had changed so little, dear, so little. But it was years ago. Now he must seem older. Have you forgotten how he looks? You were such a child when he went. Glance into your mirror and you will see him again. The same eyes that flash blue in your dark face, the same smile, the same look of gentleness; strong gentleness. You are simply your father over again. That is why I love you so." She laid her cheek on his hair.

If the words brought a stab of pain that was almost unendurable, she did not guess it. From the moment her first child was laid in her arms, Kate, like many another woman, regarded herself as a mother to all mankind. For her, this was the boy Jacques had left in her care, the husband she had chosen for her own little girl; doubly, therefore, her son. That she was less than ten years his senior, the one beautiful woman in his world, the heroine of all a young man's idealism--of these things she was as unaware as of the fact that Jacques' boy had long ago left boyhood behind him.

He stayed where she lightly held him, his head rigid upon her shoulder, conscious in every fiber of his being of the cheek pressing his hair, the warmth and fragrance of her, the rise and fall of her soft bosom--praying with all the strength that was in him to become to this beloved woman only the son she thought him, nothing more, never anything more. The Benoix men came of a race of great lovers.

She released him presently and he rose, moving with a curious stiffness as of muscles consciously controlled.

"What, going so soon? I have so much more to say to you about him--but there! You look tired--you look not quite happy, Philip. What is it? Are you still wondering what to do with him? Don't! Leave that to me, dear.

And now go straight to bed and get a good night's rest. To-morrow we shall begin on the pet.i.tion--our last, thank G.o.d! I will see the men the Governor mentions myself."

When he was gone, she sat a while longer in the dark. She was not quite ready yet to face strangers, to face even her daughters. Jacques was coming back to her! She said the words over and over to herself, till they rang through her head like the refrain of a song. All the years between them, the long, lonely, weary years, filled with work and with the sort of happiness that comes from successful endeavor,--these were suddenly as naught, and she was a girl again, a wistful, dreaming girl with a baby in her arms, listening there in her garden for the pit-a-patter of her lover's horse.

She closed her eyes. Presently the voice of the graphophone broke in upon her dreams, and she became aware of the dancers that pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed the lighted windows; among them a man in spectacles, guiding and being guided by a determined young person in apple-green, his face flushed and earnest, his grizzled hair somewhat awry. "Why--it's Jim Thorpe!" she thought, with a stab of remorse. "I'd forgotten him. But he's dancing, he's enjoying himself like a boy. Bless that thoughtful girl of mine! She's made him look ten years younger. Dear, faithful old Jim!"

Her heart was open to all the world just then. She went to the window and smiled in at him tenderly.

Perhaps it was just as well that James Thorpe could not see that smile, and misunderstand it.

CHAPTER XI

Late summer in Kentucky; deep, umbrageous woodlands fragrant with fern, dreaming noons, shimmering in the heat, with the locust drowsily shrilling; warm and silver nights, made musical by the loves of many mocking-birds; the waste places green tangles of blossoming weed, the roads a-flutter with hovering yellow b.u.t.terflies, over all the land a brooding hush, not the silence of idleness, of emptiness, but of life, intense and still as a spinning top is still. Beneath it those who listen are aware of a faint, constant stirring, a whisper of green and eager things pushing themselves up from the fecund soil.

More than ever before was Kate aware of the sympathy that bound her to these fields of hers, soon to be hers no longer. She could not keep away from them. Early and late the Madam and her racking mare were to be seen about the roads and lanes, inspecting dairies, stables, hog-pens, poultry-yards, watching the field-hands at their labor, hearing in person the requests and complaints of tenants. Much of her phenomenal success was due to personal supervision, as she knew; even, perhaps to personal charm, for field-hands and tenants are alike human. Now the executive habit stood her in good stead. None of the business of the great farm was neglected; but active as her mind was, through it all her heart was dreaming, not as a girl dreams, but as a woman may who knows well what she has missed of life. Spring had pa.s.sed her by, with all its promise blighted. Now, like her fields, she had come to late summer, to the season of fulfilment.

There was much to be done in connection with Jacques Benoix' pardon; certain men to be interviewed, not always successfully, though the woman who had made Storm was heard with more respect than had been the desperate young heroine of a scandal; lawyers to be seen, land-agents, cattle-dealers, for in resigning her stewardship of the estate, a certain amount of liquidation was necessary. Optimist that she was, however, for years she had been preparing for this contingency. Her affairs were in such order that at any moment she could turn them over to others. Nothing that had any claim upon her was overlooked. The servants, the horses in her stable, the very mongrel dogs who by the instinct of their kind had discovered her weakness and spread the discovery broadcast,--all had their share in her planning for the future--their future, not hers.

Hers was to be put without question into the hands of Jacques Benoix.

She would go to him at the door of his prison-house and say, "Here I am, as you left me. What will you do with us, me and my children?"

She would trust the answer to his wisdom, ready, glad to follow wherever he should lead. Yet so much of herself, of her vital force, had gone into the building up of Storm that sometimes a realization of what was about to happen stabbed through her dreaming like a sharp pain. For twenty years this had been her world, and she was about to leave it.

Often, as she pa.s.sed among her young orchard trees, she laid a hand upon them yearningly, as a mother might touch children with whom she was about to part.

In all her planning, there was only one problem that baffled her, a new problem: Mag Henderson. It was difficult to arrange a future for Mag Henderson.

"I shall simply have to leave it to Jacques. He will know what to do with her," she decided, with a thrill at the thought of her coming dependence. It is only strength that realizes to the full the joy of leaning.

Mag and her child were both thriving under the care lavished upon them at Storm. They had been established in a room of the long-disused guest-wing, where young Jemima might keep a capable if impersonal eye upon their welfare. But Jacqueline, somewhat to her sister's surprise, had promptly relieved her of all responsibility with regard to the baby, and was doing her best to relieve the mother of responsibility also.

From the first she regarded the child as her own personal possession, neglecting in its behalf the various colts and puppies which had hitherto occupied most of her waking moments.

The girl had a fund of maternal instinct that sat oddly upon her careless, madcap nature. It was a queer and rather a touching thing to Philip Benoix to see this young tomboy running about the place with an infant tucked casually under her arm or across her shoulder; and to Jemima, for some reason, it was rather a shocking thing.

"She's perfectly possessed by the child, always bathing it or dressing it or something, just as she used to do with dolls. You know we couldn't make her give up dolls till a year or two ago. She is actually persuading Mag to wean it, Philip," complained Jemima, who had no reserves with her friend, "so that she can keep it in her room at night.

Did you ever hear of such a thing? A squalling infant that would much rather be with its mother! Isn't it--unseemly of her?"

But Philip did not find it unseemly. "She's growing up, that's all," he said, looking at his young playmate and pupil with eyes newly observant.

Since his acceptance of the Storm parish, Philip had supplanted all other tutors to Kate's children, and was "finishing" their education with an attention to detail not possible in even the best of girls'

finishing schools.

Mag had needed little persuasion to give over the care of her child to Jacqueline. She was not lacking in animal instinct, and those who advocated taking the child from her permanently would have found a fury to deal with. But she had also the ineradicable laziness of the "poor white," and it took effort to keep the baby up to the standard of Storm cleanliness. If one of the young ladies chose to take this effort off her hands, so much the better. Besides, it was Jacqueline who had kissed her.

Her temporary interest in the novel state of maternity was soon superseded by an interest still more novel and far more absorbing--the pa.s.sion for dress.

Even in her abject poverty, there had been something noticeable about Mag Henderson, aside from mere prettiness. Her print frocks, while often ragged and rarely clean, fitted her figure very neatly, and she managed effects with a bit of ribbon and a cheap feather that might have roused the envy of many a professional milliner. Now that she had become the possessor of several cast-off dresses of Jemima's and Jacqueline's, her pleasure in them was a rather piteous thing to see. As her strength rapidly returned, under the influence of care and good feeding, she became absorbed in the task of altering these treasures to fit herself.

For this she showed such apt.i.tude and taste that Jemima spoke to her mother about it.

"I believe I've found what Mag is meant for--dressmaking."

Kate gave her daughter a delighted hug. "You clever Blossom! What should I do without you? We'll give Mag a profession. That solves the problem.

Write to town at once for patterns and material, and set her to work.

Teach her all you can, and whatever you do, now that she is getting strong, _keep her busy_."

Mrs. Kildare was a firm believer in the adage with regard to Satan and idle hands.

Jemima nodded responsibly. As it happened, this suggestion fitted in very well with certain schemes of her own. Like all good generals, she realized that equipment plays a vital part in war; and little as her mother realized it, the recent "party" was the opening move in a well-thought-out campaign. Jemima had no idea of pa.s.sing her entire life in the role of exiled princess; and since her mother evidently did not realize certain of the essential duties of motherhood, she intended to supply deficiencies herself.

So the voice of the sewing-machine began to hum through the old house like a cheerful b.u.mble-bee, and Mag entered upon what was certainly the happiest period of her career. Laces, silks, fine muslins--these had the effect upon her developing soul that a virgin canvas has upon the painter. Her fingers wrought with them eagerly, deftly, achieving results which astonished Jemima, herself a dressmaker of parts. Her att.i.tude toward Mag lost something of its cool patronage. She had always great respect for ability.

It was perhaps her absorption in Mag's efforts and the approaching campaign which blinded her keen young eyes to certain changes which had taken place in her mother. She did notice that she spent more time than usual in the juniper-tree eyrie; and one night when the three sat as usual in the great hall, busy with books and sewing, she suddenly realised that her mother had been reading for an hour without once turning her page.

"Mother's got something on her mind. I wonder why she doesn't consult me," she thought, characteristically; but at the moment she had too many weighty affairs on her own mind to give the matter her usual attention.

Occasionally Kate wandered into the sewing-room in the rather vague way that had come to her recently, quite unlike her usual brisk alertness.

"What are you up to, you and Mag?" she asked on one of these occasions.

"You seem to be turning out garments by the wholesale." She fingered the dainty pile of fineries on the bed. "What a pretty petticoat! And a peignoir to match. How grand they are! And what's this--no sleeves in it, no waist to speak of--Why, it's a ball-dress! Where in the world have you ever seen a ball-dress, Jemmy girl?"

"In a magazine." Jemima spoke rather anxiously, with a mouth full of pins. "Does it look all right, Mother? Did you use to wear as--as little as that at a ball?"

"Well, not quite as little, perhaps," murmured Kate--the frock in her hand was of the Empire period. "Fashions change, however, and it looks very pretty. But what do you need with such a dress at Storm, dear?"

The girl said rather tensely, "Mother, do you expect Jacqueline and me to spend the rest of our lives at Storm?"

Kate's eyes dropped. "No," she answered in a low voice. She wondered whether the time had come to make the announcement she dreaded.

"Well, then!" said Jemima with a breath of relief. "You see I believe in being forehanded. Young ladies in society need lots of clothes, don't they?"

"You are not exactly young ladies in society."

"Not yet. But we mean to be," said Jemima, quietly.

Kate winced. She had not forgotten it, the thing her daughter called "society"; the little, cruel, careless, prurient world she had left far behind her and thought well lost. To Jemima it meant b.a.l.l.s and beaux and gaiety. To her it meant the faces of women, life-long friends, turned upon her blank and frozen as she walked down a church aisle carrying the child she had named for her lover. Wider, kinder worlds were open to her children, surely, the world of books, of travel, of new acquaintance.

But the thing Jemima craved, the simple, trivial, pleasure-filled neighborhood life that made her own girlhood bright to remember--of this she had deprived her children forever.

She caught the girl to her in a gesture of protection that was almost fierce. "What does it matter? Haven't you been happy with me, you and Jacqueline? Hasn't your mother been enough for you, my darling?"