Kildares of Storm Part 19

She gave this letter, silently, to Philip, but he did not offer her his own. There were things his father had said to him in farewell not meant for other eyes to read; and for a long time they left him awed and silent.

CHAPTER XIV

Kate made the long drive back to Storm, which was to have been her wedding journey, with Philip beside her. They rarely spoke. Conversation was never necessary between them, and now both were busy with their thoughts. She drove, sitting erect as was her custom, her hands very light upon the lines, steadying the young horses now and then with a word, never urging or hurrying them; yet after a few coltish alarms and excursions they settled down to their work with a long, steady trot that ate up the miles like magic.--It was always a pleasure to Philip to see her drive. It was her great gift, he thought, settling men and horses alike to their stride.

They stopped for the nooning at a farmhouse where they were expected, and where their hostess met them eagerly at the gate. But when she saw who was Kate's companion, her face fell, and she hurried to her dining-room to remove from the table a large cake, decorated in candy roses. She asked no questions. There was that in the Madam's face which made questioning impossible.

After the meal and a brief rest for the horses, they drove on, still in silence, the colts trotting steadily now like old, sedate roadsters.

Philip's thoughts were still too chaotic for speech. Disappointment, sorrow for his father, admiration, struggled with an unwilling relief, a secret gladness that made him sick with shame.

"Poor father! What am I thinking of!" he said to himself, angrily. "He may be ill, he may be without money. Why did I not ask more questions?

Oh, I must find him somehow, I must! And yet--What a solution! She is here beside me. He will not take her from me. How did he know? I shall never have to call her 'mother.' He gives her to me. His whole life has been a sacrifice. What was it he wrote--'We must consider nothing now except her happiness, you and I, except her greatest good.' I wonder, I wonder--"

He dared not look at her often, but sat quite still through the long miles, thrilling to the touch of her skirts when they blew against his knees. The thoughts within him clamored so that sometimes he feared she must be aware of them.

But Kate had forgotten that he was there. Her eyes gazed straight before her down the white road, over which yellow August b.u.t.terflies hovered like drifting flowers; across the dappled, fragrant fields of the wide valley they crossed to the hills, whose vanguard, Storm, was already to be distinguished by the pennant of smoke flying from its tip. She longed for her home with a great longing, as children who have been hurt yearn for the comfort of their mother's arms.

Her mind was too bruised, too weary for consecutive thought. Sometimes the dream she had at dawn came back to her.--How broken he was, how frail! It did not seem to her that she had seen only a vision. It was Jacques himself. She understood now what promise he had made her. He was indeed never so far away that any need of hers could fail to reach him.

He was giving her back her child, giving her back the land she loved, the work she loved; he was giving her what he could of happiness. But he was taking with him the hope that had kept her young.

Storm stood out clearly now against its background of hills, and a cloud of dust approached down the road, which presently revealed the galloping figure of Jacqueline, waving a large bouquet.

"Your wedding bouquet, Mummy," she cried from afar off, with rather tremulous gaiety. "Welcome home! Welcome home!"

Then, as her eyes made out the second figure in the phaeton, her expressive face changed. "Why--it's only you, Philip? Where is _he_?"

Philip said huskily, "We do not know."

"You don't know! You--you haven't _lost_ him?"

Philip nodded. To his surprise he found that he was sobbing, crying as he had not cried since he was a boy.

"Oh--_oh_!" gasped Jacqueline. Then, "Stop, please, Mummy. I want to get in and comfort Phil."

She turned her horse loose with a slap on the flank, and clambered in between them.

Jacqueline knew a great deal about comforting people. It was a knowledge that had been given to her with her warm lips, and her crooning voice, and her clinging, caressing hands. She said nothing, because she could think of nothing to say; but for the rest of the way Philip was aware of a young arm wound tight about his shoulders, and more than once of lips fluttering against his cheek. Jacqueline's kisses were like the dew from heaven, which falls alike upon the just and the unjust; none the less blessed, perhaps, for that.

Philip had more than his share of these attentions, because Kate did not seem to need them. She still drove silently, sitting upright, staring straight before her.

Once the girl leaned far out of the phaeton, and waved a handkerchief three times, as if she were signaling. There was an answering flutter from beneath the juniper-tree.

"Who is that in the eyrie?" It was the first time Kate had spoken for hours, and her voice seemed to come with a great effort.

"Why, it's the Blossom, Mother. She hasn't gone yet. She was waiting till the last possible moment, to be sure whether--whether Philip's father was with you. I promised to signal her yes or no."

Kate turned suddenly and looked at her. "Why did Jemima think he might not be with me?"

The girl answered very low, "Because--because she wrote to him."

The colts with a last gallant effort breasted the hill at a trot. At the door a wagon was waiting with a trunk in it, and Jemima stood beside it, dressed for traveling. But as they appeared, she dropped the satchel out of her hand and ran toward the phaeton.

"Bring brandy, Mag--be quick!" she called over her shoulder as she ran.

She had seen what the others had failed to notice: that her mother, still sitting upright with the lines in her hands, was quite unconscious.

CHAPTER XV

Years before, when gentle Mrs. Leigh turned her back forever upon the beloved Bluegra.s.s town of her youth, and came to spend the remaining years of her life at Storm--for with all her ineffectiveness she was not the woman to leave her daughter alone in disgrace and sorrow--Kate had tried to make the strange country more homelike for her by building an Episcopal church. Meeting-houses of several denominations had been long established there; but to Mrs. Leigh, with Virginia and English antecedents, "church" meant candles on the altar, a vested choir, a rector in robes reading the familiar service of her childhood. She was willing to concede to Methodists, Baptists, Campbellites, other attendants of meeting-houses, a possible place in heaven; but hardly in the best society of heaven; and she was one of the people who cannot worship G.o.d comfortably except in the best society.

The church Kate built was small and plain--she had found her husband's estate heavily enc.u.mbered with debt. But it had its cross, its choir, and its rector, a scholarly old man who persuaded Philip into the ministry and who on his death was succeeded by him. And from the first it had its congregation. The farming people of that section of the State had come, or their immediate forebears had come, almost entirely from Virginia, so that the English service was as much a part of their traditions as of Mrs. Leigh's. The building of the first Episcopal church in that country did more to break down the enmity toward Basil Kildare's young widow than any of her patient efforts to win their friendship; and this despite the fact that she herself rarely entered it.

The little edifice stood in a grove of fine beeches between Storm and the crossroads village; a four-square structure of field boulders, with a modest steeple, and a gallery across the back for negroes, in the patriarchal Virginia fashion. The mistress of Storm saw to it that this gallery was well filled. The corner-stone bore an inscription that excited much comment in the community, as Kate intended it should:

ERECTED IN MEMORY OF BASIL KILDARE BY HIS TWO CHILDREN

It was the first word of her answer to the world, and it had its weight.

"It says _his_ two children. She wouldn't dare to tell a lie on stone!"

was the current opinion.

Near the church was the rectory, one of those log-cabins boarded over and whitewashed, which are still quite common in Kentucky, st.u.r.dy mementoes of the st.u.r.dy pioneers whom they have outlived and will outlive for many a generation yet to come. Lilac, hollyhock, and hydrangea bloomed in season about this cabin, and it had a door-yard that made women linger enviously and men smile in scorn; for to these rough, hard-working, hard-living farmers it seemed that a young man might find better use for his leisure than the tending of flowers.

He had other weaknesses than flowers. The walls of his long living-room were lined with books, many of them "poetry-books," and the rector was reported to have read them all. Pa.s.sers-by often heard him playing softly on his mother's old piano, and more than once he had been discovered in the kitchen, cooking his own dinner. The one servant he kept was an ancient negress addicted to the use of whisky and cocaine.

To those who remonstrated with him for keeping the old woman, he explained that he got her very cheap because of her habits; but the community suspected other reasons, and despised him accordingly.

Their scorn of his "softness," however, failed to extend to the man himself. Different, they found him, reserved, a little cold, unless they happened to be in trouble; but never alien. For one thing, he had inherited from his father a gift that made "the French doctor" long remembered in that horse-raising community. It was an understanding of horses, indeed of all brute creatures, that amounted almost to wizardry.

There was never a colt so unmanageable that he could not bring it to terms, without the aid of either whip or spur; never an equine ailment too subtle for him to discover and alleviate. At all hours of the day or night owners of sick beasts sent for the young rector as they had sent for his father, confident of willing a.s.sistance.

He had created his reputation by entering, against all protests, the stall of a crazed stallion which had just mangled its groom. "I want to look at his mouth," he explained. "Just as I thought! It's an ulcerated tooth. Give me my lancet. No wonder the poor beast was vicious!"

Philip had made the discovery among animals made by his father among men, that most wickedness may be traced to physical causes. He had also been heard to say, not very originally, that horses needed more care than people, because people had speech and religion to help them and horses had neither; a saying which deeply endeared him to a community that ranks its thoroughbreds with its wives.

Two other qualities of his offset, in the eyes of the neighborhood, the matter of the flowers, the poetry-books, and the cooking. He had courage, and he had a temper, both proved. A few years previously, during the "tobacco-war" which upset the State, when the entire countryside was terrified by the outrages of the Night-Riders who had taken justice into their own hands, after the fashion of the moribund Ku-Klux Klan, young Benoix alone, of all the pastors in his neighborhood, did not hesitate to denounce from his pulpit Sunday after Sunday the men who resorted to masked terrorism as sneaks, cowards, and murderers. And this, despite the fact that the majority of his congregation were in sympathy with the Night-Riders for the best of reasons--kinship. Indeed, more than one man who listened to him with a stolid face had worn the mask and wielded the whip and torch himself.

Benoix knew it; they knew that he did. They knew also that no possible circ.u.mstance could persuade him to give up one of the names he suspected to the law he was determined to uphold.

Anonymous letters came to him, warning, insulting, threatening his personal safety. More than one advised him to go armed. His board of vestrymen themselves remonstrated, counseling moderation for fear of alienating the congregation. His reply became famous throughout the State.

"Look here!" he cried, his blue eyes suddenly ablaze. "You want me to shut up, do you? Then behave yourselves, and see that your sons behave themselves. I'm talking to you, and you, and you--" he pointed direct at several of his vestrymen. "I want you to understand that I'm a disciple of peace. And, by G.o.d, I'm going to have peace in this parish if I have to fight for it with my fists!"