On the rare occasions when the mistress of Storm sat idle in her eyrie,
her household--children, negroes, even the motley assortment of dogs
that claimed her for their own--had learned to go their ways softly. The
morning after Mag's affair, three collies, a hound or so, and several
curs waited in a respectful row, tentative tails astir, with eyes fixed
patiently upon a certain great juniper-tree at the edge of Storm garden.
On the other side of it sat a very weary woman, cradled between its
hospitable roots, with her back turned on the workaday world and her
face to the open country. This was her eyrie; and here, when another
woman would have been shut into a darkened chamber courting sleep, came
Kate Kildare on occasion to rest her soul.
To the left and right of her rose taller hills, of which Storm was the
forerunner, the first small ripple of the Cumberlands as they broke upon
the plain. At her feet stretched mile after rolling mile of summer
green, and gold, and brown. There were dappled pastures of bluegrass,
clover-fields, beech-woods, great golden reaches of corn; there was the
rich black-green of tobacco--not much of that, for Kate Kildare loved
her land too well to ruin it. Here and there the farm of some neighbor
showed larger patches of the parasite that soon or late must sap
Kentucky of its vigor, even while it fills her coffers with gold; but
these were few. The greater part of the land in sight was Kildare land.
Storms, like some feudal keep of the Old World, brooded its chickens
under its wings, watchfully.
Far away, perhaps five miles or so, the roof of another mansion showed
among the trees; a new house. Kate rarely looked in that direction. It
made her feel crowded. It was not the only direction from which she kept
her eyes averted. On the edge of the distant horizon rested always a low
gray cloud, never lifting, nor shifting. It seemed to her an aureole of
shadow crowning some evil thing, even as the saints in old paintings are
crowned with light. It was the smoke of the little city of Frankfort,
where there is a penitentiary.
The plateau at her feet was crossed by many a slender thread of road, to
one of which her eyes came presently, as wandering feet stray naturally
into a path they often use. It was rather a famous road, with a name of
its own in history. Wild creatures had made it centuries ago, on their
way from the hills to the river. The silent moccasins of Indians had
widened it; later, pioneers, Kildares and their hardy kindred, flintlock
on shoulder, ear alert for the crackling of a twig in the primeval
forest, seeking a place of safety for their women and children in the
new world they had come to conquer. Now it was become a thoroughfare for
prosperous loaded wains, for world-famed horses, for their supplanter,
the automobile, which in ever-increasing numbers has come to enjoy and
kill the peace of distant countrysides.
But to Kate Kildare the early history of that road meant nothing. It was
for her the road that led back, a two days' journey, into her girlhood.
In the house Jacqueline was singing, her voice drowning the mellow tones
of the old piano, ringing out singularly pure and clear, like a child's,
lacking as yet the modulations to be learned of one teacher alone; life.
It was a new song that Philip Benoix had brought for her to try:
"A little winding road
Goes over the hill to the plain--
A little road that crosses the plain
And comes to the hill again.
I sought for Love on that road--"
sang Jacqueline, cheerfully.
The eyes of the listener filled with sharp tears. She too had sought for
Love on that road.
She saw herself riding down it into her great adventure, so young, so
laughing and brave, Basil Kildare on his great horse beside her, all the
world a misty golden green. She saw--even with closed eyes, she saw--the
turn of the road where Jacques Benoix, Philip's father, had come to meet
them on their wedding journey.
So far her memories often led her before she stopped them. But the
experience of the night had left her oddly stirred and weakened, not
quite herself. To-day the memories had their way with her.
She lived again through the whirlwind courtship that was still
remembered in a community where sudden marriages are not unusual; saw
again, as she had first seen it, the arresting, great figure of Basil
Kildare framed in a ballroom door, with smoldering black eyes upon her,
that spoke so much more eloquently than his tongue. Yet his tongue had
done well enough, too, that night. Before their first dance was over he
had said to her: "I have been watching you grow up, Kate. Now I think
you are old enough to marry me."
Two weeks later they went to her mother, hand in hand.
"But, my dearest!" fluttered the startled lady, "Mr. Kildare is a man of
forty, and you only seventeen, only a child! Besides--"
"Mr. Kildare," answered the girl, with a proud glance at her lover,
"will help me to become a woman, Mother dear."
What was she, newly widowed, who had depended in all things upon her
husband, to oppose such a pair of wills? Rumors of the wild doings at
Storm were not lacking in that gentler community, nor was the Kildare
blood what she would have chosen to mix with her own. But there is among
this type of women always the rather touching belief that it needs only
matrimony to tame the wildest of eagles into a cooing dove. Kildare,
moreover, was one of the great landowners of the State, a man of
singular force and determination, and, when he chose to exert it, of a
certain virile charm. When Mrs. Leigh realized that, ever since her
daughter had been old enough to exhibit promise of the beauty she
afterwards attained, this man had marked her for his own, a feeling of
utter helplessness came over her.
They were a magnificent pair to look at, as they stood before her, tall,
vivid, vital. Beside Basil Kildare the youths who had hitherto courted
Kate, young as she was, seemed callow and insignificant, even to the
mother. It would need a man to rule such a woman as Kate was to become,
not an adoring boy; and Mrs. Leigh was of the type and generation that
believed firmly in the mastery of husbands.
She could not make up her mind to consent to the marriage, but she did
not forbid it. And it is probable that her forbidding would have had as
much effect upon that pair of lovers as the sighing of the southwind.
Perhaps less effect; for, in a Kentucky May, the sighing of the
southwind is very persuasive.
Bridesmaids and their escorts rode part way on the wedding journey; a
gay cavalcade, some of the youths a little white and quiet, all of the
girls with envious, sentimental eyes upon Kate where she rode beside the
handsomest of the wild Kildares, with the romantic, whispered reputation
of his race upon him.
When these had turned back, the bridegroom, chafing a little under their
surveillance, swore a great oath of relief and spurred his horse close.
In a sudden panic Kate bolted away from him, galloped up a lane, leaped
a fence into a field, where he caught her and seized her, laughing
aloud: "That's my girl! That's my pretty wild hawk! The spirit for a
mother of Kildare men, by God!"
After that she met his kisses unafraid. Girl as she was, it seemed to
her a beautiful saying--"a mother of Kildare men." Only three things she
was bringing with her from the old home to the new--her piano, her
father's books, and the oaken cradle that had come with the first Leigh
from overseas, and followed other Leighs across the mountains along the
old Wilderness Trail, into Kentucky.
Toward the end of their two days' journey through the May woods and
meadows, a little barking dog sprung out at them, frightening Kate's
thoroughbred until it almost threw her. Kildare struck furiously at the
dog, and missed; struck again, leaped from his horse, and pursued it,
striking and kicking, so that the terrified creature ran for its life,
and Kate cried out, "Stop, Basil, stop. What are you doing? Stop, I
say!"
He came back to her, cursing, an ugly line between his brows. "Got away,
damn the luck! I almost--Why, Kate! Tears? Oh, good Lord," he laughed,
still frowning. "You're as soft as Jacques Benoix!"
She mastered the tears; mastered, too, a strange little fear at her
heart, thinking proudly, "He came when I called! He stopped when I
called!"
Aloud she said, "It was the sun that made my eyes water. Who is Jacques
Benoix?"
He told her about his neighbor, a stranger--"the only gentleman within
ten miles of us, so you'll have to be friends with him"--a man so
soft-hearted that he would not hunt foxes or rabbits; a man who broke
his colts without the whip, and was trying to break a son the same way.
"More fool he, coming up here out of a city and trying to teach _us_ to
break colts!"
"Has he a wife?"
Kildare gave his great laugh. "You don't suppose a man as soft as that
would have escaped? The woman's sickly--of course! That's why he married
her, and that's why he has come up here. Gave up a big practice in New
Orleans, they say, because he thought it would be healthier here. So it
is! Too damned healthy for him, I reckon! We don't need more than one
doctor around Storm, and old Doc Jones has got a corner on the births
and deaths already. Yes, Benoix is rather a fool. But he's got his uses.
He'll play poker for twenty-four hours at a stretch, and drink--Lord!"
said Kildare, admiringly. "I don't know where the little fellow puts it
all!"
It was at the next crossroads that they found Benoix waiting; a slender,
rather foreign-looking man, very carefully dressed, with a stiff little
bouquet of geraniums in his hands. For the first time Kate's direct
young gaze met the eyes whose blueness, in their dark setting, was a
never-failing surprise to her. They held hers steadily for a moment; it
seemed to her that they had already talked together before he spoke.
"I bring to Mrs. Kildare the first fruits from her kingdom," he said,
offering the little bouquet.
"Flowers from Storm?" laughed Basil, incredulously. "Where'd you get
them? You're a wizard, Jacques! I never saw any flowers at Storm."
"You were not looking for them, my friend. Now you will look!" Benoix'
smile was a gleam of white teeth.
Kate tucked the flowers into her habit, and held out her hand to him.
"I've been ordered to be friends with you. I do not think it will be
hard," she said.
Kildare laughed again as the other bent formally over her hand. "Thank
Heaven, I'm no Frenchman! A woman's hand, in a glove, must be about as
thrilling to kiss as a mare's hoof. Try her lips, man! You'll find them
better," he urged; and roared with laughter to see them both blushing.
Benoix rode with them the rest of the way, pointing out to the girl the
beauties of her kingdom; mares nuzzling their new-born foals; the tender
green of young crops; cloud shadows drifting over the rolling miles that
darkled like ocean beneath a wind; a pair of mocking-birds at play,
their gray wings flashing circles of white. For some time the hills had
been marching toward them, and at last they reached the first. It was
low, and covered with juniper-bushes. On the crest of it stood a house,
grim and stanch as when the pioneer Kildare built it, facing undaunted
through the years the brunt of every storm that swept the plateau. Its
trees were bent and twisted by the giant grasp of many winds.
"You see why they call it 'Storm,'" said Benoix.
Kildare had left them, spurring forward with sudden eagerness,
whistling. Crashing down through the underbrush came two enormous
bloodhounds, baying like mad things. Kildare flung himself from his
horse and met them with a shout, seizing them in his arms, romping and
tumbling about with the great, frantic beasts until all three were
covered with mud and slaver. It was a rather terrific spectacle. Kate
thought of a bas-relief she had seen somewhere of a satyr playing with
leopards.
"The only things in the world Basil loves!" murmured the Creole; adding
quickly, "or did love. Do not be startled, Mrs. Kildare. Bloodhounds are
greatly maligned. Jove and Juno, there, are as kind as kittens, despite
their rough ways. Here you will find many rough ways," he spoke as if in
warning. "It is a man's place. But you will change it!"
He was mistaken. After all her years there, Storm was still "a man's
place." Kate had never found the time, nor the heart, to make a home of
it.
Benoix left them, and Kate and Basil mounted to their house alone. Seen
close at hand, it proved to be not without a certain charm, despite its
weather-beaten grimness. No house can lack personality that has grown
generation by generation with the race it shelters. The older part was
of rough-hewn logs, whitewashed. To this had been added later a wing of
boulders; later still, one of brick. Across the long front ran a
brick-paved gallery, where a disused carriage had been drawn for
shelter, and taken possession of by a flock of turkeys.
Negroes, big and little, came running from the quarters at the back. A
huge, beaming black woman waddled out and lifted Kate bodily from the
saddle, loudly praising God.
"My Lawdy, ain't she des' a _beauty_? Ain't Mr. Bas' done picked him a
beauty-bright?"
In the open door waited another house-servant; a handsome young mulatto
girl, who curtseyed respectfully and stared at her new mistress with
hostile, curious eyes.
Remembering, Kate shuddered, as she had shuddered then with the
bewilderment, the sense of unreality, that took possession of her at
that moment. It was all so unlike what she had expected, so appallingly
unlike the gracious, well-ordered life of the stately Bluegrass homes
she had known.
Rank weeds grew to the very door-sill. Within she saw a huge, raftered
hall hung with antlers and guns and saddles, pelts, fox-brushes. There
was a stuffed bloodhound, the ancestor perhaps of Jove and Juno. A
horse's head protruded from the wall, nostrils dilated, glassy eyes
starting from the sockets, as if the poor creature were still running
his last race with Death.
"Welcome home, wife!" cried Basil Kildare, kissing her lips with a loud
smack.
The negroes guffawed in delight, the hounds bayed again till the hills
echoed.
Then beside the house she saw a few squares and circles of fresh-turned
earth, planted with limp coleas, and dusty-millers, and all the other
unlovely specimens of horticulture favored by men when they go
a-gardening. Her eyes filled with sudden tears.
"Why, Basil!" She slipped a hand into his. "You dear! How sweet of you
to try to make me the little garden!"
"Eh? What garden?" His eyes followed hers. "Oh! That must be some of
Benoix' doings. He's the only man 'round here who has time to fool with
posies."