Kate stepped down into the porch with outstretched hands. "I am so glad
it is you, Phil dear. You must have felt me wishing for you. Come, come
in, boy! You don't have half enough of 'high jinks'!"
He shook his head silently.
She made a little grimace. "I forgot--the Cloth does not dance. But
surely the Cloth may look on?"
"From afar off, perhaps, out of the way of temptation."
He spoke smilingly, but she reproached herself for thoughtlessness.
Philip was very careful not to present himself anywhere that his
presence might cause restraint or embarrassment, he never forgot, no
matter if others forgot, that he was the son of a convict.
"Then I shall sit out here with you." As she drew closer to him, she saw
his face clearly in the light that streamed from the open doorway. It
was very pale. "Oh!" she cried. "What is the matter, Philip?"
"My father--"
Her hand went to her heart.
"Not bad news," he said quickly. "Good news. To-day I had a letter from
the Governor."
The newly elected Governor of the State had been the presiding judge at
Jacques Benoix' trial.
"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 petition 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 God 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 passed 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 pass.
"Don't you know it will hurt you to give up Storm?" His voice was
hoarse. "It has been your life so long. You love the land, every stick
and stone of it."
"And every twig and grass-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 passing 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 passed--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.
"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 petition--our last, thank God! 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 passed and
repassed 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.