The fact that, while the countryside had been astir for weeks with
rumors of Jacques Benoix' impending release, her daughters were quite
unaware of them was evidence of the Madam's complete sovereignty over
her realm. It would have been a brave man or woman who dared to gossip
of Mrs. Kildare's affairs with her children. They remained unconscious
of the undercurrent of excitement and speculation in the atmosphere
about them. In time, mention of the pardon and reference to the old-time
scandal it revived, was made in the newspapers; but these papers failed
to reach the reading-table at Storm, and the girls did not miss them.
Kate had never encouraged the reading of newspapers in her household,
finding the monthly reviews cleaner and more reliable; and indeed the
doings of people in the far-off world were less real to Jemima and
Jacqueline than episodes in such novels as their mother read aloud by
the evening lamp, while one girl sewed and the other lost herself in
those dreams of youth which are such "long, long dreams."
They wondered a little, it is true, over Kate's frequent absences from
home, and over the defection of Philip.
"He hasn't been here for days, and he used to come every evening,"
complained Jacqueline, always his sworn ally and companion. "No time for
riding, or music, or even lessons--not that I'm complaining of that! But
he's never been too busy for us before."
The fact was that Philip dared not trust himself at Storm just yet, not
until he had accustomed himself to the immediate thought of Kate Kildare
as his mother.
"Philip looks a little queer, too--sort of hollow about the eyes," mused
Jemima, the observant. "Still, he always was rather a solemn person."
"No such thing, Jemmy!" cried Jacqueline, who could bear no criticism of
the thing or person she loved. "He's positively giddy sometimes when I
have him alone. Anyway, wouldn't you be solemn yourself, if you had a
father in the penitentiary?"
"He ought to be used to it by this time. No, I don't believe it is that.
I believe it is mother."
"What do you mean--'mother'?"
"Oh, nothing. Only"--Jemima severely bit off a thread--"I do wish
mother'd grow wrinkled or--or fat, or something, like other people's
mothers."
"Why, Jemmy Kildare!" cried the other, shocked. "How can you say such a
thing? Mother's the most beautiful person in the world!"
"Exactly. If I'm not mistaken, Philip thinks so too."
"Well, why shouldn't he? That's nothing to be solemn about."
The other smiled an enigmatical smile.
"Stop looking like that horrid Mona Lisa. You mean--" Jacqueline stared,
then shouted with laughter. "Blossom, you're _too_ silly! Of course
mother's the most beautiful person in the world, but after all she
is--mother! She's old."
"Remember Henry Esmond."
"Pooh! That's in a novel. Why, Philip might as well get up a romantic
passion for--for the Sistine Madonna."
"Which would be exactly like him," commented Jemima; but Jacqueline
dismissed the absurdity from her mind with another laugh.
From day to day now, Kate put off the breaking of her news. "Not yet,"
she pleaded with her better judgment. "I will wait till everything is
settled."
She waited a day too long.
Jemima had driven down to the crossroads store for some pressing
necessity of the sewing-room. Like many country stores, it combined the
sale of groceries, fishing-tackle, hardware, dry-goods, and other
commodities with the sale of wet-goods, the latter being confined to the
rear portion of the establishment, opening upon a different road from
the front portion.
The proprietor's wife, who usually managed the dry-goods and groceries'
section, happened to be absent at the time, and the proprietor's
unaccustomed efforts to find the buttons Jemima needed aroused her quick
impatience.
"Never mind--let me find them myself, Mr. Tibbits," she urged. "I'll put
them down in your book. There's a customer in the back store. Do go and
attend to him."
Tibbits meekly obeyed, murmuring, "You might find them buttons on the
shelf with the canned goods, or then agin they might be under the
counter behind them bolts of mosquito-bar."
So it happened that Jemima was on her knees behind the counter, quite
invisible, when two women in sunbonnets entered, deep in a congenial
discussion of their betters, such as might have been heard in a dozen
homes in the vicinity that day. They had failed to recognize the buggy
at the door as a Storm equipage.
"What I want to know is how's she ever goin' to manage with the two of
them at once. They do say the young parson's sort of took his father's
place with her."
"Laws! I should think she'd be ashamed. Her old enough to be his
mother!"
"No, she ain't, either. She wa'n't twenty, nothin' like, when Mr.
Kildare brought her here, and the French doctor's boy must a-been about
ten then. Ten years or less ain't such a heap of difference, not when
you hold your looks the way she does. Anyway, they been seen kissin'."
"You don't say!"
The informer nodded, pursing her lips. "It come to me pretty straight.
That old nigger Zeke, who does chores about, seen 'em with his own eyes,
and tol' me about it next day when he was doin' some work in my patch.
Said he caught 'em kissin' and just carryin' on, right in the public
road."
"The idea! What for do you s'pose they want the father pardoned out,
then? She got up the petition herself. Laws, what a mix-up! I shouldn't
think she'd dare have anything to do with either of them. Don't look
good, does it? Him killin' her husband and all."
It was here that the girl behind the counter, flushed and furious and
just about to speak, suddenly lost her color.
"There was some that never believed he done it, Miz Sykes. If you'd ever
known the French doctor--always so sort of soft and gentle in his ways,
didn't believe in huntin' rabbits unless for food, used to doctor
animals just as if they was folks. He didn't seem the sort of man to
make a killer. But there! You never can tell with for'ners. And Kildare
wa'n't the sort of man to let his wife go gallivantin' round the country
with a lover, that's certain. We was s'prised he stood it long as he
did. Oh, I ain't sayin' Dr. Benoix done his killin' in cold blood! He
prob'ly done it in self-defense. The gentlest critter'll fight if it's
got to. But killin' it certainly was. No axdent about that!"
They went toward the back store, still talking, unaware of the
white-lipped girl who slipped out from behind the counter and gained the
refuge of her buggy with trembling knees.
Her knees might tremble, but her lips did not. They were set in a
straight, grim line, and her brows met over eyes that had grown almost
black. It would have been difficult to recognize in this stricken face
the pink-and-white Dresden prettiness that had won her the sobriquet of
"Apple Blossom."
An old man, fumbling at his cap as she passed, suddenly paused and
stared after the buggy, aghast. He thought for the moment that he had
seen the ghost of Basil Kildare.
She went straight to her mother's office, a small room opening off the
great hall. She opened the door without knocking, and closed it after
her.
"One moment, please, I am busy," murmured Kate, glancing up from her
desk in surprise. She was not often interrupted so unceremoniously. But
instantly she rose to her feet. She had no need to ask what had
happened. The girl's face told her.
"Mother!" Jemima's voice was hoarse. "Is it true that--Philip's
father--is coming out of the penitentiary?"
Kate inclined her head, paling.
"And that you are getting him out?"
"Philip and I together."
"Why?"
Kate did not answer. She was struggling to collect her wits for this
sudden necessity.
Jemima came quite close, searching her face with curious grimness; and
Kate saw the resemblance the old man had seen, and shivered.
"Mother, that was not the only news I heard at the store. I overheard
some women talking. They said--"
"Surely we need not concern ourselves with village gossip, my child!"
Kate was fighting for time.
But the appeal to the girl's pride went for once unheeded. "If they
lied," she said tensely, "they must be punished for it. If they did
not--Mother, what they said was that my father was not killed by
accident. They said the man who killed him was Dr. Benoix. They
said--why."
Kate moistened her lips. The time had come to speak, to explain what she
could, to lie if necessary--anything to wipe out of her child's face
that look of frozen horror.
But her tongue refused her bidding. She was hypnotized by the
realization of her own utter folly. To have left such a discovery to
chance! To have hoped that some impossible luck would keep her daughters
in ignorance of her tragedy--and this in a rural community where nothing
is ever forgotten, where every sordid detail of its one great scandal
had been for years a household word!
The two stared at each other. Slowly the ruthless inquiry in the girl's
eyes changed into fear, into a very piteous dismay. "Can't you
deny--anything?" she whispered at last. "Mother! say it isn't so. I'll
believe you."
She began to cry; not weakly with hidden face, but as a man cries,
painful tears rolling unheeded down her cheeks, her shoulders heaving
with hard sobs.
It came to Kate that never since her babyhood had she seen this child of
hers in tears. She held out her arms, infinitely touched. "My dear, my
baby!" she said. "Come here to Mother."
But the girl avoided her touch with a sort of shrinking. "All these
years we've been trusting you, loving you, almost worshiping you--and
you were _that sort_! Oh, Mother! Your husband's murderer--and his son
coming and going about our house as if he were our brother. Those women
said something about you and Philip, too,--but never mind that now. Will
you tell me the truth, please? Before my father's death, you and--that
man--loved each other?"
"Yes, Jemima, but--"
The girl silenced her. "And now that he is coming out of prison, you
will go on--being lovers?"
Her mother answered quietly, "I shall marry him, dear, if that is what
you mean."
Without another word, the girl turned and went out of the room. Kate
hurried after her. "Wait, daughter, I haven't finished. There are some
things I must tell you. Where are you going?"
"To tell Jacqueline."
Kate cried out, "No, not Jacqueline! She's too young. Wait, please--"
She followed up the stairs, commanding, pleading. "Wait! I prefer to
tell her myself. Please, please! Jemima, do you hear me? I insist."
Jemima never paused. "My sister must know the truth. I owe that much to
my father. Young or not, Jacqueline is a Kildare," she said stonily at
the door of her room; and shut her mother out into the world of people
who were not Kildares.
All that morning the Madam, greatly to the bewilderment of her
household, wandered about the house in utter idleness, never stopping;
saying to herself reasonably, "I must find something to do. Now is the
time to be doing something;" wondering with that helpless, childlike
egotism of people in great distress, how the sun happened to be shining
so brightly out-of-doors, the birds singing quite as usual.
Invariably her footsteps came back to the door of the room that had been
the nursery. It was there the two tiny cribs had stood, the
rocking-horse, the doll's house, the little desks at which her babies
had lisped their first lessons. It was there they murmured together now
through the endless morning, discussing her fate, sitting in final
judgment upon their mother.
She could not keep away from the door. Sometimes she pressed against it
soundlessly, as if the passionate throbbing of her heart might send a
wave through to reach them, to help them understand. How else could she
help them to understand? Only by blackening now the memory of a father
who was not there to defend himself, a father whom she herself had
taught them to respect and to love.
It was an expedient that did not once occur to Kate Kildare.
"My little girls!" she whispered to herself. "My poor little frightened
babies!"
If only she had been more with them, had taught them to know her better!
In those hours she accused herself of neglecting her children, of
leaving them too much to the care of others while she absented herself
upon their business. She begrudged, as mothers of dead children
begrudge, every necessary moment she had spent away from them. What
things were they saying in there, what things were they thinking of
their mother?
At last she went upon her knees beside the door, her ear shamelessly at
the keyhole. Jemima heard her there, and opened.
She said coldly, "You might have come in, if you wanted so much to hear
what we were saying. The door was not locked. We have been deciding
where we shall go."
Kate got with difficulty to her feet. "Where you shall go?" she
repeated.
Then she thought she understood. Jemima had remembered the terms of her
father's will, by which in case of her mother's re-marriage the property
of Storm was forfeit.
"Oh, but daughter!"--the words tumbled over each other in their
eagerness to be out. "You need not trouble about that! Losing Storm
won't matter. You lose only what your father left, and I have doubled
that--trebled it. Besides, there is the little property that came to me
from my parents. I've always meant, when I married, to give you more
than my marriage would cost you. That is why I have worked so hard, and
saved. Perhaps you thought me miserly, grasping? I know people do. But
that is why. The money is to be yours, all yours and Jacqueline's--at
once, not after I die. We shall need very little, Jacques and I. Just a
start somewhere--"
The girl stopped the hurrying words with a gesture of some dignity. "We
have not thought about the money part yet, Mother. We were simply
deciding where to live now."
"To live?" The words were puzzled.
"Yes. Surely you don't expect us to go on living with you and our
father's murderer?"
Kate groped at the wall behind her for support. Here was a thing she had
not thought of. She had known that she might lose her children's
respect, perhaps, temporarily, their love; but she had counted
unconsciously upon the force of daily habit, of companionship, of her
own personal magnetism, to win back both, as she had won them from
others. Deprived of their companionship, what chance had she? They were
lost to her, utterly. Yet not even in that bitter moment did it occur to
her that she might fail the man who was coming back to her out of his
living death.
She said tonelessly, "You are very young to leave your mother. Where
could you go?"
The girl had her answer ready. "To my father's aunt Jemima. Now I
understand why you and she have not been on good terms. I understand
many things now. When she hears that we are leaving you, and why, I
think she will be glad to offer us a home."
Kate bowed her head, "And Jacqueline? Is she, too, willing to leave me?"
At this there was a cry from inside the door, and a dishevelled, sobbing
figure flung itself into Kate's arms and clung, desperately.
"No, no, _no_! Don't let her make me. I won't, I won't! She's been
saying--oh, terrible things, Mummy! I tried not to listen. She said you
didn't love us, you loved him. She said that when he comes--that man,
Philip's father--you wouldn't want us around any more. But I know
better. No matter who comes, you'll want _me_, you'll want your baby!
Won't you, Mother? Dearest, darlingest Mother!"
"Jacky, don't be so weak," commanded her sister, sternly. "Remember what
I told you. Remember our father."
"But I never knew our father. What do I care about him? It's Mummy I
want. Whoever she loves, I love. I don't care _what_ she's done! I
wouldn't care if she'd killed Father herself--"
"Child, hush, hush!" whispered the trembling woman.
"I wouldn't! I'd just know he needed killing. There, there--" she had
her mother's head on her breast now, fondling it, crooning over it as if
it were Mag's baby. "Look--you've made her cry!" She stamped a furious
foot at her sister. "What are you staring at with your cold, wicked
eyes? You told me she was a bad woman--my _mother_! If she is, then I
choose to be bad myself. I'd rather be bad and like her than good
as--God. Now, then! Get out of here, you Jemmy Kildare!"
Jemima went. Sternly she closed her door upon the clinging pair,
shutting both out together into the world of people who were not
Kildares. But they were together.