Jacqueline had never quite thought out to herself the reason for
Channing's unexplained disappearance. It was a subject upon which her
mind dwelt constantly whenever she was alone; hence she managed to be
alone as little as possible. The realization that he was a coward, as
she had more than once suspected--afraid to face the consequences of his
own act; afraid (the weakest cowardice of all!) of what people might
say--had done much to help her pride through the humiliation of
desertion, had done much, indeed, to banish him from her heart.
But she could not banish him from her mind. Again and again her thoughts
went over all that had passed between them, trying piteously to
discover what had happened to put them apart. He had been so madly
in love, had wanted her so desperately--or was it she who had wanted
him? Had she shown that too plainly?--Had she not shown him plainly
enough?--Sometimes she reproached herself bitterly for her little
instinctive coquetries with him. More often she asked herself in a
terrified whisper whether he had ever really loved her at all, whether
it was she herself who had done the seeking, the demanding?--she a
shameless creature, blinded by her own feeling, to whom he had responded
out of pity, perhaps (Jacqueline shivered), laughing at her all the
while in his sleeve.
Poor Jacqueline! It was no wonder that her eyes were shadowed, her
manner listless. Always, in these dreaded meditations, she came to a
certain point where she dared think no further, but ran away from
herself in a sort of panic, to the comfort of whoever happened to be
nearer, Philip or her mother. And she saw to it that one of them was
always near.
It was the frequency of these sudden, unexplained attacks of frantic
affection that had driven Philip to the necessity of another study,
where he might write sermons and attend to necessary matters free from
the distraction of a wife who at any moment might fling herself into his
arms demanding wordlessly to be comforted.
Not that he begrudged the little bruised soul any comfort he had to
offer. He at least had gone into marriage with his eyes wide open. He
understood Jacqueline far better than did her mother, who ascribed her
varying moods to the whims and megrims usual with young wives in the
first difficult year or two of married life.
Frequently these panics occurred at night, when she suddenly found
herself awake in the black loneliness, remembering Channing. Then she
would jump out of bed and run into her husband's room, a distraught,
white ghost of a figure, and climb in beside him to hide her head in the
ready refuge of his shoulder.
"Nightmares again?" he would ask.
And she, nodding, buried her head deeper, while he held her close and
silent until her shuddering ceased, and he knew by her light breathing
that she was asleep there in his arms.
Perhaps it was a comforting that worked both ways, for Philip sometimes
had nightmares of his own.
One day Jacqueline, after lunch with her mother, was glancing over the
numerous magazines that littered the reading-table, when she came across
something which riveted her attention. Kate, getting no answer to a
twice-repeated question, looked over her shoulder to see what she was
reading. On the front page she saw a picture of Percival Channing, with
a notice of his new book, just published.
"He finished it without me after all, you see," said Jacqueline faintly.
"He--he said he couldn't."
Kate made no comment. The mention of Channing always embarrassed her
quite as much as it did Jacqueline. Her duplicity in the matter of his
disappearance weighed heavily on her conscience, and she longed for the
time to come when she could make full confession and be absolved. She
wondered if the time had come already, since Jacqueline spoke of him of
her own accord.
"I suppose I ought to be proud to have helped at all with such a book as
that," went on the girl, haltingly. "It says here it is the greatest
book he has ever written.--And I'm in it, Mother. It's a great honor,
isn't it?"
"It's a great impertinence," exclaimed Kate.
Jacqueline flushed. "Mummy, dear, you've never been quite fair to Mr.
Channing, and--it's not like you. If you realized how much I--I cared
for him, you would be fairer.--Mother, I want to tell you something, now
that it's all done and over."
Kate braced herself for what she knew was coming.
"I--I kept on seeing Mr. Channing, even after you told me not to--You
never made _me_ promise anything, you know."
"I trusted you."
"Yes, but it isn't fair to trust people when they don't want you to! If
you had asked me any questions, I think I should have told you the
truth--I _think_ so. But you didn't ask me any questions.--It wasn't his
fault, Mummy. I made him come. I used to meet him in the Ruin every
night." She peered at her mother anxiously, and Kate got up abruptly and
crossed the room so that her face should not be visible.
"That isn't all," went on the hurried voice, rather breathless now. "You
see--it didn't seem very honorable, somehow, to go on meeting him like
that, on your place, when you didn't know about it--"
"No," agreed Kate.
"So--so I thought I'd just better go away with him.--Oh, he didn't ask
me to, he didn't really want me to--he said it was too much of a
sacrifice to ask of me. But--you and I know, Mother, don't we? that
there's no sacrifice too great to make when you love a man!"
"Oh, my little girl," groaned Kate, "how could you love him like that
when you knew about--that woman, knew what sort of man he was?"
Jacqueline said eagerly, "But he explained all about that woman. He
never really loved her at all, but he was lonely, and she was very
beautiful and fascinating, as that sort of woman knows how to
be. And artistic people are so susceptible. It was a sort of
experiment--experience is an author's stock in trade, you know." (Kate
could almost hear Channing saying it.) "It turned out wrong, of course.
Why, Mother, she was _horrid_! The fact that a bad woman had got hold of
him was all the more reason for a good woman to--to win him back. Oh, I
suppose he was weak--I know he was--but weak people are the very ones
who need us most, Mother, aren't they?"
Kate came behind her chair and laid her cheek on the girl's hair. "Don't
say anything more, dear. I know, I understand. Surely nobody, neither
God nor man, can condemn us women for our divine gift of pity."
But Jacqueline had dedicated herself to honesty that day. "It wasn't
just pity, Mummy. I----I wanted him, too! I wanted him as much as he
wanted me--more, I think, because after all he never came for me. Just
went away without a word." Suddenly she hid her face in her hands. "Oh,
Mummy, and I loved him so! I adored him!--I loved him as much as you
loved Phil's father."
Kate opened her lips in quick protest, but did not speak. How could she
explain the difference between this childish infatuation for a first
lover and her own devotion to such a man as Jacques Benoix? Was there,
after all, such a difference? It is not the recipient but the giver that
makes love a holy thing.
She knelt beside the girl, and put both arms around her. "My dear!--Did
it hurt very much when he did not come?"
Jacqueline leaned her head on the warm shoulder that had received so
many of her griefs, and gave way freely to the relief of weeping.
"Oh, yes, it hurt," she said between sobs. "It still hurts."
"You don't mean that you still--care for him?"
The other raised tear-filled eyes in surprise. "Now that I am married to
Philip? Why, of course not! How could I? My husband is the dearest thing
in the world!"
Kate laughed in sheer relief.
But the girl's lips were still quivering, and she ducked her head down
on the comfortable shoulder again. "I can't help feeling ashamed,
though," she sobbed. "Ashamed be-because Mr. Channing proved to be
such--such a coward, and because--he never could have loved me at all,
or he would have come for me, or written, or something!--He must have
been glad to get away from me, just as he was from that other woman."
"Listen, darling!" Kate realized that her own moment of confession had
arrived. "He _did_ come for you! It is my fault that he has never
explained to you;"--and with the girl's widening, incredulous eyes fixed
upon her, she told every detail of her experience that night of the
storm.
When she finished, Jacqueline was on her feet, queerly white and still.
"You knew," she whispered as if to herself, "and you let me think him--?
You never told me--you let me suffer--Oh, _Mother_!--Why, it was deceit!
It was a lie!"
Kate frowned. "What of it? Lying, deceit--what are they to me beside
your happiness? I only wanted that--and thank God I've got it!"
Jacqueline gave her a strange look. "My happiness," she repeated.
The tone of her voice startled Kate. "You _are_ happy?" she said,
quickly, between a statement and a question. "You told me yourself that
Philip was the dearest thing in the world to you!"
Jacqueline answered, "Mother, I love Philip now better than I ever
dreamed it was possible to love any one. But--It does not make you
exactly happy to feel that way about a man who--who doesn't know you're
there, unless you remind him."
"Jacqueline! Philip does not love you--?"
"He tries his best to," said the girl with a hopeless little smile, "but
he can't. Oh, it's quite true!"--she stopped her mother's protest by a
gesture. "I knew it before I married him. Jemmy told me--Oh, do you
think I would have done such a thing, do you dream I would have accepted
such a sacrifice, if I had seen anything else to do? If I had guessed
that Mr. Channing really wanted me?--I belonged to Mr. Channing,
Mother.--Now do you see what you have done?"
Kate had risen, too, her hands shaking. A strange and appalling thought
had forced itself into her head. She asked in a sort of whisper,
"Daughter, _why did you marry Philip_?"
The answer came with a terrible simplicity, "Because I did not want to
be like Mag Henderson. Because I thought--if a baby came--you never can
tell--it would be better to have a father for it."
In the silence that followed, innumerable little familiar home-sounds
came to Kate's ears; the crackling of a log in the fire, a negro voice
out of doors calling "Soo-i, soo-i," to the pigs, Big Liza in the
distant kitchen chanting a revival hymn while she washed the dishes. Her
eyes in that one moment took in, as do the eyes of a drowning person,
every detail of her surroundings; the sturdy masculine furniture covered
incongruously with its wedding crétonne, the piano and books that had
been a part of her childhood's home, her open office beyond, with its
business-like array of maps and ledgers; and all these things seemed to
accuse her of something, of being a traitor to some trust. Her eyes came
to rest at last upon the old flintlock rifle over the mantel-shelf,
beneath the wooden, grim-faced Kildare who had carried it.
"And I did not kill him!" she muttered aloud, as if in apology to the
rifle.
Jacqueline, who had been watching her fearfully, ran with a little cry
and clung to her close.
"Mummy, don't look like that, don't stare so queerly! You frighten me,"
she wailed. "Didn't you guess--didn't you understand, when I told you
how I adored him? I--I thought you would. How could I help it? I didn't
know--I--Oh, Mummy!"
Kate with a gesture brushed aside her incoherences, brushed aside the
thing she was confessing--a thing she saw to have been inevitable,
taking into account the girl's nature, her inheritance ("From both
sides," the mother reminded herself, grimly), and the man she had had to
deal with. Kate told herself she was a fool not to have suspected it
from the first; or rather to have allowed Channing to dull her suspicion
of it with his halting statement that he was, after all, "a gentleman."
Even in that moment of sickening surprise, she faced and accepted and
took upon herself the burden of her child's weakness. It was not that
sin which roused in her a rapidly mounting tide of furious anger against
Jacqueline. It was her sin against Philip Benoix.
"You accused me of deceit, of a lie. You!" Her voice was curiously
thick, and she spoke with great effort. "Ah! There have been bad women
in this family of yours, my girl, but never before, I think, a
dishonorable one."
Jacqueline recoiled from her.
"Dishonorable! And my daughter! Stealing a good man's name to cover her
own shame. How dared you, how _dared_ you?" She began to stride up and
down the room, the words pouring from her lips at white heat. Kate
Kildare was one of the people whose quiet serenity covers a great power
of anger, all the more forceful for being kept within bounds. Rarely
indeed had she allowed it to force the flood-gates; and Jacqueline
cowered away from her, staring, hardly believing it was herself to whom
this cold fury of speech was addressed.
"Philip, left to my care by his father, Philip for whom I wanted
everything good in life even more than for my own children! Oh, how
dared you? So devoted to us, so grateful to me--how could he refuse?
What chance had he? Even if he had known--" She turned on Jacqueline
with a sudden gleam of hope. "_Did_ he know? Were you honest enough to
tell him?"
The girl gasped. "How could I?" The blood came up over her face in a
painful flood and her head drooped. "But--but I think he--understood.
He--seemed to."
The other gave a short, hard laugh. "Not likely! Men, even such men as
Philip, don't marry the--Magdalens, however much they pity them. Unless
somebody makes them, as I made Philip.--Oh, my God! And I thought he was
too modest to ask for you! I thought I was offering him the best I had!"
A faint voice interrupted her. "Did you--offer me to Philip?"
If Kate was aware of the cruelty of her words, she was beyond
compunction just then. "Yes! Offered you?--Good Heavens, I insisted upon
it! Oh, what a fool I have been, what a blind, blundering fool! Now I
understand why he was so queer, so quiet.--Taking advantage of his
devotion to shunt my disgrace onto him--Jacques' son!"
At last her anger exhausted her, and she sank into a chair, quite limp
and silent. She did not know just when Jacqueline left the house, had
been only vaguely aware of a horse galloping down the hill recklessly,
as Jacqueline, like her father before her, was wont to gallop. In the
reaction of emotion, she felt rather ill, and had to struggle with a
physical weakness that threatened to overcome her.
Some time later a servant, entering to announce supper, found her there
in the dark, and receiving no reply to her summons, ran back to the
kitchen in some alarm.
Big Liza, with the wisdom of the simple, herself brought a tray of
nourishing food, and stood over her mistress firmly while she ate,
obediently enough, but tasting nothing of what she put into her mouth.
Presently, however, the food had its effect. Weakness passed; and Kate
found that her anger had dissipated, leaving only a great, aching
sorrow, not only for her daughter, but with her. Philip receded to the
back of her mind. Channing was there only as one is aware of the
presence of some crawling, hidden thing in the grass, whom one intends
presently to crush with a heel. All her thoughts rested now upon
Jacqueline.
She saw her as she had cowered away from that torrent of wrath, her
tearless, strained eyes fixed incredulously upon the mother who was
hurting her. She remembered all her little tender, clinging ways, her
piteous loyalty to the man who had deserted her, her gallant effort to
bear gaily the load of fear that must for so long have been upon her
heart. She remembered farther back than that--her fierce rage with the
accusing Jemima, her arms wound tight about the mother whose weakness
she had learned, her cry, "If she is bad, then I'll be bad, too! I'd
rather be bad like her than good as--as God!"
Kate began to shiver. She, the defender of Mag Henderson, of all weak
and helpless creatures, she had failed her own daughter!...
Her mind went still further back into the past, and recalled the scene
between herself and Jacques Benoix, when she had offered herself to him,
when only the fact that her lover was stronger than herself had kept her
from far worse sinning than Jacqueline's--worse, because less ignorant.
What right had she, Kate Leigh, reckless, headstrong, hot-hearted, to
expect of her child either the sort of strength that resists temptation,
or the sort that declines to shield itself at the expense of another?
Gradually she came to absolve Jacqueline from blame even in the matter
of Philip. She had not sought Philip's help, she had only accepted what
had been offered her--what her mother had prompted him to offer. Poor
little victim, passive in the hands of stronger natures, in the hands of
circumstance, heredity, character--that Fate which the ancient gods
surely meant by their cryptic saying: "The fate of all men we have hung
about their necks...."
If it had not been so late she would have gone to her daughter then, and
begged for forgiveness. Instead she sat on before the dying fire,
shivering without knowing it, sometimes unconsciously beating her breast
with her hand, as Catholics beat their breasts during the mass, when
they murmur, "_Mea culpa, mea culpa_."
It was almost dawn when she realized that the fire was out, and went
stiffly up to bed, careful not to wake Mag's baby, who slept beside her
in the crib that had held in turn each of her own children.