A second shock within a week at The Towers found Kimberly still dazed.
In the confusion of the household Uncle John failed one morning to
answer Francis's greeting. No word of complaint had came from him. He
lay as he had gone to sleep.
Hamilton stood in the room a moment with Kimberly beside his dead uncle.
"He was an extraordinary man, Robert," said the surgeon, breaking the
silence at last. "A great man."
"He asked no compromise with the inevitable," responded Kimberly,
looking at the stern forehead and the cruel mouth. "I don't know"--he
added, turning mechanically away, "perhaps, there is none."
After the funeral Dolly urged Robert to take Hamilton to sea and the two
men spent a week together on the yacht. Between them there existed a
community of mental interest and material achievement as well as a
temperamental attraction. Hamilton was never the echo of any expression
of thought that he disagreed with. Yet he was acute enough to realize
that Kimberly's mind worked more deeply than his own and was by this
strongly drawn to him.
Moreover, to his attractive independence Hamilton united a tenderness
and tact developed by long work among the suffering--and the suffering,
like children, know their friends. Kimberly, while his wound was still
bleeding, could talk to Hamilton more freely than to any one else.
The day after their return to The Towers the two men were riding
together in the deep woods over toward the Sound when Kimberly spoke for
the first time freely of Alice. "You know," he said to Hamilton,
"something of the craving of a boy's imagination. When we are young we
dream of angels--and we wake to clay. The imagination of childhood sets
no bounds to its demands, and poor reality, forced to deliver, is left
bankrupt. From my earliest consciousness my dreams were of a little girl
and I loved and hungered for her. She was last in my sleeping and first
in my waking thoughts.
"It grew in me, and with me, this pictured companion of my life. It was
my childish happiness. Then the time came when she left me and I could
not call her back. An old teacher rebuked me once. 'You think,' said
he, 'that innocence is nothing; wait till you have lost it.'
"I believed at last, as year after year slipped away, that I had created
a being of fancy too lovely to be real. I never found her--in all the
women I have ever known I never found her until one night I saw Alice
MacBirney. Dolly asked me that night if I had seen a ghost. She was my
dream come true. Think of what it means to live to a reality that can
surpass the imagination--Alice was that to me.
"To be possessed of perfect grace; that alone means so much--and grace
was but one of her natural charms. I thought I knew how to love such a
woman. It was all so new to her--our life here; she was like a child.
I thought my love would lift me up to her. I know, too late, it dragged
her down to me."
"You are too harsh. You did what you believed right."
"Right?" echoed Kimberly scornfully. "What _is_ right? Who knows or
cares? We do what we please--who does _right_?"
They turned their horses into a bridle-path toward the village and
Kimberly continued to speak. "Sometimes I have thought, what
possibilities would lie in moulding a child to your own ideas of
womanhood. It must be pleasing to contemplate a girl budding into such
a flower as you have trained her to be.
"But if this be pleasing, think what it is to find such a girl already
in the flower of her womanhood; to find in her eyes the light that moves
everything best within you; to read in them the answer to every question
that springs from your heart. This is to realize the most powerful of
all emotions--the love of man for woman."
The horses stopped on the divide overlooking the lakes and the sea. To
the left, the village lay at their feet, and beyond, the red roofs of
the Institute clustered among clumps of green trees. The sight of the
Institute brought to Kimberly's mind Brother Francis, who, released from
his charge at The Towers, had returned to it.
He had for a time wholly forgotten him. He reflected now that after
Hamilton's departure the companionship of Francis might help to relieve
his insupportable loneliness. The men rode together past the village
and parted when they reached the lake, Hamilton returning to The Towers
and Kimberly riding south to the Institute to take, if possible, Brother
Francis home with him. He expected some objection, but was prepared to
overcome it as he dismounted at the door of the infirmary and rang. A
tall, shock-haired brother answered.
"I have come to see Brother Francis."
"You mean Brother Francis, who was at The Towers? He has gone, I am
sorry to say."
"Where has he gone?"
"Brother Francis has gone to the leper mission at Molokai."
Kimberly stared at the man: "Molokai! Francis gone to Molokai? What do
you mean?"
A wave of amazement darkening Kimberly's features startled the
red-haired brother. "Who sent him?" demanded Kimberly angrily. "Why
was I not notified? What kind of management is this? Where is your
Superior?"
"Brother Ambrose is ill. I, Mr. Kimberly, am Brother Edgar. No one
sent Brother Francis. Surely you must know, for years he has wished to
go to the Molokai Mission? When he was once more free he renewed his
petition. The day after it was granted he left to catch the steamer.
He went to The Towers to find you to say good-by. They told him you had
gone to sea."
Kimberly rode slowly home. He was unwilling to admit even to himself
how hateful what he had now heard was to him and how angrily and
inexplicably he resented it.
He had purposed on the day that he made Alice his wife to give Brother
Francis as a foundation for those higher schools that were the poor
Italian's dream, a sum of money much larger than Francis had ever
conceived of. It was to have been one of those gifts the Kimberlys
delighted in--of royal munificence, without ceremony and without the
slightest previous intimation; one of those overwhelming surprises that
gratified the Kimberly pride.
Because it was to have been in ready money even the securities had
previously been converted, and the tons of gold lay with those other
useless tons that were to have been Alice's on the same day--in the bank
vaults. And of the two who were to have been made happy by them, one
lay in her grave and the other with his own hand had opened the door of
his living tomb.
Kimberly in the weariness of living returned to the empty Towers. Dolly
and her husband had gone home and Hamilton now returning to town was to
dine with Charles Kimberly. Robert, welcoming isolation, went upstairs
alone.
His dinner was brought to his room and was sent down again untasted. He
locked his doors and sat down to think. The sounds about the house
which at best barely penetrated the heavy walls of his apartment died
gradually away. A clock within the room chiming the hour annoyed him
and he stopped it. His thoughts ran over his affairs and the affairs of
his brother and his sister and partners and turned to those in various
measure dependent upon his bounty.
His sense of justice, never wholly obscured, because rooted in his
exorbitant pride, was keenly alive in this hour of silent reckoning. No
injustice, however slight, must be left that could be urged against his
memory, and none, he believed, could now thus be urged. If there were a
shock on the exchanges at the news of his death, if the stocks of his
companies should be raided, no harm could come to the companies
themselves. The antidote to all uneasiness lay in the unnecessarily
large cash balances, rooted likewise in the Kimberly pride, that he kept
always in hand for the unexpected.
His servants, to the least, had been remembered and he was going over
his thought of them when, with a pang, he reflected that he had
completely forgotten the maid, Annie. It was a humiliation to think
that of all minor things this could happen--that the faithful girl who
had been closer than all others to her who was dearest to him could have
been neglected. However, this could be trusted to a letter to his
brother, and going to a table he wrote a memorandum of the provisions he
wished made for Annie.
Brother Francis and his years of servitude came to his mind. Was there
any injustice to this man in leaving undone what he had fully intended
to do in providing for the new school? He thought the subject over long
and loosely. What would Francis say when he heard? Could he, stricken
sometime with a revolting disease, ever think of Kimberly as unjust?
The old fancy of Francis in heaven and Dives begging for a drop of water
returned. But the thought of lying for an eternity in hell without a
drop of water was more tolerable than the thought of this faithful
Lazarus' accusing finger pointing to a tortured Dives who had been in
the least matter unjust. If there were a hereafter, pride had something
at stake in this, too.
And thus the thought he most hated obtruded itself unbidden--was there a
hereafter?
Alice rose before him. He hid his face in his hands. Could this woman,
the very thought of whom he revered and loved more than life
itself--could she now be mere dissolving clay--or did she live? Was it
but breathing clay that once had called into life every good impulse in
his nature?
He rose and found himself before his mother's picture. How completely
he had forgotten his mother, whose agony had given him life! He looked
long and tenderly into her eyes. When he turned away, dawn was beating
at the drawn shades. The night was gone. Without even asking what had
swayed him he put his design away.