Kildares of Storm Part 18

Even then the tremble of a lip, a tear on an eyelash, might have brought them into each other's arms. But neither was the sort of woman who weeps in a crisis. They kissed, their lips quite cool and firm.

It was Jacqueline who did the weeping for both of them, and insisted upon sitting in her mother's lap all the way to the station, so that Kate had some difficulty in driving....

Such were the scenes and memories that flitted through Kate's brain all the night before her wedding; and the night was long.

Near morning she slept at last, and dreamed. Somebody stood beside her, smiling down--a stranger, she thought him, till she met his eyes.

"Jacques!" she cried, starting up with hands outstretched. "You, Jacques!"

The consoling vision for which she yearned had come at last; but not as she had seen it before, not in the prime of manhood, strong to hear her burdens. This was an elderly man, stooping, gray-haired, frail. Only the eyes were the same, blue as a child's in his wan face, warm as a caress.

He spoke to her. He seemed to promise something.

She awoke with his name on her lips, and saw that it was morning. Peace had come to her with the vision. She faced a new day, a new life, serene and unafraid. What was it that he had promised? No matter. She would ask him when she saw him, soon now.

Smiling at her own credulity, she began with hasty hands to dress.

Out in the street she heard the crisp trot of horses, stopping beneath her window. Looking down, she saw one of her own vehicles, a light phaeton drawn by a pair of young blooded colts she had sent in to Frankfort some days earlier, that they might be rested and fresh for the day's drive back to Storm, which was to be their wedding journey. She looked them over critically.

"They are in excellent condition. We ought to make it in eight hours,"

she thought. "How he will love to drive those pretty fillies! He was always so fond of horses."

Philip knocked on her door. His voice said, "I am ready now."

It had been her idea to send him for Jacques alone, so that father and son might have a little time together before they came to her. She opened to him and stood, a white-clad vision, framed in the doorway of that dreary bridal suite.

"You see, I am ready too," she said, blus.h.i.+ng a little. "Do you like my dress, Philip?"

He stared at her without speaking. His eyes were heavy and rimmed with shadow. For Philip, too, the night had been long.

She asked again rather anxiously, "Do I look nice, Philip? It doesn't seem too--young for me, this white?" She was in need of all her vanity just then. The mirror had shown her a face pale and luminous, not less beautiful--she knew that--but far older than the face whose memory Jacques carried with him into prison. She was obsessed by the fear that he would not recognize her.

But for once Philip's comforting admiration failed her. "I don't know how you look," he muttered, and turned abruptly away.

She stared after him in surprise. "Dear Phil--he must be very much upset to speak to me like that!" she thought.

She went into the parlor, and busied herself arranging flowers she had ordered to make the place less cheerless for the little wedding. The proprietress came in presently with more flowers, a box bearing the card of James Thorpe. The woman was in a flutter of excitement.

"They's two reporters in the office already, _Mrs. Kildare_," she said, emphasizing the name, "and more on the way, I reckon. If I'd 'a guessed who you were, I'd 'a' had a weddin'-cake baked, I surely would. I've been on your side from the very first!"

"Thank you," said Kate, wearily.

"We've often had folks stayin' here to meet a friend who was comin'

out,"--she jerked a significant thumb over her shoulder toward the penitentiary--"but never any one so famous, and never a weddin' right at the very gate, so to speak," she added unctuously.

Kate winced. She had registered under a false name, hoping thus to escape notoriety. Now she saw the folly of any such hope. From the first, no detail of her unfortunate romance had escaped notoriety.

"Let the reporters come up," she sighed. "Perhaps if I speak to them now they will let us alone afterwards."

She was speaking to them, when she heard in the street outside the familiar, crisp trot of the colts from Storm. Her voice broke off in the middle of a sentence, and the two reporters, exchanging glances, tactfully withdrew.

Kate was suddenly very weak in the knees. She stood by the window for a moment, clinging to the curtains, with closed eyes. "I must be prepared for changes," she said to herself. "It is many years, many years--"

She opened her eyes and looked down. Philip had alighted, throwing the lines to a porter. As he crossed the sidewalk, he glanced up at her window and she saw his face. No one followed him.

She met him at the head of the stairs. "Where is he, Philip?" Her voice was very quiet.

"Gone."

He led her into the room, closing the door in the faces of the eager reporters.

"Father caught a train that went through Frankfort just after dawn," he said tonelessly.

She cried out. "Just after dawn!" It was the hour of her vision. "He did not get our letters, then? He did not know that we were coming to take him home? There was some mistake!"

"There was no mistake. From the first he did not mean to see us. The warden said so."

"Where has he gone?"

"I do not know. The warden would not tell me."

Kate ran into her room, and returned with a hat and coat. "He will tell me," she said. "Come."

The warden received them in his private office, grave with sympathy.

"I understand what a blow this is to you," he said. "I argued with him to make him change his intention--Dr. Benoix was as nearly my personal friend as was possible under the circ.u.mstances. But from his first coming here he was determined never to be a burden upon his son--nor upon you, Mrs. Kildare. He felt, rightly or wrongly, that he had already darkened your life too much. It was for that reason he declined to write to you or to receive letters from you. He did not wish to keep alive a--a sentiment which would be better dead."

Kate gasped, "He said that?"

"Yes," said the warden, gently. "He asks that you forget him, if it is possible, or that you think of him as one who has died."

After a moment she said in her resolute voice, "You must tell us where he is."

The other shook his head. "I cannot, and I would not if I could. He has the right to make his life as he chooses. But you may be sure that wherever he has gone, there will be a place for him." The warden's voice changed, "He will be missed here. My business is not a sentimental one.

It does not soften a man. We see a great deal of evil in this place, and very little that is good, and it is easy to--to question the ways of Providence, if there is any belief left in Providence. But when men like Benoix come to us, as occasionally they do come, the old-fas.h.i.+oned idea of a guardian Providence becomes--well, more tangible. There seems to be a reason back of such miscarriage of justice. I believe," he said rather haltingly, "that Benoix was sent here, not because he had any need of prison, but because prison had need of him."

He told them something of the doctor's prison life; of an epidemic that had raged through the wards, when he offered his services to the jail physician and for many days and nights had gone without sleep in his efforts to a.s.suage suffering; of women in the surgical wards who mentioned his name beside that of G.o.d in their prayers; of men to whom he had given new hope and a new outlook on life by curing them of obscure disease from which they had not known they suffered.

"I would have recommended him for pardon or parole years ago, but he forbade me. He said he had more opportunity for research here than elsewhere." The warden smiled. "By 'research' he meant help, of course, he held the modern theory that crime is always a thing for the surgeon's knife, or the physician, or the teacher, to handle. We let him practise his theories wherever possible, because he was of great a.s.sistance to us. He could do more with the prisoners than we could, being one of them. Whenever we had trouble with an inmate, his first punishment was Benoix. He did not often need a second. It is many years since the whipping-post, or the standing-irons, or solitary confinement, have been used in this place, as perhaps you know. Many of our prison reforms may be traced to Benoix' influence, though he will never get the credit of them. He said once, 'What is the use of making men desperate? What you want is to make them ashamed. And that comes from inside.' Young man,"

he turned to Philip, "convict or not, you need never be ashamed of your father."

"I never have been," said Philip.

They went away, each with a letter Jacques had left for them. Kate's was very short:

I have known always that you would come, and that I must not let you. I am going while I have the strength to go. Fill up your busy, useful life without me, Kate. I thank G.o.d that you have your children and my boy, whom you have made a man. Once I left him to your care. Now I leave you to his, without fear. He is worthy.

Do not trouble your great heart for me. I shall find my work in a world that is so full of people--work and friends, too. We cannot be together, you and I, but remember always that I am not far from you wherever I may go, never so far that any need of yours will not reach me.

JACQUES.