Kildares of Storm Part 61

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 n.o.body, neither G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 st.u.r.dy masculine furniture covered incongruously with its wedding cretonne, 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 G.o.d! 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 nouris.h.i.+ng food, and stood over her mistress firmly while she ate, obediently enough, but tasting nothing of what she put into her mouth.