Kildares of Storm

She was disappointed to find that Philip, despite his telegram, was not at the station to meet her, but had sent instead a wagon which, its driver explained, was to take her as far as wheels were feasible after the Spring rains, and then return.

"Reckon thar'll be a mule or somethin' to tote you the rest of the way," he added, indifferently.

He was unable to answer any of her questions, or to allay the fears which, despite the eager happiness in her heart, were beginning to make themselves felt. Jacqueline wanted her at last—but why?

Mile after mile they drove in utter silence, Kate's thoughts racing ahead of her; while small Kitty, on a pile of quilts in the bottom of the bouncing wagon, adapted herself to circumstances with the ease of a born traveler, and alternately dozed, or imbibed refreshment out of a bottle, or rehearsed her vocabulary aloud for the pleasure of the world at large. She would have preferred a more attentive audience, but she could do without it.

Where the road degenerated into a mere trail along the mountain-side, Kate found a mule awaiting her, in charge, not of Philip, as she had hoped, but of a mountaineer even more taciturn than the driver. Her fears became more acute.

"Can you tell me whether my daughter—young Mrs. Benoix—is ill?" she asked her new conductor, anxiously.

The man took so long to answer that she thought he had not heard her, and repeated the question.

He spat exhaustively—he was chewing tobacco—and finally replied, "The gal at Teacher's house? Dunno as I've heerd tell."

"Aren't you a neighbor of hers?"

He gave a brief nod of assent.

"Then," she persisted, "you surely would have heard if she were ill, wouldn't you?"

Another long pause. "Dunno as I would. We-all ain't much on talk."

"You certainly are not!" exclaimed Kate with some asperity.

It seemed to her anxious impatience that his taciturnity was deliberate, hostile. He was a rough, unkempt, savage-looking creature; yet the tenderness and skill with which he held little Kitty before him on his ungainly mount would have done credit to any woman.

Kate remarked presently, observing this, "You've had children of your own?"

"Thirteen on 'em."

"Thirteen? Splendid! All living?"

He spat again. "All daid. Died when they was babies."

"Good Heavens! This must be looked into!" exclaimed Kate, with a touch of the old authority; and then remembered that she was not in her own domain.

Presently, as they mounted, her attention was attracted to a woman planting in a steep and barren-looking field, swinging her arms with the fine free grace of a Millet figure.

"What's she trying to raise there—corn?" Kate inspected the soil with a professional eye. "She won't do it—not in that soil! It needs fertilizing."

Her companion remarked impartially, "Ben raisin' corn thar a right smart while."

"All the more reason to give it a rest! I suppose you've never heard of rotation of crops?"

"Yes, I hev," was the unexpected reply. "Fum Teacher." He spat with great success, and added, "We-all ain't much on new-fangled idees."

Kate attempted no more conversation. She began to feel the fatigue of the hurried journey, and to her secret fears was added a growing dread of the end of it, a sudden shyness about meeting not only Jacqueline, but Philip, after the conclusion to which her long meditations had led her. She had recalled again and again, and always with a sharp twinge of shame, the hurt bewilderment on Philip's face when she had offered him Jacqueline in marriage. What a blind and stubborn fool she had been not to understand! If he still had that look in his eyes, that patient acquiescence in her will, Kate felt that she could not bear it.... But surely he had forgotten her, now that he was with Jacqueline? Surely the girl was lovely enough, and piteous enough in her great need of him, to drive any other woman out of his mind?

After many miles, the mountaineer volunteered a remark: "Thar's the school buildin's."

She saw on the rise beyond a group of log-cabins, the central one small and old, the two wings much larger and evidently of recent construction. In the doorway of one a man stood, looking out; and as he started down the slope toward them Kate recognized him. It was Philip.

"Mother!—At last!" he cried out. "I would have gone to meet you, but she could not spare me. She's been asking for you every moment.—Wait, let me help you!"

The tone of his voice laid to rest all her misgivings with regard to him. Even as he welcomed her, he was thinking of his wife.—As for Philip, if he remembered a time when to call this woman "mother" would have been like a knife-thrust in his breast, he thought only that the time was very long ago.

Kate sprang down unaided, her fatigue forgotten. "Jacqueline?" she demanded eagerly.

"A little stronger to-day. But—the baby—"

Kate gave a cry. Her unspoken fears had been true. "A baby?"

"Yes. It did not live.—That is why I asked you to bring little Kitty."

Kate put her hands before her eyes. "My poor little girl! Oh, my poor little girl!—Let me go to her."

At the door she was not surprised to find Jemima, in a neat nursing-dress, her eyes heavily lined with fatigue.

"I've been here several days. Jacky forgot to make them promise not to send for me. She never thought of me," she explained humbly.... "Oh Mother, it has been pretty bad! Jacky was so—so brave!" She broke down a little in Kate's arms.

"Steady, there," whispered Philip behind them. "She can't stand any excitement yet."

But the two had assumed charge of too many sickrooms together to need his admonition.

Kate took off her hat, smoothed her hair, and went in to Jacqueline, as calmly as if they had parted yesterday.

The sight of the wan, thin face among the pillows, with eyes that looked by contrast enormous and black, shook her composure a little, and she gathered Jacqueline up against her breast without speaking. Jacqueline, too, was silent, clinging to her, touching her mother's hair and cheeks with feeble hands, as if to be sure it was really Kate.

"I knew you would come," she said at last, with a great sigh.

"Come! Oh, my darling, why didn't you send for me sooner?"

"Because I wanted to surprise you, Mummy. Because I knew when you saw baby, you'd forgive me, you wouldn't care, nothing would matter, except him.... But now there isn't any baby!" The weak voice suddenly rose to a wail. "There isn't any baby! Nothing has turned out as I had planned. Oh, Mummy! He was going to be so little, and sweet, and fat—nobody who saw him could have stayed angry with me!... And I never heard him cry, I never even felt his tiny hand clutching my finger!... It's because I was wicked," she moaned, tossing about so that Kate caught the waving hands and held them tight. "God wanted to get even with me. So He took the thing I wanted most in all the world. He took my baby. Oh, but that was cruel of Him, no matter how bad I'd been! Wasn't it? Wasn't it, Mummy?"

"Hush, child!" whispered Kate. "Hush! God isn't that sort!"

"Yes, He is, too! 'The Lord thy God is a jealous God'—ask Phil!—Oh, where is Phil?" She looked wildly around, her voice growing higher and higher. "He promised he wouldn't go away—he promised he wouldn't ever leave me again. I want him! Phil, Phil!—Oh, there you are!" The relief in her tone was pitiful. "Don't get where I can't see you again, Flippy darling. It frightens me so! Come here, I want to hold on to you.... Now, tell mother all about the baby. She didn't see him, you know, and I didn't see him either, very well. Oh, why did you let them make me stupid with chloroform, so I couldn't see him? Tell mother about his little ears, and his feet just exactly like mine—"

"Quiet, now," soothed Philip, striving to hush that painful, excited babble. "See, your mother is tired! Let's not talk about it now."

"But I want to talk! I want to, before I forget anything about him. It's the only baby I'll ever have. Mother wants to hear—don't you, Mummy? It was her grandson, you see."

"What nonsense!" interrupted Kate with tremulous cheerfulness. "The only baby? You're just eighteen—you shall have all the babies you want!"

"That shows how much you know about it!" cried Jacqueline with a sort of agonized triumph. "I can't have any more! The doctor said so. I heard him whispering to Jemmy, when he thought I was asleep, and I made her tell me. She didn't want to, but she thought I'd better know.... It isn't as if it would kill me to have them, Mother—that wouldn't matter! But it would kill them. It takes too long. Something is wrong about me."

Kate glanced at Philip in shocked questioning. He nodded slightly.

"So now you know the sort God is, Mother! Cruel, cruel! Just because I wasn't good.... Think of it, never any babies! No one to play with, and pet, and take care of.... No one that needs me, or wants me...."

Philip bent over her, "My darling, the world is full of babies!"

"But not mine. Not one that wants me.—Oh, how my breast aches, how my breast aches."

"This won't do," murmured Jemima, anxiously. "She's working herself up into a fever again. I'm going to call the doctor."

Philip whispered something in her ear, and she hurried to the door.

There was a sound outside that stopped the frantic words on Jacqueline's lips. "What's that?" she breathed. It came again; the fretful whimper of a sleepy child.

Jemima came into the room, carrying small Kitty, newly awakened from a nap on somebody's comfortable knees, and naturally resentful.

"O-oh!" gasped Jacqueline on a long-drawn breath. "Give her to me!"

Presently, held warm against that aching breast, Mag's baby slept again; and Jacqueline looked from one to the other of those about her with the first dawning of her old, wide, radiant smile.

Soon her own eyes drooped. The three tiptoed toward the door; but quiet as they were the faint voice from the bed followed them: "Phil, Phil! where are you?"

"I can't leave her," he whispered apologetically. "You see how it is!" (Kate was glad indeed to see how it was.) "Will you go into the next room, and say good-by to—our son?"

Kate stood gazing down at the grandchild she had so longed for, Jacqueline's baby; an old, wrinkled, strangely wise little face, as befitted one who had solved with his first breath both the mysteries of Life and of Death. His tiny fists were clenched, his brow puckered, as if that momentary glimpse of knowledge had not been a happy one.

No woman who has not gazed so into the face of her own dead child can understand the hopelessness, the sense of bafflement, of the futility of all human endeavor, which surged through Kate Kildare at that moment. The waste of it! The utter, insensate waste of so much passion and hope and tenderness, of such desperate agony, of such courage to bear...! There is no spendthrift so prodigal as Nature. For one perfected product that pleases her, hundreds of preciously guarded lives, such as this, thrown aside like so many pot-shards, useless, done for—and all to what purpose?... For the moment Kate visualised Nature as some incredible, insatiable goddess, a female Moloch, who must be propitiated always with mother's tears....

Then she had a thought of her husband; of his tenderness with their little suffering Katherine, his remorse-stricken grief over the child's death. Was that the purpose? For the moment, she forgot the other Basil whom she knew better, the one who had put aside his own flesh and blood as ruthlessly as Nature herself had put aside this little son of Jacqueline.

"Basil would be sorry for this," she whispered, half aloud. "Poor Basil!"

She did not know that she was weeping, or that she was not alone, till Jemima touched her hand; the girl's nearest approach to a caress.

"So this," said the latter, in a queer, small voice, "is the last of the Kildares of Storm!... Why do you cry, Mother? Aren't you glad?" She spoke fiercely. "Isn't it time we made way in the world for—better people?"

Kate tried haltingly to explain the sorrow that was upon her. "He wasn't all Kildare, this little fellow.... You never knew my father, or his father. They were gallant gentlemen, Jemima. All my life I have wanted sons like them, and like—the Benoix men. I have been proud of my health, my strength. I have lived honorably, I have tried to keep myself a—a—"

"A gallant gentleman," said Jemima, nodding.

"Yes. So that the spark should remain alive, for my grandsons. It seemed to me—"

She broke off, finding it impossible to put into words what she felt; that her own indomitable vitality, her energy, her courage, the thing she had called "the spark," was something which had been put in her hands to guard for the long future, and that, instead, here in her hands it had gone out.

This meant death to Kate Kildare, far more than the separation of body and spirit would mean death.

Each woman was busy with her own thoughts for a while; widely different thoughts. Jemima murmured presently, "Philip said 'our son,' Mother! Oh, do you suppose that was—true? Or was he—"

She did not finish her own question; nor did Kate attempt to answer it.

"That would be like Philip," muttered the girl at last. "Anyway, it's his own affair."

She saw that her mother was sobbing.

"Don't!" she whispered in distress. "Don't! I—I never know what to do when people cry. Please!" Her voice altered suddenly. "Mother, you wait here a minute! You just wait here!"

Kate heard her leave the room, and then stooped to kiss her grandson good-by.

As she knelt there, tears raining fast on the tiny, unresponsive face in the coffin, she heard a step behind her. Thinking it was Jemima again, she did not look around.

It was some moments later that a memory came to her, so clear as to be almost a vision; the memory of her dream in Frankfort—a man standing near, with bent shoulders and gray hair, but eyes as blue as a child's, as tender as a woman's, gazing down at her, smiling down....

Behind her sounded a slight cough.

She lifted her head, suddenly trembling. "Who—who is there?" she whispered.

A voice answered, very low—"Kate!—Kate!"

Without another word, without a glance to make sure, she rose and went blindly into the arms that were ready for her.

It was like coming home.

The Madam made one final appearance at Storm, no longer as Mrs. Kildare but as Mrs. Benoix, remaining only long enough to put affairs in order for resigning her stewardship of the estate.

She had been married in the mountains to Dr. Benoix, over-ruling all his protests with a quiet, "Do you think I am going to run the risk of losing you again?"

And indeed his protests were not very heartfelt. He was unaware until too late of the clause in Basil Kildare's will by which Kate's re-marriage would lose Storm to herself and her children. His chief objection was on the score of his health, and to it Kate had replied simply, "That in itself would be a reason for our marriage, if there were no other. Oh, Jacques, if you could know how I love to be needed!"

He made his last weak protest. "But I cannot bear to think of you wasting your loveliness, your charm, here among these uncouth people, you who should shine in courts and palaces!"

She laughed softly. "I never have shone in any courts or palaces, goose! As for what you call my 'loveliness and charm'—they have been most valuable assets, I assure you, in dealing with my fellow-men." Her eyes danced with the daring that had made Kate Leigh's bellehood remembered beyond its time. "Why should beauty be wasted here more than elsewhere? There's less of it, and your mountaineers have eyes—though not very sound ones, poor dears!"

She went down to Storm alone, partly because of that little sinister cough of her husband's, which she made light of but never forgot; partly because she wished to spare him the publicity of the nine days' wonder that their marriage was.

But it was a publicity she need not have dreaded. Slowly enough, there had come about a great change in the feeling of the community toward Basil Kildare's widow; and when it was learned that she was at last relinquishing her great estate to marry the man for whom she had waited twenty years, the thing that had been scandal became suddenly romance. Kate woke one day to find herself a heroine.

There was a constant passage of vehicles Stormward in the fortnight she remained there, ranging from humble farm-wagons to luxurious limousines; for not only her neighbors shared in the ovation, but people from her girlhood's home recalled the old-time friendship, and made haste to renew it. Something of the Bishop's influence might be felt here, perhaps; something, too, of the influence of young Mrs. Thorpe, whose brief stay among them had been by no means forgotten.

Kate accepted it all with a pleased surprise; received her guests, when she had time, in all friendliness, but with a certain reserve which was partly shyness. She found very little to say to people, especially women, of her own class, after all these years; and they went away to speak with some awe of one who seemed dedicated, set apart from life, like a nun who is about to take the veil. It was very different talk from that which had raged around the name of Kate Kildare twenty years before!

When at last she turned her back on Storm forever, her going was something in the nature of an Hegira. She took with her certain members of her household, notably Big Liza, who had grown too old in her service to adapt themselves to other ways; also a few favorite horses, and those of the dogs for whom she had not found suitable homes; to say nothing of cattle, hogs, and poultry, chosen for the purpose of showing Jacques' mountaineers how livestock ought to look.

This cavalcade was joined in the village, somewhat to Kate's dismay, by the Ladies of the Evening Star, in a body, also the Civic League, with a brass band, which accompanied her to the train, playing all the way as lustily as for a funeral. The final act of the performance was the presentation, rather fussily overseen by Philip's successor, of a mammoth bouquet of Spring blossoms, raised in the reclaimed dooryards of the Civic League.

Kate's last look, as the train pulled away, was for the old juniper-tree, her eyrie, lifting its hoary head, green now with tender leaves, across the wide valley where she had been for so long a prisoner.

The time came, when, as the Bishop had prophesied, Philip and Jacqueline were called away from the mountains into a wider field; to a crowded, dingy district in a city larger than any of Kentucky, where Jacqueline's mothering arms have never an excuse to be empty, and where, as her husband proudly confesses, more people are attracted to his church by the quality of the music it provides than the quality of the sermons. But it is something else than music or sermons which attracts to these two all people who are in trouble, or in need; all derelicts of life. The hearts of Philip and his wife have not contracted about happiness of their own. They understand.

Mag's baby is with them, already learning, a docile, womanly little creature of six years, to pick up the stitches dropped by busy, careless, eager Jacqueline. It is a household Jacques Benoix loves to hear about, and Kate to visit.

But she never stays long. Cities bewilder her with their crowded indifference—men hurrying hither and thither like ants in an ant-hill, heedless of the wide sky above, heedless of each other, heedless of everything except each the small burden he carries on his back. Always she turns home to Jacques and the mountains with a sigh of relief.

Often, for she is not the woman to neglect a duty because it is painful, Kate goes down to Storm, a home now for crippled children, both white and black. It seems to her that the old house has grown less grim and forbidding under the influence of the little people who are happy there because of Basil Kildare's memory of his crippled daughter;—and also, perhaps, of another crippled child, his son.

Often, too, she makes one of her flying visits to James and Jemima Thorpe.

Once, some years since, she was called in haste to nurse Jemima through what her husband's telegram indicated as a "slight indisposition"; and upon hurrying to the sickroom was astounded to find Mrs. Thorpe propped up in bed, ministering very deftly to the needs of an infant son, so like his father that it was rather a shock to see him without eye-glasses.

It took Kate several days to recover her breath.

At last, happening one day to discover Jemima gazing down at her gourmand child with something more than tolerance in her expression, Kate blurted out:

"But I thought you did not believe in babies, Blossom!"

"Believe in them? Why, of course, Mother! Babies are quite indispensable to the scheme of things—but not to me."

"Then—why—?"

"Oh," said Jemima, practically, "it seemed rather a pity that there should be no one to inherit Aunt Jemima's money. And then—well, intelligences such as James' and mine really ought to be perpetuated, I suppose. As you once said—my baby isn't all Kildare!"

She gave her husband a quick, shy smile that was rather demonstrative for Jemima.

He leaned over and took her hand. "Why not tell your mother the truth, my dear?"

She flushed. "That is the truth, of course! Or—well, not perhaps all the truth.... You see, Mother, you were so upset about poor Jacky's baby.... Of course it's not quite the same, she is more like you than I am. But still ... And what you said about the 'spark.' ... So, you see—"

In her dread of sentiment, she was bungling the explanation so badly that James Thorpe took it out of her hands.

"Kate, you may regard the young person in question" (he grinned down at it fatuously) "as our child in only the technical sense of the word. It is, in fact, Jemima's gift to you. She came to the conclusion that she could offer you nothing you would prefer to a grandson."

"But," choked Kate, between laughter and tears, "suppose it had been a granddaughter?"

"Evidently you don't yet know our Jemima," remarked the husband.

Even Kate's grandson, however, does not keep her long away from the mountains and Jacques.

She knows that their time together, hers and her husband's, must be short. Neither misunderstands the significance of the little cough with which he has fought, for years, a losing battle. But they know, too, that it is given to few to taste the splendor of life as they have tasted it together; the joy of dreams realized, of service shared.

Kate was right in her belief that Jacques could take no advantage of the disclosure made by Mahaly. "The stone I threw was meant for Basil," he said. "Nevertheless—I am glad it failed to strike him. And I think that Basil, wherever he is, must be glad, too."

"Wherever he is?" repeated Kate, quickly. The subject of the hereafter was become of poignant interest to her, facing as she must what lay before them. "Oh, Jacques! Are you beginning to believe—to believe—?"

He interrupted her sadly. "I can believe only what I can understand. You must forgive me, my Kate. Only, sometimes there are dreams a man has, echoes perhaps out of his childhood—" he broke off with a shrug, "And one is envious when one sees a faith such as Philip's in his God, so strong, so sure.—Like his little-boy faith that his father was the best and greatest of men, all-wise, infallible."

Kate said, with her hand on his, "Sometimes a little boy is right, dear."

There have been great changes on Misty Ridge since Kate went to live in the mountains. The work Dr. Benoix started alone has grown beyond belief, and the influence of it extends now far beyond his immediate locality.

He has many other assistants than his wife, though none more able—a young oculist who specializes in trachoma, and makes no complaint of lack of practice; two trained teachers to help in the classrooms; even a clergyman fresh from his seminary to take the place left vacant by Philip, greatly to the satisfaction of Bates the peddler, and somewhat to the satisfaction of Dr. Benoix himself.

As he once explained to the visiting Bishop: "I will undertake to treat as best I can any ill of the human body or the human mind; but when it comes to the human soul—that calls for a bolder man than I am!"

The State is beginning to take notice of Misty Ridge, and offers of assistance come more rapidly than Kate can decline them. She does decline them; for the work there is Jacques Benoix' work, and she guards it for him jealously, to be his monument in the eyes of men when the great spirit that created it shall have passed into some other sphere of usefulness.

She herself, for all her share in the life of Jacques' people, their birth, their death, and the hard interval between, is nothing more to the dwellers on Misty Ridge than "Mrs. Teacher"—sometimes "Ole Mrs. Teacher," now that the glow of her hair is touched with gray, and beautiful lines are growing about her beautiful eyes.

But it is a name she loves above all other names—"Ole Mrs. Teacher." She wears it far more proudly than she ever wore her former title of "the Madam."