Part 3 (1/2)
It was a new song that Philip Benoix had brought for her to try:
”A little winding road Goes over the hill to the plain-- A little road that crosses the plain And comes to the hill again.
I sought for Love on that road--”
sang Jacqueline, cheerfully.
The eyes of the listener filled with sharp tears. She too had sought for Love on that road.
She saw herself riding down it into her great adventure, so young, so laughing and brave, Basil Kildare on his great horse beside her, all the world a misty golden green. She saw--even with closed eyes, she saw--the turn of the road where Jacques Benoix, Philip's father, had come to meet them on their wedding journey.
So far her memories often led her before she stopped them. But the experience of the night had left her oddly stirred and weakened, not quite herself. To-day the memories had their way with her.
She lived again through the whirlwind courts.h.i.+p that was still remembered in a community where sudden marriages are not unusual; saw again, as she had first seen it, the arresting, great figure of Basil Kildare framed in a ballroom door, with smoldering black eyes upon her, that spoke so much more eloquently than his tongue. Yet his tongue had done well enough, too, that night. Before their first dance was over he had said to her: ”I have been watching you grow up, Kate. Now I think you are old enough to marry me.”
Two weeks later they went to her mother, hand in hand.
”But, my dearest!” fluttered the startled lady, ”Mr. Kildare is a man of forty, and you only seventeen, only a child! Besides--”
”Mr. Kildare,” answered the girl, with a proud glance at her lover, ”will help me to become a woman, Mother dear.”
What was she, newly widowed, who had depended in all things upon her husband, to oppose such a pair of wills? Rumors of the wild doings at Storm were not lacking in that gentler community, nor was the Kildare blood what she would have chosen to mix with her own. But there is among this type of women always the rather touching belief that it needs only matrimony to tame the wildest of eagles into a cooing dove. Kildare, moreover, was one of the great landowners of the State, a man of singular force and determination, and, when he chose to exert it, of a certain virile charm. When Mrs. Leigh realized that, ever since her daughter had been old enough to exhibit promise of the beauty she afterwards attained, this man had marked her for his own, a feeling of utter helplessness came over her.
They were a magnificent pair to look at, as they stood before her, tall, vivid, vital. Beside Basil Kildare the youths who had hitherto courted Kate, young as she was, seemed callow and insignificant, even to the mother. It would need a man to rule such a woman as Kate was to become, not an adoring boy; and Mrs. Leigh was of the type and generation that believed firmly in the mastery of husbands.
She could not make up her mind to consent to the marriage, but she did not forbid it. And it is probable that her forbidding would have had as much effect upon that pair of lovers as the sighing of the southwind.
Perhaps less effect; for, in a Kentucky May, the sighing of the southwind is very persuasive.
Bridesmaids and their escorts rode part way on the wedding journey; a gay cavalcade, some of the youths a little white and quiet, all of the girls with envious, sentimental eyes upon Kate where she rode beside the handsomest of the wild Kildares, with the romantic, whispered reputation of his race upon him.
When these had turned back, the bridegroom, chafing a little under their surveillance, swore a great oath of relief and spurred his horse close.
In a sudden panic Kate bolted away from him, galloped up a lane, leaped a fence into a field, where he caught her and seized her, laughing aloud: ”That's my girl! That's my pretty wild hawk! The spirit for a mother of Kildare men, by G.o.d!”
After that she met his kisses unafraid. Girl as she was, it seemed to her a beautiful saying--”a mother of Kildare men.” Only three things she was bringing with her from the old home to the new--her piano, her father's books, and the oaken cradle that had come with the first Leigh from overseas, and followed other Leighs across the mountains along the old Wilderness Trail, into Kentucky.
Toward the end of their two days' journey through the May woods and meadows, a little barking dog sprung out at them, frightening Kate's thoroughbred until it almost threw her. Kildare struck furiously at the dog, and missed; struck again, leaped from his horse, and pursued it, striking and kicking, so that the terrified creature ran for its life, and Kate cried out, ”Stop, Basil, stop. What are you doing? Stop, I say!”
He came back to her, cursing, an ugly line between his brows. ”Got away, d.a.m.n the luck! I almost--Why, Kate! Tears? Oh, good Lord,” he laughed, still frowning. ”You're as soft as Jacques Benoix!”
She mastered the tears; mastered, too, a strange little fear at her heart, thinking proudly, ”He came when I called! He stopped when I called!”
Aloud she said, ”It was the sun that made my eyes water. Who is Jacques Benoix?”
He told her about his neighbor, a stranger--”the only gentleman within ten miles of us, so you'll have to be friends with him”--a man so soft-hearted that he would not hunt foxes or rabbits; a man who broke his colts without the whip, and was trying to break a son the same way.
”More fool he, coming up here out of a city and trying to teach _us_ to break colts!”
”Has he a wife?”
Kildare gave his great laugh. ”You don't suppose a man as soft as that would have escaped? The woman's sickly--of course! That's why he married her, and that's why he has come up here. Gave up a big practice in New Orleans, they say, because he thought it would be healthier here. So it is! Too d.a.m.ned healthy for him, I reckon! We don't need more than one doctor around Storm, and old Doc Jones has got a corner on the births and deaths already. Yes, Benoix is rather a fool. But he's got his uses.