Part 17 (1/2)
Kate got with difficulty to her feet. ”Where you shall go?” she repeated.
Then she thought she understood. Jemima had remembered the terms of her father's will, by which in case of her mother's re-marriage the property of Storm was forfeit.
”Oh, but daughter!”--the words tumbled over each other in their eagerness to be out. ”You need not trouble about that! Losing Storm won't matter. You lose only what your father left, and I have doubled that--trebled it. Besides, there is the little property that came to me from my parents. I've always meant, when I married, to give you more than my marriage would cost you. That is why I have worked so hard, and saved. Perhaps you thought me miserly, grasping? I know people do. But that is why. The money is to be yours, all yours and Jacqueline's--at once, not after I die. We shall need very little, Jacques and I. Just a start somewhere--”
The girl stopped the hurrying words with a gesture of some dignity. ”We have not thought about the money part yet, Mother. We were simply deciding where to live now.”
”To live?” The words were puzzled.
”Yes. Surely you don't expect us to go on living with you and our father's murderer?”
Kate groped at the wall behind her for support. Here was a thing she had not thought of. She had known that she might lose her children's respect, perhaps, temporarily, their love; but she had counted unconsciously upon the force of daily habit, of companions.h.i.+p, of her own personal magnetism, to win back both, as she had won them from others. Deprived of their companions.h.i.+p, what chance had she? They were lost to her, utterly. Yet not even in that bitter moment did it occur to her that she might fail the man who was coming back to her out of his living death.
She said tonelessly, ”You are very young to leave your mother. Where could you go?”
The girl had her answer ready. ”To my father's aunt Jemima. Now I understand why you and she have not been on good terms. I understand many things now. When she hears that we are leaving you, and why, I think she will be glad to offer us a home.”
Kate bowed her head, ”And Jacqueline? Is she, too, willing to leave me?”
At this there was a cry from inside the door, and a dishevelled, sobbing figure flung itself into Kate's arms and clung, desperately.
”No, no, _no_! Don't let her make me. I won't, I won't! She's been saying--oh, terrible things, Mummy! I tried not to listen. She said you didn't love us, you loved him. She said that when he comes--that man, Philip's father--you wouldn't want us around any more. But I know better. No matter who comes, you'll want _me_, you'll want your baby!
Won't you, Mother? Dearest, darlingest Mother!”
”Jacky, don't be so weak,” commanded her sister, sternly. ”Remember what I told you. Remember our father.”
”But I never knew our father. What do I care about him? It's Mummy I want. Whoever she loves, I love. I don't care _what_ she's done! I wouldn't care if she'd killed Father herself--”
”Child, hush, hus.h.!.+” whispered the trembling woman.
”I wouldn't! I'd just know he needed killing. There, there--” she had her mother's head on her breast now, fondling it, crooning over it as if it were Mag's baby. ”Look--you've made her cry!” She stamped a furious foot at her sister. ”What are you staring at with your cold, wicked eyes? You told me she was a bad woman--my _mother_! If she is, then I choose to be bad myself. I'd rather be bad and like her than good as--G.o.d. Now, then! Get out of here, you Jemmy Kildare!”
Jemima went. Sternly she closed her door upon the clinging pair, shutting both out together into the world of people who were not Kildares. But they were together.
CHAPTER XIII
The night before Jacques Benoix' release found Kate Kildare lying sleepless within sight of a grim gray wall that blocked the end of the street upon which her window opened. A great fatigue was upon her, a fatigue more of the spirit than of the body. For years, it seemed to her, she had been fighting the world alone, unaided; and now that victory was within her grasp it tasted strangely like defeat.
She tried to realize that the gray wall no longer stood between her and happiness; was a menace that with the sun's rays would disappear out of her life like so much mist. But the effort was useless. The aura of shadow that hung always over that place wrapped her in its suffocating miasma, became part of the very air she breathed.
She had taken rooms in an old hostelry near the railroad station, wis.h.i.+ng to avoid the curious recognition that would have been inevitable in the town's one good hotel. She was occupying what had been known in days of former prosperity as the bridal suite. This consisted of a dingy parlor, in which on the morrow Philip was to perform the ceremony that made her his father's wife, and of the room in which she lay, its walls dimly visible in the light of an arc-lamp just outside the window, gay with saffron cupids who disported themselves among roses of the same complexion. Over the mantel-piece of black iron hung an improbably colored lithograph of lovers embracing.
Kate found the effect of these decorations ironic, curiously depressing.
She was not usually so responsive to environment.
Very near her now Jacques must be lying sleepless, too; watching for the dawn as she was watching--but with what eagerness, what trembling hope!
Her depression shamed her. She tried in vain to conjure up a consoling vision of the man she had loved so long. The figure that came to her mind was more Philip than his father. She put it from her impatiently, angrily.