Part 29 (1/2)

drive before us!”

Jacqueline clung to her mother. ”Oh, if you were only coming too, Mummy!

If you only were! Just say the word, and I won't go. Why, you'll be here alone, Mummy, darling, alone all night! You'll miss us _dreadfully_.

What do I care about beaux and b.a.l.l.s. I'd rather be with you than with any one else in the world--_Almost_ any one else,” she added honestly, flus.h.i.+ng.

Kate laughed, and pushed her away. ”Mag is looking daggers at us. We mustn't crumple that finery any more, precious.--Remember not to talk at the top of your lungs.--Have you got a pocket-handkerchief?”

She followed them out to the waiting automobile, smiling; but Philip noticed that her lips moved now and then silently, and he suspected that she was praying. He was right. It was the first time in their lives that her children had gone out of her own protection.

Mag shrouded them in long dust garments, tucked the robes about them solicitously, having first wrapped each white-slippered foot in tissue paper. The pa.s.sionate interest of the girl in the pleasures of these other girls, pleasures she could never hope to share, struck two at least of the onlookers as a rather piteous thing.

”Good-by, good-by!” Jacqueline leaned out to throw last kisses impartially. ”How I wish you were coming too, Mag and Mummy and Phil, you dears! I'll remember everything to tell you, compliments, and all, and dresses especially, Mag. I'll bring home all the goodies I can stuff into my pockets, too--oh, dear, there aren't any pockets to a ball dress! Never mind--I'll put 'em in G.o.ddy's pockets. Good-by! When next you see us, we'll be real young ladies.”

Kate stood gazing after them as wistfully as Mag, both following with their thoughts two happy young adventurers into a happy world forever closed to themselves. ”You'd like to be going to a ball yourself, wouldn't you?” said she, to the girl beside her.

”Would I? Oh, my Gawd! _Would_ I?” gasped Mag, and ran into the house.

The repressed intensity of the reply startled Mrs. Kildare. She looked at Philip. ”Did you hear that? I wonder if the girl isn't happy here.”

The past few months had done a great deal for Mag Henderson's body, whatever they had accomplished for her soul. Maternity had developed her lissome figure into beautiful lines; health, the result of care and good feeding, colored her lips and her cheeks and her pretty, shallow eyes; she had learned not only the trick of dressing becomingly, but of keeping her hair, her hands, and her feet as neat as those of a lady.

Even her voice had lost something of its uncouth drawl, and its lazy softness had a charm of its own. She was very imitative.

For some time Philip had been aware that his lady's protegee was developing into an attractive young woman.

”You say she seems devoted to the child?” he asked thoughtfully.

”I think so, yes. She is always making clothes for the baby, and playing with it, and petting it--when Jacqueline will let her. But,”--Kate sighed faintly--”maternity isn't enough for all women, it seems.”

It was such remarks as this that gave Philip his strong hope for the future.

But now he put himself aside to consider the problem of Mag Henderson.

From the first he had foreseen that it was not a problem to be handled as simply as Kate thought to handle it. The psychological instinct of the priest was very strong in him--doubtless there had been many a good cure of souls among past generations of Benoixes, professing an older faith than his. In moments of clear vision that came to him he battled, as all thinkers must battle, with a great discouragement, a sense of helplessness that was almost terrifying. Of what use man's puny human endeavors against the forces of predestination arrayed against him--the forces of heredity, temperament, opportunity?

Mag Henderson cost him a wakeful night; and from her his thoughts kept straying oddly and unaccountably to Jacqueline, little Jacqueline, his playmate and pupil and chum, with her mischievous, daredevil impulses and her generous heart. He jerked his thoughts back angrily to poor Mag Henderson.

Why should he bracket the two together thus, the one a weed shooting up in a neglected fence corner, the other the loveliest and most lovingly tended blossom in a garden?--why, indeed, except that both were come, weed and flower alike, to the period of their blooming.

CHAPTER XXI

Kate's thoughts, too, were busy with her young adventurers into the world, throughout a wakeful night; only her anxieties did not concern themselves with Jacqueline. A nature so trusting, so unconscious, so bubbling over with friendliness toward all mankind, could not fail to make friends for itself among strangers, among even enemies. She had smiled to notice Jacqueline's success with the young men Thorpe had brought to supper. Her own girlhood had been a succession of just such triumphs. But belle as she was, many a ballroom had been spoiled for her by the sight of girls to whom it was not a scene of triumph, to whom it was no less than a battlefield, where the vanquished face defeat with the fixed and piteous smile of the hopeless wallflower.

Her heart yearned over her eldest daughter. Poor, clever, pretty Jemima, who knew so well what she wanted of life, and wanted it so determinedly!

A world of which carefree gaiety is the essential element might be very cruel to Jemima. If Kate could have plucked out her own charm by the roots and given it to her child for a weapon, she would have done it thankfully.

She fell asleep at last over one of the prayers that had been unconsciously upon her lips that day: ”Make people nice to them, G.o.d!

You must see that my girls have partners, both of them, since I am not there to attend to it myself.”