During the ride back to Storm both remained silent, Jacqueline nursing with some difficulty her displeasure against her friend. So this was Philip's famous temper, in which she had never quite believed! In truth, that sudden outburst of inexplicable rage on the part of the grave, quiet, young clergyman had appealed strongly to the love of brute force that is inborn in all women.
But it had frightened Philip himself. He realized for the first time that he was indeed the son of a man who had killed in anger. He touched more than once the little inconspicuous gold cross that hung at his belt, wondering whether he were fitted after all for the vocation he had chosen.
CHAPTER XVII
There stood, in the ravine which separated Storm hill from the property that had formerly belonged to Jacques Benoix, a roofless, tumbledown stone cabin which had been from childhood Jacqueline's own particular playground, as sacred to her as the eyrie to her mother. She called it, grandiloquently, the Ruin. The place had a sinister reputation, and was sedulously avoided by both negroes and whites of the neighborhood; which suited Jacqueline's purposes excellently. All dreamers feel the need of a hidden place where they may retire, free from the gaze of a not too sympathetic world; and the Ruin made a strong appeal to the imagination of Jacqueline.
If the place was haunted, as the neighborhood averred, it was perhaps not without reason. The cabin had once been a slave-house where an earlier Kildare kept certain human livestock to be fattened like hogs for the market, overcrowding and neglecting them, however, as he would not have dared to neglect and overcrowd hogs, so that the venture was not altogether successful. Recently, workmen laying drainage pipes through the ravine had uncovered a long trench filled with many bones, ghastly witness to the folly of neglecting livestock, human or otherwise. Cholera was the first ghost to haunt that spot, but it had left others which were heard about the cabin on windy nights, moaning and rattling chains and, because they were the ghosts of negroes, singing.
Jacqueline, unaware of this episode in the proud Kildare history, had nevertheless been faithfully warned by the negroes of "ha'nts" in the ravine, which added materially to her pleasure in the place. Not every budding genius has at her private disposal a haunted ruin; and at this period of her career Jacqueline was being a budding genius.
Their mother had recently taken both girls to a near-by city for their first taste of grand opera, completing the effect by the purchase of a graphophone and opera records. Since that time Jacqueline had nourished the more or less secret ambition of becoming the world's greatest diva. She had taken to singing in church with an impassioned ardor which startled, even while it titillated, the ear of the congregation. As Mrs. Sykes put it, "Folks hadn't ought to sing hymns as if they was love-songs, no matter how nice it sounds."
Jacqueline had not taken her family, even her adored mother, entirely into her confidence, having a shrewd conviction that her ambition would meet with slight encouragement from them. Of late, since the disturbance about Philip's father, both Jemima and her mother were too distrait, too absorbed in their own affairs, to pay much attention to Jacqueline. Whatever confidences trembled on her lips, remained unsaid. She felt that they had more important things to think about. Once, indeed, she had ventured to join her voice to that of the Victrola in the mad scene from "Lucia," acting at the same time her conception of the part; and her family, staring in amazement, had suddenly roared with laughter, the first laughter heard in that house for many a day.
So Jacqueline and her hurt dignity sought refuge in the Ruin, there to rehearse her art hereafter untroubled by the jeers of an untemperamental world. Her faithful audience and inseparable companion was Mag's baby, who crowed and gurgled impartially over the woes of La Tosca, Camille or Manon, having inherited the easy-going placidity of her mother. Sometimes Kate, coming and going about her work, paused to listen, smiling at the arias soaring up out of the ravine, and thought, "It is a good thing that child has all outdoors at her disposal! Whatever should I do with her between four walls?"