CHAPTER IV
There was never a stranger honeymoon than that of Kate and Basil Kildare. It began with a view-halloa. It ended ... how should happy hunting end except with the death of something?
That first year was not without its heady charm for a girl with the facile, the almost tragic, adaptability of seventeen years. True, it was not married life as she had dreamed it; but it was her husband's life. She made it hers.
Kildare's boon companions found to their relief that a young wife was no restraint upon their pleasures; was indeed an addition to them. No sport was too rough for her to share, no riding too hard, no gambling too heavy. Despite her town breeding, this was no hothouse plant, this daughter of a horse-racing, whisky-drinking, card-playing gentry. Kildare took a vast delight in her prowess, particularly at the card-table; swearing joyously when she won, paying her losses, which were considerable, with an amused indifference equal to her own. One quality, and one alone, had power to move him in man, woman, or beast. It was the quality he called Spirit.
In that Kate was not lacking. Rumors of the wild Kildares, always rife in a countryside they had made famous for generations with their amusements, did not abate after the coming of a new mistress to Storm. Of the society of her own sex, she had little or nothing. The few women of her class within driving distance were careful to call once—Kildare was not a man to antagonize. But they did not come again. Kate was not sorry. She found them less interesting than their men-folk. Their manners were provincial, their outlook narrow, and—they did not fall in love with her. In this they were unlike their husbands, their brothers, their sons, and fathers.
The guest-house was rarely empty. The bride and groom were never alone. Storm had long been a gathering place for sportsmen of every type, from the neighboring towns, from the city, from other States. Nor were their guests always gentlemen. Kate, indeed, grew to prefer certain of the rough and simple farmers who came there to the more polished visitors. Their admiration was humbler, less troublesome.
Gentlemen or not, Kate numbered her admirers among her husband's friends by the score. She grew as adept in handling them as in handling colts; and her prowess in this, too, amused Basil Kildare enormously. He rallied her on each new victim with chuckles of delight. Too confident of himself for jealousy, he knew, if he thought of it at all, that his honor was safer in her hands than it had ever been in his own.
That the girl came to no harm in that wild year was owing to no watchfulness of her husband's. The Kildare motto was "Liberty For All." Nor was it owing to any love of her husband's, Kate soon knew this.
Her beauty was a matter of great pride to him. He flaunted it, his property, before other envious men; took her often upon his knee when any were about; pulled the pins out of her hair to reveal the full flowing splendor of it; hung her with jewels, sent away for velvets and silks and laces, so that she went about the rough place clad like a young queen at court. But despite various episodes in his career, Kildare was never a woman's man. He had married for one reason, and one alone. He made no concealment of it. "People say we Kildares are doomed, that the stock is dying out. We'll show 'em!" he often said. "Meanwhile, let the girl have her fling."