Kildares of Storm

by Eleanor Mercein Kelly

Lying there, despite the depressing hour, content stole over her; a feeling that all was well with her elder child, at least.

She turned her thoughts to Jacqueline. There, too, things were going better. None of Philip's growing interest and tenderness for his little playmate had escaped her notice. Motherwise, she exaggerated these into symptoms of greater import. Blunderer that she was, she had at least managed to bring the child safe through the perils of a first passion, that rock upon which so many young lives wreck, even as hers had wrecked. In the rebound from the affair with Channing, the girl could not fail to appreciate the superior charm of Jacques' big and simple son, who was so much like Jacques himself. She was sure that Jacqueline already loved Philip without suspecting it. Women ere this have loved two men at once.

Then, as suddenly as pain that has been waiting for the first motion on the part of its victim to pounce, the apprehension she had been fighting came back upon her, twofold.—Was she so certain? And had she not in her blundering life been certain of too many things? That she would be a true wife to Basil Kildare, for instance; that she could justify Jacques before the world; that at least she might atone to him for all he had lost through her. And in each of these things she had been wrong. She, with all her boast of efficiency, she the successful Mrs. Kildare of Storm, what was she in the end but a failure—a wife whose husband had not trusted her, a woman who had ruined her lover's life, a mother whose daughter married without love, to get away from her?

She wondered, as at all such moments, what was the purpose for which she had been created; or whether there had indeed been a purpose. This humanity that takes itself so seriously, may it be after all only a superior sort of spider-egg, hatching out in due season, spinning busy webs for the world to brush away, laying other eggs, and so on, ad infinitum? Perhaps the God of simple people, such as her mother and Philip Benoix and Brother Bates, the God upon whom she herself called at times because of the force of early habit—perhaps He was only life-principle—the warmth of the sun, for instance—an impersonal, intangible something which started the universe as one winds a clock, and left it to go on ticking till the mechanism runs down.... Good or bad, wise or foolish—what difference? Spin our webs no matter how carefully, they are only gossamer, visible for a moment with the dew or the frost upon them and then—vanished. Human and spider alike, unnoted, innumerable, self-perpetuating....

Poor Kate Kildare! When natures such as hers lose their self-reliance, life becomes as unsubstantial as an opium dream. If they cannot count upon themselves, what then may they count upon?

She jumped out of bed, and went to the window, where she stood for a while in the cold starlight, letting the wind blow in across her feverish face. She wrapped blankets around her, and sat listening to the sounds of the sleeping country; an owl mournfully hooting, a premature cock crowing lustily, the drowsy whickering of horses stirring in their stalls; for it was two o'clock, and the countryside was beginning to dream of day. She stayed for a long while brooding over the land she loved, as over a sleeping child. Always the great out-of-doors had its balm for her....

Suddenly she sat erect. In the shadows back of the stables something had moved. One of the dogs, perhaps? Then out into the starlight, crossing rapidly toward the house, flitted the slight figure of a girl, with several of the dogs leaping and gamboling about her in a silence that showed her to be no stranger. She was shrouded in a long hooded cape, and passed out of Kate's range too quickly lo be recognizable.

"Now which of the wenches was that?" thought Kate, frowning. The amorous adventures of their black servants have come to be accepted by Southern housekeepers with unenquiring philosophy. "But why was she coming to the house at this hour?" she wondered further.

The negroes had their quarters well at the back, and no one slept in the "great house" with Kate and her daughters, except the housewoman, Ella, too elderly for midnight adventure, and Mag Henderson, who with her baby occupied a room in the guest-wing, under the Madam's immediate supervision.

She listened acutely. Her bedroom door rattled a little in the draught of another door which opened and closed. She heard an unmistakable creaking of the back stairs that led to a hall behind her room and the girls' rooms, and which also led to the guest-wing.