Kildares of Storm

by Eleanor Mercein Kelly

His own thoughts, more than her presence, kept him silent. The phrase she had uttered so carelessly (he did not altogether know his lady there!) had set them clamoring—"How you do need a wife to look after you...."

Philip tried in vain to remember a time when he had not loved this woman. As a child, made older than his years by the shadow of his mother's invalidism, he had treasured his glimpses of the reckless, beautiful girl with her two babies, as other children might treasure glimpses into fairyland. As an older boy, with his world already in ruins about him, he had idealized his one friend into a sort of goddess, a super-human deity who could do no wrong, whose every word was magic and whose slightest wish law. At that period, if Kate had bade him rob a bank or commit a murder, he would have done it unquestioningly, happy only to be of service to her. Later, as he grew into a thoughtful young manhood, he came to understand that even deities may have their faults; but Kate's were dear faults, never of the heart. As she became less goddess she became more human, and so nearer to him, until at last she was woman to his man. But a very wonderful woman, to be approached, even in thought, with reverence. Philip's love had so grown with him, step by step, as to be part of the fabric of himself, large now as his very nature; and that was large indeed.

Yet never once in all the years had he imagined the sacrilege of making her his wife, until there came the farewell letter from his father in prison; that man used to reading the hearts of men, who saw the truth between the lines of his son's letters, and deliberately gave the woman both loved into his son's keeping.

"She is still young," Jacques Benoix had written, "and you are young, and my time is over. You must be to her what I would have been. We must consider now nothing but her greatest happiness, you and I, her greatest good."

Since then Philip, if he had not thought of it before, thought of little else than of marrying Kate Kildare.

Not soon, of course; not until time should have brought its blessed balm of forgetfulness, when both the girls would be married and gone, perhaps, and she in her loneliness would turn to him. Meanwhile he must be at hand to take care of her, as his father had bidden him; to watch over her unobtrusively, helping her as he had with Jacqueline, sharing any trouble that came to her; making himself necessary in every way possible, so that more and more he should take with her the place of his father.

Kate was wrong in her ideas that his poverty had much influence upon Philip. Poverty and wealth mean little to the idealist; and his faith was very strong. He knew that if God gave this beloved woman into his keeping, He would provide very surely the means of keeping her.

He was patient, too; yet lately all the talk of love and of marriage, the companionship of wistful, lovelorn Jacqueline, perhaps, the sight of James Thorpe's almost fatuous happiness, had made patience newly difficult; had stirred a restlessness in him that sometimes he believed his lady noticed. When she was in the room with him, whether they spoke or not, he found it almost impossible to keep his eyes from her; and when at such times their glances met, it seemed to him there was a quick flash of response in hers, an understanding look, almost of expectancy, as if she were waiting for him to say something he did not say.

Philip was of course right. Nothing of the change in him had been lost on Kate; only she attributed it unfortunately to another cause—to Jacqueline.

She was chattering desultorily about many things, as they sat there in the deepening November dusk, by the fire; but he did not hear what she was saying. He began to look covetously out of the corner of his eye toward one of her hands that lay on the arm of the chair close beside him; a big, beautiful hand like Kate herself, capable as little Jemima's, but with the warmth, the healing in its touch, of Jacqueline's own. When he pictured her to himself, he always saw first her eyes, clear and direct as a boy's; then her lovely, curved lips; then these sentient hands of hers. He wished that he had the courage to take the hand in his own, to hold it against his breast, his cheek. It had been his often enough to hold, and even to kiss; but always of her own volition. She was as generous of caresses as her youngest daughter; but it never occurred to Philip, nor had it perhaps occurred to other men who loved her, that they might venture to take what she did not offer. Kate was the giver, always.