CHAPTER XIII
The night before Jacques Benoix' release found Kate Kildare lying sleepless within sight of a grim gray wall that blocked the end of the street upon which her window opened. A great fatigue was upon her, a fatigue more of the spirit than of the body. For years, it seemed to her, she had been fighting the world alone, unaided; and now that victory was within her grasp it tasted strangely like defeat.
She tried to realize that the gray wall no longer stood between her and happiness; was a menace that with the sun's rays would disappear out of her life like so much mist. But the effort was useless. The aura of shadow that hung always over that place wrapped her in its suffocating miasma, became part of the very air she breathed.
She had taken rooms in an old hostelry near the railroad station, wishing to avoid the curious recognition that would have been inevitable in the town's one good hotel. She was occupying what had been known in days of former prosperity as the bridal suite. This consisted of a dingy parlor, in which on the morrow Philip was to perform the ceremony that made her his father's wife, and of the room in which she lay, its walls dimly visible in the light of an arc-lamp just outside the window, gay with saffron cupids who disported themselves among roses of the same complexion. Over the mantel-piece of black iron hung an improbably colored lithograph of lovers embracing.
Kate found the effect of these decorations ironic, curiously depressing. She was not usually so responsive to environment.
Very near her now Jacques must be lying sleepless, too; watching for the dawn as she was watching—but with what eagerness, what trembling hope! Her depression shamed her. She tried in vain to conjure up a consoling vision of the man she had loved so long. The figure that came to her mind was more Philip than his father. She put it from her impatiently, angrily.
"I believe I'm developing nerves," she thought.
Her eyes, weary of the meaningless, leering antics of the cupids, presently came to rest on the ceiling above her bed, which appeared to be a-flutter with small pieces of pasteboard. She made them out to be business cards, evidently momentoes of passing knights of the road who had amused themselves by sailing their credentials heavenward, each with a transfixing pin. Kate smiled a little, oddly cheered by these reminders of carefree, commonplace humanity which had lain sleepless also in that dreary bridal chamber. The knights of the road were better company for her thoughts than brides who might have dreamed there dreams to which she had forfeited her right; young, innocent brides who were not fighting their way to happiness over the happiness of their children.
Now and again a train came thundering past her window, till the old house shook to its foundation. For these she listened, tense and quivering. One of them would be bearing away from her forever the first-born of her children....