Erected in Memory of Basil Kildare
By His Two Children
It was the first word of her answer to the world, and it had its weight.
"It says his two children. She wouldn't dare to tell a lie on stone!" was the current opinion.
Near the church was the rectory, one of those log-cabins boarded over and whitewashed, which are still quite common in Kentucky, sturdy mementoes of the sturdy pioneers whom they have outlived and will outlive for many a generation yet to come. Lilac, hollyhock, and hydrangea bloomed in season about this cabin, and it had a door-yard that made women linger enviously and men smile in scorn; for to these rough, hard-working, hard-living farmers it seemed that a young man might find better use for his leisure than the tending of flowers.
He had other weaknesses than flowers. The walls of his long living-room were lined with books, many of them "poetry-books," and the rector was reported to have read them all. Passers-by often heard him playing softly on his mother's old piano, and more than once he had been discovered in the kitchen, cooking his own dinner. The one servant he kept was an ancient negress addicted to the use of whisky and cocaine. To those who remonstrated with him for keeping the old woman, he explained that he got her very cheap because of her habits; but the community suspected other reasons, and despised him accordingly.
Their scorn of his "softness," however, failed to extend to the man himself. Different, they found him, reserved, a little cold, unless they happened to be in trouble; but never alien. For one thing, he had inherited from his father a gift that made "the French doctor" long remembered in that horse-raising community. It was an understanding of horses, indeed of all brute creatures, that amounted almost to wizardry. There was never a colt so unmanageable that he could not bring it to terms, without the aid of either whip or spur; never an equine ailment too subtle for him to discover and alleviate. At all hours of the day or night owners of sick beasts sent for the young rector as they had sent for his father, confident of willing assistance.
He had created his reputation by entering, against all protests, the stall of a crazed stallion which had just mangled its groom. "I want to look at his mouth," he explained. "Just as I thought! It's an ulcerated tooth. Give me my lancet. No wonder the poor beast was vicious!"
Philip had made the discovery among animals made by his father among men, that most wickedness may be traced to physical causes. He had also been heard to say, not very originally, that horses needed more care than people, because people had speech and religion to help them and horses had neither; a saying which deeply endeared him to a community that ranks its thoroughbreds with its wives.
Two other qualities of his offset, in the eyes of the neighborhood, the matter of the flowers, the poetry-books, and the cooking. He had courage, and he had a temper, both proved. A few years previously, during the "tobacco-war" which upset the State, when the entire countryside was terrified by the outrages of the Night-Riders who had taken justice into their own hands, after the fashion of the moribund Ku-Klux Klan, young Benoix alone, of all the pastors in his neighborhood, did not hesitate to denounce from his pulpit Sunday after Sunday the men who resorted to masked terrorism as sneaks, cowards, and murderers. And this, despite the fact that the majority of his congregation were in sympathy with the Night-Riders for the best of reasons—kinship. Indeed, more than one man who listened to him with a stolid face had worn the mask and wielded the whip and torch himself. Benoix knew it; they knew that he did. They knew also that no possible circumstance could persuade him to give up one of the names he suspected to the law he was determined to uphold.
Anonymous letters came to him, warning, insulting, threatening his personal safety. More than one advised him to go armed. His board of vestrymen themselves remonstrated, counseling moderation for fear of alienating the congregation. His reply became famous throughout the State.