Jenkins was a young man trained by herself into efficiency, who had long been anxious to a.s.sume a more important part in the management of Storm, and was rising to his opportunity very creditably.

At last a letter came from Philip which Jemima believed would rouse Kate from her apathy. She read it--she opened all her mother's mail in those days--and rushed into her mother's room, almost tearful with her news.

"He's found Channing at last!" she cried; "and Jacqueline was not with him! Do you hear, Mother? Jacqueline was not with him at all! She never had been. It was another woman--some one he has married. Oh, Mother, _don't you understand_?"

Kate's eyes lifted very slowly to her face. "Then what," each word was an effort, "has he done with my Jacqueline?--Is she dead?"

Jemima caught her hands. "No, no, dear! Listen!"--she spoke very distinctly. "It was all a dreadful mistake--our mistake. She never went to Mr. Channing at all. She simply ran away to New York to study her singing, Philip says, and has been there all this time.--Oh, how can I ever make it up to poor little Jacky? Imagine thinking such a thing of her! I must have been crazy, jumping to such a _wicked_ conclusion!" In her distress she wrung her hands. "And what must Jacqueline have been thinking of us, leaving her alone there so long? Oh, Mother!--" a happy idea had come to her. "Don't, let's leave her alone another day! Philip may not have reached her yet--this letter was mailed in Paris, just before he sailed. Let's go and find her ourselves, you and I!"

But the answering spark of eagerness she hoped for did not come.

"If Jacqueline wants me," said Kate, closing her eyes, "she will let me know."

The coldness of the reply chilled Jemima. It seemed so utterly unlike her impulsive, warm-hearted generous mother.

"Don't you realize how we have misunderstood her? Why, she hasn't been--been wicked at all! She simply saw she had made a mistake, and tried to undo it by going away--foolish, but so like Jacky, poor darling!--Mother! You don't mean to say you're not going to _forgive_ her for running away?"

"_Forgive?_" repeated Kate wonderingly. Then she remembered that Jemima had never been a mother.

"It is Jacqueline who cannot forgive me," she explained, in her dull and lifeless voice.

Jemima gave up in despair. There was something about all this beyond her understanding.

In a few days a second letter came from Philip, postmarked New York, telling her that he had at last learned the where-abouts of his wife, and hoped soon to be going to her. He begged Kate to have patience, explaining that he was under promise not to reveal Jacqueline's hiding-place.

We must humor her now (he wrote). It is only because of the intervention of a friend she has found that she has consented to let me come to her presently. G.o.d knows what thoughts of us who love her and could not trust her have been in her head through these lonely weeks! We must give her time to get over them. She is not ready for us yet. You will understand, you who understand everything. Wait. And meanwhile comfort yourself as I do with the knowledge that she is safe, safe!

This letter puzzled Jemima almost unbearably, but she dared ask no question of her mother as to what had occurred. She was grateful to see that it at least roused the invalid to a show of interest. Kate took it into her languid hand and read it over twice, looking for some possible message for herself from Jacqueline, some little word of love that Jemima might have overlooked.

But finding nothing, she relapsed into the old listlessness.

CHAPTER XLIX

It was a very trivial and unimportant thing, to Jemima's thinking, which presently lifted Kate out of her languor into action once more. Big Liza, entering timidly one morning, as she did many times in the day, to gaze with miserable eyes at the figure on the bed, murmured to Jemima: "They's a message come fum that 'ooman Mahaly, down in the village, sayin' she's dyin', and wants to see the Madam. She 'lows she cain't die in peace 'thout'n she sees Miss Kate."

"Of course that's impossible," said Jemima in the same low tone. "Send word that we're very sorry. See that she has whatever she needs. If necessary, I'll go myself."

"Did you say she was dying?" asked an unexpected voice from the bed.

"Yais'm, Miss Kate! but don't you keer, honey. Tain't nothin but that mulatter 'ooman, Mahaly--You 'members about _her_!" she added scornfully.--Very little had pa.s.sed among her "white folks" that was unknown to the sovereign of the kitchen.

To the amaze of both, Kate slipped without apparent effort out of the bed where she had lain for weeks. "Where are my clothes?" she demanded.

Jemima ran to her with a cry of protest. "Mother, be careful! What, you aren't thinking of going to see her? You can't--you're not strong enough!"

"Mahaly must not die before I speak with her."

"Then," said Jemima calmly, "I'll have her brought to you."

"A dying woman? Jemmy, don't be silly!" Kate spoke with an asperity that brought a wide grin to Big Liza's face, because it sounded as though the Madam were come back again.

Jemima, alarmed, continued to protest; at last ran to the telephone and called Dr. Jones to her a.s.sistance. Meanwhile Kate, scolded at, fussed over, but in the end helped by her cook, got into out-door clothes; and before Doctor Jones was on his way to Storm, she had taken the road for the village.

She sat erect in her surrey, pale, but scorning the proffered arm of Jemima, driven by a proud and anxious coachman behind the quietest pair of horses in the stable; and people as she pa.s.sed stared at her with utter amaze--with more; with a delight that rose in some cases to the point of tears. For the first time, Kate realized that she had won something besides respect and dependence and fear from her realm. She had won love. The realization pierced through her apathy. A faint color came into her cheeks. More than once, as she paused to exchange greetings with some beaming and incoherent acquaintance, her own lips were tremulous.

"Why are they so glad to see me, Jemmy?" she asked once. "Did they think I was very ill?"

Her daughter nodded, not trusting her own voice. It seemed as if a miracle had occurred before her eyes.

"Well, I've fooled them," smiled Kate, drawing into her lungs a great breath of the keen, rain-swept air that was bringing new life into a world done with winter.

She asked one other question as they drove. "Jemmy, what does the neighborhood think about--Jacqueline?"

Jemima explained that she had allowed the impression to go abroad that Philip and Jacqueline had taken advantage of an opportunity to go to Europe on a belated honeymoon journey.

She did not say, because she did not know, that the countryside, always with an interested eye upon its betters, had connected the extreme suddenness of this journey with Philip's vanished father, picturing to itself touching death-bed scenes, and eleventh-hour repentances.

Remembering the Madam's brief illness at the time of Dr. Benoix'

disappearance, the neighborhood had connected her present illness also with its romantic imaginings; with the result that what was left of its disapproval had been swallowed up in a sudden and quite human wave of sympathy for that faithful woman and the man she loved.

When they reached a neat little cottage in the portion of the village devoted to white workingmen's homes, Kate allowed herself to be a.s.sisted to the door, where she dismissed her daughter, telling her to return in half an hour.

"I must see Mahaly alone," was her only answer to Jemima's uneasy protests.

She was ushered respectfully into a neat, clean room, hung with the enlarged crayon portraits dear to the colored race, and boasting a parlor-organ draped in Battenberg lace. The window was open--a rare thing in a negro home, despite her efforts with the Civic League. The bed was stiffly starched and unoccupied, and the woman she had come to see sat upright in a chair, propped with pillows, panting with the effort of keeping breath in her lungs. She was dying of heart-disease.

She had been in her day rather a handsome creature, with the straight hair and high features that indicate a not unusual admixture of Indian blood. But though she must have been of about the same age as Mrs.

Kildare, she looked by comparison withered and superannuated, with the grayish film across her eyes that one sees in those of aged animals.

These blurred eyes stared at Kate with a queer hostility, mixed with something else; as they had stared on the day she came a bride to Storm.

She made a slight, futile attempt to rise.

"Nonsense, Mahaly! Don't move," said the Madam, kindly. "This is no time for manners."

She closed the door behind her, and would have closed the window had it not been for the woman's need of air and the inevitable faint odor that clings about negro habitations, no matter how cleanly they are kept.

What she and her old servant had to say to each other must not be overheard. Fancying that she detected sounds as of some one moving on the porch outside, she called briefly: "Keep out of ear-shot, please."

She was too accustomed to obedience to investigate results.

"You wanted to see me, Mahaly?" she said. "You wanted to explain something to me, perhaps?"

The woman struggled with her laboring breath. She was very near the end.

Kate found it painful to look at her, and her gaze wandered away to the crayon portraits on the wall. The one over the bed, in the place of honor, was a portrait of her husband, Basil Kildare. Her face hardened.

This was an impertinence! And yet....

Mahaly was speaking. "You-all ain't--found the French doctor yet--is you?"