CHAPTER XLIV

A second shock within a week at The Towers found Kimberly still dazed. In the confusion of the household Uncle John failed one morning to answer Francis's greeting. No word of complaint had came from him. He lay as he had gone to sleep.

Hamilton stood in the room a moment with Kimberly beside his dead uncle.

"He was an extraordinary man, Robert," said the surgeon, breaking the silence at last. "A great man."

"He asked no compromise with the inevitable," responded Kimberly, looking at the stern forehead and the cruel mouth. "I don't know"--he added, turning mechanically away, "perhaps, there is none."

After the funeral Dolly urged Robert to take Hamilton to sea and the two men spent a week together on the yacht. Between them there existed a community of mental interest and material achievement as well as a temperamental attraction. Hamilton was never the echo of any expression of thought that he disagreed with. Yet he was acute enough to realize that Kimberly's mind worked more deeply than his own and was by this strongly drawn to him.

Moreover, to his attractive independence Hamilton united a tenderness and tact developed by long work among the suffering--and the suffering, like children, know their friends. Kimberly, while his wound was still bleeding, could talk to Hamilton more freely than to any one else.

The day after their return to The Towers the two men were riding together in the deep woods over toward the Sound when Kimberly spoke for the first time freely of Alice. "You know," he said to Hamilton, "something of the craving of a boy's imagination. When we are young we dream of angels--and we wake to clay. The imagination of childhood sets no bounds to its demands, and poor reality, forced to deliver, is left bankrupt. From my earliest consciousness my dreams were of a little girl and I loved and hungered for her. She was last in my sleeping and first in my waking thoughts.

"It grew in me, and with me, this pictured companion of my life. It was my childish happiness. Then the time came when she left me and I could not call her back. An old teacher rebuked me once. 'You think,' said he, 'that innocence is nothing; wait till you have lost it.'

"I believed at last, as year after year slipped away, that I had created a being of fancy too lovely to be real. I never found her--in all the women I have ever known I never found her until one night I saw Alice MacBirney. Dolly asked me that night if I had seen a ghost. She was my dream come true. Think of what it means to live to a reality that can surpass the imagination--Alice was that to me.

"To be possessed of perfect grace; that alone means so much--and grace was but one of her natural charms. I thought I knew how to love such a woman. It was all so new to her--our life here; she was like a child. I thought my love would lift me up to her. I know, too late, it dragged her down to me."

"You are too harsh. You did what you believed right."

"Right?" echoed Kimberly scornfully. "What _is_ right? Who knows or cares? We do what we please--who does _right_?"

They turned their horses into a bridle-path toward the village and Kimberly continued to speak. "Sometimes I have thought, what possibilities would lie in moulding a child to your own ideas of womanhood. It must be pleasing to contemplate a girl budding into such a flower as you have trained her to be.

"But if this be pleasing, think what it is to find such a girl already in the flower of her womanhood; to find in her eyes the light that moves everything best within you; to read in them the answer to every question that springs from your heart. This is to realize the most powerful of all emotions--the love of man for woman."

The horses stopped on the divide overlooking the lakes and the sea. To the left, the village lay at their feet, and beyond, the red roofs of the Institute clustered among clumps of green trees. The sight of the Institute brought to Kimberly's mind Brother Francis, who, released from his charge at The Towers, had returned to it.

He had for a time wholly forgotten him. He reflected now that after Hamilton's departure the companionship of Francis might help to relieve his insupportable loneliness. The men rode together past the village and parted when they reached the lake, Hamilton returning to The Towers and Kimberly riding south to the Institute to take, if possible, Brother Francis home with him. He expected some objection, but was prepared to overcome it as he dismounted at the door of the infirmary and rang. A tall, shock-haired brother answered.

"I have come to see Brother Francis."

"You mean Brother Francis, who was at The Towers? He has gone, I am sorry to say."

"Where has he gone?"

"Brother Francis has gone to the leper mission at Molokai."

Kimberly stared at the man: "Molokai! Francis gone to Molokai? What do you mean?"

A wave of amazement darkening Kimberly's features startled the red-haired brother. "Who sent him?" demanded Kimberly angrily. "Why was I not notified? What kind of management is this? Where is your Superior?"

"Brother Ambrose is ill. I, Mr. Kimberly, am Brother Edgar. No one sent Brother Francis. Surely you must know, for years he has wished to go to the Molokai Mission? When he was once more free he renewed his petition. The day after it was granted he left to catch the steamer. He went to The Towers to find you to say good-by. They told him you had gone to sea."

Kimberly rode slowly home. He was unwilling to admit even to himself how hateful what he had now heard was to him and how angrily and inexplicably he resented it.

He had purposed on the day that he made Alice his wife to give Brother Francis as a foundation for those higher schools that were the poor Italian's dream, a sum of money much larger than Francis had ever conceived of. It was to have been one of those gifts the Kimberlys delighted in--of royal munificence, without ceremony and without the slightest previous intimation; one of those overwhelming surprises that gratified the Kimberly pride.

Because it was to have been in ready money even the securities had previously been converted, and the tons of gold lay with those other useless tons that were to have been Alice's on the same day--in the bank vaults. And of the two who were to have been made happy by them, one lay in her grave and the other with his own hand had opened the door of his living tomb.

Kimberly in the weariness of living returned to the empty Towers. Dolly and her husband had gone home and Hamilton now returning to town was to dine with Charles Kimberly. Robert, welcoming isolation, went upstairs alone.

His dinner was brought to his room and was sent down again untasted. He locked his doors and sat down to think. The sounds about the house which at best barely penetrated the heavy walls of his apartment died gradually away. A clock within the room chiming the hour annoyed him and he stopped it. His thoughts ran over his affairs and the affairs of his brother and his sister and partners and turned to those in various measure dependent upon his bounty.

His sense of justice, never wholly obscured, because rooted in his exorbitant pride, was keenly alive in this hour of silent reckoning. No injustice, however slight, must be left that could be urged against his memory, and none, he believed, could now thus be urged. If there were a shock on the exchanges at the news of his death, if the stocks of his companies should be raided, no harm could come to the companies themselves. The antidote to all uneasiness lay in the unnecessarily large cash balances, rooted likewise in the Kimberly pride, that he kept always in hand for the unexpected.

His servants, to the least, had been remembered and he was going over his thought of them when, with a pang, he reflected that he had completely forgotten the maid, Annie. It was a humiliation to think that of all minor things this could happen--that the faithful girl who had been closer than all others to her who was dearest to him could have been neglected. However, this could be trusted to a letter to his brother, and going to a table he wrote a memorandum of the provisions he wished made for Annie.

Brother Francis and his years of servitude came to his mind. Was there any injustice to this man in leaving undone what he had fully intended to do in providing for the new school? He thought the subject over long and loosely. What would Francis say when he heard? Could he, stricken sometime with a revolting disease, ever think of Kimberly as unjust?

The old fancy of Francis in heaven and Dives begging for a drop of water returned. But the thought of lying for an eternity in hell without a drop of water was more tolerable than the thought of this faithful Lazarus' accusing finger pointing to a tortured Dives who had been in the least matter unjust. If there were a hereafter, pride had something at stake in this, too.

And thus the thought he most hated obtruded itself unbidden--was there a hereafter?

Alice rose before him. He hid his face in his hands. Could this woman, the very thought of whom he revered and loved more than life itself--could she now be mere dissolving clay--or did she live? Was it but breathing clay that once had called into life every good impulse in his nature?

He rose and found himself before his mother's picture. How completely he had forgotten his mother, whose agony had given him life! He looked long and tenderly into her eyes. When he turned away, dawn was beating at the drawn shades. The night was gone. Without even asking what had swayed him he put his design away.