VII. A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE…

VII. A WOMAN'S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE

The harvest was over. The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved like a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose in innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye. The ground appeared bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert. The land now, all stubble, still looked good for anything. If bare, it did not seem starved. It was naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down after the fight. Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed the fibre of its being to no disadvantage. And overhead the joy of the prairie grew apace.

September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come into the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of nature recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength, a battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and energy. Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity; evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his eyes. There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of pensiveness-- the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian summer soon to come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to the past and forget that to-morrow was all in all.

Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than elsewhere. Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself in the delicate contentment of the sunset. There were many who took it all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at all, save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose solicitous friend is the sun. These heeded it little, even though a good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north Atlantic and the German Ocean. From Erin and England and the land o' cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity as to the permanency of such conditions, and then settled down to take it as it was, endless days of sunshine and stirring vivacious air--as though they had always known it and had it.

There were exceptions, and these had joy in what they saw and felt according to the measure of their temperament. Shiel Crozier saw and felt much of it, and probably the Young Doctor saw more of it than any one; stray people here and there who take no part in this veracious tale had it in greater or less degree; fat Jesse Bulrush was so sensitive to it that he, as he himself said, "almost leaked sentimentality" and Kitty Tynan possessed it. She was pulsing with life, as a bird drunken with the air's sweetness sings itself into an abandonment of motion.

Before Crozier came she had enjoyed existence as existence, wondering often why it was she wanted to spring up from the ground with the idea that she could fly, if she chose to try. Once when she was quite a little girl she had said to her mother, "I'm going to ile away," and her mother, puzzled, asked her what she meant. Her reply was, "It's in the hymn." Her mother persisted in asking what hymn; and was told with something like scorn that it was the hymn she herself had taught her only child--"I'll away, I'll away to the Promised Land."

Kitty had thought that "I'll away" meant some delicious motion which was to ile, and she had visions of something between floating and flying as being that blessed means of transportation.

As the years grew, she still wanted to "ile away" whenever the spirit of elation seized her, and it had increased greatly since Shiel Crozier came. Out of her star as he was, she still felt near to him, and as though she understood him and he comprehended her. He had almost at once become to her an admired mystery, which, however, at first she did not dare wish to solve. She had been content to be a kind of handmaiden to a generous and adored master. She knew that where he had been she could in one sense never go, and yet she wanted to be near him just the same. This was intensified after the Logan Trial and the shooting of the man who somehow seemed to have made her live in a new way.

As long ago as she could recall she had, in a crude, untutored way, been fond of the things that nature made beautiful; but now she seemed to see them in a new light, but not because any one had deliberately taught her. Indeed, it bored her almost to hear books read as Jesse Bulrush and Nurse Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his operation, to help him pass away the time. The only time she ever cared to listen-- at school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for the printed page--was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or recited. Then she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but by the music of the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying feeling; and she got something out of it which had in one sense nothing to do with the verses themselves or with the conception of the poet.

Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read. He was a born sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to Kitty during Crozier's illness. Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse contrived to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too; for he was a picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and clean linen--he always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and he had a taste in ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought by the yard. He was, in fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for material things, as he had shown in the land proposal on which Shiel Crozier's fortunes hung, but with no gift for carrying them out, having neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose. Yet he was an agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found himself "an old bach," as he called himself, in love at last with a middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.

Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by the bedside of the wounded man. Jesse had been away so much in different parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had had a real chance to make permanent impression. By accident, however, his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at the moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer feelings.

It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened to his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville, and Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest. His content was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was lovely, as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their cordial, ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the divine lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice rising and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse; though it meant nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound was using it on her behalf.

This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty understood. Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a mistress of his heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did not talk. That, to him, was the best thing of all. She was a superb listener, and he was a prodigious talker--was it not all appropriate?

One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made a pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point. He found her in her usual place, with a look almost pensive on her face. He did not notice that, for he was excited and elated.

"I want to read you something I've written," he said, and he drew from his pocket a paper.

"If it's another description of the timber-land you have for sale-please, not to me," she answered provokingly, for she guessed well what he held in his hand. She had seen him writing it. She had even seen some of the lines scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing careful if not swift and skillful manufacture. One of these crumpled-up bits of paper she had in her pocket now, having recovered it that she might tease him by quoting the lines at a provoking opportunity.

"It's not that. It's some verses I've written," he said, with a wave of his hand.

"All your own?" she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of aloes on her tongue.

"Yes. Yes. I've always written verses more or less--I write a good many advertisements in verse," he added cheerfully. "They are very popular. Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses in commerce as in affairs of the heart. But if you'd rather not, if it makes you tired--"

"Courage, soldier, bear your burden," she said gaily. "Mount your horse and get galloping," she added, motioning him to sit.

A moment later he was pouring out his soul through a pleasing voice, from fat lips, flanked by a high-coloured healthy cheek like a russet apple:

"Like jewels of the sky they gleam, Your eyes of light, your eyes of fire; In their dark depths behold the dream Of Life's glad hope and Love's desire.

"Above your quiet brow, endowed With Grecian charm to crown your grace, Your hair in one soft Titian cloud Throws heavenly shadows on your face."

"Well, I've never had verses written to me before," Kitty remarked demurely, when he had finished and sat looking at her questioningly. "But 'dark depths'--that isn't the right thing to say of my eyes! And Titian cloud of hair--is my hair Titian? I thought Titian hair was bronzy-tawny was what Mr. Burlingame called it when he was spouting," --her upper lip curled in contempt.

"It isn't you, and you know it," he replied jerkily. She bridled. "Do you mean to say that you come and read to me without a word of explanation, so that I shouldn't misunderstand, verses written for another? Am I to be told now that my eyes aren't eyes of light and eyes of fire, that I haven't got a Grecian brow? Do you dare to say those verses don't fit me--except for the Titian hair and heavenly shadows? And that I've got no right to think they're meant for me? Is it so, that a man that's lived in my mother's house for years, eating at the same table with the family, and having his clothes mended free, with supper to suit him and no questions asked--is it so, that he reads me poetry, four lines at a stretch, and a rhyme every other line, and then announces it isn't for me!"

Her eyes flashed, her bosom palpitated, her hand made passionate gestures, and she really seemed a young fury let loose. For a moment he was deceived by her acting; he did not see the lurking grin in the depths of her eyes.

Her voice shook with assumed passion. "Because I didn't show what I felt all these years, and only exposed my real feelings when you read those verses to me, do you think any man who was a gentleman wouldn't in the circumstances say, 'These verses are for you, Kitty Tynan'? You betrayed me into showing you what I felt, and then you tell me your verses are for another girl!"

"Girl! Girl! Girl!" he burst out. "Nurse is thirty-seven--she told me so herself, and how could I tell that you--why, it's absurd! I've only thought of you always as a baby in long skirts"--she spasmodically drew her skirts down over her pretty, shapely ankles, while she kept her eyes covered with one hand--"and you've seen me makin' up to her ever since Crozier got the bullet. Ever since he was operated on, I've--"

"Yes, yes, that's right," she interrupted. "That's manly! Put the blame on him--him that couldn't help himself, struck by a horse-thief's bullet in the dark; him that's no more to blame for your carryings on while death was prowling about the door there--"

"Carryings on! Carryings on!" Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and indignant. The little devil, to put him in a hole like this! "Carryings on! I've acted like a man all through--never anything else in your house, and it's a shame that I've got to listen to things that have never been said of me in all my life. My mother was a good, true woman, and she brought me up--"

"Yes, that's it, put it on your mother now, poor woman! who isn't here to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two girls so placed they couldn't help themselves--just doing kind acts for a sick man." Suddenly she got to her feet. "I tell you, Jesse Bulrush, that you're a man--you're a man--"

But she could keep it up no longer. She burst out laughing, and the false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: "That you're a man after my own heart. But you can't have it, even if you are after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in there!" She tossed a hand towards the house.

By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting. "Well, you wicked little rip--you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up like that! Why, never on the stage was there such--!"

"It's the poetry made me do it. It inspired me," she gurgled. "I felt --why, I felt here"--she pressed her hand to her heart "all the pangs of unrequited love--oh, go away, go back to the house and read that to her! She's in the sitting-room, and my mother's away down-town. Now's your chance, Claude Melnotte."

She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward towards the house. "You're good enough for anybody, and if I wasn't so young and daren't leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till I'm thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!" She laughed till the tears came into her eyes. "This is as good as--as a play."

"It's the best acted play I ever saw, from 'Ten Nights in a Bar-room' to 'Struck Oil,'" rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed yet beaming. "But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses worth anything? Do you think she'll like them?"

Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read deepened in her eyes. "Nurse 'll like them--of course she will," she said gently. "She'll like them because they are you. Read them to her as you read them to me, and she'll only hear your voice, and she'll think them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh a thousand pounds. It doesn't matter to a woman what a man's saying or doing, or whether he's so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that under everthing he's saying, 'I love you.' A man isn't that way, but a woman is. Now go." Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.

"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" he said admiringly.

"Then be a father to me," she said teasingly.

"I can't marry both your mother and nurse."

"P'r'aps you can't marry either," she replied sarcastically, "and I know that in any case you'll never be any relative of mine by marriage. Get going," she said almost impatiently.

He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, "I'll let you hear some of my verses one day when you're more developed and can understand them."

"I'll bet they beat mine," he called back.

"You'll win your bet," she answered, and stood leaning against a tree with a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes. When he had disappeared, sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper, unfolded it, and laid it on her knee. "It is better," she said. "It's not good poetry, of course, but it's truer, and it's not done according to a pattern like his. Yes, it's real, real, real, and he'll never see it--never see it now, for I've fought it' all out, and I've won."

Then she slowly read the verses aloud:

"Yes, I've won," she said with determination. So many of her sex have said things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never, never, never do. Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a new force awakened in her character.

For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house. She was thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social pale. Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world beyond this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the conscience of a man or woman was the only law. She was not lawless in mind or spirit. She was only rebelling gainst a situation in which she was bound hand and foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive desire, if she wished to do so.

Here was a man who was married, yet in a real sense who had no wife. Suppose that man cared for her, what a tragedy it would be for them to be kept apart! This man did not love her, and so there was no tragedy for both. Still all was not over yet--yes, all was "over and over and over," she said to herself as she sprang to her feet with a sharp exclamation of disgust--with herself.

Her mother was coming hurriedly towards her from the house. There was a quickness in her walk suggesting excitement, yet from the look in her face it was plain that the news she brought was not painful. "He told me you were here, and--"

"Who told you I was here?"

"Mr. Bulrush."

"So it's all settled," she said, with a little quirk of her shoulders.

"Yes, he's asked her, and they're going to be married. It's enough to make you die laughing to see the two middle-aged doves cooing in there."

"I thought perhaps it would be you. He said he would like to be a father to me."

"That would prevent me if nothing else would," answered the widow of Tyndall Tynan. "A stepfather to an unmarried girl, both eyeing each other for a chance to find fault--if you please, no thank you!"

"That means you won't get married till I'm out of the way?" asked Kitty, with a look which was as much touched with myrrh as with mirth.

"It means I wouldn't get married till you are married, anyway," was the complacent answer.

"Is there any one special that--"

"Don't talk nonsense. Since your father died I've only thought of his child and mine, and I've not looked where I might. Instead, I've done my best to prove that two women could live and succeed without a man to earn for them; though of course without the pension it couldn't have been done in the style we've done it. We've got our place!"

There is a dignity attached to a pension which has an influence quite its own, and in the most primitive communities it has an aristocratic character which commands general respect. In Askatoon people gave Mrs. Tynan a better place socially because of her pension than they would have done if she had earned double the money which the pension brought her.

"Everybody has called on us," she added with reflective pride.

"Principally since Mr. Crozier came," added Kitty. "It's funny, isn't it, how he made people respect him before they knew who he was?"

"He would make Satan stand up and take off his hat, if he paid Hades a visit," said Mrs. Tynan admiringly. "Anybody'd do anything for him."

Kitty eyed her mother closely. There was a strange, far-away, brooding look in Mrs. Tynan's eyes, and she seemed for a moment lost in thought.

"You're in love with him," said Kitty sharply.

"I was, in a way," answered her mother frankly. "I was, in a way, a kind of way, till I knew he was married. But it didn't mean anything. I never thought of it except as a thing that couldn't be."

"Why couldn't it be?" asked Kitty, smothering an agitation rising in her breast.

"Because I always knew he belonged to where we didn't, and because if he was going to be in love himself, it would be with some girl like you. He's young enough for that, and it's natural he should get as his profit the years of youth that a young woman has yet to live."

"As though it was a choice between you and me, for instance!"

Mrs. Tynan started, but recovered herself. "Yes. If there had been any choosing, he'd not have hesitated a minute. He'd have taken you, of course. But he never gave either of us a thought that way."

"I thought that till--till after he'd told us his story," replied Kitty boldly.

"What has happened since then?" asked her mother, with sudden apprehension.

"Nothing has happened since. I don't understand it, but it's as though he'd been asleep for a long time and was awake again."

Mrs. Tynan gravely regarded her daughter, and a look of fear came into her face. "I knew you kept thinking of him always," she said; "but you had such sense, and he never showed any feeling for you; and young girls get over things. Besides, you always showed you knew he wasn't a possibility. But since he told us that day about his being married and all, has--has he been different towards you?"

"Not a thing, not a word," was the reply; "but--but there's a difference with him in a way. I feel it when I go in the room where he is."

"You've got to stop thinking of him," insisted the elder woman querulously. "You've got to stop it at once. It's no good. It's bad for you. You've too much sense to go on caring for a man that--"

"I'm going to get married," said Kitty firmly. "I've made up my mind. If you have to think about one person, you should stop thinking about another; anyhow, you've got to make yourself stop. So I'm going to marry--and stop."

"Who are you going to marry, Kitty? You don't mean to say it's John Sibley !"

"P'r'aps. He keeps coming."

"That gambling and racing fellow!"

"He owns a big farm, and it pays, and he has got an interest in a mine, and--"

"I tell you, you shan't," peevishly interjected Mrs. Tynan. "You shan't. He's vicious. He's--oh, you shan't! I'd rather--"

"You'd rather I threw myself away--on a married man?" asked Kitty covertly.

"My God--oh, Kitty!" said the other, breaking down. "You can't mean it --oh, you can't mean that you'd--"

"I've got to work out my case in my own way," broke in Kitty calmly. "I know how I've got to do it. I have to make my own medicine--and take it. You say John Sibley is vicious. He has only got one vice."

"Isn't it enough? Gambling--"

"That isn't a vice; it's a sport. It's the same as Mr. Crozier had. Mr. Crozier did it with horses only, the other does it with cards and horses. The only vice John Sibley's got is me."

"Is you?" asked her mother bewilderedly.

"Well, when you've got an idea you can't control and it makes you its slave, it's a vice. I'm John's vice, and I'm thinking of trying to cure him of it--and cure myself too," Kitty added, folding and unfolding the paper in her hand.

"Here comes the Young Doctor," said her mother, turning towards the house. "I think you don't mean to marry Sibley, but if you do, make him give up gambling."

"I don't know that I want him to give it up," answered Kitty musingly.

A moment later she was alone with the Young Doctor.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VIII. ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER

"What's this you've been doing?" asked the Young Doctor, with a quizzical smile. "We never can tell where you'll break out."

"Kitty Tynan's measles!" she rejoined, swinging her hat by its ribbon. "Mine isn't a one-sided character, is it?"

"I know one of the sides quite well," returned the Young Doctor.

"Which, please, sir?"

The Young Doctor pretended to look wise. "The outside. I read it like a book. It fits the life in which it moves like the paper on the wall. But I'm not sure of the inside. In fact, I don't think I know that at all."

"So I couldn't call you in if my character was sick inside, could I?" she asked obliquely.

"I might have an operation, and see what's wrong with it," he answered playfully.

Suddenly she shivered. "I've had enough of operations to last me awhile," she rejoined. "I thought I could stand anything, but your operation on Mr. Crozier taught me a lesson. I'd never be a doctor's wife if I had to help him cut up human beings."

"I'll remember that," the Young Doctor replied mockingly.

"But if it would help put things on a right basis, I'd make a bargain that I wasn't to help do the carving," she rejoined wickedly. The Young Doctor always incited her to say daring things. They understood each other well. "So don't let that stand in the way," she added slyly.

"The man who marries you will be glad to get you without the anatomy," he returned gallantly.

"I wasn't talking of a man; I was talking of a doctor."

He threw up a hand and his eyebrows. "Isn't a doctor a man?"

"Those I've seen have been mostly fish."

"No feelings--eh?"

She looked him in the eyes, and he felt a kind of shiver go through him. "Not enough to notice. I never observed you had any," she replied. "If I saw that you had, I'd be so frightened I'd fly. I've seen pictures of an excited whale turning a boat full of men over. No, I couldn't bear to see you show any feeling."

The dark eyes of the Young Doctor suddenly took on a look which was a stranger to them. In his relations with women he was singularly impersonal, but he was a man, and he was young enough to feel the Adam stir in him. The hidden or controlled thing suddenly emerged. It was not the look which would be in his eyes if he were speaking to the woman he wanted to marry. Kitty saw it, and she did not understand it, for she had at heart a feeling that she could go to him in any trouble of life and be sure of healing. To her he seemed wonderful; but she thought of him as she would have thought of her father, as a person of authority and knowledge--that operation showed him a great man, she thought, so skillful and precise and splendid; and the whole countryside had such confidence in him.

She regarded him as a being apart; but for a moment, an ominous moment, he was almost one with that race of men who feed in strange pastures. She only half saw the reddish glow which came swimming into his eyes, and she did not realise it, for she did not expect to find it there. For an instant, however, he saw with new eyes that primary eloquence of woman life, the unspent splendour of youth, the warm joy of the material being, the mystery of maidenhood in all its efflorescence. It was the emergence of his own youth again, as why should it not be, since he had never married and had never dallied! But in a moment it was gone again--driven away.

"What a wicked little flirt you are!" he said, with a shake of the head. "You'll come to a bad end, if you don't change your ways."

"Perform an operation, then, if you think you know what's the matter with me," she retorted. "Sometimes in operating for one disease we come on another, and then there's a lot of thinking to be done."

The look in her face was quizzical, yet there was a strange, elusive gravity in her eyes, an almost pathetic appealing. "If you were going to operate on me, what would it be for?" she asked more flippantly than her face showed.

"Well, it's obscure, and the symptoms are not usual, but I should strike for the cancer love," he answered, with a direct look.

She flushed and changed on the instant. "Is love a cancer?" she asked. All at once she felt sure that he read her real story, and something very like anger quickened in her.

"Unrequited love is," he answered deliberately. "How do you know it is unrequited?" she asked sharply.

"Well, I don't know it," he answered, dismayed by the look in her face. "But I certainly hope I'm right. I do, indeed."

"And if you were right, what would you do--as a surgeon?" she questioned, with an undertone of meaning.

"I would remove the cause of the disease."

She came close and looked him straight in the eyes. "You mean that he should go? You think that would cure the disease? Well, you are not going to interfere. You are not going to manoeuvre anything to get him away--I know doctors' tricks. You'd say he must go away east or west to the sea for change of air to get well. That's nonsense, and it isn't necessary. You are absolutely wrong in your diagnosis--if that's what you call it. He is going to stay here. You aren't going to drive away one of our boarders and take the bread out of our mouths. Anyhow, you're wrong. You think because a girl worships a man's ability that she's in love with him. I adore your ability, but I'd as soon fall in love with a lobster--and be boiled with the lobster in a black pot. Such conceit men have!"

He was not convinced. He had a deep-seeing eye, and he saw that she was boldly trying to divert his belief or suspicion. He respected her for it. He might have said he loved her for it--with a kind of love which can be spoken of without blushing or giving cause to blush, or reason for jealousy, anger, or apprehension.

He smiled down into her gold-brown eyes, and he thought what a real woman she was. He felt, too, that she would tell him something that would give him further light if he spoke wisely now.

"I'd like to see some proof that you are right, if I am wrong," he answered cautiously.

"Well, I'm going to be married," she said, with an air of finality.

He waved a hand deprecatingly. "Impossible--there's no man worth it. Who is the undeserving wretch?"

"I'll tell you to-morrow," she replied. "He doesn't know yet how happy he's going to be. What did you come here for? Why did you want to see me?" she added. "You had something you were going to tell me. Hadn't you?"

"That's quite right," he replied. "It's about Crozier. This is my last visit to him professionally. He can go on now without my care. Yours will be sufficient for him. It has been all along the very best care he could have had. It did more for him than all the rest, it--"

"You don't mean that," she interrupted, with a flush and a bosom that leaped under her pretty gown. "You don't mean that I was of more use than the nurse--than the future Mrs. Jesse Bulrush?"

"I mean just that," he answered. "Nearly every sick person, every sick man, I should say, has his mascot, his ministering angel, as it were. It's a kind of obsession, and it often means life or death, whether the mascot can stand the strain of the situation. I knew an old man--down by Dingley's Flat it was, and he wanted a boy--his grand-nephew-beside him always. He was getting well, but the boy took sick and the old man died the next day. The boy had been his medicine. Sometimes it's a particular nurse that does the trick; but whoever it is, it's a great vital fact. Well, that's the part you played to Mr. Shiel Crozier of Lammis and Castlegarry aforetime. He owes you much."

"I am glad of that," she said softly, her eyes on the distance.

"She is in love with him in spite of what she says," remarked the Young Doctor to himself. "Well," he continued aloud, "the fact is, Crozier's almost well in a way, but his mind is in a state, and he is not going to get wholly right as things are. Since things came out in court, since he told us his whole story, he has been different. It's as though--"

She interrupted him hastily and with suppressed emotion. "Yes, yes, do you think I've not noticed that? He's been asleep in a way for five years, and now he's awake again. He is not James Gathorne Kerry now; he is James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, and--oh, you understand: he's back again where he was before--before he left her."

The Young Doctor nodded approvingly. "What a little brazen wonder you are! I declare you see more than--"

"Yet you won't have me?" she asked mockingly. "You're too clever for me," he rejoined with spirit. "I'm too conceited. I must marry a girl that'd kneel to me and think me as wise as Socrates. But he's back again, as you say, and, in my view, his wife ought to be back again also."

"She ought to be here," was Kitty's swift reply, "though I think mighty little of her--mighty little, I can tell you. Stuckup, great tall stork of a woman, that lords it over a man as though she was a goddess. Wears diamonds in the middle of the day, I suppose, and cold-blooded as--as a fish."

"She ought to have married me, according to your opinion of me. You said I was a fish," remarked the Young Doctor, with a laugh.

"The whale and the catfish!"

"Heavens, what spite!" he rejoined. "Catfish--what do you know about Mrs. Crozier? You may be brutally unjust--waspishly unjust, I should say."

"Do I look like a wasp?" she asked half tearfully. She was in a strange mood.

"You look like a golden busy bee," he answered. But tell me, how did you come to know enough about her to call her a cat?"

"Because, as you say, I was a busy golden bee," she retorted.

"That information doesn't get me much further," he answered.

"I opened that letter," she replied.

"'That letter'--you mean you opened the letter he showed us which he had left sealed as it came to him five years ago?" The Young Doctor's face wore a look of dismay.

"I steamed the envelope open--how else could I have done it! I steamed it open, saw what I wanted, and closed it up again."

The Young Doctor's face was pale now. This was a terrible revelation. He had a man's view of such conduct. He almost shrank from her, though she stood there as inviting and innocent a specimen of girlhood as the eye could wish to see. She did not look dishonourable.

"Do you realise what that means?" he asked in a cold, hard tone.

"Oh, come, don't put on that look and don't talk like John the Evangelist," she retorted. "I did it, not out of curiosity, and not to do any one harm, but to do her good--his wife."

"It was dishonourable--wicked and dishonourable."

"If you talk like that, Mr. Piety, I'm off," she rejoined, and she started away.

"Wait--wait," he said, laying firm fingers on her arm. "Of course you did it for a good purpose. I know. You cared enough for him for that."

He had said the right thing, and she halted and faced him. "I cared enough to do a good deal more than that if necessary. He has been like a second father to me, and--"

Suddenly a light of humour shot into the eyes of both. Sheil Crozier as a "father" to her was too artificial not to provoke their sense of the grotesque.

"I wanted to find out his wife's address to write to her and tell her to come quick," she explained. "It was when he was at the worst. And then, too, I wanted to know the kind of woman she was before I wrote to her. So--"

"You mean to say you read that letter which he had kept unopened and unread for five long years?" The Young Doctor was certainly disturbed again.

"Every word of it," Kitty answered shamelessly, "and I'm not sorry. It was in a good cause. If he had said, 'Courage, soldier,' and opened it five years ago, it would have been good for him. Better to get things like that over."

"It was that kind of a letter, was it--a catfish letter?"

Kitty laughed a little scornfully. "Yes, just like that, Mr. Easily Shocked. Great, showy, purse-proud creature!"

"And you wrote to her?"

"Yes--a letter that would make her come if anything would. Talk of tact --I was as smooth as a billiard-ball. But she hasn't come."

"The day after the operation I cabled to her," said the Young Doctor.

"Then you steamed the letter open and read it too?" asked Kitty sarcastically.

"Certainly not. Ladies first-and last," was the equally sarcastic answer. "I cabled to Castlegarry, his father's place, also to Lammis that he mentioned when he told us his story. Crozier of Lammis, he was."

"Well, I wrote to the London address in the letter," added Kitty. "I don't think she'll come. I asked her to cable me, and she hasn't. I wrote such a nice letter, too. I did it for his sake."

The Young Doctor laid his hands on both her shoulders. "Kitty Tynan, the man who gets you will get what he doesn't deserve," he remarked.

"That might mean anything."

"It means that Crozier owes you more than he can guess."

Her eyes shone with a strange, soft glow. "In spite of opening the letter?"

The Young Doctor nodded, then added humorously: "That letter you wrote her--I'm not sure that my cable wouldn't have far more effect than your letter."

"Certainly not. You tried to frighten her, but I tried to coax her, to make her feel ashamed. I wrote as though I was fifty."

The Young Doctor regarded her dubiously. "What was the sort of thing you said to her?"

"For one thing, I said that he had every comfort and attention two loving women and one fond nurse could give him; but that, of course, his legitimate wife would naturally be glad to be beside him when he passed away, and that if she made haste she might be here in time."

The Young Doctor leaned against a tree shaking with laughter.

"What are you smiling at?" Kitty asked ironically. "Oh, she'll be sure to come--nothing will keep her away after being coaxed like that!" he said, when he could get breath.

"Laughing at me as though I was a clown in a circus!" she exclaimed. "Laughing when, as you say yourself, the man that she--the cat--wrote that fiendish letter to is in trouble."

"It was a fiendish letter, was it?" he asked, suddenly sobered again. "No, no, don't tell me," he added, with a protesting gesture. "I don't want to hear. I don't want to know. I oughtn't to know. Besides, if she comes, I don't want to be prejudiced against her. He is troubled, poor fellow."

"Of course he is. There's the big land deal--his syndicate. He's got a chance of making a fortune, and he can't do it because--but Jesse Bulrush told me in confidence, so I can't explain."

"I have an idea, a pretty good idea. Askatoon is small."

"And mean sometimes."

"Tell me what you know. Perhaps I can help him," urged the Young Doctor. "I have helped more than one good man turn a sharp corner here."

She caught his arm. "You are as good as gold." "You are--impossible," he replied.

They talked of Crozier's land deal and syndicate as they walked slowly towards the house. Mrs. Tynan met them at the door, a look of excitement in her face. "A telegram for you Kitty," she said.

"For me!" exclaimed Kitty eagerly. "It's a year since I had one."

She tore open the yellow envelope. A light shot up in her face. She thrust the telegram into the Young Doctor's hands.

"She's coming; his wife's coming. She's in Quebec now. It was my letter--my letter, not your cable, that brought her," Kitty added triumphantly.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IX. NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY

It was as though Crozier had been told of the coming of his wife, for when night came, on the day Kitty had received her telegram, he could not sleep. He was the sport of a consuming restlessness. His brain would not be still. He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and make it vacuous. It would not relax. It seized with intentness on each thing in turn, which was part of his life at the moment, and gave it an abnormal significance. In vain he tried to shake himself free of the successive obsessions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging him after them, a slave lashed to the wheels of a chariot of flame.

At last it was the land deal and syndicate on which his future depended, and the savage fate which seemed about to snatch his fortune away as it had done so often before; as it had done on the day when Flamingo went down near the post at the Derby with a madwoman dragging at the bridle. He had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would have enabled him to pass the crisis of his life. Wife, home, the old fascinating, crowded life--they had all vanished because of that vile trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the wilderness through years that brought no fruit of his labours. Yet here was his chance, his great chance, to get back what he had and was in the old misspent days, with new purposes in life to follow and serve; and it was all in cruel danger of being swept away when almost within his grasp.

If he could but achieve the big deal, he could return to wife and home, he could be master in his own house, not a dependent on his wife's bounty. That very evening Jesse Bulrush, elated by his own good fortune in capturing Cupid, had told him as sadly as was possible, while his own fortunes were, as he thought, soaring, that every avenue of credit seemed closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan company, would let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him to hold his place in the syndicate; while each of the other members of the clique had flatly and cheerfully refused, saying they were busy carrying their own loads. Crozier had commanded Jesse not to approach them, but the fat idealist had an idea that his tongue had a gift of wheedling, and he believed that he could make them "shell out," as he put it. He had failed, and he was obliged to say so, when Crozier, suspecting, brought him to book.

"They mean to crowd you out--that's their game," Bulrush had said. "They've closed up all the ways to cash or credit. They're laying to do you out of your share. Unless you put up the cash within the four days left, they'll put it through without you. They told me to tell you that."

And Crozier had not even cursed them. He said to Jesse Bulrush that it was an old game to get hold of a patent that made a fortune for a song while the patentee died in the poor-house. Yet that four days was time enough for a live man to do a "flurry of work," and he was fit enough to walk up their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when a man was out for war.

Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little and big things to torture him--remembrances of incidents when debts and disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face. It was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years. It was the first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the operation which saved his life--the face of Kitty Tynan.

And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence. Kitty had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was startlingly true. It was as though, while he was living under an assumed name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry. His wife and the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived out, which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the present. Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her had seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of his own name and the telling if his story had produced a complete psychological change in him mentally and bodily. The impersonal feeling which had marked his relations with the two women of this household, and with all women, was suddenly gone. He longed for the arms of a woman round his neck--it was five years since any woman's arms had been there, since he had kissed any woman's lips. Now, in the hour when his fortunes were again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a fair race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another face came between.

All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife was living, came to him. He had never for an instant thought of her as dead, but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him. If his wife was living! Living? Her death had never been even a remote possibility to his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death. Beneath all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a romancist to whom life was an adventure in a half-real world.

It was impossible to sleep. He tossed from side to side. Once he got up in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a sudden impulse seized him. He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went to the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out. With the feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he knew, ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any cruelty, of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of the candle when he thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of his room gently closing. Laying the letter down, he went to the door and opened it. There was no one stirring. Yet he had a feeling as though some one was there in the darkness. His lips framed the words,

"Who is it? Is any one there?" but he did not utter them.

A kind of awe possessed him. He was Celtic; he had been fed on the supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry, and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical. It is hard to tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness of the other room-the living-room of the house. He was in a state of trance, almost, a victim of the night. But as he closed the door softly the words of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he found her brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain. The last two verses of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was swayed by the superstition of bygone ancestors:

"Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone? Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave; Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.

"When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway, Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow, I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say-- 'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'"

He went to bed again, but sleep would not come. The verses of the lament kept singing in his brain. He tossed from side to side, he sought to control himself, but it was of no avail. Suddenly he remembered the bed of boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her meeting with the Young Doctor the previous day. Before he was shot he used to sleep in the open in the summer-time. If he could get to sleep anywhere it would be there.

Hastily dressing himself in flannel shirt and trousers, and dragging a blanket from the bed, he found his way to the bedroom door, went into the other room, and felt his way to the front door, which would open into the night. All at once he was conscious of another presence in the room, but the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved himself for succumbing to fantasy. Finding the front door in the dark, he opened it and stepped outside. There was no moon, but there were millions of stars in the blue vault above, and there was enough light for him to make his way to the place where he had slept "hereaway and oft."

He knew that the bed of boughs would be dry, but the night would be his, and the good, cool ground, and the soughing of the pines, and the sweet, infinitesimal and innumerable sounds of the breathing, sleeping earth. He found the place and threw himself down. Why, here were green boughs under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there! Kitty--it was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing, thinking that he might want to sleep in the open again after his illness. Kitty--it was she who had so thoughtfully served him; Kitty, with the instinct of strong, unselfish womanhood, with the gift of the outdoor life, with the unpurchasable gift of friendship. What a girl she was! How rich she could make the life of a man!

"Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes, Held my hand, and laid his cheek warm against my brow, Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"

How different she was, this child of the West, of Nature, from the woman he had left behind in England, the sophisticated, well-appointed, well- controlled girl; too well-controlled even in the first days of married life; too well-controlled for him who had the rushing impulses of a Celtic warrior of olden days. Delicate, refined, perfectly poised, and Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope! Mona--Kitty, the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life, each in her own way, as none others had done, they floated before his eyes till sight and feeling grew dim. With a last effort he strove to eject Kitty from his thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the race of life, and he must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly, even in exile from her, run straight, even with that unopened, bitter, upbraiding letter in the--

He fell asleep, and soon and slowly and ever so dimly the opal light of the prairie dawn crept shyly over the landscape. With it came stealing the figure of a girl towards the group of trees where lay the man of Lammis on the bed of green boughs which she had renewed for him. She had followed him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through the night--near him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him and the kind, holy night before the morrow came which belonged to the other woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to any man in whose arms she ever had lain. And the pity and the tragedy of it was that he loved his wife--the catfish wife. The sharp, pitiless instinct of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come of late to him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near him now, was only the reflection of what he felt for his wife. She knew the unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet what she must put away from herself after to-morrow. Those verses she wrote --they were to show that she had conquered herself. Yet, but a few hours after, here she was kneeling outside his door at night, here she was pursuing him to the place where he slept. The coming of the other woman --she knew well that she was something to this man of men--had roused in her all she had felt, had intensified it.

She trembled, but she drew near, accompanied by the heavenly odours of the freshened herbs and foliage and the cool tenderness of the river close by. In her white dress and loosened hair she was like some spirit of a new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home. It was all so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the bushes and the night. Noiselessly she stole over the grass and into the shadows of the trees where he lay. Again and again she paused. What would she do if he was awake and saw her? She did not know. The moment must take care of itself. She longed to find him sleeping.

It was so. The hazy light showed his face upward to the skies, his breast rising and falling in a heavy, luxurious sleep.

She drew nearer and nearer till she was kneeling beside him. His face was warm with colour even in the night air, warmer than she had ever seen it. One hand lay across his chest and one was thrown back over his head with the abandon of perfect rest. All the anxiety and restlessness which had tortured him had fled, and his manhood showed bold and serene in the brightening dusk.

A sob almost broke from her as she gazed her fill, then slowly she leaned over and softly pressed her lips to his--the first time that ever in love they had been given to any man. She had the impulse to throw her arms round him, but she mastered herself. He stirred, but he did not wake. His lips moved as she withdrew hers.

"My darling!" he said in the quick, broken way of the dreamer.

She rose swiftly and fled away among the trees towards the house.

What he had said in his sleep--was it in reality the words of unconsciousness, or was it subconscious knowledge?--they kept ringing in her ears.

"My darling!" he had said when she kissed him. There was a light of joy in her eyes now, though she felt that the words were meant for another. Yet it was her kiss, her own kiss, which had made him say it. If--but with happy eyes she stole to her room.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter X

"S. O. S."

At breakfast next morning Kitty did not appear. Had it been possible she would have fled into the far prairie and set up a lonely tabernacle there; for with the day came a reaction from the courage possessing her the night before and in the opal wakening of the dawn. When broad daylight came she felt as though her bones were water and her body a wisp of straw. She could not bear to meet Shiel Crozier's eyes, and thus it was she had an early breakfast on the plea that she had ironing to do. She was not, however, prepared to see Jesse Bulrush drive up with a buggy after breakfast and take Crozier away. When she did see them at the gate the impulse came to cry out to Crozier; what to say she did not know, but still to cry out. The cry on her lips was that which she had seen in the newspaper the day before, the cry of the shipwrecked seafarers, the signal of the wireless telegraphy, "S. O. S."--the piteous call, "Save Our Souls!" It sprang to her lips, but it got no farther except in an unconscious whisper. On the instant she felt so weak and shaken and lonely that she wanted to lean upon some one stronger than herself; as she used to lean against her father, while he sat with one arm round her studying his railway problems. She had been self-sufficient enough all her life,--"an independent little bird of freedom," as Crozier had called her; but she was like a boat tossed on mountainous waves now.

"S. O. S.!-Save Our Souls!"

As though she really had made this poignant call Crozier turned round in the buggy where he sat with Jesse Bulrush, pale but erect; and, with a strange instinct, he looked straight to where she was. When he saw her his face flushed, he could not have told why. Was it that there had passed to him in his sleep the subconscious knowledge of the kiss which Kitty had given him; and, after all, had he said "My darling" to her and not to the wife far away across the seas, as he thought? A strange feeling, as of secret intimacy, never felt before where Kitty was concerned, passed through him now, and he was suddenly conscious that things were not as they had ever been; that the old impersonal comradeship had vanished. It disturbed, it almost shocked him. Whereupon he made a valiant effort to recover the old ground, to get out of the new atmosphere into the old, cheering air.

"Come and say good-bye, won't you?" he called to her.

"S. O. S.--S. O. S.--S. O. S.!" was the cry in her heart, but she called back to him from her lips, "I can't. I'm too busy. Come back soon, soldier."

With a wave of the hand he was gone. "Not a care in the world she has," Crozier said to Jesse Bulrush. "She's the sunniest creature Heaven ever made."

"Too skittish for me," responded the other with a sidelong look, for he had caught a note in Crozier's voice which gave him a sudden suspicion.

"You want the kind you can drive with an oatstraw and a chirp--eh, my friend?"

"Well, I've got what I want," was the reply. "Neither of us 'll kick over the traces."

"You are a lucky man," replied Crozier. "You've got a remarkably big prize in the lottery. She is a fine woman, is Nurse Egan, and I owe her a great deal. I only hope things turn out so well that I can give her a good fat wedding-present. But I shan't be able to do anything that's close to my heart if I can't get the cash for my share in the syndicate."

"Courage, soldier, as Kitty Tynan says," responded Jesse Bulrush cheerily. "You never know your luck. The cash is waiting for you somewhere, and it'll turn up, be sure of that."

"I'm not sure of that. I can see as plain as your nose how Bradley and his clique have blocked me everywhere from getting credit, and I'd give five years of my life to beat them in their dirty game. If I fail to get it at Aspen Vale I'm done. But I'll have a try, a good big try. How far exactly is it? I've never gone by this trail."

Bulrush shook his head reprovingly. "It's too long a journey for you to take after your knock-out. You're not fit to travel yet. I don't like it a bit. Lydia said this morning it was a crime against yourself, going off like this, and--"

"Lydia?--oh yes, pardonnez-moi, m'sieu'! I did not know her name was Lydia."

"I didn't either till after we were engaged." Crozier stared in blank amazement. "You didn't know her name till after you were engaged? What did you call her before that?"

"Why, I called her Nurse." answered the fat lover. "We all called her that, and it sounded comfortable and homelike and good for every day. It had a sort of York-shilling confidence, and your life was in her hands --a first-class you-and-me kind of feeling."

"Why don't you stick to it, then?"

"She doesn't want it. She says it sounds so old, and that I'd be calling her 'mother' next."

"And won't you?" asked Crozier slyly. "Everything in season," beamed Jesse, and he shone, and was at once happy and composed. Crozier relapsed into silence, for he was thinking that the lost years had been barren of children. He turned to look at the home they had left. It was some distance away now, but he could see Kitty still at the corner of the house with a small harvest of laundered linen in her hand.

"She made that fresh bed of boughs for me--ah, but I had a good sleep last night!" he added aloud. "I feel fit for the fight before me." He drew himself up and began to nod here and there to people who greeted him.

In the house behind them at that moment Kitty was saying to her mother, "Where is he going, mother?"

"To Aspen Vale," was the reply. "If you'd been at breakfast you'd have heard. He'll be gone two days, perhaps three."

Three days! She regretted now that she had not said to herself, "Courage, soldier," and gone to say good-bye to him when he called to her. Perhaps she would not see him again till after the other woman-- till after the wife-came. Then--then the house would be empty; then the house would be so still. And then John Sibley would come and--

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XI. IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER

Three days passed, but before they ended there came another telegram from Mrs. Crozier stating the time of her expected arrival at Askatoon. It was addressed to Kitty, and Kitty almost savagely tore it up into little pieces and scattered it to the winds. She did not even wait to show it to the Young Doctor; but he had a subtle instinct as to why she did not; and he was rather more puzzled than usual at what was passing before his eyes. In any case, the coming of the wife must alter all the relations existing in the household of the widow Tynan. The old, unrestrained, careless friendship could not continue. The newcomer would import an element of caste and class which would freeze mother and daughter to the bones. Crozier was the essence of democracy, which in its purest form is akin to the most aristocratic element and is easily affiliated with it. He had no fear of Crozier. Crozier would remain exactly the same; but would not Crozier be whisked away out of Askatoon to a new fate, reconciled to being a receiver of his wife's bounty.

"If his wife gets her arms round his neck, and if she wants to get them there, she will, and once there he'll go with her like a gentleman," said the Young Doctor sarcastically. Admiring Crozier as he did, he also had underneath all his knowledge of life an unreasonable apprehension of man's weakness where a woman was concerned. The man who would face a cannon's mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could crumple with one hand.

The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and Kitty met the train. The local operator had not divulged to any one the contents of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators on the platform. As the great express stole in almost noiselessly, like a tired serpent, Kitty watched its approach with outward cheerfulness. She had braced herself to this moment, till she looked the most buoyant, joyous thing in the world. It had not come easily. With desperation she had fought a fight during these three lonely days, till at last she had conquered, sleeping each night on Crozier's star-lit bed of boughs and coming in with the silver-grey light of dawn. Now she leaned forward with heart beating fast; but with smiling face and with eyes so bright that she deceived the Young Doctor.

There was no sign of inward emotion, of hidden troubles, as she leaned forward to see the great lady step from the train--great in every sense was this lady in her mind; imposing in stature, a Juno, a tragedy queen, a Zenobia, a daughter of the gods who would not stoop to conquer. She looked in vain, however, for the Mrs. Crozier she had imagined made no appearance from the train. She hastened down the platform still with keen eyes scanning the passengers, who were mostly alighting to stretch their legs and get a breath of air.

"She's not here," she said at last darkly to the Young Doctor who had followed her.

Then suddenly she saw emerge from a little group at the steps of a car a child in a long dress--so it seemed to her, the being was so small and delicate--and come forward, having hastily said good-bye to her fellow- passengers. As the Young Doctor said afterwards, "She wasn't bigger than a fly," and she certainly was as graceful and pretty and piquante as a child-woman could be.

Presently, with her alert, rather assertive blue eyes she saw Kitty, and came forward. "Miss Tynan?" she asked, with an encompassing look.

Now Kitty was idiomatic in her speech at times, and she occasionally used slang of the best brand, but she avoided those colloquialisms which were of the vocabulary of the uneducated. Indeed, she had had no inclination to use them, for her father had set her a good example, and she liked to hear good English spoken. That was why Crozier's talk had been like music to her; and she had been keen to distinguish between the rhetorical method of Augustus Burlingame, who modelled himself on the orators of all the continents, and was what might be called a synthetic elocutionist. Kitty was as simple and natural as a girl could be, and as a rule had herself in perfect command; but she was so stunned by the sight of this petite person before her that, in reply to Mrs. Crozier's question, she only said abruptly

"The same!"

Then she came to herself and could have bitten her tongue out for that plunge into the vernacular of the West; and forthwith a great prejudice was set up in her mind against Mona Crozier, in whose eyes she caught a look of quizzical criticism or, as she thought, contemptuous comment. That for one instant she had been caught unawares and so had put herself at a disadvantage angered her; but she had been embarrassed and confounded by this miniature goddess, and her reply was a vague echo of talk she heard around her every day. Also she could have choked the Young Doctor, whom she caught looking at her with wondering humour, as though he was trying to see "what her game was," as he said to her afterwards.

It was all due to the fact that from the day of the Logan Trial, and particularly from the day when Shiel Crozier had told his life-story, she had always imagined his wife as a stately Amazonian being with the carriage of a Boadicea. She had looked for an empress in splendid garments, and--and here was a humming-bird of a woman, scarcely bigger, than a child, with the buzzing energy of a bee, but with a queer sort of manfulness too; with a square, slightly-projecting chin, as Kitty came to notice afterwards; together with some small lines about the mouth and at the eyes, which came from trouble endured and suffering undergone. Kitty did not notice that, but the Young Doctor took it in with his embracing glance, as the wife saluted Kitty with her inward comment, which was:

"So this is the chit who wrote to me like a mother!" But Mona Crozier did not underestimate Kitty for all that, and she wondered why it was that Kitty had written as she did. One thing was quite clear: Kitty had had good intentions, else why have written at all?

All these thoughts had passed through the mind of each, with a good many others, while they were shaking hands; and the Young Doctor summoned his man to carry Mona's hand-luggage to the extra buggy he had brought to the station. One of the many other thoughts that were passing through three active minds was Kitty's unspoken satire:

"Just think; this is the woman he talked of as though she was a moving mountain which would fall on you and crush you, if you didn't look out!"

No doubt Crozier would have repudiated this description of his talk, but the fact was he had unconsciously spoken of Mona with a sort of hush in his voice; for a woman to him was something outside real understanding. He had a romantic mediaeval view, which translated weakness and beauty into a miracle, and what psychologists call "an inspired control."

"She's no bigger than--than a wasp," said Kitty to herself, after the Young Doctor had assured Mrs. Crozier that her husband was almost well again; that he had recovered more quickly than was expected, and had gained strength wonderfully after the crisis was passed.

"An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you," was Kitty's further inward comment, "and that's why he was always nervous when he spoke of her." Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed the tiny lines about the tiny mouth, and the fine-spun webs about the bird-bright eyes.

The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most, spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey--and this, a journey across a continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the decision of every step and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and she said to herself,

"Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo," and she instinctively felt the little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she ever wore, or had ever worn.

"Sensible of her not to bring a maid," commented the Young Doctor inwardly. "That would have thrown Kitty into a fit. Yet how she manages to look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is beyond me--and Crozier so rather careless in his ways. Not what you would call two notes in the same key, she and Crozier," he reflected as he told her she need not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of the checks for it.

"My husband--is--is he quite better now?" Mrs. Crozier asked with sharp anxiety, as the two-seated "rig" started away with the ladies in the back seat.

"Oh, better, thanks to him," was Kitty's reply, nodding towards the Young Doctor.

"You have told him I was coming?"

"Wasn't it better to have a talk with you first?" asked Kitty meaningly.

Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried, then she looked Kitty in the eyes.

"You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it," was her enigmatical reply. "And of course you will tell me. You did not let him know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?"

"Oh, you got his cable?" questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph in her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor. It did reach him, and he replied to the question.

"We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country planned his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did not, unfortunately, take you into account."

The little lady blushed, or flushed. "May I ask how you know this to be so, if it is so?" she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in her tone, as it seemed to Kitty.

"The Logan Trial--I mentioned it in my letter to you," interposed Kitty. "He was shot for the evidence he gave at the trial. Well, at the trial a great many questions were asked by a lawyer who wanted to hurt him, and he answered them."

"Why did the lawyer want to hurt him?" Mona Crozier asked quickly.

"Just mean-hearted envy and spite and devilry," was Kitty's answer. "They were both handsome men, and perhaps that was it."

"I never thought my husband handsome, though he was always distinguished looking," was the quiet reply.

"Ah, but you haven't seen him at all for so long!" remarked Kitty, a little spitefully.

"How do you know that?" Mrs. Crozier was nettled, though she did not show it; but Kitty felt it was so, and was glad.

"He said so at the Logan Trial."

"Was that the kind of question asked at the trial?" the wife quickly interjected.

"Yes, lots of that kind," returned Kitty.

"What was the object?"

"To make him look not so distinguished--like nothing. If a man isn't handsome, but only distinguished"--Kitty's mood was dangerous--"and you make him look cheap, that's one advantage, and--"

Here the Young Doctor, having observed the rising tide of antagonism in the tone of the voices behind him, gently interposed, and made it clear that the purpose was to throw a shadow on the past of her husband in order to discredit his evidence; to which Mrs. Crozier nodded her understanding. She liked the Young Doctor, as who did not who came in contact with him, except those who had fear of him, and who had an idea that he could read their minds as he read their bodies. And even this girl at her side--Mona Crozier realised that the part she had played was evidently an unselfish one, though she felt with piercing intuition that whatever her husband thought of the girl, the girl thought too much of her husband. Somehow, all in a moment, it made her sorry for the girl's sake. The girl had meant well by her husband in sending for his wife, that was certain; and she did not look bad. She was too sedately and reservedly dressed, in spite of her auriferous face and head and her burnished tone, to be bad; too fearless in eye, too concentrated to be the rover in fields where she had no tenure or right.

She turned and looked Kitty squarely in the eyes, and a new, softer look came into her own, subduing what to Kitty was the challenging alertness and selfish inquisitiveness.

"You have been very good to Shiel--you two kind people," she said, and there came a sudden faint mist to her eyes.

That was her lucky moment, and she spoke as she did just in time, for Kitty was beginning to resent her deeply; to dislike her far more than was reasonable, and certainly without any justice.

Kitty spoke up quickly. "Well, you see, he was always kind and good to other people, and that was why--"

"But that Mr. Burlingame did not like him?" The wife had a strange intuition regarding Mr. Burlingame. She was sure that there was a woman in the case--the girl beside her?

"That was because Mr. Burlingame was not kind or good to other people," was Kitty's sedate response. There was an undertone of reflection in the voice which did not escape Mrs. Crozier's senses, and it also caught the ear of the Young Doctor, to whom there came a sudden revelation of the reason why Burlingame had left Mrs. Tynan's house.

"Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Crozier enigmatically. Presently, with suppressed excitement as she saw the Young Doctor reining in the horses slowly, she added: "My husband--when have you arranged that I should see him?"

"When he gets back--home," Kitty replied, with an accent on the last word.

Mrs. Crozier started visibly. "When he gets back home-back from where? He is not here?" she asked in a tone of chagrin. She had come a long way, and she had pictured this meeting at the end of the journey with a hundred variations, but never with this one--that she should not see Shiel at once when the journey was over, if he was alive. Was it hurt pride or disappointed love which spoke in her face, in her words? After all, it was bad enough that her private life and affairs should be dragged out in a court of law; that these two kind strangers, whom she had never seen till a few minutes ago, should be in the inner circle of knowledge of the life of her husband and herself, without her self-esteem being hurt like this. She was very woman, and the look of the thing was not nice to her eyes, while it must belittle her in theirs. Had this girl done it on purpose? Yet why should she--she who had so appealed to her to come to him--have sought to humiliate her?

Kitty was not quite sure what she ought to say. "You see, we expected him back before this. He is very exact!"

"Very exact?" asked Mrs. Crozier in astonishment. This was a new phase of Shiel Crozier's character. He must, indeed, have changed since he had caused her so much anxiety in days gone by.

"Usen't he to be so?" asked Kitty, a little viciously. "He is so very exact now," she added. "He expected to be back home before this"--how she loved to use that word home--"and so we thought he would be here when you arrived. But he has been detained at Aspen Vale. He had a big business deal on--"

"A big business deal? Is he--is he in a large way of business?" Mona asked almost incredulously. Shiel Crozier in a large way of business, in a big business deal? It did not seem possible. His had ever been the game of chance. Business--business?

"He doesn't talk himself, of course; that wouldn't be like him,"--Kitty had joy in giving this wife the character of her husband," but they say that if he succeeds in what he's trying to do now he will make a great deal of money."

"Then he has not made it yet?" asked Mrs. Crozier.

"He has always been able to pay his board regularly, with enough left for a pew in church," answered Kitty with dry malice; for she mistook the light in the other's eyes, and thought it was avarice; and the love of money had no place in Kitty's make-up. She herself would never have been influenced by money where a man was concerned.

"Here's the house," she quickly added; "our home, where Mr. Crozier lives. He has the best room, so yours won't be quite so good. It's mother's--she's giving it up to you. With your trunks and things, you'll want a room to yourself," Kitty added, not at all unconscious that she was putting a phase of the problem of Crozier and his wife in a very commonplace way; but she did not look into Mrs. Crozier's face as she said it.

Mrs. Crozier, however, was fully conscious of the poignancy of the remark, and once again her face flushed slightly, though she kept outward composure.

"Mother, mother, are you there?" Kitty called, as she escorted the wife up the garden walk.

An instant later Mrs. Tynan cheerfully welcomed the disturber of the peace of the home where Shiel Crozier had been the central figure for so long.

YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK

[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.

XII. AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM XIII. KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN XIV. AWAITING THE VERDICT XV. "MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM" XVI. "'TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU GO BACK FOR MINE" XVII. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT? EPILOGUE

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XII. AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM

"What are you laughing at, Kitty? You cackle like a young hen with her first egg." So spoke Mrs. Tynan to her daughter, who alternately swung backwards and forwards in a big rocking-chair, silently gazing into the distant sky, or sat still and "cackled" as her mother had said.

A person of real observation and astuteness, however, would have noticed that Kitty's laughter told a story which was not joy and gladness-- neither good humour nor the abandonment of a luxurious nature. It was tinged with bitterness and had the smart of the nettle.

Her mother's question only made her laugh the more, and at last Mrs. Tynan stooped over her and said, "I could shake you, Kitty. You'd make a snail fidget, and I've got enough to do to keep my senses steady with all the house-work--and now her in there!" She tossed a hand behind her fretfully.

Quick with love for her mother, as she always was, Kitty caught the other's trembling hand. "You've always had too much to do, mother; always been slaving for others. You've never had time to think whether you're happy or not, or whether you've got a problem--that's what people call things, when they're got so much time on their hands that they make a play of their inside feelings and work it up till it sets them crazy."

Mrs. Tynan's mouth tightened and her brow clouded. "I've had my problems too, but I always made quick work of them. They never had a chance to overlay me like a mother overlays her baby and kills it."

"Not 'like a mother overlays,' but 'as a mother overlays,'" returned Kitty with a queer note to her voice. "That's what they taught me at school. The teacher was always picking us up on that kind of thing. I said a thing worse than that when Mrs. Crozier"--her fingers motioned towards another room--"came to-day. I don't know what possessed me. I was off my trolley, I suppose, as John Sibley puts it. Well, when Mrs. James Shiel Gathorne Crozier said--oh, so sweetly and kindly--'You are Miss Tynan?' what do you think I replied? I said to her, 'The same'!"

Rather an acidly satisfied smile came to Mrs. Tynan's lips. "That was like the Slatterly girls," she replied. "Your father would have said it was the vernacular of the rail-head. He was a great man for odd words, but he knew always just what he wanted to say and he said it out. You've got his gift. You always say the right thing, and I don't know why you made that break with her--of all people."

A meditative look came into Kitty's eyes. "Mr. Crozier says every one has an imp that loves to tease us, and trip us up, and make us appear ridiculous before those we don't want to have any advantage over us."

"I don't want Mrs. Crozier to have any advantage over you and me, I can tell you that. Things'll never be the same here again, Kitty dear, and we've all got on so well; with him so considerate of every one, and a good friend always, and just one of us, and his sickness making him seem like our own, and--"

"Oh, hush--will you hush, mother!" interposed Kitty sharply. "He's going away with her back to the old country, and we might just as well think about getting other borders, for I suppose Mr. Bulrush and his bonny bride will set up a little bulrush tabernacle on the banks of the Nile"--she nodded in the direction of the river outside--"and they'll find a little Moses and will treat it as their very own."

"Kitty, how can you!"

Kitty shrugged a shoulder. "It would be ridiculous for that pair to have one of their own. It's only the young mother with a new baby that looks natural to me."

"Don't talk that way, Kitty," rejoined her mother sharply. "You aren't fit to judge of such things."

"I will be before long," said her daughter. "Anyway, Mrs. Crozier isn't any better able to talk than I am," she added irrelevantly. "She never was a mother."

"Don't blame her," said Mrs. Tynan severely. "That's God's business. I'd be sorry for her, so far as that was concerned, if I were you. It's not her fault."

"It's an easy way of accounting for good undone," returned Kitty. "P'r'aps it was God's fault, and p'r'aps if she had loved him more--"

Mrs. Tynan's face flushed with sudden irritation and that fretful look came to her eyes which accompanies a lack of comprehension. "Upon my word, well, upon my word, of all the vixens that ever lived, and you looking like a yellow pansy and too sweet for daily use! Such thoughts in your head! Who'd have believed that you--!"

Kitty made a mocking face at her mother. "I'm more than a girl, I'm a woman, mother, who sees life all around me, from the insect to the mountain, and I know things without being told. I always did. Just life and living tell me things, and maybe, too, the Irish in me that father was."

"It's so odd. You're such a mixture of fun and fancy, at least you always have been; but there's something new in you these days. Kitty, you make me afraid--yes, you make your mother afraid. After what you said the other day about Mr. Crozier I've had bad nights, and I get nervous thinking."

Kitty suddenly got up, put her arm round her mother and kissed her. "You needn't be afraid of me, mother. If there'd been any real danger, I wouldn't have told you. Mr. Crozier's away, and when he comes back he'll find his wife here, and there's the end of everything. If there'd been danger, it would have been settled the night before he went away. I kissed him that night as he was sleeping out there under the trees."

Mrs. Tynan sat down weakly and fanned herself with her apron. "Oh, oh, oh, dear Lord!" she said. "I'm not afraid to tell you anything I ever did, mother," declared Kitty firmly; "though I'm not prepared to tell you everything I've felt. I kissed him as he slept. He didn't wake, he just lay there sleeping--sleeping." A strange, distant, dreaming look came into her eyes. She smiled like one who saw a happy vision, and an eerie expression stole into her face. "I didn't want him to wake," she continued. "I asked God not to let him wake. If he'd waked--oh, I'd have been ashamed enough till the day I died in one way! Still he'd have understood, and he'd have thought no harm. But it wouldn't have been fair to him--and there's his wife in there," she added, breaking off into a different tone. "They're a long way above us--up among the peaks, and we're at the foot of the foothills, mother; but he never made us feel that, did he? The difference between him and most of the men I've ever seen! The difference!"

"There's the Young Doctor," said her mother reproachfully.

"He-him! He's by himself, with something of every sort in him from the top to the bottom. There's been a ditcher in his family, and there may have been a duke. But Shiel Crozier--Shiel"--she flushed as she said the name like that, but a little touch of defiance came into her face too-- "he is all of one kind. He's not a blend. And he's married to her in there!"

"You needn't speak in that tone about her. She's as fine as can be."

"She's as fine as a bee," retorted Kitty. Again she laughed that almost mirthless laugh for which her mother had called her to account a moment before. "You asked me a while ago what I was laughing at, mother," she continued. "Why, can't you guess? Mr. Crozier talked of her always as though she was--well, like the pictures you've seen of Britannia, all swelling and spreading, with her hand on a shield and her face saying, 'Look at me and be good,' and her eyes saying, 'Son of man, get upon thy knees!' Why, I expected to see a sort of great--goodness--gracious goddess, that kept him frightened to death of her. Bless you, he never opened her letter, he was so afraid of her; and he used to breathe once or twice hard--like that, when he mentioned her!" She breathed in such mock awe that her mother laughed with a little kindly malice too.

"Even her letter," Kitty continued remorselessly, "it was as though she --that little sprite--wrote it with a rod of chastisement, as the Bible says. It--"

"What do you know of the inside of that letter?" asked her mother, staring.

"What the steam of the tea-kettle could let me see," responded Kitty defiantly; and then, to her shocked mother, she told what she had done, and what the nature of the letter was.

"I wanted to help him if I could, and I think I'll be able to do it--I've worked it all out," Kitty added eagerly, with a glint of steel in the gold of her eyes and a fantastic kind of wisdom in her look.

"Kitty," said her mother severely and anxiously, "it's madness interfering with other people's affairs--of that kind. It never was any use."

"This will be the exception to the rule," returned Kitty. "There she is"--again she flicked a hand towards the other room--"after they've been parted five years. Well, she came after she read my letter to her, and after I'd read that unopened letter to him, which made me know how to put it all to her. I've got intuition--that's Celtic and mad," she added, with her chin thrusting out at her mother, to whom the Irish that her husband had been, which was so deep in her daughter, was ever a mystery to her, and of which she was more or less afraid.

"I've got a plan, and I believe--I know--it will work," Kitty continued. "I've been thinking and thinking, and if there's trouble between them; if he says he isn't going on with her till he's made his fortune; if he throws that unopened letter in her face, I'll bring in my invention to deal with the problem, and then you'll see! But all this fuss for a little tiny button of a thing like that in there--pshaw! Mr. Crozier is worth a real queen with the beauty of one of the Rhine maidens. How he used to tell that story of the Rhinegold--do you remember? Wasn't it grand? Well, I am glad now that he's going--yes, whatever trouble there may be, still he is going. I feel it in my heart."

She paused, and her eyes took on a sombre tone. Presently, with a slight, husky pain in her voice, like the faint echo of a wail, she went on: "Now that he's going, I'm glad we've had the things he gave us, things that can't be taken away from us. What you have enjoyed is yours for ever and ever. It's memory; and for one moment or for one day or one year of those things you loved, there's fifty years, perhaps, for memory. Don't you remember the verses I cut out of the magazine:

"'Time, the ruthless idol-breaker, Smileless, cold iconoclast, Though he rob us of our altars, Cannot rob us of the past.'"

"That's the way your father used to talk," replied her mother. "There's a lot of poetry in you, Kitty." "More than there is in her?" asked Kitty, again indicating the region where Mrs. Crozier was.

"There's as much poetry in her as there is in--in me. But she can do things; that little bit of a babywoman can do things, Kitty. I know women, and I tell you that if that woman hadn't a penny, she'd set to and earn it; and if her husband hadn't a penny, she'd make his home comfortable just the same somehow, for she's as capable as can be. She had her things unpacked, her room in order herself--she didn't want your help or mine--and herself with a fresh dress on before you could turn round."

Kitty's eyes softened still more. "Well, if she'd been poor he would never have left her, and then they wouldn't have lost five years--think of it, five years of life with the man you love lost to you!--and there wouldn't be this tough old knot to untie now."

"She has suffered--that little sparrow has suffered, I tell you, Kitty. She has a grip on herself like--like--"

"Like Mr. Crozier with a broncho under his hand," interjected Kitty. "She's too neat, too eternally spick and span for me, mother. It's as though the Being that made her said, 'Now I'll try and see if I can produce a model of a grown-up, full-sized piece of my work.' Mrs. Crozier is an exhibition model, and Shiel Crozier's over six feet three, and loose and free, and like a wapiti in his gait. If he was a wapiti he'd carry the finest pair of antlers ever was."

"Kitty, you make me laugh," responded the puzzled woman. "I declare, you're the most whimsical creature, and--"

At that moment there came a tapping at the door behind them, and a small, silvery voice said, "May I come in?" as the door opened and Mrs. Crozier, very precisely yet prettily dressed, entered.

"Please make yourself at home--no need to rap," answered Mrs. Tynan. "Out in the West here we live in the open like. There's no room closed to you, if you can put up with what there is, though it's not what you're used to."

"For five months in the year during the past five years I've lived in a house about half as large as this," was Mrs. Crozier's reply. "With my husband away there wasn't the need of much room."

"Well, he only has one room here," responded Mrs. Tynan. "He never seemed too crowded in it."

"Where is it? Might I see it?" asked the small, dark-eyed, dark-haired wife, with the little touch of nectarine bloom and a little powder also; and though she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, there was a look of wistfulness in her eyes, a gleam of which Kitty caught ere it passed.

"You've been separated, Mrs. Crozier," answered the elder woman, "and I've no right to let you into his room without his consent. You've had no correspondence at all for five years--isn't that so?"

"Did he tell you that?" the regal little lady asked composedly, but with an underglow of anger in her eyes.

"He told the court that at the Logan Trial," was the reply.

"At the murder trial--he told that?" Mrs. Crozier asked almost mechanically, her face gone pale and a little haggard.

"He was obliged to answer when that wolf, Gus Burlingame, was after him," interposed Kitty with kindness in her tone, for, suddenly, she saw through the outer walls of the little wife's being into the inner courts. She saw that Mrs. Crozier loved her husband now, whatever she had done in the past. The sight of love does not beget compassion in a loveless heart, but there was love in Kitty's heart; and it was even greater than she would have wished any human being to see; and by it she saw with radium clearness through the veil of the other woman's being.

"Surely he could have avoided answering that," urged Mona Crozier bitterly.

"Only by telling a lie," Kitty quickly answered, "and I don't believe he ever told a lie in his life. Come," she added, "I will show you his room. My mother needn't do it, and so she won't be responsible. You have your rights as a wife until they're denied you. You mustn't come, mother," she said to Mrs. Tynan, and she put a tender hand on her arm.

"This way," she added to the little person in the pale blue, which suited well her very dark hair, blue eyes, and rose-touched cheeks.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIII. KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN

A moment later they stood inside Shiel Crozier's room. The first glance his wife gave took in the walls, the table, the bureau, and the desk which contained her own unopened letter. She was looking for a photograph of herself.

There was none in the room, and an arid look came into her face. The glance and its sequel did not escape Kitty's notice. She knew well--as who would not?--what Mona Crozier was hoping to see, and she was human enough to feel a kind of satisfaction in the wife's chagrin and disappointment; for the unopened letter in the baize-covered desk which she had read was sufficient warrant for a punishment and penalty due the little lady, and not the less because it was so long delayed. Had not Shiel Crozier had his draught of bitter herbs to drink over the past five years?

Moreover, Kitty was sure beyond any doubt at all that Shiel Crozier's wife, when she wrote the letter, did not love her husband, or at least did not love him in the right or true way. She loved him only so far as her then selfish nature permitted her to do; only in so far as the pride of money which she had, and her husband had not, did not prevent; only in so far as the nature of a tyrant could love--though the tyranny was pink and white and sweetly perfumed and had the lure of youth. In her primitive way Kitty had intuitively apprehended the main truth, and that was enough to justify her in contributing to Mona Crozier's punishment.

Kitty's perceptions were true. At the start, Mona was in nature proportionate to her size; and when she married she had not loved Crozier as he had loved her. Maybe that was why--though he may not have admitted it to himself--he could not bear to be beholden to her when his ruin came. Love makes all things possible, and there is no humiliation in taking from one who loves and is loved, that uncapitalised and communal partnership which is not of the earth earthy. Perhaps that was why, though Shiel loved her, he had had a bitterness which galled his soul; why he had a determination to win sufficient wealth to make himself independent of her. Down at the bottom of his chivalrous Irish heart he had learned the truth, that to be dependent on her would beget in her contempt for him, and he would be only her paid paramour and not her husband in the true sense. Quixotic he had been, but under his quixotism there was at least the shadow of a great tragical fact, and it had made him a matrimonial deserter. Whether tragedy or comedy would emerge was all on the knees of the gods.

"It's a nice room, isn't it?" asked Kitty when there had passed from Mona Crozier's eyes the glaze or mist--not of tears, but stupefaction-- which had followed her inspection of the walls, the bureau, the table, and the desk.

"Most comfortable, and so very clean--quite spotless," the wife answered admiringly, and yet drearily. It made her feel humiliated that her man could live this narrow life of one room without despair, with sufficient resistance to the lure of her hundred and fifty thousand pounds and her own delicate and charming person. Here, it would seem, he was content. One easy-chair, made out of a barrel, a couch, a bed--a very narrow bed, like a soldier's, a bed for himself alone--a small table, a shelf on the wall with a dozen books, a little table, a bureau, and an old-fashioned, sloping-topped, shallow desk covered with green baize, on high legs, so that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made that high stand for the desk himself). That was what the room conveyed to her--the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a workshop and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on the march. After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation she espied a little card hung under the small mirror on the wall. There was writing on it, and going nearer, she saw in red pencil the words, "Courage, soldier!"

These were the words which Kitty was so fond of using, and the girl had a thrill of triumph now as she saw the woman from whom Crozier had fled looking at the card. She herself had come and looked at it many times since Crozier had gone, for he had only put it there just before he left on his last expedition to Aspen Vale to carry through his deal. It had brought a great joy to Kitty's heart. It had made her feel that she had some share in his life; that, in a way, she had helped him on the march, the vivandiere who carried the water-bag which would give him drink when parched, battle-worn, or wounded.

Mona Crozier turned away from the card, sadly reflecting that nothing in the room recalled herself; that she was not here in the very core of his life in even the smallest way. Yet this girl, this sunny creature with the call of youth and passion in her eyes, this Ruth of the wheat-fields, came and went here as though she was a part of it. She did this and that for him, and she was no doubt on such terms of intimacy with him that they were really part of each other's life in a scheme of domesticity unlike any boarding-house organization she had ever known. Here in everything there was the air, the decorum, and the unartificial comfort of home.

This was why he could live without his wedded wife and her gold and her brocade, and the silk and the Persian rugs, and the grand piano and the carriages and the high silk hat from Piccadilly. Her husband had had the luxuries of wealth, and here he was living like a Spartan on his hill-- and alone; though he had a wife whom men had beseiged both before and after marriage. A feeling of impotent indignation suddenly took possession of her. Here he was with two women, unattached,--one interesting and good and agreeable and good-looking, and the other almost a beauty,--who were part of the whole rustic scheme in which he lived. They made him comfortable, they did the hundred things that a valet or a fond wife would do; they no doubt hung on every word he uttered--and he could be interesting beyond most men. She had realised terribly how interesting he was after he had fled; when men came about her and talked to her in many ways, with many variations, but always with the one tune behind all they said; always making for the one goal, whatever the point from which they started or however circuitous their route.

As time went on she had hungrily longed to see her husband again, and other men had no power to interest her; but still she had not sought to find him. At first it had been offended pride, injured self-esteem, in which the value of her own desirable self and of her very desirable fortune was not lost; then it became the pride of a wife in whom the spirit of the eternal woman was working; and she would have died rather than have sought to find him. Five years--and not a word from him.

Five years--and not a letter from him! Her eyes involuntarily fell on the high desk with the greenbaize top. Of all the letters he had written at that desk not one had been addressed to her. Slowly, and with an unintentional solemnity, she went up to it and laid a hand upon it. Her chin only cleared the edge of it-he was a tall man, her husband.

"This is the place of secrets, I suppose?" she said, with a bright smile and an attempt at gaiety to Kitty, who had watched her with burning eyes; for she had felt the thrill of the moment. She was as sensitive to atmosphere of this sad play of life as nearly and as vitally as the deserted wife.

"I shouldn't think it a place of secrets," Kitty answered after a moment. "He seldom locks it, and when he does I know where the key is."

"Indeed?" Mona Crozier stiffened. A look of reproach came into her eyes. It was as though she was looking down from a great height upon a poor creature who did not know the first rudiments of personal honour, the fine elemental customs of life.

Kitty saw and understood, but she did not hasten to reply, or to set things right. She met the lofty look unflinchingly, and she had pride and some little malice too--it would do Mrs. Crozier good, she thought-- in saying, as she looked down on the humming-bird trying to be an eagle:

"I've had to get things for him-papers and so on, and send them on when he was away, and even when he was at home I've had to act for him; and so even when it was locked I had to know where the key was. He asked me to help him that way."

Mona noted the stress laid upon the word home, and for the first time she had a suspicion that this girl knew more than even the Logan Trial had disclosed, and that she was being satirical and suggestive.

"Oh, of course," she returned cheerfully in response to Kitty--"you acted as a kind of clerk for him!" There was a note in her voice which she might better not have used. If she but knew it, she needed this girl's friendship very badly. She ought to have remembered that she would not have been here in her husband's room had it not been for the letter Kitty had written--a letter which had made her heart beat so fast when she received it, that she had sunk helpless to the floor on one of those soft rugs, representing the soft comfort which wealth can bring.

The reply was like a slap in the face.

"I acted for him in any way at all that he wished me to," Kitty answered, with quiet boldness and shining, defiant face.

Mona's hand fell away from the green baize desk, and her eyes again lost their sight for a moment. Kitty was not savage by nature. She had been goaded as much by the thought of the letter Crozier's wife had written to him in the hour of his ruin as by the presence of the woman in this house, where things would never be as they had been before. She had struck hard, and now she was immediately sorry for it: for this woman was here in response to her own appeal; and, after all, she might well be jealous of the fact that Crozier had had close to him for so long and in such conditions a girl like herself, younger than his own wife, and prettier--yes, certainly prettier, she admitted to herself.

"He is that kind of a man. What he asked for, any good woman could give and not be sorry," Kitty convincingly added when the knife had gone deep enough.

"Yes, he was that kind of a man," responded the other gently now, and with a great sigh of relief. Suddenly she came nearer and touched Kitty's arm. "And thank you for saying so," she added. "He and I have been so long parted, and you have seen so much more of him than I have of late years! You know him better--as he is. If I said something sharp just now, please forgive me. I am--indeed, I am grateful to you and your mother."

She paused. It was hard for her to say what she felt she must say, for she did not know how her husband would receive her--he had done without her for so long; and she might need this girl and her mother sorely. The girl was a friend in the best sense, or she would not have sent for her. She must remind herself of this continually lest she should take wrong views.

Kitty nodded, but for a moment she did not reply. Her hand was on the baize-covered desk. All at once, with determination in her eyes, she said: "You didn't use him right or you'd not have been parted for five years. You were rich and he was poor, he is poor now, though he may be rich any day, and he wouldn't stay with you because he wouldn't take your money to live on. If you had been a real wife to him he wouldn't have seen that he'd be using your money; he'd have taken it as though it was his own, out of the purse always open and belonging to both, just as though you were partners. You must feel--"

"Hush, for pity's sake, hush!" interrupted the other.

"You are going to see him again," Kitty persisted. "Now, don't you think it just as well to know what the real truth is?"

"How do you know what is the truth?" asked the trembling little stranger with a last attempt to hold her position, to conceal from herself the actual facts.

"The Young Doctor and my mother and I were with him all the time he was ill after he was shot, and the Trial had only told half the truth. He wanted us, his best friends here, to know the whole truth, so he told us that he left you because he couldn't bear to live on your money. It was you made him feel that, though he didn't say so. All the time he told his story he spoke of you as though you were some goddess, some great queen--"

A look of hope, of wonder, of relief came into the tiny creature's eyes. "He spoke like that of me; he said--?"

"He said what no one else would have said, probably; but that's the way with people in love--they see what no one else sees, they think what no one else thinks. He talked with a sort of hush in his voice about you till we thought you must be some stately, tall, splendid Helen of Troy with a soul like an ocean, instead of"--she was going to say something that would have seemed unkind, and she stopped herself in time--"instead of a sort of fairy, one of the little folk that never grow up; the same as my father used to tell me about."

"You think very badly of me, then?" returned the other with a sigh. Her courage, her pride, her attempt to control the situation had vanished suddenly, and she became for the moment almost the child she looked.

"We've only just begun. We're all his friends here, and we'll judge you and think of you according to what happens between you and him. You wrote him that letter!"

She suddenly placed her hand on the desk as the inspiration came to her to have this matter of the letter out now, and to have Mrs. Crozier know exactly what the position was, no matter what might be thought of herself. She was only thinking of Shiel Crozier and his future now.

"What letter did I write?" There was real surprise and wonder in her tone.

"That last letter you wrote to him--the letter in which you gave him fits for breaking his promise, and talked like a proud, angry angel from the top of the stairs."

"How do you know of that letter? He, my husband, told you what was in that letter; he showed it to you?" The voice was indignant, low, and almost rough with anger.

"Yes, your husband showed me the letter--unopened."

"Unopened--I do not understand." Mona steadied herself against the foot of the bed and looked in a helpless way at Kitty. Her composure was gone, though she was very quiet, and she had that look of a vital absorption which possesses human beings in crises of their lives.

Suddenly Kitty took from behind a book on the shelf a key, opened the desk, and drew out the letter which Crozier had kept sealed and unopened all the years, which he had never read.

"Do you know that?" Kitty asked, and held it out for Mrs. Crozier to see.

Two dark blue eyes stared confusedly at the letter--at her own handwriting. Kitty turned it over. "You see it is closed as it was when you sent it to him. He has never opened it. He does not know what is in it."

"He has-kept it--five years--unopened," Mona said in broken phrases scarce above a whisper.

"He has never opened it, as you see."

"Give--give it to me," the wife said, stepping forward to stay Kitty's hand as she opened the lid of the desk to replace the letter.

"It's not your letter--no, you shall not," said Kitty firmly as she jerked aside the hand laid upon her wrist, and threw one arm on the lid, holding it down as Mrs. Crozier tried to keep it open. Then with a swift action of the free hand she locked the desk and put the key in her pocket.

"If you destroyed this letter he would never believe but that it was worse than it is; and it is bad enough, Heaven knows, for any woman to have written to her husband--or to any one else's husband. You thought you were the centre of the world when you wrote that letter. Without a penny, he would be a great man, with a great future; but you are only a pretty little woman with a fortune, who has thought a great lot of herself, and far too much of herself only, when she wrote that letter."

"How do you know what is in it?" There was agony and challenge at once in the other's voice. "Because I read it--oh, don't look so shocked! I'd do it again. I knew just how to act when I'd read it. I steamed it open and closed it up again. Then I wrote to you. I'm not sorry I did it. My motive was a good one. I wanted to help him. I wanted to understand everything, so that I'd know best what to do. Though he's so far above us in birth and position, he seemed in one way like our own. That's the way it is in new countries like this. We don't think of lots of things that you finer people in the old countries do, and we don't think evil till it trips us up. In a new country all are strangers among the pioneers, and they have to come together. This town is only twenty years old, and scarcely anybody knew each other at the start. We had to take each other on trust, and we think the best as long as we can. Mr. Crozier came to live with us, and soon he was just part of our life--not a boarder; not some one staying the night who paid you what he owed you in the morning. He was a friend you could say your prayers with, or eat your meals with, or ride a hundred miles with, and just take it as a matter of course; for he was part of what you were part of, all this out here--don't you understand?"

"I am trying hard to do so," was the reply in a hushed voice. Here was a world, here were people of whom Mona Crozier had never dreamed. They were so much of an antique time--far behind the time that her old land represented; not a new world, but the oldest world of all. She began to understand the girl also, and her face took on a comprehending look, as with eyes like bronze suns Kitty continued:

"So, though it was wrong--wicked--in one way, I read the letter, to do some good by it, if it could be done. If I hadn't read it you wouldn't be here. Was it worth while?"

At that moment there was a knock at the outer door of the other room, or, rather, on the lintel of it. Mona started. Suppose it was her husband --that was her thought.

Kitty read the look. "No, it isn't Mr. Crozier. It's the Young Doctor. I know his knock. Will you come and see him?"

The wife was trembling, she was very pale, her eyes were rather staring, but she fought to control herself. It was evident that Kitty expected her to do so. It was also quite certain that Kitty meant to settle things now, in so far as it could be done.

"He knows as much as you do?" asked Mrs. Crozier.

"No, the Young Doctor hasn't read the letter and I haven't told him what's in it; but he knows that I read it, and what he doesn't know he guesses. He is Mr. Crozier's honest, clever friend. I've got an idea-- an invention to put this thing right. It's a good one. You'll see. But I want the Young Doctor to know about it. He never has to think twice. He knows what to do the very first time."

A moment later they were in the other room, with the Young Doctor smiling down at "the little spot of a woman," as he called Crozier's wife.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XIV. AWAITING THE VERDICT

"You look quite settled and at home," the Young Doctor remarked, as he offered Mrs. Crozier a chair. She took it, for never in her life had she felt so small physically since coming to the great, new land. The islands where she was born were in themselves so miniature that the minds of their people, however small, were not made to feel insignificant. But her mind, which was, after all, vastly larger in proportion than the body enshrining it, felt suddenly that both were lost in a universe. Her impulse was to let go and sink into the helplessness of tears, to be overwhelmed by an unconquerable loneliness; but the Celtic courage in her, added to that ancient native pride which prevents one woman from giving way before another woman towards whom she bears jealousy, prevented her from showing the weakness she felt. Instead, it roused her vanity and made her choose to sit down, so disguising perceptibly the disparity of height which gave Kitty an advantage over her and made the Young Doctor like some menacing Polynesian god.

Both these people had an influence and authority in Mona Crozier's life which now outweighed the advantage wealth gave her. Her wealth had not kept her husband beside her when delicate and perfumed tyranny began to flutter its banners of control over him. Her fortune had driven him forth when her beauty and her love ought to have kept him close to her, whatever fate might bring to their door, or whatever his misfortune or the catastrophe falling on him. It was all deeply humiliating, and the inward dejection made her now feel that her body was the last effort of a failing creative power. So she sat down instead of standing up in a vain effort at retrieval.

The Young Doctor sat down also, but Kitty did not, and in her buoyant youth and command of the situation she seemed Amazonian to Mona's eyes. It must be said for Kitty that she remained standing only because a restlessness had seized her which was not present when she was with Mona in Crozier's room. It was now as though something was going to happen which she must face standing; as though something was coming out of the unknown and forbidding future and was making itself felt before its time. Her eyes were almost painfully bright as she moved about the room doing little things. Presently she began to lay a cloth and place dishes silently on the table--long before the proper time, as her mother reminded her when she entered for a moment and then quickly passed on into the kitchen, at a warning glance from Kitty, which said that the Young Doctor and Mona were not to be disturbed.

"Well, Askatoon is a place where one feels at home quickly," added the Young Doctor, as Mona did not at once respond to his first remark. "Every one who comes here always feels as though he--or she--owns the place. It's the way the place is made. The trouble with most of us is that we want to put the feeling into practice and take possession of 'all and sundry.' Isn't that true, Miss Tynan?"

"As true as most things you say," retorted Kitty, as she flicked the white tablecloth. "If mother and I hadn't such wonderful good health I suppose you'd come often enough here to give you real possession. Do you know, Mrs. Crozier," she added, with her wistful eyes vainly trying to be merely mischievous, "he once charged me five dollars for torturing me like a Red Indian. I had put my elbow out of joint, and he put it in again with his knee and both hands, as though it was the wheel of a wagon and he was trying to put on the tire."

"Well, you were running round soon after," answered the Young Doctor. "But as for the five dollars, I only took it to keep you quiet. So long as you had a grievance you would talk and talk and talk, and you never were so astonished in your life as when I took that five dollars."

"I've taken care never to dislocate my elbow since."

"No, not your elbow," remarked the Young Doctor meaningly, and turned to Mona, who had now regained her composure.

"Well, I shan't call you in to reduce the dislocation--that's the medical term, isn't it?" persisted Kitty, with fire in her eyes.

"What is the dislocation?" asked Mona, with a subtle, inquiring look but a manner which conveyed interest.

The Young Doctor smiled. "It's only her way of saying that my mind is unhinged and that I ought to be sent to a private hospital for two."

"No--only one," returned Kitty.

"Marriage means common catastrophe, doesn't it?" he asked quizzically.

"Generally it means that one only is permanently injured," replied Kitty, lifting a tumbler and looking through it at him as though to see if the glass was properly polished.

Mona was mystified. At first she thought there had been oblique references to her husband, but these remarks about marriage would certainly exclude him. Yet, would they exclude him? During the time in which Shiel's history was not known might there not have been--but no, it could not have been so, for it was Kitty who had sent the letter which had brought her to Askatoon.

"Are you to be married--soon?" she asked of Kitty, with a friendly yet trembling smile, for her agitation was, despite appearances, troubling every nerve.

"I've thought of it quite lately," responded Kitty calmly, seating herself now and looking straight into the eyes of the woman, who was suggesting more truth than she knew.

"May I congratulate you? Am I justified on such slight acquaintance? I am sure you have chosen wisely," was the smooth rejoinder.

Kitty did not shrink from looking Mona in the eyes. "It isn't quite time for congratulations yet, and I'm not sure I've chosen wisely. My family very strongly disapproves. I can't help that, of course, and I may have to elope and take the consequences."

"It takes two to elope," interposed the Young Doctor, who thought that Kitty, in her humorous extravagance, was treading very dangerous ground indeed. He was thinking of Crozier and Kitty; but Kitty was thinking of Crozier, and meaning John Sibley. Somehow she could not help playing with this torturing thing in the presence of the wife of the man who was the real "man in possession" so far as her life was concerned.

"Why, he is waiting on the doorstep," replied Kitty boldly and referring only to John Sibley.

At that minute there was the crunch of gravel on the pathway and the sound of a quick footstep. Kitty and Mona were on their feet at once. Both recognised the step of Shiel Crozier. Presently the Young Doctor recognised it also, but he rose with more deliberation.

At that instant a voice calling from the road arrested Crozier's advance to the open door of the room where they were. It was Jesse Bulrush asking a question. Crozier paused in his progress, and in the moment's time it gave, Kitty, with a swift look of inquiry and with a burst of the real soul in her, caught the hand of Crozier's wife and pressed it warmly. Then, with a face flushed and eyes that looked straight ahead of her, she left the room as the Young Doctor went to the doorway and stepped outside. Within ten feet of the door he met Crozier.

"How goes it, patient?" he said, standing in Crozier's way. Being a man who thought much and wisely for other people, he wanted to give the wife time to get herself in control.

"Right enough in your sphere of operations," answered Crozier.

"And not so right in other fields, eh?"

"I've come back after a fruitless hunt. They've got me, the thieves!" said Crozier, with a look which gave his long face an almost tragic austerity. Then suddenly the look changed, the mediaeval remoteness passed, and a thought flashed up into his eves which made his expression alive with humour.

"Isn't it wonderful, that just when a man feels he wants a rope to hang himself with, the rope isn't to be had?" he exclaimed. "Before he can lay his hands on it he wants to hang somebody else, and then he has to pause whether he will or no. Did I ever tell you the story of the old Irishwoman who lived down at Kenmare, in Kerry? Well, she used to sit at her doorway and lament the sorrows of the world with a depth of passion that you'd think never could be assuaged. 'Oh, I fale so bad, I am so wake--oh, I do fale so bad,' she used to say. 'I wish some wan would take me by the ear and lade me round to the ould shebeen, and set me down, and fill a noggen of whusky and make me dhrink it--whether I would or no!' Whether I would or no I have to drink the cup of self-denial," Crozier continued, "though Bradley and his gang have closed every door against me here, and I've come back without what I went for at Aspen Vale, for my men were away. I've come back without what I went for, but I must just grin and bear it." He shrugged his shoulders and gave a great sigh.

"Perhaps you'll find what you went for here," returned the Young Doctor meaningly.

"There's a lot here--enough to make a man think life worth while"--inside the room the wife shrank at the words, for she could hear all--"but just the same I'm not thinking the thing I went to look for is hereabouts."

"You never know your luck," was the reply. "'Ask and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.'"

The long face blazed up with humour again. "Do you mean that I haven't asked you yet?" Crozier remarked, with a quizzical look, which had still that faint hope against hope which is a painful thing for a good man's eyes to see.

The Young Doctor laid a hand on Crozier's arm. "No, I didn't mean that, patient. I'm in that state when every penny I have is out to keep me from getting a fall. I'm in that Starwhon coal-mine down at Bethbridge, and it's like a suction-pump. I couldn't borrow a thousand dollars myself now. I can't do it, or I'd stand in with you, Crozier. No, I can't help you a bit; but step inside. There's a room in this house where you got back your life by the help of a knife. There's another room in there where you may get back your fortune by the help of a wife."

Stepping aside he gave the wondering Crozier a slight push forward into the doorway, then left him and hurried round to the back of the house, where he hoped he might see Kitty.

The Young Doctor found Kitty pumping water on a pail of potatoes and stirring them with a broom-handle.

"A most unscientific way of cleaning potatoes," he said, as Kitty did not look at him. "If you put them in a trough where the water could run off, the dirt would go with the water, and you would'nt waste time and intelligence, and your fingers would be cleaner in the end."

The only reply Kitty made was to flick the broomhead at him. It had been dipped in water, and the spray from it slightly spattered his face.

"Will you never grow up?" he exclaimed as he applied a handkerchief to his ruddy face.

"I'd like you so much better if you were younger--will you never be young?" she asked.

"It makes a man old before his time to have to meet you day by day and live near you."

"Why don't you try living with me?" she retorted. "Ah, then, you meant me when you said to Mrs. Crozier that you were going to be married? Wasn't that a bit 'momentary'? as my mother's cook used to remark. I think we haven't 'kept company'--you and I"

"It's true you haven't been a beau of mine, but I'd rather marry you than be obliged to live with you," was the paradoxical retort.

"You have me this time," he said, trying in vain to solve her reply.

Kitty tossed her head. "No, I haven't got you this time, thank Heaven, and I don't want you; but I'd rather marry you than live with you, as I said. Isn't it the custom for really nice-minded people to marry to get rid of each other--for five years, or for ever and ever and ever?"

"What a girl you are, Kitty Tynan !" he said reprovingly. He saw that she meant Crozier and his wife.

Kitty ceased her work for an instant and, looking away from him into the distance, said: "Three people said those same words to me all in one day a thousand years ago. It was Mr. Crozier, Jesse Bulrush, and my mother; and now you've said it a thousand years after; as with your inexpensive education and slow mind you'd be sure to do."

"I have an idea that Mrs. Crozier said the same to you also this very day. Did she--come, did she?"

"She didn't say, 'What a girl you are!' but in her mind she probably did say, 'What a vixen!"'

The Young Doctor nodded satirically. "If you continued as you began when coming from the station, I'm sure she did; and also I'm sure it wasn't wrong of her to say it."

"I wanted her to say it. That's why I uttered the too, too utter-things, as the comic opera says. What else was there to do? I had to help cure her."

"To cure her of what, miss?"

"Of herself, doctor-man."

The Young Doctor's look became graver. He wondered greatly at this young girl's sage instinct and penetration. "Of herself? Ah, yes, to think more of some one else than herself! That is--"

"Yes, that is love," Kitty answered, her head bent over the pail and stirring the potatoes hard.

"I suppose it is," he answered.

"I know it is," she returned.

"Is that why you are going to be married?" he asked quizzically.

"It will probably cure the man I marry of himself," she retorted. "Oh, neither of us know what we are talking about--let's change the subject!" she added impatiently now, with a change of mood, as she poured the water off the potatoes.

There was a moment's silence in which they were both thinking of the same thing. "I wonder how it's all going inside there?" he remarked. "I hope all right, but I have my doubts."

"I haven't any doubt at all. It isn't going right," she answered ruefully; "but it has to be made go right."

"Whom do you think can do that?"

Kitty looked him frankly and decisively in the face. Her eyes had the look of a dreaming pietist for the moment. The deep-sea soul of her was awake. "I can do it if they don't break away altogether at once. I helped her more than you think. I told her I had opened that letter."

He gasped. "My dear girl--that letter--you told her you had done such a thing, such--!"

"Don't dear girl me, if you please. I know what I am doing. I told her that and a great deal more. She won't leave this house the woman she was yesterday. She is having a quick cure--a cure while you wait."

"Perhaps he is cured of her," remarked the Young Doctor very gravely.

"No, no, the disease might have got headway, but it didn't," Kitty returned, her face turned away. "He became a little better; but he was never cured. That's the way with a man. He can never forget a woman he has once cared for, and he can go back to her half loving her; but it isn't the case with a woman. There's nothing so dead to a woman as a man when she's cured of him. The woman is never dead to the man, no matter what happens."

The Young Doctor regarded her with a strange, new interest and a puzzled surprise. "Sappho--Sappho, how did you come to know these things!" he exclaimed. "You are only a girl at best, or something of a boy-girl at worst, and yet you have, or think you have, got into those places which are reserved for the old-timers in life's scramble. You talk like an ancient dame."

Kitty smiled, but her eyes had a slumbering look as if she was half dreaming. "That's the mistake most of you make--men and women. There's such a thing as instinct, and there's such a thing as keeping your eyes open."

"What did Mrs. Crozier say when you told her about opening that five- year-old letter? Did she hate you?"

Kitty nodded with wistful whimsicality. "For a minute she was like an industrious hornet. Then I made her see she wouldn't have been here at all if I hadn't opened it. That made, her come down from the top of her nest on the church-spire, and she said that, considering my opportunities, I was not such an aboriginal after all."

"Now, look you, Saphira, prospective wife of Ananias, she didn't say that, of course. Still, it doesn't matter, does it? The point is, suppose he opens that letter now."

"If he does, he'll probably not go with her. It was a letter that would send a man out with a scalping-knife. Still, if Mr. Crozier had his land-deal through he might not read the letter as it really is. His brain wouldn't then be grasping what his eyes saw."

"He hasn't got his land-deal through. He told me so just now before he saw her."

"Then it's ora pro nobis--it's pray for us hard," rejoined Kitty sorrowfully. "Poor man from Kerry!" At that moment Mrs. Tynan came from the house, her face flushed, her manner slightly agitated. "John Sibley is here, Kitty--with two saddle-horses.... He says you promised to ride with him to-day."

"I probably did," responded Kitty calmly. "It's a good day for riding too. But John will have to wait. Please tell him to come back at six o'clock. There'll be plenty of time for an hour's ride before sundown."

"Are you lame, dear child?" asked her mother ironically. "Because if you're not, perhaps you'll be your own messenger. It's no way to treat a friend--or whatever you like to call him."

Kitty smiled tenderly at her mother. "Then would you mind telling him to come here, mother darling? I'm giving this doctor-man a prescription. Ah, please do what I ask you, mother! It is true about the prescription. It's not for himself; it's for the foreign people quarantined inside." She nodded towards the room where Shiel Crozier and his wife were shaping their fate.

As her mother disappeared with a gesture of impatience and the remark that she washed her hands of the whole Sibley business, the Young Doctor said to Kitty, "What is your prescription, Ma'm'selle Saphira? Suppose they come out of quarantine with a clean bill of health?"

"If they do that you needn't make up the prescription. But if Aspen Vale hasn't given him what he wanted, then Mr. Shiel Crozier will still be an exile from home and the angel in the house."

"What is the prescription? Out with your Sibylline leaves!"

"It's in that unopened letter. When the letter is opened you'll see it effervesce like a seidlitz powder."

"But suppose I am not here when the letter is opened?"

"You must be here-you must. You'll stay now, if you please."

"I'm afraid I can't. I have patients waiting." Kitty made an impetuous gesture of command. "There are two patients here who are at the crisis of their disease. You may be wanted to save a life any minute now."

"I thought that with your prescription you were to be the AEsculapius."

"No, I'm only going to save the reputation of AEsculapius by giving him a prescription got from a quack to give to a goose."

"Come, come, no names. You are incorrigible. I believe you'd have your joke on your death-bed."

"I should if you were there. I should die laughing," Kitty retorted.

"There will be no death-bed for you, miss. You'll be translated--no, that's not right; no one could translate you."

"God might--or a man I loved well enough not to marry him."

There was a note of emotion in her laugh as she uttered the words. It did not escape the ear of the Young Doctor, who regarded her fixedly for a moment before he said: "I'm not sure that even He would be able to translate you. You speak your own language, and it's surely original. I am only just learning its alphabet. No one else speaks it. I have a fear that you'll be terribly lonely as you travel along the trail, Kitty Tynan."

A light of pleasure came into Kitty's eyes, though her face was a little drawn. "You really do think I'm original--that I'm myself and not like anybody else?" she asked him with a childlike eagerness.

"Almost more than any one I ever met," answered the Young Doctor gently; for he saw that she had her own great troubles, and he also felt now fully what this comedy or tragedy inside the house meant to her. "But you're terribly lonely--and that's why: because you are the only one of your kind."

"No, that's why I'm not going to be lonely," she said, nodding towards the corner of the house where John Sibley appeared.

Suddenly, with a gesture of confidence and almost of affection, she laid a hand on the Young Doctor's breast. "I've left the trail, doctor-man. I'm cutting across the prairie. Perhaps I shall reach camp and perhaps I shan't; but anyhow I'll know that I met one good man on the way. And I also saw a resthouse that I'd like to have stayed at, but the blinds were drawn and the door was locked."

There was a strange, eerie look in her face again as her eyes of soft umber dwelt on his for a moment; then she turned with a gay smile to John Sibley, who had seen her hand on the Young Doctor's chest without dismay; for the joy of Kitty was that she hid nothing; and, anyhow, the Young Doctor had a place of his own; and also, anyhow, Kitty did what she pleased. Once when she had visited the Coast the Governor had talked to her with great gusto and friendliness; and she had even gone so far as to touch his arm while, chuckling at her whimsically, he listened to a story she told him of life at the rail-head. And the Governor had patted her fingers in quite a fatherly way--or not, as the mind of the observer saw it; while subsequently his secretary had written verses to her.

"So you've been gambling again--you've broken your promise to me," she said reprovingly to Sibley, but with that wonderful, wistful laughter in her eyes.

Sibley looked at her in astonishment. "Who told you?" he asked. It had only happened the night before, and it didn't seem possible she could know.

He was quite right. It wasn't possible she could know, and she didn't know. She only divined.

"I knew when you made the promise you couldn't keep it; that's why I forgive you now," she added. "Knowing what I did about you, I oughtn't to have let you make it."

The Young Doctor saw in her words a meaning that John Sibley could never have understood, for it was a part of the story of Crozier's life reproduced--and with what a different ending!

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XV

"MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"

When Crozier stepped out of the bright sunlight into the shady living- room of the Tynan home, his eyes were clouded by the memory of his conference with Studd Bradley and his financial associates, and by the desolate feeling that the five years since he had left England had brought him nothing--nothing at all except a new manhood. But that he did not count an asset, because he had not himself taken account of this new capital. He had never been an introspective man in the philosophic sense, and he never had thought that he was of much account. He had lived long on his luck, and nothing had come of it--"nothing at all, at all," as he said to himself when he stepped inside the room where, unknown to him, his wife awaited him. So abstracted was he, so disturbed was his gaze (fixed on the inner thing), that he did not see the figure in blue and white over against the wall, her hand on the big arm-chair once belonging to Tyndall Tynan, and now used always by Shiel Crozier, "the white-haired boy of the Tynan sanatorium," as Jesse Bulrush had called him.

There was a strange timidity, and a fear not so strange, in Mona's eyes as she saw her husband enter with that quick step which she had so longingly remembered after he had fled from her; but of which she had taken less account when he was with her at Lammis long ago-When Crozier of Lammis was with her long ago. How tall and shapely he was! How large he loomed with the light behind him! How shadowed his face and how distant the look in his eyes.

Somehow the room seemed too small for him, and yet he had lived in this very house for four years and more; he had slept in the next room all that time; had eaten at this table and sat in this very chair--Mrs. Tynan had told her that--for this long time, like the master of a household. With that far-away, brooding look in his face, he seemed in one sense as distant from her as when she was in London in those dreary, desolate years with no knowledge of his whereabouts, a widow in every sense save one; but in her acts--that had to be said for her--a wife always and not a widow. She had not turned elsewhere, though there had been temptation enough to do so.

Crozier advanced to the centre of the room, even to the table laid for dinner, before he was conscious of some one in the room, of a figure by the chair. For a moment he stood still, startled as if he had seen a vision, and his sight became blurred. When it cleared, Mona had come a step nearer to him, and then he saw her clearly. He caught his breath as though Life had burst upon him with some staggering revelation. If she had been a woman of genius, as in her way Kitty Tynan was, she would have spoken before he had a chance to do so. Instead, she wished to see how he would greet her, to hear what he would say. She was afraid of him now. It was not her gift to do the right thing by perfect instinct; she had to think things out; and so she did now. Still it has to be said for her that she also had a strange, deep sense of apprehension in the presence of the man whose arms had held her fast, and then let her go for so bitter a length of time, in which her pride was lacerated and her heart brought low. She did not know how she was going to be met now, and a womanly shyness held her back. If she had said one word--his name only--it might have made a world of difference to them both at that moment; for he was tortured by failure, and now when hope was gone, here was the woman whom he had left in order to force gifts from fate to bring himself back to her.

"You--you here!" he exclaimed hoarsely. He did not open his arms to her or go a step nearer to her. His look was that of blank amazement, of mingled remembrance and stark realisation. This was a turn of affairs for which he had made no calculation. There had ever been the question of his return to her, but never of her coming to him. Yet here she was, debonnaire and fresh and perfectly appointed--and ah, so terribly neat and spectacularly finessed! Here she was with all that expert formality which, in the old days, had been a reproach to his loosely-swung life and person, to his careless, almost slovenly but well-brushed, cleanly, and polished ease--not like his wife, as though he had been poured out of a mould and set up to dry. He was not tailor-made, and she had ever been so exact that it was as though she had been crystallised, clothes and all--a perfect crystal, yet a crystal. It was this very perfection, so charming to see, but in a sense so inhuman, which had ever dismayed him. "What should I be doing in the home of an angel!" he had exclaimed to himself in the old home at Lammis.

Truth is, he ought never to have had such a feeling, and he would not have had it, if she had diffused the radiance of love, which would have made her outer perfectness mere slovenliness beside her inner charm and magnetism. Very little of all this passed through Crozier's mind, as with confused vision he looked at her. He had borne the ordeal of the witness-box in the Logan Trial with superb coolness; he had been in physical danger over and over again, and had kept his head; he had never been faced by a human being who embarrassed him--except his own wife. "There is no fear like that of one's own wife," was the saying of an ancient philosopher, and Crozier had proved it true; not because of errors committed, but because he was as sensitive as a girl of sensibility; because he felt that his wife did not understand him, and he was ever in fear of doing the wrong thing, while eager beyond telling to please her. After all, during the past five years, parted from her while loving her, there had still been a feeling of relief unexplainable to himself in not having to think whether he was pleasing her or not, or to reproach himself constantly that he was failing to conform to her standard.

"How did you come--why? How did you know?" he asked helplessly, as she made no motion to come nearer; as she kept looking at him with an expression in her eyes wholly unfamiliar to him. Yet it was not wholly unfamiliar, for it belonged to the days when he courted her, when she seemed to have got nearer to him than in the more intimate relations of married life.

"Is--is that all you have to say to me, Shiel?" she asked, with a swelling note of feeling in her voice; while there was also emerging in her look an elusive pride which might quickly become sharp indignation. That her deserter should greet her so after five years of such offence to a woman's self-respect, as might entitle her to become a rebel against matrimony, was too cruel to be borne. This feeling suddenly became alive in her, in spite of a joy in her heart different from that which she had ever known; in defiance of the fact that now that they were together once more, what would she not do to prevent their being driven apart again!

"After abandoning me for five years, is that all you have to say to me, Shiel? After I have suffered before the world--"

He threw up his arms with a passionate gesture. "The world!" he exclaimed--"the devil take the world! I've been out of it for five years, and well out of it. What do I care for the world!"

She drew herself up in a spirit of defence. "It isn't what you care for the world, but I had to live in it--alone, and because I was alone, eyebrows were lifted. It has been easy enough for you. You were where no one knew you. You had your freedom"--she advanced to the table, and, as though unconsciously, he did the same, and they gazed at each other over the white linen and its furnishings--"and no one was saying that your wife had left you for this or that, because of her bad conduct or of yours. Either way it was not what was fair and just; yet I had to bear and suffer, not you. There is no pain like it. There I was in misery and--"

A bitter smile came to his lips. "A woman can endure a good deal when she has all life's luxuries in her grasp. Did you ever think, Mona, that a man must suffer when he goes out into a world where he knows no one, penniless, with no trade, no profession, nothing except his own helpless self? He might have stayed behind among the luxuries that belonged to another, and eaten from the hand of his wife's charity, but"--(all the pride and pain of the old situation rose up in him, impelled by the brooding of the years of separation, heightened by the fact that he was no nearer to his goal of financial independence of her than he was when he left London five years before)--"but do you think, no matter what I've done, broken a pledge or not, been in the wrong a thousand times as much as I was, that I'd be fed by the hand of one to whom I had given a pledge and broken it? Do you think that I'd give her the chance to say, or not to say, but only think, 'I forgive you; I will give you your food and clothes and board and bed, but if you are not good in the future, I will be very, very angry with you'? Do you think--?"

His face was flaming now. The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment and pride and love--the love that tore itself in pieces because it had not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money gives-- broke forth in him, fresh as he was from a brutal interview with the financial clique whom he had given the chance to make much money, and who were now, for a few thousand dollars, trying to cudgel him out of his one opportunity to regain his place in his lost world.

"I live--I live like this," he continued, with a gesture that embraced the room where they were, "and I have one room to myself where I have lived over four years"--he pointed towards it. "Do you think I would choose this and all it means--its poverty and its crudeness, its distance from all I ever had and all my people had, if I could have stood the other thing--a pauper taking pennies from his own wife? I had had taste enough of it while I had a little something left; but when I lost everything on Flamingo, and I was a beggar, I knew I could not stand the whole thing. I could not, would not, go under the poor-law and accept you, with the lash of a broken pledge in your hand, as my guardian. So that's why I left, and that's why I stay here, and that's why I'm going to stay here, Mona."

He looked at her firmly, though his face had that illumination which the spirit in his eyes--the Celtic fire drawn through the veins of his ancestors--gave to all he did and felt; and now as in a dream he saw little things in her he had never seen before. He saw that a little strand of her beautiful dark hair had broken away from its ordered place and hung prettily against the rosy, fevered skin of her cheek just beside her ear. He saw that there were no rings on her fingers save one, and that was her wedding-ring--and she had always been fond of wearing rings. He noted, involuntarily, that in her agitation the white tulle at her bosom had been disturbed into pretty disarray, and that there was neither brooch nor necklace at her breast or throat.

"If you stay, I am going to stay too," she declared in an almost passionate voice, and she spoke with deliberation and a look which left no way open to doubt. She was now a valiant little figure making a fight for happiness.

"I can't prevent that," he responded stubbornly.

She made a quick, appealing motion of her hands. "Would you prevent it? Aren't you glad to see me? Don't you love me any more? You used to love me. In spite of all, you used to love me. Even though you hated my money, and I hated your gambling--your betting on horses. You used to love me--I was sure you did then. Don't you love me now, Shiel?"

A gloomy look passed over his face. Memory of other days was admonishing him. "What is the good of one loving when the other doesn't? And, anyhow, I made up my mind five years ago that I would not live on my wife. I haven't done so, and I don't mean to 'do so. I don't mean to take a penny of your money. I should curse it to damnation if I was living on it. I'm not, and I don't mean to do so."

"Then I'll stay here and work too, without it," she urged, with a light in her eyes which they had never known.

He laughed mirthlessly. "What could you do--you never did a day's work in your life!"

"You could teach me how, Shiel."

His jaw jerked in a way it had when he was incredulous. "You used to say I was only--mark you, only a dreamer and a sportsman. Well, I'm no longer a dreamer and a sportsman; I'm a practical man. I've done with dreaming and sportsmanship. I can look at a situation as it is, and--"

"You are dreaming--but yes, you are dreaming still," she interjected. "And you are a sportsman still, but it is the sport of a dreamer, and a mad dreamer too. Shiel, in spite of all my faults in the past, I come to you, to stay with you, to live on what you earn if you like, if it's only a loaf of bread a day. I--I don't care about my money. I don't care about the luxuries which money can buy; I can do without them if I have you. Am I not to stay, and won't you--won't you kiss me, Shiel?"

She came close to him-came round the table till she stood within a few feet of him.

There was one trembling instant when he would have taken her hungrily into his arms, but as if some evil spirit interposed with malign purpose, there came the sound of feet on the gravel outside, and the figure of a man darkened the doorway. It was Augustus Burlingame, whose face as he saw Mona Crozier took on an ironical smile.

"Yes--what do you want?" inquired Crozier quietly. "A few words with Mr. Crozier on business, if he is not too much occupied?"

"What business?"

"I am acting for Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons."

The cloud darkened on Crozier's face. His lips tightened, his face hardened. "I will see you in a moment--wait outside, please," he added, as Burlingame made as though to step inside. "Wait at the gate," he added quietly, but with undisguised contempt.

The moment of moments for Mona and himself had passed. All the bitterness of defeat was on him again. All the humiliation of undeserved failure to accomplish what had been the dear desire of five years bore down his spirit now. Suddenly he had a suspicion that his wife had received information of his whereabouts from this very man, Burlingame. Had not the Young Doctor said that Burlingame had written to lawyers in the old land to get information concerning him? Was it not more than likely that he had given his wife the knowledge which had brought her here?

When Burlingame had disappeared he turned to Mona. "Who told you I was here? Who wrote to you?" he asked darkly. The light had died away from his face. It was ascetic in its lonely gravity now.

"Your doctor cabled to Castlegarry and Miss Tynan wrote to me."

A faint flush spread over Crozier's face. "How did Miss Tynan know where to write?"

Mona had told the truth at once because she felt it was the only way. Now, however, she was in a position where she must either tell him that Kitty had opened that still sealed letter from herself to him which he had carried all these years, or else tell him an untruth. She had no right to tell him what Kitty had confided to her. There was no other way save to lie.

"How should I know? It was enough for me to get her letter," she replied.

"At Castlegarry?"

What was there to do? She must keep faith with Kitty, who had given her this sight of her husband again.

"Forwarded from Lammis," she said. "It reached me before the doctor's cable."

So it was Kitty--Kitty Tynan-who had brought his wife to this new home from which he had been trying so hard to get back to the old home. Kitty, the angel of the house.

"You wrote me a letter which drove me from home," he said heavily.

"No--no--no," she protested. "It was not that. I know it was not that. It was my money--it was that which drove you away. You have just said so."

"You wrote me a hateful letter," he persisted. "You didn't want to see me. You sent it to me by your sweet, young brother."

Her eyes flashed. "My letter did not drive you away. It couldn't have. You went because you did not love me. It was that and my money, not the letter, not the letter."

Somehow she had a curious feeling that the very letter which contained her bitter and hateful reproaches might save her yet. The fact that he had not opened it--well, she must see Kitty again. Her husband was in a dark mood. She must wait. She knew that her fortunate moment had passed when the rogue Burlingame appeared. She must wait for another.

"Shall I go now? You want to see that man outside. Shall I go, Shiel?" She was very pale, very quiet, steady and gentle.

"I must hear what that fellow has to say. It is business--important," he replied. "It may mean anything--everything, or nothing."

As she left the room he had an impulse to call her back, but he conquered it.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter XVI

"'TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU SHALL GO BACK FOR MINE"

For a moment Crozier stood looking at the closed doorway through which Mona had gone, with a look of repentant affection in his eyes; but as the thought of his own helpless insolvency and broken hopes flashed across his mind, a look of dark and harassed reflection shadowed his face. He turned to the front doorway with a savage gesture. The mutilated dignity of his manhood, the broken pride of a lifetime, the bitterness in his heart need not be held in check in dealing with the man who waited to give him a last thrust of enmity.

He left the house. Burlingame was seated on the stump of a tree which had been made into a seat. "Come to my room if you have business with me," Crozier said sharply.

As they went, Crozier swung aside from the front door towards the corner of the house.

"The back way?" asked Burlingame with a sneer.

"The old familiar way to you," was the smarting reply. "In any case, you are not welcome in Mrs. Tynan's part of the house. My room is my own, however, and I should prefer you within four walls while doing business with you."

Burlingame's face changed colour slightly, for the tone of Crozier's voice, the grimness of his manner, suggested an abnormal condition. Burlingame was not a brave man physically. He had never lived the outdoor life, though he had lived so much among outdoor people. He was that rare thing in a new land, a decadent, a connoisseur in vice, a lover of opiates and of liquor. He was young enough yet not to be incapacitated by it. His face and hands were white and a little flabby, and he wore his hair rather long, which, it is said, accounts for the weakness of some men, on the assumption that long hair wastes the strength. But Burlingame quickly remembered the attitude of the lady-- Crozier's wife, he was certain--and of Crozier in the dining-room a few moments before, and to his suspicious eyes it was not characteristic of a happy family party. No doubt this grimness of Crozier was due to domestic trouble and not wholly to his own presence. Still, he felt softly for the tiny pistol he always carried in his big waistcoat pocket, and it comforted him.

Beyond the corner of the house Crozier paused and took a key from his pocket. It opened a side door to his own room, seldom used, since it was always so pleasant in this happy home to go through the main living-room, which every one liked so much that, though it was not the dining-room, it was generally used as such, and though it was not the parlour, it was its frequent substitute. Opening the door, Crozier stepped aside to let Burlingame pass. It was two years since Burlingame had been in this room, and then he had entered it without invitation. His inquisitiveness had led him to explore it with no good intent when he lived in the house.

Entering now, he gave it quick scrutiny. It was clear he was looking for something in particular. He was, in fact, searching for signs of its occupancy by another than Shiel Crozier--tokens of a woman's presence. There was, however, no sign at all of that, though there were signs of a woman's care and attention in a number of little things--homelike, solicitous, perhaps affectionate care and attention. Certainly the spotless pillows, the pretty curtains, the pincushion, and charmingly valanced bed and shelves, cheap though the material was, showed a woman's very friendly care. When he lived in that house there were no such little attentions paid to him! It was his experience that where such attentions went something else went with them. A sensualist himself, it was not conceivable to him that men and women could be under the same roof without "passages of sympathetic friendship and tokens of affinity." That was a phrase he had frequently used when pursuing his own sort of happiness.

His swift scrutiny showed that Crozier's wife had no habitation here, and that gave him his cue for what the French call "the reconstruction of the crime." It certainly was clear that, as he had suggested at the Logan Trial, there was serious trouble in the Crozier family of two, and the offender must naturally be the man who had flown, not the woman who had stayed. Here was circumstantial evidence.

His suggestive glance, the look in his eyes, did not escape Crozier, who read it all aright; and a primitive expression of natural antipathy passed across his mediaeval face, making it almost inquisitorial.

"Will you care to sit?" he said, however, with the courtesy he could never avoid; and he pointed to a chair beside the little table in the centre of the room. As Burlingame sat down he noticed on the table a crumpled handkerchief. It had lettering in the corner. He spread it out slightly with his fingers, as though abstractedly thinking of what he was about to say. The initial in the corner was K. Kitty had left it on the table while she was talking to Mrs. Crozier a halfhour before. Whatever Burlingame actually thought or believed, he could not now resist picking up the handkerchief and looking at it with a mocking smile. It was too good a chance to waste. He still hugged to his evil heart the humiliating remembrance of his expulsion from this house, the share Crozier had had in it, and the things which Crozier had said to him then. He had his enemy now between the upper and the nether mill-stones, and he meant to grind him to the flour of utter abasement. It was clear that the arrival of Mrs. Crozier had brought him no relief, for Crozier's face was not that of a man who had found and opened a casket of good fortune.

"Rather dangerous that, in the bedroom of a family man," he said, picking up the handkerchief and looking suggestively from the lettering in the corner to Crozier. He laid it down again, smiling detestably.

Crozier calmly picked up the handkerchief, saw the lettering, then went quietly to the door of the room and called Mrs. Tynan's name. Presently she appeared. Crozier beckoned her into the room. When she entered, he closed the door behind her.

"Mrs. Tynan," he said, "this fellow found your daughter's handkerchief on my table, and he has said regarding it, 'Rather dangerous that, in the bedroom of a family man.' What would you like me to do with him?"

Mrs. Tynan walked up to Burlingame with the look of a woman of the Commune and said: "If I had a son I would disown him if he didn't mangle you till your wife would never know you again, you loathesome thing. There isn't a man or woman in Askatoon who'd believe your sickening slanders, for every one knows what you are. How dare you enter this house? If the men of Askatoon had any manhood in them they would tar- and-feather you. My girl is as good as any girl that ever lived, and you know it. Now go out of here--now!"

Crozier intervened quietly. "Mrs. Tynan, I asked him in here because it is my room. I have some business with him. When it is over, then he shall go, and we will fumigate the place. As for the tar-and-feathers, you might leave that to me. I think I can arrange it.

"I'll turn the hose on him as he goes out, if you don't mind," the irate mother exclaimed as she left the room.

Crozier nodded. "Well, that would be appropriate, Mrs. Tynan, but it wouldn't cleanse him. He is the original leopard whose spots are there for ever."

By this time Burlingame was on his feet, and a look of craft and fear and ugly meaning was in his face. Morally he was a coward, physically he was a coward, but he had in his pocket a weapon which gave him a feeling of superiority in the situation; and after a night of extreme self- indulgence he was in a state of irritation of the nerves which gave him what the searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts call "brain-storms." He had had sense enough to know that his amorous escapades would get him into trouble one day, and he had always carried the little pistol which was now so convenient to his hand. It gave him a fictitious courage which he would not have had unarmed against almost any man--or woman--in Askatoon.

"You get a woman to do your fighting for you," he said hatefully. "You have to drag her in. It was you I meant to challenge, not the poor girl young enough to be your daughter." His hand went to his waistcoat pocket. Crozier saw and understood.

Suddenly Crozier's eyes blazed. The abnormal in him--the Celtic strain always at variance with the normal, an almost ultra-natural attendant of it awoke like a tempest in the tropics. His face became transformed, alive with a passion uncanny in its recklessness and purpose. It was a brain-storm indeed, but it had behind it a normal power, a moral force which was not to be resisted.

"None of your sickly melodrama here. Take out of your pocket the pistol you carry and give it to me," Crozier growled. "You are not to be trusted. The habit of thinking you would shoot somebody some time-- somebody you had injured--might become too much for you to-day, and then I should have to kill you, and for your wife's sake I don't want to do that. I always feel sorry for a woman with a husband like you. You could never shoot me. You couldn't be quick enough, but you might try. Then I should end you, and there'd be another trial; but the lawyer who defended me would not have to cross-examine any witness about your character. It is too well-known, Burlingame. Out with it--the pistol!" he added, standing menacingly over the other.

In a kind of stupor, under the storm that was breaking above him, Burlingame slowly drew out of a capacious waistcoat pocket a tiny but powerful pistol of the most modern make.

"Put it in my hand," insisted Crozier, his eyes on the other's.

The flabby hand laid the weapon in Crozier's lean and strenuous fingers. Crozier calmly withdrew the cartridges and then tossed the weapon back on the table.

"Now we have equality of opportunity," he remarked quietly. "If you think you would like to repeat any slander that's slid off your foul tongue, do it now; and in a moment or two Mrs. Tynan can turn the hose on the floor of this room."

"I want to get to business," said Burlingame sullenly, as he took from his pocket a paper.

Crozier nodded. "I can imagine your haste," he remarked. "You need all the fees you can get to pay Belle Bingley's bills."

Burlingame did not wince. He made no reply to the challenge that he was the chief supporter of a certain wanton thereabouts.

"The time for your option to take ten thousand dollars' worth of shares in the syndicate is up," he said; "and I am instructed to inform you that Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons propose to take over your unpaid shares and to complete the transaction without you."

"Who informed Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons that I am not prepared to pay for my shares?" asked Crozier sharply.

"The time is up," surlily replied Burlingame. "It is assumed you can't take up your shares, and that you don't want to do so. The time us up," he added emphatically, and he tapped the paper spread before him on the table.

Crozier's eyes half closed in an access of stubbornness and hatred. "You are not to assume anything whatever," he declared. "You are to accommodate yourself to actual facts. The time is not up. It is not up till midnight, and any action taken before then on any other assumption will give grounds for damages."

Crozier spoke without passion and with a coldblooded insistence not lost on Burlingame. Taking down a calendar from the wall, he laid it beside the paper on the table before the too eager lawyer. "Examine the dates," he said. "At twelve o'clock tonight Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons are free to act, if the money is not at the disposal of the syndicate by then; but till then my option is indefeasible. Does that meet the case or not?"

"It meets the case," said Burlingame in a morose voice, rising. "If you can produce the money before the stroke of midnight, why can't you produce it now? What's the use of bluffing! It can't do any good in the end. Your credit--"

"My credit has been stopped by your friends," interrupted Crozier, "but my resources are current." "Midnight is not far off," viciously remarked Burlingame as he made for the door.

Crozier intercepted him. "One word with you on another business before you go," he said. "The tar-and-feathers for which Mrs. Tynan asks will be yours at any moment I raise my hand in Askatoon. There are enough women alone who would do it."

"Talk of that after midnight," sneered Burlingame desperately as the door was opened for him by Crozier. "Better not go out by the front gate," remarked Crozier scornfully. "Mrs. Tynan is a woman of her word, and the hose is handy."

A moment later, with contemptuous satisfaction, he saw Burlingame climb the picket-fence at the side of the house.

Turning back into the room, he threw up his arms. "Midnight--midnight-- my God, where am I to get the money! I must--I must have it . . . It's the only way back."

Sitting down at the table, he dropped his head into his hands and shut his eyes in utter dejection. "Mona--by Heaven, no, I'll never take it from her!" he said once, and clenched his hands at his temples and sat on and on unmoving.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us