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You Never Know Your Luck; being the story of a matrimonial deserter. Complete

by Gilbert Parker · English · Gutenberg #6288 · 361,442 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: You Never Know Your Luck; being the story of a matrimonial deserter. Complete

Author: Gilbert Parker


        
Release date: November 19, 2004 [eBook #6288]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6288

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK; BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER. COMPLETE ***



Produced by David Widger





YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK

[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS:

  Volume 1.
  PROEM
  I.     “PIONEERS, O PIONEERS”
   II.    CLOSING THE DOORS
  III.   THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT
  IV.    “STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE”
   V.     A STORY TO BE TOLD

  Volume 2.
  VI.    “HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON”
   VII.   A WOMAN’S WAY TO KNOWLEDGE
  VIII.  ALL ABOUT AN UNOPENED LETTER
  IX.    NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY
  X.    “S. O. S.”
   XI.    IN THE CAMP OF THE DESERTER

  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




INTRODUCTION

This volume contains two novels dealing with the life of prairie people
in the town of Askatoon in the far West. ‘The World for Sale’ and the
latter portion of ‘The Money Master’ deal with the same life, and ‘The
Money Master’ contained some of the characters to be found in ‘Wild
Youth’. ‘The World for Sale’ also was a picture of prairie country with
strife between a modern Anglo-Canadian town and a French-Canadian town
in the West. These books are of the same people; but ‘You Never
Know Your Luck’ and ‘Wild Youth’ have several characters which move
prominently through both.

In the introduction to ‘The World for Sale’ in this series, I drew a
description of prairie life, and I need not repeat what was said there.
‘In You Never Know Your Luck’ there is a Proem which describes briefly
the look of the prairie and suggests characteristics of the life of
the people. The basis of the book has a letter written by a wife to her
husband at a critical time in his career when he had broken his promise
to her. One or two critics said the situation is impossible, because no
man would carry a letter unopened for a long number of years. My reply
is: that it is exactly what I myself did. I have still a letter written
to me which was delivered at my door sixteen years ago. I have never
read it, and my reason for not reading it was that I realised, as I
think, what its contents were. I knew that the letter would annoy, and
there it lies. The writer of the letter who was then my enemy is now my
friend. The chief character in the book, Crozier, was an Irishman, with
all the Irishman’s cleverness, sensitiveness, audacity, and timidity;
for both those latter qualities are characteristic of the Irish race,
and as I am half Irish I can understand why I suppressed a letter and
why Crozier did. Crozier is the type of man that comes occasionally to
the Dominion of Canada; and Kitty Tynan is the sort of girl that the
great West breeds. She did an immoral thing in opening the letter that
Crozier had suppressed, but she did it in a good cause--for Crozier’s
sake; she made his wife write another letter, and she placed it again
in the envelope for Crozier to open and see. Whatever lack of morality
there was in her act was balanced by the good end to the story, though
it meant the sacrifice of Kitty’s love for Crozier, and the making of
his wife happy once more.

As for ‘Wild Youth’ I make no apology for it. It is still fresh in the
minds of the American public, and it is true to the life. Some critics
frankly called it melodramatic. I do not object to the term. I know
nothing more melodramatic than certain of the plots of Shakespeare’s
plays. Thomas Hardy is melodramatic; Joseph Conrad is melodramatic;
Balzac was melodramatic, and so were Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and
Sir Walter Scott. The charge of melodrama is not one that should disturb
a writer of fiction. The question is, are the characters melodramatic.
Will anyone suggest to me the marriage of a girl of seventeen with a man
over sixty is melodramatic. It may be, but I think it tragical, and so
it was in this case. As for Orlando Guise, I describe the man as I knew
him, and he is still alive. Some comments upon the story suggested that
it was impossible for a man to spend the night on the prairie with a
woman whom he loved without causing her to forget her marriage vows. It
is not sentimental to say that is nonsense. It is a prurient mind that
only sees evil in a situation of the sort. Why it should be desirable to
make a young man and woman commit a misdemeanor to secure the praise of
a critic is beyond imagination. It would be easy enough to do. I did it
in The Right of Way. I did it in others of my books. What happens to one
man and one woman does not necessarily happen to another. There are men
who, for love of a woman, would not take advantage of her insecurity.
There are others who would. In my books I have made both classes do
their will, and both are true to life. It does not matter what one book
is or is not, but it does matter that an author writes his book with a
sense of the fitting and the true.

Both these books were written to present that side of life in Canada
which is not wintry and forbidding. There is warmth of summer in both
tales, and thrilling air and the beauty of the wild countryside. As for
the cold, it is severe in most parts of Canada, but the air is dry, and
the sharpness is not felt as it is in this damper climate of England.
Canadians feel the cold of a March or November day in London far more
than the cold of a day in Winnipeg, with the thermometer many degrees
below zero. Both these books present the summer side of Canada, which is
as delightful as that of any climate in the world; both show the modern
western life which is greatly changed since the days when Pierre
roamed the very fields where these tales take place. It should never
be forgotten that British Columbia has a climate like that of England,
where, on the Coast, it is never colder than here, and where there is
rain instead of snow in winter.

There is much humour and good nature in the West, and this also I tried
to bring out in these two books; and Askatoon is as cosmopolitan as
London. Canada in the West has all races, and it was consistent of me to
give a Chinaman of noble birth a part to play in the tragicomedy. I
have a great respect for the Chinaman, and he is a good servant and a
faithful friend. Such a Chinaman as Li Choo I knew in British Columbia,
and all I did was to throw him on the Eastern side of the Rockies, a few
miles from the border of the farthest Western province. The Chinaman’s
death was faithful in its detail, and it was true to his nature. He had
to die, and with the old pagan philosophy, still practised in China
and Japan, he chose the better way, to his mind. Princes still destroy
themselves in old Japan, as recent history proves.




YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK




PROEM

Have you ever seen it in reaping-time? A sea of gold it is, with gentle
billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
salute the reaper and say, “All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall.” The countless million
heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles
them to the hour of harvest. The air-like the tingle of water from a
mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
the dust of the world flushed away.

Arcady? Look closely. Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are
houses--sometimes in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
domesticity or naked industry in the workfield. Also rising here and
there in the expanse, clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a
powdery mist. They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
Sacrifice it is. The vast steam-threshers are mightily devouring what
their servants, the monster steam-reapers, have gleaned for them. Soon,
when September comes, all that waving sea will be still. What was gold
will still be a rusted gold, but near to the earth-the stubble of the
corn now lying in vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
east and west and south and across the seas.

Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature’s travail which
is not pain. Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun
will be a soft--sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
wool. Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the
threshers, will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home.
There the farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought
that while he waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding;
and as in April, the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it
will push upward and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with
the “What cheer, partner!” of a mate in the scheme of nature.

Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here--bright, singing
birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the
wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth,
the lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash
of the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the
mallard from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by
its joy in song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very
good.




CHAPTER I. “PIONEERS, O PIONEERS”

If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the “field of
the cloth of gold,” which your eye has already been invited to see.
With the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
joyously at twenty-two. This morning singer was just that age; and if
you had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of
miles, before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in
tone with the scene. She was a symphony in gold--nothing less. Her hair,
her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all gold.
Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might have
had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal, and
the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion. The eyelashes were so
long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
was so very busy, a keynote.

Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
not; but it is a libel. She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and
is never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There was,
however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl’s
presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her
quite apart from her place in this nature-scheme. She was not wholly
aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which
would have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so
black. Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it
may be a matter of parentage.

Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted. Her father had
been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West.
His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to
maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
daughter was now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the origin
of the girl’s slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of
selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial
decision. The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his
daughter to a real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul
as ever lived, was a product of southern English rural life--a little
sumptuous, but wholesome, and for her daughter’s sake at least, keeping
herself well and safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked
temptations. She was forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample
but proper graces that at forty-five she had numerous admirers. The girl
was English in appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who
can say? Was it because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish
coast long since? Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her
father’s. You would have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have
thought that nature had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so
pointedly designed to express the ancient dame’s colour-scheme, even to
the delicate auriferous down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud
look of her faintly retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a
purse and scarcely needed one. In any case she had an ample pocket in
her dress.

This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story.
As a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
deserter. Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean
and low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
matrimony without its status.

As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
misleading. A man had once said to her that “she looked too gay to be
good,” but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
rather better. Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
turned from her wiser if not better men. Because they had pursued the
old but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan
had exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional
and deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for
their own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
themselves well. She scored in any contest--in spite of her rather small
brain, large heart, and ardent appearance. A very clever, shiftless
Irish husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy
watching and fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and
fend herself to the same extent as she would have done had she been free
and childless and thirty. The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw
none of those things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time
and look into the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or
the grey-blue foothills. She never sang--she had never sung a note in
her life; but this girl of hers, with a man’s coat in her hand, and eyes
on the joyous scene before her, was for ever humming or singing. She
had even sung in the church choir till she declined to do so any longer,
because strangers stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not
so vain as people of her colouring sometimes are. It was just as bad,
however, when she sat in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang,
people stared at her. So it was that she seldom went to church at all;
but it was not because of this that her ideas of right and wrong were
quite individual and not conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial
deserter will show.

This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom
to the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when
he was in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair
proportion of the time. It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy
and the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as
a child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the
alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular
man whose coat she now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust
upon it. This was the song she sang:

     “Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
     Hereaway I waited him, hereaway and oft;
     When I sang my song to him, bright his eyes began to shine--
     Hereaway I loved him well, for my heart was soft.

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

     “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?’”

There was a plaintive quality in the voice of this russet maiden in
perfect keeping with the music and the words; and though her lips
smiled, there was a deep, wistful look in her eyes more in harmony with
the coming autumn than with this gorgeous harvest-time.

For a moment after she had finished singing she stood motionless,
absorbed by the far horizon; then suddenly she gave a little shake of
the body and said in a brisk, playfully chiding way:

“Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” There was no one near,
so far as eye could see, so it was clear that the words were addressed
to herself. She was expressing that wonder which so many people feel
at discovering in themselves long-concealed characteristics, or find
themselves doing things out of their natural orbit, as they think. If
any one had told Kitty Tynan that she had rare imagination, she would
have wondered what was meant. If anyone had said to her, “What are you
dreaming about, Kitty?” she would have understood, however, for she had
had fits of dreaming ever since she was a child, and they had increased
during the past few years--since the man came to live with them whose
coat she was brushing. Perhaps this was only imitation, because the
man had a habit of standing or sitting still and looking into space for
minutes--and on Sundays for hours--at a time; and often she had watched
him as he lay on his back in the long grass, head on a hillock, hat
down over his eyes, while the smoke from his pipe came curling up from
beneath the rim. Also she had seen him more than once sitting with a
letter before him and gazing at it for many minutes together. She had
also noted that it was the same letter on each occasion; that it was a
closed letter, and also that it was unstamped. She knew that, because
she had seen it in his desk--the desk once belonging to her father, a
sloping thing with a green-baize top. Sometimes he kept it locked, but
very often he did not; and more than once, when he had asked her to get
him something from the desk, not out of meanness, but chiefly because
her moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios, she
had examined the envelope curiously. The envelope bore a woman’s
handwriting, and the name on it was not that of the man who owned the
coat--and the letter. The name on the envelope was Shiel Crozier, but
the name of the man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry--James Gathorne
Kerry, so he said.

Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
mystery. She wondered greatly what it all meant. Never in anything else
had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but
she felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up
fifty stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who
for over four years had lived in her mother’s house. He had become part
of her life, perhaps just because he was a man,--and what home is a
real home without a man?--perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet,
confidential word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness;
indeed, he showed in his manner occasionally almost a boisterous
hilarity. He undoubtedly was what her mother called “a queer dick,” but
also “a pippin with a perfect core,” which was her way of saying that
he was a man to be trusted with herself and with her daughter; one who
would stand loyally by a friend or a woman. He had stood by them both
when Augustus Burlingame, the lawyer, who had boarded with them when
J. G. Kerry first came, coarsely exceeded the bounds of liberal
friendliness which marked the household, and by furtive attempts at
intimacy began to make life impossible for both mother and daughter.
Burlingame took it into his head, when he received notice that his rooms
were needed for another boarder, that J. G. Kerry was the cause of it.
Perhaps this was not without reason, since Kerry had seen Kitty Tynan
angrily unclasping Burlingame’s arm from around her waist, and had used
cutting and decisive words to the sensualist afterwards.

There had taken the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent--Jesse
Bulrush--who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three
days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous
fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and
adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient
for harmless deceit. He was fifty, and no gallant save in words; and,
as a wary bachelor of many years’ standing, it was a long time before
he showed a tendency to blandish a good-looking middle-aged nurse named
Egan who also lodged with Mrs. Tynan; though even a plain-faced nurse
in uniform has an advantage over a handsome unprofessional woman. Jesse
Bulrush and J. G. Kerry were friends--became indeed such confidential
friends to all appearance, though their social origin was evidently
so different, that Kitty Tynan, when she wished to have a pleasant
conversation which gave her a glow for hours afterwards, talked to the
fat man of his lean and aristocratic-looking friend.

“Got his head where it ought to be--on his shoulders; and it ain’t
for playing football with,” was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush
concerning Mr. Kerry. This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she
could not have told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a
long history of the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and
whom even the inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to “discover” when
he lived in the same house. But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing
as a canary, and relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and
becoming means, with her good contralto voice. She was indeed a creature
of contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice
it was she. She looked a soprano.

What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry’s coat in her hand
it would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the
detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no
consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her,
for there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the
house, the words of the lyric singing themselves over in her brain:

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

She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of
laying his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had
said aloud to herself, “Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!”
 Perhaps--and perhaps not.

As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the
house, and she quickened her footsteps. The blood in her face, the look
in her eye quickened also. And now a figure appeared in the doorway--a
figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.

“Villain’!” he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient
moods--after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush. “Hither with my coat; my
spotless coat in a spotted world,--the unbelievable anomaly--

         “‘For the earth of a dusty to-day
          Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.’”

When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought
it was clever beyond thinking--a heavenly jumble. “If it wasn’t for me
you’d be carted for rubbish,” she replied joyously as she helped him on
with his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.

“I heard you singing--what was it?” he asked cheerily, while it could
be seen that his mind was preoccupied. The song she had sung, floating
through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long
time, with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or
rear-guard or what you will:

    “‘Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
     Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft--’”

she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
saddened her, she knew not why. At the words the flaming exhilaration of
the man’s face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant look.

“That--oh, that!” he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a
clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.

“Your hat!” she called after him, and ran inside the house. An instant
later she gave it to him. Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
kindly at her.

“‘Whereaway, hereaway’ is a wonderful song,” he said. “We used to sing
it when I was a boy--and after, and after. It’s an old song--old as the
hills. Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan. What a girl you are--to be so kind to
a fellow like--me!”

“Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!”--these were the very words she had
used about herself a little while before. The song--why did it make
Mr. Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it? Kitty
watched him striding down the street into the town.

Now a voice--a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:

“Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat,” it said.

Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
struggle, into his coat.

“Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly,” she answered cheerily as she entered.

“Of course I’m not the star boarder--nothing for me!” he said in
affected protest.

“A little more to starboard and you’ll get it on,” she retorted with
a glint of her late father’s raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch
which put it right on the ample shoulders.

“Bully! bully!” he cried. “I’ll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup.”

“I’m a Christian. I hate horse-racers and gamblers,” she returned
mockingly.

“I’ll turn Christian--I want to be loved,” he bleated from the doorway.

“Roll on, proud porpoise!” she rejoined, which shows that her
conversation was not quite aristocratic at all times.

“Golly, but she’s a gold dollar in a gold bank,” remarked Jesse Bulrush
warmly as he lurched into the street.

The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down the
way the two men had gone.

The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her. She heard the dizzy din
of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of
the solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing,
machine-like sound. This particular sound went on and on.

She opened the door of the next room. Her mother sat at a sewing-machine
intent upon some work, the needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.

“What are you making, mother?” Kitty asked. “New blinds for Mr. Kerry’s
bedroom-he likes this green colour,” the widow added with a slight
flush, due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.

“Everybody does everything for him,” remarked the girl almost pettishly.

“That’s a nice spirit, I must say!” replied her mother reprovingly, the
machine almost stopping.

“If I said it in a different way it would be all right,” the other
returned with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft
inflection, like a born actress.

“Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” declared her mother, and she
bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring
way. Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes. A look
of pleasure stole over the girl’s face, and her bosom rose and fell with
a happy sigh. Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.




CHAPTER II. CLOSING THE DOORS

There are many people who, in some subtle psychological way, are very
like their names; as though some one had whispered to “the parents of
this child” the name designed for it from the beginning of time. So it
was with Shiel Crozier. Does not the name suggest a man lean and flat,
sinewy, angular and isolated like a figure in one of El Greco’s pictures
in the Prado at Madrid? Does not the name suggest a figure of elongated
humanity with a touch of ancient mysticism and yet also of the
fantastical humour of Don Quixote?

In outward appearance Shiel Crozier, otherwise J. G. Kerry, of Askatoon,
was like his name for the greater part of the time. Take him in
repose, and he looked a lank ascetic who dreamed of a happy land where
flagellation was a joy and pain a panacea. In action, however, as when
Kitty Tynan helped him on with his coat, he was a pure improvisation
of nature. He had a face with a Cromwellian mole, which broke out in
emotion like an April day, with eyes changing from a blue-grey to the
deepest ultramarine that ever delighted the soul and made the reputation
of an Old Master. Even in the prairie town of Askatoon, where every man
is so busy that he scarcely knows his own children when he meets them,
and almost requires an introduction to his wife when the door closes on
them at bedtime, people took a second look at him when he passed. Many
who came in much direct contact with him, as Augustus Burlingame the
lawyer had done, tried to draw from him all there was to tell about
himself; which is a friendly custom of the far West. The native-born
greatly desire to tell about themselves. They wear their hearts on their
sleeves, and are childlike in the frank recitals of all they were and
are and hope to be. This covers up also a good deal of business acumen,
shrewdness, and secretiveness which is not so childlike and bland.

In this they are in sharp contrast to those not native-born. These
come from many places on the earth, and they are seldom garrulously
historical. Some of them go to the prairie country to forget they ever
lived before, and to begin the world again, having been hurt in life
undeservingly; some go to bury their mistakes or worse in pioneer work
and adventure; some flee from a wrath that would devour them--the law,
society, or a woman.

This much must be said at once for Crozier, that he had no crime to
hide. It was not because of crime that “He buckles up his talk like the
bellyband on a broncho,” as Malachi Deely, the exile from Tralee, said
of him; and Deely was a man of “horse-sense,” no doubt because he was a
horse-doctor--“a veterenny surgeon,” as his friends called him when they
wished to flatter him. Deely supplemented this chaste remark about the
broncho with the observation that, “Same as the broncho, you buckle him
tightest when you know the divil is stirring in his underbrush.” And he
added further, “‘Tis a woman that’s put the mumplaster on his tongue,
Sibley, and I bet you a hundred it’s another man’s wife.”

Like many a speculator, Malachi Deely would have made no profit out of
his bet in the end, for Shiel Crozier had had no trouble with the law,
or with another man’s wife, nor yet with any single maid--not yet;
though there was now Kitty Tynan in his path. Yet he had had trouble.
There was hint of it in his occasional profound abstraction; but more
than all else in the fact that here he was, a gentleman, having lived
his life for over four years past as a sort of horse-expert, overseer,
and stud-manager for Terry Brennan, the absentee millionaire. In the
opinion of the West, “big-bugs” did not come down to this kind of
occupation unless they had been roughly handled by fate or fortune.

“Talk? Watch me now, he talks like a testimonial in a frame,” said
Malachi Deely on the day this tale opens, to John Sibley, the gambling
young farmer who, strange to say, did well out of both gambling and
farming.

“Words to him are like nuts to a monkey. He’s an artist, that man is.
Been in the circles where the band plays good and soft, where the music
smells--fairly smells like parfumery,” responded Sibley. “I’d like to
get at the bottom of him. There’s a real good story under his asbestos
vest--something that’d make a man call for the oh-be-joyful, same as I
do now.”

After they had seen the world through the bottom of a tumbler Deely
continued the gossip. “Watch me now, been a friend of dukes in
England--and Ireland, that Mr. James Gathorne Kerry, as any one can see;
and there he is feelin’ the hocks of a filly or openin’ the jaws of a
stud horse, age-hunting! Why, you needn’t tell me--I’ve had my mind made
up ever since the day he broke the temper of Terry Brennan’s Inniskillen
chestnut, and won the gold cup with her afterwards. He just sort of
appeared out of the mist of the marnin’, there bein’ a divil’s lot of
excursions and conferences and holy gatherin’s in Askatoon that time
back, ostensible for the business which their names denote, like the
Dioceesan Conference and the Pure White Water Society. That was their
bluff; but they’d come herealong for one good pure white dioceesan thing
before all, and that was to see the dandiest horse-racing which ever
infested the West. Come--he come like that!”--Deely made a motion like
a swoop of an aeroplane to earth--“and here he is buckin’ about like a
rough-neck same as you and me; but yet a gent, a swell, a cream della
cream, that’s turned his back on a lady--a lady not his own wife, that’s
my sure and sacred belief.”

“You certainly have got women on the brain,” retorted Sibley. “I ain’t
ever seen such a man as you. There never was a woman crossing the street
on a muddy day that you didn’t sprint to get a look at her ankles.
Behind everything you see a woman. Horses is your profession, but woman
is your practice.”

“There ain’t but one thing worth livin’ for, and that’s a woman,”
 remarked Deely.

“Do you tell Mrs. Deely that?” asked Sibley.

“Watch me now, she knows. What woman is there don’t know when her
husband is what he is! And it’s how I know that the trouble with James
Gathorne Kerry is a woman. I know the signs. Divils me own, he’s got ‘em
in his face.”

“He’s got in his face what don’t belong here and what you don’t know
much about--never having kept company with that sort,” rejoined Sibley.

“The way he lives and talks--‘No, thank you, I don’t care for any
thing,’ says he, when you’re standin’ at the door of a friendly saloon,
which is established by law to bespeak peace and goodwill towards men,
and you ask him pleasant to step inside. He don’t seem to have a single
vice. Haven’t we tried him? There was Belle Bingley, all frizzy hair and
a kicker; we put her on to him. But he give her ten dollars to buy a hat
on condition she behaved like a lady in the future--smilin’ at her, the
divil! And Belle, with temper like dinnemite, took it kneelin’ as it
were, and smiled back at him--her! Drink, women--nothin’ seems to have a
hold on him. What’s his vice? Sure, then, that’s what I say, what’s his
vice? He’s got to have one; any man as is a man has to have one vice.”

“Bosh! Look at me,” rejoined Sibley. “Drink women--nit! Not for me! I’ve
got no vice. I don’t even smoke.”

“No vice? Begobs, yours has got you like a tire on a wheel! Vice--what
do you call gamblin’? It’s the biggest vice ever tuk grip of a man. It’s
like a fever, and it’s got you, John, like the nail on your finger.”

“Well, p’r’aps, he’s got that vice too. P’r’aps J. G. Kerry’s got that
vice same as me.”

“Anyhow, we’ll get to know all we want when he goes into the witness
box at the Logan murder trial next week. That’s what I’m waitin’ for,”
 Deely returned, with a grin of anticipation. “That drug-eating Gus
Burlingame’s got a grudge against him somehow, and when a lawyer’s got
a grudge against you it’s just as well to look where y’ are goin’.
Burlingame don’t care what he does to get his way in court. What set him
against Kerry I ain’t sure, but, bedad, I think it’s looks. Burlingame
goes in for lookin’ like a picture in a frame--gold seals hangin’ beyant
his vestpocket, broad silk cord to his eye-glass, loose flowin’ tie,
and long hair-makes him look pretentuous and showy. But your ‘Mr. Kerry,
sir,’ he don’t have any tricks to make him look like a doge from Veenis
and all the eyes of the females battin’ where’er he goes. Jealousy, John
Sibley, me boy, is a cruil thing.”

“Why is it you ain’t jealous of him? There’s plenty of women that
watch you go down-town--you got a name for it, anyway,” remarked Sibley
maliciously.

Deely nodded sagely. “Watch me now, that’s right, me boy. I got a name
for it, but I want the game without the name, and that’s why I ain’t
puttin’ on any airs--none at all. I depend on me tongue, not on me
looks, which goes against me. I like Mr. J. G. Kerry. I’ve plenty
dealin’s with him, naturally, both of us being in the horse business,
and I say he’s right as a minted dollar as he goes now. Also, and
behold, I’d take my oath he never done anything to blush for. His
touble’s been a woman--wayward woman what stoops to folly! I give up
tryin’ to pump him just as soon as I made up my mind it was a woman.
That shuts a man’s mouth like a poor-box.

“Next week’s fixed for the Logan killin’ case, is it?”

“Monday comin’, for sure. I wouldn’t like to be in Mr. Kerry’s shoes.
Watch me now, if he gives the evidence they say he can give--the
prasecution say it--that M’Mahon Gang behind Logan ‘ll get him sure as
guns, one way or another.”

“Some one ought to give Mr. Kerry the tip to get out and not give
evidence,” remarked Sibley sagely. Deely shook his head vigorously.
“Begobs, he’s had the tip all right, but he’s not goin’. He’s got as
much fear as a canary has whiskers. He doesn’t want to give evidence,
he says, but he wants to see the law do its work. Burlingame ‘ll try to
make it out manslaughter; but there’s a widow with children to suffer
for the manslaughter, just as much as though it was murder, and there
isn’t a man that doesn’t think murder was the game, and the grand joory
had that idea too.

“Between Gus Burlingame and that M’Mahon bunch of horse-thieves,
the stranger in a strange land ‘ll have to keep his eyes open, I’m
thinkin’.”

“Divils me darlin’, his eyes are open all right,” returned Deely.

“Still, I’d like to jog his elbow,” Sibley answered reflectively. “It
couldn’t do any harm, and it might do good.”

Deely nodded good-naturedly. “If you want to so bad as that, John,
you’ve got the chance, for he’s up at the Sovereign Bank now. I seen
him leave the Great Overland Railway Bureau ten minutes ago and get away
quick to the bank.”

“What’s he got on at the bank and the railway?”

“Some big deal, I guess. I’ve seen him with Studd Bradley.”

“The Great North Trust Company boss?”

“On it, my boy, on it--the other day as thick as thieves. Studd Bradley
doesn’t knit up with an outsider from the old country unless there’s
reason for it--good gold-currency reasons.”

“A land deal, eh?” ventured Sibley. “What did I say--speculation,
that’s his vice, same as mine! P’r’aps that’s what ruined him. Cards,
speculation, what’s the difference? And he’s got a quiet look, same as
me.”

Deely laughed loudly. “And bursts out same as you! Quiet one hour like
a mill-pond or a well, and then--swhish, he’s blazin’! He’s a volcano in
harness, that spalpeen.”

“He’s a volcano that doesn’t erupt when there’s danger,” responded
Sibley. “It’s when there’s just fun on that his volcano gets loose. I’ll
go wait for him at the bank. I got a fellow-feeling for Mr. Kerry. I’d
like to whisper in his ear that he’d better be lookin’ sharp for the
M’Mahon Gang, and that if he’s a man of peace he’d best take a holiday
till after next week, or get smallpox or something.”

The two friends lounged slowly up the street, and presently parted near
the door of the bank. As Sibley waited, his attention was drawn to a
window on the opposite side of the street at an angle from themselves.
The light was such that the room was revealed to its farthest corners,
and Sibley noted that three men were evidently carefully watching the
bank, and that one of the men was Studd Bradley, the so-called boss. The
others were local men of some position commercially and financially in
the town. Sibley did not give any sign that he noticed the three men,
but he watched carefully from under the rim of his hat. His imagination,
however, read a story of consequence in the secretive vigilance of the
three, who evidently thought that, standing far back in the room, they
could not be seen.

Presently the door of the bank opened, and Sibley saw Studd Bradley lean
forward eagerly, then draw back and speak hurriedly to his companions,
using a gesture of satisfaction.

“Something damn funny there!” Sibley said to himself, and stepped
forward to Crozier with a friendly exclamation. Crozier turned rather
impatiently, for his face was aflame with some exciting reflection. At
this moment his eyes were the deepest blue that could be imagined--an
almost impossible colour, like that of the Mediterranean when it
reflects the perfect sapphire of the sky. There was something almost
wonderful in their expression. A woman once said as she looked at a
picture of Herschel, whose eyes had the unworldly gaze of the great
dreamer looking beyond this sphere, “The stars startled him.” Such a
look was in Crozier’s eyes now, as though he was seeing the bright end
of a long road, the desire of his soul.

That, indeed, was what he saw. After two years of secret negotiation
he had (inspired by information dropped by Jesse Bulrush, his
fellow-boarder) made definite arrangements for a big land-deal in
connection with the route of a new railway and a town-site, which would
mean more to him than any one could know. If it went through, he would,
for an investment of ten thousand dollars, have a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars; and that would solve an everlasting problem for him.

He had reached a critical point in his enterprise. All that was wanted
now was ten thousand dollars in cash to enable him to close the great
bargain and make his hundred and fifty thousand. But to want ten
thousand dollars and to get it in a given space of time, when you have
neither securities, cash, nor real estate, is enough to keep you awake
at night. Crozier had been so busy with the delicate and difficult
negotiations that he had not deeply concerned himself with the absence
of the necessary ten thousand dollars. He thought he could get the
money at any time, so good was the proposition; and it was best to defer
raising it to the last moment lest some one learning the secret should
forestall him. He must first have the stake to be played for before
he moved to get the cash with which to make the throw. This is not
generally thought a good way, but it was his way, and it had yet to be
tested.

There was no cloud of apprehension, however, in Crozier’s eyes as they
met those of Sibley. He liked Sibley. At this point it is not necessary
to say why. The reason will appear in due time. Sibley’s face had always
something of that immobility and gravity which Crozier’s face had part
of the time-paler, less intelligent, with dark lines and secret
shadows absent from Crozier’s face; but still with some of the El Greco
characteristics which marked so powerfully that of the man who passed as
J. G. Kerry.

“Ah, Sibley,” he said, “glad to see you! Anything I can do for you?”

“It’s the other way if there’s any doing at all,” was the quick
response.

“Well, let’s walk along together,” remarked Crozier a little
abstractedly, for he was thinking hard about his great enterprise.

“We might be seen,” said Sibley, with an obvious undermeaning meant to
provoke a question.

Crozier caught the undertone of suggestion. “Being about to burgle the
bank, it’s well not to be seen together--eh?”

“No, I’m not in on that business, Mr. Kerry. I’m for breaking banks, not
burgling ‘em,” was the cheerful reply.

They laughed, but Crozier knew that the observant gambling farmer was
not talking at haphazard. They had met on the highway, as it were, many
times since Crozier had come to Askatoon, and Crozier knew his man.

“Well, what are we going to do, and who will see us if we do it?”
 Crozier asked briskly.

“Studd Bradley and his secret-service corps have got their eyes on this
street--and on you,” returned Sibley dryly.

Crozier’s face sobered and his eyes became less emotional. “I don’t see
them anywhere,” he answered, but looking nowhere.

“They’re in Gus Burlingame’s office. They had you under observation
while you were in the bank.”

“I couldn’t run off with the land, could I?” Crozier remarked dryly, yet
suggestively, in his desire to see how much Sibley knew.

“Well, you said it was a bank. I’ve no more idea what it is you’re
tryin’ to run off with than I know what an ace is goin’ to do when
there’s a joker in the pack,” remarked Sibley; “but I thought I’d tell
you that Bradley and his lot are watchin’ you gettin’ ready to run.”
 Then he hastily told what he had seen.

Crozier was reassured. It was natural that Bradley & Co. should take an
interest in his movements. They would make a pile of money if he pulled
off the deal-far more than he would. It was not strange that they should
watch his invasion of the bank. They knew he wanted money, and a bank
was the place to get it. That was the way he viewed the matter on the
instant. He replied to Sibley cheerfully. “A hundred to one is a lot
when you win it,” he said enigmatically.

“It depends on how much you have on,” was Sibley’s quiet reply--“a
dollar or a thousand dollars.

“If you’ve got a big thing on, and you’ve got an outsider that you think
is goin’ to win and beat the favourite, it’s just as well to run no
risks. Believe me, Mr. Kerry, if you’ve got anything on that asks for
your attention, it’d be sense and saving if you didn’t give evidence at
the Logan Trial next week. It’s pretty well-guessed what you’re goin’ to
say and what you know, and you take it from me, the M’Mahon mob that’s
behind Logan ‘ll have it in for you. They’re terrors when they get
goin’, and if your evidence puts one of that lot away, ther’ll be
trouble for you. I wouldn’t do it--honest, I wouldn’t. I’ve been out
West here a good many years, and I know the place and the people. It’s
a good place, and there’s lots of first-class people here, but there’s
a few offscourings that hang like wolves on the edge of the sheepfold,
ready to murder and git.”

“That was what you wanted to see me about, wasn’t it?” Crozier asked
quietly.

“Yes; the other was just a shot on the chance. I don’t like to see men
sneakin’ about and watching. If they do, you can bet there’s something
wrong. But the other thing, the Logan Trial business, is a dead
certainty. You’re only a new-comer, in a kind of way, and you don’t
need to have the same responsibility as the rest. The Law’ll get what it
wants whether you chip in or not. Let it alone. What’s the Law ever done
for you that you should run risks for it? It’s straight talk, Mr. Kerry.
Have a cancer in the bowels next week or go off to see a dyin’ brother,
but don’t give evidence at the Logan Trial--don’t do it. I got a
feeling--I’m superstitious--all sportsmen are. By following my instincts
I’ve saved myself a whole lot in my time.”

“Yes; all men that run chances have their superstitions, and they’re
not to be sneered at,” replied Crozier thoughtfully. “If you see black,
don’t play white; if you see a chestnut crumpled up, put your money
on the bay even when the chestnut is a favourite. Of course you’re
superstitious, Sibley. The tan and the green baize are covered with
ghosts that want to help you, if you’ll let them.”

Sibley’s mouth opened in amazement. Crozier was speaking with the look
of the man who hypnotises himself, who “sees things,” who dreams as only
the gambler and the plunger on the turf do dream, not even excepting the
latter-day Irish poets.

“Say, I was right what I said to Deely--I was right,” remarked Sibley
almost huskily, for it seemed to him as though he had found a long-lost
brother. No man except one who had staked all he had again and again
could have looked or spoken like that.

Crozier looked at the other thoughtfully for a moment, then he said:

“I don’t know what you said to Deely, but I do know that I’m going to
the Logan Trial in spite of the M’Mahon mob. I don’t feel about it as
you do. I’ve got a different feeling, Sibley. I’ll play the game out.
I shall not hedge. I shall not play for safety. It’s everything on the
favourite this time.”

“You’ll excuse me, but Gus Burlingame is for the defence, and he’s got
his knife into you,” returned Sibley.

“Not yet.” Crozier smiled sardonically.

“Well, I apologise, but what I’ve said, Mr. Kerry, is said as man to
man. You’re ridin’ game in a tough place, as any man has to do who
starts with only his pants and his head on. That’s the way you begun
here, I guess; and I don’t want to see your horse tumble because some
one throws a fence-rail at its legs. Your class has enemies always in a
new country--jealousy, envy.”

The lean, aristocratic, angular Crozier, with a musing look on his long
face, grown ascetic again, as he held out his hand and gripped that of
the other, said warmly: “I’m just as much obliged to you as though I
took your advice, Sibley. I am not taking it, but I am taking a pledge
to return the compliment to you if ever I get the chance.”

“Well, most men get chances of that kind,” was the gratified reply of
the gambling farmer, and then Crozier turned quickly and entered the
doorway of the British Bank, the rival of that from which he had turned
in brave disappointment a little while before.

Left alone in the street, Sibley looked back with the instinct of the
hunter. As he expected, he saw a head thrust out from the window where
Studd Bradley and his friends had been. There was an hotel opposite the
British Bank. He entered and waited. Bradley and one of his companions
presently came in and seated themselves far back in the shadow, where
they could watch the doorway of the bank.

It was quite a half-hour before Shiel Crozier emerged from the bank. His
face was set and pale. For an instant he stood as though wondering which
way to go, then he moved up the street the way he had come.

Sibley heard a low, poisonous laugh of triumph rankle through the
hotel office. He turned round. Bradley, the over-fed, over-confident,
over-estimated financier, laid a hand on the shoulder of his companion
as they moved towards the door.

“That’s another gate shut,” he said. “I guess we can close ‘em all with
a little care. It’s working all right. He’s got no chance of raising the
cash,” he added, as the two passed the chair where Sibley sat--with his
hat over his eyes, chewing an unlighted cigar.

“I don’t know what it is, but it’s dirt--and muck at that,” John Sibley
remarked as he rose from his chair and followed the two into the street.

Bradley and his friends were trying steadily to close up the avenues of
credit to the man to whom the success of his enterprise meant so much.
To crowd him out would mean an extra hundred and fifty thousand dollars
for themselves.




CHAPTER III. THE LOGAN TRIAL AND WHAT CAME OF IT

What the case was in which Shiel Crozier was to give evidence is not
important; what came from the giving of his testimony is all that
matters; and this story would never have been written if he had not
entered the witness-box.

A court-room at any time seems a little warmer than any other spot
to all except the prisoner; but on a July day it is likely to be a
punishment for both innocent and guilty. A man had been killed by one
of the group of toughs called locally the M’Mahon Gang, and against the
charge of murder that of manslaughter had been set up in defence; and
manslaughter might mean jail for a year or two or no jail at all. Any
evidence which justified the charge of murder would mean not jail, but
the rope in due course; for this was not Montana or Idaho, where the
law’s delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committed.

The court-room of Askatoon was crowded to suffocation, for the M’Mahons
were detested, and the murdered man had a good reputation in the
district. Besides, a widow and three children mourned their loss, and
the widow was in court. Also Crozier’s evidence was expected to be
sensational, and to prove the swivel on which the fate of the accused
man would hang. Among those on the inside it was also known that the
clever but dissipated Augustus Burlingame, the counsel for the prisoner,
had a grudge against Crozier,--no one quite knew why except Kitty Tynan
and her mother, and that cross-examination would be pressed mercilessly
when Crozier entered the witness-box. As Burlingame came into the
court-room he said to the Young Doctor--he was always spoken of as the
Young Doctor in Askatoon, though he had been there a good many years
and he was no longer as young as he looked--who was also called as a
witness, “We’ll know more about Mr. J. G. Kerry when this trial is over
than will suit his book.” It did not occur to Augustus Burlingame that
in Crozier, who knew why he had fled the house of the showy but virtuous
Mrs. Tynan, he might find a witness of a mental and moral calibre with
baffling qualities and some gift of riposte.

Crozier entered the witness-box at a stage when excitement was at fever
height; for the M’Mahon Gang had given evidence which every one believed
to be perjured; and the widow of the slain man was weeping bitterly in
her seat because of noxious falsehoods sworn against her honest husband.

There was certainly something credible and prepossessing in the look of
Crozier. He might be this or that, but he carried no evil or vice of
character in his face. He was in his grave mood this summer afternoon.
There he stood with his long face and the very heavy eyebrows,
clean-shaven, hard-bitten, as though by wind and weather, composed
and forceful, the mole on his chin a kind of challenge to the
vertical dimple in his cheek, his high forehead more benevolent than
intellectual, his brown hair faintly sprinkled with grey and a bit
unmanageable, his fathomless eyes shining. “No man ought to have such
eyes,” remarked a woman present to the Young Doctor, who abstractedly
nodded assent, for, like Malachi Deely and John Sibley, he himself had a
theory about Crozier; and he had a fear of what the savage enmity of the
morally diseased Burlingame might do. He had made up his mind that so
intense a scrupulousness as Crozier had shown since coming to Askatoon
had behind it not only character, but the rigidity of a set purpose; and
that view was supported by the stern economy of Crozier’s daily life,
broken only by sudden bursts of generosity for those in need.

In the box Crozier kept his eye on the crown attorney, who prosecuted,
and on the judge. He appeared not to see any one in the court-room,
though Kitty Tynan had so placed herself that he must see her if he
looked at the audience at all. Kitty thought him magnificent as he told
his story with a simple parsimony but a careful choice of words which
made every syllable poignant with effect. She liked him in his grave
mood even better than when he was aflame with an internal fire of his
own creation, when he was almost wildly vivid with life.

“He’s two men,” she had often said to herself; and she said it now
as she looked at him in the witness-box, measuring out his words and
measuring off at the same time the span of a murderer’s life; for
when the crown attorney said to the judge that he had concluded his
examination there was no one in the room--not even the graceless
Burlingame--who did not think the prisoner guilty.

“That is all,” the crown attorney said to Crozier as he sank into his
chair, greatly pleased with one of the best witnesses who had ever been
through his hands--lucid, concentrated, exact, knowing just where he
was going and reaching his goal without meandering. Crozier was about to
step down when Burlingame rose.

“I wish to ask a few questions,” he said.

Crozier bowed and turned, again grasping the rail of the witness-box
with one hand, while with an air of cogitation and suspense he stroked
his chin with the long fingers of the other hand.

“What is your name?” asked Burlingame in a tone a little louder than
he had used hitherto in the trial, indeed even louder than lawyers
generally use when they want to bully a witness. In this case it was as
though he wished to summon the attention of the court.

For a second Crozier’s fingers caught his chin almost spasmodically. The
real meaning of the question, what lay behind it, flashed to his mind.
He saw in lightning illumination the course Burlingame meant to pursue.
For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, and he turned slightly
pale, but the blue of his eyes took on a new steely look--a look also
of striking watchfulness, as of an animal conscious of its danger, yet
conscious too of its power when at bay.

“What is your name?” Burlingame asked again in a somewhat louder tone,
and turned to look at the jury, as if bidding them note the hesitation
of the witness; though, indeed, the waiting was so slight that none but
a trickster like Burlingame would have taken advantage of it, and only
then when there was much behind.

For a moment longer Crozier remained silent, getting strength, as it
were, and saying to himself, “What does he know?” and then, with a
composed look of inquiry at the judge, who appeared to take no notice,
he said: “I have already, in evidence, given my name to the court.”

“Witness, what is your name?” again almost shouted the lawyer, with a
note of indignation in his voice, as though here was a dangerous fellow
committing a misdemeanour in their very presence. He spread out his
hands to the jury, as though bidding them observe, if they would, this
witness hesitating in answer to a simple, primary question--a witness
who had just sworn a man’s life away!

“What is your name?”

“James Gathorne Kerry, as I have already given it to the court,” was the
calm reply.

“Where do you live?”

“In Askatoon, as I have already said in evidence; and if it is necessary
to give my domicile, I live at the house of Mrs. Tyndall Tynan, Pearl
Street--as you know so well.”

The tone in which he uttered the last few words was such that even the
judge pricked up his ears.

A look of hatred came into the decadent but able lawyer’s face.

“Where do you live when you are at home?”

“Mrs. Tynan’s house is the only home I have at present.”

He was outwitting the pursuer so far, but it only gained him time, as he
knew; and he knew also that no suggestive hint concerning the episode at
Mrs. Tynan’s, when Burlingame was asked to leave her house, would be of
any avail now.

“Where were you born?”

“In Ireland.”

“What part of Ireland?”

“County Kerry.”

“What place--what town or city or village in County Kerry?”

“In neither.”

“What house, then--what estate?” Burlingame was more than nettled; and
he sharpened his sword.

“The estate of Castlegarry.”

“What was your name in Ireland?”

In the short silence that followed, the quick-drawn breath of many
excited and some agitated people could be heard. Among the latter were
Mrs. Tynan and her daughter and Malachi Deely; among those who held
their breath in suspense were John Sibley, Studd Bradley the financier,
and the Young Doctor. The swish of a skirt seemed ridiculously loud
in the hush, and the scratching of the judge’s quill pen was noisily
irritating.

“My name in Ireland was James Shiel Gathorne Crozier, commonly called
Shiel Crozier,” came the even reply from the witness-box.

“James Shiel Gathorne Crozier in Ireland, but James Gathorne Kerry
here!” Burlingame turned to the jury significantly. “What other name
have you been known by in or out of Ireland?” he added sharply to
Crozier. “No other name so far as I know.”

“No other name so far as you know,” repeated the lawyer in a sarcastic
tone intended to impress the court.

“Who was your father?”

“John Gathorne Crozier.”

“Any title?”

“He was a baronet.”

“What was his business?”

“He had no profession, though he had business, of course.”

“Ah, he lived by his wits?”

“No, he was not a lawyer! I have said he had no profession. He lived on
his money on his estate.”

The judge waved down the laughter at Burlingame’s expense.

“In official documents what was his description?” snarled Burlingame.

“‘Gentleman’ was his designation in official documents.”

“You, then, were the son of a gentleman?” There was a hateful suggestion
in the tone.

“I was.”

“A legitimate son?”

Nothing in Crozier’s face showed what he felt, except his eyes, and they
had a look in them which might well have made his questioner shrink. He
turned calmly to the judge.

“Your honour, does this bear upon the case? Must I answer this legal
libertine?”

At the word libertine, the judge, the whole court, and the audience
started; but it was presently clear the witness meant that the
questioner was abusing his legal privileges, though the people present
interpreted it another way, and quite rightly.

The reply of the judge was in favour of the lawyer. “I do not quite see
the full significance of the line of defence, but I think I must allow
the question,” was the judge’s gentle and reluctant reply, for he
was greatly impressed by this witness, by his transparent honesty and
straightforwardness.

“Were you a legitimate son of John Gathorne Crozier and his wife?” asked
Burlingame.

“Yes, a legitimate son,” answered Crozier in an even voice.

“Is John Gathorne Crozier still living?”

“I said that gentleman was his designation in official documents. I
supposed that would convey the fact that he was not living, but I see
you do not quickly grasp a point.”

Burlingame was stung by the laughter in the court and ventured a
riposte.

“But is once a gentleman always a gentleman an infallible rule?”

“I suppose not; I did not mean to convey that; but once a rogue always a
bad lawyer holds good in every country,” was Crozier’s comment in a low,
quiet voice which stirred and amused the audience again.

“I must ask counsel to put questions which have some relevance even to
his own line of defence,” remarked the judge sternly. “This is not a
corner grocery.”

Burlingame bowed. He had had a facer, but he had also shown the witness
to have been living under an assumed name. That was a good start.
He hoped to add to the discredit. He had absolutely no knowledge of
Crozier’s origin and past; but he was in a position to find it out if
Crozier told the truth on oath, and he was sure he would.

“Where was your domicile in the old country?” Burlingame asked.

“In County Kerry--with a flat in London.”

“An estate in County Kerry?”

“A house and two thousand acres.”

“Is it your property still?”

“It is not.”

“You sold it?”

“No.”

“If you did not sell, how is it that you do not own it?”

“It was sold for me--in spite of me.”

The judge smiled, the people smiled, the jury smiled. Truly, though a
life-history was being exposed with incredible slowness--“like pulling
teeth,” as the Young Doctor said--it was being touched off with
laughter.

“You were in debt?”

“Quite.”

“How did you get into debt?”

“By spending more than my income.”

If Askatoon had been proud of its legal talent in the past it had now
reason for revising its opinion. Burlingame was frittering away the
effect of his inquiry by elaboration of details. What he gained by the
main startling fact he lost in the details by which the witness scored.
He asked another main question.

“Why did you leave Ireland?”

“To make money.”

“You couldn’t do it there?”

“They were too many for me over there, so I thought I’d come here,”
 slyly answered Crozier, and with a grave face; at which the solemn scene
of a prisoner being tried for his life was shaken by a broad smiling,
which in some cases became laughter haughtily suppressed by the court
attendant.

“Have you made money here?”

“A little--with expectations.”

“What was your income in Ireland?”

“It began with three thousand pounds--”

“Fifteen thousand dollars about?”

“About that--about a lawyer’s fee for one whisper to a client less than
that. It began with that and ended with nothing.”

“Then you escaped?”

“From creditors, lawyers, and other such? No, I found you here.”

The judge intervened again almost harshly on the laughter of the court,
with the remark that a man was being tried for his life; that ribaldry
was out of place; and that, unless the course pursued by the counsel
was to discredit the reliability of the character of the witness, the
examination was in excess of the privilege of counsel.

“Your honour has rightly apprehended what my purpose is,” Burlingame
said deprecatingly. He then turned to Crozier again, and his voice
rose as it did when he began the examination. It was as though he was
starting all over again.

“What was it compelled” (he was boldly venturing) “you to leave Ireland
at last? What was the incident which drove you out from the land where
you were born--from being the owner of two thousand acres”--

“Partly bog,” interposed Crozier.

“--From being the owner of two thousand acres to becoming a kind of
head-groom on a ranch? What was the cause of your flight?”

“Flight! I came in one of the steamers of the Company for which your
firm are the agents. Eleven days it took to come from Glasgow to
Quebec.”

Again the court rippled, again the attendant intervened.

Burlingame was nonplussed this time, but he gathered himself together.

“What was the process of law which forced you to leave your own land?”

“None at all.”

“What were your debts when you left?”

“None at all.”

“How much was the last debt you paid?”

“Two thousand five hundred pounds.”

“What was its nature?”

“It was a debt of honour--do you understand?” The subtle challenge of
the voice, the sarcasm, was not lost. Again there was a struggle on the
part of the audience not to laugh outright, and so be driven from the
court as had been threatened.

The judge interposed again with the remark, not very severe in tone,
that the witness was not in the box to ask questions, but to answer
them. At the same time he must remind counsel that the examination must
discontinue unless something more relevant immediately appeared in the
evidence.

There was silence again for a moment, and even Crozier himself seemed to
steel himself for a question he felt was coming.

“Are you married or single?” asked Burlingame, and he did not need to
raise his voice to summon the interest of the court.

“I was married.”

One person in the audience nearly cried out. It was Kitty Tynan. She
had never allowed herself to think of that, but even if she had, what
difference could it make whether he was married or single, since he was
out of her star?

“Are you not married now?”

“I do not know.”

“You mean you do not know if you have been divorced?”

“No.”

“You mean your wife is dead?”

“No.”

“What do you mean? That you do not know whether your wife is living or
dead?”

“Quite so.”

“Have you heard from her since you saw her last?”

“I had one letter.”

Kitty Tynan thought of the unopened letter in a woman’s handwriting in
the green baize desk in her mother’s house.

“No more?”

“No more.”

“Are we to understand that you do not know whether your wife is living
or dead?”

“I have no information that she is dead.”

“Why did you leave her?”

“I have not said that I left her. Primarily I left Ireland.”

“Assuming that she is alive, your wife will not live with you?”

“Ah, what information have you to that effect?” The judge informed
Crozier that he must not ask questions of counsel.

“Why is she not with you here?”

“As you said, I am only picking up a living here, and even the passage
by your own second-class steamship line is expensive.”

The judge suppressed a smile. He greatly liked the witness.

“Do you deny that you parted from your wife in anger?”

“When I am asked that question I will try to answer it. Meanwhile, I do
not deny what has not been put before me in the usual way.”

Here the judge sternly rebuked the counsel, who ventured upon one last
question.

“Have you any children?”

“None.”

“Has your brother, who inherited, any children?”

“None that I know of.”

“Are you the heir-presumptive to the baronetcy?”

“I am.”

“Yet your wife will not live with you?”

“Call Mrs. Crozier as a witness and see. Meanwhile, I am not upon my
trial.”

He turned to the judge, who promptly called upon Burlingame to conclude
his examination.

Burlingame asked two questions more.

“Why did you change your name when you came here?”

“I wanted to obliterate myself.”

“I put it to you, that what you want is to avoid the outraged law of
your own country.”

“No--I want to avoid the outrageous lawyers of yours.”

Again there was a pause in the proceedings, and on a protest from the
crown attorney the judge put an end to the cross-examination with the
solemn reminder that a man was being tried for his life, and that the
present proceedings were a lamentable reflection on the levity of human
nature--in Askatoon. Turning with friendly scrutiny to Crozier, he said:

“In the early stage of his examination the witness informed the court
that he had made a heavy loss through a debt of honour immediately
before leaving England. Will he say in what way he incurred the
obligation? Are we to assume that it was through gambling-card-playing,
or other games of chance?”

“Through backing the wrong horse,” was Crozier’s instant reply.

“That phrase is often applied to mining or other unreal flights for
fortune,” said the judge, with a dry smile.

“This was a real horse on a real flight to the winning-post,” added
Crozier, with a quirk at the corner of his mouth.

“Honest contest with man or horse is no crime, but it is tragedy to
stake all on the contest and lose,” was the judge’s grave and pedagogic
comment. “We shall now hear from the counsel for defence his reason for
conducting his cross-examination on such unusual lines. Latitude of this
kind is only permissible if it opens up any weakness in the case against
the prisoner.”

The judge thus did Burlingame a good turn as well as Crozier, by
creating an atmosphere of gravity, even of tragedy, in which Burlingame
could make his speech in defence of the prisoner.

Burlingame started hesitatingly, got into his stride, assembled the
points of his defence with the skill of which he really was capable. He
made a strong appeal for acquittal, but if not acquittal, then a verdict
of manslaughter. He showed that the only real evidence which could
convict his man of murder was that of the witness Crozier. If he had
been content to discredit evidence of the witness by an adroit but
guarded misuse of the facts he had brought out regarding Crozier’s past,
to emphasise the fact that he was living under an assumed name and that
his bona fides was doubtful, he might have impressed the jury to some
slight degree. He could not, however, control the malice he felt, and he
was smarting from Crozier’s retorts. He had a vanity easily lacerated,
and he was now too savage to abate the ferocity of his forensic attack.
He sat down, however, with a sure sense of failure. Every orator
knows when he is beating the air, even when his audience is quiet and
apparently attentive.

The crown attorney was a man of the serenest method and of cold,
unforensic logic. He had a deadly precision of speech, a very remarkable
memory, and a great power of organising and assembling his facts. There
was little left of Burlingame’s appeal when he sat down. He declared
that to discredit Crozier’s evidence because he chose to use another
name than his own, because he was parted from his wife, because he left
England practically penniless to earn an honest living--no one had
shown it was not--was the last resort of legal desperation. It was
an indefensible thing to endeavour to create prejudice against a man
because of his own evidence given with great frankness. Not one single
word of evidence had the defence brought to discredit Crozier, save by
Crozier’s own word of mouth; and if Crozier had cared to commit perjury,
the defence could not have proved him guilty of it. Even if Crozier had
not told the truth as it was, counsel for the defence would have found
it impossible to convict him of falsehood. But even if Crozier was a
perjurer, justice demanded that his evidence should be weighed as truth
from its own inherent probability and supported by surrounding facts.
In a long experience he had never seen animus against a witness so
recklessly exhibited as by counsel in this case.

The judge was not quite so severe in his summing up, but he did say of
Crozier that his direct replies to Burlingame’s questions, intended
to prejudice him in the eyes of the community into which he had come a
stranger, bore undoubted evidence of truth; for if he had chosen to say
what might have saved him from the suspicions, ill or well founded, of
his present fellow-citizens, he might have done so with impunity, save
for the reproach of his own conscience. On the whole, the judge summed
up powerfully against the prisoner Logan, with the result that the jury
were not out for more than a half-hour. Their verdict was, guilty of
murder.

In the scene which followed, Crozier dropped his head into his hand and
sat immovable as the judge put on the black cap and delivered sentence.
When the prisoner left the dock, and the crowd began to disperse,
satisfied that justice had been done--save in that small circle where
the M’Mahons were supreme--Crozier rose with other witnesses to leave.
As he looked ahead of him the first face he saw was that of Kitty Tynan,
and something in it startled him. Where had he seen that look before?
Yes, he remembered. It was when he was twenty-one and had been sent away
to Algiers because he was falling in love with a farmer’s daughter. As
he drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those
long years ago, he had seen the girl’s face looking at him from the
window of a labourer’s cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied
desolation haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married
and gone to live in Scotland--that place of torment for an Irish soul.

The look in Kitty Tynan’s face reminded him of that farmer’s lass in his
boyhood’s history. He was to blame then--was he to blame now? Certainly
not consciously, not by any intended word or act. Now he met her eyes
and smiled at her, not gaily, not gravely, but with a kind of whimsical
helplessness; for she was the first to remind him that he was leaving
the court-room in a different position (if not a different man) from
that in which he entered it. He had entered the court-room as James
Gathorne Kerry, and he was leaving it as Shiel Crozier; and somehow
James Gathorne Kerry had always been to himself a different man
from Shiel Crozier, with different views, different feelings, if not
different characteristics.

He saw faces turned to him, a few with intense curiosity, fewer
still with a little furtiveness, some with amusement, and many with
unmistakable approval; for one thing was clear, if his own evidence
was correct: he was the son of a baronet, he was heir-presumptive to
a baronetcy, and he had scored off Augustus Burlingame in a way which
delighted a naturally humorous people. He noted, however, that the nod
which Studd Bradley, the financier, gave him had in it an enigmatic
something which puzzled him. Surely Bradley could not be prejudiced
against him because of the evidence he had given. There was nothing
criminal in living under an assumed name, which, anyhow, was his own
name in three-fourths of it, and in the other part was the name of the
county where he was born.

“Divils me own, I told you he was up among the dukes,” said Malachi
Deely to John Sibley as they came out. “And he’s from me own county, and
I know the name well enough; an’ a damn good name it is. The bulls of
Castlegarry was famous in the south of Ireland.”

“I’ve a warm spot for him. I was right, you see. Backing horses ruined
him,” said Sibley in reply; and he looked at Crozier admiringly.

There is the communion of saints, but nearer and dearer is the communion
of sinners; for a common danger is their bond, and that is even more
than a common hope.




CHAPTER IV. “STRENGTH SHALL BE GIVEN THEE”

On the evening of the day of the trial, Mrs. Tynan, having fixed the
new blind to the window of Shiel Crozier’s room, which was on the
ground-floor front, was lowering and raising it to see if it worked
properly, when out in the moonlit street she saw a wagon approaching her
house surrounded and followed by obviously excited men. Once before she
had seen just such a group nearing her door. That was when her husband
was brought home to die in her arms. She had a sudden conviction, as,
holding the blind in her hand, she looked out into the night, that again
tragedy was to cross her threshold. Standing for an instant under
the fascination of terror, she recovered herself with a shiver, and,
stepping down from the chair where she had been fixing the blind, with
the instinct of real woman, she ran to the bed of the room where she
was, and made it ready. Why did she feel that it was Shiel Crozier’s bed
which should be made ready? Or did she not feel it? Was it only a dazed,
automatic act, not connected with the person who was to lie in the bed?
Was she then a fatalist? Were trouble and sorrow so much her portion
that to her mind this tragedy, whatever it was, must touch the man
nearest to her--and certainly Shiel Crozier was far nearer than Jesse
Bulrush. Quite apart from wealth or position, personality plays a part
more powerful than all else in the eyes of every woman who has a soul
which has substance enough to exist at all. Such men as Crozier have
compensations for “whate’er they lack.” It never occurred to Mrs. Tynan
to go to Jesse Bulrush’s room or the room of middle-aged, comely Nurse
Egan. She did the instinctive thing, as did the woman who sent a man a
rope as a gift, on the ground that the fortune in his hand said that he
was born not to be drowned.

Mrs. Tynan’s instinct was right. By the time she had put the bed into
shape, got a bowl of water ready, lighted a lamp, and drawn the bed out
from the wall, there was a knocking at the door. In a moment she had
opened it, and was faced by John Sibley, whose hat was off as though
he were in the presence of death. This gave her a shock, and her eyes
strove painfully to see the figure which was being borne feet foremost
over her threshold.

“It’s Mr. Crozier?” she asked.

“He was shot coming home here--by the M’Mahon mob, I guess,” returned
Sibley huskily.

“Is--is he dead?” she asked tremblingly. “No. Hurt bad.”

“The kindest man--it’d break Kitty’s heart--and mine,” she added
hastily, for she might be misunderstood; and John Sibley had shown signs
of interest in her daughter.

“Where’s the Young Doctor?” she asked, catching sight of Crozier’s face
as they laid him on the bed. “He’s done the first aid, and he’s off
getting what’s needed for the operation. He’ll be here in a minute or
so,” said a banker who, a few days before, had refused Crozier credit.

“Gently, gently--don’t do it that way,” said Mrs. Tynan in sharp reproof
as they began to take off Crozier’s clothes.

“Are you going to stay while we do it?” asked a maker of mineral waters,
who whined at the prayer meetings of a soul saved and roared at his
employees like a soul damned.

“Oh, don’t be a fool!” was the impatient reply. “I’ve a grown-up girl
and I’ve had a husband. Don’t pull at his vest like that. Go away. You
don’t know how. I’ve had experience--my husband... There, wait till
I cut it away with the scissors. Cover him with the quilt. Now, then,
catch hold of his trousers under the quilt, and draw them off slowly....
There you are--and nothing to shock the modesty of a grown-up woman or
any other when a life’s at stake. What does the Young Doctor say?”

“Hush! He’s coming to,” interposed the banker. It was as though the
quiet that followed the removal of his clothes and the touch of Mrs.
Tynan’s hand on his head had called Crozier back from unconsciousness.

The first face he saw was that of the banker. In spite of the loss of
blood and his pitiable condition, a whimsical expression came to his
eyes. “Lucky for you you didn’t lend me the money,” he said feebly.

The banker shook his head. “I’m not thinking of that, Mr. Crozier. God
knows, I’m not!”

Crozier caught sight of Mrs. Tynan. “It’s hard on you to have me brought
here,” he murmured as she took his hand.

“Not so hard as if they hadn’t,” she replied. “That’s what a home’s
for--not just a place for eating and drinking and sleeping.”

“It wasn’t part of the bargain,” he said weakly.

“It was my part of the bargain.”

“Here’s Kitty,” said the maker of mineral waters, as there was the swish
of a skirt at the door.

“Who are you calling ‘Kitty’?” asked the girl indignantly, as they
motioned her back from the bedside. “There’s too many people here,”
 she added abruptly to her mother. “We can take care of him”--she nodded
towards the bed. “We don’t want any help except--except from John
Sibley, if he will stay, and you too,” she added to the banker.

She had not yet looked at the figure on the bed. She felt she could not
do so while all these people were in the room. She needed time to adjust
herself to the situation. It was as though she was the authority in the
household and took control even of her mother. Mrs. Tynan understood.
She had a great belief in her daughter and admired her cleverness, and
she was always ready to be ruled by her; it was like being “bossed” by
the man she had lost.

“Yes, you’d all better go,” Mrs. Tynan said. “He wants all the air he
can get, and I can’t make things ready with all of you in the room. Go
outdoors for a while, anyway. It’s summer and you’ll not take cold! The
Young Doctor has work to do, and my girl and I and these two will help
him plenty.” She motioned towards the banker and the gambling farmer.

In a moment the room was cleared of all save the four and Crozier,
who knew that upon the coming operation depended his life. He had been
conscious when the Young Doctor said this was so, and he was thinking,
as he lay there watching these two women out of his nearly closed eyes,
that he would like to be back in Ireland at Castlegarry with the girl he
had married and had left without a good-bye near five years gone. If he
had to die he would like to die at home; and that could not be.

Kitty had the courage to turn towards him now. As she caught sight
of his face for the first time--she had so far kept her head turned
away--she became very pale. Then, suddenly, she gathered herself
together. Going over to the bed, she took the limp hand lying on the
coverlet.

“Courage, soldier,” she said in the colloquialism her father often used,
and she smiled at Crozier a great-hearted, helpful smile.

“You are a brick of bricks, Kitty Tynan,” he whispered, and smiled.

“Here comes the Young Doctor,” said Mrs. Tynan as the door opened
unceremoniously.

“Well, I have to make an excursion,” Crozier said, “and I mayn’t come
back. If I don’t, au revoir, Kitty.”

“You are coming back all right,” she answered firmly. “It’ll take more
than a horse-thief’s bullet to kill you. You’ve got to come back. You’re
as tough as nails. And I’ll hold your hand all through it--yes, I will!”
 she added to the Young Doctor, who had patted her shoulder and told her
to go to another room.

“I’m going to help you, doctor-man, if you please,” she said, as he
turned to the box of instruments which his assistant held.

“There’s another--one of my colleagues--coming I hope,” the Young Doctor
replied.

“That’s all right, but I am staying to see Mr. Crozier through. I said
I’d hold his hand, and I’m going to do it,” she added firmly.

“Very well; put on a big apron, and see that you go through with us if
you start. No nonsense.”

“There’ll be no nonsense from me,” she answered quietly.

“I want the bed in the middle of the room,” the Young Doctor said, and
the others gently moved it.




CHAPTER V. A STORY TO BE TOLD

A great surgeon said a few years ago that he was never nervous when
performing an operation, though there was sometimes a moment when every
resource of character, skill, and brain came into play. That was when,
having diagnosed correctly and operated, a new and unexpected seat of
trouble and peril was exposed, and instant action had to be taken. The
great man naturally rose to the situation and dealt with it coolly; but
he paid the price afterwards in his sleep when, night after night, he
performed the operation over and over again with the same strain on his
subconscious self.

So it was with Kitty Tynan in her small way. She had insisted on being
allowed to help at the operation, and the Young Doctor, who had a good
knowledge of life and knew the stuff in her, consented; and so far as
the operation was concerned she justified his faith in her. When the
banker had to leave the room at the sight of the carnage, she remained,
and she and John Sibley were as cool as the Young Doctor and his
fellow-anatomist, till it was all over, and Shiel Crozier was started
again on a safe journey back to health. Then a thing, which would have
been amusing if it had not been so deeply human, happened. She and John
Sibley went out of the house together into the moonlit night, and the
reaction seized them both at the same moment. She gave a gulp and burst
into tears, and he, though as tall as Crozier, also broke down, and they
sat on the stump of a tree together, her hand in his, and cried like two
children.

“Never since I was a little runt--did I--never cried in thirty
years--and here I am-leaking like a pail!” Thus spoke John Sibley
in gasps and squeezing Kitty’s hand all the time unconsciously, but
spontaneously, and as part of what he felt. He would not, however, have
dared to hold her hand on any other occasion, while always wanting to
hold it, and wanting her also to share his not wholly reputed, though
far from precarious, existence. He had never got so far as to tell her
that; but if she had understanding she would realise after to-night what
he had in his mind. She, feeling her arm thrill with the magnetism of
his very vital palm, had her turn at explanation. “I wouldn’t have broke
down myself--it was all your fault,” she said. “I saw it--yes--in your
face as we left the house. I’m so glad it’s over safe--no one belonging
to him here, and not knowing if he’d wake up alive or not--I just was
swamped.”

He took up the misty excuse and explanation. “I had a feeling for him
from the start; and then that Logan Trial to-day, and the way he talked
out straight, and told the truth to shame the devil--it’s what does a
man good! And going bung over a horserace--that’s what got me too, where
I was young and tender. Swatted that Burlingame every time--one eye,
two eyes all black, teeth out, nose flattened--called him an
‘outrageous lawyer’--my, that last clip was a good one! You bet he’s a
sport--Crozier.”

Kitty nodded eagerly while still wiping her red eyes. “He made the judge
smile--I saw it, not ten minutes before his honour put on the black cap.
You couldn’t have believed it, if you hadn’t seen it--

“Here, let go my hand,” she added, suddenly conscious of the enormity
John Sibley was committing by squeezing it now.

It is perfectly true that she did not quite realise that he had taken
her hand--that he had taken her hand. She was conscious in a nice,
sympathetic way that her hand had been taken, but it was lost in the
abstraction of her emotion.

“Oh, here, let it go quick!” she added--“and not because mother’s
coming, either,” she added as the door opened and her mother came
out--not to spy, not to reproach her daughter for sitting with a man
in the moonlight at ten o’clock at night, but--good, practical soul--to
bring them each a cup of beef-tea.

“Here, you two,” she said as she hurried to them. “You need something
after that business in there, and there isn’t time to get supper ready.
It’s as good for you as supper, anyway. I don’t believe in underfeeding.
Nothing’s too good to swallow.”

She watched them sip the tea slowly like two schoolchildren.

“And when you’ve drunk it you must go right to bed, Kitty,” she added
presently. “You’ve had your own way, and you saw the thing through; but
there’s always a reaction, and you’ll pay for it. It wasn’t fit work for
a girl of your age; but I’m proud of your nerve, and I’m glad you showed
the Young Doctor what you can do. You’ve got your father’s brains and
my grit,” she added with a sigh of satisfaction. “Come along--bed now,
Kitty. If you get too tired you’ll have bad dreams.”

Perhaps she was too tired. In any case she had dreams. Just as the great
surgeon performed his operation over and over in his sleep, so Kitty
Tynan, through long hours that night, and for many nights afterwards,
saw the swift knives, helped to staunch the blood, held the basin,
disinfected the instruments which had made an attack on the man of men
in her eyes, and saw the wound stitched up--the last act of the business
before the Young Doctor turned to her and said, “You’ll do wherever
you’re put in life, Miss Kitty Tynan. You’re a great girl. And now get
some fresh air and forget all about it.”

Forget all about it! So, the Young Doctor knew what happened after a
terrific experience like that! In truth, he knew only too well. Great
surgeons do surgery only and have innumerable operations to give them
skill; but a country physician and surgeon must be a sane being to keep
his nerve when called on to use the knife, and he must have a more than
usual gift for such business. That is what the Young Doctor had; but he
knew it was not easy to forget those scenes in which man carved the body
of fellow-man, laying bare the very vitals of existence, seeing “the
wheels go round.”

It haunted Kitty Tynan in the night-time, and perhaps it was that which
toned down a little the colour of her face--the kind of difference of
colouring there is between natural gold and 14-carat. But in the daytime
she was quite happy, and though there was haunting, it was Shiel Crozier
who, first helpless, then convalescent, was haunted by her presence. It
gave him pleasure, but it was a pleasure which brought pain. He was
not so blind that he had not caught at her romance, in which he was
the central figure--a romance which had not vanished since the day he
declared in the court-room that he was married, or had been married.
Kitty’s eyes told their own story, and it made him uneasy and
remorseful. Yet he could not remember when, even for an instant, he had
played with her. She had always seemed part of a simple family life for
which he and Jesse Bulrush and her mother and the nurse-Nurse Egan-were
responsible. What a blessing Nurse Egan had been! Otherwise, all the
nursing would have been performed by Kitty and her mother, and it
might well have broken them down, for they were determined to nurse him
themselves.

When, however, Nurse Egan came back, two days after the operation
was performed, they included her in the responsibility, as one of
the family; and as she had no other important case on at the time,
fortunately she could give Crozier almost undivided attention. She had
been at first disposed to keep Kitty out of the sick-chamber, as no
place for a girl, but she soon abandoned that position, for Kitty was
not the girl ever to think of impropriety. She was primitive and she had
rather a before-the-flood nature, but she had not the faintest vulgar
strain in her. Her mind was essentially pure; nothing material in her
had been awakened. Her greatest joy was to do the many things for the
patient which a nurse must do--prepare his food, give him drink, adjust
his pillows, bathe his face and hands, take his temperature; and on his
part he tried hard to disguise from her the apprehension he felt, and to
avoid any hint by word or look that he saw anything save the actions of
a kind heart. True, her views as to what was proper and improper might
possibly be on a different plane from his own. For instance, he had seen
girls of her station in the West kiss young men freely--men whom they
had no thought of marrying; and that was not the custom of his own class
in his home-country.

As he got well slowly, and life opened out before him again, he felt he
had to pursue a new course, and in that course he must take account of
Kitty Tynan, though he could not decide how. He had a deep confidence in
the Young Doctor, in his judgment and his character; and it was almost
inevitable that he should tell his life-story to the man whose skill had
saved him from death in a strange land, with all undone he wanted to do
ere he returned to a land which was not strange.

The thing happened, as such things do happen, in a quite natural way one
day when he and the Young Doctor were discussing the probable verdict
against the man who had shot him--the trial was to come on soon, and
once again Augustus Burlingame was to be counsel for the defence, and
once again Crozier would have to appear in a witness-box.

“I think you ought to know, Crozier, that, in view of the trial,
Burlingame has written to a firm of lawyers in Kerry to get full
information about your past,” the Young Doctor said.

Crozier gave one of those little jerks of the head characteristic of
him and said: “Why, of course; I knew he would do that after I gave my
evidence in the Logan Trial.” He raised himself on his elbow. “I owe
you a great deal,” he added feelingly, “and I can’t repay you in cash or
kindness for what you have done; but it is due you to tell you my whole
story, and that is what I propose to do now.”

“If you think--”

“I do think; and also I want both Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear
my story. Better, truer friends a man could not have; and I want them to
know the worst and the best there is, if there is any best. They and you
have trusted me, been too good to me, and what I said at the trial is
not enough. I want to do what I’ve never done before. I want to tell
everything. It will do me good; and perhaps as I tell it I’ll see myself
and everything else in a truer light than I’ve yet seen it all.”

“You are sure you want Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“They are not in your rank in life, you know.”

“They are my friends, and I owe them more than I can say. There is
nothing they cannot or should not hear. I can say that at least.”

“Shall I ask them to come?”

“Yes. Give me a swig of water first. It won’t be easy, but--”

He held out his hand, and the Young Doctor grasped it.

Suddenly the latter said: “You are sure you will not be sorry? That it
is not a mood of the moment due to physical weakness?”

“Quite sure. I determined on it the day I was shot--and before I was
shot.”

“All right.” The Young Doctor disappeared.




CHAPTER VI. “HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON”

The stillness of a summer’s day in Prairie Land has all the
characteristics of music. That is not so paradoxical as it seems. The
effect of some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the senses,
a suspension of motion and aggressive life; to reduce existence to mere
pulsation. It was this kind of feeling which pervaded that region
of sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story. The sounds that
sprinkled the general stillness were in themselves sleepy notes of the
pervasive music of somnolent nature--the sough of the pine at the door,
the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding beat of the steam-thresher
out of sight hard by, the purring of the cat in the arms of Kitty Tynan
as, with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the tale of a life
as distant from that which she lived as she was from Eve.

She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on; it even seemed to
her she was listening to a theme beyond her sphere, like some shameless
eavesdropper at the curtains of a secret ceremonial. Once or twice she
looked at her mother and at the Young Doctor, as though to reassure
herself that she was not a vulgar intruder. It was far more impressive
to her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene at the Logan Trial
when a man was sentenced to death. It was strangely magnetic, this
tale of a man’s existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the
mantelpiece, as it mechanically ticked off the time, seemed only part
of some mysterious machinery of life. Once a dove swept down upon the
window-sill, and, peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital
with its deep contralto note, and then fled like a small blue cloud into
the wide and--as it seemed--everlasting peace beyond the doorway.

There was nothing at all between themselves and the far sky-line save
little clumps of trees here and there, little clusters of buildings and
houses--no visible animal life. Everything conspired to give a dignity
in keeping with the drama of failure being unfolded in the commonplace
home of the widow Tynan. Yet the home too had its dignity. The engineer
father had had tastes, and he had insisted on plain, unfigured curtains
and wallpaper and carpets, when carpets were used; and though his wife
had at first protested against the unfigured carpets as more difficult
to keep clean and as showing the dirt too easily, she had come to like
the one-colour scheme, and in that respect her home had an individuality
rare in her surroundings.

That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background; for what her
bright colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes
and “Axminsters,” such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the
imagination. It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous
surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been
arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the
story; and if it were not a true tale told just as it happened.

Perhaps the tale was the more impressive because of Crozier’s deep
baritone voice, capable, as it was, of much modulation, yet, except
when he was excited, having a slight monotone like the note of a violin
with the mute upon the strings.

This was his tale:

“Well, to begin with, I was born at Castlegarry, in Kerry--you know the
main facts from what I said in court. As a boy I wasn’t so bad a sort.
I had one peculiarity. I always wanted ‘to have something on,’ as John
Sibley would say. No matter what it was, I must have something on it.
And I was very lucky--worse luck!”

They all laughed at the bull. “I feel at home at once,” murmured the
Young Doctor, for he had come from near Enniskillen years agone, and
there is not so much difference between Enniskillen and Kerry when it
comes to Irish bulls.

“Worse luck, it was,” continued Crozier, “because it made me confident
of always winning. It’s hard to say how early I began to believe I could
see things that were going to happen. By the hour I used to shake the
dice on the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes
shut the numbers about to come up. Of course now and then I saw the
right numbers; and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated
the gift I’d be able to be right nearly every time. When I went to a
horse-race I used to fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see
beforehand the number of the winner. Again sometimes I was very right
indeed, and that deepened my confidence in myself. I was always at it.
I’d try and guess--try and see--the number of the hymn which was on the
paper in the vicar’s hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with
myself on it. I would bet with myself or with anybody available on any
conceivable thing--the minutes late a train would be; the pints of
milk a cow would give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the
babies that would be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a
peck of raw potatoes. I was out against the universe. But it wasn’t
serious at all--just a boy’s mania--till one day my father met me in
London when I came down from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite’s Club
in St. James’s Street. There was the thing that finished me. I was
twenty-one, and restless-minded, and with eyes wide open.

“Well, he took me to Thwaite’s where I was to become a member, and
after a little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the
committee--he was a member of it. He told me to make myself at home,
and I did so as soon as his back was turned. Almost the first thing with
which I became sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a
fascination for me. The binding was very old, and the leather was worn,
as you will see the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels
like a nice soap. That book brought me here.”

He paused, and in the silence the Young Doctor pushed a glass of milk
and brandy towards him. He sipped the contents. The others were in
a state of tension. Kitty Tynan’s eyes were fixed on him as though
hypnotised, and the Young Doctor was scarcely less interested; while the
widow knitted harder and faster than she had ever done, and she could
knit very fast indeed.

“It was the betting-book of Thwaite’s, and it dated back almost to the
time of the conquest of Quebec. Great men dead and gone long ago--near
a hundred and fifty years ago-had put down their bets in the book, for
Thwaite’s was then what it is now, the highest and best sporting club in
the world.”

Kitty Tynan’s face had a curious look, for there was a club in Askatoon,
and it was said that all the “sports” assembled there. She had no idea
what Thwaite’s Club in St. James’s Street would look like; but that did
not matter. She supposed it must be as big as the Askatoon Court House
at least.

“Bets--bets--bets by men whose names were in every history, and the
names of their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons; and all betting
on the oddest things as well as the most natural things in the world.
Some of the bets made were as mad as the bets I made myself. Oh!
ridiculous, some of them were; and then again bets on things that
stirred the world to the centre, from the loss of America to the
beheading of Louis XVI.

“It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis
whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government
which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six
months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is
now the United States if they revolted. This would be cheek-by-jowl with
a bet that an heir would be born to one new-married pair before another
pair. The very last bet made on the day I opened the book was that Queen
Victoria would make Lord Salisbury a duke, that a certain gentleman
known as S. S. could find his own door in St. James’s Square, blindfold,
from the club, and that Corsair would win the Derby.

“For two long hours I sat forgetful of everything around me, while I
read that record--to me the most interesting the world could show. Every
line was part of the history of the country, a part of the history of
many lives, and it was all part of the ritual of the temple of the great
god Chance. I was fascinated, lost in a land of wonders. Men came and
went, but silently. At last there entered a gentleman whose picture I
had so often seen in the papers--a man as well known in the sporting
world as was Chamberlain in the political world. He was dressed
spectacularly, but his face oozed good-nature, though his eyes were like
bright bits of coal. He bred horses, he raced this, he backed that, he
laid against the other; he was one of the greatest plungers, one of the
biggest figures on the turf. He had been a kind of god to me--a god in
a grey frock-coat, with a grey top-hat and field-glasses slung over
his shoulder; or in a hunting-suit of the most picturesque kind--great
pockets in a well-fitting coat, splendid striped waistcoat. Well, there,
I only mention this because it played so big a part in bringing me to
Askatoon.

“He came up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful
Adam’s fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and
said, ‘Do you mind--for one minute?’ and he reached out a hand for the
book.

“I made way for him, and I suppose admiration showed in my eyes, because
as he hastily wrote--what a generous scrawl it was!--he said to me,
‘Haven’t we met somewhere before? I seem to remember your face.

“Great gentleman, I thought, because it was certain he knew he had never
seen me before, and I was overcome by the reflection that he wished
to be civil in that way to me. ‘It’s my father’s face you remember, I
should think,’ I answered. ‘He is a member here. I am only a visitor.
I haven’t been elected yet.’ ‘Ah, we must see to that!’ he said with
a smile, and laid a hand on my shoulder as though he’d known me many a
year--and I only twenty-one. ‘Who is your father?’ he asked. When I told
him he nodded. ‘Yes, yes, I know him--Crozier of Castlegarry; but I knew
his father far better, though he was so much older than me, and indeed
your grandfather also. Look--in this book is the first bet I ever
made here after my election to the club, and it was made with your
grandfather. There’s no age in the kingdom of sport, dear lad,’ he
added, laughing--‘neither age nor sex nor position nor place. It’s the
one democratic thing in the modern world. It’s a republic inside
this old monarchy of ours. Look, here it is, my first bet with your
grandfather--and I’m only sixty now!’ He smoothed the page with his hand
in a manner such as I have seen a dean do with his sermon-paper in a
cathedral puplit. ‘Here it is, thirty-six years ago.’ He read the bet
aloud. It was on the Derby, he himself having bet that the Prince of
Wale’s horse would win. ‘Your grandfather, dear lad,’ he repeated, ‘but
you’ll find no bets of mine with your father. He didn’t inherit
that strain, but your grandfather and your great-grandfather had
it--sportsmen both, afraid of nothing, with big minds, great eyes for
seeing, and a sense for a winner almost uncanny. Have you got it by any
chance? Yes, yes, by George and by John, I see you have; you are your
grandfather to a hair! His portrait is here in the club--in the next
room. Have a look at it. He was only forty when it was done, and you’re
very like him; the cut of the jib is there.’ He took my hand. ‘Good-bye,
dear lad,’ he said; ‘we’ll meet-yes, we’ll meet often enough if you
are like your grandfather. And I’ll always like to see you,’ he added
generously.

“‘I always wanted to meet you,’ I answered. ‘I’ve cut your pictures out
of the papers to keep them--at Eton and Oxford.’ He laughed in great
good-humour and pride. ‘So so, so so, and I am a hero then, with one
follower! Well, well, dear lad, I don’t often go wrong, or anyhow I’m
oftener right than wrong, and you might do worse than follow me--but no,
I don’t want that responsibility. Go on your own--go on your own.’

“A minute more and he was gone with a wave of the hand, and in
excitement I picked up the betting-book. It almost took my breath away.
He had staked a thousand pounds that the favourite of the Derby would
not win the race, and that one of three outsiders would. As I sat
overpowered by the magnitude of the bet the door opened, and he appeared
with another man, not one with whose face I was then familiar, though as
a duke and owner of great possessions, he was familiar to society. ‘I’ve
put it down,’ he said. ‘Sign it, if it’s all in order.’ This the duke
did, after apologizing for disturbing me. He looked at me keenly as
he turned away. ‘Not the most elevating literature in the library,’
he said, smiling ironically. ‘If you haven’t got a taste for it beyond
control, don’t cultivate it.’ He nodded kindly, and left; and again,
till my father came and found me, I buried myself in that book of
fate--to me. I found many entries in my grandfather’s name, but not one
in my father’s name. I have an idea that when a vice or virtue skips
one generation, it appears with increased violence or persistence in the
next, for, passing over my father into my defenceless breast, the spirit
of sport went mad in me--or almost so. No miser ever had a more cheerful
and happy hour than I had as I read the betting-book at Thwaites’.

“I became a member of Thwaite’s soon after I left Oxford. As some men go
to the Temple, some to the Stock Exchange, some to Parliament, I went to
Thwaite’s. It was the centre of my interest, and I took chambers in Park
Place, St. James’s Street, a few steps away. Here I met again constantly
the great sportsman who had noticed me so kindly, and I became his
follower, his disciple. I had started with him on a wave of prejudice in
his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had
staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could
get with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred
pounds. What he won--to my youthful eyes-was fabulous. There’s no use
saying what you think--you kind friends, who’ve always done something
in life--that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to
the turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport. You must
remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin
of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in
any generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the
younger son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary
for livelihood. If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman,
had lived, it’s hard to tell what I should have become; for steered
aright, given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have
become ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another. But there
it was, she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me. At
Eton, at Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business
of life. And when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left
me, I had only one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman. I had
a name as a cricketer--”

“Ah--I remember, Crozier of Lammis!” interjected the Young Doctor
involuntarily. “I’m a north of Ireland man, but I remember--”

“Yes, Lammis,” the sick man went on. “Castlegarry was my father’s place,
but my mother left me Lammis. When I got control of it, and of the
securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn’t long in
making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader.
He gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed
horses of my own. But the luck went against him at last, and then, of
course, against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws
the cash out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw
also the whole internal economy out of your body--a ghastly, empty,
collapsing thing.”

Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh. She had once put two hundred dollars in
a mine--on paper--and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in the
lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more. When she read a
fatal telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty,
collapsing feeling.

Pausing for a moment, in which he sipped some milk, Crozier then
continued: “At last my leader died, and the see-saw of fortune began for
me; and a good deal of my sound timber was sawed into logs and made
into lumber to build some one else’s fortune. When things were balancing
pretty easily, I married. It wasn’t a sordid business to restore my
fortunes--I’ll say that for myself; but it wasn’t the thing to do, for
I wasn’t secure in my position. I might go on the rocks; but was there
ever a gambler who didn’t believe that he’d pull it off in a big way
next time, and that the turn of the wheel against him was only to tame
his spirit? Was there ever a gambler or sportsman of my class who didn’t
talk about the ‘law of chances,’ on the basis that if red, as it were,
came up three times, black stood a fair chance of coming up the fourth
time? A silly enough conclusion; for on the law of chances there’s no
reason why red shouldn’t come up three hundred times; and so I found
that your run of bad luck may be so long that you cannot have a chance
to recover, and are out of it before the wheel turns in your favour. I
oughn’t to have married.”

His voice had changed in tone, his look become most grave, there was
something very like reverence in his face, and deprecating submission in
his eyes. His fingers fussed with the rug that covered his knees.

“God help the man that’s afraid of his own wife!” remarked the Young
Doctor to himself, not erroneously reading the expression of Crozier’s
face and the tone of his voice. “There’s nothing so unnerving.”

“No, I oughtn’t to have done it,” Crozier went on. “But I will say again
it wasn’t a sordid marriage, though she had great expectations, but
not immediate; and she was a girl of great character. She was able and
brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and she knew her own mind, and
was radiantly handsome.”

Kitty Tynan almost sniffed. Through a whole fortnight she had, with a
courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation
for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what
his wife was like. She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman,
delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw
in the picture-papers. She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat,
with a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief
crossed on her breast, holding a basket of flowers, while a King Charles
spaniel gambolled at her feet.

This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words
Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding,
exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was
afraid of stepping on her train. Was it strange she should think
that? She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons
according to her kind and from what she knew of life. So she imagined
Crozier’s wife to have been a sort of Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, who
swept up the dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at
all to the children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower
than their ankles. She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a
man like Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in
the witness-box as he did; who took the bullet of the assassin with such
courage; who broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech
on a filly’s flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who,
anyhow, couldn’t be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn’t a hand
like a piece of steel and the skin of an antelope. It was enough to make
a cat laugh, or a woman cry with rage.

“Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly
handsome!” There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing
woman, in velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and
overbearing, like grey poplin. Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the
mirror-the half-length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her
hands clench and her bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive
calico frock, a thing for Chloe, not for Juno.

She was very angry with Crozier, for it was absurd, that look of
deprecating homage, that “Hush-she-is-coming” in his eyes. What a fool a
man was where a woman was concerned! Here she had been fighting herself
for a fortnight to conquer a useless passion for her man of all the
world, fit to command an array of giants; and she saw him now almost
breathless as he spoke of a great wild-cat of a woman who ought to be by
his side now. What sort of a woman was she anyhow, who could let him go
into exile as he had done and live apart from her all these years,
while he “slogged away”--that was the Western phrase which came to
her mind--to pull himself level with things again? Her feet shuffled
unevenly on the floor, and it would have been a joy to shake the in
valid there with the rapt look in his face. Unable to bear the situation
without some demonstration, she got to her feet and caught up the glass
of brandy and milk with a little exclamation.

“Here,” she said, holding the glass to his lips, “here, courage,
soldier. You don’t need to be afraid at a six-thousand-mile range.”

The Young Doctor started, for she had said what was in his own mind,
but what he would not have said for a thousand dollars. It was fortunate
that Crozier was scarcely conscious of what she was saying. His mind was
far away. Yet, when she took the glass from him again, he touched her
arm.

“Nothing is good enough for your friends, is it?” he said gratefully.

“That wouldn’t be an excuse for not getting them the best there was at
hand,” she answered with a little laugh, and at least the Young Doctor
read the meaning of her words.

Presently Crozier, with a sigh, continued: “If I had done what my wife
wanted from the start, I shouldn’t have been here. I’d have saved what
was left of a fortune, and I’d have had a home of my own.”

“Is she earning her living too?” asked Kitty softly, and Crozier did not
notice the irony under the question.

“She has a home of her own,” answered Crozier almost sharply. “Just
before the worst came to the worst she inherited her fortune--plenty of
it, as I got near the end of mine. One thing after another had gone.
I was mortgaged up to the eyes. I knew the money-lenders from Newry
to Jewry and Jewry to Jerusalem. Then it was I promised her I’d bet no
more--never again: I’d give up the turf; I’d try and start again. Down
in my soul I knew I couldn’t start again--not just then. But I wanted
to please her. She was remarkable in her way; she had one of the most
imposing intelligences I have ever known. So I promised. I promised I’d
bet no more.”

The Young Doctor caught Kitty Tynan’s eyes by accident, and there was
the same look of understanding in both. They both knew that here was
the real tragedy of Crozier’s life. If he had had less reverence for his
wife, less of that obvious prostration of soul, he probably would never
have come to Askatoon.

“I broke my promise,” he murmured. “It was a horse--well, never mind.
I was as sure of Flamingo as that the sun would rise by day and set by
night. It was a certainty; and it was a certainty. The horse could win,
it would win; I had it from a sure source. My judgment was right, too.
I bet heavily on Flamingo, intending it for my last fling, and, to save
what I had left, to get back what I had lost. I could get big odds on
him. It was good enough. From what I knew, it was like picking up a
gold-mine. And I was right, right as could be. There was no chance about
it. It was being out where the rain fell to get wet. It was just being
present when they called the roll of the good people that God wished to
be kind to. It meant so much to me. I couldn’t bear to have nothing and
my wife to have all. I simply couldn’t stand--”

Again the Young Doctor met the glance of Kitty Tynan, and there was,
once more, a new and sudden look of comprehension in the eyes of both.
They began to see light where their man was concerned.

After a moment of struggle to control himself, Crozier proceeded: “It
didn’t seem like betting. Besides, I had planned it, that when I showed
her what I had won, she would shut her eyes to the broken promise, and
I’d make another, and keep it ever after. I put on all the cash there
was to put on, all I could raise on what was left of my property.”

He paused as though to get strength to continue. Then a look of intense
excitement suddenly possessed him, and there--passed over him a wave of
feeling which transformed him. The naturally grave mediaeval face became
fired, the eyes blazed, the skin shone, the mouth almost trembled with
agitation. He was the dreamer, the enthusiast, the fanatic almost, with
that look which the pioneer, the discoverer, the adventurer has when he
sees the end of his quest.

His voice rose, vibrated. “It was a day to make you thank Heaven the
world was made. Such days only come once in a while in England, but when
they do come, what price Arcady or Askatoon! Never had there been so big
a Derby. Everybody had the fever of the place at its worst. I was
happy. I meant to pouch my winnings and go straight to my wife and say,
‘Peccavi,’ and I should hear her say to me, ‘Go and sin no more.’ Yes,
I was happy. The sky, the green of the fields, the still, home-like,
comforting trees, the mass of glorious colour, the hundreds of horses
that weren’t running and the scores that were to run, sleek and long,
and made like shining silk and steel, it all was like heaven on earth to
me--a horse-race heaven on earth. There you have the state of my mind in
those days, the kind of man I was.”

Sitting up, he gazed straight in front of him as though he saw Epsom
Downs before his eyes; as though he was watching the fateful race that
bore him down. He was terribly, exhaustingly alive. Something possessed
him, and he possessed his hearers.

“It was just as I said and knew--my horse, Flamingo, stretched away
from the rest at Tattenham Corner and came sailing away home two lengths
ahead. It was a sight to last a lifetime, and that was what I meant it
to be for me. The race was all Flamingo’s own, and the mob was going
wild, when all of a sudden a woman--the widow of a racing-man gone
suddenly mad--rushed out in front of the horse, snatched at its bridle
with a shrill cry and down she came, and down Flamingo and the jockey
came, a melee of crushed humanity. And that was how I lost my last two
thousand five hundred pounds, as I said at the Logan Trial.”

“Oh! Oh!” said Kitty Tynan, her face aflame, her eyes like topaz suns,
her hands wringing. “Oh, that was--oh, poor Flamingo!” she added.

A strange smile shot into Crozier’s face, and the dark passion of
reminiscence fled from his eyes. “Yes, you are right, little friend,”
 he said. “That was the real tragedy after all. There was the horse doing
his best, his most beautiful best, as though he knew so much depended on
him, stretching himself with the last ounce of energy he could summon,
feeling the psalm of success in his heart--yes, he knows, he knows what
he has done, none so well!--and out comes a black, hateful thing against
him, and down he goes, his game over, his course run. I felt exactly as
you do, and I felt that before everything else when it happened. Then I
felt for myself afterwards, and I felt it hard, as you can think.”

The break went from his voice, but it rang with reflective, remembered
misery. “I was ruined. One thing was clear to me. I would not live on
my wife’s money. I would not eat and drink what her money bought. No,
I would not live on my wife. Her brother, a good enough, impulsive lad,
with a tongue of his own and too small to thresh, came to me in London
the night of the race. He said his sister had been in the country-down
at Epsom--and that she bitterly resented my having broken my promise and
lost all I had. He said he had never seen her so angry, and he gave me
a letter from her. On her return to town she had been obliged to go
away at once to see her sister taken suddenly ill. He added, with an
unfeeling jibe, that he wouldn’t like the reading of the letter himself.
If he hadn’t been such a chipmunk of a fellow I’d have wrung his neck. I
put the letter her letter-in my pocket, and next day gave my lawyer full
instructions and a power of attorney. Then I went straight to Glasgow,
took steamer for Canada, and here I am. That was near five years ago.”

“And the letter from your wife?” asked Kitty Tynan demurely and slyly.

The Young Doctor looked at Crozier, surprised at her temerity, but
Crozier only smiled gently. “It is in the desk there. Bring it to me,
please,” he said.

In a moment Kitty was beside him with the letter. He took it, turned it
over, examined it carefully as though seeing it for the first time, and
laid it on his knee.

“I have never opened it,” he said. “There it is, just as it was handed
to me.”

“You don’t know what is in it?” asked Kitty in a shocked voice. “Why, it
may be that--”

“Oh, yes, I know what is in it!” he replied. “Her brother’s confidences
were enough. I didn’t want to read it. I can imagine it all.”

“It’s pretty cowardly,” remarked Kitty.

“No, I think not. It would only hurt, and the hurting could do no good.
I can hear what it says, and I don’t want to see it.”

He held the letter up to his ear whimsically. Then he handed it back to
her, and she replaced it in the desk.

“So, there it is, and there it is,” he sighed. “You have got my
story, and it’s bad enough, but you can see it’s not what Burlingame
suggested.”

“Burlingame--but Burlingame’s beneath notice,” rejoined Kitty. “Isn’t
he, mother?”

Mrs. Tynan nodded. Then, as though with sudden impulse, Kitty came
forward to Crozier and leaned over him. The look of a mother was in her
eyes. Somehow she seemed to herself twenty years older than this man
with the heart of a boy, who was afraid of his own wife.

“It’s time for your beef-tea, and when you’ve had it you must get your
sleep,” she said, with a hovering solicitude.

“I’d like to give him a threshing first, if you don’t mind,” said the
Young Doctor to her.

“Please let a little good advice satisfy you,” Crozier remarked
ruefully. “It will seem like old times,” he added rather bitterly.

“You are too young to have had ‘old times,’” said Kitty with gentle
scorn. “I’ll like you better when you are older,” she added.

“Naughty jade,” exclaimed the Young Doctor, “you ought to be more
respectful to those older than yourself.”

“Oh, grandpapa!” she retorted.




CHAPTER 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 everything 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 against 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.




CHAPTER 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.




CHAPTER 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
romanticist 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.




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--




CHAPTER 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, sh

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