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.
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:
“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.