“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.
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:
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!
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.
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—
Three days passed, but before they ended there came another telegram from Mrs. Crozier stating the time of her expected arrival at Askatoon. It was addressed to Kitty, and Kitty almost savagely tore it up into little pieces and scattered it to the winds. She did not even wait to show it to the Young Doctor; but he had a subtle instinct as to why she did not; and he was rather more puzzled than usual at what was passing before his eyes. In any case, the coming of the wife must alter all the relations existing in the household of the widow Tynan. The old, unrestrained, careless friendship could not continue. The newcomer would import an element of caste and class which would freeze mother and daughter to the bones. Crozier was the essence of democracy, which in its purest form is akin to the most aristocratic element and is easily affiliated with it. He had no fear of Crozier. Crozier would remain exactly the same; but would not Crozier be whisked away out of Askatoon to a new fate, reconciled to being a receiver of his wife’s bounty.
“If his wife gets her arms round his neck, and if she wants to get them there, she will, and once there he’ll go with her like a gentleman,” said the Young Doctor sarcastically. Admiring Crozier as he did, he also had underneath all his knowledge of life an unreasonable apprehension of man’s weakness where a woman was concerned. The man who would face a cannon’s mouth would falter before the face of a woman whom he could crumple with one hand.
The wife arrived before Crozier returned, and the Young Doctor and Kitty met the train. The local operator had not divulged to any one the contents of the telegram to Kitty, and there were no staring spectators on the platform. As the great express stole in almost noiselessly, like a tired serpent, Kitty watched its approach with outward cheerfulness. She had braced herself to this moment, till she looked the most buoyant, joyous thing in the world. It had not come easily. With desperation she had fought a fight during these three lonely days, till at last she had conquered, sleeping each night on Crozier’s star-lit bed of boughs and coming in with the silver-grey light of dawn. Now she leaned forward with heart beating fast; but with smiling face and with eyes so bright that she deceived the Young Doctor.
There was no sign of inward emotion, of hidden troubles, as she leaned forward to see the great lady step from the train—great in every sense was this lady in her mind; imposing in stature, a Juno, a tragedy queen, a Zenobia, a daughter of the gods who would not stoop to conquer. She looked in vain, however, for the Mrs. Crozier she had imagined made no appearance from the train. She hastened down the platform still with keen eyes scanning the passengers, who were mostly alighting to stretch their legs and get a breath of air.
“She’s not here,” she said at last darkly to the Young Doctor who had followed her.
Then suddenly she saw emerge from a little group at the steps of a car a child in a long dress—so it seemed to her, the being was so small and delicate—and come forward, having hastily said good-bye to her fellow-passengers. As the Young Doctor said afterwards, “She wasn’t bigger than a fly,” and she certainly was as graceful and pretty and piquante as a child-woman could be.
Presently, with her alert, rather assertive blue eyes she saw Kitty, and came forward. “Miss Tynan?” she asked, with an encompassing look.
Now Kitty was idiomatic in her speech at times, and she occasionally used slang of the best brand, but she avoided those colloquialisms which were of the vocabulary of the uneducated. Indeed, she had had no inclination to use them, for her father had set her a good example, and she liked to hear good English spoken. That was why Crozier’s talk had been like music to her; and she had been keen to distinguish between the rhetorical method of Augustus Burlingame, who modelled himself on the orators of all the continents, and was what might be called a synthetic elocutionist. Kitty was as simple and natural as a girl could be, and as a rule had herself in perfect command; but she was so stunned by the sight of this petite person before her that, in reply to Mrs. Crozier’s question, she only said abruptly
“The same!”
Then she came to herself and could have bitten her tongue out for that plunge into the vernacular of the West; and forthwith a great prejudice was set up in her mind against Mona Crozier, in whose eyes she caught a look of quizzical criticism or, as she thought, contemptuous comment. That for one instant she had been caught unawares and so had put herself at a disadvantage angered her; but she had been embarrassed and confounded by this miniature goddess, and her reply was a vague echo of talk she heard around her every day. Also she could have choked the Young Doctor, whom she caught looking at her with wondering humour, as though he was trying to see “what her game was,” as he said to her afterwards.
It was all due to the fact that from the day of the Logan Trial, and particularly from the day when Shiel Crozier had told his life-story, she had always imagined his wife as a stately Amazonian being with the carriage of a Boadicea. She had looked for an empress in splendid garments, and—and here was a humming-bird of a woman, scarcely bigger, than a child, with the buzzing energy of a bee, but with a queer sort of manfulness too; with a square, slightly-projecting chin, as Kitty came to notice afterwards; together with some small lines about the mouth and at the eyes, which came from trouble endured and suffering undergone. Kitty did not notice that, but the Young Doctor took it in with his embracing glance, as the wife saluted Kitty with her inward comment, which was:
“So this is the chit who wrote to me like a mother!” But Mona Crozier did not underestimate Kitty for all that, and she wondered why it was that Kitty had written as she did. One thing was quite clear: Kitty had had good intentions, else why have written at all?
All these thoughts had passed through the mind of each, with a good many others, while they were shaking hands; and the Young Doctor summoned his man to carry Mona’s hand-luggage to the extra buggy he had brought to the station. One of the many other thoughts that were passing through three active minds was Kitty’s unspoken satire:
“Just think; this is the woman he talked of as though she was a moving mountain which would fall on you and crush you, if you didn’t look out!”
No doubt Crozier would have repudiated this description of his talk, but the fact was he had unconsciously spoken of Mona with a sort of hush in his voice; for a woman to him was something outside real understanding. He had a romantic mediaeval view, which translated weakness and beauty into a miracle, and what psychologists call “an inspired control.”
“She’s no bigger than—than a wasp,” said Kitty to herself, after the Young Doctor had assured Mrs. Crozier that her husband was almost well again; that he had recovered more quickly than was expected, and had gained strength wonderfully after the crisis was passed.
“An elephant can crush you, but a wasp can sting you,” was Kitty’s further inward comment, “and that’s why he was always nervous when he spoke of her.” Then, as the Young Doctor had already done, she noticed the tiny lines about the tiny mouth, and the fine-spun webs about the bird-bright eyes.
The Young Doctor attributed these lines mostly to anxiety and inward suffering, but Kitty set them down as the outward signs of an inward fretfulness and quarrelsomeness, which was rendered all the more offensive in her eyes by the fact that Mona Crozier was the most, spotless thing she had ever seen, at the end of a journey—and this, a journey across a continent. Orderliness and prim exactness, taste and fastidiousness, tireless tidiness were seen in every turn, in every fold of her dress, in the way everything she wore had been put on, in the decision of every step and gesture. Kitty noticed all this, and she said to herself,
“Wound up like a watch, cut like a cameo,” and she instinctively felt the little dainty cameo-brooch at her own throat, the only jewellery she ever wore, or had ever worn.
“Sensible of her not to bring a maid,” commented the Young Doctor inwardly. “That would have thrown Kitty into a fit. Yet how she manages to look like this after six thousand miles of sea and land going is beyond me—and Crozier so rather careless in his ways. Not what you would call two notes in the same key, she and Crozier,” he reflected as he told her she need not trouble about her luggage, and took charge of the checks for it.
“My husband—is—is he quite better now?” Mrs. Crozier asked with sharp anxiety, as the two-seated “rig” started away with the ladies in the back seat.
“Oh, better, thanks to him,” was Kitty’s reply, nodding towards the Young Doctor.
“You have told him I was coming?”
“Wasn’t it better to have a talk with you first?” asked Kitty meaningly.
Mrs. Crozier almost nervously twitched the little jet bag she carried, then she looked Kitty in the eyes.
“You will, of course, have reason for thinking so, if you say it,” was her enigmatical reply. “And of course you will tell me. You did not let him know that you had written to me, or that the doctor had cabled me?”
“Oh, you got his cable?” questioned Kitty with a little ring of triumph in her voice, meant to reach the ears of the Young Doctor. It did reach him, and he replied to the question.
“We thought it better not; chiefly because he had in this country planned his life with an exclusiveness, and on a principle which did not, unfortunately, take you into account.”
The little lady blushed, or flushed. “May I ask how you know this to be so, if it is so?” she asked, and there was the sharpness of the wasp in her tone, as it seemed to Kitty.
“The Logan Trial—I mentioned it in my letter to you,” interposed Kitty. “He was shot for the evidence he gave at the trial. Well, at the trial a great many questions were asked by a lawyer who wanted to hurt him, and he answered them.”
“Why did the lawyer want to hurt him?” Mona Crozier asked quickly.
“Just mean-hearted envy and spite and devilry,” was Kitty’s answer. “They were both handsome men, and perhaps that was it.”
“I never thought my husband handsome, though he was always distinguished looking,” was the quiet reply.
“Ah, but you haven’t seen him at all for so long!” remarked Kitty, a little spitefully.
“How do you know that?” Mrs. Crozier was nettled, though she did not show it; but Kitty felt it was so, and was glad.
“He said so at the Logan Trial.”
“Was that the kind of question asked at the trial?” the wife quickly interjected.
“Yes, lots of that kind,” returned Kitty.
“What was the object?”
“To make him look not so distinguished—like nothing. If a man isn’t handsome, but only distinguished”—Kitty’s mood was dangerous—“and you make him look cheap, that’s one advantage, and—”
Here the Young Doctor, having observed the rising tide of antagonism in the tone of the voices behind him, gently interposed, and made it clear that the purpose was to throw a shadow on the past of her husband in order to discredit his evidence; to which Mrs. Crozier nodded her understanding. She liked the Young Doctor, as who did not who came in contact with him, except those who had fear of him, and who had an idea that he could read their minds as he read their bodies. And even this girl at her side—Mona Crozier realised that the part she had played was evidently an unselfish one, though she felt with piercing intuition that whatever her husband thought of the girl, the girl thought too much of her husband. Somehow, all in a moment, it made her sorry for the girl’s sake. The girl had meant well by her husband in sending for his wife, that was certain; and she did not look bad. She was too sedately and reservedly dressed, in spite of her auriferous face and head and her burnished tone, to be bad; too fearless in eye, too concentrated to be the rover in fields where she had no tenure or right.
She turned and looked Kitty squarely in the eyes, and a new, softer look came into her own, subduing what to Kitty was the challenging alertness and selfish inquisitiveness.
“You have been very good to Shiel—you two kind people,” she said, and there came a sudden faint mist to her eyes.
That was her lucky moment, and she spoke as she did just in time, for Kitty was beginning to resent her deeply; to dislike her far more than was reasonable, and certainly without any justice.
Kitty spoke up quickly. “Well, you see, he was always kind and good to other people, and that was why—”
“But that Mr. Burlingame did not like him?” The wife had a strange intuition regarding Mr. Burlingame. She was sure that there was a woman in the case—the girl beside her?
“That was because Mr. Burlingame was not kind or good to other people,” was Kitty’s sedate response. There was an undertone of reflection in the voice which did not escape Mrs. Crozier’s senses, and it also caught the ear of the Young Doctor, to whom there came a sudden revelation of the reason why Burlingame had left Mrs. Tynan’s house.
“Oh!” exclaimed Mrs. Crozier enigmatically. Presently, with suppressed excitement as she saw the Young Doctor reining in the horses slowly, she added: “My husband—when have you arranged that I should see him?”
“When he gets back—home,” Kitty replied, with an accent on the last word.
Mrs. Crozier started visibly. “When he gets back home-back from where? He is not here?” she asked in a tone of chagrin. She had come a long way, and she had pictured this meeting at the end of the journey with a hundred variations, but never with this one—that she should not see Shiel at once when the journey was over, if he was alive. Was it hurt pride or disappointed love which spoke in her face, in her words? After all, it was bad enough that her private life and affairs should be dragged out in a court of law; that these two kind strangers, whom she had never seen till a few minutes ago, should be in the inner circle of knowledge of the life of her husband and herself, without her self-esteem being hurt like this. She was very woman, and the look of the thing was not nice to her eyes, while it must belittle her in theirs. Had this girl done it on purpose? Yet why should she—she who had so appealed to her to come to him—have sought to humiliate her?
Kitty was not quite sure what she ought to say. “You see, we expected him back before this. He is very exact!”
“Very exact?” asked Mrs. Crozier in astonishment. This was a new phase of Shiel Crozier’s character. He must, indeed, have changed since he had caused her so much anxiety in days gone by.
“Usen’t he to be so?” asked Kitty, a little viciously. “He is so very exact now,” she added. “He expected to be back home before this”—how she loved to use that word home—“and so we thought he would be here when you arrived. But he has been detained at Aspen Vale. He had a big business deal on—”
“A big business deal? Is he—is he in a large way of business?” Mona asked almost incredulously. Shiel Crozier in a large way of business, in a big business deal? It did not seem possible. His had ever been the game of chance. Business—business?
“He doesn’t talk himself, of course; that wouldn’t be like him,”—Kitty had joy in giving this wife the character of her husband, “but they say that if he succeeds in what he’s trying to do now he will make a great deal of money.”
“Then he has not made it yet?” asked Mrs. Crozier.
“He has always been able to pay his board regularly, with enough left for a pew in church,” answered Kitty with dry malice; for she mistook the light in the other’s eyes, and thought it was avarice; and the love of money had no place in Kitty’s make-up. She herself would never have been influenced by money where a man was concerned.
“Here’s the house,” she quickly added; “our home, where Mr. Crozier lives. He has the best room, so yours won’t be quite so good. It’s mother’s—she’s giving it up to you. With your trunks and things, you’ll want a room to yourself,” Kitty added, not at all unconscious that she was putting a phase of the problem of Crozier and his wife in a very commonplace way; but she did not look into Mrs. Crozier’s face as she said it.
Mrs. Crozier, however, was fully conscious of the poignancy of the remark, and once again her face flushed slightly, though she kept outward composure.
“Mother, mother, are you there?” Kitty called, as she escorted the wife up the garden walk.
An instant later Mrs. Tynan cheerfully welcomed the disturber of the peace of the home where Shiel Crozier had been the central figure for so long.