When Crozier stepped out of the bright sunlight into the shady living-room of the Tynan home, his eyes were clouded by the memory of his conference with Studd Bradley and his financial associates, and by the desolate feeling that the five years since he had left England had brought him nothing—nothing at all except a new manhood. But that he did not count an asset, because he had not himself taken account of this new capital. He had never been an introspective man in the philosophic sense, and he never had thought that he was of much account. He had lived long on his luck, and nothing had come of it—“nothing at all, at all,” as he said to himself when he stepped inside the room where, unknown to him, his wife awaited him. So abstracted was he, so disturbed was his gaze (fixed on the inner thing), that he did not see the figure in blue and white over against the wall, her hand on the big arm-chair once belonging to Tyndall Tynan, and now used always by Shiel Crozier, “the white-haired boy of the Tynan sanatorium,” as Jesse Bulrush had called him.
There was a strange timidity, and a fear not so strange, in Mona’s eyes as she saw her husband enter with that quick step which she had so longingly remembered after he had fled from her; but of which she had taken less account when he was with her at Lammis long ago-When Crozier of Lammis was with her long ago. How tall and shapely he was! How large he loomed with the light behind him! How shadowed his face and how distant the look in his eyes.
Somehow the room seemed too small for him, and yet he had lived in this very house for four years and more; he had slept in the next room all that time; had eaten at this table and sat in this very chair—Mrs. Tynan had told her that—for this long time, like the master of a household. With that far-away, brooding look in his face, he seemed in one sense as distant from her as when she was in London in those dreary, desolate years with no knowledge of his whereabouts, a widow in every sense save one; but in her acts—that had to be said for her—a wife always and not a widow. She had not turned elsewhere, though there had been temptation enough to do so.
Crozier advanced to the centre of the room, even to the table laid for dinner, before he was conscious of some one in the room, of a figure by the chair. For a moment he stood still, startled as if he had seen a vision, and his sight became blurred. When it cleared, Mona had come a step nearer to him, and then he saw her clearly. He caught his breath as though Life had burst upon him with some staggering revelation. If she had been a woman of genius, as in her way Kitty Tynan was, she would have spoken before he had a chance to do so. Instead, she wished to see how he would greet her, to hear what he would say. She was afraid of him now. It was not her gift to do the right thing by perfect instinct; she had to think things out; and so she did now. Still it has to be said for her that she also had a strange, deep sense of apprehension in the presence of the man whose arms had held her fast, and then let her go for so bitter a length of time, in which her pride was lacerated and her heart brought low. She did not know how she was going to be met now, and a womanly shyness held her back. If she had said one word—his name only—it might have made a world of difference to them both at that moment; for he was tortured by failure, and now when hope was gone, here was the woman whom he had left in order to force gifts from fate to bring himself back to her.
“You—you here!” he exclaimed hoarsely. He did not open his arms to her or go a step nearer to her. His look was that of blank amazement, of mingled remembrance and stark realisation. This was a turn of affairs for which he had made no calculation. There had ever been the question of his return to her, but never of her coming to him. Yet here she was, debonnaire and fresh and perfectly appointed—and ah, so terribly neat and spectacularly finessed! Here she was with all that expert formality which, in the old days, had been a reproach to his loosely-swung life and person, to his careless, almost slovenly but well-brushed, cleanly, and polished ease—not like his wife, as though he had been poured out of a mould and set up to dry. He was not tailor-made, and she had ever been so exact that it was as though she had been crystallised, clothes and all—a perfect crystal, yet a crystal. It was this very perfection, so charming to see, but in a sense so inhuman, which had ever dismayed him. “What should I be doing in the home of an angel!” he had exclaimed to himself in the old home at Lammis.
Truth is, he ought never to have had such a feeling, and he would not have had it, if she had diffused the radiance of love, which would have made her outer perfectness mere slovenliness beside her inner charm and magnetism. Very little of all this passed through Crozier’s mind, as with confused vision he looked at her. He had borne the ordeal of the witness-box in the Logan Trial with superb coolness; he had been in physical danger over and over again, and had kept his head; he had never been faced by a human being who embarrassed him—except his own wife. “There is no fear like that of one’s own wife,” was the saying of an ancient philosopher, and Crozier had proved it true; not because of errors committed, but because he was as sensitive as a girl of sensibility; because he felt that his wife did not understand him, and he was ever in fear of doing the wrong thing, while eager beyond telling to please her. After all, during the past five years, parted from her while loving her, there had still been a feeling of relief unexplainable to himself in not having to think whether he was pleasing her or not, or to reproach himself constantly that he was failing to conform to her standard.
“How did you come—why? How did you know?” he asked helplessly, as she made no motion to come nearer; as she kept looking at him with an expression in her eyes wholly unfamiliar to him. Yet it was not wholly unfamiliar, for it belonged to the days when he courted her, when she seemed to have got nearer to him than in the more intimate relations of married life.
“Is—is that all you have to say to me, Shiel?” she asked, with a swelling note of feeling in her voice; while there was also emerging in her look an elusive pride which might quickly become sharp indignation. That her deserter should greet her so after five years of such offence to a woman’s self-respect, as might entitle her to become a rebel against matrimony, was too cruel to be borne. This feeling suddenly became alive in her, in spite of a joy in her heart different from that which she had ever known; in defiance of the fact that now that they were together once more, what would she not do to prevent their being driven apart again!
“After abandoning me for five years, is that all you have to say to me, Shiel? After I have suffered before the world—”
He threw up his arms with a passionate gesture. “The world!” he exclaimed—“the devil take the world! I’ve been out of it for five years, and well out of it. What do I care for the world!”
She drew herself up in a spirit of defence. “It isn’t what you care for the world, but I had to live in it—alone, and because I was alone, eyebrows were lifted. It has been easy enough for you. You were where no one knew you. You had your freedom”—she advanced to the table, and, as though unconsciously, he did the same, and they gazed at each other over the white linen and its furnishings—“and no one was saying that your wife had left you for this or that, because of her bad conduct or of yours. Either way it was not what was fair and just; yet I had to bear and suffer, not you. There is no pain like it. There I was in misery and—”
A bitter smile came to his lips. “A woman can endure a good deal when she has all life’s luxuries in her grasp. Did you ever think, Mona, that a man must suffer when he goes out into a world where he knows no one, penniless, with no trade, no profession, nothing except his own helpless self? He might have stayed behind among the luxuries that belonged to another, and eaten from the hand of his wife’s charity, but”—(all the pride and pain of the old situation rose up in him, impelled by the brooding of the years of separation, heightened by the fact that he was no nearer to his goal of financial independence of her than he was when he left London five years before)—“but do you think, no matter what I’ve done, broken a pledge or not, been in the wrong a thousand times as much as I was, that I’d be fed by the hand of one to whom I had given a pledge and broken it? Do you think that I’d give her the chance to say, or not to say, but only think, ‘I forgive you; I will give you your food and clothes and board and bed, but if you are not good in the future, I will be very, very angry with you’? Do you think—?”
His face was flaming now. The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment and pride and love—the love that tore itself in pieces because it had not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money gives—broke forth in him, fresh as he was from a brutal interview with the financial clique whom he had given the chance to make much money, and who were now, for a few thousand dollars, trying to cudgel him out of his one opportunity to regain his place in his lost world.
“I live—I live like this,” he continued, with a gesture that embraced the room where they were, “and I have one room to myself where I have lived over four years”—he pointed towards it. “Do you think I would choose this and all it means—its poverty and its crudeness, its distance from all I ever had and all my people had, if I could have stood the other thing—a pauper taking pennies from his own wife? I had had taste enough of it while I had a little something left; but when I lost everything on Flamingo, and I was a beggar, I knew I could not stand the whole thing. I could not, would not, go under the poor-law and accept you, with the lash of a broken pledge in your hand, as my guardian. So that’s why I left, and that’s why I stay here, and that’s why I’m going to stay here, Mona.”
He looked at her firmly, though his face had that illumination which the spirit in his eyes—the Celtic fire drawn through the veins of his ancestors—gave to all he did and felt; and now as in a dream he saw little things in her he had never seen before. He saw that a little strand of her beautiful dark hair had broken away from its ordered place and hung prettily against the rosy, fevered skin of her cheek just beside her ear. He saw that there were no rings on her fingers save one, and that was her wedding-ring—and she had always been fond of wearing rings. He noted, involuntarily, that in her agitation the white tulle at her bosom had been disturbed into pretty disarray, and that there was neither brooch nor necklace at her breast or throat.
“If you stay, I am going to stay too,” she declared in an almost passionate voice, and she spoke with deliberation and a look which left no way open to doubt. She was now a valiant little figure making a fight for happiness.
“I can’t prevent that,” he responded stubbornly.
She made a quick, appealing motion of her hands. “Would you prevent it? Aren’t you glad to see me? Don’t you love me any more? You used to love me. In spite of all, you used to love me. Even though you hated my money, and I hated your gambling—your betting on horses. You used to love me—I was sure you did then. Don’t you love me now, Shiel?”
A gloomy look passed over his face. Memory of other days was admonishing him. “What is the good of one loving when the other doesn’t? And, anyhow, I made up my mind five years ago that I would not live on my wife. I haven’t done so, and I don’t mean to ‘do so. I don’t mean to take a penny of your money. I should curse it to damnation if I was living on it. I’m not, and I don’t mean to do so.”
“Then I’ll stay here and work too, without it,” she urged, with a light in her eyes which they had never known.
He laughed mirthlessly. “What could you do—you never did a day’s work in your life!”
“You could teach me how, Shiel.”
His jaw jerked in a way it had when he was incredulous. “You used to say I was only—mark you, only a dreamer and a sportsman. Well, I’m no longer a dreamer and a sportsman; I’m a practical man. I’ve done with dreaming and sportsmanship. I can look at a situation as it is, and—”
“You are dreaming—but yes, you are dreaming still,” she interjected. “And you are a sportsman still, but it is the sport of a dreamer, and a mad dreamer too. Shiel, in spite of all my faults in the past, I come to you, to stay with you, to live on what you earn if you like, if it’s only a loaf of bread a day. I—I don’t care about my money. I don’t care about the luxuries which money can buy; I can do without them if I have you. Am I not to stay, and won’t you—won’t you kiss me, Shiel?”
She came close to him-came round the table till she stood within a few feet of him.
There was one trembling instant when he would have taken her hungrily into his arms, but as if some evil spirit interposed with malign purpose, there came the sound of feet on the gravel outside, and the figure of a man darkened the doorway. It was Augustus Burlingame, whose face as he saw Mona Crozier took on an ironical smile.
“Yes—what do you want?” inquired Crozier quietly. “A few words with Mr. Crozier on business, if he is not too much occupied?”
“What business?”
“I am acting for Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons.”
The cloud darkened on Crozier’s face. His lips tightened, his face hardened. “I will see you in a moment—wait outside, please,” he added, as Burlingame made as though to step inside. “Wait at the gate,” he added quietly, but with undisguised contempt.
The moment of moments for Mona and himself had passed. All the bitterness of defeat was on him again. All the humiliation of undeserved failure to accomplish what had been the dear desire of five years bore down his spirit now. Suddenly he had a suspicion that his wife had received information of his whereabouts from this very man, Burlingame. Had not the Young Doctor said that Burlingame had written to lawyers in the old land to get information concerning him? Was it not more than likely that he had given his wife the knowledge which had brought her here?
When Burlingame had disappeared he turned to Mona. “Who told you I was here? Who wrote to you?” he asked darkly. The light had died away from his face. It was ascetic in its lonely gravity now.
“Your doctor cabled to Castlegarry and Miss Tynan wrote to me.”
A faint flush spread over Crozier’s face. “How did Miss Tynan know where to write?”
Mona had told the truth at once because she felt it was the only way. Now, however, she was in a position where she must either tell him that Kitty had opened that still sealed letter from herself to him which he had carried all these years, or else tell him an untruth. She had no right to tell him what Kitty had confided to her. There was no other way save to lie.
“How should I know? It was enough for me to get her letter,” she replied.
“At Castlegarry?”
What was there to do? She must keep faith with Kitty, who had given her this sight of her husband again.
“Forwarded from Lammis,” she said. “It reached me before the doctor’s cable.”
So it was Kitty—Kitty Tynan-who had brought his wife to this new home from which he had been trying so hard to get back to the old home. Kitty, the angel of the house.
“You wrote me a letter which drove me from home,” he said heavily.
“No—no—no,” she protested. “It was not that. I know it was not that. It was my money—it was that which drove you away. You have just said so.”
“You wrote me a hateful letter,” he persisted. “You didn’t want to see me. You sent it to me by your sweet, young brother.”
Her eyes flashed. “My letter did not drive you away. It couldn’t have. You went because you did not love me. It was that and my money, not the letter, not the letter.”
Somehow she had a curious feeling that the very letter which contained her bitter and hateful reproaches might save her yet. The fact that he had not opened it—well, she must see Kitty again. Her husband was in a dark mood. She must wait. She knew that her fortunate moment had passed when the rogue Burlingame appeared. She must wait for another.
“Shall I go now? You want to see that man outside. Shall I go, Shiel?” She was very pale, very quiet, steady and gentle.
“I must hear what that fellow has to say. It is business—important,” he replied. “It may mean anything—everything, or nothing.”
As she left the room he had an impulse to call her back, but he conquered it.
For a moment Crozier stood looking at the closed doorway through which Mona had gone, with a look of repentant affection in his eyes; but as the thought of his own helpless insolvency and broken hopes flashed across his mind, a look of dark and harassed reflection shadowed his face. He turned to the front doorway with a savage gesture. The mutilated dignity of his manhood, the broken pride of a lifetime, the bitterness in his heart need not be held in check in dealing with the man who waited to give him a last thrust of enmity.
He left the house. Burlingame was seated on the stump of a tree which had been made into a seat. “Come to my room if you have business with me,” Crozier said sharply.
As they went, Crozier swung aside from the front door towards the corner of the house.
“The back way?” asked Burlingame with a sneer.
“The old familiar way to you,” was the smarting reply. “In any case, you are not welcome in Mrs. Tynan’s part of the house. My room is my own, however, and I should prefer you within four walls while doing business with you.”
Burlingame’s face changed colour slightly, for the tone of Crozier’s voice, the grimness of his manner, suggested an abnormal condition. Burlingame was not a brave man physically. He had never lived the outdoor life, though he had lived so much among outdoor people. He was that rare thing in a new land, a decadent, a connoisseur in vice, a lover of opiates and of liquor. He was young enough yet not to be incapacitated by it. His face and hands were white and a little flabby, and he wore his hair rather long, which, it is said, accounts for the weakness of some men, on the assumption that long hair wastes the strength. But Burlingame quickly remembered the attitude of the lady—Crozier’s wife, he was certain—and of Crozier in the dining-room a few moments before, and to his suspicious eyes it was not characteristic of a happy family party. No doubt this grimness of Crozier was due to domestic trouble and not wholly to his own presence. Still, he felt softly for the tiny pistol he always carried in his big waistcoat pocket, and it comforted him.
Beyond the corner of the house Crozier paused and took a key from his pocket. It opened a side door to his own room, seldom used, since it was always so pleasant in this happy home to go through the main living-room, which every one liked so much that, though it was not the dining-room, it was generally used as such, and though it was not the parlour, it was its frequent substitute. Opening the door, Crozier stepped aside to let Burlingame pass. It was two years since Burlingame had been in this room, and then he had entered it without invitation. His inquisitiveness had led him to explore it with no good intent when he lived in the house.
Entering now, he gave it quick scrutiny. It was clear he was looking for something in particular. He was, in fact, searching for signs of its occupancy by another than Shiel Crozier—tokens of a woman’s presence. There was, however, no sign at all of that, though there were signs of a woman’s care and attention in a number of little things—homelike, solicitous, perhaps affectionate care and attention. Certainly the spotless pillows, the pretty curtains, the pincushion, and charmingly valanced bed and shelves, cheap though the material was, showed a woman’s very friendly care. When he lived in that house there were no such little attentions paid to him! It was his experience that where such attentions went something else went with them. A sensualist himself, it was not conceivable to him that men and women could be under the same roof without “passages of sympathetic friendship and tokens of affinity.” That was a phrase he had frequently used when pursuing his own sort of happiness.
His swift scrutiny showed that Crozier’s wife had no habitation here, and that gave him his cue for what the French call “the reconstruction of the crime.” It certainly was clear that, as he had suggested at the Logan Trial, there was serious trouble in the Crozier family of two, and the offender must naturally be the man who had flown, not the woman who had stayed. Here was circumstantial evidence.
His suggestive glance, the look in his eyes, did not escape Crozier, who read it all aright; and a primitive expression of natural antipathy passed across his mediaeval face, making it almost inquisitorial.
“Will you care to sit?” he said, however, with the courtesy he could never avoid; and he pointed to a chair beside the little table in the centre of the room. As Burlingame sat down he noticed on the table a crumpled handkerchief. It had lettering in the corner. He spread it out slightly with his fingers, as though abstractedly thinking of what he was about to say. The initial in the corner was K. Kitty had left it on the table while she was talking to Mrs. Crozier a halfhour before. Whatever Burlingame actually thought or believed, he could not now resist picking up the handkerchief and looking at it with a mocking smile. It was too good a chance to waste. He still hugged to his evil heart the humiliating remembrance of his expulsion from this house, the share Crozier had had in it, and the things which Crozier had said to him then. He had his enemy now between the upper and the nether mill-stones, and he meant to grind him to the flour of utter abasement. It was clear that the arrival of Mrs. Crozier had brought him no relief, for Crozier’s face was not that of a man who had found and opened a casket of good fortune.
“Rather dangerous that, in the bedroom of a family man,” he said, picking up the handkerchief and looking suggestively from the lettering in the corner to Crozier. He laid it down again, smiling detestably.
Crozier calmly picked up the handkerchief, saw the lettering, then went quietly to the door of the room and called Mrs. Tynan’s name. Presently she appeared. Crozier beckoned her into the room. When she entered, he closed the door behind her.
“Mrs. Tynan,” he said, “this fellow found your daughter’s handkerchief on my table, and he has said regarding it, ‘Rather dangerous that, in the bedroom of a family man.’ What would you like me to do with him?”
Mrs. Tynan walked up to Burlingame with the look of a woman of the Commune and said: “If I had a son I would disown him if he didn’t mangle you till your wife would never know you again, you loathesome thing. There isn’t a man or woman in Askatoon who’d believe your sickening slanders, for every one knows what you are. How dare you enter this house? If the men of Askatoon had any manhood in them they would tar-and-feather you. My girl is as good as any girl that ever lived, and you know it. Now go out of here—now!”
Crozier intervened quietly. “Mrs. Tynan, I asked him in here because it is my room. I have some business with him. When it is over, then he shall go, and we will fumigate the place. As for the tar-and-feathers, you might leave that to me. I think I can arrange it.
“I’ll turn the hose on him as he goes out, if you don’t mind,” the irate mother exclaimed as she left the room.
Crozier nodded. “Well, that would be appropriate, Mrs. Tynan, but it wouldn’t cleanse him. He is the original leopard whose spots are there for ever.”
By this time Burlingame was on his feet, and a look of craft and fear and ugly meaning was in his face. Morally he was a coward, physically he was a coward, but he had in his pocket a weapon which gave him a feeling of superiority in the situation; and after a night of extreme self-indulgence he was in a state of irritation of the nerves which gave him what the searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts call “brain-storms.” He had had sense enough to know that his amorous escapades would get him into trouble one day, and he had always carried the little pistol which was now so convenient to his hand. It gave him a fictitious courage which he would not have had unarmed against almost any man—or woman—in Askatoon.
“You get a woman to do your fighting for you,” he said hatefully. “You have to drag her in. It was you I meant to challenge, not the poor girl young enough to be your daughter.” His hand went to his waistcoat pocket. Crozier saw and understood.
Suddenly Crozier’s eyes blazed. The abnormal in him—the Celtic strain always at variance with the normal, an almost ultra-natural attendant of it awoke like a tempest in the tropics. His face became transformed, alive with a passion uncanny in its recklessness and purpose. It was a brain-storm indeed, but it had behind it a normal power, a moral force which was not to be resisted.
“None of your sickly melodrama here. Take out of your pocket the pistol you carry and give it to me,” Crozier growled. “You are not to be trusted. The habit of thinking you would shoot somebody some time—somebody you had injured—might become too much for you to-day, and then I should have to kill you, and for your wife’s sake I don’t want to do that. I always feel sorry for a woman with a husband like you. You could never shoot me. You couldn’t be quick enough, but you might try. Then I should end you, and there’d be another trial; but the lawyer who defended me would not have to cross-examine any witness about your character. It is too well-known, Burlingame. Out with it—the pistol!” he added, standing menacingly over the other.
In a kind of stupor, under the storm that was breaking above him, Burlingame slowly drew out of a capacious waistcoat pocket a tiny but powerful pistol of the most modern make.
“Put it in my hand,” insisted Crozier, his eyes on the other’s.
The flabby hand laid the weapon in Crozier’s lean and strenuous fingers. Crozier calmly withdrew the cartridges and then tossed the weapon back on the table.
“Now we have equality of opportunity,” he remarked quietly. “If you think you would like to repeat any slander that’s slid off your foul tongue, do it now; and in a moment or two Mrs. Tynan can turn the hose on the floor of this room.”
“I want to get to business,” said Burlingame sullenly, as he took from his pocket a paper.
Crozier nodded. “I can imagine your haste,” he remarked. “You need all the fees you can get to pay Belle Bingley’s bills.”
Burlingame did not wince. He made no reply to the challenge that he was the chief supporter of a certain wanton thereabouts.
“The time for your option to take ten thousand dollars’ worth of shares in the syndicate is up,” he said; “and I am instructed to inform you that Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons propose to take over your unpaid shares and to complete the transaction without you.”
“Who informed Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons that I am not prepared to pay for my shares?” asked Crozier sharply.
“The time is up,” surlily replied Burlingame. “It is assumed you can’t take up your shares, and that you don’t want to do so. The time us up,” he added emphatically, and he tapped the paper spread before him on the table.
Crozier’s eyes half closed in an access of stubbornness and hatred. “You are not to assume anything whatever,” he declared. “You are to accommodate yourself to actual facts. The time is not up. It is not up till midnight, and any action taken before then on any other assumption will give grounds for damages.”
Crozier spoke without passion and with a coldblooded insistence not lost on Burlingame. Taking down a calendar from the wall, he laid it beside the paper on the table before the too eager lawyer. “Examine the dates,” he said. “At twelve o’clock tonight Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons are free to act, if the money is not at the disposal of the syndicate by then; but till then my option is indefeasible. Does that meet the case or not?”
“It meets the case,” said Burlingame in a morose voice, rising. “If you can produce the money before the stroke of midnight, why can’t you produce it now? What’s the use of bluffing! It can’t do any good in the end. Your credit—”
“My credit has been stopped by your friends,” interrupted Crozier, “but my resources are current.”
“Midnight is not far off,” viciously remarked Burlingame as he made for the door.
Crozier intercepted him. “One word with you on another business before you go,” he said. “The tar-and-feathers for which Mrs. Tynan asks will be yours at any moment I raise my hand in Askatoon. There are enough women alone who would do it.”
“Talk of that after midnight,” sneered Burlingame desperately as the door was opened for him by Crozier. “Better not go out by the front gate,” remarked Crozier scornfully. “Mrs. Tynan is a woman of her word, and the hose is handy.”
A moment later, with contemptuous satisfaction, he saw Burlingame climb the picket-fence at the side of the house.
Turning back into the room, he threw up his arms. “Midnight—midnight—my God, where am I to get the money! I must—I must have it... It’s the only way back.”
Sitting down at the table, he dropped his head into his hands and shut his eyes in utter dejection. “Mona—by Heaven, no, I’ll never take it from her!” he said once, and clenched his hands at his temples and sat on and on unmoving.
For a full half-hour Crozier sat buried in dark reflection, then he slowly raised his head, and for a minute looked round dazedly. His absorption had been so great that for a moment he was like one who had awakened upon unfamiliar things. As when in a dream of the night the history of years will flash past like a ray of light, so for the bad half-hour in which Crozier had given himself up to despair, his mind had travelled through an incongruous series of incidents of his past life, and had also revealed pictures of solution after solution of his present troubles.
He had that-gift of visualization which makes life an endless procession of pictures which allure, or which wear the nature into premature old age. The last picture flashing before his eyes, as he sat there alone, was of himself and his elder brother, Garnett, now master of Castlegarry, racing ponies to reach the lodge-gates before they closed for the night, after a day of disobedience and truancy. He remembered how Garnett had given him the better pony of the two, so that the younger brother, who would be more heavily punished if they were locked out, should have the better chance. Garnett, if odd in manner and character, had always been a true sportsman though not a lover of sport.
If—if—why had he never thought of Garnett? Garnett could help him, and he would do so. He would let Garnett stand in with him—take one-third of his profits from the syndicate. Yes, he must ask Garnett to see him through. Then it was that he lifted his head from his hands, and his mind awakened out of a dream as real as though he had actually been asleep. Garnett—alas! Garnett was thousands of miles away, and he had not heard from him for five years. Still, he knew the master of Castlegarry was alive, for he had seen him mentioned in a chance number of The Morning Post lately come to his hands. What avail! Garnett was at Castlegarry, and at midnight his chance of fortune and a new life would be gone. Then, penniless, he would have to face Mona again; and what would come of that he could not see, would not try to see. There was an alternative he would not attempt to face until after midnight, when this crisis in his life would be over. Beyond midnight was a darkness which he would not now try to pierce. As his eyes again became used to his surroundings, a look of determination, the determination of the true gambler, came into his face. The real gambler never throws up the sponge till all is gone; never gives up till after the last toss of the last penny of cash or credit; for he has seen such innumerable times the thing come right and good fortune extend a friendly hand with the last hazard of all.
Suddenly he remembered—saw—a scene in the gambling rooms at Monte Carlo on the only visit he had ever paid to the place. He had played constantly, and had won more or less each day. Then his fortune turned and he lost and lost each day. At last, one evening, he walked up to a table and said to the croupier, “When was zero up last?” The croupier answered, “Not for an hour.” Forthwith he began to stake on zero and on nothing else. For two hours he put his louis at each turn of the wheel on the Lonely Nought. For two hours he lost. Increasing his stake, which had begun at five francs and had risen at length to five louis, he still coaxed the sardonic deity. Finally midnight came, and he was the only person playing at the table. All others had gone or had ceased to play. These stayed to watch the “mad Inglesi,” as a foreigner called him, knocking his head against the foot stool of an unresponsive god of chance. The croupiers watched also with somewhat disdainful, somewhat pitying interest, this last representative of a class who have an insane notion that the law of chances is in their favour if they can but stay the course. And how often had they seen the stubborn challenger of a black demon, who would not appear according to the law of chances, leave the table ruined for ever!
Smiling, Crozier had played on till he had but ten louis left. Counting them over with cheerful exactness, he rose up, lit a cigarette, placed the ten louis on the fatal spot with cynical precision, and with a gay smile kissed his hand to the refractory Nothing and said, “You’ve got it all, Zero-good-night! Goodnight, Zero!” Then he had buttoned his coat and turned away to seek the cool air of the Mediterranean. He had gone but a step or two, his head half gaily turned to the table where the dwindling onlookers stood watching the wheel spin round, when suddenly the croupier’s cry of “Zero!” fell upon his ears.
With cheerful nonchalance he had come back to the table and picked up the many louis he had won—won by his last throw and with his last available coin.
As the scene passed before him now he got to his feet and, with that look of the visionary in his eyes, which those only know who have watched the born gamester, said, “I’ll back my hand till the last throw.” Then it was, as his eyes gazed in front of him dreamily, he saw the card on his mirror bearing the words, “Courage, soldier!”
With a deepening flame in his eyes he went over and gazed at it. At length he reached out and touched the writing with a caressing finger.
“Kitty—Kitty, how great you are!” he said. Then as he turned to the outer door a softness came into his face, stole up into his brilliant eyes and dimmed them with a tear. “What a hand to hold in the dark—the dark of life!” he said aloud. “Courage, soldier!” he added, as he opened the door by which he had entered, through which Burlingame had gone, and strode away towards the town of Askatoon, feeling somehow in his heart that before midnight his luck would turn.
From the dining-room Kitty had watched him go. “Courage, soldier!” she whispered after him, and she laughed; but almost immediately she threw her head up with a gasping sigh, and when it was lowered again two tears were stealing down her cheeks.
With an effort she conquered herself, wiped away the tears, and said aloud, with a whimsical but none the less pitiful self-reproach, “Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a fool you are!”
Entering the room Crozier had left, she went to the desk with the green-baize top, opened it, and took out the fateful letter which Mona Crozier had written to her husband five years ago. Putting it into her pocket she returned to the dining-room. She stood there for a moment with her chin in her hands and deep reflection in her eyes, and then, going to the door of her mother’s sitting-room, she opened it and beckoned. A moment later Mrs. Crozier and the Young Doctor entered the dining-room and sat down at a motion from her. Presently she said:
“Mrs. Crozier, I have here the letter your husband received from you five years ago in London.”
Mrs. Crozier flushed. She had been masterful by nature and she had had her way very much in life. To be dominated in the most intimate things of her life by this girl was not easy to be borne; but she realised that Kitty had been a friend indeed, even if not conventional. In response to Kitty’s remark now she inclined her head.
“Well, you have told us that you and your husband haven’t made it up. That is so, isn’t it?” Kitty continued.
“If you wish to put it that way,” answered Mona, stiffening a little in spite of herself.
“P’r’aps I don’t put it very well, but it is the stony fact, isn’t it, Mrs. Crozier?”
Mona hesitated a moment, then answered: “He is very upset concerning the land syndicate, and he has a quixotic idea that he cannot take money from me to help him carry it through.”
“I don’t quite know what quixotic means,” rejoined Kitty dryly. “If it wasn’t understood while you lived together that what was one’s was the other’s, that it was all in one purse, and that you shut your eyes to the name on the purse and took as you wanted, I don’t see how you could expect him, after your five years’ desertion, to take money from you now.”
“My five years’ desertion!” exclaimed Mona. Surely this girl was more than reckless in her talk. Kitty was not to be put down. “If you don’t mind plain speaking, he was always with you, but you weren’t always with him in those days. This letter showed that.” She tapped it on her thumb-nail. “It was only when he had gone and you saw what you had lost, that you came back to him—in heart, I mean. Well, if you didn’t go away with him when he went, and you wouldn’t have gone unless he had ordered you to go—and he wouldn’t do that—it’s clear you deserted him, since you did that which drove him from home, and you stayed there instead of going with him. I’ve worked it out, and it is certain you deserted him five years ago. Desertion doesn’t mean a sea of water between, it means an ocean of self-will and love-me-first between. If you hadn’t deserted him, as this letter shows, he wouldn’t have been here. I expect he told you so; and if he did, what did you say to him?”
The Young Doctor’s eyes were full of decorous mirth and apprehension, for such logic and such impudence as Kitty’s was like none he had ever heard. Yet it was commanding too.
Kitty caught the look in his eyes and blazed up. “Isn’t what I said correct? Isn’t it all true and logical? And if it is, why do you sit there looking so superior?”
The Young Doctor made a gesture of deprecating apology. “It’s all true, and it’s logical, too, if you stand on your head when you think it. But whether it is logical or not, it is your conclusion, and as you’ve taken the thing in hand to set it right, it is up to you now. We can only hold hard and wait.”
With a shrug of her graceful shoulders Kitty turned again to Mrs. Crozier, who intervened hastily, saying, “I did not have a chance of saying to him all I wished. Of course he could not take my money, but there was his own money! I was going to tell him about that, but just then the lawyer, Mr. Burlingame—”
“They all call him ‘Gus’ Burlingame. He doesn’t get the civility of Mr. here in Askatoon,” interposed Kitty.
Mona made an impatient gesture. “If you will listen, I want to tell you about Mr. Crozier’s money. He thinks he has no money, but he has. He has a good deal.”
She paused, and the Young Doctor and Kitty leaned forward eagerly. “Well, but go on,” said Kitty. “If he has money he must have it to-day, and now. Certainly he doesn’t know of it. He thinks he is broke,—dead broke,—and there’d be a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for him if he could put up ten thousand dollars to-night. If I were you I wouldn’t hide it from him any longer.”
Mona got to her feet in anger. “If you would give me a chance to explain, I would do so,” she said, her lips trembling. “Unfortunately, I am in your hands, but please give me credit for some intelligence—and some heart. In any case I shall not be bullied.”
The Young Doctor almost laughed outright, despite the danger of the situation. He was not prepared for Kitty’s reply and the impulsive act that marched with it. In an instant Kitty had caught Mona Crozier’s hand and pressed it warmly. “I was only doing what I’ve seen lawyers do,” she said eagerly. “I’ve got something that I want you to do, and I’ve been trying to work up to it. That’s all. I’m not as mean and bad mannered as you think me. I really do care what happens to him—to you both,” she hastened to add.
Struggling to keep back her tears, and in a low voice, Mona rejoined: “I meant to have told him what I’m going to tell you now. I couldn’t say anything about the money belonging to him till I had told him how it came to be his.”
After a moment’ pause she continued: “He told you all about the race which Flamingo lost, and about that letter.” She pointed to the letter which Kitty still carried in her hand. “Well, that letter was written under the sting of bitter disappointment. I was vain. I was young. I did not understand as I do now. If you were not such good friends—of his—I could not tell you this. It seemed to me that by breaking his pledge he showed he did not care for me; that he thought he could break a sacred pledge to me, and it didn’t matter. I thought it was treating me lightly—to do it so soon after the pledge was given. I was indignant. I felt we weren’t as we might be, and I felt, too, that I must be at fault; but I was so proud that I didn’t want to admit it, I suppose, when he did give me a grievance. It was all so mixed. I was shocked at his breaking his pledge, I was so vexed that our marriage hadn’t been the success it might have been, and I think I was a little mad.”
“That is not the monopoly of only one of your sex,” interposed the Young Doctor dryly. “If I were you I wouldn’t apologise for it. You speak to a sister in like distress.”
Kitty’s eyes flamed up, but she turned her head, as though some licensed libertine of speech had had his say, and looked with friendly eyes at Mona. “Yes, yes—please go on,” she urged.
“When I wrote that letter I had forgotten what I had done the day before the race. I had gone into my husband’s room to find some things I needed from the drawer of his dressing-table; and far at the back of a drawer I found a crumpled-up roll of ten-pound notes. It was fifty pounds altogether. I took the notes—”
She paused a moment, and the room became very still. Both her listeners were sure that they were nearing a thing of deep importance.
In a lower voice Mona continued: “I don’t know what possessed me, but perhaps it was that the things he did of which I disapproved most had got a hold on me in spite of myself. I said to myself: ‘I am going to the Derby. I will take the fifty pounds, and I’ll put it on a horse for Shiel.’ He had talked so much to my brother about Flamingo, and I had seen him go wrong so often, that I had a feeling if I put it on a horse that Shiel particularly banned, it would probably win. He had been wrong nearly every time for two years. It was his money, and if it won, it would make him happy; and if it didn’t win, well, he didn’t know the money existed—I was sure of that; and, anyhow, I could replace it. I put it on a horse he condemned utterly, but of which one or two people spoke well. You know what happened to Flamingo. While at Epsom I heard from friends that Shiel was present at the race, though he had said he would not go. Later I learned that he had lost heavily. Then I saw him in the distance paying out money and giving bills to the bookmakers. It made me very angry. I don’t think I was quite sane. Most women are like that at times.”
“As I said,” remarked the Young Doctor, his face mirthfully alive. Here was a situation indeed.
“So I wrote him that letter,” Mona went on. “I had forgotten all about the money I put on the outsider which won the race. As you know, I was called away to my sick sister that evening, and the money I won with Shiel’s fifty pounds was not paid to me till after Shiel had gone.”
“How much was it?” asked Kitty breathlessly.
“Four thousand pounds.”
Kitty exclaimed so loudly that she smothered her mouth with a hand. “Why, he only needs for the syndicate two thousand pounds—ten thousand dollars,” she said excitedly. “But what’s the good of it, if he can’t lay his hand on it by midnight to-night!”
“He can do so,” was Mona’s quick reply. “I was going to tell him that, but the lawyer came, and—”
Kitty sprang up and down in excitement. “I had a plan. It might have worked without this. It was the only way then. But this makes it sure—yes, most beautifully sure. It shows that the thing to do is to follow your convictions. You say you actually have the money, Mrs. Crozier?”
Mona took from her pocket an envelope, and out of it she drew four Bank of England notes. “Here it is—here are four one-thousand-pound notes. I had it paid to me that way five years ago, and here—here it is,” she added, with almost a touch of hysteria in her voice, for the excitement of it all acted on her like an electric storm.
“Well, we’ll get to work at once,” declared Kitty, looking at the notes admiringly, then taking them from Mona and smoothing them out with tender firmness. “It’s just the luck of the wide world, as my father used to say. It actually is. Now you see,” she continued, “it’s like this. That letter you wrote him”—she addressed herself to Mona—“it has to be changed. You have got to rewrite it, and you must put into it these four bank-notes. Then when you see him again you must have that letter opened at exactly the right moment, and—oh, I wonder if you will do it exactly right!” she added dubiously to Mona. “You don’t play your game very well, and it’s just possible that, even now, with all the cards in your hands, you will throw them away as you did in the past. I wish that—”
Seeing Mona’s agitation changing to choler, the Young Doctor intervened. He did not know Kitty was purposely stinging Crozier’s unhappy little consort, so that she should be put upon her mettle to do the thing without bungling.
“You can trust Mrs. Crozier to act carefully; but what exactly do you mean? I judge that Mrs. Crozier does not see more distinctly than I do,” he remarked inquiringly to Kitty, and with admonishment in tone and emphasis.
“No, I do not understand quite—will you explain?” interposed Mona with inner resentment at being managed, but feeling that she could not do without Kitty even if she would.
“As I said,” continued Kitty, “I will open that letter, and you will put in another letter and these bank-notes; and when he repeats what he said about the way you felt and wrote when he broke his pledge, you can blaze up and tell him to open the letter. Then he will be so sorry that he’ll get down on his knees, and you will be happy ever after.”
“But it will be a fraud, and dishonest and dishonourable,” protested Mona.
Kitty almost sniffed, but she was too agitated to be scornful. “Just leave that to me, please. It won’t make me a bit more dishonourable to open the letter again—I’ve opened it once, and I don’t feel any the worse for it. I have no conscience, and things don’t weigh on my mind at all. I’m a light-minded person.”
Looking closely at her, the Young Doctor got a still further insight into the mind and soul of this prairie girl, who used a lid of irony to cover a well of deep feeling. Things did not weigh on her mind! He was sure that pain to the wife of Shiel Crozier would be mortal torture to Kitty Tynan.
“But I felt exactly what I wrote that Derby Day when he broke his pledge, and he ought to know me exactly as I was,” urged Mona. “I don’t want to deceive him, to appear a bit better than I am.”
“Oh, you’d rather lose him!” said Kitty almost savagely. “Knowing how hard it is to keep a man under the best circumstances, you’d willingly make the circumstances as bad as they can be—is that it? Besides, weren’t you sorry afterwards that you wrote that letter?”
“Yes, yes, desperately sorry.”
“And you wished often that your real self had written on Derby Day and not the scratch-cat you were then?”
Mona flushed, but answered bravely, “Yes, a thousand times.”
“What business had you to show him your cat-self, your unreal, not your real self on Derby Day five years ago? Wasn’t it your duty to show him your real self?”
Mona nodded helplessly. “Yes, I know it was.”
“Then isn’t it your duty to see that your real self speaks in that letter now?”
“I want him to know me exactly as I am, and then—”
Kitty made a passionate gesture. Was ever such an uncomprehending woman as this diamond-button of a wife?
“And then you would be unhappy ever after instead of being happy ever after. What is the good of prejudicing your husband against you by telling the unnecessary truth. He is desperate, and besides, he has been away from you for five years, and we all change somehow—particularly men, when there are so many women in the world, and very pretty women of all ages and kinds and colours and tastes, and dazzling, deceitful hussies too. It isn’t wise for any woman to let her husband or any one at all see her exactly as she is; and only the silly ones do it. They tell what they think is the truth about their own wickedness, and it isn’t the truth at all, because I suppose women don’t know how to tell the exact truth; and they can be just as unfair to themselves as they are to others. Besides, haven’t you any sense of humour, Mrs. Crozier? It’s as good as a play, this. Just think: after five years of desertion, and trouble without end, and it all put right by a little sleight-of-hand. Shall I open it?”
She held the letter up. Mona nodded almost eagerly now, for come of a subtle, social world far away, she still was no match for the subtlety of the wilds—or was it the cunning the wild things know?
Kitty left the room, but in a moment afterwards returned with the letter open. “The kettle on the hob is the friend of the family,” she said gaily. “Here it is all ready for what there is to do. You go and keep watch for Mr. Crozier,” she added to the Young Doctor. “He won’t be gone long, I should think, and we don’t want him bursting in on us before I’ve got that letter safe back into his desk. If he comes, you keep him busy for a moment. When we’re quite ready I’ll come to the front door, and then you will know it is all right.”
“I’m to go while you make up your prescription—all right!” said the Young Doctor, and with a wave of the hand he left the room.
Instantly Kitty brought a lead pencil and paper. “Now sit down and write to him, Mrs. Crozier,” she said briskly. “Use discretion; don’t gush; slap his face a little for breaking his pledge, and afterwards tell him that you did at the Derby what you had abused him for doing. Then explain to him about this four thousand pounds—twenty thousand dollars—my, what a lot of money, and all got in one day! Tell him that it was all won by his own cash. It’s as easy as can be, and it will be a certainty now.”
So saying, she lit a match. “You—hold this wicked old catfish letter into the flame, please, Mrs. Crozier, and keep praying all the time, and please remember that ‘our little hands were never made to tear each other’s eyes.’”
Mona’s small fingers were trembling as she held the fateful letter into the flame, and then in silence both watched it burn to a cinder. A faint, hopeful smile was on Mona’s face now.
“What isn’t never was to those that never knew,” said Kitty briskly, and pushed a chair up to the table. “Now sit down and write, please.”
Mona sat down. Taking up a sheet of notepaper she looked at it dubiously.
“Oh, what a fool I am!” said Kitty, understanding the look. “And that’s what every criminal does—he forgets something. I forgot the notepaper. Of course you can’t use that notepaper. Of course not. He’d know it in a minute. Besides, the sheet we burned had an engraved address on it. I never thought of that—good gracious!”
“Wait—wait,” said Mona, her face lighting. “I may have some sheets in my writing-case. It’s only a chance, but there were some loose sheets in it when I left home. I’ll go and see.”
While she was gone to her bedroom Kitty stood still in the middle of the room lost in reflection, as completely absorbed as though she was seeing things thousands of miles away. In truth, she was seeing things millions of miles away; she was seeing a Promised Land. It was a gift of hers, or a penalty of her life, perhaps, that she could lose herself in reverie at a moment’s notice—a reverie as complete as though she was subtracted from life’s realities. Now, as she looked out of the door, far over the prairie to a tiny group of pine-trees in the vanishing distance, lines she once read floated through her mind: