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You Never Know Your Luck: Being The Story Of A Matrimonial Deserter, a novel by Gilbert Parker |
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Chapter 9. Night Shade And Morning Glory |
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_ CHAPTER IX. NIGHT SHADE AND MORNING GLORY It was as though Crozier had been told of the coming of his wife, for when night came, on the day Kitty had received her telegram, he could not sleep. He was the sport of a consuming restlessness. His brain would not be still. He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and make it vacuous. It would not relax. It seized with intentness on each thing in turn, which was part of his life at the moment, and gave it an abnormal significance. In vain he tried to shake himself free of the successive obsessions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging him after them, a slave lashed to the wheels of a chariot of flame. At last it was the land deal and syndicate on which his future depended, and the savage fate which seemed about to snatch his fortune away as it had done so often before; as it had done on the day when Flamingo went down near the post at the Derby with a madwoman dragging at the bridle. He had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would have enabled him to pass the crisis of his life. Wife, home, the old fascinating, crowded life--they had all vanished because of that vile trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the wilderness through years that brought no fruit of his labours. Yet here was his chance, his great chance, to get back what he had and was in the old misspent days, with new purposes in life to follow and serve; and it was all in cruel danger of being swept away when almost within his grasp. If he could but achieve the big deal, he could return to wife and home, he could be master in his own house, not a dependent on his wife's bounty. That very evening Jesse Bulrush, elated by his own good fortune in capturing Cupid, had told him as sadly as was possible, while his own fortunes were, as he thought, soaring, that every avenue of credit seemed closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan company, would let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him to hold his place in the syndicate; while each of the other members of the clique had flatly and cheerfully refused, saying they were busy carrying their own loads. Crozier had commanded Jesse not to approach them, but the fat idealist had an idea that his tongue had a gift of wheedling, and he believed that he could make them "shell out," as he put it. He had failed, and he was obliged to say so, when Crozier, suspecting, brought him to book. "They mean to crowd you out--that's their game," Bulrush had said. "They've closed up all the ways to cash or credit. They're laying to do you out of your share. Unless you put up the cash within the four days left, they'll put it through without you. They told me to tell you that." And Crozier had not even cursed them. He said to Jesse Bulrush that it was an old game to get hold of a patent that made a fortune for a song while the patentee died in the poor-house. Yet that four days was time enough for a live man to do a "flurry of work," and he was fit enough to walk up their backs yet with hobnailed boots, as they said in Kerry when a man was out for war. Over and over again this hovering tragedy drove sleep from his eyes; and in the spaces between there were a hundred fleeting visions of little and big things to torture him--remembrances of incidents when debts and disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face. It was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old life, but one which had been part of his daily existence for over four years. It was the first face he saw when he came back from consciousness after the operation which saved his life--the face of Kitty Tynan. And ever since the day when he had told the story of his life this face had kept passing before his eyes with a disturbing persistence. Kitty had said to her mother and to the Young Doctor that he had seemed after he had told his story like one who had awakened; and in a sense it was startlingly true. It was as though, while he was living under an assumed name, the real James Shiel Gathorne Crozier did not exist, or was in the far background of the doings and sayings of J. G. Kerry. His wife and the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived out, which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the present. Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her had seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of his own name and the telling if his story had produced a complete psychological change in him mentally and bodily. The impersonal feeling which had marked his relations with the two women of this household, and with all women, was suddenly gone. He longed for the arms of a woman round his neck--it was five years since any woman's arms had been there, since he had kissed any woman's lips. Now, in the hour when his fortunes were again in the fatal balance, when he would be started again for a fair race with the wife from whom he had been so long parted, another face came between. All at once the question Burlingame asked him, as to whether his wife was living, came to him. He had never for an instant thought of her as dead, but now a sharp and terrifying anxiety came to him. If his wife was living! Living? Her death had never been even a remote possibility to his mind, though the parting had had the decisiveness of death. Beneath all his shrewdness and ability he was at heart a dreamer, a romanticist to whom life was an adventure in a half-real world. It was impossible to sleep. He tossed from side to side. Once he got up in the dark and drank great draughts of water; once again, as he thought of Mona, his wife, as she was in the first days of their married life, a sudden impulse seized him. He sprang from his bed, lit a candle, went to the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out. With the feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he knew, ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any cruelty, of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame of the candle when he thought he heard a sound behind him as of the door of his room gently closing. Laying the letter down, he went to the door and opened it. There was no one stirring. Yet he had a feeling as though some one was there in the darkness. His lips framed the words, "Who is it? Is any one there?" but he did not utter them. A kind of awe possessed him. He was Celtic; he had been fed on the supernatural when he was a child; he had had strange, indefinable experiences or hallucinations in the days when he lived at Castlegarry, and all his life he had been a friend of the mystical. It is hard to tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness of the other room-the living-room of the house. He was in a state of trance, almost, a victim of the night. But as he closed the door softly the words of the song that Kitty Tynan had sung to him the day when he found her brushing his coat came to him and flooded his brain. The last two verses of the song kept drowning his sense of the actual, and he was swayed by the superstition of bygone ancestors: "When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
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!
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. _ |
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