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