Mazarine discovered the flight of Louise soon after she had gone. He had
not been five hundred yards from the house since she returned with
Orlando after the night spent upon the prairie, save when he had been
obliged to go in to Askatoon and had taken her with him, dumb and
passive. She had been a prisoner, tied to the stirrups of her captor;
and he had berated her, had preached at her. As Louise had said, once on
the way to Askatoon, he had even tried to make her kneel down in the
dust of the trail and plead with Heaven to convict her of sin.
On the evening of Louise’s flight, however, he had been forced to go to
a neighbouring ranch, and had commanded Li Choo to keep a strict watch
at the windows of her room to see that she did not attempt escape. She
could not escape by the door of the room because he had the key in his
pocket. Li Choo was not a stern jailer, however. Mazarine had not been
gone three minutes before the Chinaman had touch with Louise. He did
more; he threw up into the open window of her room a screw-driver, with
which she took the old-fashioned door off its hinges, after half an
hour’s work. Then, leaving a note on the table of the dining-room, to
say that she could not bear it any longer, that she would never come
back, and that she meant to be free, she summoned Patsy Kernaghan and
fled to the Young Doctor.
When Mazarine returned and found her note, he plunged up the stairs to
her bedroom, his pious wrath gurgling in his throat, only to find the
door locked; for Li Choo had promptly restored it to its hinges after
Louise had gone, afterwards dropping from the high window like a cat,
without hurt.
Li Choo, blinking, opaque, immobile, save for his piercing and
mysterious eyes, had no explanation to give. All he said was, “Me no see
all sides house same time”; so suggesting that, as the room had windows
on all three sides, Louise must have escaped while he made his supposed
sentry-go, slip-slopping round the house. Mazarine showed what he
thought by spitting in Li Choo’s face, and then rushing into the house
to get the raw-hide whip with which he had punished the Chinaman before,
and with which he had threatened his wife.
When he returned a moment afterwards, Li Choo was nowhere to be seen;
but in his place were two other Chinamen who had, as it were, fallen
from the skies, standing where Li Choo had stood, immobile, blinking
and passive like Li Choo, their hands lost in the long sleeves of their
coats, their pigtails so tightly braided as, in seeming, to draw
their slanting eyelids still to greater incline, and to give a look of
petrified intentness to their faces.
Something in their attitude gave Mazarine apprehension. It was as
though Li Choo had been transformed by some hellish magic into two other
Chinamen. The rage of his being seemed to stupefy him; he could not
resist the sensation of the unnatural.
“What do you want? How did you come here?” he asked of the two in a
husky voice.
“We want speak Li Choo. We come see Li Choo,” answered one of the
Chinamen impassively.
“He was here a minute ago,” answered Mazarine gruffly.
Then he turned away, going swiftly toward the kitchen, and calling to Li
Choo. As he went, he was conscious of low, cackling laughter, but
when he turned to look, the two Chinamen stood where he had left them,
blinking and immobile.
The uncanny feeling possessing him increased; the thing was unnatural.
He lurched on, however, looking for Li Choo. The Chinaman was not to be
found in the kitchen, in the woodshed, in the cellar, in the loft, or in
his own attic room; and the half-breed, Rada, declared she had not seen
him. He could not be at the stables, for they were too far away to be
reached in the time; and there were no signs of him between the house
and the stables. When Mazarine returned to the front of the house, the
two Chinamen also had vanished; there were no signs of them anywhere.
Search did not discover them.
Mingled anger and fear now possessed Mazarine. He would search no
longer. No doubt the other two Chinamen had joined Li Choo in his
hiding-place, wherever it was. Why had the Chinamen come? What were they
after? It did not matter for the moment. What he wanted was Louise, his
bad child-wife, who had broken from her cage and flown from him. Where
would she go? Where, but to Slow Down Ranch? Where, but to her lover,
the circus-rider, the boy with the head of brown curls, with the ring on
his finger and the Cupid mouth! Where would she go but to the man with
whom she had spent the night on the prairie!
Now he believed altogether that she was guilty, that everybody had
conspired to deceive him, that he was in a net of dark deception. Even
the two Chinamen, mysteriously coming and going, had laughed at him like
two heathen gods, and had vanished suddenly like heathen gods.
A weakness came over him, and the skin of his face became creased and
clammy like that of a drowned man; his limbs trembled, so desperate was
his passion. He stumbled into the house and into the dining-room,
where he kept a little black-bound Bible once belonging to his
great-grandfather. He had thumbed it well in past years, searching it
for passages of violence and denunciation. Now holy superstition seized
him in the midst of the work of the devil, surrounding him with an
almost medieval instinct. He seized the ancient book, as it were to
deliver its incantations against everyone destroying his peace, stealing
from him that which he prized beyond all earthly things.
Take this woman away from him, this child-wife from his sixty-five
years, and what was left for him? She was the garden of spring in which
his old age roamed at ease luxuriously. She was the fruit of the tree of
pleasure. She was that which made him young again, renewed in him youth
and the joys of youth. Take her away, the flower that smelled so sweet
and luscious, the thing that he had held so often to his lips and to his
breast? Take away what was his, by every holy right, because it was all
according to the law of the land and of the Holy Gospel, and what was
left? Only old age, the empty house bereft of a fair young mistress,
something to smile at and to curse, if need be, since it was his own by
the laws of God and man.
Take her away, and the two wives that he had buried long years ago, with
their gray heads and lank, sour faces, from which the light of youth had
fled with the first child come to them--their ghosts would seek him out.
They would sit at his table, and taunt him with his vanished Louise,
asking him if he thought she was anything more than one of the trolls
that tempted men aforetime; one of the devil’s wenches that lured him
into the secret garden, only at last to leave him scorned and alone.
Where had she gone, his troll, with the face of an angel? Where had
she gone? Where would she go, except to her devil’s lover at Slow Down
Ranch?
He had just started for Slow Down Ranch armed with his greasy,
well-thumbed Bible like a weapon in his pocket, when he heard a voice
call him. It was full of the devil’s laughter. It was the voice of
Burlingame, the lawyer, on his horse. Burlingame had had a weary day and
was refreshing himself by a canter on the prairie.
“Where are you going?” asked Burlingame, as he cantered up to Mazarine’s
wagon.
“To Slow Down Ranch?”
He saw the look of the drowned man in the face of Mazarine, over whom
the flood of disaster had passed, and he guessed at once the cause of
it; for Burlingame had the philosophy of a Satanic mind, and he knew the
things that happen to human nature.
“So, she’s gone again, has she?” he added deliberately, with intent to
put a knife into the old man’s feelings and to turn it in the thick of
them. He wanted to hurt, because Mazarine had only a short time before
dispensed with his services as a lawyer, and had blocked the way to that
intimacy which he had hoped to establish with Tralee and its mistress.
Besides, his pride as a professional man had been hurt, and he had been
deprived of income which now went to his most hated professional rival.
Mazarine’s jealous soul had cut him off, on coming to know Burlingame’s
dark reputation. He had not liked the look Burlingame had given Louise
when they met.
“Gone again, has she?” Burlingame repeated sarcastically. “Well, you
needn’t go to Slow Down Ranch to find her. She isn’t there, and you
won’t find him there either, for I saw him come by the Lark River Trail
into Askatoon as I left, and a lady was with him. He booked this morning
for the sleeper of the express going East to-night; so, if I were you,
I’d turn my horse’s nose to Askatoon, Mr. Mazarine. I don’t know why
I tell you this, as you’re not my client now, but I go about the world
doing good, Mr. Mazarine--only doing good.”
There was a look in Burlingame’s face which Heaven would not have
accepted as goodness, and there was that in his voice which did not
belong to the Courts of the Lord. Malice, though veiled, showed in face
and sounded in voice. Even as he spoke, Joel Mazarine turned his horse’s
head towards Askatoon.
“You’re sure a woman was with him? You’re sure she was with him?” he
asked in chaos of passion.
“I couldn’t see her face; it was too far away,” answered Burlingame
suggestively, “but you can form your own conclusions--and the express is
due in thirty minutes!”
He looked at his watch complacently. “What’s the good, Mazarine? Why
don’t you say, ‘Go and sin no more?’ Or why don’t you divorce her with
the evidence about that night on the prairie? I could have got you a
verdict and damages. Yes, I could have got you plenty of damages. He’s
rich. You took her back and condoned; you condoned, Mazarine, and now
you’ll neither have damages nor wife--and the express goes in thirty
minutes!”
“The express won’t take Mrs. Mazarine away tonight,” the old man said, a
look of jungle fierceness filling his face.
Burlingame laughed unpleasantly. “Yes, you’ll foul your own nest,
Mazarine, and then bring her back to live in it. I know you. It isn’t
the love of God in your heart, because you’ll never forgive her; but
you’ll bring her back to the nest you fouled, just because you want
her--‘You damned and luxurious mountain goat,’ as Shakespeare called
your kind.”
With another laugh, which somewhat resembled that of the two strange
vanished Chinamen, Burlingame flicked his horse and cantered away. A
little time afterwards, however, he turned and looked toward Askatoon,
and he saw the old man whipping his horse into a gallop to reach
Askatoon railway station before the express went East.
“It’s true, Mazarine,” he said aloud. “Orlando booked for the sleeper
going East in thirty minutes; but the sleeper was for one only, and
that one was his mother, you old hippopotamus.... But I wonder where she
is--where the divine Louise is? She hasn’t levanted with her Orlando.
... Now, I wonder!” he added.
Then, with a sudden impulse, he dug heels into his horse’s sides, and
galloped back towards Askatoon. He wanted to see what would happen
before the express went East.