Askatoon had never lost its interest for Mazarine and his wife since the
day the Mayor had welcomed them at the railway station. Askatoon was not
a petty town. Its career had been chequered and interesting, and it had
given haven to a large number of uncommon people. Unusual happenings
had been its portion ever since it had been the rail-head of the Great
Transcontinental Line, and many enterprising men, instead of moving on
with the railway, when it ceased to be the rail-head, settled there and
gave the place its character. The town had never been lawless, although
some lawless people had sojourned there.
It was too busy a place to be fussing about little things, or tearing
people’s characters to pieces, or gossiping even to the usual degree;
yet in its history it had never gossiped so much as it had done since
the Mazarines had come.
From the first the vast majority of folk had sided with Louise and
denounced Mazarine. They knew well she had married too young to be
self-seeking or intriguing; and, in any case, no woman in Askatoon or
yet in the West, could have conceived of a girl marrying “the ancient
one from the jungle,” as Burlingame had called him.
Burlingame could never have been on the side of the Ten Commandments
himself, even with a sure and certain hope of happiness on earth, and in
Heaven also, guaranteed to him. Nothing could have condemned Mazarine so
utterly as the coalition between the “holy good people,” as Burlingame
called them, and himself; and between the holy good people and himself
were many who in their secret hearts would never have shunned Louise if,
after the night on the prairie with Orlando, release had been found
for her in the Divorce Court. Jonas Billings had put the matter in a
nutshell when he said:
“It ain’t natural, them two, at Tralee. For marrying her he ought to be
tarred and feathered, and for the way he treats her he ought to be let
loose in the ha’nts of the grizzlies. What he done to that girl is a
crime ag’in’ the law. If there was any real spunk in the Methodists,
they’d spit him out like pus.”
That was exactly what the Methodist body had decided to do on the very
day that Louise had fled from Tralee and the old man pursued her in
the wrong direction. The Methodist body had determined to discipline
Mazarine, to eject him from their communion, because he had raised a
whip against his wife; because he had maltreated Li Choo; and because he
had used language unbecoming a Christian. They had decided that Mazarine
had not shown the righteous anger of a Christian man, but of one who had
backslided, and who, in the words of Rigby the chemist, “Must be spewed
out of the mouth of the righteous into the dust of shame.”
That was the situation when Joel Mazarine drove furiously into the town
and made for the railway station. Men like Jonas Billings, who saw him,
and had the scent for sensation, passed the word on downtown, as it is
called, that something “was up” with Mazarine, and the railway station
was the place where what was up could be seen. Therefore; a quarter of
an hour before the arrival of the express which was to carry Orlando
Guise’s mother to her sick sister three hundred miles down the line,
a goodly number of citizens had gathered at the station-far more than
usually watched the entrance or exit of the express.
Mazarine’s wagon and steaming horses were tied up outside the station,
and inside on the platform Moses-not-much, as Mazarine had been called
by Jonas Billings, marched up and down, his snaky little eyes blinking
at the doorway of the station reception-room. People came and some of
them nodded to him derisively. Some, with more hardihood, asked him if
he was going East; if he was expecting anyone; if he was seeing somebody
off.
A good many asked him the last question, because, as the minutes had
passed, Burlingame had arrived. He had also disclosed his great joke
to those who would carry it far and near, together with the news that
Louise had taken flight. The last fact, however, was known to several
people, because more than one had seen the Young Doctor and Patsy
Kernaghan taking Louise to Nolan Doyle’s ranch.
It was dusk. The lamps of the station were being lighted five minutes
before the express arrived, and as the lights flared up, Orlando entered
the waiting-room of the station, with a lady on his arm, and presently
showed at the platform doorway, smiling and cheerful. He did not blench
when Mazarine came towards him. Mazarine had seen the flutter of a blue
skirt in the waiting-room, and his wife had worn blue that day!
Orlando saw the heavy, offensive figure of Mazarine making for him. He,
however, appeared to take no notice, though he watched his outrageous
pursuer out of the corner of his eye, as he quietly gave orders to a
porter concerning a little heap of luggage. When he had finished this,
he turned, as it were casually, to Mazarine. Then he giggled in the face
of the Master of Tralee. It was like the matador’s waving of the
scarlet cloth in the face of the enraged bull. Having thus relieved his
feelings, Orlando turned and walked to the door of the reception-room,
but was stopped by the old man rushing at him. Swinging round, Orlando
almost filled the doorway.
“You devil’s spawn,” Mazarine almost shouted, “get out of that doorway.
I want my wife. You needn’t try to hide her. You thief! You lecherous
circus rider! Stand aside--leper!”
Orlando coolly stretched out his elbows till they touched the sides of
the door, and as the crowd pressed, he said to them mockingly:
“Get back, boys. Give him air. Can’t you see he’s gasping for breath.”
Then he giggled again.
The old man looked round at the crowd, but he saw no sympathy--only
aversion and ridicule. Suddenly he snatched his little black-bound Bible
from his pocket, and held it up.
“What does this Book say?” he thundered. “It says that a wife shall
cleave unto her husband until death. For the seducer and the betrayer
death is the portion.”
The whistle of the incoming train was heard in the distance.
The old man was desperate. It was clear he meant to assault Orlando.
“You will only take her away over my dead body,” he ground out in his
passion. “The Lord gave, and only the Lord shall take away.” He gathered
himself together for the attack.
Orlando waved a hand at him as one would at a troublesome child. At that
instant, his mother stepped up behind him in the reception-room.
“Orlando,” she said in her mincing, piping little voice, “Orlando, dear,
the train is coming. Let me out. I’m not afraid of that bad man. I want
to catch my train.”
Orlando stepped aside, and his mother passed through, to the
consternation of Mazarine, who fell back. The old man now realized that
Burlingame had tricked him. Laughter went up from the crowd. They had
had a great show at no cost.
“‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,’ Mr. Mazarine!” called
someone from the crowd.
“It’s the next train she’s going by, old Moses-not-much,” shouted a
friend of Jonas Billings.
“She’s had enough of you, Joel!” sneered another mocker.
“Wouldn’t you like to know where she is, yellow-lugs?” queried a fat
washerwoman.
For an instant Mazarine stood demused, and then, thrusting the Bible
into his pocket, he drew himself up in an effort of pride and defiance.
“Judases! Jezebels!” he burst out at them all. Then he lunged through
the doorway of the reception-room; but at the door opening on the street
his courage gave way, and hunched up like one in pain, he ran towards
the hitching-post where he had left his horses and wagon. They were not
there. With a groan which was also a malediction, he went up the street
like a wounded elephant, and made his way to the police-station through
a town which had no pity for him.
During the hour he remained in the town, Mazarine searched in vain for
his horses and wagon. He looked everywhere except the shed behind the
Methodist Church. It was there the two wags who had played the trick on
him had carefully hitched the horses, and presently they announced in
town that they did it because they knew Mazarine would want to go to the
prayer-meeting to lay his crimes before the Mercy Seat!
It was quite true that it was prayer-meeting night, and as the merciless
wags left the shed, the voice of brother Rigby the chemist was narrating
for the hundredth time the story of his conversion, when, as he said,
“the pains of hell gat hold of him.” Brother Rigby loved to relate the
tortures of the day when he was convicted of sin; but on this night his
ancient story seemed appropriate, as he had dealt with great severity on
the doings of the backslider, Joel Mazarine.
When the two wags returned to the front street of Askatoon, they were
just in time to see the second meeting of Orlando and Mazarine. Mazarine
had not been able to find his horses at any hotel or livery stable, or
in any street. It was at the moment, when, in his distraction, he had
decided to walk back to Tralee, that Orlando, driving up the street, saw
him. Orlando reined in his horses dropped from his buggy and approached
him.
There was a look in Orlando’s eyes which was a reflection from a remote
past, from ancestors who had settled their troubles with the first
weapon and the best opportunity to their hands. “The furrin element in
him,” as Jonas Billings called it, had been at full flood ever since he
had bade his mother good-bye. A storm of anger had been raised in him.
As he said to himself, he had had enough; he had been filled up to the
chin by the Mazarine business; and his impulsive youth wanted to end it
by some smashing act which would be sensational and decisive. So it was
that Fate offered the opportunity, as he came up the front street of
Askatoon, and found himself face to face with Mazarine, over against the
offices of Burlingame.
“A word with you, Mr. Mazarine,” he said, with the air of a man who
wants to ease his mind of its trouble by action. “Back there at the
station, I kept my tongue and let you down easy enough, because my
mother was present. She is old and sensitive, and she doesn’t like to
see her son doing the dirty work every man must do some time or other,
when there’s street cleaning to be done. Now, let me tell you this:
you’ve slandered as good a girl, you’ve libelled as straight a wife, as
the best man in the world ever had. You’ve made a public scandal of
your private home. You’ve treated the pure thing as if it were the foul
thing; and yet, you want to keep the pure thing that you treat like a
foul thing, under your rawhide whip, because it’s young and beautiful
and good. You don’t want to save her soul”--he pointed to the Bible,
which the old man had snatched from his pocket again--“you don’t want to
save her soul. You don’t care whether she’s happy in this world or the
next; what you want is what you can see of her, for your life in this
world only. You want--”
The old man interrupted him with a savage emotion which Jonas Billings
said made him look like “a satyre.”
“I want to save her from the wrath to come,” he said. “This here holy
Book gives me my rights. It says, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and the
trouble I have comes from you that’s stole my wife, that’s put her soul
in jeopardy, robbed my home--”
“Robbed your home!” interjected Orlando quietly, but with a voice of
suppressed passion. “Robbed your home! Why, the other day you tried to
prevent her entering it. You wanted to shut her out. After she had lived
with you all those years, you believed she lied to you when she told you
the truth about that night on the prairie; but her innocence was proved
by one who was there all the time, and for shame’s sake you had to let
her in. But she couldn’t stand it. I don’t wonder. A lark wouldn’t be at
home where a vulture roosted.”
“And so the lark flies away to the cuckoo,” snarled the old man, with
flecks of froth gathering at the corners of his mouth; for the sight of
this handsome, long-limbed youth enraged him.
“Give her back to me. You know where she is,” he persisted. “You’ve got
her hid away. That’s why you’ve sent your mother East--so’s she wouldn’t
know, though from what I see, I shouldn’t think it’d have made much
difference to her.”
Exclamations broke from the crowd. It was the wild West. It was a
country where, not twenty years before, men did justice upon men without
the assistance of the law; and the West understood that the dark insult
just uttered would in days not far gone have meant death. The onlookers
exclaimed, and then became silent, because a subtle sense of tragedy
suddenly smothered their voices. Upon the silence there broke a little
giggling laugh. It came from lips that were one in paleness with a face
grown stony.
“I ought to kill you,” Orlando said quietly after a moment, yet scarcely
above a whisper. “I ought to kill you, Mazarine, but that would only be
playing your game, for the law would get hold of me, and the girl that
has left you would be sorrowful, for she knows I love her, though I
never told her so. She’d be sorry to see the law get at me. She’s going
to be mine some day, in the right way. I’m not going behind your back to
say it; I’m announcing it to all and sundry. I never did a thing to her
that couldn’t have been seen by all the world, and I never said a thing
to her that couldn’t be heard by all the world; but I hope she’ll never
go back to you. You’ve made a sewer for her to live in, not a home. As
I said, I ought to kill you, but that would play your game, so I won’t,
not now. But I tell you this, Mazarine: if I ever meet you again--and
I’m sure to do so--and you don’t get off the road I’m travelling on, or
the side-walk I’m walking on, when I meet you or when I pass you, I’ll
let you have what’ll send you to hell, before you can wink twice.
“As for Louise--as for her: I don’t know where she is, but I’ll find
her. One thing is sure: if I see her, I’ll tell her never to go back to
you; and she won’t. You’ve drunk at the waters of Canaan for the last
time. For a Christian you’re pretty filthy. Go and wash in the pool of
Siloam and be clean--damn you, Mazarine!”
With that he turned, almost unheeding the hands thrust out to grip
his, the voices murmuring approval. In a moment he had swung his horses
round. He did not go beyond ten yards, however, before someone, running
beside his wagon, whispered up to him: “She’s out at Nolan Doyle’s
ranch. She went with the Young Doctor and Patsy Kernaghan.”
Behind, in the street, a young boy came running through the crowd and
shouting: “I know where they are! I know where they are!” He stopped
before Mazarine. “Gimme half a dollar, and I’ll tell you where your
horses are. Gimme half a dollar. Gimme half a dollar, and I’ll tell
you.”
An instant later, with the half-dollar in his hand, he said: “They’re up
to the shed of the Meetin’ House.”
“Yes, go along up to the Meetin’ House, Mr. Mazarine,” said one of
the miscreants who had driven the horses there. “They’re holding a
post-mortem on you at the prayer meetin’. They say you’re dead in
trespasses and sins. Get along, Joel.”
The crowd started to follow him to the shed where his horses were, but
after a moment he turned on them and said:
“Ain’t you heerd and seen enough? Ain’t there no law to protect a man?”
A hoe was leaning against a fence. He saw it, and with sudden fury,
seizing it, swung it round his head as if to throw it into the crowd.
At that moment a stalwart constable ran forward, raised a hand towards
Mazarine, and then addressed the crowd.
“We’ve had enough of this,” he said. “I’ll lock up any man that goes a
step further towards the Meetin’ House. Where do you think you are? This
is Askatoon, the place of peace and happiness, and we’re going to be
happy, if I have to lock up the hull lot of you. I guess you can go
right on, Mr. Mazarine,” he added. “Go right on and git your wagon.”
A moment later Mazarine was walking alone towards the Meeting House; but
no, not alone, for a hundred devils were with him.