The harvest was over. The grain was cut, the prairie no longer waved
like a golden sea, but the smoke of the incense of sacrifice still rose
in innumerable spirals in the circle of the eye. The ground appeared
bare and ill-treated, like a sheep first shorn; but yet nothing could
take away from it the look of plenty, even as the fat sides of the shorn
sheep invite the satisfied eye of the expert. The land now, all stubble,
still looked good for anything. If bare, it did not seem starved. It was
naked and unshaven; it was stripped like a boxer for the rubbing-down
after the fight. Not so refined and suggestive and luxurious as when it
was clothed with the coat of ripe corn in the ear, it still showed
the fibre of its being to no disadvantage. And overhead the joy of the
prairie grew apace.
September saw the vast prairie spaces around Askatoon shorn and
shrivelled of its glory of ripened grain, but with a new life come
into the air-sweet, stinging, vibrant life, which had the suggestion of
nature recreating her vitality, inflaming herself with Edenic strength,
a battery charging itself, to charge the world in turn with force and
energy. Morning gave pure elation, as though all created being must
strive; noon was the pulse of existence at the top of its activity;
evening was glamorous; and all the lower sky was spread with those
colours which Titian stole from the joyous horizon that filled his
eyes. There was in that evening light, somehow, just a touch of
pensiveness--the triste delicacy of heliotrope, harbinger of the Indian
summer soon to come, when the air would make all sensitive souls turn to
the past and forget that to-morrow was all in all.
Sensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each other
unduly in this world, and they were not more numerous in Askatoon than
elsewhere. Not everybody was taking joy of sunrises and losing himself
in the delicate contentment of the sunset. There were many who took it
all without thought, who absorbed it unconsciously, and got something
from it; though there were many others who got nothing out of it at
all, save the health and comfort brought by a precious climate whose
solicitous friend is the sun. These heeded it little, even though a
good number of them came from the damp islands lying between the north
Atlantic and the German Ocean. From Erin and England and the land o’
cakes they came, had a few days of staring bright-eyed happy incredulity
as to the permanency of such conditions, and then settled down to take
it as it was, endless days of sunshine and stirring vivacious air--as
though they had always known it and had it.
There were exceptions, and these had joy in what they saw and felt
according to the measure of their temperament. Shiel Crozier saw and
felt much of it, and probably the Young Doctor saw more of it than any
one; stray people here and there who take no part in this veracious tale
had it in greater or less degree; fat Jesse Bulrush was so sensitive to
it that he, as he himself said, “almost leaked sentimentality” and Kitty
Tynan possessed it. She was pulsing with life, as a bird drunken with
the air’s sweetness sings itself into an abandonment of motion.
Before Crozier came she had enjoyed existence as existence, wondering
often why it was she wanted to spring up from the ground with the idea
that she could fly, if she chose to try. Once when she was quite a
little girl she had said to her mother, “I’m going to ile away,” and her
mother, puzzled, asked her what she meant. Her reply was, “It’s in
the hymn.” Her mother persisted in asking what hymn; and was told with
something like scorn that it was the hymn she herself had taught her
only child--“I’ll away, I’ll away to the Promised Land.”
Kitty had thought that “I’ll away” meant some delicious motion which was
to ile, and she had visions of something between floating and flying as
being that blessed means of transportation.
As the years grew, she still wanted to “ile away” whenever the spirit
of elation seized her, and it had increased greatly since Shiel Crozier
came. Out of her star as he was, she still felt near to him, and as
though she understood him and he comprehended her. He had almost at once
become to her an admired mystery, which, however, at first she did not
dare wish to solve. She had been content to be a kind of handmaiden to a
generous and adored master. She knew that where he had been she could
in one sense never go, and yet she wanted to be near him just the same.
This was intensified after the Logan Trial and the shooting of the man
who somehow seemed to have made her live in a new way.
As long ago as she could recall she had, in a crude, untutored way, been
fond of the things that nature made beautiful; but now she seemed to
see them in a new light, but not because any one had deliberately taught
her. Indeed, it bored her almost to hear books read as Jesse Bulrush
and Nurse Egan, and even her mother, read them to Crozier after his
operation, to help him pass away the time. The only time she ever cared
to listen--at school, though quick and clever, she had never cared for
the printed page--was when, by chance, poetry or verses were read or
recited. Then she would listen eagerly, not attracted by the words, but
by the music of the lines, by the rhyme and rhythm, by the underlying
feeling; and she got something out of it which had in one sense nothing
to do with the verses themselves or with the conception of the poet.
Curiously enough, she most liked to hear Jesse Bulrush read. He was
a born sentimentalist, and this became by no means subtly apparent to
Kitty during Crozier’s illness. Whenever Nurse Egan was on duty Jesse
contrived to be about, and to make himself useful and ornamental too;
for he was a picturesque figure, with a taste for figured waistcoats and
clean linen--he always washed his own white trousers and waistcoats, and
he had a taste in ties, which he made for himself out of silk bought
by the yard. He was, in fact, a clean, wholesome man, with a flair for
material things, as he had shown in the land proposal on which Shiel
Crozier’s fortunes hung, but with no gift for carrying them out, having
neither constructive ability nor continuity of purpose. Yet he was an
agreeable, humorous, sentimental soul, who at fifty years of age found
himself “an old bach,” as he called himself, in love at last with a
middle-aged nurse with dark brown hair and set figure, keen, intelligent
eyes, and a most cheerful, orderly, and soothing way with her.
Before Shiel Crozier was taken ill their romance began; but it grew in
volume and intensity after the trial and the shooting, when they met by
the bedside of the wounded man. Jesse had been away so much in different
parts of the country before then that their individual merits never had
had a real chance to make permanent impression. By accident, however,
his business made it necessary for him to be much in Askatoon at
the moment, and it was a propitious time for the growth of the finer
feelings.
It had given Jesse Bulrush real satisfaction that Kitty Tynan listened
to his reading of poetry--Longfellow, Byron, Tennyson, Whyte Melville,
and Adam Lindsay Gordon chiefly--with such absorbed interest. His
content was the greater because his lovely nurse--he did think she was
lovely, as Rubens thought his painted ladies beautiful, though their
cordial, ostentatious proportions are not what Raphael regarded as the
divine lines--because his lovely nurse listened to his fat, happy voice
rising and falling, swelling and receding on the waves of verse; though
it meant nothing to her that one who had the gift of pleasant sound was
using it on her behalf.
This was not apparent to her Bulrush, though Crozier and Kitty
understood. Jesse only saw in the blue-garbed, clear-visaged woman a
mistress of his heart, who had all the virtues and graces and who did
not talk. That, to him, was the best thing of all. She was a superb
listener, and he was a prodigious talker--was it not all appropriate?
One day he went searching for Kitty at her favourite retreat, a little
knoll behind and to the left of the house, where a half-dozen trees made
a pleasant resting-place at a fine look-out point. He found her in her
usual place, with a look almost pensive on her face. He did not notice
that, for he was excited and elated.
“I want to read you something I’ve written,” he said, and he drew from
his pocket a paper.
“If it’s another description of the timber-land you have for
sale-please, not to me,” she answered provokingly, for she guessed well
what he held in his hand. She had seen him writing it. She had even seen
some of the lines scrawled and re-scrawled on bits of paper, showing
careful if not swift and skillful manufacture. One of these crumpled-up
bits of paper she had in her pocket now, having recovered it that she
might tease him by quoting the lines at a provoking opportunity.
“It’s not that. It’s some verses I’ve written,” he said, with a wave of
his hand.
“All your own?” she asked with an air of assumed innocent interest, and
he did not see the frivolous gleam in her eyes, or notice the touch of
aloes on her tongue.
“Yes. Yes. I’ve always written verses more or less--I write a good many
advertisements in verse,” he added cheerfully. “They are very popular.
Not genius, quite, but there it is, the gift; and it has its uses in
commerce as in affairs of the heart. But if you’d rather not, if it
makes you tired--”
“Courage, soldier, bear your burden,” she said gaily. “Mount your horse
and get galloping,” she added, motioning him to sit.
A moment later he was pouring out his soul through a pleasing voice,
from fat lips, flanked by a high-coloured healthy cheek like a russet
apple:
“Like jewels of the sky they gleam,
Your eyes of light, your eyes of fire;
In their dark depths behold the dream
Of Life’s glad hope and Love’s desire.
“Above your quiet brow, endowed
With Grecian charm to crown your grace,
Your hair in one soft Titian cloud
Throws heavenly shadows on your face.”
“Well, I’ve never had verses written to me before,” Kitty remarked
demurely, when he had finished and sat looking at her questioningly.
“But ‘dark depths’--that isn’t the right thing to say of my eyes! And
Titian cloud of hair--is my hair Titian? I thought Titian hair
was bronzy-tawny was what Mr. Burlingame called it when he was
spouting,”--her upper lip curled in contempt.
“It isn’t you, and you know it,” he replied jerkily. She bridled.
“Do you mean to say that you come and read to me without a word of
explanation, so that I shouldn’t misunderstand, verses written for
another? Am I to be told now that my eyes aren’t eyes of light and eyes
of fire, that I haven’t got a Grecian brow? Do you dare to say those
verses don’t fit me--except for the Titian hair and heavenly shadows?
And that I’ve got no right to think they’re meant for me? Is it so, that
a man that’s lived in my mother’s house for years, eating at the same
table with the family, and having his clothes mended free, with supper
to suit him and no questions asked--is it so, that he reads me poetry,
four lines at a stretch, and a rhyme every other line, and then
announces it isn’t for me!”
Her eyes flashed, her bosom palpitated, her hand made passionate
gestures, and she really seemed a young fury let loose. For a moment
he was deceived by her acting; he did not see the lurking grin in the
depths of her eyes.
Her voice shook with assumed passion. “Because I didn’t show what I felt
all these years, and only exposed my real feelings when you read those
verses to me, do you think any man who was a gentleman wouldn’t in the
circumstances say, ‘These verses are for you, Kitty Tynan’? You betrayed
me into showing you what I felt, and then you tell me your verses are
for another girl!”
“Girl! Girl! Girl!” he burst out. “Nurse is thirty-seven--she told me
so herself, and how could I tell that you--why, it’s absurd! I’ve only
thought of you always as a baby in long skirts”--she spasmodically drew
her skirts down over her pretty, shapely ankles, while she kept her eyes
covered with one hand--“and you’ve seen me makin’ up to her ever since
Crozier got the bullet. Ever since he was operated on, I’ve--”
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” she interrupted. “That’s manly! Put the blame
on him--him that couldn’t help himself, struck by a horse-thief’s bullet
in the dark; him that’s no more to blame for your carryings on while
death was prowling about the door there--”
“Carryings on! Carryings on!” Jesse Bulrush was thoroughly excited and
indignant. The little devil, to put him in a hole like this! “Carryings
on! I’ve acted like a man all through--never anything else in your
house, and it’s a shame that I’ve got to listen to things that have
never been said of me in all my life. My mother was a good, true woman,
and she brought me up--”
“Yes, that’s it, put it on your mother now, poor woman! who isn’t here
to stretch out her hand and stop you from playing a double game with two
girls so placed they couldn’t help themselves--just doing kind acts for
a sick man.” Suddenly she got to her feet. “I tell you, Jesse Bulrush,
that you’re a man--you’re a man--”
But she could keep it up no longer. She burst out laughing, and the
false tears of the actress she dashed from her eyes as she added: “That
you’re a man after my own heart. But you can’t have it, even if you are
after it, and you are welcome to the thirty-seven-year-old seraph in
there!” She tossed a hand towards the house.
By this time he was on his feet too, almost bursting. “Well, you wicked
little rip--you Ellen Terry at twenty-two, to think you could play it up
like that! Why, never on the stage was there such--!”
“It’s the poetry made me do it. It inspired me,” she gurgled. “I
felt--why, I felt here”--she pressed her hand to her heart “all the
pangs of unrequited love--oh, go away, go back to the house and read
that to her! She’s in the sitting-room, and my mother’s away down-town.
Now’s your chance, Claude Melnotte.”
She put both hands on his big, panting chest and pushed him backward
towards the house. “You’re good enough for anybody, and if I wasn’t so
young and daren’t leave mother till I get my wisdom-teeth cut, and till
I’m thirty-seven--oh, oh, oh!” She laughed till the tears came into her
eyes. “This is as good as--as a play.”
“It’s the best acted play I ever saw, from ‘Ten Nights in a Bar-room’
to ‘Struck Oil,’” rejoined Jesse Bulrush, with a face still half ashamed
yet beaming. “But, tell me, you heartless little woman, are the verses
worth anything? Do you think she’ll like them?”
Kitty grew suddenly serious, and a curious look he could not read
deepened in her eyes. “Nurse ‘ll like them--of course she will,” she
said gently. “She’ll like them because they are you. Read them to her as
you read them to me, and she’ll only hear your voice, and she’ll think
them clever and you a wonderful man, even if you are fifty and weigh
a thousand pounds. It doesn’t matter to a woman what a man’s saying or
doing, or whether he’s so much cleverer than she is, if she knows that
under everything he’s saying, ‘I love you.’ A man isn’t that way, but a
woman is. Now go.” Again she pushed him with a small brown hand.
“Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!” he said admiringly.
“Then be a father to me,” she said teasingly.
“I can’t marry both your mother and nurse.”
“P’r’aps you can’t marry either,” she replied sarcastically, “and I know
that in any case you’ll never be any relative of mine by marriage. Get
going,” she said almost impatiently.
He turned to go, and she said after him, as he rolled away, “I’ll let
you hear some of my verses one day when you’re more developed and can
understand them.”
“I’ll bet they beat mine,” he called back.
“You’ll win your bet,” she answered, and stood leaning against a tree
with a curious look emerging and receding in her eyes. When he had
disappeared, sitting down, she drew from her breast a slip of paper,
unfolded it, and laid it on her knee. “It is better,” she said. “It’s
not good poetry, of course, but it’s truer, and it’s not done according
to a pattern like his. Yes, it’s real, real, real, and he’ll never see
it--never see it now, for I’ve fought it’ all out, and I’ve won.”
Then she slowly read the verses aloud:
“Yes, I’ve won,” she said with determination. So many of her sex have
said things just as decisively, and while yet the exhilaration of their
decision was inflaming them, have done what they said they would never,
never, never do. Still there was a look in the fair face which meant a
new force awakened in her character.
For a long time she sat brooding, forgetful of the present and of the
little comedy of elderly lovers going on inside the house. She was
thinking of the way conventions hold and bind us; of the lack of freedom
in the lives of all, unless they live in wild places beyond the social
pale. Within the past few weeks she had had visions of such a world
beyond this active and ordered civilisation, where the will and the
conscience of a man or woman was the only law. She was not lawless in
mind or spirit. She was only rebelling against a situation in which she
was bound hand and foot, and could not follow her honest and exclusive
desire, if she wished to do so.
Here was a man who was married, yet in a real sense who had no wife.
Suppose that man cared for her, what a tragedy it would be for them to
be kept apart! This man did not love her, and so there was no tragedy
for both. Still all was not over yet--yes, all was “over and over
and over,” she said to herself as she sprang to her feet with a sharp
exclamation of disgust--with herself.
Her mother was coming hurriedly towards her from the house. There was
a quickness in her walk suggesting excitement, yet from the look in her
face it was plain that the news she brought was not painful. “He told me
you were here, and--”
“Who told you I was here?”
“Mr. Bulrush.”
“So it’s all settled,” she said, with a little quirk of her shoulders.
“Yes, he’s asked her, and they’re going to be married. It’s enough to
make you die laughing to see the two middle-aged doves cooing in there.”
“I thought perhaps it would be you. He said he would like to be a father
to me.”
“That would prevent me if nothing else would,” answered the widow of
Tyndall Tynan. “A stepfather to an unmarried girl, both eyeing each
other for a chance to find fault--if you please, no thank you!”
“That means you won’t get married till I’m out of the way?” asked Kitty,
with a look which was as much touched with myrrh as with mirth.
“It means I wouldn’t get married till you are married, anyway,” was the
complacent answer.
“Is there any one special that--”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Since your father died I’ve only thought of his
child and mine, and I’ve not looked where I might. Instead, I’ve done
my best to prove that two women could live and succeed without a man
to earn for them; though of course without the pension it couldn’t have
been done in the style we’ve done it. We’ve got our place!”
There is a dignity attached to a pension which has an influence quite
its own, and in the most primitive communities it has an aristocratic
character which commands general respect. In Askatoon people gave Mrs.
Tynan a better place socially because of her pension than they would
have done if she had earned double the money which the pension brought
her.
“Everybody has called on us,” she added with reflective pride.
“Principally since Mr. Crozier came,” added Kitty. “It’s funny, isn’t
it, how he made people respect him before they knew who he was?”
“He would make Satan stand up and take off his hat, if he paid Hades a
visit,” said Mrs. Tynan admiringly. “Anybody’d do anything for him.”
Kitty eyed her mother closely. There was a strange, far-away, brooding
look in Mrs. Tynan’s eyes, and she seemed for a moment lost in thought.
“You’re in love with him,” said Kitty sharply.
“I was, in a way,” answered her mother frankly. “I was, in a way, a kind
of way, till I knew he was married. But it didn’t mean anything. I never
thought of it except as a thing that couldn’t be.”
“Why couldn’t it be?” asked Kitty, smothering an agitation rising in her
breast.
“Because I always knew he belonged to where we didn’t, and because if
he was going to be in love himself, it would be with some girl like you.
He’s young enough for that, and it’s natural he should get as his profit
the years of youth that a young woman has yet to live.”
“As though it was a choice between you and me, for instance!”
Mrs. Tynan started, but recovered herself. “Yes. If there had been any
choosing, he’d not have hesitated a minute. He’d have taken you, of
course. But he never gave either of us a thought that way.”
“I thought that till--till after he’d told us his story,” replied Kitty
boldly.
“What has happened since then?” asked her mother, with sudden
apprehension.
“Nothing has happened since. I don’t understand it, but it’s as though
he’d been asleep for a long time and was awake again.”
Mrs. Tynan gravely regarded her daughter, and a look of fear came into
her face. “I knew you kept thinking of him always,” she said; “but you
had such sense, and he never showed any feeling for you; and young
girls get over things. Besides, you always showed you knew he wasn’t a
possibility. But since he told us that day about his being married and
all, has--has he been different towards you?”
“Not a thing, not a word,” was the reply; “but--but there’s a difference
with him in a way. I feel it when I go in the room where he is.”
“You’ve got to stop thinking of him,” insisted the elder woman
querulously. “You’ve got to stop it at once. It’s no good. It’s bad for
you. You’ve too much sense to go on caring for a man that--”
“I’m going to get married,” said Kitty firmly. “I’ve made up my mind.
If you have to think about one person, you should stop thinking about
another; anyhow, you’ve got to make yourself stop. So I’m going to
marry--and stop.”
“Who are you going to marry, Kitty? You don’t mean to say it’s John
Sibley!”
“P’r’aps. He keeps coming.”
“That gambling and racing fellow!”
“He owns a big farm, and it pays, and he has got an interest in a mine,
and--”
“I tell you, you shan’t,” peevishly interjected Mrs. Tynan. “You shan’t.
He’s vicious. He’s--oh, you shan’t! I’d rather--”
“You’d rather I threw myself away--on a married man?” asked Kitty
covertly.
“My God--oh, Kitty!” said the other, breaking down. “You can’t mean
it--oh, you can’t mean that you’d--”
“I’ve got to work out my case in my own way,” broke in Kitty calmly. “I
know how I’ve got to do it. I have to make my own medicine--and take it.
You say John Sibley is vicious. He has only got one vice.”
“Isn’t it enough? Gambling--”
“That isn’t a vice; it’s a sport. It’s the same as Mr. Crozier had.
Mr. Crozier did it with horses only, the other does it with cards and
horses. The only vice John Sibley’s got is me.”
“Is you?” asked her mother bewilderedly.
“Well, when you’ve got an idea you can’t control and it makes you its
slave, it’s a vice. I’m John’s vice, and I’m thinking of trying to cure
him of it--and cure myself too,” Kitty added, folding and unfolding the
paper in her hand.
“Here comes the Young Doctor,” said her mother, turning towards the
house. “I think you don’t mean to marry Sibley, but if you do, make him
give up gambling.”
“I don’t know that I want him to give it up,” answered Kitty musingly.
A moment later she was alone with the Young Doctor.