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:
“Whereaway goes my lad--tell me, has he gone alone?
Never harsh word did I speak, never hurt I gave;
Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flown
Hereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.
“When once more the lad I loved hereaway, hereaway,
Comes to lay his hand in mine, kiss me on the brow,
I will whisper down the wind, he will weep to hear me say--
‘Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?’”
He went to bed again, but sleep would not come. The verses of the lament
kept singing in his brain. He tossed from side to side, he sought to
control himself, but it was of no avail. Suddenly he remembered the bed
of boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her
meeting with the Young Doctor the previous day. Before he was shot he
used to sleep in the open in the summer-time. If he could get to sleep
anywhere it would be there.
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!
“Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
Held my hand, and laid his cheek warm against my brow,
Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies
Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?”
How different she was, this child of the West, of Nature, from the
woman he had left behind in England, the sophisticated, well-appointed,
well-controlled girl; too well-controlled even in the first days of
married life; too well-controlled for him who had the rushing impulses
of a Celtic warrior of olden days. Delicate, refined, perfectly
poised, and Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope!
Mona--Kitty, the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life,
each in her own way, as none others had done, they floated before his
eyes till sight and feeling grew dim. With a last effort he strove to
eject Kitty from his thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the
race of life, and he must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly,
even in exile from her, run straight, even with that unopened, bitter,
upbraiding letter in the--
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.