“You look quite settled and at home,” the Young Doctor remarked, as he
offered Mrs. Crozier a chair. She took it, for never in her life had
she felt so small physically since coming to the great, new land. The
islands where she was born were in themselves so miniature that
the minds of their people, however small, were not made to feel
insignificant. But her mind, which was, after all, vastly larger in
proportion than the body enshrining it, felt suddenly that both
were lost in a universe. Her impulse was to let go and sink into the
helplessness of tears, to be overwhelmed by an unconquerable loneliness;
but the Celtic courage in her, added to that ancient native pride which
prevents one woman from giving way before another woman towards whom
she bears jealousy, prevented her from showing the weakness she felt.
Instead, it roused her vanity and made her choose to sit down, so
disguising perceptibly the disparity of height which gave Kitty
an advantage over her and made the Young Doctor like some menacing
Polynesian god.
Both these people had an influence and authority in Mona Crozier’s life
which now outweighed the advantage wealth gave her. Her wealth had not
kept her husband beside her when delicate and perfumed tyranny began
to flutter its banners of control over him. Her fortune had driven him
forth when her beauty and her love ought to have kept him close to her,
whatever fate might bring to their door, or whatever his misfortune or
the catastrophe falling on him. It was all deeply humiliating, and the
inward dejection made her now feel that her body was the last effort of
a failing creative power. So she sat down instead of standing up in a
vain effort at retrieval.
The Young Doctor sat down also, but Kitty did not, and in her buoyant
youth and command of the situation she seemed Amazonian to Mona’s eyes.
It must be said for Kitty that she remained standing only because a
restlessness had seized her which was not present when she was with Mona
in Crozier’s room. It was now as though something was going to happen
which she must face standing; as though something was coming out of
the unknown and forbidding future and was making itself felt before its
time. Her eyes were almost painfully bright as she moved about the room
doing little things. Presently she began to lay a cloth and place
dishes silently on the table--long before the proper time, as her mother
reminded her when she entered for a moment and then quickly passed on
into the kitchen, at a warning glance from Kitty, which said that the
Young Doctor and Mona were not to be disturbed.
“Well, Askatoon is a place where one feels at home quickly,” added
the Young Doctor, as Mona did not at once respond to his first remark.
“Every one who comes here always feels as though he--or she--owns the
place. It’s the way the place is made. The trouble with most of us is
that we want to put the feeling into practice and take possession of
‘all and sundry.’ Isn’t that true, Miss Tynan?”
“As true as most things you say,” retorted Kitty, as she flicked the
white tablecloth. “If mother and I hadn’t such wonderful good health I
suppose you’d come often enough here to give you real possession. Do you
know, Mrs. Crozier,” she added, with her wistful eyes vainly trying to
be merely mischievous, “he once charged me five dollars for torturing
me like a Red Indian. I had put my elbow out of joint, and he put it
in again with his knee and both hands, as though it was the wheel of a
wagon and he was trying to put on the tire.”
“Well, you were running round soon after,” answered the Young Doctor.
“But as for the five dollars, I only took it to keep you quiet. So long
as you had a grievance you would talk and talk and talk, and you never
were so astonished in your life as when I took that five dollars.”
“I’ve taken care never to dislocate my elbow since.”
“No, not your elbow,” remarked the Young Doctor meaningly, and turned to
Mona, who had now regained her composure.
“Well, I shan’t call you in to reduce the dislocation--that’s the
medical term, isn’t it?” persisted Kitty, with fire in her eyes.
“What is the dislocation?” asked Mona, with a subtle, inquiring look but
a manner which conveyed interest.
The Young Doctor smiled. “It’s only her way of saying that my mind is
unhinged and that I ought to be sent to a private hospital for two.”
“No--only one,” returned Kitty.
“Marriage means common catastrophe, doesn’t it?” he asked quizzically.
“Generally it means that one only is permanently injured,” replied
Kitty, lifting a tumbler and looking through it at him as though to see
if the glass was properly polished.
Mona was mystified. At first she thought there had been oblique
references to her husband, but these remarks about marriage would
certainly exclude him. Yet, would they exclude him? During the time in
which Shiel’s history was not known might there not have been--but no,
it could not have been so, for it was Kitty who had sent the letter
which had brought her to Askatoon.
“Are you to be married--soon?” she asked of Kitty, with a friendly yet
trembling smile, for her agitation was, despite appearances, troubling
every nerve.
“I’ve thought of it quite lately,” responded Kitty calmly, seating
herself now and looking straight into the eyes of the woman, who was
suggesting more truth than she knew.
“May I congratulate you? Am I justified on such slight acquaintance? I
am sure you have chosen wisely,” was the smooth rejoinder.
Kitty did not shrink from looking Mona in the eyes. “It isn’t quite time
for congratulations yet, and I’m not sure I’ve chosen wisely. My family
very strongly disapproves. I can’t help that, of course, and I may have
to elope and take the consequences.”
“It takes two to elope,” interposed the Young Doctor, who thought that
Kitty, in her humorous extravagance, was treading very dangerous ground
indeed. He was thinking of Crozier and Kitty; but Kitty was thinking
of Crozier, and meaning John Sibley. Somehow she could not help playing
with this torturing thing in the presence of the wife of the man who was
the real “man in possession” so far as her life was concerned.
“Why, he is waiting on the doorstep,” replied Kitty boldly and referring
only to John Sibley.
At that minute there was the crunch of gravel on the pathway and the
sound of a quick footstep. Kitty and Mona were on their feet at once.
Both recognised the step of Shiel Crozier. Presently the Young Doctor
recognised it also, but he rose with more deliberation.
At that instant a voice calling from the road arrested Crozier’s advance
to the open door of the room where they were. It was Jesse Bulrush
asking a question. Crozier paused in his progress, and in the moment’s
time it gave, Kitty, with a swift look of inquiry and with a burst of
the real soul in her, caught the hand of Crozier’s wife and pressed it
warmly. Then, with a face flushed and eyes that looked straight ahead
of her, she left the room as the Young Doctor went to the doorway and
stepped outside. Within ten feet of the door he met Crozier.
“How goes it, patient?” he said, standing in Crozier’s way. Being a man
who thought much and wisely for other people, he wanted to give the wife
time to get herself in control.
“Right enough in your sphere of operations,” answered Crozier.
“And not so right in other fields, eh?”
“I’ve come back after a fruitless hunt. They’ve got me, the thieves!”
said Crozier, with a look which gave his long face an almost tragic
austerity. Then suddenly the look changed, the mediaeval remoteness
passed, and a thought flashed up into his eyes which made his expression
alive with humour.
“Isn’t it wonderful, that just when a man feels he wants a rope to hang
himself with, the rope isn’t to be had?” he exclaimed. “Before he can
lay his hands on it he wants to hang somebody else, and then he has to
pause whether he will or no. Did I ever tell you the story of the old
Irishwoman who lived down at Kenmare, in Kerry? Well, she used to sit at
her doorway and lament the sorrows of the world with a depth of passion
that you’d think never could be assuaged. ‘Oh, I fale so bad, I am so
wake--oh, I do fale so bad,’ she used to say. ‘I wish some wan would
take me by the ear and lade me round to the ould shebeen, and set me
down, and fill a noggen of whusky and make me dhrink it--whether I would
or no!’ Whether I would or no I have to drink the cup of self-denial,”
Crozier continued, “though Bradley and his gang have closed every door
against me here, and I’ve come back without what I went for at Aspen
Vale, for my men were away. I’ve come back without what I went for,
but I must just grin and bear it.” He shrugged his shoulders and gave a
great sigh.
“Perhaps you’ll find what you went for here,” returned the Young Doctor
meaningly.
“There’s a lot here--enough to make a man think life worth
while”--inside the room the wife shrank at the words, for she could hear
all--“but just the same I’m not thinking the thing I went to look for is
hereabouts.”
“You never know your luck,” was the reply. “‘Ask and you shall find,
knock and it shall be opened unto you.’”
The long face blazed up with humour again. “Do you mean that I haven’t
asked you yet?” Crozier remarked, with a quizzical look, which had still
that faint hope against hope which is a painful thing for a good man’s
eyes to see.
The Young Doctor laid a hand on Crozier’s arm. “No, I didn’t mean that,
patient. I’m in that state when every penny I have is out to keep me
from getting a fall. I’m in that Starwhon coal-mine down at Bethbridge,
and it’s like a suction-pump. I couldn’t borrow a thousand dollars
myself now. I can’t do it, or I’d stand in with you, Crozier. No, I
can’t help you a bit; but step inside. There’s a room in this house
where you got back your life by the help of a knife. There’s another
room in there where you may get back your fortune by the help of a
wife.”
Stepping aside he gave the wondering Crozier a slight push forward into
the doorway, then left him and hurried round to the back of the house,
where he hoped he might see Kitty.
The Young Doctor found Kitty pumping water on a pail of potatoes and
stirring them with a broom-handle.
“A most unscientific way of cleaning potatoes,” he said, as Kitty did
not look at him. “If you put them in a trough where the water could run
off, the dirt would go with the water, and you would’nt waste time and
intelligence, and your fingers would be cleaner in the end.”
The only reply Kitty made was to flick the broomhead at him. It had been
dipped in water, and the spray from it slightly spattered his face.
“Will you never grow up?” he exclaimed as he applied a handkerchief to
his ruddy face.
“I’d like you so much better if you were younger--will you never be
young?” she asked.
“It makes a man old before his time to have to meet you day by day and
live near you.”
“Why don’t you try living with me?” she retorted. “Ah, then, you meant
me when you said to Mrs. Crozier that you were going to be married?
Wasn’t that a bit ‘momentary’? as my mother’s cook used to remark. I
think we haven’t ‘kept company’--you and I.”
“It’s true you haven’t been a beau of mine, but I’d rather marry you
than be obliged to live with you,” was the paradoxical retort.
“You have me this time,” he said, trying in vain to solve her reply.
Kitty tossed her head. “No, I haven’t got you this time, thank Heaven,
and I don’t want you; but I’d rather marry you than live with you, as I
said. Isn’t it the custom for really nice-minded people to marry to get
rid of each other--for five years, or for ever and ever and ever?”
“What a girl you are, Kitty Tynan!” he said reprovingly. He saw that she
meant Crozier and his wife.
Kitty ceased her work for an instant and, looking away from him into the
distance, said: “Three people said those same words to me all in one day
a thousand years ago. It was Mr. Crozier, Jesse Bulrush, and my mother;
and now you’ve said it a thousand years after; as with your inexpensive
education and slow mind you’d be sure to do.”
“I have an idea that Mrs. Crozier said the same to you also this very
day. Did she--come, did she?”
“She didn’t say, ‘What a girl you are!’ but in her mind she probably did
say, ‘What a vixen!”’
The Young Doctor nodded satirically. “If you continued as you began when
coming from the station, I’m sure she did; and also I’m sure it wasn’t
wrong of her to say it.”
“I wanted her to say it. That’s why I uttered the too, too utter-things,
as the comic opera says. What else was there to do? I had to help cure
her.”
“To cure her of what, miss?”
“Of herself, doctor-man.”
The Young Doctor’s look became graver. He wondered greatly at this young
girl’s sage instinct and penetration. “Of herself? Ah, yes, to think
more of some one else than herself! That is--”
“Yes, that is love,” Kitty answered, her head bent over the pail and
stirring the potatoes hard.
“I suppose it is,” he answered.
“I know it is,” she returned.
“Is that why you are going to be married?” he asked quizzically.
“It will probably cure the man I marry of himself,” she retorted. “Oh,
neither of us know what we are talking about--let’s change the subject!”
she added impatiently now, with a change of mood, as she poured the
water off the potatoes.
There was a moment’s silence in which they were both thinking of the
same thing. “I wonder how it’s all going inside there?” he remarked. “I
hope all right, but I have my doubts.”
“I haven’t any doubt at all. It isn’t going right,” she answered
ruefully; “but it has to be made go right.”
“Whom do you think can do that?”
Kitty looked him frankly and decisively in the face. Her eyes had the
look of a dreaming pietist for the moment. The deep-sea soul of her
was awake. “I can do it if they don’t break away altogether at once. I
helped her more than you think. I told her I had opened that letter.”
He gasped. “My dear girl--that letter--you told her you had done such a
thing, such--!”
“Don’t dear girl me, if you please. I know what I am doing. I told her
that and a great deal more. She won’t leave this house the woman she was
yesterday. She is having a quick cure--a cure while you wait.”
“Perhaps he is cured of her,” remarked the Young Doctor very gravely.
“No, no, the disease might have got headway, but it didn’t,” Kitty
returned, her face turned away. “He became a little better; but he was
never cured. That’s the way with a man. He can never forget a woman he
has once cared for, and he can go back to her half loving her; but it
isn’t the case with a woman. There’s nothing so dead to a woman as a man
when she’s cured of him. The woman is never dead to the man, no matter
what happens.”
The Young Doctor regarded her with a strange, new interest and a puzzled
surprise. “Sappho--Sappho, how did you come to know these things!” he
exclaimed. “You are only a girl at best, or something of a boy-girl at
worst, and yet you have, or think you have, got into those places which
are reserved for the old-timers in life’s scramble. You talk like an
ancient dame.”
Kitty smiled, but her eyes had a slumbering look as if she was half
dreaming. “That’s the mistake most of you make--men and women. There’s
such a thing as instinct, and there’s such a thing as keeping your eyes
open.”
“What did Mrs. Crozier say when you told her about opening that
five-year-old letter? Did she hate you?”
Kitty nodded with wistful whimsicality. “For a minute she was like an
industrious hornet. Then I made her see she wouldn’t have been here at
all if I hadn’t opened it. That made, her come down from the top of
her nest on the church-spire, and she said that, considering my
opportunities, I was not such an aboriginal after all.”
“Now, look you, Saphira, prospective wife of Ananias, she didn’t say
that, of course. Still, it doesn’t matter, does it? The point is,
suppose he opens that letter now.”
“If he does, he’ll probably not go with her. It was a letter that would
send a man out with a scalping-knife. Still, if Mr. Crozier had his
land-deal through he might not read the letter as it really is. His
brain wouldn’t then be grasping what his eyes saw.”
“He hasn’t got his land-deal through. He told me so just now before he
saw her.”
“Then it’s ora pro nobis--it’s pray for us hard,” rejoined Kitty
sorrowfully. “Poor man from Kerry!” At that moment Mrs. Tynan came from
the house, her face flushed, her manner slightly agitated. “John Sibley
is here, Kitty--with two saddle-horses.... He says you promised to ride
with him to-day.”
“I probably did,” responded Kitty calmly. “It’s a good day for riding
too. But John will have to wait. Please tell him to come back at six
o’clock. There’ll be plenty of time for an hour’s ride before sundown.”
“Are you lame, dear child?” asked her mother ironically. “Because if
you’re not, perhaps you’ll be your own messenger. It’s no way to treat a
friend--or whatever you like to call him.”
Kitty smiled tenderly at her mother. “Then would you mind telling him
to come here, mother darling? I’m giving this doctor-man a prescription.
Ah, please do what I ask you, mother! It is true about the prescription.
It’s not for himself; it’s for the foreign people quarantined inside.”
She nodded towards the room where Shiel Crozier and his wife were
shaping their fate.
As her mother disappeared with a gesture of impatience and the remark
that she washed her hands of the whole Sibley business, the Young Doctor
said to Kitty, “What is your prescription, Ma’m’selle Saphira? Suppose
they come out of quarantine with a clean bill of health?”
“If they do that you needn’t make up the prescription. But if Aspen Vale
hasn’t given him what he wanted, then Mr. Shiel Crozier will still be an
exile from home and the angel in the house.”
“What is the prescription? Out with your Sibylline leaves!”
“It’s in that unopened letter. When the letter is opened you’ll see it
effervesce like a seidlitz powder.”
“But suppose I am not here when the letter is opened?”
“You must be here-you must. You’ll stay now, if you please.”
“I’m afraid I can’t. I have patients waiting.” Kitty made an impetuous
gesture of command. “There are two patients here who are at the crisis
of their disease. You may be wanted to save a life any minute now.”
“I thought that with your prescription you were to be the AEsculapius.”
“No, I’m only going to save the reputation of AEsculapius by giving him
a prescription got from a quack to give to a goose.”
“Come, come, no names. You are incorrigible. I believe you’d have your
joke on your death-bed.”
“I should if you were there. I should die laughing,” Kitty retorted.
“There will be no death-bed for you, miss. You’ll be translated--no,
that’s not right; no one could translate you.”
“God might--or a man I loved well enough not to marry him.”
There was a note of emotion in her laugh as she uttered the words. It
did not escape the ear of the Young Doctor, who regarded her fixedly
for a moment before he said: “I’m not sure that even He would be able to
translate you. You speak your own language, and it’s surely original. I
am only just learning its alphabet. No one else speaks it. I have a
fear that you’ll be terribly lonely as you travel along the trail, Kitty
Tynan.”
A light of pleasure came into Kitty’s eyes, though her face was a little
drawn. “You really do think I’m original--that I’m myself and not like
anybody else?” she asked him with a childlike eagerness.
“Almost more than any one I ever met,” answered the Young Doctor gently;
for he saw that she had her own great troubles, and he also felt now
fully what this comedy or tragedy inside the house meant to her. “But
you’re terribly lonely--and that’s why: because you are the only one of
your kind.”
“No, that’s why I’m not going to be lonely,” she said, nodding towards
the corner of the house where John Sibley appeared.
Suddenly, with a gesture of confidence and almost of affection, she laid
a hand on the Young Doctor’s breast. “I’ve left the trail, doctor-man.
I’m cutting across the prairie. Perhaps I shall reach camp and perhaps
I shan’t; but anyhow I’ll know that I met one good man on the way. And
I also saw a resthouse that I’d like to have stayed at, but the blinds
were drawn and the door was locked.”
There was a strange, eerie look in her face again as her eyes of soft
umber dwelt on his for a moment; then she turned with a gay smile to
John Sibley, who had seen her hand on the Young Doctor’s chest without
dismay; for the joy of Kitty was that she hid nothing; and, anyhow, the
Young Doctor had a place of his own; and also, anyhow, Kitty did what
she pleased. Once when she had visited the Coast the Governor had talked
to her with great gusto and friendliness; and she had even gone so far
as to touch his arm while, chuckling at her whimsically, he listened
to a story she told him of life at the rail-head. And the Governor had
patted her fingers in quite a fatherly way--or not, as the mind of the
observer saw it; while subsequently his secretary had written verses to
her.
“So you’ve been gambling again--you’ve broken your promise to me,” she
said reprovingly to Sibley, but with that wonderful, wistful laughter in
her eyes.
Sibley looked at her in astonishment. “Who told you?” he asked. It had
only happened the night before, and it didn’t seem possible she could
know.
He was quite right. It wasn’t possible she could know, and she didn’t
know. She only divined.
“I knew when you made the promise you couldn’t keep it; that’s why I
forgive you now,” she added. “Knowing what I did about you, I oughtn’t
to have let you make it.”
The Young Doctor saw in her words a meaning that John Sibley could
never have understood, for it was a part of the story of Crozier’s life
reproduced--and with what a different ending!