When Crozier stepped out of the bright sunlight into the shady
living-room of the Tynan home, his eyes were clouded by the memory of
his conference with Studd Bradley and his financial associates, and by
the desolate feeling that the five years since he had left England had
brought him nothing--nothing at all except a new manhood. But that he
did not count an asset, because he had not himself taken account of this
new capital. He had never been an introspective man in the philosophic
sense, and he never had thought that he was of much account. He had
lived long on his luck, and nothing had come of it--“nothing at all,
at all,” as he said to himself when he stepped inside the room where,
unknown to him, his wife awaited him. So abstracted was he, so disturbed
was his gaze (fixed on the inner thing), that he did not see the figure
in blue and white over against the wall, her hand on the big arm-chair
once belonging to Tyndall Tynan, and now used always by Shiel Crozier,
“the white-haired boy of the Tynan sanatorium,” as Jesse Bulrush had
called him.
There was a strange timidity, and a fear not so strange, in Mona’s
eyes as she saw her husband enter with that quick step which she had so
longingly remembered after he had fled from her; but of which she had
taken less account when he was with her at Lammis long ago-When Crozier
of Lammis was with her long ago. How tall and shapely he was! How large
he loomed with the light behind him! How shadowed his face and how
distant the look in his eyes.
Somehow the room seemed too small for him, and yet he had lived in this
very house for four years and more; he had slept in the next room all
that time; had eaten at this table and sat in this very chair--Mrs.
Tynan had told her that--for this long time, like the master of a
household. With that far-away, brooding look in his face, he seemed in
one sense as distant from her as when she was in London in those dreary,
desolate years with no knowledge of his whereabouts, a widow in every
sense save one; but in her acts--that had to be said for her--a wife
always and not a widow. She had not turned elsewhere, though there had
been temptation enough to do so.
Crozier advanced to the centre of the room, even to the table laid for
dinner, before he was conscious of some one in the room, of a figure
by the chair. For a moment he stood still, startled as if he had seen a
vision, and his sight became blurred. When it cleared, Mona had come a
step nearer to him, and then he saw her clearly. He caught his breath as
though Life had burst upon him with some staggering revelation. If she
had been a woman of genius, as in her way Kitty Tynan was, she would
have spoken before he had a chance to do so. Instead, she wished to see
how he would greet her, to hear what he would say. She was afraid of him
now. It was not her gift to do the right thing by perfect instinct; she
had to think things out; and so she did now. Still it has to be said
for her that she also had a strange, deep sense of apprehension in the
presence of the man whose arms had held her fast, and then let her go
for so bitter a length of time, in which her pride was lacerated and her
heart brought low. She did not know how she was going to be met now,
and a womanly shyness held her back. If she had said one word--his name
only--it might have made a world of difference to them both at that
moment; for he was tortured by failure, and now when hope was gone,
here was the woman whom he had left in order to force gifts from fate to
bring himself back to her.
“You--you here!” he exclaimed hoarsely. He did not open his arms to her
or go a step nearer to her. His look was that of blank amazement, of
mingled remembrance and stark realisation. This was a turn of affairs
for which he had made no calculation. There had ever been the question
of his return to her, but never of her coming to him. Yet here she was,
debonnaire and fresh and perfectly appointed--and ah, so terribly neat
and spectacularly finessed! Here she was with all that expert formality
which, in the old days, had been a reproach to his loosely-swung life
and person, to his careless, almost slovenly but well-brushed, cleanly,
and polished ease--not like his wife, as though he had been poured out
of a mould and set up to dry. He was not tailor-made, and she had ever
been so exact that it was as though she had been crystallised, clothes
and all--a perfect crystal, yet a crystal. It was this very perfection,
so charming to see, but in a sense so inhuman, which had ever dismayed
him. “What should I be doing in the home of an angel!” he had exclaimed
to himself in the old home at Lammis.
Truth is, he ought never to have had such a feeling, and he would not
have had it, if she had diffused the radiance of love, which would have
made her outer perfectness mere slovenliness beside her inner charm and
magnetism. Very little of all this passed through Crozier’s mind, as
with confused vision he looked at her. He had borne the ordeal of the
witness-box in the Logan Trial with superb coolness; he had been in
physical danger over and over again, and had kept his head; he had never
been faced by a human being who embarrassed him--except his own wife.
“There is no fear like that of one’s own wife,” was the saying of an
ancient philosopher, and Crozier had proved it true; not because
of errors committed, but because he was as sensitive as a girl of
sensibility; because he felt that his wife did not understand him, and
he was ever in fear of doing the wrong thing, while eager beyond telling
to please her. After all, during the past five years, parted from her
while loving her, there had still been a feeling of relief unexplainable
to himself in not having to think whether he was pleasing her or not,
or to reproach himself constantly that he was failing to conform to her
standard.
“How did you come--why? How did you know?” he asked helplessly, as
she made no motion to come nearer; as she kept looking at him with an
expression in her eyes wholly unfamiliar to him. Yet it was not wholly
unfamiliar, for it belonged to the days when he courted her, when she
seemed to have got nearer to him than in the more intimate relations of
married life.
“Is--is that all you have to say to me, Shiel?” she asked, with a
swelling note of feeling in her voice; while there was also emerging in
her look an elusive pride which might quickly become sharp indignation.
That her deserter should greet her so after five years of such offence
to a woman’s self-respect, as might entitle her to become a rebel
against matrimony, was too cruel to be borne. This feeling suddenly
became alive in her, in spite of a joy in her heart different from that
which she had ever known; in defiance of the fact that now that they
were together once more, what would she not do to prevent their being
driven apart again!
“After abandoning me for five years, is that all you have to say to me,
Shiel? After I have suffered before the world--”
He threw up his arms with a passionate gesture. “The world!” he
exclaimed--“the devil take the world! I’ve been out of it for five
years, and well out of it. What do I care for the world!”
She drew herself up in a spirit of defence. “It isn’t what you care
for the world, but I had to live in it--alone, and because I was alone,
eyebrows were lifted. It has been easy enough for you. You were where no
one knew you. You had your freedom”--she advanced to the table, and, as
though unconsciously, he did the same, and they gazed at each other over
the white linen and its furnishings--“and no one was saying that your
wife had left you for this or that, because of her bad conduct or of
yours. Either way it was not what was fair and just; yet I had to bear
and suffer, not you. There is no pain like it. There I was in misery
and--”
A bitter smile came to his lips. “A woman can endure a good deal when
she has all life’s luxuries in her grasp. Did you ever think, Mona, that
a man must suffer when he goes out into a world where he knows no one,
penniless, with no trade, no profession, nothing except his own helpless
self? He might have stayed behind among the luxuries that belonged to
another, and eaten from the hand of his wife’s charity, but”--(all the
pride and pain of the old situation rose up in him, impelled by the
brooding of the years of separation, heightened by the fact that he was
no nearer to his goal of financial independence of her than he was when
he left London five years before)--“but do you think, no matter what
I’ve done, broken a pledge or not, been in the wrong a thousand times as
much as I was, that I’d be fed by the hand of one to whom I had given a
pledge and broken it? Do you think that I’d give her the chance to say,
or not to say, but only think, ‘I forgive you; I will give you your food
and clothes and board and bed, but if you are not good in the future, I
will be very, very angry with you’? Do you think--?”
His face was flaming now. The pent-up flood of remorse and resentment
and pride and love--the love that tore itself in pieces because it
had not the pride and self-respect which independence as to money
gives--broke forth in him, fresh as he was from a brutal interview with
the financial clique whom he had given the chance to make much money,
and who were now, for a few thousand dollars, trying to cudgel him out
of his one opportunity to regain his place in his lost world.
“I live--I live like this,” he continued, with a gesture that embraced
the room where they were, “and I have one room to myself where I have
lived over four years”--he pointed towards it. “Do you think I would
choose this and all it means--its poverty and its crudeness, its
distance from all I ever had and all my people had, if I could have
stood the other thing--a pauper taking pennies from his own wife? I had
had taste enough of it while I had a little something left; but when
I lost everything on Flamingo, and I was a beggar, I knew I could not
stand the whole thing. I could not, would not, go under the poor-law
and accept you, with the lash of a broken pledge in your hand, as my
guardian. So that’s why I left, and that’s why I stay here, and that’s
why I’m going to stay here, Mona.”
He looked at her firmly, though his face had that illumination which
the spirit in his eyes--the Celtic fire drawn through the veins of his
ancestors--gave to all he did and felt; and now as in a dream he saw
little things in her he had never seen before. He saw that a little
strand of her beautiful dark hair had broken away from its ordered
place and hung prettily against the rosy, fevered skin of her cheek just
beside her ear. He saw that there were no rings on her fingers save one,
and that was her wedding-ring--and she had always been fond of wearing
rings. He noted, involuntarily, that in her agitation the white tulle
at her bosom had been disturbed into pretty disarray, and that there was
neither brooch nor necklace at her breast or throat.
“If you stay, I am going to stay too,” she declared in an almost
passionate voice, and she spoke with deliberation and a look which left
no way open to doubt. She was now a valiant little figure making a fight
for happiness.
“I can’t prevent that,” he responded stubbornly.
She made a quick, appealing motion of her hands. “Would you prevent it?
Aren’t you glad to see me? Don’t you love me any more? You used to
love me. In spite of all, you used to love me. Even though you hated my
money, and I hated your gambling--your betting on horses. You used to
love me--I was sure you did then. Don’t you love me now, Shiel?”
A gloomy look passed over his face. Memory of other days was admonishing
him. “What is the good of one loving when the other doesn’t? And,
anyhow, I made up my mind five years ago that I would not live on my
wife. I haven’t done so, and I don’t mean to ‘do so. I don’t mean to
take a penny of your money. I should curse it to damnation if I was
living on it. I’m not, and I don’t mean to do so.”
“Then I’ll stay here and work too, without it,” she urged, with a light
in her eyes which they had never known.
He laughed mirthlessly. “What could you do--you never did a day’s work
in your life!”
“You could teach me how, Shiel.”
His jaw jerked in a way it had when he was incredulous. “You used to
say I was only--mark you, only a dreamer and a sportsman. Well, I’m no
longer a dreamer and a sportsman; I’m a practical man. I’ve done with
dreaming and sportsmanship. I can look at a situation as it is, and--”
“You are dreaming--but yes, you are dreaming still,” she interjected.
“And you are a sportsman still, but it is the sport of a dreamer, and a
mad dreamer too. Shiel, in spite of all my faults in the past, I come
to you, to stay with you, to live on what you earn if you like, if it’s
only a loaf of bread a day. I--I don’t care about my money. I don’t care
about the luxuries which money can buy; I can do without them if I have
you. Am I not to stay, and won’t you--won’t you kiss me, Shiel?”
She came close to him-came round the table till she stood within a few
feet of him.
There was one trembling instant when he would have taken her hungrily
into his arms, but as if some evil spirit interposed with malign
purpose, there came the sound of feet on the gravel outside, and the
figure of a man darkened the doorway. It was Augustus Burlingame, whose
face as he saw Mona Crozier took on an ironical smile.
“Yes--what do you want?” inquired Crozier quietly. “A few words with Mr.
Crozier on business, if he is not too much occupied?”
“What business?”
“I am acting for Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons.”
The cloud darkened on Crozier’s face. His lips tightened, his face
hardened. “I will see you in a moment--wait outside, please,” he added,
as Burlingame made as though to step inside. “Wait at the gate,” he
added quietly, but with undisguised contempt.
The moment of moments for Mona and himself had passed. All the
bitterness of defeat was on him again. All the humiliation of undeserved
failure to accomplish what had been the dear desire of five years bore
down his spirit now. Suddenly he had a suspicion that his wife had
received information of his whereabouts from this very man, Burlingame.
Had not the Young Doctor said that Burlingame had written to lawyers
in the old land to get information concerning him? Was it not more than
likely that he had given his wife the knowledge which had brought her
here?
When Burlingame had disappeared he turned to Mona. “Who told you I was
here? Who wrote to you?” he asked darkly. The light had died away from
his face. It was ascetic in its lonely gravity now.
“Your doctor cabled to Castlegarry and Miss Tynan wrote to me.”
A faint flush spread over Crozier’s face. “How did Miss Tynan know where
to write?”
Mona had told the truth at once because she felt it was the only way.
Now, however, she was in a position where she must either tell him that
Kitty had opened that still sealed letter from herself to him which he
had carried all these years, or else tell him an untruth. She had no
right to tell him what Kitty had confided to her. There was no other way
save to lie.
“How should I know? It was enough for me to get her letter,” she
replied.
“At Castlegarry?”
What was there to do? She must keep faith with Kitty, who had given her
this sight of her husband again.
“Forwarded from Lammis,” she said. “It reached me before the doctor’s
cable.”
So it was Kitty--Kitty Tynan-who had brought his wife to this new home
from which he had been trying so hard to get back to the old home.
Kitty, the angel of the house.
“You wrote me a letter which drove me from home,” he said heavily.
“No--no--no,” she protested. “It was not that. I know it was not that.
It was my money--it was that which drove you away. You have just said
so.”
“You wrote me a hateful letter,” he persisted. “You didn’t want to see
me. You sent it to me by your sweet, young brother.”
Her eyes flashed. “My letter did not drive you away. It couldn’t have.
You went because you did not love me. It was that and my money, not the
letter, not the letter.”
Somehow she had a curious feeling that the very letter which contained
her bitter and hateful reproaches might save her yet. The fact that he
had not opened it--well, she must see Kitty again. Her husband was in a
dark mood. She must wait. She knew that her fortunate moment had passed
when the rogue Burlingame appeared. She must wait for another.
“Shall I go now? You want to see that man outside. Shall I go, Shiel?”
She was very pale, very quiet, steady and gentle.
“I must hear what that fellow has to say. It is business--important,” he
replied. “It may mean anything--everything, or nothing.”
As she left the room he had an impulse to call her back, but he
conquered it.