For a moment Crozier stood looking at the closed doorway through which
Mona had gone, with a look of repentant affection in his eyes; but as
the thought of his own helpless insolvency and broken hopes flashed
across his mind, a look of dark and harassed reflection shadowed
his face. He turned to the front doorway with a savage gesture. The
mutilated dignity of his manhood, the broken pride of a lifetime, the
bitterness in his heart need not be held in check in dealing with the
man who waited to give him a last thrust of enmity.
He left the house. Burlingame was seated on the stump of a tree which
had been made into a seat. “Come to my room if you have business with
me,” Crozier said sharply.
As they went, Crozier swung aside from the front door towards the corner
of the house.
“The back way?” asked Burlingame with a sneer.
“The old familiar way to you,” was the smarting reply. “In any case, you
are not welcome in Mrs. Tynan’s part of the house. My room is my own,
however, and I should prefer you within four walls while doing business
with you.”
Burlingame’s face changed colour slightly, for the tone of Crozier’s
voice, the grimness of his manner, suggested an abnormal condition.
Burlingame was not a brave man physically. He had never lived the
outdoor life, though he had lived so much among outdoor people. He was
that rare thing in a new land, a decadent, a connoisseur in vice,
a lover of opiates and of liquor. He was young enough yet not to be
incapacitated by it. His face and hands were white and a little flabby,
and he wore his hair rather long, which, it is said, accounts for
the weakness of some men, on the assumption that long hair wastes
the strength. But Burlingame quickly remembered the attitude of the
lady--Crozier’s wife, he was certain--and of Crozier in the
dining-room a few moments before, and to his suspicious eyes it was
not characteristic of a happy family party. No doubt this grimness of
Crozier was due to domestic trouble and not wholly to his own presence.
Still, he felt softly for the tiny pistol he always carried in his big
waistcoat pocket, and it comforted him.
Beyond the corner of the house Crozier paused and took a key from his
pocket. It opened a side door to his own room, seldom used, since it
was always so pleasant in this happy home to go through the main
living-room, which every one liked so much that, though it was not the
dining-room, it was generally used as such, and though it was not the
parlour, it was its frequent substitute. Opening the door, Crozier
stepped aside to let Burlingame pass. It was two years since Burlingame
had been in this room, and then he had entered it without invitation.
His inquisitiveness had led him to explore it with no good intent when
he lived in the house.
Entering now, he gave it quick scrutiny. It was clear he was looking
for something in particular. He was, in fact, searching for signs of its
occupancy by another than Shiel Crozier--tokens of a woman’s presence.
There was, however, no sign at all of that, though there were signs of
a woman’s care and attention in a number of little things--homelike,
solicitous, perhaps affectionate care and attention. Certainly the
spotless pillows, the pretty curtains, the pincushion, and charmingly
valanced bed and shelves, cheap though the material was, showed a
woman’s very friendly care. When he lived in that house there were no
such little attentions paid to him! It was his experience that where
such attentions went something else went with them. A sensualist
himself, it was not conceivable to him that men and women could be under
the same roof without “passages of sympathetic friendship and tokens of
affinity.” That was a phrase he had frequently used when pursuing his
own sort of happiness.
His swift scrutiny showed that Crozier’s wife had no habitation here,
and that gave him his cue for what the French call “the reconstruction
of the crime.” It certainly was clear that, as he had suggested at the
Logan Trial, there was serious trouble in the Crozier family of two, and
the offender must naturally be the man who had flown, not the woman who
had stayed. Here was circumstantial evidence.
His suggestive glance, the look in his eyes, did not escape Crozier,
who read it all aright; and a primitive expression of natural antipathy
passed across his mediaeval face, making it almost inquisitorial.
“Will you care to sit?” he said, however, with the courtesy he could
never avoid; and he pointed to a chair beside the little table in the
centre of the room. As Burlingame sat down he noticed on the table a
crumpled handkerchief. It had lettering in the corner. He spread it out
slightly with his fingers, as though abstractedly thinking of what he
was about to say. The initial in the corner was K. Kitty had left it
on the table while she was talking to Mrs. Crozier a halfhour before.
Whatever Burlingame actually thought or believed, he could not now
resist picking up the handkerchief and looking at it with a mocking
smile. It was too good a chance to waste. He still hugged to his evil
heart the humiliating remembrance of his expulsion from this house, the
share Crozier had had in it, and the things which Crozier had said
to him then. He had his enemy now between the upper and the nether
mill-stones, and he meant to grind him to the flour of utter abasement.
It was clear that the arrival of Mrs. Crozier had brought him no relief,
for Crozier’s face was not that of a man who had found and opened a
casket of good fortune.
“Rather dangerous that, in the bedroom of a family man,” he said,
picking up the handkerchief and looking suggestively from the lettering
in the corner to Crozier. He laid it down again, smiling detestably.
Crozier calmly picked up the handkerchief, saw the lettering, then went
quietly to the door of the room and called Mrs. Tynan’s name. Presently
she appeared. Crozier beckoned her into the room. When she entered, he
closed the door behind her.
“Mrs. Tynan,” he said, “this fellow found your daughter’s handkerchief
on my table, and he has said regarding it, ‘Rather dangerous that, in
the bedroom of a family man.’ What would you like me to do with him?”
Mrs. Tynan walked up to Burlingame with the look of a woman of the
Commune and said: “If I had a son I would disown him if he didn’t mangle
you till your wife would never know you again, you loathesome thing.
There isn’t a man or woman in Askatoon who’d believe your sickening
slanders, for every one knows what you are. How dare you enter this
house? If the men of Askatoon had any manhood in them they would
tar-and-feather you. My girl is as good as any girl that ever lived, and
you know it. Now go out of here--now!”
Crozier intervened quietly. “Mrs. Tynan, I asked him in here because
it is my room. I have some business with him. When it is over, then he
shall go, and we will fumigate the place. As for the tar-and-feathers,
you might leave that to me. I think I can arrange it.
“I’ll turn the hose on him as he goes out, if you don’t mind,” the irate
mother exclaimed as she left the room.
Crozier nodded. “Well, that would be appropriate, Mrs. Tynan, but it
wouldn’t cleanse him. He is the original leopard whose spots are there
for ever.”
By this time Burlingame was on his feet, and a look of craft and fear
and ugly meaning was in his face. Morally he was a coward, physically he
was a coward, but he had in his pocket a weapon which gave him a
feeling of superiority in the situation; and after a night of extreme
self-indulgence he was in a state of irritation of the nerves which gave
him what the searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
call “brain-storms.” He had had sense enough to know that his amorous
escapades would get him into trouble one day, and he had always carried
the little pistol which was now so convenient to his hand. It gave him
a fictitious courage which he would not have had unarmed against almost
any man--or woman--in Askatoon.
“You get a woman to do your fighting for you,” he said hatefully. “You
have to drag her in. It was you I meant to challenge, not the poor
girl young enough to be your daughter.” His hand went to his waistcoat
pocket. Crozier saw and understood.
Suddenly Crozier’s eyes blazed. The abnormal in him--the Celtic strain
always at variance with the normal, an almost ultra-natural attendant
of it awoke like a tempest in the tropics. His face became transformed,
alive with a passion uncanny in its recklessness and purpose. It was a
brain-storm indeed, but it had behind it a normal power, a moral force
which was not to be resisted.
“None of your sickly melodrama here. Take out of your pocket the pistol
you carry and give it to me,” Crozier growled. “You are not to
be trusted. The habit of thinking you would shoot somebody some
time--somebody you had injured--might become too much for you to-day,
and then I should have to kill you, and for your wife’s sake I don’t
want to do that. I always feel sorry for a woman with a husband like
you. You could never shoot me. You couldn’t be quick enough, but you
might try. Then I should end you, and there’d be another trial; but the
lawyer who defended me would not have to cross-examine any witness
about your character. It is too well-known, Burlingame. Out with it--the
pistol!” he added, standing menacingly over the other.
In a kind of stupor, under the storm that was breaking above him,
Burlingame slowly drew out of a capacious waistcoat pocket a tiny but
powerful pistol of the most modern make.
“Put it in my hand,” insisted Crozier, his eyes on the other’s.
The flabby hand laid the weapon in Crozier’s lean and strenuous fingers.
Crozier calmly withdrew the cartridges and then tossed the weapon back
on the table.
“Now we have equality of opportunity,” he remarked quietly. “If you
think you would like to repeat any slander that’s slid off your foul
tongue, do it now; and in a moment or two Mrs. Tynan can turn the hose
on the floor of this room.”
“I want to get to business,” said Burlingame sullenly, as he took from
his pocket a paper.
Crozier nodded. “I can imagine your haste,” he remarked. “You need all
the fees you can get to pay Belle Bingley’s bills.”
Burlingame did not wince. He made no reply to the challenge that he was
the chief supporter of a certain wanton thereabouts.
“The time for your option to take ten thousand dollars’ worth of shares
in the syndicate is up,” he said; “and I am instructed to inform you
that Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons propose to take over
your unpaid shares and to complete the transaction without you.”
“Who informed Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter, & Simmons that I am
not prepared to pay for my shares?” asked Crozier sharply.
“The time is up,” surlily replied Burlingame. “It is assumed you can’t
take up your shares, and that you don’t want to do so. The time us up,”
he added emphatically, and he tapped the paper spread before him on the
table.
Crozier’s eyes half closed in an access of stubbornness and hatred.
“You are not to assume anything whatever,” he declared. “You are to
accommodate yourself to actual facts. The time is not up. It is not up
till midnight, and any action taken before then on any other assumption
will give grounds for damages.”
Crozier spoke without passion and with a coldblooded insistence not lost
on Burlingame. Taking down a calendar from the wall, he laid it beside
the paper on the table before the too eager lawyer. “Examine the dates,”
he said. “At twelve o’clock tonight Messrs. Bradley, Willingden, Baxter,
& Simmons are free to act, if the money is not at the disposal of the
syndicate by then; but till then my option is indefeasible. Does that
meet the case or not?”
“It meets the case,” said Burlingame in a morose voice, rising. “If
you can produce the money before the stroke of midnight, why can’t you
produce it now? What’s the use of bluffing! It can’t do any good in the
end. Your credit--”
“My credit has been stopped by your friends,” interrupted Crozier, “but
my resources are current.”
“Midnight is not far off,” viciously remarked Burlingame as he made for
the door.
Crozier intercepted him. “One word with you on another business before
you go,” he said. “The tar-and-feathers for which Mrs. Tynan asks will
be yours at any moment I raise my hand in Askatoon. There are enough
women alone who would do it.”
“Talk of that after midnight,” sneered Burlingame desperately as the
door was opened for him by Crozier. “Better not go out by the front
gate,” remarked Crozier scornfully. “Mrs. Tynan is a woman of her word,
and the hose is handy.”
A moment later, with contemptuous satisfaction, he saw Burlingame climb
the picket-fence at the side of the house.
Turning back into the room, he threw up his arms.
“Midnight--midnight--my God, where am I to get the money! I must--I must
have it... It’s the only way back.”
Sitting down at the table, he dropped his head into his hands and shut
his eyes in utter dejection. “Mona--by Heaven, no, I’ll never take it
from her!” he said once, and clenched his hands at his temples and sat
on and on unmoving.