You Never Know Your Luck: Chapter 1
Chapter 1
PROEM
Have you ever seen it in reaping-time? A sea of gold it is, with gentle
billows telling of sleep and not of storm, which, like regiments afoot,
salute the reaper and say, "All is fulfilled in the light of the sun and
the way of the earth; let the sharp knife fall." The countless million
heads are heavy with fruition, and sun glorifies and breeze cradles them
to the hour of harvest. The air-like the tingle of water from a
mountain-spring in the throat of the worn wayfarer, bringing a sense of
the dust of the world flushed away.
Arcady? Look closely. Like islands in the shining yellow sea, are
houses--sometimes in a clump of trees, sometimes only like bare-backed
domesticity or naked industry in the workfield. Also rising here and
there in the expanse, clouds that wind skyward, spreading out in a
powdery mist. They look like the rolling smoke of incense, of sacrifice.
Sacrifice it is. The vast steam-threshers are mightily devouring what
their servants, the monster steam-reapers, have gleaned for them. Soon,
when September comes, all that waving sea will be still. What was gold
will still be a rusted gold, but near to the earth-the stubble of the
corn now lying in vast garners by the railway lines, awaiting transport
east and west and south and across the seas.
Not Arcady this, but a land of industry in the grip of industrialists,
whose determination to achieve riches is, in spite of themselves,
chastened by the magnitude and orderly process of nature's travail which
is not pain. Here Nature hides her internal striving under a smother of
white for many months in every year, when what is now gold in the sun
will be a soft--sometimes, too, a hard-shining coverlet like impacted
wool. Then, instead of the majestic clouds of incense from the threshers,
will rise blue spiral wreaths of smoke from the lonely home. There the
farmer rests till spring, comforting himself in the thought that while he
waits, far under the snow the wheat is slowly expanding; and as in April,
the white frost flies out of the soil into the sun, it will push upward
and outward, green and vigorous, greeting his eye with the "What cheer,
partner!" of a mate in the scheme of nature.
Not Arcady; and yet many of the joys of Arcady are here--bright, singing
birds, wide adventurous rivers, innumerable streams, the squirrel in the
wood and the bracken, the wildcat stealing through the undergrowth, the
lizard glittering by the stone, the fish leaping in the stream, the
plaint of the whippoorwill, the call of the bluebird, the golden flash of
the oriole, the honk of the wild geese overhead, the whirr of the mallard
from the sedge. And, more than all, a human voice declaring by its joy in
song that not only God looks upon the world and finds it very good.
CHAPTER I
"PIONEERS, O PIONEERS"
If you had stood on the borders of Askatoon, a prairie town, on the
pathway to the Rockies one late August day not many years ago, you would
have heard a fresh young human voice singing into the morning, as its
possessor looked, from a coat she was brushing, out over the "field of
the cloth of gold," which your eye has already been invited to see. With
the gift of singing for joy at all, you should be able to sing very
joyously at twenty-two. This morning singer was just that age; and if you
had looked at the golden carpet of wheat stretching for scores of miles,
before you looked at her, you would have thought her curiously in tone
with the scene. She was a symphony in gold--nothing less. Her hair, her
cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all gold.
Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might have
had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal, and
the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion. The eyelashes were so
long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
was so very busy, a keynote.
Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
not; but it is a libel. She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and is
never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There was, however,
just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl's
presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her quite
apart from her place in this nature-scheme. She was not wholly
aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which would
have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so black. Being
unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it may be a matter
of parentage.
Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted. Her father had
been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West. His
widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to maintain
her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her daughter was
now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the origin of the girl's
slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of selection
which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial decision.
The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his daughter to a
real degree inherited; but the mother, as kind a soul as ever lived, was
a product of southern English rural life--a little sumptuous, but
wholesome, and for her daughter's sake at least, keeping herself well and
safely within the moral pale in the midst of marked temptations. She was
forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample but proper graces that
at forty-five she had numerous admirers. The girl was English in
appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who can say? Was it
because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish coast long since?
Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her father's. You would
have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have thought that nature
had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so pointedly designed to
express the ancient dame's colour-scheme, even to the delicate auriferous
down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud look of her faintly
retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a purse and scarcely
needed one. In any case she had an ample pocket in her dress.
This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story. As
a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
deserter. Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean and
low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
matrimony without its status.
As with her mother the advertisement of her appearance was wholly
misleading. A man had once said to her that "she looked too gay to be
good," but in all essentials she was as good as she was gay, and indeed
rather better. Her mother had not kept boarders for seven years without
getting some useful knowledge of the world, or without imparting useful
knowledge; and there were men who, having paid their bills on demand,
turned from her wiser if not better men. Because they had pursued the old
but inglorious profession of hunting tame things, Mrs. Tyndall Tynan had
exacted compensation in one way or another--by extras, by occasional and
deliberate omission of table luxuries, and by making them pay for their
own mending, which she herself only did when her boarders behaved
themselves well. She scored in any contest--in spite of her rather small
brain, large heart, and ardent appearance. A very clever, shiftless Irish
husband had made her develop shrewdness, and she was so busy watching and
fending her daughter that she did not need to watch and fend herself to
the same extent as she would have done had she been free and childless
and thirty. The widow Tynan was practical, and she saw none of those
things which made her daughter stand for minutes at a time and look into
the distance over the prairie towards the sunset light or the grey-blue
foothills. She never sang--she had never sung a note in her life; but
this girl of hers, with a man's coat in her hand, and eyes on the joyous
scene before her, was for ever humming or singing. She had even sung in
the church choir till she declined to do so any longer, because strangers
stared at her so; which goes to show that she was not so vain as people
of her colouring sometimes are. It was just as bad, however, when she sat
in the congregation; for then, too, if she sang, people stared at her. So
it was that she seldom went to church at all; but it was not because of
this that her ideas of right and wrong were quite individual and not
conventional, as the tale of the matrimonial deserter will show.
This was not church, however, and briskly applying a light whisk-broom to
the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when he was
in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair
proportion of the time. It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy and
the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as a
child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the
alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular
man whose coat she now dusted long after there remained a speck of dust
upon it. This was the song she sang:
"Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
Hereaway I waited him, hereaway and oft;
When I sang my song to him, bright his eyes began to shine--
Hereaway I loved him well, for my heart was soft."Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
Home I saw upon the earth, heaven stood there in the skies--
'Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?'""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?'"
There was a plaintive quality in the voice of this russet maiden in
perfect keeping with the music and the words; and though her lips smiled,
there was a deep, wistful look in her eyes more in harmony with the
coming autumn than with this gorgeous harvest-time.
For a moment after she had finished singing she stood motionless,
absorbed by the far horizon; then suddenly she gave a little shake of the
body and said in a brisk, playfully chiding way:
"Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" There was no one near,
so far as eye could see, so it was clear that the words were addressed to
herself. She was expressing that wonder which so many people feel at
discovering in themselves long-concealed characteristics, or find
themselves doing things out of their natural orbit, as they think. If any
one had told Kitty Tynan that she had rare imagination, she would have
wondered what was meant. If anyone had said to her, "What are you
dreaming about, Kitty?" she would have understood, however, for she had
had fits of dreaming ever since she was a child, and they had increased
during the past few years--since the man came to live with them whose
coat she was brushing. Perhaps this was only imitation, because the man
had a habit of standing or sitting still and looking into space for
minutes--and on Sundays for hours--at a time; and often she had watched
him as he lay on his back in the long grass, head on a hillock, hat down
over his eyes, while the smoke from his pipe came curling up from beneath
the rim. Also she had seen him more than once sitting with a letter
before him and gazing at it for many minutes together. She had also noted
that it was the same letter on each occasion; that it was a closed
letter, and also that it was unstamped. She knew that, because she had
seen it in his desk--the desk once belonging to her father, a sloping
thing with a green-baize top. Sometimes he kept it locked, but very often
he did not; and more than once, when he had asked her to get him
something from the desk, not out of meanness, but chiefly because her
moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctilios, she had
examined the envelope curiously. The envelope bore a woman's handwriting,
and the name on it was not that of the man who owned the coat--and the
letter. The name on the envelope was Shiel Crozier, but the name of the
man who owned the coat was J. G. Kerry--James Gathorne Kerry, so he said.
Kitty Tynan had certainly enough imagination to make her cherish a
mystery. She wondered greatly what it all meant. Never in anything else
had she been inquisitive or prying where the man was concerned; but she
felt that this letter had the heart of a story, and she had made up fifty
stories which she thought would fit the case of J. G. Kerry, who for over
four years had lived in her mother's house. He had become part of her
life, perhaps just because he was a man,--and what home is a real home
without a man?--perhaps because he always had a kind, quiet, confidential
word for her, or a word of stimulating cheerfulness; indeed, he showed in
his manner occasionally almost a boisterous hilarity. He undoubtedly was
what her mother called "a queer dick," but also "a pippin with a perfect
core," which was her way of saying that he was a man to be trusted with
herself and with her daughter; one who would stand loyally by a friend or
a woman. He had stood by them both when Augustus Burlingame, the lawyer,
who had boarded with them when J. G. Kerry first came, coarsely exceeded
the bounds of liberal friendliness which marked the household, and by
furtive attempts at intimacy began to make life impossible for both
mother and daughter. Burlingame took it into his head, when he received
notice that his rooms were needed for another boarder, that J. G. Kerry
was the cause of it. Perhaps this was not without reason, since Kerry had
seen Kitty Tynan angrily unclasping Burlingame's arm from around her
waist, and had used cutting and decisive words to the sensualist
afterwards.
There had taken the place of Augustus Burlingame a land-agent--Jesse
Bulrush--who came and went like a catapult, now in domicile for three
days together, now gone for three weeks; a voluble, gaseous, humorous
fellow, who covered up a well of commercial evasiveness, honesty and
adroitness by a perspiring gaiety natural in its origin and convenient
for harmless deceit. He was fifty, and no gallant save in words; and, as
a wary bachelor of many years' standing, it was a long time before he
showed a tendency to blandish a good-looking middle-aged nurse named Egan
who also lodged with Mrs. Tynan; though even a plain-faced nurse in
uniform has an advantage over a handsome unprofessional woman. Jesse
Bulrush and J. G. Kerry were friends--became indeed such confidential
friends to all appearance, though their social origin was evidently so
different, that Kitty Tynan, when she wished to have a pleasant
conversation which gave her a glow for hours afterwards, talked to the
fat man of his lean and aristocratic-looking friend.
"Got his head where it ought to be--on his shoulders; and it ain't for
playing football with," was the frequent remark of Mr. Bulrush concerning
Mr. Kerry. This always made Kitty Tynan want to sing, she could not have
told why, save that it seemed to her the equivalent of a long history of
the man whose past lay in mists that never lifted, and whom even the
inquisitive Burlingame had been unable to "discover" when he lived in the
same house. But then Kitty Tynan was as fond of singing as a canary, and
relieved her feelings constantly by this virtuous and becoming means,
with her good contralto voice. She was indeed a creature of
contradictions; for if ever any one should have had a soprano voice it
was she. She looked a soprano.
What she was thinking of as she sang with Kerry's coat in her hand it
would be hard to discover by the process of elimination, as the
detectives say when tracking down a criminal. It is, however, of no
consequence; but it was clear that the song she sang had moved her, for
there was the glint of a tear in her eye as she turned towards the house,
the words of the lyric singing themselves over in her brain:
"Hereaway my heart was soft; when he kissed my happy eyes,
Held my hand, and pressed his cheek warm against my brow,
Home I saw upon the hearth, heaven stood there in the skies'
Whereaway, whereaway goes my lover now?"'
She knew that no lover had left her; that none was in the habit of laying
his warm cheek against her brow; and perhaps that was why she had said
aloud to herself, "Kitty Tynan, Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"
Perhaps--and perhaps not.
As she stepped forward towards the door she heard a voice within the
house, and she quickened her footsteps. The blood in her face, the look
in her eye quickened also. And now a figure appeared in the doorway--a
figure in shirt-sleeves, which shook a fist at the hurrying girl.
"Villain'!" he said gaily, for he was in one of his absurd, ebullient
moods--after a long talk with Jesse Bulrush. "Hither with my coat; my
spotless coat in a spotted world,--the unbelievable anomaly--
"'For the earth of a dusty to-day
Is the dust of an earthy to-morrow.'"
When he talked like this she did not understand him, but she thought it
was clever beyond thinking--a heavenly jumble. "If it wasn't for me you'd
be carted for rubbish," she replied joyously as she helped him on with
his coat, though he had made a motion to take it from her.
"I heard you singing--what was it?" he asked cheerily, while it could be
seen that his mind was preoccupied. The song she had sung, floating
through the air, had seemed familiar to him, while he had been greatly
engaged with a big business thing he had been planning for a long time,
with Jesse Bulrush in the background or foreground, as scout or
rear-guard or what you will:
"'Whereaway, whereaway goes the lad that once was mine?
Hereaway, I waited him, hereaway and oft--'"
she hummed with an exaggerated gaiety in her voice, for the song had
saddened her, she knew not why. At the words the flaming exhilaration of
the man's face vanished and his eyes took on a poignant, distant look.
"That--oh, that!" he said, and with a little jerk of the head and a
clenching of the hand he moved towards the street.
"Your hat!" she called after him, and ran inside the house. An instant
later she gave it to him. Now his face was clear and his eyes smiled
kindly at her.
"'Whereaway, hereaway' is a wonderful song," he said. "We used to sing it
when I was a boy--and after, and after. It's an old song--old as the
hills. Well, thanks, Kitty Tynan. What a girl you are--to be so kind to a
fellow like--me!"
"Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!"--these were the very words she had
used about herself a little while before. The song--why did it make Mr.
Kerry take on such a queer look all at once when he heard it? Kitty
watched him striding down the street into the town.
Now a voice--a rich, quizzical, kindly voice-called out to her:
"Come, come, Miss Tynan, I want to be helped on with my coat," it said.
Inside the house a fat, awkward man was struggling, or pretending to
struggle, into his coat.
"Roll into it, Mr. Rolypoly," she answered cheerily as she entered.
"Of course I'm not the star boarder--nothing for me!" he said in affected
protest.
"A little more to starboard and you'll get it on," she retorted with a
glint of her late father's raillery, and she gave the coat a twitch which
put it right on the ample shoulders.
"Bully! bully!" he cried. "I'll give you the tip for the Askatoon cup."
"I'm a Christian. I hate horse-racers and gamblers," she returned
mockingly.
"I'll turn Christian--I want to be loved," he bleated from the doorway.
"Roll on, proud porpoise!" she rejoined, which shows that her
conversation was not quite aristocratic at all times.
"Golly, but she's a gold dollar in a gold bank," remarked Jesse Bulrush
warmly as he lurched into the street.
The girl stood still in the middle of the room looking dreamily down the
way the two men had gone.
The quiet of the late summer day surrounded her. She heard the dizzy din
of the bees, the sleepy grinding of the grass hoppers, the sough of the
solitary pine at the door, and then behind them all a whizzing,
machine-like sound. This particular sound went on and on.
She opened the door of the next room. Her mother sat at a sewing-machine
intent upon some work, the needle eating up a spreading piece of cloth.
"What are you making, mother?" Kitty asked. "New blinds for Mr. Kerry's
bedroom-he likes this green colour," the widow added with a slight flush,
due to leaning over the sewing-machine, no doubt.
"Everybody does everything for him," remarked the girl almost pettishly.
"That's a nice spirit, I must say!" replied her mother reprovingly, the
machine almost stopping.
"If I said it in a different way it would be all right," the other
returned with a smile, and she repeated the words with a winning soft
inflection, like a born actress.
"Kitty-Kitty Tynan, what a girl you are!" declared her mother, and she
bent smiling over the machine, which presently buzzed on its devouring
way. Three people had said the same thing within a few minutes. A look of
pleasure stole over the girl's face, and her bosom rose and fell with a
happy sigh. Somehow it was quite a wonderful day for her.
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