You Never Know Your Luck: Chapter 15

Chapter 15

"MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"

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.

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