Out on the prairie under the light of the stars a man had fought the first great battle of his life, and had emerged victorious. There are no drawn battles in the struggles of the soul. As Orlando fought, he was tortured by the thought that none would believe the truth to-morrow when it was told; and that there would be penalty though there was no crime.
As for Louise, she could have returned, almost blindly defiant, to her world, hand in hand with Orlando; and yet, when morning came, and her eyes opened on the prairie at day-break, with life stirring everywhere, she was glad of the victory—though the shadow of a great trouble to come was showing in her eyes.
She knew what she had to face at Tralee, and that she had no proof of her perfect innocence. It was of little use for them to call upon Heaven to witness what the night had been; and Joel Mazarine, who distrusted every man and woman, would distrust her with a sternness which guilt only could effectively defy!
Orlando’s enforced gaiety as he invited her to a breakfast of a couple of biscuits, left from yesterday’s broncho-busting, heartened her; yet both were conscious of the make-believe. They realized they were helpless in the grip of harsh circumstance. It was almost enough to make them take advantage of calumny and the traps set for them by Fate, and join hands for ever.
As they looked into each other’s eyes, the same hopeless yet reckless thought flickered—flickered, and vanished. Yet as they looked out over the prairie towards Tralee, to which Louise must presently return, a rebellious sort of joy possessed them.
.........................
The discord of their thoughts was like music beside what had passed at Tralee. There nothing relieved the black, sullen rage of Joel Mazarine. He had returned to the house where his voice had always been able to summon his slaves, and to know that they would come—Chinaman, half-breed, wife. Now he called, and the wife did not come. On the new chestnut she had ridden away on the prairie, so the halfbreed woman had said, as hard as he could go. He had scanned the prairie till night came, without seeing a sign of her.
His black imagination instantly conceived the worst that Louise might do. It was not in him ever to have the decent alternative. He questioned the half-breed woman closely; he savagely interrogated the Chinaman; and then he declared that they lied to him, that they knew more than they said; and when he was unable to bear it any longer, he mounted his horse and galloped over to Slow Down Ranch. As he went, he kept swearing to himself that Louise had flown thither; and anger made his brain malignant. He could scarcely frame his words intelligibly when he arrived at Slow Down Ranch.
There he was presently convinced that his worst suspicions were true, for Orlando also had not returned. He saw it all. They had agreed to meet; they had met; they had eloped and were gone! His beady eyes were those of serpents watching for the instant to strike, and his words burst over the head of Orlando’s mother like shrapnel.
For once, however, the futile, fantastic mother rose higher than herself, and declared that her son had never run away from, or with, anything in his life; that he—Joel Mazarine—had never had anything worth her son’s running away with; and that her son, when he came back, would make him ask forgiveness as he had never asked it of his God.
Indeed, the gaudy little lady stood in her doorway and chattered her maledictions after him, as he rode back again towards Tralee muttering curses which no class leader in the Methodist Church ought even to quote for pious purposes.
Joel Mazarine had flattered himself that he had everything life could give—money, property and a garden of youth in which his old age could loiter and be glad; and that he should be defied suddenly and his garden made desolate, that the lines of his good fortune should be crossed, caused him to rage like any heathen. His monstrous egotism made him like some infuriated bull in the arena, with the banderillos sticking in his hot hide.
The two people whom he cursed were in Elysium compared to the place where he tortured himself. There are desert birds that silently surround a rattlesnake, as he sleeps, with little bundles of cactus-heads and their million needles, so that, when the reptile wakes, it cannot escape through the palisade of bristling weapons by which it is surrounded; and in ghoulish anger it strikes its fangs into its own body until it dies. Just such a helpless rage held Joel Mazarine, and his religion did not suggest seeking comfort at that Throne of Grace to which he had so publicly prayed on occasions.
Night held him prowling in his own coverts; morning found him yellow and mottled, malicious, but now silent. He somehow felt that he would know the truth and the whole truth soon. He ate his pork and beans for breakfast with the appetite of a ravenous animal. He put pieces of the pork chop in his mouth with his fingers; he gulped his coffee; but all the time he kept his eyes on the open door, as though he expected some messenger to announce that Providence had stricken his rebellious wife by sudden death. It seemed to him that Nature and Jehovah must unite to avenge him.
After three hours of further waiting he determined to go into Askatoon. He would have bills printed advertising for Louise as he had done for stray cattle; he would have notices put in the newspapers proclaiming that his wife was strayed or stolen and must be put in pound when discovered. At the moment he decided thus, he caught sight of a wagon approaching from the north. It was near enough for him to see that there was a woman in it; and the eyes of the half-breed hired woman, possessing the Indian far-sight, saw that it was Louise, and told her master so.
Ten minutes later Louise stood in front of the Master of Tralee, and the Master of Tralee filled the doorway. “What you want here?” he asked of her with blurred rage in his voice.
“I want to go to my room,” Louise answered quietly but firmly. “Please stand aside.”
Now that Louise was face to face with her foe, a new spirit had suddenly possessed her; and standing beside his broncho, a hand on its neck, Orlando almost smiled, for this was Louise with a new nature. There was defiance and courage in her face, not the apprehension which had almost overwhelmed her as they started back to Tralee, having been rescued by the search-party from Slow Down Ranch. The night had done something to Louise which was making itself felt.
“You think you can come back here after what you’ve done—after where you’ve been—the likes of you!” Mazarine snarled unmoving. “You think you can!”
Louise turned swiftly to look at Orlando and the three men, one riding and two in the wagon, as though to call them in evidence of her innocence; but there came to her eyes a sudden fire of courage, and she turned again to Mazarine and said:
“I’m your wife by the law—just as much your wife to-day as yesterday. You treat me before strangers as if I were a criminal. I’m not going to be treated that way. I’ve got my rights. Stand back and let me in—stand back, Joel Mazarine,” she said, and she took a step forward, child though she was, as if she would strike him. Something had transformed her.
To Orlando she seemed scarcely real. The shrinking, colourless child of a few weeks had suddenly become a woman—and such a woman!
“I’ll tell you in my own time where I’ve been and what I’ve done,” she continued. “I want to go upstairs. Stand out of the doorway.”
There was a movement behind her. A man in the wagon and the one on his horse seemed to grow angry and threatening. The ranchman dropped from his horse. Only Orlando stood cool, quiet and ominously watchful. Mazarine did not fail to notice the movement of the two men.
Presently Orlando’s voice said slowly and calmly: “Stand back, Mazarine. Let her go to her room. This is a free country, and she’s free in her own house. It’s her house until you’ve proved she’s got no right there.” Then he added with sharp insistence and menace: “Stand back—damn you, Mazarine!”
Orlando did not move as he spoke, but there was a look in his face which an enemy would not care to see. Mazarine, in spite of his rage, quailed before the sharp, menacing voice so little in tune with its reputation for giggling, and stepping back, he let Louise pass. Then he plunged forward out of the doorway.
“That’s right. Come outside,” said Orlando scornfully. “Come out into the open.” His voice became lower. There was something deadly in it, boy as he was. “Come out, you hypocrite, and listen to what I’ve got to say. Listen to the truth I’ve got to tell you. If you don’t listen, I’ll horsewhip you, that’d horsewhip a woman, till you can’t stand—you loathsome old dog.... Yes, he took his horsewhip to her yesterday,” he added to the spectators, who muttered angrily, for the West is chivalrous towards women.
Something near to madness possessed Orlando. No one had ever seen him as he was at that moment. Down through generations had come to him some iron thing that suddenly revealed itself in him, as something had just suddenly revealed itself in Louise.
The other three men—two in the wagon and one beside his horse-stared at him as though they had seen him for the first time. They were unready for the passion that possessed him. Not a muscle of his body appeared to move; he was as motionless as the trunk of a tree. But in his eyes and his voice there was, as one of the ranchers said afterwards, “Hell—and then some more.”
“Listen to me,” he said again, and his voice was low and husky now. “Yesterday I was broncho-busting—”
Thereupon he told the whole story of what had happened since he had seen Louise thrown from her chestnut on the prairie. He told how Louise was too shaken and ill to attempt the journey back to Tralee, and how they had camped where they were, near the dead horse.
As Orlando talked, the old man was seized by terrible hatred and jealousy. “You needn’t tell me the rest,” he broke in, his hands savagely opening and shutting. “I guess I understand everything.”
The words had scarcely left his mouth when from the wagon a man said: “Wait—wait, Mister. I got something to say.”
He sprang to the ground, and ran between Mazarine and Orlando.
“This is where I come in,” he said, as Louise’s face appeared at an upper window, and she listened. “You don’t know me. Well, I know you. Everybody knows you, and nobody likes you. I know what happened last night. I’m a brother of your fellow Christian Rigby, the druggist, over there in Askatoon. He’s a Methodist. I’m not. I’m only good. I been a lot o’ things, and nothing in the end. Well, you hearken to my tale.
“I was tramping with my bundle on my back acrost the prairie to Askatoon from Waterway. I’m a sundowner, as they say in Australia. When the sun goes down, I down to my bed wherever I be on the prairie. I was asleep-I’d been half drunk—when the chestnut threw your wife and broke its leg; but I was awake when he rode up.” He pointed to Orlando. “I was awake, and so I watched. I knew who she was; I knew who he was.” He pointed to Orlando again. “I guessed I’d see something. I did.
“I watched them two people all night. There was a moon. I could see. I wasn’t fifteen feet from her all night, and I jined the others when they come to rescue. I guess I got the truth, and I guess if you want any evidence about me you can get it. Lots of people know me out here. I ain’t got any house or any home, and I get drunk sometimes, and I ain’t got money to buy meals with, lots of times, but nobody ever knowed me lie. That’s what ruined me—I been too truthful. Well, I’m not lying now, Mister. I’m telling you the God-help-me truth. He’s a gentleman.” He pointed again to Orlando. “He’s a gentleman from away back in God’s country, wherever that is, and she’s the best of the best of the very best.
“You can bet your greasy old boots and ugly face that you’ve got a bigger fortune in that wife of yours than you’ve any right to. Say, she’s a queen, Mister, and don’t you forget it, and”—he drawled out his words—“you go inside your house and get down on your knees, same as you do in the Meeting House, and thank the Lord you love so well for all his blessings. As my friend here said a little while back”—he pointed to Orlando again—“‘Damn you, Mazarine!’ Go and hide yourself.”
The old man stood for a moment dumbfounded; then, without a word, he turned and hunched inside the house.
“He raised his horsewhip ag’in’ a woman, did he?” said one of Orlando’s ranchmen. “Ain’t that a matter we got to take notice of?”
“Boys,” said Orlando as he motioned them to be off, “Mrs. Mazarine can take care of herself. You’ll forget what’s happened, if you want to play up to her. If she needs you, she’ll be sure to let you know.”
A moment afterwards they were all on their way on the road leading to Slow Down Ranch.
“He didn’t giggle much that time,” said one of the ranchmen of Orlando, as they moved on.
The Young Doctor had had a trying day. Certain of his cases had given him anxiety; his drives had been long and fatiguing; he had had little sleep for several nights; and he was what Patsy Kernaghan had called “brittle”; for when Patsy was in a vexed condition, he used to say, “I’m so brittle I’ll break if you look at me.” As the Young Doctor drew his chair up to the supper-table and looked at his food with a critical air, he was very brittle.
For one born in Enniskillen he had an even nature, but its evenness was more the result of mental control than temperament. He sighed as he looked at the marrow bones which, as a rule, gave him joy when their turn came in the weekly menu; he eyed askance the baked potatoes; and the salad waiting for his skilled hand only gave him an extra feeling of fatigue.
Most men in a like state say, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” and yet many a one has been stimulated out of it, away from it, by the soft voice and friendly hand of a woman.
There was, however, no woman to distract the overworked Young Doctor by her freshness, drawn from the reservoir of her vitality; and that was a pity, because, as Patsy Kernaghan many a time said: “Aw, Doctor dear, what’s the good of a tongue to a wagon if there’s only wan horse to draw it! Shure, you’ll think a lot more of yourself whin you’re able to stand at the head of your own table and say grace for two at least, and thanksgiving for manny, if it’s the will of God.”
The Young Doctor did not know why he was so brittle, but the truth is he was feeding on himself, and that is a poor business. Every dog knows it is good to feed on the knuckle of a goat if he hasn’t got a beefbone, and every real man knows—though to know anything at all he must have been married—that any marriage is better than no marriage at all; because whether it’s happy or unhappy, it makes you concerned for some one besides yourself, if you have any soul or sense at all.
The Young Doctor was under the delusion that he loved his lonely table and the making of a simple salad for a simple man, but then he came from Ireland and had imagination; and that is always a curse when it isn’t a blessing, for there is nothing between the two. At the end of his troubled day he almost cursed the salad as it crinkled in the dish just slightly rubbed with garlic. He was turning away in apathy from it—from the bones with the marrow oozing out of the ends, from the bursting baked potatoes, from the beautiful crusts of brown bread, when he heard the door-bell ring. At the sound his face set as though it were mortar. He wanted no patients this night; but from the peremptory sound of the bell he was sure some one had come who needed medicine or the knife, and he could refuse neither; for was he not at everybody’s beck and call, the Medicine Man whose door was everybody’s door!
“Damnation!” he said aloud, and turned towards the door expectantly.
Then he bitted himself to wait; and he did not wait long. Presently he heard a voice say, “I must see him,” and the door opened wide, and Louise Mazarine stepped into the room. Her face was pale and distraught; her blue eyes, with their long, melancholy lashes, stared at him in appealing apprehension. Her lips were almost white; her hands trembled out towards him.
“I’ve come—I’ve come!” she said. It had the finality of the last chapter of a book.
The Young Doctor closed the door, ignoring for the instant the hands held out to him. After all, he was a very sane Young Doctor, and he had the faculty of keeping his head, and his heart, and his own counsel. Also he knew there was an inquisitive old servant in the hallway.
When the door was closed, he turned round on Louise slowly, and then he held out his hands to her, for she was shrinking away, as though he had repulsed her. He pressed her trembling hands in the way that only faithful friendship shows, and said:
“Yes, I know you’ve come, but tell me what you’ve come for.”
“I couldn’t bear it any longer,” she said brokenly. “I’m not made of steel or stone. It’s been terrible. He doesn’t speak to me except to order me to do this or that. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I won’t be treated so. I won’t! When he made me kneel down by him in the trail and tried to make me pray to be forgiven of my sins, I couldn’t stand it. I don’t know what my sins are, and I won’t be converted if I don’t want to. I’m not a slave. I’m of age. I’m twenty.”
There was no sign of fatigue now in the Young Doctor’s face. Something had called him out of himself, and this human need had done what a wife’s hand might have done, or the welcome of a child.
“No, you’re not twenty,” he declared, with a friendly smile. “You aren’t ten. You are only one. In fact, I think you’re only just born!”
He did not speak as lightly as the words read. In his voice there was that compassionate irony with which men shield those for whom they care. It means protection and defence. Somehow she seemed to him like a small bird on its first flight from the nest, or, as Patsy Kernaghan would have said, “a tame lamb loose in a zoolyogical gardin.”
“So because you won’t pray and can’t bear it any longer, you run away from him, and come to me!” the other remarked with a sorry smile, pouring out a glass of wine from a decanter that stood on the table.
“Drink this,” he said presently, pushing her down gently into a chair with one hand and holding the glass to her lips. “Drink it every drop. As I said, you’ve only run away from one master to fall into another master’s hands. You’re a wicked girl. Drink it—every drop.... That’s right.”
He took the empty glass from her, put it on the table, and then stood and looked at her meditatively, fastening her eyes with his own. More than her eyes were fastened, however. Her mind was also under control: but that was because she believed in him so.
“Yes, you’re a wicked girl,” he said decisively.
She shuddered and shrank back. In her eyes was a helpless look, very different from that which she had given not so many days before when, with Orlando Guise behind her, she had defied her aged husband in his doorway, and her defiance had moved him from her path. Then she had been inspired by the fact that the man she loved was near her, that she had been wrongfully accused and was ready to fight. Afterwards, however, when she was alone, the sterile presence of Joel Mazarine, his merciless eyes, his hopeless religious tyranny, had worn upon her as his past violence had never done.
“Wicked!” Did this man, then, believe her guilty? Did he, of all men, think that the night upon the prairie alone with Orlando had been her undoing? Had not the brother of Rigby the chemist borne witness with his own eyes to her complete innocence? If the Young Doctor disbelieved, then indeed she was undone.
“You don’t think that of me—of me!” she gasped, her lips all white again. She got to her feet excitedly. “You shall not believe it of me.”
“No, I did not say I believed that,” the other remarked almost casually. “But if I did believe it, I don’t know that it would make much difference to me. Fate, or God Almighty, or whatever it was, had stacked the cards against you. When I said it was wicked, I meant you did wrong in rushing away from your husband and coming to me. I suppose you have definitely left your husband—eh? You’ve ‘left’ him, as they say?”
He had an incorrigible sense of humour, as well as an infinite common sense. He wanted to break this spell of tense emotion which possessed her. So he pursued a new course.
“Don’t you think it’s rather hard on me?” he continued. “I’m a lone man in this house, with only one old woman to protect me, and I’m unmarried. I’ve a reputation to lose, and there are lots of mothers and daughters hereabouts. Besides, a medical practice is hard to get and not easy to keep. What do you mean by making a refuge of me, when there’s nothing for me in it, not even the satisfaction of going into the Divorce Court with you? You wicked Mrs. Mazarine!”
“Oh, don’t speak like that!” Louise interjected. “Please don’t. Don’t scold me. I had to come. I was going mad.”
The Young Doctor had the case well in hand. He had eased the terrible tension; he was slowly reducing her to the normal. It was the only thing to do.
“What did Mazarine do or say to you that made you run away? Come now, didn’t you first make up your mind to go to Slow Down Ranch—to Orlando?”
She flushed. “Yes, but only for a minute. Then I thought of you, because I knew you could help me as no one else could. Everybody believes in you. But then Li Choo—”
“Oh, Li Choo! So Li Choo comes into this, eh? So he said fly to Orlando, eh? Well, that’s what he would do. But why Li Choo—a Chinaman? Tell me, what does Li Choo know?”
Quickly she told him the story of the day when Joel Mazarine had almost surprised her in Orlando’s room; how Li Choo had saved the situation by falling down the staircase with the priceless porcelain, and how Mazarine had kicked him—“manhandled” him, as they say in the West.
“Chinamen don’t like being kicked, especially Chinamen of Li Choo’s station,” remarked the Young Doctor meditatively. “You don’t know, of course, that Li Choo was a prince or a big bug of some sort in his own country. Why he left China I don’t know, but I do chance to know that if another Chinky meets Li Choo carrying a basket on his shoulders, or a package in his hand, he kow-tows, and takes it away from him, and carries it himself.... No, I don’t know why Li Choo is here in Askatoon, or why he’s such a slave to Mrs. Mazarine; but I do know that he’s a different-looking man when a Chinky runs up against him than when he’s choring at Tralee. A sick Chinaman told me only a week ago that Li Choo was ‘once big high boss Chinaman in Pekin.’... And so the mandarin advised you to fly to Orlando, did he? I wonder if it’s a way they have in China.”
“But I wouldn’t go. I’ve come to you—Patsy Kernaghan brought me,” Louise urged.
“Yes, I see you’ve come to me,” remarked the Young Doctor dryly, “and you’ve stayed about long enough for me to feel your pulse and diagnose your case. And now you’re going back with Patsy Kernaghan to your own home.”
She trembled; then she seemed to strengthen herself in defiance. What a change it was from the child of a few weeks ago—indeed, of a few moments ago! The same passionate determination which seized her when she faced Mazarine with Orlando, possessed her again. With her whole being palpitating, she said: “I will not go back. I will not go back. I will kill myself first.”
“That would be a useless sacrifice of yourself and others,” the Young Doctor answered quietly. Seeing that the new thing in her was not to be conquered in a moment, he quickly made up his mind what to do.
“See,” he continued, “you needn’t go back to Tralee to-night, but you’re not going to stay here, dear child. I’ll take you over to Nolan Doyle’s ranch, to Mrs. Doyle. You’ll spend the night there, and we’ll think about to-morrow when to-morrow comes. You certainly can’t stay here. I’m not going to have it.
“Bless you, you’re neither so young nor so old as all that!”
Suddenly he grasped both her arms and looked her in the face. “My dear young lady,” he said gently, “I’m not your only friend, but I’m a stout friend—so stout that there isn’t a mount can carry us both together. When you ride, I walk; when I ride, you walk—you understand? We don’t walk or ride together. I’m taking care of you. Your life is too good to be ruined by rashness. You’re in a ‘state,’ as my old housekeeper would say, but you’ll be all right presently. As soon as I’ve made a salad, and had a marrowbone, you and I and Patsy Kernaghan are going to Nolan Doyle’s ranch.... My dear, you must do what I say, and if you do, you’ll be happy yet. I don’t see how, quite, but it is so; and meanwhile, you mustn’t make any mistakes. You must play the game. And now come and have some supper.”
She waved her hand in protest. “I can’t eat,” she said. “Indeed, I can’t.”
“Well, you can drink,” he answered. “You shall not leave this house alive unless you have a pint of milk with a little dash of what Patsy calls ‘oh-be-joyful’ in it.”
He left the room for a moment, while she sat watching the door as a prisoner might watch for the return of a friendly jailer. He had a curious influence over her. It was wholly different from that of Orlando. Presently he returned.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Patsy and you and I will be at Nolan Doyle’s ranch in another hour. I’ve sent word to Mrs. Doyle. I’ve ordered your milk-punch too, and now I think I’ll make my salad. You never saw me make a salad,” he added, smiling. “I’ve done some successful operations in my day; I’ve played about with bones and sinews, proud of my work sometimes, but the making of a perfect salad is the proud achievement of a master-mind.” He laughed like a boy. “‘Come hither, come hither, my little daughter, and do not tremble so,’” he said so cheerfully as to be almost jeering.
His cheerfulness was not in vain, for a smile stole to her lips, though it only flickered for an instant and was gone. For all that, he knew he had saved the situation, and that another chapter of the life-history of Orlando and Louise had been ended. A fresh chapter would begin tomorrow; but sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof.
Mazarine discovered the flight of Louise soon after she had gone. He had not been five hundred yards from the house since she returned with Orlando after the night spent upon the prairie, save when he had been obliged to go in to Askatoon and had taken her with him, dumb and passive. She had been a prisoner, tied to the stirrups of her captor; and he had berated her, had preached at her. As Louise had said, once on the way to Askatoon, he had even tried to make her kneel down in the dust of the trail and plead with Heaven to convict her of sin.
On the evening of Louise’s flight, however, he had been forced to go to a neighbouring ranch, and had commanded Li Choo to keep a strict watch at the windows of her room to see that she did not attempt escape. She could not escape by the door of the room because he had the key in his pocket. Li Choo was not a stern jailer, however. Mazarine had not been gone three minutes before the Chinaman had touch with Louise. He did more; he threw up into the open window of her room a screw-driver, with which she took the old-fashioned door off its hinges, after half an hour’s work. Then, leaving a note on the table of the dining-room, to say that she could not bear it any longer, that she would never come back, and that she meant to be free, she summoned Patsy Kernaghan and fled to the Young Doctor.
When Mazarine returned and found her note, he plunged up the stairs to her bedroom, his pious wrath gurgling in his throat, only to find the door locked; for Li Choo had promptly restored it to its hinges after Louise had gone, afterwards dropping from the high window like a cat, without hurt.
Li Choo, blinking, opaque, immobile, save for his piercing and mysterious eyes, had no explanation to give. All he said was, “Me no see all sides house same time”; so suggesting that, as the room had windows on all three sides, Louise must have escaped while he made his supposed sentry-go, slip-slopping round the house. Mazarine showed what he thought by spitting in Li Choo’s face, and then rushing into the house to get the raw-hide whip with which he had punished the Chinaman before, and with which he had threatened his wife.
When he returned a moment afterwards, Li Choo was nowhere to be seen; but in his place were two other Chinamen who had, as it were, fallen from the skies, standing where Li Choo had stood, immobile, blinking and passive like Li Choo, their hands lost in the long sleeves of their coats, their pigtails so tightly braided as, in seeming, to draw their slanting eyelids still to greater incline, and to give a look of petrified intentness to their faces.
Something in their attitude gave Mazarine apprehension. It was as though Li Choo had been transformed by some hellish magic into two other Chinamen. The rage of his being seemed to stupefy him; he could not resist the sensation of the unnatural.
“What do you want? How did you come here?” he asked of the two in a husky voice.
“We want speak Li Choo. We come see Li Choo,” answered one of the Chinamen impassively.
“He was here a minute ago,” answered Mazarine gruffly.
Then he turned away, going swiftly toward the kitchen, and calling to Li Choo. As he went, he was conscious of low, cackling laughter, but when he turned to look, the two Chinamen stood where he had left them, blinking and immobile.
The uncanny feeling possessing him increased; the thing was unnatural. He lurched on, however, looking for Li Choo. The Chinaman was not to be found in the kitchen, in the woodshed, in the cellar, in the loft, or in his own attic room; and the half-breed, Rada, declared she had not seen him. He could not be at the stables, for they were too far away to be reached in the time; and there were no signs of him between the house and the stables. When Mazarine returned to the front of the house, the two Chinamen also had vanished; there were no signs of them anywhere. Search did not discover them.
Mingled anger and fear now possessed Mazarine. He would search no longer. No doubt the other two Chinamen had joined Li Choo in his hiding-place, wherever it was. Why had the Chinamen come? What were they after? It did not matter for the moment. What he wanted was Louise, his bad child-wife, who had broken from her cage and flown from him. Where would she go? Where, but to Slow Down Ranch? Where, but to her lover, the circus-rider, the boy with the head of brown curls, with the ring on his finger and the Cupid mouth! Where would she go but to the man with whom she had spent the night on the prairie!
Now he believed altogether that she was guilty, that everybody had conspired to deceive him, that he was in a net of dark deception. Even the two Chinamen, mysteriously coming and going, had laughed at him like two heathen gods, and had vanished suddenly like heathen gods.
A weakness came over him, and the skin of his face became creased and clammy like that of a drowned man; his limbs trembled, so desperate was his passion. He stumbled into the house and into the dining-room, where he kept a little black-bound Bible once belonging to his great-grandfather. He had thumbed it well in past years, searching it for passages of violence and denunciation. Now holy superstition seized him in the midst of the work of the devil, surrounding him with an almost medieval instinct. He seized the ancient book, as it were to deliver its incantations against everyone destroying his peace, stealing from him that which he prized beyond all earthly things.
Take this woman away from him, this child-wife from his sixty-five years, and what was left for him? She was the garden of spring in which his old age roamed at ease luxuriously. She was the fruit of the tree of pleasure. She was that which made him young again, renewed in him youth and the joys of youth. Take her away, the flower that smelled so sweet and luscious, the thing that he had held so often to his lips and to his breast? Take away what was his, by every holy right, because it was all according to the law of the land and of the Holy Gospel, and what was left? Only old age, the empty house bereft of a fair young mistress, something to smile at and to curse, if need be, since it was his own by the laws of God and man.
Take her away, and the two wives that he had buried long years ago, with their gray heads and lank, sour faces, from which the light of youth had fled with the first child come to them—their ghosts would seek him out. They would sit at his table, and taunt him with his vanished Louise, asking him if he thought she was anything more than one of the trolls that tempted men aforetime; one of the devil’s wenches that lured him into the secret garden, only at last to leave him scorned and alone.
Where had she gone, his troll, with the face of an angel? Where had she gone? Where would she go, except to her devil’s lover at Slow Down Ranch?
He had just started for Slow Down Ranch armed with his greasy, well-thumbed Bible like a weapon in his pocket, when he heard a voice call him. It was full of the devil’s laughter. It was the voice of Burlingame, the lawyer, on his horse. Burlingame had had a weary day and was refreshing himself by a canter on the prairie.
“Where are you going?” asked Burlingame, as he cantered up to Mazarine’s wagon.
“To Slow Down Ranch?”
He saw the look of the drowned man in the face of Mazarine, over whom the flood of disaster had passed, and he guessed at once the cause of it; for Burlingame had the philosophy of a Satanic mind, and he knew the things that happen to human nature.
“So, she’s gone again, has she?” he added deliberately, with intent to put a knife into the old man’s feelings and to turn it in the thick of them. He wanted to hurt, because Mazarine had only a short time before dispensed with his services as a lawyer, and had blocked the way to that intimacy which he had hoped to establish with Tralee and its mistress. Besides, his pride as a professional man had been hurt, and he had been deprived of income which now went to his most hated professional rival. Mazarine’s jealous soul had cut him off, on coming to know Burlingame’s dark reputation. He had not liked the look Burlingame had given Louise when they met.
“Gone again, has she?” Burlingame repeated sarcastically. “Well, you needn’t go to Slow Down Ranch to find her. She isn’t there, and you won’t find him there either, for I saw him come by the Lark River Trail into Askatoon as I left, and a lady was with him. He booked this morning for the sleeper of the express going East to-night; so, if I were you, I’d turn my horse’s nose to Askatoon, Mr. Mazarine. I don’t know why I tell you this, as you’re not my client now, but I go about the world doing good, Mr. Mazarine—only doing good.”
There was a look in Burlingame’s face which Heaven would not have accepted as goodness, and there was that in his voice which did not belong to the Courts of the Lord. Malice, though veiled, showed in face and sounded in voice. Even as he spoke, Joel Mazarine turned his horse’s head towards Askatoon.
“You’re sure a woman was with him? You’re sure she was with him?” he asked in chaos of passion.
“I couldn’t see her face; it was too far away,” answered Burlingame suggestively, “but you can form your own conclusions—and the express is due in thirty minutes!”
He looked at his watch complacently. “What’s the good, Mazarine? Why don’t you say, ‘Go and sin no more?’ Or why don’t you divorce her with the evidence about that night on the prairie? I could have got you a verdict and damages. Yes, I could have got you plenty of damages. He’s rich. You took her back and condoned; you condoned, Mazarine, and now you’ll neither have damages nor wife—and the express goes in thirty minutes!”
“The express won’t take Mrs. Mazarine away tonight,” the old man said, a look of jungle fierceness filling his face.
Burlingame laughed unpleasantly. “Yes, you’ll foul your own nest, Mazarine, and then bring her back to live in it. I know you. It isn’t the love of God in your heart, because you’ll never forgive her; but you’ll bring her back to the nest you fouled, just because you want her—‘You damned and luxurious mountain goat,’ as Shakespeare called your kind.”
With another laugh, which somewhat resembled that of the two strange vanished Chinamen, Burlingame flicked his horse and cantered away. A little time afterwards, however, he turned and looked toward Askatoon, and he saw the old man whipping his horse into a gallop to reach Askatoon railway station before the express went East.
“It’s true, Mazarine,” he said aloud. “Orlando booked for the sleeper going East in thirty minutes; but the sleeper was for one only, and that one was his mother, you old hippopotamus.... But I wonder where she is—where the divine Louise is? She hasn’t levanted with her Orlando. ... Now, I wonder!” he added.
Then, with a sudden impulse, he dug heels into his horse’s sides, and galloped back towards Askatoon. He wanted to see what would happen before the express went East.
Askatoon had never lost its interest for Mazarine and his wife since the day the Mayor had welcomed them at the railway station. Askatoon was not a petty town. Its career had been chequered and interesting, and it had given haven to a large number of uncommon people. Unusual happenings had been its portion ever since it had been the rail-head of the Great Transcontinental Line, and many enterprising men, instead of moving on with the railway, when it ceased to be the rail-head, settled there and gave the place its character. The town had never been lawless, although some lawless people had sojourned there.
It was too busy a place to be fussing about little things, or tearing people’s characters to pieces, or gossiping even to the usual degree; yet in its history it had never gossiped so much as it had done since the Mazarines had come.
From the first the vast majority of folk had sided with Louise and denounced Mazarine. They knew well she had married too young to be self-seeking or intriguing; and, in any case, no woman in Askatoon or yet in the West, could have conceived of a girl marrying “the ancient one from the jungle,” as Burlingame had called him.
Burlingame could never have been on the side of the Ten Commandments himself, even with a sure and certain hope of happiness on earth, and in Heaven also, guaranteed to him. Nothing could have condemned Mazarine so utterly as the coalition between the “holy good people,” as Burlingame called them, and himself; and between the holy good people and himself were many who in their secret hearts would never have shunned Louise if, after the night on the prairie with Orlando, release had been found for her in the Divorce Court. Jonas Billings had put the matter in a nutshell when he said:
“It ain’t natural, them two, at Tralee. For marrying her he ought to be tarred and feathered, and for the way he treats her he ought to be let loose in the ha’nts of the grizzlies. What he done to that girl is a crime ag’in’ the law. If there was any real spunk in the Methodists, they’d spit him out like pus.”
That was exactly what the Methodist body had decided to do on the very day that Louise had fled from Tralee and the old man pursued her in the wrong direction. The Methodist body had determined to discipline Mazarine, to eject him from their communion, because he had raised a whip against his wife; because he had maltreated Li Choo; and because he had used language unbecoming a Christian. They had decided that Mazarine had not shown the righteous anger of a Christian man, but of one who had backslided, and who, in the words of Rigby the chemist, “Must be spewed out of the mouth of the righteous into the dust of shame.”
That was the situation when Joel Mazarine drove furiously into the town and made for the railway station. Men like Jonas Billings, who saw him, and had the scent for sensation, passed the word on downtown, as it is called, that something “was up” with Mazarine, and the railway station was the place where what was up could be seen. Therefore; a quarter of an hour before the arrival of the express which was to carry Orlando Guise’s mother to her sick sister three hundred miles down the line, a goodly number of citizens had gathered at the station-far more than usually watched the entrance or exit of the express.
Mazarine’s wagon and steaming horses were tied up outside the station, and inside on the platform Moses-not-much, as Mazarine had been called by Jonas Billings, marched up and down, his snaky little eyes blinking at the doorway of the station reception-room. People came and some of them nodded to him derisively. Some, with more hardihood, asked him if he was going East; if he was expecting anyone; if he was seeing somebody off.
A good many asked him the last question, because, as the minutes had passed, Burlingame had arrived. He had also disclosed his great joke to those who would carry it far and near, together with the news that Louise had taken flight. The last fact, however, was known to several people, because more than one had seen the Young Doctor and Patsy Kernaghan taking Louise to Nolan Doyle’s ranch.
It was dusk. The lamps of the station were being lighted five minutes before the express arrived, and as the lights flared up, Orlando entered the waiting-room of the station, with a lady on his arm, and presently showed at the platform doorway, smiling and cheerful. He did not blench when Mazarine came towards him. Mazarine had seen the flutter of a blue skirt in the waiting-room, and his wife had worn blue that day!
Orlando saw the heavy, offensive figure of Mazarine making for him. He, however, appeared to take no notice, though he watched his outrageous pursuer out of the corner of his eye, as he quietly gave orders to a porter concerning a little heap of luggage. When he had finished this, he turned, as it were casually, to Mazarine. Then he giggled in the face of the Master of Tralee. It was like the matador’s waving of the scarlet cloth in the face of the enraged bull. Having thus relieved his feelings, Orlando turned and walked to the door of the reception-room, but was stopped by the old man rushing at him. Swinging round, Orlando almost filled the doorway.
“You devil’s spawn,” Mazarine almost shouted, “get out of that doorway. I want my wife. You needn’t try to hide her. You thief! You lecherous circus rider! Stand aside—leper!”
Orlando coolly stretched out his elbows till they touched the sides of the door, and as the crowd pressed, he said to them mockingly:
“Get back, boys. Give him air. Can’t you see he’s gasping for breath.” Then he giggled again.
The old man looked round at the crowd, but he saw no sympathy—only aversion and ridicule. Suddenly he snatched his little black-bound Bible from his pocket, and held it up.
“What does this Book say?” he thundered. “It says that a wife shall cleave unto her husband until death. For the seducer and the betrayer death is the portion.”
The whistle of the incoming train was heard in the distance.
The old man was desperate. It was clear he meant to assault Orlando. “You will only take her away over my dead body,” he ground out in his passion. “The Lord gave, and only the Lord shall take away.” He gathered himself together for the attack.
Orlando waved a hand at him as one would at a troublesome child. At that instant, his mother stepped up behind him in the reception-room.
“Orlando,” she said in her mincing, piping little voice, “Orlando, dear, the train is coming. Let me out. I’m not afraid of that bad man. I want to catch my train.”
Orlando stepped aside, and his mother passed through, to the consternation of Mazarine, who fell back. The old man now realized that Burlingame had tricked him. Laughter went up from the crowd. They had had a great show at no cost.
“‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,’ Mr. Mazarine!” called someone from the crowd.
“It’s the next train she’s going by, old Moses-not-much,” shouted a friend of Jonas Billings.
“She’s had enough of you, Joel!” sneered another mocker.
“Wouldn’t you like to know where she is, yellow-lugs?” queried a fat washerwoman.
For an instant Mazarine stood demused, and then, thrusting the Bible into his pocket, he drew himself up in an effort of pride and defiance.
“Judases! Jezebels!” he burst out at them all. Then he lunged through the doorway of the reception-room; but at the door opening on the street his courage gave way, and hunched up like one in pain, he ran towards the hitching-post where he had left his horses and wagon. They were not there. With a groan which was also a malediction, he went up the street like a wounded elephant, and made his way to the police-station through a town which had no pity for him.
During the hour he remained in the town, Mazarine searched in vain for his horses and wagon. He looked everywhere except the shed behind the Methodist Church. It was there the two wags who had played the trick on him had carefully hitched the horses, and presently they announced in town that they did it because they knew Mazarine would want to go to the prayer-meeting to lay his crimes before the Mercy Seat!
It was quite true that it was prayer-meeting night, and as the merciless wags left the shed, the voice of brother Rigby the chemist was narrating for the hundredth time the story of his conversion, when, as he said, “the pains of hell gat hold of him.” Brother Rigby loved to relate the tortures of the day when he was convicted of sin; but on this night his ancient story seemed appropriate, as he had dealt with great severity on the doings of the backslider, Joel Mazarine.
When the two wags returned to the front street of Askatoon, they were just in time to see the second meeting of Orlando and Mazarine. Mazarine had not been able to find his horses at any hotel or livery stable, or in any street. It was at the moment, when, in his distraction, he had decided to walk back to Tralee, that Orlando, driving up the street, saw him. Orlando reined in his horses dropped from his buggy and approached him.
There was a look in Orlando’s eyes which was a reflection from a remote past, from ancestors who had settled their troubles with the first weapon and the best opportunity to their hands. “The furrin element in him,” as Jonas Billings called it, had been at full flood ever since he had bade his mother good-bye. A storm of anger had been raised in him. As he said to himself, he had had enough; he had been filled up to the chin by the Mazarine business; and his impulsive youth wanted to end it by some smashing act which would be sensational and decisive. So it was that Fate offered the opportunity, as he came up the front street of Askatoon, and found himself face to face with Mazarine, over against the offices of Burlingame.
“A word with you, Mr. Mazarine,” he said, with the air of a man who wants to ease his mind of its trouble by action. “Back there at the station, I kept my tongue and let you down easy enough, because my mother was present. She is old and sensitive, and she doesn’t like to see her son doing the dirty work every man must do some time or other, when there’s street cleaning to be done. Now, let me tell you this: you’ve slandered as good a girl, you’ve libelled as straight a wife, as the best man in the world ever had. You’ve made a public scandal of your private home. You’ve treated the pure thing as if it were the foul thing; and yet, you want to keep the pure thing that you treat like a foul thing, under your rawhide whip, because it’s young and beautiful and good. You don’t want to save her soul”—he pointed to the Bible, which the old man had snatched from his pocket again—“you don’t want to save her soul. You don’t care whether she’s happy in this world or the next; what you want is what you can see of her, for your life in this world only. You want—”
The old man interrupted him with a savage emotion which Jonas Billings said made him look like “a satyre.”
“I want to save her from the wrath to come,” he said. “This here holy Book gives me my rights. It says, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and the trouble I have comes from you that’s stole my wife, that’s put her soul in jeopardy, robbed my home—”
“Robbed your home!” interjected Orlando quietly, but with a voice of suppressed passion. “Robbed your home! Why, the other day you tried to prevent her entering it. You wanted to shut her out. After she had lived with you all those years, you believed she lied to you when she told you the truth about that night on the prairie; but her innocence was proved by one who was there all the time, and for shame’s sake you had to let her in. But she couldn’t stand it. I don’t wonder. A lark wouldn’t be at home where a vulture roosted.”
“And so the lark flies away to the cuckoo,” snarled the old man, with flecks of froth gathering at the corners of his mouth; for the sight of this handsome, long-limbed youth enraged him.
“Give her back to me. You know where she is,” he persisted. “You’ve got her hid away. That’s why you’ve sent your mother East—so’s she wouldn’t know, though from what I see, I shouldn’t think it’d have made much difference to her.”
Exclamations broke from the crowd. It was the wild West. It was a country where, not twenty years before, men did justice upon men without the assistance of the law; and the West understood that the dark insult just uttered would in days not far gone have meant death. The onlookers exclaimed, and then became silent, because a subtle sense of tragedy suddenly smothered their voices. Upon the silence there broke a little giggling laugh. It came from lips that were one in paleness with a face grown stony.
“I ought to kill you,” Orlando said quietly after a moment, yet scarcely above a whisper. “I ought to kill you, Mazarine, but that would only be playing your game, for the law would get hold of me, and the girl that has left you would be sorrowful, for she knows I love her, though I never told her so. She’d be sorry to see the law get at me. She’s going to be mine some day, in the right way. I’m not going behind your back to say it; I’m announcing it to all and sundry. I never did a thing to her that couldn’t have been seen by all the world, and I never said a thing to her that couldn’t be heard by all the world; but I hope she’ll never go back to you. You’ve made a sewer for her to live in, not a home. As I said, I ought to kill you, but that would play your game, so I won’t, not now. But I tell you this, Mazarine: if I ever meet you again—and I’m sure to do so—and you don’t get off the road I’m travelling on, or the side-walk I’m walking on, when I meet you or when I pass you, I’ll let you have what’ll send you to hell, before you can wink twice.
“As for Louise—as for her: I don’t know where she is, but I’ll find her. One thing is sure: if I see her, I’ll tell her never to go back to you; and she won’t. You’ve drunk at the waters of Canaan for the last time. For a Christian you’re pretty filthy. Go and wash in the pool of Siloam and be clean—damn you, Mazarine!”
With that he turned, almost unheeding the hands thrust out to grip his, the voices murmuring approval. In a moment he had swung his horses round. He did not go beyond ten yards, however, before someone, running beside his wagon, whispered up to him: “She’s out at Nolan Doyle’s ranch. She went with the Young Doctor and Patsy Kernaghan.”
Behind, in the street, a young boy came running through the crowd and shouting: “I know where they are! I know where they are!” He stopped before Mazarine. “Gimme half a dollar, and I’ll tell you where your horses are. Gimme half a dollar. Gimme half a dollar, and I’ll tell you.”
An instant later, with the half-dollar in his hand, he said: “They’re up to the shed of the Meetin’ House.”
“Yes, go along up to the Meetin’ House, Mr. Mazarine,” said one of the miscreants who had driven the horses there. “They’re holding a post-mortem on you at the prayer meetin’. They say you’re dead in trespasses and sins. Get along, Joel.”
The crowd started to follow him to the shed where his horses were, but after a moment he turned on them and said:
“Ain’t you heerd and seen enough? Ain’t there no law to protect a man?”
A hoe was leaning against a fence. He saw it, and with sudden fury, seizing it, swung it round his head as if to throw it into the crowd. At that moment a stalwart constable ran forward, raised a hand towards Mazarine, and then addressed the crowd.
“We’ve had enough of this,” he said. “I’ll lock up any man that goes a step further towards the Meetin’ House. Where do you think you are? This is Askatoon, the place of peace and happiness, and we’re going to be happy, if I have to lock up the hull lot of you. I guess you can go right on, Mr. Mazarine,” he added. “Go right on and git your wagon.”
A moment later Mazarine was walking alone towards the Meeting House; but no, not alone, for a hundred devils were with him.