"I do think; and also I want both Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear my story. Better, truer friends a man could not have; and I want them to know the worst and the best there is, if there is any best. They and you have trusted me, been too good to me, and what I said at the trial is not enough. I want to do what I've never done before. I want to tell everything. It will do me good; and perhaps as I tell it I'll see myself and everything else in a truer light than I've yet seen it all."

"You are sure you want Mrs. Tynan and her daughter to hear?"

"Absolutely sure."

"They are not in your rank in life, you know."

"They are my friends, and I owe them more than I can say. There is nothing they cannot or should not hear. I can say that at least."

"Shall I ask them to come?"

"Yes. Give me a swig of water first. It won't be easy, but--"

He held out his hand, and the Young Doctor grasped it.

Suddenly the latter said: "You are sure you will not be sorry? That it is not a mood of the moment due to physical weakness?"

"Quite sure. I determined on it the day I was shot--and before I was shot."

"All right." The Young Doctor disappeared.

CHAPTER VI. "HERE ENDETH THE FIRST LESSON"

The stillness of a summer's day in Prairie Land has all the characteristics of music. That is not so paradoxical as it seems. The effect of some music is to produce a divine quiescence of the senses, a suspension of motion and aggressive life; to reduce existence to mere pulsation. It was this kind of feeling which pervaded that region of sentient being when Shiel Crozier told his story. The sounds that sprinkled the general stillness were in themselves sleepy notes of the pervasive music of somnolent nature--the sough of the pine at the door, the murmur of insect life, the low, thudding beat of the steam-thresher out of sight hard by, the purring of the cat in the arms of Kitty Tynan as, with fascinated eyes, she listened to a man tell the tale of a life as distant from that which she lived as she was from Eve.

She felt more awed than curious as the tale went on; it even seemed to her she was listening to a theme beyond her sphere, like some shameless eavesdropper at the curtains of a secret ceremonial. Once or twice she looked at her mother and at the Young Doctor, as though to rea.s.sure herself that she was not a vulgar intruder. It was far more impressive to her, and to the Young Doctor too, than the scene at the Logan Trial when a man was sentenced to death. It was strangely magnetic, this tale of a man's existence; and the clock which sounded so loud on the mantelpiece, as it mechanically ticked off the time, seemed only part of some mysterious machinery of life. Once a dove swept down upon the window-sill, and, peering in, filled one of the pauses in the recital with its deep contralto note, and then fled like a small blue cloud into the wide and--as it seemed--everlasting peace beyond the doorway.

There was nothing at all between themselves and the far sky-line save little clumps of trees here and there, little cl.u.s.ters of buildings and houses--no visible animal life. Everything conspired to give a dignity in keeping with the drama of failure being unfolded in the commonplace home of the widow Tynan. Yet the home too had its dignity. The engineer father had had tastes, and he had insisted on plain, unfigured curtains and wallpaper and carpets, when carpets were used; and though his wife had at first protested against the unfigured carpets as more difficult to keep clean and as showing the dirt too easily, she had come to like the one-colour scheme, and in that respect her home had an individuality rare in her surroundings.

That was why Kitty Tynan had always a good background; for what her bright colouring would have been in the midst of gaudy, cheap chintzes and "Axminsters," such as abounded in Askatoon, is better left to the imagination. It was not, therefore, in sordid, mean, or incongruous surroundings that Crozier told his tale; as would no doubt have been arranged by a dramatist, if he had had the making and the setting of the story; and if it were not a true tale told just as it happened.

Perhaps the tale was the more impressive because of Crozier's deep baritone voice, capable, as it was, of much modulation, yet, except when he was excited, having a slight monotone like the note of a violin with the mute upon the strings.

This was his tale:

"Well, to begin with, I was born at Castlegarry, in Kerry--you know the main facts from what I said in court. As a boy I wasn't so bad a sort.

I had one peculiarity. I always wanted 'to have something on,' as John Sibley would say. No matter what it was, I must have something on it.

And I was very lucky--worse luck!"

They all laughed at the bull. "I feel at home at once," murmured the Young Doctor, for he had come from near Enniskillen years agone, and there is not so much difference between Enniskillen and Kerry when it comes to Irish bulls.

"Worse luck, it was," continued Crozier, "because it made me confident of always winning. It's hard to say how early I began to believe I could see things that were going to happen. By the hour I used to shake the dice on the billiard-table at Castlegarry, trying to see with my eyes shut the numbers about to come up. Of course now and then I saw the right numbers; and it deepened the conviction that if I cultivated the gift I'd be able to be right nearly every time. When I went to a horse-race I used to fasten my mind on the signal, and tried to see beforehand the number of the winner. Again sometimes I was very right indeed, and that deepened my confidence in myself. I was always at it.

I'd try and guess--try and see--the number of the hymn which was on the paper in the vicar's hand before he gave it out, and I would bet with myself on it. I would bet with myself or with anybody available on any conceivable thing--the minutes late a train would be; the pints of milk a cow would give; the people who would be at a hunt breakfast; the babies that would be christened on a Sunday; the number of eyes in a peck of raw potatoes. I was out against the universe. But it wasn't serious at all--just a boy's mania--till one day my father met me in London when I came down from Oxford, and took me to Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street. There was the thing that finished me. I was twenty-one, and restless-minded, and with eyes wide open.

"Well, he took me to Thwaite's where I was to become a member, and after a little while he left me to go and have a long pow-wow with the committee--he was a member of it. He told me to make myself at home, and I did so as soon as his back was turned. Almost the first thing with which I became sociable was a book which, at my first sight of it, had a fascination for me. The binding was very old, and the leather was worn, as you will see the leather of a pocketbook, till it looks and feels like a nice soap. That book brought me here."

He paused, and in the silence the Young Doctor pushed a gla.s.s of milk and brandy towards him. He sipped the contents. The others were in a state of tension. Kitty Tynan's eyes were fixed on him as though hypnotised, and the Young Doctor was scarcely less interested; while the widow knitted harder and faster than she had ever done, and she could knit very fast indeed.

"It was the betting-book of Thwaite's, and it dated back almost to the time of the conquest of Quebec. Great men dead and gone long ago--near a hundred and fifty years ago-had put down their bets in the book, for Thwaite's was then what it is now, the highest and best sporting club in the world."

Kitty Tynan's face had a curious look, for there was a club in Askatoon, and it was said that all the "sports" a.s.sembled there. She had no idea what Thwaite's Club in St. James's Street would look like; but that did not matter. She supposed it must be as big as the Askatoon Court House at least.

"Bets--bets--bets by men whose names were in every history, and the names of their sons and grandsons and great-grandsons; and all betting on the oddest things as well as the most natural things in the world.

Some of the bets made were as mad as the bets I made myself. Oh!

ridiculous, some of them were; and then again bets on things that stirred the world to the centre, from the loss of America to the beheading of Louis XVI.

"It was strange enough to see the half-dozen lines of a bet by a marquis whose great-grandson bet on the Franco-German War; that the Government which imposed the tea-tax in America would be out of power within six months; or that the French Canadians would join the colonists in what is now the United States if they revolted. This would be cheek-by-jowl with a bet that an heir would be born to one new-married pair before another pair. The very last bet made on the day I opened the book was that Queen Victoria would make Lord Salisbury a duke, that a certain gentleman known as S. S. could find his own door in St. James's Square, blindfold, from the club, and that Corsair would win the Derby.

"For two long hours I sat forgetful of everything around me, while I read that record--to me the most interesting the world could show. Every line was part of the history of the country, a part of the history of many lives, and it was all part of the ritual of the temple of the great G.o.d Chance. I was fascinated, lost in a land of wonders. Men came and went, but silently. At last there entered a gentleman whose picture I had so often seen in the papers--a man as well known in the sporting world as was Chamberlain in the political world. He was dressed spectacularly, but his face oozed good-nature, though his eyes were like bright bits of coal. He bred horses, he raced this, he backed that, he laid against the other; he was one of the greatest plungers, one of the biggest figures on the turf. He had been a kind of G.o.d to me--a G.o.d in a grey frock-coat, with a grey top-hat and field-gla.s.ses slung over his shoulder; or in a hunting-suit of the most picturesque kind--great pockets in a well-fitting coat, splendid striped waistcoat. Well, there, I only mention this because it played so big a part in bringing me to Askatoon.

"He came up to the table where I sat in the room with the beautiful Adam's fireplace and the ceiling like an architrave of Valhalla, and said, 'Do you mind--for one minute?' and he reached out a hand for the book.

"I made way for him, and I suppose admiration showed in my eyes, because as he hastily wrote--what a generous scrawl it was!--he said to me, 'Haven't we met somewhere before? I seem to remember your face.

"Great gentleman, I thought, because it was certain he knew he had never seen me before, and I was overcome by the reflection that he wished to be civil in that way to me. 'It's my father's face you remember, I should think,' I answered. 'He is a member here. I am only a visitor.

I haven't been elected yet.' 'Ah, we must see to that!' he said with a smile, and laid a hand on my shoulder as though he'd known me many a year--and I only twenty-one. 'Who is your father?' he asked. When I told him he nodded. 'Yes, yes, I know him--Crozier of Castlegarry; but I knew his father far better, though he was so much older than me, and indeed your grandfather also. Look--in this book is the first bet I ever made here after my election to the club, and it was made with your grandfather. There's no age in the kingdom of sport, dear lad,' he added, laughing--'neither age nor s.e.x nor position nor place. It's the one democratic thing in the modern world. It's a republic inside this old monarchy of ours. Look, here it is, my first bet with your grandfather--and I'm only sixty now!' He smoothed the page with his hand in a manner such as I have seen a dean do with his sermon-paper in a cathedral puplit. 'Here it is, thirty-six years ago.' He read the bet aloud. It was on the Derby, he himself having bet that the Prince of Wale's horse would win. 'Your grandfather, dear lad,' he repeated, 'but you'll find no bets of mine with your father. He didn't inherit that strain, but your grandfather and your great-grandfather had it--sportsmen both, afraid of nothing, with big minds, great eyes for seeing, and a sense for a winner almost uncanny. Have you got it by any chance? Yes, yes, by George and by John, I see you have; you are your grandfather to a hair! His portrait is here in the club--in the next room. Have a look at it. He was only forty when it was done, and you're very like him; the cut of the jib is there.' He took my hand. 'Good-bye, dear lad,' he said; 'we'll meet-yes, we'll meet often enough if you are like your grandfather. And I'll always like to see you,' he added generously.

"'I always wanted to meet you,' I answered. 'I've cut your pictures out of the papers to keep them--at Eton and Oxford.' He laughed in great good-humour and pride. 'So so, so so, and I am a hero then, with one follower! Well, well, dear lad, I don't often go wrong, or anyhow I'm oftener right than wrong, and you might do worse than follow me--but no, I don't want that responsibility. Go on your own--go on your own.'

"A minute more and he was gone with a wave of the hand, and in excitement I picked up the betting-book. It almost took my breath away.

He had staked a thousand pounds that the favourite of the Derby would not win the race, and that one of three outsiders would. As I sat overpowered by the magnitude of the bet the door opened, and he appeared with another man, not one with whose face I was then familiar, though as a duke and owner of great possessions, he was familiar to society. 'I've put it down,' he said. 'Sign it, if it's all in order.' This the duke did, after apologizing for disturbing me. He looked at me keenly as he turned away. 'Not the most elevating literature in the library,'

he said, smiling ironically. 'If you haven't got a taste for it beyond control, don't cultivate it.' He nodded kindly, and left; and again, till my father came and found me, I buried myself in that book of fate--to me. I found many entries in my grandfather's name, but not one in my father's name. I have an idea that when a vice or virtue skips one generation, it appears with increased violence or persistence in the next, for, pa.s.sing over my father into my defenceless breast, the spirit of sport went mad in me--or almost so. No miser ever had a more cheerful and happy hour than I had as I read the betting-book at Thwaites'.

"I became a member of Thwaite's soon after I left Oxford. As some men go to the Temple, some to the Stock Exchange, some to Parliament, I went to Thwaite's. It was the centre of my interest, and I took chambers in Park Place, St. James's Street, a few steps away. Here I met again constantly the great sportsman who had noticed me so kindly, and I became his follower, his disciple. I had started with him on a wave of prejudice in his favour; because that day when I read in the betting-book what he had staked against the favourite, I laid all the cash and credit I could get with his outsiders and against the favourite, and I won five hundred pounds. What he won--to my youthful eyes-was fabulous. There's no use saying what you think--you kind friends, who've always done something in life--that I was a good-for-nothing creature to give myself up to the turf, to horses and jockeys, and the janissaries of sport. You must remember that for generations my family had run on a very narrow margin of succession, there seldom, if ever, being more than two born in any generation of the family, so that there was always enough for the younger son or daughter; and to take up a profession was not necessary for livelihood. If my mother, who was an intellectual and able woman, had lived, it's hard to tell what I should have become; for steered aright, given true ideas of what life should mean to a man, I might have become ambitious and forged ahead in one direction or another. But there it was, she died when I was ten, and there was no one to mould me. At Eton, at Oxford-well, they are not preparatory schools to the business of life. And when at twenty-four I inherited the fortune my mother left me, I had only one idea: to live the life of a sporting gentleman. I had a name as a cricketer--"

"Ah--I remember, Crozier of Lammis!" interjected the Young Doctor involuntarily. "I'm a north of Ireland man, but I remember--"

"Yes, Lammis," the sick man went on. "Castlegarry was my father's place, but my mother left me Lammis. When I got control of it, and of the securities she left, I felt my oats, as they say; and I wasn't long in making a show of courage, not to say rashness, in following my leader.

He gave me luck for a time, indeed so great that I could even breed horses of my own. But the luck went against him at last, and then, of course, against me; and I began to feel that suction which, as it draws the cash out of your pocket, the credit out of your bank, seems to draw also the whole internal economy out of your body--a ghastly, empty, collapsing thing."

Mrs. Tynan gave a great sigh. She had once put two hundred dollars in a mine--on paper--and it ended in a lawsuit; and on the verdict in the lawsuit depended the two hundred dollars and more. When she read a fatal telegram to her saying that all was lost, she had had that empty, collapsing feeling.

Pausing for a moment, in which he sipped some milk, Crozier then continued: "At last my leader died, and the see-saw of fortune began for me; and a good deal of my sound timber was sawed into logs and made into lumber to build some one else's fortune. When things were balancing pretty easily, I married. It wasn't a sordid business to restore my fortunes--I'll say that for myself; but it wasn't the thing to do, for I wasn't secure in my position. I might go on the rocks; but was there ever a gambler who didn't believe that he'd pull it off in a big way next time, and that the turn of the wheel against him was only to tame his spirit? Was there ever a gambler or sportsman of my cla.s.s who didn't talk about the 'law of chances,' on the basis that if red, as it were, came up three times, black stood a fair chance of coming up the fourth time? A silly enough conclusion; for on the law of chances there's no reason why red shouldn't come up three hundred times; and so I found that your run of bad luck may be so long that you cannot have a chance to recover, and are out of it before the wheel turns in your favour. I oughn't to have married."

His voice had changed in tone, his look become most grave, there was something very like reverence in his face, and deprecating submission in his eyes. His fingers fussed with the rug that covered his knees.

"G.o.d help the man that's afraid of his own wife!" remarked the Young Doctor to himself, not erroneously reading the expression of Crozier's face and the tone of his voice. "There's nothing so unnerving."

"No, I oughtn't to have done it," Crozier went on. "But I will say again it wasn't a sordid marriage, though she had great expectations, but not immediate; and she was a girl of great character. She was able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and she knew her own mind, and was radiantly handsome."

Kitty Tynan almost sniffed. Through a whole fortnight she had, with a courage and a right-mindedness quite remarkable, fought her infatuation for this man, and as she fought she had imagined a hundred times what his wife was like. She had pictured to herself a gossamer kind of woman, delicate, and in contour like one of the fashion-plate figures she saw in the picture-papers. She had imagined her with a wide, drooping hat, with a soft, clinging gown, and a bodice like a great white handkerchief crossed on her breast, holding a basket of flowers, while a King Charles spaniel gambolled at her feet.

This was what she had imagined with a kind of awe; but the few words Crozier had said of her gave the impression of a Juno, commanding, exacting, bullying, sailing on with this man of men in her wake, who was afraid of stepping on her train. Was it strange she should think that? She was only a simple prairie girl who drew her own comparisons according to her kind and from what she knew of life. So she imagined Crozier's wife to have been a sort of Zen.o.bia, Queen of Palmyra, who swept up the dust of the universe with her skirts, and gave no chance at all to the children of nature like Kitty, who wore skirts scarcely lower than their ankles. She almost sniffed, and she became angry, too, that a man like Crozier, who had faced the offensive Augustus Burlingame in the witness-box as he did; who took the bullet of the a.s.sa.s.sin with such courage; who broke a horse like a Mexican; who could ride like a leech on a filly's flank, should crumple up at the thought of a woman who, anyhow, couldn't be taller than Crozier himself was, and hadn't a hand like a piece of steel and the skin of an antelope. It was enough to make a cat laugh, or a woman cry with rage.

"Able and brilliant and splendid and far-seeing, and radiantly handsome!" There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing woman, in velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and overbearing, like grey poplin. Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the mirror-the half-length mirror on the opposite wall--and she felt her hands clench and her bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive calico frock, a thing for Chloe, not for Juno.