You Never Know Your Luck, Volume 3.

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YOU NEVER KNOW YOUR LUCK

[BEING THE STORY OF A MATRIMONIAL DESERTER]

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 3.

XII. AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM
XIII. KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN
XIV. AWAITING THE VERDICT
XV. "MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM"
XVI. "'TWAS FOR YOUR PLEASURE YOU CAME HERE, YOU GO BACK FOR MINE"
XVII. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT?
EPILOGUE

CHAPTER XII

AT THE RECEIPT OF CUSTOM

"What are you laughing at, Kitty? You cackle like a young hen with her
first egg." So spoke Mrs. Tynan to her daughter, who alternately swung
backwards and forwards in a big rocking-chair, silently gazing into the
distant sky, or sat still and "cackled" as her mother had said.

A person of real observation and astuteness, however, would have noticed
that Kitty's laughter told a story which was not joy and gladness--
neither good humour nor the abandonment of a luxurious nature.
It was tinged with bitterness and had the smart of the nettle.

Her mother's question only made her laugh the more, and at last Mrs.
Tynan stooped over her and said, "I could shake you, Kitty. You'd make a
snail fidget, and I've got enough to do to keep my senses steady with all
the house-work--and now her in there!" She tossed a hand behind her
fretfully.

Quick with love for her mother, as she always was, Kitty caught the
other's trembling hand. "You've always had too much to do, mother;
always been slaving for others. You've never had time to think whether
you're happy or not, or whether you've got a problem--that's what people
call things, when they're got so much time on their hands that they make
a play of their inside feelings and work it up till it sets them crazy."

Mrs. Tynan's mouth tightened and her brow clouded. "I've had my problems
too, but I always made quick work of them. They never had a chance to
overlay me like a mother overlays her baby and kills it."

"Not 'like a mother overlays,' but 'as a mother overlays,'" returned
Kitty with a queer note to her voice. "That's what they taught me at
school. The teacher was always picking us up on that kind of thing.
I said a thing worse than that when Mrs. Crozier"--her fingers motioned
towards another room--"came to-day. I don't know what possessed me. I
was off my trolley, I suppose, as John Sibley puts it. Well, when Mrs.
James Shiel Gathorne Crozier said--oh, so sweetly and kindly--'You are
Miss Tynan?' what do you think I replied? I said to her, 'The same'!"

Rather an acidly satisfied smile came to Mrs. Tynan's lips. "That was
like the Slatterly girls," she replied. "Your father would have said it
was the vernacular of the rail-head. He was a great man for odd words,
but he knew always just what he wanted to say and he said it out. You've
got his gift. You always say the right thing, and I don't know why you
made that break with her--of all people."

A meditative look came into Kitty's eyes. "Mr. Crozier says every one
has an imp that loves to tease us, and trip us up, and make us appear
ridiculous before those we don't want to have any advantage over us."

"I don't want Mrs. Crozier to have any advantage over you and me, I can
tell you that. Things'll never be the same here again, Kitty dear, and
we've all got on so well; with him so considerate of every one, and a
good friend always, and just one of us, and his sickness making him seem
like our own, and--"

"Oh, hush--will you hush, mother!" interposed Kitty sharply. "He's
going away with her back to the old country, and we might just as well
think about getting other borders, for I suppose Mr. Bulrush and his
bonny bride will set up a little bulrush tabernacle on the banks of the
Nile"--she nodded in the direction of the river outside--"and they'll
find a little Moses and will treat it as their very own."

"Kitty, how can you!"

Kitty shrugged a shoulder. "It would be ridiculous for that pair to have
one of their own. It's only the young mother with a new baby that looks
natural to me."

"Don't talk that way, Kitty," rejoined her mother sharply. "You aren't
fit to judge of such things."

"I will be before long," said her daughter. "Anyway, Mrs. Crozier isn't
any better able to talk than I am," she added irrelevantly. "She never
was a mother."

"Don't blame her," said Mrs. Tynan severely. "That's God's business.
I'd be sorry for her, so far as that was concerned, if I were you. It's
not her fault."

"It's an easy way of accounting for good undone," returned Kitty.
"P'r'aps it was God's fault, and p'r'aps if she had loved him more--"

Mrs. Tynan's face flushed with sudden irritation and that fretful look
came to her eyes which accompanies a lack of comprehension. "Upon my
word, well, upon my word, of all the vixens that ever lived, and you
looking like a yellow pansy and too sweet for daily use! Such thoughts
in your head! Who'd have believed that you--!"

Kitty made a mocking face at her mother. "I'm more than a girl, I'm a
woman, mother, who sees life all around me, from the insect to the
mountain, and I know things without being told. I always did. Just life
and living tell me things, and maybe, too, the Irish in me that father
was."

"It's so odd. You're such a mixture of fun and fancy, at least you
always have been; but there's something new in you these days. Kitty,
you make me afraid--yes, you make your mother afraid. After what you
said the other day about Mr. Crozier I've had bad nights, and I get
nervous thinking."

Kitty suddenly got up, put her arm round her mother and kissed her.
"You needn't be afraid of me, mother. If there'd been any real danger,
I wouldn't have told you. Mr. Crozier's away, and when he comes back
he'll find his wife here, and there's the end of everything. If there'd
been danger, it would have been settled the night before he went away.
I kissed him that night as he was sleeping out there under the trees."

Mrs. Tynan sat down weakly and fanned herself with her apron. "Oh, oh,
oh, dear Lord!" she said. "I'm not afraid to tell you anything I ever
did, mother," declared Kitty firmly; "though I'm not prepared to tell you
everything I've felt. I kissed him as he slept. He didn't wake, he just
lay there sleeping--sleeping." A strange, distant, dreaming look came
into her eyes. She smiled like one who saw a happy vision, and an eerie
expression stole into her face. "I didn't want him to wake," she
continued. "I asked God not to let him wake. If he'd waked--oh, I'd
have been ashamed enough till the day I died in one way! Still he'd have
understood, and he'd have thought no harm. But it wouldn't have been
fair to him--and there's his wife in there," she added, breaking off into
a different tone. "They're a long way above us--up among the peaks, and
we're at the foot of the foothills, mother; but he never made us feel
that, did he? The difference between him and most of the men I've ever
seen! The difference!"

"There's the Young Doctor," said her mother reproachfully.

"He-him! He's by himself, with something of every sort in him from the
top to the bottom. There's been a ditcher in his family, and there may
have been a duke. But Shiel Crozier--Shiel"--she flushed as she said the
name like that, but a little touch of defiance came into her face too--
"he is all of one kind. He's not a blend. And he's married to her in
there!"

"You needn't speak in that tone about her. She's as fine as can be."

"She's as fine as a bee," retorted Kitty. Again she laughed that almost
mirthless laugh for which her mother had called her to account a moment
before. "You asked me a while ago what I was laughing at, mother," she
continued. "Why, can't you guess? Mr. Crozier talked of her always as
though she was--well, like the pictures you've seen of Britannia, all
swelling and spreading, with her hand on a shield and her face saying,
'Look at me and be good,' and her eyes saying, 'Son of man, get upon thy
knees!' Why, I expected to see a sort of great--goodness--gracious
goddess, that kept him frightened to death of her. Bless you, he never
opened her letter, he was so afraid of her; and he used to breathe once
or twice hard--like that, when he mentioned her!" She breathed in such
mock awe that her mother laughed with a little kindly malice too.

"Even her letter," Kitty continued remorselessly, "it was as though she
--that little sprite--wrote it with a rod of chastisement, as the Bible
says. It--"

"What do you know of the inside of that letter?" asked her mother,
staring.

"What the steam of the tea-kettle could let me see," responded Kitty
defiantly; and then, to her shocked mother, she told what she had done,
and what the nature of the letter was.

"I wanted to help him if I could, and I think I'll be able to do it--I've
worked it all out," Kitty added eagerly, with a glint of steel in the
gold of her eyes and a fantastic kind of wisdom in her look.

"Kitty," said her mother severely and anxiously, "it's madness
interfering with other people's affairs--of that kind. It never was
any use."

"This will be the exception to the rule," returned Kitty. "There she
is"--again she flicked a hand towards the other room--"after they've been
parted five years. Well, she came after she read my letter to her, and
after I'd read that unopened letter to him, which made me know how to put
it all to her. I've got intuition--that's Celtic and mad," she added,
with her chin thrusting out at her mother, to whom the Irish that her
husband had been, which was so deep in her daughter, was ever a mystery
to her, and of which she was more or less afraid.

"I've got a plan, and I believe--I know--it will work," Kitty continued.
"I've been thinking and thinking, and if there's trouble between them; if
he says he isn't going on with her till he's made his fortune; if he
throws that unopened letter in her face, I'll bring in my invention to
deal with the problem, and then you'll see! But all this fuss for a
little tiny button of a thing like that in there--pshaw! Mr. Crozier is
worth a real queen with the beauty of one of the Rhine maidens. How he
used to tell that story of the Rhinegold--do you remember? Wasn't it
grand? Well, I am glad now that he's going--yes, whatever trouble there
may be, still he is going. I feel it in my heart."

She paused, and her eyes took on a sombre tone. Presently, with a
slight, husky pain in her voice, like the faint echo of a wail, she went
on: "Now that he's going, I'm glad we've had the things he gave us,
things that can't be taken away from us. What you have enjoyed is yours
for ever and ever. It's memory; and for one moment or for one day or one
year of those things you loved, there's fifty years, perhaps, for memory.
Don't you remember the verses I cut out of the magazine:

"'Time, the ruthless idol-breaker,
Smileless, cold iconoclast,
Though he rob us of our altars,
Cannot rob us of the past.'"

"That's the way your father used to talk," replied her mother. "There's
a lot of poetry in you, Kitty." "More than there is in her?" asked
Kitty, again indicating the region where Mrs. Crozier was.

"There's as much poetry in her as there is in--in me. But she can do
things; that little bit of a babywoman can do things, Kitty. I know
women, and I tell you that if that woman hadn't a penny, she'd set to
and earn it; and if her husband hadn't a penny, she'd make his home
comfortable just the same somehow, for she's as capable as can be. She
had her things unpacked, her room in order herself--she didn't want your
help or mine--and herself with a fresh dress on before you could turn
round."

Kitty's eyes softened still more. "Well, if she'd been poor he would
never have left her, and then they wouldn't have lost five years--think
of it, five years of life with the man you love lost to you!--and there
wouldn't be this tough old knot to untie now."

"She has suffered--that little sparrow has suffered, I tell you, Kitty.
She has a grip on herself like--like--"

"Like Mr. Crozier with a broncho under his hand," interjected Kitty.
"She's too neat, too eternally spick and span for me, mother. It's as
though the Being that made her said, 'Now I'll try and see if I can
produce a model of a grown-up, full-sized piece of my work.' Mrs.
Crozier is an exhibition model, and Shiel Crozier's over six feet three,
and loose and free, and like a wapiti in his gait. If he was a wapiti
he'd carry the finest pair of antlers ever was."

"Kitty, you make me laugh," responded the puzzled woman. "I declare,
you're the most whimsical creature, and--"

At that moment there came a tapping at the door behind them, and a small,
silvery voice said, "May I come in?" as the door opened and Mrs.
Crozier, very precisely yet prettily dressed, entered.

"Please make yourself at home--no need to rap," answered Mrs. Tynan.
"Out in the West here we live in the open like. There's no room closed
to you, if you can put up with what there is, though it's not what you're
used to."

"For five months in the year during the past five years I've lived in a
house about half as large as this," was Mrs. Crozier's reply. "With my
husband away there wasn't the need of much room."

"Well, he only has one room here," responded Mrs. Tynan. "He never
seemed too crowded in it."

"Where is it? Might I see it?" asked the small, dark-eyed, dark-haired
wife, with the little touch of nectarine bloom and a little powder also;
and though she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, there was a look of
wistfulness in her eyes, a gleam of which Kitty caught ere it passed.

"You've been separated, Mrs. Crozier," answered the elder woman, "and
I've no right to let you into his room without his consent. You've had
no correspondence at all for five years--isn't that so?"

"Did he tell you that?" the regal little lady asked composedly, but with
an underglow of anger in her eyes.

"He told the court that at the Logan Trial," was the reply.

"At the murder trial--he told that?" Mrs. Crozier asked almost
mechanically, her face gone pale and a little haggard.

"He was obliged to answer when that wolf, Gus Burlingame, was after him,"
interposed Kitty with kindness in her tone, for, suddenly, she saw
through the outer walls of the little wife's being into the inner courts.
She saw that Mrs. Crozier loved her husband now, whatever she had done in
the past. The sight of love does not beget compassion in a loveless
heart, but there was love in Kitty's heart; and it was even greater than
she would have wished any human being to see; and by it she saw with
radium clearness through the veil of the other woman's being.

"Surely he could have avoided answering that," urged Mona Crozier
bitterly.

"Only by telling a lie," Kitty quickly answered, "and I don't believe he
ever told a lie in his life. Come," she added, "I will show you his
room. My mother needn't do it, and so she won't be responsible. You
have your rights as a wife until they're denied you. You mustn't come,
mother," she said to Mrs. Tynan, and she put a tender hand on her arm.

"This way," she added to the little person in the pale blue, which suited
well her very dark hair, blue eyes, and rose-touched cheeks.

CHAPTER XIII

KITTY SPEAKS HER MIND AGAIN

A moment later they stood inside Shiel Crozier's room. The first glance
his wife gave took in the walls, the table, the bureau, and the desk
which contained her own unopened letter. She was looking for a
photograph of herself.

There was none in the room, and an arid look came into her face. The
glance and its sequel did not escape Kitty's notice. She knew well--as
who would not?--what Mona Crozier was hoping to see, and she was human
enough to feel a kind of satisfaction in the wife's chagrin and
disappointment; for the unopened letter in the baize-covered desk which
she had read was sufficient warrant for a punishment and penalty due the
little lady, and not the less because it was so long delayed. Had not
Shiel Crozier had his draught of bitter herbs to drink over the past five
years?

Moreover, Kitty was sure beyond any doubt at all that Shiel Crozier's
wife, when she wrote the letter, did not love her husband, or at least
did not love him in the right or true way. She loved him only so far as
her then selfish nature permitted her to do; only in so far as the pride
of money which she had, and her husband had not, did not prevent; only in
so far as the nature of a tyrant could love--though the tyranny was pink
and white and sweetly perfumed and had the lure of youth. In her
primitive way Kitty had intuitively apprehended the main truth, and that
was enough to justify her in contributing to Mona Crozier's punishment.

Kitty's perceptions were true. At the start, Mona was in nature
proportionate to her size; and when she married she had not loved Crozier
as he had loved her. Maybe that was why--though he may not have admitted
it to himself--he could not bear to be beholden to her when his ruin
came. Love makes all things possible, and there is no humiliation in
taking from one who loves and is loved, that uncapitalised and communal
partnership which is not of the earth earthy. Perhaps that was why,
though Shiel loved her, he had had a bitterness which galled his soul;
why he had a determination to win sufficient wealth to make himself
independent of her. Down at the bottom of his chivalrous Irish heart
he had learned the truth, that to be dependent on her would beget in her
contempt for him, and he would be only her paid paramour and not her
husband in the true sense. Quixotic he had been, but under his quixotism
there was at least the shadow of a great tragical fact, and it had made
him a matrimonial deserter. Whether tragedy or comedy would emerge was
all on the knees of the gods.

"It's a nice room, isn't it?" asked Kitty when there had passed from
Mona Crozier's eyes the glaze or mist--not of tears, but stupefaction--
which had followed her inspection of the walls, the bureau, the table,
and the desk.

"Most comfortable, and so very clean--quite spotless," the wife answered
admiringly, and yet drearily. It made her feel humiliated that her man
could live this narrow life of one room without despair, with sufficient
resistance to the lure of her hundred and fifty thousand pounds and her
own delicate and charming person. Here, it would seem, he was content.
One easy-chair, made out of a barrel, a couch, a bed--a very narrow bed,
like a soldier's, a bed for himself alone--a small table, a shelf on the
wall with a dozen books, a little table, a bureau, and an old-fashioned,
sloping-topped, shallow desk covered with green baize, on high legs, so
that like a soldier too he could stand as he wrote (Crozier had made that
high stand for the desk himself). That was what the room conveyed to
her--the spirit of the soldier, bare, clean, strong, sparse: a workshop
and a chamber of sleep in one, like the tent of an officer on the march.
After the feeling had come to her, to heighten the sensation she espied a
little card hung under the small mirror on the wall. There was writing
on it, and going nearer, she saw in red pencil the words, "Courage,
soldier!"

These were the words which Kitty was so fond of using, and the girl had
a thrill of triumph now as she saw the woman from whom Crozier had fled
looking at the card. She herself had come and looked at it many times
since Crozier had gone, for he had only put it there just before he left
on his last expedition to Aspen Vale to carry through his deal. It had
brought a great joy to Kitty's heart. It had made her feel that she had
some share in his life; that, in a way, she had helped him on the march,
the vivandiere who carried the water-bag which would give him drink when
parched, battle-worn, or wounded.

Mona Crozier turned away from the card, sadly reflecting that nothing in
the room recalled herself; that she was not here in the very core of his
life in even the smallest way. Yet this girl, this sunny creature with
the call of youth and passion in her eyes, this Ruth of the wheat-fields,
came and went here as though she was a part of it. She did this and that
for him, and she was no doubt on such terms of intimacy with him that
they were really part of each other's life in a scheme of domesticity
unlike any boarding-house organization she had ever known. Here in
everything there was the air, the decorum, and the unartificial comfort
of home.

This was why he could live without his wedded wife and her gold and her
brocade, and the silk and the Persian rugs, and the grand piano and the
carriages and the high silk hat from Piccadilly. Her husband had had the
luxuries of wealth, and here he was living like a Spartan on his hill--
and alone; though he had a wife whom men had beseiged both before and
after marriage. A feeling of impotent indignation suddenly took
possession of her. Here he was with two women, unattached,--one
interesting and good and agreeable and good-looking, and the other almost
a beauty,--who were part of the whole rustic scheme in which he lived.
They made him comfortable, they did the hundred things that a valet or a
fond wife would do; they no doubt hung on every word he uttered--and he
could be interesting beyond most men. She had realised terribly how
interesting he was after he had fled; when men came about her and talked
to her in many ways, with many variations, but always with the one tune
behind all they said; always making for the one goal, whatever the point
from which they started or however circuitous their route.

As time went on she had hungrily longed to see her husband again, and
other men had no power to interest her; but still she had not sought to
find him. At first it had been offended pride, injured self-esteem, in
which the value of her own desirable self and of her very desirable
fortune was not lost; then it became the pride of a wife in whom the
spirit of the eternal woman was working; and she would have died rather
than have sought to find him. Five years--and not a word from him.

Five years--and not a letter from him! Her eyes involuntarily fell on
the high desk with the greenbaize top. Of all the letters he had written
at that desk not one had been addressed to her. Slowly, and with an
unintentional solemnity, she went up to it and laid a hand upon it. Her
chin only cleared the edge of it-he was a tall man, her husband.

"This is the place of secrets, I suppose?" she said, with a bright smile
and an attempt at gaiety to Kitty, who had watched her with burning eyes;
for she had felt the thrill of the moment. She was as sensitive to
atmosphere of this sad play of life as nearly and as vitally as the
deserted wife.

"I shouldn't think it a place of secrets," Kitty answered after a moment.
"He seldom locks it, and when he does I know where the key is."

"Indeed?" Mona Crozier stiffened. A look of reproach came into her
eyes. It was as though she was looking down from a great height upon a
poor creature who did not know the first rudiments of personal honour,
the fine elemental customs of life.

Kitty saw and understood, but she did not hasten to reply, or to set
things right. She met the lofty look unflinchingly, and she had pride
and some little malice too--it would do Mrs. Crozier good, she thought--
in saying, as she looked down on the humming-bird trying to be an eagle:

"I've had to get things for him-papers and so on, and send them on when
he was away, and even when he was at home I've had to act for him; and so
even when it was locked I had to know where the key was. He asked me to
help him that way."

Mona noted the stress laid upon the word home, and for the first time she
had a suspicion that this girl knew more than even the Logan Trial had
disclosed, and that she was being satirical and suggestive.

"Oh, of course," she returned cheerfully in response to Kitty--"you acted
as a kind of clerk for him!" There was a note in her voice which she
might better not have used. If she but knew it, she needed this girl's
friendship very badly. She ought to have remembered that she would not
have been here in her husband's room had it not been for the letter Kitty
had written--a letter which had made her heart beat so fast when she
received it, that she had sunk helpless to the floor on one of those soft
rugs, representing the soft comfort which wealth can bring.

The reply was like a slap in the face.

"I acted for him in any way at all that he wished me to," Kitty answered,
with quiet boldness and shining, defiant face.

Mona's hand fell away from the green baize desk, and her eyes again lost
their sight for a moment. Kitty was not savage by nature. She had been
goaded as much by the thought of the letter Crozier's wife had written to
him in the hour of his ruin as by the presence of the woman in this
house, where things would never be as they had been before. She had
struck hard, and now she was immediately sorry for it: for this woman was
here in response to her own appeal; and, after all, she might well be
jealous of the fact that Crozier had had close to him for so long and in
such conditions a girl like herself, younger than his own wife, and
prettier--yes, certainly prettier, she admitted to herself.

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