Wild Youth Part 12

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 refres.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sion.

"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 G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned 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.

CHAPTER XIII. ORLANDO GIVES A WARNING

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 nutsh.e.l.l 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 s.p.u.n.k 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, pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed, 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 rus.h.i.+ng at him. Swinging round, Orlando almost filled the doorway.

"You devil's sp.a.w.n," 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 a.s.sault Orlando.

"You will only take her away over my dead body," he ground out in his pa.s.sion. "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 pa.s.sed 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.