The Project Gutenberg EBook of Wild Youth, Volume Complete, by Gilbert Parker This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Wild Youth, Volume Complete Author: Gilbert Parker Release Date: October 18, 2006 [EBook #6291] Last Updated: August 27, 2016 Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILD YOUTH, VOLUME COMPLETE *** Produced by David Widger
.........................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.
........................Flamingo-like in her bright-coloured, figured gown, with a wild flower in her hair and her gray curls dancing gently at her temples, a little old lady trotted up and down the big sitting-room of Slow Down Ranch, talking volubly and insistently. One ironically minded would have said she chirruped, for her words came out in not unmusical, if staccato, notes, and she shook her shrivelled, ringed fingers reprovingly at a stalwart young man. Once or twice, as she seemed to threaten him with what the poet called “The slow, unmoving finger of scorn,” he giggled. It was evident that he was at once amused and troubled. This voice had cherished and chided him all his life, and he could measure accurately what was behind it. It was a wilful voice. It had the insistance which power gives, and to a woman—or to most women—power is either money or beauty, since, in the world as it is, office and authority are denied them. Beauty was gone from the face of the ancient dame, but she still had much money, and, on rare occasions, it gave her a little arrogance. It did so now as she admonished her beloved son, who at any time would have renounced fortune, or hope of fortune, for some wilful idea of his own. A less sordid modern did not exist. He was not very effective in the contest of tongue between his mother and himself. As the talk went on he foresaw that he was to be beaten; yet he persisted, for he loved a joy-wrangle, as he called it, with his mother. He had argued with her many a time, just to see her in a harmless passion, and note how the youth of her came back, giving high colour to the wrinkled face, and how the eyes shone with a brightness which had been constant in them long ago. They were now quarrelling over that ever-fruitful cause of antagonism—the second woman in the life of a man. Yet, strange to say, the flamingo-like Eugenie Guise, was fighting for the second woman, not against her. “I’ll say it all again and again and again till you have sense, Orlando,” she declared. “Your old mother hasn’t lived all these years for nothing. I’m not thinking of you; I’m thinking of her.” She pointed towards the door of another room, from which came sounds of laughter—happy laughter—in which a man’s and a woman’s voices sounded. “On the day she comes into this house—and that’s the day after to-morrow—I shall go. I’ll stand at the door and welcome you, and see you have a good wedding-breakfast and that it all goes off grand, then I shall vanish.” Orlando made a helpless gesture of the hand. “Well, mother, as I said, it will make us both unhappy—Louise as much as me. You and I have never been parted except for a few weeks at a time, and I’m sure I don’t know how I could stand it.” “Rather late to think about it,” the other returned. “You can’t have two women spoiling you in one house and being jealous of each other—oh, you needn’t toss your fingers! Even two women that love each other can’t bear the competition. Just because I love her and want her to be happy, off I go to your Aunt Amelia to live with her. She’s poor, and I’ll still have someone to boss as I’ve bossed you. I never knew how much I loved Amelia till she got sick last year when everything terrible was happening here. I’m going, Orlando—
Two birds hopping on one branch Would kill the joy of Slow Down Ranch—“There, I made that up on the moment. It’s true, even if it is poetry.” “It isn’t poetry, mother,” was the reply, and there was an ironical look in Orlando’s eyes. “Poetry’s the truth of life,” he hastened to add carefully, “and it’s not poetry to say that you could be a kill-joy.” The little lady tossed her head. “Well, you’ll never have a chance to prove it, for I’m taking the express east on the night of your wedding. That’s settled. Amelia needs me, and I’m going to her.... Your wedding present will be the ranch and a hundred thousand dollars,” she added. “You’re the sun-dried fruit of Paradise, Mother,” Orlando said, taking her by the arms. “I heard the Young Doctor call me a bird of Paradise once,” she returned. “People don’t know how sharp my ears are.... But I never stored it up against him. Taste is born in you, and if people haven’t got it in the cradle, they never have it. I suppose his mother went around in a black alpaca and wore her hair like a wardress in a jail. I’m sorry for him—that’s all.” “Suppose I should get homesick for you and run away from her!” remarked Orlando slyly. “Run away with her to me,” chirruped Eugenie, with a vain little laugh. Suddenly her manner changed, and she looked at her son with dreamy intensity. “You are so wonderfully young, my dear,” she said, “and I am very old. I had much happiness with your father while he lived. He was such a wise man. Always he gave in to me in the little things, and I gave in to him in all the big things. He almost made me a sensible woman.” There was a strange wistfulness in her face. Through all the years, down beneath everything, there had been the helpless knowledge in her own small, garish mind that she had little sense; now she realized that she was given a chance to atone for all her pettiness by doing one great sensible thing. Orlando was about to embrace her, but she briskly, turned away. She could not endure that. If he did it, the pent-up motherhood would break forth, and her courage would take flight. She was something more than the “parokeet of Pernambukoko,” as Patsy Kernaghan had called her. She went to the door of the other room. “I want to talk to the Young Doctor about Amelia,” she said. “He’s clever, and perhaps he could give her a good prescription. I’ll send Louise to you. It’s nicer courting in this room where you can see the garden and the grand hills. You’re going to give Louise the little gray mare you lassooed last year, aren’t you? I always think of Louise when I look at that gray mare. You had to break the pony’s heart before she could be what she is—the nicest little thing that ever was broken by a man’s hand; and Louise, she had to have her heart broken too. Your father and I were almost of an age—he was two years older, and we had our youth together. And you and Louise are so wonderfully young, too. Be good to her, son. She’s never been married. She was only in prison with that old lizard. What a horrible mouth he had! It’s shut now,” she added remorselessly. Opening the door of the other room, she disappeared. A moment later, Louise entered upon Orlando. The vanished months had worked wonders in her. She was like the young summer beyond the open windows, alive to her finger-tips, shyly radiant, with shining eyes, yet in their depths an alluring pensiveness never to leave them altogether. Knowledge had come to her; an apprehending soul was speaking in her face. The sweetness of her smile, as she looked at the man before her, was such as could only be distilled from the bitter herbs of the desert. “Oh, Orlando!” she said joyously, as she came forward.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: Highsterics, they call it World was only the size of four walls to a sick person
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