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The Right of Way — Complete

by Gilbert Parker · English · Gutenberg #6249 · 685,927 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Right of Way — Complete

Author: Gilbert Parker


        
Release date: November 18, 2004 [eBook #6249]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6249

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIGHT OF WAY — COMPLETE ***



Produced by David Widger





THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker


CONTENTS

  Volume 1.
  I.        THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
  II.       WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
  III.      AFTER FIVE YEARS
  IV.       CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY
  V.        THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE
  VI.       THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB
  VII.      “PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE!”
   VIII.     THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT

  Volume 2.
  IX.       OLD DEBTS FOR NEW
  X.        THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT
  XI.       THE RAISING OF THE CURTAIN
  XII.      THE COMING OF ROSALIE
  XIII.     HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING, AND WHAT HE FOUND
  XIV.      ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED
  XV.       THE MARK IN THE PAPER
  XVI.      MADAME DAUPHIN HAS A MISSION
  XVII.     THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY
  XVIII.    THE STEALING OF THE CROSS

  Volume 3.
  XIX.      THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN
  XX.       THE RETURN OF THE TAILOR
  XXI.      THE CURE HAS AN INSPIRATION
  XXII.     THE WOMAN WHO SAW
  XXIII.    THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT TELL
  XXIV.     THE SEIGNEUR TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME
  XXV.      THE COLONEL TELLS HIS STORY
  XXVI.     A SONG, A BOTTLE, AND A GHOST
  XXVII.    OUT ON THE OLD TRAIL
  XXVIII.   THE SEIGNEUR GIVES A WARNING

  Volume 4.
  XXIX.     THE WILD RIDE
  XXX.      ROSALIE WARNS CHARLEY
  XXXI.     CHARLEY STANDS AT BAY
  XXXII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
  XXXIII.   THE EDGE OF LIFE
  XXXIV.    IN AMBUSH
  XXXV.     THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER
  XXXVI.    BARRIERS SWEPT AWAY
  XXXVII.   THE CHALLENGE OF PAULETTE DUBOIS
  XXXVIII.  THE CURE AND THE SEIGNEUR VISIT THE TAILOR
  XXXIX.    THE SCARLET WOMAN
  XL.       AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING

  Volume 5.
  XLI.      IT WAS MICHAELMAS DAY
  XLII.     A TRIAL AND A VERDICT
  XLIII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
  XLIV.     “WHO WAS KATHLEEN?”
   XLV.      SIX MONTHS GO BY
  XLVI.     THE FORGOTTEN MAN
  XLVII.    ONE WAS TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT
  XLVIII.   “WHERE THE TREE OF LIFE IS BLOOMING--”
   XLIX.     THE OPEN GATE

  Volume 6.
  L.        THE PASSION PLAY AT CHAUDIERE
  LI.       FACE TO FACE
  LII.      THE COMING OF BILLY
  LIII.     THE SEIGNEUR AND THE CURE HAVE A SUSPICION
  LIV.      M. ROSSIGNOL SLIPS THE LEASH
  LV.       ROSALIE PLAYS A PART
  LVI.      MRS. FLYNN SPEAKS
  LVII.     A BURNING FIERY FURNACE
  LVIII.    WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL
  LIX.      IN WHICH CHARLEY MEETS A STRANGER
  LX.       THE HAND AT THE DOOR
  LXI.      THE CURE SPEAKS

  EPILOGUE




INTRODUCTION

In a book called ‘The House of Harper’, published in this year, 1912,
there are two letters of mine, concerning ‘The Right of Way’, written
to Henry M. Alden, editor of Harper’s Magazine. To my mind those letters
should never have been published. They were purely personal. They were
intended for one man’s eyes only, and he was not merely an editor but a
beloved and admired personal friend. Only to him and to W. E. Henley, as
editors, could I ever have emptied out my heart and brain; and, as may
be seen by these two letters, one written from London and the other from
a place near Southampton, I uncovered all my feelings, my hopes and my
ambitions concerning The Right of Way. Had I been asked permission to
publish them I should not have granted it. I may wear my heart upon my
sleeve for my friend, but not for the universe.

The most scathing thing ever said in literature was said by Robert
Buchanan on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s verses--“He has wheeled his nuptial
bed into the street.” Looking at these letters I have a great shrinking,
for they were meant only for the eyes of an aged man for whom I cared
enough to let him see behind the curtain. But since they have been
printed, and without a “by your leave,” I will use one or two passages
in them to show in what mood, under what pressure of impulse, under what
mental and, maybe, spiritual hypnotism it was written. I first planned
it as a story of twenty-five thousand words, even as ‘Valmond’ was
planned as a story of five thousand words, and ‘A Ladder of Swords’ as
a story of twenty thousand words; but I had not written three chapters
before I saw what the destiny of the tale was to be. I had gone to
Quebec to start the thing in the atmosphere where Charley Steele
belonged, and there it was borne in upon me that it must be a
three-decker novel, not a novelette. I telegraphed to Harper & Brothers
to ask them whether it would suit them just as well if I made it into a
long novel. They telegraphed their assent at once; so I went on. At that
time Mr. F. N. Doubleday was a sort of director of Harper’s firm. To
him I had told the tale in a railway train, and he had carried me off
at once to Henry M. Alden, to whom I also told it, with the result that
Harper’s Magazine was wide open to it, and there in Quebec, soon after
my interview with Mr. Alden and Mr. Doubleday, the book was begun.

The first of the letters published in The House of Harper, however, was
apparently written immediately after my return to London when the novel
was well on its way. Evidently the first paragraph of the letter was an
apology for having suddenly announced the development of the book from a
long short story to a long novel; for I used these words:

“Yet if you really take an interest in the working of the human mind in
its relation to the vicissitudes of life, you will appreciate what I am
going to tell you, and will recognise that there is only stability in
evolution which the vulgar call chance.... Now, sir, perpend. Charley
Steele is going to be a novel of one hundred thousand words or one
hundred and twenty thousand--a real bang-up heartful of a novel.”

Then there follows the confidence of a friend to a friend. As I look at
the words I am not sorry that I wrote them. They were a part of me. They
were the inveterate truth, but I would not willingly have uncovered my
inner self to any except the man to whom the words were written. But
here is what I wrote:

“I am a bit of a fool over this book. It catches me at every tender
corner of my nature. It has aroused all the old ardent dreams of youth
and springtime puissance. I cannot lay it down, and I cannot shorten it,
for story, character, soul and reflection, imagination, observation
are dragging me along after them.... This novel will make me or break
me--prove me human and an artist, or an affected literary bore. If
you want it you must take the risk. But, my dear Alden, you will be
investing in a man’s heart--which may be a fortune or a folly. Why,
I ought to have seen--and far back in my brain I did see--that the
character of Charley Steele was a type, an idiosyncrasy of modern life,
a resultant of forces all round us, and that he would demand space in
which to live and tell his story to the world.... And behold with what
joy I follow him, not only lovingly but sternly and severely, noting him
down as he really is, condoning naught, forgiving naught, but above
all else, understanding him--his wilful mystification of the world, his
shameless disdain of it, but the old law of interrogation, of sad yet
eager inquiry and wonder and ‘non possumus’ with him to the end.”

This letter was evidently written in December, 1899, and the other went
to Mr. Alden on the 7th August, 1900; therefore, eight or nine months
later. The work had gone well. Week after week, month after month it had
unfolded itself with an almost unpardonable ease. Evidently, the very
ease with which the book was written troubled me, because I find that in
this letter of the 7th August, 1900, to Mr. Alden, I used these words:

“A kind of terror has seized me, and instead of sending a dozen more
chapters to you as I proposed to do, I am setting to to break this love
story anew under the stones of my most exacting criticism and troubled
regard. I go to bury myself at a solitary little seaside place” (it
was Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire), “there to live alone with Rosalie and
Charley, and if I do not know them hereafter, never ask me to write for
‘Harper’s’ again.... This book has been written out of something vital
in me--I do not mean the religious part of it, I mean the humanity that
becomes one’s own and part of one’s self, by observation, experience,
and understanding got from dead years.”

Anyhow that shows the spirit in which the book was written, and there
must have been something in it that rang true, because not only did
it have an enormous sale and therefore a multitude of readers, but I
received hundreds of letters from people who in one way or another were
deeply interested in the story.

The majority of them were inquisitive letters. A great many of them said
that the writer had shared in controversy as to what the relations
of Charley and Rosalie were, and asked me to set for ever queries and
controversies at rest by declaring either that the relations of these
two were what, in the way of life’s stern conventions, they ought not
to be, or that Rosalie passed unscathed through the fire. I had foreseen
all this, though I could not have foreseen the passionately intense
interest which my readers would take in the life-story of these unhappy
yet happy people. I had, however, only one reply. It was that all I had
meant to say concerning Charley and Rosalie had been said in the book,
to the last word. All I had meant not to say would not be said after the
book was written. I asked them to take exactly the same view of Charley
and Rosalie as they would in real life regarding two human beings with
whom they were acquainted, and concerning whom, to their minds, there
was sufficient evidence, or not sufficient evidence, to come to a
conclusion as to what their relations were. I added that, as in real
life we used our judgment upon such things with a reasonable amount
of accuracy, I asked them to apply that judgment to Charley Steele and
Rosalie Evanturel. They and their story were there for eyes to see and
read, and when I had ended my manuscript in the year 1900 I had said
the last word I ever meant to say as to their history. The controversy
therefore continues, for the book still makes its appeal to an ever
increasing congregation of new readers.

But another kind of letter came to me--the letter of some man who had
just such a struggle as Charley Steele, or whose father or brother or
friend had had such a struggle. Letters came from clergymen who had
preached concerning the book; from men who told me in brief their own
life problems and tragedies. These letters I prize; most of them had the
real thing in them, the human truth.

That the book drew wide attention to the Dominion of Canada,
particularly to French Canada, and crystallised something of the life of
that dear Province, was a deep pleasure to me; and I was glad that I
had been able to culminate my efforts to portray the life of the
French-Canadian as I saw it, by a book which arrested the attention of
so comprehensive a public.

I have seen many statements as to the original of Charley Steele, but
I have never seen a story which was true. Many people have told me that
they had seen the original of Charley Steele in an American lawyer. They
knew he was the original, because he himself had said so. The gentleman
was mistaken; I have never seen him. As with the purple cow, I never
hope to see him. Whoever he is or whatever he is, the original Charley
was an abler and a more striking man. I knew him as a boy, and he died
while I was yet a boy, taking with him, save in the memory of a few, a
rare and wonderful, if not wholly lovable personality. For over twenty
years I had carried him in my mind, wondering whether, and when, I
should-make use of him. Again and again I was tempted, but was never
convinced that his time had come; yet through all the years he was
gaining strength, securing possession of my mind, and gathering to him,
magnet-like, the thousand observations which my experience sent in his
direction. In my mind his life-story ended with his death at the Cote
Dorion. For years and years I saw his ending there. Yet it all seemed to
me so futile, despite the wonder of his personality, that I could make
nothing of him, and though always fascinated by his character I was held
back from exploiting it, because of the hopelessness of it all. It led
nowhere. It was the ‘quid refert’ of the philosopher, and I could not
bring myself to get any further than an interrogation mark at the end of
a life which was all scepticism, mind and matter, and nothing more.

There came a day, however, when that all ended, when the doors were
flung wide to a new conception of the man, and of what he might have
become. I was going to America, and I paid an angry and reluctant visit
to my London tailor thirty-six hours before I was to start. A suit of
clothes had been sent home which, after an effective trying-on, was a
monstrosity. I went straight to my tailor, put on the clothes and bade
him look at them. He was a great tailor-he saw exactly what I saw, and
what I saw was bad; and when a tailor will do that, you may be quite
sure he is a good and a great man. He said the clothes were as bad as
they could be, but he added: “You shall have them before you sail, and
they shall be exactly as you want them. I’ll have the foreman down.” He
rang a bell. Presently the door swung open and in stepped a man with
an eyeglass in his eye. There, with a look at once reflective and
penetrating, with a figure at once slovenly and alert, was a caricature
of Charley Steele as I had known him, and of all his characteristics.
There was such a resemblance as an ugly child in a family may have to
his handsome brother. It was Charley Steele with a twist--gone to seed.
Looking at him in blank amazement, I burst out: “Good heavens, so you
didn’t die, Charley Steele! You became a tailor!”

All at once the whole new landscape of my story as it eventually became,
spread out before me. I was justified in waiting all the years. My
discontent with the futile end of the tale as I originally knew it
and saw it was justified. Charley Steele, brilliant, enigmatic and
epigrammatic, did not die at the Cote Dorion, but lived in that far
valley by Dalgrothe Mountain, and became a tailor! So far as I am
concerned he became much more. He was the beginning of a new epoch in
my literary life. I had got into subtler methods, reached more intimate
understandings, had come to a place where analysis of character had
shaken itself free--but certainly not quite free--from a natural yet
rather dangerous eloquence.

As a play The Right of Way, skilfully and sympathetically dramatised by
Mr. Eugene Presbery, has had a career extending over several years, and
still continues to make its appearance.




NOTE

It should not be assumed that the “Chaudiere” of this story is the real
Chaudiere of Quebec province. The name is characteristic, and for this
reason alone I have used it.

I must also apologise to my readers for appearing to disregard a
statement made in ‘The Lane that Had no Turning’, that that tale was the
last I should write about French Canada. In explanation I would say that
‘The Lane that Had no Turning’ was written after the present book was
finished. G. F.




THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker



   “They had lived and loved, and walked and worked in their own way,
   and the world went by them. Between them and it a great gulf was
   fixed: and they met its every catastrophe with the Quid Refert? of
   the philosophers.”

       “I want to talk with some old lover’s ghost,
        Who lived before the god of love was born.”

   “There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and
   none of them is without signification.”




CHAPTER I. THE WAY TO THE VERDICT

“Not guilty, your Honour!”

A hundred atmospheres had seemed pressing down on the fretted people in
the crowded court-room. As the discordant treble of the huge foreman of
the jury squeaked over the mass of gaping humanity, which had twitched
at skirts, drawn purposeless hands across prickling faces, and kept
nervous legs at a gallop, the smothering weights of elastic air lifted
suddenly, a great suspiration of relief swept through the place like a
breeze, and in a far corner of the gallery a woman laughed outright.

The judge looked up reprovingly at the gallery; the clerk of the court
angrily called “Silence!” towards the offending corner, and seven or
eight hundred eyes raced between three centres of interest--the judge,
the prisoner, and the prisoner’s counsel. Perhaps more people looked
at the prisoner’s counsel than at the prisoner, certainly far more than
looked at the judge.

Never was a verdict more unexpected. If a poll had been taken of the
judgment of the population twenty-four hours before, a great majority
would have been found believing that there was no escape for the
prisoner, who was accused of murdering a wealthy timber merchant. The
minority would have based their belief that the prisoner had a chance of
escape, not on his possible innocence, not on insufficient evidence,
but on a curious faith in the prisoner’s lawyer. This minority would not
have been composed of the friends of the lawyer alone, but of outside
spectators, who, because Charley Steele had never lost a criminal case,
attached to him a certain incapacity for bad luck; and of very young
men, who looked upon him as the perfect pattern of the person good to
see and hard to understand.

During the first two days of the trial the case had gone wholly against
the prisoner, who had given his name as Joseph Nadeau. Witnesses had
heard him quarrelling with the murdered man, and the next day the
body of the victim had been found by the roadside. The prisoner was a
stranger in the lumber-camp where the deed was done, and while there
had been morose and lived apart; no one knew him; and he refused to
tell even his lawyer whence he came, or what his origin, or to bring
witnesses from his home to speak for his character.

One by one the points had been made against him--with no perceptible
effect upon Charley Steele, who seemed the one cool, undisturbed person
in the courtroom.

Indifferent as he seemed, seldom speaking to the prisoner, often
looking out of the windows to the cool green trees far over on the hill,
absorbed and unbusinesslike, yet judge and jury came to see, before the
second day was done, that he had let no essential thing pass, that the
questions he asked had either a pregnant aptness, opened up new avenues
of deliberation, or were touched with mystery--seemed to have a longer
reach than the moment or the hour.

Before the end of this second day, however, more attention was upon him
than upon the prisoner, and nine-tenths of the people in the court-room
could have told how many fine linen handkerchiefs he used during the
afternoon, how many times he adjusted his monocle to look at the judge
meditatively. Probably no man, for eight hours a day, ever exasperated
and tried a judge, jury, and public, as did this man of twenty-nine
years of age, who had been known at college as Beauty Steele, and who
was still so spoken of familiarly; or was called as familiarly, Charley
Steele, by people who never had attempted to be familiar with him.

The second day of the trial had ended gloomily for the prisoner. The
coil of evidence had drawn so close that extrication seemed impossible.
That the evidence was circumstantial, that no sign of the crime was upon
the prisoner, that he was found sleeping quietly in his bed when he was
arrested, that he had not been seen to commit the deed, did not weigh
in the minds of the general public. The man’s guilt was freely believed;
not even the few who clung to the opinion that Charley Steele would yet
get him off thought that he was innocent. There seemed no flaw in the
evidence, once granted its circumstantiality.

During the last two hours of the sitting the prisoner had looked at his
counsel in despair, for he seemed perfunctorily conducting the case: was
occupied in sketching upon the blotting-pad before him, looking out of
the window, or turning his head occasionally towards a corner where sat
a half-dozen well-dressed ladies, and more particularly towards one
lady who watched him in a puzzled way--more than once with a look of
disappointment. Only at the very close of the sitting did he appear to
rouse himself. Then, for a brief ten minutes, he cross-examined a friend
of the murdered merchant in a fashion which startled the court-room,
for he suddenly brought out the fact that the dead man had once struck
a woman in the face in the open street. This fact, sharply stated by the
prisoner’s counsel, with no explanation and no comment, seemed uselessly
intrusive and malicious. His ironical smile merely irritated all
concerned. The thin, clean-shaven face of the prisoner grew more pinched
and downcast, and he turned almost pleadingly towards the judge. The
judge pulled his long side-whiskers nervously, and looked over his
glasses in severe annoyance, then hastily adjourned the sitting and
left the bench, while the prisoner saw with dismay his lawyer leave the
court-room with not even a glance towards him.

On the morning of the third day Charley Steele’s face, for the first
time, wore an expression which, by a stretch of imagination, might be
called anxious. He also took out his monocle frequently, rubbed it with
his handkerchief, and screwed it in again, staring straight before him
much of the time. But twice he spoke to the prisoner in a low voice, and
was hurriedly answered in French as crude as his own was perfect. When
he spoke, which was at rare intervals, his voice was without feeling,
concise, insistent, unappealing. It was as though the business before
him was wholly alien to him, as though he were held there against his
will, but would go on with his task bitterly to the bitter end.

The court adjourned for an hour at noon. During this time Charley
refused to see any one, but sat alone in his office with a few biscuits
and an ominous bottle before him, till the time came for him to go back
to the court-house. Arrived there he entered by a side door, and was not
seen until the court opened once more.

For two hours and a half the crown attorney mercilessly made out his
case against the prisoner. When he sat down, people glanced meaningly
at each other, as though the last word had been said, then looked at the
prisoner, as at one already condemned.

Yet Charley Steele was to reply. He was not now the same man that had
conducted the case during the past two days and a half. Some
great change had passed over him. There was no longer abstraction,
indifference, or apparent boredom, or disdain, or distant stare. He
was human, intimate and eager, yet concentrated and impelling: he was
quietly, unnoticeably drunk.

He assured the prisoner with a glance of the eye, with a word scarce
above a whisper, as he slowly rose to make his speech for the defence.

His first words caused a new feeling in the courtroom. He was a new
presence; the personality had a changed significance. At first the
public, the jury, and the judge were curiously attracted, surprised into
a fresh interest. The voice had an insinuating quality, but it also
had a measured force, a subterranean insistence, a winning tactfulness.
Withal, a logical simplicity governed his argument. The flaneur,
the poseur--if such he was--no longer appeared. He came close to the
jurymen, leaned his hands upon the back of a chair--as it were, shut out
the public, even the judge, from his circle of interest--and talked in a
conversational tone. An air of confidence passed from him to the amazed
yet easily captivated jury; the distance between them, so gaping
during the last two days, closed suddenly up. The tension of the past
estrangement, relaxing all at once, surprised the jury into an almost
eager friendliness, as on a long voyage a sensitive traveller finds
in some exciting accident a natural introduction to an exclusive
fellow-passenger, whom he discovers as human as he had thought him
offensively distant.

Charley began by congratulating the crown attorney on his statement of
the case. He called it masterly; he said that in its presentations
it was irrefutable; as a precis of evidence purely circumstantial it
was--useful and interesting. But, speech-making aside, and ability--and
rhetoric--aside, and even personal conviction aside, the case should
stand or fall by its total, not its comparative, soundness. Since the
evidence was purely circumstantial, there must be no flaw in its cable
of assumption, it must be logically inviolate within itself. Starting
with assumption only, there must be no straying possibilities, no loose
ends of certainty, no invading alternatives. Was this so in the case of
the man before them? They were faced by a curious situation. So far as
the trial was concerned, the prisoner himself was the only person who
could tell them who he was, what was his past, and, if he committed the
crime, what was--the motive of it: out of what spirit--of revenge, or
hatred--the dead man had been sent to his account. Probably in the whole
history of crime there never was a more peculiar case. Even himself
the prisoner’s counsel was dealing with one whose life was hid from him
previous to the day the murdered man was discovered by the roadside.
The prisoner had not sought to prove an alibi; he had done no more than
formally plead not guilty. There was no material for defence save
that offered by the prosecution. He had undertaken the defence of
the prisoner because it was his duty as a lawyer to see that the law
justified itself; that it satisfied every demand of proof to the last
atom of certainty; that it met the final possibility of doubt with
evidence perfect and inviolate if circumstantial, and uncontradictory if
eye-witness, if tell-tale incident, were to furnish basis of proof.

Judge, jury, and public riveted their eyes upon Charley Steele. He had
now drawn a little farther away from the jury-box; his eye took in
the judge as well; once or twice he turned, as if appealingly and
confidently, to the people in the room. It was terribly hot, the air
was sickeningly close, every one seemed oppressed--every one save a
lady sitting not a score of feet from where the counsel for the prisoner
stood. This lady’s face was not one that could flush easily; it belonged
to a temperament as even as her person was symmetrically beautiful.
As Charley talked, her eyes were fixed steadily, wonderingly upon him.
There was a question in her gaze, which never in the course of the
speech was quite absorbed by the admiration--the intense admiration--she
was feeling for him. Once as he turned with a concentrated earnestness
in her direction his eyes met hers. The message he flashed her was
sub-conscious, for his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in
hand, but it said to her:

“When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you.” For another quarter
of an hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence;
he raised in the minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the
law, the awful tyranny of miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice
against a prisoner because that prisoner demanded that the law should
prove him guilty instead of his proving himself innocent. If a man chose
to stand to that, to sternly assume this perilous position, the law had
no right to take advantage of it. He turned towards the prisoner and
traced his possible history: as the sensitive, intelligent son of godly
Catholic parents from some remote parish in French Canada. He drew an
imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come, and of the
parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of torture
knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life. It
might at first glance seem quixotic, eccentric, but was it unnatural
that the prisoner should choose silence as to his origin and home,
rather than have his family and friends face the undoubted peril
lying before him? Besides, though his past life might have been wholly
blameless, it would not be evidence in his favour. It might, indeed,
if it had not been blameless, provide some element of unjust suspicion
against him, furnish some fancied motive. The prisoner had chosen his
path, and events had so far justified him. It must be clear to the
minds of judge and jury that there were fatally weak places in the
circumstantial evidence offered for the conviction of this man.

There was the fact that no sign of the crime, no drop of blood, no
weapon, was found about him or near him, and that he was peacefully
sleeping at the moment the constable arrested him.

There was also the fact that no motive for the crime had been shown. It
was not enough that he and the dead man had been heard quarrelling. Was
there any certainty that it was a quarrel, since no word or sentence
of the conversation had been brought into court? Men with quick tempers
might quarrel over trivial things, but exasperation did not always
end in bodily injury and the taking of life; imprecations were not so
uncommon that they could be taken as evidence of wilful murder. The
prisoner refused to say what that troubled conversation was about,
but who could question his right to take the risk of his silence being
misunderstood?

The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the
prisoner; the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the
public sat open mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white face
and clinched hands listened moveless and staring. Charley Steele was
holding captive the emotions and the judgments of his hearers. All
antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the
jurymen and himself. People no longer looked with distant dislike at the
prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain only
in his surly defiance.

But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
moment. He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in
evidence, that the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago;
also that he had kept a factory girl in affluence for two years. Here
was motive for murder--if motive were to govern them--far greater than
might be suggested by excited conversation which listeners who could not
hear a word construed into a quarrel--listeners who bore the prisoner
at the bar ill-will because he shunned them while in the lumber-camp.
If the prisoner was to be hanged for motive untraceable, why should not
these two women be hanged for motive traceable!

Here was his chance. He appeared to impeach subtly every intelligence in
the room for having had any preconviction about the prisoner’s guilt. He
compelled the jury to feel that they, with him, had made the discovery
of the unsound character of the evidence. The man might be guilty, but
their personal guilt, the guilt of the law, would be far greater if they
condemned the man on violable evidence. With a last simple appeal, his
hands resting on the railing before the seat where the jury sat, his
voice low and conversational again, his eyes running down the line of
faces of the men who had his client’s life in their hands, he said:

“It is not a life only that is at stake, it is not revenge for a life
snatched from the busy world by a brutal hand that we should heed
to-day, but the awful responsibility of that thing we call the State,
which, having the power of life and death without gainsay or hindrance,
should prove to the last inch of necessity its right to take a human
life. And the right and the reason should bring conviction to every
honest human mind. That is all I have to say.”

The crown attorney made a perfunctory reply. The judge’s charge was
brief, and, if anything, a little in favour of the prisoner--very
little, a casuist’s little; and the jury filed out of the room. They
were gone but ten minutes. When they returned, the verdict was given:
“Not guilty, your Honour!”

Then it was that a woman laughed in the gallery. Then a whispering voice
said across the railing which separated the public from the lawyers:
“Charley! Charley!”

Though Charley turned and looked at the lady who spoke, he made no
response.

A few minutes later, outside the court, as he walked quickly away, again
inscrutable and debonair, the prisoner, Joseph Nadeau, touched him on
the arm and said:

“M’sieu’, M’sieu’, you have saved my life--I thank you, M’sieu’!”

Charley Steele drew his arm away with disgust. “Get out of my sight!
You’re as guilty as hell!” he said.




CHAPTER II. WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL

“When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you.” So Charley Steele’s
eyes had said to a lady in the court room on that last day of the great
trial. The lady had left the court-room dazed and exalted. She, with
hundreds of others, had had a revelation of Charley Steele; had had also
the great emotional experience of seeing a crowd make the ‘volte face’
with their convictions; looking at a prisoner one moment with eyes of
loathing and anticipating his gruesome end, the next moment seeing him
as the possible martyr to the machinery of the law. She whose heart
was used to beat so evenly had felt it leap and swell with excitement,
awaiting the moment when the jury filed back into the court-room. Then
it stood still, as a wave might hang for an instant at its crest ere it
swept down to beat upon the shore.

With her as with most present, the deepest feeling in the agitated
suspense was not so much that the prisoner should go free, as that the
prisoner’s counsel should win his case. It was as if Charley Steele were
on trial instead of the prisoner. He was the imminent figure; it was his
fate that was in the balance--such was the antic irony of suggestion.
And the truth was, that the fates of both prisoner and counsel had been
weighed in the balance that sweltering August day.

The prisoner was forgotten almost as soon as he had left the court-room
a free man, but wherever men and women met in Montreal that day, one
name was on the lips of all-Charley Steele! In his speech he had done
two things: he had thrown down every barrier of reserve--or so it
seemed--and had become human and intimate. “I could not have believed
it of him,” was the remark on every lip. Of his ability there never had
been a moment’s doubt, but it had ever been an uncomfortable ability,
it had tortured foes and made friends anxious. No one had ever seen
him show feeling. If it was a mask, he had worn it with a curious
consistency: it had been with him as a child, at school, at college,
and he had brought it back again to the town where he was born. It had
effectually prevented his being popular, but it had made him--with his
foppishness and his originality--an object of perpetual interest. Few
men had ventured to cross swords with him. He left his fellow-citizens
very much alone. He was uniformly if distantly courteous, and he was
respected in his own profession for his uncommon powers and for an utter
indifference as to whether he had cases in court or not.

Coming from the judge’s chambers after the trial he went to his office,
receiving as he passed congratulations more effusively offered than, as
people presently found, his manner warranted.

For he was again the formal, masked Charley Steele, looking calmly
through the interrogative eye-glass. By the time he reached his office,
greetings became more subdued. His prestige had increased immensely in
a few short hours, but he had no more friends than before. Old relations
were soon re-established. The town was proud of his ability as it
had always been, irritated by his manner as it had always been, more
prophetic of his future than it had ever been, and unconsciously
grateful for the fact that he had given them a sensation which would
outlast the summer.

All these things concerned him little. Once the business of the
court-room was over, a thought which had quietly lain in waiting behind
the strenuous occupations of his brain leaped forward to exclude all
others.

As he entered his office he was thinking of that girl’s face in the
court-room, with its flush of added beauty which he and his speech had
brought there. “What a perfect loveliness!” he said to himself as he
bathed his face and hands, and prepared to go into the street again.
“She needed just such a flush to make her supreme Kathleen!” He stood,
looking out into the square, out into the green of the trees where the
birds twittered. “Faultless--faultless in form and feature. She was so
as a child, she is so as a woman.” He lighted a cigarette, and blew away
little clouds of smoke. “I will do it. I will marry her. She will have
me: I saw it in her eye. Fairing doesn’t matter. Her uncle will never
consent to that, and she doesn’t care enough for him. She cares, but she
doesn’t care enough.... I will do it.”

He turned towards a cupboard into which he had put a certain bottle
before he went to the court-room two hours before. He put the key in the
lock, then stopped. “No, I think not!” he said. “What I say to her shall
not be said forensically. What a discovery I’ve made! I was dull,
blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen,
against me; and then that bottle in there--and I saw things like
crystal! I had a glow in my brain, I had a tingle in my fingers; and
I had success, and”--his face clouded--“He was as guilty as hell!”
 he added, almost bitterly, as he put the key of the cupboard into his
pocket again.

There was a knock at the door, and a youth of about nineteen entered.

“Hello!” he said. “I say, sir, but that speech of yours struck us all
where we couldn’t say no. Even Kathleen got in a glow over it. Perhaps
Captain Fairing didn’t, for he’s just left her in a huff, and she’s
looking--you remember those lines in the school-book:

         “‘A red spot burned upon her cheek,
          Streamed her rich tresses down--’”

He laughed gaily. “I’ve come to ask you up to tea,” he added. “The
Unclekins is there. When I told him that Kathleen had sent Fairing away
with a flea in his ear, he nearly fell off his chair. He lent me twenty
dollars on the spot. Are you coming our way?” he continued, suddenly
trying to imitate Charley’s manner. Charley nodded, and they left the
office together and moved away under a long avenue of maples to where,
in the shade of a high hill, was the house of the uncle of Kathleen
Wantage, with whom she and her brother Billy lived. They walked in
silence for some time, and at last Billy said, ‘a propos’ of nothing:

“Fairing hasn’t a red cent.”

“You have a perambulating mind, Billy,” said Charley, and bowed to a
young clergyman approaching them from the opposite direction.

“What does that mean?” remarked Billy, and said “Hello!” to the young
clergyman, and did not wait for Charley’s answer.

The Rev. John Brown was by no means a conventional parson. He was
smoking a cigarette, and two dogs followed at his heels. He was
certainly not a fogy. He had more than a little admiration for Charley
Steele, but he found it difficult to preach when Charley was in the
congregation. He was always aware of a subterranean and half-pitying
criticism going on in the barrister’s mind. John Brown knew that he
could never match his intelligence against Charley’s, in spite of the
theological course at Durham, so he undertook to scotch the snake by
kindness. He thought that he might be able to do this, because Charley,
who was known to be frankly agnostical, came to his church more or less
regularly.

The Rev. John Brown was not indifferent to what men thought of him. He
had a reputation for being “independent,” but his chief independence
consisted in dressing a little like a layman, posing as the athletic
parson of the new school, consorting with ministers of the dissenting
denominations when it was sufficiently effective, and being a “good
fellow” with men easily bored by church and churchmen. He preached
theatrical sermons to societies and benevolent associations. He wanted
to be thought well of on all hands, and he was shrewd enough to know
that if he trimmed between ritualism on one hand and evangelicism on
the other, he was on a safe road. He might perforate old dogmatical
prejudices with a good deal of freedom so long as he did not begin
bringing “millinery” into the service of the church. He invested his own
personal habits with the millinery. He looked a picturesque figure with
his blond moustache, a little silk-lined brown cloak thrown carelessly
over his shoulder, a gold-headed cane, and a brisk jacket half
ecclesiastical, half military.

He had interested Charley Steele, also he had amused him, and sometimes
he had surprised him into a sort of admiration; for Brown had a
temperament capable of little inspirations--such a literary inspiration
as might come to a second-rate actor--and Charley never belittled
any man’s ability, but seized upon every sign of knowledge with the
appreciation of the epicure.

John Brown raised his hat to Charley, then held out a hand.
“Masterly-masterly!” he said. “Permit my congratulations. It was the
one thing to do. You couldn’t have saved him by making him an object of
pity, by appealing to our sympathies.”

“What do you take to be the secret, then?” asked Charley, with a look
half abstracted, half quizzical. “Terror--sheer terror. You startled
the conscience. You made defects in the circumstantial evidence, the
imminent problems of our own salvation. You put us all on trial. We
were under the lash of fear. If we parsons could only do that from the
pulpit!”

“We will discuss that on our shooting-trip next week. Duck-shooting
gives plenty of time for theological asides. You are coming, eh?”

John Brown scarcely noticed the sarcasm, he was so delighted at the
suggestion that he was to be included in the annual duck-shoot of the
Seven, as the little yearly party of Charley and his friends to Lake
Aubergine was called. He had angled for this invitation for two years.

“I must not keep you,” Charley said, and dismissed him with a bow. “The
sheep will stray, and the shepherd must use his crook.”

Brown smiled at the badinage, and went on his way rejoicing in the fact
that he was to share the amusements of the Seven at Lake Aubergine--the
Lake of the Mad Apple. To get hold of these seven men of repute and
position, to be admitted into this good presence!--He had a pious
exaltation, but whether it was because he might gather into the fold
erratic and agnostical sheep like Charley Steele, or because it pleased
his social ambitions, he had occasion to answer in the future. He gaily
prepared to go to the Lake of the Mad Apple, where he was fated to eat
of the tree of knowledge.

Charley Steele and Billy Wantage walked on slowly to the house under the
hill.

“He’s the right sort,” said Billy. “He’s a sport. I can stand that kind.
Did you ever hear him sing? No? Well, he can sing a comic song fit to
make you die. I can sing a bit myself, but to hear him sing ‘The Man Who
Couldn’t Get Warm’ is a show in itself. He can play the banjo too, and
the guitar--but he’s best on the banjo. It’s worth a dollar to listen
to his Epha-haam--that’s Ephraim, you know--Ephahaam Come Home,’ and ‘I
Found Y’ in de Honeysuckle Paitch.’”

“He preaches, too!” said Charley drily.

They had reached the door of the house under the hill, and Billy had
no time for further remark. He ran into the drawing-room, announcing
Charley with the words: “I say, Kathleen, I’ve brought the man that made
the judge sit up.”

Billy suddenly stopped, however, for there sat the judge who had tried
the case, calmly munching a piece of toast. The judge did not allow
himself the luxury of embarrassment, but bowed to Charley with a
smile, which he presently turned on Kathleen, who came as near being
disconcerted as she had ever been in her life.

Kathleen had passed through a good deal to look so unflurried. She
had been on trial in the court-room as well as the prisoner. Important
things had been at stake with her. She and Charley Steele had known each
other since they were children. To her, even in childhood, he had been
a dominant figure. He had judicially and admiringly told her she was
beautiful--when he was twelve and she five. But he had said it without
any of those glances which usually accompanied the same sentiments in
the mouths of other lads. He had never made boy-love to her, and she had
thrilled at the praise of less splendid people than Charley Steele. He
had always piqued her, he was so superior to the ordinary enchantments
of youth, beauty, and fine linen.

As he came and went, growing older and more characteristic, more and
more “Beauty Steele,” accompanied by legends of wild deeds and days
at college, by tales of his fopperies and the fashions he had set, she
herself had grown, as he had termed it, more “decorative.” He had told
her so, not in the least patronisingly, but as a simple fact in which
no sentiment lurked. He thought her the most beautiful thing he had ever
seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect
pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous
purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself. He had said again and
again, as he grew older and left college and began the business of life
after two years in Europe, that sentiment would spoil her, would scatter
the charm of her perfect beauty; it would vitalise her too much, and her
nature would lose its proportion; she would be decentralised! She had
been piqued at his indifference to sentiment; she could not easily be
content without worship, though she felt none. This pique had grown
until Captain Tom Fairing crossed her path.

Fairing was the antithesis of Charley Steele. Handsome, poor,
enthusiastic, and none too able, he was simple and straightforward, and
might be depended on till the end of the chapter. And the end of it was,
that in so far as she had ever felt real sentiment for anybody, she felt
it for Tom Fairing of the Royal Fusileers. It was not love she felt in
the old, in the big, in the noble sense, but it had behind it selection
and instinct and natural gravitation.

Fairing declared his love. She would give him no answer. For as soon as
she was presented with the issue, the destiny, she began to look round
her anxiously. The first person to fill the perspective was Charley
Steele. As her mind dwelt on him, her uncle gave forth his judgment,
that she should never have a penny if she married Tom Fairing. This only
irritated her, it did not influence her. But there was Charley. He was
a figure, was already noted in his profession because of a few
masterly successes in criminal cases, and if he was not popular, he was
distinguished, and the world would talk about him to the end. He was
handsome, and he was well-to-do-he had a big unoccupied house on the
hill among the maples. How many people had said, What a couple they
would make-Charley Steele and Kathleen Wantage!

So, as Fairing presented an issue to her, she concentrated her thoughts
as she had never done before on the man whom the world set apart for
her, in a way the world has.

As she looked and looked, Charley began to look also. He had not been
enamoured of the sordid things of the world; he had been merely curious.
He thought vice was ugly; he had imagination and a sense of form.
Kathleen was beautiful. Sentiment had, so he thought, never seriously
disturbed her; he did not think it ever would. It had not affected
him. He did not understand it. He had been born non-intime. He had had
acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves or love. But he
had a fine sense of the fitting and the proportionate, and he worshipped
beauty in so far as he could worship anything. The homage was cerebral,
intellectual, temperamental, not of the heart. As he looked out upon the
world half pityingly, half ironically, he was struck with wonder at the
disproportion which was engendered by “having heart,” as it was called.
He did not find it necessary.

Now that he had begun to think of marriage, who so suitable as Kathleen?
He knew of Fairing’s adoration, but he took it as a matter of course
that she had nothing to give of the same sort in return. Her beauty was
still serene and unimpaired. He would not spoil it by the tortures of
emotion. He would try to make Kathleen’s heart beat in harmony with his
own; it should not thunder out of time. He had made up his mind that he
would marry her.

For Kathleen, with the great trial, the beginning of the end had come.
Charley’s power over her was subtle, finely sensuous, and, in deciding,
there were no mere heart-impulses working for Charley. Instinct and
impulse were working in another direction. She had not committed her
mind to either man, though her heart, to a point, was committed to
Fairing.

On the day of the trial, however, she fell wholly under that influence
which had swayed judge, jury, and public. To her the verdict of the jury
was not in favour of the prisoner at the bar--she did not think of him.
It was in favour of Charley Steele.

And so, indifferent as to who heard, over the heads of the people in
front of her, to the accused’s counsel inside the railings, she had
called, softly: “Charley! Charley!”

Now, in the house under the hill, they were face to face, and the end
was at hand: the end of something and the beginning of something.

There was a few moments of casual conversation, in which Billy talked as
much as anybody, and then Kathleen said:

“What do you suppose was the man’s motive for committing the murder?”

Charley looked at Kathleen steadily, curiously, through his monocle. It
was a singular compliment she paid him. Her remark took no heed of
the verdict of the jury. He turned inquiringly towards the judge, who,
though slightly shocked by the question, recovered himself quickly.

“What do you think it was, sir?” Charley asked quietly.

“A woman--and revenge, perhaps,” answered the judge, with a
matter-of-course air.

A few moments afterwards the judge was carried off by Kathleen’s uncle
to see some rare old books; Billy, his work being done, vanished; and
Kathleen and Charley were left alone.

“You did not answer me in the court-room,” Kathleen said. “I called to
you.”

“I wanted to hear you say them here,” he rejoined. “Say what?” she
asked, a little puzzled by the tone of his voice.

“Your congratulations,” he answered.

She held out a hand to him. “I offer them now. It was wonderful. You
were inspired. I did not think you could ever let yourself go.”

He held her hand firmly. “I promise not to do it again,” he said
whimsically.

“Why not?”

“Have I not your congratulations?” His hand drew her slightly towards
him; she rose to her feet.

“That is no reason,” she answered, confused, yet feeling that there was
a double meaning in his words.

“I could not allow you to be so vain,” he said. “We must be
companionable. Henceforth I shall congratulate myself--Kathleen.”

There was no mistaking now. “Oh, what is it you are going to say to me?”
 she asked, yet not disengaging her hand.

“I said it all in the court-room,” he rejoined; “and you heard.”

“You want me to marry you--Charley?” she asked frankly.

“If you think there is no just impediment,” he answered, with a smile.

She drew her hand away, and for a moment there was a struggle in
her mind--or heart. He knew of what she was thinking, and he did not
consider it of serious consequence. Romance was a trivial thing, and
women were prone to become absorbed in trivialities. When the woman had
no brains, she might break her life upon a trifle. But Kathleen had an
even mind, a serene temperament. Her nerves were daily cooled in a bath
of nature’s perfect health. She had never had an hour’s illness in her
life.

“There is no just or unjust impediment, Kathleen,” he added presently,
and took her hand again.

She looked him in the eyes clearly. “You really think so?” she asked.

“I know so,” he answered. “We shall be two perfect panels in one picture
of life.”




CHAPTER III. AFTER FIVE YEARS

“You have forgotten me?”

Charley Steele’s glance was serenely non-committal as he answered drily:

“I cannot remember doing so.”

The other man’s eyelids drew down with a look of anger, then the humour
of the impertinence worked upon him, and he gave a nervous little laugh
and said: “I am John Brown.”

“Then I’m sure my memory is not at fault,” remarked Charley, with an
outstretched hand. “My dear Brown! Still preaching little sermons?”

“Do I look it?” There was a curious glitter in John Brown’s eyes. “I’m
not preaching little sermons, and you know it well enough.” He laughed,
but it was a hard sort of mirth. “Perhaps you forgot to remember that,
though,” he sneeringly added. “It was the work of your hands.”

“That’s why I should remember to forget it--I am the child of modesty.”
 Charley touched the corners of his mouth with his tongue, as though his
lips were dry, and his eyes wandered to a saloon a little farther down
the street.

“Modesty is your curse,” rejoined Brown mockingly.

“Once when you preached at me you said that beauty was my curse.”
 Charley laughed a curt, distant little laugh which was no more the
spontaneous humour lying for ever behind his thoughts than his eye-glass
was the real sight of his eyes, though since childhood this laugh and
his eye-glass were as natural to all expression of himself as John
Brown’s outward and showy frankness did not come from the real John
Brown.

John Brown looked him up and down quickly, then fastened his eyes on
the ruddy cheeks of his old friend. “Do they call you Beauty now as they
used to?” he asked, rather insolently.

“No. They only say, ‘There goes Charley Steele!’” The tongue again
touched the corners of the mouth, and the eyes wandered to the doorway
down the street, over which was written in French: “Jean Jolicoeur,
Licensed to sell wine, beer, and other spirituous and fermented
liquors.”

Just then an archdeacon of the cathedral passed them, bowed gravely to
Charley, glanced at John Brown, turned colour slightly, and then with a
cold stare passed on too quickly for dignity.

“I’m thinking of Bunyan,” said the aforetime friend of Charley Steele.
“I’ll paraphrase him and say: ‘There, but for beauty and a monocle,
walks John Brown.’”

Under the bitter sarcasm of the man, who, five years ago, had gone down
at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley’s blue eye did not waver,
not a nerve stirred in his face, as he replied: “Who knows!”

“That was what you always said--who knows! That did for John Brown.”

Charley seemed not to hear the remark. “What are you doing now?” he
asked, looking steadily at the face whence had gone all the warmth
of manhood, all that courage of life which keeps men young. The lean
parchment visage had the hunted look of the incorrigible failure, had
written on it self-indulgence, cunning, and uncertainty.

“Nothing much,” John Brown replied.

“What last?”

“Floated an arsenic-mine on Lake Superior.”

“Failed?”

“More or less. There are hopes yet. I’ve kept the wolf from the door.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Don’t know--nothing, perhaps; I’ve not the courage I had.”

“I’d have thought you might find arsenic a good thing,” said Charley,
holding out a silver cigarette-case, his eyes turning slowly from the
startled, gloomy face of the man before him, to the cool darkness beyond
the open doorway of that saloon on the other side of the street.

John Brown shivered--there was something so cold-blooded in the
suggestion that he might have found arsenic a good thing. The metallic
glare of Charley’s eye-glass seemed to give an added cruelty to the
words. Charley’s monocle was the token of what was behind his blue
eye-one ceaseless interrogation. It was that everlasting questioning,
the ceaseless who knows! which had in the end unsettled John Brown’s
mind, and driven him at last from the church and the possible gaiters of
a dean into the rough business of life, where he had been a failure. Yet
as Brown looked at Charley the old fascination came on him with a rush.
His hand suddenly caught Charley’s as he took a cigarette, and he said:
“Perhaps I’ll find arsenic a good thing yet.”

For reply Charley laid a hand on his arm-turned him towards the shade of
the houses opposite. Without a word they crossed the street, entered
the saloon, and passed to a little back room, Charley giving an
unsympathetic stare to some men at the bar who seemed inclined to speak
to him.

As the two passed into the small back room with the frosted door, one
of the strangers said to the other: “What does he come here for, if
he’s too proud to speak! What’s a saloon for! I’d like to smash that
eye-glass for him!”

“He’s going down-hill fast,” said the other. “He drinks steady--steady.”

“Tiens--tiens!” interposed Jean Jolicoeur, the landlord. “It is not harm
to him. He drink all day, an’ he walk a crack like a bee-line.”

“He’s got the handsomest wife in this city. If I was him, I’d think more
of myself,” answered the Englishman.

“How you think more--hein? You not come down more to my saloon?”

“No, I wouldn’t come to your saloon, and I wouldn’t go to Theophile
Charlemagne’s shebang at the Cote Dorion.”

“You not like Charlemagne’s hotel?” said a huge black-bearded pilot,
standing beside the landlord. “Oh, I like Charlemagne’s hotel, and
I like to talk to Suzon Charlemagne, but I’m not married, Rouge
Gosselin--”

“If he go to Charlemagne’s hotel, and talk some more too mooch to dat
Suzon Charlemagne, he will lose dat glass out of his eye,” interrupted
Rouge Gosselin.

“Who say he been at dat place?” said Jean Jolicoeur. “He bin dere four
times las’ month, and dat Suzon Charlemagne talk’bout him ever since.
When dat Narcisse Bovin and Jacques Gravel come down de river, he better
keep away from dat Cote Dorion,” sputtered Rouge Gosselin. “Dat’s a long
story short, all de same for you--bagosh!”

Rouge Gosselin flung off his glass of white whiskey, and threw after it
a glass of cold water.

“Tiens! you know not M’sieu’ Charley Steele,” said Jean Jolicoeur, and
turned on his heel, nodding his head sagely.




CHAPTER IV. CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY

A hot day a month later Charley Steele sat in his office staring before
him into space, and negligently smoking a cigarette. Outside there was a
slow clacking of wheels, and a newsboy was crying “La Patrie! La
Patrie! All about the War in France! All about the massacree!”
 Bells--wedding-bells--were ringing also, and the jubilant sounds, like
the call of the newsboy, were out of accord with the slumberous feeling
of the afternoon. Charley Steele turned his head slowly towards the
window. The branches of a maple-tree half crossed it, and the leaves
moved softly in the shadow they made. His eye went past the tree and
swam into the tremulous white heat of the square, and beyond to where in
the church-tower the bells were ringing-to the church doors, from
which gaily dressed folk were issuing to the carriages, or thronged
the pavement, waiting for the bride and groom to come forth into a
new-created world--for them.

Charley looked through his monocle at the crowd reflectively, his head
held a little to one side in a questioning sort of way, on his lips the
ghost of a smile--not a reassuring smile. Presently he leaned forward
slightly and the monocle dropped from his eye. He fumbled for it,
raised it, blew on it, rubbed it with his handkerchief, and screwed it
carefully into his eye again, his rather bushy brow gathering over it
strongly, his look sharpened to more active thought. He stared straight
across the square at a figure in heliotrope, whose face was turned to a
man in scarlet uniform taller than herself two glowing figures towards
whom many other eyes than his own were directed, some curiously, some
disdain fully, some sadly. But Charley did not see the faces of those
who looked on; he only saw two people--one in heliotrope, one in
scarlet.

Presently his white firm hand went up and ran through his hair
nervously, his comely figure settled down in the chair, his tongue
touched the corners of his red lips, and his eyes withdrew from the
woman in heliotrope and the man in scarlet, and loitered among the
leaves of the tree at the window. The softness of the green, the cool
health of the foliage, changed the look of his eye from something cold
and curious to something companionable, and scarcely above a whisper two
words came from his lips:

“Kathleen! Kathleen!”

By the mere sound of the voice it would have been hard to tell what the
words meant, for it had an inquiring cadence and yet a kind of distant
doubt, a vague anxiety. The face conveyed nothing--it was smooth, fresh,
and immobile. The only point where the mind and meaning of the man
worked according to the law of his life was at the eye, where the
monocle was caught now as in a vise. Behind this glass there was a
troubled depth which belied the self-indulgent mouth, the egotism
speaking loudly in the red tie, the jewelled finger, the ostentatiously
simple yet sumptuous clothes.

At last he drew in a sharp, sibilant breath, clicked his tongue--a
sound of devil-may-care and hopelessness at once--and turned to a little
cupboard behind him. The chair squeaked on the floor as he turned, and
he frowned, shivered a little, and kicked it irritably with his heel.

From the cupboard he took a bottle of liqueur, and, pouring out a small
glassful, drank it off eagerly. As he put the bottle away, he said
again, in an abstracted fashion, “Kathleen!”

Then, seating himself at the table, as if with an effort towards energy,
he rang a bell. A clerk entered. “Ask Mr. Wantage to come for a moment,”
 he said. “Mr. Wantage has gone to the church--to the wedding,” was the
reply.

“Oh, very well. He will be in again this afternoon?”

“Sure to, sir.”

“Just so. That will do.”

The clerk retired, and Charley, rising, unlocked a drawer, and taking
out some books and papers, laid them on the table. Intently, carefully,
he began to examine them, referring at the same time to a letter which
had lain open at his hand while he had been sitting there. For a quarter
of an hour he studied the books and papers, then, all at once, his
fingers fastened on a point and stayed. Again he read the letter lying
beside him. A flush crimsoned his face to his hair--a singular flush
of shame, of embarrassment, of guilt--a guilt not his own. His breath
caught in his throat.

“Billy!” he gasped. “Billy, by God!”




CHAPTER V. THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE

The flush was still on Charley’s face when the door opened slowly, and
a lady dressed in heliotrope silk entered, and came forward. Without a
word Charley rose, and, taking a step towards her, offered a chair;
at the same time noticing her heightened colour, and a certain rigid
carriage not in keeping with her lithe and graceful figure. There was no
mistaking the quiver of her upper lip--a short lip which did not hide a
wonderfully pretty set of teeth.

With a wave of the hand she declined the seat. Glancing at the books and
papers lying on the table, she flashed an inquiry at his flushed face,
and, misreading the cause, with slow, quiet point, in which bitterness
or contempt showed, she said meaningly:

“What a slave you are!”

“Behold the white man work!” he said good-naturedly, the flush passing
slowly from his face. With apparent negligence he pushed the letter
and the books and papers a little to one side, but really to place them
beyond the range of her angry eyes. She shrugged her shoulders at his
action.

“For ‘the fatherless children and widows, and all that are desolate and
oppressed?’” she said, not concealing her malice, for at the wedding
she had just left all her married life had rushed before her in a swift
panorama, and the man in scarlet had fixed the shooting pictures in her
mind.

Again a flush swept up Charley’s face and seemed to blur his sight. His
monocle dropped the length of its silken tether, and he caught it and
slowly adjusted it again as he replied evenly:

“You always hit the nail on the head, Kathleen.” There was a kind of
appeal in his voice, a sort of deprecation in his eye, as though he
would be friends with her, as though, indeed, there was in his mind some
secret pity for her.

Her look at his face was critical and cold. It was plain that she was
not prepared for any extra friendliness on his part--there seemed no
reason why he should add to his usual courtesy a note of sympathy to
the sound of her name on his lips. He had not fastened the door of the
cupboard from which he had taken the liqueur, and it had swung open a
little, disclosing the bottle and the glass. She saw. Her face took on a
look of quiet hardness.

“Why did you not come to the wedding? She was your cousin. People asked
where you were. You knew I was going.”

“Did you need me?” he asked quietly, and his eyes involuntarily swept
to the place where he had seen the heliotrope and scarlet make a glow of
colour on the other side of the square. “You were not alone.”

She misunderstood him. Her mind had been overwrought, and she caught
insinuation in his voice. “You mean Tom Fairing!” Her eyes blazed. “You
are quite right--I did not need you. Tom Fairing is a man that all the
world trusts save you.”

“Kathleen!” The words were almost a cry. “For God’s sake! I have never
thought of ‘trusting’ men where you are concerned. I believe in no
man”--his voice had a sharp bitterness, though his face was smooth and
unemotional--“but I trust you, and believe in you. Yes, upon my soul and
honour, Kathleen.”

As he spoke she turned quickly and stepped towards the window, an
involuntary movement of agitation. He had touched a chord. But even as
she reached the window and glanced down to the hot, dusty street, she
heard a loud voice below, a reckless, ribald sort of voice, calling to
some one to, “Come and have a drink.”

“Billy!” she said involuntarily, and looked down, then shrank back
quickly. She turned swiftly on her husband. “Your soul and honour,
Charley!” she said slowly. “Look at what you’ve made of Billy! Look at
the company he keeps--John Brown, who hasn’t even decency enough to keep
away from the place he disgraced. Billy is always with him. You ruined
John Brown, with your dissipation and your sneers at religion and
your-’I-wonder-nows!’ Of what use have you been, Charley? Of what use to
anyone in the world? You think of nothing but eating, and drinking, and
playing the fop.”

He glanced down involuntarily, and carefully flicked some cigarette-ash
from his waistcoat. The action arrested her speech for a moment, and
then, with a little shudder, she continued: “The best they can say of
you is, ‘There goes Charley Steele!’”

“And the worst?” he asked. He was almost smiling now, for he admired her
anger, her scorn. He knew it was deserved, and he had no idea of making
any defence. He had said all in that instant’s cry, “Kathleen!”--that
one awakening feeling of his life so far. She had congealed the word on
his lips by her scorn, and now he was his old debonair, dissipated self,
with the impertinent monocle in his eye and a jest upon his tongue.

“Do you want to know the worst they say?” she asked, growing pale to
the lips. “Go and stand behind the door of Jolicoeur’s saloon. Go to any
street corner, and listen. Do you think I don’t know what they say? Do
you think the world doesn’t talk about the company you keep? Haven’t I
seen you going into Jolicoeur’s saloon when I was walking on the other
side of the street? Do you think that all the world, and I among the
rest, are blind? Oh, you fop, you fool, you have ruined my brother,
you have ruined my life, and I hate and despise you for a cold-blooded,
selfish coward!”

He made a deprecating gesture and stared--a look of most curious
inquiry. They had been married for five years, and during that time they
had never been anything but persistently courteous to each other. He had
never on any occasion seen her face change colour, or her manner show
chagrin or emotion. Stately and cold and polite, she had fairly met his
ceaseless foppery and preciseness of manner. But people had said of her,
“Poor Kathleen Steele!” for her spotless name stood sharply off from his
negligence and dissipation. They called her “Poor Kathleen Steele!” in
sympathy, though they knew that she had not resisted marriage with the
well-to-do Charley Steele, while loving a poor captain in the Royal
Fusileers. She preserved social sympathy by a perfect outward decorum,
though the man of the scarlet coat remained in the town and haunted the
places where she appeared, and though the eyes of the censorious world
were watching expectantly. No voice was raised against her. Her cold
beauty held the admiration of all women, for she was not eager for men’s
company, and she kept her poise even with the man in scarlet near her,
glacially complacent, beautifully still, disconcertingly emotionless.
They did not know that the poise with her was to an extent as much a
pose as Charley’s manner was to him.

“I hate you and despise you for a cold-blooded, selfish coward!” So that
was the way Kathleen felt! Charley’s tongue touched his lips quickly,
for they were arid, and he slowly said:

“I assure you I have not tried to influence Billy. I have no remembrance
of his imitating me in anything. Won’t you sit down? It is very
fatiguing, this heat.”

Charley was entirely himself again. His words concerning Billy Wantage
might have been either an impeachment of Billy’s character and, by
deduction, praise of his own, or it may have been the insufferable
egoism of the fop, well used to imitators. The veil between the two,
which for one sacred moment had seemed about to lift, was fallen now,
leaded and weighted at the bottom.

“I suppose you would say the same about John Brown! It is disconcerting
at least to think that we used to sit and listen to Mr. Brown as he
waved his arms gracefully in his surplice and preached sentimental
sermons. I suppose you will say, what we have heard you say before,
that you only asked questions. Was that how you ruined the Rev. John
Brown--and Billy?”

Charley was very thirsty, and because of that perhaps, his voice had an
unusually dry tone as he replied: “I asked questions of John Brown; I
answer them to Billy. It is I that am ruined!”

There was that in his voice she did not understand, for though long used
to his paradoxical phrases and his everlasting pose--as it seemed to her
and all the world--there now rang through his words a note she had never
heard before. For a fleeting instant she was inclined to catch at some
hidden meaning, but her grasp of things was uncertain. She had been
thrown off her balance, or poise, as Charley had, for an unwonted
second, been thrown off his pose, and her thought could not pierce
beneath the surface.

“I suppose you will be flippant at Judgment Day,” she said with a bitter
laugh, for it seemed to her a monstrous thing that they should be such
an infinite distance apart.

“Why should one be serious then? There will be no question of an alibi,
or evidence for the defence--no cross-examination. A cut-and-dried
verdict!”

She ignored his words. “Shall you be at home to dinner?” she rejoined
coldly, and her eyes wandered out of the window again to that spot
across the square where heliotrope and scarlet had met.

“I fancy not,” he answered, his eyes turned away also--towards the
cupboard containing the liqueur. “Better ask Billy; and keep him in, and
talk to him--I really would like you to talk to him. He admires you so
much. I wish--in fact I hope you will ask Billy to come and live with
us,” he added half abstractedly. He was trying to see his way through
a sudden confusion of ideas. Confusion was rare to him, and his senses,
feeling the fog, embarrassed by a sudden air of mystery and a cloud of
futurity, were creeping to a mind-path of understanding.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said coldly. “You know I won’t ask him, and you
don’t want him.”

“I have always said that decision is the greatest of all qualities--even
when the decision is bad. It saves so much worry, and tends to health.”
 Suddenly he turned to the desk and opened a tin box. “Here is further
practice for your admirable gift.” He opened a paper. “I want you to
sign off for this building--leaving it to my absolute disposal.” He
spread the paper out before her.

She turned pale and her lips tightened. She looked at him squarely in
the eyes. “My wedding-gift!” she said. Then she shrugged her shoulders.
A moment she hesitated, and in that moment seemed to congeal. “You need
it?” she asked distantly.

He inclined his head, his eye never leaving hers. With a swift angry
motion she caught the glove from her left hand, and, doubling it back,
dragged it off. A smooth round ring came off with it and rolled upon the
floor.

Stooping, he picked up the ring, and handed it back to her, saying:
“Permit me.” It was her wedding-ring. She took it with a curious
contracted look and put it on the finger again, then pulled off the
other glove quietly. “Of course one uses the pen with the right hand,”
 she said calmly.

“Involuntary act of memory,” he rejoined slowly, as she took the pen
in her hand. “You had spoken of a wedding, this was a wedding-gift,
and--that’s right, sign there!”

There was a brief pause, in which she appeared to hesitate, and then she
wrote her name in a large firm hand, and, throwing down the pen, caught
up her gloves, and began to pull them on viciously.

“Thanks. It is very kind of you,” he said. He put the document in the
tin box, and took out another, as without a word, but with a grave face
in which scorn and trouble were mingled, she now turned towards the
door.

“Can you spare a minute longer?” he said, and advanced towards her,
holding the new document in his hand. “Fair exchange is no robbery.
Please take this. No, not with the right hand; the left is better
luck--the better the hand, the better the deed,” he added with a
whimsical squint and a low laugh, and he placed the paper in her left
hand. “Item No. 2 to take the place of item No. 1.”

She scrutinised the paper. Wonder filled her face. “Why, this is a
deed of the homestead property--worth three times as much!” she said.
“Why--why do you do this?”

“Remember that questions ruin people sometimes,” he answered, and
stepped to the door and turned the handle, as though to show her out.
She was agitated and embarrassed now. She felt she had been unjust, and
yet she felt that she could not say what ought to be said, if all the
rules were right.

“Thank you,” she said simply. “Did you think of this when--when you
handed me back the ring?”

“I never had an inspiration in my life. I was born with a plan of
campaign.”

“I suppose I ought to--kiss you!” she said in some little confusion.

“It might be too expensive,” he answered, with a curious laugh. Then he
added lightly: “This was a fair exchange”--he touched the papers--“but I
should like you to bear witness, madam, that I am no robber!” He opened
the door. Again there was that curious penetrating note in his voice,
and that veiled look. She half hesitated, but in the pause there was a
loud voice below and a quick foot on the stairs.

“It’s Billy!” she said sharply, and passed out.




CHAPTER VI. THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB

A half-hour later Charley Steele sat in his office alone with Billy
Wantage, his brother-in-law, a tall, shapely fellow of twenty-four.
Billy had been drinking, his face was flushed, and his whole manner was
indolently careless and irresponsible. In spite of this, however, his
grey eyes were nervously fixed on Charley, and his voice was shaky as
he said, in reply to a question as to his finances: “That’s my own
business, Charley.”

Charley took a long swallow from the tumbler of whiskey and soda beside
him, and, as he drew some papers towards him, answered quietly: “I must
make it mine, Billy, without a doubt.”

The tall youth shifted in his chair and essayed to laugh.

“You’ve never been particular about your own business. Pshaw, what’s the
use of preaching to me!”

Charley pushed his chair back, and his look had just a touch of
surprise, a hint of embarrassment. This youth, then, thought him
something of a fool: read him by virtue of his ornamentations, his outer
idiosyncrasy! This boy, whose iniquity was under his finger on that
table, despised him for his follies, and believed in him less than his
wife--two people who had lived closer to him than any others in the
world. Before he answered he lifted the glass beside him and drank to
the last drop, then slowly set it down and said, with a dangerous smile:

“I have always been particular about other people’s finances, and the
statement that you haven’t isn’t preaching, it’s an indictment--so it
is, Billy.”

“An indictment!” Billy bit his finger-nails now, and his voice shook.

“That’s what the jury would say, and the judge would do the preaching.
You have stolen twenty-five thousand dollars of trust-moneys!”

For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside in the
square came the Marche-t’en! of a driver, and the loud cackling laugh of
some loafer at the corner. Charley’s look imprisoned his brother-in-law,
and Billy’s eyes were fixed in a helpless stare on Charley’s finger,
which held like a nail the record of his infamy.

Billy drew himself back with a jerk of recovery, and said with bravado,
but with fear in look and motion: “Don’t stare like that. The thing’s
done, and you can’t undo it, and that’s all there is about it.” Charley
had been staring at the youth-staring and not seeing him really, but
seeing his wife and watching her lips say again: “You are ruining
Billy!” He was not sober, but his mind was alert, his eccentric soul was
getting kaleidoscopic glances at strange facts of life as they rushed
past his mind into a painful red obscurity.

“Oh yes, it can be undone, and it’s not all there is about it!” he
answered quietly.

He got up suddenly, went to the door, locked it, put the key in his
pocket, and, coming back, sat down again beside the table.

Billy watched him with shrewd, hunted eyes. What did Charley mean to
do? To give him in charge? To send him to jail? To shut him out from the
world where he had enjoyed himself so much for years and years? Never to
go forth free among his fellows! Never to play the gallant with all the
pretty girls he knew! Never to have any sports, or games, or tobacco,
or good meals, or canoeing in summer, or tobogganing in winter, or
moose-hunting, or any sort of philandering!

The thoughts that filled his mind now were not those of regret for his
crime, but the fears of the materialist and sentimentalist, who revolted
at punishment and all the shame and deprivation it would involve.

“What did you do with the money?” said Charley, after a minute’s
silence, in which two minds had travelled far.

“I put it into mines.”

“What mines?”

“Out on Lake Superior.”

“What sort of mines?”

“Arsenic.”

Charley’s eye-glass dropped, and rattled against the gold button of his
white waistcoat.

“In arsenic-mines!” He put the monocle to his eye again. “On whose
advice?”

“John Brown’s.”

“John Brown’s!” Charley Steele’s ideas were suddenly shaken and
scattered by a man’s name, as a bolting horse will crumple into
confusion a crowd of people. So this was the way his John Brown had come
home to roost. He lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained
air. He was terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself
together. Five years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid
native ability, but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his
will and the sequence of his intellect.

“It was not investment?” he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his
mouth.

“No. What would have been the good?”

“Of course. Speculation--you bought heavily to sell on an expected
rise?”

“Yes.”

There was something so even in Charley’s manner and tone that Billy
misinterpreted it. It seemed hopeful that Charley was going to make the
best of a bad job.

“You see,” Billy said eagerly, “it seemed dead certain. He showed me the
way the thing was being done, the way the company was being floated, how
the market in New York was catching hold. It looked splendid. I thought
I could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have
a nice little scoop, at no one’s cost. I thought it was a dead-sure
thing--and I was hard up, and Kathleen wouldn’t lend me any more. If
Kathleen had only done the decent thing--”

A sudden flush of anger swept over Charley’s face--never before in his
life had that face been so sensitive, never even as a child. Something
had waked in the odd soul of Beauty Steele.

“Don’t be a sweep--leave Kathleen out of it!” he said, in a sharp,
querulous voice--a voice unnatural to himself, suggestive of little use,
as though he were learning to speak, using strange words stumblingly
through a melee of the emotions. It was not the voice of Charley Steele
the fop, the poseur, the idlest man in the world.

“What part of the twenty-five thousand went into the arsenic?” he said,
after a pause. There was no feeling in the voice now; it was again even
and inquiring.

“Nearly all.”

“Don’t lie. You’ve been living freely. Tell the truth, or--or I’ll know
the reason why, Billy.”

“About two-thirds-that’s the truth. I had debts, and I paid them.”

“And you bet on the races?”

“Yes.”

“And lost?”

“Yes. See here, Charley; it was the most awful luck--”

“Yes, for the fatherless children and widows, and all that are
oppressed!”

Charley’s look again went through and beyond the culprit, and he
recalled his wife’s words and his own reply. A quick contempt and a sort
of meditative sarcasm were in the tone. It was curious, too, that he
could smile, but the smile did not encourage Billy Wantage now.

“It’s all gone, I suppose?” he added.

“All but about a hundred dollars.”

“Well, you have had your game; now you must pay for it.”

Billy had imagination, and he was melodramatic. He felt danger ahead.

“I’ll go and shoot myself!” he said, banging the table with his fist so
that the whiskey-tumbler shook.

He was hardly prepared for what followed. Charley’s nerves had been
irritated; his teeth were on edge. This threat, made in such a cheap,
insincere way, was the last thing in the world he could bear to hear.
He knew that Billy lied; that if there was one thing Billy would not
do, shooting himself was that one thing. His own life was very sweet to
Billy Wantage. Charley hated him the more at that moment because he was
Kathleen’s brother. For if there was one thing he knew of Kathleen, it
was that she could not do a mean thing. Cold, unsympathetic she might
be, cruel at a pinch perhaps, but dishonourable--never! This weak,
cowardly youth was her brother! No one had ever seen such a look on
Charley Steele’s face as came upon it now--malicious, vindictive. He
stooped over Billy in a fury.

“You think I’m a fool and an ass--you ignorant, brainless, lying
cub! You make me a thief before all the world by forging my name, and
stealing the money for which I am responsible, and then you rate me
so low that you think you’ll bamboozle me by threats of suicide. You
haven’t the courage to shoot yourself--drunk or sober. And what do you
think would be gained by it? Eh, what do you think would be gained? You
can’t see that you’d insult your sister as well as--as rob me.”

Billy Wantage cowered. This was not the Charley Steele he had known,
not like the man he had seen since a child. There was something almost
uncouth in this harsh high voice, these gauche words, this raw accent;
but it was powerful and vengeful, and it was full of purpose. Billy
quivered, yet his adroit senses caught at a straw in the words, “as rob
me!” Charley was counting it a robbery of himself, not of the widows and
orphans! That gave him a ray of hope. In a paroxysm of fear, joined to
emotional excitement, he fell upon his knees, and pleaded for mercy--for
the sake of one chance in life, for the family name, for Kathleen’s
sake, for the sake of everything he had ruthlessly dishonoured. Tears
came readily to his eyes, real tears--of excitement; but he could
measure, too, the strength of his appeal.

“If you’ll stand by me in this, I’ll pay you back every cent, Charley,”
 he cried. “I will, upon my soul and honour! You shan’t lose a penny, if
you’ll only see me through. I’ll work my fingers off to pay it back till
the last hour of my life. I’ll be straight till the day I die--so help
me God!”

Charley’s eyes wandered to the cupboard where the liqueurs were. If
he could only decently take a drink! But how could he with this boy
kneeling before him? His breath scorched his throat.

“Get up!” he said shortly. “I’ll see what I can do--to-morrow. Go away
home. Don’t go out again to-night. And come here at ten o’clock in the
morning.”

Billy took up his hat, straightened his tie, carefully brushed the dust
from his knees, and, seizing Charley’s hand, said: “You’re the best
fellow in the world, Charley.” He went towards the door, dusting his
face of emotion as he had dusted his knees. The old selfish, shrewd
look was again in his eyes. Charley’s gaze followed him gloomily. Billy
turned the handle of the door. It was locked.

Charley came forward and unlocked it. As Billy passed through, Charley,
looking sharply in his face, said hoarsely: “By Heaven, I believe you’re
not worth it!” Then he shut the door again and locked it.

He almost ran back and opened the cupboard. Taking out the bottle of
liqueur, he filled a glass and drank it off. Three times he did this,
then seated himself at the table with a sigh of relief and no emotion in
his face.




CHAPTER VII. “PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE”’

The sun was setting by the time Charley was ready to leave his office.
Never in his life had he stayed so late in “the halls of industry,” as
he flippantly called his place of business. The few cases he had won so
brilliantly since the beginning of his career, he had studied at night
in his luxurious bedroom in the white brick house among the maples on
the hill. In every case, as at the trial of Joseph Nadeau, the man who
murdered the timber-merchant, the first prejudice of judge and jury had
given way slowly before the deep-seeing mind, which had as rare a power
of analysis as for generalisation, and reduced masses of evidence to
phrases; and verdicts had been given against all personal prejudice--to
be followed outside the court by the old prejudice, the old look askance
at the man called Beauty Steele.

To him it had made no difference at any time. He cared for neither
praise nor blame. In his actions a materialist, in his mind he was a
watcher of life, a baffled inquirer whose refuge was irony, and whose
singular habits had in five years become a personal insult to the
standards polite society and Puritan morality had set up. Perhaps the
insult had been intended, for irregularities were committed with an
insolent disdain for appearances. He did nothing secretly; his page
of life was for him who cared to read. He played cards, he talked
agnosticism, he went on shooting expeditions which became orgies, he
drank openly in saloons, he whose forefathers had been gentlemen of
King George, and who sacrificed all in the great American revolution for
honour and loyalty--statesmen, writers, politicians, from whom he had
direct inheritance, through stirring, strengthening forces, in the
building up of laws and civilisation in a new land. Why he chose to be
what he was--if he did choose--he alone could answer. His personality
had impressed itself upon his world, first by its idiosyncrasies and
afterwards by its enigmatical excesses.

What was he thinking of as he laid the papers away in the tin box in a
drawer, locked it, and put the key in his pocket? He had found to the
smallest detail Billy’s iniquity, and he was now ready to shoulder the
responsibility, to save the man, who, he knew, was scarce worth the
saving. But Kathleen--there was what gave him pause. As he turned to the
window and looked out over the square he shuddered. He thought of the
exchange of documents he had made with her that day, and he had a sense
of satisfaction. This defalcation of Billy’s would cripple him, for
money had flown these last few years. He had had heavy losses, and he
had dug deep into his capital. Down past the square ran a cool avenue of
beeches to the water, and he could see his yacht at anchor. On the other
side of the water, far down the shore, was a house which had been begun
as a summer cottage, and had ended in being a mansion. A few Moorish
pillars, brought from Algiers for the decoration of the entrance,
had necessitated the raising of the roof, and then all had to be in
proportion, and the cottage became like an appanage to a palace. So
it had gone, and he had cared so little about it all, and for the
consequences. He had this day secured Kathleen from absolute poverty, no
matter what happened, and that had its comfort. His eyes wandered among
the trees. He could see the yellow feathers of the oriole and catch the
note of the whippoorwill, and from the great church near the voices of
the choir came over. He could hear the words “Lord, now lettest thou thy
servant depart in peace, according to thy word.”

Depart in peace--how much peace was there in the world? Who had it? The
remembrance of what Kathleen said to him at the door--“I suppose I ought
to kiss you”--came to him, was like a refrain in his ears.

“Peace is the penalty of silence and inaction,” he said to himself
meditatively. “Where there is action there is no peace. If the brain and
body fatten, then there is peace. Kathleen and I have lived at peace, I
suppose. I never said a word to her that mightn’t be put down in large
type and pasted on my tombstone, and she never said a word to me--till
to-day--that wasn’t like a water-colour picture. Not till to-day, in a
moment’s strife and trouble, did I ever get near her. And we’ve lived
in peace. Peace? Where is the right kind of peace? Over there is old
Sainton. He married a rich woman, he has had the platter of plenty
before him always, he wears ribbons and such like baubles given by the
Queen, but his son had to flee the country. There’s Herring. He doesn’t
sleep because his daughter is going to marry an Italian count. There’s
Latouche. His place in the cabinet is begotten in corruption, in the
hotbed of faction war. There’s Kenealy. His wife has led him a dance
of deep damnation. There’s the lot of them--every one, not an ounce of
peace among them, except with old Casson, who weighs eighteen stone,
lives like a pig, grows stuffier in mind and body every day, and drinks
half a bottle of whiskey every night. There’s no one else--yes, there
is!”

He was looking at a small black-robed figure with clean-shaven face,
white hair, and shovel-hat, who passed slowly along the wooden walk
beneath, with meditative content in his face.

“There’s peace,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve known Father Hallon
for twenty-five years, and no man ever worked so hard, ever saw more
trouble, ever shared other people’s bad luck mere than he; ever took the
bit in his teeth, when it was a matter of duty, stronger than he;
and yet there’s peace; he has it; a peace that passes all
understanding--mine anyhow. I’ve never had a minute’s real peace. The
World, or Nature, or God, or It, whatever the name is, owes me peace.
And how is It to give it? Why, by answering my questions. Now it’s
a curious thing that the only person I ever met who could answer any
questions of mine--answer them in the way that satisfies--is Suzon. She
works things down to phrases. She has wisdom in the raw, and a real grip
on life, and yet all the men she has known have been river-drivers and
farmers, and a few men from town who mistook the sort of Suzon she is.
Virtuous and straight, she’s a born child of Aphrodite too--by nature.
She was made for love. A thousand years ago she would have had a
thousand loves! And she thinks the world is a magnificent place, and she
loves it, and wallows--fairly wallows--in content. Now which is right:
Suzon or Father Hallon--Aphrodite or the Nazarene? Which is peace--as
the bird and the beast of the field get it--the fallow futile content,
or--”

He suddenly stopped, hiccoughed, then hurriedly drawing paper before
him, he sat down. For an hour he wrote. It grew darker. He pushed the
table nearer the window, and the singing of the choir in the church
came in upon him as his pen seemed to etch words into the paper, firm,
eccentric, meaning. What he wrote that evening has been preserved, and
the yellow sheets lie loosely in a black despatch-box which contains the
few records Charley Steele left behind him. What he wrote that night was
the note of his mind, the key to all those strange events through which
he began to move two hours after the lines were written:

        Over thy face is a veil of white sea-mist,
        Only thine eyes shine like stars; bless or blight me,
        I will hold close to the leash at thy wrist,
        O Aphrodite!

        Thou in the East and I here in the West,
        Under our newer skies purple and pleasant:
        Who shall decide which is better--attest,
        Saga or peasant?

        Thou with Serapis, Osiris, and Isis,
        I with Jehovah, in vapours and shadows;
        Thou with the gods’ joy-enhancing devices,
        Sweet-smelling meadows!

        What is there given us?--Food and some raiment,
        Toiling to reach to some Patmian haven,
        Giving up all for uncertain repayment,
        Feeding the raven!

        Striving to peer through the infinite azure,
        Alternate turning to earthward and falling,
        Measuring life with Damastian measure,
        Finite, appalling.

        What does it matter! They passed who with Homer
        Poured out the wine at the feet of their idols:
        Passing, what found they? To-come a misnomer,
        It and their idols?

        Sacristan, acolyte, player, or preacher,
        Each to his office, but who holds the key?
        Death, only Death--thou, the ultimate teacher
        Wilt show it to me.

        And when the forts and the barriers fall,
        Shall we then find One the true, the almighty,
        Wisely to speak with the worst of us all--
        Ah, Aphrodite!

        Waiting, I turn from the futile, the human,
        Gone is the life of me, laughing with youth
        Steals to learn all in the face of a woman,
        Mendicant Truth!

Rising with a bitter laugh, and murmuring the last lines, he thrust the
papers into a drawer, locked it, and going quickly from the room, he
went down-stairs. His horse and cart were waiting for him, and he got
in.

The groom looked at him inquiringly. “The Cote Dorion!” he said, and
they sped away through the night.




CHAPTER VIII. THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT

One, two, three, four, five, six miles. The sharp click of the iron
hoofs on the road; the strong rush of the river; the sweet smell of the
maple and the pungent balsam; the dank rich odour of the cedar
swamp; the cry of the loon from the water; the flaming crane in the
fishing-boat; the fisherman, spear in hand, staring into the dark waters
tinged with sombre red; the voice of a lonely settler keeping time to
the ping of the axe as, lengthening out his day to nightly weariness, he
felled a tree; river-drivers’ camps spotted along the shore; huge cribs
or rafts which had swung down the great stream for scores of miles, the
immense oars motionless, the little houses on the timbers blinking with
light; and from cheerful raftsmen coming the old familiar song of the
rivers:

          “En roulant, ma boule roulant,
          En roulant ma boule!”

Not once had Charley Steele turned his head as the horse sped on. His
face was kept straight along the line of the road; he seemed not to see
or to hear, to be unresponsive to sound or scene. The monocle at his eye
was like a veil to hide the soul, a defence against inquiry, itself
the unceasing question, a sort of battery thrown forward, a kind of
field-casemate for a lonely besieged spirit.

It was full of suggestion. It might have been the glass behind which
showed some mediaeval relic, the body of some ancient Egyptian king
whose life had been spent in doing wonders and making signs--the
primitive, anthropomorphic being. He might have been a stone man, for
any motion that he made. Yet looking at him closely you would have seen
discontent in the eye, a kind of glaze of the sardonic over the whole
face.

What is the good! the face asked. What is there worth doing? it said.
What a limitless futility! it urged, fain to be contradicted too, as the
grim melancholy of the figure suggested.

“To be an animal and soak in the world,” he thought to himself--“that is
natural; and the unnatural is civilisation, and the cheap adventure of
the mind into fields of baffling speculation, lighted by the flickering
intelligences of dead speculators, whose seats we have bought in the
stock-exchange of mortality, and exhaust our lives in paying for. To
eat, to drink, to lie fallow, indifferent to what comes after, to roam
like the deer, and to fight like the tiger--”

He came to a dead stop in his thinking. “To fight like the tiger!” He
turned his head quickly now to where upon a raft some river-drivers were
singing:

       “And when a man in the fight goes down,
        Why, we will carry him home!”

“To fight like the tiger!” Ravage--the struggle to possess from all the
world what one wished for one’s self, and to do it without mercy and
without fear-that was the clear plan in the primitive world, where
action was more than speech and dominance than knowledge. Was not
civilisation a mistake, and religion the insinuating delusion designed
to cover it up; or, if not designed, accepted by the original few who
saw that humanity could not turn back, and must even go forward with
illusions, lest in mere despair all men died and the world died with
them?

His eyes wandered to the raft where the men were singing, and he
remembered the threat made: that if he came again to the Cote Dorion
he “would get what for!” He remembered the warning of Rouge Gosselin
conveyed by Jolicoeur, and a sinister smile crossed over his face. The
contradictions of his own thoughts came home to him suddenly, for was it
not the case that his physical strength alone, no matter what his skill,
would be of small service to him in a dark corner of contest? Primitive
ideas could only hold in a primitive world. His real weapon was his
brain, that which civilisation had given him in lieu of primitive
prowess and the giant’s strength.

They had come to a long piece of corduroy-road, and the horse’s hoofs
struck rumbling hollow sounds from the floor of cedar logs. There was
a swamp on one side where fire-flies were flickering, and there flashed
into Charley Steele’s mind some verses he had once learned at school:

       “They made her a grave too cold and damp
        For a soul so warm and true--”

It kept repeating itself in his brain in a strange dreary monotone.

“Stop the horse. I’ll walk the rest of the way,” he said presently to
the groom. “You needn’t come for me, Finn; I’ll walk back as far as the
Marochal Tavern. At twelve sharp I’ll be there. Give yourself a drink
and some supper”--he put a dollar into the man’s hand--“and no white
whiskey, mind: a bottle of beer and a leg of mutton, that’s the thing.”
 He nodded his head, and by the light of the moon walked away smartly
down the corduroy-road through the shadows of the swamp. Finn the groom
looked after him.

“Well, if he ain’t a queer dick! A reg’lar ‘centric--but a reg’lar
brick, cutting a wide swathe as he goes. He’s a tip-topper; and he’s a
sort of tough too--a sort of a kind of a tough. Well, it’s none of my
business. Get up!” he added to the horse, and turning round in the road
with difficulty, he drove back a mile to the Tavern Marochal for his
beer and mutton--and white whiskey.

Charley stepped on briskly, his shining leather shoes, straw hat, and
light cane in no good keeping with his surroundings. He was thinking
that he had never been in such a mood for talk with Suzon Charlemagne.
Charlemagne’s tavern of the Cote Dorion was known over half a province,
and its patrons carried news of it half across a continent. Suzon
Charlemagne--a girl of the people, a tavern-girl, a friend of sulking,
coarse river-drivers! But she had an alert precision of brain, an
instinct that clove through wastes of mental underbrush to the tree of
knowledge. Her mental sight was as keen and accurate as that which runs
along the rifle-barrel of the great hunter with the red deer in view.
Suzon Charlemagne no company for Charley Steele? What did it matter!
He had entered into other people’s lives to-day, had played their games
with them and for them, and now he would play his own game, live his own
life in his own way through the rest of this day. He thirsted for some
sort of combat, for the sharp contrasts of life, for the common and the
base; he thirsted even for the white whiskey against which he had warned
his groom. He was reckless--not blindly, but wilfully, wildly reckless,
caring not at all what fate or penalty might come his way.

“What do I care!” he said to himself. “I shall never squeal at any
penalty. I shall never say in the great round-up that I was weak and I
fell. I’ll take my gruel expecting it, not fearing it--if there is to be
any gruel anywhere, or any round-up anywhere!”

A figure suddenly appeared coming round the bend of the road before
him. It was Rouge Gosselin. Rouge Gosselin was inclined to speak. Some
satanic whim or malicious foppery made Charley stare him blankly in the
face. The monocle and the stare stopped the bon soir and the friendly
warning on Rouge Gosselin’s tongue, and the pilot passed on with a
muttered oath.

Gosselin had not gone far, however, before he suddenly stopped and
laughed outright, for at the bottom he had great good-nature, in keeping
with his “six-foot” height, and his temper was friendly if quick.
It seemed so absurd, so audacious, that a man could act like Charley
Steele, that he at once became interested in the phenomenon, and
followed slowly after Charley, saying as he went: “Tiens, there will be
things to watch to-night!”

Before Charley was within five hundred yards of the tavern he could
hear the laughter and song coming from the old seigneury which Theophile
Charlemagne called now the Cote Dorion Hotel, after the name given to
the point on which the house stood. Low and wide-roofed, with dormer
windows and a wide stoop in front, and walls three feet thick, behind,
on the river side, it hung over the water, its narrow veranda supported
by piles, with steps down to the water-side. Seldom was there an hour
when boats were not tied to these steps. Summer and winter the tavern
was a place of resort. Inside, the low ceiling, the broad rafters, the
great fireplace, the well-worn floor, the deep windows, the wooden cross
let into the wall, and the varied and picturesque humanity frequenting
this great room, gave it an air of romance. Yet there were people
who called the tavern a “shebang”--slander as it was against Suzon
Charlemagne, which every river-driver and woodsman and habitant who
frequented the place would have resented with violence. It was because
they thought Charley Steele slandered the girl and the place in his
mind, that the river-drivers had sworn they would make it hot for him if
he came again. Charley was the last man in the world to undeceive them
by words.

When he coolly walked into the great room, where a half-dozen of
them were already assembled, drinking white “whiskey-wine,” he had no
intention of setting himself right. He raised his hat cavalierly to
Suzon and shook hands with her.

He took no notice of the men around him. “Brandy, please!” he said. “Why
do I drink, do you say?” he added, as Suzon placed the bottle and glass
before him.

She was silent for an instant, then she said gravely: “Perhaps because
you like it; perhaps because something was left out of you when you were
made, and--”

She paused and went no further, for a red-shirted river-driver with
brass rings in his ears came close to them, and called gruffly for
whiskey. He glowered at Charley, who looked at him indolently, then
raised his glass towards Suzon and drank the brandy.

“Pish!” said Red Shirt, and, turning round, joined his comrades. It was
clear he wanted a pretext to quarrel.

“Perhaps because you like it; perhaps because something was left out of
you when you were made--” Charley smiled pleasantly as Suzon came over
to him again. “You’ve answered the question,” he said, “and struck the
thing at the centre. Which is it? The difficulty to decide which has
divided the world. If it’s only a physical craving, it means that we are
materialists naturally, and that the soil from which the grape came is
the soil that’s in us; that it is the body feeding on itself all the
time; that like returns to like, and we live a little together, and
then mould together for ever and ever, amen. If it isn’t a natural
craving--like to like--it’s a proof of immortality, for it represents
the wild wish to forget the world, to be in another medium.

“I am only myself when I am drunk. Liquor makes me human. At other times
I’m merely Charley Steele! Now isn’t it funny, this sort of talk here?”

“I don’t know about that,” she answered, “if, as you say, it’s natural.
This tavern’s the only place I have to think in, and what seems to you
funny is a sort of ordinary fact to me.”

“Right again, ma belle Suzon. Nothing’s incongruous. I’ve never felt so
much like singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs as when I’ve been
drinking. I remember the last time I was squiffy I sang all the way home
that old nursery hymn:

         “‘On the other side of Jordan,
          In the sweet fields of Eden,
          Where the tree of life is blooming,
             There is rest for you.
          There is rest for the weary,
          There is rest for the weary,
          There is rest for the weary,
             There is rest for you!’”

“I should have liked to hear you sing it--sure!” said Suzon, laughing.

Charley tossed off a quarter-tumbler of brandy, which, instead of
flushing the face, seemed only to deepen the whiteness of the skin,
showing up more brightly the spots of colour in the cheeks, that white
and red which had made him known as Beauty Steele. With a whimsical
humour, behind which was the natural disposition of the man to do
what he listed without thinking of the consequences, he suddenly began
singing, in a voice shaken a little now by drink, but full of a curious
magnetism:

          “On the other side of Jordan--”

“Oh, don’t; please don’t!” said the girl, in fear, for she saw two
river-drivers entering the door, one of whom had sworn he would do for
Charley Steele if ever he crossed his path.

“Oh, don’t--M’sieu’ Charley!” she again urged. The “Charley” caught his
ear, and the daring in his eye brightened still more. He was ready
for any change or chance to-night, was standing on the verge of any
adventure, the most reckless soul in Christendom.

          “On the other side of Jordan,
          In the sweet fields of Eden,
          Where the tree of life is blooming,
             There is rest for you!”

What more incongruous thing than this flaneur in patent leathers and red
tie, this “hell-of-a-fellow with a pane of glass in his eye,” as
Jake Hough, the horse-doctor, afterwards said, surrounded by red and
blue-shirted river-men, woodsmen, loafers, and toughs, singing a sacred
song with all the unction of a choir-boy; with a magnetism, too, that
did its work in spite of all prejudice? It was as if he were counsel in
one of those cases when, the minds and sympathies of judge and jury at
first arrayed against him, he had irresistibly cloven his way to their
judgment--not stealing away their hearts, but governing, dominating
their intelligences. Whenever he had done this he had been drinking
hard, was in a mental world created by drink, serene, clear-eyed, in
which his brain worked like an invincible machine, perfect and powerful.
Was it the case that, as he himself suggested, he was never so natural
as when under this influence? That then and only then the real man
spoke, that then and only then the primitive soul awakened, that it
supplied the thing left out of him at birth?

          “There is rest for the weary,
          There is rest for the weary,
          There is rest for the weary,
             There is rest for you!”

One, two verses he sang as the men, at first snorting and scornful,
shuffled angrily; then Jake Hough, the English horse-doctor, roared in
the refrain:

          “There is rest for the weary,
             There is rest for you!”

Upon which, carried away, every one of them roared, gurgled, or shouted

          “There is rest for the weary,
             There is rest for you!”

Rouge Gosselin, who had entered during the singing, now spoke up quickly
in French:

“A sermon now, M’sieu’!”

Charley took his monocle out of his eye and put it back again. Now each
man present seemed singled out for an attack by this little battery
of glass. He did not reply directly to Rouge Gosselin, but standing
perfectly still, with one hand resting on the counter at which Suzon
stood, he prepared to speak.

Suzon did not attempt to stop him now, but gazed at him in a sort
of awe. These men present were Catholics, and held religion in
superstitious respect, however far from practising its precepts. Many
of them had been profane and blasphemous in their time; may have sworn
“sacre bapteme!” one of the worst oaths of their race; but it had been
done in the wildness of anger, and they were little likely to endure
from Charley Steele any word that sounded like blasphemy. Besides,
the world said that he was an infidel, and that was enough for bitter
prejudice.

In the pause--very short--before Charley began speaking, Suzon’s
fingers stole to his on the counter and pressed them quickly. He made no
response; he was scarcely aware of it. He was in a kind of dream. In an
even, conversational tone, in French at once idiomatic and very simple,
he began:

“My dear friends, this is a world where men get tired. If they work they
get tired, and if they play they get tired. If they look straight ahead
of them they walk straight, but then they get blind by-and-by; if they
look round them and get open-eyed, their feet stumble and they fall. It
is a world of contradictions. If a man drinks much he loses his head,
and if he doesn’t drink at all he loses heart. If he asks questions he
gets into trouble, and if he doesn’t ask them he gets old before his
time. Take the hymn we have just sung:

          “‘On the other side of Jordan,
          In the sweet fields of Eden,
          Where the tree of life is blooming,
             There is rest for you!’

“We all like that, because we get tired, and it isn’t always summer, and
nothing blooms all the year round. We get up early and we work late, and
we sleep hard, and when the weather is good and wages good, and there’s
plenty in the house, we stay sober and we sadly sing, ‘On the other side
of Jordan’; but when the weather’s heavy and funds scarce, and the pork
and molasses and bread come hard, we get drunk, and we sing the comic
chanson ‘Brigadier, vows avez raison!’ We’ve been singing a sad song
to-night when we’re feeling happy. We didn’t think whether it was sad or
not, we only knew it pleased our ears, and we wanted those sweet fields
of Eden, and the blooming tree of life, and the rest under the tree. But
ask a question or two. Where is the other side of Jordan? Do you go up
to it, or down to it? And how do you go? And those sweet fields of Eden,
what do they look like, and how many will they hold? Isn’t it clear that
the things that make us happiest in this world are the things we go for
blind?”

He paused. Now a dozen men came a step or two nearer, and crowded
close together, looking over each others’ shoulders at him with sharp,
wondering eyes.

“Isn’t that so?” he continued. “Do you realise that no man knows where
that Jordan and those fields are, and what the flower of the tree of
life looks like? Let us ask a question again. Why is it that the one
being in all the world who could tell us anything about it, the one
being who had ever seen Jordan or Eden or that tree of life-in fact,
the one of all creation who could describe heaven, never told? Isn’t it
queer? Here he was--that one man-standing just as I am among you, and
round him were the men who followed him, all ordinary men, with ordinary
curiosity. And he said he had come down from heaven, and for years they
were with him, and yet they never asked him what that heaven was like:
what it looked like, what it felt like, what sort of life they lived
there, what manner of folk were the angels, what was the appearance of
God. Why didn’t they ask, and why didn’t he answer? People must have
kept asking that question afterwards, for a man called John answered
it. He described, as only an oriental Jew would or could, a place all
precious stones and gold and jewels and candles, in oriental language
very splendid and auriferous. But why didn’t those twelve men ask the
One Man who knew, and why didn’t the One answer? And why didn’t the One
tell without being asked?”

He paused again, and now there came a shuffling and a murmuring, a
curious rumble, a hard breathing, for Charley had touched with steely
finger the tender places in the natures of these Catholics, who,
whatever their lives, held fast to the immemorial form, the sacredness
of Mother Church. They were ever ready to step into the galley which
should bear them all home, with the invisible rowers of God at the oars,
down the wild rapids, to the haven of St. Peter. There was savagery in
their faces now.

He saw, and he could not refrain from smiling as he stretched out
his hand to them again with a little quieting gesture, and continued
soothingly:

“But why should we ask? There’s a thing called electricity. Well, you
know that if you take a slice out of anything, less remains behind. We
can take the air out of this room, and scarcely leave any in it.

“We take a drink out of a bottle, and certainly there isn’t as much left
in it! But the queer thing is that with this electricity you take it
away and just as much remains. It goes out from your toe, rushes away
to Timbuctoo, and is back in your toe before you can wink. Why? No one
knows. What’s the good of asking? You can’t see it: you can only see
what it does. What good would it do us if we knew all about it? There it
is, and it’s going to revolutionise the world. It’s no good asking--no
one knows what it is and where it comes from, or what it looks like.
It’s better to go it blind, because you feel the power, though you can’t
see where it comes from. You can’t tell where the fields of Eden are,
but you believe they’re somewhere, and that you’ll get to them some day.
So say your prayers, believe all you can, don’t ask questions, and don’t
try to answer ‘em; and remember that Charley Steele preached to you the
fear of the Lord at the Cote Dorion, and wound up the service with the
fine old hymn:

     “‘I’ll away, I’ll away, to the promised land--’”

A whole verse of this camp-meeting hymn he sang in an ominous silence
now, for it had crept into their minds that the hymn they had previously
sung so loudly was a Protestant hymn, and that this was another
Protestant hymn of the rankest sort. When he stopped singing and pushed
over his glass for Suzon to fill it, the crowd were noiseless and silent
for a moment, for the spell was still on them. They did not recover
themselves until they saw him lift his glass to Suzon, his back on them,
again insolently oblivious of them all. They could not see his face, but
they could see the face of Suzon Charlemagne, and they misunderstood the
light in her eye, the flush on her cheek. They set it down to a personal
interest in Charley Steele.

Charley had, however, thrown a spell over her in another fashion. In her
eye, in her face, was admiration, the sympathy of a strong intelligence,
the wonder of a mind in the presence of its master, but they thought
they saw passion, love, desire, in her face--in the face of their Suzon,
the pride of the river, the flower of the Cote Dorion. Not alone because
Charley had blasphemed against religion did they hate him at this
moment, but because every heart was scorched with envy and jealousy--the
black unreasoning jealousy which the unlettered, the dull, the crude,
feels for the lettered, the able and the outwardly refined.

Charley was back again in the unfriendly climate of his natural life.
Suzon felt the troubled air round them, saw the dark looks on the faces
of the men, and was at once afraid and elated. She loved the glow of
excitement, she had a keen sense of danger, but she also felt that in
any possible trouble to-night the chances of escape would be small for
the man before her.

He pushed out his glass again. She mechanically poured brandy into it.

“You’ve had more than enough,” she said, in a low voice.

“Every man knows his own capacity, Suzon. Love me little, love me long,”
 he added, again raising his glass to her, as the men behind suddenly
moved forward upon the bar.

“Don’t--for God’s sake!” she whispered hastily. “Do go--or there’ll be
trouble!”

The black face of Theophile Charlemagne was also turned anxiously in
Charley’s direction as he pushed out glasses for those who called for
liquor.

“Oh, do, do go--like a good soul!” Suzon urged. Charley laughed
disdainfully. “Like a good soul!” Had it come to this, that Suzon
pleaded with him as if he were a foolish, obstreperous child!

“Faithless and unbelieving!” he said to Suzon in English. “Didn’t I play
my game well a minute ago--eh--eh--eh, Suzon?”

“Oh, yes, yes, M’sieu’,” she replied in English; “but now you are
differen’ and so are they. You must goah, so, you must!”

He laughed again, a queer sardonic sort of laugh, yet he put out his
hand and touched the girl’s arm lightly with a forefinger. “I am a
Quaker born; I never stir till the spirit moves me,” he said.

He scented conflict, and his spirits rose at the thought. Some reckless
demon of adventure possessed him; some fatalistic courage was upon him.
So far as the eye could see, the liquor he had drunk had done no more
than darken the blue of his eye, for his hand was steady, his body was
well poised, his look was direct; there seemed some strange electric
force in leash behind his face, a watchful yet nonchalant energy of
spirit, joined to an indolent pose of body. As the girl looked at
him something of his unreckoning courage passed into her. Somehow she
believed in him, felt that by some wild chance he might again conquer
this truculent element now almost surrounding him. She spoke quickly to
her step-father. “He won’t go. What can we do?”

“You go, and he’ll follow,” said Theophile, who didn’t want a row--a
dangerous row-in his house.

“No, he won’t,” she said; “and I don’t believe they’d let him follow
me.”

There was no time to say more. The crowd were insistent and restless
now. They seemed to have a plan of campaign, and they began to carry it
out. First one, then another, brushed roughly against Charley. Cool and
collected, he refused to accept the insults.

“Pardon,” he said, in each case; “I am very awkward.”

He smiled all the time; he seemed waiting. The pushing and crowding
became worse. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “You should learn how to
carry your liquor in your legs.”

Suddenly he changed from apology to attack. He talked at them with
a cheerful scorn, a deprecating impertinence, as though they were
children; he chided them with patient imprecations. This confused them
for a moment and cleared a small space around him. There was no defiance
in his aspect, no aggressiveness of manner; he was as quiet as though
it were a drawing-room and he a master of monologues. He hurled original
epithets at them in well-cadenced French, he called them what he listed,
but in language which half-veiled the insults--the more infuriating to
his hearers because they did not perfectly understand.

Suddenly a low-set fellow, with brass rings in his ears, pulled off
his coat and threw it on the floor. “I’ll eat your heart,” he said, and
rolled up blue sleeves along a hairy arm.

“My child,” said Charley, “be careful what you eat. Take up your coat
again, and learn that it is only dogs that delight to bark and bite. Our
little hands were never made to tear each other’s eyes.”

The low-set fellow made a rush forward, but Rouge Gosselin held him
back. “No, no, Jougon,” he said. “I have the oldest grudge.”

Jougon struggled with Rouge Gosselin. “Be good, Jougon,” said Charley.

As he spoke a heavy tumbler flew from the other side of the room.
Charley saw the missile thrown and dodged. It missed his temple, but
caught the rim of his straw hat, carrying it off his head, and crashed
into a lantern hanging against the wall, putting out the light. The room
was only lighted now by another lantern on the other side of the room.
Charley stooped, picked up his hat, and put it on his head again coolly.

“Stop that, or I’ll clear the bar!” cried Theophile Charlemagne, taking
the pistol Suzon slipped into his hand. The sight of the pistol drove
the men wild, and more than one snatched at the knife in his belt.

At that instant there pushed forward into the clear space beside Charley
Steele the great figure of Jake Hough, the horse-doctor, the strongest
man, and the most popular Englishman on the river. He took his stand by
Charley, raised his great hand, smote him in the small of his back, and
said:

“By the Lord, you have sand, and I’ll stand by you!” Under the friendly
but heavy stroke the monocle shot from Charley’s eye the length of the
string. Charley lifted it again, put it up, and staring hard at Jake,
coolly said:

“I beg your pardon--but have I ever--been introduced to you?”

What unbelievable indifference to danger, what disdain to friendliness,
made Charley act as he did is a matter for speculation. It was throwing
away his one chance; it was foppery on the scaffold--an incorrigible
affectation or a relentless purpose.

Jake Hough strode forward into the crowd, rage in his eye. “Go to the
devil, then, and take care of yourself!” he said roughly.

“Please,” said Charley.

They were the last words he uttered that night, for suddenly the other
lantern went out, there was a rush and a struggle, a muffled groan,
a shrill woman’s voice, a scramble and hurrying feet, a noise of a
something splashing heavily in the water outside. When the lights were
up again the room was empty, save for Theophile Charlemagne, Jake Hough,
and Suzon, who lay in a faint on the floor with a nasty bruise on her
forehead.

A score of river-drivers were scattering into the country-side, and
somewhere in the black river, alive or dead, was Charley Steele.




CHAPTER IX. OLD DEBTS FOR NEW

Jo Portugtais was breaking the law of the river--he was running a
little raft down the stream at night, instead of tying up at sundown and
camping on the shore, or sitting snugly over cooking-pot by the little
wooden caboose on his raft. But defiance of custom and tradition was a
habit with Jo Portugais. He had lived in his own way many a year, and he
was likely to do so till the end, though he was a young man yet. He had
many professions, or rather many gifts, which he practised as it pleased
him. He was river-driver, woodsman, hunter, carpenter, guide, as whim or
opportunity came to him. On the evening when Charley Steele met with his
mishap he was a river-driver--or so it seemed. He had been up nor’west
a hundred and fifty miles, and he had come down-stream alone with his
raft-which in the usual course should take two men to guide it--through
slides, over rapids, and in strong currents. Defying the code of the
river, with only one small light at the rear of his raft, he voyaged the
swift current towards his home, which, when he arrived opposite the Cote
Dorion, was still a hundred miles below. He had watched the lights in
the river-drivers’ camps, had seen the men beside the fires, and had
drifted on, with no temptation to join in the songs floating out over
the dark water, to share the contents of the jugs raised to boisterous
lips, or to thrust his hand into the greasy cooking-pot for a succulent
bone.

He drifted on until he came opposite Charlemagne’s tavern. Here the
current carried him inshore. He saw the dim light, he saw dark figures
in the bar-room, he even got a glimpse of Suzon Charlemagne. He dropped
the house behind quickly, but looked back, leaning on the oar and
thinking how swift was the rush of the current past the tavern. His eyes
were on the tavern door and the light shining through it. Suddenly
the light disappeared, and the door vanished into darkness. He heard a
scuffle, and then a heavy splash.

“There’s trouble there,” said Jo Portugais, straining his eyes through
the night, for a kind of low roar, dwindling to a loud whispering, and
then a noise of hurrying feet, came down the stream, and he could dimly
see dark figures running away into the night by different paths.

“Some dirty work, very sure,” said Jo Portugais, and his eyes travelled
back over the dark water like a lynx’s, for the splash was in his ear,
and a sort of prescience possessed him. He could not stop his raft. It
must go on down the current, or be swerved to the shore, to be fastened.

“God knows, it had an ugly sound,” said Jo Portugais, and again strained
his eyes and ears. He shifted his position and took another oar, where
the raft-lantern might not throw a reflection upon the water. He saw a
light shine again through the tavern doorway, then a dark object
block the light, and a head thrust forward towards the river as though
listening.

At this moment he fancied he saw something in the water nearing him. He
stretched his neck. Yes, there was something.

“It’s a man. God save us--was it murder?” said Jo Portugais, and
shuddered. “Was it murder?”

The body moved more swiftly than the raft. There was a hand thrust
up--two hands.

“He’s alive!” said Jo Portugais, and, hurriedly pulling round his waist
a rope tied to a timber, jumped into the water.

Three minutes later, on the raft, he was examining a wound in the head
of an insensible man.

As his hand wandered over the body towards the heart, it touched
something that rattled against a button. He picked it up mechanically
and held it to the light. It was an eye-glass.

“My God!” said Jo Portugais, and peered into the man’s face. “It’s him.”
 Then he remembered the last words the man had spoken to him--“Get out of
my sight. You’re as guilty as hell!” But his heart yearned towards the
man nevertheless.




CHAPTER X. THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT

In his own world of the parish of Chaudiere Jo Portugais was counted a
widely travelled man. He had adventured freely on the great rivers and
in the forests, and had journeyed up towards Hudson’s Bay farther than
any man in seven parishes.

Jo’s father and mother had both died in one year--when he was
twenty-five. That year had turned him from a clean-shaven cheerful boy
into a morose bearded man who looked forty, for it had been marked by
his disappearance from Chaudiere and his return at the end of it, to
find his mother dead and his father dying broken-hearted. What had
driven Jo from home only his father knew; what had happened to him
during that year only Jo himself knew, and he told no one, not even his
dying father.

A mystery surrounded him, and no one pierced it. He was a figure apart
in Chaudiere parish. A dreadful memory that haunted him, carried him out
of the village, which clustered round the parish church, into Vadrome
Mountain, three miles away, where he lived apart from all his kind. It
was here he brought the man with the eye-glass one early dawn, after two
nights and two days on the river, pulling him up the long hill in a
low cart with his strong faithful dogs, hitching himself with them and
toiling upwards through the dark. In his three-roomed hut he laid his
charge down upon a pile of bear-skins, and tended him with a strange
gentleness, bathing the wound in the head and binding it again and
again.

The next morning the sick man opened his eyes heavily. He then began
fumbling mechanically on his breast. At last his fingers found his
monocle. He feebly put it to his eye, and looked at Jo in a strange,
questioning, uncomprehending way.

“I beg--your pardon,” he said haltingly, “have I ever--been intro--”
 Suddenly his eyes closed, a frown gathered on his forehead. After
a minute his eyes opened again, and he gazed with painful, pathetic
seriousness at Jo. This grew to a kind of childish terror; then slowly,
as a shadow passes, the perplexity, anxiety and terror cleared away,
and left his forehead calm, his eyes unvexed and peaceful. The monocle
dropped, and he did not heed it. At length he said wearily, and with an
incredibly simple dependence:

“I am thirsty now.”

Jo lifted a wooden bowl to his lips, and he drank, drank, drank to
repletion. When he had finished he patted Jo’s shoulder.

“I am always thirsty,” he said. “I shall be hungry too. I always am.”

Jo brought him some milk and bread in a bowl. When the sick man had
eaten and drunk the bowlful to the last drop and crumb, he lay back with
a sigh of content, but trembling from weakness and the strain, though
Jo’s hand had been under his head, and he had been fed like a little
child.

All day he lay and watched Jo as he worked, as he came and went.
Sometimes he put his hand to his head and said to Jo: “It hurts.” Then
Jo would cool the wound with fresh water from the mountain spring, and
he would drag down the bowl to drink from it greedily.

It was as though he could never get enough water to drink. So the first
day in the hut at Vadrome Mountain passed without questioning on the
part of either Charley Steele or his host.

With good reason. Jo Portugais saw that memory was gone; that the past
was blotted out. He had watched that first terrible struggle of memory
to reassert itself, as the eyes mechanically looked out upon new and
strange surroundings, but it was only the automatic habit of the sight,
the fumbling of the blind soul in its cell-fumbling for the latch which
it could not find, for the door which would not open. The first day on
the raft, as Charley had opened his eyes upon the world again after
that awful night at the Cote Dorion, Jo. had seen that same blank
uncomprehending look--as it were, the first look of a mind upon the
world. This time he saw, and understood what he saw, and spoke as men
speak, but with no knowledge or memory behind it--only the involuntary
action of muscle and mind repeated from the vanished past.

Charley Steele was as a little child, and having no past, and
comprehending in the present only its limited physical needs and
motions, he had no hope, no future, no understanding. In three days he
was upon his feet, and in four he walked out of doors and followed Jo
into the woods, and watched him fell a tree and do a woodsman’s work.
Indoors he regarded all Jo did with eager interest and a pleased,
complacent look, and readily did as he was told. He seldom spoke--not
above three or four times a day, and then simply and directly, and only
concerning his wants. From first to last he never asked a question, and
there was never any inquiry by look or word. A hundred and twenty miles
lay between him and his old home, between him and Kathleen and Billy and
Jean Jolicoeur’s saloon, but between him and his past life the unending
miles of eternity intervened. He was removed from it as completely as
though he were dead and buried.

A month went by. Sometimes Jo went down to the village below, and then,
at first, he locked the door of the house behind him upon Charley.
Against this Charley made no motion and said no word, but patiently
awaited Jo’s return. So it was that, at last, Jo made no attempt to lock
the door, but with a nod or a good-bye left him alone. When Charley saw
him returning he would go to meet him, and shake hands with him, and say
“Good-day,” and then would come in with him and help him get supper or
do the work of the house.

Since Charley came no one had visited the house, for there were no paths
beyond it, and no one came to the Vadrome Mountain, save by chance. But
after two months had gone the Cure came. Twice a year the Cure made it
a point to visit Jo in the interests of his soul, though the visits came
to little, for Jo never went to confession, and seldom to mass. On this
occasion the Cure arrived when Jo was out in the woods. He discovered
Charley. Charley made no answer to his astonished and friendly greeting,
but watched him with a wide-eyed anxiety till the Cure seated himself at
the door to await Jo’s coming. Presently, as he sat there, Charley,
who had studied his face as a child studies the unfamiliar face of a
stranger, brought him a bowl of bread and milk and put it in his hands.
The Cure smiled and thanked him, and Charley smiled in return and said:
“It is very good.”

As the Cure ate, Charley watched him with satisfaction, and nodded at
him kindly.

When Jo came he lied to the Cure. He said he had found Charley wandering
in the woods, with a wound in his head, and had brought him home with
him and cared for him. Forty miles away he had found him.

The Cure was perplexed. What was there to do? He believed what Jo said.
So far as he knew, Jo had never lied to him before, and he thought he
understood Jo’s interest in this man with the look of a child and no
memory: Jo’s life was terribly lonely; he had no one to care for, and
no one cared for him; here was what might comfort him! Through this
helpless man might come a way to Jo’s own good. So he argued with
himself.

What to do? Tell the story to the world by writing to the newspaper at
Quebec? Jo pooh-poohed this. Wait till the man’s memory came back? Would
it come back--what chance was there of its ever coming back? Jo said
that they ought to wait and see--wait awhile, and then, if his memory
did not return, they would try to find his friends, by publishing his
story abroad.

Chaudiere was far from anywhere: it knew little of the world, and the
world knew naught of it, and this was a large problem for the Cure.
Perhaps Jo was right, he thought. The man was being well cared for, and
what more could be wished at the moment? The Cure was a simple man, and
when Jo urged that if the sick man could get well anywhere in the world
it would be at Vadrome Mountain in Chaudiere, the Cure’s parochial pride
was roused, and he was ready to believe all Jo said. He also saw reason
in Jo’s request that the village should not be told of the sick man’s
presence. Before he left, the Cure knelt down and prayed, “for the good
of this poor mortal’s soul and body.”

As he prayed, Charley knelt down also, and kept his eyes-calm
unwondering eyes-full fixed on the good M. Loisel, whose grey hair, thin
peaceful face, and dark brown eyes made a noble picture of patience and
devotion.

When the Cure shook him by the hand, murmuring in good-bye, “God be
gracious to thee, my son,” Charley nodded in a friendly way. He watched
the departing figure till it disappeared over the crest of the hill.

This day marked an epoch in the solitude of the hut on Vadrome Mountain.
Jo had an inspiration. He got a second set of carpenter’s tools, and
straightway began to build a new room to the house. He gave the extra
set of tools to Charley with an encouraging word. For the first time
since he had been brought here, Charley’s face took on a look of
interest. In half-an-hour he was at work, smiling and perspiring, and
quickly learning the craft. He seldom spoke, but he sometimes laughed a
mirthful, natural boy’s laugh of good spirits and contentment. From that
day his interest in things increased, and before two months went round,
while yet it was late autumn, he looked in perfect health. He ate
moderately, drank a great deal of water, and slept half the circle of
the clock each day. His skin was like silk; the colour of his face was
as that of an apple; he was more than ever Beauty Steele. The Cure
came two or three times, and Charley spoke to him but never held
conversation, and no word concerning the past ever passed his tongue,
nor did he have memory of what was said to him from one day to the next.
A hundred ways Jo had tried to rouse his memory. But the words Cote
Dorion had no meaning to him, and he listened blankly to all names and
phrases once so familiar. Yet he spoke French and English in a slow,
passive, involuntary way. All was automatic, mechanical.

The weeks again wore on, and autumn became winter, and then at last one
day the Cure came, bringing his brother, a great Parisian surgeon lately
arrived from France on a short visit. The Cure had told his brother the
story, and had been met by a keen, astonished interest in the unknown
man on Vadrome Mountain. A slight pressure on the brain from accident
had before now produced loss of memory--the great man’s professional
curiosity was aroused: he saw a nice piece of surgical work ready to his
hand; he asked to be taken to Vadrome Mountain.

Now the Cure had lived long out of the world, and was not in touch with
the swift-minded action and adventuring intellects of such men as his
brother, Marcel Loisel. Was it not tempting Providence, a surgical
operation? He was so used to people getting ill and getting well without
a doctor--the nearest was twenty miles distant--or getting ill and dying
in what seemed a natural and preordained way, that to cut open a man’s
head and look into his brain, and do this or that to his skull, seemed
almost sinful. Was it not better to wait and see if the poor man would
not recover in God’s appointed time?

In answer to his sensitively eager and diverse questions, Marcel
Loisel replied that his dear Cure was merely mediaeval, and that he had
sacrificed his mental powers on the altar of a simple faith, which
might remove mountains but was of no value in a case like this, where,
clearly, surgery was the only providence.

At this the Cure got to his feet, came over, laid his hand on his
brother’s shoulder, and said, with tears in his eyes:

“Marcel, you shock me. Indeed you shock me!”

Then he twisted a knot in his cassock cords, and added “Come then,
Marcel. We will go to him. And may God guide us aright!”

That afternoon the two grey-haired men visited Vadrome Mountain, and
there they found Charley at work in the little room that the two men had
built. Charley nodded pleasantly when the Cure introduced his brother,
but showed no further interest at first. He went on working at the
cupboard under his hand. His cap was off and his hair was a little
rumpled where the wound had been, for he had a habit of rubbing the
place now and then--an abstracted, sensitive motion--although he seemed
to suffer no pain. The surgeon’s eyes fastened on the place, and as
Charley worked and his brother talked, he studied the man, the scar, the
contour of the head. At last he came up to Charley and softly placed his
fingers on the scar, feeling the skull. Charley turned quickly.

There was something in the long, piercing look of the surgeon which
seemed to come through limitless space to the sleeping and imprisoned
memory of Charley’s sick mind. A confused, anxious, half-fearful look
crept into the wide blue eyes. It was like a troubled ghost, flitting
along the boundaries of sight and sense, and leaving a chill and a
horrified wonder behind. The surgeon gazed on, and the trouble in
Charley’s eye passed to his face, stayed an instant. Then he turned away
to Jo Portugais. “I am thirsty now,” he said, and he touched his lips
in the way he was wont to do in those countless ages ago, when, millions
upon millions of miles away, people said: “There goes Charley Steele!”

“I am thirsty now,” and that touch of the lip with the tongue, were a
revelation to the surgeon.

A half-hour later he was walking homeward with the Cure. Jo accompanied
them for a distance. As they emerged into the wider road-paths that
began half-way down the mountain, the Cure, who had watched his
brother’s face for a long time in silence, said:

“What is in your mind, Marcel?” The surgeon turned with a half-smile.

“He is happy now. No memory, no conscience, no pain, no responsibility,
no trouble--nothing behind or before. Is it good to bring him back?”

The Cure had thought it all over, and he had wholly changed his mind
since that first talk with his brother. “To save a mind, Marcel!” he
said.

“Then to save a soul?” suggested the surgeon. “Would he thank me?”

“It is our duty to save him.”

“Body and mind and soul, eh? And if I look after the body and the mind?”

“His soul is in God’s hands, Marcel.”

“But will he thank me? How can you tell what sorrows, what troubles,
he has had? What struggles, temptations, sins? He has none now, of any
sort; not a stain, physical or moral.”

“That is not life, Marcel.”

“Well, well, you have changed. This morning it was I who would, and you
hesitated.”

“I see differently now, Marcel.”

The surgeon put a hand playfully on his brother’s shoulder.

“Did you think, my dear Prosper, that I should hesitate? Am I a
sentimentalist? But what will he say?

“We need not think of that, Marcel.”

“But yet suppose that with memory come again sin and shame--even crime?”

“We will pray for him.”

“But if he isn’t a Catholic?”

“One must pray for sinners,” said the Curb, after a silence.

This time the surgeon laid a hand on the shoulder of his brother
affectionately. “Upon my soul, dear Prosper, you almost persuade me to
be reactionary and mediaeval.”

The Curb turned half uneasily towards Jo, who was following at a little
distance. This seemed hardly the sort of thing for him to hear.

“You had better return now, Jo,” he said.

“As you wish, M’sieu’,” Jo answered, then looked inquiringly at the
surgeon.

“In about five days, Portugais. Have you a steady hand and a quick eye?”

Jo spread out his hands in deprecation, and turned to the Curb, as
though for him to answer.

“Jo is something of a physician and surgeon too, Marcel. He has a gift.
He has cured many in the parish with his herbs and tinctures, and he has
set legs and arms successfully.”

The surgeon eyed Jo humorously, but kindly. “He is probably as good a
doctor as some of us. Medicine is a gift, surgery is a gift and an art.
You shall hear from me, Portugais.” He looked again keenly at Jo. “You
have not given him ‘herbs and tinctures’?”

“Nothing, M’sieu’.”

“Very sensible. Good-day, Portugais.”

“Good-day, my son,” said the priest, and raised his fingers in
benediction, as Jo turned and quickly retraced his steps.

“Why did you ask him if he had given the poor man any herbs or
tinctures, Marcel?” said the priest.

“Because those quack tinctures have whiskey in them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Whiskey in any form would be bad for him,” the surgeon answered
evasively.

But to himself he kept saying: “The man was a drunkard--he was a
drunkard.”




CHAPTER XI. THE RAISING OF THE CURTAIN

M. Marcel Loisel did his work with a masterly precision, with the aid
of his brother and Portugais. The man under the instruments, not wholly
insensible, groaned once or twice. Once or twice, too, his eyes opened
with a dumb hunted look, then closed as with an irresistible weariness.
When the work was over, and every stain or sign of surgery removed,
sleep came down on the bed--a deep and saturating sleep, which seemed
to fill the room with peace. For hours the surgeon sat beside the couch,
now and again feeling the pulse, wetting the hot lips, touching the
forehead with his palm. At last, with a look of satisfaction, he came
forward to where Jo and the Cure sat beside the fire.

“It is all right,” he said. “Let him sleep as long as he will.” He
turned again to the bed. “I wish I could stay to see the end of it. Is
there no chance, Prosper?” he added to the priest.

“Impossible, Marcel. You must have sleep. You have a seventy-mile drive
before you to-morrow, and sixty the next day. You can only reach the
port now by starting at daylight to-morrow.”

So it was that Marcel Loisel, the great surgeon, was compelled to leave
Chaudiere before he knew that the memory of the man who had been under
his knife had actually returned to him. He had, however, no doubt in his
own mind, and he was confident that there could be no physical harm from
the operation. Sleep was the all-important thing. In it lay the strength
for the shock of the awakening--if awakening of memory there was to be.

Before he left he stooped over Charley and said musingly: “I wonder what
you will wake up to, my friend?” Then he touched the wound with a light
caressing finger. “It was well done, well done,” he murmured proudly.

A moment afterwards he was hurrying down the hill to the open road,
where a cariole awaited the Cure and himself.

For a day and a half Charley slept, and Jo watched him with an
affectionate solicitude. Once or twice, becoming anxious, because of the
heavy breathing and the motionless sleep, he had forced open the teeth,
and poured a little broth between.

Just before dawn on the second morning, worn out and heavy with slumber,
Jo lay down by the piled-up fire and dropped into a sleep that wrapped
him like a blanket, folding him away into a drenching darkness.

For a time there was a deep silence, troubled only by Jo’s deep
breathing, which seemed itself like the pulse of the silence. Charley
appeared not to be breathing at all. He was lying on his back, seemingly
lifeless. Suddenly on the snug silence there was a sharp sound. A tree
outside snapped with the frost.

Charley awoke. The body seemed not to awake, for it did not stir, but
the eyes opened wide and full, looking straight before them--straight
up to the brown smoke-stained rafters, along which were ranged guns and
fishing-tackle, axes and bear-traps. Full clear blue eyes, healthy and
untired as a child’s fresh from an all-night’s drowse, they looked and
looked. Yet, at first, the body did not stir; only the mind seemed to be
awakening, the soul creeping out from slumber into the day. Presently,
however, as the eyes gazed, there stole into them a wonder, a trouble,
an anxiety. For a moment they strained at the rafters and the crude
weapons and implements there, then the body moved, quickly, eagerly,
and turned to see the flickering shadows made by the fire and the simple
order of the room.

A minute more, and Charley was sitting on the side of his couch, dazed
and staring. This hut, this fire, the figure by the hearth in a sound
sleep-his hand went to his head: it felt the bandage there!

He remembered now! Last night at the Cote Dorion! Last night he had
talked with Suzon Charlemagne at the Cote Dorion; last night he had
drunk harder than he had ever drunk in his life, he had defied, chaffed,
insulted the river-drivers. The whole scene came back: the faces of
Suzon and her father; Suzon’s fingers on his for an instant; the glass
of brandy beside him; the lanterns on the walls; the hymn he sang; the
sermon he preached--he shuddered a little; the rumble of angry noises
round him; the tumbler thrown; the crash of the lantern, and only one
light left in the place! Then Jake Hough and his heavy hand, the flying
monocle, and his disdainful, insulting reply; the sight of the pistol in
the hand of Suzon’s father; then a rush, a darkness, and his own fierce
plunge towards the door, beyond which were the stars and the cool night
and the dark river. Curses, hands that battered and tore at him, the
doorway reached, and then a blow on the head and--falling, falling,
falling, and distant noises growing more distant, and suddenly and
sweetly--absolute silence.

Again he shuddered. Why? He remembered that scene in his office
yesterday with Kathleen, and the one later with Billy. A sensitive chill
swept all over him, making his flesh creep, and a flush sped over his
face from chin to brow. To-day he must pick up all these threads again,
must make things right for Billy, must replace the money he had stolen,
must face Kathleen again he shuddered. Was he at the Cote Dorion still?
He looked round him. No, this was not the sort of house to be found at
the Cote Dorion. Clearly this was the hut of a hunter. Probably he had
been fished out of the river by this woodsman and brought here. He felt
his head. The wound was fresh and very sore. He had played for death,
with an insulting disdain, yet here he was alive.

Certainly he was not intended to be drowned or knifed--he remembered the
knives he saw unsheathed--or kicked or pummelled into the hereafter.
It was about ten o’clock when he had had his “accident”--he affected a
smile, yet somehow he did not smile easily--it must be now about five,
for here was the morning creeping in behind the deer-skin blind at the
window.

Strange that he felt none the worse for his mishap, and his tongue was
as clean and fresh as if he had been drinking milk last night, and
not very doubtful brandy at the Cote Dorion. No fever in his hands,
no headache, only the sore skull, so well and tightly bandaged but a
wonderful thirst, and an intolerable hunger. He smiled. When had he ever
been hungry for breakfast before? Here he was with a fine appetite: it
was like coals of fire heaped on his head by Nature for last night’s
business at the Cote Dorion. How true it was that penalties did not
always come with--indiscretions. Yet, all at once, he flushed again to
the forehead, for a curious sense of shame flashed through his whole
being, and one Charley Steele--the Charley Steele of this morning,
an unknown, unadventuring, onlooking Charley Steele--was viewing with
abashed eyes the Charley Steele who had ended a doubtful career in the
coarse and desperate proceedings of last night. With a nervous confusion
he sought refuge in his eye-glass. His fingers fumbled over his
waistcoat, but did not find it. The weapon of defence and attack, the
symbol of interrogation and incomprehensibility, was gone. Beauty Steele
was under the eyes of another self, and neither disdain, nor contempt,
nor the passive stare, were available. He got suddenly to his feet, and
started forward, as though to find refuge from himself.

The abrupt action sent the blood to his head, and feeling a blindness
come over him, he put both hands up to his temples, and sank back on the
couch, dizzy and faint.

His motions waked Jo Portugais, who scrambled from the floor, and came
towards him.

“M’sieu’,” he said, “you must not. You are faint.” He dropped his hands
supportingly to Charley’s shoulders.

Charley nodded, but did not yet look up. His head throbbed sorely.
“Water--please!” he said.

In an instant Jo was beside him again, with a bowl of fresh water at his
lips. He drank, drank, drank, until the great bowl was drained to the
last drop.

“Whew! That was good!” he said, and looked up at Jo with a smile. “Thank
you, my friend; I haven’t the honour of your acquaintance, but--”

He stopped suddenly and stared at Jo. Inquiry, mystification, were in
his look.

“Have I ever seen you before?” he said. “Who knows, M’sieu’!”

Since Jo had stood before Charley in the dock near six years ago he had
greatly changed. The marks of smallpox, a heavy beard, grey hair, and
solitary life had altered him beyond Charley’s recognition.

Jo could hardly speak. His legs were trembling under him, for now he
knew that Charley Steele was himself again. He was no longer the simple,
quiet man-child of three days ago, and of these months past, but the
man who had saved him from hanging, to whom he owed a debt he dare not
acknowledge. Jo’s brain was in a muddle. Now that the great crisis was
over, now that the expected thing had come, and face to face with the
cure, he had neither tongue, nor strength, nor wit. His words stuck in
his throat where his heart was, and for a minute his eyes had a kind of
mist before them.

Meanwhile Charley’s eyes were upon him, curious, fixed, abstracted.

“Is this your house?”

“It is, M’sieu’.”

“You fished me out of the river by the Cote Dorion?” He still held his
head with his hands, for it throbbed so, but his eyes were intent on his
companion.

“Yes, M’sieu’.”

Charley’s hand mechanically fumbled for his monocle. Jo turned quickly
to the wall, and taking it by its cord from the nail where it had been
for these long months, handed it over. Charley took it and mechanically
put it in his eye. “Thank you, my friend,” he said. “Have I been
conscious at all since you rescued me last night?” he asked.

“In a way, M’sieu’.”

“Ah, well, I can’t remember, but it was very kind of you--I do thank you
very much. Do you think you could find me something to eat? I beg your
pardon--it isn’t breakfast-time, of course, but I was never so hungry in
my life!”

“In a minute, M’sieu’--in one minute. But lie down, you must lie down a
little. You got up too quick, and it makes your head throb. You have had
nothing to eat.”

“Nothing, since yesterday noon, and very little then. I didn’t eat
anything at the Cote Dorion, I remember.” He lay back on the couch and
closed his eyes. The throbbing in his head presently stopped, and he
felt that if he ate something he could go to sleep again, it was so
restful in this place--a whole day’s sleep and rest, how good it
would be after last night’s racketing! Here was primitive and material
comfort, the secret of content, if you liked! Here was this poor
hunter-fellow, with enough to eat and to drink, earning it every day
by every day’s labour, and, like Robinson Crusoe no doubt, living in a
serene self-sufficiency and an elysian retirement. Probably he had no
responsibilities in the world, with no one to say him nay, himself only
to consider in all the universe: a divine conception of adequate life.
Yet himself, Charley Steele, an idler, a waster, with no purpose in
life, with scarcely the necessity to earn his bread-never, at any rate,
until lately--was the slave of the civilisation to which he belonged.
Was civilisation worth the game?

His hand involuntarily went to his head. It changed the course of his
thoughts. He must go back to-day to put Billy’s crime right, to replace
the trust-moneys Billy had taken by forging his brother-in-law’s name.
Not a moment must be lost. No doubt he was within driving distance
of his office, and, bandaged head or no bandaged head, last night’s
disgraceful doings notwithstanding, it was his duty to face the
wondering eyes--what did he care for wondering eyes? hadn’t he been
making eyes wonder all his life?--face the wondering eyes in the little
city, and set a crooked business straight. Fool and scoundrel certainly
Billy was, but there was Kathleen!

His lips tightened; he had a strange anxious flutter of the heart. When
had his heart fluttered like this? When had he ever before considered
Kathleen’s feelings as to his personal conduct so delicately? Well,
since yesterday he did feel it, and a sudden sense of pity sprang up
in him--vague, shamefaced pity, which belied the sudden egotistical
flourish with which he put his monocle to his eye and tried futilely to
smile in the old way.

He had lain with his eyes closed. They opened now, and he saw his host
spreading a newspaper as a kind of cloth on a small rough table, and
putting some food upon it-bread, meat, and a bowl of soup. It was
thoughtful of this man to make his soup overnight-he saw Jo lift it from
beside the fire where it had been kept hot. A good fellow-an excellent
fellow, this woodsman.

His head did not throb now, and he drew himself up slowly on his
elbow-then, after a moment, lifted himself to a sitting posture.

“What is your name, my friend?” he said.

“Jo Portugais, M’sieu’,” Jo answered, and brought a candle and put it on
the table, then lifted the tin-plate from over the bowl of savoury soup.

Never before had Charley Steele sat down to such a breakfast. A roll and
a cup of coffee had been enough, and often too much, for him. Yet now
he could not wait to eat the soup with a spoon, but lifted the bowl and
took a long draught of it, and set it down with a sigh of content. Then
he broke bread into the soup--large pieces of black oat bread--until the
bowl was a mass of luscious pulp. This he ate almost ravenously, his eye
wandering avidly the while to the small piece of meat beside the bowl.
What meat was it? It looked like venison, yet summer was not the time
for venison. What did it matter! Jo sat on a bench beside the fire, his
face turned towards his guest, dreading the moment when the man he had
nursed and cared for, with whom he had eaten and drunk for so long,
should know the truth about himself. He could not tell him all there was
to tell, he was taking another means of letting him know.

Charley did not speak. Hunger was a new sensation, a delicious thing,
too good to be broken by talking. He ate till he had cleared away the
last crumbs of bread and meat and drunk the last drop of soup. He looked
at the woodsman as though wondering if he would bring more. Jo evidently
thought he had had enough, for he did not move. Charley’s glance
withdrew from Jo, and busied itself with the few crumbs remaining upon
the table. He saw a little piece of bread on the floor. He picked it up
and ate it with relish, laughing to himself.

“How long will it take us to get to town? Can we do it this morning?”

“Not this morning, M’sieu’,” said Jo, in a sort of hoarse whisper.

“How many hours would it take?”

He was gathering the last crumbs of his feast with his hand, and looking
casually down at the newspaper spread as a table-cloth.

All at once his hand stopped, his eyes became fixed on a spot in the
paper. He gave a hoarse, guttural cry, like an animal in agony. His lips
became dry, his hand wiped a blinding mist from his eyes.

Jo watched him with an intense alarm and a horrified curiosity. He felt
a base coward for not having told Charley what this paper contained.
Never had he seen such a look as this. He felt his beads, and told
them over and over again, as Charley Steele, in a dry, croaking sort
of whisper, read, in letters that seemed monstrous symbols of fire, a
record of himself:

“To-day, by special license from the civil and ecclesiastical courts
[the paragraph in the paper began], was married, at St. Theobald’s
Church, Mrs. Charles Steele, daughter of the late Hon. Julien Wantage,
and niece of the late Eustace Wantage, Esq., to Captain Thomas Fairing,
of the Royal Fusileers--”

Charley snatched at the top of the paper and read the date “Tenth of
February, 18-!” It was August when he was at the Cote Dorion, the 5th
August, 18-, and this paper was February 10th, 18-. He read on, in the
month-old paper, with every nerve in his body throbbing now: a fierce
beating that seemed as if it must burst the heart and the veins:

“--Captain Thomas Fairing, of the Royal Fusileers, whose career in our
midst has been marked by an honourable sense of public and private duty.
Our fellow-citizens will unite with us in congratulating the bride,
whose previous misfortunes have only increased the respect in which she
is held. If all remember the obscure death of her first husband (though
the body was not found, there has never been a doubt of his death),
and the subsequent discovery that he had embezzled trust-moneys to the
extent of twenty-five thousand dollars, thereby setting the final seal
of shame upon a misspent life, destined for brilliant and powerful
uses, all have conspired to forget the association of our beautiful
and admired townswoman with his career. It is painful to refer to these
circumstances, but it is only within the past few days that the estate
of the misguided man has been wound up, and the money he embezzled
restored to its rightful owners; and it is better to make these remarks
now than repeat them in the future, only to arouse painful memories in
quarters where we should least desire to wound.

“In her new life, blessed by a romantic devotion known and admired by
all, Mrs. Fairing and her husband will be followed by the affectionate
good wishes of the whole community.”

The man on the hearth-stone shrank back at the sight of the still, white
face, in which the eyes were like sparks of fire. His impulse had been
to go over and offer the hand of sympathy to the stricken man, but his
simple mind grasped the fact that no one might, with impunity, invade
this awful quiet. Charley was frozen in body, but his brain was awake
with the heat of “a burning fiery furnace.”

Seven months of unconscious life-seven months of silence--no sight, no
seeing, no knowing; seven months of oblivion, in which the world had
buried him out of ken in an unknown grave of infamy! Seven months--and
Kathleen was married again to the man she had always loved. To the world
he himself was a rogue and thief. Billy had remained silent--Billy, whom
he had so befriended, had let decent men heap scorn and reproaches on
his memory. Here was what the world thought of him--he read the lines
over again, his eyes scorching, but his finger steady, as it traced the
lines slowly: “the obscure death...” “embezzled trustmoneys...” “the
final seal of shame upon a misspent life!”

These were the epitaphs on the tombstone of Charley Steele; dead and
buried, out of sight, out of repute, soon to be out of mind and out of
memory, save as a warning to others--an old example raked out of the
dust-bin of time by the scavengers of morality, to toss at all who trod
the paths of dalliance.

What was there to do? Go back? Go back and knock at Kathleen’s door,
another Enoch Arden, and say: “I have come to my own again?” Return and
tell Tom Fairing to go his way and show his face no more? Break up
this union, this marriage of love in which these two rejoiced? Summon
Kathleen out of her illegal intercourse with the man who had been true
to her all these years?

To what end? What had he ever done for her that he might destroy her
now? What sort of Spartan tragedy was this, that the woman who had been
the victim of circumstances, who had been the slave to a tie he never
felt, yet which had been as iron-bound to her, should now be brought out
to be mangled body and soul for no fault of her own? What had she done?
What had she ever done to give him right to touch so much as a hair of
her head?

Go back, and bring Billy to justice, and clear his own name? Go back,
and send Kathleen’s brother, the forger, to jail? What an achievement
in justice! Would not the world have a right to say that the only decent
thing he could do was to eliminate himself from the equation? What
profit for him in the great summing-up, that he was technically innocent
of this one thing, and that to establish his innocence he broke a
woman’s heart and destroyed a boy’s life? To what end! It was the
murderer coming back as a ghost to avenge himself for being hanged.
Suppose he went back--the death’s-head at the feast--what would there be
for himself afterwards; for any one for whom he was responsible? Living
at that price?

To die and end it all, to disappear from this petty life where he had
done so little, and that little ill? To die?

No. There was in him some deep, if obscure, fatalism after all. If he
had been meant to die now, why had he not gone to the bottom of the
river that yesterday at the Cote Dorion? Why had he been saved by this
yokel at the fire, and brought here to lie in oblivion in this mountain
hut, wrapped in silence and lost to the world? Why had his brain and
senses lain fallow all these months, a vacuous vegetation, an empty
consciousness? Was it fate? Did it not seem probable that the Great
Machine had, in its automatic movement, tossed him up again on the
shores of Time because he had not fallen on the trap-door predestined
for his eternal exit?

It was clear to him that death by his own hand was futile, and that if
there were trap-doors set for him alone, it were well to wait until he
trod upon them and fell through in his appointed hour in the movement of
the Great Machine.

What to do--where to live--how to live?

He got slowly to his feet and took a step forward half blindly. The man
on the bench stirred. Crossing the room he dropped a hand on the man’s
shoulder. “Open the blind, my friend.”

Jo Portugais got to his feet quickly, eyes averted--he did not dare look
into Charley’s face--and went over and drew back the deer-skin blind.
The clear, crisp sunlight of a frosty morning broke gladly into the
room. Charley turned and blew out the candle on the table where he had
eaten, then walked feebly to the window. Standing on the crest of the
mountain the hut looked down through a clearing, flanked by forest
trees.

It was a goodly scene. The green and frosted foliage of the pines and
cedars; the flowery tracery of frost hanging like cobwebs everywhere;
the poudre sparkle in the air; the hills of silver and emerald sloping
down to the valley miles away, where the village clustered about the
great old parish church; the smoke from a hundred chimneys, in purple
spirals, rising straight up in the windless air; over all peace and a
perfect silence.

Charley mechanically fixed his eye-glass and stood with hands resting on
the window-sill, looking, looking out upon a new world.

At length he turned.

“Is there anything I can do for you, M’sieu’?” said Jo huskily.

Charley held out his hand and clasped Jo’s. “Tell me about all these
months,” he said.




CHAPTER XII. THE COMING OF ROSALIE

Charley Steele saw himself as he had been through the eyes of another.
He saw the work that he had done in the carpentering shed, and had no
memory of it. The real Charley Steele had been enveloped in oblivion for
seven months. During that time a mild phantom of himself had wandered,
as it were in a somnambulistic dream, through the purlieus of life.
Open-eyed, but with the soul asleep, all idiosyncrasy laid aside, all
acquired impressions and influences vanished, he had been walking in
the world with no more complexity of mind than a new-born child, nothing
intervening between the sight of the eyes and the original sense.

Now, when the real Charley Steele emerged again, the folds of mind and
soul unrolling to the million-voiced creation and touched by the antenna
of a various civilisation, the phantom Charley was gone once more into
obscurity. The real Charley could remember naught of the other, could
feel naught, save, as in the stirring industrious day, one remembers
that he has dreamed a strange dream the night before, and cannot recall
it, though the overpowering sense of it remains.

He saw the work of his hands, the things he had made with adze and
plane, with chisel and hammer, but nothing seemed familiar save the
smell of the glue pot, which brought back in a cloudy impression curious
unfamiliar feelings. Sights, sounds, motions, passed in a confused way
through his mind as the smell of the glue crept through his nostrils;
and he struggled hard to remember. But no--seven months of his life were
gone for ever. Yet he knew and felt that a vast change had gone over
him, had passed through him. While the soul had lain fallow, while the
body had been growing back to childlike health again, and Nature
had been pouring into his sick senses her healing balm; while the
medicaments of peace and sleep and quiet labour had been having their
way with him, he had been reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid
silt of dissipation. For his sins and weaknesses there had been no gall
and vinegar to drink.

As Charley stood looking round the workshop, Jo entered, shaking the
snow from his moccasined feet. “The Cure, M’sieu’ Loisel, has come,” he
said. Charley turned, and, without a word, followed Jo into the house.
There, standing at the window and looking down at the village
beneath, was the Cure. As Charley entered, M. Loisel came forward with
outstretched hand.

“I am glad to see you well again, Monsieur,” he said, and his cool thin
hand held Charley’s for a moment, as he looked him benignly in the eye.

With a kind of instinct as to the course he must henceforth pursue,
Charley replied simply, dropping his eye-glass as he met that clear
soluble look of the priest--such a well of simplicity he had never
before seen. Only naked eye could meet that naked eye, imperfect though
his own sight was.

“It is good of you to feel so, and to come and tell me so,” he answered
quietly. “I have been a great trouble, I know.”

There was none of the old pose in his manner, none of the old cryptic
quality in his words.

“We were anxious for your sake--and for the sake of your friends,
Monsieur.”

Charley evaded the suggestion. “I cannot easily repay your kindness and
that of Jo Portugais, my good friend here,” he rejoined.

“M’sieu’,” replied Jo, his face turned away, and his foot pushing a log
on the fire, “you have repaid it.”

Charley shook his head. “I am in a conspiracy of kindness,” he said. “It
is all a mystery to me. For why should one expect such treatment from
strangers, when, besides all, one can never make any real return, not
even to pay for board and lodging!”

“‘I was a stranger and ye took me in,”’ said the Cure, smiling by no
means sentimentally. “So said the Friend of the World.”

Charley looked the Curb steadily in the eyes. He was thinking how simply
this man had said these things; as if, indeed, they were part of
his life; as though it were usual speech with him, a something that
belonged, not an acquired language. There was the old impulse to ask a
question, and he put the monocle to his eye, but his lips did not open,
and the eye-glass fell again. He had seen familiarity with sacred names
and things in the uneducated, in excited revivalists, worked up to a
state clairvoyant and conversational with the Creator; but he had never
heard an educated man speak as this man did.

At last Charley said: “Your brother--Portugais tells me that your
brother, the surgeon, has gone away. I should have liked to thank
him--if no more.”

“I have written him of your good recovery. He will be glad, I know. But
my brother, from one stand-point--a human stand-point--had scruples.
These I did not share, but they were strong in him, Monsieur. Marcel
asked himself--” He stopped suddenly and looked towards Jo.

Charley saw the look, and said quickly: “Speak plainly. Portugais is my
friend.”

Jo turned slowly towards him, and a light seemed to come to his eyes--a
shining something that resolved itself into a dog-like fondness, an
utter obedience, a strange intense gratitude.

“Marcel asked himself,” the Cure continued, “whether you would thank him
for bringing you back to--to life and memory. I fear he was trying to
see what I should say--I fear so. Marcel said, ‘Suppose that he should
curse me for it? Who knows what he would be brought back to--to what
suffering and pain, perhaps?’ Marcel said that.”

“And you replied, Monsieur le Cure?”

“I replied that Nature required you to answer that question for
yourself, and whether bitterly or gladly, it was your duty to take up
your life and live it out. Besides, it was not you alone that had to be
considered. One does not live alone or die alone in this world. There
were your friends to consider.”

“And because I had no friends here, you were compelled to think for me!”
 answered Charley calmly. “Truth is, it was not a question of my friends,
for what I was during those seven months, or what I am now, can make no
difference to them.”

He looked the Cure in the eyes steadily, and as though he would
convey his intentions without words. The Curb understood. The habit of
listening to the revelations of the human heart had given him something
of that clairvoyance which can only be pursued by the primitive mind,
unvexed by complexity.

“It is, then, as though you had not come to life again? It is as though
you had no past, Monsieur?”

“It is that, Monsieur.”

Jo suddenly turned and left the room, for he heard a step on the frosty
snow without.

“You will remain here, Monsieur?” said the Cure. “I cannot tell.”

The Cure had the bravery of simple souls with a duty to perform. He
fastened his eyes on Charley. “Monsieur, is there any reason why you
should not stay here? I ask it now, man to man--not as a priest of my
people, but as man to man.”

Charley did not answer for a moment. He was wondering how he should put
his reply. But his look did not waver, and the Cure saw the honesty of
the gaze. At length he replied: “If you mean, have I committed any crime
which the law may punish?--I answer no, Monsieur. If you mean, have I
robbed or killed, or forged--or wronged a woman as men wrong women? No.
These, I take it, are the things that matter first. For the rest,
you can think of me as badly as you will, or as well, for what I do
henceforth is the only thing that really concerns the world, Monsieur le
Cure.”

The Cure came forward and put out his hand with a kindly gesture.
“Monsieur, you have suffered,” he said.

“Never, never at all, Monsieur. Never for a moment, until I was dropped
down here like a stone from a sling. I had life by the throat; now it
has me there--that is all.”

“You are not a Catholic, Monsieur?” asked the priest, almost pleadingly,
and as though the question had been much on his mind.

“No, Monsieur.”

The Cure made no rejoinder. If he was not a Catholic, what matter
what he was? If he was not a Catholic, were he Buddhist, pagan, or
Protestant, the position for them personally was the same. “I am
very sorry,” he said gently. “I might have helped you had you been a
Catholic.”

The eye-glass came like lightning to the eye, and a caustic, questioning
phrase was on the tongue, but Charley stopped himself in time. For,
apart from all else, this priest had been his friend in calamity, had
acted with a charming sensibility. The eye-glass troubled the Cure, and
the look on Charley’s face troubled him still more, but it passed as
Charley said, in a voice as simple as the Cure’s own:

“You may still help me as you have already done. I give you my word,
too”--strange that he touched his lips with his tongue as he did in the
old days when his mind turned to Jean Jolicoeur’s saloon--“that I
will do nothing to cause regret for your humanity and--and Christian
kindness.” Again the tongue touched the lips--a wave of the old life had
swept over him, the old thirst had rushed upon him. Perhaps it was the
force of this feeling which made him add, with a curious energy, “I give
you my word, Monsieur le Cure.” At that moment the door opened and Jo
entered.

“M’sieu’,” he said to Charley, “a registered parcel has come for you.
It has been brought by the postmaster’s daughter. She will give it to no
one but yourself.”

Charley’s face paled, and the Cure’s was scarcely less pale. In
Charley’s mind was the question, Who had discovered his presence here?
Was he not, then, to escape? Who should send him parcels through the
post?

The Cure was perturbed. Was he, then, to know who this man was--his name
and history? Was the story of his life now to be told?

Charley broke the silence. “Tell the girl to come in.” Instantly
afterwards the postmaster’s daughter entered. The look of the girl’s
face, at once delicate and rosy with health, almost put the question of
the letter out of his mind for an instant. Her dark eyes met his as he
came forward with outstretched hand.

“This is addressed, as you will see, ‘To the Sick Man at the House of
Jo Portugais, at Vadrome Mountain.’ Are you that person, Monsieur?” she
asked.

As she handed the parcel, Charley’s eyes scanned her face quickly. How
did this habitant girl come by this perfect French accent, this refined
manner? He did not know the handwriting on the parcel; he hastily tore
it open. Inside were a few dozen small packets. Here also was a sheet of
paper. He opened and read it quickly. It said:

   Monsieur, I am not sure that you have recovered your memory and your
   health, and I am also not sure that in such case you will thank me
   for my work. If you think I have done you an injury, pray accept my
   profound apologies. Monsieur, you have been a drunkard. If you
   would reverse the record now, these powders, taken at opportune
   moments, will aid you. Monsieur, with every expression of my good-
   will, and the hope that you will convey to me without reserve your
   feelings on this delicate matter, I append my address in Paris, and
   I have the honour to subscribe myself, with high consideration,
   Monsieur, yours faithfully,
                    MARCEL LOISEL.

The others looked at him with varied feelings as he read. Curiosity,
inquiry, expectation, were common to them all, but with each was a
different personal feeling. The Cure’s has been described. Jo Portugais’
mind was asking if this meant that the man who had come into his life
must now go out of it; and the girl was asking who was this mysterious
man, like none she had ever seen or known.

Without hesitation Charley handed over the letter to the Cure, who took
it with surprise, read it with amazement, and handed it back with a
flush on his face.

“Thank you,” said Charley to the girl. “It is good of you to bring it
all this way. May I ask--”

“She is Mademoiselle Rosalie Evanturel,” said the Cure smiling.

“I am Charles Mallard,” said Charley slowly. “Thank you. I will go
now, Monsieur Mallard,” the girl said, lifting her eyes to his face.
He bowed. As she turned and went towards the door her eyes met his. She
blushed.

“Wait, Mademoiselle; I will go back with you,” said the Cure kindly.
He turned to Charley and held out his hand. “God be with you,
Monsieur--Charles,” he said. “Come and see me soon.” Remembering that
his brother had written that the man was a drunkard, his eyes had a
look of pity. This was the man’s own secret and his. It was a way to the
man’s heart; he would use it.

As the two went out of the door, the girl looked back. Charley was
putting the surgeon’s letter into the fire, and did not see her; yet she
blushed again.




CHAPTER XIII. HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING AND WHAT HE FOUND

A week passed. Charley’s life was running in a tiny circle, but his mind
was compassing large revolutions. The events of the last few days had
cut deep. His life had been turned upside down. All his predispositions
had been suddenly brought to check, his habits turned upon the flank and
routed, his mental postures flung into confusion. He had to start life
again; but it could not be in the way of any previous travel of mind or
body. The line of cleavage was sharp and wide, and the only connection
with the past was in the long-reaching influence of evil habits, which
crept from their coverts, now and again, to mock him as his old self
had mocked life--to mock him and to tempt him. Through seven months of
healthy life for his body, while brain and will were sleeping, the whole
man had made long strides towards recreation. But with the renewal of
will and mind the old weaknesses, roused by memory, began to emerge
intermittently, as water rises from a spring. There was something
terrible in this repetition of sensation--the law of habit answering
to the machine-like throbbing of memory, as, a kaleidoscope turning,
turning, its pictures pass a certain point at fixed intervals--an
automatic recurrence. He found himself at times touching his lips with
his tongue, and with this act came the dry throat, the hot eye, the
restless hand feeling for a glass that eluded his fingers.

Twice in one week did this fever surge up in him, and it caught him
in those moments when, exhausted by the struggle of his mind to adapt
itself to the new conditions, his senses were delicately susceptible.
Visions of Jolicoeur’s saloon came to his mind’s eye. With a singular
separateness, a new-developed dual sense, he saw himself standing in the
summer heat, looking over to the cool dark doorway of the saloon, and
he caught again the smell of the fresh-drawn beer. He was conscious
of watching himself do this and that, of seeing himself move here and
there. He began to look upon Charley Steele as a man he had known--he,
Charles Mallard, had known--while he had to suffer for what Charley
Steele had done. Then, all at once, as he was thinking and dreaming and
seeing, there would seize upon him the old appetite, coincident with the
seizure of his brain by the old sense of cynicism at its worst--such a
worst as had made him insult Jake Hough when the rough countryman was
ready to take his part that wild night at the Cote Dorion.

At such moments life became a conflict--almost a terror--for as yet he
had not swung into line with the new order of things. In truth, there
was no order of things; for one life was behind him and the new one
was not yet decided upon, save that here he would stay--here out of the
world, out of the game, far from old associations, cut off, and to be
for ever cut off, from all that he had ever known or seen or felt or
loved!... Loved! When did he ever love? If love was synonymous with
unselfishness, with the desire to give greater than the desire to get,
then he had never known love. He realised now that he had given Kathleen
only what might be given across a dinner-table--the sensuous tribute of
a temperament, passionate without true passion or faith or friendship.
Kathleen had known that he gave her nothing worth the having; for in
some meagre sense she knew what love was, and had given it meagrely,
after her nature, to another man, preserving meanwhile the letter of the
law, respecting that bond which he had shamed by his excesses.

Kathleen was now sitting at another man’s table--no, probably at his own
table--his, Charley Steele’s own table in his own house--the house he
had given her by deed of gift the day he died. Tom Fairing was sitting
where he used to sit, talking across the table--not as he used to
talk--looking into Kathleen’s face as he had never looked. He was no
more to them than a dark memory. “Well, why should I be more?” he asked
himself. “I am dead, if not buried. They think me down among the fishes.
My game is done; and when she gets older and understands life better,
Kathleen will say, ‘Poor Charley--he might have been anything!’ She’ll
be sure to say that some day, for habit and memory go round in a circle
and pass the same point again and again. For me--they take me by the
throat--” He put his hand up as if to free his throat from a grip, his
tongue touched his lips, his hands grew restless.

“It comes back on me like a fit of ague, this miserable thirst. If I
were within sight of Jolicoeur’s saloon, I should be drinking hard this
minute. But I’m here, and--” His hand felt his pocket, and he took out
the powders the great surgeon had sent him.

“He knew--how did he know that I was a drunkard? Does a man carry in his
face the tale he would not tell? Jo says I didn’t talk of the past, that
I never had delirium, that I never said a word to suggest who I was, or
where I came from. Then how did the doctor--man know? I suppose every
particular habit carries its own signal, and the expert knows the
ciphers.” He opened the paper containing the powders, and looked round
for water, then paused, folded the paper up, and put it in his pocket
again. He went over to the window and looked out. His shoulders set
square. “No, no, no, not a speck on my tongue!” he said. “What I can’t
do of my own will is not worth doing. It’s too foolish, to yield to the
shadow of an old appetite. I play this game alone--here in Chaudiere.”

He looked out and down. The sweet sun of early spring was shining
hard, and the snow was beginning to pack, to hang like a blanket on
the branches, to lie like a soft coverlet over all the forest and the
fields. Far away on the frozen river were saplings stuck up to show
where the ice was safe--a long line of poles from shore to shore--and
carioles were hurrying across to the village. Being market-day, the
place was alive with the cheerful commerce of the habitant. The bell
of the parish church was ringing. The sound of it came up distantly and
peacefully. Charley drew a long breath, turned away to a pail of water,
filled a dipper half full, and drank it off gaspingly. Then he returned
to the window with a look of relief.

“That does it,” he said. “The horrible thing is gone again--out of my
brain and out of my throat.”

As he stood there, Jo came up the hill with a bundle in his arms.
Charley watched him for a moment, half whimsically, half curiously. Yet
he sighed once too as Portugais opened the door and came into the room.
“Well done, Jo!” said he. “You have ‘em?”

“Yes, M’sieu’. A good suit, and I believe they’ll fit. Old Trudel says
it’s the best suit he’s made in a year. I’m afraid he’ll not make many
more suits, old Trudel.

“He’s very bad. When he goes there’ll be no tailor--ah, old Trudel will
be missed for sure, M’sieu’!”

Jo spread the clothes out on the table--a coat, waistcoat, and trousers
of fulled cloth, grey and bulky, and smelling of the loom and the
tailor’s iron. Charley looked at them interestedly, then glanced at
the clothes he had on, the suit that had belonged to him last
year--grave-clothes.

He drew himself up as though rousing from a dream. “Come, Jo, clear out,
and you shall have your new habitant in a minute,” he said. Portugais
left the room, and when he came back, Charley was dressed in the suit
of grey fulled cloth. It was loose, but comfortable, and save for the
refined face--on which a beard was growing now--and the eye-glass, he
might easily have passed for a farmer. When he put on the dog-skin
fur cap and a small muffler round his neck, it was the costume of the
habitant complete.

Yet it was no disguise, for it was part of the life that Charles
Mallard, once Charley Steele, should lead henceforth.

He turned to the door and opened it. “Good-bye, Portugais,” he said.

Jo was startled. “Where are you going, M’sieu’?”

“To the village.”

“What to do, M’sieu’?”

“Who knows?”

“You will come back?” Jo asked anxiously.

“Before sundown, Jo. Good-bye!”

This was the first long walk he had taken since he had become himself
again. The sweet, cold air, with a bracing wind in his face, gave peace
to the nerves but now strained and fevered in the fight with appetite.
His mind cleared, and he drank in the sunny air and the pungent smell
of the balsams. His feet light with moccasins, he even ran a distance,
enjoying the glow from a fast-beating pulse.

As he came into the high-road, people passed him in carioles and
sleighs. Some eyed him curiously. What did he mean to do? What object
had he in coming to the village? What did he expect? As he entered the
village his pace slackened. He had no destination, no object. He was
simply aware that his new life was beginning.

He passed a little house on which was a sign, “Narcisse Dauphin,
Notary.” It gave him a curious feeling. It was the old life before him.
“Charles Mallard, Notary?”--No, that was not for him. Everything that
reminded him of the past, that brought him in touch with it, must be set
aside. He moved on. Should he go to the Cure? No; one thing at a time,
and today he wanted his thoughts for himself. More people passed
him, and spoke of him to each other, though there was no coarse
curiosity--the habitant has manners.

Presently he passed a low shop with a divided door. The lower half was
closed, the upper open, and the winter sun was shining full into the
room, where a bright fire burned.

Charley looked up. Over the door was painted, in straggling letters:
“Louis Trudel, Tailor.” He looked inside. There, on a low table, bent
over his work, with a needle in his hand, sat Louis Trudel the tailor.
Hearing footsteps, feeling a shadow, he looked up. Charley started at
the look of the shrunken, yellow face; for if ever death had set his
seal, it was on that haggard parchment. The tailor’s yellow eyes ran
from Charley’s face to his clothes.

“I knew they’d fit,” he said, with a snarl. “Drove me hard, too!”

Charley had an inspiration. He opened the halfdoor, and entered.

“Do you want help?” he said, fixing his eyes on the tailor’s, steady and
persistent.

“What’s the good of wanting--I can’t get it,” was the irritable reply,
as he uncrossed his legs.

Charley took the iron out of his hand. “I’ll press, if you’ll show me
how,” he said.

“I don’t want a fiddling ten-minutes’ help like that.”

“It isn’t fiddling. I’m going to stay, if you think I’ll do.”

“You are going to stop-every day?” The old man’s voice quavered a
little.

“Precisely that.” Charley wetted a seam with water as he had often
seen tailors do. He dropped the hot iron on the seam, and sniffed with
satisfaction.

“Who are you?” said the tailor.

“A man who wants work. The Cure knows. It’s all right. Shall I stay?”

The tailor nodded, and sat down with a colour in his face.




CHAPTER XIV. ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED

From the moment there came to the post-office the letter addressed to
“The Sick Man at the House of Jo Portugais at Vadrome Mountain,” Rosalie
Evanturel dreamed dreams. Mystery, so fascinating a thing in all the
experiences of life, took hold of her. The strange man in the lonely
hut on the hill, the bandaged head, the keen, piercing blue eyes,
the monocle, like a masked battery of the mind, levelled at her--all
appealed to that life she lived apart from the people with whom she had
daily commerce. Her world was a world of books and dreams, and simple,
practical duties of life. Most books were romance to her, for most were
of a life to which she had not been educated. Even one or two purely
Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead
mother’s room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure. It was
all new, therefore all delightful, even when the Protestant sentiments
shocked her as being not merely untrue, but hurting that aesthetic sense
never remote from the mind of the devout Catholic.

She had blushed when monsieur had first looked at her, in the hut on
Vadrome Mountain, not because there was any soft sentiment about him
in her heart--how could there be for a man she had but just seen!--but
because her feelings, her imagination, were all at high temperature;
because the man compelled attention. The feeling sprang from a deep
sensibility, a natural sense, not yet made incredulous by the ironies
of life. These had never presented themselves to her in a country, in
a parish, where people said of fortune and misfortune, happiness and
sorrow, “C’est le bon Dieu!”--always “C’est le bon Dieu!”

In some sense it was a pity that she had brains above the ordinary, that
she had had a good education and nice tastes. It was the cultivation of
the primitive and idealistic mind, which could not rationalise a sense
of romance, of the altruistic, by knowledge of life. As she sat behind
the post-office counter she read all sorts of books that came her way.
When she learned English so as to read it almost as easily as she read
French, her greatest joy was to pore over Shakespeare, with a heart full
of wonder, and, very often, eyes full of tears--so near to the eyes of
her race. Her imagination inhabited Chaudiere with a different folk,
living in homes very unlike these wide, sweeping-roofed structures, with
double windows and clean-scrubbed steps, tall doors, and wide, uncovered
stoops. Her people--people of bright dreaming--were not quarrelsome,
or childish, or merely traditional, like the habitants. They were
picturesque and able and simple, doing good things in disguise,
succouring distress, yielding their lives without thought for a cause,
or a woman, and loving with an undying love.

Charley was of these people--from the first instant she saw him. The
Cure, the Avocat, and the Seigneur were also of them, but placidly,
unimportantly. “The Sick Man at Jo Portugais’ House” came out of a
mysterious distance. Something in his eyes said, “I have seen, I have
known,” told her that when he spoke she would answer freely, that they
were kinsfolk in some hidden way. Her nature was open and frank; she
lived upon the house-tops, as it were, going in and out of the lives of
the people of Chaudiere with neighbourly sympathy and understanding. Yet
she knew that she was not of them, and they knew that, poor as she was,
in her veins flowed the blood of the old nobility of France. For this
the Cure could vouch. Her official position made her the servant of the
public, and she did her duty with naturalness.

She had been a figure in the parish ever since the day she returned from
the convent at Quebec, and took her dead mother’s place in the home and
the parish. She had a quick temper, but there was not a cheerless note
in her nature, and there was scarce a dog or a horse in the parish but
knew her touch, and responded to it. Squirrels ate out of her hand, she
had even tamed two partridges, and she kept in her little garden a bear
she had brought up from a cub. Her devotion to her crippled father was
in keeping with her quick response to every incident of sorrow or joy in
the parish--only modified by wilful prejudices scarcely in keeping with
her unselfishness.

As Mrs. Flynn, the Seigneur’s Irish cook, said of her: “Shure, she’s not
made all av wan piece, the darlin’! She’ll wear like silk, but she’s not
linen for everybody’s washin’.” And Mrs. Flynn knew a thing or two, as
was conceded by all in Chaudiere. No gossip was Mrs. Flynn, but she knew
well what was going on in the parish, and she had strong views upon
all subjects, and a special interest in the welfare of two people in
Chaudiere. One of these was the Seigneur, who, when her husband died,
leaving behind him a name for wit and neighbourliness, and nothing else,
proposed that she should come to be his cook. In spite of her protest
that what was “fit for Teddy was not fit for a gintleman of quality,”
 the Seigneur had had his way, never repenting of his choice. Mrs.
Flynn’s cooking was not her only good point. She had the rarest sense
and an unfailing spring of good-nature--life bubbled round her. It was
she that had suggested the crippled M. Evanturel to the Seigneur when
the office of postmaster became vacant, and the Seigneur had acted on
her suggestion, henceforth taking greater interest in Rosalie.

It was Mrs. Flynn who gave Rosalie information concerning Charley’s
arrival at the shop of Louis Trudel the tailor. The morning after
Charley came, Mrs. Flynn had called for a waistcoat of the Seigneur, who
was expected home from a visit to Quebec. She found Charley standing at
a table pressing seams, and her quick eye took him in with knowledge and
instinct. She was the one person, save Rosalie, who could always divert
old Louis, and this morning she puckered his sour face with amusement by
the story of the courtship of the widow Plomondon and Germain Boily the
horse-trainer, whose greatest gift was animal-training, and greatest
weakness a fondness for widows, temporary and otherwise. Before she left
the shop, with the stranger’s smile answering to her nod, she had made
up her mind that Charley was a tailor by courtesy only. So she told
Rosalie a few moments afterwards.

“‘Tis a man, darlin’, that’s seen the wide wurruld. ‘Tis himisperes he
knows, not parrishes. Fwhat’s he doin’ here, I dun’no’. Fwhere’s he come
from, I dun’no’. French or English, I dun’no’. But a gintleman born, I
know. ‘Tis no tailor, darlin’, but tailorin’ he’ll do as aisy as he’ll
do a hunderd other things anny day. But how he shlipped in here, an’
when he shlipped in here, an’ what’s he come for, an’ how long he’s
stayin’, an’ meanin’ well, or doin’ ill, I dun’no’, darlin’, I dun’
no’.”

“I don’t think he’ll do ill, Mrs. Flynn,” said Rosalie, in English.

“An’ if ye haven’t seen him, how d’ye know?” asked Mrs. Flynn, taking a
pinch of snuff.

“I have seen him--but not in the tailor-shop. I saw him at Jo Portugais’
a fortnight ago.”

“Aisy, aisy, darlin’. At Jo Portugais’--that’s a quare place for a
stranger. ‘Tis not wid Jo’s introducshun I’d be comin’ to Chaudiere.”

“He comes with the Cure’s introduction.”

“An’ how d’ye know that, darlin’?”

“The Curb was at Jo Portugais’ with monsieur when I went there.”

“You wint there!”

“To take him a letter--the stranger.” “What’s his name, darlin’?”

“The letter I took him was addressed, ‘To the Sick Man at Jo Portugais’
House at Vadrome Mountain.’”

“Ah, thin, the Cure knows. ‘Tis some rich man come to get well, and
plays at bein’ tailor. But why didn’t the letther come to his name, I
wander now? That’s what I wander.”

Rosalie shook her head, and looked reflectively through the window
towards the tailor-shop.

“How manny times have ye seen him?”

“Only once;” answered Rosalie truthfully. She did not, however, tell
Mrs. Flynn that she had thrice walked nearly to Vadrome Mountain in the
hope of seeing him again; and that she had gone to her favourite resort,
the Rest of the Flax-Beaters, lying in the way of the riverpath from
Vadrome Mountain, on the chance of his passing. She did not tell Mrs.
Flynn that there had scarcely been a waking hour when she had not
thought of him.

“What Portugais knows, he’ll not be tellin’,” said Mrs. Flynn, after a
moment. “An’ ‘tis no business of ours, is it, darlin’? Shure, there’s Jo
comin’ out of the tailor-shop now!”

They both looked out of the window, and saw Jo encounter Filion Lacasse
the saddler, and Maximilian Cour the baker. The three stood in the
middle of the street for a minute, Jo talking freely. He was usually
morose and taciturn, but now he spoke as though eager to unburden his
mind--Charley and he had agreed upon what should be said to the people
of Chaudiere.

The sight of the confidences among the three was too much for Mrs.
Flynn. She opened the door of the post office and called to Jo. “Like
three crows shtandin’ there!” she said. “Come in--ma’m’selle says come
in, and tell your tales here, if they’re fit to hear, Jo Portugais. Who
are you to say no when ma’m’selle bids!” she added.

Very soon afterwards Jo was inside the post-office, telling his tale
with the deliberation of a lesson learned by heart.

“It’s all right, as ma’m’selle knows,” he said. “The Cure was there
when ma’m’selle brought a letter to M’sieu’ Mallard. The Cure knows all.
M’sieu’ come to my house sick-and he stayed there. There is nothing like
the pine-trees and the junipers to cure some things. He was with me
very quiet some time. The Cure come and come. He knows. When m’sieu’ got
well, he say, ‘I will not go from Chaudiere; I will stay. I am poor,
and I will earn my bread here.’ At first, when he is getting well, he is
carpent’ring. He makes cupboards and picture-frames. The Cure has one of
the cupboards in the sacristy; the frames he puts on the Stations of the
Cross in the church.”

“That’s good enough for me!” said Maximilian Cour. “Did he make them for
nothing?” asked Filion Lacasse solemnly.

“Not one cent did he ask. What’s more, he’s working for Louis Trudel
for nothing. He co

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