The Right of Way, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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"No, no, no," interposed the Cure eagerly. "So you have lived here,
Monsieur; I can vouch for that. Charity and a good heart have gone with
you always."
"Do you mean that a man is an infidel because he cannot say, as Louis
Trudel said to me, 'Do you believe in God?' and replies, as I replied,
'God knows!' Is that infidelity? If God is God, He alone knows when the
mind or the tongue can answer in the terms of that faith which you
profess. He knows the secret desires of our hearts, and what we believe,
and what we do not believe; He knows better than we ourselves know--if
there is a God. Does a man conjure God, if he does not believe in God?
'God knows!' is not a statement of infidelity. With me it was a
phrase--no more. You ask me to bare my inmost soul. I have not learned
how to confess. You ask me to lay bare my past, to prove my identity. For
conscience sake you ask that, and I for conscience sake say I will not,
Monsieur. You, when you enter your priestly life, put all your past
behind you. It is dead for ever: all its deeds and thoughts and desires,
all its errors--sins. I have entered on a life here which is to me as
much a new life as your priesthood is to you. Shall I not have the right
to say, that may not be disinterred? Have I not the right to say, Hands
off? For the past I am responsible, and for the past I will speak from
the past; but for the deeds of the present I will speak only from the
present. I am not a Frenchman; I did not steal the little cross from the
church door here, nor the golden chalices in Quebec; nor did I seek to
injure the Governor's residence. I have not been in Quebec for three
years."
He ceased speaking, and fixed his eyes on the Abbe, who now met his look
fairly.
"In the way of justice, there is nothing hidden that shall not be
revealed, nor secret that shall not be made known," answered the Abbe.
"Prove that you were not in Quebec on the day the robbery was committed."
There was silence. The Abbe's pertinacity was too difficult. The Seigneur
saw the grim look in Charley's face, and touched the Abbe on the arm.
"Let us walk a little outside. Come, Cure" he added. "It is right that
Monsieur should have a few minutes alone. It is a serious charge against
him, and reflection will be good for us all."
He motioned the constables from the room. The Abby passed through the
door into the open air, and the Cure and the Seigneur went arm in arm
together, talking earnestly. The Cure turned in the doorway.
"Courage, Monsieur!" he said to Charley, and bowed himself out. Jo
Portugais followed.
One officer took his place at the front door and the other at the back
door, outside.
The Abby, by himself, took to walking backward and forward under the
trees, buried in gloomy reflection. Jo Portugais caught his sleeve.
"Come with me for a moment, M'sieu'," he said. "It is important."
The Abby followed him.
CHAPTER XXXII
JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
Jo Portugais had fastened down a secret with clasps heavier than iron,
and had long stood guard over it. But life is a wheel, and natures move
in circles, passing the same points again and again, the points being
distant or near to the sense as the courses of life have influenced the
nature. Confession was an old principle, a light in the way, a rest-house
for Jo and all his race, by inheritance, by disposition, and by practice.
Again and again Jo had come round to the rest-house since one direful
day, but had not, found his way therein. There were passwords to give at
the door, there was the tale of the journey to tell to the door-keeper.
And this tale he had not been ready to tell. But the man who knew of the
terrible thing he had done, who had saved him from the consequences of
that terrible thing, was in sore trouble, and this broke down the gloomy
guard he had kept over his dread secret. He fought the matter out with
himself, and, the battle ended, he touched the door-keeper on the arm,
beckoned him to a lonely place in the trees, and knelt down before him.
"What is it you seek?" asked the door-keeper, whose face was set and
forbidding.
"To find peace," answered the man; yet he was thinking more of another's
peril than of his own soul. "What have I to do with the peace of your
soul? Yonder is your shepherd and keeper," said the doorkeeper, pointing
to where two men walked arm in arm under the trees.
"Shall the sinner not choose the keeper of his sins?" said the man
huskily.
"Who has been the keeper all these years? Who has given you peace?"
"I have had no keeper; I have had no peace these many years."
"How many years?" The Abbe's voice was low and even, and showed no
feeling, but his eyes were keenly inquiring and intent.
"Seven years."
"Is the sin that held you back from the comfort of the Church a great
one?"
"The greatest, save one."
"What would be the greatest?"
"To curse God."
"The next?"
"To murder."
The other's whole manner changed on the instant. He was no longer the
stern Churchman, the inveterate friend of Justice, the prejudiced priest,
rigid in a pious convention, who could neither bend nor break. The sin of
an infidel breaker of the law, that was one thing; the crime of a son of
the Church, which a human soul came to relate in its agony, that was
another. He had a crass sense of justice, but there was in him a deeper
thing still: the revelation of the human soul, the responsibility of
speaking to the heart which has dropped the folds of secrecy, exposing
the skeleton of truth, grim and staring, to the eye of a secret earthly
mentor.
"If it has been hidden all these years, why do you tell it now, my son?"
"It is the only way."
"Why was it hidden?"
"I have come to confess," answered the man bitterly. The priest looked at
him anxiously. "You have spoken rightly, my son. I am not here to ask,
but to receive."
"Forgive me, but it is my crime I would speak of now. I choose this
moment that another should not suffer for what he did not do."
The priest thought of the man they had left in the little house, and the
crime with which he was charged, and wondered what the sinner before him
was going to say.
"Tell your story, my son, and God give your tongue the very spirit of
truth, that nothing be forgotten and nothing excused."
There was a fleeting pause, in which the colour left the priest's face,
and, as he opened the door of his mind--of the Church, secret and
inviolate--he had a pain at his heart; for beneath his arrogant
churchmanship there was a fanatical spirituality of a mediaeval kind. His
sense of responsibility was painful and intense. The same pain possessed
him always, were the sin that of a child or a Borgia.
As he listened to the broken tale, the forest around was vocal, the
chipmunks scampered from tree to tree, the woodpecker's tap-tap, tap-tap,
went on over their heads, the leaves rustled and gave forth their divine
sweetness, as though man and nature were at peace, and there were no
storms in sky above or soul beneath, or in the waters of life that are
deeper than "the waters under the earth."
It was only a short time, but to the door-keeper and the wayfarer it
seemed hours, for the human soul travels far and hard and long in moments
of pain and revelation. The priest in his anxiety suffered as much as the
man who did the wicked thing. When the man had finished, the priest said:
"Is this all?"
"It is the great sin of my life." He shuddered, and continued: "I have no
love of life; I have no fear of death; but there is the man who saved me
years ago, who got me freedom. He has had great sorrow and trouble, and I
would live for his sake--because he has no friend."
"Who is the man?"
The other pointed to where the little house was hidden among the trees.
The priest almost gasped his amazement, but waited.
Thereupon the woodsman told the whole truth concerning the tailor of
Chaudiere.
"To save him, I have confessed my own sin. To you I might tell all in
confession, and the truth about him would be buried for ever. I might not
confess at all unless I confessed my own sin. You will save him, father?"
he asked anxiously.
"I will save him," was the reply of the priest.
"I want to give myself to justice; but he has been ill, and he may be ill
again, and he needs me." He told of the tailor's besetting weakness, of
his struggles against it, of his fall a few days before, and the cause of
it . . . told all to the man of silence.
"You wish to give yourself to justice?"
"I shall have no peace unless."
There was something martyr-like in the man's attitude. It appealed to
some stern, martyr-like quality in the priest. If the man would win
eternal peace so, then so be it. His grim piety approved. He spoke now
with the authority of divine justice.
"For one year longer go on as you are, then give yourself to justice--one
year from to-day, my son. Is it enough?"
"It is enough."
"Absolvo te!" said the priest.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE EDGE OF LIFE
Meantime Charley was alone with his problem. The net of circumstances
seemed to have coiled inextricably round him. Once, at a trial in court
in other days, he had said in his ironical way: "One hasn't to fear the
penalties of one's sins, but the damnable accident of discovery."
To try to escape now, or, with the assistance of Jo Portugais, when en
route to Quebec in charge of the constables, and find refuge and
seclusion elsewhere? There was nothing he might ask of Portugais which he
would not do. To escape--and so acknowledge a guilt not his own! Well,
what did it matter! Who mattered? He knew only too well. The Cure
mattered--that good man who had never intruded his piety on him; who had
been from the first a discreet friend, a gentleman,--a Christian
gentleman, if there was such a sort of gentleman apart from all others.
Who mattered? The Seigneur, whom he had never seen before, yet who had
showed that day a brusque sympathy, a gruff belief in him? Who mattered?
Above all, Rosalie mattered. To escape, to go from Rosalie's presence by
a dark way, as it were, like a thief in the night--was that possible? His
escape would work upon her mind. She would first wonder, then doubt, and
then believe at last that he was a common criminal. She was the one who
mattered in that thought of escape escape to some other parish, to some
other province, to some other country--to some other world!
To some other world? He looked at a little bottle he held in the palm of
his hand.
A hand held aside the curtain of the door entering on the next room, and
a girl's troubled face looked in, but he did not see.
Escape to some other world? And why not, after all? On the day his memory
came back he had resisted the idea in this very room. As the fatalist he
had resisted it then. Now how poor seemed the reasons for not having
ended it all that day! If his appointed time had been come, the river
would have ended him then--that had been his argument. Was that argument
not belief in Somebody or Something which governed his going or staying?
Was it not preordination? Was not fatalism, then, the cheapest sort of
belief in an unchangeable Somebody or Something, representing purpose and
law and will? Attribute to anything power, and there was God, whatever
His qualities, personality, or being.
The little phial of laudanum was in his hand to loosen life into
knowledge. Was it not his duty to eliminate himself, rather than be an
unsolvable quantity in the problem of many lives? It was neither vulgar
nor cowardly to pass quietly from forces making for ruin, and so avert
ruin and secure happiness. To go while yet there was time, and smooth for
ever the way for others by an eternal silence--that seemed well.
Punishment thereafter, the Cure would say. But was it not worth while
being punished, even should the Cure's fond belief in the noble fable be
true, if one saved others here? Who--God or man--had the right to take
from him the right to destroy himself, not for fear, not through despair,
but for others' sake? Had he not the right to make restitution to
Kathleen for having given her nothing but himself, whom she had learned
to despise? If he were God, he would say, Do justice and fear not. And
this was justice. Suppose he were in a battle, with all these things
behind him, and put himself, with daring and great results, in some
forlorn hope--to die; and he died, ostensibly a hero for his country,
but, in his heart of hearts, to throw his life away to save some one he
loved, not his country, which profited by his sacrifice--suppose that
were the case, what would the world say?
"He saved others, himself he could not save"--flashed through his mind,
possessed him. He could save others; but it was clear he could not save
himself. It was so simple, so kind, and so decent. And he would be buried
here in quiet, unconsecrated ground, a mystery, a tailor who, finding he
could not mend the garment of life, cast it away, and took on himself the
mantle of eternal obscurity. No reproaches would follow him; and he would
not reproach himself, for Kathleen and Billy and another would be safe
and free to live their lives.
Far, far better for Rosalie! She too would be saved--free from the peril
of his presence. For where could happiness come to her from him? He might
not love her; he might not marry her; and it were well to go now, while
yet love was not a habit, but an awakening, a realisation of life. His
death would settle this sad question for ever. To her he would be a
softening memory as time went on.
The girl who had watched by the curtain stepped softly inside the room
. . . she divined his purpose. He was so intent he did not hear.
"I will do it," he said to himself. "It is better to go than to stay. I
have never done a good thing for love of any human being. I will do one
now."
He turned towards the window through which the sunlight streamed.
Stepping forward into the sun, he uncorked the bottle.
There was a quick step behind him, and the girl's voice said clearly:
"If you go, I go also."
He turned swiftly, cold with amazement, the blood emptied from his heart.
Rosalie stood a little distance from him, her face pale, her hands held
hard to her side.
"I understand all. I could not go outside, I stayed there"--she pointed
to the other room--"and I know why you would die. You would die to save
others."
"Rosalie!" he protested in a hoarse voice, and could say nothing more.
"You think that I will stay, if you go! No, no, no--I will not. You
taught me how to live, and I will follow you now."
He saw the strange determination of her look. It startled him; he knew
not what to say. "Your father, Rosalie--"
"My father will be cared for. But who will care for you in the place
where you are going? You will have no friends there. You shall not go
alone. You will need me--in the dark."
"It is good that I go," he said. "It would be wicked, it would be
dreadful, for you to go."
"I go if you go," she urged. "I will lose my soul to be with you; you
will want me--there!"
There was no mistaking her intention. Footsteps sounded outside. The
others were coming back. To die here before her face? To bring her to
death with him? He was sick with despair.
"Go into the next room quickly," he said. "No matter what comes, I will
not--on my honour!"
She threw him a look of gratitude, and, as the bearskin curtain dropped
behind her, he put the phial of laudanum in his pocket.
The door opened, and the Abbe Rossignol entered, followed by the
Seigneur, the Cure, and Jo Portugais. Charley faced them calmly, and
waited.
The Abbe's face was still cold and severe, but his voice was human as he
said quickly: "Monsieur, I have decided to take you at your word. I am
assured you are not the man who committed the crime. You probably have
reasons for not establishing your identity."
Had Charley been a prisoner in the dock, he could not have had a moment
of deeper amazement--even if after the jury had said Guilty, a piece of
evidence had been handed in, proving innocence, averting the death
sentence. A wave of excitement passed over him, leaving him cold and
still. In the other room a girl put her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry
of joy.
Charley bowed. "You made a mistake, Monsieur--pray do not apologise," he
said.
CHAPTER XXXIV
IN AMBUSH
Weeks went by. Summer was done, autumn was upon the land. Harvest-home
had gone, and the "fall" ploughing was forward. The smell of the burning
stubble, of decaying plant and fibre, was mingling with the odours of the
orchards and the balsams of the forest. The leafy hill-sides, far and
near, were resplendent in scarlet and saffron and tawny red. Over the
decline of the year flickered the ruined fires of energy.
It had been a prosperous summer in the valley. Harvests had been reaped
such as the country had not known for years--and for years there had been
great harvests. There had not been a death in the parish all summer, and
births had occurred out of all usual proportion.
When Filion Lacasse commented thereon, and mentioned the fact that even
the Notary's wife had had the gift of twins as the crowning fulness of
the year, Maximilian Cour, who was essentially superstitious, tapped on
the table three times, to prevent a turn in the luck.
The baker was too late, however, for the very next day the Notary was
brought home with a nasty gunshot wound in his leg. He had been lured
into duck-hunting on a lake twenty miles away, in the hills, and had been
accidentally shot on an Indian reservation, called Four Mountains, where
the Church sometimes held a mission and presented a primitive sort of
passion-play. From there he had been brought home by his comrades, and
the doctor from the next parish summoned. The Cure assisted the doctor at
first, but the task was difficult to him. At the instant when the case
was most critical the tailor of Chaudiere set his foot inside the
Notary's door. A moment later he relieved the Cure and helped to probe
for shot, and care for an ugly wound.
Charley had no knowledge of surgery, but his fingers were skilful, his
eye was true, and he had intuition. The long operation over, the rural
physician and surgeon washed his hands and then studied Charley with
curious admiration.
"Thank you, Monsieur," he said, as he dried his hands on a towel. "I
couldn't have done it without you. It's a pretty good job; and you share
the credit."
Charley bowed. "It's a good thing not to halloo till you're out of the
woods," he said. "Our friend there has a bad time before him--hein?"
"I take you. It is so." The man of knives and tinctures pulled his
side-whiskers with smug satisfaction as he looked into a small mirror on
the wall. "Do you chance to know if madame has any cordials or spirits?"
he added, straightening his waistcoat and adjusting his cravat.
"It is likely," answered Charley, and moved away to the window looking
upon the street.
The doctor turned in surprise. He was used to being waited on, and he had
expected the tailor to follow the tradition.
"We might--eh?" he said suggestively. "It is usually the custom to
provide refreshment, but the poor woman, madame, has been greatly
occupied with her husband, and--"
"And the twins," Charley put in drily--"and a house full of work, and
only one old crone in the kitchen to help. Still, I have no doubt she has
thought of the cordials too. Women are the slaves of custom--ah, here
they are, as I said, and--"
He stopped short, for in the doorway, with a tray, stood Rosalie
Evanturel. The surgeon was so intent upon at once fortifying himself that
he did not see the look which passed between Rosalie and the tailor.
Rosalie had been absent for two months. Her father had been taken
seriously ill the day after the critical episode in the but at Vadrome
Mountain, and she had gone with him to the hospital at Quebec, for an
operation. The Abbe Rossignol had undertaken to see them safely to the
hospital, and Jo Portugais, at his own request, was permitted to go in
attendance upon M. Evanturel.
There had been a hasty leave-taking between Charley and Rosalie, but it
was in the presence of others, and they had never spoken a word privately
together since the day she had said to him that where he went she would
go, in life or out of it.
"You have been gone two months," Charley said now, after their touch of
hands and voiceless greeting. "Two months yesterday," she answered.
"At sundown," he replied, in an even voice.
"The Angelus was ringing," she answered calmly, though her heart was
leaping and her hands were trembling. The doctor, instantly busy with the
cordial, had not noticed what they said.
"Won't you join me?" he asked, offering a glass to Charley.
"Spirits do not suit me," answered Charley. "Matter of constitution,"
rejoined the doctor, and buttoned up his coat, preparing to depart. He
came close to Charley. "Now, I don't want to put upon you, Monsieur," he
said, "but this sick man is valuable in the parish--you take me? Well,
it's a difficult, delicate case, and I'd be glad if I could rely on you
for a few days. The Cure would do, but you are young, you have a sense of
things--take me? Half the fees are yours if you'll keep a sharp eye on
him--three times a day, and be with him at night a while. Fever is the
thing I'm afraid of--temperature--this way, please!" He went to the
window, and for a minute engaged Charley in whispered conversation. "You
take me?" he said cheerily at last, as he turned again towards Rosalie.
"Quite, Monsieur," answered Charley, and drew away, for he caught the
odour of the doctor's breath, and a cold perspiration broke out over him.
He felt the old desire for drink sweeping through him. "I will do what I
can," he said.
"Come, my dear," the doctor said to Rosalie. "We will go and see your
father."
Charley's eyes had fastened on the bottles avidly. As Rosalie turned to
bid him good-bye, he said to her, almost hoarsely: "Take the tray back to
Madame Dauphin--please."
She flashed a glance of inquiry at him. She was puzzled by the fire in
his eyes. With her soul in her face as she lifted the tray, out of the
warm-beating life in her, she said in a low tone:
"It is good to live, isn't it?"
He nodded and smiled, and the trouble slowly passed from his eyes. The
woman in her had conquered his enemy.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER
"It is good to live, isn't it?" In the autumn weather when the air drank
like wine, it seemed so indeed, even to Charley, who worked all day in
his shop, his door wide open to the sunlight, and sat up half the night
with Narcisse Dauphin, sometimes even taking a turn at the cradle of the
twins, while madame sat beside her husband's bed.
To Charley the answer to Rosalie's question lay in the fact that his eyes
had never been so keen, his face so alive, or his step so buoyant as in
this week of double duty. His mind was more hopeful than it had ever been
since the day he awoke with memory restored in the silence of a mountain
hut.
He had found the antidote to his great temptation, to the lurking,
relentless habit which had almost killed him the night John Brown had
sung Champagne Charlie from behind the flaring lights. From a
determination to fight his own fight with no material aids, he had never
once used the antidote sent him by the Cure's brother.
On St. Jean Baptiste's day his proud will had failed him; intellectual
force, native power of mind, had broken like reeds under the weight of a
cruel temptation. But now a new force had entered into him. As his
fingers were about to reach for the spirit-bottle in the house of the
Notary, and he had, for the first time in his life, made an appeal for
help, a woman's voice had said, "It is good to live, isn't it?" and his
hand was stayed. A woman's look had stilled the strife. Never before in
his life had he relied on a moral or a spiritual impulse in him. What of
these existed in him were in unseen quantities--for which there was
neither multiple nor measure--had been primitive and hereditary, flowing
in him like a feeble tincture diluted to inefficacy.
Rosalie had resolved him back to the original elements. The quiet days he
had spent in Chaudiere, the self-sacrifice he had been compelled to make,
the human sins, such as those of Jo Portugais and Louis Trudel, with
which he had had to do, the simplicity of the life around him--the
uncomplicated lie and the unvarnished truth, the obvious sorrow and the
patent joy, the childish faith, and the rude wickedness so pardonable
because so frankly brutal--had worked upon him. The elemental spirit of
it all had so invaded his nature, breaking through the crust of old habit
to the new man, that, when he fell before his temptation, and his body
became saturated with liquor, the healthy natural being and the growing
natural mind were overpowered by the coarse onslaught, and death had
nearly followed.
It was his first appeal to a force outside himself, to an active
principle unfamiliar to the voluntary working of his nature, and the
answer had been immediate and adequate. Yet what was it? He did not ask;
he had not got beyond the mere experience, and the old questioning habit
was in abeyance. Each new and great emotion has its dominating moment,
its supreme occasion, before taking its place in the modulated moral
mechanism. He was touched with helplessness.