The Right of Way, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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In the evening hours and on Sunday Charley had worked at his drawings for
the scenery and costumes of the Play, and completed his translation of
the German text, but there had been days when he could not put pen to
paper. Life to him now was one aching emptiness--since that day at the
Rest of the Flax-beaters Rosalie had been absent. On the very morning
after their meeting by the river she had gone away with her father to the
great hospital at Montreal--not Quebec this time, on the advice of the
Seigneur--as the one chance of prolonging his life. There had come but
one letter from her since that hour when he saw her in the Seigneur's
coach with her father, moving away in the still autumn air, a piteous
appeal in her eyes. The good-bye look she gave him then was with him day
and night.
She had written him one letter, and he had written one in reply, and no
more. Though he was wholly reckless for himself, for her he was prudent
now--there was nothing else to do. To save her--if he could but save her
from himself! If he might only put back the clock!
In his letter to her he had simply said that it were wiser not to write,
since the acting postmistress, the Cure's sister, would note the exchange
of letters, and this would arouse suspicion. He could not see what was
best to do, what was right to do. To wait seemed the only thing, and his
one letter ended with the words: Rosalie, my life is lived only in the
thought of you. There is no hour but I think of you, no moment but you
are with me. The greatest proof of love that man can give, I will give to
you, in the hour fate wills--for us. But now, we must wait--we must wait,
Rosalie. Do not write to me, but know that if I could go to you I would
go; if I could say to you, Come, I would say it. If the giving of my life
would save you any pain or sorrow, I would give it.
Sitting on his bench at work, it seemed to Charley that sometimes she was
near him, and more than once he turned quickly round as though she were,
in very truth, standing beside him. He thought of her continually, and
often with an unbearable pain. He figured her in his mind as pale and
distressed, and always her eyes had the piteous terror of that last look
as she went away over the hills.
But the weeks had worn on, then the Seigneur, who had been to Montreal,
came back with the news that Rosalie was looking as beautiful as a
picture. "Grown a woman in beauty and in stature; comely--comely as a
lady in a Watteau picture, my dear messieurs!" he had said to the Cure,
standing in the tailor's shop.
Replying, the Cure had said: "She is in good hands, with good people,
recommended to me by an abbe there; yet I am not wholly happy about her.
When her trouble comes to her"--Charley's needle slipped and pierced his
finger to the bone--"when her father goes, as he must, I fear, there will
be no familiar face; she will hear no familiar voice."
"Faith, there you are wrong, my dear Cure" answered the Seigneur;
"there'll be a face yonder she likes very well indeed, and a voice she's
fond of too."
Charley's back was on them at that moment, of which he was glad, for his
face was haggard with anxiety, and it seemed hours before the Cure said:
"Whom do you mean, Maurice?" and hours before the Seigneur replied: "Mrs.
Flynn, of course. I'm sending her tomorrow."
Mrs. Flynn had gone, and Charley had, in one sense, been made no happier
by that, for it seemed to him that Rosalie would rather that strangers'
eyes were on her than the inquisitively friendly eye of Mary Flynn.
Weeks had grown into months, and no news came--none save that which the
Cure let fall, or was brought by the irresponsible Notary, who heard all
gossip. Only the Cure's scant news were authentic, however, and Charley
never saw the good priest but he had a secret hope of hearing him say
that Rosalie was coming back. Yet when she came back, what would, or
could, he do? There was always the crime for which he or Billy must be
punished. Concerning this crime his heart was growing harder--for
Rosalie's sake. But there was Kathleen--and Rosalie was now in the city
where she lived, and they might meet! There was one solution--if Kathleen
should die! It sickened him that he could think of that with a sense of
relief, almost of hope. If Kathleen should die, then he would be free to
marry Rosalie--into what? He still could only marry her into the peril
and menace of the law? Again, even if Kathleen did not stand in the way,
neither the Cure nor any other priest would marry him to her without his
antecedents being certified. A Protestant minister would, perhaps, but
would Rosalie give up her faith? Following him without the blessing of
the Church, she would trample under foot every dear tradition of her
life, win the scorn of all of her religion, and destroy her own peace;
for the faith of her fathers was as the breath of her nostrils. What
cruelty to her!
But was it, after all, even true that he had but to call and she would
come? In truth it well might be that she had learned to despise him; to
feel how dastardly he had been to take her love, given in blind
simplicity, bestowed like the song of the bird upon the listening
fields--to take the plenteous fulness of her life, and give nothing in
return save the empty hand, the hopeless hour, the secret sorrow.
Nothing could quench his misery. The physical part of him craved without
ceasing for something to allay his distress. Again and again he fought
his old enemy with desperate resolve. To fall again, to touch liquor once
more, was to end all for ever. He fought on tenaciously and gloomily,
with little of the pride of life, with nothing of the old stubborn
self-will, but with a new-awakened sense. He had found conscience at
last--and more.
The months went by and still M. Evanturel lingered on, and Rosalie did
not come. The strain became too great at last. In the week preceding
Easter, when all the parish was busy at Four Mountains, making costumes,
rehearsing, building, putting up seats, cutting down trees, and erecting
crosses and calvaries, Charley disclosed to Jo a new intention.
In the earlier part of the winter Jo and he had met two or three times a
week, but now Jo had come to help him with his work in the shop--two
silent, devoted companions. They understood each other, and in that
understanding were life and death. For never did Jo forget that a year
from the day he had confessed his sins he meant to give himself up to
justice. This caused him no sleepless nights. He thought more of Charley
than of himself, and every month now he went to confession, and every day
he said his prayers. He was at his prayers when Charley went to tell him
of his purpose. Charley had often seen Jo on his knees of late, and he
had wondered, but not with the old pagan mind. "Jo," he said, "I am going
away--to Montreal."
"To Montreal!" exclaimed Jo huskily. "You are going back--to stay?"
"Not that. I am going--to see--Rosalie Evanturel." Jo was troubled but
not dumfounded. It had slowly crept into his mind that Charley loved the
girl, though he had no real ground for suspicion. His will, however, had
been so long the slave of the other man's that he had far-off reflections
of his thoughts. He made no reply in words, but nodded his head.
"I want you to stay here, Jo. If I don't come back, and--and she does,
stand by her, Jo. I can trust you." "You will come back, M'sieu'--but you
will come back, then?" Jo asked heavily.
"If I can, Jo--if I can," he answered.
Long after he had gone, Jo wandered up and down among the trees on the
river-road, up which Charley had disappeared with Jo's dogs and sled. He
kept shaking his head mournfully.
CHAPTER XLVI
THE FORGOTTEN MAN
It was Easter morning, and the good sunrise of a perfect spring made
radiant the high hill above the town. Rosy-fingered morn touched with
magic colour the masts and scattered sails of the ships upon the great
river, and spires and towers quivered with rainbow light. The city was
waking cheerfully, though the only active life was in the pealing bells
and on the deep flowing rivers. The streets were empty yet, save for an
assiduous priest or the cart of a milkman. Here and there a window opened
and a drowsy head was thrust into the eager air. These saw a bearded
countryman with his team of six dogs and his little cart going slowly up
the street. It was plain the man had come a long distance--from the
mountains in the east or south, no doubt, where horses were few, and
dogs, canoes, and oxen the means of transportation.
As the man moved slowly through the streets, his dogs still gallantly
full of life after their hard journey, he did not stare about him after
the manner of countrymen. His movements had intelligence and freedom. He
was an unusual figure for a woodsman or river-man--he did not wear
ear-rings or a waist-sash as did the river-men, and he did not turn in
his toes like a woodsman. Yet he was plainly a man from the far
mountains.
The man with the dogs did not heed the few curious looks turned his way,
but held his head down as though walking in familiar places. Now and then
he spoke to his dogs, and once he stopped before a newspaper office,
which had a placard bearing these lines:
The Coming Passion Play In the Chaudiere Valley.
He looked at it mechanically, for, though he was concerned in the Passion
Play and the Chaudiere Valley, it was an abstraction to him at this
moment. His mind was absorbed by other things.
Though he looked neither to right nor to left, he was deeply affected by
all round him.
At last he came to a certain street, where he and his dogs travelled more
quickly. It opened into a square, where bells were booming in the steeple
of a church. Shops and offices in the street were shut, but a saloon-door
was open, and over the doorway was the legend: Jean Jolicoeur, Licensed
to sell Wine, Beer, and other Spirituous and Fermented Liquors.
Nearly opposite was a lawyer's office, with a new-painted sign. It had
once read, in plain black letters, Charles Steele, Barrister, etc.; now
it read, in gold letters and many flourishes of the sign-painter's art,
Rockwell and Tremblay, Barristers, Attorneys, etc.
Here the man looked up with trouble in his eyes. He could see dimly the
desk and the window beside which he had sat for so many years, and on the
wall a map of the city glowed with the incoming sun.
He moved on, passing the saloon with the open door. The landlord, in his
shirt-sleeves, was standing in the doorway. He nodded, then came out to
the edge of the board-walk.
"Come a long way, M'sieu'?" he asked.
"Four days' journey," answered the man gruffly through his beard, looking
the landlord in the eyes. If this landlord, who in the past had seen him
so often and so closely, did not recognise him, surely no one else would.
It was, however, a curious recurrence of habit that, as he looked at the
landlord, he instinctively felt for his eye-glass, which he had discarded
when he left Chaudiere. For an instant there was an involuntary arrest of
Jean Jolicoeur's look, as though memory had been roused, but this swiftly
passed, and he said:
"Fine dogs, them! We never get that kind hereabouts now, M'sieu'. Ever
been to the city before?"
"I've never been far from home before," answered the Forgotten Man.
"You'd better keep your eyes open, my friend, though you've got a sharp
pair in your head--sharp as Beauty Steele's almost. There's rascals in
the river-side drinking-places that don't let the left hand know what the
right does."
"My dogs and I never trust anybody," said the Forgotten Man, as one of
the dogs snarled at the landlord's touch. "So I can take care of myself,
even if I haven't eyes as sharp as Beauty Steele's, whoever he is."
The landlord laughed. "Beauty's only skin-deep, they say. Charley Steele
was a lawyer; his office was over there"--he pointed across the street.
"He went wrong. He come here too often--that wasn't my fault. He had an
eye like a hawk, and you couldn't read it. Now I can read your eye like a
book. There's a bit of spring in 'em, M'sieu'. His eyes were hard
winter-ice five feet deep and no fishing under--froze to the bed. He had
a tongue like a cross-cut saw. He's at the bottom of the St. Lawrence,
leaving a bad job behind him.
"Have a drink--hein?" He jerked a finger backwards to the saloon door.
"It's Sunday, but stolen waters are sweet, sure!"
The Forgotten Man shook his head. "I don't drink, thank you."
"It'd do you good. You're dead beat. You've been travelling hard--eh?"
"I've come a long way, and travelled all night."
"Going on?"
"I am going back to-morrow."
"On business?"
Charley nodded--he glanced involuntarily at the sign across the street.
Jean Jolicoeur saw the look. "Lawyer's business, p'r'aps?"
"A lawyer's business--yes."
"Ah, if Charley Steele was here!"
"I have as good a lawyer as--"
The landlord laughed scornfully. "They're not made. He'd legislate the
devil out of the Pit. Where are you going to stay, M'sieu'?"
"Somewhere cheap--along the river," answered the Forgotten Man.
Jolicoeur's good-natured face became serious. "I'll tell you a
place--it's honest. It's the next street, a few hundred yards down, on
the left. There's a wooden fish over the door. It's called The Black
Bass--that hotel. Say I sent you. Good luck to you, countryman! Ah, la;
la, there's the second bell--I must be getting to Mass!" With a nod he
turned and went into the house.
The Forgotten Man passed slowly up the street, into the side street, and
followed it till he came to The Black Bass, and turned into the small
stable-yard. A stable-man was stirring. He at once put his dogs into a
little pen set apart for them, saw them fed from the kitchen, and,
betaking himself to a little room behind the bar of the hotel, ordered
breakfast. The place was empty, save for the servant--the household were
at Mass. He looked round the room abstractedly. He was thinking of a
crippled man in a hospital, of a girl from a village in the Chaudiere
Valley. He thought with a shiver of a white house on the hill. He thought
of himself as he had never done before in his life. Passing along the
street, he had realised that he had no moral claim upon anything or
anybody within these precincts of his past life. The place was a tomb to
him.
As he sat in the little back parlour of The Black Bass, eating his frugal
breakfast of eggs and bread and milk, the meaning of it all slowly dawned
upon him. Through his intellect he had known something of humanity, but
he had never known men. He had thought of men in the mass, and despised
them because of their multitudinous duplication, and their typical
weaknesses; but he had never known one man or one woman from the subtler,
surer divination of the heart. His intellect had made servants and lures
of his emotions and his heart, for even his every case in court had been
won by easy and selfish command of all those feelings in mankind which
make possible personal understanding.
In this little back parlour it came to him with sudden force how, long
ago, he had cut himself off from any claim upon his fellows--not only by
his conduct, but by his merciless inhuman intelligence working upon the
merciful human life about him. He never remembered to have had any real
feeling till on that day with Kathleen--the day he died. The bitter
complaint of a woman he had wronged cruelly, by having married her, had
wrung from him his own first wail of life, in the one cry "Kathleen!"
As he sat eating his simple meal his pulses were beating painfully. Every
nerve in his body seemed to pluck at the angry flesh. There flashed
across his mind in sympathetic sensation a picture. It was the
axe-factory on the river, before which he used to stand as a boy, and
watch the men naked to the waist, with huge hairy arms and streaming
faces, toiling in the red glare, the trip-hammers endlessly pounding upon
the glowing metal. In old days it had suggested pictures of gods and
demi-gods toiling in the workshops of the primeval world. So the whole
machinery of being seemed to be toiling in the light of an awakened
conscience, to the making of a man. It seemed to him that all his life
was being crowded into these hours. His past was here--its posing, its
folly, its pitiful uselessness, and its shame. Kathleen and Billy were
here, with all the problems that involved them. Rosalie was here, with
the great, the last problem.
"Nothing matters but that--but Rosalie," he said to himself as he turned
to look out of the window at the wrangling dogs gnawing bones. "Here she
is in the midst of all I once knew, and I know that I am no more a part
of it than she is. She and Kathleen may have met face to face in these
streets--who can tell! The world is large, but there's a sort of
whipper-in of Fate, who drives the people wearing the same livery into
one corner in the end. If they met"--he rose and walked hastily up and
down--"what then? I have a feeling that Rosalie would recognise her as
plainly as though the word Kathleen were stitched on her breast."
There was a clock on the wall. He looked at it. "It will not be safe to
go out until evening. Then I can go to the hospital, and watch her coming
out." He realised with satisfaction that many people coming from Mass
must pass the inn. There was a chance of his seeing Rosalie, if she had
gone to early Mass. This street lay in her way from the hospital. "One
look--ah, one look!" For this one look he had come. For this, and to
secure that which would save Rosalie from want always, if anything should
happen to him. This too had been greatly on his mind. There was a way to
give her what was his very own, which would rob no one and serve her well
indeed.
Looking at his face in the mirror over the mantel, he said to himself
"I might have had ten thousand friends, yet I have a thousand enemies,
who grin at the memory of the drunken fop down among the eels and the
cat-fish. Every chance was with me then. I come back here, and--and
Jolicoeur tells me the brutal truth. But if I had had ambition"--a wave
of the feeling of the old life passed over him--"if I had had ambition as
I was then, I should have been a monster. It was all so paltry that, in
sheer disgust, I should have kicked every ladder down that helped me up.
I should have sacrificed everything to myself."
He stopped short and stared, for, in the mirror, he saw a girl passing
through the stable-yard towards the quarrelling dogs in the kennel. He
clapped his hand to his mouth to stop a cry. It was Rosalie.
He did not turn round but looked at her in the mirror, as though it were
the last look he might give on earth.
He could hear her voice speaking to the dogs: "Ah, my friends, ah, my
dears! I know you every one. Jo Portugais is here. I know your bark, you,
Harpy, and you, Lazybones, and you, Cloud and London! I know you every
one. I heard you as I came from Mass, beauty dears. Ah, you know me,
sweethearts? Ah, God bless you for coming! You have come to bring us
home; you have come to fetch us home--father and me." The paws of one of
the dogs was on her shoulder, and his nose was in her hair.
Charley heard her words, for the window was open, and he listened and
watched now with an infinite relief in his look. Her face was half turned
towards him. It was pale-very pale and sad. It was Rosalie as of
old--thank God, as of old!--but more beautiful in the touching sadness,
the far-off longing, of her look.
"I must go and see your master," she said to the dogs. "Down--down,
Lazybones!"
There was no time to lose--he must not meet her ere. He went into the
outer hall hastily. The servant was passing through. "If any one asks for
Jo Portugais," he said, "say that I'll be back to-morrow morning--I'm
going across the river to-day."
"Certainly, M'sieu'," said the girl, and smiled because of the piece of
silver he put in her hand.
As he heard the side door open he stepped through the front doorway into
the street, and disappeared round a corner.
CHAPTER XLVII
ONE WAS TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT
Rosalie carried to the hospital that afternoon a lighter heart than she
had known for many a day. The sight of Jo Portugais' dogs had roused her
out of the apathy which had been growing on her in this patient but
hopeless watching beside her father. She had always a smile and a
cheerful word for the poor man. A settled sorrow hung upon her face,
however, taking away its colour, but giving it a sweet gravity which made
her slave more than one young doctor of the hospital, for whom, however,
she showed no more than a friendly frankness, free from
self-consciousness. For hours she would sit in reverie beside her
sleeping father, her heart "over the water to Charley." As in a trance,
she could see him sitting at his bench, bent over his work, now and again
lifting up his head to look across to the post-office, where another hand
than hers sorted letters now.
Day by day her father weakened and faded away. All that was possible to
medical skill had been done. As the money left by her mother dwindled,
she had no anxiety, for she knew that the life she so tenderly cherished
would not outlast the gold which lengthened out the tenuous chain of
being. This last illness of her father's had been the salvation of her
mind, the saving of her health. Maybe it had been the saving of her soul;
for at times a curious contempt of life came upon her--she who had loved
it so eagerly and fully. There descended on her then the bitter
conviction that never again would she see the man she loved. Then not
even Mrs. Flynn could call back "the fun o' the world" to her step and
her tongue and her eye. At first there had been a timid shrinking, but
soon her father and herself were brighter and better for the old
Irishwoman's presence, and she began to take comfort in Mrs. Flynn.
Mrs. Flynn gave hopefulness to whatever life she touched, and Rosalie,
buoyant and hopeful enough by nature, responded to the living warmth and
the religion of life in the Irishwoman's heart.
"'Tis worth the doin', ivery bit of it, darlin', the bither an' the
swate, the hard an' the aisy, the rough an' the smooth, the good an' the
bad," said Mrs. Flynn to her this very Easter morning. "Even the avil is
worth doin', if so be 'twas not mint, an' the good is in yer heart in the
ind, an' ye do be turnip' to the Almoighty, repentin' an' glad to be
aloive: provin' to Him 'twas worth while makin' the world an' you, to
want, an' worry, an' work, an' play, an' pick the flowers, an' bleed o'
the thorns, an' dhrink the sun, an' ate the dust, an' be lovin' all the
way! Ah, that's it, darlin'," persisted Mrs. Flynn, "'tis lovin' all the
way makes it aisier. There's manny kinds o' love. There's lad an' lass,
there's maid an' man. An' that last is spring, an' all the birds singin',
an' shtorms now an' thin, an' siparations, an' misthrust, an' God in
hivin bein' that aisy wid ye for bein' fools an' children, an' bringin'
ye thegither in the ind, if so be ye do be lovin' as man an' maid should
love, wid all yer heart. Thin there's the love o' man an' wife. Shure,
that's the love that lasts, if it shtarts right. Shure, it doesn't always
shtart wid the sun shinin.' 'Will ye marry me?' says Teddy Flynn to me.
'I will,' says I. 'Then I'll come back from Canaday to futch ye,' says
he, wid a tear in his eye.
"'For what's a man in ould Ireland that has a head for annything but
puttaties! There's land free in Canaday, an' I'm goin' to make a home for
ye, Mary,' says he, wavin' a piece of paper in the air. 'Are ye, thin?'
says I. He goes away that night, an' the next mornin' I have a lether
from him, sayin' he's shtartin' that day for Canaday. He hadn't the heart
to tell me to me face. Fwaht do I do thin? I begs, borrers, an' stales,
an' I reached that ship wan minnit before she sailed. There was no praste
aboord, but we was married six weeks afther at Quebec. And thegither we
lived wid ups an' downs--but no ups an' downs to the love of us for
twenty years, blessed be God for all His mercies!"
Rosalie had listened with eyes that hungrily watched every expression,
ears that weighed eagerly every inflection; for she was hearing the story
of another's love, and it did not seem strange to her that a woman, old,
red-faced, and fat, should be telling it.
Yet there were times when she wept till she was exhausted; when all her
girlhood was drowned in the overflow of her eyes; when there was a sense
of irrevocable loss upon her. Then it was, in her fear of soul and
pitiful loneliness, that her lover--the man she would have died
for--seemed to have deserted her. Then it was that a sudden hatred
against him rose up in her--to be swept away as swiftly as it came by the
memory of his broken tale of love, his passionate words: "I have never
loved any one but you in all my life, Rosalie." And also, there was that
letter from Chaudiere, which said that in the hour when the greatest
proof of his love must be given he would give it. Reading the letter
again, hatred, doubt, even sorrow, passed from her, and her imagination
pictured the hour when, disguise and secrecy ended, he would step forward
before all the world and say: "I take Rosalie Evanturel to be my wife."
Despite the gusts of emotion that swayed her at times, in the deepest
part of her being she trusted him completely.