The Right of Way, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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When she reached the hospital this Sunday afternoon her step was quick,
her smile bright--though she had not been to confession as was her duty
on Easter day. The impulse towards it had been great, but her secret was
not her own, and the passionate desire to give relief to her full heart
was overborne by thought of the man. Her soul was her own, but this
secret of their love was his as well as hers. She knew that she was the
only just judge between.
Soon after she entered the ward, the chief surgeon said that all that
could be done for her father had now been done, and that as M. Evanturel
constantly asked to be taken back to Chaudiere (he never said to die,
though they knew what was in his mind), he might now make the journey,
partly by river, partly by land. It seemed to the delighted and excited
Rosalie that Jo Portugais had been sent to her as a surprise, and that
his team of dogs was to take her father back.
She sat by her father's bed this beautiful, wonderful Sunday afternoon,
and talked cheerfully, and laughed a little, and told M. Evanturel of the
dogs, and together they looked out of the window to the far-off hills, in
their golden purple, beyond which, in the valley of the Chaudiere, was
their little home. With her father's hand in hers the girl dreamed dreams
again, and it seemed to her that she was the very Rosalie Evanturel of
old, whose thoughts were bounded by a river and a hill, a post-office and
a church, a catechism and a few score of books. Here in the crowded city
she had come to be a woman who, bitterly shaken in soul, knew life's
sufferings; who had, during the past few months, read with avidity
history, poetry, romance, fiction, and the drama, English and French; for
in every one she found something that said: "You have felt that." In
these long months she had learned more than she had known or learned in
all her previous life.
As she sat looking out into the eastern sky she became conscious of
voices, and of a group of people who came slowly down the ward, sometimes
speaking to the sick and crippled. It was not a general visitors' day,
but one reserved for the few to come and say a kindly word to the
suffering, to bring some flowers and distribute books. Rosalie had always
been absent at this hour before, for she shrank from strangers; but
to-day she had stayed on unthinking. It mattered nothing to her who came
and went. Her heart was over the hills, and the only tie she had here was
with this poor cripple whose hand she held. If she did not resent the
visit of these kindly strangers, she resolutely held herself apart from
the object of their visit with a sense of distance and cold dignity. If
she had given Charley something of herself, she had in turn taken
something from him, something unlike her old self, delicately non-intime.
Knowledge of life had rationalised her emotions to a definite degree, had
given her the pride of self-repression. She had had need of it in these
surroundings, where her beauty drew not a little dangerous attention,
which she had held at arm's-length--her great love for one man made her
invulnerable.
Now, as the visitors came near, she did not turn towards them, but still
sat, her chin on her hand, looking out across the hills, in resolute
abstraction. She felt her father's fingers press hers, as if to draw her
attention, for he, weak man, was ever ready to open his hand and heart to
any friendly soul. She took no notice, but held his hand firmly, as
though to say that she had no wish to see.
She was conscious now that they were beside her father's bed. She hoped
that they would pass. But no, the feet stopped, there was whispering, and
then she heard a voice say, "Rather rude!" then another, "Not wanted,
that's plain!"--the first a woman's, the second a man's. Then another
voice, clear and cold, and well modulated, said to her father: "They tell
me you have been here a long time, and have had much pain. You will be
glad to go, I am sure."
Something in the voice startled her. Some familiar sound or inflection
struck upon her ear with a far-off note, some lost tone she knew. Of
what, of whom, did this voice remind her? She turned round quickly and
caught two cold blue eyes looking at her. The face was older than her
own, handsome and still, and happy in a placid sort of way. Few gusts of
passion or of pain had passed across that face. The figure was shapely to
the newest fashion, the bonnet was perfect, the hand which held two books
was prettily gloved. Polite charity was written in her manner and
consecrated every motion. On the instant, Rosalie resented this fine
epitome of convention, this dutiful charity-monger, herself the centre of
an admiring quartet. She saw the whispering, she noted the well-bred
disguise of interest, and she met the visitor's gaze with cold courtesy.
The other read the look in her face, and a slightly pacifying smile
gathered at her lips.
"We are glad to hear that your father is better. He has been ill a long
time?"
Rosalie started again, for the voice perplexed her--rather, not the
voice, but the inflection, the deliberation.
She bowed, and set her lips, but, chancing to glance at her father, she
saw that he was troubled by her manner. Flashing a look of love at him,
she adjusted the pillow under his head, and said to her questioner in a
low voice: "He is better now, thank you."
Encouraged, the other rejoined: "May I leave one or two books for him to
read--or for you to read to him?" Then added hastily, for she saw a
curious look in Rosalie's eyes: "We can have mutual friends in books,
though we cannot be friends with each other. Books are the go-betweens of
humanity."
Rosalie's heart leapt, she flushed, then grew slightly pale, for it was
not tone or inflection alone that disturbed her now, but words
themselves. A voice from over the hills seemed to say these things to
her. A haunting voice from over the hills had said them to her--these
very words.
"Friends need no go-betweens," she said quietly, "and enemies should not
use them."
She heard a voice say, "By Jove!" in a tone of surprise, as though it
were wonderful the girl from Chaudiere should have her wits about her. So
Rosalie interpreted it.
"Have you many friends here?" asked the cold voice, meant to be kindly
and pacific. It was schooled to composure, because it gave advantage in
life's intercourse, not from any inner urbanity.
"Some need many friends, some but a few. I come from a country where one
only needs a few."
"Where is your country, I wonder?" said the cold echo of another voice.
Charley had passed out of Kathleen's life--he was dead to her, his memory
scorned and buried. She loved the man to whom she supposed she was
married; she was only too glad to let the dust of death and time cover
every trace of Charley from her gaze; she would have rooted out every
particle of association: yet his influence on her had been so great that
she had unconsciously absorbed some of his idiosyncrasies--in the tone of
his voice, in his manner of speaking. To-day she had even repeated
phrases he had used.
"Beyond the hills," said Rosalie, turning away.
"Is it not strange?" said the voice. "That is the title of one of the
books I have just brought--'Beyond the Hills'. It is by an English
writer. This other book is French. May I leave them?"
Rosalie inclined her head. It would make her own position less dignified
if she refused them. "Books are always welcome to my father," she said.
There was an instant's pause, as though the fashionable lady would offer
her hand; but their eyes met, and they only bowed. The lady moved on with
a smile, leaving a perfume of heliotrope behind her.
"Where is your country, I wonder?"--the voice of the lady rang in
Rosalie's ears. As she sat at the window again, long after the visitors
had disappeared, the words, "I wonder--I wonder--I wonder!" kept beating
in her brain. It was absurd that this woman should remind her of the
tailor of Chaudiere.
Suddenly she was roused by her father's voice. "This is beautiful--ah,
but beautiful, Rosalie!"
She turned towards him. He was reading the book in his hand--'Beyond the
Hills'. "Listen," he said, and he read, in English: "'Compensation is the
other name for God. How often is it that those whom disease or accident
has robbed of active life find greater inner rejoicing and a larger
spiritual itinerary! It would seem that withdrawal from the ruder
activities gives a clearer seeing. Also for these, so often, is granted a
greater love, which comes of the consecration of other lives to theirs.
And these too have their reward, for they are less encompassed by the
vanities of the world, having the joy of self-sacrifice.'" He looked at
Rosalie with an unnatural brightness in his eyes, and she smiled at him
now and stroked his hand.
"It has been all compensation to me," he said, after a moment. "You have
been a good daughter to me, Rosalie."
She shook her head and smiled. "Good fathers think they have good
daughters," she answered, choking back a sob.
He closed the book and let it lie upon the coverlet. "I will sleep now,"
he said, and turned on his side. She arranged his pillow, and adjusted
the bedclothes to his comfort.
"Good-night," he said, as, with a faint hand, he drew her head down and
kissed her. "Good girl! Goodnight!"
She patted his hand. "It is not night yet, father."
He was already half asleep. "Good-night!" he said again, and fell into a
deep sleep.
She sat down by the window, in her hand the book he had laid down. A
hundred thoughts were busy in her brain--of her father; of the woman who
had just left; of her lover over the hills. The woman's voice came to her
again--a far-off mockery. She opened the book mechanically and turned
over the pages. Presently her eyes were riveted to a page. On it was
written the word Kathleen.
For a moment she sat transfixed. The word Kathleen and the haunting voice
became one, and her mind ran back to the day when she had said to
Charley: "Who is Kathleen?"
She sprang to her feet. What should she do? Follow the woman? Find out
who and what she was? Go to the young surgeon who had accompanied them,
ask him who she was, and so learn the clue to the mystery concerning her
lover?
In the midst of her confusion she became sharply conscious of two things:
the approach of Mrs. Flynn, and her father's heavy breathing. Dropping
the book, she leaned over her father's bed and looked closely at him.
Then she turned to the frightened and anxious Mrs. Flynn.
"Go for the priest," she said. "He is dying."
"I'll send some one. I'm stayin' here by you, darlin'," said the old
woman, and hurried to the room of the young surgeon for a messenger.
As the sun went down, the cripple went out upon a long journey alone.
CHAPTER XLVIII
"WHERE THE TREE OF LIFE IS BLOOMING--"
As Charley walked the bank of the great river by the city where his old
life lay dead, he struggled with the new life which--long or short--must
henceforth belong to the village of the woman he loved. . . . But as he
fought with himself in the long night-watch it was borne in upon him that
though he had been shown the Promised Land, he might never find there a
habitation and a home. The hymn he had mockingly sung the night he had
been done to death at the Cote Dorion sang in his senses now, an
ever-present mockery:
"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."
In the uttermost corner of his intelligence he felt with sure prescience
that, however befalling, the end of all was not far off. In the exercise
of new faculties, which had more to do with the soul than with reason, he
now believed what he could not see, and recognised what was not proved.
Labour of the hand, trouble, sorrow, and perplexity, charity and
humanity, had cleared and simplified his life, had sweetened his
intelligence, and taken the place of ambition. He saw life now through
the lens of personal duty, which required that the thing nearest to one's
hand should be done first.
But as foreboding pressed upon him there came the thought of what should
come after--to Rosalie. His thoughts took a practical form--her good was
uppermost in his mind. All Rosalie had to live on was her salary as
postmistress, for it was in every one's knowledge that the little else
she had was being sacrificed to her father's illness. Suppose, then, that
through illness or accident she lost her position, what could she do? He
might leave her what he had--but what had he? Enough to keep her for a
year or two--no more. All his earnings had gone to the poor and the
suffering of Chaudiere.
There was one way. It had suggested itself to him so often in Chaudiere,
and had been one of the two reasons for bringing him here. There were his
dead mother's pearls and one thousand dollars in notes behind a secret
panel in the white house on the hill, in this very city where he was. The
pearls were worth over ten thousand dollars--in all, there would be
eleven thousand, enough to secure Rosalie from poverty. What should
Kathleen do with his mother's pearls, even if they were found by her?
What should she do with his money did she not loathe his memory? Had not
all his debts been paid? These pearls and this money were all his own.
But to get them. To go now to the white house on the hill; to face that
old life even for an hour, a knocking at the door of a haunted house--he
shrank from the thought. He would have to enter the place like a thief in
the night.
Yet for Rosalie he must take the risk--he must go.
CHAPTER XLIX
THE OPEN GATE
It was a still night, and the moon, delicately bright, gave forth that
radiance which makes spiritual to the eye the coarsest thing. Inside the
white house on the hill all was dark. Sleep had settled on it long before
midnight, for, on the morrow, its master and mistress hoped to make a
journey to the valley of the Chaudiere, where the Passion Play was being
performed by habitants and Indians. The desire to see the play had become
an infatuation in the minds of the two, eager for some interest to
relieve the monotony of a happy life.
But as all slept, a figure in the dress of a habitant moved through the
passages of the house stealthily, yet with an assurance unusual in the
thief or housebreaker. In the darkest passages his step was sure, and his
hand fastened on latch or door-knob with perfect precision. He came at
last into a large hallway flooded by the moon, pale, watchful, his beard
frosted by the light. In the stillness of his tread and the composed
sorrow of his face he seemed like one long dead who "revisits the
glimpses of the moon."
At last he entered a room the door of which stood wide open. In this room
had been begotten, or had had exercise, whatever of him was worth
approving in the days before he died. It was a place of books and statues
and tapestry, and the dark oak was nobly smutched of Time. This sombre
oaken wall had been handed down through four generations from the man's
great-grandfather: the breath of generations had steeped it in human
association.
Entering, he turned for an instant with clinched hands to look at another
door across the hall. Behind that door were two people who despised his
memory, who conspired to forget his very name. This house was the
woman's, for he had given it to her the day he died. But that she could
live there with all the old associations, with memories that, however
bitter, however shaming, had a sort of sacredness, struck into his soul
with a harrowing pain. There she was whom he had spared--himself; whose
happiness had lain in his hands, and he had given it to her. Yet her very
existence robbed himself of happiness, and made sorrowful a life dearer
than his own.
Kathleen lay asleep in that room--he fancied he could hear her breathing;
and, by the hospital on the hill, up beyond the point of pines, in a
little cottage which he could see from the great window, lay Rosalie with
sleepless eyes and wan cheeks, longing for morning and the stir of life
to help her to forget.
For Rosalie he had come to this house once more. For her sake he was
revisiting this torture-chamber, from which he knew he must go again,
blanched and shaken, as a man goes from a tomb where his dead lie
unforgiving.
He shut his teeth, went swiftly across the room, and beside a great
carved oak table touched a hidden spring in the side of it. The spring
snapped; the panel creaked a little and drew back. It seemed to him that
the noise he made must be heard in every part of the house, so sensitive
was his ear, so deep was the silence on which the sounds had broken. He
turned round to the doorway to listen before he put his hand within the
secret place.
There was no sound. He turned his attention to the table. Drawing forth
two packets with a gasp of relief, he put them in his pocket, and, with
extreme care, proceeded to close the panel. By rubbing the edges of the
wood with grease from a candle on the table, he was able to readjust the
panel in silence. But, as the spring came home, he became suddenly
conscious of a presence in the room. A shiver passed through him. He
turned round-softly, quickly. He was in the shadow and near great
window-curtains, and his fingers instinctively clutched them as he saw a
figure in white at the door of the room. Slowly, strangely deliberate,
the figure moved further into the room.
Charley's breath stopped. He felt his face flush, and a strange weakness
came on him. There before him stood Kathleen.
She was in her night-gown, and she stood still, as though listening; yet,
as Charley looked closer, he realised that it was an unconscious, passive
listening, and that she did not know he was there.
Her mind only was listening. She was asleep. Was it possible that his
very presence in the house had touched some old note of memory, which,
automatically responding, had carried her from her bed in this
somnambulistic trance? That subtle telegraphy between our subconscious
selves which we cannot reduce to a law, yet alarming us at times,
announced to Kathleen's mind, independent of the waking senses, the
presence once familiar to this house for so many years. In her sleep she
had involuntarily responded to the call of Charley's approach.
Once, in the past, the night her uncle died, she had walked in her sleep,
and the memory of this flashed upon Charley now. Silently he came closer
to her. The moonlight shone on her face. He could see plainly she was
asleep. His position was painful and perilous. If she waked, the shock to
herself would be great; if she waked and saw him, what disaster might not
occur!
Yet he had no agitation now, only clearness of mind and a curious sense
of confusion that he should see her en dishabille--the old fastidious
sense mingling with the feeling that she was now a stranger to him, and
that, waking, she would fly embarrassed from his presence, as he was
ready to fly from hers. He was about to steal to the door and escape
before she waked, but she turned round, moved through the doorway, and
glided down the hall. He followed silently.
She moved to the staircase, then slowly down it, and through a passage to
a morning-room, where, opening a pair of French windows, she passed out
onto the lawn. He followed, not more than a dozen paces behind her. His
safety lay in getting outside, where he could easily hide among the
bushes, should someone else appear and an alarm be raised.
She crossed the lawn swiftly, a white, ghostlike figure. In the middle of
the lawn she stopped short once as if in doubt what to do--as a
thought-reader pauses in his search for the mental scent again, ere he
rushes upon the object of his search with the certainty of instinct.
Presently she moved on, going directly towards a gate that opened out on
the cliff above the river. In Charley's day this gate had been often
used, for it gave upon four steep wooden steps leading to a narrow shelf
of rock below. From the edge of this cliff a rope-ladder dropped fifty
feet to the river. For years he had used this rope-ladder to get down to
his boat, and often, when they were first married, Kathleen used to come
and watch him descend, and sometimes, just at the very first, would
descend also. As he stole into the grounds this evening he had noticed,
however, that the rope-ladder was gone, and that new steps were being
built. He had also mechanically observed that the gate was open.
For an instant he watched her slowly moving towards the gate. At first he
did not realise the situation. Suddenly her danger flashed upon him.
Passing through the gateway, she must fall over the cliff.
Her life was in his hands.
He could rush forward swiftly and close the gate, then, raising an alarm,
get away before he was seen; or--he could escape now.
What had he to do with her? A weird, painful suggestion crept into his
brain: he was not responsible for her, and he was responsible for a woman
up there by the hospital, whose home was the valley of the Chaudiere!
If Kathleen were gone, what barrier would there be between him and
Rosalie? What had he to do with this strange disposition of events?
Kathleen was never absent from her church twice on Sundays; she was
devoted to work of all sorts for the church on week-days--where was her
intervening personal Providence? If Providence permitted her to
die?--well, she had had two years of happiness with the man she loved, at
some expense to himself--was it not fair that Rosalie should have her
share? Had he the right to call upon Rosalie for constant self-sacrifice,
when, by shutting his eyes now, by being dead to Kathleen and her need,
as he was dead to the world he once knew, the way would be clear to marry
Rosalie?
Dead--he was dead to the world and to Kathleen! Should his ghost
interpose between her and the death now within two-score feet of her? Who
could know? It was grim, it was awful, but was it not a wild kind of
justice? Who could blame? It was the old Charley Steele, the Charley
Steele of the court-room, who argued back humanity and the inherent
rightness of things.
But it was only a moment's pause. The thoughts flashed by like the
lightning impressions of a dream, and a voice said in his ear, the voice
of the new Charley with a conscience:
"Save her--save her!"
Even as he was conscious of another presence on the lawn, he rushed
forward noiselessly. Stealing between Kathleen and the gate-she was
within five feet of it he closed and locked it. Then, with a quick glance
at her sleeping face-it was engraven on his memory ever after like a dead
face in a coffin--he ran along the fence among the shrubbery. A man not
fifty feet away called to him.
"Hush--she is asleep!" Charley whispered, and disappeared.
It was Fairing himself who saw this deed which saved Kathleen's life.
Awaking, and not finding her, he had glanced towards the window, and had
seen her on the lawn. He had rushed down to her, in time to see her saved
by a strange bearded man in habitant dress. His one glance at the man's
face, as it turned towards him, produced an extraordinary effect upon his
mind, not soon to be dispelled--a haunting, ghostlike apparition, which
kept reminding him of something or somebody, he could not tell what or
whom. The whispering voice and the breathless words, "Hush--she is
asleep!" repeated themselves over and over again in his brain, as, taking
Kathleen's hand, he led her, unresisting, and still sleeping, back to her
room. In agitated thankfulness he resolved not to speak of the event to
Kathleen, or to any one else, lest it should come to her ears and
frighten her.
He would, however, keep a sharp lookout for the man who had saved her
life, and would reward him duly. The face of the bearded habitant came
between him and his sleep.
Meanwhile this disturber of a woman's dreams and a man's sleep was
hurrying to an inn in the town by the waterside, where he met another
habitant with a team of dogs--Jo Portugais. Jo had not been able to bear
the misery of suspense and anxiety, and had come seeking him. There was
little speech between them.
"You have not been found out, M'sieu'?" was Jo's anxious question.
"No, no, but I have had a bad night, Jo. Get the dogs together."
A little later, as Charley made ready to go back to Chaudiere, Jo said:
"You look as if you'd had a black dream, M'sieu'." With the river
rustling by, and the trees stirring in the first breath of dawn, Charley
told Jo what had happened.
For a moment the murderer did not speak or stir, for a struggle was going
on in his breast also; then he stooped quickly, caught his companion's
hand, and kissed it.
"I could not have done it, M'sieu'," he said hoarsely. They parted, Jo to
remain behind as they had agreed, to be near Rosalie if needed; Charley
to return to the valley of the Chaudiere.