The Right of Way, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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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.