The Right of Way, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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"You've never been particular about your own business. Pshaw, what's the
use of preaching to me!"
Charley pushed his chair back, and his look had just a touch of surprise,
a hint of embarrassment. This youth, then, thought him something of a
fool: read him by virtue of his ornamentations, his outer idiosyncrasy!
This boy, whose iniquity was under his finger on that table, despised him
for his follies, and believed in him less than his wife--two people who
had lived closer to him than any others in the world. Before he answered
he lifted the glass beside him and drank to the last drop, then slowly
set it down and said, with a dangerous smile:
"I have always been particular about other people's finances, and the
statement that you haven't isn't preaching, it's an indictment--so it is,
Billy."
"An indictment!" Billy bit his finger-nails now, and his voice shook.
"That's what the jury would say, and the judge would do the preaching.
You have stolen twenty-five thousand dollars of trust-moneys!"
For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. From outside in the
square came the Marche-t'en! of a driver, and the loud cackling laugh of
some loafer at the corner. Charley's look imprisoned his brother-in-law,
and Billy's eyes were fixed in a helpless stare on Charley's finger,
which held like a nail the record of his infamy.
Billy drew himself back with a jerk of recovery, and said with bravado,
but with fear in look and motion: "Don't stare like that. The thing's
done, and you can't undo it, and that's all there is about it." Charley
had been staring at the youth-staring and not seeing him really, but
seeing his wife and watching her lips say again: "You are ruining Billy!"
He was not sober, but his mind was alert, his eccentric soul was getting
kaleidoscopic glances at strange facts of life as they rushed past his
mind into a painful red obscurity.
"Oh yes, it can be undone, and it's not all there is about it!" he
answered quietly.
He got up suddenly, went to the door, locked it, put the key in his
pocket, and, coming back, sat down again beside the table.
Billy watched him with shrewd, hunted eyes. What did Charley mean to do?
To give him in charge? To send him to jail? To shut him out from the
world where he had enjoyed himself so much for years and years? Never to
go forth free among his fellows! Never to play the gallant with all the
pretty girls he knew! Never to have any sports, or games, or tobacco, or
good meals, or canoeing in summer, or tobogganing in winter, or
moose-hunting, or any sort of philandering!
The thoughts that filled his mind now were not those of regret for his
crime, but the fears of the materialist and sentimentalist, who revolted
at punishment and all the shame and deprivation it would involve.
"What did you do with the money?" said Charley, after a minute's silence,
in which two minds had travelled far.
"I put it into mines."
"What mines?"
"Out on Lake Superior."
"What sort of mines?"
"Arsenic."
Charley's eye-glass dropped, and rattled against the gold button of his
white waistcoat.
"In arsenic-mines!" He put the monocle to his eye again. "On whose
advice?"
"John Brown's."
"John Brown's!" Charley Steele's ideas were suddenly shaken and scattered
by a man's name, as a bolting horse will crumple into confusion a crowd
of people. So this was the way his John Brown had come home to roost. He
lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained air. He was
terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself together. Five
years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid native ability,
but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his will and the
sequence of his intellect.
"It was not investment?" he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his mouth.
"No. What would have been the good?"
"Of course. Speculation--you bought heavily to sell on an expected rise?"
"Yes."
There was something so even in Charley's manner and tone that Billy
misinterpreted it. It seemed hopeful that Charley was going to make the
best of a bad job.
"You see," Billy said eagerly, "it seemed dead certain. He showed me the
way the thing was being done, the way the company was being floated, how
the market in New York was catching hold. It looked splendid. I thought I
could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have a nice
little scoop, at no one's cost. I thought it was a dead-sure thing--and I
was hard up, and Kathleen wouldn't lend me any more. If Kathleen had only
done the decent thing--"
A sudden flush of anger swept over Charley's face--never before in his
life had that face been so sensitive, never even as a child. Something
had waked in the odd soul of Beauty Steele.
"Don't be a sweep--leave Kathleen out of it!" he said, in a sharp,
querulous voice--a voice unnatural to himself, suggestive of little use,
as though he were learning to speak, using strange words stumblingly
through a melee of the emotions. It was not the voice of Charley Steele
the fop, the poseur, the idlest man in the world.
"What part of the twenty-five thousand went into the arsenic?" he said,
after a pause. There was no feeling in the voice now; it was again even
and inquiring.
"Nearly all."
"Don't lie. You've been living freely. Tell the truth, or--or I'll know
the reason why, Billy."
"About two-thirds-that's the truth. I had debts, and I paid them."
"And you bet on the races?"
"Yes."
"And lost?"
"Yes. See here, Charley; it was the most awful luck--"
"Yes, for the fatherless children and widows, and all that are
oppressed!"
Charley's look again went through and beyond the culprit, and he recalled
his wife's words and his own reply. A quick contempt and a sort of
meditative sarcasm were in the tone. It was curious, too, that he could
smile, but the smile did not encourage Billy Wantage now.
"It's all gone, I suppose?" he added.
"All but about a hundred dollars."
"Well, you have had your game; now you must pay for it."
Billy had imagination, and he was melodramatic. He felt danger ahead.
"I'll go and shoot myself!" he said, banging the table with his fist so
that the whiskey-tumbler shook.
He was hardly prepared for what followed. Charley's nerves had been
irritated; his teeth were on edge. This threat, made in such a cheap,
insincere way, was the last thing in the world he could bear to hear. He
knew that Billy lied; that if there was one thing Billy would not do,
shooting himself was that one thing. His own life was very sweet to Billy
Wantage. Charley hated him the more at that moment because he was
Kathleen's brother. For if there was one thing he knew of Kathleen, it
was that she could not do a mean thing. Cold, unsympathetic she might be,
cruel at a pinch perhaps, but dishonourable--never! This weak, cowardly
youth was her brother! No one had ever seen such a look on Charley
Steele's face as came upon it now--malicious, vindictive. He stooped over
Billy in a fury.
"You think I'm a fool and an ass--you ignorant, brainless, lying cub! You
make me a thief before all the world by forging my name, and stealing the
money for which I am responsible, and then you rate me so low that you
think you'll bamboozle me by threats of suicide. You haven't the courage
to shoot yourself--drunk or sober. And what do you think would be gained
by it? Eh, what do you think would be gained? You can't see that you'd
insult your sister as well as--as rob me."
Billy Wantage cowered. This was not the Charley Steele he had known, not
like the man he had seen since a child. There was something almost
uncouth in this harsh high voice, these gauche words, this raw accent;
but it was powerful and vengeful, and it was full of purpose. Billy
quivered, yet his adroit senses caught at a straw in the words, "as rob
me!" Charley was counting it a robbery of himself, not of the widows and
orphans! That gave him a ray of hope. In a paroxysm of fear, joined to
emotional excitement, he fell upon his knees, and pleaded for mercy--for
the sake of one chance in life, for the family name, for Kathleen's sake,
for the sake of everything he had ruthlessly dishonoured. Tears came
readily to his eyes, real tears--of excitement; but he could measure,
too, the strength of his appeal.
"If you'll stand by me in this, I'll pay you back every cent, Charley,"
he cried. "I will, upon my soul and honour! You shan't lose a penny, if
you'll only see me through. I'll work my fingers off to pay it back till
the last hour of my life. I'll be straight till the day I die--so help me
God!"
Charley's eyes wandered to the cupboard where the liqueurs were. If he
could only decently take a drink! But how could he with this boy kneeling
before him? His breath scorched his throat.
"Get up!" he said shortly. "I'll see what I can do--to-morrow. Go away
home. Don't go out again to-night. And come here at ten o'clock in the
morning."
Billy took up his hat, straightened his tie, carefully brushed the dust
from his knees, and, seizing Charley's hand, said: "You're the best
fellow in the world, Charley." He went towards the door, dusting his face
of emotion as he had dusted his knees. The old selfish, shrewd look was
again in his eyes. Charley's gaze followed him gloomily. Billy turned the
handle of the door. It was locked.
Charley came forward and unlocked it. As Billy passed through, Charley,
looking sharply in his face, said hoarsely: "By Heaven, I believe you're
not worth it!" Then he shut the door again and locked it.
He almost ran back and opened the cupboard. Taking out the bottle of
liqueur, he filled a glass and drank it off. Three times he did this,
then seated himself at the table with a sigh of relief and no emotion in
his face.
CHAPTER VII
"PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE"'
The sun was setting by the time Charley was ready to leave his office.
Never in his life had he stayed so late in "the halls of industry," as he
flippantly called his place of business. The few cases he had won so
brilliantly since the beginning of his career, he had studied at night in
his luxurious bedroom in the white brick house among the maples on the
hill. In every case, as at the trial of Joseph Nadeau, the man who
murdered the timber-merchant, the first prejudice of judge and jury had
given way slowly before the deep-seeing mind, which had as rare a power
of analysis as for generalisation, and reduced masses of evidence to
phrases; and verdicts had been given against all personal prejudice--to
be followed outside the court by the old prejudice, the old look askance
at the man called Beauty Steele.
To him it had made no difference at any time. He cared for neither praise
nor blame. In his actions a materialist, in his mind he was a watcher of
life, a baffled inquirer whose refuge was irony, and whose singular
habits had in five years become a personal insult to the standards polite
society and Puritan morality had set up. Perhaps the insult had been
intended, for irregularities were committed with an insolent disdain for
appearances. He did nothing secretly; his page of life was for him who
cared to read. He played cards, he talked agnosticism, he went on
shooting expeditions which became orgies, he drank openly in saloons, he
whose forefathers had been gentlemen of King George, and who sacrificed
all in the great American revolution for honour and loyalty--statesmen,
writers, politicians, from whom he had direct inheritance, through
stirring, strengthening forces, in the building up of laws and
civilisation in a new land. Why he chose to be what he was--if he did
choose--he alone could answer. His personality had impressed itself upon
his world, first by its idiosyncrasies and afterwards by its enigmatical
excesses.
What was he thinking of as he laid the papers away in the tin box in a
drawer, locked it, and put the key in his pocket? He had found to the
smallest detail Billy's iniquity, and he was now ready to shoulder the
responsibility, to save the man, who, he knew, was scarce worth the
saving. But Kathleen--there was what gave him pause. As he turned to the
window and looked out over the square he shuddered. He thought of the
exchange of documents he had made with her that day, and he had a sense
of satisfaction. This defalcation of Billy's would cripple him, for money
had flown these last few years. He had had heavy losses, and he had dug
deep into his capital. Down past the square ran a cool avenue of beeches
to the water, and he could see his yacht at anchor. On the other side of
the water, far down the shore, was a house which had been begun as a
summer cottage, and had ended in being a mansion. A few Moorish pillars,
brought from Algiers for the decoration of the entrance, had necessitated
the raising of the roof, and then all had to be in proportion, and the
cottage became like an appanage to a palace. So it had gone, and he had
cared so little about it all, and for the consequences. He had this day
secured Kathleen from absolute poverty, no matter what happened, and that
had its comfort. His eyes wandered among the trees. He could see the
yellow feathers of the oriole and catch the note of the whippoorwill, and
from the great church near the voices of the choir came over. He could
hear the words "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
according to thy word."
Depart in peace--how much peace was there in the world? Who had it? The
remembrance of what Kathleen said to him at the door--"I suppose I ought
to kiss you"--came to him, was like a refrain in his ears.
"Peace is the penalty of silence and inaction," he said to himself
meditatively. "Where there is action there is no peace. If the brain and
body fatten, then there is peace. Kathleen and I have lived at peace, I
suppose. I never said a word to her that mightn't be put down in large
type and pasted on my tombstone, and she never said a word to me--till
to-day--that wasn't like a water-colour picture. Not till to-day, in a
moment's strife and trouble, did I ever get near her. And we've lived in
peace. Peace? Where is the right kind of peace? Over there is old
Sainton. He married a rich woman, he has had the platter of plenty before
him always, he wears ribbons and such like baubles given by the Queen,
but his son had to flee the country. There's Herring. He doesn't sleep
because his daughter is going to marry an Italian count. There's
Latouche. His place in the cabinet is begotten in corruption, in the
hotbed of faction war. There's Kenealy. His wife has led him a dance of
deep damnation. There's the lot of them--every one, not an ounce of peace
among them, except with old Casson, who weighs eighteen stone, lives like
a pig, grows stuffier in mind and body every day, and drinks half a
bottle of whiskey every night. There's no one else--yes, there is!"
He was looking at a small black-robed figure with clean-shaven face,
white hair, and shovel-hat, who passed slowly along the wooden walk
beneath, with meditative content in his face.
"There's peace," he said with a laugh. "I've known Father Hallon for
twenty-five years, and no man ever worked so hard, ever saw more trouble,
ever shared other people's bad luck mere than he; ever took the bit in
his teeth, when it was a matter of duty, stronger than he; and yet
there's peace; he has it; a peace that passes all understanding--mine
anyhow. I've never had a minute's real peace. The World, or Nature, or
God, or It, whatever the name is, owes me peace. And how is It to give
it? Why, by answering my questions. Now it's a curious thing that the
only person I ever met who could answer any questions of mine--answer
them in the way that satisfies--is Suzon. She works things down to
phrases. She has wisdom in the raw, and a real grip on life, and yet all
the men she has known have been river-drivers and farmers, and a few men
from town who mistook the sort of Suzon she is. Virtuous and straight,
she's a born child of Aphrodite too--by nature. She was made for love. A
thousand years ago she would have had a thousand loves! And she thinks
the world is a magnificent place, and she loves it, and wallows--fairly
wallows--in content. Now which is right: Suzon or Father
Hallon--Aphrodite or the Nazarene? Which is peace--as the bird and the
beast of the field get it--the fallow futile content, or--"
He suddenly stopped, hiccoughed, then hurriedly drawing paper before him,
he sat down. For an hour he wrote. It grew darker. He pushed the table
nearer the window, and the singing of the choir in the church came in
upon him as his pen seemed to etch words into the paper, firm, eccentric,
meaning. What he wrote that evening has been preserved, and the yellow
sheets lie loosely in a black despatch-box which contains the few records
Charley Steele left behind him. What he wrote that night was the note of
his mind, the key to all those strange events through which he began to
move two hours after the lines were written:
Over thy face is a veil of white sea-mist,
Only thine eyes shine like stars; bless or blight me,
I will hold close to the leash at thy wrist,
O Aphrodite!
Thou in the East and I here in the West,
Under our newer skies purple and pleasant:
Who shall decide which is better--attest,
Saga or peasant?
Thou with Serapis, Osiris, and Isis,
I with Jehovah, in vapours and shadows;
Thou with the gods' joy-enhancing devices,
Sweet-smelling meadows!
What is there given us?--Food and some raiment,
Toiling to reach to some Patmian haven,
Giving up all for uncertain repayment,
Feeding the raven!
Striving to peer through the infinite azure,
Alternate turning to earthward and falling,
Measuring life with Damastian measure,
Finite, appalling.
What does it matter! They passed who with Homer
Poured out the wine at the feet of their idols:
Passing, what found they? To-come a misnomer,
It and their idols?
Sacristan, acolyte, player, or preacher,
Each to his office, but who holds the key?
Death, only Death--thou, the ultimate teacher
Wilt show it to me.
And when the forts and the barriers fall,
Shall we then find One the true, the almighty,
Wisely to speak with the worst of us all--
Ah, Aphrodite!
Waiting, I turn from the futile, the human,
Gone is the life of me, laughing with youth
Steals to learn all in the face of a woman,
Mendicant Truth!
Rising with a bitter laugh, and murmuring the last lines, he thrust the
papers into a drawer, locked it, and going quickly from the room, he went
down-stairs. His horse and cart were waiting for him, and he got in.
The groom looked at him inquiringly. "The Cote Dorion!" he said, and they
sped away through the night.
CHAPTER VIII
THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT
One, two, three, four, five, six miles. The sharp click of the iron hoofs
on the road; the strong rush of the river; the sweet smell of the maple
and the pungent balsam; the dank rich odour of the cedar swamp; the cry
of the loon from the water; the flaming crane in the fishing-boat; the
fisherman, spear in hand, staring into the dark waters tinged with sombre
red; the voice of a lonely settler keeping time to the ping of the axe
as, lengthening out his day to nightly weariness, he felled a tree;
river-drivers' camps spotted along the shore; huge cribs or rafts which
had swung down the great stream for scores of miles, the immense oars
motionless, the little houses on the timbers blinking with light; and
from cheerful raftsmen coming the old familiar song of the rivers:
"En roulant, ma boule roulant,
En roulant ma boule!"
Not once had Charley Steele turned his head as the horse sped on. His
face was kept straight along the line of the road; he seemed not to see
or to hear, to be unresponsive to sound or scene. The monocle at his eye
was like a veil to hide the soul, a defence against inquiry, itself the
unceasing question, a sort of battery thrown forward, a kind of
field-casemate for a lonely besieged spirit.
It was full of suggestion. It might have been the glass behind which
showed some mediaeval relic, the body of some ancient Egyptian king whose
life had been spent in doing wonders and making signs--the primitive,
anthropomorphic being. He might have been a stone man, for any motion
that he made. Yet looking at him closely you would have seen discontent
in the eye, a kind of glaze of the sardonic over the whole face.
What is the good! the face asked. What is there worth doing? it said.
What a limitless futility! it urged, fain to be contradicted too, as the
grim melancholy of the figure suggested.
"To be an animal and soak in the world," he thought to himself--"that is
natural; and the unnatural is civilisation, and the cheap adventure of
the mind into fields of baffling speculation, lighted by the flickering
intelligences of dead speculators, whose seats we have bought in the
stock-exchange of mortality, and exhaust our lives in paying for. To eat,
to drink, to lie fallow, indifferent to what comes after, to roam like
the deer, and to fight like the tiger--"
He came to a dead stop in his thinking. "To fight like the tiger!" He
turned his head quickly now to where upon a raft some river-drivers were
singing:
"And when a man in the fight goes down,
Why, we will carry him home!"
"To fight like the tiger!" Ravage--the struggle to possess from all the
world what one wished for one's self, and to do it without mercy and
without fear-that was the clear plan in the primitive world, where action
was more than speech and dominance than knowledge. Was not civilisation a
mistake, and religion the insinuating delusion designed to cover it up;
or, if not designed, accepted by the original few who saw that humanity
could not turn back, and must even go forward with illusions, lest in
mere despair all men died and the world died with them?
His eyes wandered to the raft where the men were singing, and he
remembered the threat made: that if he came again to the Cote Dorion he
"would get what for!" He remembered the warning of Rouge Gosselin
conveyed by Jolicoeur, and a sinister smile crossed over his face. The
contradictions of his own thoughts came home to him suddenly, for was it
not the case that his physical strength alone, no matter what his skill,
would be of small service to him in a dark corner of contest? Primitive
ideas could only hold in a primitive world. His real weapon was his
brain, that which civilisation had given him in lieu of primitive prowess
and the giant's strength.
They had come to a long piece of corduroy-road, and the horse's hoofs
struck rumbling hollow sounds from the floor of cedar logs. There was a
swamp on one side where fire-flies were flickering, and there flashed
into Charley Steele's mind some verses he had once learned at school:
"They made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true--"
It kept repeating itself in his brain in a strange dreary monotone.
"Stop the horse. I'll walk the rest of the way," he said presently to the
groom. "You needn't come for me, Finn; I'll walk back as far as the
Marochal Tavern. At twelve sharp I'll be there. Give yourself a drink and
some supper"--he put a dollar into the man's hand--"and no white whiskey,
mind: a bottle of beer and a leg of mutton, that's the thing." He nodded
his head, and by the light of the moon walked away smartly down the
corduroy-road through the shadows of the swamp. Finn the groom looked
after him.
"Well, if he ain't a queer dick! A reg'lar 'centric--but a reg'lar brick,
cutting a wide swathe as he goes. He's a tip-topper; and he's a sort of
tough too--a sort of a kind of a tough. Well, it's none of my business.
Get up!" he added to the horse, and turning round in the road with
difficulty, he drove back a mile to the Tavern Marochal for his beer and
mutton--and white whiskey.
Charley stepped on briskly, his shining leather shoes, straw hat, and
light cane in no good keeping with his surroundings. He was thinking that
he had never been in such a mood for talk with Suzon Charlemagne.
Charlemagne's tavern of the Cote Dorion was known over half a province,
and its patrons carried news of it half across a continent. Suzon
Charlemagne--a girl of the people, a tavern-girl, a friend of sulking,
coarse river-drivers! But she had an alert precision of brain, an
instinct that clove through wastes of mental underbrush to the tree of
knowledge. Her mental sight was as keen and accurate as that which runs
along the rifle-barrel of the great hunter with the red deer in view.
Suzon Charlemagne no company for Charley Steele? What did it matter! He
had entered into other people's lives to-day, had played their games with
them and for them, and now he would play his own game, live his own life
in his own way through the rest of this day. He thirsted for some sort of
combat, for the sharp contrasts of life, for the common and the base; he
thirsted even for the white whiskey against which he had warned his
groom. He was reckless--not blindly, but wilfully, wildly reckless,
caring not at all what fate or penalty might come his way.