The Right of Way, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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"This is addressed, as you will see, 'To the Sick Man at the House of Jo
Portugais, at Vadrome Mountain.' Are you that person, Monsieur?" she
asked.
As she handed the parcel, Charley's eyes scanned her face quickly. How
did this habitant girl come by this perfect French accent, this refined
manner? He did not know the handwriting on the parcel; he hastily tore it
open. Inside were a few dozen small packets. Here also was a sheet of
paper. He opened and read it quickly. It said:
Monsieur, I am not sure that you have recovered your memory and your
health, and I am also not sure that in such case you will thank me
for my work. If you think I have done you an injury, pray accept my
profound apologies. Monsieur, you have been a drunkard. If you
would reverse the record now, these powders, taken at opportune
moments, will aid you. Monsieur, with every expression of my good-
will, and the hope that you will convey to me without reserve your
feelings on this delicate matter, I append my address in Paris, and
I have the honour to subscribe myself, with high consideration,
Monsieur, yours faithfully,
MARCEL LOISEL.
The others looked at him with varied feelings as he read. Curiosity,
inquiry, expectation, were common to them all, but with each was a
different personal feeling. The Cure's has been described. Jo Portugais'
mind was asking if this meant that the man who had come into his life
must now go out of it; and the girl was asking who was this mysterious
man, like none she had ever seen or known.
Without hesitation Charley handed over the letter to the Cure, who took
it with surprise, read it with amazement, and handed it back with a flush
on his face.
"Thank you," said Charley to the girl. "It is good of you to bring it all
this way. May I ask--"
"She is Mademoiselle Rosalie Evanturel," said the Cure smiling.
"I am Charles Mallard," said Charley slowly. "Thank you. I will go now,
Monsieur Mallard," the girl said, lifting her eyes to his face. He bowed.
As she turned and went towards the door her eyes met his. She blushed.
"Wait, Mademoiselle; I will go back with you," said the Cure kindly. He
turned to Charley and held out his hand. "God be with you,
Monsieur--Charles," he said. "Come and see me soon." Remembering that his
brother had written that the man was a drunkard, his eyes had a look of
pity. This was the man's own secret and his. It was a way to the man's
heart; he would use it.
As the two went out of the door, the girl looked back. Charley was
putting the surgeon's letter into the fire, and did not see her; yet she
blushed again.
CHAPTER XIII
HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING AND WHAT HE FOUND
A week passed. Charley's life was running in a tiny circle, but his mind
was compassing large revolutions. The events of the last few days had cut
deep. His life had been turned upside down. All his predispositions had
been suddenly brought to check, his habits turned upon the flank and
routed, his mental postures flung into confusion. He had to start life
again; but it could not be in the way of any previous travel of mind or
body. The line of cleavage was sharp and wide, and the only connection
with the past was in the long-reaching influence of evil habits, which
crept from their coverts, now and again, to mock him as his old self had
mocked life--to mock him and to tempt him. Through seven months of
healthy life for his body, while brain and will were sleeping, the whole
man had made long strides towards recreation. But with the renewal of
will and mind the old weaknesses, roused by memory, began to emerge
intermittently, as water rises from a spring. There was something
terrible in this repetition of sensation--the law of habit answering to
the machine-like throbbing of memory, as, a kaleidoscope turning,
turning, its pictures pass a certain point at fixed intervals--an
automatic recurrence. He found himself at times touching his lips with
his tongue, and with this act came the dry throat, the hot eye, the
restless hand feeling for a glass that eluded his fingers.
Twice in one week did this fever surge up in him, and it caught him in
those moments when, exhausted by the struggle of his mind to adapt itself
to the new conditions, his senses were delicately susceptible. Visions of
Jolicoeur's saloon came to his mind's eye. With a singular separateness,
a new-developed dual sense, he saw himself standing in the summer heat,
looking over to the cool dark doorway of the saloon, and he caught again
the smell of the fresh-drawn beer. He was conscious of watching himself
do this and that, of seeing himself move here and there. He began to look
upon Charley Steele as a man he had known--he, Charles Mallard, had
known--while he had to suffer for what Charley Steele had done. Then, all
at once, as he was thinking and dreaming and seeing, there would seize
upon him the old appetite, coincident with the seizure of his brain by
the old sense of cynicism at its worst--such a worst as had made him
insult Jake Hough when the rough countryman was ready to take his part
that wild night at the Cote Dorion.
At such moments life became a conflict--almost a terror--for as yet he
had not swung into line with the new order of things. In truth, there was
no order of things; for one life was behind him and the new one was not
yet decided upon, save that here he would stay--here out of the world,
out of the game, far from old associations, cut off, and to be for ever
cut off, from all that he had ever known or seen or felt or loved! . . .
Loved! When did he ever love? If love was synonymous with unselfishness,
with the desire to give greater than the desire to get, then he had never
known love. He realised now that he had given Kathleen only what might be
given across a dinner-table--the sensuous tribute of a temperament,
passionate without true passion or faith or friendship. Kathleen had
known that he gave her nothing worth the having; for in some meagre sense
she knew what love was, and had given it meagrely, after her nature, to
another man, preserving meanwhile the letter of the law, respecting that
bond which he had shamed by his excesses.
Kathleen was now sitting at another man's table--no, probably at his own
table--his, Charley Steele's own table in his own house--the house he had
given her by deed of gift the day he died. Tom Fairing was sitting where
he used to sit, talking across the table--not as he used to talk--looking
into Kathleen's face as he had never looked. He was no more to them than
a dark memory. "Well, why should I be more?" he asked himself. "I am
dead, if not buried. They think me down among the fishes. My game is
done; and when she gets older and understands life better, Kathleen will
say, 'Poor Charley--he might have been anything!' She'll be sure to say
that some day, for habit and memory go round in a circle and pass the
same point again and again. For me--they take me by the throat--" He put
his hand up as if to free his throat from a grip, his tongue touched his
lips, his hands grew restless.
"It comes back on me like a fit of ague, this miserable thirst. If I were
within sight of Jolicoeur's saloon, I should be drinking hard this
minute. But I'm here, and--" His hand felt his pocket, and he took out
the powders the great surgeon had sent him.
"He knew--how did he know that I was a drunkard? Does a man carry in his
face the tale he would not tell? Jo says I didn't talk of the past, that
I never had delirium, that I never said a word to suggest who I was, or
where I came from. Then how did the doctor--man know? I suppose every
particular habit carries its own signal, and the expert knows the
ciphers." He opened the paper containing the powders, and looked round
for water, then paused, folded the paper up, and put it in his pocket
again. He went over to the window and looked out. His shoulders set
square. "No, no, no, not a speck on my tongue!" he said. "What I can't do
of my own will is not worth doing. It's too foolish, to yield to the
shadow of an old appetite. I play this game alone--here in Chaudiere."
He looked out and down. The sweet sun of early spring was shining hard,
and the snow was beginning to pack, to hang like a blanket on the
branches, to lie like a soft coverlet over all the forest and the fields.
Far away on the frozen river were saplings stuck up to show where the ice
was safe--a long line of poles from shore to shore--and carioles were
hurrying across to the village. Being market-day, the place was alive
with the cheerful commerce of the habitant. The bell of the parish church
was ringing. The sound of it came up distantly and peacefully. Charley
drew a long breath, turned away to a pail of water, filled a dipper half
full, and drank it off gaspingly. Then he returned to the window with a
look of relief.
"That does it," he said. "The horrible thing is gone again--out of my
brain and out of my throat."
As he stood there, Jo came up the hill with a bundle in his arms. Charley
watched him for a moment, half whimsically, half curiously. Yet he sighed
once too as Portugais opened the door and came into the room. "Well done,
Jo!" said he. "You have 'em?"
"Yes, M'sieu'. A good suit, and I believe they'll fit. Old Trudel says
it's the best suit he's made in a year. I'm afraid he'll not make many
more suits, old Trudel.
"He's very bad. When he goes there'll be no tailor--ah, old Trudel will
be missed for sure, M'sieu'!"
Jo spread the clothes out on the table--a coat, waistcoat, and trousers
of fulled cloth, grey and bulky, and smelling of the loom and the
tailor's iron. Charley looked at them interestedly, then glanced at the
clothes he had on, the suit that had belonged to him last
year--grave-clothes.
He drew himself up as though rousing from a dream. "Come, Jo, clear out,
and you shall have your new habitant in a minute," he said. Portugais
left the room, and when he came back, Charley was dressed in the suit of
grey fulled cloth. It was loose, but comfortable, and save for the
refined face--on which a beard was growing now--and the eye-glass, he
might easily have passed for a farmer. When he put on the dog-skin fur
cap and a small muffler round his neck, it was the costume of the
habitant complete.
Yet it was no disguise, for it was part of the life that Charles Mallard,
once Charley Steele, should lead henceforth.
He turned to the door and opened it. "Good-bye, Portugais," he said.
Jo was startled. "Where are you going, M'sieu'?"
"To the village."
"What to do, M'sieu'?"
"Who knows?"
"You will come back?" Jo asked anxiously.
"Before sundown, Jo. Good-bye!"
This was the first long walk he had taken since he had become himself
again. The sweet, cold air, with a bracing wind in his face, gave peace
to the nerves but now strained and fevered in the fight with appetite.
His mind cleared, and he drank in the sunny air and the pungent smell of
the balsams. His feet light with moccasins, he even ran a distance,
enjoying the glow from a fast-beating pulse.
As he came into the high-road, people passed him in carioles and sleighs.
Some eyed him curiously. What did he mean to do? What object had he in
coming to the village? What did he expect? As he entered the village his
pace slackened. He had no destination, no object. He was simply aware
that his new life was beginning.
He passed a little house on which was a sign, "Narcisse Dauphin, Notary."
It gave him a curious feeling. It was the old life before him. "Charles
Mallard, Notary?"--No, that was not for him. Everything that reminded him
of the past, that brought him in touch with it, must be set aside. He
moved on. Should he go to the Cure? No; one thing at a time, and today he
wanted his thoughts for himself. More people passed him, and spoke of him
to each other, though there was no coarse curiosity--the habitant has
manners.
Presently he passed a low shop with a divided door. The lower half was
closed, the upper open, and the winter sun was shining full into the
room, where a bright fire burned.
Charley looked up. Over the door was painted, in straggling letters:
"Louis Trudel, Tailor." He looked inside. There, on a low table, bent
over his work, with a needle in his hand, sat Louis Trudel the tailor.
Hearing footsteps, feeling a shadow, he looked up. Charley started at the
look of the shrunken, yellow face; for if ever death had set his seal, it
was on that haggard parchment. The tailor's yellow eyes ran from
Charley's face to his clothes.
"I knew they'd fit," he said, with a snarl. "Drove me hard, too!"
Charley had an inspiration. He opened the halfdoor, and entered.
"Do you want help?" he said, fixing his eyes on the tailor's, steady and
persistent.
"What's the good of wanting--I can't get it," was the irritable reply, as
he uncrossed his legs.
Charley took the iron out of his hand. "I'll press, if you'll show me
how," he said.
"I don't want a fiddling ten-minutes' help like that."
"It isn't fiddling. I'm going to stay, if you think I'll do."
"You are going to stop-every day?" The old man's voice quavered a little.
"Precisely that." Charley wetted a seam with water as he had often seen
tailors do. He dropped the hot iron on the seam, and sniffed with
satisfaction.
"Who are you?" said the tailor.
"A man who wants work. The Cure knows. It's all right. Shall I stay?"
The tailor nodded, and sat down with a colour in his face.
CHAPTER XIV
ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED
From the moment there came to the post-office the letter addressed to
"The Sick Man at the House of Jo Portugais at Vadrome Mountain," Rosalie
Evanturel dreamed dreams. Mystery, so fascinating a thing in all the
experiences of life, took hold of her. The strange man in the lonely hut
on the hill, the bandaged head, the keen, piercing blue eyes, the
monocle, like a masked battery of the mind, levelled at her--all appealed
to that life she lived apart from the people with whom she had daily
commerce. Her world was a world of books and dreams, and simple,
practical duties of life. Most books were romance to her, for most were
of a life to which she had not been educated. Even one or two purely
Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead
mother's room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure. It was all
new, therefore all delightful, even when the Protestant sentiments
shocked her as being not merely untrue, but hurting that aesthetic sense
never remote from the mind of the devout Catholic.
She had blushed when monsieur had first looked at her, in the hut on
Vadrome Mountain, not because there was any soft sentiment about him in
her heart--how could there be for a man she had but just seen!--but
because her feelings, her imagination, were all at high temperature;
because the man compelled attention. The feeling sprang from a deep
sensibility, a natural sense, not yet made incredulous by the ironies of
life. These had never presented themselves to her in a country, in a
parish, where people said of fortune and misfortune, happiness and
sorrow, "C'est le bon Dieu!"--always "C'est le bon Dieu!"
In some sense it was a pity that she had brains above the ordinary, that
she had had a good education and nice tastes. It was the cultivation of
the primitive and idealistic mind, which could not rationalise a sense of
romance, of the altruistic, by knowledge of life. As she sat behind the
post-office counter she read all sorts of books that came her way. When
she learned English so as to read it almost as easily as she read French,
her greatest joy was to pore over Shakespeare, with a heart full of
wonder, and, very often, eyes full of tears--so near to the eyes of her
race. Her imagination inhabited Chaudiere with a different folk, living
in homes very unlike these wide, sweeping-roofed structures, with double
windows and clean-scrubbed steps, tall doors, and wide, uncovered stoops.
Her people--people of bright dreaming--were not quarrelsome, or childish,
or merely traditional, like the habitants. They were picturesque and able
and simple, doing good things in disguise, succouring distress, yielding
their lives without thought for a cause, or a woman, and loving with an
undying love.
Charley was of these people--from the first instant she saw him. The
Cure, the Avocat, and the Seigneur were also of them, but placidly,
unimportantly. "The Sick Man at Jo Portugais' House" came out of a
mysterious distance. Something in his eyes said, "I have seen, I have
known," told her that when he spoke she would answer freely, that they
were kinsfolk in some hidden way. Her nature was open and frank; she
lived upon the house-tops, as it were, going in and out of the lives of
the people of Chaudiere with neighbourly sympathy and understanding. Yet
she knew that she was not of them, and they knew that, poor as she was,
in her veins flowed the blood of the old nobility of France. For this the
Cure could vouch. Her official position made her the servant of the
public, and she did her duty with naturalness.
She had been a figure in the parish ever since the day she returned from
the convent at Quebec, and took her dead mother's place in the home and
the parish. She had a quick temper, but there was not a cheerless note in
her nature, and there was scarce a dog or a horse in the parish but knew
her touch, and responded to it. Squirrels ate out of her hand, she had
even tamed two partridges, and she kept in her little garden a bear she
had brought up from a cub. Her devotion to her crippled father was in
keeping with her quick response to every incident of sorrow or joy in the
parish--only modified by wilful prejudices scarcely in keeping with her
unselfishness.
As Mrs. Flynn, the Seigneur's Irish cook, said of her: "Shure, she's not
made all av wan piece, the darlin'! She'll wear like silk, but she's not
linen for everybody's washin'." And Mrs. Flynn knew a thing or two, as
was conceded by all in Chaudiere. No gossip was Mrs. Flynn, but she knew
well what was going on in the parish, and she had strong views upon all
subjects, and a special interest in the welfare of two people in
Chaudiere. One of these was the Seigneur, who, when her husband died,
leaving behind him a name for wit and neighbourliness, and nothing else,
proposed that she should come to be his cook. In spite of her protest
that what was "fit for Teddy was not fit for a gintleman of quality," the
Seigneur had had his way, never repenting of his choice. Mrs. Flynn's
cooking was not her only good point. She had the rarest sense and an
unfailing spring of good-nature--life bubbled round her. It was she that
had suggested the crippled M. Evanturel to the Seigneur when the office
of postmaster became vacant, and the Seigneur had acted on her
suggestion, henceforth taking greater interest in Rosalie.
It was Mrs. Flynn who gave Rosalie information concerning Charley's
arrival at the shop of Louis Trudel the tailor. The morning after Charley
came, Mrs. Flynn had called for a waistcoat of the Seigneur, who was
expected home from a visit to Quebec. She found Charley standing at a
table pressing seams, and her quick eye took him in with knowledge and
instinct. She was the one person, save Rosalie, who could always divert
old Louis, and this morning she puckered his sour face with amusement by
the story of the courtship of the widow Plomondon and Germain Boily the
horse-trainer, whose greatest gift was animal-training, and greatest
weakness a fondness for widows, temporary and otherwise. Before she left
the shop, with the stranger's smile answering to her nod, she had made up
her mind that Charley was a tailor by courtesy only. So she told Rosalie
a few moments afterwards.
"'Tis a man, darlin', that's seen the wide wurruld. 'Tis himisperes he
knows, not parrishes. Fwhat's he doin' here, I dun'no'. Fwhere's he come
from, I dun'no'. French or English, I dun'no'. But a gintleman born, I
know. 'Tis no tailor, darlin', but tailorin' he'll do as aisy as he'll do
a hunderd other things anny day. But how he shlipped in here, an' when he
shlipped in here, an' what's he come for, an' how long he's stayin', an'
meanin' well, or doin' ill, I dun'no', darlin', I dun' no'."
"I don't think he'll do ill, Mrs. Flynn," said Rosalie, in English.
"An' if ye haven't seen him, how d'ye know?" asked Mrs. Flynn, taking a
pinch of snuff.
"I have seen him--but not in the tailor-shop. I saw him at Jo Portugais'
a fortnight ago."
"Aisy, aisy, darlin'. At Jo Portugais'--that's a quare place for a
stranger. 'Tis not wid Jo's introducshun I'd be comin' to Chaudiere."
"He comes with the Cure's introduction."
"An' how d'ye know that, darlin'?"
"The Curb was at Jo Portugais' with monsieur when I went there."
"You wint there!"
"To take him a letter--the stranger." "What's his name, darlin'?"
"The letter I took him was addressed, 'To the Sick Man at Jo Portugais'
House at Vadrome Mountain.'"
"Ah, thin, the Cure knows. 'Tis some rich man come to get well, and plays
at bein' tailor. But why didn't the letther come to his name, I wander
now? That's what I wander."
Rosalie shook her head, and looked reflectively through the window
towards the tailor-shop.
"How manny times have ye seen him?"
"Only once;" answered Rosalie truthfully. She did not, however, tell Mrs.
Flynn that she had thrice walked nearly to Vadrome Mountain in the hope
of seeing him again; and that she had gone to her favourite resort, the
Rest of the Flax-Beaters, lying in the way of the riverpath from Vadrome
Mountain, on the chance of his passing. She did not tell Mrs. Flynn that
there had scarcely been a waking hour when she had not thought of him.
"What Portugais knows, he'll not be tellin'," said Mrs. Flynn, after a
moment. "An' 'tis no business of ours, is it, darlin'? Shure, there's Jo
comin' out of the tailor-shop now!"
They both looked out of the window, and saw Jo encounter Filion Lacasse
the saddler, and Maximilian Cour the baker. The three stood in the middle
of the street for a minute, Jo talking freely. He was usually morose and
taciturn, but now he spoke as though eager to unburden his mind--Charley
and he had agreed upon what should be said to the people of Chaudiere.
The sight of the confidences among the three was too much for Mrs. Flynn.
She opened the door of the post office and called to Jo. "Like three
crows shtandin' there!" she said. "Come in--ma'm'selle says come in, and
tell your tales here, if they're fit to hear, Jo Portugais. Who are you
to say no when ma'm'selle bids!" she added.
Very soon afterwards Jo was inside the post-office, telling his tale with
the deliberation of a lesson learned by heart.
"It's all right, as ma'm'selle knows," he said. "The Cure was there when
ma'm'selle brought a letter to M'sieu' Mallard. The Cure knows all.
M'sieu' come to my house sick-and he stayed there. There is nothing like
the pine-trees and the junipers to cure some things. He was with me very
quiet some time. The Cure come and come. He knows. When m'sieu' got well,
he say, 'I will not go from Chaudiere; I will stay. I am poor, and I will
earn my bread here.' At first, when he is getting well, he is
carpent'ring. He makes cupboards and picture-frames. The Cure has one of
the cupboards in the sacristy; the frames he puts on the Stations of the
Cross in the church."
"That's good enough for me!" said Maximilian Cour. "Did he make them for
nothing?" asked Filion Lacasse solemnly.
"Not one cent did he ask. What's more, he's working for Louis Trudel for
nothing. He come through the village yesterday; he see Louis old and sick
on his bench, and he set down and go to work."
"That's good enough for me," said the saddler. "If a man work for the
Church for nothing, he is a Christian. If he work for Louis Trudel for
nothing, he is a fool--first-class--or a saint. I wouldn't work for Louis
Trudel if he give me five dollars a day."
"Tiens! the man that work for Louis Trudel work for the Church, for all
old Louis makes goes to the Church in the end--that is his will. The
Notary knows," said Maximilian Cour.
"See there, now," interposed Mrs. Flynn, pointing across the street to
the tailor-shop. "Look at that grocer-man stickin' in his head; and
there's Magloire Cadoret and that pig of a barber, Moise Moisan, starin'
through the dure, an'--"
As she spoke, the barber and his companion suddenly turned their faces to
the street, and started forward with startled exclamations, the grocer
following. They all ran out from the post-office. Not far up the street a
crowd was gathering. Rosalie locked the office-door and followed the
others quickly.
In front of the Hotel Trois Couronnes a painful thing was happening.
Germain Boily, the horse-trainer, fresh from his disappointment with the
widow Plomondon, had driven his tamed moose up to the Trois Couronnes,
and had drunk enough whiskey to make him ill-tempered. He had then begun
to "show off" the animal, but the savage instincts of the moose being
roused, he had attacked his master, charging with wide-branching horns,
and striking with his feet. Boily was too drunk to fight intelligently.
He went down under the hoofs of the enraged animal, as his huge
boar-hound, always with him, fastened on the moose's throat, dragged him
to the ground, and tore gaping wounds in his neck.