Right of Way — 11 - Chapters 32, 33, 34, 35, & 36
CHAPTER XXXII. JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
Jo Portugais had fastened down a secret with clasps heavier than iron, and had long stood guard over it.
But life is a wheel, and natures move in circles, passing the same points again and again, the points being distant or near to the sense as the courses of life have influenced the nature.
Confession was an old principle, a light in the way, a rest-house for Jo and all his race, by inheritance, by disposition, and by practice.
Again and again Jo had come round to the rest-house since one direful day, but had not, found his way therein.
There were passwords to give at the door, there was the tale of the journey to tell to the door-keeper.
And this tale he had not been ready to tell.
But the man who knew of the terrible thing he had done, who had saved him from the consequences of that terrible thing, was in sore trouble, and this broke down the gloomy guard he had kept over his dread secret.
He fought the matter out with himself, and, the battle ended, he touched the door-keeper on the arm, beckoned him to a lonely place in the trees, and knelt down before him.
“What is it you seek?
” asked the door-keeper, whose face was set and forbidding.
“To find peace,” answered the man; yet he was thinking more of another’s peril than of his own soul.
“What have I to do with the peace of your soul?
Yonder is your shepherd and keeper,” said the doorkeeper, pointing to where two men walked arm in arm under the trees.
“Shall the sinner not choose the keeper of his sins?
” said the man huskily.
“Who has been the keeper all these years?
Who has given you peace?
” “I have had no keeper; I have had no peace these many years.
” “How many years?
” The Abbe’s voice was low and even, and showed no feeling, but his eyes were keenly inquiring and intent.
“Seven years.
” “Is the sin that held you back from the comfort of the Church a great one?
” “The greatest, save one.
” “What would be the greatest?
” “To curse God.
” “The next?
” “To murder.
” The other’s whole manner changed on the instant.
He was no longer the stern Churchman, the inveterate friend of Justice, the prejudiced priest, rigid in a pious convention, who could neither bend nor break.
The sin of an infidel breaker of the law, that was one thing; the crime of a son of the Church, which a human soul came to relate in its agony, that was another.
He had a crass sense of justice, but there was in him a deeper thing still: the revelation of the human soul, the responsibility of speaking to the heart which has dropped the folds of secrecy, exposing the skeleton of truth, grim and staring, to the eye of a secret earthly mentor.
“If it has been hidden all these years, why do you tell it now, my son?
” “It is the only way.
” “Why was it hidden?
” “I have come to confess,” answered the man bitterly.
The priest looked at him anxiously.
“You have spoken rightly, my son.
I am not here to ask, but to receive.
” “Forgive me, but it is my crime I would speak of now.
I choose this moment that another should not suffer for what he did not do.
” The priest thought of the man they had left in the little house, and the crime with which he was charged, and wondered what the sinner before him was going to say.
“Tell your story, my son, and God give your tongue the very spirit of truth, that nothing be forgotten and nothing excused.
” There was a fleeting pause, in which the colour left the priest’s face, and, as he opened the door of his mind--of the Church, secret and inviolate--he had a pain at his heart; for beneath his arrogant churchmanship there was a fanatical spirituality of a mediaeval kind.
His sense of responsibility was painful and intense.
The same pain possessed him always, were the sin that of a child or a Borgia.
As he listened to the broken tale, the forest around was vocal, the chipmunks scampered from tree to tree, the woodpecker’s tap-tap, tap-tap, went on over their heads, the leaves rustled and gave forth their divine sweetness, as though man and nature were at peace, and there were no storms in sky above or soul beneath, or in the waters of life that are deeper than “the waters under the earth.
” It was only a short time, but to the door-keeper and the wayfarer it seemed hours, for the human soul travels far and hard and long in moments of pain and revelation.
The priest in his anxiety suffered as much as the man who did the wicked thing.
When the man had finished, the priest said: “Is this all?
” “It is the great sin of my life.
” He shuddered, and continued: “I have no love of life; I have no fear of death; but there is the man who saved me years ago, who got me freedom.
He has had great sorrow and trouble, and I would live for his sake--because he has no friend.
” “Who is the man?
” The other pointed to where the little house was hidden among the trees.
The priest almost gasped his amazement, but waited.
Thereupon the woodsman told the whole truth concerning the tailor of Chaudiere.
“To save him, I have confessed my own sin.
To you I might tell all in confession, and the truth about him would be buried for ever.
I might not confess at all unless I confessed my own sin.
You will save him, father?
” he asked anxiously.
“I will save him,” was the reply of the priest.
“I want to give myself to justice; but he has been ill, and he may be ill again, and he needs me.
” He told of the tailor’s besetting weakness, of his struggles against it, of his fall a few days before, and the cause of it...
told all to the man of silence.
“You wish to give yourself to justice?
” “I shall have no peace unless.
” There was something martyr-like in the man’s attitude.
It appealed to some stern, martyr-like quality in the priest.
If the man would win eternal peace so, then so be it.
His grim piety approved.
He spoke now with the authority of divine justice.
“For one year longer go on as you are, then give yourself to justice--one year from to-day, my son.
Is it enough?
” “It is enough.
” “Absolvo te!
” said the priest.
CHAPTER XXXIII. THE EDGE OF LIFE
Meantime Charley was alone with his problem.
The net of circumstances seemed to have coiled inextricably round him.
Once, at a trial in court in other days, he had said in his ironical way: “One hasn’t to fear the penalties of one’s sins, but the damnable accident of discovery.
” To try to escape now, or, with the assistance of Jo Portugais, when en route to Quebec in charge of the constables, and find refuge and seclusion elsewhere?
There was nothing he might ask of Portugais which he would not do.
To escape--and so acknowledge a guilt not his own!
Well, what did it matter!
Who mattered?
He knew only too well.
The Cure mattered--that good man who had never intruded his piety on him; who had been from the first a discreet friend, a gentleman,--a Christian gentleman, if there was such a sort of gentleman apart from all others.
Who mattered?
The Seigneur, whom he had never seen before, yet who had showed that day a brusque sympathy, a gruff belief in him?
Who mattered?
Above all, Rosalie mattered.
To escape, to go from Rosalie’s presence by a dark way, as it were, like a thief in the night--was that possible?
His escape would work upon her mind.
She would first wonder, then doubt, and then believe at last that he was a common criminal.
She was the one who mattered in that thought of escape escape to some other parish, to some other province, to some other country--to some other world!
To some other world?
He looked at a little bottle he held in the palm of his hand.
A hand held aside the curtain of the door entering on the next room, and a girl’s troubled face looked in, but he did not see.
Escape to some other world?
And why not, after all?
On the day his memory came back he had resisted the idea in this very room.
As the fatalist he had resisted it then.
Now how poor seemed the reasons for not having ended it all that day!
If his appointed time had been come, the river would have ended him then--that had been his argument.
Was that argument not belief in Somebody or Something which governed his going or staying?
Was it not preordination?
Was not fatalism, then, the cheapest sort of belief in an unchangeable Somebody or Something, representing purpose and law and will?
Attribute to anything power, and there was God, whatever His qualities, personality, or being.
The little phial of laudanum was in his hand to loosen life into knowledge.
Was it not his duty to eliminate himself, rather than be an unsolvable quantity in the problem of many lives?
It was neither vulgar nor cowardly to pass quietly from forces making for ruin, and so avert ruin and secure happiness.
To go while yet there was time, and smooth for ever the way for others by an eternal silence--that seemed well.
Punishment thereafter, the Cure would say.
But was it not worth while being punished, even should the Cure’s fond belief in the noble fable be true, if one saved others here?
Who--God or man--had the right to take from him the right to destroy himself, not for fear, not through despair, but for others’ sake?
Had he not the right to make restitution to Kathleen for having given her nothing but himself, whom she had learned to despise?
If he were God, he would say, Do justice and fear not.
And this was justice.
Suppose he were in a battle, with all these things behind him, and put himself, with daring and great results, in some forlorn hope--to die; and he died, ostensibly a hero for his country, but, in his heart of hearts, to throw his life away to save some one he loved, not his country, which profited by his sacrifice--suppose that were the case, what would the world say?
“He saved others, himself he could not save”--flashed through his mind, possessed him.
He could save others; but it was clear he could not save himself.
It was so simple, so kind, and so decent.
And he would be buried here in quiet, unconsecrated ground, a mystery, a tailor who, finding he could not mend the garment of life, cast it away, and took on himself the mantle of eternal obscurity.
No reproaches would follow him;
and he would not reproach himself, for Kathleen and Billy and another would be safe and free to live their lives.
Far, far better for Rosalie!
She too would be saved--free from the peril of his presence.
For where could happiness come to her from him?
He might not love her; he might not marry her; and it were well to go now, while yet love was not a habit, but an awakening, a realisation of life.
His death would settle this sad question for ever.
To her he would be a softening memory as time went on.
The girl who had watched by the curtain stepped softly inside the room she divined his purpose.
He was so intent he did not hear.
“I will do it,” he said to himself.
“It is better to go than to stay.
I
have never done a good thing for love of any human being.
I will do one now.
” He turned towards the window through which the sunlight streamed.
Stepping forward into the sun, he uncorked the bottle.
There was a quick step behind him, and the girl’s voice said clearly: “If you go, I go also.
” He turned swiftly, cold with amazement, the blood emptied from his heart.
Rosalie stood a little distance from him, her face pale, her hands held hard to her side.
“I understand all.
I could not go outside, I stayed there”--she pointed to the other room--“and I know why you would die.
You would die to save others.
” “Rosalie!
” he protested in a hoarse voice, and could say nothing more.
“You think that I will stay, if you go!
No, no, no--I will not.
You taught me how to live, and I will follow you now.
” He saw the strange determination of her look.
It startled him; he knew not what to say.
“Your father, Rosalie--” “My father will be cared for.
But who will care for you in the place where you are going?
You will have no friends there.
You shall not go alone.
You will need me--in the dark.
” “It is good that I go,” he said.
“It would be wicked, it would be dreadful, for you to go.
” “I go if you go,” she urged.
“I will lose my soul to be with you; you will want me--there!
” There was no mistaking her intention.
Footsteps sounded outside.
The others were coming back.
To die here before her face?
To bring her to death with him?
He was sick with despair.
“Go into the next room quickly,” he said.
“No matter what comes, I will not--on my honour!
” She threw him a look of gratitude, and, as the bearskin curtain dropped behind her, he put the phial of laudanum in his pocket.
The door opened, and the Abbe Rossignol entered, followed by the Seigneur, the Cure, and Jo Portugais.
Charley faced them calmly, and waited.
The Abbe’s face was still cold and severe, but his voice was human as he said quickly: “Monsieur, I have decided to take you at your word.
I am assured you are not the man who committed the crime.
You probably have reasons for not establishing your identity.
” Had Charley been a prisoner in the dock, he could not have had a moment of deeper amazement--even if after the jury had said Guilty, a piece of evidence had been handed in, proving innocence, averting the death sentence.
A wave of excitement passed over him, leaving him cold and still.
In the other room a girl put her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry of joy.
Charley bowed.
“You made a mistake, Monsieur--pray do not apologise,” he said.
CHAPTER XXXIV. IN AMBUSH
Weeks went by.
Summer was done, autumn was upon the land.
Harvest-home had gone, and the “fall” ploughing was forward.
The smell of the burning stubble, of decaying plant and fibre, was mingling with the odours of the orchards and the balsams of the forest.
The leafy hill-sides, far and near, were resplendent in scarlet and saffron and tawny red.
Over the decline of the year flickered the ruined fires of energy.
It had been a prosperous summer in the valley.
Harvests had been reaped such as the country had not known for years--and for years there had been great harvests.
There had not been a death in the parish all summer, and births had occurred out of all usual proportion.
When Filion Lacasse commented thereon, and mentioned the fact that even the Notary’s wife had had the gift of twins as the crowning fulness of the year, Maximilian Cour, who was essentially superstitious, tapped on the table three times, to prevent a turn in the luck.
The baker was too late, however, for the very next day the Notary was brought home with a nasty gunshot wound in his leg.
He had been lured into duck-hunting on a lake twenty miles away, in the hills, and had been accidentally shot on an Indian reservation, called Four Mountains, where the Church sometimes held a mission and presented a primitive sort of passion-play.
From there he had been brought home by his comrades, and the doctor from the next parish summoned.
The Cure assisted the doctor at first, but the task was difficult to him.
At the instant when the case was most critical the tailor of Chaudiere set his foot inside the Notary’s door.
A moment later he relieved the Cure and helped to probe for shot, and care for an ugly wound.
Charley had no knowledge of surgery, but his fingers were skilful, his eye was true, and he had intuition.
The long operation over, the rural physician and surgeon washed his hands and then studied Charley with curious admiration.
“Thank you, Monsieur,” he said, as he dried his hands on a towel.
“I couldn’t have done it without you.
It’s a pretty good job; and you share the credit.
” Charley bowed.
“It’s a good thing not to halloo till you’re out of the woods,” he said.
“Our friend there has a bad time before him--hein?
” “I take you.
It is so.
” The man of knives and tinctures pulled his side-whiskers with smug satisfaction as he looked into a small mirror on the wall.
“Do you chance to know if madame has any cordials or spirits?
” he added, straightening his waistcoat and adjusting his cravat.
“It is likely,” answered Charley, and moved away to the window looking upon the street.
The doctor turned in surprise.
He was used to being waited on, and he had expected the tailor to follow the tradition.
“We might--eh?
” he said suggestively.
“It is usually the custom to provide refreshment, but the poor woman, madame, has been greatly occupied with her husband, and--” “And the twins,” Charley put in drily--“and a house full of work, and only one old crone in the kitchen to help.
Still, I have no doubt she has thought of the cordials too.
Women are the slaves of custom--ah, here they are, as I said, and--” He stopped short, for in the doorway, with a tray, stood Rosalie Evanturel.
The surgeon was so intent upon at once fortifying himself that he did not see the look which passed between Rosalie and the tailor.
Rosalie had been absent for two months.
Her father had been taken seriously ill the day after the critical episode in the but at Vadrome Mountain, and she had gone with him to the hospital at Quebec, for an operation.
The Abbe Rossignol had undertaken to see them safely to the hospital, and Jo Portugais, at his own request, was permitted to go in attendance upon M. Evanturel.
There had been a hasty leave-taking between Charley and Rosalie, but it was in the presence of others, and they had never spoken a word privately together since the day she had said to him that where he went she would go, in life or out of it.
“You have been gone two months,” Charley said now, after their touch of hands and voiceless greeting.
“Two months yesterday,” she answered.
“At sundown,” he replied, in an even voice.
“The Angelus was ringing,” she answered calmly, though her heart was leaping and her hands were trembling.
The doctor, instantly busy with the cordial, had not noticed what they said.
“Won’t you join me?
” he asked, offering a glass to Charley.
“Spirits do not suit me,” answered Charley.
“Matter of constitution,” rejoined the doctor, and buttoned up his coat, preparing to depart.
He came close to Charley.
“Now, I don’t want to put upon you, Monsieur,” he said, “but this sick man is valuable in the parish--you take me?
Well, it’s a difficult, delicate case, and I’d be glad if I could rely on you for a few days.
The Cure would do, but you are young, you have a sense of things--take me?
Half the fees are yours if you’ll keep a sharp eye on him--three times a day, and be with him at night a while.
Fever is the thing I’m afraid of--temperature--this way, please!
” He went to the window, and for a minute engaged Charley in whispered conversation.
“You take me?
” he said cheerily at last, as he turned again towards Rosalie.
“Quite, Monsieur,” answered Charley, and drew away, for he caught the odour of the doctor’s breath, and a cold perspiration broke out over him.
He felt the old desire for drink sweeping through him.
“I will do what I can,” he said.
“Come, my dear,” the doctor said to Rosalie.
“We will go and see your father.
” Charley’s eyes had fastened on the bottles avidly.
As Rosalie turned to bid him good-bye, he said to her, almost hoarsely: “Take the tray back to Madame Dauphin--please.
” She flashed a glance of inquiry at him.
She was puzzled by the fire in his eyes.
With her soul in her face as she lifted the tray, out of the warm-beating life in her, she said in a low tone: “It is good to live, isn’t it?
” He nodded and smiled, and the trouble slowly passed from his eyes.
The woman in her had conquered his enemy.
CHAPTER XXXV. THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER
“It is good to live, isn’t it?
” In the autumn weather when the air drank like wine, it seemed so indeed, even to Charley, who worked all day in his shop, his door wide open to the sunlight, and sat up half the night with Narcisse Dauphin, sometimes even taking a turn at the cradle of the twins, while madame sat beside her husband’s bed.
To Charley the answer to Rosalie’s question lay in the fact that his eyes had never been so keen, his face so alive, or his step so buoyant as in this week of double duty.
His mind was more hopeful than it had ever been since the day he awoke with memory restored in the silence of a mountain hut.
He had found the antidote to his great temptation, to the lurking, relentless habit which had almost killed him the night John Brown had sung Champagne Charlie from behind the flaring lights.
From a determination to fight his own fight with no material aids, he had never once used the antidote sent him by the Cure’s brother.
On St. Jean Baptiste’s day his proud will had failed him; intellectual force, native power of mind, had broken like reeds under the weight of a cruel temptation.
But now a new force had entered into him.
As his fingers were about to reach for the spirit-bottle in the house of the Notary, and he had, for the first time in his life, made an appeal for help, a woman’s voice had said, “It is good to live, isn’t it?
” and his hand was stayed.
A woman’s look had stilled the strife.
Never before in his life had he relied on a moral or a spiritual impulse in him.
What of these existed in him were in unseen quantities--for which there was neither multiple nor measure--had been primitive and hereditary, flowing in him like a feeble tincture diluted to inefficacy.
Rosalie had resolved him back to the original elements.
The quiet days he had spent in Chaudiere, the self-sacrifice he had been compelled to make, the human sins, such as those of Jo Portugais and Louis Trudel, with which he had had to do, the simplicity of the life around him--the uncomplicated lie and the unvarnished truth, the obvious sorrow and the patent joy, the childish faith, and the rude wickedness so pardonable because so frankly brutal--had worked upon him.
The elemental spirit of it all had so invaded his nature, breaking through the crust of old habit to the new man, that, when he fell before his temptation, and his body became saturated with liquor, the healthy natural being and the growing natural mind were overpowered by the coarse onslaught, and death had nearly followed.
It was his first appeal to a force outside himself, to an active principle unfamiliar to the voluntary working of his nature, and the answer had been immediate and adequate.
Yet what was it?
He did not ask;
he had not got beyond the mere experience, and the old questioning habit was in abeyance.
Each new and great emotion has its dominating moment, its supreme occasion, before taking its place in the modulated moral mechanism.
He was touched with helplessness.
As he sat beside Narcisse Dauphin’s bedside, one evening, the sick man on his way to recovery, there came to him the text of a sermon he had once heard John Brown preach: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.
” He had been thinking of Rosalie and that day at Vadrome Mountain.
She would not only have died with him, but she would have died for him, if need had been.
What might he give in return for what she gave?
The Notary interrupted his thoughts.
He had lain watching Charley for a long time, his brow drawn down with thought.
At last he said: “Monsieur, you have been good to me.
” Charley laid a hand on the sick man’s arm.
“I don’t see that.
But if you won’t talk, I’ll believe you think so.
” The Notary shook his head.
“I’ve not been talking for an hour, I’ve no fever, and I want to say some things.
When I’ve said them, I’ll feel better--voila!
I want to make the amende honorable.
I once thought you were this and that--I won’t say what I thought you.
I said you interfered--giving advice to people, as you did to Filion Lacasse, and taking the bread out of my mouth.
I said that!
” He paused, raised himself on his elbow, smoothed back his grizzled hair behind his ears, looked at himself in the mirror opposite with satisfaction, and added oracularly: “But how prone is the mind of man to judge amiss!
You have put bread into my mouth--no, no, Monsieur, you shall hear me!
As well as doing your own work, you have done my business since my accident as well as a lawyer could do it; and you’ve given every penny to my wife.
” “As for the work I’ve done,” answered Charley, “it was nothing--you notaries have easy times.
