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Title: The Right of Way, Volume 1.

Author: Gilbert Parker

Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6243]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on October 24, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIGHT OF WAY, PARKER, V1 ***



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THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 1.


CONTENTS

Volume 1.
I.        THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
II.       WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
III.      AFTER FIVE YEARS
IV.       CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY
V.        THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE
VI.       THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB
VII.      "PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE!"
VIII.     THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT

Volume 2.
IX.       OLD DEBTS FOR NEW
X.        THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT
XI.       THE RAISING OF THE CURTAIN
XII.      THE COMING OF ROSALIE
XIII.     HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING, AND WHAT HE FOUND
XIV.      ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED
XV.       THE MARK IN THE PAPER
XVI.      MADAME DAUPHIN HAS A MISSION
XVII.     THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY
XVIII.    THE STEALING OF THE CROSS

Volume 3.
XIX.      THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN
XX.       THE RETURN OF THE TAILOR
XXI.      THE CURE HAS AN INSPIRATION
XXII.     THE WOMAN WHO SAW
XXIII.    THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT TELL
XXIV.     THE SEIGNEUR TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME
XXV.      THE COLONEL TELLS HIS STORY
XXVI.     A SONG, A BOTTLE, AND A GHOST
XXVII.    OUT ON THE OLD TRAIL
XXVIII.   THE SEIGNEUR GIVES A WARNING

Volume 4.
XXIX.     THE WILD RIDE
XXX.      ROSALIE WARNS CHARLEY
XXXI.     CHARLEY STANDS AT BAY
XXXII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
XXXIII.   THE EDGE OF LIFE
XXXIV.    IN AMBUSH
XXXV.     THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER
XXXVI.    BARRIERS SWEPT AWAY
XXXVII.   THE CHALLENGE OF PAULETTE DUBOIS
XXXVIII.  THE CURE AND THE SEIGNEUR VISIT THE TAILOR
XXXIX.    THE SCARLET WOMAN
XL.       AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING

Volume 5.
XLI.      IT WAS MICHAELMAS DAY
XLII.     A TRIAL AND A VERDICT
XLIII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
XLIV.     "WHO WAS KATHLEEN?"
XLV.      SIX MONTHS GO BY
XLVI.     THE FORGOTTEN MAN
XLVII.    ONE WAS TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT
XLVIII.   "WHERE THE TREE OF LIFE IS BLOOMING--"
XLIX.     THE OPEN GATE

Volume 6.
L.        THE PASSION PLAY AT CHAUDIERE
LI.       FACE TO FACE
LII.      THE COMING OF BILLY
LIII.     THE SEIGNEUR AND THE CURE HAVE A SUSPICION
LIV.      M. ROSSIGNOL SLIPS THE LEASH
LV.       ROSALIE PLAYS A PART
LVI.      MRS. FLYNN SPEAKS
LVII.     A BURNING FIERY FURNACE
LVIII.    WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL
LIX.      IN WHICH CHARLEY MEETS A STRANGER
LX.       THE HAND AT THE DOOR
LXI.      THE CURE SPEAKS

EPILOGUE




INTRODUCTION

In a book called 'The House of Harper', published in this year, 1912,
there are two letters of mine, concerning 'The Right of Way', written to
Henry M. Alden, editor of Harper's Magazine.  To my mind those letters
should never have been published.  They were purely personal.  They were
intended for one man's eyes only, and he was not merely an editor but a
beloved and admired personal friend.  Only to him and to W. E. Henley, as
editors, could I ever have emptied out my heart and brain; and, as may be
seen by these two letters, one written from London and the other from a
place near Southampton, I uncovered all my feelings, my hopes and my
ambitions concerning The Right of Way.  Had I been asked permission to
publish them I should not have granted it.  I may wear my heart upon my
sleeve for my friend, but not for the universe.

The most scathing thing ever said in literature was said by Robert
Buchanan on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's verses--"He has wheeled his nuptial
bed into the street."  Looking at these letters I have a great shrinking,
for they were meant only for the eyes of an aged man for whom I cared
enough to let him see behind the curtain.  But since they have been
printed, and without a "by your leave," I will use one or two passages
in them to show in what mood, under what pressure of impulse, under what
mental and, maybe, spiritual hypnotism it was written.  I first planned
it as a story of twenty-five thousand words, even as 'Valmond' was
planned as a story of five thousand words, and 'A Ladder of Swords' as a
story of twenty thousand words; but I had not written three chapters
before I saw what the destiny of the tale was to be.  I had gone to
Quebec to start the thing in the atmosphere where Charley Steele
belonged, and there it was borne in upon me that it must be a three-
decker novel, not a novelette.  I telegraphed to Harper & Brothers to ask
them whether it would suit them just as well if I made it into a long
novel.  They telegraphed their assent at once; so I went on.  At that
time Mr. F. N. Doubleday was a sort of director of Harper's firm.  To him
I had told the tale in a railway train, and he had carried me off at once
to Henry M. Alden, to whom I also told it, with the result that Harper's
Magazine was wide open to it, and there in Quebec, soon after my
interview with Mr. Alden and Mr. Doubleday, the book was begun.

The first of the letters published in The House of Harper, however, was
apparently written immediately after my return to London when the novel
was well on its way.  Evidently the first paragraph of the letter was an
apology for having suddenly announced the development of the book from a
long short story to a long novel; for I used these words:

"Yet if you really take an interest in the working of the human mind in
its relation to the vicissitudes of life, you will appreciate what I am
going to tell you, and will recognise that there is only stability in
evolution which the vulgar call chance.  .  .  .  Now, sir, perpend.
Charley Steele is going to be a novel of one hundred thousand words or
one hundred and twenty thousand--a real bang-up heartful of a novel."

Then there follows the confidence of a friend to a friend.  As I look
at the words I am not sorry that I wrote them.  They were a part of me.
They were the inveterate truth, but I would not willingly have uncovered
my inner self to any except the man to whom the words were written.  But
here is what I wrote:

"I am a bit of a fool over this book.  It catches me at every tender
corner of my nature.  It has aroused all the old ardent dreams of youth
and springtime puissance.  I cannot lay it down, and I cannot shorten it,
for story, character, soul and reflection, imagination, observation are
dragging me along after them.  .  .  .  This novel will make me or break
me--prove me human and an artist, or an affected literary bore.  If you
want it you must take the risk.  But, my dear Alden, you will be
investing in a man's heart--which may be a fortune or a folly.  Why,
I ought to have seen--and far back in my brain I did see--that the
character of Charley Steele was a type, an idiosyncrasy of modern life, a
resultant of forces all round us, and that he would demand space in which
to live and tell his story to the world.  .  .  .  And behold with what
joy I follow him, not only lovingly but sternly and severely, noting him
down as he really is, condoning naught, forgiving naught, but above all
else, understanding him--his wilful mystification of the world, his
shameless disdain of it, but the old law of interrogation, of sad yet
eager inquiry and wonder and 'non possumus' with him to the end."

This letter was evidently written in December, 1899, and the other went
to Mr. Alden on the 7th August, 1900; therefore, eight or nine months
later.  The work had gone well.  Week after week, month after month it
had unfolded itself with an almost unpardonable ease.  Evidently, the
very ease with which the book was written troubled me, because I find
that in this letter of the 7th August, 1900, to Mr. Alden, I used these
words:

"A kind of terror has seized me, and instead of sending a dozen more
chapters to you as I proposed to do, I am setting to to break this love
story anew under the stones of my most exacting criticism and troubled
regard.  I go to bury myself at a solitary little seaside place" (it was
Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire), "there to live alone with Rosalie and
Charley, and if I do not know them hereafter, never ask me to write for
'Harper's' again.  .  .  .  This book has been written out of something
vital in me--I do not mean the religious part of it, I mean the humanity
that becomes one's own and part of one's self, by observation,
experience, and understanding got from dead years."

Anyhow that shows the spirit in which the book was written, and there
must have been something in it that rang true, because not only did it
have an enormous sale and therefore a multitude of readers, but I
received hundreds of letters from people who in one way or another were
deeply interested in the story.

The majority of them were inquisitive letters.  A great many of them said
that the writer had shared in controversy as to what the relations of
Charley and Rosalie were, and asked me to set for ever queries and
controversies at rest by declaring either that the relations of these two
were what, in the way of life's stern conventions, they ought not to be,
or that Rosalie passed unscathed through the fire.  I had foreseen all
this, though I could not have foreseen the passionately intense interest
which my readers would take in the life-story of these unhappy yet happy
people.  I had, however, only one reply.  It was that all I had meant to
say concerning Charley and Rosalie had been said in the book, to the last
word.  All I had meant not to say would not be said after the book was
written.  I asked them to take exactly the same view of Charley and
Rosalie as they would in real life regarding two human beings with whom
they were acquainted, and concerning whom, to their minds, there was
sufficient evidence, or not sufficient evidence, to come to a conclusion
as to what their relations were.  I added that, as in real life we used
our judgment upon such things with a reasonable amount of accuracy,
I asked them to apply that judgment to Charley Steele and Rosalie
Evanturel.  They and their story were there for eyes to see and read,
and when I had ended my manuscript in the year 1900 I had said the last
word I ever meant to say as to their history.  The controversy therefore
continues, for the book still makes its appeal to an ever increasing
congregation of new readers.

But another kind of letter came to me--the letter of some man who had
just such a struggle as Charley Steele, or whose father or brother or
friend had had such a struggle.  Letters came from clergymen who had
preached concerning the book; from men who told me in brief their own
life problems and tragedies.  These letters I prize; most of them had
the real thing in them, the human truth.

That the book drew wide attention to the Dominion of Canada, particularly
to French Canada, and crystallised something of the life of that dear
Province, was a deep pleasure to me; and I was glad that I had been able
to culminate my efforts to portray the life of the French-Canadian as I
saw it, by a book which arrested the attention of so comprehensive a
public.

I have seen many statements as to the original of Charley Steele, but I
have never seen a story which was true.  Many people have told me that
they had seen the original of Charley Steele in an American lawyer.
They knew he was the original, because he himself had said so.  The
gentleman was mistaken; I have never seen him.  As with the purple cow,
I never hope to see him.  Whoever he is or whatever he is, the original
Charley was an abler and a more striking man.  I knew him as a boy, and
he died while I was yet a boy, taking with him, save in the memory of a
few, a rare and wonderful, if not wholly lovable personality.  For over
twenty years I had carried him in my mind, wondering whether, and when,
I should-make use of him.  Again and again I was tempted, but was never
convinced that his time had come; yet through all the years he was
gaining strength, securing possession of my mind, and gathering to him,
magnet-like, the thousand observations which my experience sent in his
direction.  In my mind his life-story ended with his death at the Cote
Dorion.  For years and years I saw his ending there.  Yet it all seemed
to me so futile, despite the wonder of his personality, that I could make
nothing of him, and though always fascinated by his character I was held
back from exploiting it, because of the hopelessness of it all.  It led
nowhere.  It was the 'quid refert' of the philosopher, and I could not
bring myself to get any further than an interrogation mark at the end of
a life which was all scepticism, mind and matter, and nothing more.

There came a day, however, when that all ended, when the doors were flung
wide to a new conception of the man, and of what he might have become.
I was going to America, and I paid an angry and reluctant visit to my
London tailor thirty-six hours before I was to start.  A suit of clothes
had been sent home which, after an effective trying-on, was a
monstrosity.  I went straight to my tailor, put on the clothes and bade
him look at them.  He was a great tailor-he saw exactly what I saw, and
what I saw was bad; and when a tailor will do that, you may be quite sure
he is a good and a great man.  He said the clothes were as bad as they
could be, but he added: "You shall have them before you sail, and they
shall be exactly as you want them.  I'll have the foreman down."  He rang
a bell.  Presently the door swung open and in stepped a man with an
eyeglass in his eye.  There, with a look at once reflective and
penetrating, with a figure at once slovenly and alert, was a caricature
of Charley Steele as I had known him, and of all his characteristics.
There was such a resemblance as an ugly child in a family may have to his
handsome brother.  It was Charley Steele with a twist--gone to seed.
Looking at him in blank amazement, I burst out: "Good heavens, so you
didn't die, Charley Steele!  You became a tailor!"

All at once the whole new landscape of my story as it eventually became,
spread out before me.  I was justified in waiting all the years.  My
discontent with the futile end of the tale as I originally knew it and
saw it was justified.  Charley Steele, brilliant, enigmatic and
epigrammatic, did not die at the Cote Dorion, but lived in that far
valley by Dalgrothe Mountain, and became a tailor!  So far as I am
concerned he became much more.  He was the beginning of a new epoch in
my literary life.  I had got into subtler methods, reached more intimate
understandings, had come to a place where analysis of character had
shaken itself free--but certainly not quite free--from a natural yet
rather dangerous eloquence.

As a play The Right of Way, skilfully and sympathetically dramatised by
Mr. Eugene Presbery, has had a career extending over several years, and
still continues to make its appearance.




NOTE

It should not be assumed that the "Chaudiere" of this story is the real
Chaudiere of Quebec province.  The name is characteristic, and for this
reason alone I have used it.

I must also apologise to my readers for appearing to disregard a
statement made in 'The Lane that Had no Turning', that that tale was the
last I should write about French Canada.  In explanation I would say that
'The Lane that Had no Turning' was written after the present book was
finished.

G. F.







THE RIGHT OF WAY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 1.


I.        THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
II.       WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
III.      AFTER FIVE YEARS
IV.       CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY
V.        THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE
VI.       THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB
VII.      "PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE!"
VIII.     THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT



     "They had lived and loved, and walked and worked in their own way,
     and the world went by them.  Between them and it a great gulf was
     fixed: and they met its every catastrophe with the Quid Refert? of
     the philosophers."

              "I want to talk with some old lover's ghost,
               Who lived before the god of love was born."

     "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and
     none of them is without signification."




CHAPTER I

THE WAY TO THE VERDICT

"Not guilty, your Honour!"

A hundred atmospheres had seemed pressing down on the fretted people in
the crowded court-room.  As the discordant treble of the huge foreman of
the jury squeaked over the mass of gaping humanity, which had twitched at
skirts, drawn purposeless hands across prickling faces, and kept nervous
legs at a gallop, the smothering weights of elastic air lifted suddenly,
a great suspiration of relief swept through the place like a breeze, and
in a far corner of the gallery a woman laughed outright.

The judge looked up reprovingly at the gallery; the clerk of the court
angrily called "Silence!" towards the offending corner, and seven or
eight hundred eyes raced between three centres of interest--the judge,
the prisoner, and the prisoner's counsel.  Perhaps more people looked at
the prisoner's counsel than at the prisoner, certainly far more than
looked at the judge.

Never was a verdict more unexpected.  If a poll had been taken of the
judgment of the population twenty-four hours before, a great majority
would have been found believing that there was no escape for the
prisoner, who was accused of murdering a wealthy timber merchant.  The
minority would have based their belief that the prisoner had a chance of
escape, not on his possible innocence, not on insufficient evidence, but
on a curious faith in the prisoner's lawyer.  This minority would not
have been composed of the friends of the lawyer alone, but of outside
spectators, who, because Charley Steele had never lost a criminal case,
attached to him a certain incapacity for bad luck; and of very young men,
who looked upon him as the perfect pattern of the person good to see and
hard to understand.

During the first two days of the trial the case had gone wholly against
the prisoner, who had given his name as Joseph Nadeau.  Witnesses had
heard him quarrelling with the murdered man, and the next day the body of
the victim had been found by the roadside.  The prisoner was a stranger
in the lumber-camp where the deed was done, and while there had been
morose and lived apart; no one knew him; and he refused to tell even his
lawyer whence he came, or what his origin, or to bring witnesses from his
home to speak for his character.

One by one the points had been made against him--with no perceptible
effect upon Charley Steele, who seemed the one cool, undisturbed person
in the courtroom.

Indifferent as he seemed, seldom speaking to the prisoner, often looking
out of the windows to the cool green trees far over on the hill, absorbed
and unbusinesslike, yet judge and jury came to see, before the second day
was done, that he had let no essential thing pass, that the questions
he asked had either a pregnant aptness, opened up new avenues of
deliberation, or were touched with mystery--seemed to have a longer
reach than the moment or the hour.

Before the end of this second day, however, more attention was upon him
than upon the prisoner, and nine-tenths of the people in the court-room
could have told how many fine linen handkerchiefs he used during the
afternoon, how many times he adjusted his monocle to look at the judge
meditatively.  Probably no man, for eight hours a day, ever exasperated
and tried a judge, jury, and public, as did this man of twenty-nine years
of age, who had been known at college as Beauty Steele, and who was still
so spoken of familiarly; or was called as familiarly, Charley Steele, by
people who never had attempted to be familiar with him.

The second day of the trial had ended gloomily for the prisoner.  The
coil of evidence had drawn so close that extrication seemed impossible.
That the evidence was circumstantial, that no sign of the crime was upon
the prisoner, that he was found sleeping quietly in his bed when he was
arrested, that he had not been seen to commit the deed, did not weigh in
the minds of the general public.  The man's guilt was freely believed;
not even the few who clung to the opinion that Charley Steele would yet
get him off thought that he was innocent.  There seemed no flaw in the
evidence, once granted its circumstantiality.

During the last two hours of the sitting the prisoner had looked at his
counsel in despair, for he seemed perfunctorily conducting the case: was
occupied in sketching upon the blotting-pad before him, looking out of
the window, or turning his head occasionally towards a corner where sat a
half-dozen well-dressed ladies, and more particularly towards one lady
who watched him in a puzzled way--more than once with a look of
disappointment.  Only at the very close of the sitting did he appear to
rouse himself.  Then, for a brief ten minutes, he cross-examined a friend
of the murdered merchant in a fashion which startled the court-room, for
he suddenly brought out the fact that the dead man had once struck a
woman in the face in the open street.  This fact, sharply stated by the
prisoner's counsel, with no explanation and no comment, seemed uselessly
intrusive and malicious.  His ironical smile merely irritated all
concerned.  The thin, clean-shaven face of the prisoner grew more pinched
and downcast, and he turned almost pleadingly towards the judge.  The
judge pulled his long side-whiskers nervously, and looked over his
glasses in severe annoyance, then hastily adjourned the sitting and left
the bench, while the prisoner saw with dismay his lawyer leave the court-
room with not even a glance towards him.

On the morning of the third day Charley Steele's face, for the first
time, wore an expression which, by a stretch of imagination, might be
called anxious.  He also took out his monocle frequently, rubbed it with
his handkerchief, and screwed it in again, staring straight before him
much of the time.  But twice he spoke to the prisoner in a low voice, and
was hurriedly answered in French as crude as his own was perfect.  When
he spoke, which was at rare intervals, his voice was without feeling,
concise, insistent, unappealing.  It was as though the business before
him was wholly alien to him, as though he were held there against his
will, but would go on with his task bitterly to the bitter end.

The court adjourned for an hour at noon.  During this time Charley
refused to see any one, but sat alone in his office with a few biscuits
and an ominous bottle before him, till the time came for him to go back
to the court-house.  Arrived there he entered by a side door, and was not
seen until the court opened once more.

For two hours and a half the crown attorney mercilessly made out his case
against the prisoner.  When he sat down, people glanced meaningly at each
other, as though the last word had been said, then looked at the
prisoner, as at one already condemned.

Yet Charley Steele was to reply.  He was not now the same man that had
conducted the case during the past two days and a half.  Some great
change had passed over him.  There was no longer abstraction,
indifference, or apparent boredom, or disdain, or distant stare.
He was human, intimate and eager, yet concentrated and impelling:
he was quietly, unnoticeably drunk.

He assured the prisoner with a glance of the eye, with a word scarce
above a whisper, as he slowly rose to make his speech for the defence.

His first words caused a new feeling in the courtroom.  He was a new
presence; the personality had a changed significance.  At first the
public, the jury, and the judge were curiously attracted, surprised into
a fresh interest.  The voice had an insinuating quality, but it also had
a measured force, a subterranean insistence, a winning tactfulness.
Withal, a logical simplicity governed his argument.  The flaneur, the
poseur--if such he was--no longer appeared.  He came close to the
jurymen, leaned his hands upon the back of a chair--as it were, shut out
the public, even the judge, from his circle of interest--and talked in a
conversational tone.  An air of confidence passed from him to the amazed
yet easily captivated jury; the distance between them, so gaping during
the last two days, closed suddenly up.  The tension of the past
estrangement, relaxing all at once, surprised the jury into an almost
eager friendliness, as on a long voyage a sensitive traveller finds in
some exciting accident a natural introduction to an exclusive fellow-
passenger, whom he discovers as human as he had thought him offensively
distant.

Charley began by congratulating the crown attorney on his statement of
the case.  He called it masterly; he said that in its presentations it
was irrefutable; as a precis of evidence purely circumstantial it was--
useful and interesting.  But, speech-making aside, and ability--and
rhetoric--aside, and even personal conviction aside, the case should
stand or fall by its total, not its comparative, soundness.  Since the
evidence was purely circumstantial, there must be no flaw in its cable of
assumption, it must be logically inviolate within itself.  Starting with
assumption only, there must be no straying possibilities, no loose ends
of certainty, no invading alternatives.  Was this so in the case of the
man before them?  They were faced by a curious situation.  So far as the
trial was concerned, the prisoner himself was the only person who could
tell them who he was, what was his past, and, if he committed the crime,
what was--the motive of it: out of what spirit--of revenge, or hatred--
the dead man had been sent to his account.  Probably in the whole history
of crime there never was a more peculiar case.  Even himself the
prisoner's counsel was dealing with one whose life was hid from him
previous to the day the murdered man was discovered by the roadside.
The prisoner had not sought to prove an alibi; he had done no more than
formally plead not guilty.  There was no material for defence save that
offered by the prosecution.  He had undertaken the defence of the
prisoner because it was his duty as a lawyer to see that the law
justified itself; that it satisfied every demand of proof to the last
atom of certainty; that it met the final possibility of doubt with
evidence perfect and inviolate if circumstantial, and uncontradictory if
eye-witness, if tell-tale incident, were to furnish basis of proof.

Judge, jury, and public riveted their eyes upon Charley Steele.
He had now drawn a little farther away from the jury-box; his eye took
in the judge as well; once or twice he turned, as if appealingly and
confidently, to the people in the room.  It was terribly hot, the air
was sickeningly close, every one seemed oppressed--every one save a lady
sitting not a score of feet from where the counsel for the prisoner
stood.  This lady's face was not one that could flush easily; it belonged
to a temperament as even as her person was symmetrically beautiful.  As
Charley talked, her eyes were fixed steadily, wonderingly upon him.
There was a question in her gaze, which never in the course of the speech
was quite absorbed by the admiration--the intense admiration--she was
feeling for him.  Once as he turned with a concentrated earnestness in
her direction his eyes met hers.  The message he flashed her was sub-
conscious, for his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in hand,
but it said to her:

"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you."  For another quarter
of an hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence; he
raised in the minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the law,
the awful tyranny of miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice
against a prisoner because that prisoner demanded that the law should
prove him guilty instead of his proving himself innocent.  If a man chose
to stand to that, to sternly assume this perilous position, the law had
no right to take advantage of it.  He turned towards the prisoner and
traced his possible history: as the sensitive, intelligent son of godly
Catholic parents from some remote parish in French Canada.  He drew an
imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come, and of the
parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of torture
knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life.  It
might at first glance seem quixotic, eccentric, but was it unnatural that
the prisoner should choose silence as to his origin and home, rather than
have his family and friends face the undoubted peril lying before him?
Besides, though his past life might have been wholly blameless, it would
not be evidence in his favour.  It might, indeed, if it had not been
blameless, provide some element of unjust suspicion against him, furnish
some fancied motive.  The prisoner had chosen his path, and events had so
far justified him.  It must be clear to the minds of judge and jury that
there were fatally weak places in the circumstantial evidence offered for
the conviction of this man.

There was the fact that no sign of the crime, no drop of blood, no
weapon, was found about him or near him, and that he was peacefully
sleeping at the moment the constable arrested him.

There was also the fact that no motive for the crime had been shown.
It was not enough that he and the dead man had been heard quarrelling.
Was there any certainty that it was a quarrel, since no word or sentence
of the conversation had been brought into court?  Men with quick tempers
might quarrel over trivial things, but exasperation did not always end in
bodily injury and the taking of life; imprecations were not so uncommon
that they could be taken as evidence of wilful murder.  The prisoner
refused to say what that troubled conversation was about, but who could
question his right to take the risk of his silence being misunderstood?

The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the
prisoner; the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the
public sat open mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white face
and clinched hands listened moveless and staring.  Charley Steele was
holding captive the emotions and the judgments of his hearers.  All
antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the
jurymen and himself.  People no longer looked with distant dislike at the
prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain only in
his surly defiance.

But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
moment.  He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in
evidence, that the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago;
also that he had kept a factory girl in affluence for two years.  Here
was motive for murder--if motive were to govern them--far greater than
might be suggested by excited conversation which listeners who could not
hear a word construed into a quarrel--listeners who bore the prisoner at
the bar ill-will because he shunned them while in the lumber-camp.  If
the prisoner was to be hanged for motive untraceable, why should not
these two women be hanged for motive traceable!

Here was his chance.  He appeared to impeach subtly every intelligence in
the room for having had any preconviction about the prisoner's guilt.  He
compelled the jury to feel that they, with him, had made the discovery of
the unsound character of the evidence.  The man might be guilty, but
their personal guilt, the guilt of the law, would be far greater if they
condemned the man on violable evidence.  With a last simple appeal, his
hands resting on the railing before the seat where the jury sat, his
voice low and conversational again, his eyes running down the line of
faces of the men who had his client's life in their hands, he said:

"It is not a life only that is at stake, it is not revenge for a life
snatched from the busy world by a brutal hand that we should heed to-day,
but the awful responsibility of that thing we call the State, which,
having the power of life and death without gainsay or hindrance, should
prove to the last inch of necessity its right to take a human life.  And
the right and the reason should bring conviction to every honest human
mind.  That is all I have to say."

The crown attorney made a perfunctory reply.  The judge's charge was
brief, and, if anything, a little in favour of the prisoner--very little,
a casuist's little; and the jury filed out of the room.  They were gone
but ten minutes.  When they returned, the verdict was given: "Not guilty,
your Honour!"

Then it was that a woman laughed in the gallery.  Then a whispering voice
said across the railing which separated the public from the lawyers:
"Charley!  Charley!"

Though Charley turned and looked at the lady who spoke, he made no
response.

A few minutes later, outside the court, as he walked quickly away, again
inscrutable and debonair, the prisoner, Joseph Nadeau, touched him on the
arm and said:

"M'sieu', M'sieu', you have saved my life--I thank you, M'sieu'!"

Charley Steele drew his arm away with disgust.  "Get out of my sight!
You're as guilty as hell!" he said.




CHAPTER II

WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL

"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you."  So Charley Steele's
eyes had said to a lady in the court room on that last day of the great
trial.  The lady had left the court-room dazed and exalted.  She, with
hundreds of others, had had a revelation of Charley Steele; had had also
the great emotional experience of seeing a crowd make the 'volte face'
with their convictions; looking at a prisoner one moment with eyes of
loathing and anticipating his gruesome end, the next moment seeing him
as the possible martyr to the machinery of the law.  She whose heart was
used to beat so evenly had felt it leap and swell with excitement,
awaiting the moment when the jury filed back into the court-room.  Then
it stood still, as a wave might hang for an instant at its crest ere it
swept down to beat upon the shore.

With her as with most present, the deepest feeling in the agitated
suspense was not so much that the prisoner should go free, as that the
prisoner's counsel should win his case.  It was as if Charley Steele were
on trial instead of the prisoner.  He was the imminent figure; it was his
fate that was in the balance--such was the antic irony of suggestion.
And the truth was, that the fates of both prisoner and counsel had been
weighed in the balance that sweltering August day.

The prisoner was forgotten almost as soon as he had left the court-room
a free man, but wherever men and women met in Montreal that day, one name
was on the lips of all-Charley Steele!  In his speech he had done two
things: he had thrown down every barrier of reserve--or so it seemed--
and had become human and intimate.  "I could not have believed it of
him," was the remark on every lip.  Of his ability there never had been
a moment's doubt, but it had ever been an uncomfortable ability, it had
tortured foes and made friends anxious.  No one had ever seen him show
feeling.  If it was a mask, he had worn it with a curious consistency: it
had been with him as a child, at school, at college, and he had brought
it back again to the town where he was born.  It had effectually
prevented his being popular, but it had made him--with his foppishness
and his originality--an object of perpetual interest.  Few men had
ventured to cross swords with him.  He left his fellow-citizens very much
alone.  He was uniformly if distantly courteous, and he was respected in
his own profession for his uncommon powers and for an utter indifference
as to whether he had cases in court or not.

Coming from the judge's chambers after the trial he went to his office,
receiving as he passed congratulations more effusively offered than, as
people presently found, his manner warranted.

For he was again the formal, masked Charley Steele, looking calmly
through the interrogative eye-glass.  By the time he reached his office,
greetings became more subdued.  His prestige had increased immensely in
a few short hours, but he had no more friends than before.  Old relations
were soon re-established.  The town was proud of his ability as it had
always been, irritated by his manner as it had always been, more
prophetic of his future than it had ever been, and unconsciously grateful
for the fact that he had given them a sensation which would outlast the
summer.

All these things concerned him little.  Once the business of the court-
room was over, a thought which had quietly lain in waiting behind the
strenuous occupations of his brain leaped forward to exclude all others.

As he entered his office he was thinking of that girl's face in the
court-room, with its flush of added beauty which he and his speech had
brought there.  "What a perfect loveliness!" he said to himself as he
bathed his face and hands, and prepared to go into the street again.
"She needed just such a flush to make her supreme Kathleen!"  He stood,
looking out into the square, out into the green of the trees where the
birds twittered.  "Faultless--faultless in form and feature.  She was so
as a child, she is so as a woman."  He lighted a cigarette, and blew away
little clouds of smoke.  "I will do it.  I will marry her.  She will have
me: I saw it in her eye.  Fairing doesn't matter.  Her uncle will never
consent to that, and she doesn't care enough for him.  She cares, but she
doesn't care enough.  .  .  .  I will do it."

He turned towards a cupboard into which he had put a certain bottle
before he went to the court-room two hours before.  He put the key in the
lock, then stopped.  "No, I think not!" he said.  "What I say to her
shall not be said forensically.  What a discovery I've made!  I was dull,
blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen,
against me; and then that bottle in there--and I saw things like crystal!
I had a glow in my brain, I had a tingle in my fingers; and I had
success, and"--his face clouded--"He was as guilty as hell!" he added,
almost bitterly, as he put the key of the cupboard into his pocket again.

There was a knock at the door, and a youth of about nineteen entered.

"Hello!" he said.  "I say, sir, but that speech of yours struck us all
where we couldn't say no.  Even Kathleen got in a glow over it.  Perhaps
Captain Fairing didn't, for he's just left her in a huff, and she's
looking--you remember those lines in the school-book:

                  "'A red spot burned upon her cheek,
                    Streamed her rich tresses down--'"

He laughed gaily.  "I've come to ask you up to tea," he added.  "The
Unclekins is there.  When I told him that Kathleen had sent Fairing away
with a flea in his ear, he nearly fell off his chair.  He lent me twenty
dollars on the spot.  Are you coming our way?" he continued, suddenly
trying to imitate Charley's manner.  Charley nodded, and they left the
office together and moved away under a long avenue of maples to where, in
the shade of a high hill, was the house of the uncle of Kathleen Wantage,
with whom she and her brother Billy lived.  They walked in silence for
some time, and at last Billy said, 'a propos' of nothing:

"Fairing hasn't a red cent."

"You have a perambulating mind, Billy," said Charley, and bowed to a
young clergyman approaching them from the opposite direction.

"What does that mean?" remarked Billy, and said "Hello!" to the young
clergyman, and did not wait for Charley's answer.

The Rev. John Brown was by no means a conventional parson.  He was
smoking a cigarette, and two dogs followed at his heels.  He was
certainly not a fogy.  He had more than a little admiration for Charley
Steele, but he found it difficult to preach when Charley was in the
congregation.  He was always aware of a subterranean and half-pitying
criticism going on in the barrister's mind.  John Brown knew that he
could never match his intelligence against Charley's, in spite of the
theological course at Durham, so he undertook to scotch the snake by
kindness.  He thought that he might be able to do this, because Charley,
who was known to be frankly agnostical, came to his church more or less
regularly.

The Rev. John Brown was not indifferent to what men thought of him.  He
had a reputation for being "independent," but his chief independence
consisted in dressing a little like a layman, posing as the athletic
parson of the new school, consorting with ministers of the dissenting
denominations when it was sufficiently effective, and being a "good
fellow" with men easily bored by church and churchmen.  He preached
theatrical sermons to societies and benevolent associations.  He wanted
to be thought well of on all hands, and he was shrewd enough to know that
if he trimmed between ritualism on one hand and evangelicism on the
other, he was on a safe road.  He might perforate old dogmatical
prejudices with a good deal of freedom so long as he did not begin
bringing "millinery" into the service of the church.  He invested his own
personal habits with the millinery.  He looked a picturesque figure with
his blond moustache, a little silk-lined brown cloak thrown carelessly
over his shoulder, a gold-headed cane, and a brisk jacket half
ecclesiastical, half military.

He had interested Charley Steele, also he had amused him, and
sometimes he had surprised him into a sort of admiration; for Brown had
a temperament capable of little inspirations--such a literary inspiration
as might come to a second-rate actor--and Charley never belittled any
man's ability, but seized upon every sign of knowledge with the
appreciation of the epicure.

John Brown raised his hat to Charley, then held out a hand.  "Masterly-
masterly!" he said.  "Permit my congratulations.  It was the one thing
to do.  You couldn't have saved him by making him an object of pity, by
appealing to our sympathies."

"What do you take to be the secret, then?" asked Charley, with a look
half abstracted, half quizzical.  "Terror--sheer terror.  You startled
the conscience.  You made defects in the circumstantial evidence, the
imminent problems of our own salvation.  You put us all on trial.  We
were under the lash of fear.  If we parsons could only do that from the
pulpit!"

"We will discuss that on our shooting-trip next week.  Duck-shooting
gives plenty of time for theological asides.  You are coming, eh?"

John Brown scarcely noticed the sarcasm, he was so delighted at the
suggestion that he was to be included in the annual duck-shoot of the
Seven, as the little yearly party of Charley and his friends to Lake
Aubergine was called.  He had angled for this invitation for two years.

"I must not keep you," Charley said, and dismissed him with a bow.  "The
sheep will stray, and the shepherd must use his crook."

Brown smiled at the badinage, and went on his way rejoicing in the fact
that he was to share the amusements of the Seven at Lake Aubergine--the
Lake of the Mad Apple.  To get hold of these seven men of repute and
position, to be admitted into this good presence!--He had a pious
exaltation, but whether it was because he might gather into the fold
erratic and agnostical sheep like Charley Steele, or because it pleased
his social ambitions, he had occasion to answer in the future.  He gaily
prepared to go to the Lake of the Mad Apple, where he was fated to eat
of the tree of knowledge.

Charley Steele and Billy Wantage walked on slowly to the house under the
hill.

"He's the right sort," said Billy.  "He's a sport.  I can stand that
kind.  Did you ever hear him sing?  No?  Well, he can sing a comic song
fit to make you die.  I can sing a bit myself, but to hear him sing 'The
Man Who Couldn't Get Warm' is a show in itself.  He can play the banjo
too, and the guitar--but he's best on the banjo.  It's worth a dollar to
listen to his Epha-haam--that's Ephraim, you know--Ephahaam Come Home,'
and 'I Found Y' in de Honeysuckle Paitch.'"

"He preaches, too!" said Charley drily.

They had reached the door of the house under the hill, and Billy had no
time for further remark.  He ran into the drawing-room, announcing
Charley with the words: "I say, Kathleen, I've brought the man that made
the judge sit up."

Billy suddenly stopped, however, for there sat the judge who had tried
the case, calmly munching a piece of toast.  The judge did not allow
himself the luxury of embarrassment, but bowed to Charley with a smile,
which he presently turned on Kathleen, who came as near being
disconcerted as she had ever been in her life.

Kathleen had passed through a good deal to look so unflurried.  She had
been on trial in the court-room as well as the prisoner.  Important
things had been at stake with her.  She and Charley Steele had known each
other since they were children.  To her, even in childhood, he had been
a dominant figure.  He had judicially and admiringly told her she was
beautiful--when he was twelve and she five.  But he had said it without
any of those glances which usually accompanied the same sentiments in the
mouths of other lads.  He had never made boy-love to her, and she had
thrilled at the praise of less splendid people than Charley Steele.  He
had always piqued her, he was so superior to the ordinary enchantments
of youth, beauty, and fine linen.

As he came and went, growing older and more characteristic, more and more
"Beauty Steele," accompanied by legends of wild deeds and days at
college, by tales of his fopperies and the fashions he had set, she
herself had grown, as he had termed it, more "decorative."  He had told
her so, not in the least patronisingly, but as a simple fact in which no
sentiment lurked.  He thought her the most beautiful thing he had ever
seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect
pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous
purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself.  He had said again and
again, as he grew older and left college and began the business of life
after two years in Europe, that sentiment would spoil her, would scatter
the charm of her perfect beauty; it would vitalise her too much, and her
nature would lose its proportion; she would be decentralised!  She had
been piqued at his indifference to sentiment; she could not easily be
content without worship, though she felt none.  This pique had grown
until Captain Tom Fairing crossed her path.

Fairing was the antithesis of Charley Steele.  Handsome, poor,
enthusiastic, and none too able, he was simple and straightforward, and
might be depended on till the end of the chapter.  And the end of it was,
that in so far as she had ever felt real sentiment for anybody, she felt
it for Tom Fairing of the Royal Fusileers.  It was not love she felt in
the old, in the big, in the noble sense, but it had behind it selection
and instinct and natural gravitation.

Fairing declared his love.  She would give him no answer.  For as soon
as she was presented with the issue, the destiny, she began to look round
her anxiously.  The first person to fill the perspective was Charley
Steele.  As her mind dwelt on him, her uncle gave forth his judgment,
that she should never have a penny if she married Tom Fairing.  This only
irritated her, it did not influence her.  But there was Charley.  He was
a figure, was already noted in his profession because of a few masterly
successes in criminal cases, and if he was not popular, he was
distinguished, and the world would talk about him to the end.  He was
handsome, and he was well-to-do-he had a big unoccupied house on the hill
among the maples.  How many people had said, What a couple they would
make-Charley Steele and Kathleen Wantage!

So, as Fairing presented an issue to her, she concentrated her thoughts
as she had never done before on the man whom the world set apart for her,
in a way the world has.

As she looked and looked, Charley began to look also.  He had not been
enamoured of the sordid things of the world; he had been merely curious.
He thought vice was ugly; he had imagination and a sense of form.
Kathleen was beautiful.  Sentiment had, so he thought, never seriously
disturbed her; he did not think it ever would.  It had not affected him.
He did not understand it.  He had been born non-intime.  He had had
acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves or love.  But he
had a fine sense of the fitting and the proportionate, and he worshipped
beauty in so far as he could worship anything.  The homage was cerebral,
intellectual, temperamental, not of the heart.  As he looked out upon the
world half pityingly, half ironically, he was struck with wonder at the
disproportion which was engendered by "having heart," as it was called.
He did not find it necessary.

Now that he had begun to think of marriage, who so suitable as Kathleen?
He knew of Fairing's adoration, but he took it as a matter of course that
she had nothing to give of the same sort in return.  Her beauty was still
serene and unimpaired.  He would not spoil it by the tortures of emotion.
He would try to make Kathleen's heart beat in harmony with his own; it
should not thunder out of time.  He had made up his mind that he would
marry her.

For Kathleen, with the great trial, the beginning of the end had come.
Charley's power over her was subtle, finely sensuous, and, in deciding,
there were no mere heart-impulses working for Charley.  Instinct and
impulse were working in another direction.  She had not committed her
mind to either man, though her heart, to a point, was committed to
Fairing.

On the day of the trial, however, she fell wholly under that influence
which had swayed judge, jury, and public.  To her the verdict of the jury
was not in favour of the prisoner at the bar--she did not think of him.
It was in favour of Charley Steele.

And so, indifferent as to who heard, over the heads of the people in
front of her, to the accused's counsel inside the railings, she had
called, softly: "Charley!  Charley!"

Now, in the house under the hill, they were face to face, and the end was
at hand: the end of something and the beginning of something.

There was a few moments of casual conversation, in which Billy talked as
much as anybody, and then Kathleen said:

"What do you suppose was the man's motive for committing the murder?"

Charley looked at Kathleen steadily, curiously, through his monocle.
It was a singular compliment she paid him.  Her remark took no heed of
the verdict of the jury.  He turned inquiringly towards the judge, who,
though slightly shocked by the question, recovered himself quickly.

"What do you think it was, sir?" Charley asked quietly.

"A woman--and revenge, perhaps," answered the judge, with a matter-of-
course air.

A few moments afterwards the judge was carried off by Kathleen's uncle
to see some rare old books; Billy, his work being done, vanished; and
Kathleen and Charley were left alone.

"You did not answer me in the court-room," Kathleen said.  "I called to
you."

"I wanted to hear you say them here," he rejoined.  "Say what?" she
asked, a little puzzled by the tone of his voice.

"Your congratulations," he answered.

She held out a hand to him.  "I offer them now.  It was wonderful.  You
were inspired.  I did not think you could ever let yourself go."

He held her hand firmly.  "I promise not to do it again," he said
whimsically.

"Why not?"

"Have I not your congratulations?"  His hand drew her slightly towards
him; she rose to her feet.

"That is no reason," she answered, confused, yet feeling that there was a
double meaning in his words.

"I could not allow you to be so vain," he said.  "We must be
companionable.  Henceforth I shall congratulate myself--Kathleen."

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.

"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.

"What do I care!" he said to himself.  "I shall never squeal at any
penalty.  I shall never say in the great round-up that I was weak and
I fell.  I'll take my gruel expecting it, not fearing it--if there is
to be any gruel anywhere, or any round-up anywhere!"

A figure suddenly appeared coming round the bend of the road before him.
It was Rouge Gosselin.  Rouge Gosselin was inclined to speak.  Some
satanic whim or malicious foppery made Charley stare him blankly in the
face.  The monocle and the stare stopped the bon soir and the friendly
warning on Rouge Gosselin's tongue, and the pilot passed on with a
muttered oath.

Gosselin had not gone far, however, before he suddenly stopped and
laughed outright, for at the bottom he had great good-nature, in keeping
with his "six-foot" height, and his temper was friendly if quick.  It
seemed so absurd, so audacious, that a man could act like Charley Steele,
that he at once became interested in the phenomenon, and followed slowly
after Charley, saying as he went: "Tiens, there will be things to watch
to-night!"

Before Charley was within five hundred yards of the tavern he could hear
the laughter and song coming from the old seigneury which Theophile
Charlemagne called now the Cote Dorion Hotel, after the name given to the
point on which the house stood.  Low and wide-roofed, with dormer windows
and a wide stoop in front, and walls three feet thick, behind, on the
river side, it hung over the water, its narrow veranda supported by
piles, with steps down to the water-side.  Seldom was there an hour when
boats were not tied to these steps.  Summer and winter the tavern was a
place of resort.  Inside, the low ceiling, the broad rafters, the great
fireplace, the well-worn floor, the deep windows, the wooden cross let
into the wall, and the varied and picturesque humanity frequenting this
great room, gave it an air of romance.  Yet there were people who called
the tavern a "shebang"--slander as it was against Suzon Charlemagne,
which every river-driver and woodsman and habitant who frequented the
place would have resented with violence.  It was because they thought
Charley Steele slandered the girl and the place in his mind, that the
river-drivers had sworn they would make it hot for him if he came again.
Charley was the last man in the world to undeceive them by words.

When he coolly walked into the great room, where a half-dozen of them
were already assembled, drinking white "whiskey-wine," he had no
intention of setting himself right.  He raised his hat cavalierly to
Suzon and shook hands with her.

He took no notice of the men around him.  "Brandy, please!" he said.
"Why do I drink, do you say?" he added, as Suzon placed the bottle and
glass before him.

She was silent for an instant, then she said gravely: "Perhaps because
you like it; perhaps because something was left out of you when you were
made, and--"

She paused and went no further, for a red-shirted river-driver with brass
rings in his ears came close to them, and called gruffly for whiskey.  He
glowered at Charley, who looked at him indolently, then raised his glass
towards Suzon and drank the brandy.

"Pish!" said Red Shirt, and, turning round, joined his comrades.  It was
clear he wanted a pretext to quarrel.

"Perhaps because you like it; perhaps because something was left out of
you when you were made--" Charley smiled pleasantly as Suzon came over to
him again.  "You've answered the question," he said, "and struck the
thing at the centre.  Which is it?  The difficulty to decide which has
divided the world.  If it's only a physical craving, it means that we are
materialists naturally, and that the soil from which the grape came is
the soil that's in us; that it is the body feeding on itself all the
time; that like returns to like, and we live a little together, and then
mould together for ever and ever, amen.  If it isn't a natural craving--
like to like--it's a proof of immortality, for it represents the wild
wish to forget the world, to be in another medium.

"I am only myself when I am drunk.  Liquor makes me human.  At other times
I'm merely Charley Steele!  Now isn't it funny, this sort of talk here?"

"I don't know about that," she answered, "if, as you say, it's natural.
This tavern's the only place I have to think in, and what seems to you
funny is a sort of ordinary fact to me."

"Right again, ma belle Suzon.  Nothing's incongruous.  I've never felt so
much like singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs as when I've been
drinking.  I remember the last time I was squiffy I sang all the way home
that old nursery hymn:

                  "'On the other side of Jordan,
                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
                         There is rest for you.
                    There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for the weary,
                         There is rest for you!'"

"I should have liked to hear you sing it--sure!" said Suzon, laughing.

Charley tossed off a quarter-tumbler of brandy, which, instead of
flushing the face, seemed only to deepen the whiteness of the skin,
showing up more brightly the spots of colour in the cheeks, that white
and red which had made him known as Beauty Steele.  With a whimsical
humour, behind which was the natural disposition of the man to do what he
listed without thinking of the consequences, he suddenly began singing,
in a voice shaken a little now by drink, but full of a curious magnetism:

                    "On the other side of Jordan--"

"Oh, don't; please don't!" said the girl, in fear, for she saw two
river-drivers entering the door, one of whom had sworn he would do for
Charley Steele if ever he crossed his path.

"Oh, don't--M'sieu' Charley!" she again urged.  The "Charley" caught his
ear, and the daring in his eye brightened still more.  He was ready for
any change or chance to-night, was standing on the verge of any
adventure, the most reckless soul in Christendom.

                   "On the other side of Jordan,
                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
                         There is rest for you!"

What more incongruous thing than this flaneur in patent leathers and red
tie, this "hell-of-a-fellow with a pane of glass in his eye," as Jake
Hough, the horse-doctor, afterwards said, surrounded by red and blue-
shirted river-men, woodsmen, loafers, and toughs, singing a sacred song
with all the unction of a choir-boy; with a magnetism, too, that did its
work in spite of all prejudice?  It was as if he were counsel in one of
those cases when, the minds and sympathies of judge and jury at first
arrayed against him, he had irresistibly cloven his way to their
judgment--not stealing away their hearts, but governing, dominating their
intelligences.  Whenever he had done this he had been drinking hard, was
in a mental world created by drink, serene, clear-eyed, in which his
brain worked like an invincible machine, perfect and powerful.  Was it
the case that, as he himself suggested, he was never so natural as when
under this influence?  That then and only then the real man spoke, that
then and only then the primitive soul awakened, that it supplied the
thing left out of him at birth?

                   "There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for the weary,
                    There is rest for the weary,
                         There is rest for you!"

One, two verses he sang as the men, at first snorting and scornful,
shuffled angrily; then Jake Hough, the English horse-doctor, roared in
the refrain:

                   "There is rest for the weary,
                         There is rest for you!"

Upon which, carried away, every one of them roared, gurgled, or shouted

                   "There is rest for the weary,
                         There is rest for you!"

Rouge Gosselin, who had entered during the singing, now spoke up quickly
in French:

"A sermon now, M'sieu'!"

Charley took his monocle out of his eye and put it back again.  Now each
man present seemed singled out for an attack by this little battery of
glass.  He did not reply directly to Rouge Gosselin, but standing
perfectly still, with one hand resting on the counter at which Suzon
stood, he prepared to speak.

Suzon did not attempt to stop him now, but gazed at him in a sort of awe.
These men present were Catholics, and held religion in superstitious
respect, however far from practising its precepts.  Many of them had been
profane and blasphemous in their time; may have sworn "sacre bapteme!"
one of the worst oaths of their race; but it had been done in the
wildness of anger, and they were little likely to endure from Charley
Steele any word that sounded like blasphemy.  Besides, the world said
that he was an infidel, and that was enough for bitter prejudice.

In the pause--very short--before Charley began speaking, Suzon's
fingers stole to his on the counter and pressed them quickly.  He made no
response; he was scarcely aware of it.  He was in a kind of dream.  In an
even, conversational tone, in French at once idiomatic and very simple,
he began:

"My dear friends, this is a world where men get tired.  If they work they
get tired, and if they play they get tired.  If they look straight ahead
of them they walk straight, but then they get blind by-and-by; if they
look round them and get open-eyed, their feet stumble and they fall.  It
is a world of contradictions.  If a man drinks much he loses his head,
and if he doesn't drink at all he loses heart.  If he asks questions he
gets into trouble, and if he doesn't ask them he gets old before his
time.  Take the hymn we have just sung:

                   "'On the other side of Jordan,
                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
                         There is rest for you!'

"We all like that, because we get tired, and it isn't always summer, and
nothing blooms all the year round.  We get up early and we work late, and
we sleep hard, and when the weather is good and wages good, and there's
plenty in the house, we stay sober and we sadly sing, 'On the other side
of Jordan'; but when the weather's heavy and funds scarce, and the pork
and molasses and bread come hard, we get drunk, and we sing the comic
chanson 'Brigadier, vows avez raison!'  We've been singing a sad song
to-night when we're feeling happy.  We didn't think whether it was sad or
not, we only knew it pleased our ears, and we wanted those sweet fields
of Eden, and the blooming tree of life, and the rest under the tree.  But
ask a question or two.  Where is the other side of Jordan?  Do you go up
to it, or down to it?  And how do you go?  And those sweet fields of
Eden, what do they look like, and how many will they hold?  Isn't it
clear that the things that make us happiest in this world are the things
we go for blind?"

He paused.  Now a dozen men came a step or two nearer, and crowded close
together, looking over each others' shoulders at him with sharp,
wondering eyes.

"Isn't that so?" he continued.  "Do you realise that no man knows where
that Jordan and those fields are, and what the flower of the tree of life
looks like?  Let us ask a question again.  Why is it that the one being
in all the world who could tell us anything about it, the one being who
had ever seen Jordan or Eden or that tree of life-in fact, the one of all
creation who could describe heaven, never told?  Isn't it queer?  Here he
was--that one man-standing just as I am among you, and round him were the
men who followed him, all ordinary men, with ordinary curiosity.  And he
said he had come down from heaven, and for years they were with him, and
yet they never asked him what that heaven was like: what it looked like,
what it felt like, what sort of life they lived there, what manner of
folk were the angels, what was the appearance of God.  Why didn't they
ask, and why didn't he answer?  People must have kept asking that
question afterwards, for a man called John answered it.  He described,
as only an oriental Jew would or could, a place all precious stones and
gold and jewels and candles, in oriental language very splendid and
auriferous.  But why didn't those twelve men ask the One Man who knew,
and why didn't the One answer?  And why didn't the One tell without being
asked?"

He paused again, and now there came a shuffling and a murmuring, a
curious rumble, a hard breathing, for Charley had touched with steely
finger the tender places in the natures of these Catholics, who, whatever
their lives, held fast to the immemorial form, the sacredness of Mother
Church.  They were ever ready to step into the galley which should bear
them all home, with the invisible rowers of God at the oars, down the
wild rapids, to the haven of St.  Peter.  There was savagery in their
faces now.

He saw, and he could not refrain from smiling as he stretched out his
hand to them again with a little quieting gesture, and continued
soothingly:

"But why should we ask?  There's a thing called electricity.  Well, you
know that if you take a slice out of anything, less remains behind.  We
can take the air out of this room, and scarcely leave any in it.

"We take a drink out of a bottle, and certainly there isn't as much left
in it!  But the queer thing is that with this electricity you take it
away and just as much remains.  It goes out from your toe, rushes away to
Timbuctoo, and is back in your toe before you can wink.  Why?  No one
knows.  What's the good of asking?  You can't see it: you can only see
what it does.  What good would it do us if we knew all about it?  There
it is, and it's going to revolutionise the world.  It's no good asking--
no one knows what it is and where it comes from, or what it looks like.
It's better to go it blind, because you feel the power, though you can't
see where it comes from.  You can't tell where the fields of Eden are,
but you believe they're somewhere, and that you'll get to them some day.
So say your prayers, believe all you can, don't ask questions, and don't
try to answer 'em; and remember that Charley Steele preached to you the
fear of the Lord at the Cote Dorion, and wound up the service with the
fine old hymn:

          "'I'll away, I'll away, to the promised land--'"

A whole verse of this camp-meeting hymn he sang in an ominous silence
now, for it had crept into their minds that the hymn they had previously
sung so loudly was a Protestant hymn, and that this was another
Protestant hymn of the rankest sort.  When he stopped singing and pushed
over his glass for Suzon to fill it, the crowd were noiseless and silent
for a moment, for the spell was still on them.  They did not recover
themselves until they saw him lift his glass to Suzon, his back on them,
again insolently oblivious of them all.  They could not see his face, but
they could see the face of Suzon Charlemagne, and they misunderstood the
light in her eye, the flush on her cheek.  They set it down to a personal
interest in Charley Steele.

Charley had, however, thrown a spell over her in another fashion.  In her
eye, in her face, was admiration, the sympathy of a strong intelligence,
the wonder of a mind in the presence of its master, but they thought they
saw passion, love, desire, in her face--in the face of their Suzon, the
pride of the river, the flower of the Cote Dorion.  Not alone because
Charley had blasphemed against religion did they hate him at this moment,
but because every heart was scorched with envy and jealousy--the black
unreasoning jealousy which the unlettered, the dull, the crude, feels for
the lettered, the able and the outwardly refined.

Charley was back again in the unfriendly climate of his natural life.
Suzon felt the troubled air round them, saw the dark looks on the faces
of the men, and was at once afraid and elated.  She loved the glow of
excitement, she had a keen sense of danger, but she also felt that in any
possible trouble to-night the chances of escape would be small for the
man before her.

He pushed out his glass again.  She mechanically poured brandy into it.

"You've had more than enough," she said, in a low voice.

"Every man knows his own capacity, Suzon.  Love me little, love me long,"
he added, again raising his glass to her, as the men behind suddenly
moved forward upon the bar.

"Don't--for God's sake!" she whispered hastily.  "Do go--or there'll be
trouble!"

The black face of Theophile Charlemagne was also turned anxiously in
Charley's direction as he pushed out glasses for those who called for
liquor.

"Oh, do, do go--like a good soul!" Suzon urged.  Charley laughed
disdainfully.  "Like a good soul!"  Had it come to this, that Suzon
pleaded with him as if he were a foolish, obstreperous child!

"Faithless and unbelieving!" he said to Suzon in English.  "Didn't I
play my game well a minute ago--eh--eh--eh, Suzon?"

"Oh, yes, yes, M'sieu'," she replied in English; "but now you are
differen' and so are they.  You must goah, so, you must!"

He laughed again, a queer sardonic sort of laugh, yet he put out his hand
and touched the girl's arm lightly with a forefinger.  "I am a Quaker
born; I never stir till the spirit moves me," he said.

He scented conflict, and his spirits rose at the thought.  Some reckless
demon of adventure possessed him; some fatalistic courage was upon him.
So far as the eye could see, the liquor he had drunk had done no more
than darken the blue of his eye, for his hand was steady, his body was
well poised, his look was direct; there seemed some strange electric
force in leash behind his face, a watchful yet nonchalant energy of
spirit, joined to an indolent pose of body.  As the girl looked at him
something of his unreckoning courage passed into her.  Somehow she
believed in him, felt that by some wild chance he might again conquer
this truculent element now almost surrounding him.  She spoke quickly to
her step-father.  "He won't go.  What can we do?"

"You go, and he'll follow," said Theophile, who didn't want a row--
a dangerous row-in his house.

"No, he won't," she said; "and I don't believe they'd let him follow me."

There was no time to say more.  The crowd were insistent and restless
now.  They seemed to have a plan of campaign, and they began to carry it
out.  First one, then another, brushed roughly against Charley.  Cool and
collected, he refused to accept the insults.

"Pardon," he said, in each case; "I am very awkward."

He smiled all the time; he seemed waiting.  The pushing and crowding
became worse.  "Don't mention it," he said.  "You should learn how to
carry your liquor in your legs."

Suddenly he changed from apology to attack.  He talked at them with a
cheerful scorn, a deprecating impertinence, as though they were children;
he chided them with patient imprecations.  This confused them for a
moment and cleared a small space around him.  There was no defiance in
his aspect, no aggressiveness of manner; he was as quiet as though it
were a drawing-room and he a master of monologues.  He hurled original
epithets at them in well-cadenced French, he called them what he listed,
but in language which half-veiled the insults--the more infuriating to
his hearers because they did not perfectly understand.

Suddenly a low-set fellow, with brass rings in his ears, pulled off his
coat and threw it on the floor.  "I'll eat your heart," he said, and
rolled up blue sleeves along a hairy arm.

"My child," said Charley, "be careful what you eat.  Take up your coat
again, and learn that it is only dogs that delight to bark and bite.  Our
little hands were never made to tear each other's eyes."

The low-set fellow made a rush forward, but Rouge Gosselin held him back.
"No, no, Jougon," he said.  "I have the oldest grudge."

Jougon struggled with Rouge Gosselin.  "Be good, Jougon," said Charley.

As he spoke a heavy tumbler flew from the other side of the room.
Charley saw the missile thrown and dodged.  It missed his temple, but
caught the rim of his straw hat, carrying it off his head, and crashed
into a lantern hanging against the wall, putting out the light.  The room
was only lighted now by another lantern on the other side of the room.
Charley stooped, picked up his hat, and put it on his head again coolly.

"Stop that, or I'll clear the bar!" cried Theophile Charlemagne, taking
the pistol Suzon slipped into his hand.  The sight of the pistol drove
the men wild, and more than one snatched at the knife in his belt.

At that instant there pushed forward into the clear space beside Charley
Steele the great figure of Jake Hough, the horse-doctor, the strongest
man, and the most popular Englishman on the river.  He took his stand by
Charley, raised his great hand, smote him in the small of his back, and
said:

"By the Lord, you have sand, and I'll stand by you!"  Under the friendly
but heavy stroke the monocle shot from Charley's eye the length of the
string.  Charley lifted it again, put it up, and staring hard at Jake,
coolly said:

"I beg your pardon--but have I ever--been introduced to you?"

What unbelievable indifference to danger, what disdain to friendliness,
made Charley act as he did is a matter for speculation.  It was throwing
away his one chance; it was foppery on the scaffold--an incorrigible
affectation or a relentless purpose.

Jake Hough strode forward into the crowd, rage in his eye.  "Go to the
devil, then, and take care of yourself!" he said roughly.

"Please," said Charley.

They were the last words he uttered that night, for suddenly the other
lantern went out, there was a rush and a struggle, a muffled groan, a
shrill woman's voice, a scramble and hurrying feet, a noise of a
something splashing heavily in the water outside.  When the lights were
up again the room was empty, save for Theophile Charlemagne, Jake Hough,
and Suzon, who lay in a faint on the floor with a nasty bruise on her
forehead.

A score of river-drivers were scattering into the country-side, and
somewhere in the black river, alive or dead, was Charley Steele.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

He had had acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves
He has wheeled his nuptial bed into the street
He left his fellow-citizens very much alone
I am only myself when I am drunk
I should remember to forget it
Liquor makes me human
Nervous legs at a gallop
So say your prayers, believe all you can, don't ask questions
Was not civilisation a mistake
Who knows!





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