One day Charley began to know the gossip of the village about him from a source less friendly than Jo Portugais. The Notary’s wife, bringing her boy to be measured for a suit of broadcloth, asked Charley if the things Jo had told about him were true, and if it was also true that he was a Protestant, and perhaps an Englishman. As yet, Charley had been asked no direct questions, for the people of Chaudiere had the consideration of their temperament; but the Notary’s wife was half English, and being a figure in the place, she took to herself more privileges than did old Madame Dugal, the Cure’s sister.
To her ill-disguised impertinence in English, as bad as her French and as fluent, Charley listened with quiet interest. When she had finished her voluble statement she said, with a simper and a sneer-for, after all, a Notary’s wife must keep her position—“And now, what is the truth about it? And are you a Protestant?”
There was a sinister look in old Trudel’s eyes as, cross-legged on his table, he listened to Madame Dauphin. He remembered the time, twenty-five years ago, when he had proposed to this babbling woman, and had been rejected with scorn—to his subsequent satisfaction; for there was no visible reason why any one should envy the Notary, in his house or out of it. Already Trudel had a respect for the tongue of M’sieu’. He had not talked much the few days he had been in the shop, but, as the old man had said to Filion Lacasse the saddler, his brain was like a pair of shears—it went clip, clip, clip right through everything. He now hoped that his new apprentice, with the hand of a master-workman, would go clip, clip through madame’s inquisitiveness. He was not disappointed, for he heard Charley say:
“One person in the witness-box at a time, Madame. Till Jo Portugais is cross-examined and steps down, I don’t see what I can do!”
“But you are a Protestant!” said the woman snappishly. This man was only a tailor, dressed in fulled cloth, and no doubt his past life would not bear inspection; and she was the Notary’s wife, and had said to people in the village that she would find out the man’s history from himself.
“That is one good reason why I should not go to confession,” he replied casually, and turned to a table where he had been cutting a waistcoat—for the first time in his life.
“Do you think I’m going to stand your impertinence? Do you know who I am?”
Charley calmly put up his monocle. He looked at the foolish little woman with so cruel a flash of the eye that she shrank back.
“I should know you anywhere,” he said.
“Come, Stephan,” she said nervously to her boy, and pulled him towards the door.
On the instant Charley’s feeling changed. Was he then going to carry the old life into the new, and rebuke a silly garish woman whose faults were generic more than personal? He hurried forward to the door and courteously opened it for her.
“Permit me, Madame,” he said.
She saw that there was nothing ironical in this politeness. She had a sudden apprehension of an unusual quality called “the genteel,” for no storekeeper in Chaudiere ever opened or shut a shop-door for anybody. She smiled a vacuous smile; she played “the lady” terribly, as, with a curious conception of dignity, she held her body stiff as a ramrod, and with a prim merci sailed into the street.
This gorgeous exit changed her opinion of the man she had been unable to catechise. Undoubtedly he had snubbed her—that was the word she used in her mind—but his last act had enabled her, in the sight of several habitants and even of Madame Dugal, “to put on airs,” as the charming Madame Dugal said afterwards.
Thinking it better to give the impression that she had had a successful interview, she shook her head mysteriously when asked about M’sieu’, and murmured, “He is quite the gentleman!” which she thought a socially distinguished remark.
When she had gone, Charley turned to old Louis.
“I don’t want to turn your customers away,” he said quietly, “but there it is! I don’t need to answer questions as a part of the business, do I?”
There was a sour grin on the face of old Trudel. He grunted some inaudible answer, then, after a pause, added: “I’d have been hung for murder, if she’d answered the question I asked her once as I wanted her to.”
He opened and shut his shears with a sardonic gesture.
Charley smiled, and went to the window. For a minute he stood watching Madame Dauphin and Rosalie at the post-office door. The memory of his talk with Rosalie was vivid to him at the moment. He was thinking also that he had not a penny in the world to pay for the rest of the paper he had bought. He turned round and put on his coat slowly.
“What are you doing that for?” asked the old man, with a kind of snarl, yet with trepidation.
“I don’t think I’ll work any more to-day.”
“Not work! Smoke of the devil, isn’t Sunday enough to play in? You’re not put out by that fool wife of Dauphin’s?”
“Oh no—not that! I want an understanding about wages.”
To Louis the dread crisis had come. He turned a little green, for he was very miserly-for the love of God.
He had scarcely realised what was happening when Charley first sat down on the bench beside him. He had been taken by surprise. Apart from the excitement of the new experience, he had profited by the curiosity of the public, for he had orders enough to keep him busy until summer, and he had had to give out work to two extra women in the parish, though he had never before had more than one working for him. But his ruling passion was strong in him. He always remembered with satisfaction that once when the Cure was absent and he was supposed to be dying, a priest from another parish came, and, the ministrations over, he had made an offering of a gold piece. When the young priest hesitated, his fingers had crept back to the gold piece, closed on it, and drawn it back beneath the coverlet again. He had then peacefully fallen asleep. It was a gracious memory.
“I don’t need much, I don’t want a great deal,” continued Charley when the tailor did not answer, “but I have to pay for my bed and board, and I can’t do it on nothing.”
“How have you done it so far?” peevishly replied the tailor.
“By working after hours at carpentering up there”—he made a gesture towards Vadrome Mountain. “But I can’t go on doing that all the time, or I’ll be like you too soon.”
“Be like me!” The voice of the tailor rose shrilly.
“Be like me! What’s the matter with me?”
“Only that you’re in a bad way before your time, and that you mayn’t get out of this hole without stepping into another. You work too hard, Monsieur Trudel.”
“What do you want—wages?”
Charley inclined his head. “If you think I’m worth them.”
The tailor viciously snipped a piece of cloth. “How can I pay you wages, if you stand there doing nothing?” “This is my day for doing nothing,” Charley answered pleasantly, for the tailor-man amused him, and the whimsical mental attitude of his past life was being brought to the surface by this odd figure, with big spectacles pushed up on a yellow forehead, and shrunken hands viciously clutching the shears.
“You don’t mean to say you’re not going to work to-day, and this suit of clothes promised for to-morrow night—for the Manor House too!”
With a piece of chalk Charley idly made heads on brown paper. “After all, why should clothes be the first thing in one’s mind—when they are some one else’s! It’s a beautiful day outside. I’ve never felt the sun so warm and the air so crisp and sweet—never in all my life.”
“Then where have you lived?” snapped out the tailor with a sneer. “You must be a Yankee—they have only what we leave over down there!”—he jerked his head southward. “We don’t stop to look at weather here. I suppose you did where you come from?”
Charley smiled in a distant sort of way. “Where I came from, when we weren’t paid for our work we always stopped to consider our health—and the weather. I don’t want a great deal. I put it to you honestly. Do you want me? If you do, will you give me enough to live on—enough to buy a suit of clothes a year, to pay for food and a room? If I work for you for nothing, I have to live on others for nothing, or kill myself as you’re doing.”
There was no answer at once, and Charley went on: “I came to you because I saw you wanted help badly. I saw that you were hard-pushed and sick—”
“I wasn’t sick,” interrupted the tailor with a snarl.
“Well, overworked, which is the same thing in the end. I did the best I could: I gave you my hands—awkward enough they were at first, I know, but—”
“It’s a lie. They weren’t awkward,” churlishly cut in the tailor.
“Well, perhaps they weren’t so awkward, but they didn’t know quite what to do—”
“You knew as well as if you’d been taught,” came back in a growl.
“Well, then, I wasn’t awkward, and I had a knack for the work. What was more, I wanted work. I wanted to work at the first thing that appealed to me. I had no particular fancy for tailoring—you get bowlegged in time!”—the old spirit was fighting with the new—“but here you were at work, and there I was idle, and I had been ill, and some one who wasn’t responsible for me—a stranger-worked for me and cared for me. Wasn’t it natural, when you were playing the devil with yourself, that I should step in and give you a hand? You’ve been better since—isn’t that so?” The tailor did not answer.
“But I can’t go on as we are, though I want only enough to keep me going,” Charley continued.
“And if I don’t give you what you want, you’ll leave?”
“No. I’m never going to leave you. I’m going to stay here, for you’ll never get another man so cheap; and it suits me to stay—you need some one to look after you.”
A curious soft look suddenly flashed into the tailor’s eyes.
“Will you take on the business after I’m gone?” he asked at last. “It’s along time to look ahead, I know,” he added quickly, for not in words would he acknowledge the possibility of the end.
“I should think so,” Charley answered, his eyes on the bright sun and the soft snow on the trees beyond the window.
The tailor snatched up a pattern and figured on it for a moment. Then he handed it to Charley. “Will that do?” he asked with anxious, acquisitive look, his yellow eyes blinking hard.
Charley looked at it musingly, then said “Yes, if you give me a room here.”
“I meant board and lodging too,” said Louis Trudel with an outburst of eager generosity, for, as it was, he had offered about one-half of what Charley was worth to him.
Charley nodded. “Very well, that will do,” he said, and took off his coat and went to work. For a long time they worked silently. The tailor was in great good-humour; for the terrible trial was over, and he now had an assistant who would be a better tailor than himself. There would be more profit, more silver nails for the church door, and more masses for his soul.
“The Cure says you are all right.... When will you come here?” he said at last.
“To-morrow night I shall sleep here,” answered Charley.
So it was arranged that Charley should come to live in the tailor’s house, to sleep in the room which the tailor had provided for a wife twenty-five years before—even for her that was now known as Madame Dauphin.
All morning the tailor chuckled to himself. When they sat down at noon to a piece of venison which Charley had prepared himself—taking the frying-pan out of the hands of Margot Patry, the old servant, and cooking it to a turn—Louis Trudel saw his years lengthen to an indefinite period. He even allowed himself to nervously stand up, bow, shake Charley’s hand jerkingly, and say:
“M’sieu’, I care not what you are or where you come from, or even if you’re a Protestant, perhaps an Englishman. You’re a gentleman and a tailor, and old Louis Trudel will not forget you. It shall be as you said this morning—it is no day for work. We will play, and the clothes for the Manor can go to the devil. Smoke of hell-fire, I will go and have a pipe with that, poor wretch the Notary!”
So, a wonderful thing happened. Louis Trudel, on a week-day and a market-day, went to smoke a pipe with Narcisse Dauphin, and to tell him that M. Mallard was going to stay with him for ever, at fine wages. He also announced that he had paid this whole week’s wages in advance; but he did not tell what he did not know—that half the money had already been given to old Margot, whose son lay ill at home with a broken leg, and whose children were living on bread and water. Charley had slowly drawn from the woman the story of her life as he sat by the kitchen fire and talked to her, while her master was talking to the Notary.
Since the day Charley had brought home the paper bought at the post-office, and water-marked Kathleen, he had, at odd times, written down his thoughts, and promptly torn the paper up again or put it in the fire. In the repression of the new life, in which he must live wholly alone, so far as all past habits of mind were concerned, it was a relief to record his passing reflections, as he had been wont to do when the necessity for it was less. Writing them here was like the bursting of an imprisoned stream; it was relaxing the ceaseless eye of vigilance; freeing an imprisoned personality. This personality was not yet merged into that which must take its place, must express itself in the involuntary acts which tell of a habit of mind and body—no longer the imitative and the histrionic, but the inherent and the real.
On the afternoon of the day that old Louis agreed to give him wages, and went to smoke a pipe with the Notary, Charley scribbled down his thoughts on this matter of personality and habit.
“Who knows,” he wrote, “which is the real self? A child comes into the world gin-begotten, with the instinct for liquor in his brain, like the scent of the fox in the nostrils of the hound. And that seems the real. But the same child caught up on the hands of chance is carried into another atmosphere, is cared for by ginhating minds and hearts: habit fastens on him—fair, decent, and temperate habit—and he grows up like the Cure yonder, a brother of Aaron. Which is the real? Is the instinct for the gin killed, or covered? Is the habit of good living mere habit and mere acting, in which the real man never lives his real life, or is it the real life?
“Who knows! Here am I, born with a question in my mouth, with the ever-present ‘non possumus’ in me. Here am I, to whom life was one poor futility; to whom brain was but animal intelligence abnormally developed; to whom speechless sensibility and intelligence was the only reality; to whom nothing from beyond ever sent a flash of conviction, an intimation, into my soul—not one. To me God always seemed a being of dreams, the creation of a personal need and helplessness, the despairing cry of the victims of futility—And here am I flung like a stone from a sling into this field where men believe in God as a present and tangible being; who reply to all life’s agonies and joys and exultations with the words ‘C’est le bon Dieu.’ And what shall I become? Will habit do its work, and shall I cease to be me? Shall I, in the permanency of habit, become like unto this tailor here, whose life narrows into one sole cause; whose only wish is to have the Church draw the coverlet of forgiveness and safety over him; who has solved all questions in a blind belief or an inherited predisposition—which? This stingy, hard, unhappy man—how should he know what I am denied! Or does he know? Is it all illusion? If there is a God who receives such devotion, to the exclusion of natural demand and spiritual anxieties, why does not this tailor ‘let his light so shine before men that they may see his good works, and glorify his Father which is in heaven?’ That is it. Therefore, wherefore, tailor-man? Therefore, wherefore, God? Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!”
Seated on his bench in the shop, with his eyes ever and anon raised towards the little post-office opposite, he wrote these words. Afterwards he sat and thought till the shadows deepened, and the tailor came in to supper. Then he took up the pieces of paper, and, going to the fire, which was still lighted of an evening, thrust them inside.
Louis Trudel saw the paper burning, and, glancing down, he noticed that one piece—the last—had slipped to the floor and was lying under the table. He saw the pencil still in Charley’s hand. Forthwith his natural suspicion leaped up, and the cunning of the monomaniac was upon him. With all his belief in le bon Dieu and the Church, Louis Trudel trusted no one. One eye was ever open to distrust man, while the other was ever closed with blind belief in Heaven.
As Charley stooped to put wood in the fire, the tailor thrust a foot forward and pushed the piece of paper further under the table.
That night the tailor crept down into the shop, felt for the paper in the dark, found it, and carried it away to his room. All kinds of thoughts had raged through his diseased mind. It was a letter, perhaps, and if a letter, then he would gain some facts about the man’s life. But if it was a letter, why did he burn it? It was said that he never received a letter and never sent one, therefore it was little likely to be a letter if not a letter, then what could it be? Perhaps the man was English and a spy of the English government, for was there not disaffection in some of the parishes? Perhaps it was a plan of robbery. To such a state of hallucination did his weakened mind come, that he forgot the kindly feeling he had had for this stranger who had worked for him without pay. Suspicion, the bane of sick old age, was hot on him. He remembered that M’sieu’ had put an arm through his when they went upstairs, and that now increased suspicion. Why should the man have been so friendly? To lull him into confidence, perhaps, and then to rob and murder him in his sleep. Thank God, his ready money was well hid, and the rest was safe in the bank far away! He crept back to his room with the paper in his hand. It was the last sheet of what Charley had written, and had been accidentally brushed off on the floor. It was in French, and, holding the candle close, he slowly deciphered the crabbed, characteristic handwriting.
His eyes dilated, his yellow cheeks took on spots of unhealthy red, his hand trembled. Anger seized him, and he mumbled the words over and over again to himself. Twice or thrice, as the paper lay in one hand, he struck it with the clinched fist of the other, muttering and distraught.
“This tailor here.... This stingy, hard, unhappy man.... If there is a God!... Therefore, wherefore, tailor-man?... Therefore, wherefore, God?... Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!”
Hatred of himself, blasphemy, the profane and hellish humour of—of the infidel! A Protestant heretic—he was already damned; a robber—you could put him in jail; a spy—you could shoot him or tar and feather him; a murderer—you could hang him. But an infide—this was a deadly poison, a black danger, a being capable of all crimes. An infidel—“Therefore, wherefore, tailor-man?... Therefore, wherefore, God?... Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!”
The devil laughing—the devil incarnate come to mock a poor tailor, to sow plague through a parish where all were at peace in the bosom of the Church. The tailor had three ruling passions—cupidity, vanity, and religion. Charley had now touched the three, and the whole man was alive. His cupidity had been flattered by the unpaid service of a capable assistant, but now he saw that he was paying the devil a wage. His vanity was overwhelmed by a satanic ridicule. His religion and his God had been assaulted in so shameful a way that no punishment could be great enough for the man of hell. In religion he was a fanatic; he was a demented fanatic now.
He thrust the paper into his pocket, then crept out into the hall and to the door of Charley’s bedroom. He put his ear to the door. After a moment he softly raised the latch, and opened the door and listened again. ‘M’sieu’ was in a deep sleep.
Louis Trudel scarcely knew why he had listened, why he had opened the door and stood looking at the figure in the bed, barely definable in the semi-darkness of the room. If he had meant harm to the helpless man, he had brought no weapon; if he had been curious, there the man was peacefully sleeping!
His sick, morbid imagination was so alive, that he scarcely knew what he did. As he stood there listening, hatred and horror in his heart, a voice said to him: “Thou shalt do no murder.” The words kept ringing in his ears. Yet he had not thought of murder. The fancied command itself was his first temptation towards such a deed. He had thought of raising the parish, of condign punishment of many sorts, but not this. As he closed the door softly, killing entered his mind and stayed there. “Thou shalt not” had been the first instigation to “Thou shalt.”
It haunted him as he returned to his room, undressed himself, and went to bed. He could not sleep. “Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!” The challenge had been to himself. He must respond to it. The duty lay with him; he must answer this black infidel for the Church, for faith, for God.
The more he thought of it, the more Charley’s face came before him, with the monocle shining and hard in the eye. The monocle haunted him. That was the infidel’s sign. “Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!” What sign should he show?
Presently he sat up straight in bed. In another minute he was out and dressing. Five minutes later he was on his way to the parish church. When he reached it he took a tool from his pocket and unscrewed a small iron cross from the front door. It was a cross which had been blessed by the Pope, and had been brought to Chaudiere by the beloved mother of the Cure, now dead.
“When I have done with it I will put it back,” he said, as he thrust it inside his shirt, and hurried stealthily back to his house. As he got into bed he gave a noiseless, mirthless laugh. All night he lay with his yellow eyes wide open, gazing at the ceiling. He was up at dawn, hovering about the fire in the shop.
If Charley had been less engaged with his own thoughts, he would have noticed the curious baleful look in the eyes of the tailor; but he was deeply absorbed in a struggle that had nothing to do with Louis Trudel.
The old fever of thirst and desire was upon him. All morning the door of Jolicoeur’s saloon was opening and shutting before his mind’s eye, and there was a smell of liquor everywhere. It was in his nostrils when the hot steam rose from the clothes he was pressing, in the thick odour of the fulled cloth, in the melting snow outside the door.
Time and again he felt that he must run out of the shop and away to the little tavern where white whiskey was sold to unwise habitants. But he fought on. Here was the heritage of his past, the lengthening chain of slavery to his old self—was it his real self? Here was what would prevent him from forgetting all that he had been and not been, all the happiness he might have had, all that he had lost—the ceaseless reminder. He was still the victim to a poison which gave not only a struggle of body, but a struggle of soul—if he had a soul.
“If he had a soul!” The phrase kept repeating itself to him even as he fought the fever in his throat, resisting the temptation to take that medicine which the Curb’s brother had sent him.
“If he had a soul!” The thinking served as an antidote, for by the ceaseless iteration his mind was lulled into a kind of drowse. Again and again he went to the pail of water that stood on the window-sill, and lifting it to his lips, drank deep and full, to quench the wearing thirst.
“If he had a soul!” He looked at Louis Trudel, silent and morose, the clammy yellow of a great sickness in his face and hands, but his mind only intent on making a waistcoat—and the end of all things very near! The words he had written the night before came to him: “Therefore, wherefore, tailor-man? Therefore, wherefore, God?... Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!” As if in reply to his thoughts there came the sound of singing, and of bells ringing in the parish church.
A procession with banners was coming near. It was a holy day, and Chaudiere was mindful of its duties. The wanderers of the parish had come home for Easter. All who belonged to Chaudiere and worked in the woods or shanties, or lived in big cities far away, were returned—those who could return—to take the holy communion in the parish church. Yesterday the parish had been alive with a pious hilarity. The great church had been crowded beyond the doors, the streets had been full of cheerily dressed habitants. There had, however, come a sudden chill to the seemly rejoicings—the little iron cross blessed by the Pope had been stolen from the door of the church!
The fact had been told to the Cure as he said the Mass, and from the altar steps, before going to the pulpit, he referred to the robbery with poignant feeling; for the relic had belonged to a martyr of the Church, who, two centuries before, had laid down his life for the Master on the coast of Africa.
Louis Trudel had heard the Cure’s words, and in his place at the rear of the church he smiled sourly to himself. In due time the little cross should be returned, but it had work to do first. He did not take the holy communion this Easter day, or go to confession as was his wont. Not, however, until a certain day later did the Cure realise this, though for thirty years the tailor had never omitted his Easter-time duties.
The people guessed and guessed, but they knew not on whom to cast suspicion at first. No sane Catholic of Chaudiere could possibly have taken the holy thing. Presently a murmur crept about that M’sieu’ might have been the thief. He was not a Catholic, and—who could tell? Who knew where he came from? Who knew what he had been? Perhaps a jail-bird-robber-murderer! Charley, however, stitched on, intent upon his own struggle.
The procession passed the doorway: men bearing banners with sacred texts, acolytes swinging censers, a figure of the Saviour carved in wood borne aloft, the Cure under a silk canopy, and a long line of habitants following with sacred song. People fell upon their knees in the street as the procession passed, and the Cure’s face was bent here and there, his hand raised in blessing.
Old Louis got up from his bench, and, putting on a coat over his wool jacket, hastened to the doorway, knelt down, made the sign of the cross, and said a prayer. Then he turned quickly towards Charley, who, looking at the procession, then at the tailor, then back again at the procession, smiled.
Charley was hardly conscious of what he did. His mind had ranged far beyond this scene to the large issues which these symbols represented. Was it one universal self-deception? Was this “religion” the pathetic, the soul-breaking make-believe of mortality? So he smiled—at himself, at his own soul, which seemed alone in this play, the skeleton in armour, the thing that did not belong. His own words written that fateful day before he died at the Cote Dorion came to him:
“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!”
He was suddenly startled from his reverie, through which the procession was moving—a cloud of witnesses. It was the voice of Louis Trudel, sharp and piercing:
“Don’t you believe in God and the Son of God?”
“God knows!” answered Charley slowly in reply—an involuntary exclamation of helplessness, an automatic phrase deflected from its first significance to meet a casual need of the mind. Yet it seemed like satire, like a sardonic, even vulgar, humour. So it struck Louis Trudel, who snatched up a hot iron from the fire and rushed forward with a snarl. So astounded was Charley that he did not stir. He was not prepared for the sudden onslaught. He did not put up his hand even, but stared at the tailor, who, within a foot of him, stopped short with the iron poised.
Louis Trudel repented in time. With the cunning of the monomaniac he realised that an attack now might frustrate his great stroke. It would bring the village to his shop door, precipitate the crisis upon the wrong incident.
As it chanced, only one person in Chaudiere saw the act. That was Rosalie Evanturel across the way. She saw the iron raised, and looked for M’sieu’ to knock the tailor down; but, instead, she beheld the tailor go back and put the iron on the fire again. She saw also that M’sieu’ was speaking, though she could hear no words.
Charley’s words were simple enough. “I beg your pardon, Monsieur,” he said across the room to old Louis; “I meant no offence at all. I was trying to think it out in a human sort of way. I suppose I wanted a sign from Heaven—wanted too much, no doubt.”
The tailor’s lips twitched, and his hand convulsively clutched the shears at his side.
“It is no matter now,” he answered shortly. “I have had signs from Heaven; perhaps you will have one too!”
“It would be worth while,” rejoined Charley musingly. Charley wondered bitterly if he had made an irreparable error in saying those ill-chosen words. This might mean a breach between them, and so make his position in the parish untenable. He had no wish to go elsewhere—where could he go? It mattered little what he was, tinker or tailor. He had now only to work his way back to the mind of the peasant; to be an animal with intelligence; to get close to mother earth, and move down the declivity of life with what natural wisdom were possible. It was his duty to adapt himself to the mind of such as this tailor; to acquire what the tailor and his like had found—an intolerant belief and an inexpensive security, to be got through yielding his nature to the great religious dream. And what perfect tranquillity, what smooth travelling found therein.
Gazing across the street towards the little post-office, he saw Rosalie Evanturel at the window. He fell to thinking about her. Rosalie, on her part, kept wondering what old Louis’ violence meant.
Presently she saw a half-dozen men come quickly down the street, and, before they reached the tailorshop, stand in a group talking excitedly. Afterwards one came forward from the others quickly—Filion Lacasse the saddler. He stopped short at the tailor’s door. Looking at Charley, he exclaimed roughly:
“If you don’t hand out the cross you stole from the church door, we’ll tar and feather you, M’sieu’.” Charley looked up, surprised. It had never occurred to him that they could associate him with the theft. “I know nothing of the cross,” he said quietly. “You’re the only heretic in the place. You’ve done it. Who are you? What are you doing here in Chaudiere?”
“Working at my trade,” was Charley’s quiet answer. He looked towards Louis Trudel, as though to see how he took this ugly charge.
Old Louis responded at once. “Get away with you, Filion Lacasse,” he croaked. “Don’t come here with your twaddle. M’sieu’ hasn’t stole the cross. What does he want with a cross? He’s not a Catholic.”
“If he didn’t steal the cross, why, he didn’t,” answered the saddler; “but if he did, what’ll you say for yourself, Louis? You call yourself a good Catholic—bah!—when you’ve got a heretic living with you.”
“What’s that to you?” growled the tailor, and reached out a nervous hand towards the iron. “I served at the altar before you were born. Sacre! I’ll make your grave-clothes yet, and be a good Catholic when you’re in the churchyard. Be off with you. Ach,” he sharply added, when Filion did not move, “I’ll cut your hair for you!” He scrambled off the bench with his shears.
Filion Lacasse disappeared with his friends, and the old man settled back on his bench.
Charley, looking up quietly from his work, said “Thank you, Monsieur.”
He did not notice what an evil look was in Louis Trudel’s face as it turned towards him, but Rosalie Evanturel, standing outside, saw it; and she stole back to the post-office ill at ease and wondering.
All that day she watched the tailor’s shop, and even when the door was shut in the evening, her eyes were fastened on the windows.
The agitation and curiosity possessing Rosalie all day held her in the evening when the wooden shutters of the tailor’s shop were closed and only a flickering light showed through the cracks. She was restless and uneasy during supper, and gave more than one unmeaning response to the remarks of her crippled father, who, drawn up for supper in his wheel-chair, was more than usually inclined to gossip.
Damase Evanturel’s mind was stirred concerning the loss of the iron cross; the threat made by Filion Lacasse and his companions troubled him. The one person beside the Cure, Jo Portugais, and Louis Trudel, to whom M’sieu’ talked much, was the postmaster, who sometimes met him of an evening as he was taking the air. More than once he had walked behind the wheel-chair and pushed it some distance, making the little crippled man gossip of village matters.
As the two sat at supper the postmaster was inclined to take a serious view of M’sieu’s position. He railed at Filion Lacasse; he called the suspicious habitants clodhoppers, who didn’t know any better—which was a tribute to his own superior birth; and at last, carried away by a feverish curiosity, he suggested that Rosalie should go and look through the cracks in the shutters of the tailor-shop and find out what was going on within. This was indignantly rejected by Rosalie, but the more she thought, the more uneasy she became. She ceased to reply to her father’s remarks, and he at last relapsed into gloom, and said that he was tired and would go to bed. Thereupon she wheeled him inside his bedroom, bade him good-night, and left him to his moodiness, which, however, was soon absorbed in a deep sleep, for the mind of the little grey postmaster could no more hold trouble or thought than a sieve.
Left alone, Rosalie began to be tortured. What were they doing in the house opposite?
Go and look through the windows? But she had never spied on people in her life! Yet would it be spying? Would it not be pardonable? In the interest of the man who had been attacked in the morning by the tailor, who had been threatened by the saddler, and concerning whom she had seen a signal pass between old Louis and Filion Lacasse, would it not be a humane thing to do? It might be foolish and feminine to be anxious, but did she not mean well, and was it not, therefore, honourable?
The mystery inflamed her imagination. Charley’s passiveness when he was assaulted by old Louis and afterwards threatened by the saddler seemed to her indifference to any sort of danger—the courage of the hopeless life, maybe. Instantly her heart overflowed with sympathy. Monsieur was not a Catholic perhaps? Well, so much the more he should be befriended, for he was so much the more alone and helpless. If a man was born a Protestant—or English—he could not help it, and should not be punished in this world for it, since he was sure to be punished in the next.
Her mind became more and more excited. The postoffice had been long since closed, and her father was asleep—she could hear him snoring. It was ten o’clock, and there was still a light in the tailor’s shop. Usually the light went out before nine o’clock. She went to the post-office door and looked out. The streets were empty; there was not a light burning anywhere, save in the house of the Notary. Down towards the river a sleigh was making its way over the thin snow of spring, and screeching on the stones. Some late revellers, moving homewards from the Trois Couronnes, were roaring at the top of their voices the habitant chanson, ‘Le Petit Roger Bontemps’:
The chanson died away as she stood there, and still the light was burning in the shop opposite. A thought suddenly came to her. She would go over and see if the old housekeeper, Margot Patry, had gone to bed. Here was the solution to the problem, the satisfaction of modesty and propriety.
She crossed the street quickly, hurried round the corner of the house, and was passing the side-window of the shop, when a crack in the shutters caught her eye. She heard something fall on the floor within. Could it be that the tailor and M’sieu’ were working at so late an hour? She had an irresistible impulse, and glued her eye to the crack.
But presently she started back with a smothered cry. There by the great fireplace stood Louis Trudel picking up a red-hot cross with a pair of pincers. Grasping the iron firmly just below the arms of the cross, the tailor held it up again. He looked at it with a wild triumph, yet with a malignancy little in keeping with the object he held—the holy relic he had stolen from the door of the parish church. The girl gave a low cry of dismay.
She saw old Louis advance stealthily towards the door of the shop leading into the house. In bewilderment, she stood still an instant, then, with a sudden impulse, she ran to the kitchen-door and tried it softly. It was not locked. She opened it, entered quickly, and found old Margot standing in the middle of the room in her night-dress.
“Oh, Rosalie, Rosalie!” cried the old woman, “something’s going to happen. M’sieu’ Trudel has been queer all evening. I peeped in the key-hole of the shop just now, and—”
“Yes, yes, I’ve seen too. Come!” said Rosalie, and going quickly to the door, opened it, and passed through to another room. Here she opened another door, leading into the hall between the shop and the house. Entering the hall, she saw a glimmer of light above. It was the reddish glow of the iron cross held by old Louis. She crept softly up the stone steps. She heard a door open very quietly. She hurried now, and came to the landing. She saw the door of Charley’s room open—all the village knew what room he slept in—and the moonlight was streaming in at the window.
She saw the sleeping man on the bed, and the tailor standing over him. Charley was lying with one arm thrown above his head; the other lay over the side of the bed.
As she rushed forward, divining old Louis’ purpose, the fiery cross descended, and a voice cried: “‘Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!’”
This voice was drowned by that of another, which, gasping with agony out of a deep sleep, as the body sprang upright, cried: “God-oh God!” Rosalie’s hand grasped old Louis’ arm too late. The tailor sprang back with a horrible laugh, striking her aside, and rushed out to the landing.
“Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur!” cried Rosalie, and, snatching a scarf from her bosom, thrust it in upon the excoriated breast, as Charley, hardly realising what had happened, choked back moans of pain.
“What did he do?” he gasped.
“The iron cross from the church door!” she answered. “A minute, one minute, Monsieur!”
She rushed out upon the landing in time to see the tailor stumble on the stairs and fall head forwards to the bottom, at the feet of Margot Patry.
Rosalie paid no heed to the fallen man. “Oil! flour! Quick!” she cried. “Quick! Quick!” She stepped over the body of the tailor, snatched at Margot’s arm, and dragged her into the kitchen. “Quick-oil and flour!”
The old woman showed her where they were, moaning and whining.
“He tried to kill Monsieur,” cried Rosalie, “burned him on the breast with the holy cross!”
With oil and flour she hurried back, over the body of the tailor, up the stairs, and into Charley’s room. Charley was now out of bed and half dressed, though choking with pain, and preserving consciousness only by a great effort.
“Good Mademoiselle!” he said.
She took the scarf off gently, soaked it in oil and splashed it with flour, and laid it quickly back on the burnt flesh.
Margot came staggering into the room.
“I cannot rouse him. I cannot rouse him. He is dead! He is dead!” she whimpered.
“He—”
Charley swayed forward towards the woman, recovered himself, and said:
“Now not a word of what he did to me, remember. Not one word, or you will go to jail with him. If you keep quiet, I’ll say nothing. He didn’t know what he was doing.” He turned to Rosalie. “Not a word of this, please,” he moaned. “Hide the cross.”
He moved towards the door. Rosalie saw his purpose, and ran out ahead of him and down the stairs to where the tailor lay prone on his face, one hand still holding the pincers. The little iron cross lay in a dark corner. Stooping, she lifted up the tailor’s head, then felt his heart.
“He is not dead,” she cried. “Quick, Margot, some water,” she added, to the whimpering woman. Margot tottered away, and came again presently with the water.
“I will go for some one to help,” Rosalie said, rising to her feet, as she saw Charley come slowly down the staircase, his face white with misery. She ran and took his arm to help him down.
“No, no, dear Mademoiselle,” he said; “I shall be all right presently. You must get help to carry him up stairs. Bring the Notary; he and I can carry him up.”
“You, Monsieur! You—it would kill you! You are terribly hurt.”
“I must help to carry him, else people will be asking questions,” he answered painfully. “He is going to die. It must not be known—you understand!” His eyes searched the floor until they found the cross. Rosalie picked it up with the pincers. “It must not be known what he did to me,” Charley said to the muttering and weeping old woman. He caught her shoulder with his hand, for she seemed scarcely to heed.
She nodded. “Yes, yes, M’sieu’, I will never speak.” Rosalie was standing in the door. “Go quickly, Mademoiselle,” he said. She disappeared with the iron cross, and flying across the street, thrust it inside the post-office, then ran to the house of the Notary.