Jo Portugais had fastened down a secret with clasps heavier than iron, and had long stood guard over it. But life is a wheel, and natures move in circles, passing the same points again and again, the points being distant or near to the sense as the courses of life have influenced the nature. Confession was an old principle, a light in the way, a rest-house for Jo and all his race, by inheritance, by disposition, and by practice. Again and again Jo had come round to the rest-house since one direful day, but had not, found his way therein. There were passwords to give at the door, there was the tale of the journey to tell to the door-keeper. And this tale he had not been ready to tell. But the man who knew of the terrible thing he had done, who had saved him from the consequences of that terrible thing, was in sore trouble, and this broke down the gloomy guard he had kept over his dread secret. He fought the matter out with himself, and, the battle ended, he touched the door-keeper on the arm, beckoned him to a lonely place in the trees, and knelt down before him.
“What is it you seek?” asked the door-keeper, whose face was set and forbidding.
“To find peace,” answered the man; yet he was thinking more of another’s peril than of his own soul. “What have I to do with the peace of your soul? Yonder is your shepherd and keeper,” said the doorkeeper, pointing to where two men walked arm in arm under the trees.
“Shall the sinner not choose the keeper of his sins?” said the man huskily.
“Who has been the keeper all these years? Who has given you peace?”
“I have had no keeper; I have had no peace these many years.”
“How many years?” The Abbe’s voice was low and even, and showed no feeling, but his eyes were keenly inquiring and intent.
“Seven years.”
“Is the sin that held you back from the comfort of the Church a great one?”
“The greatest, save one.”
“What would be the greatest?”
“To curse God.”
“The next?”
“To murder.”
The other’s whole manner changed on the instant. He was no longer the stern Churchman, the inveterate friend of Justice, the prejudiced priest, rigid in a pious convention, who could neither bend nor break. The sin of an infidel breaker of the law, that was one thing; the crime of a son of the Church, which a human soul came to relate in its agony, that was another. He had a crass sense of justice, but there was in him a deeper thing still: the revelation of the human soul, the responsibility of speaking to the heart which has dropped the folds of secrecy, exposing the skeleton of truth, grim and staring, to the eye of a secret earthly mentor.
“If it has been hidden all these years, why do you tell it now, my son?”
“It is the only way.”
“Why was it hidden?”
“I have come to confess,” answered the man bitterly. The priest looked at him anxiously. “You have spoken rightly, my son. I am not here to ask, but to receive.”
“Forgive me, but it is my crime I would speak of now. I choose this moment that another should not suffer for what he did not do.”
The priest thought of the man they had left in the little house, and the crime with which he was charged, and wondered what the sinner before him was going to say.
“Tell your story, my son, and God give your tongue the very spirit of truth, that nothing be forgotten and nothing excused.”
There was a fleeting pause, in which the colour left the priest’s face, and, as he opened the door of his mind—of the Church, secret and inviolate—he had a pain at his heart; for beneath his arrogant churchmanship there was a fanatical spirituality of a mediaeval kind. His sense of responsibility was painful and intense. The same pain possessed him always, were the sin that of a child or a Borgia.
As he listened to the broken tale, the forest around was vocal, the chipmunks scampered from tree to tree, the woodpecker’s tap-tap, tap-tap, went on over their heads, the leaves rustled and gave forth their divine sweetness, as though man and nature were at peace, and there were no storms in sky above or soul beneath, or in the waters of life that are deeper than “the waters under the earth.”
It was only a short time, but to the door-keeper and the wayfarer it seemed hours, for the human soul travels far and hard and long in moments of pain and revelation. The priest in his anxiety suffered as much as the man who did the wicked thing. When the man had finished, the priest said:
“Is this all?”
“It is the great sin of my life.” He shuddered, and continued: “I have no love of life; I have no fear of death; but there is the man who saved me years ago, who got me freedom. He has had great sorrow and trouble, and I would live for his sake—because he has no friend.”
“Who is the man?”
The other pointed to where the little house was hidden among the trees. The priest almost gasped his amazement, but waited.
Thereupon the woodsman told the whole truth concerning the tailor of Chaudiere.
“To save him, I have confessed my own sin. To you I might tell all in confession, and the truth about him would be buried for ever. I might not confess at all unless I confessed my own sin. You will save him, father?” he asked anxiously.
“I will save him,” was the reply of the priest.
“I want to give myself to justice; but he has been ill, and he may be ill again, and he needs me.” He told of the tailor’s besetting weakness, of his struggles against it, of his fall a few days before, and the cause of it... told all to the man of silence.
“You wish to give yourself to justice?”
“I shall have no peace unless.”
There was something martyr-like in the man’s attitude. It appealed to some stern, martyr-like quality in the priest. If the man would win eternal peace so, then so be it. His grim piety approved. He spoke now with the authority of divine justice.
“For one year longer go on as you are, then give yourself to justice—one year from to-day, my son. Is it enough?”
“It is enough.”
“Absolvo te!” said the priest.
Meantime Charley was alone with his problem. The net of circumstances seemed to have coiled inextricably round him. Once, at a trial in court in other days, he had said in his ironical way: “One hasn’t to fear the penalties of one’s sins, but the damnable accident of discovery.”
To try to escape now, or, with the assistance of Jo Portugais, when en route to Quebec in charge of the constables, and find refuge and seclusion elsewhere? There was nothing he might ask of Portugais which he would not do. To escape—and so acknowledge a guilt not his own! Well, what did it matter! Who mattered? He knew only too well. The Cure mattered—that good man who had never intruded his piety on him; who had been from the first a discreet friend, a gentleman,—a Christian gentleman, if there was such a sort of gentleman apart from all others. Who mattered? The Seigneur, whom he had never seen before, yet who had showed that day a brusque sympathy, a gruff belief in him? Who mattered?
Above all, Rosalie mattered. To escape, to go from Rosalie’s presence by a dark way, as it were, like a thief in the night—was that possible? His escape would work upon her mind. She would first wonder, then doubt, and then believe at last that he was a common criminal. She was the one who mattered in that thought of escape escape to some other parish, to some other province, to some other country—to some other world!
To some other world? He looked at a little bottle he held in the palm of his hand.
A hand held aside the curtain of the door entering on the next room, and a girl’s troubled face looked in, but he did not see.
Escape to some other world? And why not, after all? On the day his memory came back he had resisted the idea in this very room. As the fatalist he had resisted it then. Now how poor seemed the reasons for not having ended it all that day! If his appointed time had been come, the river would have ended him then—that had been his argument. Was that argument not belief in Somebody or Something which governed his going or staying? Was it not preordination? Was not fatalism, then, the cheapest sort of belief in an unchangeable Somebody or Something, representing purpose and law and will? Attribute to anything power, and there was God, whatever His qualities, personality, or being.
The little phial of laudanum was in his hand to loosen life into knowledge. Was it not his duty to eliminate himself, rather than be an unsolvable quantity in the problem of many lives? It was neither vulgar nor cowardly to pass quietly from forces making for ruin, and so avert ruin and secure happiness. To go while yet there was time, and smooth for ever the way for others by an eternal silence—that seemed well. Punishment thereafter, the Cure would say. But was it not worth while being punished, even should the Cure’s fond belief in the noble fable be true, if one saved others here? Who—God or man—had the right to take from him the right to destroy himself, not for fear, not through despair, but for others’ sake? Had he not the right to make restitution to Kathleen for having given her nothing but himself, whom she had learned to despise? If he were God, he would say, Do justice and fear not. And this was justice. Suppose he were in a battle, with all these things behind him, and put himself, with daring and great results, in some forlorn hope—to die; and he died, ostensibly a hero for his country, but, in his heart of hearts, to throw his life away to save some one he loved, not his country, which profited by his sacrifice—suppose that were the case, what would the world say?
“He saved others, himself he could not save”—flashed through his mind, possessed him. He could save others; but it was clear he could not save himself. It was so simple, so kind, and so decent. And he would be buried here in quiet, unconsecrated ground, a mystery, a tailor who, finding he could not mend the garment of life, cast it away, and took on himself the mantle of eternal obscurity. No reproaches would follow him; and he would not reproach himself, for Kathleen and Billy and another would be safe and free to live their lives.
Far, far better for Rosalie! She too would be saved—free from the peril of his presence. For where could happiness come to her from him? He might not love her; he might not marry her; and it were well to go now, while yet love was not a habit, but an awakening, a realisation of life. His death would settle this sad question for ever. To her he would be a softening memory as time went on.
The girl who had watched by the curtain stepped softly inside the room ... she divined his purpose. He was so intent he did not hear.
“I will do it,” he said to himself. “It is better to go than to stay. I have never done a good thing for love of any human being. I will do one now.”
He turned towards the window through which the sunlight streamed. Stepping forward into the sun, he uncorked the bottle.
There was a quick step behind him, and the girl’s voice said clearly:
“If you go, I go also.”
He turned swiftly, cold with amazement, the blood emptied from his heart.
Rosalie stood a little distance from him, her face pale, her hands held hard to her side.
“I understand all. I could not go outside, I stayed there”—she pointed to the other room—“and I know why you would die. You would die to save others.”
“Rosalie!” he protested in a hoarse voice, and could say nothing more.
“You think that I will stay, if you go! No, no, no—I will not. You taught me how to live, and I will follow you now.”
He saw the strange determination of her look. It startled him; he knew not what to say. “Your father, Rosalie—”
“My father will be cared for. But who will care for you in the place where you are going? You will have no friends there. You shall not go alone. You will need me—in the dark.”
“It is good that I go,” he said. “It would be wicked, it would be dreadful, for you to go.”
“I go if you go,” she urged. “I will lose my soul to be with you; you will want me—there!”
There was no mistaking her intention. Footsteps sounded outside. The others were coming back. To die here before her face? To bring her to death with him? He was sick with despair.
“Go into the next room quickly,” he said. “No matter what comes, I will not—on my honour!”
She threw him a look of gratitude, and, as the bearskin curtain dropped behind her, he put the phial of laudanum in his pocket.
The door opened, and the Abbe Rossignol entered, followed by the Seigneur, the Cure, and Jo Portugais. Charley faced them calmly, and waited.
The Abbe’s face was still cold and severe, but his voice was human as he said quickly: “Monsieur, I have decided to take you at your word. I am assured you are not the man who committed the crime. You probably have reasons for not establishing your identity.”
Had Charley been a prisoner in the dock, he could not have had a moment of deeper amazement—even if after the jury had said Guilty, a piece of evidence had been handed in, proving innocence, averting the death sentence. A wave of excitement passed over him, leaving him cold and still. In the other room a girl put her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry of joy.
Charley bowed. “You made a mistake, Monsieur—pray do not apologise,” he said.
Weeks went by. Summer was done, autumn was upon the land. Harvest-home had gone, and the “fall” ploughing was forward. The smell of the burning stubble, of decaying plant and fibre, was mingling with the odours of the orchards and the balsams of the forest. The leafy hill-sides, far and near, were resplendent in scarlet and saffron and tawny red. Over the decline of the year flickered the ruined fires of energy.
It had been a prosperous summer in the valley. Harvests had been reaped such as the country had not known for years—and for years there had been great harvests. There had not been a death in the parish all summer, and births had occurred out of all usual proportion.
When Filion Lacasse commented thereon, and mentioned the fact that even the Notary’s wife had had the gift of twins as the crowning fulness of the year, Maximilian Cour, who was essentially superstitious, tapped on the table three times, to prevent a turn in the luck.
The baker was too late, however, for the very next day the Notary was brought home with a nasty gunshot wound in his leg. He had been lured into duck-hunting on a lake twenty miles away, in the hills, and had been accidentally shot on an Indian reservation, called Four Mountains, where the Church sometimes held a mission and presented a primitive sort of passion-play. From there he had been brought home by his comrades, and the doctor from the next parish summoned. The Cure assisted the doctor at first, but the task was difficult to him. At the instant when the case was most critical the tailor of Chaudiere set his foot inside the Notary’s door. A moment later he relieved the Cure and helped to probe for shot, and care for an ugly wound.
Charley had no knowledge of surgery, but his fingers were skilful, his eye was true, and he had intuition. The long operation over, the rural physician and surgeon washed his hands and then studied Charley with curious admiration.
“Thank you, Monsieur,” he said, as he dried his hands on a towel. “I couldn’t have done it without you. It’s a pretty good job; and you share the credit.”
Charley bowed. “It’s a good thing not to halloo till you’re out of the woods,” he said. “Our friend there has a bad time before him—hein?”
“I take you. It is so.” The man of knives and tinctures pulled his side-whiskers with smug satisfaction as he looked into a small mirror on the wall. “Do you chance to know if madame has any cordials or spirits?” he added, straightening his waistcoat and adjusting his cravat.
“It is likely,” answered Charley, and moved away to the window looking upon the street.
The doctor turned in surprise. He was used to being waited on, and he had expected the tailor to follow the tradition.
“We might—eh?” he said suggestively. “It is usually the custom to provide refreshment, but the poor woman, madame, has been greatly occupied with her husband, and—”
“And the twins,” Charley put in drily—“and a house full of work, and only one old crone in the kitchen to help. Still, I have no doubt she has thought of the cordials too. Women are the slaves of custom—ah, here they are, as I said, and—”
He stopped short, for in the doorway, with a tray, stood Rosalie Evanturel. The surgeon was so intent upon at once fortifying himself that he did not see the look which passed between Rosalie and the tailor.
Rosalie had been absent for two months. Her father had been taken seriously ill the day after the critical episode in the but at Vadrome Mountain, and she had gone with him to the hospital at Quebec, for an operation. The Abbe Rossignol had undertaken to see them safely to the hospital, and Jo Portugais, at his own request, was permitted to go in attendance upon M. Evanturel.
There had been a hasty leave-taking between Charley and Rosalie, but it was in the presence of others, and they had never spoken a word privately together since the day she had said to him that where he went she would go, in life or out of it.
“You have been gone two months,” Charley said now, after their touch of hands and voiceless greeting. “Two months yesterday,” she answered.
“At sundown,” he replied, in an even voice.
“The Angelus was ringing,” she answered calmly, though her heart was leaping and her hands were trembling. The doctor, instantly busy with the cordial, had not noticed what they said.
“Won’t you join me?” he asked, offering a glass to Charley.
“Spirits do not suit me,” answered Charley. “Matter of constitution,” rejoined the doctor, and buttoned up his coat, preparing to depart. He came close to Charley. “Now, I don’t want to put upon you, Monsieur,” he said, “but this sick man is valuable in the parish—you take me? Well, it’s a difficult, delicate case, and I’d be glad if I could rely on you for a few days. The Cure would do, but you are young, you have a sense of things—take me? Half the fees are yours if you’ll keep a sharp eye on him—three times a day, and be with him at night a while. Fever is the thing I’m afraid of—temperature—this way, please!” He went to the window, and for a minute engaged Charley in whispered conversation. “You take me?” he said cheerily at last, as he turned again towards Rosalie.
“Quite, Monsieur,” answered Charley, and drew away, for he caught the odour of the doctor’s breath, and a cold perspiration broke out over him. He felt the old desire for drink sweeping through him. “I will do what I can,” he said.
“Come, my dear,” the doctor said to Rosalie. “We will go and see your father.”
Charley’s eyes had fastened on the bottles avidly. As Rosalie turned to bid him good-bye, he said to her, almost hoarsely: “Take the tray back to Madame Dauphin—please.”
She flashed a glance of inquiry at him. She was puzzled by the fire in his eyes. With her soul in her face as she lifted the tray, out of the warm-beating life in her, she said in a low tone:
“It is good to live, isn’t it?”
He nodded and smiled, and the trouble slowly passed from his eyes. The woman in her had conquered his enemy.
“It is good to live, isn’t it?” In the autumn weather when the air drank like wine, it seemed so indeed, even to Charley, who worked all day in his shop, his door wide open to the sunlight, and sat up half the night with Narcisse Dauphin, sometimes even taking a turn at the cradle of the twins, while madame sat beside her husband’s bed.
To Charley the answer to Rosalie’s question lay in the fact that his eyes had never been so keen, his face so alive, or his step so buoyant as in this week of double duty. His mind was more hopeful than it had ever been since the day he awoke with memory restored in the silence of a mountain hut.
He had found the antidote to his great temptation, to the lurking, relentless habit which had almost killed him the night John Brown had sung Champagne Charlie from behind the flaring lights. From a determination to fight his own fight with no material aids, he had never once used the antidote sent him by the Cure’s brother.
On St. Jean Baptiste’s day his proud will had failed him; intellectual force, native power of mind, had broken like reeds under the weight of a cruel temptation. But now a new force had entered into him. As his fingers were about to reach for the spirit-bottle in the house of the Notary, and he had, for the first time in his life, made an appeal for help, a woman’s voice had said, “It is good to live, isn’t it?” and his hand was stayed. A woman’s look had stilled the strife. Never before in his life had he relied on a moral or a spiritual impulse in him. What of these existed in him were in unseen quantities—for which there was neither multiple nor measure—had been primitive and hereditary, flowing in him like a feeble tincture diluted to inefficacy.
Rosalie had resolved him back to the original elements. The quiet days he had spent in Chaudiere, the self-sacrifice he had been compelled to make, the human sins, such as those of Jo Portugais and Louis Trudel, with which he had had to do, the simplicity of the life around him—the uncomplicated lie and the unvarnished truth, the obvious sorrow and the patent joy, the childish faith, and the rude wickedness so pardonable because so frankly brutal—had worked upon him. The elemental spirit of it all had so invaded his nature, breaking through the crust of old habit to the new man, that, when he fell before his temptation, and his body became saturated with liquor, the healthy natural being and the growing natural mind were overpowered by the coarse onslaught, and death had nearly followed.
It was his first appeal to a force outside himself, to an active principle unfamiliar to the voluntary working of his nature, and the answer had been immediate and adequate. Yet what was it? He did not ask; he had not got beyond the mere experience, and the old questioning habit was in abeyance. Each new and great emotion has its dominating moment, its supreme occasion, before taking its place in the modulated moral mechanism. He was touched with helplessness.
As he sat beside Narcisse Dauphin’s bedside, one evening, the sick man on his way to recovery, there came to him the text of a sermon he had once heard John Brown preach: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” He had been thinking of Rosalie and that day at Vadrome Mountain. She would not only have died with him, but she would have died for him, if need had been. What might he give in return for what she gave?
The Notary interrupted his thoughts. He had lain watching Charley for a long time, his brow drawn down with thought. At last he said:
“Monsieur, you have been good to me.” Charley laid a hand on the sick man’s arm.
“I don’t see that. But if you won’t talk, I’ll believe you think so.”
The Notary shook his head. “I’ve not been talking for an hour, I’ve no fever, and I want to say some things. When I’ve said them, I’ll feel better—voila! I want to make the amende honorable. I once thought you were this and that—I won’t say what I thought you. I said you interfered—giving advice to people, as you did to Filion Lacasse, and taking the bread out of my mouth. I said that!”
He paused, raised himself on his elbow, smoothed back his grizzled hair behind his ears, looked at himself in the mirror opposite with satisfaction, and added oracularly: “But how prone is the mind of man to judge amiss! You have put bread into my mouth—no, no, Monsieur, you shall hear me! As well as doing your own work, you have done my business since my accident as well as a lawyer could do it; and you’ve given every penny to my wife.”
“As for the work I’ve done,” answered Charley, “it was nothing—you notaries have easy times. You may take your turn with my shears and needle one day.”
With a dash of patronage true to his nature, “You are wonderful for a tailor,” the Notary rejoined. Charley laughed—seldom, if ever, had he laughed since coming to Chaudiere. It was, however, a curious fact that he took a real pleasure in the work he did with his hands. In making clothes for habitant farmers, and their sons and their sons’ sons, and jackets for their wives and daughters, he had had the keenest pleasure of his life.
He had taken his earnings with pride, if not with exultation. He knew the Notary did not mean that he was wonderful as a tailor, but he answered to the suggestion.
“You liked that last coat I made for you, then,” he said drily; “I believe you wore it when you were shot. It was the thing for your figure, man.”
The Notary looked in the large mirror opposite with sad content. “Ah, it was a good figure, the first time I went to that hut at Four Mountains!”
“We can’t always be young. You have a waist yet, and your chest-barrel gives form to a waistcoat. Tut, tut! Think of the twins in the way of vainglory and hypocrisy.”
“‘Twins’ and ‘hypocrisy’; there you have struck the nail on the head, tailor. There is the thing I’m going to tell you about.”
After a cautious glance at the door and the window, Dauphin continued in quick, broken sentences: “It wasn’t an accident at Four Mountains—not quite. It was Paulette Dubois—you know the woman that lives at the Seigneur’s gate? Twelve years ago she was a handsome girl. I fell in love with her, but she left here. There were two other men. There was a timber-merchant,—and there was a lawyer after. The timber-merchant was married; the lawyer wasn’t. She lived at first with the timber-merchant. He was killed—murdered in the woods.”
“What was the timber-merchant’s name?” interrupted Charley in an even voice.
“Turley—but that doesn’t matter!” continued the Notary. “He was murdered, and then the lawyer came on the scene. He lived with her for a year. She had a child by him. One day he sent the child away to a safe place and told her he was going to turn over a new leaf—he was going to stand for Parliament, and she must go. She wouldn’t go without the child. At last he said the child was dead; and showed her the certificate of death. Then she came back here, and for a while, alas! she disgraced the parish. But all at once she changed—she got a message that her child was alive. To her it was like being born again. It was at this time they were going to drive her from the parish. But the Seigneur and then the Cure spoke for her, and so did I—at last.”
He paused and plaintively admired himself in the mirror. He was grateful that he had been clean-shaved that morning, and he was content to catch the citrine odour of the bergamot upon his hair.
New phases of the most interesting case Charley had ever defended spread out before him—the case which had given him his friend Jo Portugais, which had turned his own destiny. Yet he could not quite trace in it the vital association of this vain Notary now in the confessional mood.
“You behaved very well,” said Charley tentatively.
“Ah, you say that, knowing so little! What will you say when you know all—ah! That I should take a stand also was important. Neither the Seigneur nor the Cure was married; I was. I have been long-suffering for a cause. My marital felicity has been bruised—bruised—but not broken.”
“There are the twins,” said Charley, with a half-closed eye.
“Could woman ask greater proof?” urged the Notary seriously, for the other’s voice had been so well masked that he did not catch its satire. “But see my peril, and mark the ground of my interest in this poor wanton! Yet a woman—a woman-frail creatures, as we know, and to be pitied, not made more pitiable by the stronger sex.... But, see now! Why should I have perilled mine own conjugal peace, given ground for suspicion even—for I am unfortunate, unfortunate in the exterior with which Dame Nature has honoured me!” Again he looked in the mirror with sad complacency.
On these words his listener offered no comment, and he continued:
“For this reason I lifted my voice for the poor wanton. It was I who wrote the letter to her that her child was alive. I did it with high purpose—I foresaw that she would change her ways if she thought her child was living. Was I mistaken? No. I am an observer of human nature. Intellect conquered. ‘Io triumphe’. The poor fly-away changed, led a new life. Ever since then she has tried to get the man—the lawyer—to tell her where her child is. He has not done so. He has said the child is dead—always. When she seemed to give up belief, then would come another letter to her, telling her the child was living—but not where. So she would keep on writing to the man, and sometimes she would go away searching—searching. To what end? Nothing! She had a letter some months ago, for she had got restless, and a young kinsman of the Seigneur had come to visit at the seigneury for a week, and took much notice of her. There was danger. Voila, another letter.”
“From you?”
“Monsieur, of course! Will you keep a secret—on your sacred honour?”
“I can keep a secret without sacred honour.”
“Ah, yes, of course! You have a secret of your own—pardon me, I am only saying what every one says. Well, this is the secret of the woman Paulette Dubois. My cousin, Robespierre Dauphin, a notary in Quebec, is the agent of the lawyer, the father of the child. He pities the poor woman. But he is bound in professional honour to the lawyer fellow, not to betray. When visiting Robespierre once I found out the truth-by accident.
“I told him what I intended. He gave permission to tell the woman her child was alive; and, if need be for her good, to affirm it over and over again—no more.”
“And this?” said Charley, pointing to the injured leg, for he now associated the accident with the secret just disclosed.
“Ah, you apprehend! You have an avocat’s mind—almost. It was at Four Mountains. Paulette is superstitious; so not long ago she went to live there alone with an old half-breed woman who has second-sight. Monsieur, it is a gift unmistakably. For as soon as the hag clapped eyes on me in the hut, she said: ‘There is the man that wrote you the letters.’ Well—what! Paulette Dubois came down on me like an avalanche—Monsieur, like an avalanche! She believed the old witch; and there was I lying with an unconvincing manner”—he sighed—“lying requires practice, alas! She saw I was lying, and in a rage snatched up my gun. It went off by accident, and brought me down. Did she relent? Not so. She helped to bind me up, and the last words she said to me were: ‘You will suffer; you will have time to think. I am glad. You have kept me on the rack. I shall only be sorry if you die, for then I shall not be able to torture you till you tell me where my child is!’ Monsieur, I lied to the last, lest she should come here and make a noise; but I’m not sure it wouldn’t have been better to break faith with Robespierre, and tell the poor wanton where her child is. What would you do, Monsieur? I cannot ask the Cure or the Seigneur—I have reasons. But you have the head of a lawyer—almost—and you have no local feelings, no personal interest—eh?”
“I should tell the truth.”
“Your reasons, Monsieur?”
“Because the lawyer is a scoundrel. Your betrayal of his secret is not a thousandth part so bad as one lie told to this woman, whose very life is her child. Is it a boy or a girl?”
“A boy.”
“Good! What harm can be done? A left-handed boy is all right in the world. Your wife has twins—then think of the woman, the one ewe lamb of ‘the poor wanton.’ If you do not tell her, you will have her here making a noise, as you say. I wonder she has not been here on your door-step.”
“I had a letter from her to-day. She is coming-ah, mon dieu!”
“When?”
There was a tap at the window. The Notary started. “Ah, Heaven, here she is!” he gasped, and drew over to the wall.
A voice came from outside. “Shall I play for you, Dauphin? It is as good as medicine.”
The Notary recovered himself at once. His volatile nature sprang back to its pose. He could forget Paulette Dubois for the moment.
“It is Maximilian Cour in the garden,” he said happily. Then he raised his voice. “Play on, baker; but something for convalescence—the return of spring, the sweet assonance of memory.”
“A September air, and a gush of spring,” said the baker, trying to crane his long neck through the window. “Ah, there you are, Dauphin! I shall give you a sleep to-night like a balmy eve.” He nodded to the tailor. “M’sieu’, you shall judge if sentiment be dead.
“I have racked my heart to play this time. I have called it, ‘The Baffled Quest of Love’. I have taken the music of the song of Alsace, ‘Le Jardin d’Amour’, and I have made variations on it, keeping the last verse of the song in my mind. You know the song, M’sieu’:
The baker sat down on a stool he had brought, and began to tune his fiddle. From inside came the voice of the Notary.
“Play ‘The Woods are Green’ first,” he said. “Then the other.”
The Notary possessed the one high-walled garden in the village, and though folk gathered outside and said that the baker was playing for the sick man, there was no one in the garden save the fiddler himself. Once or twice a lad appeared on the top of the wall, looking over, but vanished at once when he saw Charley’s face at the window. Long ere the baker had finished, the song was caught up from outside, and before the last notes of the violin had died away, twenty voices were singing it in the street, and forty feet marched away with it into the dusk.
Darkness comes quickly in this land of brief twilight. Presently out of the soft shadowed stillness, broken by the note of a vagrant whippoorwill, crept out from Maximilian Cour’s old violin the music of ‘The Baffled Quest of Love’.
The baker was not a great musician, but he had a talent, a rare gift of pathos, and an imagination untrammelled by rigorous rules of harmony and construction. Whatever there was in his sentimental bosom he poured into this one achievement of his life. It brought tears to the eyes of Narcisse Dauphin. It opened a gate of the garden wall, and drew inside a girl’s face, shining with feeling.
Maximilian Cour spoke for more than himself that night. His philandering spirit had, at middle age, begotten a desire to house itself in a quiet place, where the blinds could be drawn close, and the room of life made ready with all the furniture of love. So he had spoken to his violin, and it had answered as it had never done before. The soul of the lean baker touched the heart of a man whose life had been but a baffled quest, and the spirit of a girl whose love was her sun by day, her moon by night, and the starlight of her dreams.
From the shade of the window the man the girl loved watched her as she sank upon the ground and clasped her hands before her in abandonment to the music. He watched her when the baker, at last, overcome by his own feelings—and ashamed of them—got up and stole swiftly out of the garden. He watched her till he saw her drop her face in her hands; then, opening the door and stealing out, he came and laid a hand upon her shoulder, and she heard him say:
“Rosalie!”
Rosalie came to her feet, gasping with pleasure. She had been unhappy ever since she had returned from Quebec, for though she had sometimes been brought in contact with Charley in the Notary’s house since the day of the operation, nothing had passed between them save the necessary commonplaces of a sick-room, given a little extra colour, perhaps, by the sense of responsibility which fell upon them both, and by that importance which hidden sentiment gives to every motion. The twins had been troublesome and ill, and Madame Dauphin had begged Rosalie to come in for a couple of hours every evening. Thus the tailor and the girl who, by every rule of wisdom, should have been kept as far apart as the poles, were played into each other’s hands by human kindness and damnable propinquity. The man, manlike, felt no real danger, because nothing was said—after everything had been said for all time at the hut on Vadrome Mountain. He had not realised the true situation, because of late her voice, like his, had been even and her hand cool and steady. He had not noticed that her eyes were like hungry fires, eating up her face—eating away its roundness, and leaving a pathetic beauty behind.
It seemed to him that because there was silence—neither the written word nor the speaking look—that all was well. He was hugging the chain of denial to his bosom, as though to say, “This way is safety”; he was hiding his face from the beacon-lights of her eyes, which said: “This way is home.”
Home? Pictures of home, of a home such as Maximilian Cour painted in his music, had passed before him now and then since that great day on Vadrome Mountain. A simple fireside, with frugal but comfortable fare; a few books; the study of the fields and woods; the daily humble task over which he could meditate as his hands worked mechanically; the happy face of a happy woman near—he had thought of home; and he had put it from him. No matter what the temptation, his must be, perhaps for ever, the bed and board unshared. He had had his chance in the old days, and he had thrown it away with insolent indifference, and an unpardonable contempt for the opinion of the world.
Now, with a blind fatuousness which had nothing to do with his old intellectual power, but was evidence of a primitive life of feeling, had vaguely imagined that because there were no clinging hands, or stolen looks, or any vow or promise, that all might go on as at present—upon the surface. With a curious absence of his old accuracy of observation he was treating the immediate past—his and Rosalie’s past—as if it did not actually exist; as if only the other and farther past was a tragedy, and this nearer one a dream.
But the film fell from his eyes as Maximilian Cour played his ‘Baffled Quest’, with its quaint, searching pathos; and as he saw the figure of the girl alone in the shade of the great rose-bushes, past and present became one, and the whole man was lost in that one word “Rosalie!” which called her to her feet with outstretched hands.
The tears sprang to her eyes; her face upturned to his was a mute appeal, a speechless ‘Viens ici’.
Past, present, future, duty, apprehension, consequences, suddenly fell away from Charley’s mind like a garment slipping from the shoulders, and the new man, swept off his feet by the onrush of unused and ungoverned emotions, caught the girl to his arms with a desperate joy.
“Oh, do you care, then—for me?” wept the girl, and hid her face in his breast.
A voice came from inside the house: “Monsieur, Monsieur—ah, come, if you please, tailor!”
The girl drew back quickly, looked up at him for one instant with a triumphant happy daring, then, suddenly covered with confusion, turned, ran to the gate, opened it, passed swiftly out, and was swallowed up in the dusk.