


Produced by David Widger





THE RIGHT OF WAY, Volume 6 (of 6)

By Gilbert Parker



CONTENTS:

  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



CHAPTER L. THE PASSION PLAY AT CHAUDIERE

For the first time in its history Chaudiere was becoming notable in the
eyes of the outside world.

"We'll have more girth after this," said Filion Lacasse the saddler
to the wife of the Notary, as, in front of the post-office, they stood
watching a little cavalcade of habitants going up the road towards Four
Mountains to rehearse the Passion Play.

"If Dauphin's advice had been taken long ago, we'd have had a hotel at
Four Mountains, and the city folk would be coming here for the summer,"
said Madame Dauphin, with a superior air.

"Pish!" said a voice behind them. It was the Seigneur's groom, with a
straw in his mouth. He had a gloomy mind.

"There isn't a house but has two or three boarders. I've got three,"
said Filion Lacasse. "They come tomorrow."

"We'll have ten at the Manor. But no good will come of it," said the
groom.

"No good! Look at the infidel tailor!" said Madame Dauphin. "He
translated all the writing. He drew all the dresses, and made a hundred
pictures--there they are at the Cure's house."

"He should have played Judas," said the groom malevolently. "That'd be
right for him."

"Perhaps you don't like the Passion Play," said Madame Dauphin
disdainfully.

"We ain't through with it yet," said the death's-head groom.

"It is a pious and holy mission," said Madame Dauphin. "Even that Jo
Portugais worked night and day till he went away to Montreal, and he
always goes to Mass now. He's to take Pontius Pilate when he comes
back. Then look at Virginie Morrissette, that put her brother's eyes out
quarrelling--she's to play Mary Magdalene."

"I could fit the parts better," said the groom.

"Of course. You'd have played St. John," said the saddler--"or, maybe,
Christus himself!"

"I'd have Paulette Dubois play Mary the sinner."

"Magdalene repented, and knelt at the foot of the cross. She was sorry
and sinned no more," said the Notary's wife in querulous reprimand.

"Well, Paulette does all that," said the stolid, dark-visaged groom.

Filion Lacasse's ears pricked up. "How do you know--she hasn't come
back?"

"Hasn't she, though! And with her child too--last night."

"Her child!" Madame Dauphin was scandalised and amazed.

The groom nodded. "And doesn't care who knows it. Seven years old, and
as fine a child as ever was!"

"Narcisse--Narcisse!" called Madame Dauphin to her husband, who was
coming up the street. She hastily repeated the groom's news to him.

The Notary stuck his hand between the buttons of his waistcoat. "Well,
well, my dear Madame," he said consequentially, "it is quite true."

"What do you know about it--whose child is it?" she asked, with curdling
scorn.

"'Sh-'sh!" said the Notary. Then, with an oratorical wave of his free
hand: "The Church opens her arms to all--even to her who sinned much
because she loved much, who, through woful years, searched the world for
her child and found it not--hidden away, as it was, by the duplicity
of sinful man"--and so on through tangled sentences, setting forth in
broken terms Paulette Dubois's life.

"How do you know all about it?" asked the saddler. "I've known it for
years," said the Notary grandly--stoutly too, for he would freely risk
his wife's anger that the vain-glory of the moment might be enlarged.

"And you keep it even from madame!" said the saddler, with a smile too
broad to be sarcastic. "Tiens! if I did that, my wife'd pick my eyes out
with a bradawl."

"It was a professional secret," said the Notary, with a desperate
resolve to hold his position.

"I'm going home, Dauphin--are you coming?" questioned his wife, with an
air.

"You will remain, and hear what I've got to say. This Paulette
Dubois--she should play Mary Magdalene, for--"

"Look--look, what's that?" said the saddler. He pointed to a wagon
coming slowly up the road. In front of it a team of dogs drew a cart.
It carried some thing covered with black. "It's a funeral! There's the
coffin. It's on Jo Portugais' little cart," added Filion Lacasse.

"Ah, God be merciful, it's Rosalie Evanturel and Mrs. Flynn! And M'sieu'
Evanturel in the coffin!" said Madame Dauphin, running to the door of
the postoffice to call the Cure's sister.

"There'll be use enough for the baker's Dead March now," remarked M.
Dauphin sadly, buttoning up his coat, taking off his hat, and going
forward to greet Rosalie. As he did so, Charley appeared in the doorway
of his shop.

"Look, Monsieur," said the Notary. "This is the way Rosalie Evanturel
comes home with her father."

"I will go for the Cure" Charley answered, turning white. He leaned
against the doorway for a moment to steady himself, then hurried up the
street. He did not dare meet Rosalie, or go near her yet. For her sake
it was better not.

"That tailor infidel has a heart. His eyes were leaking," said the
Notary to Filion Lacasse, and went on to meet the mournful cavalcade.




CHAPTER LI. FACE TO FACE

"If I could only understand!"--this was Rosalie's constant cry in these
weeks wherein she lay ill and prostrate after her father's burial. Once
and once only had she met Charley alone, though she knew that he was
keeping watch over her. She had first seen him the day her father was
buried, standing apart from the people, his face sorrowful, his eyes
heavy, his figure bowed.

The occasion of their meeting alone was the first night of her return,
when the Notary and Charley had kept watch beside her father's body.

She had gone into the little hallway, and had looked into the room of
death. The Notary was sound asleep in his arm-chair, but Charley sat
silent and moveless, his eyes gazing straight before him. She murmured
his name, and though it was only to herself, not even a whisper, he got
up quickly and came to the hall, where she stood grief-stricken, yet
with a smile of welcome, of forgiveness, of confidence. As she put out
her hand to him, and his swallowed it, she could not but say to him--so
contrary is the heart of woman, so does she demand a Yes by asserting a
No, and hunger for the eternal assurance--she could not but say:

"You do not love me--now."

It was but a whisper, so faint and breathless that only the heart of
love could hear it. There was no answer in words, for some one was
stirring beyond Rosalie in the dark, and a great figure heaved through
the kitchen doorway, but his hand crushed hers in his own; his heart
said to her, "My love is an undying light; it will not change for time
or tears"--the words they had read together in a little snuff-coloured
book on the counter in the shop one summer day a year ago. The words
flashed into his mind, and they were carried to hers. Her fingers
pressed his, and then Charley said, over her shoulder, to the
approaching Mrs. Flynn: "Do not let her come again, Madame. She should
get some sleep," and he put her hand in Mrs. Flynn's. "Be good to her,
as you know how, Mrs. Flynn," he added gently.

He had won the heart of Mrs. Flynn that moment, and it may be she had a
conviction or an inspiration, for she said, in a softer voice than she
was wont to use to any one save Rosalie:

"I'll do by her as you'd do by your own, sir," and tenderly drew Rosalie
to her own room.

Such had been their first meeting after her return. Afterwards she was
taken ill, and the torture of his heart drove him out into the night,
to walk the road and creep round her house like a sentinel, Mrs. Flynn's
words ringing in his ears to reproach him--"I'll do by her as you would
do by your own, sir." Night after night it was the same, and Rosalie
heard his footsteps and listened and was less sorrowful, because she
knew that she was ever in his thoughts. But one day Mrs. Flynn came to
him in his shop.

"She's wantin' a word with ye on business," she said, and gestured
towards the little house across the way. "'Tis few words ye do be
shpakin' to annybody, but if y' have kind words to shpake and good
things to say, y' naidn't be bitin' yer tongue," she added in response
to his nod, and left him.

Charley looked after her with a troubled face. On the instant it seemed
to him that Mrs. Flynn knew all. But his second thought told him that
it was only an instinct on her part that there was something between
them--the beginning of love, maybe.

In another half-hour he was beside Rosalie's chair. "Perhaps you are
angry," she said, as he came towards her where she sat in the great
arm-chair. She did not give him time to answer, but hurried on. "I
wanted to tell you that I have heard you every night outside, and that I
have been glad, and sorry too--so sorry for us both."

"Rosalie! Rosalie" he said hoarsely, and dropped on a knee beside her
chair, and took her hand and kissed it. He did not dare do more.

"I wanted to say to you," she said, dropping a hand on his shoulder,
"that I do not blame you for anything--not for anything. Yet I want you
to be sorry too. I want you to feel as sorry for me as I feel sorry for
you."

"I am the worst man and you the best woman in the world."

She leaned over him with tears in her eyes. "Hush!" she said. "I want to
help you--Charles. You are wise. You know ten thousand things more than
I; but I know one thing you do not understand."

"You know and do whatever is good," he said brokenly.

"Oh, no, no, no! But I know one thing, because I have been taught, and
because it was born with me. Perhaps much was habit with me in the past,
but now I know that one thing is true. It is God."

She paused. "I have learned so much since--since then."

He looked up with a groan, and put a finger on her lips. "You are
feeling bitterly sorry for me," she said. "But you must let me
speak--that is all I ask. It is all love asks. I cannot bear that you
should not share my thoughts. That is the thing that has hurt--hurt so
all these months, these long hard months, when I could not see you, and
did not know why I could not. Don't shake so, please! Hear me to the
end, and we shall both be the better after. I felt it all so cruelly,
because I did not--and I do not--understand. I rebelled, but not against
you. I rebelled against myself, against what you called Fate. Fate
is one's self, what one brings on one's self. But I had faith in
you--always--always, even when I thought I hated you."

"Ah, hate me! Hate me! It is your loving that cuts me to the quick," he
said. "You have the magnanimity of God."

Her eyes leapt up. "'Of God'--you believe in God!" she said eagerly.
"God is God to you? He is the one thing that has come out of all this
to me." She reached out her hand and took her Bible from a table.
"Read that to yourself," she said, and, opening the Book, pointed to a
passage. He read it:

   And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in
   the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the
   presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

   And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art
   thou?

   And he said, I heard Thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid,
   because I was naked; and I hid myself.

   And He said, Who told thee that thou wart naked? Hast thou eaten of
   the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

Closing the Book, Charley said: "I understand--I see."

"Will you say a prayer with me?" she urged. "It is all I ask. It is the
only--the only thing I want to hurt you, because it may make you happier
in the end. What keeps us apart, I do not know. But if you will say one
prayer with me, I will keep on trusting, I will never complain, and I
will wait--wait."

He kissed both her hands, but the look in his eyes was that of a man
being broken on the wheel. She slipped to the floor, her rosary in her
fingers. "Let us pray," she said simply, and in a voice as clear as a
child's, but with the anguish of a woman's struggling heart behind.

He did not move. She looked at him, caught his hands in both of hers,
and cried: "But you will not deny me this! Haven't I the right to ask
it? Haven't I a right to ask of you a thousand times as much?"

"You have the right to ask all that is mine to give life, honour, my
body in pieces inch by inch, the last that I can call my own. But,
Rosalie, this is not mine to give! How can I pray, unless I believe!"

"You do--oh, you do believe in God," she cried passionately.

"Rosalie--my life," he urged, hoarse misery in his voice, "the only
thing I have to give you is the bare soul of a truthful man--I am that
now at least. You have made me so. If I deceived the whole world, if I
was as the thief upon the cross, I should still be truthful to you. You
open your heart to me--let me open mine to you, to see it as it is.
Once my soul was like a watch, cased and carried in the pocket of life,
uncertain, untrue, because it was a soul made, not born. I must look at
the hands to know the time, and because it varied, because the working
did not answer to the absolute, I said: 'The soul is a lie.' You--you
have changed all that, Rosalie. My soul now is like a dial to the sun.
But the clouds are there above, and I do not know what time it is in
life. When the clouds break--if they ever break--and the sun shines, the
dial will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth--"

He paused, confused, for he had repeated the words of a witness taking
the oath in court.

"'So help me God!"' she finished the oath for him. Then, with a sudden
change of manner, she came to her feet with a spring. She did not quite
understand. She was, however, dimly conscious of the power she had over
his chivalrous mind: the power of the weak over the strong--the tyranny
of the defended over the defender. She was a woman tortured beyond
bearing; and she was fighting for her very life, mad with anguish as she
struggled.

"I do not understand you," she cried, with flashing eyes. "One minute
you say you do not believe in anything, and the next you say, 'So help
me God!'"

"Ah, no, you said that, Rosalie," he interposed gently.

"You said I was as magnanimous as God. You were laughing at me then,
mocking me, whose only fault is that I loved and trusted you. In the
wickedness of your heart you robbed me of happiness, you--"

"Don't--don't! Rosalie! Rosalie!" he exclaimed in shrinking protest.

That she had spoken to him as her deepest heart abhorred only increased
her agitated denunciation. "Yes, yes, in your mad selfishness, you did
not care for the poor girl who forgot all, lost all, and now--"
She stopped short at the sight of his white, awe stricken face. His
eye-glass seemed like a frost of death over an eye that looked upon
some shocking scene of woe. Yet he appeared not to see, for his fingers
fumbled on his waistcoat for the monocle--fumbled--vaguely, helplessly.
It was the realisation of a soul cast into the outer darkness. Her
abrupt silence came upon him like the last engulfing wave to a drowning
