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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Right of Way, by G. Parker, v1
+#70 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: The Right of Way, Volume 1.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6243]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 24, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIGHT OF WAY, PARKER, V1 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT OF WAY
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 1.
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Volume 1.
+I.        THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
+II.       WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
+III.      AFTER FIVE YEARS
+IV.       CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY
+V.        THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE
+VI.       THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB
+VII.      "PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE!"
+VIII.     THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT
+
+Volume 2.
+IX.       OLD DEBTS FOR NEW
+X.        THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT
+XI.       THE RAISING OF THE CURTAIN
+XII.      THE COMING OF ROSALIE
+XIII.     HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING, AND WHAT HE FOUND
+XIV.      ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED
+XV.       THE MARK IN THE PAPER
+XVI.      MADAME DAUPHIN HAS A MISSION
+XVII.     THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY
+XVIII.    THE STEALING OF THE CROSS
+
+Volume 3.
+XIX.      THE SIGN FROM HEAVEN
+XX.       THE RETURN OF THE TAILOR
+XXI.      THE CURE HAS AN INSPIRATION
+XXII.     THE WOMAN WHO SAW
+XXIII.    THE WOMAN WHO DID NOT TELL
+XXIV.     THE SEIGNEUR TAKES A HAND IN THE GAME
+XXV.      THE COLONEL TELLS HIS STORY
+XXVI.     A SONG, A BOTTLE, AND A GHOST
+XXVII.    OUT ON THE OLD TRAIL
+XXVIII.   THE SEIGNEUR GIVES A WARNING
+
+Volume 4.
+XXIX.     THE WILD RIDE
+XXX.      ROSALIE WARNS CHARLEY
+XXXI.     CHARLEY STANDS AT BAY
+XXXII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
+XXXIII.   THE EDGE OF LIFE
+XXXIV.    IN AMBUSH
+XXXV.     THE COMING OF MAXIMILIAN COUR AND ANOTHER
+XXXVI.    BARRIERS SWEPT AWAY
+XXXVII.   THE CHALLENGE OF PAULETTE DUBOIS
+XXXVIII.  THE CURE AND THE SEIGNEUR VISIT THE TAILOR
+XXXIX.    THE SCARLET WOMAN
+XL.       AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING
+
+Volume 5.
+XLI.      IT WAS MICHAELMAS DAY
+XLII.     A TRIAL AND A VERDICT
+XLIII.    JO PORTUGAIS TELLS A STORY
+XLIV.     "WHO WAS KATHLEEN?"
+XLV.      SIX MONTHS GO BY
+XLVI.     THE FORGOTTEN MAN
+XLVII.    ONE WAS TAKEN AND THE OTHER LEFT
+XLVIII.   "WHERE THE TREE OF LIFE IS BLOOMING--"
+XLIX.     THE OPEN GATE
+
+Volume 6.
+L.        THE PASSION PLAY AT CHAUDIERE
+LI.       FACE TO FACE
+LII.      THE COMING OF BILLY
+LIII.     THE SEIGNEUR AND THE CURE HAVE A SUSPICION
+LIV.      M. ROSSIGNOL SLIPS THE LEASH
+LV.       ROSALIE PLAYS A PART
+LVI.      MRS. FLYNN SPEAKS
+LVII.     A BURNING FIERY FURNACE
+LVIII.    WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL
+LIX.      IN WHICH CHARLEY MEETS A STRANGER
+LX.       THE HAND AT THE DOOR
+LXI.      THE CURE SPEAKS
+
+EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+In a book called 'The House of Harper', published in this year, 1912,
+there are two letters of mine, concerning 'The Right of Way', written to
+Henry M. Alden, editor of Harper's Magazine.  To my mind those letters
+should never have been published.  They were purely personal.  They were
+intended for one man's eyes only, and he was not merely an editor but a
+beloved and admired personal friend.  Only to him and to W. E. Henley, as
+editors, could I ever have emptied out my heart and brain; and, as may be
+seen by these two letters, one written from London and the other from a
+place near Southampton, I uncovered all my feelings, my hopes and my
+ambitions concerning The Right of Way.  Had I been asked permission to
+publish them I should not have granted it.  I may wear my heart upon my
+sleeve for my friend, but not for the universe.
+
+The most scathing thing ever said in literature was said by Robert
+Buchanan on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's verses--"He has wheeled his nuptial
+bed into the street."  Looking at these letters I have a great shrinking,
+for they were meant only for the eyes of an aged man for whom I cared
+enough to let him see behind the curtain.  But since they have been
+printed, and without a "by your leave," I will use one or two passages
+in them to show in what mood, under what pressure of impulse, under what
+mental and, maybe, spiritual hypnotism it was written.  I first planned
+it as a story of twenty-five thousand words, even as 'Valmond' was
+planned as a story of five thousand words, and 'A Ladder of Swords' as a
+story of twenty thousand words; but I had not written three chapters
+before I saw what the destiny of the tale was to be.  I had gone to
+Quebec to start the thing in the atmosphere where Charley Steele
+belonged, and there it was borne in upon me that it must be a three-
+decker novel, not a novelette.  I telegraphed to Harper & Brothers to ask
+them whether it would suit them just as well if I made it into a long
+novel.  They telegraphed their assent at once; so I went on.  At that
+time Mr. F. N. Doubleday was a sort of director of Harper's firm.  To him
+I had told the tale in a railway train, and he had carried me off at once
+to Henry M. Alden, to whom I also told it, with the result that Harper's
+Magazine was wide open to it, and there in Quebec, soon after my
+interview with Mr. Alden and Mr. Doubleday, the book was begun.
+
+The first of the letters published in The House of Harper, however, was
+apparently written immediately after my return to London when the novel
+was well on its way.  Evidently the first paragraph of the letter was an
+apology for having suddenly announced the development of the book from a
+long short story to a long novel; for I used these words:
+
+"Yet if you really take an interest in the working of the human mind in
+its relation to the vicissitudes of life, you will appreciate what I am
+going to tell you, and will recognise that there is only stability in
+evolution which the vulgar call chance.  .  .  .  Now, sir, perpend.
+Charley Steele is going to be a novel of one hundred thousand words or
+one hundred and twenty thousand--a real bang-up heartful of a novel."
+
+Then there follows the confidence of a friend to a friend.  As I look
+at the words I am not sorry that I wrote them.  They were a part of me.
+They were the inveterate truth, but I would not willingly have uncovered
+my inner self to any except the man to whom the words were written.  But
+here is what I wrote:
+
+"I am a bit of a fool over this book.  It catches me at every tender
+corner of my nature.  It has aroused all the old ardent dreams of youth
+and springtime puissance.  I cannot lay it down, and I cannot shorten it,
+for story, character, soul and reflection, imagination, observation are
+dragging me along after them.  .  .  .  This novel will make me or break
+me--prove me human and an artist, or an affected literary bore.  If you
+want it you must take the risk.  But, my dear Alden, you will be
+investing in a man's heart--which may be a fortune or a folly.  Why,
+I ought to have seen--and far back in my brain I did see--that the
+character of Charley Steele was a type, an idiosyncrasy of modern life, a
+resultant of forces all round us, and that he would demand space in which
+to live and tell his story to the world.  .  .  .  And behold with what
+joy I follow him, not only lovingly but sternly and severely, noting him
+down as he really is, condoning naught, forgiving naught, but above all
+else, understanding him--his wilful mystification of the world, his
+shameless disdain of it, but the old law of interrogation, of sad yet
+eager inquiry and wonder and 'non possumus' with him to the end."
+
+This letter was evidently written in December, 1899, and the other went
+to Mr. Alden on the 7th August, 1900; therefore, eight or nine months
+later.  The work had gone well.  Week after week, month after month it
+had unfolded itself with an almost unpardonable ease.  Evidently, the
+very ease with which the book was written troubled me, because I find
+that in this letter of the 7th August, 1900, to Mr. Alden, I used these
+words:
+
+"A kind of terror has seized me, and instead of sending a dozen more
+chapters to you as I proposed to do, I am setting to to break this love
+story anew under the stones of my most exacting criticism and troubled
+regard.  I go to bury myself at a solitary little seaside place" (it was
+Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire), "there to live alone with Rosalie and
+Charley, and if I do not know them hereafter, never ask me to write for
+'Harper's' again.  .  .  .  This book has been written out of something
+vital in me--I do not mean the religious part of it, I mean the humanity
+that becomes one's own and part of one's self, by observation,
+experience, and understanding got from dead years."
+
+Anyhow that shows the spirit in which the book was written, and there
+must have been something in it that rang true, because not only did it
+have an enormous sale and therefore a multitude of readers, but I
+received hundreds of letters from people who in one way or another were
+deeply interested in the story.
+
+The majority of them were inquisitive letters.  A great many of them said
+that the writer had shared in controversy as to what the relations of
+Charley and Rosalie were, and asked me to set for ever queries and
+controversies at rest by declaring either that the relations of these two
+were what, in the way of life's stern conventions, they ought not to be,
+or that Rosalie passed unscathed through the fire.  I had foreseen all
+this, though I could not have foreseen the passionately intense interest
+which my readers would take in the life-story of these unhappy yet happy
+people.  I had, however, only one reply.  It was that all I had meant to
+say concerning Charley and Rosalie had been said in the book, to the last
+word.  All I had meant not to say would not be said after the book was
+written.  I asked them to take exactly the same view of Charley and
+Rosalie as they would in real life regarding two human beings with whom
+they were acquainted, and concerning whom, to their minds, there was
+sufficient evidence, or not sufficient evidence, to come to a conclusion
+as to what their relations were.  I added that, as in real life we used
+our judgment upon such things with a reasonable amount of accuracy,
+I asked them to apply that judgment to Charley Steele and Rosalie
+Evanturel.  They and their story were there for eyes to see and read,
+and when I had ended my manuscript in the year 1900 I had said the last
+word I ever meant to say as to their history.  The controversy therefore
+continues, for the book still makes its appeal to an ever increasing
+congregation of new readers.
+
+But another kind of letter came to me--the letter of some man who had
+just such a struggle as Charley Steele, or whose father or brother or
+friend had had such a struggle.  Letters came from clergymen who had
+preached concerning the book; from men who told me in brief their own
+life problems and tragedies.  These letters I prize; most of them had
+the real thing in them, the human truth.
+
+That the book drew wide attention to the Dominion of Canada, particularly
+to French Canada, and crystallised something of the life of that dear
+Province, was a deep pleasure to me; and I was glad that I had been able
+to culminate my efforts to portray the life of the French-Canadian as I
+saw it, by a book which arrested the attention of so comprehensive a
+public.
+
+I have seen many statements as to the original of Charley Steele, but I
+have never seen a story which was true.  Many people have told me that
+they had seen the original of Charley Steele in an American lawyer.
+They knew he was the original, because he himself had said so.  The
+gentleman was mistaken; I have never seen him.  As with the purple cow,
+I never hope to see him.  Whoever he is or whatever he is, the original
+Charley was an abler and a more striking man.  I knew him as a boy, and
+he died while I was yet a boy, taking with him, save in the memory of a
+few, a rare and wonderful, if not wholly lovable personality.  For over
+twenty years I had carried him in my mind, wondering whether, and when,
+I should-make use of him.  Again and again I was tempted, but was never
+convinced that his time had come; yet through all the years he was
+gaining strength, securing possession of my mind, and gathering to him,
+magnet-like, the thousand observations which my experience sent in his
+direction.  In my mind his life-story ended with his death at the Cote
+Dorion.  For years and years I saw his ending there.  Yet it all seemed
+to me so futile, despite the wonder of his personality, that I could make
+nothing of him, and though always fascinated by his character I was held
+back from exploiting it, because of the hopelessness of it all.  It led
+nowhere.  It was the 'quid refert' of the philosopher, and I could not
+bring myself to get any further than an interrogation mark at the end of
+a life which was all scepticism, mind and matter, and nothing more.
+
+There came a day, however, when that all ended, when the doors were flung
+wide to a new conception of the man, and of what he might have become.
+I was going to America, and I paid an angry and reluctant visit to my
+London tailor thirty-six hours before I was to start.  A suit of clothes
+had been sent home which, after an effective trying-on, was a
+monstrosity.  I went straight to my tailor, put on the clothes and bade
+him look at them.  He was a great tailor-he saw exactly what I saw, and
+what I saw was bad; and when a tailor will do that, you may be quite sure
+he is a good and a great man.  He said the clothes were as bad as they
+could be, but he added: "You shall have them before you sail, and they
+shall be exactly as you want them.  I'll have the foreman down."  He rang
+a bell.  Presently the door swung open and in stepped a man with an
+eyeglass in his eye.  There, with a look at once reflective and
+penetrating, with a figure at once slovenly and alert, was a caricature
+of Charley Steele as I had known him, and of all his characteristics.
+There was such a resemblance as an ugly child in a family may have to his
+handsome brother.  It was Charley Steele with a twist--gone to seed.
+Looking at him in blank amazement, I burst out: "Good heavens, so you
+didn't die, Charley Steele!  You became a tailor!"
+
+All at once the whole new landscape of my story as it eventually became,
+spread out before me.  I was justified in waiting all the years.  My
+discontent with the futile end of the tale as I originally knew it and
+saw it was justified.  Charley Steele, brilliant, enigmatic and
+epigrammatic, did not die at the Cote Dorion, but lived in that far
+valley by Dalgrothe Mountain, and became a tailor!  So far as I am
+concerned he became much more.  He was the beginning of a new epoch in
+my literary life.  I had got into subtler methods, reached more intimate
+understandings, had come to a place where analysis of character had
+shaken itself free--but certainly not quite free--from a natural yet
+rather dangerous eloquence.
+
+As a play The Right of Way, skilfully and sympathetically dramatised by
+Mr. Eugene Presbery, has had a career extending over several years, and
+still continues to make its appearance.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+It should not be assumed that the "Chaudiere" of this story is the real
+Chaudiere of Quebec province.  The name is characteristic, and for this
+reason alone I have used it.
+
+I must also apologise to my readers for appearing to disregard a
+statement made in 'The Lane that Had no Turning', that that tale was the
+last I should write about French Canada.  In explanation I would say that
+'The Lane that Had no Turning' was written after the present book was
+finished.
+
+G. F.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT OF WAY
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 1.
+
+
+I.        THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
+II.       WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
+III.      AFTER FIVE YEARS
+IV.       CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY
+V.        THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE
+VI.       THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB
+VII.      "PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE!"
+VIII.     THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT
+
+
+
+     "They had lived and loved, and walked and worked in their own way,
+     and the world went by them.  Between them and it a great gulf was
+     fixed: and they met its every catastrophe with the Quid Refert? of
+     the philosophers."
+
+              "I want to talk with some old lover's ghost,
+               Who lived before the god of love was born."
+
+     "There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and
+     none of them is without signification."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
+
+"Not guilty, your Honour!"
+
+A hundred atmospheres had seemed pressing down on the fretted people in
+the crowded court-room.  As the discordant treble of the huge foreman of
+the jury squeaked over the mass of gaping humanity, which had twitched at
+skirts, drawn purposeless hands across prickling faces, and kept nervous
+legs at a gallop, the smothering weights of elastic air lifted suddenly,
+a great suspiration of relief swept through the place like a breeze, and
+in a far corner of the gallery a woman laughed outright.
+
+The judge looked up reprovingly at the gallery; the clerk of the court
+angrily called "Silence!" towards the offending corner, and seven or
+eight hundred eyes raced between three centres of interest--the judge,
+the prisoner, and the prisoner's counsel.  Perhaps more people looked at
+the prisoner's counsel than at the prisoner, certainly far more than
+looked at the judge.
+
+Never was a verdict more unexpected.  If a poll had been taken of the
+judgment of the population twenty-four hours before, a great majority
+would have been found believing that there was no escape for the
+prisoner, who was accused of murdering a wealthy timber merchant.  The
+minority would have based their belief that the prisoner had a chance of
+escape, not on his possible innocence, not on insufficient evidence, but
+on a curious faith in the prisoner's lawyer.  This minority would not
+have been composed of the friends of the lawyer alone, but of outside
+spectators, who, because Charley Steele had never lost a criminal case,
+attached to him a certain incapacity for bad luck; and of very young men,
+who looked upon him as the perfect pattern of the person good to see and
+hard to understand.
+
+During the first two days of the trial the case had gone wholly against
+the prisoner, who had given his name as Joseph Nadeau.  Witnesses had
+heard him quarrelling with the murdered man, and the next day the body of
+the victim had been found by the roadside.  The prisoner was a stranger
+in the lumber-camp where the deed was done, and while there had been
+morose and lived apart; no one knew him; and he refused to tell even his
+lawyer whence he came, or what his origin, or to bring witnesses from his
+home to speak for his character.
+
+One by one the points had been made against him--with no perceptible
+effect upon Charley Steele, who seemed the one cool, undisturbed person
+in the courtroom.
+
+Indifferent as he seemed, seldom speaking to the prisoner, often looking
+out of the windows to the cool green trees far over on the hill, absorbed
+and unbusinesslike, yet judge and jury came to see, before the second day
+was done, that he had let no essential thing pass, that the questions
+he asked had either a pregnant aptness, opened up new avenues of
+deliberation, or were touched with mystery--seemed to have a longer
+reach than the moment or the hour.
+
+Before the end of this second day, however, more attention was upon him
+than upon the prisoner, and nine-tenths of the people in the court-room
+could have told how many fine linen handkerchiefs he used during the
+afternoon, how many times he adjusted his monocle to look at the judge
+meditatively.  Probably no man, for eight hours a day, ever exasperated
+and tried a judge, jury, and public, as did this man of twenty-nine years
+of age, who had been known at college as Beauty Steele, and who was still
+so spoken of familiarly; or was called as familiarly, Charley Steele, by
+people who never had attempted to be familiar with him.
+
+The second day of the trial had ended gloomily for the prisoner.  The
+coil of evidence had drawn so close that extrication seemed impossible.
+That the evidence was circumstantial, that no sign of the crime was upon
+the prisoner, that he was found sleeping quietly in his bed when he was
+arrested, that he had not been seen to commit the deed, did not weigh in
+the minds of the general public.  The man's guilt was freely believed;
+not even the few who clung to the opinion that Charley Steele would yet
+get him off thought that he was innocent.  There seemed no flaw in the
+evidence, once granted its circumstantiality.
+
+During the last two hours of the sitting the prisoner had looked at his
+counsel in despair, for he seemed perfunctorily conducting the case: was
+occupied in sketching upon the blotting-pad before him, looking out of
+the window, or turning his head occasionally towards a corner where sat a
+half-dozen well-dressed ladies, and more particularly towards one lady
+who watched him in a puzzled way--more than once with a look of
+disappointment.  Only at the very close of the sitting did he appear to
+rouse himself.  Then, for a brief ten minutes, he cross-examined a friend
+of the murdered merchant in a fashion which startled the court-room, for
+he suddenly brought out the fact that the dead man had once struck a
+woman in the face in the open street.  This fact, sharply stated by the
+prisoner's counsel, with no explanation and no comment, seemed uselessly
+intrusive and malicious.  His ironical smile merely irritated all
+concerned.  The thin, clean-shaven face of the prisoner grew more pinched
+and downcast, and he turned almost pleadingly towards the judge.  The
+judge pulled his long side-whiskers nervously, and looked over his
+glasses in severe annoyance, then hastily adjourned the sitting and left
+the bench, while the prisoner saw with dismay his lawyer leave the court-
+room with not even a glance towards him.
+
+On the morning of the third day Charley Steele's face, for the first
+time, wore an expression which, by a stretch of imagination, might be
+called anxious.  He also took out his monocle frequently, rubbed it with
+his handkerchief, and screwed it in again, staring straight before him
+much of the time.  But twice he spoke to the prisoner in a low voice, and
+was hurriedly answered in French as crude as his own was perfect.  When
+he spoke, which was at rare intervals, his voice was without feeling,
+concise, insistent, unappealing.  It was as though the business before
+him was wholly alien to him, as though he were held there against his
+will, but would go on with his task bitterly to the bitter end.
+
+The court adjourned for an hour at noon.  During this time Charley
+refused to see any one, but sat alone in his office with a few biscuits
+and an ominous bottle before him, till the time came for him to go back
+to the court-house.  Arrived there he entered by a side door, and was not
+seen until the court opened once more.
+
+For two hours and a half the crown attorney mercilessly made out his case
+against the prisoner.  When he sat down, people glanced meaningly at each
+other, as though the last word had been said, then looked at the
+prisoner, as at one already condemned.
+
+Yet Charley Steele was to reply.  He was not now the same man that had
+conducted the case during the past two days and a half.  Some great
+change had passed over him.  There was no longer abstraction,
+indifference, or apparent boredom, or disdain, or distant stare.
+He was human, intimate and eager, yet concentrated and impelling:
+he was quietly, unnoticeably drunk.
+
+He assured the prisoner with a glance of the eye, with a word scarce
+above a whisper, as he slowly rose to make his speech for the defence.
+
+His first words caused a new feeling in the courtroom.  He was a new
+presence; the personality had a changed significance.  At first the
+public, the jury, and the judge were curiously attracted, surprised into
+a fresh interest.  The voice had an insinuating quality, but it also had
+a measured force, a subterranean insistence, a winning tactfulness.
+Withal, a logical simplicity governed his argument.  The flaneur, the
+poseur--if such he was--no longer appeared.  He came close to the
+jurymen, leaned his hands upon the back of a chair--as it were, shut out
+the public, even the judge, from his circle of interest--and talked in a
+conversational tone.  An air of confidence passed from him to the amazed
+yet easily captivated jury; the distance between them, so gaping during
+the last two days, closed suddenly up.  The tension of the past
+estrangement, relaxing all at once, surprised the jury into an almost
+eager friendliness, as on a long voyage a sensitive traveller finds in
+some exciting accident a natural introduction to an exclusive fellow-
+passenger, whom he discovers as human as he had thought him offensively
+distant.
+
+Charley began by congratulating the crown attorney on his statement of
+the case.  He called it masterly; he said that in its presentations it
+was irrefutable; as a precis of evidence purely circumstantial it was--
+useful and interesting.  But, speech-making aside, and ability--and
+rhetoric--aside, and even personal conviction aside, the case should
+stand or fall by its total, not its comparative, soundness.  Since the
+evidence was purely circumstantial, there must be no flaw in its cable of
+assumption, it must be logically inviolate within itself.  Starting with
+assumption only, there must be no straying possibilities, no loose ends
+of certainty, no invading alternatives.  Was this so in the case of the
+man before them?  They were faced by a curious situation.  So far as the
+trial was concerned, the prisoner himself was the only person who could
+tell them who he was, what was his past, and, if he committed the crime,
+what was--the motive of it: out of what spirit--of revenge, or hatred--
+the dead man had been sent to his account.  Probably in the whole history
+of crime there never was a more peculiar case.  Even himself the
+prisoner's counsel was dealing with one whose life was hid from him
+previous to the day the murdered man was discovered by the roadside.
+The prisoner had not sought to prove an alibi; he had done no more than
+formally plead not guilty.  There was no material for defence save that
+offered by the prosecution.  He had undertaken the defence of the
+prisoner because it was his duty as a lawyer to see that the law
+justified itself; that it satisfied every demand of proof to the last
+atom of certainty; that it met the final possibility of doubt with
+evidence perfect and inviolate if circumstantial, and uncontradictory if
+eye-witness, if tell-tale incident, were to furnish basis of proof.
+
+Judge, jury, and public riveted their eyes upon Charley Steele.
+He had now drawn a little farther away from the jury-box; his eye took
+in the judge as well; once or twice he turned, as if appealingly and
+confidently, to the people in the room.  It was terribly hot, the air
+was sickeningly close, every one seemed oppressed--every one save a lady
+sitting not a score of feet from where the counsel for the prisoner
+stood.  This lady's face was not one that could flush easily; it belonged
+to a temperament as even as her person was symmetrically beautiful.  As
+Charley talked, her eyes were fixed steadily, wonderingly upon him.
+There was a question in her gaze, which never in the course of the speech
+was quite absorbed by the admiration--the intense admiration--she was
+feeling for him.  Once as he turned with a concentrated earnestness in
+her direction his eyes met hers.  The message he flashed her was sub-
+conscious, for his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in hand,
+but it said to her:
+
+"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you."  For another quarter
+of an hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence; he
+raised in the minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the law,
+the awful tyranny of miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice
+against a prisoner because that prisoner demanded that the law should
+prove him guilty instead of his proving himself innocent.  If a man chose
+to stand to that, to sternly assume this perilous position, the law had
+no right to take advantage of it.  He turned towards the prisoner and
+traced his possible history: as the sensitive, intelligent son of godly
+Catholic parents from some remote parish in French Canada.  He drew an
+imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come, and of the
+parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of torture
+knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life.  It
+might at first glance seem quixotic, eccentric, but was it unnatural that
+the prisoner should choose silence as to his origin and home, rather than
+have his family and friends face the undoubted peril lying before him?
+Besides, though his past life might have been wholly blameless, it would
+not be evidence in his favour.  It might, indeed, if it had not been
+blameless, provide some element of unjust suspicion against him, furnish
+some fancied motive.  The prisoner had chosen his path, and events had so
+far justified him.  It must be clear to the minds of judge and jury that
+there were fatally weak places in the circumstantial evidence offered for
+the conviction of this man.
+
+There was the fact that no sign of the crime, no drop of blood, no
+weapon, was found about him or near him, and that he was peacefully
+sleeping at the moment the constable arrested him.
+
+There was also the fact that no motive for the crime had been shown.
+It was not enough that he and the dead man had been heard quarrelling.
+Was there any certainty that it was a quarrel, since no word or sentence
+of the conversation had been brought into court?  Men with quick tempers
+might quarrel over trivial things, but exasperation did not always end in
+bodily injury and the taking of life; imprecations were not so uncommon
+that they could be taken as evidence of wilful murder.  The prisoner
+refused to say what that troubled conversation was about, but who could
+question his right to take the risk of his silence being misunderstood?
+
+The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the
+prisoner; the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the
+public sat open mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white face
+and clinched hands listened moveless and staring.  Charley Steele was
+holding captive the emotions and the judgments of his hearers.  All
+antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the
+jurymen and himself.  People no longer looked with distant dislike at the
+prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain only in
+his surly defiance.
+
+But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
+moment.  He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in
+evidence, that the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago;
+also that he had kept a factory girl in affluence for two years.  Here
+was motive for murder--if motive were to govern them--far greater than
+might be suggested by excited conversation which listeners who could not
+hear a word construed into a quarrel--listeners who bore the prisoner at
+the bar ill-will because he shunned them while in the lumber-camp.  If
+the prisoner was to be hanged for motive untraceable, why should not
+these two women be hanged for motive traceable!
+
+Here was his chance.  He appeared to impeach subtly every intelligence in
+the room for having had any preconviction about the prisoner's guilt.  He
+compelled the jury to feel that they, with him, had made the discovery of
+the unsound character of the evidence.  The man might be guilty, but
+their personal guilt, the guilt of the law, would be far greater if they
+condemned the man on violable evidence.  With a last simple appeal, his
+hands resting on the railing before the seat where the jury sat, his
+voice low and conversational again, his eyes running down the line of
+faces of the men who had his client's life in their hands, he said:
+
+"It is not a life only that is at stake, it is not revenge for a life
+snatched from the busy world by a brutal hand that we should heed to-day,
+but the awful responsibility of that thing we call the State, which,
+having the power of life and death without gainsay or hindrance, should
+prove to the last inch of necessity its right to take a human life.  And
+the right and the reason should bring conviction to every honest human
+mind.  That is all I have to say."
+
+The crown attorney made a perfunctory reply.  The judge's charge was
+brief, and, if anything, a little in favour of the prisoner--very little,
+a casuist's little; and the jury filed out of the room.  They were gone
+but ten minutes.  When they returned, the verdict was given: "Not guilty,
+your Honour!"
+
+Then it was that a woman laughed in the gallery.  Then a whispering voice
+said across the railing which separated the public from the lawyers:
+"Charley!  Charley!"
+
+Though Charley turned and looked at the lady who spoke, he made no
+response.
+
+A few minutes later, outside the court, as he walked quickly away, again
+inscrutable and debonair, the prisoner, Joseph Nadeau, touched him on the
+arm and said:
+
+"M'sieu', M'sieu', you have saved my life--I thank you, M'sieu'!"
+
+Charley Steele drew his arm away with disgust.  "Get out of my sight!
+You're as guilty as hell!" he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
+
+"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you."  So Charley Steele's
+eyes had said to a lady in the court room on that last day of the great
+trial.  The lady had left the court-room dazed and exalted.  She, with
+hundreds of others, had had a revelation of Charley Steele; had had also
+the great emotional experience of seeing a crowd make the 'volte face'
+with their convictions; looking at a prisoner one moment with eyes of
+loathing and anticipating his gruesome end, the next moment seeing him
+as the possible martyr to the machinery of the law.  She whose heart was
+used to beat so evenly had felt it leap and swell with excitement,
+awaiting the moment when the jury filed back into the court-room.  Then
+it stood still, as a wave might hang for an instant at its crest ere it
+swept down to beat upon the shore.
+
+With her as with most present, the deepest feeling in the agitated
+suspense was not so much that the prisoner should go free, as that the
+prisoner's counsel should win his case.  It was as if Charley Steele were
+on trial instead of the prisoner.  He was the imminent figure; it was his
+fate that was in the balance--such was the antic irony of suggestion.
+And the truth was, that the fates of both prisoner and counsel had been
+weighed in the balance that sweltering August day.
+
+The prisoner was forgotten almost as soon as he had left the court-room
+a free man, but wherever men and women met in Montreal that day, one name
+was on the lips of all-Charley Steele!  In his speech he had done two
+things: he had thrown down every barrier of reserve--or so it seemed--
+and had become human and intimate.  "I could not have believed it of
+him," was the remark on every lip.  Of his ability there never had been
+a moment's doubt, but it had ever been an uncomfortable ability, it had
+tortured foes and made friends anxious.  No one had ever seen him show
+feeling.  If it was a mask, he had worn it with a curious consistency: it
+had been with him as a child, at school, at college, and he had brought
+it back again to the town where he was born.  It had effectually
+prevented his being popular, but it had made him--with his foppishness
+and his originality--an object of perpetual interest.  Few men had
+ventured to cross swords with him.  He left his fellow-citizens very much
+alone.  He was uniformly if distantly courteous, and he was respected in
+his own profession for his uncommon powers and for an utter indifference
+as to whether he had cases in court or not.
+
+Coming from the judge's chambers after the trial he went to his office,
+receiving as he passed congratulations more effusively offered than, as
+people presently found, his manner warranted.
+
+For he was again the formal, masked Charley Steele, looking calmly
+through the interrogative eye-glass.  By the time he reached his office,
+greetings became more subdued.  His prestige had increased immensely in
+a few short hours, but he had no more friends than before.  Old relations
+were soon re-established.  The town was proud of his ability as it had
+always been, irritated by his manner as it had always been, more
+prophetic of his future than it had ever been, and unconsciously grateful
+for the fact that he had given them a sensation which would outlast the
+summer.
+
+All these things concerned him little.  Once the business of the court-
+room was over, a thought which had quietly lain in waiting behind the
+strenuous occupations of his brain leaped forward to exclude all others.
+
+As he entered his office he was thinking of that girl's face in the
+court-room, with its flush of added beauty which he and his speech had
+brought there.  "What a perfect loveliness!" he said to himself as he
+bathed his face and hands, and prepared to go into the street again.
+"She needed just such a flush to make her supreme Kathleen!"  He stood,
+looking out into the square, out into the green of the trees where the
+birds twittered.  "Faultless--faultless in form and feature.  She was so
+as a child, she is so as a woman."  He lighted a cigarette, and blew away
+little clouds of smoke.  "I will do it.  I will marry her.  She will have
+me: I saw it in her eye.  Fairing doesn't matter.  Her uncle will never
+consent to that, and she doesn't care enough for him.  She cares, but she
+doesn't care enough.  .  .  .  I will do it."
+
+He turned towards a cupboard into which he had put a certain bottle
+before he went to the court-room two hours before.  He put the key in the
+lock, then stopped.  "No, I think not!" he said.  "What I say to her
+shall not be said forensically.  What a discovery I've made!  I was dull,
+blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen,
+against me; and then that bottle in there--and I saw things like crystal!
+I had a glow in my brain, I had a tingle in my fingers; and I had
+success, and"--his face clouded--"He was as guilty as hell!" he added,
+almost bitterly, as he put the key of the cupboard into his pocket again.
+
+There was a knock at the door, and a youth of about nineteen entered.
+
+"Hello!" he said.  "I say, sir, but that speech of yours struck us all
+where we couldn't say no.  Even Kathleen got in a glow over it.  Perhaps
+Captain Fairing didn't, for he's just left her in a huff, and she's
+looking--you remember those lines in the school-book:
+
+                  "'A red spot burned upon her cheek,
+                    Streamed her rich tresses down--'"
+
+He laughed gaily.  "I've come to ask you up to tea," he added.  "The
+Unclekins is there.  When I told him that Kathleen had sent Fairing away
+with a flea in his ear, he nearly fell off his chair.  He lent me twenty
+dollars on the spot.  Are you coming our way?" he continued, suddenly
+trying to imitate Charley's manner.  Charley nodded, and they left the
+office together and moved away under a long avenue of maples to where, in
+the shade of a high hill, was the house of the uncle of Kathleen Wantage,
+with whom she and her brother Billy lived.  They walked in silence for
+some time, and at last Billy said, 'a propos' of nothing:
+
+"Fairing hasn't a red cent."
+
+"You have a perambulating mind, Billy," said Charley, and bowed to a
+young clergyman approaching them from the opposite direction.
+
+"What does that mean?" remarked Billy, and said "Hello!" to the young
+clergyman, and did not wait for Charley's answer.
+
+The Rev. John Brown was by no means a conventional parson.  He was
+smoking a cigarette, and two dogs followed at his heels.  He was
+certainly not a fogy.  He had more than a little admiration for Charley
+Steele, but he found it difficult to preach when Charley was in the
+congregation.  He was always aware of a subterranean and half-pitying
+criticism going on in the barrister's mind.  John Brown knew that he
+could never match his intelligence against Charley's, in spite of the
+theological course at Durham, so he undertook to scotch the snake by
+kindness.  He thought that he might be able to do this, because Charley,
+who was known to be frankly agnostical, came to his church more or less
+regularly.
+
+The Rev. John Brown was not indifferent to what men thought of him.  He
+had a reputation for being "independent," but his chief independence
+consisted in dressing a little like a layman, posing as the athletic
+parson of the new school, consorting with ministers of the dissenting
+denominations when it was sufficiently effective, and being a "good
+fellow" with men easily bored by church and churchmen.  He preached
+theatrical sermons to societies and benevolent associations.  He wanted
+to be thought well of on all hands, and he was shrewd enough to know that
+if he trimmed between ritualism on one hand and evangelicism on the
+other, he was on a safe road.  He might perforate old dogmatical
+prejudices with a good deal of freedom so long as he did not begin
+bringing "millinery" into the service of the church.  He invested his own
+personal habits with the millinery.  He looked a picturesque figure with
+his blond moustache, a little silk-lined brown cloak thrown carelessly
+over his shoulder, a gold-headed cane, and a brisk jacket half
+ecclesiastical, half military.
+
+He had interested Charley Steele, also he had amused him, and
+sometimes he had surprised him into a sort of admiration; for Brown had
+a temperament capable of little inspirations--such a literary inspiration
+as might come to a second-rate actor--and Charley never belittled any
+man's ability, but seized upon every sign of knowledge with the
+appreciation of the epicure.
+
+John Brown raised his hat to Charley, then held out a hand.  "Masterly-
+masterly!" he said.  "Permit my congratulations.  It was the one thing
+to do.  You couldn't have saved him by making him an object of pity, by
+appealing to our sympathies."
+
+"What do you take to be the secret, then?" asked Charley, with a look
+half abstracted, half quizzical.  "Terror--sheer terror.  You startled
+the conscience.  You made defects in the circumstantial evidence, the
+imminent problems of our own salvation.  You put us all on trial.  We
+were under the lash of fear.  If we parsons could only do that from the
+pulpit!"
+
+"We will discuss that on our shooting-trip next week.  Duck-shooting
+gives plenty of time for theological asides.  You are coming, eh?"
+
+John Brown scarcely noticed the sarcasm, he was so delighted at the
+suggestion that he was to be included in the annual duck-shoot of the
+Seven, as the little yearly party of Charley and his friends to Lake
+Aubergine was called.  He had angled for this invitation for two years.
+
+"I must not keep you," Charley said, and dismissed him with a bow.  "The
+sheep will stray, and the shepherd must use his crook."
+
+Brown smiled at the badinage, and went on his way rejoicing in the fact
+that he was to share the amusements of the Seven at Lake Aubergine--the
+Lake of the Mad Apple.  To get hold of these seven men of repute and
+position, to be admitted into this good presence!--He had a pious
+exaltation, but whether it was because he might gather into the fold
+erratic and agnostical sheep like Charley Steele, or because it pleased
+his social ambitions, he had occasion to answer in the future.  He gaily
+prepared to go to the Lake of the Mad Apple, where he was fated to eat
+of the tree of knowledge.
+
+Charley Steele and Billy Wantage walked on slowly to the house under the
+hill.
+
+"He's the right sort," said Billy.  "He's a sport.  I can stand that
+kind.  Did you ever hear him sing?  No?  Well, he can sing a comic song
+fit to make you die.  I can sing a bit myself, but to hear him sing 'The
+Man Who Couldn't Get Warm' is a show in itself.  He can play the banjo
+too, and the guitar--but he's best on the banjo.  It's worth a dollar to
+listen to his Epha-haam--that's Ephraim, you know--Ephahaam Come Home,'
+and 'I Found Y' in de Honeysuckle Paitch.'"
+
+"He preaches, too!" said Charley drily.
+
+They had reached the door of the house under the hill, and Billy had no
+time for further remark.  He ran into the drawing-room, announcing
+Charley with the words: "I say, Kathleen, I've brought the man that made
+the judge sit up."
+
+Billy suddenly stopped, however, for there sat the judge who had tried
+the case, calmly munching a piece of toast.  The judge did not allow
+himself the luxury of embarrassment, but bowed to Charley with a smile,
+which he presently turned on Kathleen, who came as near being
+disconcerted as she had ever been in her life.
+
+Kathleen had passed through a good deal to look so unflurried.  She had
+been on trial in the court-room as well as the prisoner.  Important
+things had been at stake with her.  She and Charley Steele had known each
+other since they were children.  To her, even in childhood, he had been
+a dominant figure.  He had judicially and admiringly told her she was
+beautiful--when he was twelve and she five.  But he had said it without
+any of those glances which usually accompanied the same sentiments in the
+mouths of other lads.  He had never made boy-love to her, and she had
+thrilled at the praise of less splendid people than Charley Steele.  He
+had always piqued her, he was so superior to the ordinary enchantments
+of youth, beauty, and fine linen.
+
+As he came and went, growing older and more characteristic, more and more
+"Beauty Steele," accompanied by legends of wild deeds and days at
+college, by tales of his fopperies and the fashions he had set, she
+herself had grown, as he had termed it, more "decorative."  He had told
+her so, not in the least patronisingly, but as a simple fact in which no
+sentiment lurked.  He thought her the most beautiful thing he had ever
+seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect
+pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous
+purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself.  He had said again and
+again, as he grew older and left college and began the business of life
+after two years in Europe, that sentiment would spoil her, would scatter
+the charm of her perfect beauty; it would vitalise her too much, and her
+nature would lose its proportion; she would be decentralised!  She had
+been piqued at his indifference to sentiment; she could not easily be
+content without worship, though she felt none.  This pique had grown
+until Captain Tom Fairing crossed her path.
+
+Fairing was the antithesis of Charley Steele.  Handsome, poor,
+enthusiastic, and none too able, he was simple and straightforward, and
+might be depended on till the end of the chapter.  And the end of it was,
+that in so far as she had ever felt real sentiment for anybody, she felt
+it for Tom Fairing of the Royal Fusileers.  It was not love she felt in
+the old, in the big, in the noble sense, but it had behind it selection
+and instinct and natural gravitation.
+
+Fairing declared his love.  She would give him no answer.  For as soon
+as she was presented with the issue, the destiny, she began to look round
+her anxiously.  The first person to fill the perspective was Charley
+Steele.  As her mind dwelt on him, her uncle gave forth his judgment,
+that she should never have a penny if she married Tom Fairing.  This only
+irritated her, it did not influence her.  But there was Charley.  He was
+a figure, was already noted in his profession because of a few masterly
+successes in criminal cases, and if he was not popular, he was
+distinguished, and the world would talk about him to the end.  He was
+handsome, and he was well-to-do-he had a big unoccupied house on the hill
+among the maples.  How many people had said, What a couple they would
+make-Charley Steele and Kathleen Wantage!
+
+So, as Fairing presented an issue to her, she concentrated her thoughts
+as she had never done before on the man whom the world set apart for her,
+in a way the world has.
+
+As she looked and looked, Charley began to look also.  He had not been
+enamoured of the sordid things of the world; he had been merely curious.
+He thought vice was ugly; he had imagination and a sense of form.
+Kathleen was beautiful.  Sentiment had, so he thought, never seriously
+disturbed her; he did not think it ever would.  It had not affected him.
+He did not understand it.  He had been born non-intime.  He had had
+acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves or love.  But he
+had a fine sense of the fitting and the proportionate, and he worshipped
+beauty in so far as he could worship anything.  The homage was cerebral,
+intellectual, temperamental, not of the heart.  As he looked out upon the
+world half pityingly, half ironically, he was struck with wonder at the
+disproportion which was engendered by "having heart," as it was called.
+He did not find it necessary.
+
+Now that he had begun to think of marriage, who so suitable as Kathleen?
+He knew of Fairing's adoration, but he took it as a matter of course that
+she had nothing to give of the same sort in return.  Her beauty was still
+serene and unimpaired.  He would not spoil it by the tortures of emotion.
+He would try to make Kathleen's heart beat in harmony with his own; it
+should not thunder out of time.  He had made up his mind that he would
+marry her.
+
+For Kathleen, with the great trial, the beginning of the end had come.
+Charley's power over her was subtle, finely sensuous, and, in deciding,
+there were no mere heart-impulses working for Charley.  Instinct and
+impulse were working in another direction.  She had not committed her
+mind to either man, though her heart, to a point, was committed to
+Fairing.
+
+On the day of the trial, however, she fell wholly under that influence
+which had swayed judge, jury, and public.  To her the verdict of the jury
+was not in favour of the prisoner at the bar--she did not think of him.
+It was in favour of Charley Steele.
+
+And so, indifferent as to who heard, over the heads of the people in
+front of her, to the accused's counsel inside the railings, she had
+called, softly: "Charley!  Charley!"
+
+Now, in the house under the hill, they were face to face, and the end was
+at hand: the end of something and the beginning of something.
+
+There was a few moments of casual conversation, in which Billy talked as
+much as anybody, and then Kathleen said:
+
+"What do you suppose was the man's motive for committing the murder?"
+
+Charley looked at Kathleen steadily, curiously, through his monocle.
+It was a singular compliment she paid him.  Her remark took no heed of
+the verdict of the jury.  He turned inquiringly towards the judge, who,
+though slightly shocked by the question, recovered himself quickly.
+
+"What do you think it was, sir?" Charley asked quietly.
+
+"A woman--and revenge, perhaps," answered the judge, with a matter-of-
+course air.
+
+A few moments afterwards the judge was carried off by Kathleen's uncle
+to see some rare old books; Billy, his work being done, vanished; and
+Kathleen and Charley were left alone.
+
+"You did not answer me in the court-room," Kathleen said.  "I called to
+you."
+
+"I wanted to hear you say them here," he rejoined.  "Say what?" she
+asked, a little puzzled by the tone of his voice.
+
+"Your congratulations," he answered.
+
+She held out a hand to him.  "I offer them now.  It was wonderful.  You
+were inspired.  I did not think you could ever let yourself go."
+
+He held her hand firmly.  "I promise not to do it again," he said
+whimsically.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Have I not your congratulations?"  His hand drew her slightly towards
+him; she rose to her feet.
+
+"That is no reason," she answered, confused, yet feeling that there was a
+double meaning in his words.
+
+"I could not allow you to be so vain," he said.  "We must be
+companionable.  Henceforth I shall congratulate myself--Kathleen."
+
+There was no mistaking now.  "Oh, what is it you are going to say to me?"
+she asked, yet not disengaging her hand.
+
+"I said it all in the court-room," he rejoined; "and you heard."
+
+"You want me to marry you--Charley?" she asked frankly.
+
+"If you think there is no just impediment," he answered, with a smile.
+
+She drew her hand away, and for a moment there was a struggle in her
+mind--or heart.  He knew of what she was thinking, and he did not
+consider it of serious consequence.  Romance was a trivial thing, and
+women were prone to become absorbed in trivialities.  When the woman had
+no brains, she might break her life upon a trifle.  But Kathleen had an
+even mind, a serene temperament.  Her nerves were daily cooled in a bath
+of nature's perfect health.  She had never had an hour's illness in her
+life.
+
+"There is no just or unjust impediment, Kathleen," he added presently,
+and took her hand again.
+
+She looked him in the eyes clearly.  "You really think so?" she asked.
+
+"I know so," he answered.  "We shall be two perfect panels in one picture
+of life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+AFTER FIVE YEARS
+
+"You have forgotten me?"
+
+Charley Steele's glance was serenely non-committal as he answered drily:
+
+"I cannot remember doing so."
+
+The other man's eyelids drew down with a look of anger, then the humour
+of the impertinence worked upon him, and he gave a nervous little laugh
+and said: "I am John Brown."
+
+"Then I'm sure my memory is not at fault," remarked Charley, with an
+outstretched hand.  "My dear Brown!  Still preaching little sermons?"
+
+"Do I look it?"  There was a curious glitter in John Brown's eyes.  "I'm
+not preaching little sermons, and you know it well enough."  He laughed,
+but it was a hard sort of mirth.  "Perhaps you forgot to remember that,
+though," he sneeringly added.  "It was the work of your hands."
+
+"That's why I should remember to forget it--I am the child of modesty."
+Charley touched the corners of his mouth with his tongue, as though his
+lips were dry, and his eyes wandered to a saloon a little farther down
+the street.
+
+"Modesty is your curse," rejoined Brown mockingly.
+
+"Once when you preached at me you said that beauty was my curse."
+Charley laughed a curt, distant little laugh which was no more the
+spontaneous humour lying for ever behind his thoughts than his eye-glass
+was the real sight of his eyes, though since childhood this laugh and his
+eye-glass were as natural to all expression of himself as John Brown's
+outward and showy frankness did not come from the real John Brown.
+
+John Brown looked him up and down quickly, then fastened his eyes on the
+ruddy cheeks of his old friend.  "Do they call you Beauty now as they
+used to?" he asked, rather insolently.
+
+"No.  They only say, 'There goes Charley Steele!'"  The tongue again
+touched the corners of the mouth, and the eyes wandered to the doorway
+down the street, over which was written in French: "Jean Jolicoeur,
+Licensed to sell wine, beer, and other spirituous and fermented liquors."
+
+Just then an archdeacon of the cathedral passed them, bowed gravely to
+Charley, glanced at John Brown, turned colour slightly, and then with a
+cold stare passed on too quickly for dignity.
+
+"I'm thinking of Bunyan," said the aforetime friend of Charley Steele.
+"I'll paraphrase him and say: 'There, but for beauty and a monocle, walks
+John Brown.'"
+
+Under the bitter sarcasm of the man, who, five years ago, had gone down
+at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley's blue eye did not waver,
+not a nerve stirred in his face, as he replied: "Who knows!"
+
+"That was what you always said--who knows!  That did for John Brown."
+
+Charley seemed not to hear the remark.  "What are you doing now?" he
+asked, looking steadily at the face whence had gone all the warmth of
+manhood, all that courage of life which keeps men young.  The lean
+parchment visage had the hunted look of the incorrigible failure,
+had written on it self-indulgence, cunning, and uncertainty.
+
+"Nothing much," John Brown replied.
+
+"What last?"
+
+"Floated an arsenic-mine on Lake Superior."
+
+"Failed?"
+
+"More or less.  There are hopes yet.  I've kept the wolf from the door."
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"Don't know--nothing, perhaps; I've not the courage I had."
+
+"I'd have thought you might find arsenic a good thing," said Charley,
+holding out a silver cigarette-case, his eyes turning slowly from the
+startled, gloomy face of the man before him, to the cool darkness beyond
+the open doorway of that saloon on the other side of the street.
+
+John Brown shivered--there was something so cold-blooded in the
+suggestion that he might have found arsenic a good thing.  The metallic
+glare of Charley's eye-glass seemed to give an added cruelty to the
+words.  Charley's monocle was the token of what was behind his blue eye-
+one ceaseless interrogation.  It was that everlasting questioning, the
+ceaseless who knows! which had in the end unsettled John Brown's mind,
+and driven him at last from the church and the possible gaiters of a dean
+into the rough business of life, where he had been a failure.  Yet as
+Brown looked at Charley the old fascination came on him with a rush.
+His hand suddenly caught Charley's as he took a cigarette, and he said:
+"Perhaps I'll find arsenic a good thing yet."
+
+For reply Charley laid a hand on his arm-turned him towards the shade of
+the houses opposite.  Without a word they crossed the street, entered the
+saloon, and passed to a little back room, Charley giving an unsympathetic
+stare to some men at the bar who seemed inclined to speak to him.
+
+As the two passed into the small back room with the frosted door, one of
+the strangers said to the other: "What does he come here for, if he's too
+proud to speak!  What's a saloon for!  I'd like to smash that eye-glass
+for him!"
+
+"He's going down-hill fast," said the other.  "He drinks steady--steady."
+
+"Tiens--tiens!" interposed Jean Jolicoeur, the landlord.  "It is not
+harm to him.  He drink all day, an' he walk a crack like a bee-line."
+
+"He's got the handsomest wife in this city.  If I was him, I'd think more
+of myself," answered the Englishman.
+
+"How you think more--hein?  You not come down more to my saloon?"
+
+"No, I wouldn't come to your saloon, and I wouldn't go to Theophile
+Charlemagne's shebang at the Cote Dorion."
+
+"You not like Charlemagne's hotel?" said a huge black-bearded pilot,
+standing beside the landlord.  "Oh, I like Charlemagne's hotel, and I
+like to talk to Suzon Charlemagne, but I'm not married, Rouge Gosselin--"
+
+"If he go to Charlemagne's hotel, and talk some more too mooch to dat
+Suzon Charlemagne, he will lose dat glass out of his eye," interrupted
+Rouge Gosselin.
+
+"Who say he been at dat place?" said Jean Jolicoeur.  "He bin dere four
+times las' month, and dat Suzon Charlemagne talk'bout him ever since.
+When dat Narcisse Bovin and Jacques Gravel come down de river, he better
+keep away from dat Cote Dorion," sputtered Rouge Gosselin.  "Dat's a long
+story short, all de same for you--bagosh!"
+
+Rouge Gosselin flung off his glass of white whiskey, and threw after it a
+glass of cold water.
+
+"Tiens!  you know not M'sieu' Charley Steele," said Jean Jolicoeur, and
+turned on his heel, nodding his head sagely.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+CHARLEY MAKES A DISCOVERY
+
+A hot day a month later Charley Steele sat in his office staring before
+him into space, and negligently smoking a cigarette.  Outside there was a
+slow clacking of wheels, and a newsboy was crying "La Patrie!  La Patrie!
+All about the War in France!  All about the massacree!"  Bells--wedding-
+bells--were ringing also, and the jubilant sounds, like the call of the
+newsboy, were out of accord with the slumberous feeling of the afternoon.
+Charley Steele turned his head slowly towards the window.  The branches
+of a maple-tree half crossed it, and the leaves moved softly in the
+shadow they made.  His eye went past the tree and swam into the tremulous
+white heat of the square, and beyond to where in the church-tower the
+bells were ringing-to the church doors, from which gaily dressed folk
+were issuing to the carriages, or thronged the pavement, waiting for the
+bride and groom to come forth into a new-created world--for them.
+
+Charley looked through his monocle at the crowd reflectively, his head
+held a little to one side in a questioning sort of way, on his lips the
+ghost of a smile--not a reassuring smile.  Presently he leaned forward
+slightly and the monocle dropped from his eye.  He fumbled for it, raised
+it, blew on it, rubbed it with his handkerchief, and screwed it carefully
+into his eye again, his rather bushy brow gathering over it strongly, his
+look sharpened to more active thought.  He stared straight across the
+square at a figure in heliotrope, whose face was turned to a man in
+scarlet uniform taller than herself two glowing figures towards whom many
+other eyes than his own were directed, some curiously, some disdain
+fully, some sadly.  But Charley did not see the faces of those who looked
+on; he only saw two people--one in heliotrope, one in scarlet.
+
+Presently his white firm hand went up and ran through his hair nervously,
+his comely figure settled down in the chair, his tongue touched the
+corners of his red lips, and his eyes withdrew from the woman in
+heliotrope and the man in scarlet, and loitered among the leaves of the
+tree at the window.  The softness of the green, the cool health of the
+foliage, changed the look of his eye from something cold and curious to
+something companionable, and scarcely above a whisper two words came from
+his lips:
+
+"Kathleen!  Kathleen!"
+
+By the mere sound of the voice it would have been hard to tell what the
+words meant, for it had an inquiring cadence and yet a kind of distant
+doubt, a vague anxiety.  The face conveyed nothing--it was smooth, fresh,
+and immobile.  The only point where the mind and meaning of the man
+worked according to the law of his life was at the eye, where the monocle
+was caught now as in a vise.  Behind this glass there was a troubled
+depth which belied the self-indulgent mouth, the egotism speaking loudly
+in the red tie, the jewelled finger, the ostentatiously simple yet
+sumptuous clothes.
+
+At last he drew in a sharp, sibilant breath, clicked his tongue--a sound
+of devil-may-care and hopelessness at once--and turned to a little
+cupboard behind him.  The chair squeaked on the floor as he turned, and
+he frowned, shivered a little, and kicked it irritably with his heel.
+
+From the cupboard he took a bottle of liqueur, and, pouring out a small
+glassful, drank it off eagerly.  As he put the bottle away, he said
+again, in an abstracted fashion, "Kathleen!"
+
+Then, seating himself at the table, as if with an effort towards energy,
+he rang a bell.  A clerk entered.  "Ask Mr. Wantage to come for a
+moment," he said.  "Mr. Wantage has gone to the church--to the wedding,"
+was the reply.
+
+"Oh, very well.  He will be in again this afternoon?"
+
+"Sure to, sir."
+
+"Just so.  That will do."
+
+The clerk retired, and Charley, rising, unlocked a drawer, and taking out
+some books and papers, laid them on the table.  Intently, carefully, he
+began to examine them, referring at the same time to a letter which had
+lain open at his hand while he had been sitting there.  For a quarter of
+an hour he studied the books and papers, then, all at once, his fingers
+fastened on a point and stayed.  Again he read the letter lying beside
+him.  A flush crimsoned his face to his hair--a singular flush of shame,
+of embarrassment, of guilt--a guilt not his own.  His breath caught in
+his throat.
+
+"Billy!" he gasped.  "Billy, by God!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE WOMAN IN HELIOTROPE
+
+The flush was still on Charley's face when the door opened slowly, and a
+lady dressed in heliotrope silk entered, and came forward.  Without a
+word Charley rose, and, taking a step towards her, offered a chair; at
+the same time noticing her heightened colour, and a certain rigid
+carriage not in keeping with her lithe and graceful figure.  There was no
+mistaking the quiver of her upper lip--a short lip which did not hide a
+wonderfully pretty set of teeth.
+
+With a wave of the hand she declined the seat.  Glancing at the books and
+papers lying on the table, she flashed an inquiry at his flushed face,
+and, misreading the cause, with slow, quiet point, in which bitterness or
+contempt showed, she said meaningly:
+
+"What a slave you are!"
+
+"Behold the white man work!" he said good-naturedly, the flush passing
+slowly from his face.  With apparent negligence he pushed the letter and
+the books and papers a little to one side, but really to place them
+beyond the range of her angry eyes.  She shrugged her shoulders at his
+action.
+
+"For 'the fatherless children and widows, and all that are desolate and
+oppressed?'" she said, not concealing her malice, for at the wedding she
+had just left all her married life had rushed before her in a swift
+panorama, and the man in scarlet had fixed the shooting pictures in her
+mind.
+
+Again a flush swept up Charley's face and seemed to blur his sight.  His
+monocle dropped the length of its silken tether, and he caught it and
+slowly adjusted it again as he replied evenly:
+
+"You always hit the nail on the head, Kathleen."  There was a kind of
+appeal in his voice, a sort of deprecation in his eye, as though he would
+be friends with her, as though, indeed, there was in his mind some secret
+pity for her.
+
+Her look at his face was critical and cold.  It was plain that she was
+not prepared for any extra friendliness on his part--there seemed no
+reason why he should add to his usual courtesy a note of sympathy to the
+sound of her name on his lips.  He had not fastened the door of the
+cupboard from which he had taken the liqueur, and it had swung open a
+little, disclosing the bottle and the glass.  She saw.  Her face took on
+a look of quiet hardness.
+
+"Why did you not come to the wedding?  She was your cousin.  People asked
+where you were.  You knew I was going."
+
+"Did you need me?" he asked quietly, and his eyes involuntarily swept
+to the place where he had seen the heliotrope and scarlet make a glow of
+colour on the other side of the square.  "You were not alone."
+
+She misunderstood him.  Her mind had been overwrought, and she caught
+insinuation in his voice.  "You mean Tom Fairing!"  Her eyes blazed.
+"You are quite right--I did not need you.  Tom Fairing is a man that
+all the world trusts save you."
+
+"Kathleen!"  The words were almost a cry.  "For God's sake!  I have never
+thought of 'trusting' men where you are concerned.  I believe in no man"
+--his voice had a sharp bitterness, though his face was smooth and
+unemotional--"but I trust you, and believe in you.  Yes, upon my soul and
+honour, Kathleen."
+
+As he spoke she turned quickly and stepped towards the window, an
+involuntary movement of agitation.  He had touched a chord.  But even as
+she reached the window and glanced down to the hot, dusty street, she
+heard a loud voice below, a reckless, ribald sort of voice, calling to
+some one to, "Come and have a drink."
+
+"Billy!" she said involuntarily, and looked down, then shrank back
+quickly.  She turned swiftly on her husband.  "Your soul and honour,
+Charley!" she said slowly.  "Look at what you've made of Billy!  Look at
+the company he keeps--John Brown, who hasn't even decency enough to keep
+away from the place he disgraced.  Billy is always with him.  You ruined
+John Brown, with your dissipation and your sneers at religion and your-
+'I-wonder-nows!'  Of what use have you been, Charley?  Of what use to
+anyone in the world?  You think of nothing but eating, and drinking, and
+playing the fop."
+
+He glanced down involuntarily, and carefully flicked some cigarette-ash
+from his waistcoat.  The action arrested her speech for a moment, and
+then, with a little shudder, she continued: "The best they can say of you
+is, 'There goes Charley Steele!'"
+
+"And the worst?" he asked.  He was almost smiling now, for he admired
+her anger, her scorn.  He knew it was deserved, and he had no idea of
+making any defence.  He had said all in that instant's cry, "Kathleen!"
+--that one awakening feeling of his life so far.  She had congealed the
+word on his lips by her scorn, and now he was his old debonair,
+dissipated self, with the impertinent monocle in his eye and a jest upon
+his tongue.
+
+"Do you want to know the worst they say?" she asked, growing pale to the
+lips.  "Go and stand behind the door of Jolicoeur's saloon.  Go to any
+street corner, and listen.  Do you think I don't know what they say?  Do
+you think the world doesn't talk about the company you keep?  Haven't I
+seen you going into Jolicoeur's saloon when I was walking on the other
+side of the street?  Do you think that all the world, and I among the
+rest, are blind?  Oh, you fop, you fool, you have ruined my brother, you
+have ruined my life, and I hate and despise you for a cold-blooded,
+selfish coward!"
+
+He made a deprecating gesture and stared--a look of most curious inquiry.
+They had been married for five years, and during that time they had never
+been anything but persistently courteous to each other.  He had never on
+any occasion seen her face change colour, or her manner show chagrin or
+emotion.  Stately and cold and polite, she had fairly met his ceaseless
+foppery and preciseness of manner.  But people had said of her, "Poor
+Kathleen Steele!" for her spotless name stood sharply off from his
+negligence and dissipation.  They called her "Poor Kathleen Steele!" in
+sympathy, though they knew that she had not resisted marriage with the
+well-to-do Charley Steele, while loving a poor captain in the Royal
+Fusileers.  She preserved social sympathy by a perfect outward decorum,
+though the man of the scarlet coat remained in the town and haunted the
+places where she appeared, and though the eyes of the censorious world
+were watching expectantly.  No voice was raised against her.  Her cold
+beauty held the admiration of all women, for she was not eager for men's
+company, and she kept her poise even with the man in scarlet near her,
+glacially complacent, beautifully still, disconcertingly emotionless.
+They did not know that the poise with her was to an extent as much a pose
+as Charley's manner was to him.
+
+"I hate you and despise you for a cold-blooded, selfish coward!"  So that
+was the way Kathleen felt!  Charley's tongue touched his lips quickly,
+for they were arid, and he slowly said:
+
+"I assure you I have not tried to influence Billy.  I have no remembrance
+of his imitating me in anything.  Won't you sit down?  It is very
+fatiguing, this heat."
+
+Charley was entirely himself again.  His words concerning Billy Wantage
+might have been either an impeachment of Billy's character and, by
+deduction, praise of his own, or it may have been the insufferable egoism
+of the fop, well used to imitators.  The veil between the two, which for
+one sacred moment had seemed about to lift, was fallen now, leaded and
+weighted at the bottom.
+
+"I suppose you would say the same about John Brown!  It is disconcerting
+at least to think that we used to sit and listen to Mr. Brown as he waved
+his arms gracefully in his surplice and preached sentimental sermons.
+I suppose you will say, what we have heard you say before, that you only
+asked questions.  Was that how you ruined the Rev. John Brown--
+and Billy?"
+
+Charley was very thirsty, and because of that perhaps, his voice had an
+unusually dry tone as he replied: "I asked questions of John Brown; I
+answer them to Billy.  It is I that am ruined!"
+
+There was that in his voice she did not understand, for though long used
+to his paradoxical phrases and his everlasting pose--as it seemed to her
+and all the world--there now rang through his words a note she had never
+heard before.  For a fleeting instant she was inclined to catch at some
+hidden meaning, but her grasp of things was uncertain.  She had been
+thrown off her balance, or poise, as Charley had, for an unwonted second,
+been thrown off his pose, and her thought could not pierce beneath the
+surface.
+
+"I suppose you will be flippant at Judgment Day," she said with a bitter
+laugh, for it seemed to her a monstrous thing that they should be such an
+infinite distance apart.
+
+"Why should one be serious then?  There will be no question of an alibi,
+or evidence for the defence--no cross-examination.  A cut-and-dried
+verdict!"
+
+She ignored his words.  "Shall you be at home to dinner?" she rejoined
+coldly, and her eyes wandered out of the window again to that spot across
+the square where heliotrope and scarlet had met.
+
+"I fancy not," he answered, his eyes turned away also--towards the
+cupboard containing the liqueur.  "Better ask Billy; and keep him in,
+and talk to him--I really would like you to talk to him.  He admires you
+so much.  I wish--in fact I hope you will ask Billy to come and live with
+us," he added half abstractedly.  He was trying to see his way through a
+sudden confusion of ideas.  Confusion was rare to him, and his senses,
+feeling the fog, embarrassed by a sudden air of mystery and a cloud of
+futurity, were creeping to a mind-path of understanding.
+
+"Don't be absurd," she said coldly.  "You know I won't ask him, and you
+don't want him."
+
+"I have always said that decision is the greatest of all qualities--even
+when the decision is bad.  It saves so much worry, and tends to health."
+Suddenly he turned to the desk and opened a tin box.  "Here is further
+practice for your admirable gift."  He opened a paper.  "I want you to
+sign off for this building--leaving it to my absolute disposal."  He
+spread the paper out before her.
+
+She turned pale and her lips tightened.  She looked at him squarely in
+the eyes.  "My wedding-gift!" she said.  Then she shrugged her
+shoulders.  A moment she hesitated, and in that moment seemed to congeal.
+"You need it?" she asked distantly.
+
+He inclined his head, his eye never leaving hers.  With a swift angry
+motion she caught the glove from her left hand, and, doubling it back,
+dragged it off.  A smooth round ring came off with it and rolled upon the
+floor.
+
+Stooping, he picked up the ring, and handed it back to her, saying:
+"Permit me."  It was her wedding-ring.  She took it with a curious
+contracted look and put it on the finger again, then pulled off the other
+glove quietly.  "Of course one uses the pen with the right hand," she
+said calmly.
+
+"Involuntary act of memory," he rejoined slowly, as she took the pen in
+her hand.  "You had spoken of a wedding, this was a wedding-gift, and--
+that's right, sign there!"
+
+There was a brief pause, in which she appeared to hesitate, and then she
+wrote her name in a large firm hand, and, throwing down the pen, caught
+up her gloves, and began to pull them on viciously.
+
+"Thanks.  It is very kind of you," he said.  He put the document in the
+tin box, and took out another, as without a word, but with a grave face
+in which scorn and trouble were mingled, she now turned towards the door.
+
+"Can you spare a minute longer?" he said, and advanced towards her,
+holding the new document in his hand.  "Fair exchange is no robbery.
+Please take this.  No, not with the right hand; the left is better luck
+--the better the hand, the better the deed," he added with a whimsical
+squint and a low laugh, and he placed the paper in her left hand.  "Item
+No. 2 to take the place of item No. 1."
+
+She scrutinised the paper.  Wonder filled her face.  "Why, this is a deed
+of the homestead property--worth three times as much!" she said.
+"Why--why do you do this?"
+
+"Remember that questions ruin people sometimes," he answered, and stepped
+to the door and turned the handle, as though to show her out.  She was
+agitated and embarrassed now.  She felt she had been unjust, and yet she
+felt that she could not say what ought to be said, if all the rules were
+right.
+
+"Thank you," she said simply.  "Did you think of this when--when you
+handed me back the ring?"
+
+"I never had an inspiration in my life.  I was born with a plan of
+campaign."
+
+"I suppose I ought to--kiss you!" she said in some little confusion.
+
+"It might be too expensive," he answered, with a curious laugh.  Then he
+added lightly: "This was a fair exchange"--he touched the papers--"but I
+should like you to bear witness, madam, that I am no robber!"  He opened
+the door.  Again there was that curious penetrating note in his voice,
+and that veiled look.  She half hesitated, but in the pause there was a
+loud voice below and a quick foot on the stairs.
+
+"It's Billy!" she said sharply, and passed out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE WIND AND THE SHORN LAMB
+
+A half-hour later Charley Steele sat in his office alone with Billy
+Wantage, his brother-in-law, a tall, shapely fellow of twenty-four.
+Billy had been drinking, his face was flushed, and his whole manner was
+indolently careless and irresponsible.  In spite of this, however, his
+grey eyes were nervously fixed on Charley, and his voice was shaky as he
+said, in reply to a question as to his finances: "That's my own business,
+Charley."
+
+Charley took a long swallow from the tumbler of whiskey and soda beside
+him, and, as he drew some papers towards him, answered quietly: "I must
+make it mine, Billy, without a doubt."
+
+The tall youth shifted in his chair and essayed to laugh.
+
+"You've never been particular about your own business.  Pshaw, what's the
+use of preaching to me!"
+
+Charley pushed his chair back, and his look had just a touch of surprise,
+a hint of embarrassment.  This youth, then, thought him something of a
+fool: read him by virtue of his ornamentations, his outer idiosyncrasy!
+This boy, whose iniquity was under his finger on that table, despised him
+for his follies, and believed in him less than his wife--two people who
+had lived closer to him than any others in the world.  Before he answered
+he lifted the glass beside him and drank to the last drop, then slowly
+set it down and said, with a dangerous smile:
+
+"I have always been particular about other people's finances, and the
+statement that you haven't isn't preaching, it's an indictment--so it is,
+Billy."
+
+"An indictment!"  Billy bit his finger-nails now, and his voice shook.
+
+"That's what the jury would say, and the judge would do the preaching.
+You have stolen twenty-five thousand dollars of trust-moneys!"
+
+For a moment there was absolute silence in the room.  From outside in the
+square came the Marche-t'en! of a driver, and the loud cackling laugh of
+some loafer at the corner.  Charley's look imprisoned his brother-in-law,
+and Billy's eyes were fixed in a helpless stare on Charley's finger,
+which held like a nail the record of his infamy.
+
+Billy drew himself back with a jerk of recovery, and said with bravado,
+but with fear in look and motion: "Don't stare like that.  The thing's
+done, and you can't undo it, and that's all there is about it."  Charley
+had been staring at the youth-staring and not seeing him really, but
+seeing his wife and watching her lips say again: "You are ruining Billy!"
+He was not sober, but his mind was alert, his eccentric soul was getting
+kaleidoscopic glances at strange facts of life as they rushed past his
+mind into a painful red obscurity.
+
+"Oh yes, it can be undone, and it's not all there is about it!" he
+answered quietly.
+
+He got up suddenly, went to the door, locked it, put the key in his
+pocket, and, coming back, sat down again beside the table.
+
+Billy watched him with shrewd, hunted eyes.  What did Charley mean to do?
+To give him in charge?  To send him to jail?  To shut him out from the
+world where he had enjoyed himself so much for years and years?  Never to
+go forth free among his fellows!  Never to play the gallant with all the
+pretty girls he knew!  Never to have any sports, or games, or tobacco, or
+good meals, or canoeing in summer, or tobogganing in winter, or moose-
+hunting, or any sort of philandering!
+
+The thoughts that filled his mind now were not those of regret for his
+crime, but the fears of the materialist and sentimentalist, who revolted
+at punishment and all the shame and deprivation it would involve.
+
+"What did you do with the money?" said Charley, after a minute's
+silence, in which two minds had travelled far.
+
+"I put it into mines."
+
+"What mines?"
+
+"Out on Lake Superior."
+
+"What sort of mines?"
+
+"Arsenic."
+
+Charley's eye-glass dropped, and rattled against the gold button of his
+white waistcoat.
+
+"In arsenic-mines!"  He put the monocle to his eye again.  "On whose
+advice?"
+
+"John Brown's."
+
+"John Brown's!"  Charley Steele's ideas were suddenly shaken and
+scattered by a man's name, as a bolting horse will crumple into confusion
+a crowd of people.  So this was the way his John Brown had come home to
+roost.  He lifted the empty whiskey-glass to his lips and drained air.
+He was terribly thirsty; he needed something to pull himself together.
+Five years of dissipation had not robbed him of his splendid native
+ability, but it had, as it were, broken the continuity of his will and
+the sequence of his intellect.
+
+"It was not investment?" he asked, his tongue thick and hot in his
+mouth.
+
+"No.  What would have been the good?"
+
+"Of course.  Speculation--you bought heavily to sell on an expected
+rise?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was something so even in Charley's manner and tone that Billy
+misinterpreted it.  It seemed hopeful that Charley was going to make the
+best of a bad job.
+
+"You see," Billy said eagerly, "it seemed dead certain.  He showed me the
+way the thing was being done, the way the company was being floated, how
+the market in New York was catching hold.  It looked splendid.  I thought
+I could use the money for a week or so, then put it back, and have a nice
+little scoop, at no one's cost.  I thought it was a dead-sure thing--and
+I was hard up, and Kathleen wouldn't lend me any more.  If Kathleen had
+only done the decent thing--"
+
+A sudden flush of anger swept over Charley's face--never before in his
+life had that face been so sensitive, never even as a child.  Something
+had waked in the odd soul of Beauty Steele.
+
+"Don't be a sweep--leave Kathleen out of it!" he said, in a sharp,
+querulous voice--a voice unnatural to himself, suggestive of little use,
+as though he were learning to speak, using strange words stumblingly
+through a melee of the emotions.  It was not the voice of Charley Steele
+the fop, the poseur, the idlest man in the world.
+
+"What part of the twenty-five thousand went into the arsenic?" he said,
+after a pause.  There was no feeling in the voice now; it was again even
+and inquiring.
+
+"Nearly all."
+
+"Don't lie.  You've been living freely.  Tell the truth, or--or I'll know
+the reason why, Billy."
+
+"About two-thirds-that's the truth.  I had debts, and I paid them."
+
+"And you bet on the races?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And lost?"
+
+"Yes.  See here, Charley; it was the most awful luck--"
+
+"Yes, for the fatherless children and widows, and all that are
+oppressed!"
+
+Charley's look again went through and beyond the culprit, and he recalled
+his wife's words and his own reply.  A quick contempt and a sort of
+meditative sarcasm were in the tone.  It was curious, too, that he could
+smile, but the smile did not encourage Billy Wantage now.
+
+"It's all gone, I suppose?" he added.
+
+"All but about a hundred dollars."
+
+"Well, you have had your game; now you must pay for it."
+
+Billy had imagination, and he was melodramatic.  He felt danger ahead.
+
+"I'll go and shoot myself!" he said, banging the table with his fist so
+that the whiskey-tumbler shook.
+
+He was hardly prepared for what followed.  Charley's nerves had been
+irritated; his teeth were on edge.  This threat, made in such a cheap,
+insincere way, was the last thing in the world he could bear to hear.
+He knew that Billy lied; that if there was one thing Billy would not do,
+shooting himself was that one thing.  His own life was very sweet to
+Billy Wantage.  Charley hated him the more at that moment because he
+was Kathleen's brother.  For if there was one thing he knew of Kathleen,
+it was that she could not do a mean thing.  Cold, unsympathetic she might
+be, cruel at a pinch perhaps, but dishonourable--never!  This weak,
+cowardly youth was her brother!  No one had ever seen such a look on
+Charley Steele's face as came upon it now--malicious, vindictive.  He
+stooped over Billy in a fury.
+
+"You think I'm a fool and an ass--you ignorant, brainless, lying cub!
+You make me a thief before all the world by forging my name, and stealing
+the money for which I am responsible, and then you rate me so low that
+you think you'll bamboozle me by threats of suicide.  You haven't the
+courage to shoot yourself--drunk or sober.  And what do you think would
+be gained by it?  Eh, what do you think would be gained?  You can't see
+that you'd insult your sister as well as--as rob me."
+
+Billy Wantage cowered.  This was not the Charley Steele he had known,
+not like the man he had seen since a child.  There was something almost
+uncouth in this harsh high voice, these gauche words, this raw accent;
+but it was powerful and vengeful, and it was full of purpose.  Billy
+quivered, yet his adroit senses caught at a straw in the words, "as rob
+me!"  Charley was counting it a robbery of himself, not of the widows and
+orphans!  That gave him a ray of hope.  In a paroxysm of fear, joined to
+emotional excitement, he fell upon his knees, and pleaded for mercy--for
+the sake of one chance in life, for the family name, for Kathleen's sake,
+for the sake of everything he had ruthlessly dishonoured.  Tears came
+readily to his eyes, real tears--of excitement; but he could measure,
+too, the strength of his appeal.
+
+"If you'll stand by me in this, I'll pay you back every cent, Charley,"
+he cried.  "I will, upon my soul and honour!  You shan't lose a penny,
+if you'll only see me through.  I'll work my fingers off to pay it back
+till the last hour of my life.  I'll be straight till the day I die--so
+help me God!"
+
+Charley's eyes wandered to the cupboard where the liqueurs were.  If he
+could only decently take a drink!  But how could he with this boy
+kneeling before him?  His breath scorched his throat.
+
+"Get up!" he said shortly.  "I'll see what I can do--to-morrow.  Go away
+home.  Don't go out again to-night.  And come here at ten o'clock in the
+morning."
+
+Billy took up his hat, straightened his tie, carefully brushed the dust
+from his knees, and, seizing Charley's hand, said: "You're the best
+fellow in the world, Charley."  He went towards the door, dusting his
+face of emotion as he had dusted his knees.  The old selfish, shrewd look
+was again in his eyes.  Charley's gaze followed him gloomily.  Billy
+turned the handle of the door.  It was locked.
+
+Charley came forward and unlocked it.  As Billy passed through, Charley,
+looking sharply in his face, said hoarsely: "By Heaven, I believe you're
+not worth it!"  Then he shut the door again and locked it.
+
+He almost ran back and opened the cupboard.  Taking out the bottle of
+liqueur, he filled a glass and drank it off.  Three times he did this,
+then seated himself at the table with a sigh of relief and no emotion in
+his face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+"PEACE, PEACE, AND THERE IS NO PEACE"'
+
+The sun was setting by the time Charley was ready to leave his office.
+Never in his life had he stayed so late in "the halls of industry," as
+he flippantly called his place of business.  The few cases he had won so
+brilliantly since the beginning of his career, he had studied at night in
+his luxurious bedroom in the white brick house among the maples on the
+hill.  In every case, as at the trial of Joseph Nadeau, the man who
+murdered the timber-merchant, the first prejudice of judge and jury had
+given way slowly before the deep-seeing mind, which had as rare a power
+of analysis as for generalisation, and reduced masses of evidence to
+phrases; and verdicts had been given against all personal prejudice--to
+be followed outside the court by the old prejudice, the old look askance
+at the man called Beauty Steele.
+
+To him it had made no difference at any time.  He cared for neither
+praise nor blame.  In his actions a materialist, in his mind he was a
+watcher of life, a baffled inquirer whose refuge was irony, and whose
+singular habits had in five years become a personal insult to the
+standards polite society and Puritan morality had set up.  Perhaps the
+insult had been intended, for irregularities were committed with an
+insolent disdain for appearances.  He did nothing secretly; his page of
+life was for him who cared to read.  He played cards, he talked
+agnosticism, he went on shooting expeditions which became orgies, he
+drank openly in saloons, he whose forefathers had been gentlemen of King
+George, and who sacrificed all in the great American revolution for
+honour and loyalty--statesmen, writers, politicians, from whom he had
+direct inheritance, through stirring, strengthening forces, in the
+building up of laws and civilisation in a new land.  Why he chose to be
+what he was--if he did choose--he alone could answer.  His personality
+had impressed itself upon his world, first by its idiosyncrasies and
+afterwards by its enigmatical excesses.
+
+What was he thinking of as he laid the papers away in the tin box in a
+drawer, locked it, and put the key in his pocket?  He had found to the
+smallest detail Billy's iniquity, and he was now ready to shoulder the
+responsibility, to save the man, who, he knew, was scarce worth the
+saving.  But Kathleen--there was what gave him pause.  As he turned to
+the window and looked out over the square he shuddered.  He thought of
+the exchange of documents he had made with her that day, and he had a
+sense of satisfaction.  This defalcation of Billy's would cripple him,
+for money had flown these last few years.  He had had heavy losses, and
+he had dug deep into his capital.  Down past the square ran a cool avenue
+of beeches to the water, and he could see his yacht at anchor.  On the
+other side of the water, far down the shore, was a house which had been
+begun as a summer cottage, and had ended in being a mansion.  A few
+Moorish pillars, brought from Algiers for the decoration of the entrance,
+had necessitated the raising of the roof, and then all had to be in
+proportion, and the cottage became like an appanage to a palace.
+So it had gone, and he had cared so little about it all, and for the
+consequences.  He had this day secured Kathleen from absolute poverty, no
+matter what happened, and that had its comfort.  His eyes wandered among
+the trees.  He could see the yellow feathers of the oriole and catch the
+note of the whippoorwill, and from the great church near the voices of
+the choir came over.  He could hear the words "Lord, now lettest thou thy
+servant depart in peace, according to thy word."
+
+Depart in peace--how much peace was there in the world?  Who had it?  The
+remembrance of what Kathleen said to him at the door--"I suppose I ought
+to kiss you"--came to him, was like a refrain in his ears.
+
+"Peace is the penalty of silence and inaction," he said to himself
+meditatively.  "Where there is action there is no peace.  If the brain
+and body fatten, then there is peace.  Kathleen and I have lived at
+peace, I suppose.  I never said a word to her that mightn't be put down
+in large type and pasted on my tombstone, and she never said a word to
+me--till to-day--that wasn't like a water-colour picture.  Not till
+to-day, in a moment's strife and trouble, did I ever get near her.  And
+we've lived in peace.  Peace?  Where is the right kind of peace?  Over
+there is old Sainton.  He married a rich woman, he has had the platter of
+plenty before him always, he wears ribbons and such like baubles given by
+the Queen, but his son had to flee the country.  There's Herring.  He
+doesn't sleep because his daughter is going to marry an Italian count.
+There's Latouche.  His place in the cabinet is begotten in corruption,
+in the hotbed of faction war.  There's Kenealy.  His wife has led him a
+dance of deep damnation.  There's the lot of them--every one, not an
+ounce of peace among them, except with old Casson, who weighs eighteen
+stone, lives like a pig, grows stuffier in mind and body every day, and
+drinks half a bottle of whiskey every night.  There's no one else--yes,
+there is!"
+
+He was looking at a small black-robed figure with clean-shaven face,
+white hair, and shovel-hat, who passed slowly along the wooden walk
+beneath, with meditative content in his face.
+
+"There's peace," he said with a laugh.  "I've known Father Hallon for
+twenty-five years, and no man ever worked so hard, ever saw more trouble,
+ever shared other people's bad luck mere than he; ever took the bit in
+his teeth, when it was a matter of duty, stronger than he; and yet
+there's peace; he has it; a peace that passes all understanding--mine
+anyhow.  I've never had a minute's real peace.  The World, or Nature, or
+God, or It, whatever the name is, owes me peace.  And how is It to give
+it?  Why, by answering my questions.  Now it's a curious thing that the
+only person I ever met who could answer any questions of mine--answer
+them in the way that satisfies--is Suzon.  She works things down to
+phrases.  She has wisdom in the raw, and a real grip on life, and yet all
+the men she has known have been river-drivers and farmers, and a few men
+from town who mistook the sort of Suzon she is.  Virtuous and straight,
+she's a born child of Aphrodite too--by nature.  She was made for love.
+A thousand years ago she would have had a thousand loves!  And she thinks
+the world is a magnificent place, and she loves it, and wallows--fairly
+wallows--in content.  Now which is right: Suzon or Father Hallon--
+Aphrodite or the Nazarene?  Which is peace--as the bird and the beast
+of the field get it--the fallow futile content, or--"
+
+He suddenly stopped, hiccoughed, then hurriedly drawing paper before him,
+he sat down.  For an hour he wrote.  It grew darker.  He pushed the table
+nearer the window, and the singing of the choir in the church came in
+upon him as his pen seemed to etch words into the paper, firm, eccentric,
+meaning.  What he wrote that evening has been preserved, and the yellow
+sheets lie loosely in a black despatch-box which contains the few records
+Charley Steele left behind him.  What he wrote that night was the note of
+his mind, the key to all those strange events through which he began to
+move two hours after the lines were written:
+
+               Over thy face is a veil of white sea-mist,
+               Only thine eyes shine like stars; bless or blight me,
+               I will hold close to the leash at thy wrist,
+               O Aphrodite!
+
+               Thou in the East and I here in the West,
+               Under our newer skies purple and pleasant:
+               Who shall decide which is better--attest,
+               Saga or peasant?
+
+               Thou with Serapis, Osiris, and Isis,
+               I with Jehovah, in vapours and shadows;
+               Thou with the gods' joy-enhancing devices,
+               Sweet-smelling meadows!
+
+               What is there given us?--Food and some raiment,
+               Toiling to reach to some Patmian haven,
+               Giving up all for uncertain repayment,
+               Feeding the raven!
+
+               Striving to peer through the infinite azure,
+               Alternate turning to earthward and falling,
+               Measuring life with Damastian measure,
+               Finite, appalling.
+
+               What does it matter!  They passed who with Homer
+               Poured out the wine at the feet of their idols:
+               Passing, what found they?  To-come a misnomer,
+               It and their idols?
+
+               Sacristan, acolyte, player, or preacher,
+               Each to his office, but who holds the key?
+               Death, only Death--thou, the ultimate teacher
+               Wilt show it to me.
+
+               And when the forts and the barriers fall,
+               Shall we then find One the true, the almighty,
+               Wisely to speak with the worst of us all--
+               Ah, Aphrodite!
+
+               Waiting, I turn from the futile, the human,
+               Gone is the life of me, laughing with youth
+               Steals to learn all in the face of a woman,
+               Mendicant Truth!
+
+Rising with a bitter laugh, and murmuring the last lines, he thrust the
+papers into a drawer, locked it, and going quickly from the room, he went
+down-stairs.  His horse and cart were waiting for him, and he got in.
+
+The groom looked at him inquiringly.  "The Cote Dorion!" he said, and
+they sped away through the night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE COST OF THE ORNAMENT
+
+One, two, three, four, five, six miles.  The sharp click of the iron
+hoofs on the road; the strong rush of the river; the sweet smell of the
+maple and the pungent balsam; the dank rich odour of the cedar swamp; the
+cry of the loon from the water; the flaming crane in the fishing-boat;
+the fisherman, spear in hand, staring into the dark waters tinged with
+sombre red; the voice of a lonely settler keeping time to the ping of the
+axe as, lengthening out his day to nightly weariness, he felled a tree;
+river-drivers' camps spotted along the shore; huge cribs or rafts which
+had swung down the great stream for scores of miles, the immense oars
+motionless, the little houses on the timbers blinking with light; and
+from cheerful raftsmen coming the old familiar song of the rivers:
+
+                   "En roulant, ma boule roulant,
+                    En roulant ma boule!"
+
+Not once had Charley Steele turned his head as the horse sped on.  His
+face was kept straight along the line of the road; he seemed not to see
+or to hear, to be unresponsive to sound or scene.  The monocle at his eye
+was like a veil to hide the soul, a defence against inquiry, itself the
+unceasing question, a sort of battery thrown forward, a kind of field-
+casemate for a lonely besieged spirit.
+
+It was full of suggestion.  It might have been the glass behind which
+showed some mediaeval relic, the body of some ancient Egyptian king whose
+life had been spent in doing wonders and making signs--the primitive,
+anthropomorphic being.  He might have been a stone man, for any motion
+that he made.  Yet looking at him closely you would have seen discontent
+in the eye, a kind of glaze of the sardonic over the whole face.
+
+What is the good!  the face asked.  What is there worth doing?  it said.
+What a limitless futility!  it urged, fain to be contradicted too, as the
+grim melancholy of the figure suggested.
+
+"To be an animal and soak in the world," he thought to himself--" that is
+natural; and the unnatural is civilisation, and the cheap adventure of
+the mind into fields of baffling speculation, lighted by the flickering
+intelligences of dead speculators, whose seats we have bought in the
+stock-exchange of mortality, and exhaust our lives in paying for.  To
+eat, to drink, to lie fallow, indifferent to what comes after, to roam
+like the deer, and to fight like the tiger--"
+
+He came to a dead stop in his thinking.  "To fight like the tiger!"  He
+turned his head quickly now to where upon a raft some river-drivers were
+singing:
+
+              "And when a man in the fight goes down,
+               Why, we will carry him home!"
+
+"To fight like the tiger!"  Ravage--the struggle to possess from all the
+world what one wished for one's self, and to do it without mercy and
+without fear-that was the clear plan in the primitive world, where action
+was more than speech and dominance than knowledge.  Was not civilisation
+a mistake, and religion the insinuating delusion designed to cover it up;
+or, if not designed, accepted by the original few who saw that humanity
+could not turn back, and must even go forward with illusions, lest in
+mere despair all men died and the world died with them?
+
+His eyes wandered to the raft where the men were singing, and he
+remembered the threat made: that if he came again to the Cote Dorion he
+"would get what for!"  He remembered the warning of Rouge Gosselin
+conveyed by Jolicoeur, and a sinister smile crossed over his face.  The
+contradictions of his own thoughts came home to him suddenly, for was it
+not the case that his physical strength alone, no matter what his skill,
+would be of small service to him in a dark corner of contest?  Primitive
+ideas could only hold in a primitive world.  His real weapon was his
+brain, that which civilisation had given him in lieu of primitive prowess
+and the giant's strength.
+
+They had come to a long piece of corduroy-road, and the horse's hoofs
+struck rumbling hollow sounds from the floor of cedar logs.  There was a
+swamp on one side where fire-flies were flickering, and there flashed
+into Charley Steele's mind some verses he had once learned at school:
+
+              "They made her a grave too cold and damp
+               For a soul so warm and true--"
+
+It kept repeating itself in his brain in a strange dreary monotone.
+
+"Stop the horse.  I'll walk the rest of the way," he said presently to
+the groom.  "You needn't come for me, Finn; I'll walk back as far as the
+Marochal Tavern.  At twelve sharp I'll be there.  Give yourself a drink
+and some supper"--he put a dollar into the man's hand--"and no white
+whiskey, mind: a bottle of beer and a leg of mutton, that's the thing."
+He nodded his head, and by the light of the moon walked away smartly down
+the corduroy-road through the shadows of the swamp.  Finn the groom
+looked after him.
+
+"Well, if he ain't a queer dick!  A reg'lar 'centric--but a reg'lar
+brick, cutting a wide swathe as he goes.  He's a tip-topper; and he's a
+sort of tough too--a sort of a kind of a tough.  Well, it's none of my
+business.  Get up!" he added to the horse, and turning round in the road
+with difficulty, he drove back a mile to the Tavern Marochal for his beer
+and mutton--and white whiskey.
+
+Charley stepped on briskly, his shining leather shoes, straw hat, and
+light cane in no good keeping with his surroundings.  He was thinking
+that he had never been in such a mood for talk with Suzon Charlemagne.
+Charlemagne's tavern of the Cote Dorion was known over half a province,
+and its patrons carried news of it half across a continent.  Suzon
+Charlemagne--a girl of the people, a tavern-girl, a friend of sulking,
+coarse river-drivers!  But she had an alert precision of brain, an
+instinct that clove through wastes of mental underbrush to the tree of
+knowledge.  Her mental sight was as keen and accurate as that which runs
+along the rifle-barrel of the great hunter with the red deer in view.
+Suzon Charlemagne no company for Charley Steele?  What did it matter!  He
+had entered into other people's lives to-day, had played their games with
+them and for them, and now he would play his own game, live his own life
+in his own way through the rest of this day.  He thirsted for some sort
+of combat, for the sharp contrasts of life, for the common and the base;
+he thirsted even for the white whiskey against which he had warned
+his groom.  He was reckless--not blindly, but wilfully, wildly reckless,
+caring not at all what fate or penalty might come his way.
+
+"What do I care!" he said to himself.  "I shall never squeal at any
+penalty.  I shall never say in the great round-up that I was weak and
+I fell.  I'll take my gruel expecting it, not fearing it--if there is
+to be any gruel anywhere, or any round-up anywhere!"
+
+A figure suddenly appeared coming round the bend of the road before him.
+It was Rouge Gosselin.  Rouge Gosselin was inclined to speak.  Some
+satanic whim or malicious foppery made Charley stare him blankly in the
+face.  The monocle and the stare stopped the bon soir and the friendly
+warning on Rouge Gosselin's tongue, and the pilot passed on with a
+muttered oath.
+
+Gosselin had not gone far, however, before he suddenly stopped and
+laughed outright, for at the bottom he had great good-nature, in keeping
+with his "six-foot" height, and his temper was friendly if quick.  It
+seemed so absurd, so audacious, that a man could act like Charley Steele,
+that he at once became interested in the phenomenon, and followed slowly
+after Charley, saying as he went: "Tiens, there will be things to watch
+to-night!"
+
+Before Charley was within five hundred yards of the tavern he could hear
+the laughter and song coming from the old seigneury which Theophile
+Charlemagne called now the Cote Dorion Hotel, after the name given to the
+point on which the house stood.  Low and wide-roofed, with dormer windows
+and a wide stoop in front, and walls three feet thick, behind, on the
+river side, it hung over the water, its narrow veranda supported by
+piles, with steps down to the water-side.  Seldom was there an hour when
+boats were not tied to these steps.  Summer and winter the tavern was a
+place of resort.  Inside, the low ceiling, the broad rafters, the great
+fireplace, the well-worn floor, the deep windows, the wooden cross let
+into the wall, and the varied and picturesque humanity frequenting this
+great room, gave it an air of romance.  Yet there were people who called
+the tavern a "shebang"--slander as it was against Suzon Charlemagne,
+which every river-driver and woodsman and habitant who frequented the
+place would have resented with violence.  It was because they thought
+Charley Steele slandered the girl and the place in his mind, that the
+river-drivers had sworn they would make it hot for him if he came again.
+Charley was the last man in the world to undeceive them by words.
+
+When he coolly walked into the great room, where a half-dozen of them
+were already assembled, drinking white "whiskey-wine," he had no
+intention of setting himself right.  He raised his hat cavalierly to
+Suzon and shook hands with her.
+
+He took no notice of the men around him.  "Brandy, please!" he said.
+"Why do I drink, do you say?" he added, as Suzon placed the bottle and
+glass before him.
+
+She was silent for an instant, then she said gravely: "Perhaps because
+you like it; perhaps because something was left out of you when you were
+made, and--"
+
+She paused and went no further, for a red-shirted river-driver with brass
+rings in his ears came close to them, and called gruffly for whiskey.  He
+glowered at Charley, who looked at him indolently, then raised his glass
+towards Suzon and drank the brandy.
+
+"Pish!" said Red Shirt, and, turning round, joined his comrades.  It was
+clear he wanted a pretext to quarrel.
+
+"Perhaps because you like it; perhaps because something was left out of
+you when you were made--" Charley smiled pleasantly as Suzon came over to
+him again.  "You've answered the question," he said, "and struck the
+thing at the centre.  Which is it?  The difficulty to decide which has
+divided the world.  If it's only a physical craving, it means that we are
+materialists naturally, and that the soil from which the grape came is
+the soil that's in us; that it is the body feeding on itself all the
+time; that like returns to like, and we live a little together, and then
+mould together for ever and ever, amen.  If it isn't a natural craving--
+like to like--it's a proof of immortality, for it represents the wild
+wish to forget the world, to be in another medium.
+
+"I am only myself when I am drunk.  Liquor makes me human.  At other times
+I'm merely Charley Steele!  Now isn't it funny, this sort of talk here?"
+
+"I don't know about that," she answered, "if, as you say, it's natural.
+This tavern's the only place I have to think in, and what seems to you
+funny is a sort of ordinary fact to me."
+
+"Right again, ma belle Suzon.  Nothing's incongruous.  I've never felt so
+much like singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs as when I've been
+drinking.  I remember the last time I was squiffy I sang all the way home
+that old nursery hymn:
+
+                  "'On the other side of Jordan,
+                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
+                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
+                         There is rest for you.
+                    There is rest for the weary,
+                    There is rest for the weary,
+                    There is rest for the weary,
+                         There is rest for you!'"
+
+"I should have liked to hear you sing it--sure!" said Suzon, laughing.
+
+Charley tossed off a quarter-tumbler of brandy, which, instead of
+flushing the face, seemed only to deepen the whiteness of the skin,
+showing up more brightly the spots of colour in the cheeks, that white
+and red which had made him known as Beauty Steele.  With a whimsical
+humour, behind which was the natural disposition of the man to do what he
+listed without thinking of the consequences, he suddenly began singing,
+in a voice shaken a little now by drink, but full of a curious magnetism:
+
+                    "On the other side of Jordan--"
+
+"Oh, don't; please don't!" said the girl, in fear, for she saw two
+river-drivers entering the door, one of whom had sworn he would do for
+Charley Steele if ever he crossed his path.
+
+"Oh, don't--M'sieu' Charley!" she again urged.  The "Charley" caught his
+ear, and the daring in his eye brightened still more.  He was ready for
+any change or chance to-night, was standing on the verge of any
+adventure, the most reckless soul in Christendom.
+
+                   "On the other side of Jordan,
+                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
+                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
+                         There is rest for you!"
+
+What more incongruous thing than this flaneur in patent leathers and red
+tie, this "hell-of-a-fellow with a pane of glass in his eye," as Jake
+Hough, the horse-doctor, afterwards said, surrounded by red and blue-
+shirted river-men, woodsmen, loafers, and toughs, singing a sacred song
+with all the unction of a choir-boy; with a magnetism, too, that did its
+work in spite of all prejudice?  It was as if he were counsel in one of
+those cases when, the minds and sympathies of judge and jury at first
+arrayed against him, he had irresistibly cloven his way to their
+judgment--not stealing away their hearts, but governing, dominating their
+intelligences.  Whenever he had done this he had been drinking hard, was
+in a mental world created by drink, serene, clear-eyed, in which his
+brain worked like an invincible machine, perfect and powerful.  Was it
+the case that, as he himself suggested, he was never so natural as when
+under this influence?  That then and only then the real man spoke, that
+then and only then the primitive soul awakened, that it supplied the
+thing left out of him at birth?
+
+                   "There is rest for the weary,
+                    There is rest for the weary,
+                    There is rest for the weary,
+                         There is rest for you!"
+
+One, two verses he sang as the men, at first snorting and scornful,
+shuffled angrily; then Jake Hough, the English horse-doctor, roared in
+the refrain:
+
+                   "There is rest for the weary,
+                         There is rest for you!"
+
+Upon which, carried away, every one of them roared, gurgled, or shouted
+
+                   "There is rest for the weary,
+                         There is rest for you!"
+
+Rouge Gosselin, who had entered during the singing, now spoke up quickly
+in French:
+
+"A sermon now, M'sieu'!"
+
+Charley took his monocle out of his eye and put it back again.  Now each
+man present seemed singled out for an attack by this little battery of
+glass.  He did not reply directly to Rouge Gosselin, but standing
+perfectly still, with one hand resting on the counter at which Suzon
+stood, he prepared to speak.
+
+Suzon did not attempt to stop him now, but gazed at him in a sort of awe.
+These men present were Catholics, and held religion in superstitious
+respect, however far from practising its precepts.  Many of them had been
+profane and blasphemous in their time; may have sworn "sacre bapteme!"
+one of the worst oaths of their race; but it had been done in the
+wildness of anger, and they were little likely to endure from Charley
+Steele any word that sounded like blasphemy.  Besides, the world said
+that he was an infidel, and that was enough for bitter prejudice.
+
+In the pause--very short--before Charley began speaking, Suzon's
+fingers stole to his on the counter and pressed them quickly.  He made no
+response; he was scarcely aware of it.  He was in a kind of dream.  In an
+even, conversational tone, in French at once idiomatic and very simple,
+he began:
+
+"My dear friends, this is a world where men get tired.  If they work they
+get tired, and if they play they get tired.  If they look straight ahead
+of them they walk straight, but then they get blind by-and-by; if they
+look round them and get open-eyed, their feet stumble and they fall.  It
+is a world of contradictions.  If a man drinks much he loses his head,
+and if he doesn't drink at all he loses heart.  If he asks questions he
+gets into trouble, and if he doesn't ask them he gets old before his
+time.  Take the hymn we have just sung:
+
+                   "'On the other side of Jordan,
+                    In the sweet fields of Eden,
+                    Where the tree of life is blooming,
+                         There is rest for you!'
+
+"We all like that, because we get tired, and it isn't always summer, and
+nothing blooms all the year round.  We get up early and we work late, and
+we sleep hard, and when the weather is good and wages good, and there's
+plenty in the house, we stay sober and we sadly sing, 'On the other side
+of Jordan'; but when the weather's heavy and funds scarce, and the pork
+and molasses and bread come hard, we get drunk, and we sing the comic
+chanson 'Brigadier, vows avez raison!'  We've been singing a sad song
+to-night when we're feeling happy.  We didn't think whether it was sad or
+not, we only knew it pleased our ears, and we wanted those sweet fields
+of Eden, and the blooming tree of life, and the rest under the tree.  But
+ask a question or two.  Where is the other side of Jordan?  Do you go up
+to it, or down to it?  And how do you go?  And those sweet fields of
+Eden, what do they look like, and how many will they hold?  Isn't it
+clear that the things that make us happiest in this world are the things
+we go for blind?"
+
+He paused.  Now a dozen men came a step or two nearer, and crowded close
+together, looking over each others' shoulders at him with sharp,
+wondering eyes.
+
+"Isn't that so?" he continued.  "Do you realise that no man knows where
+that Jordan and those fields are, and what the flower of the tree of life
+looks like?  Let us ask a question again.  Why is it that the one being
+in all the world who could tell us anything about it, the one being who
+had ever seen Jordan or Eden or that tree of life-in fact, the one of all
+creation who could describe heaven, never told?  Isn't it queer?  Here he
+was--that one man-standing just as I am among you, and round him were the
+men who followed him, all ordinary men, with ordinary curiosity.  And he
+said he had come down from heaven, and for years they were with him, and
+yet they never asked him what that heaven was like: what it looked like,
+what it felt like, what sort of life they lived there, what manner of
+folk were the angels, what was the appearance of God.  Why didn't they
+ask, and why didn't he answer?  People must have kept asking that
+question afterwards, for a man called John answered it.  He described,
+as only an oriental Jew would or could, a place all precious stones and
+gold and jewels and candles, in oriental language very splendid and
+auriferous.  But why didn't those twelve men ask the One Man who knew,
+and why didn't the One answer?  And why didn't the One tell without being
+asked?"
+
+He paused again, and now there came a shuffling and a murmuring, a
+curious rumble, a hard breathing, for Charley had touched with steely
+finger the tender places in the natures of these Catholics, who, whatever
+their lives, held fast to the immemorial form, the sacredness of Mother
+Church.  They were ever ready to step into the galley which should bear
+them all home, with the invisible rowers of God at the oars, down the
+wild rapids, to the haven of St.  Peter.  There was savagery in their
+faces now.
+
+He saw, and he could not refrain from smiling as he stretched out his
+hand to them again with a little quieting gesture, and continued
+soothingly:
+
+"But why should we ask?  There's a thing called electricity.  Well, you
+know that if you take a slice out of anything, less remains behind.  We
+can take the air out of this room, and scarcely leave any in it.
+
+"We take a drink out of a bottle, and certainly there isn't as much left
+in it!  But the queer thing is that with this electricity you take it
+away and just as much remains.  It goes out from your toe, rushes away to
+Timbuctoo, and is back in your toe before you can wink.  Why?  No one
+knows.  What's the good of asking?  You can't see it: you can only see
+what it does.  What good would it do us if we knew all about it?  There
+it is, and it's going to revolutionise the world.  It's no good asking--
+no one knows what it is and where it comes from, or what it looks like.
+It's better to go it blind, because you feel the power, though you can't
+see where it comes from.  You can't tell where the fields of Eden are,
+but you believe they're somewhere, and that you'll get to them some day.
+So say your prayers, believe all you can, don't ask questions, and don't
+try to answer 'em; and remember that Charley Steele preached to you the
+fear of the Lord at the Cote Dorion, and wound up the service with the
+fine old hymn:
+
+          "'I'll away, I'll away, to the promised land--'"
+
+A whole verse of this camp-meeting hymn he sang in an ominous silence
+now, for it had crept into their minds that the hymn they had previously
+sung so loudly was a Protestant hymn, and that this was another
+Protestant hymn of the rankest sort.  When he stopped singing and pushed
+over his glass for Suzon to fill it, the crowd were noiseless and silent
+for a moment, for the spell was still on them.  They did not recover
+themselves until they saw him lift his glass to Suzon, his back on them,
+again insolently oblivious of them all.  They could not see his face, but
+they could see the face of Suzon Charlemagne, and they misunderstood the
+light in her eye, the flush on her cheek.  They set it down to a personal
+interest in Charley Steele.
+
+Charley had, however, thrown a spell over her in another fashion.  In her
+eye, in her face, was admiration, the sympathy of a strong intelligence,
+the wonder of a mind in the presence of its master, but they thought they
+saw passion, love, desire, in her face--in the face of their Suzon, the
+pride of the river, the flower of the Cote Dorion.  Not alone because
+Charley had blasphemed against religion did they hate him at this moment,
+but because every heart was scorched with envy and jealousy--the black
+unreasoning jealousy which the unlettered, the dull, the crude, feels for
+the lettered, the able and the outwardly refined.
+
+Charley was back again in the unfriendly climate of his natural life.
+Suzon felt the troubled air round them, saw the dark looks on the faces
+of the men, and was at once afraid and elated.  She loved the glow of
+excitement, she had a keen sense of danger, but she also felt that in any
+possible trouble to-night the chances of escape would be small for the
+man before her.
+
+He pushed out his glass again.  She mechanically poured brandy into it.
+
+"You've had more than enough," she said, in a low voice.
+
+"Every man knows his own capacity, Suzon.  Love me little, love me long,"
+he added, again raising his glass to her, as the men behind suddenly
+moved forward upon the bar.
+
+"Don't--for God's sake!" she whispered hastily.  "Do go--or there'll be
+trouble!"
+
+The black face of Theophile Charlemagne was also turned anxiously in
+Charley's direction as he pushed out glasses for those who called for
+liquor.
+
+"Oh, do, do go--like a good soul!" Suzon urged.  Charley laughed
+disdainfully.  "Like a good soul!"  Had it come to this, that Suzon
+pleaded with him as if he were a foolish, obstreperous child!
+
+"Faithless and unbelieving!" he said to Suzon in English.  "Didn't I
+play my game well a minute ago--eh--eh--eh, Suzon?"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes, M'sieu'," she replied in English; "but now you are
+differen' and so are they.  You must goah, so, you must!"
+
+He laughed again, a queer sardonic sort of laugh, yet he put out his hand
+and touched the girl's arm lightly with a forefinger.  "I am a Quaker
+born; I never stir till the spirit moves me," he said.
+
+He scented conflict, and his spirits rose at the thought.  Some reckless
+demon of adventure possessed him; some fatalistic courage was upon him.
+So far as the eye could see, the liquor he had drunk had done no more
+than darken the blue of his eye, for his hand was steady, his body was
+well poised, his look was direct; there seemed some strange electric
+force in leash behind his face, a watchful yet nonchalant energy of
+spirit, joined to an indolent pose of body.  As the girl looked at him
+something of his unreckoning courage passed into her.  Somehow she
+believed in him, felt that by some wild chance he might again conquer
+this truculent element now almost surrounding him.  She spoke quickly to
+her step-father.  "He won't go.  What can we do?"
+
+"You go, and he'll follow," said Theophile, who didn't want a row--
+a dangerous row-in his house.
+
+"No, he won't," she said; "and I don't believe they'd let him follow me."
+
+There was no time to say more.  The crowd were insistent and restless
+now.  They seemed to have a plan of campaign, and they began to carry it
+out.  First one, then another, brushed roughly against Charley.  Cool and
+collected, he refused to accept the insults.
+
+"Pardon," he said, in each case; "I am very awkward."
+
+He smiled all the time; he seemed waiting.  The pushing and crowding
+became worse.  "Don't mention it," he said.  "You should learn how to
+carry your liquor in your legs."
+
+Suddenly he changed from apology to attack.  He talked at them with a
+cheerful scorn, a deprecating impertinence, as though they were children;
+he chided them with patient imprecations.  This confused them for a
+moment and cleared a small space around him.  There was no defiance in
+his aspect, no aggressiveness of manner; he was as quiet as though it
+were a drawing-room and he a master of monologues.  He hurled original
+epithets at them in well-cadenced French, he called them what he listed,
+but in language which half-veiled the insults--the more infuriating to
+his hearers because they did not perfectly understand.
+
+Suddenly a low-set fellow, with brass rings in his ears, pulled off his
+coat and threw it on the floor.  "I'll eat your heart," he said, and
+rolled up blue sleeves along a hairy arm.
+
+"My child," said Charley, "be careful what you eat.  Take up your coat
+again, and learn that it is only dogs that delight to bark and bite.  Our
+little hands were never made to tear each other's eyes."
+
+The low-set fellow made a rush forward, but Rouge Gosselin held him back.
+"No, no, Jougon," he said.  "I have the oldest grudge."
+
+Jougon struggled with Rouge Gosselin.  "Be good, Jougon," said Charley.
+
+As he spoke a heavy tumbler flew from the other side of the room.
+Charley saw the missile thrown and dodged.  It missed his temple, but
+caught the rim of his straw hat, carrying it off his head, and crashed
+into a lantern hanging against the wall, putting out the light.  The room
+was only lighted now by another lantern on the other side of the room.
+Charley stooped, picked up his hat, and put it on his head again coolly.
+
+"Stop that, or I'll clear the bar!" cried Theophile Charlemagne, taking
+the pistol Suzon slipped into his hand.  The sight of the pistol drove
+the men wild, and more than one snatched at the knife in his belt.
+
+At that instant there pushed forward into the clear space beside Charley
+Steele the great figure of Jake Hough, the horse-doctor, the strongest
+man, and the most popular Englishman on the river.  He took his stand by
+Charley, raised his great hand, smote him in the small of his back, and
+said:
+
+"By the Lord, you have sand, and I'll stand by you!"  Under the friendly
+but heavy stroke the monocle shot from Charley's eye the length of the
+string.  Charley lifted it again, put it up, and staring hard at Jake,
+coolly said:
+
+"I beg your pardon--but have I ever--been introduced to you?"
+
+What unbelievable indifference to danger, what disdain to friendliness,
+made Charley act as he did is a matter for speculation.  It was throwing
+away his one chance; it was foppery on the scaffold--an incorrigible
+affectation or a relentless purpose.
+
+Jake Hough strode forward into the crowd, rage in his eye.  "Go to the
+devil, then, and take care of yourself!" he said roughly.
+
+"Please," said Charley.
+
+They were the last words he uttered that night, for suddenly the other
+lantern went out, there was a rush and a struggle, a muffled groan, a
+shrill woman's voice, a scramble and hurrying feet, a noise of a
+something splashing heavily in the water outside.  When the lights were
+up again the room was empty, save for Theophile Charlemagne, Jake Hough,
+and Suzon, who lay in a faint on the floor with a nasty bruise on her
+forehead.
+
+A score of river-drivers were scattering into the country-side, and
+somewhere in the black river, alive or dead, was Charley Steele.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+He had had acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves
+He has wheeled his nuptial bed into the street
+He left his fellow-citizens very much alone
+I am only myself when I am drunk
+I should remember to forget it
+Liquor makes me human
+Nervous legs at a gallop
+So say your prayers, believe all you can, don't ask questions
+Was not civilisation a mistake
+Who knows!
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIGHT OF WAY, PARKER, V1 ***
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