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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Right of Way, by G. Parker, v2
+#71 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
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+
+Title: The Right of Way, Volume 2.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6244]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 24, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIGHT OF WAY, PARKER, V2 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RIGHT OF WAY
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+OLD DEBTS FOR NEW
+
+Jo Portugtais was breaking the law of the river--he was running a little
+raft down the stream at night, instead of tying up at sundown and camping
+on the shore, or sitting snugly over cooking-pot by the little wooden
+caboose on his raft.  But defiance of custom and tradition was a habit
+with Jo Portugais.  He had lived in his own way many a year, and he was
+likely to do so till the end, though he was a young man yet.  He had many
+professions, or rather many gifts, which he practised as it pleased him.
+He was river-driver, woodsman, hunter, carpenter, guide, as whim or
+opportunity came to him.  On the evening when Charley Steele met with his
+mishap he was a river-driver--or so it seemed.  He had been up nor'west a
+hundred and fifty miles, and he had come down-stream alone with his raft-
+which in the usual course should take two men to guide it--through
+slides, over rapids, and in strong currents.  Defying the code of the
+river, with only one small light at the rear of his raft, he voyaged the
+swift current towards his home, which, when he arrived opposite the Cote
+Dorion, was still a hundred miles below.  He had watched the lights in
+the river-drivers' camps, had seen the men beside the fires, and had
+drifted on, with no temptation to join in the songs floating out over the
+dark water, to share the contents of the jugs raised to boisterous lips,
+or to thrust his hand into the greasy cooking-pot for a succulent bone.
+
+He drifted on until he came opposite Charlemagne's tavern.  Here the
+current carried him inshore.  He saw the dim light, he saw dark figures
+in the bar-room, he even got a glimpse of Suzon Charlemagne.  He dropped
+the house behind quickly, but looked back, leaning on the oar and
+thinking how swift was the rush of the current past the tavern.  His eyes
+were on the tavern door and the light shining through it.  Suddenly the
+light disappeared, and the door vanished into darkness.  He heard a
+scuffle, and then a heavy splash.
+
+"There's trouble there," said Jo Portugais, straining his eyes through
+the night, for a kind of low roar, dwindling to a loud whispering, and
+then a noise of hurrying feet, came down the stream, and he could dimly
+see dark figures running away into the night by different paths.
+
+"Some dirty work, very sure," said Jo Portugais, and his eyes travelled
+back over the dark water like a lynx's, for the splash was in his ear,
+and a sort of prescience possessed him.  He could not stop his raft.  It
+must go on down the current, or be swerved to the shore, to be fastened.
+
+"God knows, it had an ugly sound," said Jo Portugais, and again strained
+his eyes and ears.  He shifted his position and took another oar, where
+the raft-lantern might not throw a reflection upon the water.  He saw a
+light shine again through the tavern doorway, then a dark object block
+the light, and a head thrust forward towards the river as though
+listening.
+
+At this moment he fancied he saw something in the water nearing him.  He
+stretched his neck.  Yes, there was something.
+
+"It's a man.  God save us--was it murder?" said Jo Portugais, and
+shuddered.  "Was it murder?"
+
+The body moved more swiftly than the raft.  There was a hand thrust up--
+two hands.
+
+"He's alive!" said Jo Portugais, and, hurriedly pulling round his waist
+a rope tied to a timber, jumped into the water.
+
+Three minutes later, on the raft, he was examining a wound in the head of
+an insensible man.
+
+As his hand wandered over the body towards the heart, it touched
+something that rattled against a button.  He picked it up mechanically
+and held it to the light.  It was an eye-glass.
+
+"My God!" said Jo Portugais, and peered into the man's face.  "It's
+him."  Then he remembered the last words the man had spoken to him--
+"Get out of my sight.  You're as guilty as hell!"  But his heart yearned
+towards the man nevertheless.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT
+
+In his own world of the parish of Chaudiere Jo Portugais was counted a
+widely travelled man.  He had adventured freely on the great rivers and
+in the forests, and had journeyed up towards Hudson's Bay farther than
+any man in seven parishes.
+
+Jo's father and mother had both died in one year--when he was twenty-
+five.  That year had turned him from a clean-shaven cheerful boy into a
+morose bearded man who looked forty, for it had been marked by his
+disappearance from Chaudiere and his return at the end of it, to find his
+mother dead and his father dying broken-hearted.  What had driven Jo from
+home only his father knew; what had happened to him during that year only
+Jo himself knew, and he told no one, not even his dying father.
+
+A mystery surrounded him, and no one pierced it.  He was a figure apart
+in Chaudiere parish.  A dreadful memory that haunted him, carried him out
+of the village, which clustered round the parish church, into Vadrome
+Mountain, three miles away, where he lived apart from all his kind.  It
+was here he brought the man with the eye-glass one early dawn, after two
+nights and two days on the river, pulling him up the long hill in a low
+cart with his strong faithful dogs, hitching himself with them and
+toiling upwards through the dark.  In his three-roomed hut he laid his
+charge down upon a pile of bear-skins, and tended him with a strange
+gentleness, bathing the wound in the head and binding it again and again.
+
+The next morning the sick man opened his eyes heavily.  He then began
+fumbling mechanically on his breast.  At last his fingers found his
+monocle.  He feebly put it to his eye, and looked at Jo in a strange,
+questioning, uncomprehending way.
+
+"I beg--your pardon," he said haltingly, "have I ever--been intro--"
+Suddenly his eyes closed, a frown gathered on his forehead.  After a
+minute his eyes opened again, and he gazed with painful, pathetic
+seriousness at Jo.  This grew to a kind of childish terror; then slowly,
+as a shadow passes, the perplexity, anxiety and terror cleared away, and
+left his forehead calm, his eyes unvexed and peaceful.  The monocle
+dropped, and he did not heed it.  At length he said wearily, and with an
+incredibly simple dependence:
+
+"I am thirsty now."
+
+Jo lifted a wooden bowl to his lips, and he drank, drank, drank to
+repletion.  When he had finished he patted Jo's shoulder.
+
+"I am always thirsty," he said.  "I shall be hungry too.  I always am."
+
+Jo brought him some milk and bread in a bowl.  When the sick man had
+eaten and drunk the bowlful to the last drop and crumb, he lay back with
+a sigh of content, but trembling from weakness and the strain, though
+Jo's hand had been under his head, and he had been fed like a little
+child.
+
+All day he lay and watched Jo as he worked, as he came and went.
+Sometimes he put his hand to his head and said to Jo: "It hurts."
+Then Jo would cool the wound with fresh water from the mountain spring,
+and he would drag down the bowl to drink from it greedily.
+
+It was as though he could never get enough water to drink.  So the first
+day in the hut at Vadrome Mountain passed without questioning on the part
+of either Charley Steele or his host.
+
+With good reason.  Jo Portugais saw that memory was gone; that the past
+was blotted out.  He had watched that first terrible struggle of memory
+to reassert itself, as the eyes mechanically looked out upon new and
+strange surroundings, but it was only the automatic habit of the sight,
+the fumbling of the blind soul in its cell-fumbling for the latch which
+it could not find, for the door which would not open.  The first day on
+the raft, as Charley had opened his eyes upon the world again after that
+awful night at the Cote Dorion, Jo.  had seen that same blank
+uncomprehending look--as it were, the first look of a mind upon the
+world.  This time he saw, and understood what he saw, and spoke as men
+speak, but with no knowledge or memory behind it--only the involuntary
+action of muscle and mind repeated from the vanished past.
+
+Charley Steele was as a little child, and having no past, and
+comprehending in the present only its limited physical needs and motions,
+he had no hope, no future, no understanding.  In three days he was upon
+his feet, and in four he walked out of doors and followed Jo into the
+woods, and watched him fell a tree and do a woodsman's work.  Indoors he
+regarded all Jo did with eager interest and a pleased, complacent look,
+and readily did as he was told.  He seldom spoke--not above three or four
+times a day, and then simply and directly, and only concerning his wants.
+From first to last he never asked a question, and there was never any
+inquiry by look or word.  A hundred and twenty miles lay between him and
+his old home, between him and Kathleen and Billy and Jean Jolicoeur's
+saloon, but between him and his past life the unending miles of eternity
+intervened.  He was removed from it as completely as though he were dead
+and buried.
+
+A month went by.  Sometimes Jo went down to the village below, and then,
+at first, he locked the door of the house behind him upon Charley.
+Against this Charley made no motion and said no word, but patiently
+awaited Jo's return.  So it was that, at last, Jo made no attempt to lock
+the door, but with a nod or a good-bye left him alone.  When Charley saw
+him returning he would go to meet him, and shake hands with him, and say
+"Good-day," and then would come in with him and help him get supper or do
+the work of the house.
+
+Since Charley came no one had visited the house, for there were no paths
+beyond it, and no one came to the Vadrome Mountain, save by chance.  But
+after two months had gone the Cure came.  Twice a year the Cure made it a
+point to visit Jo in the interests of his soul, though the visits came to
+little, for Jo never went to confession, and seldom to mass.  On this
+occasion the Cure arrived when Jo was out in the woods.  He discovered
+Charley.  Charley made no answer to his astonished and friendly greeting,
+but watched him with a wide-eyed anxiety till the Cure seated himself at
+the door to await Jo's coming.  Presently, as he sat there, Charley, who
+had studied his face as a child studies the unfamiliar face of a
+stranger, brought him a bowl of bread and milk and put it in his hands.
+The Cure smiled and thanked him, and Charley smiled in return and said:
+"It is very good."
+
+As the Cure ate, Charley watched him with satisfaction, and nodded at him
+kindly.
+
+When Jo came he lied to the Cure.  He said he had found Charley wandering
+in the woods, with a wound in his head, and had brought him home with him
+and cared for him.  Forty miles away he had found him.
+
+The Cure was perplexed.  What was there to do?  He believed what Jo said.
+So far as he knew, Jo had never lied to him before, and he thought he
+understood Jo's interest in this man with the look of a child and no
+memory: Jo's life was terribly lonely; he had no one to care for, and no
+one cared for him; here was what might comfort him!  Through this
+helpless man might come a way to Jo's own good.  So he argued with
+himself.
+
+What to do?  Tell the story to the world by writing to the newspaper at
+Quebec?  Jo pooh-poohed this.  Wait till the man's memory came back?
+Would it come back--what chance was there of its ever coming back?  Jo
+said that they ought to wait and see--wait awhile, and then, if his
+memory did not return, they would try to find his friends, by publishing
+his story abroad.
+
+Chaudiere was far from anywhere: it knew little of the world, and the
+world knew naught of it, and this was a large problem for the Cure.
+Perhaps Jo was right, he thought.  The man was being well cared for, and
+what more could be wished at the moment?  The Cure was a simple man, and
+when Jo urged that if the sick man could get well anywhere in the world
+it would be at Vadrome Mountain in Chaudiere, the Cure's parochial pride
+was roused, and he was ready to believe all Jo said.  He also saw reason
+in Jo's request that the village should not be told of the sick man's
+presence.  Before he left, the Cure knelt down and prayed, "for the good
+of this poor mortal's soul and body."
+
+As he prayed, Charley knelt down also, and kept his eyes-calm unwondering
+eyes-full fixed on the good M. Loisel, whose grey hair, thin peaceful
+face, and dark brown eyes made a noble picture of patience and devotion.
+
+When the Cure shook him by the hand, murmuring in good-bye, "God be
+gracious to thee, my son," Charley nodded in a friendly way.  He watched
+the departing figure till it disappeared over the crest of the hill.
+
+This day marked an epoch in the solitude of the hut on Vadrome Mountain.
+Jo had an inspiration.  He got a second set of carpenter's tools, and
+straightway began to build a new room to the house.  He gave the extra
+set of tools to Charley with an encouraging word.  For the first time
+since he had been brought here, Charley's face took on a look of
+interest.  In half-an-hour he was at work, smiling and perspiring, and
+quickly learning the craft.  He seldom spoke, but he sometimes laughed a
+mirthful, natural boy's laugh of good spirits and contentment.  From that
+day his interest in things increased, and before two months went round,
+while yet it was late autumn, he looked in perfect health.  He ate
+moderately, drank a great deal of water, and slept half the circle of the
+clock each day.  His skin was like silk; the colour of his face was as
+that of an apple; he was more than ever Beauty Steele.  The Cure came
+two or three times, and Charley spoke to him but never held conversation,
+and no word concerning the past ever passed his tongue, nor did he have
+memory of what was said to him from one day to the next.  A hundred ways
+Jo had tried to rouse his memory.  But the words Cote Dorion had no
+meaning to him, and he listened blankly to all names and phrases once so
+familiar.  Yet he spoke French and English in a slow, passive,
+involuntary way.  All was automatic, mechanical.
+
+The weeks again wore on, and autumn became winter, and then at last one
+day the Cure came, bringing his brother, a great Parisian surgeon lately
+arrived from France on a short visit.  The Cure had told his brother the
+story, and had been met by a keen, astonished interest in the unknown man
+on Vadrome Mountain.  A slight pressure on the brain from accident had
+before now produced loss of memory--the great man's professional
+curiosity was aroused: he saw a nice piece of surgical work ready
+to his hand; he asked to be taken to Vadrome Mountain.
+
+Now the Cure had lived long out of the world, and was not in touch with
+the swift-minded action and adventuring intellects of such men as his
+brother, Marcel Loisel.  Was it not tempting Providence, a surgical
+operation?  He was so used to people getting ill and getting well without
+a doctor--the nearest was twenty miles distant--or getting ill and dying
+in what seemed a natural and preordained way, that to cut open a man's
+head and look into his brain, and do this or that to his skull, seemed
+almost sinful.  Was it not better to wait and see if the poor man would
+not recover in God's appointed time?
+
+In answer to his sensitively eager and diverse questions, Marcel Loisel
+replied that his dear Cure was merely mediaeval, and that he had
+sacrificed his mental powers on the altar of a simple faith, which might
+remove mountains but was of no value in a case like this, where, clearly,
+surgery was the only providence.
+
+At this the Cure got to his feet, came over, laid his hand on his
+brother's shoulder, and said, with tears in his eyes:
+
+"Marcel, you shock me.  Indeed you shock me!"
+
+Then he twisted a knot in his cassock cords, and added "Come then,
+Marcel.  We will go to him.  And may God guide us aright!"
+
+That afternoon the two grey-haired men visited Vadrome Mountain, and
+there they found Charley at work in the little room that the two men had
+built.  Charley nodded pleasantly when the Cure introduced his brother,
+but showed no further interest at first.  He went on working at the
+cupboard under his hand.  His cap was off and his hair was a little
+rumpled where the wound had been, for he had a habit of rubbing the place
+now and then--an abstracted, sensitive motion--although he seemed to
+suffer no pain.  The surgeon's eyes fastened on the place, and as Charley
+worked and his brother talked, he studied the man, the scar, the contour
+of the head.  At last he came up to Charley and softly placed his fingers
+on the scar, feeling the skull.  Charley turned quickly.
+
+There was something in the long, piercing look of the surgeon which
+seemed to come through limitless space to the sleeping and imprisoned
+memory of Charley's sick mind.  A confused, anxious, half-fearful look
+crept into the wide blue eyes.  It was like a troubled ghost, flitting
+along the boundaries of sight and sense, and leaving a chill and a
+horrified wonder behind.  The surgeon gazed on, and the trouble in
+Charley's eye passed to his face, stayed an instant.  Then he turned away
+to Jo Portugais.  "I am thirsty now," he said, and he touched his lips in
+the way he was wont to do in those countless ages ago, when, millions
+upon millions of miles away, people said: "There goes Charley Steele!"
+
+"I am thirsty now," and that touch of the lip with the tongue, were a
+revelation to the surgeon.
+
+A half-hour later he was walking homeward with the Cure.  Jo accompanied
+them for a distance.  As they emerged into the wider road-paths that
+began half-way down the mountain, the Cure, who had watched his brother's
+face for a long time in silence, said:
+
+"What is in your mind, Marcel?"  The surgeon turned with a half-smile.
+
+"He is happy now.  No memory, no conscience, no pain, no responsibility,
+no trouble--nothing behind or before.  Is it good to bring him back?"
+
+The Cure had thought it all over, and he had wholly changed his mind
+since that first talk with his brother.  "To save a mind, Marcel!" he
+said.
+
+"Then to save a soul?" suggested the surgeon.  "Would he thank me?"
+
+"It is our duty to save him."
+
+"Body and mind and soul, eh?  And if I look after the body and the mind?"
+
+"His soul is in God's hands, Marcel."
+
+"But will he thank me?  How can you tell what sorrows, what troubles, he
+has had?  What struggles, temptations, sins?  He has none now, of any
+sort; not a stain, physical or moral."
+
+"That is not life, Marcel."
+
+"Well, well, you have changed.  This morning it was I who would, and you
+hesitated."
+
+"I see differently now, Marcel."
+
+The surgeon put a hand playfully on his brother's shoulder.
+
+"Did you think, my dear Prosper, that I should hesitate?  Am I a
+sentimentalist?  But what will he say?
+
+"We need not think of that, Marcel."
+
+"But yet suppose that with memory come again sin and shame--even crime?"
+
+"We will pray for him."  "But if he isn't a Catholic?"
+
+"One must pray for sinners," said the Curb, after a silence.
+
+This time the surgeon laid a hand on the shoulder of his brother
+affectionately.  "Upon my soul, dear Prosper, you almost persuade me to
+be reactionary and mediaeval."
+
+The Curb turned half uneasily towards Jo, who was following at a little
+distance.  This seemed hardly the sort of thing for him to hear.
+
+"You had better return now, Jo," he said.
+
+"As you wish, M'sieu'," Jo answered, then looked inquiringly at the
+surgeon.
+
+"In about five days, Portugais.  Have you a steady hand and a quick eye?"
+
+Jo spread out his hands in deprecation, and turned to the Curb, as though
+for him to answer.
+
+"Jo is something of a physician and surgeon too, Marcel.  He has a gift.
+He has cured many in the parish with his herbs and tinctures, and he has
+set legs and arms successfully."
+
+The surgeon eyed Jo humorously, but kindly.  "He is probably as good a
+doctor as some of us.  Medicine is a gift, surgery is a gift and an art.
+You shall hear from me, Portugais."  He looked again keenly at Jo.  "You
+have not given him 'herbs and tinctures'?"
+
+"Nothing, M'sieu'."
+
+"Very sensible.  Good-day, Portugais."
+
+"Good-day, my son," said the priest, and raised his fingers in
+benediction, as Jo turned and quickly retraced his steps.
+
+"Why did you ask him if he had given the poor man any herbs or tinctures,
+Marcel?" said the priest.
+
+"Because those quack tinctures have whiskey in them."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Whiskey in any form would be bad for him," the surgeon answered
+evasively.
+
+But to himself he kept saying: "The man was a drunkard--he was a
+drunkard."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE RAISING OF THE CURTAIN
+
+M. Marcel Loisel did his work with a masterly precision, with the aid of
+his brother and Portugais.  The man under the instruments, not wholly
+insensible, groaned once or twice.  Once or twice, too, his eyes opened
+with a dumb hunted look, then closed as with an irresistible weariness.
+When the work was over, and every stain or sign of surgery removed, sleep
+came down on the bed--a deep and saturating sleep, which seemed to fill
+the room with peace.  For hours the surgeon sat beside the couch, now and
+again feeling the pulse, wetting the hot lips, touching the forehead with
+his palm.  At last, with a look of satisfaction, he came forward to where
+Jo and the Cure sat beside the fire.
+
+"It is all right," he said.  "Let him sleep as long as he will."  He
+turned again to the bed.  "I wish I could stay to see the end of it.
+Is there no chance, Prosper?" he added to the priest.
+
+"Impossible, Marcel.  You must have sleep.  You have a seventy-mile drive
+before you to-morrow, and sixty the next day.  You can only reach the
+port now by starting at daylight to-morrow."
+
+So it was that Marcel Loisel, the great surgeon, was compelled to leave
+Chaudiere before he knew that the memory of the man who had been under
+his knife had actually returned to him.  He had, however, no doubt in
+his own mind, and he was confident that there could be no physical harm
+from the operation.  Sleep was the all-important thing.  In it lay the
+strength for the shock of the awakening--if awakening of memory there
+was to be.
+
+Before he left he stooped over Charley and said musingly: "I wonder what
+you will wake up to, my friend?"  Then he touched the wound with a light
+caressing finger.  "It was well done, well done," he murmured proudly.
+
+A moment afterwards he was hurrying down the hill to the open road, where
+a cariole awaited the Cure and himself.
+
+For a day and a half Charley slept, and Jo watched him with an
+affectionate solicitude.  Once or twice, becoming anxious, because of the
+heavy breathing and the motionless sleep, he had forced open the teeth,
+and poured a little broth between.
+
+Just before dawn on the second morning, worn out and heavy with slumber,
+Jo lay down by the piled-up fire and dropped into a sleep that wrapped
+him like a blanket, folding him away into a drenching darkness.
+
+For a time there was a deep silence, troubled only by Jo's deep
+breathing, which seemed itself like the pulse of the silence.  Charley
+appeared not to be breathing at all.  He was lying on his back, seemingly
+lifeless.  Suddenly on the snug silence there was a sharp sound.  A tree
+outside snapped with the frost.
+
+Charley awoke.  The body seemed not to awake, for it did not stir, but
+the eyes opened wide and full, looking straight before them--straight up
+to the brown smoke-stained rafters, along which were ranged guns and
+fishing-tackle, axes and bear-traps.  Full clear blue eyes, healthy and
+untired as a child's fresh from an all-night's drowse, they looked and
+looked.  Yet, at first, the body did not stir; only the mind seemed to be
+awakening, the soul creeping out from slumber into the day.  Presently,
+however, as the eyes gazed, there stole into them a wonder, a trouble, an
+anxiety.  For a moment they strained at the rafters and the crude weapons
+and implements there, then the body moved, quickly, eagerly, and turned
+to see the flickering shadows made by the fire and the simple order of
+the room.
+
+A minute more, and Charley was sitting on the side of his couch, dazed
+and staring.  This hut, this fire, the figure by the hearth in a sound
+sleep-his hand went to his head: it felt the bandage there!
+
+He remembered now!  Last night at the Cote Dorion!  Last night he had
+talked with Suzon Charlemagne at the Cote Dorion; last night he had drunk
+harder than he had ever drunk in his life, he had defied, chaffed,
+insulted the river-drivers.  The whole scene came back: the faces of
+Suzon and her father; Suzon's fingers on his for an instant; the glass of
+brandy beside him; the lanterns on the walls; the hymn he sang; the
+sermon he preached--he shuddered a little; the rumble of angry noises
+round him; the tumbler thrown; the crash of the lantern, and only one
+light left in the place!  Then Jake Hough and his heavy hand, the flying
+monocle, and his disdainful, insulting reply; the sight of the pistol in
+the hand of Suzon's father; then a rush, a darkness, and his own fierce
+plunge towards the door, beyond which were the stars and the cool night
+and the dark river.  Curses, hands that battered and tore at him, the
+doorway reached, and then a blow on the head and--falling, falling,
+falling, and distant noises growing more distant, and suddenly and
+sweetly--absolute silence.
+
+Again he shuddered.  Why?  He remembered that scene in his office
+yesterday with Kathleen, and the one later with Billy.  A sensitive chill
+swept all over him, making his flesh creep, and a flush sped over his
+face from chin to brow.  To-day he must pick up all these threads again,
+must make things right for Billy, must replace the money he had stolen,
+must face Kathleen again he shuddered.  Was he at the Cote Dorion still?
+He looked round him.  No, this was not the sort of house to be found at
+the Cote Dorion.  Clearly this was the hut of a hunter.  Probably he had
+been fished out of the river by this woodsman and brought here.  He felt
+his head.  The wound was fresh and very sore.  He had played for death,
+with an insulting disdain, yet here he was alive.
+
+Certainly he was not intended to be drowned or knifed--he remembered the
+knives he saw unsheathed--or kicked or pummelled into the hereafter.  It
+was about ten o'clock when he had had his "accident"--he affected a
+smile, yet somehow he did not smile easily--it must be now about five,
+for here was the morning creeping in behind the deer-skin blind at the
+window.
+
+Strange that he felt none the worse for his mishap, and his tongue was as
+clean and fresh as if he had been drinking milk last night, and not very
+doubtful brandy at the Cote Dorion.  No fever in his hands, no headache,
+only the sore skull, so well and tightly bandaged but a wonderful thirst,
+and an intolerable hunger.  He smiled.  When had he ever been hungry for
+breakfast before?  Here he was with a fine appetite: it was like coals of
+fire heaped on his head by Nature for last night's business at the Cote
+Dorion.  How true it was that penalties did not always come with--
+indiscretions.  Yet, all at once, he flushed again to the forehead, for a
+curious sense of shame flashed through his whole being, and one Charley
+Steele--the Charley Steele of this morning, an unknown, unadventuring,
+onlooking Charley Steele--was viewing with abashed eyes the Charley
+Steele who had ended a doubtful career in the coarse and desperate
+proceedings of last night.  With a nervous confusion he sought refuge in
+his eye-glass.  His fingers fumbled over his waistcoat, but did not find
+it.  The weapon of defence and attack, the symbol of interrogation and
+incomprehensibility, was gone.  Beauty Steele was under the eyes of
+another self, and neither disdain, nor contempt, nor the passive stare,
+were available.  He got suddenly to his feet, and started forward, as
+though to find refuge from himself.
+
+The abrupt action sent the blood to his head, and feeling a blindness
+come over him, he put both hands up to his temples, and sank back on the
+couch, dizzy and faint.
+
+His motions waked Jo Portugais, who scrambled from the floor, and came
+towards him.
+
+"M'sieu'," he said, "you must not.  You are faint."  He dropped his hands
+supportingly to Charley's shoulders.
+
+Charley nodded, but did not yet look up.  His head throbbed sorely.
+"Water--please!" he said.
+
+In an instant Jo was beside him again, with a bowl of fresh water at his
+lips.  He drank, drank, drank, until the great bowl was drained to the
+last drop.
+
+"Whew!  That was good!" he said, and looked up at Jo with a smile.
+"Thank you, my friend; I haven't the honour of your acquaintance, but--"
+
+He stopped suddenly and stared at Jo.  Inquiry, mystification, were in
+his look.
+
+"Have I ever seen you before?" he said.  "Who knows, M'sieu'!"
+
+Since Jo had stood before Charley in the dock near six years ago he had
+greatly changed.  The marks of smallpox, a heavy beard, grey hair, and
+solitary life had altered him beyond Charley's recognition.
+
+Jo could hardly speak.  His legs were trembling under him, for now he
+knew that Charley Steele was himself again.  He was no longer the simple,
+quiet man-child of three days ago, and of these months past, but the man
+who had saved him from hanging, to whom he owed a debt he dare not
+acknowledge.  Jo's brain was in a muddle.  Now that the great crisis was
+over, now that the expected thing had come, and face to face with the
+cure, he had neither tongue, nor strength, nor wit.  His words stuck in
+his throat where his heart was, and for a minute his eyes had a kind of
+mist before them.
+
+Meanwhile Charley's eyes were upon him, curious, fixed, abstracted.
+
+"Is this your house?"
+
+"It is, M'sieu'."
+
+"You fished me out of the river by the Cote Dorion?"  He still held his
+head with his hands, for it throbbed so, but his eyes were intent on his
+companion.
+
+"Yes, M'sieu'."
+
+Charley's hand mechanically fumbled for his monocle.  Jo turned quickly
+to the wall, and taking it by its cord from the nail where it had been
+for these long months, handed it over.  Charley took it and mechanically
+put it in his eye.  "Thank you, my friend," he said.  "Have I been
+conscious at all since you rescued me last night?" he asked.
+
+"In a way, M'sieu'."
+
+"Ah, well, I can't remember, but it was very kind of you--I do thank you
+very much.  Do you think you could find me something to eat?  I beg your
+pardon--it isn't breakfast-time, of course, but I was never so hungry in
+my life!"
+
+"In a minute, M'sieu'--in one minute.  But lie down, you must lie down a
+little.  You got up too quick, and it makes your head throb.  You have
+had nothing to eat."
+
+"Nothing, since yesterday noon, and very little then.  I didn't eat
+anything at the Cote Dorion, I remember."  He lay back on the couch and
+closed his eyes.  The throbbing in his head presently stopped, and he
+felt that if he ate something he could go to sleep again, it was so
+restful in this place--a whole day's sleep and rest, how good it would be
+after last night's racketing!  Here was primitive and material comfort,
+the secret of content, if you liked!  Here was this poor hunter-fellow,
+with enough to eat and to drink, earning it every day by every day's
+labour, and, like Robinson Crusoe no doubt, living in a serene self-
+sufficiency and an elysian retirement.  Probably he had no
+responsibilities in the world, with no one to say him nay, himself only
+to consider in all the universe: a divine conception of adequate life.
+Yet himself, Charley Steele, an idler, a waster, with no purpose in life,
+with scarcely the necessity to earn his bread-never, at any rate, until
+lately--was the slave of the civilisation to which he belonged.  Was
+civilisation worth the game?
+
+His hand involuntarily went to his head.  It changed the course of his
+thoughts.  He must go back to-day to put Billy's crime right, to replace
+the trust-moneys Billy had taken by forging his brother-in-law's name.
+Not a moment must be lost.  No doubt he was within driving distance of
+his office, and, bandaged head or no bandaged head, last night's
+disgraceful doings notwithstanding, it was his duty to face the wondering
+eyes--what did he care for wondering eyes?  hadn't he been making eyes
+wonder all his life?--face the wondering eyes in the little city, and set
+a crooked business straight.  Fool and scoundrel certainly Billy was, but
+there was Kathleen!
+
+His lips tightened; he had a strange anxious flutter of the heart.  When
+had his heart fluttered like this?  When had he ever before considered
+Kathleen's feelings as to his personal conduct so delicately?  Well,
+since yesterday he did feel it, and a sudden sense of pity sprang up in
+him--vague, shamefaced pity, which belied the sudden egotistical flourish
+with which he put his monocle to his eye and tried futilely to smile in
+the old way.
+
+He had lain with his eyes closed.  They opened now, and he saw his host
+spreading a newspaper as a kind of cloth on a small rough table, and
+putting some food upon it-bread, meat, and a bowl of soup.  It was
+thoughtful of this man to make his soup overnight-he saw Jo lift it from
+beside the fire where it had been kept hot.  A good fellow-an excellent
+fellow, this woodsman.
+
+His head did not throb now, and he drew himself up slowly on his elbow-
+then, after a moment, lifted himself to a sitting posture.
+
+"What is your name, my friend?" he said.
+
+"Jo Portugais, M'sieu'," Jo answered, and brought a candle and put it on
+the table, then lifted the tin-plate from over the bowl of savoury soup.
+
+Never before had Charley Steele sat down to such a breakfast.  A roll and
+a cup of coffee had been enough, and often too much, for him.  Yet now he
+could not wait to eat the soup with a spoon, but lifted the bowl and took
+a long draught of it, and set it down with a sigh of content.  Then he
+broke bread into the soup--large pieces of black oat bread--until the
+bowl was a mass of luscious pulp.  This he ate almost ravenously, his eye
+wandering avidly the while to the small piece of meat beside the bowl.
+What meat was it?  It looked like venison, yet summer was not the time
+for venison.  What did it matter!  Jo sat on a bench beside the fire, his
+face turned towards his guest, dreading the moment when the man he had
+nursed and cared for, with whom he had eaten and drunk for so long,
+should know the truth about himself.  He could not tell him all there was
+to tell, he was taking another means of letting him know.
+
+Charley did not speak.  Hunger was a new sensation, a delicious thing,
+too good to be broken by talking.  He ate till he had cleared away the
+last crumbs of bread and meat and drunk the last drop of soup.  He looked
+at the woodsman as though wondering if he would bring more.  Jo evidently
+thought he had had enough, for he did not move.  Charley's glance
+withdrew from Jo, and busied itself with the few crumbs remaining upon
+the table.  He saw a little piece of bread on the floor.  He picked it up
+and ate it with relish, laughing to himself.
+
+"How long will it take us to get to town?  Can we do it this morning?"
+
+"Not this morning, M'sieu'," said Jo, in a sort of hoarse whisper.
+
+"How many hours would it take?"
+
+He was gathering the last crumbs of his feast with his hand, and looking
+casually down at the newspaper spread as a table-cloth.
+
+All at once his hand stopped, his eyes became fixed on a spot in the
+paper.  He gave a hoarse, guttural cry, like an animal in agony.  His
+lips became dry, his hand wiped a blinding mist from his eyes.
+
+Jo watched him with an intense alarm and a horrified curiosity.  He felt
+a base coward for not having told Charley what this paper contained.
+Never had he seen such a look as this.  He felt his beads, and told them
+over and over again, as Charley Steele, in a dry, croaking sort of
+whisper, read, in letters that seemed monstrous symbols of fire, a record
+of himself:
+
+"To-day, by special license from the civil and ecclesiastical courts [the
+paragraph in the paper began], was married, at St. Theobald's Church,
+Mrs. Charles Steele, daughter of the late Hon.  Julien Wantage, and niece
+of the late Eustace Wantage, Esq., to Captain Thomas Fairing, of the
+Royal Fusileers--"
+
+Charley snatched at the top of the paper and read the date "Tenth of
+February, 18-!"  It was August when he was at the Cote Dorion, the 5th
+August, 18-, and this paper was February 10th, 18-.  He read on, in the
+month-old paper, with every nerve in his body throbbing now: a fierce
+beating that seemed as if it must burst the heart and the veins:
+
+"--Captain Thomas Fairing, of the Royal Fusileers, whose career in our
+midst has been marked by an honourable sense of public and private duty.
+Our fellow-citizens will unite with us in congratulating the bride, whose
+previous misfortunes have only increased the respect in which she is
+held.  If all remember the obscure death of her first husband (though the
+body was not found, there has never been a doubt of his death), and the
+subsequent discovery that he had embezzled trust-moneys to the extent of
+twenty-five thousand dollars, thereby setting the final seal of shame
+upon a misspent life, destined for brilliant and powerful uses, all
+have conspired to forget the association of our beautiful and admired
+townswoman with his career.  It is painful to refer to these
+circumstances, but it is only within the past few days that the estate of
+the misguided man has been wound up, and the money he embezzled restored
+to its rightful owners; and it is better to make these remarks now than
+repeat them in the future, only to arouse painful memories in quarters
+where we should least desire to wound.
+
+"In her new life, blessed by a romantic devotion known and admired by
+all, Mrs. Fairing and her husband will be followed by the affectionate
+good wishes of the whole community."
+
+The man on the hearth-stone shrank back at the sight of the still, white
+face, in which the eyes were like sparks of fire.  His impulse had been
+to go over and offer the hand of sympathy to the stricken man, but his
+simple mind grasped the fact that no one might, with impunity, invade
+this awful quiet.  Charley was frozen in body, but his brain was awake
+with the heat of "a burning fiery furnace."
+
+Seven months of unconscious life-seven months of silence--no sight, no
+seeing, no knowing; seven months of oblivion, in which the world had
+buried him out of ken in an unknown grave of infamy!  Seven months--and
+Kathleen was married again to the man she had always loved.  To the world
+he himself was a rogue and thief.  Billy had remained silent--Billy, whom
+he had so befriended, had let decent men heap scorn and reproaches on his
+memory.  Here was what the world thought of him--he read the lines over
+again, his eyes scorching, but his finger steady, as it traced the lines
+slowly: "the obscure death .  .  .  .  ."  "embezzled trustmoneys .  .  .
+.  ."  "the final seal of shame upon a misspent life!"
+
+These were the epitaphs on the tombstone of Charley Steele; dead and
+buried, out of sight, out of repute, soon to be out of mind and out of
+memory, save as a warning to others--an old example raked out of the
+dust-bin of time by the scavengers of morality, to toss at all who trod
+the paths of dalliance.
+
+What was there to do?  Go back?  Go back and knock at Kathleen's door,
+another Enoch Arden, and say: "I have come to my own again?"  Return and
+tell Tom Fairing to go his way and show his face no more?  Break up this
+union, this marriage of love in which these two rejoiced?  Summon
+Kathleen out of her illegal intercourse with the man who had been true to
+her all these years?
+
+To what end?  What had he ever done for her that he might destroy her
+now?  What sort of Spartan tragedy was this, that the woman who had been
+the victim of circumstances, who had been the slave to a tie he never
+felt, yet which had been as iron-bound to her, should now be brought out
+to be mangled body and soul for no fault of her own?  What had she done?
+What had she ever done to give him right to touch so much as a hair of
+her head?
+
+Go back, and bring Billy to justice, and clear his own name?  Go back,
+and send Kathleen's brother, the forger, to jail?  What an achievement
+in justice!  Would not the world have a right to say that the only decent
+thing he could do was to eliminate himself from the equation?  What
+profit for him in the great summing-up, that he was technically innocent
+of this one thing, and that to establish his innocence he broke a woman's
+heart and destroyed a boy's life?  To what end!  It was the murderer
+coming back as a ghost to avenge himself for being hanged.  Suppose he
+went back--the death's-head at the feast--what would there be for himself
+afterwards; for any one for whom he was responsible?  Living at that
+price?
+
+To die and end it all, to disappear from this petty life where he had
+done so little, and that little ill?  To die?
+
+No.  There was in him some deep, if obscure, fatalism after all.  If he
+had been meant to die now, why had he not gone to the bottom of the river
+that yesterday at the Cote Dorion?  Why had he been saved by this yokel
+at the fire, and brought here to lie in oblivion in this mountain hut,
+wrapped in silence and lost to the world?  Why had his brain and senses
+lain fallow all these months, a vacuous vegetation, an empty
+consciousness?  Was it fate?  Did it not seem probable that the Great
+Machine had, in its automatic movement, tossed him up again on the shores
+of Time because he had not fallen on the trap-door predestined for his
+eternal exit?
+
+It was clear to him that death by his own hand was futile, and that if
+there were trap-doors set for him alone, it were well to wait until he
+trod upon them and fell through in his appointed hour in the movement of
+the Great Machine.
+
+What to do--where to live--how to live?
+
+He got slowly to his feet and took a step forward half blindly.  The man
+on the bench stirred.  Crossing the room he dropped a hand on the man's
+shoulder.  "Open the blind, my friend."
+
+Jo Portugais got to his feet quickly, eyes averted--he did not dare look
+into Charley's face--and went over and drew back the deer-skin blind.
+The clear, crisp sunlight of a frosty morning broke gladly into the room.
+Charley turned and blew out the candle on the table where he had eaten,
+then walked feebly to the window.  Standing on the crest of the mountain
+the hut looked down through a clearing, flanked by forest trees.
+
+It was a goodly scene.  The green and frosted foliage of the pines and
+cedars; the flowery tracery of frost hanging like cobwebs everywhere; the
+poudre sparkle in the air; the hills of silver and emerald sloping down
+to the valley miles away, where the village clustered about the great old
+parish church; the smoke from a hundred chimneys, in purple spirals,
+rising straight up in the windless air; over all peace and a perfect
+silence.
+
+Charley mechanically fixed his eye-glass and stood with hands resting on
+the window-sill, looking, looking out upon a new world.
+
+At length he turned.
+
+"Is there anything I can do for you, M'sieu'?" said Jo huskily.
+
+Charley held out his hand and clasped Jo's.  "Tell me about all these
+months," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE COMING OF ROSALIE
+
+Charley Steele saw himself as he had been through the eyes of another.
+He saw the work that he had done in the carpentering shed, and had no
+memory of it.  The real Charley Steele had been enveloped in oblivion for
+seven months.  During that time a mild phantom of himself had wandered,
+as it were in a somnambulistic dream, through the purlieus of life.
+Open-eyed, but with the soul asleep, all idiosyncrasy laid aside, all
+acquired impressions and influences vanished, he had been walking in the
+world with no more complexity of mind than a new-born child, nothing
+intervening between the sight of the eyes and the original sense.
+
+Now, when the real Charley Steele emerged again, the folds of mind and
+soul unrolling to the million-voiced creation and touched by the antenna
+of a various civilisation, the phantom Charley was gone once more into
+obscurity.  The real Charley could remember naught of the other, could
+feel naught, save, as in the stirring industrious day, one remembers that
+he has dreamed a strange dream the night before, and cannot recall it,
+though the overpowering sense of it remains.
+
+He saw the work of his hands, the things he had made with adze and plane,
+with chisel and hammer, but nothing seemed familiar save the smell of the
+glue pot, which brought back in a cloudy impression curious unfamiliar
+feelings.  Sights, sounds, motions, passed in a confused way through his
+mind as the smell of the glue crept through his nostrils; and he
+struggled hard to remember.  But no--seven months of his life were gone
+for ever.  Yet he knew and felt that a vast change had gone over him, had
+passed through him.  While the soul had lain fallow, while the body had
+been growing back to childlike health again, and Nature had been pouring
+into his sick senses her healing balm; while the medicaments of peace and
+sleep and quiet labour had been having their way with him, he had been
+reorganised, renewed, flushed of the turgid silt of dissipation.  For his
+sins and weaknesses there had been no gall and vinegar to drink.
+
+As Charley stood looking round the workshop, Jo entered, shaking the snow
+from his moccasined feet.  "The Cure, M'sieu' Loisel, has come," he said.
+Charley turned, and, without a word, followed Jo into the house.  There,
+standing at the window and looking down at the village beneath, was the
+Cure.  As Charley entered, M. Loisel carne forward with outstretched
+hand.
+
+"I am glad to see you well again, Monsieur," he said, and his cool thin
+hand held Charley's for a moment, as he looked him benignly in the eye.
+
+With a kind of instinct as to the course he must henceforth pursue,
+Charley replied simply, dropping his eye-glass as he met that clear
+soluble look of the priest--such a well of simplicity he had never before
+seen.  Only naked eye could meet that naked eye, imperfect though his own
+sight was.
+
+"It is good of you to feel so, and to come and tell me so," he answered
+quietly.  "I have been a great trouble, I know."
+
+There was none of the old pose in his manner, none of the old cryptic
+quality in his words.
+
+"We were anxious for your sake--and for the sake of your friends,
+Monsieur."
+
+Charley evaded the suggestion.  "I cannot easily repay your kindness and
+that of Jo Portugais, my good friend here," he rejoined.
+
+"M'sieu'," replied Jo, his face turned away, and his foot pushing a log
+on the fire, "you have repaid it."
+
+Charley shook his head.  "I am in a conspiracy of kindness," he said.
+"It is all a mystery to me.  For why should one expect such treatment
+from strangers, when, besides all, one can never make any real return,
+not even to pay for board and lodging!"
+
+"'I was a stranger and ye took me in,"' said the Cure, smiling by no
+means sentimentally.  "So said the Friend of the World."
+
+Charley looked the Curb steadily in the eyes.  He was thinking how simply
+this man had said these things; as if, indeed, they were part of his
+life; as though it were usual speech with him, a something that belonged,
+not an acquired language.  There was the old impulse to ask a question,
+and he put the monocle to his eye, but his lips did not open, and the
+eye-glass fell again.  He had seen familiarity with sacred names and
+things in the uneducated, in excited revivalists, worked up to a state
+clairvoyant and conversational with the Creator; but he had never heard
+an educated man speak as this man did.
+
+At last Charley said: "Your brother--Portugais tells me that your
+brother, the surgeon, has gone away.  I should have liked to thank him
+--if no more."
+
+"I have written him of your good recovery.  He will be glad, I know.  But
+my brother, from one stand-point--a human stand-point--had scruples.
+These I did not share, but they were strong in him, Monsieur.  Marcel
+asked himself--"  He stopped suddenly and looked towards Jo.
+
+Charley saw the look, and said quickly: "Speak plainly.  Portugais is my
+friend."
+
+Jo turned slowly towards him, and a light seemed to come to his eyes--a
+shining something that resolved itself into a dog-like fondness, an utter
+obedience, a strange intense gratitude.
+
+"Marcel asked himself," the Cure continued, "whether you would thank him
+for bringing you back to--to life and memory.  I fear he was trying to
+see what I should say--I fear so.  Marcel said, 'Suppose that he should
+curse me for it?  Who knows what he would be brought back to--to what
+suffering and pain, perhaps?'  Marcel said that."
+
+"And you replied, Monsieur le Cure?"
+
+"I replied that Nature required you to answer that question for yourself,
+and whether bitterly or gladly, it was your duty to take up your life and
+live it out.  Besides, it was not you alone that had to be considered.
+One does not live alone or die alone in this world.  There were your
+friends to consider."
+
+"And because I had no friends here, you were compelled to think for me!"
+answered Charley calmly.  "Truth is, it was not a question of my friends,
+for what I was during those seven months, or what I am now, can make no
+difference to them."
+
+He looked the Cure in the eyes steadily, and as though he would convey
+his intentions without words.  The Curb understood.  The habit of
+listening to the revelations of the human heart had given him something
+of that clairvoyance which can only be pursued by the primitive mind,
+unvexed by complexity.
+
+"It is, then, as though you had not come to life again?  It is as though
+you had no past, Monsieur?"
+
+"It is that, Monsieur."
+
+Jo suddenly turned and left the room, for he heard a step on the frosty
+snow without.
+
+"You will remain here, Monsieur?" said the Cure.  "I cannot tell."
+
+The Cure had the bravery of simple souls with a duty to perform.  He
+fastened his eyes on Charley.  "Monsieur, is there any reason why you
+should not stay here?  I ask it now, man to man--not as a priest of my
+people, but as man to man."
+
+Charley did not answer for a moment.  He was wondering how he should put
+his reply.  But his look did not waver, and the Cure saw the honesty of
+the gaze.  At length he replied: "If you mean, have I committed any crime
+which the law may punish?--I answer no, Monsieur.  If you mean, have I
+robbed or killed, or forged--or wronged a woman as men wrong women?  No.
+These, I take it, are the things that matter first.  For the rest, you
+can think of me as badly as you will, or as well, for what I do
+henceforth is the only thing that really concerns the world, Monsieur le
+Cure."
+
+The Cure came forward and put out his hand with a kindly gesture.
+"Monsieur, you have suffered," he said.
+
+"Never, never at all, Monsieur.  Never for a moment, until I was dropped
+down here like a stone from a sling.  I had life by the throat; now it
+has me there--that is all."
+
+"You are not a Catholic, Monsieur?" asked the priest, almost pleadingly,
+and as though the question had been much on his mind.
+
+"No, Monsieur."
+
+The Cure made no rejoinder.  If he was not a Catholic, what matter
+what he was?  If he was not a Catholic, were he Buddhist, pagan, or
+Protestant, the position for them personally was the same.  "I am very
+sorry," he said gently.  "I might have helped you had you been a
+Catholic."
+
+The eye-glass came like lightning to the eye, and a caustic, questioning
+phrase was on the tongue, but Charley stopped himself in time.  For,
+apart from all else, this priest had been his friend in calamity, had
+acted with a charming sensibility.  The eye-glass troubled the Cure, and
+the look on Charley's face troubled him still more, but it passed as
+Charley said, in a voice as simple as the Cure's own:
+
+"You may still help me as you have already done.  I give you my word,
+too"--strange that he touched his lips with his tongue as he did in the
+old days when his mind turned to Jean Jolicoeur's saloon--"that I will do
+nothing to cause regret for your humanity and--and Christian kindness."
+Again the tongue touched the lips--a wave of the old life had swept over
+him, the old thirst had rushed upon him.  Perhaps it was the force of
+this feeling which made him add, with a curious energy, "I give you my
+word, Monsieur le Cure."  At that moment the door opened and Jo entered.
+
+"M'sieu'," he said to Charley, "a registered parcel has come for you.
+It has been brought by the postmaster's daughter.  She will give it to no
+one but yourself."
+
+Charley's face paled, and the Cure's was scarcely less pale.  In
+Charley's mind was the question, Who had discovered his presence here?
+Was he not, then, to escape?  Who should send him parcels through the
+post?
+
+The Cure was perturbed.  Was he, then, to know who this man was--his name
+and history?  Was the story of his life now to be told?
+
+Charley broke the silence.  "Tell the girl to come in."  Instantly
+afterwards the postmaster's daughter entered.  The look of the girl's
+face, at once delicate and rosy with health, almost put the question of
+the letter out of his mind for an instant.  Her dark eyes met his as he
+came forward with outstretched hand.
+
+"This is addressed, as you will see, 'To the Sick Man at the House of Jo
+Portugais, at Vadrome Mountain.'  Are you that person, Monsieur?" she
+asked.
+
+As she handed the parcel, Charley's eyes scanned her face quickly.  How
+did this habitant girl come by this perfect French accent, this refined
+manner?  He did not know the handwriting on the parcel; he hastily tore
+it open.  Inside were a few dozen small packets.  Here also was a sheet
+of paper.  He opened and read it quickly.  It said:
+
+     Monsieur, I am not sure that you have recovered your memory and your
+     health, and I am also not sure that in such case you will thank me
+     for my work.  If you think I have done you an injury, pray accept my
+     profound apologies.  Monsieur, you have been a drunkard.  If you
+     would reverse the record now, these powders, taken at opportune
+     moments, will aid you.  Monsieur, with every expression of my good-
+     will, and the hope that you will convey to me without reserve your
+     feelings on this delicate matter, I append my address in Paris, and
+     I have the honour to subscribe myself, with high consideration,
+     Monsieur, yours faithfully,
+                                        MARCEL LOISEL.
+
+The others looked at him with varied feelings as he read.  Curiosity,
+inquiry, expectation, were common to them all, but with each was a
+different personal feeling.  The Cure's has been described.  Jo
+Portugais' mind was asking if this meant that the man who had come
+into his life must now go out of it; and the girl was asking who was
+this mysterious man, like none she had ever seen or known.
+
+Without hesitation Charley handed over the letter to the Cure, who took
+it with surprise, read it with amazement, and handed it back with a flush
+on his face.
+
+"Thank you," said Charley to the girl.  "It is good of you to bring it
+all this way.  May I ask--"
+
+"She is Mademoiselle Rosalie Evanturel," said the Cure smiling.
+
+"I am Charles Mallard," said Charley slowly.  "Thank you.  I will go now,
+Monsieur Mallard," the girl said, lifting her eyes to his face.  He
+bowed.  As she turned and went towards the door her eyes met his.  She
+blushed.
+
+"Wait, Mademoiselle; I will go back with you," said the Cure kindly.  He
+turned to Charley and held out his hand.  "God be with you, Monsieur--
+Charles," he said.  "Come and see me soon."  Remembering that his brother
+had written that the man was a drunkard, his eyes had a look of pity.
+This was the man's own secret and his.  It was a way to the man's heart;
+he would use it.
+
+As the two went out of the door, the girl looked back.  Charley was
+putting the surgeon's letter into the fire, and did not see her; yet she
+blushed again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+HOW CHARLEY WENT ADVENTURING AND WHAT HE FOUND
+
+A week passed.  Charley's life was running in a tiny circle, but his mind
+was compassing large revolutions.  The events of the last few days had
+cut deep.  His life had been turned upside down.  All his predispositions
+had been suddenly brought to check, his habits turned upon the flank and
+routed, his mental postures flung into confusion.  He had to start life
+again; but it could not be in the way of any previous travel of mind or
+body.  The line of cleavage was sharp and wide, and the only connection
+with the past was in the long-reaching influence of evil habits, which
+crept from their coverts, now and again, to mock him as his old self had
+mocked life--to mock him and to tempt him.  Through seven months of
+healthy life for his body, while brain and will were sleeping, the whole
+man had made long strides towards recreation.  But with the renewal of
+will and mind the old weaknesses, roused by memory, began to emerge
+intermittently, as water rises from a spring.  There was something
+terrible in this repetition of sensation--the law of habit answering
+to the machine-like throbbing of memory, as, a kaleidoscope turning,
+turning, its pictures pass a certain point at fixed intervals--an
+automatic recurrence.  He found himself at times touching his lips with
+his tongue, and with this act came the dry throat, the hot eye, the
+restless hand feeling for a glass that eluded his fingers.
+
+Twice in one week did this fever surge up in him, and it caught him in
+those moments when, exhausted by the struggle of his mind to adapt itself
+to the new conditions, his senses were delicately susceptible.  Visions
+of Jolicoeur's saloon came to his mind's eye.  With a singular
+separateness, a new-developed dual sense, he saw himself standing in the
+summer heat, looking over to the cool dark doorway of the saloon, and he
+caught again the smell of the fresh-drawn beer.  He was conscious of
+watching himself do this and that, of seeing himself move here and there.
+He began to look upon Charley Steele as a man he had known--he, Charles
+Mallard, had known--while he had to suffer for what Charley Steele had
+done.  Then, all at once, as he was thinking and dreaming and seeing,
+there would seize upon him the old appetite, coincident with the seizure
+of his brain by the old sense of cynicism at its worst--such a worst as
+had made him insult Jake Hough when the rough countryman was ready to
+take his part that wild night at the Cote Dorion.
+
+At such moments life became a conflict--almost a terror--for as yet he
+had not swung into line with the new order of things.  In truth, there
+was no order of things; for one life was behind him and the new one was
+not yet decided upon, save that here he would stay--here out of the
+world, out of the game, far from old associations, cut off, and to be for
+ever cut off, from all that he had ever known or seen or felt or loved!
+.  .  .  Loved!  When did he ever love?  If love was synonymous with
+unselfishness, with the desire to give greater than the desire to get,
+then he had never known love.  He realised now that he had given Kathleen
+only what might be given across a dinner-table--the sensuous tribute of
+a temperament, passionate without true passion or faith or friendship.
+Kathleen had known that he gave her nothing worth the having; for in some
+meagre sense she knew what love was, and had given it meagrely, after her
+nature, to another man, preserving meanwhile the letter of the law,
+respecting that bond which he had shamed by his excesses.
+
+Kathleen was now sitting at another man's table--no, probably at his own
+table--his, Charley Steele's own table in his own house--the house he had
+given her by deed of gift the day he died.  Tom Fairing was sitting where
+he used to sit, talking across the table--not as he used to talk--looking
+into Kathleen's face as he had never looked.  He was no more to them than
+a dark memory.  "Well, why should I be more?" he asked himself.  "I am
+dead, if not buried.  They think me down among the fishes.  My game is
+done; and when she gets older and understands life better, Kathleen will
+say, 'Poor Charley--he might have been anything!'  She'll be sure to say
+that some day, for habit and memory go round in a circle and pass the
+same point again and again.  For me--they take me by the throat--"  He
+put his hand up as if to free his throat from a grip, his tongue touched
+his lips, his hands grew restless.
+
+"It comes back on me like a fit of ague, this miserable thirst.  If I
+were within sight of Jolicoeur's saloon, I should be drinking hard this
+minute.  But I'm here, and--"  His hand felt his pocket, and he took out
+the powders the great surgeon had sent him.
+
+"He knew--how did he know that I was a drunkard?  Does a man carry in his
+face the tale he would not tell?  Jo says I didn't talk of the past, that
+I never had delirium, that I never said a word to suggest who I was, or
+where I came from.  Then how did the doctor--man know?  I suppose every
+particular habit carries its own signal, and the expert knows the
+ciphers."  He opened the paper containing the powders, and looked round
+for water, then paused, folded the paper up, and put it in his pocket
+again.  He went over to the window and looked out.  His shoulders set
+square.  "No, no, no, not a speck on my tongue!" he said.  "What I can't
+do of my own will is not worth doing.  It's too foolish, to yield to the
+shadow of an old appetite.  I play this game alone--here in Chaudiere."
+
+He looked out and down.  The sweet sun of early spring was shining
+hard, and the snow was beginning to pack, to hang like a blanket on the
+branches, to lie like a soft coverlet over all the forest and the fields.
+Far away on the frozen river were saplings stuck up to show where the ice
+was safe--a long line of poles from shore to shore--and carioles were
+hurrying across to the village.  Being market-day, the place was alive
+with the cheerful commerce of the habitant.  The bell of the parish
+church was ringing.  The sound of it came up distantly and peacefully.
+Charley drew a long breath, turned away to a pail of water, filled a
+dipper half full, and drank it off gaspingly.  Then he returned to the
+window with a look of relief.
+
+"That does it," he said.  "The horrible thing is gone again--out of my
+brain and out of my throat."
+
+As he stood there, Jo came up the hill with a bundle in his arms.
+Charley watched him for a moment, half whimsically, half curiously.  Yet
+he sighed once too as Portugais opened the door and came into the room.
+"Well done, Jo!" said he.  "You have 'em?"
+
+"Yes, M'sieu'.  A good suit, and I believe they'll fit.  Old Trudel says
+it's the best suit he's made in a year.  I'm afraid he'll not make many
+more suits, old Trudel.
+
+"He's very bad.  When he goes there'll be no tailor--ah, old Trudel will
+be missed for sure, M'sieu'!"
+
+Jo spread the clothes out on the table--a coat, waistcoat, and trousers
+of fulled cloth, grey and bulky, and smelling of the loom and the
+tailor's iron.  Charley looked at them interestedly, then glanced at the
+clothes he had on, the suit that had belonged to him last year--grave-
+clothes.
+
+He drew himself up as though rousing from a dream.  "Come, Jo, clear out,
+and you shall have your new habitant in a minute," he said.  Portugais
+left the room, and when he came back, Charley was dressed in the suit of
+grey fulled cloth.  It was loose, but comfortable, and save for the
+refined face--on which a beard was growing now--and the eye-glass, he
+might easily have passed for a farmer.  When he put on the dog-skin fur
+cap and a small muffler round his neck, it was the costume of the
+habitant complete.
+
+Yet it was no disguise, for it was part of the life that Charles Mallard,
+once Charley Steele, should lead henceforth.
+
+He turned to the door and opened it.  "Good-bye, Portugais," he said.
+
+Jo was startled.  "Where are you going, M'sieu'?"
+
+"To the village."
+
+"What to do, M'sieu'?"
+
+"Who knows?"
+
+"You will come back?" Jo asked anxiously.
+
+"Before sundown, Jo.  Good-bye!"
+
+This was the first long walk he had taken since he had become himself
+again.  The sweet, cold air, with a bracing wind in his face, gave peace
+to the nerves but now strained and fevered in the fight with appetite.
+His mind cleared, and he drank in the sunny air and the pungent smell of
+the balsams.  His feet light with moccasins, he even ran a distance,
+enjoying the glow from a fast-beating pulse.
+
+As he came into the high-road, people passed him in carioles and sleighs.
+Some eyed him curiously.  What did he mean to do?  What object had he in
+coming to the village?  What did he expect?  As he entered the village
+his pace slackened.  He had no destination, no object.  He was simply
+aware that his new life was beginning.
+
+He passed a little house on which was a sign, "Narcisse Dauphin, Notary."
+It gave him a curious feeling.  It was the old life before him.  "Charles
+Mallard, Notary?"--No, that was not for him.  Everything that reminded
+him of the past, that brought him in touch with it, must be set aside.
+He moved on.  Should he go to the Cure?  No; one thing at a time, and
+today he wanted his thoughts for himself.  More people passed him, and
+spoke of him to each other, though there was no coarse curiosity--the
+habitant has manners.
+
+Presently he passed a low shop with a divided door.  The lower half was
+closed, the upper open, and the winter sun was shining full into the
+room, where a bright fire burned.
+
+Charley looked up.  Over the door was painted, in straggling letters:
+"Louis Trudel, Tailor."  He looked inside.  There, on a low table, bent
+over his work, with a needle in his hand, sat Louis Trudel the tailor.
+Hearing footsteps, feeling a shadow, he looked up.  Charley started at
+the look of the shrunken, yellow face; for if ever death had set his
+seal, it was on that haggard parchment.  The tailor's yellow eyes ran
+from Charley's face to his clothes.
+
+"I knew they'd fit," he said, with a snarl.  "Drove me hard, too!"
+
+Charley had an inspiration.  He opened the halfdoor, and entered.
+
+"Do you want help?" he said, fixing his eyes on the tailor's, steady and
+persistent.
+
+"What's the good of wanting--I can't get it," was the irritable reply, as
+he uncrossed his legs.
+
+Charley took the iron out of his hand.  "I'll press, if you'll show me
+how," he said.
+
+"I don't want a fiddling ten-minutes' help like that."
+
+"It isn't fiddling.  I'm going to stay, if you think I'll do."
+
+"You are going to stop-every day?"  The old man's voice quavered a
+little.
+
+"Precisely that."  Charley wetted a seam with water as he had often seen
+tailors do.  He dropped the hot iron on the seam, and sniffed with
+satisfaction.
+
+"Who are you?" said the tailor.
+
+"A man who wants work.  The Cure knows.  It's all right.  Shall I stay?"
+
+The tailor nodded, and sat down with a colour in his face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+ROSALIE, CHARLEY, AND THE MAN THE WIDOW PLOMONDON JILTED
+
+From the moment there came to the post-office the letter addressed to
+"The Sick Man at the House of Jo Portugais at Vadrome Mountain," Rosalie
+Evanturel dreamed dreams.  Mystery, so fascinating a thing in all the
+experiences of life, took hold of her.  The strange man in the lonely
+hut on the hill, the bandaged head, the keen, piercing blue eyes, the
+monocle, like a masked battery of the mind, levelled at her--all appealed
+to that life she lived apart from the people with whom she had daily
+commerce.  Her world was a world of books and dreams, and simple,
+practical duties of life.  Most books were romance to her, for most were
+of a life to which she had not been educated.  Even one or two purely
+Protestant books of missionary enterprise, found in a box in her dead
+mother's room, had had all the charms of poetry and adventure.  It was
+all new, therefore all delightful, even when the Protestant sentiments
+shocked her as being not merely untrue, but hurting that aesthetic sense
+never remote from the mind of the devout Catholic.
+
+She had blushed when monsieur had first looked at her, in the hut on
+Vadrome Mountain, not because there was any soft sentiment about him in
+her heart--how could there be for a man she had but just seen!--but
+because her feelings, her imagination, were all at high temperature;
+because the man compelled attention.  The feeling sprang from a deep
+sensibility, a natural sense, not yet made incredulous by the ironies of
+life.  These had never presented themselves to her in a country, in a
+parish, where people said of fortune and misfortune, happiness and
+sorrow, "C'est le bon Dieu!"--always "C'est le bon Dieu!"
+
+In some sense it was a pity that she had brains above the ordinary, that
+she had had a good education and nice tastes.  It was the cultivation of
+the primitive and idealistic mind, which could not rationalise a sense of
+romance, of the altruistic, by knowledge of life.  As she sat behind the
+post-office counter she read all sorts of books that came her way.  When
+she learned English so as to read it almost as easily as she read French,
+her greatest joy was to pore over Shakespeare, with a heart full of
+wonder, and, very often, eyes full of tears--so near to the eyes of her
+race.  Her imagination inhabited Chaudiere with a different folk, living
+in homes very unlike these wide, sweeping-roofed structures, with double
+windows and clean-scrubbed steps, tall doors, and wide, uncovered stoops.
+Her people--people of bright dreaming--were not quarrelsome, or childish,
+or merely traditional, like the habitants.  They were picturesque and
+able and simple, doing good things in disguise, succouring distress,
+yielding their lives without thought for a cause, or a woman, and loving
+with an undying love.
+
+Charley was of these people--from the first instant she saw him.  The
+Cure, the Avocat, and the Seigneur were also of them, but placidly,
+unimportantly.  "The Sick Man at Jo Portugais' House" came out of a
+mysterious distance.  Something in his eyes said, "I have seen, I have
+known," told her that when he spoke she would answer freely, that they
+were kinsfolk in some hidden way.  Her nature was open and frank; she
+lived upon the house-tops, as it were, going in and out of the lives of
+the people of Chaudiere with neighbourly sympathy and understanding.  Yet
+she knew that she was not of them, and they knew that, poor as she was,
+in her veins flowed the blood of the old nobility of France.  For this
+the Cure could vouch.  Her official position made her the servant of the
+public, and she did her duty with naturalness.
+
+She had been a figure in the parish ever since the day she returned from
+the convent at Quebec, and took her dead mother's place in the home and
+the parish.  She had a quick temper, but there was not a cheerless note
+in her nature, and there was scarce a dog or a horse in the parish but
+knew her touch, and responded to it.  Squirrels ate out of her hand, she
+had even tamed two partridges, and she kept in her little garden a bear
+she had brought up from a cub.  Her devotion to her crippled father was
+in keeping with her quick response to every incident of sorrow or joy in
+the parish--only modified by wilful prejudices scarcely in keeping with
+her unselfishness.
+
+As Mrs. Flynn, the Seigneur's Irish cook, said of her: "Shure, she's not
+made all av wan piece, the darlin'!  She'll wear like silk, but she's not
+linen for everybody's washin'."  And Mrs. Flynn knew a thing or two, as
+was conceded by all in Chaudiere.  No gossip was Mrs. Flynn, but she knew
+well what was going on in the parish, and she had strong views upon all
+subjects, and a special interest in the welfare of two people in
+Chaudiere.  One of these was the Seigneur, who, when her husband died,
+leaving behind him a name for wit and neighbourliness, and nothing else,
+proposed that she should come to be his cook.  In spite of her protest
+that what was "fit for Teddy was not fit for a gintleman of quality," the
+Seigneur had had his way, never repenting of his choice.  Mrs. Flynn's
+cooking was not her only good point.  She had the rarest sense and an
+unfailing spring of good-nature--life bubbled round her.  It was she that
+had suggested the crippled M. Evanturel to the Seigneur when the office
+of postmaster became vacant, and the Seigneur had acted on her
+suggestion, henceforth taking greater interest in Rosalie.
+
+It was Mrs. Flynn who gave Rosalie information concerning Charley's
+arrival at the shop of Louis Trudel the tailor.  The morning after
+Charley came, Mrs. Flynn had called for a waistcoat of the Seigneur, who
+was expected home from a visit to Quebec.  She found Charley standing at
+a table pressing seams, and her quick eye took him in with knowledge and
+instinct.  She was the one person, save Rosalie, who could always divert
+old Louis, and this morning she puckered his sour face with amusement by
+the story of the courtship of the widow Plomondon and Germain Boily the
+horse-trainer, whose greatest gift was animal-training, and greatest
+weakness a fondness for widows, temporary and otherwise.  Before she left
+the shop, with the stranger's smile answering to her nod, she had made up
+her mind that Charley was a tailor by courtesy only.  So she told Rosalie
+a few moments afterwards.
+
+"'Tis a man, darlin', that's seen the wide wurruld.  'Tis himisperes he
+knows, not parrishes.  Fwhat's he doin' here, I dun'no'.  Fwhere's he
+come from, I dun'no'.  French or English, I dun'no'.  But a gintleman
+born, I know.  'Tis no tailor, darlin', but tailorin' he'll do as aisy as
+he'll do a hunderd other things anny day.  But how he shlipped in here,
+an' when he shlipped in here, an' what's he come for, an' how long he's
+stayin', an' meanin' well, or doin' ill, I dun'no', darlin', I dun'
+no'."
+
+"I don't think he'll do ill, Mrs. Flynn," said Rosalie, in English.
+
+"An' if ye haven't seen him, how d'ye know?" asked Mrs. Flynn, taking a
+pinch of snuff.
+
+"I have seen him--but not in the tailor-shop.  I saw him at Jo Portugais'
+a fortnight ago."
+
+"Aisy, aisy, darlin'.  At Jo Portugais'--that's a quare place for a
+stranger.  'Tis not wid Jo's introducshun I'd be comin' to Chaudiere."
+
+"He comes with the Cure's introduction."
+
+"An' how d'ye know that, darlin'?"
+
+"The Curb was at Jo Portugais' with monsieur when I went there."
+
+"You wint there!"
+
+"To take him a letter--the stranger."  "What's his name, darlin'?"
+
+"The letter I took him was addressed, 'To the Sick Man at Jo Portugais'
+House at Vadrome Mountain.'"
+
+"Ah, thin, the Cure knows.  'Tis some rich man come to get well, and
+plays at bein' tailor.  But why didn't the letther come to his name,
+I wander now?  That's what I wander."
+
+Rosalie shook her head, and looked reflectively through the window
+towards the tailor-shop.
+
+"How manny times have ye seen him?"
+
+"Only once;" answered Rosalie truthfully.  She did not, however, tell
+Mrs. Flynn that she had thrice walked nearly to Vadrome Mountain in the
+hope of seeing him again; and that she had gone to her favourite resort,
+the Rest of the Flax-Beaters, lying in the way of the riverpath from
+Vadrome Mountain, on the chance of his passing.  She did not tell Mrs.
+Flynn that there had scarcely been a waking hour when she had not thought
+of him.
+
+"What Portugais knows, he'll not be tellin'," said Mrs. Flynn, after a
+moment.  "An' 'tis no business of ours, is it, darlin'?  Shure, there's
+Jo comin' out of the tailor-shop now!"
+
+They both looked out of the window, and saw Jo encounter Filion Lacasse
+the saddler, and Maximilian Cour the baker.  The three stood in the
+middle of the street for a minute, Jo talking freely.  He was usually
+morose and taciturn, but now he spoke as though eager to unburden his
+mind--Charley and he had agreed upon what should be said to the people of
+Chaudiere.
+
+The sight of the confidences among the three was too much for Mrs. Flynn.
+She opened the door of the post office and called to Jo.  "Like three
+crows shtandin' there!" she said.  "Come in--ma'm'selle says come in,
+and tell your tales here, if they're fit to hear, Jo Portugais.  Who are
+you to say no when ma'm'selle bids!" she added.
+
+Very soon afterwards Jo was inside the post-office, telling his tale with
+the deliberation of a lesson learned by heart.
+
+"It's all right, as ma'm'selle knows," he said.  "The Cure was there when
+ma'm'selle brought a letter to M'sieu' Mallard.  The Cure knows all.
+M'sieu' come to my house sick-and he stayed there.  There is nothing like
+the pine-trees and the junipers to cure some things.  He was with me very
+quiet some time.  The Cure come and come.  He knows.  When m'sieu' got
+well, he say, 'I will not go from Chaudiere; I will stay.  I am poor, and
+I will earn my bread here.' At first, when he is getting well, he is
+carpent'ring.  He makes cupboards and picture-frames.  The Cure has one
+of the cupboards in the sacristy; the frames he puts on the Stations of
+the Cross in the church."
+
+"That's good enough for me!" said Maximilian Cour.  "Did he make them
+for nothing?" asked Filion Lacasse solemnly.
+
+"Not one cent did he ask.  What's more, he's working for Louis Trudel for
+nothing.  He come through the village yesterday; he see Louis old and
+sick on his bench, and he set down and go to work."
+
+"That's good enough for me," said the saddler.  "If a man work for the
+Church for nothing, he is a Christian.  If he work for Louis Trudel for
+nothing, he is a fool--first-class--or a saint.  I wouldn't work for
+Louis Trudel if he give me five dollars a day."
+
+"Tiens!  the man that work for Louis Trudel work for the Church, for all
+old Louis makes goes to the Church in the end--that is his will.  The
+Notary knows," said Maximilian Cour.
+
+"See there, now," interposed Mrs. Flynn, pointing across the street to
+the tailor-shop.  "Look at that grocer-man stickin' in his head; and
+there's Magloire Cadoret and that pig of a barber, Moise Moisan, starin'
+through the dure, an'--"
+
+As she spoke, the barber and his companion suddenly turned their faces to
+the street, and started forward with startled exclamations, the grocer
+following.  They all ran out from the post-office.  Not far up the street
+a crowd was gathering.  Rosalie locked the office-door and followed the
+others quickly.
+
+In front of the Hotel Trois Couronnes a painful thing was happening.
+Germain Boily, the horse-trainer, fresh from his disappointment with the
+widow Plomondon, had driven his tamed moose up to the Trois Couronnes,
+and had drunk enough whiskey to make him ill-tempered.  He had then begun
+to "show off" the animal, but the savage instincts of the moose being
+roused, he had attacked his master, charging with wide-branching horns,
+and striking with his feet.  Boily was too drunk to fight intelligently.
+He went down under the hoofs of the enraged animal, as his huge boar-
+hound, always with him, fastened on the moose's throat, dragged him to
+the ground, and tore gaping wounds in his neck.
+
+It was all the work of a moment.  People ran from the doorways and
+sidewalks, but stayed at a comfortable distance until the moose was
+dragged down; then they made to approach the insensible man.  Before any
+one could reach him, however, the great hound, with dripping fangs,
+rushed to his master's body, and, standing over it, showed his teeth
+savagely.  The hotel-keeper approached, but the bristles of the hound
+stood up, he prepared to attack, and the landlord drew back in haste.
+Then M. Dauphin, the Notary, who had joined the crowd, held out a hand
+coaxingly, and with insinuating rhetoric drew a little nearer than the
+landlord had done; but he retreated precipitously as the hound crouched
+back for a spring.  Some one called for a gun, and Filion Lacasse ran
+into his shop.  The animal had now settled down on his master's body, his
+bloodshot eyes watching in menace.  The one chance seemed to be to shoot
+him, and there must be no bungling, lest his prostrate master suffer at
+the same time.  The crowd had melted away into the houses, and were now
+standing at doorways and windows, ready for instant retreat.
+
+Filion Lacasse's gun was now at disposal, but who would fire it?  Jo
+Portugais was an expert shot, and he reached out a hand for the weapon.
+
+As he did so, Rosalie Evanturel cried: "Wait, oh, wait!"  Before any one
+could interfere she moved along the open space to the mad beast, speaking
+soothingly, and calling his name.
+
+The crowd held their breath.  A woman fainted.  Some wrung their hands,
+and Jo Portugais, with blanched face, stood with gun half raised.  With
+assured kindness of voice and manner, Rosalie walked deliberately over to
+the hound.  At first the animal's bristles came up, and he prepared to
+spring, but murmuring to him, she held out her hand, and presently laid
+it on his huge head.  With a growl of subjection, the dog drew from the
+body of his master, and licked Rosalie's fingers as she knelt beside
+Boily and felt his heart.  She put her arm round the dog's neck, and said
+to the crowd, "Some one come--only one--ah, yes, you, Monsieur!" she
+added, as Charley, who had just arrived on the scene, came forward.
+"Only you, if you can lift him.  Take him to my house."
+
+Her arm still round the dog, she talked to him, as Charley came forward,
+and, lifting up the body of the little horse-trainer, drew him across his
+shoulder.  The hound at first resented the act, but under Rosalie's touch
+became quiet, and followed at their heels towards the post-office,
+licking the wounded man's hands as they hung down.  Inside M. Evanturel's
+house the injured man was laid upon a couch.  Charley examined his
+wounds, and, finding them severe, advised that the Cure be sent for,
+while he and Jo Portugais set about restoring him to consciousness.
+Jo had skill of a sort, and his crude medicaments were efficacious.
+
+When the Cure came, the injured man was handed over to his care, and he
+arranged that in the evening Boily should be removed to his house, to
+await the arrival of the doctor from the next parish.
+
+This was Charley's public introduction to the people of Chaudiere, and it
+was his second meeting with Rosalie Evanturel.
+
+The incident brought him into immediate prominence.  Before he left the
+post-office, Filion Lacasse, Maximilian Cour, and Mrs. Flynn had given
+forth his history, as related by Jo Portugais.  The village was agog with
+excitement.
+
+But attention was not centred on himself, for Rosalie's courage had set
+the parish talking.  When the Notary stood on the steps of the saddler's
+shop, and with fine rhetoric proposed a vote of admiration for the girl,
+the cheering could be heard inside the post-office, and it brought Mrs.
+Flynn outside.
+
+"'Tis for her, the darlin'--for Ma'm'selle Rosalie--they're splittin'
+their throats!" she said to Charley as he was making his way from the
+sick man's room to the street door.  "Did ye iver see such an eye an'
+hand?  That avil baste that's killed two Injins already--an' all the men
+o' the place sneakin' behind dures, an' she walkin' up cool as leaf in
+mornin' dew, an' quietin' the divil's own!  Did ye iver see annything
+like it, sir--you that's seen so much?"
+
+"Madame, it is not touch of hand alone, or voice alone," answered
+Charley.
+
+"Shure, 'tis somethin' kin in baste an' maid, you're manin' thin?"
+
+"Quite so, Madame."
+
+"Simple like, an' understandin' what Noah understood in that ark av his
+--for talk to the bastes he must have, explainin' what was for thim to
+do."
+
+"Like that, Madame."
+
+"Thrue for you, sir, 'tis as you say.  There's language more than tongue
+of man can shpake.  But listen, thin, to me"--her voice got lower--
+"for 'tis not the furst time, a thing like that, the lady she is--
+granddaughter of a Seigneur, and descinded from nobility in France!  'Tis
+not the furst time to be doin' brave things.  Just a shlip of a girl she
+was, three years ago, afther her mother died, an' she was back from
+convint.  A woman come to the parish an' was took sick in the house of
+her brother--from France she was.  Small-pox they said at furst.  'Twas
+no small-pox, but plague, got upon the seas.  Alone she was in the house
+--her brother left her alone, the black-hearted coward.  The people
+wouldn't go near the place.  The Cure was away.  Alone the woman was--
+poor soul!  Who wint--who wint and cared for her?  Who do ye think, sir?"
+
+"Mademoiselle?"
+
+"None other.  'Go tell Mrs. Flynn,' says she, 'to care for my father till
+I come back,' an' away she wint to the house of plague.  A week she
+stayed, an' no one wint near her.  Alone she was with the woman and the
+plague.  'Lave her be,' said the Cure when he come back; "tis for the
+love of God.  God is with her--lave her be, and pray for her,' says he.
+An' he wint himself, but she would not let him in.  ''Tis my work,' says
+she.  ''Tis God's work for me to do,' says she.  'An' the woman will live
+if 'tis God's will,' says she.  'There's an agnus dei on her breast,'
+says she.  'Go an' pray,' says she.  Pray the Cure did, an' pray did we
+all, but the woman died of the plague.  All alone did Rosalie draw her to
+the grave on a stone-boat down the lane, an' over the hill, an' into the
+churchyard.  An' buried her with her own hands at night, no one knowin'
+till the mornin', she did.  So it was.  An' the burial over, she wint
+back an' burned the house to the ground--sarve the villain right that
+lave the sick woman alone!  An' her own clothes she burned, an' put on
+the clothes I brought her wid me own hand.  An' for that thing she did,
+the love o' God in her heart, is it for Widdy Flynn or Cure or anny other
+to forgit?  Shure the Cure was for iver broken-hearted, for that he was
+sick abed for days an' could not go to the house when the woman died, an'
+say to Rosalie, 'Let me in for her last hour.'  But the word of Rosalie
+--shure 'twas as good as the words of a praste, savin' the Cure prisince
+wheriver he may be!"
+
+This was the story of Rosalie which Mrs. Flynn told Charley, as he stood
+at the street door of the post-office.  When she had finished, Charley
+went back into the room where Rosalie sat beside the sick man's couch,
+the hound at her feet.  She came forward, surprised, for he had bade her
+good-bye but a few minutes before.
+
+"May I sit and watch for an hour longer, Mademoiselle?" he said.  "You
+will have your duties in the post-office."
+
+"Monsieur--it is good of you," she answered.
+
+For two hours Charley watched her going in and out, whispering directions
+to Mrs. Flynn, doing household duty, bringing warmth in with her, and
+leaving light behind her.
+
+It was afternoon when he returned to his bench in the tailor-shop, and
+was received by old Louis Trudel in peevish silence.  For an hour they
+worked in silence, and then the tailor said:
+
+"A brave girl--that.  We will work till nine to-night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE MARK IN THE PAPER
+
+Chaudiere was nearing the last of its nine-days' wonder.  It had filed
+past the doorway of the tailor-shop; it had loitered on the other side of
+the street; it had been measured for more clothes than in three months
+past--that it might see Charley at work in the shop, cross-legged on a
+bench, or wielding the goose, his eye glass in his eye.  Here was
+sensation indeed, for though old M. Rossignol, the Seigneur, had an eye-
+glass, it was held to his eye--a large bone-bound thing with a little
+gold handle; but no one in Chaudiere had ever worn a glass in his eye
+like that.  Also, no one in Chaudiere had ever looked quite like
+"M'sieu'"--for so it was that, after the first few days (a real tribute
+to his importance and sign of the interest he created) Charley came to be
+called "M'sieu'," and the Mallard was at last entirely dropped.
+
+Presently people came and stood at the tailor's door and talked, or
+listened to Louis Trudel and M'sieu' talking.  And it came to be noised
+abroad that the stranger talked as well as the Cure and better than the
+Notary.  By-and-by they associated his eye-glass with his talent, so that
+it seemed, as it were, to be the cause of it.  Yet their talk was ever of
+simple subjects, of everyday life about them, now and then of politics,
+occasionally of the events of the world filtered to them through vast
+tracts of country.  There was one subject which, however, was barred;
+perhaps because there was knowledge abroad that M'sieu' was not a
+Catholic, perhaps because Charley himself adroitly changed the
+conversation when it veered that way.
+
+Though the parish had not quite made up its mind about him, there were a
+number of things in his favour.  In the first place, the Cure seemed
+satisfied; secondly, he minded his own business.  Also, he was working
+for Louis Trudel for nothing.  These things Jo Portugais diligently
+impressed on the minds of all who would listen.
+
+From above the frosted part of the windows of the post-office, in the
+corner where she sorted letters, Rosalie could look over at the tailor's
+shop at an angle; could sometimes even see M'sieu' standing at the long
+table with a piece of chalk, a pair of shears, or a measure.  She watched
+the tailor-shop herself, but it annoyed her when she saw any one else do
+so.  She resented--she was a woman and loved monopoly--all inquiry
+regarding M'sieu', so frequently addressed to her.
+
+One afternoon, as Charley came out, on his way to the house on Vadrome
+Mountain, she happened to be outside.  He saw her, paused, lifted his fur
+cap, and crossed the street to her.
+
+"Have you, perhaps, paper, pens, and ink for sale, Mademoiselle?"
+
+"Yes, oh yes; come in, Monsieur Mallard."
+
+"Ah, it is nice of you to remember me," he answered.  "I see you every
+day--often," she answered.
+
+"Of course, we are neighbours," he responded.  "The man--the horse-
+trainer--is quite well again?"
+
+"He has gone home almost well," she answered.  She placed pens, paper,
+and ink before him.  "Will these do?"
+
+"Perfectly," he answered mechanically, and laid a few pens and a bottle
+of ink beside the paper.
+
+"You were very brave that day," he said--they had not talked together
+since, though seeing each other so often.
+
+"Oh, no; I knew he would make friends with me--the hound."
+
+"Of course," he rejoined.
+
+"We should show animals that we trust them," she said, in some confusion,
+for being near him made her heart throb painfully.
+
+He did not answer.  Presently his eye glanced at the paper again, and was
+arrested.  He ran his fingers over it, and a curious look flashed across
+his face.  He held the paper up to the light quickly, and looked through
+it.  It was thin, half-foreign paper, without lines, and there was a
+water-mark in it-large, shadowy, filmy--Kathleen.
+
+It was paper made in the mills which had belonged to Kathleen's uncle.
+This water-mark was made to celebrate their marriage-day.  Only for one
+year had this paper been made, and then the trade in it was stopped.  It
+had gone its ways down the channels of commerce, and here it was in his
+hand, a reminder, not only of the old life, but, as it were, the
+parchment for the new.  There it was, a piece of plain good paper, ready
+for pen and ink and his letter to the Cure's brother in Paris--the only
+letter he would ever write, ever again until he died, so he told himself;
+but hold it up to the light and there was the name over which his letter
+must be written--Kathleen, invisible but permanent, obscured, but brought
+to life by the raising of a hand.
+
+The girl caught the flash of feeling in his face, saw him holding the
+paper up to the light, and then, with an abstracted air, calmly lay it
+down.
+
+"That will do, thank you," he said.  "Give me the whole packet."  She
+wrapped it up for him without a word, and he laid down a two-dollar note,
+the last he had in the world.
+
+"How much of this paper have you?" he asked.  The girl looked under the
+counter.  "Six packets," she said.  "Six, and a few sheets over."
+
+"I will take it all.  But keep it for me, for a week, or perhaps a
+fortnight, will you?"  He did not need all this paper to write letters
+upon, yet he meant to buy all the paper of this sort that the shop
+contained.  But he must get money from Louis Trudel--he would speak about
+it to-morrow.
+
+"Monsieur does not want me to sell even the loose sheets?"
+
+"No.  I like the paper, and I will take it all."
+
+"Very good, Monsieur."
+
+Her heart was beating hard.  All this man did had peculiar significance
+to her.  His look seemed to say: "Do not fear.  I will tell you things."
+
+She gave him the parcel and the change, and he turned to go.  "You read
+much?" he asked, almost casually, yet deeply interested in the charm and
+intelligence of her face.
+
+"Why, yes, Monsieur," she answered quickly.  "I am always reading."
+
+He did not speak at once.  He was wondering whether, in this primitive
+place, such a mind and nature would be the wiser for reading; whether it
+were not better to be without a mental aspiration, which might set up
+false standards.
+
+"What are you reading now?" he asked, with his hand on the door.
+
+"Antony and Cleopatra, also Enoch Arden," she answered, in good English,
+and without accent.
+
+His head turned quickly towards her, but he did not speak.
+
+"Enoch Arden is terrible," she added eagerly.  "Don't you think so,
+Monsieur?"
+
+"It is very painful," he answered.  "Good-night."  He opened the door and
+went out.
+
+She ran to the door and watched him go down the street.  For a little she
+stood thinking, then, turning to the counter, and snatching up a sheet of
+the paper he had bought, held it up to the light.  She gave a cry of
+amazement.
+
+"Kathleen!" she exclaimed.
+
+She thought of the start he gave when he looked at the water-mark; she
+thought of the look on his face when he said he would buy all this paper
+she had.
+
+"Who was Kathleen?" she whispered, as though she was afraid some one
+would hear.  "Who was Kathleen!" she said again resentfully.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+MADAME DAUPHIN HAS A MISSION
+
+One day Charley began to know the gossip of the village about him from a
+source less friendly than Jo Portugais.  The Notary's wife, bringing her
+boy to be measured for a suit of broadcloth, asked Charley if the things
+Jo had told about him were true, and if it was also true that he was a
+Protestant, and perhaps an Englishman.  As yet, Charley had been asked
+no direct questions, for the people of Chaudiere had the consideration
+of their temperament; but the Notary's wife was half English, and being
+a figure in the place, she took to herself more privileges than did old
+Madame Dugal, the Cure's sister.
+
+To her ill-disguised impertinence in English, as bad as her French and as
+fluent, Charley listened with quiet interest.  When she had finished her
+voluble statement she said, with a simper and a sneer-for, after all, a
+Notary's wife must keep her position--"And now, what is the truth about
+it?  And are you a Protestant?"
+
+There was a sinister look in old Trudel's eyes as, cross-legged on his
+table, he listened to Madame Dauphin.  He remembered the time, twenty-
+five years ago, when he had proposed to this babbling woman, and had been
+rejected with scorn--to his subsequent satisfaction; for there was no
+visible reason why any one should envy the Notary, in his house or out of
+it.  Already Trudel had a respect for the tongue of M'sieu'.  He had not
+talked much the few days he had been in the shop, but, as the old man had
+said to Filion Lacasse the saddler, his brain was like a pair of shears--
+it went clip, clip, clip right through everything.  He now hoped that his
+new apprentice, with the hand of a master-workman, would go clip, clip
+through madame's inquisitiveness.  He was not disappointed, for he heard
+Charley say:
+
+"One person in the witness-box at a time, Madame.  Till Jo Portugais is
+cross-examined and steps down, I don't see what I can do!"
+
+"But you are a Protestant!" said the woman snappishly.  This man was
+only a tailor, dressed in fulled cloth, and no doubt his past life would
+not bear inspection; and she was the Notary's wife, and had said to
+people in the village that she would find out the man's history from
+himself.
+
+"That is one good reason why I should not go to confession," he replied
+casually, and turned to a table where he had been cutting a waistcoat--
+for the first time in his life.
+
+"Do you think I'm going to stand your impertinence?  Do you know who I
+am?"
+
+Charley calmly put up his monocle.  He looked at the foolish little woman
+with so cruel a flash of the eye that she shrank back.
+
+"I should know you anywhere," he said.
+
+"Come, Stephan," she said nervously to her boy, and pulled him towards
+the door.
+
+On the instant Charley's feeling changed.  Was he then going to carry the
+old life into the new, and rebuke a silly garish woman whose faults were
+generic more than personal?  He hurried forward to the door and
+courteously opened it for her.
+
+"Permit me, Madame," he said.
+
+She saw that there was nothing ironical in this politeness.  She had a
+sudden apprehension of an unusual quality called "the genteel," for no
+storekeeper in Chaudiere ever opened or shut a shop-door for anybody.
+She smiled a vacuous smile; she played "the lady" terribly, as, with a
+curious conception of dignity, she held her body stiff as a ramrod, and
+with a prim merci sailed into the street.
+
+This gorgeous exit changed her opinion of the man she had been unable to
+catechise.  Undoubtedly he had snubbed her--that was the word she used in
+her mind--but his last act had enabled her, in the sight of several
+habitants and even of Madame Dugal, "to put on airs," as the charming
+Madame Dugal said afterwards.
+
+Thinking it better to give the impression that she had had a successful
+interview, she shook her head mysteriously when asked about M'sieu', and
+murmured, "He is quite the gentleman!" which she thought a socially
+distinguished remark.
+
+When she had gone, Charley turned to old Louis.
+
+"I don't want to turn your customers away," he said quietly, "but there
+it is!  I don't need to answer questions as a part of the business, do
+I?"
+
+There was a sour grin on the face of old Trudel.  He grunted some
+inaudible answer, then, after a pause, added: "I'd have been hung for
+murder, if she'd answered the question I asked her once as I wanted her
+to."
+
+He opened and shut his shears with a sardonic gesture.
+
+Charley smiled, and went to the window.  For a minute he stood watching
+Madame Dauphin and Rosalie at the post-office door.  The memory of his
+talk with Rosalie was vivid to him at the moment.  He was thinking also
+that he had not a penny in the world to pay for the rest of the paper he
+had bought.  He turned round and put on his coat slowly.
+
+"What are you doing that for?" asked the old man, with a kind of snarl,
+yet with trepidation.
+
+"I don't think I'll work any more to-day."
+
+"Not work!  Smoke of the devil, isn't Sunday enough to play in?  You're
+not put out by that fool wife of Dauphin's?"
+
+"Oh no--not that!  I want an understanding about wages."
+
+To Louis the dread crisis had come.  He turned a little green, for he was
+very miserly-for the love of God.
+
+He had scarcely realised what was happening when Charley first sat down
+on the bench beside him.  He had been taken by surprise.  Apart from the
+excitement of the new experience, he had profited by the curiosity of the
+public, for he had orders enough to keep him busy until summer, and he
+had had to give out work to two extra women in the parish, though he had
+never before had more than one working for him.  But his ruling passion
+was strong in him.  He always remembered with satisfaction that once when
+the Cure was absent and he was supposed to be dying, a priest from
+another parish came, and, the ministrations over, he had made an offering
+of a gold piece.  When the young priest hesitated, his fingers had crept
+back to the gold piece, closed on it, and drawn it back beneath the
+coverlet again.  He had then peacefully fallen asleep.  It was a gracious
+memory.
+
+"I don't need much, I don't want a great deal," continued Charley when
+the tailor did not answer, "but I have to pay for my bed and board, and I
+can't do it on nothing."
+
+"How have you done it so far?" peevishly replied the tailor.
+
+"By working after hours at carpentering up there"--he made a gesture
+towards Vadrome Mountain.  "But I can't go on doing that all the time,
+or I'll be like you too soon."
+
+"Be like me!"  The voice of the tailor rose shrilly.
+
+"Be like me!  What's the matter with me?"
+
+"Only that you're in a bad way before your time, and that you mayn't get
+out of this hole without stepping into another.  You work too hard,
+Monsieur Trudel."
+
+"What do you want--wages?"
+
+Charley inclined his head.  "If you think I'm worth them."
+
+The tailor viciously snipped a piece of cloth.  "How can I pay you wages,
+if you stand there doing nothing?"  "This is my day for doing nothing,"
+Charley answered pleasantly, for the tailor-man amused him, and the
+whimsical mental attitude of his past life was being brought to the
+surface by this odd figure, with big spectacles pushed up on a yellow
+forehead, and shrunken hands viciously clutching the shears.
+
+"You don't mean to say you're not going to work to-day, and this suit of
+clothes promised for to-morrow night--for the Manor House too!"
+
+With a piece of chalk Charley idly made heads on brown paper.  "After
+all, why should clothes be the first thing in one's mind--when they are
+some one else's!  It's a beautiful day outside.  I've never felt the sun
+so warm and the air so crisp and sweet--never in all my life."
+
+"Then where have you lived?" snapped out the tailor with a sneer.
+"You must be a Yankee--they have only what we leave over down there!"
+--he jerked his head southward.  "We don't stop to look at weather here.
+I suppose you did where you come from?"
+
+Charley smiled in a distant sort of way.  "Where I came from, when we
+weren't paid for our work we always stopped to consider our health--and
+the weather.  I don't want a great deal.  I put it to you honestly.  Do
+you want me?  If you do, will you give me enough to live on--enough to
+buy a suit of clothes a year, to pay for food and a room?  If I work for
+you for nothing, I have to live on others for nothing, or kill myself as
+you're doing."
+
+There was no answer at once, and Charley went on: "I came to you because
+I saw you wanted help badly.  I saw that you were hard-pushed and sick--"
+
+"I wasn't sick," interrupted the tailor with a snarl.
+
+"Well, overworked, which is the same thing in the end.  I did the best I
+could: I gave you my hands--awkward enough they were at first, I know,
+but--"
+
+"It's a lie.  They weren't awkward," churlishly cut in the tailor.
+
+"Well, perhaps they weren't so awkward, but they didn't know quite what
+to do--"
+
+"You knew as well as if you'd been taught," came back in a growl.
+
+"Well, then, I wasn't awkward, and I had a knack for the work.  What was
+more, I wanted work.  I wanted to work at the first thing that appealed
+to me.  I had no particular fancy for tailoring--you get bowlegged in
+time!"--the old spirit was fighting with the new--"but here you were at
+work, and there I was idle, and I had been ill, and some one who wasn't
+responsible for me--a stranger-worked for me and cared for me.  Wasn't it
+natural, when you were playing the devil with yourself, that I should
+step in and give you a hand?  You've been better since--isn't that so?"
+The tailor did not answer.
+
+"But I can't go on as we are, though I want only enough to keep me
+going," Charley continued.
+
+"And if I don't give you what you want, you'll leave?"
+
+"No.  I'm never going to leave you.  I'm going to stay here, for you'll
+never get another man so cheap; and it suits me to stay--you need some
+one to look after you."
+
+A curious soft look suddenly flashed into the tailor's eyes.
+
+"Will you take on the business after I'm gone?" he asked at last.
+"It's along time to look ahead, I know," he added quickly, for not in
+words would he acknowledge the possibility of the end.
+
+"I should think so," Charley answered, his eyes on the bright sun and the
+soft snow on the trees beyond the window.
+
+The tailor snatched up a pattern and figured on it for a moment.
+Then he handed it to Charley.  "Will that do?" he asked with anxious,
+acquisitive look, his yellow eyes blinking hard.
+
+Charley looked at it musingly, then said "Yes, if you give me a room
+here."
+
+"I meant board and lodging too," said Louis Trudel with an outburst of
+eager generosity, for, as it was, he had offered about one-half of what
+Charley was worth to him.
+
+Charley nodded.  "Very well, that will do," he said, and took off his
+coat and went to work.  For a long time they worked silently.  The tailor
+was in great good-humour; for the terrible trial was over, and he now had
+an assistant who would be a better tailor than himself.  There would be
+more profit, more silver nails for the church door, and more masses for
+his soul.
+
+"The Cure says you are all right.  .  .  .  When will you come here?" he
+said at last.
+
+"To-morrow night I shall sleep here," answered Charley.
+
+So it was arranged that Charley should come to live in the tailor's
+house, to sleep in the room which the tailor had provided for a wife
+twenty-five years before--even for her that was now known as Madame
+Dauphin.
+
+All morning the tailor chuckled to himself.  When they sat down at noon
+to a piece of venison which Charley had prepared himself--taking the
+frying-pan out of the hands of Margot Patry, the old servant, and cooking
+it to a turn--Louis Trudel saw his years lengthen to an indefinite
+period.  He even allowed himself to nervously stand up, bow, shake
+Charley's hand jerkingly, and say:
+
+"M'sieu', I care not what you are or where you come from, or even if
+you're a Protestant, perhaps an Englishman.  You're a gentleman and a
+tailor, and old Louis Trudel will not forget you.  It shall be as you
+said this morning--it is no day for work.  We will play, and the clothes
+for the Manor can go to the devil.  Smoke of hell-fire, I will go and
+have a pipe with that, poor wretch the Notary!"
+
+So, a wonderful thing happened.  Louis Trudel, on a week-day and a
+market-day, went to smoke a pipe with Narcisse Dauphin, and to tell him
+that M. Mallard was going to stay with him for ever, at fine wages.  He
+also announced that he had paid this whole week's wages in advance; but
+he did not tell what he did not know--that half the money had already
+been given to old Margot, whose son lay ill at home with a broken leg,
+and whose children were living on bread and water.  Charley had slowly
+drawn from the woman the story of her life as he sat by the kitchen fire
+and talked to her, while her master was talking to the Notary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE TAILOR MAKES A MIDNIGHT FORAY
+
+Since the day Charley had brought home the paper bought at the post-
+office, and water-marked Kathleen, he had, at odd times, written down
+his thoughts, and promptly torn the paper up again or put it in the fire.
+In the repression of the new life, in which he must live wholly alone, so
+far as all past habits of mind were concerned, it was a relief to record
+his passing reflections, as he had been wont to do when the necessity for
+it was less.  Writing them here was like the bursting of an imprisoned
+stream; it was relaxing the ceaseless eye of vigilance; freeing an
+imprisoned personality.  This personality was not yet merged into that
+which must take its place, must express itself in the involuntary acts
+which tell of a habit of mind and body--no longer the imitative and the
+histrionic, but the inherent and the real.
+
+On the afternoon of the day that old Louis agreed to give him wages, and
+went to smoke a pipe with the Notary, Charley scribbled down his thoughts
+on this matter of personality and habit.
+
+"Who knows," he wrote, "which is the real self?  A child comes into the
+world gin-begotten, with the instinct for liquor in his brain, like the
+scent of the fox in the nostrils of the hound.  And that seems the real.
+But the same child caught up on the hands of chance is carried into
+another atmosphere, is cared for by ginhating minds and hearts: habit
+fastens on him--fair, decent, and temperate habit--and he grows up like
+the Cure yonder, a brother of Aaron.  Which is the real?  Is the instinct
+for the gin killed, or covered?  Is the habit of good living mere habit
+and mere acting, in which the real man never lives his real life, or is
+it the real life?
+
+"Who knows!  Here am I, born with a question in my mouth, with the ever-
+present 'non possumus' in me.  Here am I, to whom life was one poor
+futility; to whom brain was but animal intelligence abnormally developed;
+to whom speechless sensibility and intelligence was the only reality; to
+whom nothing from beyond ever sent a flash of conviction, an intimation,
+into my soul--not one.  To me God always seemed a being of dreams, the
+creation of a personal need and helplessness, the despairing cry of the
+victims of futility--And here am I flung like a stone from a sling into
+this field where men believe in God as a present and tangible being; who
+reply to all life's agonies and joys and exultations with the words
+'C'est le bon Dieu.' And what shall I become?  Will habit do its work,
+and shall I cease to be me?  Shall I, in the permanency of habit, become
+like unto this tailor here, whose life narrows into one sole cause; whose
+only wish is to have the Church draw the coverlet of forgiveness and
+safety over him; who has solved all questions in a blind belief or an
+inherited predisposition--which?  This stingy, hard, unhappy man--how
+should he know what I am denied!  Or does he know?  Is it all illusion?
+If there is a God who receives such devotion, to the exclusion of natural
+demand and spiritual anxieties, why does not this tailor 'let his light
+so shine before men that they may see his good works, and glorify his
+Father which is in heaven?' That is it.  Therefore, wherefore, tailor-
+man?  Therefore, wherefore, God?  Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-
+man!"
+
+Seated on his bench in the shop, with his eyes ever and anon raised
+towards the little post-office opposite, he wrote these words.
+Afterwards he sat and thought till the shadows deepened, and the tailor
+came in to supper.  Then he took up the pieces of paper, and, going to
+the fire, which was still lighted of an evening, thrust them inside.
+
+Louis Trudel saw the paper burning, and, glancing down, he noticed that
+one piece--the last--had slipped to the floor and was lying under the
+table.  He saw the pencil still in Charley's hand.  Forthwith his natural
+suspicion leaped up, and the cunning of the monomaniac was upon him.
+With all his belief in le bon Dieu and the Church, Louis Trudel trusted
+no one.  One eye was ever open to distrust man, while the other was ever
+closed with blind belief in Heaven.
+
+As Charley stooped to put wood in the fire, the tailor thrust a foot
+forward and pushed the piece of paper further under the table.
+
+That night the tailor crept down into the shop, felt for the paper in the
+dark, found it, and carried it away to his room.  All kinds of thoughts
+had raged through his diseased mind.  It was a letter, perhaps, and if a
+letter, then he would gain some facts about the man's life.  But if it
+was a letter, why did he burn it?  It was said that he never received a
+letter and never sent one, therefore it was little likely to be a letter.
+if not a letter, then what could it be?  Perhaps the man was English and
+a spy of the English government, for was there not disaffection in some
+of the parishes?  Perhaps it was a plan of robbery.  To such a state of
+hallucination did his weakened mind come, that he forgot the kindly
+feeling he had had for this stranger who had worked for him without pay.
+Suspicion, the bane of sick old age, was hot on him.  He remembered that
+M'sieu' had put an arm through his when they went upstairs, and that now
+increased suspicion.  Why should the man have been so friendly?  To lull
+him into confidence, perhaps, and then to rob and murder him in his
+sleep.  Thank God, his ready money was well hid, and the rest was safe in
+the bank far away!  He crept back to his room with the paper in his hand.
+It was the last sheet of what Charley had written, and had been
+accidentally brushed off on the floor.  It was in French, and, holding
+the candle close, he slowly deciphered the crabbed, characteristic
+handwriting.
+
+His eyes dilated, his yellow cheeks took on spots of unhealthy red, his
+hand trembled.  Anger seized him, and he mumbled the words over and over
+again to himself.  Twice or thrice, as the paper lay in one hand, he
+struck it with the clinched fist of the other, muttering and distraught.
+
+"This tailor here.  .  .  .  This stingy, hard, unhappy man.  .  .  .  If
+there is a God!  .  .  .  Therefore, wherefore, tailor-man?  .  .  .
+Therefore, wherefore, God?  .  .  .  Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-
+man!"
+
+Hatred of himself, blasphemy, the profane and hellish humour of--of the
+infidel!  A Protestant heretic--he was already damned; a robber--you
+could put him in jail; a spy--you could shoot him or tar and feather him;
+a murderer--you could hang him.  But an infide--this was a deadly poison,
+a black danger, a being capable of all crimes.  An infidel--"Therefore,
+wherefore, tailor-man?  .  .  .  Therefore, wherefore, God?  .  .  .
+Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!"
+
+The devil laughing--the devil incarnate come to mock a poor tailor, to
+sow plague through a parish where all were at peace in the bosom of the
+Church.  The tailor had three ruling passions--cupidity, vanity, and
+religion.  Charley had now touched the three, and the whole man was
+alive.  His cupidity had been flattered by the unpaid service of a
+capable assistant, but now he saw that he was paying the devil a wage.
+His vanity was overwhelmed by a satanic ridicule.  His religion and his
+God had been assaulted in so shameful a way that no punishment could be
+great enough for the man of hell.  In religion he was a fanatic; he was a
+demented fanatic now.
+
+He thrust the paper into his pocket, then crept out into the hall and to
+the door of Charley's bedroom.  He put his ear to the door.  After a
+moment he softly raised the latch, and opened the door and listened
+again.  'M'sieu' was in a deep sleep.
+
+Louis Trudel scarcely knew why he had listened, why he had opened the
+door and stood looking at the figure in the bed, barely definable in the
+semi-darkness of the room.  If he had meant harm to the helpless man, he
+had brought no weapon; if he had been curious, there the man was
+peacefully sleeping!
+
+His sick, morbid imagination was so alive, that he scarcely knew what he
+did.  As he stood there listening, hatred and horror in his heart, a
+voice said to him: "Thou shalt do no murder."  The words kept ringing in
+his ears.  Yet he had not thought of murder.  The fancied command itself
+was his first temptation towards such a deed.  He had thought of raising
+the parish, of condign punishment of many sorts, but not this.  As he
+closed the door softly, killing entered his mind and stayed there.  "Thou
+shalt not" had been the first instigation to "Thou shalt."
+
+It haunted him as he returned to his room, undressed himself, and went
+to bed.  He could not sleep.  "Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!"
+The challenge had been to himself.  He must respond to it.  The duty lay
+with him; he must answer this black infidel for the Church, for faith,
+for God.
+
+The more he thought of it, the more Charley's face came before him, with
+the monocle shining and hard in the eye.  The monocle haunted him.  That
+was the infidel's sign.  "Show me a sign from Heaven, tailor-man!"  What
+sign should he show?
+
+Presently he sat up straight in bed.  In another minute he was out and
+dressing.  Five minutes later he was on his way to the parish church.
+When he reached it he took a tool from his pocket and unscrewed a small
+iron cross from the front door.  It was a cross which had been blessed by
+the Pope, and had been brought to Chaudiere by the beloved mother of the
+Cure, now dead.
+
+"When I have done with it I will put it back," he said, as he thrust it
+inside his shirt, and hurried stealthily back to his house.  As he got
+into bed he gave a noiseless, mirthless laugh.  All night he lay with his
+yellow eyes wide open, gazing at the ceiling.  He was up at dawn,
+hovering about the fire in the shop.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE STEALING OF THE CROSS
+
+If Charley had been less engaged with his own thoughts, he would have
+noticed the curious baleful look in the eyes of the tailor; but he was
+deeply absorbed in a struggle that had nothing to do with Louis Trudel.
+
+The old fever of thirst and desire was upon him.  All morning the door of
+Jolicoeur's saloon was opening and shutting before his mind's eye, and
+there was a smell of liquor everywhere.  It was in his nostrils when the
+hot steam rose from the clothes he was pressing, in the thick odour of
+the fulled cloth, in the melting snow outside the door.
+
+Time and again he felt that he must run out of the shop and away to the
+little tavern where white whiskey was sold to unwise habitants.  But he
+fought on.  Here was the heritage of his past, the lengthening chain of
+slavery to his old self--was it his real self?  Here was what would
+prevent him from forgetting all that he had been and not been, all the
+happiness he might have had, all that he had lost--the ceaseless
+reminder.  He was still the victim to a poison which gave not only a
+struggle of body, but a struggle of soul--if he had a soul.
+
+"If he had a soul!"  The phrase kept repeating itself to him even as he
+fought the fever in his throat, resisting the temptation to take that
+medicine which the Curb's brother had sent him.
+
+"If he had a soul!"  The thinking served as an antidote, for by the
+ceaseless iteration his mind was lulled into a kind of drowse.  Again and
+again he went to the pail of water that stood on the window-sill, and
+lifting it to his lips, drank deep and full, to quench the wearing
+thirst.
+
+"If he had a soul!"  He looked at Louis Trudel, silent and morose, the
+clammy yellow of a great sickness in his face and hands, but his mind
+only intent on making a waistcoat--and the end of all things very near!
+The words he had written the night before came to him: "Therefore,
+wherefore, tailor-man?  Therefore, wherefore, God?  .  .  .  Show me a
+sign from Heaven, tailor-man!"  As if in reply to his thoughts there came
+the sound of singing, and of bells ringing in the parish church.
+
+A procession with banners was coming near.  It was a holy day, and
+Chaudiere was mindful of its duties.  The wanderers of the parish had
+come home for Easter.  All who belonged to Chaudiere and worked in the
+woods or shanties, or lived in big cities far away, were returned--those
+who could return--to take the holy communion in the parish church.
+Yesterday the parish had been alive with a pious hilarity.  The great
+church had been crowded beyond the doors, the streets had been full of
+cheerily dressed habitants.  There had, however, come a sudden chill to
+the seemly rejoicings--the little iron cross blessed by the Pope had been
+stolen from the door of the church!
+
+The fact had been told to the Cure as he said the Mass, and from the
+altar steps, before going to the pulpit, he referred to the robbery with
+poignant feeling; for the relic had belonged to a martyr of the Church,
+who, two centuries before, had laid down his life for the Master on the
+coast of Africa.
+
+Louis Trudel had heard the Cure's words, and in his place at the rear of
+the church he smiled sourly to himself.  In due time the little cross
+should be returned, but it had work to do first.  He did not take the
+holy communion this Easter day, or go to confession as was his wont.
+Not, however, until a certain day later did the Cure realise this, though
+for thirty years the tailor had never omitted his Easter-time duties.
+
+The people guessed and guessed, but they knew not on whom to cast
+suspicion at first.  No sane Catholic of Chaudiere could possibly have
+taken the holy thing.  Presently a murmur crept about that M'sieu' might
+have been the thief.  He was not a Catholic, and--who could tell?  Who
+knew where he came from?  Who knew what he had been?  Perhaps a jail-
+bird-robber-murderer!  Charley, however, stitched on, intent upon his own
+struggle.
+
+The procession passed the doorway: men bearing banners with sacred texts,
+acolytes swinging censers, a figure of the Saviour carved in wood borne
+aloft, the Cure under a silk canopy, and a long line of habitants
+following with sacred song.  People fell upon their knees in the street
+as the procession passed, and the Cure's face was bent here and there,
+his hand raised in blessing.
+
+Old Louis got up from his bench, and, putting on a coat over his wool
+jacket, hastened to the doorway, knelt down, made the sign of the cross,
+and said a prayer.  Then he turned quickly towards Charley, who, looking
+at the procession, then at the tailor, then back again at the procession,
+smiled.
+
+Charley was hardly conscious of what he did.  His mind had ranged far
+beyond this scene to the large issues which these symbols represented.
+Was it one universal self-deception?  Was this "religion" the pathetic,
+the soul-breaking make-believe of mortality?  So he smiled--at himself,
+at his own soul, which seemed alone in this play, the skeleton in armour,
+the thing that did not belong.  His own words written that fateful day
+before he died at the Cote Dorion came to him:
+
+"Sacristan, acolyte, player, or preacher, Each to his office, but who
+holds the key?  Death, only Death, thou, the ultimate teacher, Wilt show
+it to me!"
+
+He was suddenly startled from his reverie, through which the procession
+was moving--a cloud of witnesses.  It was the voice of Louis Trudel,
+sharp and piercing:
+
+"Don't you believe in God and the Son of God?"
+
+"God knows!" answered Charley slowly in reply--an involuntary
+exclamation of helplessness, an automatic phrase deflected from its first
+significance to meet a casual need of the mind.  Yet it seemed like
+satire, like a sardonic, even vulgar, humour.  So it struck Louis Trudel,
+who snatched up a hot iron from the fire and rushed forward with a snarl.
+So astounded was Charley that he did not stir.  He was not prepared for
+the sudden onslaught.  He did not put up his hand even, but stared at the
+tailor, who, within a foot of him, stopped short with the iron poised.
+
+Louis Trudel repented in time.  With the cunning of the monomaniac he
+realised that an attack now might frustrate his great stroke.  It would
+bring the village to his shop door, precipitate the crisis upon the wrong
+incident.
+
+As it chanced, only one person in Chaudiere saw the act.  That was
+Rosalie Evanturel across the way.  She saw the iron raised, and looked
+for M'sieu' to knock the tailor down; but, instead, she beheld the tailor
+go back and put the iron on the fire again.  She saw also that M'sieu'
+was speaking, though she could hear no words.
+
+Charley's words were simple enough.  "I beg your pardon, Monsieur," he
+said across the room to old Louis; "I meant no offence at all.  I was
+trying to think it out in a human sort of way.  I suppose I wanted a sign
+from Heaven--wanted too much, no doubt."
+
+The tailor's lips twitched, and his hand convulsively clutched the shears
+at his side.
+
+"It is no matter now," he answered shortly.  "I have had signs from
+Heaven; perhaps you will have one too!"
+
+"It would be worth while," rejoined Charley musingly.  Charley wondered
+bitterly if he had made an irreparable error in saying those ill-chosen
+words.  This might mean a breach between them, and so make his position
+in the parish untenable.  He had no wish to go elsewhere--where could he
+go?  It mattered little what he was, tinker or tailor.  He had now only
+to work his way back to the mind of the peasant; to be an animal with
+intelligence; to get close to mother earth, and move down the declivity
+of life with what natural wisdom were possible.  It was his duty to adapt
+himself to the mind of such as this tailor; to acquire what the tailor
+and his like had found--an intolerant belief and an inexpensive security,
+to be got through yielding his nature to the great religious dream.  And
+what perfect tranquillity, what smooth travelling found therein.
+
+Gazing across the street towards the little post-office, he saw Rosalie
+Evanturel at the window.  He fell to thinking about her.  Rosalie, on her
+part, kept wondering what old Louis' violence meant.
+
+Presently she saw a half-dozen men come quickly down the street, and,
+before they reached the tailorshop, stand in a group talking excitedly.
+Afterwards one came forward from the others quickly--Filion Lacasse the
+saddler.  He stopped short at the tailor's door.  Looking at Charley, he
+exclaimed roughly:
+
+"If you don't hand out the cross you stole from the church door, we'll
+tar and feather you, M'sieu'."  Charley looked up, surprised.  It had
+never occurred to him that they could associate him with the theft.
+"I know nothing of the cross," he said quietly.  "You're the only heretic
+in the place.  You've done it.  Who are you?  What are you doing here in
+Chaudiere?"
+
+"Working at my trade," was Charley's quiet answer.  He looked towards
+Louis Trudel, as though to see how he took this ugly charge.
+
+Old Louis responded at once.  "Get away with you, Filion Lacasse," he
+croaked.  "Don't come here with your twaddle.  M'sieu' hasn't stole the
+cross.  What does he want with a cross?  He's not a Catholic."
+
+"If he didn't steal the cross, why, he didn't," answered the saddler;
+"but if he did, what'll you say for yourself, Louis?  You call yourself a
+good Catholic--bah!--when you've got a heretic living with you."
+
+"What's that to you?" growled the tailor, and reached out a nervous hand
+towards the iron.  "I served at the altar before you were born.  Sacre!
+I'll make your grave-clothes yet, and be a good Catholic when you're in
+the churchyard.  Be off with you.  Ach," he sharply added, when Filion
+did not move, "I'll cut your hair for you!"  He scrambled off the bench
+with his shears.
+
+Filion Lacasse disappeared with his friends, and the old man settled back
+on his bench.
+
+Charley, looking up quietly from his work, said "Thank you, Monsieur."
+
+He did not notice what an evil look was in Louis Trudel's face as it
+turned towards him, but Rosalie Evanturel, standing outside, saw it; and
+she stole back to the post-office ill at ease and wondering.
+
+All that day she watched the tailor's shop, and even when the door was
+shut in the evening, her eyes were fastened on the windows.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Is the habit of good living mere habit and mere acting
+Suspicion, the bane of sick old age
+
+
+
+
+
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