The Right of Way Part 51

And the Lord G.o.d called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You do--oh, you do believe in G.o.d," she cried pa.s.sionately.

"Rosalie--my life," he urged, hoa.r.s.e misery in his voice, "the only thing I have to give you is the bare soul of a truthful man--I am that now at least. You have made me so. If I deceived the whole world, if I was as the thief upon the cross, I should still be truthful to you. You open your heart to me--let me open mine to you, to see it as it is.

Once my soul was like a watch, cased and carried in the pocket of life, uncertain, untrue, because it was a soul made, not born. I must look at the hands to know the time, and because it varied, because the working did not answer to the absolute, I said: 'The soul is a lie.' You--you have changed all that, Rosalie. My soul now is like a dial to the sun.

But the clouds are there above, and I do not know what time it is in life. When the clouds break--if they ever break--and the sun s.h.i.+nes, the dial will speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth--"

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

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

"I do not understand you," she cried, with flas.h.i.+ng eyes. "One minute you say you do not believe in anything, and the next you say, 'So help me G.o.d!'"

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

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

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

That she had spoken to him as her deepest heart abhorred only increased her agitated denunciation. "Yes, yes, in your mad selfishness, you did not care for the poor girl who forgot all, lost all, and now--"

She stopped short at the sight of his white, awe stricken face. His eye-gla.s.s seemed like a frost of death over an eye that looked upon some shocking scene of woe. Yet he appeared not to see, for his fingers fumbled on his waistcoat for the monocle--fumbled--vaguely, helplessly.

It was the realisation of a soul cast into the outer darkness. Her abrupt silence came upon him like the last engulfing wave to a drowning man--the final a.s.surance of the end, in which there is quiet and the deadly smother.

"Now--I know-the truth!" he said, in a curious even tone, different from any she had ever heard from him. It was the old Charley Steele who spoke, the Charley Steele in whom the intellect was supreme once more.

The judicial spirit, the inveterate intelligence which put justice before all, was alive in him, almost rejoicing in its regained governance. The new Charley was as dead as the old had been of late, and this clarifying moment left the grim impression behind that the old law was not obsolete. He felt that in the abandonment of her indignation she had mercilessly told the truth; and the irreducible quality of mind in him which in the old days made for justice, approved. There was a new element now, however--that conscience which never possessed him fully until the day he saw Rosalie go travelling over the hills with her crippled father. That picture of the girl against the twilight, her figure silhouetted in the clear air, had come to him in sleeping and waking dreams, the type and sign of an everlasting melancholy. As he looked at her blindly now, he saw, not herself, but that melancholy figure. Out of the distance his own voice said again:

"Now--I know-the truth!"

She had struck with a violence she did not intend, which, she knew, must rend her own heart in the future, which put in the dice-box the last hopes she had. But she could not have helped it--she could not have stayed the words, though a suspended sword were to fall with the saying. It was the cry of tradition and religion, and every home-bred, convent-nurtured habit, the instinct of heredity, the wail of woman, for whom destiny, or man, or nature, has arranged the disproportionate share of life's penalties. It was the impotent rebellion against the first curse, that man in his punishment should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow--which he might do with joy--while the woman must work out her ordained sentence "in sorrow all the days of her life."

In her bitter words was the inherent revolt of the race of woman. But now she suddenly felt that she had flung him an infinite distance from her; that she had struck at the thing she most cherished--his belief that she loved him; that even if she had told the truth--and she felt she had not--it was not the truth she wished him most to feel.

For an instant she stood looking at him, shocked and confounded, then her changeless love rushed back on her, the maternal and protective spirit welled up, and with a pa.s.sionate cry she threw herself in the chair again in very weakness, with outstretched hands, saying:

"Forgive me--oh, forgive me! I did not mean it--oh, forgive your Rosalie!"

Stooping over her, he answered:

"It is good for me to know the whole truth. What hurts you may give me will pa.s.s--for life must end, and my life cannot be long enough to pay the price of the hurts I have given you. I could bear a thousand--one for every hour--if they could bring back the light to your eye, the joy to your heart. Could prayer, do you think, make me sorrier than I am? I have hurt what I would have spared from hurt at the cost of my life--and all the lives in all the world!" he added fiercely.

"Forgive me--oh, forgive your Rosalie!" she pleaded. "I did not know what I was saying--I was mad."

"It was all so sane and true," he said, like one who, on the brink of death, finds a satisfaction in speaking the perfect truth. "I am glad to hear the truth--I have been such a liar."

She looked up startled, her tears blinding her. "You have not deceived me?" she asked bitterly. "Oh, you have not deceived me--you have loved me, have you not?" It was that which mattered, that only. Moveless and eager, she looked--looked at him, waiting, as it were, for sentence.

"I never lied to you, Rosalie--never!" he answered, and he touched her hand.

She gave a moan of relief at his words. "Oh, then, oh, then... " she said, in a low voice, and the tears in her eyes dried away.

"I meant that until I knew you, I kept deceiving myself and others all my life--"

"But without knowing it?" she said eagerly.

"Perhaps, without quite knowing it."

"Until you knew me?" she asked, in quick, quivering tones.

"Till I knew you," he answered.

"Then I have done you good--not ill?" she asked, with painful breathlessness.

"The only good there may be in me is you, and you only," he said, and he choked something rising in his throat, seeing the greatness of her heart, her dear desire to have entered into his life to his own good. He would have said that there was no good in him at all, but that he wished to comfort her.

A little cry of joy broke from her lips. "Oh, that--that!" she cried, with happy tears. "Won't you kiss me now?" she added softly.

He clasped her in his arms, and though his eyes were dry, his heart wept tears of blood.

CHAPTER LII. THE COMING OF BILLY

Chaudiere had made--and lost--a reputation. The Pa.s.sion Play in the valley had become known to a whole country--to the Cure's and the Seigneur's unavailing regret. They had meant to revive the great story for their own people and the Indians--a homely, beautiful object-lesson, in an Eden--like innocence and quiet and repose; but behold the world had invaded them! The vanity of the Notary had undone them. He had written to the great papers of the province, telling of the advent of the play, and pilgrimages had been organised, and excursions had been made to the spot, where a simple people had achieved a crude but n.o.ble picture of the life and death of the Hero of Christendom. The Cure viewed with consternation the invasion of their quiet. It was no longer his own Chaudiere; and when, on a Sunday, his dear people were jostled from the church to make room for strangers, his gentle eloquence seemed to forsake him, he spoke haltingly, and his intoning of the Ma.s.s lacked the old soothing simplicity.

"Ah, my dear Seigneur!" he said, on the Sunday before the playing was to end, "we have overshot the mark."

The Seigneur nodded and turned his head away. "There is an English play which says, 'I have shot mine arrow o'er the house and hurt my brother.'

That's it--that's it! We began with religion, and we end with greed, and pride, and notoriety."

"What do we want of fame! The price is too high, Maurice. Fame is not good for the hearts and minds of simple folk."

"It will soon be over."

"I dread a sordid reaction."