A CONCERT DE LUXE
"----Consumed
And vexed and chafed by levity and scorn,
And fruitless indignation, galled by pride,
Made desperate by contempt."
Ringfield, who had confessed to a fixed and abiding ignorance of the
stage, was also ignorant of music, except so far as he could recognize
a few patriotic airs and old-country ballads. Of church music there
was nothing worth speaking of or listening to in the Methodist
conventicles of those days, so that he brought an absolutely open mind
to a consideration of Miss Clairville's voice and method when he first
heard her sing. That had been one evening in an impromptu and
carelessly inadequate manner in company with Miss Cordova--whom, with
her bleached hair, green eyes accentuated by badly-drawn,
purplish-black eyebrows, and a shrill American accent, he was learning
to dislike and avoid as much as possible; but now a better opportunity
presented itself. A Grand Evening Concert, Concert de Luxe, was to be
given at Poussette's for the survivors of Telesphore Tremblay, a
woodcutter who lived at the edge of the forest of Fournier, and who had
generously left behind him one of those long legacies of thriving sons
and daughters for which French Canada is famous. The modest birth-rate
of the province of Quebec is not in these days of "race suicide" a
thing to be ungrateful for: many Tremblays remain, with their family of
eighteen or twenty-four, of sturdy, healthy boys and girls, for the
most part pure French, with an occasional streak of Scotch or Irish,
and a still rarer tincture of Indian. Frugal, sober, industrious, and
intelligent along certain limited lines, the habitant sets an example
of domestic bliss, which, in its unalterable and cheerful conviction of
what are the duties of parents to the state and to the Church, tends to
the eternal and unimpoverished perpetuation of the French Canadian
race. The Tremblays were named as follows, and as some interest
attaches to the choice of triple, and even quadruple, titles, largely
chosen from the saints of the Roman Calendar, augmented by memories of
heroes, queens, and great men in history, it is thought well to give
them at length. Thus the sons, nine in number, were:--
Alexis Paul Abelard
Joseph Maurice Cleophas
Hector Jerome Panteleon Etienne
Jean Gabriel
Jules Alfred Napoleon
François-Xavier Hercule Narcisse
Patrick Zenophile
Pierre Joseph Louis-Felippe
Alphonse Arthur
while the daughters were:--
Minnie Archange
Emma Catherine Lucille
Victoria Cécile
Marie-Antoinette Colombe
Brigide Zenobie
Eugenie Louise Angelique
Bernardette Ste. Anne.
The dining-room at Poussette's was transformed for the occasion into a
moderate sized concert hall, by the erection of a platform at one end
by Antoine Archambault under Pauline's skilled directions, and by rows
of planks crosswise over chairs, the people of the village joining
forces with those at Poussette's, just as in towns others conspire
together to hold fêtes and bazaars; but Ringfield stood afar off and
would have nothing to say to it. Miss Clairville intercepted him that
day after dinner and asked him to assist her.
"I cannot think," said she, "how you remain so narrow in one respect,
while broad enough in others! I am sure that sermon yesterday about
the widow and the fatherless was the most beautiful thing I ever heard,
and that you have ever said. How then--is it wicked to get up a
concert, act, sing, and amuse ourselves, and all for a good object,
that we make money for the unfortunate? Ah--but I do not understand
you at all!"
"No, I suppose I cannot expect you to do so," replied Ringfield sadly.
"But I have never approved of similar practices in the city, and it
seems to me that I must now include the country. Why not make a
personal canvass from house to house, through the mill, and so on, and
interest the members of our small community in the Tremblays--I believe
you would raise more."
"Ah!" exclaimed Pauline, with a swift shrug of impatience; "see
now--how we should quarrel always! Quarrel? I think it would be one
grand, great long fight, if I--if I----" she faltered, and he noted
with quick passion the drooping of her ordinarily flashing eyes.
"If you----" he repeated softly. "Oh--say the rest, or if you would
rather not--I will say it for you. You mean, if you could make up your
mind to leave all this, leave everything and everyone you have known,
and come to me--is that it?"
They were for a moment completely alone, but as Antoine might approach
at any instant, laden with boughs of evergreen for decoration purposes,
conversation was of a stolen and hurried kind. Ringfield, in whom
first love had rapidly modified all natural shyness of the sex, was no
lukewarm lover; he took Pauline's hands, and bringing them to his lips,
pressed ardent kisses upon them, urging her to at once decide in his
favour and give him the right to guard her interests for ever. How or
where they would live was no matter, her best impulses must surely move
all her heart towards him, and at last he heard from her a soft answer,
which was nevertheless a clear affirmative, and now, not only hands but
lips joined in this rare moment, and Pauline, no longer estimating the
minister as one unlearned in the subtle lists of love, felt happier
than she had done for months. She had made, she told herself, the best
choice offered her, and for the moment she swore resolutions of holy
living and quiet dying, all in the character of Ringfield's wife. As
for him, the kiss had sealed all and changed all.
"Now at last I shall live again, be a free agent, able to do my work!
You can have no conception of what it has been for me to get up my
sermons, for example, or to go about among the people here, thinking of
you, wondering if you would ever come to me or not. I have pictured
you going back to that other man, and I have hated you for it, hated
you both!"
"Oh--hush, hush, be careful!" Miss Clairville, like all women, was now
afraid of the passion she had awakened. "Let us get to work--some one
may come in--you do not mind helping me now?"
"Not--if you mean what you say! Not--if this time you are telling me
the truth!"
"You cannot forget that lapse of mine, it seems. Well, I do mean it, I
do, I do! And you--you mean it too? You would take me even with my
past, and that past unexplained, with my faults and my temper?"
"I have told you before that I would," he returned firmly. "No matter
what has happened; no matter what you have done, what anyone else has
done, I would, I will, I do take you! You are Heaven's choicest,
dearest gift to me--and what am I but an erring man trying to walk
straight and see straight!"
Miss Clairville's eyes sparkled with mischief, while her mouth remained
solemn.
"Then you must not talk of hating. Love your enemies, Mr. Ringfield,
and bless them that persecute you. That isn't in the Catholic Manual
in those words perhaps, but I have seen it somewhere, I think in the
Testament Nouveau. You see---- I am always 'good Methodist' as our
friend Poussette would say."
"You shall be a better one in the future," exclaimed Ringfield,
tenderly, and as at that moment Poussette himself appeared, to lend
assistance, the interview was at an end.
And now ensued a scene which a week earlier would have sorely tried
Ringfield's patience, but which now sufficed to amuse him, so secure
was he in Pauline's affection and so contented with her recent
promises. The evergreens were brought to her, seated on the platform
and wearing gloves to protect her hands; she cut off the branches,
trimmed them, and sometimes handed them to Poussette, and sometimes to
Ringfield, who then nailed them up at the back of the improvised dais
to make a becoming background; she also twined the smaller pieces into
festoons and ropes for the side of the room, and Poussette, who could
not keep his admiration a secret, hovered about her, continually
pressing her fingers as he received the greens, patting her back,
offering her the scissors and the ball of twine much more frequently
than she required them. It was a relief to the couple most concerned
when Miss Cordova entered, wearing an elaborately pleated and not too
clean violet dressing gown, over which she had put on a dark blue
blanket coat and her host's fur cap to keep her warm. Thus from the
ill-assorted trio was formed a comfortable _partie carrée_, for
Poussette seemed careless as to which lady he attended and he still
bore the cornelian ring upon his finger. Ringfield, forgetting his
scruples, had promised to take the chair and introduce the artists;
Antoine was door-keeper, and Poussette, clad in tweeds, a white
waistcoat and tie of bright blue, would receive the guests in his own
effusive way, seating the ladies carefully on the fresh yellow planks
with great gallantry and address.
At eight o'clock the room began to fill, the village turning out well,
and a few coming all the way from Hawthorne, among these Enderby, the
Cockney butcher, and his wife and daughter, and as soon as Ringfield
had made a few appropriate remarks, couched this time in safe and
secular terms, the first number was given, consisting of an orchestral
selection by four players belonging to St. Ignace and to the choir of
Father Rielle's big church, St. Jean-Baptiste-on-the-Hill. A cornet,
two fiddles and a flute rendered the music with good time and fair
intonation, and as it was lighthearted, even gay in character,
melodious and tripping, Ringfield thought it must be of operatic
origin, but found later on to his intense surprise that it was a
transcription of Mozart's Twelfth Mass, interpreted by Alexis Gagnon,
the undertaker, as first violin, his eldest son, second violin,
François Xavier Tremblay, one of the beneficiaries, on the cornet, and
Adolphe Trudel, a little hunchback, on the flute.
This selection, performed with more gusto and enthusiasm than
customary, gave so much satisfaction that it had to be repeated after
noisy and prolonged applause, and then Miss Cordova appeared at the
side of the platform, dressed in Spanish costume and carrying
castanets. The opera of "Carmen," at that time quite new, had been
performed in some small towns of the United States by a "scratch"
company, including Pauline's acquaintance and--to show that Art is a
reality, and some people born into it, at their best in it and unfit
for anything else--the lady was greatly changed, not only in
Ringfield's eyes, but in her own. The greenish-yellow hair looked dull
gold by lamplight; her eyes gleamed blackly from their blue
crystallized lids (the bath of indigo being a stage device known to all
devotees of the art), and her dancing, which immediately commenced to
her own castanets and a subdued "pizzicato" from the two violins, was
original and graceful, and free from any taint of vulgarity. Her
draperies of handsome black and yellow stuffs were high to the throat
and reached to her ankles; her expression was dreamy, almost sad; one
would have said she was figuring in some serious rite, so dignified her
mien, so chaste and refined her gestures. If Bizet has idealized the
heroine of Prosper-Merimée's crude but strong little story, Sadie
Cordova idealized in her turn the orthodox tempestuous, unhappy Carmen
of the modern stage. The beauty of the music with its rhythmic
measured beat, and the grace of her swaying changeful poses, riveted
all eyes and ears, and Ringfield, to whom such an exhibition was
altogether new, was absorbed in watching this woman he had endeavoured
not to despise, and whom he certainly would have exhorted in his most
earnest fashion to flee St. Ignace directly, had he known that she was
a person who had experimented more than once in matrimony, not having
waited for the death of her first husband before she married the
second, and that she had two children living.
The next on the programme was a baritone solo from a young habitant,
another of the Tremblay family, a portion of a Mass in which he was ill
at ease, and over-weighted; this apparently not mattering to the
populace, he was encored, and returned to sing, in his own simple
fashion and without accompaniment, one of the many beautiful melodies
known to him from his childhood--A Chanson Populaire.
Quand un Chrétien se determine
A voyager,
Faut bien penser qu'il se destine
A des dangers;
Mille fois a ses yeux la mort
Prend son image,
Mille fois il maudit son sort
Dans le cours du voyage.
Quand tu seras dans les portages,
Pauvre engagé,
Les sueurs te couleront dea visages
Pauvre affligé,
Loin de jurer, si tu me crois,
Dans ta colère,
Pense à Jesus portant sa croix--
Il a monté au Calvaire!
What words were these--to be sung at a mixed concert in a summer hotel
in the primitive village of St. Ignace? Ringfield knew enough French
to follow them, and as the minor plainsong of the melody floated
through the hall, he saw Miss Clairville's eyes filling with tears
where she sat in the front at one side awaiting her turn. She had
often spoken to him of the beautiful national music of her
province--this was the first time he had heard it. But quickly now
followed Poussette with a solo on the concertina, in which his fat body
laboured to and fro, and his fat hands plunged the instrument to one
side, then to the other, while his broad smile and twinkling eyes first
pleased, then convulsed the audience. After him came Miss Clairville,
and Ringfield, nervously reading out the title of the song, did not
observe how she was dressed until she had reached the platform and had
greeted her audience. The black and scarlet garb so familiar to him
was now accompanied by a smart little jacket of red worn rather
queerly, since one arm only was thrust in and the empty sleeve caught
up in some way he did not understand, while on her head she wore a kind
of arch hussar's cap. It was evident that her selection was familiar
to some in the audience, those who had seen her as "La Grande Duchesse
de Gerolstein" in Montreal, and a few who had attended similar
functions to the present.
"It's only an old turn of mine," she managed to whisper to Ringfield,
"but they all like it. Le Sabre de Mon Père--I never tire singing it
myself. You look stupid enough this minute to be my Fritz--but
there--you do not understand!"
The accompaniment was played on the American organ, moved for that
occasion up to the platform, but even that could not detract from the
passionate pride and fire with which Miss Clairville rendered that
spirited song, so far removed from opera "bouffe" or "comic" opera;
indeed the noble character of the first strain was considerably
enhanced by the church-like quality of the accompaniment. So far
Ringfield was greatly surprised, for he had seen and heard nothing that
failed to appeal to the artistic and elevated side of life, and Pauline
threw additional vigour and life into her representation of the
autocratic Duchess, half-acted, half-sung, as she observed her latest
captive; new chains were being forged by the unexpected grandeur and
beauty of her thrilling voice and all went breathlessly and well until
the door at the end of the room opened and a startling figure appeared.
This was Edmund Crabbe--but no longer Crabbe the guide, the dilatory
postmaster, the drunken loafer; in his stead appeared Crabbe Hawtree,
Esquire, the gentleman and "Oxford man," in his right mind and
clothed--_mirabile dictu_--in full and correct evening dress.
Piccadilly and Pall Mall need not have been ashamed of him; the
regulation coat, waistcoat and trousers were there, a little worn, but
still in fashion; the white tie was there, the stiff collar and cuffs,
the patent leather pumps, even a white silk handkerchief tucked inside
the waistcoat, and some kind of sprig in the buttonhole. He paused,
carefully shutting the door behind him, and stood while Pauline
finished her song; at its conclusion he walked up through the rows of
village people--shanty and mill hands, habitants and farmers--and
presented the artist with a handsome bunch of florist's roses, quite in
the accepted style of large cities, and her surprise was evident. She
started, stared at him, faltered, and might have spoken but for the
impassive and nonchalant air with which he faced her. As for
Ringfield, a great anger and distress filled his mind. What spasm of
reform had animated this fallen, worthless creature to create an
impression which could not, in the nature of things, lead to systematic
rehabilitation? To ape the garb of worthy men, to stand thus, tricked
out in the dress of a remote civilization from which he had thrust
himself forever, before the woman he perhaps had wronged, and with so
easy and disdainful a bearing, seemed to Ringfield the summit of
senseless folly and contemptible weakness. Subjected during the rest
of the evening to the cynical, amused and imperturbable gaze of this
man, whom, in spite of his Christianity, he hated, Ringfield made but a
sorry chairman. His French stuck in his throat; he cast dark and angry
looks at the noisy flirtation going on between Poussette and Miss
Cordova, and it was with relief that he heard the patriotic strains of
"God Save the Queen" from the strength of the company, in which the
hoarse bass of the transplanted cockney, Enderby, the Hawthorne
butcher, was paramount.
Crabbe was waiting for Pauline and gave her his arm down from the
platform.
"Well," said he, openly displaying his admiration, "you gave us a
Gregorian Grand Duchess to-night, but I, for one, will not quarrel with
you for that. All the old time vivacity and charm were there, I assure
you, and I do not find as much alteration in your style and appearance
as I expected from hearing that you had joined the Methodists!"
Pauline glanced quickly from Crabbe to Ringfield; she foresaw an open
and unseemly quarrel, and as one could never tell when Crabbe was
sober, she rather feared than welcomed the bright audacity of his
manner, the amiable ease with which he held the situation. In the
presence of the guide Ringfield always lost his austere calm; his
manners underwent deterioration and he stood now with a rigid
_gaucherie_ spoiling his fine presence, and a pitiful nervousness
prompting him to utter and do the wrong thing.
"I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Methodists all the same,
you know," continued Crabbe, giving her arm a final and caressing pat
as he released her, "but still I've seen better chairmen." Crabbe was
now leaning lazily against the wall and occasionally moved his arm
across Miss Clairville's back, as if he might at any moment fold it
around her waist as he had done outside the barn.
"Your French needs polishing up a bit. How would a course at one of
our theological colleges down here do for you? It's a pity you
couldn't have six months even at Laval--but, of course, Sabrevois and
the long procession of colporteurs is more in your line. But in spite
of such small defects you remain a man of cheerful yesterdays, and we
may presume--equally confident tomorrows, and therefore, to be envied."
The three stood comparatively alone, the people having passed out and
Poussette and Enderby talking apart in a corner. Every vestige of
healthy colour fled from the minister's face, and his hands clasped and
unclasped with peculiar and unnatural tension. In his brain a prayer
had formed. "My Dear God--" he kept saying to himself--"my Dear
God--help me from myself! Protect me now lest I offend Thee, and be
forever cast from Thy Holy Presence. Remove this temptation from me,
or give me strength to meet it and endure, and so rise triumphant."
His lips moved and the word "God" made itself faintly heard. Pauline
went closer to him and saw the set strain of his face and watched the
tightening fingers.
"Oh, you are right--we torture you, he and I, with our foolish ways
that you do not understand!"
"I understand well enough," he returned below his breath; "I understand
better than you think. But come now, come away with me!"
"Come--where? I am living here, remember!"
"Come away--away!"
A new recklessness animated Ringfield; he was now the one to dash aside
convention and make a bold attempt for mastery. "It is not yet very
late. The snow is dry and hard--we can walk for half an hour."
Crabbe smiled in a slow infuriating way.
"I claim, I demand the lady for something better than a walk, under
dreary midnight skies, over cold and inhospitable winter snows! Like a
man in a certain chronicle I have made a supper and would bid you both
attend--one at least."
"A supper? But whom----" Pauline stopped, although glad of the
diversion Crabbe's words offered. She had seen him hand a couple of
bills towards the Tremblay fund; she now recollected preparations
towards extra cooking during that day, which she had set down to
Poussette's mania for treating and feeding people, but which now must
be attributed to the guide, and in her hand were the forced roses sent
from Montreal--there was no nearer place. Crabbe must be out of his
senses, for never before even in the old days when his remittance came
to hand had she seen him so lavish. He read her meaning.
"Who pays, eh! Is that it, my lady? Well, I do on this occasion, and
the fact is--well, I'll tell you all about it at supper."
Pauline, still incredulous but extremely curious, took small notice of
Ringfield after this, and as Enderby was approaching, and she
particularly avoided meeting anyone from Hawthorne on all occasions,
she departed with the guide. There was a very attractive supper ready
for her in a private room, where Miss Cordova was also present in her
Spanish costume, a giddy chaperone who soon retired and left the two
together, and Pauline could hardly credit the fact that Crabbe was
genuinely sober, clad in his irreproachable evening suit, his hair
neatly brushed with a kind of military cut, and his features composed
and pleased, recalling much of what he had been when first they met;
and she also observed with much surprise that Poussette was present at
the feast altogether in the character of menial and inferior, with his
coat off, bustling about with the glasses, corkscrews and towels.
Instead of hobnobbing with the guide, he waited upon him with
discretion and assiduity, and Pauline even fancied that towards herself
there was a grain more of respect than of admiration in the hotel
keeper's bearing.