THE NATURAL MAN
"Wretched at home, he gained no peace abroad;
Asked comfort of the open air, and found
No quiet in the darkness of the night,
No pleasure in the beauty of the day."
Pauline, on retiring to her room, was naturally in a whirl of excited
feelings; never had she dreamt of escape from her surroundings under
such auspices as these. The new affection she had been nursing for
several months speedily melted as she lived over again the
extraordinary sensations of the past hour. Crabbe came in for some of
the glory; she congratulated herself on partly belonging to him, and
with characteristic quickness she amused herself, being too wide awake
for bed just then, in turning out her drawers and boxes and in tying up
the Grand Duchess costume and other accessories in a bundle which she
intended to leave as a present for Sadie Cordova.
"I shall never require those again, thank Heaven!" said she to herself
as she moved about the plain little room, "or these stage paints and
other 'fixings' as Sadie calls them."
The imitation earrings went into the bundle; her old sealskin coat and
muff and some photographs of herself and associates in theatrical
costume. It was a case of "on with the new life" carried out with that
conviction and sincerity that distinguished all Miss Clairville's
actions. If she was to marry a rich Englishman, and go to England with
him, travel and keep a maid, she would do it thoroughly; the stage as
well as "Poussette's," the Hotel Champlain as well as Henry and Angeel
must be completely blotted out, else there could be no happiness for
her. Yet at moments there survived, along with this directness of
upward aims, a curious sense of caution, of dislike to part with
certain relics of value, or anything that had figured in her theatrical
life; the Clairville instinct was atavistically working against the new
creature, Pauline; heredity asserting itself in the midst of new and
promising environment.
The next few days brought remarkable changes, veiled by great care and
deliberation on Crabbe's part. He gave up the shack to Martin and had
a bonfire of his effects. He read the Montreal advertisements of
clothing, and sent for a complete wardrobe and two large trunks, yet
his manner to the few at Poussette's was sufficiently repressed to
discourage curiosity. Every hour Pauline expected him to leave her, be
mysteriously lost, then reappear sullen and sodden, but nothing of the
kind occurred. The news of his rehabilitation had spread, but the
community was too small and the place too remote to understand it
thoroughly; meanwhile, the virtuous aspect of both himself and Amable
Poussette was almost enough to drive a man to drink, so depressing was
the atmosphere of the bar--that place once so cheerful! The lemons
grew dry and crinkled one by one; the lager glasses gradually came to
require dusting; the spirit bottles were discreetly put behind almanacs
and large advertisements of "Fall Fairs"; over all was settling a
blight born of conversion and sobriety. Pitiful to relate--the person
who should have been most pleased and interested in this moral
spectacle was bitterly dubious; Ringfield would not, at this stage,
consent to believe in Crabbe's reformation, but winced and shied at
reports of altered prospects. The subject was easily of first
importance to all at Poussette's, but the Englishman's disdain of
explanations and Pauline's fine-lady air precluded much reference to
the matter; the minister could only accept the position.
And what was the position? Had not Miss Clairville given him a certain
soft and memorably tender answer, turning away all his jealous wrath;
and filling his soul with "Comfort and Joy, Comfort and Joy"? Had not
his lips pressed hers, his embrace enveloped her yielding form, her
eyes, melting and languorous, drooped before his fiery ones? Were
these things nothing to her, while to him they almost constituted a
marriage? Even with daily evidence of the strongest, he could not
bring himself to believe that she was anything but true.
Once they met in the wood, face to face, and there could be no excuse
on her part, no elegant evasion of the relations between them, as with
those chilling superior accents she persevered in ignoring the past.
Snow was again on the ground, every twig encased in a round tube of
glassy ice through which showed the grey, brown, or black stem, for a
wonderful glissade had followed the milder weather. The pendent
branches were freighted with soft, white tufts and cushions, and just
as Miss Clairville met Ringfield, under his heavier tread there broke a
large arm of larch stretched across the path. Thus he was compelled to
halt; the rebound and crash had sent snow flying all over her face and
clothes, and naturally he began to brush it off. She kept her hands in
her muff--the old one after all, for Crabbe's purchase had not yet
arrived--and regarded him, with some abatement, it is true, of the
aristocratic hauteur she wore so loftily at Poussette's, but still with
an air far removed from the intimate and sympathetic self she had
revealed in their first meetings.
"I believe you would have passed me!" said he bitterly, forcing that
raw and unpleasant smile. "If it had been a street, I mean, with
anyone about, or coming out of church! Surely nothing that has
happened can justify you in avoiding me like this!"
"Avoiding you?" She opened her large eyes in haughty incredulity.
"Why, I have been waiting for an opportunity like this to meet you and
talk it over! tell you something about myself, rather. What odd ideas
you get, _bizarre, mon ami_! Have you heard about my friend, Mr.
Hawtree?"
Ringfield answered unintelligibly, looking away from her.
"Have you not? Oh--you have! I thought it very likely. Well, he has
come into a little money; more than a little, indeed, but I am not to
tell. How then--do you think I shall be able to keep the secret? I am
the bad one at that, sure,--as Mr. Poussette would say."
By degrees her old racy manner returned, and looking over her muff she
permitted her eloquent mischief-making eyes to speak. "What else have
you heard?"
"That--you are going to marry him."
"Ah--and that, of course, you do not believe!"
"For the matter of that, I never believe anything you say. How can I,
how can anyone? You promised me--you know, what--and here you coolly
talk to me about this other man, this wreck of a man, this sot, this
Crabbe! And he is not the only one, I daresay Poussette gets his pay
sometimes, and perhaps the priest as well!"
"Gets his--pay! _Mon Dieu_, but it is you, you, to insult a woman!
Yes, to insult me!"
"I am not intending it, I am not aiming insult, but I know whereof I
speak. I impute no more than this; no man works for nothing. If
Poussette harbours you, as he does, he must exact something, if only
silly songs and smiles, the faculty of amusing him now that he has
dropped drinking, and must feed his lower senses in some manner. I
impute no more--no more than frivolity and waste of time, the abasement
of impulses noble enough in themselves."
"Oh--what a creed, what a creed! I deny such a charge, such an
imputation. I sing and act before Mr. Poussette as I would before you,
and Miss Cordova too. We are artists--do you know what that means, Mr.
Ringfield? And suppose we do not pay--what is that? Mr. Poussette is
agreeable to the arrangement, it is a plentiful house, and always more
than enough in it to eat and drink. I am Ma'amselle de Clairville and
Sadie Cordova is my friend. We take our holiday here--that is all.
_Ma foy_, but why must every one anger me? Why do you purposely
misunderstand?"
She stamped her foot and trembled.
"I have only one thing to ask you. Do you intend to--my God, that I
should have to ask it--to marry him?"
"_Certainement_." A return to her natural manner was characterized by
more French than she customarily used. "I am considering it, thinking
of it, as you did when coming to St. Ignace."
"Considering it! And when--when--is it likely to be?"
"Oh--that is for him, for Mr. Hawtree to decide, but I think it will be
at Noël, Christmas time, and in Montreal. Next week I pay some visits;
after that I go to the Hotel Champlain, in Jacques Cartier Square, to
prepare myself for my new _rôle_, you see."
"Your new _rôle_? But are you not then leaving the theatre? Oh--I
understand now, I see what you mean. And you think this is your duty,
to end your life thus by consenting to marry this man?"
"To end my life? to begin it rather. Believe me--it is better for me
so."
Great distress showed in Ringfield's voice and bearing; he was in that
state of mind when it became necessary to insist upon his sufferings,
to rehearse his wrongs, and thus an hour wore away in the petty strife
which in his case was characterized by ceaseless strivings to win again
that place in her heart filched from him by her old lover; on her part
the quarrel and the cold weather acted equally in stimulating her to
fresh coquetries. Farther and farther they withdrew into the heart of
the snowy wood, till, when quite remote, they sat down on a fallen log,
beautiful in summer with mosses, lichen and waving ferns, now converted
to a long white cylinder, softly rounded at either end. Here
Ringfield's ardour and his conscientious feelings for her future broke
out in a long and impassioned speech in which he implored her to change
her mind while there was time and to remember her warm promises to
himself. He did not embrace her, and throughout his discourse, for
such it might aptly be termed, he was more the saviour of souls than
the lover.
"And although I claim no reward for the fact," he concluded sternly,
"it is due me, when I tell you that I know all about that poor child at
Hawthorne, poor Angeel, and that I am going to take the whole matter on
myself and remove her to a more suitable home and surroundings."
Miss Clairville flushed an angry red. "You--you know all?" she
repeated. "But how--how did you find out? You have seen Henry,
perhaps--oh! you have been talking to him, my poor brother!"
"No," returned Ringfield. "You forget that people talk to me, bring
these stories to me, make me the recipient of confessions. I have seen
and I have heard, therefore I know. But I will do as I have said. I
shall write to the proper people to look after Angeel, and I shall see
that she is removed before long from Hawthorne."
"Where to?"
"Perhaps to a hospital; that of the Incarnation at Lalurette."
"But that is a Catholic institution!"
"So much the better."
"This is extremely kind, extremely generous of you!" said she, in her
most English, and therefore haughtiest manner. "But I myself have had
the same intention. We can work together, I suppose!"
"No, I prefer that you leave this to me."
To this she replied sneeringly, and a new cause of recrimination ensued.
Pauline rose abruptly from the snowy mound and walked to the road,
Ringfield following her, and they did not know that never again on this
earth and during this life would they meet thus--part thus--alone, with
full opportunity to say what they thought, what they wished.
Sadness fell on both as they shortly went different ways, but whereas
the lively nature of one was soon occupied gaily at Poussette's with
fresh purchases to look at and approve, in the other grief was
succeeded by a gathering of all his forces, as he mentally resolved
(swore, to rightly translate his indomitable mood) to prevent the
marriage. For this was what he had arrived at; nothing more nor less,
and how it might be done haunted him continually as he walked by night
on the frozen road, or sat at meals within sound of Crabbe's cynical
and lettered humour, and within sight of Pauline's white hands on which
gleamed a couple of new and handsome rings.
She must not marry him! That became the burden of his thought, and the
time-limit of three weeks, bringing it to Christmas Eve, was to him as
the month before execution of the condemned criminal.
She must not marry him! What then, could or in all likelihood would,
prevent this consummation? The hours flew by and he thought of no
plan. The hard weather still held and grew harder, colder, until the
great drifts blocked all the roads, and St. Ignace was cut off from the
outside world. Still, any hour a thaw might set in and, at the worst,
the railway was hardly ever impracticable for more than a couple of
days. Delay there might be, but one could see that Crabbe would not
refuse to welcome even delay; he sat at the head of the chief table
clad in the regulation tweeds of the country gentleman, and with a kind
of fierce and domineering inflation in his manner that subdued the
irrepressible hilarity of Poussette, threatening to break out again,
for by way of keeping his pledge as to liquor, he seemed to take more
beer than was necessary or good for him. The Cordova, held as a
willing witness and prospective bridesmaid, had to "learn her place"
under the new _régime_, and felt fully as miserable as she looked, for
now no longer revelry graced the night. Poussette's unnaturally long
face matched with Pauline's hauteur and Crabbe's careless air of
mastery; he, the sullen cad, the drunken loafer, having become the
arbiter of manners, the final court of appeal. One day Ringfield had
been lashed to even unusual distress and mortification by the offensive
manner of the guide, who in the course of conversation at the table had
allowed his natural dislike of Dissent and Dissenters to show; "damned
Methodists," and all that sort of talk. The very terms annoyed
Ringfield; they savoured of the Old Country, not of Canada, where
denominational hatred and bigotry should be less pronounced, and as he
left the room Poussette joined him in the hall.
"Bigosh, Mr. Ringfield, sir--but I don't know how you stand that talk
so long--no, sir, I don't know at all!" He patted the other on the
back.
"Well, Poussette, I must do the best to stand it that I know how. You
and I agree about a good many things. Tell me--do you believe
that--that Mr.--that he is really a reformed man, really changed in his
habits? And is he going to marry Miss Clairville? You are around with
him a good deal; you are likely to know."
"The day is feex," returned Poussette without enthusiasm. "The day is
feex, and I am bes' man."
"What do you think about it, though? Don't you think he'll break out
again?"
Ringfield's anxious bitter inflections could not escape Poussette.
"Ah-ha! Mr. Ringfield, sir--you remember that I wanted Miss Clairville
for myself? Bigosh--but I have got over that, fine! Sir, I tell you
this, me, a common man--you can get over anything if you make up the
mind. Fonny things happens--and now I snap the finger at Mlle.
Pauline. Why? Because I feex up things with Mees Cordova even better."
"Mme. Poussette----" began Ringfield.
"Mme. Poussette is come no more here on me at all, I tell you. No more
on St. Ignace at all."
"But you cannot _marry_ Miss Cordova, Poussette!"
"I know very well that, Mr. Ringfield, sir. No. For that, sir, I will
wait. My wife must die some day! Mees Cordova will wait too; she will
_ménager_ here for me, and I will threat her proper--oh! you shall see
how I will threat that one!" Poussette seductively nodded his head.
"I will threat her proper, sir, like a lady. Mme. Poussette--she may
stay with Henry Clairville all the rest of her life! I would not take
her back now, for she leave me to go nurse him, and not threat me
right. No sir, not threat me, her husband, Amable Poussette, right at
all."
"I'm in no mood for these difficult distinctions in morality!" cried
Ringfield in exasperation. "What day is this wedding--tell me that!"
Poussette gave him the day and hour--eleven o'clock in a certain
Episcopal church in Montreal on the 24th of December, and then they
parted.
From this moment a steady pursuit of one idea characterized Ringfield's
actions. Already charged to explosive point by pressure of emotions
both worthy and the reverse, he immediately entered into correspondence
with several charitable institutions with regard to Angeel, and he also
wrote to Mr. Enderby and Mr. Abercorn. It was now the ninth of the
month and the snow still held. Sobriety still held and long faces; the
American organ was never opened, and Pauline and her satellite, Miss
Cordova, were mostly buried in their bedrooms, concocting an impromptu
trousseau.