THE QUEST OF HAPPINESS
"Ye wish for act and circumstance, that make
The individual known and understood;
And such as my best judgment could select
From what the place afforded, have been given."
The consistency of character or rather the defect of that virtue which
had perhaps caused the aberration under which Ringfield had very nearly
committed a crime without being, as we say, a depraved or vicious
member of society, helped after the melancholy dénoûment of Crabbe's
sudden death to determine a line of conduct for the future. His mind,
restored to its natural bent, the study of the soul of man and its
relation to the spiritual world, no longer dwelt on Miss Clairville nor
on any other worldly matter, and therefore his next and as it proved
final move was not so peculiar as seemed at first sight; he chose to
enter a religious house and end his days there, as in the heat of
remorseful and involuntary confession he had told Father Rielle. There
was no chance for this last act of abnegation in his own community,
hence the attention he now began to give to the personality and
conversation of the priest, and hence the ultimate triumph of the
Catholic Church. He still loved his own Church, but what was there for
him within her narrow boundaries in the future? That Church said: "You
must be good even if you are narrow, you must practise holiness, you
must stand daily in the fierce light of secular criticism, and you know
you shall be found wanting," and at the voice he quailed, feeling his
weakness. Then it was that Rome claimed him, showing him her unique
position among the Churches. Never allowing or fostering modern doubt,
immune against innovation, with myriad and labyrinthine channels of
work for the different temperaments that entered within her gates, she
presented at that time the spectacle of the only Church not divided
against herself, and Ringfield suddenly yearned towards the cloister,
the cross, the strange, hooded, cloaked men, the pale and grave, or
red-cheeked merry nuns, the rich symbolism of even the simplest
service, and he longed to hurl himself from the outside world to that
beckoning world of monks and monastic quiet. As a Methodist, there was
then no possible opening of the kind he wished for, whatever there may
be at a later day, when hardly any religious body keeps itself to
itself but is daily invaded by efforts and struggles, apings after
something coveted and difficult of attainment, and when the term
evangelical is a word signifying the loosening of all proper bonds and
the admission of dangerous degrees and shades of doubtful moral
unsteadfastness.
He felt an inward shame, a daily humiliation, when he considered his
position; he had disgraced his own Church--would any other Church then
receive him? Finally he sought the priest.
"If I am proved unworthy of the ministrations of the Church I was born
and brought up in, am I not unworthy of yours? What is to become of
me, for a God and a Church and a hiding-place I must have?"
And Father Rielle answered quietly:--
"There is no difficulty, my son. The sin, if sin it was, is past, and
even if it were not, if it still lingered in you, we would take you in
and help and restore you. We refuse no man, no woman; we do not
question, we do not talk, we make no guesses, we are not curious. We
will take you as we have taken, as our Church has taken, thousands of
others--for the present and for the future--caring nothing for the
past. We recognize that all men are not alike. Some will still
preach, and you were one of these, but you will soon be content to
preach no longer; for such as you it is but a weariness of the flesh, a
disturber, a tempter. Others will still do parish work, like myself;
regular work among the people that does not show, more or less
successful, more or less uneventful. Others will pass in behind the
high walls of a monastery and lead the ordered life prescribed for
them; you are to be one of these and I foresee you gaining in
self-restraint, calm, and growing in spiritual insight as you
voluntarily forsake all worldly ties and sympathies and disappear from
men for ever."
Ringfield moved uneasily. It seemed as if the priest took things too
much for granted.
"How can I tell?" he faltered. "It attracts me, it moves before me
night and day; the quiet hours told off by bells--are they not?"
"Yes, my brother."
"The cowled men working in the garden, at graves, I have heard. Is it
not so?"
"Yes, yes, and at other things," said the priest indulgently.
"The prayers, said kneeling on the cold floors, the precision and
solemnity of it all, the absence of all distractions. Oh, there surely
I shall find rest unto my soul;--only if I joined, and found I could
not stay, if the world again called me!"
Father Rielle closed his eyes and yawned with an indescribable air of
mastery and insolence.
"There would always be your oath, my son. Do not forget that."
"My oath! An oath!"
"Certainly. There will be preparation necessary for many days before
you can enter. But once a member, a sworn member of that community (I
am thinking of our brothers at Oka), you have done with the world. You
know the world no longer. It cannot call you."
"But if it did----"
"I say it cannot."
"But I might burst my bonds and seek it!"
"You might, but I do not think you will. Our Church can be loving and
restful and harmonious and beautiful (thus the jargon of the heretic)
but it can also be masterful and tyrannical and terrible, even cruel,
so they say, although I do not go that far myself. And the call of it,
the memory of it, the significance of it, the power and majesty and
awfulness of it will draw you back. Oh! Have no fear, monsieur! If I
may charge myself with your conversion I will stake a great deal, a
very great deal indeed, on the chances of your absolute and final
surrender, with even temporary reversion an impossibility. You will
decide quickly then, monsieur, although we do not ask for haste. We
can wait."
And with emphasis in his thrilling voice the priest murmured again:
"The Church of Rome can always wait."
This statement and the other predictions concerning Ringfield were
verified in course of time, for without seeing Pauline again he made
instant preparation for the solemn and extraordinary step which closed
his career in the world as we know it. Poor Pauline! The promise
given to Henry Clairville on his death-bed was kept, it is needless to
say, but only half kept, as she did not admit the child to her
confidence, nor show it affection, and only kept at all because she
could not help herself. Very gradually her strength returned after
nearly two years of invalidism, and then the streaks of grey in her
hair, her altered figure and expression, told part of her story to
those who thought they knew all. Who at St. Ignace could enter into
her feelings or offer her consolation?
"No one could be sorrier than I am for doing the young lady an
injustice," was the loudly expressed opinion of Enderby. "Not but what
there was grounds. There is, they tell me, often a more striking
likeness between cousins, aunts, and such, than between mother and
daughter and father and son. What I done any one might have done, and
what I said I've long ago took back."
These remarks were made with characteristic magnanimity at the annual
Hawthorne festival, a couple of years after the picnic tea at which
Ringfield had assisted; held this year on 20th October, a warm sun
flooded the valley, the women wore their lightest dresses, and Mrs.
Abercorn was particularly gay in a flowered muslin, dating from the
time of William the Fourth, with _honi soit qui mal y pense_ on a blue
ribbon worked into the design of the material; a garden hat was tied
under her chin and a fur cape lay over her shoulders. No one was
present from St. Ignace, but a good deal of talk might have been heard
which signified that Miss Clairville was still the interesting central
figure of the neighbourhood.
"She spends very little time, they tell me, with the child yonder,
although it is her brother's own. The child sits in one room and her
aunt in another; one draws pictures of every mortal thing, and some
things not mortal, and the other looks out of window and rarely speaks.
'Tis a sad sight, they say, that members of one family are thus as far
removed in feeling and ways of talking as--as----" the speaker paused
in perplexity, vainly searching for a suitable and sufficiently strong
simile.
"What can ye expect, ma'am?" said Enderby loftily, with his habitual
consideration for the aristocracy. "Miss Clairville has been cruelly
treated. Her brother to marry, to marry, look you, ma'am, with one of
a menial family--'twas hard on one by nature so genteel, and the manner
of her long sickness was not to be wondered at; had she only gone
through the form of marriage with the one her heart was interested in
and then lost him the next moment; I think I may say, without fear of
exaggeration, she would then have had something to live for; she could
have claimed his money. But no marriage, no man, no money--and in
place of it all, sickness and poverty and the care of the unwelcome
child--why, I've never known a harder thing!"
Crabbe's expectations had often been referred to among the villagers
and had grown to astonishing dimensions in the minds of the simple, but
the idea of Miss Clairville's share in them was new and afforded plenty
of material for conjecture.
"Though what a lone thing like her would have done with all that money,
I cannot think!" said Mrs. Enderby, who in company with Mrs. Abercorn
had always harboured a suspicious and jealous dislike of the handsome
and dashing Pauline.
"Cannot think!" echoed her husband. "Why, them's the ones to know what
to do with any power of money coming to them. I'll warrant she has had
plans enough, to keep the old place up, maybe, to dress herself and
travel to foreign lands and never act no more. That would all take
money, bless ye! Before I settled here, as some of ye know, I kept
butcher shop in Blandville, a bigger place far, than this, all English
and all so pleasant too, so--so equalizing like, that when parties did
run into debt (and some were pretty deep in my books) you could almost
forgive it to them, they were so plausible and polite about it. Eighty
dollars a month was what one family took out in the best meats
procurable and 'ow could you refuse it, knowing they were not going to
run away owing it! 'Some day, Mr. Enderby,' they would say, 'you shall
have it. You shall 'ave it, sir, some day.'"
"And did you ever get it?" said a thin woman, the Hawthorne milliner,
edging to the front of the group in some anxiety. "Did you?"
"I did, ma'am. They owned considerable property round about there, and
when they wanted anything they would sell off a little, piece by piece.
Just as they needed things they sold it, and by and by they came to me
and my little account was paid off--honourable."
"All at once?" said the anxious woman, and Enderby nodded.
"What a state of things though!" remarked his wife. "I remember it
quite distinctly. When they wanted to give a party they would sell off
a piece of land, or when they needed a new carpet. 'Twould make me so
nervous like."
"So it would me," said the milliner, "so it would me."
"Because you were not born to it. It's what you must expect from the
gentry."
"Gentry? There's not many around here, but I recognize them when I
meet them and the lady at the Manor House is one of them and I'm sorry
for her, ma'am, in her disappointment and sickness."
"Who is that you are sorry for, Enderby?" said Mrs. Abercorn shrilly,
having caught some of his remarks. "And how do you come to be talking
about gentry of all things! My good man, if you are alluding to Miss
Clairville, let me tell you she got just what she deserved."
And directly a chorus arose, chiefly from the feminine voices present:
"Just what she deserved. She got just what she deserved."
The state of affairs at Clairville was much as described; Pauline,
during her long, dreary convalescence, gave no sign of temper or of
suffering, but had apparently changed to a listless, weak, silent
creature, occupied almost altogether with her own thoughts, by turns
ignoring and passively tolerating her sister-in-law and the child. The
latter grew brighter and stronger every day, and Dr. Renaud was of the
opinion that she would live to womanhood and become physically fit in
many ways, although retaining her deformity, and even achieve some
professional success, as her talent for the pencil was of unusual
order. Sadie Cordova and her children were firmly established at
Poussette's, and this chronicle would be incomplete without a glance at
the future of the good-hearted couple. Poussette, who had never meant
any harm either in the case of Miss Clairville or Miss Cordova,
appeared to be considerably impressed by the events of a certain
winter, and after the arrival of Maisie and Jack treated them as his
own and gave up the idea of a divorce. The pranks and escapades of two
irresponsible, spoilt and active children kept him on the look-out a
good deal of his time, and before very long he had decided that
children after all were occasionally in the way, and like other good
things on this earth, best had in moderation. Still, he never failed
to treat them with all kindness, and towards their mother he remained
to the last, upon hearing her story of two cruel husbands, one of whom
might claim her any day, the very pattern of chivalrous honour. Who
shall pronounce the final word as to happiness--the quest of it, the
failure to find it, the rapture with which it sometimes announces
itself attained! This is no morbid tale, after all, although we may
have lingered at times over scenes neither pleasant nor cheerful, for
behold!--Mme. Poussette is happy, in her hospital: Dr. Renaud is happy
among his patients; Angeel is deliriously happy, with her crayons and
paper; all the Archambaults are happy; Maisie and Jack, Poussette and
Miss Cordova are all happy, happy in their rude health, with plenty of
good food, fun and excitement; even Father Rielle is happy, in his
work, having conquered his passion for Miss Clairville, and perhaps
when a few years have flown and her health is restored the dweller
against her will in the gloomy house of her fathers will emerge from
her torpor and engage in some active work that will afford her restless
spirit a measure of happiness. Often she cries in the dead of night:--
"Have I deserved this? Have I done wrong that I am punished like
this?" and she answers herself, saying: "Yes, I did wrong, although not
so wrong as others, and therefore am I punished." No other answer ever
occurs to her, and all she knows is that she must work out her fate as
best she can and try and be kinder to the child.
And Ringfield--is he happy, behind his high wall, listening for the
solemn bell, kneeling on the cold floor, sleeping on the hard bed,
working in the quiet garden? No one knows, for where he entered we do
not enter, and if we did we should not be able to distinguish him from
his brother monks, all clad alike, all silent, all concentrated on the
duty of the moment.
The Church of Rome has him and she will keep him--we may be sure of
that. _Ainsi soit-il_.