Ringfield Part 34

"You must drive or be driven then. You cannot walk."

It was true. Pauline's breath was now very short, her articulation difficult, her throat contracted and relaxed by turns.

"It is true!" she gasped. "I cannot walk. I cannot even stand up.

Oh, Dr. Renaud, this is more than weakness or fright. I am very sick, Doctor. Why cannot I stand up?"

Renaud tore off his coat, the priest and Martin did the same. Folding all three beside the fence where the snow was still thick and dry they laid Miss Clairville down and watched her. Martin fetched brandy while the entire Archambault family flocked out to see the sight, and stood gaping and chattering until rebuked by Father Rielle. The doctor knelt a long time at her side. Knowing her so well, he was secretly astonished at the weakness she had shown and he dealt with her most kindly. Tragedy had at last touched her too deeply; a latent tendency of the heart to abnormal action had suddenly developed under pressure of emotion and strain of shock, and he foresaw what she and the others did not--a long and tedious illness with periods of alarming collapse and weakness. For herself, so ill was she for the first time in her active life, she thought more about her own condition than of her loss; she imagined herself dying and following her lover on the same day to the grave. The image of Ringfield too was absent from her thoughts, which were now chiefly concentrated on her symptoms and sufferings.

"Am I not very ill?" she asked presently, after a little of the brandy had somewhat stilled the dreadful beating of her heart, the dreadful booming in her ears.

"Yes, mademoiselle. But you will recover."

"I have never been sick before."

"You are sure of that? Never had any nervous sensations, no tremors, no palpitations?"

"Ah, those! Yes, frequently, but I never thought much about them.

They were part of my life, my emotional life, and natural to me. Shall I die?"

"I think not, mademoiselle. I believe not, but you may be ill for a while."

"Ill! For how long?"

"That I cannot tell you. You must have care and quiet, absolute quiet."

Pauline said no more. The distress of heart and nerves came on again; she moaned, being exceedingly troubled in spirit and her pallor was great.

"It is clear you must not remain out in the road any longer, mademoiselle. You must be put to bed and have warmth and rest and some kind woman to look after you. Ah! How we would welcome our good Mme.

Poussette now, but she has flown, she has flown. So it will be Mme.

Archambault perhaps, who knows all about sickness; has she not reared thirteen of her own, or fourteen, I forget which? Come, mademoiselle, we will lift you carefully. The door is open, the manor is hospitable and warm, its kitchen and larder well stocked, its cellars overflowing.

Faith--you might do worse, and at Poussette's who would be there to nurse you?"

Pauline was too spent to utter the defiant objections that in health she would have hurled at the speaker. Tragedy indeed had touched her for once too deeply, and she submitted to be helped back into her old home, the house made hateful by a thousand painful a.s.sociations of an unhappy youth, without uttering a single remonstrance. Some of her native courage knocked timidly at her frightened heart, clamouring to be rea.s.sured of days to come, of duties to be taken up, of life to be lived, for over and above her sense of cruel frustration and bereavement she dreaded death, not caring to die. The closing of the episode in which the guide figured so prominently appalled and stupefied her, yet her inherent vitality sprang up, already trying to a.s.sert itself.

"What a position is mine!" she thought, when a slight return of strength enabled her, leaning on the doctor's arm, to reach the room so long occupied by her brother. But her lips said nothing. There was no other place to put her; the salon did not contain a sofa, she could not be lodged with Artemise or Angeel, and meanwhile her weakness increased till she asked herself to be put to bed. Maman Archambault was sent for and in a few moments Pauline was lying on the lumpy tattered mattress which had served Henry Clairville for his last couch.

The course of tragic accident had brought her to this, and could she have foreseen the long, long weary time, first of illness, then of convalescence, and finally a physical change so marked as to unfit her for all but a narrow domestic life, it is likely that with her fierce and impatient temper she might have been tempted to end her existence.

As one for whom the quest of happiness was ended as far as a prosperous marriage and removal from St. Ignace were involved, she now depended on herself again, and bitterly as she might mourn and lament the disappointment and chagrin which in a moment had permanently saddened her future, her grief and mortification would have been bitterer still could she have foreseen the long nights of half-delirious insomnia, the days of utter apathy and uselessness which stretched blankly before her.

Later that night, when she had tried to compose herself to sleep but without success, she called Maman Archambault into the room.

"Give me a light--for the love of G.o.d, a light!" she wailed, sitting up with all her dark hair pouring over the bed. "How dare you leave me without a light and I so ill!"

"But the doctor said----"

"What do I care what he said! In this room, in the dark, are all sorts of creatures, I hear them! Henry is here, or his ghost, and the Poussette woman is here, singing her silly songs, and rats are here, and cats, and worse things, moving and crawling all over me, in the walls, everywhere!"

The old woman set the lamp on the table. She was very angry.

"It is not so, mademoiselle. The room was cleaned. Maybe a ghost, _n'sais pas_. Maybe a cat or two. Yes, there's the white one now under your bed and her kittens! I'll drive them out."

Miss Clairville sank back and watched. So had her brother lain. So had the cats lain under the bed during his sickness. Maman Archambault went out to her _pailla.s.se_ in the hall, the night wore on, but without sleep for Pauline, and towards morning so intense were her sufferings that a messenger was sent for Dr. Renaud, who came as requested and was destined to come again and again for many a weary month.

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE QUEST OF HAPPINESS

"Ye wish for act and circ.u.mstance, 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 denoument 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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!"