Ringfield Part 30

Then he saw the carpet-bag and remembered it, and in that instant a pang of horrid doubt and fear pa.s.sed through him and he looked around for Ringfield. Escape from death gave him additional courage and sharpened his wits; his brain cleared now and did him good service, he felt himself a man, able to resist and proud to endure, and he hoped to meet the parson and demand explanations from him, for he could scarcely be blamed for divining some connexion between the deadly gap in the bridge and the carefully planted decoy--the carpet-bag. Yet in this induction he was wrong. The hole under the snow had not been known to Ringfield and the bag had been left by him in a certain position of safety while he was inside the little church--nothing more. Even as Crabbe was standing with growing wrath and gathering resolution in his expression and demeanour Ringfield walked out and confronted him.

Hatred, nothing less, looked forth from his lowering brows and bitter mouth, and he was met by answering hate, wedded to cruel scorn, in the guide. The latter spoke first.

"Do you know what has nearly happened?" he cried with a fine tempest of wrath kindling in his usually contemptuous manner. "I could have you arrested, more than that, my good sir, Mr. Methodist Parson!--convicted, perhaps worse, for the trap you led me into! You and your bag--confound you!"

Ringfield, who could hardly look more miserable on this accusation than he did already from illness and other causes, made some dumb motion with his hands and started as he perceived the traces of struggle about the other.

"My bag? The carpet-bag? What has that to do with you, with us? What are you talking of? What trap? I know nothing of any trap."

"Do you know nothing of a man caught there in the middle of the bridge where the footway has fallen out--do you know nothing of that man struggling to lift himself up from that cursed hole and crying for help? You know nothing, do you?"

Ringfield's surprise was genuine, as Crabbe was beginning to see.

"Certainly I know nothing, have heard nothing. I have been in the church some time, an hour I should think. A hole----"

Then he remembered.

"The dog!" he cried. "The little dead dog! Now I understand. He must have fallen through. I wondered at the time how he got out there under the bridge on top of those rolling logs that carried him over the fall.

Once there, it was impossible to save him. I remember his eyes."

"What are you talking about now?" said the other angrily. "I'll swear you knew something of that hole and meant to see me go down through it."

Ringfield smiled with that slow, wry smile of his.

"I knew nothing of the hole. But I am not so sure that I would be sorry if I saw you go down through it this moment, so long as it was not my direct work. You and I can never be friends. You and I cannot expect tolerance of each other. We are enemies, we must always be enemies, to the death--to the death!"

Crabbe had, as usual, the upper hand in ease and coolness, and being now quite restored in physical courage he began to note the signs of illness and misery in the other's face. He was almost sorry for him and said so.

"I'm sorry for all this, Ringfield, I really am. It's some misunderstanding, I suppose. I can't blame you for admiring Pauline.

I don't blame you for it. You're a man, despite your calling, same as I am. And I have liked you better since you have shown me your rough side.--By Heaven, I have, Ringfield! Things have turned out in an unexpected way with me, and you have suffered on account, and if not in silence, as we might look for from you, why, it only proves you a man like the rest of us! You'll get over it, you know. She's to leave here for good with me the day after to-morrow; everything's settled and it's much the best thing that could happen for both of us. I wish you would be reasonable and understand this and make her going away easier."

This rambling speech was received at first in silence, then Ringfield spoke, his slow utterances affording a contrast to the half-jocular, half-querulous words of the ex-guide.

"That word reasonable! Be reasonable! You--you ask me to be reasonable! As if I were at fault, as if I were doing her the injury!

G.o.d knows I have my own battle to fight, my own self to overcome, but that is beside the question. Do you see nothing unreasonable in your own relation to--to Miss Clairville? When I came here--and G.o.d knows I'm sorry at times I ever came or stayed--I met Miss Clairville. I talked to her and she to me. I learned her mind, or thought I did. I fathomed her heart, or she allowed me to think so, and thus I became acquainted with her story, the story that is concerned with her young life and with you. I was deeply affected, deeply moved, deeply interested--how could it be otherwise! And then to my eternal sorrow, as I fear, I grew to love her. She--she--returned it."

Crabbe made some indistinct remark, but Ringfield went on without caring to ask what it was.

"I tell you--she returned my affection and gave me proof of it. All that, whatever it was between us, is very sacred and I am not going to talk about it. Then you know what happened; you would not leave her alone, you followed and I believe annoyed and pestered her, using the power you have over her for her destruction and despair."

"The whole thing is monstrous," cried the other hotly. "You have cast your d.a.m.ned ugly, black shadow over this place too long as it is! Miss Clairville is no child; she knows, has always known, her own mind, and I do not grudge her a slight flirtation or two with any one she fancies; it is her way, a safe outlet for her strong yet variable temperament. You take things too seriously, that's all."

And the guide, slapping and shaking the snow from his clothing and adjusting his cap, walked down from the bridge to one side and sat upon a rock in sheer fatigue. It was the identical rock from which Poussette had been pulled back by Ringfield on that April day when the affairs of the parish had been discussed, and was no safer now than at that time, in fact, footing was precarious everywhere around the fall, for the same gla.s.sy covering, slowly melting and slippery, had spread to all objects in sight.

Ringfield, too, turned and stood a few yards behind the guide and again he kept that peculiar silence.

"Now consider," said Crabbe quietly, looking in his pocket for matches and holding his pipe comfortably in his hand. "I'm perfectly ready to sympathize with you. I know when you first saw me you cannot have been very pleasantly impressed, and all that, but that's all or nearly all over, and I'm going to try and turn over a new leaf, Ringfield. No more Nature for me, nor for her; we are to flee these dismal wilds and try a brighter clime,--a brighter clime! You must be generous and confess that I can do more for her than you can. It will be a new lease of life for us both, but candidly, Ringfield--lazy dog and worse that I have been--I think more of what it will mean for her than for myself."

"If you consider her happiness and her--her good name so much," said Ringfield, trembling and white, "why did you lie to me about your relations with her?"

"When did I lie to you?"

"You cannot have forgotten. That day in the shack, the first day I met you."

"That is easily explained." Crabbe continued to look at and think of his pipe, oblivious of the white countenance behind him. "I spoke after a fas.h.i.+on. The thing--I mean our relations--amounted virtually to a marriage. The difference was in your thought--in your mind. You pictured a ceremony, a religious rite, whereas I intended to convey the idea of a state, a mutual feeling----"

"You allowed me to think of a ceremony, you encouraged me to think of it."

"Nothing of the sort. Besides, I was not sober at the time. Make allowances, my Christian friend, always make allowances."

"Then what of the child? If you mentioned anything it should have been the child."

At this Crabbe turned, and so sudden was his movement that Ringfield retreated as if caught guiltily; in doing so he very nearly slipped on the icy rocks that sloped imperceptibly towards the rus.h.i.+ng fall, and he was about to warn the guide, who was farther down the bank than himself when the latter, rising abruptly, cried:--

"The child? What child? There never was any child. Thank heaven, we were spared that complication!"

"You deny it? You deny it in the face of the likeness, of the stories of the village and the entire countryside; in face of the misery its existence has caused her--the mother, and of the proof in your own sodden, embruted condition, in face of her own admission----"

"Admission? It is impossible she can have admitted what never occurred. What did she say?"

"She implied--implied--made me think----"

"Made you think?" said the guide in disgust. "Made you think? That's what's been the matter with you all along;--you think too much. You wanted a bigger parish, Reverend Father, to occupy your time and mind.

St. Ignace was too small."

This tone of banter was the one least calculated to appease the jealous and vindictive spirit holding Ringfield in its grasp. He became whiter, more agitated, and held up one hand as if to guard himself, yet there was nothing furious in Crabbe's manner; rather the contrary, for he was relieved at hearing of the natural misapprehension by which he had been looked upon as Angeel's father. But Ringfield was difficult to convince. No gossip had reached him where he lay at Archibald Groom's, with Madame Poussette watching him, nor at the Hotel Champlain where he had staggered the night before for a mad moment only, as he asked for news of Crabbe and was told that he gone back to St. Ignace; therefore he knew nothing of the _affaire Archambault_, as some of the provincial papers called it, and had heard only the bare facts of Henry Clairville's death and burial. To complete his ignorance, the charitable inst.i.tutions to which he had written had neglected to answer his letters, for such an offer coming from such a source required time for consideration, and his brain, neither a subtly trained nor naturally cunning one, was incapable of those s.h.i.+fting drifts of thought which occupy themselves with idly fitting certain acts to certain individuals. His literal mind had always connected. Miss Clairville, from the day of the Hawthorne picnic, with Angeel, and to be told that they were not, as he had supposed, mother and child, was only to merge him in the absolutely crus.h.i.+ng puzzle of a question--whose child then could she be? Might it not be--for here at last his mind gave a twist, fatal to its usual literal drift--her child by some one other than Crabbe? For who could mistake the eyes and their expression, the way the hair grew on the forehead, the shape of the hands, white and firm like Pauline's,--resemblances all made the stranger by a.s.sociation with the unnaturally formed head and shoulders of the unhappy child?

The two stood facing each other; the Christian minister, originally a being of blameless instincts and moral life, but now showing a countenance and owning a temper distorted to sinful conditions from the overshadowing of the great master pa.s.sion; and the battered exile, genuine, however, in his dealings with himself, and sincere in the midst of degradation. So the Pharisee and the publican might have stood. So in all ages often stand those extreme types, the moral man who has avoided or by circ.u.mstances been free of temptation, and the sinner who yet keeps a universal kindliness or other simple virtue in his heart. Anguish in one was met by cheerful contempt and growing pity in the other, and once more Crabbe essayed to reason with Ringfield.

"Believe me," he said, "I would give way to the better man, and you, of course, are he, if I thought Miss Clairville's future would thereby be benefited, but I cannot imagine anything more uncongenial than the life which you--pardon me--would be likely to offer her. She has no money and she loves money. She is tired of her home and all these surroundings; I can take her from them for ever. She is gifted, intelligent, and brilliant, and I can show her much that will interest and transform her. She runs a risk, certainly, in marrying me, but she knows my worst, and by Heaven--Ringfield, there's a power of comfort in that! No setting on a pedestal, no bowing to an idol--and then perhaps she will help in the working out of the tiger and the ape, make the beast within me die. How the old familiar lines come back to one here in this solitary place! I suppose I'll go down to Oxford some day and see my old rooms,--take Pauline. We'd like to keep in touch with you, Ringfield, send you a line now and then after you leave St. Ignace, for I don't figure you remaining here all your life at the beck and call of Poussette."

Ringfield's eyes were on the ground, for a deep mystification still possessed him; he had scarcely heard the latter part of Crabbe's speech, for there remained unanswered that question in his tortured mind--whose child was Angeel if not Pauline's, for he still saw the basket-chair with the dreadful face in it as he looked down in the barn, and still heard those damaging whispers from Enderby the night of the concert.

A groan escaped him; he threw a pained and bitter glance at Crabbe and again studied the ground.

"I find it hard to believe you. Hard, hard. The people at Hawthorne all say it was--it was her's. Enderby told me."

"G.o.d help you for a silly lunatic if you listen to the tales of country people, Ringfield! They may have said so, they may have said all kinds of stuff--I never spoke of it to a living soul myself, even in my cups; I'll swear I left it alone even then."

"But now, now you can speak! The time has come to speak! If not you, then who, who could be that poor child's father!"

"Why, of course I can tell you that!" said Crabbe, coming a pace nearer. "I wonder you have not guessed by now. Her brother, Henry Clairville. It was a bad business, but he paid for it, as we all do, Ringfield, we all do."

With a fierce gesture of extreme astonishment the minister sprang forward and in his excitement struck the guide on the breast, a heavy blow. Startled into forgetting his dangerous position, Crabbe threw himself backward, seeing, as he thought, sudden madness in the other's eyes, and immediately his doom was sealed. He slipped, tripped, tried to save himself, rolled from one ice-covered boulder to another, was cast from one mighty cauldron of furious seething waters to another, and finally disappeared in the deeper pools that formed the lower and greater fall. His poor body, bruised and beaten, choked and maimed, had met the same fate as the little dog--and, strange to relate--he had uttered no cry as he sank backwards into the cold watery abysses from which there was no escape; his face only showed surprise and reproach as he looked his last on Ringfield and this world. When upon the bridge he had expected death, set his teeth and prayed, felt all vital force drop away, then by degrees flow back again, but now, when Death clutched him from behind and thrust him over those slippery precipices, to the last moment there was only a profound consternation in his staring blue eyes, as if he found it impossible to believe he was being sucked down, whirled down, to eternity. Such was the end of Edmund Crabbe Hawtree, Esquire, of Suffolk, England.

Ringfield had not moved since Crabbe had fallen. His face was horrible in the white intensity of its pa.s.sion, and he continued to stare at the spot where a moment before the guide had been sitting without making the slightest endeavour to go to the rescue, or, by shouting for a.s.sistance, attract the attention of people on the inhabited side of the river. The image of the little dead dog merged into that of Crabbe and vice versa; he confused these images and saw unnatural shapes struggling in stormy waters, and thus the time wore on, ten, twenty, thirty minutes, before he perceived a man at the far end of the bridge.

At first he thought it was Poussette, then it looked like Martin; finally he knew it for Father Rielle, and at this everything cleared and came back to him. He recollected the great hole spoken of by Crabbe and knew that he ought to call out or lift a hand in warning, yet he did neither. Father Rielle, however, was not too preoccupied to observe the hole; he walked around it instead of over or through it and had the presence of mind to pause, and after a few minutes' kneading and compressing lumps of the damp snow into a species of scarecrow, erected the clumsy squat figure of a misshapen man by the side of the yawning gap and pa.s.sed on. The sun was radiantly bright by now and the ice beginning to melt off from twigs and wires; the red carpet-bag flamed forth more emphatically than ever, and presently the two men were not more than a few paces apart.