Ringfield Part 8

He now had all her attention; she tried to maintain her proud air, but something was working in her to the exclusion of all coquetry, all dissimulation.

"If you know him so well, why--why come to me for information? Of course any one living here, as you say, must have met him."

"But he has spoken to me of you as if he knew you very well, as if----"

He could not continue, and even in her own uneasiness she felt a pity and tenderness for him.

"Why do you bother yourself about us--about him, I mean? Or me. I shall be going away soon, I hope; you will not remain all your life in such a little place as St. Ignace; try and forget what he has said."

"I cannot. It is with me day and night. Tell me if it is true!"

"Why should I tell you?"

"Because I must know. Because, if a lie, such a tale must be traced back from where it came--the black imagination of a depraved and incorrigible villain. Because if true, if true----" his voice failed him, and although it was now quite dark, Miss Clairville could detect great excitement in his usually calm and pleasantly austere manner.

She leant to him over the balcony.

"But I cannot tell you here! I cannot go to you; will you then come to me? There will be none upstairs at this hour in this house; they are all gone to see the boat come in at the wharf. There is her whistle now! Would you mind coming very much, Mr. Ringfield? Do you think it wrong of me to ask you?"

"Wrong, Miss Clairville?"

"Improper, I mean. Even here there are the _convenances_, the proprieties."

"Proprieties! When we are talking of our immortal souls and of our hopes of salvation! When truth is at stake, your character, your future perhaps--think if that had been told to anyone else!" he exclaimed half to himself.

"Then you will come?" Miss Clairville's tone was full of a radiant incredulity. She leant still farther towards him, and her eyes burned into the surrounding darkness of the night.

"I will come at once. I--if I meet anyone I can say that I am calling on you to hear about your brother."

She smiled, then frowned, in the dark. Would it be her lot to teach a good man subtlety? Should she tell the truth? She had not long to wait or think about it, for in five minutes Ringfield was knocking at her door. Nothing subtle as yet looked forth from his earnest eyes, and the grasp with which he took and held her hand was that of the pastor rather than that of the lover, but the night was dark and heavily warm, and although there were stars in the sky he did not look at them. Jupiter was just rising, giving a large mellow light like a house lamp, round and strong, and casting a shadow, but the fall of a sable lock on Miss Clairville's white neck was already more to him.

They were soon seated side by side on the balcony. She had regained something other usual manner.

"You must not think that I am ungrateful for your interest in me," she said. "I believe that you are a good man, a Christian I suppose you call yourself, outside and above all creed, all ritual, the first I have ever met. No, I am not forgetting Father Rielle. He did the best he could for me, and Henry and others, but I could never follow the rules of the Romish Church, although born and bred a Catholic. With grand music one might stay in that communion, but not as our service is rendered here. And then, the confession! That is all right when you have nothing to confess, but not for me! Oh--Mr. Ringfield, why is it I cannot confess to Father Rielle, but that I can or could to you?"

"Then that story is true?"

"What was the story? What did he say?"

They talked now in whispers, and Ringfield told her in four short and to him abhorrent words. "He said--you were his wife."

Great was his relief when Pauline, starting from her seat, almost screamed aloud her agitated reply.

"No, it is not true! I never married him. That is--at least--no, I entirely deny it. I am _not_ his wife. I am _not_ married to him."

In his state of mind and inexperience he failed to notice the equivocal nature of this denial. He heard the impa.s.sioned negatives; he saw fear, resentment, and a sort of womanly repulsion in the frightened gesture she flung upon the air, and what he wished to hear and prayed to hear, that he heard. Crabbe then had deliberately lied perhaps, considering his condition, he had only boastfully invented.

"Thank G.o.d!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, standing up and taking Miss Clairville's finely formed white hand in both of his own. "Thank G.o.d!" he repeated, and, with restored confidence and renewed enthusiasm in all good works, he seized the opportunity to speak of what was in his heart. "Now you must listen to me. I believe, I honestly believe, that by His all-wise and all-knowing ruling I have been sent here to help you and be your friend. That letter I wrote to you--you received it I know, for I heard about it. I went West from a sense of duty. I was not required, and again the sense of duty brought me back to St. Ignace and--you."

"Oh, not only me! You would have come back in any case. You say it was Duty, not,--not----" Not Desire? If this were thought in some vague and unapprehended shape, it was not spoken. Ringfield gave her hand a strong and kindly pressure and let it fall.

"It was duty, yes, duty revealed to me by my Maker, to serve and obey whom is not only my duty but my whole desire and pleasure."

"You really mean what you say in telling me this? It sounds like things we read, like the little books they gave us at Sorel-en-haut.

_Mon Dieu_! but those little books! And one big one there was, a story-book about a girl, all about a girl. A girl called Ellen, Ellen something, I have forgotten."

"That must have been 'The Wide, Wide World'. And you read that while you were at school!"

"Yes, when I was a young girl. I am afraid it didn't do me much good."

These interchanges of simple talk marked the progress of their friends.h.i.+p. Any fact about her past or present life, no matter how trivial, was of astonis.h.i.+ng interest to him. And to her, the knowledge that she was already and swiftly, pa.s.sionately, purely dear to a being of Ringfield's earnest mould and serious mien, so different to the other man who had come into her life, gave a sense of delicious triumph and joy. They continued to talk thus, in accents growing momentarily more tender, of many things connected with her youth and his calling, and the fact that they kept their voices down so intimately low lent additional zest and delight to the situation. Only when Ringfield alluded directly to Edmund Crabbe did she show uneasiness.

"You must give me the right to settle this affair with him," said her visitor. "We cannot risk such statements being made to people of the village, to such a man as Poussette, for example."

"Oh--Poussette!" Miss Clairville found it possible and even pleasant now to laugh. "Do you not know then all about Mr. Poussette? He is in love with me, too, or so he says. Yes, I have had a great deal of bother with him. That poor Mme. Poussette! It is not enough that one is faded and worn and has lost one's only little child, but one must also be _wished dead_, out of the way by one's husband. Ah--you are startled, _mais c'est la belle verite_! It is a good thing to be a clergyman, like you, Mr. Ringfield; you are removed from all these _betises_, all these foolish imaginings. You do your work and look neither to the right nor the left. How I wish I were like you! I only pray, for I do pray sometimes, that no thought of me will ever darken your young and ardent life; I only hope that no care for me will ever turn you aside from your plain duty."

"Do not, please," broke in Ringfield, pus.h.i.+ng back his chair so loudly that she was obliged to beg more caution, "use that tone to me.

Twenty-six is not so very young. I should have spoken and felt as I feel and as I speak when I was twenty. So Poussette is added to your list of admirers! Will it be Father Rielle himself next, I wonder?

Oh, Miss Clairville--I was right! The theatre is no place for you. I ask you to leave it, to forsake it for ever. This your opportunity.

Do not go back to it. I do not, it is true, know anything about it from actual experience, but I can gather that it presents, must present, exceptional temptations. Will you not be guided by me? Will you not take and act upon my advice?"

"But the special troubles that beset me are here, not within the theatre! If Poussette is silly, with his ridiculous attentions when he thinks his wife is not looking, if the other person, if----"

"You mean this man Crabbe?"

She inclined her head; at the mention of the name all spirit seemed to die out of her.

"If he maligns me, slanders and lies about me, that is here--here at St. Ignace, and not at the theatre. Why, then, do you expect me to return here for good? I come back too often as it is. I should leave here altogether, but that some influence, some fate, always draws me back."

"Whose influence? for with fate I will have nothing to do. G.o.d and a man's self--with these we front the world, the flesh, and the Devil.

Crabbe's evil influence still! You knew him when he called himself by another name?"

"Yes, Mr. Edmund Hawtree. We, we---- I suppose you would call it a flirtation. He was very different then, as you may believe."

Jealousy leapt into Ringfield's breast, the first he had ever known, and a common retort sprang to his lips.

"I should hope so! I cannot bear to think of your having known him well under any circ.u.mstances. The man is low! Whether drunk or sober he has nothing to commend him, and I believe him to be utterly irreclaimable and lost."

"In this world perhaps. But not necessarily in the next? Do you decline, then, to continue the work of reformation?"

He winced, and upon recalling what he had said saw his error. "No, I retract that. He is human, therefore a soul to be saved, as one of G.o.d's creatures, but whether the man can be reinstated in society is a doubtful matter. You are right to defend him, and I am sad only when I grudge you those memories of him. You knew him then so very well?"

She understood the pleading tone and she endeavoured to be candid, but how explain certain things to a man of Ringfield's calibre? To another, a glance, a smile, the inflection of a word, of a syllable, and all would be clear. How was she to frame an explanation which should receive his tacit and grave but unenlightened approval? How far he could conjecture, disa.s.sociate, dissect, limit and a.n.a.lyse, weigh and deduct, the various progresses in a crude amalgamation people call Love, she did not know, and there lay her difficulty.

"I will tell you what I can. I was quite young when I met Mr. Hawtree, 'Crabbe,' as he is now known. It is his second name. He had been unfortunate in money affairs, I understood, and had not been trained to any kind of work. It was after I returned from Sorel that I found him here. He frequently came to visit Henry; they described themselves as gentlemen together, and I suppose they were not wise company for one another, but at first I did not take any notice. He fell in love with me, and talked a great deal to me, improving my English as he called it, and you can understand how little opportunity I had had of reading or continuing my studies. I have no talent for the _menage_; besides, Henry's methods had been long in practice, and I could not unchange them, at the age of nineteen! Mr. Hawtree and I were thus thrown very much together, yet one thing kept occurring which made me very miserable. I found out that he was drinking, and Henry too! Then another thing--my bad temper. Ah! how I suffered, suffered, in those days with that man, Mr. Ringfield!"

"I can well believe it."

"And he with me! Perhaps some other kind of woman would have suited him better, a timid, angelic, gentle little being who would have appealed to him more. When we quarrelled he grew like all you English, haughty and sneering--ah! when I think of it! And I changed to a fury--the Clairville temper--and gave back even more, even worse, than I got. But do not let us talk any more about it! You have discovered what I would have hidden, and for my part I get on better when I make myself forget it and him altogether."