A Rich Man's Relatives Volume I Part 7

RALPH.

It was with a sweet and respectful smile that Judith looked at the curate, and left him to make the first observation. She would have liked to look up to him; that being her natural mental att.i.tude to men of his cloth; but physically the thing was impracticable. She was not notably a tall woman, but he was distinctly a short man; and though too bulky to be called little, his figure justified Susan's mental definition of him as "stumpy." He was her junior too, and his countenance was not impressive. It was blond as regarded hair and eyes, indefinite in feature, pasty in complexion; still, it was neatly kept, and relieved from vacuity by that undoubting self-complacency which comes to those privileged to reprove and exhort unchallenged, for twenty minutes at a stretch.

Mr. Bunce waited, coughed, observed on the fineness of the weather, and was silent. Miss Susan agreed with him in her mind, but having nothing to say on the subject, said nothing, and it was left for Judith to fan the verbal spark, and nurse it into a conversation. She opened in dulcet tones, and with a respectful effusiveness, like the carved nymphs round an old fountain, catching the wasting driblets in their marble sh.e.l.ls. She agreed that the weather was indeed extremely pleasant, and counted up how many other fine days there had been that week and the week before. But there had been a shower the week before that, just when the people were leaving the missionary meeting, where the good Bishop of Rara Tonga spoke so sweetly. Had Mr. Bunce been there? No? Ah! then, he had indeed missed a treat. It had been most instructive. The bishop told about a deacon who remembered having eaten part of his grandmother, and about the octopus coming out of the sea, to eat breadfruit on sh.o.r.e on moonlight nights,--perhaps it was not breadfruit, by the way, it may have been something else; and perhaps it was not an octopus; but at any rate it was some dreadful creature, and it did something very curious, and it was all most interesting; "and indeed, Mr. Bunce, you missed a treat."

Mr. Bunce said he found his parochial duty too heavy and too engrossing to admit of desultory meeting-going.

"But the heathen! Mr. Bunce, if you take no interest in the octopus."

"We have heathens in Montreal, Miss Herkimer, as ignorant of good as any South Sea Islander. They want to be taught, and some even to be fed, for work is scarce this year, and winter coming on."

"Ah, yes!" answered Miss Judith, "it is sad to think of, and," she added--with a twinge of conscience for what she was about, to say, for she was of St. Silas, and set no great store by the church activities of St. Wittikind, but then good manners and Christian charity require one to stretch a point verbally sometimes--"You are doing much good in St. Wittikind's, I understand. We in St. Silas are doing what we can too. We distribute fifty thousand gospel leaflets every month, and with--well, they must have the best results. So many benighted Romanists have no other opportunity to get a glimpse of the truth; and you know, Mr. Bunce, the truth _must_ prevail."

"No doubt. Miss Herkimer, it will, someday. In St. Wittikind's parish, however, we find so many in physical want, and so many with no religion at all, that our hands are full, and we do not attempt controversy."

Miss Judith sighed softly, so as not to be observed. These were not the views in vogue at St. Silas, and of course they were wrong; but with her "yearning" towards this curate, who seemed meet for better things, if he could be won, it seemed her duty to be winning. So she suppressed her inclination to say something "sound," merely observing that all souls were alike precious, and then added that she had heard much of the zealous beneficence exercised at St. Wittikind's, and "would he explain about those sisterhoods, of which people talked so much."

This, to use an Americanism, "fetched" the curate--fetched him round, as it were, to his own shopdoor, the pulpit, into which he at once stepped, and held forth fluently and minutely, and at very great length, while Judith listened with interest. Not so Susan, who found the prelection both tedious and unnecessary. She paid what she thought she could afford to the different charities recommended by her church, whose business she considered it to see that its member's money was well applied; and having paid, she took a receipt in full from her conscience, and did not wish to hear any more about giving till that day twelvemonths, when, if convenient, she would renew the contribution. Every one, she said, had her own preference in fancy-work and amus.e.m.e.nts; hers was Berlin wool--as indeed her drawing-room showed, where every chair and ottoman was bedecked with representations of impossible herbage in the crudest of colour and design. Judith's fad was handing tracts to ragged French and Irish men, an equally harmless exercise, though with less result to show, seeing the recipients hardly waited till her back was turned before lighting their pipes with them.

Susan's eyes strayed from one pa.s.ser-by to the next, in search of something to interest her more than the clerical monologue proceeding at her side, and by-and-by she espied a gentleman being driven in the direction from which she had come. An idea struck her; she hailed the cab, which stopped before her, and the gentleman within looked out inquiringly.

"Oh! Mr. Jordan," she said, "forgive my stopping you; but this was the day that wretched woman who stole our little niece was to be tried, and I know you have charge of Mr. Selby's interests in the matter. Is the case decided? What have they done with her? Has she confessed?"

"She has been acquitted, ma'am. I am just now on my way to Mrs.

Selby's, who will no doubt be impatient to hear the result; though, for myself, I have suspected for some time there was a mistake in arresting her."

"Acquitted? But the nurse-girl swore positively--did she not?--that that was the squaw who was at the house! And the ferry-boatmen corroborated what she said."

"Yes. The man swore that a squaw with a bundle, which he suspected might be a baby, crossed in the steamboat that afternoon, and he was inclined to swear to the ident.i.ty of the blanket the prisoner wore, on account of its being torn at one corner. The girl Lisette was very positive about both the blanket and the wearer, and I fear her being so will materially prejudice any further attempts we may make, for the priest swore to the squaw's having been in Caughnawaga all day, and he produced the school roll of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart to show that she had not only been there, but had taken the medal of honour that day."

"Ah!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Judith with emphasis, "what a system is Popery! So insidious! So soul-destroying!--capable of any subterfuge. I wonder you don't take out a warrant and have that convent searched."

Mr. Bunce opened his eyes, startled and shocked that one so much interested in works of beneficence should have so little charity.

Mr. Jordan, who knew the lady better, sniffed impatiently but not loud, as recognizing the ebullition to be const.i.tutional and unworthy of notice. "The worst of it is," he said, "the girl has sworn so positively that it will weaken the value of her testimony when we bring her up by-and-by to identify the real offender, if found. And we have no other witness to produce. In my professional experience I have always found that too much zeal is dangerous--far worse than too little! How do _you_ find it, Mr. Bunce in _your_ profession? Zeal without knowledge, eh?" and he glanced with a sly smile from Miss Judy's face to the curate's.

The curate looked blankly before him. He was too slightly acquainted with the ladies to feel warranted in poking fun at their eccentricities; and he was too much of a cleric to welcome a layman's jest on subjects pertaining to his cloth. It was well, he thought, that the lady should have a zeal, whether wise or the reverse. The trouble he had found had oftener been to kindle a zeal than to direct it, and he doubted not but with judicious guidance this ardent lady might be brought right--that is, to take views like his own of most things.

The pause resulting from Mr. Jordan's wit and the curate's unresponsiveness was broken by Miss Susan, who was growing restless.

Though no longer young, she retained some of the characteristics of her departed youth, and had what, to misquote the high-heeled dignitaries of literature, might be called "the modern spirit."

Had she been thirty years younger than the family bible showed her to be she would a.s.suredly have said that all men of the professions--especially successful ones--were prigs, and most of them bores into the bargain; and, as it was, she thought it. Foolish old woman! Her weakness, in days of old had been for the red coats, and though none of them had ever proposed, she was still loyal to her ancient ideal. Her roving eye descried her nephew Ralph on the other side of the way, and just as the pause incident to the curate's silence became notable, she called aloud, "Ralph!" and waved her parasol.

Ralph obeyed the signal, and joined the party on the curbstone, around the cab door.

"Ah, Ralph!" cried Mr. Jordan. "Going to call on your aunt, I daresay, and tell her the trial is over and that it is proved now we have been on a wrong scent these last three months, and must begin all over again from the beginning. Here, get in; we may as well go together--or, better still, I will yield you up the cab. You can explain it all, just as well as I could; it seems like a fresh disappointment to the poor lady, and the news will come better from a relative." Then, looking at his watch, "I have a meeting due in ten minutes from now; I shall still be in time; so good-bye! and thanks."

"No--you--don't! Mr. Jordan," responded Ralph. "I will not deny that I intended to call at Selby's; but, since _you_ are so far on your way, just complete the trip. Take all the credit yourself and charge it in your bill. I can't do that, you know, being only a broker."

Jordan looked disgusted, re-seated himself in his cab and drove away.

Susan repeated her expressions of regret at what she still looked on as a miscarriage of justice; but Ralph replied:

"Not at all! No one who was present at the trial could have looked for any other conclusion. We must just try again; but--now that old Jordan is out of hearing, one may venture to say it--the whole case has been mismanaged. Why did they not offer a reward at the first? Now, I fear, it will be too late! The little circ.u.mstances which detectives are able to piece together to so good a purpose are soon forgotten, and so the clue is lost."

"Poor Mary!" said Susan, "my heart bleeds for her. It may turn out for the best, perhaps, and remedy the iniquity of Gerald's preposterous will, by keeping the money in his own family, but it is very sad. She seems crushed. If her boy had been spared to her--but to lose them both! It is turning her hair grey. She who used to be the flower of our family!"

Judith's lips tightened at "flower of the family." Herself was that interesting blossom she thought, but that was not what she said. On the contrary she expressed herself with evangelical superiority to such trifles.

"_I_ regard it as a dispensation, to wean her from earthly joys. It is in love that, when we make ourselves idols, they are taken away.

Perhaps, too, it may be a judgment on her for marrying in defiance of those who were older and wiser than herself. There are warnings in all these mysterious happenings, and food for thought;" and she rolled her eyes Sibyl-wise over Ralph to the curate.

There was an irreverent gleam in Ralph's eyes, and he turned to watch a pa.s.sing dray till his inclination to laugh went off. The curate was regarding her with a puzzled expression. He was a well-meaning young man, who wished both to be and to do good; but who, not being any wiser than his neighbours, notwithstanding the higher ground on which, in right of his orders, he believed himself to stand, was often in doubt both as to what he ought to feel and to say. He was very sure it would never have occurred to himself to use the language he had listened to, and he began to wonder if he had stumbled on some advancedly serious person, whose acquaintance would be improving, or--or something else. There seemed a fine devotional tone in her opening words, especially enunciated as they were, with a full and rounded unction. They were not very novel, perhaps; he seemed to have heard the like before, and more than once; but then, what that is true is also new?--as was said, or something not unlike it in sound, by a late prime minister. Her next proposition rather startled him, carrying him back to his college days, and reminding him of the stealing of Jove's thunderbolts; but there was a third-like the third course beloved by another prime minister, reconciling contradictions and committing to nothing--"mysterious happenings, food for thought."

That was it! He would think it over; and there was balm in this, for had she not been listening to him, as they came along, as to another Gamaliel, while he described the charitable schemes of St.

Wittikind's? and would it not be painful to think otherwise than well of so responsive a lady?

Confused by all these thoughts the curate did not speak; and Susan, thinking it high time to break up the meeting, reminded Judith that their dressmaker lived hard by, and now would be a good opportunity to order their winter gowns. Judith said goodbye regretfully and made the curate promise to come very soon and tell her more about St.

Wittikind's, and the two gentlemen walked townwards together.

"You seem to know my aunt well," said Ralph. "I am agreeably surprised. I fancied she was too grimly Low Church to speak to any clergyman not of St. Silas or St. Zebedee. I hope your acquaintance will broaden her views, which are rather extreme, and something of a nuisance in the family. However, Aunt Judy means well. We all allow that. The trouble is that she will never allow that we mean well, when we go counter to her advice; and then she treats us to a word in season, which is apt to be very highly seasoned with brimstone and what not."

There was a tone of levity and indifference to his cloth in this talk which jarred on Mr. Bunce. It was evident that Ralph looked on him as just like a secular person, or perhaps as less shrewd, and this was not as he liked. His a.s.sociations were mostly with the docile of the other s.e.x, and the more reverential of his own, and the company of this robust worldling was so unpleasantly bracing that they soon parted, and Ralph was alone when he reached his office.

"A man waiting to see you, sir."

"What sort of man?"

"An Indian. The same I think who came for your guns last year, when you went camping out."

"Tell him I've gone out."

"He saw you come in through the gla.s.s door."

"Say I'm engaged."

"He says he will wait till you are at leisure."

"Bid him come in, then," and presently Paul stood before his employer, looking in his eyes but saying nothing.

"Well, Paul?" said Ralph, without looking up from the letter he appeared to be writing, "deer have been seen near the Lake of Two Mountains, eh? Too busy! Shall not be able to leave town this Fall.

Hard on a man--is it not? Wish I was an Indian and could do as I pleased."

"Ouff," grunted Paul, with an impatient glance, and that slight twitch of the eyebrows equivalent to a Frenchman's shrug, which says so plainly "Why all these idle words?" Then, producing a paper from his bosom he handed it to Ralph.

"Ze notaire gave dis! Want pay--for Therese--Judge court defend."

"Ah!" said Ralph, taking the paper and glancing over it. "Your bill of costs. Defending that squaw--eh? You want me to look it over?--Oh yes!

quite right. O.K![1] all correct! Pay it at once, Paul, and finish the business."