"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 paillasse 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 XXX
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?"