For a moment Crabbe looked, spat, and swore like a fiend; then he collapsed into his chair, though still gazing at Ringfield with those full, rolling eyes and that hateful, superior smile.
"I'll hear anything you have to tell about yourself," continued Ringfield, "but I won't listen to tales of other people, men or women. And what's the use of telling me about yourself? That won't do any good. Put it all back in the past, man; put it all away. Now is your accepted time, now is your day of salvation, right here, this moment. But I won't preach to you. I won't vindicate my calling and talk religion, as you'd call it, in this place and at this hour, because I see you're not ready. I thought you were sober. Now I see my mistake, and now, I don't know how to talk to you. I don't know how to begin! I've never tasted the stuff myself—not even a glass of wine has ever passed my lips, and my mother, Crabbe, used to make home-made wine and give it to us—all but me. I wouldn't taste it. If I understood the fascination of it, if I could follow the process, if I could sympathize at all with you, then I might appreciate the difficulty and realize the force of the temptation. But I can't! Other vices, take theft or treachery, or cowardice, or insubordination; the seed of hatred suffered to grow till the black Death Flower of Murder be born; covetousness, sins of temper, all these I understand. And in some degree those other temptations to which you have alluded."
A slight wave of colour surged in the young minister's cheeks. Crabbe was apparently beyond impressing. He sat and whistled, looking wisely at his nails. The loss of the whisky did not trouble him, for he remembered where he had a second bottle hidden, and a small quantity yet remained at the bottom of the tumbler, unnoticed by Ringfield. But presently he broke out again.
"As for women," he cried thickly, as if he had not heard the other's latest speech. "I've had enough of them, too much, as I said before. You be warned, Ringfield! You keep out of trouble! I wouldn't swear that I did not take to drink on account of them, and then, look here—the trouble followed me out to this country, even to St. Ignace, even to this hut and hole. What d'ye think of that?"
"Why, who is there here?" exclaimed Ringfield, but as he spoke he had a vision; the foolish wife of Poussette seemed to come along the path, chanting as she came some minor French refrain and tapping at the uncared for window as she passed. She might have been attractive once, and Crabbe was not a very young man now. Some graces she must have had; a way of catching at the side of her skirt, suggesting a curtsy; plenty of fair hair and a child's smile playing at the corners of her mouth—not so foolish then. But wise or foolish, she had been another man's wife, unless he had encountered her in her maiden days, which seemed improbable.
"I cannot think," went on Ringfield, striving to shut this vision out, "how women, any woman, plain or fair, sane or mad, could bring herself to care for you,—and not because,—hear me, Crabbe, you are beyond caring about. God forbid!—but because your form of vice must ever be so distasteful to a woman. And then you are all wrong about your surroundings. You are, you have been, at least, a man of education, and yet you call this a hut and a hole. It is you who make it so! You vilify, where you might ennoble. You defile where you should enrich and keep pure. You are set here, in the midst of the most beautiful scenes of Nature, scenes that cannot be matched anywhere in the world, and yet you despise them and use them for your own undoing and that of others. Nature lies at your door and you are answerable for your treatment other."
Crabbe laughed surlily. "She's no business lying—where'd you say—at my door. Nature, always Nature! Much good it's done me, Nature, and all that rubbish. I hate it, I hate and abhor it, Ringfield. That's what makes me drink. Too much Nature's been my ruin. I'd be sober enough in a big town with lively streets and bustle and riot and row. I wouldn't drink there. I'd show them the pace, I'd go it myself once more and be d——d to all this rot and twaddle about Nature! Nature doesn't care for me. So careful of the type she seems, but so careless of the single life. She doesn't bother her head about me, or you, or Henry Clairville or Pauline!"
He paused, and Ringfield shivered with sudden poignancy of recollection. What right had this miserable scion of good family, so fallen from grace, so shaken and so heartless, to call the lady of Clairville Manor by her Christian name?
"Or Mme. Poussette!" said the minister hurriedly, but with meaning, as he pronounced the name, his voice trembling in spite of himself. "Nature, it is true, does not care for any of us. Nature will let you starve, get drunk, go mad. Therefore, we need a greater than Nature. Therefore, having this committed unto us we speak as——"
"O Mme. Poussette!" interrupted Crabbe, pouring the contents of the tumbler down his throat. "Shall I get you some? No? Well, I don't blame you, don't blame you. Mme. Poussette, poor creature! I have heard she was pretty once. That was before I came, before—God's truth this, Ringfield—before I taught her husband to drink deep."