“I will not turn my back upon delight, and invite dryness of life by looking for it,” he thought. “If the Bible does not proclaim my right to pursue happiness, the Declaration of Independence does, and I will give myself the benefit of the doubt. When the summer fails, I must look about me, and think of work, and remember the curse of Adam; but I will give myself a few weeks of lotos-eating—if they are to be had.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHOOSING THE PATH.
“Now that the priest is gone, we have peace,” said the Seaton paper.
In fact, having driven the priest away, so that these poor souls were deprived of their consolations and restraints of religion, having destroyed their school-house, so that there seemed no possibility that the school could continue after the cold weather should set in, there appeared no more mischief to do. Catholicism was, apparently, dead in Seaton.
The Catholics did not raise their voices. Those who mourned their deserted altar, mourned in silence; the rest went back to their whiskey-drinking, their quarrelling and stealing. That was what the atheists meant by peace. “The lion and the lamb had lain down together,” but the lamb was inside the lion.
On the surface of these halcyon circumstances, Carl Yorke found his lotos-flower growing. Everybody was smiling and conciliatory. Congratulations, not always overdelicate, on his accession to fortune met him at every hand, and callers became more frequent, in spite of a reception as cool as politeness would allow. In fine, the Yorkes, having suffered a temporary eclipse, shone out again with dazzling lustre, regilt by their new prosperity. If they bore themselves rather haughtily in the face of this subservience, we can scarcely blame them. We can forgive, we may not care for, the frowns that darken with our adversity; but the smiles that brighten when fortune brightens, must, in a noble nature, awaken a feeling of involuntary disgust.
Dr. Martin and his wife called a few days after Carl came home. It was rather an embarrassing call, for there was scarcely a non-explosive subject on which they could speak, but by dint of careful management on the part of the ladies, and a determination on the part of each gentleman that he would not be the aggressor, no accident happened. Mr. Yorke and the minister exchanged a few remarks on agriculture, Clara hovering between them, and volubly smoothing the asperities of their uphill talk. Mrs. Martin and Melicent were kindred souls on the subject of worsted work, and grew quite intimate over a new pattern and a rainbow package of wools. Mrs. Yorke
acted as presiding deity, and dropped a smile or a word at the right time, and Carl was somewhat cynically amused by the situation, and therefore amusing. The visitors had asked for Edith, but she declined to come down. When they had gone, however, she spoke kindly of Dr. Martin.
“He asked me once,” she said, “if, when I came to die, I should need any one but Christ. I could not answer him, for I did not understand then that he was attacking the doctrine of extreme unction, and intimating his belief that Catholics think only of the priest, and not at all of God. But I noticed that he showed a great deal of feeling, and when he said, ‘If you have Christ, you need no one else,’ there were tears in his eyes. Since then, I have liked him. I think he is mistaken, rather than malicious.”