A Rich Man's Relatives Volume I Part 10

"No! my fine fellow, you don't come it over me again like that!--no use supposing it. But I'll tell you what I _will_ do, for I like you, you see, Paul; though I know you're a rascal. I have been thinking that if that child were to die it would be bad for you. You could not try it on with me any more by threatening to carry the kid home to its people, and so your pension would come to an end, and you'd have to go to work. How would you like that, Paul, you idle dog, after all these years? So I have been thinking that if that were to happen--the kid's death, you know--and you could bring me some proof, I would give you a lump sum and have done with you."

"If the papoose die?"

"Yes."

"You give thousand dollars?--dollars down?"

"Down on the nail, if you bring proof."

"How make sure?"

"You will tell me how it all happened, and I shall know how to verify the fact."

"No, no! Make _me_ sure. Thousand dollars."

"Ha! I see. You want some a.s.surance that I will pay what I say? Don't see what more a.s.surance I can give than to say so, or what more you should want. Have I not kept my word with you before?"

"Ouff"--and Paul plunged into thought where he stood, while Ralph, impatient to be rid of him, collected his papers and locked them in his desk, rose, and took his hat and gloves, as if about to go home.

This brought Paul's reflections to a point. He turned to Ralph with a grin and a grunt, and held out his hand.

"Thousand dollars!" he said with another grunt; and when Ralph, supposing it a fas.h.i.+on of leave-taking, laid some of his fingers rather gingerly on the extended palm, he caught and shook them eagerly, saying:

"Pay down! Pay down! Papoose dead."

Ralph drew back.

"Dead! When? Where? Tell me all about it."

"Dead at Caughnawaga."

"How long ago?"

"Ten year--Day 'twas took. Come, see, if you will. _Au-dessous du plancher_ at my _cabane_--Thousand dollars!" and he held out his hand again.

"Ten years ago! And you have been drawing money from me for that child's support all this time? And never told!"

Paul looked gratified, and drew himself up like modest genius when at length its merit is brought to light. Then he chuckled and moved his fingers as if to poke Ralph in the ribs. The idea of Ralph's having been so completely fooled was too delicious.

"But how could it have happened? You cannot mean that you--murdered the child?"

"Ouff," grunted Paul, from whose face the grin was fading. His sly escapade appeared not to be appreciated as it deserved. He placed his fingers on his throat now, and let his tongue protrude, to describe the process of strangulation.

Ralph drew back in horror. It is one thing to entertain the idea of a crime hypothetically, and even to incite to the deed. The mind busies itself in contemplating the results, and the act appears but a circ.u.mstance, a necessary one perhaps, but one on which it is unnecessary to dwell. It is another thing to confront the deed after it has been done, and can no longer be overlooked, when it has become a realized infamy, withering and dwindling the profits and results into worthless Dead Sea fruit. The bloodhound will pursue its prey for days together, eager to pull him down and bury its fangs in his flesh, but if in the heat of the chase it should encounter blood, there is an end, the scent is lost, the hunt ended. And so was Ralph staggered at what he heard. This child's life had stood in his way, and he had striven to set it aside. But to think that it had been murdered, and that his was the finger which touched the spring and set the murderous machine in motion! No! He _would_ not think it. It was horrible. The instrument, the over-zealous instrument which had done too much, must shoulder the responsibility of his own deed; and, for himself, he would no longer compromise his respectability by having dealings with such a ruffian, now that it had become quite safe to break with him.

The blood of the little innocent seemed crying out of the ground for vengeance, and at least he would wash his hands of the murderer, and not a cent of blood-money should the homicide receive from him. A virtuous glow diffused itself through Ralph's pulses as these thoughts pa.s.sed through his mind in a s.p.a.ce far shorter than it takes to write or read them; indeed there had been little more than the ordinary conversational pause between Paul's last grunt of a.s.sent and pantomimic signs, and Ralph's reply as he now looked him squarely in the face with a frown of the severest virtue, and a demeanour of dignified rebuke which an ignorant onlooker might have hoped would not be lost on the poor untaught son of the wilderness.

"And you have been drawing money from me for that child's support all these years!" He grew indignant as he thought how he had been imposed upon; and Paul, quenched the moment before, and astonished at his demeanour, began to pluck up heart again, and the dawn of a smile at his own cleverness began to re-appear on his wooden visage; but it faded again as Ralph proceeded:

"Do you know that what you have been accusing yourself of is a hanging offence? A cruel, cowardly murder of a helpless infant? But I will not be made accessory after the fact! I am done with you, Paul!--Go!--Do you hear me? Git!"

Paul looked in his face amazed. What had he meant then when he promised him money to bring news of the child's death? He was about to speak, but Ralph stopped him before, in his stupefaction, he could find words.

"Go! I say. And never let me see you again. Or----! You can guess yourself what will happen."

Confused, crestfallen and crushed, Paul withdrew. A new view of the inscrutable ways of the great white man had been given him. He could only draw a great breath in his helplessness and go his way. The white folks were too much for him, that was the one idea which penetrated his darkened mind. They would make use of him when they wanted him, and then cast him aside; but for the future he promised himself to keep out of their way.

Ralph coughed and drew on his gloves, not ill-pleased, at the last, at the turn which affairs had taken, and hurried off to catch the afternoon train for St. Euphrase, where his family were spending the summer at a smart new villa which he had built a year or two before.

CHAPTER XI.

MAHOMET AND KADIJAH.

Ralph Herkimer reached the station as the train was about to start. M.

Rouget was in the act of a.s.sisting his wife and daughter into the parlour car, and Ralph sprang in after him just as the train moved from the platform. M. Rouget owned the seigniory of La Hache, on the outskirts of St. Euphrase, an outlying fragment of which Ralph had purchased and built upon, hoping that with the other products of the soil there would spring up an intimacy with the Rouget family, and thereby an entrance to that French circle which so few English-speaking Canadians ever penetrate. Not that that circle is more wealthy, or of necessity more cultured than others on the great American continent; but language, religion, and customs make it less accessible and more exclusive, and therefore, like other things difficult, both desirable and distinguished. A certain prescriptive precedence, too, naturally attaches to the first comers everywhere, if only they are strong enough to enforce it; and it must be remembered that these Lower Canada seigniors represent the earliest settlers, and as a body are the only approach to a landed aristocracy in North America. North America, it is true, is the chosen home of democracy and equality; but democratic equality--what is it? Does it not mean, my brother, that you are on no pretext whatever to claim any sort of betterness over _me_, while _I_, if I can secure distinction or superiority am to be protected in the enjoyment of my acquisition; for is it not a free and a law-abiding country that we live in? Witness the army of the decorated in democratic France! or the shoals of colonels, generals, and judges in the United States. Such is democracy. _You_ must have nothing which I have not, but _I_ may take whatever I can lay my hands on; and you, sir, are to bow down to me for having it. It is the autocrat's crown cut up in slices, and placed on the head of every one self-a.s.serting enough to wear his fraction.

Ralph had made money--secured a substantial hunch of the bread of subsistence, and now he was minded to b.u.t.ter it with all the social distinctions and advantages he could attain to. M. Rouget pa.s.sed up the car before him, preceded by madame and the demoiselle, his daughter. These ladies had not called upon Ralph's wife on her coming to reside in the neighbourhood; but then Martha, as he told himself, though a worthy creature, and one who had made him an excellent wife in his day of small things, was scarcely equal to the promotion which had overtaken her. She was undeniably diffident and undistinguished; perhaps even dowdy, he added with a sigh, as the fresh crisp dresses of the French ladies, befringed, bebugled, and "relieved" with streamers of lace and ribbon, swam on in front of him. He would claim his neighbour's acquaintance, he thought, who doubtless would introduce him to his family; and then he doubted not he should make himself so pleasant that the ladies would re-consider their previous reserve and call on Martha forthwith. Already he saw himself at La Hache, invited to meet Monseigneur the Archbishop and the Honourable the Minister of Drainage and Irrigation, whom after that, if he were but civil, he should feel bound to support at future elections, though hitherto he had voted _rouge_.

So quick is thought, all this and more had flashed through his mind, ill.u.s.trated with _vignettes_ of gracious smiling ladies and gesticulating Frenchmen--the prismatic glintings of a sn.o.b's beatific vision--and he had not yet reached the middle of the car. M. Rouget was walking on before. Another step and he would overtake him. Already his hand was raised to touch the seignior's arm, when, hs.h.!.+--the prod of a parasol point dexterously planted in the small of his back made him start, exclaim, stop, and turn round.

In the corner of a sofa he had pa.s.sed, a wizened little woman, somewhat dusty and tumbled was smiling, to him from under the frizzes of her false front, wide-mouthedly smiling, till every gold pin in her best set of teeth shone in the slanting sunbeams of the afternoon. She held out a clawlike hand in a cotton glove, by way of welcome, making room on the sofa beside her, and dropping the parasol point, as the wild Indian lays down his tomahawk in sign of amity.

"Judy!" said Ralph in some disgust; but while he spoke he saw the Rouget party seat themselves with some friends, and recognized that the opportunity for his little _coup_ was past, so he recovered himself and dropped into the place so effusively offered.

"And how come _you_ to be here, ma'am? The general car does not seem over-crowded. If the treasurer of the diocesan fund were to see you travelling in parlour cars, he would doubt the need of that augmentation we have been pet.i.tioning for."

"It would be just like him if he did. He is mean enough for anything in the way of prying into the private affairs of the rural clergy. I wonder how he would like it himself? Still, there _are_ a few whose goings on he might inquire into more closely. But he has favourites. I wish Synod would make a change."

"But they will say _you_ are a favourite if you travel in this regardlessly extravagant way."

"Let them, if they dare! But there is no fear of that. They cannot but know that on the five hundred dollars of stipend they allow Mr. Bunce, a clergyman's family cannot travel at all, except on foot; and even that takes more shoe leather than they can afford. They understand perfectly well, that, but for my little income, Mr. Bunce could not have afforded to accept the parish of St. Euphrase at all--a fact which is no credit to our church. And I think, Ralph, it would have been more respectful to Mr. Bunce, and kinder to me, if you had not alluded to our pecuniary circ.u.mstances. We cannot all be brokers, you must remember."

"Beg pardon, Judy. No offence. And you remind me that I have not yet inquired after the health of my respected uncle," he added with an impertinent laugh. "I hope he is well."

Ralph's acquisition of an uncle on his Aunt Judith's marriage was rather an ancient ground of amus.e.m.e.nt by this time, for the marriage had taken place years before; but the idea of his maiden aunt created a wife, and the cleric, his junior, transformed into his uncle, was a perennial joke, from which time and familiarity could not rub the point. His other uncle, Gerald, had been one to make a nephew quail; and that this mild, shaven, unwealthy, and, so far, youthful parson should have stepped into the redoubtable t.i.tle, was inexhaustibly droll. It is notable how long the same quip and jest will serve to tickle the busy man engrossed in material interests; but in this case there was the excuse that the Bunces really were an oddly-a.s.sorted pair. A stranger could not but have inquired how they had come to marry each other--she, so mature, he, with his drab-coloured hair and round smooth cheeks. "Cherubical," his bride had called the cheeks to her bridesmaid in a moment of enthusiasm and confidence; but they were too loose and pasty to deserve the t.i.tle, or if not, the cherub must have been out of health--cloyed with ambrosia perhaps, or too much nectar, in the Elysian Fields.

Judith herself had rejuvenated, or brightened, perhaps, since we saw her first, with hair and clothing severely plain, and a look of reproving superiority to all things pleasant. She was an old young woman in those days, and now she was a young old one. Then, leanness and the tight-drawn skin prevented the crows' feet round the eyes from being strongly marked, and the low-toned colouring harmonized in its way with the grizzling of the hair; now, with some gain of adipose tissue, and the relaxed tension incident to a mind relieved from the imaginary reproach of spinsterhood, the lines and creases showed quite clearly, like ripple marks on the sand left by the ebbing waves of time. The hair, too, with its faded browns sympathizing with the greyness of the flesh tints was changed; for now the lady shone in a new capillary outfit, and seemingly, when buying it, she had chosen to revert to the livelier colouring of her youth. The "front," "bang,"

"fringe," or whatever she may have called it, was of a cheerful gingerbread hue, which quenched any lingering l.u.s.tre of the eye, or aspiration toward pinkness in the cheek, and gave her somewhat the look of a mummy, which, after ages wasted in darkness, comes forth again to taste the happiness of life, and the warmth of the upper world.

The love tale of these two had no doubt been as thrilling an idyl to themselves as that of any pair of nightingales in all Arcadia, but it appeared rather a drab-coloured romance, or, better, no romance at all, to their friends, who opened their eyes in blank amaze when the project of marriage was announced, and vowed the strangely-a.s.sorted couple had lost their wits. Judith, the severely Protestant virgin of St. Silas, to the High Church--the very high--curate of St.

Wittikind's! It seemed incredible. It was true that for some time she had visited a good deal among the poor of St. Wittikind's parish, frequented its schools, guilds and sisterhoods, where things were conducted not precisely as the good people of St. Silas thought best; but still that was "Church work," and as she continued to distribute tracts as copiously as ever in the Catholic neighbourhood selected by the St. Silas' ladies as their experimental farm of controversy, they had agreed to regard the vagary as only showing great breadth of view, and a largely comprehensive charity, which they hoped would lead to reciprocity, and bring some darkling wanderer from the other pen to their own better-lighted fold.

The reality of the case was far otherwise. Miss Judith had a leisure and energy ravenous of occupation, and which would not be filled up, and appeased with fancy-work, and dispensing printed leaves to French people who could not understand what she said. These are pleasing occupations, but they grow monotonous after a time. She had tried improving her mind, too, a good work, but it postulates a mind capable of being improved by printed matter, and the minds of many who have done the world's work, and done it well, have not been of that kind.

Miss Judith's mind was practical rather than contemplative, and her studies did not go great lengths, while nature had blessed her with a sustaining self-content. When her book wearied her she laid it down and sought some other occupation--somebody else to improve, when her own mind had had enough of it. Her sister Susan declined her offices, knowing the teacher too well to set much store by the lessons, and therefore she had to carry her instructions farther afield.

Such is the sad lot of spinsterhood in modern life, when woman misses her natural vocation of house-mother, and fortune exempts her from the need to earn her living. The instincts and traits which society for its own entertainment encouraged and cultivated in youth lose their power to please when bloom and sprightliness have vanished. Then the love of applause and excitement so attractive in the youthful beauty turn like famished hounds on their forsaken mistress, and rend her own heart when she can furnish them no other game. She has been taught to think highly of herself, and to claim much, and she may have learned the world and its lessons well, but the world has grown weary of her, and goes its way in search of a fresher plaything. There is tragedy in this of the unspoken kind, but it is so common, and it drags its course so slowly--for people do not easily die of spinsterhood--that we fail to note the restless gnawing of hearts and brains condemned to inaction, and only laugh at the _bizarrerie_, when, growing intolerable, it breaks out into lady-doctors of divinity, law, or physic.