in the chair.
"Henry!" exclaimed she, with great volubility and a kind of fierce disgust, "how is this? What can you mean by so disobeying me? This is no place to bring strangers! Nor do I want strangers brought into any part of this house at any time of the day! It is suffocating here. Do you not find it very heavy, very close in here?" she added, to Ringfield, who had risen and slightly changed countenance as she pronounced the word "stranger".
He looked from the lady to the man in the chair in astonishment, for he saw the former in a new and painful light. So dark was the frown upon her usually serene countenance, so angry the light in her fine hazel eyes, so anxious and perturbed her entire being, that she appeared almost ugly. Not only so, but added to impatience and anger there seemed something like repugnance, disgust, directed at the miserable pedant who under the fires of womanly wrath blinked and smiled, but had no defence ready.
"It is altogether my fault that I am here," said Ringfield quietly; "I took another walk in this direction, hoping for a sight of the peacock."
"And you saw something else instead! Ah!—there is much I must explain to you, you who come among us not knowing, not understanding. You see only the outside. But I suppose I must tell you who we are. This is my brother, my only brother, in fact my only living relative, Henry Clairville. I am Miss—Mademoiselle Clairville."
Ringfield bowed to her and to the man in the chair.
"We are the last of what—of what it pleases him to call our Line. It is all most foolish, most absurd. But I cannot tell you here. Since chance has brought you our way again, and as you may take up your residence in the neighbourhood—have you decided yet?—I feel I must make some explanation of how you find us, my brother and myself. Can you row? or paddle?"
Her manner, gradually changing and growing easier every moment, made it easy for Ringfield, who answered her with a smile.
"Of course."
"I asked, because some clergymen are so useless in some directions while good enough in others."
CHAPTER IV
THE HOUSE OF CLAIRVILLE
"High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised."
The hall through which they passed was sufficiently dark to prevent the masculine eye of Ringfield noting that long and systematic neglect marked every inch of the wall, every foot of flooring, every window, door, stair, sill and sash. Nothing was clean, nothing was orderly, and as the books and papers contained in the invalid's room had overflowed into the halls, lying on the steps and propped up on chairs and in corners, the dirt and confusion was indescribable. Hideous wallpapers were peeling off the damp and cracking wall, tattered shreds showing, by the accumulation on their fly-specked yellow edges of thick dust, how long they had waved upon the close air of this uncared-for house. All the woodwork was rough and horrid to the touch by reason of the millions of similar fly-specks; had nothing ever been washed here? Cats were alarmingly abundant. Three lay about in the hall; four were stretched on the grass in front of the door, and Ringfield saw two more—so large and brown and with such huge tigers' heads, prowling under the trees, that he scarcely took them for cats. The chain of barns, farm-buildings and sheds was all in the same dilapidated, dirty condition, and it was hardly strange that the vision of that white loveliness—the peacock—which had tempted him in this direction, crossed his mind as they proceeded to the landing-place. And yet the Clairvilles were not without servants. Mademoiselle, having regained a measure of her wonted serenity, began to describe her retainers, proving that servants were almost as numerous as cats in that neighbourhood. The elderly woman, the man, the two girls and the boy, were all one family, and living "about" as their mistress carelessly put it, in the barns and out-buildings, divided the work among them. The woman's husband, Xavier Archambault, employed at the Fall as assistant to look after the bridge and dam, helped at odd moments in the business of the estate, thus making in all six servants, a rather large contingent for a dwindling concern; and Ringfield, listening to these wonders, could not fail to observe that their united wages must reach a high figure.
"Oh—they are not paid!" exclaimed mademoiselle, "at least, not in money. My brother, who is, as I was going to tell you, a person of stronger character than you might imagine, has never paid a cent of wages to anyone in his life. He has managed to infect all his work-people, and, indeed, many in the village, with his own belief that it is an honour to labour for him and his, he being a De Clairville and the highest in rank in this part of the country. Of course you, having lived in the West, and knowing so much of the world, must see how foolish this is, how it involves us—my brother and myself—in many unpleasant and difficult situations."
A note of challenge in her voice led Ringfield, who had taken off his coat and was paddling, to stop sharply and observe her.
"Pray be careful!" she cried in sudden alarm. "When I was at home all the time I could stand any kind of behaviour in a canoe, but lately I seem to be losing my nerve. I suppose you must kneel?"
"Certainly. Much the easier, therefore the safer way."
"Therefore! All easy things—safe?"
He was clumsy at this kind of refined innuendo, and considered before replying.
"No, perhaps not. But I give you my word not to disturb the equilibrium again."
The lake, a basin of clear water, small as Lower Canadian lakes go, and framed with thick foliage reaching to the edge, was absolutely silent, absolutely deserted, on this warm afternoon. Ringfield found it almost too hot to talk, but his companion seemed to enjoy the unburdening of various confidences, and as she had such a willing listener she had every opportunity, of taking her own time, and of delivering herself in her own way, of a remarkable tale.
That, within two days of his enforced sojourn at St. Ignace, the young preacher found himself thus—floating on a silent desolate lake in one of the remotest parishes of Quebec, listening to a family history of mediaeval import from the lips of a woman, young too, cultivated, self-possessed to the degree of hauteur, whose Christian name was as yet unknown to him, was in itself remarkable.
Ringfield, ardent, gifted, good, inherited directness of aim, purity of ideals, and narrowness of vision, from the simple working stock from which he had sprung, and it would have been easy for a man of the world to foresee the limitations existing in such a nature. When mademoiselle therefore began the Clairville history by relating some circumstances in the flighty career of the Sieur De Clairville, hinting at certain deflections and ridiculing uncertain promises of reformation, of reparation—for even the seventeenth century had its cant—the matter was far from being either real or relevant to her listener. What had he to do with a bundle of old-world memoirs, even when edited and brought up to date by an interesting woman! What to him was the spotless character of the ignoble François, son of a butcher, created a Clairville for his plebeian virtues, or the lives of each succeeding descendant of François, growing always a little richer, a little more polished, till in time the wheel turned and the change came in the fortunes of the house which culminated in the present! All these were mere abstractions, dull excerpts from some period of remote and unfamiliar history, because that system which gave him his secular education did not include knowledge of his country from an historical standpoint.
Macaulay and Alison, Gibbon and Grote, Motley and Bancroft—but not yet Garneau or Parkman. The lady might have romanced indeed, with glib falseness gilding picturesque invention, and he would not have detected it.
As it was, the truth remained sufficiently high coloured. He listened, he apprehended, but he could not see that it mattered.
"So now," remarked mademoiselle, trailing her large firm white hand through the water and knitting her firm black brows still closer, "I have brought the story up to the appearance on the scene of my brother, whom you have met, no doubt pondered