From Quinet who had been deliberately dealing with his dessert, now came words:
"Mistaken impulses! Led after will o" the wisps by dreamers and designers! If it were not that all movements work but one way, like the backward and forward of a machine--towards _advancement_, these things would make a man despond."
"What then, sir," Chrysler asked, "are your ideas?"
"Hear me, like a different messenger from the same battle. The motto, "G.o.d has made Law to Every Man to Labour," means that the slaves of priestcraft are to be contented with their servitude. "To Make the People Better," means to blind the second eye of their obedience."
"To--?"
"Stop my dear friend," Chamilly interrupted with emotion, "that motto"s words are sacred to me and will ever justly be to all our people. Do not disparage that motto?"
"I will never disparage making the people truly better. It is to the tone of those who usurp the aim, you should apply my critique. The men who lip these terms are none other than the evil geniuses of history. It is the _Jesuits_ who would make us poor and miserable,--who have wrecked French America, past and future. Without them we should have welcomed to our dominions from the first, an immigration twice larger than England"s: we should have held the continent north, south and centre; our people would have been vitalized by education instead of so ignorant that no commoner but one ever wrote a book; they would have built and flourished and extended; and in place of a poor and helpless people they would have been rich, powerful, and self-reliant, like the Bostonians; Bigot and his nest of horse-leeches would never have sucked our blood and left us to ruin!"
He paused, but as if not yet quite finished. His hearers listened.
"And _since_--," he suddenly and energetically added, with a stern look around and a bitter suggestiveness on the word as if it were enough to p.r.o.nounce it; and in truth, it silenced both De La Lande and Chamilly, and appeared to make a completely effective ending.
In the evening, walking out on the road before retiring, Chamilly and Chrysler commented on the discussion, and Chrysler said, "I must say I was unprepared for this debate. I was a poor helpless Briton, caught like Braddock in Mr. De La Lande"s ambush. Tell me what you think yourself of these things."
"It is a sad thing to belong to a disappearing order," Haviland replied, "Sympathising with my people, I am grieved in a sense to believe their present aspirations dreams. It is sad to behold any race, and deeply so if it is your own, blind in the presence of unalterable forces which will soon begin their removal of what it considers to be dearest."
"I sympathize with them and you," Chrysler said.
"Ecclesiasticism ruins us!" exclaimed Quinet the Radical, who was with them:
"Quiconque me resiste et me brave est impie Ce qu"ici-bas j"ecris, la-haut Dieu la copie."
"You should moderate your animosity," Chamilly said. "These Jesuits are most certainly humble, self-devoted men?"
"I detest them as machines, not as men!" retorted the Radical.
CHAPTER XIX.
HUMAN NATURE.
"Va ...
A monsieur le Cure Lui dire que sa paroisse Est tout bouleversee."
--POPULAR BALLAD.
Cure L"Archeveque, black skull-cap on head, was in the best of humour, playing with his little dog in the ample reception-room of the parsonage, when a laborer came and brought an account of several late doings in the village.
When Messire heard what had been said at Zotique"s, his rotund black stole writhed as if founts of lava boiled in him; his face swelled to the likeness of a fiery planet; indignation choked his speech for four minutes by the face of the tall clock in his sitting-room; and then the lava rose to the surface in jets:
"Gang of accurseds!"
"Atheists!"
"Freemasons!"
He turned for a moment to the laborer again who had come to inform him.
Then he exploded successively as before:
"They laughed?"
"They laughed!"
"I will make them laugh!"
The young cure, his vicar, who was present, tried to calm him, but could not.
His energies turned to action; he dismissed the parishioner, who, hat in hand, stood humbly by the door, and sitting down began to write letters and concoct vows.
The first of the latter was to announce a spiritual boycott from the pulpit on Zotique and his iniquitous hall; and with this he wrote to the Attorney-General on the scandal of the gross misuse of the Circuit Court and the bad character of the local Registrar.
The second bitter vow was that the Liberals should lose their election: this inspired a letter to Grandmoulin, the "Cave" Chief.
There were other vows and other letters; one each to the Bishop and the Archbishop,--whose contents are unknown.
At similar times, however, the Reverend gentleman had a recreation to which he was accustomed to turn for refreshment, and this was not long in rising in his mind. By law he was Visitor to the secular school: than which there was nothing he considered more nearly the root of all evil.
He therefore took up his brown straw hat and black cane, and started determinedly out to exercise his habit of vexing the high spirit of the school master, De La Lande.
"Ah bon, fratello!" cried Zotique that afternoon when de La Lande appeared at his door, "How goes it? Come in and speak to Mr. Chrysler, here."
"It goes ill, Zotique," answered the school master, gloomily, "I have had the Cure again."
"And what did he say to you?"
"Quarrels with everything in the system. Our geography was galimatias, and book-keeping a crime: the people must not think they were on a level with the learned, and the children must do this and that. At last--at last--I was exasperated, and told him I had a right under the laws to my position and powers. He said there can be no right against the Right! I told him there were many wrongs against the Right! And he went away saying he would bring me to a bed of straw."
"Let him do!" laughed the Registrar.
But Zotique himself was not to escape quite scot-free, for when Chrysler stopped next day at his office, as he was getting accustomed to do, he found him in one of his excitements.
[F]"ac-re-ye!" he was ejaculating.
[Footnote F: NOTE--An evasive form of "Sacre," a.n.a.logous to "Sapre,"
"Sacristie," "Sac," "St. Christophe," &c.]
"Ah, good day, sir. Come in and take a seat aa-a-creye, how they enrage us!"--and he cast an impatient glance on the floor at a large envelope deeply marked with his heel.
"What is the matter?" Chrysler queried.
"The matter, sir, is that!"--spurning the envelope.