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A softer mood held him now and he dropped upon his knee and laid his head upon her lap, but she could not follow his swift changes of emotion; the mention of the money had obliterated every other thought, and whether it was the woman in her or the potential miserliness of her race the Clairvilles were traditionally stingy she seemed unable to get away from the mere image of the ten thousand pounds.
His labours among the few scattered and uneducated families of conflicting race and origin seemed unconvincing and empty, and a new shyness possessed him; he disliked hearing any mention of the Clairvilles, for Crabbe's story he had come to accept as true without a word of questioning; indeed, Miss Clairville's own words came back to him as a proof. "Another patient of the soul," she had said.
That is your name, the name of the young lady, the name of this place?" "Of this house. Also the estate. This house is, or should be, the Manoir of the Clairvilles, of the De Clairvilles. You are some kind of clergyman?" "I am. I am a Methodist." "Have you read much?" Ringfield, looking around somewhat whimsically at so many books, on a pile of which he was obliged to sit, felt unusual ignorance.
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.
"Ah I could see, I could see. Poor Henry! He is the victim of many delusions. One that he is a great invalid and cannot leave his room, that room you saw him in to-day. Another that we are properly De Clairvilles, but that we have somehow lost the prefix, the 'De, in course of years, and that a Bill may have to pass in Parliament to permit us using it legally. There has been already in this antiquated province a case very similar to ours, but it was a genuine case, which ours is not. My brother owns the largest collection of old French and old French-Canadian memoirs and books in the country, I believe, and it may be that out of constant poring over them has come this ruling passion, this dominant idea, to prove himself a seigneur, and more, a noble, grand seigneur de France! Voil
François, his foster-brother, received at his master's death a gift of land under the Crown to him and his heirs for ever, the name Gaillard to be abandoned for that of Clairville. In 1684 the Sieur de Clairville died; François survived him twenty years, leaving one son and two daughters. These became Clairvilles; there were no De Clairvilles.
That glory, such as it was, for the ignoble François was the founder of it, gradually departed. The Clairvilles deteriorated, sold off large parcels of their land, married undesirable persons, till, in the present generation, the culmination of domestic ruin seemed probable.
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