ladies and was moving off with them. "This way, this way," he said,
waving his hand towards a larger number of vehicles on the shore than
could have been reasonably attributed to Ha-Ha Bay. "I hope you won't
object to having another passenger with you? There's plenty of room for
all. He seems a very nice, gentlemanly person," said he, with a queer,
patronizing graciousness which he had no doubt caught from his English
patrons.
"The more the merrier," answered Colonel Ellison, and "Not in the
least!" said his wife, not meaning the proverb. Her eye had swept the
whole array of vehicles and had found them all empty, save one, in which
she detected the blamelessly coated back of Mr. Arbuton. But I ought
perhaps to explain Mrs. Ellison's motives better than they can be made
to appear in her conduct. She cared nothing for Mr. Arbuton; and she had
no logical wish to see Kitty in love with him. But here were two young
people thrown somewhat romantically together; Mrs. Ellison was a born
match-maker, and to have refrained from promoting their better
acquaintance in the interest of abstract matrimony was what never could
have entered into her thought or desire. Her whole being closed for the
time about this purpose; her heart, always warm towards Kitty,--whom she
admired with a sort of generous frenzy,--expanded with all kinds of
lovely designs; in a word, every dress she had she would instantly have
bestowed upon that worshipful creature who was capable of adding another
marriage to the world. I hope the reader finds nothing vulgar or
unbecoming in this, for I do not; it was an enthusiasm, pure and simple,
a beautiful and unselfish abandon; and I am sure men ought to be sorry
that they are not worthier to be favored by it. Ladies have often to
lament in the midst of their finesse that, really, no man is deserving
the fate they devote themselves to prepare for him, or, in other words,
that women cannot marry women.
I am not going to be so rash as try to depict Mrs. Ellison's arts, for
then, indeed, I should make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was
not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance of such matters.
Whether Mr. Arbuton was ever aware of them, I am not sure: as a man he
was, of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other hand, he had
seen far more of the world than Mrs. Ellison, and she may have been
clear as day to him. Probably, though, he did not detect any design; he
could not have conceived of such a thing in a person with whom he had
been so irregularly made acquainted, and to whom he felt himself so
hopelessly superior. A film of ice such as in autumn you find casing the
still pools early in the frosty mornings had gathered upon his manner
over night; but it thawed under the greetings of the others, and he
jumped actively out of the vehicle to offer the ladies their choice of
seats. When all was arranged he found himself at Mrs. Ellison's side,
for Kitty had somewhat eagerly climbed to the front seat with the
colonel. In these circumstances it was pure zeal that sustained Mrs.
Ellison in the flattering constancy with which she babbled on to Mr.
Arbuton and refrained from openly resenting Kitty's contumacy.
As the wagon began to ascend the hill, the road was so rough that the
springs smote together with pitiless jolts, and the ladies uttered some
irrepressible moans. "Never mind, my dear," said the colonel, turning
about to his wife, "we've got all the English there is at Ha-Ha Bay, any
way." Whereupon the driver gave him a wink of sudden liking and
good-fellowship. At the same time his tongue was loosed, and he began to
talk of himself. "You see my dog, how he leaps at the horse's nose? He
is a moose-dog, and keeps himself in practice of catching the moose by
the nose. You ought to come in the hunting season. I could furnish you
with Indians and everything you need to hunt with. I am a dealer in wild
beasts, you know, and I must keep prepared to take them."
"Wild beasts?"
"Yes, for Barnum and the other showmen. I deal in deer, wolf, bear,
beaver, moose, cariboo, wild-cat, link--"
"What?"
"Link--link! You say deer for deers, and link for lynx, don't you?"
"Certainly," answered the unblushing colonel. "Are there many link about
here?"
"Not many, and they are a very expensive animal. I have been shamefully
treated in a link that I have sold to a Boston showman. It was a
difficult beast to take; bit my Indian awfully; and Mr. Doolittle would
not give the price he promised."
"What an outrage!"
"Yes, but it was not so bad as it might have been. He wanted the money
back afterwards; the link died in about two weeks," said the dealer in
wild animals, with a smile that curled his mustache into his ears, and a
glance at Colonel Ellison. "He may have been bruised, I suppose. He may
have been homesick. Perhaps he was never a very strong link. The link is
a curious animal, miss," he said to Kitty, in conclusion.
They had been slowly climbing the mountain road, from which, on either
hand, the pasturelands fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows.
The tops were quite barren, but in the little vales, despite the stones,
a short grass grew very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine
tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory assonance as they cropped
the herbage. Below, the bay filled the oval of the hills with its sunny
expanse, and the white steamer, where she lay beside the busy wharf, and
the black lumber-ships, gave their variety to the pretty scene, which
was completed by the picturesque villages on the shore. It was a very
simple sight, but somehow very touching, as if the soft spectacle were
but a respite from desolation and solitude; as indeed it was.
Mr. Arbuton must have been talking of travel elsewhere, for now he said
to Mrs. Ellison, "This looks like a bit of Norway; the bay yonder might
very well be a fjord of the Northern sea."
Mrs. Ellison murmured her sense of obligation to the bay, the fjord, and
Mr. Arbuton, for their complaisance, and Kitty remembered that he had
somewhat snubbed her the night before for attributing any suggestive
grace to the native scenery. "Then you've really found something in an
American landscape. I suppose we ought to congratulate it," she said, in
smiling enjoyment of her triumph.
The colonel looked at her with eyes of humorous question; Mrs. Ellison
looked blank; and Mr. Arbuton, having quite forgotten what he had said
to provoke this comment now, looked puzzled and answered nothing: for he
had this trait also in common with the sort of Englishman for whom he
was taken, that he never helped out your conversational venture, but if
he failed to respond inwardly, left you with your unaccepted remark upon
your hands, as it were. In his silence, Kitty fell a prey to very evil
thoughts of him, for it made her harmless sally look like a blundering
attack upon him. But just then the driver came to her rescue; he said,
"Gentlemen and ladies, this is the end of the mountain promenade," and,
turning his horse's head, drove rapidly back to the village.
At the foot of the hill they came again to the church, and his
passengers wanted to get out and look into it. "O certainly," said he,
"it isn't finished yet, but you can say as many prayers as you like in
it."
The church was decent and clean, like most Canadian churches, and at
this early hour there was a good number of the villagers at their
devotions. The lithographic pictures of the stations to Calvary were, of
course, on its walls, and there was the ordinary tawdriness of paint and
carving about the high altar.
"I don't like to see these things," said Mrs. Ellison. "It really seems
to savor of idolatry. Don't you think so, Mr. Arbuton?"
"Well, I don't know. I doubt if they're the sort of people to be hurt by
it."
"They need a good stout faith in cold climates, I can tell you," said
the colonel. "It helps to keep them warm. The broad church would be too
full of draughts up here. They want something snug and tight. Just
imagine one of these poor devils listening to a liberal sermon about
birds and fruits and flowers and beautiful sentiments, and then driving
home over the hills with the mercury thirty degrees below zero! He
couldn't stand it."
"Yes, yes, certainly," said Mr. Arbuton, and looked about him with an
eye of cold, uncompassionate inspection, as if he were trying it by a
standard of taste, and, on the whole, finding the poor little church
vulgar.
When they mounted to their places again, the talk fell entirely to the
colonel, who, as his wont was, got what information he could out of the
driver. It appeared, in spite of his theory, that they were not all good
Catholics at Ha-Ha Bay. "This chap, for example," said the Frenchman,
touching himself on the breast and using the slang he must have picked
up from American travellers, "is no Catholic,--not much! He has made too
many studies to care for religion. There's a large French party, sir, in
Canada, that's opposed to the priests and in favor of annexation."
He satisfied the colonel's utmost curiosity, discoursing, as he drove by
the log-built cottages which were now and then sheathed in birch-bark,
upon the local affairs, and the character and history of such of his
fellow-villagers as they met. He knew the pretty girls upon the street
and saluted them by name, interrupting himself with these courtesies in
the lecture he was giving the colonel on life at Ha-Ha Bay. There was
only one brick house (which he had built himself, but had been obliged
to sell in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices
dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with
straw. These he excused to his Americans, but added that the ungainly
thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the
end of an unusually long, hard winter.
"And the people," asked the colonel, "what do they do in the winter to
pass the time?"
"Draw the wood, smoke the pipe, court the ladies.--But wouldn't you like
to see the inside of one of our poor cottages? I shall be very proud to
have you look at mine, and to have you drink a glass of milk from my
cows. I am sorry that I cannot offer you brandy, but there's none to be
bought in the place."
"Don't speak of it! For an eye-opener there is nothing like a glass of
milk," gayly answered the colonel.
They entered the best room of the house,--wide, low-ceiled, dimly lit by
two small windows, and fortified against the winter by a huge Canada
stove of cast-iron. It was rude but neat, and had an air of decent
comfort. Through the window appeared a very little vegetable garden with
a border of the hardiest flowers. "The large beans there," explained the
host, "are for soup and coffee. My corn," he said, pointing out some
rows of dwarfish maize, "has escaped the early August frosts, and so I
expect to have some roasting-ears yet this summer."
"Well, it isn't exactly what you'd call an inviting climate, is it?"
asked the colonel.
The Canadian seemed a hard little man, but he answered now with a kind
of pathos, "It's cruel! I came here when it was all bush. Twenty years I
have lived here, and it has not been worth while. If it was to do over
again, I should rather not live anywhere. I was born in Quebec," he
said, as if to explain that he was used to mild climates, and began to
tell of some events of his life at Ha-Ha Bay. "I wish you were going to
stay here awhile with me. You wouldn't find it so bad in the
summer-time, I can assure you. There are bears in the bush, sir," he
said to the colonel, "and you might easily kill one."
"But then I should be helping to spoil your trade in wild beasts,"
replied the colonel, laughing.
Mr. Arbuton looked like one who might be very tired of this. He made no
sign of interest either in the early glooms and privations or the summer
bears of Ha-Ha Bay. He sat in the quaint parlor, with his hat on his
knee, in the decorous and patient attitude of a gentleman making a call.
He had no feeling, Kitty said to herself; but that is a matter about
which we can easily be wrong. It was rather to be said of Mr. Arbuton
that he had always shrunk from knowledge of things outside of a very
narrow world, and that he had not a ready imagination. Moreover, he had
a personal dislike, as I may call it, of poverty; and he did not enjoy
this poverty as she did, because it was strange and suggestive, though
doubtless he would have done as much to relieve distress.
"Rather too much of his autobiography," he said to Kitty, as he waited
outside the door with her, while the Canadian quieted his dog, which was
again keeping himself in practice of catching the moose by making
vicious leaps at the horse's nose. "The egotism of that kind of people
is always so aggressive. But I suppose he's in the habit of throwing
himself upon the sympathy of summer visitors in this way. You can't
offer a man so little as shilling and sixpence who's taken you into his
confidence. Did you find enough that was novel in his place to justify
him in bringing us here, Miss Ellison?" he asked with an air he had of
taking you of course to be of his mind, and which equally offended you
whether you were so or not.
Every face that they had seen in their drive had told its pathetic story
to Kitty; every cottage that they passed she had entered in thought, and
dreamed out its humble drama. What their host had said gave breath and
color to her fancies of the struggle of life there, and she was startled
and shocked when this cold doubt was cast upon the sympathetic tints of
her picture. She did not know what to say at first; she looked at Mr.
Arbuton with a sudden glance of embarrassment and trouble; then she
answered, "I was very much interested. I don't agree with you, I
believe"; which, when she heard it, seemed a resentful little speech,
and made her willing for some occasion to soften its effect. But nothing
occurred to her during the brief drive back to the boat, save the fact
that the morning air was delicious.
"Yes, but rather cool," said Mr. Arbuton, whose feelings apparently had
not needed any balm; and the talk fell again to the others.
On the pier he helped her down from the wagon, for the colonel was
intent on something the driver was saying, and then offered his hand to
Mrs. Ellison.
She sprang from her place, but stumbled slightly, and when she touched
the ground, "I believe I turned my foot a little," she said with a
laugh. "It's nothing, of course," and fainted in his arms.
Kitty gave a cry of alarm, and the next instant the colonel had relieved
Mr. Arbuton. It was a scene, and nothing could have annoyed him more
than this tumult which poor Mrs. Ellison's misfortune occasioned among
the bystanding habitans and deck-hands, and the passengers eagerly
craning forward over the bulwarks, and running ashore to see what the
matter was. Few men know just how to offer those little offices of
helpfulness which such emergencies demand, and Mr. Arbuton could do
nothing after he was rid of his burden; he hovered anxiously and
uselessly about, while Mrs. Ellison was carried to an airy position on
the bow of the boat, where in a few minutes he had the great
satisfaction of seeing her open her eyes. It was not the moment for him
to speak, and he walked somewhat guiltily away with the dispersing
crowd.
Mrs. Ellison addressed her first words to pale Kitty at her side. "You
can have all my things, now," she said, as if it were a clause in her
will, and perhaps it had been her last thought before unconsciousness.
"Why, Fanny," cried Kitty, with an hysterical laugh, "you're not going
to die! A sprained ankle isn't fatal!"
"No; but I've heard that a person with a sprained ankle can't put their
foot to the ground for weeks; and I shall only want a dressing-gown, you
know, to lie on the sofa in." With that, Mrs. Ellison placed her hand
tenderly on Kitty's head, like a mother wondering what will become of a
helpless child during her disability; in fact she was mentally weighing
the advantages of her wardrobe, which Kitty would now fully enjoy,
against the loss of the friendly strategy which she would now lack.
Helpless to decide the matter, she heaved a sigh.
"But, Fanny, you won't expect to travel in a dressing-gown."
"Indeed, I wish I knew whether I _could_ travel in _anything_ or not.
But the next twenty-four hours will show. If it swells up, I shall have
to rest awhile at Quebec; and if it doesn't, there may be something
internal. I've read of accidents when the person thought they were
perfectly well and comfortable, and the first thing they knew they were
in a very dangerous state. That's the worst of these internal injuries:
you never can tell. Not that I think there's anything of that kind the
matter with me. But a few days' rest won't do any harm, whatever
happens; the stores in Quebec are quite as good and a little cheaper
than in Montreal; and I could go about in a carriage, you know, and put
in the time as well in one place as the other. I'm sure we could get on
very pleasantly there; and the colonel needn't be home for a month yet.
I suppose that I could hobble into the stores on a crutch."
Whilst Mrs. Ellison's monologue ran on with scarcely a break from Kitty,
her husband was gone to fetch her a cup of tea and such other light
refreshment as a lady may take after a swoon. When he returned she
bethought herself of Mr. Arbuton, who, having once come back to see if
all was going well, had vanished again.
"Why, our friend Boston is bearing up under his share of the morning's
work like a hero--or a lady with a sprained ankle," said the colonel as
he arranged the provision. "To see the havoc he's making in the ham and
eggs and chiccory is to be convinced that there is no appetizer like
regret for the sufferings of others."
"Why, and here's poor Kitty not had a bite yet!" cried Mrs. Ellison.
"Kitty, go off at once and get your breakfast. Put on my--"
"O, _don't_, Fanny, or I can't go; and I'm really very hungry."
"Well, I won't then," said Mrs. Ellison, seeing the rainy cloud in
Kitty's eyes. "Go just as you are, and don't mind me." And so Kitty
went, gathering courage at every pace, and sitting down opposite Mr.
Arbuton with a vivid color to be sure, but otherwise lion-bold. He had
been upbraiding the stars that had thrust him further and further at
every step into the intimacy of these people, as he called them to
himself. It was just twenty-four hours, he reflected, since he had met
them, and resolved to have nothing to do with them, and in that time the
young lady had brought him under the necessity of apologizing for a
blunder of her own; he had played the eavesdropper to her talk; he had
sentimentalized the midnight hour with her; they had all taken a morning
ride together; and he had ended by having Mrs. Ellison sprain her ankle
and faint in his arms. It was outrageous; and what made it worse was
that decency obliged him to take henceforth a regretful, deprecatory
attitude towards Mrs. Ellison, whom he liked least among these people.
So he sat vindictively eating an enormous breakfast, in a sort of angry
abstraction, from which Kitty's coming roused him to say that he hoped
Mrs. Ellison was better.
"O, very much! It's just a sprain."
"A sprain may be a very annoying thing," said Mr. Arbuton dismally.
"Miss Ellison," he cried, "I've been nothing but an affliction to your
party since I came on board this boat!"
"Do you think evil genius of our party would be too harsh a term?"
suggested Kitty.
"Not in the least; it would be a mere euphemism,--base flattery, in
fact. Call me something worse."
"I can't think of anything. I must leave you to your own conscience. It
was a pity to end our ride in that way; it would have been such a
pleasant ride!" And Kitty took heart from his apparent mood to speak of
some facts of the morning that had moved her fancy. "What a strange
little nest it is up here among these half-thawed hills! and imagine the
winter, the fifteen or twenty months of it, they must have every year. I
could almost have shed tears over that patch of corn that had escaped
the early August frosts. I suppose this is a sort of Indian summer that
we are enjoying now, and that the cold weather will set in after a week
or two. My cousin and I thought that Tadoussac was somewhat retired and
composed last night, but I'm sure that I shall see it in its true light,
as a metropolis, going back. I'm afraid that the turmoil and bustle of
Eriecreek, when I get home--"
"Eriecreek?--when you got home?--I thought you lived at Milwaukee."
"O no! It's my cousins who live at Milwaukee. I live at Eriecreek, New
York State."
"Oh!" Mr. Arbuton looked blank and not altogether pleased. Milwaukee was
bad enough, though he understood that it was largely peopled from New
England, and had a great German element, which might account for the
fact that these people were not quite barbaric. But this Eriecreek, New
York State! "I don't think I've heard of it," he said.
"It's a small place," observed Kitty, "and I believe it isn't noted for
anything in particular; it's not even on any railroad. It's in the
north-west part of the State."
"Isn't it in the oil-regions?" groped Mr. Arbuton.
"Why, the oil-regions are rather migratory, you know. It used to be in
the oil-regions; but the oil was pumped out, and then the oil-regions
gracefully withdrew and left the cheese-regions and grape-regions to
come back and take possession of the old derricks and the rusty boilers.
You might suppose from the appearance of the meadows, that all the
boilers that ever blew up had come down in the neighborhood of
Eriecreek. And every field has its derrick standing just as the last
dollar or the last drop of oil left it."
Mr. Arbuton brought his fancy to bear upon Eriecreek, and wholly failed
to conceive of it. He did not like the notion of its being thrust within
the range of his knowledge; and he resented its being the home of Miss
Ellison, whom he was beginning to accept as a not quite comprehensible
yet certainly agreeable fact, though he still had a disposition to cast
her off as something incredible. He asked no further about Eriecreek,
and presently she rose and went to join her relatives, and he went to
smoke his cigar, and to ponder upon the problem presented to him in this
young girl from whose locality and conjecturable experiences he was at
loss how to infer her as he found her here.
She had a certain self-reliance mingling with an innocent trust of
others which Mrs. Isabel March had described to her husband as a charm
potent to make everybody sympathetic and good-natured, but which it
would not be easy to account for to Mr. Arbuton. In part it was a
natural gift, and partly it came from mere ignorance of the world; it
was the unsnubbed fearlessness of a heart which did not suspect a sense
of social difference in others, or imagine itself misprized for anything
but a fault. For such a false conception of her relations to polite
society, Kitty's Uncle Jack was chiefly to blame. In the fierce
democracy of his revolt from his Virginian traditions he had taught his
family that a belief in any save intellectual and moral distinctions was
a mean and cruel superstition; he had contrived to fix this idea so
deeply in the education of his children, that it gave a coloring to
their lives, and Kitty, when her turn came, had the effect of it in the
character of those about her. In fact she accepted his extreme theories
of equality to a degree that delighted her uncle, who, having held them
many years, was growing perhaps a little languid in their tenure and was
glad to have his grasp strengthened by her faith. Socially as well as
politically Eriecreek was almost a perfect democracy, and there was
little in Kitty's circumstances to contradict the doctor's teachings.
The brief visits which she had made to Buffalo and Erie, and, since the
colonel's marriage, to Milwaukee, had not sufficed to undeceive her; she
had never suffered slight save from the ignorant and uncouth; she
innocently expected that in people of culture she should always find
community of feeling and ideas; and she had met Mr. Arbuton all the more
trustfully because as a Bostonian he must be cultivated.