of some home-returning sojourners, the pier was a labyrinth of equipages
of many sorts and sizes, and a herd of bright-hooded, gayly blanketed
horses gave variety to the human crowd that soaked and steamed in the
fine, slowly falling rain. A draught-horse was every three minutes
driven into their midst with tedious iteration as he slowly drew baskets
of coal up from the sloop unloading at the wharf, and each time they
closed solidly upon his retreat as if they never expected to see that
horse again while the world stood. They were idle ladies and gentlemen
under umbrellas, Indians and habitans taking the rain stolidly erect or
with shrugged shoulders, and two or three clergymen of the curate type,
who might have stepped as they were out of any dull English novel. These
were talking in low voices and putting their hands to their ears to
catch the replies of the lady-passengers who hung upon the rail, and
twaddled back as dryly as if there was no moisture in life. All the
while the safety-valves hissed with the escaping steam, and the boat's
crew silently toiled with the grooms of the different horses to get the
equipages on board. With the carriages it was an affair of mere muscle,
but the horses required to be managed with brain. No sooner had one of
them placed his fore feet on the gangway plank than he protested by
backing up over a mass of patient Canadians, carrying with him half a
dozen grooms and deck-hands. Then his hood was drawn over his eyes, and
he was blindly walked up and down the pier, and back to the gangway,
which he knew as soon as he touched it. He pulled, he pranced, he shied,
he did all that a bad and stubborn horse can do, till at last a groom
mounted his back, a clump of deck-hands tugged at his bridle, and other
grooms, tenderly embracing him at different points, pushed, and he was
thus conveyed on board with mingled affection and ignominy. None of the
Canadians seemed amused by this; they regarded it with serious composure
as a fitting decorum, and Mr. Arbuton had no comment to make upon it.
But at the first embrace bestowed upon the horse by the grooms the
colonel said absently, "Ah! long-lost brother," and Kitty laughed; and
as the scruples of each brute were successively overcome, she helped to
give some grotesque interpretation to the various scenes of the
melodrama, while Mr. Arbuton stood beside her, and sheltered her with
his umbrella; and a spice of malice in her heart told her that he viewed
this drolling, and especially her part in it, with grave misgiving. That
gave the zest of transgression to her excess, mixed with dismay; for the
tricksy spirit in her was not a domineering spirit, but was easily
abashed by the moods of others. She ought not to have laughed at Dick's
speeches, she soon told herself, much less helped him on. She dreadfully
feared that she had done something indecorous, and she was pensive and
silent over it as she moved listlessly about after supper; and she sat
at last thinking in a dreary sort of perplexity on what had passed
during the day, which seemed a long one.
The shabby Englishman with his wife and sister were walking up and down
the cabin. By and by they stopped, and sat down at the table facing
Kitty; the elder woman, with a civil freedom, addressed her some
commonplace, and the four were presently in lively talk; for Kitty had
beamed upon the woman in return, having already longed to know something
of them. The world was so fresh to her, that she could find delight in
those poor singing or acting folk, though she had soon to own to herself
that their talk was not very witty nor very wise, and that the best
thing about them was their good-nature. The colonel sat at the end of
the table with a newspaper; Mrs. Ellison had gone to bed; and Kitty was
beginning to tire of her new acquaintance, and to wonder how she could
get away from them, when she saw rescue in the eye of Mr. Arbuton as he
came down to the cabin. She knew he was looking for her; she saw him
check himself with a start of recognition; then he walked rapidly by the
group, without glancing at them.
"Brrrr!" said the blond girl, drawing her blue knit shawl about her
shoulders, "isn't it cold?" and she and her friends laughed.
"O dear!" thought Kitty, "I didn't suppose they were so rude. I'm afraid
I must say good night," she added aloud, after a little, and stole away
the most conscience-stricken creature on that boat. She heard those
people laugh again after she left them.
IV.
MR. ARBUTON'S INSPIRATION.
The next morning, when Mr. Arbuton awoke, he found a clear light upon
the world that he had left wrapped in fog at midnight. A heavy gale was
blowing, and the wide river was running in seas that made the boat
stagger in her course, and now and then struck her bows with a force
that sent the spray from their seething tops into the faces of the
people on the promenade. The sun, out of rifts of the breaking clouds,
launched broad splendors across the villages and farms of the level
landscape and the crests and hollows of the waves; and a certain joy of
the air penetrated to the guarded consciousness of Mr. Arbuton.
Involuntarily he looked about for the people he meant to have nothing
more to do with, that he might appeal to the sympathies of one of them,
at least, in his sense of such an admirable morning. But a great many
passengers had come on board, during the night, at Murray Bay, where the
brief season was ending, and their number hid the Ellisons from him.
When he went to breakfast, he found some one had taken his seat near
them, and they did not notice him as he passed by in search of another
chair. Kitty and the colonel were at table alone, and they both wore
preoccupied faces. After breakfast he sought them out and asked for Mrs.
Ellison, who had shared in most of the excitements of the day before,
helping herself about with a pretty limp, and who certainly had not, as
her husband phrased it, kept any of the meals waiting.
"Why," said the colonel, "I'm afraid her ankle's worse this morning, and
that we'll have to lie by at Quebec for a few days, at any rate."
Mr. Arbuton heard this sad news with a cheerful aspect unaccountable in
one who was concerned at Mrs. Ellison's misfortune. He smiled, when he
ought to have looked pensive, and he laughed at the colonel's joke when
the latter added, "Of course, this is a great hardship for my cousin,
who hates Quebec, and wants to get home to Eriecreek as soon as
possible."
Kitty promised to bear her trials with firmness, and Mr. Arbuton said,
not very consequently, as she thought, "I had been planning to spend a
few days in Quebec, myself, and I shall have the opportunity of
inquiring about Mrs. Ellison's convalescence. In fact," he added,
turning to the colonel, "I hope you'll let me be of service to you in
getting to a hotel."
And when the boat landed, Mr. Arbuton actually busied himself in finding
a carriage and putting the various Ellison wraps and bags into it. Then
he helped to support Mrs. Ellison ashore, and to lift her to the best
place. He raised his hat, and had good-morning on his tongue, when the
astonished colonel called out, "Why, the deuce! You're going to ride up
with us!"
Mr. Arbuton thought he had better get another carriage; he should
incommode Mrs. Ellison; but Mrs. Ellison protested that he would not at
all; and, to cut the matter short, he mounted to the colonel's side. It
was another stroke of fate.
At the hotel they found a line of people reaching half-way down the
outer steps from the inside of the office.
"Hallo! what's this?" asked the colonel of the last man in the queue.
"O, it's a little procession to the hotel register! We've been three
quarters of an hour in passing a given point," said the man, who was
plainly a fellow-citizen.
"And haven't got by yet," said the colonel, taking to the speaker. "Then
the house is full?"
"Well, no; they haven't begun to throw them out of the window."
"His humor is degenerating, Dick," said Kitty; and "Hadn't you better go
inside and inquire?" asked Mrs. Ellison. It was part of the Ellison
travelling joke for her thus to prompt the colonel in his duty.
"I'm glad you mentioned it, Fanny. I was just going to drive off in
despair." The colonel vanished within doors, and after long delay came
out flushed, but not with triumph. "On the express condition that I have
ladies with me, one an invalid, I am promised a room on the fifth floor
some time during the day. They tell me the other hotel is crammed and
it's no use to go there."
Mrs. Ellison was ready to weep, and for the first time since her
accident she harbored some bitterness against Mr. Arbuton. They all sat
silent, and the colonel on the sidewalk silently wiped his brow.
Mr. Arbuton, in the poverty of his invention, wondered if there was not
some lodging-house where they could find shelter.
"Of course there is," cried Mrs. Ellison, beaming upon her hero, and
calling Kitty's attention to his ingenuity by a pressure with her well
foot. "Richard, we must look up a boarding-house."
"Do you know of any good boarding-houses?" asked the colonel of the
driver, mechanically.
"Plenty," answered the man.
"Well, drive us to twenty or thirty first-class ones," commanded the
colonel; and the search began.
The colonel first asked prices and looked at rooms, and if he pronounced
any apartment unsuitable, Kitty was despatched by Mrs. Ellison to view
it and refute him. As often as she confirmed him, Mrs. Ellison was sure
that they were both too fastidious, and they never turned away from a
door but they closed the gates of paradise upon that afflicted lady. She
began to believe that they should find no place whatever, when at last
they stopped before a portal so unboarding-house-like in all outward
signs, that she maintained it was of no use to ring, and imparted so
much of her distrust to the colonel that, after ringing, he prefaced his
demand for rooms with an apology for supposing that there were rooms to
let there. Then, after looking at them, he returned to the carriage and
reported that the whole affair was perfect, and that he should look no
farther. Mrs. Ellison replied that she never could trust his judgment,
he was so careless. Kitty inspected the premises, and came back in a
transport that alarmed the worst fears of Mrs. Ellison. She was sure
that they had better look farther, she knew there were plenty of nicer
places. Even if the rooms were nice and the situation pleasant, she was
certain that there must be some drawbacks which they did not know of
yet. Whereupon her husband lifted her from the carriage, and bore her,
without reply or comment of any kind, into the house.
Throughout the search Mr. Arbuton had been making up his mind that he
would part with his friends as soon as they found lodgings, give the day
to Quebec, and take the evening train for Gorham, thus escaping the
annoyances of a crowded hotel, and ending at once an acquaintance which
he ought never to have let go so far. As long as the Ellisons were
without shelter, he felt that it was due to himself not to abandon them.
But even now that they were happily housed, had he done all that
nobility obliged? He stood irresolute beside the carriage.
"Won't you come up and see where we live?" asked Kitty, hospitably.
"I shall be very glad," said Mr. Arbuton.
"My dear fellow," said the colonel, in the parlor, "I didn't engage a
room for you. I supposed you'd rather take your chances at the hotel."
"O, I'm going away to-night."
"Why, that's a pity!"
"Yes, I've no fancy for a cot-bed in the hotel parlor. But I don't quite
like to leave you here, after bringing this calamity upon you."
"O, don't mention that! I was the only one to blame. We shall get on
splendidly here."
Mr. Arbuton suffered a vague disappointment. At the bottom of his heart
was a formless hope that he might in some way be necessary to the
Ellisons in their adversity; or if not that, then that something might
entangle him further and compel his stay. But they seemed quite equal in
themselves to the situation; they were in far more comfortable quarters
than they could have hoped for, and plainly should want for nothing;
Fortune put on a smiling face, and bade him go free of them. He fancied
it a mocking smile, though, as he stood an instant silently weighing one
thing against another. The colonel was patiently waiting his motion;
Mrs. Ellison sat watching him from the sofa; Kitty moved about the room
with averted face,--a pretty domestic presence, a household priestess
ordering the temporary Penates. Mr. Arbuton opened his lips to say
farewell, but a god spoke through them,--inconsequently, as the gods for
the most part do, saying, "Besides, I suppose you've got all the rooms
here."
"O, as to that I don't know," answered the colonel, not recognizing the
language of inspiration, "let's ask." Kitty knocked a photograph-book
off the table, and Mrs. Ellison said, "Why, Kitty!" But nothing more was
spoken till the landlady came. She had another room, but doubted if it
would answer. It was in the attic, and was a back room, though it had a
pleasant outlook. Mr. Arbuton had no doubt that it would do very well
for the day or two he was going to stay, and took it hastily, without
going to look at it. He had his valise carried up at once, and then he
went to the post-office to see if he had any letters, offering to ask
also for Colonel Ellison.
Kitty stole off to explore the chamber given her at the rear of the
house; that is to say, she opened the window looking out on what their
hostess told her was the garden of the Ursuline Convent, and stood there
in a mute transport. A black cross rose in the midst, and all about this
wandered the paths and alleys of the garden, through clumps of
lilac-bushes and among the spires of hollyhocks. The grounds were
enclosed by high walls in part, and in part by the group of the convent
edifices, built of gray stone, high gabled, and topped by
dormer-windowed steep roofs of tin, which, under the high morning sun,
lay an expanse of keenest splendor, while many a grateful shadow dappled
the full-foliaged garden below. Two slim, tall poplars stood against the
gable of the chapel, and shot their tops above its roof, and under a
porch near them two nuns sat motionless in the sun, black-robed, with
black veils falling over their shoulders, and their white faces lost in
the white linen that draped them from breast to crown. Their hands lay
quiet in their laps, and they seemed unconscious of the other nuns
walking in the garden-paths with little children, their pupils, and
answering their laughter from time to time with voices as simple and
innocent as their own. Kitty looked down upon them all with a swelling
heart. They were but figures in a beautiful picture of something old and
poetical; but she loved them, and pitied them, and was most happy in
them, the same as if they had been real. It could not be that they and
she were in the same world: she must be dreaming over a book in
Charley's room at Eriecreek. She shaded her eyes for a better look, when
the noonday gun boomed from the citadel; the bell upon the chapel
jangled harshly, and those strange maskers, those quaint black birds
with white breasts and faces, flocked indoors. At the same time a small
dog under her window howled dolorously at the jangling of the bell; and
Kitty, with an impartial joy, turned from the pensive romance of the
convent garden to the mild comedy of the scene to which his woeful note
attracted her. When he had uttered his anguish, he relapsed into the
quietest small French dog that ever was, and lay down near a large,
tranquil cat, whom neither the bell nor he had been able to stir from
her slumbers in the sun; a peasant-like old man kept on sawing wood, and
a little child stood still amidst the larkspurs and marigolds of a tiny
garden, while over the flower-pots on the low window-sill of the
neighboring house to which it belonged, a young, motherly face gazed
peacefully out. The great extent of the convent grounds had left this
poor garden scarce breathing-space for its humble blooms; with the low
paling fence that separated it from the adjoining house-yards it looked
like a toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show, and in its way it
was as quaintly unreal to the young girl as the nunnery itself.
When she saw it first, the city's walls and other warlike ostentations
had taken her imagination with the historic grandeur of Quebec; but the
fascination deepened now that she was admitted, as it were, to the
religious heart and the domestic privacy of the famous old town. She was
romantic, as most good young girls are; and she had the same pleasure in
the strangeness of the things about her as she would have felt in the
keeping of a charming story. To Fanny's "Well, Kitty, I suppose all this
just suits you," when she had returned to the little parlor where the
sufferer lay, she answered with a sigh of irrepressible content, "O yes!
could anything be more beautiful?" and her enraptured eye dwelt upon the
low ceilings, the deep, wide chimneys eloquent of the mighty fires with
which they must roar in winter, the French windows with their curious
and clumsy fastenings, and every little detail that made the place alien
and precious.
Fanny broke into a laugh at the visionary absence in her face.
"Do you think the place is good enough for your hero and heroine?" asked
she, slyly; for Kitty had one of those family reputes, so hard to
survive, for childish attempts of her own in the world of fiction where
so great part of her life had been passed; and Mrs. Ellison, who was as
unliterary a soul as ever breathed, admired her with the heartiness
which unimaginative people often feel for their idealizing friends, and
believed that she was always deep in the mysteries of some plot.
"O, I don't know," Kitty answered with a little color, "about heroes and
heroines; but, I'd like to live here, myself. Yes," she continued,
rather to herself than to her listener, "I do believe this is what I was
made for. I've always wanted to live amongst old things, in a stone
house with dormer-windows. Why, there isn't a single dormer-window in
Eriecreek, nor even a brick house, let alone a stone one. O yes, indeed!
I was meant for an old country."
"Well, then, Kitty, I don't see what you're to do but to marry East and
live East; or else find a rich husband, and get him to take you to
Europe to live."
"Yes; or get him to come and live in Quebec. That's all I'd ask, and he
needn't be a very rich man, for that."
"Why, you poor child, what sort of husband could you get to settle down
in _this_ dead old place?"
"O, I suppose some kind of artist or literary man."
This was not Mrs. Ellison's notion of the kind of husband who was to
realize for Kitty her fancy for life in an old country; but she was
content to let the matter rest for the present, and, in a serene
thankfulness to the power that had brought two marriageable young
creatures together beneath the same roof, and under her own observance,
she composed herself among the sofa-cushions, from which she meant to
conduct the campaign against Mr. Arbuton with relentless vigor.
"Well," she said, "it won't be fair if you are not happy in this world,
Kitty, you ask so little of it"; while Kitty turned to the window
overlooking the street, and lost herself in the drama of the passing
figures below. They were new, and yet oddly familiar, for she had long
known them in the realm of romance. The peasant-women who went by, in
hats of felt or straw, some on foot with baskets, and some in their
light market-carts, were all, in their wrinkled and crooked age or their
fresh-faced, strong-limbed youth, her friends since childhood in many a
tale of France or Germany; and the black-robed priests, who mixed with
the passers on the narrow wooden sidewalk, and now and then courteously
gave way, or lifted their wide-rimmed hats in a grave, smiling
salutation, were more recent acquaintances, but not less intimate. They
were out of old romances about Italy and Spain, in which she was very
learned; and this butcher's boy, tilting along through the crowd with a
half-staggering run, was from any one of Dickens's stories, and she
divined that the four-armed wooden trough on his shoulder was the
butcher's tray, which figures in every novelist's description of a
London street-crowd. There were many other types, as French mothers of
families with market-baskets on their arms; very pretty French
school-girls with books under their arms; wild-looking country boys with
red raspberries in birch-bark measures; and quiet gliding nuns with
white hoods and downcast faces: each of whom she unerringly relegated to
an appropriate corner of her world of unreality. A young, mild-faced,
spectacled Anglican curate she did not give a moment's pause, but rushed
him instantly through the whole series of Anthony Trollope's novels,
which dull books, I am sorry to say, she had read, and liked, every one;
and then she began to find various people astray out of Thackeray. The
trig corporal, with the little visorless cap worn so jauntily, the light
stick carried in one hand, and the broad-sealed official document in the
other, had also, in his breast-pocket, one of those brief, infrequent
missives which Lieutenant Osborne used to send to poor Amelia; a tall,
awkward officer did duty for Major Dobbin; and when a very pretty lady
driving a pony carriage, with a footman in livery on the little perch
behind her, drew rein beside the pavement, and a handsome young captain
in a splendid uniform saluted her and began talking with her in a
languid, affected way, it was Osborne recreant to the thought of his
betrothed, one of whose tender letters he kept twirling in his fingers
while he talked.
Most of the people whom she saw passing had letters or papers, and, in
fact, they were coming from the post-office, where the noonday mails had
just been opened. So she went on turning substance into shadow,--unless,
indeed, flesh and blood is the illusion,--and, as I am bound to own,
catching at very slight pretexts in many cases for the exercise of her
sorcery, when her eye fell upon a gentleman at a little distance. At the
same moment he raised his eyes from a letter at which he had been
glancing, and ran them along the row of houses opposite, till they
rested on the window at which she stood. Then he smiled and lifted his
hat, and, with a start, she recognized Mr. Arbuton, while a certain
chill struck to her heart through the tumult she felt there. Till he saw
her there had been such a cold reserve and hauteur in his bearing, that
the trepidation which she had felt about him at times, the day before,
and which had worn quite away under the events of the morning, was
renewed again, and the aspect, in which he had been so strange that she
did not know him, seemed the only one that he had ever worn. This effect
lasted till Mr. Arbuton could find his way to her, and place in her
eager hand a letter from the girls and Dr. Ellison. She forgot it then,
and vanished till she read her letter.
V.
MR. ARBUTON MAKES HIMSELF AGREEABLE.
The first care of Colonel Ellison had been to call a doctor, and to know
the worst about the sprained ankle, upon which his plans had fallen
lame; and the worst was that it was not a bad sprain, but Mrs. Ellison,
having been careless of it the day before, had aggravated the hurt, and
she must now have that perfect rest, which physicians prescribe so
recklessly of other interests and duties, for a week at least, and
possibly two or three.