Arbuton so much, and you say yourself I haven't shown myself so careful
of him before. But I never was so glad to see Dick in my life, and to
have some excuse for laughing. I didn't dare to speak to Mr. Arbuton
about it, for he couldn't, if he had tried, have let me laugh it out and
be done with it. I trudged demurely along by his side, and neither of us
mentioned the matter to Dick," she concluded breathlessly. Then, "I
don't know why I should tell you now; it seems wicked and cruel," she
said penitently, almost pensively.
Mrs. Ellison had not been amused. She said, "Well, Kitty, in _some_
girls I should say it was quite heartless to do as you've done."
"It's heartless in _me_, Fanny; and you needn't say such a thing. I'm
sure I didn't utter a syllable to wound him, and just before that he'd
been _very_ disagreeable, and I forgave him because I thought he was
mortified. And you needn't say that I've no feeling"; and thereupon she
rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin's, "Fanny," she cried,
vehemently, "I _have_ been heartless. I'm afraid I haven't shown any
sympathy or consideration. I'm afraid I must have seemed dreadfully
callous and hard. I oughtn't to have thought of anything but the danger
to him; and it seems to me now I scarcely thought of that at all. O, how
rude it was of me to see anything funny in it! What _can_ I do?"
"Don't go crazy, at any rate, Kitty. _He_ doesn't know that you've been
laughing about him. You needn't do anything."
"O yes, I need. He doesn't know that I've been laughing about him to
you; but, don't you see, I laughed when we met Dick; and what can he
think of that?"
"He just thinks you were nervous, I suppose."
"O, do you suppose he does, Fanny? O, I _wish_ I could believe that! O,
I'm so horribly ashamed of myself! And here yesterday I was criticising
him for being unfeeling, and now I've been a thousand times worse than
he has ever been, or ever could be! O dear, dear, dear!"
"Kitty! hush!" exclaimed Mrs. Ellison; "you run on like a wild thing,
and you're driving me distracted, by not being like yourself."
"O, it's very well for _you_ to be so calm; but if you didn't know what
to do, you wouldn't."
"Yes, I would; I don't, and I am."
"But what shall I do?" And Kitty plucked away the hands which Fanny had
been holding and wrung them. "I'll tell you what I can do," she suddenly
added, while a gleam of relief dawned upon her face: "I can bear all his
disagreeable ways after this, as long as he stays, and not say anything
back. Yes, I'll put up with everything. I'll be as _meek_! He may
patronize me and snub me and put me in the wrong as much as he pleases.
And then he won't be _approaching_ my behavior. O Fanny!"
Upon this, Mrs. Ellison said that she was going to give her a good
scolding for her nonsense, and pulled her down and kissed her, and said
that she had not done anything, and was, nevertheless, consoled at her
resolve to expiate her offence by respecting thenceforward Mr. Arbuton's
foibles and prejudices.
It is not certain how far Kitty would have succeeded in her good
purposes: these things, so easily conceived, are not of such facile
execution; she passed a sleepless night of good resolutions and schemes
of reparation; but, fortunately for her, Mr. Arbuton's foibles and
prejudices seemed to have fallen into a strange abeyance. The change
that had come upon him that day remained; he was still Mr. Arbuton, but
with a difference. He could not undo his whole inherited and educated
being, and perhaps no chance could deeply affect it without destroying
the man. He continued hopelessly superior to Colonel and Mrs. Ellison;
but it is not easy to love a woman and not seek, at least before
marriage, to please those dear to her. Mr. Arbuton had contested his
passion at every advance; he had firmly set his face against the fancy
that, at the beginning, invested this girl with a charm; he had only
done the things afterwards that mere civilization required; he had
suffered torments of doubt concerning her fitness for himself and his
place in society; he was not sure yet that her unknown relations were
not horribly vulgar people; even yet, he was almost wholly ignorant of
the circumstances and conditions of her life. But how he saw her only in
the enrapturing light of his daring for her sake, of a self-devotion
that had seemed to make her his own; and he behaved toward her with a
lover's self-forgetfulness,--or something like it: say a perfect
tolerance, a tender patience, in which it would have been hard to detect
the lurking shadow of condescension.
He was fairly domesticated with the family. Mrs. Ellison's hurt, in
spite of her many imprudences, was decidedly better, and sometimes she
made a ceremony of being helped down from her room to dinner; but she
always had tea beside her sofa, and he with the others drank it there.
Few hours of the day passed in which they did not meet in that easy
relation which establishes itself among people sojourning in summer
idleness under the same roof. In the morning he saw the young girl fresh
and glad as any flower of the garden beneath her window, while the sweet
abstraction of her maiden dreams yet hovered in her eyes. At night he
sat with her beside the lamp whose light, illuming a little world
within, shut out the great world outside, and seemed to be the soft
effulgence of her presence, as she sewed, or knit, or read,--a heavenly
spirit of home. Sometimes he heard her talking with her cousin, or
lightly laughing after he had said good night; once, when he woke, she
seemed to be looking out of her window across the moonlight in the
Ursulines' Garden while she sang a fragment of song. To meet her on the
stairs or in the narrow entries; or to encounter her at the doors, and
make way for her to pass with a jest and blush and flutter; to sit down
at table with her three times a day,--was a potent witchery. There was a
rapture in her shawl flung over the back of a chair; her gloves, lying
light as fallen leaves on the table, and keeping the shape of her hands,
were full of winning character; and all the more unaccountably they
touched his heart because they had a certain careless, sweet shabbiness
about the finger-tips.
He found himself hanging upon her desultory talk with Fanny about the
set of things and the agreement of colors. There was always more or less
of this talk going on, whatever the main topic was, for continual
question arose in the minds of one or other lady concerning those
adaptations of Mrs. Ellison's finery to the exigencies of Kitty's daily
life. They pleased their innocent hearts with the secrecy of the affair,
which, in the concealments it required, the sudden difficulties it
presented, and the guiltless equivocations it inspired, had the
excitement of intrigue. Nothing could have been more to the mind of Mrs.
Ellison than to deck Kitty for this perpetual masquerade; and, since the
things were very pretty, and Kitty was a girl in every motion of her
being, I do not see how anything could have delighted her more than to
wear them. Their talk effervesced with the delicious consciousness that
he could not dream of what was going on, and babbled over with
mysterious jests and laughter, which sometimes he feared to be at his
expense, and so joined in, and made them laugh the more at his
misconception. He went and came among them at will; he had but to tap at
Mrs. Ellison's door, and some voice of unaffected cordiality welcomed
him in; he had but to ask, and Kitty was frankly ready for any of those
strolls about Quebec in which most of their waking hours were dreamed
away.
The gray Lady of the North cast her spell about them,--the freshness of
her mornings, the still heat of her middays, the slant, pensive radiance
of her afternoons, and the pale splendor of her auroral nights. Never
was city so faithfully explored; never did city so abound in objects of
interest; for Kitty's love of the place was boundless, and his love for
her was inevitable friendship with this adoptive patriotism.
"I didn't suppose you Western people cared for these things," he once
said; "I thought your minds were set on things new and square."
"But how could you think so?" replied Kitty, tolerantly. "It's because
we have so many new and square things that we like the old crooked ones.
I do believe I should enjoy Europe even better than you. There's a
forsaken farm-house near Eriecreek, dropping to pieces amongst its
wild-grown sweetbriers and quince-bushes, that I used to think a wonder
of antiquity because it was built in 1815. Can't you imagine how I must
feel in a city like this, that was founded nearly three centuries ago,
and has suffered so many sieges and captures, and looks like pictures of
those beautiful old towns I can never see?"
"O, perhaps you will see them some day!" he said, touched by her fervor.
"I don't ask it at present: Quebec's enough. I'm in love with the place.
I wish I never had to leave it. There isn't a crook, or a turn, or a
tin-roof, or a dormer-window, or a gray stone in it that isn't
precious."
Mr. Arbuton laughed. "Well, you shall be sovereign lady of Quebec for
me. Shall we have the English garrison turned out?"
"No; not unless you can bring back Montcalm's men to take their places."
This might be as they sauntered out of one of the city gates, and
strayed through the Lower Town till they should chance upon some poor,
bare-interiored church, with a few humble worshippers adoring their
Saint, with his lamps alight before his picture; or as they passed some
high convent-wall, and caught the strange, metallic clang of the nuns'
voices singing their hymns within. Sometimes they whiled away the hours
on the Esplanade, breathing its pensive sentiment of neglect and
incipient decay, and pacing up and down over the turf athwart the slim
shadows of the poplars; or, with comfortable indifference to the local
observances, sat in talk on the carriage of one of the burly,
uncared-for guns, while the spider wove his web across the mortar's
mouth, and the grass nodded above the tumbled pyramids of shot, and the
children raced up and down, and the nursery-maids were wooed of the
dapper sergeants, and the red-coated sentry loitered lazily to and fro
before his box. On the days of the music, they listened to the band in
the Governor's Garden, and watched the fine world of the old capital in
flirtation with the blond-whiskered officers; and on pleasant nights
they mingled with the citizen throng that filled the Durham Terrace,
while the river shaped itself in the lights of its shipping, and the
Lower Town, with its lamps, lay, like a nether firmament, two hundred
feet below them, and Point Levis glittered and sparkled on the thither
shore, and in the northern sky the aurora throbbed in swift pulsations
of violet and crimson. They liked to climb the Break-Neck Steps at
Prescott Gate, dropping from the Upper to the Lower Town, which reminded
Mr. Arbuton of Naples and Trieste, and took Kitty with the unassociated
picturesqueness of their odd shops and taverns, and their lofty windows
green with house-plants. They would stop and look up at the geraniums
and fuchsias, and fall a thinking of far different things, and the
friendly, unbusy people would come to their doors and look up with them.
They recognized the handsome, blond young man, and the pretty, gray-eyed
girl; for people in Quebec have time to note strangers who linger there,
and Kitty and Mr. Arbuton had come to be well-known figures, different
from the fleeting tourists on their rounds; and, indeed, as sojourners
they themselves perceived their poetic distinction from mere birds of
passage.
Indoors they resorted much to the little entry-window looking out on the
Ursulines' Garden. Two chairs stood confronted there, and it was hard
for either of the young people to pass them without sinking a moment
into one of them, and this appeared always to charm another presence
into the opposite chair. There they often lingered in the soft
forenoons, talking in desultory phrase of things far and near, or
watching, in long silences, the nuns pacing up and down in the garden
below, and waiting for the pensive, slender nun, and the stout, jolly
nun whom Kitty had adopted, and whom she had gayly interpreted to him as
an allegory of Life in their quaint inseparableness; and they played
that the influence of one or other nun was in the ascendant, according
as their own talk was gay or sad. In their relation, people are not so
different from children; they like the same thing over and over again;
they like it the better the less it is in itself.
At times Kitty would come with a book in her hand (one finger shut in to
keep the place),--some latest novel, or a pirated edition of Longfellow,
recreantly purchased at a Quebec bookstore; and then Mr. Arbuton must
ask to see it; and he read romance or poetry to her by the hour. He
showed to as much advantage as most men do in the serious follies of
wooing; and an influence which he could not defy, or would not, shaped
him to all the sweet, absurd demands of the affair. From time to time,
recollecting himself, and trying to look consequences in the face, he
gently turned the talk upon Eriecreek, and endeavored to possess himself
of some intelligible image of the place, and of Kitty's home and
friends. Even then, the present was so fair and full of content, that
his thoughts, when they reverted to the future, no longer met the
obstacles that had made him recoil from it before. Whatever her past had
been, he could find some way to weaken the ties that bound her to it; a
year or two of Europe would leave no trace of Eriecreek; without effort
of his, her life would adapt itself to his own, and cease to be a part
of the lives of those people there; again and again his amiable
imaginations--they were scarcely intents--accomplished themselves in
many a swift, fugitive revery, while the days went by, and the shadow of
the ivy in the window at which they sat fell, in moonlight and sunlight,
upon Kitty's cheeks, and the fuchsia kissed her hair with its purple and
crimson blossom.
X.
MR. ARBUTON SPEAKS.
Mrs. Ellison was almost well; she had already been shopping twice in the
Rue Fabrique, and her recovery was now chiefly retarded by the
dress-maker's delays in making up a silk too precious to be risked in
the piece with the customs officers, at the frontier. Moreover, although
the colonel was beginning to chafe, she was not loath to linger yet a
few days for the sake of an affair to which her suffering had been a
willing sacrifice. In return for her indefatigable self-devotion, Kitty
had lately done very little. She ungratefully shrunk more and more from
those confidences to which her cousin's speeches covertly invited; she
openly resisted open attempts upon her knowledge of facts. If she was
not prepared to confess everything to Fanny, it was perhaps because it
was all so very little, or because a young girl has not, or ought not to
have, a mind in certain matters, or else knows it not, till it is asked
her by the one first authorized to learn it. The dream in which she
lived was flattering and fair; and it wholly contented her imagination
while it lulled her consciousness. It moved from phase to phase without
the harshness of reality, and was apparently allied neither to the
future nor to the past. She herself seemed to have no more fixity or
responsibility in it than the heroine of a romance.
As their last week in Quebec drew to its close, only two or three things
remained for them to do, as tourists; and chief among the few unvisited
shrines of sentiment was the site of the old Jesuit mission at Sillery.
"It won't do not to see that, Kitty," said Mrs. Ellison, who, as usual,
had arranged the details of the excursion, and now announced them. "It's
one of the principal things here, and your Uncle Jack would never be
satisfied if you missed it. In fact, it's a shame to have left it so
long. I can't go with you, for I'm saving up my strength for our picnic
at Château-Bigot to-morrow; and I want you, Kitty, to see that the
colonel sees everything. I've had trouble enough, goodness knows,
getting the facts together for him." This was as Kitty and Mr. Arbuton
sat waiting in Mrs. Ellison's parlor for the delinquent colonel, who had
just stepped round to the Hôtel St. Louis and was to be back presently.
But the moment of his return passed; a quarter-hour of grace; a
half-hour of grim magnanimity,--and still no colonel. Mrs. Ellison began
by saying that it was perfectly abominable, and left herself, in a
greater extremity, with nothing more forcible to add than that it was
too provoking. "It's getting so late now," she said at last, "that it's
no use waiting any longer, if you mean to go at all, to-day; and to-day's
the only day you _can_ go. There, you'd better drive on without him. I
can't bear to have you miss it." And, thus adjured, the younger people
rose and went.
When the high-born Noël Brulart de Sillery, Knight of Malta and courtier
of Marie de Medicis, turned from the vanities of this world and became a
priest, Canada was the fashionable mission of the day, and the noble
neophyte signalized his self-renunciation by giving of his great wealth
for the conversion of the Indian heathen. He supplied the Jesuits with
money to maintain a religious establishment near Quebec; and the
settlement of red Christians took his musical name, which the region
still keeps. It became famous at once as the first residence of the
Jesuits and the nuns of the Hôtel Dieu, who wrought and suffered for
religion there amidst the terrors of pestilence, Iroquois, and winter.
It was the scene of miracles and martyrdoms, and marvels of many kinds,
and the centre of the missionary efforts among the Indians. Indeed, few
events of the picturesque early history of Quebec left it untouched; and
it is worthy to be seen, no less for the wild beauty of the spot than
for its heroical memories. About a league from the city, where the
irregular wall of rock on which Quebec is built recedes from the river,
and a grassy space stretches between the tide and the foot of the woody
steep, the old mission and the Indian village once stood; and to this
day there yet stands the stalwart frame of the first Jesuit Residence,
modernized, of course, and turned to secular uses, but firm as of old,
and good for a century to come. All round is a world of lumber, and
rafts of vast extent cover the face of the waters in the ample
cove,--one of many that indent the shore of the St. Lawrence. A careless
village straggles along the roadside and the river's margin; huge
lumber-ships are loading for Europe in the stream; a town shines out of
the woods on the opposite shore; nothing but a friendly climate is
needed to make this one of the most charming scenes the heart could
imagine.
Kitty and Mr. Arbuton drove out towards Sillery by the St. Louis Road,
and already the jealous foliage that hides the pretty villas and stately
places of that aristocratic suburb was tinged in here and there a bough
with autumnal crimson or yellow; in the meadows here and there a vine
ran red along the grass; the loath choke-cherries were ripening in the
fence corners; the air was full of the pensive jargoning of the crickets
and grasshoppers, and all the subtle sentiment of the fading summer.
Their hearts were open to every dreamy influence of the time; their
driver understood hardly any English, and their talk might safely be
made up of those harmless egotisms which young people exchange,--those
strains of psychological autobiography which mark advancing intimacy and
in which they appear to each other the most uncommon persons that ever
lived, and their experiences and emotions and ideas are the more
surprisingly unique because exactly alike.
It seemed a very short league to Sillery when they left the St. Louis
Road, and the driver turned his horses' heads towards the river, down
the winding sylvan way that descended to the shore; and they had not so
much desire, after all, to explore the site of the old mission.
Nevertheless, they got out and visited the little space once occupied by
the Jesuit chapel, where its foundations may yet be traced in the grass,
and they read the inscription on the monument lately raised by the
parish to the memory of the first Jesuit missionary to Canada, who died
at Sillery. Then there seemed nothing more to do but admire the mighty
rafts and piles of lumber; but their show of interest in the local
celebrity had stirred the pride of Sillery, and a little French boy
entered the chapel-yard, and gave Kitty a pamphlet history of the place,
for which he would not suffer himself to be paid; and a sweet-faced
young Englishwoman came out of the house across the way, and
hesitatingly asked if they would not like to see the Jesuit Residence.
She led them indoors, and showed them how the ancient edifice had been
encased by the modern house, and bade them note, from the deep shelving
window-seats, that the stone walls were three feet thick. The rooms were
low-ceiled and quaintly shaped, but they borrowed a certain grandeur
from this massiveness; and it was easy to figure the priests in black
and the nuns in gray in those dim chambers, which now a life so
different inhabited. Behind the house was a plot of grass, and thence
the wooded hill rose steep.
"But come up stairs," said the ardent little hostess to Kitty, when her
husband came in, and had civilly welcomed the strangers, "and I'll show
you my own room, that's as old as any."
They left the two men below, and mounted to a large room carpeted and
furnished in modern taste. "We had to take down the old staircase," she
continued, "to get our bedstead up,"--a magnificent structure which she
plainly thought well worth the sacrifice; and then she pointed out
divers remnants of the ancient building. "It's a queer place to live in;
but we're only here for the summer"; and she went on to explain, with a
pretty _naïveté_, how her husband's business brought him to Sillery from
Quebec in that season. They were descending the stairs, Kitty foremost,
as she added, "This is my first housekeeping, you know, and of course it
would be strange anywhere; but you can't think how funny it is here. I
suppose," she said, shyly, but as if her confidences merited some
return, while Kitty stepped from the stairway face to face with Mr.
Arbuton, who was about to follow them, with the lady's husband,--"I
suppose this is your wedding-journey."
A quick alarm flamed through the young girl, and burned out of her
glowing cheeks. This pleasant masquerade of hers must look to others
like the most intentional love-making between her and Mr. Arbuton,--no
dreams either of them, nor figures in a play, nor characters in a
romance; nay, on one spectator, at least, it had shed the soft lustre of
a honeymoon. How could it be otherwise? Here on this fatal line of
wedding-travel,--so common that she remembered Mrs. March half
apologized for making it her first tour after marriage,--how could it
happen but that two young people together as they were should be taken
for bride and bridegroom? Moreover, and worst of all, he must have heard
that fatal speech!
He was pale, if she was flushed, and looked grave, as she fancied; but
he passed on up the stairs, and she sat down to wait for his return.
"I used to notice so many couples from the States when we lived in the
city," continued the hospitable mistress of the house, "but I don't
think they often came out to Sillery. In fact, you're the only pair
that's come this summer; and so, when you seemed interested about the
mission, I thought you wouldn't mind if I spoke to you, and asked you in
to see the house. Most of the Americans stay long enough to visit the
citadel, and the Plains of Abraham, and the Falls at Montmorenci, and
then they go away. I should think they'd be tired always doing the same
things. To be sure, they're always different people."