way; and Kitty said how glad she was to see the old Residence, and that
she should always be grateful to her for asking them in. She did not
disabuse her of her error; it cost less to leave it alone; and when Mr.
Arbuton reappeared, she took leave of those kind people with a sort of
remote enjoyment of the wife's mistakenness concerning herself. Yet, as
the young matron and her husband stood beside the carriage repeating
their adieux, she would fain have prolonged the parting forever, so much
she dreaded to be left alone with Mr. Arbuton. But, left alone with him,
her spirits violently rose; and as they drove along under the shadow of
the cliff, she descanted in her liveliest strain upon the various
interests of the way; she dwelt on the beauty of the wide, still river,
with the ships at anchor in it; she praised the lovely sunset-light on
the other shore; she commented lightly on the village, through which
they passed, with the open doors and the suppers frying on the great
stoves set into the partition-walls of each cleanly home; she made him
look at the two great stairways that climb the cliff from the
lumber-yards to the Plains of Abraham, and the army of laborers, each
with his empty dinner-pail in hand, scaling the once difficult heights
on their way home to the suburb of St. Roch; she did whatever she could
to keep the talk to herself and yet away from herself. Part of the way
the village was French and neat and pleasant, then it grovelled with
Irish people, and ceased to be a tolerable theme for discourse; and so
at last the silence against which she had battled fell upon them and
deepened like a spell that she could not break.
It would have been better for Mr. Arbuton's success just then if he had
not broken it. But failure was not within his reckoning; for he had so
long regarded this young girl _de haut en bas_, to say it brutally, that
he could not imagine she should feel any doubt in accepting him.
Moreover, a magnanimous sense of obligation mingled with his confident
love, for she must have known that he had overheard that speech at the
Residence. Perhaps he let this feeling color his manner, however
faintly. He lacked the last fine instinct; he could not forbear; and he
spoke while all her nerves and fluttering pulses cried him mercy.
XI.
KITTY ANSWERS.
It was dimmest twilight when Kitty entered Mrs. Ellison's room and sank
down on the first chair in silence.
"The colonel met a friend at the St. Louis, and forgot about the
expedition, Kitty," said Fanny, "and he only came in half an hour ago.
But it's just as well; I know you've had a splendid time. Where's Mr.
Arbuton?"
Kitty burst into tears.
"Why, has anything happened to him?" cried Mrs. Ellison, springing
towards her.
"To him? No! What should happen to _him_?" Kitty demanded with an
indignant accent.
"Well, then, has anything happened to _you_?"
"I don't know if you can call it _happening_. But I suppose you'll be
satisfied now, Fanny. He's offered himself to me." Kitty uttered the
last words with a sort of violence, as if since the fact must be stated,
she wished it to appear in the sharpest relief.
"O dear!" said Mrs. Ellison, not so well satisfied as the successful
match-maker ought to be. So long as it was a marriage in the abstract,
she had never ceased to desire it; but as the actual union of Kitty and
this Mr. Arbuton, of whom, really, they knew so little, and of whom, if
she searched her heart, she had as little liking as knowledge, it was
another affair. Mrs. Ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think
that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least
suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life
to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose
modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able
to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she
did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. "Did you accept him?" she whispered,
feebly.
"Accept him?" repeated Kitty. "No!"
"O dear!" again sighed Mrs. Ellison, feeling that this was scarcely
better, and not daring to ask further.
"I'm dreadfully perplexed, Fanny," said Kitty, after waiting for the
questions which did not come, "and I wish you'd help me think."
"I will, darling. But I don't know that I'll be of much use. I begin to
think I'm not very good at thinking."
Kitty, who longed chiefly to get the situation more distinctly before
herself, gave no heed to this confession, but went on to rehearse the
whole affair. The twilight lent her its veil; and in the kindly
obscurity she gathered courage to face all the facts, and even to find
what was droll in them.
"It was very solemn, of course, and I was frightened; but I tried to
keep my wits about me, and _not_ to say yes, simply because that was the
easiest thing. I told him that I didn't know,--and I don't; and that I
must have time to think,--and I must. He was very ungenerous, and said
he had hoped I had already had time to think; and he couldn't seem to
understand, or else I couldn't very well explain, how it had been with
me all along."
"He might certainly say you had encouraged him," Mrs. Ellison remarked,
thoughtfully.
"Encouraged him, Fanny? How can you accuse me of such indelicacy?"
"Encouraging isn't indelicacy. The gentlemen _have_ to be encouraged, or
of course they'd never have any courage. They're so timid, naturally."
"I don't think Mr. Arbuton is very timid. He seemed to think that he had
only to ask as a matter of form, and I had no business to say anything.
What has he ever done for me? And hasn't he often been intensely
disagreeable? He oughtn't to have spoken just after overhearing what he
did. It was horrid to do so. He was very obtuse, too, not to see that
girls can't always be so certain of themselves as men, or, if they are,
don't know they are as soon as they're asked."
"Yes," interrupted Mrs. Ellison, "that's the way with girls. I do
believe that most of them--when they're young like you, Kitty--never
think of marriage as the end of their flirtations. They'd just like the
attentions and the romance to go on forever, and never turn into
anything more serious; and they're not to blame for that, though they
_do_ get blamed for it."
"Certainly," assented Kitty, eagerly, "that's it; that's just what I was
saying; that's the very reason why girls must have time to make up their
minds. _You_ had, I suppose."
"Yes, two minutes. Poor Dick was going back to his regiment, and stood
with his watch in his hand. I said no, and called after him to correct
myself. But, Kitty, if the romance had happened to stop without his
saying anything, you wouldn't have liked that either, would you?"
"No," faltered Kitty, "I suppose not."
"Well, then, don't you see? That's a great point in his favor. How much
time did you want, or did he give you?"
"I said I should answer before we left Quebec," answered Kitty, with a
heavy sigh.
"Don't you know what to say now?"
"I can't tell. That's what I want you to help me think out."
Mrs. Ellison was silent for a moment before she said, "Well, then, I
suppose we shall have to go back to the very beginning."
"Yes," assented Kitty, faintly.
"You did have a sort of fancy for him the first time you saw him, didn't
you?" asked Mrs. Ellison, coaxingly, while forcing herself to be
systematic and coherent, by a mental strain of which no idea can be
given.
"Yes," said Kitty, yet more faintly, adding, "but I can't tell just what
sort of a fancy it was. I suppose I admired him for being handsome and
stylish, and for having such exquisite manners."
"Go on," said Mrs. Ellison. "And after you got acquainted with him?"
"Why, you know we've talked that over once already, Fanny."
"Yes, but we oughtn't to skip anything now," replied Mrs. Ellison, in a
tone of judicial accuracy which made Kitty smile.
But she quickly became serious again, and said, "Afterwards I couldn't
tell whether to like him or not, or whether he wanted me to. I think he
acted very strangely for a person in--love. I used to feel so troubled
and oppressed when I was with him. He seemed always to be making himself
agreeable under protest."
"Perhaps that was just your imagination, Kitty."
"Perhaps it was; but it troubled me just the same."
"Well, and then?"
"Well, and then after that day of the Montgomery expedition, he seemed
to change altogether, and to try always to be pleasant, and to do
everything he could to make me like him. I don't know how to account for
it. Ever since then he's been extremely careful of me, and behaved--of
course without knowing it--as if I belonged to him already. Or maybe
I've imagined that too. It's very hard to tell what has really happened
the last two weeks."
Kitty was silent, and Mrs. Ellison did not speak at once. Presently she
asked, "Was his acting as if you belonged to him disagreeable?"
"I can't tell. I think it was rather presuming. I don't know why he did
it."
"Do you respect him?" demanded Mrs. Ellison.
"Why, Fanny, I've always told you that I did respect some things in
him."
Mrs. Ellison had the facts before her, and it rested upon her to sum
them up, and do something with them. She rose to a sitting posture, and
confronted her task.
"Well, Kitty, I'll tell you: I don't really know what to think. But I
can say this: if you liked him at first, and then didn't like him, and
afterwards he made himself more agreeable, and you didn't mind his
behaving as if you belonged to him, and you respected him, but after all
didn't think him fascinating--"
"He _is_ fascinating--in a kind of way. He was, from the beginning. In a
story his cold, snubbing, putting-down ways would have been perfectly
fascinating."
"Then why didn't you take him?"
"Because," answered Kitty, between laughing and crying, "it isn't a
story, and I don't know whether I like him."
"But do you think you might get to like him?"
"I don't know. His asking brings back all the doubts I ever had of him,
and that I've been forgetting the past two weeks. I can't tell whether I
like him or not. If I did, shouldn't I trust him more?"
"Well, whether you are in love or not, I'll tell you what you _are_,
Kitty," cried Mrs. Ellison, provoked with her indecision, and yet
relieved that the worst, whatever it was, was postponed thereby for a
day or two.
"What!"
"You're--"
But at this important juncture the colonel came lounging in, and Kitty
glided out of the room.
"Richard," said Mrs. Ellison, seriously, and in a tone implying that it
was the colonel's fault, as usual, "you know what has happened, I
suppose."
"No, my dear, I don't; but no matter: I will presently, I dare say."
"O, I wish for once you wouldn't be so flippant. Mr. Arbuton has offered
himself to Kitty."
Colonel Ellison gave a quick, sharp whistle of amazement, but trusted
himself to nothing more articulate.
"Yes," said his wife, responding to the whistle, "and it makes me
perfectly wretched."
"Why, I thought you liked him."
"I didn't _like_ him; but I thought it would be an excellent thing for
Kitty."
"And won't it?"
"She doesn't know."
"Doesn't know?"
"No."
The colonel was silent, while Mrs. Ellison stated the case in full, and
its pending uncertainty. Then he exclaimed vehemently, as if his
amazement had been growing upon him, "This is the most astonishing thing
in the world! Who would ever have dreamt of that young iceberg being in
love?"
"Haven't I _told_ you all along he was?"
"O yes, certainly; but that might be taken either way, you know. You
would discover the tender passion in the eye of a potato."
"Colonel Ellison," said Fanny with sternness, "why do you suppose he's
been hanging about us for the last four weeks? Why should he have stayed
in Quebec? Do you think he pitied _me_, or found _you_ so very
agreeable?"
"Well, I thought he found us just tolerable, and was interested in the
place."
Mrs. Ellison made no direct reply to this pitiable speech, but looked a
scorn which, happily for the colonel, the darkness hid. Presently she
said that bats did not express the blindness of men, for any bat could
have seen what was going on.
"Why," remarked the colonel, "I did have a momentary suspicion that day
of the Montgomery business; they both looked very confused, when I saw
them at the end of that street, and neither of them had anything to say;
but that was accounted for by what you told me afterwards about his
adventure. At the time I didn't pay much attention to the matter. The
idea of his being in love seemed too ridiculous."
"Was it ridiculous for you to be in love with me?"
"No; and yet I can't praise my condition for its wisdom, Fanny."
"Yes! that's _like_ men. As soon as one of them is safely married, he
thinks all the love-making in the world has been done forever, and he
can't conceive of two young people taking a fancy to each other."
"That's something so, Fanny. But granting--for the sake of argument
merely--that Boston has been asking Kitty to marry him, and she doesn't
know whether she wants him, what are we to do about it? _I_ don't like
him well enough to plead his cause; do you? When does Kitty think she'll
be able to make up her mind?"
"She's to let him know before we leave."
The colonel laughed. "And so he's to hang about here on uncertainties
for two whole days! That _is_ rather rough on him. Fanny, what made you
so eager for this business?"
"Eager? I _wasn't_ eager."
"Well, then,--reluctantly acquiescent?"
"Why, she's so literary and that."
"And what?"
"How insulting!--Intellectual, and so on; and I thought she would be
just fit to live in a place where everybody is literary and
intellectual. That is, I thought that, if I thought anything."
"Well," said the colonel, "you may have been right on the whole, but I
don't think Kitty is showing any particular force of mind, just now,
that would fit her to live in Boston. My opinion is, that it's
ridiculous for her to keep him in suspense. She might as well answer him
first as last. She's putting herself under a kind of obligation by her
delay. I'll talk to her--"
"If you do, you'll kill her. You don't know how she's wrought up about
it."
"O well, I'll be careful of her sensibilities. It's my duty to speak
with her. I'm here in the place of a parent. Besides, don't I know
Kitty? I've almost brought her up."
"Maybe you're right. You're all so queer that perhaps you're right.
Only, do be careful, Richard. You must approach the matter very
delicately,--indirectly, you know. Girls are different, remember, from
young men, and you mustn't be blunt. Do maneuver a little, for once in
your life."
"All right, Fanny; you needn't be afraid of my doing anything awkward or
sudden. I'll go to her room pretty soon, after she is quieted down, and
have a good, calm old fatherly conversation with her."
The colonel was spared this errand; for Kitty had left some of her
things on Fanny's table, and now came back for them with a lamp in her
hand. Her averted face showed the marks of weeping; the corners of her
firm-set lips were downward bent, as if some resolution which she had
taken were very painful. This the anxious Fanny saw; and she made a
gesture to the colonel which any woman would have understood to enjoin
silence, or, at least, the utmost caution and tenderness of speech. The
colonel summoned his _finesse_ and said, cheerily, "Well, Kitty, what's
Boston been saying to you?"
Mrs. Ellison fell back upon her sofa as if shot, and placed her hand
over her face.
Kitty seemed not to hear her cousin. Having gathered up her things, she
bent an unmoved face and an unseeing gaze full upon him, and glided from
the room without a word.
"Well, upon my soul," cried the colonel, "this is a pleasant,
nightmarish, sleep-walking, Lady-Macbethish little transaction. Confound
it, Fanny this comes of your wanting me to maneuver. If you'd let me
come straight _at_ the subject,--like a _man_--"
"_Please_, Richard, don't say anything more now," pleaded Mrs. Ellison
in a broken voice. "You can't help it, I know; and I must do the best I
can, under the circumstances. Do go away for a little while, darling! O
dear!"
As for Kitty, when she had got out of the room in that phantasmal
fashion, she dimly recalled, through the mists of her own trouble, the
colonel's dismay at her so glooming upon him, and began to think that
she had used poor Dick more tragically than she need, and so began to
laugh softly to herself; but while she stood there at the entry window a
moment, laughing in the moonlight, that made her lamp-flame thin, and
painted her face with its pale lustre, Mr. Arbuton came down the attic
stairway. He was not a man of quick fancies; but to one of even slower
imagination and of calmer mood, she might very well have seemed unreal,
the creature of a dream, fantastic, intangible, insensible, arch, not
wholly without some touch of the malign. In his heart he groaned over
her beauty as if she were lost to him forever in this elfish
transfiguration.
"Miss Ellison!" he scarcely more than whispered.
"You ought not to speak to me now," she answered, gravely.
"I know it; but I could not help it. For heaven's sake, do not let it
tell against me. I wished to ask if I should not see you to-morrow; to
beg that all might go on as had been planned, and as if nothing had been
said to-day."
"It'll be very strange," said Kitty. "My cousins know everything now.
How can we meet before them!"
"I'm not going away without an answer, and we can't remain here without
meeting. It will be less strange if we let everything take its course."
"Well."
"Thanks."
He looked strangely humbled, but even more bewildered than humbled.
She listened while he descended the steps, unbolted the street door, and
closed it behind him. Then she passed out of the moonlight into her own
room, whose close-curtained space the lamp filled with its ruddy glow,
and revealed her again, no malicious sprite, but a very puzzled,
conscientious, anxious young girl.
Of one thing, at least, she was clear. It had all come about through
misunderstanding, through his taking her to be something that she was
not; for she was certain that Mr. Arbuton was of too worldly a spirit to
choose, if he had known, a girl of such origin and lot as she was only
too proud to own. The deception must have begun with dress; and she
determined that her first stroke for truth and sincerity should be most
sublimely made in the return of Fanny's things, and a rigid fidelity to
her own dresses. "Besides," she could not help reflecting, "my
travelling-suit will be just the thing for a picnic." And here, if the
cynical reader of another sex is disposed to sneer at the method of her
self-devotion, I am sure that women, at least, will allow it was most
natural and highly proper that in this great moment she should first
think of dress, upon which so great consequences hang in matters of the
heart Who--to be honest for once, O vain and conceited men!--can deny
that the cut, the color, the texture, the stylish set of dresses, has
not had everything to do with the rapture of love's young dream? Are not
certain bits of lace and knots of ribbon as much a part of it as any
smile or sidelong glance of them all? And hath not the long experience
of the fair taught them that artful dress is half the virtue of their
spells? Full well they know it; and when Kitty resolved to profit no
longer by Fanny's wardrobe, she had won the hardest part of the battle
in behalf of perfect truth towards Mr. Arbuton. She did not, indeed,
stop with this, but lay awake, devising schemes by which she should
disabuse him of his errors about her, and persuade him that she was no
wife for him.
XII.
THE PICNIC AT CHATEAU-BIGOT.
"Well," said Mrs. Ellison, who had slipped into Kitty's room, in the
morning, to do her back hair with some advantages of light which her own
chamber lacked, "it'll be no crazier than the rest of the performance;
and if you and he can stand it, I'm sure that _we_'ve no reason to
complain."
"Why, I don't see how it's to be helped, Fanny. He's asked it; and I'm
rather glad he has, for I should have hated to have the conventional
headache that keeps young ladies from being seen; and at any rate I
don't understand how the day could be passed more sensibly than just as
we originally planned to spend it. I can make up my mind a great deal
better with him than away from him. But I think there never was a more
ridiculous situation: now that the high tragedy has faded out of it, and
the serious part is coming, it makes me laugh. Poor Mr. Arbuton will
feel all day that he is under my mercilessly critical eye, and that he
mustn't do this and he mustn't say that, for fear of me; and he can't
run away, for he's promised to wait patiently for my decision. It's a
most inglorious position for him, but I don't think of anything to do
about it. I could say no at once, but he'd rather not."
"What have you got that dress on for?" asked Mrs. Ellison, abruptly.
"Because I'm not going to wear your things any more, Fanny. It's a case
of conscience. I feel like a guilty creature, being courted in another's
clothes; and I don't know but it's for a kind of punishment of my deceit
that I can't realize this affair as I ought, or my part in it. I keep
feeling, the whole time, as if it were somebody else, and I have an
absurd kind of other person's interest in it."
Mrs. Ellison essayed some reply, but was met by Kitty's steadfast
resolution, and in the end did not prevail in so much as a ribbon for
her hair.
It was not till well into the forenoon that the preparations for the
picnic were complete and the four set off together in one carriage. In
the strong need that was on each of them to make the best of the affair,
the colonel's unconsciousness might have been a little overdone, but
Mrs. Ellison's demeanor was sublimely successful. The situation gave
full play to her peculiar genius, and you could not have said that any
act of hers failed to contribute to the perfection of her design, that
any tone or speech was too highly colored. Mr. Arbuton, of whom she took
possession, and who knew that she knew all, felt that he had never done
justice to her, and seconded her efforts with something like cordial
admiration; while Kitty, with certain grateful looks and aversions of
the face, paid an ardent homage to her strokes of tact, and after a few
miserable moments, in which her nightlong trouble gnawed at her heart,
began, in spite of herself, to enjoy the humor of the situation.
It is a lovely road out to Château-Bigot. First you drive through the
ancient suburbs of the Lower Town, and then you mount the smooth, hard
highway, between pretty country-houses, toward the village of
Charlesbourg, while Quebec shows, to your casual backward-glance, like a
wondrous painted scene, with the spires and lofty roofs of the Upper
Town, and the long, irregular wall wandering on the verge of the cliff;
then the thronging gables and chimneys of St. Roch, and again many
spires and convent walls; lastly the shipping in the St. Charles, which,
in one direction, runs, a narrowing gleam, up into its valley, and in
the other widens into the broad light of the St. Lawrence. Quiet, elmy
spaces of meadow land stretch between the suburban mansions and the
village of Charlesbourg, where the driver reassured himself as to his
route from the group of idlers on the platform before the church. Then
he struck off on a country road, and presently turned from this again
into a lane that grew rougher and rougher, till at last it lapsed to a
mere cart-track among the woods, where the rich, strong odors of the
pine, and of the wild herbs bruised under the wheels, filled the air. A
peasant and his black-eyed, open-mouthed boy were cutting withes to bind
hay at the side of the track, and the latter consented to show the
strangers to the château from a point beyond which they could not go
with the carriage. There the small habitant and the driver took up the
picnic-baskets, and led the way through pathless growths of underbrush
to a stream, so swift that it is said never to freeze, so deeply sprung
that the summer never drinks it dry. A screen of water-growths bordered
it; and when this was passed, a wide open space revealed itself, with
the ruin of the château in the midst.
The pathos of long neglect lay upon the scene; for here were evidences
of gardens and bowery aisles in other times, and now, for many a year,
desolation and the slow return of the wilderness. The mountain rising
behind the château grounds showed the dying flush of the deciduous
leaves among the dark green of the pines that clothed it to the crest; a
cry of innumerable crickets filled the ear of the dreaming noon.