of the popular fancy rather than through any right of its own; for it
was, in truth, never more than the hunting-lodge of the king's
Intendant, Bigot, a man whose sins claim for him a lordly consideration
in the history of Quebec, He was the last Intendant before the British
conquest, and in that time of general distress he grew rich by
oppression of the citizens, and by peculation from the soldiers. He
built this pleasure-house here in the woods, and hither he rode out from
Quebec to enjoy himself in the chase and the carouses that succeed the
chase. Here, too, it is said, dwelt in secret the Huron girl who loved
him, and who survives in the memory of the peasants as the murdered
_sauragesse_; and, indeed, there is as much proof that she was murdered
as that she ever lived. When the wicked Bigot was arrested and sent to
France, where he was tried with great result of documentary record, his
château fell into other hands; at last a party of Arnold's men wintered
there in 1775, and it is to our own countrymen that we owe the
conflagration and the ruin of Château-Bigot. It stands, as I said, in
the middle of that open place, with the two gable walls and the stone
partition-wall still almost entire, and that day showing very
effectively against the tender northern sky. On the most weatherward
gable the iron in the stone had shed a dark red stain under the lash of
many winter storms, and some tough lichens had incrusted patches of the
surface; but, for the rest, the walls rose in the univied nakedness of
all ruins in our climate, which has no clinging evergreens wherewith to
pity and soften the forlornness of decay. Out of the rubbish at the foot
of the walls there sprang a wilding growth of syringas and lilacs; and
the interior was choked with flourishing weeds, and with the briers of
the raspberry, on which a few berries hung. The heavy beams, left where
they fell a hundred years ago, proclaimed the honest solidity with which
the château had been built, and there was proof in the cut stone of the
hearths and chimney-places that it had once had at least the ambition of
luxury.
While its visitors stood amidst the ruin, a harmless garden-snake
slipped out of one crevice into another; from her nest in some hidden
corner overhead a silent bird flew away. For the moment,--so slight is
the capacity of any mood, so deeply is the heart responsive to a little
impulse,--the palace of the Cæsars could not have imparted a keener
sense of loss and desolation. They eagerly sought such particulars of
the ruin as agreed with the descriptions they had read of it, and were
as well contented with a bit of cellar-way outside as if they had really
found the secret passage to the subterranean chamber of the château, or
the hoard of silver which the little habitant said was buried under it.
Then they dispersed about the grounds to trace out the borders of the
garden, and Mr. Arbuton won the common praise by discovering the
foundations of the stable of the château.
Then there was no more to do but to prepare for the picnic. They chose a
grassy plot in the shadow of a half-dismantled bark-lodge,--a relic of
the Indians, who resort to the place every summer. In the ashes of that
sylvan hearth they kindled their fire, Mr. Arbuton gathering the sticks,
and the colonel showing a peculiar genius in adapting the savage flames
to the limitations of the civilized coffee-pot borrowed of Mrs. Gray.
Mrs. Ellison laid the cloth, much meditating the arrangement of the
viands, and reversing again and again the relative positions of the
sliced tongue and the sardines that flanked the cold roast chicken, and
doubting dreadfully whether to put down the cake and the canned peaches
at once, or reserve them for a second course; the stuffed olives drove
her to despair, being in a bottle, and refusing to be balanced by
anything less monumental in shape. Some wild asters and red leaves and
green and yellowing sprays of fern which Kitty arranged in a tumbler
were hailed with rapture, but presently flung far away with fierce
disdain because they had ants on them. Kitty witnessed this outburst
with her usual complacency, and then went on making the coffee. With
such blissful pain as none but lovers know, Mr. Arbuton saw her break
the egg upon the edge of the coffee-pot, and let it drop therein, and
then, with a charming frenzy, stir it round and round. It was a picture
of domestic suggestion, a subtle insinuation of home, the unconscious
appeal of inherent housewifery to inherent husbandhood. At the crash of
the eggshell he trembled; the swift agitation of the coffee and the egg
within the pot made him dizzy.
"Sha'n't I stir that for you, Miss Ellison?" he said, awkwardly.
"O dear, no!" she answered in surprise at a man's presuming to stir
coffee; "but you may go get me some water at the creek, if you please."
She gave him a pitcher, and he went off to the brook, which was but a
minute's distance away. This minute, however, left her alone, for the
first time that day, with both Dick and Fanny, and a silence fell upon
all three at once. They could not help looking at one another; and then
the colonel, to show that he was not thinking of anything, began to
whistle, and Mrs. Ellison rebuked him for whistling.
"Why not?" he asked. "It isn't a funeral, is it?"
"Of course it isn't," said Mrs. Ellison; and Kitty, who had been
blushing to the verge of tears, laughed instead, and then was consumed
with vexation when Mr. Arbuton came up, feeling that he must suspect
himself the motive of her ill-timed mirth. "The champagne ought to be
cooled, I suppose," observed Mrs. Ellison, when the coffee had been
finally stirred and set to boil on the coals.
"I'm best acquainted with the brook," said Mr. Arbuton, "and I know just
the eddy in it where the champagne will cool soonest."
"Then you shall take it there," answered the governess of the feast; and
Mr. Arbuton duteously set off with the bottle in his hand.
The pitcher of water which he had already brought stood in the grass; by
a sudden movement of the skirt, Kitty knocked it over. The colonel made
a start forward; Mrs. Ellison arrested him with a touch, while she bent
a look of ineffable admiration upon Kitty.
"Now, I'll teach myself," said Kitty, "that I can't be so clumsy with
impunity. I'll go and fill that pitcher again myself." She hurried after
Mr. Arbuton; they scarcely spoke going or coming; but the constraint
that Kitty felt was nothing to that she had dreaded in seeking to escape
from the tacit raillery of the colonel and the championship of Fanny.
Yet she trembled to realize that already her life had become so far
entangled with this stranger's, that she found refuge with him from her
own kindred. They could do nothing to help her in this; the trouble was
solely hers and his, and they two must get out of it one way or other
themselves; the case scarcely admitted even of sympathy, and if it had
not been hers, it would have been one to amuse her rather than appeal to
her compassion. Even as it was, she sometimes caught herself smiling at
the predicament of a young girl who had passed a month in every
appearance of love-making, and who, being asked her heart, was holding
her lover in suspense whilst she searched it, and meantime was
picnicking with him upon the terms of casual flirtation. Of all the
heroines in her books, she knew none in such a strait as this.
But her perplexities did not impair the appetite which she brought to
the sylvan feast. In her whole simple life she had never tasted
champagne before, and she said innocently, as she put the frisking fluid
from her lips after the first taste, "Why, I thought you had to _learn_
to like champagne."
"No," remarked the colonel, "it's like reading and writing: it comes by
nature. I suppose that even one of the lower animals would like
champagne. The refined instinct of young ladies makes them recognize its
merits instantly. Some of the Confederate cellars," added the colonel,
thoughtfully, "had very good champagne in them. Green seal was the
favorite of our erring brethren. It wasn't one of their errors. I prefer
it myself to our own native cider, whether made of apples or grapes.
Yes, it's better even than the water from the old chain-pump in the back
yard at Eriecreek, though it hasn't so fine a flavor of lubricating oil
in it."
The faint chill that touched Mr. Arbuton at the mention of Eriecreek and
its petrolic associations was transient. He was very light of heart,
since the advance that Kitty seemed to have made him; and in his
temporary abandon he talked well, and promoted the pleasure of the time
without critical reserves. When the colonel, with the reluctance of our
soldiers to speak of their warlike experiences before civilians, had
suffered himself to tell a story that his wife begged of him about his
last battle, Mr. Arbuton listened with a deference that flattered poor
Mrs. Ellison, and made her marvel at Kitty's doubt concerning him; and
then he spoke entertainingly of some travel experiences of his own,
which he politely excused as quite unworthy to come after the colonel's
story. He excused them a little too much, and just gave the modest
soldier a faint, uneasy fear of having boasted. But no one else felt
this result of his delicacy, and the feast was merry enough. When it was
ended, Mrs. Ellison, being still a little infirm of foot, remained in
the shadow of the bark-lodge, and the colonel lit his cigar, and loyally
stretched himself upon the grass before her.
There was nothing else for Kitty and Mr. Arbuton but to stroll off
together, and she preferred to do this.
They sauntered up to the château in silence, and peered somewhat
languidly about the ruin. On a bit of smooth surface in a sheltered
place many names of former visitors were written, and Mr. Arbuton said
he supposed they might as well add those of their own party.
"O yes," answered Kitty, with a half-sigh, seating herself upon a fallen
stone, and letting her hands fall into each other in her lap as her wont
was, "you write them." A curious pensiveness passed from one to the
other and possessed them both.
Mr. Arbuton began to write. Suddenly, "Miss Ellison," said he, with a
smile, "I've blundered in your name; I neglected to put the Miss before
it; and now there isn't room on the plastering."
"O, never mind," replied Kitty, "I dare say it won't be missed!"
Mr. Arbuton neither perceived nor heeded the pun. He was looking in a
sort of rapture at the name which his own hand had written now for the
first time, and he felt an indecorous desire to kiss it.
"If I could speak it as I've written it--"
"I don't see what harm there would be in that," said the owner of the
name, "or what object," she added more discreetly.
--"I should feel that I had made a great gain."
"I never told you," answered Kitty, evasively, "how much I admire _your_
first name, Mr. Arbuton."
"How did you know it?"
"It was on the card you gave my cousin," said Kitty, frankly, but
thinking he now must know she had been keeping his card.
"It's an old family name,--a sort of heirloom from the first of us who
came to the country; and in every generation since, some Arbuton has had
to wear it."
"It's superb!" cried Kitty. "Miles! 'Miles Standish, the Puritan
captain,' 'Miles Standish, the Captain of Plymouth.' I should be very
proud of such a name."
"You have only to take it," he said, gravely.
"O, I didn't mean that," she said with a blush, and then added, "Yours
is a very old family, then, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's pretty well," answered Mr. Arbuton, "but it's not such a rare
thing in the East, you know."
"I suppose not. The Ellisons are _not_ an old family. If we went back of
my uncle, we should only come to backwoodsmen and Indian fighters.
Perhaps that's the reason we don't care much for old families. You think
a great deal of them in Boston, don't you?"
"We do, and we don't. It's a long story, and I'm afraid I couldn't make
you understand, unless you had seen something of Boston society."
"Mr. Arbuton," said Kitty, abruptly plunging to the bottom of the
subject on which they had been hovering, "I'm dreadfully afraid that
what you said to me--what you asked of me, yesterday--was all through a
misunderstanding. I'm afraid that you've somehow mistaken me and my
circumstances, and that somehow I've innocently helped on your mistake."
"There is no mistake," he answered, eagerly, "about my loving you!"
Kitty did not look up, nor answer this outburst, which flattered while
it pained her. She said, "I've been so much mistaken myself, and I've
been so long finding it out, that I should feel anxious to have you know
just what kind of girl you'd asked to be your wife, before I--"
"What?"
"Nothing. But I should want you to know that in many things my life has
been very, very different from yours. The first thing I can
remember--you'll think I'm more autobiographical than our driver at
Ha-Ha Bay, even, but I must tell you all this--is about Kansas, where we
had moved from Illinois, and of our having hardly enough to eat or wear,
and of my mother grieving over our privations. At last, when my father
was killed," she said, dropping her voice, "in front of our own door--"
Mr. Arbuton gave a start. "Killed?"
"Yes; didn't you know? Or no: how could you? He was shot by the
Missourians."
Whether it was not hopelessly out of taste to have a father-in-law who
had been shot by the Missourians? Whether he could persuade Kitty to
suppress that part of her history? That she looked very pretty, sitting
there, with her earnest eyes lifted toward his. These things flashed
wilfully through Mr. Arbuton's mind.
"My father was a Free-State man," continued Kitty, in a tone of pride.
"He wasn't when he first went to Kansas," she added simply; while Mr.
Arbuton groped among his recollections of that forgotten struggle for
some association with these names, keenly feeling the squalor of it all,
and thinking still how very pretty she was. "He went out there to
publish a proslavery paper. But when he found out what the Border
Ruffians really were, he turned against them. He used to be very bitter
about my uncle's having become an Abolitionist; they had had a quarrel
about it; but father wrote to him from Kansas, and they made it up; and
before father died he was able to tell mother that we were to go to
uncle's. But mother was sick then, and she only lived a month after
father; and when my cousin came out to get us, just before she died,
there was scarcely a crust of cornbread in our cabin. It seemed like
heaven to get to Eriecreek; but even at Eriecreek we live in a way that
I am afraid you wouldn't respect. My uncle has just enough, and we are
very plain people indeed. I suppose," continued the young girl meekly,
"that I haven't had at all what you'd call an education. Uncle told me
what to read, at first, and after that I helped myself. It seemed to
come naturally; but don't you see that it wasn't an education?"
"I beg pardon," said Mr. Arbuton, with a blush; for he had just then
lost the sense of what she said in the music of her voice, as it
hesitated over these particulars of her history.
"I mean," explained Kitty, "that I'm afraid I must be very one-sided.
I'm dreadfully ignorant of a great many things. I haven't any
accomplishments, only the little bit of singing and playing that you've
heard; I couldn't tell a good picture from a bad one; I've never been to
the opera; I don't know anything about society. Now just imagine," cried
Kitty, with sublime impartiality, "such a girl as that in Boston!"
Even Mr. Arbuton could not help smiling at this comic earnestness, while
she resumed: "At home my cousins and I do all kinds of things that the
ladies whom you know have done for them. We do our own work, for one
thing," she continued, with a sudden treacherous misgiving that what she
was saying might be silly and not heroic, but bravely stifling her
doubt. "My cousin Virginia is housekeeper, and Rachel does the sewing,
and I'm a kind of maid-of-all-work."
Mr. Arbuton listened respectfully, vainly striving for some likeness of
Miss Ellison in the figure of the different second-girls who, during
life, had taken his card, or shown him into drawing-rooms, or waited on
him at table; failing in this, he tried her in the character of daughter
of that kind of farm-house where they take summer boarders and do their
own work; but evidently the Ellisons were not of that sort either; and
he gave it up and was silent, not knowing what to say, while Kitty, a
little piqued by his silence, went on: "We're not ashamed, you
understand, of our ways; there's such a thing as being proud of not
being proud; and that's what we are, or what I am; for the rest are not
mean enough ever to think about it, and once I wasn't, either. But
that's the kind of life I'm used to; and though I've read of other kinds
of life a great deal, I've not been brought up to anything different,
don't you understand? And maybe--I don't know--I mightn't like or
respect your kind of people any more than they did me. My uncle taught
us ideas that are quite different from yours; and what if I shouldn't be
able to give them up?"
"There is only one thing I know or see: I love you!" he said,
passionately, and drew nearer by a step; but she put out her hand and
repelled him with a gesture.
"Sometimes you might be ashamed of me before those you knew to be my
inferiors,--really common and coarse-minded people, but regularly
educated, and used to money and fashion. I should cower before them, and
I never could forgive you."
"I've one answer to all this: I love you!"
Kitty flushed in generous admiration of his magnanimity, and said, with
more of tenderness than she had yet felt towards him, "I'm sorry that I
can't answer you now, as you wish, Mr. Arbuton."
"But you will, to-morrow."
She shook her head. "I don't know; O, I don't know! I've been thinking
of something. That Mrs. March asked me to visit her in Boston; but we
had given up doing so, because of the long delay here. If I asked my
cousins, they'd still go home that way. It's too bad to put you off
again; but you must see me in Boston, if only for a day or two, and
after you've got back into your old associations there, before I answer
you. I'm in great trouble. You must wait, or I must say no."
"I'll wait," said Mr. Arbuton.
"O, _thank_ you," sighed Kitty, grateful for this patience, and not for
the chance of still winning him; "you are very forbearing, I'm sure."
She again put forth her hand, but not now to repel him. He clasped it,
and kept it in his, then impulsively pressed it against his lips.
Colonel and Mrs. Ellison had been watching the whole pantomime,
forgotten.
"Well," said the colonel, "I suppose that's the end of the play, isn't
it? I don't like it, Fanny; I don't like it."
"Hush!" whispered Mrs. Ellison.
They were both puzzled when Kitty and Mr. Arbuton came towards them with
anxious faces. Kitty was painfully revolving in her mind what she had
just said, and thinking she had said not so much as she meant and yet so
much more, and tormenting herself with the fear that she had been at
once too bold and too meek in her demand for longer delay. Did it not
give him further claim upon her? Must it not have seemed a very
audacious thing? What right had she to make it, and how could she now
finally say no? Then the matter of her explanation to him: was it in the
least what she meant to say? Must it not give him an idea of
intellectual and spiritual poverty in her life which she knew had not
been in it? Would he not believe, in spite of her boasts, that she was
humiliated before him by a feeling of essential inferiority? O, _had_
she boasted? What she meant to do was just to make him understand
clearly what she was; but, had she? Could he be made to understand this
with what seemed his narrow conception of things outside of his own
experience? Was it worth while to try? Did she care enough for him to
make the effort desirable? Had she made it for his sake, or in the
interest of truth, merely, or in self-defence?
These and a thousand other like questions beset her the whole way home
to Quebec, amid the frequent pauses of the talk, and underneath whatever
she was saying. Half the time she answered yes or no to them, and not to
what Dick, or Fanny, or Mr. Arbuton had asked her; she was distraught
with their recurrence, as they teased about her like angry bees, and one
now and then settled, and stung and stung. Through the whole night, too,
they pursued her in dreams with pitiless iteration and fantastic change;
and at dawn she was awakened by voices calling up to her from the
Ursulines' Garden,--the slim, pale nun crying out, in a lamentable
accent, that all men were false and there was no shelter save the
convent or the grave, and the comfortable sister bemoaning herself that
on meagre days Madame de la Peltrie ate nothing but choke-cherries from
Château-Bigot.
Kitty rose and dressed herself, and sat at the window, and watched the
morning come into the garden below: first, a tremulous flush of the
heavens; then a rosy light on the silvery roofs and gables; then little
golden aisles among the lilacs and hollyhocks. The tiny flower-beds just
under her window were left, with their snap-dragons and larkspurs, in
dew and shadow; the small dog stood on the threshold, and barked
uneasily when the bell rang in the Ursulines' Chapel, where the nuns
were at matins.
It was Sunday, and a soft tranquillity blest the cool air in which the
young girl bathed her troubled spirit. A faint anticipative homesickness
mingled now with her nightlong anxiety,--a pity for herself that on the
morrow she must leave those pretty sights, which had become so dear to
her that she could not but feel herself native among them. She must go
back to Eriecreek, which was not a walled city, and had not a stone
building, much less a cathedral or convent, within its borders; and
though she dearly loved those under her uncle's roof there, yet she had
to own that, beyond that shelter, there was little in Eriecreek to touch
the heart or take the fancy; that the village was ugly, and the village
people mortally dull, narrow, and uncongenial. Why was not her lot cast
somewhere else? Why should she not see more of the world that she had
found so fair, and which all her aspirations had fitted her to enjoy?
Quebec had been to her a rapture of beautiful antiquity; but Europe, but
London, Venice, Rome, those infinitely older and more storied cities of
which she had lately talked so much with Mr. Arbuton,--why should she
not see them?
Here, for the guilty space of a heat-lightning flash, Kitty wickedly
entertained the thought of marrying Mr. Arbuton for the sake of a bridal
trip to Europe, and bade love and the fitness of things and the
incompatibility of Boston and Eriecreek traditions take care of
themselves. But then she blushed for her meanness, and tried to atone
for it as she could by meditating the praise of Mr. Arbuton. She felt
remorse for having, as he had proved yesterday, undervalued and
misunderstood him; and she was willing now to think him even more
magnanimous than his generous words and conduct showed him. It would be
a base return for his patience to accept him from a worldly ambition; a
man of his noble spirit merited the best that love could give. But she
respected him; at last she respected him fully and entirely, and she
could tell him that at any rate.
The words in which he had yesterday protested his love for her repeated
themselves constantly in her revery. If he should speak them again after
he had seen her in Boston, in the light by which she was anxious to be
tested,--she did not know what she should say.
XIII.
ORDEAL.
They had not planned to go anywhere that day; but after church they
found themselves with the loveliest afternoon of their stay at Quebec to
be passed somehow, and it was a pity to pass it indoors, the colonel
said at their early dinner. They canvassed the attractions of the
different drives out of town, and they decided upon that to Lorette. The
Ellisons had already been there, but Mr. Arbuton had not, and it was
from a dim motive of politeness towards him that Mrs. Ellison chose the
excursion; though this did not prevent her from wondering aloud
afterward, from time to time, why she had chosen it. He was restless and
absent, and answered at random when points of the debate were referred
to him, but he eagerly assented to the conclusion, and was in haste to
set out.