meadows and rye-fields, where, crossing and recrossing the swift St.
Charles, it finally rises at Lorette above the level of the citadel. It
is a lonelier road than that to Montmorenci, and the scattering cottages
upon it have not the well-to-do prettiness, the operatic repair, of
stone-built Beauport. But they are charming, nevertheless, and the
people seem to be remoter from modern influences. Peasant-girls, in
purple gowns and broad straw hats, and not the fashions of the year
before last, now and then appeared to our acquaintance; near one ancient
cottage an old man, in the true habitant's red woollen cap with a long
fall, leaned over the bars of his gate and smoked a short pipe.
By and by they came to Jeune-Lorette, an almost ideally pretty hamlet,
bordering the road on either hand with galleried and balconied little
houses, from which the people bowed to them as they passed, and piously
enclosing in its midst the village church and churchyard. They soon
after reached Lorette itself, which they might easily have known for an
Indian town by its unkempt air, and the irregular attitudes in which the
shabby cabins lounged along the lanes that wandered through it, even if
the Ellisons had not known it already, or if they had not been welcomed
by a pomp of Indian boys and girls of all shades of darkness. The girls
had bead-wrought moccasins and work-bags to sell, and the boys bore bows
and arrows and burst into loud cries of "Shoot! shoot! grand shoot!
Put-up-pennies! shoot-the-pennies! Grand shoot!" When they recognized
the colonel, as they did after the party had dismounted in front of the
church, they renewed these cries with greater vehemence.
"Now, Richard," implored his wife, "you're _not_ going to let those
little pests go through all that shooting performance again?"
"I must. It is expected of me whenever I come to Lorette; and I would
never be the man to neglect an ancient observance of this kind." The
colonel stuck a copper into the hard sand as he spoke, and a small storm
of arrows hurtled around it. Presently it flew into the air, and a
fair-faced, blue-eyed boy picked it up: he won most of the succeeding
coins.
"There's an aborigine of pure blood," remarked the colonel; "his
ancestors came from Normandy two hundred years ago. That's the reason he
uses the bow so much better than these coffee-colored impostors."
They went into the chapel, which stands on the site of the ancient
church burnt not long ago. It is small, and it is bare and rude inside,
with only the commonest ornamentation about the altar, on one side of
which was the painted wooden statue of a nun, on the other that of a
priest,--slight enough commemoration of those who had suffered so much
for the hopeless race that lingers and wastes at Lorette in incurable
squalor and wildness. They are Christians after their fashion, this poor
remnant of the mighty Huron nation converted by the Jesuits and crushed
by the Iroquois in the far-western wilderness; but whatever they are at
heart, they are still savage in countenance, and these boys had faces of
wolves and foxes. They followed their visitors into the church, where
there was only an old woman praying to a picture, beneath which hung a
votive hand and foot, and a few young Huron suppliants with very sleek
hair, whose wandering devotions seemed directed now at the strangers,
and now at the wooden effigy of the House of St. Ann borne by two gilt
angels above the high-altar. There was no service, and the visitors soon
quitted the chapel amid the clamors of the boys outside. Some young
girls, in the dress of our period, were promenading up and down the road
with their arms about each other and their eyes alert for the effect
upon spectators.
From one of the village lanes came swaggering towards the visitors a
figure of aggressive fashion,--a very buckish young fellow, with a heavy
black mustache and black eyes, who wore a jaunty round hat, blue checked
trousers, a white vest, and a morning-coat of blue diagonals, buttoned
across his breast; in his hand he swung a light cane.
"That is the son of the chief, Paul Picot," whispered the driver.
"Excuse me," said the colonel, instantly; and the young gentleman
nodded. "Can you tell me if we could see the chief to-day?"
"O yes!" answered the notary in English, "my father is chief. You can
see him"; and passed on with a somewhat supercilious air.
The colonel, in his first hours at Quebec, had bought at a bazaar of
Indian wares the photograph of an Indian warrior in a splendor of
factitious savage panoply. It was called "The Last of the Hurons," and
the colonel now avenged himself for the curtness of M. Picot by styling
him "The Next to the Last of the Hurons."
"Well," said Fanny, who had a wife's willingness to see her husband
occasionally snubbed, "I don't know why you asked him. I'm sure nobody
wants to see that old chief and his wretched bead trumpery again."
"My dear," answered the colonel, "wherever Americans go, they like to be
presented at court. Mr. Arbuton, here, I've no doubt has been introduced
to the crowned heads of the Old World, and longs to pay his respects to
the sovereign of Lorette. Besides, I always call upon the reigning
prince when I come to Lorette. The coldness of the heir-apparent shall
not repel me."
The colonel led the way up the principal lane of the village. Some of
the cabins were ineffectually whitewashed, but none of them were so
uncleanly within as the outside prophesied. At the doors and windows sat
women and young girls working moccasins; here and there stood a well-fed
mother of a family with an infant Huron in her arms. They all showed the
traces of white blood, as did the little ones who trooped after the
strangers and demanded charity as clamorously as so many Italians; only
a few faces were of a clear dark, as if stained by walnut-juice, and it
was plain that the Hurons were fading, if not dying out. They responded
with a queer mixture of French liveliness and savage stolidity to the
colonel's jocose advances. Great lean dogs lounged about the thresholds;
they and the women and children were alone visible; there were no men.
None of the houses were fenced, save the chief's; this stood behind a
neat grass plot, across which, at the moment our travellers came up, two
youngish women were trailing in long morning-gowns and eye-glasses. The
chief's house was a handsome cottage, papered and carpeted, with a huge
stove in the parlor, where also stood a table exposing the bead trumpery
of Mrs. Ellison's scorn. A full-bodied elderly man with quick, black
eyes and a tranquil, dark face stood near it; he wore a half-military
coat with brass buttons, and was the chief Picot. At sight of the
colonel he smiled slightly and gave his hand in welcome. Then he sold
such of his wares as the colonel wanted, rather discouraging than
inviting purchase. He talked, upon some urgency, of his people, who, he
said, numbered three hundred, and were a few of them farmers, but were
mostly hunters, and, in the service of the officers of the garrison,
spent the winter in the chase. He spoke fair English, but reluctantly,
and he seemed glad to have his guests go, who were indeed willing enough
to leave him.
Mr. Arbuton especially was willing, for he had been longing to find
himself alone with Kitty, of which he saw no hope while the idling about
the village lasted.
The colonel bought an insane watch-pocket for _une dolleur_ from a
pretty little girl as they returned through the village; but he forbade
the boys any more archery at his expense, with "Pas de grand shoot,
_now_, mes enfans!--Friends," he added to his own party, "we have the
Falls of Lorette and the better part of the afternoon still before us;
how shall we employ them?"
Mrs. Ellison and Kitty did not know, and Mr. Arbuton did not know, as
they sauntered down past the chapel, to the stone mill that feeds its
industry from the beauty of the fall. The cascade, with two or three
successive leaps above the road, plunges headlong down a steep
crescent-shaped slope, and hides its foamy whiteness in the
dark-foliaged ravine below. It is a wonder of graceful motion, of
iridescent lights and delicious shadows; a shape of loveliness that
seems instinct with a conscious life. Its beauty, like that of all
natural marvels on our continent, is on a generous scale; and now the
spectators, after viewing it from the mill, passed for a different
prospect of it to the other shore, and there the colonel and Fanny
wandered a little farther down the glen, leaving Kitty with Mr. Arbuton.
The affair between them was in such a puzzling phase, that there was as
much reason for as against this: nobody could do anything, not even
openly recognize it. Besides, it was somehow very interesting to Kitty
to be there alone with him, and she thought that if all were well, and
he and she were really engaged, the sense of recent betrothal could be
nowhere else half so sweet as in that wild and lovely place. She began
to imagine a bliss so divine, that it would have been strange if she had
not begun to desire it, and it was with a half reluctant,
half-acquiescent thrill that she suffered him to touch upon what was
first in both their minds.
"I thought you had agreed not to talk of that again for the present,"
she feebly protested.
"No; I was not forbidden to tell you I loved you: I only consented to
wait for my answer; but now I shall break my promise. I cannot wait. I
think the conditions you make dishonor me," said Mr. Arbuton, with an
impetuosity that fascinated her.
"O, how can you say such a thing as that?" she asked, liking him for his
resentment of conditions that he found humiliating, while her heart
leaped remorseful to her lips for having imposed them. "You know very
well why I wanted to delay; and you know that--that--if--I had done
anything to wound you, I never could forgive myself."
"But you doubted me, all the same," he rejoined.
"Did I? I thought it was myself that I doubted." She was stricken with
sudden misgiving as to what had seemed so well; her words tended rapidly
she could not tell whither.
"But why do you doubt yourself?"
"I--I don't know."
"No," he said bitterly, "for it's really me that you doubt. I can't
understand what you have seen in me that makes you believe anything
could change me towards you," he added with a kind of humbleness that
touched her. "I could have borne to think that I was not worthy of you."
"Not worthy of me! I never dreamed of such a thing."
"But to have you suspect me of such meanness--"
"O Mr. Arbuton!"
--"As you hinted yesterday, is a disgrace that I ought not to bear. I
have thought of it all night; and I must have my answer now, whatever it
is."
She did not speak; for every word that she had uttered had only served
to close escape behind her. She did not know what to do; she looked up
at him for help. He said with an accent of meekness pathetic from him,
"Why must you still doubt me?"
"I don't," she scarcely more than breathed.
"Then you are mine, now, without waiting, and forever," he cried; and
caught her to him in a swift embrace.
She only said, "Oh!" in a tone of gentle reproach, yet clung to him a
helpless moment as for rescue from himself. She looked at him in blank
pallor, striving to realize the tender violence in which his pulses
wildly exulted; then a burning flush dyed her face, and tears came into
her eyes. "O, I hope you'll never be sorry," she said; and then, "Do let
us go," for she had no distinct desire save for movement, for escape
from that place.
Her heart had been surprised, she hardly knew how; but at his kiss a
novel tenderness had leaped to life in it. She suffered him to put her
hand upon his arm, and then she began to feel a strange pride in his
being tall and handsome, and hers. But she kept thinking as they walked,
"I hope he'll never he sorry," and she said it again, half in jest. He
pressed her hand against his heart, and met her look with one of protest
and reassurance, that presently melted into something sweeter yet. He
said, "What beautiful eyes you have! I noticed the long lashes when I
saw you on the Saguenay boat, and I couldn't get away from them."
"O please, don't speak of that dreadful time!" cried Kitty.
"No? Why not?"
"O because! I think it was such a bold kind of accident my taking your
arm by mistake; and the whole next day has always been a perfect horror
to me."
He looked at her in questioning amaze.
"I think I was very pert with you all day,--and I don't think I'm pert
naturally,--taking you up about the landscape, and twitting you about
the Saguenay scenery and legends, you know. But I thought you were
trying to put me down,--you are rather down-putting at times,--and I
admired you, and I couldn't bear it."
"Oh!" said Mr. Arbuton. He dimly recollected, as if it had been in some
former state of existence, that there were things he had not approved in
Kitty that day, but now he met her penitence with a smile and another
pressure of the hand. "Well, then," he said, "if you don't like to
recall that time, let's go back of it to the day I met you on Goat
Island Bridge at Niagara."
"O, did you see _me_ there? I thought you didn't; but _I_ saw _you_. You
had on a blue cravat," she answered; and he returned with as much the
air of coherency as if really continuing the same train of thought, "You
won't think it necessary to visit Boston, now, I suppose," and he smiled
triumphantly upon her. "I fancy that I have now a better right to
introduce you there than your South End friends."
Kitty smiled, too. "I'm willing to wait. But don't you think you ought
to see Eriecreek before you promise too solemnly? I can't allow that
there's anything serious, till you've seen me at home."
They had been going, for no reason that they knew, back to the country
inn near which you purchase admittance to a certain view of the falls,
and now they sat down on the piazza, somewhat apart from other people
who were there, as Mr. Arbuton said, "O, I shall visit Eriecreek soon
enough. But I shall not come to put myself or you to the proof. I don't
ask to see you at home before claiming you forever."
Kitty murmured, "Ah! you are more generous than I was."
"I doubt it."
"O yes, you are. But I wonder if you'll be able to find Eriecreek."
"Is it on the map?"
"It's on the county map; and so is Uncle Jack's lot on it, and a picture
of his house, for that matter. They'll all be standing on the
piazza--something like this one--when you come up. You'll know Uncle
Jack by his big gray beard, and his bushy eyebrows, and his boots, which
he won't have blacked, and his Leghorn hat, which we can't get him to
change. The girls will be there with him,--Virginia all red and heated
with having got supper for you, and Rachel with the family mending in
her hand,--and they'll both come running down the walk to welcome you.
How will you like it?"
Mr. Arbuton suspected the gross caricature of this picture, and smiled
securely at it. "I shall like it well enough," he said, "if you run down
with them. Where shall you be?"
"I forgot. I shall be up stairs in my room, peeping through the
window-blinds, to see how you take it. Then I shall come down, and
receive you with dignity in the parlor, but after supper you'll have to
excuse me while I help with the dishes. Uncle Jack will talk to you.
He'll talk to you about Boston. He's much fonder of Boston than you are,
even." And here Kitty broke off with a laugh, thinking what a very
different Boston her Uncle Jack's was from Mr. Arbuton's, and
maliciously diverted with what she conceived of their mutual
bewilderment in trying to get some common stand-point. He had risen from
his chair, and was now standing a few paces from her, looking toward the
fall, as if by looking he might delay the coming of the colonel and
Fanny.
She checked her merriment a moment to take note of two ladies who were
coming up the path towards the porch where she was sitting. Mr. Arbuton
did not see them. The ladies mounted the steps, and turned slowly and
languidly to survey the company. But at sight of Mr. Arbuton, one of
them advanced directly toward him, with exclamations of surprise and
pleasure, and he with a stupefied face and a mechanical movement turned
to meet her.
She was a lady of more than middle age, dressed with certain personal
audacities of color and shape, rather than overdressed, and she thrust
forward, in expression of her amazement, a very small hand, wonderfully
well gloved; her manner was full of the anxiety of a woman who had
fought hard for a high place in society, and yet suggested a latent
hatred of people who, in yielding to her, had made success bitter and
humiliating.
Her companion was a young and very handsome girl, exquisitely dressed,
and just so far within the fashion as to show her already a mistress of
style. But it was not the vivid New York stylishness. A peculiar
restraint of line, an effect of lady-like concession to the ruling mode,
a temperance of ornament, marked the whole array, and stamped it with
the unmistakable character of Boston. Her clear tints of lip and cheek
and eye were incomparable; her blond hair gave weight to the poise of
her delicate head by its rich and decent masses. She had a look of
independent innocence, an angelic expression of extremely nice young
fellow blending with a subtle maidenly charm. She indicated her surprise
at seeing Mr. Arbuton by pressing the point of her sun-umbrella somewhat
nervously upon the floor, and blushing a very little. Then she gave him
her hand with friendly frankness, and smiled dazzlingly upon him, while
the elder hailed him with effusive assertion of familiar acquaintance,
heaping him with greetings and flatteries and cries of pleasure.
"O dear!" sighed Kitty, "these are old friends of his; and will I have
to know them? Perhaps it's best to begin at once, though," she thought.
But he made no movement toward her where she sat. The ladies began to
walk up and down, and he with them. As they passed her, he did not seem
to see her.
The ladies said they were waiting for their carriage, which they had
left at a certain point when they went to look at the fall, and had
ordered to take them up at the inn. They talked about people and things
that Kitty had never heard of.
"Have you seen the Trailings since you left Newport?" asked the elder
woman.
"No," said Mr. Arbuton.
"Perhaps you'll be surprised then--or perhaps you won't--to hear that we
parted with them on the top of Mount Washington, Thursday. And the
Mayflowers are at the Glen House. The mountains are horribly full. But
what are you to do! Now the Continent"--she spoke as if the English
Channel divided it from us--"is so common, you can't run over there any
more."
Whenever they walked towards Kitty, this woman, whose quick eye had
detected Mr. Arbuton at her side as she came up to the inn, bent upon
the young girl's face a stare of insolent curiosity, yet with a front of
such impassive coldness that to another she might not have seemed aware
of her presence. Kitty shuddered at the thought of being made acquainted
with her; then she remembered, "Why, how stupid I am! Of course a
gentleman can't introduce ladies; and the only thing for him to do is to
excuse himself to them as soon as he can without rudeness, and come back
to me." But none the less she felt helpless and deserted. Though
ordinarily so brave, she was so beaten down by that look, that for a
glance of not unkindly interest that the young lady gave her she was
abjectly grateful. She admired her, and fancied that she could easily be
friends with such a girl as that, if they met fairly. She wondered that
she should be there with that other, not knowing that society cannot
really make distinctions between fine and coarse, and could not have
given her a reason for their association.
Still the three walked up and down before Kitty, and still she made his
peace with herself, thinking, "He is embarrassed; he can't come to me at
once; but he will, of course."
The elder of his companions talked on in her loud voice of this thing
and that, of her summer, and of the people she had met, and of their
places and yachts and horses, and all the splendors of their
keeping,--talk which Kitty's aching sense sometimes caught by fragments,
and sometimes in full. The lady used a slang of deprecation and apology
for having come to such a queer resort as Quebec, and raised her brows
when Mr. Arbuton reluctantly owned how long he had been there.
"Ah, ah!" she said briskly, bringing the group to a stand-still while
she spoke, "one doesn't stay in a slow Canadian city a whole month for
love of the _place_. Come, Mr. Arbuton, is she English or French?"
Kitty's heart beat thickly, and she whispered to herself, "O, now!--now
surely he _must_ do something."
"Or perhaps," continued his tormentor, "she's some fair fellow-wanderer
in these Canadian wilds,--some pretty companion of voyage."
Mr. Arbuton gave a kind of start at this, like one thrilled for an
instant with a sublime impulse. He cast a quick, stealthy look at Kitty,
and then as suddenly withdrew his glance. What had happened to her who
was usually dressed so prettily? Alas! true to her resolution, Kitty had
again refused Fanny's dresses that morning, and had faithfully put on
her own travelling-suit,--the suit which Rachel had made her, and which
had seemed so very well at Eriecreek that they had called Uncle Jack in
to admire it when it was tried on. Now she knew that it looked
countrified, and its unstylishness struck in upon her, and made her feel
countrified in soul. "Yes," she owned, as she met Mr. Arbuton's glance,
"I'm nothing but an awkward milkmaid beside that young lady." This was
unjust to herself; but truly it was never in her present figure that he
had intended to show her to his world, which he had been sincere enough
in contemning for her sake while away from it. Confronted with good
society in these ladies, its delegates, he doubtless felt, as never
before, the vastness of his self-sacrifice, the difficulty of his
enterprise, and it would not have been so strange if just then she
should have appeared to him through the hard cold vision of the best
people instead of that which love had illumined. She saw whatever
purpose toward herself was in his eyes, flicker and die out as they fell
from hers. Then she sat alone while they three walked up and down, up
and down, and the skirts of the ladies brushed her garments in passing.
"O, where can Dick and Fanny be?" she silently bemoaned herself, "and
why don't they come and save me from these dreadful people?"
She sat in a stony quiet while they talked on, she thought, forever.
Their voices sounded in her ears like voices heard in a dream, their
laughter had a nightmare cruelty. Yet she was resolved to be just to Mr.
Arbuton, she was determined not meanly to condemn him; she confessed to
herself, with a glimmer of her wonted humor, that her dress must be an
ordeal of peculiar anguish to him, and she half blamed herself for her
conscientiousness in wearing it. If she had conceived of any such chance
as this, she would perhaps, she thought, have worn Fanny's grenadine.
She glanced again at the group which was now receding from her. "Ah!"
the elder of the ladies said, again halting the others midway of the
piazza's length, "there's the carriage at last! But what is that stupid
animal stopping for? O, I suppose he didn't understand, and expects to
take us up at the bridge! Provoking! But it's no use; we may as well go
to him at once; it's plain he isn't coming to us. Mr. Arbuton, will you
see us on board?"
"Who--I? Yes, certainly," he answered absently, and for the second time
he cast a furtive look at Kitty, who had half started to her feet in
expectation of his coming to her before he went,--a look of appeal, or
deprecation, or reassurance, as she chose to interpret it, but after all
a look only.
She sank back in blank rejection of his look, and so remained motionless
as he led the way from the porch with a quick and anxious step. Since
those people came he had not openly recognized her presence, and now he
had left her without a word. She could not believe what she could not
but divine, and she was powerless to stir as the three moved down the
road towards the carriage. Then she felt the tears spring to her eyes:
she flung down her veil, and, swept on by a storm of grief and pride and
pain, she hurried, ran towards the grounds about the falls. She thrust
aside the boy who took money at the gate. "I have no money," she said
fiercely; "I'm going to look for my friends: they're in here."