|Once a year, and once only, Hiram had a holiday. For a glorious
fortnight every summer, Sam Churchill and his partner gave their head
draughtsman leave to go and amuse himself wheresoever the spirit led
him. And on the first of such holidays, Hiram went with Audouin to the
Thousand Islands, and spent a delightful time boating, fishing, and
sketching, among the endless fairy mazes of that enchanted region, where
the great St. Lawrence loses itself hopelessly in innumerable petty
channels, between countless tiny bosses of pine-clad rock. It was a
fortnight of pure enjoyment for poor drudging advertisement-drawing
Hiram, and he revelled in its wealth of beauty as he had never revelled
in anything earthly before during his whole lifetime.
One morning Hiram had taken his little easel out with him from
Alexandria Bay to one of the prettiest points of view upon the
neighbouring mainland--a jutting spit of ice-worn rock, projecting far
into the placid lake, and thickly overhung with fragrant brush of the
beautiful red cedar--and was making a little water-colour sketch of a
tiny islet in the foreground, just a few square yards of smooth granite
covered in the centre with an inch deep of mould, and crowned by a
single tall straight stem of sombre spruce fir. It was a delicate,
dainty little sketch, steeped in the pale morning haze of Canadian
summer; and the scarlet columbines, waving from the gnarled roots of the
solitary fir tree, stood out like brilliant specks of light against the
brown bark and dark green foliage that formed the background. Hiram was
just holding it at arm's length, to see how it looked, and turning
to ask for Audouin's friendly criticism, when he heard a clear bright
woman's voice close behind him speaking so distinctly that he couldn't
help overhearing the words.
'Oh, papa,' the voice said briskly, 'there's an artist working down
there. I wonder if he'd mind our going down and looking at his picture.
I do so love to see an artist painting.'
The very sound of the voice thrilled through Hiram's inmost marrow as he
heard it, somewhat as Audouin's voice had done long ago, when first he
came upon him in the Muddy Creek woodland--only more so. He had never
heard a woman's voice before at all like it. It didn't in the least
resemble Miss Almeda A. Stiles's, or any other one of the lady students
at Bethabara or Orange, who formed the sole standard of female society
that Hiram Winthrop had ever yet met with. It was a rich, liquid,
rippling voice, and it spoke with the soft accent and delicate
deliberate intonation of an English lady. Hiram, of course, didn't by
the light of nature recognise at once this classificatory fact as to its
origin and history, but he did know that it stirred him strangely, and
made him look round immediately to see from what manner of person the
voice itself ultimately proceeded.
A tall girl of about nineteen, with a singularly full ripe-looking
face and figure for her age, was standing on the edge of the little
promontory just above, and looking down inquisitively towards Hiram's
easel. Her cheeks had deeper roses in them than Hiram had ever seen
before, and her complexion was clearer and more really flesh-coloured
than that of most pale and sallow American women. 'What a beautiful skin
to paint!' thought Hiram instinctively; and then the next moment, with
a flush of surprise, he began to recognise to himself that this unknown
girl, whose eyes met his for an infinitesimal fraction of a second, had
somehow immediately impressed him--nay, thrilled him--in a way that no
other woman had ever before succeeded in doing. In one word, she seemed
to him more womanly. Why, he didn't know, and couldn't have
explained even to himself, for Hiram's forte certainly did not lie in
introspective analysis; but he felt it instinctively, and was conscious
at once of a certain bashful desire to speak with her, which he had
never experienced towards a single one of the amiable young ladies at
Bethabara Seminary.
'Gwen, my dear,' the father said in a dried-up Indian military tone,
'you will disturb these artists. Come away, come away; people don't like
to be watched at their duties, really.'
Gwen, by way of sole reply, only bent over the edge of the little bluff
that overhung the platform of rock where Hiram was sitting, and said
with the same clear deliberate accent as before, 'May I look? Oh, thank
you. How very, very pretty!'
'It isn't finished yet,' Audouin said, taking the words out of Hiram's
mouth almost, as he held up the picture for Gwen's inspection. 'It's
only a rough sketch, so far: it'll look much worthier of the original
when mv friend has put the last little touches to it. In art, you know,
the last loving lingering touch is really everything.'
Hiram felt half vexed that Audouin should thus have assumed the place of
spokesman for him towards the unknown lady; and yet at the same time he
was almost grateful to him for it also, for he felt too abashed to speak
himself in her overawing presence.
'Yes, the original's beautiful,' Gwen answered, taking her father's arm
and leading him down, against his will, to the edge of the water: 'but
the sketch is very pretty too, and the point of view so exquisitely
chosen. What a thing it is, papa, to have the eye of an artist, isn't
it? You and I might have passed this place a dozen times over, and never
noticed what a lovely little bit it is to make a sketch of; but the
painter sees it at once, and picks out by instinct the very spot to make
a beautiful picture.'
'Ah, quite so,' the father echoed in a cold unconcerned voice, as if the
subject rather bored him. 'Quite so, quite so. Very pretty place indeed,
an excellent retired corner, I should say, for a person who has a taste
that way, to sit and paint in.'
'It _is_ beautiful,' Audouin said, addressing himself musingly to the
daughter, 'and our island in particular is the prettiest of all the
thousand, I do believe.'
'Your island?' Gwen cried interrogatively. 'Then you own that sweet
little spot there, do you?'
'My friend and I, yes,' Audouin answered airily, to Hiram's great
momentary astonishment. 'In the only really worthy sense of ownership,
we own it most assuredly. I dare say some other man somewhere or other
keeps locked up in his desk a dirty little piece of crabbed parchment,
which he calls a title-deed, and which gives him some sort of illusory
claim to the productive power of the few square yards of dirt upon its
surface. But the island itself and the enjoyment of it is ours, and ours
only: the gloss on the ice-grooves in the shelving granite shore, the
scarlet columbines on the tall swaying stems, the glow of the sunlight
on the russet boles of the spruce fir--you see my friend has fairly
impounded them all upon his receptive square of cartridge paper here for
our genuine title-deed of possession.'
'Ah, I see, I see,' the old gentleman said testily. 'You and your friend
claim the island by prescription, but your claim is disputed by the
original freeholder.'
The three others all smiled slightly. 'Oh dear, no, papa,' Gwen answered
with a touch of scorn and impatience in her tone. 'Don't you understand?
This gentleman----'
'My name is Audouin,' the New Englander put in with a slight
inclination.
'Mr. Audouin means that the soil is somebody else's, but the sole
enjoyment of the island is his friend's and his own.'
'The so-called landowner often owns nothing more than the dirt in the
ditches,' Audouin explained with a wave of the hand, in his romantic
mystifying fashion, 'while the observer owns all that is upon it, of
any real use or beauty. For our whole lifetime, my friend and I have had
that privilege and pleasure. The grass grows green for us in spring; the
birds build nests for us in early summer; the fire-flies flit before our
eyes on autumn evenings; the stoat and hare put on their snow-white coat
for our delight in winter weather. I've seen a poet enjoy for a whole
season the best part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed he
had only had out of it a few worthless wild apples. _We_ are the real
freeholders, sir; the man with the title-deeds has merely the usufruct.'
'Oh, ah,' the military gentleman repeated, as if a light were beginning
slowly to dawn upon his bewildered intelligence. 'Some reservation
in favour of rights of way and royalties and so forth, in America,
I suppose. Only owns the dirt in the ditches, you say,--the soil
presumably. Now, in England, every landowner owns the mines and minerals
and springs and everything else beneath the soil, to the centre of the
earth, I believe, if I've been rightly instructed.'
'It can seldom be worth his while to push his claims so far.' Audouin
replied with great gravity, still smiling sardonically.
Gwen coloured slightly. Hiram noticed the delicate flush of the colour,
as it mantled all her cheek for a single second, and was hardly angry
with his friend for having provoked so pretty a protest. Then Gwen said
with a little cough, as if to change the subject: 'These islands are
certainly very lovely. They're the most beautiful thing we've seen in
a six weeks' tour in America. I don't think even Niagara charmed me so
much, in spite of all its grandeur.'
'You're right,' Audouin went on (a little in the Sir Oracle vein,
Hiram fancied); 'at any rate, the islands are more distinctly American.
There's nothing like them anywhere else in the world. They're the final
word of our level American river basins. You have grand waterfalls in
Europe; you have broad valleys; you have mountains finer than any of
ours here east at least; but you've nothing equal in its way to this
flat interwoven scenery of river and foliage, of land and water. It has
no sublimity, not a particle; it's utterly wanting in everything that
ordinarily makes beautiful country; but it's absolutely fairy like in
its endless complexity of channels and islands, and capes and rocks and
lakelets, all laid out on such an infinitesimally tiny scale, as one
might imagine the sylphs and gnomes or the Lilliputians would lay out
their ground plan of a projected paradise.'
'Yes, I think it's exquisite in its way,' Gwen went on. 'My father
doesn't care for it because it's so flat: after Naini Tal and the
Himalayas, he says, all American scenery palls and fades away into utter
insignificance. Of course I haven't seen the Himalayas--and don't want
to, you know--but I've been in Switzerland; and I don't see why,
because Switzerland is beautiful as mountain country, this shouldn't be
beautiful too in a different fashion.'
'Quite so,' Audouin answered briskly. 'We should admire all types of
beauty, each after its own kind. Not to do so argues narrowness--a want
of catholicity.'
The military gentleman fidgeted sadly by Gwen's side; he had caught at
the word 'catholicity,' and he didn't like it. It savoured of religious
discussion; and being, like most other old Indian officers, strictly
evangelical, he began to suspect Audouin of High Church tendencies,
or even dimly to envisage him to himself in the popular character of a
Jesuit in disguise.
As for Hiram, he listened almost with envy to Audouin's glib tongue,
as it ran on so lightly and so smoothly to the beautiful overawing
stranger. If only, now, he himself dared talk like that, or rather if
only he dared talk after his own fashion--which, indeed, to say the
truth, would have been a great deal better! But he didn't dare, and so
he let Audouin carry off all the conversation unopposed; while Audouin,
with his easy Boston manners, never suspected for a moment that the shy,
self restraining New Yorker countryman was burning all the time to put
in a little word or two on his own account, or to attract some tiny
share of the beautiful stranger's passing attention. And thus it came
to pass that Audouin went on talking for half an hour or more
uninterruptedly to Gwen, the military gentleman subsiding meanwhile into
somewhat sulky silence, and Hiram listening with all his ears to hear
what particulars he could glean by the way as to the sudden apparition,
her home, name, and calling. They had come to America for a six weeks'
tour, it seemed, 'Papa' having business in Canada, where he owned a
little property, and having leave of absence for the purpose from his
regiment at Chester. That was almost all that Hiram gathered as to her
actual position; and that little he treasured up in his memory most
religiously against the possible contingency of a future journey
to England 'And you contemplate returning to Europe shortly?' Hiram
ventured to ask at last of the English lady. It was the first time he
had opened his lips during the entire conversation, and he was surprised
even now at his own temerity in presuming to say anything.
Gwen turned towards the young artist carelessly. Though she had been
evidently interested in Audouin's talk, she had not so far even
noticed the painter of the little picture which had formed the first
introduction to the entire party. 'Yes,' she said, as unconcernedly as
if Europe were in the same State; 'we sail next Friday.'
It was the only sentence she said to him, but she said it with a bright
frank smile, which Hiram could have drawn from memory a twelvemonth
after. As a matter of fact, he did draw it in his own bedroom at the
Alexandria Bay Hotel that very evening: and he kept it long in his
little pocket-book as a memento of a gleam of light bursting suddenly
upon his whole existence. For Hiram was not so inexperienced in the ways
of the world that he couldn't recognise one very simple and palpable
fact: he was in love at first sight with the unknown English lady.
'Really, Gwen,' the military gentleman said at this point in the
conversation, 'we must go back to lunch, if we're going to catch our
steamer for Montreal. Besides, you're hindering our friend here from
finishing his picture. Good morning--good morning; thank you so very
much for the opportunity of seeing it.'
Gwen said a little 'Good morning' to Audouin, bowed more distantly to
Hiram, and taking her father's arm jumped lightly up the rocks again,
and disappeared in the direction of the village. When she was fairly
out of sight, Hiram sat down once more and finished his water-colour in
complete silence.
'Pretty girl, Hiram,' Audouin said lightly, as they walked back to their
quarters at lunch-time.
'I should think, Mr. Audouin,' Hiram answered slowly, with even more
than his usual self-restraint, 'she must be a tolerably favourable
specimen of European women.'
Audouin said no more; and Hiram, too, avoided the subject in future.
Somehow, for the first time in his life, he felt just a little bit
aggrieved and jealous of Audouin. It was he, Hiram, who had painted the
picture which first caught Gwen's fancy--he called her 'Gwen' in his own
mind, quite simply, having no other name by which to call her. It was
he who was the artist and the selector of that particular point of view;
and yet Audouin, all unconsciously as it seemed, had stepped in and
appropriated to himself, by implication, the artistic honours of the
situation. Audouin had talked his vague poetical nature-worship talk--it
seemed to Hiram a trifle affected somehow, to-day; and had monopolised
all Gwen's interest in the interview, and had left him, Hiram (the
founder of the feast, so to speak), out in the cold, while he himself
basked in the full sunshine of Gwen's momentary favour. And yet to
Audouin what was she, after all, but a pretty passing stranger? while
to him she was a revelation, a new birth, a latter-day Aphrodite, rising
unbidden with her rosy cheeks from the very bosom of the smiling lake.
And now she was going back again at once to Europe, that great, unknown,
omnipotential Europe; and perhaps Hiram Winthrop would never again see
the one woman who had struck him at first sight with the instantaneous
thrill which the man who has once experienced it can never forget. Colin
Churchill hadn't once yet even asked himself whether or not he was in
love with Minna; but Hiram Winthrop acknowledged frankly forthwith to
his own heart that he was certainly and undeniably in love with Gwen.
Who was she? that was the question. He didn't even know her surname: his
sole information about her amounted exactly to this, that she was called
Gwen, and that her father had been quartered at Chester. Hiram smiled
to himself as he recollected the old legend of how St. Thomas à Becket's
mother, a Saracen maiden, had come to England from the East, in search
of her Christian lover, knowing only the two proper names, Gilbert and
London. Was he, Hiram Winthrop, in this steam-ridden nineteenth century,
in like manner to return to the old home of his forefathers, and make
inquiry with all diligence for Gwen, Chester? The notion was of course
too palpably absurd (though Audouin would have been charmed with
it). Yet there can be no denying that from the moment Hiram met that
beautiful English girl by the Lake of the Thousand Islands, his desire
to see Europe was quickened by yet one more unacknowledged, but very
powerful private attraction. If anybody had talked to him about marrying
Gwen, he would have honestly laughed at the improbable notion, but in
the indefinite way that young men often feel, he felt as though some
vague influence drew him on towards Gwen, not as a woman to be wooed and
won, but as a central object of worship and admiration.
At the hotel, they didn't know the name of the English gentleman and
his daughter; the clerk said they only came for a day and expected no
letters. Another guest had asked about them, too, he mentioned casually;
but Hiram, accustomed to looking upon his friend as so much older than
himself as to have outgrown the folly of admiring female beauty, never
dreamt of supposing that that other guest was Lothrop Audouin. He
searched the 'Herald,' indeed, a week later, to see if any English
officer and his daughter had sailed from New York on the Friday, but
there were no passengers whom he could at all identify with Gwen and her
father. It didn't occur to him that they might have sailed, as they did
sail, by the Canadian mail steamer from Quebec, where he couldn't have
failed to discover them in the list of passengers; so he was left in
the end with no other memorial of this little episode save the sketch
of that sunny face, and the two names, Gwen and Chester. To those little
memorials Hiram's mind turned back oftener than less solitary people
could easily imagine during the next long twelve months of dreary
advertisement-drawing at long, white, dusty, sun-smitten Syracuse.