I myself, more fortunate, was there some five years longer. During this
period I lost my friend Latouche, who died of a malarious fever during a
tour in the Levant. One of the first things I did on my return was to go
up to Grimwinter to pay a consolatory visit to his poor mother. I found
her in deep affliction, and I sat with her the whole of the morning
that followed my arrival (I had come in late at night), listening to
her tearful descant and singing the praises of my friend. We talked of
nothing else, and our conversation terminated only with the arrival of
a quick little woman who drove herself up to the door in a “carryall,”
and whom I saw toss the reins upon the horse’s back with the briskness
of a startled sleeper throwing back the bed-clothes. She jumped out
of the carryall and she jumped into the room. She proved to be the
minister’s wife and the great town-gossip, and she had evidently, in the
latter capacity, a choice morsel to communicate. I was as sure of this
as I was that poor Mrs. Latouche was not absolutely too bereaved to
listen to her. It seemed to me discreet to retire; I said I believed I
would go and take a walk before dinner.
“And, by the way,” I added, “if you will tell me where my old friend
Miss Spencer lives, I will walk to her house.”
The minister’s wife immediately responded. Miss Spencer lived in the
fourth house beyond the “Baptist church; the Baptist church was the one
on the right, with that queer green thing over the door; they called it
a portico, but it looked more like an old-fashioned bedstead.
“Yes, do go and see poor Caroline,” said Mrs. Latouche. “It will refresh
her to see a strange face.”
“I should think she had had enough of strange faces!” cried the
minister’s wife.
“I mean, to see a visitor,” said Mrs. Latouche, amending her phrase.
“I should think she had had enough of visitors!” her companion rejoined.
“But _you_ don’t mean to stay ten years,” she added, glancing at me.
“Has she a visitor of that sort?” I inquired, perplexed.
“You will see the sort!” said the minister’s wife. “She’s easily seen;
she generally sits in the front yard. Only take care what you say to
her, and be very sure you are polite.”
“Ah, she is so sensitive?”
The minister’s wife jumped up and dropped me a curtsey, a most ironical
curtsey.
“That’s what she is, if you please. She’s a countess!”
And pronouncing this word with the most scathing accent, the little
woman seemed fairly to laugh in the Countess’s face. I stood a moment,
staring, wondering, remembering.
“Oh, I shall be very polite!” I cried; and grasping my hat and stick, I
went on my way.
I found Miss Spencer’s residence without difficulty. The Baptist church
was easily identified, and the small dwelling near it, of a rusty
white, with a large central chimney-stack and a Virginia creeper, seemed
naturally and properly the abode of a frugal old maid with a taste for
the picturesque. As I approached I slackened my pace, for I had heard
that some one was always sitting in the front yard, and I wished
to reconnoitre. I looked cautiously over the low white fence which
separated the small garden-space from the unpaved street; but I descried
nothing in the shape of a countess. A small straight path led up to the
crooked doorstep, and on either side of it was a little grass-plot,
fringed with currant-bushes. In the middle of the grass, on either side,
was a large quince-tree, full of antiquity and contortions, and beneath
one of the quince-trees were placed a small table and a couple of
chairs. On the table lay a piece of unfinished embroidery and two or
three books in bright-colored paper covers. I went in at the gate and
paused halfway along the path, scanning the place for some farther
token of its occupant, before whom--I could hardly have said why--I
hesitated abruptly to present myself. Then I saw that the poor little
house was very shabby. I felt a sudden doubt of my right to intrude;
for curiosity had been my motive, and curiosity here seemed singularly
indelicate. While I hesitated, a figure appeared in the open doorway and
stood there looking at me. I immediately recognized Caroline Spencer,
but she looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Gently, but
gravely and timidly, I advanced to the doorstep, and then I said, with
an attempt at friendly badinage,--
“I waited for you over there to come back, but you never came.”
“Waited where, sir?” she asked softly, and her light-colored eyes
expanded more than before.
She was much older; she looked tired and wasted.
“Well,” I said, “I waited at Havre.”
She stared; then she recognized me. She smiled and blushed and clasped
her two hands together. “I remember you now,” she said. “I remember that
day.” But she stood there, neither coming out nor asking me to come in.
She was embarrassed.
I, too, felt a little awkward. I poked my stick into the path. “I kept
looking out for you, year after year,” I said.
“You mean in Europe?” murmured Miss Spencer.
“In Europe, of course! Here, apparently, you are easy enough to find.”
She leaned her hand against the unpainted doorpost, and her head fell a
little to one side. She looked at me for a moment without speaking, and
I thought I recognized the expression that one sees in women’s eyes
when tears are rising. Suddenly she stepped out upon the cracked slab
of stone before the threshold and closed the door behind her. Then she
began to smile intently, and I saw that her teeth were as pretty as
ever. But there had been tears too.
“Have you been there ever since?” she asked, almost in a whisper.
“Until three weeks ago. And you--you never came back?”
Still looking at me with her fixed smile, she put her hand behind her
and opened the door again. “I am not very polite,” she said. “Won’t you
come in?”
“I am afraid I incommode you.”
“Oh, no!” she answered, smiling more than ever. And she pushed back the
door, with a sign that I should enter.
I went in, following her. She led the way to a small room on the left of
the narrow hall, which I supposed to be her parlor, though it was at the
back of the house, and we passed the closed door of another apartment
which apparently enjoyed a view of the quince-trees. This one looked
out upon a small woodshed and two clucking hens. But I thought it very
pretty, until I saw that its elegance was of the most frugal kind; after
which, presently, I thought it prettier still, for I had never seen
faded chintz and old mezzotint engravings, framed in varnished autumn
leaves, disposed in so graceful a fashion. Miss Spencer sat down on a
very small portion of the sofa, with her hands tightly clasped in her
lap. She looked ten years older, and it would have sounded very perverse
now to speak of her as pretty. But I thought her so; or at least I
thought her touching. She was peculiarly agitated. I tried to appear not
to notice it; but suddenly, in the most inconsequent fashion,--it was an
irresistible memory of our little friendship at Havre,--I said to her,
“I do incommode you. You are distressed.”
She raised her two hands to her face, and for a moment kept it buried in
them. Then, taking them away,--“It’s because you remind me--” she said.
“I remind you, you mean, of that miserable day at Havre?”
She shook her head. “It was not miserable. It was delightful.”
“I never was so shocked as when, on going back to your inn the next
morning, I found you had set sail again.”
She was silent a moment; and then she said, “Please let us not speak of
that.”
“Did you come straight back here?” I asked.
“I was back here just thirty days after I had gone away.”
“And here you have remained ever since?”
“Oh, yes!” she said gently.
“When are you going to Europe again?”
This question seemed brutal; but there was something that irritated me
in the softness of her resignation, and I wished to extort from her some
expression of impatience.
She fixed her eyes for a moment upon a small sunspot on the carpet;
then she got up and lowered the window-blind a little, to obliterate
it. Presently, in the same mild voice, answering my question, she said,
“Never!”
“I hope your cousin repaid you your money.”
“I don’t care for it now,” she said, looking away from me.
“You don’t care for your money?”
“For going to Europe.”
“Do you mean that you would not go if you could?”
“I can’t--I can’t,” said Caroline Spencer. “It is all over; I never
think of it.”
“He never repaid you, then!” I exclaimed.
“Please--please,” she began.
But she stopped; she was looking toward the door. There had been a
rustling aud a sound of steps in the hall.
I also looked toward the door, which was open, and now admitted another
person, a lady, who paused just within the threshold. Behind her came
a young man. The lady looked at me with a good deal of fixedness, long
enough for my glance to receive a vivid impression of herself. Then
she turned to Caroline Spencer, and, with a smile and a strong foreign
accent,--
“Excuse my interruption!” she said. “I knew not you had company, the
gentleman came in so quietly.”
With this she directed her eyes toward me again.
She was very strange; yet my first feeling was that I had seen her
before. Then I perceived that I had only seen ladies who were very much
like her. But I had seen them very far away from Grimwinter, and it was
an odd sensation to be seeing her here. Whither was it the sight of her
seemed to transport me? To some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian
_quatrième_,--to an open door revealing a greasy antechamber, and to
Madame leaning over the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown
together and bawls down to the portress to bring up her coffee. Miss
Spencer’s visitor was a very large woman, of middle age, with a plump,
dead-white face, and hair drawn back _a la chinoise_. She had a small
penetrating eye, and what is called in French an agreeable smile.
She wore an old pink cashmere dressing-gown, covered with white
embroideries, and, like the figure in my momentary vision, she was
holding it together in front with a bare and rounded arm and a plump and
deeply dimpled hand.
“It is only to spick about my _café_,” she said to Miss Spencer, with
her agreeable smile. “I should like it served in the garden under the
leetle tree.”
The young man behind her had now stepped into the room, and he also
stood looking at me. He was a pretty-faced little fellow, with an air
of provincial foppishness,--a tiny Adonis of Grimwinter. He had a
small pointed nose, a small pointed chin, and, as I observed, the most
diminutive feet. He looked at me foolishly, with his mouth open.
“You shall have your coffee,” said Miss Spencer, who had a faint red
spot in each of her cheeks.
“It is well!” said the lady in the dressing-gown. “Find your bouk,” she
added, turning to the young man.
He gazed vaguely round the room. “My grammar, d’ye mean?” he asked,
with a helpless intonation.
But the large lady was inspecting me, curiously, and gathering in her
dressing-gown with her white arm.
“Find your bouk, my friend,” she repeated.
“My poetry, d’ye mean?” said the young man, also staring at me again.
“Never mind your bouk,” said his companion. “To-day we will talk. We
will make some conversation. But we must not interrupt. Come;” and she
turned away. “Under the leetle tree,” she added, for the benefit of Miss
Spencer.
Then she gave me a sort of salutation, and a “Monsieur!” with which she
swept away again, followed by the young man.
Caroline Spencer stood there with her eyes fixed upon the ground.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“The Countess, my cousin.”
“And who is the young man?”
“Her pupil, Mr. Mixter.”
This description of the relation between the two persons who had just
left the room made me break into a little laugh. Miss Spencer looked at
me gravely.
“She gives French lessons; she has lost her fortune.”
“I see,” I said. “She is determined to be a burden to no one. That is
very proper.”
Miss Spencer looked down on the ground again, “I must go and get the
coffee,” she said.
“Has the lady many pupils?” I asked.
“She has only Mr. Mixter. She gives all her time to him.”
At this I could not laugh, though I smelt provocation; Miss Spencer was
too grave. “He pays very well,” she presently added, with simplicity.
“He is very rich. He is very kind. He takes the Countess to drive.” And
she was turning away.
“You are going for the Countess’s coffee?” I said.
“If you will excuse me a few moments.”
“Is there no one else to do it?”
She looked at me with the softest serenity. “I keep no servants.”
“Can she not wait upon herself?”
“She is not used to that.”
“I see,” said I, as gently as possible. “But before you go, tell me
this: who is this lady?”
“I told you about her before--that day. She is the wife of my cousin,
whom you saw.”
“The lady who was disowned by her family in consequence of her
marriage?”
“Yes; they have never seen her again. They have cast her off.”
“And where is her husband?”
“He is dead.”
“And where is your money?”
The poor girl flinched; there was something too consistent in my
questions. “I don’t know,” she said wearily.
But I continued a moment. “On her husband’s death this lady came over
here?”
“Yes, she arrived one day.”
“How long ago?”
“Two years.”
“She has been here ever since?”
“Every moment.”
“How does she like it?”
“Not at all.”
“And how do _you_ like it?”
Miss Spencer laid her face in her two hands an instant, as she had done
ten minutes before.
Then, quickly, she went to get the Countess’s coffee.
I remained alone in the little parlor; I wanted to see more, to learn
more. At the end of five minutes the young man whom Miss Spencer had
described as the Countess’s pupil came in. He stood looking at me for a
moment with parted lips. I saw he was a very rudimentary young man.
“She wants to know if you won’t come out there,” he observed at last.
“Who wants to know?”
“The Countess. That French lady.”
“She has asked you to bring me?”
“Yes, sir,” said the young man feebly, looking at my six feet of
stature.
I went out with him, and we found the Countess sitting under one of
the little quince-trees in front of the house. She was drawing a needle
through the piece of embroidery which she had taken from the small
table. She pointed graciously to the chair beside her, and I seated
myself. Mr. Mixter glanced about him, and then sat down in the grass at
her feet. He gazed upward, looking with parted lips from the Countess
to me. “I am sure you speak French,” said the Countess, fixing her
brilliant little eyes upon me.
“I do, madam, after a fashion,” I answered in the lady’s own tongue.
“_Voilà!_” she cried most expressively. “I knew it so soon as I looked
at you. You have been in my poor dear country.”
“A long time.”
“You know Paris?”
“Thoroughly, madam.” And with a certain conscious purpose I let my eyes
meet her own.
She presently, hereupon, moved her own and glanced down at Mr. Mixter
“What are we talking about?” she demanded of her attentive pupil.
He pulled his knees up, plucked at the grass with his hand, stared,
blushed a little. “You are talking French,” said Mr. Mixter.
“_La belle découverte!_” said the Countess. “Here are ten months,” she
explained to me, “that I am giving him lessons. Don’t put yourself out
not to say he’s an idiot; he won’t understand you.”
“I hope your other pupils are more gratifying,” I remarked.
“I have no others. They don’t know what French is in this place; they
don’t want to know. You may therefore imagine the pleasure it is to me
to meet a person who speaks it like yourself.” I replied that my own
pleasure was not less; and she went on drawing her stitches through
her embroidery, with her little finger curled out. Every few moments
she put her eyes close to her work, nearsightedly. I thought her a very
disagreeable person; she was coarse, affected, dishonest, and no more a
countess than I was a caliph. “Talk to me of Paris,” she went on. “The
very name of it gives me an emotion! How long since you were there?”
“Two months ago.”
“Happy man! Tell me something about it What were they doing? Oh, for an
hour of the boulevard!”
“They were doing about what they are always doing,--amusing themselves a
good deal.”
“At the theatres, eh?” sighed the Countess. “At the _cafés-concerts_, at
the little tables in front of the doors? _Quelle existence!_ You know I
am a Parisienne, monsieur,” she added, “to my fingertips.”
“Miss Spencer was mistaken, then,” I ventured to rejoin, “in telling me
that you are a Provençale.”
She stared a moment, then she put her nose to her embroidery, which had
a dingy, desultory aspect. “Ah, I am a Provençale by birth; but I am a
Parisienne by--inclination.”
“And by experience, I suppose?” I said.
She questioned me a moment with her hard little eyes. “Oh, experience!
I could talk of experience if I wished. I never expected, for example,
that experience had _this_ in store for me.” And she pointed with her
bare elbow, and with a jerk of her head, at everything that surrounded
her,--at the little white house, the quince-tree, the rickety paling,
even at Mr. Mixter.
“You are in exile!” I said, smiling.
“You may imagine what it is! These two years that I have been here I
have passed hours--hours! One gets used to things, and sometimes I
think I have got used to this. But there are some things that are always
beginning over again. For example, my coffee.”
“Do you always have coffee at this hour?” I inquired.
She tossed back her head and measured me.
“At what hour would you prefer me to have it? I must have my little cup
after breakfast.”
“Ah, you breakfast at this hour?”
“At midday--_comme cela se fait_. Here they breakfast at a quarter past
seven! That ‘quarter past’ is charming!”
“But you were telling me about your _coffee?_ I observed
sympathetically.
“My _cousine_ can’t believe in it; she can’t understand it. She’s an
excellent girl; but that little cup of black coffee, with a drop of
cognac, served at this hour,--they exceed her comprehension. So I have
to break the ice every day, and it takes the coffee the time you see to
arrive. And when it arrives, monsieur! If I don’t offer you any of it
you must not take it ill. It will be because I know you have drunk it on
the boulevard.”
I resented extremely this scornful treatment of poor Caroline Spencer’s
humble hospitality; but I said nothing, in order to say nothing uncivil.
I only looked on Mr. Mixter, who had clasped his arms round his
knees and was watching my companion’s demonstrative graces in solemn
fascination. She presently saw that I was observing him; she glanced at
me with a little bold explanatory smile. “You know, he adores me,” she
murmured, putting her nose into her tapestry again. I expressed the
promptest credence, and she went on. “He dreams of becoming my lover!
Yes, it’s his dream. He has read a French novel; it took him six
months. But ever since that he has thought himself the hero, and me
the heroine!”
Mr. Mixter had evidently not an idea that he was being talked about; he
was too preoccupied with the ecstasy of contemplation. At this moment
Caroline Spencer came out of the house, bearing a coffee-pot on a little
tray. I noticed that on her way from the door to the table she gave me a
single quick, vaguely appealing glance. I wondered what it signified; I
felt that it signified a sort of half-frightened longing to know what,
as a man of the world who had been in France, I thought of the Countess.
It made me extremely uncomfortable. I could not tell her that the
Countess was very possibly the runaway wife of a little hair-dresser. I
tried suddenly, on the contrary, to show a high consideration for
her. But I got up; I could n’t stay longer. It vexed me to see Caroline
Spencer standing there like a waiting-maid.
“You expect to remain some time at Grimwinter?” I said to the Countess.
She gave a terrible shrug.
“Who knows? Perhaps for years. When one is in misery!--_Chere belle_”
she added, turning to Miss Spencer, “you have forgotten the cognac!”
I detained Caroline Spencer as, after looking a moment in silence at the
little table, she was turning away to procure this missing delicacy. I
silently gave her my hand in farewell. She looked very tired, but there
was a strange hint of prospective patience in her severely mild little
face. I thought she was rather glad I was going. Mr. Mixter had risen to
his feet and was pouring out the Countess’s coffee. As I went back past
the Baptist church I reflected that poor Miss Spencer had been right in
her presentiment that she should still see something of that dear old
Europe.