Madame Arles was a mild and quiet little woman, with a singular absence
of that vivacity which most people are disposed to attribute to all of
French blood. Her age--so far as one could judge from outward
indications--might have been anywhere from twenty-eight to forty. There
were no wrinkles in that smooth, calm forehead of hers; and if there
were lines of gray amid her hair, this indication of age was so
contradicted by the youthfulness of her eye, that a keen observer would
have been disposed to attribute it rather to some weight of past grief
that had left its silvery imprint than to the mere dull burden of her
years.
There are those who stolidly measure a twelve-month always by its count,
and age by such token as a gray head; but who has not had experience of
months so piled with life that two or three or four of them count more
upon the scale of mortality than a score of other and sunny ones? Who
cannot reckon such? Who, looking back, cannot summon to his thought some
passage of a week in which he seemed to stride toward the END with a
crazy swiftness, and under which he felt that every outward indication
of age was deepening its traces with a wondrous surety? Ay, we slip, we
are forged upon the anvil of Time,--God, who deals the blows, only knows
how fast!
Yet in Madame Arles we have no notable character to bring forward; if
past griefs have belonged to her, they have become long since a part of
her character; they are in no way obtrusive. There was, indeed, a
singular cast in one of her eyes, which in moments of excitement--such
few as came over her--impressed the observer very strangely; as if,
while she looked straight upon you and calmly with one eye, the other
were bent upon some scene far remote and out of range, some past episode
it might be of her own life, by over-dwelling upon which she had brought
her organs of sight into this tortured condition. Nine out of ten
observers, however, would never have remarked the peculiarity we have
mentioned, and would only have commented upon Madame Arles--if they had
commented at all--as a quiet person, in whom youth and age seemed just
now to struggle for the mastery, and in whom no trace of French birth
and rearing was apparent, save her speech, and a certain wonderful
aptitude in the arrangement of her dress. The poor lady, moreover, who
showed traces of a vanished beauty, was a sad invalid, and for this
reason, perhaps, had readily accepted the relief afforded by this summer
vacation with two of her city pupils. A violent palpitation of the
heart, from time to time, after sudden or undue exertion or excitement,
shook the poor woman's frail hold upon life. Possibly from this
cause--as is the case with many who are compelled to listen to those
premonitory raps of the grim visitor at the very seat of life--Madame
Arles was a person of strong religious proclivities. Death is knocking
at all hearts, indeed, pretty regularly, and his pace toward triumph is
as formally certain as a pulse beat; but it is, after all, those
disorderly summons of his,--when in a kind of splenetic rage he grips at
our heart-strings, and then lets go,--which keep specially active the
religious sentiment. Madame Arles had been educated in the Romish faith,
and accepted all its tenets with the same unquestioning placidity with
which she enjoyed the sunshine. Without any particular knowledge of the
way in which this faith diverged from other Christian forms, she leaned
upon it (as so many fainting spirits do and will) because the most
available and accessible prop to that religious yearning in her which
craved support. So instinctive and unreasoning a faith was not, however,
such as to provoke any proselytizing zeal or noisy demonstration. Had
it been otherwise, indeed, it could hardly have disturbed her position
with the Bowriggs or interrupted relations with her city patrons.
In Ashfield the case was far different.
Adele, accompanied by her friend Rose,--who, notwithstanding the quiet
remonstrances of the Doctor, had won her mother's permission for such
equipment in French as she could gain from a summer's teaching,--went
with early greeting to the Bowriggs. The curiosity of Adele was intense
to listen to the music of her native speech once more; and when Madame
Arles slipped quietly into the room, Adele darted toward her with warm,
girlish impulse, and the poor woman, excited beyond bounds by this
heartiness of greeting, and murmuring some tender words of endearment,
had presently folded her to her bosom.
Adele, blushing as much with pleasure as with a half-feeling of
mortification at the wild show of feeling she had made, was stammering
her apology, when she was arrested by a sudden change in the aspect of
her new friend.
"My dear Madame, you are suffering?"
"A little, my child!"
It was too true, as the quick glance of her old pupils saw in an
instant. Her lips were pinched and blue; that strange double look in her
eyes,--one fastened upon Adele, and the other upon vacancy; her hands
clasped over her heart as if to stay its mad throbbings. While Sophie
supported and conducted the sufferer to her own chamber, the younger
sister explained to Adele that such spasmodic attacks were of frequent
occurrence, and their physician had assured them must, at a very early
day, destroy her.
Nothing more was needed to enlist Adele's sympathies to the full. She
carried home the story of it to the Doctor, and detailed it in such an
impassioned way, and with such interpretation of the kind lady's
reception of herself, that the Doctor was touched, and abated no small
measure of the prejudice he had been disposed to entertain against the
Frenchwoman.
But her heresies in the matter of religion remained,--it being no secret
that Madame Arles was thoroughly Popish; and these disturbed the good
Doctor the more, as he perceived the growing and tender intimacy which
was establishing itself, week by week, between Adele and her new
teacher. Indeed, he has not sanctioned this without his own private
conversation with Madame, in which he has set forth his responsibility
respecting Adele and the wishes of her father, and insisted upon entire
reserve of Madame's religious opinions in her intercourse with his
_protegee_. All which the poor lady had promised with a ready zeal that
surprised the minister.
"Indeed, I know too little, Doctor; I could wish she might be better
than I. May God make her so!"
"I do not judge you, Madame; it is not ours to judge; but I would keep
Adaly securely, if God permit, in the faith which we reverence here, and
which I much fear she could never learn in her own land or her own
language."
"May-be, may-be, my good Doctor; her faith shall not be disturbed by me,
I promise you."
Adele, with her quick ear and eye, has no difficulty in discovering the
ground of the Doctor's uneasiness and of Miss Eliza's frequent
questionings in regard to her intercourse with the new teacher.
"I am sure they think you very bad," she said to Madame Arles, one day,
in a spirit of mischief.
"Bad! bad! Adele, why? how?"--and that strange tortuous look came to her
eye, with a quick flush to her cheeks.
"Ah, now, dear Madame, don't be disturbed; 'tis only your religion they
think so bad, and fear you will mislead me. _Tenez!_ this little rosary"
(and she displays it to the eye of the wondering Madame Arles) "they
would have taken from me."
Madame pressed the beads reverently to her lips, while her manner
betrayed a deep religious emotion, (as it seemed to Adele,) which she
had rarely seen in her before.
"And you claimed it, my child?"
"Not for any faith I had in it; but it was my mother's."
The good woman kissed Adele.
"You must long to see her, my child!"
A shade of sorrow and doubt ran over the face of the girl. This did not
escape the notice of Madame Arles, who, with a terribly dejected and
distracted air, replaced the rosary in her hands.
"_Mon ange!_" (in this winsome way she was accustomed at times to
address Adele) "we cannot talk of these things. I have promised as much
to the Doctor; it is better so; he is a good man."
Adele sat toying for a moment with the rosary upon her fingers, looking
down; then, seeing that woe-begone expression that had fastened upon the
face of her companion, she sprang up, kissed her forehead, and,
restoring thus--as she knew she could do--a cheeriness to her manner,
resumed her lesson.
But from this time forth she showed an eagerness to unriddle, so far as
she might, the mystery of that faith which the Doctor clothed in his
ponderous discourses,--weighed down and oppressed by his prolixity, and
confounded by doctrines she could not comprehend, yet recognizing, under
all, his serene trust, and gratefully conscious of his tender regard and
constant watchfulness. But, more than all, it was a subject of confusion
to her, that the prim and austere Miss Eliza, whose pride and
selfishness her keen eye could not fail to see, should be possessed of a
truer faith than the poor stranger whose gentleness, and suffering so
patiently borne, seemed in a measure to Christianize and dignify
character. And if she dropped a hint of these doubts, as she sometimes
did, in the ear of the motherly Mrs. Elderkin, that good woman took her
hand tenderly,--"My dear Adele, we are all imperfect; but God sees with
other eyes than ours. Trust Him,--trust Him above all, Adele!"
Yes, she trusts Him,--she knows she trusts Him. Why not? Whom else to
trust? No tender motherly care and guidance; the father, by these years
of absence, made almost a stranger. The low voice of her native land,
that comes to her ear with a charming flow from the lips of her new
teacher, never to speak of her doubts or questionings; the constrained
love of the Doctor, her New Papa, framing itself, whenever it touches
upon the deeper motives of her nature, in stark formulas of speech, that
blind and confound her; the spinster sister talking kindly, but
commending the tie of her hat-ribbons in the same tone with which she
urges adherence to some cumbrous enunciation of doctrine. And Adele
cherishes her little friendships (most of all with Rose); not alive as
yet to any tenderer and stronger passion that shall engross her, and
make or mar her life; swinging her reticule, as in the days gone by,
under the trees that embower the village street; loving the bloom, the
verdure, the singing of the birds, but with every month now--as she
begins to fathom the abyss of life with her own thought--grown more
serious. It is always thus: the girl we toyed with yesterday with our
inanities of speech is to-morrow, by some sudden reach of womanly
thought, another creature,--out of range, and so alert, that, if we
would conquer her, we must bring up our heaviest siege-trains.