Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Indoors they resorted much to the little entry-window looking out on the Ursulines’ Garden. Two chairs stood confronted there, and it was hard for either of the young people to pass them without sinking a moment into one of them, and this appeared always to charm another presence into the opposite chair. There they often lingered in the soft forenoons, talking in desultory phrase of things far and near, or watching, in long silences, the nuns pacing up and down in the garden below, and waiting for the pensive, slender nun, and the stout, jolly nun whom Kitty had adopted, and whom she had gayly interpreted to him as an allegory of Life in their quaint inseparableness; and they played that the influence of one or other nun was in the ascendant, according as their own talk was gay or sad. In their relation, people are not so different from children; they like the same thing over and over again; they like it the better the less it is in itself.

  At times Kitty would come with a book in her hand (one finger shut in to keep the place), — some latest novel, or a pirated edition of Longfellow, recreantly purchased at a Quebec bookstore; and then Mr. Arbuton must ask to see it; and he read romance or poetry to her by the hour. He showed to as much advantage as most men do in the serious follies of wooing; and an influence which he could not defy, or would not, shaped him to all the sweet, absurd demands of the affair. From time to time, recollecting himself, and trying to look consequences in the face, he gently turned the talk upon Eriecreek, and endeavored to possess himself of some intelligible image of the place, and of Kitty’s home and friends. Even then, the present was so fair and full of content, that his thoughts, when they reverted to the future, no longer met the obstacles that had made him recoil from it before. Whatever her past had been, he could find some way to weaken the ties that bound her to it; a year or two of Europe would leave no trace of Eriecreek; without effort of his, her life would adapt itself to his own, and cease to be a part of the lives of those people there; again and again his amiable imaginations — they were scarcely intents — accomplished themselves in many a swift, fugitive revery, while the days went by, and the shadow of the ivy in the window at which they sat fell, in moonlight and sunlight, upon Kitty’s cheeks, and the fuchsia kissed her hair with its purple and crimson blossom.

  X.

  MR. ARBUTON SPEAKS.

  Mrs. Ellison was almost well; she had already been shopping twice in the Rue Fabrique, and her recovery was now chiefly retarded by the dress-maker’s delays in making up a silk too precious to be risked in the piece with the customs officers, at the frontier. Moreover, although the colonel was beginning to chafe, she was not loath to linger yet a few days for the sake of an affair to which her suffering had been a willing sacrifice. In return for her indefatigable self-devotion, Kitty had lately done very little. She ungratefully shrunk more and more from those confidences to which her cousin’s speeches covertly invited; she openly resisted open attempts upon her knowledge of facts. If she was not prepared to confess everything to Fanny, it was perhaps because it was all so very little, or because a young girl has not, or ought not to have, a mind in certain matters, or else knows it not, till it is asked her by the one first authorized to learn it. The dream in which she lived was flattering and fair; and it wholly contented her imagination while it lulled her consciousness. It moved from phase to phase without the harshness of reality, and was apparently allied neither to the future nor to the past. She herself seemed to have no more fixity or responsibility in it than the heroine of a romance.

  As their last week in Quebec drew to its close, only two or three things remained for them to do, as tourists; and chief among the few unvisited shrines of sentiment was the site of the old Jesuit mission at Sillery.

  “It won’t do not to see that, Kitty,” said Mrs. Ellison, who, as usual, had arranged the details of the excursion, and now announced them. “It’s one of the principal things here, and your Uncle Jack would never be satisfied if you missed it. In fact, it’s a shame to have left it so long. I can’t go with you, for I’m saving up my strength for our picnic at Château-Bigot to-morrow; and I want you, Kitty, to see that the colonel sees everything. I’ve had trouble enough, goodness knows, getting the facts together for him.” This was as Kitty and Mr. Arbuton sat waiting in Mrs. Ellison’s parlor for the delinquent colonel, who had just stepped round to the Hôtel St. Louis and was to be back presently. But the moment of his return passed; a quarter-hour of grace; a half-hour of grim magnanimity, — and still no colonel. Mrs. Ellison began by saying that it was perfectly abominable, and left herself, in a greater extremity, with nothing more forcible to add than that it was too provoking. “It’s getting so late now,” she said at last, “that it’s no use waiting any longer, if you mean to go at all, to-day; and to-day’s the only day you can go. There, you’d better drive on without him. I can’t bear to have you miss it.” And, thus adjured, the younger people rose and went.

  When the high-born Noël Brulart de Sillery, Knight of Malta and courtier of Marie de Medicis, turned from the vanities of this world and became a priest, Canada was the fashionable mission of the day, and the noble neophyte signalized his self-renunciation by giving of his great wealth for the conversion of the Indian heathen. He supplied the Jesuits with money to maintain a religious establishment near Quebec; and the settlement of red Christians took his musical name, which the region still keeps. It became famous at once as the first residence of the Jesuits and the nuns of the Hôtel Dieu, who wrought and suffered for religion there amidst the terrors of pestilence, Iroquois, and winter. It was the scene of miracles and martyrdoms, and marvels of many kinds, and the centre of the missionary efforts among the Indians. Indeed, few events of the picturesque early history of Quebec left it untouched; and it is worthy to be seen, no less for the wild beauty of the spot than for its heroical memories. About a league from the city, where the irregular wall of rock on which Quebec is built recedes from the river, and a grassy space stretches between the tide and the foot of the woody steep, the old mission and the Indian village once stood; and to this day there yet stands the stalwart frame of the first Jesuit Residence, modernized, of course, and turned to secular uses, but firm as of old, and good for a century to come. All round is a world of lumber, and rafts of vast extent cover the face of the waters in the ample cove, — one of many that indent the shore of the St. Lawrence. A careless village straggles along the roadside and the river’s margin; huge lumber-ships are loading for Europe in the stream; a town shines out of the woods on the opposite shore; nothing but a friendly climate is needed to make this one of the most charming scenes the heart could imagine.

  Kitty and Mr. Arbuton drove out towards Sillery by the St. Louis Road, and already the jealous foliage that hides the pretty villas and stately places of that aristocratic suburb was tinged in here and there a bough with autumnal crimson or yellow; in the meadows here and there a vine ran red along the grass; the loath choke-cherries were ripening in the fence corners; the air was full of the pensive jargoning of the crickets and grasshoppers, and all the subtle sentiment of the fading summer. Their hearts were open to every dreamy influence of the time; their driver understood hardly any English, and their talk might safely be made up of those harmless egotisms which young people exchange, — those strains of psychological autobiography which mark advancing intimacy and in which they appear to each other the most uncommon persons that ever lived, and their experiences and emotions and ideas are the more surprisingly unique because exactly alike.

  It seemed a very short league to Sillery when they left the St. Louis Road, and the driver turned his horses’ heads towards the river, down the winding sylvan way that descended to the shore; and they had not so much desire, after all, to explore the site of the old mission. Nevertheless, they got out and visited the little space once occupied by the Jesuit chapel, where its foundations may yet be traced in the grass, and they read the inscription on the monument lately raised by the parish to the memory of the first Jesuit missionary to Canada, who died at Sillery. Then there seemed
nothing more to do but admire the mighty rafts and piles of lumber; but their show of interest in the local celebrity had stirred the pride of Sillery, and a little French boy entered the chapel-yard, and gave Kitty a pamphlet history of the place, for which he would not suffer himself to be paid; and a sweet-faced young Englishwoman came out of the house across the way, and hesitatingly asked if they would not like to see the Jesuit Residence. She led them indoors, and showed them how the ancient edifice had been encased by the modern house, and bade them note, from the deep shelving window-seats, that the stone walls were three feet thick. The rooms were low-ceiled and quaintly shaped, but they borrowed a certain grandeur from this massiveness; and it was easy to figure the priests in black and the nuns in gray in those dim chambers, which now a life so different inhabited. Behind the house was a plot of grass, and thence the wooded hill rose steep.

  “But come up stairs,” said the ardent little hostess to Kitty, when her husband came in, and had civilly welcomed the strangers, “and I’ll show you my own room, that’s as old as any.”

  They left the two men below, and mounted to a large room carpeted and furnished in modern taste. “We had to take down the old staircase,” she continued, “to get our bedstead up,” — a magnificent structure which she plainly thought well worth the sacrifice; and then she pointed out divers remnants of the ancient building. “It’s a queer place to live in; but we’re only here for the summer”; and she went on to explain, with a pretty naïveté, how her husband’s business brought him to Sillery from Quebec in that season. They were descending the stairs, Kitty foremost, as she added, “This is my first housekeeping, you know, and of course it would be strange anywhere; but you can’t think how funny it is here. I suppose,” she said, shyly, but as if her confidences merited some return, while Kitty stepped from the stairway face to face with Mr. Arbuton, who was about to follow them, with the lady’s husband,— “I suppose this is your wedding-journey.”

  A quick alarm flamed through the young girl, and burned out of her glowing cheeks. This pleasant masquerade of hers must look to others like the most intentional love-making between her and Mr. Arbuton, — no dreams either of them, nor figures in a play, nor characters in a romance; nay, on one spectator, at least, it had shed the soft lustre of a honeymoon. How could it be otherwise? Here on this fatal line of wedding-travel, — so common that she remembered Mrs. March half apologized for making it her first tour after marriage, — how could it happen but that two young people together as they were should be taken for bride and bridegroom? Moreover, and worst of all, he must have heard that fatal speech!

  He was pale, if she was flushed, and looked grave, as she fancied; but he passed on up the stairs, and she sat down to wait for his return.

  “I used to notice so many couples from the States when we lived in the city,” continued the hospitable mistress of the house, “but I don’t think they often came out to Sillery. In fact, you’re the only pair that’s come this summer; and so, when you seemed interested about the mission, I thought you wouldn’t mind if I spoke to you, and asked you in to see the house. Most of the Americans stay long enough to visit the citadel, and the Plains of Abraham, and the Falls at Montmorenci, and then they go away. I should think they’d be tired always doing the same things. To be sure, they’re always different people.”

  It was unfair to let her entertainer go on talking for quantity in this way; and Kitty said how glad she was to see the old Residence, and that she should always be grateful to her for asking them in. She did not disabuse her of her error; it cost less to leave it alone; and when Mr. Arbuton reappeared, she took leave of those kind people with a sort of remote enjoyment of the wife’s mistakenness concerning herself. Yet, as the young matron and her husband stood beside the carriage repeating their adieux, she would fain have prolonged the parting forever, so much she dreaded to be left alone with Mr. Arbuton. But, left alone with him, her spirits violently rose; and as they drove along under the shadow of the cliff, she descanted in her liveliest strain upon the various interests of the way; she dwelt on the beauty of the wide, still river, with the ships at anchor in it; she praised the lovely sunset-light on the other shore; she commented lightly on the village, through which they passed, with the open doors and the suppers frying on the great stoves set into the partition-walls of each cleanly home; she made him look at the two great stairways that climb the cliff from the lumber-yards to the Plains of Abraham, and the army of laborers, each with his empty dinner-pail in hand, scaling the once difficult heights on their way home to the suburb of St. Roch; she did whatever she could to keep the talk to herself and yet away from herself. Part of the way the village was French and neat and pleasant, then it grovelled with Irish people, and ceased to be a tolerable theme for discourse; and so at last the silence against which she had battled fell upon them and deepened like a spell that she could not break.

  It would have been better for Mr. Arbuton’s success just then if he had not broken it. But failure was not within his reckoning; for he had so long regarded this young girl de haut en bas, to say it brutally, that he could not imagine she should feel any doubt in accepting him. Moreover, a magnanimous sense of obligation mingled with his confident love, for she must have known that he had overheard that speech at the Residence. Perhaps he let this feeling color his manner, however faintly. He lacked the last fine instinct; he could not forbear; and he spoke while all her nerves and fluttering pulses cried him mercy.

  XI.

  KITTY ANSWERS.

  It was dimmest twilight when Kitty entered Mrs. Ellison’s room and sank down on the first chair in silence.

  “The colonel met a friend at the St. Louis, and forgot about the expedition, Kitty,” said Fanny, “and he only came in half an hour ago. But it’s just as well; I know you’ve had a splendid time. Where’s Mr. Arbuton?”

  Kitty burst into tears.

  “Why, has anything happened to him?” cried Mrs. Ellison, springing towards her.

  “To him? No! What should happen to him?” Kitty demanded with an indignant accent.

  “Well, then, has anything happened to you?”

  “I don’t know if you can call it happening. But I suppose you’ll be satisfied now, Fanny. He’s offered himself to me.” Kitty uttered the last words with a sort of violence, as if since the fact must be stated, she wished it to appear in the sharpest relief.

  “O dear!” said Mrs. Ellison, not so well satisfied as the successful match-maker ought to be. So long as it was a marriage in the abstract, she had never ceased to desire it; but as the actual union of Kitty and this Mr. Arbuton, of whom, really, they knew so little, and of whom, if she searched her heart, she had as little liking as knowledge, it was another affair. Mrs. Ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. “Did you accept him?” she whispered, feebly.

  “Accept him?” repeated Kitty. “No!”

  “O dear!” again sighed Mrs. Ellison, feeling that this was scarcely better, and not daring to ask further.

  “I’m dreadfully perplexed, Fanny,” said Kitty, after waiting for the questions which did not come, “and I wish you’d help me think.”

  “I will, darling. But I don’t know that I’ll be of much use. I begin to think I’m not very good at thinking.”

  Kitty, who longed chiefly to get the situation more distinctly before herself, gave no heed to this confession, but went on to rehearse the whole affair. The twilight lent her its veil; and in the kindly obscurity she gathered courage to face all the facts, and even to find what was droll in them.

  “It was very solemn, of course, and I was frightened; but I tried to keep my wits about me, and
not to say yes, simply because that was the easiest thing. I told him that I didn’t know, — and I don’t; and that I must have time to think, — and I must. He was very ungenerous, and said he had hoped I had already had time to think; and he couldn’t seem to understand, or else I couldn’t very well explain, how it had been with me all along.”

  “He might certainly say you had encouraged him,” Mrs. Ellison remarked, thoughtfully.

  “Encouraged him, Fanny? How can you accuse me of such indelicacy?”

  “Encouraging isn’t indelicacy. The gentlemen have to be encouraged, or of course they’d never have any courage. They’re so timid, naturally.”

  “I don’t think Mr. Arbuton is very timid. He seemed to think that he had only to ask as a matter of form, and I had no business to say anything. What has he ever done for me? And hasn’t he often been intensely disagreeable? He oughtn’t to have spoken just after overhearing what he did. It was horrid to do so. He was very obtuse, too, not to see that girls can’t always be so certain of themselves as men, or, if they are, don’t know they are as soon as they’re asked.”

  “Yes,” interrupted Mrs. Ellison, “that’s the way with girls. I do believe that most of them — when they’re young like you, Kitty — never think of marriage as the end of their flirtations. They’d just like the attentions and the romance to go on forever, and never turn into anything more serious; and they’re not to blame for that, though they do get blamed for it.”