Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Certainly,” assented Kitty, eagerly, “that’s it; that’s just what I was saying; that’s the very reason why girls must have time to make up their minds. You had, I suppose.”

  “Yes, two minutes. Poor Dick was going back to his regiment, and stood with his watch in his hand. I said no, and called after him to correct myself. But, Kitty, if the romance had happened to stop without his saying anything, you wouldn’t have liked that either, would you?”

  “No,” faltered Kitty, “I suppose not.”

  “Well, then, don’t you see? That’s a great point in his favor. How much time did you want, or did he give you?”

  “I said I should answer before we left Quebec,” answered Kitty, with a heavy sigh.

  “Don’t you know what to say now?”

  “I can’t tell. That’s what I want you to help me think out.”

  Mrs. Ellison was silent for a moment before she said, “Well, then, I suppose we shall have to go back to the very beginning.”

  “Yes,” assented Kitty, faintly.

  “You did have a sort of fancy for him the first time you saw him, didn’t you?” asked Mrs. Ellison, coaxingly, while forcing herself to be systematic and coherent, by a mental strain of which no idea can be given.

  “Yes,” said Kitty, yet more faintly, adding, “but I can’t tell just what sort of a fancy it was. I suppose I admired him for being handsome and stylish, and for having such exquisite manners.”

  “Go on,” said Mrs. Ellison. “And after you got acquainted with him?”

  “Why, you know we’ve talked that over once already, Fanny.”

  “Yes, but we oughtn’t to skip anything now,” replied Mrs. Ellison, in a tone of judicial accuracy which made Kitty smile.

  But she quickly became serious again, and said, “Afterwards I couldn’t tell whether to like him or not, or whether he wanted me to. I think he acted very strangely for a person in — love. I used to feel so troubled and oppressed when I was with him. He seemed always to be making himself agreeable under protest.”

  “Perhaps that was just your imagination, Kitty.”

  “Perhaps it was; but it troubled me just the same.”

  “Well, and then?”

  “Well, and then after that day of the Montgomery expedition, he seemed to change altogether, and to try always to be pleasant, and to do everything he could to make me like him. I don’t know how to account for it. Ever since then he’s been extremely careful of me, and behaved — of course without knowing it — as if I belonged to him already. Or maybe I’ve imagined that too. It’s very hard to tell what has really happened the last two weeks.”

  Kitty was silent, and Mrs. Ellison did not speak at once. Presently she asked, “Was his acting as if you belonged to him disagreeable?”

  “I can’t tell. I think it was rather presuming. I don’t know why he did it.”

  “Do you respect him?” demanded Mrs. Ellison.

  “Why, Fanny, I’ve always told you that I did respect some things in him.”

  Mrs. Ellison had the facts before her, and it rested upon her to sum them up, and do something with them. She rose to a sitting posture, and confronted her task.

  “Well, Kitty, I’ll tell you: I don’t really know what to think. But I can say this: if you liked him at first, and then didn’t like him, and afterwards he made himself more agreeable, and you didn’t mind his behaving as if you belonged to him, and you respected him, but after all didn’t think him fascinating—”

  “He is fascinating — in a kind of way. He was, from the beginning. In a story his cold, snubbing, putting-down ways would have been perfectly fascinating.”

  “Then why didn’t you take him?”

  “Because,” answered Kitty, between laughing and crying, “it isn’t a story, and I don’t know whether I like him.”

  “But do you think you might get to like him?”

  “I don’t know. His asking brings back all the doubts I ever had of him, and that I’ve been forgetting the past two weeks. I can’t tell whether I like him or not. If I did, shouldn’t I trust him more?”

  “Well, whether you are in love or not, I’ll tell you what you are, Kitty,” cried Mrs. Ellison, provoked with her indecision, and yet relieved that the worst, whatever it was, was postponed thereby for a day or two.

  “What!”

  “You’re—”

  But at this important juncture the colonel came lounging in, and Kitty glided out of the room.

  “Richard,” said Mrs. Ellison, seriously, and in a tone implying that it was the colonel’s fault, as usual, “you know what has happened, I suppose.”

  “No, my dear, I don’t; but no matter: I will presently, I dare say.”

  “O, I wish for once you wouldn’t be so flippant. Mr. Arbuton has offered himself to Kitty.”

  Colonel Ellison gave a quick, sharp whistle of amazement, but trusted himself to nothing more articulate.

  “Yes,” said his wife, responding to the whistle, “and it makes me perfectly wretched.”

  “Why, I thought you liked him.”

  “I didn’t like him; but I thought it would be an excellent thing for Kitty.”

  “And won’t it?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t know?”

  “No.”

  The colonel was silent, while Mrs. Ellison stated the case in full, and its pending uncertainty. Then he exclaimed vehemently, as if his amazement had been growing upon him, “This is the most astonishing thing in the world! Who would ever have dreamt of that young iceberg being in love?”

  “Haven’t I told you all along he was?”

  “O yes, certainly; but that might be taken either way, you know. You would discover the tender passion in the eye of a potato.”

  “Colonel Ellison,” said Fanny with sternness, “why do you suppose he’s been hanging about us for the last four weeks? Why should he have stayed in Quebec? Do you think he pitied me, or found you so very agreeable?”

  “Well, I thought he found us just tolerable, and was interested in the place.”

  Mrs. Ellison made no direct reply to this pitiable speech, but looked a scorn which, happily for the colonel, the darkness hid. Presently she said that bats did not express the blindness of men, for any bat could have seen what was going on.

  “Why,” remarked the colonel, “I did have a momentary suspicion that day of the Montgomery business; they both looked very confused, when I saw them at the end of that street, and neither of them had anything to say; but that was accounted for by what you told me afterwards about his adventure. At the time I didn’t pay much attention to the matter. The idea of his being in love seemed too ridiculous.”

  “Was it ridiculous for you to be in love with me?”

  “No; and yet I can’t praise my condition for its wisdom, Fanny.”

  “Yes! that’s like men. As soon as one of them is safely married, he thinks all the love-making in the world has been done forever, and he can’t conceive of two young people taking a fancy to each other.”

  “That’s something so, Fanny. But granting — for the sake of argument merely — that Boston has been asking Kitty to marry him, and she doesn’t know whether she wants him, what are we to do about it? I don’t like him well enough to plead his cause; do you? When does Kitty think she’ll be able to make up her mind?”

  “She’s to let him know before we leave.”

  The colonel laughed. “And so he’s to hang about here on uncertainties for two whole days! That is rather rough on him. Fanny, what made you so eager for this business?”

  “Eager? I wasn’t eager.”

  “Well, then, — reluctantly acquiescent?”

  “Why, she’s so literary and that.”

  “And what?”

  “How insulting! — Intellectual, and so on; and I thought she would be just fit to live in a place where everybody is literary and intellectual. That is, I thought that, if I thought anything.”

  “Well,�
� said the colonel, “you may have been right on the whole, but I don’t think Kitty is showing any particular force of mind, just now, that would fit her to live in Boston. My opinion is, that it’s ridiculous for her to keep him in suspense. She might as well answer him first as last. She’s putting herself under a kind of obligation by her delay. I’ll talk to her—”

  “If you do, you’ll kill her. You don’t know how she’s wrought up about it.”

  “O well, I’ll be careful of her sensibilities. It’s my duty to speak with her. I’m here in the place of a parent. Besides, don’t I know Kitty? I’ve almost brought her up.”

  “Maybe you’re right. You’re all so queer that perhaps you’re right. Only, do be careful, Richard. You must approach the matter very delicately, — indirectly, you know. Girls are different, remember, from young men, and you mustn’t be blunt. Do maneuver a little, for once in your life.”

  “All right, Fanny; you needn’t be afraid of my doing anything awkward or sudden. I’ll go to her room pretty soon, after she is quieted down, and have a good, calm old fatherly conversation with her.”

  The colonel was spared this errand; for Kitty had left some of her things on Fanny’s table, and now came back for them with a lamp in her hand. Her averted face showed the marks of weeping; the corners of her firm-set lips were downward bent, as if some resolution which she had taken were very painful. This the anxious Fanny saw; and she made a gesture to the colonel which any woman would have understood to enjoin silence, or, at least, the utmost caution and tenderness of speech. The colonel summoned his finesse and said, cheerily, “Well, Kitty, what’s Boston been saying to you?”

  Mrs. Ellison fell back upon her sofa as if shot, and placed her hand over her face.

  Kitty seemed not to hear her cousin. Having gathered up her things, she bent an unmoved face and an unseeing gaze full upon him, and glided from the room without a word.

  “Well, upon my soul,” cried the colonel, “this is a pleasant, nightmarish, sleep-walking, Lady-Macbethish little transaction. Confound it, Fanny this comes of your wanting me to maneuver. If you’d let me come straight at the subject, — like a man—”

  “Please, Richard, don’t say anything more now,” pleaded Mrs. Ellison in a broken voice. “You can’t help it, I know; and I must do the best I can, under the circumstances. Do go away for a little while, darling! O dear!”

  As for Kitty, when she had got out of the room in that phantasmal fashion, she dimly recalled, through the mists of her own trouble, the colonel’s dismay at her so glooming upon him, and began to think that she had used poor Dick more tragically than she need, and so began to laugh softly to herself; but while she stood there at the entry window a moment, laughing in the moonlight, that made her lamp-flame thin, and painted her face with its pale lustre, Mr. Arbuton came down the attic stairway. He was not a man of quick fancies; but to one of even slower imagination and of calmer mood, she might very well have seemed unreal, the creature of a dream, fantastic, intangible, insensible, arch, not wholly without some touch of the malign. In his heart he groaned over her beauty as if she were lost to him forever in this elfish transfiguration.

  “Miss Ellison!” he scarcely more than whispered.

  “You ought not to speak to me now,” she answered, gravely.

  “I know it; but I could not help it. For heaven’s sake, do not let it tell against me. I wished to ask if I should not see you to-morrow; to beg that all might go on as had been planned, and as if nothing had been said to-day.”

  “It’ll be very strange,” said Kitty. “My cousins know everything now. How can we meet before them!”

  “I’m not going away without an answer, and we can’t remain here without meeting. It will be less strange if we let everything take its course.”

  “Well.”

  “Thanks.”

  He looked strangely humbled, but even more bewildered than humbled.

  She listened while he descended the steps, unbolted the street door, and closed it behind him. Then she passed out of the moonlight into her own room, whose close-curtained space the lamp filled with its ruddy glow, and revealed her again, no malicious sprite, but a very puzzled, conscientious, anxious young girl.

  Of one thing, at least, she was clear. It had all come about through misunderstanding, through his taking her to be something that she was not; for she was certain that Mr. Arbuton was of too worldly a spirit to choose, if he had known, a girl of such origin and lot as she was only too proud to own. The deception must have begun with dress; and she determined that her first stroke for truth and sincerity should be most sublimely made in the return of Fanny’s things, and a rigid fidelity to her own dresses. “Besides,” she could not help reflecting, “my travelling-suit will be just the thing for a picnic.” And here, if the cynical reader of another sex is disposed to sneer at the method of her self-devotion, I am sure that women, at least, will allow it was most natural and highly proper that in this great moment she should first think of dress, upon which so great consequences hang in matters of the heart Who — to be honest for once, O vain and conceited men! — can deny that the cut, the color, the texture, the stylish set of dresses, has not had everything to do with the rapture of love’s young dream? Are not certain bits of lace and knots of ribbon as much a part of it as any smile or sidelong glance of them all? And hath not the long experience of the fair taught them that artful dress is half the virtue of their spells? Full well they know it; and when Kitty resolved to profit no longer by Fanny’s wardrobe, she had won the hardest part of the battle in behalf of perfect truth towards Mr. Arbuton. She did not, indeed, stop with this, but lay awake, devising schemes by which she should disabuse him of his errors about her, and persuade him that she was no wife for him.

  XII.

  THE PICNIC AT CHATEAU-BIGOT.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Ellison, who had slipped into Kitty’s room, in the morning, to do her back hair with some advantages of light which her own chamber lacked, “it’ll be no crazier than the rest of the performance; and if you and he can stand it, I’m sure that we’ve no reason to complain.”

  “Why, I don’t see how it’s to be helped, Fanny. He’s asked it; and I’m rather glad he has, for I should have hated to have the conventional headache that keeps young ladies from being seen; and at any rate I don’t understand how the day could be passed more sensibly than just as we originally planned to spend it. I can make up my mind a great deal better with him than away from him. But I think there never was a more ridiculous situation: now that the high tragedy has faded out of it, and the serious part is coming, it makes me laugh. Poor Mr. Arbuton will feel all day that he is under my mercilessly critical eye, and that he mustn’t do this and he mustn’t say that, for fear of me; and he can’t run away, for he’s promised to wait patiently for my decision. It’s a most inglorious position for him, but I don’t think of anything to do about it. I could say no at once, but he’d rather not.”

  “What have you got that dress on for?” asked Mrs. Ellison, abruptly.

  “Because I’m not going to wear your things any more, Fanny. It’s a case of conscience. I feel like a guilty creature, being courted in another’s clothes; and I don’t know but it’s for a kind of punishment of my deceit that I can’t realize this affair as I ought, or my part in it. I keep feeling, the whole time, as if it were somebody else, and I have an absurd kind of other person’s interest in it.”

  Mrs. Ellison essayed some reply, but was met by Kitty’s steadfast resolution, and in the end did not prevail in so much as a ribbon for her hair.

  It was not till well into the forenoon that the preparations for the picnic were complete and the four set off together in one carriage. In the strong need that was on each of them to make the best of the affair, the colonel’s unconsciousness might have been a little overdone, but Mrs. Ellison’s demeanor was sublimely successful. The situation gave full play to her peculiar genius, and you could not have said that any act of hers failed to contribute
to the perfection of her design, that any tone or speech was too highly colored. Mr. Arbuton, of whom she took possession, and who knew that she knew all, felt that he had never done justice to her, and seconded her efforts with something like cordial admiration; while Kitty, with certain grateful looks and aversions of the face, paid an ardent homage to her strokes of tact, and after a few miserable moments, in which her nightlong trouble gnawed at her heart, began, in spite of herself, to enjoy the humor of the situation.

  It is a lovely road out to Château-Bigot. First you drive through the ancient suburbs of the Lower Town, and then you mount the smooth, hard highway, between pretty country-houses, toward the village of Charlesbourg, while Quebec shows, to your casual backward-glance, like a wondrous painted scene, with the spires and lofty roofs of the Upper Town, and the long, irregular wall wandering on the verge of the cliff; then the thronging gables and chimneys of St. Roch, and again many spires and convent walls; lastly the shipping in the St. Charles, which, in one direction, runs, a narrowing gleam, up into its valley, and in the other widens into the broad light of the St. Lawrence. Quiet, elmy spaces of meadow land stretch between the suburban mansions and the village of Charlesbourg, where the driver reassured himself as to his route from the group of idlers on the platform before the church. Then he struck off on a country road, and presently turned from this again into a lane that grew rougher and rougher, till at last it lapsed to a mere cart-track among the woods, where the rich, strong odors of the pine, and of the wild herbs bruised under the wheels, filled the air. A peasant and his black-eyed, open-mouthed boy were cutting withes to bind hay at the side of the track, and the latter consented to show the strangers to the château from a point beyond which they could not go with the carriage. There the small habitant and the driver took up the picnic-baskets, and led the way through pathless growths of underbrush to a stream, so swift that it is said never to freeze, so deeply sprung that the summer never drinks it dry. A screen of water-growths bordered it; and when this was passed, a wide open space revealed itself, with the ruin of the château in the midst.