University of Virginia Library

4. IV.
MR. ARBUTON'S INSPIRATION.

THE next morning, when Mr. Arbuton
awoke, he found a clear light upon the
world that he had left wrapped in fog at
midnight. A heavy gale was blowing, and the
wide river was running in seas that made the boat
stagger in her course, and now and then struck
her bows with a force that sent the spray from
their seething tops into the faces of the people on
the promenade. The sun, out of rifts of the
breaking clouds, launched broad splendors across
the villages and farms of the level landscape and
the crests and hollows of the waves; and a certain
joy of the air penetrated to the guarded
consciousness of Mr. Arbuton. Involuntarily he
looked about for the people he meant to have
nothing more to do with, that he might appeal to
the sympathies of one of them, at least, in his
sense of such an admirable morning. But a great
many passengers had come on board, during the
night, at Murray Bay, where the brief season was
ending, and their number hid the Ellisons from

him. When he went to breakfast, he found some
one had taken his seat near them, and they did
not notice him as he passed by in search of another
chair. Kitty and the colonel were at table alone,
and they both wore preoccupied faces. After breakfast
he sought them out and asked for Mrs.
Ellison, who had shared in most of the excitements
of the day before, helping herself about
with a pretty limp, and who certainly had not, as
her husband phrased it, kept any of the meals
waiting.

“Why,” said the colonel, “I 'm afraid her
ankle 's worse this morning, and that we 'll have
to lie by at Quebec for a few days, at any rate.”

Mr. Arbuton heard this sad news with a cheerful
aspect unaccountable in one who was concerned
at Mrs. Ellison's misfortune. He smiled, when he
ought to have looked pensive, and he laughed at
the colonel's joke when the latter added, “Of
course, this is a great hardship for my cousin, who
hates Quebec, and wants to get home to Eriecreek
as soon as possible.”

Kitty promised to bear her trials with firmness,
and Mr. Arbuton said, not very consequently, as
she thought, “I had been planning to spend a few
days in Quebec, myself, and I shall have the opportunity
of inquiring about Mrs. Ellison's convalescence.

In fact,” he added, turning to the
colonel, “I hope you 'll let me be of service to you
in getting to a hotel.”

And when the boat landed, Mr. Arbuton actually
busied himself in finding a carriage and putting
the various Ellison wraps and bags into it. Then
he helped to support Mrs. Ellison ashore, and to
lift her to the best place. He raised his hat, and
had good-morning on his tongue, when the astonished
colonel called out, “Why, the deuce!
You 're going to ride up with us!”

Mr. Arbuton thought he had better get another
carriage; he should incommode Mrs. Ellison; but
Mrs. Ellison protested that he would not at all;
and, to cut the matter short, he mounted to the
colonel's side. It was another stroke of fate.

At the hotel they found a line of people reaching
half-way down the outer steps from the inside
of the office.

“Hallo! what 's this?” asked the colonel of
the last man in the queue.

“O, it 's a little procession to the hotel register!
We 've been three quarters of an hour in passing
a given point,” said the man, who was plainly a
fellow-citizen.

“And have n't got by yet,” said the colonel,
taking to the speaker. “Then the house is full?”

“Well, no; they have n't begun to throw them
out of the window.”

“His humor is degenerating, Dick,” said Kitty;
and “Had n't you better go inside and inquire?”
asked Mrs. Ellison. It was part of the Ellison
travelling joke for her thus to prompt the colonel
in his duty.

“I 'm glad you mentioned it, Fanny. I was
just going to drive off in despair.” The colonel
vanished within doors, and after long delay came
out flushed, but not with triumph. “On the express
condition that I have ladies with me, one an
invalid, I am promised a room on the fifth floor
some time during the day. They tell me the other
hotel is crammed and it 's no use to go there.”

Mrs. Ellison was ready to weep, and for the first
time since her accident she harbored some bitterness
against Mr. Arbuton. They all sat silent, and
the colonel on the sidewalk silently wiped his
brow.

Mr. Arbuton, in the poverty of his invention,
wondered if there was not some lodging-house
where they could find shelter.

“Of course there is,” cried Mrs. Ellison, beaming
upon her hero, and calling Kitty's attention
to his ingenuity by a pressure with her well foot.
“Richard, we must look up a boarding-house.”

“Do you know of any good boarding-houses?”
asked the colonel of the driver, mechanically.

“Plenty,” answered the man.

“Well, drive us to twenty or thirty first-class
ones,” commanded the colonel; and the search
began.

The colonel first asked prices and looked at
rooms, and if he pronounced any apartment unsuitable,
Kitty was despatched by Mrs. Ellison to
view it and refute him. As often as she confirmed
him, Mrs. Ellison was sure that they were both
too fastidious, and they never turned away from a
door but they closed the gates of paradise upon
that afflicted lady. She began to believe that they
should find no place whatever, when at last they
stopped before a portal so unboarding-house-like in
all outward signs, that she maintained it was of no
use to ring, and imparted so much of her distrust
to the colonel that, after ringing, he prefaced his
demand for rooms with an apology for supposing
that there were rooms to let there. Then, after
looking at them, he returned to the carriage and
reported that the whole affair was perfect, and that
he should look no farther. Mrs. Ellison replied
that she never could trust his judgment, he was so
careless. Kitty inspected the premises, and came
back in a transport that alarmed the worst fears

of Mrs. Ellison. She was sure that they had better
look farther, she knew there were plenty of nicer
places. Even if the rooms were nice and the situation
pleasant, she was certain that there must be
some drawbacks which they did not know of yet.
Whereupon her husband lifted her from the carriage,
and bore her, without reply or comment of
any kind, into the house.

Throughout the search Mr. Arbuton had been
making up his mind that he would part with
his friends as soon as they found lodgings, give
the day to Quebec, and take the evening train
for Gorham, thus escaping the annoyances of a
crowded hotel, and ending at once an acquaintance
which he ought never to have let go so far.
As long as the Ellisons were without shelter, he
felt that it was due to himself not to abandon
them. But even now that they were happily
housed, had he done all that nobility obliged? He
stood irresolute beside the carriage.

“Won't you come up and see where we live?”
asked Kitty, hospitably.

“I shall be very glad,” said Mr. Arbuton.

“My dear fellow,” said the colonel, in the parlor,
“I did n't engage a room for you. I supposed
you 'd rather take your chances at the hotel.”

“O, I 'm going away to-night.”

“Why, that 's a pity!”

“Yes, I 've no fancy for a cot-bed in the hotel
parlor. But I don't quite like to leave you here,
after bringing this calamity upon you.”

“O, don't mention that! I was the only one to
blame. We shall get on splendidly here.”

Mr. Arbuton suffered a vague disappointment.
At the bottom of his heart was a formless hope that
he might in some way be necessary to the Ellisons
in their adversity; or if not that, then that something
might entangle him further and compel his
stay. But they seemed quite equal in themselves
to the situation; they were in far more comfortable
quarters than they could have hoped for, and
plainly should want for nothing; Fortune put on
a smiling face, and bade him go free of them. He
fancied it a mocking smile, though, as he stood an
instant silently weighing one thing against another.
The colonel was patiently waiting his motion;
Mrs. Ellison sat watching him from the sofa;
Kitty moved about the room with averted face,
— a pretty domestic presence, a household priestess
ordering the temporary Penates. Mr. Arbuton
opened his lips to say farewell, but a god spoke
through them, — inconsequently, as the gods for
the most part do, saying, “Besides, I suppose
you 've got all the rooms here.”

“O, as to that I don't know,” answered the
colonel, not recognizing the language of inspiration,
“let 's ask.” Kitty knocked a photograph-book
off the table, and Mrs. Ellison said, “Why,
Kitty!” But nothing more was spoken till the
landlady came. She had another room, but doubted
if it would answer. It was in the attic, and was a
back room, though it had a pleasant outlook. Mr.
Arbuton had no doubt that it would do very well
for the day or two he was going to stay, and took
it hastily, without going to look at it. He had his
valise carried up at once, and then he went to the
post-office to see if he had any letters, offering to
ask also for Colonel Ellison.

Kitty stole off to explore the chamber given her
at the rear of the house; that is to say, she
opened the window looking out on what their hostess
told her was the garden of the Ursuline Convent,
and stood there in a mute transport. A
black cross rose in the midst, and all about this
wandered the paths and alleys of the garden,
through clumps of lilac-bushes and among the
spires of hollyhocks. The grounds were enclosed
by high walls in part, and in part by the group of
the convent edifices, built of gray stone, high
gabled, and topped by dormer-windowed steep roofs
of tin, which, under the high morning sun, lay

an expanse of keenest splendor, while many a
grateful shadow dappled the full-foliaged garden
below. Two slim, tall poplars stood against the
gable of the chapel, and shot their tops above its
roof, and under a porch near them two nuns sat
motionless in the sun, black-robed, with black veils
falling over their shoulders, and their white faces
lost in the white linen that draped them from
breast to crown. Their hands lay quiet in their
laps, and they seemed unconscious of the other
nuns walking in the garden-paths with little
children, their pupils, and answering their laughter
from time to time with voices as simple and
innocent as their own. Kitty looked down upon
them all with a swelling heart. They were but
figures in a beautiful picture of something old
and poetical; but she loved them, and pitied
them, and was most happy in them, the same as
if they had been real. It could not be that they
and she were in the same world: she must be
dreaming over a book in Charley's room at Eriecreek.
She shaded her eyes for a better look,
when the noonday gun boomed from the citadel;
the bell upon the chapel jangled harshly, and those
strange maskers, those quaint black birds with
white breasts and faces, flocked indoors. At the
same time a small dog under her window howled
dolorously at the jangling of the bell; and Kitty,
with an impartial joy, turned from the pensive
romance of the convent garden to the mild comedy
of the scene to which his woful note attracted
her. When he had uttered his anguish, he relapsed
into the quietest small French dog that ever was,
and lay down near a large, tranquil cat, whom neither
the bell nor he had been able to stir from her
slumbers in the sun; a peasant-like old man kept
on sawing wood, and a little child stood still amidst
the larkspurs and marigolds of a tiny garden, while
over the flower-pots on the low window-sill of the
neighboring house to which it belonged, a young,
motherly face gazed peacefully out. The great
extent of the convent grounds had left this poor
garden scarce breathing-space for its humble
blooms; with the low paling fence that separated
it from the adjoining house-yards it looked like a
toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show,
and in its way it was as quaintly unreal to the
young girl as the nunnery itself.

When she saw it first, the city's walls and other
warlike ostentations had taken her imagination
with the historic grandeur of Quebec; but the
fascination deepened now that she was admitted,
as it were, to the religious heart and the domestic
privacy of the famous old town. She was romantic,

as most good young girls are; and she had the
same pleasure in the strangeness of the things
about her as she would have felt in the keeping of
a charming story. To Fanny's “Well, Kitty, I suppose
all this just suits you,” when she had returned
to the little parlor where the sufferer lay, she answered
with a sigh of irrepressible content, “O
yes! could anything be more beautiful?” and her
enraptured eye dwelt upon the low ceilings, the
deep, wide chimneys eloquent of the mighty fires
with which they must roar in winter, the French
windows with their curious and clumsy fastenings,
and every little detail that made the place alien
and precious.

Fanny broke into a laugh at the visionary absence
in her face.

“Do you think the place is good enough for
your hero and heroine?” asked she, slyly; for
Kitty had one of those family reputes, so hard to
survive, for childish attempts of her own in the
world of fiction where so great part of her life had
been passed; and Mrs. Ellison, who was as unliterary
a soul as ever breathed, admired her with
the heartiness which unimaginative people often
feel for their idealizing friends, and believed that
she was always deep in the mysteries of some plot.

“O, I don't know,” Kitty answered with a little

color, “about heroes and heroines; but I 'd like
to live here, myself. Yes,” she continued, rather
to herself than to her listener, “I do believe this
is what I was made for. I 've always wanted to
live amongst old things, in a stone house with dormer-windows.
Why, there is n't a single dormer-window
in Eriecreek, nor even a brick house, let
alone a stone one. O yes, indeed! I was meant
for an old country.”

“Well, then, Kitty, I don't see what you 're to
do but to marry East and live East; or else find a
rich husband, and get him to take you to Europe
to live.”

“Yes; or get him to come and live in Quebec.
That 's all I 'd ask, and he need n't be a very rich
man, for that.”

“Why, you poor child, what sort of husband
could you get to settle down in this dead old
place?”

“O, I suppose some kind of artist or literary
man.”

This was not Mrs. Ellison's notion of the kind of
husband who was to realize for Kitty her fancy for
life in an old country; but she was content to let
the matter rest for the present, and, in a serene
thankfulness to the power that had brought two
marriageable young creatures together beneath the

same roof, and under her own observance, she composed
herself among the sofa-cushions, from which
she meant to conduct the campaign against Mr.
Arbuton with relentless vigor.

“Well,” she said, “it won't be fair if you are
not happy in this world, Kitty, you ask so little of
it”; while Kitty turned to the window overlooking
the street, and lost herself in the drama of the
passing figures below. They were new, and yet
oddly familiar, for she had long known them in the
realm of romance. The peasant-women who went
by, in hats of felt or straw, some on foot with
baskets, and some in their light market-carts, were
all, in their wrinkled and crooked age or their
fresh-faced, strong-limbed youth, her friends since
childhood in many a tale of France or Germany;
and the black-robed priests, who mixed with the
passers on the narrow wooden sidewalk, and
now and then courteously gave way, or lifted their
wide-rimmed hats in a grave, smiling salutation,
were more recent acquaintances, but not less intimate.
They were out of old romances about Italy
and Spain, in which she was very learned; and
this butcher's boy, tilting along through the crowd
with a half-staggering run, was from any one of
Dickens's stories, and she divined that the four-armed
wooden trough on his shoulder was the

butcher's tray, which figures in every novelist's
description of a London street-crowd. There were
many other types, as French mothers of families
with market-baskets on their arms; very pretty
French school-girls with books under their arms;
wild-looking country boys with red raspberries in
birch-bark measures; and quiet gliding nuns with
white hoods and downcast faces: each of whom
she unerringly relegated to an appropriate corner
of her world of unreality. A young, mild-faced,
spectacled Anglican curate she did not give a
moment's pause, but rushed him instantly through
the whole series of Anthony Trollope's novels,
which dull books, I am sorry to say, she had read,
and liked, every one; and then she began to find
various people astray out of Thackeray. The trig
corporal, with the little visorless cap worn so
jauntily, the light stick carried in one hand, and
the broad-sealed official document in the other, had
also, in his breast-pocket, one of those brief, infrequent
missives which Lieutenant Osborne used to
send to poor Amelia; a tall, awkward officer did
duty for Major Dobbin; and when a very pretty
lady driving a pony carriage, with a footman in
livery on the little perch behind her, drew rein
beside the pavement, and a handsome young captain
in a splendid uniform saluted her and began
talking with her in a languid, affected way, it was
Osborne recreant to the thought of his betrothed,
one of whose tender letters he kept twirling in his
fingers while he talked.

Most of the people whom she saw passing had
letters or papers, and, in fact, they were coming
from the post-office, where the noonday mails had
just been opened. So she went on turning substance
into shadow, — unless, indeed, flesh and
blood is the illusion, — and, as I am bound to own,
catching at very slight pretexts in many cases
for the exercise of her sorcery, when her eye fell
upon a gentleman at a little distance. At the
same moment he raised his eyes from a letter at
which he had been glancing, and ran them along
the row of houses opposite, till they rested on the
window at which she stood. Then he smiled and
lifted his hat, and, with a start, she recognized Mr.
Arbuton, while a certain chill struck to her heart
through the tumult she felt there. Till he saw
her there had been such a cold reserve and hauteur
in his bearing, that the trepidation which she
had felt about him at times, the day before, and
which had worn quite away under the events of
the morning, was renewed again, and the aspect,
in which he had been so strange that she did
not know him, seemed the only one that he had

ever worn. This effect lasted till Mr. Arbuton
could find his way to her, and place in her eager
hand a letter from the girls and Dr. Ellison.
She forgot it then, and vanished till she read
her letter.