University of Virginia Library

5. V.
MR. ARBUTON MAKES HIMSELF AGREEABLE.

THE first care of Colonel Ellison had been
to call a doctor, and to know the worst
about the sprained ankle, upon which his
plans had fallen lame; and the worst was that it
was not a bad sprain, but Mrs. Ellison, having been
careless of it the day before, had aggravated the
hurt, and she must now have that perfect rest,
which physicians prescribe so recklessly of other interests
and duties, for a week at least, and possibly
two or three.

The colonel was still too much a soldier to be
impatient at the doctor's order, but he was of far
too active a temper to be quiet under it. He
therefore proposed to himself nothing less than
the capture of Quebec in an historical sense, and
even before dinner he began to prepare for the
campaign. He sallied forth, and descended upon
the bookstores wherever he found them lurking,
in whatsoever recess of the Upper or Lower Town,
and returned home laden with guide-books to
Quebec, and monographs upon episodes of local

history, such as are produced in great quantity by
the semi-clerical literary taste of out-of-the-way
Catholic capitals. The colonel (who had gone actively
into business, after leaving the army, at the
close of the war) had always a newspaper somewhere
about him, but he was not a reader of many
books. Of the volumes in the doctor's library, he
had never in former days willingly opened any but
the plays of Shakespeare, and Don Quixote, long
passages of which he knew by heart. He had sometimes
attempted other books, but for the most of
Kitty's favorite authors he professed as frank a
contempt as for the Mound-Builders themselves.
He had read one book of travel, namely, The
Innocents Abroad, which he held to be so good a
book that he need never read anything else about
the countries of which it treated. When he brought
in this extraordinary collection of pamphlets, both
Kitty and Fanny knew what to expect; for the
colonel was as ready to receive literature at second-hand
as to avoid its original sources. He had in
this way picked up a great deal of useful knowledge,
and he was famous for clipping from newspapers
scraps of instructive fact, all of which he
relentlessly remembered. He had already a fair
outline of the local history in his mind, and this
had been deepened and freshened by Dr. Ellison's recent
talk of his historical studies. Moreover, he had
secured in the course of the present journey, from
his wife's and cousin's reading of divers guide-books,
a new store of names and dates, which he desired to
attach to the proper localities with their help.

“Light reading for leisure hours, Fanny,” said
Kitty, looking askance at the colonel's literature
as she sat down near her cousin after dinner.

“Yes; and you start fair, ladies. Start with
Jacques Cartier, ancient mariner of Dieppe, in the
year 1535. No favoritism in this investigation;
no bringing forward of Champlain or Montcalm
prematurely; no running off on subsequent conquests
or other side-issues. Stick to the discovery,
and the names of Jacques Cartier and Donnacona.
Come, do something for an honest living.”

“Who was Donnacona?” demanded Mrs. Ellison,
with indifference.

“That is just what these fascinating little volumes
will tell us. Kitty, read something to your
suffering cousins about Donnacona, — he sounds
uncommonly like an Irishman,” answered the colonel,
establishing himself in an easy-chair; and
Kitty picked up a small sketch of the history of
Quebec, and, opening it, fell into the trance which
came upon her at the touch of a book, and read
on for some pages to herself.

“Well, upon my word,” said the colonel, “I
might as well be reading about Donnacona myself,
for any comfort I get.”

“O Dick, I forgot. I was just looking. Now
I 'm really going to commence.”

“No, not yet,” cried Mrs. Ellison, rising on her
elbow. “Where is Mr. Arbuton?”

“What has he to do with Donnacona, my
dear?”

“Everything. You know he 's stayed on our
account, and I never heard of anything so impolite,
so inhospitable, as offering to read without
him. Go and call him, Richard, do.”

“O, no,” pleaded Kitty, “he won't care about
it. Don't call him, Dick.”

“Why, Kitty, I 'm surprised at you! When
you read so beautifully! You need n't be ashamed,
I 'm sure.”

“I 'm not ashamed; but, at the same time, I
don't want to read to him.”

“Well, call him any way, colonel. He 's in his
room.”

“If you do,” said Kitty, with superfluous dignity,
“I must go away.”

“Very well, Kitty, just as you please. Only I
want Richard to witness that I 'm not to blame if
Mr. Arbuton thinks us unfeeling or neglectful.”

“O, if he does n't say what he thinks, it 'll make
no difference.”

“It seems to me that this is a good deal of fuss
to make about one human being, a mere passing
man and brother of a day, is n't it?” said the
colonel. “Go on with Donnacona, do.”

There came a knock at the door. Kitty leaped
nervously to her feet, and fled out of the room.
But it was only the little French serving-maid
upon some errand which she quickly despatched.

“Well, now what do you think?” asked Mrs.
Ellison.

“Why, I think you 've a surprising knowledge
of French for one who studied it at school. Do
you suppose she understood you?”

“O, nonsense! You know I mean Kitty and
her very queer behavior. Richard, if you moon at
me in that stupid way,” she continued, “I shall
certainly end in an insane asylum. Can't you see
what 's under your very nose?”

“Yes, I can, Fanny,” answered the colonel, “if
anything 's there. But I give you my word, I
don't know any more than millions yet unborn
what you 're driving at.” The colonel took up the
book which Kitty had thrown down, and went to
his room to try to read up Donnacona for himself,
while his wife penitently turned to a pamphlet in

French, which he had bought with the others.
“After all,” she thought, “men will be men”;
and seemed not to find the fact wholly wanting in
consolation.

A few minutes after there was a murmur of
voices in the entry without, at a window looking
upon the convent garden, where it happened to
Mr. Arbuton, descending from his attic chamber,
to find Kitty standing, a pretty shape against the
reflected light of the convent roofs, and amidst a
little greenery of house-plants, tall geraniums, an
overarching ivy, some delicate roses. She had
paused there, on her way from Fanny's to her own
room, and was looking into the garden, where a
pair of silent nuns were pacing up and down the
paths, turning now their backs with the heavy
sable coiffure sweeping their black robes, and now
their still, mask-like faces, set in that stiff framework
of white linen. Sometimes they came so
near that she could distinguish their features, and
imagine an expression that she should know if she
saw them again; and while she stood self-forgetfully
feigning a character for each of them, Mr.
Arbuton spoke to her and took his place at her
side.

“We 're remarkably favored in having this bit
of opera under our windows, Miss Ellison,” he

said, and smiled as Kitty answered, “O, is it really
like an opera? I never saw one, but I could
imagine it must be beautiful,” and they both
looked on in silence a moment, while the nuns
moved, shadow-like, out of the garden, and left it
empty.

Then Mr. Arbuton said something to which
Kitty answered simply, “I 'll see if my cousin
does n't want me,” and presently stood beside Mrs.
Ellison's sofa, a little conscious in color. “Fanny,
Mr. Arbuton has asked me to go and see the
cathedral with him. Do you think it would be
right?”

Mrs. Ellison's triumphant heart rose to her lips.
“Why, you dear, particular, innocent little goose,”
she cried, flinging her arms about Kitty, and kissing
her till the young girl blushed again; “of
course it would! Go! You must n't stay mewed
up in here. I sha' n't be able to go about with
you; and if I can judge by the colonel's breathing,
as he calls it, from the room in there, he won't, at
present. But the idea of your having a question
of propriety!” And indeed it was the first time
Kitty had ever had such a thing, and the remembrance
of it put a kind of constraint upon her, as
she strolled demurely beside Mr. Arbuton towards
the cathedral.

“You must be guide,” said he, “for this is my
first day in Quebec, you know, and you are an old
inhabitant in comparison.”

“I 'll show the way,” she answered, “if you 'll
interpret the sights. I think I must be stranger
to them than you, in spite of my long residence.
Sometimes I 'm afraid that I do only fancy I enjoy
these things, as Mrs. March said, for I 've no
European experiences to contrast them with. I
know that it seems very delightful, though, and
quite like what I should expect in Europe.”

“You 'd expect very little of Europe, then, in
most things; though there 's no disputing that
it 's a very pretty illusion of the Old World.”

A few steps had brought them into the market-square
in front of the cathedral, where a little
belated traffic still lingered in the few old peasant-women
hovering over baskets of such fruits and
vegetables as had long been out of season in the
States, and the housekeepers and serving-maids
cheapening these wares. A sentry moved mechanically
up and down before the high portal of
the Jesuit Barracks, over the arch of which were
still the letters I. H. S. carved long ago upon the
keystone; and the ancient edifice itself, with its
yellow stucco front and its grated windows, had
every right to be a monastery turned barracks in

France or Italy. A row of quaint stone houses —
inns and shops — formed the upper side of the
Square; while the modern buildings of the Rue
Fabrique on the lower side might serve very well
for that show of improvement which deepens the
sentiment of the neighboring antiquity and decay
in Latin towns. As for the cathedral, which faced
the convent from across the Square, it was as cold
and torpid a bit of Renaissance as could be found
in Rome itself. A red-coated soldier or two passed
through the Square; three or four neat little
French policemen lounged about in blue uniforms
and flaring havelocks; some walnut-faced, blue-eyed
old citizens and peasants sat upon the thresholds
of the row of old houses, and gazed dreamily
through the smoke of their pipes at the slight stir
and glitter of shopping about the fine stores of the
Rue Fabrique. An air of serene disoccupation
pervaded the place, with which the occasional riot
of the drivers of the long row of calashes and
carriages in front of the cathedral did not discord.
Whenever a stray American wandered into the
Square, there was a wild flight of these drivers
towards him, and his person was lost to sight
amidst their pantomime. They did not try to
underbid each other, and they were perfectly good-humored;
as soon as he had made his choice, the
rejected multitude returned to their places on the
curbstone, pursuing the successful aspirant with
inscrutable jokes as he drove off, while the horses
went on munching the contents of their leathern
head-bags, and tossing them into the air to shake
down the lurking grains of corn.

“It is like Europe; your friends were right,”
said Mr. Arbuton as they escaped into the cathedral
from one of these friendly onsets. “It 's
quite the atmosphere of foreign travel, and you
ought to be able to realize the feelings of a
tourist.”

A priest was saying mass at one of the side-altars,
assisted by acolytes in their every-day
clothes; and outside of the railing a market-woman,
with a basket of choke-cherries, knelt
among a few other poor people. Presently a
young English couple came in, he with a dashing
India scarf about his hat, and she very stylishly
dressed, who also made their genuflections with
the rest, and then sat down and dropped their
heads in prayer.

“This is like enough Europe, too,” murmured
Mr. Arbuton. “It 's very good North Italy; or
South, for the matter of that.”

“O, is it?” answered Kitty, joyously. “I
thought it must be!” And she added, in that

trustful way of hers: “It 's all very familiar; but
then it seems to me on this journey that I 've
seen a great many things that I know I 've only
read of before”; and so followed Mr. Arbuton in
his tour of the pictures.

She was as ignorant of art as any Roman or
Florentine girl whose life has been passed in the
midst of it; and she believed these mighty fine
pictures, and was puzzled by Mr. Arbuton's behavior
towards them, who was too little imaginative
or too conscientious to make merit for them
out of the things they suggested. He treated the
poor altar-pieces of the Quebec cathedral with the
same harsh indifference he would have shown to
the second-rate paintings of a European gallery;
doubted the Vandyck, and cared nothing for the
Conception, “in the style of Le Brun,” over the
high-altar, though it had the historical interest of
having survived that bombardment of 1759 which
destroyed the church.

Kitty innocently singled out the worst picture
in the place as her favorite, and then was piqued,
and presently frightened, at his cold reluctance
about it. He made her feel that it was very bad,
and that she shared its inferiority, though he said
nothing to that effect. She learned the shame of
not being a connoisseur in a connoisseur's company,

and she perceived more painfully than ever
before that a Bostonian, who had been much in
Europe, might be very uncomfortable to the simple,
untravelled American. Yet, she reminded
herself, the Marches had been in Europe, and
they were Bostonians also; and they did not go
about putting everything under foot; they seemed
to care for everything they saw, and to have a
friendly jest, if not praises, for it. She liked
that; she would have been well enough pleased
to have Mr. Arbuton laugh outright at her picture,
and she could have joined him in it. But
the look, however flattered into an air of polite
question at last, which he had bent upon her,
seemed to outlaw her and condemn her taste in
everything. As they passed out of the cathedral,
she would rather have gone home than continued
the walk as he begged her, if she were not tired, to
do; but this would have been flight, and she was
not a coward. So they sauntered down the Rue
Fabrique, and turned into Palace Street. As they
went by the door of Hotel Musty, her pleasant
friends came again into her mind, and she said,
“This is where we stayed last week, with Mr. and
Mrs. March.”

“Those Boston people?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where they live in Boston?”

“Why, we have their address; but I can't think
of it. I believe somewhere in the southern part of
the city —”

“The South End?”

“O yes, that 's it. Have you ever heard of
them?”

“No.”

“I thought perhaps you might have known Mr.
March. He 's in the insurance business —”

“O no! No, I don't know him,” said Mr. Arbuton,
eagerly. Kitty wondered if there could be
anything wrong with the business repute of Mr.
March, but dismissed the thought as unworthy;
and having perceived that her friends were
snubbed, she said bravely, that they were the
most delightful people she had ever seen, and she
was sorry that they were not still in Quebec. He
shared her regret tacitly, if at all, and they walked
in silence to the gate, whence they strolled down
the winding steet outside the wall into the Lower
Town. But it was not a pleasant ramble for Kitty:
she was in a dim dread of hitherto unseen and unimagined
trespasses against good taste, not only in
pictures and people, but in all life, which, from
having been a very smiling prospect when she set
out with Mr. Arbuton, had suddenly become a

narrow pathway, in which one must pick one's way
with more regard to each step than any general
end. All this was as obscure and uncertain as the
intimations which had produced it, and which, in
words, had really amounted to nothing. But she
felt more and more that in her companion there
was something wholly alien to the influences which
had shaped her; and though she could not know
how much, she was sure of enough to make her
dreary in his presence.

They wandered through the quaintness and
noiseless bustle of the Lower Town thoroughfares,
and came by and by to that old church, the oldest
in Quebec, which was built near two hundred
years ago, in fulfilment of a vow made at the repulse
of Sir William Phipps's attack upon the city,
and further famed for the prophecy of a nun, that
this church should be ruined by the fire in which a
successful attempt of the English was yet to involve
the Lower Town. A painting, which represented
the vision of the nun, perished in the conflagration
which verified it, in 1759; but the walls
of the ancient structure remain to witness this singular
piece of history, which Kitty now glanced at
furtively in one of the colonel's guide-books; since
her ill-fortune with the picture in the cathedral, she
had not openly cared for anything.

At one side of the church there was a booth for
the sale of crockery and tin ware; and there was
an every-day cheerfulness of small business in the
shops and tented stands about the square on which
the church faced, and through which there was
continual passing of heavy burdens from the port,
swift calashes, and slow, country-paced market-carts.

Mr. Arbuton made no motion to enter the
church, and Kitty would not hint the curiosity she
felt to see the interior; and while they lingered a
moment, the door opened, and a peasant came out
with a little coffin in his arms. His eyes were dim
and his face wet with weeping, and he bore the
little coffin tenderly, as if his caress might reach
the dead child within. Behind him she came
who must be the mother, her face deeply hidden
in her veil. Beside the pavement waited a shabby
calash, with a driver half asleep on his perch; and
the man, still clasping his precious burden, clambered
into the vehicle, and laid it upon his knees,
while the woman groped, through her tears and
veil, for the step. Kitty and her companion had
moved reverently aside; but now Mr. Arbuton
came forward, and helped the woman to her place.
She gave him a hoarse, sad “Merci!” and spread
a fold of her shawl fondly over the end of the little

coffin; the drowsy driver whipped up his beast,
and the calash jolted away.

Kitty cast a grateful glance upon Mr. Arbuton,
as they now entered the church, by a common impulse.
On their way towards the high-altar they
passed the rude black bier, with the tallow candles
yet smoking in their black wooden candlesticks. A
few worshippers were dropped here and there in
the vacant seats, and at a principal side-altar knelt
a poor woman praying before a wooden effigy of
the dead Christ that lay in a glass case under the
altar. The image was of life-size, and was painted
to represent life, or rather death, with false hair
and beard, and with the muslin drapery managed
to expose the stigmata: it was stretched upon a
bed strewn with artificial flowers; and it was
dreadful. But the poor soul at her devotions
there prayed to it in an ecstasy of supplication,
flinging her arms asunder with imploring gesture,
clasping her hands and bowing her head upon
them, while her person swayed from side to side
in the abandon of her prayer. Who could she be,
and what was her mighty need of blessing or forgiveness?
As her wont was, Kitty threw her own
soul into the imagined case of the suppliant, the
tragedy of her desire or sorrow. Yet, like all who
suffer sympathetically, she was not without consolations

unknown to the principal; and the waning
afternoon, as it lit up the conventional ugliness of
the old church, and the paraphernalia of its worship,
relieved her emotional self-abandon with a
remote sense of content, so that it may have been
a jealousy for the integrity of her own revery, as
well as a feeling for the poor woman, that made
her tremble lest Mr. Arbuton should in some way
disparage the spectacle. I suppose that her interest
in it was more an æsthetic than a spiritual
one; it embodied to her sight many a scene of
penitence that had played before her fancy, and
I do not know but she would have been willing to
have the suppliant guilty of some dreadful misdeed,
rather than eating meat last Friday, which
was probably her sin. However it was, the ancient
crone before that ghastly idol was precious to her,
and it seemed too great a favor, when at last the
suppliant wiped her eyes, rose trembling from her
knees, and approaching Kitty, stretched towards
her a shaking palm for charity.

It was a touch that transfigured all, and gave
even Mr. Arbuton 's neutrality a light of ideal
character. He bestowed the alms craved of him
in turn, he did not repulse the beldame's blessing;
and Kitty, who was already moved by his kindness
to that poor mourner at the door, forgot that the

earlier part of their walk had been so miserable,
and climbed back to the Upper Town through the
Prescott Gate in greater gayety than she had yet
known that day in his company. I think he had
not done much to make her cheerful; but it is
one of the advantages of a temperament like his,
that very little is expected of it, and that it can
more easily than any other make the human heart
glad; at the least softening in it, the soul frolics
with a craven lightsomeness. For this reason
Kitty was able to enjoy with novel satisfaction the
picturesqueness of Mountain Street, and they both
admired the huge shoulder of rock near the gate,
with its poplars atop, and the battery at the brink,
with the muzzles of the guns thrust forward against
the sky. She could not move him to her pleasure
in the grotesqueness of the circus-bills plastered
half-way up the rock; but he tolerated the levity
with which she commented on them, and her light
sallies upon passing things, and he said nothing to
prevent her reaching home in serene satisfaction.

“Well, Kitty,” said the tenant of the sofa, as
Kitty and the colonel drew up to the table on
which the tea was laid at the sofa-side, “you 've
had a nice walk, have n't you?”

“O yes, very nice. That is, the first part of it
was n't very nice; but after a while we reached

an old church in the Lower Town, — which was
very interesting, — and then we appeared to cheer
up and take a new start.”

“Well,” asked the colonel, “what did you find
so interesting at that old church?”

“Why, there was a baby's funeral; and an old
woman, perfectly crushed by some trouble or other,
praying before an altar, and —”

“It seems to take very little to cheer you up,”
said the colonel. “All you ask of your fellow-beings
is a heart-breaking bereavement and a
religious agony, and you are lively at once. Some
people might require human sacrifices, but you
don't.”

Kitty looked at her cousin a moment with vague
amaze. The grossness of the absurdity flashed
upon her, and she felt as if another touch must
bring the tears. She said nothing; but Mrs. Ellison,
who saw only that she was cut off from her
heart's desire of gossip, came to the rescue.

“Don't answer a word, Kitty, not a single
word; I never heard anything more insulting from
one cousin to another; and I should say it, if I
was brought into a court of justice.

A sudden burst of laughter from Kitty, who hid
her conscious face in her hands, interrupted Mrs.
Ellison's defence.

“Well,” said Mrs. Ellison, piqued at her desertion,
“I hope you understand yourselves.
I don't.” This was Mrs. Ellison's attitude towards
her husband's whole family, who on their
part never had been able to account for the colonel's
choice except as a joke, and sometimes
questioned if he had not perhaps carried the joke
too far; though they loved her too, for a kind of
passionate generosity and sublime, inconsequent
unselfishness about her.

“What I want to know, now,” said the colonel,
as soon as Kitty would let him, “and I 'll try to
put it as politely as I can, is simply this: what
made the first part of your walk so disagreeable?
You did n't see a wedding-party, or a child rescued
from a horrible death, or a man saved from drowning,
or anything of that kind, did you?”

But the colonel would have done better not to
say anything. His wife was made peevish by his
persistence, and the loss of the harmless pleasure
upon which she had counted in the history of
Kitty's walk with Mr. Arbuton. Kitty herself
would not laugh again; in fact she grew serious
and thoughtful, and presently took up a book, and
after that went to her own room, where she stood
awhile at her window, and looked out on the
garden of the Ursulines. The moon hung full orb

in the stainless heaven, and deepened the mystery
of the paths and trees, and lit the silvery roofs and
chimneys of the convent with tender effulgence. A
wandering odor of leaf and flower stole up from the
garden, but she perceived the sweetness, like the
splendor, with veiled senses. She was turning
over in her thought the incidents of her walk, and
trying to make out if anything had really happened,
first to provoke her against Mr. Arbuton,
and then to reconcile her to him. Had he said or
done anything about her favorite painting (which
she hated now), or the Marches, to offend her? Or
if it had been his tone and manner, was his after-conduct
at the old church sufficient penance?
What was it he had done that common humanity
did not require? Was he so very superior to common
humanity, that she should meekly rejoice at
his kindness to the afflicted mother? Why need
she have cared for his forbearance toward the rapt
devotee? She became aware that she was ridiculous.
“Dick was right,” she confessed, “and I will
not let myself be made a goose of”; and when the
bugle at the citadel called the soldiers to rest, and
the harsh chapel-bell bade the nuns go dream of
heaven, she also fell asleep, a smile on her lips and
a light heart in her breast.