 | VII.
LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM. A chance acquaintance |  |
7. VII.
LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM.
WITH the two young people whose days now
lapsed away together, it could not be said
that Monday varied much from Tuesday,
or ten o'clock from half past three; they were not
always certain what day of the week it was, and
sometimes they fancied that a thing which happened
in the morning had taken place yesterday
afternoon.
But whatever it was, and however uncertain
in time and character their slight adventure was
to themselves, Mrs. Ellison secured all possible
knowledge of it from Kitty. Since it was her misfortune
that promoted it, she considered herself a
martyr to Kitty's acquaintance with Mr. Arbuton,
and believed that she had the best claim to any
gossip that could come of it. She lounged upon
her sofa, and listened with a patience superior to
the maiden caprice with which her inquisition was
sometimes met; for if that delayed her satisfaction
it also employed her arts, and the final triumph
of getting everything out of Kitty afforded
young girl was ready enough to speak, for she was
glad to have the light of a worldlier mind and a
greater experience than her own on Mr. Arbuton's
character: if Mrs. Ellison was not the wisest head,
still talking him over was at least a relief from
thinking him over; and then, at the end of the
ends, when were ever two women averse to talk
of a man?
She commonly sought Fanny's sofa when she
returned from her rambles through the city, and
gave a sufficiently strict account of what had happened.
This was done light-heartedly and with
touches of burlesque and extravagance at first;
but the reports grew presently to have a more
serious tone, and latterly Kitty had been so absent
at times that she would fall into a puzzled silence
in the midst of her narration; or else she would
meet a long procession of skilfully marshalled
questions with a flippancy that no one but a martyr
could have suffered. But Mrs. Ellison bore
all and would have borne much more in that
cause. Baffled at one point, she turned to another,
and the sum of her researches was often a
clearer perception of Kitty's state of mind than
the young girl herself possessed. For her, indeed,
the whole affair was full of mystery and misgiving.
“Our acquaintance has the charm of novelty
every time we meet,” she said once, when pressed
hard by Mrs. Ellison. “We are growing better
strangers, Mr. Arbuton and I. By and by, some
morning, we shall not know each other by sight.
I can barely recognize him now, though I thought
I knew him pretty well once. I want you to understand
that I speak as an unbiassed spectator,
Fanny.”
“O Kitty! how can you accuse me of trying to
pry into your affairs!” cries injured Mrs. Ellison,
and settles herself in a more comfortable posture
for listening.
“I don't accuse you of anything. I 'm sure
you 've a right to know everything about me.
Only, I want you really to know.”
“Yes, dear,” says the matron, with hypocritical
meekness.
“Well,” resumes Kitty, “there are things that
puzzle me more and more about him, — things
that used to amuse me at first, because I did n't
actually believe that they could be, and that I
felt like defying afterwards. But now I can't bear
up against them. They frighten me, and seem
to deny me the right to be what I believe I
am.”
“I don't understand you, Kitty.”
“Why, you 've seen how it is with us at
home, and how Uncle Jack has brought us up.
We never had a rule for anything except to do
what was right, and to be careful of the rights of
others.”
“Well.”
“Well, Mr. Arbuton seems to have lived in a
world where everything is regulated by some rigid
law that it would be death to break. Then, you
know, at home we are always talking about people,
and discussing them; but we always talk of each
person for what he is in himself, and I always
thought a person could refine himself if he tried,
and was sincere, and not conceited. But he seems
to judge people according to their origin and
locality and calling, and to believe that all refinement
must come from just such training and circumstances
as his own. Without exactly saying
so, he puts everything else quite out of the
question. He does n't appear to dream that there
can be any different opinion. He tramples upon
all that I have been taught to believe; and though
I cling the closer to my idols, I can't help, now
and then, trying myself by his criterions; and
then I find myself wanting in every civilized trait,
and my whole life coarse and poor, and all my
associations hopelessly degraded. I think his
even my little experience would prove them false;
but then, they are his, and I can't reconcile them
with what I see is good in him.”
Kitty spoke with half-averted face where she
sat beside one of the front windows, looking absently
out on the distant line of violet hills beyond
Charlesbourg, and now and then lifting her
glove from her lap and letting it drop again.
“Kitty,” said Mrs. Ellison in reply to her difficulties,
“you ought n't to sit against a light like
that. It makes your profile quite black to any
one back in the room.”
“O well, Fanny, I 'm not black in reality.”
“Yes, but a young lady ought always to think
how she is looking. Suppose some one was to
come in.”
“Dick 's the only one likely to come in just
now, and he would n't mind it. But if you like it
better, I 'll come and sit by you,” said Kitty, and
took her place beside the sofa.
Her hat was in her hand, her sack on her arm;
the fatigue of a recent walk gave her a soft pallor,
and languor of face and attitude. Mrs. Ellison
admired her pretty looks with a generous regret
that they should be wasted on herself, and then
asked, “Where were you this afternoon?”
“O, we went to the Hotel Dieu, for one thing,
and afterwards we looked into the court-yard of the
convent; and there another of his pleasant little
traits came out, — a way he has of always putting
you in the wrong even when it 's a matter of no
consequence any way, and there need n't be any
right or wrong about it. I remembered the place
because Mrs. March, you know, showed us a rose
that one of the nuns in the hospital gave her, and
I tried to tell Mr. Arbuton about it, and he graciously
took it as if poor Mrs. March had made an
advance towards his acquaintance. I do wish you
could see what a lovely place that court-yard is,
Fanny. It 's so strange that such a thing should
be right there, in the heart of this crowded city;
but there it was, with its peasant cottage on one
side, and its long, low barns on the other, and
those wide-horned Canadian cows munching at the
racks of hay outside, and pigeons and chickens all
about among their feet — ”
“Yes, yes; never mind all that, Kitty. You
know I hate nature. Go on about Mr. Arbuton,”
said Mrs. Ellison, who did not mean a sarcasm.
“It looked like a farm-yard in a picture, far out
in the country somewhere,” resumed Kitty; “and
Mr. Arbuton did it the honor to say it was just
like Normandy.”
“Kitty!”
“He did, indeed, Fanny; and the cows did n't
go down on their knees out of gratitude, either.
Well, off on the right were the hospital buildings
climbing up, you know, with their stone walls and
steep roofs, and windows dropped about over them,
like our convent here; and there was an artist
there, sketching it all; he had such a brown,
pleasant face, with a little black mustache and
imperial, and such gay black eyes that nobody
could help falling in love with him; and he was
talking in such a free-and-easy way with the lazy
workmen and women overlooking him. He jotted
down a little image of the Virgin in a niche on
the wall, and one of the people called out, — Mr.
Arbuton was translating, — `Look there! with
one touch he 's made our Blessed Lady.' `O,' says
the painter, `that 's nothing; with three touches
I can make the entire Holy Family.' And they
all laughed; and that little joke, you know, won
my heart, — I don't hear many jokes from Mr.
Arbuton; — and so I said what a blessed life a
painter's must be, for it would give you a right to
be a vagrant, and you could wander through the
world, seeing everything that was lovely and funny,
and nobody could blame you; and I wondered
everybody who had the chance did n't learn to
people had to have something more than the
chance to learn before they could sketch, and that
most of them were an affliction with their sketchbooks,
and he had seen too much of the sad effects
of drawing from casts. And he put me in the
wrong, as he always does. Don't you see? I
did n't want to learn drawing; I wanted to be a
painter, and go about sketching beautiful old convents,
and sit on camp-stools on pleasant afternoons,
and joke with people. Of course, he
could n't understand that. But I know the artist
could. O Fanny, if it had only been the
painter whose arm I took that first day on the
boat, instead of Mr. Arbuton! But the worst of
it is, he is making a hypocrite of me, and a cowardly,
unnatural girl. I wanted to go nearer and
look at the painter's sketch; but I was ashamed
to say I'd never seen a real artist's sketch before,
and I 'm getting to be ashamed, or to seem
ashamed, of a great many innocent things. He
has a way of not seeming to think it possible that
any one he associates with can differ from him.
And I do differ from him. I differ from him as
much as my whole past life differs from his; I
know I 'm just the kind of production that he disapproves
of, and that I 'm altogether irregular and
funny to have him talking to me as if I must have
the sympathy of a rich girl with his ideas, it 's
provoking, too, and it 's very bad for me. Up to
the present moment, Fanny, if you want to know,
that 's the principal effect of Mr. Arbuton on me.
I 'm being gradually snubbed and scared into
treasons, stratagems, and spoiles.”
Mrs. Ellison did not find all this so very grievous,
for she was one of those women who like a
snub from the superior sex, if it does not involve
a slight to their beauty or their power of pleasing.
But she thought it best not to enter into the
question, and merely said, “But surely, Kitty,
there are a great many things in Mr. Arbuton that
you must respect.”
“Respect? O, yes, indeed! But respect is n't
just the thing for one who seems to consider
himself sacred. Say revere, Fanny; say revere!”
Kitty had risen from her chair, but Mrs. Ellison
waved her again to her seat with an imploring gesture.
“Don't go, Kitty; I'm not half done with
you yet. You must tell me something more.
You 've stirred me up so, now. I know you don't
always have such disagreeable times. You 've
often come home quite happy. What do you generally
find to talk about? Do tell me some particulars
for once.”
“Why, little topics come up, you know. But
sometimes we don't talk at all, because I don't
like to say what I think or feel, for fear I should
be thinking or feeling something vulgar. Mr.
Arbuton is rather a blight upon conversation in
that way. He makes you doubtful whether there
is n't something a little common in breathing
and the circulation of the blood, and whether it
would n't be true refinement to stop them.”
“Stuff, Kitty! He 's very cultivated, is n't he?
Don't you talk about books? He 's read everything,
I suppose.”
“O yes, he 's read enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Only sometimes it seems to me as
if he had n't read because he loved it, but because
he thought it due to himself. But maybe I 'm
mistaken. I could imagine a delicate poem shutting
up half its sweetness from his cold, cold scrutiny,
— if you will excuse the floweriness of the
idea.”
“Why, Kitty! don't you think he 's refined?
I 'm sure, I think he 's a very refined person.”
“He 's a very elaborated person. But I don't
think it would make much difference to him what
our opinion of him was. His own good opinion
would be quite enough.”
“Is he — is he — always agreeable?”
“I thought we were discussing his mind, Fanny.
I don't know that I feel like enlarging upon his
manners,” said Kitty, slyly.
“But surely, Kitty,” said the matron, with an
air of argument, “there 's some connection between
his mind and his manners.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I don't think there 's much
between his heart and his manners. They seem
to have been put on him instead of having come
out of him. He 's very well trained, and nine
times out of ten he 's so exquisitely polite that it 's
wonderful; but the tenth time he may say something
so rude that you can't believe it.”
“Then you like him nine times out of ten.”
“I did n't say that. But for the tenth time,
it 's certain, his training does n't hold out, and he
seems to have nothing natural to fall back upon.
But you can believe that, if he knew he 'd been
disagreeable, he 'd be sorry for it.”
“Why, then, Kitty, how can you say that there 's
no connection between his heart and manners?
This very thing proves that they come from his
heart. Don't be illogical, Kitty,” said Mrs. Ellison,
and her nerves added, sotto voce, “if you are
so abominably provoking!”
“O,” responded the young girl, with the kind of
laughing matter, “I did n't say he 'd be sorry
for you! Perhaps he would; but he 'd be certain
to be sorry for himself. It 's with his politeness
as it is with his reading; he seems to consider it
something that 's due to himself as a gentleman to
treat people well; and it is n't in the least as if he
cared for them. He would n't like to fail in such a
point.”
“But, Kitty, is n't that to his credit?”
“Maybe. I don't say. If I knew more about
the world, perhaps I should admire it. But now,
you see,” — and here Kitty's laugh grew more
natural, and she gave a subtle caricature of Mr.
Arbuton's air and tone as she spoke, — “I can't
help feeling that it 's a little — vulgar.”
Mrs. Ellison could not quite make out how much
Kitty really meant of what she had said. She
gasped once or twice for argument; then she sat
up, and beat the sofa-pillows vengefully in composing
herself anew, and finally, “Well, Kitty, I 'm
sure I don't know what to make of it all,” she said
with a sigh.
“Why, we 're not obliged to make anything of
it, Fanny, there 's that comfort,” replied Kitty;
and then there was a silence, while she brooded
over the whole affair of her acquaintance with Mr.
more pleasant or hopeful light. It had begun like
a romance; she had pleased her fancy, if not her
heart, with the poetry of it; but at last she felt
exiled and strange in his presence. She had no
right to a different result, even through any deep
feeling in the matter; but while she owned, with
her half-sad, half-comical consciousness, that she
had been tacitly claiming and expecting too much,
she softly pitied herself, with a kind of impersonal
compassion, as if it were some other girl whose
pretty dream had been broken. Its ruin involved
the loss of another ideal; for she was aware that
there had been gradually rising in her mind an
image of Boston, different alike from the holy place
of her childhood, the sacred city of the antislavery
heroes and martyrs, and from the jesting, easy,
sympathetic Boston of Mr. and Mrs. March. This
new Boston with which Mr. Arbuton inspired her
was a Boston of mysterious prejudices and lofty
reservations; a Boston of high and difficult tastes,
that found its social ideal in the Old World, and
that shrank from contact with the reality of this;
a Boston as alien as Europe to her simple experiences,
and that seemed to be proud only of the
things that were unlike other American things; a
Boston that would rather perish by fire and sword
and reluctant Boston, dissatisfied with the
rest of the hemisphere, and gelidly self-satisfied in
so far as it was not in the least the Boston of her
fond preconceptions. It was, doubtless, no more
the real Boston we know and love, than either of
the others; and it perplexed her more than it
need, even if it had not been mere phantasm. It
made her suspicious of Mr. Arbuton's behavior
towards her, and observant of little things that
might very well have otherwise escaped her. The
bantering humor, the light-hearted trust and self-reliance
with which she had once met him deserted
her, and only returned fitfully when some accident
called her out of herself, and made her forget the
differences that she now too plainly saw in their
ways of thinking and feeling. It was a greater and
greater effort to place herself in sympathy with
him; she relaxed into a languid self-contempt, as
if she had been playing a part, when she succeeded.
“Sometimes, Fanny,” she said, now, after a long
pause, speaking in behalf of that other girl she
had been thinking of, “it seems to me as if Mr.
Arbuton were all gloves and slim umbrella, — the
mere husk of well-dressed culture and good manners.
His looks do promise everything; but O
dear me! I should be sorry for any one that was
with such a man, and taking a fancy to him! I
suppose she never would quite believe but that he
must somehow be what she first thought him, and
she would go down to her grave believing that she
had failed to understand him. What a curious
story it would make!”
“Then, why don't you write it, Kitty?” asked
Mrs. Ellison. “No one could do it better.”
Kitty flushed quickly; then she smiled: “O, I
don't think I could do it at all. It would n't be
a very easy story to work out. Perhaps he might
never do anything positively disagreeable enough
to make anybody condemn him. The only way
you could show his character would be to have
her do and say hateful things to him, when she
could n't help it, and then repent of it, while he
was impassively perfect through everything. And
perhaps, after all, he might be regarded by some
stupid people as the injured one. Well, Mr. Arbuton
has been very polite to us, I 'm sure, Fanny,”
she said after another pause, as she rose from her
chair, “and maybe I 'm unjust to him. I beg his
pardon of you; and I wish,” she added with a
dull disappointment quite her own, and a pang of
surprise at words that seemed to utter themselves,
“that he would go away.”
“Why, Kitty, I 'm shocked,” said Mrs. Ellison,
rising from her cushions.
“Yes; so am I, Fanny.”
“Are you really tired of him, then?”
Kitty did not answer, but turned away her face
a little, where she stood beside the chair in which
she had been sitting.
Mrs. Ellison put out her hand towards her.
“Kitty, come here,” she said with imperious tenderness.
“No, I won't, Fanny,” answered the young girl,
in a trembling voice. She raised the glove that
she had been nervously swinging back and forth,
and bit hard upon the button of it. “I don't
know whether I 'm tired of him, — though he is n't
a person to rest one a great deal, — but I 'm tired
of it. I 'm perplexed and troubled the whole time,
and I don't see any end to it. Yes, I wish he
would go away! Yes, he is tiresome. What is he
staying here for? If he thinks himself so much
better than all of us, I wonder he troubles himself
with our company. It 's quite time for him
to go. No, Fanny, no,” cried Kitty with a little
broken laugh, still rejecting the outstretched hand,
“I 'll be flat in private, if you please.” And dashing
her hand across her eyes, she flitted out
of the room. At the door she turned and said,
Fanny.”
“No indeed, dear; you 're just overwrought.”
“For I really wish he 'd go.”
But it was on this very day that Mr. Arbuton
found it harder than ever to renew his resolution
of quitting Quebec, and cutting short at once his
acquaintance with these people. He had been
pledging himself to this in some form every day,
and every morrow had melted his resolution away.
Whatever was his opinion of Colonel and Mrs.
Ellison, it is certain that, if he considered Kitty
merely in relation to the present, he could not
have said how, by being different, she could have
been better than she was. He perceived a charm,
that would be recognized anywhere, in her manner,
though it was not of his world; her fresh pleasure
in all she saw, though he did not know how to
respond to it, was very winning; he respected what
he thought the good sense running through her
transports; he wondered at the culture she had
somewhere, somehow got; and he was so good as
to find that her literary enthusiasms had nothing
offensive, but were as pretty and naïve as a girl's
love of flowers. Moreover, he approved of some
personal attributes of hers: a low, gentle voice,
tender long-lashed eyes; a trick of drooping
one in the other's palm; a serene repose of face;
a light and eager laugh. There was nothing so
novel in those traits, and in different combination
he had seen them a thousand times; yet in her
they strangely wrought upon his fancy. She had
that soft, kittenish way with her which invites a
caressing patronage, but, as he learned, she had
also the kittenish equipment for resenting over-condescension;
and she never took him half so
much as when she showed the high spirit that was
in her, and defied him most.
For here and now, it was all well enough; but
he had a future to which he owed much, and a
conscience that would not leave him at rest. The
fascination of meeting her so familiarly under the
same roof, the sorcery of the constant sight of her,
were becoming too much; it would not do on any
account; for his own sake he must put an end to
it. But from hour to hour he lingered upon his
unenforced resolve. The passing days, that brought
him doubts in which he shuddered at the great difference
between himself and her and her people,
brought him also moments of blissful forgetfulness
in which his misgivings were lost in the sweetness
of her looks, or the young grace of her motions.
Passing, the days rebuked his delay in vain; a
and still he had waited for fate to part him and
his folly. But now at last he would go; and in
the evening, after his cigar on Durham Terrace,
he knocked at Mrs. Ellison's door to say that on
the day after to-morrow he should push on to the
White Mountains.
He found the Ellisons talking over an expedition
for the next morning, in which he was also to take
part. Mrs. Ellison had already borne her full
share in the preparation; for, being always at
hand there in her room, and having nothing to
do, she had been almost a willing victim to the colonel's
passion for information at second-hand, and
had probably come to know more than any other
American woman of Arnold's expedition against
Quebec in 1775. She knew why the attack was
planned, and with what prodigious hazard and
heroical toil and endurance it was carried out;
how the dauntless little army of riflemen cut their
way through the untrodden forests of Maine and
Canada, and beleaguered the gray old fortress on
her rock till the red autumn faded into winter, and,
on the last bitter night of the year, flung themselves
against her defences, and fell back, leaving half
their number captive, Montgomery dead, and Arnold
wounded, but haplessly destined to survive.
“Yes,” said the colonel, “considering the age in
which they lived, and their total lack of modern
improvements, mental, moral, and physical, we
must acknowledge that they did pretty well. It
was n't on a very large scale; but I don't see how
they could have been braver, if every man had
been multiplied by ten thousand. In fact, as it 's
going to be all the same thing a hundred years
from now, I don't know but I 'd as soon be one of
the men that tried to take Quebec as one of the
men that did take Atlanta. Of course, for the
present, and on account of my afflicted family, Mr.
Arbuton, I 'm willing to be what and where I am;
but just see what those fellows did.” And the
colonel drew from his glowing memory of Mrs.
Ellison's facts a brave historical picture of Arnold's
expedition. “And now we 're going to-morrow
morning to look up the scene of the attack on
the 31st of December. Kitty, sing something.”
At another time Kitty might have hesitated;
but that evening she was so at rest about Mr.
Arbuton, so sure she cared nothing for his liking
or disliking anything she did, that she sat
down at the piano, and sang a number of songs,
which I suppose were as unworthy the cultivated
ear as any he had heard. But though they were
given with an untrained voice and a touch as little
pleased. The simple-hearted courage of the performance
would alone have made it charming;
and Mr. Arbuton had no reason to ask himself
how he should like it in Boston, if he were married,
and should hear it from his wife there. Yet
when a young man looks at a young girl or listens
to her, a thousand vagaries possess his mind, —
formless imaginations, lawless fancies. The question
that presented itself remotely, like pain in
a dream, dissolved in the ripple of the singer's
voice, and left his revery the more luxuriously
untroubled for having been.
He remembered, after saying good-night, that
he had forgotten something: it was to tell them
he was going away.
| VII.
LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM. A chance acquaintance | |