University of Virginia Library

9. IX.
MR. ARBUTON'S INFATUATION.

KITTY went as usual to Mrs. Ellison's
room after her walk, but she lapsed
into a deep abstraction as she sat down
beside the sofa.

“What are you smiling at?” asked Mrs. Ellison,
after briefly supporting her abstraction.

“Was I smiling?” asked Kitty, beginning to
laugh. “I did n't know it.”

“What has happened so very funny?”

“Why, I don't know whether it 's so very funny
or not. I believe it is n't funny at all.”

“Then what makes you laugh?”

“I don't know. Was I — ”

“Now don't ask me if you were laughing, Kitty.
It 's a little too much. You can talk or not, as
you choose; but I don't like to be turned into
ridicule.”

“O Fanny, how can you? I was thinking about
something very different. But I don't see how I
can tell you, without putting Mr. Arbuton in a
ludicrous light, and it is n't quite fair.”

“You 're very careful of him, all at once,” said
Mrs. Ellison. “You did n't seem disposed to spare
him yesterday so much. I don't understand this
sudden conversion.”

Kitty responded with a fit of outrageous laughter.
“Now I see I must tell you,” she said, and
rapidly recounted Mr. Arbuton's adventure.

“Why, I never knew anything so cool and brave,
Fanny, and I admired him more than ever I did;
but then I could n't help seeing the other side of it,
you know.”

“What other side? I don't know.”

“Well, you 'd have had to laugh yourself, if
you 'd seen the lordly way he dismissed the poor
people who had come running out of their houses
to help him, and his stateliness in rewarding that
little cooper, and his heroic parting from his cherished
overcoat, — which of course he can't replace
in Quebec, — and his absent-minded politeness in
taking my hand under his arm, and marching off
with me so magnificently. But the worst thing,
Fanny,” — and she bowed herself under a tempest
of long-pent mirth, — “the worst thing was, that
the iron, you know, was the cooper's branding-iron,
and I had a vision of the dog carrying about
on his nose, as long as he lived, the monogram
that marks the cooper's casks as holding a certain
number of gallons — ”

“Kitty, don't be — sacrilegious!” cried Mrs.
Ellison.

“No, I'm not,” she retorted, gasping and panting.
“I never respected Mr. Arbuton so much,
and you say yourself I have n't shown myself so
careful of him before. But I never was so glad to
see Dick in my life, and to have some excuse for
laughing. I did n't dare to speak to Mr. Arbuton
about it, for he could n't, if he had tried, have let
me laugh it out and be done with it. I trudged
demurely along by his side, and neither of us mentioned
the matter to Dick,” she concluded breathlessly.
Then, “I don't know why I should tell
you now; it seems wicked and cruel,” she said
penitently, almost pensively.

Mrs. Ellison had not been amused. She said,
“Well, Kitty, in some girls I should say it was
quite heartless to do as you 've done.”

“It 's heartless in me, Fanny; and you need n't
say such a thing. I 'm sure I did n't utter a syllable
to wound him, and just before that he 'd
been very disagreeable, and I forgave him because
I thought he was mortified. And you need n't
say that I 've no feeling”; and thereupon she
rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin's,
“Fanny,” she cried, vehemently, “I have been
heartless. I 'm afraid I have n't shown any sympathy

or consideration. I 'm afraid I must have
seemed dreadfully callous and hard. I ought n't
to have thought of anything but the danger to
him; and it seems to me now I scarcely thought
of that at all. O, how rude it was of me to see
anything funny in it! What can I do?”

“Don't go crazy, at any rate, Kitty. He
does n't know that you 've been laughing about
him. You need n't do anything.”

“O yes, I need. He does n't know that I 've
been laughing about him to you; but, don't you
see, I laughed when we met Dick; and what can
he think of that?”

“He just thinks you were nervous, I suppose.”

“O, do you suppose he does, Fanny? O, I wish
I could believe that! O, I 'm so horribly ashamed
of myself! And here yesterday I was criticising
him for being unfeeling, and now I 've been a
thousand times worse than he has ever been, or
ever could be! O dear, dear, dear!”

“Kitty! hush! exclaimed Mrs. Ellison; “you
run on like a wild thing, and you 're driving me
distracted, by not being like yourself.”

“O, it 's very well for you to be so calm; but if
you did n't know what to do, you would n't.”

“Yes, I would; I don't, and I am.”

“But what shall I do?” And Kitty plucked
away the hands which Fanny had been holding
and wrung them. “I 'll tell you what I can do,”
she suddenly added, while a gleam of relief dawned
upon her face: “I can bear all his disagreeable
ways after this, as long as he stays, and not say
anything back. Yes, I 'll put up with everything.
I 'll be as meek! He may patronize me and snub
me and put me in the wrong as much as he
pleases. And then he won't be approaching my
behavior. O Fanny!”

Upon this, Mrs. Ellison said that she was going
to give her a good scolding for her nonsense, and
pulled her down and kissed her, and said that she
had not done anything, and was, nevertheless, consoled
at her resolve to expiate her offence by respecting
thenceforward Mr. Arbuton's foibles and
prejudices.

It is not certain how far Kitty would have succeeded
in her good purposes: these things, so
easily conceived, are not of such facile execution;
she passed a sleepless night of good resolutions
and schemes of reparation; but, fortunately for
her, Mr. Arbuton's foibles and prejudices seemed to
have fallen into a strange abeyance. The change
that had come upon him that day remained; he
was still Mr. Arbuton, but with a difference.

He could not undo his whole inherited and educated
being, and perhaps no chance could deeply
affect it without destroying the man. He continued
hopelessly superior to Colonel and Mrs.
Ellison; but it is not easy to love a woman and
not seek, at least before marriage, to please those
dear to her. Mr. Arbuton had contested his passion
at every advance; he had firmly set his face
against the fancy that, at the beginning, invested
this girl with a charm; he had only done the
things afterwards that mere civilization required;
he had suffered torments of doubt concerning her
fitness for himself and his place in society; he was
not sure yet that her unknown relations were not
horribly vulgar people; even yet, he was almost
wholly ignorant of the circumstances and conditions
of her life. But now he saw her only in
the enrapturing light of his daring for her sake,
of a self-devotion that had seemed to make her his
own; and he behaved toward her with a lover's
self-forgetfulness, — or something like it: say a
perfect tolerance, a tender patience, in which it
would have been hard to detect the lurking shadow
of condescension.

He was fairly domesticated with the family.
Mrs. Ellison's hurt, in spite of her many imprudences,
was decidedly better, and sometimes she

made a ceremony of being helped down from her
room to dinner; but she always had tea beside her
sofa, and he with the others drank it there. Few
hours of the day passed in which they did not
meet in that easy relation which establishes itself
among people sojourning in summer idleness under
the same roof. In the morning he saw the young
girl fresh and glad as any flower of the garden
beneath her window, while the sweet abstraction
of her maiden dreams yet hovered in her eyes.
At night he sat with her beside the lamp whose
light, illuming a little world within, shut out the
great world outside, and seemed to be the soft
effulgence of her presence, as she sewed, or knit,
or read, — a heavenly spirit of home. Sometimes
he heard her talking with her cousin, or lightly
laughing after he had said good night; once, when
he woke, she seemed to be looking out of her window
across the moonlight in the Ursulines' Garden
while she sang a fragment of song. To meet her
on the stairs or in the narrow entries; or to encounter
her at the doors, and make way for her to
pass with a jest and blush and flutter; to sit down
at table with her three times a day, — was a
potent witchery. There was a rapture in her
shawl flung over the back of a chair; her gloves,
lying light as fallen leaves on the table, and keeping
the shape of her hands, were full of winning
character; and all the more unaccountably they
touched his heart because they had a certain careless,
sweet shabbiness about the finger-tips.

He found himself hanging upon her desultory
talk with Fanny about the set of things and the
agreement of colors. There was always more or
less of this talk going on, whatever the main topic
was, for continual question arose in the minds of one
or other lady concerning those adaptations of Mrs.
Ellison's finery to the exigencies of Kitty's daily
life. They pleased their innocent hearts with the
secrecy of the affair, which, in the concealments it
required, the sudden difficulties it presented, and
the guiltless equivocations it inspired, had the
excitement of intrigue. Nothing could have been
more to the mind of Mrs. Ellison than to deck
Kitty for this perpetual masquerade; and, since
the things were very pretty, and Kitty was a girl in
every motion of her being, I do not see how anything
could have delighted her more than to wear
them. Their talk effervesced with the delicious
consciousness that he could not dream of what was
going on, and bubbled over with mysterious jests
and laughter, which sometimes he feared to be at
his expense, and so joined in, and made them
laugh the more at his misconception. He went

and came among them at will; he had but to tap
at Mrs. Ellison's door, and some voice of unaffected
cordiality welcomed him in; he had but to ask,
and Kitty was frankly ready for any of those
strolls about Quebec in which most of their waking
hours were dreamed away.

The gray Lady of the North cast her spell about
them, — the freshness of her mornings, the still
heat of her middays, the slant, pensive radiance
of her afternoons, and the pale splendor of her
auroral nights. Never was city so faithfully explored;
never did city so abound in objects of
interest; for Kitty's love of the place was boundless,
and his love for her was inevitable friendship
with this adoptive patriotism.

“I did n't suppose you Western people cared
for these things,” he once said; “I thought your
minds were set on things new and square.”

“But how could you think so?” replied Kitty,
tolerantly. “It 's because we have so many new
and square things that we like the old crooked
ones. I do believe I should enjoy Europe even
better than you. There 's a forsaken farm-house
near Eriecreek, dropping to pieces amongst its wild-grown
sweetbriers and quince-bushes, that I used
to think a wonder of antiquity because it was built
in 1815. Can't you imagine how I must feel in

a city like this, that was founded nearly three
centuries ago, and has suffered so many sieges and
captures, and looks like pictures of those beautiful
old towns I can never see?”

“O, perhaps you will see them some day!” he
said, touched by her fervor.

“I don't ask it at present: Quebec 's enough.
I 'm in love with the place. I wish I never had
to leave it. There is n't a crook, or a turn, or a
tin-roof, or a dormer-window, or a gray stone in it
that is n't precious.”

Mr. Arbuton laughed. “Well, you shall be
sovereign lady of Quebec for me. Shall we have
the English garrison turned out?”

“No; not unless you can bring back Montcalm's
men to take their places.”

This might be as they sauntered out of one of
the city gates, and strayed through the Lower
Town till they should chance upon some poor, bare-interiored
church, with a few humble worshippers
adoring their Saint, with his lamps alight before
his picture; or as they passed some high convent-wall,
and caught the strange, metallic clang of the
nuns' voices singing their hymns within. Sometimes
they whiled away the hours on the Esplanade,
breathing its pensive sentiment of neglect
and incipient decay, and pacing up and down over

the turf athwart the slim shadows of the poplars;
or, with comfortable indifference to the local observances,
sat in talk on the carriage of one of the
burly, uncared-for guns, while the spider wove his
web across the mortar's mouth, and the grass nodded
above the tumbled pyramids of shot, and the
children raced up and down, and the nursery-maids
were wooed of the dapper sergeants, and the red-coated
sentry loitered lazily to and fro before his
box. On the days of the music, they listened to
the band in the Governor's Garden, and watched
the fine world of the old capital in flirtation with
the blond-whiskered officers; and on pleasant nights
they mingled with the citizen throng that filled the
Durham Terrace, while the river shaped itself in
the lights of its shipping, and the Lower Town,
with its lamps, lay, like a nether firmament, two
hundred feet below them, and Point Levis glittered
and sparkled on the thither shore, and in the
northern sky the aurora throbbed in swift pulsations
of violet and crimson. They liked to climb
the Break-Neck Steps at Prescott Gate, dropping
from the Upper to the Lower Town, which reminded
Mr. Arbuton of Naples and Trieste, and
took Kitty with the unassociated picturesqueness
of their odd shops and taverns, and their lofty
windows green with house-plants. They would
stop and look up at the geraniums and fuchsias,
and fall a thinking of far different things, and the
friendly, unbusy people would come to their doors
and look up with them. They recognized the
handsome, blond young man, and the pretty, gray-eyed
girl; for people in Quebec have time to note
strangers who linger there, and Kitty and Mr. Arbuton
had come to be well-known figures, different
from the fleeting tourists on their rounds; and,
indeed, as sojourners they themselves perceived
their poetic distinction from mere birds of passage.

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 Long-fellow,
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 aniable 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.