 | X.
MR. ARBUTON SPEAKS. A chance acquaintance |  |
10. X.
MR. ARBUTON SPEAKS.
MRS. ELLISON was almost well; she had
already been shopping twice in the Rue
Fabrique, and her recovery was now
chiefly retarded by the dress-maker's delays in
making up a silk too precious to be risked in the
piece with the customs officers, at the frontier.
Moreover, although the colonel was beginning to
chafe, she was not loath to linger yet a few days
for the sake of an affair to which her suffering had
been a willing sacrifice. In return for her indefatigable
self-devotion, Kitty had lately done very
little. She ungratefully shrunk more and more
from those confidences to which her cousin's
speeches covertly invited; she openly resisted open
attempts upon her knowledge of facts. If she was
not prepared to confess enverything to Fanny, it
was perhaps because it was all so very little, or
because a young girl has not, or ought not to have,
a mind in certain matters, or else knows it not,
till it is asked her by the one first authorized to
learn it. The dream in which she lived was flattering
imagination while it lulled her consciousness. It
moved from phase to phase without the harshness
of reality, and was apparently allied neither to the
future nor to the past. She herself seemed to
have no more fixity or responsibility in it than the
heroine of a romance.
As their last week in Quebec drew to its close,
only two or three things remained for them to do,
as tourists; and chief among the few unvisited
shrines of sentiment was the site of the old Jesuit
mission at Sillery.
“It won't do not to see that, Kitty,” said Mrs.
Ellison, who, as usual, had arranged the details of
the excursion, and now announced them. “It 's
one of the principal things here, and your Uncle
Jack would never be satisfied if you missed it. In
fact, it 's a shame to have left it so long. I can't
go with you, for I 'm saving up my strength for
our picnic at Château-Bigot to-morrow; and I
want you, Kitty, to see that the colonel sees everything.
I 've had trouble enough, goodness knows,
getting the facts together for him.” This was as
Kitty and Mr. Arbuton sat waiting in Mrs. Ellison's
parlor for the delinquent colonel, who had
just stepped round to the Hotel St. Louis and was
to be back presently. But the moment of his
of grim magnanimity, — and still no colonel.
Mrs. Ellison began by saying that it was perfectly
abominable, and left herself, in a greater extremity,
with nothing more forcible to add than that it
was too provoking. “It 's getting so late now,”
she said at last, “that it 's no use waiting any
longer, if you mean to go at all, to-day; and to-day
's the only day you can go. There, you 'd
better drive on without him. I can't bear to have
you miss it.” And, thus adjured, the younger
people rose and went.
When the high-born Noël Brulart de Sillery,
Knight of Malta and courtier of Marie de Medicis,
turned from the vanities of this world and became
a priest, Canada was the fashionable mission of the
day, and the noble neophyte signalized his self-renunciation
by giving of his great wealth for the
conversion of the Indian heathen. He supplied
the Jesuits with money to maintain a religious
establisment near Quebec; and the settlement of
red Christians took his musical name, which the
region still keeps. It became famous at once as
the first residence of the Jesuits and the nuns of
the Hôtel Dieu, who wrought and suffered for
religion there amidst the terrors of pestilence,
Iroquois, and winter. It was the scene of miracles
the centre of the missionary efforts among the
Indians. Indeed, few events of the picturesque
early history of Quebec left it untouched; and it
is worthy to be seen, no less for the wild beauty
of the spot than for its heroical memories. About
a league from the city, where the irregular wall
of rock on which Quebec is built recedes from the
river, and a grassy space stretches between the
tide and the foot of the woody steep, the old mission
and the Indian village once stood; and to
this day there yet stands the stalwart frame of the
first Jesuit Residence, modernized, of course, and
turned to secular uses, but firm as of old, and
good for a century to come. All round is a world
of lumber, and rafts of vast extent cover the face
of the waters in the ample cove, — one of many
that indent the shore of the St. Lawrence. A
careless village straggles along the roadside and
the river's margin; huge lumber-ships are loading
for Europe in the stream; a town shines out of
the woods on the opposite shore; nothing but a
friendly climate is needed to make this one of the
most charming scenes the heart could imagine.
Kitty and Mr. Arbuton drove out towards Sillery
by the St. Louis Road, and already the jealous
foliage that hides the pretty villas and stately
here and there a bough with autumnal crimson or
yellow; in the meadows here and there a vine ran
red along the grass; the loath choke-cherries were
ripening in the fence corners; the air was full of
the pensive jargoning of the crickets and grasshoppers,
and all the subtle sentiment of the fading
summer. Their hearts were open to every dreamy
influence of the time; their driver understood
hardly any English, and their talk might safely be
made up of those harmless egotisms which young
people exchange, — those strains of psychological
autobiography which mark advancing intimacy and
in which they appear to each other the most uncommon
persons that ever lived, and their experiences
and emotions and ideas are the more
surprisingly unique because exactly alike.
It seemed a very short league to Sillery when
they left the St. Louis Road, and the driver turned
his horses' heads towards the river, down the
winding sylvan way that descended to the shore;
and they had not so much desire, after all, to
explore the site of the old mission. Nevertheless,
they got out and visited the little space once
occupied by the Jesuit chapel, where its foundations
may yet be traced in the grass, and they read
the inscription on the monument lately raised by
to Canada, who died at Sillery. Then
there seemed nothing more to do but admire the
mighty rafts and piles of lumber; but their show
of interest in the local celebrity had stirred the
pride of Sillery, and a little French boy entered
the chapel-yard, and gave Kitty a pamphlet history
of the place, for which he would not suffer
himself to be paid; and a sweet-faced young
Englishwoman came out of the house across the
way, and hesitatingly asked if they would not like
to see the Jesuit Residence. She led them indoors,
and showed them how the ancient edifice had been
encased by the modern house, and bade them note,
from the deep shelving window-seats, that the
stone walls were three feet thick. The rooms were
low-ceiled and quaintly shaped, but they borrowed
a certain grandeur from this massiveness; and it
was easy to figure the priests in black and the
nuns in gray in those dim chambers, which now a
life so different inhabited. Behind the house was
a plot of grass, and thence the wooded hill rose
steep.
“But come up stairs,” said the ardent little
hostess to Kitty, when her husband came in, and
had civilly welcomed the strangers, “and I 'll
show you my own room, that 's as old as any.”
They left the two men below, and mounted to a
large room carpeted and furnished in modern
taste. “We had to take down the old staircase,”
she continued, “to get our bedstead up,” — a
magnificent structure which she plainly thought
well worth the sacrifice; and then she pointed out
divers remnants of the ancient building. “It 's a
queer place to live in; but we 're only here for
the summer”; and she went on to explain, with a
pretty naïveté, how her husband's business brought
him to Sillery from Quebec in that season. They
were descending the stairs, Kitty foremost, as she
added, “This is my first housekeeping, you know,
and of course it would be strange anywhere; but
you can't think how funny it is here. I suppose,”
she said, shyly, but as if her confidences merited
some return, while Kitty stepped from the stairway
face to face with Mr. Arbuton, who was about
to follow them, with the lady's husband, — “I
suppose this is your wedding-journey.”
A quick alarm flamed through the young girl,
and burned out of her glowing cheeks. This pleasant
masquerade of hers must look to others like
the most intentional love-making between her and
Mr. Arbuton, — no dreams either of them, nor
figures in a play, nor characters in a romance;
nay, on one spectator, at least, it had shed the
otherwise? Here on this fatal line of wedding-travel,
— so common that she remembered Mrs.
March half apologized for making it her first tour
after marriage, — how could it happen but that
two young people together as they were should be
taken for bride and bridegroom? Moreover, and
worst of all, he must have heard that fatal speech!
He was pale, if she was flushed, and looked
grave, as she fancied; but he passed on up the
stairs, and she sat down to wait for his return.
“I used to notice so many couples from the
States when we lived in the city,” continued the
hospitable mistress of the house, “but I don't
think they often came out to Sillery. In fact,
you 're the only pair that 's come this summer;
and so, when you seemed interested about the
mission, I thought you would n't mind if I spoke
to you, and asked you in to see the house. Most
of the Americans stay long enough to visit the
citadel, and the Plains of Abraham, and the Falls
at Montmorenci, and then they go away. I should
think they 'd be tired always doing the same
things. To be sure, they 're always different people.”
It was unfair to let her entertainer go on talking
for quantity in this way; and Kitty said how glad
should always be grateful to her for asking them
in. She did not disabuse her of her error; it cost
less to leave it alone; and when Mr. Arbuton reappeared,
she took leave of those kind people with
a sort of remote enjoyment of the wife's mistakenness
concerning herself. Yet, as the young matron
and her husband stood beside the carriage
repeating their adieux, she would fain have prolonged
the parting forever, so much she dreaded
to be left alone with Mr. Arbuton. But, left alone
with him, her spirits violently rose; and as they
drove along under the shadow of the cliff, she descanted
in her liveliest strain upon the various interests
of the way; she dwelt on the beauty of the
wide, still river, with the ships at anchor in it;
she praised the lovely sunset-light on the other
shore; she commented lightly on the village,
through which they passed, with the open doors
and the suppers frying on the great stoves set
into the partition-walls of each cleanly home; she
made him look at the two great stairways that
climb the cliff from the lumber-yards to the Plains
of Abraham, and the army of laborers, each with
his empty dinner-pail in hand, scaling the once
difficult heights on their way home to the suburb
of St. Roch; she did whatever she could to keep
Part of the way the village was French and neat
and pleasant, then it grovelled with Irish people,
and ceased to be a tolerable theme for discourse;
and so at last the silence against which she had
battled fell upon them and deepened like a spell
that she could not break.
It would have been better for Mr. Arbuton's
success just then if he had not broken it. But
failure was not within his reckoning; for he had so
long regarded this young girl de haut en bas, to say
it brutally, that he could not imagine she should
feel any doubt in accepting him. Moreover, a
magnanimous sense of obligation mingled with
his confident love, for she must have known that
he had overheard that speech at the Residence.
Perhaps he let this feeling color his manner, however
faintly. He lacked the last fine instinct; he
could not forbear; and he spoke while all her
nerves and fluttering pulses cried him mercy.
| X.
MR. ARBUTON SPEAKS. A chance acquaintance | |