 | XII.
THE PICNIC AT CHATEAU-BIGOT. A chance acquaintance |  |
12. XII.
THE PICNIC AT CHATEAU-BIGOT.
WELL, said Mrs. Ellison, who had slipped
into Kitty's room, in the morning, to do
her back hair with some advantages of
light which her own chamber lacked, “it 'll be no
crazier than the rest of the performance; and if
you and he can stand it, I 'm sure that we 've no
reason to complain.”
“Why, I don't see how it 's to be helped, Fanny.
He 's asked it; and I 'm rather glad he has, for
I should have hated to have the conventional
headache that keeps young ladies from being
seen; and at any rate I don't understand how the
day could be passed more sensibly than just as we
originally planned to spend it. I can make up my
mind a great deal better with him than away from
him. But I think there never was a more ridiculous
situation: now that the high tragedy has
faded out of it, and the serious part is coming, it
makes me laugh. Poor Mr. Arbuton will feel all
day that he is under my mercilessly critical eye,
and that he must n't do this and he must n't say
he 's promised to wait patiently for my decision.
It 's a most inglorious position for him, but I
don't think of anything to do about it. I could
say no at once, but he 'd rather not.”
“What have you got that dress on for?” asked
Mrs. Ellison, abruptly.
“Because I 'm not going to wear your things
any more, Fanny. It 's a case of conscience. I
feel like a guilty creature, being courted in another's
clothes; and I don't know but it 's for a
kind of punishment of my deceit that I can't realize
this affair as I ought, or my part in it. I keep
feeling, the whole time, as if it were somebody
else, and I have an absurd kind of other person's
interest in it.”
Mrs. Ellison essayed some reply, but was met
by Kitty's steadfast resolution, and in the end did
not prevail in so much as a ribbon for her hair.
It was not till well into the forenoon that the
preparations for the picnic were complete and the
four set off together in one carriage. In the strong
need that was on each of them to make the best
of the affair, the colonel's unconsciousness might
have been a little overdone, but Mrs. Ellison's
demeanor was sublimely successful. The situation
gave full play to her peculiar genius, and you could
to the perfection of her design, that any
tone or speech was too highly colored. Mr. Arbuton,
of whom she took possession, and who
knew that she knew all, felt that he had never
done justice to her, and seconded her efforts with
something like cordial admiration; while Kitty,
with certain grateful looks and aversions of the
face, paid an ardent homage to her strokes of tact,
and after a few miserable moments, in which her
nightlong trouble gnawed at her heart, began, in
spite of herself, to enjoy the humor of the situation.
It is a lovely road out to Château-Bigot. First
you drive through the ancient suburbs of the
Lower Town, and then you mount the smooth,
hard highway, between pretty country-houses,
toward the village of Charlesbourg, while Quebec
shows, to your casual backward-glance, like a
wondrous painted scene, with the spires and lofty
roofs of the Upper Town, and the long, irregular
wall wandering on the verge of the cliff; then the
thronging gables and chimneys of St. Roch, and
again many spires and convent walls; lastly the
shipping in the St. Charles, which, in one direction,
runs, a narrowing gleam, up into its valley,
and in the other widens into the broad light of
land stretch between the suburban mansions and
the village of Charlesbourg, where the driver reassured
himself as to his route from the group of
idlers on the platform before the church. Then
he struck off on a country road, and presently
turned from this again into a lane that grew
rougher and rougher, till at last it lapsed to a
mere cart-track among the woods, where the rich,
strong odors of the pine, and of the wild herbs
bruised under the wheels, filled the air. A peasant
and his black-eyed, open-mouthed boy were
cutting withes to bind hay at the side of the
track, and the latter consented to show the
strangers to the château from a point beyond
which they could not go with the carriage. There
the small habitant and the driver took up the
picnic-baskets, and led the way through pathless
growths of underbrush to a stream, so swift that
it is said never to freeze, so deeply sprung that
the summer never drinks it dry. A screen of
water-growths bordered it; and when this was
passed, a wide open space revealed itself, with the
ruin of the château in the midst.
The pathos of long neglect lay upon the scene;
for here were evidences of gardens and bowery
aisles in other times, and now, for many a year,
The mountain rising behind the château grounds
showed the dying flush of the deciduous leaves
among the dark green of the pines that clothed it
to the crest; a cry of innumerable crickets filled
the ear of the dreaming noon.
The ruin itself is not of impressive size, and it
is a château by grace of the popular fancy rather
than through any right of its own; for it was, in
truth, never more than the hunting-lodge of the
king's Intendant, Bigot, a man whose sins claim
for him a lordly consideration in the history of Quebec.
He was the last Intendant before the British
conquest, and in that time of general distress he
grew rich by oppression of the citizens, and by peculation
from the soldiers. He built this pleasure-house
here in the woods, and hither he rode out
from Quebec to enjoy himself in the chase and the
carouses that succeed the chase. Here, too, it is
said, dwelt in secret the Huron girl who loved
him, and who survives in the memory of the peasants
as the murdered sauvagesse; and, indeed,
there is as much proof that she was murdered
as that she ever lived. When the wicked Bigot
was arrested and sent to France, where he was
tried with great result of documentary record, his
château fell into other hands; at last a party of
our own countrymen that we owe the conflagration
and the ruin of Château-Bigot. It stands, as I said,
in the middle of that open place, with the two
gable walls and the stone partition-wall still almost
entire, and that day showing very effectively
against the tender northern sky. On the most
weatherward gable the iron in the stone had shed
a dark red stain under the lash of many winter
storms, and some tough lichens had incrusted
patches of the surface; but, for the rest, the walls
rose in the univied nakedness of all ruins in our
climate, which has no clinging evergreens wherewith
to pity and soften the forlornness of decay.
Out of the rubbish at the foot of the walls there
sprang a wilding growth of syringas and lilacs;
and the interior was choked with flourishing weeds,
and with the briers of the raspberry, on which a few
berries hung. The heavy beams, left where they fell
a hundred years ago, proclaimed the honest solidity
with which the château had been built, and there
was proof in the cut stone of the hearths and chimney-places
that it had once had at least the ambition
of luxury.
While its visitors stood amidst the ruin, a harmless
garden-snake slipped out of one crevice into
another; from her nest in some hidden corner
— so slight is the capacity of any mood, so
deeply is the heart responsive to a little impulse,
— the palace of the Cæsars could not have imparted
a keener sense of loss and desolation. They
eagerly sought such particulars of the ruin as
agreed with the descriptions they had read of it,
and were as well contented with a bit of cellar-way
outside as if they had really found the secret passage
to the subterranean chamber of the château, or
the hoard of silver which the little habitant said
was buried under it. Then they dispersed about
the grounds to trace out the borders of the garden,
and Mr. Arbuton won the common praise by discovering
the foundations of the stable of the château.
Then there was no more to do but to prepare for
the picnic. They chose a grassy plot in the shadow
of a half-dismantled bark-lodge, — a relic of the
Indians, who resort to the place every summer.
In the ashes of that sylvan hearth they kindled
their fire, Mr. Arbuton gathering the sticks, and the
colonel showing a peculiar genius in adapting the
savage flames to the limitations of the civilized
coffee-pot borrowed of Mrs. Gray. Mrs. Ellison
laid the cloth, much meditating the arrangement
of the viands, and reversing again and again the
relative positions of the sliced tongue and the
doubting dreadfully whether to put down the cake
and the canned peaches at once, or reserve them
for a second course; the stuffed olives drove her
to despair, being in a bottle, and refusing to be
balanced by anything less monumental in shape.
Some wild asters and red leaves and green and
yellowing sprays of fern which Kitty arranged in
a tumbler were hailed with rapture, but presently
flung far away with fierce disdain because they had
ants on them. Kitty witnessed this outburst with
her usual complacency, and then went on making
the coffee. With such blissful pain as none but
lovers know, Mr. Arbuton saw her break the egg
upon the edge of the coffee-pot, and let it drop
therein, and then, with a charming frenzy, stir it
round and round. It was a picture of domestic
suggestion, a subtle insinuation of home, the
unconscious appeal of inherent housewifery to
inherent husbandhood. At the crash of the eggshell
he trembled; the swift agitation of the coffee
and the egg within the pot made him dizzy.
“Sha' n't I stir that for you, Miss Ellison?” he
said, awkwardly.
“O dear, no!” she answered in surprise at a
man's presuming to stir coffee; “but you may go
get me some water at the creek, if you please.”
She gave him a pitcher, and he went off to the
brook, which was but a minute's distance away.
This minute, however, left her alone, for the first
time that day, with both Dick and Fanny, and a
silence fell upon all three at once. They could not
help looking at one another; and then the colonel,
to show that he was not thinking of anything,
began to whistle, and Mrs. Ellison rebuked him for
whistling.
“Why not?” he asked. “It is n't a funeral, is
it?”
“Of course it is n't,” said Mrs. Ellison; and
Kitty, who had been blushing to the verge of
tears, laughed instead, and then was consumed
with vexation when Mr. Arbuton came up, feeling
that he must suspect himself the motive of her ill-timed
mirth. “The champagne ought to be cooled,
I suppose,” observed Mrs. Ellison, when the coffee
had been finally stirred and set to boil on the
coals.
“I 'm best acquainted with the brook,” said Mr.
Arbuton, “and I know just the eddy in it where
the champagne will cool soonest.”
“Then you shall take it there,” answered the
governess of the feast; and Mr. Arbuton duteously
set off with the bottle in his hand.
The pitcher of water which he had already
of the skirt, Kitty knocked it over. The
colonel made a start forward; Mrs. Ellison arrested
him with a touch, while she bent a look of
ineffable admiration upon Kitty.
“Now, I'll teach myself,” said Kitty, “that I
can't be so clumsy with impunity. I 'll go and
fill that pitcher again myself.” She hurried after
Mr. Arbuton; they scarcely spoke going or coming;
but the constraint that Kitty felt was nothing
to that she had dreaded in seeking to escape
from the tacit raillery of the colonel and the
championship of Fanny. Yet she trembled to
realize that already her life had become so far entangled
with this stranger's, that she found refuge
with him from her own kindred. They could do
nothing to help her in this; the trouble was solely
hers and his, and they two must get out of it one
way or other themselves; the case scarcely admitted
even of sympathy, and if it had not been hers,
it would have been one to amuse her rather than
appeal to her compassion. Even as it was, she
sometimes caught herself smiling at the predicament
of a young girl who had passed a month in
every appearance of love-making, and who, being
asked her heart, was holding her lover in suspense
whilst she searched it, and meantime was picnicking
all the heroines in her books, she knew none in such
a strait as this.
But her perplexities did not impair the appetite
which she brought to the sylvan feast. In her
whole simple life she had never tasted champagne
before, and she said innocently, as she put the
frisking fluid from her lips after the first taste,
“Why, I thought you had to learn to like champagne.”
“No,” remarked the colonel, “it 's like reading
and writing: it comes by nature. I suppose that
even one of the lower animals would like champagne.
The refined instinct of young ladies makes
them recognize its merits instantly. Some of the
Confederate cellars,” added the colonel, thoughtfully,
“had very good champagne in them. Green
seal was the favorite of our erring brethren. It
was n't one of their errors. I prefer it myself to
our own native cider, whether made of apples or
grapes. Yes, it 's better even than the water from
the old chain-pump in the back yard at Eriecreek,
though it has n't so fine a flavor of lubricating oil
in it.”
The faint chill that touched Mr. Arbuton at the
mention of Eriecreek and its petrolic associations
was transient. He was very light of heart, since
and in his temporary abandon he talked well, and
promoted the pleasure of the time without critical
reserves. When the colonel, with the reluctance
of our soldiers to speak of their warlike experiences
before civilians, had suffered himself to tell a story
that his wife begged of him about his last battle,
Mr. Arbuton listened with a deference that flattered
poor Mrs. Ellison, and made her marvel at
Kitty's doubt concerning him; and then he spoke
entertainingly of some travel experiences of his own,
which he politely excused as quite unworthy to
come after the colonel's story. He excused them
a little too much, and just gave the modest soldier
a faint, uneasy fear of having boasted. But no one
else felt this result of his delicacy, and the feast
was merry enough. When it was ended, Mrs.
Ellison, being still a little infirm of foot, remained
in the shadow of the bark-lodge, and the colonel
lit his cigar, and loyally stretched himself upon
the grass before her.
There was nothing else for Kitty and Mr. Arbuton
but to stroll off together, and she preferred to
do this.
They sauntered up to the château in silence, and
peered somewhat languidly about the ruin. On a
bit of smooth surface in a sheltered place many
Arbuton said he supposed they might as well add
those of their own party.
“O yes,” answered Kitty, with a half-sigh, seating
herself upon a fallen stone, and letting her
hands fall into each other in her lap as her wont
was, “you write them.” A curious pensiveness
passed from one to the other and possessed them
both.
Mr. Arbuton began to write. Suddenly, “Miss
Ellison,” said he, with a smile, “I 've blundered
in your name; I neglected to put the Miss before
it; and now there is n't room on the plastering.”
“O, never mind,” replied Kitty, “I dare say it
won't be missed!”
Mr. Arbuton neither perceived nor heeded the
pun. He was looking in a sort of rapture at the
name which his own hand had written now for
the first time, and he felt an indecorous desire to
kiss it.
“If I could speak it as I 've written it —”
“I don't see what harm there would be in
that,” said the owner of the name, “or what object,”
she added more discreetly.
— “I should feel that I had made a great
gain.”
“I never told you,” answered Kitty, evasively,
“How did you know it?”
“It was on the card you gave my cousin,” said
Kitty, frankly, but thinking he now must know
she had been keeping his card.
“It 's an old family name, — a sort of heirloom
from the first of us who came to the country; and
in every generation since, some Arbuton has had
to wear it.”
“It 's superb!” cried Kitty. “Miles! `Miles
Standish, the Puritan captain,' `Miles Standish,
the Captain of Plymouth.' I should be very proud
of such a name.”
“You have only to take it,” he said, gravely.
“O, I did n't mean that,” she said with a blush,
and then added, “Yours is a very old family, then,
is n't it?”
“Yes, it 's pretty well,” answered Mr. Arbuton,
“but it 's not such a rare thing in the East, you
know.”
“I suppose not. The Ellisons are not an old
family. If we went back of my uncle, we should
only come to backwoodsmen and Indian fighters.
Perhaps that 's the reason we don't care much for
old families. You think a great deal of them in
Boston, don't you?”
“We do, and we don't. It 's a long story, and
I 'm afraid I could n't make you understand,
unless you had seen something of Boston society.”
“Mr. Arbuton,” said Kitty, abruptly plunging
to the bottom of the subject on which they had
been hovering, “I 'm dreadfully afraid that what
you said to me — what you asked of me, yesterday
— was all through a misunderstanding. I 'm
afraid that you 've somehow mistaken me and my
circumstances, and that somehow I 've innocently
helped on your mistake.”
“There is no mistake,” he answered, eagerly,
“about my loving you!”
Kitty did not look up, nor answer this outburst,
which flattered while it pained her. She said,
“I 've been so much mistaken myself, and I 've
been so long finding it out, that I should feel
anxious to have you know just what kind of girl
you 'd asked to be your wife, before I —”
“What?”
“Nothing. But I should want you to know
that in many things my life has been very, very
different from yours. The first thing I can remember
— you 'll think I 'm more autobiographical
than our driver at Ha-Ha Bay, even, but I
must tell you all this — is about Kansas, where
hardly enough to eat or wear, and of my mother
grieving over our privations. At last, when my
father was killed,” she said, dropping her voice,
“in front of our own door —”
Mr. Arbuton gave a start. “Killed?”
“Yes; did n't you know? Or no: how could
you? He was shot by the Missourians.”
Whether it was not hopelessly out of taste to
have a father-in-law who had been shot by the
Missourians? Whether he could persuade Kitty
to suppress that part of her history? That she
looked very pretty, sitting there, with her earnest
eyes lifted toward his. These things flashed wilfully
through Mr. Arbuton's mind.
“My father was a Free-State man,” continued
Kitty, in a tone of pride. “He was n't when he
first went to Kansas,” she added simply; while
Mr. Arbuton groped among his recollections of that
forgotten struggle for some association with these
names, keenly feeling the squalor of it all, and
thinking still how very pretty she was. “He
went out there to publish a proslavery paper.
But when he found out what the Border Ruffians
really were, he turned against them. He used to
be very bitter about my uncle's having become an
Abolitionist; they had had a quarrel about it;
made it up; and before father died he was able to
tell mother that we were to go to uncle's. But
mother was sick then, and she only lived a month
after father; and when my cousin came out to get
us, just before she died, there was scarcely a crust
of cornbread in our cabin. It seemed like heaven
to get to Eriecreek; but even at Eriecreek we live
in a way that I am afraid you would n't respect.
My uncle has just enough, and we are very plain
people indeed. I suppose,” continued the young
girl meekly, “that I have n't had at all what
you 'd call an education. Uncle told me what to
read, at first, and after that I helped myself. It
seemed to come naturally; but don't you see that
it was n't an education?”
“I beg pardon,” said Mr. Arbuton, with a blush;
for he had just then lost the sense of what she
said in the music of her voice, as it hesitated over
these particulars of her history.
“I mean,” explained Kitty, “that I 'm afraid I
must be very one-sided. I 'm dreadfully ignorant
of a great many things. I have n't any accomplishments,
only the little bit of singing and playing
that you 've heard; I could n't tell a good
picture from a bad one; I 've never been to the
opera; I don't know anything about society. Now
“such a girl as that in Boston!”
Even Mr. Arbuton could not help smiling at
this comic earnestness, while she resumed: “At
home my cousins and I do all kinds of things that
the ladies whom you know have done for them.
We do our own work, for one thing,” she continued,
with a sudden treacherous misgiving that
what she was saying might be silly and not heroic,
but bravely stifling her doubt. “My cousin Virginia
is housekeeper, and Rachel does the sewing,
and I 'm a kind of maid-of-all-work.”
Mr. Arbuton listened respectfully, vainly striving
for some likeness of Miss Ellison in the figure
of the different second-girls who, during life, had
taken his card, or shown him into drawing-rooms,
or waited on him at table; failing in this, he tried
her in the character of daughter of that kind of
farm-house where they take summer boarders and
do their own work; but evidently the Ellisons
were not of that sort either; and he gave it up
and was silent, not knowing what to say, while
Kitty, a little piqued by his silence, went on:
“We 're not ashamed, you understand, of our
ways; there 's such a thing as being proud of not
being proud; and that 's what we are, or what I
am; for the rest are not mean enough ever to
that 's the kind of life I 'm used to; and though
I 've read of other kinds of life a great deal, I 've
not been brought up to anything different, don't
you understand? And maybe — I don't know —
I might n't like or respect your kind of people any
more than they did me. My uncle taught us
ideas that are quite different from yours; and
what if I should n't be able to give them up?”
“There is only one thing I know or see: I love
you!” he said, passionately, and drew nearer by a
step; but she put out her hand and repelled him
with a gesture.
“Sometimes you might be ashamed of me before
those you knew to be my inferiors, — really common
and coarse-minded people, but regularly
educated, and used to money and fashion. I
should cower before them, and I never could forgive
you.”
“I 've one answer to all this: I love you!”
Kitty flushed in generous admiration of his
magnanimity, and said, with more of tenderness
than she had yet felt towards him, “I 'm sorry
that I can't answer you now, as you wish, Mr.
Arbuton.”
“But you will, to-morrow.”
She shook her head. “I don't know; O, I don't
Mrs. March asked me to visit her in Boston; but
we had given up doing so, because of the long
delay here. If I asked my cousins, they 'd still go
home that way. It 's too bad to put you off again;
but you must see me in Boston, if only for a day
or two, and after you 've got back into your old
associations there, before I answer you. I 'm in
great trouble. You must wait, or I must say no.”
“I 'll wait,” said Mr. Arbuton.
“O, thank you,” sighed Kitty, grateful for this
patience, and not for the chance of still winning
him; “you are very forbearing, I 'm sure.”
She again put forth her hand, but not now to
repel him. He clasped it, and kept it in his, then
impulsively pressed it against his lips.
Colonel and Mrs. Ellison had been watching the
whole pantomime, forgotten.
“Well,” said the colonel, “I suppose that 's the
end of the play, is n't it? I don't like it, Fanny;
I don't like it.”
“Hush!” whispered Mrs. Ellison.
They were both puzzled when Kitty and Mr.
Arburton came towards them with anxious faces.
Kitty was painfully revolving in her mind what
she had just said, and thinking she had said not so
much as she meant and yet so much more, and
at once too bold and too meek in her demand for
longer delay. Did it not give him further claim
upon her? Must it not have seemed a very audacious
thing? What right had she to make it, and
how could she now finally say no? Then the matter
of her explanation to him: was it in the least
what she meant to say? Must it not give him
an idea of intellectual and spiritual poverty in her
life which she knew had not been in it? Would
he not believe, in spite of her boasts, that she was
humiliated before him by a feeling of essential inferiority?
O, had she boasted? What she meant
to do was just to make him understand clearly
what she was; but, had she? Could he be made
to understand this with what seemed his narrow
conception of things outside of his own experience?
Was it worth while to try? Did she care enough
for him to make the effort desirable? Had she
made it for his sake, or in the interest of truth,
merely, or in self-defence?
These and a thousand other like questions beset
her the whole way home to Quebec, amid the frequent
pauses of the talk, and underneath whatever
she was saying. Half the time she answered yes
or no to them, and not to what Dick, or Fanny, or
Mr. Arbuton had asked her; she was distraught
like angry bees, and one now and then settled, and
stung and stung. Through the whole night, too,
they pursued her in dreams with pitiless iteration
and fantastic change; and at dawn she was awakened
by voices calling up to her from the Ursulines'
Garden, — the slim, pale nun crying out, in a
lamentable accent, that all men were false and
there was no shelter save the convent or the grave,
and the comfortable sister bemoaning herself that
on meagre days Madame de la Peltrie ate nothing
but choke-cherries from Château-Bigot.
Kitty rose and dressed herself, and sat at the
window, and watched the morning come into the
garden below: first, a tremulous flush of the
heavens; then a rosy light on the silvery roofs
and gables; then little golden aisles among the
lilacs and hollyhocks. The tiny flower-beds just
under her window were left, with their snap-dragons
and larkspurs, in dew and shadow; the
small dog stood on the threshold, and barked
uneasily when the bell rang in the Ursulines'
Chapel, where the nuns were at matins.
It was Sunday, and a soft tranquillity blest the
cool air in which the young girl bathed her troubled
spirit. A faint anticipative homesickness
mingled now with her nightlong anxiety, — a pity
these pretty sights, which had become so dear to
her that she could not but feel herself native
among them. She must go back to Eriecreek,
which was not a walled city, and had not a stone
building, much less a cathedral or convent, within
its borders; and though she dearly loved those
under her uncle's roof there, yet she had to own
that, beyond that shelter, there was little in Eriecreek
to touch the heart or take the fancy; that
the village was ugly, and the village people mortally
dull, narrow, and uncongenial. Why was
not her lot cast somewhere else? Why should she
not see more of the world that she had found so
fair, and which all her aspirations had fitted her
to enjoy? Quebec had been to her a rapture of
beautiful antiquity; but Europe, but London, Venice,
Rome, those infinitely older and more storied
cities of which she had lately talked so much with
Mr. Arbuton, — why should she not see them?
Here, for the guilty space of a heat-lightning
flash, Kitty wickedly entertained the thought of
marrying Mr. Arbuton for the sake of a bridal trip
to Europe, and bade love and the fitness of things
and the incompatibility of Boston and Eriecreek
traditions take care of themselves. But then she
blushed for her meanness, and tried to atone for it
Arbuton. She felt remorse for having, as he
had proved yesterday, undervalued and misunderstood
him; and she was willing now to think him
even more magnanimous than his generous words
and conduct showed him. It would be a base return
for his patience to accept him from a worldly
ambition; a man of his noble spirit merited the
best that love could give. But she respected him;
at last she respected him fully and entirely, and
she could tell him that at any rate.
The words in which he had yesterday protested
his love for her repeated themselves constantly in
her revery. If he should speak them again after
he had seen her in Boston, in the light by which
she was anxious to be tested, — she did not know
what she should say.
| XII.
THE PICNIC AT CHATEAU-BIGOT. A chance acquaintance | |