A Chance Acquaintance Part 2

"Kitty," said he, "don't you let yourself be made a goose of."

"I hope she won't--by _you_!" retorted his wife, "and I'll thank you, Colonel Ellison, not to be a Betty, whatever you are. I don't think it's manly to be always noticing ladies' clothes."

"Who said anything about clothes?" demanded the colonel, taking his stand upon the letter.

"Well, don't _you_, at any rate. Yes, I'd like to ride, of all things; and we've time enough, for breakfast isn't ready till half past eight.

Where's the carriage?"

The only English scholar at Ha-Ha Bay had taken the light wraps of the ladies and was moving off with them. "This way, this way," he said, waving his hand towards a larger number of vehicles on the sh.o.r.e than could have been reasonably attributed to Ha-Ha Bay. "I hope you won't object to having another pa.s.senger with you? There's plenty of room for all. He seems a very nice, gentlemanly person," said he, with a queer, patronizing graciousness which he had no doubt caught from his English patrons.

"The more the merrier," answered Colonel Ellison, and "Not in the least!" said his wife, not meaning the proverb. Her eye had swept the whole array of vehicles and had found them all empty, save one, in which she detected the blamelessly coated back of Mr. Arbuton. But I ought perhaps to explain Mrs. Ellison's motives better than they can be made to appear in her conduct. She cared nothing for Mr. Arbuton; and she had no logical wish to see Kitty in love with him. But here were two young people thrown somewhat romantically together; Mrs. Ellison was a born match-maker, and to have refrained from promoting their better acquaintance in the interest of abstract matrimony was what never could have entered into her thought or desire. Her whole being closed for the time about this purpose; her heart, always warm towards Kitty,--whom she admired with a sort of generous frenzy,--expanded with all kinds of lovely designs; in a word, every dress she had she would instantly have bestowed upon that wors.h.i.+pful creature who was capable of adding another marriage to the world. I hope the reader finds nothing vulgar or unbecoming in this, for I do not; it was an enthusiasm, pure and simple, a beautiful and unselfish abandon; and I am sure men ought to be sorry that they are not worthier to be favored by it. Ladies have often to lament in the midst of their finesse that, really, no man is deserving the fate they devote themselves to prepare for him, or, in other words, that women cannot marry women.

I am not going to be so rash as try to depict Mrs. Ellison's arts, for then, indeed, I should make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance of such matters.

Whether Mr. Arbuton was ever aware of them, I am not sure: as a man he was, of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other hand, he had seen far more of the world than Mrs. Ellison, and she may have been clear as day to him. Probably, though, he did not detect any design; he could not have conceived of such a thing in a person with whom he had been so irregularly made acquainted, and to whom he felt himself so hopelessly superior. A film of ice such as in autumn you find casing the still pools early in the frosty mornings had gathered upon his manner over night; but it thawed under the greetings of the others, and he jumped actively out of the vehicle to offer the ladies their choice of seats. When all was arranged he found himself at Mrs. Ellison's side, for Kitty had somewhat eagerly climbed to the front seat with the colonel. In these circ.u.mstances it was pure zeal that sustained Mrs.

Ellison in the flattering constancy with which she babbled on to Mr.

Arbuton and refrained from openly resenting Kitty's contumacy.

As the wagon began to ascend the hill, the road was so rough that the springs smote together with pitiless jolts, and the ladies uttered some irrepressible moans. "Never mind, my dear," said the colonel, turning about to his wife, "we've got all the English there is at Ha-Ha Bay, any way." Whereupon the driver gave him a wink of sudden liking and good-fellows.h.i.+p. At the same time his tongue was loosed, and he began to talk of himself. "You see my dog, how he leaps at the horse's nose? He is a moose-dog, and keeps himself in practice of catching the moose by the nose. You ought to come in the hunting season. I could furnish you with Indians and everything you need to hunt with. I am a dealer in wild beasts, you know, and I must keep prepared to take them."

"Wild beasts?"

"Yes, for Barnum and the other showmen. I deal in deer, wolf, bear, beaver, moose, cariboo, wild-cat, link--"

"What?"

"Link--link! You say deer for deers, and link for lynx, don't you?"

"Certainly," answered the unblus.h.i.+ng colonel. "Are there many link about here?"

"Not many, and they are a very expensive animal. I have been shamefully treated in a link that I have sold to a Boston showman. It was a difficult beast to take; bit my Indian awfully; and Mr. Doolittle would not give the price he promised."

"What an outrage!"

"Yes, but it was not so bad as it might have been. He wanted the money back afterwards; the link died in about two weeks," said the dealer in wild animals, with a smile that curled his mustache into his ears, and a glance at Colonel Ellison. "He may have been bruised, I suppose. He may have been homesick. Perhaps he was never a very strong link. The link is a curious animal, miss," he said to Kitty, in conclusion.

They had been slowly climbing the mountain road, from which, on either hand, the pasturelands fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows.

The tops were quite barren, but in the little vales, despite the stones, a short gra.s.s grew very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory a.s.sonance as they cropped the herbage. Below, the bay filled the oval of the hills with its sunny expanse, and the white steamer, where she lay beside the busy wharf, and the black lumber-s.h.i.+ps, gave their variety to the pretty scene, which was completed by the picturesque villages on the sh.o.r.e. It was a very simple sight, but somehow very touching, as if the soft spectacle were but a respite from desolation and solitude; as indeed it was.

Mr. Arbuton must have been talking of travel elsewhere, for now he said to Mrs. Ellison, "This looks like a bit of Norway; the bay yonder might very well be a fjord of the Northern sea."

Mrs. Ellison murmured her sense of obligation to the bay, the fjord, and Mr. Arbuton, for their complaisance, and Kitty remembered that he had somewhat snubbed her the night before for attributing any suggestive grace to the native scenery. "Then you've really found something in an American landscape. I suppose we ought to congratulate it," she said, in smiling enjoyment of her triumph.

The colonel looked at her with eyes of humorous question; Mrs. Ellison looked blank; and Mr. Arbuton, having quite forgotten what he had said to provoke this comment now, looked puzzled and answered nothing: for he had this trait also in common with the sort of Englishman for whom he was taken, that he never helped out your conversational venture, but if he failed to respond inwardly, left you with your unaccepted remark upon your hands, as it were. In his silence, Kitty fell a prey to very evil thoughts of him, for it made her harmless sally look like a blundering attack upon him. But just then the driver came to her rescue; he said, "Gentlemen and ladies, this is the end of the mountain promenade," and, turning his horse's head, drove rapidly back to the village.

At the foot of the hill they came again to the church, and his pa.s.sengers wanted to get out and look into it. "O certainly," said he, "it isn't finished yet, but you can say as many prayers as you like in it."

The church was decent and clean, like most Canadian churches, and at this early hour there was a good number of the villagers at their devotions. The lithographic pictures of the stations to Calvary were, of course, on its walls, and there was the ordinary tawdriness of paint and carving about the high altar.

"I don't like to see these things," said Mrs. Ellison. "It really seems to savor of idolatry. Don't you think so, Mr. Arbuton?"

"Well, I don't know. I doubt if they're the sort of people to be hurt by it."

"They need a good stout faith in cold climates, I can tell you," said the colonel. "It helps to keep them warm. The broad church would be too full of draughts up here. They want something snug and tight. Just imagine one of these poor devils listening to a liberal sermon about birds and fruits and flowers and beautiful sentiments, and then driving home over the hills with the mercury thirty degrees below zero! He couldn't stand it."

"Yes, yes, certainly," said Mr. Arbuton, and looked about him with an eye of cold, uncompa.s.sionate inspection, as if he were trying it by a standard of taste, and, on the whole, finding the poor little church vulgar.

When they mounted to their places again, the talk fell entirely to the colonel, who, as his wont was, got what information he could out of the driver. It appeared, in spite of his theory, that they were not all good Catholics at Ha-Ha Bay. "This chap, for example," said the Frenchman, touching himself on the breast and using the slang he must have picked up from American travellers, "is no Catholic,--not much! He has made too many studies to care for religion. There's a large French party, sir, in Canada, that's opposed to the priests and in favor of annexation."

He satisfied the colonel's utmost curiosity, discoursing, as he drove by the log-built cottages which were now and then sheathed in birch-bark, upon the local affairs, and the character and history of such of his fellow-villagers as they met. He knew the pretty girls upon the street and saluted them by name, interrupting himself with these courtesies in the lecture he was giving the colonel on life at Ha-Ha Bay. There was only one brick house (which he had built himself, but had been obliged to sell in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with straw. These he excused to his Americans, but added that the ungainly thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the end of an unusually long, hard winter.

"And the people," asked the colonel, "what do they do in the winter to pa.s.s the time?"

"Draw the wood, smoke the pipe, court the ladies.--But wouldn't you like to see the inside of one of our poor cottages? I shall be very proud to have you look at mine, and to have you drink a gla.s.s of milk from my cows. I am sorry that I cannot offer you brandy, but there's none to be bought in the place."

"Don't speak of it! For an eye-opener there is nothing like a gla.s.s of milk," gayly answered the colonel.

They entered the best room of the house,--wide, low-ceiled, dimly lit by two small windows, and fortified against the winter by a huge Canada stove of cast-iron. It was rude but neat, and had an air of decent comfort. Through the window appeared a very little vegetable garden with a border of the hardiest flowers. "The large beans there," explained the host, "are for soup and coffee. My corn," he said, pointing out some rows of dwarfish maize, "has escaped the early August frosts, and so I expect to have some roasting-ears yet this summer."

"Well, it isn't exactly what you'd call an inviting climate, is it?"

asked the colonel.

The Canadian seemed a hard little man, but he answered now with a kind of pathos, "It's cruel! I came here when it was all bush. Twenty years I have lived here, and it has not been worth while. If it was to do over again, I should rather not live anywhere. I was born in Quebec," he said, as if to explain that he was used to mild climates, and began to tell of some events of his life at Ha-Ha Bay. "I wish you were going to stay here awhile with me. You wouldn't find it so bad in the summer-time, I can a.s.sure you. There are bears in the bush, sir," he said to the colonel, "and you might easily kill one."

"But then I should be helping to spoil your trade in wild beasts,"

replied the colonel, laughing.

Mr. Arbuton looked like one who might be very tired of this. He made no sign of interest either in the early glooms and privations or the summer bears of Ha-Ha Bay. He sat in the quaint parlor, with his hat on his knee, in the decorous and patient att.i.tude of a gentleman making a call.

He had no feeling, Kitty said to herself; but that is a matter about which we can easily be wrong. It was rather to be said of Mr. Arbuton that he had always shrunk from knowledge of things outside of a very narrow world, and that he had not a ready imagination. Moreover, he had a personal dislike, as I may call it, of poverty; and he did not enjoy this poverty as she did, because it was strange and suggestive, though doubtless he would have done as much to relieve distress.

"Rather too much of his autobiography," he said to Kitty, as he waited outside the door with her, while the Canadian quieted his dog, which was again keeping himself in practice of catching the moose by making vicious leaps at the horse's nose. "The egotism of that kind of people is always so aggressive. But I suppose he's in the habit of throwing himself upon the sympathy of summer visitors in this way. You can't offer a man so little as s.h.i.+lling and sixpence who's taken you into his confidence. Did you find enough that was novel in his place to justify him in bringing us here, Miss Ellison?" he asked with an air he had of taking you of course to be of his mind, and which equally offended you whether you were so or not.

Every face that they had seen in their drive had told its pathetic story to Kitty; every cottage that they pa.s.sed she had entered in thought, and dreamed out its humble drama. What their host had said gave breath and color to her fancies of the struggle of life there, and she was startled and shocked when this cold doubt was cast upon the sympathetic tints of her picture. She did not know what to say at first; she looked at Mr.

Arbuton with a sudden glance of embarra.s.sment and trouble; then she answered, "I was very much interested. I don't agree with you, I believe"; which, when she heard it, seemed a resentful little speech, and made her willing for some occasion to soften its effect. But nothing occurred to her during the brief drive back to the boat, save the fact that the morning air was delicious.

"Yes, but rather cool," said Mr. Arbuton, whose feelings apparently had not needed any balm; and the talk fell again to the others.

On the pier he helped her down from the wagon, for the colonel was intent on something the driver was saying, and then offered his hand to Mrs. Ellison.

She sprang from her place, but stumbled slightly, and when she touched the ground, "I believe I turned my foot a little," she said with a laugh. "It's nothing, of course," and fainted in his arms.

Kitty gave a cry of alarm, and the next instant the colonel had relieved Mr. Arbuton. It was a scene, and nothing could have annoyed him more than this tumult which poor Mrs. Ellison's misfortune occasioned among the bystanding habitans and deck-hands, and the pa.s.sengers eagerly craning forward over the bulwarks, and running ash.o.r.e to see what the matter was. Few men know just how to offer those little offices of helpfulness which such emergencies demand, and Mr. Arbuton could do nothing after he was rid of his burden; he hovered anxiously and uselessly about, while Mrs. Ellison was carried to an airy position on the bow of the boat, where in a few minutes he had the great satisfaction of seeing her open her eyes. It was not the moment for him to speak, and he walked somewhat guiltily away with the dispersing crowd.

Mrs. Ellison addressed her first words to pale Kitty at her side. "You can have all my things, now," she said, as if it were a clause in her will, and perhaps it had been her last thought before unconsciousness.

"Why, f.a.n.n.y," cried Kitty, with an hysterical laugh, "you're not going to die! A sprained ankle isn't fatal!"

"No; but I've heard that a person with a sprained ankle can't put their foot to the ground for weeks; and I shall only want a dressing-gown, you know, to lie on the sofa in." With that, Mrs. Ellison placed her hand tenderly on Kitty's head, like a mother wondering what will become of a helpless child during her disability; in fact she was mentally weighing the advantages of her wardrobe, which Kitty would now fully enjoy, against the loss of the friendly strategy which she would now lack.