A Chance Acquaintance Part 10

He had not thought of the danger to himself in what he had done. He knew that he was unhurt, but he did not care for that; he cared only that she was safe; and as he pressed her hand tight against his heart, there pa.s.sed through it a thrill of inexpressible tenderness, a quick, pa.s.sionate sense of possession, a rapture as of having won her and made her his own forever, by saving her from that horrible risk. The maze in which he had but now dwelt concerning her seemed an obsolete frivolity of an alien past; all the cold doubts and hindering scruples which he had felt from the first were gone; gone all his care for his world. His world? In that supreme moment, there was no world but in the tender eyes at which he looked down with a glance which she knew not how to interpret.

She thought that his pride was deeply wounded at the ignominy of his adventure,--for she was sure he would care more for that than for the danger,--and that if she spoke of it she might add to the angry pain he felt. As they hurried along she waited for him to speak, but he did not; though always, as he looked down at her with that strange look, he seemed about to speak.

Presently she stopped, and, withdrawing her hand from his arm, she cried, "Why, we've forgotten my cousin!"

"O--yes!" said Mr. Arbuton with a vacant smile.

Looking back they saw the colonel standing on the pavement near the end of the old Sault au Matelot, with his hands in his pockets, and steadfastly staring at them. He did not relax the severity of his gaze when they returned to join him, and appeared to find little consolation in Kitty's "O d.i.c.k, I forgot all about you," given with a sudden, inexplicable laugh, interrupted and renewed as some ludicrous image seemed to come and go in her mind.

"Well, this may be very flattering, Kitty, but it isn't altogether comprehensible," said he, with a keen glance at both their faces. "I don't know what you'll say to Uncle Jack. It's not forgetting me alone: it's forgetting the whole American expedition against Quebec."

The colonel waited for some reply; but Kitty dared not attempt an explanation, and Mr. Arbuton was not the man to seem to boast of his share of the adventure by telling what had happened, even if he had cared at that moment to do so. Her very ignorance of what he had dared for her only confirmed his new sense of possession; and, if he could, he would not have marred the pleasure he felt by making her grateful yet, sweet as that might be in its time. Now he liked to keep his knowledge, to have had her unwitting compa.s.sion, to hear her pour out her unwitting relief in this laugh, while he superiorly permitted it.

"I don't understand this thing," said the colonel, through whose dense, masculine intelligence some suspicions of love-making were beginning to pierce. But he dismissed them as absurd, and added, "However, I'm willing to forgive, and you've done the forgetting; and all that I ask now is the pleasure of your company on the spot where Montgomery fell.

f.a.n.n.y'll never believe I've found it unless you go with me," he appealed, finally.

"O, we'll go, by all means," said Mr. Arbuton, unconsciously speaking, as by authority, for both.

They came into busier streets of the Port again, and then pa.s.sed through the square of the Lower Town Market, with the market-house in the midst, the shops and warehouses on either side, the long row of tented booths with every kind of peasant-wares to sell, and the wide stairway dropping to the river which brought the abundance of the neighboring country to the mart. The whole place was alive with country-folk in carts and citizens on foot. At one point a gayly painted wagon was drawn up in the midst of a group of people to whom a quackish-faced Yankee was hawking, in his own personal French, an American patent-medicine, and making his audience giggle. Because Kitty was amused at this, Mr. Arbuton found it the drollest thing imaginable, but saw something yet droller when she made the colonel look at a peasant, standing in one corner beside a basket of fowls, which a woman, coming up to buy, examined as if the provision were some natural curiosity, while a crowd at once gathered round.

"It requires a considerable population to make a bargain, up here,"

remarked the colonel. "I suppose they turn out the garrison when they sell a beef." For both buyer and seller seemed to take advice of the bystanders, who discussed and inspected the different fowls as if nothing so novel as poultry had yet fallen in their way.

At last the peasant himself took up the fowls and carefully scrutinized them.

"_Those_ chickens, it seems, never happened to catch his eye before,"

interpreted Kitty; and Mr. Arbuton, who was usually very restive during such banter, smiled as if it were the most admirable fooling, or the most precious wisdom, in the world. He made them wait to see the bargain out, and could, apparently, have lingered there forever.

But the colonel had a conscience about Montgomery, and he hurried them away, on past the Queen's Wharf, and down the Cove Road to that point where the scarped and rugged breast of the cliff bears the sign, "Here fell Montgomery," though he really fell, not half-way up the height, but at the foot of it, where stood the battery that forbade his juncture with Arnold at Prescott Gate.

A certain wildness yet possesses the spot: the front of the crag, topped by the high citadel-wall, is so grim, and the few tough evergreens that cling to its clefts are torn and twisted by the winter blasts, and the houses are decrepit with age, showing here and there the scars of the frequent fires that sweep the Lower Town.

It was quite useless: neither the memories of the place nor their setting were sufficient to engage the wayward thoughts of these curiously a.s.sorted pilgrims; and the colonel, after some attempts to bring the matter home to himself and the others, was obliged to abandon Mr. Arbuton to his tender reveries of Kitty, and Kitty to her puzzling over the change in Mr. Arbuton. His complaisance made her uncomfortable and shy of him, it was so strange; it gave her a little s.h.i.+ver, as if he were behaving undignifiedly.

"Well, Kitty," said the colonel, "I reckon Uncle Jack would have made more out of this than we've done. He'd have had their geology out of these rocks, any way."

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 didn'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 isn'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 f.a.n.n.y, 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 isn't quite fair."

"You're very careful of him, all at once," said Mrs. Ellison. "You didn'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, f.a.n.n.y, and I admired him more than ever I did; but then I couldn'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, f.a.n.n.y,"--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 haven't shown myself so careful of him before. But I never was so glad to see d.i.c.k in my life, and to have some excuse for laughing. I didn't dare to speak to Mr. Arbuton about it, for he couldn'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 d.i.c.k," 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_, f.a.n.n.y; and you needn't say such a thing. I'm sure I didn'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 needn't say that I've no feeling"; and thereupon she rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin's, "f.a.n.n.y," she cried, vehemently, "I _have_ been heartless. I'm afraid I haven't shown any sympathy or consideration. I'm afraid I must have seemed dreadfully callous and hard. I oughtn'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_ doesn't know that you've been laughing about him. You needn't do anything."

"O yes, I need. He doesn't know that I've been laughing about him to you; but, don't you see, I laughed when we met d.i.c.k; and what can he think of that?"

"He just thinks you were nervous, I suppose."

"O, do you suppose he does, f.a.n.n.y? 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! hus.h.!.+" 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 didn't know what to do, you wouldn't."

"Yes, I would; I don't, and I am."

"But what shall I do?" And Kitty plucked away the hands which f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y!"