William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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ladies with me, one an invalid, I am promised a room on the fifth floor some time during the day. They tell me the other hotel is crammed and it's no use to go there."
Mrs. Ellison was ready to weep, and for the first time since her accident she harbored some bitterness against Mr. Arbuton. They all sat silent, and the colonel on the sidewalk silently wiped his brow.
Mr. Arbuton, in the poverty of his invention, wondered if there was not some lodging-house where they could find shelter.
"Of course there is," cried Mrs. Ellison, beaming upon her hero, and calling Kitty's attention to his ingenuity by a pressure with her well foot. "Richard, we must look up a boarding-house."
"Do you know of any good boarding-houses?" asked the colonel of the driver, mechanically.
"Plenty," answered the man.
"Well, drive us to twenty or thirty first-class ones," commanded the colonel; and the search began.
The colonel first asked prices and looked at rooms, and if he pronounced any apartment unsuitable, Kitty was despatched by Mrs. Ellison to view it and refute him. As often as she confirmed him, Mrs. Ellison was sure that they were both too fastidious, and they never turned away from a door but they closed the gates of paradise upon that afflicted lady. She began to believe that they should find no place whatever, when at last they stopped before a portal so unboarding-house-like in all outward signs, that she maintained it was of no use to ring, and imparted so much of her distrust to the colonel that, after ringing, he prefaced his demand for rooms with an apology for supposing that there were rooms to let there. Then, after looking at them, he returned to the carriage and reported that the whole affair was perfect, and that he should look no farther. Mrs. Ellison replied that she never could trust his judgment, he was so careless. Kitty inspected the premises, and came back in a transport that alarmed the worst fears of Mrs. Ellison. She was sure that they had better look farther, she knew there were plenty of nicer places. Even if the rooms were nice and the situation pleasant, she was certain that there must be some drawbacks which they did not know of yet. Whereupon her husband lifted her from the carriage, and bore her, without reply or comment of any kind, into the house.
Throughout the search Mr. Arbuton had been making up his mind that he would part with his friends as soon as they found lodgings, give the day to Quebec, and take the evening train for Gorham, thus escaping the annoyances of a crowded hotel, and ending at once an acquaintance which he ought never to have let go so far. As long as the Ellisons were without shelter, he felt that it was due to himself not to abandon them. But even now that they were happily housed, had he done all that nobility obliged? He stood irresolute beside the carriage.
"Won't you come up and see where we live?" asked Kitty, hospitably.
"I shall be very glad," said Mr. Arbuton.
"My dear fellow," said the colonel, in the parlor, "I didn't engage a room for you. I supposed you'd rather take your chances at the hotel."
"O, I'm going away to-night."
"Why, that's a pity!"
"Yes, I've no fancy for a cot-bed in the hotel parlor. But I don't quite like to leave you here, after bringing this calamity upon you."
"O, don't mention that! I was the only one to blame. We shall get on splendidly here."
Mr. Arbuton suffered a vague disappointment. At the bottom of his heart was a formless hope that he might in some way be necessary to the Ellisons in their adversity; or if not that, then that something might entangle him further and compel his stay. But they seemed quite equal in themselves to the situation; they were in far more comfortable quarters than they could have hoped for, and plainly should want for nothing; Fortune put on a smiling face, and bade him go free of them. He fancied it a mocking smile, though, as he stood an instant silently weighing one thing against another. The colonel was patiently waiting his motion; Mrs. Ellison sat watching him from the sofa; Kitty moved about the room with averted face,—a pretty domestic presence, a household priestess ordering the temporary Penates. Mr. Arbuton opened his lips to say farewell, but a god spoke through them,—inconsequently, as the gods for the most part do, saying, "Besides, I suppose you've got all the rooms here."
"O, as to that I don't know," answered the colonel, not recognizing the language of inspiration, "let's ask." Kitty knocked a photograph-book off the table, and Mrs. Ellison said, "Why, Kitty!" But nothing more was spoken till the landlady came. She had another room, but doubted if it would answer. It was in the attic, and was a back room, though it had a pleasant outlook. Mr. Arbuton had no doubt that it would do very well for the day or two he was going to stay, and took it hastily, without going to look at it. He had his valise carried up at once, and then he went to the post-office to see if he had any letters, offering to ask also for Colonel Ellison.
Kitty stole off to explore the chamber given her at the rear of the house; that is to say, she opened the window looking out on what their hostess told her was the garden of the Ursuline Convent, and stood there in a mute transport. A black cross rose in the midst, and all about this wandered the paths and alleys of the garden, through clumps of lilac-bushes and among the spires of hollyhocks. The grounds were enclosed by high walls in part, and in part by the group of the convent edifices, built of gray stone, high gabled, and topped by dormer-windowed steep roofs of tin, which, under the high morning sun, lay an expanse of keenest splendor, while many a grateful shadow dappled the full-foliaged garden below. Two slim, tall poplars stood against the gable of the chapel, and shot their tops above its roof, and under a porch near them two nuns sat motionless in the sun, black-robed, with black veils falling over their shoulders, and their white faces lost in the white linen that draped them from breast to crown. Their hands lay quiet in their laps, and they seemed unconscious of the other nuns walking in the garden-paths with little children, their pupils, and answering their laughter from time to time with voices as simple and innocent as their own. Kitty looked down upon them all with a swelling heart. They were but figures in a beautiful picture of something old and poetical; but she loved them, and pitied them, and was most happy in them, the same as if they had been real. It could not be that they and she were in the same world: she must be dreaming over a book in Charley's room at Eriecreek. She shaded her eyes for a better look, when the noonday gun boomed from the citadel; the bell upon the chapel jangled harshly, and those strange maskers, those quaint black birds with white breasts and faces, flocked indoors. At the same time a small dog under her window howled dolorously at the jangling of the bell; and Kitty, with an impartial joy, turned from the pensive romance of the convent garden to the mild comedy of the scene to which his woeful note attracted her. When he had uttered his anguish, he relapsed into the quietest small French dog that ever was, and lay down near a large, tranquil cat, whom neither the bell nor he had been able to stir from her slumbers in the sun; a peasant-like old man kept on sawing wood, and a little child stood still amidst the larkspurs and marigolds of a tiny garden, while over the flower-pots on the low window-sill of the neighboring house to which it belonged, a young, motherly face gazed peacefully out. The great extent of the convent grounds had left this poor garden scarce breathing-space for its humble blooms; with the low paling fence that separated it from the adjoining house-yards it looked like a toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show, and in its way it was as quaintly unreal to the young girl as the nunnery itself.
When she saw it first, the city's walls and other warlike ostentations had taken her imagination with the historic grandeur of Quebec; but the fascination deepened now that she was admitted, as it were, to the religious heart and the domestic privacy of the famous old town. She was romantic, as most good young girls are; and she had the same pleasure in the strangeness of the things about her as she would have felt in the keeping of a charming story. To Fanny's "Well, Kitty, I suppose all this just suits you," when she had returned to the little parlor where the sufferer lay, she answered with a sigh of irrepressible content, "O yes! could anything be more beautiful?" and her enraptured eye dwelt upon the low ceilings, the deep, wide chimneys eloquent of the mighty fires with which they must roar in winter, the French windows with their curious and clumsy fastenings, and every little detail that made the place alien and precious.
Fanny broke into a laugh at the visionary absence in her face.
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