William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
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Italy; or South, for the matter of that."
"O, is it?" answered Kitty, joyously. "I thought it must be!" And she added, in that trustful way of hers: "It's all very familiar; but then it seems to me on this journey that I've seen a great many things that I know I've only read of before"; and so followed Mr. Arbuton in his tour of the pictures.
She was as ignorant of art as any Roman or Florentine girl whose life has been passed in the midst of it; and she believed these mighty fine pictures, and was puzzled by Mr. Arbuton's behavior towards them, who was too little imaginative or too conscientious to make merit for them out of the things they suggested. He treated the poor altar-pieces of the Quebec cathedral with the same harsh indifference he would have shown to the second-rate paintings of a European gallery; doubted the Vandyck, and cared nothing for the Conception, "in the style of Le Brun," over the high-altar, though it had the historical interest of having survived that bombardment of 1759 which destroyed the church.
Kitty innocently singled out the worst picture in the place as her favorite, and then was piqued, and presently frightened, at his cold reluctance about it. He made her feel that it was very bad, and that she shared its inferiority, though he said nothing to that effect. She learned the shame of not being a connoisseur in a connoisseur's company, and she perceived more painfully than ever before that a Bostonian, who had been much in Europe, might be very uncomfortable to the simple, unravelled American. Yet, she reminded herself, the Marches had been in Europe, and they were Bostonians also; and they did not go about putting everything under foot; they seemed to care for everything they saw, and to have a friendly jest, if not praises, for it. She liked that; she would have been well enough pleased to have Mr. Arbuton laugh outright at her picture, and she could have joined him in it. But the look, however flattered into an air of polite question at last, which he had bent upon her, seemed to outlaw her and condemn her taste in everything. As they passed out of the cathedral, she would rather have gone home than continued the walk as he begged her, if she were not tired, to do; but this would have been flight, and she was not a coward. So they sauntered down the Rue Fabrique, and turned into Palace Street. As they went by the door of Hôtel Musty, her pleasant friends came again into her mind, and she said, "This is where we stayed last week, with Mr. and Mrs. March."
"Those Boston people?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where they live in Boston?"
"Why, we have their address; but I can't think of it. I believe somewhere in the southern part of the city—"
"The South End?"
"O yes, that's it. Have you ever heard of them?"
"No."
"I thought perhaps you might have known Mr. March. He's in the insurance business—"
"O no! No, I don't know him," said Mr. Arbuton, eagerly. Kitty wondered if there could be anything wrong with the business repute of Mr. March, but dismissed the thought as unworthy; and having perceived that her friends were snubbed, she said bravely, that they were the most delightful people she had ever seen, and she was sorry that they were not still in Quebec. He shared her regret tacitly, if at all, and they walked in silence to the gate, whence they strolled down the winding street outside the wall into the Lower Town. But it was not a pleasant ramble for Kitty: she was in a dim dread of hitherto unseen and unimagined trespasses against good taste, not only in pictures and people, but in all life, which, from having been a very smiling prospect when she set out with Mr. Arbuton, had suddenly become a narrow pathway, in which one must pick one's way with more regard to each step than any general end. All this was as obscure and uncertain as the intimations which had produced it, and which, in words, had really amounted to nothing. But she felt more and more that in her companion there was something wholly alien to the influences which had shaped her; and though she could not know how much, she was sure of enough to make her dreary in his presence.
They wandered through the quaintness and noiseless bustle of the Lower Town thoroughfares, and came by and by to that old church, the oldest in Quebec, which was built near two hundred years ago, in fulfilment of a vow made at the repulse of Sir William Phipps's attack upon the city, and further famed for the prophecy of a nun, that this church should be ruined by the fire in which a successful attempt of the English was yet to involve the Lower Town. A painting, which represented the vision of the nun, perished in the conflagration which verified it, in 1759; but the walls of the ancient structure remain to witness this singular piece of history, which Kitty now glanced at furtively in one of the colonel's guide-books; since her ill-fortune with the picture in the cathedral, she had not openly cared for anything.
At one side of the church there was a booth for the sale of crockery and tin ware; and there was an every-day cheerfulness of small business in the shops and tented stands about the square on which the church faced, and through which there was continual passing of heavy burdens from the port, swift calashes, and slow, country-paced market-carts.
Mr. Arbuton made no motion to enter the church, and Kitty would not hint the curiosity she felt to see the interior; and while they lingered a moment, the door opened, and a peasant came out with a little coffin in his arms. His eyes were dim and his face wet with weeping, and he bore the little coffin tenderly, as if his caress might reach the dead child within. Behind him she came who must be the mother, her face deeply hidden in her veil. Beside the pavement waited a shabby calash, with a driver half asleep on his perch; and the man, still clasping his precious burden, clambered into the vehicle, and laid it upon his knees, while the woman groped, through her tears and veil, for the step. Kitty and her companion had moved reverently aside; but now Mr. Arbuton came forward, and helped the woman to her place. She gave him a hoarse, sad "Merci!" and spread a fold of her shawl fondly over the end of the little coffin; the drowsy driver whipped up his beast, and the calash jolted away.
Kitty cast a grateful glance upon Mr. Arbuton, as they now entered the church, by a common impulse. On their way towards the high-altar they passed the rude black bier, with the tallow candles yet smoking in their black wooden candlesticks. A few worshippers were dropped here and there in the vacant seats, and at a principal side-altar knelt a poor woman praying before a wooden effigy of the dead Christ that lay in a glass case under the altar. The image was of life-size, and was painted to represent life, or rather death, with false hair and beard, and with the muslin drapery managed to expose the stigmata: it was stretched upon a bed strewn with artificial flowers; and it was dreadful. But the poor soul at her devotions there prayed to it in an ecstasy of supplication, flinging her arms asunder with imploring gesture, clasping her hands and bowing her head upon them, while her person swayed from side to side in the abandon of her prayer. Who could she be, and what was her mighty need of blessing or forgiveness? As her wont was, Kitty threw her own soul into the imagined case of the suppliant, the tragedy of her desire or sorrow. Yet, like all who suffer sympathetically, she was not without consolations unknown to the principal; and the waning afternoon, as it lit up the conventional ugliness of the old church, and the paraphernalia of its worship, relieved her emotional self-abandon with a remote sense of content, so that it may have been a jealousy for the integrity of her own revery, as well as a feeling for the poor woman, that made her tremble lest Mr. Arbuton should in some way disparage the spectacle. I suppose that her interest in it was more an aesthetic than a spiritual one; it embodied to her sight many a scene of penitence that had played before her fancy, and I do not know but she would have been willing to have the suppliant guilty of some dreadful misdeed, rather than eating meat last Friday, which was probably her sin. However it was, the ancient crone before that ghastly idol was precious to her, and it seemed too great a favor, when at last the suppliant wiped her eyes, rose trembling from her knees, and approaching Kitty, stretched towards her a shaking palm for charity.
It was a touch that transfigured all, and gave even Mr. Arbuton's neutrality a light of ideal character. He bestowed the alms craved of him in turn, he did not repulse the beldame's blessing; and Kitty, who was already moved by his kindness to that poor mourner at the door, forgot that the earlier part of their walk had been so miserable, and climbed back to the Upper Town through the Prescott Gate in greater gayety than she had yet known that day in his company. I think he had not done much to make her cheerful; but it is one of the advantages of a temperament like his, that very little is expected