William Dean Howells: 27 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated). William Dean Howells
Читать онлайн книгу.
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 for herself that on the morrow she must leave those 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 as she could by meditating the praise of Mr. 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.
XIII. Ordeal
They had not planned to go anywhere that day; but after church they found themselves with the loveliest afternoon of their stay at Quebec to be passed somehow, and it was a pity to pass it indoors, the colonel said at their early dinner. They canvassed the attractions of the different drives out of town, and they decided upon that to Lorette. The Ellisons had already been there, but Mr. Arbuton had not, and it was from a dim motive of politeness towards him that Mrs. Ellison chose the excursion; though this did not prevent her from wondering aloud afterward, from time to time, why she had chosen it. He was restless and absent, and answered at random when points of the debate were referred to him, but he eagerly assented to the conclusion, and was in haste to set out.
The road to Lorette is through St. John's Gate, down into the outlying meadows and rye-fields, where, crossing and recrossing the swift St. Charles, it finally rises at Lorette above the level of the citadel. It is a lonelier road than that to Montmorenci, and the scattering cottages upon it have not the well-to-do prettiness, the operatic repair, of stone-built Beauport. But they are charming, nevertheless, and the people seem to be remoter from modern influences. Peasant-girls, in purple gowns and broad straw hats, and not the fashions of the year before last, now and then appeared to our acquaintance; near one ancient cottage an old man, in the true habitant's red woollen cap with a long fall, leaned over the bars of his gate and smoked a short pipe.
By and by they came to Jeune-Lorette, an almost ideally pretty hamlet, bordering the road on either hand with galleried and balconied little houses, from which the people bowed to them as they passed, and piously enclosing in its midst the village church and churchyard. They soon after reached Lorette itself, which they might easily have known for an Indian town by its unkempt air, and the irregular attitudes in which the shabby cabins lounged along the lanes that wandered through it, even if the Ellisons had not known it already, or if they had not been welcomed by a pomp of Indian boys and girls of all shades of darkness. The girls had bead-wrought moccasins and work-bags to sell, and the boys bore bows and arrows and burst into loud cries of "Shoot! shoot! grand shoot! Put-up-pennies! shoot-the-pennies! Grand shoot!" When they recognized the colonel, as they did after the party had dismounted in front of the church, they renewed these cries with greater vehemence.
"Now, Richard," implored his wife, "you're not going to let those little pests go through all that shooting performance again?"
"I must. It is expected of me whenever I come to Lorette; and I would never be the man to neglect an ancient observance of this kind." The colonel stuck a copper into the hard sand as he spoke, and a small storm of arrows hurtled around it. Presently it flew into the air, and a fair-faced, blue-eyed boy picked it up: he won most of the succeeding coins.
"There's an aborigine of pure blood," remarked the colonel; "his ancestors came from Normandy two hundred years ago. That's the reason he uses the bow so much better than these coffee-colored impostors."
They went into the chapel, which stands on the site of the ancient church burnt not long ago. It is small, and it is bare and rude inside, with only the commonest ornamentation about the altar, on one side of which was the painted wooden statue of a nun, on the other that of a priest,—slight enough commemoration of those who had suffered so much for the hopeless race that lingers and wastes at Lorette in incurable squalor and wildness. They are Christians after their fashion, this poor remnant of the mighty Huron nation converted by the Jesuits and crushed by the Iroquois in the far-western wilderness; but whatever they are at heart, they are still savage in countenance, and these boys had faces of wolves and foxes. They followed their visitors into the church, where there was only an old woman praying to a picture, beneath which hung a votive hand and foot, and a few young Huron suppliants with very sleek hair, whose wandering devotions seemed directed now at the strangers, and now at the wooden effigy of the House of St. Ann borne by two gilt angels above the high-altar. There was no service, and the visitors soon quitted the chapel amid the clamors of the boys outside. Some young girls, in the dress of our period, were promenading up and down the road with their arms about each other and their eyes alert for the effect upon spectators.
From one of the village lanes came swaggering towards the visitors a figure of aggressive fashion,—a very buckish young fellow, with a heavy black mustache and black eyes, who wore a jaunty round hat, blue checked trousers, a white vest, and a morning-coat of blue diagonals, buttoned across his breast; in his hand he swung a light cane.
"That is the son of the chief, Paul Picot," whispered the driver.
"Excuse me," said the colonel, instantly; and the young gentleman nodded. "Can you tell me if we could see the chief to-day?"
"O yes!" answered the notary in English, "my father is chief. You can see him"; and passed on with a somewhat supercilious air.
The colonel, in his first hours at Quebec, had bought at a bazaar of Indian wares the photograph of an Indian warrior in a splendor of factitious savage panoply. It was called "The Last of the Hurons," and the colonel now avenged himself for the curtness of M. Picot by styling him "The Next to the Last of the Hurons."
"Well," said Fanny, who had a wife's willingness to see her husband occasionally snubbed, "I don't know why you asked him. I'm sure nobody wants to see that old chief and his wretched bead trumpery again."
"My dear," answered the colonel, "wherever Americans go, they like to be presented at court. Mr. Arbuton, here, I've no doubt has been introduced to the crowned heads of the Old World, and longs to pay his respects to the sovereign of Lorette. Besides, I always call upon the reigning prince when I come to Lorette. The coldness of the heir-apparent shall not repel me."
The colonel led the way up the principal lane of the village. Some of