“The voice of the turtle was heard in the land.”
Between the garden and the carriage gates there was a fountain where a bronze boy with the dropsy (but not minding it) lived in a perpetual bath from a green goblet held over his head. Nearby, a stone sun-dial gleamed against a clump of lilac bushes; and it was upon this spot that the white kitten introduced Thomas Vanrevel to Miss Carewe.
Upon the morning after her arrival, having finished her piano-forte practice, touched her harp twice, and arpeggioed the Spanish Fandango on her guitar, Miss Betty read two paragraphs of “Gilbert” (for she was profoundly determined to pursue her tasks with diligence), but the open windows disclosing a world all sunshine and green leaves, she threw the book aside with a good conscience, and danced out to the garden. There, coming upon a fuzzy, white ball rolling into itself spirally on a lazy pathway, she pounced at it, whereupon the thing uncurled with lightning swiftness, and fled, more like a streak than a kitten, down the drive, through the open gates and into the street, Miss Betty in full cry.
Across the way there chanced to be strolling a young lady in blue, accompanied by a gentleman whose leisurely gait gave no indication of the maneuvering he had done to hasten their walk into its present direction. He was apparently thirty or thirty-one, tall, very straight, dark, smooth-shaven, his eyes keen, deep-set, and thoughtful, and his high white hat, white satin cravat, and careful collar, were evidence of an elaboration of toilet somewhat unusual in Rouen for the morning; also, he was carrying a pair of white gloves in his hand and dangled a slender ebony cane from his wrist. The flying kitten headed toward the couple, when, with a celerity only to be accounted for on the theory that his eye had been fixed on the Carewe gateway for some time previous to this sudden apparition, the gentleman leaped in front of the fugitive.
The kitten attempted a dodge to pass; the gentleman was there before it. The kitten feinted; the gentleman was altogether too much on the spot. Immediately — and just as Miss Carewe, flushed and glowing, ran into the street — the small animal doubled, evaded Miss Betty’s frantic clutch, re-entered the gateway, and attempted a disappearance into the lilac bushes, instead of going round them, only to find itself, for a fatal two seconds, in difficulties with the close-set thicket of stems.
In regard to the extraordinary agility of which the pursuing gentleman as capable, it is enough to say that he caught the cat. He emerged from the lilacs holding it in one hand, his gloves and white hat in the other, and presented himself before Miss Betty with a breathlessness not entirely attributable to his exertions.
For a moment, as she came running toward him and he met her flashing look, bright with laughter and recognition and haste, he stammered. A thrill nothing less than delirious sent the blood up behind his brown cheeks, for he saw that she, too, knew that this was the second time their eyes had met. Naturally, at that time he could not know how many other gentlemen were to feel that same thrill (in their cases, also, delirious, no less) with the same, accompanying, mysterious feeling, which came just before Miss Betty’s lashes fell, that one had found, at last, a precious thing, lost long since in childhood, or left, perhaps, upon some other planet in a life ten thousand years ago.
He could not speak at once, but when he could, “Permit me, madam,” he said solemnly, offering the captive, “to restore your kitten.”
An agitated kitten should not be detained by clasping its waist, and already the conqueror was paying for his victory. There ensued a final, outrageous squirm of despair; two frantic claws, extended, drew one long red mark across the stranger’s wrist and another down the back of his hand to the knuckles. They were good, hearty scratches, and the blood followed the artist’s lines rapidly; but of this the young man took no note, for he knew that he was about to hear Miss Carewe’s voice for the first time.
“They say the best way to hold them,” he observed, “is by the scruff of the neck.”
Beholding his wounds, suffered in her cause, she gave a pitying cry that made his heart leap with the richness and sweetness of it. Catching the kitten from him, she dropped it to the ground in such wise as to prove nature’s foresight most kind in cushioning the feet of cats.
“Ah! I didn’t want it that much!”
“A cat in the hand is worth two nightingales in the bush,” he said boldly, and laughed. “I would shed more blood than that!”
Miss Betty blushed like a southern dawn, and started back from him. From the convent but yesterday — and she had taken a man’s hand in both of hers!
It was to this tableau that the lady in blue entered, following the hunt through the gates, where she stopped with a discomposed countenance. At once, however, she advanced, and with a cry of greeting, enveloped Miss Betty in a brief embrace, to the relief of the latter’s confusion. It was Fanchon Bareaud, now two years emancipated from St. Mary’s, and far gone in taffeta. With her lustreful light hair, absent blue eyes, and her gentle voice, as small and pretty as her face and figure, it was not too difficult to justify Crailey Gray’s characterization of her as one of those winsome baggages who had made an air of feminine helplessness the fashion of the day.
It is a wicked thing that some women should kiss when a man is by; in the present instance the gentleman became somewhat faint.
“I’m so glad — glad!” exclaimed Betty. “You were just coming to see me, weren’t you? My father is in the library. Let me—”
Miss Bareaud drew back. “No, no!” she interrupted hastily and with evident perturbation. “I — we must be on our way immediately.” She threw a glance at the gentleman, which let him know that she now comprehended his gloves, and why their stroll had trended toward Carewe Street. “Come at once!” she commanded him quickly, in an undertone.
“But now that you’re here,” said Miss Betty, wondering very much why he was not presented to her, “won’t you wait and let me gather a nosegay for you? Our pansies and violets—”
“I could help,” the gentleman suggested, with the look of a lame dog at Miss Bareaud. “I have been considered useful about a garden.”
“Fool!” Betty did not hear the word that came from Miss Bareaud’s closed teeth, though she was mightily surprised at the visible agitation of her schoolmate, for the latter’s face was pale and excited. And Miss Carewe’s amazement was complete when Fanchon, without more words, cavalierly seized the gentleman’s arm and moved toward the street with him as rapidly as his perceptible reluctance to leave permitted. But at the gate Miss Bareaud turned and called back over her shoulder, as if remembering the necessity of offering an excuse for so remarkable a proceeding: “I shall come again very soon. Just now we are upon an errand of great importance. Good-day!”
Miss Betty waved her hand, staring after them, her eyes large with wonder. She compressed her lips tightly: “Errand!” This was the friend of childhood’s happy hour, and they had not met in two years!
“Errand!” She ran to the hedge, along the top of which a high white hat was now seen perambulating; she pressed down a loose branch, and called in a tender voice to the stranger whom Fanchon had chosen should remain nameless:
“Be sure to put some salve on your hand!”
He made a bow which just missed being too low, but did miss it.
“It is there — already,” he said; and, losing his courage after the bow, made his speech with so palpable a gasp before the last word that the dullest person in the world could have seen that he meant it.
Miss Betty disappeared.
There was a rigidity of expression about the gentle mouth of Fanchon Bareaud, which her companion did not enjoy, as they went on their way, each preserving an uneasy silence, until at her own door, she turned sharply upon him. “Tom Vanrevel, I thought you were the steadiest — and now you’ve proved yourself the craziest — soul in Rouen!” she burst out. “And I couldn’t say worse!”
“Why didn’t you present me to her?” asked Vanrevel.
“Because I thought a man of your gallantry might prefer not to face
a shotgun in the presence of ladies!”
“Pooh!”
“Pooh!” mimicked Miss Bareaud. “You can ‘pooh’ as much as you like, but if he had seen us from the window—” She covered her face with her hands for a moment, then dropped them and smiled upon him. “I understand perfectly to what I owe the pleasure of a stroll with you this morning, and your casual insistence on the shadiness of Carewe Street!” He laughed nervously, but her smile vanished, and she continued, “Keep away, Tom. She is beautiful, and at St. Mary’s I always thought she had spirit and wit, too. I only hope Crailey won’t see her before the wedding! But it isn’t safe for you. Go along, now, and ask Crailey please to come at three this afternoon.”
This message from Mr. Gray’s betrothed was not all the ill-starred Tom conveyed to his friend. Mr. Vanrevel was ordinarily esteemed a person of great reserve and discretion; nevertheless there was one man to whom he told everything, and from whom he had no secrets. He spent the noon hour in feeble attempts to describe to Crailey Gray the outward appearance of Miss Elizabeth Carewe; how she ran like a young Diana; what one felt upon hearing her voice; and he presented in himself an example exhibiting something of the cost of looking in her eyes. His conversation was more or less incoherent, but the effect of it was complete.
CHAPTER II. Surviving Evils of the Reign of Terror
DOES THERE EXIST an incredulous, or jealous, denizen of another portion of our country who, knowing that the room in the wooden cupola over Mr. Carewe’s library was commonly alluded to by Rouen as the “Tower Chamber,” will prove himself so sectionally prejudiced as to deny that the town was a veritable hotbed of literary interest, or that Sir ‘Walter Scott was ill-appreciated there? Some of the men looked sly, and others grinned, at mention of this apartment; but the romantic were not lacking who spoke of it in whispers: how the lights sometimes shone there all night long, and the gentlemen drove away, whitefaced, in the dawn. The cupola, rising above the library, overlooked the garden; and the house, save for that, was of a single story, with a low veranda running the length of its front. The windows of the library and of a row of bedrooms — one of which was Miss Betty’s — lined the veranda, “steamboat fashion;” the inner doors of these rooms all opening upon a long hail which bisected the house, the stairway leading to the room in the cupola rose the library itself, while the bisecting hail afforded be only access to the library; hence, the gossips, ‘eli acquainted with the geography of the place, conferred seriously together upon what effect Miss Betty’s homecoming would have in this connection:
Dr anyone going to the stairway must needs pass her door; and, what was more to the point, a party C gentlemen descending late from the mysterious garret might be not so quiet as they intended, and the young lady sufficiently disturbed to inquire of her father what entertainment he provided that should keep his guests until four in the morning.
But at present it was with the opposite end of the house that the town was occupied, for there, workmen were hammering and sawing and painting day long, finishing the addition Mr. Carewe was building for his daughter’s debut. This hammering disturbed Miss Betty, who had become almost as busy with the French Revolution as with her mantua-maker. For she had found in her father’s library many books not for convent-shelves; and she had become a Girondin. She found memoirs, histories, and tales of that delectable period, then not so dim with time but that the figures of it were more than tragic shadows; and for a week there was no meal in that house to which she sat down earlier than half an hour Jate. She had a rightful property-interest in the Revolution, her own great-uncle having been one of those who “suffered;” not, however, under the guillotine; for to Georges Meilhac appertained the rare distinction of death by accident on the day when the business-like young Bonaparte played upon the mob with his cannon.
There were some yellow letters of this great uncle’s in a box which had belonged to her grandmother, a rich discovery for Miss Betty, who read and re-read them with eager and excited eyes, living more in Paris with Georges and his friends than in Rouen with her father. Indeed, she had little else to do. Mr. Carewe was no comrade for her, by far the reverse. She seldom saw him, except at the table, when he sat with averted eyes, and talked to her very little; and, while making elaborate preparation for her introduction to his friends (such was his phrase) he treated her with a perfunctory civility which made her wonder if her advent was altogether welcome to him; bat when she noticed that his hair looked darker than usual about every fourth day, she began to understand Why he appeared ungrateful to her for growing up. He went out a great deal, though no visitors came to the house; for it was known that Mr. Carewe desired to present his daughter to no one until he presented her to all. Fanchon Bareaud, indeed, made one hurried and embarrassed call, evading Miss Betty’s reference to the chevalier of the kitten with a dexterity too nimble to be thought unintentional. Miss Carewe was forbidden to return her friend’s visit until after her debut; and Mr. Carewe explained that there was always some worthless Young men hanging about the Bareaud’s, where (he did not add) they interfered with a worthy oh one who desired to honor Fanchon’s older sister, Virginia, with his attentions.
This was no great hardship for Miss Betty, as, since plunging into the Revolution with her great-uncle, she had lost some curiosity concerning the men of to-day, doubting that they would show forth as heroic, as debonnair, gay and tragic as he. He was the legendary hero of her childhood; she remembered her mother’s stories of him perhaps more clearly than she remembered her mother; and one of the older Sisters had known him in Paris and had talked of him at length, giving the flavor of his dandyism and his beauty at first hand to his young relative. He had been one of those hardy young men wearing unbelievable garments, who began to appear in the garden of the Tuileries with knives in their sleeves and cudgels in their hands, about April, 1794, and whose dash and recklessness in many matters were the first intimations that the Citizen Tallien was about to cause the Citizen Robespierre to shoot himself through the jaw.
In the library hung a small, full-length drawing of Georges, done in color by Miss Betty’s grandmother; and this she carried to her own room an& studied long and ardently, until sometimes the man himself seemed to stand before her, in spite of the fact that Mile. Meithac had not a distinguished talent and M. Meilhac’s features might have been anybody’s. It was to be seen, however, that he was smiling.
Miss Betty had an impression that her grandmother’s art of portraiture would have been more-successful with the profile than the “full-face.” Nevertheless, nothing could be more clearly indicated than that the hair of M. Melihac was very yellow, and his short, huge-lapelled waistcoat white, striped with scarlet. An enormous cravat covered his chin; the heavy collar of his yellow coat rose behind his ears, while its tails fell to his ankles; and the tight trousers of white and yellow stripes were tied with white ribbons about the middle of the calf; he wore white stockings and gold-buckled yellow shoes, and on the back of his head a jauntily cocked black hat. Miss Betty innocently wondered why his letters did not speak of Petion, of Vergniaud, or of Dumoriez, since in the historical novels which she read, the hero’s lot was inevitably linked with that of everyone of importance in his generation; yet Georges appeared to have been unacquainted with these personages, Robespierre being the only name of consequence mentioned in his letters; and then it appeared in much the same fashion practised by her father in alluding to the Governor of the State, who had the misfortune to be unpopular with Mr. Carewe. But this did not dim her great-uncle’s lustre in Miss Betty’s eyes, nor lessen for her the pathetic romance of the smile he wore.
Beholding this smile, one remembered the end to which his light footsteps bad led him; and it was unavoidable to picture him left lying in the empty street behind the heels of the flying crowd, carefully forming that same smile on his lips, and taking much pride in passing with some small, cynical speech, murmured to himself, concerning the futility of a gentleman’s getting shot by his friends for merely
being present to applaud them. So, fancying him thus, with his yellow hair, his scarlet-striped waistcoat, and his tragedy, the young girl felt a share of family greatness, or, at least, of picturesqueness, descend to her. And she smiled sadly back upon the smile in the picture, and dreamed about its original night after night.
Whether or no another figure, that of a dark young man in a white hat, with a white kitten etching his wrist in red, found any place in her dreams at this period, — it is impossible to determine. She did not see him again. It is quite another thing, hazardous to venture, to state that he did not see her. At all events, it is certain that many people who bad never beheld her were talking of her; that Rouen was full of contention concerning her beauty and her gift of music, for a song can be heard through an open window. And how did it happen that Crailey Gray knew that it was Miss Carewe’s habit to stroll in her garden for half an hour or so, each evening before retiring, and that she went to mass every morning soon after sunrise? Crailey Gray never rose at, or near, sunrise in his life, though he sometimes beheld it, from another point of view, as the end of the evening. It appears that someone must have told him.
One night when the moon lay white on the trees and housetops, Miss Betty
paused in her evening promenade and seated herself upon a bench on the
borders of the garden, “touched,” as the books of the time would have
put it, “by the sweet tranquillity of the scene,” and wrought upon by
the tender incentive to sighs and melancholy which youth in loneliness
finds in a loveliness of the earth. The breeze bore the smells of the
old-fashioned garden, of violets and cherry blossoms, and a sound of
distant violins came on the air playing the new song from the new opera.
“But I also dreamt, which pleased me most,
That you loved me just the same—”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 45