"I should think she had had enough of visitors!" her companion rejoined.
"But _you_ don"t mean to stay ten years," she added, glancing at me.
"Has she a visitor of that sort?" I inquired, perplexed.
"You will see the sort!" said the minister"s wife. "She"s easily seen; she generally sits in the front yard. Only take care what you say to her, and be very sure you are polite."
"Ah, she is so sensitive?"
The minister"s wife jumped up and dropped me a curtsey, a most ironical curtsey.
"That"s what she is, if you please. She"s a countess!"
And p.r.o.nouncing this word with the most scathing accent, the little woman seemed fairly to laugh in the Countess"s face. I stood a moment, staring, wondering, remembering.
"Oh, I shall be very polite!" I cried; and grasping my hat and stick, I went on my way.
I found Miss Spencer"s residence without difficulty. The Baptist church was easily identified, and the small dwelling near it, of a rusty white, with a large central chimney-stack and a Virginia creeper, seemed naturally and properly the abode of a frugal old maid with a taste for the picturesque. As I approached I slackened my pace, for I had heard that some one was always sitting in the front yard, and I wished to reconnoitre. I looked cautiously over the low white fence which separated the small garden-s.p.a.ce from the unpaved street; but I descried nothing in the shape of a countess. A small straight path led up to the crooked doorstep, and on either side of it was a little gra.s.s-plot, fringed with currant-bushes. In the middle of the gra.s.s, on either side, was a large quince-tree, full of antiquity and contortions, and beneath one of the quince-trees were placed a small table and a couple of chairs. On the table lay a piece of unfinished embroidery and two or three books in bright-colored paper covers. I went in at the gate and paused halfway along the path, scanning the place for some farther token of its occupant, before whom--I could hardly have said why--I hesitated abruptly to present myself. Then I saw that the poor little house was very shabby. I felt a sudden doubt of my right to intrude; for curiosity had been my motive, and curiosity here seemed singularly indelicate. While I hesitated, a figure appeared in the open doorway and stood there looking at me. I immediately recognized Caroline Spencer, but she looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Gently, but gravely and timidly, I advanced to the doorstep, and then I said, with an attempt at friendly badinage,--
"I waited for you over there to come back, but you never came."
"Waited where, sir?" she asked softly, and her light-colored eyes expanded more than before.
She was much older; she looked tired and wasted.
"Well," I said, "I waited at Havre."
She stared; then she recognized me. She smiled and blushed and clasped her two hands together. "I remember you now," she said. "I remember that day." But she stood there, neither coming out nor asking me to come in.
She was embarra.s.sed.
I, too, felt a little awkward. I poked my stick into the path. "I kept looking out for you, year after year," I said.
"You mean in Europe?" murmured Miss Spencer.
"In Europe, of course! Here, apparently, you are easy enough to find."
She leaned her hand against the unpainted doorpost, and her head fell a little to one side. She looked at me for a moment without speaking, and I thought I recognized the expression that one sees in women"s eyes when tears are rising. Suddenly she stepped out upon the cracked slab of stone before the threshold and closed the door behind her. Then she began to smile intently, and I saw that her teeth were as pretty as ever. But there had been tears too.
"Have you been there ever since?" she asked, almost in a whisper.
"Until three weeks ago. And you--you never came back?"
Still looking at me with her fixed smile, she put her hand behind her and opened the door again. "I am not very polite," she said. "Won"t you come in?"
"I am afraid I incommode you."
"Oh, no!" she answered, smiling more than ever. And she pushed back the door, with a sign that I should enter.
I went in, following her. She led the way to a small room on the left of the narrow hall, which I supposed to be her parlor, though it was at the back of the house, and we pa.s.sed the closed door of another apartment which apparently enjoyed a view of the quince-trees. This one looked out upon a small woodshed and two clucking hens. But I thought it very pretty, until I saw that its elegance was of the most frugal kind; after which, presently, I thought it prettier still, for I had never seen faded chintz and old mezzotint engravings, framed in varnished autumn leaves, disposed in so graceful a fashion. Miss Spencer sat down on a very small portion of the sofa, with her hands tightly clasped in her lap. She looked ten years older, and it would have souuded very perverse now to speak of her as pretty. But I thought her so; or at least I thought her touching. She was peculiarly agitated. I tried to appear not to notice it; but suddenly, in the most inconsequent fashion,--it was an irresistible memory of our little friendship at Havre,--I said to her, "I do incommode you. You are distressed."
She raised her two hands to her face, and for a moment kept it buried in them. Then, taking them away,--"It"s because you remind me--" she said.
"I remind you, you mean, of that miserable day at Havre?"
She shook her head. "It was not miserable. It was delightful."
"I never was so shocked as when, on going back to your inn the next morning, I found you had set sail again."
She was silent a moment; and then she said, "Please let us not speak of that."
"Did you come straight back here?" I asked.
"I was back here just thirty days after I had gone away."
"And here you have remained ever since?"
"Oh, yes!" she said gently.
"When are you going to Europe again?"
This question seemed brutal; but there was something that irritated me in the softness of her resignation, and I wished to extort from her some expression of impatience.
She fixed her eyes for a moment upon a small sunspot on the carpet; then she got up and lowered the window-blind a little, to obliterate it. Presently, in the same mild voice, answering my question, she said, "Never!"
"I hope your cousin repaid you your money."
"I don"t care for it now," she said, looking away from me.
"You don"t care for your money?"
"For going to Europe."
"Do you mean that you would not go if you could?"
"I can"t--I can"t," said Caroline Spencer. "It is all over; I never think of it."
"He never repaid you, then!" I exclaimed.
"Please--please," she began.
But she stopped; she was looking toward the door. There had been a rustling aud a sound of steps in the hall.
I also looked toward the door, which was open, and now admitted another person, a lady, who paused just within the threshold. Behind her came a young man. The lady looked at me with a good deal of fixedness, long enough for my glance to receive a vivid impression of herself. Then she turned to Caroline Spencer, and, with a smile and a strong foreign accent,--
"Excuse my interruption!" she said. "I knew not you had company, the gentleman came in so quietly."
With this she directed her eyes toward me again.
She was very strange; yet my first feeling was that I had seen her before. Then I perceived that I had only seen ladies who were very much like her. But I had seen them very far away from Grimwinter, and it was an odd sensation to be seeing her here. Whither was it the sight of her seemed to transport me? To some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian _quatrieme_,--to an open door revealing a greasy antechamber, and to Madame leaning over the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls down to the portress to bring up her coffee. Miss Spencer"s visitor was a very large woman, of middle age, with a plump, dead-white face, and hair drawn back _a la chinoise_. She had a small penetrating eye, and what is called in French an agreeable smile.
She wore an old pink cashmere dressing-gown, covered with white embroideries, and, like the figure in my momentary vision, she was holding it together in front with a bare and rounded arm and a plump and deeply dimpled hand.