Four Meetings

“I see you have a great deal of eye,” I replied. “Your cousin tells me you are studying art.” He looked at me in the same way without answering, and I went on with deliberate urbanity, “I suppose you are at the studio of one of those great men.”

Still he looked at me, and then he said softly, “Gérôme.”

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“Do you understand French?” he said.

“Some kinds,” I answered.

He kept his little eyes on me; then he said, “J’adore la peinture!”

“Oh, I understand that kind!” I rejoined. Miss Spencer laid her hand upon her cousin’s arm with a little pleased and fluttered movement; it was delightful to be among people who were on such easy terms with foreign tongues. I got up to take leave, and asked Miss Spencer where, in Paris, I might have the honor of waiting upon her. To what hotel would she go?

She turned to her cousin inquiringly, and he honored me again with his little languid leer. “Do you know the Hôtel des Princes?”

“I know where it is.”

“I shall take her there.”

“I congratulate you,” I said to Caroline Spencer. “I believe it is the best inn in the world; and in case I should still have a moment to call upon you here, where are you lodged?”

“Oh, it’s such a pretty name,” said Miss Spencer gleefully. “À la Belle Normande.”

As I left them her cousin gave me a great flourish with his picturesque hat.

III

My sister, as it proved, was not sufficiently restored to leave Havre by the afternoon train; so that, as the autumn dusk began to fall, I found myself at liberty to call at the sign of the Fair Norman. I must confess that I had spent much of the interval in wondering what the disagreeable thing was that my charming friend’s disagreeable cousin had been telling her. The “Belle Normande” was a modest inn in a shady bystreet, where it gave me satisfaction to think Miss Spencer must have encountered local color in abundance. There was a crooked little court, where much of the hospitality of the house was carried on; there was a staircase climbing to bedrooms on the outer side of the wall; there was a small trickling fountain with a stucco statuette in the midst of it; there was a little boy in a white cap and apron cleaning copper vessels at a conspicuous kitchen door; there was a chattering landlady, neatly laced, arranging apricots and grapes into an artistic pyramid upon a pink plate. I looked about, and on a green bench outside of an open door labelled Salle à Manger, I perceived Caroline Spencer. No sooner had I looked at her than I saw that something had happened since the morning. She was leaning back on her bench, her hands were clasped in her lap, and her eyes were fixed upon the landlady, at the other side of the court, manipulating her apricots.

But I saw she was not thinking of apricots. She was staring absently, thoughtfully; as I came near her I perceived that she had been crying. I sat down on the bench beside her before she saw me; then, when she had done so, she simply turned round, without surprise, and rested her sad eyes upon me. Something very bad indeed had happened; she was completely changed.

I immediately charged her with it. “Your cousin has been giving you bad news; you are in great distress.”

For a moment she said nothing, and I supposed that she was afraid to speak, lest her tears should come back. But presently I perceived that in the short time that had elapsed since my leaving her in the morning she had shed them all, and that she was now softly stoical, intensely composed.

“My poor cousin is in distress,” she said at last. “His news was bad.” Then, after a brief hesitation, “He was in terrible want of money.”

“In want of yours, you mean?”

“Of any that he could get—honestly. Mine was the only money.”

“And he has taken yours?”

She hesitated again a moment, but her glance, meanwhile, was pleading. “I gave him what I had.”

I have always remembered the accent of those words as the most angelic bit of human utterance I had ever listened to; but then, almost with a sense of personal outrage, I jumped up. “Good heavens!” I said, “do you call that getting, it honestly?”

I had gone too far; she blushed deeply. “We will not speak of it,” she said.

“We must speak of it,” I answered, sitting down again. “I am your friend; it seems to me you need one. What is the matter with your cousin?”

“He is in debt.”

“No doubt! But what is the special fitness of your paying his debts?”

“He has told me all his story; I am very sorry for him.”

“So am I! But I hope he will give you back your money.”

“Certainly he will; as soon as he can.”

“When will that be?”

“When he has finished his great picture.”

“My dear young lady, confound his great picture! Where is this desperate cousin?”

She certainly hesitated now. Then,—“At his dinner,” she answered.

I turned about and looked through the open door into the salle à manger. There, alone at the end of a long table, I perceived the object of Miss Spencer’s compassion, the bright young art-student. He was dining too attentively to notice me at first; but in the act of setting down a well-emptied wineglass he caught sight of my observant attitude. He paused in his repast, and, with his head on one side and his meagre jaws slowly moving, fixedly returned my gaze. Then the landlady came lightly brushing by with her pyramid of apricots.

“And that nice little plate of fruit is for him?” I exclaimed.

Miss Spencer glanced at it tenderly. “They do that so prettily!” she murmured.

I felt helpless and irritated. “Come now, really,” I said; “do you approve of that long strong fellow accepting your funds?” She looked away from me; I was evidently giving her pain. The case was hopeless; the long strong fellow had “interested” her.

“Excuse me if I speak of him so unceremoniously,” I said. “But you are really too generous, and he is not quite delicate enough. He made his debts himself; he ought to pay them himself.”

“He has been foolish,” she answered; “I know that He has told me everything. We had a long talk this morning; the poor fellow threw himself upon my charity. He has signed notes to a large amount.”

“The more fool he!”

“He is in extreme distress; and it is not only himself. It is his poor wife.”

“Ah, he has a poor wife?”

“I didn’t know it; but he confessed everything. He married two years since, secretly.”

“Why secretly?”

Caroline Spencer glanced about her, as if she feared listeners. Then softly, in a little impressive tone,—“She was a countess!”

“Are you very sure of that?”

“She has written me a most beautiful letter.”

“Asking you for money, eh?”

“Asking me for confidence and sympathy,” said Miss Spencer. “She has been disinherited by her father. My cousin told me the story, and she tells it in her own way, in the letter. It is like an old romance. Her father opposed the marriage, and when he discovered that she had secretly disobeyed him he cruelly cast her off. It is really most romantic. They are the oldest family in Provence.”

I looked and listened in wonder. It really seemed that the poor woman was enjoying the “romance” of having a discarded countess-cousin, out of Provence, so deeply as almost to lose the sense of what the forfeiture of her money meant for her.

“My dear young lady,” I said, “you don’t want to be ruined for picturesqueness’ sake?”

“I shall not be ruined. I shall come back before long to stay with them. The Countess insists upon that.”

“Come back! You are going home, then?”

She sat for a moment with her eyes lowered, then with an heroic suppression of a faint tremor of the voice,—“I have no money for travelling!” she answered.

“You gave it all up?”

“I have kept enough to take me home.”

I gave an angry groan; and at this juncture Miss Spencer’s cousin, the fortunate possessor of her sacred savings and of the hand of the Provençal countess, emerged from the little dining-room. He stood on the threshold for an instant, removing the stone from a plump apricot which he had brought away from the table; then he put the apricot into his mouth, and while he let it sojourn there, gratefully, stood looking at us, with his long legs apart and his hands dropped into the pockets of his velvet jacket. My companion got up, giving him a thin glance which I caught in its passage, and which expressed a strange commixture of resignation and fascination,—a sort of perverted exaltation. Ugly, vulgar, pretentious, dishonest, as I thought the creature, he had appealed successfully to her eager and tender imagination. I was deeply disgusted, but I had no warrant to interfere, and at any rate I felt that it would be vain.

The young man waved his hand with a pictorial gesture. “Nice old court,” he observed. “Nice mellow old place. Good tone in that brick. Nice crooked old staircase.”

Decidedly, I could n’t stand it; without responding I gave my hand to Caroline Spencer. She looked at me an instant with her little white face and expanded eyes, and as she showed her pretty teeth I suppose she meant to smile.

“Don’t be sorry for me,” she said, “I am very sure I shall see something of this dear old Europe yet.”

I told her that I would not bid her goodby; I should find a moment to come back the next morning. Her cousin, who had put on his sombrero again, flourished it off at me by way of a bow, upon which I took my departure.

The next morning I came back to the inn, where I met in the court the landlady, more loosely laced than in the evening. On my asking for Miss Spencer,—“Partie, monsieu,” said the hostess. “She went away last night at ten o ‘clock, with her—her—not her husband, eh?—in fine, her monsieur. They went down to the American ship.” I turned away; the poor girl had been about thirteen hours in Europe.

IV

I myself, more fortunate, was there some five years longer. During this period I lost my friend Latouche, who died of a malarious fever during a tour in the Levant. One of the first things I did on my return was to go up to Grimwinter to pay a consolatory visit to his poor mother. I found her in deep affliction, and I sat with her the whole of the morning that followed my arrival (I had come in late at night), listening to her tearful descant and singing the praises of my friend. We talked of nothing else, and our conversation terminated only with the arrival of a quick little woman who drove herself up to the door in a “carryall,” and whom I saw toss the reins upon the horse’s back with the briskness of a startled sleeper throwing back the bed-clothes. She jumped out of the carryall and she jumped into the room. She proved to be the minister’s wife and the great town-gossip, and she had evidently, in the latter capacity, a choice morsel to communicate. I was as sure of this as I was that poor Mrs. Latouche was not absolutely too bereaved to listen to her. It seemed to me discreet to retire; I said I believed I would go and take a walk before dinner.

“And, by the way,” I added, “if you will tell me where my old friend Miss Spencer lives, I will walk to her house.”

The minister’s wife immediately responded. Miss Spencer lived in the fourth house beyond the “Baptist church; the Baptist church was the one on the right, with that queer green thing over the door; they called it a portico, but it looked more like an old-fashioned bedstead.

“Yes, do go and see poor Caroline,” said Mrs. Latouche. “It will refresh her to see a strange face.”

“I should think she had had enough of strange faces!” cried the minister’s wife.

“I mean, to see a visitor,” said Mrs. Latouche, amending her phrase.

“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 pronouncing 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-space 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 grass-plot, fringed with currant-bushes. In the middle of the grass, 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 embarrassed.

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 passed 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 quatrième,—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.

“It is only to spick about my café,” she said to Miss Spencer, with her agreeable smile. “I should like it served in the garden under the leetle tree.”

The young man behind her had now stepped into the room, and he also stood looking at me. He was a pretty-faced little fellow, with an air of provincial foppishness,—a tiny Adonis of Grimwinter. He had a small pointed nose, a small pointed chin, and, as I observed, the most diminutive feet. He looked at me foolishly, with his mouth open.

“You shall have your coffee,” said Miss Spencer, who had a faint red spot in each of her cheeks.

“It is well!” said the lady in the dressing-gown. “Find your bouk,” she added, turning to the young man.

He gazed vaguely round the room. “My grammar, d ‘ye mean?” he asked, with a helpless intonation.

But the large lady was inspecting me, curiously, and gathering in her dressing-gown with her white arm.

“Find your bouk, my friend,” she repeated.

“My poetry, d ‘ye mean?” said the young man, also staring at me again.

“Never mind your bouk,” said his companion. “To-day we will talk. We will make some conversation. But we must not interrupt. Come;” and she turned away. “Under the leetle tree,” she added, for the benefit of Miss Spencer.

Then she gave me a sort of salutation, and a “Monsieur!” with which she swept away again, followed by the young man.

Caroline Spencer stood there with her eyes fixed upon the ground.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“The Countess, my cousin.”

“And who is the young man?”

“Her pupil, Mr. Mixter.”

This description of the relation between the two persons who had just left the room made me break into a little laugh. Miss Spencer looked at me gravely.

“She gives French lessons; she has lost her fortune.”

“I see,” I said. “She is determined to be a burden to no one. That is very proper.”

Miss Spencer looked down on the ground again, “I must go and get the coffee,” she said.

“Has the lady many pupils?” I asked.

“She has only Mr. Mixter. She gives all her time to him.”

At this I could not laugh, though I smelt provocation; Miss Spencer was too grave. “He pays very well,” she presently added, with simplicity. “He is very rich. He is very kind. He takes the Countess to drive.” And she was turning away.

“You are going for the Countess’s coffee?” I said.

“If you will excuse me a few moments.”

“Is there no one else to do it?”

She looked at me with the softest serenity. “I keep no servants.”

“Can she not wait upon herself?”

“She is not used to that.”

“I see,” said I, as gently as possible. “But before you go, tell me this: who is this lady?”

“I told you about her before—that day. She is the wife of my cousin, whom you saw.”

“The lady who was disowned by her family in consequence of her marriage?”

“Yes; they have never seen her again. They have cast her off.”

“And where is her husband?”

“He is dead.”

“And where is your money?”

The poor girl flinched; there was something too consistent in my questions. “I don’t know,” she said wearily.

But I continued a moment. “On her husband’s death this lady came over here?”

“Yes, she arrived one day.”

“How long ago?”

“Two years.”

“She has been here ever since?”

“Every moment.”

“How does she like it?”

“Not at all.”

“And how do you like it?”

Miss Spencer laid her face in her two hands an instant, as she had done ten minutes before.

Then, quickly, she went to get the Countess’s coffee.

I remained alone in the little parlor; I wanted to see more, to learn more. At the end of five minutes the young man whom Miss Spencer had described as the Countess’s pupil came in. He stood looking at me for a moment with parted lips. I saw he was a very rudimentary young man.

“She wants to know if you won’t come out there,” he observed at last.

“Who wants to know?”

“The Countess. That French lady.”

“She has asked you to bring me?”

“Yes, sir,” said the young man feebly, looking at my six feet of stature.

I went out with him, and we found the Countess sitting under one of the little quince-trees in front of the house. She was drawing a needle through the piece of embroidery which she had taken from the small table. She pointed graciously to the chair beside her, and I seated myself. Mr. Mixter glanced about him, and then sat down in the grass at her feet. He gazed upward, looking with parted lips from the Countess to me. “I am sure you speak French,” said the Countess, fixing her brilliant little eyes upon me.