XXXI.
Madame Arles was a mild and quiet little woman, with a singular absence of that vivacity which most people are disposed to attribute to all of French blood. Her age—so far as one could judge from outward indications—might have been anywhere from twenty-eight to forty. There were no wrinkles in that smooth, calm forehead of hers; and if there were lines of gray amid her hair, this indication of age was so contradicted by the youthfulness of her eye, that a keen observer would have been disposed to attribute it rather to some weight of past grief that had left its silvery imprint than to the mere dull burden of her years.
There are those who stolidly measure a twelve-month always by its count, and age by such token as a gray head; but who has not had experience of months so piled with life that two or three or four of them count more upon the scale of mortality than a score of other and sunny ones? Who cannot reckon such? Who, looking back, cannot summon to his thought some passage of a week in which he seemed to stride toward the end with a crazy swiftness, and under which he felt that every outward indication of age was deepening its traces with a wondrous surety? Ay, we slip, we are forged upon the anvil of Time,—God, who deals the blows, only knows how fast!
Yet in Madame Arles we have no notable character to bring forward; if past griefs have belonged to her, they have become long since a part of her character; they are in no way obtrusive. There was, indeed, a singular cast in one of her eyes, which in moments of excitement—such few as came over her—impressed the observer very strangely; as if, while she looked straight upon you and calmly with one eye, the other were bent upon some scene far remote and out of range, some past episode it might be of her own life, by over-dwelling upon which she had brought her organs of sight into this tortured condition. Nine out of ten observers, however, would never have remarked the peculiarity we have mentioned, and would only have commented upon Madame Arles—if they had commented at all—as a quiet person, in whom youth and age seemed just now to struggle for the mastery, and in whom no trace of French birth and rearing was apparent, save her speech, and a certain wonderful aptitude in the arrangement of her dress. The poor lady, moreover, who showed traces of a vanished beauty, was a sad invalid, and for this reason, perhaps, had readily accepted the relief afforded by this summer vacation with two of her city pupils. A violent palpitation of the heart, from time to time, after sudden or undue exertion or excitement, shook the poor woman's frail hold upon life. Possibly from this cause—as is the case with many who are compelled to listen to those premonitory raps of the grim visitor at the very seat of life—Madame Arles was a person of strong religious proclivities. Death is knocking at all hearts, indeed, pretty regularly, and his pace toward triumph is as formally certain as a pulse beat; but it is, after all, those disorderly summons of his,—when in a kind of splenetic rage he grips at our heart-strings, and then lets go,—which keep specially active the religious sentiment. Madame Arles had been educated in the Romish faith, and accepted all its tenets with the same unquestioning placidity with which she enjoyed the sunshine. Without any particular knowledge of the way in which this faith diverged from other Christian forms, she leaned upon it (as so many fainting spirits do and will) because the most available and accessible prop to that religious yearning in her which craved support. So instinctive and unreasoning a faith was not, however, such as to provoke any proselytizing zeal or noisy demonstration. Had it been otherwise, indeed, it could hardly have disturbed her position with the Bowriggs or interrupted relations with her city patrons.
In Ashfield the case was far different.
Adèle, accompanied by her friend Rose,—who, notwithstanding the quiet remonstrances of the Doctor, had won her mother's permission for such equipment in French as she could gain from a summer's teaching,—went with early greeting to the Bowriggs. The curiosity of Adèle was intense to listen to the music of her native speech once more; and when Madame Arles slipped quietly into the room, Adèle darted toward her with warm, girlish impulse, and the poor woman, excited beyond bounds by this heartiness of greeting, and murmuring some tender words of endearment, had presently folded her to her bosom.
Adèle, blushing as much with pleasure as with a half-feeling of mortification at the wild show of feeling she had made, was stammering her apology, when she was arrested by a sudden change in the aspect of her new friend.
"My dear Madame, you are suffering?"
"A little, my child!"
It was too true, as the quick glance of her old pupils saw in an instant. Her lips were pinched and blue; that strange double look in her eyes,—one fastened upon Adèle, and the other upon vacancy; her hands clasped over her heart as if to stay its mad throbbings. While Sophie supported and conducted the sufferer to her own chamber, the younger sister explained to Adèle that such spasmodic attacks were of frequent occurrence, and their physician had assured them must, at a very early day, destroy her.
Nothing more was needed to enlist Adèle's sympathies to the full. She carried home the story of it to the Doctor, and detailed it in such an impassioned way, and with such interpretation of the kind lady's reception of herself, that the Doctor was touched, and abated no small measure of the prejudice he had been disposed to entertain against the Frenchwoman.
But her heresies in the matter of religion remained,—it being no secret that Madame Arles was thoroughly Popish; and these disturbed the good Doctor the more, as he perceived the growing and tender intimacy which was establishing itself, week by week, between Adèle and her new teacher. Indeed, he has not sanctioned this without his own private conversation with Madame, in which he has set forth his responsibility respecting Adèle and the wishes of her father, and insisted upon entire reserve of Madame's religious opinions in her intercourse with his protégée. All which the poor lady had promised with a ready zeal that surprised the minister.
"Indeed, I know too little, Doctor; I could wish she might be better than I. May God make her so!"
"I do not judge you, Madame; it is not ours to judge; but I would keep Adaly securely, if God permit, in the faith which we reverence here, and which I much fear she could never learn in her own land or her own language."
"May-be, may-be, my good Doctor; her faith shall not be disturbed by me, I promise you."
Adèle, with her quick ear and eye, has no difficulty in discovering the ground of the Doctor's uneasiness and of Miss Eliza's frequent questionings in regard to her intercourse with the new teacher.
"I am sure they think you very bad," she said to Madame Arles, one day, in a spirit of mischief.
"Bad! bad! Adèle, why? how?"—and that strange tortuous look came to her eye, with a quick flush to her cheeks.
"Ah, now, dear Madame, don't be disturbed; 'tis only your religion they think so bad, and fear you will mislead me. Tenez! this little rosary" (and she displays it to the eye of the wondering Madame Arles) "they would have taken from me."
Madame pressed the beads reverently to her lips, while her manner betrayed a deep religious emotion, (as it seemed to Adèle,) which she had rarely seen in her before.
"And you claimed it, my child?"
"Not for any faith I had in it; but it was my mother's."
The good woman kissed Adèle.
"You must long to see her, my child!"
A shade of sorrow and doubt ran over the face of the girl. This did not escape the notice of Madame Arles, who, with a terribly dejected and distracted air, replaced the rosary in her hands.
"Mon ange!" (in this winsome way she was accustomed at times to address Adèle) "we cannot talk of these things. I have promised as much to the Doctor; it is better so; he is a good man."
Adèle sat toying for a moment with the rosary upon her fingers, looking down; then, seeing that woe-begone expression that had fastened upon the face of her companion, she sprang up, kissed her forehead, and, restoring thus—as she knew she could do—a cheeriness to her manner, resumed her lesson.
But from this time forth she showed an eagerness to unriddle, so far as she might, the mystery of that faith which the Doctor clothed in his ponderous discourses,—weighed down and oppressed by his prolixity, and confounded by doctrines she could not comprehend, yet recognizing, under all, his serene trust, and gratefully conscious of his tender regard and constant watchfulness. But, more than all, it was a subject of confusion to her, that the prim and austere Miss Eliza, whose pride and selfishness her keen eye could not fail to see, should be possessed of a truer faith than the poor stranger whose gentleness, and suffering so patiently borne, seemed in a measure to Christianize and dignify character. And if she dropped a hint of these doubts, as she sometimes did, in the ear of the motherly Mrs. Elderkin, that good woman took her hand tenderly,—"My dear Adèle, we are all imperfect; but God sees with other eyes than ours. Trust Him,—trust Him above all, Adèle!"
Yes, she trusts Him,—she knows she trusts Him. Why not? Whom else to trust? No tender motherly care and guidance; the father, by these years of absence, made almost a stranger. The low voice of her native land, that comes to her ear with a charming flow from the lips of her new teacher, never to speak of her doubts or questionings; the constrained love of the Doctor, her New Papa, framing itself, whenever it touches upon the deeper motives of her nature, in stark formulas of speech, that blind and confound her; the spinster sister talking kindly, but commending the tie of her hat-ribbons in the same tone with which she urges adherence to some cumbrous enunciation of doctrine. And Adèle cherishes her little friendships (most of all with Rose); not alive as yet to any tenderer and stronger passion that shall engross her, and make or mar her life; swinging her reticule, as in the days gone by, under the trees that embower the village street; loving the bloom, the verdure, the singing of the birds, but with every month now—as she begins to fathom the abyss of life with her own thought—grown more serious. It is always thus: the girl we toyed with yesterday with our inanities of speech is to-morrow, by some sudden reach of womanly thought, another creature,—out of range, and so alert, that, if we would conquer her, we must bring up our heaviest siege-trains.