Crowded Out! and Other Sketches | Page 3

air, Hortense, with her imperial brow and her hair rolled over its
cushion, Hortense, the _Châtelaine_ of _Beau Séjour_, the delicate,
haughty, pale and impassioned daughter of a noble house, that Hortense,
my Hortense, is nobody!
Who in this great London will believe in me, who will care to know
about Hortense or about _Beau Séjour_? If they ask me, I shall say-- oh!
proudly--not in Normandy nor in Alsace, but far away across a great
water dwells such a maiden in such a _château_. There by the side of a
northern river, ever rippling, ever sparkling in Summer, hard, hard
frozen in winter, stretches a vast estate. I remember its impenetrable
pinewood, its deep ravine; I see the _château_, long and white and
straggling, with the red tiled towers and the tall French windows; I see
the terrace where the hound must still sleep; I see the square side tower
with the black iron shutters; I see the very window where Hortense has
set her light; I see the floating cribs on the river, I hear the boatmen
singing--
Descendez â l'ombre, Ma Jolie blonde.
And now I am dreaming surely! This is London, not _Beau Séjour_,
and Hortense is far away, and it is that cursed fellow in the street I hear!

The morrow comes on quickly. If I were to draw up that crooked blind
now I should see the first streaks of daylight. Who pinned those other
curtains together? That was well done, for I don't want to see the
daylight; and it comes in, you know, Hortense, when you think it is
shut out. Somebody calls it fingers, and that is just what it is, long
fingers of dawn, always pale, always gray and white, stealing in and
around my pillow for me. Never pink, never rosy, mind that; always
faint and shadowy and gray.
It was all caste. Caste in London, caste in Le Bos Canada, all the same.
Because she was a _St. Hilaire_. Her full name--_Hortense Angelique
De Repentigny de St. Hilaire_--how it grates on me afresh with its
aristocratic plentitude. She is well-born, certainly; better born than
most of these girls I have seen here in London, driving, walking, riding
in the Parks. They wear their hair over cushions too. Freckled skins,
high cheek-bones, square foreheads, spreading eyebrows--they
shouldn't wear it so. It suits Hortense-- with her pale patrician outline
and her dark pencilled eyebrows, and her little black ribbon and amulet
around her neck. _O, Marie, priey pour nous qui avous recours a vous_!
Once I walked out to _Beau Séjour_. She did not expect me and I crept
through the leafy ravine to the pinewood, then on to the steps, and so
up to the terrace. Through the French window I could see her seated at
the long table opposite Father Couture. She lives alone with the good
Père. She is the last one of the noble line, and he guards her well and
guards her money too.
"I do remember that it vill be all for ze Church," she has said to me.
And the priest has taught her all she knows, how to sew and embroider,
and cook and read, though he never lets her read anything but works on
religion. Religion, always religion! He has brought her up like a nun,
crushed the life out of her. Until I found her out, found my jewel out. It
is Tennyson who says that. But his "Maud" was freer to woo than
Hortense, freer to love and kiss and hold--my God! that night while I
watched them studying and bending over those cursed works on the
Martyrs and the Saints and the Mission houses--I saw him-- him--that
old priest--take her in his arms and caress her, drink her breath, feast on
her eyes, her hair, her delicate skin, and I burst in like a young madman
and told Father Conture what I thought. Oh! I was mad! I should have
won her first. I should have worked quietly, cautiously, waiting,

waiting, biding my time. But I could never bide my time. And now she
hates me, Hortense hates me, though she so nearly learned to love me.
There where we used to listen to the magical river songs, we nearly
loved, did we not Hortense? But she was a _St. Hilaire_, and I--I was
nobody, and I had insulted le bon Pere. Yet if I can go back to her rich,
prosperous, independent-- What if that happen? But I begin to fancy it
will never happen. My resolutions, where are they, what comes of them?
Nothing. I have tried everything except the opera. Everything else has
been rejected. For a week I have not gone to bed at all. I wait and see
those ghastly gray fingers smoothing my pillow.