Crowded Out! and Other Sketches | Page 3

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 S��jour_? 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 _chateau_. 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 _chateau_, 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 a l'ombre, Ma Jolie blonde.
And now I am dreaming surely! This is London, not _Beau S��jour_, 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 S��jour_. 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 P��re. 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. I am not wanted. I am crowded out. My hands tremble and I cannot write. My eyes fail and I cannot see. To the window!
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The lights of Oxford St.