Four Meetings | Page 9

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.