Read Ebook: A Cathedral Courtship by Wiggin Kate Douglas Smith

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Ebook has 133 lines and 14726 words, and 3 pages

But, to go on, we were standing at the door of Ye Olde Bell and Horns, at Bath, waiting for the fly which we had ordered to take us to the station, when who should drive up in a four-wheeler but the flower of chivalry. Aunt Celia was saying very audibly, "We shall certainly miss the train if the man doesn't come at once."

"Pray take this fly," said the flower of chivalry. "I am not leaving till the next train."

Aunt Celia got in without a murmur; I sneaked in after her. I don't think she looked at him, though she did vouchsafe the remark that he seemed to be a civil sort of person.

At Bristol, I was walking about by myself, and I espied a sign, "Martha Huggins, Licensed Victualer." It was a nice, tidy little shop, with a fire on the hearth and flowers in the window, and, as it was raining smartly, I thought no one would catch me if I stepped inside to chat with Martha. I fancied it would be so delightful and Dickensy to talk quietly with a licensed victualer by the name of Martha Huggins.

Just after I had settled myself, the flower of chivalry came in and ordered ale. I was disconcerted at being found in a dramshop alone, for I thought, after the bag episode, he might fancy us a family of inebriates. But he didn't evince the slightest astonishment; he merely lifted his hat, and walked out after he had finished his ale. He certainly has the loveliest manners!

And so it goes on, and we never get any further. I like his politeness and his evident feeling that I can't be flirted and talked with like a forward boarding-school miss, but I must say I don't think much of his ingenuity. Of course one can't have all the virtues, but, if I were he, I would part with my distinguished air, my charming ease, in fact almost anything, if I could have in exchange a few grains of common sense, just enough to guide me in the practical affairs of life.

I wonder what he is? He might be an artist, but he doesn't seem quite like an artist; or a dilettante, but he doesn't seem in the least like a dilettante. Or he might be an architect; I think that is the most probable guess of all. Perhaps he is only "going to be" one of these things, for he can't be more than twenty-five or twenty-six. Still he looks as if he were something already; that is, he has a kind of self-reliance in his mien,--not self-assertion, nor self-esteem, but belief in self, as if he were able, and knew that he was able, to conquer circumstances.

Nothing accomplished yet. Her aunt is a Van Tyck, and a stiff one, too. I am a Copley, and that delays matters. Much depends upon the manner of approach. A false move would be fatal. We have six more towns , and if their thirst for cathedrals isn't slaked when these are finished we have the entire continent to do. If I could only succeed in making an impression on the retina of aunt Celia's eye! Though I have been under her feet for ten days, she never yet has observed me. This absent-mindedness of hers serves me ill now, but it may prove a blessing later on.

SHE

It was here in Oxford that a grain of common sense entered the brain of the flower of chivalry. You might call it the dawn of reason. We had spent part of the morning in High Street, "the noblest old street in England," as our dear Hawthorne calls it. As Wordsworth had written a sonnet about it, aunt Celia was armed for the fray,--a volume of Wordsworth in one hand, and one of Hawthorne in the other. When we had done High Street, we went to Magdalen College, and sat down on a bench in Addison's Walk, where aunt Celia proceeded to store my mind with the principal facts of Addison's career, and his influence on the literature of the something or other century. The cramming process over, we wandered along, and came upon "him" sketching a shady corner of the walk.

Aunt Celia went up behind him, and, Van Tyck though she is, she could not restrain her admiration of his work. I was surprised myself: I didn't suppose so good looking a youth could do such good work. I retired to a safe distance, and they chatted together. He offered her the sketch; she refused to take advantage of his kindness. He said he would "dash off" another that evening, and bring it to our hotel,--"so glad to do anything for a fellow-countryman," etc. I peeped from behind a tree and saw him give her his card. It was an awful moment; I trembled, but she read it with unmistakable approval, and gave him her own with an expression that meant, "Yours is good, but beat that if you can!"

She called to me, and I appeared. Mr. John Quincy Copley, Cambridge, was presented to her niece, Miss Katharine Schuyler, New York. It was over, and a very small thing to take so long about, too.

He is an architect, and of course has a smooth path into aunt Celia's affections. Theological students, ministers, missionaries, heroes, and martyrs she may distrust, but architects never!

"He is an architect, my dear Katharine, and he is a Copley," she told me afterwards. "I never knew a Copley who was not respectable, and many of them have been more."

After the introduction was over, aunt Celia asked him guilelessly if he had visited any other of the English cathedrals. Any others, indeed! This to a youth who had been all but in her lap for a fortnight! It was a blow, but he rallied bravely, and, with an amused look in my direction, replied discreetly that he had visited most of them at one time or another. I refused to let him see that I had ever noticed him before; that is, particularly.

Memoranda: "The very stones and mortar of this historic town seem impregnated with the spirit of restful antiquity." Among the great men who have studied here are the Prince of Wales, Duke of Wellington, Gladstone, Sir Robert Peel, Sir Philip Sidney, William Penn, John Locke, the two Wesleys, Ruskin, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Otway.

I have done it, and if I hadn't been a fool and a coward I might have done it a week ago, and spared myself a good deal of delicious torment. I have just given two hours to a sketch of Addison's Walk and carried it to aunt Celia at the Mitre. Object, to find out whether they make a long stay in London , and if so where. It seems they go directly through. I said in the course of conversation, "So Miss Schuyler is willing to forego a London season? Marvelous self-denial!"

"My niece did not come to Europe for a London season," replied Miss Van Tyck. "We go through London this time merely as a cathedral town, simply because it chances to be where it is geographically. We shall visit St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey, and then go directly on, that our chain of impressions may have absolute continuity and be free from any disturbing elements."

Oh, but she is lovely, is aunt Celia!

I am stopping at a beastly little hole, which has the one merit of being opposite Miss Schuyler's lodgings. My sketch-book has deteriorated in artistic value during the last two weeks. Many of its pages, while interesting to me as reminiscences, will hardly do for family or studio exhibition. If I should label them, the result would be something like this:--

"How are the mighty fallen!"

SHE

Aunt Celia says we shall have no worthy architecture until every building is made an exquisitely sincere representation of its deepest purpose,--a symbol, as it were, of its indwelling meaning. I should think it would be very difficult to design a lunatic asylum on that basis, but I didn't dare say so, as Mr. Copley seemed to think it all right. Their conversation is absolutely sublimated when they get to talking of architecture. I have just copied two quotations from Emerson, and am studying them every night for fifteen minutes before I go to sleep. I'm going to quote them some time offhand, just after morning service, when we are wandering about the cathedral grounds. The first is this: "The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportion and perspective of vegetable beauty." Then when he has recovered from the shock of this, here is my second: "Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and English cathedrals without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, pine, and spruce."

Kitty Schuyler is the concentrated essence of feminine witchery. Intuition strong, logic weak, and the two qualities so balanced as to produce an indefinable charm; will-power large, but docility equal, if a man is clever enough to know how to manage her; knowledge of facts absolutely nil, but she is exquisitely intelligent in spite of it. She has a way of evading, escaping, eluding, and then gives you an intoxicating hint of sudden and complete surrender. She is divinely innocent, but roguishness saves her from insipidity. Her looks? She looks as you would imagine a person might look who possessed these graces; and she is worth looking at, though every time I do it I have a rush of love to the head. When you find a girl who combines all the qualities you have imagined in the ideal, and who has added a dozen or two on her own account, merely to distract you past all hope, why stand up and try to resist her charm? Down on your knees like a man, say I!

I'm getting to adore aunt Celia. I didn't care for her at first, but she is so deliciously blind! Anything more exquisitely unserviceable as a chaperon I can't imagine. Absorbed in antiquity, she ignores the babble of contemporaneous lovers. That any man could look at Kitty when he could look at a cathedral passes her comprehension. I do not presume too greatly on her absent-mindedness, however, lest she should turn unexpectedly and rend me. I always remember that inscription on the backs of the little mechanical French toys,--"Quoiqu'elle soit tres solidement montee, il faut ne pas brutaliser la machine."

And so my courtship progresses under aunt Celia's very nose. I say "progresses," but it is impossible to speak with any certainty of courting, for the essence of that gentle craft is hope, rooted in labor and trained by love.

I set out to propose to her during service this afternoon by writing my feelings on the fly-leaf of the hymn-book, or something like that; but I knew that aunt Celia would never forgive such blasphemy, and I thought that Kitty herself might consider it wicked. Besides, if she should chance to accept me, there was nothing I could do, in a cathedral, to relieve my feelings. No; if she ever accepts me, I wish it to be in a large, vacant spot of the universe, peopled by two only, and those two so indistinguishably blended, as it were, that they would appear as one to the casual observer. So I practiced repression, though the wall of my reserve is worn to the thinness of thread-paper, and I tried to keep my mind on the droning minor canon, and not to look at her, "for that way madness lies."

SHE

My taste is so bad! I just begin to realize it, and I am feeling my "growing pains," like Gwendolen in "Daniel Deronda." I admired the stained glass in the Lincoln Cathedral, especially the Nuremberg window. I thought Mr. Copley looked pained, but he said nothing. When I went to my room, I looked in a book and found that all the glass in that cathedral is very modern and very bad, and the Nuremberg window is the worst of all. Aunt Celia says she hopes that it will be a warning to me to read before I speak; but Mr. Copley says no, that the world would lose more in one way than it would gain in the other. I tried my quotations this morning, and stuck fast in the middle of the first.

Mr. Copley says that aunt Celia has been feeing the vergers altogether too much, and I wrote a song about it called "The Ballad of the Vergers and the Foolish Virgin," which I sang to my guitar. Mr. Copley says it is cleverer than anything he ever did with his pencil, but of course he says that only to be agreeable.

Just as we were turning into the quiet little street where we are lodging I said, "Oh dear, I wish that I knew something about architecture!"

"If you don't know anything about it, you are certainly responsible for a good deal of it," said Mr. Copley.

"I? How do you mean?" I asked quite innocently, because I couldn't see how he could twist such a remark as that into anything like sentiment.

"I have never built so many castles in my life as since I've known you, Miss Schuyler," he said.

"Oh," I answered as lightly as I could, "air-castles don't count."

"The building of air-castles is an innocent amusement enough, I suppose," he said, "but I'm committing the folly of living in mine. I"--

Then I was frightened. When, all at once, you find you have something precious you only dimly suspected was to be yours, you almost wish it hadn't come so soon. But just at that moment Mrs. Benedict called to us, and came tramping back from the gate, and hooked her supercilious, patronizing arm in Mr. Copley's, and asked him into the sitting-room to talk over the "lady chapel" in her new memorial church. Then aunt Celia told me they would excuse me, as I had had a wearisome day; and there was nothing for me to do but to go to bed, like a snubbed child, and wonder if I should ever know the end of that sentence. And I listened at the head of the stairs, shivering, but all that I could hear was that Mrs. Benedict asked Mr. Copley to be her own architect. Her architect indeed! That woman ought not to be at large!

We left York this morning, and arrived here about eleven o'clock. It seems there is some sort of an election going on in the town, and there was not a single fly at the station. Mr. Copley walked about in every direction, but neither horse nor vehicle was to be had for love nor money. At last we started to walk to the village, Mr. Copley so laden with our hand-luggage that he resembled a pack-mule. We made a tour of the inns, but not a single room was to be had, not for that night nor for three days ahead, on account of that same election.

"Hadn't we better go on to Edinburgh, aunt Celia?" I asked.

"Edinburgh? Never!" she replied. "Do you suppose that I would voluntarily spend a Sunday in those bare Presbyterian churches until the memory of these past ideal weeks has faded a little from my memory? What, leave out Durham and spoil the set?" "I intended to stay here for a week or more, and write up a record of our entire trip from Winchester while the impressions were fresh in my mind."

"And I had intended doing the same thing," said Mr. Copley. "That is, I hoped to finish off my previous sketches, which are in a frightful state of incompletion, and spend a good deal of time on the interior of this cathedral, which is unusually beautiful."

"For my part," said I, with mock humility, "I am a docile person who never has any intentions of her own, but who yields herself sweetly to the intentions of other people in her immediate vicinity."

"Are you?" asked Mr. Copley, taking out his pencil.

"Yes, I said so. What are you doing?"

"Merely taking note of your statement, that's all.--Now, Miss Van Tyck, I have a plan to propose. I was here last summer with a couple of Harvard men, and we lodged at a farmhouse half a mile from the cathedral. If you will step into the coffee-room of the Shoulder of Mutton and Cauliflower for an hour, I'll walk up to Farmer Hendry's and see if they will take us in. I think we might be fairly comfortable."

"Can aunt Celia have Apollinaris and black coffee after her morning bath?" I asked.

"I hope, Katharine," said aunt Celia majestically,--"I hope that I can accommodate myself to circumstances. If Mr. Copley can secure lodgings for us, I shall be more than grateful."

So here we are, all lodging together in an ideal English farmhouse. There is a thatched roof on one of the old buildings, and the dairy house is covered with ivy, and Farmer Hendry's wife makes a real English courtesy, and there are herds of beautiful sleek Durham cattle, and the butter and cream and eggs and mutton are delicious; and I never, never want to go home any more. I want to live here forever, and wave the American flag on Washington's birthday.

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