MY QUARTERS, WHERE YOU WILL BECOME ACQUAINTED WITH OLD JACK RANDOLPH,
MY MOST INTIMATE FRIEND, AND ONE WHO DIVIDES WITH ME THE HONOR OF BEING
THE HERO OF MY STORY.
I'll never forget the time. It was a day in April.
But an April day in Canada is a very different thing from an April day
in England. In England all Nature is robed in vivid green, the air is
balmy; and all those beauties abound which usually set poets
rhapsodizing, and young men sentimentalizing, and young girls
tantalizing. Now, in Canada there is nothing of the kind. No Canadian
poet, for instance, would ever affirm that in the spring a livelier
iris blooms upon the burnished dove; in the spring a young man's fancy
lightly turns to thoughts of love. No. For that sort of thing--the
thoughts of love I mean--winter is the time of day in Canada. The fact
is, the Canadians haven't any spring. The months which Englishmen
include under that pleasant name are here partly taken up with
prolonging the winter, and partly with the formation of a new and
nondescript season. In that period Nature, instead of being darkly,
deeply, beautifully green, has rather the shade of a dingy, dirty,
melancholy gray. Snow covers the ground--not by any means the
glistening white robe of Winter--but a rugged substitute, damp, and
discolored. It is snow, but snow far gone into decay and decrepitude--
snow that seems ashamed of itself for lingering so long after wearing
out its welcome, and presenting itself in so revolting a dress--snow,
in fact, which is like a man sinking into irremediable ruin and
changing its former glorious state for that condition which is
expressed by the unpleasant word "slush." There is no an object, not a
circumstance, in visible Nature which does not heighten the contrast.
In England there is the luxuriant foliage, the fragrant blossom, the
gay flower; in Canada, black twigs--bare, scraggy, and altogether
wretched--thrust their repulsive forms forth into the bleak air--there,
the soft rain-shower falls; here, the fierce snow-squall, or maddening
sleet!--there, the field is traversed by the cheerful plough; here, it
is covered with ice-heaps or thawing snow; there, the rivers run
babbling onward under the green trees; here, they groan and chafe under
heaps of dingy and slowly-disintegrating ice-hummocks; there, one's
only weapon against the rigor of the season is the peaceful umbrella;
here, one must defend one's self with caps and coats of fur and
india-rubber, with clumsy leggings, ponderous boots, steel-creepers,
gauntlets of skin, iron-pointed alpenstocks, and forty or fifty other
articles which the exigencies of space and time will not permit me to
mention. On one of the darkest and most dismal of these April days, I
was trying to kill time in my quarters, when Jack Randolph burst in
upon my meditations. Jack Randolph was one of Ours--an intimate friend
of mine, and of everybody else who had the pleasure of his
acquaintance. Jack was in every respect a remarkable man--physically,
intellectually, and morally. Present company excepted, he was certainly
by all odds the finest-looking fellow in a regiment notoriously filled
with handsome men; and to this rare advantage he added all the
accomplishments of life, and the most genial nature in the world. It
was difficult to say whether he was a greater favorite with men or with
women. He was noisy, rattling, reckless, good-hearted, generous,
mirthful, witty, jovial, daring, open-handed, irrepressible,
enthusiastic, and confoundedly clever. He was good at every thing, from
tracking a moose or caribou, on through all the gamut of rinking,
skating, ice-boating, and tobogganing, up to the lightest
accomplishments of the drawing-room. He was one of those lucky dogs who
are able to break horses or hearts with equal buoyancy of soul. And it
was this twofold capacity which made him equally dear to either sex.
A lucky dog? Yea, verily, that is what he was. He was welcomed at every
mess, and he had the _entrée_ of every house in Quebec. He could drink
harder than any man in the regiment, and dance down a whole regiment of
drawing-room knights. He could sing better than any amateur I ever
heard; and was the best judge of a meerschaum-pipe I ever saw. Lucky?
Yes, he was--and especially so, and more than all else--on account of
the joyousness of his soul. There was a contagious and a godlike
hilarity in his broad, open brow, his frank, laughing eyes, and his
mobile lips. He seemed to carry about with him a bracing moral
atmosphere. The sight of him had the same effect on the dull man of
ordinary life that the Himalayan air has on an Indian invalid; and yet
Jack was head-over-heels in debt. Not a tradesman would trust him.
Shoals of little bills were sent him every day. Duns without number
plagued him from morning to night. The Quebec attorneys were sharpening
their bills, and preparing, like birds of prey, to swoop down upon him.
In fact, taking it altogether, Jack had full before him the sure and
certain prospect of some dismal explosion.
On this occasion, Jack--for the first time in our acquaintance--seemed
to have not a vestige of his ordinary flow of spirits. He entered
without a word, took up a pipe, crammed some tobacco into the bowl,
flung himself into an easy-chair, and began--with fixed eyes and set
lips--to pour forth enormous volumes of smoke.
My own pipe was very well under way, and I sat opposite, watching him
in wonder. I studied his face, and marked there what I had never before
seen upon it--a preoccupied and troubled expression. Now, Jack's
features, by long indulgence in the gayer emotions, had immovably
moulded themselves into an expression of joyousness and hilarity.
Unnatural was it for the merry twinkle to be extinguished in his eyes;
for the corners of the mouth, which usually curled upward, to settle
downward; for the general shape of feature, cut-line of muscle, set of
lips, to undertake to become the exponents of feelings to which they
were totally unaccustomed. On this occasion, therefore, Jack's face did
not appear so much mournful as dismal; and, where another face might
have elicited sympathy, Jack's face had such a grewsomeness, such an
utter incongruity between feature and expression, that it seemed only
droll.
I bore this inexplicable conduct as long as I could, but at length I
could stand it no longer.
"My dear Jack," said I, "would it be too much to ask, in the mildest
manner in the world, and with all possible regard for your feelings,
what, in the name of the Old Boy, happens to be up just now?"
Jack took the pipe from his mouth, sent a long cloud of smoke forward
in a straight line, then looked at me, then heaved a deep sigh, and
then--replaced the pipe, and began smoking once more.
Under such circumstances I did not know what to do next, so I took up
again the study of his face.
"Heard no bad news, I hope," I said at length, making another venture
between the puffs of my pipe.
A shake of the head.
Silence again.
"Duns?"
Another shake.
Silence.
"Writs?"
Another shake.
Silence.
"Liver?"
Another shake, together with a contemptuous smile.
"Then I give it up," said I, and betook myself once more to my pipe.
After a time, Jack gave a long sigh, and regarded me fixedly for some
minutes, with a very doleful face. Then he slowly ejaculated:
"Macrorie!"
"Well?"
"It's a woman!"
"A woman? Well. What's that? Why need that make any particular
difference to you, my boy?"
He sighed again, more dolefully than before.
"I'm in for it, old chap," said he.
"How's that?"
"It's all over."
"What do you mean?"
"Done up, sir--dead and gone!"
"I'll be hanged if I understand you."
"_Hic jacet_ Johannes Randolph."
"You're taking to Latin by way of making yourself more intelligible, I
suppose."
"Macrorie, my boy--"
"Well?"
"Will you be going anywhere near Anderson's to-day--the stone-cutter, I
mean?"
"Why?"
"If you should, let me ask you to do a particular favor for me. Will
you?"
"Why, of course. What is it?"
"Well--it's only to order a tombstone for me--plain, neat--four feet by
sixteen inches--with nothing on it but my name and date. The sale of my
effects will bring enough to pay for it. Don't you fellows go and put
up a tablet about me. I tell you plainly, I don't want it, and, what's
more, I won't stand it."
"By Jove!" I cried; "my dear fellow, one would think you were raving.
Are you thinking of shuffling off the mortal coil? Are you going to
blow your precious brains out for a woman? Is it because some fair one
is cruel that you are thinking of your latter end? Will you, wasting
with despair, die because a woman's fair?"
"No, old chap. I'm going to do something worse."
"Something worse than suicide! What's that? A clean breast, my boy."
"A species of moral suicide."
"What's that? Your style of expression to-day is a kind of secret
cipher. I haven't the key. Please explain."
Jack resumed his pipe, and bent down his head; then he rubbed his broad
brow with his unoccupied hand; then he raised himself up, and looked at
me for a few moments in solemn silence; then he said, in a low voice,
speaking each, word separately and with thrilling emphasis: