Isabel hurried out upon the forward promenade, where all the other
passengers seemed to be assembled, and beheld a vast bulk of gray and
purple rock, swelling two hundred feet up from the mists of the river,
and taking the early morning light warm upon its face and crown.
Black-hulked, red-illumined Liverpool steamers, gay river-craft and ships
of every sail and flag, filled the stream athwart which the ferries sped
their swift traffic-laden shuttles; a lower town hung to the foot of the
rock, and crept, populous and picturesque, up its sides; from the massive
citadel on its crest flew the red banner of Saint George, and along its
brow swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic, beautiful city,
overtopped by many a gleaming spire and antique roof.
Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, modern world the vessel
steamed up to this city of an olden time and another ideal,--to her who
was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still,
after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of
the feudal past from which she sprung. Upon her height she sits unique;
and when you say Quebec, having once beheld her, you invoke a sense of
medieval strangeness and of beauty which the name of no other city could
intensify.
As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarming over a broad
square, a market beside which the Bonsecours Market would have shown as
common as the Quincy, and up the odd wooden-sidewalked street stretched
an aisle of carriages and those high swung calashes, which are to Quebec
what the gondolas are to Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon our
tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus. They were going to the
dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be thought
of without a pang. It is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through which
they drove into the Upper Town, has been demolished since the summer of
last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by those Quebec
horses which expect to gallop up hill whatever they do going down, they
turned a corner of the towering weed-grown rock, and shot in under the
low arch of the gate, pierced with smaller doorways for the
foot-passengers. The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors were
thickly studded with heavy iron spikes; old cannon, thrust endwise into
the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against passing wheels.
Why did not some semi-forbidding commissary of police, struggling hard to
overcome his native politeness, appear and demand their passports? The
illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but this touch. How often
in the adored Old World, which we so love and disapprove, had they driven
in through such gates at that morning hour! On what perverse pretext,
then, was it not some ancient town of Normandy?
"Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and they'd soon rattle this
old wall down and let in a little fresh air!" said a patriotic voice at
Isabel's elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow irregular
streets, the huddling gables, the quaint roofs, through which and under
which they drove on to the hotel.
As they dashed into a broad open square, "Here is the French Cathedral;
there is the Upper Town Market; yonder are the Jesuit Barracks!" cried
Basil; and they had a passing glimpse of gray stone towers at one side of
the square, and a low, massive yellow building at the other, and, between
the two, long ranks of carts, and fruit and vegetable stands, protected
by canvas awnings and broad umbrellas. Then they dashed round the corner
of a street, and drew up before the hotel door. The low ceilings, the
thick walls, the clumsy wood-work, the wandering corridors, gave the
hotel all the desired character of age, and its slovenly state bestowed
an additional charm. In another place they might have demanded neatness,
but in Quebec they would almost have resented it. By a chance they had
the best room in the house, but they held it only till certain people who
had engaged it by telegraph should arrive in the hourly expected steamer
from Liverpool; and, moreover, the best room at Hotel Musty was
consolingly bad. The house was very full, and the Ellisons (who had come
on with them from Montreal) were bestowed in less state only on like
conditions.
The travellers all met at breakfast, which was admirably cooked, and well
served, with the attendance of those swarms of flies which infest Quebec,
and especially infested the old Musty House, in summer. It had, of
course, the attraction of broiled salmon, upon which the traveller
breakfasts every day as long as he remains in Lower Canada; and it
represented the abundance of wild berries in the Quebec market; and it
was otherwise a breakfast worthy of the appetites that honored it.
There were not many other Americans besides themselves at this hotel,
which seemed, indeed, to be kept open to oblige such travellers as had
been there before, and could not persuade themselves to try the new Hotel
St. Louis, whither the vastly greater number resorted. Most of the faces
our tourists saw were English or English-Canadian, and the young people
from Omaha; who had got here by some chance, were scarcely in harmony
with the place. They appeared to be a bridal party, but which of the two
sisters, in buff linen 'clad from head to foot' was the bride, never
became known. Both were equally free with the husband, and he was
impartially fond of both: it was quite a family affair.
For a moment Isabel harbored the desire to see the city in company with
Miss Ellison; but it was only a passing weakness. She remembered directly
the coolness between friends which she had seen caused by objects of
interest in Europe, and she wisely deferred a more intimate acquaintance
till it could have a purely social basis. After all, nothing is so
tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy or so apt to end in mutual
dislike,--except gratitude. So the ladies parted friends till dinner, and
drove off in separate carriages.
As in other show cities, there is a routine at Quebec for travellers who
come on Saturday and go on Monday, and few depart from it. Our friends
necessarily, therefore, drove first to the citadel. It was raining one of
those cold rains by which the scarce-banished winter reminds the Canadian
fields of his nearness even in midsummer, though between the bitter
showers the air was sultry and close; and it was just the light in which
to see the grim strength of the fortress next strongest to Gibraltar in
the world. They passed a heavy iron gateway, and up through a winding
lane of masonry to the gate of the citadel, where they were delivered
into the care of Private Joseph Drakes, who was to show them such parts
of the place as are open to curiosity. But, a citadel which has never
stood a siege, or been threatened by any danger more serious than
Fenianism, soon becomes, however strong, but a dull piece of masonry to
the civilian; and our tourists more rejoiced in the crumbling fragment of
the old French wall which the English destroyed than in all they had
built; and they valued the latter work chiefly for the glorious prospects
of the St. Lawrence and its mighty valleys which it commanded. Advanced
into the centre of an amphitheatre inconceivably vast, that enormous beak
of rock overlooks the narrow angle of the river, and then, in every
direction, immeasurable stretches of gardened vale, and wooded upland,
till all melts into the purple of the encircling mountains. Far and near
are lovely white villages nestling under elms, in the heart of fields and
meadows; and everywhere the long, narrow, accurately divided farms
stretch downward to the river-shores. The best roads on the continent
make this beauty and richness accessible; each little village boasts some
natural wonder in stream, or lake, or cataract: and this landscape,
magnificent beyond any in eastern America, is historical and interesting
beyond all others. Hither came Jacques Cartier three hundred and fifty
years ago, and wintered on the low point there by the St. Charles; here,
nearly a century after, but still fourteen years before the landing at
Plymouth, Champlain founded the missionary city of Quebec; round this
rocky beak came sailing the half-piratical armament of the Calvinist
Kirks in 1629, and seized Quebec in the interest of the English, holding
it three years; in the Lower Town, yonder, first landed the coldly
welcomed Jesuits, who came with the returning French and made Quebec
forever eloquent of their zeal, their guile, their heroism; at the foot
of this rock lay the fleet of Sir William Phipps, governor of
Massachusetts, and vainly assailed it in 1698; in 1759 came Wolfe and
embattled all the region, on river and land, till at last the bravely
defended city fell into his dying hand on the Plains of Abraham; here
Montgomery laid down his life at the head of the boldest and most
hopeless effort of our War of Independence.
Private Joseph Drakes, with the generosity of an enemy expecting
drink-money, pointed out the sign, board on the face of the crag
commemorating 'Montgomery's death'; and then showed them the officers'
quarters and those of the common soldiers, not far from which was a line
of hang-dog fellows drawn up to receive sentence for divers small
misdemeanors, from an officer whose blond whiskers drooped Dundrearily
from his fresh English cheeks. There was that immense difference between
him and the men in physical grandeur and beauty, which is so notable in
the aristocratically ordered military services of Europe, and which makes
the rank seem of another race from the file. Private Drakes saluted his
superior, and visibly deteriorated in his presence, though his breast was
covered with medals, and he had fought England's battles in every part of
the world. It was a gross injustice, the triumph of a thousand years of
wrong; and it was touching to have Private Drakes say that he expected in
three months to begin life for himself, after twenty years' service of
the Queen; and did they think he could get anything to do in the States?
He scarcely knew what he was fit for, but he thought--to so little in him
came the victories he had helped to win in the Crimea, in China, and in
India--that he could take care of a gentleman's horse and work about his
place. He looked inquiringly at Basil, as if he might be a gentleman with
a horse to be taken care of and a place to be worked about, and made him
regret that he was not a man of substance enough to provide for Private
Drakes and Mrs. Drakes and the brood of Ducklings, who had been shown to
him stowed away in one of those cavernous rooms in the earthworks where
the married soldiers have their quarters. His regret enriched the reward
of Private Drakes' service,--which perhaps answered one of Private
Drakes' purposes, if not his chief aim. He promised to come to the States
upon the pressing advice of Isabel, who, speaking from her own large
experience, declared that everybody got on there,--and he bade our
friends an affectionate farewell as they drove away to the Plains of
Abraham.
The fashionable suburban cottages and places of Quebec are on the St.
Louis Road leading northward to the old battle-ground and beyond it; but,
these face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawrence and St. Charles, and
lofty hedges and shrubbery hide them in an English seclusion from the
highway; so that the visitor may uninterruptedly meditate whatever
emotion he will for the scene of Wolfe's death as he rides along. His
loftiest emotion will want the noble height of that heroic soul, who must
always stand forth in history a figure of beautiful and singular
distinction, admirable alike for the sensibility and daring, the poetic
pensiveness, and the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxed his
feeble frame with tasks greater than it could bear. The whole story of
the capture of Quebec is full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fall
was a triumph for all the English-speaking race, and to us Americans,
long scourged by the cruel Indian wars plotted within her walls or
sustained by her strength, such a blessing as was hailed with ringing
bells and blazing bonfires throughout the Colonies; yet now we cannot
think without pity of the hopes extinguished and the labors brought to
naught in her overthrow. That strange colony of priests and soldiers, of
martyrs and heroes, of which she was the capital, willing to perish for
an allegiance to which the mother-country was indifferent, and fighting
against the armies with which England was prepared to outnumber the whole
Canadian population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down
his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win
her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his
costly victory, the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which he would
"rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;" but it aches for
the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief
his time was, "So much the better; then I shall not live to see the
surrender of Quebec."
In the city for which they perished their fame has never been divided.
The English have shown themselves very generous victors; perhaps nothing
could be alleged against them, but that they were victors. A shaft common
to Wolfe and Montcalm celebrates them both in the Governor's Garden; and
in the Chapel of the Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed, where Montcalm
died, by the same conquerors who raised to Wolfe's memory the column on
the battle-field.
A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell, and the monument
stands on the spot where Wolfe breathed his last, on ground lower than
the rest of the field; the friendly hollow that sheltered him from the
fire of the French dwarfs his monument; yet it is sufficient, and the
simple inscription, "Here died Wolfe victorious," gives it a dignity
which many cubits of added stature could not bestow. Another of those
bitter showers, which had interspersed the morning's sunshine, drove
suddenly across the open plain, and our tourists comfortably
sentimentalized the scene behind the close-drawn curtains of their
carriage. Here a whole empire had been lost and won, Basil reminded
Isabel; and she said, "Only think of it!" and looked to a wandering fold
of her skirt, upon which the rain beat through a rent of the curtain.
Do I pitch the pipe too low? We poor honest men are at a sad
disadvantage; and now and then I am minded to give a loose to fancy, and
attribute something really grand and fine to my people, in order to make
them worthier the reader's respected acquaintance. But again, I forbid
myself in a higher interest; and I am afraid that even if I were less
virtuous, I could not exalt their mood upon a battle-field; for of all
things of the past a battle is the least conceivable. I have heard men
who fought in many battles say that the recollection was like a dream to
them; and what can the merely civilian imagination do on the Plains of
Abraham, with the fact that there, more than a century ago, certain
thousands of Frenchmen marched out, on a bright September morning, to
kill and maim as many Englishmen? This ground, so green and oft with
grass beneath the feet, was it once torn with shot and soaked with the
blood of men? Did they lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable slain,
for whom tender hearts away yonder over the sea were to ache and break?
Did the wretches that fell wounded stretch themselves here, and writhe
beneath the feet of friend and foe, or crawl array for shelter into
little hollows, and behind gushes and fallen trees! Did he, whose soul
was so full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot through like
some ravening beast? The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din
of arms, the cries of victory,--I vainly strive to conjure up some image
of it all now; and God be thanked, horrible spectre! that, fill the world
with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in its moments
of sanity and peace. Least credible art thou on the old battle-fields,
where the mother of the race denies thee with breeze and sun and leaf and
bird, and every blade of grass! The red stain in Basil's thought yielded
to the rain sweeping across the pasture-land from which it had long since
faded, and the words on the monument, "Here died Wolfe victorious," did
not proclaim his bloody triumph over the French, but his self-conquest,
his victory over fear and pain and love of life. Alas! when shall the
poor, blind, stupid world honor those who renounce self in the joy of
their kind, equally with those who devote themselves through the anguish
and loss of thousands? So old a world and groping still!
The tourists were better fitted for the next occasion of sentiment, which
was at the Hotel Dieu whither they went after returning from the
battlefield. It took all the mal-address of which travellers are masters
to secure admittance, and it was not till they had rung various wrong
bells, and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking French through
grated doors, and set divers sympathetic spectators doing ineffectual
services, that they at last found the proper entrance, and were answered
in English that the porter would ask if they might see the chapel. They
hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs who
perished long ago for the conversion of a race that has perished, and
whose relics they had come, fresh from their reading of Parkman, with
some vague and patronizing intention to revere. An elderly sister with a
pale, kind face led them through a ward of the hospital into the chapel,
which they found in the expected taste, and exquisitely neat and cool,
but lacking the martyr's skull. They asked if it were not to be seen.
"Ah, yes, poor Pere Brebeuf!" sighed the gentle sister, with the tone and
manner of having lost him yesterday; "we had it down only last week,
showing it to some Jesuit fathers; but it's in the convent now, and isn't
to be seen." And there mingled apparently in her regret for Pere Brebeuf
a confusing sense of his actual state as a portable piece of furniture.
She would not let them praise the chapel. It was very clean, yes, but
there was nothing to see in it. She deprecated their compliments with
many shrugs, but she was pleased; for when we renounce the pomps and
vanities of this world, we are pretty sure to find them in some
other,--if we are women. She, good and pure soul, whose whole life was
given to self-denying toil, had yet something angelically coquettish in
her manner, a spiritual-worldliness which was the clarified likeness of
this-worldliness. O, had they seen the Hotel Dieu at Montreal? Then (with
a vivacious wave of the hands) they would not care to look at this, which
by comparison was nothing. Yet she invited them to go through the wards
if they would, and was clearly proud to have them see the wonderful
cleanness and comfort of the place. There were not many patients, but
here and there a wan or fevered face looked at them from its pillow, or a
weak form drooped beside a bed, or a group of convalescents softly talked
together. They came presently to the last hall, at the end of which sat
another nun, beside a window that gave a view of the busy port, and
beyond it the landscape of village-lit plain and forest-darkened height.
On a table at her elbow stood a rose-tree, on which hung two only pale
tea-roses, so fair, so perfect, that Isabel cried out in wonder and
praise. Ere she could prevent it, the nun, to whom there had been some
sort of presentation, gathered one of the roses, and with a shy grace
offered it to Isabel, who shrank back a little as from too costly a gift.
"Take it," said the first nun, with her pretty French accent; while the
other, who spoke no English at all, beamed a placid smile; and Isabel
took it. The flower, lying light in her palm, exhaled a delicate odor,
and a thrill of exquisite compassion for it trembled through her heart,
as if it had been the white, cloistered life of the silent nun: with its
pallid loveliness, it was as a flower that had taken the veil. It could
never have uttered the burning passion of a lover for his mistress; the
nightingale could have found no thorn on it to press his aching poet's
heart against; but sick and weary eyes had dwelt gratefully upon it; at
most it might have expressed, like a prayer, the nun's stainless love of
some favorite saint in paradise. Cold, and pale, and sweet,--was it
indeed only a flower, this cloistered rose of the Hotel Dieu?
"Breathe it," said the gentle Gray Sister; "sometimes the air of the
hospital offends. Not us, no; we are used; but you come from the
outside." And she gave her rose for this humble use as lovingly as she
devoted herself to her lowly taxes.
"It is very little to see," she said at the end; "but if you are pleased,
I am very glad. Goodby, good-by!" She stood with her arms folded, and
watched them out of sight with her kind, coquettish little smile, and
then the mute, blank life of the nun resumed her.
From Hotel Dieu to Hotel Musty it was but a step; both were in the same
street; but our friends fancied themselves to have come an immense
distance when they sat down at an early dinner, amidst the clash of
crockery and cutlery, and looked round upon all the profane travelling
world assembled. Their regard presently fixed upon one company which
monopolized a whole table, and were defined from the other diners by
peculiarities as marked as those of the Soeurs Grises themselves. There
were only two men among some eight or ten women; one of the former had a
bad amiable face, with eyes full of a merry deviltry; the other, clean
shaven, and dark, was demure and silent as a priest. The ladies were of
various types, but of one effect, with large rolling eyes, and faces that
somehow regarded the beholder as from a distance, and with an impartial
feeling for him as for an element of publicity. One of them, who caressed
a lapdog with one hand while she served herself with the other, was, as
she seemed to believe, a blonde; she had pale blue eyes, and her hair was
cut in front so as to cover her forehead with a straggling sandy-colored
fringe. She had an English look, and three or four others, with dark
complexion and black, unsteady eyes, and various abandon of back-hair,
looked like Cockney houris of Jewish blood; while two of the lovely
company were clearly of our own nation, as was the young man with the
reckless laughing face. The ladies were dressed and jeweled with a kind
of broad effectiveness, which was to the ordinary style of society what
scene-painting is to painting, and might have borne close inspection no
better. They seemed the best-humored people in the world, and on the
kindliest terms with each other. The waiters shared their pleasant mood,
and served them affectionately, and were now and then invited to join in
the gay talk which babbled on over dislocated aspirates, and filled the
air with a sentiment of vagabond enjoyment, of the romantic freedom of
violated convention, of something Gil Blas-like, almost picaresque.
If they had needed explanation it would have been given by the
announcement in the office of the hotel that a troupe of British blondes
was then appearing in Quebec for one week only.
After dinner they took possession of the parlor, and while one strummed
fitfully upon the ailing hotel piano, the rest talked, and talked shop,
of course, as all of us do when several of a trade are got together.
"W'at," said the eldest of the dark-faced, black haired British blondes
of Jewish race,--"w'at are we going to give at Montrehal?"
"We're going to give 'Pygmalion,' at Montrehal," answered the British
blonde of American birth, good-humoredly burlesquing the erring h of her
sister.
"But we cahn't, you know," said the lady with the fringed forehead;
"Hagnes is gone on to New York, and there's nobody to do Wenus."
"Yes, you know," demanded the first speaker, "oo's to do Wenus?
"Bella's to do Wenus," said a third.
There was an outcry at this, and "'Ow ever would she get herself up for
'Venus?" and "W'at a guy she'll look!" and "Nonsense! Bella's too 'eavy
for Venus!" came from different lively critics; and the debate threatened
to become too intimate for the public ear, when one of their gentlemen
came in and said, "Charley don't seem so well this afternoon." On this
the chorus changed its note, and at the proposal, "Poor Charley, let's
go and cheer 'im hop a bit," the whole good-tempered company trooped out
of the parlor together.
Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoon to that sort of
aimless wandering to and fro about the streets which seizes a foreign
city unawares, and best develops its charm of strangeness. So they went
out and took their fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long
fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Montreal, and
impartially rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the
thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied
having been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every
house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls;
the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the
universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the
greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths of
weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries,
with their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of masonry, and the
red-coated sergeants flirting with nursery-maids upon the carriages,
while the children tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and shell; the
sloping market-place before the cathedral, where yet some remnant of the
morning's traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where Isabel bought
a bouquet of marigolds and asters of an old woman peasant enough to have
sold it in any market-place of Europe; the small, dark shops beyond the
quarter invaded by English retail trade; the movement of all the strange
figures of cleric and lay and military life; the sound of a foreign
speech prevailing over the English; the encounter of other tourists, the
passage back and forth through the different city gates; the public
wooden stairways, dropping flight after flight from the Upper to the
Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with its commerce and shipping and
seafaring life huddled close in under the hill; the many desolate streets
of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous as the last great fire left them;
and the marshy meadows beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of
Cartier and Montcalm.
They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University, and admired
the Le Brun, and the other paintings of less merit, but equal interest
through their suggestion of a whole dim religious world of paintings; and
then they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so much in looking at
the Crucifixion by Vandyck which is there, as in reveling amid the
familiar rococo splendors of the temple. Every swaggering statue of a
saint, every rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that on the carven
and gilded clouds above the high altar float--
"Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,"--
was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the sacred properties with a
feather brush, and giving each shrine a business-like nod as he passed,
was as a long-lost brother; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness for
the young girls and old women who stepped in for a half-hour's devotion,
and for the men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a moment from
affairs and crops, and gave it to the saints. There was nothing in the
place that need remind them of America, and its taste was exactly that of
a thousand other churches of the eighteenth century. They could easily
have believed themselves in the farthest Catholic South, but for the two
great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave near the
entrance, and that too vividly reminded them of the possibility of cold.
In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and other confusions of the
South and North, and one never quite reconciles himself to them. The
Frenchmen, who expected to find there the climate of their native land,
and ripen her wines in as kindly a sun, have perpetuated the image of
home in so many things, that it goes to the heart with a painful emotion
to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon them. As you ponder some
characteristic aspect of Quebec,--a bit of street with heavy stone houses
opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplar rising
slim against it,--you say, to your satisfied soul, "Yes, it is the real
thing!" and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky strikes in upon
you, and makes the reality a mere picture. The sky is blue, the sun is
often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic
radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that summer is but
hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first
dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow. But
somehow, from without or from within, that light of the North is there.
It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the little circular garden
near Durham Terrace, where every brightness of fall flowers
abounded,--marigold, coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and
sunflower. It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and they fancied
that fainter-hearted plants would have pined away in that garden, where
the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light, fell back again
with a musical shiver. The consciousness of this latent cold, of winter
only held in abeyance by the bright sun, was not deeper even in the once
magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden, where there was actually a
rawness in the late afternoon air, and whither they were strolling for
the view from its height, and to pay their duty to the obelisk raised
there to the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm. The sounding Latin
inscription celebrates the royal governor-general who erected it almost
as much as the heroes to whom it was raised; but these spectators did not
begrudge the space given to his praise, for so fine a thought merited
praise. It enforced again the idea of a kind posthumous friendship
between Wolfe and Montcalm, which gives their memory its rare
distinction, and unites them, who fell in fight against each other, as
closely as if they had both died for the same cause.
Some lasting dignity seems to linger about the city that has once been a
capital; and this odor of fallen nobility belongs to Quebec, which was a
capital in the European sense, with all the advantages of a small
vice-regal court, and its social and political intrigues, in the French
times. Under the English, for a hundred years it was the centre of
Colonial civilization and refinement, with a governor-general's residence
and a brilliant, easy, and delightful society, to which the large
garrison of former days gave gayety and romance. The honors of a capital,
first shared with Montreal and Toronto, now rest with half-savage Ottawa;
and the garrison has dwindled to a regiment of rifles, whose presence
would hardly be known, but for the natty sergeants lounging, stick in
hand, about the streets and courting the nurse-maids. But in the days of
old there were scenes of carnival pleasure in the Governor's Garden, and
there the garrison band still plays once a week, when it is filled by the
fashion and beauty of Quebec, and some semblance of the past is recalled.
It is otherwise a lonesome, indifferently tended place, and on this
afternoon there was no one there but a few loafing young fellows of low
degree, French and English, and children that played screaming from seat
to seat and path to path and over the too-heavily shaded grass. In spite
of a conspicuous warning that any dog entering the garden would be
destroyed, the place was thronged with dogs unmolested and apparently in
no danger of the threatened doom. The seal of a disagreeable desolation
was given in the legend rudely carved upon one of the benches, "Success
to the Irish Republic!"
The morning of the next day our tourists gave to hearing mass at the
French cathedral, which was not different, to their heretical senses,
from any other mass, except that the ceremony was performed with a very
full clerical force, and was attended by an uncommonly devout
congregation. With Europe constantly in their minds, they were bewildered
to find the worshippers not chiefly old and young women, but men also of
all ages and of every degree, from the neat peasant in his Sabbath-day
best to the modish young Quebecker, who spread his handkerchief on the
floor to save his pantaloons during supplication. There was fashion and
education in large degree among the men, and there was in all a pious
attention to the function in poetical keeping with the origin and history
of a city which the zeal of the Church had founded.
A magnificent beadle, clothed in a gold-laced coat aid bearing a silver
staff, bowed to them when they entered, and, leading them to a pew,
punched up a kneeling peasant, who mutely resumed his prayers in the
aisle outside, while they took his place. It appeared to Isabel very
unjust that their curiosity should displace his religion; but she
consoled herself by making Basil give a shilling to the man who, preceded
by the shining beadle, came round to take up a collection. The peasant
could have given nothing but copper, and she felt that this restored the
lost balance of righteousness in their favor. There was a sermon, very
sweetly and gracefully delivered by a young priest of singular beauty,
even among clergy whose good looks are so notable as those of Quebec; and
then they followed the orderly crowd of worshippers out, and left the
cathedral to the sacristan and the odor of incense.
They thought the type of French-Canadian better here than at Montreal,
and they particularly noticed the greater number of pretty young girls.
All classes were well dressed; for though the best dressed could not be
called stylish according to the American standard, as Isabel decided, and
had only a provincial gentility, the poorest wore garments that were
clean and whole. Everybody, too, was going to have a hot Sunday dinner,
if there was any truth in the odors that steamed out of every door and
window; and this dinner was to be abundantly garnished with onions, for
the dullest nose could not err concerning that savor.
Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that showed itself superior to
every distinction of race, were strolling vaguely and not always quite
happily about; but they made no impression on the proper local character,
and the air throughout the morning was full of the sentiment of Sunday in
a Catholic city. There was the apparently meaningless jangling of bells,
with profound hushes between, and then more jubilant jangling, and then
deeper silence; there was the devout trooping of the crowds to the
churches; and there was the beginning of the long afternoon's lounging
and amusement with which the people of that faith reward their morning's
devotion. Little stands for the sale of knotty apples and choke-cherries
and cakes and cider sprang magically into existence after service, and
people were already eating and drinking at them. The carriage-drivers
resumed their chase of the tourists, and the unvoiceful stir of the new
week had begun again. Quebec, in fact, is but a pantomimic reproduction
of France; it is as if two centuries in a new land, amidst the primeval
silences of nature and the long hush of the Northern winters, had stilled
the tongues of the lively folk and made them taciturn as we of a graver
race. They have kept the ancestral vivacity of manner; the elegance of
the shrug is intact; the talking hands take part in dialogue; the
agitated person will have its share of expression. But the loud and eager
tone is wanting, and their dumb show mystifies the beholder almost as
much as the Southern architecture under the slanting Northern sun. It is
not America; if it is not France, what is it?
Of the many beautiful things to see in the neighborhood of Quebec, our
wedding-journeyers were in doubt on which to bestow their one precious
afternoon. Should it be Lorette, with its cataract and its remnant of
bleached and fading Hurons, or the Isle of Orleans with its fertile farms
and its primitive peasant life, or Montmorenci, with the unrivaled fall
and the long drive through the beautiful village of Beauport? Isabel
chose the last, because Basil had been there before, and it had to it the
poetry of the wasted years in which she did not know him. She had
possessed herself of the journal of his early travels, among the other
portions and parcels recoverable from the dreadful past, and from time to
time on this journey she had read him passages out of it, with mingled
sentiment and irony, and, whether she was mocking or admiring, equally to
his confusion. Now, as they smoothly bowled away from the city, she made
him listen to what he had written of the same excursion long ago.
It was, to be sure, a sad farrago of sentiment about the village and the
rural sights, and especially a girl tossing hay in the field. Yet it had
touches of nature and reality, and Basil could not utterly despise
himself for having written it. "Yes," he said, "life was then a thing to
be put into pretty periods; now it's something that has risks and
averages, and may be insured."
There was regret, fancied or expressed, in his tone, that made her sigh,
"Ah! if I'd only had a little more money, you might have devoted yourself
to literature;" for she was a true Bostonian in her honor of our poor
craft.
"O, you're not greatly to blame," answered her husband, "and I forgive
you the little wrong you've done me. I was quits with the Muse, at any
rate, you know, before we were married; and I'm very well satisfied to be
going back to my applications and policies to-morrow."
To-morrow? The word struck cold upon her. Then their wedding journey
would begin to end tomorrow! So it would, she owned with another sigh;
and yet it seemed impossible.
"There, ma'am," said the driver, rising from his seat and facing round,
while he pointed with his whip towards Quebec, "that's what we call the
Silver City."
They looked back with him at the city, whose thousands of tinned roofs,
rising one above the other from the water's edge to the citadel, were all
a splendor of argent light in the afternoon sun. It was indeed as if some
magic had clothed that huge rock, base and steepy flank and crest, with a
silver city. They gazed upon the marvel with cries of joy that satisfied
the driver's utmost pride in it, and Isabel said, "To live there, there
in that Silver City, in perpetual sojourn! To be always going to go on a
morrow that never came! To be forever within one day of the end of a
wedding journey that never ended!"
From far down the river by which they rode came the sound of a cannon,
breaking the Sabbath repose of the air. "That's the gun of the Liverpool
steamer, just coming in," said the driver.
"O," cried Isabel, "I'm thankful we're only to stay one night more, for
now we shall be turned out of our nice room by those people who
telegraphed for it!"
There is a continuous village along the St. Lawrence from Quebec, almost
to Montmorenci; and they met crowds of villagers coming from the church
as they passed through Beauport. But Basil was dismayed at the change
that had befallen them. They had their Sunday's best on, and the women,
instead of wearing the peasant costume in which he had first seen them,
were now dressed as if out of "Harper's Bazar" of the year before. He
anxiously asked the driver if the broad straw hats and the bright sacks
and kirtles were no more. "O, you'd see them on weekdays, sir," was the
answer, "but they're not so plenty any time as they used to be." He
opened his store of facts about the habitans, whom he praised for every
virtue,--for thrift, for sobriety, for neatness, for amiability; and his
words ought to have had the greater weight, because he was of the Irish
race, between which and the Canadians there is no kindness lost. But the
looks of the passers-by corroborated him, and as for the little houses,
open-doored beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window and portal,
they were miracles of picturesqueness and cleanliness. From each the
owner's slim domain, narrowing at every successive division among the
abundant generations, runs back to hill or river in well-defined lines,
and beside the cottage is a garden of pot-herbs, bordered with a flame of
bright autumn flowers; somewhere in decent seclusion grunts the fattening
pig, which is to enrich all those peas and onions for the winter's broth;
there is a cheerfulness of poultry about the barns; I dare be sworn there
is always a small girl driving a flock of decorous ducks down the middle
of the street; and of the priest with a book under his arm, passing a
way-side shrine, what possible doubt? The houses, which are of one model,
are built by the peasants themselves with the stone which their land
yields more abundantly than any other crop, and are furnished with
galleries and balconies to catch every ray of the fleeting summer, and
perhaps to remember the long-lost ancestral summers of Normandy. At every
moment, in passing through this ideally neat and pretty village, our
tourists must think of the lovely poem of which all French Canada seems
but a reminiscence and illustration. It was Grand Pre, not Beauport; and
they paid an eager homage to the beautiful genius which has touched those
simple village aspects with an undying charm, and which, whatever the
land's political allegiance, is there perpetual Seigneur.
The village, stretching along the broad interval of the St. Lawrence,
grows sparser as you draw near the Falls of Montmorenci, and presently
you drive past the grove shutting from the road the country-house in
which the Duke of Kent spent some merry days of his jovial youth, and
come in sight of two lofty towers of stone,--monuments and witnesses of
the tragedy of Montmorenci.
Once a suspension-bridge, built sorely against the will of the
neighboring habitans, hung from these towers high over the long plunge of
the cataract. But one morning of the fatal spring after the first
winter's frost had tried the hold of the cable on the rocks, an old
peasant and his wife with their little grandson set out in their cart to
pass the bridge. As they drew near the middle the anchoring wires
suddenly lost their grip upon the shore, and whirled into the air; the
bridge crashed under the hapless passengers and they were launched from
its height, upon the verge of the fall and thence plunged, two hundred
and fifty feet, into the ruin of the abyss.
The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood upon low stone piers, so far up
the river from the cataract that whoever fell from it would yet have many
a chance for life; and it would have been perilous to offer to replace
the fallen structure, which, in the belief of faithful Christians,
clearly belonged to the numerous bridges built by the Devil, in times
when the Devil did not call himself a civil engineer.
The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad tale as he halted his
horses on the bridge; and as his passengers looked down the rock-fretted
brown torrent towards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion to shudder
that ever she had set foot on that suspension-bridge below Niagara, and
to prove to Basil's confusion that her doubt of the bridges between the
Three Sisters was not a case of nerves but an instinctive wisdom
concerning the unsafety of all bridges of that design.
From the gate opening into the grounds about the fall two or three little
French boys, whom they had not the heart to forbid, ran noisily before
them with cries in their sole English, "This way, sir" and led toward a
weather-beaten summer-house that tottered upon a projecting rock above
the verge of the cataract. But our tourists shook their heads, and turned
away for a more distant and less dizzy enjoyment of the spectacle, though
any commanding point was sufficiently chasmal and precipitous. The lofty
bluff was scooped inward from the St. Lawrence in a vast irregular
semicircle, with cavernous hollows, one within another, sinking far into
its sides, and naked from foot to crest, or meagrely wooded here and
there with evergreen. From the central brink of these gloomy purple
chasms the foamy cataract launched itself, and like a cloud,
"Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem."
I say a cloud, because I find it already said to my hand, as it were, in
a pretty verse, and because I must needs liken Montmorenci to something
that is soft and light. Yet a cloud does not represent the glinting of
the water in its downward swoop; it is like some broad slope of
sun-smitten snow; but snow is coldly white and opaque, and this has a
creamy warmth in its luminous mass; and so, there hangs the cataract
unsaid as before. It is a mystery that anything so grand should be so
lovely, that anything so tenderly fair in whatever aspect should yet be
so large that one glance fails to comprehend it all. The rugged wildness
of the cliffs and hollows about it is softened by its gracious beauty,
which half redeems the vulgarity of the timber-merchant's uses in setting
the river at work in his saw-mills and choking its outlet into the St.
Lawrence with rafts of lumber and rubbish of slabs and shingles. Nay,
rather, it is alone amidst these things, and the eye takes note of them
by a separate effort.
Our tourists sank down upon the turf that crept with its white clover to
the edge of the precipice, and gazed dreamily upon the fall, filling
their vision with its exquisite color and form. Being wiser than I, they
did not try to utter its loveliness; they were content to feel it, and
the perfection of the afternoon, whose low sun slanting over the
landscape gave, under that pale, greenish-blue sky, a pensive sentiment
of autumn to the world. The crickets cried amongst the grass; the
hesitating chirp of birds came from the tree overhead; a shaggy colt left
off grazing in the field and stalked up to stare at them; their little
guides, having found that these people had no pleasure in the sight of
small boys scuffling on the verge of a precipice, threw themselves also
down upon the grass and crooned a long, long ballad in a mournful minor
key about some maiden whose name was La Belle Adeline. It was a moment of
unmixed enjoyment for every sense, and through all their being they were
glad; which considering, they ceased to be so, with a deep sigh, as one
reasoning that he dreams must presently awake. They never could have an
emotion without desiring to analyze it; but perhaps their rapture would
have ceased as swiftly, even if they had not tried to make it a fact of
consciousness.
"If there were not dinner after such experiences as these," said Isabel,
as they sat at table that evening, "I don't know what would become of
one. But dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty, and brings you
gently back to earth. You must eat, don't you see, and there's nothing
disgraceful about what you're obliged to do; and so--it's all right."
"Isabel, Isabel," cried her husband, "you have a wonderful mind, and its
workings always amaze me. But be careful, my dear; be careful. Don't work
it too hard. The human brain, you know: delicate organ."
"Well, you understand what I mean; and I think it's one of the great
charms of a husband, that you're not forced to express yourself to him. A
husband," continued Isabel, sententiously, poising a bit of meringue
between her thumb and finger,--for they had reached that point in the
repast, "a husband is almost as good as another woman!"
In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and exchanged the history of the
day with them.
"Certainly," said Mrs. Ellison, at the end, "it's been a pleasant day
enough, but what of the night? You've been turned out, too, by those
people who came on the steamer, and who might as well have stayed on
board to-night; have you got another room?"
"Not precisely," said Isabel; "we have a coop in the fifth story, right
under the roof."
Mrs. Ellison turned energetically upon her husband and cried in tones of
reproach, "Richard, Mrs. March has a room!"
"A coop, she said," retorted that amiable Colonel, "and we're too good
for that. The clerk is keeping us in suspense about a room, because he
means to surprise us with something palatial at the end. It's his joking
way."
"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Ellison. "Have you seen him since dinner?"
"I have made life a burden to him for the last half-hour," returned the
Colonel, with the kindliest smile.
"O Richard," cried his wife, in despair of his amendment, "you wouldn't
make life a burden to a mouse!" And having nothing else for it, she
laughed, half in sorrow, half in fondness.
"Well, Fanny," the Colonel irrelevantly answered, "put on your hat and
things, and let's all go up to Durham Terrace for a promenade. I know our
friends want to go. It's something worth seeing; and by the time we get
back, the clerk will have us a perfectly sumptuous apartment."
Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of Southern Europe in Quebec
than the Sunday-night promenading on Durham Terrace. This is the ample
space on the brow of the cliff to the left of the citadel, the noblest
and most commanding position in the whole city, which was formerly
occupied by the old castle of Saint Louis, where dwelt the brave Count
Frontenac and his splendid successors of the French regime. The castle
went the way of Quebec by fire some forty years ago, and Lord Durham
leveled the site and made it a public promenade. A stately arcade of
solid masonry supports it on the brink of the rock, and an iron parapet
incloses it; there are a few seats to lounge upon, and some idle old guns
for the children to clamber over and play with. A soft twilight had
followed the day, and there was just enough obscurity to hide from a
willing eye the Northern and New World facts of the scene, and to bring
into more romantic relief the citadel dark against the mellow evening,
and the people gossiping from window to window across the narrow streets
of the Lower Town. The Terrace itself was densely thronged, and there was
a constant coming and going of the promenaders, who each formally paced
back and forth upon the planking for a certain time, and then went
quietly home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were nearly all
French, and they were not generally, it seemed, of the first fashion, but
rather of middling condition in life; the English being represented only
by a few young fellows and now and then a redfaced old gentleman with an
Indian scarf trailing from his hat. There were some fair American
costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essentially Quebecian. The
young girls walking in pairs, or with their lovers, had the true touch of
provincial unstylishness, the young men the ineffectual excess of the
second-rate Latin dandy, their elders the rich inelegance of a
bourgeoisie in their best. A few, better-figured avocats or notaires
(their profession was as unmistakable as if they had carried their
well-polished brass doorplates upon their breasts) walked and gravely
talked with each other. The non-American character of the scene was not
less vividly marked in the fact that each person dressed according to his
own taste and frankly indulged private preferences in shapes and colors.
One of the promenaders was in white, even to his canvas shoes; another,
with yet bolder individuality, appeared in perfect purple. It had a
strange, almost portentous effect when these two startling figures met as
friends and joined each other in the promenade with linked arms; but the
evening was already beginning to darken round them, and presently the
purple comrade was merely a sombre shadow beside the glimmering white.
The valleys and the heights now vanished; but the river defined itself by
the varicolored lights of the ships and steamers that lay, dark,
motionless bulks, upon its broad breast; the lights of Point Lewis
swarmed upon the other shore; the Lower Town, two hundred feet below
them, stretched an alluring mystery of clustering roofs and lamplit
windows and dark and shining streets around the mighty rock,
mural-crowned. Suddenly a spectacle peculiarly Northern and
characteristic of Quebec revealed itself; a long arch brightened over the
northern horizon; the tremulous flames of the aurora, pallid violet or
faintly tinged with crimson, shot upward from it, and played with a weird
apparition and evanescence to the zenith. While the strangers looked, a
gun boomed from the citadel, and the wild sweet notes of the bugle sprang
out upon the silence.
Then they all said, "How perfectly in keeping everything has been!" and
sauntered back to the hotel.
The Colonel went into the office to give the clerk another turn on the
rack, and make him confess to a hidden apartment somewhere, while Isabel
left her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and invited Miss Kitty to
look at her coop in the fifth story. As they approached, light and music
and laughter stole out of an open door next hers, and Isabel,
distinguishing the voices of the theatrical party, divined that this was
the sick-chamber, and that they were again cheering up the afflicted
member of the troupe. Some one was heard to say, "Well, 'ow do you feel
now, Charley?" and a sound of subdued swearing responded, followed by
more laughter, and the twanging of a guitar, and a snatch of song, and a
stir of feet and dresses as for departure.
The two listeners shrank together; as women they could not enjoy these
proofs of the jolly camaraderie existing among the people of the troupe.
They trembled as before the merriment of as many light-hearted, careless,
good-natured young men: it was no harm, but it was dismaying; and,
"Dear!" cried Isabel, "what shall we do?"
"Go back," said Miss Ellison, boldly, and back they ran to the parlor,
where they found Basil and the Colonel and his wife in earnest conclave.
The Colonel, like a shrewd strategist, was making show of a desperation
more violent than his wife's, who was thus naturally forced into the
attitude of moderating his fury.
"Well, Fanny, that's all he can do for us; and I do think it's the most
outrageous thing in the world! It's real mean!"
Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own denunciatory manner, but just
then she was obliged to answer Isabel's eager inquiry whether they had
got a room yet. "Yes, a room," she said, "with two beds. But what are we
to do with one room? That clerk--I don't know what to call him"--("Call
him a hotel-clerk, my dear; you can't say anything worse," interrupted
her husband)--"seems to think the matter perfectly settled."
"You see, Mrs. March," added the Colonel, "he's able to bully us in this
way because he has the architecture on his side. There isn't another room
in the house."
"Let me think a moment," said Isabel not thinking an instant. She had
taken a fancy to at least two of these people from the first, and in the
last hour they had all become very well acquainted now she said, "I'll
tell you: there are two beds in our room also; we ladies will take one
room, and you gentlemen the other!"
"Mrs. March, I bow to the superiority of the Boston mind," said the
Colonel, while his females civilly protested and consented; "and I might
almost hail you as our preserver. If ever you come to Milwaukee,--which
is the centre of the world, as Boston is,--we--I--shall be happy to have
you call at my place of business.--I didn't commit myself, did I,
Fanny?--I am sometimes hospitable to excess, Mrs. March," he said, to
explain his aside. "And now, let us reconnoitre. Lead on, madam, and the
gratitude of the houseless stranger will follow you."
The whole party explored both rooms, and the ladies decided to keep
Isabel's. The Colonel was dispatched to see that the wraps and traps of
his party were sent to this number, and Basil went with him. The things
came long before the gentlemen returned, but the ladies happily employed
the interval in talking over the excitements of the day, and in saying
from time to time, "So very kind of you, Mrs. March," and "I don't know
what we should have done," and "Don't speak of it, please," and "I'm sure
it's a great pleasure to me."
In the room adjoining theirs, where the invalid actor lay, and where
lately there had been minstrelsy and apparently dancing for his solace,
there was now comparative silence. Two women's voices talked together,
and now and then a guitar was touched by a wandering hand. Isabel had
just put up her handkerchief to conceal her first yawn, when the
gentlemen, odorous of cigars, returned to say good-night.
"It's the second door from this, isn't it, Isabel?" asked her husband.
"Yes, the second door. Good-night. Good-night."
The two men walked off together; but in a minute afterwards they had
returned and were knocking tremulously at the closed door.
"O, what has happened?" chorused the ladies in woeful tune, seeing a
certain wildness in the face that confronted them.
"We don't know!" answered the others in as fearful a key, and related how
they had found the door of their room ajar, and a bright light streaming
into the corridor. They did not stop to ponder this fact, but, with the
heedlessness of their sex, pushed the door wide open, when they saw
seated before the mirror a bewildering figure, with disheveled locks
wandering down the back, and in dishabille expressive of being quite at
home there, which turned upon them a pair of pale blue eyes, under a
forehead remarkable for the straggling fringe of hair that covered it.
They professed to have remained transfixed at the sight, and to have
noted a like dismay on the visage before the glass, ere they summoned
strength to fly. These facts Colonel Ellison gave at the command of his
wife, with many protests and insincere delays amidst which the curiosity
of his hearers alone prevented them from rending him in pieces.
"And what do you suppose it was?" demanded his wife, with forced
calmness, when he had at last made an end of the story and his abominable
hypoocisies.
"Well, I think it was a mermaid."
"A mermaid!" said his wife, scornfully. "How do you know?"
"It had a comb in its hand, for one thing; and besides, my dear, I hope I
know a mermaid when I see it."
"Well," said Mrs. Ellison, "it was no mermaid, it was a mistake; and I'm
going to see about it. Will you go with me, Richard?"
"No money could induce me! If it's a mistake, it isn't proper for me to
go; if it's a mermaid, it's dangerous."
"O you coward!" said the intrepid little woman to a hero of all the
fights on Sherman's march to the sea; and presently they heard her attack
the mysterious enemy with a lady-like courage, claiming the invaded
chamber. The foe replied with like civility, saying the clerk had given
her that room with the understanding that another lady was to be put
there with her, and she had left the door unlocked to admit her. The
watchers with the sick man next door appeared and confirmed this speech,
a feeble voice from the bedclothes swore to it.
"Of course," added the invader, "if I'd known 'ow it really was, I never
would lave listened to such a thing, never. And there isn't another 'ole
in the louse to lay me 'ead," she concluded.
"Then it's the clerk's fault," said Mrs. Ellison, glad to retreat
unharmed; and she made her husband ring for the guilty wretch, a pale,
quiet young Frenchman, whom the united party, sallying into the corridor,
began to upbraid in one breath, the lady in dishabille vanishing as often
as she remembered it, and reappearing whenever some strong point of
argument or denunciation occurred to her.
The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his wicked tribe, threw himself upon
their mercy and confessed everything: the house was so crowded, and he
had been so crazed by the demands upon him, that he had understood
Colonel Ellison's application to be for a bed for the young lady in his
party, and he had done the very best he could. If the lady there--she
vanished again--would give up the room to the two gentlemen, he would
find her a place with the housekeeper. To this the lady consented without
difficulty, and the rest dispersing, she kissed one of the sick man's
watchers with "Isn't it a shame, Bella?" and flitted down the darkness of
the corridor. The rooms upon it seemed all, save the two assigned our
travellers, to be occupied by ladies of the troupe; their doors
successively opened, and she was heard explaining to each as she passed.
The momentary displeasure which she had shown at her banishment was over.
She detailed the facts with perfect good-nature, and though the others
appeared no more than herself to find any humorous cast in the affair,
they received her narration with the same amiability. They uttered their
sympathy seriously, and each parted from her with some friendly word.
Then all was still.
"Richard," said Mrs. Ellison, when in Isabel's room the travellers had
briefly celebrated these events, "I should think you'd hate to leave us
alone up here."
"I do; but you can't think how I hate to go off alone. I wish you'd come
part of the way with us, Ladies; I do indeed. Leave your door unlocked,
at any rate."
This prayer, uttered at parting outside the room, was answered from
within by a sound of turning keys and sliding bolts, and a low thunder as
of bureaus and washstands rolled against the door. "The ladies are
fortifying their position," said the Colonel to Basil, and the two
returned to their own chamber. "I don't wish any intrusions," he said,
instantly shutting himself in; "my nerves are too much shaken now. What
an awfully mysterious old place this Quebec is, Mr. March! I'll tell you
what: it's my opinion that this is an enchanted castle, and if my ribs
are not walked over by a muleteer in the course of the night, it's all I
ask."
In this and other discourse recalling the famous adventure of Don
Quixote, the Colonel beguiled the labor of disrobing, and had got as far
as his boots, when there came a startling knock at the door. With one
boot in his hand and the other on his foot, the Colonel limped forward.
"I suppose it's that clerk has sent to say he's made some other mistake,"
and he flung wide the door, and then stood motionless before it, dumbly
staring at a figure on the threshold,--a figure with the fringed forehead
and pale blue eyes of her whom they had so lately turned out of that
room.
Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, "Excuse me, gentlemen," she
said, with a dignity that recalled their scattered senses, "but will you
'ave the goodness to look if my beads are on your table--O thanks,
thanks, thanks!" she continued, showing her face and one hand, as Basil
blushingly advanced with a string of heavy black beads, piously adorned
with a large cross. "I'm sure, I'm greatly obliged to you, gentlemen, and
I hask a thousand pardons for troublin' you," she concluded in a somewhat
severe tone, that left them abashed and culpable; and vanished as
mysteriously as she had appeared.
"Now, see here," said the Colonel, with a huge sigh as he closed the door
again, and this time locked it, "I should like to know how long this sort
of thing is to be kept up? Because, if it's to be regularly repeated
during the night, I'm going to dress again." Nevertheless, he finished
undressing and got into bed, where he remained for some time silent.
Basil put out the light. "O, I'm sorry you did that, my dear fellow,"
said the Colonel; "but never mind, it was an idle curiosity, no doubt.
It's my belief that in the landlord's extremity of bedlinen, I've been
put to sleep between a pair of tablecloths; and I thought I'd like to
look. It seems to me that I make out a checkered pattern on top and a
flowered or arabesque pattern underneath. I wish they had given me mates.
It's pretty hard having to sleep between odd tablecloths. I shall
complain to the landlord of this in the morning. I've never had to sleep
between odd table-cloths at any hotel before."
The Colonel's voice seemed scarcely to have died away upon Basil's drowsy
ear, when suddenly the sounds of music and laughter from the invalid's
room startled him wide awake. The sick man's watchers were coquetting
with some one who stood in the little court-yard five stories below. A
certain breadth of repartee was naturally allowable at that distance; the
lover avowed his passion in ardent terms, and the ladies mocked him with
the same freedom, now and then totally neglecting him while they sang a
snatch of song to the twanging of the guitar, or talked professional
gossip, and then returning to him with some tormenting expression of
tenderness.
All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to Basil; yet he could
recollect few things intended for his pleasure that had given him more
satisfaction. He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight on the
high-gabled silvery roofs around and on the gardens of the convents and
the towers of the quaint city, that the scene wanted nothing of the
proper charm of Spanish humor and romance, and he was as grateful to
those poor souls as if they had meant him a favor. To us of the hither
side of the foot-lights, there is always something fascinating in the
life of the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are never so
unreal as in their own characters. In their shabby bestowal in those mean
upper rooms, their tawdry poverty, their merry submission to the errors
and caprices of destiny, their mutual kindliness and careless friendship,
these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-footed burlesque seemed to
be playing rather than living the life of strolling players; and their
love-making was the last touch of a comedy that Basil could hardly accept
as reality, it was so much more like something seen upon the stage. He
would not have detracted anything from the commonness and cheapness of
the 'mise en scene', for that, he reflected drowsily and confusedly,
helped to give it an air of fact and make it like an episode of fiction.
But above all, he was pleased with the natural eventlessness of the whole
adventure, which was in perfect agreement with his taste; and just as his
reveries began to lose shape in dreams, he was aware of an absurd pride
in the fact that all this could have happened to him in our commonplace
time and hemisphere. "Why," he thought, "if I were a student in Alcala,
what better could I have asked?" And as at last his soul swung out from
its moorings and lapsed down the broad slowly circling tides out in the
sea of sleep, he was conscious of one subtle touch of compassion for
those poor strollers,--a pity so delicate and fine and tender that it
hardly seemed his own but rather a sense of the compassion that pities
the whole world.