Ferry with them, and were good-natured to the last, having shaken hands
all round with the waiters, chambermaids, and porters of the hotel. The
young fellow with the bad amiable face came in a calash, and refused to
overpay the driver with a gay decision that made him Basil's envy till he
saw his tribulation in getting the troupe's luggage checked. There were
forty pieces, and it always remained a mystery, considering the small
amount of clothing necessary to those people on the stage, what could
have filled their trunks. The young man and the two English blondes of
American birth found places in the same car with our tourists, and
enlivened the journey with their frolics. When the young man pretended to
fall asleep, they wrapped his golden curly head in a shawl, and vexed him
with many thumps and thrusts, till he bought a brief truce with a handful
of almonds; and the ladies having no other way to eat them, one of them
saucily snatched off her shoe, and cracked them hammerwise with the heel.
It was all so pleasant that it ought to have been all right; and in their
merry world of outlawry perhaps things are not so bad as we like to think
them.
The country into which the train plunges as soon as Quebec is out of
sight is very stupidly savage, and our friends had little else to do but
to watch the gambols of the players, till they came to the river St.
Francis, whose wandering loveliness the road follows through an infinite
series of soft and beautiful landscapes, and finds everywhere glassing in
its smooth current the elms and willows of its gentle shores. At one
place, where its calm broke into foamy rapids, there was a huge saw mill,
covering the stream with logs and refuse, and the banks with whole cities
of lumber; which also they accepted as no mean elements of the
picturesque. They clung the most tenderly to traces of the peasant life
they were leaving. When some French boys came aboard with wild
raspberries to sell in little birch-bark canoes, they thrilled with
pleasure, and bought them, but sighed then, and said, "What thing
characteristic of the local life will they sell us in Maine when we get
there? A section of pie poetically wrapt in a broad leaf of the
squash-vine, or pop-corn in its native tissue-paper, and advertising the
new Dollar Store in Portland?" They saw the quaintness vanish from the
farm-houses; first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the steep roof,
then the steep roof itself. By and by they came to a store with a Grecian
portico and four square pine pillars. They shuddered and looked no more.
The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at Island Pond took place at
nine o'clock, without costing them a cent of duty or a pang of
conscience. At that charming station the trunks are piled
higgledy-piggledy into a room beside the track, where a few inspectors
with stifling lamps of smoky kerosene await the passengers. There are no
porters to arrange the baggage, and each lady and gentleman digs out his
box, and opens it before the lordly inspector, who stirs up its contents
with an unpleasant hand and passes it. He makes you feel that you are
once more in the land of official insolence, and that, whatever you are
collectively, you are nothing personally. Isabel, who had sent her
husband upon this business with quaking meekness of heart, experienced
the bold indignation of virtue at his account of the way people were made
their own baggage-smashers, and would not be amused when he painted the
vile terrors of each husband as he tremblingly unlocked his wife's store
of contraband.
The morning light showed them the broad elmy meadows of western-looking
Maine; and the Grand Trunk brought them, of course, an hour behind time
into Portland. All breakfastless they hurried aboard the Boston train on
the Eastern Road, and all along that line (which is built to show how
uninteresting the earth can be when she is 'ennuyee' of both sea and
land), Basil's life became a struggle to construct a meal from the
fragmentary opportunities of twenty different stations where they stopped
five minutes for refreshments. At one place he achieved two cups of
shameless chickory, at another three sardines, at a third a dessert of
elderly bananas.
"Home again, home again, from a foreign shore!"
they softly sang as the successive courses of this feast were disposed
of.
The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escaped during their sojourn
in Canada, brooded sovereign upon the tiresome landscape. The red granite
rocks were as if red-hot; the banks of the deep cuts were like ash heaps;
over the fields danced the sultry atmosphere; they fancied that they
almost heard the grasshoppers sing above the rattle of the train. When
they reached Boston at last, they were dustier than most of us would like
to be a hundred years hence. The whole city was equally dusty; and they
found the trees in the square before their own door gray with dust. The
bit of Virginia-creeper planted under the window hung shriveled upon its
trellis.
But Isabel's aunt met them with a refreshing shower of tears and kisses
in the hall, throwing a solid arm about each of them. "O you dears!" the
good soul cried, "you don't know how anxious I've been about you; so many
accidents happening all the time. I've never read the 'Evening
Transcript' till the next morning, for fear I should find your names
among the killed and wounded."
"O aunty, you're too good, always!" whimpered Isabel; and neither of the
women took note of Basil, who said, "Yes, it's probably the only thing
that preserved our lives."
The little tinge of discontent, which had colored their sentiment of
return faded now in the kindly light of home. Their holiday was over, to
be sure, but their bliss had but began; they had entered upon that long
life of holidays which is happy marriage. By the time dinner was ended
they were both enthusiastic at having got back, and taking their aunt
between them walked up and down the parlor with their arms round her
massive waist, and talked out the gladness of their souls.
Then Basil said he really must run down to the office that afternoon, and
he issued all aglow upon the street. He was so full of having been long
away and of having just returned, that he unconsciously tried to impart
his mood to Boston, and the dusty composure of the street and houses, as
he strode along, bewildered him. He longed for some familiar face to
welcome him, and in the horse-car into which he stepped he was charmed to
see an acquaintance. This was a man for whom ordinarily he cared nothing,
and whom he would perhaps rather have gone out upon the platform to avoid
than have spoken to; but now he plunged at him with effusion, and wrung
his hand, smiling from ear to ear.
The other remained coldly unaffected, after a first start of surprise at
his cordiality, and then reviled the dust and heat. "But I'm going to
take a little run down to Newport, to-morrow, for a week," he said. "By
the way, you look as if you needed a little change. Aren't you going
anywhere this summer?"
"So you see, my dear," observed Basil, when he had recounted the fact to
Isabel at tea, "our travels are incommunicably our own. We had best say
nothing about our little jaunt to other people, and they won't know we've
been gone. Even if we tried, we couldn't make our wedding-journey
theirs."
She gave him a great kiss of recompense and consolation. "Who wants it,"
she demanded, "to be Their Wedding Journey?"