Life had not used them ill in this time, and the fairish treatment they
had received was not wholly unmerited. The twelve years past had made
them older, as the years must in passing. Basil was now forty-two, and
his moustache was well sprinkled with gray. Isabel was thirty-nine, and
the parting of her hair had thinned and retreated; but she managed to
give it an effect of youthful abundance by combing it low down upon her
forehead, and roughing it there with a wet brush. By gaslight she was
still very pretty; she believed that she looked more interesting, and she
thought Basil's gray moustache distinguished. He had grown stouter; he
filled his double-breasted frock coat compactly, and from time to time he
had the buttons set forward; his hands were rounded up on the backs, and
he no longer wore his old number of gloves by two sizes; no amount of
powder or manipulation from the young lady in the shop would induce them
to go on. But this did not matter much now, for he seldom wore gloves at
all. He was glad that the fashion suffered him to spare in that
direction, for he was obliged to look somewhat carefully after the
out-goes. The insurance business was not what it had been, and though
Basil had comfortably established himself in it, he had not made money.
He sometimes thought that he might have done quite as well if he had gone
into literature; but it was now too late. They had not a very large
family: they had a boy of eleven, who took after his father, and a girl
of nine, who took after the boy; but with the American feeling that their
children must have the best of everything, they made it an expensive
family, and they spent nearly all Basil earned.
The narrowness of their means, as well as their household cares, had kept
them from taking many long journeys. They passed their winters in Boston,
and their summers on the South Shore, cheaper than the North Shore, and
near enough for Basil to go up and down every day for business; but they
promised themselves that some day they would revisit certain points on
their wedding journey, and perhaps somewhere find their lost second-youth
on the track. It was not that they cared to be young, but they wished the
children to see them as they used to be when they thought themselves very
old; and one lovely afternoon in June they started for Niagara.
It had been very hot for several days, but that morning the east wind
came in, and crisped the air till it seemed to rustle like tinsel, and
the sky was as sincerely and solidly blue as if it had been chromoed.
They felt that they were really looking up into the roof of the world,
when they glanced at it; but when an old gentleman hastily kissed a young
woman, and commended her to the conductor as being one who was going all
the way to San Francisco alone, and then risked his life by stepping off
the moving train, the vastness of the great American fact began to affect
Isabel disagreeably. "Isn't it too big, Basil?" she pleaded, peering
timidly out of the little municipal consciousness in which she had been
so long housed.--In that seclusion she had suffered certain original
tendencies to increase upon her; her nerves were more sensitive and
electrical; her apprehensions had multiplied quite beyond the ratio of
the dangers that beset her; and Basil had counted upon a tonic effect of
the change the journey would make in their daily lives. She looked
ruefully out of the window at the familiar suburbs whisking out of sight,
and the continental immensity that advanced devouringly upon her. But
they had the best section in the very centre of the sleeping-car,--she
drew what consolation she could from the fact,--and the children's
premature demand for lunch helped her to forget her anxieties; they began
to be hungry as soon as the train started. She found that she had not put
up sandwiches enough; and when she told Basil that he would have to get
out somewhere and buy some cold chicken, he asked her what in the world
had become of that whole ham she had had boiled. It seemed to him, he
said, that there was enough of it to subsist them to Niagara and back;
and he went on as some men do, while Somerville vanished, and even Tufts
College, which assails the Bostonian vision from every point of the
compass, was shut out by the curve at the foot of the Belmont hills.
They had chosen the Hoosac Tunnel route to Niagara, because, as Basil
said, their experience of travel had never yet included a very long
tunnel, and it would be a signal fact by which the children would always
remember the journey, if nothing else remarkable happened to impress it
upon them. Indeed, they were so much concerned in it that they began to
ask when they should come to this tunnel, even before they began to ask
for lunch; and the long time before they reached it was not perceptibly
shortened by Tom's quarter-hourly consultations of his father's watch.
It scarcely seemed to Basil and Isabel that their fellow-passengers were
so interesting as their fellow passengers used to be in their former days
of travel. They were soberly dressed, and were all of a middle-aged
sobriety of deportment, from which nothing salient offered itself for
conjecture or speculation; and there was little within the car to take
their minds from the brilliant young world that flashed and sang by them
outside. The belated spring had ripened, with its frequent rains, into
the perfection of early summer; the grass was thicker and the foliage
denser than they had ever seen it before; and when they had run out into
the hills beyond Fitchburg, they saw the laurel in bloom. It was
everywhere in the woods, lurking like drifts among the underbrush, and
overflowing the tops, and stealing down the hollows, of the railroad
embankments; a snow of blossom flushed with a mist of pink. Its shy, wild
beauty ceased whenever the train stopped, but the orioles made up for its
absence with their singing in the village trees about the stations; and
though Fitchburg and Ayer's Junction and Athol are not names that invoke
historical or romantic associations, the hearts of Basil and Isabel began
to stir with the joy of travel before they had passed these points. At
the first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken which had been commanded,
and he recognized in the keeper of the railroad restaurant their former
conductor, who had been warned by the spirits never to travel without a
flower of some sort carried between his lips, and who had preserved his
own life and the lives of his passengers for many years by this simple
device. His presence lent the sponge cake and rhubarb pie and baked beans
a supernatural interest, and reconciled Basil to the toughness of the
athletic bird which the mystical ex-partner of fate had sold him; he
justly reflected that if he had heard the story of the restaurateur's
superstition in a foreign land, or another time, he would have found in
it a certain poetry. It was this willingness to find poetry in things
around them that kept his life and Isabel's fresh, and they taught their
children the secret of their elixir. To be sure, it was only a genre
poetry, but it was such as has always inspired English art and song; and
now the whole family enjoyed, as if it had been a passage from Goldsmith
or Wordsworth, the flying sentiment of the railroad side. There was a
simple interior at one place,--a small shanty, showing through the open
door a cook stove surmounted by the evening coffee-pot, with a lazy cat
outstretched upon the floor in the middle distance, and an old woman
standing just outside the threshold to see the train go by,--which had an
unrivaled value till they came to a superannuated car on a siding in the
woods, in which the railroad workmen boarded--some were lounging on the
platform and at the open windows, while others were "washing up" for
supper, and the whole scene was full of holiday ease and sylvan comradery
that went to the hearts of the sympathetic spectators. Basil had lately
been reading aloud the delightful history of Rudder Grange, and the
children, who had made their secret vows never to live in anything but an
old canal-boat when they grew up, owned that there were fascinating
possibilities in a worn-out railroad car.
The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open on either hand, with smooth
stretches of the quiet river, and breadths of grassy intervale and
tableland; the elms grouped themselves like the trees of a park; here and
there the nearer hills broke away, and revealed long, deep, chasmed
hollows, full of golden light and delicious shadow. There were people
rowing on the water; and every pretty town had some touch of
picturesqueness or pastoral charm to offer: at Greenfield, there were
children playing in the new-mown hay along the railroad embankment; at
Shelburne Falls, there was a game of cricket going on (among the English
operatives of the cutlery works, as Basil boldly asserted). They looked
down from their car-window on a young lady swinging in a hammock, in her
door-yard, and on an old gentleman hoeing his potatoes; a group of girls
waved their handkerchiefs to the passing train, and a boy paused in
weeding a garden-bed,--and probably denied that he had paused, later. In
the mean time the golden haze along the mountain side changed to a clear,
pearly lustre, and the quiet evening possessed the quiet landscape. They
confessed to each other that it was all as sweet and beautiful as it used
to be; and in fact they had seen palaces, in other days, which did not
give them the pleasure they found in a woodcutter's shanty, losing itself
among the shadows in a solitude of the hills. The tunnel, after this, was
a gross and material sensation; but they joined the children in trying to
hold and keep it, and Basil let the boy time it by his watch. "Now," said
Tom, when five minutes were gone, "we are under the very centre of the
mountain." But the tunnel was like all accomplished facts, all hopes
fulfilled, valueless to the soul, and scarcely appreciable to the sense;
and the children emerged at North Adams with but a mean opinion of that
great feat of engineering. Basil drew a pretty moral from their
experience. "If you rode upon a comet you would be disappointed. Take my
advice, and never ride upon a comet. I shouldn't object to your riding on
a little meteor,--you wouldn't expect much of that; but I warn you
against comets; they are as bad as tunnels."
The children thought this moral was a joke at their expense, and as they
were a little sleepy they permitted themselves the luxury of feeling
trifled with. But they woke, refreshed and encouraged, from slumbers that
had evidently been unbroken, though they both protested that they had not
slept a wink the whole night, and gave themselves up to wonder at the
interminable levels of Western New York over which the train was running.
The longing to come to an edge, somewhere, that the New England traveler
experiences on this plain, was inarticulate with the children; but it
breathed in the sigh with which Isabel welcomed even the architectural
inequalities of a city into which they drew in the early morning. This
city showed to their weary eyes a noble stretch of river, from the waters
of which lofty piles of buildings rose abruptly; and Isabel, being left
to guess where they were, could think of no other place so picturesque as
Rochester.
"Yes," said her husband; "it is our own Enchanted City. I wonder if that
unstinted hospitality is still dispensed by the good head waiter at the
hotel where we stopped, to bridal parties who have passed the ordeal of
the haughty hotel clerk. I wonder what has become of that hotel clerk.
Has he fallen, through pride, to some lower level, or has he bowed his
arrogant spirit to the demands of advancing civilization, and realized
that he is the servant, and not the master, of the public? I think I've
noticed, since his time, a growing kindness in hotel clerks; or perhaps I
have become of a more impressive presence; they certainly unbend to me a
little more. I should like to go up to our hotel, and try myself on our
old enemy, if he is still there. I can fancy how his shirt front has
expanded in these twelve years past; he has grown a little bald, after
the fashion of middle-aged hotel clerks, but he parts his hair very much
on one side, and brushes it squarely across his forehead to hide his
loss; the forefinger that he touches that little snapbell with, when he
doesn't look at you, must be very pudgy now. Come, let us get out and
breakfast at Rochester; they will give us broiled whitefish; and we can
show the children where Sam Patch jumped over Genesee Falls, and--"
"No, no, Basil," cried his wife. "It would be sacrilege! All that is
sacred to those dear young days of ours; and I wouldn't think of trying
to repeat it. Our own ghosts would rise up in that dining-room to
reproach us for our intrusion! Oh, perhaps we have done a wicked thing in
coming this journey! We ought to have left the past alone; we shall only
mar our memories of all these beautiful places. Do you suppose Buffalo
can be as poetical as it was then? Buffalo! The name doesn't invite the
Muse very much. Perhaps it never was very poetical! Oh, Basil, dear, I'm
afraid we have only come to find out that we were mistaken about
everything! Let's leave Rochester alone, at any rate!"
I'm not troubled! We won't disturb our dream of Rochester; but I don't
despair of Buffalo. I'm sure that Buffalo will be all that our fancy ever
painted it. I believe in Buffalo."
"Well, well," murmured Isabel, "I hope you're right;" and she put some
things together for leaving their car at Buffalo, while they were still
two hours away.
When they reached a place where the land mated its level with the level
of the lake, they ran into a wilderness of railroad cars, in a world
where life seemed to be operated solely by locomotives and their helpless
minions. The bellowing and bleating trains were arriving in every
direction, not only along the ground floor of the plain, but stately
stretches of trestle-work, which curved and extended across the plain,
carried them to and fro overhead. The travelers owned that this railroad
suburb had its own impressiveness, and they said that the trestle-work
was as noble in effect as the lines of aqueduct that stalk across the
Roman Campagna. Perhaps this was because they had not seen the Campagna
or its aqueducts for a great while; but they were so glad to find
themselves in the spirit of their former journey again that they were
amiable to everything. When the children first caught sight of the lake's
delicious blue, and cried out that it was lovelier than the sea, they
felt quite a local pride in their preference. It was what Isabel had said
twelve years before, on first beholding the lake.
But they did not really see the lake till they had taken the train for
Niagara Falls, after breakfasting in the depot, where the children, used
to the severe native or the patronizing Irish ministrations of Boston
restaurants and hotels, reveled for the first time in the affectionate
devotion of a black waiter. There was already a ridiculous abundance and
variety on the table; but this waiter brought them strawberries and again
strawberries, and repeated plates of griddle cakes with maple syrup; and
he hung over the back of first one chair and then another with an
unselfish joy in the appetites of the breakfasters which gave Basil
renewed hopes of his race. "Such rapture in serving argues a largeness of
nature which will be recognized hereafter," he said, feeling about in his
waistcoat pocket for a quarter. It seemed a pity to render the waiter's
zeal retroactively interested, but in view of the fact that he possibly
expected the quarter, there was nothing else to do; and by a mysterious
stroke of gratitude the waiter delivered them into the hands of a friend,
who took another quarter from them for carrying their bags and wraps to
the train. This second retainer approved their admiration of the
aesthetic forms and colors of the depot colonnade; and being asked if
that were the depot whose roof had fallen in some years before, proudly
replied that it was.
"There were a great many killed, weren't there?" asked Basil, with
sympathetic satisfaction in the disaster. The porter seemed humiliated;
he confessed the mortifying truth that the loss of life was small, but he
recovered a just self-respect in adding, "If the roof had fallen in five
minutes sooner, it would have killed about three hundred people."
Basil had promised the children a sight of the Rapids before they reached
the Falls, and they held him rigidly accountable from the moment they
entered the train, and began to run out of the city between the river and
the canal. He attempted a diversion with the canal boats, and tried to
bring forward the subject of Rudder Grange in that connection. They said
that the canal boats were splendid, but they were looking for the Rapids
now; and they declined to be interested in a window in one of the boats,
which Basil said was just like the window that the Rudder Granger and the
boarder had popped Pomona out of when they took her for a burglar.
"You spoil those children, Basil," said his wife, as they clambered over
him, and clamored for the Rapids.
"At present I'm giving them an object-lesson in patience and self-denial;
they are experiencing the fact that they can't have the Rapids till they
get to them, and probably they'll be disappointed in them when they
arrive."
In fact, they valued the Rapids very little more than the Hoosac Tunnel,
when they came in sight of them, at last; and Basil had some question in
his own mind whether the Rapids had not dwindled since his former visit.
He did not breathe this doubt to Isabel, however, and she arrived at the
Falls with unabated expectations. They were going to spend only half a
day there; and they turned into the station, away from the phalanx of
omnibuses, when they dismounted from their train. They seemed, as before,
to be the only passengers who had arrived, and they found an abundant
choice of carriages waiting in the street, outside the station. The
Niagara hackman may once have been a predatory and very rampant animal,
but public opinion, long expressed through the public prints, has reduced
him to silence and meekness. Apparently, he may not so much as beckon
with his whip to the arriving wayfarer; it is certain that he cannot
cross the pavement to the station door; and Basil, inviting one of them
to negotiation, was himself required by the attendant policeman to step
out to the curbstone, and complete his transaction there. It was an
impressive illustration of the power of a free press, but upon the whole
Basil found the effect melancholy; it had the saddening quality which
inheres in every sort of perfection. The hackman, reduced to entire
order, appealed to his compassion, and he had not the heart to beat him
down from his moderate first demand, as perhaps he ought to have done.
They drove directly to the cataract, and found themselves in the pretty
grove beside the American Fall, and in the air whose dampness was as
familiar as if they had breathed it all their childhood. It was full now
of the fragrance of some sort of wild blossom; and again they had that
old, entrancing sense of the mingled awfulness and loveliness of the
great spectacle. This sylvan perfume, the gayety of the sunshine, the
mildness of the breeze that stirred the leaves overhead, and the
bird-singing that made itself heard amid the roar of the rapids and the
solemn incessant plunge of the cataract, moved their hearts, and made
them children with the boy and girl, who stood rapt for a moment and then
broke into joyful wonder. They could sympathize with the ardor with which
Tom longed to tempt fate at the brink of the river, and over the tops of
the parapets which have been built along the edge of the precipice, and
they equally entered into the terror with which Bella screamed at his
suicidal zeal. They joined her in restraining him; they reduced him to a
beggarly account of half a dozen stones, flung into the Rapids at not
less than ten paces from the brink; and they would not let him toss the
smallest pebble over the parapet, though he laughed to scorn the notion
that anybody should be hurt by them below.
It seemed to them that the triviality of man in the surroundings of the
Falls had increased with the lapse of time. There were more booths and
bazaars, and more colored feather fans with whole birds spitted in the
centres; and there was an offensive array of blue and green and yellow
glasses on the shore, through which you were expected to look at the
Falls gratis. They missed the simple dignity of the blanching Indian
maids, who used to squat about on the grass, with their laps full of
moccasins and pin-cushions. But, as of old, the photographer came out of
his saloon, and invited them to pose for a family group; representing
that the light and the spray were singularly propitious, and that
everything in nature invited them to be taken. Basil put him off gently,
for the sake of the time when he had refused to be photographed in a
bridal group, and took refuge from him in the long low building from
which you descend to the foot of the cataract.
The grove beside the American Fall has been inclosed, and named Prospect
Park, by a company which exacts half a dollar for admittance, and then
makes you free of all its wonders and conveniences, for which you once
had to pay severally. This is well enough; but formerly you could refuse
to go down the inclined tramway, and now you cannot, without feeling that
you have failed to get your money's worth. It was in this illogical
spirit of economy that Basil invited his family to the descent; but
Isabel shook her head. "No, you go with the children," she said, "and I
will stay, here, till you get back;" her agonized countenance added, "and
pray for you;" and Basil took his children on either side of him, and
rumbled down the terrible descent with much of the excitement that
attends travel in an open horse-car. When he stepped out of the car he
felt that increase of courage which comes to every man after safely
passing through danger. He resolved to brave the mists and
slippery-stones at the foot of the Fall; and he would have plunged at
once into this fresh peril, if he had not been prevented by the Prospect
Park Company. This ingenious association has built a large tunnel-like
shed quite to the water's edge, so that you cannot view the cataract as
you once could, at a reasonable remoteness, but must emerge from the
building into a storm of spray. The roof of the tunnel is painted with a
lively effect in party-colored stripes, and is lettered "The Shadow of
the Rock," so that you take it at first to be an appeal to your aesthetic
sense; but the real object of the company is not apparent till you put
your head out into the tempest, when you agree with the nearest
guide--and one is always very near--that you had better have an oil-skin
dress, as Basil did. He told the guide that he did not wish to go under
the Fall, and the guide confidentially admitted that there was no fun in
that, any way; and in the mean time he equipped him and his children for
their foray into the mist. When they issued forth, under their friend's
leadership, Basil felt that, with his children clinging to each hand, he
looked like some sort of animal with its young, and, though not unsocial
by nature, he was glad to be among strangers for the time. They climbed
hither and thither over the rocks, and lifted their streaming faces for
the views which the guide pointed out; and in a rift of the spray they
really caught one glorious glimpse of the whole sweep of the Fall. The
next instant the spray swirled back, and they were glad to turn for a
sight of the rainbow, lying in a circle on the rocks as quietly and
naturally as if that had been the habit of rainbows ever since the flood.
This was all there was to be done, and they streamed back into the
tunnel, where they disrobed in the face of a menacing placard, which
announced that the hire of a guide and a dress for going under the Fall
was one dollar.
"Will they make you pay a dollar for each of us, papa?" asked Tom,
fearfully.
"Oh, pooh, no!" returned Basil; "we haven't been under the Fall." But he
sought out the proprietor with a trembling heart. The proprietor was a
man of severely logical mind; he said that the charge would be three
dollars, for they had had the use of the dresses and the guide just the
same as if they had gone under the Fall; and he refused to recognize
anything misleading in the dressing-room placard. In fine, he left Basil
without a leg to stand upon. It was not so much the three dollars as the
sense of having been swindled that vexed him; and he instantly resolved
not to share his annoyance with Isabel. Why, indeed, should he put that
burden upon her? If she were none the wiser, she would be none the
poorer; and he ought to be willing to deny himself her sympathy for the
sake of sparing her needless pain.
He met her at the top of the inclined tramway with a face of exemplary
unconsciousness, and he listened with her to the tale their coachman
told, as they sat in a pretty arbor looking out on the Rapids, of a
Frenchman and his wife. This Frenchman had returned, one morning, from a
stroll on Goat Island, and reported with much apparent concern that his
wife had fallen into the water, and been carried over the Fall. It was so
natural for a man to grieve for the loss of his wife, under the peculiar
circumstances, that every one condoled with the widower; but when a few
days later, her body was found, and the distracted husband refused to
come back from New York to her funeral, there was a general regret that
he had not been arrested. A flash of conviction illumed the whole fact to
Basil's guilty consciousness: this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar
for the use of an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall, and had been
ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife, till, in a moment of remorse
and madness, he shouted the fact into her ear, and then Basil looked at
the mother of his children, and registered a vow that if he got away from
Niagara without being forced to a similar excess he would confess his
guilt to Isabel at the very first act of spendthrift profusion she
committed. The guide pointed out the rock in the Rapids to which Avery
had clung for twenty-four hours before he was carried over the Falls, and
to the morbid fancy of the deceitful husband Isabel's bonnet ribbons
seemed to flutter from the pointed reef. He could endure the pretty arbor
no longer. "Come, children!" he cried, with a wild, unnatural gayety;
"let us go to Goat Island, and see the Bridge to the Three Sisters, that
your mother was afraid to walk back on after she had crossed it."
"For shame, Basil!" retorted Isabel. "You know it was you who were afraid
of that bridge."
The children, who knew the story by heart, laughed with their father at
the monstrous pretension; and his simulated hilarity only increased upon
paying a toll of two dollars at the Goat Island bridge.
"What extortion!" cried Isabel, with an indignation that secretly
unnerved him. He trembled upon the verge of confession; but he had
finally the moral force to resist. He suffered her to compute the cost of
their stay at Niagara without allowing those three dollars to enter into
her calculation; he even began to think what justificative extravagance
he could tempt her to. He suggested the purchase of local bric-a-brac; he
asked her if she would not like to dine at the International, for old
times' sake. But she answered, with disheartening virtue, that they must
not think of such a thing, after what they had spent already. Nothing,
perhaps, marked the confirmed husband in Basil more than these hidden
fears and reluctances.
In the mean time Isabel ignorantly abandoned herself to the charm of the
place, which she found unimpaired, in spite of the reported ravages of
improvement about Niagara. Goat Island was still the sylvan solitude of
twelve years ago, haunted by even fewer nymphs and dryads than of old.
The air was full of the perfume that scented it at Prospect Park; the
leaves showered them with shade and sun, as they drove along. "If it were
not for the children here," she said, "I should think that our first
drive on Goat Island had never ended."
She sighed a little, and Basil leaned forward and took her hand in his.
"It never has ended; it's the same drive; only we are younger now, and
enjoy it more." It always touched him when Isabel was sentimental about
the past, for the years had tended to make her rather more seriously
maternal towards him than towards the other children; and he recognized
that these fond reminiscences were the expression of the girlhood still
lurking deep within her heart.
She shook her head. "No, but I'm willing the children should be young in
our place. It's only fair they should have their turn."
She remained in the carriage, while Basil visited the various points of
view on Luna Island with the boy and girl. A boy is probably of
considerable interest to himself, and a man looks back at his own boyhood
with some pathos. But in his actuality a boy has very little to commend
him to the toleration of other human beings. Tom was very well, as boys
go; but now his contribution to the common enjoyment was to venture as
near as possible to all perilous edges; to throw stones into the water,
and to make as if to throw them over precipices on the people below; to
pepper his father with questions, and to collect cumbrous mementos of the
vegetable and mineral kingdoms. He kept the carriage waiting a good five
minutes, while he could cut his initials on a band-rail. "You can come
back and see 'em on your bridal tower," said the driver. Isabel gave a
little start, as if she had almost thought of something she was trying to
think of.
They occasionally met ladies driving, and sometimes they encountered a
couple making a tour of the island on foot. But none of these people were
young, and Basil reported that the Three Sisters were inhabited only by
persons of like maturity; even a group of people who were eating lunch to
the music of the shouting Rapids, on the outer edge of the last Sister,
were no younger, apparently.
Isabel did not get out of the carriage to verify his report; she
preferred to refute his story of her former panic on those islands by
remaining serenely seated while he visited them. She thus lost a superb
novelty which nature has lately added to the wonders of this Fall, in
that place at the edge of the great Horse Shoe where the rock has fallen
and left a peculiarly shaped chasm: through this the spray leaps up from
below, and flashes a hundred feet into the air, in rocket-like jets and
points, and then breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotechnic curves of a
perpetual Fourth of July. Basil said something like this in celebrating
the display, with the purpose of rendering her loss more poignant; but
she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would rather keep her Niagara
unchanged; and she declared that, as she understood him, there must be
something rather cheap and conscious in the new feature. She approved,
however, of the change that had removed that foolish little Terrapin
Tower from the brink on which it stood, and she confessed that she could
have enjoyed a little variety in the stories the driver told them of the
Indian burial-ground on the island: they were exactly the stories she and
Basil had heard twelve years before, and the ill-starred goats, from
which the island took its name, perished once more in his narrative.
Under the influence of his romances our travelers began to find the whole
scene hackneyed; and they were glad to part from him a little sooner than
they had bargained to do. They strolled about the anomalous village on
foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of travel and the enormity of
the local preparation. Surely the hotels are nowhere else in the world so
large! Could there ever have been visitors enough at Niagara to fill
them? They were built so big for some good reason, no doubt; but it is no
more apparent than why all these magnificent equipages are waiting about
the empty streets for the people who never come to hire them.
"It seems to me that I don't see so many strangers here as I used," Basil
had suggested to their driver.
"Oh, they haven't commenced coming yet," he replied, with hardy
cheerfulness, and pretended that they were plenty enough in July and
August.
They went to dine at the modest restaurant of a colored man, who
advertised a table d'hote dinner on a board at his door; and they put
their misgivings to him, which seemed to grieve him, and he contended
that Niagara was as prosperous and as much resorted to as ever. In fact,
they observed that their regret for the supposed decline of the Falls as
a summer resort was nowhere popular in the village, and they desisted in
their offers of sympathy, after their rebuff from the restaurateur.
Basil got his family away to the station after dinner, and left them
there, while he walked down the village street, for a closer inspection
of the hotels. At the door of the largest a pair of children sported in
the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk's island; looking
into the hotel, he saw a few porters and call-boys seated in statuesque
repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity
behind the register; some deserted ladies flitted through the door of the
parlor at the side. He recalled the evening of his former visit, when he
and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed, in the
retrospect, a scene of the wildest gayety. He turned for consolation into
the barber's shop, where he found himself the only customer, and no busy
sound of "Next" greeted his ear. But the barber, like all the rest, said
that Niagara was not unusually empty; and he came out feeling bewildered
and defrauded. Surely the agent of the boats which descend the Rapids of
the St. Lawrence must be frank, if Basil went to him and pretended that
he was going to buy a ticket. But a glance at the agent's sign showed
Basil that the agent, with his brave jollity of manner and his impressive
"Good-morning," had passed away from the deceits of travel, and that he
was now inherited by his widow, who in turn was absent, and temporarily
represented by their son. The boy, in supplying Basil with an
advertisement of the line, made a specious show of haste, as if there
were a long queue of tourists waiting behind him to be served with
tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed, a spectral line there, but Basil was
the only tourist present in the flesh, and he shivered in his isolation,
and fled with the advertisement in his hand. Isabel met him at the door
of the station with a frightened face.
"Basil," she cried, "I have found out what the trouble is! Where are the
brides?"
He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through
his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at
the news-man's booth the moccasins and the birchbark bric-a-brac of the
Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from
Devonshire.
"My dear," he said, "there are no brides; everybody was married twelve
years ago, and the brides are middle-aged mothers of families now, and
don't come to Niagara if they are wise."
"Yes," she desolately asserted, "that is so! Something has been hanging
over me ever since we came, and suddenly I realized that it was the
absence of the brides. But--but--down at the hotels--Didn't you see
anything bridal there? When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of
minstrelsy? Was there--"
She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into the nearest seat.
"Perhaps," said Basil, dreamily regarding the contest of Tom and Bella
for a newly-purchased paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecasting
in his remoter mind the probable consequences, "there were both brides
and minstrelsy at the hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the
ears to hear. In this world, my dear, we are always of our own time, and
we live amid contemporary things. I daresay there were middle-aged people
at Niagara when we were here before, but we did not meet them, nor they
us. I daresay that the place is now swarming with bridal couples, and it
is because they are invisible and inaudible to us that it seems such a
howling wilderness. But the hotel clerks and the restaurateurs and the
hackmen know them, and that is the reason why they receive with surprise
and even offense our sympathy for their loneliness. Do you suppose,
Isabel, that if you were to lay your head on my shoulder, in a bridal
manner, it would do anything to bring us en rapport with that lost bridal
world again?"
Isabel caught away her hand. "Basil," she cried, "it would be disgusting!
I wouldn't do it for the world--not even for that world. I saw one
middle-aged couple on Goat Island, while you were down at the Cave of the
Winds, or somewhere, with the children. They were sitting on some steps,
he a step below her, and he seemed to want to put his head on her knee;
but I gazed at him sternly, and he didn't dare. We should look like them,
if we yielded to any outburst of affection. Don't you think we should
look like them?"
"I don't know," said Basil. "You are certainly a little wrinkled, my
dear."
"And you are very fat, Basil."
They glanced at each other with a flash of resentment, and then they both
laughed. "We couldn't look young if we quarreled a week," he said. "We
had better content ourselves with feeling young, as I hope we shall do if
we live to be ninety. It will be the loss of others if they don't see our
bloom upon us. Shall I get you a paper of cherries, Isabel? The children
seem to be enjoying them."
Isabel sprang upon her offspring with a cry of despair. "Oh, what shall I
do? Now we shall not have a wink of sleep with them to-night. Where is
that nux?" She hunted for the medicine in her bag, and the children
submitted; for they had eaten all the cherries, and they took their
medicine without a murmur. "I wonder at your letting them eat the sour
things, Basil," said their mother, when the children had run off to the
newsstand again.
"I wonder that you left me to see what they were doing," promptly
retorted their father.
"It was your nonsense about the brides," said Isabel; "and I think this
has been a lesson to us. Don't let them get anything else to eat,
dearest."
"They are safe; they have no more money. They are frugally confining
themselves to the admiration of the Japanese bows and arrows yonder. Why
have our Indians taken to making Japanese bows and arrows?"
Isabel despised the small pleasantry. "Then you saw nobody at the hotel?"
she asked.
"Not even the Ellisons," said Basil.
"Ah, yes," said Isabel; "that was where we met them. How long ago it
seems! And poor little Kitty! I wonder what has become of them? But I'm
glad they're not here. That's what makes you realize your age: meeting
the same people in the same place a great while after, and seeing how
old--they've grown. I don't think I could bear to see Kitty Ellison
again. I'm glad she didn't come to visit us in Boston, though, after
what happened, she couldn't, poor thing! I wonder if she's ever
regretted her breaking with him in the way she did. It's a very painful
thing to think of,--such an inconclusive conclusion; it always seemed as
if they ought to meet again, somewhere."
"I don't believe she ever wished it."
"A man can't tell what a woman wishes."
"Well, neither can a woman," returned Basil, lightly.
His wife remained serious. "It was a very fine point,--a very little
thing to reject a man for. I felt that when I first read her letter about
it."