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_A Chance Acquaintance._
BY W. D. HOWELLS.
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY
Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.
1873.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge.
A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE.
I.
UP THE SAGUENAY.
On the forward promenade of the Saguenay boat which had been advertised
to leave Quebec at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, Miss Kitty Ellison
sat tranquilly expectant of the joys which its departure should bring,
and tolerantly patient of its delay; for if all the Saguenay had not
been in promise, she would have thought it the greatest happiness just
to have that prospect of the St. Lawrence and Quebec. The sun shone with
a warm yellow light on the Upper Town, with its girdle of gray wall, and
on the red flag that drowsed above the citadel, and was a friendly
lustre on the tinned roofs of the Lower Town; while away off to the
south and east and west wandered the purple hills and the farmlit plains
in such dewy shadow and effulgence as would have been enough to make the
heaviest heart glad. Near at hand the river was busy with every kind of
craft, and in the distance was mysterious with silvery vapors; little
breaths of haze, like an ethereal colorless flame, exhaled from its
surface, and it all glowed with a lovely inner radiance. In the middle
distance a black ship was heaving anchor and setting sail, and the voice
of the seamen came soft and sad and yet wildly hopeful to the dreamy ear
of the young girl, whose soul at once went round the world before the
ship, and then made haste back again to the promenade of the Saguenay
boat. She sat leaning forward a little with her hands fallen into her
lap, letting her unmastered thoughts play as they would in memories and
hopes around the consciousness that she was the happiest girl in the
world, and blest beyond desire or desert. To have left home as she had
done, equipped for a single day at Niagara, and then to have come
adventurously on, by grace of her cousin's wardrobe, as it were, to
Montreal and Quebec; to be now going up the Saguenay, and finally to be
destined to return home by way of Boston and New York;--this was more
than any one human being had a right to; and, as she had written home to
the girls, she felt that her privileges ought to be divided up among all
the people of Eriecreek. She was very grateful to Colonel Ellison and
Fanny for affording her these advantages; but they being now out of
sight in pursuit of state-rooms, she was not thinking of them in
relation to her pleasure in the morning scene, but was rather regretting
the absence of a lady with whom they had travelled from Niagara, and to
whom she imagined she would that moment like to say something in praise
of the prospect. This lady was a Mrs. Basil March of Boston; and though
it was her wedding journey and her husband's presence ought to have
absorbed her, she and Miss Kitty had sworn a sisterhood, and were
pledged to see each other before long at Mrs. March's home in Boston. In
her absence, now, Kitty thought what a very charming person she was, and
wondered if all Boston people were really like her, so easy and friendly
and hearty. In her letter she had told the girls to tell her Uncle Jack
that he had not rated Boston people a bit too high, if she were to judge
from Mr. and Mrs. March, and that she was sure they would help her as
far as they could to carry out his instructions when she got to Boston.
These instructions were such as might seem preposterous if no more
particular statement in regard to her Uncle Jack were made, but will be
imaginable enough, I hope, when he is a little described. The Ellisons
were a West Virginia family who had wandered up into a corner of
Northwestern New York, because Dr. Ellison (unceremoniously known to
Kitty as Uncle Jack) was too much an abolitionist to live in a
slaveholding State with safety to himself or comfort to his neighbors.
Here his family of three boys and two girls had grown up, and hither in
time had come Kitty, the only child of his youngest brother, who had
gone first to Illinois and thence, from the pretty constant adversity of
a country editor, to Kansas, where he joined the Free State party and
fell in one of the border feuds. Her mother had died soon after, find
Dr. Ellison's heart bowed itself tenderly over the orphan. She was
something not only dear, but sacred to him as the child of a martyr to
the highest cause on earth; and the love of the whole family encompassed
her. One of the boys had brought her from Kansas when she was yet very
little, and she had grown up among them as their youngest sister; but
the doctor, from a tender scruple against seeming to usurp the place of
his brother in her childish thought, would not let her call him father,
and in obedience to the rule which she soon began to give their love,
they all turned and called him Uncle Jack with her. Yet the Ellisons,
though they loved their little cousin, did not spoil her,--neither the
doctor, nor his great grown-up sons whom she knew as the boys, nor his
daughters whom she called the girls, though they were wellnigh women
when she came to them. She was her uncle's pet and most intimate friend,
riding with him on his professional visits till she became as familiar a
feature of his equipage as the doctor's horse itself; and he educated
her in those extreme ideas, tempered by humor, which formed the
character of himself and his family. They loved Kitty, and played with
her, and laughed at her when she needed ridiculing; they made a jest of
their father on the one subject on which he never jested, and even the
antislavery cause had its droll points turned to the light. They had
seen danger and trouble enough at different times in its service, but no
enemy ever got more amusement out of it. Their house was a principal
_entrepôt_ of the underground railroad, and they were always helping
anxious travellers over the line; but the boys seldom came back from an
excursion to Canada without adventures to keep the family laughing for a
week; and they made it a serious business to study the comic points of
their beneficiaries, who severally lived in the family records by some
grotesque mental or physical trait. They had an irreverent name among
themselves for each of the humorless abolition lecturers who unfailingly
abode with them on their rounds; and these brethren and sisters, as they
called them, paid with whatever was laughable in them for the
substantial favors they received.
Miss Kitty, having the same natural bent, began even as a child to share
in these harmless reprisals, and to look at life with the same
wholesomely fantastic vision. But she remembered one abolition visitor
of whom none of them made fun, but treated with a serious distinction
and regard,--an old man with a high, narrow forehead, and thereon a
thick upright growth of gray hair; who looked at her from under bushy
brows with eyes as of blue flame, and took her on his knee one night and
sang to her "Blow ye the trumpet, blow!" He and her uncle had been
talking of some indefinite, far-off place that they called Boston, in
terms that commended it to her childish apprehension as very little less
holy than Jerusalem, and as the home of all the good and great people
outside of Palestine.
In fact, Boston had always been Dr. Ellison's foible. In the beginning
of the great antislavery agitation, he had exchanged letters
(corresponded, he used to say) with John Quincy Adams on the subject of
Lovejoy's murder; and he had met several Boston men at the Free Soil
Convention in Buffalo in 1848. "A little formal perhaps, a little
reserved," he would say, "but excellent men; polished, and certainly of
sterling principle": which would make his boys and girls laugh, as they
grew older, and sometimes provoke them to highly colored dramatizations
of the formality of these Bostonians in meeting their father. The years
passed and the boys went West, and when the war came, they took service
in Iowa and Wisconsin regiments. By and by the President's Proclamation
of freedom to the slaves reached Eriecreek while Dick and Bob happened
both to be home on leave. After they had allowed their sire his rapture,
"Well, this is a great blow for father," said Bob; "what are you going
to do now, father? Fugitive slavery and all its charms blotted out
forever, at one fell swoop. Pretty rough on you, isn't it? No more men
and brothers, no more soulless oligarchy. Dull lookout, father."
"O no," insinuated one of the girls, "there's Boston."
"Why, yes," cried Dick, "to be sure there is. The President hasn't
abolished Boston. Live for Boston."
And the doctor did live for an ideal Boston, thereafter, so far at least
as concerned a never-relinquished, never-fulfilled purpose of some day
making a journey to Boston. But in the mean time there were other
things; and at present, since the Proclamation had given him a country
worth living in, he was ready to honor her by studying her antiquities.
In his youth, before his mind had been turned so strenuously to the
consideration of slavery, he had a pretty taste for the mystery of the
Mound Builders, and each of his boys now returned to camp with
instructions to note any phenomena that would throw light upon this
interesting subject. They would have abundant leisure for research,
since the Proclamation, Dr. Ellison insisted, practically ended the war.
The Mound Builders were only a starting-point for the doctor. He
advanced from them to historical times in due course, and it happened
that when Colonel Ellison and his wife stopped off at Eriecreek on their
way East, in 1870, they found him deep in the history of the Old French
War. As yet the colonel had not intended to take the Canadian route
eastward, and he escaped without the charges which he must otherwise
have received to look up the points of interest at Montreal and Quebec
connected with that ancient struggle. He and his wife carried Kitty with
them to see Niagara (which she had never seen because it was so near);
but no sooner had Dr. Ellison got the despatch announcing that they
would take Kitty on with them down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and bring
her home by way of Boston, than he sat down and wrote her a letter of
the most comprehensive character. As far as concerned Canada his mind
was purely historical; but when it came to Boston it was strangely
re-abolitionized, and amidst an ardor for the antiquities of the place,
his old love for its humanitarian pre-eminence blazed up. He would have
her visit Faneuil Hall because of its Revolutionary memories, but not
less because Wendell Phillips had there made his first antislavery
speech. She was to see the collections of the Massachusetts Historical
Society, and if possible certain points of ancient colonial interest
which he named; but at any rate she was somehow to catch sight of the
author of the "Biglow Papers," of Senator Sumner, of Mr. Whittier, of
Dr. Howe, of Colonel Higginson, and of Mr. Garrison. These people were
all Bostonians to the idealizing remoteness of Dr. Ellison, and he could
not well conceive of them asunder. He perhaps imagined that Kitty was
more likely to see them together than separately; and perhaps indeed
they were less actual persons, to his admiration, than so many figures
of a grand historical composition. Finally, "I want you to remember, my
dear child," he wrote, "that in Boston you are not only in the
birthplace of American liberty, but the yet holier scene of its
resurrection. There everything that is noble and grand and liberal and
enlightened in the national life has originated, and I cannot doubt that
you will find the character of its people marked by every attribute of a
magnanimous democracy. If I could envy you anything, my dear girl, I
should envy you this privilege of seeing a city where man is valued
simply and solely for what he is in himself, and where color, wealth,
family, occupation, and other vulgar and meretricious distinctions are
wholly lost sight of in the consideration of individual excellence."
Kitty got her uncle's letter the night before starting up the Saguenay,
and quite too late for compliance with his directions concerning Quebec;
but she resolved that as to Boston his wishes should be fulfilled to the
utmost limit of possibility. She knew that nice Mr. March must be
acquainted with some of those very people. Kitty had her uncle's letter
in her pocket, and she was just going to take it out and read it again,
when something else attracted her notice.
The boat had been advertised to leave at seven o'clock, and it was now
half past. A party of English people were pacing somewhat impatiently up
and down before Kitty, for it had been made known among the passengers
(by that subtle process through which matters of public interest
transpire in such places) that breakfast would not be served till the
boat started, and these English people had the appetites which go before
the admirable digestions of their nation. But they had also the good
temper which does not so certainly accompany the insular good appetite.
The man in his dashing Glengarry cap and his somewhat shabby gray suit
took on one arm the plain, jolly woman who seemed to be his wife, and on
the other, the amiable, handsome young girl who looked enough like him
to be his sister, and strode rapidly back and forth, saying that they
must get up an appetite for breakfast. This made the women laugh, and so
he said it again, which made them laugh so much that the elder lost her
balance, and in regaining it twisted off her high shoe-heel, which she
briskly tossed into the river. But she sat down after that, and the
three were presently intent upon the Liverpool steamer which was just
arrived and was now gliding up to her dock, with her population of
passengers thronging her quarter-deck.
"She's from England!" said the husband, expressively.
"Only fancy!" answered the wife. "Give me the glass, Jenny." Then, after
a long survey of the steamer, she added, "Fancy her being from England!"
They all looked and said nothing for two or three minutes, when the
wife's mind turned to the delay of their own boat and of breakfast.
"This thing," she said, with that air of uttering a novelty which the
English cast about their commonplaces,--"this this thing doesn't start
at seven, you know."
"No," replied the younger woman, "she waits for the Montreal boat."
"Fancy her being from England!" said the other, whose eyes and thoughts
had both wandered back to the Liverpool steamer.
"There's the Montreal boat now, comin' round the point," cried the
husband. "Don't you see the steam?" He pointed with his glass, and then
studied the white cloud in the distance. "No, by Jove! it's a saw-mill
on the shore."
"O Harry!" sighed both the women, reproachfully.
"Why, deuce take it, you know," he retorted, "I didn't turn it into a
saw-mill. It's been a saw-mill all along, I fancy."
Half an hour later, when the Montreal boat came in sight, the women
would have her a saw-mill till she stood in full view in mid-channel.
Their own vessel paddled out into the stream as she drew near, and the
two bumped and rubbed together till a gangway plank could he passed from
one to the other. A very well dressed young man stood ready to get upon
the Saguenay boat, with a porter beside him bearing his substantial
valise. No one else apparently was coming aboard.
The English people looked upon him for an instant with wrathful eyes, as
they hung over the rail of the promenade. "Upon my word," said the elder
of the women, "have we been waitin' all this time for one man?"
"Hush, Edith," answered the younger, "it's an Englishman." And they all
three mutely recognized the right of the Englishman to stop, not only
the boat, but the whole solar system, if his ticket entitled him to a
passage on any particular planet, while Mr. Miles Arbuton of Boston,
Massachusetts, passed at his ease from one vessel to the other. He had
often been mistaken for an Englishman, and the error of those
spectators, if he had known it, would not have surprised him. Perhaps it
might have softened his judgment of them as he sat facing them at
breakfast; but he did not know it, and he thought them three very common
English people with something professional, as of public singing or
acting, about them. The young girl wore, instead of a travelling-suit, a
vivid light blue dress; and over her sky-blue eyes and fresh cheeks a
glory of corn-colored hair lay in great braids and masses. It was
magnificent, but it wanted distance; so near, it was almost harsh. Mr.
Arbuton's eyes fell from the face to the vivid blue dress, which was not
quite fresh and not quite new, and a glimmer of cold dismissal came into
them, as he gave himself entirely to the slender merits of the steamboat
breakfast.
He was himself, meantime, an object of interest to a young lady who sat
next to the English party, and who glanced at him from time to time, out
of tender gray eyes, with a furtive play of feeling upon a sensitive
face. To her he was that divine possibility which every young man is to
every young maiden; and, besides, he was invested with a halo of romance
as the gentleman with the blond mustache, whom she had seen at Niagara
the week before, on the Goat Island Bridge. To the pretty matron at her
side, he was exceedingly handsome, as a young man may frankly be to a
young matron, but not otherwise comparable to her husband, the
full-personed good-humored looking gentleman who had just added sausage
to the ham and eggs on his plate. He was handsome, too, but his full
beard was reddish, whereas Mr. Arbuton's mustache was flaxen; and his
dress was not worn with that scrupulosity with which the Bostonian bore
his clothes; there was a touch of slovenliness in him that scarcely
consorted with the alert, ex-military air of some of his movements.
"Good-looking young John Bull," he thought concerning Mr. Arbuton, and
then thought no more about him, being no more self-judged before the
supposed Englishman than he would have been before so much Frenchman or
Spaniard. Mr. Arbuton, on the other hand, if he had met an Englishman so
well dressed as himself, must at once have arraigned himself, and had
himself tacitly tried for his personal and national difference. He
looked in his turn at these people, and thought he should have nothing
to do with them, in spite of the long-lashed gray eyes.
It was not that they had made the faintest advance towards acquaintance,
or that the choice of knowing them or not was with Mr. Arbuton; but he
had the habit of thus protecting himself from the chances of life, and a
conscience against encouraging people whom he might have to drop for
reasons of society. This was sometimes a sacrifice, for he was not past
the age when people take a lively interest in most other human beings.
When breakfast was over, and he had made the tour of the boat, and seen
all his fellow-passengers, he perceived that he could have little in
common with any of them, and that probably the journey would require the
full exercise of that tolerant spirit in which he had undertaken a
branch of summer travel in his native land.
The rush of air against the steamer was very raw and chill, and the
forward promenade was left almost entirely to the English professional
people, who walked rapidly up and down, with jokes and laughter of their
kind, while the wind blew the girl's hair in loose gold about her fresh
face, and twisted her blue drapery tight about her comely shape. When
they got out of breath they sat down beside a large American lady, with
a great deal of gold filling in her front teeth, and presently rose
again and ran races to and from the bow. Mr. Arbuton turned away in
displeasure. At the stern he found a much larger company, most of whom
had furnished themselves with novels and magazines from the stock on
board and were drowsing over them. One gentleman was reading aloud to
three ladies the newspaper account of a dreadful shipwreck; other ladies
and gentlemen were coming and going forever from their state-rooms, as
the wont of some is; others yet sat with closed eyes, as if having come
to see the Saguenay they were resolved to see nothing of the St.
Lawrence on the way thither, but would keep their vision sacred to the
wonders of the former river.
Yet the St. Lawrence was worthy to be seen, as even Mr. Arbuton owned,
whose way was to slight American scenery, in distinction from his
countrymen who boast it the finest in the world. As you leave Quebec,
with its mural-crowned and castled rock, and drop down the stately
river, presently the snowy fall of Montmorenci, far back in its purple
hollow, leaps perpetual avalanche into the abyss, and then you are
abreast of the beautiful Isle of Orleans, whose low shores, with their
expanses of farmland, and their groves of pine and oak, are still as
lovely as when the wild grape festooned the primitive forests and won
from the easy rapture of old Cartier the name of Isle of Bacchus. For
two hours farther down the river either shore is bright and populous
with the continuous villages of the _habitans_, each clustering about
its slim-spired church, in its shallow vale by the water's edge, or
lifted in more eminent picturesqueness upon some gentle height. The
banks, nowhere lofty or abrupt, are such as in a southern land some
majestic river might flow between, wide, slumbrous, open to all the
heaven and the long day till the very set of sun. But no starry palm
glasses its crest in the clear cold green from these low brinks; the
pale birch, slender and delicately fair, mirrors here the wintry
whiteness of its boughs; and this is the sad great river of the awful
North.
Gradually, as the day wore on, the hills which had shrunk almost out of
sight on one hand, and on the other were dark purple in the distance,
drew near the shore, and at one point on the northern side rose almost
from the water's edge. The river expanded into a lake before them, and
in their lap some cottages, and half-way up the hillside, among the
stunted pines, a much-galleried hotel, proclaimed a resort of fashion in
the heart of what seemed otherwise a wilderness. Indian huts sheathed in
birch-bark nestled at the foot of the rocks, which were rich in orange
and scarlet stains; out of the tops of the huts curled the blue smoke,
and at the door of one stood a squaw in a flame-red petticoat; others in
bright shawls squatted about on the rocks, each with a circle of dogs
and papooses. But all this warmth of color only served, like a winter
sunset, to heighten the chilly and desolate sentiment of the scene. The
light dresses of the ladies on the veranda struck cold upon the eye; in
the faces of the sojourners who lounged idly to the steamer's
landing-place, the passenger could fancy a sad resolution to repress
their tears when the boat should go away and leave them. She put off two
or three old peasant-women who were greeted by other such on the pier,
as if returned from a long journey; and then the crew discharged the
vessel of a prodigious freight of onions which formed the sole luggage
these old women had brought from Quebec. Bale after bale of the pungent
bulbs were borne ashore in the careful arms of the deck-hands, and
counted by the owners; at last order was given to draw in the plank,
when a passionate cry burst from one of the old women, who extended both
hands with an imploring gesture towards the boat. A bale of onions had
been left aboard; a deck-hand seized it and ran quickly ashore with it,
and then back again, followed by the benedictions of the tranquillized
and comforted beldam. The gay sojourners at Murray Bay controlled their
grief, and as Mr. Arbuton turned from them, the boat, pushing out, left
them to their fashionable desolation. She struck across to the southern
shore, to land passengers for Cacouna, a watering-place greater than
Murray Bay. The tide, which rises fifteen feet at Quebec, is the
impulse, not the savor of the sea; but at Cacouna the water is salt, and
the sea-bathing lacks nothing but the surf; and hither resort in great
numbers the Canadians who fly their cities during the fierce, brief
fever of the northern summer. The watering-place village and hotel is
not in sight from the landing, but, as at Murray Bay, the sojourners
thronged the pier, as if the arrival of the steamboat were the great
event of their day. That afternoon they were in unusual force, having
come on foot and by omnibus and calash; and presently there passed down
through their ranks a strange procession with a band of music leading
the way to the steamer.
"It's an Indian wedding," Mr. Arbuton heard one of the boat's officers
saying to the gentleman with the ex-military air, who stood next him
beside the rail; and now, the band having drawn aside, he saw the bride
and groom,--the latter a common, stolid-faced savage, and the former
pretty and almost white, with a certain modesty and sweetness of mien.
Before them went a young American, with a jaunty Scotch cap and a visage
of supernatural gravity, as the master of ceremonies which he had
probably planned; arm in arm with him walked a portly chieftain in black
broadcloth, preposterously adorned on the breast with broad flat disks
of silver in two rows. Behind the bridal couple came the whole village
in pairs, men and women, and children of all ages, even to brown babies
in arms, gay in dress and indescribably serious in demeanor. They were
mated in some sort according to years and size; and the last couple were
young fellows paired in an equal tipsiness. These reeled and wavered
along the pier; and when the other wedding guests crowned the day's
festivity by going aboard the steamer, they followed dizzily down the
gangway. Midway they lurched heavily; the spectators gave a cry; but
they had happily lurched in opposite directions; their grip upon each
other's arms held, and a forward stagger launched them victoriously
aboard in a heap. They had scarcely disappeared from sight, when, having
as it were instantly satisfied their curiosity concerning the boat, the
other guests began to go ashore in due order. Mr. Arbuton waited in a
slight anxiety to see whether the tipsy couple could repeat their
maneuver successfully on an upward incline; and they had just appeared
on the gangway, when he felt a hand passed carelessly and as if
unconsciously through his arm, and at the same moment a voice said,
"Those are a pair of disappointed lovers, I suppose."
He looked round and perceived the young lady of the party he had made up
his mind to have nothing to do with resting one hand on the rail, and
sustaining herself with the other passed through his arm, while she was
altogether intent upon the scene below. The ex-military gentleman, the
head of the party, and apparently her kinsman, had stepped aside without
her knowing, and she had unwittingly taken Mr. Arbuton's arm. So much
was clear to him, but what he was to do was not so plain. It did not
seem quite his place to tell her of her mistake, and yet it seemed a
piece of unfairness not to do so. To leave the matter alone, however,
was the simplest, safest, and pleasantest; for the pressure of the
pretty figure lightly thrown upon his arm had something agreeably
confiding and appealing in it. So he waited till the young lady, turning
to him for some response, discovered her error, and disengaged herself
with a face of mingled horror and amusement. Even then he had no
inspiration. To speak of the mistake in tones of compliment would have
been grossly out of place; an explanation was needless; and to her
murmured excuses, he could only bow silently. She flitted into the
cabin, and he walked away, leaving the Indians to stagger ashore as they
might. His arm seemed still to sustain that elastic weight, and a voice
haunted his ear with the words, "A pair of disappointed lovers, I
suppose"; and still more awkward and stupid he felt his own part in the
affair to be; though at the same time he was not without some obscure
resentment of the young girl's mistake as an intrusion upon him.
It was late twilight when the boat reached Tadoussac, and ran into a
sheltered cove under the shadow of uplands on which a quaint village
perched and dispersed itself on a country road in summer cottages; above
these in turn rose loftier heights of barren sand or rock, with here and
there a rank of sickly pines dying along their sterility. It had been
harsh and cold all day when the boat moved, for it was running full in
the face of the northeast; the river had widened almost to a sea,
growing more and more desolate, with a few lonely islands breaking its
expanse, and the shores sinking lower and lower till, near Tadoussac,
they rose a little in flat-topped bluffs thickly overgrown with stunted
evergreens. Here, into the vast low-walled breadth of the St. Lawrence,
a dark stream, narrowly bordered by rounded heights of rock, steals down
from the north out of regions of gloomy and ever-during solitude. This
is the Saguenay; and in the cold evening light under which the traveller
approaches its mouth, no landscape could look more forlorn than that of
Tadoussac, where early in the sixteenth century the French traders fixed
their first post, and where still the oldest church north of Florida is
standing.
The steamer lies here five hours, and supper was no sooner over than the
passengers went ashore in the gathering dusk. Mr. Arbuton, guarding his
distance as usual, went too, with a feeling of surprise at his own
concession to the popular impulse. He was not without a desire to see
the old church, wondering in a half-compassionate way what such a bit of
American antiquity would look like; and he had perceived since the
little embarrassment at Cacouna that he was a discomfort to the young
lady involved by it. He had caught no glimpse of her till supper, and
then she had briefly supped with an air of such studied unconsciousness
of his presence that it was plain she was thinking of her mistake every
moment. "Well, I'll leave her the freedom of the boat while we stay,"
thought Mr. Arbuton as he went ashore. He had not the least notion
whither the road led, but like the rest he followed it up through the
village, and on among the cottages which seemed for the most part empty,
and so down a gloomy ravine, in the bottom of which, far beneath the
tremulous rustic bridge, he heard the mysterious crash and fall of an
unseen torrent. Before him towered the shadowy hills up into the
starless night; he thrilled with a sense of the loneliness and
remoteness, and he had a formless wish that some one qualified by the
proper associations and traditions were there to share the satisfaction
he felt in the whole effect. At the same instant he was once more aware
of that delicate pressure, that weight so lightly, sweetly borne upon
his arm. It startled him, and again he followed the road, which with a
sudden turn brought him in sight of a hotel and in sound of a
bowling-alley, and therein young ladies' cackle and laughter, and he
wondered a little scornfully who could be spending the summer there. A
bay of the river loftily shut in by rugged hills lay before him, and on
the shore, just above high-tide, stood what a wandering shadow told him
was the ancient church of Tadoussac. The windows were faintly tinged
with red as from a single taper burning within, and but that the
elements were a little too bare and simple for one so used to the rich
effects of the Old World, Mr. Arbuton might have been touched by the
vigil which this poor chapel was still keeping after three hundred years
in the heart of that gloomy place. While he stood at least tolerating
its appeal, he heard voices of people talking in the obscurity near the
church door, which they seemed to have been vainly trying for entrance.
"Pity we can't see the inside, isn't it?"
"Yes; but I am so glad to see any of it. Just think of its having been
built in the seventeenth century!"
"Uncle Jack would enjoy it, wouldn't he?"
"O yes, poor Uncle Jack! I feel somehow as if I were cheating him out of
it. He ought to be here in my place. But I _do_ like it; and, Dick, I
don't know what I can ever say or do to you and Fanny for bringing me."
"Well, Kitty, postpone the subject till you can think of the right
thing. We're in no hurry."
Mr. Arbuton heard a shaking of the door, as of a final attempt upon it,
before retreat, and then the voices faded into inarticulate sounds in
the darkness. They were the voices, he easily recognized, of the young
lady who had taken his arm, and of that kinsman of hers, as she seemed
to be. He blamed himself for having not only overheard them, but for
desiring to hear more of their talk, and he resolved to follow them back
to the boat at a discreet distance. But they loitered so at every point,
or he unwittingly made such haste, that he had overtaken them as they
entered the lane between the outlying cottages, and he could not help
being privy to their talk again.
"Well, it may be old, Kitty, but I don't think it's lively."
"It _is_n't exactly a whirl of excitement, I must confess."
"It's the deadliest place I ever saw. Is that a swing in front of that
cottage? No, it's a gibbet. Why, they've all got 'em! I suppose they're
for the summer tenants at the close of the season. What a rush there
would be for them if the boat should happen to go off and leave her
passengers!"
Mr. Arbuton thought this rather a coarse kind of drolling, and
strengthened himself anew in his resolution to avoid those people.
They now came in sight of the steamer, where in the cove she lay
illumined with all her lamps, and through every window and door and
crevice was bursting with the ruddy light. Her brilliancy contrasted
vividly with the obscurity and loneliness of the shore where a few
lights glimmered in the village houses, and under the porch of the
village store some desolate idlers--_habitans_ and half-breeds--had
clubbed their miserable leisure. Beyond the steamer yawned the wide
vacancy of the greater river, and out of this gloomed the course of the
Saguenay.
"O, I hate to go on board!" said the young lady. "Do you think he's got
back yet? It's perfect misery to meet him."
"Never mind, Kitty. He probably thinks you didn't mean anything by it.
_I_ don't believe you would have taken his arm if you hadn't supposed it
was mine, _any_ way."
She made no answer to this, as if too much overcome by the true state of
the case to be troubled by its perversion. Mr. Arbuton, following them
on board, felt himself in the unpleasant character of persecutor, some
one to be shunned and escaped by every maneuver possible to
self-respect. He was to be the means, it appeared, of spoiling the
enjoyment of the voyage for one who, he inferred, had not often the
opportunity of such enjoyment. He had a willingness that she should
think well and not ill of him; and then at the bottom of all was a
sentiment of superiority, which, if he had given it shape, would have
been _noblesse oblige_. Some action was due to himself as a gentleman.
The young lady went to seek the matron of the party, and left her
companion at the door of the saloon, wistfully fingering a cigar in one
hand, and feeling for a match with the other. Presently he gave himself
a clap on the waistcoat which he had found empty, and was turning away,
when Mr. Arbuton said, offering his own lighted cigar, "May I be of use
to you?"
The other took it with a hearty, "O yes, thank you!" and, with many
inarticulate murmurs of satisfaction, lighted his cigar, and returned
Mr. Arbuton's with a brisk, half-military bow.
Mr. Arbuton looked at him narrowly a moment. "I'm afraid," he said
abruptly, "that I've most unluckily been the cause of annoyance to one
of the ladies of your party. It isn't a thing to apologize for, and I
hardly know how to say that I hope, if she's not already forgotten the
matter, she'll do so." Saying this, Mr. Arbuton, by an impulse which he
would have been at a loss to explain, offered his card.
His action had the effect of frankness, and the other took it for
cordiality. He drew near a lamp, and looked at the name and street
address on the card, and then said, "Ah, of Boston! _My_ name is
Ellison; I'm of Milwaukee, Wisconsin." And he laughed a free, trustful
laugh of good companionship. "Why yes, my cousin's been tormenting
herself about her mistake the whole afternoon; but of course it's all
right, you know. Bless my heart! it was the most natural thing in the
world. Have you been ashore? There's a good deal of repose about
Tadoussac, now; but it must be a lively place in winter! Such a cheerful
lookout from these cottages, or that hotel over yonder! We went over to
see if we could get into the little old church; the purser told me there
are some lead tablets there, left by Jacques Cartier's men, you know,
and dug up in the neighborhood. I don't think it's likely, and I'm
bearing up very well under the disappointment of not getting in. I've
done my duty by the antiquities of the place; and now I don't care how
soon we are off."
Colonel Ellison was talking in the kindness of his heart to change the
subject which the younger gentleman had introduced, in the belief, which
would scarcely have pleased the other, that he was much embarrassed. His
good-nature went still further; and when his cousin returned presently,
with Mrs. Ellison, he presented Mr. Arbuton to the ladies, and then
thoughtfully made Mrs. Ellison walk up and down the deck with him for
the exercise she would not take ashore, that the others might be left to
deal with their vexation alone.
"I am very sorry, Miss Ellison," said Mr. Arbuton, "to have been the
means of a mistake to you to-day."
"And I was dreadfully ashamed to make you the victim of my blunder,"
answered Miss Ellison penitently; and a little silence ensued. Then as
if she had suddenly been able to alienate the case, and see it apart
from herself in its unmanageable absurdity, she broke into a confiding
laugh, very like her cousin's, and said, "Why, it's one of the most
hopeless things I ever heard of. I don't see what in the world can be
done about it."
"It _is_ rather a difficult matter, and I'm not prepared to say myself.
Before I make up my mind I should like it to happen again."
Mr. Arbuton had no sooner made this speech, which he thought neat, than
he was vexed with himself for having made it, since nothing was further
from his purpose than a flirtation. But the dark, vicinity, the young
girl's prettiness, the apparent freshness and reliance on his sympathy
from which her frankness came, were too much: he tried to congeal again,
and ended in some feebleness about the scenery, which was indeed very
lonely and wild, after the boat started up the Saguenay, leaving the few
lights of Tadoussac to blink and fail behind her. He had an absurd sense
of being alone in the world there with the young lady; and he suffered
himself to enjoy the situation, which was as perfectly safe as anything
could be. He and Miss Ellison had both come on from Niagara, it seemed,
and they talked of that place, she consciously withholding the fact that
she had noticed Mr. Arbuton there; they had both come down the Rapids of
the St. Lawrence, and they had both stopped a day in Montreal. These
common experiences gave them a surprising interest for each other, which
was enhanced by the discovery that their experiences differed
thereafter, and that whereas she had passed three days at Quebec, he, as
we know, had come on directly from Montreal.
"Did you enjoy Quebec very much, Miss Ellison?"
"O yes, indeed! It's a beautiful old town, with everything in it that I
had always read about and never expected to see. You know it's a walled
city."
"Yes. But I confess I had forgotten it till this morning. Did you find
it all that you expected a walled city to be?"
"More, if possible. There were some Boston people with us there, and
they said it was exactly like Europe. They fairly sighed over it, and it
seemed to remind them of pretty nearly everything they had seen abroad.
They were just married."
"Did that make Quebec look like Europe?"
"No, but I suppose it made them willing to see it in the pleasantest
light. Mrs. March--that was their name--wouldn't allow me to say that
_I_ enjoyed Quebec, because if I hadn't seen Europe, I _could_n't
properly enjoy it. 'You may _think_ you enjoy it,' she was always
saying, 'but that's merely fancy.' Still I cling to my delusion. But I
don't know whether I cared more for Quebec, or the beautiful little
villages in the country all about it. The whole landscape looks just
like a dream of 'Evangeline.'"
"Indeed! I must certainly stop at Quebec. I should like to see an
American landscape that put one in mind of anything. What can your
imagination do for the present scenery?"
"I don't think it needs any help from me," replied the young girl, as if
the tone of her companion had patronized and piqued her. She turned as
she spoke and looked up the sad, lonely river. The moon was making its
veiled face seen through the gray heaven, and touching the black stream
with hints of melancholy light. On either hand the uninhabitable shore
rose in desolate grandeur, friendless heights of rock with a thin
covering of pines seen in dim outline along their tops and deepening
into the solid dark of hollows and ravines upon their sides. The cry of
some wild bird struck through the silence of which the noise of the
steamer had grown to be a part, and echoed away to nothing. Then from
the saloon there came on a sudden the notes of a song; and Miss Ellison
led the way within, where most of the other passengers were grouped
about the piano. The English girl with the corn-colored hair sat, in
ravishing picture, at the instrument, and the commonish man and his very
plain wife were singing with heavenly sweetness together.
"Isn't it beautiful!" said Miss Ellison. "How nice it must be to be able
to do such things!"
"Yes? do you think so? It's rather public," answered her companion.
When the English people had ended, a grave, elderly Canadian gentleman
sat down to give what he believed a comic song, and sent everybody
disconsolate to bed.
"Well, Kitty?" cried Mrs. Ellison, shutting herself inside the young
lady's state-room a moment.
"Well, Fanny?"
"Isn't he handsome?"
"He is, indeed."
"Is he nice?"
"I don't know."
"Sweet?"
"_Ice_-cream," said Kitty, and placidly let herself be kissed an
enthusiastic good-night. Before Mrs. Ellison slept she wished to ask her
husband one question.
"What is it?"
"Should you want Kitty to marry a Bostonian? They say Bostonians are so
cold."
"What Bostonian has been asking Kitty to marry him?"
"O, how spiteful you are! I didn't say any had. But if there should?"
"Then it'll be time to think about it. You've married Kitty right and
left to everybody who's looked at her since we left Niagara, and I've
worried myself to death investigating the character of her husbands. Now
I'm not going to do it any longer,--till she has an offer."
"Very well. _You_ can depreciate your own cousin, if you like. But I
know what _I_ shall do. I shall let her wear all my best things. How
fortunate it is, Richard, that we're exactly of a size! O, I am so glad
we brought Kitty along! If she should marry and settle down in
Boston--no, I hope she could get her husband to live in New York--"
"Go on, go on, my dear!" cried Colonel Ellison, with a groan of despair.
"Kitty has talked twenty-five minutes with this young man about the
hotels and steamboats, and of course he'll be round to-morrow morning
asking my consent to marry her as soon as we can get to a justice of the
peace. My hair is gradually turning gray, and I shall be bald before my
time; but I don't mind that if you find any pleasure in these little
hallucinations of yours. _Go_ on!"
II.
MRS. ELLISON'S LITTLE MANEUVRE.
The next morning our tourists found themselves at rest in Ha-Ha Bay, at
the head of navigation for the larger steamers. The long line of sullen
hills had fallen away, and the morning sun shone warm on what in a
friendlier climate would have been a very lovely landscape. The bay was
an irregular oval, with shores that rose in bold but not lofty heights
on one side, while on the other lay a narrow plain with two villages
clinging about the road that followed the crescent beach, and lifting
each the slender tin-clad spire of its church to sparkle in the sun.
At the head of the bay was a mountainous top, and along its waters were
masses of rocks, gayly painted with lichens and stained with metallic
tints of orange and scarlet. The unchanging growth of stunted pines was
the only forest in sight, though Ha-Ha Bay is a famous lumbering port,
and some schooners now lay there receiving cargoes of odorous pine
plank. The steamboat-wharf was all astir with the liveliest toil and
leisure. The boat was taking on wood, which was brought in wheelbarrows
to the top of the steep, smooth gangway-planking, where the _habitant_
in charge planted his broad feet for the downward slide, and was hurled
aboard more or less _en masse_ by the fierce velocity of his heavy-laden
wheelbarrow. Amidst the confusion and hazard of this feat a procession
of other habitans marched aboard, each one bearing under his arm a
coffin-shaped wooden box. The rising fear of Colonel Ellison, that these
boxes represented the loss of the whole infant population of Ha-Ha Bay,
was checked by the reflection that the region could not have produced so
many children, and calmed altogether by the purser, who said that they
were full of huckleberries, and that Colonel Ellison could have as many
as he liked for fifteen cents a bushel. This gave him a keen sense of
the poverty of the land, and he bought of the boys who came aboard such
abundance of wild red raspberries, in all manner of birch-bark canoes
and goblets and cornucopias, that he was obliged to make presents of
them to the very dealers whose stock he had exhausted, and he was in
treaty with the local half-wit--very fine, with a hunchback, and a
massive wen on one side of his head--to take charity in the wild fruits
of his native province, when the crowd about him was gently opened by a
person who advanced with a flourishing bow and a sprightly "Good
morning, good morning, sir!" "How do you do?" asked Colonel Ellison; but
the other, intent on business, answered, "I am the only person at Ha-Ha
Bay who speaks English, and I have come to ask if you would not like to
make a promenade in my horse and buggy upon the mountain before
breakfast. You shall be gone as long as you will for one shilling and
sixpence. I will show you all that there is to be seen about the place,
and the beautiful view of the bay from the top of the mountain. But it
is elegant, you know, I can assure you."
The speaker was so fluent of his English, he had such an audacious,
wide-branching mustache, such a twinkle in his left eye,--which wore its
lid in a careless, slouching fashion,--that the heart of man naturally
clove to him; and Colonel Ellison agreed on the spot to make the
proposed promenade, for himself and both his ladies, of whom he went
joyfully in search. He found them at the stern of the boat, admiring the
wild scenery, and looking
"Fresh as the morn and as the season fair."
He was not a close observer, and of his wife's wardrobe he had the
ignorance of a good husband, who, as soon as the pang of paying for her
dresses is past, forgets whatever she has; but he could not help seeing
that some gayeties of costume which he had dimly associated with his
wife now enhanced the charms of his cousin's nice little face and
figure. A scarf of lively hue carelessly tied about the throat to keep
off the morning chill, a prettier ribbon, a more stylish jacket than
Miss Ellison owned,--what do I know?--an air of preparation for battle,
caught the colonel's eye, and a conscious red stole responsive into
Kitty's cheek.
"Kitty," said he, "don't you let yourself be made a goose of."
"I hope she won't--by _you_!" retorted his wife, "and I'll thank you,
Colonel Ellison, not to be a Betty, whatever you are. I don't think it's
manly to be always noticing ladies' clothes."
"Who said anything about clothes?" demanded the colonel, taking his
stand upon the letter.
"Well, don't _you_, at any rate. Yes, I'd like to ride, of all things;
and we've time enough, for breakfast isn't ready till half past eight.
Where's the carriage?"