It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing, and it was on
them in full disaster ere they knew. Such a very little while ago, there
in the convent garden, their lives had been drawn closer in sympathy
than ever before; and now that blessed time seemed ages since, and
they were further asunder than those who have never been friends. “I
thought,” bitterly mused Isabel, “that he would have done anything
for me.” “Who could have dreamed that a woman of her sense would be
so unreasonable,” he wondered. Both had tempers, as I know my dearest
reader has (if a lady), and neither would yield; and so, presently, they
could hardly tell how, for they were aghast at it all, Isabel was
alone in her room amidst the ruins of her life, and Basil alone in
the one-horse carriage, trying to drive away from the wreck of his
happiness. All was over; the dream was past; the charm was broken. The
sweetness of their love was turned to gall; whatever had pleased them in
their loving moods was loathsome now, and the things they had praised a
moment before were hateful. In that baleful light, which seemed to dwell
upon all they ever said or did in mutual enjoyment, how poor and stupid
and empty looked their wedding-journey! Basil spent five minutes in
arraigning his wife and convicting her of every folly and fault. His
soul was in a whirl,
“For to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.”
In the midst of his bitter and furious upbraidings he found himself
suddenly become her ardent advocate, and ready to denounce her judge as
a heartless monster. “On our wedding journey, too! Good heavens, what an
incredible brute I am!” Then he said, “What an ass I am!” And the pathos
of the case having yielded to its absurdity, he was helpless. In five
minutes more he was at Isabel's side, the one-horse carriage driver
dismissed with a handsome pour-boire, and a pair of lusty bays with a
glittering barouche waiting at the door below. He swiftly accounted for
his presence, which she seemed to find the most natural thing that could
be, and she met his surrender with the openness of a heart that forgives
but does not forget, if indeed the most gracious art is the only one
unknown to the sex.
She rose with a smile from the ruins of her life, amidst which she
had heart-brokenly sat down with all her things on. “I knew you'd come
back,” she said.
“So did I,” he answered. “I am much too good and noble to sacrifice my
preference to my duty.”
“I didn't care particularly for the two horses, Basil,” she said, as
they descended to the barouche. “It was your refusing them that hurt
me.”
“And I didn't want the one-horse carriage. It was your insisting so that
provoked me.”
“Do you think people ever quarreled before on a wedding journey?” asked
Isabel as they drove gayly out of the city.
“Never! I can't conceive of it. I suppose if this were written down,
nobody would believe it.”
“No, nobody could,” said Isabel, musingly, and she added after a pause,
“I wish you would tell me just what you thought of me, dearest. Did you
feel as you did when our little affair was broken off, long ago? Did you
hate me?”
“I did, most cordially; but not half so much as I despised myself the
next moment. As to its being like a lover's quarrel, it wasn't. It was
more bitter, so much more love than lovers ever give had to be taken
back. Besides, it had no dignity, and a lover's quarrel always has. A
lover's quarrel always springs from a more serious cause, and has an air
of romantic tragedy. This had no grace of the kind. It was a poor shabby
little squabble.”
“O, don't call it so, Basil! I should like you to respect even a quarrel
of ours more than that. It was tragical enough with me, for I didn't
see how it could ever be made up. I knew I couldn't make the advances. I
don't think it is quite feminine to be the first to forgive, is it?”
“I'm sure I can't say. Perhaps it would be rather unladylike.”
“Well, you see, dearest, what I am trying to get at is this: whether we
shall love each other the more or the less for it. I think we shall get
on all the better for a while, on account of it. But I should have said
it was totally out of character it's something you might have expected
of a very young bridal couple; but after what we've been through, it
seems too improbable.”
“Very well,” said Basil, who, having made all the concessions, could
not enjoy the quarrel as she did, simply because it was theirs; “let's
behave as if it had never been.”
“O no, we can't. To me, it's as if we had just won each other.”
In fact it gave a wonderful zest and freshness to that ride round the
mountain, and shed a beneficent glow upon the rest of their journey. The
sun came out through the thin clouds, and lighted up the vast plain that
swept away north and east, with the purple heights against the eastern
sky. The royal mountain lifted its graceful mass beside them, and hid
the city wholly from sight. Peasant-villages, in the shade of beautiful
elms, dotted the plain in every direction, and at intervals crept up
to the side of the road along which they drove. But these had been
corrupted by a more ambitious architecture since Basil saw them last,
and were no longer purely French in appearance. Then, nearly every house
was a tannery in a modest way, and poetically published the fact by
the display of a sheep's tail over the front door, like a bush at
a wine-shop. Now, if the tanneries still existed, the poetry of the
sheeps' tails had vanished from the portals. But our friends were
consoled by meeting numbers of the peasants jolting home from market in
the painted carts, which are doubtless of the pattern of the carts first
built there two hundred years ago. They were grateful for the immortal
old wooden, crooked and brown with the labor of the fields, who abounded
in these vehicles; when a huge girl jumped from the tail of her cart,
and showed the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasant-maid, they could
only sigh out their unspeakable satisfaction.
Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages, through the open doors
of which they could see the exquisite neatness of the life within. One
of the doors opened into a school-house, where they beheld with rapture
the school-mistress, book in hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray
head, and encircled by her flock of little boys and girls.
By and by it began to rain again; and now while their driver stopped to
put up the top of the barouche, they entered a country church which had
taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps that blend
with silence rather than break it, while they heard only the soft
whisper of the shower without. There was no one there but themselves.
The urn of holy water seemed not to have been troubled that day, and
no penitent knelt at the shrine, before which twinkled so faintly one
lighted lamp. The white roof swelled into dim arches over their heads;
the pale day like a visible hush stole through the painted windows; they
heard themselves breathe as they crept from picture to picture.
A narrow door opened at the side of the high altar, and a slender young
priest appeared in a long black robe, and with shaven head. He, too as
he moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part of the silence; and when
he approached with dreamy black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed
courteously, it seemed impossible he should speak. But he spoke, the
pale young priest, the dark-robed tradition, the tonsured vision of an
age and a church that are passing.
“Do you understand French, monsieur?”
“A very little, monsieur.”
“A very little is more than my English,” he said, yet he politely went
the round of the pictures with them, and gave them the names of the
painters between his crossings at the different altars. At the high
altar there was a very fair Crucifixion; before this the priest bent one
knee. “Fine picture, fine altar, fine church,” he said in English. At
last they stopped next the poor-box. As their coins clinked against
those within, he smiled serenely upon the good heretics. Then he bowed,
and, as if he had relapsed into the past, he vanished through the narrow
door by which he had entered.
Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on the church steps. Then she
cried,
“O, why didn't something happen?”
“Ah, my dear! what could have been half so good as the nothing that
did happen? Suppose we knew him to have taken orders because of a
disappointment in love: how common it would have made him; everybody has
been crossed in love once or twice.” He bade the driver take them back
to the hotel. “This is the very bouquet of adventure why should we care
for the grosser body? I dare say if we knew all about yonder pale young
priest, we should not think him half so interesting as we do now.”
At dinner they spent the intervals of the courses in guessing the
nationality of the different persons, and in wondering if the Canadians
did not make it a matter of conscientious loyalty to out-English the
English even in the matter of pale-ale and sherry, and in rotundity of
person and freshness of face, just as they emulated them in the cut of
their clothes and whiskers. Must they found even their health upon the
health of the mother-country?
Our friends began to detect something servile in it all, and but
that they were such amiable persons, the loyally perfect digestion of
Montreal would have gone far to impair their own.
The loyalty, which had already appeared to them in the cathedral,
suggested itself in many ways upon the street, when they went out after
dinner to do that little shopping which Isabel had planned to do in
Montreal. The booksellers' windows were full of Canadian editions of
our authors, and English copies of English works, instead of our pirated
editions; the dry-goods stores were gay with fabrics in the London taste
and garments of the London shape; here was the sign of a photographer to
the Queen, there of a hatter to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales; a barber
was “under the patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, H. E. the Duke
of Cambridge, and the gentry of Montreal.” 'Ich dien' was the motto of
a restaurateur; a hosier had gallantly labeled his stock in trade with
'Honi soit qui mal y pense'. Again they noted the English solidity
of the civic edifices, and already they had observed in the foreign
population a difference from that at home. They saw no German faces on
the streets, and the Irish faces had not that truculence which they
wear sometimes with us. They had not lost their native simpleness and
kindliness; the Irishmen who drove the public carriages were as civil as
our own Boston hackmen, and behaved as respectfully under the shadow of
England here, as they would have done under it in Ireland. The problem
which vexes us seems to have been solved pleasantly enough in Canada.
Is it because the Celt cannot brook equality; and where he has not an
established and recognized caste above him, longs to trample on those
about him; and if he cannot be lowest, will at least be highest?
However, our friends did not suffer this or any other advantage of
the colonial relation to divert them from the opinion to which their
observation was gradually bringing them,--that its overweening loyalty
placed a great country like Canada in a very silly attitude, the
attitude of an overgrown, unmanly boy, clinging to the maternal skirts,
and though spoilt and willful, without any character of his own. The
constant reference of local hopes to that remote centre beyond seas,
the test of success by the criterions of a necessarily different
civilization, the social and intellectual dependence implied by traits
that meet the most hurried glance in the Dominion, give an effect of
meanness to the whole fabric. Doubtless it is a life of comfort, of
peace, of irresponsibility they live there, but it lacks the grandeur
which no sum of material prosperity can give; it is ignoble, like all
voluntarily subordinate things. Somehow, one feels that it has no basis
in the New World, and that till it is shaken loose from England it
cannot have.
It would be a pity, however, if it should be parted from the parent
country merely to be joined to an unsympathetic half-brother like
ourselves and nothing, fortunately, seems to be further from the
Canadian mind. There are some experiments no longer possible to us which
could still be tried there to the advantage of civilization, and we
were better two great nations side by side than a union of discordant
traditions and ideas. But none the less does the American traveller,
swelling with forgetfulness of the shabby despots who govern New York,
and the swindling railroad kings whose word is law to the whole land,
feel like saying to the hulling young giant beyond St. Lawrence and the
Lakes, “Sever the apron-strings of allegiance, and try to be yourself
whatever you are.”
Something of this sort Basil said, though of course not in apostrophic
phrase, nor with Isabel's entire concurrence, when he explained to her
that it was to the colonial dependence of Canada she owed the ability to
buy things so cheaply there.
The fact is that the ladies' parlor at the hotel had been after dinner
no better than a den of smugglers, in which the fair contrabandists had
debated the best means of evading the laws of their country. At heart
every man is a smuggler, and how much more every woman! She would have
no scruple in ruining the silk and woolen interest throughout the United
States. She is a free-trader by intuitive perception of right, and is
limited in practice by nothing but fear of the statute. What could be
taken into the States without detection, was the subject before that
wicked conclave; and next, what it would pay to buy in Canada. It seemed
that silk umbrellas were most eligible wares; and in the display of
such purchases the parlor was given the appearance of a violent
thunder-storm. Gloves it was not advisable to get; they were better
at home, as were many kinds of fine woolen goods. But laces, which you
could carry about you, were excellent; and so was any kind of silk.
Could it be carried if simply cut, and not made up? There was a
difference about this: the friend of one lady had taken home half a
trunkful of cut silks; the friend of another had “run up the breadths”
of one lone little silk skirt, and then lost it by the rapacity of the
customs officers. It was pretty much luck, and whether the officers
happened to be in good-humor or not. You must not try to take in
anything out of season, however. One had heard of a Boston lady going
home in July, who “had the furs taken off her back,” in that inclement
month. Best get everything seasonable, and put it on at once. “And then,
you know, if they ask you, you can say it's been worn.” To this black
wisdom came the combined knowledge of those miscreants. Basil could not
repress a shudder at the innate depravity of the female heart. Here were
virgins nurtured in the most spotless purity of life, here were virtuous
mothers of families, here were venerable matrons, patterns in society
and the church,--smugglers to a woman, and eager for any guilty
subterfuge! He glanced at Isabel to see what effect the evil
conversation had upon her. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks glowed; all the
woman was on fire for smuggling. He sighed heavily and went out with her
to do the little shopping.
Shall I follow them upon their excursion? Shopping in Montreal is very
much what it is in Boston or New York, I imagine, except that the clerks
have a more honeyed sweetness of manners towards the ladies of our
nation, and are surprisingly generous constructionists of our revenue
laws. Isabel had profited by every word that she had heard in the
ladies' parlor, and she would not venture upon unsafe ground; but her
tender eyes looked her unutterable longing to believe in the charming
possibilities that the clerks suggested. She bemoaned herself before the
corded silks, which there was no time to have made up; the piece-velvets
and the linens smote her to the heart. But they also stimulated her
invention, and she bought and bought of the made-up wares in real or
fancied needs, till Basil represented that neither their purses nor
their trunks could stand any more. “O, don't be troubled about the
trunks, dearest,” she cried, with that gayety which nothing but shopping
can kindle in a woman's heart; while he faltered on from counter to
counter, wondering at which he should finally swoon from fatigue. At
last, after she had declared repeatedly, “There, now, I am done,” she
briskly led the way back to the hotel to pack up her purchases.
Basil parted with her at the door. He was a man of high principle
himself, and that scene in the smugglers' den, and his wife's
preparation for transgression, were revelations for which nothing
could have consoled him but a paragon umbrella for five dollars, and an
excellent business suit of Scotch goods for twenty.
When some hours later he sat with Isabel on the forward promenade of the
steamboat for Quebec, and summed up the profits of their shopping, they
were both in the kindliest mood towards the poor Canadians, who had
built the admirable city before them.
For miles the water front of Montreal is superbly faced with quays and
locks of solid stone masonry, and thus she is clean and beautiful to
the very feet. Stately piles of architecture, instead of the foul old
tumble-down warehouses that dishonor the waterside in most cities, rise
from the broad wharves; behind these spring the twin towers of Notre
Dame, and the steeples of the other churches above the city roofs.
“It's noble, yes, it's noble, after the best that Europe can show,”
said Isabel, with enthusiasm; “and what a pleasant day we've had here!
Doesn't even our quarrel show 'couleur de rose' in this light?”
“One side of it,” answered Basil, dreamily, “but all the rest is black.”
“What do you mean, my dear?”
“Why, the Nelson Monument, with the sunset on it at the head of the
street there.”
The affect was so fine that Isabel could not be angry with him for
failing to heed what she had said, and she mused a moment with him.
“It seems rather far-fetched,” she said presently, “to erect a monument
to Nelson in Montreal, doesn't it? But then, it's a very absurd monument
when you're near it,” she added, thoughtfully.
Basil did not answer at once, for gazing on this Nelson column in
Jacques Cartier Square, his thoughts wandered away, not to the hero of
the Nile, but to the doughty old Breton navigator, the first white man
who ever set foot upon that shore, and who more than three hundred years
ago explored the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal, and in the splendid
autumn weather climbed to the top of her green height and named it.
The scene that Jacques Cartier then beheld, like a mirage of the fast
projected upon the present, floated before him, and he saw at the
mountain's foot the Indian city of Hochelaga, with its vast and populous
lodges of bark, its encircling palisades, and its wide outlying fields
of yellow maize. He heard with Jacques Cartier's sense the blare of his
followers' trumpets down in the open square of the barbarous city, where
the soldiers of many an Old-World fight, “with mustached lip and bearded
chin, with arquebuse and glittering halberd, helmet, and cuirass,” moved
among the plumed and painted savages; then he lifted Jacques Cartier's
eyes, and looked out upon the magnificent landscape. “East, west, and
north, the mantling forest was over all, and the broad blue ribbon of
the great river glistened amid a realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds
of Mexico, stretched a leafy desert, and the vast hive of industry,
the mighty battle-ground of late; centuries, lay sunk in savage torpor,
wrapped in illimitable woods.”
A vaguer picture of Champlain, who, seeking a westward route to China
and the East, some three quarters of a century later, had fixed the
first trading-post at Montreal, and camped upon the spot where the
convent of the Gray Nuns now stands, appeared before him, and vanished
with all its fleets of fur-traders' boats and hunters' birch canoes,
and the watch-fires of both; and then in the sweet light of the spring
morning, he saw Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon the green meadows, that
spread all gay with early flowers where Hochelaga once stood, and with
the black-robed Jesuits, the high-born, delicately nurtured, and devoted
nuns, and the steel-clad soldiers of his train, kneeling about the altar
raised there in the wilderness, and silent amidst the silence of nature
at the lifted Host.
He painted a semblance of all this for Isabel, using the colors of the
historian who has made these scenes the beautiful inheritance of all
dream era, and sketched the battles, the miracles, the sufferings, and
the penances through which the pious colony was preserved and prospered,
till they both grew impatient of modern Montreal, and would fain have
had the ancient Villemarie back in its place.
“Think of Maisonneuve, dearest, climbing in midwinter to the top of the
mountain there, under a heavy cross set with the bones of saints,
and planting it on the summit, in fulfillment of a vow to do so if
Villemarie were saved from the freshet; and then of Madame de la Peltrie
romantically receiving the sacrament there, while all Villemarie fell
down adoring! Ah, that was a picturesque people! When did ever a Boston
governor climb to the top of Beacon hill in fulfillment of a vow? To be
sure, we may yet see a New York governor doing something of the kind--if
he can find a hill. But this ridiculous column to Nelson, who never had
anything to do with Montreal,” he continued; “it really seems to me the
perfect expression of snobbish colonial dependence and sentimentality,
seeking always to identify itself with the mother-country, and ignoring
the local past and its heroic figures. A column to Nelson in Jacques
Cartier Square, on the ground that was trodden by Champlain, and won for
its present masters by the death of Wolfe.”
The boat departed on her trip to Quebec. During supper they were
served by French waiters, who, without apparent English of their own,
miraculously understood that of the passengers, except in the case
of the furious gentleman who wanted English breakfast tea; to so much
English as that their inspiration did not reach, and they forced him to
compromise on coffee. It was a French boat, owned by a French company,
and seemed to be officered by Frenchmen throughout; certainly, as our
tourists in the joy of their good appetites affirmed, the cook was of
that culinarily delightful nation.
The boat was almost as large as those of the Hudson, but it was not so
lavishly splendid, though it had everything that could minister to the
comfort and self-respect of the passengers. These were of all nations,
but chiefly Americans, with some French Canadians. The former gathered
on the forward promenade, enjoying what little of the landscape the
growing night left visible, and the latter made society after their
manner in the saloon. They were plain-looking men and women, mostly,
and provincial, it was evident, to their inmost hearts; provincial in
origin, provincial by inheritance, by all their circumstances, social
and political. Their relation with France was not a proud one, but it
was not like submersion by the slip-slop of English colonial loyalty;
yet they seem to be troubled by no memories of their hundred years'
dominion of the land that they rescued from, the wilderness, and that
was wrested from them by war. It is a strange fate for any people thus
to have been cut off from the parent-country, and abandoned to whatever
destiny their conquerors chose to reserve for them; and if each of the
race wore the sadness and strangeness of that fate in his countenance it
would not be wonderful. Perhaps it is wonderful that none of them
shows anything of the kind. In their desertion they have multiplied and
prospered; they may have a national grief, but they hide it well; and
probably they have none.
Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the person of the pale, slender
young ecclesiastic who had shown her and Basil the pictures in the
country church. She was confessing to the priest, and she was not at all
surprised to find that he was Basil in a suit of medieval armor. He had
an immense cross on his shoulder.
“To get this cross to the top of the mountain,” thought Isabel, “we must
have two horses. Basil,” she added, aloud, “we must have two horses!”
“Ten, if you like, my dear,” answered his voice, cheerfully, “though I
think we'd better ride up in the omnibus.”
She opened her eyes, and saw him smiling.
“We're in sight of Quebec,” he said. “Come out as soon as you can,--come
out into the seventeenth century.”
IX. QUEBEC.
Isabel hurried out upon the forward promenade, where all the other
passengers seemed to be assembled, and beheld a vast bulk of gray and
purple rock, swelling two hundred feet up from the mists of the river,
and taking the early morning light warm upon its face and crown.
Black-hulked, red-illumined Liverpool steamers, gay river-craft and
ships of every sail and flag, filled the stream athwart which the
ferries sped their swift traffic-laden shuttles; a lower town hung to
the foot of the rock, and crept, populous and picturesque, up its sides;
from the massive citadel on its crest flew the red banner of Saint
George, and along its brow swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic,
beautiful city, overtopped by many a gleaming spire and antique roof.
Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, modern world the vessel
steamed up to this city of an olden time and another ideal,--to her who
was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still,
after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of
the feudal past from which she sprung. Upon her height she sits unique;
and when you say Quebec, having once beheld her, you invoke a sense of
medieval strangeness and of beauty which the name of no other city could
intensify.
As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarming over a broad
square, a market beside which the Bonsecours Market would have shown as
common as the Quincy, and up the odd wooden-sidewalked street stretched
an aisle of carriages and those high swung calashes, which are to Quebec
what the gondolas are to Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon our
tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus. They were going to
the dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be
thought of without a pang. It is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through
which they drove into the Upper Town, has been demolished since the
summer of last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by
those Quebec horses which expect to gallop up hill whatever they do
going down, they turned a corner of the towering weed-grown rock, and
shot in under the low arch of the gate, pierced with smaller doorways
for the foot-passengers. The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors
were thickly studded with heavy iron spikes; old cannon, thrust endwise
into the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against
passing wheels. Why did not some semi-forbidding commissary of police,
struggling hard to overcome his native politeness, appear and demand
their passports? The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but
this touch. How often in the adored Old World, which we so love and
disapprove, had they driven in through such gates at that morning
hour! On what perverse pretext, then, was it not some ancient town of
Normandy?
“Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and they'd soon rattle this
old wall down and let in a little fresh air!” said a patriotic voice at
Isabel's elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow irregular
streets, the huddling gables, the quaint roofs, through which and under
which they drove on to the hotel.
As they dashed into a broad open square, “Here is the French Cathedral;
there is the Upper Town Market; yonder are the Jesuit Barracks!” cried
Basil; and they had a passing glimpse of gray stone towers at one side
of the square, and a low, massive yellow building at the other, and,
between the two, long ranks of carts, and fruit and vegetable stands,
protected by canvas awnings and broad umbrellas. Then they dashed round
the corner of a street, and drew up before the hotel door. The
low ceilings, the thick walls, the clumsy wood-work, the wandering
corridors, gave the hotel all the desired character of age, and its
slovenly state bestowed an additional charm. In another place they might
have demanded neatness, but in Quebec they would almost have resented
it. By a chance they had the best room in the house, but they held it
only till certain people who had engaged it by telegraph should arrive
in the hourly expected steamer from Liverpool; and, moreover, the best
room at Hotel Musty was consolingly bad. The house was very full, and
the Ellisons (who had come on with them from Montreal) were bestowed in
less state only on like conditions.
The travellers all met at breakfast, which was admirably cooked, and
well served, with the attendance of those swarms of flies which infest
Quebec, and especially infested the old Musty House, in summer. It had,
of course, the attraction of broiled salmon, upon which the traveller
breakfasts every day as long as he remains in Lower Canada; and it
represented the abundance of wild berries in the Quebec market; and it
was otherwise a breakfast worthy of the appetites that honored it.
There were not many other Americans besides themselves at this hotel,
which seemed, indeed, to be kept open to oblige such travellers as had
been there before, and could not persuade themselves to try the new
Hotel St. Louis, whither the vastly greater number resorted. Most of the
faces our tourists saw were English or English-Canadian, and the young
people from Omaha; who had got here by some chance, were scarcely in
harmony with the place. They appeared to be a bridal party, but which of
the two sisters, in buff linen 'clad from head to foot' was the bride,
never became known. Both were equally free with the husband, and he was
impartially fond of both: it was quite a family affair.
For a moment Isabel harbored the desire to see the city in company
with Miss Ellison; but it was only a passing weakness. She remembered
directly the coolness between friends which she had seen caused by
objects of interest in Europe, and she wisely deferred a more intimate
acquaintance till it could have a purely social basis. After all,
nothing is so tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy or so apt to
end in mutual dislike,--except gratitude. So the ladies parted friends
till dinner, and drove off in separate carriages.
As in other show cities, there is a routine at Quebec for travellers who
come on Saturday and go on Monday, and few depart from it. Our friends
necessarily, therefore, drove first to the citadel. It was raining one
of those cold rains by which the scarce-banished winter reminds the
Canadian fields of his nearness even in midsummer, though between the
bitter showers the air was sultry and close; and it was just the light
in which to see the grim strength of the fortress next strongest to
Gibraltar in the world. They passed a heavy iron gateway, and up through
a winding lane of masonry to the gate of the citadel, where they were
delivered into the care of Private Joseph Drakes, who was to show them
such parts of the place as are open to curiosity. But, a citadel which
has never stood a siege, or been threatened by any danger more serious
than Fenianism, soon becomes, however strong, but a dull piece of
masonry to the civilian; and our tourists more rejoiced in the crumbling
fragment of the old French wall which the English destroyed than in all
they had built; and they valued the latter work chiefly for the glorious
prospects of the St. Lawrence and its mighty valleys which it commanded.
Advanced into the centre of an amphitheatre inconceivably vast, that
enormous beak of rock overlooks the narrow angle of the river, and then,
in every direction, immeasurable stretches of gardened vale, and wooded
upland, till all melts into the purple of the encircling mountains. Far
and near are lovely white villages nestling under elms, in the heart of
fields and meadows; and everywhere the long, narrow, accurately divided
farms stretch downward to the river-shores. The best roads on the
continent make this beauty and richness accessible; each little village
boasts some natural wonder in stream, or lake, or cataract: and this
landscape, magnificent beyond any in eastern America, is historical and
interesting beyond all others. Hither came Jacques Cartier three hundred
and fifty years ago, and wintered on the low point there by the St.
Charles; here, nearly a century after, but still fourteen years before
the landing at Plymouth, Champlain founded the missionary city of
Quebec; round this rocky beak came sailing the half-piratical armament
of the Calvinist Kirks in 1629, and seized Quebec in the interest of the
English, holding it three years; in the Lower Town, yonder, first landed
the coldly welcomed Jesuits, who came with the returning French and made
Quebec forever eloquent of their zeal, their guile, their heroism; at
the foot of this rock lay the fleet of Sir William Phipps, governor of
Massachusetts, and vainly assailed it in 1698; in 1759 came Wolfe and
embattled all the region, on river and land, till at last the bravely
defended city fell into his dying hand on the Plains of Abraham; here
Montgomery laid down his life at the head of the boldest and most
hopeless effort of our War of Independence.
Private Joseph Drakes, with the generosity of an enemy expecting
drink-money, pointed out the sign, board on the face of the crag
commemorating 'Montgomery's death'; and then showed them the officers'
quarters and those of the common soldiers, not far from which was a
line of hang-dog fellows drawn up to receive sentence for divers small
misdemeanors, from an officer whose blond whiskers drooped Dundrearily
from his fresh English cheeks. There was that immense difference between
him and the men in physical grandeur and beauty, which is so notable
in the aristocratically ordered military services of Europe, and which
makes the rank seem of another race from the file. Private Drakes
saluted his superior, and visibly deteriorated in his presence, though
his breast was covered with medals, and he had fought England's battles
in every part of the world. It was a gross injustice, the triumph of a
thousand years of wrong; and it was touching to have Private Drakes say
that he expected in three months to begin life for himself, after twenty
years' service of the Queen; and did they think he could get anything
to do in the States? He scarcely knew what he was fit for, but he
thought--to so little in him came the victories he had helped to win
in the Crimea, in China, and in India--that he could take care of a
gentleman's horse and work about his place. He looked inquiringly at
Basil, as if he might be a gentleman with a horse to be taken care of
and a place to be worked about, and made him regret that he was not a
man of substance enough to provide for Private Drakes and Mrs. Drakes
and the brood of Ducklings, who had been shown to him stowed away in one
of those cavernous rooms in the earthworks where the married soldiers
have their quarters. His regret enriched the reward of Private Drakes'
service,--which perhaps answered one of Private Drakes' purposes, if
not his chief aim. He promised to come to the States upon the pressing
advice of Isabel, who, speaking from her own large experience, declared
that everybody got on there,--and he bade our friends an affectionate
farewell as they drove away to the Plains of Abraham.
The fashionable suburban cottages and places of Quebec are on the St.
Louis Road leading northward to the old battle-ground and beyond it;
but, these face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawrence and St. Charles,
and lofty hedges and shrubbery hide them in an English seclusion from
the highway; so that the visitor may uninterruptedly meditate whatever
emotion he will for the scene of Wolfe's death as he rides along. His
loftiest emotion will want the noble height of that heroic soul, who
must always stand forth in history a figure of beautiful and singular
distinction, admirable alike for the sensibility and daring, the poetic
pensiveness, and the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxed his
feeble frame with tasks greater than it could bear. The whole story of
the capture of Quebec is full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fall
was a triumph for all the English-speaking race, and to us Americans,
long scourged by the cruel Indian wars plotted within her walls or
sustained by her strength, such a blessing as was hailed with ringing
bells and blazing bonfires throughout the Colonies; yet now we cannot
think without pity of the hopes extinguished and the labors brought to
naught in her overthrow. That strange colony of priests and soldiers, of
martyrs and heroes, of which she was the capital, willing to perish for
an allegiance to which the mother-country was indifferent, and fighting
against the armies with which England was prepared to outnumber the
whole Canadian population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm
laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe
dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on
the eve of his costly victory, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,”
which he would “rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;” but
it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when
told how brief his time was, “So much the better; then I shall not live
to see the surrender of Quebec.”
In the city for which they perished their fame has never been divided.
The English have shown themselves very generous victors; perhaps nothing
could be alleged against them, but that they were victors. A shaft
common to Wolfe and Montcalm celebrates them both in the Governor's
Garden; and in the Chapel of the Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed,
where Montcalm died, by the same conquerors who raised to Wolfe's memory
the column on the battle-field.
A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell, and the monument
stands on the spot where Wolfe breathed his last, on ground lower than
the rest of the field; the friendly hollow that sheltered him from the
fire of the French dwarfs his monument; yet it is sufficient, and the
simple inscription, “Here died Wolfe victorious,” gives it a dignity
which many cubits of added stature could not bestow. Another of those
bitter showers, which had interspersed the morning's sunshine,
drove suddenly across the open plain, and our tourists comfortably
sentimentalized the scene behind the close-drawn curtains of their
carriage. Here a whole empire had been lost and won, Basil reminded
Isabel; and she said, “Only think of it!” and looked to a wandering fold
of her skirt, upon which the rain beat through a rent of the curtain.
Do I pitch the pipe too low? We poor honest men are at a sad
disadvantage; and now and then I am minded to give a loose to fancy, and
attribute something really grand and fine to my people, in order to make
them worthier the reader's respected acquaintance. But again, I forbid
myself in a higher interest; and I am afraid that even if I were less
virtuous, I could not exalt their mood upon a battle-field; for of all
things of the past a battle is the least conceivable. I have heard men
who fought in many battles say that the recollection was like a dream to
them; and what can the merely civilian imagination do on the Plains
of Abraham, with the fact that there, more than a century ago, certain
thousands of Frenchmen marched out, on a bright September morning, to
kill and maim as many Englishmen? This ground, so green and oft with
grass beneath the feet, was it once torn with shot and soaked with the
blood of men? Did they lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable slain,
for whom tender hearts away yonder over the sea were to ache and break?
Did the wretches that fell wounded stretch themselves here, and writhe
beneath the feet of friend and foe, or crawl array for shelter into
little hollows, and behind gushes and fallen trees! Did he, whose soul
was so full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot through like
some ravening beast? The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din
of arms, the cries of victory,--I vainly strive to conjure up some image
of it all now; and God be thanked, horrible spectre! that, fill the
world with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in
its moments of sanity and peace. Least credible art thou on the old
battle-fields, where the mother of the race denies thee with breeze
and sun and leaf and bird, and every blade of grass! The red stain in
Basil's thought yielded to the rain sweeping across the pasture-land
from which it had long since faded, and the words on the monument, “Here
died Wolfe victorious,” did not proclaim his bloody triumph over the
French, but his self-conquest, his victory over fear and pain and love
of life. Alas! when shall the poor, blind, stupid world honor those who
renounce self in the joy of their kind, equally with those who devote
themselves through the anguish and loss of thousands? So old a world and
groping still!
The tourists were better fitted for the next occasion of sentiment,
which was at the Hotel Dieu whither they went after returning from the
battlefield. It took all the mal-address of which travellers are masters
to secure admittance, and it was not till they had rung various wrong
bells, and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking French through
grated doors, and set divers sympathetic spectators doing ineffectual
services, that they at last found the proper entrance, and were answered
in English that the porter would ask if they might see the chapel. They
hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs
who perished long ago for the conversion of a race that has perished,
and whose relics they had come, fresh from their reading of Parkman,
with some vague and patronizing intention to revere. An elderly sister
with a pale, kind face led them through a ward of the hospital into the
chapel, which they found in the expected taste, and exquisitely neat and
cool, but lacking the martyr's skull. They asked if it were not to be
seen. “Ah, yes, poor Pere Brebeuf!” sighed the gentle sister, with the
tone and manner of having lost him yesterday; “we had it down only last
week, showing it to some Jesuit fathers; but it's in the convent now,
and isn't to be seen.” And there mingled apparently in her regret for
Pere Brebeuf a confusing sense of his actual state as a portable piece
of furniture. She would not let them praise the chapel. It was very
clean, yes, but there was nothing to see in it. She deprecated their
compliments with many shrugs, but she was pleased; for when we renounce
the pomps and vanities of this world, we are pretty sure to find them in
some other,--if we are women. She, good and pure soul, whose whole life
was given to self-denying toil, had yet something angelically coquettish
in her manner, a spiritual-worldliness which was the clarified likeness
of this-worldliness. O, had they seen the Hotel Dieu at Montreal? Then
(with a vivacious wave of the hands) they would not care to look at
this, which by comparison was nothing. Yet she invited them to go
through the wards if they would, and was clearly proud to have them see
the wonderful cleanness and comfort of the place. There were not many
patients, but here and there a wan or fevered face looked at them
from its pillow, or a weak form drooped beside a bed, or a group of
convalescents softly talked together. They came presently to the last
hall, at the end of which sat another nun, beside a window that gave a
view of the busy port, and beyond it the landscape of village-lit plain
and forest-darkened height. On a table at her elbow stood a rose-tree,
on which hung two only pale tea-roses, so fair, so perfect, that Isabel
cried out in wonder and praise. Ere she could prevent it, the nun,
to whom there had been some sort of presentation, gathered one of the
roses, and with a shy grace offered it to Isabel, who shrank back a
little as from too costly a gift. “Take it,” said the first nun, with
her pretty French accent; while the other, who spoke no English at all,
beamed a placid smile; and Isabel took it. The flower, lying light in
her palm, exhaled a delicate odor, and a thrill of exquisite compassion
for it trembled through her heart, as if it had been the white,
cloistered life of the silent nun: with its pallid loveliness, it was
as a flower that had taken the veil. It could never have uttered the
burning passion of a lover for his mistress; the nightingale could have
found no thorn on it to press his aching poet's heart against; but
sick and weary eyes had dwelt gratefully upon it; at most it might have
expressed, like a prayer, the nun's stainless love of some favorite
saint in paradise. Cold, and pale, and sweet,--was it indeed only a
flower, this cloistered rose of the Hotel Dieu?
“Breathe it,” said the gentle Gray Sister; “sometimes the air of
the hospital offends. Not us, no; we are used; but you come from the
outside.” And she gave her rose for this humble use as lovingly as she
devoted herself to her lowly taxes.
“It is very little to see,” she said at the end; “but if you are
pleased, I am very glad. Goodby, good-by!” She stood with her arms
folded, and watched them out of sight with her kind, coquettish little
smile, and then the mute, blank life of the nun resumed her.
From Hotel Dieu to Hotel Musty it was but a step; both were in the
same street; but our friends fancied themselves to have come an immense
distance when they sat down at an early dinner, amidst the clash of
crockery and cutlery, and looked round upon all the profane travelling
world assembled. Their regard presently fixed upon one company which
monopolized a whole table, and were defined from the other diners by
peculiarities as marked as those of the Soeurs Grises themselves. There
were only two men among some eight or ten women; one of the former had a
bad amiable face, with eyes full of a merry deviltry; the other, clean
shaven, and dark, was demure and silent as a priest. The ladies were
of various types, but of one effect, with large rolling eyes, and faces
that somehow regarded the beholder as from a distance, and with an
impartial feeling for him as for an element of publicity. One of them,
who caressed a lapdog with one hand while she served herself with the
other, was, as she seemed to believe, a blonde; she had pale blue
eyes, and her hair was cut in front so as to cover her forehead with a
straggling sandy-colored fringe. She had an English look, and three or
four others, with dark complexion and black, unsteady eyes, and various
abandon of back-hair, looked like Cockney houris of Jewish blood; while
two of the lovely company were clearly of our own nation, as was the
young man with the reckless laughing face. The ladies were dressed and
jeweled with a kind of broad effectiveness, which was to the ordinary
style of society what scene-painting is to painting, and might have
borne close inspection no better. They seemed the best-humored people
in the world, and on the kindliest terms with each other. The waiters
shared their pleasant mood, and served them affectionately, and were
now and then invited to join in the gay talk which babbled on over
dislocated aspirates, and filled the air with a sentiment of vagabond
enjoyment, of the romantic freedom of violated convention, of something
Gil Blas-like, almost picaresque.
If they had needed explanation it would have been given by the
announcement in the office of the hotel that a troupe of British blondes
was then appearing in Quebec for one week only.
After dinner they took possession of the parlor, and while one strummed
fitfully upon the ailing hotel piano, the rest talked, and talked shop,
of course, as all of us do when several of a trade are got together.
“W'at,” said the eldest of the dark-faced, black haired British blondes
of Jewish race,--“w'at are we going to give at Montrehal?”
“We're going to give 'Pygmalion,' at Montrehal,” answered the British
blonde of American birth, good-humoredly burlesquing the erring h of her
sister.
“But we cahn't, you know,” said the lady with the fringed forehead;
“Hagnes is gone on to New York, and there's nobody to do Wenus.”
“Yes, you know,” demanded the first speaker, “oo's to do Wenus?
“Bella's to do Wenus,” said a third.
There was an outcry at this, and “'Ow ever would she get herself up for
'Venus?” and “W'at a guy she'll look!” and “Nonsense! Bella's too
'eavy for Venus!” came from different lively critics; and the debate
threatened to become too intimate for the public ear, when one of their
gentlemen came in and said, “Charley don't seem so well this afternoon.”
On this the chorus changed its note, and at the proposal, “Poor Charley,
let's go and cheer 'im hop a bit,” the whole good-tempered company
trooped out of the parlor together.
Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoon to that sort of
aimless wandering to and fro about the streets which seizes a foreign
city unawares, and best develops its charm of strangeness. So they
went out and took their fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long
fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Montreal, and
impartially rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the
thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied
having been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every
house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls;
the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the
universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the
greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths
of weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the
batteries, with their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of
masonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting with nursery-maids upon
the carriages, while the children tumbled about over the pyramids of
shot and shell; the sloping market-place before the cathedral, where yet
some remnant of the morning's traffic lingered under canvas canopies,
and where Isabel bought a bouquet of marigolds and asters of an old
woman peasant enough to have sold it in any market-place of Europe; the
small, dark shops beyond the quarter invaded by English retail trade;
the movement of all the strange figures of cleric and lay and military
life; the sound of a foreign speech prevailing over the English; the
encounter of other tourists, the passage back and forth through the
different city gates; the public wooden stairways, dropping flight after
flight from the Upper to the Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with
its commerce and shipping and seafaring life huddled close in under the
hill; the many desolate streets of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous
as the last great fire left them; and the marshy meadows beyond,
memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of Cartier and Montcalm.
They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University, and admired
the Le Brun, and the other paintings of less merit, but equal interest
through their suggestion of a whole dim religious world of paintings;
and then they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so much in
looking at the Crucifixion by Vandyck which is there, as in reveling
amid the familiar rococo splendors of the temple. Every swaggering
statue of a saint, every rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that
on the carven and gilded clouds above the high altar float--
“Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,”--
was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the sacred properties with a
feather brush, and giving each shrine a business-like nod as he passed,
was as a long-lost brother; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness for
the young girls and old women who stepped in for a half-hour's devotion,
and for the men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a moment from
affairs and crops, and gave it to the saints. There was nothing in the
place that need remind them of America, and its taste was exactly that
of a thousand other churches of the eighteenth century. They could
easily have believed themselves in the farthest Catholic South, but for
the two great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave
near the entrance, and that too vividly reminded them of the possibility
of cold.
In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and other confusions of the
South and North, and one never quite reconciles himself to them. The
Frenchmen, who expected to find there the climate of their native land,
and ripen her wines in as kindly a sun, have perpetuated the image of
home in so many things, that it goes to the heart with a painful emotion
to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon them. As you ponder
some characteristic aspect of Quebec,--a bit of street with heavy stone
houses opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplar
rising slim against it,--you say, to your satisfied soul, “Yes, it
is the real thing!” and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky
strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a mere picture. The sky is
blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that
the pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that
summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit
at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before
the snow. But somehow, from without or from within, that light of the
North is there.
It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the little circular
garden near Durham Terrace, where every brightness of fall flowers
abounded,--marigold, coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and
sunflower. It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and they
fancied that fainter-hearted plants would have pined away in that
garden, where the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light,
fell back again with a musical shiver. The consciousness of this latent
cold, of winter only held in abeyance by the bright sun, was not deeper
even in the once magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden, where
there was actually a rawness in the late afternoon air, and whither they
were strolling for the view from its height, and to pay their duty to
the obelisk raised there to the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm. The
sounding Latin inscription celebrates the royal governor-general who
erected it almost as much as the heroes to whom it was raised; but these
spectators did not begrudge the space given to his praise, for so fine a
thought merited praise. It enforced again the idea of a kind posthumous
friendship between Wolfe and Montcalm, which gives their memory its rare
distinction, and unites them, who fell in fight against each other, as
closely as if they had both died for the same cause.
Some lasting dignity seems to linger about the city that has once been a
capital; and this odor of fallen nobility belongs to Quebec, which was
a capital in the European sense, with all the advantages of a small
vice-regal court, and its social and political intrigues, in the French
times. Under the English, for a hundred years it was the centre
of Colonial civilization and refinement, with a governor-general's
residence and a brilliant, easy, and delightful society, to which the
large garrison of former days gave gayety and romance. The honors of
a capital, first shared with Montreal and Toronto, now rest with
half-savage Ottawa; and the garrison has dwindled to a regiment
of rifles, whose presence would hardly be known, but for the natty
sergeants lounging, stick in hand, about the streets and courting
the nurse-maids. But in the days of old there were scenes of carnival
pleasure in the Governor's Garden, and there the garrison band still
plays once a week, when it is filled by the fashion and beauty of
Quebec, and some semblance of the past is recalled. It is otherwise a
lonesome, indifferently tended place, and on this afternoon there was
no one there but a few loafing young fellows of low degree, French and
English, and children that played screaming from seat to seat and path
to path and over the too-heavily shaded grass. In spite of a conspicuous
warning that any dog entering the garden would be destroyed, the place
was thronged with dogs unmolested and apparently in no danger of the
threatened doom. The seal of a disagreeable desolation was given in
the legend rudely carved upon one of the benches, “Success to the Irish
Republic!”
The morning of the next day our tourists gave to hearing mass at the
French cathedral, which was not different, to their heretical senses,
from any other mass, except that the ceremony was performed with a
very full clerical force, and was attended by an uncommonly devout
congregation. With Europe constantly in their minds, they were
bewildered to find the worshippers not chiefly old and young women, but
men also of all ages and of every degree, from the neat peasant in
his Sabbath-day best to the modish young Quebecker, who spread his
handkerchief on the floor to save his pantaloons during supplication.
There was fashion and education in large degree among the men, and there
was in all a pious attention to the function in poetical keeping with
the origin and history of a city which the zeal of the Church had
founded.
A magnificent beadle, clothed in a gold-laced coat aid bearing a silver
staff, bowed to them when they entered, and, leading them to a pew,
punched up a kneeling peasant, who mutely resumed his prayers in the
aisle outside, while they took his place. It appeared to Isabel very
unjust that their curiosity should displace his religion; but she
consoled herself by making Basil give a shilling to the man who,
preceded by the shining beadle, came round to take up a collection.
The peasant could have given nothing but copper, and she felt that this
restored the lost balance of righteousness in their favor. There was
a sermon, very sweetly and gracefully delivered by a young priest of
singular beauty, even among clergy whose good looks are so notable as
those of Quebec; and then they followed the orderly crowd of worshippers
out, and left the cathedral to the sacristan and the odor of incense.
They thought the type of French-Canadian better here than at Montreal,
and they particularly noticed the greater number of pretty young girls.
All classes were well dressed; for though the best dressed could not be
called stylish according to the American standard, as Isabel decided,
and had only a provincial gentility, the poorest wore garments that were
clean and whole. Everybody, too, was going to have a hot Sunday dinner,
if there was any truth in the odors that steamed out of every door and
window; and this dinner was to be abundantly garnished with onions, for
the dullest nose could not err concerning that savor.
Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that showed itself superior to
every distinction of race, were strolling vaguely and not always
quite happily about; but they made no impression on the proper local
character, and the air throughout the morning was full of the sentiment
of Sunday in a Catholic city. There was the apparently meaningless
jangling of bells, with profound hushes between, and then more jubilant
jangling, and then deeper silence; there was the devout trooping of
the crowds to the churches; and there was the beginning of the long
afternoon's lounging and amusement with which the people of that faith
reward their morning's devotion. Little stands for the sale of knotty
apples and choke-cherries and cakes and cider sprang magically into
existence after service, and people were already eating and drinking at
them. The carriage-drivers resumed their chase of the tourists, and the
unvoiceful stir of the new week had begun again. Quebec, in fact, is but
a pantomimic reproduction of France; it is as if two centuries in a new
land, amidst the primeval silences of nature and the long hush of the
Northern winters, had stilled the tongues of the lively folk and made
them taciturn as we of a graver race. They have kept the ancestral
vivacity of manner; the elegance of the shrug is intact; the talking
hands take part in dialogue; the agitated person will have its share of
expression. But the loud and eager tone is wanting, and their dumb show
mystifies the beholder almost as much as the Southern architecture under
the slanting Northern sun. It is not America; if it is not France, what
is it?
Of the many beautiful things to see in the neighborhood of Quebec, our
wedding-journeyers were in doubt on which to bestow their one precious
afternoon. Should it be Lorette, with its cataract and its remnant of
bleached and fading Hurons, or the Isle of Orleans with its fertile
farms and its primitive peasant life, or Montmorenci, with the unrivaled
fall and the long drive through the beautiful village of Beauport?
Isabel chose the last, because Basil had been there before, and it had
to it the poetry of the wasted years in which she did not know him. She
had possessed herself of the journal of his early travels, among the
other portions and parcels recoverable from the dreadful past, and from
time to time on this journey she had read him passages out of it, with
mingled sentiment and irony, and, whether she was mocking or admiring,
equally to his confusion. Now, as they smoothly bowled away from the
city, she made him listen to what he had written of the same excursion
long ago.
It was, to be sure, a sad farrago of sentiment about the village and the
rural sights, and especially a girl tossing hay in the field. Yet it
had touches of nature and reality, and Basil could not utterly despise
himself for having written it. “Yes,” he said, “life was then a thing
to be put into pretty periods; now it's something that has risks and
averages, and may be insured.”
There was regret, fancied or expressed, in his tone, that made her
sigh, “Ah! if I'd only had a little more money, you might have devoted
yourself to literature;” for she was a true Bostonian in her honor of
our poor craft.
“O, you're not greatly to blame,” answered her husband, “and I forgive
you the little wrong you've done me. I was quits with the Muse, at any
rate, you know, before we were married; and I'm very well satisfied to
be going back to my applications and policies to-morrow.”
To-morrow? The word struck cold upon her. Then their wedding journey
would begin to end tomorrow! So it would, she owned with another sigh;
and yet it seemed impossible.
“There, ma'am,” said the driver, rising from his seat and facing round,
while he pointed with his whip towards Quebec, “that's what we call the
Silver City.”
They looked back with him at the city, whose thousands of tinned roofs,
rising one above the other from the water's edge to the citadel, were
all a splendor of argent light in the afternoon sun. It was indeed as if
some magic had clothed that huge rock, base and steepy flank and crest,
with a silver city. They gazed upon the marvel with cries of joy that
satisfied the driver's utmost pride in it, and Isabel said, “To live
there, there in that Silver City, in perpetual sojourn! To be always
going to go on a morrow that never came! To be forever within one day of
the end of a wedding journey that never ended!”
From far down the river by which they rode came the sound of a cannon,
breaking the Sabbath repose of the air. “That's the gun of the Liverpool
steamer, just coming in,” said the driver.
“O,” cried Isabel, “I'm thankful we're only to stay one night more,
for now we shall be turned out of our nice room by those people who
telegraphed for it!”
There is a continuous village along the St. Lawrence from Quebec, almost
to Montmorenci; and they met crowds of villagers coming from the church
as they passed through Beauport. But Basil was dismayed at the change
that had befallen them. They had their Sunday's best on, and the women,
instead of wearing the peasant costume in which he had first seen them,
were now dressed as if out of “Harper's Bazar” of the year before. He
anxiously asked the driver if the broad straw hats and the bright sacks
and kirtles were no more. “O, you'd see them on weekdays, sir,” was
the answer, “but they're not so plenty any time as they used to be.” He
opened his store of facts about the habitans, whom he praised for every
virtue,--for thrift, for sobriety, for neatness, for amiability; and his
words ought to have had the greater weight, because he was of the Irish
race, between which and the Canadians there is no kindness lost. But the
looks of the passers-by corroborated him, and as for the little houses,
open-doored beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window and
portal, they were miracles of picturesqueness and cleanliness. From each
the owner's slim domain, narrowing at every successive division among
the abundant generations, runs back to hill or river in well-defined
lines, and beside the cottage is a garden of pot-herbs, bordered with a
flame of bright autumn flowers; somewhere in decent seclusion grunts
the fattening pig, which is to enrich all those peas and onions for the
winter's broth; there is a cheerfulness of poultry about the barns; I
dare be sworn there is always a small girl driving a flock of decorous
ducks down the middle of the street; and of the priest with a book under
his arm, passing a way-side shrine, what possible doubt? The houses,
which are of one model, are built by the peasants themselves with the
stone which their land yields more abundantly than any other crop, and
are furnished with galleries and balconies to catch every ray of the
fleeting summer, and perhaps to remember the long-lost ancestral summers
of Normandy. At every moment, in passing through this ideally neat and
pretty village, our tourists must think of the lovely poem of which all
French Canada seems but a reminiscence and illustration. It was Grand
Pre, not Beauport; and they paid an eager homage to the beautiful genius
which has touched those simple village aspects with an undying charm,
and which, whatever the land's political allegiance, is there perpetual
Seigneur.
The village, stretching along the broad interval of the St. Lawrence,
grows sparser as you draw near the Falls of Montmorenci, and presently
you drive past the grove shutting from the road the country-house in
which the Duke of Kent spent some merry days of his jovial youth, and
come in sight of two lofty towers of stone,--monuments and witnesses of
the tragedy of Montmorenci.
Once a suspension-bridge, built sorely against the will of the
neighboring habitans, hung from these towers high over the long plunge
of the cataract. But one morning of the fatal spring after the first
winter's frost had tried the hold of the cable on the rocks, an old
peasant and his wife with their little grandson set out in their cart
to pass the bridge. As they drew near the middle the anchoring wires
suddenly lost their grip upon the shore, and whirled into the air; the
bridge crashed under the hapless passengers and they were launched from
its height, upon the verge of the fall and thence plunged, two hundred
and fifty feet, into the ruin of the abyss.
The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood upon low stone piers, so far
up the river from the cataract that whoever fell from it would yet have
many a chance for life; and it would have been perilous to offer
to replace the fallen structure, which, in the belief of faithful
Christians, clearly belonged to the numerous bridges built by the Devil,
in times when the Devil did not call himself a civil engineer.
The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad tale as he halted his
horses on the bridge; and as his passengers looked down the rock-fretted
brown torrent towards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion to shudder
that ever she had set foot on that suspension-bridge below Niagara, and
to prove to Basil's confusion that her doubt of the bridges between
the Three Sisters was not a case of nerves but an instinctive wisdom
concerning the unsafety of all bridges of that design.
From the gate opening into the grounds about the fall two or three
little French boys, whom they had not the heart to forbid, ran noisily
before them with cries in their sole English, “This way, sir” and led
toward a weather-beaten summer-house that tottered upon a projecting
rock above the verge of the cataract. But our tourists shook their
heads, and turned away for a more distant and less dizzy enjoyment of
the spectacle, though any commanding point was sufficiently chasmal and
precipitous. The lofty bluff was scooped inward from the St. Lawrence in
a vast irregular semicircle, with cavernous hollows, one within another,
sinking far into its sides, and naked from foot to crest, or meagrely
wooded here and there with evergreen. From the central brink of these
gloomy purple chasms the foamy cataract launched itself, and like a
cloud,
“Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.”
I say a cloud, because I find it already said to my hand, as it were, in
a pretty verse, and because I must needs liken Montmorenci to something
that is soft and light. Yet a cloud does not represent the glinting
of the water in its downward swoop; it is like some broad slope of
sun-smitten snow; but snow is coldly white and opaque, and this has a
creamy warmth in its luminous mass; and so, there hangs the cataract
unsaid as before. It is a mystery that anything so grand should be so
lovely, that anything so tenderly fair in whatever aspect should yet be
so large that one glance fails to comprehend it all. The rugged wildness
of the cliffs and hollows about it is softened by its gracious beauty,
which half redeems the vulgarity of the timber-merchant's uses in
setting the river at work in his saw-mills and choking its outlet into
the St. Lawrence with rafts of lumber and rubbish of slabs and shingles.
Nay, rather, it is alone amidst these things, and the eye takes note of
them by a separate effort.
Our tourists sank down upon the turf that crept with its white clover
to the edge of the precipice, and gazed dreamily upon the fall, filling
their vision with its exquisite color and form. Being wiser than I, they
did not try to utter its loveliness; they were content to feel it,
and the perfection of the afternoon, whose low sun slanting over the
landscape gave, under that pale, greenish-blue sky, a pensive sentiment
of autumn to the world. The crickets cried amongst the grass; the
hesitating chirp of birds came from the tree overhead; a shaggy colt
left off grazing in the field and stalked up to stare at them; their
little guides, having found that these people had no pleasure in
the sight of small boys scuffling on the verge of a precipice, threw
themselves also down upon the grass and crooned a long, long ballad in a
mournful minor key about some maiden whose name was La Belle Adeline. It
was a moment of unmixed enjoyment for every sense, and through all their
being they were glad; which considering, they ceased to be so, with a
deep sigh, as one reasoning that he dreams must presently awake. They
never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it; but perhaps
their rapture would have ceased as swiftly, even if they had not tried
to make it a fact of consciousness.
“If there were not dinner after such experiences as these,” said Isabel,
as they sat at table that evening, “I don't know what would become of
one. But dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty, and brings you
gently back to earth. You must eat, don't you see, and there's nothing
disgraceful about what you're obliged to do; and so--it's all right.”
“Isabel, Isabel,” cried her husband, “you have a wonderful mind, and
its workings always amaze me. But be careful, my dear; be careful. Don't
work it too hard. The human brain, you know: delicate organ.”
“Well, you understand what I mean; and I think it's one of the great
charms of a husband, that you're not forced to express yourself to him.
A husband,” continued Isabel, sententiously, poising a bit of meringue
between her thumb and finger,--for they had reached that point in the
repast, “a husband is almost as good as another woman!”
In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and exchanged the history of the
day with them.
“Certainly,” said Mrs. Ellison, at the end, “it's been a pleasant day
enough, but what of the night? You've been turned out, too, by those
people who came on the steamer, and who might as well have stayed on
board to-night; have you got another room?”
“Not precisely,” said Isabel; “we have a coop in the fifth story, right
under the roof.”
Mrs. Ellison turned energetically upon her husband and cried in tones of
reproach, “Richard, Mrs. March has a room!”
“A coop, she said,” retorted that amiable Colonel, “and we're too good
for that. The clerk is keeping us in suspense about a room, because
he means to surprise us with something palatial at the end. It's his
joking way.”
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Ellison. “Have you seen him since dinner?”
“I have made life a burden to him for the last half-hour,” returned the
Colonel, with the kindliest smile.
“O Richard,” cried his wife, in despair of his amendment, “you wouldn't
make life a burden to a mouse!” And having nothing else for it, she
laughed, half in sorrow, half in fondness.
“Well, Fanny,” the Colonel irrelevantly answered, “put on your hat and
things, and let's all go up to Durham Terrace for a promenade. I know
our friends want to go. It's something worth seeing; and by the time we
get back, the clerk will have us a perfectly sumptuous apartment.”
Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of Southern Europe in
Quebec than the Sunday-night promenading on Durham Terrace. This is the
ample space on the brow of the cliff to the left of the citadel, the
noblest and most commanding position in the whole city, which was
formerly occupied by the old castle of Saint Louis, where dwelt the
brave Count Frontenac and his splendid successors of the French regime.
The castle went the way of Quebec by fire some forty years ago, and Lord
Durham leveled the site and made it a public promenade. A stately arcade
of solid masonry supports it on the brink of the rock, and an iron
parapet incloses it; there are a few seats to lounge upon, and some idle
old guns for the children to clamber over and play with. A soft twilight
had followed the day, and there was just enough obscurity to hide from a
willing eye the Northern and New World facts of the scene, and to bring
into more romantic relief the citadel dark against the mellow evening,
and the people gossiping from window to window across the narrow streets
of the Lower Town. The Terrace itself was densely thronged, and there
was a constant coming and going of the promenaders, who each formally
paced back and forth upon the planking for a certain time, and then went
quietly home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were nearly all
French, and they were not generally, it seemed, of the first fashion,
but rather of middling condition in life; the English being represented
only by a few young fellows and now and then a redfaced old gentleman
with an Indian scarf trailing from his hat. There were some fair
American costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essentially
Quebecian. The young girls walking in pairs, or with their lovers,
had the true touch of provincial unstylishness, the young men the
ineffectual excess of the second-rate Latin dandy, their elders the rich
inelegance of a bourgeoisie in their best. A few, better-figured avocats
or notaires (their profession was as unmistakable as if they had carried
their well-polished brass doorplates upon their breasts) walked and
gravely talked with each other. The non-American character of the
scene was not less vividly marked in the fact that each person dressed
according to his own taste and frankly indulged private preferences
in shapes and colors. One of the promenaders was in white, even to
his canvas shoes; another, with yet bolder individuality, appeared in
perfect purple. It had a strange, almost portentous effect when these
two startling figures met as friends and joined each other in the
promenade with linked arms; but the evening was already beginning to
darken round them, and presently the purple comrade was merely a sombre
shadow beside the glimmering white.
The valleys and the heights now vanished; but the river defined itself
by the varicolored lights of the ships and steamers that lay, dark,
motionless bulks, upon its broad breast; the lights of Point Lewis
swarmed upon the other shore; the Lower Town, two hundred feet below
them, stretched an alluring mystery of clustering roofs and lamplit
windows and dark and shining streets around the mighty rock,
mural-crowned. Suddenly a spectacle peculiarly Northern and
characteristic of Quebec revealed itself; a long arch brightened over
the northern horizon; the tremulous flames of the aurora, pallid violet
or faintly tinged with crimson, shot upward from it, and played with
a weird apparition and evanescence to the zenith. While the strangers
looked, a gun boomed from the citadel, and the wild sweet notes of the
bugle sprang out upon the silence.
Then they all said, “How perfectly in keeping everything has been!” and
sauntered back to the hotel.
The Colonel went into the office to give the clerk another turn on the
rack, and make him confess to a hidden apartment somewhere, while Isabel
left her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and invited Miss Kitty
to look at her coop in the fifth story. As they approached, light and
music and laughter stole out of an open door next hers, and Isabel,
distinguishing the voices of the theatrical party, divined that this
was the sick-chamber, and that they were again cheering up the afflicted
member of the troupe. Some one was heard to say, “Well, 'ow do you feel
now, Charley?” and a sound of subdued swearing responded, followed by
more laughter, and the twanging of a guitar, and a snatch of song, and a
stir of feet and dresses as for departure.
The two listeners shrank together; as women they could not enjoy these
proofs of the jolly camaraderie existing among the people of the
troupe. They trembled as before the merriment of as many light-hearted,
careless, good-natured young men: it was no harm, but it was dismaying;
and, “Dear!” cried Isabel, “what shall we do?”
“Go back,” said Miss Ellison, boldly, and back they ran to the parlor,
where they found Basil and the Colonel and his wife in earnest conclave.
The Colonel, like a shrewd strategist, was making show of a desperation
more violent than his wife's, who was thus naturally forced into the
attitude of moderating his fury.
“Well, Fanny, that's all he can do for us; and I do think it's the most
outrageous thing in the world! It's real mean!”
Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own denunciatory manner, but just
then she was obliged to answer Isabel's eager inquiry whether they had
got a room yet. “Yes, a room,” she said, “with two beds. But what are we
to do with one room? That clerk--I don't know what to call him”--(“Call
him a hotel-clerk, my dear; you can't say anything worse,” interrupted
her husband)--“seems to think the matter perfectly settled.”
“You see, Mrs. March,” added the Colonel, “he's able to bully us in this
way because he has the architecture on his side. There isn't another
room in the house.”
“Let me think a moment,” said Isabel not thinking an instant. She had
taken a fancy to at least two of these people from the first, and in the
last hour they had all become very well acquainted now she said, “I'll
tell you: there are two beds in our room also; we ladies will take one
room, and you gentlemen the other!”
“Mrs. March, I bow to the superiority of the Boston mind,” said the
Colonel, while his females civilly protested and consented; “and I might
almost hail you as our preserver. If ever you come to Milwaukee,--which
is the centre of the world, as Boston is,--we--I--shall be happy to
have you call at my place of business.--I didn't commit myself, did I,
Fanny?--I am sometimes hospitable to excess, Mrs. March,” he said, to
explain his aside. “And now, let us reconnoitre. Lead on, madam, and the
gratitude of the houseless stranger will follow you.”
The whole party explored both rooms, and the ladies decided to keep
Isabel's. The Colonel was dispatched to see that the wraps and traps of
his party were sent to this number, and Basil went with him. The things
came long before the gentlemen returned, but the ladies happily employed
the interval in talking over the excitements of the day, and in saying
from time to time, “So very kind of you, Mrs. March,” and “I don't know
what we should have done,” and “Don't speak of it, please,” and “I'm
sure it's a great pleasure to me.”
In the room adjoining theirs, where the invalid actor lay, and where
lately there had been minstrelsy and apparently dancing for his solace,
there was now comparative silence. Two women's voices talked together,
and now and then a guitar was touched by a wandering hand. Isabel
had just put up her handkerchief to conceal her first yawn, when the
gentlemen, odorous of cigars, returned to say good-night.
“It's the second door from this, isn't it, Isabel?” asked her husband.
“Yes, the second door. Good-night. Good-night.”
The two men walked off together; but in a minute afterwards they had
returned and were knocking tremulously at the closed door.
“O, what has happened?” chorused the ladies in woeful tune, seeing a
certain wildness in the face that confronted them.
“We don't know!” answered the others in as fearful a key, and related
how they had found the door of their room ajar, and a bright light
streaming into the corridor. They did not stop to ponder this fact, but,
with the heedlessness of their sex, pushed the door wide open, when they
saw seated before the mirror a bewildering figure, with disheveled locks
wandering down the back, and in dishabille expressive of being quite
at home there, which turned upon them a pair of pale blue eyes, under a
forehead remarkable for the straggling fringe of hair that covered it.
They professed to have remained transfixed at the sight, and to have
noted a like dismay on the visage before the glass, ere they summoned
strength to fly. These facts Colonel Ellison gave at the command of his
wife, with many protests and insincere delays amidst which the curiosity
of his hearers alone prevented them from rending him in pieces.
“And what do you suppose it was?” demanded his wife, with forced
calmness, when he had at last made an end of the story and his
abominable hypoocisies.
“Well, I think it was a mermaid.”
“A mermaid!” said his wife, scornfully. “How do you know?”
“It had a comb in its hand, for one thing; and besides, my dear, I hope
I know a mermaid when I see it.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Ellison, “it was no mermaid, it was a mistake; and I'm
going to see about it. Will you go with me, Richard?”
“No money could induce me! If it's a mistake, it isn't proper for me to
go; if it's a mermaid, it's dangerous.”
“O you coward!” said the intrepid little woman to a hero of all the
fights on Sherman's march to the sea; and presently they heard her
attack the mysterious enemy with a lady-like courage, claiming the
invaded chamber. The foe replied with like civility, saying the clerk
had given her that room with the understanding that another lady was to
be put there with her, and she had left the door unlocked to admit her.
The watchers with the sick man next door appeared and confirmed this
speech, a feeble voice from the bedclothes swore to it.
“Of course,” added the invader, “if I'd known 'ow it really was, I never
would lave listened to such a thing, never. And there isn't another 'ole
in the louse to lay me 'ead,” she concluded.
“Then it's the clerk's fault,” said Mrs. Ellison, glad to retreat
unharmed; and she made her husband ring for the guilty wretch, a
pale, quiet young Frenchman, whom the united party, sallying into
the corridor, began to upbraid in one breath, the lady in dishabille
vanishing as often as she remembered it, and reappearing whenever some
strong point of argument or denunciation occurred to her.
The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his wicked tribe, threw himself upon
their mercy and confessed everything: the house was so crowded, and
he had been so crazed by the demands upon him, that he had understood
Colonel Ellison's application to be for a bed for the young lady in his
party, and he had done the very best he could. If the lady there--she
vanished again--would give up the room to the two gentlemen, he would
find her a place with the housekeeper. To this the lady consented
without difficulty, and the rest dispersing, she kissed one of the sick
man's watchers with “Isn't it a shame, Bella?” and flitted down the
darkness of the corridor. The rooms upon it seemed all, save the two
assigned our travellers, to be occupied by ladies of the troupe; their
doors successively opened, and she was heard explaining to each as she
passed. The momentary displeasure which she had shown at her banishment
was over. She detailed the facts with perfect good-nature, and though
the others appeared no more than herself to find any humorous cast in
the affair, they received her narration with the same amiability. They
uttered their sympathy seriously, and each parted from her with some
friendly word. Then all was still.
“Richard,” said Mrs. Ellison, when in Isabel's room the travellers had
briefly celebrated these events, “I should think you'd hate to leave us
alone up here.”
“I do; but you can't think how I hate to go off alone. I wish you'd come
part of the way with us, Ladies; I do indeed. Leave your door unlocked,
at any rate.”
This prayer, uttered at parting outside the room, was answered from
within by a sound of turning keys and sliding bolts, and a low thunder
as of bureaus and washstands rolled against the door. “The ladies are
fortifying their position,” said the Colonel to Basil, and the two
returned to their own chamber. “I don't wish any intrusions,” he said,
instantly shutting himself in; “my nerves are too much shaken now. What
an awfully mysterious old place this Quebec is, Mr. March! I'll tell you
what: it's my opinion that this is an enchanted castle, and if my ribs
are not walked over by a muleteer in the course of the night, it's all I
ask.”
In this and other discourse recalling the famous adventure of Don
Quixote, the Colonel beguiled the labor of disrobing, and had got as far
as his boots, when there came a startling knock at the door. With one
boot in his hand and the other on his foot, the Colonel limped forward.
“I suppose it's that clerk has sent to say he's made some other
mistake,” and he flung wide the door, and then stood motionless before
it, dumbly staring at a figure on the threshold,--a figure with the
fringed forehead and pale blue eyes of her whom they had so lately
turned out of that room.
Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she
said, with a dignity that recalled their scattered senses, “but will
you 'ave the goodness to look if my beads are on your table--O thanks,
thanks, thanks!” she continued, showing her face and one hand, as Basil
blushingly advanced with a string of heavy black beads, piously adorned
with a large cross. “I'm sure, I'm greatly obliged to you, gentlemen,
and I hask a thousand pardons for troublin' you,” she concluded in a
somewhat severe tone, that left them abashed and culpable; and vanished
as mysteriously as she had appeared.
“Now, see here,” said the Colonel, with a huge sigh as he closed the
door again, and this time locked it, “I should like to know how long
this sort of thing is to be kept up? Because, if it's to be regularly
repeated during the night, I'm going to dress again.” Nevertheless, he
finished undressing and got into bed, where he remained for some time
silent. Basil put out the light. “O, I'm sorry you did that, my dear
fellow,” said the Colonel; “but never mind, it was an idle curiosity, no
doubt. It's my belief that in the landlord's extremity of bedlinen, I've
been put to sleep between a pair of tablecloths; and I thought I'd like
to look. It seems to me that I make out a checkered pattern on top and
a flowered or arabesque pattern underneath. I wish they had given me
mates. It's pretty hard having to sleep between odd tablecloths. I
shall complain to the landlord of this in the morning. I've never had to
sleep between odd table-cloths at any hotel before.”
The Colonel's voice seemed scarcely to have died away upon Basil's
drowsy ear, when suddenly the sounds of music and laughter from the
invalid's room startled him wide awake. The sick man's watchers were
coquetting with some one who stood in the little court-yard five stories
below. A certain breadth of repartee was naturally allowable at that
distance; the lover avowed his passion in ardent terms, and the ladies
mocked him with the same freedom, now and then totally neglecting him
while they sang a snatch of song to the twanging of the guitar,
or talked professional gossip, and then returning to him with some
tormenting expression of tenderness.
All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to Basil; yet he could
recollect few things intended for his pleasure that had given him more
satisfaction. He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight on the
high-gabled silvery roofs around and on the gardens of the convents
and the towers of the quaint city, that the scene wanted nothing of the
proper charm of Spanish humor and romance, and he was as grateful to
those poor souls as if they had meant him a favor. To us of the hither
side of the foot-lights, there is always something fascinating in the
life of the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are never so
unreal as in their own characters. In their shabby bestowal in those
mean upper rooms, their tawdry poverty, their merry submission to the
errors and caprices of destiny, their mutual kindliness and careless
friendship, these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-footed
burlesque seemed to be playing rather than living the life of strolling
players; and their love-making was the last touch of a comedy that Basil
could hardly accept as reality, it was so much more like something seen
upon the stage. He would not have detracted anything from the commonness
and cheapness of the 'mise en scene', for that, he reflected drowsily
and confusedly, helped to give it an air of fact and make it like an
episode of fiction. But above all, he was pleased with the natural
eventlessness of the whole adventure, which was in perfect agreement
with his taste; and just as his reveries began to lose shape in dreams,
he was aware of an absurd pride in the fact that all this could have
happened to him in our commonplace time and hemisphere. “Why,” he
thought, “if I were a student in Alcala, what better could I have
asked?” And as at last his soul swung out from its moorings and lapsed
down the broad slowly circling tides out in the sea of sleep, he was
conscious of one subtle touch of compassion for those poor strollers,--a
pity so delicate and fine and tender that it hardly seemed his own but
rather a sense of the compassion that pities the whole world.
X. HOMEWARD AND HOME.
The travellers all met at breakfast and duly discussed the adventures of
the night; and for the rest, the forenoon passed rapidly and slowly with
Basil and Isabel, as regret to leave Quebec, or the natural impatience
of travellers to be off, overcame them. Isabel spent part of it in
shopping, for she had found some small sums of money and certain odd
corners in her trunks still unappropriated, and the handsome stores on
the Rue Fabrique were very tempting. She said she would just go in and
look; and the wise reader imagines the result. As she knelt over her
boxes, trying so to distribute her purchases as to make them look as if
they were old,--old things of hers, which she had brought all the way
round from Boston with her,--a fleeting touch of conscience stayed her
hand.
“Basil,” she said, “perhaps we'd better declare some of these things.
What's the duty on those?” she asked, pointing to certain articles.
“I don't know. About a hundred per cent. ad valorem.”
“C'est a dire--?”
“As much as they cost.”
“O then, dearest,” responded Isabel indignantly, “it can't be wrong to
smuggle! I won't declare a thread!”
“That's very well for you, whom they won't ask. But what if they ask me
whether there's anything to declare?”
Isabel looked at her husband and hesitated. Then she replied in terms
that I am proud to record in honor of American womanhood: “You mustn't
fib about--it, Basil” (heroically); “I couldn't respect you if you did,”
(tenderly); “but” (with decision) “you must slip out of it some way!”
The ladies of the Ellison party, to whom she put the case in the parlor,
agreed with her perfectly. They also had done a little shopping in
Quebec, and they meant to do more at Montreal before they returned to
the States. Mrs. Ellison was disposed to look upon Isabel's compunctions
as a kind of treason to the sex, to be forgiven only because so quickly
repented.
The Ellisons were going up the Saguenay before coming on to Boston, and
urged our friends hard to go with them. “No, that must be for another
time,” said Isabel. “Mr. March has to be home by a certain day; and we
shall just get back in season.” Then she made them promise to spend
a day with her in Boston, and the Colonel coming to say that he had a
carriage at the door for their excursion to Lorette, the two parties
bade good-by with affection and many explicit hopes of meeting soon
again.
“What do you think of them, dearest?” demanded Isabel, as she sallied
out with Basil for a final look at Quebec.
“The young lady is the nicest; and the other is well enough, too. She is
a good deal like you, but with the sense of humor left out. You've only
enough to save you.”
“Well, her husband is jolly enough for both of them. He's funnier
than you, Basil, and he hasn't any of your little languid airs and
affectations. I don't know but I'm a bit disappointed in my choice,
darling; but I dare say I shall work out of it. In fact, I don't know
but the Colonel is a little too jolly. This drolling everything is
rather fatiguing.” And having begun, they did not stop till they
had taken their friends to pieces. Dismayed, then, they hastily
reconstructed them, and said that they were among the pleasantest people
they ever knew, and they were really very sorry to part with them, and
they should do everything to make them have a good time in Boston.
They were sauntering towards Durham Terrace where they leaned long upon
the iron parapet and blest themselves with the beauty of the prospect. A
tender haze hung upon the landscape and subdued it till the scene was
as a dream before them. As in a dream the river lay, and dream-like the
shipping moved or rested on its deep, broad bosom. Far off stretched
the happy fields with their dim white villages; farther still the mellow
heights melted into the low hovering heaven. The tinned roofs of the
Lower Town twinkled in the morning sun; around them on every hand, on
that Monday forenoon when the States were stirring from ocean to ocean
in feverish industry, drowsed the gray city within her walls; from the
flag-staff of the citadel hung the red banner of Saint George in sleep.
Their hearts were strangely and deeply moved. It seemed to them that
they looked upon the last stronghold of the Past, and that afar off
to the southward they could hear the marching hosts of the invading
Present; and as no young and loving soul can relinquish old things
without a pang, they sighed a long mute farewell to Quebec.
Next summer they would come again, yes; but, ah me' every one knows what
next summer is!
Part of the burlesque troupe rode down in the omnibus to the Grand Trunk
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?”
XI. NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.
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.