University of Virginia Library

3. III.
ON THE WAY BACK TO QUEBEC.

BY this time the boat was moving down the
river, and every one was alive to the
scenery. The procession of the pine-clad,
rounded heights on either shore began shortly
after Ha-Ha Bay had disappeared behind a curve,
and it hardly ceased, save at one point, before the
boat re-entered the St. Lawrence. The shores of
the stream are almost uninhabited. The hills rise
from the water's edge, and if ever a narrow vale
divides them, it is but to open drearier solitudes
to the eye. In such a valley would stand a saw-mill,
and huddled about it a few poor huts, while
a friendless road, scarce discernible from the boat,
wound up from the river through the valley, and
led to wildernesses all the forlorner for the devastation
of their forests. Now and then an island,
rugged as the shores, broke the long reaches of the
grim river with its massive rock and dark evergreen,
and seemed in the distance to forbid escape
from those dreary waters, over which no bird flew,
and in which it was incredible any fish swam.

Mrs. Ellison, with her foot comfortably and not
ungracefully supported on a stool, was in so little
pain as to be looking from time to time at one of
the guide-books which the colonel had lavished upon
his party, and which she was disposed to hold to
very strict account for any excesses of description.

“It says here that the water of the Saguenay
is as black as ink. Do you think it is, Richard?”

“It looks so.”

“Well, but if you took some up in your hand?”

“Perhaps it would n't be as black as the best
Maynard and Noyes, but it would be black enough
for all practical purposes.”

“Maybe,” suggested Kitty, “the guide-book
means the kind that is light blue at first, but `becomes
a deep black on exposure to the air,' as the
label says.”

“What do you think, Mr. Arbuton?” asked
Mrs. Ellison with unabated anxiety.

“Well, really, I don't know,” said Mr. Arbuton,
who thought it a very trivial kind of talk, “I can't
say, indeed. I have n't taken any of it up in my
hand.”

“That 's true,” said Mrs. Ellison gravely, with
an accent of reproval for the others who had not
thought of so simple a solution of the problem,
“very true.”

The colonel looked into her face with an air of
well-feigned alarm. “You don't think the sprain
has gone to your head, Fanny?” he asked, and
walked away, leaving Mr. Arbuton to the ladies.
Mrs. Ellison did not care for this or any other gibe,
if she but served her own purposes; and now,
having made everybody laugh and given the conversation
a lively turn, she was as perfectly content
as if she had not been herself an offering to
the cause of cheerfulness. She was, indeed, equal
to any sacrifice in the enterprise she had undertaken,
and would not only have given Kitty all
her worldly goods, but would have quite effaced
herself to further her own designs upon Mr. Arbuton.
She turned again to her guide-book, and
left the young people to continue the talk in unbroken
gayety. They at once became serious, as
most people do after a hearty laugh, which, if you
think, seems always to have something strange
and sad in it. But besides, Kitty was oppressed
by the coldness that seemed perpetually to hover
in Mr. Arbuton's atmosphere, while she was interested
by his fastidious good looks and his blameless
manners and his air of a world different from
any she had hitherto known. He was one of those
men whose perfection makes you feel guilty of
misdemeanor whenever they meet you, and whose

greeting turns your honest good-day coarse and
common; even Kitty's fearless ignorance and more
than Western disregard of dignities were not proof
against him. She had found it easy to talk with
Mrs. March as she did with her cousin at home;
she liked to be frank and gay in her parley, to
jest and to laugh and to make harmless fun, and to
sentimentalize in a half-earnest way; she liked to
be with Mr. Arbuton, but now she did not see how
she could take her natural tone with him. She
wondered at her daring lightness at the breakfast-table;
she waited for him to say something, and
he said, with a glance at the gray heaven that
always overhangs the Saguenay, that it was beginning
to rain, and unfurled the slender silk umbrella
which harmonized so perfectly with the
London effect of his dress, and held it over her.
Mrs. Ellison sat within the shelter of the projecting
roof, and diligently perused her book with her
eyes, and listened to their talk.

“The great drawback to this sort of thing in
America,” continued Mr. Arbuton, “is that there
is no human interest about the scenery, fine as it
is.”

“Why, I don't know,” said Kitty, “there was
that little settlement round the saw-mill. Can't
you imagine any human interest in the lives of the

people there? It seems to me that one might
make almost anything out of them. Suppose, for
example, that the owner of that mill was a disappointed
man who had come here to bury the wreck
of his life in — sawdust?”

“O, yes! That sort of thing; certainly. But
I did n't mean that, I meant something historical.
There is no past, no atmosphere, no traditions, you
know.”

“O, but the Saguenay has a tradition,” said
Kitty. “You know that a party of the first explorers
left their comrades at Tadoussac, and came up
the Saguenay three hundred years ago, and never
were seen or heard of again. I think it 's so in
keeping with the looks of the river. The Saguenay
would never tell a secret.”

“Um!” uttered Mr. Arbuton, as if he were not
quite sure that it was the Saguenay's place to have
a legend of this sort, and disposed to snub the
legend because the Saguenay had it. After a little
silence, he began to speak of famous rivers abroad.

“I suppose,” Kitty said, “the Rhine has traditions
enough, has n't it?”

“Yes,” he answered, “but I think the Rhine
rather overdoes it. You can't help feeling, you
know, that it 's somewhat melodramatic and —
common. Have you ever seen the Rhine?”

“O, no! This is almost the first I 've seen of
anything. Perhaps,” she added, demurely, yet
with a tremor at finding herself about to make
light of Mr. Arbuton, “if I had had too much of
tradition on the Rhine I should want more of it on
the Saguenay.”

“Why, you must allow there 's a golden mean
in everything, Miss Ellison,” said her companion
with a lenient laugh, not feeling it disagreeable to
be made light of by her.

“Yes; and I 'm afraid we 're going to find Cape
Trinity and Cape Eternity altogether too big when
we come to them. Don't you think eighteen hundred
feet excessively high for a feature of river
scenery?”

Mr. Arbuton really did have an objection to the
exaggerations of nature on this continent, and secretly
thought them in bad taste, but he had never
formulated his feeling. He was not sure but it
was ridiculous, now that it was suggested, and yet
the possibility was too novel to be entertained
without suspicion.

However, when after a while the rumor of their
approach to the great objects of the Saguenay
journey had spread among the passengers, and
they began to assemble at points favorable for the
enjoyment of the spectacle, he was glad to have

secured the place he held with Miss Ellison, and a
sympathetic thrill of excitement passed through
his loath superiority. The rain ceased as they
drew nearer, and the gray clouds that had hung
so low upon the hills sullenly lifted from them and
let their growing height be seen. The captain
bade his sight-seers look at the vast Roman profile
that showed itself upon the rock, and then he
pointed out the wonderful Gothic arch, the reputed
doorway of an unexplored cavern, under which an
upright shaft of stone had stood for ages statue-like,
till not many winters ago the frost heaved it from
its base, and it plunged headlong down through
the ice into the unfathomed depths below. The
unvarying gloom of the pines was lit now by the
pensive glimmer of birch-trees, and this gray tone
gave an indescribable sentiment of pathos and of
age to the scenery. Suddenly the boat rounded the
corner of the three steps, each five hundred feet
high, in which Cape Eternity climbs from the
river, and crept in under the naked side of the
awful cliff. It is sheer rock, springing from the
black water, and stretching upward with a weary,
effort-like aspect, in long impulses of stone marked
by deep seams from space to space, till, fifteen
hundred feet in air, its vast brow beetles forward,
and frowns with a scattering fringe of pines.
There are stains of weather and of oozing springs
upon the front of the cliff, but it is height alone
that seems to seize the eye, and one remembers
afterwards these details, which are indeed so few
as not properly to enter into the effect. The rock
fully justifies its attributive height to the eye,
which follows the upward rush of the mighty
acclivity, steep after steep, till it wins the cloud-capt
summit, when the measureless mass seems to
swing and sway overhead, and the nerves tremble
with the same terror that besets him who looks
downward from the verge of a lofty precipice. It
is wholly grim and stern; no touch of beauty relieves
the austere majesty of that presence. At
the foot of Cape Eternity the water is of unknown
depth, and it spreads, a black expanse, in the rounding
hollow of shores of unimaginable wildness and
desolation, and issues again in its river's course
around the base of Cape Trinity. This is yet
loftier than the sister cliff, but it slopes gently
backward from the stream, and from foot to crest
it is heavily clothed with a forest of pines. The
woods that hitherto have shagged the hills with a
stunted and meagre growth, showing long stretches
scarred by fire, now assume a stately size, and assemble
themselves compactly upon the side of the
mountain, setting their serried stems one rank
above another, till the summit is crowned with the
mass of their dark green plumes, dense and soft
and beautiful; so that the spirit perturbed by the
spectacle of the other cliff is calmed and assuaged
by the serene grandeur of this.

There have been, to be sure, some human agencies
at work even under the shadow of Cape
Eternity to restore the spirit to self-possession,
and perhaps none turns from it wholly dismayed.
Kitty, at any rate, took heart from some works of
art which the cliff wall displayed near the water's
edge. One of these was a lively fresco portrait of
Lieutenant-General Sherman, with the insignia of
his rank, and the other was an even more striking
effigy of General O'Neil, of the Armies of the Irish
Republic, wearing a threatening aspect, and designed
in a bold conceit of his presence there as
conqueror of Canada in the year 1875. Mr.
Arbuton was inclined to resent these intrusions
upon the sublimity of nature, and he could not
conceive, without disadvantage to them, how Miss
Ellison and the colonel should accept them so
cheerfully as part of the pleasure of the whole.
As he listened blankly to their exchange of jests
he found himself awfully beset by a temptation
which one of the boat's crew placed before the passengers.
This was a bucket full of pebbles of inviting

size; and the man said, “Now, see which
can hit the cliff. It 's farther than any of you
can throw, though it looks so near.”

The passengers cast themselves upon the store
of missiles, Colonel Ellison most actively among
them. None struck the cliff, and suddenly Mr.
Arbuton felt a blind, stupid, irresistible longing to
try his chance. The spirit of his college days, of
his boating and ball-playing youth, came upon
him. He picked up a pebble, while Kitty opened
her eyes in a stare of dumb surprise. Then he
wheeled and threw it, and as it struck against the
cliff with a shock that seemed to have broken all
the windows on the Back Bay, he exulted in a
sense of freedom the havoc caused him. It was
as if for an instant he had rent away the ties of
custom, thrown off the bonds of social allegiance,
broken down and trampled upon the conventions
which his whole life long he had held so dear and
respectable. In that moment of frenzy he feared
himself capable of shaking hands with the shabby
Englishman in the Glengarry cap, or of asking the
whole admiring company of passengers down to
the bar. A cry of applause had broken from them
at his achievement, and he had for the first time
tasted the sweets of popular favor. Of course a
revulsion must come, and it must be of a corresponding

violence; and the next moment Mr. Arbuton
hated them all, and most of all Colonel
Ellison, who had been loudest in his praise. Him
he thought for that moment everything that was
aggressively and intrusively vulgar. But he could
not utter these friendly impressions, nor is it so
easy to withdraw from any concession, and he
found it impossible to repair his broken defences.
Destiny had been against him from the beginning,
and now why should he not strike hands with it
for the brief half-day that he was to continue in
these people's society? In the morning he would
part from them forever, and in the mean time why
should he not try to please and be pleased? There
might, to be sure, have been many reasons why
he should not do this; but however the balance
stood he now yielded himself passively to his fate.
He was polite to Mrs. Ellison, he was attentive to
Kitty, and as far as he could be entered into the
fantastic spirit of her talk with the colonel. He
was not a dull man; he had quite an apt wit of
his own, and a neat way of saying things; but
humor always seemed to him something not perfectly
well bred; of course he helped to praise it
in some old-established diner-out, or some woman
of good fashion, whose mots it was customary to
repeat, and he even tolerated it in books; but he
was at a loss with these people, who looked at life
in so bizarre a temper, yet without airiness or
pretension, nay, with a whimsical readiness to
acknowledge kindred in every droll or laughable
thing.

The boat stopped at Tadoussac on her return,
and among the spectators who came down to the
landing was a certain very pretty, conscious-looking,
silly, bridal-faced young woman, — imaginably
the belle of the season at that forlorn watering-place,
— who before coming on board stood awhile
attended by a following of those elderly imperial
and colonial British who heavily flutter round the
fair at such resorts. She had an air of utterly
satisfied vanity, in which there was no harm in the
world, and when she saw that she had fixed the
eyes of the shoreward-gazing passengers, it appeared
as if she fell into a happy trepidation too
blissful to be passively borne; she moistened her
pretty red lips with her tongue, she twitched her
mantle, she settled the bow at her lovely throat,
she bridled and tossed her graceful head.

“What should you do next, Kitty?” asked the
colonel, who had been sympathetically intent upon
all this.

“O, I think I should pat my foot,” answered
Kitty; and in fact the charming simpleton on

shore, having perfected her attitude, was tapping
the ground nervously with the toe of her adorable
slipper.

After the boat started, a Canadian lady of ripe
age, yet of a vivacity not to be reconciled with the
notion of the married state, capered briskly about
among her somewhat stolid and indifferent friends,
saying, “They 're going to fire it as soon as we
round the point”; and presently a dull boom, as
of a small piece of ordnance discharged in the
neighborhood of the hotel, struck through the gathering
fog, and this elderly sylph clapped her hands
and exulted: “They 've fired it, they 've fired it!
and now the captain will blow the whistle in answer.”
But the captain did nothing of the kind,
and the lady, after some more girlish effervescence,
upbraided him for an old owl and an old muff, and
so sank into such a flat and spiritless calm that
she was sorrowful to see.

“Too bad, Mr. Arbuton, is n't it?” said the
colonel; and Mr. Arbuton listened in vague doubt
while Kitty built up with her cousin a touching
romance for the poor lady, supposed to have spent
the one brilliant and successful summer of her life
at Tadoussac, where her admirers had agreed to
bemoan her loss in this explosion of gunpowder.
They asked him if he did not wish the captain had

whistled; and “Oh!” shuddered Kitty, “does n't
it all make you feel just as if you had been doing
it yourself?” — a question which he hardly knew
how to answer, never having, to his knowledge,
done a ridiculous thing in his life, much less been
guilty of such behavior as that of the disappointed
lady.

At Cacouna, where the boat stopped to take on
the horses and carriages of some home-returning
sojourners, the pier was a labyrinth of equipages
of many sorts and sizes, and a herd of bright-hooded,
gayly blanketed horses gave variety to
the human crowd that soaked and steamed in the
fine, slowly falling rain. A draught-horse was
every three minutes driven into their midst with
tedious iteration as he slowly drew baskets of coal
up from the sloop unloading at the wharf, and each
time they closed solidly upon his retreat as if they
never expected to see that horse again while the
world stood. They were idle ladies and gentlemen
under umbrellas, Indians and habitans taking
the rain stolidly erect or with shrugged shoulders,
and two or three clergymen of the curate type,
who might have stepped as they were out of any
dull English novel. These were talking in low
voices and putting their hands to their ears to
catch the replies of the lady-passengers who hung

upon the rail, and twaddled back as dryly as if
there was no moisture in life. All the while the
safety-valves hissed with the escaping steam, and
the boat's crew silently toiled with the grooms
of the different horses to get the equipages on
board. With the carriages it was an affair of
mere muscle, but the horses required to be managed
with brain. No sooner had one of them
placed his fore feet on the gangway plank than he
protested by backing up over a mass of patient
Canadians, carrying with him half a dozen grooms
and deck-hands. Then his hood was drawn over
his eyes, and he was blindly walked up and down
the pier, and back to the gangway, which he knew
as soon as he touched it. He pulled, he pranced,
he shied, he did all that a bad and stubborn horse
can do, till at last a groom mounted his back,
a clump of deck-hands tugged at his bridle, and
other grooms, tenderly embracing him at different
points, pushed, and he was thus conveyed on
board with mingled affection and ignominy. None
of the Canadians seemed amused by this; they regarded
it with serious composure as a fitting decorum,
and Mr. Arbuton had no comment to make
upon it. But at the first embrace bestowed upon
the horse by the grooms the colonel said absently,
“Ah! long-lost brother,” and Kitty laughed;
and as the scruples of each brute were successively
overcome, she helped to give some grotesque
interpretation to the various scenes of the melodrama,
while Mr. Arbuton stood beside her, and
sheltered her with his umbrella; and a spice of
malice in her heart told her that he viewed this
drolling, and especially her part in it, with grave
misgiving. That gave the zest of transgression to
her excess, mixed with dismay; for the tricksy
spirit in her was not a domineering spirit, but was
easily abashed by the moods of others. She ought
not to have laughed at Dick's speeches, she soon
told herself, much less helped him on. She dreadfully
feared that she had done something indecorous,
and she was pensive and silent over it as she
moved listlessly about after supper; and she sat
at last thinking in a dreary sort of perplexity on
what had passed during the day, which seemed a
long one.

The shabby Englishman with his wife and sister
were walking up and down the cabin. By and by
they stopped, and sat down at the table facing
Kitty; the elder woman, with a civil freedom, addressed
her some commonplace, and the four were
presently in lively talk; for Kitty had beamed
upon the woman in return, having already longed to
know something of them. The world was so fresh

to her, that she could find delight in those poor
singing or acting folk, though she had soon to own
to herself that their talk was not very witty nor
very wise, and that the best thing about them was
their good-nature. The colonel sat at the end of
the table with a newspaper; Mrs. Ellison had gone
to bed; and Kitty was beginning to tire of her new
acquaintance, and to wonder how she could get
away from them, when she saw rescue in the eye
of Mr. Arbuton as he came down the cabin. She
knew he was looking for her; she saw him check
himself with a start of recognition; then he walked
rapidly by the group, without glancing at them.

“Brrrr!” said the blond girl, drawing her blue
knit shawl about her shoulders, “is n't it cold?”
and she and her friends laughed.

“O dear!” thought Kitty, “I did n't suppose
they were so rude. I 'm afraid I must say good
night,” she added aloud, after a little, and stole
away the most conscience-stricken creature on that
boat. She heard those people laugh again after
she left them.