University of Virginia Library

8. VIII.
NEXT MORNING.

QUEBEC lay shining in the tender oblique
light of the northern sun when they
passed next morning through the Upper
Town market-place and took their way towards
Hope Gate, where they were to be met by the colonel
a little later. It is easy for the alert tourist
to lose his course in Quebec, and they, who were
neither hurried nor heedful, went easily astray.
But the street into which they had wandered, if
it did not lead straight to Hope Gate, had many
merits, and was very characteristic of the city.
Most of the houses on either hand were low structures
of one story, built heavily of stone or stuccoed
brick, with two dormer-windows, full of house-plants,
in each roof; the doors were each painted
of a livelier color than the rest of the house, and
each glistened with a polished brass knob, a large
brass knocker, or an intricate bell-pull of the same
resplendent metal, and a plate bearing the owner's
name and his professional title, which if not avocat
was sure to be notaire, so well is Quebec supplied

with those ministers of the law. At the side of
each house was a porte-cochère, and in this a smaller
door. The thresholds and doorsteps were covered
with the neatest and brightest oil-cloth; the
wooden sidewalk was very clean, like the steep,
roughly paved street itself; and at the foot of the
hill down which it sloped was a breadth of the city
wall, pierced for musketry, and, past the corner
of one of the houses, the half-length of cannon
showing. It had the charm of those ancient
streets, dear to Old-World travel, in which the
past and the present, decay and repair, peace and
war, have made friends in an effect that not only
wins the eye, but, however illogically, touches the
heart; and over the top of the wall it had a
stretch of such landscape as I know not what Old-World
street can command: the St. Lawrence,
blue and wide; a bit of the white village of Beauport
on its bank; then a vast breadth of pale-green,
upward-sloping meadows; then the purple
heights; and the hazy heaven over them. Half-way
down this happy street sat the artist whom
they had seen before in the court of the Hôtel
Dieu; he was sketching something, and evoking
the curious life of the neighborhood. Two schoolboys
in the uniform of the Seminary paused to
look at him as they loitered down the pavement;
a group of children encircled him; a little girl
with her hair in blue ribbons talked at a window
about him to some one within; a young
lady opened her casement and gazed furtively at
him; a door was set quietly ajar, and an old
grandam peeped out, shading her eyes with her
hand; a woman in deep mourning gave his sketch
a glance as she passed; a calash with a fat Quebecker
in it ran into a cart driven by a broad-hatted
peasant-woman, so eager were both to know what
he was drawing; a man lingered even at the head
of the street, as if it were any use to stop there.

As Kitty and Mr. Arbuton passed him, the artist
glanced at her with the smile of a man who
believes he knows how the case stands, and she
followed his eye in its withdrawal towards the bit
he was sketching: an old roof, and on top of this
a balcony, shut in with green blinds; yet higher,
a weather-worn, wood-colored gallery, pent-roofed
and balustered, with a geranium showing through
the balusters; a dormer-window with hook and
tackle, beside an Oriental-shaped pavilion with a
shining tin dome, — a picturesque confusion of
forms which had been, apparently, added from
time to time without design, and yet were full of
harmony. The unreasonable succession of roofs
had lifted the top far above the level of the surrounding

houses, into the heart of the morning
light, and some white doves circled about the pavilion,
or nestled cooing upon the window-sill,
where a young girl sat and sewed.

“Why, it 's Hilda in her tower,” said Kitty,
“of course! And this is just the kind of street
for such a girl to look down into. It does n't seem
like a street in real life, does it? The people all
look as if they had stepped out of stories, and
might step back any moment; and these queer
little houses: they 're the very places for things
to happen in!”

Mr. Arbuton smiled forbearingly, as she thought,
at this burst, but she did not care, and she turned,
at the bottom of the street, and lingered a few
moments for another look at the whole charming
picture; and then he praised it, and said that the
artist was making a very good sketch. “I wonder
Quebec is n't infested by artists the whole summer
long,” he added. “They go about hungrily picking
up bits of the picturesque, along our shores
and country roads, when they might exchange
their famine for a feast by coming here.”

“I suppose there 's a pleasure in finding out the
small graces and beauties of the poverty-stricken
subjects, that they would n't have in better ones,
is n't there?” asked Kitty. “At any rate, if I

were to write a story, I should want to take the
slightest sort of plot, and lay the scene in the
dullest kind of place, and then bring out all their
possibilities. I 'll tell you a book after my own
heart: `Details,' — just the history of a week in
the life of some young people who happen together
in an old New England country-house; nothing
extraordinary, little, every-day things told so exquisitely,
and all fading naturally away without
any particular result, only the full meaning of
everything brought out.”

“And don't you think it 's rather a sad ending
for all to fade away without any particular result?”
asked the young man, stricken he hardly knew
how or where. “Besides, I always thought that
the author of that book found too much meaning
in everything. He did for men, I 'm sure; but I
believe women are different, and see much more
than we do in a little space.”

nor a woman,” mocked Kitty. “Have you read
his other books?”

“Yes.”

“Are n't they delightful?”

“They 're very well; and I always wondered
he could write them. He does n't look it.”

“O, have you ever seen him?”

“He lives in Boston, you know.”

“Yes, yes; but — ” Kitty could not go on and
say that she had not supposed authors consorted
with creatures of common clay; and Mr. Arbuton,
who was the constant guest of people who would
have thought most authors sufficiently honored in
being received among them to meet such men as he,
was very far from guessing what was in her mind.

He waited a moment for her, and then said,
“He 's a very ordinary sort of man, — not what
one would exactly call a gentleman, you know, in
his belongings, — and yet his books have nothing
of the shop, nothing professionally literary, about
them. It seems as if almost any of us might
have written them.”

Kitty glanced quickly at him to see if he were
jesting; but Mr. Arbuton was not easily given to
irony, and he was now very much in earnest about
drawing on his light overcoat, which he had hitherto
carried on his arm with that scrupulous
consideration for it which was not dandyism, but
part of his self-respect; apparently, as an overcoat,
he cared nothing for it; as the overcoat of a man
of his condition he cared everything; and now,
though the sun was so bright on the open spaces, in
these narrow streets the garment was comfortable.

At another time, Kitty would have enjoyed the
care with which he smoothed it about his person,
but this profanation of her dearest ideals made the
moment serious. Her pulse quickened, and she
said, “I 'm afraid I can't enter into your feelings.
I was n't taught to respect the idea of a gentleman
very much. I 've often heard my uncle say that,
at the best, it was a poor excuse for not being just
honest and just brave and just kind, and a false
pretence of being something more. I believe, if
I were a man, I should n't want to be a gentleman.
At any rate, I 'd rather be the author of
those books, which any gentleman might have
written, than all the gentlemen who did n't, put
together.”

In the career of her indignation she had unconsciously
hurried her companion forward so swiftly
that they had reached Hope Gate as she spoke,
and interrupted the revery in which Colonel Ellison,
loafing up against the masonry, was contemplating
the sentry in his box.

“You 'd better not overheat yourself so early in
the day, Kitty,” said her cousin, serenely, with a
glance at her flushed face; “this expedition is not
going to be any joke.”

Now that Prescott Gate, by which so many
thousands of Americans have entered Quebec since

Arnold's excursionists failed to do so, is demolished,
there is nothing left so picturesque and characteristic
as Hope Gate, and I doubt if anywhere in
Europe there is a more mediæval-looking bit of
military architecture. The heavy stone gateway
is black with age, and the gate, which has probably
never been closed in our century, is of massive
frame set thick with mighty bolts and spikes. The
wall here sweeps along the brow of the crag on
which the city is built, and a steep street drops
down, by stone-parapeted curves and angles, from
the Upper to the Lower Town, where, in 1775,
nothing but a narrow lane bordered the St. Lawrence.
A considerable breadth of land has since
been won from the river, and several streets and
many piers now stretch between this alley and the
water; but the old Sault au Matelot still crouches
and creeps along under the shelter of the city wall
and the overhanging rock, which is thickly bearded
with weeds and grass, and trickles with abundant
moisture. It must be an ice-pit in winter, and I
should think it the last spot on the continent for
the summer to find; but when the summer has at
last found it, the old Sault au Matelot puts on a
vagabond air of Southern leisure and abandon, not
to be matched anywhere out of Italy. Looking
from that jutting rock near Hope Gate, behind
which the defeated Americans took refuge from
the fire of their enemies, the vista is almost unique
for a certain scenic squalor and gypsy luxury of
color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed,
sunken-chested workshops of every sort
lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean
up against the cliff in every imaginable posture of
worthlessness and decrepitude; light wooden galleries
cross to them from the second stories of the
houses which back upon the alley; and over these
galleries flutters, from a labyrinth of clothes-lines,
a variety of bright-colored garments of all ages,
sexes, and conditions; while the footway underneath
abounds in gossiping women, smoking men,
idle poultry, cats, children, and large, indolent
Newfoundland dogs.

“It was through this lane that Arnold's party
advanced almost to the foot of Mountain Street,
where they were to be joined by Montgomery's
force in an attempt to surprise Prescott Gate,” said
the colonel, with his unerring second-hand history.

`Wait till you see the whites of their eyes, and
then fire low,' and so forth. By the way, do you
suppose anybody did that at Bunker Hill, Mr.
Arbuton? Come, you 're a Boston man. My experience
is that recruits chivalrously fire into the
air without waiting to see the enemy at all, let
alone the whites of their eyes. Why! are n't you
coming?” he asked, seeing no movement to follow
in Kitty or Mr. Arbuton.

“It does n't look very pleasant under foot,
Dick,” suggested Kitty.

“Well, upon my word! Is this your uncle's
niece? I shall never dare to report this panic at
Eriecreek.”

“I can see the whole length of the alley, and
there 's nothing in it but chickens and domestic
animals.”

“Very well, as Fanny says; when Uncle Jack
— he 's your uncle — asks you about every inch of
the ground that Arnold's men were demoralized
over, I hope you 'll know what to say.”

Kitty laughed and said she should try a little
invention, if her Uncle Jack came down to inches.

“All right, Kitty; you can go along St. Paul
Street, there, and Mr. Arbuton and I will explore
the Sault au Matelot, and come out upon you,
covered with glory, at the other end.”

“I hope it 'll be glory,” said Kitty, with a glance
at the lane, “but I think it 's more likely to be
feathers and chopped straw. — Good by, Mr. Arbuton.”

“Not in the least,” answered the young man;
“I 'm going with you.”

The colonel feigned indignant surprise, and
marched briskly down the Sault au Matelot alone,
while the others took their way through St. Paul
Street in the same direction, amidst the bustle and
business of the port, past the banks and great commercial
houses, with the encounter of throngs of
seafaring faces of many nations, and, at the corner
of St. Peter Street, a glimpse of the national flag
thrown out from the American Consulate, which
intensified for untravelled Kitty her sense of remoteness
from her native land. At length they
turned into the street now called Sault au Matelot,
into which opens the lane once bearing that name,
and strolled idly along in the cool shadow, silence,
and solitude of the street. She was strangely
released from the constraint which Mr. Arbuton
usually put upon her. A certain defiant ease
filled her heart; she felt and thought whatever
she liked, for the first time in many days; while
he went puzzling himself with the problem of
a young lady who despised gentlemen, and yet
remained charming to him.

A mighty marine smell of oakum and salt-fish
was in the air, and “O,” sighed Kitty, “does n't
it make you long for distant seas? Should n't you

like to be shipwrecked for half a day or so, Mr.
Arbuton?”

“Yes; yes, certainly,” he replied absently, and
wondered what she laughed at. The silence of
the place was broken only by the noise of coopering
which seemed to be going on in every other house;
the solitude relieved only by the Newfoundland
dogs that stretched themselves upon the thresholds
of the cooper-shops. The monotony of these
shops and dogs took Kitty's humor, and as they
went slowly by she made a jest of them, as she
used to do with things she saw.

“But here 's a door without a dog!” she said,
presently. “This can't be a genuine cooper-shop,
of course, without a dog. O, that accounts for it,
perhaps!” she added, pausing before the threshold,
and glancing up at a sign — “Académie commerciale
et littéraire” — set under an upper window. What
a curious place for a seat of learning! What do
you suppose is the connection between cooper-shops
and an academical education, Mr. Arbuton?”

She stood looking up at the sign that moved her
mirth, and swinging her shut parasol idly to and
fro, while a light of laughter played over her face.

Suddenly a shadow seemed to dart betwixt her
and the open doorway, Mr. Arbuton was hurled
violently against her, and, as she struggled to keep

her footing under the shock, she saw him bent over
a furious dog, that hung from the breast of his
overcoat, while he clutched its throat with both
his hands.

He met the terror of her face with a quick
glance. “I beg your pardon; don't call out,
please,” he said. But from within the shop came
loud cries and maledictions, “O nom de Dieu!
c'est le boule-dogue du capitaine anglais!” with
appalling screams for help; and a wild, uncouth
little figure of a man, bareheaded, horror-eyed,
came flying out of the open door. He wore a
cooper's apron, and he bore in one hand a red-hot
iron, which, with continuous clamor, he dashed
against the muzzle of the hideous brute. Without
a sound the dog loosed his grip, and, dropping
to the ground, fled into the obscurity of the shop,
as silently as he had launched himself out of it,
while Kitty yet stood spell-bound, and before the
crowd that the appeal of Mr. Arbuton's rescuer
had summoned could see what had happened.

Mr. Arbuton lifted himself, and looked angrily
round upon the gaping spectators, who began, one by
one, to take in their heads from their windows and
to slink back to their thresholds as if they had
been guilty of something much worse than a desire
to succor a human being in peril.

“Good heavens!” said Mr. Arbuton, “what an
abominable scene!” His face was deadly pale, as
he turned from these insolent intruders to his
deliverer, whom he saluted, with a “Merci bien!”
spoken in a cold, steady voice. Then he drew off
his overcoat, which had been torn by the dog's
teeth and irreparably dishonored in the encounter.
He looked at it shuddering, with a countenance of
intense disgust, and made a motion as if to hurl it
into the street. But his eye again fell upon the
cooper's squalid little figure, as he stood twisting
his hands into his apron, and with voluble
eagerness protesting that it was not his dog, but
that of the English ship-captain, who had left it
with him, and whom he had many a time besought
to have the beast killed. Mr. Arbuton, who seemed
not to hear what he was saying, or to be so absorbed
in something else as not to consider whether he
was to blame or not, broke in upon him in French:
“You 've done me the greatest service. I cannot
repay you, but you must take this,” he said, as he
thrust a bank-note into the little man's grimy hand.

“O, but it is too much! But it is like a monsieur
so brave, so —”

“Hush! It was nothing,” interrupted Mr. Arbuton
again. Then he threw his overcoat upon the
man's shoulder. “If you will do me the pleasure

to receive this also? Perhaps you can make use
of it.”

“Monsieur heaps me with benefits; — monsieur
—” began the bewildered cooper; but Mr.
Arbuton turned abruptly away from him toward
Kitty, who trembled at having shared the guilt of
the other spectators, and seizing her hand, he placed
it on his arm, where he held it close as he strode
away, leaving his deliverer planted in the middle
of the sidewalk and staring after him. She scarcely
dared ask him if he were hurt, as she found herself
doing now with a faltering voice.

“No, I believe not,” he said with a glance at
the frock-coat, which was buttoned across his
chest and was quite intact; and still he strode
on, with a quick glance at every threshold which
did not openly declare a Newfoundland dog.

It had all happened so suddenly, and in so brief
a time, that she might well have failed to understand
it, even if she had seen it all. It was barely
intelligible to Mr. Arbuton himself, who, as Kitty
had loitered mocking and laughing before the door
of the shop, chanced to see the dog crouched within,
and had only time to leap forward and receive
the cruel brute on his breast as it flung itself at
her.

He had not thought of the danger to himself in

what he had done. He knew that he was unhurt,
but he did not care for that; he cared only that
she was safe; and as he pressed her hand tight
against his heart, there passed through it a thrill
of inexpressible tenderness, a quick, passionate
sense of possession, a rapture as of having won her
and made her his own forever, by saving her from
that horrible risk. The maze in which he had but
now dwelt concerning her seemed an obsolete frivolity
of an alien past; all the cold doubts and hindering
scruples which he had felt from the first
were gone; gone all his care for his world. His
world? In that supreme moment, there was no
world but in the tender eyes at which he looked
down with a glance which she knew not how to
interpret.

She thought that his pride was deeply wounded
at the ignominy of his adventure, — for she was
sure he would care more for that than for the
danger, — and that if she spoke of it she might
add to the angry pain he felt. As they hurried
along she waited for him to speak, but he did not;
though always, as he looked down at her with that
strange look, he seemed about to speak.

Presently she stopped, and, withdrawing her
hand from his arm, she cried, “Why, we 've forgotten
my cousin!”

“O — yes!” said Mr. Arburton with a vacant
smile.

Looking back they saw the colonel standing on
the pavement near the end of the old Sault au
Matelot, with his hands in his pockets, and steadfastly
staring at them. He did not relax the
severity of his gaze when they returned to join
him, and appeared to find little consolation in
Kitty's “O Dick, I forgot all about you,” given
with a sudden, inexplicable laugh, interrupted and
renewed as some ludicrous image seemed to come
and go in her mind.

“Well, this may be very flattering, Kitty, but it
is n't altogether comprehensible,” said he, with a
keen glance at both their faces. “I don't know
what you 'll say to Uncle Jack. It 's not forgetting
me alone: it 's forgetting the whole American
expedition against Quebec.”

The colonel waited for some reply; but Kitty
dared not attempt an explanation, and Mr. Arbuton
was not the man to seem to boast of his share
of the adventure by telling what had happened,
even if he had cared at that moment to do so. Her
very ignorance of what he had dared for her only
confirmed his new sense of possession; and, if he
could, he would not have marred the pleasure he
felt by making her grateful yet, sweet as that

might be in its time. Now he liked to keep his
knowledge, to have had her unwitting compassion,
to hear her pour out her unwitting relief in this
laugh, while he superiorly permitted it.

“I don't understand this thing,” said the colonel,
through whose dense, masculine intelligence some
suspicions of love-making were beginning to pierce.
But he dismissed them as absurd, and added,
“However, I 'm willing to forgive, and you 've
done the forgetting; and all that I ask now is the
pleasure of your company on the spot where Montgomery
fell. Fanny 'll never believe I 've found
it unless you go with me,” he appealed, finally.

“O, we 'll go, by all means,” said Mr. Arbuton,
unconsciously speaking, as by authority, for both.

They came into busier streets of the Port again,
and then passed through the square of the Lower
Town Market, with the market-house in the midst,
the shops and warehouses on either side, the long
row of tented booths with every kind of peasantwares
to sell, and the wide stairway dropping to
the river which brought the abundance of the
neighboring country to the mart. The whole
place was alive with country-folk in carts and citizens
on foot. At one point a gayly painted wagon
was drawn up in the midst of a group of people to
whom a quackish-faced Yankee was hawking, in

his own personal French, an American patent-medicine,
and making his audience giggle. Because
Kitty was amused at this, Mr. Arbuton
found it the drollest thing imaginable, but saw
something yet droller when she made the colonel
look at a peasant, standing in one corner beside a
basket of fowls, which a woman, coming up to buy,
examined as if the provision were some natural
curiosity, while a crowd at once gathered round.

“It requires a considerable population to make
a bargain, up here,” remarked the colonel. “I
suppose they turn out the garrison when they sell
a beef.” For both buyer and seller seemed to
take advice of the bystanders, who discussed and
inspected the different fowls as if nothing so novel
as poultry had yet fallen in their way.

At last the peasant himself took up the fowls
and carefully scrutinized them.

“Those chickens, it seems, never happened to
catch his eye before,” interpreted Kitty; and Mr.
Arbuton, who was usually very restive during such
banter, smiled as if it were the most admirable fooling,
or the most precious wisdom, in the world.
He made them wait to see the bargain out, and
could, apparently, have lingered there forever.

But the colonel had a conscience about Montgomery,
and he hurried them away, on past the

Queen's Wharf, and down the Cove Road to that
point where the scarped and rugged breast of the
cliff bears the sign, “Here fell Montgomery,”
though he really fell, not half-way up the height,
but at the foot of it, where stood the battery that
forbade his juncture with Arnold at Prescott Gate.

A certain wildness yet possesses the spot: the
front of the crag, topped by the high citadel-wall,
is so grim, and the few tough evergreens that cling
to its clefts are torn and twisted by the winter
blasts, and the houses are decrepit with age, showing
here and there the scars of the frequent fires
that sweep the Lower Town.

It was quite useless: neither the memories of
the place nor their setting were sufficient to engage
the wayward thoughts of these curiously assorted
pilgrims; and the colonel, after some attempts to
bring the matter home to himself and the others,
was obliged to abandon Mr. Arbuton to his tender
reveries of Kitty, and Kitty to her puzzling over
the change in Mr. Arbuton. His complaisance
made her uncomfortable and shy of him, it was so
strange; it gave her a little shiver, as if he were
behaving undignifiedly.

“Well, Kitty,” said the colonel, “I reckon
Uncle Jack would have made more out of this
than we 've done. He 'd have had their geology
out of these rocks, any way.”