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