University of Virginia Library

7. VII.
DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

They were
to take the
Canadian
steamer at
Charlotte,
the port of
Rochester,
and they
rattled uneventfully
down from Niagara by rail. At the
broad, low-banked river-mouth the steamer lay
beside the railroad station; and while Isabel disposed
of herself on board, Basil looked to the transfer
of the baggage, novelly comforted in the business
by the respectfulness of the young Canadian who
took charge of the trunks for the boat. He was
slow, and his system was not good, — he did not
give checks for the pieces, but marked them with
the name of their destination; and there was that
indefinable something in his manner which hinted
his hope that you would remember the porter; but
he was so civil that he did not snub the meekest
and most vexatious of the passengers, and Basil

mutely blessed his servile soul. Few white Americans,
he said to himself, would behave so decently
in his place; and he could not conceive of the
American steamboat clerk who would use the
politeness towards a waiting crowd that the Canadian
purser showed when they all wedged themselves
in about his window to receive their state-room
keys. He was somewhat awkward, like the
porter, but he was patient, and he did not lose his
temper even when some of the crowd, finding he
would not bully them, made bold to bully him.
He was three times as long in serving them as an
American would have been, but their time was of
no value there, and he served them well. Basil
made a point of speaking him fair, when his turn
came, and the purser did not trample on him for a
base truckler, as an American jack-in-office would
have done.

Our tourists felt at home directly on this steamer,
which was very comfortable, and in every way sufficient
for its purpose, with a visible captain, who
answered two or three questions very pleasantly,
and bore himself towards his passengers in some
sort like a host.

In the saloon Isabel had found among the passengers
her semi-acquaintances of the hotel parlor
and the Rapids-elevator, and had glanced tentatively
towards them. Whereupon the matron of
the party had made advances that ended in their
all sitting down together, and wondering when the

boat would start, and what time they would get to
Montreal next evening, with other matters that
strangers going upon the same journey may properly
marvel over in company. The introduction
having thus accomplished itself, they exchanged addresses,
and it appeared that Richard was Colonel
Ellison, of Milwaukee, and that Fanny was his
wife. Miss Kitty Ellison was of Western New
York, not far from Erie. There was a diversion
presently towards the different state-rooms; but
the new acquaintances sat vis-à-vis at the table,
and after supper the ladies drew their chairs together
on the promenade deck, and enjoyed the
fresh evening breeze. The sun set magnificent
upon the low western shore which they had now
left an hour away, and a broad stripe of color
stretched behind the steamer. A few thin, luminous
clouds darkened momently along the horizon,
and then mixed with the land. The stars came out
in a clear sky, and a light wind softly buffeted the
cheeks, and breathed life into nerves that the day's
heat had wasted. It scarcely wrinkled the tranquil
expanse of the lake, on which loomed, far or
near, a full-sailed schooner, and presently melted
into the twilight, and left the steamer solitary upon
the waters. The company was small, and not remarkable
enough in any way to take the thoughts
of any one off his own comfort. A deep sense of
the coziness of the situation possessed them all,
which was if possible intensified by the spectacle
of the captain, seated on the upper deck, and smoking
a cigar that flashed and fainted like a stationary
fire-fly in the gathering dusk. How very
distant, in this mood, were the most recent events!
Niagara seemed a fable of antiquity; the ride from
Rochester a myth of the Middle Ages. In this
cool, happy world of quiet lake, of starry skies, of
air that the soul itself seemed to breathe, there was
such consciousness of repose as if one were steeped
in rest and soaked through and through with calm.

The points of likeness between Isabel and Mrs.
Ellison shortly made them mutually uninteresting,
and, leaving her husband to the others, Isabel
frankly sought the companionship of Miss Kitty, in
whom she found a charm of manner which puzzled
at first, but which she presently fancied must be
perfect trust of others mingling with a peculiar
self-reliance.

“Can't you see, Basil, what a very flattering
way it is?” she asked of her husband, when, after
parting with their friends for the night, she tried
to explain the character to him. “Of course no
art could equal such a natural gift; for that kind
of belief in your good-nature and sympathy makes
you feel worthy of it, don't you know; and so you
can't help being good-natured and sympathetic.
This Miss Ellison, why, I can tell you, I shouldn't
be ashamed of her anywhere.” By anywhere Isabel
meant Boston, and she went on to praise the
young lady's intelligence and refinement, with

those expressions of surprise at the existence of
civilization in a westerner which westerners find it
so hard to receive graciously. Happily, Miss Ellison
had not to hear them. “The reason she happened
to come with only two dresses is, she lives
so near Niagara that she could come for one day,
and go back the next. The colonel 's her cousin,
and he and his wife go East every year, and they
asked her this time to see Niagara with them.
She told me all over again what we eavesdropped
so shamefully in the hotel parlor; and I don't
know whether she was better pleased with the
prospect of what 's before her, or with the notion
of making the journey in this original way. She
didn't force her confidence upon me, any more
than she tried to withhold it. We got to talking
in the most natural manner; and she seemed to
tell these things about herself because they amused
her and she liked me. I had been saying how my
trunk got left behind once on the French side of
Mont Cenis, and I had to wear aunt's things at
Turin till it could be sent for.”

“Well, I don't see but Miss Ellison could describe
you to her friends very much as you've
described her to me,” said Basil. “How did these
mutual confidences begin? Whose trustfulness first
flattered the other's? What else did you tell about
yourself?”

“I said we were on our wedding journey,”
guiltily admitted Isabel.

“O, you did!”

“Why, dearest! I wanted to know, for once,
you see, whether we seemed honeymoon-struck.”

“And do we?”

“No,” came the answer, somewhat ruefully.
“Perhaps, Basil,” she added, “we've been a little
too successful in disguising our bridal character.
Do you know,” she continued, looking him anxiously
in the face, “this Miss Ellison took me at
first for — your sister!”

Basil broke forth in outrageous laughter. “One
more such victory,” he said, “and we are undone;”
and he laughed again immoderately. “How sad
is the fruition of human wishes! There 's nothing,
after all, like a good thorough failure for making
people happy.”

Isabel did not listen to him. Safe in a dim
corner of the deserted saloon, she seized him in a
vindictive embrace; then, as if it had been he who
suggested the idea of such a loathsome relation,
hissed out the hated words, “Your sister!” and
released him with a disdainful repulse.

A little after daybreak the steamer stopped at
the Canadian city of Kingston, a handsome place,
substantial to the water's edge, and giving a sense
of English solidity by the stone of which it is
largely built. There was an accession of many
passengers here, and they and the people on the
wharf were as little like Americans as possible.
They were English or Irish or Scotch, with the

healthful bloom of the Old World still upon their
faces, or if Canadians they looked not less hearty;
so that one must wonder if the line between the Dominion
and the United States did not also sharply
separate good digestion and dyspepsia. These provincials
had not our regularity of features, nor the
best of them our careworn sensibility of expression;
but neither had they our complexions of adobe;
and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men
were, on the whole, better dressed than the same
number of average Americans would have been in
a city of that size and remoteness. The stevedores
who were putting the freight aboard were men of
leisure; they joked in a kindly way with the orange-women
and the old women picking up chips on the
pier; and our land of hurry seemed beyond the
ocean rather than beyond the lake.

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort
Frontenac two hundred years ago; of Count Frontenac's
splendid advent among the Indians; of the
brave La Salle, who turned its wooden walls to
stone; of wars with the savages and then with the
New York colonists, whom the French and their
allies harried from this point; of the destruction
of La Salle's fort in the Old French War; and of
final surrender a few years later to the English. It
is as picturesque as it is historical. All about the
city the shores are beautifully wooded, and there
are many lovely islands, — the first indeed of those
Thousand Islands with which the head of the St.

Lawrence is filled, and among which the streamer
was presently threading her way. They are still as
charming and still almost as wild as when, in 1673,
Frontenac's flotilla of canoes passed through their
labyrinth and issued upon the lake. Save for a
light-house upon one of them, there is almost nothing
to show that the foot of man has ever pressed
the thin grass clinging to their rocky surfaces, and
keeping its green in the eternal shadow of their
pines and cedars. In the warm morning light they
gathered or dispersed before the advancing vessel,
which some of them almost touched with the plumage
of their evergreens; and where none of them
were large, some were so small that it would not
have been too bold to figure them as a vaster race
of water-birds assembling and separating in her
course. It is curiously affecting to find them so unclaimed
yet from the solitude of the vanished wilderness,
and scarcely touched even by tradition.
But for the interest left them by the French, these
tiny islands have scarcely any associations, and
must be enjoyed for their beauty alone. There is
indeed about them a faint light of legend concerning
the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for several
patriots are said to have taken refuge amidst their
lovely multitude; but this episode of modern history
is difficult for the imagination to manage, and
somehow one does not take sentimentally even to
that daughter of a lurking patriot, who long baffled
her father's pursuers by rowing him from one island
to another, and supplying him with food by night.

Either the reluctance is from the natural desire
that so recent a heroine should be founded on fact,
or it is mere perverseness. Perhaps I ought to
say, in justice to her, that it was one of her own
sex who refused to be interested in her, and forbade
Basil to care for her. When he had read of her
exploit from the guide-book, Isabel asked him if he
had noticed that handsome girl in the blue and
white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat, who had
come aboard at Kingston. She pointed her out,
and courageously made him admire her beauty,
which was of the most bewitching Canadian type.
The young girl was redeemed by her New World
birth from the English heaviness; a more delicate
bloom lighted her cheeks; a softer grace dwelt in
her movement; yet she was round and full, and
she was in the perfect flower of youth. She was
not so ethereal in her loveliness as an American
girl, but she was not so nervous and had none of

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 181. In-line Illustration. Image of a woman standing at the handrail of a ship.] the painful fragility of the latter. Her expression
was just a little vacant, it must be owned; but so
far as she went she was faultless. She looked like
the most tractable of daughters, and as if she would
be the most obedient of wives. She had a blameless
taste in dress, Isabel declared; her costume of
blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat
(set upon heavy masses of dark brown hair) being
completed by a black silk skirt. “And you can
see,” she added, “that it 's an old skirt made over,
and that she 's dressed as cheaply as she is prettily.”
This surprised Basil, who had imputed the
young lady's personal sumptuousness to her dress,
and had thought it enormously rich. When she
got off with her chaperone at one of the poorest-looking
country landings, she left them in hopeless
conjecture about her. Was she visiting there, or
was the interior of Canada full of such stylish and
exquisite creatures? Where did she get her taste,
her fashions, her manners? As she passed from
sight towards the shadow of the woods, they felt
the poorer for her going; yet they were glad to
have seen her, and on second thoughts they felt
that they could not justly ask more of her than to
have merely existed for a few hours in their presence.
They perceived that beauty was not only
its own excuse for being, but that it flattered and
favored and profited the world by consenting to be.

At Prescott, the boat on which they had come
from Charlotte, and on which they had been promised
a passage without change to Montreal, stopped,
and they were transferred to a smaller steamer
with the uncomfortable name of Banshee. She
was very old, and very infirm and dirty, and in
every way bore out the character of a squalid Irish
goblin. Besides, she was already heavily laden
with passengers, and, with the addition of the

other steamer's people had now double her complement;
and our friends doubted if they were not to
pass the Rapids in as much danger as discomfort.
Their fellow-passengers were in great variety, however,
and thus partly atoned for their numbers.
Among them of course there was a full force of
brides from Niagara and elsewhere, and some curious
forms of the prevailing infatuation appeared.
It is well enough, if she likes, and it may even be
very noble for a passably good-looking young lady
to marry a gentleman of venerable age; but to
intensify the idea of self-devotion by furtively caressing
his wrinkled front seems too reproachful
of the general public; while, on the other hand,
if the bride is very young and pretty, it enlists in
behalf of the white-haired husband the unwilling
sympathies of the spectator to see her the centre of
a group of young people, and him only acknowledged
from time to time by a Parthian snub.
Nothing, however, could have been more satisfactory
than the sisterly surrounding of this latter
bride. They were of a better class of Irish people;
and if it had been any sacrifice for her to marry so
old a man, they were doing their best to give the
affair at least the liveliness of a wake. There
were five or six of those great handsome girls, with
their generous curves and wholesome colors, and
they were every one attended by a good-looking
colonial lover, with whom they joked in slightly
brogued voices, and laughed with careless Celtic
laughter. One of the young fellows presently lost
his hat overboard, and had to wear the handkerchief
of his lady about his head; and this appeared
to be really one of the best things in the world, and
led to endless banter. They were well dressed,
and it could be imagined that the ancient bridegroom
had come in for the support of the whole
good-looking, healthy, light-hearted family. In
some degree he looked it, and wore but a rueful
countenance for a bridegroom; so that a very young
newly married couple, who sat next the jolly sister-and-loverhood
could not keep their pitying eyes off
his downcast face. “What if he, too, were young
at heart!” the kind little wife's regard seemed to
say.

For the sake of the slight air that was stirring,
and to have the best view of the Rapids, the Banshee's
whole company was gathered upon the forward
promenade, and the throng was almost as
dense as in a six-o'clock horse-car out from Boston.
The standing and sitting groups were closely packed
together, and the expanded parasols and umbrellas
formed a nearly unbroken roof. Under this Isabel
chatted at intervals with the Ellisons, who sat near;
but it was not an atmosphere that provoked social
feeling, and she was secretly glad when after a
while they shifted their position.

It was deadly hot, and most of the people saddened
and silenced in the heat. From time to time
the clouds idling about overhead met and sprinkled

down a cruel little shower of rain that seemed to
make the air less breathable than before. The
lonely shores were yellow with drought; the islands
grew wilder and barrener; the course of the river
was for miles at a stretch through country which
gave no signs of human life. The St. Lawrence
has none of the bold picturesqueness of the Hudson,
and is far more like its far-off cousin the Mississippi.
Its banks are low like the Mississippi's, its current
swift, its way through solitary lands. The same
sentiment of early adventure hangs about each:
both are haunted by visions of the Jesuit in his
priestly robe, and the soldier in his mediæval steel;
the same gay, devout, and dauntless race has
touched them both with immortal romance. If
the water were of a dusky golden color, instead of
translucent green, and the shores and islands were
covered with cottonwoods and willows instead of
dark cedars, one could with no great effort believe
one's self on the Mississippi between Cairo and St.
Louis, so much do the great rivers strike one as
kindred in the chief features of their landscape.
Only, in tracing this resemblance you do not know
just what to do with the purple mountains of Vermont,
seen vague against the horizon from the St.
Lawrence, or with the quaint little French villages
that begin to show themselves as you penetrate farther
down into Lower Canada. These look so
peaceful, with their dormer-windowed cottages clustering
about their church-spires, that it seems impossible
they could once have been the homes of the
savages and the cruel peasants who, with fire-brand
and scalping-knife and tomahawk, harassed the
borders of New England for a hundred years.
But just after you descend the Long Sault you pass
the hamlet of St. Regis, in which was kindled the
torch that wrapt Deerfield in flames, waking her
people from their sleep to meet instant death or
taste the bitterness of a captivity. The bell which
was sent out from France for the Indian converts of
the Jesuits, and was captured by an English ship
and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield,
where it called the Puritans to prayer, till at last it
also summoned the priest-led Indians and habitans
across hundreds of miles of winter and of wilderness
to reclaim it from that desecration, — this fateful
bell still hangs in the church-tower of St. Regis,
and has invited to matins and vespers for nearly
two centuries the children of those who fought so
pitilessly and dared and endured so much for it.
Our friends would fain have heard it as they passed,
hoping for some mournful note of history in its
sound; but it hung silent over the silent hamlet,
which, as it lay in the hot afternoon sun by the
river's side, seemed as lifeless as the Deerfield burnt
long ago.

They turned from it to look at a gentleman who
had just appeared in a mustard-colored linen duster,
and Basil asked, “Shouldn't you like to know the
origin, personal history, and secret feelings of a

gentleman who goes about in a duster of that particular
tint? Or, that gentleman yonder with his
eye tied up in a wet handkerchief, do you suppose
he 's travelling for pleasure? Look at those young
people from Omaha: they haven't ceased flirting
or cackling since we left Kingston. Do you think
everybody has such spirits out at Omaha? But
behold a yet more surprising figure than any we
have yet seen among this boat-load of nondescripts!”

This was a tall, handsome young man, with a
face of somewhat foreign cast, and well dressed,
with a certain impressive difference from the rest
in the cut of his clothes. But what most drew the
eye to him was a large cross, set with brilliants,
and surmounted by a heavy double-headed eagle in
gold. This ornament dazzled from a conspicuous
place on the left lappel of his coat; on his hand
shone a magnificent diamond ring, and he bore a
stately opera-glass, with which, from time to time,
he imperiously, as one may say, surveyed the landscape.
As the imposing apparition grew upon Isabel,
“O here,” she thought, “is something truly
distinguished. Of course, dear,” she added aloud
to Basil, “he 's some foreign nobleman travelling
here”; and she ran over in her mind the newspaper
announcements of patrician visitors from abroad
and tried to identify him with some one of them.
The cross must be the decoration of a foreign order,
and Basil suggested that he was perhaps a member

of some legation at Washington, who had run up
there for his summer vacation. The cross puzzled
him, but the double-headed eagle, he said, meant
either Austria or Russia; probably Austria, for the
wearer looked a trifle too civilized for a Russian.

“Yes, indeed! What an air he has. Never tell
me, Basil, that there 's nothing in blood!” cried
Isabel, who was a bitter aristocrat at heart, like all
her sex, though in principle she was democratic
enough. As she spoke, the object of her regard
looked about him on the different groups, not with
pride, not with hauteur, but with a glance of unconscious,
unmistakable superiority. “O, that stare!”
she added; nothing but high birth and long descent
can give it! Dearest, he 's becoming a great affliction
to me. I want to know who he is. Couldn't
you invent some pretext for speaking to him?”

“No, I couldn't do it decently; and no doubt
he'd snub me as I deserved if I intruded upon him.
Let 's wait for fortune to reveal him.”

“Well, I suppose I must, but it 's dreadful; it 's
really dreadful. You can easily see that 's distinction,”
she continued, as her hero moved about the
promenade and gently but loftily made a way for
himself among the other passengers and favored
the scenery through his opera-glass from one point
and another. He spoke to no one, and she reasonably
supposed that he did not know English.

In the mean time it was drawing near the hour
of dinner, but no dinner appeared. Twelve, one,

two came and went, and then at last came the dinner,
which had been delayed, it seemed, till the
cook could recruit his energies sufficiently to meet
the wants of double the number he had expected to
provide for. It was observable of the officers and
crew of the Banshee, that while they did not hold
themselves aloof from the passengers in the disdainful
American manner, they were of feeble
mind, and not only did everything very slowly (in
the usual Canadian fashion), but with an inefficiency
that among us would have justified them in
being insolent. The people sat down at several
successive tables to the worst dinner that ever was
cooked; the ladies first, and the gentlemen afterwards,
as they made conquest of places. At the
second table, to Basil's great satisfaction, he found
a seat, and on his right hand the distinguished foreigner.

“Naturally, I was somewhat abashed,” he said
in the account he was presently called to give Isabel
of the interview, “but I remembered that I
was an American citizen, and tried to maintain a
decent composure. For several minutes we sat
silent behind a dish of flabby cucumbers, expecting
the dinner, and I was wondering whether I should
address him in French or German, — for I knew
you'd never forgive me if I let slip such a chance,
— when he turned and spoke himself.”

“O what did he say, dearest?”

“He said, `Pretty tejious waitin,' ain't it?' in
the best New York State accent.”

“You don't mean it!” gasped Isabel.

“But I do. After that I took courage to ask
what his cross and double-headed eagle meant.
He showed the condescension of a true nobleman.
`O,' says he, `I 'm glad you like it, and it 's not
the least offense to ask,' and he told me. Can
you imagine what it is? It 's the emblem of the
fifty-fourth degree in the secret society he belongs
to!”

“I don't believe it!”

“Well, ask him yourself, then,” returned Basil;
“he 's a very good fellow. `O, that stare! nothing
but high birth and long descent could give
it!”' he repeated, abominably implying that he
had himself had no share in their common error.

What retort Isabel might have made cannot now
be known, for she was arrested at this moment by
a rumor amongst the passengers that they were
coming to the Long Sault Rapids. Looking forward
she saw the tossing and flashing of surges
that, to the eye, are certainly as threatening as the
rapids above Niagara. The steamer had already
passed the Deplau and the Galopes, and they had
thus had a foretaste of whatever pleasure or terror
there is in the descent of these nine miles of stormy
sea. It is purely a matter of taste, about shooting
the rapids of the St. Lawrence. The passengers
like it better than the captain and the pilot, to
guess by their looks, and the women and children
like it better than the men. It is no doubt very

thrilling and picturesque and wildly beautiful: the
children crow and laugh, the women shout forth
their delight, as the boat enters the seething current;
great foaming waves strike her bows, and
brawl away to the stern, while she dips, and rolls,
and shoots onward, light as a bird blown by the
wind; the wild shores and islands whirl out of
sight; you feel in every fibre the career of the
vessel. But the captain sits in front of the pilothouse
smoking with a grave face, the pilots tug
hard at the wheel; the hoarse roar of the waters
fills the air; beneath the smoother sweeps of the
current you can see the brown rocks; as you sink
from ledge to ledge in the writhing and twisting
steamer, you have a vague sense that all this is
perhaps an achievement rather than an enjoyment.
When, descending the Long Sault, you look back
up hill, and behold those billows leaping down the
steep slope after you, “No doubt,” you confide to
your soul, “it is magnificent; but it is not pleasure.”
You greet with silent satisfaction the level
river, stretching between the Long Sault and the
Coteau, and you admire the delightful tranquillity
of that beautiful Lake St. Francis into which it
expands. Then the boat shudders into the Coteau
Rapids, and down through the Cedars and Cascades.
On the rocks of the last lies the skeleton
of a steamer wrecked upon them, and gnawed at
still by the white-tusked wolfish rapids. No one,
they say, was lost from her. “But how,” Basil
thought, “would it fare with all these people
packed here upon her bow, if the Banshee should
swing round upon a ledge?” As to Isabel, she
looked upon the wrecked steamer with indifference,
as did all the women; but then they could not
swim, and would not have to save themselves.
“The La Chine 's to come yet,” they exulted,
“and that 's the awfullest of all!”

They passed the Lake St. Louis; the La Chine
Rapids flashed into sight. The captain rose up
from his seat, took his pipe from his mouth, and
waved a silence with it. “Ladies and gentlemen,”
said he, “it 's very important in passing these rapids
to keep the boat perfectly trim. Please to remain
just as you are.”

It was twilight, for the boat was late. From
the Indian village on the shore they signaled to
know if he wanted the local pilot; the captain refused;
and then the steamer plunged into the leaping
waves. From rock to rock she swerved and
sank; on the last ledge she scraped with a deadly
touch that went to the heart.

Then the danger was passed, and the noble city
of Montreal was in full sight, lying at the foot of
her dark green mountain, and lifting her many
spires into the rosy twilight air: massive and
grand showed the sister towers of the French cathedral.

Basil had hoped to approach this famous city
with just associations. He had meant to conjure

up for Isabel's sake some reflex, however faint, of
that beautiful picture Mr. Parkman has painted of
Maisonneuve founding and consecrating Montreal.
He flushed with the recollection of the historian's
phrase; but in that moment there came forth from
the cabin a pretty young person who gave every
token of being a pretty young actress, even to the
duenna-like, elderly female companion, to be detected
in the remote background of every young
actress. She had flirted audaciously during the
day with some young Englishmen and Canadians
of her acquaintance, and after passing the La Chine
Rapids she had taken the hearts of all the men by
springing suddenly to her feet, apostrophizing the
tumult with a charming attitude, and warbling a
delicious bit of song. Now as they drew near the
city the Victoria Bridge stretched its long tube
athwart the river, and looked so low because of its
great length that it seemed to bar the steamer's
passage.

“I wonder,” said one of the actress's adorers, —
a Canadian, whose face was exactly that of the
beaver on the escutcheon of his native province,
and whose heavy gallantries she had constantly received
with a gay, impertinent nonchalance, — “I
wonder if we can be going right under that
bridge?”

“No, sir!” answered the pretty young actress
with shocking promptness, “we're going right over
it: —

At this witless, swet impudence the Canadian
looked very sheepish — for a beaver; and all the
other people laughed; but the noble historical
shades of Basil's thought vanished in wounded
dignity beyond recall, and left him feeling rather
ashamed, — for he had laughed too.