University of Virginia Library

21. CHAPTER XXI.
WITH AN ENTIRE CHANGE OF SCENE.

After leaving Lakeside, Maxwell Woodbury first directed
his course to Niagara, to refresh himself with its inexhaustible
beauty, before proceeding to the great lakes of the Northwest.
His intention was, to spend six or eight weeks amid
the bracing atmosphere and inspiring scenery of the Northern
frontier, both as a necessary change from his quiet life on the
farm, and in order to avoid the occasional intense heat of the
Atauga Valley. From Niagara he proceeded to Detroit and
Mackinaw, where, enchanted by the bold shores, the wild
woods, and the marvellous crystal of the water, he remained
for ten days. A change of the weather to rain and cold obliged
him to turn his back on the attractions of Lake Superior
and retrace his steps to Niagara. Thence, loitering down the
northern shore of Ontario, shooting the rapids of the Thousand
Isles, or delaying at the picturesque French settlements on the
Lower St. Lawrence, he reached Quebec in time to take one
of the steamboats to the Saguenay.

At first, the superb panorama over which the queenly city is
enthroned—the broad, undulating shores, dotted with the cottages
of the habitans—the green and golden fields of the Isle
d'Orleans, basking in the sun—the tremulous silver veil of the
cataract of Montmorency, fluttering down the dark rocks, and
the blue ranges of the distant Laurentian mountains—absorbed
all the new keenness of his faculties. Standing on the prow of
the hurricane-deck, he inhaled the life of a breeze at once
resinous from interminable forests of larch and fir, and sharp

with the salt of the ocean, as he watched the grander sweep
of the slowly separating shores. Except a flock of Quebeckers
on their way to Murray Bay and Rivière du Loup, there were
but few passengers on board. A professor from a college in
New Hampshire, rigid in his severe propriety, looked through
his gold-rimmed spectacles, and meditated on the probable
geology of the headland of Les Eboulemens; two Georgians,
who smoked incessantly, and betrayed in their accent that of
the negro children with whom they had played, commented,
with unnecessary loudness, on the miserable appearance of the
Canadian “peasants;” a newly-married pair from Cincinnati
sat apart from the rest, dissolved in tender sentiment; and
a tall, stately lady, of middle age, at the stern of the boat,
acted at the same time as mother, guide, and companion to two
very pretty children—a girl of fourteen and a boy of twelve.

As the steamboat halted at Murray Bay to land a number of
passengers, Woodbury found time to bestow some notice on
his fellow-travellers. His attention was at once drawn to the
lady and children. The plain, practical manner in which they
were dressed for the journey denoted refinement and cultivation.
The Cincinnati bride swept the deck with a gorgeous
purple silk; but this lady wore a coarse, serviceable gray
cloak over her travelling-dress of brown linen, and a hat of
gray straw, without ornament. Her head was turned towards
the shore, and Woodbury could not see her face; but the
sound of her voice, as she spoke to the children, took familiar
hold of his ear. He had certainly heard that voice before;
but where, and when? The boat at last backed away from
the pier, and she turned her head. Her face was a long oval,
with regular and noble features, the brow still smooth and
serene, the dark eyes soft and bright, but the hair prematurely
gray on the temples. Her look had that cheerful calmness
which is the maturity of a gay, sparkling temperament of
youth, and which simply reserves, not loses, its fire.

Woodbury involuntarily struck his hand upon his forehead,
with a sudden effort of memory. Perhaps noticing this action,

the lady looked towards him and their eyes met. Hers, too,
betrayed surprise and semi-recognition. He stepped instantly
forward.

“I beg pardon,” said he, “if I am mistaken, but I feel sure
that I have once known you as Miss Julia Remington. Am I
not right?”

“That was my name fifteen years ago,” she answered, slowly.
“Why cannot I recall yours? I remember your face.”

“Do you not remember having done me the honor to attend
a soirée which I gave, at the corner of Bowery and —
street?”

“Mr. Woodbury!” she exclaimed, holding out both her
hands: “how glad I am to see you again! Who could have
dreamed that two old friends should come from Calcutta and
St. Louis to meet at the mouth of the Saguenay?”

“St. Louis!”

“Yes, St. Louis has been my home for the last ten years.
But you must know my present name—Blake: wife of Andrew
Blake, and mother of Josephine and George, besides
two younger ones, waiting for me at Saratoga. Come here,
Josey; come, George—this is Mr. Woodbury, whom I used to
know many, many years ago in New York. You must be
good friends with him, and perhaps he will tell you of the
wonderful ball he once gave.”

Woodbury laughed, and cordially greeted the children, who
came to him with modest respect, but without embarrassment.
Long before the boat had reached Rivière du Loup, the old
friendship was sweetly re-established, and two new members
introduced into its circle.

Mrs. Blake had been spending some weeks at Saratoga,
partly with her husband and partly alone, while he attended to
some necessary business in New York and Philadelphia. This
business had obliged him to give up his projected trip to the
Saguenay, and it was arranged that his wife should make it in
company with the two oldest children, the youngest being
left, meanwhile, in the care of a faithful servant.

Woodbury had always held Miss Remington in grateful
remembrance, and it was a great pleasure to him to meet her
thus unexpectedly. He found her changed in out ward appearance,
but soon perceived that her admirable common sense, her
faithful, sturdily independent womanhood, were still, as formerly,
the basis of her nature. She was one of those rare
women who are at the same time as clear and correct as possible
in their perceptions, penetrating all the disguises and
illusions of life, yet unerringly pure and true in instinct and
feeling. Such are almost the only women with whom thoroughly
developed and cultivated men can form those intimate
and permanent friendships, in which both heart and brain
find the sweetest repose, without the necessity of posting a
single guard on any of the avenues which lead to danger.
Few women, and still fewer men, understand a friendship of
this kind, and those who possess it must brave suspicion and
misunderstanding at every turn.

The relation between Woodbury and Miss Remington had
never, of course, attained this intimacy, but they now instinctively
recognized its possibility. Both had drunk of the cup
of knowledge since their parting, and they met again on a
more frank and confidential footing than they had previously
known. Mrs. Blake was so unconsciously correct in her impulses
that she never weighed and doubted, before obeying
them. The wand of her spirit never bent except where the
hidden stream was both pure and strong.

That evening, as the boat halted at Rivière du Loup for the
night, they walked the hurricane-deck in the long Northern
twilight, and talked of the Past. Many characters had faded
away from the sight of both; others had either fallen from
their early promise, or soared surprisingly far above it; but
all, with their attendant loves, and jealousies, and hates, stood
out sharp and clear in the memory of the speakers. Mrs.
Blake, then, in answer to Woodbury's inquiries, gave him a
rapid sketch of her own life.

“I am quite satisfied,” she said at the close. “My husband

is not exactly the preux chevalier I used to imagine, as a girl,
but he is a true gentleman”—

“You never could have married him, if he were not,”
Woodbury interrupted.

—“a true gentleman, and an excellent man of business,
which is as necessary in this age as knighthood was in those
famous Middle ones. Our married life has been entirely happy
from the start, because we mutually put aside our illusions,
and made charitable allowances for each other. We did not
attempt to cushion the sharp angles, but courageously clashed
them together until they were beaten into roundness.”

She broke into a pleasant, quiet laugh, and then went on:
“I want you to know my husband. You are very different,
but there are points of contact which, I think, would attract both.
You have in common, at least, a clear, intelligent faculty of
judgment, which is a pretty sure sign of freemasonry between
man and man. I don't like Carlyle as an author, yet I
indorse, heart and soul, his denunciation of shams. But here
I am at the end of my history: now tell me yours.”

She listened with earnest, sympathetic interest to Woodbury's
narrative, and the closing portion, which related to his
life at Lakeside, evidently aroused her attention more than all
the lazy, uneventful tropical years he had spent in Calcutta.
When he had finished the outlines, she turned suddenly towards
him and asked: “Is there nothing more?”

“What should there be?” he asked in return, with a smile
which showed that he understood her question.

“What should be, is not, I know,” said she; “I saw that
much, at once. You will allow me to take a liberty which
I am sure cannot now give pain: she is not the cause of
it, I hope?”

She looked him full in the face, and felt relieved as she detected
no trace of a pang which her words might have called
up. The expression of his lips softened rather to pity as he
answered: “She has long ceased to have any part in my life,
and she has now very little in my thoughts. When I saw her

again, last winter, there was not a single fibre of my heart disturbed.
I will confess this much, however—another face, a
more hopeless memory, long ago displaced hers. Both are
gone, and I am now trying to find a third.”

His tone was apparently light and indifferent, but to Mrs.
Blake's true ear it betrayed both weariness and longing.
“You cannot be deceived the third time,” she said, consolingly.

“I was not deceived the second time,” he answered, “but I
will not tell you the story, just now. It is as completely at an
end as if it had never happened. Can you help me to another
trial?”

She shook her head. “It is strange that so few of the best
men and women discover each other. Nature must be opposed
to the concentration of qualities, and continually striving
to reconcile the extremes; I cannot account for it in any other
way. You are still young; but do not carelessly depend on
your youth; you are not aware how rapidly a man's habits
become ossified, at your age. Marriage involves certain mutual
sacrifices, under the most favorable circumstances. Don't
trust too long to your own strength.”

“Ah, but where is the girl with your clear sense, Mrs. Blake?”
asked Woodbury, pausing in his walk. “My wife must be
strong enough to know her husband as he was and is. The deceits
which so many men habitually practise, disgust me. Who
would hear my confession, and then absolve me by love?”

“Who? Almost every woman that loves! No: I will
make no exceptions, because the woman who would not do so,
does not really love. Men are cowards, because they fancy
that women are, and so each sex cheats itself through want of
faith in the other. Is that a recent misgiving of yours?”

“You are a dangerous friend, Mrs. Blake. Your husband,
I suspect, is forced to be candid, out of sheer despair at the
possibility of concealing any thing from you. Yes, you have
interpreted my thought correctly. I spoke with reference to
one particular person, whom I am very far from loving, or even

desiring to love, but whose individuality somewhat interests
me. A woman's ideal of man, I am afraid, rises in proportion
to her intellectual culture. From the same cause, she is not so
dependent on her emotions, and therefore more calculating and
exacting. Is it not so?”

“No, it is not so!” replied Mrs. Blake, with energy. “Recollect,
we are not speaking of the sham women.”

“She does not belong to that class,” said Woodbury. “She
is, in many respects, a rare and noble character; she possesses
natural qualities of mind which place her far above the average
of women; she is pure as a saint, bold and brave, and yet
thoroughly feminine in all respects save one—but that one
exceptional feature neutralizes all the others.”

“What is it?”

“She is strong-minded.”

“What!” exclaimed Mrs. Blake, “do you mean a second
Bessie Stryker?”

“Something of the kind—so far as I know. She is one of
the two or three really intelligent women in Ptolemy—but
with the most singularly exaggerated sense of duty. Some
persons would have censured me more considerately for forgery
or murder than she did for smoking a cigar. I discussed
the subject of Women's Rights with her, the last thing before
leaving home, and found her as intolerant as the rankest Conservative.
What a life such a woman would lead one! Yet,
I confess she provokes me, because, but for that one fault, she
would be worth winning. It is vexatious to see a fine creature
so spoiled.”

“With all her fanaticism, she seems to have made a strong
impression on you.”

“Yes, I do not deny it,” Woodbury candidly replied.
“How could it be otherwise? In the first place, she is still
something of a phenomenon to me, and therefore stimulates
my curiosity. Secondly, she is far above all the other girls of
Ptolemy, both in intellect and in natural refinement. She
makes the others so tame that, while I could not possibly love

her, she prevents me from loving any of them. What am I
to do?”

“A difficult case, upon my word. If I knew the characters,
I might assist you to a solution. The only random suggestion
I can make is this: if the strong-minded woman should come
to love you, in spite of her strength, it will make short work
of her theories of women's rights. Our instincts are stronger
than our ideas, and the brains of some of us run wild only
because our hearts are unsatisfied. I should probably have
been making speeches through the country, in a Bloomer
dress, by this time, if I had not met with my good Andrew.
You need not laugh: I am quite serious. And I can give you
one drop of comfort, before you leave the confessional: I see
that your feelings are fresh and healthy, without a shade of
cynicism: as we say in the West, the latch-string of your
heart has not been pulled in, and I predict that somebody will
yet open the door. Good-night!”

Giving his hand a hearty, honest pressure of sympathy,
Mrs. Blake went to her state-room. Woodbury leaned over
the stern-railing, and gazed upon the sprinkles of reflected
starlight in the bosom of the St. Lawrence. The waves
lapped on the stones of the wharf with a low, liquid murmur,
and a boatman, floating upwards with the tide, sang at a distance:
“Jamais je ne t'oublierai.” Woodbury mechanically
caught the melody and sang the words after him, till boat and
voice faded together out of sight and hearing. It refreshed
rather than disturbed him that the eye of a true woman had
looked upon his heart. “Whatever may be the end,” he said
to himself, “she shall know the whole truth, one day. When
we suspect that a seed of passion may have been dropped in
our natures, we must quietly wait until we feel that it has put
forth roots. I did not tell her the whole truth. I am not
sure but that I may love that girl, with all her mistaken views.
Her face follows me, and calls me back. If each of us could
but find the other's real self, then—why, then”—

He did not follow the thought further. The old pang arose,

the old hunger of the heart came over him, and brought with
it those sacred yearnings for the tenderer ties which follow
marriage, and which man, scarcely less than woman, craves.
The red lights of two cigars came down the long pier, side by
side: it was the Georgians, returning from a visit to the village.
The New Hampshire Professor approached him, and
politely remarked: “It is singular that the Old Red Sandstone
reappears in this locality.”

“Very singular,” answered Woodbury. “Good-night, Sir!”
and went to bed.

The next morning the steamer crossed to Tadoussac, and
entered the pitch-brown waters of the savage, the sublime, the
mysterious Saguenay. The wonderful scenery of this river,
or rather fiord, made the deepest impression on the new-made
friends. It completely banished from their minds the conversation
of the previous evening. Who could speak or even
think of love, or the tender sorrow that accompanies the
memory of betrayed hopes, in the presence of this stern and
tremendous reality. Out of water which seemed thick and
sullen as the stagnant Styx, but broke into a myriad beads of
dusky amber behind the steamer's paddles, leaped now and
then a white porpoise, weird and solitary as the ghost of a
murdered fish. On either side rose the headlands of naked
granite, walls a thousand feet in height, cold, inaccessible,
terrible; and even where, split apart by some fore-world convulsion,
they revealed glimpses up into the wilderness behind,
no cheating vapor, no haze of dreams, softened the distant
picture, but the gloomy green of the fir-forests darkened into
indigo blue, and stood hard and cold against the gray sky.
After leaving L'Anse à l'Eau, all signs of human life ceased.
No boat floated on the black glass; no fisher's hut crouched in
the sheltered coves; no settler's axe had cut away a single
feather from the ragged plumage of the hills.

But as they reached the awful cliffs of Trinity and Eternity,
rising straight as plummet falls from their bases, a thousand
feet below the surface, to their crests, fifteen hundred feet in

the air, a wind blew out of the north, tearing and rolling
away the gray covering of the sky, and allowing sudden floods
of sunshine to rush down through the blue gaps. The hearts
of the travellers were lifted, as by the sound of trumpets.
Far back from between the two colossal portals of rock, like
the double propylæ of some Theban temple, ran a long, deep
gorge of the wilderness, down which the coming sunshine
rolled like a dazzling inundation, drowning the forests in
splendor, pouring in silent cataracts over the granite walls,
and painting the black bosom of the Saguenay with the blue
of heaven. It was a sudden opening of the Gates of the
North, and a greeting from the strong Genius who sat enthroned
beyond the hills,—not in slumber and dreams, like his
languid sister of the South, cooling her dusky nakedness in the
deepest shade, but with the sun smiting his unflinching eyes,
with his broad, hairy breast open to the wind, with the best
blood of the world beating loud and strong in his heart, and
the seed of empires in his virile loins!

Woodbury was not one of your “gushing” characters, who
cry out “Splendid!” “Glorious!” on the slightest provocation.
When most deeply moved by the grander aspects of Nature,
he rarely spoke; but he had an involuntary habit of singing
softly to himself, at such times. So he did now, quite unconsciously,
and had got as far as:

—when he suddenly checked himself and turned away with
a laugh and a light blush of self-embarrassment. He had been
picturing to himself the intense delight which Hannah Thurston
would have felt in the scene before him.

Meanwhile the boat sped on, and soon reached the end of
the voyage at Ha-ha Bay. Mrs. Blake and her children were
delighted with their journey, to which the meeting with

Woodbury had given such an additional charm. As they
descended the Saguenay in the afternoon, their eyes grew accustomed
to the vast scale of the scenery; loftier and grander
arose the walls of granite, and more wild and awful yawned
the gorges behind them. The St. Lawrence now opened in
front with the freedom of the sea, and in the crimson light of
a superb sunset they returned to Rivière du Loup.

The companionship was not dropped after they had reached
Quebec. Woodbury accompanied them to the Falls of the
Montmorency and the Chaudière; to the Plains of Abraham
and the quaint French villages on the shores; and their evenings
were invariably spent on Durham Terrace, to enjoy,
over and over again, the matchless view. It was arranged
that they should return to Saratoga together, by way of Champlain
and Lake George; and a few more days found them
there, awaiting the arrival of Mr. Blake.

He came at last; and his wife had not incorrectly judged,
in supposing that there were some points of mutual attraction
between the two men. The Western merchant, though a
shrewd and prudent man of business, was well educated, had
a natural taste for art (he had just purchased two pictures by
Church and Kensett), and was familiar with the literature of
the day. He was one of those fortunate men who are capable
of heartily enjoying such things, without the slightest ambition
to produce them. He neither complained of his own vocation,
nor did he lightly esteem it. He was not made for idle
indulgence, and was sufficiently prosperous to allow himself
proper recreation. His temperament, therefore, was healthy,
cheerful, and stimulating to those with whom he came in contact.
He was by no means handsome, and had a short,
abrupt manner of speaking, which Woodbury's repose of
manner threw into greater distinctness. His wife, however,
knew his true value, as he knew hers, and their mutual confidence
was absolute.

Woodbury strongly urged them to spend a few days with
him at Lakeside, on their return journey to St. Louis. In addition

to the pleasure he derived from their society, he had a
secret desire that Mrs. Blake should see Hannah Thurston—a
curiosity to know the impression which the two women would
make on each other. What deeper motive lurked behind this,
he did not question.

The discussion of the proposal reminded him that he had
not heard from Lakeside since his departure. He immediately
wrote to Arbutus Wilson, announcing his speedy return, and
asking for news of the farming operations. Six days afterwards
an answer came, not from Arbutus, but from Mr.
Waldo—an answer of a nature so unexpected, that he left
Saratoga the same night.