Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Isabel burst into tears; and now he went on his knees at her side, and took her hands in his. “Isabel! Isabel! Are you crazy?” he cried, as if he meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shuddered in reply; he said, to mend matters, that it was a jest, about the boat; and he was driven to despair when Isabel repeated, “I never can go back by the bridges, never.”

  “But what do you propose to do?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!”

  He would try sarcasm. “Do you intend to set up a hermitage here, and have your meals sent out from the hotel? It’s a charming spot, and visited pretty constantly; but it’s small, even for a hermitage.”

  Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her eyes, and wondered that he was not ashamed to make fun of her.

  He would try kindness. “Perhaps, darling, you’ll let me carry you ashore.”

  “No, that will bring double the weight on the bridge at once.”

  “Couldn’t you shut your eyes, and let me lead you?”

  “Why, it isn’t the sight of the rapids,” she said, looking up fiercely.

  “The bridges are not safe. I’m not a child, Basil. O, what shall we do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Basil, gloomily. “It’s an exigency for which I wasn’t prepared.” Then he silently gave himself to the Evil One, for having probably overwrought Isabel’s nerves by repeating that poem about Avery, and by the ensuing talk about Niagara, which she had seemed to enjoy so much. He asked her if that was it; and she answered, “O no, it’s nothing but the bridges.” He proved to her that the bridges, upon all known principles, were perfectly safe, and that they could not give way. She shook her head, but made no answer, and he lost his patience.

  “Isabel,” he cried, “I’m ashamed of you!”

  “Don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for afterwards, Basil,” she replied, with the forbearance of those who have reason and justice on their side.

  The rapids beat and shouted round their little prison-isle, each billow leaping as if possessed by a separate demon. The absurd horror of the situation overwhelmed him. He dared not attempt to carry her ashore, for she might spring from his grasp into the flood. He could not leave her to call for help; and what if nobody came till she lost her mind from terror? Or, what if somebody should come and find them in that ridiculous affliction?

  Somebody was coming!

  “Isabel!” he shouted in her ear, “here come those people we saw in the parlor last night.”

  Isabel dashed her veil over her face, clutched Basil’s with her icy hand, rose, drew her arm convulsively through his, and walked ashore without a word.

  In a sheltered nook they sat down, and she quickly “repaired her drooping head and tricked her beams” again. He could see her tearfully smiling through her veil. “My dear,” he said, “I don’t ask an explanation of your fright, for I don’t suppose you could give it. But should you mind telling me why those people were so sovereign against it?”

  “Why, dearest! Don’t you understand? That Mrs. Richard — whoever she is — is so much like me.”

  She looked at him as if she had made the most satisfying statement, and he thought he had better not ask further then, but wait in hope that the meaning would come to him. They walked on in silence till they came to the Biddle Stairs, at the head of which is a notice that persons have been killed by pieces of rock from the precipice overhanging the shore below, and warning people that they descend at their peril. Isabel declined to visit the Cave of the Winds, to which these stairs lead, but was willing to risk the ascent of Terrapin Tower. “Thanks; no,” said her husband. “You might find it unsafe to come back the way you went up. We can’t count certainly upon the appearance of the lady who is so much like you; and I’ve no fancy for spending my life on Terrapin Tower.” So he found her a seat, and went alone to the top of the audacious little structure standing on the verge of the cataract, between the smooth curve of the Horse-Shoe and the sculptured front of the Central Fall, with the stormy sea of the Rapids behind, and the river, dim seen through the mists, crawling away between its lofty bluffs before. He knew again the awful delight with which so long ago he had watched the changes in the beauty of the Canadian Fall as it hung a mass of translucent green from the brink, and a pearly white seemed to crawl up from the abyss, and penetrate all its substance to the very crest, and then suddenly vanished from it, and perpetually renewed the same effect. The mystery of the rising vapors veiled the gulf into which the cataract swooped; the sun shone, and a rainbow dreamed upon them.

  Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks extend quite to the verge, and here Basil saw an elderly gentleman skipping from one slippery stone to another, and looking down from time to time into the abyss, who, when he had amused himself long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time, made bold to say that he thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous. The gentleman took this in good part, and owned it might seem so, but added that a distinguished phrenologist had examined his head, and told him he had equilibrium so large that he could go anywhere.

  “On your bridal tour, I presume,” he continued, as they approached the bench where Basil had left Isabel. She had now the company of a plain, middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inward festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. “Well, this is my third bridal tour to Niagara, and my wife’s been here once before on the same business. We see a good many changes. I used to stand on Table Rock with the others. Now that’s all gone. Well, old lady, shall we move on?” he asked; and this bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply, by the guardian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet pleasing associations.

  At dinner, Mr. Richard’s party sat at the table next Basil’s, and they were all now talking cheerfully over the emptiness of the spacious dining-hall.

  “Well, Kitty,” the married lady was saying, you can tell the girls what you please about the gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They’ll believe anything sooner than the truth.”

  “O yes, indeed,” said Kitty, “I’ve got a good deal of it made up already. I’ll describe a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionable people from all parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced with the most. I’m going to have had quite a flirtation with the gentleman of the long blond mustache, whom we met on the bridge this morning and he’s got to do duty in accounting for my missing glove. It’ll never do to tell the girls I dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you know, Fanny, I really can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners, waited upon by their black servants.”

  This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for the first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its way. He sat with his wife at a table farther down the room, and their child was served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid. The fact did not quite answer to the young lady’s description of it, and yet it certainly afforded her a ground-work. Basil fancied a sort of bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he used to come every year to Niagara before the war, and was now puzzled to find it so changed.

  “Yes,” he said, “I can’t account for him except as the ghost of Southern travel, and I can’t help feeling a little sorry for him. I suppose that almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourish the remains of the feudal system in the kind of poetry they produce. The impoverished slave-holder is a pathetic figure, in spite of all justice and reason, the beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and it is of no use to think of Andersonville in his presence. This gentleman, and others like him, used to be the lords of our summer resorts. They spent the money they did not earn like princes; they held their heads high; they trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair; t
hey received the homage of the doughface in his home. They came up here from their rice-swamps and cotton-fields, and bullied the whole busy civilization of the North. Everybody who had merchandise or principles to sell truckled to them, and travel amongst us was a triumphal progress. Now they’re moneyless and subjugated (as they call it), there’s none so poor to do them reverence, and it’s left for me, an Abolitionist from the cradle, to sigh over their fate. After all, they had noble traits, and it was no great wonder they got, to despise us, seeing what most of us were. It seems to me I should like to know our friend. I can’t help feeling towards him as towards a fallen prince, heaven help my craven spirit! I wonder how our colored waiter feels towards him. I dare say he admires him immensely.”

  There were not above a dozen other people in the room, and Basil contrasted the scene with that which the same place formerly presented. “In the old time,” he said, “every table was full, and we dined to the music of a brass band. I can’t say I liked the band, but I miss it. I wonder if our Southern friend misses it? They gave us a very small allowance of brass band when we arrived, Isabel. Upon my word, I wonder what’s come over the place,” he said, as the Southern party, rising from the table, walked out of the dining-room, attended by many treacherous echoes in spite of an ostentatious clatter of dishes that the waiters made.

  After dinner they drove on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara. As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly strange that the Neutral Nation should have revered the cataract as a demon; and another subtle spell (not to be broken even by the business-like composure of the man who shows off the hell-broth) is added to those successive sorceries by which Niagara gradually changes from a thing of beauty to a thing of terror. By all odds, too, the most tremendous view of the Falls is afforded by the point on the drive whence you look down upon the Horse-Shoe, and behold its three massive walls of sea rounding and sweeping into the gulf together, the color gone, and the smooth brink showing black and ridgy.

  Would they not go to the battle-field of Lundy’s Lane? asked the driver at a certain point on their return; but Isabel did not care for battle-fields, and Basil preferred to keep intact the reminiscence of his former visit. “They have a sort of tower of observation built on the battle-ground,” he said, as they drove on down by the river, “and it was in charge of an old Canadian militia-man, who had helped his countrymen to be beaten in the fight. This hero gave me a simple and unintelligible account of the battle, asking me first if I had ever heard of General Scott, and adding without flinching that here he got his earliest laurels. He seemed to go just so long to every listener, and nothing could stop him short, so I fell into a revery until he came to an end. It was hard to remember, that sweet summer morning, when the sun shone, and the birds sang, and the music of a piano and a girl’s voice rose from a bowery cottage near, that all the pure air had once been tainted with battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields had been planted with cannon, instead of potatoes and corn, and that where the cows came down the farmer’s lane, with tinkling bells, the shock of armed men had befallen. The blue and tranquil Ontario gleamed far away, and far away rolled the beautiful land, with farm-houses, fields, and woods, and at the foot of the tower lay the pretty village. The battle of the past seemed only a vagary of mine; yet how could I doubt the warrior at my elbow? — grieved though I was to find that a habit of strong drink had the better of his utterance that morning. My driver explained afterwards, that persons visiting the field were commonly so much pleased with the captain’s eloquence, that they kept the noble old soldier in a brandy-and-water rapture throughout the season, thereby greatly refreshing his memory, and making the battle bloodier and bloodier as the season advanced and the number of visitors increased. There my dear,” he suddenly broke off, as they came in sight of a slender stream of water that escaped from the brow of a cliff on the American side below the Falls, and spun itself into a gauze of silvery mist, “that’s the Bridal Veil; and I suppose you think the stream, which is making such a fine display, yonder, is some idle brooklet, ending a long course of error and worthlessness by that spectacular plunge. It’s nothing of the kind; it’s an honest hydraulio canal, of the most straightforward character, a poor but respectable mill-race which has devoted itself strictly to business, and has turned mill-wheels instead of fooling round water-lilies. It can afford that ultimate finery. What you behold in the Bridal Veil, my love, is the apotheosis of industry.”

  “What I can’t help thinking of,” said Isabel, who had not paid the smallest attention to the Bridal Veil, or anything about it, “is the awfulness of stepping off these places in the night-time.” She referred to the road which, next the precipice, is unguarded by any sort of parapet. In Europe a strong wall would secure it, but we manage things differently on our continent, and carriages go running over the brink from time to time.

  “If your thoughts have that direction,” answered her husband, “we had better go back to the hotel, and leave the Whirlpool for to-morrow morning. It’s late for it to-day, at any rate.” He had treated Isabel since the adventure on the Three Sisters with a superiority which he felt himself to be very odious, but which he could not disuse.

  “I’m not afraid,” she sighed, “but in the words of the retreating soldier, I — I’m awfully demoralized;” and added, “You know we must reserve some of the vital forces for shopping this evening.”

  Part of their business also was to buy the tickets for their return to Boston by way of Montreal and Quebec, and it was part of their pleasure to get these of the heartiest imaginable ticket-agent. He was a colonel or at least a major, and he made a polite feint of calling Basil by some military title. He commended the trip they were about to make as the most magnificent and beautiful on the whole continent, and he commended them for intending to make it. He said that was Mrs. General Bowdur of Philadelphia who just went out; did they know her? Somehow, the titles affected Basil as of older date than the late war, and as belonging to the militia period; and he imagined for the agent the romance of a life spent at a watering-place, in contact with rich money-spending, pleasure-taking people, who formed his whole jovial world. The Colonel, who included them in this world, and thereby brevetted them rich and fashionable, could not secure a state-room for them on the boat, — a perfectly splendid Lake steamer, which would take them down the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and on to Montreal without change, — but he would give them a letter to the captain, who was a very particular friend of his, and would be happy to show them as his friends every attention; and so he wrote a note ascribing peculiar merits to Basil, and in spite of all reason making him feel for the moment that he was privileged by a document which was no doubt part of every such transaction. He spoke in a loud cheerful voice; he laughed jollily at no apparent joke; he bowed very low and said, “GOOD-evening!” at parting, and they went away as if he had blessed them.

  The rest of the evening they spent in wandering through the village, charmed with its bizarre mixture of quaintness and commonplaceness; in hanging about the shop-windows with their monotonous variety of feather fans, — each with a violently red or yellow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre, — moccasons, bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouches, bows and arrows, and whatever else the savage art of the neighboring squaws can invent; in sauntering through these gay booths, pricing many things, and in hanging long and undecidedly over cases full of feldspar crosses, quartz bracelets and necklaces, and every manner of vase, inoperative pitcher, and other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geological formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by the heat of the gas-lights and the persistence of the mosquitoes. There were very few people besides themselves in the shops, and Isabel’s purchases were not lavish. Her husband had made up his mind to get her some little keepsake; and when he had taken her to the hotel he ran back to one of the shops, and hastily bought
her a feather fan, — a magnificent thing of deep magenta dye shading into blue, with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the centre. When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, “Who’s that for, Basil?” demanded his wife; “the cook?” But seeing his ghastly look at this, she fell upon his neck, crying, “O you poor old tasteless darling! You’ve got it for me!” and seemed about to die of laughter.

  “Didn’t you start and throw up your hands,” he stammered, “when you came to that case of fans?”

  “Yes, — in horror! Did you think I liked the cruel things, with their dead birds and their hideous colors? O Basil, dearest! You are incorrigible. Can’t you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the hues that the perverseness of man has invented in defiance of nature? Now, my love, just promise me one thing,” she said pathetically. “We’re going to do a little shopping in Montreal, you know; and perhaps you’ll be wanting to surprise me with something there. Don’t do it. Or if you must, do tell me all about it beforehand, and what the color of it’s to be; and I can say whether to get it or not, and then there’ll be some taste about it, and I shall be truly surprised and pleased.”

  She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he murmured something about exchanging it. “No,” she said, “we’ll keep it as a — a — monument.” And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter, from the proud height to which he had climbed in pity of her nervous fears of the day. So completely were their places changed, that he doubted if it were not he who had made that scene on the Third Sister; and when Isabel said, “O, why won’t men use their reasoning faculties?” he could not for himself have claimed any, and he could not urge the truth: that he had bought the fan more for its barbaric brightness than for its beauty. She would not let him get angry, and he could say nothing against the half-ironical petting with which she soothed his mortification.

  But all troubles passed with the night, and the next morning they spent a charming hour about Prospect Point, and in sauntering over Goat Island, somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the place on whose wonders they had so hungrily and indiscriminately feasted at first. They had already the feeling of veteran visitors, and they loftily marveled at the greed with which newer-comers plunged at the sensations. They could not conceive why people should want to descend the inclined railway to the foot of the American Fall; they smiled at the idea of going up Terrapin Tower; they derided the vulgar daring of those who went out upon the Three Weird Sisters; for some whom they saw about to go down the Biddle Stairs to the Cave of the Winds, they had no words to express their contempt.