Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “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 had grown to be a part, and echoed away to 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.

  “Isn’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?”

  “Isn’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. Ellison slept she wished to ask her husband one 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 didn’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 round to-morrow morning asking my consent to 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!”

  II.

  MRS. ELLISON’S LITTLE MANEUVRE.

  The next morning our tourists found themselves at rest in Ha-Ha Bay, at the head of navigation for the larger steamers. The long line of sullen hills had fallen away, and the morning sun shone warm on what in a friendlier climate would have been a very lovely landscape. The bay was an irregular oval, with shores that rose in bold but not lofty heights on one side, while on the other lay a narrow plain with two villages clinging about the road that followed the crescent beach, and lifting each the slender tin-clad spire of its church to sparkle in the sun.

  At the head of the bay was a mountainous top, and along its waters were masses of rocks, gayly painted with lichens and stained with metallic tints of orange and scarlet. The unchanging growth of stunted pines was the only forest in sight, though Ha-Ha Bay is a famous lumbering port, and some schooners now lay there receiving cargoes of odorous pine plank. The steamboat-wharf was all astir with the liveliest toil and leisure. The boat was taking on wood, which was brought in wheelbarrows to the top of the steep, smooth gangway-planking, where the habitant in charge planted his broad feet for the downward slide, and was hurled aboard more or less en masse by the fierce velocity of his heavy-laden wheelbarrow. Amidst the confusion and hazard of this feat a procession of other habitans marched aboard, each one bearing under his arm a coffin-shaped wooden box. The rising fear of Colonel Ellison, that these boxes represented the loss of the whole infant population of Ha-Ha Bay, was checked by the reflection that the region could not have produced so many children, and calmed altogether by the purser, who said that they were full of huckleberries, and that Colonel Ellison could have as many as he liked for fifteen cents a bushel. This gave him a keen sense of the poverty of the land, and he bought of the boys who came aboard such abundance of wild red raspberries, in all manner of birch-bark canoes and goblets and cornucopias, that he was obliged to make presents of them to the very dealers whose stock he had exhausted, and he was in treaty with the local half-wit — very fine, with a hunchback, and a massive wen on one side of his head — to take charity in the wild fruits of his native province, when the crowd about him was gently opened by a person who advanced with a flourishing bow and a sprightly “Good morning, good morning, sir!” “How do you do?” asked Colonel Ellison; but the other, intent on business, answered, “I am the only person at Ha-Ha Bay who speaks English, and I have come to ask if you would not like to make a promenade in my horse and buggy upon the mountain before breakfast. You shall be gone as long as you will for one shilling and sixpence. I will show you all that there is to be seen about the place, and the beautiful view of the bay from the top of the mountain. But it is elegant, you know, I can assure you.”

  The speaker was so fluent of his English, he had such an audacious, wide-branching mustache, such a twinkle in his left eye, — which wore its lid in a careless, slouching fashion, — that the heart of man naturally clove to him; and Colonel Ellison agreed on the spot to make the proposed promenade, for himself and both his ladies, of whom he went joyfully in search. He found them at the stern of the boat, admiring the wild scenery, and looking

  “Fresh as the morn and as the season fair.”

  He was not a close observer, and of his wife’s wardrobe he had the ignorance of a good husband, who, as soon as the pang of paying for her dresses is past, forgets whatever she has; but he could not help seeing that some gayeties of costume which he had dimly associated with his wife now enhanced the charms of his cousin’s nice little face and figure. A scarf of lively hue carelessly tied about the throat to keep off the morning chill, a prettier ribbon, a more stylish jacket than Miss Ellison owned, — what do I know? — an air of preparation for battle, caught the colonel’s eye, and a conscious red stole responsive into Kitty’s cheek.

  “Kitty,” said he, “don’t you let yourself be made a goose of.”

  “I hope she won’t — by you!” retorted his wife, “and I’ll thank you, Colonel Ellison, not to be a Betty, whatever you are. I don’t think it’s manly to be always noticing ladies’ clothes.”

  “Who said anything about clothes?” demanded the colonel, taking his stand upon the letter.

  “Well, don’t you, at any rate. Yes, I’d like to ride, of all things; and we’ve time enough, for breakfast isn’t ready till half past eight. Where’s the carriage?”

  The only English scholar at Ha-Ha Bay had taken the light wraps of the ladies and was moving off with them. “This way, this way,” he said, waving his hand towards a larger number of vehicles on the shore than could have been reasonably attributed to Ha-Ha Bay. “I hope you won’t object to having another passenger with you? There’s plenty of room for all. He seems a very nice, gentlemanly person,” s
aid he, with a queer, patronizing graciousness which he had no doubt caught from his English patrons.

  “The more the merrier,” answered Colonel Ellison, and “Not in the least!” said his wife, not meaning the proverb. Her eye had swept the whole array of vehicles and had found them all empty, save one, in which she detected the blamelessly coated back of Mr. Arbuton. But I ought perhaps to explain Mrs. Ellison’s motives better than they can be made to appear in her conduct. She cared nothing for Mr. Arbuton; and she had no logical wish to see Kitty in love with him. But here were two young people thrown somewhat romantically together; Mrs. Ellison was a born match-maker, and to have refrained from promoting their better acquaintance in the interest of abstract matrimony was what never could have entered into her thought or desire. Her whole being closed for the time about this purpose; her heart, always warm towards Kitty, — whom she admired with a sort of generous frenzy, — expanded with all kinds of lovely designs; in a word, every dress she had she would instantly have bestowed upon that worshipful creature who was capable of adding another marriage to the world. I hope the reader finds nothing vulgar or unbecoming in this, for I do not; it was an enthusiasm, pure and simple, a beautiful and unselfish abandon; and I am sure men ought to be sorry that they are not worthier to be favored by it. Ladies have often to lament in the midst of their finesse that, really, no man is deserving the fate they devote themselves to prepare for him, or, in other words, that women cannot marry women.

  I am not going to be so rash as try to depict Mrs. Ellison’s arts, for then, indeed, I should make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance of such matters. Whether Mr. Arbuton was ever aware of them, I am not sure: as a man he was, of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other hand, he had seen far more of the world than Mrs. Ellison, and she may have been clear as day to him. Probably, though, he did not detect any design; he could not have conceived of such a thing in a person with whom he had been so irregularly made acquainted, and to whom he felt himself so hopelessly superior. A film of ice such as in autumn you find casing the still pools early in the frosty mornings had gathered upon his manner over night; but it thawed under the greetings of the others, and he jumped actively out of the vehicle to offer the ladies their choice of seats. When all was arranged he found himself at Mrs. Ellison’s side, for Kitty had somewhat eagerly climbed to the front seat with the colonel. In these circumstances it was pure zeal that sustained Mrs. Ellison in the flattering constancy with which she babbled on to Mr. Arbuton and refrained from openly resenting Kitty’s contumacy.

  As the wagon began to ascend the hill, the road was so rough that the springs smote together with pitiless jolts, and the ladies uttered some irrepressible moans. “Never mind, my dear,” said the colonel, turning about to his wife, “we’ve got all the English there is at Ha-Ha Bay, any way.” Whereupon the driver gave him a wink of sudden liking and good-fellowship. At the same time his tongue was loosed, and he began to talk of himself. “You see my dog, how he leaps at the horse’s nose? He is a moose-dog, and keeps himself in practice of catching the moose by the nose. You ought to come in the hunting season. I could furnish you with Indians and everything you need to hunt with. I am a dealer in wild beasts, you know, and I must keep prepared to take them.”

  “Wild beasts?”

  “Yes, for Barnum and the other showmen. I deal in deer, wolf, bear, beaver, moose, cariboo, wild-cat, link—”

  “What?”

  “Link — link! You say deer for deers, and link for lynx, don’t you?”

  “Certainly,” answered the unblushing colonel. “Are there many link about here?”

  “Not many, and they are a very expensive animal. I have been shamefully treated in a link that I have sold to a Boston showman. It was a difficult beast to take; bit my Indian awfully; and Mr. Doolittle would not give the price he promised.”

  “What an outrage!”

  “Yes, but it was not so bad as it might have been. He wanted the money back afterwards; the link died in about two weeks,” said the dealer in wild animals, with a smile that curled his mustache into his ears, and a glance at Colonel Ellison. “He may have been bruised, I suppose. He may have been homesick. Perhaps he was never a very strong link. The link is a curious animal, miss,” he said to Kitty, in conclusion.

  They had been slowly climbing the mountain road, from which, on either hand, the pasturelands fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows. The tops were quite barren, but in the little vales, despite the stones, a short grass grew very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory assonance as they cropped the herbage. Below, the bay filled the oval of the hills with its sunny expanse, and the white steamer, where she lay beside the busy wharf, and the black lumber-ships, gave their variety to the pretty scene, which was completed by the picturesque villages on the shore. It was a very simple sight, but somehow very touching, as if the soft spectacle were but a respite from desolation and solitude; as indeed it was.

  Mr. Arbuton must have been talking of travel elsewhere, for now he said to Mrs. Ellison, “This looks like a bit of Norway; the bay yonder might very well be a fjord of the Northern sea.”

  Mrs. Ellison murmured her sense of obligation to the bay, the fjord, and Mr. Arbuton, for their complaisance, and Kitty remembered that he had somewhat snubbed her the night before for attributing any suggestive grace to the native scenery. “Then you’ve really found something in an American landscape. I suppose we ought to congratulate it,” she said, in smiling enjoyment of her triumph.

  The colonel looked at her with eyes of humorous question; Mrs. Ellison looked blank; and Mr. Arbuton, having quite forgotten what he had said to provoke this comment now, looked puzzled and answered nothing: for he had this trait also in common with the sort of Englishman for whom he was taken, that he never helped out your conversational venture, but if he failed to respond inwardly, left you with your unaccepted remark upon your hands, as it were. In his silence, Kitty fell a prey to very evil thoughts of him, for it made her harmless sally look like a blundering attack upon him. But just then the driver came to her rescue; he said, “Gentlemen and ladies, this is the end of the mountain promenade,” and, turning his horse’s head, drove rapidly back to the village.

  At the foot of the hill they came again to the church, and his passengers wanted to get out and look into it. “O certainly,” said he, “it isn’t finished yet, but you can say as many prayers as you like in it.”

  The church was decent and clean, like most Canadian churches, and at this early hour there was a good number of the villagers at their devotions. The lithographic pictures of the stations to Calvary were, of course, on its walls, and there was the ordinary tawdriness of paint and carving about the high altar.

  “I don’t like to see these things,” said Mrs. Ellison. “It really seems to savor of idolatry. Don’t you think so, Mr. Arbuton?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I doubt if they’re the sort of people to be hurt by it.”

  “They need a good stout faith in cold climates, I can tell you,” said the colonel. “It helps to keep them warm. The broad church would be too full of draughts up here. They want something snug and tight. Just imagine one of these poor devils listening to a liberal sermon about birds and fruits and flowers and beautiful sentiments, and then driving home over the hills with the mercury thirty degrees below zero! He couldn’t stand it.”

  “Yes, yes, certainly,” said Mr. Arbuton, and looked about him with an eye of cold, uncompassionate inspection, as if he were trying it by a standard of taste, and, on the whole, finding the poor little church vulgar.

  When they mounted to their places again, the talk fell entirely to the colonel, who, as his wont was, got what information he could out of the driver. It appeared, in spite of his theory, that they were not all good Catholics at Ha-Ha Bay. “This chap, for example,” said the Frenchman, touching himself on the breast and using the slang he m
ust have picked up from American travellers, “is no Catholic, — not much! He has made too many studies to care for religion. There’s a large French party, sir, in Canada, that’s opposed to the priests and in favor of annexation.”

  He satisfied the colonel’s utmost curiosity, discoursing, as he drove by the log-built cottages which were now and then sheathed in birch-bark, upon the local affairs, and the character and history of such of his fellow-villagers as they met. He knew the pretty girls upon the street and saluted them by name, interrupting himself with these courtesies in the lecture he was giving the colonel on life at Ha-Ha Bay. There was only one brick house (which he had built himself, but had been obliged to sell in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with straw. These he excused to his Americans, but added that the ungainly thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the end of an unusually long, hard winter.

  “And the people,” asked the colonel, “what do they do in the winter to pass the time?”

  “Draw the wood, smoke the pipe, court the ladies. — But wouldn’t you like to see the inside of one of our poor cottages? I shall be very proud to have you look at mine, and to have you drink a glass of milk from my cows. I am sorry that I cannot offer you brandy, but there’s none to be bought in the place.”

  “Don’t speak of it! For an eye-opener there is nothing like a glass of milk,” gayly answered the colonel.

  They entered the best room of the house, — wide, low-ceiled, dimly lit by two small windows, and fortified against the winter by a huge Canada stove of cast-iron. It was rude but neat, and had an air of decent comfort. Through the window appeared a very little vegetable garden with a border of the hardiest flowers. “The large beans there,” explained the host, “are for soup and coffee. My corn,” he said, pointing out some rows of dwarfish maize, “has escaped the early August frosts, and so I expect to have some roasting-ears yet this summer.”