The Bishop of Saskabasquia.
I have not a story, properly speaking, to tell about him. He, my Bishop, is quite unconscious that I am writing about him, and would, I daresay, be quite astonished if he knew that I could find anything that relates to him to write about. But I will tell you just how I came to do so. I went to see the “Private Secretary” some months ago. I had never been a great admirer of clergymen as a sex (vide Frenchman's classification), and I thoroughly enjoyed the capital performance of so clever a play. Here, thought I, is a genuine and perfectly fair, though doubtless exaggerated, portrait of the young and helpless curate. I quite lived on that play. I used to go about, like many another delighted playgoer, I expect, quoting the better bits in it, and they are many, and often laughing to himself at its admirable caricature. However, to go on with what I am going to tell you, about two months after I had seen the “Private Secretary,” I had occasion to undertake a sea voyage. I had to go out on business to Canada, and embarked one fine Thursday at Liverpool. One of the first things you do on board an ocean steamer is to find your allotted place at table, and the names, etc, of your companions. I soon found mine, and discovered with a pang that I was six seats from the Captain at the side, between a lady and her daughter I had already met at the North-Western Hotel and did not like, and opposite to the Bishop of Saskabasquia, his wife and sister and three children. There was no help for it, I must endure the placid small talk, the clerical platitudes, the intolerable intolerance born of a deathless bigotry that would emanate from my vis-a-vis. What a fuss they made over him, too! Only a Colonial Bishop after all, but when we were all at the wharf, ready to get into the tender, we were kept waiting—we the more insignificant portion of the passengers, mercantile and so on—till “my lord” and his family, nine in number, were safely handed up, with boys and bundles and baggage of every description.
The Bishop himself was a tall thin man, rather priestly in aspect and careworn. Mrs. Saskabasquia as I called her all through the voyage and the seven children—seven little Saskabasquians—and Miss Saskabasquia, the aunt, were all merry enough it seemed though dressed in the most unearthly costumes I had ever seen. Where they had been procured I could not imagine, but they appeared to be made of different kinds of canvas, flannel shirting, corduroy, knitted wool and blankets. Of course we all mustered at the lunch table that first day, people always do, and affect great brightness and hysterical intellectuality and large appetites. I took my seat with a resigned air. There was not a single pretty girl on board. There were plenty of children, but I did not care much for the society of children. The lady and her daughter between whom I sat, presumably to hand them the dishes, did not like me any better than I liked them. They were Canadians, that was easy to discover by their peculiarly flat pronunciation, a detestable accent I hold, the American is preferable. They were connected with the Civil Service in some way through “papa” who figured much in their conversation and I fancy the mother rather disliked the idea of such close contact with a member of the commercial world. So much for colonial snobbery. The lunch was good however, excellent, and we did justice to it. The Bishop did not appear nor any of his family until we had almost finished. Then he entered with his wife and the two eldest boys. The only vacant seats were those opposite me which they took. I wondered they had not placed him next the Capt., but divined that the handsome brunette and the horsey broker, Wyatt and his wife of Montreal, fabulously rich and popular, had arranged some time before to sit next the Capt. My Bishop was perhaps annoyed. But if so, he did not show it. He and his wife ate abundantly, it was good to see them. I involuntarily smiled once when the Bishop sent his plate back the second time for soup, and he caught me. To my surprise, he laughed very heartily and said to me:
“I hope you do not think I am forgetting all the other good things to come! I assure you we are very hungry, are we not, Mary?”
Mrs. Saskabasquia laughed in her turn, and I began to perceive what a very pretty girl she must have been once, and her accent was the purest, most beautiful English. We seemed to warm up generally around the table as we watched the Bishop eat. The boys behaved beautifully and enjoyed their meal as well. Presently we heard a baby crying. It was evidently the youngest of the seven young Saskabasquians. The Bishop stopped directly.
“Go on, go on with your dinner, my dear; I'll see to him, its only James. Dropped his rattle and put his finger in his eye, I expect.”
He jumped up and went, I suppose, to the stateroom. Mrs. Saskabasquia laughed softly, and when she spoke she rather addressed herself to me.
“My husband is very good, you know. And James is such a little monkey, and so much better with him than with anyone else, so I just let him go, but it does certainly look very selfish, doesn't it?”
“Not at all,” I responded gallantly. “I am sure you need the rest quite as much as he does, particularly if the ba—if the little boy is very young and you—that is—” I was not very clear as to what I was going to say, but she took it up for me.
“Oh, James is the baby. He is just six months' old, you know.”
“That is very young to travel,” said I. I began to enjoy the charming confidences of Mrs. Saskabasquia, in spite of myself.
“Oh, he was only three months old when we left for England, quite a young traveller as you say. But he is very good, and I have so many to help me.”
Here the Bishop returned and sat down once more to his lunch. We had some further conversation, in which I learned that he and his wife had gone out to the North-West just twelve years ago for the first time. All their children had been born there, and they were returning to work again after a brief summer holiday in England. They told me all this with the most delightful frankness, and I began to be grateful for my place at table, as without free and congenial society at meal-time, life on board an ocean steamer narrows down to something vastly uncomfortable. It was a bright and beautiful afternoon on deck, and I soon found myself walking energetically up and down with the Bishop. I commenced by asking him some questions as to his work, place of residence and so on, and once started he talked for a long time about his northern home in the wilds of Canada.
“My wife and I had been only married two months when we went out,” said he, with a smile at the remembrance. “We did not know what we were going to.”
“Would you have gone had you known?” I enquired as we paused in our walk to take in a view of the Mersey we were leaving behind.
“Yes, I think so. Yes, I am quite sure we would. I was an Oxford man, country-bred; my father is still alive, and has a small living in Essex. I was imbued with the idea of doing something in the colonies long after I was comfortably settled in an English living myself, but I had always fancied it would be Africa. However, just at the time of our marriage I was offered this bishopric in Canada, and my wife was so anxious to go that I easily fell in with the plan.”
“Anxious to go out there?” I said in much surprise.
“Ah! You don't know what a missionary in herself my wife is! Then, of course, young people never think of the coming events—children and all that you know. We found ourselves one morning at three o'clock, having gone as far as there was any train to take us, waiting in a barn that served as a station for the buckboard to take us on further to our destination. Have you been in Canada yourself? No? Then you have not seen a buckboard. It consists of two planks laid side by side, lengthwise, over four antiquated wheels—usually the remains of a once useful wagon. Upon this you sit as well as you can, and get driven and jolted and bumped about to the appointed goal. I remember that morning so well,” continued the Bishop. “It was very cold, being late in November, and at that hour one feels it so much more—3 a.m., you know. There was one man in charge of the barn; we called him the station-master, though the title sat awkwardly enough upon him. He was a surly fellow. I never met such another. Usually the people out there are agreeable, if slow and stupid.”
“Slow, are they?” said I in surprise.
“Oh, frightfully slow. A Canadian laborer is the slowest person in existence, I really believe. However, this man would not give us any information, except to barely tell us that this buckboard was coming for us shortly. It was pitch dark of course and the barn was lighted by one oil lamp and warmed by a coal stove. The lamp would not burn well, so my wife unstrapped her travelling bag and with a pair of tiny curved nail scissors did her best, with the wick, the man remaining perfectly unmoveable and taciturn all the while. At four o'clock our conveyance arrived, and would you believe it—both the driver and the station master allowed me to lift my own luggage into it as well as I could? What it would not take I told the man in charge I would send for as soon as possible. There was no sleighing yet, and that drive was the most excruciating thing I ever endured over corduroy roads through wild and dark forests, along interminable country roads of yellow clay mixed with mud till finally we reached the house of the chief member of society in my district where we were to stay until our own house was ready.”
“How long did that take you?” I was quite interested. This was unlike the other clergymen's conversation I remembered.
“O, a matter of eight hours or so. We had the eggs and bacon—the piece de resistance in every Canadian farmhouse—at about half-past 12, for which we were thankful and—hungry. But now you must excuse me for here come two of the boys. Now, then, Alick, where's your mother? Isn't she coming on deck with James? Run and fetch her and you, George, get one of the chairs ready for her. And get the rugs at the same time Alick, do you hear?”
I excused myself in turn and watched the family preparations with much amusement. Mrs. Saskabasquia came up from her state room with a baby in her arms, and a big fellow he was, followed by the other six and their aunt. The Bishop placed chairs for the two ladies and walked up and down the deck I should think the entire afternoon, first with two children and then with two more and finally with the baby in his arms. This was a funny sight but still not one to be ridiculed, far from it. Well, every day showed my new friend in an improved light. Who was it took all the children, not only his own but actually the entire troop on board up to the bow and down to the stern in a laughing crowd to see this or that or the other? Now a shoal of porpoises, now a distant sail or an iceberg, now the beautiful phosphorescence or the red light of a passing ship—the Bishop. Who divined the innate cliquism of life on board ship and cunningly got together in intercourse the very people who wanted to know each other, and even brought into good temper those unfortunate souls who thought only of their own dignity and station in life? The Bishop. Who organized the Grand Concert and Readings in the saloon, writing the programmes himself, pinning them on the doors, discovering the clever and encouraging the timid and reading from the “Cricket on the Hearth,” and the “Wreck of the Grosvenor,” as I had never imagined a divine could read? The Bishop again. Who might be seen in the mid-day hours when the cabin passengers were asleep, quietly and without ostentation reading or talking to the steerage, ay, and Mrs. Saskabosquia too with her baby on her arm, going about amongst those poor tired folk, many of them with their own babies, not too well fed and not too well washed nor clothed? Still the Bishop, always the Bishop. They appeared as if they could not rest without helping on somebody or something, and yet there was in Mrs. Saskabasquia at least, a delightful sense of calm which affected all who came near her. I used often to sit down by her, she with the inevitable baby on her lap and two or three of the others at her feet on rugs, and she would talk most frankly and unaffectedly of their strange life in Canada. I learnt that she was the daughter of a clergyman in Essex, and had, of course, been brought up in a refined and charming country home like an English gentlewoman. What she had had to do in the new world seemed like a dream.
“What servants do I keep?” she said one day in answer to a question of mine “Why, sometimes I am without any. Then Kathleen and I do the best we can and the children they do the same and my husband takes what we give him! Indeed, my house is a sort of dispensary you know. The most extraordinary people come to me for the most extraordinary things. Now for a bottle of medicine, now for some cast off clothing, now for writing paper and old newspapers or a few tacks. So we have many wants to relieve besides our own and really, that is good for us you know. One Xmas dinner was an amusing one. Roast beef was out of the question, we couldn't get any, and the old woman who usually brought us a turkey came eight miles in the snow to bitterly lament the failure of her turkey crop. The one she had intended for me had been killed and trussed and then the rats which abound out there, got at it in the night and left not a bone of it! So I got the poor old thing a warm cup of tea and gave her some thick socks and sent her away relieved, resolved to spread myself on the pudding. Do you remember Kathleen!”
And Miss Saskabasquia did and smiled at the remembrance.
“What was it like?”
“The pudding? Oh! It was the funniest pudding! George—no—Ethel, was the baby then and very troublesome. Yes, you were my dear and cutting teeth. I was far from strong and in the act of stirring the pudding was taken quite ill and had to give it up. Kathleen was naturally forced to attend to me and the three children, and only for Henry, we should have had no Xmas dinner at all! He went to work with a will, stirred it well, put it into the cloth and was just I believe dropping it into the water when the string broke and the poor pudding tumbled into the water! Of course it was useless, and my husband scarcely knew what to do with himself. Fancy what he did do, though! He went to work and made another out of what he could find without telling us. He'll tell you about it if you ask him, how puzzled he was at first. There was some suet over, only not minced, you know. So he took that just as it was in a lump and buried it in bread-crumbs, luckily we had plenty of bread. Then he broke in the eggs, but when he came to look for the fruit, that was all in the pot of hot water, not a raisin left. He just ladled them out and put them in the second time. I think that was delicious of him don't you? But he forgot the flour and there was so little sugar seemingly in the bag (he didn't know where my Xmas stores were kept) that he took fright and wouldn't use it but broke up some maple sugar instead, then tied it up and got it safely launched the second time. And it was not at all bad, though very shapeless and unlike a trim plum pudding, with the holly at the top.”
And many another tale did she tell me of “Henry's” ceaseless activity, and courage and patience. He had learnt three Indian dialects, the patois of the habitant, and the Gaelic of two Scotch settlements, in order to converse freely with his people and understand their wants properly. He could doctor the body as well as the soul, set a fractured limb, bind a wound, apply ice for sunstroke and snow for chilblains. He could harness a horse and milk a cow; paddle a canoe and shoot and fish like an Indian, cook and garden and hew and build—indeed there seemed nothing he could not do and had not done, and all this along with the care of his office, as much a missionary one as any could be. Peril of shipwreck and peril of fire, peril of frost and peril of heat, peril of sickness, pain and death, peril of men, ignorant and wicked, of wild beasts and wilder storms—all these he had braved with his wife and little ones for the sake of his convictions added to a genuine love of his fellow-man. I began to consider, and rightly I think, the unknown, obscure Bishop of Saskabasquia one of the most interesting men of the day.
Our journey, however, could not always last. Our pleasant chats, our lively table-talk, Mrs. Saskabasquia's pretty womanly confidences and her husband's deep-voiced readings from Dickens which he told me were of the utmost moral value to his people, all came to an end. We all felt sorry to part, yet greatly relieved at seeing the mighty cliff of Quebec draw nearer and nearer with each succeeding hour. I had been quite ill for the last two days like nearly all the other passengers. Coming up the Gulf of St. Lawrence that is sometimes the case, and we were a miserable party that Friday, hardly anyone on deck except the irrepressible Bishop and his family and myself. I was wretched, sick and cold and trembling in every limb, undoubted mal de mer had fastened upon me. We were standing close by the railing of the promenade deck when a something swept by on the water. “Child overboard!” I sang out as loudly as I could. Instantly the steerage was in a state of commotion—the child was missed. There didn't appear to be a sailor on the spot. The Bishop looked at me, and I looked at the Bishop. Like lightning he tore off his coat. I put my hand on his arm.
“Dear sir, you will not do such a thing!”
“What is it, Henry?” cried his wife. “Somebody must.”
“I wish to God I could, sir!” In another moment he was over.
How he ever recovered from that awful plunge I don't know, but a boat was immediately lowered for him and the child—he had it safe, miraculously enough. How I cursed my weakness which prevented my going in his place. But when I saw the two lives saved I was glad I had not gone, for in my weak state I could not even have saved the child.
I am invited to a Christmas dinner, whenever I like, with the Bishop of Saskabasquia, whom I count as perhaps the finest specimen of healthy Christian manhood I have ever met, and although I can still laugh at the fun of “The Private Secretary” I can say that even among her clergy England can boast of heroes in these latter days as noble and disinterested as in years gone by.
A CHRISTMAS SKETCH.
CHAPTER I.
It is Christmas day in the morning. There is no doubt about it. The shine of the sun, the frost on the trees, the voice of the birds, and the unusual crow, and cackle and clatter and confusion outside the house can leave no doubts upon the subject, to say nothing of the inside of the house. Here it is Christmas day and no mistake. On what other day is the larder so full?—Full is not expressive enough; crammed, rammed, jammed full is more like the actual condition of things, so tightly wedged are pheasants and partridges, grouse and quail, great roasts of beef and haunches of venison, pork and pasty, mutton and fowl. On what other day is the still-room so alluring, where cordials are at their liveliest of brown and amber, and the white fingers of the lady of the house gleam in and out of the piling of herbs and the stirring of compounds—both innocent and inebriating? On what other day is the kitchen so important? Why, the cook is actually thinner than she was the yesterday! Christmas day in the morning is taking it out of her. “No men cooks about me”, growls Sir Humphrey Desart, “we'll keep Sarah.” So Sarah is kept, and though she be fat, aye, and getting on to three score, yet her strength faileth not, as you may observe. Somewhat of a martinet, yet kindly withal and leading the hubbub in the kitchen with all the gusto of twenty years ago. My lady will descend presently to see if all goes on properly, and Sarah must lose no time. Heavens, how many eggs is she going to break? What are they all for? Will not the resources of the farmyard fail her? This, then, explains all the crow and cackle outside. Now what is she at? Lemons this time, and anon giving a fine stimulus with her master-hand to the lumpy yellow contents of a smooth yellow bowl. Ah! No lumps now; one turn and all resolved into a perfect cadence. Anyone is an artist and a great one who can so resolve a discordant measure. And now she is busy with the brandy! Ah! Sarah, will no temptation accrue from the pouring of the warming draught? “Out upon thee!” says Sarah. “Am I not already as warm over my work as I want to be, and shall I not have my good glass of beer at my dinner? Leave the quality upstairs their brandy,” says Sarah, “and let me get to my work.”
Well, and the upshot of all this is, that, despite all one may affirm to the contrary, the one grand essential, the peculiar and individualizing attribute of Christmas is—the dinner. The parson may think of his preaching (and if he ever does so, surely most of all on this day) and the virtuous may think of the poor; the old may remember the young, and the young be pardoned for only remembering each other, but the chief thought, the most blissful remembrance is still—The Dinner.
If the parson preach a little better sermon than usual, it is because his nine children have not been forgotten by Lady Bountiful, and are actually going to have—A Dinner.
My Lady Bountiful in her turn may go to church, and appear devoutly removed from the mundus edibilis, yet if you could look into her reflections, you would perceive that she has but one thought—The Dinner. Do you suppose, much as the youths from Oxford and their friend the captain, from London, are devoted to mamma and her daughters, they are not at the same time being eaten up, as it were, devoured, by the intense wish for the hour to come when they may partake of—That Dinner!
Sir Humphrey has asked a particularly large party down this Christmas, and seems to have forgotten nobody he ever knew. Not a poor relation but has been remembered, and things are on a grander scale than usual. The candles build famously, set in the chimney candelabra; the logs are all of the biggest, and as for the Yule himself, he is a veritable Brobdignag; the staircases drop flowers, and holly and mistletoe hang all about. Everything shines, and gleams, and glows. There is to be a boar's head, with, no lack of mustard and minstrelsy, and nothing eatable or drinkable that pertains to Christmas will be wanting. Carols, and waits, and contended tenants; merry chimes and clinking glasses; twanging fiddles and the rush down the middle—nothing is spared and nobody is forgotten. So the hour draws on, the guests pull through the dreary day (for as I have said before, everything on Christmas day gives place to the dinner), and at last the dinner becomes an absolute fact, something to be apprehended, sat down to, and finally eaten. It is eaten, and everyone has come into the long hall, at one end of which the Yule burns. There is merry talk, and it is easier now for the captain to devote himself to the girls, having left the dinner behind; there is talk, too, of a little wonder at the gorgeousness of the dinner, for Sir Humphrey has not been so gay for years, yes, just twenty years, when it is evident that Sir Humphrey is going to make a speech. He stands alone in front of the fire, and this is what he says. If you want to know what he looks like, you may think of an old man who is a gentleman, white-haired, noble and resolute, but with a sense of broken fortunes and deferred hopes upon him.
“I have been young and now am old,” says Sir Humphrey, “and I have never yet seen the house, known the family, or penetrated the life where there did not exist some trouble or some secret. Therefore, if I refer to-night to the skeleton in my own house,” he continues, with a slight shudder, “I only do what perhaps each individual before me might also do were there the like necessity. The necessity of such reference, in my own case, does not make it less hard for me.” Here, Sir Humphrey pauses. When he speaks again he is something straighter and firmer than before. “But as at this season the Church and our good friend the parson would teach us all to remember each other and to help those we can help, I am about to speak. You have heard, all of you, how twenty years ago I sent my two eldest sons out of the house. You have heard, all of you, that they were foolish, and that I was hard, something about a girl and cut off with a shilling, I suppose. Well, to-night you shall hear the true story. I do not think even Lady Desart knows it. She was not their mother, but, as you know, my adored and adoring second wife. I do not know if many of you remember my boys. I can see Humphrey now—a man does not easily forget his first-born, and Hugh was no less dear. My dear friends, if I drove the lads from my house twenty years ago to-night, I did it in obedience to the rules of my own conscience and with regard to the laws of nature, which I should have put before my conscience, as I have far greater respect for them. I did it, as we so often futilely say, for the best. But how often, oh, my dear friends, how often since I have thought that I may have made a terrible mistake.”
“They were, Hugh and Humphrey, both madly in love with the same girl. She was no pauper, as you may have been led to believe, but the Lady Barbara Hastings. Her name is familiar to you. She was beautiful and talented, never married, and you may remember that about a month ago she died at the house of friends in London. I knew her, fortunately or unfortunately, however, moving in society as the adopted daughter of a refined gentlewoman, to be the child of a lunatic mother and a father who drank his life away in a Continental retreat. Knowing this I would not for a moment consent even to the thought of either of my sons marrying her, although I knew her to be all that was gracious in womankind. I could not tell them the reason: the secret was hers, poor girl, and I did not betray it. I said 'No,' and each knew what that meant. So we separated, but the worst of it was, my friends, that each lad thought I had refused my consent to save the other the pain of seeing his brother happy; so that greater than their anger with me was their jealousy of one another. With murder in their hearts they fled to America, I believe, pursuing in self-torture that phantom of revenge which we have all seen sometime or another, and whose hot breath we must have felt.”
Sir Humphrey pauses oftener now.
“I tell you all this because I want you to see how possible it may be for a man to think he is doing the very best, the only right thing, and then for perhaps an infinitely worse one to crop up. I read not long ago in a wild Western paper a story of two Englishmen who fought a lonely duel on some slope of those great mountains out there, and I think I have not slept since I read it. To have exiled my boys only that they might kill one another in foreign lands and sleep so far away from our English ground!”
Sir Humphrey's voice is failing now and his eyes grow moist A man, you see, does not easily forget his first-born.
“I tell you all this,” he continues, “that it may help you to be kind and to think twice. I only thought once, and perhaps the worst may have come of it. Then I tell it to you, too, because I am an old man now, and my voice is not as strong as it was, and I can't get out to church as regularly as I used to do, and I want you all to help me to remember these absent ones and with them any of your own. There is virtue in the holding up of many hands and the lifting up of many hearts. Whether I see them again or not, that does not matter; but for the assurance that they have not harmed each other, let us pray Almighty God this night.”
Ah! Sir Humphrey, there are those who would give their life for yours, but they cannot bring you that assurance to-night. Can you wait?
“I can wait,” says Sir Humphrey.
CHAPTER II.
It is Christmas day in the morning. At least, so Almanack says, and Almanack ought to know, though he is given in those days to such ornate and emblazoned titivation of himself outwardly, putting himself in the hands of fair Mistress Kate Greenaway at the head of a mischievous throng, that he causes one to seriously consider whether his old head be turned or no. A scholar and statistician buried in heaps of flowers, with a rope of daisies round his neck, and a belt of primroses round his waist; a sunflower in his buttonhole, and a singing bird upon his shoulder; and, worst of all, the picture of a pink-frocked, pink-faced girl next his heart—can he be relied upon? But he persists in his claim to be listened to, and we must take his word for it that this is Christmas day in the morning, although it just looks like any other day. On any other day the sun is just as bright, and the air just as keen. On other days the snow is just as white, just as deep—two feet where the constant tramping has levelled its crystalline beauty, ten, twelve, fifteen there where a great soft cloud of drift reaches halfway up the side of a small wooden house. On other days there is just as much blue in the sky, in the smoke, in the shadows of the pines, and the shadows of the icicles. On other days the house looks just as neat, just as silent, just as poor. The clearing is small, the house is small, a small terrier suns himself on a pile of wood, and the only large object apparently in existence is the tall, broad-shouldered, well-proportioned man who presently emerges from the wooden house. His ear has just caught the sound of a bell. It is not a bad bell for Muskoka, and it has a most curious effect on this white, cold silent world of snow and blue shadows. The owner of the house, who is also the builder of it, stands a few moments listening. There is only the twitter of the snowbirds to listen to, then the bell; more snowbirds, and then the bell again.
“It has quite a churchy sound,” he remarks; “I never noticed how churchy before, but it reminds me of some other bell. Ten years I have read for them here, and I never noticed it before.” More twitter from the snowbirds and the bell again. Time for church, although the functions of the lay-reader will be this day laid aside, giving place to the more exacting ones of the rector chori. This being Christmas day in the morning, it devolves upon one clergyman to preach in four different places, if not literally at once, at least on the same day.
“It isn't possible,” thinks the tall man swinging along at a tremendous pace, “that this bell—there it is again, confound it; yet no, not confound it—can resemble that other bell I used to know. No, quite impossible. Is it likely that anything here,” and the thinker spreads both long arms out to take in the entire landscape, “can resemble or remotely suggest the Old Country, or, as people call it, home? Home? Why this is home. That four-roomed and convenient, if not commodious, mansion I have just quitted is my home. Talking of commodiousness, it's quite large enough, too. I have no wife, no children, no partner, not even a sleeping one, no one ever comes to see me. So I do not need a drawing-room, a nursery, a guest chamber, or a smoking-room. I have no books, therefore I need no library; I indulge in no chemical pursuits, therefore I need no laboratory; my music-room is the forest in summer and the chimney in winter, while my studio, according to the latest aesthetic fad—I think that is the word—opens off the music-room.
“Now, if you take away art, science, literature, and society from the daily life of a man, what do you leave? Simply the three radical necessities of sleeping, eating, working. My work I do mostly in the open air, so that, practically, I need but two rooms, one to cook in and the other to sleep in. I have always felt convinced that to be happy I only require two rooms, except on extra cold nights, when I find that one suffices. That is when Tim and I lie near the kitchen fire to keep warm. Home! Why of course it is home. Didn't I build the house myself? What association is dearer than that? To come into a pile of half-ruined towers, all gables and gargoyles, built somewhere about the fourteenth century, and added to by every fool who liked, without the slightest pretence to knowledge of architecture and civilization may be very gratifying, but, strange as it may seem, I prefer the work of my own hands. I am quite a Canadian, of course, though I once was an Englishman. I array myself in strange raiment, thick and woollen, of many colours; my linen is coarse and sometimes superseded by flannel; I wear a cast-off fur cap on my head and moccasins on my feet. I have grown a beard and a fierce moustache. I have made no money and won no friends except the simple settlers around me here. And I shall grow old and grey in your service, my Muskoka. I shall be forty-one on my next birthday. Then will come fifty-one, another ten years and sixty-one. All to be lived here? Yes, I have sworn it. Not Arcady, not Utopia, only Muskoka, but very dear to me. There is the forest primeval! I know everything in it from the Indian pipe—clammy white thing, but how pretty!—to that great birch there with the bark peeling off in pieces a yard wide. There is the lovely Shadow river. Masses of cardinal flowers grow there in the summer, and when I take my boat up its dark waters I feel that no human being has felt its beauty so before. I think, for a small river it is the loveliest in the world. And as to my larder now, why I am going to make my Christmas dinner off a piece or pork and ask for nothing better! I shall have a glorious appetite, which is the main point. The bell again!”
Yes, and the snow birds, too, flying round the porch of the little church. It is a very small and plain edifice and not over warm, and the officiating clergyman, who has just driven eighteen miles with the prospect of eighteen back after service, hurries the proceedings somewhat. There is a harmonium played by the tall man, and there is a choir consisting of himself and a small boy. In place of the usual Anglican hymns two carols are sung by the choir, which have the quaintest effect in such a place, and which appear to interest and even excite one of the congregation. This is a man of middle age, most richly dressed with a certain foreign air about him and evidently in a very delicate state of health. He is accompanied by a lady whose dress is also a marvel of beauty and costliness though hardly of fitness. The broad bands of gold which adorn her wrists and neck would alone procure for her the entire attention of the congregation were she seated in a more conspicuous place. As it is they are seated near the stove for increased comfort. “Good King Wenceslas” sings the choir, the small boy finding the long word very trying, and coming utterly to grief in the last two verses, for his companion appears to have lost his place. With the last verse of the carol comes the close of the service, the straggling congregation disperse and the jolly clergyman drives off again. Then an important thing happens, and happens very quietly. So quietly that the richly dressed lady who is a bright, shallow and unsentimental Californian does not mind it at all. “Humphrey!” says the tall man, “Hugh!” says the other, and all is said. There is not much sentiment in the meeting, how can there be? Their ways have gone too far apart. The years—nearly twenty, since they parted in Los Angeles—have brought gold and kith and kin to the one, with an enfeebled constitution and an uncertain temper. To the other, they have brought the glory of health for his manhood's crown, content and peace unutterable. To learn to subdue the ground is to learn one great lesson. So the strange meeting is soon over. The Christmas spell may not always last and the brothers separate once more.
FINIS.
The bright little lady who is taking her husband for a winter's Canadian tour gets restive in this silent snowy world. But before they part a letter is written to a white-haired old gentleman' in England, who has only a month to wait.
“Whether I see them again or not does not matter,” says Sir Humphrey, “but for the assurance that they have not harmed each other, I thank Almighty God this night!”
THE IDYL OF THE ISLAND.
Here lies mid-way between parallels 48 and 49 of latitude, and degrees 89 and 90 of longitude, in the northern hemisphere of the New World, serenely anchored on an ever-rippling and excited surface, an exquisitely lovely island. No tropical wonder of palm-treed stateliness, or hot tangle of gaudy bird and glowing creeper, can compare with it; no other northern isle, cool and green and refreshing to the eye like itself, can surpass it. It is not a large island. It is about half-a-mile long and quarter of a mile broad It is an irregular oval in shape, and has two distinct and different sides. On the west side its grey limestone rises to the height of twenty feet straight out of the water. On the east side there occurs a gradual shelving of a sumac-fringed shore, that mingles finally with the ever-rippling water. For the waters in this northern country are never still. They are perpetually bubbling up and boiling over; seething and fuming and frothing and foaming and yet remaining so cool and clear that a quick fancy would discover thousands of banished fountains under that agitated and impatient surface. Both ends of the island are as much alike as its sides are dissimilar. They taper off almost to a distinct bladepoint of rock, in which a mere doll's flagstaff of a pine-tree grows; then comes a small detached rock, with a small evergreen on it, then a still smaller rock, with a tuft of grass, then a line of partially submerged stones, and so out to the deep yet ever-bubbling water. This island might seem, just the size for two, and there were two on it on a certain July morning at five o'clock. One of these was a lady who lay at full length and fast asleep upon a most unique couch. These northern islands are in many places completely covered with a variety of yellowish-green moss, varying from a couple of inches to a foot and a half in thickness; and yielding to the pressure of the foot or the body as comfortably as a feather bed, if not more so, being elastic in nature. A large square of this had been cut up from some other part of the island and placed on the already moss-grown and cushioned ground, serving as a mattress, while two smaller pieces served as pillows. A sumac tree at the head of the improvised couch gave the necessary shade to the face of the sleeper, while a wild grapevine, after having run over and encircled with its moist green every stone and stem on the island, fulfilled its longing at length in a tumultuous possession of the sumac, making a massive yet aerial patched green curtain or canopy to the fantastic bed, and ending seemingly in two tiny transparent spirals curling up to the sky.
If there were a fault in the structure it was that it was too clever, too well thought out, too rectangular, too much in fact like a bed. But it told certainly of a skillful pair of hands and of a beautiful mind and the union of art with nature perfectly suited the charms—contradictory yet consistent—of the occupant. For being anything but a beautiful woman she was still far from a plain one, which though no original mode of putting it does convey the actual impression she made upon a gentleman in a small boat who rowing past this island at the hour of five o'clock in the morning was so much struck with this curious sight, quite visible from the water below, that he was rude enough to stand up that he might see better. The lady was dressed in some dark blue stuff that evidently covered her all over and fitted tightly where it could be seen. A small linen collar, worn all night and therefore shorn of its usual freshness was round her neck, and she was tucked up from the waist under a Scotch woollen rug. Her hair, of a peculiar red-brown, was allowed to hang about her and was lovely; her mouth sad; her nose, rather too prominent; her complexion natural and healthy, but marred by freckles and moles, not many of either but undeniably scattered over the countenance. All told but her eyes which, if they proved to match with her hair, would atone for these other shortcomings. The gentleman sat down again and reflected.
“How still it is!” he said under his breath. “Absolutely not a thing stirring. This is the time when the fish bite. I ought to be fishing I suppose. Going to be warm by-and-bye.”
It was indeed almost absolutely silent. The sun climbed higher but the lady slept on, and the gentleman gazed as if fascinated. The only sound that broke the beautiful early morning silence was the occasional weird laugh of the loon. It came twice and then a third time. The sleeper stirred.
“If that thing out there cries again she will wake,” said the gentleman to himself. “I must be off before that happens. But I should like to see her eyes. What a pretty picture it is!” Once more the loon gave its maniacal laugh and the lady started, sat bolt upright and wide awake. Her admirer had not time to retreat but he took his oars up and confronted her manfully. It was an awkward moment. He apologized. The lady listened very politely. Then she smiled.
“Most of the islands in this lake are owned by private people,” she said, “who use them during the summer months for the purpose of camping out upon them. I should advise you, if you row about much here, to keep to the open water, unless you wish to be seriously handled by the fathers and mothers of families.”
“Thank you very much,” returned the gentleman, standing up in his boat, “I assure you I intended no rudeness, but I have never seen so charming a summer couch before, and I was really fascinated by the—ah,—the picture you made. May I ask what you mean by 'camping out'? Is it always done in this fashion?”
The lady stared “Have you never camped out?”
“Never in my life,” said the gentleman. “I am an Englishman, staying at the hotel near the point for a day or two. I came out to see something of the country.”
“Then you should at least have camped out for a week or so. That is a genuine Canadian experience,” said the lady with a frankness which completely restored the equanimity of the Englishman.
“But how do you live?” he went on in a puzzled manner that caused the lady with the red-brown hair, still all hanging about her, much amusement.
“O, capitally! Upon fish and eggs, and gooseberry tarts, and home-made bread and French coffee. Just what you would get in town, and much better than you get at the hotel.”
“O, that would be easy!” the gentleman groaned. “I eat my meals in a pitch-dark room, in deadly fear and horror of the regiments of flies that swarm in and settle on everything the minute one raises the green paper blinds.”
The lady nodded. “I know. We tried it for two or three seasons, but we could not endure it; the whole thing, whitewash and all, is so trying, isn't it? So we bought this lovely island and bring our tent here and live so comfortably.” The gentleman did not reply at once. He was thinking that it was his place to say “Good morning,” and go, although he would much have liked to remain a little longer. He hazarded the remark:
“Now, for instance, what are you going to breakfast on presently?”
The lady laughed lightly and shook her red brown hair.
“First of all I have to make a fire.”
“Oh!”
“But that is not so very difficult”
“How do you do it?”
“Would you like to know?”
“Very much indeed. I should like to see, if I may.”
The lady reflected a moment. “I suppose you may, but if you do, you ought to help me, don't you think?” The gentleman much amused and greatly interested.
“Ah but you see, it is you I want to see make it. I am very useless you know at that sort of thing, still, if you will allow me, I will try my best. Am I to come ashore?”
“Certainly, if you are to be of any use.”
The lady jumped lightly off the pretty couch of moss and wound her plentiful hair round her head with one turn of her arm. Her dress was creased but well-fitting, her figure not plump enough for beauty but decidedly youthful. She watched her new friend moor his boat and ascend with one or two strides of his long legs up the side of the cliff that was not so steep. He took off his hat.
“I am at your service,” he said with a profound bow. The lady made him another, during which all her long hair fell about her again, at which they both laughed.
“What do we do first?” said he.
“O we find a lot of sticks and pieces of bark, mostly birch bark, and anything else that will burn—you may have to fell a tree while you are about it—and I'll show you how to place them properly between two walls of stones, put a match to them and there is our fire. Will you come with me?”
He assented of course, and they were soon busy in the interior of the little wood that grew up towards the centre of the island. I must digress here to say that the gentleman's name was Amherst. He was known to the world in latter life as Admiral Amherst, and he was a great friend of mine. When he related this story to me, he was very particular in describing the island as I have done—indeed he carried a little chart about with him of it which he had made from memory, and he told me besides that he never forgot the peculiar beauty of that same little tract of wood. The early hour, the delicious morning air, the great moss-grown and brown decaying tree trunks, the white, clammy, ghostly, flower or fungus of the Indian Pipe at his feet, the masses of ferns, the elastic ground he trod upon, and the singular circumstance that he was alone in this exquisite spot with a woman he had never seen until five minutes previously, all combined to make an ineffaceable impression upon his mind. The lady showed herself proficient in the art of building a fire and attended by Amherst soon had a fine flame rising up from between the fortifications evidently piled by stronger hands than her own.
“What do we do now?” asked Amherst “I should suggest—a kettle.”
“Of course, that is the next step. If I give it to you, you might run and fill it, eh?'
“Delighted!” and away went Amherst. When he returned the lady was not to be seen. The place was shorn of its beauty, but he waited discreetly and patiently, putting the kettle on to boil in the meanwhile.
“It's very singular,” said he, “how I come to be here. I wonder who are with her in her party; no one else appears to be up or about. That striped red and white thing is the tent, I see, over there. Ah! That's where she has gone, and now she beckons me! Oh! I'll go, but I don't want to meet the rest of them!”
But when he reached the tent, it was quite empty, save for rugs and wraps, boxes, etc., and the lady was laughingly holding out a loaf of bread in one hand and a paper package in the other.
“You will stay and breakfast with me?”
“What will you give me?” said Amherst, smiling.
“I can only give you eggs, boiled in the kettle, coffee and bread and butter. The fish haven't come in yet.”
“What can be nicer than eggs—especially when boiled in the kettle, that is, if you make the coffee first.”
“Certainly I do.”
“And it is really French coffee?”
“Really. Café des Gourmets, you know; we—I always use it—do not like any other.”
Amherst was fast falling in love. He told me that at this point his mind was quite made up that if it were possible he would remain in the neighborhood a few days at least, in order to see more of this charming girl. She seemed to him to be about twenty-six or seven, and so frank, simple and graceful, one could not have resisted liking her. Her hair and eyes were identical in colour and both were beautiful; her expression was arch and some of her gestures almost childish, but a certain dignity appeared at times and sat well upon her. Her hands were destitute of any rings as Amherst soon discovered, and were fine and small though brown. While she made the coffee, Amherst threw himself down on the wonderful moss, the like of which he had never seen before and looked out over the water. An unmistakeable constraint had taken the place of the unaffected hilarity of the first ten minutes. A reaction had set in. Amherst could of course only answer to me in telling this for himself, but he divined at the time a change in his companion's manner as well.
“I hope you like your eggs,” she said presently.
“They are very nice, indeed, thank you,” rejoined Amherst.
“And I have made your coffee as you like it?”
“Perfectly, thank you. But you—you are not eating anything! Why is that?”
As he asked the question he turned quickly around, in order to rise that he might help her with the ponderous kettle that she was about lifting off the camp-fire, when a long strand of her hair again escaping from its coil blew directly across his face. Amherst uttered a radiant “Oh!”, and taking it to his lips forgot himself so far as to press kiss after kiss upon it. The lady stood as if transfixed and did not move, even when Amherst actually swept all her hair down over one arm and turning her face to his, pressed one long long kiss on her forehead.
The moment he had done this his senses returned and he stepped back in indignation with himself. But his companion was still apparently transfixed. Amherst looked at her in dismay. She did not seem to see him and had grown very pale. He touched her gently on the arm but she did not show that she felt the touch. He retreated a few paces and stood by himself, overcome with shame and contrition. What had he done? How should he ever atone for such an unwarrantable action? Had it been the outcome of any ordinary flirtation, he would have felt no such scruples, but the encounter, though short, had been one of singular idyllic charm until he had by his own rash act spoilt it. A few minutes passed thus in self contemplation appeared like an eternity. He must speak.
“If you would allow me—”
But the lady put out her left hand in deprecation as it were and he got no further. The silence was unendurable. Amherst took a step or two forward and perceived great tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Oh!” he began desperately, “won't you allow me to say a word to tell you how very, very sorry I am, how grieved I am and always shall be? I never—I give you my word of honor—I never do those sort of things, have never done such a thing before! But I can't tell what it was, the place is so beautiful, and when all that lovely hair came sweeping past my face, I could not help doing as I did, it was so electrical! Any man would have done the same. I know that sounds like a miserable, cowardly excuse, but it is true, perfectly true.” The lady seemed to struggle to appear calm and with a great effort she turned her face towards Amherst.
“I know one man,” she said, in a voice choked with sobs, “who would not have done it?”
Amherst started. “I am sorrier than ever, believe me. I might have known you were engaged, or had a lover—one so Charming”—
“It is not that,” said the lady. “I am married.” She was still struggling with her emotion.
Amherst recoiled. He was torn with conflicting thoughts. What if he had been seen giving that involuntary salute? He might have ruined her peace for ever. Who would believe in the truth of any possible explanation?
“I will leave you at once;” he said stiffly, “there is nothing more to be said.”
“Oh! You will reproach me now!” said his companion, wiping her eyes as the tears came afresh.
“I will try not to;” said Amherst, “but you could so easily have told me; I do not think it was—quite—fair.” Yet he could not be altogether angry with the partner of his thoughtlessness, nor could he be entirely cold. Her beautiful eyes, her despairing attitude would haunt him he knew for many a day. She had ceased weeping and stood quietly awaiting his departure. Amherst felt all the force of a strong and novel passion sweep along his frame as he looked at her. Was she happy, was she a loved and loving wife? Somehow the conviction forced itself upon him that she was not. Yet he could not ask her, it must remain her secret.
Amherst looked at his watch. It aroused her.
“What is the time?” she said lifting her head for the first time since he had kissed her.
“Ten minutes past six,” Amherst replied.
“You must go,” she said, with an effort at self-control. “I shall have much to do presently.”
He cast one look about and approached her.
“Will you forgive me”—he began in a tone of repression, then with another mighty and involuntary movement he caught her hands and pressed them to his breast. “My God,” he exclaimed, “how I should have loved you!”
A moment after he flung her hands away and strode down the cliff, unfastened his boat and rowed away in the direction of the hotel as fast as he could. Rounding a sharp rock that hid what lay beyond it, he nearly succeeded in overturning another boat like his own, in which sat a gentleman of middle age, stout and pleasant and mild of countenance. The bottom of the boat was full of fish. Amherst made an incoherent apology, to which the gentleman answered with a good-natured laugh, insisting that the fault was his own. He would have liked to enter into conversation with Amherst, but my friend was only anxious to escape from the place altogether and forget his recent adventure in the hurry of departure from the hotel. Three days after he embarked at Quebec for England, and never revisited Canada. But he never married and never forgot the woman whom he always asserted he might have truly and passionately loved. He was about twenty-eight when that happened and perfectly heart-whole. Why—I used to say to him, why did you not learn her name and that of her husband? Perhaps she is a widow now, perhaps you made as great an impression upon her mind and affections as she did upon yours.
But my friend Admiral Amherst, as the world knew him, was a strange, irrational creature in many ways, and none of these ideas would he ever entertain. That the comfortable gentleman in the boat was her husband he never doubted; more it was impossible to divine. But the cool northern isle, with its dark fringe of pines; its wonderful moss, its fragrant and dewy ferns, its graceful sumacs, just putting on their scarlet-lipped leaves, the morning stillness broken only by the faint unearthly cry of the melancholy loon, the spar-dyked cliffs of limestone, and the fantastic couch, with its too lovely occupant, never faded from his memory and remained to the last as realities which indeed they have become likewise to me, through the intensity with which they were described to me.