Their Wedding Journey

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"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.

Then they made their excursion to the Whirlpool, mistakenly going down on
the American side, for it is much better seen from the other, though seen
from any point it is the most impressive feature of the whole prodigious
spectacle of Niagara.

Here within the compass of a mile, those inland seas of the North,
Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and the multitude of smaller lakes, all
pour their floods, where they swirl in dreadful vortices, with resistless
under-currents boiling beneath the surface of that mighty eddy. Abruptly
from this scene of secret power, so different from the thunderous
splendors of the cataract itself, rise lofty cliffs on every side, to a
height of two hundred feet, clothed from the water's edge almost to their
create with dark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your senses perceive, the
lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then, drunk and wild, with brawling
rapids roar away to Ontario through the narrow channel of the river.
Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it that you do not know the
half of its terribleness; for those waters that look so smooth are great
ridges and rings, forced, by the impulse of the currents, twelve feet
higher in the centre than at the margin. Nothing can live there, and with
what is caught in its hold, the maelstrom plays for days, and whirls and
tosses round and round in its toils, with a sad, maniacal patience. The
guides tell ghastly stories, which even their telling does not wholly rob
of ghastliness, about the bodies of drowned men carried into the
whirlpool and made to enact upon its dizzy surges a travesty of life,
apparently floating there at their pleasure, diving and frolicking amid
the waves, or frantically struggling to escape from the death that has
long since befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the railway suspension bridge, is an
elevator more than a hundred and eighty feet high, which is meant to let
people down to the shore below, and to give a view of the rapids on their
own level. From the cliff opposite, it looks a terribly frail structure
of pine sticks, but is doubtless stronger than it looks; and at any rate,
as it has never yet fallen to pieces, it may be pronounced perfectly
safe.

In the waiting-room at the top, Basil and Isabel found Mr. Richard and
his ladies again, who got into the movable chamber with them, and they
all silently descended together. It was not a time for talk of any kind,
either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the
lugubrious upper part of the structure, where it was darkened by a rough
weatherboarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light showed the
grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the
audacious slightness of the elevator.

An abiding distrust of the machinery overhead mingled in Isabel's heart
with a doubt of the value of the scene below, and she could not look
forward to escape from her present perils by the conveyance which had
brought her into them, with any satisfaction. She wanly smiled, and
shrank closer to Basil; while the other matron made nothing of seizing
her husband violently by the arm and imploring him to stop it whenever
they experienced a rougher jolt than usual.

At the bottom of the cliff they were helped out of their prison by a
humid young Englishman, with much clay on him, whose face was red and
bathed in perspiration, for it was very hot down there in his little
inclosure of baking pine boards, and it was not much cooler out on the
rocks upon which the party issued, descending and descending by repeated
and desultory flights of steps, till at last they stood upon a huge
fragment of stone right abreast of the rapids. Yet it was a magnificent
sight, and for a moment none of them were sorry to have come. The surges
did not look like the gigantic ripples on a river's course as they were,
but like a procession of ocean billows; they arose far aloft in vast
bulks of clear green, and broke heavily into foam at the crest. Great
blocks and shapeless fragments of rock strewed the margin of the awful
torrent; gloomy walls of dark stone rose naked from these, bearded here
and there with cedar, and everywhere frowning with shaggy brows of
evergreen. The place is inexpressibly lonely and dreadful, and one feels
like an alien presence there, or as if he had intruded upon some mood or
haunt of Nature in which she had a right to be forever alone. The slight,
impudent structure of the elevator rises through the solitude, like a
thing that merits ruin, yet it is better than something more elaborate,
for it looks temporary, and since there must be an elevator, it is well
to have it of the most transitory aspect. Some such quality of rude
impermanence consoles you for the presence of most improvements by which
you enjoy Niagara; the suspension bridges for their part being saved from
offensiveness by their beauty and unreality.

Ascending, none of the party spoke; Isabel and the other matron blanched
in each other's faces; their husbands maintained a stolid resignation.
When they stepped out of their trap into the waiting room at the top,
"What I like about these little adventures," said Mr. Richard to Basil,
abruptly, "is getting safely out of them. Good-morning, sir." He bowed
slightly to Isabel, who returned his politeness, and exchanged faint
nods, or glances, with the ladies. They got into their separate
carriages, and at that safe distance made each other more decided
obeisances.

"Well," observed Basil, "I suppose we're introduced now. We shall be
meeting them from time to time throughout our journey. You know how the
same faces and the same trunks used to keep turning up in our travels on
the other side. Once meet people in travelling, and you can't get rid of
them."

"Yes," said Isabel, as if continuing his train of thought, "I'm glad
we're going to-day."

"O dearest!"

"Truly. When we first arrived I felt only the loveliness of the place. It
seemed more familiar, too, then; but ever since, it's been growing
stranger and dreadfuller. Somehow it's begun to pervade me and possess me
in a very uncomfortable way; I'm tossed upon rapids, and flung from
cataract brinks, and dizzied in whirlpools; I'm no longer yours, Basil;
I'm most unhappily married to Niagara. Fly with me, save me from my awful
lord!"

She lightly burlesqued the woes of a prima donna, with clasped hands and
uplifted eyes.

"That'll do very well," Basil commented, "and it implies a reality that
can't be quite definitely spoken. We come to Niagara in the patronizing
spirit in which we approach everything nowadays, and for a few hours we
have it our own way, and pay our little tributes of admiration with as
much complacency as we feel in acknowledging the existence of the Supreme
Being. But after a while we are aware of some potent influence
undermining our self-satisfaction; we begin to conjecture that the great
cataract does not exist by virtue of our approval, and to feel that it
will not cease when we go away. The second day makes us its abject
slaves, and on the third we want to fly from it in terror. I believe some
people stay for weeks, however, and hordes of them have written odes to
Niagara."

"I can't understand it, at all," said Isabel. "I don't wonder now that
the town should be so empty this season, but that it should ever be full.
I wish we'd gone after our first look at the Falls from the suspension
bridge. How beautiful that was! I rejoice in everything that I haven't
done. I'm so glad I haven't been in the Cave of the Winds; I'm so happy
that Table Rock fell twenty years ago! Basil, I couldn't stand another
rainbow today. I'm sorry we went out on the Three Weird Sisters. O, I
shall dream about it! and the rush, and the whirl, and the dampness in
one's face, and the everlasting chirr-r-r-r of everything!"

She dipped suddenly upon his shoulder for a moment's oblivion, and then
rose radiant with a question: "Why in the world, if Niagara is really
what it seems to us now, do so many bridal parties come here?"

"Perhaps they're the only people who've the strength to bear up against
it, and are not easily dispersed and subjected by it."

"But we're dispersed and subjected."

"Ah, my dear, we married a little late. Who knows how it would be if you
were nineteen instead of twenty-seven, and I twenty-five and not turned
of thirty?"

"Basil, you're very cruel."

"No, no. But don't you see how it is? We've known too much of life to
desire any gloomy background for our happiness. We're quite contented to
have things gay and bright about us. Once we couldn't have made the
circle dark enough. Well, my dear, that's the effect of age. We're
superannuated."

"I used to think I was before we were married," answered Isabel simply;
"but now," she added triumphantly, "I'm rescued from all that. I shall
never be old again, dearest; never, as long as you love me!"

They were about to enter the village, and he could not make any open
acknowledgment of her tenderness; but her silken mantle (or whatever)
slipped from her shoulder, and he embracingly replaced it, flattering
himself that he had delicately seized this chance of an unavowed caress
and not allowing (O such is the blindness of our sex!) that the
opportunity had been yet more subtly afforded him, with the art which
women never disuse in this world, and which I hope they will not forget
in the next.

They had an early dinner, and looked their last upon the nuptial gayety
of the otherwise forlorn hotel. Three brides sat down with them in
travelling-dress; two occupied the parlor as they passed out; half a
dozen happy pairs arrived (to the music of the band) in the omnibus that
was to carry our friends back to the station; they caught sight of
several about the shop windows, as that drove through the streets. Thus
the place perpetually renews itself in the glow of love as long as the
summer lasts. The moon which is elsewhere so often of wormwood, or of the
ordinary green cheese at the best, is of lucent honey there from the
first of June to the last of October; and this is a great charm in
Niagara. I think with tenderness of all the lives that have opened so
fairly there; the hopes that have reigned in the glad young hearts; the
measureless tide of joy that ebbs and flows with the arriving and
departing trains. Elsewhere there are carking cares of business and of
fashion, there are age, and sorrow, and heartbreak: but here only youth,
faith, rapture. I kiss my hand to Niagara for that reason, and would I
were a poet for a quarter of an hour.

Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood towards the weak sisterhood of
evident brides, and both our friends felt a lurking fondness for Niagara
at the last moment. I do not know how much of their content was due to
the fact that they had suffered no sort of wrong there, from those who
are apt to prey upon travellers. In the hotel a placard warned them to
have nothing to do with the miscreant hackmen on the streets, but always
to order their carriage at the office; on the street the hackmen
whispered to them not to trust the exorbitant drivers in league with the
landlords; yet their actual experience was great reasonableness and
facile contentment with the sum agreed upon.

This may have been because the hackmen so far outnumbered the visitors,
that the latter could dictate terms; but they chose to believe it a
triumph of civilization; and I will never be the cynic to sneer at their
faith. Only at the station was the virtue of the Niagarans put in doubt,
by the hotel porter who professed to find Basil's trunk enfeebled by
travel, and advised a strap for it, which a friend of his would sell for
a dollar and a half. Yet even he may have been a benevolent nature
unjustly suspected.




DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

They were to take the Canadian steamer at Charlotte, the port of
Rochester, and they rattled uneventfully down from Niagara by rail. At
the broad, low-banked river-mouth the steamer lay beside the railroad
station; and while Isabel disposed of herself on board, Basil looked to
the transfer of the baggage, novelly comforted in the business by the
respectfulness of the young Canadian who took charge of the trunks for
the boat. He was slow, and his system was not good,--he did not give
checks for the pieces, but marked them with the name of their
destination; and there was that indefinable something in his manner which
hinted his hope that you would remember the porter; but he was so civil
that he did not snub the meekest and most vexatious of the passengers,
and Basil mutely blessed his servile soul. Few white Americans, he said
to himself, would behave so decently in his place; and he could not
conceive of the American steamboat clerk who would use the politeness
towards a waiting crowd that the Canadian purser showed when they all
wedged themselves in about his window to receive their stateroom keys. He
was somewhat awkward, like the porter, but he was patient, and he did not
lose his temper even when some of the crowd, finding he would not bully
them, made bold to bully him. He was three times as long in serving them
as an American would have been, but their time was of no value there, and
he served them well. Basil made a point of speaking him fair, when his
turn came, and the purser did not trample on him for a base truckler, as
an American jack-in-office would have done.

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

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

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

"Can't you see, Basil, what a very flattering way it is?" she asked of
her husband, when, after parting with their friends for the night, she
tried to explain the character to him. "Of course no art could equal such
a natural gift; for that kind of belief in your good-nature and sympathy
makes you feel worthy of it, don't you know; and so you can't help being
good-natured and sympathetic. This Miss Ellison, why, I can tell you, I
shouldn't be ashamed of her anywhere." By anywhere Isabel meant Boston,
and she went on to praise the young lady's intelligence and refinement,
with those expressions of surprise at the existence of civilization in a
westerner which westerners find it so hard to receive graciously.
Happily, Miss Ellison had not to hear them. "The reason she happened to
come with only two dresses is, she lives so near Niagara that she could
come for one day, and go back the next. The colonel's her cousin, and he
and his wife go East every year, and they asked her this time to see
Niagara with them. She told me all over again what we eavesdropped so
shamefully in the hotel parlor;--and I don't know whether she was better
pleased with the prospect of what's before her, or with the notion of
making the journey in this original way. She didn't force her confidence
upon me, any more than she tried to withhold it. We got to talking in the
most natural manner; and she seemed to tell these things about herself
because they amused her and she liked me. I had been saying how my trunk
got left behind once on the French side of Mont Cenis, and I had to wear
aunt's things at Turin till it could be sent for."

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

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

"O, you did!"

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

"And do we?"

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

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

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

A little after daybreak the steamer stopped at the Canadian city of
Kingston, a handsome place, substantial to the water's edge, and giving a
sense of English solidity by the stone of which it is largely built.
There was an accession of many passengers here, and they and the people
on the wharf were as little like Americans as possible. They were English
or Irish or Scotch, with the healthful bloom of the Old World still upon
their faces, or if Canadians they looked not less hearty; so that one
must wonder if the line between the Dominion and the United States did
not also sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia. These provincials
had not our regularity of features, nor the best of them our careworn
sensibility of expression; but neither had they our complexions of adobe;
and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men were, on the whole,
better dressed than the same number of average Americans would have been
in a city of that size and remoteness. The stevedores who were putting
the freight aboard were men of leisure; they joked in a kindly way with
the orange-women and the old women picking up chips on the pier; and our
land of hurry seemed beyond the ocean rather than beyond the lake.

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort Frontenac two hundred years
ago; of Count Frontenac's splendid advent among the Indians; of the brave
La Salle, who turned its wooden walls to stone; of wars with the savages
and then with the New York colonists, whom the French and their allies
harried from this point; of the destruction of La Salle's fort in the Old
French War; and of final surrender a few years later to the English. It
is as picturesque as it is historical. All about the city, the shores are
beautifully wooded, and there are many lovely islands,--the first indeed
of those Thousand Islands with which the head of the St. Lawrence is
filled, and among which the steamer was presently threading her way. They
are still as charming and still almost as wild as when, in 1673,
Frontenac's flotilla of canoes passed through their labyrinth and issued
upon the lake. Save for a light-house upon one of them, there is almost
nothing to show that the foot of man has ever pressed the thin grass
clinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping its green in the eternal
shadow of their pines and cedars. In the warm morning light they gathered
or dispersed before the advancing vessel, which some of them almost
touched with the plumage of their evergreens; and where none of them were
large, some were so small that it would not have been too bold to figure
them as a vaster race of water-birds assembling and separating in her
course. It is curiously affecting to find them so unclaimed yet from the
solitude of the vanished wilderness, and scarcely touched even by
tradition. But for the interest left them by the French, these tiny
islands have scarcely any associations, and must be enjoyed for their
beauty alone. There is indeed about them a faint light of legend
concerning the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for several patriots are said
to have taken refuge amidst their lovely multitude; but this episode of
modern history is difficult for the imagination to manage, and somehow
one does not take sentimentally even to that daughter of a lurking
patriot, who long baffled her father's pursuers by rowing him from one
island to another, and supplying him with food by night.

Either the reluctance is from the natural desire that so recent a heroine
should be founded on fact, or it is mere perverseness. Perhaps I ought to
say; in justice to her, that it was one of her own sex who refused to be
interested in her, and forbade Basil to care for her. When he had read of
her exploit from the guide-book, Isabel asked him if he had noticed that
handsome girl in the blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat, who
had come aboard at Kingston. She pointed her out, and courageously made
him admire her beauty, which was of the most bewitching Canadian type.
The young girl was redeemed by her New World birth from the English
heaviness; a more delicate bloom lighted her cheeks; a softer grace dwelt
in her movement; yet she was round and full, and she was in the perfect
flower of youth. She was not so ethereal in her loveliness as an American
girl, but she was not so nervous and had none of the painful fragility of
the latter. Her expression was just a little vacant, it must be owned;
but so far as she went she was faultless. She looked like the most
tractable of daughters, and as if she would be the most obedient of
wives. She had a blameless taste in dress, Isabel declared; her costume
of blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat (set upon heavy masses
of dark brown hair) being completed by a black silk skirt. "And you can
see," she added, "that it's an old skirt made over, and that she's
dressed as cheaply as she is prettily." This surprised Basil, who had
imputed the young lady's personal sumptuousness to her dress, and had
thought it enormously rich. When she got off with her chaperone at one of
the poorest-looking country landings, she left them in hopeless
conjecture about her. Was she visiting there, or was the interior of
Canada full of such stylish and exquisite creatures? Where did she get
her taste, her fashions, her manners? As she passed from sight towards
the shadow of the woods, they felt the poorer for her going; yet they
were glad to have seen her, and on second thoughts they felt that they
could not justly ask more of her than to have merely existed for a few
hours in their presence. They perceived that beauty was not only its own
excuse for being, but that it flattered and favored and profited the
world by consenting to be.