Chapter VI: A Letter of Kitty's

Quebec, August --, 1870.

Dear Girls: Since the letter I wrote you a day or two after we got
here, we have been going on very much as you might have expected. A
whole week has passed, but we still bear our enforced leisure with
fortitude; and, though Boston and New York are both fading into the
improbable (as far as we are concerned), Quebec continues
inexhaustible, and I don't begrudge a moment of the time we are
giving it.

Fanny still keeps her sofa; the first enthusiasm of her affliction
has worn away, and she has nothing to sustain her now but planning
our expeditions about the city. She has got the map and the history
of Quebec by heart, and she holds us to the literal fulfilment of her
instructions. On this account, she often has to send Dick and me out
together when she would like to keep him with her, for she won't
trust either of us alone, and when we come back she examines us
separately to see whether we have skipped anything. This makes us
faithful in the smallest things. She says she is determined that
Uncle Jack shall have a full and circumstantial report from me of all
that he wants to know about the celebrated places here, and I really
think he will, if I go on, or am goaded on, in this way. It's pure
devotion to the cause in Fanny, for you know she doesn't care for
such things herself, and has no pleasure in it but carrying a point.
Her chief consolation under her trial of keeping still is to see how
I look in her different dresses. She sighs over me as I appear in a
new garment, and says, O, if she only had the dressing of me! Then
she gets up and limps and hops across the room to where I stand
before the glass, and puts a pin here and a ribbon there, and gives
my hair (which she has dressed herself) a little dab, to make it lie
differently, and then scrambles back to her sofa, and knocks her lame
ankle against something, and lies there groaning and enjoying herself
like a martyr. On days when she thinks she is never going to get
well, she says she doesn't know why she doesn't give me her things at
once and be done with it; and on days when she thinks she is going to
get well right away, she says she will have me one made something
like whatever dress I have got on, as soon as she's home. Then up
she'll jump again for the exact measure, and tell me the history of
every stitch, and how she'll have it altered just the least grain,
and differently trimmed to suit my complexion better; and ends by
having promised to get me something not in the least like it. You
have some idea already of what Fanny is; and all you have got to do
is to multiply it by about fifty thousand. Her sprained ankle simply
intensifies her whole character.

Besides helping to compose Fanny's expeditionary corps, and really
exerting himself in the cause of Uncle Jack, as he calls it, Dick is
behaving beautifully. Every morning, after breakfast, he goes over to
the hotel, and looks at the arrivals and reads the newspapers, and
though we never get anything out of him afterwards, we somehow feel
informed of all that is going on. He has taken to smoking a clay pipe
in honor of the Canadian fashion, and he wears a gay, barbaric scarf
of Indian muslin wound round his hat and flying out behind; because
the Quebeckers protect themselves in that way against sunstroke when
the thermometer gets up among the sixties. He has also bought a pair
of snow-shoes to be prepared for the other extreme of weather, in
case anything else should happen to Fanny, and detain us into the
winter. When he has rested from his walk to the hotel, we usually go
out together and explore, as we do also in the afternoon; and in the
evening we walk on Durham Terrace,--a promenade overlooking the
river, where the whole cramped and crooked city goes for exercise.
It's a formal parade in the evening; but one morning I went there
before breakfast, for a change, and found it the resort of careless
ease; two or three idle boys were sunning themselves on the carriages
of the big guns that stand on the Terrace, a little dog was barking
at the chimneys of the Lower Town, and an old gentleman was walking
up and down in his dressing-gown and slippers, just as if it were
his own front porch. He looked something like Uncle Jack, and I
wished it had been he,--to see the smoke curling softly up from the
Lower Town, the bustle about the market-place, and the shipping in
the river, and the haze hanging over the water a little way off, and
the near hills all silver, and the distant ones blue.

But if we are coming to the grand and the beautiful, why, there is no
direction in which you can look about Quebec without seeing it; and
it is always mixed up with something so familiar and homelike, that
my heart warms to it. The Jesuit Barracks are just across the street
from us in the foreground of the most magnificent landscape; the
building is--think, you Eriecreekers of an hour!--two hundred years
old, and it looks five hundred. The English took it away from the
Jesuits in 1760, and have used it as barracks ever since; but it
isn't in the least changed, so that a Jesuit missionary who visited
it the other day said that it was as if his brother priests had been
driven out of it the week before. Well, you might think so old and so
historical a place would be putting on airs, but it takes as kindly
to domestic life as a new frame-house, and I am never tired of
looking over into the yard at the frowsy soldiers' wives hanging
out clothes, and the unkempt children playing among the burdocks, and
chickens and cats, and the soldiers themselves carrying about the
officers' boots, or sawing wood and picking up chips to boil the
teakettle. They are off dignity as well as off duty, then; but when
they are on both, and in full dress, they make our volunteers (as I
remember them) seem very shabby and slovenly.

Over the belfry of the Barracks, our windows command a view of half
Quebec, with its roofs and spires dropping down the slope to the
Lower Town, where the masts of the ships in the river come tapering
up among them, and then of the plain stretching from the river in the
valley to a range of mountains against the horizon, with far-off
white villages glimmering out of their purple folds. The whole plain
is bright with houses and harvest-fields; and the distinctly divided
farms--the owners cut them up every generation, and give each son a
strip of the entire length--run back on either hand, from the
straight roads bordered by poplars, while the highways near the city
pass between lovely villas.

But this landscape and the Jesuit Barracks, with all their merits,
are nothing to the Ursuline Convent, just under our back windows,
which I told you something about in my other letter. We have been
reading up its history since, and we know about Madame de la Peltrie,
the noble Norman lady who founded it in 1640. She was very rich and
very beautiful, and a saint from the beginning, so that when her
husband died, and her poor old father wanted her to marry again and
not go into a nunnery, she didn't mind cheating him by a sham
marriage with a devout gentleman; and she came to Canada as soon as
her father was dead, with another saint, Marie de l'Incarnation, and
founded this convent. The first building is standing yet, as strong
as ever, though everything but the stone walls was burnt two
centuries ago. Only a few years since an old ash-tree, under which
the Ursulines first taught the Indian children, blew down, and now a
large black cross marks its place. The modern nuns are in the garden
nearly the whole morning long, and by night the ghosts of the former
nuns haunt it; and in very bright moonlight I myself do a bit of
Madame de la Peltrie there, and teach little Indian boys, who dwindle
like those in the song, as the moon goes down. It is an enchanted
place, and I wish we had it in the back yard at Eriecreek, though I
don't think the neighbors would approve of the architecture. I have
adopted two nuns for my own: one is tall and slender and pallid, and
you can see at a glance that she broke the heart of a mortal lover,
and knew it, when she became the bride of heaven; and the other is
short and plain and plump, and looks as comfortable and commonplace
as life-after-dinner. When the world is bright I revel in the
statue-like sadness of the beautiful nun, who never laughs or plays
with the little girl pupils; but when the world is dark--as the best
of worlds will be at times for a minute or two--I take to the fat
nun, and go in for a clumsy romp with the children; and then I fancy
that I am wiser if not better than the fair slim Ursuline. But
whichever I am, for the time being, I am vexed with the other; yet
they always are together, as if they were counterparts. I think a
nice story might be written about them.

In Wolfe's siege of Quebec this Ursuline Garden of ours was
everywhere torn up by the falling bombs, and the sisters were driven
out into the world they had forsaken forever, as Fanny has been
reading in a little French account of the events, written at the
time, by a nun of the General Hospital. It was there the Ursulines
took what refuge there was; going from their cloistered school-rooms
and their innocent little ones to the wards of the hospital, filled
with the wounded and dying of either side, and echoing with their
dreadful groans. What a sad, evil, bewildering world they had a
glimpse of! In the garden here, our poor Montcalm--I belong to the
French side, please, in Quebec--was buried in a grave dug for him by
a bursting shell. They have his skull now in the chaplain's room of
the convent, where we saw it the other day. They have made it
comfortable in a glass box, neatly bound with black, and covered with
a white lace drapery, just as if it were a saint's. It was broken a
little in taking it out of the grave; and a few years ago, some
English officers borrowed it to look at, and were horrible enough to
pull out some of the teeth. Tell Uncle Jack the head is very broad
above the ears, but the forehead is small.

The chaplain also showed us a copy of an old painting of the first
convent, Indian lodges, Madame de la Peltrie's house, and Madame
herself, very splendidly dressed, with an Indian chief before her,
and some French cavaliers riding down an avenue towards her. Then he
showed us some of the nuns' work in albums, painted and lettered in a
way to give me an idea of old missals. By and by he went into the
chapel with us, and it gave such a queer notion of his indoors life
to have him put on an overcoat and india-rubbers to go a few rods
through the open air to the chapel door: he had not been very well,
he said. When he got in, he took off his hat, and put on an octagonal
priest's cap, and showed us everything in the kindest way--and his
manners were exquisite. There were beautiful paintings sent out from
France at the time of the Revolution; and wood-carvings round the
high-altar, done by Quebec artists in the beginning of the last
century; for he said they had a school of arts then at St. Anne's,
twenty miles below the city. Then there was an ivory crucifix, so
life-like that you could scarcely bear to look at it. But what I most
cared for was the tiny twinkle of a votive lamp which he pointed out
to us in one corner of the nuns' chapel: it was lit a hundred and
fifty years ago by two of our French officers when their sister took
the veil, and has never been extinguished since, except during the
siege of 1759. Of course, I think a story might be written about
_this_; and the truth is, the possibilities of fiction in Quebec are
overpowering; I go about in a perfect haze of romances, and meet
people at every turn who have nothing to do but invite the passing
novelist into their houses, and have their likenesses done at once
for heroes and heroines. They needn't change a thing about them, but
sit just as they are; and if this is in the present, only think how
the whole past of Quebec must be crying out to be put into historical
romances!

I wish you could see the houses, and how substantial they are. I
can only think of Eriecreek as an assemblage of huts and bark-lodges
in contrast. Our boarding-house is comparatively slight, and has
stone walls only a foot and a half thick, but the average is two
feet and two and a half; and the other day Dick went through the
Laval University,--he goes everywhere and gets acquainted with
everybody,--and saw the foundation walls of the first building, which
have stood all the sieges and conflagrations since the seventeenth
century; and no wonder, for they are six feet thick, and form a
series of low-vaulted corridors, as heavy, he says, as the casemates
of a fortress. There is a beautiful old carved staircase there, of
the same date; and he liked the president, a priest, ever so much;
and we like the looks of all the priests we see; they are so handsome
and polite, and they all speak English, with some funny little
defect. The other day, we asked such a nice young priest about the
way to Hare Point, where it is said the Recollet friars had their
first mission on the marshy meadows: he didn't know of this bit of
history, and we showed him our book. "Ah! you see, the book say
'pro-_bab_-ly the site.' If it had said _certainly_, I should have
known. But pro-_bab_-ly, pro-_bab_-ly, you see!" However, he showed
us the way, and down we went through the Lower Town, and out past the
General Hospital to this Pointe aux Lièvres, which is famous also
because somewhere near it, on the St. Charles, Jacques Cartier
wintered in 1536, and kidnapped the Indian king Donnacona, whom he
carried to France. And it was here Montcalm's forces tried to rally
after their defeat by Wolfe. (Please read this several times to Uncle
Jack, so that he can have it impressed upon him how faithful I am in
my historical researches.)

It makes me dreadfully angry and sad to think the French should have
been robbed of Quebec, after what they did to build it. But it is
still quite a French city in everything, even to sympathy with France
in this Prussian war, which you would hardly think they would care
about. Our landlady says the very boys in the street know about the
battles, and explain, every time the French are beaten, how they were
outnumbered and betrayed,--something the way we used to do in the
first of our war.

I suppose you will think I am crazy; but I do wish Uncle Jack would
wind up his practice at Eriecreek, and sell the house, and come to
live at Quebec. I have been asking prices of things, and I find that
everything is very cheap, even according to the Eriecreek standard;
we could get a beautiful house on the St. Louis Road for two hundred
a year; beef is ten or twelve cents a pound, and everything else in
proportion. Then besides that, the washing is sent out into the
country to be done by the peasant-women, and there isn't a crumb of
bread baked in the house, but it all comes from the bakers; and only
think, girls, what a relief that would be! Do get Uncle Jack to
consider it _seriously_.

Since I began this letter the afternoon has worn away--the light from
the sunset on the mountains would glorify our supper-table without
extra charge, if we lived here--and the twilight has passed, and the
moon has come up over the gables and dormer-windows of the convent,
and looks into the garden so invitingly that I can't help joining
her. So I will put my writing by till to-morrow. The going-to-bed
bell has rung, and the red lights have vanished one by one from the
windows, and the nuns are asleep, and another set of ghosts is
playing in the garden with the copper-colored phantoms of the Indian
children of long ago. What! not Madame de la Peltrie? Oh! how do they
like those little fibs of yours up in heaven?

_Sunday afternoon._--As we were at the French cathedral last Sunday,
we went to the English to-day; and I could easily have imagined
myself in some church of Old England, hearing the royal family prayed
for, and listening to the pretty poor sermon delivered with such an
English _brogue_. The people, too, had such Englishy faces and such
queer little eccentricities of dress; the young lady that sang
contralto in the choir wore a scarf like a man's on her hat. The
cathedral isn't much, architecturally, I suppose, but it affected me
very solemnly, and I couldn't help feeling that it was as much a part
of British power and grandeur as the citadel itself. Over the
bishop's seat drooped the flag of a Crimean regiment, tattered by
time and battles, which was hung up here with great ceremonies, in
1860, when the Prince of Wales presented them with new colors; and up
in the gallery was a kind of glorified pew for royal highnesses and
governor-generals and so forth, to sit in when they are here. There
are tablets and monumental busts about the walls; and one to the
memory of the Duke of Lenox, the governor-general who died in the
middle of the last century from the bite of a fox; which seemed an
odd fate for a duke, and somehow made me very sorry for him.

Fanny, of course, couldn't go to church with me, and Dick got out of
it by lingering too late over the newspapers at the hotel, and so I
trudged off with our Bostonian, who is still with us here. I didn't
dwell much upon him in my last letter, and I don't believe now I can
make him quite clear to you. He has been a good deal abroad, and he
is Europeanized enough not to think much of America, though I can't
find that he quite approves of Europe, and his experience seems not
to have left him any particular country in either hemisphere.

He isn't the Bostonian of Uncle Jack's imagination, and I suspect he
wouldn't like to be. He is rather too young, still, to have much of
an antislavery record, and even if he had lived soon enough, I think
that he would not have been a John Brown man. I am afraid that he
believes in "vulgar and meretricious distinctions" of all sorts, and
that he hasn't an atom of "magnanimous democracy" in him. In fact, I
find, to my great astonishment, that some ideas which I thought were
held only in England, and which I had never seriously thought of,
seem actually a part of Mr. Arbuton's nature or education. He talks
about the lower classes, and tradesmen, and the best people, and good
families, as I supposed nobody in _this_ country _ever_ did,--in
earnest. To be sure, I have always been reading of characters who had
such opinions, but I thought they were just put into novels to eke
out somebody's unhappiness,--to keep the high-born daughter from
marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of
in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and I
could hardly believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in
talking in that way. Such things sound so differently in real life;
and I laughed at them till I found that he didn't know what to make
of my laughing, and then I took leave to differ with him in some of
his notions; but he never disputes anything I say, and so makes it
seem rude to differ with him. I always feel, though he begins it,
as if I had thrust my opinions upon him. But in spite of his
weaknesses and disagreeabilities, there is something really _high_
about him; he is so scrupulously true, so exactly just, that Uncle
Jack himself couldn't be more so; though you can see that he respects
his virtues as the peculiar result of some extraordinary system. Here
at Quebec, though he goes round patronizing the landscape and the
antiquities, and coldly smiling at my little enthusiasms, there is
really a great deal that ought to be at least improving in him. I get
to paying him the same respect that he pays himself, and imbues his
very clothes with, till everything he has on appears to look like him
and respect itself accordingly. I have often wondered what his hat,
his honored hat, for instance, would do, if I should throw it out of
the front window. It would make an earthquake, I believe.

He is politely curious about us; and from time to time, in a
shrinking, disgusted way, he asks some leading question about
Eriecreek, which he doesn't seem able to form any idea of, as much
as I explain it. He clings to his original notion, that it is in the
heart of the Oil Regions, of which he has seen pictures in the
illustrated papers; and when I assert myself against his opinions, he
treats me very gingerly, as if I were an explosive sprite, or an
inflammable naiad from a torpedoed well, and it wouldn't be quite
safe to oppose me, or I would disappear with a flash and a bang.

When Dick isn't able to go with me on Fanny's account, Mr. Arbuton
takes his place in the expeditionary corps; and we have visited a
good many points of interest together, and now and then he talks very
entertainingly about his travels. But I don't think they have made
him very cosmopolitan. It seems as if he went about with a little
imaginary standard, and was chiefly interested in things, to see
whether they fitted it or not. Trifling matters annoy him; and when
he finds sublimity mixed up with absurdity, it almost makes him
angry. One of the oddest and oldest-looking buildings in Quebec is a
little one-story house on St. Louis Street, to which poor General
Montgomery was taken after he was shot; and it is a pastry-cook's
now, and the tarts and cakes in the window vexed Mr. Arbuton so
much--not that he seemed to care for Montgomery--that I didn't dare
to laugh.

I live very little in the nineteenth century at present, and do not
care much for people who do. Still I have a few grains of affection
left for Uncle Jack, which I want you to give him.

I suppose it will take about six stamps to pay this letter. I forgot
to say that Dick goes to be barbered every day at the "Montcalm
Shaving and Shampooing Saloon," so called because they say Montcalm
held his last council of war there. It is a queer little steep-roofed
house, with a flowering bean up the front, and a bit of garden, full
of snap-dragons, before it.

We shall be here a week or so yet, at any rate, and then, I think, we
shall go straight home, Dick has lost so much time already.

With a great deal of love,

Your Kitty.