The night of summer comes late in this north land. Although it was nearly nine o’clock, the shadows, long gathering in the valleys and the woods, had but just now overflowed onto the broad levels of the river. Above was hurry of low-lying clouds, through which swift star-gleams seemed to flit, like the momentary beacons of the rare fireflies along the shore. Far away the shriek of a departing train broke the general stillness and rang fainter and more faint in wild variety of tones among the farther hills.
On the bank of this wide Canadian river, a little above the margin, stood under the yet dripping trees a group of diverse people, but all of one household. Travel-weary and silent, for a time they looked down on the dimly lit stream, and heard, as they waited, the murmur and hum of its waters, or, with eyes as yet unused to the gloom, strove to see the group of men about the boats on the beach below them.
“This way, Margaret,” said a man’s cheerful voice; “take care; there is my arm, dear. How delightful to see the old river!”
The night was so dark that Lyndsay hesitated as he stood on the verge.
“What is it?” said his wife.
“I do not quite like to go up to-night in this depth of darkness. Do you think it quite safe, Polycarp? Can you see?”
“Not very well,” said the guide, “but soon break and have heap moon.”
“I think we must risk it, my dear. You will go with me.” Then he said a word of caution to the guides, and called to the boys, “Come, Dicky, and you, Jackums.” They ran down the slope in haste and stood a little, made quiet for once in their noisy lives, but interested, alert, and peering through the darkness.
“Is that you, Tom and Ambrose? How are you all? and Pierre—have you kept me a big salmon?”
He shook hands with each of the guides, having a gay word of kindly remembrance for all in turn. Meanwhile the sister of the boys came down to the canoes, made silent, like the children, by the night, the pervasive stillness, and the novelty of the situation.
“Baggage gone up, Pierre?”
“Yes, Mr. Lyndsay; everything is right,—and the salmon thick as pine-needles. The small traps are all in. We might be getting away.”
“Shall the women need their waterproofs, Tom?”—this to a huge form which loomed large as it moved among the other men, who were busy adjusting the small freight of hand baggage. The voice, when it broke out in reply, was, even for a fellow of six feet two, of unproportioned loudness.
“They won’t want none; it ’s a-goin’ to bust out clear.”
Miss Anne Lyndsay, the maiden aunt of the children, came down the bank as Thunder Tom replied. Her steps, too feeble for health, were thoughtfully aided by Edward, the youngest boy. To her turned Rose, the niece, a woman of twenty years.
“Did you ever hear the like?”
She felt the queer impropriety of this terrible voice in the solemn stillness which, somehow, adequately suggested the tribute of the bated breath.
“Won’t need no wraps, Miss Lyndsay. Rain’s done. There fell a power of water.”
“What a voice, Aunt Anne!” said Rose. “It ’s like the boom of the sea.”
“He explodes,—he doesn’t speak; a conversational cannonade.”
“Hush,” said Mrs. Lyndsay, the mother; “he is quite sensitive about it. He was with us last year, and a very good man, too, as I know.”
“Canoe is ready, sir.”
“It is like a parting salute,” said Rose.
“Well, my dear,” whispered Miss Anne, “it will be a fine reminder for a certain person; all things have their uses.”
“Thanks, Aunt Anne. A certain person has a not uncertain consciousness that she doesn’t need it. Folks complain that we women speak too loud. I am sure our men have lost their voices. As for the English women you admire so much, I could hardly understand them at all, with their timid, thin voices, and fat a’s.”
“Stuff!” said Miss Anne. “That is English.”
“I prefer Shakspere’s English,” said Rose. “I advise them to read ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost.’”
“That is our old battle-field, Rose. But you would have to be consistent, and I do assure you, if you talked as Shakspere talked, you would make a sensation.”
“Come, adjourn that skirmish,” said Archibald Lyndsay, who had been rearranging the canoeloads.
Then the voice, to which others were as whispers, roared:
“Who’s for where, Mr. Lyndsay?”
“All right. Tom, your voice is really getting broken. Come, Margaret,--this way dear.”
“It’s so,” said Tom. “I kin speak bigger if I try,”—this to Miss Lyndsay, apologetically, as he aided her into the boat. “Fact is, Miss, I was twins, like them boys, and Bill he died. He hadn’t no voice to count on. It’s main useful when you’re drivin’ logs.”
“What a baby he must have been in a quiet family!” whispered Anne to Rose and Ned. “Imagine it!”
“I didn’t understand what he said, Aunt Anne,” remarked the boy.
“I do not think he quite understood himself. Perhaps he had a vague notion that he had to talk so as to represent the dead brother, ‘who hadn’t no voice to count on.’”
“I like it,” remarked Rose. “Yes, papa.”
“This way,” said Lyndsay; “here, Margaret, in my canoe.”
“Could I have Ned with me, brother?” asked Miss Anne.
“Certainly. Here, in this canoe, not the birch. This one,—now, so, with your face up the river, and you, Ned,—yes, on the cushion on the bottom.”
“How comfortable!” said Anne, as she leaned back on a board set at a slope against the seat.
“And now, Margaret,—you and I, together with Pierre and—Halloa there, Gemini! Oh, you are in the birch already. No nonsense, now! No larking! These birches turn over like tumbler-pigeons.”
“You, dear,”—to Rose,—“you are to go with Polycarp and Ambrose. By yourself, my child? Yes.”
There was a special note of tenderness in his voice as he spoke.
“How is that, Rosy Posy?”
“Delightful! How well you know! And I did want to be alone,—just to-night,—for a little while.”
“Yes.” As he released her hand he kissed her. “Now, away with you.” In a few moments the little fleet was off, and the paddles were splashing jets of white out of the deep blackness of the stream. By degrees the canoes fell apart. Despite the parental warning, the twins had secured paddles, and were more or less competently aiding their men, so that soon they were far ahead.
Lyndsay chatted with his guides of the salmon, and of his luggage and stores, sent up the day before. Aunt Anne and her favorite Ned were silent for a time; but the boy’s glance roamed restlessly from sky to stream, and up over the great dim hills. At last he said:
“Hark, Aunt Anne; how loud things sound at night!”
“Them’s the rapids,” said Tom, in tones that made Miss Lyndsay start. “Them’s a mile away.”
“I suppose, Ned, that when all one’s other senses are more or less unused, the ear may hear more distinctly; at all events, what you say is true, I think. If I want to hear very plainly, I am apt to shut my eyes—good music always makes me do that.”
“That’s so,” said John. He considered himself quite free to have his share in the talk. “When I’m callin’ moose, I most allus shuts my eyes to listen to them trumpetin’ back. Dory Maybrook was a-sayin’ that same thing las’ Toosday a week. We was a-settin’ out by her wood-pile. An’ she sat there a-thinkin’. An’ says she, ‘It’s cur’ous how you can hear things at night.’ Jus’ like you said. Hiram he was a-choppin’.”
“Who is Dory Maybrook?” said Ned.
“Well, she’s Dory Maybrook; she’s Hiram’s wife. Hiram’s her husband,” and he laughed,—laughed as he talked, so that the noise of it boomed across the wide waters.
Again for a while they were silent, asking no more questions. The aunt was wondering what could have given big Tom his overpowering voice, and how it would affect one to live with such an organ. She turned it over in her mind in all its droller aspects, imagining Tom making love, or at his sonorous devotions, for to Anne Lyndsay there were few things in life remote from the possibility of humorous relation.
Twice the boy asked if she were comfortable, or warm enough, and, reassured, fell back into the possession of the deepening night and the black water, whence, suddenly, here and there, flashed something white through the blackness, like, as the lad thought, the snowy wings of the turning sea-gulls he had seen over the St. Lawrence at break of day.
In the other canoe, far behind and out of sight, Rose Lyndsay lay, propped against the baggage, in delicious contentment of mind and body. It was a vast and satisfying change from the completed civilizations of the world of Europe, where for a year she had wandered with Anne Lyndsay. Three weeks before the evening on which begins my tale, she was in London, and now she was greeted with a sudden sense of emancipation from the world of conventionalities. Neither father nor mother was exclusively represented in this happily fashioned womanhood. And thus it was that her inherited qualities so modified one another that people missed the resemblances, and said only that she was like none of her people.
Nevertheless, she had her father’s taste and capacity for seeing accurately and enjoying the simple uses of observation, with also, in a measure, what he somewhat lacked—the aunt’s unending joy in all humor; sharing with her the privilege of finding a smile or a laugh where others, who lack this magic, can only conjure sadness. She saw with mental directness, and, where her affections were not concerned, acted without the hesitations which perplex the inadequate thinker.
Her aunt, to whom she bore some resemblance in face, had learned much in a life of nearly constant sickness, but never the power to restrain her fatal incisiveness of speech. She could hurt herself with it as well as annoy others, as she well knew. But in her niece, keenness of perception and large sense of the ridiculous were put to no critical uses. The simple kindliness of her mother was also hers.
At times in life permanent qualities of mind vary in the importance of the use we make of them. Rose was now in the day of questions. Everything interested her: an immense curiosity sharpened her naturally acute mental vision; an eloquently imaginative nature kept her supplied with endless queries. The hour of recognized limitations had not yet struck for her. Now she set the broad sails of a willing mood, and gave herself up to the influences of the time and place. Deep darkness was about her. The sky seemed to be low above her. The dusky hills appeared to be close at hand on each side. The water looked, as it rose to left and right, as though the sky, the waves, the hills were crowding in upon her, and she, sped by rhythmic paddles, was flitting through a lane of narrowing gloom.
The impression I describe, of being walled in at night by water, hill, and sky, is familiar to the more sensitive of those who are wise enough to find their holiday by wood and stream. The newness of the sensation charmed the girl. Then in turn came to her the noise of the greater rapids, as, after two hours, the river became more swift.
Twice she had spoken; but twice the dark guide had made clear to her that he needed all his wits about him, and once he had altogether failed to answer her or, perhaps, to hear at all. But now the clouds began to break, and the night became clear, so that all objects were more easily discernible. “Is your name Polycarp?” she said, at last, turning as she sat to look back at the impassive figure in the stern.
“I’m Polycarp,” said the Indian.
“What is that I hear? Of course I hear the rapids, but—it is like voices and—and—laughter. Is it only the rapids? How strange! Could you—just stop paddling a moment?”
The paddles were silent, and she listened. The sounds came and went, mysteriously rising, falling, or changing, despite the absence of wind, as they drifted downward when the paddles no longer moved. Mr. Lyndsay’s canoe overtook them. “What is it?” he called. “Anything wrong?”
“No, no! I wanted to hear the rapids. They seem like voices.”
“Ask me about that to-morrow,” said her father, “but push on now. We shall be late enough.”
Again the paddles fell, and her canoe slid away into the ever-deepening night. Of a sudden her trance of thought was broken, and over the waters from the twins came snatches of song, bits of Scotch ballads, familiar in this household. At last she smiled and murmured, “The scamps!” They were caroling the song with which they had been fond of mocking her in her girlhood.
The voices rang clear a moment, and then were lost, and heard anew, without seeming cause for the break. Then came a fresh snatch of song:
As she listened and caught the wilder notes of Burnieboozle, they fell into the orchestral oppositions of the rapids, and died to the car amid the cry and crash and hoarse noises of the broken waters.
Rose saw the men rise and take their poles, and felt amidst the beautiful dim vision of white wave-crests how the frail canoe quivered as it was driven up the watery way.
Then they kept to the shore under the trees, the poles monotonously ringing, with ever around her, coming and going, that delicious odor of the spruce, richest after rain, which to smell in the winter, amid the roar of the city, brings to the wood-farer the homesickness of the distant forest. Her dreamy mood once broken was again disturbed by that rare speaker, the silent Polycarp.
“I smell camp.”
“What!” she said.
“Yes—very good smell—when bacon fry—smell him long away—two mile.”
“I smell it,” she said. “How strange!”
“Smell fry long way—smell baccy not so far. Smell Mr. Lyndsay pipe little while back.”
And now far ahead she saw lights, and started as the Indian smote the water with the flat of his paddle, making a loud sound, which came back in altered notes from the hills about them.
“Make ’em hear at camp.”
Presently she was at the foot of a little cliff, where the twins were already noisily busy.
“Halloa, Rose! Can you see?”
“Yes, Jack.”
“Isn’t it jolly? Give me a hand.”
“No, me.”
“This beats Columbus,” said the elder lad. “Take care, Spices”—this to the younger twin, who, by reason of many freckles, was known in the household, to his disgust, as the Cinnamon Bear, Cinnamon, Spices, or Bruin, as caprice dictated.
“I’ll punch your red head, Rufus,” cried the lad. “You just wait, Ruby.”
“Boys! boys!” said Rose. “Now each of you give me a hand. Don’t begin with a quarrel.”
“It isn’t a quarrel; it’s a row,” said Jack.
“A distinction not without a difference,” laughed Rose. “Oh, here is everybody.” And with jest and laughter they climbed the steps cut in the cliff, and gaily entered the cabin which was to be their home for some weeks.
There was a large, low-raftered room, covered with birch-bark of many tints. On each side were two chambers, for the elders. The boys, to their joy, were to sleep in tents on the bluff, near to where the tents of the guides were pitched, a little away from the cabin, and back of a roaring camp-fire. Behind the house a smaller cabin sufficed for a kitchen, and in the log-house, where also a fire blazed in ruddy welcome, not ungrateful after the coolness of the river, the supper-table was already set. As Rose got up from table, after the meal, she missed her mother, and, taking a shawl, went out onto the porch which surrounded the house on all sides.
For a moment, she saw only the upward flare of the northern lights, and then, presently, Mrs. Lyndsay, standing silent on the bluff, with a hand on Ned’s shoulder, looking across the river. Rose quietly laid the shawl over her mother’s shoulders, and caught her hand. Mrs. Lyndsay said, “Thank you, dear Rose, but I want to be alone a little. I shall come in very soon.” They went without a word, meeting their father just within the door. “Mother sent us in,” said Rose.
“I understand,” and he also turned back. “It is Harry! It is about Harry.”
“Yes, it is Harry,” repeated Rose; for the year before Mrs. Lyndsay had left a little weakly fellow, her youngest, in the rude burial-ground of the small Methodist church, some miles away, up the stream. She had been alone with Mr. Lyndsay and the child, and it had been her first summer on the river. When, the next spring, she had proposed to take thither the whole family, her husband had gladly consented.
Mrs. Lyndsay—comely, rosy, in the vigor of young middle-life—was the first to welcome the sun, as it came over the hills beyond the river. In the camps was stir of breakfast, and silent, inverted cones of smoke from the fires. Soon Rose, on the edge of the cliff, cried “Good morning!” and the mother saw the strong, well-built girl come toward her, and had pride in her vigor and sweetness. They kissed, and the mother went in, and Rose back to her maiden meditations.
She sat down on a camp-stool, and felt that for the first time she had leisure to think. She and her aunt had been met by her father when their steamer came, and amidst incessant questions they had been hurried off into the wilds of New Brunswick. A year away had made for her new possibilities of observation, and now, with surprised interest, she found herself in the center of a household which, assuredly, even to the more experienced, would have seemed peculiar. It was, in fact, more peculiar than odd. There was no eccentricity, but much positive character. This Rose Lyndsay saw as she had never seen it before. The growth of definitely marked natures in the boys struck her, the fresh air of a kind of family freedom rare elsewhere; the audacity of the lads’ comments, and their easy relations with the father, were things which now she saw anew with more thoughtfully observant eyes.
It were well to say, however, that it was a republic with sudden probabilities of dictatorship, and that a stranger coming within its circle rarely beheld much of the outspoken fashions and droll appearance of equality which, at times, seemed to disregard the deference ordinarily yielded to parental opinion. In fact, there was a comfortable sense of comradeship all around, which had its values, and with it an affection so strong that the wounds of all intellectual differences, and of the somewhat rare physical contests of the boys, were easily healed by its constancy, and by the father’s power to make each see in all the rest their specifically valuable traits. Some things which in other households are looked upon as serious were in this little noticed,—while, as to certain lapses, punishment was apt to be severe enough.
By and by Ned came out and sat down by Rose. He was the most silent of them all.
“Well,” said Rose, as he kissed her, “isn’t it beautiful, Ned? Look at the low meadows down below the elms, and the cliffs opposite, and the wild water! Don’t you love it?”
“I think I—I like it,” he replied. “How black the water looks—how wilful it looks—that was what I wanted to say. I think I like it, Rose. Sometimes I don’t like things other people like,—I mean grown-up people. I suppose that’s very stupid.”
“No,—oh, no!” She was struck with the oddness of some aspects of his mind. “Was that what troubled you yesterday, when we were all looking at that great flare of red sunset light,—you wouldn’t speak?”
“It was beautiful, but—you won’t tell, Rose?—the Bear and Rufus would laugh at me,—it was terrible!”
She looked aside at him, curious and interested. “I think I understand, and I shall never, never laugh at you, Ned. You must tell me everything.”
“Sometimes I can’t,” he said. “It is queer, but sometimes I don’t want to.” He was truthful to a fault, and was of no mind to make unconditional treaties.
“I understand that, too”; and then they fell into lighter chat of friends and cousins, until Mr. Lyndsay called “breakfast,” from the cabin-door, and they went in.
The twins were scarcely more than wide-awake enough to settle down to serious work at bread and butter and porridge. The canned milk they pronounced abominable, but soon learned that Mrs. Maybrook’s cows would furnish a fair supply of their essential diet. Miss Anne came in a little wearily, glad as she moved of the stay of a chair-back and the boys’ help, for they all rose at once.
“Did you sleep well?” said Lyndsay.
“No; worse than usual.”
“I thought by your smiling you would have had a good night, but your dear old face is a dreadful purveyor of fibs. Are you feeling badly to-day?”
“Sh—sh—!” she cried, “don’t dose me with myself, Archy; as that delightful Mrs. Maybrook said to Margaret, ‘I do hate to be babied.’ Is that your tenth corncake, Jack?”
“Ninth, aunty,—I have to eat for you and me. I’m like Thunder Tom’s voice.”
“That’s the good of being twins,—you can eat for two!” cried Ned.
“It’s my seventh,” said Dick, complacently. “I wouldn’t be such a G. I. P. as Jack.”
“Sudden death is what he will get,” returned Dick.
“Your seventh,” said Anne. “But how can one die better than facing fearful odds?” And then there was a little moment of laughter, and the gay chatter went on. At last Mr. Lyndsay said:
“When you are through, boys, with this astounding breakfast, we will talk of our plans. Your mother wants to go up the river. She shall have the two Gaspé men. Rose, you will go with me for a first lesson in salmon-fishing, and you three boys shall go with Polycarp after trout. Lunch at one; and remember, boys, no nonsense in the canoe, mind. This water is too cold and too swift to trifle with. You are a pretty bad lot, but I should not like to have to choose which I would part with. As Marcus Aurelius said, ‘Girls make existence difficult, but boys make it impossible.’”
“Who? What?” cried Rose.
“That was because of Master Commodus,” said Ned.
“I’d like to have licked him,” remarked Jack, whose remedial measures were always combative.
“He was not a nice boy, like me,” said Dick with a grin.
“Like who? I hope he spoke Latin with decent correctness. Out with you!”
“I had almost forgotten about Marc. Aurelius, aunt,” said Rose, aside. “I was really taken in for a moment.”
It was a family fiction, and still a half belief, that Archibald Lyndsay would some day publish a great commentary on the famous emperor’s philosophy; meanwhile it served a variety of humorous purposes.
“I shall provide myself with a book and sunshine,” said Miss Anne, “and then with a good field-glass, I shall own the world,—mental and physical.”
“But are the books unpacked?” said Rose.
“No, but I have all I want. I must go and see.”
Rose set out a lounging-chair on the porch, put beside it a foot-stool and a rude little table, made by a guide, and following her aunt to her room, came back laughing with an arm-load of books. Archibald Lyndsay smiled.
“No wonder that man at St. Lambert’s groaned over Anne’s trunk.”
“That delightful man!” cried Rose, “who checked baggage, switched the trains off and on, sold tickets, answered questions, and did the work of three and laughed for six. He told papa ‘he guessed he wasn’t no Canadian. Not much! Had to go down to York State once a year to eat pumpkin-pie and get sot up—kind of.’”
“He was of the best type of our people,” said Lyndsay. “Come, Rose; Anne appears to be reasonably supplied.”
“I should think so, papa. But I must see,—wait a bit.”
“Oh!” he exclaimed, picking the books up in turn, “‘Massillon,’ ‘Feuchtersleben,’ what a name! ‘Dietetics of the Soul,’ what a droll business! ‘The Mystery of Pain,’‘The Mystery of Pain,’ my poor Anne! ‘History of the Council of Trent,’ good gracious!”
At this moment his sister reappeared. “Are you supplied for the morning, Anne? Past risk of famine, eh!”
“Not, too heavily,” she said. “You know what Marcus Aurelius says about books. ‘There is nothing as economical as a bad memory, because then there ariseth no need to buy many books.’ That is my case.”
“Then this is all,” laughed Lyndsay, pointing with his pipe-stem to the table. “Hum! Well, well! Come, Rose.”
“Yes, go!” cried Anne, seating herself, “and take with you Epictetus. ‘If that which is of another’s life perplex thy judgment, go a-fishing,—for there thou shall find more innocent uncertainties, and will capture the whale wisdom, if thou takest nothing else.’ You may recall the passage. Carp might have been the fish. Eh, Archie?”
“Stuff and nonsense!” cried her brother, as they turned away. “Anne gets worse day by day, Rose. Come. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, indeed!”
As they went down the steps to the bluff, Anne Lyndsay, her thin white hands in her lap, looked after them. Her face was rarely without a smile; but, as Rose said truly, “Aunt Anne wears her smiles with a difference.” Just now her smile was delicately flavored with a look of satisfied affection. As she looked over river and sun-lit hills, a sharp twinge of pain crossed her face, and her hands shut tight a moment, while the sweat of a brief but overpowering pang wrung from her lips an exclamation. Her life had been physically narrowing for years. As she became less and less able to go here and there, to do this or that, she more and more resolutely broadened the horizon of her mental activities, but, no matter what happened, she continued to smile at or with everything, herself included. Now she wiped her forehead, and fell to smiling again, looking sharply about her, for this woman immensely disliked to be seen in the rare moments when pain was too emphatic for absolute silence. “I wonder why I hate to be seen,” she said aloud, being unusually given to soliloquizing; for, as she liked to explain, “I have more respect for my own opinion if I say it out. It is easier to disregard the unspoken. I like to think I have the good manners to listen to myself. It does so trouble Archie, and that girl, for a day when I break up. I wonder if that small Spartan had had the perpetual company of his fox, how long he would have gone on without squealing. I know he wriggled,” she said, and so fell to laughing, after which she lay back in her chair, waved her handkerchief to Rose, and began to read.
While the Gaspé canoe went away up the stream, urged by skilful arms, Archibald Lyndsay and Rose talked merrily.
“I told those boys to keep their eyes open, and not to come back and tell me they had seen nothing in particular. As for Ned, he is sure to see certain things and not others. He is a dreamer,—oh, worse than ever, my dear,—it grows on him.”
“But his dreams—”
“Yes, I know. There is always something in them. He seems to me, Rose, too absent-minded for this world’s uses. At times he puzzles me. He is the duck in my henbrood.”
“He is pure gold.”
“Yes, but when he comes to be put into current coin,—really, I don’t know. As to Rufus,—Dick, I mean, I hate nicknames, and this family has enough for a directory; you will have six a week,—as to Red-head—”
Rose laughed.
“I get no more respect in this household than—”
“Oh, was that a salmon?” A fish, some three feet long, leaped high in air, dripping silver in the sun, and fell with a mighty swash into the glowing waters.
“Yes; there’s another! As to Dick, he sees everything, and for questions—you are nothing to him. I wanted to talk to you about them, Rose.”
“And Jack?”
“Oh, Jack! Jack will do. He hates books, but he also hates defeat,—a first-rate quality, Rose. He is one of the three people I have seen in my life who honestly enjoy peril. That comes from his Uncle Robert. My poor Robin used to laugh when he rode into the hottest fight!”
Rose, remembering how the major died at Antietam, was silent. Her father was also quiet for a few moments.
“That boy must always be fighting somebody. Just now, he and Ned have a standing difficulty about the Roundheads and Jacobites. I believe it has cost two black eyes already.”
“How funny! What do you do about it?”
“I? Nothing. Ned is like a cat for activity, small as he is, and as to an occasional black eye,—well, I don’t ask too many questions.”
“But doesn’t it distress mother?”
“Yes, yes, of course; but so long as they love one another, I find it wise to say little. By and by, dear, when you are married, and have a lot of boys of your own, you will understand the wisdom of knowing when not to see,—when not to ask questions.”
This astounding improbability, of a sudden, struck Rose dumb. Then she said, abruptly, “Who is that away up the river?”
“Two young Boston men. Are they from the island camp, Tom?”
“Yes, sir,” said Tom, in his great voice. “Mr. Ellett, and Mr.—I don’t rightly mind me of the other man’s name. Think it’s Carington.”
“Rather a pretty name,” said Rose,—“Carington.”
“Not a New England name, I suspect. Probably Southern. How easily one tells where most of our family names belong,—the older ones, I mean. Oh, there is their camp. See how neat everything is about their tents. Above this point, Rose, there are a few clearings, and the graveyard lies back from the shore, where our Harry is buried. Poor little man! He was well out of it, Rose, well out of it. We rarely talk of him. Your mother dislikes it. For myself, I like better to speak of my dead—and they are many—in a wholesome way, without the strange reserve which even the best of folks have about their lost ones. However!”
“Shall we anchor to the head of the pool, sir?” said Tom.
“Yes, yes. And now, Rose, I want first to have you watch me closely,—hand, rod, and line,—and to try to follow the fly on the water. I promise you to talk enough about the trees and the waters next Sunday. There are some dead forests above us, on the river, from which I want sketches made; but now it is the more serious business of the salmon; ask what you like.”
“Well, then, isn’t it late to fish? It is eight o’clock.”
“No; the salmon is an aristocrat, and rises late. If you want striped bass, the break of day is none too early.”
“But will that thin line—what you call the casting-line—hold a great thing like the fish I saw leap?”
“Yes, with the bend and give of this sixteen-foot rod, and the certainty with which these matchless Vom Hoff reels work. Look, now, the day is pleasantly cloudy, the water a little thick, riled,—roily, if you like. I think a silver doctor—that’s a fly, see, Rose—will do. There, you can look over my fly-book.”
“Well,” said Rose, “I am compelled to sympathize with the salmon. Are not our Anglo-Saxon ideas of sport a little hard on birds and fish?”
“We will adjourn that discussion,” said her father, “until you see a salmon. Then we shall know whether your store of pity will hold out.”
The canoe was now anchored in some four feet of strong, broken water. The bowman, with his anchor-rope ready, the sternman, on the bottom of the boat, with his face to the pool, his eye on every cast of the fly. Mr. Lyndsay stood a little back from the center, a fine figure, Rose thought, tall, strong, ruddy, with a face clean-shaven, except for side-whiskers. At first he cast his fly near to the canoe, left and right in succession, and giving the rod a slight motion, kept the fly moving down-stream until directly astern of the boat. Then with a new cast, adding two or more feet of line from the reel, he again let the swift water run it out. Thus, casting each time a little farther, he covered by degrees an increasing triangular area of water, of which the stern of the boat was the apex. As he went on fishing, he chatted with Rose, who sat in front of him, so that he cast over both the girl and the burly figure of Tom.
“I am now casting about forty-five feet of line,” he said. “I can cast about sixty-five, from reel to fly. There are men who can cast one hundred feet and more, but here it is needless. I could not do it if it were needed.”
Rose began to think all this a little slow, for a pastime. At last Lyndsay, saying, “Drop, Tom,” reeled up his line within a few feet from the long silk leader. As he gave the word, the lump of lead used as an anchor was lightly lifted and held well in hand, the sternman used his paddle, and the boat dropped some forty feet farther down the pool, and was gently anchored. The stream at this place was more broken, and was what Tom called “strong water.”
The casting business began again, with no better result, so that Rose, to whom it all looked easy enough, began to find it more pleasant to watch the shadows of the hills and the heavy clouds moving overhead. Mr. Lyndsay was now casting some fifty feet of line, and, as Rose turned, trying to analyze for her own use the succession of movements, she was struck with the grace and ease with which the line was recovered at the end of the cast,—sent apparently without effort directly behind the fisherman, and then without crack or snap impelled in a straight line to right or left at an angle from the boat, so that the casting-line and fly dropped or settled lightly on the water; the fly always maintaining its place at the end of the cast. Then she heard, “You riz him!” “We have tickled his fancy, Rose, or tempted his curiosity. Now we have a little game to play. Sometimes we wait a few minutes. I rarely do so unless the fish are scarce. Look sharp. Did you see him rise?”
“No.”
“That fish lies in a line with yonder dead pine. In this quick water the fly buries itself, but as I follow it with the rod, you can guess its place. Most commonly a salmon remains in one spot, with his nose up-stream, and—”
“Oh!” cried Rose, as the fly reached the indicated spot and a swirl in the water and a broad back caught her eye. “Oh! oh!”
“It has all the charm of gambling,” said Mr. Lyndsay, “without the badness.”
“Will he rise again?”
“Perhaps. Ah, not this time”; and after a couple of casts, he said, “Put on a black dose.”
“A what?”
“Our flies have all manner of queer names. This is a ‘dark fly,’ quite unlike the bright doctor. It may tempt him.” And at the first cast, with the same length of line, the peaceful scene was turned into one of intense excitement.
“There!” cried Rose. “Oh!” for as the new fly reached the fated spot, there was a sudden flash of white a dozen yards away. The reel ran out a few feet, the rod was lifted and turned over to bring the winch to the right hand, and the pressure on the entire length of the bending rod. The angler sat down.
Tom meanwhile had called to the bowman as the fish struck, and the anchor was instantly drawn up. For this brief interval of time the great salmon stayed, pausing. “Thinking what’s wrong,” said Lyndsay. The next instant the reel sang, and some two hundred feet of line ran out with incredible swiftness. Far away across the stream a great white thing leaped high out of the water, as Lyndsay dropped the tip of his rod to relax the tension of the line.
“How exciting it is!” cried Rose, as the fish leaped again. “I don’t sympathize with the salmon at all; I am intent on murdering him.”
“Fresh run and clean,” said Tom,—“a beauty!”
The canoe, urged by deft paddles, moved across the river. The tension relaxing, Lindsay reeled up line. Then again there was a wild rush up river.
“Tom, quick! After him!”
The next moment the line came back, slack.
“Oh!” cried Rose, “he is gone!”
“No! no!” shouted Tom. “Reel! reel, sir!” and presently the long, loose line grew tight, for the salmon had turned and made straight for the boat. Now, once more, he broke water, thirty feet away.
“Them long runs tires ’em,” said Tom, “and the jumps tires ’em more. Showed his belly, sir.”
Lyndsay now slowly lifted his rod-tip, throwing it back of him, and then lowering it as he recovered the line.
“Take care, sir!” cried Tom, for once more there was a fierce, short dash across, and again a leap. This time the fish came in slowly, but surely, and Tom took his gaff.
“Can you do it?”
“Yes, sir.” The gaff was in, and the great, flapping fish in the boat, and Rose pretty well splashed with water as Tom cleverly lifted his prey on the gaff-hook.
“A twenty-pounder, Mr. Lyndsay, sure!”
“Well, Rose, how do you like it?”
“Oh, papa, it is splendid!
“Where are we going?” she added, as the canoe was run ashore.
“The men will put the fish under a bush, to be out of the sun; and now, what were you about to ask? I saw a question ready in your eyes.”
“I wish, papa—I wish I did not think the fish had a dreadful time. I have to think of pleasure holding the rod and tragedy at the end of the line.”
“Upon my word, Rose, you are emphatic. I can assure you, my dear, that you may safely keep your emotional statements for another occasion.
“Let me tell you something. Once when fishing on the Nipigon, I saw an odd-looking, very large trout. He rose every time I cast, and at last took the fly. Now, why the salmon takes the fly, not Solomon could say, because he eats nothing while in the rivers; but trout are pigs for greediness. When I looked this hungry trout over, he was still bleeding from a fish-hawk’s claws, and his intestines and liver were hanging in the water. Such pain, or injury if you like, as this, does in man utterly destroy appetite and cause inaction. The inference is plain enough: fish cannot be said to suffer what we call pain. I once took a striped bass which had been terribly torn by a gaff. On the whole, Rose, I conclude that, as we go down the scale of life, there is less and less of what we call pain, and at last, probably, only something nearer to discomfort or inconvenience.”
“Is that so? Then we hold our higher place at the cost of suffering, which must increase as we go on rising through the ages to come?”
“Yes,” said Lyndsay, looking aside with freshened curiosity at this young logician. “Yes, the rule must work both ways. But man alone has the power to limit, lessen, even annihilate pain. The amount of pain in the civilized world must have been vastly diminished within forty years, since we got ether and the like.”
“And will not that in time lessen our power to endure? But then,” she added quickly, “that might be of less moment if we are always increasingly able to diminish or stop pain.”
Lyndsay smiled. This alert grasp of a subject was a novel acquisition. As he was adjusting a fly, and the boat was dropping to a new station, she said:
“I hate pain. I don’t believe in its usefulness. Not for Rose Lyndsay, at least. It only makes me cross.”
“Yet you would hesitate to make a world without it?”
“Yes. One can see the difficulties.”
“The more you think of them the more they multiply. It is, of course, commonplace to say pain is protective, and in a sense educative. That one may admit; and yet there will still be such a lot of torment which is natural that one does keep on wondering why.”
“Do you remember, Pardy,”—this was her nursery name for her father,—“when Mr. Caramel preached about the uses of pain, and said the man who suffered was ignorantly rich: he had only to learn to use his wealth?”
“Oh, very well I remember. As we came out Anne said she would be glad to be generous with her over-competence, and wanted to send Mr. Caramel a few of the crumbs to relieve his too comfortable poverty!”
“Yes, only one can’t repeat her bits of grim fun, Pardy; and when she tells Dick a green-apple stomach-ache is only a joke which he don’t understand, you must see her face and Dick’s grimace.—Oh, see how that fish jumped!”
“North has a curious notion that pain, except for early protective education, is, in a measure, useless. He declares that long bouts of it make men bad.”
“Not Aunt Anne, Pardy.”
“Oh, a woman! That is different.”
“Nor that splendid fellow, Dr. Hall, now—”
“Bother, Rose! Don’t interrupt me. North says he has seen certain hysterical women get well as to everything except loss of sense of pain. He knows of two who are ignorant, at present, of the feeling of pain. You cannot hurt them. One of them declares that she would on no account resume the normal state.”
“I cannot imagine any one wanting to be so unnatural, and she must lose all warnings as to burns and knocks.”
“No, she substitutes intelligent watchfulness for the sentinel pain.”
“I shall never get rid of pain by having hysterics,” said Rose, confidently. “I can’t imagine that.”
“Occasion may assist imagination. Take care!”
“There is a scornful masculine note in that remark, sir! Why do not men have hysterics?”
“Ask North; he will refer you to Hamlet’s condition. Isn’t it in Act I, Scene IV, where he gets what Jack calls ‘rattled’ about the ghost? North says he was hysterical. Dr. Shakspere knew his business. But I meant to add that North says there is one case on record of a man who, in all his life, never knew what pain was,—had no pain; could not be hurt in any way!”
“How strange!”
“Yes, but we are losing the shining hours. The busiest bee could not improve them here.”
“No, indeed!”
“Oh, one word more, and then let us pitch the horrid thing overboard. I was so puzzled once—I still am—about this passage in my Aurelius.”
“Real or fictitious, Pardy? You are not always above following Aunt Anne’s wicked ways!”
“Oh, real. He says, ‘There is no dishonor in pain.’ I have remarked in my commentary that this passage is not clear.”
“But is it not, papa? He must mean that dishonor is the worst anguish, and that pain is only an evil to the body, and that an ache of the soul is worst of all, and therefore—”
“Only an ill to our grossest part, if we so determine to limit its effects. Is that it, my dear?”
“I suppose so,” said Rose, with some hesitation. “Yes, that is it.”
“But now you shall argue with a fish. You will be awkward at first. Here is a lighter rod; we call it a grilse-rod. Tom shall coach you, and I will grin at your failures!”
“I hate failure!”
“And I loathe it. But, as the Persian poet says, ‘Failure is the child of doubt, and the grandfather of success.’”
“Pardy! Pardy!” Rose smiled. Those Oriental quotations were family properties, and a source of some bewilderment to the educated stranger.
“Now, dear, see how I hold the rod—lightly. Yes, so, without tension. Don’t make too much physical effort. Let the rod do its share. Don’t insist on doing all, and too much yourself.”
Rose took the rod, and Tom began his lesson. But the gods were good, and, after a few awkward casts, a salmon, more eager than his kind, made a mad bolt for the fly, and was off like a crazy thing, across the stream.
“Turn your rod! Down! Sit down! Tip up! Up! That is rare,” said Lyndsay. “If that salmon were to keep on running, there would be no salmon for you. Quick, boys!” for before the anchor was up, the wild fish had run off two thirds of the reel. Now they were away after him at fullest speed.
“Reel! reel!” cried Tom. “Reel up!”
“But I am tired! Oh, I shall lose him!”
However, after he had made another run, Rose began to get in the line, then the fish stopped a moment, and again was away.
Meanwhile, the canoe, in crossing and recrossing, had come close to the swift water below the pool.
“We have got to go down the rapids, sir.”
“Let her go, then. Steady, Rose, keep a strain on him.”
“But I am nearly dead!”
“You will come to. Quick! Drop the tip!” for as they fled down-stream, the boat dancing, the water splashing in, the poles, now pushing, now snubbing the canoe, the salmon made a leap high in air, and fell across the taut line, which came back free, while Rose looked around in disgusted amazement.
“He is gone!” she said.
“Yes. You should have lowered the tip when he jumped. But think how pleased he is, my dear!”
“I hate him!”
“He has got half a leader and a good silver doctor,” said her father. “You can quote Browning, dear, ‘The Last Leader.’”
“For shame! I knew those things must be weak. I would have a good, thick rope.”
“You wouldn’t take many fish, miss,” said Tom, grinning.
“What are these wretched leaders made of?” said Rose.
“Silk. They drown the silkworm in vinegar, and then, cutting out the silk sac, take the two ends, and pull them apart. The silk, for a whole cocoon, is in a state of thick solution, and is thus pulled out into one of the many lengths which we tie to make a nine-foot leader.”
“How curious!”
Meanwhile, another leader was well soaked and adjusted, and Rose began anew. But, although she cast better, no more salmon rose, and, tired out, she gave up the rod. Mr. Lyndsay had no better luck, and, as it was close to lunch-time, they ran ashore to pick up their salmon, which Tom laid in the canoe and covered with ferns. Soon again the little vessel was in the strong current.
“There is no hurry, Tom,” said Lyndsay; and so the canoe, held straight by a guiding paddle, glided swiftly onward.
“It is perfect motion, Pardy,—at most, it has the ease and grace of flight.”
“It makes one envy the fish.”
“Ah, the dear things. I am so glad to be able to think it really does not hurt them.”
“Hurt ’em?” said Tom. “They likes it, else why’d they want it. They needn’t ’less they’re a mind to.”
As they floated quietly down the river, close to shore, under birch and beech and pine and silky tamarack, the delight of open air, the pleasantness of the shifting pictures, the delicate, changeful odors, even the charm of the motion, were keenly felt by Rose. She was falling under the subtle magic of this woodland life, and lazily accepting the unobservant, half-languid joy it brought. At last she said:
“Papa, does it take you long to—well, to get away from your work, so that you can fully enjoy all this?”
“Three or four days; not more. I like at once the feeling that I have nothing I must do. After awhile the habit of using the mind in some way reasserts its sway. At home I watch men. It is part of my stock in the business of the law. Here I readjust my mind, and it is nature I have learned to watch. I was not a born observer; I have made myself one. After a day or two on the water, I begin to notice the life of the woods; the birds, the insects. This grows on me day by day, and, I think, year by year. It is a very mild form of mental industry, but it suffices to fill the intervals of time when salmon will not rise.”
“It is so pleasant to drift!”
“Yes; that is the charm of the life. Nobody elbows you here; no rude world jostles your moods. You may entertain the gentle melancholy of Penseroso or the entire idleness of Adam before the apple tempted him. You may be gay and noisy,—no one is shocked; and then, the noble freedom of a flannel shirt and knickerbockers! Why do we ever go back?”
“There is a queer indefiniteness about it all to me,” said Rose. “I cannot get into any full—I mean interested—relation with the life and all there is in it. I don’t say just what I mean.”
“I see, Rose: from Rome to this is a long way,—‘a far cry,’ we say in Scotland. Let yourself go. Drift, as you said.”
“Ah,” said Rose,
It is not always easy to drift, and I am not yet enough at ease to drift. I find, Pardy, that the changes at home are very great. I am getting slowly used to them. The boys seem new creatures. You are just the same. But mama! I am so sorry for her.”