Part 27

We liked the old gentleman's spunk. He was typical of the old French blood as it pulses within the new France. We liked the old gentleman, too. To us he was as one who had just stepped from one of Honoré Balzac's stories, with his mustaches, waxed and dyed into a drooping perfection, his low-set soft hat, his vast envelope of a faded greatcoat, his cane thrust under his arm, as Otis Skinner might have done it. We had first met him one morning coming out of the arched gateway of the very ancient whitewashed pile of the Seminary; again as he stepped from his morning devotions out through the doorway of the Basilica into the sunlight of what was once the market-square of the Upper Town--after that many more times. Finally we had risked a little smile of recognition, to be answered by the salute courtly. We had conquered. We knew that romance personified was close to him. Perhaps our old gentleman was an army man; he must have been able to sit on the long porch of the Garrison Club, that delectable and afternoon-teable place that looks out upon the trim grass-carpeted court-yard, and tell stories at least as far back as the Crimea.

"A Frenchman?" you begin, as if attacking the very substance of our argument of romance, "fighting the battles of the English Queen?"

Bless your heart, yes. The Frenchmen of lower Canada have never hesitated at helping England fight her battles. Within sixteen years after their own disastrous defeat before the walls of the citadel city that they loved so dearly, they were fighting alongside of their conquerors to hold her safe from the attacks of the tremendously brave, and half-fed little American army which ventured north through the fearful rigors of a Canadian winter, hopelessly to essay the impossible.

But our old gentleman was not a soldier. He was a seller of cheeses in St. Roch ward, who had retired in the sunset of his life. He knew the Quebec of the days when the Parliament house stood perched at the ramparts at the Prescott gate, and the old gateways themselves were narrow _impasses_ at which the traffic of great carts and little _caleches_ in summer, and dancing, splendid sleighs in winter, was forever fearfully congested; he could tell many of the romances that still linger up this street and down that, within the stout walls of this house or in the sheltered garden of some nunnery or half-hidden home. He could speak English well, which, for a Frenchman in Quebec, is a mark of uncommon education. But, best of all, he knew his Quebec. He was in a true sense the old Quebec living in the new.

Even among the cosmopolitan folk of the Terrace in the shady late afternoons, you could recognize him as such. He was apart from the throng--a motley of bare-footed, brown-cloaked friars, full-skirted priests, white nuns and gray and black, red-coated soldiers from the Citadel to give a sharp note of color to the great promenade of Quebec, millionaires real and would-be from New York, tourists of every sort from all the rest of our land, funny looking English folk from the yellow-funnelled _Empress_, which had just pulled in from Liverpool and even now lay resting almost under the walls of old Quebec--he was readily distinguished. To be with him was, of itself, a matter of distinction.

To walk the staid streets of the fascinating old town with him was a privilege. Always the excursion led to new and unexpected turns; one day up the narrow lane and through the impressive gates of the Citadel, where a petty officer detained our American cameras and assigned us to a mumbling rear private for perfunctory escort around the old place. It is no longer tenanted by British troops. The last of these left forty years ago. These red-coats are counterfeit; raw-boned boys from Canadian farms being put through their military paces by a distant government which may sometimes overlook, but not always. The Citadel as a military work is tremendously out-of-date. Even as it now stands, it is almost a century old, and that tells the story. The guns that have so wide a sweep and so exquisite a view from the ramparts may look fear-inspiring, but the ramparts are of stone and would be quickly vulnerable to modern naval ordnance.

The gun that is unfailingly shown to Americans is a small field-piece which is said to have been captured from us at Bunker Hill. Whereupon our tourists, with a rare gift of repartee, always exclaim:

"Ah, you may have the gun, but we have the hill!"

And the military training of the young Canadian militiaman is so perfect that he smiles politely in response. As a matter of fact, there is no record of the fact that the gun was ever taken from the Americans, although each little while there is a request from the States for its return, which is always met with derision and scorn by the Canadians. Politics in Our Lady of the Snows is almost entirely beyond the understanding of an American.

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Sometimes our friend of old Quebec led us to the churches of the town--many of them capped with roosters upon their steeples, instead of the Roman cross which we had believed inevitable with the Catholic church. Since then we have been informed that many of the Swiss churches of the same faith have that high-perched cock upon the steeple-tops. We paused once at a new church on the rim of the town, where the very old habit of having a nun in constant adoration of the Host is perpetuated, paused again at the ever fascinating Notre Dame des Victoiries in Lower Town, with its battlemented altar and its patriotic legends in French, which a British government has been indulgent enough to overlook, stood again and again at the wonderful Van Dyke which hangs in the clear, cool, white and gold Basilica. From the churches, we sometimes went to the chapels; the modern structure of the Seminary, or the fascinating holy places of the Ursulines, where the kind-hearted Mother Superior turned our attention from the imprisoned nuns chanting their prayers behind an altar screen, like the decorous and constant hum of honey-bees, to the skull of Montcalm. Then we must see his burial place in the very spot in the chapel wall cleft open by a rampant British shell sent to harass his army.

"Montcalm," said our gentleman of the old Quebec. "He was, sir, the bravest soldier and the finest that France ever sent overseas."

And we could only remember that other fine monument of Quebec, out on the Grande Allee toward the point where Abraham Martius's cows, chewing their cuds on an open plain, awoke one day to find one of the world's great battles being fought--almost over their very heads. In that creation of marble and of bronze, the great figure of Fame is perched aloft, reaching down to place her laurel branch upon a real French gentleman--Montcalm--at the very hour of his death. That memorial is something more. In a fashion somewhat unusual to monuments, it fairly vitalizes reality.

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There must be a real reason why Quebec is such a Mecca for honeymoon journeys. You can see the grooms and the brides out on the Terrace, summernight after summernight. Romance hovers over that high-hung place. It sometimes saunters there of a sunshiny morning--a couple here, or a couple there in seemingly loving irresponsibility as to the fact that ours is a workaday world, after all. It lingers at the afternoon tea, along the Terrace promenade. It comes into its own, night after night, when the boys and girls of the town promenade back and forth to the rhythmical crash of a military band, or in the intervals stand at the rail looking down at the rough pattern of street-lights in Lower Town, the glistening string of electrics at Levis, or listening to the rattle of ship's winches which give a hint that, after all, there is a world beyond Quebec.

When night comes upon the Terrace, one may see it at its very best. He may watch the day die over the Laurentians, the western sky fill with pink afterglow, and the very edge of those ancient peaks sharpen as if outlined with an engraver's steel. For a moment, as the summer day hesitates there on the threshold of twilight and good-by, he may trace the country road that runs its course along the north bank of the St. Lawrence by the tiny homes of the _habitans_ that line it, he may raise his eyes again to the sharp blue profile of the mountains. He may hear, as we heard, the old gentleman from St. Roch, whisper as he raises his pointing cane:

"I come here every night and look upon the amphitheater of the gods."

So it is the night that is the most subtle thing about Quebec. It is night when one may hear the bells of all the churches that have been a-jangle since early morning ring out for vespers before the many altars, the sharp report of the evening gun speaking out from the ramparts of the Citadel. After that, silence--the silence of waiting. There is a surcease of the chiming bells--the Terrace becomes deserted of the army of pleasure-seekers who a little time before were making meaningless rotation upon it, the bandmen fall asleep in their cell-like casements of the Citadel, the lights of Lower Town and of Levis go snuffing out one by one. Silence--the silence of waiting. Only the sentinels who pace the ramparts of the crumbling fortifications, the occasional policeman in the narrow street, the white-robed sister who sits in perpetual adoration of the Sacrament, proclaim Quebec awake. Quebec does not sleep. She lives, like an aged belle in memory of her triumphs of the past, keeps patiently the vigil of the lonely years, and awaits the coming of Christ.

THE END

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

Punctuation and spelling standardized.

Frequent inconsistent hyphenation not changed.