Confessions Of Con Cregan Part 24

"I believe we used to have, sir; but the English plucked us," said I, with a look of a.s.sumed simplicity.

"And what is all that about the Blarney stone?" said another; "is n't there some story or other about it?"

"It's a stone they kiss in _my_ country, sir, to give us a smooth tongue."

"I don't see the great use of that," rejoined he, with a stupid look.

"It's mighty useful at times, sir," said I, with a half glance towards Captain Pike.

"You're too much, gentlemen, far too much for my poor friend Con," said the captain; "you forget that he's only a poor Irish lad. Come, now, let us rather think of starting him in the world, with something to keep the devil out of his pocket." And, with this kind suggestion, he chucked a dollar into his cap, and then commenced a begging tour of the room, which, I am ready to confess, showed the company to be far more generous than they were witty.

"Here, Master Con," said he, as he poured the contents into my two hands, "here is wherewithal to pay your footing at Mrs. Davis's. As a traveller from the old country, you 'll be expected to entertain the servants' hall,--do it liberally; there's nothing like a bold push at the first go off."

"I know it, sir; my father used to say that the gentleman always won his election who made most freeholders drunk the first day of the poll."

"Your father was a man of keen observation, Con."

"And is, sir, still, with your leave, if kangaroo meat has n't disagreed with him, and left me to sustain the honors of the house."

"Oh, that's it, Con, is it?" said Captain Pike, with a sly glance.

"Yes, sir, that's it," said I, replying more to his look than his words.

"Here's the letter for Mrs. Davis: you'll present it early to-morrow; be discreet, keep your own counsel, and I 've no doubt you 'll do well."

"I'd be an ungrateful vagabond if I made your honor out a false prophet," said I; and, bowing respectfully to the company, I withdrew.

"What a wonderful principle of equilibrium exists between one's heart and one's pocket!" thought I as I went downstairs. "I never felt the former so light as now that the latter is heavy."

I wandered out into the town, somewhat puzzled how to dispose of myself for the evening. Had I been performing the part of a "walking gentleman," I fancied I could have easily hit upon some appropriate and becoming pastime. A theatre,--there was one in the "Lower Town,"--and a tavern afterwards, would have filled the interval before it was time to go to bed. "Time to go to bed! "--strange phrase, born of a thousand and one conventionalities. For some, that time comes when the sun has set, and with its last beams of rosy light reminds labor of the coming morrow. To some, it is the hour when wearied faculties can do no more, when tired intellect falters "by the way," and cannot keep the "line of march." To others, it comes with dawning light, and when roses and rouge look ghastly; and to others, again, whose "deeds are evil," it is the glare of noonday.

Now, as for me, I was neither wearied by toil nor pleasure; no sense of past fatigue, no antic.i.p.ation of coming exertion, invited slumber,--nay, I was actually more wakeful than I had been during the entire evening, and I felt a most impulsive desire for a little social enjoyment,--that kind of intercourse with strangers which I always remarked had the effect of eliciting my own conversational qualities to a degree that astonished even myself.

In search of some house of entertainment, some public resort, I paced all the streets of the Upper Town, but to no purpose. Occasionally, lights in a drawing-room, and the sound of a piano, would tell where some small evening party was a.s.sembled; or now and then, from a lower story, a joyous roar of laughter, or the merry chorus of a drinking-song, would bespeak some after-dinner convivialities; but to mingle in scenes like these, I felt that I had yet a long road to travel,--ay, to pa.s.s muster in the very humblest of those circles, what a deal had I to learn! How much humility, how much confidence; what deference, and what self-reliance; what mingled gravity and levity; what shades and gradations of color, so nicely balanced and proportioned, too, that, unresolved by the prism, they show no preponderating tint,--make up that pellucid property men call "tact!" Ay, Con, that is your rarest gift of all,--only acquire that, and you may dispense with ancestry, and kindred, and even wealth itself; since he who has "tact"

partic.i.p.ates in all these advantages, "_among his friends_."

As I mused thus, I had reached the "Lower Town," and found myself opposite the door of a tavern, over which a brilliant lamp illuminated the sign of "The British Grenadier,"--a species of canteen in high favor with sergeants and quartermasters of the garrison. I entered boldly, and with the intention of behaving generously to myself; but scarcely had I pa.s.sed the threshold than I heard a sharp voice utter in a half-whisper, "Dang me if he an't in livery!"

I did not wait for more. My "tact" a.s.sured me that even there I was not admissible; so I strolled out again, muttering to myself, "When a man has neither friend nor supper, and the hour is past midnight, the chances are it is 'time to go to bed;'" and with this sage reflection, I wended my way towards a humble lodging-house on the quay, over which, on landing, I read the words, "The Emigrant's Home."

CHAPTER XIV. HOW I 'FELL IN' AND 'OUT' WITH THE WIDOW DAVIS

For the sake of conciseness in this veracious history, I prefer making the reader acquainted at once with facts and individuals, not by the slow process in which the knowledge of them was acquired by myself, but in all the plenitude which intimate acquaintance now supplies; and although this may not seem to accord with the bit-by-bit and day-by-day narrative of a life, it saves a world of time, some patience, and mayhap some skipping too. Under this plea, I have already introduced Sir Dudley Broughton to the reader; and now, with permission, mean to present Mrs.

Davis.

Mrs. Davis, relict of Thomas John Davis, was a character so a.s.sociated with Quebec that to speak of that city without her would be like writing an account of Newfoundland and never alluding to the article "cod-fish."

For a great number of years her house had been the rendezvous of everything houseless, from the newly come "married" officer to the flash commercial traveller from the States; from the agent of an unknown land company to the "skipper" of a rank pretentious enough to dine at a boarding-house. The establishment--as she loved to style it--combined all the free-and-easy air of domesticity with the enjoyment of society.

It was an "acted newspaper," where paragraphs, military and naval, social, scandalous, and commercial, were fabricated with a speed no "compositor" could have kept up with. Here the newly arrived subaltern heard all the pipeclay gossip, not of the garrison, but of the Province; here the bagman made contracts and took orders; here the "French Deputy"

picked up what he called afterwards in the Chamber "l'opinion publique;"

and here the men of pine-logs and white deal imbibed what they fervently believed to be the habits and manners of the "English aristocracy." "To invest the establishment with this character," to make it go forth to the world as the mirror of high and fas.h.i.+onable life, had been the pa.s.sion of Mrs. D.'s existence. Never did monarch labor for the safeguard that might fence and hedge round his dynasty more zealously; never did minister strive for the guarantees that should insure the continuance of his system. It was the moving purpose of her life; in it she had invested all her activity, both of mind and body; and as she looked back to the barbarism from which her generous devotion had rescued hundreds, she might well be pardoned if a ray of self-glorification lighted up her face. "When I think of Quebec when T. J."--her familiar mode of alluding to the defunct Thomas John--"and myself first beheld it," would she say, "and see it now, I believe I may be proud." The social habits were indeed at a low ebb. The skippers--and there were few other strangers--had a manifest contempt for the use of the fork at dinner, and performed a kind of sword-exercise while eating, of the most fearful kind. Napkins were always misconstrued,--the prevailing impression being that they were pocket-handkerchiefs. No man had any vested interest in his own wine-gla.s.s; while thirsty souls even dispensed with such luxuries, and drank from the bottle itself.

Then sea-usages had carried themselves into sh.o.r.e life. The company were continually getting up to look out of windows, watching the vessels that pa.s.sed, remarking on the state of the tide, and then, resuming their places with a muttering over the "half ebb," and that the wind was "northing-by-west," looked for change. All the conversation smacked of salt-water; every allusion had an odor of tar and seaweed about it.

Poor Mrs. Davis! How was she to civilize these savages; how invest their lives with any interest above timber? They would not listen to the polite news of "Government House;" they would not vouchsafe the least attention to the interesting paragraphs she recited as table-talk,--how the Prince of Hohenhumbughousen had arrived at Windsor on a visit to Majesty, nor how Royalty walked in "The Slopes," or sat for its picture.

Of the "Duke of Northumberland," they only knew a troops.h.i.+p of the name, and even that had been waterlogged! The "Wellington" traded to Mirimachi, and the "Robert Peel" was a barque belonging to Newfoundland, and employed in general traffic, and not believed very seaworthy.

Some may make the ungracious remark that she might have spared herself this task of humanizing; that she could have left these "ligneous Christians," these creatures of tar and turpentine, where she found them. The same observation will apply equally to Cooke, to Franklin, to Brooke of Borneo, and a hundred other civilizers: so Mrs. D. felt it, and so she labored to make T. J. feel it; but he would n't. The ungrateful old bear saw the ordinary grow daily thinner; he perceived that Banquo might have seated himself at any part of the table, and he actually upbraided his wife with the fact. Every day he announced some new defection from the list of their old supporters. Now it was old Ben Crosseley, of the "Lively Biddy," that would n't stand being ordered to shake out his canvas--that is, to spread his napkin--when he was taking in sea store; then it was Tom Galket grew indignant at not being permitted to beat "to quarters" with his knuckles at every pause in the dinner. Some were put out by being obliged to sit with their legs under the table, being long habituated to dine at a cask with a plank on it, and of course keeping their limbs "stowed away" under the seat; and one, an old and much-respected river pilot, was carried away insensible from table, on hearing that grog was not a recognized table beverage throughout the British dominions.

The banishment of lobscouse and sea-pie, pork, with its concomitant cataplasm of peas, and other similar delicacies from the bill of fare, completed the defection; and at last none remained of the "once goodlie company," save an old attenuated Guernsey skipper too much in debt to leave, but who attributed his fealty to the preference he entertained for "les usages de la bonne societe et la charmante Mde. Davis." T. J.

could never hold up his head again; he moped about the docks and quays, like the restless spirit of some Ancient Mariner. Every one pitied him; and he grew so accustomed to condolence--so dependent, in fact, on commiseration--that he spent his days in rowing from one s.h.i.+p to the other in the harbor, drinking grog with the skippers, till, by dint of pure sympathy, he slipped quietly into his grave, after something like a two years' attack of delirium tremens.

The same week that saw T. J. descend to the tomb saw his widow ascend to the "Upper Town,"--the more congenial locality for aspirations like hers. If no eulogistic inscription marked _his_ resting-place, a very showy bra.s.s plate adorned _hers_. From that hour she was emanc.i.p.ated; it seemed, indeed, as if she had turned a corner in life, and at once emerged from gloom and darkness into suns.h.i.+ne. It chanced that the barracks were at that very moment undergoing repair, and several officers were glad to find, at a convenient distance, the comforts and accommodations which a plausible advertis.e.m.e.nt in the "Quebec Messenger"

a.s.sured them were to be obtained for one pound one s.h.i.+lling weekly.

There are people who tell you that we live in a heartless, selfish, grabbing, grasping age, where each preys upon his neighbor, and where gain is the spirit of every contract; and yet, in what period of the world was maternal tenderness, the comforts of a home, the watchful anxieties of parental love, to be had so cheaply? Who ever heard of bachelors being admitted into families, where music and the arts formed the evening's recreation, in the Middle Ages? Does Herodotus inform us that "young and attractive ladies would take charge of a widower's household, and superintend the care of his family"? Not a bit of it! On this point, at least, the wisdom of our ancestors has no chance with us. There is not a wish of the heart, there is not a yearning of the affections, that a three-and-sixpenny advertis.e.m.e.nt in the "Times" will not evoke a remedy for. You can make love, or a book, or a speech, by deputy; for every relative you lose, there are fifty kind-hearted creatures to supply the place; and not only may you travel over half the globe without more personal exertion than it costs you to go to bed, but you can be measured either for a wife or a suit of clothes without ever seeing the lady or the tailor.

The "Hotel Davis," so said the newspaper, "was situated in the most airy and healthful locality of the Upper Town." No one ever rung the bell of the hall-door from the first of October to May, but would acknowledge the truth of the first epithet. The society, for admission to which the most particular references are required, embraces all that is intellectual, high-bred, and refined. The table, where preside the 'feast of reason and the flow of soul,' combines the elegance and delicacy of the French, with the less sophisticated succulence of English cookery. Intellectual resources,--the humanizing influences of song and poetry,--the varied pleasures of cultivated and kindred spirits, which have won for this establishment the epithet of the Davisian Acropolis, continue to make it the chosen retreat of gentlemen connected with civil and military pursuits, who are lodged and boarded for one guinea weekly.

"Receptions every Thursday. b.a.l.l.s, during the winter, on the first Monday of each month."

Such was one among many--I select it as the shortest--announcements of this cheap Elysium; and now, two words about Mrs. D. herself. She was a poor, thin, shrivelled-up little woman, with a rugged, broken-up face, whose profile looked like a jagged saw. Next to elegance of manner, her pa.s.sion was personal appearance,--by which she meant the advent.i.tious aid of false hair, rouge, and cosmetics; and these she employed with such ever-varying ingenuity that her complexion changed daily from cla.s.sic pallor to Spanish richness, while the angle of incidence of her eyebrows took in everything, from forty-five degrees to the horizontal.

Her style was "sylph," and so she was gauzy and floating in all her drapery. A black veil to the back of her head, a filmy, gossamer kind of scarf across her shoulders, a.s.sisted this deception, and when she crossed the room, gave her the air of a clothes'-line in a high wind.

Black mittens, over fingers glowing in all the splendor of imitation rings, and a locket, about the size of a cheese-plate, containing the hair--some said the scalp--of the late T. J., completed a costume which Mrs. D. herself believed Parisian, but to which no revolution, democratic or social, could reduce a Frenchwoman.

She borrowed her language as well as her costume from the "Grande Nation," and with this comfortable reflection, that she was not likely to be asked to restore the loan. Her French was about as incongruous as her dress; but Quebec, fortunately, was not Paris, and she drove her coach-and-six through "Adelow," with a hardihood that outstripped, if it did not defy, criticism.

By the military and naval people she was deemed the best "fun" going; her pretension, her affectation, her shrewdness, and her simplicity, her religious homage to fas.h.i.+on, her unmerciful tyranny towards what she thought vulgarity, made her the subject of many a joke and much amus.e.m.e.nt. The other cla.s.ses, the more regular _habitues_ of the "house," thought she was a princess in disguise; they revered her opinions as oracles, and only wondered how the court-end could spare one so evidently formed to be the gla.s.s of fas.h.i.+on.

If I have been too prolix in my sketch, kind reader, attribute it to the true cause,--my anxiety to serve those who are good enough to place themselves under my guidance. Mrs. D. still lives; the establishment still survives; at five o'clock each day--ay, this very day, I have no doubt--her table is crowded by "the rank and fas.h.i.+on" of the Quebec world; and the chances are, if you yourself, worthy reader, should visit that city, that you may be glad to give your blank days to the fare of Madam Davis.

It was ten o'clock in the forenoon as I arrived at her door, and sent in Captain Pike's letter, announcing my arrival. I found Mrs. D. in what she called her own room,--a little den of about eleven feet square, shelved all round, and showing an array of jars and preserve-pots that was most imposing,--the offerings of skippers from the West India Islands and Madeira, who paid a kind of black-mail in preserved ginger, guavas, yams, pepper-pots, chili, and potted crabs that would have given liver complaints to half the Province.

Mrs. D. was standing on a step-ladder, arranging her treasures by the aid of a negro boy of about twelve years old, as I entered; and not feeling that I was of consequence sufficient to require a more formal audience, she took a steady and patient observation of me, and then resumed her labors. The little window, about six feet from the ground, threw a fine Rembrandt light upon me as I stood in my showy habiliments, endeavoring, by an imposing att.i.tude, to exhibit myself to the best advantage.

"Forty-seven; Guava jelly, Sambo!--where is forty-seven?"

"Me no see him," said Sambo; "missus eat him up, perhaps."

"Monsonze! you filthy creature; look for it, sirrah!" So Baying, Mrs.

Davis applied her double eye-gla.s.s to her eyes, and again surveyed me for some seconds.

"You are the"--she hesitated--"the young person my friend Pike brought out, I believe?"

"Yes, my lady," said I, bowing profoundly.