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.
*****
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