"But why not tell me, and I will tell him?"
"Because there are several points connected with the matter with which you are not familiar, and because he might misconstrue both your motives and mine. No. It is a matter to be settled between man and man. Besides, it is late and your absence must not be prolonged. I, too, have a military report to make to the authorities without delay."
Pauline suffered herself to be convinced, and the two, after a few mutual words of love, which wonderfully recuperated them, bent their way up Mountain Hill. At the gate they separated.
"I will be with you within two hours," said Hardinge, as he took the direction of the Chateau.
Pauline stepped into the old church on her way, and in its consecrated gloom poured out a prayer at the feet of Her whom she worshipped as the Comforter of the Afflicted. Consolatrix Afflictorum.
[XVI.]
[THE ROUND TABLE.]
There was high festival at the Chateau St. Louis. Sieur Hector Théophile Cramahé, Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Quebec, and Commander of the Forces in the capital, during the absence of Guy Carleton, Captain General and Governor Chief, was a man of convivial spirit. He had for years presided over a choice circle of friends, men of wealth and standing in the ancient city. They were known as the Barons of the Round Table. An invariable rule with them was to dine together once a week, when they would rehearse the memories of old times, and conduct revels worthy of the famous Intendant Bigot himself. They numbered twenty-four, and it so happened that in five years not one of them had missed the hebdomadal banquet—a remarkable circumstance well worthy the attention of those who study the mathematical curiosities of the chapter of accidents.
The ninth of November was dinner night. The Lieutenant-Governor had a moment's hesitation about the propriety of holding it, but all objections were at once drowned in a flood of valid reasons in favor of the repast. In the first place, His Excellency had been particularly burdened with the cares of office during the past two days. That young fellow Hardinge had kept him as busy as he could be. In the next place, though the citizens of Quebec really knew nothing of the true state of affairs, they were making all kinds of conjecture, and if the dinner did not take place, the gossips would hear of it immediately, and interpret it as the worst possible sign of impending trouble. In the third place, if the banquet were postponed for a day or two, that villain Arnold might turn up and prevent it altogether. Cramahé paced up and down in his drawing room, rubbing his hands and smiling as these fancies flitted through his brain. If he had been serious, which he was not, his doubts would all have been dissipated by the arrival of the Barons almost in a body. Up they came through the spacious entrance and illuminated hall, in claret-colored coats, lace bosom-frills and cuffs, velvet breeches, silken hose, silver-buckled shoes, and powdered wigs, holding their gold-knobbed canes aslant in their left hand, and waving salutations to their host with their feathered tricorns. A lordlier band never ascended the marble stairs of Versailles. Handsome for the most part, exquisite in manners, worldly in the elevated sense of the term, they represented a race which had transplanted the courtly refinement of the old world into the wilds of the new—a race the more interesting that it did not survive beyond the second generation after the Conquest, and is at present only seen at glimpses amid the wreck of the ancient seigniorial families about Quebec.