“Will you forgive me”—he began in a tone of repression, then with another mighty and involuntary movement he caught her hands and pressed them to his breast. “My God,” he exclaimed, “how I should have loved you!”
A moment after he flung her hands away and strode down the cliff, unfastened his boat and rowed away in the direction of the hotel as fast as he could. Rounding a sharp rock that hid what lay beyond it, he nearly succeeded in overturning another boat like his own, in which sat a gentleman of middle age, stout and pleasant and mild of countenance. The bottom of the boat was full of fish. Amherst made an incoherent apology, to which the gentleman answered with a good-natured laugh, insisting that the fault was his own. He would have liked to enter into conversation with Amherst, but my friend was only anxious to escape from the place altogether and forget his recent adventure in the hurry of departure from the hotel. Three days after he embarked at Quebec for England, and never revisited Canada. But he never married and never forgot the woman whom he always asserted he might have truly and passionately loved. He was about twenty-eight when that happened and perfectly heart-whole. Why—I used to say to him, why did you not learn her name and that of her husband? Perhaps she is a widow now, perhaps you made as great an impression upon her mind and affections as she did upon yours.
But my friend Admiral Amherst, as the world knew him, was a strange, irrational creature in many ways, and none of these ideas would he ever entertain. That the comfortable gentleman in the boat was her husband he never doubted; more it was impossible to divine. But the cool northern isle, with its dark fringe of pines; its wonderful moss, its fragrant and dewy ferns, its graceful sumacs, just putting on their scarlet-lipped leaves, the morning stillness broken only by the faint unearthly cry of the melancholy loon, the spar-dyked cliffs of limestone, and the fantastic couch, with its too lovely occupant, never faded from his memory and remained to the last as realities which indeed they have become likewise to me, through the intensity with which they were described to me.
The Story of Delle Josephine Boulanger
CHAPTER I.
Delle Josephine Boulanger, Miss Josephine Baker, Miss Josephine Baker, Delle Josephine Boulanger. What a difference it makes, the language! What a transformation! I thought this to myself as I stood on the opposite side of the street looking at the sign. To be sure, it, was only printed in French and sad little letters they were that composed the name, but my mind quickly translated them into the more prosaic English as I stood and gazed. Delle Josephine was a milliner and I had been recommended to try and get a little room “sous les toits” that she sometimes had to let, during my stay in the dismal Canadian village with the grand and inappropriate name of Bonheur du Roi. Bonneroi, or Bonneroy, it was usually called. Such a dismal place it seemed to be; one long street of whitewashed or dirty wooden houses, two raw red brick “stores,” and the inevitable Roman Catholic Church, Convent and offices, still and orderly and gray, with the quiet priests walking about and the occasional sound of the unmistakeable convent bell. I arrived on a sleety winter's day early in December. Everything was gray, or colorless or white; the people's faces were pinched and pale, the sky was a leaden gray in hue, and I thought as I stood opposite to my future abode under Delle Josephine's roof that the only bit of “local color” so far was to be found in her window. I could distinctly see from where I stood the most extraordinary hat I had ever seen. I immediately crossed the road to examine it. It was a triumph in lobster-color. In shape like a very large Gainsborough, it was made of shirred scarlet satin with large bows of satin ribbon of the same intense color and adorned with a bird of paradise. I can see it now and can recall the images it suggested to my mind at the time. These were of cardinals and kings, of sealing-wax and wafers, of tropic noons and tangled marshes, of hell and judgment and the conventional Zamiel. It looked fit to be worn by a Mrs. Zamiel, if there be such a person. I looked so long and earnestly that I evidently attracted the notice of the mistress of the shop, for I saw a hand push back the faded red curtain that veiled the interior and a queer little visage appeared regarding me with something I thought of distrust. Did I look as if I might break the glass and run off with the hat? Perhaps I did, so I entered the shop immediately and said in a reasoning tone,