The Lady of the Ice | Page 4

dress--snow, in fact, which is like a man sinking into
irremediable ruin and changing its former glorious state for that
condition which is expressed by the unpleasant word "slush." There is
no an object, not a circumstance, in visible Nature which does not
heighten the contrast. In England there is the luxuriant foliage, the
fragrant blossom, the gay flower; in Canada, black twigs--bare, scraggy,
and altogether wretched--thrust their repulsive forms forth into the
bleak air--there, the soft rain-shower falls; here, the fierce snow-squall,
or maddening sleet!--there, the field is traversed by the cheerful plough;
here, it is covered with ice-heaps or thawing snow; there, the rivers run
babbling onward under the green trees; here, they groan and chafe
under heaps of dingy and slowly-disintegrating ice-hummocks; there,
one's only weapon against the rigor of the season is the peaceful
umbrella; here, one must defend one's self with caps and coats of fur
and india-rubber, with clumsy leggings, ponderous boots, steel-creepers,
gauntlets of skin, iron-pointed alpenstocks, and forty or fifty other
articles which the exigencies of space and time will not permit me to
mention. On one of the darkest and most dismal of these April days, I
was trying to kill time in my quarters, when Jack Randolph burst in
upon my meditations. Jack Randolph was one of Ours--an intimate
friend of mine, and of everybody else who had the pleasure of his
acquaintance. Jack was in every respect a remarkable man--physically,
intellectually, and morally. Present company excepted, he was certainly
by all odds the finest-looking fellow in a regiment notoriously filled
with handsome men; and to this rare advantage he added all the

accomplishments of life, and the most genial nature in the world. It was
difficult to say whether he was a greater favorite with men or with
women. He was noisy, rattling, reckless, good-hearted, generous,
mirthful, witty, jovial, daring, open-handed, irrepressible, enthusiastic,
and confoundedly clever. He was good at every thing, from tracking a
moose or caribou, on through all the gamut of rinking, skating,
ice-boating, and tobogganing, up to the lightest accomplishments of the
drawing-room. He was one of those lucky dogs who are able to break
horses or hearts with equal buoyancy of soul. And it was this twofold
capacity which made him equally dear to either sex.
A lucky dog? Yea, verily, that is what he was. He was welcomed at
every mess, and he had the entrée of every house in Quebec. He could
drink harder than any man in the regiment, and dance down a whole
regiment of drawing-room knights. He could sing better than any
amateur I ever heard; and was the best judge of a meerschaum-pipe I
ever saw. Lucky? Yes, he was--and especially so, and more than all
else--on account of the joyousness of his soul. There was a contagious
and a godlike hilarity in his broad, open brow, his frank, laughing eyes,
and his mobile lips. He seemed to carry about with him a bracing moral
atmosphere. The sight of him had the same effect on the dull man of
ordinary life that the Himalayan air has on an Indian invalid; and yet
Jack was head-over-heels in debt. Not a tradesman would trust him.
Shoals of little bills were sent him every day. Duns without number
plagued him from morning to night. The Quebec attorneys were
sharpening their bills, and preparing, like birds of prey, to swoop down
upon him. In fact, taking it altogether, Jack had full before him the sure
and certain prospect of some dismal explosion.
On this occasion, Jack--for the first time in our acquaintance--seemed
to have not a vestige of his ordinary flow of spirits. He entered without
a word, took up a pipe, crammed some tobacco into the bowl, flung
himself into an easy-chair, and began--with fixed eyes and set lips--to
pour forth enormous volumes of smoke.
My own pipe was very well under way, and I sat opposite, watching
him in wonder. I studied his face, and marked there what I had never

before seen upon it--a preoccupied and troubled expression. Now,
Jack's features, by long indulgence in the gayer emotions, had
immovably moulded themselves into an expression of joyousness and
hilarity. Unnatural was it for the merry twinkle to be extinguished in
his eyes; for the corners of the mouth, which usually curled upward, to
settle downward; for the general shape of feature, cut-line of muscle,
set of lips, to undertake to become the exponents of feelings to which
they were totally unaccustomed. On this occasion, therefore, Jack's face
did not appear so much mournful as dismal; and, where another face
might have elicited sympathy, Jack's face had such a grewsomeness,
such an utter incongruity between feature and expression, that it
seemed only droll.
I bore this inexplicable conduct as long as I