II.

THE PHANTOM GUARD.

Just a hundred years have passed since the assault on Prés-de-Ville. It is the last day of 1875, and in the Citadel above the cliff the Commandant and his lady are holding a ball. Outside the warm rooms winter binds Quebec. The St. Lawrence is frozen over, and the copings and escarpments of the old fortress sparkle white under a flying moon.

The Commandant's lady had decreed fancy dress for her dancers, and further, that their costumes shall be those of 1775. The Commandant himself wears the antique uniform of the Royal Artillery, and some of his guests salute him in the very coats, and carry the very swords, their ancestors wore this night a hundred years ago. They pass up the grand staircase hung with standards—golden leopards of England, golden irises of France, the Dominion ensign, the Stars and Stripes— and come face to face with a trophy, on the design of which Captain Larne of the B Battery has spent some pious hours. Here, above stacks of muskets piled over drums and trumpets, is draped the red and black "rebel" pennant so that its folds fall over the escutcheon of the United States; and against this hangs a sword, heavily craped, with the letters R.I.P. beneath it.

It is the same thin blade of steel which dropped on the snow, its hilt warm from Richard Montgomery's hand, as he turned to wave forward his men. His enemies salute it to-night.

They pass into the upper ballroom. They are met to dance a new year in, and the garrison band is playing a waltz of Strauss's—"Die guten alten Zeiten." So dance follows dance, and the hours fly by to midnight—outside, the moon in chase past the clouds and over fields and wastes of snow—inside, the feet of dancers warming to their work under the clustered lights.

But on the stroke of midnight a waltz ceases suddenly. From the lower ballroom the high, clear note of a trumpet rings out, silencing the music of the bandsmen. A panel has flown open there and a trumpeter steps forth blowing a call which, as it dies away, is answered by a skirl of pipes and tapping of drums from a remote corner of the barracks. The guests fall back as the sound swells on the night, drawing nearer. Pipes are shrieking now; the rattle of drums shakes the windows. Two folding doors fall wide, and through them stalks a ghostly guard headed by the ghost of Sergeant Hugh McQuarters, in kilt and tartan and cross-belt yet spotted with the blood of a brave Highlander who died in 1775, defending Quebec. The guard looks neither to right nor to left; it passes on through hall and passage and ballroom, halts beneath Montgomery's sword, salutes it in silence, and vanishes.

Some of the ladies are the least bit scared. But the men are pronouncing it a brilliant coup de théâtre, and presently crowd about the trophy, discussing Montgomery and what manner of man he was.

Down in St. Louis Street the windows have been illuminated in the old house in which his body lay. Up in the Citadel the boom of guns salutes his memory.

So the world commemorates its heroes, the brave hearts and high minds that never doubted but pressed straight to their happy or unhappy goals. But some of us hear the guns saluting those who doubted and were lost, or seemed to achieve little; whose high hopes perished by the way; whom fate bound or frustrated; whom conscience or divided counsel drove athwart into paths belying their promise; whom, wrapping both in one rest, earth covers at length indifferently with its heroes.

So let these guns, a hundred years late, salute the meeting of two lovers who, before they met and were reconciled, suffered much. The flying moon crosses the fields over which they passed forth together, and a hundred winters have smoothed their tracks on the snow. There is a tradition that they sought Boisveyrac; that children were born to them there; and that they lived and died as ordinary people do. But a thriving town hides the site of the Seigniory, and their graves are not to be found.

And north of Lake Michigan there long lingered another tradition—but it has died now—of an Englishman and his wife who came at rare intervals and would live among the Ojibways for a while, accepted by them and accepting their customs; that none could predict the time of their coming or of their departure; but that the man had, in his time, been a famous killer of bears.

THE END.