Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [160]
The greatest excitement came in February, when an engraved and crested invitation arrived for Catharine from Rideau Hall. His Excellency the Governor-General, and his wife Lady Lansdowne, requested the pleasure of the company of Mrs. Traill at a winter soirée. On the evening of Saturday, February 23, Catharine, the Chamberlins and Maime Fitzgibbon swaddled themselves in buffalo robes for the short drive through the icy evening air under a star-studded sky. Catharine was in ecstasy: “The drive through the avenue among the snow laden trees was delightful …a splendid young moon just above the dark pine woods gave light enough to make every old leafless oak and silvery birch stand out from the darker evergreens in bold relief.” As the party neared the Hall, they saw “a great vapoury cloud of smoke rising into the still air and spreading in fold after fold upwards above the trees, the lower part gilded till it appeared like a golden veil over the great solid banks of snow.” The next turn in the driveway revealed the flames of a giant bonfire leaping skyward and illuminating the toboggan slide. The toboggans “flashed past on their downward descent with a speed that almost took my breath to see their lightning-like swiftness as they flew past us,” Catharine wrote to Sarah Gwyllim.
Lady Lansdowne made the old lady feel very welcome. She took her arm and escorted her along a path, illuminated by Chinese paper lanterns hung from tree branches, to see the skating rink. The belles of Ottawa, cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling in the cold air, spun around as a brave little band played Viennese waltzes: “It was a pretty lively sight, the girls skating on this wood-encircled sheet of ice lighted up by torches on a little islet in the far end of the rink.” By now, Catharine was feeling chilled, so she and Lady Lansdowne went into what the latter called the “log cabin” to warm up by the stove. Catharine chuckled as she compared this Petit Trianon fantasy of life in the woods with her own memory of the real thing. “It was not a real log cabin, for it was … handsomely panelled with varnished wood inside … not rough and chinked and plastered as log houses used to be. This would have been a palace for a settler in the old settlement days of the Backwoods. We should have been thought too luxurious altogether and the house out of keeping with the rude furniture, diet and dress of that time.”
The 1884 skating party at Rideau Hall, organized by the Governor-General. Catharine found the log cabin “a palace …far too handsomely panelled.”
Up until this moment, Catharine had been enjoying herself. But she suddenly realized that people were staring and pointing at her. She heard people whisper, “That’s her, that’s Mrs. Traill.” Several of the voices spoke in the kind of aristocratic English accents that she thought she had left far behind her when she waved goodbye to England. A tidal wave of self-consciousness rushed through her. She felt out of her element, just as, years ago, she had felt unsettled within the unfriendly class system of Britain. Had her sister Susanna been the literary lion at this gathering, she would have watched with cool amusement the Henry James world of cigar smoke, rustling silk skirts and social nuance, as she had once enjoyed them in Thomas Pringle’s house in Hampstead. Susanna would have risen to the occasion and revelled in being the centre of attention. But Susanna at that time was close to death in