Sunday, 1 P.M.Miss Harris:—You have meddled successfully, and whether you are right or wrong in what you allege, I shall not be here to contest the question. If your husband, if you ever get one, keeps half as close a watch over you, he will probably see quite enough to satisfy him. Perhaps you will be kind enough to communicatethisto Miss Mary Crawford, and thus finish the obligations under which I rest.Yours, humbly,Egbert Crawford.
Sunday, 1 P.M.
Miss Harris:—
You have meddled successfully, and whether you are right or wrong in what you allege, I shall not be here to contest the question. If your husband, if you ever get one, keeps half as close a watch over you, he will probably see quite enough to satisfy him. Perhaps you will be kind enough to communicatethisto Miss Mary Crawford, and thus finish the obligations under which I rest.
Yours, humbly,
Egbert Crawford.
In a moment more this note was sealed and directed to "Miss Josephine Harris—Care of Miss Crawford" and left lying on the table, with the superscription upward. Then Colonel Egbert Crawford put on his hat, walked deliberately down-stairs and out at the front of the house. No one seemed to observe him—not even a domestic, and probably nothing would have pleased him better at that moment. Walking down the lane to the road, he turned up the road to the left, went up to a little country tavern where he had sometimes hired a riding-horse on previous visits, and hired a horse and buggy, with a driver, to go at once to Utica. Ten minutes completed the negotiation, and ten more harnessed up the horse to the vehicle; so that before the call to dinner was made at the Crawford mansion, before old John Crawford was assisted in from the portico, or Mary thought of the arbiter of her destiny as elsewhere than in his own room,—he was bowling down the dusty road towards Utica. When the down-train from Suspension Bridge left Utica for Albany that afternoon, the detected and beaten gambler in reputations, lives and matrimonial ventures, was a passenger.
Affairs in the Crawford Family in New York—The Two Brothers—Marion Hobart the Enigma—Niagara by way of the Central Park.
It has been already said that John Crawford, wounded, and with the poor little Virginian orphan-girl in his company, reached New York on the evening of the Fourth of July—the same evening, it will be remembered, on which Tom Leslie and Josephine Harris left the city, the one for Niagara and the other for her matrimonial operations at West Falls. It is just possible that their not arriving earlier was a lucky event, as Joe Harris, had she once set eyes on the delicate and singular-looking Virginian girl, would have been almost certainly attracted towards her, and in that event her pet hobby for the time might have been neglected—her departure for the North might have been delayed for a day or two—and Mary Crawford might have been left to meet her fate in helplessness and ignorance.
And yet all this is an array of "mights" that have no real propriety, for events occur but once in the world, and they only occur in one mode. Human will is free, and human responsibility is never to be ignored; and still no human hand changes in any degree the inevitable. "Oh, if I had!" and "Oh, if I had not!" are very common exclamations, and those who have committed terrible errors or met with severe misfortunes will continue to make them until the whole course of human existence is run; and yet they are none the lessfollies. The events of yesterday were part of that general plan on which the world was first formed and on which it may have been conducted through all the hundreds of centuries which puzzle Agassiz and frighten the theologists. The downfall of an empire and the picking up of a basket of chips by a ragged child in a ship-yard, may each have equally formed part of it, and each been equally impossible to avert. Human will seemed to move each event, and human responsibility certainly attached to each; but the event itself, unknown until accomplished, moved in its appointed course and could no more be jarred from it than one of the planets from its orbit.
But all this by the way. Joe Harris had her own odd work to do, hundreds of miles away, and there was no hindrance in the way of her accomplishing it, from any new ties suddenly added to bind her to the city.
Of course that strange and unexpected arrival from the seat of war (for John Crawford had not even taken the precaution to telegraph from Fortress Monroe or Washington) created a sensation in the Crawford household. A mixed sensation—for while both the brothers were heartily glad to meet, each had a cause for sorrow on meeting the other. Richard was naturally sorry to see John, who had passed through so many fights without harm, wounded at last and disabled for an indefinite period; and John was correspondingly sorry to see Richard, whom he had left in such high health and spirits, a broken-down and house-ridden invalid. Not long before he had another cause for anxiety; for in the first half hour of private conference which ensued, on the very evening of their arrival, in response to a question from John, as to the health of the family at West Falls and the progress of his expected marriage with Mary, Richard revealed the unaccountable state of coldness which had sprung up, Mary's neglect to answer his late letters, and the fact that Egbert remained all the visiting-link between the city and country branches of the family.
"Egbert, eh?" asked John, whose service at looking out for skulking enemies when on picket-duty, might have made him more watchful and suspicious than he would have been under other circumstances. "Egbert, eh? Well, all I can say is that I don't like the link!"
Richard Crawford started, as he lay reclining upon the sofa. He was decidedly better than he had been a week before, and kept his little room less closely, though he was fearfully weak and the racking pain had not entirely left his system. "You never liked Egbert," he said.
"No," said John, "I never liked him, a bit more than Dean Swift liked Doctor Fell, though perhaps I could not tellwhy, any better than the Dean."
"No, I suppose not," said Richard, musingly. And here the conversation dropped, on that point. Whatever may have been Richard Crawford's suspicions of his cousin, forced on him by circumstances and by the young girl who had so strangely volunteered to disenchant him—he had no intention of communicating them even to his brother.
If there was a mixed feeling in the meeting of the brothers, there was one quite as complicated in that of Isabel Crawford and Marion Hobart—two total strangers so unexpectedly flung together. Bell Crawford was better fitted to receive and care for the orphan girl, than she would have been a month before, when the mysterious turning-point of her existence had not been reached; and there had been no time since she had become the mistress of her brother's mansion, when she would not have used every exertion to make one comfortable and happy who had been so strangely recommended to her sympathy. What she would before have lacked, was discipline and thoughtfulness. These she had attained to some degree, in a manner which she could not much more comprehend than those who surrounded her. But it was impossible that she could be able at once to supply the double want of sister and mother to one who had been so differently nurtured and educated as Marion Hobart; and the very desire to be even kinder than she would have cared to be to one who had more claims upon her, necessarily placed her in embarrassment which was very likely to produce the opposite effect. The young Virginian girl could not do otherwise than receive those attentions with gratitude, and yet her very desire not to be obtrusive and not to seem to demand more attention than was necessary, placed her in an equally anomalous position. The two girls consequently became much less intimately acquainted within the first few days, than they might have done if thrown together under different auspices.
Marion Hobart was, as her conversation and conduct on the night of her grandfather's death so plainly indicated, a most singular person, and one who might have been studied for years without being fully understood. She talked but little, and yet her silence seemed to be more the result of having nothing to say and no sympathy with the ordinary topics of conversation, than from dislike or inability to converse. When she did speak, the same childlike curtness and immobility were observable, that had been shown by the couch of her dying relative. She seemed to be repeating set words, that did not affect her heart or make any change in the expression of her face; even though she may have been deeply moved in reality. She received kindnesses with thankfulness, and yet that thankfulness was generally too set and formal in its phrase to create the impression of gushing warm from the heart, and to give that exquisite pleasure that a simple "Thank you!" will often convey when it seems to leap out unbidden.
Of course in the double disaster of the fire and the death, the poor girl found herself almost entirely unprovided with clothes. Isabel, with thoughtful care, the next day after her arrival, spoke of making arrangements for procuring the services of a dressmaker at once.
"Yes, thank you, I have no clothes. I shall want some," answered the young girl.
"Excuse my touching upon your grief," said Bell, "but I suppose that you will wish black? You will wear mourning?"
"No, if you please," was the reply. "My family never wear mourning. My grandmother never did. I have been told so. I do not remember my grandmother. I do not know why we never wear mourning. But if you please, I wish to do as grandmother did."
Here was the same peculiarity again, that had been shown at the bedside of the dying grandfather—the grandmother spoken of, but no mention of amother. Bell Crawford noticed the fact, as her brother had not done; but she could no more have asked that strange girl for an explanation, and risked the possible opening of some family wound, than she could have gone to the stake.
Nothing more was said upon the subject of the mourning; and Bell Crawford made the necessary arrangements for procuring her clothing that suggested no remembrance of her recent loss.
John Crawford had not forgotten the words of the old man, as to money in his granddaughter's name, lying in one of the city banks. He suggested the matter to her, aware that she would be anxious to rid herself from any feeling of absolute dependence,—and she answered him at once. She knew the name of the bank, and nearly the amount that should be standing to her credit, which was, as her grandfather had said, quite enough to make her comfortable for an ordinary life, ranging closely upon fifty thousand dollars. He procured her some checks, and she filled up one in a hand of crow-quill lightness, which looked indescribably like herself, but with a readiness which showed that she must have been before familiar with banking business. He presented the check, and it was honored without enquiry, this fact proving that her signature was known; and thus all anxiety on the pecuniary question was set at rest.
The young girl had said, in that dreadful hour by the death-couch, when speaking of her grandfather's fervent Union sentiments, "I do not know anything about politics, myself!" The truth that she had no knowledge or no feeling on the subject of the struggle between the two sections, was made manifest before she had been twenty-four hours an inmate of Richard Crawford's house. John continued to fight, mentally, though wounded and absent from the army. Richard was an ardent loyalist, as we have seen. The brothers naturally ran into warm denunciations of rebellion, and confident prophecies of the success of the Union cause, in spite of all past disasters. Bell and Marion were both present when they launched into the first of these; but before the conversation had lasted many minutes, the young Virginian girl rose and left the room with a word of apology. Both the brothers noticed the act and her manner. It did not indicate anger or dissatisfaction—simply a total want of interest.
The next morning something still more conclusive on this subject occurred. Richard Crawford had been much in the habit, during his illness, of being read to by his sister, Joe Harris, or any other friend who would take the trouble to amuse him in that manner. As he began to recover, he did not lose the relish for that description of lazy luxury. On the morning in question, John had gone out, Bell was busy, and Marion and her host happened to be alone in the room, when the morning papers were brought in.
"Miss Hobart, will you be so kind as to read the news to me?" suggested the invalid.
"If you wish, Mr. Crawford," she said at once. "I do not read very well aloud. But I will do my best." She picked up one of the papers and commenced reading. European news—news from Central and South America—railroad accidents—dramatic notices—everything except the news from Washington and the war, which happened to be all that he cared to hear at all! He looked at her in some surprise, but watched her closely and saw that she did not do this by chance, but that she carefully avoided the columns containing the news from the army. Directly Bell entered the room, andshebegan, at his request, to read the war news. Then Marion left the room, with an apology, as she had done the day before.
When John returned, his brother related the incident to him. In return John informed him of her words on the first night of their meeting, and the two agreed that she had an unaccountable antipathy to everything connected with the war, and that nothing more should be said to her on the subject.
"What if she should be a little secesh?" asked Richard, very much at random.
"She?" said John. "The granddaughter of that man? Not a bit of it! She is a little of an oddity, and a veryprettylittle oddity—don't you think so, Richard?" and so the conversation dropped.
The young girl had evidently had a fine musical education. She played very sweetly, though only upon request. Once she sang an English ballad, upon still more urgent request, but she seemed to do so with such unwillingness that she was not pressed again. Her voice, as shown on that occasion, was mournfully sweet and pure, and highly cultivated. She spoke French with singular facility and unusual correctness for an American. Bell and the brothers hoped that when the novelty of her position had worn away, she would more fully enter into their tastes and habits, and become less impracticable, if not happier.
A very neat little chamber on the second floor, which adjoined Bell's and had been standing empty except when occupied by chance visitors, was arranged for the young girl as soon as she entered the household, and she took possession of it with apparent satisfaction. And what a little "box" she made of it at once. The very next day she went into the street, without any consultation with Bell, and made purchases of not less than a hundred dollars worth of pictures and articles ofvertu, to ornament it. It was not difficult to see, at once, that though she might be indolently content without the surroundings of luxury, yet it was onlywiththem, and with them in somewhat aristocratic profusion, that she could be spiritedly happy. When she had added her purchases to the comforts and even luxuries already in her chamber, she ran into Bell's room with something approaching to excitement upon her face, and called her in to see the arrangement. Bell literally clapped her hands in delight, the young Virginian girl had shown such exquisite taste and made the little room look so much like a cross between the sleeping chamber of a very young princess, a museum, and an art gallery. She had imagination enough to fancy how the scene would appear, with the room so ornamented, the light turned low and filtering through the white porcelain shade of the burner, and that singularly beautiful little head lying in sleep on the white pillow, the calm, childlike features in repose, and the blonde hair a little dishevelled and insensibly fading away into the white upon which it rested.
There were some articles ofvertu, a very small statue of Washington among them, lying on the bureau and not yet arranged. Bell Crawford went up to the bureau and examined them, while Marion was arranging a different loop to the curtains of her bed, which would enable her to look out, before she rose, on a handsome little steel engraving of the white-plumed Henry the Fourth at the battle of Ivry, which she had just placed in position on the wall. Among the articles on the bureau lay a locket, in gold with a band of blue enamel crossing it diagonally. It was unclasped, and almost without a thought whether she was doing right or wrong, Bell (as woman, and evenman, will often do in such cases) took it up in her hand, threw open the case and looked at the face of the miniature within. This was simply the head from an admirablecarte de visite, artistic enough to have been made by Gurney or Fredericks, and showing that it must have been taken within a very few months,—cut out in a circle and placed within the glass. The face was that of a man who might have been thirty years of age, dark complexioned butstronglyhandsome, indicating size and sinew in figure, with the cheek-bones a little high, fiery dark eyes under heavy brows, heavy black hair worn long and curling, and a very heavy and yet graceful dark moustache. In the picture he had a broad white collar turned down under the velvet of his dark coat, giving him a peculiar look which may have been Southern or South-western and was certainly not of the North and the "great citie." Bell Crawford had only a moment to notice the picture, and though she supposed it to be the portrait of some near relative of the young girl, she could not help thinking how completely and exactly her opposite it was in every particular—black hair for blonde, strength for fragility, and the fire of those dark eyes for the calm, childlike innocence of Marion Hobart's.
Only a moment sufficed to make these observations: the next instant the young girl saw the picture in her hand and sprung down from the chair upon which she had been standing, with an agitation entirely different from anything which she had before exhibited. Her pale face was for the instant deeply flushed—Bell Crawford was sure of it—and there was something more passionate than usual in the sad eyes. Her lips trembled, and her hostess grew both pained and alarmed in the belief that she was about to utter harsh and angry words. But if the eyes of Bell had not been mistaken, and there had really been such an agitation raging in the breast of the young girl, certainly a most remarkable change had come over her before she had taken the two or three steps forward and reached the bureau where Miss Crawford was standing. She was herself again, completely; and her words, when they came, were such as might have been expected of her from previous observation.
"Please do not look at that!" she said, reaching out her hand to take it. Then she instantly added: "But youhaveseen it. It was my own fault. I should not have left it lying open in that manner. I did not wish you to see it, or any one."
"I am really sorry," said Bell. "I took it up without thinking, and I hope that you will not think that I wished to pry into any secret of yours." She was a little ashamed at her slight breach of etiquette, and a good deal pained; and her strange guest seemed to be at once aware of both feelings. Before Bell knew what she was about to do, Marion had thrust the locket into her bosom, then laid (notthrown) her arms around her neck, and kissed her on the cheek.
"Please do not be hurt or angry with me," she said, her voice very low and her whole manner childlike. "It was not wrong for you to look at the picture. It was wrong in me to pain you. It is the picture of a very dear friend—of my family." There was the least instant of hesitation before adding the last three words. "If you do not wish very much, I will not tell you his name, for—for reasons that you would not understand." Another slight instant of hesitation in the middle of the sentence.
"Oh, by no means—do not tell me the name. You would pain me if you did so," answered Bell. "Now let us forget all about it, and only think of the wilderness of pretty things that you have been buying, to make this room the very neatest in the house."
"Do you think so?" said Marion. "I am very glad if you like them. I am very glad when I please any one, and very unhappy when I do not. I do not quite know how to arrange them all. Will you help me?" and in a moment more the episode of the picture seemed to be quite forgotten in the bestowal of the remainder of Marion's "art-treasures."
Saturday afternoon saw a marked event in the history of the Crawford family, in the crossing by Richard of the threshold of the outer door, for the first time in so many weeks. He was weak, faint and feeble, but the racking pains of his disease seemed hourly to leave him more completely. He had no more thought of leaving the house, however, than of flying, until the tempter appeared in the shape of his brother. John had been reading over the morning paper, a little late; and after the news had been thoroughly exhausted, he had happened upon the programme of the music at the Central Park.
"Hallo!" he said. "Here, Dick! Dodworth's Band at the Central Park this afternoon. I have heard plenty of what theycalledmusic, all the while that I have been gone; but not Dodworth. Let's go up and hear it! Besides, I want to see how much more they have wasted on the Park."
"I!" answered Richard Crawford, astounded. "You are not very kind, brother John, to speak ofmygoing out, when you know that I have not left the house for months."
"No," said John, "indeed I did not think of that! But now that I do think of it, all the more reason why you should go."
"Why, I could not sit up to ride a block!" said Richard.
"Don't believe a word of it!" said John, gayly. "You never know what you can do, until you try. You are better—yousaythat you are better—and the more you stay within the house, the more you may. In my opinion, to get well rapidly, you should be out of the house more than half the time, regaining the strength you have lost."
Just then there was a ring at the bell, and Dr. Thompson, the old family physician who had attended both the brothers since boyhood, came in to look at Richard and after the dressing of John's wounded arm. John had made a personal call upon him that morning, and the genial, gray-haired, but young-hearted old doctor had been very glad to see him returned, with no worse wound than that in his arm.
"See here, Doctor," said John, the moment he entered, "I have been giving Richard good advice, and I wish you to bear me out in it."
"Advising me to kill myself, he means!" said Richard.
"Humph! let's hear what it is all about, and see how much you are both wrong!" answered the doctor, who had made that advance in philosophy which recognizes that neither side in an argument is at all likely to represent the whole truth.
"I have been telling him that he should go out, and bantering him to ride with me to the Central Park," said John.
"And I have been telling him that I had not strength enough to ride a single block, much less to the Central Park," said Richard.
"Let me see," said the doctor, taking the invalid's hand in his, examining his pulse, and subjecting him to a general scrutiny. "The proposal is a bold one, but I fancy that it is sensible, after all. Yes, when youcango out, you can go out to advantage, and I believe that time has come. You had probably better accept your brother's proposal."
The result of all which was, that the carriage was ordered between three and four o'clock, and that in spite of the insufferable heat of the day the two invalids (so very differently disabled) were driven to the Central Park, were driven around it, heard Dodworth's Band perform half a dozen operatic selections as only that cornet-band can perform them, saw the loungers on the grass, the promenaders on the walks, the boats on the pond which is called a lake, and all the picturesque features of that Saturday-afternoon gathering which within the past two years has become a pleasant feature of summer in the metropolis.
Richard Crawford did not experience the fatigue he had expected. On the contrary he felt new life and vigor flowing in with every breath of the yet early summer; and when they drove back to the house an hour before sunset, he had the sensations of a school-boy whose play-hour is over and who is just going back to school and his books. He was not only better, but he was nearly well. He felt and realized the fact for the first time. The wide, glorious, open world, with its flowers, its waters, its sunshine, and its smiling human faces worth them all, had once more called the man who had so lately believed himself shut away from life and enjoyment forever; and he was answering the call.
Not that Richard Crawford was happy, even while the music was sounding over the lake and nature was wooing him with her midsummer smile. He had loved—he yet loved—truly and devotedly; and without his realizing what evil influence could have fallen like a blight upon all his hopes, those hopes were destroyed. He was not broken-hearted, as he had believed himself to be while laboring under more serious bodily illness: he was onlysad; but that sadness, he believed, would remain during life. Ah, well!—if life and health were still to be his, he must nerve himself to meet whatever of sorrow or disappointment might come, and bear what he could not conquer. So thought he as they rode homeward, when John for a time ceased that constant stream of chat for which a wounded arm did not in the least disable him. He little knew how a lumbering stage was at the same hour setting down a dusty little woman in a gray travelling-dress, at a country village hundreds of miles away, whose acts and words were to produce so marked an effect on his own destiny.
These details of very ordinary events in the Crawford family, which followed the re-union of the two brothers, may seem very uninteresting and common-place; and yet they are necessary for the possible understanding of what so soon followed. For the letting in of sunshine on a dark place may not only warm and illumine that place for a time but make the continuance of sunshine a necessity. And going out into the sunshine may have the same effect. The school-boy, once let out for his "play-spell," may have great objection to spending so many hours, thereafter, over his books in the dusky school-room; and Nature, after a time, may develop the fact that he needed the reviving and strengthening education of the outer world, much more imperatively than the additional education of the brain which he would have acquired within the sound of the teacher's voice. Nature's hygiene is very little understood, but it is at the same time very simple and very powerful. Thesuncontains the great mystery of health and hardihood, and the man who carefully shuts himself away from its rays is arranging for the same kind of existence which the unfortunate plant is forced to experience, growing under the shelter of a rotten log, succulent, tender and perishable. The fire-worship of the Ghebers was founded upon common-sense; and no doubt the first kneeling adoration of the sun-worshippers both of Persia and Peru, was paid by some poor fellow who had been sick, attenuated and miserable, who had finally crawled out into the sunshine after long confinement, and who believed that there must be some supernatural influence in the life radiating from the great orb and bounding through every half-chilled vein. The inventor of parasols and sun-shades should have been executed immediately on the announcement of his invention, for he has been the means of shutting away the faces of more than half the world, and especially the fairer portion, from their best inanimate friend, the sun, of making sallow complexions and lack-lustre eyes, and of causing a demand for cosmetics that would never have been known had the sun-god been allowed to steal kisses from the cheek of beauty and leave there the ruddy glow of health as a compensation for the privilege.
To induce a belief on the part of Richard Crawford that he was well enough and strong enough to leave the house to which he had been so long confined, had been found a little difficult. The ice once broken, the next adventure into the summer sunshine would need far less inducement. So it proved. And so it happened that within four days from the time when he believed that he was committing suicide by adventuring to the Central Park, he permitted himself to be persuaded, under the sanction of the doctor, into taking a step which was certain to test his powers of endurance pretty thoroughly—nothing less thangoing to Niagara Falls.
Of course this movement originated with John Crawford the Zouave, whose original restlessness had not been a whit quieted by the ever-moving adventure of a year in the army. The city was growing unendurably hot, he said, so that he every day expected to find the paving-stones splitting to pieces with the heat, and the fish boiling in the North River. It was ten degrees worse, he averred, than he had experienced in Virginia either season; and such a thing as a hot day had never been known at Niagara, even by the oldest inhabitant. (Perhaps the young man altered his opinion on that point, visiting it especially during the early days of July, 1862!) Dick would grow worse again—he knew he would—and lose the little strength he had gained, sweltering in such an unventilated pig-stye as the city. Come!—there were to be no more words about it!—they should all go to Niagara!
Richard Crawford was at first alarmed—then puzzled—then a little delighted. Bell, who did not often fall into the peculiarly girlish weakness of clapping her hands, did so on this occasion. She had missed Niagara for the previous two years; and this season, owing to the serious illness of her brother, she had expected to be debarred the privilege of exhibiting her unimpeachable summer wardrobe (which she had notquiteforgotten) at any of the watering-places. Richard's rapid improvement and this restless suggestion of John, seemed like a god-send.Shevoted for Niagara, if Richard felt that he could endure the fatigue of the journey. His citadel surrounded on two sides in that manner, and the genial old doctor faithless, there was little else left than a surrender, and Richard Crawford surrendered.
Stop!—there was something of which neither had thought for a moment! They had a guest, whose wishes should be consulted the more religiously because she would make no parade of them. Would Marion Hobart, who mourned in heart if not in the sombre hue of her garments, for her last relative so lately dead—wouldshebe pleased to go into the gay world of a fashionable watering-place? Notcontent, butpleased? If she would not, the project must be abandoned, whatever the temptations to go forward. Bell, who had the moment before been about commencing her action as a committee of one to overhaul Richard's laid-away wardbrobe and discover what additions would be necessary, had the sphere of her operations suddenly changed by being sent up-stairs to sound the inclinations of the young Virginian girl on the subject.
She found Marion Hobart halfen deshabille, lying upon the bed in her own little chamber, busily reading and comparing the letter-press with the coats-of-arms, in a copy of the English Peerage which she had found in Dick's little library, and to which she had exhibited a scandalously aristocratic taste by paying more attention than to all the other books in the house.
"Have you ever been at Niagara, Marion?" asked Bell Crawford, leaning over her with a sisterly caress.
"No," answered the young girl, looking away from her book, but without any indication of rising or any sign of that anxious agitation which inevitably brightens the faces of most American girls who have not seen the world's-wonder, when that magic word is uttered in their presence. "Father and some friends were at Saratoga once, when I was a very little girl. But father was drowned at sea. Grandfather never came North."
"Would you like to see Niagara?" was Bell's second question.
"I do not know," answered the young Virginian girl, with strange coolness and candor. "I think I should like to see it as well as anything else. I have not seen many waterfalls. I once saw the Falls of the Black Fork of Cheat; and I saw the Natural Bridge. They are both in Virginia. I do not know whether I should like Niagara or not."
"Would you like to go there. Suppose brother and myself were going to Niagara and should ask you to go with us—would you be pleased to go?"
"I would as lief go as stay here or go anywhere else," said the singular girl.
"I thought you might possibly have objections to going, because there is so much company at Niagara, and because you have so lately lost your grandfather—that is why I asked," explained Bell.
"I do not mind the company. They are nothing to me. I do not mourn for my poor grandfatheraloud. But you are very kind to think of me," answered the little enigma. And with that very unenthusiastic endorsement of the Niagara project, Bell Crawford was compelled to descend the stairs and make report of the event of her embassy. But the result was held to be rather satisfactory than otherwise, and the hastily-devised arrangements for Niagara went forward.
To pass rapidly over that movement, the manner of which does not in any degree affect the progress of this narration, let it be said that on Wednesday, the 9th of July, the two brothers, the sister and their guest, with the proper array of the "great North River travelling-trunks" and other baggage, took the steamer Daniel Drew for a sail by daylight up the Hudson, as the mode of making half the journey least fatiguing to the recovering invalid. That the three New Yorkers, to whom the scenery of that noble river was thoroughly familiar, clapped hands and shouted their joy once more, nearly all day, at the flashing blue of the river, the rafts of steamboats, sloops and tows that continually came sweeping down it, the rugged frowning of the Palisades, the narrow-passes and rugged peaks of the Highlands, and the long, blue, uneven line of the Cattskills, with the white glimmering of the Mountain House,—while the young Virginian girl, introduced to that scenery for the first time in her life, seemed to maintain her calmness and comparative insensibility. That they rested for the night at Albany, out of respect to the comfort of the invalid—John Crawford submitting under protest, and declaring Albany, after Washington, the most unendurable "one-horse town" in the universe. That they took the cars of the Central Road in the morning, Richard being so pillowed among cloaks and blankets and shawls, that he had quite the comfort of lying in an ordinary bed; and that on Thursday night, the Tenth of July, when the full moon had risen so high in heaven as to make the coming midnight a very mockery of day, they rolled into the village of Niagara Falls, and found a resting-place at the still wide-awake and ever-lively Cataract.
Tom Leslie at Niagara—A Dash at Scenery There—A Rencontre—Dexter Ralston Once More—union Man or Rebel?—Tom Leslie Discounted.
It will be remembered that Tom Leslie, leaving Josephine Harris with a sigh of regret at Utica (those jolly fellows do sigh sometimes, after all!) went on to Niagara on the afternoon of the Fifth of July. Walter Lane Harding had promised to join him at the Cataract, early in the following week, if he could so arrange his business as to leave the city on Sunday or Monday; but just now Leslie was alone—worse alone than he ever remembered to have been at any former period of his life. Lost one night in a pass of the Apennines, with some doubts whether he should ever be able to find his way to supper and civilization, he had been lonely enough for comfort; and pacing his solitary night round as a sentinel under the frowning guns of Sebastopol, he had felt that another friendly human face would be pleasant to see and a friendly human voice something not be despised; but neither of those situations could for a moment compare with the loneliness of that summer afternoon and evening, while he was bowling along through the Genesee Valley.
The absence of the whole world is a grief, when we do not wish to be alone, but that is a grief in thegeneral. The coming of any one person will break the spell and fill the void. But the absence of theone, immediately after earth and air have seemed to be full of the sacred presence, is grief in theparticular. Only one can fill that void, and the coming of that one is for the time impossible. The company of thousands of others is then an aggravation and an insult, making the loneliness worse by contrast with the apparent companionship of all others.
Tom Leslie (this fact may have been sufficiently indicated before)—Tom Leslie was deeply, irrevocably, hopelessly in love, and he had not even taken the ordinary pains to deceive himself on the subject. He had found his destiny and submitted to it, after a long period of immunity. He had every reason to know that his regard was returned; and he had no reason to doubt, though not an explicit word had been spoken to warrant the belief—that when he asked the corresponding question of Josephine Harris, as he certainly meant to do at a very early day, her answer would be a frank and satisfactory—yes! So much for content and the future. But Tom, like many another child, had no propensity for waiting, and liked his sugar-plumsnowas well as to-morrow. He would have liked to give up business, ignore propriety, and have the company of the odd combination of female graces and weaknesses who had won him, all the while for the present, and afterwards by way of variety. So he felt at that moment, at least; and it was with more than one, or two, or a dozen yawns and "Heighos!" and several short naps that happened along on his travel like cities of refuge, that he managed to wear through the last hours of his journey.
But Tom Leslie, the cosmopolitan and journalist, would have been unworthy the experience through which he had passed, had he lacked the power to endure what he disliked. He could never have digested horse-beef among the Kalmucks, or stomached the rancid sour-krout of Old Haarlem, without this indispensable qualification. So, though on the night of his arrival at the Cataract he allowed the thunder of the fall to call him in vain to a view by the broken moonlight, and though he tumbled into bed within ten minutes after his late and light supper and went sullenly to sleep as if there had not been a woman in the world worth thinking of,—yet he was in quite another mood the next morning.
Niagara was unusually full for so early a period in the season, the leading houses being already crowded, though principally by transient visitors. The Fourth of July, then just passed, had been kept with unusual vigor and display, in the way of powder, fireworks and general patriotism at the International, the Cataract and all the other more popular houses—partially, no doubt, because the evil eyes from across the river began to be noticeable, and because the red-cross flag had been more conspicuously displayed at the Clifton House and on the flag-staff at the Museum at Table Rock, than in ordinary seasons.
But whatever changes might have occurred in personal and national feeling, Tom Leslie felt, as he strolled across the bridge and over Goat Island, on the morning after his arrival, that there had been no change which the human eye could perceive, in the great cataract or its surroundings, since he had looked upon it for the last time before his departure for Europe, when that narrow river supplied the northern boundary of what seemed to be a united and happy nation. Humanity is changing, inconsistent and unreliable: Nature is calm, grand, and verges on the eternal. He saw that the great American Rapid still came thundering down, "like a herd of white buffaloes with wild eyes and sea-green manes," as a graphic writer has described it; that the grand old trees with their gloomy immensity of shade and the thousands of unknown and long-forgotten names carved upon their bark, still stood as sentinels along the beaten pathways over the Island; that the thunder of the Fall still kept the whole solid mass of the Island in one creeping and trembling shudder, as if a slight earthquake was just passing, with a dull, heavy boom like that of a continuous distant cannonade, coming up in the pauses of the wind.
He saw, too, as he paid his inevitable quarter at the toll-house on the causeway, that the course of "honest industry" (i.e., that blatant humbug which eternally taxes the pockets for superfluities) had not been checked; for the usual amount of birchen-canoes, bead-caps and feather-fans with sprawled birds in the centre, were on sale under peculiarly aboriginal auspices. And that the whole race of Jehus had not relieved society by going to be killed-off in the war, he became painfully aware by the number of villainous-looking wretches armed with dilapidated whips, who beset him on the bridge and offered to convey him anywhere for something less than the mere pleasure of his company. Tom Leslie had been somewhat too familiar in other lands as well as his own, with such human vermin as those with the whips, and such fungi temptations to extravagance as those that hung from the tawny hands and beckoned from shelves and glass cases,—to pay them much attention or receive much annoyance from them; and so he passed on across the Island, to look once more upon the great English Fall and the Canada shore beyond.
Emerging from the woods upon the high bank overlooking the English rapids, the whole unequalled scene burst once more on his view, as he had patriotically tried to remember it when looking at Terni and Schaffhausen. He had carried the sight and almost the roar with him, in memory, ready to dwarf with them all that the European world could present; and so sacred seemed the thought of that wonder of nature which could form such a talisman, that the broad hat was insensibly lifted from his brow as he caught the first new glimpse, and he stood before the Fall fairly uncovered as he might have done on the crest of the Judean hills, overlooking the first-seen Jerusalem.
The dark and rugged Canadian shore was full in view on the other side of the river, with the Clifton House and the Museum glimmering brightly in the morning sunlight, and the red-cross flag waving sluggishly from both as if in defiance of the great nation that lay so near and yet could not possess the little patch of land over which it floated. The Horse-Shoe Tower stood as of old, still unconquered by the fierce rapids striving to undermine it; and around base and balcony swarmed visitors who seemed like pigmies not so much on account of the distance as because they were dwarfed and belittled in the presence of the immense and the immeasurable. All these things lay broadly in sight of the journalist on that glorious Sunday morning, and perhaps at another time he might have seen and attempted to describe them; but notthen. He for the moment failed to see what was before him, and he saw something else not revealed to every eye.
Tom Leslie was either the master or the slave of a powerful imagination. Some who knew him said the one, and some the other. But all agreed as to the possession of the faculty; and it was not always that his soberest and most conscientious relations (in type) were received without a shade of suspicion on that account. It may have been that the loneliness of the night before had not quite worn away, and that it left him sadder and more impressible than usual; and it may have been that the one element before wanting in his nature, that of earnest and undivided human love, had changed him when it was supplied. At all events, there was a something in that wondrous scene, that came to him that morning as he had never before known it—something that came to him from dream-land, and made the sight of his eyes only the exercise of a secondary faculty. He saw, with this peculiar sight, all the features of the scene that we have noted, and another and one strikingly unusual, in a shipwreck in the rapids.
Two days before, on the Fourth, and in honor of the day, a knot of gay fellows had procured an old schooner, hoisted white streamers at the tops of her stripped masts, and sent her down the river into the rapids from Chippewa Creek, expecting to enjoy the rare pleasure of seeing her leap over the Falls and emerge in little fragments and splinters of timber in the river below. Thousands had gathered on the Canadian shore, and on Goat Island, to witness a prank never matched in audacity since the British "guerrillas" from the other side, in the time of the Canadian rebellion, seized the steamer "Caroline" at Schlosser, set her on fire, and sent her down the Falls—an act which almost lit the torch of war so effectually between the two countries, that all the waters which overwhelmed the "Caroline" would not have been enough to quench it.
But with reference to the old schooner, sent down from Chippewa Creek on the Fourth of July. She had only shown that human calculations are not infallible, even when they presage disaster. The thousands assembled to witness the destruction, had been doomed to disappointment. The current had swept the boat well over on the Canadian side, and there some unknown eddy had seized and driven her between two sunken rocks, where she lay as safe from any danger of the Falls as if she had been ten miles below them, instead of half a mile above. She lay, bow up the river, inclined lengthwise, as if she had been caught when shooting down the Lachine Rapids, and the white streamers on her bare masts fluttering out to the winds as signals of distress that would have been—ah! so hopeless and useless with human life on board and in peril.
At the first moment of beholding the old wreck, Tom Leslie found her a prominent feature in the spectacle, and his reflections took a shape which may have been taken by those of many sojourners at the Falls, who saw her during the season:
"There she lies to-day, and there she may lie for many a long month, gradually weakening and breaking apart from the action of the rapids surging around her, until some night when the wind comes fiercely down the river, and heavy storms have increased the volume of water as well as loosened the last bolt that yet holds her securely together,—then, when there is none to witness the death-throe of wood and iron, she will heave and labor and at last break apart. The two fragments will go sweeping down, whirled over like playthings—touching the points of the rocks and giving out groans and shrieks like those which precede dissolution; then for one moment there will be a dark mass poised on the edge of the Fall, and the next there will be one more deafening crash added even to the thunder of the waters. A few broken splinters will go sweeping away down the dark river, and all will be over."
But what was it that Tom Leslie saw, more than is revealed to the natural eyes, looking on that scene when he had contemplated it for a few moments? This and only this—but quite enough to make the memory of that moment immortal. He saw itapplied to the human heart and human life. The water pouring over the Horse-shoe Fall ceased for the moment to be the falling water of this real world, and became some weird stream falling thunderously and in white glory through the land of dreams. The dark misty gulf into which it poured below was not the physical abyss over which the natural man must stand with a shudder, but the unfathomed pit of woe and sorrow into which, in nightmare dreams, man has been ever falling yet never destroyed, since the first visions of early childhood. The tower ceased to be a palpable mass of wood and stone, and became human hope and energy, with the clear blue sky of God's providence above, beaten by storms and undermined by fierce currents every moment threatening it with destruction, but standing yet through all. And the old wrecked schooner above had ceased to be a mere material wreck of plank and timber and iron—it was one of those unreal but sadder wrecks of a human life and a human soul, stranded for the moment on the rock of some great calamity, and eventually to be swept away and engulfed by the inevitable.
There had been a slight veil of haze shrouding the sun for the previous half hour; but as Tom Leslie partially awakened from his dream and listlessly descended the stairs cut in the bank, towards the bridge leading to the Tower, the mist rolled away, the sun broke forth in the glory of high-noon, and out of the darkness below sprang an arch of light that almost made the journalist, who was too old and too world-hardened for such exhibitions, clap his hands and cry: "The rainbow! the rainbow!" Of old he had seen the rainbow spanning the eastern heaven when looking out at early evening from the home of his childhood, and when the thunder-storms of summer were dying away over the Atlantic; but here it was, a thing of arms' reach, and at his feet! At one moment it merely glimmered up through the mist from the bed of the river, a little broken space of the arch, and the colors dim and indistinct; anon the sky grew brighter and the column of mist rose higher; and now it formed more than the half circle, the top a little above the level of the Fall,—and the blue, and gold, and green, and orange, and purple, painted so brightly on the retina of the eye that they seemed to be a part of the very air the observer was inhaling. How near he stood, impressible Tom, at that moment, to the eternal mystery!—how near to the workshop in which seem to be flashed out from eternal forges the beauties of the sunshine and the storm! Climbing down from the bridge to the end of the rock, leaning tremblingly over and looking down into the misty gulf below with that Jacob's Ladder of faith set therein—it is not strange that the journalist for one moment wished for a line and plummet to drop into that reservoir of golden glory and bring up some memento of what seemed so near to the celestial;—just as one wishes, sometimes when the midnight heaven is darkest and the stars are burning most purely there, to be able to stretch forth a hand among the stellar lights and bring it back bathed with that radiance which is so fearfully beautiful.
Leslie had no intention of ascending the tower that day—other days would be his at Niagara, and something must be saved for each. Besides, he had breakfasted lightly and an unromantic call for lunch was being made on faculties quite as delicate as his mental perceptions. He had accordingly just turned again and ascended the stairs to the bank in front of the Pavilion, when the fates (ever kind to him in this regard, as to every other true lover of nature) vouchsafed him one moment's glimpse of a spectacle often wished for and seen but seldom. Turning for one last glimpse as he walked away, at that instant his eye was resting on the sharpest point of the curve of the Horse-shoe Fall, where the volume of water is evidently deepest, and where from that depth it makes one broad unbroken sweep of amber green as it plunges over, without one fleck of foam to mar it. He was just scanning for an instant that calm depth, and saying thattherewas after all the majesty of Niagara—there, where the great green flood approaches the awful precipice, impelled by a resistless force from above, but unruffled and untroubled by the approaching fate—bends gracefully and proudly at the verge, as some dusky Antoinette might do her proud neck when the axe of the executioner was impending—then, still without a ripple or a tremor takes the last long plunge as Curtius may have done when the gulf was open in the Forum and he rode down the Aventine and spurred out into thin air to fulfil the omens of the augurs and save the perilled life of Rome,—he was just feeling and saying this, when a dark speck appeared at the very edge of the green. It was a log, perhaps fifteen or twenty feet in length, over the Fall!—a mere log, nothing in another place, but everything in the place it for that moment occupied. For one instant he saw it hang trembling on the verge, then for another its dark outlines were thrown into clear relief against the bright green water with the sunshine glimmering through; and then down, down it was hurled, rushing like an arrow's flight into the feathery foam of the broken water below, and at last (so far as human eye could ever know) into the blinding mist at the bottom of the cataract. What a reed upon the brook had been that log, that might have required the strength of a dozen men to lift it from the ground!—what is the might with which the elements make playthings of what seem to mortal strength dense and immoveable—even as the great Power that is equally above nature and above man, "holdeth the mountains in the hollow of his hand, and taketh up the isles as a very little thing!"
"By George!" said Leslie. "What a lucky dog I am! I have known a thousand people who wished for just such a view, and I have had it all alone, after all!" He was not in the habit of holding conversations aloud with himself; but he had been so impressed as to speak aloud involuntarily, in this instance.
"No, not quite alone, if you please, Mr. Leslie!" said a deep voice behind him, and at the same instant a hand was laid upon his shoulder. He turned, and met the powerful form and singular face of Dexter Ralston, the Virginian.
It was not unnatural that Leslie should be surprised; and it would be idle to say that he was not even startled at this most unexpected meeting, remembering what he did of the last three occasions on which he had met this man—in each instance, as he had reason to suppose, his observation being unknown to the other. He might have been pardoned if he even shuddered, remembering the connection which he believed Ralston to bear towards the "red woman"; and he was too ardent a Union man, as we have seen, not instantly to remember the ambiguous circumstances under which he had twice seen him, and the chase after him and his companions which had cost him so long a ride only a few days before. It may be said, in this place, that he had heard nothing from Superintendent Kennedy, before leaving the city, of the watch placed upon the house and its result,—and that after the second adventure of the house on Prince Street, and the opening of the new channel into which his thoughts and feelings had been led by the meeting with Joe Harris, he had not thought proper to follow up the mystery, and consequently had no knowledge that any of the parties had left New York.
All those thoughts, and the counter one that the man before him had really done him no harm but had once rendered him an important service—passed through the mind of Leslie so quickly that the other must have been a close observer to know that they were passing at all. As a result, by the time that they became fairly confronted and Dexter Ralston held out his hand, that of Tom Leslie met him with all apparent frankness.
"Mr. Ralston," he said, owning a part of the truth, "really you surprised me."
"So I suppose," said the other; "and yet I have been standing here, leaning against one of the posts of the Pavilion, for several minutes; and I am certainly not so small of stature as to be easily overlooked."
"No," laughed Leslie. And then he added. "But yonder is something larger. The Falls dwarf everything, and I supposehideeverything."
"Very probably," said Ralston. "Were you walking back towards the bridge? Shall I walk with you? That is—I mean to ask—are you alone?"
"Oh yes, all alone!" said Leslie. "I am at the Cataract. And you—are you staying here?"
"Ihavebeen staying at the Clifton," answered the other, as they strolled back across the Island. "But just now I am at the Monteagle. It is long since we met," he added. "You have been in Europe, have you not? I think you told me you were going, when I saw you last."
"Yes," said Leslie, "I have been in Europe again, and only came back last spring." But he added a mental enquiry that was by no means shaped into words: "DidI say to him that I was going to Europe? or does he keep watch of me and know my every movement, through the mysterious agency of the woman of the Rue la Reynie Ogniard?"
"You are a newspaper man still?" asked Ralston, after a momentary silence, as they walked on.
"Yes," said Leslie, "I am still at that drudgery, in my own way, and shall probably never be freed from it. But you see that I do not stick so closely to the desk as to injure my health very much! And you—excuse my asking the question," and he tried, walking at his side though he was, to mark closely whether the question produced any effect on the face of the other—"but the truth is, Ralston, that I scarcely expected to meet you in the North at the present moment. I thought you so incarnate a Southerner, as well as a slaveholder, that you would have been likely to join in the rebellion!"
"No, did you?" asked Ralston; and if his face changed, certainly Leslie, close observer as he thought himself, could not detect the difference. "Well, I must say that you put the matter plainly. Youshouldhave thought better of an old friend, and remembered that if I was aVirginianI was also and still more anAmerican."
How openly and with what apparent honesty the man spoke! And how impossible it seemed that hecouldbe uttering other words than those of entire truth? But Tom Leslie remembered the night under the arches of the Capitol, the stars-and-bars and the mystic circlet of the house on Prince Street, and the mysterious words that procured admission to the house up-town; and he had seen and heard enough of double faces not to betoosure of his ground on any man's word.
"Well, I am glad to know it," he said, in reply to Ralston's disclaimer. "We have not too many true Union men, who haveforgotten the particular part of the Union in which they were born, for the sake of the country and the whole country. I am glad to know that you are one of them." He laid peculiar stress on the more important words of the last sentence, and bent his eyes still more searchingly on the countenance of the singular man before him.
"How long do you remain?" asked Ralston, as they neared the end of the bridge.
"A few days only," answered Leslie—"perhaps a week or two. I came up to catch the moon on the Falls."
"You should have come in time, then, and seen the eclipse," said the Virginian.
"Aha!" said Tom Leslie to himself. "One point of information gained, if no more! He is a little in thehabitof being at Niagara, for he was here at the full moon in June and he has since been absent! One touch inside your armor, old fellow, if no more! You were here to see the eclipse, then?" he asked aloud of Ralston. "I tried to come myself, but could not manage it. What was it like, if you saw it over the Falls?"
"I was staying at the Clifton House, then," said Ralston, "and I came down to Table Rock, alone, just after midnight, and sat there from the beginning to the end of the obscuration. You should have seen"—and here his undeniable though repressed poetical temperament began to show itself in his cheek and eye—"you should have seen the dull, dismal shadow gradually creeping over the rapids as the disk grew smaller, every flashing wave seeming to be touched with a ghastly reflection that said: 'Daylight and moonlight are both gone forever—the last darkness is creeping on—the end of all things is at hand.' The spray below the cataract seemed dun and lead-colored, as if it might have been the sulphurous smoke rolling up from a battle-field. All was splendidly dismal, let me tell you!—such a spectacle as few men see and no man who sees ever forgets!"
"And what was the appearance of the moon when fully obscured?" asked Leslie, almost breathless with interest at the strangely graphic words of the Virginian, and no longer wondering, after those words, that there should have been a connection between the mysterious "red woman" and one who seemed so nearly of her mental kin.
"It wasnomoon," answered Ralston, and his dark eyes seemed to lose all their fierceness and grow inexpressibly sad and solemn as he spoke. "It wasnomoon! It was a mere unreal shadow and mockery—the dead ghost of a moon that had been, perished long ago, and embodying all the griefs and all the sorrows that had weighed down the heart of man since the Creation. The waters of Niagara lay beneath it, as if under a pall that had settled over a dead world!"
"I should have liked to see it—I would have travelled a thousand miles to see it, had I thought so far!" said Leslie, with the earnestness of a lover of Nature under all her aspects.
"Would you?" said Ralston. "Well, it was something to seeonce: I should scarcely like to trust the brain of the man who saw it much oftener. I must leave you, but I hope I shall meet you again. Here boy!" beckoning to one of the lounging hack-drivers at the hotel-end of the bridge, "Drive me to the Monteagle. Good-bye!" and away he whirled, leaving Leslie to look after him until out of sight, and to say to himself as he walked up the esplanade over the rapids:
"I thought thatIwas an oddity and a contradiction, but that fellow candiscountme! I don't know half as much about him now, as I did the first moment I saw him!"
Society and Shoulder-Straps at the Falls—Tom Leslie Annexing Canada—Meeting of the New Yorkers—Another Rencontre, a Mysterious Disappearance and a General Wonder.
Tom Leslie was not left to loneliness and his own resources very long at the Cataract, for Walter Lane Harding reached Niagara at noon on Monday, having left New York on Sunday evening. Though even had Leslie been left to his "own resources," these resources were somewhat more numerous than usual, and he was never much in the habit of being so bored by Time as to be obliged to lay plots against its life. In the first place—no, that should be thesecondplace—he had his duties as a newspaper-correspondent at a leading and fashionable resort, which entailed a letter every day, but which did not entail, let us say, the chronicling of the details of hops and evening assemblies, after a manner somewhat scandalously prevalent, with descriptions of the "charming dress worn by Miss A——," the "elegance and grace of the accomplished Miss B——," and all the other disgusting and indecent Jenkinsism of the initials, together with fulsome laudations of the table and even the laundry of the hotel, leading to the impression that the correspondent is upon free board and even freewashing! Our cosmopolitan had outlived that phase of callow journalism, long before; and the managing-editor would have been a bold one who should now have proposed to him to re-enter that most contemptible of all literary harness. What he was to write and what hedidwrite, catching up the prevailing topics of conversation and tones of feeling, with sensational descriptions of scenery and incident interspersed like under-tones to joyous music,—men who have hearts, brains and breeding will at once recognize, and others will never know under any detail of information.
What Tom Leslie found it necessary to do in thefirstplace, was to write a letter per day, and occasionally two, to a certain lady temporarily located at West Falls, Oneida County, that lady having very kindly given him her address with permission to use it, and having promised to answer these epistles with brief and maidenly little notes of her own. When it is said that as early as Monday he received one of those notes, and that for an hour thereafter he had very indefinite ideas as to which end of the human figure was intended for the purposes of locomotion, it will be understood that both parties to the compact were carrying out their agreement with praiseworthy faithfulness.
But even without the duties devolved upon him by love or newspapers, Tom Leslie, a trained observer of society around him, would have found plenty of occupation on the favorite promenades and in the parlors and halls of the International and Cataract. Such a complete and total revolution in society was beginning to show itself, in the gradual dropping away of the old "good families" who years before had made Niagara, Saratoga and Newport their Meccas at midsummer; such bloated pretenders, with unlicked cubs of families, the "shoddy aristocracy" who had first aided to make the war, and then make dishonest fortunes from it, had come up to take their places, with everything about them, sire and son, mother and daughter, new, arrogant and unpleasant; and there was such a marked absence of that Southern element which in other days had supplied money to obsequious waiters and green girls to needy fortune-hunters,—that there seemed to have been a complete turn of the kaleidoscope, and it almost puzzled an old habitue to know whether he had not exchanged lands as well as years.
And something else, of no secondary importance, presented its claims to notice. This was the "blue and buttons"—the "absenteeism" to which notice has been before so often called during the progress of this narration. The result of the Seven Days' Battles was just coming to the sojourners at Niagara, through the Buffalo and New York papers; and while the Fourth of July address of McClellan to his soldiers, which came among the other items of news from the army, and which was then and there being read and commented upon, showed that the last chance of victory was not yet lost, it showed at the same time how fearfully the ranks of our armies had been thinned and what a necessity there was that every man who had pretended to be a soldier, and who had from any cause been so far absent from the field, should return at once and aid to sustain the perilled cause. And yet through every corridor of the leading houses at Niagara, in every parlor, on every walk and on every piazza, sat, stood, walked, read, smoked or flirted, the blue-clothed, buttoned, shoulder-strapped, jaunty-capped, natty-whiskered and killingly-moustached officers of the Union army, who had sworn to serve the country and aid to defend the republic,—but who paid no more attention to the pleading call of the generals in the field or the authoritative voice of the President, than they would have done to a blind piper playing in the street! It was easier to dawdle than to fight or even do duty in camp: it was more pleasant to bask in the admiring smiles of silly girls who should have turned their eyes into basilisks to blast the indolent and miserable cowards—than to dare the July sun on the banks of the James, or run the risk of a flash from the enemy's cannon. Men who had the welfare of the republic at heart, turned sick when they looked at these hale, hearty and unwounded absentees from an honorable service, every man of them daily breaking his oath to his country and his obligations to his own conscience. This was one more of the phases of society at Niagara, which Tom Leslie was called upon to note down and study during those opening days of July, and one of the evils which—shame to the nation that it should be so!—is only now[16]beginning to find a partial remedy.