Anomalies of the War for the Union—The Watering-place rush of 1863—A White-Mountain Party disembarking at Littleton—Who filled the Concord Coach—The Vanderlyns—Shoddy on its travels—Mr. Brooks Cunninghame and his Family—"H. T.," and an Excitement.
Anomalies of the War for the Union—The Watering-place rush of 1863—A White-Mountain Party disembarking at Littleton—Who filled the Concord Coach—The Vanderlyns—Shoddy on its travels—Mr. Brooks Cunninghame and his Family—"H. T.," and an Excitement.
The War for the Union has been unlike all other great struggles, throughout, in nearly every characteristic that canbe named. Unnatural in its inception, the rebellion has seemed to have the power of making unnatural many of the details through which and in spite of which it has been carried forward—of changing character and subverting all ordinary conditions. There have been anomalies in the field: still more notable anomalies in society. Unflinching bravery and stubborn devotion to the fighting interests of the country have been found blended, in the same man, with pecuniary dishonesty which seemed capable of pillaging a death-chamber. The greatest military ability has been found conjoined with such inactivity and tardiness as to paralyze action and destroy public patience. Rapidity of movement has been discovered to be wedded to such Utopian want of understanding or such culpable recklessness as to make movement not seldom a blunder instead of a stroke of policy. Times which threatened disaster have brought triumph; and the preparations made to celebrate a victory have more than once been employed in concealing a defeat. All things have been mixed in estimation. The Copperhead, detestable on account of his view of the national duty, has yet compelled some portion of respect by his real or affected reverence for a perilled Constitution; the Radical, worthy of all credit for his active spirit and uncompromising position, has yet deserved contempt for a narrowness of view which made him almost as dangerous as disloyalty could have done; and the Conservative, that man of the golden mean, that hope of the nation in many regards, has bargained for a part of the abuse which he has received from either extreme, by faulting the active measures of both and offering meanwhile no active, practical course to supply their stead.
But amid the general anomaly perhaps fashionable (or would-be fashionable) society, and the world of ease and amusement, have supplied the most interesting and the most astounding study of all. The status of the "non-productive classes" is and has been, during most of the struggle, literally inverted, and the conditions of costly enjoyment have beenchanging as rapidly as if we were rioting through a carnival instead of breasting a rebellion. No nation ever carried on such a war as that waged by this loyal people; and no nation ever spent so much blood and treasure in accomplishing the same comparative results. Naturally, in view of the personal bereavement, it might have been expected that society should be quiet in its amusements and low-toned in all its conversation: naturally, a people bleeding at every pecuniary pore for the public good, might have been expected to diminish personal expenditure and husband those resources on the holding-out of which so much must eventually depend. Instead of this, society, with the craped banners and the muffled drums every day appealing to eye and ear, has grown continually louder in its tone and more pronounced and even blatant in its mirth; and reckless personal expenditure has quite kept place with any general waste that the highwaymen or incapables of government had power to entail. The theatre and the circus have never before been so full, the opera has never before been so generally patronized. Babylon could never have rioted more luxuriously on the very night before its fall, than have the people of our great cities dined, ridden, danced and bathed themselves in seas of costly music, any day since the first three months of the rebellion ended.
Summer recreations have perhaps told quite as significant a story as any other feature, of the inevitable drift of society towards reckless expense and extravagant display. The summer resorts within the rebel territory may have grown desolate or deserted—the buildings of the White Sulphur and the Rockbridge Alum of Virginia may have been left empty or turned into hospitals, and Old Point may only have been visited for far other purposes than the meeting of the sea-breeze there in midsummer; but a very different fate has awaited the favorite hot-weather resorts of the North. Saratoga and Sharon of the chalybeates; Niagara and Trenton of the cataracts; the White Mountains, the Cattskills and theAlleghanies, of the high, pure air and the cloud shadow; Newport, Rockaway, Long Branch and Cape May of the south-eastern breeze and the salt aroma,—all have been, with the exception of a few frightened weeks of 1861, more densely filled during the war than at any former period in the memory of the pleasure-seeker; and wealth and enjoyment have both run riot there to an extent but little in accordance with the sack-cloth and ashes which the observant eye saw all the while lying on the head of the nation itself. All this may have been inappropriate and a part of it painful; but the result could not well have been otherwise. Some, with wealth honestly earned and no capacity for the public service, have needed rest or distraction and there found one or the other. Habitual idlers and professional students of society, never available for any other purpose, have naturally, as ever, found there their best ground of personal study. Young girls have needed the experience, and managing mammas have quite as sorely needed those fields for matrimonial campaigns. Invalids have needed their real or supposed opportunity for the recovery of lost health. Shoddy, grown suddenly rich while remaining incurably ignorant and vulgar, and finding it no easy task to force its way into the coveted "society" in the great cities, has eagerly welcomed the opportunities there afforded for at least learning the rudiments of what is called gentility, and creeping into that miscellaneous outer circle which surrounds the charmed inner. Politicians have found it necessary to do, in such places, that particular portion of the great task of boring, button-holing, prying and packing which cannot be so well done either at the primary election or the convention as around the spring or on the beach—on the piazza of the Ocean House or the United States; and officers on furlough, who had fought enough for the time or had no intention to fight at all, have found no places like these for displaying jaunty uniform and decorated shoulder to the admiring eyes of that sex which descends from Athena and recognizes the cousinship of Mars.Add to all this the rise of exchange on Europe and the folly of steamship companies in charging gold rates for passages abroad, which have together almost checked the summer exodus to the Old World,—and there is no longer reason to wonder at the watering-place crowds and the summer gayeties which have made carnival throughout the loyal States and filled the wallets of enterprizing landlords.
The year of grace 1863 saw an earlier beginning to the summer hegira than any other late year had done, as before its close it saw houses over-crowded, waiters overworked, and cots at a premium, from Casco to Cresson. The smoke had not yet rolled away from Gettysburgh when "the great North River travelling-trunk" began its perambulations; and by the middle of July everybody who was anybody (except a few in the city of New York, temporarily frightened or hindered by the riots) was gone from the great cities, and they were given over to the temporary occupancy of those laboring starlings who could not "get out," and the ever ebbing and flowing wave of transient visit.
All this as a necessary reminder of the period and a back-ground to the incidents so soon to follow,—and because the course of narration, at this juncture, leads us for a time to one of the favorite shrines of American summer pilgrimage and into the whirl of that literal storm of fashion and curiosity which eddies and sweeps, all summer long, around the peaks of the White Mountains—the Alps of Eastern America.
It was a somewhat varied as well as extensive crowd of passengers that disembarked from the cars of the White Mountain Railroad at Littleton, in sight of the head-waters of the Connecticut, about five o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of July. The dog-days had begun; New York, Philadelphia and Boston were steaming furnaces, though partially emptied as we have before had occasion to notice; and those who had already visited them during the month, declared that neither Saratoga, the Cattskills, or even Lake George or Niagara, had the power to impart any coolness tosuffering humanity. The sea-shore or the northern mountains offered the only alternative; and a very heavy list of passengers had come up that day by the Norwich and Worcester line from New York, the Boston lines falling in at Nashua Junction, and the Vermont Central throwing in its reinforcement at Wells River.
Every portion of the loyal States (and no doubt a portion of the disloyal, if the truth could have been known!) had seemed to be represented in the crowd that thronged the platforms while fighting for a mouthful of lunch at Nashua Junction or crowding in to a hurried dinner at the poor substitute for the burned Pemigawasset House at Plymouth. There were even half a dozen resident Europeans—English, Scotch, with one Frenchman who snuffed continually, and one Spaniard who smoked in season and out of season—people who had no doubt rushed over to see the "American war," but very soon found the South too hot for comfort, in one sense or the other,—among the number destined to add variety to the overfilled caravanserais of the Franconia and White ranges. A few had dropped away at Weir's Landing, for a day or two on Lake Winnipiseogee, enticed by the pleasant loom of Centre Harbor down the bright blue water and the romantic figure of the Lady of the Lake on the prow of her namesake steamer; and a few more had left the train at Plymouth for the long coach-ride of thirty miles through the mountains to the Glen House, or by the southern approach to the Profile or the Crawford. Two or three stage-loads, too, who had but one thought in their pilgrimage—Mount Washington,—were bustling in for the immediate ride from Littleton to the Crawford; but there were still four heavy stage-loads—not less than forty to fifty persons—going on to the crowded Profile House that evening.
Some of the occupants of one of those heavy stages, rolling away towards the Profile, require, for the purposes of this narration, a somewhat closer view than was probably takenof them by many of their fellow-passengers; and that view cannot be more appropriately taken than at this moment.
On the back seat of that vehicle sat two ladies, with a troublesome boy of ten years wedged in between them as if to come the nearest possible to getting him out of the way. Neither paid the youngster that attention which would have indicated that he belonged to them or was travelling in their company; and indeed they had every right as well as every inclination to wash their hands of his relationship if they could not wash from their travelling-dresses the marks of his taffy-smeared fingers. The two ladies were evidently mother and daughter; and at least one person in the coach had remarked them as they came up from Concord, and seen that their sole chaperon and protector seemed to be a son of the one and brother of the other, some eighteen or twenty years of age. As he saw them then and as he afterwards better knew them, they may be briefly described.
The Vanderlyns were Baltimoreans—the widow and children of a man of large wealth and considerable distinction, who had died three or four years before in that city, after having amassed a fortune by property speculations and subsequently filled more than one responsible office under the State government. They had the true Southern pride in wealth and position; and the hand of the daughter had already been sought, however ineffectually, by scions of the best families in and about the Monumental city. Let it be added that they belonged, whatever may have been their pride and arrogance as a family, to the not-too-extensive class ofloyalMarylanders,—and then a better title of nobility will have been enrolled than any that Clayton Vanderlyn's money and former public employments had power to supply. The widowed mother and her children were among the few residents below Mason and Dixon's line who had not forgotten the pleasant summer days of old in the North, when Puritan and Cavalier met as friends and brothers; and this summertour, which was to include Saratoga and Newport before it closed, was a result of the old recollection.
Mrs. Vanderlyn, the mother, seemed forty-five, but was fine-looking and had evidently been handsome in her youth—with those splendid brown eyes that must then have sparkled so much more brilliantly than at this period, and that perfect wealth of chestnut hair, not yet in the least sprinkled with gray, which must then have been a charm and a glory. Her travelling-dress was very plain, but of the best materials; and every thing in her appearance—especially pride of look and action,—spoke of wealth, the habit of mingling in that indefinable but actual thing, good society, and a perfect consciousness of what she was and what she possessed. Those who looked twice upon Mrs. Vanderlyn, with keen eyes, had no difficulty in deciding that she might be a very pleasant acquaintance for those in her own "set" and whom she considered her equals,—but that she would be any thing but a pleasant acquaintance for those whom she despised or with whom she chanced to fall into feud.
Clara Vanderlyn, the daughter, was a yet more interesting study than her mother; and it seemed altogether probable that the same observer before mentioned, and who will be hereafter more particularly introduced, coming up in the same car from Nashua and again thrown into near proximity in the coach, had read and was reading that second page of the Vanderlyn genealogy with peculiar care and attention. She was of middle height; slight, but well-rounded and evidently elastic in figure, with a clearly cut but very pleasant face, eyes a shade darker than Mrs. Vanderlyn's, and hair what that lady's had probably been twenty years before. A wonderful feature, indeed, was that head of hair—fine, silken, but perfectly massive in profusion, with more of a tendency to the wave than the curl, and of that rich golden chestnut or true auburn so seldom seen though so often lauded. At the first observation, it seemed that Clara Vanderlyn's hair was the great charm of her presence; but those who had the goodfortune to be many hours in her company, learned that a still stronger and more abiding charm lay in the affability of her manners, the expression of thorough goodness in her whole demeanor, and the purity and sweetness of her smile. That face was certainly worthy of the fixed gaze which had rested upon it quite as often during the afternoon as delicacy permitted; and it might even have furnished excuse for glancing at it a moment too long, and planting blushes on those cheeks that the lip could have no hope of gathering.
The third and youngest of the family, Frank Vanderlyn, did not enter into the group under observation, as he was at that time on the top of the coach with half a dozen others, enjoying the cigar which had been impossible in the passenger-car. But the glimpses caught of him before disembarking, may suffice to complete the family triad. He seemed a well-grown stripling, verging upon manhood, with a face distantly reminding the observer of his sister's, but with darker hair than either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Clara, and with an expression of settled hauteur upon his well-cut features, which very much detracted from the charm of a face that would otherwise have been singularly handsome. He was dressed a little too well for dusty travel, and wore more wealth in a single diamond in his cravat and a cluster-ring on the little finger of his right hand, than most young men would have been either able or willing to devote to such purposes of mere ornament.
This description of the occupants of that singularly-fortunate coach may have very little interest beyond that of a mere catalogue; yet it must be continued, for Fate, that grim old auctioneer who sometimes knocks us down at very low prices and to odd owners, may have some necessity for a mercantile list of his chattels.
The occupants of the middle seat were three in number, and they could have furnished any needed information as to the personality of the troublesome boy with the taffied fingers, who had been wedged between Clara Vanderlyn and her mother. All of one family—that second triad: Mr. BrooksCunninghame, Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, and Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame. The first, a squat man of fifty-five, with a broad, coarse, beardless face, bad teeth and bristly gray hair just suffering under its first infliction of slaty-brown hair-dye. His large hands had been all day cased in kid gloves, spite of the heat of the weather; and his gray suit, of really fine material, had a sort of new look, and did not seem to be worn easily. There was an impression carried about by the man and disseminated at every movement, that another and a much shabbier suit hung immediately behind his bed-room door at home, and that in that he would have been easy and comfortable, while in the fashionable garb he was laboring under a sort of Sunday-clothes restraint. The second, a stout woman of fifty, with reddish hair, a coarse pink face, high cheek bones and pert nose, corresponding well with her lord in conformation, while it wore an expression of dignity and self-satisfaction to which the countenance of that poor man could not have made the least pretension. She was only alittleoverdressed, for travelling—her bonnet of fine straw too much of a flower-garden for her years, a heavy gold watch-chain with the watch prominent, a diamond breastpin flashing hotly, and her voluminous blue lawn of costly fabric partially covered by a long gray mantle which must have been recommended to her by some mantua-maker with a "spasm of sense." But if there was any restraint in the make-up of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that restraint was fully compensated by the gorgeousness of the general arrangement of Miss Marianna. That young lady of thirty, with a large mouth, sandy hair, bluish gray eyes and freckles, a dumpy figure and no eye-brows whatever, was arrayed—shade of Madame La Modiste forgive us while we pen the record—arrayed for that hot and dusty day of railroad and coach riding, in a rich pink silk flounced and braided to the extreme of the current fashion; with a jockey leghorn and white feather which—well, we may say with truth that theyrelievedher face; with a braided mantle of white merino thatmight have been originally designed for an opera-cloak; white kid gloves in a transition state; and such a profusion of gold watch, gold chain, enamelled bracelet, diamond cluster-breastpin, costly lace, and other feminine means of attracting admiration and envy, that the brain of a masculine relator reels among the chaos of finery and he desists in despair. The fourth of this family was Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame,ætatten, wedged in between the two aristocratic representatives of the Vanderlyn exclusiveness, and the freckles on his coarse little face and hands about equally balanced by the dauby debris of more or less hardened taffy to which allusion has before been unavoidably made.
This group (the fact may as well be set down in this place as at any later period)—this was Shoddy on its summer tour. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had been, a considerable number of years before, Patrick B. Cunningham; and his name had been scrawled, many hundreds of times, to receipts for work done as a petty contractor about the streets of New York City, with one horse and a dirt-cart, digging out cellars, and helping to cart the dirt of pipe-layings and excavations. Gradually he had crept up to two carts, and then to three. Eventually he had reached the employing of a dozen or two, with the bipeds that drove and the quadrupeds that drew them. By that time he had removed from his shanty of one story and rented a house. Then he had gone into ward politics and contracts with the city, at about the same time, and emerged into possession of a couple of brown-stone-front houses and a seat in the Board of Aldermen, at periods not very far apart. People said that the seat in the municipal board, with the "ring" performances (more or less clown-ish) thereunto appertaining, were made the means of increasing the two houses to four and of causing Mrs. Patrick B. Cunningham to forget the whole of her husband's first name and merely use the initials "P. B.," which might or might not stand for 'Pollo Belvidere. Then had come the war, with that golden opportunity for all who stood prepared for it.Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been at that time the proprietor of some fifty or sixty gallant steeds used before dirt-carts, and his vigorous and patriotic mind had conceived the propriety of aiding the country by disposing of those mettled chargers as aids towards a first-class cavalry mount. He had sold, prospered, bought more dirt-cart and stage-horses with an admixture of those only to be discovered between the thills of clam-wagons, found no difficulty in passing them as fit for the service, through the kindness of a friendly inspector who only charged two dollars per head for deciding favorably on the quadrupeds,—sold and prospered again and yet again. Mr. P. B. Cunningham had accordingly found himself, three months before the period of this narration, the lawful proprietor of half a million, acquired in the most loyal manner and without for one moment wavering in his connection with either Tammany Hall, through which he managed the Democrats, or the Loyal League by which he kept in favor with the Republicans.
So far Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been uninterruptedly successful—the monarch as well as architect of his own fortune. But at that period (the three months before) he had suddenly been made aware that every man has his fate and the end of his career of supremacy. Mrs. P. B. Cunningham had proved herself his fate and put a sudden end to his supremacy. That lady, all the while emerging, had emerged, from the dust and darkness of lower fortune, and become a fashionable butterfly. She had ordered him to buy a four-story brown-stone front, finer than any that he owned, on one of the up-town streets not far fromtheAvenue; and he had obeyed. She had ordered him to discard his old clothes, and he had obeyed again, though with a sincere reluctance. She had changed his name to Brooks Cunninghame, (observe thee!) her own to Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that of Mary Ann to Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame, and that of the male scion of the house,ætatten as aforesaid, to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame. The door-plate of the newhouse could not be arranged in accordance with the new programme, for door-plates had been voted vulgar and abandoned by thecreme de la creme; but the family cards had been made to bear all the blushing honors in steel engraving and round-hand. This done, the requisite jewelry bought, and some other little arrangements perfected which may develop themselves in due time, the lady had informed Mr. Brooks Cunninghame that both the health and the dignity of the family required summer recreation, and dragged him away on that tour of which we have the privilege of witnessing one of the progresses.
Some reference has been made to the array, rather gorgeous than otherwise, of Miss Marianna, for dusty travel. A few words which had passed between the three heads of the family at one of the Boston hotels that morning, may give a little insight into the philosophy of this arrangement. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, yet retaining a little of the common-sense of his dirt-cart days, had ventured to suggest that "Mary Ann mought wear her commoner duds to ride in, for thim fineries 'ud be spiled before night wid the dust intirely;" and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, alike indignant at a suggestion so smacking of low life and grieved to find that her husband would persist in retaining a few touches of the brogue of which she had cured herself and her children so triumphantly,—had answered with a sort of verbal two-edged sword that did fatal execution on both the others:
"Brooks Cunninghame, you'd better keep your mouth shut if you can't open it without letting out some of that low Irish! One would think you drove a dirt-cart yit! And you, my dear"—to Marianna (the mother had been "posting herself" in some of the phrases of "good society," as well as in some other things which may also yet develop themselves)—"you, my dear, put on the very best o' them things that you've got! Ain't we rich, I should like to know? We may see a good many folks to-day, in them cars, and who knows whether you mightn't lose a beau that'd take a fancyto you, if you went slouchin' around with your old things on? Dress up, my dear!"
Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had succumbed; Miss Marianna had "dressed up," as per order; and collective Shoddy was thus far on its way, without accident, towards the first halting-place in the grand tour of the mountains.
But what of the observer who has more than once before been mentioned, and who sat in the corner of the front seat, half buried under the voluminous skirts of two ladies who have nothing whatever to do with this narration, but looking so steadily (people who have habitually ridden in those Concord coaches know that the front is another back, and that the occupants of the front and back seats face each other)—looking so steadily, we say, at every permissible opportunity, into the sweet face of Clara Vanderlyn? He was a man of apparently thirty years of age, rather tall and very vigorous-looking even if slight, with curling dark hair, almost or quite black, and worn short, the face finely cut and showing no beard except a close, full moustache of raven blackness, the complexion (brow and all, as could be noticed when he lifted his hat from his head, as he often did, for coolness) of such a dark clear brown as to mark him of Southern birth or blood, clothes of thin dark gray material, with a round tourist hat and a duster, the small hands gloved in summer silk, and the whole appearance and manner that of a gentleman, used to good society, and very probably professional. He had been reading, nearly all the way up from Worcester, some of the other passengers noticed—though it must be confessed that a part of his reading had been over the top of the book at that attractive large type formed by a pretty human face; and no blame is intended to be cast upon Clara Vanderlyn when we say that that young lady had more than once met the evidently admiring glance of so fine-looking a man, with the little tinge of color that was becoming, but without any expression upon her face or any thought in her mind, resenting any more than returning an admiration which shebelieved that she had a right to receive and any gentleman to pay thus respectfully. He had spoken but seldom, during the ride, in such a way that any person then present had heard him; but once he had taken (ormade) occasion to apologize to Miss Vanderlyn and her mother for being thrown against their seat by the motion of the car while walking through it, on the rough road when coming up from Plymouth to Wells river; and his few words, as the lady remarked, consorted well with the respectability (to say the least) of his appearance. As to his personality, which there did not seem the slightest occasion for his wishing to disguise, there was a big black trunk in the baggage-wagon following behind the line of coaches, and a small satchel strapped over his shoulder as he rode; and the first bore the initials "H. T." and the direction "Cincinnati."
While so much attention has been paid to the occupants of that single coach, leaving the others and even the noisy passengers on the roof of this, unnoticed, the vehicles had been buzzing and clattering along over the table-land lying at the foot of the mountains, past the little hamlet of Franconia, and nearing the mountains themselves. A glorious July evening it was, with the fiery air which had been so oppressive below gradually cooled by the approach to the presence of the monarchs, and the smoke from the fires in the woods playing fantastic tricks among the peaks, and compensating for the absence of the clouds which sometimes enveloped them. Not half the passengers in those four stages had ever seen the mountains before; and not one, even of those accustomed to such scenery, but felt the blood beating a little quicker as the mountain road beyond Franconia was reached, and they began to experience those rapid ascents, and yet more rapid descents, which accompany thence all the way to the Notch, with grand old woods overhanging, steep and sheer ravines at the side of the road that made the head dizzy in looking, reverential glimpses of the awful peaks of Lafayette and the Cannon frowning ahead,and of Washington, grander still, towering far away over the White range, and with all the other accompaniments of the finest mountain scenery on the Atlantic coast of the American continent. There was quite enough, indeed, to engage the attention of any except the most blasé and ennuyée traveller, in the grandeur of the scenery and the excitement of being galloped in rocking, lumbering, four-horse coaches, down declivities of road which would have made a driver in any ordinary hill-country draw tight rein and creep down with a heavy foot on the brake.
Not a few nervous passengers, first or last, dashing up and down the slopes of the White Mountain roads, have been more or less frightened, and wished that they could be once more on terra firma without incurring the penalty of a laugh at their cowardice; and in the present instance this little bit of locomotion was not to be allowed to pass without an adventure.
Half an hour from the foot of the mountain the coach went rapidly up a sharp ascent in the road, then dashed down again at full gallop, striking one of those necessary nuisances known as "breakwaters" when a few yards from the top, with a shock that sent the coach-body leaping on its leathern jacks like a yawl-boat in a heavy surf, made some of the outsiders on the top shout and hold on merrily to keep from being whirled off into one of the side-ravines, and created such a state of affairs inside the vehicle, generally, as effectually broke up the monotony. That shock drove the head of Mrs. Vanderlyn back against the leathern cushions with a force seriously damaging to the crown of her bonnet, brought a slight scream from Clara, who was frightened for the instant, made the troublesome Master Brooks Brooks yell and dash a dirty hand into the dress of each of the ladies who had the honor of the same seat, and elicited from Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame and her husband one of those brief but very significant marital displays which were no doubt afterwards to edify so many. Whether the lady had ascertained that fashionablepeople must always fall and faint under any sudden excitement, or whether the shock really frightened as well as unseated her, is a matter of no consequence: certain it is that she at that juncture threw up her hands and rolled up her eyes, gave one scream that degenerated into a groan, rolled from her seat and subsided into the bottom of the coach, under the feet of "H. T.," in what seemed to be a fit of some description. Miss Marianna, really alarmed, with the affectionate if not classic words, "Oh, mammy!" made a grab at that lady, clutching the back of her hat and tearing it from the head it crowned, while Master Brooks Brooks changed his yell into a howl and Mr. Brooks Cunninghame stooped down, terror in his face and his hands feeling around at the bottom of the vehicle for any portion of what had been his wife, with the affectionate but not politic inquiry: "Is it kilt ye are, Bridget?"
Not politic?—no, certainly not! A stronger word might be applied without risk to the unfortunate expression. Among the changes in family polity not before indicated, had been an indignant throwing over of her very honest name of "Bridget" by the wife of the horse-contractor, and the adoption of "Julia" in its stead. More than one curtain-lecture had poor Mr. Brooks Cunninghame endured, before leaving New York, on the necessity of avoiding any blunder in that regard, when they should be "away from home"; and he had not escaped without severe drill and many promises of perfection in his part. And now to have forgotten the adopted "Julia" and used the tell-tale "Bridget" at the very moment of the family's entering upon their first essay in fashionable watering-place life, was really a little too much for patience not entirely angelic.
Both the poets and the romancers tell of cases in which some word of heart-broken affection, uttered at the instant when the death-film was stealing over the eyes of the beloved one, has had power to strike the dulled sense and call back for a moment the fleeting life when it had escaped far beyondthe reach of any other sound. Something of the same character—not quite so romantic, perhaps, but quite as real,—was developed in the present instance. The woman may have been falling into an actual faint; but if so, that offensive word pierced through the gathering mists of insensibility, and she crawled out from the entanglement of legs before any effectual aid could be afforded her, and with such a look of contempt and hatred burning full upon her unfortunate husband that he must have felt for the moment as if placed directly under the lens of a sun-glass at focus. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame shrank into his number eleven patent-leathers, and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame "swatted" herself (there is no other word in or out of the language that will quite so well express the act) down on the seat with an air that implied a wish for some one's head being beneath her at that juncture. Her glance had not at all softened, nor had "H. T." ceased looking out of the window or Clara Vanderlyn (behind her) yet taken her handkerchief from her mouth, when the female Cunninghame said, in what she thought very honeyed accents:
"Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, I wish you would find some other time to go and call me nicknames, than when I am jolted out of my seat in that way and a'most dead!"
The stroke of policy was a fine one, and even the thick head of Mr. Brooks Cunninghame recognized the necessity of following it up—an act which he performed thus gracefully and with a look intended for one of the staring ladies on the front seat:
"Yes, mim, her name isn't Bridget at all at all, but Julia. It's only a bit of a way I have of jokin' wid her, mim!"
This was satisfactory, of course—absolutely conclusive; and so Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame grew mollified by degrees; the redness which had come into the face of Miss Marianna gradually faded out; Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame took occasion to manifest his filial fondness by reaching over and hugging his mother with hands just re-coated with candydug out of his capacious pocket; and the Concord coach, with its consorts, rolled and jolted and swayed along, up and down the mountain road to its destination.
Landing at the Profile House—Halstead Rowan and Gymnastics—How that person saw Clara Vanderlyn and became a Rival of "H. T."—The Full Moon in the Notch—Trodden Toes, a Name, a Voice, and a Rencontre—Margaret Hayley and Capt. Hector Coles—The Old Man of the Mountain by Moonlight, and a Mystery.
Landing at the Profile House—Halstead Rowan and Gymnastics—How that person saw Clara Vanderlyn and became a Rival of "H. T."—The Full Moon in the Notch—Trodden Toes, a Name, a Voice, and a Rencontre—Margaret Hayley and Capt. Hector Coles—The Old Man of the Mountain by Moonlight, and a Mystery.
Spite of the sometimes rapid speed, the toil up the mountain had been long and tedious; and dusk was very nearly falling and the chill of the coming evening was sufficient to induce the drawing close of mantles and wrappers that only two hours before had been reckoned an incumbrance,—when the coaches with their loads broke out from the overhanging woods on a steep down-grade, the passengers caught a glimpse of Echo Lake lying like a sheet of molten silver under the evening calm, and the whole cortege swept down at a gallop and with cracking of whips, to the broad, level plateau lying before the Profile House in the Franconia Notch.
Two of the coaches had been in advance of that to which the attention of the reader has been particularly directed, and still other coaches had just come in from Plymouth, the Glen and the Crawford; so that when they drew up to alight the long piazza of the Profile was filled with sojourners satisfying their curiosity or looking out for fresh arrivals; and coachmen, servants and every employee of the establishment, were busy hauling down from the racks and boots wherethey had been stowed, immense piles of trunks, valises and every description of baggage that had not been entrusted to the van yet lumbering behind. Landlord Taft and superintendent Jennings were alert and busy; old comers were curious as to the number and nature of new arrivals; new comers were glancing momentarily at the glorious scenery and anxiously inquiring every thing of everybody who knew no more of the things inquired about than did the askers themselves. All was charming bustle—delightful confusion: one of those peculiar scenes connected with summer travel and watering-place life, which furnish the very best of opportunities for study to the quiet observer.
The coach door had been opened and all the inside passengers handed out, before the merry party from the roof made any attempt at getting down. Peal after peal of hearty laughter went up from that outside division of the vehicle; and evidently the party there assembled had reached the Profile before achieving the end of the jests and story-telling in which they had been engaged. They had already attracted some attention from the piazza, and one boarding-school miss had been appealed to by her eye-glassed swain in attendance, to "heah those awful vulgah fellahs!"—when the laughter ceased, and one of the roof-passengers made a sudden spring from that elevation, over the heads of half a dozen of those standing on the ground, and came safely to his feet with a jerk which would have laid up a less perfect physical man for a week and completely shaken out the false teeth from the mouth of any victim of a dentist.
The rapid man was followed by his companions, Frank Vanderlyn included among the number; but they all seemed to choose the more popular mode of getting down, by the aid of steps and braces.
"Pretty well done, Rowan!" exclaimed one of the others as he himself reached the ground. "Broke any thing?"
"No, nothing—except," and at that moment his eye caught the forms and faces of Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her mother, whowere standing at the edge of the piazza, waiting while Frank descended and made some arrangement for the disposition of their baggage. "H. T.," of the coach-load, was standing within a few feet of them, his little satchel still strapped over his shoulder and his eyes scarcely wandering at all from the woman whom they had scanned so long and well during the journey by rail. But he had glanced around, with the others, at the noise made by the singular descent; and his eye met that of the man who had been called Rowan, as the latter made the discovery of mother and daughter. It was but a lightning flash that Rowan gave or the stranger detected, but few glances of any human eye have ever expressed more within the same period. He evidently saw the young girl for the first time, at that moment; and quite as evidently he drank in at that one glimpse the full charm of her beauty and goodness. That was not all: in the one glance, too, he apparently measured her wealth and social position—saw and reckoned up the proud woman standing beside her—then took, it is probable, an introspective view of himself and his own surroundings, and found time to realize the utter hopelessness of that impulse which for the tithe of a moment he must have felt stirring within him.
Perhaps half-a-dozen seconds had elapsed before he concluded the answer he had begun. "No, nothing—except—my heart!" He had begun to speak in a light, gay, off-hand manner: he concluded in a low, sad voice, full alike of music and melancholy.
"H. T." had been observing him very closely during that brief space of time, as had nearly all the other spectators, their notice attracted by his reckless mode of alighting. He was apparently about thirty years of age, a little less than six feet high—perhaps five feet eleven; with a form undeniably stout, but rounded like a reed and as elastic as whalebone. His hands were soft and womanish in their contour, though they were rather large, nut-brown in color, and had evidently felt, as had his face, the meridian sun. His feet were almostsingularly small for so large a man—highly arched and springy. His face and head, as he the moment after removed his hat, were capable of attracting attention in any company. The face was a little broad and heavily moulded; the cheek-bones prominent and the nose slightly aquiline; the eyes dark, dreamy and lazy; the brow fair, and above it clustering dark, short, soft hair, curled, but so delicate in texture that it waved like silk floss with the veriest breath. The mouth would have been, the observer might have thought, heavy and a little sensual, had it not been hidden away by the thick and curling dark moustache which he wore without other beard. Only one other feature need be named—a chin rather broad and square and showing a very slight depression of the bone in the centre—such as has marked a singular description of men for many an hundred years. It needed a second glance to see that a broad, heavy scar, thoroughly healed, commenced at the left cheek-bone and traversed below the ear until lost in the thick hair at the base of the neck. Such was the picture this man presented—a contradictory one in some respects, but evidencing great strength, power and agility, and yet more than a suspicion of intellectuality and refinement. A close and habitual observer of men does not often err in "placing" one whom he may happen to meet, even at first sight,—after a few seconds of careful examination; but the keenest might have been puzzled to decide what was that man's station in life, his profession, or even his character. Any one must have been in the main favorably impressed: beyond that point little could possibly have been imagined by the most daring.
A small black trunk came off the top of the coach at about the time that "H. T.," who seemed to be bargaining for a rival at that early period, had concluded his inspection; and there was not much difficulty in connecting the name and address painted in white on the end with the appellation by which the stranger had the moment before been designated. That name and address read: "Halstead Rowan, Chicago, Illinois."
Two men appeared to be travelling in company with Rowan; one a man of something beyond his own age—the other five or six years younger; both respectable but by no means affluent in appearance. All were well dressed and gentlemanly in aspect; but neither Rowan nor either of his companions gave the impression of what might be designated as the "first circles of society," even in the great grain-metropolis of the West.
"H. T.," the observer, had fixed his eyes so closely on the male party in that singular meeting, that he probably lost the answering expression of the lady's face and did not know whether or not she had returned that glance of wondering interest. Something like disappointment at that lost opportunity may have been the cause of his biting his lip a little nervously as he took his way, with the rest of the new-comers, into the hall and reception-room, waiting opportunity for the booking of names and the assignment of chambers. Some of those in waiting no doubt found the tedium materially diminished by finding themselves, in the reception-room, at that close of a blazing day of July, standing or sitting with a decidedly grateful feeling before a quarter-of-a-cord of birchen wood, blazing away in the open fire-place with that peculiar warmth and hearty geniality so little known to this coal-burning age, but so well remembered by those who knew the old baronial halls of republican America in a time long passed away.
Not many minutes after the rencontre that has been described, the crowd had vanished from the piazza of the Profile House, the coaches had driven away, the baggage was being rapidly removed within doors, and the tired and hungry new-comers were booked for rooms and clearing away the soil and dust of travel, preparatory to supper. Soon the crockery and cutlery jingled in the long dining-room, and the flaky tea-biscuits steamed for those who hurried down to catch them in their full perfection.
It was a desultory supper and a somewhat hurried one, forthe moonrise was coming—that rise of the full moon which so many had promised themselves, and for which, indeed, not a few of the arrivals of that evening had timed their visit to the mountains. Then, hunger has but little curiosity, and surveys and recognitions were both waited for until the broader light and greater leisure of the morning; and probably of the dozens of old residents (a week is "old residence" at a watering-place, be it remembered, and a fortnight confers all the privileges of the habitue)—probably of the dozens of old residents and new-comers who had acquaintances among the opposite class, not two found time or thought for seeking out familiar faces during that period when the sharpened appetite was so notably in the ascendant.
"The moonlight is coming: come out, all of you who care more for scenery than stuffing!" said a high, shrill voice, after a time had elapsed which would scarcely have begun the meal under ordinary circumstances. It was an elderly man with white hair and white side-whiskers, an old habitue of the house and therefore a privileged character, who spoke, pulling out his watch and at once rising from his seat. He was followed by more than half those at table, and would have been followed especially by Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, who had somewhere learned that fashion and a rage for moonlight had a mysterious connection,—but for the insatiable hunger of Mr. Brooks Cunninghame himself, who was engaged in mortal combat with a formidable piece of steak and a whole pile of biscuits, and who outraged Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame by declaring, sotto voce, that "he'd be something-or-othered if he'd lave his supper until he was done, for any moonlight or other something-or-othered thing in the wurruld!"—and the obstreperousness of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, who was up to his eyes in three kinds of preserves and bade fair to stick permanently fast to the table through the agency of those glutinous compounds.
Out on the piazza and the broad plateau in front of it, the visitors at the Profile gathered, to see what is not oftenvouchsafed to the most devoted of nature-lovers—the rising of the full moon in the mountains. Those who are familiar with the Franconia Notch well know how the mountains around the Profile always seem to draw closer after sunset, and how the frowning cliffs seem to form insurmountable barriers between them and the outer world, making it doubtful to the bewildered thought whether there is indeed any egress from that cool paradise of summer—whether or not they can ride away at will and look again upon green fields and flashing streams and the faces of those they love. And they well know that moonrise there, over those encircling cliffs, is not the moonrise of the lower country, with the orb throwing its broad beams of light at once wide over the world, but an actual peeping down from heaven of a fair and genial spirit that deigns for the time to pour welcome radiance into an abode of solitude and darkness. The spectacle, then, is one to be sought and remembered; and as storms habitually beat around those mountain tops and fog and mist quite divide the time with fair weather in the valleys, the tourist is mad or emotionless who allows the cloudless full moon to come up without catching its smile on cheek and brow.
The intense blue of the eastern sky was already gone when the anxious groups clustered in front of the great white caravanserai, and the stars began to glimmer paler in that direction. There was not a fleck of cloud, not a shadow of mist, to prevent the rounded orb, when it came up, flooding the whole gorge with the purest of liquid silver. The winds were still as if they waited with finger on lip for the pageant; and the shrill scream of a young eagle that broke out for an instant from one of the eyries under the brow of Eagle Cliff and then died trembling away down the valley, seemed like profanation. Conversation was hushed, among all that varying and even discordant crowd, as if there might be power in a profane word to check the wheeling of the courses of nature. The orient began to be flushed with that tremblinglight, and glints of it touched the dark pines on the brow of the cliff, a mile away. Then that light beyond the cliffs deepened and the dark pines grew still darker as fully relieved against it. Then at last, as they watched with hushed breath, a rim of silver seemed suddenly to have been set as an arch on the very brow of the mountain, and slowly the full orb rolled into view. As it heaved up, a broad, full circle of glittering and apparently dripping silver, it threw out the trees on the brow of the mountain into such bold relief as if a lightning flash had literally been burning behind them. There was one giant old pine, no doubt an hundred feet in height, so far away on the bold crest of Eagle Cliff that it seemed to be only a toy tree of three inches; and this was thrown against the very centre of the moon, every gnarled limb and pendant branch as plain to the eye as if it hung within a stone's throw, a dead pigmy of the same family shooting up its ragged point not far distant, and a tangled wilderness of broken trees and scraggy branches filling the remainder of the circle. Then, the moment after, the moon heaved slowly up beyond the trees, they fell back into darkness, and the broad glow streamed full into the faces of the gazers and flooded the whole valley with light. The great spectacle of the month had been exhibited to hundreds of admiring eyes, and the full moon of July shed its broad glory like a blessing upon the Franconia.
It was at the moment when the pageant was just concluding and exclamations of pleasure breaking from a hundred lips, that "H. T." (who has not as yet furnished us data for any fuller revelation of his name), standing at some distance out on the plateau from the piazza, and stepping suddenly backward to observe a particular effect of the light among the trees on the cliff, trod upon the foot of a lady immediately behind him and nearly overthrew her. He turned immediately, with a word of apology, at the same time that a gentleman near her, who seemed to be in her immediate company, sprang to prevent her possible fall, venting meanwhile on thepresumed awkwardness of the aggressor a word of ill-disguised petulance:—
"You should be a little more careful, sir, I think, how you step upon ladies' feet and risk hurting them seriously."
"I beg a thousand pardons!" was the reply. "Certainly I did not know that there was a lady immediately behind me, and—"
The lady gave a sudden start, caught a quick glance at the speaker, and then recovered her equanimity so suddenly that perhaps not two of all the company observed the momentary agitation; while the gentleman interrupted the attempted apology, not too politely, with—
"Is your foot much injured, Miss Hayley?"
The answer made by the lady was in the negative, and in a tone that, though it trembled a little, proved her less petulant than her companion. But it is possible that "H. T.," as he has been known, did not pay that answer any attention whatever. As he turned he must certainly have seen the lady more or less distinctly in the moonlight, and yet had manifested no surprise at what he saw; but when the name was mentioned he gave a start that must have been noticeable by any acute observer. Had he really not noticed her before his attention was called by the mention of the name? or was the face one which he did not recognize while the name bore a talisman that commanded all his interest? Certain it is that he saw the lady now, distinctly; and equally certain is it that the face was the same which has met the gaze of the reader, a month before, on the piazza of the house at West Philadelphia.
Margaret Hayley, in very truth, dressed so darkly that at the first glance her attire might almost have been taken for black, and with not even one ornament to sparkle in the moonbeams, while that peculiarity of her raiment was made more notable by a light summer scarf or "cloud," of white berlin, thrown over her head to guard it from the night air, in a fashion somewhat oriental. Her proud, statuesquefigure rose erect as ever; and the same stately perfection of womanhood looked out from her dark eyes and beamed upon her pure, high brow, that had shone there before the falling of that blow which had so truly been the turning point of her life. The cheek may have been a shade thinner than a month before; and there may have been a shadow under the eyes, too marked for her heyday of youth and health; but if so the moonlight was not enough of a tell-tale to make the revelation.
The gentleman who had so promptly attended to the comfort of Margaret Hayley, and who did not seem averse to picking up a quarrel on her behalf, was dark haired and dark bearded, round-faced and rather fine-looking than otherwise, a little above the middle height, and wearing the uniform of a Captain on staff service. So much the eye of "H. T." took in at once, and he seemed to keep his attention somewhat anxiously on the two as the moment after they turned away and walked back towards the piazza, as if he would gladly have caught some additional word conveying a knowledge of the officer's personality. Nothing more was said, however, that could afford such a clue if one he really desired; and but a little time had elapsed when another subject of excitement arose, calculated to interest many of the hundreds who had already become partially drunk with the glory of the moonlight.
"The moon is high enough, now: let us see how the Old Man of the Mountain looks when his face is silvered!" said some one in the crowd; and the happy suggestion was at once acted upon. There were quite enough old habitues present to supply guides and chaperons for the new-comers; and in a moment fifty or more of the visitors went trooping away down the white sandy road through the glen and under the sweeping branches among which the moonbeams peeped and played so coquettishly.
Two or three windings of the road, two or three slight ascents and descents in elevation; some one said: "Here isthe best view;" and the whole company paused in their scattering march. A sudden break, opening upon a dark quiet little lake or tarn, was to be seen through the trees to the right; and a quarter of a mile away, hanging sheer over the gulf of more than two thousand feet sweeping down towards the foot of the Cannon—there, with the massive iron face staring full into the moonlight that touched nose and cheek and brow with so strange and doubtful a light that the unpractised eye could not trace the outlines, while the accustomed could see them almost as plainly as in the sunlight—there loomed the awful countenance of the Old Man of the Mountain. Some there were in that company, familiar with every changing phase of that most marvellous freak of nature, who thought that grand as it had before seemed to them when the sun was high in the heavens and the dark outline relieved against the bright western sky, it was yet grander then, in the still, doubtful, solemn moonlight.
Among those who had gone down to the edge of the little Old Man's Mirror for this view, were two of the sterner sex who happened to be without ladies under charge and to be separated from any other company. Directly, walking near each other, they fell together and exchanged casual remarks on the beauty of the night and the peculiarities of different points of scenery. They were the two who had first seen each other at the moment of alighting at the Profile little more than an hour before—"H. T." of the initials and the lady's smashed foot, and Halstead Rowan of the gymnastic spring from the coach-top. The first glance had told to each that there was something of mark in the other; and under the peculiar circumstances of that night they drifted together, without introduction except such as each could furnish for himself, but not likely to separate again without a much more intimate acquaintance,—just as many other waifs and fragments, floating down the great stream of life, have been thrown into what seemed accidental collision by a chance eddy, and yet never separated again until each had exercised upon theother an influence materially controlling the whole after course of destiny.
Eventually the two, both rapid walkers, had gone faster than the rest and become the leaders of the impromptu procession to the shrine of the Old Man, so that when the halt was called they were standing together and apart from the others, forty or fifty feet further down the glen and where they had perhaps a yet better view of the profile than any of the company. Both were dear lovers of nature, if the word "reverent" could not indeed be added to the appreciation of both; and standing together there, even in silence, the intuitive knowledge of the inner life of each seemed to bring them more closely together than introductions and a better knowledge of antecedents could possibly have done. Then the crowd tired of gazing and moved back towards the house, leaving the two standing together and probably supposing themselves alone. They were not alone, in fact; for under the shadow of the trees to the left, half way between the spot where the new friends were standing and that which had been occupied by the body of the visitors, were three persons continuing the same lingering gaze. These were the officer and two ladies who each found the support of an arm—Margaret Hayley and her mother, the latter of whom, it would thus seem, was also at the Profile under the escort of the military gentleman. Unobserved themselves, they had the two men in full moonlight below and could see them almost as well as in the broader light of day.
"Who are they, Captain Coles? Anybody we know?" asked the elder lady, speaking so low that the sound did not creep down to the two gazers.
"Both new-comers, I think," answered the military gentleman. "Yes, they both came in to-night; and one of them, Margaret, is the booby who stepped on your foot a little while ago, and whom I shall yet take occasion to kick before he leaves the mountains if he does not learn to keep out of people's way."
"I beg you will not allow yourself to get into difficulty on account of that trifling accident, and for me!" answered Margaret Hayley, while something very like a shudder, not at all warranted by the words, and that the Captain was not keen enough to perceive, swept through her form and even trembled the arm that rested within his.
"Difficulty? oh, no difficulty, to me, you know; and for you, Margaret, more willingly than any other person in the world, of course!" and Captain Hector Coles, confident that he had expressed himself rather felicitously, thought it a good time to bow around to Miss Hayley, and did so.
"You are quite right, Captain Hector Coles," said Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Low people, who do not even know how to walk without running over others, should be kept at their proper distance; and of course gentlemen and soldiers like yourself find it not only a duty but a privilege to afford to us ladies that protection."
This time Captain Hector Coles, immensely flattered, bowed round on the other side, to the elder lady.
"Hark!" said Margaret Hayley, in a louder voice than either had before used, and a voice that had a perceptible tremor in it like that of fright.
"What did you hear?" asked the Captain.
"Listen—I want to hear what that man was saying."
"H. T." was speaking, just below.
"No, I have never been here before," he said. "Strangely enough, some of the greatest curiosities of the continent are neglected by just such fools as myself, until too old or too busy or too careworn to enjoy them."
"You speak like a jolly old grandfather, and yet you are scarcely as old as myself," answered the rich, sonorous voice of Halstead Rowan. "Well, that isyourbusiness. The White Mountains are no novelty to me, or any other mountains, I believe, North of the Isthmus."
"Is there any thing finer than this, at this moment, among them all?"
"No, and I doubt if there is any thing finer on earth!" was the enthusiastic reply. "And by the way, evenIhave not happened to see the full moon on the face of the Old Man, before. It is a magnificent sight—a new sensation."
"How long has it stood so, I wonder? Since creation?" said the voice of "H. T.," "or did the Flood hurl those masses of stone into so unaccountable an accidental position?"
"Haven't the most remote idea!" answered Rowan, gayly. "I have often thought of it, though, when looking at the marvel in the sunlight. But I have never been able to get any farther back than the idea how the winds must have howled and the rains beaten around that immobile face, age after age, while whole generations of the men after whom the face is apparently copied as a mockery, have been catching cold and dying from a mere puff of air on the head or a pair of wet feet."
"The eternal—the immovable!" said "H. T.," his voice so solemn and impressive that it was evident his words were only a faint representation of the inner feeling.
"I know one thing that it has been, without a doubt," said Rowan. "When the whole country was filled with Indians of a somewhat nobler character than the miserable wretches that alternately beg and murder on the Western plains, there is not much question that they must have worshipped it as the face of the Great Manitou, looking down upon them in anger or in love, as the storm-cloud swept around it or the summer sun tinted it with an iron smile."
Halstead Rowan was speaking unconscious poetry, as many another man of his disposition has done, while those who sought to make it a trade have been hammering their dull brains and spoiling much good paper in the mere stringing of rhymes bearing the same relation to poetry that an onion does to the bulb of a tulip! Whether his companion caught the tone from him and merely elaborated it into another utterance, or whether he possessed the fire within himself and this rencontre was only the means of bringing out the spark, issomething not now to be decided. But he spoke words that not only made the other turn and gaze upon him for a moment with astonishment, but moved the three unseen auditors with feelings which neither could very well analyze. His dark face, tinted by the moonlight as the stony brow of the mountain was itself touched and hallowed, seemed rapt as those of the seers of old are sometimes said to have been; and his voice was strangely sweet and melodious:
"To me, just now," he said, "that iron face is assuming a new shape."
"The deuce it is!" answered Rowan. "Where?"
"'In my mind's eye, Horatio!'" quoted the speaker, and the other seemed to understand something of his mood. "Do you know that face may be nothing more than sixty feet of strangely-shaped stone, to others; but to me, at this moment, it is the Spirit of the North looking sadly down over our fields of conflict and saying words that I almost hear. Listen, and see if you do not hear them, too!"
How strangely earnestness sometimes impresses us, even when little else than madness is the motive power! Halstead Rowan, by no means a man to be easily moulded to the fancies of any other, found himself insensibly turning his ear towards the Sphynx, as if it was indeed speaking through the still night air!
"'I am the Soul of the Nation,'" the singular voice went on, speaking as if for the lips of stone. "'Storms have raved around my forehead and thunders have shaken my base, but nothing has moved me! Scarred I may have been by the lightning and discolored by the beating rain, but the hand of man cannot touch me, and even the elements can disturb me not. I have seen ten thousand storms, and not one but was followed by the bright sunshine, because Nature was ever true to itself. Be but true to yourselves, loyal men of the great American Union, and the nation you love shall yet be throned above the reach of treason as I am throned above thetouch of man—unapproachable in its power as I am fearful in my eternal isolation!'"
Halstead Rowan had ceased looking at the Sphynx and gazed only at its oracle, long before the strange rhapsody concluded; and Margaret Hayley, supported upon the arm of Captain Hector Coles, had more than once shuddered, and at last leaned so heavily upon that arm as to indicate that she must be suddenly ill. To the startled inquiry of the Captain as to the cause of her trembling, she replied in words that indicated her feeling to have been excited by the strangely-patriotic words, and by a request to be taken back at once to the Profile. That request was immediately heeded, and the three passed on up the road, where all the other company had some time preceded them.
But one expression more fell from the lips of the strange man, as the three moved away, and Margaret Hayley heard it.
"Why, you must be a poet!" said the Illinoisan, when his companion had concluded the rhapsody.
"No, I am only a lawyer, and you must not take all that we say for gospel, or even for poetry!" was the reply. "Come, let us go back to the house and imagine that we have had enough of moonlight."
The two followed up the road at once and overtook the three but a moment after. As they passed, "H. T." recognized first the shoulder-straps of the officer, and then the figure of the lady upon his left arm. Turning to see her face more closely, his own was for a moment under the full glare of the moon, and Margaret Hayley had a fair opportunity to observe every feature. Shaded as were her own eyes, their direction could not be distinguished; but they really scanned the face before them with even painful earnestness, a low, intense sigh of disappointment and unhappiness escaping her when the inspection had ended. She walked back with Captain Coles and her mother to the door of the Profile, and left them in conversation on the moonlit piazza, escaping up-stairs to herown room and not leaving it again during the evening. What may have been her thoughts and feelings can only be divined from one expression which fell from her lips as she closed the door of her chamber and dropped unnerved upon a chair at the table:
"Who can that man be? His voice, and yet not his voice! A shadow of his face, and yet no more like his face than like mine! Am I haunted, or has this trouble turned my brain and am I going mad? Another such evening would kill me, I think!"
There was the sound of horn and harp and violin ringing through the long corridors of the Profile that evening; and many of those who had shared in the glory of the moonrise and the solemn levee of the Old Man of the Mountain were joining in the dance that went on in that parlor which appeared large enough for the drill evolutions of an entire regiment. But few of the new-comers joined the revel for that evening; most of them, fatigued at once with travel and excitement, crept away to early beds in order to refresh themselves against the morning; and nothing remained, of any interest to the progress of this narration, except Captain Hector Coles walking up and down the long piazza for more than an hour after Margaret Hayley had retired, his boot-heels ringing upon the planks with a somewhat ostentatious affectation of the military step, Mrs. Burton Hayley meanwhile leaning upon his arm, and the two holding in tones so low that no passer-by could catch them, a conversation which seemed to be peculiarly earnest and confidential.
Yet there was still one occurrence of that night which cannot be passed over without serious injury to the character of this record for strict veracity. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, during a large part of the night, was in serious trouble which required the full exercise of her maternal vigilance—while Miss Marianna, deserted by her father who had surreptitiously smoked a short pipe in the edge of the woods and thence gone to bed and to sleep, wandered disconsolately round the parlor,dressed in more costly frippery than would have sufficed to establish two mantua-makers, unintroduced to any one, stared at with the naked eye and through eye-glasses, her freckles complimented in an undertone that she could not avoid hearing, the name of her dress-maker facetiously inquired after, and the poor girl, made miserable by being dragged by her silly parents to precisely the spot of all the world where she least belonged, suffering such torments as should only be inflicted upon the most unrepentant criminal.
But the peculiar trouble of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame has not as yet been explained, and it must be so disposed of in a few words. Ill health, on the plea of which she had started on her "summer tour," had really attacked her interesting family, or at least one highly-important member of it. Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, naturally a little sharp set after his long ride and accustomed to regard any supper with "goodies" on the table as something to be clung to until the buttons of his small waistband could endure no farther pressure—Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, as has already been mentioned, had remained at the table a little beyond the bounds of strict prudence. In other words, he had devoured beef-steak and fruits, fish and milk, biscuits and pickles, tea, pickled oysters and sweetmeats, until even his digestive pack-horse was overloaded. Very soon after supper he had petitioned to be taken to bed, and then unpleasant if not serious symptoms had been no long time in supervening. During a large part of the night there were a couple of chambermaids running to and from that part of the building, with hot water, brandy, laudanum, foot-baths and other appliances for suffering small humanity; while Master Brooks Brooks kept doubling himself up in all imaginable attitudes and crying: "Oh, mommy!" in a manner calculated to wring the heart of that motherly person,—to make Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, who wished to sleep, growl out some reasonably-coarse oaths between his clenched teeth,—and to induce wonder on the part of people who had occasion topass the front of the building or come out on the piazza, whether they did or did not keep a small menagerie of young bears, wolves and wild-cats in full blast on the second floor.