Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley—A strange Rencontre in the Parlor—Another Rencontre, equally strange but less pleasant—How Clara Vanderlyn faded away prom the Mountains—And how the Comanche Rider disappeared.
Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley—A strange Rencontre in the Parlor—Another Rencontre, equally strange but less pleasant—How Clara Vanderlyn faded away prom the Mountains—And how the Comanche Rider disappeared.
Breakfast was nearly over, the next morning, and many of the guests had left the tables, when Horace Townsend strolled into the parlor, attracted by the ripple of a set of very light fingers on the piano—something not usual at that early hour. He found the great room entirely unoccupied, except by the player; and he had half turned to leave the room in order to avoid the appearance of intrusion, when he ventured a look at the pianist and discovered her to be Margaret Hayley! Then he hesitated for a moment, bowed, and was again about to retire, when the young girl rose from the piano and advanced towards him. He was a man, past those years when the blood should rush to the face with the rapidity of that of a school-girl; but the dark cheek was certainly flame in an instant as she came nearer, and when she spoke his name his whole appearance evinced some feeling so much like terror that the object of it seemed to start back with a corresponding emotion. That was the first instance in which he had chanced to be alone for one moment with the lady, from the time of their first meeting at the Profile, and something might be forgiven a bachelor on that account; but some cause beyond this must have moved that man, accustomed alike to society, to the company of women and the making of public appearances.
If he tried to speak, his breath did not shape itself into audible words; and Margaret Hayley was very near him and had herself spoken, before he in any degree recovered from that strange confusion.
"Good-morning, Mr. Townsend," she said; and—mingled surprise and rapture to the man who had heard himself so denounced in her presence the night before!—she held out those long, slight, dainty white fingers to shake hands with him! An advance like that, and from her! That thought seemed almost to take away his breath, and he really permitted those tempting fingers to be extended for quite a moment before he took them.
"Good-morning, Miss Hayley," at length he uttered, in a voice low and perceptibly husky, taking the offered hand at the same instant, but scarcely holding it so long as even the briefest acquaintance might have warranted.
One instant's pause: the lady was not doing as ladies of her delicacy and gentle breeding are in the habit of doing under corresponding circumstances—she was looking the lawyer steadily and still not boldly in the face, penetrating inquiry in her eyes, as if she would read the soul through the countenance, and yet with an interest shown in her own which made the act a compliment instead of an insult.
"I am afraid that you are not a very cordial friend," at last she said. "I hoped that I had made one, the other day, after nearly drowning you; but last night you merely bowed without speaking, and this morning when you see me you attempt to run away!"
There was warm, genial, kindly pleasantry in her tone—pleasantry a little beyond what the proud face indicated that she would bestow upon any casual acquaintance; and perhaps that recognition did something to unlock the tongue that had been silent.
"You are very kind to remember me at all!" he said. "Some of us poor fellows of the rougher sex have reason to be glad to form new acquaintances or remember old ones; but beautiful women like yourself, Miss Hayley, are much more likely to wish to diminish the list than to increase it."
"What!—a compliment already!" she said, in the same tone of gayety. "But I forgot—you told me that you were alawyer, and I believe that you all have a sort of license to say words that mean nothing."
"Oh, you paid the first compliment!" answered Townsend, catching her tone, as they turned in the unconscious promenade into which their steps had shaped themselves, and walked down the still lonely parlor.
"I? How?" she asked.
"By noticing me at all!" was the reply.
"Very neatly turned, upon my word!—and still another repetition of the same compliment smuggled into it! Decidedly you must be a dangerous man in the presence of a jury."
"Let me hope thatyouwill not consider me so, and I shall be content with the other part of the reputation."
Neither said any thing more for a moment, though they were still walking together with any thing rather than the manner of comparative strangers. Then Horace Townsend paused in his walk, and said, his voice falling nearly as low as it had been at first:
"Miss Hayley, this is the first opportunity that I have enjoyed of speaking with you, away from the ears of others. Will you pardon me if I do not deal altogether in complimentary badinage, but speak a few words of earnest?"
"What can you mean, Mr. Townsend?" She looked at him for a moment, as if in doubt, then added: "Yes, certainly!"
"Then, to be candid—that is, as candid as I dare be," said the lawyer, "I have taken the great liberty of being very much interested in you, since the first day we met. I had no reason to expect you to be correspondingly impressed, but—"
"What amIto expect at the end of this, Mr. Townsend?" she interrupted him. "Are you sure that you are not about to say very imprudent words, out of time, out of place, and that may do much evil while they cannot accomplish any good?"
He saw her put her left hand to her heart, when she madethe interruption, as if some sudden pang had pierced her or some organic pain was located there; and all the past gayety of her manner was gone.
"I am perfectly sure, Miss Hayley!" he said, bowing; and the assurance was received with a nod of confidence. "I have only said what any gentleman of respectability ought to be able to say to any lady without offence—that I have been very much interested in you; and I was about to say that while I had no reason to expect my impression to be returned, yet I felt that I had arightto fair-dealing and no unfavorable prejudgment."
"Fair-dealing? prejudgment?" she uttered, in a not unnatural tone of surprise. "Does my conduct of this morning—oh, what am I saying?—Mr. Townsend, I do not understand you!"
"Of course you cannot, until I explain," said the lawyer. "I have just said thatyouhonored me too much, but I cannot extend that remark to some of your most intimate friends—Captain Coles, for instance—who may be—I hope you will excuse what may sound like an impertinence but is certainly not intended to be such—more nearly connected with yourself and your future plans in life than I have any right to know."
There was respectful inquiry in his tone, though he by no means put the remark as a question. Margaret Hayley recognized the tone but did not see the keen interrogation in his eyes at that moment, for her own—those proud, magnificent eyes—were drooped to the floor.
"By which you mean," answered the lady, "that you think it possible that Captain Coles is my betrothed husband."
"I am sorry to say—yes!" said the lawyer, his voice again dropped very low.
"Well, the remark, which amounts to a direct question, is certainly a singular one to come from a man who has no right—even of old acquaintance—to make it," responded Margaret. "And yet Iwillanswer it, a little more frankly than it was put! Captain Hector Coles is not, and neverwill be, any nearer in relationship to myself than you see him to-day."
"I thank you very much for the confidence, to which, as you say, I have no right," said Townsend. "It makes what I have yet to say a little easier. I beg you not to misunderstand me when I tell you that I was last evening an accidental listener to the story of my disgraceful conduct coming down the mountains, as told by the Captain at second-hand, as well as to his allegations that I was a coward and an adventurer."
Margaret Hayley did not say "What, eaves-dropping?" as the heroine of sensation romance or melo-drama would certainly have been called upon to do. She did not even question how he had heard what he alleged. She merely said:
"I am sorry, indeed, if you heard words that should never have been spoken."
"I did hear them," pursued the lawyer, "and I really did not suppose, this morning, that after hearing the statements made by the Captain, you would even have cared to pursue the very slight speaking acquaintance you had done me the honor to form with me."
"Had I believed them, I would not!" spoke the lady, frankly.
"And you didnotbelieve them?" Tone very intense and anxious.
"Not one word of them!" Tone very sharp and decided.
"God bless the heart of woman, that leaps to the truth when the boasted brain of man fails!" said Townsend, fervently. "Not every word that he said was a falsehood, but everyinjuriousone was so, if I know myself and what I do. May I tell you what really occurred yesterday on the mountain, so that you may better understand the next version?"
"I shall be very happy to hear your account," she replied, "for the incident must at all events have been a thrilling one."
"It was thrilling indeed, as you suppose," said the lawyer."People form romances sometimes out of much less, I fancy!" The two stood by the window, looking at the hurrying to and fro of drivers and passengers preparing for some late departures; and so standing, Horace Townsend briefly and rapidly related the facts of the adventure. Margaret Hayley did not turn her eyes upon him as he spoke, and a part of the time she was even drumming listlessly and noiselessly on the glass with those dainty white fingers; but that she was listening to him and to him only was evident, for the speaker could catch enough of her side-glance to know that eye and cheek were kindling with excitement, and he could hear the quick breath laboring in throat and nostrils almost as if she herself stood in some situation of peril. She was interested—he felt and knew it,—not only in the danger of Clara Vanderlyn and the rash bravery in riding of Halstead Rowan, but inhim—in the scape-goat of the occasion; and he was stirred by the knowledge to a degree that made a very cool and clear head necessary for avoiding a plunge quite as fatal in its effects as would have been that from the brow of the precipice over the gulf.
"And that is the whole story—a dull one, after all, I am afraid!" he said, not altogether candidly, perhaps, in conclusion.
"Dull? oh no, Mr. Townsend, every thing but dull!" was her reply. "I have seldom been so much interested in any relation. And the facts, so far as they relate to yourself, are very nearly what I should have supposed after hearing the story floating about the hotel."
"You seem to have something of the legal faculty—that of sifting out truth from falsehood, grain from chaff!" said the lawyer, looking at her a little searchingly.
"I? No, not always, though I may be able to do so sometimes," she said, somewhat sadly, and with a sigh choked in its birth. "I have made some terrible mistakes in the judgment of character and action, Mr. Townsend, young as my life is; but perhaps the effect of all that is to make me alittle more careful in the reception of loose statements, and so I may have lost nothing. And now—"
"—I have occupied as much of your time as you can spare me this morning," the lawyer concluded the sentence for her, with a smile calculated to put her at her ease in the dismissal.
"Well,youdraw conclusions pretty rapidly!" she said, turning her eyes upon him curiously. "Iwasgoing to excuse myself; and yet I should not be afraid to make a small woman's-wager that you err in at least half of your calculation?"
"As how?" asked the lawyer, somewhat surprised.
"Why, Mr. Townsend," answered Margaret Hayley (and what woman who held less true pride and less confidence in herself would ever have spoken so singularly, not to say boldly?) "it is at perhaps a rather early period in our acquaintance for me to return your candor with any thing that corresponds, and yet I feel disposed to waive the woman's right of reticence and do so. You think that I am already tired of your company and conversation, and that when you leave me I may go into pleasanter company. You are mistaken—I think you will not misunderstand me, any more than I did you a while ago, when I say that I quite reciprocate the interest and friendship you have expressed, and that I shallnotgo into more congenial associations when I leave you! There, willthatdo?"
Her eyes were smiling, but there was a tell-tale flush on either cheek, as she said this and extended those taper fingers, bending her proud neck the while, it must be confessed, alittleas a queen might do when conferring knighthood upon one of her most favored nobles. Horace Townsend, in strict propriety, should have taken that offered hand in the tips of his own fingers, bowed over it, and let it fall gently back to its place. He was not playing strict propriety, as, indeed, the lady had not been for the past few minutes; and whether he took that chance before the surprised owner of the hand could draw it away, or whether there was very little surpriseor offence in the matter, certain it is that though he did bow over the hand, he bowed too low—so low that his still warmer lips touched the warm fingers with a close, clinging pressure, and that the breath from those lips sent a tingle through every pulse of that strange girl, who was either dangerously frank or an arrant coquette.
That rape of the fingers perpetrated, Townsend turned away, too suddenly to notice whether his action had planted yet deeper roses on the lady's cheek. Margaret Hayley went back towards the piano, without another word, apparently to re-commence her suspended musical exercises, and the lawyer passed through the door leading into the hall. He did not do so, however, sufficiently soon to escape the notice of Captain Hector Coles, who, apparently on a voyage of discovery after the truant Margaret, strode into the parlor just as the other was leaving it, and as he nodded managed at the same time to stare into the lawyer's face in so supercilious and insulting a manner that he fairly entitled himself to what he did not receive—a mortal defiance or a blow on the spot! It was plain that he recognized Margaret Hayley at the piano, and that he saw she must have been alone with the object of his suspicion and hatred: was there not indeed some cause for the face of the gallant Captain assuming such an arrogant ferocity of aspect as might have played Gorgon's head to a whole rebel army? But the awkward meeting did not seem seriously to disturb the young lady: she looked up from her keys, saw the foes in the door-way, saw the glance they interchanged, and then dashed those bewitching fingers into a German waltz of such startling and impudent brilliancy that it seemed to accord almost premeditatedly with certain points in her own character.
Here, to Horace Townsend, the curtain of that morning shut down. He passed on and did not see the meeting between Captain Hector Coles, and "the lady" (more or less) "of his love," which may or may not have been cordial and agreeable to an extreme!
Another of those inevitable dashes, here. They are very useful, as they prevent the necessity of a steady and unbroken narration which would not be at all like real life—that thing most unsteady and most constantly broken into fragments.
The reader, who is perhaps by this time somewhat sated with White Mountain scenery (though, sooth to say, no gazer, however old a habitue, ever was so)—the reader is to be spared any further infliction, except as one remaining point of personal adventure may require the advantage of appropriate setting; and the mountains themselves are soon to fade away behind writer and reader, as they have faded away amid longing and lingering looks from the eyes of so many, losing their peaks one by one as they swept up Northward by rail from Gorham or rolled down Southward by coach through the long valley of the Pemigawasset to Plymouth. The thousand miscellaneous beauties of the White Mountain Notch, grander than those at the Franconia but far less easy of intelligent description—the magnificent long rides down the glen and over the bridges that span the leaping and tumbling rock-bedded little Saco—the Willey House with its recollections of a sad catastrophe and its one-hundred-and-fifty-eighth table being cut up and sold in little chips at a dime each, as "the one used by the unfortunate Willey Family,"—all these must wait the eye that is yet to see them for the first time, or linger unrecounted in the memories of those who have made them a loving study in the past. Personal adventure must hurry on, like the ever accelerating course of the goaded and maddened nation, and eliciting the same inquiry—whither?
Two days following the events already recorded, and all the different characters involved in this portion of the life-drama, yet lingered at the Crawford. On one of the two days another ascent of Mount Washington had been made; but with the exception of Mrs. Burton Hayley, her daughter and Captain Hector Coles, all those people peculiarly belonging to us had already made the ascent, and it was the intention of the Philadelphia matron (perhaps a little influenced by the storyof the Vanderlyn peril) to go up herself and take up her small party from the Glen House by carriage, when her stay at the Crawford should be completed.
In all that time we have no data whatever for declaring the state of affairs existing between Halstead Rowan and the lady whose auburn hair had lain for those few blissful moments on his breast. Probably no explicit love-declaration had passed between them; and Mrs. Vanderlyn and her arrogant son were sufficiently familiar with all the modes by which those who wish to be together can be kept apart, to prevent any of those dangerous "opportunities" which might otherwise have brought an immediatemesallianceupon the stately house of Vanderlyn. If the would-be lovers met, they only met beneath watchful eyes; and Halstead Rowan, who had already displayed that amount of dash and recklessness in personal exposure indicating that an elopement down the mountain roads, with a flying horse beneath him and his arm around the lady's waist, would have been the most congenial thing in life to his nature,—even had Clara Vanderlyn been weak enough to yield to such a proposal, bore all the while within him too much of the true gentleman to lower himself by a runaway alliance, or to compromise the character of the woman he wished to make his wife by wedding her otherwise than in the face of all who dared raise a word of opposition. So there seemed—heigho, for this world of disappointments, hindrances, and incongruities!—little prospect that any thing more could result from the meetings that had already been so eventful, than an early and final parting, and two lives shadowed by one long regret that the fates had not ordained otherwise.
But little more can be said of the fortunes, during those two days, of Horace Townsend and the lady of the proud eyes and the winning smile. Two or three times they had met and conversed, but only for a moment, and they had by no means ever returned again to the sudden cordiality and confidence of that first morning. Something in the manner ofMargaret Hayley seemed to give token that she was frightened at the position she had assumed and the emotions of her own heart (might she not well have been—she who but a month or two before had been clasped to the breast of an accepted lover and believed that she held towards him a life-long devotion?); and something in the demeanor of Horace Townsend quite as conclusively showed that he was treading ground of the solidity of which he was doubtful, and impelled to utter words that could not be spoken without sacrificing the whole truth of his manhood! Captain Hector Coles had believed his name an assumed one and looked after the initials on his handkerchief to satisfy himself of the fact; and the reader has found reason to believe that there was really an assumption: did that departure from truth already begin to assert its penalty, when he was brought into contact with a woman who showed her own candor so magnificently? Strange problems, that will be solved eventually without any aid from the imagination.
Once during that two days there had been a collision between the lawyer and the V. A. D. C., not one word of which, probably, had reached the ears of the lady in whose behalf it had occurred, from the lips of the politic Captain, or from any of those who saw and heard it,—as it certainly had not been hinted to her by the other party in the rencontre.
That collision had happened in this wise.
On the afternoon of the same day on which the very pleasant interview with Margaret Hayley took place in the parlor of the Crawford, Horace Townsend strolled into the billiard-saloon. Since the night before, in one particular direction, he had been decidedly ill-tempered, not to say ferocious; and however he might have been softened for the moment by the encounter of the morning, in one respect that encounter had left him much more likely to assault the man who had calumniated him so foully, than he could have been before a certain assurance had been given him on that occasion. Then the officer's stare into his face, when leaving the room, had nottended to remove any of his bile; he did not believe, it is probable, that he would stand any the worse with the peculiarly constituted Margaret Hayley, in the event of an insult to the man who had insultedhimcoming to her knowledge; and in short he had been all day prepared, at any time when he could do so with most effect, to repay him, interest included, in his own coin of ill-treatment. How soon or how effectually his opportunity was coming—theopportunity of all others for a stab in a vital part,—he had no idea when he entered the billiard-room.
Several gentlemen were there, some playing and others smoking and in conversation. In one corner of the room, conversing with two or three others, Captain Hector Coles was giving a graphic account of the Battle of White Oak Swamp, in the retreat from the Peninsula, during one period of which, according to his account, General —— was wounded and all the field officers of a whole division cut up, so that he, though only on the staff and without positive command, was obliged to direct all the movements and eventually to head three different charges by which the enemy, four or five times superior in numbers in that part of the field, were finally repulsed with great slaughter. The story, as told, was a good one, and Captain Hector Coles played the part of Achilles in it to perfection, especially as there did not happen to be present (and there is strong reason to believe that he had assured himself of the fact in advance) a single officer who had shared in the Peninsular campaign. He was emphatically, just then, the hero of the hour, in that most assured of all points of view, a military one. It does not follow that Horace Townsend had been an actor in the Peninsular campaign, but he certainly arrogated to himself some knowledge of very small details that had taken place at Glendale, for he was guilty of the great rudeness of breaking in upon a conversation in which he was not included, with a question that served as a sort of pendant to the story of the Captain:
"Let me see—it was in one of those charges, Captain, orwas it while carrying some order, that you had that bad attack of giddiness in the head and were obliged to dismount and lie behind one of the brush-heaps in the swamp for an hour?"
"Who the——." The Captain, who had not recognized the voice or seen the intruder, began to ask some question which he never finished, for he checked himself as suddenly as if he had been about committing a serious blunder. But he recovered himself very quickly, and pieced-out the remark so that it seemed very much as if he had pursued his original intention.
"Who the —— areyou, Horace Townsend as you call yourself, to put in your remarks whengentlemenare in conversation?"
"Oh, I beg pardon, I did not know that you were ashamed of it. I happened to hear Colonel D—— relate the little circumstance not long after the battle; and I thought, from your leaving it out, that you might possibly have forgotten it."
The gentlemen present stared from one to the other and said nothing. Such plain speaking was a novelty even among the excitements of mountain life. The Captain began by having a very white face, and ended with having a very red one.
"Colonel D—— lied, if he said any thing of the kind!" he foamed.
"I will tell him you say so, the next time I meet him," was the cool reply, "and you can try the little question of veracity between yourselves."
"No, I will try it withyou!" the Captain almost shouted. "You are the liar—not Colonel D——, and I will shoot you as I would a dog."
"You will be obliged to do it by waylaying me, then," answered the lawyer. "Apart from any objection I may have to duels in the abstract, I certainly am not going out with agentleman," and he laid a terrible stress upon the word—"agentlemanwho picks pockets."
"Gentlemen! gentlemen!" expostulated one or two at that period.
"Recall that word, or I will shoot you on the spot!" cried the Captain, his face now fiery as blood itself, and his hand moving up to his breast as if he really followed the cowardly practice of carrying a revolver there, while meeting in peaceful society. If he had a weapon and momentarily intended to draw it, he desisted, however.
"I will not recall the word, but I will explain it," answered the lawyer. "I heard you confess last night, Captain Hector Coles, in the midst of about half an hour's falsehoods about my poor self, that you had picked my pocket of a handkerchief, the night before in the ten-pin alley. After that and the little indisposition at White-Oak Swamp, I think you will all agree with me, gentlemen, that I am under no obligations to afford that person any satisfaction."
"Coward!" hissed the Captain. At the word a shiver seemed to go over the lawyer's frame, but he only replied:
"Yes, that was what you called me last night! Excuse me, gentlemen, for interrupting a very pretty little story, but I am going away and the Captain will no doubt continue it."
He did go away, walking down towards the house, a little flushed in face but otherwise as composed as possible. Captain Hector Coles did not tell out his story, for some reason or other; and the moment after he too went away.
"What the deuce is it all about?" asked one of the gentlemen when they had both departed.
"Haven't the least idea," said another. "Though, by the way, the Captain has a very pretty woman with him—I wonder if there should not be a lady at the bottom of the trouble, as usual?"
"Seemed to be some truth in that story about getting giddy in the head, by the way it hit!" said a third.
"Don't look much like cowards, either of them," said a fourth. "And, now that I think of it—wasn't that the name—Townsend—ofthe fellow who leaped into the Pool the other day over at the Profile?"
"Don't know—shouldn't wonder—well, let them fight it out as they please—none ofourbusiness, I suppose!" rejoined one of the others; and the party dispersed in their several directions.
Such was the scene in the billiard room; and it was not strange that more than a day after, no report of it had come to the ears of Margaret Hayley or her mother, through the medium of any of the bye-standers; for the persons most nearly interested are not those who first hear such revelations of gossip. That neither the Captain nor Horace Townsend should personally have spoken of it to Margaret is quite as natural, for reasons easily appreciated. That young lady, with two lovers more or less declared, was accordingly very much in the dark as to the peculiarly volcanic character of her admirers and the chances that at some early day they might fall to and finish each other up on the Kilkenny-cat principle, leaving her with none!
The third day after the ascent of Washington by our party witnessed its disruption in some important particulars. The morning stage down the Notch took away the Vanderlyns, on their way to Lake Winnipiseogee and thence to Newport. They had been in the mountains little more than a week, but seen most of the points of interest at the Franconia and White Notches; and other engagements, previously formed, were hurrying them forward, as humanity in the New World is always hurried, whether engaged in a pleasure tour or a life labor. They left a vacancy behind them, and foretold the gradual flight of all those summer birds who had made the mountains musical, and the coming of those long and desolate winter months when the rooms then so alive with life and gayety should all be bare and empty, the snow lying piled in valley and on mountain peak so deeply that no foot of man might venture to tread them, and the wild northern blastwailing through the gorges and around the deserted dwellings as if sounding a requiem for the life and love and hope fled away.
They left a blank—all the three; and yet how different was the vacancy caused by each of the three departures! Mrs. Vanderlyn, a lady in the highest fashionable acceptance of the term, but so proud and stately that her better qualities were more than half hidden beneath the icy crust of conventionalism,—had dazzled much and charmed to a great degree, but won no regard that could not be supplied, after a time, by some other. Her son Frank, handsome and gifted but arrogant beyond endurance, had won no friends wherever he moved, except such friends as money can mould from subservience; and his going away left no regrets except in the breasts of the landlords whom he lavishingly patronized and the servants whom he subsidized after the true Southern fashion. But Clara Vanderlyn, who seemed to have fallen among the mountains with the softness, innocence and tenderness of a snow-flake—Clara with her gentle smile, her sweet, low voice and wealth of auburn hair,—the friendsshehad formed from the rough ore of strangerhood and then from the half-minted gold of mere acquaintance, were to be numbered only by counting the inmates of the houses where she made her sojourn; and there was not one, unless the exception may have been found in some spiteful old maid who could not forgive her not being past forty, angular and ugly, or some man of repulsive manners and worse morals who had been intuitively shunned by the pure, true-hearted young girl—not one but lifted up a kind thought half syllabled into breath, as they caught the last glimpse of the sunny head—"God bless her!"
It is a rough, difficult world—a cold, hard world, in many regards. The brain is exalted at the expense of the heart, and scheming intellect counted as the superior of unsuspicious innocence and goodness. "Smart"—"keen"—"sharp"—these are the flattering adjectives to be applied even to the sisters we love and the daughters we cherish, while in thatone word "soft" lies a volume of depreciation. And of those educated with such a thought in view, are to be the mothers of our land if we have a land remaining to require the existence of mothers. Is not a little leaven of unquestioning tenderness necessary to season the cold, hard, crystallizing mass? Will womanhood still be that womanhood which has demanded and won our knightly devotion, when all that is reliant and yielding becomes crushed or schooled away and clear-eyed Artemis entirely usurps the realm once ruled by ox-eyed Juno? Will there be any chivalry left, when she who once awoke the spirit of chivalry stands boldly out, half-unsexed, the equal of man in guile if not in bodily strength, and quite as capable of giving as of requiring protection? And may we not thank God for the few Clara Vanderlyns of the age—the gentle, impulsive, unreasoning souls, who make the heart the altar upon which the first and best tribute of life is to be laid—who love too soon, perhaps, and too irrevocably, but so escape that hard, cold mercantile calculation of the weight of a purse and the standing of a lover in fashionable society, upon which so many of their sisters worse wreck themselves than they could do by any imprudent love-match that did not bring absolute starvation within a twelvemonth?
This is something of a rhapsody, perhaps; and let it be so. It flows out, unbidden, under the impulse of a gentle memory; and sweet Clara Vanderlyn, when she goes to her long rest, might have a worse epitaph carved upon the stone above her head, than the simple legend: "She lived to love."
But if the going away of Clara Vanderlyn left a blank in the social circle at the Crawford, what must have been the effect produced by it upon Halstead Rowan, the chivalrous and the impressible, with a heart as big as his splendid Western physique, who could have little prospect of ever meeting her again except under circumstances of worse disadvantage than had fought against him in the mountains, and who could entertain no more hope of ever wedding her without bringingher painfully down from her position in society, than he could of plucking one of the stars harmlessly from its place in heaven!
The Illinoisan was not upon the piazza when the coach drove away. If any farewell had been made, it had been made briefly and hurriedly, where no eye but their own could see it. Horace Townsend thought of all that has been here set down, and looked around for Rowan at the moment of their departure; but he was invisible. The lawyer had himself a pleasant word of farewell and shake of the hand as she stepped to her seat in the coach, from the young girl whose dangerous perch upon the pinnacle of the mountains he was not likely soon to forget; and then the door closed and she disappeared from his sight perhaps forever in life, leaving him thinking of the pleasant afternoon, so few days before, when he gazed for the first time upon her sweet face as they came up from Plymouth and Littleton,—and of the romance connected with her which had since been crowded into so brief a space.
He saw nothing of Rowan for an hour after. Then he met him walking alone up the road north of the house, with his head bent down a little and something dim and misty about the eyes that even gave a suspicion of the late unmanliness (that is what the world calls it!) of tears. He raised his head as he recognized the lawyer, and held out his hand in a silence very unlike his usual bold, frank greeting. Townsend, who may all the while have had quite enough matters of his own to demand his whole attention, could not help pitying the subdued manner and the downcast look that sat so strangely upon the usually cheerful face. There had been nothing like it before, within his knowledge—not even on the night when he had been so foully insulted by Frank Vanderlyn at the Profile.
The lawyer knew, intuitively, what must be the subject of conversation to which the mind of Rowan would turn, if his lips did not; and he felt quite enough in his confidence to humor him.
"I did not see you this morning," he said.
"When they went away?—no!" was the answer. No fear that his listener could misunderstand who "they" were, and he did not display the cheap wit of pretending to do so.
"You look down-hearted! Come—that will never do for the mountains—especially for the boldest rider and the most dashing fellow that has ever stepped foot among them!" and he laid his hand somewhat heavily on the shoulder of the other, as if there might be power in the blow to rouse and exhilarate. It did indeed produce the effect of making him throw up his head to its usual erect position, but it was beyond any physical power to lighten the dark shadow that lay upon his face.
"You are a good fellow as well as a gentleman, Townsend," he said. "I wishIwas a gentleman—one of the miserable dawdling things that know nothing else than small talk and the use of their heels. Then, and with plenty of money, I should know what to do."
"And whatwouldyou do?" asked the lawyer.
"Marry the woman I loved, in less than a month, or never speak to a woman again as long as I lived!" was the energetic reply. "As it is, I am a poor devil—only a railroad conductor! What business haveI, with neither money in my pocket nor aristocratic blood in my veins, to think of a woman who has white hands and knows nothing of household drudgery?"
"A woman, however," said Townsend, "who could and would learn household drudgery, and do it, for the sake of the man she loved—well, there is no use in mincing the matter—foryou,—and think it the happiest thing she ever did in all her life!"
"God bless her sweet face! do you think so? do you really believe that personally she likes me well enough to marry me if my circumstances were nearer her own?" He had grasped Townsend by the hand with one of his own and by the arm with the other, with all the impetuosity of a school-boy;but before the latter could answer he dropped the hand and the tone of inquiry, and said: "Pshaw! What use in asking that question?—Iknowshe could be happier with me than with any other man in the world, and that makes the affair all the more painful."
"Heigho!" said the lawyer, "you are not the only man in the world who does not see his way clearly in matrimonial affairs, and you must not be one of the first to mope."
"I suppose not," replied the Illinoisan. "But then you, with your wealth and education—you can know nothing of such a situation except by guess; and so your sympathy is a little blind, after all."
"Think so?" asked Horace Townsend. "Humph! well, old boy, confidence for confidence, at least a little! Look me in the face—do you see any thing like jest or trifling in it?"
"No, it is earnest, beyond a doubt."
"Then listen for one moment. Halstead Rowan, I do not believe that there is any barrier between Clara Vanderlyn and yourself, that cannot be removed if you have the will to remove it. Now for myself. What would you think—" He stopped and seemed to consider for a moment, while the other watched him narrowly and with much interest. Then he went on: "You saw me meet—well, we will mention no names—the lady down at the house, the same night on which you chanced upon your own destiny."
"Yes," answered the Illinoisan.
"You thought, no doubt, that it was a first meeting. And so it was, on her part, for she had never before met Horace Townsend, to know him. But what would you think if I should tell you that I had seen and lovedher, many months before—that she was then engaged to be married to a very different person, though a man in the same profession—that I love her so madly as to make my life one long torture on her account—that I am throwing myself into her company, under circumstances that if she knew them would make her shrink away from me with loathing—and that such a barrierexists between us that I have not much more hope of winning her than of bending down one of yon mountain peaks to kiss me, while I can no more avoid the trial than the drunkard can keep away from his glass or the madman escape his paroxysm!"
"Is all that true?" asked Rowan, who had been looking at the speaking face with still increasing wonder.
"Every word of it, and more!" was the reply.
"Thenmysituation is nothing, and I have been whining like a school-boy before I was half whipped!" exclaimed the Illinoisan. The effect intended by the other had been produced: he had been made to see that there could be even worse barriers between man and woman, than differences of family and fortune. And once teach any man that there is something worse that might have happened to him, than that which has indeed happened—much is achieved towards bringing him to resignation if not to content.
"I have told you all this," said the lawyer, "partially because I felt that I had no right to be acquainted with so much in your situation while you knew nothing of mine, and partially because I was really anxious to show you that others than yourself sometimes find rocks in the bed of that pleasant stream which the poets call 'true love.' And now that I have gone so far, involving reputation as well as happiness, I know that you will do me the only favor I ask in return, and forget that I have said a word on the subject."
"I have forgotten it already, so far as repeating it to any mortal man is concerned," replied the Illinoisan. He paused an instant, as his friend had done before, and then he added: "Meeting you has been the pleasantest—no, one of the pleasantest incidents of my days among the mountains, and I am glad that you have made me feel so much nearer to your confidence at the moment of parting."
"Parting? What, are you going away already?" asked Townsend.
"At once," answered Halstead Rowan. "I should think,though, that you would scarcely need to ask the question! My friends and myself are going to start back for Littleton immediately after dinner, and on to Montreal to-morrow. Do you think that I could sit at that table, as I feel just now, more than one meal longer, and think of the vacant chairs? No—I am a baby, I suppose, and God knows whether I shall ever grow any older and wiser!"
"God forbid that you evershouldgrow so old and so wise as to be able to master your heart altogether!" said the lawyer. "I am sorry to part with you, for I too, have made a pleasant acquaintance. But you are right, no doubt. Try a little change of scene; and you will be calmer next week, if not happier."
They were now near the house, and walked on for a moment in silence. Suddenly Rowan, catching up the last words at some distance, turned short around and said:
"Townsend, I am going to change something besides scene—life! I am going back into the army again, not for a frolic this time, but as a profession. Officers aregentlemen, are they not, even in fashionable society?—and would not a pair of shoulder-straps make somebody even out of a railroad conductor?"
His tone was half badinage, but oh, what a sad earnest lay at the bottom of it! His companion understood him too well to reply, and the conversation was not renewed. They parted at the piazza a moment after. Two or three hours later, after a long grasp of the hand which went far to prove that strong friendship between men has not become altogether a myth since the days of David and Jonathan, of Damon and Pythias, they parted at the same piazza once more and for a period that no human calculation could measure. Horace Townsend and Halstead Rowan were almost as certain never to meet again after that parting moment, as if one of the two had been already done with life and ticketed away with the dead Guelphs and Bourbons!
A Strange Character at Breakfast—"The Rambler" and his Antecedents—What Horace Townsend heard about Fate—Going up to Pic-nic on Mount Willard—The Plateau, the Rope and the Swing—Spreading the Banquet—The Dinner-call and a Cry which answered it—A Fearful Situation.
A Strange Character at Breakfast—"The Rambler" and his Antecedents—What Horace Townsend heard about Fate—Going up to Pic-nic on Mount Willard—The Plateau, the Rope and the Swing—Spreading the Banquet—The Dinner-call and a Cry which answered it—A Fearful Situation.
At breakfast, the next morning after the departure of the Illinoisan, a somewhat strange character was called to the attention of the guests at the Crawford; and a few of them, sitting near him, entered into conversation with him when they discovered the peculiar habits of life and mind which had for years made him an object of interest to visitors among the mountains. He had been absent southward of the range, in Pinkham Notch, at Glen Ellis Falls and other wild localities lying north of Conway, for the preceding two or three weeks, only arriving the night before; and very few of the persons then present at the Crawford had seen him except in half-forgotten meetings in previous years. He called himself and was called by others who knew him (very few of whom, probably, knew him by any other name) "The Rambler," and his habits of life were said to justify the appellation most completely, as his appearance certainly accorded with the preconceived opinions of an itinerant hermit.
He was a man evidently past fifty, with a face much wrinkled by time and roughened by exposure—with a high forehead bald nearly to the apex of the head, long grizzled hair, rapidly approaching to white, tumbled about in careless profusion, beard straggling and ungraceful and graying as fast as the hair, and something melancholy and unsettled in the eye which indicated that his wandering habits might have had an origin, many years before, in some loss or misfortune that made quiet a torture. In figure he was rather below thanabove the middle height, with a certain wiriness in the limbs and a hard look in the bones and tendons of the hand, suggestive of unusual activity and an iron grip.
But when they came to know more of him from the explanations of the servants and a little listening to his own conversation, those who on that occasion first met him had reason to confess that the Rambler needed all the iron nerve and hard endurance indicated by his physique. They believed him to be a man of means, and he certainly spent money with freedom if not with lavishness, the supply seeming to be as slight and yet as inexhaustible as that of the widow's cruse. He spent very little of it upon his own person, however: such a suit of coarse gray woollen as he wore that morning, with a slouched hat and strong brogan shoes, usually completing his outer equipment. Sometimes he carried a heavy cane, but much oftener went armed with a stout staff of his own length, cut with ready hawks-bill jack-knife from a convenient oaken or hickory sapling and trimmed from its superabundance of knots by the same easily-managed substitute for a whole "kit" of carpenters'-tools.
This man, as it appeared, had never missed coming to the mountains for a single summer of the preceding fifteen years. Whence he came, no one knew; and whither he went when his season was over (hisseason had very little to do with the fashionable one, in commencement or duration), was known quite as little. He might be looked for, they said, at the Profile, the Crawford, the Glen, the Alpine, the White Mountain or down in Pinkham Notch, at any time after they began to paint up and repair the houses for the reception of visitors, in early June; and he might be expected to make his appearance at any or all of those places, any day or no day, during the fall season and even up to the time when the last coach-load rolled away in September and the first snows began to sprinkle themselves on the brows of Washington and Lafayette. He never remained at any one of the houses more than a few hours at a time, carrying away from each a few sandwiches, alittle dried tongue, some cheese and crackers in a small haversack, and sleeping nine nights out of ten in the open air, with no pillow but a stone or a log of wood, and his slouched hat. Most of the time he was alone on the tops of the most difficult peaks or at the bottom of gorges where no foot but his own would be likely to tread; or he was to be seen dodging across a path, staff in hand and haversack on side, as a party was making some one of the ascents,—rather shunning any company then seeking it, and yet evidently neither misanthropic nor embarrassed when thrown into society and forced into conversation. Wherever he wished to go he went on foot, even when thirty or forty miles of rough mountain roads and paths were to be measured; and no man, they averred, had ever seen him set foot over the side of a vehicle or recognize the right of the animal man to be drawn about from place to place by his brother animal the horse.
So far the Rambler, according to the accounts given of him, was merely a harmless monomaniac—harmless even to himself, as all monomaniacs arenot. But beyond that point, the servants and some of the old habitues averred, came positive madness. He had been mad, since the first day of his coming to the mountains and perhaps long before, on the idea ofclimbing. Many had seen him go up to those peaks and down into those ravines before mentioned, and found as little disposition as ability to follow him. He seemed to climb without purpose, except his purpose might be the mere reckless exposure of himself to danger at which every one except himself would draw back with a shudder. And that he did this without any motive outside of himself for the action—that he had no thought of awakening admiration by such exhibitions,—was evident from the fact that he was just as likely to make some ascent or descent of the most reckless fool-hardiness, when he did not know of the presence of any other person within possible sight, as when he had groups of horrified spectators; and that loneliness was not a condition precedent to such an attempt, was just as evident from thefact that he never seemed to desist because one person or fifty came suddenly upon him and "caught him in the act." He seemed to live in a climbing world of his own, in which he was the only resident and all the others merely chance visitors who might or might not be in the way when he found it necessary to hang himself like a fly on the crags between heaven and earth.
We are making no attempt whatever at analyzing the mentality of this singular man, whom many will remember as having met him during some period of the last dozen years, at one or more of the Notches of the White Mountains. As well might the attempt be made to survey one of his own mountain tops or discover the superfices of one of the mighty masses of perpendicular rock that so often afforded him a footing at which the chamois would have given up in despair and Hervio Nano (that human "fly on the ceiling") writhed his boneless limbs in a shudder! We are only roughly daguerreotyping the man as he appeared, preparatory to one terrible incident which made him an important character in this narration. Were any effort to be made at explaining his strange and apparently purposeless predilection, perhaps one word would come as near to furnishing the explanation as five hundred others—excitement. One man drinks liquors until he goes beyond himself; another invites to his brain the tempting demons of opium, hasheesh or nicotine; another perils his prosperity and the very bread of his family at play; still another plunges into pleasure so deeply that the draught is all the while maddening agony; and yet another claps spur on heel and takes sword in hand and rides into the thick of the deadliest fight, without one motive of patriotism or one thought of duty: and all these are seeking that which will temporarily lift them above and beyond themselves (alas!—that which will just as assuredly plunge thembelowthemselves, in reaction!)—excitement. Who knows that the poor Rambler, bankrupt in heart, hope and memory, had not tasted all the other maddening bowls and found them too weak towean him from his hour of suffering, so that when the frequent paroxysm came he had no alternative but to place himself in some position where the hand and the foot could become masters of every thought and feeling, that the rude minstrelsy of deadly danger might thus charm away the black moment from his soul!
All this is mere speculation—the man may have been nothing more nor less than a maniac; and yet his conversation, which was coherent and marked by entire propriety, did not create any such impression.
No one who has made any study of the scenery of our Northern Mountains fails to know that many of them (and almost all the White Mountains that have full descent on either side to either of the Notches) in addition to the bald scarred brows of cliff that on one side or another seem like faces lifting themselves in stern defiance to the storm,—have chased down them, from brow to foot, channels or "schutes" from which the torrent or the lightning has originally shorn away trees, herbage and at last earth, every year wearing them deeper and making more startling the contrast of the almost direct line of bluish gray cliff, seeming the very mockery of a path that no man can walk, with the green of the living grass and foliage and the white skeletons of the dead birches, that border them on either side. Perhaps no feature of the mountain scenery is more certain to awake a shudder, than such "schutes," as looked up to from below or down upon from above; as the thought of a passage-way is inevitable, followed by the remembrance of the headlong fall of any man who should attempt a progress so nearly perpendicular, and that followed by the imagination that the gazer has really attempted it and is falling. Mount Webster and Mount Willard, at the White Mountain Notch, are more marked than almost any of the others, by such features; and certain terrible adventures along those "schutes" make part of the repertoires of guides and the boasting stories of old habitues. With one of those descending Mount Willard, and the pointsof scenery immediately surrounding it, we shall have painful occasion to make more intimate acquaintance in this immediate connection.
These "schutes" and their topography were the subject of conversation at the breakfast-table that morning, not alone on account of the presence of the Rambler, which might have provoked it, but from the fact that a pic-nic on the top of Mount Willard, in the near vicinity of one of those tempting horrors, had been for some days in contemplation and the wagons were being prepared for going up and the cold food packing away in baskets and hampers at the very moment of that discussion.
"You must know the mountains remarkably well," one of the gentlemen at the table was saying to the Rambler.
"I ought to do so," was the reply. "There is scarcely a spot from Littleton to Winnipiseogee that my foot has not touched; and I may almost say that there is not a spot where I have not eaten or slept." He said this in a manner as far removed from any desire to make a display of himself as from any thing like modesty—merely as the fact, and therefore a matter of course.
"I heard you speaking of climbing the schutes a moment ago, but I did not quite catch what you said," spoke another. "You certainly cannot hold on to the rocks alone, when they are so nearly perpendicular, can you?"
"Oh, no," answered the Rambler, "of course that would be impossible. I suppose I have a sure foot and a steady hand, and those schutes always have trees and shrubbery beside them, all the way down. It is no trouble to hold on tothem—at least it is not so tome."
"Ugh!" said yet another—"rather you than me! Such exposures are terrible!" and he shuddered at the picture his imagination had been drawing.
"They may be terrible, and I suppose that they are so, to some people," was the quiet reply. "Habit is every thing, no doubt. Some of you might walk into battle, if you havebeen there before, a good deal more coolly than I could do, even though you had a good deal more to sacrifice in life than myself in the event of a bullet going astray."
"Bullets never go astray, nor do men fall down the rocks accidentally!" put in a breakfaster who wore a white neckcloth but no mock-sanctimonious visage. "I am afraid, brothers, that you all forget the Overruling Hand which guides all things and prevents what thoughtless people call 'accidents.'"
"Ah!" said Horace Townsend. "Domine, do you carry fatalism, or predestination, if you like the word any better,—so far as to believe that every step of a man is supernaturally protected?"
"It is supernaturallyordered, beyond a doubt: it may beprotected, or quite the opposite," was the minister's smiling reply. "And I might go a step further and say that every man is supernaturallyupheld, when doing a great duty, however dangerous, so that that result may follow, whether it come in life or death, in success or failure—which may be eventually best forhimas well as best for the interests of heaven and earth, all men and all time."
"A sublime thought, and one that may be worth calling to mind a good many times in life!" was all the reply that the lawyer made, and he took no further part in the conversation. He sat back in his chair, the moment after; and Margaret Hayley (who had now become to some extent his "observer," as he had erewhile filled the same office to Halstead Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn)—Margaret Hayley, sitting at a considerable distance up the table on the opposite side, saw that his face seemed strangely moved, and that there was intense thought in the eye that looked straight forward and yet apparently gazed on vacancy.
Meanwhile the Rambler had not yet ceased to be an object of interest; and a little warning (such as he had undoubtedly heard a good many times during his strange life) was to follow the inquiries and the speculations.
"Then you probably do not think, Domine," said one of the interlocutors in response to the remark which seemed to have struck Horace Townsend so forcibly, "that our friend here is under any especial supernatural protection when climbing up and down places where he has no errand whatever except his own amusement."
"I might think so, if I had the power to decide that he was really attempting no good whatever to himself or others," was the reply. "But as I cannot so decide, though I certainly think such exposures of life very imprudent, I shall be very careful not to express any such opinion."
"Well, sir, I certainly wish you no harm," said another, "but if all accounts are true, I think that you expose yourself very recklessly, and I expect, some day, to hear that the pitcher you have carried once too often to the well is broken at last."
"Perhaps so," said the Rambler, without one indication on his features that he was either frightened or moved by the suggestions. "I am long past the middle of life—my limbs are not quite so nimble as they once were—and if I do make a miss-step some time and get killed, I hope that they will allow me to lie peaceably where I fall!"
After which strange wish the conversation went no further. Breakfast was just breaking up; and a few moments afterwards some who were standing on the piazza saw the Rambler stepping away down the road, haversack of bread, cheese, and meats strapped under his left arm, and his weather-beaten slouched hat thrown forward to shield his eyes from the morning sun that came streaming low and broad up the Notch.
It was perhaps an hour afterwards when two wagons drew up at the door, ready to bear some score of the visitors up Mount Willard for the expected pic-nic. A third wagon had started ahead, bearing provisions enough to have supplied a small army—all to be wasted or made into perquisites for the servants by a frolic dictated a little by ennui and nota little by a love for any thing novel or merry. Two or three of the young men staying at the house had been up Mount Willard a few days before, and on their return they had brought such flattering accounts of a magnificent broad, green plateau which they had discovered (how many times it had before been discovered is not stated) not far from the end of the carriage-road, on the southern brow of the mountain and overlooking the cascades and the edge of the Devil's Den,—that the effect produced on the as yet untravelled people at the Crawford by the announcement was very much the same that we may suppose to have been manifested at the Court of Castile and Leon when Columbus came back with the Indians, the birds'-feathers and the big stories. The young men had signalized their own faith in the desirableness of the land as a place of permanent occupation, by possessing themselves of a small coil of inch rope, lying unused in one of the out-houses since the re-erection of the Crawford (after the fire of the winter before), in 1859, carting it in a wagon up the mountain and to the tempting plateau, and there using one end of it and a seat-board to make such a stupendous swing between two high trees that stood on one side of the green space, as had probably never been seen before in any locality where the clouds every morning tangled themselves among the branches. One of them had declared that he had the "highest old swing," in that "scup," ever taken by mortal, and a good many believed him. The swing, with its hundred feet or more of super-abundant rope, had remained as a permanence; a few of the ladies at the house had been coaxed into going up Mount Willard especially to indulge in that "scupping" which ordinarily belonged to low lands and lazier watering-places; and for two or three days before preparations and arrangements for a pic-nic had been in progress, destined to culminate on that splendid cloudless morning of early August.
So much premised, nothing more need be said than that all the few persons connected with this relation and yet remainingat the Crawford, were members of the pic-nic party of twenty or twenty-five, a pleasant mingling of both sexes but not of all the ages; that Captain Hector Coles and Margaret Hayley went up especially in each other's company, as was both usual and proper; that Mrs. Burton Hayley, getting ready to go on to the Glen and a little absorbed in one of the ministerial brethren whom she had found, did not ascend a mountain on any such vain and frivolous errand as a mere pic-nic; that Horace Townsend rode up, in a different wagon from that occupied by Margaret and her cavalier, and with no one in charge, or even in especial company—precisely as he had gone up Mount Washington; that the party, in both wagons, was very merry and tuned to the highest possible pitch of enjoyment; that the usual jolts incidental to very bad mountain roads were periodically encountered, and the little screams and jerkings at protecting coats, ordinarily consequent thereupon, were evoked; that a few magnificent views down the Notch and among the sea of peaks were enjoyed, with a few contretemps among the riders adding zest thereto; that nearly every one would have been willing to make oath that they had been "all but upset down the mountain" several times, when they had not really been even once in that threatening predicament; and that after something more than an hour of riding they found themselves and their pic-nic preparations at the end of the carriage-road and very near the diminutive promised land which they had been invited and enticed to come up and occupy.
It was indeed, as those who had never before visited the place found upon reaching it through a little clump of trees and bushes beyond the termination of the road—a spot well worthy the attention of any visitor to the Notch. Nothing else like it, probably, could have been found in the whole chain of the White Mountains, following them from the head waters of the Androscoggin to the mouth of the Pemigawasset. For the purposes of this veracious narration it becomes necessary to describe some of the features of the spotmore closely than they would demand under ordinary circumstances; and the reader may find it equally necessary to make close application of the details of description, in order fully to appreciate that which must inevitably follow, beyond the control of either reader or writer.
At some day, no doubt many a long year before, whether caused by the melting of the snows at the top of the mountain or by some one of those internal convulsions which the earth seems to share with the human atom who inhabits it,—there had been a heavy "slide" from near the peak on the south-south-western side, coming down perhaps a quarter of a mile before earth and stone met with any check. Then the check had been sudden and severe, from some obstruction below, and as a consequence the slide had gone no farther downward but spread itself into a broad plateau of fifty or sixty feet by one hundred, nearly level though with a slight inclination downward towards the edge. There had chanced to be but few rocks at the top of this mass of earth, and the southern exposure and shelter from the north winds had no doubt tended to warm and fertilize it, so that while much of the top of the mountain was bald, scarred and bare, and all the remainder covered with wild, rough forest—this little plateau had really grown to be covered with grassy sward, of no particular luxuriance but quite a marvel at that bleak height. Behind it, upward, the mountain rose gradually towards the peak, seen through a younger growth of trees that had found their origin since the catastrophe which swept away all their predecessors. On both sides the thick tangled woods closed down heavily, leaving no view in either direction, except through their swaying branches; while in the direction of the slide itself, no tree intervening between the plateau and its edge, one of the most beautiful perspectives of the whole mountain range spread itself out to the admiring gaze.
Looking close as possible down the side of Mount Willard, at that point, the trees and undergrowth of the gorge below, some fifteen hundred or two thousand feet away, could bediscerned, through that slight blue haze which marks distance and faintly suggests the great depth of the sky. Lifting the eye, it swept south-westward and took in a terribly rough range of wooded hills and minor mountain peaks, with a broad intervale lying between, through which glittered and flashed the little stream with its white cascades which gave name to the spot, hurrying down in foam and fury to join the Saco in the broad valley below. Further westward and at still greater distance rose the mountains lying behind Bethlehem, with the top of Lafayette, of the Franconia range, rising yet higher and beyond all, touched with the warm light of the noonday sun and supplying a perfect finish to what was truly an enchanting picture.
But at the edge of the plateau itself lay that which must command the most special notice in this connection. Whether formed before the slide or consequent upon it, one of the most precipitous of all the "schutes" of the mountains had its start at the very centre. It had worn away the earth of the plateau in the middle, until it reduced it nearly to the stone of the first formation; while at the side of the narrow trough thus formed, thick trees and undergrowth clustered as far down as the eye could extend, with one sharp bend outward at the right, and striking out still beyond that, the massive roots of a fallen tree, of which the trunk lay buried in the earth and covered with undergrowth, while one long thorn or fang of the root hung half way across the chasm and suggested that there of all places, above the dizzy depth beneath, one of those eagles should sit screaming, that are supposed ever to have kept position on some such outpost, shouting hoarse rage and defiance through far away and desolate Glencoe, ever since the massacre of the Macdonalds. Still below this and almost touching the stony bottom of the trough of the schute, another and much smaller fang of root extended, the broad bulk of the side-roots forming a close wall between the two branches and the hedge of undergrowth, almost as impervious to the hand of man and as unfavorable for any purpose of clinging,as the sloping stone itself. It was a dizzy thing to look down—that schute, as some of the stronger-sexed, clearer-headed and surer-footed of the pic-nic party found by venturing near the edge, and as they did not feel it necessary to reassure themselves by any second examination.
The baskets and hampers had been brought over from the baggage-wagon, at the same time that the party themselves made their arrival. Why it is that people who go out upon pic-nics, in any part of the country or indeed in any part of the globe, with high expectations of much enjoyment which is to be found in other modes than the use of the masticative apparatus,—why it is, we say, that all such persons, even though they may have eaten heartily not two hours before, become ravenously hungry the very moment they reach the ground designated and are good for nothing thereafter until they have rendered themselves helpless by over-eating,—why all this is, we say once more, passes human understanding; but the fact remains not the less patent. Let any frequenter of pic-nics think backward and try whether he or she can remember any instance to the contrary,—and whether the conclusion has not been more than once arrived at, in his or her particular mind, that the true aim and object of the pic-nic, as an institution, is to enjoy the eating of a bad dinner away from the ordinary table instead of a good one properly spread upon it.
The party on Mount Willard was mortal, and they bowed at once to this unaccountable weakness of mortality. Five minutes of inspecting the ground and viewing the scenery; and then, while the more selfish members of the company or those who had eaten heartier breakfasts, flirted, strolled, or indulged in the doubtful pleasures of the swing (which hung between two tall trees at the left of the plateau, with a loose hundred feet of rope at the root of one), the less selfish or the more hungry applied themselves to spreading out on the dry sward the half dozen of cloths that had been brought up from the hotel, and to laying out upon it, in various stages andphases of damage and disarrangement, eatables which had been appetizing enough when they left the Crawford, but of which, now, they would have been seriously puzzled to separate the fish from the farina or the maccaroni from the mustard.
The helpful ladies and their male assistants had just succeeded in producing that amount of confusion among the articles on the spread table-cloths which was supposed to represent arranging the lunch,—and the call for volunteers to disarrange it more effectually with forks and fingers was about to be made,—when one of the gentlemen looked up suddenly as a shadow passed him.
"Our friend the Rambler," he said as the other, with a slight nod, recognized his notice and passed on down the plateau towards the thicket at the north-western edge.
"Why yes," said one of the ladies. "He walked and we rode, and yet he seems to have been up before us, for he is coming down from the farthest side of the mountain."
"Shall I call him and ask him to take a share in our dinner?" asked one of the male stewards.