A Disaster To Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame—Exit into the Bottom of the Pool—Nobody that could Swim, and Margaret Hayley in Excitement—"H. T." in his element, in two senses—Another Introduction and a new Hero—Scenes in the Profile parlor—Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn—The Insult.
A Disaster To Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame—Exit into the Bottom of the Pool—Nobody that could Swim, and Margaret Hayley in Excitement—"H. T." in his element, in two senses—Another Introduction and a new Hero—Scenes in the Profile parlor—Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn—The Insult.
"But what hasbecomeof the crazy old philosopher?" asked the same elderly gentleman who had first introduced the subject,—only a moment after Halstead Rowan had delivered himself of his speculations concerning the centre of the earth, China and suicide, given at the close of the last chapter.
"Oh," answered Rowan, "I was asking Jennings about him this morning, before we came away from the Profile. Did you ever hear of the mode in which the two Irishmen conducted their little debate, which ended in a couple of broken heads?"
"I do not know!" laughed the old gentleman.
"Well, they debated physically—they held what they called a little 'dishcussion wid sticks'! Poor old Merrill got into a debate with the Sheriff of Coos County, last spring a year, Jennings tells me, and he carried it on with anaxe, nearly killing the official. The result of all which was that he was lugged off to jail at Wells River and the Pool is bereaved."
"Sorry that his boat is not here, at least," said the old gentleman. "We have just a nice party for circumnavigating the Pool; and I do not know that even the letter from Queen Victoria and the lecture would be so much of a bore, now that there is no danger of them."
"Couldn't manage to get up a boat, unless we improvised one out of a log," said the Illinoisan, "and that would be a little unstable, I fancy. And by the way, I think I never sawa place more dangerous-looking for a sudden tumble than that deep black pool, or one more difficult to get out of than it would prove without something afloat to depend upon. So we must give it up—the glory of the Pool has departed!Sic transit gloriabig hole in the woods!"
At that moment, and when the attention of the whole company had been drawn to the peculiar depth and quality of the Pool by the last observations—an event took place which may or may not have been paralleled in the earlier history of that peculiar wonder of nature. Sambo, of those days when the negro only half ruled the great Western republic instead of ruling it altogether,—related a story about a 'coon hunt of his, in which an episode occurred at about the time when he had climbed out upon an extending limb that was supposed to have the 'coon at the end. "Just then," said Sambo, graphically—"just then I heard sumfin drap, and come to look, 'twas dis yer nigger!" The party of visitors at the Pool heard "sumfin drap" about as suddenly and unexpectedly; and when they had time to look around them, they discovered that one of their number was missing—not a very valuable member of the combination, but still one that was supposed to have the usual immortal soul and antipathy to sudden death.
There never was a troublesome boy of an age corresponding to that of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, who did not have the propensity for climbing developed in exact proportion to the incapacity for climbing at all; and Master Brooks Brooks had not done half mischief enough that morning to be content without making another effort. As the party climbed down to the Pool, some of the members had spoken of the clearness of the water and the coolness which it was said to possess even in the heat of midsummer; and one of the ladies had extracted from her reticule one of those telescopic ring drinking-cups of Britannia which are found so convenient in touring or camping-out. Captain Hector Coles had volunteered to play Ganymede to the rest of the company,and stepping down to the edge of the Pool, balanced himself with one foot on a projecting stone, stooped down and dipped up some of the sparkling coolness, which was thereupon passed around from hand to hand and from lip to lip. That done, Master Brooks Brooks had been allowed to possess himself of the cup, very much to the disgust of the owner, but inevitably—and to make various demonstrations with it, around the verge of the water. For a moment every one had lost sight of him—his careful mother included; and during that moment he had climbed round to the western side of the Pool, on the high rocks, where he stood brandishing the cup in a series of motions which varied between mischief and idiocy. Then and there an accident, not uncommon to persons who climb to high places and are not careful of their footing there, had happened to the young scion of the baronial house of Cunninghame, who, losing balance in one of his gyrations, tumbled down some twenty or thirty feet of rock and went splash! into the Pool, just where the waters seemed deepest, darkest and most unfathomable!
Exit from view Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, with a fair prospect, to all appearance, that he would carry out the laughable theory of Halstead Rowan, and if he ever again came to light at all, do so in a drowned condition at the antipodes. Droll enough, in a certain sense, but by no means droll in another, for that he would be drowned, even in that insignificant little puddle of water, was almost beyond doubt, and there were supposed to be maternal feelings even beneath the ridiculous finery of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame! All heard the cry of fright that he gave in falling, and the splash as he struck the water; and at least a part of the company not only saw him disappear beneath the surface, but caught glimpses of him as he went on down—down—down towards the bottom with the unerring steadiness of a stone.
They saw him sink, but they did not see him rise again—not even in the time which should have secured that result. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame uttered a scream when she sawthe boy strike the water, then yelled out: "Patsey! oh, my poor Patsey!" an exclamation entirely enigmatical as referring to a person bearing no such name,—then finally fell back into the arms of one of the old gentlemen in such a way as seriously to threaten his tumbling in after the boy, and without the least necessity for shamming nervousness to ape the "quality." She had indubitably fainted.
The situation was a peculiar one. Scarcely twenty seconds had elapsed since the boy's fall, but an hour seemed to have passed. He did not rise. It was likely that he must have been killed in the fall or struck a rock below and crushed his poor little head. Still other seconds, growing to more than a minute, and he did not rise. It was beyond doubt that he would never rise again, alive. And what could be done to save him? Nothing—literally nothing, as it appeared. All the party were ladies, except five men—Captain Hector Coles, Halstead Rowan and three others, all the latter white-haired and past the day for heroic exposure. Halstead Rowan had his wounded hand wrapped in a heavy bandage which would have disabled him in the water as thoroughly as if he had lost the limb at the elbow. For either of the old men to plunge into the Pool would have been suicide. Margaret Hayley stood beside Captain Hector Coles, the only young and unwounded man, when the accident occurred; and after one moment her eyes turned upon him with a glance that he too well understood.
"I am ashamed to say it, but I cannot swim one stroke!" he replied to that glance of half appeal and half command. The glance—unreasonably enough, of course—expressed something else the instant after.
"Oh, shame!—can nothing be done to save him?" she cried with clasped hands and in a tone that manifested quite as much of the feeling of mortification as of anxiety. At that period nearly all the women present broke out into cries of terror, as if help could be brought to the helpless by the appealing voice.
"Good heavens, ladies, what is the matter?"
It was the voice of "H. T." that spoke, and the man of the initials stood on the other side of the Pool, where he had emerged from his laborious walk over fallen trees and broken rocks from the Flume. He had his hat in his hand and was wiping the perspiration from his hot brow.
Margaret Hayley, more moved beyond herself than any of the others present (the poor mother had not yet recovered consciousness) was the first to answer; though she little thought that perhaps the destiny of a whole life was involved in the few words then to be spoken.
"Oh, sir, if you can swim, for heaven's sake try to save that boy! He has fallen into the Pool, there—there—" and she pointed with her hand to the very depth of the dark water—"and he must be at the bottom!"
"Heisat the bottom, without doubt, if he has fallen in!" was the answer. "I saw him filling his pockets with bright stones, up at the Flume, and he has probably enough of them about him to keep him at the bottom till doomsday." Then, for the first time, the anxious watchers knew the reason why even in the death-struggle the body had not risen—the poor little fellow had been loading himself down with those tempting, fatal stones, to make more certain the doom that was coming!
"Can you swim, sir? I asked you if you could swim!" Margaret Hayley's voice rung across the Pool, with no little impatient petulance blended with the evident anxiety; and she seemed totally to forget, as people will forget on some occasions, that she had never been introduced to the man whom she interrogated so sharply.
"Icanswim!" was the answer and the only answer. With the word he threw off his coat and kicked off the convenient Congress gaiters that enveloped his feet; and in ten seconds more he had leaped high into the air and headlong into the dark waters at the spot indicated by the hand of Margaret. So sudden had been all this, that scarcely onerealized, until he had disappeared, the whole peril he encountered.
"He will strike the stony bottom and kill himself!" said one of the elderly gentlemen.
"Hot as he was, he will die with the chill, if he ever comes out!" said the second, who had medical warrant for knowing the probable consequences of such an act. Whereupon all began to realize that two deaths instead of one might be the probable event; and Margaret Hayley set her teeth hard and clasped her hands in the agonized thought that perhaps her words had driven him to the rash leap, and that he must be either that thing for which she had been so long looking, a man incarnately brave,—or willing to go out of his own nature at her command, after less than a single day's acquaintance—the latter feeling one not slow to awaken other and warmer companions in the bosom of a true woman!
After those words had been spoken, dead silence reigned except as broken by a sob of deadly anxiety from one of the ladies who could not control the fear that oppressed her. And how long that silence of oppressive anxiety lasted! It might have been a moment—it might have been five years, for any capacity of measurement given to a single member of that waiting group scattered over the rocks. Only the whilome watcher by a sick bed which might be one of death, at the instant when the crisis of disease was reached and the next minute was to decide between a life of love and usefulness and the drear silence of the grave—only the man who has lifted his faint signal of distress on a drifting wreck at sea, when a sail was in sight, the last crust eaten, and night and storm coming to end all,—only one or the other of these can realize the long agony of such moments and the eternity which can be compressed into the merest fraction of time!
They had perhaps waited sixty seconds after the disappearance of the would-be rescuer beneath the dark waters of the Pool, and already every one had given him up for lost,—when a ripple agitated its surface, a white-sleeved arm cameup, then a figure bearing another. It battled wearily towards the shoaler part of the Pool, touched bottom and struggled shoreward, dropped its burthen with one glance upon it, and then toppled over—both out of danger from the water, but both apparently dead alike!
In an instant all those above had rushed down to the margin, and while some caught the drowned boy and attempted to restore the life that seemed so hopelessly fled, others, and the medical man among them, devoted more than equal anxiety to the man who appeared to have paid so dearly for his heroism. He was senseless, but his pulse still beat—the doctor discovered so much; and a fairer hand than that of the doctor sought the heart and found that the motion of that mysterious red current which bears the whole of life upon its bosom was not yet stilled forever. The hand was that of Margaret Hayley, who had drawn the head of the half-drowned man upon one knee while she kneeled on the bare stone with the other, and who seemed to feel that if that man died his blood would be upon her head and upon her soul! A dangerous position, Margaret Hayley, whether he lives or dies, for the woman who but yesterday dreamed that she kept her early love still undimmed in her heart, however the object of it might be clouded in shame and banished from her presence forever! Is that new ideal found already, and found in a man so wrapped in mystery that his very name has never yet been spoken in your presence? Fie! fie! if this is the eternity of love, about which lovers themselves have raved and poets worse raved in their behalf, any time these past five hundred years!
There is no intention of mystifying this scene, or even of prolonging it. Whatever might have been the danger, that danger was past, and the shadow of death did not loom ghastly out of it. The vigorous shaking, rolling and rubbing to which the inanimate Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame was exposed, under hands which proved themselves expert in that operation if in no other, soon restored the breath to his nostrils,though it left him a limp rag to be taken up in arms and carried away by his now recovered and half-addled mother. There was a sharp cut upon his head, and the blood flowed freely, but the wound had no depth or danger. The insensibility which had fallen upon his preserver, induced much more as was believed by the sudden chill of that ice-cold water acting upon a heated system, than even by his long exertion in recovering the little fellow's body from the bottom of the pool—this soon gave way beneath the continued rubbing bestowed upon wrists and temples, and the warmth induced by the wrapping of all the shawls and mantles in the company about his shoulders and feet. He moaned once, only a few minutes after the efforts for his resuscitation had been commenced, and a moment or two later opened his eyes and saw what face bent over him most closely. Something else than the chafing and the unaccustomed robes then sent blood to cheek and brow; and with a strength which no one had believed him to possess he sprang to his feet, to sink down again the moment after into a sitting posture but unsupported.
In that position he for the first time appeared to glance round upon the company and to recognize the whole situation. Especially his eye fell upon Captain Hector Coles, who stood at a little distance, his arms folded and nothing in his appearance indicating that he had taken any part in the labors of resuscitation, while his face looked undeniably saturnine and ill-humored. Had the mere fact that the head of a half-drowned man lay for a few moments on the knees of a lady supposed to be under his peculiar protection, so much moved the gallant warrior of the Union army, or was something more decided lying at the bottom of his observance? Perhaps words already spoken during the late progress of this narration may have indicated the state of feeling in the breast of the captain: if not, future developments will have the duty of making plain all that may be yet doubtful in that regard. At all events, something inthat man's face gave to the brown cheeks of "H. T." a warmer color than they had before attained, and to his frame a strength which sent him once more to his feet, throwing off the shawls and mantles which enveloped him, and standing barefoot and in his shirt-sleeves, his hair yet plastered and dripping, his garments yet clinging to his person, the most unpicturesque of figures, and yet one of the noblest possible to employ the artist's pencil—a man fresh from one of the great perils of disinterested benevolence.
Certainly Margaret Hayley saw nothing antagonistic to romance in that tall, erect figure, half-draped though it was and shivering yet with cold and weakness. It is not impossible that the dusky brown of the face glowed with something of a sacred light, to her eyes—a subject for her waiting hero-worship, after that sad feeling of an opposite character which it had so lately been her duty to manifest. Nothing else than such an estimation could well explain, in a woman of her overweening pride, movements which took place immediately after, and which bore their fruit, at no distant day, in placing her in a position of such terrible conflict with herself that no calamity occurring beneath the waters of the Pool but might have been reckoned a mercy in comparison.
Halstead Rowan, too sure of his admiration of the conduct of his new friend to be in a hurry about expressing it, had done what his wounded hand did not prevent his doing, by springing across the stream below and bringing the discarded shoes and coat from the rock where they lay. All the rest, except poor Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, yet busy with her partially resuscitated boy, crowded round the new hero of the hour to offer their thanks and congratulations; but it was Margaret Hayley who took him by the hand as he stood, unmindful of the scowl of Captain Hector Coles that gloomed upon her, and said:
"I do not know, sir, by what name to thank you—"
"I believe I am right in calling you Miss Hayley," was the answer, in a voice as yet somewhat weak and tremulous."My own name is Horace Townsend, and my business is that of a lawyer at—at Cincinnati." So we, like those of the company who had noticed the initials without taking the trouble to possess themselves of the whole name by the arrival-book at the office, have the blanks filled at last, and may discard the use of the two mysterious letters.
"I was only half intentionally the means, Mr. Townsend," the young girl went on, "of plunging you into a situation of danger without the least right to do so; and yet I do not know that Icanbe sorry for the liberty I have taken, as it may have been the cause of saving a life that would otherwise have been lost, and of my witnessing an act of disinterested generosity which I can never forget, or forget to honor, while I live."
"You do me altogether too much honor," was the reply, in a somewhat steadier voice. "I have really done nothing, except to make an exhibition of myself by my weakness. There was no danger to me in the water, for I am a good swimmer and ought to be able to dive well; but I suppose that I stayed too long under, for I could not find the little fellow at once, and the chill of the water no doubt affected me, after getting warm in climbing over those logs. That is all, and I really hope you will all forget that the unpleasant affair has occurred, as I shall certainly do after I have found a suit of dry clothes."
He spoke pleasantly, but with nothing of the rattling gayety which seemed to characterize his rival of the day—the hero of the bear-stakes; and once again while he was speaking, Margaret Hayley seemed strangely moved and partially shuddered at something in the tones of the voice. As he finished, he bowed and turned away, as if quite enough had been said, and the lady also moved away a step or two and rejoined her escort. Halstead Rowan came up with the coat and shoes, and as he dropped them on the rock at the feet of Townsend grasped his hand with his own unwounded one, with a pressure so warm and manly that it told volumes of respect and regard.
"Iam nowhere!" he said. "I dared you over that log;but you have gone where I should not like to follow, and done it for something, while mine was merely a prank. And by the way—" they were at that moment a little apart from the others, and Rowan spoke low—"do you know where your head lay when you came to?"
"Hush! for heaven's sake, hush!" said Townsend, quickly and with something in his face that made the other pause instantly. The conversation, at that point, was not renewed there and then.
A portion of the company had by that time commenced ascending the steps, carrying the abated boy-nuisance and accompanying his mother. Townsend managed to draw on the discarded shoes over his wet stockings, put on his coat and accompanied the rear-guard with very slight assistance, enjoying a continued walking-bath, but no doubt consoled for any discomfort by the reflection that he had been where few men had ever plunged and come out alive,—and perhaps yet more moved by some other reflections of a much more mixed character.
An hour later, the whole party had reached the Profile House once more, and Horace Townsend, as he named himself and as we must continue to name him in deference to his own statement, was the happy possessor of a dry suit, a slight headache and an eventual nap which left him fresh as if he had bathed in the Pool as a hygienic measure. Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame needed longer renovating, but he came round during the afternoon, with the fatal facility of those who are of no use in the world, and was quite ready for supper. And what a buzzing there was about the Profile all the afternoon, while those who had witnessed the affair at the Pool detailed it, with additions, to those who had remained at the house, and those who had not caught the name or address of the stranger ran to the book to satisfy themselves, and speculations as to his married or single state were indulged in, and the Cincinnati lawyer underwent, without his being thoroughly aware of the fact, all the mental manipulationsand verbal remouldings incidental to any one who treads out of the common path, whether creditably or discreditably, among the half idle and more than half ennuyée habitues of a watering place.
One or two additional peeps at events of that afternoon must be taken, before passing on to those of the evening, which were to prove quite as momentous in some regards.
Peep the first.Margaret Hayley kept her chamber all the afternoon, pleading headache and fatigue, while Mrs. Burton Hayley and Captain Hector Coles "did" Echo Lake and talked very confidentially. A large part of that time the young girl lay on her bed, her eyes closed but by no means sleeping—thinking, thinking, thinking, until her brain seemed to be in a whirl and all the world unreal.
Peep the second.At a certain hour in the afternoon, unknown then to the other members of the Vanderlyn family but too well known to them afterwards, as the sequel proved, Halstead Rowan, rapidly improving if not indeed presuming upon his acquaintance of the morning, enticed Clara Vanderlyn away to the ten-pin alley and inducted her into the art and mystery of knocking down bilstead pins with a lignum vitæ ball, apparently to the satisfaction of that young lady, who should certainly have held herself above such an amusement of the athletic canaille. If the lady, with two hands, beat her instructor with one, he was no more than justly punished.
Peep the third.Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, walking through one of the corridors, heard two young ladies, accompanied by a gentleman, say: "Patsey! oh, my poor Patsey!" in such dolorous tones and with what seemed so meaning a look towardsher, as tended to recall an unfortunate exclamation at the Pool very forcibly to her recollection, and to put her into a frame of mind the exact reverse of felicitous. This was not improved by the discovery that Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had fallen into the company of certain stage-drivers, at the bar, and had imbibed whiskey with them to an extent which rounded his brogue but did not assure the steadinessof his perpendicular or add to the respectability of his general demeanor.
And now to the event of the evening, which seemed eminently fit to close a day so full of adventure that the movements of a dozen ordinary days might have been compressed into it. Most of this, from reasons which will eventually develop themselves, is to be seen through the eyes of one who has been before called "the observer."
When Horace Townsend came out late from supper that evening, after a meal at which the succulent steaks, the flaky tea-biscuit and the sweet little mountain strawberries had not been quite so fully enjoyed as they might have been with a little additional company at table,—harp, horn and violin were again sounding in the long parlors, as they had been the evening before, and much more attention was being paid to them than when the full moon was their momentary rival. Perhaps not less than half the beauty, grace and gallantry then assembled at the Profile, were gathered under the flashing lights, dancing, promenading, flirting, and generally floating down the pleasant stream of moderate watering-place dissipation. The Russian "Redowa" was sounding from brass and string as he entered the long parlor from the hall; and among the figures sweeping proudly by to that most voluptuous of measures, he instantly recognized two whose identity could not indeed have been very well mistaken under any circumstances. The larger and coarser figure wore on one of its hands a glove several sizes too large—one, indeed, that might have been constructed by some glove-maker of the Titan period: Halstead Rowan was whirling Clara Vanderlyn lazily around in the dance.
The strange introduction of the morning, then, had already produced its effect, and the possible romance to be built out of that rescue was coming on quite as rapidly as even a sensation novelist could have anticipated. Horace Townsend, whose eyes seemed to be wandering in search of some face or figure which did not fall under their view, but who hadbeen gazing with undisguised admiration, for some hours the previous day, on those of this very Clara Vanderlyn—Horace Townsend thought, as he saw the manly arm of Rowan spanning the pliant white-robed waist of his partner, that seldom could the old illustration of the rugged oak and the clinging ivy be better supplied,—and that if fate and fortune had set, as they too evidently seemed to have done, an eternal bar between the two, they had predestined to remain apart one couple whom the fitness of nature would certainly have joined. His frank, hearty, manly energy, deficient in some of the finer cultures and at times approaching to roughness, and her gentle, womanly tenderness, with almost too much of delicate refinement, seemed mentally to blend in the thought of the future and of the children likely to spring from such a union, as physically stood in relief and pleasing contrast the close-curled dark hair and the shower of waving gold.
Passing still further down the room, either in that quest which has before been hinted at, or in the search for a vacant seat among the male and female wall-flowers, Townsend came upon the mother of the young lady. Mrs. Vanderlyn was standing beside a centre-table, under one of the chandeliers, an illustrated book in her hand, and apparently absorbed in the contemplation of some of the engravings after Landseer and Corbould. But books have been known, many times in the history of the world, to be used for the same purpose as fans or fire-screens, (or even spectacles, for that matter), and looked over; and the lawyer felt a sudden curiosity awakened to examine theeyes, especially as the lady was standing in such a position as to command the dancers.
He was not at all disappointed in the surmise which he seemed to have formed. The haughty matron had no eyes for her book, but really had her gaze fixed, with a close pressure of the eye-balls against the brows, on her daughter and Halstead Rowan. And no one who had only seen it under more favorable circumstances, would have believed it possible that a face of such matronly comeliness could be brought tolook so harshly—even vindictively. The eyes were literally fierce; and the mouth was set with a firm, hard expression which brought the full lower lip perceptibly over the upper.
Suddenly the observer saw the features relax and the whole expression change. He turned instantly and half involuntarily, and saw that a substitution had taken place in partners. Without quitting the floor, Miss Vanderlyn had accepted the proffered hand of a young Boston exquisite who was already rumored around the Notch to be the heir of a paternal half million,—and was whirling away in another polka. Rowan was gone. A second glance showed that he had not left the room, but that he stood far back in one of the corners, alone and silent, and his eyes, heedless of the amount of observation which their glance might excite, fixed in profound admiration on the beautiful girl whom he had just quitted. Then the expression of his face seemed for the moment to change, and the same emotions might have been read there that had startled at least one of the spectators the evening before at the piazza—the same emotions of contending pride and abasement, hope and fear, but intensified now so that there could be no mistaking their import.
At that stage Horace Townsend left the room, perhaps to pursue the personal search which had so far proved unavailing. He, who had himself been originally observing the young girl with such admiration, saw, or thought that he saw, the materials for a very pretty if not a very painful romance, in which the two would form the chief dramatis personæ. Two or three conditions, he thought, were already evolved: an unmistakable mutual interest—observation and dislike on the part of the aristocratic mother—to be followed by eventual discovery on the part of the weaker and yet more aristocratic brother—an unpleasanteclaircissement—coolness born of the very warmth underlying—a parting in pleasant dissatisfaction with themselves and each other—and perhaps a shadow of blended sweet and painful memory over the whole of two after lives!
Then the lawyer passed out to the piazza and paced with measured step up and down that promenade and the plateau in front, for perhaps more than half an hour. He might have been entirely absorbed in the contemplation of the possible fortunes of Chicago and Baltimore; and he might have found matter for thought much more personal to himself. At all events the starlight and the coming moon seemed to be company which he failed to find elsewhere; and even the dusky shadows of the bears, deserted by their friends of the sunshine and walking their weary rounds like sentinels, possibly supplied something denied him by humanity. His step was that of a man restless, absorbed and ill at ease; his head had fallen forward on his breast; and once, when he was so far away from the loiterers on the piazza that no ear was likely to catch his words, he muttered something that could scarcely have found an application to the persons of the drama in the parlor. That murmur ran:
"I suppose this is the most dishonorable action in my life—planning to betray confidence and take an unfair advantage. Why didhetell me so much before he went to Europe? Pshaw!" and he put his hand to his brow and walked on for a moment in silence. "I willnotgo back—Iwilltry the experiment—Iwillwin that woman, if I can, under this very name, now that I begin to understand her weakness so well. And if I do—heavens, in what a situation shall I have placed her and myself! And will she ever forgive the deception? No matter!—let the future take care of itself."
Either the stars grew less companionable, then, at the thought that some strange deceit was being wrought beneath them, or the soliloquist felt that there yet remained something worth looking after within the parlor, for he looked up at one of the windows of the second story, said: "Ah, no light there, at last!" stepped back to the piazza and once more entered the house and the dancing-room.
The music was still sounding as merrily as ever, and as he re-entered the room a new set was forming. In the verymidst of those who were preparing to join it, full under the blaze of the central chandelier, stood Clara Vanderlyn. She was for the moment motionless, and he had better opportunity than before of scanning her really radiant loveliness. She wore a simple evening-dress of white, with a single wild-flower wreathed in her bright auburn hair and a single jewel of value set like a star at the apex of the forehead, confined by a delicate and almost unseen chain of gold which encircled her head. Frank Vanderlyn, in full evening-dress, was standing a few feet off, in conversation with some young men with whom he had already formed an acquaintance, and did not seem to be preparing to join the set. A hurried glance around the room did not show that either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Halstead Rowan was present.
The band struck up a schottische, and all began to take partners. At this moment Mrs. Vanderlyn came through the door-way from the hall, sweeping in with more of that pronounced haughtiness which seemed indexed by her face and carriage, than any of the visitors at the Profile had before seen her exhibit, and creating a kind of impression upon those near whom she passed, that they were suddenly taken under proprietorship. She swept very near the lawyer as he stood at the left of the door-way, and passing down the room touched her son on the arm. And the lawyer could not, if he would (which seemed not over probable) have avoided hearing the single word that she uttered, almost in Frank's ear, and in a low, concentrated tone:
"Remember!"
Frank Vanderlyn nodded, with a supercilious smile upon his face, as though he understood the direction; and the stately mother swept down the room and partially disappeared among the crowd of quiet people below.
Clara Vanderlyn stood for the moment alone, as the band struck up. Whether she had received and declined invitations to dance, or whether no one had found the temerity to offer himself with the chance of refusal, seemed doubtful, forshe certainly appeared to have no partner. But as the first couple moved forward to take their places, a tall form darkened the door-way for an instant, and Halstead Rowan was again at the fair girl's side, his face literally radiant with pride and triumph. There was no word spoken at that moment, and it would seem that there must have been some previous understanding between them, for her hand was instantly placed within his arm when he offered it, and her face reflected his own with a look of gratification that any close observer could not well avoid noticing.
Both had taken a step forward to join the set, when an interruption took place of so painful a character as at once to call the attention of every one within hearing; and Horace Townsend, standing very near, had a sudden opportunity to compare the reality with his unspoken foreboding of half an hour before. Frank Vanderlyn suddenly left the group with whom he had been conversing but a few feet away, stepped up to his sister, and before either she or Rowan could have been aware of his intention, drew her hand away from the arm of her escort, and somewhat rudely placed it within his own, with a bold glance at Rowan and the words:
"Miss Clara Vanderlyn, if you wish to dance, your family would prefer that you should select a different partner from the first low-bred nobody who happens to fall in your way—a good enough ten-pin-alley companion, perhaps, but not quite the thing in a ball-room!"
"Oh, brother!"
The face of the poor girl, so foully outraged, first flushed, then whitened, and she seemed on the point of sinking to the floor with the shame of such a public insult and exposure. She might indeed have done so, under the first shock, had not the arm of Frank supported her. The next instant it was evident that all the pride of the Vanderlyns had not been exhausted before her birth, for she jerked away her arm from its compulsory refuge, and stood erect and angry—all the woman fully aroused. Her glance of withering contempt and scorn,then directed at the ill-mannered stripling who called himself her brother, was such a terrible contrast to the sweet and almost infantile smile which rested on her face in happier moments, that it would have been no difficult matter to doubt her identity.
As for Halstead Rowan—at the moment when the cruel act was done and the insulting words were spoken, he turned instantly upon the intruder, evidently failing to recognize him in the sudden blindness of his rage. His right hand, though the injured one, clenched as it might have done under the shock of an electric battery, and Townsend saw him jerk it to the level of his shoulder as if he would have struck a blow certain to cause regret for a lifetime. But he had no occasion to interpose, for the outraged girl's "Oh, brother!" came just in time to prevent the commission of the intended violence. Instantly his hand dropped; Clara Vanderlyn's expression of angry contempt, easily read under the full glare of the chandelier, chased the fierce rage from his face if it did not root out the bitterness from his heart; he bowed low to the sister, cast a glance upon the brother which he did not seem likely soon to forget; and in another moment, passing rapidly between the few who surrounded the door-way, he touched Horace Townsend forcibly upon the arm, nodded to him with a gesture which the latter readily understood as a request to follow, and the two passed out from the parlor, the hall and the house.
It is not easy to describe the scene in the parlor which followed thedenouementthat has been so feebly pictured. The music sounded on, but the set remained unformed and no one seemed to heed it. The room was instantly full of conversation in regard to the strange event, more or less loud in its tone. Frank Vanderlyn, calculating upon the sympathies of a company principally composed of wealthy and fashionable people, looked around him as if for approbation of what he had done, but did not appear to receive it. It was not difficult for him to read in the faces near him that the sympathiesof the whole company were with the insulted person, most of the members of it, if they had no other reason for the feeling, remembering the event of the bear-stakes in the morning and thinking that if the Illinoisan was to receive any thing from the Vanderlyn family that day, it should have been gratitude instead of insult. Made painfully aware of this state of feeling, the young man paled, bit his lips, then passed rapidly out of the room and disappeared, leaving his sister still in the attitude of outraged sensibility and mortification, which she retained, uttering no word to any one and not even casting a glance around the room, until Mrs. Vanderlyn, who had apparently constituted herself the reserve force for the attack upon her daughter's dignity which Frank had so gallantly led, swept up from below and led her unresistingly away up the stair-case to their apartments.
The set was finally formed, and a few more figures were danced in the parlor of the Profile that evening; but the painful incident just recorded had dulled the sense of enjoyment, and the company thinned out and eventually dispersed to earlier beds than they might have found under other circumstances.
How Halstead Rowan arranged that expected Duel—Ten-pins versus Bloodshed—Some anxiety about identity—The "H. T." initials, again—A farewell to the Brooks Cunninghames—An hour on Echo Lake, with a rhapsody and a strangely-interested listener.
How Halstead Rowan arranged that expected Duel—Ten-pins versus Bloodshed—Some anxiety about identity—The "H. T." initials, again—A farewell to the Brooks Cunninghames—An hour on Echo Lake, with a rhapsody and a strangely-interested listener.
This chapter must be unavoidably as fragmentary, not to say desultory, as some that have preceded it at considerable distance, the course of events in it seeming to partake in somedegree of the broken, heaped and heterogeneous quality of the mountain rocks amidst which they occurred.
It has been seen that Halstead Rowan, quitting the room in which he had met with so severe a mortification, touched Horace Townsend on the arm and made him a signal to follow, and that the latter obeyed the call. Of course this obedience was a matter of courtesy that could not well be refused, and yet it was accorded with a feeling so painful that it would scarcely have been asked had the torture been foreseen. Rowan, as the lawyer knew, had been insulted before a company of mark and numbers, in so deadly a manner that more than usual forbearance would be necessary to forgive the outrage; and the insulted man belonged, as the lawyer also knew, to a class of Western men not much more prone than those of the South and Southwest, to smother down a wrong under good-feeling or expediency. He had refrained from striking the insulter on the spot; but that forbearance might have been merely the effect of a recollection that ladies were present, and the one lady of all among them; and Horace Townsend no more doubted, during the moment that elapsed while the two young men stepped into the reception-room and secured their hats from the table, that he was being called upon in the sacred name of friendship to act in an affair that would probably cost the life of one or both the antagonists, than he questioned the fact of his own existence. It is doubtful whether he did not believe, before the affair was concluded, that so strange a task had never been set for his friend, by any man incensed to the necessity of mortal combat, since the day when duelling proper had its origin in two naked savages going out behind their huts with knives and a third to look on, for the love of a dusky she-heathen with oblique eyes—down through all the ages, when Sir Grostete set lance in rest and met Sir Maindefer in full career, over a little question of precedence at the table of King Grandpillard; when Champfleury and St. Esprit, beaux of the Regency of Orleans, with keen rapiers sliced up each other like cucumbers,between two bows and a dozen of grimaces, because one did not appreciate the perfume used by the other; until Fighting Joe of Arkansas and Long Alick of St. Louis culminated the whole art of single combat by a little encounter with rifles, followed by a closer embrace with bowies, at one of the Mississippi landings, instigated by the unequal division of the smiles of Belle Logan, of Western Row, Cincinnati. All which means, if the reader has not entirely lost the context, that the course pursued by Halstead Rowan, as a combatant, was eventually found to be something out of the common order.
"You saw that, of course—I know that you did!" said rather than inquired Rowan, when they had reached the piazza and were out of hearing of any of the promenading groups.
"I did," answered Townsend, with some hesitation and a wish that he could deny the fact and thus escape the duties certain to be forced upon him. "Yes, I saw it all, and it was most disgraceful. But I hope—"
That intended lecture was lost to the world, as so many others have been; for Rowan interrupted him:
"Are you poor?"
"No, I cannot say that I am, in money!" was the surprised reply.
"Were you ever?"
"No—I must answer in the negative a second time. I have never been what the world calls poor, since I can remember."
"Then you do not know how it feels," said the Illinoisan. "I am poor—I have never been rich, and I do not know that I have ever really wished to be so until a few moments ago. I wanted to buy a puppy, so that I could tie a stone to his neck and drown him; but I felt that I had not money enough."
Townsend, still surprised and in a good deal of doubt whither the conversation was tending, murmured something about the fact that however decided the insult of the brother had been, evidently the sister did not share in the feeling.
"She? oh no, heaven bless her brown eyes!" he replied, rapidly and earnestly, while the other could see, in the light of the now fairly risen moon, that there was a strange sparkle in his own dark orbs. "As for the rest—well, heaven need not be particular about blessing them—that is all! But this gabble is not what I drew you out here for. I want you to do me a great favor, at once, and I askyou, because I seem to be better acquainted with you, after a very short time, than with any other person just now at the Notch."
"Now it is coming—just what I dreaded!" said Townsend to himself; but he answered very differently, in a feeble attempt to stave off the trouble.
"Thananyother person?"
"Hold your tongue!—you know what I mean!" was the reply. "Answer my question, yes or no—are you the man upon whom I can depend, to do me an immediate personal service that may involve some sacrifice of bodily comfort and perhaps of feeling?"
"I hope so—yes!" answered Townsend. "But before you take any steps in this matter—"
"Conditions already?" asked Rowan. "I thought it was to be an unconditional yes or no!"
"Well, it is!" said Townsend, apparently satisfied that expostulation would after all be useless.
"Enough said!" replied Rowan, catching him by the arm. "Come along with me to the alley, then, and roll me not less than five games of ten-pins."
"But the business you wished me to do?" asked Townsend. "If it is to be done at all—"
"Why, confound the man!—what ails you?Thatis the business!"
"To roll you five games of ten-pins?"
"Exactly! Why, what else should it be? Oh, I see!" and Rowan chuckled out a low laugh from his great throat. "I understand your tragic face, now. You thought that I wanted you as a friend, to—"
"To challenge Frank Vanderlyn—precisely what I thought," said the lawyer, "and I consented to act because I thought that I might be better able than some other person to prevent any serious result."
"To shoother brother, merely because he is a fool?—Oh, no, Townsend—you could not thinkthat! Duelling is murder nearly always, and folly always when it is not a crime; and if I should ever be driven into another duel, be sure that it would not be with an inexperienced boy who probably does not know half so much about a pistol as at pen-knife or a tooth-pick."
"You are a true man, as well as a sensible one, and I honor you!" said the relieved lawyer, grasping him by the hand, and his face at the same time wearing a look, which, though unseen by the other, seemed actually to express personal gratitude.
"I do not know about the 'true man,' though I have tried to be so," answered Rowan, as they neared the door of the ten-pin alley. "But I suppose that perhaps I am the oddest mortal on the globe, and that may answer the same purpose. And now you are dying to know why I wish to roll ten-pin balls at this particular moment? Simply because I need some way of working off this excitement that might lead me to commit a violent act if it did not find that very harmless physical vent. I have tried the experiment before, and I know what ten-pins are with a man of fiery temperament. Here, boy, set 'em up!"
The alley was alone, except as to the sleepy boy; but the loud call of the Illinoisan soon put the machinery of the place into operation and the momentous games commenced. No matter how they progressed or how they ended in regard to winning or losing: it is only with some of the conversation which took place while the match was under way, that we have at present to do.
"You are a lawyer and belong to Cincinnati, you said,"observed Rowan, as he paused a moment to wipe his brow after thundering down half a dozen of the ponderous globes.
"Yes, I said so," answered Townsend; but he did not enlarge upon the answer, as he was obviously expected to do; and one or two other questions, having the same scope, being parried at every point beyond the mere name, occupation and place of residence, the Illinoisan began to suspect that there must be some motive for reticence, which he was at least bound to respect while he held the catechumen impressed in his own service. With reference to himself, a theme upon which the conversation seemed to turn very easily, (many of the stout, bluff, frank, go-ahead Rowans whom one meets in society have the same characteristic, fault or the reverse),—he manifested no corresponding nervousness; and one moment strangely silent as if under the influence of some thought which kept him too busy for speech, the next he would rattle on almost as glibly as the polished balls rolled down the pine floor.
"You called yourself odd a little while ago, and I fancy that if youareodd you have the excuse of very wide experience for a man of your age," said Townsend, a little later in the quintette of games, and certainly displaying a bit of the prying nature of the lawyer, if not the subtlety of the Jesuit, in the suggestion. "To tell you the truth, I cannot quite place you in profession. A while ago I thought you possibly a steamboat-captain, but you have just upset that hypothesis by proving that you are nearly all the while on land; and yet you seem to be perpetually flying about from one town to another. What the deuceareyou?"
"Oh, you cannot place me, eh?" laughed Rowan, who was getting fairly soothed and mellowed by his creditable substitute for duelling. "Well, I am a conductor on the —— Railroad, which you know has its terminus in Chicago, and I am off on a couple of months leave of absence from the Company. As to experience, I suppose that I may have had a little of it. I have been a civil-engineer, employedat laying out some of the worst roads in the West, and of course laying them out the worst. Have crossed the plains to California twice, and back again, including a look at Brigham and his wives at Salt Lake City, very nearly getting my throat cut, I fancy, in that latter operation. Did a little at gold-mining, for a short time, but soon quitted it out of deference to a constitutional backache when stooping. Have been here at the East a good many times, and once lived in New York, (a great deal worse place than Salt Lake City, and with more polygamy!) for a twelvemonth, telegraphing. Once ran down to Santa Fe with a train, and came very near to being speared by the Comanches. Then concluded to stay among those amiable savages for a while, to learn to ride, and spent six months in the study. No man knows how to ride a horse—by the way—except an Arab (I take the word of the travellers for that, as I have never been across), a Comanche or an Arapahoe, or some one they have taught. There, have I told you enough?"
"Humph!—yes," answered the lawyer, eying the strange compound with unavoidable admiration and no little wonder. "Yes, except one thing."
"And that is about this scar?"
"I confess that my curiosity lay in that direction!" laughed Townsend. "I think that scar has not been long healed—that you have been taking a turn in the present war."
"Yes, a short one," said the Illinoisan, "and that scar is one mark of it. I was a private in the ranks of the Ninth Illinois for a few months last year, and got pretty badly slashed with a Mississippi bowie-knife, with Grant, two or three days before they took Fort Donelson.Theytook it—Idid not—I suppose that I did not amount to much at about that period, with a little hack in the jugular that came pretty near letting out life and blood together!"
Before this conversation had concluded, and long before the specified five games were accomplished, half a dozen persons from the hotel, male and female, came strolling in.Among them was Captain Hector Coles, with Margaret Hayley upon his arm. They stood at the head of the alley, looking at the game; and Townsend, as he was about to make one of his most difficult rolls, recognized the lady and her slight nod and was sufficiently agitated by the presence of that peculiar spectator, to miss his aim entirely and roll the ball off into the gutter—a fact which did not escape the quick eye of the Captain.
Directly, as the game still went on, some conversation occurred between the lady and her attendant, which, if overheard, might have produced a still more decided trembling in the nerves of the ten-pin player.
"Iknowthat I have seen that face before, more than once, and not in Cincinnati," the Captain said. "I believe that he is a Philadelphian, and that his name is no more Horace Townsend than mine is Jenkins."
"What motive could any one possibly have for coming to a place like this in disguise and with a feigned name?" asked Margaret Hayley.
"Humph!" said the Captain, in a tone by no means good-humored, though it was low, as the previous words had been, "there are plenty of men who find it necessary to disguise names and faces now-a-days, for the very best of reasons."
"Traitors?" asked the lady.
"Yes, traitors!" answered the Captain.
"Andthatreason he has not, I know!" said Margaret. "The man who uttered the words thatIheard last night, is no traitor, and I do not think that I should believe the very angels of heaven if they should come down to make the assertion!"
"You seem strangely interested in the man!" said the Captain, his voice undeniably querulous.
"And I have a right to be so if I choose, I suppose!" answered the lady, in a voice that if it was not querulous was at least signally decided.
"Oh, certainly! certainly!" was the reply, coming out between set teeth.
Silence fell for a moment thereafter, except as the crashing balls made music among the pins. Then it was interrupted by Rowan calling out to the lawyer, who seemed to stand abstracted and forgetful of the game.
"Townsend!"
No motion on the part of the person addressed, or any sign that he heard the utterance.
"Townsend! I say, Townsend!"
Still no motion, or any recognition whatever of the name; and it was not until the Illinoisan, who had just been making three ten-strikes in succession with his left hand, and who was naturally anxious to call the attention of his opponent to the exploit, touched him on the shoulder and literally shouted the word into his ear, that he paid any attention whatever.
"Me? Oh!"
"Did you notice that?" asked the keen-witted Captain, returning to the charge, as a repulsed soldier should always do. "His name isnotTownsend, and he has not been long in the habit of being called by it; for it was forgetfulness that made him wait for it to be repeated three times!"
There was triumph in the tone of the Captain, now; and there was every thing but triumph in that of Margaret Hayley as she leaned heavily on his arm and said:
"Pray do not say any thing more about it! That man is nothing to me. Let us go back to the house."
"Wait one moment! I am going to do something to satisfy myself. Do you see that handkerchief? Sometimes initials tell a story that trunks and hotel-books do not."
The lawyer had thrown off his coat upon the chair behind him—a blue flannel coat, half military, which both remembered to have seen him wear after changing clothes from the accident at the pool. From the breast-pocket a white handkerchief hung temptingly almost half way out, and it was towards that that the hand of the officer dived downward.The owner of the coat was some distance away, following up one of his flying balls, and was not likely to see the examination made of his personal property, if it was done with quick hand and eye.
"Hector Coles, you would not dothat!"
But she spoke too late. With the stereotyped lie on his lips that has been made the excuse for so many wrongs and scoundrelisms during all this unfortunate struggle, "All is fair in war-time!" the Captain whipped out the handkerchief, turned it quickly from corner to corner, glancing it to the light as he did so, and then as quickly returned it to the pocket, long before the owner had returned from watching the effect of his shot. Margaret Hayley had not intended to join in the reprehensible act, but she involuntarily did so, and she as well as the officer saw the initials "H. T." elaborately embroidered in red silk in one of the corners. It is not too much to say that a pang of joy went through her heart at that refutation of the Captain's mean suspicions and that evidence to her own mind that the man in whom she had become so suddenly and unaccountably interested was playing no game of deceit and treachery. "H. T." were the initials, Horace Townsend was the name that he had given her, and there could be no doubt whatever of the truth of his statement.
Captain Hector Coles did not seem by any means so well satisfied with the result of his researches. Something very like a scowl answered the look of indignation upon Margaret Hayley's face, as he said:
"Humph! well, he has been keen enough, it seems, to mismark his handkerchief too!"
"And you are ungenerous enough, Captain Hector Coles, first to do an improper action and then to find fault with your own discomfiture!" was the reply, as the lady once more took the proffered arm of the officer and left the alley, the combatants still pursuing the concluding game of that most memorable match of left hand against scanty practice. Whitherone of them went, an hour or two later, may possibly be discovered at no distant period of this narration.
There were stormy times, that night, in the chamber of connubial bliss occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame; and poor Caudle, belabored as he was in the imaginative mind of Douglas Jerrold, never suffered as much in one hour as on that occasion did the ex-contractor, ex-Alderman and ex-purveyor of mettled steeds for the United States cavalry service. Shoddy was in an ill-humor, and Shoddy had a right to be in an ill-humor. Every thing had gone wrong, specially and collectively, from the moment of their entering those fatal mountains. Mishap the first: Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame had fainted and been called "Bridget," before company. Mishap the second: Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame had overeaten himself and come near to leaving the whole family in mourning as loud as his own wails. Mishap the third: Master Brooks Brooks had badgered the bears, in plain sight of all, caused a serious accident, and been visited, both loudly and silently, with objurgations not pleasant to remember. Mishap the fourth: Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame had been herself badgered, worse than the bears, by an irreverent scamp who threw discredit at once upon her foreign travels and her geography. Mishap the fifth: Master Brooks Brooks had tumbled into the Pool, been nearly drowned, and come out a limp rag requiring some washing and several hours wringing before recovering its original consistency. Mishap the sixth: Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, in the agitation of that serious accident, had called the dear boy by a name, that of "Patsey," which would be likely to stick to him, in taunting mouths, during his whole stay at the Profile. Mishap the seventh: Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had fallen in, that day, with the before-mentioned certain stage-drivers, who consented to drink brandy, wine and punch at his expense, enticing him thereafter into low stories of the days when he drove a horse and cart about town, and leaving him eventually in a state of fuddle amusingto their hard heads and harder hearts but by no means conducive to his standing in fashionable watering-place society. Mishap the eighth: Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame had passed two evenings in the parlor and one day among the guests in their rides and walks, bedizened in successive fineries of the most enticing order; and not one person had desired the honor of her acquaintance out of doors, asked her to dance in the parlor, or paid her any more attention than might have been bestowed upon a very ungraceful lay-figure carried around for the showing off of modes and millinery.
All this in thirty hours; and all this was certainly enough to disturb more equable pulses than those which beat under the coarse red skin of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame.
And when, that night while the moon was high in heaven and nearly all the guests had left parlor and piazza to silence after such an eventful day—while poor Marianna in her chamber wept over the cruel neglect which had made mockery of all her rosy anticipations, and Master Brooks Brooks moaned out at her side his petulant complaints born of ill-breeding, fright and weakness,—when Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame opened upon her not-yet-sobered husband the battery of her tongue, and accused him of being the author of all the mishaps before named, those with which he had nothing to do quite as much as those in which he had been really instrumental,—then and there, for the moment, the Nemesis of the outraged republic was duly asserting the power delegated to her by the gods, and Shoddy, in the person of one of its humblest representatives, was undergoing a slight foretaste of that eternal torture to be hereafter enforced.
Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, on that occasion, declared her intention of not remaining another day among "such low people," and she further intimated to Mr. Brooks Cunninghame that if he did not learn to behave himself in a manner more becoming to his high position (or at least the high position of his wife and children!) she would "take him homeat once and never bring him out agin into respectable society while her head was warrum."
At the end of which exordium the berated husband not unnaturally remarked, in a brogue nearly as broad as it had ever been:
"And fwhat the divil did ye come trapesin here for at all at all? Ye'd be doin' well enough at home, if ye'd only sthay there, Bridget—I mane Julia. Ye'r no more fit to be kapin company wid dhe quality, nor meself; and I'm as much out of place here as a pig 'ud be goin' to mass! Sure Mary Ann 'il niver be gettin' a husband among these people wid dhe turned-up noses, and poor little Pat'll be dhrouned and kilt and murthered intirely! You'd betther be gettin' out of this as soon as ye can, and I'd be savin' me hard-earned money!"
"The money you have cheated for, ye mane, Pat Cunningham," said Mrs. Brooks, who when alone with the object of her devoted affection and in a temper the reverse of amiable, could unveil some of the household skeletons of language and history quite as readily as he. "Pretty things them was that ye sold for horses to the government! and there's a good dale of the money ye made when ye was Alderman, that they'd send ye to the State Prison for if they knowed all about it!"
"Thrue for ye, Bridget!—and who but yer oogly self put the worst o' thim things into me head, dinnin' at me o' nights when ye ought to been aslape?—answer me that, will ye? And now ye'r sthruttin' like a peacock wid dhe money I made to plase ye, and divil the bit can ye kape a civil tongue between yer lanthern jaws. Take that and be hanged" [or some other word] "to ye, Bridget Cunningham!"
"Pat Cunningham, ye'r a coarse, miserable brute—a low Irishman, and money can't make any thing else out of ye! Away from this we go to-morrow morning, mind that, before ye'r drunk again with yer low stage-drivers and thim fellers."
A snore was the only reply. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame had secured the last word, according to her usual habit; butshe had only done so at the expense of not having her rejoinder heard by the ears for which it was intended.
The lady kept her word, in the one important particular. Those who shared in the early breakfast of the next morning, before the starting of the stages, had the pleasure of seeing the whole family at table all bedizened for the road—Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame red-faced, stately and snappish; Miss Marianna subdued and unhappy, with red rings around her eyes, as if she had been crying all night; Mr. Brooks Cunninghame with his coarse face yet coarser than usual and his eyes suggestive of a late fuddle, piling away beef-steaks, eggs and biscuits into the human mill, as if he had some doubts of ever reaching another place where they could be procured to the same advantage; and Master Brooks Brooks, the freckles showing worse than ever on his pale and sickly-looking face, whining between every two mouthfuls, and vociferating: "Mommy, mommy, I've got a pain!" and, "Mommy, mommy, I tell you I want some more o' them are taters and gravy!"
They were pleasant company at the meal, very!—as they had been at all previous times when beaming on the horizon of other travellers, and as people out of place always prove to be to those who surround them! But the meal came to an end, the trunks that held the remaining finery of the two ladies were safely stowed, the stage-drivers bellowed: "All aboard!" and the three more precious members of the Brooks Cunninghame family were stowed within the coach without personally causing more than ten minutes of hindrance, while Mr. Brooks Cunninghame himself, with a bad cigar in mouth and a surreptitiously-obtained bottle of raw whiskey in the pocket of his duster, occupied a seat on the top and felt, for the time, almost as happy as he had once done when surmounting his loaded dirt-cart.
So Shoddy, or that particular manifestation of it, at least, rolled away from the Profile House. Whither, is no matter of consequence, for the incidental connection of the Brooks Cunninghames with this veracious history is concluded withthe exit of that morning. But let no one suppose that the travelling world was thereafter rid of them, or of others to whom they only supply a type and index, during the remainder of the summer. For did not some of us meet them at Niagara later in the season, resident at the Clifton as the most aristocratic (because on monarchical ground) of all the houses, Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame a little more querulous and redder in the face than when at the Notch; Mr. Brooks Cunninghame a little trembly, as if whiskey and idleness were beginning to tell upon his system; Miss Marianna still un-cavaliered and hopelessly unexpectant in the wreck of her silks, laces, and jewelry; and Master Brooks Brooks pulling the curtains and drumming on the keys of the piano with his unwashed fingers, pending his greater opportunity to frighten a pair of horses into plunging over the bank, or to relieve the future of a dreary prospect by himself falling off Table Hock?
There was another departure from the Profile House the same morning. Whether the event of the night before had done anything to bring about that consummation, or whether previous arrangements and the pressure of time dictated such a movement—Halstead Rowan and the two friends in his company were among the passengers by one of the coaches that went through to the Crawford, bearing such as contemplated an immediate ascent of Mount Washington from that direction. It may be the pleasant duty of writer and reader to overtake them at the Crawford, at a very early period. Nothing more can now be said of the situation in which the Vanderlyn imbroglio and the Townsend friendship were left, than that the departing man saw nothing of the lawyer after they parted on the evening previous, and that his early stage rolled away long before the luxurious Vanderlyns were likely to have opened their eyes at the summons of the first gong rolling through the corridors to awaken them for the regular breakfast.
It was nearly noon of that morning of the departures—a cloudless, glorious morning, the sun just warming the chill of the Notch to a pleasant May air, and not a fleck of mist to dim the view of the peaks on the very extreme verge of the line of vision, when Horace Townsend strolled down the half mile of road northward from the Profile, to Echo Lake, intent upon entering on those mysteries which specially belong to that haunted little sheet of water—the mysteries of the boat, the horn, and the cannon. He was alone, as he had been from the first moment of his coming to the Notch, except as the newly-formed intimacy between Halstead Rowan and himself had temporarily drawn them together. He seemed to have formed no other new acquaintance, but that was to be, perhaps, formal and distant; and there was no certainty that the incident would not add to rather than take away from any feeling of positive loneliness which had before oppressed him.
As he turned down the by-road shooting sharply away to the right, with the Lake glimmering silver in the sunlight through the trees, there was a great crash of sound, a deafening reverberation from the rocks of Eagle Cliff, hanging immediately over the Lake, a fainter following, and then another and another, dying away among the far-off hills in the infinite variety of the highland echo. There were already visitors at the Lake; and the factotum who blended the triple characters of keeper, guide, and boatman, had been discharging the little old cannon on the wharf, as a crowning proof to some party with whom he was just finishing, of the capacity ofhislake for dwarfing all the travelled ones' recollections of Killarney and the Echo Rocks of Superior.
Such was indeed the fact, and as the lawyer emerged upon the Lake immediately at the wharf, he met the party who had "done" the Lake strolling away, while the boatman was re-arming himself with his long horn, and beginning to turn his attention to certain new-comers, a part of whom had already taken their seats in the big paddle-wheeled boat of which thesteam was to be supplied by cranks and hand-labor, for a trip around the pond with the dignified name, and a new development of the capacities of echo. He had indeed dropped the stipendiary sum in currency into the hand of the factotum, and was about stepping into the boat to join the party already miscellaneous, before he discovered that any acquaintance was numbered among them. When he did so, for one instant he hesitated as if about to defer his trip, then muttered below his breath the few words: "No!—I must take my chances—now as well as ever!" stepped in from the little wharf and took one of the few empty seats remaining near the stern of the boat. He sat looking backward, and he was consequently brought face to face with the three occupants of the stern seat, who were necessarily looking forward. Perhaps his fatewasupon that stern seat, for its three occupants were Mrs. Burton Hayley, her daughter, and Captain Hector Coles.
Margaret Hayley paled a little, then flushed the least in the world and finally smiled a proud but pleasant smile and returned a nod and a "good-morning," in response to Townsend's comprehensive bow and salutation, which were intended to take in all three. Captain Hector Coles sat bolt upright, as if he had been riding his horse on parade, and moved no inch from his perpendicular as he returned the greeting in so formal a voice that it constituted no recognition whatever; and Mrs. Burton Hayley, to whom the lawyer had not been introduced, had some excuse for the supercilious but puzzled stare with which she honored him. The young girl saw the glance, and remembered the position.