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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Coward, by Henry Morford
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Coward
+       A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863
+
+
+Author: Henry Morford
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2011  [eBook #36644]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWARD***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Edwards, Josephine Paolucci, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images
+generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries
+(http://www.archive.org/details/americana)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022429835
+
+
+
+
+
+THE COWARD.
+
+A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863.
+
+by
+
+HENRY MORFORD.
+
+Author of "Shoulder-Straps," "The Days of Shoddy," etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Philadelphia:
+T. B. Peterson & Brothers,
+306 Chestnut Street.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
+T. B. Peterson & Brothers,
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United
+States, in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
+
+
+
+
+                        TO
+         THE PATRIOT PRINTERS OF AMERICA--
+                  THE MEN WHO
+            HAVE FURNISHED MORE SOLDIERS
+              THAN ANY OTHER CLASS
+    IN COMPARISON WITH THE WHOLE NUMBER OF THEIR CRAFT,
+                       TO
+        THE DEAD HEROES OF THE WAR FOR THE UNION
+                      AND
+      THE LIVING ARMIES THAT YET BULWARK ITS HOPE,--
+                      THIS
+    BLENDING OF THE FACTS AND FANCIES
+                       OF
+                    WAR-TIME,
+                       IS
+        DEDICATED BY THEIR BROTHER-CRAFTSMAN,
+
+                                          THE AUTHOR.
+
+_New York City, July, 1864._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+Some persons, taking up this work with expectations more or less elevated,
+may possibly lay it down with disappointment after perusal, because it does
+not discuss with sharp personalities, as the title may have led them to
+suppose, the conduct of some of those well-known men connected with the
+Union Army, who have disgracefully faltered on the field. But the truth is
+that the Union Army has mustered very few cowards--so few, that a
+distinguished artist, not long ago called on to draw an ideal head of one
+of that class, said: "Really it is so long since I have seen a coward, that
+I scarcely know how to go about it!" The aim of the writer, eschewing all
+such tempting personalities, and quite as carefully avoiding all dry
+didactic discussion of the theme of courage and its opposite,--has
+principally been to illustrate the tendency of many men to misunderstand
+their own characters in certain particulars, and the inevitable consequence
+of their being misunderstood by the world, in one direction or the other.
+No apology is felt to be necessary for the length at which the scenery of
+the White Mountains, their actualities of interest and possibilities of
+danger, have been introduced into the narration; nor is it believed that
+the chain of connection with the great contest will be found the weaker
+because the glimpses given of it are somewhat more brief than in preceding
+publications of the same series. In those portions the writer has again
+occasion to acknowledge the assistance of the same capable hand which
+supplied much of the war data for both of his previous volumes.
+
+                                       NEW YORK CITY, _July 1st, 1864._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+    A June Morning of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three--Glimpses
+    of West Philadelphia--The Days before Gettysburgh--The Two on
+    the Piazza--Margaret Hayley and Elsie Brand--An Embrace and a
+    Difference--Foreshadowings of Carlton Brand, Brother and
+    Lover                                                                29
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+    The Coming of Carlton Brand--Almost a Paladin of
+    Balaclava--Brother and Sister--A Spasm of Shame--The
+    Confession--The Coward--How Margaret Hayley heard Many Words
+    not intended for her--The Rupture and the Separation                 45
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+    Kitty Hood and her School-house--Dick Compton going
+    Soldiering--A Lover's Quarrel, a bit of Jealousy, and a
+    Threat--How Dick Compton met his supposed Rival--An
+    Encounter, Sudden Death, and Kitty Hood's terrible Discovery         61
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+    The Residence of the Brands--Robert Brand and Dr.
+    Pomeroy--Radical and Copperhead--A passage-at-arms that ended
+    in a Quarrel--Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper--The Shadow of
+    Shame--Father and Daughter--The falling of a parent's Curse          81
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+    The Birth and Blood of the Brands--Pride that came down from
+    the Crusades--Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent--How
+    Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed to be
+    answered--Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a Corpus Delicti         99
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+    The Residence of Dr. Pomeroy--Nathan Bladesden and Eleanor
+    Hill--A kneeling Woman and a rigid Quaker--The ruin that a
+    Letter had wrought--A Parting that seemed eternal--Carlton
+    Brand alive once more, and a Glance at the fatal Letter             120
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+    A return to 1856--Nicholas Hill, Iron-merchant--His Death,
+    his Daughter, and his Friend--How Dr. Pomeroy became a
+    Guardian and how he Discharged that duty--A ruin and an
+    awakening--The market value of Dunderhaven Stock in 1858            137
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+    What followed the revelation of Betrayal--A gleam of Hope for
+    Eleanor Hill--A relative from California, a projected Voyage,
+    and a Disappointment--One more Letter--The broken thread
+    resumed--Carlton Brand's farewell, and an Elopement                 164
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+    Dr. Pomeroy's purposed Pursuit--A plain Quaker who used very
+    plain Language--Almost a Fight--How Mrs. Burton Hayley
+    consoled her Daughter, and how Margaret revealed the Past--A
+    Compact--Dr. Pomeroy's Canine Adventure--Old Elspeth once
+    more--A Search that found Nothing.                                  174
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+    Before and after Gettysburgh--The Apathy and Despair which
+    preceded, and the Jubilation which followed--What Kitty Hood
+    said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand--Brother and
+    Sister--A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel--A fire-room Visit,
+    an Interview, and a Departure for Europe                            200
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+    Anomalies of the War for the Union--The Watering-place rush
+    of 1863--A White Mountain party disembarking at
+    Littleton--Who filled the Concord coach--The
+    Vanderlyns--Shoddy on its travels--Mr. Brooks Cunninghame and
+    his Family--"H. T." and an Excitement                               219
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+    Landing at the Profile House--Halstead Rowan and
+    Gymnastics--How that person saw Clara Vanderlyn and became a
+    Rival of "H. T."--The Full Moon in the Notch--Trodden Toes, a
+    Name, a Voice, and a Rencontre--Margaret Hayley and Capt.
+    Hector Coles--The Old Man of the Mountain by Moonlight, and a
+    Mystery                                                             237
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+    Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her Pet Bears--A misadventure and a
+    Friendly Hand in time--The question of Courage--Halstead
+    Rowan and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame on Geography--The Dead
+    Washington, the Flume and the Pool--With the personal
+    relations weaving at that juncture.                                 255
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+    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               279
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+    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                                                            298
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+    Cloud and Storm at the Profile--Sights and Sensations of a
+    rainy-day ride to the Crawford--Horace Townsend and Halstead
+    Rowan once more together--Unexpected Arrivals--A cavalcade of
+    Miserables--An ascent of Mount Washington, with Equestrianism
+    and War-whoops extraordinary                                        323
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+    Horace Townsend with a Lady in charge--An adventure over the
+    "Gulf of Mexico"--Clara Vanderlyn in deadly peril--A moment
+    of horror--Halstead Rowan and a display of the Comanche
+    riding--Townsend's eclipse--The return to the
+    Crawford--Margaret Hayley again, and a Conversation overheard       348
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+    Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley--A strange Rencontre in
+    the Parlor--Another Rencontre, equally strange but less
+    pleasant--How Clara Vanderlyn faded away from the
+    Mountains--And how the Comanche Rider "played baby" and
+    disappeared                                                         370
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+    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.                                   392
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+    Suspense in danger, in two Senses--Horace Townsend with a
+    Swing-rope--An invitation to Captain Hector Coles--A fearful
+    piece of Amateur Gymnastics--Going down into the
+    Schute--Success or Failure?--The event, and Margaret Hayley's
+    madness--Two unfortunate Declarations                               410
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+    The bearer of a Disgraced Name in England--A strange Quest
+    and a strange Unrest--Hurrying over to Ireland--Too late for
+    the Packet--The little Despatch-steamer--Henry Fitzmaurice,
+    the journalist--The peril of the Emerald, and the end of all
+    Quests save one                                                     432
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+    Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper--Crossing the
+    Rappahannock--The fight and the calamity of Rawson's
+    Cross-Roads--Taking of Culpeper--Pleasanton's Volunteer
+    Aide--Townsend versus Coles--The meeting of Two who loved
+    each other--And the Little Ride they took together                  452
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+    Once more at West Philadelphia--September and Change--Last
+    glimpses of Kitty Hood and Dick Compton--Robert Brand and his
+    invited Guest--The news of Death--Old Elspeth Graeme as a
+    Seeress--The dispatch from Alexandria--The Quest of Brand and
+    Margaret Hayley                                                     478
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+    In the Hospital at Alexandria--The wounded Man and his
+    Nurse--Who was Horace Townsend?--A Mystery explained--How
+    Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's--One word more of the
+    Comanche Rider--Conclusion                                          490
+
+
+
+
+THE COWARD.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+     A JUNE MORNING OF EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THREE--GLIMPSES
+     OF WEST PHILADELPHIA--THE DAYS BEFORE GETTYSBURG--THE TWO ON
+     THE PIAZZA--MARGARET HAYLEY AND ELSIE BRAND--AN EMBRACE AND
+     A DIFFERENCE--FORESHADOWINGS OF CARLTON BRAND, BROTHER AND
+     LOVER.
+
+
+A wide piazza, with the columns made of such light tracery in scrolled
+plank-work that they seemed to be almost unreal and gave an appearance of
+etheriality to the whole front of the house. The piazza, flecked over with
+the golden June sunshine that stole down between the branches of the tall
+trees standing in front and shading the house, and that crept in through
+the network of twine and climbing roses clambering almost up to the roof
+from the balustrade below. The house to which the piazza adjoined, large,
+built of wood in that half Flemish and half Elizabethan style which has of
+late years been made popular through cheap books on cottage architecture
+and the illustrations in agricultural newspapers,--two and a half stories
+in height, with a double gabled front that belonged to the one, elaborate
+cornices and work over the piazza that belonged to the other, and a turret
+in the centre that belonged to neither. A wide, tall door opening from the
+piazza, and windows also opening upon it, sweeping down quite to the
+floor. Altogether a house which approached more nearly to the "composite"
+order of architecture so much affected by wealthy Americans, than to any
+one set down in the books by a particular designation; and yet shapely and
+imposing, and showing that if the most unimpeachable taste had not presided
+over the erection, yet wealth had been lavishly expended and all the modern
+graces and ornaments freely supplied.
+
+In front of the house, and sweeping down to the road that ran within a
+hundred feet, a grassed lawn lying in the lovely green of early summer,
+only broken at irregular intervals by the dozen of trees of larger and
+smaller sizes, round which the earth had been artistically made to swell so
+as to do away with any appearance of newness and create the impression that
+the roundness had been caused by the bursting of the trees farther out of
+the ground through many years of vigorous growth. Beneath one of the
+largest of the trees--a maple, with the silver sheen almost equally divided
+between its bark and its glossy leaves, a long wooden bench or settee, with
+two or three sofa-cushions thrown carelessly upon it, as if it formed at
+times a favorite lounge for a reader or a smoker. On the piazza a triad of
+chairs, irregularly placed and all unoccupied. One of the two folding doors
+leading into the halls from the piazza, wide open, as became the season,
+and the other half closed as if a single puff of summer breeze coming
+through the hall had become exhausted before closing it entirely. One of
+the windows opening from the piazza into what seemed to be the better part
+of the house, closed entirely; and the other, with the shutters "bowed" or
+half open, permitting a peep into a large parlor or sitting-room, with rich
+carpet and handsome furniture, but kept dusky under the impression (more or
+less reasonable) that thereby additional coolness would be secured.
+
+Near the house, on both sides, other houses of corresponding pretension
+though displaying great variety in style of architecture; and in front,
+across the wide road, still others showing to the right and left, and the
+whole appearance of the immediate neighborhood evidencing that it was
+neither country nor city, but a blending of both, suburban, and a chosen
+spot for the residences of those who did business in the great city and
+wished to be near it, and who possessed means and taste to make so pleasant
+a selection. Still farther away in front, as seen between the other houses
+and shrubbery, and stretching off southward in a long rolling sweep, rich
+agricultural country, with some of the hay-crop yet ungathered, broad
+fields of grain receiving the last ripening kiss of the sun before yielding
+to the sickle or the reaping-machine, and fruit-trees already beginning to
+be golden with the apples, pears and peaches glimmering amid the leaves. A
+quiet, gentle scene, with evident wealth to gild it and perfect repose to
+lend it character; and over all the warm sun of a June morning resting like
+a benediction, and a slight shadow of golden haze in the air softening
+every object in the perspective. Occasionally a pedestrian figure moving
+slowly along one of the foot-paths that bordered the wide road; and anon a
+farm-wagon loaded with early produce and on its way to market, rumbling by
+with such a sleepy expression on the face of the driver and such lollings
+of the ears of the full-fed and lazy horses, that the episode of its
+passage rather added to than detracted from the slumberous quiet of the
+prospect.
+
+Then another passage, very different and not at all in keeping with any of
+the points that have before been noted. An officer in full uniform, with
+the front of his chasseur cap thrown high in defiance of the glare of the
+sunshine, spurring by on a high-stepping and fast-trotting horse, eastward
+towards the city, with such life and haste in every movement of himself and
+the animal he bestrode as to momentarily dash the whole view with unquiet.
+Then the equestrian figure out of sight and the beat of his horse's hoofs
+heard no longer; and the scene relapsing into that languor born of the June
+morning verging rapidly towards noon.
+
+Then a sudden sound, still more discordant with the drowsy peace of the
+hour than the sight of the spurring soldier, and still more painfully
+suggestive of war in the land of peace. The quick, sharp rattle of a
+snare-drum, but a little space removed, and apparently passing down one of
+the lateral roads in the neighborhood, dying away with a light tap into the
+distance a moment after, and quiet coming back again yet more markedly
+after so incongruous an interruption.
+
+The place, West Philadelphia, half a mile or more beyond the Schuylkill,
+not far from the line traversed beyond the bridge by the Market Street
+cars, and near the intersection of that branch of the main artery known as
+the Darby Road,--in the outer edge of that beautiful little section with
+its tall trees and plats of natural green, out of and into which the
+shrieking monsters of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad dart every hour in
+the day with freight and passengers to and from the Great West. The time,
+late in June, 1863, a few days before Gettysburg, when the long-threatened
+invasion of the North by the rebels had become for the moment an
+accomplished fact, when Lee and Ewell had crossed the Potomac, swept on
+through Upper Maryland, entered Pennsylvania, devastated the farms and
+carried away the stock of the farmers on the border, laid York under a
+contribution, burned the barracks at Carlisle, and threatened every hour to
+capture Harrisburgh and force the passage of the Susquehanna. When women
+and children, and by far too many of the able-bodied inhabitants who should
+have shown more pride if they indeed possessed no courage, had fled away
+from the Seat of Government of the Keystone State, and the public records
+were following them to prevent their falling into the hands of an enemy
+known to be destructive and revengeful, and for the moment believed to be
+irresistible. When the rebels themselves boasted that they were about to
+teach the North all the horrors of war that had fallen upon the South in
+the long contest,--and that in a few days they would water their
+cavalry-horses in the Delaware, if they did not achieve the same success at
+the very banks of the Hudson; and when the newspapers of New York and
+Philadelphia, for the moment completely discouraged, gave up the line of
+defence of the Susquehanna, and gravely debated, whether a check could
+indeed be made at the Delaware, with the loss of the Quaker City, or
+whether the great struggle must at last be transferred to the Hudson hills
+of New Jersey. When the Reserves were mustering in Philadelphia, and the
+Coal Regiments forming in the haunts of the sturdy miners. When the
+Pennsylvania coal-mines were to be set on fire by the invader, and left to
+burn on until all the fuel of the nation was destroyed, if the "great
+conflagration" of the whole earth did not follow as a result. When more
+placards calling for the defence of the State, were exhibited in the
+neighborhood of old Independence Hall, than had ever shown there, inviting
+the idle to amusement, in the most prosperous seasons of opera, theatre and
+concert-saloon--drums beating at every corner, brass bands blowing on every
+square, patriotic appeals and efforts to recruit on every hand, and yet the
+people apparently lying under bodily apathy or mental paralysis. When
+Governor Seymour, of New York, and Governor Parker, of New Jersey, waiving
+the political question for the moment, were calling out the troops of those
+States to the defence of Pennsylvania; and when the militia of the city of
+New York and the returned nine-months volunteers of New Jersey were showing
+themselves equally ready to respond to the call. When the Army of the
+Potomac seemed for the moment to be nothing, even for the defence of the
+North, Hooker discredited, no successor discovered, public confidence lost,
+the very darkest day of the struggle at hand, and no man able or willing to
+predict what might be the extent of disaster reached before the rolling
+back of the tide of invasion from the homes of the loyal States.
+
+Such were the place, the time, the surroundings, and the atmosphere (so to
+speak) of the house of the blended Flemish and Elizabethan styles of
+architecture, at West Philadelphia, of which, thus far, only the outward
+aspects have been presented. Yet there may be an inexcusable neglect of
+the proprieties, in presenting a house, its green lawn, shady trees, and
+even the pleasant landscape stretching away in front of it, before those
+living figures which would certainly have attracted the attention of an
+observer in advance of any of the inanimate beauties of art or nature.
+
+Those figures were two in number, both standing on the piazza, very near
+the trellis of climbing roses, and where the flecks of sunshine fell
+through the leaves upon them and dashed them with little dots and lines of
+moving light, as well as the floor upon which they stood. Both were
+girls--both young--both beautiful; at least each possessed that combination
+of features, form and manner, making her very pleasing to the casual
+observer, and certain to be reckoned beautiful by some one admitted to a
+closer knowledge of the spirit enshrined within. They were evidently dear
+friends; for as they stood near the trellis, and the hand of the taller of
+the two plucked a half-open rose from one of the clusters, and she
+playfully tried to coax it to a fuller opening by breathing caressingly
+upon it and separating its clinging leaves with her dainty fingers,--the
+arm of the other was around her waist, and both the trim and graceful forms
+were slightly swaying backward and forward in that pleasant, idle,
+school-girl motion which the grown woman does not easily forget until it
+has given the "fidgets" to half her elder acquaintances.
+
+The taller and perhaps by a year the elder--she of the rose--was the
+daughter of the mistress of that pleasant summer paradise, born to wealth
+and position, and her birth registered some two-and-twenty years before in
+the predecessor of the heavy family Bible with its golden clasps, which lay
+in state in the parlor so near her, as Margaret Hayley. She was a little
+above the average height of womanhood, and might have seemed too tall for
+grace but for the exquisite rounding of the lithe form, the matchless fall
+of a pair of sloping shoulders that could not probably be matched within a
+radius of an hundred miles, the graceful carriage of a neck that would
+have been long if less elegantly poised, the beauty in shape and spring in
+motion of the Arab foot under which the water would have run as easily as
+beneath a bridge, and the supple delicacy of the long taper fingers with
+their rose-tinted nails, which seemed perfect and high-blooded enough to
+have a mission of playing among heart-strings as the fingers of others
+might do among the chords of a harp.
+
+In feature the young girl had quite as many claims to attention. The hair
+was very dark and very profuse--so near to black that it needed the
+sunlight before the golden shadows in the dark brown became fully
+apparent--swept plainly down on either side, in the madonna fashion, from a
+brow that was very pure, high and clear. The face was handsomely moulded,
+rather long than broad, as beseemed the figure, rather pale than ruddy,
+though with a dash of healthy color in each cheek that belied any momentary
+suspicion of ill health; the nose a little long and somewhat decided, but
+very classic in outline and finely cut at the nostril; the eyes dark--so
+dark that a careless observer would have lost their brown and called them
+black, and their expression a little reserved if not sad and even sometimes
+severe; the mouth small and well-shaped, with the lips as delicately tinted
+as the faintest blush-rose in the cluster near her, but a shade too thin
+for the exhibition of exuberant passion, and showing a slight curl of pride
+at the corners of the upper; the chin rounded, full, and forming a pleasant
+point for the eye to rest upon as it descended from the face to study the
+contour of neck and shoulders. The first appreciative glance at her was
+certain to be followed by the suppressed exclamation: "How very handsome!"
+and the second by a thought that the lips did not syllable: "How very proud
+and queenly!" It might have needed many more than a third, before the gazer
+could go to the full depth of a very marked character, and say how much of
+that queenly bearing might be ready to bend at last to the magic touch of
+the softer passions, and how much of that evident goodness and firmness
+might be employed in conveying happiness to others than herself. Among her
+peculiarities, she seemed to despise stripes, plaids, sprigs, spots, and
+the other endless varieties of color in material; and the lawn which swept
+that morning around her erect figure was of a neutral tint and as devoid of
+spot as were arms, ears and neck of any ornament in jewelry except a small
+cameo at the throat, a slight gold chain around the neck and descending to
+the bosom, and a single cluster diamond sparkling on the forefinger of the
+right-hand that was dallying with the spirit hidden among the rose-leaves.
+
+No more telling contrast to the tall, majestic girl could well have been
+supplied, than her neighbor and dear friend, Elsie Brand (Elspeth,
+baptismally, for reasons that will hereafter develop themselves, but always
+called Elsie by those admitted to the least intimacy.) She was at least
+four inches shorter than Miss Hayley, round and rather plump, though very
+graceful in figure, with a chubby face, ruddy cheeks, piquant nose, merry
+blue eyes, pouting red lips, full hair coming low down on the forehead and
+of that pale gold which the old Scotch poets immortalized as "yellow," in
+so many of their lays of the bardic era. Pretty, beyond question, but more
+good and attractive-looking than beautiful; and if a second look at
+Margaret Hayley would have induced an observation having reference to her
+pride, a second at Elsie Brand was certain to bring out the thought if not
+the speech: "What a charming, good little girl!" Perhaps a third, with
+persons not too severely in training for the great Olympian races of
+morality, was very likely to create such a sensation as one experiences in
+gazing at a lusciously ripe peach, having particular reference to the pulpy
+red lips with their funny pout and kissable look, and ending in a wish that
+the crimson love-apples of the modern Hesperides were not quite so
+zealously guarded.
+
+Elsie had not yet passed her twenty-second birthday, though she had been
+"of age" for a good many twelvemonths, in the estimation of those who had
+come near enough to her to feel the beating of her warm heart. Doctor
+James Holton, graduate of the Pennsylvania Medical College, and lately a
+student with one who had been a student with David Hosack, held his own
+peculiar estimation of Elsie Brand, and had almost been driven into rank
+atheism from the necessity of both holding and proving that the theory of
+our springing from one common father and mother could not possibly be
+correct, as the clay of which Elsie was made had been so very different--so
+much purer, sweeter and better--from that employed in the moulding of
+ordinary mortals!
+
+For some minutes the two young girls had been standing in silence, Margaret
+engaged with experiments on her opening rose and Elsie with one arm around
+her and lazily observing the operation--both apparently full of that
+indolent enjoyment born of ease, content, and the languid air of the summer
+morning. Then the little one spoke:
+
+"Margaret, do you know of what I have been thinking for the last two
+minutes?"
+
+"Haven't any machine by which I could pry into the droll secrets of your
+brain, Elsie, my dear!" answered the taller, pleasantly, but with no smile
+upon her lips meanwhile, and apparently with all her attention yet absorbed
+in her horticultural experiment.
+
+"Shall I tell you?" queried Elsie.
+
+"Certainly, pet, if you like!" was the reply, the tone, as well as the word
+of endearment, showing indefinably that Margaret Hayley thought of herself
+as a woman and yet of her companion (of nearly the same age) as little more
+than a child.
+
+"I was thinking," said the little girl, "how much of character is sometimes
+shown in the action of a moment, and how very different we are."
+
+"Who thought your little head was so philosophical, Elsie?" answered
+Margaret, and this time she for a moment deserted her rose and looked
+around with a pleasant smile. "Well, the application of your thought to
+yourself and to me?"
+
+"Oh," said the little one. "It was only about the rose. I should have
+plucked it, if I plucked it at all, and enjoyed it as it was. You are
+trying to make something else out of it, and yet show no wish to destroy
+the flower. A cruel woman--different from either of us, I hope--would
+probably be plucking off the leaves one by one and throwing them away,
+without caring how much pain she might be inflicting on the life of the
+flower, hidden away down somewhere in its heart."
+
+"A very pretty idea, upon my word!" said Margaret, ceasing to blow upon and
+pluck at the leaves, and turning upon her companion a countenance showing
+something like surprised admiration. "And what do you make of my character,
+Elsie, as shown by my handling of the rose?"
+
+"You must not be angry with me, Margaret," answered the young girl, a
+little in the spirit of deprecation. "But you see _I_ should have been
+satisfied with the rose as it was, and the other would have been cruelly
+dissatisfied with it in any shape, and you----"
+
+"Well, dear? I----"
+
+"You showed that you were not entirely satisfied with every thing as it
+was, and that you had a little self-will leading you to force things to be
+as you chose, by trying to make that poor little flower outrun the course
+of nature and bloom before it was quite ready."
+
+"I think you are right, Elsie," said Margaret, nodding her head in that
+slight and repeated manner indicative of answering the mind within quite as
+much as any observation from without. "I am _not_ satisfied with every
+thing in the world, Elsie. I am not cruel, I hope and believe; but I am
+sharper, harder, more requiring than you, and consequently not formed for
+half so much true happiness. I _do_ feel like forcing things to be what I
+require, sometimes, and then I suppose I grow unamiable."
+
+"You are never any thing else than a dear good girl, with a wiser head than
+my rattle-pate, and my own sweet sister that is to be!" and the arm of the
+speaker went still more closely around the slight waist it encircled. A
+blush as delicately roseate as the first flushings of dawn crept over the
+more classic face that bent above her own, the lips above came down to meet
+those pouting below, and the two young girls were kissing and embracing as
+if they had been two lovers of opposite sexes but very much of one opinion
+as to the best office of the lips. Any delicately-nerved old bachelor who
+should have happened to pass in front of the house at that moment and catch
+a glimpse of the scene just then enacted on the piazza, would certainly
+have fainted away on the spot, at the idea of such a waste of the most
+delicious of "raw material."
+
+"You may have the rose for your lesson--you see I have not spoiled it,
+after all," said Margaret, when the kiss had been given and the rosy flush
+died away from her own cheek.
+
+"To give to Carlton?" asked Elsie, as she held out her hand for it.
+
+"No, Carlton must come after his own roses!" was the reply, with the least
+dash of pride in the curling of the upper lip.
+
+"And pluck them himself?" asked saucy Elsie.
+
+"Certainly!"
+
+"No matter where he finds them growing--on tree, or on cheek, or on lips!"
+continued the young girl, with a light laugh.
+
+For an instant the same flush rose again on the cheek of Margaret Hayley;
+then she forced it away, smiled, and said:
+
+"Certainly! why not? Carlton Brand kisses me, sometimes, and I have more
+than once kissed him back. What is that to you, sauce-box, when we are
+engaged to be married?"
+
+"What is that to me? Every thing! Joy--happiness--to know that I am going
+to have so dear a sister!" cried the little one, throwing both her arms,
+this time, around the pliant waist of Margaret and hugging her in a perfect
+transport of delight, which seemed quite shared in, though more
+tranquilly, by the object of the demonstration.
+
+The saddest, cruellest thing in all the lyric drama is the blast of De
+Sylva's horn on Ernani's wedding morning, calling him in one instant from
+happy love to dishonor or death. Neither in romance nor in nature should
+such sudden transitions occur. Alas, for humanity! they do occur in both,
+not occasionally but habitually. The Duchess of Richmond's ball--then
+Waterloo. De Joinville springs on board his flag-ship to sail for the
+attack on Vera Cruz, in the very ball dress in which he has been dancing
+the whole night through with the republican belles at Castle Garden. The
+Pall is over every thing of earth: how sadly and how inevitably it droops
+above the Banner! No scene upon earth could have been more exquisitely
+peaceful, and few could have been lovelier, than that which surrounded and
+comprehended those two fair girls in their embrace upon the piazza. Wealth,
+youth, beauty, good feeling, happiness--all were there; and love blent with
+friendship, for was not the embrace, given by Elsie Brand and accepted by
+Margaret Hayley, both given and accepted quite as much for her brother's
+sake as her own? It was fitting, then, according to the sad fitness of
+earth, that the element of discord should enter into the peaceful and the
+beautiful.
+
+The officer spurred by, as we have seen him do, gazing only with our
+incorporeal eyes. Both the young girls, just releasing each other from
+their embrace, saw the dark cloud of war sweeping between them and the
+sunlit grain fields. Elsie Brand shuddered and drew back, as if the
+incongruity jarred her nature. Margaret Hayley instantly lifted her proud
+neck the higher, as if something in _her_ nature sympathized with every
+suggestion of the struggle, and as if she was, indeed, insensibly riding on
+with the hurrying horseman.
+
+"And what does the shudder mean, little one?" asked Margaret, who had
+plainly distinguished it at the moment of release.
+
+"I hate war, and every thing connected with it!" was the reply, the tone
+almost petulant.
+
+"And I do _not_ hate it, painful as it may be in many particulars," said
+Margaret. "Force and energy are the noblest developments in life. Bravery
+is the nearest possible approach to that divine character which knows no
+superior and consequently fears none."
+
+"Nearer to the divine than _love_?" asked the little one.
+
+Just for one instant, again, that roseate tint on the cheek of Margaret, as
+she said: "Nobler, if not nearer to the divine; and sorry as I must be to
+see the bloodshed caused by a civil war in my native land, I am almost glad
+that it has occurred, sometimes, as a means of rousing the sluggish pulses
+of men who would otherwise have stagnated in trade and pleasure, and
+proving that we yet possess something of the hero spirit of old."
+
+"And _I_ am sorry for it all the while, night and day, in my prayers and in
+my dreams," answered Elsie Brand, with a sigh. "Hark!" as the tap of the
+drum came across from the lateral road before-mentioned. "There is another
+reminder of the curse, and one that comes nearer home. Do you remember,
+Margaret, that I shall soon have a brother, and you a lover, separated from
+us and in terrible danger? They say Harrisburgh must be taken, unless a
+very large body of troops can reach it at once. The Reserves will probably
+go on, to-night, and Carlton will probably accept his old commission again.
+I do want him to do his duty, Margaret, if it _is_ his duty; but I hope
+that he will not think so--that he will not go away."
+
+"And _I_ hope that he _will_!" answered Margaret, her tall form drawn up to
+its full height, and a look of stern pride upon her face that could not
+very well be mistaken.
+
+"To go into danger--perhaps to death?" asked Elsie, looking sadly at the
+proud Sibylline face.
+
+"To a thousand deaths, if necessary, rather than towards the least
+suspicion of a want of true manhood!"
+
+"Ah, you do not know the trembling fear of a sister's love!" said Elsie,
+with a sigh.
+
+"I know a love fifty times deeper!" said Margaret, the pride still on her
+face, and yet that ever-returning flush coming up again to say that if love
+had not conquered pride it had at least divided the dominion. "Listen,
+Elsie Brand, to some words that you may as well understand now as ever.
+There is no one near to hear us, and so it is almost like speaking before
+heaven alone. I love your brother, deeply, devotedly, with all the power of
+my nature--so devotedly that if that love should be wrenched away from my
+heart by any circumstance, I know that my life would thenceforth be but one
+long, wretched mockery of existence. Happy natures like yours, Elsie, do
+not know the absolute agony that lies in such love. And yet I could give up
+that love, and my life with it, and would do so, before I would live, love,
+and yet _despise_!"
+
+"Despise?--are you speaking of Carlton--of my brother?" asked the young
+girl, apparently a little lost in the mysterious energy of her companion's
+words.
+
+"I said that I could _not_ despise," Margaret Hayley went on. "I must not,
+or we have no future. Do you know that I should have reverenced your
+brother more, even if I did not love him better, if he had not refused the
+commission in the army tendered him at the commencement of the war? I might
+have wept, perhaps mourned--but I should have idolized. Now, I only love a
+mortal like myself, where I might have been worshipping a hero!"
+
+"Or sobbing over a grave!" said Elsie, with a sigh which told how easily
+she might have been brought to illustrate the word she used.
+
+"What then!" was the quick reply of Margaret. "The glory would have been
+his--the loss and grief would have been mine, and I could have borne them.
+But he did not choose to enter the struggle, prominent as he had once been
+in military movements. He had the excuse of business and occupation, and I
+have tried to believe that he needed no other."
+
+"Needed?--what do you mean, Margaret?" cried Elsie Brand in a tone and with
+a movement of starting back which evidenced both pain and alarm.
+
+"It is a painful thing, but I must say it, to you, as I do not know that I
+could say it to him," pursued Margaret. "I mean, that I have tried to
+believe that there was no flaw in my idol--that Carlton Brand, who held
+every pulse of my woman's heart responsive to his touch--did not lack the
+one manly virtue of _courage_!"
+
+"And would you _dare_ to believe my brother--the man you have pretended to
+love--a _coward_?" There was something vexed and sharp, almost angry, in
+Elsie's tone, now, that did not promise another immediate embrace like that
+of a few moments previous. Margaret Hayley saw the expression of her face,
+but neither blenched before it nor seemed to feel any anger at the
+manifestation.
+
+"Elsie Brand," she said, her words slow, measured, and with a cadence that
+was somehow inexpressibly pained and mournful, "I am no school-girl, and I
+am speaking words that I mean. I know your brother to be patriotic, I know
+him to be in high health, athletic, vigorous and determined; and have
+sometimes believed that if he had possessed that one requisite, animal
+courage, he would long ago have been fighting the foes of the republic.
+Grieve as I may to part with him, I am glad you believe that he is going
+with the Reserves. He had his choice, before, and I let my own heart
+instead of my reason have sway, and did not question its propriety. But
+were he to hang back now, when his native State is invaded and every arm
+necessary to drive back the rebels from Pennsylvania soil, I should know
+that he was a coward!"
+
+"I don't like you, Margaret Hayley, when your face looks so and you talk in
+that manner!" said the little girl. "But I will not quarrel with you.
+Carlton is going with the Reserves, and some day when he is killed or you
+hear how he has shamed all the rest with his bravery, you will be sorry for
+the words you have just spoken!" Just then the little yellow-haired girl
+was the Sibyl, and her prophecy went upon record with the wild words of
+Margaret, to be afterwards remembered--how sadly!
+
+"No--do not be angry with me, Elsie," said Margaret, taking the hand that
+had been temporarily released. "You have no cause. I have been speaking
+against my own heart all the while, much more than against the man whom I
+truly love. I know him to be noble and true, and I will believe him brave.
+Are you satisfied? Kiss me!" and the proud, statuesque face once more lost
+its gravity, to bring back all the joyousness into the rounder and merrier
+one from which it had temporarily departed.
+
+The light summer jockey-hat of Elsie lay just within the door, on a chair.
+With a quick glance at the watch hidden under her waist-riband, she stepped
+within the door, threw on her hat, and was about to terminate her somewhat
+prolonged morning-call, when Margaret took it off again, dropped it into
+one of the vacant chairs, and said:
+
+"No--do not go away. You have nothing to do at home--mother has gone down
+to the city for the day, you know, and I shall be lonely. We shall have
+some lunch--you may call it dinner if it will taste any better,--very soon.
+Stay till the afternoon--cannot you do so, just as well as not?"
+
+"I suppose so--no, I must see Carlton--yes, though, Carlton will be quite
+as likely to come here first as to go home, if he has arranged to go
+away--yes, I will stay if you wish it so much!" rapidly answered the little
+one.
+
+"That is a good girl," said Margaret Hayley, just as she might have patted
+a school hobby-de-hoy on the head. "Now run into the parlor and get the
+very nicest book you can find, draw the easy-chair out of the hall, and
+enjoy yourself the best you can for just twenty minutes, while I go down
+to the kitchen, in ma's place, and see what progress our new Dutch cook has
+been making."
+
+She disappeared with the words, and her injunctions were acted upon almost
+as rapidly. In half a minute Elsie had the arm-chair out of the hall, and
+an illustrated work off one of the tables in the parlor, and was prepared
+for her short period of indolent enjoyment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+     THE COMING OF CARLTON BRAND--ALMOST A PALADIN OF
+     BALAKLAVA--BROTHER AND SISTER--A SPASM OF SHAME--THE
+     CONFESSION--THE COWARD--HOW MARGARET HAYLEY HEARD MANY WORDS
+     NOT INTENDED FOR HER--THE RUPTURE AND THE SEPARATION.
+
+
+Not long was the young girl, left at the close of the last chapter bodily
+ensconced in an easy-chair on the broad piazza, and mentally absorbed in
+the attractions of one of the choicest books in Margaret Hayley's
+collection, allowed to pursue her reading undisturbed. Not two minutes had
+elapsed when a horseman, riding a chestnut horse of handsome appearance and
+fine action, came rapidly up from the direction of the city, dismounted
+with the same practised grace that he had shown when in the saddle, threw
+the rein of his horse over one of the posts standing near the gate, opened
+that gate and came up the walk, without attracting the attention of the
+young lady on the piazza, or that of any other occupant of the house he was
+approaching.
+
+Lifting from his brow, as he approached the house, to wipe away the slight
+moisture which had gathered there even in riding, the broad-brimmed and
+low-crowned hat of light gray, which so well accorded with his loose but
+well-fitting suit of the same color, he gave an opportunity for studying
+the whole man, which could not well have been attained under other
+circumstances; and both narrator and reader may be excused for stopping him
+momentarily in that position, while due examination is made of his most
+striking outward peculiarities.
+
+He was at least five feet eleven inches in height, with a figure rather
+slight than stout, but singularly erect, sinewy, and elastic, every
+movement giving evidence that the body could not well be set to a task
+beyond its power of endurance. The foot was not very small, but
+well-shaped, and the ungloved hand which held his riding-whip was almost
+faultless in shape and color. The hat removed, a brow rather broad than
+high was seen, with a head well balanced in all the intellectual and moral
+requirements, densely covered with light, curling hair, of that peculiar
+shade which the poetical designate as "blonde" and the practical as
+"sandy." The complexion, though the cheeks were a little browned by the
+summer sun, was very fair, and that of the brow as stainless as any petted
+girl's could be. The features were nearly faultless in the Greek severity
+of their outline, the nose straight and well cut, the mouth small but with
+full curved lips, the eyes of hazel, widely set. The lower part of his face
+was effectually concealed by a luxuriant full beard and moustache, a few
+shades darker than his hair, and showing a propensity to curl on slight
+provocation. He was a decidedly handsome man of twenty-eight to thirty,
+erect, gentlemanly, dignified, and with something in his general appearance
+irresistibly reminding the spectator of the traditional appearance of those
+blonde Englishmen of good birth, who seem made to dawdle life away without
+exhibiting one of the sterner qualities of human nature, until deadly
+danger shows them to have that cool recklessness of life which charged two
+hundred years ago with Prince Rupert and ten years ago with poor Nolan. Yet
+this was the idea more likely to be formed of him and his capabilities, by
+strangers and those who lacked opportunity to examine his face and manner
+closely, than by those intimately acquainted with both; for there was an
+occasional nervousness in the movement of the hands, and even of the whole
+figure, that to a close observer would have belied the first-assumed
+self-confidence; and a something drooping, tremulous, and undecided in the
+lower lip at the corners, was so well matched by a sad and even troubled
+expression that often rested like a cloud over the eyes, that the whole man
+seemed to be made into another self by them.
+
+Such was Carlton Brand, the brother of Elsie, about whom the tongues of the
+two young girls had wagged so unreservedly but a few minutes before. Such
+was his appearance, to the outward eye, as, hat still in hand, he
+approached the piazza. Elsie was sufficiently absorbed in her book, not to
+feel his presence; and it was not until he was close upon her that the
+young girl saw him, flung down the costly illustrated volume in her chair
+with less care than might have pleased the less impulsive owner, sprang to
+the step and seized both the occupied hands of the new-comer, with a warmth
+that showed how cordial was the affection between brother and sister, so
+widely different in appearance and indication of character.
+
+"How did you come here, pet?" the brother asked, as soon as his mouth was
+free from the kiss his sister tendered.
+
+"Oh, ran across the fields half an hour ago, and intended to be back home
+by this time, only that Margaret was alone and wished me to stay; and
+besides----"
+
+"Well--besides what?"
+
+"Besides, I almost knew that you would stop _here_ before you went home,
+and I should see more of you before you went away, by remaining."
+
+Could the young girl but have seen the quick spasm of agony that just then
+passed over the face of Carlton Brand--the agitation and trembling which
+seized upon lip and hands--she might have been wiser the next moment, but
+she certainly would not have been happier. Just for that one moment there
+seemed to be lack-lustre vacancy in the eyes, total want of self-assertion
+in face and figure, and the handsome, noble-looking man actually seemed to
+have collapsed, bowed, and sunk within himself, so that he was more an
+object of pity than of envy. But the sister's eyes were fortunately turned
+away at that instant, and she saw nothing. When she looked at him again,
+the spasm, whatever it might have been, was gone, and she only saw his
+usual self. He did not reply to her last suggestion, but asked, after an
+instant of hesitation:
+
+"Where is Margaret?"
+
+"Gone down into the kitchen for a few moments, to look after a new Dutch
+cook, but she will soon return. And so you are really going away, brother,
+and I shall be so lonesome!" and the hand of the sister sought that of the
+dearly-loved brother again, as if every moment lost without some touch of
+one who was so soon to leave her, was lost indeed.
+
+Even to this the brother gave no reply, but made a remark with reference to
+the rapid ripening of the grain in the wheat-fields that skirted the road
+beyond. A duller wit than that of Elsie Brand might have become aware that
+he was avoiding an unpleasant subject; and the young girl recognized the
+fact, but gave it an entirely erroneous explanation, believing that he must
+have heard some peculiarly threatening news from the scene of the invasion,
+making the peril of the troops about to leave more deadly than it would
+have been under ordinary circumstances, and that he dreaded to enter upon
+the theme at all, for fear of alarming her. As a consequence, her next
+words were a disclaimer of her own fears.
+
+"Oh, Carlton, you need not be afraid to speak of it to me. Much as I have
+dreaded your going away, I know, now, that it is your duty, when your own
+State is invaded; and I have made up my mind to bear the separation, and
+even to think of you, my own dear brother, as in danger, without saying one
+word to hold you back."
+
+"Have you?" That spasm was again upon his face, and the words were hoarse;
+but again the eye and the ear of the sister missed the recognition of any
+thing unusual.
+
+"Yes; and so has Margaret."
+
+"Has she?" The spasm had not gone off his face, and the second question was
+asked even more hoarsely than the first. For some reason that the young
+girl could not understand, he turned away from her, walked down to the end
+of the piazza, and stood looking off. What he was suffering at that moment,
+with three or four of the most powerful passions known to humanity tearing
+at his heart-strings at once, none may know who have not passed through the
+same terrible ordeal which he was then enduring. There were only the fays
+who may have been playing among the green grass, and the dryads yet
+lingering among the whispering leaves of the maples, looking in at the end
+of the piazza upon his face: had they been human eyes, what of wrestling
+and struggle might they not have seen! When he turned to walk back towards
+the spot where his sister was standing in surprise not unmingled with
+alarm, his face was again calm, but it would have shown, to the observant
+eye, a calmness like that of despair. His words, too, were forced when they
+came:
+
+"You and Margaret both, Elsie, love me so well, I know, that you would give
+up almost any thing to please me; but I do not intend to task either of you
+too far. I am not going--that is, business detains me so that I cannot--I
+am not going to Harrisburgh."
+
+"Business!" Elsie Brand had never before, in her whole young life, uttered
+a word so hardly or in a tone so nearly approaching to a sneer, as she
+spoke the single word at that moment. Were the words of Margaret Hayley
+ringing in her ear, and did she find some terrible confirmation, now, of
+what had before been so impossible to believe? "Business!--what business,
+Carlton, _can_ be sufficient to keep you at home when they seem to need you
+so much?"
+
+"What do _you_ know about it?" and _his_ tones were harsh and almost
+menacing. "Do we ask you women to decide what we shall do, where we shall
+go, and where we shall stay?"
+
+"Oh, Carlton!" and the cry seemed to come from the very heart of the young
+girl. It was perhaps the first harsh word that had ever fallen on her ear,
+aimed at her from the lips of the brother she so adored. God only knew the
+agony under which that harsh word had been wrung out, as only he could know
+the agony it might cause! The cry instantly melted the heart to which it
+appealed. Carlton Brand took the hand of his sister in his own, kissed her
+tenderly, and said:
+
+"Forgive me, Elsie, if I spoke as I should never speak to _you_! But you do
+not know, sometimes, what moves men to harshness which they afterwards
+bitterly repent."
+
+"But you are not going with the regiment?" again she asked.
+
+"No!--I have told you I was not, Elsie!" and the tone came very near to
+being a harsh one, once more.
+
+"I am sorry--very sorry, Carlton!"
+
+"Sorry?" and the often-recurring spasm which again passed over his
+features, could not have been unobserved by the young girl, for her own
+face seemed to reflect it. "Sorry? Are you indeed sorry that I am not going
+into--that I am not going to be absent from you?"
+
+"Oh, no, Carlton! heaven knows I am not!" said Elsie, and the merry blue
+eyes were filled with tears. "But I think you ought to go; and you do not
+know, Carlton, how much may hang upon it. Do you love Margaret--really and
+truly love her?"
+
+"Love her? as my own soul!" answered Carlton Brand. He did not say "as his
+own _life_"! "Why do you ask, after all that you have known of our
+attachment and our engagement?"
+
+"Because, Carlton"--and the young girl, weeping the while under an impulse
+of feeling that she could scarcely herself understand, caught him by the
+arm and drew down his head towards her--"because I believe that if you do
+not go with the Reserves, Margaret will think that you do not do so
+because--oh, I cannot speak the word!"
+
+"Because what? Speak it out!" and he seemed to be nerving himself to meet
+some shock that was likely to need all his energies.
+
+"Because"--in a voice very low and broken--"because you are afraid to
+go--because you are a _coward_!"
+
+"Has she said as much?" and the eyes of the speaker, very sad, troubled,
+and almost wild, seemed still to have power to read the very soul of the
+young girl before him. Elsie could not speak at first, but she nodded
+twice, and never death-bell of a condemned criminal rung out more clearly
+or more frightfully on the startled air, tolling the knell of a last hope,
+than the whisper that came at last from her lips:
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Then God help me!" came from those of the strong man, in such a
+manifestation of agony as was painful to behold, while his hands for one
+moment clasped themselves together as if he would wring them in womanish
+weakness, then went up to his face and spread themselves as if they would
+shut it away forever from human sight. "God help me!--and you, Elsie,
+despise me if you will, but, oh, help me to keep it from _her_. I dare not
+go! I _am_ a coward! If I should go into battle I should disgrace myself
+there forever, by running away at the first fire, and that would break our
+poor old father's heart!"
+
+"Carlton! Carlton! my poor brother!" and the hands of the young girl closed
+around one of her brother's, with so warm a pressure as proved that she did
+not think of any shame, disgrace or fault in the connection, but only as
+the announcement of some great misfortune.
+
+"Yes, Elsie, you have wrung from me the confession that I hoped never to be
+obliged to make to any one but my God. I have made it to Him, oh, how many
+times, and I almost feel that he has forgiven me, as my fellow-men will
+never do. I have been a coward, I suppose, from my very cradle and heaven
+only knows how I have managed to conceal the terrible truth from you, all
+this while! The very sight of blood sickens me, even when it is only the
+blood of beeves in a slaughter-house. One spirt from the arm of a man when
+he is being bled sets every nerve to trembling, and sometimes sends me
+fainting to the floor. One moment among the horrible sights of battle--the
+groans, and shrieks, and crashing bullets and spouting blood of
+carnage--would drive me mad or send me flying away with the curses of my
+whole race ringing in my ears."
+
+"Oh, Carlton! my poor brother!" repeated once more, and in the same tone of
+heart-broken sympathy, was all that Elsie Brand could answer to this
+humiliation of the one to whom, perhaps, next to God, she had ever looked
+up as to His noblest human manifestation of greatness in creative power.
+
+"Do you see what a poor miserable wretch I am?" he went on, apparently
+forgetful that any one besides his sister might be within hearing, and she
+so absorbed in the grief and shame of the revelation that she possessed no
+more forethought. "Think of me as an officer in my regiment, and know with
+what a reddened face I must have walked the streets when we paraded,
+conscious that if suddenly called to duty--even the quelling of a mob at
+the street-corner--I should be obliged to disgrace myself at once and
+forever! Think what I have suffered since the war broke out!--commission
+after commission offered me--loving my country as I believe man never loved
+it before--and yet not daring to strike one blow in its behalf. Obliged to
+make slight excuses when others have inquired why I did not go to the
+war--obliged to wear a double face, a mask, everywhere and at all
+times--dreading detection every day, and in that detection perhaps the loss
+of my proud father's life and of the love that has made the only hope of my
+own--cursing the omen that unwittingly gave me the brand of the coward in
+my very name--racked and tortured thus, and yet obliged to hold an
+honorable place among my fellow-men--it has been too hard, Elsie, too hard!
+And now to lose all! If _she_ has learned to suspect me--I know her brave
+heart and her proud nature--I shall lose her, the richest, noblest thing on
+earth, half grasped, to be mourned for as never man yet mourned for woman!
+Do help me, Elsie! Help me to conceal my shame--to deceive her, yes--God
+help me!--to deceive _her_ before whom my very soul should be laid bare--so
+that she will not know me for the miserable wretch and coward that I am!"
+
+And all this while his face was wrought and contorted, at short intervals,
+by those fearful spasms of shame and mental suffering; and ever and anon
+his hands locked together and seemed to wring themselves even beyond his
+own volition. How different he looked, at that moment, from the handsome,
+noble man, in the full pride of mature adolescence, who had stepped upon
+that piazza but a few moments before!
+
+"I would do any thing in the world to help you, Carlton; but what _can_ I
+do?" faltered the young girl, who saw no light beyond the thick, black
+cloud of shame and ruin slowly settling down on the head of her beloved
+brother.
+
+"Help me to conceal the truth"--he went on--"to enforce any excuse for not
+leaving the city at this moment! I know it is base and contemptible, but it
+is for a good purpose, Elsie--to save a heart that is already distracted,
+and a life that must be wrecked without it. We may never be placed in the
+same circumstances again--the war may soon be ended--if she can only be
+kept from knowing this, I may never be placed in the same peril again, and
+my whole life shall be one long proof that I am not otherwise unworthy of
+the woman I love so madly."
+
+"It does not need, Carlton Brand!" sounded a voice from within--a voice
+that both recognized but too well; and out of the hall came the figure of
+Margaret Hayley.
+
+Her words and her manner alike proved that she had heard all, or at least
+enough; for there was an expression of withering contempt flashing out of
+her dark eye and curling her proud lip, not easily to be borne by any
+person towards whom they were directed. There did not seem, for the moment,
+to be any thing like pity in her composition; and if there had been love
+within her heart, it appeared to have been so crushed out by one stunning
+blow that it could never bloom again any more than the wild flower ground
+beneath the heel of the wayfarer. Her head was proud, erect, haughty,
+disdainful; and one who had leisure to examine her closely would have seen
+that the nostril was opening and shutting convulsively, as if overwhelming
+passion was only suppressed by the physical act of holding the breath.
+Elsie Brand was too much dizzied and confused to be quite aware what had
+happened or what was about to happen. She merely uttered a cry of agitation
+and fright, and shrunk back alike from her brother and the woman who had
+come to be his judge. Carlton Brand saw more, with the quick eye of the
+lawyer and the sharpened perception of the lover. He realized that Margaret
+Hayley had heard his agonized and unmanly confession--that anger and scorn
+had driven away from her face the love which had so often and so pleasantly
+beamed upon him--that his doom was sealed.
+
+With the knowledge came back to him that manliness in demeanor of which he
+had been so sorely in need a moment before. In the presence only of his
+sister, and when pleading with her to assist in rescuing him from the pit
+of grief and shame into which he felt himself to be sinking, he had been
+humble, abject, even cowering. Now, and in the presence of the woman for
+whose softened opinion he would have given the world and almost bartered
+his hopes of heaven,--he stood erect, and if the spasm of pain did not
+entirely pass away from his face, at least it changed in its character so
+that he was a man once more.
+
+"I understand you, Miss Hayley," were the first words he spoke. "You have
+heard some words not intended for your ear. You have been _listening_."
+
+"If you merely mean that I have heard what was not intended for my ear, you
+certainly speak the truth, Mr. Brand," she replied, catching the formality
+of his address at once. "But if you mean that I have listened meanly, or
+even voluntarily, to words intended to be confidential, you wrong yourself,
+equally with me, in saying so. You have spoken so loudly that not only I
+but even the servants in the house could not well avoid hearing you; and
+there is not much 'listening' in hearing words almost brawled on a piazza."
+
+Her words were very bitter--they beseemed the lips from which they flowed.
+A man who loved her less or, who had fewer of the natural impulses of the
+gentleman than Carlton Brand, might only have thought of the taunt conveyed
+and forgotten its justice. He did not do so, but bowed at once with an air
+of respectful humility, and said:
+
+"I beg ten thousand pardons for my hasty speech. I was mad when I made it.
+Certainly you have heard nothing but what you had a right to hear." And
+then he stood erect but silent.
+
+Poor little Elsie Brand could contain herself no longer. How she loved her
+brother, only the angels knew. How easily we pardon, in those of our
+kindred, what would be indelible disgrace in the characters of others, all
+close observers of humanity know too well. Little Elsie Brand was only
+acting the part of nature in espousing the cause of her own blood, and
+saying, before time enough had elapsed for any additional words between the
+two principals:
+
+"Margaret Hayley, I say that you are too hard with Carlton! If you had ever
+loved him, as you pretended, you would not be so! There, you have not asked
+my opinion, but you have it!"
+
+The words, though kindly meant, were ill-advised. Not even her brother, who
+had but a few moments before been imploring her assistance, thanked her
+for what she had then spoken. At least he silenced her for the time with--
+
+"You can do no good now by speaking, Elsie. It is too late. Miss Hayley has
+something more to say to me, no doubt, after what she has accidently heard;
+and I am prepared to hear it." He stood almost coolly, then, the bared head
+bent only a very little, and the face almost as calm as it was
+inexpressibly mournful. So might a convicted criminal stand, feeling
+himself innocent of wrong in intent, beaten down under a combination of
+circumstances too strong to combat, awaiting the words of his sentence, and
+yet determined that there should be something more of dignity in his
+reception of the last blow than there had ever been in any previous action
+of his life.
+
+Twice Margaret Hayley essayed to speak, and twice she failed in the effort.
+If she had been calmly indignant the moment before, Nature had already
+begun to take its revenge, and she was the woman again. Her proud head was
+bent a little lower, and there was a dewy moisture in the dark eyes, that
+could never be so well dried up as in being kissed away. Who knows that the
+proud woman was not really relenting--letting the old love come back in one
+overwhelming tide and sweep away all the barriers erected by indignation
+and contempt? Who knows how much of change might possibly have been
+wrought, had the next words of Carlton Brand been such as indicated his
+belief that the chain between them was not yet severed utterly? Who knows,
+indeed?--for his words were very different.
+
+"Miss Hayley, I have waited for you to speak what I feel that you have to
+say. You have heard words that no betrothed woman, I suppose, can hear from
+her promised husband and yet retain that respect for him which should be
+the very foundation of the marriage-bond."
+
+"I have." The words came from her lips in tones much lower than those in
+which she had before spoken, and she did not even look at him as she
+answered.
+
+"You have heard me declare myself--I know by the face you wore but a moment
+since, that you have heard all this--what you hold to be the lowest and
+most contemptible thing on God's footstool--a _coward_."
+
+"I have. I would rather have died on the spot than heard those words from
+the lips of the man I have--have loved!" The words still low, and some
+hesitation in those which concluded the sentence. One would almost have
+believed, at that moment, that of the two the culprit was the down-looking
+and low-voiced woman, instead of the man whose godlike presence so
+contradicted the dastardly vice he was confessing.
+
+"I have no defence to offer," the speaker went on. "If you have heard all
+that I believe, no further explanation is necessary. You know the worst;
+and as a proud woman, with honor unspotted and beyond suspicion, you have a
+right to pass what sentence you choose upon my--my shame, my crime, if you
+will!"
+
+Perfect silence for an instant, then a broken sob from Elsie, whose face
+was streaming with tears denied to both the others, and who was leaning her
+forehead against the sharp corner of one of the columns of the piazza,
+apparently that the slight physical pain thus inflicted might do something
+to still the mental agony that raged within. Then Margaret Hayley, as if
+she had passed through a long struggle but conquered at last with a triumph
+slaying her own soul, raised her head, drew in a hard breath, shook back
+one of the tresses of her dark hair which had fallen over her brow, and
+spoke:
+
+"Do you know, Carlton Brand--I cannot call you _Mr._ Brand again, for that
+address is mockery after what we have been to each other--do you know what
+that sentence must be, in justice to myself and to you?"
+
+"I can guess it, Margaret Hayley," was the answer, the prefix changed again
+in imitation of her, just as she a moment before had changed it in
+imitating him. The incident was a mere nothing, and yet suggestive as
+showing how closely the two seemed to study each other, and how much of
+real sympathy there must after all have been between them. "I can guess it,
+and I will try to bear it."
+
+"You can guess it--you do guess it--separation!" said Margaret in a low
+voice that she could not quite render firm.
+
+"I was not mistaken--I supposed as much," he answered. "You are a proud
+woman, Margaret, and you could not marry a man for whom you failed to
+entertain respect--"
+
+"I _am_ a proud woman, but a woman still," said Margaret. "You whom I have
+loved so truly, can best guess the depth of my woman's nature. But I cannot
+and will not marry a man to whom I cannot look up and say: 'This man has
+the courage and the will to protect me in every peril!'"
+
+"Have you ever had reason to believe that I could not and would not protect
+you, if need came, against all the world?" and his eyes momentarily
+flashed, at that thought, with a light which should not have shone in the
+orbs of a coward.
+
+"Words are idle, Carlton Brand!" said Margaret. "There is no protection so
+sacredly due as that of a strong man to his country. You know it, and I
+know it as well. The man who knows his duty to his country and dares not do
+it, through sheer bodily fear, could not be trusted in any relation. His
+wife would not dare trust him, if she knew it; and you have opened my eyes
+but too painfully. And so, in mercy to both, all must be over between us--"
+
+"Oh, do not say that, Margaret, sister!" broke out Elsie, in a more
+faltering voice than she had ever used in pleading for herself since the
+earliest day of childhood. Margaret did not heed her, if she heard, but
+went on from the point at which she had been interrupted:
+
+"All is over between us, Carlton Brand, at once and forever, unless----"
+
+"Unless?--what is the possibility you would yet hold out to me?" and the
+speaker showed more agitation, at that one renewed glimpse of hope, than he
+had done when battling against utter despair.
+
+"Unless you will yet obey the summons that has called you with every other
+true son of Pennsylvania to the field, and prove to me that you did not
+know yourself or that you were endeavoring to play a cruel part in
+deceiving your sister and me!"
+
+The face of Carlton Brand had been comparatively calm, ever since the
+coming out of Margaret. Suffer as he might, most of the suffering had been
+hidden. Now that face assumed an aspect that was really fearful to behold.
+The veins on his forehead swelled as if they would burst, his lip set hard,
+his eyes glared as if one touch might have made him a maniac, and his hands
+worked convulsively. All the symptoms of extreme terror and of a repugnance
+which no effort could overcome, were imminent in every glance and motion;
+and something of those phenomena was exhibited which we may suppose the
+Highland seer of old time to have shown, when he was carried beyond himself
+by the invisible powers, and saw battle, defeat and horrible death for
+himself or others, slowly unrolling before his spiritual sight. Elsie Brand
+shuddered and drew back to the column which had before sheltered her.
+Margaret Hayley still stood erect, though she was evidently laboring under
+suppressed excitement, and none could say what the end of this scene might
+be. It was quite a moment before Carlton Brand could command himself
+sufficiently to speak, and then he said in a low, broken voice:
+
+"No--I cannot. I cannot kill my poor gray-haired old father with the
+spectacle of the flight and disgrace of his only son."
+
+"And you have decided well," said Margaret. "It is a bitter thing to say,
+but I am glad that you have marked out my course as you have done.
+Think--oh heaven!" and she seemed indeed to be for the moment addressing
+the powers above instead of those regnant upon the earth--"think how near I
+came to being this man's wife and the possible mother of his children, each
+one marked with the curse set upon them by their father!" No human ear
+could have heard the whisper which followed: "Enough of disgraces
+descending from parents--oh, heaven!"
+
+"You are right, Margaret Hayley--right!" spoke Carlton Brand, his voice
+lower, more hoarse and broken than it had been at any part of the long
+interview. "You have reminded me well of your duty and mine. The day may
+come when you will be sorry for every word that has fallen from your lips;
+but it may not. To-day you are doing right--let the future take care of
+itself. Good-bye!"
+
+He took the long, slender white fingers in his, and looked upon them a
+minute, the tears at last gathering in his eyes. Then, when through the
+thickening drops he could scarcely see them longer, he raised them to his
+lips, pressed a kiss upon them, dropped the hand and strode off the piazza
+and away, never once looking back as he passed down the path towards the
+gate.
+
+Margaret Hayley had been overstraining both heart and brain, and the
+penalty asserted itself very soon. Her discarded lover was scarcely half
+way down the path when the revulsion came, and pride for the moment broke
+down before her terrible sorrow. The proud neck bent, she stretched out her
+arms after the retreating figure, the single word, "Carlton!" came half
+whispered and half groaned through her lips, her eyes closed, and she sunk
+fainting into the arms of Elsie.
+
+Carlton Brand did not hear the call. A moment, and still without another
+glance at the house where he was leaving behind the happiness of a life, he
+had unloosed the splendid chestnut pawing at the gate, swung himself into
+the saddle and ridden away westward. He reeled a little in his seat as he
+rode, as a drunken man might have done--that was all the apparent
+difference between the man with a hope who had arrived half an hour before
+and the man who now departed without one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+     KITTY HOOD AND HER SCHOOL-HOUSE--DICK COMPTON GOING
+     SOLDIERING--A LOVERS' QUARREL, A BIT OF JEALOUSY, AND A
+     THREAT--HOW DICK COMPTON MET HIS SUPPOSED RIVAL--AN
+     ENCOUNTER, SUDDEN DEATH, AND KITTY HOOD'S TERRIBLE
+     DISCOVERY.
+
+
+"I do not care, Dick Compton! You are a mean, good-for-nothing fellow, and
+the sooner you go away and get killed, the better. I hope I may never set
+eyes on you again, as long as I live."
+
+A pleasant style of address, especially from a pretty woman; and yet one to
+which a good many persons have submitted, first and last, from little
+people whom they could physically have slain with a single stroke and
+mentally discomfited with very little more trouble!
+
+The time of this objurgation was the same morning on which the events took
+place which have already been recorded as occurring at the residence of
+Margaret Hayley, and at a very little earlier hour than that which
+witnessed the departure of Carlton Brand from the place of his signal
+discomfiture. The place was in front of a little country-school-house
+standing half a mile from the Darby road, north-westward, and perhaps two
+miles westward from the Hayleys. The interlocutors were Richard Compton
+(already introduced as "Dick" by the flippant tongue of his companion), a
+young and well-to-do farmer of the neighborhood, about a quarter of a
+century old, perhaps some five feet nine in height, thickset,
+strong-limbed, with a round, good-humored face guiltless of beard but
+browned a good deal by exposure in the field, generally smiling and
+content, but with a spice of the bull-dog in his nature which made him
+sullen occasionally and led him always to be very fond of his own peculiar
+way;--and Kitty Hood, teacher of the district school of that particular
+section of the Keystone State, a short, round, rosy little lass, with merry
+brown eyes that only occasionally had a sterner kind of mischief in them,
+dark brown waved hair, and just the last general appearance in the world
+that a phrenologist would have selected for the necessarily calm and
+dignified life of an instructress of callow youth.
+
+The old weather-beaten school-house, erected perhaps fifty years before but
+not yet swept away in the prevailing rage for staring new white baby-houses
+for the instruction of children in the country, stood at the base of a
+slight wooded hill, facing southward; a fine old sycamore near the door
+holding the whole house and all its contents in flecked light and shade; a
+group of locusts not far away to the left showing a motley jumble of
+benches beneath, that were evidently the favorite lounging-place of the
+children during play-hours; and a little pond of a hundred or two feet in
+diameter, with one edge half covered with the leaves of the intrusive
+pond-lilies, and the other bordered by a juvenile wharf of stones, old
+boards and bark, supplying the youngsters with a place in which to paddle,
+sail boats and get very wet without any danger of being drowned, in summer,
+and with a reliable though limited skating-ground in winter. Its
+convenience for winter sports could only be imagined, at that season of the
+year when the wild-roses were clambering up the dingy boards of the
+inclosure, to the windows of the school-room; but its inevitable use as a
+part of the great "highway of nations" was too plainly shown by a
+circumstance which, alas!--at the same moment illustrated the vicissitudes
+of commerce and the necessity for the existence of insurance companies. A
+stately vessel of the mercantile guild, twelve inches in length but with
+the dignity of three masts and each holding spitted on it as a sail nearly
+an entire half-sheet of foolscap paper, had evidently left the little wharf
+during the morning play-hour, freighted for the Spice Islands lying up
+among the pond-lilies, but suffered the fate of many sea-going ships,
+fallen under the power of foul winds or adverse currents, and stranded on
+a reef of mud some paces from the shore, from which the ingenuity of her
+factors had not yet been able to release her, and where she lay "keeled
+over" in a manner equally contaminating to her white paper sails and
+unpleasant to her possible passengers. No doubt anxious eyes were meanwhile
+glancing out of the windows, between two leaves of the geography which
+detailed the perils of navigation in the East Indian archipelago, to see
+whether piratical canoes or pirogues did not put off to burn that noble
+vessel and massacre her crew, before noon should give time for any further
+efforts towards her release. Here the course of this narration painfully
+but necessarily loses sight of the good three-master "Snorter, of
+Philadelphia," as many another of the fairy barks launched by inexperienced
+youth disappears from view and is known no more forever; but let us hope
+that this particular venture was floated off at some early "spring tide" of
+play-spell, and that she "came safely to her desired haven!"
+
+Within the little one-story school-house, with its unpainted desks and
+benches of pine, dark with age and scarred by notch and inscription from
+the penknives of half a century of school-boys,--there was going on, at
+that moment, precisely what may be seen in any school from Windsor to
+Washoe, when the ruling power is temporarily absent. Wilkie painted not
+only from life, but from the inevitable in life, when he drew the "Village
+School in an Uproar;" for mobs have been put down by the military power and
+even savage communities have been made quiet by the exercise of
+powder-and-ball; but no force has yet been discovered that could check (and
+who would wish it to be entirely checked, after all?) the riotous mischief
+of the school-room when the terrible eye is removed! Five minutes before,
+Mistress Hood in the chair of authority, fifty heads of all hues and all
+textures had been more or less closely bent down over book and slate, and a
+low monotonous hum, something like the sleepy drone from a score of
+bee-hives, had been heard floating out on the summer air. Now, Mistress
+Kitty Hood had been just two minutes absent from the school-room, and a
+nice little Pandemonium was already established, that it would need some
+birchings and many strong words to annihilate. Half a dozen of the big boys
+had gathered into a knot, not far from the door, and were snickering aloud
+and pointing knowingly towards the point of interest without, with running
+comments on "Miss Hood's beau!" Three little girls, forgetting their sex,
+were playing at leap-frog between and over two of the benches, to the
+disarrangement of their short skirts and the eventual tumbling over of one
+of the benches with a loud clatter. Two or three of the larger girls were
+in close conversation, about what there is no means of knowing except that
+one of them remarked that "it was real indecent and she meant to tell her
+ma!" One boy, who was the possessor of a magnificently national
+handkerchief, had stuck it on the end of the long ruler from the mistress'
+desk, and was going through a dress parade of one, with a feeble whistle as
+music. A young brute was taking the opportunity of pinching the ear of a
+smaller boy, and making him whimper, as a punishment for some previous
+alleged injury. Another had made a pair of spectacles out of blue paper,
+and stuck them on the nose of a little girl on one of the near benches, who
+blushed so rosily that her white dress, blue spectacles and red face quite
+supplied the national colors. And still another, with cheeks marvellously
+distended, was trying whether he could, in the short space of time during
+which the mistress might be absent, manage to choke down three early
+harvest-apples without dying by strangulation or requiring any assistance
+from his companions.
+
+Such were the surroundings of the country school-house, and such was the
+aspect of Kitty Hood's little school-room during her temporary absence. And
+now what was the necessity which had for the moment withdrawn her from her
+charge, and what was the provocation under which the words were uttered,
+given at the commencement of this chapter?
+
+Perhaps the personal appearance of Dick Compton may go at least a little
+distance towards the explanation. As he stood kicking his foot against the
+lower step of the school-house door and listening to the words of petulance
+which his mistress so plentifully bestowed upon him, it was to be seen that
+while his coat was a sack of ordinary light summer-stuff, looking civil and
+homelike enough, his pants and cap were both gray and military, according
+to the pattern of the Reserves. Under his arm he held a bundle which might
+very easily have contained the coat necessary to make the uniform complete;
+and such was, indeed, the composition of the parcel. Dick Compton, never
+before connected with any military organization, had the night before
+determined to abandon home and the girl he loved, leave other hands to
+gather in the fast ripening harvest, intrust his favorite pair of
+farm-horses to the care of his younger brother and the hands on the farm,
+and make at least a small part of the response to the urgent call of
+Governor Curtin. He had been down to the rendezvous, to sign the roll of
+membership in the Reserves, and to get his uniform, that morning. He was to
+leave with the regiment for Harrisburgh, that evening, and it was on his
+way home to the pleasant farm-house lying a couple of miles northward and
+across the main road leading up from Market street, that he had called at
+the school-house to make his adieux to Kitty Hood, which seemed to be so
+ungraciously received.
+
+They were so indeed. Kitty, from the moment when Compton tapped at the door
+and called her out amid the surprised glances and then the tittering of the
+school-children--from the moment when she had observed his military cap and
+pants--had understood the whole story and put herself not only on her
+dignity but her unamiability. She had not smiled even once upon him, or
+allowed him to take her hand, though he reached out for it; and though the
+jolly round face of the school-mistress was not by any means the pattern of
+countenance that could be made stupendously awful by the greatest amount
+of effort, yet Kitty had done her best to be royal--not to say imperial. To
+his explanations she had been worse than the traditional
+"deaf"--insultingly interrupting; and to his asseverations that the country
+needed the heart and the arm of every true man, she had answered with that
+unromantic but unanswerable word: "fiddlestick!" She had tried wheedling,
+coaxing, scolding, every thing but crying, in the effort to make him forego
+his resolution and take off his name (supposing that he could do such a
+thing) from the roll of the Reserves. She had no doubt, and expressed
+herself to that effect, that if he went to Harrisburgh he would come back
+in a coffin, all cut up into little bits by the savages, or not come back
+at all and have his skull and bones used for a drinking cup and a few
+necklaces by the women of Secessia, or come back in a condition worse than
+either, with both legs cut off close up to the body, one arm gone and his
+skull broken in, and a pretty thing for a respectable young woman to marry!
+
+It was very well, for the sake of his adherence to his patriotic purpose,
+that Dick Compton had in him that dash of bull-dog tenacity to which
+allusion has before been made; for it is not every man to whom such words
+of spiteful prophesy and determined discouragement, coming from the lips of
+a pretty woman who made her own love the excuse for uttering them, would
+have been without their effect. They might as well have been uttered to one
+of the granite gods of old, as to Compton, so far as moving him to any
+change of purpose was concerned; but his temper was by no means of as good
+proof as his determination. In fact, Kitty Hood's spiteful expostulations
+very soon made him ill-natured if not angry; and by the time the
+culmination already recorded was reached, he was quite ready to say, in a
+tone corresponding to her own:
+
+"Well, I _will_ go, Kitty Hood, whether you like it or not. I was a fool
+not to go away without walking a mile further to let you know any thing
+about it."
+
+"Nobody asked you!" was the petulant reply.
+
+"Nobody _need_ to ask me, next time!" was the rejoinder. "I have a right to
+be killed, if I please, and it is none of your business whether I am or
+not. A pretty world it would be, with half of it made up of women too weak
+and too cowardly to fight a cat, and the other half of men tied fast of
+their apron strings, so that they had to ask every time they wanted to go
+away, just as one of your little whelps of school-boys whines: 'Please to
+let me go out!'"
+
+Kitty Hood was finding a tongue quite as sharp as her own, by this time,
+and the effect was very much what is often seen in corresponding cases.
+Finding her lover growing as angry as herself, and a little more violent,
+the young school-mistress concluded that it was time to assume a less
+decided demeanor, so that if they must part they might do so without an
+absolute quarrel.
+
+"Well, Dick," she said, after a moment of pause, "there is no use of your
+being angry about it!" Just as if she had not been showing ill-temper from
+the beginning--the minx! "Of course I cannot hold you, and do not wish to
+do so, if you prefer dressing yourself up in that ridiculous manner and
+standing up to be shot at, to remaining here with _me_."
+
+"I don't _prefer_ it, you know I don't, Kitty!" said Dick, aware that his
+flank of conversation had once more been turned and himself placed in a
+false position.
+
+But here came an interruption. A young gentleman of seven made his
+appearance in the door of the school-room, his hands blacker than the
+proverbial ace-of-spades, his nether raiments spotted, and his face drawn
+into a most comical whimper, while his words came out between a sob and a
+hiccough:
+
+"Please, Miss Hood, won't you come in to Jem Stephenson? He has gone and
+upsot the inkstand all over my hands and spoilt my new trowsers!"
+
+"Go in and keep your seat, you young villain, or I shall flog you and Jem
+Stephenson both!" was the consoling assurance with which the "young
+villain" departed; while the hum from the school-room was evidently
+increasing, and the young school-mistress felt that she must indeed soon
+resume the reins of government if she was not to be permanently left
+without a realm worth ruling. But she took time to rejoin to Compton's last
+assertion.
+
+"I don't know any thing of the kind. I say that if you thought half as much
+of me as you did of public opinion and making a show of your fine new
+clothes, you would not stir one step."
+
+"Now, Kitty, do be reasonable--" again began Compton.
+
+"Look at other people--don't _they_ respect the wishes of those they expect
+to marry?" the young lady went on, not heeding his last attempt.
+"See--there is Carlton Brand--who does not know that he has remained at
+home ever since the war broke out, though he could have been a Colonel and
+perhaps even a General--just because he was really in love with Margaret
+Hayley, and she did not wish him to leave her?"
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say, at this stage of the narration, that Miss
+Kitty Hood was "begging the question." She had never heard one word to
+indicate why Carlton Brand had not accepted his opportunities, and she
+merely mentioned the two as people of prominence in the section,
+acquaintances, and the first pair of lovers of whom she happened to think.
+But she had made a terrible blunder, as many of us do at the very moment
+when we seem to be performing the very keenest of operations. Carlton
+Brand--one of the finest-looking men to be found within a radius of an
+hundred miles, a member of one of the liberal professions, and known to be
+wealthy enough to afford indulgence in any line of life which he might
+happen to fancy--was naturally an object of envy if not of suspicion to
+hundreds of other young men who did not feel that they possessed quite the
+same advantages. Young farmers, who chanced to catch him saying a polite
+word to their sisters, looked at him through eyes not too confiding, in
+spite of the fact that not even rumor had pointed out a single instance in
+which he had indulged in a dishonorable amour; and those who detected him
+in glances of kindness (perhaps of admiration) towards demoiselles whom
+they had marked out as their own destined marital property, had a bad habit
+of even looking out of the corners of their eyes and scowling a little, at
+such manifestations. Carlton Brand, in all this, was only paying a very
+slight penalty for his triple advantage of wealth, position and good looks,
+while many others pay the same unpleasant toll to society for the
+possession of even one (and sometimes none) of the three favors of fortune.
+
+The farm-house of the Comptons and the residence of the Brands (as will be
+hereafter made apparent) lay but a very short distance apart; and the
+little house (perhaps it might with more propriety have been called a
+cottage) in which Kitty Hood had seen the light, and where she lived with
+her quiet widowed mother, was still nearer to the abode of the young
+lawyer. Though the Hoods were much more humbly circumstanced than their
+neighbors, intercourse between the two families had always been frequent,
+with a very pleasant friendship between Elsie and Kitty, and more visits of
+the young girl at the residence of the Brands, and of Carlton, accompanying
+his sister, to that of the Hoods, than at all pleased the lover and
+expectant husband of Kitty. Then the latter had a head a little giddy and a
+tongue more than a little imprudent; and she had shown the bad taste, many
+times since their tacit engagement, to draw comparisons, in the presence of
+her lover, to his disadvantage, and in favor of a man who had much better
+opportunities than the farmer for keeping his clothes unimpeachable, his
+hands unsoiled, and his cheek unbrowned. Only very imprudent people, and
+perhaps very unfeeling ones, use such words; but they are used much too
+often, ignoring the pure gold that may lie within a rough nugget, and
+preferring the mere tinsel leaf on a bit of handsome carving. Kitty Hood
+was one of the thoughtless, and she was likely, some day, to pay the
+penalty in a manner she little anticipated.
+
+Within the few weeks previous, without Kitty being at all aware of the
+fact, Mr. Dick Compton had allowed himself to ruminate more than was
+healthy upon the glances he had chanced to see interchanged between Kitty
+and her "stuck-up lawyer friend," as he chose to designate him, and upon
+the continual commendations which she chose to bestow on the latter--until
+rooted personal dislike and something very near to positive jealousy, had
+been the result. Walking over towards the rendezvous that morning, if one
+shadow of hesitation on the subject of going to Harrisburgh had passed
+through the mind of the young farmer, it was caused by his dislike of
+leaving Kitty out of view, with Carlton Brand in the same near
+neighborhood. All that difficulty had been removed by the understanding
+that the lawyer was to leave at the same time and on the same service with
+himself; but when Kitty at once revived the obnoxious name with a new
+phrase of commendation, and signified that the section was not to be
+relieved of the lawyer's presence during his own absence, it is not very
+strange that the unreasonable demons of jealousy began tugging again at his
+heart-strings, and that he felt like performing some severe operation upon
+the Mordecai who sat in his gate, if he could only catch him!
+
+"So you have got to quoting Carlton Brand again, have you!" he responded to
+Miss Kitty's citation. "I thought I had told before that I had heard nearly
+enough of that proud puppy!"
+
+"'Puppy' indeed!" and Miss Kitty fired in an instant. "He's nothing of the
+kind, but a man and a gentleman, and you know it, Dick Compton!"
+
+"Oh, yes, a _gentleman_, and that suits you to a turn, Kitty Hood!" was the
+sneering reply. "When your _gentlemen_ are in the way, you think that an
+honest hard-working man is nobody."
+
+If ever a man spoke an unjust word to a woman (and it is to be feared that
+a great many have been uttered since the unfortunate gift of speech was
+conferred upon the race), Dick Compton was stupidly unjust at that moment.
+For the very quarrel (it was but little else, from first to last) in which
+they were engaged, had originated in the young girl's evident anxiety for
+his safety and pleading that he would not go away and leave her, even for a
+short period! Kitty Hood felt the injustice, if he did not, and all the old
+rage came back again, in a varied form, but hotter than ever. Her eyes
+flashed, she choked for a moment, and then, before Dick Compton could be at
+all aware what was about to happen, the school-mistress drew her little
+white hand back and brought him a ringing box on the ear and cheek, that
+the latter would not be very likely to forget for a fortnight,--while she
+flashed out:
+
+"Dick Compton, just take that for a fool! You are not worth any honest
+woman's loving, with your mean jealousy. You can go where you please, and I
+will never speak to you again until you learn better manners than to talk
+to _me_ in that manner!"
+
+Before the jealous lover had half recovered from the blow she stepped away
+from him and put her foot on the sill of the door, to re-enter. Compton,
+spite of the tingle in his cheek, did not quite believe in the propriety of
+parting in that manner, when he was just going to the war; and he made a
+step towards her.
+
+"Kitty!--oh, now, Kitty--"
+
+"Keep off, Dick Compton! Good-day and good-bye, and nobody cares where you
+go or how long you stay!" was the forbidding rejoinder, as the
+school-mistress swung herself round the jamb of the door and half
+disappeared. Her blood was at fever heat: that of her lover was likely to
+be at the same pitch in a moment.
+
+"You won't come back, then?"
+
+"No, I won't!"
+
+"Then I will tell you something, Kitty Hood!" and the young man was very
+angry and very earnest when he made the threat. "If I can catch Carlton
+Brand before I go away to-night, I will just flog him till he is the
+nearest to a dead man _you_ ever saw,--and see how you both like it!"
+
+Without another word the young farmer turned and strode round the corner of
+the school-house with his bundle and his indignation, making hasty strides
+up the hill and towards the woods that lay in the direction of his home.
+Kitty Hood saw thus much, and realized that very probably she was looking
+at him for the last time. Then she realized, too, what she had scarcely
+felt before--that she had been terribly to blame in the quarrel--that she
+might have been wrecking the happiness of a life by her ill-temper--and
+that it would never do to let poor Dick go away to the war, so angry at her
+that if killed his last thought would be upon every one else rather than
+her, and that if he returned he would never come near her again--never!
+Then poor Kitty dropped her head upon her desk, heedless of the only
+partially-hushed Pandemonium around her and the necessity of settling with
+Master Jem Stephenson, spiller of ink and others,--dropped her head upon
+her desk and sobbed loudly enough for some of the children to be quite
+aware of the fact, so that one of the little boys hazarded the remark,
+_sotto voce_: "Wonder what is the matter with her!" and a bigger one
+enlightened his ignorance with: "Why, didn't you see? Her beau has got on
+sojer clothes and is going away--stupid!"
+
+Only a minute or two, and then Kitty Hood could endure the struggle no
+longer. She was very unhappy and not a little penitent. She _could_ not
+remain any longer in the midst of those noisy children: she _must_ go home
+(or elsewhere) and see what facilities fate might yet throw in her way for
+seeing and speaking once more to her angry lover before his departure.
+Perhaps she could even find some means, still, for inducing him to remain,
+and then----. And at that thought the school-mistress raised her head,
+informed her school that she had a bad headache and must go home to bed,
+and dismissed them for a half-holiday.
+
+Whereupon one of the larger girls, who had seen the lover go away, without
+hearing any of the parting words, and who thought that she understood all
+about the affair, remarked to one of her companions that: "That was real
+nice, and she thought all the better of Miss Hood for it!" while one of the
+larger boys, unawake as yet to any of the softer feelings, bawled out to
+his mates that: "Miss Hood was going to see her old beau off--ki-yah!" It
+is painful to be obliged to say, justifying previously-expressed
+apprehension, that even the stranded vessel was forgotten in the haste with
+which the school separated, and that all the imaginary pirates of the
+Society, the Friendly and various other islands that maintained every thing
+else rather than friendly society for sailors, had at least one day more of
+chance at her with their canoes and pirogues.
+
+Her scholars dismissed, Kitty Hood took time to wash and cool her eyes and
+to smooth her hair, for a moment, at the little wash-closet in one corner
+of the school-room--then flung on her light bonnet and gauzy mantle and
+took her way, walking somewhat rapidly in spite of the heat of the coming
+noon, along the path that led around the base of the hill north-westward
+towards the residence of Carlton and Elsie Brand.
+
+Mr. Richard Compton had meanwhile been walking yet more rapidly, with his
+bundle under his arm, up the path leading over the hill, almost due north,
+and through the belt of woods discernible from the school-house. Whether
+the increasing heat of the day added to the heat of his temper is
+uncertain; but certain it is that he did not at all cool down under it. He
+had the excuse of being the party _last_ ill-used, if not indeed the party
+_first_ so treated. He loved Kitty Hood beyond all reason, and he was of
+course the person most likely to grow angry at her and jealous of her,
+beyond all endurance. He felt that he could not worse punish her, or better
+satisfy himself, than by carrying out his threat and soundly flogging
+Carlton Brand if he should once catch him under proper circumstances; he
+had no doubt whatever of his ability to flog him or "any other man," when
+he once set about the task; and while surmounting the hill, and even after
+plunging into the cool, thick, leafy woods, full of the twitter of birds
+and the fragrance of June blossoms, which should have had the power to
+soften passion in the breast of any man who held a true sympathy with
+Nature, his mental fists were clenched and his teeth set in a manner most
+threatening for any opposing force with which he might happen to be brought
+into contact.
+
+That "opposing force" was much nearer than the young man at the moment
+imagined. He was just emerging by the path to the main road which he was to
+cross, half a mile before reaching his own farm, when he saw a horseman
+riding rapidly up from the eastward. Intersecting the path just where it
+joined the road, was a blind road leading through the woods across toward
+the Darby, and closed at the entrance by a swinging gate. There was a low
+panel near it, and the young farmer leaped it in preference to unfastening
+the clumsy latch--finding himself, when beyond the fence, in the presence
+of Carlton Brand, who had just reined in his horse at the gate. Whatever
+there may have been in the face of the horseman at that moment, within a
+few minutes after his leaving the presence of Margaret Hayley and his
+sister, the eyes of Dick Compton were not sufficiently keen to recognize
+it. He only saw the handsome, proud-looking young lawyer, and his old
+antipathy rose, with the remembrance of the threat he had just used,
+accompanying it. Carlton Brand saw nothing more in the face of the young
+farmer than he had been accustomed to see, and accosted him as he might
+have done any other acquaintance, under the same circumstances, with a
+request for a slight service.
+
+"Ah, Compton, is that you?--just be kind enough to throw open that gate for
+me, will you?"
+
+"No--I'll not do any thing of the kind. If you want the gate open, just
+get off and open it yourself!" was the surly reply, very much to the
+astonishment of the lawyer. His face paled a little, then flushed, and he
+hesitated for an instant before he asked:
+
+"What do you mean, Richard Compton, by answering me in that manner?"
+
+"What I say!" answered Compton, quite as insolently as before. "You are a
+puppy, Carlton Brand, and I have half a mind to take you off that horse and
+flog you soundly, instead of opening a gate for you."
+
+"The d----l you have!" was the very natural reply. "Well, Dick Compton, I
+do not know what it is all about, but you are behaving very much like a
+ruffian, to a man who has never done any thing worse to you than to treat
+you like a gentleman."
+
+"You lie, Carlton Brand, and you know it!" was the response.
+
+"I lie, do I?" and the speaker shifted a little uneasily in his saddle,
+though he made no apparent movement to alight.
+
+"Yes, you lie!" said Compton, his voice thick and hoarse with agitation and
+anger. "And if you will get off that horse I will teach you a lesson about
+meddling with other people's property, that you will remember for a
+twelvemonth."
+
+If Carlton Brand's face expressed intense surprise, it was certainly
+nothing more than he felt; for what the "meddling with other people's
+property" could mean, except that he might unwittingly have run across some
+interest of Compton's in the pursuit of his profession, he had no more idea
+than he could have had of the number of trees in the adjoining wood or the
+depth of soil on which his horse was standing. Yet he threw his leg at once
+over the saddle, at the last salutation, sprang to the ground, flung his
+bridle over one of the posts near the gate, and said:
+
+"Now then!"
+
+In an instant and without another word, Dick Compton, who had dropped his
+bundle as the other dismounted, sprang at him, fury in his face and the
+clench of determined hostility in every nerve. Probably no battle on earth
+was ever fought so singularly--the one combatant without the least cause
+for his rage, and the other not even acquainted with the accusation made
+against him. They seemed not badly matched, in physical force, though any
+connoisseur of the exclusively muscular would have considered Compton
+likely to be by far the most enduring. He was fifteen or twenty pounds the
+heavier, and fully trained by field labor; Brand two or three inches the
+taller, athletic, and a little the longer armed.
+
+Half a dozen blows were rapidly exchanged, before either succeeded in
+breaking the guard of the other. Then Compton managed to reach the lawyer's
+cheek, with a blow of some violence that probably stung within quite as
+much as it did without. At all events it brought a new color to his face,
+and from that instant he was cool no longer. He struck out more rapidly and
+angrily, and Compton followed his motion. In less than a minute half a
+dozen blows had reached the faces and bodies of each, and there was a
+probability that, whatever the event of the fight, both would be injured as
+well as disfigured. Suddenly, the instant after, as Compton aimed a
+well-directed blow at the throat of his antagonist, that he believed would
+entirely settle the affair, something happened, upon which he had not
+calculated. Whether his blow was entirely fended he did not know; but what
+he did know, so far as he knew any thing, was that Carlton Brand's right
+fist, dashed out with a force little less formidable than the kick of an
+iron-shod horse, struck him on the left of the nose and the cheek
+adjoining, sending a perfect gore of blood spouting over face and clothing,
+and throwing him reeling backward, stunned and half senseless, to the
+earth,--the fight over, so far as he was to bear any part in it.
+
+There was only a little sensation left in poor Compton at that juncture,
+but that little cried out against being beaten down in such a manner by a
+man whom he had before considered his inferior in muscular power, and whom
+he had set out to flog. The bull-dog within him wished to rise and make
+another effort, but for a moment his eyes _would not_ open and his head
+would not clear sufficiently for him to make any effort at regaining his
+lost perpendicular. When he thought he heard a groan and a loud "thud" on
+the ground, and he did manage to struggle to a sitting position, the sight
+that met his eyes was nearly sufficient to drive him back into his partial
+insensibility, amazement and horror being about equally compounded in the
+spectacle. Carlton Brand lay at length on the ground, his face set in a
+frightful spasm, a thin white froth issuing from the set lips, the eyes
+closed, and not even a quiver of motion in the limbs. Dick Compton sprang
+up, then, with a supernatural energy born of absolute fright, and bent over
+his prostrate antagonist. To all appearance he was dead!--dead as if he had
+been lying there for the last century! The frightened farmer put his hand
+to his temples, his pulses and his heart, and found no motion whatever.
+Then the dreadful fear took possession of him that his own last blow, which
+he remembered aiming at the throat of the other, might have taken effect
+there at the same moment when he was himself struck and prostrated--that
+some vital part of the throat might have been touched and death instantly
+ensued!
+
+To say that Dick Compton was frightened and even horrified at this
+unexpected issue of the pugilistic combat which he had forced, is indeed to
+put the case very mildly. He was literally paralyzed, for the moment, with
+consternation. What was his fate?--to be a homicide! And--good God!--here
+another thought took possession of him. He had left Kitty Hood at the
+school-house, only a little while before, himself angry and in a dangerous
+mood, and with his last words threatening personal violence against Carlton
+Brand! If he should be dead--and there seemed to be no hope to the
+contrary--what words of his could ever persuade the school-mistress that he
+had not entertained enough of jealousy and anger against the lawyer to
+desire his death?--and how far would not Kitty's evidence go in proving
+before a criminal court that he was an intentional murderer?
+
+Such reflections are not pleasant, to say the least! A very few of them go
+a great way in a man's life. Those who have been placed, even for one
+moment, in the belief that they have suddenly become homicides, need not be
+told how far beyond all other horrors is the feeling: those who have missed
+the sensation, may thank God with all reverence for having spared them one
+of the untold agonies which belong only to the damned!
+
+Dick Compton was not one of the most delicate of men, either in action or
+perception, but he was a good fellow in the main, with quite enough of
+intuition to foresee the worst perils of a situation, and with quite enough
+of presence of mind to act quickly in a desperate emergency. There was yet
+no breath or motion in the prostrate man: he would die very soon if not
+already dead: something might yet be done for him: but that something, if
+done at all, must be done at once. Besides, if death should prove to be
+real, he would himself be a little better circumstanced if found trying to
+preserve the life of his antagonist, than if discovered to have let him die
+without effort. A mile to the westward, and at the side of the very road at
+the edge of which he was standing, was the residence of one of the two
+doctors of the immediate section, and medical assistance might be procured,
+with the aid of the fallen man's horse, in a brief period.
+
+With this thought in mind, and in far less time after the occurrence of the
+catastrophe than it has needed to put it upon record, Dick Compton had
+unfastened the horse of Carlton Brand from the post, swung himself into the
+saddle, and was galloping away westward, a little doubtful in mind whether
+he was indeed going after a doctor or looking for a convenient gallows and
+a hangman,--and wishing, from the bottom of his soul, that he had never
+entertained quite so good an opinion of his personal prowess as that which
+had led him into such a terrible position. Once, as he galloped on, he
+caught sight of his new military trowsers, and found himself thinking
+whether, when they hung soldiers, they allowed them to retain their uniform
+or subjected them to the degrading alternative of the prison gray! And that
+is all, of the very peculiar reflections of Mr. Dick Compton as he sped
+away after the doctor, that needs to be put upon record.
+
+Kitty Hood, meanwhile, leaving the school-house perhaps ten minutes after
+her lover, had sped along the path at the base of the woods, intent on
+going over to the residence of the Brands and seeking advice, if not
+assistance, from Elsie, in her dilemma. She had quite overcome her anger,
+now, and taken into her young heart a full supply of that which very often
+follows the former--anxiety; and her feet moved as glibly, in the better
+cause of reconciliation, as her tongue had done not long before in a very
+unreasonable lovers' quarrel.
+
+The path she was pursuing would have led her out to the main road, which
+she must cross to reach the Brands', some half a mile further west than the
+point at which the gate gave access to the blind road through the wood. But
+there was a little spot of marshy ground before reaching the road; she
+remembered that her shoes were thin and that wet feet were disagreeable
+even in June, and as a consequence she struck into a cross path which
+intersected the blind road and would bring her out at the gate. As a
+secondary consequence, she followed that road and came out a minute after
+at the gate, to open it without observing what lay beyond, and to start
+back with a scream of affright as she saw the body of Carlton Brand lying
+on the green sward without, his face still set in that terrible contortion,
+and the rigidity of death alike in limb and feature.
+
+The young girl had seen but little of death, and not yet learned to regard
+it rather as a deliverance than otherwise; and in any shape it frightened
+her. How natural, then, that she should regard it with peculiar horror when
+she came upon it alone, by a wood-side, and in the person of an
+acquaintance equally admired and respected! But what must have been her
+feelings when, the moment after, and before she had commanded herself
+sufficiently to do more than utter that single scream of terror, she saw a
+bundle lying near the apparently dead man, saw blood staining one of his
+hands and the grass beside him, and recognized the bundle as the same she
+had seen, not half an hour before, under the arm of Richard Compton!
+
+If that unfortunate young man, on discovering the supposed extent of his
+mishap, had remembered the threat against the lawyer made but a little
+while before to Kitty, how did that threat spring into her mind on seeing
+the blood and recognizing the bundle! Murder, beyond a doubt, and Dick
+Compton the murderer! The two had met, accidentally, had quarrelled, had
+clenched, and in that clench her lover had forgotten all except his
+jealousy and fear of the lawyer, and had killed him outright! Oh, here was
+trouble, indeed, to which that of a few moments previous had been but the
+merest shadow! Dick would be arrested, tried, imprisoned, perhaps hung; and
+_she_ would be obliged to give the fatal evidence that must seal his doom!
+Terrible indeed--most terrible!--the thought culminating in such mental
+suffering that the poor girl scarcely knew whether she was treading upon
+earth or air, as she took one more look upon the motionless form, the
+blood, and the accusing bundle that lay beside--then turned her back with a
+shudder upon all, crossed the road and hastened over the fields beyond, by
+a bye-path that would lead her to the home of the murdered man--her errand
+now, and her reason for haste, how different from what it had been when
+walking towards, the same destination but a few moments before!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+     THE RESIDENCE OF THE BRANDS--ROBERT BRAND AND DR. PHILIP
+     POMEROY--RADICAL AND COPPERHEAD--A PASSAGE-AT-ARMS THAT
+     ENDED IN A QUARREL--ELSPETH GRAEME THE HOUSEKEEPER--THE
+     SHADOW OF SHAME--FATHER AND DAUGHTER--THE FALLING OF A
+     PARENT'S CURSE.
+
+
+Half a mile northward from the Market street road which has already been
+before so many times alluded to--on the north side of that road and at the
+distance of a mile westward from the Hayley residence, was located that
+before mentioned as the abode of the Brands. It was a fine old house, built
+fifty or sixty years before, but within a few years repaired and rebuilt
+with a lavish disregard of cost, a railed promenade having been added at
+the apex of the steep roof, the whole two stories of height re-enclosed,
+the windows and doors comparatively modernized, the piazzas remodelled and
+widened, and all done that the carpenter's art could well be expected to
+achieve, to add to the comfort and durability of the mansion without
+destroying the appearance of respectable age which it had already put on.
+The house stood facing southward upon nearly level ground, the lawn in
+front of good depth and thickly dotted with forest and other shade trees
+that had evidently known all the years of the building; while from the
+eastern side a narrow lane ran down to the road and afforded ingress and
+egress to carriages passing back towards the handsomely-grouped range of
+outbuildings in the rear. Adjoining this lane and behind the house was a
+large garden, with grape trellises and many of the appliances of luxury in
+horticulture.
+
+At the eastern end of the piazza a broad single door opened into the
+somewhat antiquated hall; and from that hall a door opened into a parlor
+fitted up with every appliance of convenience that could be needed in such
+a country residence. Behind that parlor another door opened into a smaller
+apartment correspondingly fitted but with more of those belongings
+calculated to show its constant occupancy; and from that rear room still
+another door opening to the left disclosed a bed-room of comfortable
+appearance and tasteful arrangement. On the other side of the hall the
+dining and domestic apartments stretched away, while the spacious upper
+story supplied rooms to other members of the family.
+
+It was very evident, at a glance, that wealth presided over the modernized
+old house, and that good taste was not forgotten; and yet an impression
+could not well be avoided that there must be something of severity, and
+repugnance to ornament, conjoined with the wealth. Poverty, or even
+struggling pride, would not have afforded so much of the best: warm taste
+and lavish liberality would have supplied something more of the costly and
+the luxurious.
+
+In the second of the rooms mentioned--that immediately in the rear of the
+parlor, two persons were in conversation at about noon of the same day of
+the occurrences previously recorded. The one, sitting in an easy-chair with
+his right leg raised and resting upon another chair crowned with a
+pillow,--was apparently sixty-five to seventy years of age; tall, if his
+proportions could properly be judged as he sat, with a figure that must
+have been robust in its time; the hair so nearly white as to preclude any
+idea of the color which it might have worn in earlier days; the face well
+cut and even handsome for its age, though with a shade of severity in the
+firm nose and shaven lips, which under some circumstances might grow
+threatening; but any accurate judgment of his character rendered difficult,
+by the look of pain stamped upon his face by evident bodily suffering.
+Resting against a small table partially covered with bandages and
+embrocations, was a stout cane, indicating both that the invalid was in the
+habit of using a support of that character, and that he could not, even
+now, be entirely confined to his chair. Such was Robert Brand, owner of
+the mansion into which we have been introduced, and father of two children
+apparently as little alike in nature as in sex--Carlton and Elsie Brand.
+
+The second figure was quite as well deserving of notice as the old man in
+his easy-chair. Doctor Philip Pomeroy, who was at that moment pacing up and
+down the room without any apparent cause for that violent exercise in warm
+weather, was a man in whom the acute physiognomist might have found
+something illustrated by that seemingly listless motion--something
+possessed in common by restless men, in the superior animal kingdom, and
+those bears and hyenas which seem to traverse a great many unnecessary
+miles in travelling up and down the bars of their cages, in the inferior.
+And yet the doctor could not have been called, with any propriety, an
+"animal-looking man"--it was the motion which supplied the comparison. He
+was apparently forty-five to fifty, tall and slight figured, with face
+clean shaven except a heavy dark moustache, features a little aquiline and
+decidedly sharp lips that suggested an occasional sneer and a word cutting
+like a scimetar, eyes of keen scintillant dark brown or black, and rather
+long dark straight hair through which the threads of silver began to show
+more as an ornament than a disadvantage. A very fine looking man--a man of
+undoubted power and will--a man who had evidently enjoyed the most
+favorable associations; and yet how nearly a man to be either braved or
+trusted without reserve, it might have needed Lavater's self to decide on a
+brief acquaintance. That same Lavater, if acquainted with the peculiarities
+of road turn-outs, would have decided one point, at least, from the vehicle
+that stood in the lane, near the door--no clumsy and cumbersome gig,
+weighing an indefinite number of tons and set down as the proper conveyance
+for doctors from the day when the first one grew too lazy to walk,--but a
+light, sporting-looking buggy, seated for one, and suggesting fast driving
+quite as much as the high-blooded, thorough-bred bay that champed his bit
+before it and stamped impatiently for the coming of his master.
+
+From the medical character of the visitor and the disabled appearance of
+the man in the easy-chair, it might have been concluded that the call was a
+professional one; and such was indeed the fact. An injury to the right limb
+of Robert Brand, received many years before, had a habit of asserting
+itself at uncertain periods, crippling him materially all the while, and at
+those particular times throwing him into all those agonies indifferently
+known as the pangs of neuralgia and inflammatory rheumatism. At such
+periods, the traditional character of the "gouty old Admiral" of the
+English stage, always limping and thumping a heavy cane, and nearly always
+venting words more forcible than polite, was very nearly illustrated in the
+old gentleman, his desire for active motion being generally in an inverse
+ratio to the power of movement. Dr. Pomeroy, one of the most skilful of the
+physicians of the section, and a man in very extensive practice, was always
+his medical adviser at such times, and re-directed the application of those
+warm flannels and neutralizing embrocations which constituted all that even
+science could do for the alleviation of his sufferings, and about which old
+Elspeth the housekeeper knew a good deal more, all the while, than any
+physician could possibly do. For the three days previous, Robert Brand had
+been suffering to a most painful degree, and this was the third of the
+daily visits of the doctor.
+
+But whatever might have been the professional character of the visit, it
+had, before the moment when our attention is called to the two
+interlocutors, lost any feature which could have marked it as such. Robert
+Brand was a patriot, almost equally warm-hearted and hot-headed in the type
+of his attachment to his country; while Dr. Pomeroy was one of those
+quasi-loyalists, popularly called "Copperheads," who have the love of
+country quite as often on their lips as the most unshrinking war-advocate
+can do, but who prefer to show that love by objecting to every effort made
+for the preservation of nationality, by denouncing, in every nine words out
+of ten, something done by the loyal government, while only the poor tenth
+is kept for a wail over the unfortunate character of the "civil war,"--and
+by undervaluing every success won by the Union arms, while every momentary
+advantage gained by the rebels is correspondingly magnified. He seemed to
+take particular delight, always, in tormenting the old gentleman just to
+the verge of a positive rupture without quite causing one; and just now, in
+the advance of the rebel forces into Pennsylvania, he found a golden
+opportunity.
+
+"Bah!" he said, in response to a strongly patriotic expression of his
+patron, which had led him to bring down one of his hands upon the disabled
+leg with a force causing a new tingle in that limb and a new expression of
+agony upon his face--"bah! All you hot-headed people, young and old, use
+just such language, all the while. It amounts to nothing, except that
+perhaps it eases your minds. Saying that 'the Union must and shall be
+preserved,' and prophesying all kinds of good things for the nation, amount
+to but very little while a set of incapables sit filling their pockets at
+Washington (more than half of them traitors, in my opinion), while the army
+is worse mismanaged than it could be if a set of school-boys led it, and
+while the enemies you affect to despise are really winning every thing and
+overrunning the whole country."
+
+"Out upon you, Dr. Pomeroy!" cried the old man, angrily. "You dare to call
+yourself a patriot, and talk in that manner! There are plenty of fools at
+Washington, but I would rather see fools there than traitors! If you are
+not a perfect block-head, you know that the rebels have lost twice as much
+as they have gained, within the past year, and that if the fight goes on in
+the same manner for one year more, the miserable mongrel concern will die
+of its own weakness! But you do not _want_ it to die--that is just what
+ails _you_!--you would rather see Jeff Davis in the Capitol than any loyal
+man who would not give all the offices to your miserable broken-down
+party!"
+
+"And you would rather see the whole country lying in ruins, with heaps of
+dead everywhere and the few who remain starving to death in the midst of
+them, than that the country should be in any other hands than those of your
+friends who do nothing else than talk about the nigger, legislate for the
+nigger, and fight for the nigger!" answered the doctor, still continuing
+his walk, and his face showing decided temper.
+
+"It is false, and you know it, Philip Pomeroy!" said the invalid, with a
+motion of his hand towards the big cane, which indicated that he would have
+liked to use it by breaking it over the doctor's head.
+
+"It is true, and _you_ know it, Robert Brand!" replied the doctor, whose
+temper seemed to return to its equanimity the moment he had succeeded in
+throwing his patient into a sufficient rage. "But you need not take so much
+pains to conceal your opinions, old gentleman! _I_ don't! If the country is
+to lie under the control of men who only legislate and fight for the
+nigger, who trample upon the Constitution and fill Fort McHenry and Fort
+Lafayette and Fort Warren with better men than themselves, who do not
+happen to think and act precisely as _they_ do,--why, the sooner that Jeff
+Davis, or any one else, gets possession, the better for all concerned."
+
+"Doctor Pomeroy, you ought to be taken and hung, with the other traitors,
+and I shouldn't much mind having a pull at the rope!" broke out the old
+man, now almost entirely beside himself with indignation.
+
+"Oh, I know that!" answered the doctor, whose temper was still visibly
+improving as that of his patient grew worse. "Any of your abolition pack
+would have helped to hang every democrat, long ago, if they had only
+_dared_! The only trouble is that they did not do it while they had the
+opportunity. Now it is too late. You daren't open the doors of your
+State-prisons any more, unless it is to let somebody _out_! And before many
+days some of you will sing a different tune--take my word for it. Some of
+you radicals, even here at Philadelphia, will try to make the Confederate
+leaders believe that you have been the truest friends of the South, all the
+while."
+
+"What do you mean, you scoundrel?" asked the old gentleman, whose harsh
+words to a man somewhat younger than himself appeared to be fully
+understood and not taken in quite the sense which they might have borne to
+other ears.
+
+"I mean that Lee will take Harrisburgh, and that next he will take
+Philadelphia; then--"
+
+"Take Purgatory! He can never take Harrisburgh, let alone Philadelphia!"
+
+"He can and will take it! What is to hinder him?"
+
+"Just what has hindered his taking Washington, any time the last two
+years--better troops than his own, and more of them."
+
+"Sheep before butchers'-dogs! The men of the North have never gone into the
+war at all, and they never will go. That scum which you call an army cannot
+fight the earnest and determined men of the South, and you ought to know
+it. Within a week Lee will be in Philadelphia, and then we will see about
+the change of tune!"
+
+"Within a week, if he dares advance, he will be eaten up by the State
+militia alone, even if the Army of the Potomac does not save them the
+trouble!" said the old man.
+
+"The Army of the Potomac has been good for nothing ever since Hooker
+blundered its last opportunity away at Chancellorsville!" retorted the
+physician. "The army has no confidence in _him_, and the country has no
+confidence either in him or the army. The State militia will vigorously
+stay at home, or they will behave so badly after they go out, that they had
+much better kept where nobody saw them! Oh, by the way!--" and the face of
+the doctor lit up with a new expression. A sneer settled itself upon his
+well-formed lips, and there came into his scintillant eyes a gleam of
+deadly dislike which boded no good to the subject of which he was about to
+speak. He might have been only half in earnest, before, while driving the
+old man wild with his Copperhead banter; but he was certainly interested in
+what he was about to say, now!
+
+"Well?" asked the patient, querulously, as he saw that some new topic was
+to interlard that which had already been so unpleasant.
+
+"That State militia you were talking about," said the doctor. "Your son was
+expected to take up his old commission and go out with one of the
+regiments, was he not?"
+
+"He was not only expected to do so, but he has done so!" answered the
+father, with love and pride in his eyes. "Not all the people in the country
+are either Copperheads or cowards, doctor; and I am proud to tell you that
+if _I_ am too old and too much crippled to take part in the battles of my
+country, or even to get up and break my cane over your head when you insult
+the very name of patriotism,--I have a son who when his opportunity comes
+can do the one and will do the other!"
+
+"When his 'opportunity' comes!" echoed the doctor, sneeringly.
+
+"Yes, his opportunity!" re-echoed the father, who felt that there was
+something invidious in the tone, though he could not read that face which
+might have given him a better clue to the character of the man with whom he
+was dealing. "My son has been too much hampered with business before, to
+accept any of the chances which have been offered him; but now that his
+native State is invaded, business is thrown by and you will find him, sir,
+keeping up the honor of the name."
+
+"Humph!" said the doctor, pausing in his walk and for some unexplainable
+reason going to the window and looking out; so that he stood with his back
+to the old gentleman. "Where is your son, now?"
+
+"Where? Gone down to the rendezvous to take his commission, of course, as I
+understand that the troops will leave to-night."
+
+"Humph!" once more said the doctor, in the same insolent tone and retaining
+his position at the window. "And yet I happen to know that your son has
+discovered some new '_business_,' (with a terribly significant emphasis on
+the last word) and that he is not going one step with the regiment."
+
+"Dr. Pomeroy, I know better!" was the reply.
+
+"Mr. Brand, I know what I am talking about, a good deal better than you
+imagine!" sneered the doctor, who having by that time managed to get his
+face into that shape which he had no objection to being seen by his
+patient, now turned about and faced him, with his hands under the tails of
+his coat.
+
+"_What_ do you know?" was the inquiry, a little trouble blending with the
+anxiety in the face.
+
+"Well, I will tell you, as perhaps you may as well learn the fact from me
+as from any one else," answered the doctor, his tones now very smooth, and
+his manner almost deferential, as should be the demeanor of any man towards
+his victim at the moment of stabbing him under the fifth rib. "I had
+occasion to call at the armory of the Reserves, an hour or two ago, to set
+the broken arm of one of the fellows who had taken too much Monongahela in
+anticipation of his start, and fallen down-stairs. I learned there and
+then, with some surprise and not a little grief (the father ought to have
+caught the expression of his face at that moment, and thereby measured the
+"grief" indicated!) that Mr. Carlton Brand had been down at the armory,
+alleged his _business_ to be such that he could not possibly leave the
+city, and declined any further connection whatever with the regiment."
+
+"It is impossible!" said the father.
+
+"It is true, however, like a good many impossible things!" again sneered
+the physician. "And I have been thinking whether some others of members of
+the State militia would not be found like your amiable son--too _busy_ to
+pay any attention to the defence of the State!"
+
+"Dr. Pomeroy!" said the father, after one moment of almost stupefied
+silence. "Dr. Pomeroy, you have not been friends with my son for a long
+time, and I know it, though I do not know what could have caused any
+disagreement. But I do not suppose you would deliberately tell a falsehood
+about him that could be detected in half an hour; and I want to know what
+there is hidden in your words, more than you have chosen to convey."
+
+"You had better ask your son when he comes!" was the reply.
+
+"No--I ask _you, now_, and I think you had better answer me!" said the old
+man.
+
+"Well, then," answered the doctor, "if you insist upon it, my love for the
+young man is not so warm as to give me a great deal of pain in the telling,
+and you may know all you wish. Your son has been doubted a little, ever
+since the breaking out of the war, from his repeated refusals of positions
+in the army; and--"
+
+"The man who says that my son is disloyal, lies!" cried the old man,
+interrupting him. "You, or any other man!"
+
+"It was not on the ground of his _disloyalty_ that he was suspected!"
+sneered the doctor.
+
+"And what ground then?" asked the father, his face and his whole manner
+showing something terrible within that could be only partially suppressed.
+
+"The ground of his _cowardice_, since you will have it!" spoke the doctor,
+in such a tone of fiendish exultation as Mephistopheles may have used to
+Faust, at the moment of assuring him that the last hope of happiness on
+earth or pardon from heaven had been swept away in the slaughter of
+Valentine and the moral murder of Marguerite. "There is not an officer in
+the Reserves, who heard him refuse to join the regiment this morning, but
+believes him--yes, _knows_ him, to be an arrant poltroon."
+
+"Doctor Philip Pomeroy, you are a liar as well as a traitor and a
+scoundrel! If I had two legs, and still was, as I am, old enough to be your
+father, you would not leave this house without broken bones! Get out of it,
+send me your bill to-morrow, or even to-day, and never let me see you set
+foot in it again while I live!"
+
+The face of the old man was fearful, at that juncture. In spite of the pain
+of his disabled limb, he had grasped his cane and struggled to a standing
+position, before concluding his violent words; and as he concluded, passion
+overcame all prudence, and the heavy cane went by the doctor's head,
+crashing through the window and taking its way out into the garden, at the
+same moment when his limb gave way and he sunk back into his chair with a
+groan that was almost a shriek, clutching at the bell-rope that hung near
+him and nearly tearing it from its fastenings.
+
+Dr. Pomeroy said not another word, whatever he might have felt. He had
+dodged the flying cane, by not more than an inch, and such chances are not
+likely to improve the temper of even the most amiable. For one instant
+there was something in his face that might have threatened personal revenge
+of the violence as well as the unpardonable words, in spite of the
+difference of age: then the sneer crept over his face again, he stepped out
+through the parlor into the hall, took his hat, and the next moment was
+bowling down the lane into the road, behind his fast-trotting bay. It
+seemed likely that his last professional visit to the Brands had been paid,
+even if it had not yet been paid for!
+
+The terrible appeal of the master of the house to the bell-rope at his hand
+was answered the moment after by the appearance of a woman of so remarkable
+an aspect as to be worthy of quite as much attention as either of the
+personages who have before been called, in the same room, to the reader's
+attention. Her dress was that of a housekeeper or upper servant, though the
+height of her carriage and the erectness of her figure might have stamped
+her as an empress. And in truth that figure did not need any such
+extraordinary carriage to develop it, for, as compared with the ordinary
+stature of woman, it was little else than gigantic. The man who built a
+door for Elspeth Graeme, less than six feet in the clear, subjected her to
+imminent danger of bringing up with a "bump" every time she entered it; and
+her broad, square, bony figure showed that all the power of her frame had
+not been frittered away in length. Her hands were large and masculine,
+though by no means ill-shaped, and her foot had not only the tread supposed
+to belong to that of the coarser sex, but very nearly its size. In face she
+was broad yet still longer of feature, with hair that had been light brown
+before the gray sifted itself so thickly among it as to render the color
+doubtful,--with eyes of bluish gray, a strong and somewhat coarse mouth
+with no contemptible approach to a moustache of light hairs bristling at
+the corners,--and with complexion wrinkled and browned by the exposures of
+at least sixty years, until very nearly the last trace of what had once
+been youth and womanhood was worn away and forgotten. Yet there was
+something very good and very kindly amid the rugged strength of the face;
+and while little children might at the first glance have feared the old
+woman and run away from her as a "witch," they would at the second
+certainly have crept back to her knees and depended upon a protection which
+they were certain to receive.
+
+It is only necessary, to say, in addition, that she was Scottish by birth
+as well as by blood and name--that she had come to this country nearly
+forty years before, when Robert Brand was a young man, and attached herself
+to the fortunes of the family because they were Scottish by blood and she
+was the very incarnation of faithful feudality--that his daughter had been
+named Elspeth (since softened to Elsie) at her earnest desire, because she
+said the name was "the bonniest ava" and she had herself been named after
+a noble lady who bore it, in her own land, and who had done much to give
+her that upright carriage by standing as her god-mother--and that for many
+a long year, now, she had been the working head of the Brand household,
+scarcely more so since the death of its weak, hysterical mistress, a dozen
+years before, than while she was alive and pretending to a management which
+she never understood.
+
+If any one person beneath that roof, more legitimately than another,
+belonged to the family and felt herself so belonging, that person was
+Elspeth Graeme; and if something of the romantic, which the stern sense of
+the father would have been slow to approve, had grown up in both his
+children, it was to the partial love of Elspeth and her stories of Scottish
+romance, poetry, history, song and superstition, carrying them away from
+prosaic America to the wimpling burns and haunted glens of the land from
+which their blood had been derived,--that such a feeling, fortunate or
+unfortunate as the future might prove, was principally to be credited.
+
+"Did you ring, sir? Ech, Lord, the mon's deein'!" were the two very
+different exclamations made by Elspeth as she entered the room, after the
+departure of the doctor, and caught sight of the situation in which the
+master seemed to be lying.
+
+"No, Elspeth, I am not 'deein' as you call it," he growled out, when the
+pain of his exertion had again somewhat subsided and he could find breath
+for words. "But I wish I was! Is that cursed doctor gone?"
+
+"He was gettin' to his carriage the minute, and he's awa by this," answered
+the housekeeper. "But what ava has he been doin' to ye? Murderin' ye
+maybe!--they're a dolefu' uncanny set, the doctors!"
+
+"If you ever see that man here again, and you don't have him shot or set
+the dog on him, out of the house you go, neck and crop, the whole pack of
+you--do you hear!" was the reply to Elspeth's comment on the medical
+profession.
+
+"Just as ye say, master," said Elspeth. "I'll set Carlo at him myself, if
+ye say so; and wo but the brute will just worry him, for he does na like
+him and is unco fond of snappin' aboot his heels!"
+
+"Where is Elsie?" was the next question.
+
+"Gone over to Mistress Hayley's the mornin'. Can I do any thing for your
+leg, sir?--for the wench in the kitchen's clean daft, and I'll be wanted
+there, maybe."
+
+"No--you can do nothing. My leg is better. But send Elsie to me the moment
+she comes in."
+
+"Hark!" said the housekeeper, as a light foot sounded on the piazza and
+came in through the hall. "There's the lassie hersel--I ken her step among
+a thousand. I'll just send her in to you the moment she has thrawn aff her
+bonnet." And the old woman departed on her errand.
+
+There must have been an acuteness beyond nature, in the ears of old
+Elspeth, if she indeed knew the tread of the young girl; for her step, as
+she entered the room, was so slow, laggard and lifeless, so unlike the
+usual springing rapidity of her girlish nature, that even her lover might
+have been pardoned for failing to recognize it. It was as if some crushing
+weight fettered her limbs and bowed down her brow. And a crushing weight
+indeed rested upon her--the first unendurable grief of her young life--the
+knowledge of her only brother's shame. Robert Brand marked the slow step
+and saw the downcast head; and little as he could possibly know of the
+connection of that demeanor with the subject of his previous thought, it
+was not of that cheerful and reassuring character calculated to restore the
+lost equanimity of a man insulted in the tenderest point of his honor and
+chafed beyond human endurance. His first words were rough and peremptory:
+
+"Why do you move in that manner, girl, when you come to see _me_? I do not
+like it--do not let me see any more of it!"
+
+"I was coming, father!" was poor Elsie's only answer.
+
+"So I see--at the rate of ten feet an hour! What is the matter with you?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?--do not tell me that, girl! I know better, or you would never
+carry that gloomy face and move as if you were going to your grandmother's
+funeral!"
+
+"Indeed there is nothing the matter with me, father; but there soon will
+be, if you scold me!" and the young girl, making a terrible effort to be
+cheerful, came up to his side, put her arm around his neck and pressed her
+lips to his forehead with a movement so pure and fond that it might have
+softened Nero at the moment of ordering his last wholesale murder. It
+partially disarmed the pained and querulous father. He put his arm around
+the daughter's waist, returned the pressure and seemed to be soothed for a
+moment by resting his head against the bosom that pressed close to him. But
+the demon that had been roused could only sleep thus temporarily. Directly
+he put her away, though not roughly, looked her full in the face, and
+asked:
+
+"Where is your brother?"
+
+"You know he went down to town this morning, and he has not yet come home,"
+was the reply, with an effort not by any means a successful one, to keep
+the voice from quavering. The practised ear of the father detected the
+difference between that intonation and the usual unembarrassed utterance of
+his daughter; and he naturally connected it at once with the restraint of
+her manner, and noticed an evasion in her answer that might otherwise have
+escaped him.
+
+"I know he has not come home," he said. "But that was not my question. You
+have been at Mrs. Hayley's where he spends quite as much of his time as
+here. Have you seen him?"
+
+Elsie Brand would have given the proudest feature of her personal
+adornment, at that moment, to be able to lie! She saw that some undefined
+anxiety with reference to her brother must have moved her father's repeated
+questions, and naturally she feared the worst--that Carlton's mad words
+had indeed been overheard, and that even in that brief space of time some
+messenger of evil had travelled fast and betrayed the fatal secret. If so,
+the storm was about to burst on the devoted head of her brother, not the
+less deadly because she must bear the first brunt of its violence.
+Yes--Elsie Brand would almost have given her right hand to be able to lie
+at that moment. But her education had been as true as was her nature, and
+she managed to falter out, yet more suspiciously:
+
+"Yes, father!"
+
+"And you _dared_ to trifle with me, girl, when I asked you a plain
+question?" and Robert Brand grasped his daughter by the arm so forcibly
+that she nearly screamed with the violent pressure, and tears did indeed
+start to her eyes as she sobbed out--
+
+"I did not mean to trifle with you, father. I only thought--"
+
+"You thought that when I asked one question, I meant another, did you?" and
+the face that looked upon her was set, hard and very stern. "You had better
+not try the experiment again, if you do not wish to suffer for it!"
+
+"Oh, father!" and the young girl, enough broken before, now wept outright.
+But he stopped her, very roughly.
+
+"No bawling! not a whimper! Now listen to me. You have seen your brother
+since morning--since he went down to the rendezvous."
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"You saw him at Mrs. Hayley's."
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"And he came there to bid Margaret good-bye, before he went away, and you
+are such a miserable whining school-girl that you are making all this fuss
+about his absence. Is that the fact? Speak!" He still held her arm, though
+his grasp was less painful than it had been at first; and his eyes looked
+upon her with such a steady, anxious, almost fearful gaze, that it would
+have driven away the second temptation to falsehood, even had such a
+temptation once obtained power. There was nothing for it, at that moment,
+but to speak the truth so far as compelled.
+
+"No, father. Carlton is not going away." The last three words were uttered
+so low, and so tangled up among the sobs that she had not been able
+entirely to check, that they might not have been distinguishable except to
+the preternaturally acute ear of the suspicious father.
+
+"He is not going? Why?" The first words were harsh and loud--the last one
+was almost thunder, easily heard, if any one was listening, over the whole
+house. Before it the young girl shook like an aspen and broke out into
+fresh sobs as she attempted to answer.
+
+"Because--because his business will not allow--"
+
+"Because he is _a coward!_ Answer me that question, girl, or never speak to
+me again while you live!" Robert Brand had apparently forgotten all his
+pain and risen from his chair, still holding his daughter's arm, as he
+hurled out the interrogation and the threat. Poor Elsie saw that he knew
+all, too surely; further dissembling was useless; and she dropped upon her
+knees, that iron grasp still upon her arm, lifted up both her hands, and
+piteously moaned--
+
+"Yes, that is the reason! Oh, how did you hear it? Kill _me_, father, if
+you will, but do not kill poor Carlton! He cannot help it--indeed he
+cannot!"
+
+They were fearful words that immediately thereafter fell from the lips of
+Robert Brand--words that no provocation should ever tempt a father to
+utter, but words which have been plentifully showered on the heads of the
+shamed or the disobedient, by the thoughtless or the unmerciful, who
+arrogated to themselves God's power of judgment and retribution, through
+all the long ages.
+
+"Get up, girl, if you do not wish me to forget that you are not yourself
+the miserable hound for whom you are pleading!"
+
+"Oh, father!" broke again from the lips of the frightened girl, who did not
+move from her kneeling position.
+
+"Get up, I say, or I will strike you with this cane as I would a dog!"
+
+Elsie Brand staggered to her feet, she knew not how, but stood bowed before
+the stern judge in an attitude of pleading quite as humble and pitiful as
+that of prayer. The next words that fell upon her ears were not addressed
+to her, but seemed to be spoken for others' hearing than those who dwell in
+tenements of clay, while the voice that uttered them trembled in mingled
+grief and indignation, and the disabled frame shook as if it had been
+racked with palsy.
+
+"_My_ son a coward! a miserable poltroon to be pointed at, spat upon, and
+whipped! _My_ blood made a shame in the land, by the one whom I trusted to
+honor it! God's blackest and deepest curse--"
+
+"Oh, father! father!" broke in the young girl in a very wail of agony so
+pitiful that it must have moved any heart not calloused for the moment
+against all natural feeling, but that availed nothing to stop the impending
+curse or even to lower the voice that uttered it.
+
+"--God's deepest and blackest curse 'light upon the coward! shame, sorrow,
+and quick death! He shall have neither house, home nor family from this
+moment! I disown this bastard of my blood! I devote him to ruin and to
+perdition!"
+
+Few men have ever uttered, over the most criminal and degraded of the
+offspring of their own loins, so dire an imprecation; and no father, who
+has ever uttered one approaching it in horrible earnest, but is doomed here
+or hereafter to feel the bitterest weight of that curse resting upon his
+own head. Lear was clean distraught by wrongs beyond human endurance,
+before he called upon "all the stored vengeances of heaven" to fall on the
+"ingrateful top" of Goneril, and threatened both his unnatural daughters
+with "such revenges" that they should be the "terrors of the earth"; and
+only that incipient madness clears him from the sin and leaves him human to
+demand our after pity. There can be no excuse for such paroxysms of
+remorseless anger--it is difficult to supply even a palliation. And yet
+there was something in the blood, in the past life and associations of
+Robert Brand, coming as near to offering excuse for shame and indignation
+driving to temporary madness, as could well have been offered in behalf of
+any man of his day, committing a sin of such nature. And to circumstances
+embodying these it is now necessary to revert, even at the expense of a
+temporary pause in the directness of this narration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+     THE BIRTH AND BLOOD OF THE BRANDS--PRIDE THAT CAME DOWN FROM
+     THE CRUSADES--ROBERT BRAND AS SOLDIER AND PENSION-AGENT--THE
+     PENSIONERS OF THE REVOLUTION--HOW ELSIE RAVED, AND HOW THE
+     FATHER'S CURSE SEEMED TO BE ANSWERED--DR. JAMES HOLTON, AND
+     THE LOSS OF A CORPUS DELICTI.
+
+
+It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound Elspeth
+Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by
+both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from
+Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even
+modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who
+claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was
+gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the
+Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who
+claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little
+less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house of
+Stirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish
+and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later
+day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields
+since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards
+of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious
+hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that
+Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King
+Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that
+no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten
+that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another
+antique appellation for the sword.
+
+Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New
+Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly
+outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of
+Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New
+Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to
+the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long
+Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never
+rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner
+on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after
+Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the
+trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the
+patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief
+over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it
+could not be otherwise than that the ears of _his_ son, Robert (the man of
+1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep
+alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor
+of the land in which his lot had been cast.
+
+Then had come another influence, not less potent--the second breaking-out
+of hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brands
+was not cooled--it sprung to arms; and Robert Brand, then a young lawyer,
+taking the place of his father already invalided, assumed the sword of his
+armorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane,
+receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latter
+battle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, but
+glorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury had
+not been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained where
+brave men dared their doom.
+
+And yet another influence, not less potent, was still to come. Years after,
+when Carlton Brand was a child in arms, his father, then a practising
+lawyer in his native State, became identified with that most romantic and
+most picturesque body of men, of whom the present age remembers but little,
+and of whom the age to come will know nothing except as the knowledge is
+handed down from father to son, or carried forward in such desultory
+records as these--_The Pensioners of the Revolution_. At that time, not
+less on account of his spotless reputation than the crippling wound
+received in the service, he was appointed Pension Agent for the section in
+which he resided, and duly commissioned twice a year to receive from the
+War Department and pay over to the old men the somewhat scant and very
+tardy pay with which the land of Washington at last smoothed the passage to
+the grave of those who had been his companions.
+
+It was Robert Brand's privilege, then, to meet those men in the familiar
+intercourse of business--to listen to their tales, so often slighted by
+those wiser or less reverent, of foughten field and toilsome march, of
+cheerless camp and suffering in the wilderness, when this giant nation was
+a wilful child unjustly scourged by a tyrant mother--to find in each some
+reminder of his patriot grandfather, and some suggestion of what that
+grandfather would have been had the fortune of war spared him to go down
+into old age and senility.
+
+Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered in
+the little room where the scanty pension was to be doled--each with the
+measured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularly
+as when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain of
+Princeton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one they
+gathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindly
+greetings of garrulous and failing age--with the gentle complaint, so
+patiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight of
+time, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker had
+been young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officer
+at Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters--said they--were colder than they
+are now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all long
+before gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside the
+church,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew!
+
+Harmless deception of age!--pleasant coloring that distance gives in time
+as well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may be
+even more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawns
+upon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they ever
+were beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxiety
+and vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have no
+power to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freighted
+with unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in the
+heavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Mary
+and Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle of
+Kisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter far
+than song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so that
+the young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before their
+return at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day is
+remembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water is
+seen, and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes back
+more as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud upon
+her brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbon
+lightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirted
+with Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiff
+verging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and the
+parting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is with
+the millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only the
+moonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love are
+remembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixed
+enjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of
+grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's
+mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we
+grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long
+before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the
+rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard
+realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and
+worn away forever!
+
+Sitting side by side, they talked--those bent and worn and gray old men--of
+scenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and natural
+glory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarse
+fare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye of
+Washington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips that
+seldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked their honest service. Few men,
+even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile from
+the Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light of
+glorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smile
+of the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless.
+
+It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire that
+blazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, as he told how Washington
+commended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day of
+Long Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightened
+sheep,--and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if the
+head which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Liberty
+should scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of Walter
+Thorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledge
+of faith of the Monmouth League--quivering yet with the anger which had
+brooded for more than fifty years,--as he pictured so plainly the burning
+of his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid waste
+by them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead,
+the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figure
+of the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spanned
+the road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes of
+Captain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on the
+heights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which Stephen
+Holmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations of
+that patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of New
+York, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carry
+live-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleet
+lying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands for
+the use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of the
+squadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the half
+playful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told by
+his old companions, for the five-hundredth time beyond a doubt, that he was
+suspected of a share in Arnold's treason, for not stopping the disguised
+Andre as he passed his sentinel post below West Point, before he fell into
+the hands of the three very common and insignificant men made immortal by
+one single act--Williams, Paulding and Van Wert. There would have been no
+pretence in the motion, spite of his eighty years and faltering limbs, had
+the speaker hazarded more than a jest against the faithfulness of the old
+man's service in the "dark day." But easiest of all was it to remember the
+story of Thomas West, wounded, and crippled from that day forth, in
+assisting to bear the wounded Lafayette from the field of Brandywine, and
+named a subaltern officer at the close of that memorable action. His was
+the seat of honor; and his was something more, even, than that measure of
+respect demanded by all and so cheerfully paid to white hairs and honorable
+scars.
+
+Seldom was there a voice to speak one word of disrespect or undervaluation
+in the old men's company; and though the privilege of garrulous and failing
+age was often taken, and though the story once full of life and interest
+grew sadly tedious when again and again repeated,--yet there was no pardon,
+and deserved to be none, for him who forgot that reverence due to the men
+who bore the last personal recollections of the seven-years war. Only once,
+within the experience of Robert Brand as a Pension Agent, was such
+disrespect shown; and then the punishment was so signal that there were no
+fears of the impropriety being repeated. Mart Tunison, a wealthy young
+landowner, rudely jostled old Job Marston on one occasion, and when called
+to account for the offence, snapped his fingers at the veteran as a "cursed
+old humbug, always in the way and always telling stories of battles he had
+never seen." "You are rich, they say, Mart Tunison," said the old man,
+while the younger one could not read the flash that still lived in his
+faded eye. "I _am_ rich, and what is that to you, grand-daddy?" was the
+answer, with a slap of the hand on the jingling pocket. "Yes, you are rich,
+and most people do not know how you became so!" almost hissed the old man,
+little knowing how he was pointing a moral for a future day by speaking of
+the "shoddy" of that by-gone time. "I will tell all your friends, and you,
+how you got so stuffed up that you can snap your fingers in an old man's
+face! You are living on the proceeds of the money that your Tory
+grandfather, old Tom Tunison, made by stealing cattle, when he was one of
+the Refugee Cow-Boys, and driving them over the lines to sell to the
+British, before he ran away to Nova Scotia to save his neck!" Mart Tunison,
+if he had ever before known the real origin of his wealth, which is
+doubtful,--would probably have given the best field of all his broad lands
+to prevent that revelation of the shame of his family, which afterwards
+followed him like a thing of ill-omen, to the very grave!
+
+There was at that time in the office of Robert Brand, a stripling youngster
+who promised very little good to the world and has probably as yet
+disappointed no one--who thought more of play than of work, of music than
+of mortgages, of Burns than Blackstone, and of a rosy-cheeked girl who came
+into the office on some little errand to the "'Squire" than of the most
+proud and stately of his male clients. Among his vices, he had a fancy for
+jingling verse; and one day when the semi-annual visit of the pensioners
+had just terminated and he had listened afresh to the same old tales of
+glory told over again in the same faltering accents that he had heard so
+many times before, his one virtue of reverence for the aged and the
+venerable rose into an idle rhyme, which may have a fit place in this
+connection, and which he called
+
+
+THE PENSIONERS.
+
+    They come but twice a year,
+      When the pension-day rolls round,--
+    Old men with hoary hair
+      And their faces to the ground.
+    One leans upon his crutch;
+      And one is upright still,
+    As if he bore Time's clutch
+      With an iron nerve and will.
+
+    And feeble are the steps
+      That so patiently they feel;
+    And they kiss with trembling lips
+      The old Bible and the seal;
+    And they lay with care away,
+      In wallets old and worn,
+    The scant and tardy pay
+      Of a life of toil and scorn.
+
+    They love a cheerful pipe
+      And a warm place in the sun,
+    From an age so old and ripe
+      To call memories one by one;--
+    To tell of Arnold's crime,
+      And of Washington's proud form
+    That beamed, in battle time,
+      A beacon o'er the storm.--
+
+    To tell of Yorktown's day,
+      When the closing fight was gained,--
+    When Cornwallis went away
+      And the eagle was unchained;
+    To show us, o'er and o'er,
+      The seamed and withered scars
+    That many a hero bore,
+      As his passport from the wars.
+
+    'Tis pride, with these old men,
+      To tell what they have seen,
+    Of battle-fields, again
+      With their harvest bright and green:
+    'Twill be pride, when we are old,
+      To say that in our youth
+    We heard the tales they told
+      And looked on them in their truth.
+
+    They are the last sad link
+      Of a race of men with ours,
+    Who stood on ruin's brink
+      And built up fair freedom's towers.
+    They are passing, as the foam
+      From the ocean wave departs,
+    But finding yet a home
+      In heaven, and in our hearts.
+
+    And when the last is gone,
+      To their memory we will build
+    A pyramid of stone
+      Whose top the sun shall gild
+    When the name of patriot weal
+      And of tyrants' bitter wrong
+    Shall be told but in a tale
+      And known but in a song.
+
+The time then prophesied has come; though the monument then promised has
+not been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and grander
+though scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created,
+almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resources
+of wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolution
+are all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting where
+the last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out.
+
+Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more withered
+leaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sad
+comments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah,
+well-a-day!--poor ---- is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we must
+all follow him--some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblings
+of the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end must
+come. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six--to four--to
+three--to two! Oh, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!--enough gone to
+mark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholy
+converse! And then one day there came but _one_, who looked vacantly round
+on the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself must
+once have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not then
+been written, and _Geoffry Dale_ was yet to spring from the imagination or
+the memory of the dramatist and supply poor _Jesse Rural_ Blake with one of
+his best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of the
+pensioners his history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, and
+then the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their forms
+seemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered into
+impalpable dust. It was the most natural thing in life for Robert Brand,
+months and even years after, to turn when hearing the measured beat of an
+old man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one of
+the veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the time
+of his companions. But no--death had come to all, and as yet no
+resurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for the
+last time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away by
+the hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble country
+church-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to free
+and to cover with human glory!
+
+Perhaps they died in good time--before the dark hour came back again after
+a glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the last
+of the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-felt
+shame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their last
+moments with the belief that after all they might have labored and suffered
+in vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended in
+the sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels back
+through the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven of
+self-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear us
+on triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from which
+it is made was preserved through the long night of corruption and misrule,
+in the breasts of the Fathers of the Republic.
+
+Their children have long been old men now. Their very grandchildren begin
+to show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of the
+Revolution--the last of the men who could say that they saw and took part
+in that throe which gave birth to a nation,--tread all those who can even
+say that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and the
+last of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personal
+recollection is growing thin,--it may break to-morrow; and "the rest is
+silence."
+
+Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences and
+surroundings of his earlier life--himself a soldier when in possession of
+health and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest of
+all American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved his
+native land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the long
+struggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he had
+imbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree little
+less than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when the
+note of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippled
+frame must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he held
+one pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrance
+that he had a noble and gallant son, too busy and too much needed at home,
+thus far, to join the ranks of his country's defenders in the field, but
+ready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied the
+honor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that the
+knowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseated
+his reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partial
+insanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadow
+of excuse?
+
+At the close of the last chapter, and before this long explanatory episode
+intervened to break the progress of the narration, Elsie Brand, the
+agonized sister and daughter, was seen standing before her father, with
+hands clasped in agony and lips uttering agonized pleadings. But the very
+instant after, when the terrible severity of that parental curse had been
+fully rounded from the lips and that fatal evidence given that for the
+moment all natural affection had given way to impious rage and
+denunciation,--the young girl stood erect, her blue eyes still tearful but
+flashing anger of which they commonly seemed to be little capable, and her
+lips uttering words as determined as those of the madman, even if they were
+less furious and vindictive:
+
+"You may strike me if you like, but I do not care for you, now--not one
+snap of my finger! You are not my father--you are nobody's father, but a
+bad, wicked, unfeeling old man, gray headed enough to know better, and yet
+cursing your own flesh and blood as if you wished to go to perdition
+yourself and carry everybody else along with you!"
+
+The very audacity of this speech partially sobered the enraged man, and he
+only ejaculated in a lower but still angry tone:
+
+"What!"
+
+"What I say and what I mean!" the young girl went on, oblivious or heedless
+of any parental authority at the moment. "I do not love you--I hate and
+shudder at you! I would rather be my poor brother, a coward and disgraced
+as he may be, than his miserable father cursing him like a brute!"
+
+"Do you dare----" the father began to say, in a louder voice and with the
+thunder again threatening, but Elsie Brand was proving, just then, that the
+gift of heedless speech "ran in the family," and that for the moment she
+"had the floor" in the contest of denunciation.
+
+"Oh, you need not look at me in that manner!" she said, marking the
+expression of the old man's eyes and conscious that he might at any moment
+recover himself sufficiently to pour out upon her, for her unpardonable
+impudence, quite as bitter a denunciation as he had lately vented against
+her disgraced brother. "I am not afraid of your eyes, or of your tongue.
+You have turned Carlton out of doors, for a mere nothing, and I am going
+with him. I will never set foot in this house again, never, until----"
+
+How long was the period the indignant girl intended to set for her absence,
+must ever remain in doubt, with many other things of much more consequence;
+for the sentence thus begun, was never completed. In at the open front
+door, through the parlor and into the room of the invalid, at that moment
+staggered Kitty Hood. The phrase descriptive of her movement is used
+advisedly and with good reason; for fright, exhaustion and the terrible
+heat of the June meridian had reduced the young school-mistress to a most
+pitiable condition. Her face was one red glow, her brow streamed with
+perspiration, and she was equally destitute of strength and out of breath.
+
+This strange and unannounced interruption naturally broke the unpleasant
+chain of conversation between father and daughter; and the eyes of both,
+during her moment of enforced silence to recover breath, looked upon her
+with equal wonder and alarm.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Brand!" and here the breath gave out again and she sank exhausted
+into the chair which Elsie pushed up to her.
+
+"You are sick? Somebody has insulted or hurt you? What _is_ the matter,
+Kitty?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, no, no!" at last the school-mistress mustered breath to say, at short,
+jerky intervals. "Nothing ails _me_, except that I am out of breath; but
+your son, Mr. Brand."
+
+"Well, what of _him_?" asked the old man, his tone sharp and angry and his
+brow frowning, confident that the coming information must have some
+connection with the disgraceful report of the morning--that Kitty Hood had
+only run herself out of breath in her anxiety to tell his family unwelcome
+news that they already knew too well.
+
+"Oh, sir, Mr. Carlton--your poor brother, Elsie!--is dead!"
+
+"Dead!" The word had two echoes--one, from the lips of Robert Brand, little
+else than a groan; and the other from poor tortured Elsie, compounded
+between groan and shriek.
+
+"Oh, yes, how can I tell it?" the young school-mistress went on, as fast as
+her broken breath would allow. "I found him lying dead, only a little while
+ago, by the gate, down at the blind-road, as I came across from school;
+and I have run all the way here to tell you!"
+
+"My poor brother dead! oh, Carlton!" moaned Elsie Brand; then, but an
+instant after, and before the old man had found time to speak again, the
+curse came up in connection with the bereavement and she broke out,
+hysterically: "See what you have done, father! You wished poor Carlton
+dead, and now you have your cruel wish! Oh, my poor, poor brother!"
+
+"Silence, girl!" spoke Robert Brand, sharply, with a not unnatural dislike
+to have the school-mistress made aware of what had so lately passed. The
+old man was terribly affected, but he managed to control himself and to
+speak with some approach to calmness.
+
+"You are sure, Kitty, that you saw my son lying dead?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Mr. Brand, he was lying dead on the grass close by the gate."
+
+"Lying alone?" The voice of the father trembled, in spite of himself, as he
+asked the question.
+
+"All alone, and he could only have been dead a few moments. He looked so."
+
+"Was there--" and the old lawyer tried to steady his voice as he had many a
+time before done when asking equally solemn questions concerning the fate
+of other men's children--"did you see any thing to prove what killed him?
+He went away from home on horseback--"
+
+"Yes, he was on horseback at Mrs. Hayley's only a little while ago," Elsie
+mustered strength to interrupt.
+
+"Did you see his horse?--had he fallen from it--or--" and then the voice of
+the father, who but a few moments before had believed his love for his son
+crushed out forever, entirely broke down. Heaven only knew the agony of the
+question he was attempting to put; for the thought had taken possession of
+him that that son, overwhelmed by the knowledge that he would be pointed
+out and scoffed as a poltroon, had shown his second lack of courage by
+laying violent hands on his own life and rushing unbidden into the
+presence of his Maker!
+
+"No," answered Kitty Hood, setting her teeth hard as she realized that the
+time had come when she must prove her own honesty at the possible sacrifice
+of the life of the man who had been her lover. "No, I did not see his
+horse. He had not been killed by falling from it, I am sure. He had been
+_murdered_!"
+
+"Murdered!" Again the word was a double echo from the very dissimilar
+voices of father and daughter; the latter speaking in the terror of the
+thought, the former under the conviction that the dreadful truth was being
+revealed, and that, though the young girl did not suspect the fact, the
+crime would be found to have been _self_-murder.
+
+"There was blood on his face and on the grass," poor Kitty went on, "and
+there was a bundle lying close beside him, that I had seen under the arm
+of--of--"
+
+"Eh, what? Under whose arm?" asked the father, in a quick voice, as the
+relation took this new turn.
+
+"Richard Compton's!" choked out Kitty Hood.
+
+"Richard Compton's!" again echoed the old man. "Why he was your--"
+
+"We were engaged to be married," cried poor Kitty, at last overwrought and
+bursting into tears. "But I must tell the truth, even if it hangs him and
+breaks my heart. He was at the school-house only a little while before; he
+was angry with Mr. Carlton, and threatened him; and I am afraid that he
+killed him."
+
+"Oh, this is dreadful!" said Elsie.
+
+"Dreadful indeed!" replied Robert Brand, whose own grief and horror were
+somewhat modified if not lessened by the thought in what a situation the
+honest young girl was placing herself and her lover. He reached back and
+pulled the bell-rope again, and again Elspeth Graeme made her appearance, a
+little surprised to find three persons in the room where she had before
+left but two, the third coming unannounced, and all three of the faces
+looking as if their owners had been summoned to execution.
+
+"Tell Stephen to get up the large carriage, instantly, and have it round
+within five minutes," was the order to the old woman, delivered in a quick
+and agitated voice.
+
+"Are ye gaein' out, sir?" was the inquiry, in reply.
+
+"Yes, but what is that to you, woman?"
+
+"Naethin', maybe, only you're clean daft if ye'r thinkin' of it, Mr. Robert
+Brand."
+
+"I am not only thinking of it but going to do it; and the quicker you do my
+bidding, the better."
+
+"Gang yer ways, then, for an uncanny, unmanageable auld ne'er-do-weel!" was
+the grumbling comment of the Scotch woman, as she prepared to obey the
+injunction. She strode half way through the parlor, then returned and fired
+another shot into the invalid's room before she finally departed: "Hech,
+but ye've been sendin' away the doctor wi' the grin on his grunzie, and
+wha' will I ca' when ye come back a' ram-feezled and done over--answer me
+that, noo!"
+
+Less than five minutes sufficed to bring the carriage to the door, with its
+team of well-groomed bays, and with much exertion (of which the stalwart
+Elspeth furnished no small proportion) the invalid was placed in it and so
+surrounded with cushions that he could ride with comparative ease. Elsie's
+tearful request to be allowed to accompany him in his quest of the body of
+her brother was sharply denied, with orders that both Kitty and herself
+should remain within the house until his return; and the carriage drove
+rapidly away towards the point designated by the school-mistress, while the
+housekeeper was learning the fearful tidings from the lips of the two
+girls, and uttering broken laments and raining tears down her coarse
+cheeks, over "her winsome bairn that had been sae sair wanchancie!"
+
+Scarcely more time than had been consumed in getting ready the vehicle
+elapsed before the carriage, driven at rapid speed, dashed up to the spot
+that had been indicated by Kitty, the eyes of the father looking out in
+advance with an indescribable horror, to catch the first glimpse of the
+body of a son whom he half accused himself, in his own heart, of murdering.
+A doctor's top-sulky and a saddled horse, with two men, were seen standing
+near the gate as they approached; but, strangely enough, they saw no dead
+body. One of these men, Robert Brand saw, was the young farmer, Richard
+Compton, who had been accused by Kitty of committing that terrible crime;
+the other, standing by the side of his professional sulky, was a man of
+twenty-five, of medium height, very carefully dressed, fair faced, dark
+haired and dark eyed, with features well rounded and an inexpressibly sweet
+smile about the handsome mouth, which might have made an impression, under
+proper circumstances, upon other hearts than the susceptible one of Elsie
+Brand. Dr. James Holton, as has before been said, was a young physician, in
+very moderate practice, pleasing though very quiet in manners,
+irreproachable in character (an unpopular point, as we are all well aware,
+in one of the heroes of any tale), and considered very much more eligible
+as a match by the young lady with whom his name has before been connected,
+than by the parent who was supposed to have the disposal of her hand. Dr.
+Holton, as many people believed, possessed skill enough and was
+sufficiently attentive and studious in his profession, to have run a closer
+race with the local professional autocrat, Dr. Pomeroy, than he had yet
+been able to do, but for the skilfully managed sneers and quiet
+undervaluations by which the elder had kept him from winning public
+confidence. For more than two years he had been a frequent visitor at
+Robert Brand's, received with undisguised pleasure by Elsie and treated
+with great consideration by her brother, but meeting from the respected
+head of the family that peculiar treatment which can no more be construed
+into cordiality than insult, and which says, quite as plainly as words
+could speak, "You are a respectable young man enough, and may be received
+with politeness as a visitor; but you do not amount to enough in the
+world, ever to become a member of my family." Quarrel as he might with Dr.
+Philip Pomeroy, the old gentleman persisted in retaining him as his medical
+adviser; and it was her knowledge of the antagonism between the two and of
+the estimation in which each was held, that had induced the housekeeper to
+make her parting suggestion of the effect which must follow his order to
+set the dog on Pomeroy if he ever again attempted to approach the house. No
+one, meanwhile, could better appreciate his own position than Dr. James
+Holton; and while well aware that he loved Elsie Brand dearly, and firmly
+believing that she held towards him an unwavering affection, he was content
+to wait until his fortunes should so improve as to make him a more eligible
+match for her, or until in some other providential manner the obstacles to
+their union might be removed.
+
+Such was the gentleman who approached Robert Brand's carriage door with a
+bow, the moment the coachman had reined up his horses, and while that
+gentleman was looking around with fearful anxiety for an object which his
+eyes did not discover.
+
+"We are in trouble about your son," he said, before the other had spoken.
+"Something very extraordinary has occurred. Have you heard--"
+
+"That my son was killed and lying here? Yes. Miss Kitty Hood, the
+school-mistress, saw the body as she passed, and came to inform me."
+
+"Kitty Hood!" gasped Richard Compton, turning from the fence against which
+he had been leaning, and exhibiting a face nearly as white as that
+traditionally supposed to belong to a ghost.
+
+"Is it true?" continued the father. "If so, where is the body?"
+
+"That is what puzzles us," answered the physician. "Mr. Compton, here, had
+an altercation with your son--"
+
+"Excuse me, Doctor, for telling the story myself," said the farmer,
+interrupting. "Altercation is not the word--it was a _fight_. The devil
+was in me, I suppose, and I insulted Carlton Brand like a fool, and dared
+him to get off his horse to fight me. He got off, we exchanged a few blows,
+and directly he knocked me stiff. Perhaps I hit him in some unlucky place
+at the same time--I do not know. All that I do know is, that when I got my
+senses again, he lay stiff as a poker there on the grass. I thought him
+dead or dying, and rode away on his horse for the doctor. When we got here,
+just a moment ago, the body, or Mr. Carlton Brand with the life in him--the
+Lord knows which!--was gone."
+
+"My son got off his horse to fight you, you say?" asked Robert Brand, in
+such a tone of interest as almost seemed to be exulting.
+
+"Yes, sir," answered the farmer.
+
+"And actually fought you?--do not tell me a falsehood on this point, young
+man, for your life!"
+
+"Fought me? yes, he did more than that--_whipped_ me; and I do not let
+myself be whipped every day. If I ever found strength to rise again, I was
+just going to own up beat and ask his pardon."
+
+From that moment, an expression of pain which had been perceptible on
+Robert Brand's face from the instant of his conversation with Dr. Pomeroy,
+changed in its character and lightened up, so to speak, if it did not
+entirely depart. "Not so total and abject a poltroon as I feared!" was his
+thought. He had not alighted from the carriage, his crippled limb making
+that step difficult; but leaning over the side of it, he saw something on
+the grass reminding him of what Kitty had alleged.
+
+"There is blood upon the grass--whose is it?--my son's?" he asked.
+
+"Mine, every drop of it--out of my nose. See, here is the rest of it,"
+answered Dick Compton, drawing from his pocket the bloody handkerchief with
+which he had tried to improve the appearance of his countenance, while
+riding away after the doctor.
+
+"What do you make of all this, Doctor?" at length asked Robert Brand.
+
+"It puzzles me, of course," said the medical man. "It is strange how Mr.
+Brand should have fallen for dead, if he was not. And yet it is not likely
+that any one would have taken up the body and carried it away, if he was.
+It would seem most probable that--"
+
+"That he is still alive?"
+
+"That his apparent death was only the result of a fit of some character,
+and that, coming to after Mr. Compton left, and missing his horse, he has
+gone homeward, or in some other direction, on foot."
+
+"So I should think," answered the father. "Stephen, drive me home again. If
+you should hear any thing further, Doctor--"
+
+"I will do myself the honor of letting you know immediately," answered the
+young physician, with a bow and a quiet consciousness that, from stress of
+circumstances, the man whom he yet hoped to call father-in-law, had at last
+given him a tacit invitation to come to his house on _his_ business.
+
+"And what shall I do with the horse?" asked Compton.
+
+"As it seems that you have been the means of forcing the rider off its
+back, if you have not killed him, I think you can do no less than to ride
+him home to Mr. Brand's stables," said the doctor.
+
+"I am sorry that I brought you here for nothing, Doctor. You don't think
+that I need to go and give myself up, eh?"
+
+"I am very _glad_ that you brought me here for nothing, as it appears,
+instead of for something," answered the doctor. "No, I do not think that
+you will have occasion to give any thing up, except your bad temper and
+your propensity for fighting peaceable men along public roads. I wish you a
+very good day, Mr. Brand!" and stepping into his sulky, he drove away down
+the road to attend to some one of his limited number of patients; while the
+carriage containing Robert Brand whirled rapidly home again, followed at a
+little distance by Dick Compton on Carlton Brand's horse, the fear of being
+proved a murderer somewhat lifted from his mind; his military pants
+haunting him a little less than they had done during the former ride; and
+the bundle which had at one time threatened to prove so damning an evidence
+against him, hugged up under his left arm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+     THE RESIDENCE OF DR. POMEROY--NATHAN BLADESDEN AND ELEANOR
+     HILL--A KNEELING WOMAN AND A RIGID QUAKER--THE RUIN THAT A
+     LETTER HAD WROUGHT--A PARTING THAT SEEMED ETERNAL--CARLTON
+     BRAND ALIVE ONCE MORE, AND A GLANCE AT THE FATAL LETTER.
+
+
+It sometimes happens, in this world which fast people consider dull and
+slow, that events crowd themselves very closely, both as to time and space.
+Within a very limited section, in a period covering scarcely more than an
+hour, we have seen a complication of occurrences, affecting many persons,
+sufficient to occupy many hours in the recital. And yet the storehouses of
+event and circumstance have not yet been at all closely ransacked; and that
+June-day has yet much to reveal, affecting some of the persons already
+introduced, and others who have not yet come into the field of observation.
+
+The spot at which the conflict between Carlton Brand and Richard Compton
+occurred, it will be remembered, was at the intersection of the highway
+leading down to the Schuylkill at Market Street, by a blind road which ran
+back southwardly through the wood,--and that the request of the lawyer to
+Compton that he would open the gate admitting to that blind road, was made
+by the farmer the occasion of that quarrel and fight which we have seen
+terminate so singularly.
+
+Following that blind road half a mile through the wood, southward towards
+the Darby road, the visitor descended the little range of high land crowned
+by the wood, crossed a wide meadow with the frogs sunning themselves on the
+banks of the little brooks that ran beneath the bridges of the causeway,
+and the blackbirds singing in the low clumps of elder-bush that grew beside
+them, and found himself, on the other side, rising another slight hillock
+and at the back gate of the residence of Dr. Philip Pomeroy.
+
+This was a house of modern construction, and of a completeness betokening
+the wealth of the owner; standing near the crown of the hillock, with the
+garden at the back sloping away towards the meadow (a bad slope, that
+towards the north, all the agriculturists in the section averred); handsome
+shrubbery in the broad yard lying before the pillared front or south face
+of the house; and a good many fine trees of inconsiderable age, with the
+pine everywhere predominant, promising abundant shade in coming years, both
+in front and at the rear. The continuation of the blind road which crossed
+the meadow, extended past the house on the west side, immediately beside
+the pickets of the yard enclosure, and running across to the Darby road
+afforded access to both the great highways, with only short distances of
+travel, and at the price of opening an occasional gate, which merely
+answered the purpose of stretching the cramped limbs of the rider. Some
+persons, who knew the extensive practice of Dr. Pomeroy, were disposed to
+wonder that he had not located himself immediately on one of the great
+roads, with no necessity for traversing by-ways to reach them; while
+others, who better knew the peculiarities of his will, believed that his
+motive was a fancy for being comparatively isolated and a little baronial.
+Whether he really had any motive whatever in selecting the location, except
+the desire of pleasing himself, is a matter of very little consequence.
+
+There was a light buggy, drawn by two magnificent horses, standing at a
+post in the road, very near the house, at a little after noon on that day;
+and within the house certain developments were at the same moment being
+made, so illustrative of the depth to which human depravity can descend
+when the rein is given to all base and unholy passions, that the pen of the
+narrator, who is merely attempting a feeble recital of actual occurrences
+in the real life of to-day, pauses at the task before it, the fact being so
+certain that the circumstances about to be recorded will be supposed to
+have sprung from the disorder of an unscrupulous imagination, instead of
+being the fruit of sad research and knowledge that would be avoided if such
+a thing was possible.
+
+The middle portion of the front of the doctor's residence, immediately over
+the somewhat narrow portico, was a sitting-room of small dimensions,
+tastily furnished; while out of it opened a little bed-room, the white
+curtains and snowy bed-drapery of which, seen in glimpses through the door,
+suggested maiden purity and peace or that bridal rest which should be quite
+as pure and holy. The sitting-room had at that moment two occupants; and
+the picture presented was such as no looker-on would have been likely to
+forget while he lived.
+
+Nearly in the centre of the room stood a gentleman some years past middle
+age, large framed and with large hands, tall and commanding in figure,
+unexceptionably dressed in garments betraying the Quaker cut, and with that
+air of undeniable respectability which no pretence can ever imitate,
+conveyed by every motion of the man and every fold of his garments. He was
+dark-eyed and with features a little prominent; and years had made a
+perceptible mark on the smoothness of his face, at the same time that they
+had heavily grayed his neat side-whiskers and dashed heavy masses of gray
+among the still-curling locks that clustered upon his head. A merchant or
+banker, evidently, from manner and general appearance--and one to whom the
+idea of dishonorable conduct and the thought of a disgraced reputation
+would be alike unendurable. With a face in which sorrow seemed to be
+struggling with anger, this man stood holding a letter clenched in his
+right hand, and looking down upon something at his feet. That something was
+a woman.
+
+The woman was kneeling, with hands clasped in entreaty, hair shaken
+partially loose, face streaming with tears, and her whole system so shaken
+by the sobs convulsing it that the most dangerous form of hysterics might
+be very likely to follow that excitement. Even when kneeling it was to be
+observed that her figure was tall, finely moulded and upright--that her
+face was fair, pleasant, and notably handsome, though the features were too
+small, the dark eyes mournful, and the general impression created that of
+confiding helplessness very likely to degenerate into dangerous
+weakness--that her hands were long, taper and delicate, as beseemed her
+figure--that her brown hair was very full, rich, silken and glossy--and
+that she had probably numbered some five-and-twenty summers. Formed to be
+loved, protected and shielded from every harm, and certain to return for
+that love and protection the most unreserved affection and the most
+unquestioning obedience; and yet kneeling there with that upon her face
+which told a tale of the most cruel outrage quite as plainly as the
+quivering lips could speak it!
+
+Much has been said of the sadness of the spectacle when a strong man weeps,
+as compared to the same exhibition of feeling by a woman. It is equally sad
+when a woman is seen kneeling to any other power than that of her God! It
+seems man's province, given alike by nature and the laws of chivalry, to
+bend his proud knee in other aspects than that of devotion; and even when
+he is showing that prostration his eye may be glowing with the conscious
+pride of the future conqueror; but what except the most abject shame or the
+most overwhelming sorrow, can be shown when the delicate limb of womanhood
+kisses the green sod or the floor beneath her tread? To save by pitiful
+entreaties a perilled honor--to beg through blinding tears and choking
+sobs the restoration of that honor lost, that can often so easily be given
+back to her by the hands of the tyrant who will not hear her cry--to
+implore the concealment of a shame too heavy to bear--to plead for the
+forfeit life of some one dearer than the very pulses beating in her own
+bosom--to moan for the restoration of some object of love and protection,
+her babe perhaps, reft from her and her heart and her arms left alike
+empty--ay, to wail for the boon of a crust that shall chase starvation from
+the thin lips of herself or her child and keep them yet a little longer as
+clinging sufferers upon the earth,--these have been the compelling motives
+so often bending the knee of woman since the earliest day of recorded time.
+And yet not one of all the long array of unchronicled martyrs has been
+bowed under a deeper wrong than was that day made manifest, or uttered a
+more piteous appeal than that day went up to heaven!
+
+"Oh, do not cast me off!--do not desert me, Mr. Bladesden!" wailed a voice
+that would have been marvellously sweet and tender had it not been broken
+and roughened by grief, while her poor hands wrung and agonized themselves
+in sad sympathy with the writhings of her cowering form. "Do not take away
+from me my last hope of knowing one hour of peace before they put me into
+the coffin! I am no worse to-day than I was yesterday! Oh, do pity and save
+me, even if you cannot love me any longer!"
+
+"I do pity thee, Eleanor Hill, and I should like to save thee if I could!"
+answered a voice rich, full and strong, with only an occasional tremor in
+its intonation, and the Quaker phraseology seeming to accord peculiarly
+with the voice as well as the general appearance of the man. "But thou hast
+deceived me, and the plain people--"
+
+"Oh, no, I did not deceive you, Mr. Bladesden," the poor girl interrupted.
+"Do let me speak! Do let me try if I cannot move your heart to believe that
+I have never willingly done wrong--that I have never been intentionally
+wicked!"
+
+"Can thee deny what is in this letter, Eleanor Hill?" asked the Quaker,
+his voice trembling, in spite of himself, a little more than it had before
+done. Then he added, with something very like a sob in his throat, that
+seemed strangely at variance with the general calmness of his demeanor: "I
+am rich, Eleanor--very rich, men say; and yet I would give half of all that
+I have won in these many years that have made my hair gray, if I could see
+thee lay thy hand upon thy heart and look up in my face and say: 'The man
+who writes this writes falsehood!'"
+
+"I cannot--oh, God, you know that I cannot, Mr. Bladesden!" sobbed the poor
+girl. "It is true in word, and yet heaven knows how false it is in spirit."
+
+"Thee should not appeal to heaven so much, Eleanor, and thee should rise
+from thy knees, for I will believe thee just as quickly in the one position
+as the other, and the friendly people make their yea yea and their nay nay,
+without taking the name of the Father every moment between their lips."
+
+Eleanor Hill managed to rise from her knees and stagger to her feet; but
+her position was not the less humble afterward, for she stood grasping the
+back of a chair with both hands for support, and with her head bowed down
+in such abject shame and humility that the change of posture seemed rather
+to have been taking on an added degradation than putting one away.
+
+"See, I have done as you told me to do!" she said, without looking up. "I
+would be so obedient to you, always, if you would only take me away from
+this misery and shame. Oh, why would he injure me so cruelly--me to whom he
+should have been merciful, now, if there was any mercy in his nature!"
+
+"Can thee say that Doctor Philip did not do right, if, as thee says, he
+wrote this letter?" asked the Quaker, keeping his eyes steadily upon the
+crouching woman, and making no motion to change the distance between them.
+"Thee had deceived me, and he knew it. He was sure, perhaps, that thee had
+not told me all, and--"
+
+"I told you, months ago, when you first spoke of making me your wife, Mr.
+Bladesden," said the poor girl, with one momentary lifting of the bowed
+head and one transient flash of womanly spirit--"that I could not give you
+a whole heart--that my life had been very unfortunate, and that if I
+consented to marry you, you must promise never to ask me one question of my
+miserable past. Do you remember that I did?"
+
+"Thee did tell me so much, Eleanor," answered the Quaker. "But thee only
+indicated misfortune--not guilt."
+
+"I have _not_ been guilty--I was never guilty!" spoke the girl, the
+momentary flash of womanhood not yet extinguished. "You will not let me
+appeal to heaven, Mr. Bladesden, yet I must do so once more. I call upon
+the all-seeing God to punish me with even worse grief and shame than I have
+already borne, if there has ever been one guilty wish in my mind towards
+that man or any other--if I have not been forced or deceived into every act
+which makes you despise me to-day."
+
+The Quaker turned away, the letter still in his hand, and walked toward the
+window. He lifted the other hand to his brow and seemed to brush away
+something that troubled him; and he yet retained that position towards the
+girl, as he said, after the pause of a moment:
+
+"I believe thee speaks the truth, Eleanor Hill."
+
+"You do believe me! Oh, thank you for that mercy, if no more!" and the poor
+girl had stepped forward, caught his disengaged hand in both hers and
+lifted it to her lips, before he could prevent her. Then something in his
+manner, as he turned, seemed to chill her again to the heart, and she fell
+back silent to the support of the chair.
+
+"I believe thee so far, and yet thee deceived me."
+
+"How _could_ I tell you all, Mr. Bladesden? How _could_ I publish my own
+shame? Oh, why was I ever born!" and the voice had sunk low again, and the
+spirit seemed crushed quite as completely as before.
+
+"Thee blames Dr. Philip, and yet Dr. Philip was a better friend to me than
+thee was; for thee would have allowed me to bring disgrace upon my name,
+and he would not."
+
+The proverbial worm turns when trodden upon. Eleanor Hill had little native
+spirit, and she had been the veriest worm of the dust throughout all that
+terrible interview; but this last deadly stab at the vitals of her faith,
+given in laudation of her destroyer, seemed too much for human endurance,
+and there was yet one spark of spirit left in the very ashes of disgrace.
+
+"Nathan Bladesden," she said, standing fully erect, and anger usurping the
+place of shame in her face, "I am satisfied! I will kneel to you no
+more--beg you for mercy no more! If you are base enough to defend the man
+who could write that letter, and to call his action honorable, I would
+rather crawl out into the road and beg my bread from door to door, than to
+call you husband; and I thank heaven even for that letter which has saved
+me from a worse man than Philip Pomeroy!"
+
+Life and society are both full of terrible struggles. Perhaps there is no
+conflict of them all, more enduring in its character, or more racking to
+those necessarily engaged in it, than that which is fought by those who
+take the Sermon on the Mount as their declared pattern, and attempt to
+carry out the principles it enunciates. To forgive when smitten is
+God-like; but, oh, how difficult for any mere man! To love an enemy is an
+injunction coming down to us from a higher and purer source than that which
+gave the philosophy once taught in the Groves of Academe; but, oh, how
+impossible for any man to do in reality, until he has been baptized with
+fire! While others have waged this conflict desultorily and in isolated
+instances, for nearly three centuries, the Quakers have waged it as a sect,
+entitling themselves alike to wonder and admiration. They have practised a
+non-resistance unaccountable to the fiery children of the world, and stark
+madness on any other supposition than that there is really a special
+protecting Hand over those who heed the peaceful injunction. They have
+triumphed alike in society and in savage life, when the strong hand failed
+and the maxims of worldly wisdom became powerless. And on the faces of the
+men and women of the sect, to-day--beneath the broad hat of the Friend,
+under the close gray bonnet of his wife, on brow and cheek of the Quaker
+maiden with her softly-folded hair, and even in eye and lip of the young
+man subjected to temptations which have power to fever and wreck all
+others,--in all, there is the record of a long line of men at peace with
+God, themselves, and the world, as easily read and as unmistakable as are
+the traces of toil, unrest, and consuming passion on the countenances of
+those who have fought through the world with the defiant heart and the
+strong hand. They have met despisers as well as foes, outside of their own
+charmed circle; but they have also met admirers. And to-day there are men
+who could not and who would not take up their cross of self-control and
+occasional self-denial so long and so patiently carried,--but who cannot
+and will not refuse to them the tribute of heart-felt admiration, and who
+often heave fruitless sighs towards that land of mental peace from which
+they are themselves excluded, because they neither share its blood nor know
+the tongue of its speech.
+
+But the Quaker has not conquered without struggling, and he has not always
+conquered at any sacrifice. Twice, the old men of the Revolution used to
+tell us, the _Pater Patriæ_ was known to vent words of even profane
+anger--once, when the Continental troops failed him on the day of Long
+Island, and again, when Lee disappointed his just expectations and almost
+broke his line of battle at Monmouth. These were the two great exceptions
+proving the rule of his habitual self-command and his religious purity of
+speech; and the occasional outburst of anger in the Quaker blood may be
+held to illustrate the same self-control--to prove its abiding existence by
+the weight of the shock which momentarily throws it into confusion.
+
+The face of Nathan Bladesden showed, as Eleanor Hill spoke the last words
+already recorded, a mental conflict to which he was evidently little
+accustomed. The calm cheek flushed, the smooth brow corrugated, and the
+dark eye was for the moment so nearly fierce that the purity of the Quaker
+blood might well have been doubted. And when she had finished, the lips of
+the merchant uttered words, at which words themselves and their tone the
+speaker would equally have shuddered half an hour before:
+
+"Doctor Philip Pomeroy is an infernal scoundrel--unfit to live! He deserves
+to be killed, and I could kill him with my own hands!"
+
+"Ha!" It was something like a cry of joy from the lips of the poor girl.
+"Oh, I am so glad! You know this man--you hate him--you have only been
+trying me--you----" and her brow and cheeks glowed with excitement as she
+looked up in the Quaker's face. Then her eyes fell again, for she did not
+read there what she had been led to expect by his words. There was anger,
+but no pity; and even the anger was dying out under the strong habit of
+self-control, as rapidly as the momentary glow of a slight conflagration
+goes down under the dense volume of water poured upon it by the engine.
+
+"Thee mistakes me, Eleanor Hill!" he said. "I may follow the evil ways of
+the world's people so far as to hate the bad man who has ruined thee, but I
+have been speaking to thee in all earnest. I have not been 'trying thee,'
+as thee calls it. I pity thee, truly, and would help thee, but--"
+
+"But in the only way in which you _could_ help me, Nathan Bladesden, by
+lifting me out of this horrible pit in which my feet are sinking lower and
+lower every day in defiance of all my struggles and all my prayers--you
+desert me and leave me to perish. I understand you at last, and God help
+you and me!"
+
+"Thee knows I cannot marry thee, Eleanor Hill, after what has passed," said
+the Quaker, apologetically.
+
+"I know nothing of the kind, Nathan Bladesden!" answered the girl, no tears
+in her eyes now, and her words short and even petulant. "You have nothing
+to do with my past, any more than I with yours, to come to the truth of the
+matter! You know, in your own soul, that had you despised the malice of
+that serpent in human shape, and kept the engagement you had made with me,
+no man on earth would have owned a more faithful or a more loving wife. But
+you have cast me off, degraded me even lower than before in my own sight,
+made me kneel to you as I should only have kneeled to my Father in heaven;
+and this is the end."
+
+"Eleanor--" the Quaker began to say; but the girl interrupted him.
+
+"Please don't say another word to me! I understand you, now, and I know my
+fate. Let me have that letter, and do not speak any more in the streets, of
+the shame of a woman whom you once professed to love, than is absolutely
+necessary; and I shall never ask another favor of you in this world."
+
+"Eleanor Hill, thee is doubting my honor!" said the Quaker, alike
+forgetting that such idle words as "honor" were only supposed to belong to
+the "world's people," and that his voice was becoming so low and broken
+that he could scarcely make himself understood.
+
+"You have done more than doubt mine!" answered the girl, bitterly. "You
+have told me, in so many words, that because I had been cruelly wronged and
+outraged by a man who should have cared for me and protected me, I had no
+'honor' left. We begin to understand each other."
+
+A moment of silence, the girl weeping again but not convulsively as before;
+the Quaker with his hand upon his brow and his eyes hidden. How materially
+the situation had changed within a few minutes, since Eleanor Hill was
+kneeling with clasped hands and tearing out her heart with sobs. Yet
+another moment of silence, and then the merchant said:
+
+"I am going away, Eleanor. Has thee nothing more to say to me?"
+
+"Not another word, Mr. Bladesden!" answered the girl, through her set
+teeth. The Quaker raised his head, looked at her face for one moment, and
+then slowly moved towards the door, still looking towards her. She made no
+movement, as he seemed to expect that she would do, and as it seemed
+possible that some changed action on his part might depend upon her doing.
+
+"Farewell, Eleanor!" The Quaker stood in the door, hat in hand.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Bladesden!" The girl still remained on the other side of the
+room, as if either too much stupefied or too indignant to make any nearer
+approach. The next moment Nathan Bladesden had left the room and descended
+the stairs; and within two minutes after, seated alone in the buggy, behind
+his span of fast horses, he was bowling along towards the Darby road,
+apparently driving at such speed as if he would willingly fly as fast as
+possible away from a scene where his manhood had been severely tested and
+not found proof in extremity.
+
+For an instant after the departure of the Quaker, Eleanor Hill stood erect
+as he had last seen her. Both hands were pressed upon her heart, and it
+might have seemed doubtful whether she had nerved herself to that position
+or lacked power to quit it. Then her eyes fell upon the letter which
+Bladesden, when she requested him to leave it, had dropped upon a chair;
+and at the sight the spell, whatever it was, gave way. The poor girl
+dropped upon her knees before another chair which stood near her, with a
+cry of such heart-breaking agony as must have moved any heart, not utterly
+calloused, that listened to it,--dashed her hand into her long, dishevelled
+hair with such a gesture as indicated that she would madly tear it out by
+the roots in handfuls, then desisted and broke out through moans and sobs
+into one of those prayers which the purists believe are seldom or never
+forgiven by the heaven to which they are addressed--a prayer for immediate
+death!
+
+"Oh God!--let me die! Do let me die, here and at this moment! I cannot
+live and be so wretched! Let me die!--oh, let me die!"
+
+Whether unpardonable or not, the prayer was certainly impious; for next to
+that last extremity of crime which any man commits when he dismisses his
+own life, is his crime when he becomes a suicide in heart and wish, without
+daring to use the physical force necessary for that consummation. Despair
+is cowardice; the theft of time is a sin that no amendment can repay; and
+the robbery of that time which heaven allots to a human life, whether in
+act or thought, is something over which humanity well may shudder.
+
+But Eleanor Hill's impious prayer had no answer--at least no answer except
+the denial found in the breath of life which still fluttered from her
+nostrils and the blood which seemed to flow in torture through the poor
+frame sympathizing with the mind within. The aspiration was scarcely yet
+dead upon her lips when there was a footfall on the floor behind her; and
+she sprung up with one wild desperate hope darting through her brain, that
+the stern judge had at last relented after leaving her presence--that he
+had proved himself capable of a great sacrifice and returned to extricate
+her feet from the pit into which she was so irretrievably sinking. But that
+hope died on the instant, another and if possible a madder one taking its
+place; for before her, as she turned, stood Carlton Brand, though so
+disfigured and changed in appearance that any one except the most intimate
+of acquaintances might have been excused for doubting his identity.
+
+The young lawyer had always been noted for a neatness of personal
+appearance approaching to dandyism without reaching that mark; and only an
+hour before, in face and garb, he would have attracted attention in any
+circle, from the perfection of every appointment. Now, his face was bruised
+and swollen; his eyes were bloodshot and fiery; one lappel of his coat was
+torn from the collar; his coat and his nether garments were soiled and
+dusty; his hat was crushed and out of shape; and every detail of his
+presence seemed to be marred in corresponding proportion. A rough
+peasant's or a highwayman's disguise for a masquerade, would scarcely have
+changed him more than he had been changed, without the least premeditation,
+by that little rencontre with Dick Compton, to which we have already been
+unbidden witnesses. Absorbed as poor Eleanor Hill was in her own situation,
+she could scarcely suppress a scream when she saw the aspect of a man who
+always appeared before her so differently; and there was fright as well as
+concern in her voice as she said:
+
+"Why, Carlton Brand! Good heaven!--what _has_ happened to you?"
+
+"Much, Eleanor!" answered the lawyer, dropping into a chair with every
+indication of weariness, and wiping his heated brow with a handkerchief
+which showed that it had been soiled in removing some of the grime from his
+clothing.
+
+"Your clothes are torn--your face is swollen! Have you been
+attacked?--beaten? Are you seriously hurt?" inquired the girl, coming close
+to him and laying her hand on his shoulder with the affectionate anxiety
+which a sister might have shown. These women have no bounds to that
+sympathy which alternately makes them angels and lures them on the road to
+be fiends; and there is probably no true woman, who had ever been wife,
+sweetheart or mother, but would forget at least one pang of her pain on the
+rack, in sympathy for some wronged and suffering person who approached her!
+
+"Oh, no!" and Carlton Brand tried to laugh and made a miserable failure of
+the attempt, with his bruised face and swollen mouth. "Do not be alarmed,
+Eleanor. I have simply been in a little encounter with one of my neighbors,
+and--I scarcely know what has happened--I believe my clothes are torn and I
+suppose that I am disfigured a little."
+
+"Disfigured a little! Good heaven, I should think you were!" said the girl,
+coming still closer and looking into his face. As she did so, the eyes of
+the lawyer, not too bloodshot for sight if they were for grace of aspect,
+detected the swollen condition of her face, the fearful redness of her
+eyes, and the various symptoms which told through what a storm of shame and
+sorrow she had lately been passing. He started to his feet at once,
+grasping her hand:
+
+"Eleanor, _you_ are worse hurt than myself! Tell me what has happened! Has
+he been torturing you again?"
+
+"Oh, yes," answered the poor girl--"worse than torturing me! I could bear
+his personal cruelty, for I have grown used to it. But he has just made me
+lose my last hope in life, and I have nothing left me but to die!"
+
+"Your last hope?" echoed Carlton Brand. "What? Has Mr. Bladesden--"
+
+"Mr. Bladesden has just been here," answered Eleanor Hill, choking down the
+grief and indignation that were so painfully combating each other in her
+throat, dropping her head as she had done a few minutes before in the
+presence of the merchant, and holding out in her hand the crushed letter
+which Bladesden had dropped as he left the house. "Mr. Bladesden has just
+been here, and he brought this letter to read to me. It had been sent to
+his store, and he received it this morning. You can see, after reading it,
+what hope in life he has left me!"
+
+"Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and will find it!"
+
+Carlton Brand had momentarily forgotten his own troubles in the evident
+anguish of the young girl, just as a few moments before she had merged all
+those sorrows in anxiety for his personal safety. He took the letter she
+handed, smoothed out the crumpled folds made in it by the grasp of anger
+and shame, and read the damning words that follow--words so black and
+dastardly that one of the fiends from the lower pit might come back to
+earth to clear away from his name the suspicion that he had ever penned
+them. A few sentences of this _bona fide_ communication are necessarily
+omitted, in an interest easily understood:
+
+
+                           WEST PHILADELPHIA, _June --, 1863._
+
+     MR. NATHAN BLADESDEN:
+
+     SIR:--You are a merchant of respectability, as well as a
+     member of the Society of Friends--a society for which I have
+     the highest respect, although I do not happen to have been
+     born a member of it. I should very much regret to see you
+     made the victim of a designing woman, and linked for life to
+     one who would bring disgrace upon your name and family.
+     Report says that you are engaged to be married, or that you
+     very probably may be so at an early period, to Miss Eleanor
+     Hill, the ward for some years of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and who
+     is still resident in the house of that medical gentleman. I
+     suppose that you know very little of the early history of
+     the young lady, as, if you had known, you would never have
+     allowed yourself to be entangled in that manner. Her father
+     left her a few thousands of dollars in property, which she
+     no doubt has the reputation of still possessing, while I
+     have very good reason to know that it has really all (or
+     nearly all) been used up in unfortunate speculations by
+     different persons to whom she intrusted it, and that she is
+     little else than a beggar, except as the Doctor offers her a
+     home. As to her personal character, which is the thing of
+     greatest consequence at the present moment,--Miss Hill was a
+     very giddy girl, and many of her friends had fears for her
+     future; but none of them foresaw what would indeed be the
+     issue of the unfortunate situation in which she was placed.
+     I am writing this letter, as you must be aware, for no
+     purposes of my own, and simply to serve an honorable man who
+     seems to have been tricked and cajoled by unscrupulous
+     people. As a consequence, I must ask of you as a right which
+     you cannot disregard, that you will not show this letter to
+     Dr. Pomeroy, who might know enough of the direction from
+     which such a revelation would be likeliest to come, to
+     awaken his suspicion and put him in the way of injuring me.
+     This promised, I now go on to state what you will never
+     cease to thank me for communicating to you, if you are the
+     high-toned man of honor that I suppose. Dr. Pomeroy is well
+     known to be a man of somewhat violent passions; and though I
+     believe that his conduct has been nearly spotless during his
+     professional career, yet there are stains against him for
+     which he is probably the sorriest of men in his calmer
+     moments. Miss Hill, as I have said, was giddy and
+     thoughtless, if no worse; and very soon after the death of
+     her father, those who happened to see her in company with
+     her guardian, noticed that she paid him attentions which
+     showed a very warm personal attachment, while he received
+     them as a bachelor man of the world could not very well
+     avoid receiving such marks of regard from a young and pretty
+     girl. How long this went on, I am not at liberty to say,
+     even if I have any means of knowing: it is enough that, to
+     my knowledge and that of more than one person with whom you
+     are acquainted, the natural result followed. If there was
+     any seduction, I should be puzzled to say on which side the
+     art was used; but perhaps when you remember that the lady
+     has, during all your acquaintance with her, (at least I
+     presume so, from your continuing to visit her,) passed
+     herself off on you as pure enough to be worthy of the honor
+     of your hand, you may be able to form some idea whether she
+     might not have been quite as much in fault as her partner in
+     crime. I say "partner in crime," as I have no wish or motive
+     to shelter Dr. Pomeroy. Perhaps I ought not to say more, and
+     indeed my pen hesitates when I attempt to set down what I
+     consider so lamentable, as well as so culpable. But I must
+     go on, after going thus far. The secret of Miss Hill's
+     remaining at the house of Dr. Pomeroy after her attainment
+     of majority, is that a guilty attachment and connection has
+     existed between them for not less than five years past,
+     unsuspected by most persons who know them, but well known to
+     myself and some others, at least one of whom has been the
+     accidental witness of their crime. If you should think
+     proper to tax her with this depravity, and she should choose
+     to deny this statement, by way of convincing yourself
+     whether this is a foul calumny or a bitter truth, ask her *
+     * * * * * * * I hope and believe that you will take the
+     warning that I have thus conveyed, and not give yourself any
+     trouble to discover the writer, who does not conceal his
+     name from any other motives than those which you can
+     understand and approve.
+
+                                             A TRUE FRIEND.
+
+
+
+Carlton Brand read through this precious document without speaking--a
+document not worse in motive than all other anonymous communications, any
+one of which should subject the perpetrator, if discovered, to cropped ears
+and slitted tongue,--but worse than all others of its evil kind in the
+atrocity of its surrounding circumstances, as the reader will have no
+difficulty in believing when a little additional light is shed upon the
+personality of the writer by the chapters immediately following.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+     A RETURN TO 1856--NICHOLAS HILL, IRON MERCHANT--HIS DEATH,
+     HIS DAUGHTER AND HIS FRIEND--HOW DR. POMEROY BECAME A
+     GUARDIAN, AND HOW HE DISCHARGED THAT DUTY--A RUIN AND AN
+     AWAKENING--THE MARKET VALUE OF DUNDERHAVEN STOCK IN 1858.
+
+
+Seven years before 1863, and consequently in 1856, died Nicholas Hill, a
+merchant of Philadelphia, whose place of business on Market Street above
+Third had been the seat of a respectable though not remarkably extensive
+trade, for nearly a quarter of a century. His trade had been in iron and
+hardware, but the material of his stock by no means entered into his own
+composition, for he was a man somewhat noted for his quiet and retiring
+manners and a pliancy of spirit making him at times the victim of the
+unscrupulously plausible. His private fortune met with sundry serious
+drawbacks on account of this weakness, though a generally prosperous
+business enabled him to keep intact the few thousands which he had already
+won, and gradually if slowly to add to the accumulation. He had remained a
+widower since the death of his wife ten years before his own demise; and
+his pleasant though quiet little house on Locust Street, had only contained
+one member of his family besides himself, for years before his death--his
+only daughter and only child, Eleanor.
+
+The warmest and longest-continued friendships are very often formed by
+persons diametrically opposed in character and disposition; and the rule
+seemed to hold good in the instance under notice. A friendship formed
+several years before between the merchant and Dr. Philip Pomeroy, when the
+latter was a practising physician resident in the city proper, had never
+died out or become weakened, at least in the heart of the confiding and
+quiet dealer in iron, and there was no reason to believe that the sentiment
+had been more transient in the breast of the physician. Mr. Hill had been
+suffering under the incipient threats of consumption, for years, and the
+doctor had been his medical attendant, as before the death of his wife he
+had filled the same confidential relation towards that lady and the other
+members of his household. Neither personally nor by marriage had the
+merchant any near relatives in the city or its vicinity; and his retiring
+disposition was such that while he made many friends in the ordinary
+acceptation of the word, he had few who stood in that peculiar relation
+which the French, supplying a noun which has scarcely yet crept into our
+own language, designate as _les intimes_.
+
+It was not strange, then, that when Nicholas Hill was suddenly seized with
+hemorrhage of the lungs and brought home in an almost dying condition from
+his store, one afternoon in November, 1856, Dr. Pomeroy, who was hurriedly
+summoned to his aid, was summoned quite as much in the capacity of friend
+as in that of medical attendant. The story of life or death was soon told.
+The merchant had believed, from the moment of attack, that his day of
+probation was over; and, apart from his natural anxiety for the welfare of
+his only child, there was little tie to bind the sufferer to earth. His
+wife--his wife that day as much as she had been at any period of their
+wedded life,--had long been awaiting him, as he believed, in a better
+world; and there is something in the facility with which those quiet, good
+people, who seem never to have enjoyed existence with the fiery zest which
+tingles in finger and lip of the sons of pleasure and sorrow, give up their
+hold upon being and pass away into the infinite unknown which lies beyond
+the dark valley,--something that may well make it a matter of question
+whether theirs is not after all the golden secret of human happiness, for
+which all ages have been studying and delving.
+
+The doctor came, with that rapidity which was usual with him, and with
+every mark of intense interest on his face and in his general demeanor. He
+found the invalid sinking rapidly, and his attendants, the weeping
+Eleanor, then a handsome, promising but defectively-educated girl of near
+eighteen, and two or three of the ladies of the near neighborhood who had
+gathered in to tender their services when it was known that the merchant
+had been brought home in a dying condition. A few words from the sufferer,
+uttered in a low tone almost in the ear of the stooping physician, and then
+all the others were sent out of the room except his daughter, whose
+pleading gesture, asking to be allowed to remain within the room was not
+disregarded, but who was motioned by the doctor to take her place at the
+window, beyond supposed hearing of the words that were to pass between the
+two friends.
+
+"Tell me the exact truth," said the low voice of Nicholas Hill, when these
+dispositions had been made. "I am prepared to hear any judgment which your
+lips may speak. There is no hope for me?--I am dying?"
+
+Either the doctor could not speak, or he would not. He merely bowed his
+head in a manner that the questioner well understood.
+
+"So I thought, from the first," said the dying man. "The life blood does
+not flow away in that manner for nothing. And I do not know that I regret
+the end, for I have lived almost as long as I could make myself useful, and
+I think I am as nearly prepared to die as poor, fallen humanity can hope to
+be."
+
+"I hope and believe that you are indeed prepared to die, my dear, good
+friend," answered the doctor, with feeling in his tone, and the feeble hand
+of the sufferer meanwhile within his. "I cannot hold out a false hope to
+you--you cannot live. How gladly science and friendship would both join
+hands in doing something to keep you in the world, you know; but how much
+we shall all miss you and grieve for you, you do _not_ know."
+
+"That you will miss me, I hope," said the dying man. "But there is no
+occasion whatever to grieve for me. It is a peaceful end, I think, and in
+God's own good time. I have but one anxiety."
+
+He paused, and the doctor nodded his head towards the side of the room
+where poor Eleanor was sitting, trying to distract her own thoughts by
+looking out of the window. The father saw that he understood him, and
+pressed the hand that he held.
+
+"Yes, you have guessed rightly," he said. "My only anxiety is for the fate
+of my child. Eleanor is a good girl, but she is yet very young, and she
+will need protection."
+
+"She shall find it!" said the doctor, solemnly.
+
+The face of the dying man lit up with an expression of the sincerest
+pleasure and happiness, and his feeble grasp again pressed the hand of high
+health which lay so near his own ebbing pulse.
+
+"I believe you and I thank you, my friend as well as physician," he
+replied. "I have not been afraid to think of this day, as they tell me that
+so many are; and my affairs are in some degree prepared for it. I have a
+handsome property, though not a large one, and you will find a will lying
+in the private drawer of the safe at the store. With the exception of a few
+legacies to friends, a small one to yourself included--it all goes to
+Eleanor, and you will find yourself named my executor."
+
+"A confidence which flatters me, and which I hope I shall deserve," said
+the doctor, as the enfeebled man again paused for a moment.
+
+"I _know_ that you will," the sufferer resumed. "Thanks to my property,
+Eleanor will not be a burthen to you, except in the demand of _care_. Her
+few relatives, as you know, are distant ones, and none of them reside
+nearer than California. There will be none to interfere with you in guiding
+her aright, keeping her pure in her remaining years of girlhood, and
+watching over her until she becomes the wife of some honorable man, or in
+some other way ceases to need your protection."
+
+"I accept the charge as freely as it is given, and I will perform it as I
+would for one of my own blood!" was the solemn answer of the medical man.
+
+"I knew that before I asked, or I should never have asked at all!" said the
+dying man. "Eleanor, my daughter, come here."
+
+The young girl obeyed and knelt beside the bed, striving to restrain her
+sobs and tears. The father laid his hand on her head and gently smoothed
+the masses of dark brown hair with fingers that would so soon be beyond
+capacity for such a caress.
+
+"Eleanor," he said, "you are almost a woman in years, and you must be
+altogether a woman, now. I am going to leave you--I may leave you in a few
+minutes."
+
+"Oh, I know it, father!--dear, dear father! Oh, what will become of me?"
+and in spite of her efforts to restrain herself she sobbed and choked
+piteously.
+
+"You will be cared for, my child, not only by heaven but by kind friends;
+and you must not grieve so over what does not grieve me at all," said the
+departing parent. "Dr. Pomeroy is to be the executor of my estate, and your
+guardian. Love and obey him, my daughter, in every thing, as you would love
+and obey me if I was allowed to remain with you. Do you understand me?--do
+you promise me, Eleanor?"
+
+"I do understand you!--I do promise you, dear, dear father!" sobbed the
+young girl. "I will obey Dr. Philip, and try to be good all my life, so
+that I can meet you where I know that you are going to meet my mother."
+
+"My dear, good child!--you and the doctor have made me so happy! Kiss me
+now, Eleanor, and then let me sleep a few moments." And directly after that
+kiss of agonized love was given, he fell back upon his pillow--as if he was
+indeed dropping into a quiet sleep; but the doctor felt the hand that lay
+within his relax its pressure, one or two sighs fluttered from the
+quivering lips, while a light foam tinged with blood crept up to them and
+bubbled there, and the moment after Eleanor Hill was fatherless.
+
+And yet the poor girl who sobbed so heart-brokenly over the corpse of one
+who had been to her the truest and kindest of parents, was not fatherless
+in that desolate sense in which the word is so often used. The ties of
+blood might be rudely broken, but did not the hand of true friendship stand
+ready to assert itself? Had not Philip Pomeroy promised the friend of
+years, that he would be father and protector to her--that he would shelter
+her with all the power given to his ripe manhood, and hold her pure as the
+very angels, so far as he had power to direct her course? No--not
+fatherless: the weeping girl, in the midst of her sobs and unfelt caresses
+over what had once been the father of her idolatry, appreciated the truth
+and was partially comforted.
+
+It so chanced that Dr. Pomeroy, in his domestic relations, was admirably
+placed for offering a home to the daughter of his dead friend. Marrying did
+not seem to run in the Pomeroy family, for not only was the doctor a
+confirmed bachelor, some years past middle age, but his only living sister
+had kept herself free, like him, of matrimonial chains, and presided
+pleasantly over his household under her maiden name of Miss Hester Pomeroy.
+While the removal of a young girl of eighteen to a bachelor's residence,
+without the cover of female society, might have seemed grossly improper in
+spite of the color given to it by the guardianship so lately acquired,
+there could be no impropriety whatever in her becoming the companion and to
+some extent the pupil of the bachelor's maiden sister of forty.
+
+Dr. Pomeroy's residence was at that time within the city limits, though in
+that extreme upper section bordering on the Schuylkill; but his practice
+had been gradually extending out into the country over the river; and ideas
+long cherished, of a residence beyond the reach of the noises of the great
+city, were gradually becoming realized. At the time of the death of his
+friend, that mansion which it has just been our sad privilege to enter,
+was in the course of erection; and in the spring which followed he took up
+his abode within it, with his sister, his ward, and that array of domestics
+necessary for a man of his supposed wealth and somewhat expensive habits.
+
+It did indeed seem that Eleanor Hill was blessed among orphans if not among
+women. Her tears dried easily, as they had good cause to do. The residence
+to which she had been removed was a very handsome and even a luxurious one;
+Miss Hester Pomeroy was one of those good easy souls who neither possess
+any strength of character themselves nor envy it in others,--with an almost
+idolizing admiration of her gifted and popular brother, and a belief that
+no movement of his could be other than the best possible under the
+circumstances; and the doctor himself, a man of fine education,
+distinguished manners, admitted professional skill, and an uprightness of
+carriage which seemed to more than atone for any lack of suavity in his
+demeanor--the doctor himself appeared to be anxious, from the first, that
+no shadow of accusation should lie against his name, of inattention to the
+ward committed to his charge. From the day of her coming into his house,
+whenever his professional engagements would allow, he spent much time in
+the society of Eleanor, greatly to the delight of Miss Hester, who had
+thought herself very unattractive company and wished that her gifted
+brother had some one in the house more worthy to be his companion. He
+selected books for the young girl; brought home others; directed her
+studies into channels calculated to form her mind (at least some portions
+of it); invited the young people of the neighborhood to meet her; drove her
+out frequently; took such care of her health as he might have done of that
+of a darling daughter or an idolized sweetheart; and gave evidence that
+none could doubt, of his intention to fulfil in the most liberal and
+conscientious manner the sacred promises he had made over the death-bed of
+her father.
+
+To the young girl, meanwhile her surroundings became Elysium. She had warm
+affections, of that clinging character which finds no difficulty in
+fastening almost anywhere if permitted time and quiet. She had little force
+of will and still less of that serpent wisdom which discerns the shadow of
+danger before that danger really approaches. She was equally good, by
+nature, and weak by disposition--formed of that material out of which good
+wives and mothers are so easily made, and which may, on the other hand, be
+fashioned so easily into the most melancholy semblance of lost womanhood.
+She was handsome, if not strictly beautiful, and the lips of her guardian,
+so strict to most others, told her so with smiles and low-breathed words.
+She was flattered by his preference, paid her deferentially in public and
+yet more unreservedly when none but themselves heard the words he
+uttered,--proud to be thus distinguished by one so attractive in appearance
+and unimpeachable in position,--bound to him by that obedience enjoined by
+her dying father, and by that strong tie of gratitude which she felt to be
+due to her willing and unrecompensed protector,--and brought into that
+close communion with his strong mind which could not fail to sway an
+unmeasured influence over her, by those studies in poetry, romance and
+philosophy which he had himself directed.
+
+It is an old story, and melancholy as old. Before she had been six months
+an inmate of the house of Dr. Pomeroy, Eleanor Hill loved him as madly as
+young, defenceless and untrained girlhood can love that which supplies its
+best ideal and lures it on by the most specious of pretences. Not more than
+that time had elapsed, when she would have plucked out her heart and laid
+it in his hand, had he asked it and had such an act of bodily
+self-sacrifice been possible. Less than a year, and the tale of her destiny
+was told. For weeks before, the words of her "guardian" and "father" had
+been such as ill became either relation, but not warmer, still, than the
+snared heart of the young girl craved and echoed. Then came that promise of
+the dearest tie on earth, which falls on the ear of loving woman with a
+sweeter sound than any other ever uttered under the sun or stars. He loved
+her--that proud, high-spirited, distinguished man, the friend of her
+father, and the man for whose hand (so he had told her, not boastingly but
+in pity, and so she had every reason to believe) the wealthiest, the most
+beautiful and the most arrogant belles of Broad Street and Girard Avenue
+had been willing to barter all their pride and all their coyness--he loved
+_her_, the poor young and comparatively portionless girl, held her worthy
+to be his wife, and was willing to share his high destiny with her!
+
+What marvel that the untutored heart beat faster than its wont, when that
+golden gate of paradise was opened in expectation to her eyes? What marvel
+that all the lessons of childhood, which stood between her and obedience to
+the master of her destiny, were forgotten or only remembered with
+abhorrence? What marvel that the past became a dream, the present dull and
+unendurable, and only the delirious future worth a wish or a thought? What
+marvel that one evening when the full moon of August was peeping in through
+the trees which already began to cast their shade over the new home into
+the room where the "guardian" and the "ward" were sitting alone
+together--when the air seemed balm and the earth heaven--when the
+night-sounds of late summer made a sadness that was not sorrow, and
+temptation put on the very robes of holy feeling to do its evil work--when
+the lips of the subtle, bad, unscrupulous man of the world repeated words
+as sweet as they were unmeaning, promises as hollow as they were delicious
+and prayers as bewildering as they were sacrilegious--when the heart of the
+young girl had proved traitor to her senses and all the guardian angels of
+her maidenhood had fled away and left her to a conflict for which she had
+neither wisdom nor strength--what marvel that the moment of total madness
+came to one and perhaps to both, and that before it ended Eleanor Hill lay
+upon the breast of her destroyer, a poor dishonored thing, frightened,
+delirious, half-senseless, and yet blindly happier in her shame than she
+had ever been while the white doves still folded their wings above her!
+
+We know something of ends and something of intermediary occurrences, but
+very little of beginnings. The common eye can see the oak from a tiny
+sprout to its lordship of the forest, but none may behold the first
+movement of the germ in the buried acorn. The unnatural rebellion of
+Absalom, the reckless treason of Arnold, the struggle for universal empire
+of Napoleon, all stand out boldly on the historic page, as they appeared at
+the moment of culmination; but who sees the disobedient son of David when
+he walks out into the night with the first unfilial curse upon his lips, or
+the arch-traitor of the Western Continent as he starts from his sleep with
+the first thought of his black deed creeping under his hair and curdling
+his blood, or the victor of Marengo nursing his first far-off vision of the
+dangerous glory yet to be! We can know nothing more of the beginnings of
+vice in the hearts of the great criminals of private life. It can never be
+known, until all other secrets are unveiled before the eyes of a startled
+universe, whether Dr. Pomeroy, (no imaginary character, but a personage too
+real and very slightly disguised), in this ruin wrought by his hand had
+been acting the part of an unmitigated scoundrel from the beginning, a lie
+upon his lip and mockery in his heart when he promised the dying Nicholas
+Hill protection to his helpless daughter, and every act and word of his
+intercourse with her subtly calculated to bring about the one unholy
+end,--or whether he had merely _permitted_ himself, without early
+premeditation, to do the unpardonable evil which proved so convenient. For
+the welfare of the victim, it seemed a question of little consequence: for
+the credit of humanity, always enough disgraced, at best, by its robbers
+and cut-throats of the moral highway, it may be at least worth a thought.
+After events make it doubtful whether the very worst had not been intended
+and labored for from the outset; and certain it is that if there had before
+been one redeeming trait to temper the moral baseness of Philip Pomeroy,
+from the moment when that ruin was accomplished no obstacle of goodness
+hindered his way towards the end of the irredeemable. If he had before kept
+terms with Eleanor Hill and his own soul, he kept those terms no longer.
+
+The poor girl had of course no right to be happy in her new and guilty
+relation, and yet she was so for a time--almost entirely happy. She had
+been wooed and won (oh, how fearfully _won_!) under an explicit promise of
+marriage and with continual repetitions of words of respect which left her
+no room to doubt the good faith of the man who uttered them. She was more
+than a little weak, as has already been said; very unsuspicious and
+clinging in her trust; and neither wise enough to know that the man who
+respected her sufficiently to make her his wife, no insurmountable obstacle
+lying in his way, would have made her so before laying his hand on the hem
+of the garment of her purity,--or precise enough to feel that any disgrace
+had really fallen upon her, which would not be removed the moment that
+promise of marriage was fulfilled. Then, by a natural law which can be
+easily understood if it cannot be explained, the young girl a thousand
+times more deeply loved the master of her destiny because he had made
+himself entirely so; and for a time, at least, the conduct of the victor
+towards his helpless captive was full of such exquisite tenderness in
+private that she could not have found room for a regret had her heart even
+revolted at the situation in which she was placed. He did not speak of an
+immediate fulfilment of his promise of marriage--no, but he had before
+hinted that owing to certain temporary circumstances (oh, those "temporary
+circumstances"!) the hour when he could make her his own before the world
+must be yet a little delayed; and so the young heart took no fright at the
+procrastination. Good Miss Hester, meanwhile, saw nothing suspicious and
+suspected nothing improper. Perhaps she saw a deeper light of tenderness in
+the eyes of the poor betrayed girl, when they beamed upon him who should
+have been her husband; and perhaps she saw that her brother treated his
+ward with even more delicate attention than he had shown during the months
+before; but the spinster's eyes had no skill to read beneath the mask of
+either, and if she thought upon the subject at all her impressions were not
+likely to go farther than the mental remark: "How good Philip is to
+Eleanor; how obedient to him she seems to be; and how happy for both that
+he ever became her guardian and she his charge!"
+
+Under such circumstances the awakening, even a partial one, could not come
+otherwise than very slowly. But unless the young girl was an absolute idiot
+or utterly depraved, an awakening must come at some period or other. Though
+weak and ill-trained, Eleanor Hill was by no means an idiot; and the angels
+of heaven could look down and see that through all that had occurred there
+had been no depravity in her soul, no coarse, sensual passion in her
+nature. If she had fallen, she had been sacrificed on the altar of man's
+unscrupulous libertinism, and offering up the incense, meanwhile, of a
+good, yielding, compliant, worshipping heart. The moral perceptions may
+have been blunted, but they were not annihilated; the reason may have been
+choked and dizzied in the flood of feeling, but it was immortal and could
+not be drowned.
+
+Months had elapsed after the culmination of their intercourse, before the
+sense of right became strong enough and the heart bold enough, for the
+young girl to hint at the fulfilment of what had been so long delayed. The
+answer was a passionate kiss and an assurance that "only a little time more
+should elapse--just yet it would not be prudent and was in fact
+impossible." Eleanor wondered: she had not yet learned to doubt; and for a
+time she kept silent. Again, a few weeks later, and the question was
+repeated. This time a light laugh met her ear, and there was more of the
+master toying with his slave or the spoiled boy trifling with his
+play-thing, than there had been in the first instance. Still the promise
+was repeated, and still there were "insurmountable obstacles." Another
+interval of silence, then a third request, this time with tears, that he
+would do her the justice he had promised. To this ill-nature responded, and
+for the first time the young girl learned what a claw of pride and
+arrogance lay folded in the velvet palm of the tiger. She shrunk away
+within herself, at his first harsh word, almost believing that she must
+have committed some wrong in speaking to him of his delayed promise; and
+when he kissed her at the end of that conversation and said: "There, run
+away and do not bother me about it when I am worried and busy!" she almost
+felt--heaven help her poor, weak heart!--that that kiss was one of needed
+pardon!
+
+The dullest eyes will recognize at last what only the quick and accustomed
+discern at first. Eleanor Hill had been blind, but her eyes gradually
+opened,--with an agony in the first gleams of light, of which her yielding,
+compliant nature had before given little promise. Nearly two years had
+elapsed after her becoming the ward of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and more than
+one year after that fatal era in her own destiny, when the wronged girl,
+then twenty and within only twelve months of her legal majority, at last
+sounded the depths of that man's nature sufficiently to know that he had
+been inventing the existence of obstacles--that he had never intended to
+marry her, at least at any near period. At that moment of discovery a
+higher and prouder nature than hers might have been moved to personal
+upbraiding, despair and perhaps to suicide: with Eleanor Hill the only
+result was that a sense of shame, before kept in abeyance, came in and
+settled down upon her, making her more humble than angry or indignant, and
+unnerving her instead of bracing her mind anew for any conflict that might
+arise in the future. Aware, at last, of his deception, she could not quite
+believe in her guardian's utter baseness; and she still _hoped_ that though
+he might demand his own time for the fulfilment of that promise which had
+won her from herself, in his own time he would render her that justice in
+reality so poor but to her so full of compensation for all the past.
+
+Would it not seem, even to one most fully acquainted with all the falsehood
+of the betrayer and all the cruelty of the torturer, that the cup of that
+man's infamy was nearly filled? And yet--sorrow that the bitter truth must
+be recorded!--not a tithe of that which was to curse him before the end,
+has yet been indicated. Slowly and surely the blackening crimes pile up,
+when the love of virtue and the fear of heaven have both faded out from the
+human heart; and who can measure the height to which those mountain masses
+of guilt may tower, after the first foundations have been laid in one
+unrepented wrong, and before the coming of that day when the criminal must
+call upon those very mountains to fall and bury him away from the wrath
+that is inevitable!
+
+Dr. Pomeroy came home late one evening in December, 1858. Hester had long
+been in bed, and Eleanor, as was her habit, had waited up for his return.
+Some weeks had now elapsed since her discovery of his deception, but hope
+had not yet died out, nor had all her confidence been lost in that
+affection for her which she believed underlay all the impropriety of his
+treatment. So far, except in the one particular, he had treated her with
+almost unvarying kindness; and while that pleasant status existed and hope
+had yet a little point for the clinging of her tenacious fingers, it was
+not in the nature of the young girl to despair. She met him at the door, as
+she had done on so many previous occasions, assisted him to divest himself
+of the rough wrappers by which he had been sheltered from the winter wind,
+and when at last he dropped into his cushioned chair before the grate,
+which had been kept broadly aglow to minister to his comfort, took her
+place half by his side and half at his feet.
+
+Perhaps there was some malevolent spirit who on that occasion, before the
+glow of the winter fire, once more brought to the lips of the poor girl
+that subject always lying so near her heart--marriage. She mentioned the
+word, and for the first time since he had given her shelter under his
+roof, Philip Pomeroy hurled an oath at her. Perhaps he had been taking wine
+somewhat too freely, in one of the tempting supper-rooms of the city; or
+some other cause may have disturbed his equanimity and brought out the
+truth of his worst nature. The reply of Eleanor Hill to this was the not
+unnatural one of a burst of tears, and that outburst may have maddened him
+still more. The truth came at last, in all its black, bitter, naked
+deformity:
+
+"Eleanor, you have made a fool of yourself long enough! No more of this
+whining, or it will be the worse for you! When _I_ marry _you_, I shall be
+very nearly out of business; and if you have not had judgment enough to
+know that fact before, so much the worse for your common sense!"
+
+Eleanor Hill staggered up from her chair and cast one glance full into the
+face of her destroyer. Her eyes could read the expression that it bore,
+then, if they had never before attained the same power. There was neither
+the smile of reckless pleasantry nor the unbent lines of partial pity for
+suffering, upon that face. All was cold, hard, determined, cruel earnest,
+and the victim read at last aright what she should have been able to
+decipher more than two years before. And never the life of a dangerous
+infant heir went out beneath the choking fingers of a hired murderer, at
+midnight and in silence in one of the thick vaulted chambers of the Tower,
+more suddenly or more effectually than at that moment the last honorable
+hope of Eleanor Hill expired, strangled by the hand of that "guardian" who
+had promised beside a dying bed that he would shield and protect her as his
+own child!
+
+In that hard, cold face Eleanor Hill at last read her destiny. She had been
+weak, compliant and submissive, but never reconciled to her shame; and at
+that moment began her revolt.
+
+"I understand you at last," she said. "After all your promises, you will
+_not_ marry me!"
+
+"Once for all--no!" was the firm reply, the cruel face not blenching in
+the least before that glance, mingled of pain and indignation, and so
+steadily bent upon it.
+
+"Then I have lived long enough in this house--too long!" broke from the
+lips of the young girl. "I will leave it to-morrow. You cannot give me back
+the thing of most value of which you have robbed me--my honor and my peace
+of mind; but my father left my property in your hands--give me back that,
+so that I may go away and hide myself where I shall never be any more
+trouble to you or to any others who know me."
+
+"Humph! your property!" was the reply, in so sneering a tone that even the
+unsuspicious ears of the victim caught something more in the manner than in
+the words themselves.
+
+"Yes, I said my property--the property my father left in your hands for
+me!" answered poor Eleanor, striving to conquer the deadly depression at
+her heart and to be calm and dignified. "You have told me the truth at
+last; and I will never ask you the question again if you will give me
+enough money for my support and let me go away from this life of sin into
+which you have dragged me."
+
+"You want to go away, do you!" again spoke the doctor, in the same sneering
+tone. "And you expect to support yourself upon what you call 'your
+property?'"
+
+"I do want to go away--I must go away, Dr. Philip!" answered the victim,
+still managing to choke down the tears and sobs that were rising so
+painfully. "You have cruelly deceived a poor girl who trusted you, and we
+had better never see each other again while we live."
+
+"Your property, you said! Bring me that large black portfolio from the top
+of the closet yonder," was the only and strange reply. With the habit of
+her old obedience the young girl went to the place designated, found the
+pocket-book and brought it to him. He opened it, took out half a dozen
+pieces of what seemed to be bank-note paper, and handed them over to her
+without an additional word.
+
+"What are these, and what I am to do with them?" she asked, in surprise.
+
+"They are 'your fortune' that you have been talking about, and you may do
+what you like with them if you insist upon leaving my house!" was the
+reply.
+
+"I do not understand you!" very naturally answered the recipient, making no
+motion to open the papers. "If these are mine, I cannot tell what to do
+with them or how much they are worth."
+
+"Oh, I can tell you their value, very easily, though I might be puzzled to
+direct you as to the other part of your anxiety!" said the doctor, with a
+scarcely-suppressed chuckle at the bottom of his sneer. "They are the scrip
+for four thousand shares in the capital stock of the Dunderhaven Coal and
+Mining Company, in which, with your consent, I invested the forty thousand
+dollars left you by your father; and their present worth is not much, as
+the company unfortunately failed about six months ago, paying a dividend of
+five-sixteenths of a cent on the dollar. The amount would be--I remember
+calculating it up at the time of the failure--just one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars."
+
+"And that is all the money that I have in the world!" gasped the young
+girl, tottering towards a chair.
+
+"Every penny, if you leave my house!" answered the model guardian. "If you
+remain in it, as I wish, and forget all the nonsense that priests and old
+women have dinned into your ears, about marriage,--your fortune is just as
+much as my own, for you shall find that there is nothing which I can afford
+to purchase for myself, that I will not just as freely purchase for you!"
+
+Eleanor Hill said not a word in reply. She had sunk into a chair and
+covered her face with both her hands, through the delicate fingers of which
+streamed the bright tears, while her whole frame was shaken and racked by
+the violence of her mental torture. How utterly and completely desolate she
+was at that moment! Refused the justice of marriage by the man for whom
+she had perilled all, and bidden no longer even to hope for that
+justice--then coldly informed that if she left the house of her betrayer
+she went away to beggary, as all the fortune left her by her father had
+been squandered by imprudence or dishonesty,--what additional blow could
+fall upon her, and what other and heavier bolt could there yet be stored
+for her in the clouds of wrath?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+     WHAT FOLLOWED THE REVELATION OF BETRAYAL--A GLEAM OF HOPE
+     FOR ELEANOR HILL--A RELATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA, A PROJECTED
+     VOYAGE, AND A DISAPPOINTMENT--ONE MORE LETTER--THE BROKEN
+     THREAD RESUMED--CARLTON BRAND'S FAREWELL, AND A SUDDEN
+     ELOPEMENT.
+
+
+Eleanor Hill should of course have left the house of her guardian, that had
+proved such a valley of poison to her girlhood, the very moment when she
+made that discovery of her final and complete betrayal. But then, strictly
+speaking, she should have left it long before; and the same compliant
+spirit that had once yielded, could yield again. Pity her who will--blame
+her who may--she bowed beneath the weight of her own helplessness and
+remained, instead of fleeing from the spot that very night and shaking off
+the dust of her feet against it, even if she begged her bread thereafter
+from door to door. Not with what she should have done, and not with what
+some others whom we have known would have done under the circumstances,
+have we to do. She remained. Not the same as she had been before--Dr.
+Philip Pomeroy knew and felt the difference; and yet submissive and
+apparently unrepining. Not the same in cheerfulness, as Miss Hester felt
+and deplored: she spoke less, seldomer went out, even when strongly
+tempted, and spent much more time in the solitude and silence of her own
+room.
+
+It is not for us to put upon record precisely what passed between the
+guardian and his ward in the months that immediately followed that
+revelation; as unfortunately at that point information otherwise complete
+and uninterrupted, is defective for a considerable interval. It is beyond
+doubt that in the breast of Eleanor Hill fear and hatred had taken the
+place of love towards the man whom she had once idolized--that the sense of
+shame weighing upon her had become every day heavier and less
+endurable--and that she would have fled away at any moment, but from the
+fact that she was utterly helpless, pecuniarily and in any capacity for
+earning her own subsistence, and that she believed in the probability of
+Dr. Philip Pomeroy putting in force the cruel threat he had made, and
+publishing her shame to the world, distorted to suit his own purposes, the
+moment she should have quitted his abode and his guardianly "protection!"
+
+With reference to the wishes and intentions of Dr. Philip Pomeroy himself,
+it is not much more easy to form any accurate calculation. That he did not
+wish to follow the example set him by so many unscrupulous traffickers in
+female virtue, and drive away at once from his presence the woman whose
+life he had poisoned, is only too certain. That he had no intention of
+making her legally his own by marriage, his own tongue had declared. It
+only remains to believe that he held towards the poor girl some sort of
+tiger mixture of love and hate, which would not consent to make her happy
+in the only manner which could secure that end, and which yet would not
+consent to part with her at any demand or upon any terms. Other than she
+was, to him, she could not be: as she was, she seemed to minister to some
+unholy but actual need of his nature; and he held her to himself with an
+evil tenacity which really seemed to afford a new study in psychology.
+Circumstances were close at hand, calculated to show something of the
+completeness of the net drawn around the feet of the young girl, even if
+they did not clearly point out the hand drawing the cord of continued
+restraint.
+
+Miss Hester Pomeroy died suddenly in the winter of 1860, alike guiltless
+and ignorant of the evil which had taken place under the roof which owned
+her as its mistress, regretted by her brother with as much earnest feeling
+as he had the capacity of bestowing upon so undemonstrative a relation, and
+sincerely mourned by the forced dweller beneath that roof, to whom her
+presence had been a protection in the eyes of the world, and to whose cruel
+lot she had furnished more alleviations than she had herself capacity to
+understand.
+
+With this death, the introduction of a mere housekeeper to take the place
+which she had so worthily filled, the additional loneliness which was
+inevitable when a hired stranger occupied her room, and the certainty that
+the last excuse of propriety for her remaining was removed,--it may be
+supposed that the struggle in the mind of the poor girl began anew, and
+raged with redoubled violence. The desire to be freed from the presence and
+the power of her destroyer had by that time grown to be an absorbing
+thought, ever present with her, and worthy of any possible sacrifice to
+give it reality. Any _possible_ sacrifice: to poor Eleanor Hill, sacrifices
+which many others would have embraced without a moment's hesitation, seemed
+literal madness. The certainty of penury and the probability of open shame
+pressed her close; and she could not shake off the double fetter. Her
+tyrant would give her no release; and she succumbed to her living death
+once more.
+
+Months longer of weary waiting for deliverance, every spark of love died
+out from her heart, and yet soul and body alike enslaved. Oh, God of all
+the suffering!--how often has this been, with no visible hand to deliver,
+with no pen to chronicle! Months, and then came what seemed the opportunity
+of the poor girl's life.
+
+It will be remembered that Nicholas Hill, at his dying hour, spoke of his
+only relatives, and even those removed by several degrees, residing on the
+Pacific coast. One of these, William Barnes, a distant cousin, and a man of
+forty, who owned a comfortable ranch near Sacramento, came on to the East
+in the summer of 1861, bringing his wife, and in one of his visits to
+Philadelphia casually heard of the whereabouts of the orphaned daughter of
+his relative. Within a day or two following he pursued his information by
+driving out to the Schuylkill and calling upon Eleanor, in the absence of
+the doctor as it chanced. Half an hour's conversation satisfied the
+large-hearted Californian that the young girl was unhappy, from whatever
+cause; ten minutes more drew from her the information that all the property
+left her by her father had melted away in unfortunate speculations, though
+of course they won no way towards the other and more terrible secret; and
+the next ten minutes sufficed him to offer her a home, as a relative and
+companion to his wife, at his pleasant ranch in the Golden State. Girls
+were scarce in California, he said; girls as handsome as Eleanor were
+scarce in any quarter of the globe; and if she would accept his invitation
+they would astonish all his neighbors a little, on their arrival out, while
+she could select at will among fifty stalwart fellows, with plenty of
+money, any day when she might fancy a husband.
+
+Here was hope--here was deliverance. How eagerly Eleanor Hill grasped at it
+can only be known by the wretch who has once been so nearly drowned that
+the last gasp was on his lip, and then found a helping hand stretched out
+for his rescue--or that other wretch who has wandered for hours over a
+trackless waste and then found a landmark at the moment when he was ready
+to lie down and die! William Barnes was to leave New York on his return to
+California within a fortnight: he would inform his wife of the arrangement,
+and she would be delighted with the thought of finding a companion; and on
+the morning of the sailing of the steamer Eleanor would appear, to fill the
+state-room already engaged.
+
+Somewhat to the surprise of the escaping prisoner, and immeasurably to her
+joy, when that evening, with an expression on her lip that was nearer to
+triumph than any which had rested there during all the four years of her
+sinful slavery--Dr. Philip Pomeroy neither threatened her with poverty nor
+exposure as he had before done (perhaps because he felt that when under Mr.
+Barnes' protection the former would be beyond his power and the latter of
+little consequence in a State so far removed as California) nor even
+seriously opposed her accepting the offer made her. At last, then, the
+cruel heart had relented, her shameful dependence was at an end, and the
+reformation of her life could find its late beginning.
+
+Three days later came a letter from New York, from William Barnes,
+reiterating what had been said personally, and accompanied by the
+indorsement of the arrangement by Mrs. Barnes. The last shadow of doubt,
+then, was removed out of the way, and the young girl's moderate
+preparations for removal went on with new vigor. One hundred dollars in
+money was all that she asked of her guardian for these preparations, and
+that sum was accorded without hesitation or comment. On the morning of the
+sailing of the steamer she left Philadelphia by the early train, the doctor
+himself bringing her down to the depot in his carriage, and bidding her
+good-bye with a word of kind regret, and a kiss which seemed chaste enough
+for that of a brother. Her small array of baggage had preceded her, and was
+no doubt already within the hold of the vessel that was to bear her to the
+Pacific, to a renewed life, and an opportunity of gathering up the broken
+threads of lost happiness.
+
+The steamer, the old Northern Light, of such varying fortunes, was to sail
+at two. At half-past twelve, the carriage containing Eleanor Hill dashed
+down to the foot of Warren Street, among all that crush of carriages,
+baggage-wagons, foot-people with valises and carpet-bags, idlers,
+policemen, pickpockets, United States Mail vans, weeping women, whining
+children, and insatiate shakers of human hands, that has attended the
+departure of every California steamer since the first ploughed her ocean
+way towards the land of gold. Mr. Barnes had promised to meet her at the
+gangway or on shipboard, but neither on the dock nor on deck could she
+discover him. One o'clock was long past, and Eleanor had grown sick at
+heart under the idea that some mistake as to the steamer must have been
+made, when from the gangway she saw a carriage drive up and her new
+protector alight from it. He was assisting out a lady who could be no other
+than his wife; and the young girl, fairly overjoyed, ran down the plank to
+meet and welcome them. The lady, who was just starting up the plank as
+Eleanor reached the foot of it, did not notice her, but continued her
+ascent: William Barnes did see her, and allowing his wife to proceed alone,
+he seized her arm and drew her hurriedly away down the pier, and beyond
+ear-shot. Eleanor noticed that his face seemed flushed, and his whole
+demeanor agitated; but she was far from being prepared for the startling
+intelligence that burst from his lips, interlarded with oaths and
+expressions of honest indignation. The generous-hearted Californian was, in
+truth, very nearly beside himself with shame and mortification. Eleanor
+could not accompany his wife and himself to California, after all! And the
+story of the disappointment, though a little mixed up with those energetic
+expressions and once interrupted by the necessity of the enraged man's
+pausing to throw into the dock a package of fruit which his wife had just
+been purchasing for her comfort on the voyage (the porter who brought it
+being very nearly included in that sacrifice to Neptune), the story, in
+spite of all these hindrances, was far too quickly told; and every word,
+after the first which revealed her fate, fell upon the heart of the poor
+girl as if it had been the blow of a hammer smiting her living flesh.
+
+Up to that morning--the Californian said--his wife had seemed not only
+willing to accept Eleanor's society, but highly pleased at the prospect.
+Her ticket had been bought and various presents selected by Mrs. Barnes'
+own hands, for the comfort of their guest on the route and in her new home.
+That morning, and not more than two hours before, the weather in the
+matrimonial horizon, never entirely reliable in the latitude of Mrs.
+Barnes, had changed entirely. On coming into the hotel from some business
+calls, among them a visit to the Post Office (though Mr. Barnes thought,
+very naturally, that the latter place could have nothing to do with the
+sudden barometric variation)--she had suddenly declared to him that "he
+might as well go down to the office and countermand the order for Miss
+Hill's ticket and save the money; as if she [Miss Hill] went to California
+with him on the steamer that day, she [Mrs. Barnes] would not stir one step
+but stay in New York." Inquiry and even demand had failed to secure any
+explanation of this strange and sudden veering of the marital weathercock;
+and expostulation and even entreaty, with full representations of the
+contemptible position in which he would be placed by any change in the
+arrangements at that hour, had failed to secure any modification of the
+sentence. She wanted no strangers in her house, or in her company on board
+ship; and she would not have any--that was flat! If Eleanor Hill went to
+California, _she_ remained! A full-blown domestic quarrel, lasting with
+different degrees of gusty violence for nearly an hour, had been the
+result; and that other result had followed which nearly always follows when
+husband and wife commence discussion of any matter seriously affecting the
+feelings (or whims) of the latter--the husband had succumbed, the
+arrangement had been definitely broken off, and the state-room which the
+young girl was to have occupied was no doubt by that time in the occupancy
+of a man with a red beard, long boots, a broad hat and a gray blanket!
+
+Poor Eleanor Hill!--it seemed too hard, indeed--this being plunged back
+again into the pit of helpless sin and self-reproach, at every effort made
+for extrication!
+
+There is a legend told of the great well in the court-yard of one of the
+old English castles, at the period of the Parliamentary wars, which comes
+into mind when the cruel facts of her life are remembered. Sir Hugh, the
+Cavalier, had seen his castle surprised, taken and sacked by the
+Cromwellian troopers, guided and led on by a roundhead churl who owed him
+gratitude instead of ill-service--had been wounded and made prisoner, while
+the females of his family were maltreated and the pictures that made half
+his ancestral pride stabbed and hacked in pieces by the ruffians who could
+not enough outrage the living members of his race. Then the tide of fortune
+had turned; he had once more regained his strong-hold, with manly arms
+around him, and those of his dear ones who had not perished by outrage and
+exposure, once more under his sheltering hand. Then the recreant roundhead
+neighbor fell one day into his hands, and the cruel blood of the Norman
+ancestors who had begun _their_ robbery and rapine on English soil at
+Hastings, rose up in the breast of Sir Hugh and made him for the time a
+very fiend of revenge. The great well had been ruined by the corpses thrown
+into it at the sacking of the castle; and into that well, in spite of his
+struggles, he had the poor wretch lowered by his retainers, then the slight
+rope cut away and the victim left to cling to the slippery stones at the
+edge of the water thirty feet below, unable to climb them, too desperate to
+sink, and wailing out his cries for mercy, while a huge lamp, lowered by
+another rope, showed the whole terrible spectacle to the pitiless eyes that
+dared look down upon it. Then another rope was lowered by the great
+windlass, within reach of the struggling wretch, and he was allowed to
+seize hold upon it and climb a little way from the water, under the belief
+that his tyrant had at last relented and that he was to be allowed to save
+himself after that dreadful trial. Then, when he had climbed for a few feet
+from the black ooze beneath him, the rope was lowered away and the poor
+wretch again submerged, to shriek, and wail, and climb again, and to be
+again dropped back at the moment of transient hope, until the wearied
+fingers could cling and climb no longer and the life thus outraged and the
+light which had revealed that sad refinement upon cruelty went horribly out
+together! And how much less cruel was Fate, thus standing guard over the
+life of Eleanor Hill and dropping her back again into her own shame at
+every attempt which she made to escape from it or to rise above it,--than
+the grim and grizzled old Sir Hugh who had been made a human fiend by his
+past wrongs and the bandit blood of his race?
+
+There was genuine regret blended with the anger and shame on the honest
+face of William Barnes, as he made that confession which dashed all the
+hopes of the young girl,--that he _dared not_ take her to California. But
+who shall describe the expression of hopeless sorrow and despondency which
+dwelt upon hers at that moment? Yet despondency was unwise as struggle was
+unavailing. This, too, must be borne, as a part of the penalty of--no, we
+cannot write the word "guilt"--the penalty of being unfortunate and abused!
+The Californian took the privilege of blood, to urge the acceptance of such
+a sum from his well-filled wallet as would enable her to replace the
+clothing and other articles in her trunks, then too late to remove from the
+hold of the vessel,--bade her good-bye and sprung on board just as the last
+call was given. The poor outcast mustered courage to speak to a hackman as
+the steamer moved away that she had so lately hoped was to bear her to a
+more hospitable land and a better life; and half an hour later she was
+speeding back towards Philadelphia on the Camden and Amboy boat; with
+strange thoughts running through her mind but happily finding no lodgment
+there, that under some circumstances of desertion and despair there could
+not be such a terrible crime in slipping quietly overboard and going to a
+dreamless sleep in the cool, placid water.
+
+Had Eleanor Hill possessed that energy the want of which has been so many
+times before deplored, she would have sought out another home, though in
+the most miserable alley of the overcrowded city, before returning yet
+more disgraced to that place of misery once abandoned. But she lacked that
+energy, and perhaps her coming life was foredoomed, as the past had been.
+That night the bars of her cage closed again upon her. Dr. Philip Pomeroy
+received her in all kindness, with some expressions of pleased surprise and
+a few sharp epithets hurled at the man who could be weak enough to change
+his mind in that manner at the bidding of a woman. But there was something
+in his tone and demeanor which left the girl in doubt whether he was really
+so much surprised as he pretended; and later developments were rapidly
+approaching which made the doubt more tenable.
+
+Among the acquaintances formed by Eleanor Hill in the early days of her
+residence under the roof of Dr. Pomeroy, had been the family of Robert
+Brand, which the doctor visited (as he did many others in the neighborhood)
+both as friend and medical attendant. In those days she had been visited by
+Elsie Brand and her brother, and had visited them in return. Gradually all
+intimacy between Elsie and herself had ceased, as that great change, known
+only to herself and two others, affected the whole tenor of her life. But
+the friendship at that time formed with Carlton Brand had never weakened,
+and it perhaps grew the stronger from the hour when each became satisfied
+that no warmer personal interest would ever rise in the breast of the
+other. Perhaps Carlton Brand, to some extent a man of the world, and a
+close student of character by virtue of his profession, may have formed his
+opinions, long before 1861, of the relations existing between the doctor
+and his ward; but if so, he had not a thought of blame or any depreciation
+of respect for the poor girl on account of it; and during all those years,
+if he indeed harbored such suspicions, he had no means of verifying them,
+for Eleanor Hill's lips had been and remained quite as closely sealed to
+him as to others.
+
+Between Dr. Philip Pomeroy and the lawyer had always existed, since the
+young girl had been an inmate of the house, an antagonism which could not
+well be mistaken. No open rupture had taken place, in the knowledge of any
+acquaintance of either; but they never met without exchanging looks which
+told of mutual dislike and distrust. Within the three years between 1858
+and 1861 that antagonism, as even the unobservant girl could see, had
+markedly increased, so that even in his own house the doctor, when he came
+upon him, seldom addressed a word to his unwelcome guest. Had she known
+that in the investigations which followed the failure of the Dunderhaven
+Coal and Mining Company, in the later days of the great commercial crash of
+1857-8, Carlton Brand had been one of the counsel employed to prosecute
+that great swindle in which her own fortune had been swallowed up with
+hundreds of others,--had she known this, we say, she might have imagined
+some reason for this increase of dislike which was certainly not founded
+upon jealousy. But she would not have guessed, even then, one tithe of the
+causes for deadly and life-long hatred which lay between two men of
+corresponding eminence in two equally liberal professions. It is not
+possible, at this stage of the narration, to explain what were those
+causes, eventually so certain to develop themselves.
+
+On the eve of her attempted transit to California, of which we have already
+seen the melancholy failure, Eleanor Hill wrote but one letter of farewell,
+and that letter was addressed to Carlton Brand. On her way homeward from
+her great disappointment, she paused in the city to drop a pencil note
+written on board the steamboat; and that was also to Carlton Brand,
+informing him of her return. No reply was made to the latter note, for
+three days: then the lawyer called upon her one day during the professional
+absence of the doctor. He had been absent, at the city of New York and
+still farther eastward, for more than a week previous. He had returned from
+the commercial metropolis only the day before, and had taken the very
+earliest moment to acknowledge the reception of her missive and to express
+his sympathy in her disappointment--perhaps something more.
+
+After a few moments of conversation on that unfortunate affair, the lawyer
+remarked that he had chanced to stop at the same hotel in New York,
+patronized by Mr. Barnes and his wife, and having some recollection of the
+face of the former, from old Philadelphia rencontres, had made the
+acquaintance of both. He had known nothing whatever of the intention of
+Eleanor to accompany them to the Pacific coast, or even that any
+relationship existed between herself and William Barnes. But Mrs. Barnes
+had "cottoned to him" a little, apparently, he had been the possessor of a
+few spare hours, and he had become her companion and escort on some of her
+shopping excursions when Mr. Barnes was otherwise employed. He had been her
+escort on the morning of the day on which she sailed, and after her return
+from the Post-office had been present at her opening of several letters,
+over one of which she fell into a storm of rage requiring an apology for
+such an exposure before a comparative stranger. As a part of that apology,
+she had handed him the letter, bearing the Philadelphia post-mark; and
+inadvertently, as he then supposed, but providentially, as he afterwards
+saw reason to believe, he had kept the letter in his hands, dropped it into
+his pocket with his newspaper, and forgotten to return it until he had
+parted from the enraged woman and left the hotel. It was only after his
+return to Philadelphia and reception of the two notes advising him of
+Eleanor's intended departure and her disappointment, that he had been able
+to connect that letter with any one in whom he possessed a personal
+interest.
+
+Eleanor Hill had been gradually growing paler during this recital; and she
+was chalky white and almost ready to faint, when at that stage the lawyer
+paused and handed her a letter taken from his pocket, with the inquiry, "if
+she knew that handwriting." The letter was very brief, but very expressive,
+and ran as follows--the words being faithfully copied from the shameful
+original, lying at the writer's hand at this moment:
+
+                                    PHILADELPHIA, ---- --, 1861.
+
+     MADAM:--I have accidentally learned that arrangements have
+     been made by your husband and yourself, to take a young lady
+     back with you to your home in California, on your return.
+     When I tell you that I knew your husband and his family many
+     years ago, you will understand my motive for taking part in
+     what is apparently none of my business. If the report is
+     true, that you do so intend, you have been shamefully
+     deceived and imposed upon. The young lady, whose name I need
+     not mention, has been for years the mistress of the man with
+     whom she is living; and you can judge for yourself the
+     policy of introducing such a person into your household. I
+     have no means of judging whether your husband is or is not
+     acquainted with the real character of the lady; but any
+     doubt on that subject you can have no difficulty in solving
+     for yourself. I have preferred to address you instead of
+     him, with this warning, because in the event of his really
+     being aware of all the circumstances, any communication to
+     him would of course never have reached your eyes. With the
+     highest esteem and regard for yourself, for your husband and
+     his family, I am (only concealing my real name, for the
+     present, from motives which I hope you will readily
+     appreciate,) yours, obediently,
+
+                                        D. T. M.
+
+"My God!--yes, I know that handwriting!" sobbed Eleanor Hill, covering her
+eyes with both hands, after glancing over the precious epistle.
+
+"So I feared!" said Carlton Brand.
+
+"Oh, how can any man be so cruel!" continued the poor girl.
+
+"How could he dare to utter such a falsehood?" said the lawyer, glancing
+closely at the young girl meanwhile. Her face, that had the moment before
+been pale, was now one flush of crimson, and it seemed as if the very veins
+would burst with the pressure of shamed and indignant blood. Carlton Brand
+saw, and if he had before doubted, he doubted no longer. He spoke not
+another word. But the instant after, at last goaded beyond all endurance,
+Eleanor Hill started to her feet, and said:
+
+"Carlton Brand, I believe that I have but one friend in the world, and you
+are that friend. I have tried to keep my shame from you, because I could
+not bear to forfeit your good opinion. You know all, now, but do not
+believe me guilty and wicked! That man--"
+
+"I do not believe you guilty, Eleanor, whatever may be the errors into
+which you have been dragged by that worst devil out of torment!" he
+interrupted her.
+
+"Expose that man to the world, then, or kill him! Do not let my shame stand
+in the way! I can bear any thing, to see him punished as he deserves, for
+this last cruel deed!" The girl was for the moment beside herself, and she
+little thought, just then, what was the penalty she braved! It seemed that
+Carlton Brand better appreciated the peril, or that some other weighty
+consideration chained his limbs and his spirit, for his was now the flushed
+face, and he made none of those physical movements which the avenger
+inevitably assumes, even if beneath no other eye than God's, when he
+determines upon a course of action involving exposure and possible danger.
+He seemed to tremble, but not with anxiety: his was rather the quiver of
+inertiæ than any nobler incitement.
+
+"Expose him?--kill him?" he gasped rather than said. "You do not know what
+you ask, Eleanor! I cannot!--dare not--"
+
+"_Dare_ not?" echoed Eleanor Hill, her face that had ordinarily so little
+pride or courage in it, now expressing wonder not unmingled with contempt.
+For the first time, she saw the countenance of that man who had seemed to
+her almost a demi-god, convulsed with pain and shame; and the sad wonder
+that was almost pity grew in her eyes, as within a moment after, moved by
+her confidence and assured by it that he need fear no danger of betrayal,
+Carlton Brand entrusted her with the secret of that skeleton in his mental
+closet which made him powerless against the bold, unscrupulous and
+determined Philip Pomeroy. Each had the most dangerous confidence of the
+other, then; and each realized, if nothing more, a certain painful
+satisfaction in knowing that the burthen was not thenceforth to be borne
+entirely without sympathy. But to neither did there appear any hope of
+unravelling a villany which seemed to both so monstrous.
+
+All this took place in the summer of 1861, it will be remembered; and
+between that time and the period at which we have seen Eleanor Hill
+kneeling piteously before Nathan Bladesden and afterwards greeting Carlton
+Brand with such a sympathy of shame and sorrow,--nearly two years had
+elapsed. During that time Carlton Brand had seemed to gather more and more
+dislike of the physician, and, as must be confessed, more and more positive
+fear of him; while Dr. Pomeroy had more than once treated poor Eleanor with
+positive bodily indignity for daring to receive his visits at all, though
+he was the last of all her old acquaintances who kept up the least pretence
+at intimacy. Finally, for months before the June of 1863, the lawyer had
+ceased to make any visits to the house, except at times when he knew the
+doctor to be absent; and then he stayed but briefly at each infrequent
+call, while one of the female servants, who was devoted to Eleanor, had
+confidential orders from her to keep watch for the sudden coming of the
+doctor, so that this man, who seemed born to be a Paladin, could skulk away
+by one door or the other and avoid a meeting! A most pitiable exhibition,
+truly!--but the record must be made a faithful one, even in this melancholy
+instance.
+
+Since Eleanor Hill's return from her temporary Hegira, for a long period,
+so far as the eye could see no change had taken place in the relations
+existing between the "guardian" and his "ward." Perhaps he treated her with
+more coolness than of old; and she may have been more habitually silent,
+while she had become a virtual recluse and seldom passed beyond the doors
+of that fated dwelling. Whatever the weakness which the fact may have shown
+on her part, whatever of persistent evil on his,--the old intimacy of crime
+had been maintained, though the love once existing in the breast of the
+young girl had long changed to loathing, and there was every reason to
+believe that the ignobler passion urging on her destroyer had quite as long
+before become satiety.
+
+This up to a certain period. One day during the winter of 1862, Nathan
+Bladesden, a Quaker merchant of the city, gray-headed, eminently
+respectable and a widower, had found occasion to call at the residence of
+Dr. Pomeroy. In the host's absence he had been received by his ward; and
+the blind god, ever fantastic in his dealings, had smitten the calm, strong
+man with a feeling not to be overcome. He had called again and again,
+sometimes in the doctor's absence and sometimes when he was at home; but
+the object of his pursuit had evidently been Eleanor Hill. His visits had
+seemed to be rather pleasing than otherwise to the master of the house, who
+could not fail to see towards what they tended; and that he did see and
+approve had seemed to be evident from his entire withdrawal of himself from
+Eleanor's private society, from the time of the second visit. The poor
+girl's heart had leaped with joy, at the possibility of union with a noble
+man, that should finally remove her from her false position and make her
+past life only a sad remembrance; and those precisians may blame her who
+will, while all must sorrow for the circumstances which seemed to render
+the deception necessary,--that she had not shuddered, as she possibly
+should have done, at the idea of marriage without full confidence. Two
+months before, while April was laughing and weeping over the earth, the
+grave, unimpeachable man, who already held so much of her respect and could
+so easily induce a much warmer feeling of her nature,--had asked her to be
+his honored wife and the mistress of his handsome house in the city; and
+the harrassed girl, the goal of a life of peace once more in sight, had
+answered him that she would be his wife at any moment if he would consent
+to accept the remnant of a heart which had been cruelly tortured and to
+make no inquiries as to a past which must ever remain buried. To these
+terms the Quaker had consented; this had been Eleanor Hill's betrothal; and
+with such a redeeming prospect in view had her life remained, until that
+fatal day of June when the knowledge that her whole secret was betrayed
+burst upon her in the presence and the reproaches of Nathan Bladesden. What
+passed between them has already been recorded, at a stage of this narration
+antecedent to the long but necessary resumé just concluded; and we have
+seen how, only a few minutes after, Carlton Brand held in his hand the
+letter of her second denunciation, and what were his brief but burning
+words as he commenced reading.
+
+"Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and he will find it!"
+
+He read through the letter without speaking another word, though there were
+occasional convulsive twitches of his face which showed how his heart was
+stirred to indignation by the perusal.
+
+"You are sure, are you not?" Eleanor asked, when he had finished.
+
+"Just as sure as I was in the other case. The deed is the most black and
+damning that I have ever known; and if I had before been an infidel I
+should be converted by the knowledge that such an incarnate scoundrel must
+roast in torment!"
+
+"And what am I to do?" asked the girl, with that helpless and irresolute
+air which is so pitiable.
+
+"Heaven help us both! I do not know!" was the reply, with the proud head
+drooping lower on the breast than it should ever have been bowed by any
+feeling except devotion.
+
+"I cannot remain here after this!" she said. "Can you not take me away--do
+something for me? Does the--do the same obstacles stand in your way that
+stood there two years ago?"
+
+"No--not the same, but worse!" answered the lawyer, bitterly. "Oh, there
+never was a child so helpless as I am at this moment. I have wealth, but I
+cannot use it for your benefit without exposing you to final and complete
+ruin in public opinion. And for myself--poor Eleanor, I pity you, God
+knows I do, but I pity myself still worse. I came to tell you that I am
+going away this very day,--that I shall not again set foot within my
+father's house--perhaps never again while I live,--that my spirit is
+crushed and my heart broken."
+
+"What has happened? tell me! The old trouble, Carlton?" asked the young
+girl, in a tone of true commiseration.
+
+"Yes, the old trouble, and worse!" was the reply, followed by a rapid
+relation of the events of the morning, and concluding with these hopeless
+words: "An hour since, I parted with the woman I loved and hoped to make my
+own. To-morrow my name may be a scoff and a by-word in the mouth of every
+man who knows me. I cannot and will not meet this shame, which is not
+hidden like your own, but will be blown abroad by the breath of thousands
+of personal acquaintances, and perhaps made the subject of jest in the
+public newspapers. Think how those who have hated and perhaps feared
+me--criminals whom I have brought to justice and thieves whom I have foiled
+in their plunderings,--will gloat over the knowledge that I can trouble
+them no more--that I have fallen lower, in the public eye, than they have
+ever been! I am going away, where no man who has ever looked upon my face
+and known it, can look upon it again!"
+
+The tone in which Carlton Brand spoke was one of utter despondency and
+abandonment. There was nothing of the sharp, vigorous ring of that speech
+which contains and declares a purpose: the words fell stolid and lifeless
+as hung the head and drooped the arms of the utterer in her presence with
+whom he held a sad community of disgrace.
+
+"I understand you, and I believe that your lot is even worse than my own!"
+said Eleanor Hill, after a moment of silence. "You do right in going away,
+and you could not help me if you stayed. Nothing can help me, I suppose. Do
+not think of me any more. I can bear what is to come, quite as well as I
+have borne all that is past!" She had been nodding her head mechanically
+when she commenced speaking, and at every nod it sank lower and lower until
+the face was hidden from the one friend whom she was thus losing beyond
+recall.
+
+At that moment there was a rapid foot on the stairway above, and the house
+servant whom Eleanor had managed to keep in her interest spoke quickly at
+the door.
+
+"If you please, Miss, doctor's carriage is coming through the gate from the
+Darby road. Thought you would like to know it." And as rapidly as she had
+come down, she ascended again to her employment in the attic.
+
+"Oh, Carlton, you must not be seen here, now!" exclaimed the poor girl, her
+face all fright and anxiety, and herself apparently forgotten. Something in
+that look and tone smote the heart of Carlton Brand more deeply than it had
+ever been smitten by the sorrow and disgrace of his own situation; and with
+that feeling of intense compassion a new thought was born within him.
+"Yesterday I could not have done it--to-day I can!" he muttered, so low
+that the girl could not understand his words; then he said aloud, and
+speaking very rapidly:
+
+"I cannot meet him, and you shall not! Throw something on your head and
+over your shoulders, quick; and come with me!"
+
+For one instant the young girl gazed into his face as if in doubt and
+hesitation; but the repetition of a single word decided her:
+
+"Quick!"
+
+A glow of delight and surprise that had long been a stranger to her face,
+broke over it; she ran to the little bed-room adjoining the apartment in
+which they were speaking, threw on a black-silken mantle and a sober little
+hat that hung there, and was ready in an instant. In another Carlton Brand
+had seized her arm, hurried her out of the room, down the stairs, through
+the hall and out into the garden which lay at the north side of the house
+and extended down almost to the edge of the causeway. Dr. Pomeroy was
+driving down the lane leading from the Darby road, and was consequently on
+the opposite side of the house from the fugitives. Fugitives they may well
+have been called, though perhaps so strange an elopement had never before
+been planned--an elopement over a comparatively open country in the broad
+light of a summer noon, by two persons who held no tie of blood and no
+warmer feeling for each other than friendship, and who had not dreamed of
+such an act even five minutes before.
+
+But those operations the most suddenly conceived are not always the worst
+executed. Necessity, if not genius, is often a successful imitator of that
+quality. When the doctor drove up at the gate in front of the house, his
+"ward" and her new companion were just dodging out of the tall bean-poles
+and shrubbery, over the garden fence, to the edge of the meadow; by the
+time he had fairly entered the house they were on the causeway and
+partially sheltered by the elders that ran along it and fringed the bank of
+the singing brook; and long before he could have discovered the flight and
+made such inquiries of the servants as might have directed his gaze in that
+direction, the lawyer in his strangely soiled and unaccustomed attire, and
+the girl so slightly arrayed for starting out on her travels in the world,
+were within the circle of woods before mentioned, stretching northward to
+the great road leading down to the city.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+     DR. POMEROY'S PURPOSED PURSUIT--A PLAIN QUAKER WHO USED VERY
+     PLAIN LANGUAGE--ALMOST A FIGHT--HOW MRS. BURTON HAYLEY
+     CONSOLED HER DAUGHTER, AND HOW MARGARET REVEALED THE PAST--A
+     COMPACT--DR. POMEROY'S CANINE ADVENTURE--OLD ELSPETH ONCE
+     MORE--A SEARCH THAT FOUND NOTHING.
+
+
+It will be noticed that with the exception of the somewhat extended glance
+at the earlier fortunes of Eleanor Hill, all the occurrences thus far
+recorded, and affecting the after lives of so many different people, have
+occupied not more than two or three hours of a single June day. The Parcæ
+were evidently very busy on that day of June, repaying the past and
+arranging the future; and not less than three scenes of this veritable
+history yet remain, occurring on the same day, a little later, but within
+the same space as to distance, that has been covered by those preceding.
+
+The first of these is that presented in the house of Dr. Pomeroy, ten
+minutes after he had entered it, and when two or three sharp inquiries
+after his "ward," whom he failed to find in her room, had elicited from one
+of the frightened servants the information not only that she had left the
+house, through the garden, with hat and mantle and in great haste,--but in
+the company of the man of all the world towards whom the medical gentleman
+entertained that deadliest hatred which would have made his drugs safe and
+reliable had he been attending him in a dangerous sickness! He might not
+have known the fact quite so soon, from any of the other servants, as he
+certainly would not have discovered the truth under a twelvemonth from the
+one who had acted as Eleanor's sentinel on the watch tower; but it chanced
+that he possessed one creature of his own, who had been in the habit of
+playing spy around the house generally and making very considerable
+additions to her wages from the "appropriation for secret service"; and
+from that open-mouthed person, who seemed to see with that organ as well as
+with the eyes, he had no difficulty in extracting all the truth that could
+be known, in an inconceivably minute fraction of time.
+
+The rage which broke out in the face of Dr. Philip Pomeroy and set his eyes
+ablaze, at about that period, would not have been a pleasant thing to look
+upon, for any person liable to the penalties and inflictions which that
+rage denoted. For he was a sharp, keen, calculating man, jumping to a
+conclusion with great rapidity, and seldomer missing the fact than most men
+under corresponding circumstances. Eleanor Hill was gone--had left his
+house forever, so far as her own will had any power: he knew the fact
+intuitively. She would never have dared to cross the threshold with Carlton
+Brand, knowing the hatred which he held against that man of all others, if
+she had intended to place herself again in a position where she could feel
+his displeasure. Then the doctor knew, as the reader may by this time be
+inclined to suspect, reasons why the young girl would have been much more
+likely to leave his house forever, that day, than at any previous time of
+her sojourn, if aid and protection chanced to offer themselves. They _had_
+offered themselves, in the shape of the lawyer: they had been embraced; and
+the good physician, hurling a few outward curses at the servant who had
+afforded him the intelligence, at all the other servants, at the house and
+every thing within it,--mentally included in his malediction every patient
+who had assisted in luring him away from his home that day, while such a
+spoil was being made of his "domestic happiness."
+
+The worst of the affair--and the doctor saw it--was that Eleanor Hill had
+attained her majority years before, and that he had no power whatever to
+compel her return, except that power still existed in the impending threat
+of public shame. But he was wronged--robbed--outraged! He would pursue the
+fugitive--find her--force her to abandon her new protection--drag her by
+main force from any arm that dared to interpose! If he failed, he would
+make such a general desolation in family peace, in the quiet neighborhood
+lying beyond that side the Schuylkill, as had never been known within the
+memory of the "oldest inhabitant"--such an exposé, convulsion and general
+explosion as would put out of countenance any thing in the power of the
+advancing rebel Lee!
+
+All this in the two minutes following the knowledge of Eleanor's flight.
+The ostler had just led round his heated horse to the stable, before the
+discovery; and that functionary had orders shot at him from the back
+piazza, in a very loud and commanding voice, to throw the harness on
+another of his fastest trotters, and have him round at the gate in less
+than half a minute, before his double-seated buggy, on pain of being flayed
+alive with his own horse-whip. It may be supposed that under such
+incitement the stable official handled strap and buckle with unusual
+dexterity; and in very little more time than that allowed by the
+regulation, the vehicle dashed round to the gate, and the enraged owner
+stood whip in hand, ready to leap into it and urge a pursuit yet madder
+than had been the elopement. But Dr. Philip Pomeroy, having prepared to
+ride at once and with all diligence, found an unexpected hindrance, and did
+not pursue his journey until a much more advantageous start had been
+allowed to the fugitives.
+
+For while the doctor was preparing to spring into his vehicle, down the
+lane from the Darby road dashed the buggy and pair of Nathan Bladesden,
+which had so lately taken that direction--dashed down, driven at such speed
+as flung the fine horses into a lather of foam, and utterly belied the calm
+reputation of the Quaker merchant. Nor was there any thing of the
+deliberation of the sect in the jerk with which he brought up the flying
+team by throwing them both back upon their haunches, or the suddenness with
+which he sprang from the buggy, leaving the horses unfastened, and strode
+to the open gate.
+
+The rencontre was most inopportune and vexatious to the doctor, to whom
+minutes just then were hours; and he may have had motives for wishing, that
+day, not to be placed beneath an eye so sharpened by age and experience.
+But Nathan Bladesden was a man of wealth and a power in the city, and not
+even Dr. Pomeroy could afford to treat him with rudeness by driving away at
+the very moment of his arrival. He smoothed his bent brows, therefore, and
+accosted him with every demonstration of interest.
+
+"Glad to see you, Mr. Bladesden! You seem to have been driving fast! But
+you come just in time, for I was about starting in a hurry to--to see a
+patient."
+
+Had Dr. Pomeroy been aware of all the circumstances connected with the
+morning call of the merchant--the shameful revelations made in the little
+room overhead--the agony of spirit in which the Quaker had forced himself
+away from the presence of Eleanor Hill, deserting her utterly and leaving
+her in such a state of suffering as made suicide very possible--and the
+continued and ever-deepening conflict which had since been going on in his
+mind, as he dashed along roads that led him nowhere, his horses foaming in
+the heat but the heat in his brain a thousand times more intense, until at
+last he had driven back determined to drag the young girl, at every hazard
+and sacrifice, from that moral pest-house which must be sure infection and
+death to her soul,--had Dr. Pomeroy known all this, we say, not even his
+hardy spirit might have been willing to brave the encounter. But he knew
+nothing, and some of the perilous consequences of ignorance followed.
+
+"I did not come to see _thee_, Dr. Philip," replied the Quaker to his
+salutation, passing on meanwhile towards the front door, and something
+short and choppy in his words indicating that he did not wish to open his
+mouth at full freedom. "I saw thy ward, Eleanor Hill, this morning, and I
+am going to see her again."
+
+"Ah, you have been here to-day, then, before? And you are going to see her
+again, after--." It was surprising, for a man of his age and experience,
+how near he came to saying a word too much!
+
+"After receiving _thy letter_?--yes!" answered the Quaker, turning short
+and confronting his quondam host, the restraint on his utterance removed.
+
+"_My_ letter? What do you mean by my letter?" Had any one told Philip
+Pomeroy, half an hour before, that there was a man living who in five words
+could change the color on his cheek, he would have reckoned the informant a
+liar and grossly insulted him. Yet so it was; and the flush, though it was
+already growing into that of defiant anger, had not been such when it began
+to rise.
+
+"Thee does not seem to understand me, Dr. Philip," said the Quaker, his
+words still slow and no point of the sectarian idiom lost, but each
+dropping short and curtly as if a weighty substance falling heavily. "But
+thee will understand me before I am done. Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A
+True Friend'--"
+
+"You lie!" A terrible word, to be flung into the teeth of any man; and
+doubly terrible as hurled from lips then ashy white. For just one instant
+the Quaker's large hands clutched, and he might have been moved to advance
+upon his insulter and avenge Eleanor Hill, himself and all the world, by
+choking the insult from his throat. But if such a thought really moved him,
+he controlled it and merely smote on with his words.
+
+"Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A True Friend,' and thee shall have my
+opinion of it, before I go into that house and remove from thee, at any
+peril that may be necessary, the poor girl thee has disgraced."
+
+"Set a foot nearer that house, if you dare!" was the reply.
+
+"Thee is a base, miserable coward, Dr. Philip!--a scoundrel, a seducer, a
+lying slanderer, the offspring of a female dog of the cur species, a
+disgrace to thy country and thy profession; and if thee knows any more
+hard words that I forget, thee may put them all in on my account."
+
+"Nathan Bladesden, do you think that you will leave this spot alive, after
+using such words to _me_!" and the hands of Philip Pomeroy were clutching
+at his wristbands as if rolling them up to put them out of the way of
+blood! The purpose of attack was reversed: he seemed to be about to spring,
+tiger-like, at the Quaker's throat.
+
+"_Thee_ will not kill me, Dr. Philip, if I do not!" the latter said. "I am
+stronger than thee, and have a better cause. I think I will not touch thee,
+but leave thee to thy Maker, if thee keeps thy hands off; but I have made
+up my mind, if thee touches me, to beat thee until thee has no shape of a
+man--until thee is dead as yonder gate-post. If thee thinks that I will
+not, thee had better try it!"
+
+Dr. Pomeroy did not believe himself a poltroon, nor was he one in that
+sense relating to purely physical courage. And had there been merely
+involved a conflict with that larger, stronger and better-preserved man, in
+which one or the other might suffer severe injury and disfigurement, he
+would have carried out his thought and sprung upon him, beyond a question.
+But something in those slow dropping pellets of compressed rage falling
+from the Quaker's lips, told the medical man (seldom too angry to be subtle
+and cunning), that in the event of a struggle, and the merchant getting the
+upper hand, he would probably carry out his threat and actually beat him to
+death with those heavy fists before any human aid could interpose. And to
+be mangled into a corpse by a Quaker--bah! there was really something in
+the idea, likely to calm blood quite as hot with rage as that of Dr.
+Philip--apart from the slight objection he may have had to being hurried
+into eternity in any way, at that moment. Then another thought struck
+him--a double one: how completely the Quaker would be at fault, searching
+through the house for Eleanor Hill; and how he was himself losing time, in
+that miserable quarrel--time that could never be regained. His horse and
+buggy stood all the while just within the opened gate, where the ostler
+had left it and gone back to his care of the blown animal at the stable;
+and as that important reflection forced itself upon his mind, he turned his
+back short upon the Quaker, strode to his buggy, stepped into it and dashed
+away, only pausing to hurl at his tormentor this one verbal bolt:
+
+"You infernal, snuffling, hypocritical ruffian! I will settle with you for
+all this, when I have more time!"
+
+"Thee had better let the account stand as it does, Dr. Philip, if thee is
+not a fool as well as a scoundrel!" was the reply of the Quaker, but it is
+very doubtful whether the doctor heard half the words. He was already
+flying past the garden palings, at the full speed of his trotter, towards
+the causeway and the Market Street road, on his errand of reclamation and
+perhaps of vengeance. Then Nathan Bladesden pursued his way into the house,
+looking for the lost sheep, with that ill success rendered certain by
+Eleanor's flight, and that disappointment which often attends noble
+resolutions embraced one moment too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second of the supplementary scenes of that day was presented in the
+parlors of the residence of Mrs. Burton Hayley--that parlor into which the
+reader had only a doubtful glance a few hours earlier, when events which
+seemed likely to affect the life-long interests of some of the residents of
+that house, were occurring on the piazza.
+
+Rich furniture in rosewood and purple damask; a piano of modern
+manufacture, the open bank of keys showing the soft coolness of
+mother-of-pearl; carpets of English tapestry; pier glasses that might have
+given reflection to the colonel of a Maine regiment or one of the sons of
+Anak; tables and mantels strewn but not overloaded with delicate bronzes,
+gems in porcelain and Bohemian glass, and articles of fanciful bijouterie;
+on one of the mantels--that of the front room--Cleopatra in _ormolu_
+upholding the dial of a clock with one hand, but with the other applying
+to her voluptuously-rounded bosom the asp so soon to put a period to all
+her connection with time;--what need of more than this to indicate the home
+in which Margaret Hayley had passed the last few years of her young life
+and approached that crisis so momentous to her future happiness? Yet one
+thing more must be noticed--the stand of rosewood elaborately carved, set
+not far from the centre of the front parlor, and bearing on it a large
+Bible in the full luxury of russet morocco and gold, with massive gold
+clasps and a heavy marker in silk and bullion dependent from amid the
+leaves,--the whole somewhat ostentatiously displayed to the sight of any
+one who first entered the room, as if to say: "There may seem to be pomps
+and vanities in this house, but any such impression would be a mistake:
+this book is the rule by which every thing within it is squared."
+
+On the sofa, wheeled into that corner of the luxurious parlor upon which
+the closed shutter threw the deepest and coolest shadow, lay Margaret
+Hayley, her head buried in the white pillow which some careful hand had
+brought for her, and her thrown-up hands drawing the ends of that pillow
+around her face as if she desired to shut away every sight and every sound.
+Her slight, tall figure seemed, as she lay at length, to be limp and
+unnerved; and there was that in the whole position which seemed to indicate
+that the mental energies, if not the vital ones, had recoiled after being
+cruelly overtasked, and left her alike incapable of thought and motion.
+
+She was not alone, for beside her sat a lady dressed in very thin and light
+but rich and rather showy summer costume, rolling backward and forward in
+her Boston rocker, waving a feather fan of such formidable dimensions that
+its manufacture must have created a sudden rise in the material immediately
+after, and talking all the while with such stately volubility as if she
+believed that the hot air of the June afternoon would be less unendurable
+if kept constantly in motion by the personal windmill of the tongue. This
+was Mrs. Burton Hayley, mother of Margaret, widow of the late Mr. Burton
+Hayley, railroad-contractor, snugly jointured with eight or ten thousand
+per annum, and endowed (as she herself believed, and as we will certainly
+endeavor to believe with her, in charity) with so many of those higher
+gifts and graces of a spiritual order that her wealth had become dross and
+her liberal income rather a thing to be deplored than otherwise. (It may be
+the proper place, here, to say that the gilt Bible on the stand was the
+peculiar arrangement of this lady, and the sign--if so mercantile a word
+may be applied to any thing really demanding all human respect and
+devotion--of that peculiar mental stock in trade which she was to be found
+most ready in exhibiting on all occasions.)
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley was tall--even taller than her daughter; and her form
+had assumed, with advancing years, a fulness which the complimentary would
+have designated as "plump," the irreverent as "stout," and the vulgar as
+"fat." Her face, moulded somewhat after the same fashion as that of
+Margaret, must have been undeniably handsome in youth, though now--the
+truth must be told--it was not a specially lovable face to the acute
+observer. Her dark eyes had still kept their depths of beautiful shadow,
+and her intensely dark hair (though she had married late in girlhood and
+was now fifty) showed neither thinness nor any touch of gray. But the long
+and once classical features had become coarsened a little in the secondary
+formation of adipose particles; the possible paleness of girlhood had given
+place to a slight red flush (especially in that tropical weather) that was
+not by any means becoming to her; and there were all the while two
+conflicting expressions fighting for prominence in her face, so different
+in themselves and so really impossible of amalgamation, that the most rabid
+disciple of "miscegenation" could not have arranged a plan for blending
+them both into one. The outer expression, which seemed somehow to lie as a
+thin transparent strata over the other, indicated pious and resigned
+humility--that feeling which passes by the ordinary accidents and troubles
+of life as merely gentle trials of faith and of no consequence in view of
+the great truth rooted within. The second and inner, which would persist in
+obtruding itself through the transparent mask, was _pride_--pride in its
+most intense and concentrated form--pride in blood, wealth, personal
+appearance, position, every thing belonging to and going to make up that
+marvellous human compound, Mrs. Burton Hayley. The eyes were trained to be
+very subdued and decorous in their expression; but they did so want to
+flash out authority, if not arrogance! The nose was kept always (or
+generally) at the proper subservient level; but it did so itch and tingle
+for the privilege of lifting itself high in air and taking a nasal view,
+from that altitude, of all the world lying below it! It was very evident,
+to any one observing the mother after having examined the daughter's face
+in the clear light of physiognomy, that the latter had derived from her
+maternal progenitor most of that overweening pride which youth and beauty
+yet wore as a crown of glory but age might wear as something much less
+attractive,--and that she must have inherited from her dead father that
+softness, frankness, and that better-developed love-nature which toned down
+in her own all the more decided features of the mother's face and made her
+worthy of affection as well as admiration.
+
+As we have said, Mrs. Burton Hayley was using her tongue with great
+volubility at the moment of her introduction to the attention of the
+reader, though really the mode in which her single auditor kept her head
+buried in the pillow and drew the soft folds around her ears with both
+hands, did not indicate that desire for steady conversation which could
+have made such a continual verbal clatter a thing of necessity. There is
+the more occasion for giving Mrs. Burton Hayley her full opportunity for
+speech, as she has occasion to utter but little hereafter, in this
+connection.
+
+"You should be very thankful, my child, for all that has occurred," the
+voluble woman was saying. "A Power higher than ourselves overrules all
+these affairs much better than we could do; and it is flying in the face of
+Providence to cry and go on over little disappointments."
+
+A pause of one instant, and one instant only, as if in expectation that
+some reply would be vouchsafed; and then the band was again thrown upon the
+driving-wheel--as one of the machinery-tenders in a factory might say,--and
+the human buzz-saw whirled once more.
+
+"I have told you, child, time and again, that you would be punished for
+setting your affections on any person who had not given evidence of a
+changed heart--a man who had not passed from death unto life, but who still
+ran after the pomps and vanities of the world--those pomps and vanities
+which religion teaches us to despise and put away from us." (Oh, Mrs.
+Burton Hayley, why did you not catch a glance, at that moment, of the room
+in which you were sitting, redolent of every luxury within the reach of any
+ordinary wealth, and of your own stately and still comely person, arrayed
+in garments the least possible like those with which people content
+themselves who have really eschewed the "pomps and vanities of the world,"
+either from conscientious humility or that other and much commoner
+motive--the lack of means to continue them!) "You should be very glad that
+you have been providentially delivered from your engagement with an
+unbeliever and a man of the world--a man without principle, I dare say, as
+you have discovered that he is without courage; and all the money there is
+in his family (and they _do_ say that the Brands have not much and never
+have had much!)--all their money, I say, acquired in the disreputable
+practice of the law, so that if this thing had not happened and you had
+been left to depend for subsistence upon his fortune, you might have found
+it all melting away in a moment, as money dishonestly acquired is certain
+to do; for does not the blessed book that I try to make my rule of life,
+say, my child, that moth is certain to corrupt and thieves break through
+and steal whatever has been wrung from the widow and the orphan?"
+
+Margaret Hayley had not replied a word during the whole application of that
+verbal instrument of torture, though it seemed evident from the context
+that some conversation employing the tongues of both must have passed at an
+earlier period of the interview. She had merely writhed in body and groaned
+in spirit, as every moment told her more and more distinctly that in her
+dark hour she had no mother who could understand and sympathize with
+her--that cant phrases and pious generalizations were to be hurled against
+her at that moment when most of all she needed to be treated by that mother
+like a wearied child, drawn home to her bosom and cradled to sleep amid
+soothing words and loving kisses.
+
+But Margaret Hayley did something else than writhe when the accusation of
+having acquired his wealth by dishonesty was cast upon the man whom she had
+worshipped--yes, the man whom she worshipped still, in spite of the one
+terrible defect which seemed to draw an eternal line of separation between
+them. She started up from her recumbent position, her hair dishevelled, her
+eyes red with weeping, and her whole face marked and marred by the anguish
+she had been suffering,--sprang up erect at once, with all her mother's
+pride manifest in voice and gesture, and said:
+
+"Mother, are you a rank hypocrite, or have you neither sense nor memory?"
+
+A strange question, from a daughter to her mother! The reply was not quite
+so strange, and it seemed to have much more of earnest in it than any
+portion of the long tirade she had before been delivering:
+
+"Margaret Hayley, how _dare_ you!"
+
+"We can dare a good many things, when we do not care whether we live or
+die!" was the reply. "And though I have loved and respected you as my
+mother, I do not know that I have ever been afraid of you. Now listen. You
+have hated Carlton Brand, ever since he first came to this house, because
+he did not treat your religious assumptions with quite as much deference as
+you considered proper. He may have been right, or wrong: no matter now, as
+he is out of the way! But you have hated him, and you know it--because I
+loved him--I am not ashamed to own it!--loved him with my whole soul, as I
+believed that he deserved--as any woman _should_ love the man whom she
+expects to take her to his heart!"
+
+"Well, what if I did dislike him? I had a right to do that, I suppose!"
+answered the mother, her voice no longer religiously calm, but rough and
+querulous.
+
+"Do not interrupt me!--hear me out!" said the young girl. "You liked Hector
+Coles for a corresponding reason--because he pretended to fall into all
+your notions, and complimented you on your 'piety' and 'Christian dignity,'
+when he was all the while laughing at you behind your back. You would have
+been pleased to see me discard the man I loved, and marry the man I could
+never love while I lived,--because your own likes and dislikes were in the
+way, and because you believed that in the position of mother-in-law you
+could manage the one and could _not_ manage the other."
+
+"Well, what else, to your mother, Miss Impertinence!" broke in the lady who
+had been so voluble.
+
+"Oh, a great deal more!" answered Margaret, with a manner not very
+different from a sneer. "To-day, since you have known that for one spot on
+a character otherwise so noble, I have broken off all relations with
+Carlton Brand, you have done nothing but sit here and preach me Christian
+resignation in words that your own heart was as steadily denying. When a
+true mother would have tried to console, you have tortured. And you have
+ended all by alleging that Carlton Brand and his father have acquired their
+money dishonorably, because they have both been lawyers,--and that such
+money must be accursed in the hands of any one who holds it."
+
+"I have said so, and I have a right to say so!" echoed the mother. "You may
+let loose your ribald tongue against the author of your being, ungrateful
+girl; but the truth is from heaven, and must be told--wealth obtained in
+any manner by day, upon which a blessing cannot be asked at night, is
+itself accursed, and curses every one who partakes in the use of it."
+
+"And every dollar that has been dishonestly obtained, then, should at once
+be restored to the rightful owner, I suppose--in order to escape the
+curse?" suggested Margaret.
+
+"Every dollar, and at once; for, as the Bible says, the spoiler cometh as a
+thief in the night, and no one can say how soon the judgment may fall!"
+answered the mother, triumphantly and in full confidence that she had at
+last silenced her refractory child by a strictly orthodox quotation.
+
+"How much are we worth, mother?" was the singular question which followed
+this supposed annihilation of all argument.
+
+"Why, you know as well as I do that we have eighty thousand in stocks and
+in bank; and this property and that at Pottsville is believed to be worth
+twenty or thirty thousand more. We are worth, as you call it, more than a
+hundred thousand, and the whole of it will be yours some day--not very long
+first, when I have gone, as I hope and trust I may say, to my reward. You
+are rich, my child, and I am glad to see that you think of these things at
+last, as you may be kept from throwing yourself away _again_."
+
+The voice and whole manner of the mother were much more amiable than they
+had been at any time since the rising of her daughter from the sofa; for
+nothing seemed to restore the tone of her agitated feeling like references,
+from whatever source, to her wealth and position.
+
+"A hundred thousand. There is not nearly enough, then!" The words were half
+muttered, but Mrs. Burton Hayley distinctly heard them. And she saw
+something on the face of the young girl which she by no means understood,
+as the latter drew from her bosom the lower ends of the gold chain
+depending there, and unclasped the back of a rather large and very thick
+locket, the front of which presented a miniature in ivory of the handsome,
+well-whiskered and pleasant-looking Mr. Burton Hayley, her deceased father.
+Though she raised the locket to her lips and kissed it reverently, that
+something on the face had not changed when she took from its unsuspected
+concealment a small slip of newspaper, neatly folded and of size enough to
+contain some twenty or thirty lines of small type. The mother's eyes were
+by this time wide open with astonishment and partial fear that her daughter
+had lost her wits in the agitation of that day. The paper looked old and
+yellow. Margaret unrolled it and said:
+
+"Mother, here is something that I have carried with me night and day for
+five years past. I found it at that time, when clipping old newspapers in
+the attic, for my scrap-book. I marked the date on the back--it is eighteen
+years old, and the paper was a Harrisburgh one of that time. Have you your
+glasses with you, or shall I read it?"
+
+"Why, child, are you crazy? What has that slip of paper to do with the
+subject of which we were talking?"
+
+"Perhaps you can tell quite as well as myself, after I read it," answered
+Margaret. And she moved nearer to the one unshuttered window of the parlor,
+to secure a better light for the small type and dingy paper, the face of
+her mother gradually changing, meanwhile, from the surprise which had
+filled it, to a whiteness which seemed born of terror. Margaret read:
+
+     "SOUTTER AND OTHERS VS. HAYLEY AND OTHERS.--This somewhat
+     remarkable railroad case closed yesterday, and the complaint
+     was dismissed. Judge L----, in granting the motion for a
+     dismissal, took occasion to remark that he had seldom
+     performed a more painful duty. That the railroad company had
+     been defrauded to the extent of not less than eighty
+     thousand dollars by Burton Hayley, the contractor, was one
+     of the conclusions--the learned judge said--in which all
+     would unfortunately agree. But the operation had been
+     managed with great skill, and legal evidence of what was
+     morally certain had not been produced. He should therefore
+     grant the motion, with the regret expressed, and with the
+     hope that in a future prosecution the evidence which was
+     certainly demanded might be forthcoming, and the defrauded
+     company at least find themselves in a position to punish the
+     wrong-doer. We hear it stated, upon authority which seems
+     reliable, that Hayley has heretofore been known as a
+     reliable man, and that he has undoubtedly been urged to
+     steps which he must regret during his whole life, even if
+     justice does not reach him, or conscience compel him to make
+     restitution,--by the demands made upon him in behalf of a
+     ruinously expensive family, and by evil advice which he has
+     no doubt received from the same quarter. Hayley will
+     probably leave Harrisburgh at once, to enjoy what may be
+     left of his ill-gotten gains in some locality where his
+     antecedents are less fully understood."
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley had sunk back into her chair at the moment when Margaret
+read the first words, and she remained silent till the close. Her face was
+white, except that a single red spot burned in the very centre of either
+cheek. Her daughter looked steadily upon her for an instant after she had
+concluded. Still neither spoke. The mother's eyes had in them something of
+that baleful light shown by the orbs of a wild beast when driven to its
+corner; and they, with the crimson spotted cheeks, were not pleasant things
+to look upon. At last Margaret asked:
+
+"Did you ever hear of this before? Was that man my father?"
+
+"What of it? Yes!" The words were nearer spat out than spoken. Margaret
+glanced, perhaps involuntarily, at the ostentatious Bible on its carved
+stand.
+
+"Was that money ever repaid to the railroad company?"
+
+For just one instant the lips of Mrs. Burton Hayley moved as if she was
+about to utter a falsehood little less black than the original crime had
+been. If she had for that instant intended to do so, she thought better of
+it and jerked out: "How should I know? I suppose there is no use in telling
+a lie about it, to _you_! No!"
+
+"So I thought!" said Margaret Hayley. "That eighty thousand dollars, then,
+has been standing for fifteen years, and the interest upon it would nearly
+double the sum. We owe that railroad company, or so many members of the
+original company as may be yet alive, not less than one hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars. We have only an hundred thousand or a very little more,
+but that will be something. Of course, after what you have just said of the
+curse that clings to ill-gotten gain, you will join me in paying over every
+dollar in our possession, at once."
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley sprang up from her chair with more celerity than she had
+before exhibited. "Margaret Hayley, are you a born fool?" she almost
+screamed.
+
+"No, nor a born _hypocrite_!" the young girl replied. Again her eyes went
+round to the Bible, and those of the mother followed hers as if they were
+compelled by a charm. Then those of the latter drooped, and they did not
+rise again as she said, in a much lower voice:
+
+"You know the secret. I am in your power. But I am your mother, and it may
+be quite as well for you to be merciful to me as well as to yourself. Upon
+what terms will you give me that paper and promise never to speak of it or
+of the affair to any one without my consent?"
+
+"I will not give you the paper upon _any_ terms!" was the answer. "That has
+been my shame and my torture for five years, and must still accompany me.
+But I will be your accomplice in crime and make the promise you require, on
+three conditions and those only. _First_, that you drop all hypocrisy when
+speaking to _me_, whatever you may do before the world. _Second_, that you
+never speak one disrespectful word of Carlton Brand, again, in my hearing.
+He is dead to me: let your hatred of him die with him, or at least let me
+hear no word of it. _Third_, that you urge no person upon me as a husband.
+Present me whom you please--throw me into any company you wish; but say not
+one word to force me into marriage with Hector Coles or any other person.
+This will not break my heart--I know it. I shall marry some time, no doubt,
+when I find the man who can supply that place in my heart which has to-day
+been left empty,--without any foible or weakness to make him an unfit match
+for my own _stainless_ blood!"
+
+There was a bitter emphasis upon the penultimate word, and Mrs. Burton
+Hayley distinctly recognized it. She recognized, too, the somewhat singular
+prophecy made by a young girl on the very day of her final parting with the
+man she had loved so dearly--that _she would yet find another to fill her
+heart more completely_. Most young persons think very differently at the
+moment of the great first sorrow, believe that the vacant niche can never
+be filled, and make painful promises of hopeless lives and celibacy, to
+cancel those promises some day amid blushes of regret or peals of laughter.
+Mrs. Burton Hayley recognized the singularity then, and she may have had
+reason to recall that prophecy at another day in the near future.
+
+But there was yet something that she must do, to seal that treaty of which
+her daughter was the dictator. Her own compact was to be made: she made it.
+
+"I will do as you wish, Margaret. They are hard terms to set, to _your
+mother_; but I accept them."
+
+"Very well, then. We understand each other, now; and I hope there will
+never be another painful word between us. I will try to speak none, and for
+both our sakes I hope you will be as careful. Now leave me, please. I will
+draw to this other shutter, for I need darkness, silence and rest--yes,
+rest!"
+
+The closed blind left the room in almost total dusk. The mother left the
+room, stepping slowly and appearing to bear about with her a dim
+consciousness that within the past half-hour her relative position with her
+daughter had been most signally changed. Margaret Hayley threw herself once
+more on the sofa, buried her fevered brow and her dishevelled hair in the
+soft, cool, white pillow, and sought that wished-for "rest." Alas! no
+tyrant ever invented a torture-bed so full of weary turnings and agonized
+prayers for deliverance or oblivion, as the softest couch whereon young
+love, suddenly and hopelessly bereft, reaches out its arms in vain, finds
+emptiness, and falls back despairing--moaning for the lost twin of its
+soul! The agony may be all forgotten to-morrow, in the sunshine, and the
+intoxication of music, and the voices of friends, and the far-off dawning
+of a new passion; but oh, what is the martyrdom of to-night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third and last of these supplementary scenes, occurring at nearly the
+same period in the afternoon as the second, has its location at the house
+of Robert Brand, and a part of it in the same room where we have before
+seen the testy invalid while receiving the news of his son's defection and
+disgrace.
+
+Robert Brand was once more back in his easy-chair, his injured limb again
+propped on the pillows, and his face showing all those contortions of
+extraordinary pain likely to be induced by his imprudent ride and the
+agitation attending it. Satisfied, now, that his son was not dead, the
+tender father had again died out in him; but made aware by a succession of
+facts, which he could neither understand nor doubt, that that son, just
+characterized, even by himself, as a hopeless coward, had since that time
+been fighting, and fighting without any evidence of cowardice, in a species
+of hand-to-hand conflict likely to try the courage quite as seriously as
+the shock of any ordinary battle,--he was mentally in a state of confusion
+on the young man's account, altogether unusual with him and not a little
+painful. He did not curse any more, or at least no more of his curses were
+aimed at the head of his son.
+
+Poor little Elsie had been left without a hope of reconciliation between
+her father and her brother, after the hurling of that wild and wicked curse
+and the exile from his home which it involved. But the episode of the
+supposed death had made a diversion in Carlton's favor; her father had
+returned from the search for his son's body, worried and unsettled if not
+mollified; and the affectionate soul thought that the opportunity might be
+a favorable one for securing the reversal of the cruel sentence, with
+concealment from her brother that any such words had ever been uttered, and
+his eventual return home as if nothing painful or unpleasant had occurred.
+"Blessed are the peace-makers!" says very high authority; and most blessed
+of all are those who, like little Elsie, ignoring their own suffering and
+ill-treatment, strive to bring together the divided members of a once happy
+household!
+
+But the little girl was not half aware how stubborn was the material upon
+which she was trying to work, or how deeply seated was the feeling of
+mortification which had embittered the whole nature of the man who held
+cowardice to be the most unpardonable of vices.
+
+"Hold your tongue, girl!" was the severe reply to her suggestion that there
+might be some mistake, after all--that poor Carlton had enemies, and they
+had no doubt labored to place him in a false position--and that he would be
+sorry, to the last day he lived, if when Carlton returned home, as he
+probably would do that night if nothing serious had really happened to him,
+he should say one word to drive him away again, to leave himself without a
+son, and her without a brother. "Hold your tongue, girl! You are a little
+fool, and do not know what you are talking about. If you do not wish to
+follow your brother, you had best not meddle any more in the relations
+which I choose to establish with a son who has disgraced himself and me!"
+
+"But suppose poor Carlton _should_ be dead, after all, father? Who knows
+but some stranger may have come by in a wagon, seen the body lying on the
+ground, picked it up and carried it away to the Coroner's?"
+
+"Eh! What is that you say?" For the instant Robert Brand was startled by
+the suggestion and his heart sunk as well as softened at the recurring
+thought that his son might indeed be dead. But the thought was just as
+instantaneous, how general was the objection to touching an unknown dead
+body, and how unlikely that any such course should have been adopted by
+strangers, while any acquaintance, removing the body at all, would
+certainly have brought it home to his own house. No--he was alive; and
+that belief was once more full in the mind of Robert Brand as he said:
+
+"What do I care if he _is_ dead! I believe I could forgive him better, if I
+knew that he was, and that I should never again set eyes on the likeness of
+a man with the soul of a cat or a sheep! If he is alive, as I believe he
+is, let him never come near this house again if he does not wish to hear
+words said that he will remember and curse the last thing before he dies!"
+
+A sharp spasm of pain concluded this unhallowed utterance, and words
+followed that have no business on this page. Elsie Brand fired again, when
+she found all her pleading in vain, and broke out with:
+
+"You are a miserable heartless old wretch, and I have a great mind to go
+out of this house, this very moment, and never come into it again as long
+as I live, unless you send for me to come back with my brother!"
+
+"Go, and the quicker the better!" writhed the miserable man, in the midst
+of a spasm of pain. "If I hear one more impertinent word out of you, you
+_will_ go, whether you wish to go or not, and you will never come back
+again unless you come on your knees!"
+
+What might have been the next word spoken by either, and whether that next
+word might not indeed have wrought the separation of father and daughter,
+no one can say. For at that moment came a fortunate interruption, in the
+sound of carriage wheels coming rapidly up the lane, and easily heard
+through the open doors--then the furious barking of a dog, the yell of a
+woman's voice, and a volley of fearful curses poured out from the rougher
+lips of a man. Elsie, alarmed, but perhaps rather glad than otherwise to
+have the threatening conversation so suddenly ended, rushed out of the
+room, through the parlor, to the front piazza, where she joined the general
+confusion with a scream of affright, hearing which, the invalid, who had
+before, more than once that day, proved how superior the mind could be to
+the disablements of the body, hurled one more oath at the people who would
+not even allow him to suffer in quiet, started again from his chair,
+grasped his heavy cane and stumped hurriedly to the door, writhing in agony
+and half crazed with pain and vexation. There the sight which had the
+instant before met the eyes of his daughter, met his own, though the effect
+produced by it upon himself was so very different that instead of screaming
+he dropped against the lintel of the front door in a loud explosion of
+laughter.
+
+There was a horse and buggy in the lane, very near the gate--the horse
+unheld, rearing and squealing, but making no attempt to run away as might
+have been expected. Close beside the vehicle, a man easily recognizable as
+Dr. Philip Pomeroy, was engaged in a hand-to-hand (or is it
+hand-to-_mouth_?) conflict with Carlo, the big watch-dog, using the butt of
+his whip, the lash of it, his boots, and any other weapon of offence in his
+possession, against the determined assaults of the powerful brute that
+really seemed disposed to make a meal of the man of medicine. The doctor
+fought well, in that new revival of the sports of the Roman arena, but he
+was terribly bested (by which it is only intended to use an old word of the
+days of chivalry, and not to make an atrocious pun upon _beast-ed_;) and
+just at the moment when Robert Brand's eyes took in all the particulars of
+the scene, the human combatant, following up a temporary advantage, lunged
+ahead a little too far, lost his balance or caught his foot, and went
+headlong on the top of the dog, the contest being thereafter conducted on
+the ground and in the partial obscurity of the fence. At the same instant,
+too, the tall, bare-headed and bare-armed figure of old Elspeth Graeme
+appeared from behind the corner of the house, and the voice of that
+Caledonian servitor was heard screaming out:
+
+"Here, Carlo! Here, lad! coom awa, ye daft deevil! Here! here! coom awa,
+lad!"
+
+Elsie joined with a feeble "Here, Carlo!" from the piazza; and Robert
+Brand, if he could have found voice, would probably have assisted in
+calling off the dog; but Carlo, a formidable animal in size, black, with a
+few dashes of white, compounded of the Newfoundland and the Mount St.
+Bernard, with a surreptitious cross of the bull-dog (such immorality has
+been known even in canine families, to the great regret of precisian
+dog-fanciers)--Carlo had no idea whatever of "throwing up the sponge,"
+(which with a dog consists, we believe, in dropping his tail), and might
+have fought on until death, doomsday, or the loss of his teeth from old
+age, arrived to stop him--had not Elspeth closed in with a "Hech! ye born
+deevil! Ye'll aye be doin' more than ye'r tauld!" grasped the huge animal
+by the nape of the neck, and dragged him away very much as if she had been
+dealing with a kitten.
+
+Thus relieved, the doctor recovered his feet; but he was--as Elspeth
+described him in a communication made not long after--"a sair lookin'
+chiel!" He had lost his hat, dusted his coat, and found a sad rent in one
+leg of his nether garments, not to mention the rage which flashed in his
+eye and almost foamed from his mouth. For the first moment after the rescue
+he seemed to have a fancy for "pitching into" old Elspeth, unreasonable as
+such a course would have been after her calling off the dog and finally
+lugging him off by main force; and he did hurl after her an appellation or
+two which might have furnished a rhyme to the name of the Scottish national
+disease; but the stout serving woman quelled him with this significant
+threat, and went on her way, dragging the dog towards his kennel in the
+backyard:
+
+"'Deed, if ye can't keep a ceevil tongue in yer heid, I'll no be holdin'
+the tyke awa from ye a bit langer, and he'll eat ye up, I doubt!"
+
+At that juncture the discomfited doctor caught sight of Robert Brand and
+his daughter, in the door and on the piazza, and he strode in to them
+without further ado, whip still in hand, rage still in his face, and
+threatening enough in his manner to indicate that he intended to cowhide so
+many of the family as he could find, male and female.
+
+"Who let out that infernal dog?" was his first salutation, without first
+addressing either the old man or his daughter by name.
+
+"He must have broken loose, himself. Indeed, Doctor, we are so sorry--"
+began little Elsie, who had really been frightened out of her wits, and who
+had that organ unknown to the phrenologists, called Hospitality, very
+largely developed.
+
+"Hold your tongue, girl, and let me attend to my own business!" was the
+surly interruption of the invalid father, who had stopped laughing, and who
+had at that juncture a very low development of the corresponding organ. "We
+are not sorry at all. Dr. Pomeroy, I told you this morning, when I ordered
+you out of this house, never to come near it again; and you had better paid
+attention to the order."
+
+"Then _you_ had that dog set loose!"
+
+"That is a lie!" was the response. The doctor, who had used the same
+expression in a still more offensive form, not long before, was getting the
+chalice returned to his lips at very short notice. And the old man, in
+denying the act, intended to tell the exact truth--he had not turned the
+dog loose, or set him upon the doctor, except secondarily. Some hours
+before, when the medical man had just been dismissed for the first time, he
+had told the Scottish woman that 'he would bundle her out, neck and crop,
+if she did not set the dog on that man if he ever came near the house
+again!' and she had promised to obey his orders: that was all! Carlo, a
+dear friend of his young master, had always hated the doctor, who was his
+enemy, and never passed without snapping and growling at him; and the old
+woman well knew the fact. Consequently, when she saw the buggy dashing up
+the lane, and recognized it, she had religiously kept her promise, darted
+round to the kennel, unloosed the dog and directed his attention to the
+obnoxious individual, with a "Catch him, laddie!" that sent him flying at
+the doctor's throat just as he stepped to the ground. And it was only when
+the old woman believed the punishment going a little too far and the
+victim likely to be eaten up in very deed, that she had interposed and
+dragged the enraged brute from his prey. All this was unknown to both
+father and daughter, who merely supposed that the dog had broken loose at
+that awkward moment; and Robert Brand's disclaimer, though a very
+uncourteous one, had the merit of truth. But the doctor, just then enraged
+beyond endurance, literally "boiled over" at the word.
+
+"I lie, do I?" he foamed. "If you were not a miserable cripple, I would
+horse-whip you on your own door-step, old as you are!"
+
+"Oh, Doctor! oh, father!" pleaded the frightened Elsie, who did not know
+what might be coming after this.
+
+"Hold your tongue, girl!" again spoke Robert Brand, who still stood leaning
+against the lintel of the door. "Horsewhip me, would you, you poisoning
+Copperhead! If I could not beat out your brains with this stick, I could
+set a woman at you who would take you across her knee and spank you till
+you were flat like a pancake!"
+
+Dr. Pomeroy thought of the woman who had dragged off the dog, and had some
+doubts whether she could not indeed do all that her master promised. He
+seemed to have the luck, that day, to fall into the way of people sturdy of
+arm and strong of will!
+
+"What do you _want_ here?" was the inquiry of the old man, before the
+doctor could answer again, and remembering that there might be some special
+errand upon which he had a right to come.
+
+"You have remembered it, have you?" was the response. "Well, then, I want
+your thief of a son! Is he in this house?"
+
+"Oh, he was a coward this morning: now he is a thief, is he? What do you
+want of him?"
+
+"He committed theft at my house not more than an hour ago; and I am going
+to find him if he is in the State. Once more--is he here?"
+
+"What did he steal?" asked the father with a sneer, while poor Elsie stood
+nearly fainting and yet unable to move from the spot, at that new charge
+against her brother.
+
+"A woman." Elsie felt relieved; the old man sneered.
+
+"Well, I can only say that if he took away any woman belonging to _you_, he
+must have a singular taste!"
+
+"Robert Brand"--and the doctor spoke in a tone of low and concentrated
+passion--"once more and for the last time I ask you whether your son is in
+this house, with Eleanor Hill, my--my adopted daughter, in his company."
+
+"Eleanor Hill!" gasped Elsie, but no one heard her.
+
+"Dr. Pomeroy," answered Robert Brand, "you do not deserve any answer except
+a blow, but I will give you one. My son, as you call him, Carlton Brand, is
+not here, and will never be here again while I live, unless to be thrust
+out like a dog. How many girls he has, or where he conceals them, is none
+of my business, or _yours_! Now go, if you know when you are well off, for
+as sure as God lets me live, if I ever see you approaching this house
+again, I will shoot you from the window with my own hand."
+
+Something in the tone told Dr. Pomeroy that both the assertion and the
+threat were true. He turned without another word, stepped to his buggy,
+mounted into it and drove away.
+
+"He is alive, father--thank God!" said Elsie Brand, reverently, when the
+unwelcome visitor had disappeared and she was assisting the invalid back to
+his chair of suffering. That one assurance had been running through her
+little head, putting out all other thoughts, since the remark of the doctor
+that Carlton had been at his house not an hour before.
+
+"He is as dead to me as if he had been buried ten years!" was the reply of
+the implacable father, who stood in momentary peril of the grave from some
+sudden turn of his disease, and yet who had not even taken that first step
+towards preparation for the Judgment, comprised in pity and forgiveness!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+     BEFORE AND AFTER GETTYSBURGH--THE APATHY AND DESPAIR WHICH
+     PRECEDED, AND THE JUBILATION WHICH FOLLOWED--WHAT KITTY HOOD
+     SAID AFTER THE BATTLE, AND WHAT ROBERT BRAND--BROTHER AND
+     SISTER--A GUEST AT THE FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL--A FIRE-ROOM
+     VISIT, AN INTERVIEW, AND A DEPARTURE FOR EUROPE.
+
+
+It was a dark day for the nation--perhaps none darker!--that day of late
+June, 1863, marked by the occurrence of the preceding events. Private
+interests, private wrongs, private sorrows seemed all to be culminating or
+laying down fearful material for culmination in the future; but those
+domestic convulsions were only a faint and feeble type of that great throe
+agitating the whole nation. That day the bravest feared, not for themselves
+but for the country they loved; and that day the miserable trucklers who
+would long before have had the republic veil its face and sink on its knees
+before the arrogance of rebellion, begging for "peace" with dishonor,
+instead of demanding and enforcing victory,--that day they experienced such
+a triumph as they had never before known and such as their narrow souls
+could scarcely appreciate. "We told you so!" rung out from the throat of
+every "conditional loyalist," as the same paltry exultation had rung many
+an age before against the unsubmitting tribunes by the mad populace when
+the Volscians threatened to devastate Rome--as it had been yelled into the
+ears of Philip Van Artevelde and his brother defenders, when Ypres and
+Bruges fell, and the fierce Earl of Flanders promised death to the burghers
+of Ghent; and there was little, except bald defiance, that loyal men could
+reply. That long-boasted "invasion of the North" had come at last; and
+there is always a disheartening effect in the drawing of war nearer to the
+doors it has heretofore spared, even as there is always a scum among any
+population, ready to cry "ruin!" and counsel "submission" or "compromise"
+when a single move in the great game of war has ended disastrously.
+
+A more dreary spectacle than Philadelphia presented during some of the days
+of that week, cannot very well be imagined. From Harrisburgh and many of
+the minor towns of the west and southwest of the State, the inhabitants had
+fled by thousands to other places supposed to be less easily within reach
+of the enemy; and, if in a future day of peace those who at this juncture
+took part with the rebellion should chance to be shamed with a reminder of
+the panic in Richmond, and the removal of the Confederate archives, after
+Hanover Court-House in 1862, they may very pleasantly retaliate by calling
+up the panic at Harrisburgh and the packing up of the Pennsylvania State
+records, after York and Carlisle in 1863. Hundreds of wealthy persons
+removed their valuables even to Philadelphia; and there is no guarantee
+whatever that many of them did not make a still further removal East, when
+they could do so without attracting disagreeable attention and running the
+chance of after ridicule.
+
+There seemed to be an impression just then, in fact, that there was no
+power whatever to check the disciplined but half-starved and desperate
+rebel hordes. Even those who did not view the affair as any matter of gloom
+or discouragement, still believed it one of heavy loss that must be
+submitted to with the best grace possible.
+
+One of the young Philadelphia merchants was recognized by a friend, on one
+of the very last days of June, knocking about the balls in the
+billiard-room of the Cattskill Mountain House, and questioned by him as to
+the propriety of his being away from the Quaker City at a time when so
+heavy a misfortune as the rebel advance to the Delaware seemed to be
+impending.
+
+"Oh," said the merchant, making an eight-shot at the same moment, "I do not
+see any good that I could do by staying."
+
+"And do you not believe that the rebels will reach Philadelphia?" asked the
+friend.
+
+"Well, yes, I rather think they will," answered the nonchalant. "I should
+not be surprised if they should reach there to-morrow. In fact I
+telegraphed to my partner from Albany, yesterday, whenever they had taken
+Harrisburgh to pack up the most valuable of our goods and send them to New
+York."
+
+"And when they have taken New York?" asked the interrogator, not a little
+amused at that new system of defending valuable property and the country.
+
+"Oh," said the merchant, as he sighted another shot and made his carom
+without the tremor of a pulse--"when they take New York, as I suppose they
+will in a week or two, we shall move them to Boston, and so keep on working
+East till they drive us into Canada or the Atlantic."
+
+And this was not all a jest, by any means. The player had so telegraphed,
+and he more than half believed that his goods were at that time in course
+of removal, while he had no thought whatever of deserting his
+billiard-table and going down to assist in defending them. He was not
+alone, meanwhile, in his reprehensible coolness, as history will be at some
+pains to record of that extraordinary crisis.
+
+Philadelphia presented many strange spectacles on those days. Apart from
+the blowing of a brass band on every corner, the patrolling of every
+sidewalk by a recruiting officer with fife and drum, and the requisite
+number of human "stool-pigeons," and the exhibition of the placard before
+noted, offering every inducement in money and every plea of patriotism for
+"State defence,"--there were other and yet more marked indications of a
+period out of the common order even for war-time. The American and the
+Merchants', favorite resorts of mercantile buyers from the rural counties
+of the State, were full of guests, but they lounged in the reading and
+smoking-rooms, and had no thought of commercial transactions. Gold was
+going up, its higher rate marking increased fever in the pulse of the
+national patient; and yet business was almost as stagnant in the broker's
+offices of Third Street as were wholesale transactions in the heavy houses
+on Walnut and Chestnut and Market below Second. The old Tonawanda and the
+still older Saranac, lying idle at the foot of Walnut Street, their yards
+lank and bare as winter trees, and the ships waiting for freight that
+seemed to be long in coming, found a new use in illustrating the hopeless
+stagnation of the city. The theatres had nearly all closed before, and the
+last hurried its unprofitable season to an end. The red bricks of old
+Independence Hall seemed more dingy than ever; and those who glanced into
+the hall where the great Declaration was signed in Seventy-six, at the
+cracked bell and the other sad reminders of a past age and a by-gone
+patriotism, thought whether new masters would not claim those relics for
+their own, before many days, issuing a new manifesto of slavery from that
+second Cradle of Liberty, while their gaunt steeds were picketed in
+Independence Square. Men saw the sleepless eye of the clock look down from
+the old steeple, at night, with a helpless prayer, as if something of
+protection which had before lived in the sacred building was to be found no
+more; and the bell woke many a sleeper at midnight, with its slow and
+melancholy stroke, to a feeling of loss and sorrow like that which it might
+have evoked when sounding for the burial of dear friends. All day long
+crowds gathered and held their place, wearily moving to and fro, but never
+dispersing, in the open space in front of the historic pile; and "peace"
+orators, who had before been awed into silence by the threats and
+demonstrations of earlier days, once more ventured treasonable harangues to
+sections of those crowds, while the policemen scarcely found energy enough
+to disperse the hearers or arrest the disturbers. The bulletin boards were
+besieged; the newspaper offices had a demand for extras unknown to the
+oldest inhabitant of the quiet city; and the telegraph offices, busied
+alike with messages of public and private interest, had never before known
+such a test of their capacity since Morse first set Prometheus at his new
+occupation of a messenger. A few troops marched away, the Reserves (with
+Dick Compton in their ranks) among the number; and the New York militia
+regiments and some of the New Jersey troops passed through on their third
+campaign for "home defence;" but the public mind was not reassured. Once
+there was a rumor that McClellan had been called again to the command of
+the Army of the Potomac, or at least entrusted with the defence of the
+State, and then the general pulse for the moment beat wildly; but the
+inspiriting report died away again, the non-arrival of the morning train
+from Harrisburgh one day threw the whole city into panic, and the thought
+of successfully defending the State capital sunk lower than ever. The
+President, who had been bespoken to meet the Loyal Leagues and raise a new
+flag on Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, was too busy or too much
+discouraged, and would not come; and what heart lacked an excuse for
+sinking down when so much was threatened and so little spirit shown for
+meeting the great peril?
+
+This was the week preceding the Fourth; and in that week, which closed with
+the National Anniversary, what changes had taken place! The time and its
+vicissitudes seemed to be an exact offset to the hopes and the
+disappointments of the same period of 1862. Then, the Army of the Potomac
+had lain before Richmond, and the Fourth was to have seen the old flag
+waving in the rebel capital. It had really seen the little General driven
+back upon the James, and repulsed if not hopelessly defeated. The Fourth of
+1863 was to see Harrisburgh in the hands of the rebels, and the national
+cause sunken lower than it had before been since the advent of the
+secession. What did it really see? Thank God for a few such hours as those
+of the close of the Fourth, in the midst of whole centuries of loss and
+disappointment! All was changed--all was saved! Meade, a man of whom but
+few knew any thing more, a week earlier, than that he was a brave man, a
+good fighting General, and a brother of the overslaughed Captain Dick
+Meade, of the North Carolina--Meade had arisen in doubt and culminated in
+glory. Bloodiest and most important of all the battles of the Continent,
+Gettysburgh stood already upon the pages of the National history, soaked
+with the blood of the bravest--holy with the bravery and the energy which
+had there broken and rolled back the tide of invasion, and yet to be holier
+still as the Cemetery of the Battle-Dead of the Republic. Orators who began
+their Fourth of July addresses with only their pulses of anxiety stirred by
+the knowledge that there had been three days fighting, that Reynolds was
+killed, and that the conflict seemed to have been desperate and undecided,
+did not close them before they knew that the great victory was won, that
+Meade was to be thenceforth a name of honor in the land, that Lee and his
+hordes were in disastrous retreat, and that the "invasion of the North" was
+at an end for all the time covered by this struggle. The news of Vicksburg
+was soon to come, another crowning glory for the Fourth, though not known
+for days after, and Grant was to be a third time canonized. But just then
+there was enough without Vicksburg, and the nation might have gone mad over
+the double tidings had they come at once.
+
+Who, that has one drop of patriotic blood surging in his heart, can ever
+forget the reading of those "victory extras" that flew wide over the land
+on Saturday night and Sunday morning--the quavering voices of the readers,
+the reddening cheeks and flashing eyes of the hearers? Never before did so
+much seem to have been won, because never before did so much seem to have
+been perilled. And Philadelphia, that had sunken lowest in despondency of
+any of the great cities, naturally rose highest when the word of victory
+came. Bells rung, flags waved, music sounded, gas blazed like the noonday,
+processions paraded, business revived as if Trade had a human form and a
+crushing weight had suddenly been lifted from its breast, and old
+Independence Hall once more boomed its bell and flashed over the city its
+midnight eye of fire, as if its defiance to tyranny and treason had never
+faltered for a moment.
+
+It was of Gettysburgh that Kitty Hood had been reading, at her little
+cottage home near the great road, after her return from church on Sunday
+the fifth of July, when she dashed away the tears of agitation and anxiety
+that had been gathering in her eyes, and said:
+
+"Dick Compton was right, after all, and I was a fool to try to keep him
+away! If he had obeyed me, I should have despised him now; and if he has
+not been killed in that terrible battle and lives to come home again, I
+will tell him how wrong I was, and what a ninny I made of myself, and how
+sorry I am for every word I spoke that day, and how much better I love him
+because he obeyed the call of his country instead of the poor, weak,
+miserable voice of a frightened woman!"
+
+And it was of Gettysburgh and the desperate fighting around Cemetery Hill
+that Robert Brand had been reading, on the same Sunday afternoon, sitting
+in the shade of his own piazza, when he hurled out these bitter words,
+which poor little Elsie heard as she lay upon the lounge in the parlor
+within:
+
+"This is what he has lost, the low-lived, contemptible poltroon! _My son_,
+and to shirk a great battle! He might have been dead now, and in a grave
+better than any house in which he can ever hide his miserable life; or he
+might have had something to remember and boast of all his days--that he was
+one of the Men of Gettysburgh! If I had two legs, I would go out and find
+him yet and shoot him with my own hand--the infernal cowardly cur!"
+
+And then the disgraced and irate father tried to forget his son and to bury
+himself in other details of the great battle.
+
+The sister did not reply aloud to her father's renewed objurgation. She
+merely sobbed a little and took from her bosom a crumpled note and read it
+over again for perhaps the fiftieth time, muttering low as she did so:
+
+"Oh, father, father! If you knew how far you would need to go to seek poor
+Carlton and make him even more miserable than he is, and how little chance
+you have of ever seeing him again while you live--perhaps you would not
+speak so cruelly of him." Then she kissed the crumpled note again and put
+it back into her bosom, and tried to compose herself once more to that
+sleep which the tropical heat invited and her aching heart forbade.
+
+From the tone of that letter, it would seem that Elsie had written to her
+brother, to his place of business in the city, when fully aware of the
+unreasonable indignation which moved her father, advising him not to risk
+serious personal insult by coming home until he should again hear from
+her,--and that he had replied, from a place much farther away, informing
+her of his intention to put seas between himself and the eyes of all who
+had looked upon his disgrace. But better even this long separation--thought
+the young girl--than a return which would induce words between father and
+son, never to be forgiven or forgotten while either held life and memory.
+Years might mellow the recollection and change the feeling--years when the
+country should no longer make demands upon her children to breast the
+battle storm in her behalf, and when the eloquent voice in the halls of
+justice and the active, busy life in deeds securing the common welfare,
+might be sufficient to win new honor and blot away any recollection of that
+single sad misstep in the career of manhood. Poor, gentle, loving, faithful
+little Elsie Brand!--it may be long before we have occasion to look upon
+her again, and indeed she becomes henceforth but a comparative shadow; so
+let it be put upon record here that she seemed "faithful among the
+faithless" in practising the great lessons of hope and charity. The father
+might utter curses to be set down against his own soul in the day when
+human words as well as human actions must be called into judgment; friends
+might look askance and enemies gloat over the disgrace of one who had
+before stood high above them in all the details of honorable character;
+even the sweetheart, whose pulses had once beaten so close to his that the
+twin currents seemed flowing into one--even she might find some poor excuse
+of pride to falsify her by-gone boast that she loved him better than all
+the world, and let that hollow, wordy "honor" work their eternal
+separation: all this might be, but the _sister_ had no such license to
+waver in the course of her affection towards one who had been fondled by
+the same hands in babyhood and drawn sustenance from the same maternal
+bosom as herself. And no treason, all this, to the truths and the
+eternities of other loves. All other relations may sooner change than that
+which binds sister and brother, whose fondness has not been tainted by some
+falsehood in blood or chilled by some wrong in education. Wife or mistress,
+yesterday cold, may be to-day throbbing with the most intense warmth of
+absorbing passion, and to-morrow chilled again by instability in herself or
+unworthiness in the object of her regard: even the mother, that tenderest
+friend of song and story and sometimes of real life, may scatter her
+affections wide among so many children that each has but the pauper's
+share, or form new ties and forget that ever the old existed. But the
+brother, if he be not the veriest libel upon that sacred name, clings with
+undying fondness to the sister; and the sister, ever faithful, clings to
+the brother "through evil and through good report," when one or even both
+may have become a scoff and a bye-word in every mouth that opens to speak
+their names. Happy those men for whom the bond has never been either frayed
+or broken: sad for those who ever look back through the long years and see
+some sunny head of childhood hiding itself beneath the falling clods of the
+church-yard, that might have nestled closer to them in after years than all
+whom they have grasped, and cherished, and chilled, and lost!
+
+It now becomes necessary to inquire the whereabouts of Carlton Brand, the
+subject of so much sisterly love and so much fatherly indignation, at that
+second period when Gettysburgh was a glorious novelty, its bloody splendors
+flashing broad over the loyal States. And those whereabouts may very
+readily be discovered. On the register of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the
+city of New York, his name had been inscribed on the Wednesday evening
+previous to Gettysburgh (the first day of July); and those among our
+readers who may have chanced to be sojourners at the Fifth Avenue during
+that week, and who will take the trouble to read over again the close and
+accurate description given of the lawyer on his first appearance in the
+presence of his sister and Margaret Hayley, in the second chapter of this
+narration, may not find much difficulty in remembering the appearance of so
+marked a man at the hotel at that period--the glances of admiration cast
+upon his handsome face and manly figure as he sat at table or moved quietly
+among the ever-changing crowd in the reading-room or down the long
+halls--the almost total silence which he maintained, seeming to have no
+acquaintances or to be anxious for escape from all conversation--his
+inquiring more than once every day at the office for letters which
+continually disappointed him--and the expression of drooping-eyed
+melancholy in face and restless unquiet in movement, which gave rise to
+many side remarks and led to many singular speculations.
+
+He was alone--at least alone at the hotel; and Dr. Pomeroy, if he had
+entertained any actual belief in his suggested elopement between the lawyer
+and his "ward," might easily have satisfied himself, had he followed him to
+the commercial metropolis, that no such elopement had taken place or that
+the abductor had hidden his paramour carefully away and managed to keep
+continually out of her presence.
+
+Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and
+action of Carlton Brand at this time; and the writer, without any wish or
+will to do so, yields to the necessity, very much as the proud man of the
+world yields to the pressure when events which he has assumed to direct
+grow too mighty for his hand and bear him away in their rush and
+tumult,--or as a father--to use a yet stronger and more painful
+image--submits with a groan and a prayer when the child of his dear love
+shuts the heart against him and breaks away from that tender control which
+it has been alike his duty and his pleasure to supply. Some of our mental
+children, especially when they are so real that time, place and
+circumstance cannot be made for them at will, are sadly unmanageable; and
+this instance furnishes an illustration which will be better understood at
+a later period. Acts may yet be recorded, while yet acts remain to record;
+but the heart closes, motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator
+grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of
+events without connection and actions without explanation.
+
+Taking up his quarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Wednesday, this man, on
+Friday, the third of July, while the city was in agonized anxiety over the
+conflicting accounts of Meade's first battle of the day before, and while
+the black frames for the Fourth of July fireworks were being erected in
+front of the City Hall in the Park, with some uncertainty in the minds of
+the workmen whether they would not be used for a pyrotechnic display over
+the death-throe of the nation,--this man, Carlton Brand, took one of the
+omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line passing the door of his hotel, alighted
+at the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway, walked down to the Bowling
+Green and entered the office of the Cunard Steamships fronting that faded
+relic of the Colonial splendors of New York. When he emerged from the
+office, fifteen minutes later, the cash-box of the British and North
+American Royal Mail Steamship Company was the richer by many broad pieces
+of American gold, and Carlton Brand bore, folded away in his wallet, one of
+those costly little pearl-white wings on which the birds of passage bear
+themselves over the Atlantic. It was evident that he was about to desert
+his country--that country for which he had before refused to fight,--to
+desert it at the very moment when its fate before God and the world seemed
+to hang trembling in the balance.
+
+Coming out from the office of the Steamship Company, apparently wooed by
+the breeze from the North River, the lawyer bent his steps in that
+direction as if intending to make the tour of the shipping at the piers and
+resume his conveyance at some point higher up the town. Past two or three
+of the piers; and the dense black smoke pouring out from the funnels of one
+of the transport steamers on the eve of departure for the South with troops
+and munitions, seemed to attract his attention. He walked down the dock and
+observed more closely the movements on and around the vessel. The black
+smoke still rolled out, and steam was hissing from the escape-valves. Heavy
+wagons were discharging boxes at the gangway, and with much puffing and
+clatter a donkey-engine was hoisting them on board. A marine stood at the
+plank, bayonetted musket on shoulder, and close behind him an officer. To
+the civil inquiry of the lawyer, how long before the steamer would sail,
+the sentry replied that she was then steaming-up and would probably leave
+within a few hours; and to a request to be allowed to come on board and see
+the arrangements of a government transport on the eve of sailing, the
+officer, after a moment's glance at the unimpeachable dress and appearance
+of the visitor, assented with the stately bow of his profession.
+
+It certainly seemed strange that on that blazing day, when his errand at
+the Hudson side of the city had been to inhale the cool breeze from the
+river, Carlton Brand, within a moment after stepping on board the
+transport, should have ignored all the details of decks, spars, cabins, and
+even machinery, and descended the narrow stair-ways, little more than
+ladders, leading down to those flaming intestines of the ship from which
+the hot air crept up through the companion-ways like breaths from some
+roasting and agonized monster. Yet so it was; and regardless alike of the
+heat which fevered his lips and the greasy rails upon which he soiled his
+gloves and risked the smirching of his spotless summer garments, the
+lawyer pressed down to the fire-room, where the stokers were sweating great
+drops of perspiration that rolled down like beads from their broiled
+foreheads--where the coal was rattling and crashing as it was thrown
+forward, then crackling and hissing at its first contact with the flame, as
+it was dashed into the midst of the sweltering furnaces. Down, until he
+stood before those mighty furnaces and caught blinding glimpses, as the
+firemen momentarily opened the doors to dash in still other tons of the
+crackling coal of what seemed little less than a ship's-cargo of the fuel,
+seething, raging and lowing in such a heat that it made the old fancy of
+the lower pit no longer a dream but a horrible present reality.
+
+"Terrible work for hot weather, I should think," said the lawyer, when the
+shovels were still for a moment and the great fires raged, roared and
+crackled within. He seemed to feel the necessity of saying something to do
+away with the impression of his being a sulky intruder,--and was addressing
+one of the bronzed old stokers who had paused to wipe from his grimy brow
+the sweat that was actually pouring into his eyes and blinding him.
+
+"Yes, hot enough while we are lying at the dock," answered the stoker.
+
+"Why hotter now than at any other time?" asked the lawyer, who had probably
+never happened to study that peculiar philosophy, simply because he had
+never been thrown into contact with it.
+
+"Why? oh, Lord bless you!--because we are lying still, now, and there is no
+draught. When we are going through the water, and of course through the
+air, the motion makes a draught and we do not more than _half_ roast."
+
+"Then it never gets _very_ cool down here?" was the next inquiry.
+
+"Not _very_!" answered the fireman, sententiously. "But we never have the
+worst of these hot fires," he continued, answering something that had not
+been spoken but that seemed to be in the face of his auditor.
+
+"Who then?"
+
+"The passengers--at least some of them--on board any steamer that carries
+them over sea or down the coast."
+
+"You mean when they--when the steamers take fire and burn?" The question
+was asked in what seemed to be a hurried and troubled voice; and had not
+the reflected glow from the furnace made every thing red under its light,
+there might have been seen a face of ghastly white contrasting with the
+dark and grimy one so near.
+
+"No!" and the stoker laughed. "I did not mean that--only the thought of it.
+Steamers do not burn _very_ often--not half so often as I should think they
+would, the way they are built, and with a whole Pennsylvania coal-mine on
+fire inside of them at once. When they do go, though, they make things
+howl! No slow burning, as there is sometimes on sailing-vessels, so that
+they can batten down the hatches and keep the fire under until there is a
+chance of help: every thing goes in a moment, and all is over in an
+hour--iron steamer or wood, very little difference."
+
+"Horrible!" said the lawyer. The word seemed forced from him, and there
+could not be a doubt that he was at the moment fancying some terrible
+reality.
+
+"Yes, horrible enough!" answered the stoker. "But what I was speaking of,
+is the foolish habit that passengers have--I have seen it often in crossing
+the Atlantic--of coming down into the fire-room very soon after they start,
+and taking a look at the furnaces. A good many of them never sleep a wink
+afterwards, during the whole voyage, I believe, thinking of that mass of
+red-hot coal lying in the middle of the ship, and wondering _when_ she is
+going to burn. They are fools to come down at all: if they would just keep
+out of the way they would never know how badly it looks, and then at least
+they would never be burned until their time came!"
+
+Just then the raging monster within seemed to demand more blazing food,
+and the stoker turned away to attend to his duty. Had he remained
+conversing one moment longer, he might have seen Carlton Brand totter back
+against the bulk-head of the fire-room, literally gasping for breath--then
+grapple for the railing of the stairs, and ascend the steps with the
+staggering motion of a sick or drunken man, breathing heavily and giving
+painful indications of being on the verge of falling insensible.
+
+When the lawyer again emerged to the air of the deck, his face was ghastly
+white, and he seemed altogether strangely altered since the moment of his
+descent into those regions of fire and grime and terrible suggestion. What
+had so changed him?--the heat, choking his lungs and preying upon a frame
+unaccustomed to it?--or had the curse of his nature again found him out, in
+the low of the furnaces and the heedless conversation of the fireman? and
+did he remember that between himself and even that flight beyond the sea
+which only could shut out from his ears the voice of contempt and the cry
+of a neglected country, there yet lay the peril of the Amazon and the
+Austria?
+
+This occurred on Friday the third of July; and between that day and the
+Sunday following there was nothing in the movements of the sojourner at the
+Fifth Avenue, worthy of special record. But on that Sunday afternoon,
+perhaps at the very hour when Kitty Hood, in one spot of that section of
+country which had been his old home, was glorying over her lover's having
+been at Gettysburgh,--and when Robert Brand, in another, was writhing and
+cursing over the absence of his son from the same great battle,--an
+incident took place at the hotel, apparently trivial, but which may
+subsequently be found to have exercised no slight influence on the fortunes
+of some of the different persons named in this chronicle. Unfortunately,
+again, over this little event hangs a mist and a shadow, and only slight
+glimpses can be obtained of what afterwards proved to be of such
+unsuspected importance.
+
+On that Sunday afternoon, at about two o'clock, Carlton Brand went down
+from his room to the office of the hotel, to exchange a few words with the
+clerk, and to secure one of the battle-extras which he had just heard from
+his window cried in the street. Knots of men, guests, or passers-by, driven
+in by the pouring rain without, filled the long hall, every third holding a
+newspaper, every group in more or less animated conversation, and the one
+topic that great conflict which had just bloomed out into a great victory.
+The lawyer seemed to have company enough in his own thoughts, and did not
+join any of the groups. He secured his extra, transacted his brief business
+at the desk, and returned immediately upstairs. The moment after he had
+left the desk, a young man advanced from one of the groups near the door,
+asked a question of the clerk, was answered, overran a few pages of the
+register with eye and finger, and then passed upstairs under the guidance
+of a servant.
+
+Carlton Brand had already thrown off coat and boots again, and was sitting
+at the open window in dressing-gown and slippers, glancing over the
+sensation-headings of the extra which gave the particulars of the Waterloo
+of Secessia,--when there was a tap at the door. Stepping hastily thither
+and opening it, with a muttered wonder why he could not be left alone to
+his reading, a well-known figure stepped into the room and one of his
+Philadelphia bar-intimates--perhaps the nearest to a confidential friend in
+the whole profession, took him by the hand. For an instant the occupant of
+the room seemed to be displeased at the intrusion and an expression of
+annoyance flitted over his face; but old friendship was evidently too
+powerful even for shame and lacerated feeling, and the next instant he had
+cordially returned the grasp.
+
+The new-comer, strangely enough, bore no slight resemblance to Carlton
+Brand. We say strangely, because the lawyer was by no means such a person,
+in general appearance, as could be readily duplicated. Henry Thornton, his
+professional brother, had the same tall, lithe figure with evidence of
+great agility, the same mould of countenance in many respects, and with
+eyes of hazel only a shade darker than Brand's. But here the resemblance,
+which might otherwise have been extraordinary, became slighter and
+eventually disappeared. His complexion was much darker, even brown, from
+chin to forehead, indicating Southern blood or residence. His hair, curling
+a little, was of very dark brown, almost black; and his heavy moustache,
+the only beard he wore, was so nearly black as generally to pass under that
+designation. In spite of the similarity of form and feature, it may be
+imagined that these differences told very strongly on the general effect
+produced by the two men on the mere casual observer; and while there was
+that indefinable something in the face of Carlton Brand, to which attention
+has before been called, denoting intellect and true nobility of soul,
+accompanied by an occasional pitiable weakness or want of self-assertion of
+the full manhood, there was that quite as plainly to be read in the face of
+Henry Thornton, which told of dauntless courage and iron will, a brain busy
+and scheming if not even plotting, and powers which might not always be
+turned to the service of the candid, the open and the honorable. Lavater
+would have thought, looking at his face--Well for him and for the world if
+what he wills is in consonance with honor and justice, for what he wills he
+will pursue with the unfaltering courage of the lion and the untiring
+determination of the sleuth-hound!
+
+But Nature, giving to these two men who held no known relationship
+whatever, so striking a resemblance in some particulars and so great a
+dissimilarity in others--had not quite ended her freak of comparison. It is
+doubtful whether either was fully aware of the fact, but the similarity
+between the tones of their voices, in ordinary times, was quite as marked
+as that between certain physical features; and any person standing that day
+without the door, when the two had entered into conversation, might have
+been puzzled to know whether two persons were really speaking or one was
+carrying on a monologue. This, only at ordinary times: Thornton's voice was
+much steadier and more uniform under feeling, and it never broke into tones
+so low and melancholy as that of the other, when influenced by temporary
+depression.
+
+Such was Carlton Brand's visitor on that Sunday afternoon, and he it was
+who but the moment after was seated in the proffered chair near the window
+and chatting upon current topics with as much nonchalance as if he had
+merely called upon his entertainer at his little office on Sixth Street,
+Philadelphia, instead of visiting him at a hotel in a distant city.
+
+There was a little table standing between the two windows of the room and
+within reach of Thornton as he sat. On the table lay part of that
+miscellaneous collection of articles which every careless bachelor will
+persist in scattering about his room at the hotel; and at the edge of what
+may be called the pile lay a paper more than half unfolded, which caught
+the observant eye of the visitor. With a quick: "Will you allow me?" which
+brought an affirmative response, he reached over, took up the paper,
+unfolded it and read a receipt for a first cabin passage in the Cunard Mail
+Steamship to sail from New York to Liverpool, on the 8th July, for which
+$130.50 had been paid by Mr. Carlton Brand.
+
+"The Cunarder for Liverpool next Wednesday," he said, when he had finished
+running his eye over the passage-ticket.
+
+"Yes," answered the owner, and he answered nothing more.
+
+A strange expression passed over the face of his interrogator--an
+expression so doubtful that even Lavater, or any other man pretending to
+read the human countenance like an open book, might have been puzzled to
+say whether it conveyed pleasure, scorn, wonder, or any one of the thousand
+different feelings whose outward show glints over our faces as often and as
+transiently as the cloud-shadows floating over the mountain woods or the
+mottled sunshine flickering over the wheat-fields. There was something
+there--something which the other did not appear to notice; and with that
+fact we must be content.
+
+Five minutes later, Carlton Brand, through the medium of words growing out
+of the discovery of the passage-ticket, was in confidential conversation
+with Henry Thornton with reference to the disgrace which had driven him
+from home and must make him an exile for years if not forever. It may have
+been a serious weakness, towards one who had never been even on terms of
+speaking acquaintance with her, to talk to him of Margaret Hayley and to
+confess the shameful dismissal which he had received. But Henry Thornton
+knew of the Hayleys if he did not claim an acquaintance with them; he had
+it in his power to impart information of them and their probable movements
+during the summer, which the other might have found difficulty in obtaining
+through any other means; and perhaps that knowledge gave some excuse for
+reciprocal confidence. At all events that confidence was given, and it
+elicited a return of apparently equal candor. Before the separation took
+place, at the end of an interview which lasted more than an hour, a strange
+bond seemed to have been established and cemented between the two lawyers,
+very different from any which official intercourse can often rivet. That
+interview, in fact, appeared to have produced marked effects upon both, for
+while on the face of Henry Thornton, as he rose to take his farewell, there
+was a look of entire satisfaction that could not have been without a
+meaning more or less creditable,--there was in the eye of Carlton Brand
+less of that troubled expression which had been for days resting there like
+a shadow, and he breathed as if a weight had been lifted from his breast.
+To one this new satisfaction and lightness of heart may have been no false
+presage: to the other, what an omen of unsuspected evil, disaster and
+death!
+
+They parted at the door of the lawyer's room, with a much warmer grasp of
+the hand than that with which they had met little more than a hour before;
+and each held the palm of the other in his for a moment, as those should
+do who have however slight a bond in common and between whom the waves of a
+whole wide ocean are so soon to roll.
+
+"A pleasant voyage and a happy return!" said the one, on the threshold.
+
+"A pleasant summer to you, wherever you are!" was the reply of the other.
+
+So parted, after that brief meeting, Henry Thornton and Carlton Brand. The
+bearer of that latter name, once so honored but now holding so doubtful a
+position, left New York by the Cunarder Scotia from Jersey City on
+Wednesday the 8th of July, looking his last that evening from the deck of
+his steamer, on the dim blue line of the Highlands--a fading speck of that
+native land that the fates had ordained he should never see again with his
+living eyes! And as at this moment we lose sight of him for the time, to
+trace the fortunes of others remaining on this side of the Atlantic, it may
+be well to say that his outward voyage must have been a safe and prosperous
+one, for there was duly registered as having arrived at Liverpool, on the
+twentieth of July, (a date which it may afterwards be important to
+remember) "Carlton Brand, Philadelphia."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+     ANOMALIES OF THE WAR FOR THE UNION--THE WATERING-PLACE RUSH
+     OF 1863--A WHITE-MOUNTAIN PARTY DISEMBARKING AT
+     LITTLETON--WHO FILLED THE CONCORD COACH--THE
+     VANDERLYNS--SHODDY ON ITS TRAVELS--MR. BROOKS CUNNINGHAME
+     AND HIS FAMILY--"H. T.," AND AN EXCITEMENT.
+
+
+The War for the Union has been unlike all other great struggles,
+throughout, in nearly every characteristic that can be named. Unnatural in
+its inception, the rebellion has seemed to have the power of making
+unnatural many of the details through which and in spite of which it has
+been carried forward--of changing character and subverting all ordinary
+conditions. There have been anomalies in the field: still more notable
+anomalies in society. Unflinching bravery and stubborn devotion to the
+fighting interests of the country have been found blended, in the same man,
+with pecuniary dishonesty which seemed capable of pillaging a
+death-chamber. The greatest military ability has been found conjoined with
+such inactivity and tardiness as to paralyze action and destroy public
+patience. Rapidity of movement has been discovered to be wedded to such
+Utopian want of understanding or such culpable recklessness as to make
+movement not seldom a blunder instead of a stroke of policy. Times which
+threatened disaster have brought triumph; and the preparations made to
+celebrate a victory have more than once been employed in concealing a
+defeat. All things have been mixed in estimation. The Copperhead,
+detestable on account of his view of the national duty, has yet compelled
+some portion of respect by his real or affected reverence for a perilled
+Constitution; the Radical, worthy of all credit for his active spirit and
+uncompromising position, has yet deserved contempt for a narrowness of view
+which made him almost as dangerous as disloyalty could have done; and the
+Conservative, that man of the golden mean, that hope of the nation in many
+regards, has bargained for a part of the abuse which he has received from
+either extreme, by faulting the active measures of both and offering
+meanwhile no active, practical course to supply their stead.
+
+But amid the general anomaly perhaps fashionable (or would-be fashionable)
+society, and the world of ease and amusement, have supplied the most
+interesting and the most astounding study of all. The status of the
+"non-productive classes" is and has been, during most of the struggle,
+literally inverted, and the conditions of costly enjoyment have been
+changing as rapidly as if we were rioting through a carnival instead of
+breasting a rebellion. No nation ever carried on such a war as that waged
+by this loyal people; and no nation ever spent so much blood and treasure
+in accomplishing the same comparative results. Naturally, in view of the
+personal bereavement, it might have been expected that society should be
+quiet in its amusements and low-toned in all its conversation: naturally, a
+people bleeding at every pecuniary pore for the public good, might have
+been expected to diminish personal expenditure and husband those resources
+on the holding-out of which so much must eventually depend. Instead of
+this, society, with the craped banners and the muffled drums every day
+appealing to eye and ear, has grown continually louder in its tone and more
+pronounced and even blatant in its mirth; and reckless personal expenditure
+has quite kept place with any general waste that the highwaymen or
+incapables of government had power to entail. The theatre and the circus
+have never before been so full, the opera has never before been so
+generally patronized. Babylon could never have rioted more luxuriously on
+the very night before its fall, than have the people of our great cities
+dined, ridden, danced and bathed themselves in seas of costly music, any
+day since the first three months of the rebellion ended.
+
+Summer recreations have perhaps told quite as significant a story as any
+other feature, of the inevitable drift of society towards reckless expense
+and extravagant display. The summer resorts within the rebel territory may
+have grown desolate or deserted--the buildings of the White Sulphur and the
+Rockbridge Alum of Virginia may have been left empty or turned into
+hospitals, and Old Point may only have been visited for far other purposes
+than the meeting of the sea-breeze there in midsummer; but a very different
+fate has awaited the favorite hot-weather resorts of the North. Saratoga
+and Sharon of the chalybeates; Niagara and Trenton of the cataracts; the
+White Mountains, the Cattskills and the Alleghanies, of the high, pure air
+and the cloud shadow; Newport, Rockaway, Long Branch and Cape May of the
+south-eastern breeze and the salt aroma,--all have been, with the exception
+of a few frightened weeks of 1861, more densely filled during the war than
+at any former period in the memory of the pleasure-seeker; and wealth and
+enjoyment have both run riot there to an extent but little in accordance
+with the sack-cloth and ashes which the observant eye saw all the while
+lying on the head of the nation itself. All this may have been
+inappropriate and a part of it painful; but the result could not well have
+been otherwise. Some, with wealth honestly earned and no capacity for the
+public service, have needed rest or distraction and there found one or the
+other. Habitual idlers and professional students of society, never
+available for any other purpose, have naturally, as ever, found there their
+best ground of personal study. Young girls have needed the experience, and
+managing mammas have quite as sorely needed those fields for matrimonial
+campaigns. Invalids have needed their real or supposed opportunity for the
+recovery of lost health. Shoddy, grown suddenly rich while remaining
+incurably ignorant and vulgar, and finding it no easy task to force its way
+into the coveted "society" in the great cities, has eagerly welcomed the
+opportunities there afforded for at least learning the rudiments of what is
+called gentility, and creeping into that miscellaneous outer circle which
+surrounds the charmed inner. Politicians have found it necessary to do, in
+such places, that particular portion of the great task of boring,
+button-holing, prying and packing which cannot be so well done either at
+the primary election or the convention as around the spring or on the
+beach--on the piazza of the Ocean House or the United States; and officers
+on furlough, who had fought enough for the time or had no intention to
+fight at all, have found no places like these for displaying jaunty uniform
+and decorated shoulder to the admiring eyes of that sex which descends from
+Athena and recognizes the cousinship of Mars. Add to all this the rise of
+exchange on Europe and the folly of steamship companies in charging gold
+rates for passages abroad, which have together almost checked the summer
+exodus to the Old World,--and there is no longer reason to wonder at the
+watering-place crowds and the summer gayeties which have made carnival
+throughout the loyal States and filled the wallets of enterprizing
+landlords.
+
+The year of grace 1863 saw an earlier beginning to the summer hegira than
+any other late year had done, as before its close it saw houses
+over-crowded, waiters overworked, and cots at a premium, from Casco to
+Cresson. The smoke had not yet rolled away from Gettysburgh when "the great
+North River travelling-trunk" began its perambulations; and by the middle
+of July everybody who was anybody (except a few in the city of New York,
+temporarily frightened or hindered by the riots) was gone from the great
+cities, and they were given over to the temporary occupancy of those
+laboring starlings who could not "get out," and the ever ebbing and flowing
+wave of transient visit.
+
+All this as a necessary reminder of the period and a back-ground to the
+incidents so soon to follow,--and because the course of narration, at this
+juncture, leads us for a time to one of the favorite shrines of American
+summer pilgrimage and into the whirl of that literal storm of fashion and
+curiosity which eddies and sweeps, all summer long, around the peaks of the
+White Mountains--the Alps of Eastern America.
+
+It was a somewhat varied as well as extensive crowd of passengers that
+disembarked from the cars of the White Mountain Railroad at Littleton, in
+sight of the head-waters of the Connecticut, about five o'clock on
+Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of July. The dog-days had begun; New York,
+Philadelphia and Boston were steaming furnaces, though partially emptied as
+we have before had occasion to notice; and those who had already visited
+them during the month, declared that neither Saratoga, the Cattskills, or
+even Lake George or Niagara, had the power to impart any coolness to
+suffering humanity. The sea-shore or the northern mountains offered the
+only alternative; and a very heavy list of passengers had come up that day
+by the Norwich and Worcester line from New York, the Boston lines falling
+in at Nashua Junction, and the Vermont Central throwing in its
+reinforcement at Wells River.
+
+Every portion of the loyal States (and no doubt a portion of the disloyal,
+if the truth could have been known!) had seemed to be represented in the
+crowd that thronged the platforms while fighting for a mouthful of lunch at
+Nashua Junction or crowding in to a hurried dinner at the poor substitute
+for the burned Pemigawasset House at Plymouth. There were even half a dozen
+resident Europeans--English, Scotch, with one Frenchman who snuffed
+continually, and one Spaniard who smoked in season and out of
+season--people who had no doubt rushed over to see the "American war," but
+very soon found the South too hot for comfort, in one sense or the
+other,--among the number destined to add variety to the overfilled
+caravanserais of the Franconia and White ranges. A few had dropped away at
+Weir's Landing, for a day or two on Lake Winnipiseogee, enticed by the
+pleasant loom of Centre Harbor down the bright blue water and the romantic
+figure of the Lady of the Lake on the prow of her namesake steamer; and a
+few more had left the train at Plymouth for the long coach-ride of thirty
+miles through the mountains to the Glen House, or by the southern approach
+to the Profile or the Crawford. Two or three stage-loads, too, who had but
+one thought in their pilgrimage--Mount Washington,--were bustling in for
+the immediate ride from Littleton to the Crawford; but there were still
+four heavy stage-loads--not less than forty to fifty persons--going on to
+the crowded Profile House that evening.
+
+Some of the occupants of one of those heavy stages, rolling away towards
+the Profile, require, for the purposes of this narration, a somewhat closer
+view than was probably taken of them by many of their fellow-passengers;
+and that view cannot be more appropriately taken than at this moment.
+
+On the back seat of that vehicle sat two ladies, with a troublesome boy of
+ten years wedged in between them as if to come the nearest possible to
+getting him out of the way. Neither paid the youngster that attention which
+would have indicated that he belonged to them or was travelling in their
+company; and indeed they had every right as well as every inclination to
+wash their hands of his relationship if they could not wash from their
+travelling-dresses the marks of his taffy-smeared fingers. The two ladies
+were evidently mother and daughter; and at least one person in the coach
+had remarked them as they came up from Concord, and seen that their sole
+chaperon and protector seemed to be a son of the one and brother of the
+other, some eighteen or twenty years of age. As he saw them then and as he
+afterwards better knew them, they may be briefly described.
+
+The Vanderlyns were Baltimoreans--the widow and children of a man of large
+wealth and considerable distinction, who had died three or four years
+before in that city, after having amassed a fortune by property
+speculations and subsequently filled more than one responsible office under
+the State government. They had the true Southern pride in wealth and
+position; and the hand of the daughter had already been sought, however
+ineffectually, by scions of the best families in and about the Monumental
+city. Let it be added that they belonged, whatever may have been their
+pride and arrogance as a family, to the not-too-extensive class of _loyal_
+Marylanders,--and then a better title of nobility will have been enrolled
+than any that Clayton Vanderlyn's money and former public employments had
+power to supply. The widowed mother and her children were among the few
+residents below Mason and Dixon's line who had not forgotten the pleasant
+summer days of old in the North, when Puritan and Cavalier met as friends
+and brothers; and this summer tour, which was to include Saratoga and
+Newport before it closed, was a result of the old recollection.
+
+Mrs. Vanderlyn, the mother, seemed forty-five, but was fine-looking and had
+evidently been handsome in her youth--with those splendid brown eyes that
+must then have sparkled so much more brilliantly than at this period, and
+that perfect wealth of chestnut hair, not yet in the least sprinkled with
+gray, which must then have been a charm and a glory. Her travelling-dress
+was very plain, but of the best materials; and every thing in her
+appearance--especially pride of look and action,--spoke of wealth, the
+habit of mingling in that indefinable but actual thing, good society, and a
+perfect consciousness of what she was and what she possessed. Those who
+looked twice upon Mrs. Vanderlyn, with keen eyes, had no difficulty in
+deciding that she might be a very pleasant acquaintance for those in her
+own "set" and whom she considered her equals,--but that she would be any
+thing but a pleasant acquaintance for those whom she despised or with whom
+she chanced to fall into feud.
+
+Clara Vanderlyn, the daughter, was a yet more interesting study than her
+mother; and it seemed altogether probable that the same observer before
+mentioned, and who will be hereafter more particularly introduced, coming
+up in the same car from Nashua and again thrown into near proximity in the
+coach, had read and was reading that second page of the Vanderlyn genealogy
+with peculiar care and attention. She was of middle height; slight, but
+well-rounded and evidently elastic in figure, with a clearly cut but very
+pleasant face, eyes a shade darker than Mrs. Vanderlyn's, and hair what
+that lady's had probably been twenty years before. A wonderful feature,
+indeed, was that head of hair--fine, silken, but perfectly massive in
+profusion, with more of a tendency to the wave than the curl, and of that
+rich golden chestnut or true auburn so seldom seen though so often lauded.
+At the first observation, it seemed that Clara Vanderlyn's hair was the
+great charm of her presence; but those who had the good fortune to be many
+hours in her company, learned that a still stronger and more abiding charm
+lay in the affability of her manners, the expression of thorough goodness
+in her whole demeanor, and the purity and sweetness of her smile. That face
+was certainly worthy of the fixed gaze which had rested upon it quite as
+often during the afternoon as delicacy permitted; and it might even have
+furnished excuse for glancing at it a moment too long, and planting blushes
+on those cheeks that the lip could have no hope of gathering.
+
+The third and youngest of the family, Frank Vanderlyn, did not enter into
+the group under observation, as he was at that time on the top of the coach
+with half a dozen others, enjoying the cigar which had been impossible in
+the passenger-car. But the glimpses caught of him before disembarking, may
+suffice to complete the family triad. He seemed a well-grown stripling,
+verging upon manhood, with a face distantly reminding the observer of his
+sister's, but with darker hair than either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Clara, and
+with an expression of settled hauteur upon his well-cut features, which
+very much detracted from the charm of a face that would otherwise have been
+singularly handsome. He was dressed a little too well for dusty travel, and
+wore more wealth in a single diamond in his cravat and a cluster-ring on
+the little finger of his right hand, than most young men would have been
+either able or willing to devote to such purposes of mere ornament.
+
+This description of the occupants of that singularly-fortunate coach may
+have very little interest beyond that of a mere catalogue; yet it must be
+continued, for Fate, that grim old auctioneer who sometimes knocks us down
+at very low prices and to odd owners, may have some necessity for a
+mercantile list of his chattels.
+
+The occupants of the middle seat were three in number, and they could have
+furnished any needed information as to the personality of the troublesome
+boy with the taffied fingers, who had been wedged between Clara Vanderlyn
+and her mother. All of one family--that second triad: Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame, Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, and Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame.
+The first, a squat man of fifty-five, with a broad, coarse, beardless face,
+bad teeth and bristly gray hair just suffering under its first infliction
+of slaty-brown hair-dye. His large hands had been all day cased in kid
+gloves, spite of the heat of the weather; and his gray suit, of really fine
+material, had a sort of new look, and did not seem to be worn easily. There
+was an impression carried about by the man and disseminated at every
+movement, that another and a much shabbier suit hung immediately behind his
+bed-room door at home, and that in that he would have been easy and
+comfortable, while in the fashionable garb he was laboring under a sort of
+Sunday-clothes restraint. The second, a stout woman of fifty, with reddish
+hair, a coarse pink face, high cheek bones and pert nose, corresponding
+well with her lord in conformation, while it wore an expression of dignity
+and self-satisfaction to which the countenance of that poor man could not
+have made the least pretension. She was only a _little_ overdressed, for
+travelling--her bonnet of fine straw too much of a flower-garden for her
+years, a heavy gold watch-chain with the watch prominent, a diamond
+breastpin flashing hotly, and her voluminous blue lawn of costly fabric
+partially covered by a long gray mantle which must have been recommended to
+her by some mantua-maker with a "spasm of sense." But if there was any
+restraint in the make-up of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that restraint was
+fully compensated by the gorgeousness of the general arrangement of Miss
+Marianna. That young lady of thirty, with a large mouth, sandy hair, bluish
+gray eyes and freckles, a dumpy figure and no eye-brows whatever, was
+arrayed--shade of Madame La Modiste forgive us while we pen the
+record--arrayed for that hot and dusty day of railroad and coach riding, in
+a rich pink silk flounced and braided to the extreme of the current
+fashion; with a jockey leghorn and white feather which--well, we may say
+with truth that they _relieved_ her face; with a braided mantle of white
+merino that might have been originally designed for an opera-cloak; white
+kid gloves in a transition state; and such a profusion of gold watch, gold
+chain, enamelled bracelet, diamond cluster-breastpin, costly lace, and
+other feminine means of attracting admiration and envy, that the brain of a
+masculine relator reels among the chaos of finery and he desists in
+despair. The fourth of this family was Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame,
+_ætat_ ten, wedged in between the two aristocratic representatives of the
+Vanderlyn exclusiveness, and the freckles on his coarse little face and
+hands about equally balanced by the dauby debris of more or less hardened
+taffy to which allusion has before been unavoidably made.
+
+This group (the fact may as well be set down in this place as at any later
+period)--this was Shoddy on its summer tour. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had
+been, a considerable number of years before, Patrick B. Cunningham; and his
+name had been scrawled, many hundreds of times, to receipts for work done
+as a petty contractor about the streets of New York City, with one horse
+and a dirt-cart, digging out cellars, and helping to cart the dirt of
+pipe-layings and excavations. Gradually he had crept up to two carts, and
+then to three. Eventually he had reached the employing of a dozen or two,
+with the bipeds that drove and the quadrupeds that drew them. By that time
+he had removed from his shanty of one story and rented a house. Then he had
+gone into ward politics and contracts with the city, at about the same
+time, and emerged into possession of a couple of brown-stone-front houses
+and a seat in the Board of Aldermen, at periods not very far apart. People
+said that the seat in the municipal board, with the "ring" performances
+(more or less clown-ish) thereunto appertaining, were made the means of
+increasing the two houses to four and of causing Mrs. Patrick B. Cunningham
+to forget the whole of her husband's first name and merely use the initials
+"P. B.," which might or might not stand for 'Pollo Belvidere. Then had come
+the war, with that golden opportunity for all who stood prepared for it.
+Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been at that time the proprietor of some fifty or
+sixty gallant steeds used before dirt-carts, and his vigorous and patriotic
+mind had conceived the propriety of aiding the country by disposing of
+those mettled chargers as aids towards a first-class cavalry mount. He had
+sold, prospered, bought more dirt-cart and stage-horses with an admixture
+of those only to be discovered between the thills of clam-wagons, found no
+difficulty in passing them as fit for the service, through the kindness of
+a friendly inspector who only charged two dollars per head for deciding
+favorably on the quadrupeds,--sold and prospered again and yet again. Mr.
+P. B. Cunningham had accordingly found himself, three months before the
+period of this narration, the lawful proprietor of half a million, acquired
+in the most loyal manner and without for one moment wavering in his
+connection with either Tammany Hall, through which he managed the
+Democrats, or the Loyal League by which he kept in favor with the
+Republicans.
+
+So far Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been uninterruptedly successful--the
+monarch as well as architect of his own fortune. But at that period (the
+three months before) he had suddenly been made aware that every man has his
+fate and the end of his career of supremacy. Mrs. P. B. Cunningham had
+proved herself his fate and put a sudden end to his supremacy. That lady,
+all the while emerging, had emerged, from the dust and darkness of lower
+fortune, and become a fashionable butterfly. She had ordered him to buy a
+four-story brown-stone front, finer than any that he owned, on one of the
+up-town streets not far from _the_ Avenue; and he had obeyed. She had
+ordered him to discard his old clothes, and he had obeyed again, though
+with a sincere reluctance. She had changed his name to Brooks Cunninghame,
+(observe the _e_!) her own to Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that of Mary Ann to
+Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame, and that of the male scion of the house,
+_ætat_ ten as aforesaid, to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame. The
+door-plate of the new house could not be arranged in accordance with the
+new programme, for door-plates had been voted vulgar and abandoned by the
+_creme de la creme_; but the family cards had been made to bear all the
+blushing honors in steel engraving and round-hand. This done, the requisite
+jewelry bought, and some other little arrangements perfected which may
+develop themselves in due time, the lady had informed Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame that both the health and the dignity of the family required
+summer recreation, and dragged him away on that tour of which we have the
+privilege of witnessing one of the progresses.
+
+Some reference has been made to the array, rather gorgeous than otherwise,
+of Miss Marianna, for dusty travel. A few words which had passed between
+the three heads of the family at one of the Boston hotels that morning, may
+give a little insight into the philosophy of this arrangement. Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame, yet retaining a little of the common-sense of his dirt-cart
+days, had ventured to suggest that "Mary Ann mought wear her commoner duds
+to ride in, for thim fineries 'ud be spiled before night wid the dust
+intirely;" and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, alike indignant at a suggestion so
+smacking of low life and grieved to find that her husband would persist in
+retaining a few touches of the brogue of which she had cured herself and
+her children so triumphantly,--had answered with a sort of verbal two-edged
+sword that did fatal execution on both the others:
+
+"Brooks Cunninghame, you'd better keep your mouth shut if you can't open it
+without letting out some of that low Irish! One would think you drove a
+dirt-cart yit! And you, my dear"--to Marianna (the mother had been "posting
+herself" in some of the phrases of "good society," as well as in some other
+things which may also yet develop themselves)--"you, my dear, put on the
+very best o' them things that you've got! Ain't we rich, I should like to
+know? We may see a good many folks to-day, in them cars, and who knows
+whether you mightn't lose a beau that'd take a fancy to you, if you went
+slouchin' around with your old things on? Dress up, my dear!"
+
+Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had succumbed; Miss Marianna had "dressed up," as
+per order; and collective Shoddy was thus far on its way, without accident,
+towards the first halting-place in the grand tour of the mountains.
+
+But what of the observer who has more than once before been mentioned, and
+who sat in the corner of the front seat, half buried under the voluminous
+skirts of two ladies who have nothing whatever to do with this narration,
+but looking so steadily (people who have habitually ridden in those Concord
+coaches know that the front is another back, and that the occupants of the
+front and back seats face each other)--looking so steadily, we say, at
+every permissible opportunity, into the sweet face of Clara Vanderlyn? He
+was a man of apparently thirty years of age, rather tall and very
+vigorous-looking even if slight, with curling dark hair, almost or quite
+black, and worn short, the face finely cut and showing no beard except a
+close, full moustache of raven blackness, the complexion (brow and all, as
+could be noticed when he lifted his hat from his head, as he often did, for
+coolness) of such a dark clear brown as to mark him of Southern birth or
+blood, clothes of thin dark gray material, with a round tourist hat and a
+duster, the small hands gloved in summer silk, and the whole appearance and
+manner that of a gentleman, used to good society, and very probably
+professional. He had been reading, nearly all the way up from Worcester,
+some of the other passengers noticed--though it must be confessed that a
+part of his reading had been over the top of the book at that attractive
+large type formed by a pretty human face; and no blame is intended to be
+cast upon Clara Vanderlyn when we say that that young lady had more than
+once met the evidently admiring glance of so fine-looking a man, with the
+little tinge of color that was becoming, but without any expression upon
+her face or any thought in her mind, resenting any more than returning an
+admiration which she believed that she had a right to receive and any
+gentleman to pay thus respectfully. He had spoken but seldom, during the
+ride, in such a way that any person then present had heard him; but once he
+had taken (or _made_) occasion to apologize to Miss Vanderlyn and her
+mother for being thrown against their seat by the motion of the car while
+walking through it, on the rough road when coming up from Plymouth to Wells
+river; and his few words, as the lady remarked, consorted well with the
+respectability (to say the least) of his appearance. As to his personality,
+which there did not seem the slightest occasion for his wishing to
+disguise, there was a big black trunk in the baggage-wagon following behind
+the line of coaches, and a small satchel strapped over his shoulder as he
+rode; and the first bore the initials "H. T." and the direction
+"Cincinnati."
+
+While so much attention has been paid to the occupants of that single
+coach, leaving the others and even the noisy passengers on the roof of
+this, unnoticed, the vehicles had been buzzing and clattering along over
+the table-land lying at the foot of the mountains, past the little hamlet
+of Franconia, and nearing the mountains themselves. A glorious July evening
+it was, with the fiery air which had been so oppressive below gradually
+cooled by the approach to the presence of the monarchs, and the smoke from
+the fires in the woods playing fantastic tricks among the peaks, and
+compensating for the absence of the clouds which sometimes enveloped them.
+Not half the passengers in those four stages had ever seen the mountains
+before; and not one, even of those accustomed to such scenery, but felt the
+blood beating a little quicker as the mountain road beyond Franconia was
+reached, and they began to experience those rapid ascents, and yet more
+rapid descents, which accompany thence all the way to the Notch, with grand
+old woods overhanging, steep and sheer ravines at the side of the road that
+made the head dizzy in looking, reverential glimpses of the awful peaks of
+Lafayette and the Cannon frowning ahead, and of Washington, grander still,
+towering far away over the White range, and with all the other
+accompaniments of the finest mountain scenery on the Atlantic coast of the
+American continent. There was quite enough, indeed, to engage the attention
+of any except the most blasé and ennuyée traveller, in the grandeur of the
+scenery and the excitement of being galloped in rocking, lumbering,
+four-horse coaches, down declivities of road which would have made a driver
+in any ordinary hill-country draw tight rein and creep down with a heavy
+foot on the brake.
+
+Not a few nervous passengers, first or last, dashing up and down the slopes
+of the White Mountain roads, have been more or less frightened, and wished
+that they could be once more on terra firma without incurring the penalty
+of a laugh at their cowardice; and in the present instance this little bit
+of locomotion was not to be allowed to pass without an adventure.
+
+Half an hour from the foot of the mountain the coach went rapidly up a
+sharp ascent in the road, then dashed down again at full gallop, striking
+one of those necessary nuisances known as "breakwaters" when a few yards
+from the top, with a shock that sent the coach-body leaping on its leathern
+jacks like a yawl-boat in a heavy surf, made some of the outsiders on the
+top shout and hold on merrily to keep from being whirled off into one of
+the side-ravines, and created such a state of affairs inside the vehicle,
+generally, as effectually broke up the monotony. That shock drove the head
+of Mrs. Vanderlyn back against the leathern cushions with a force seriously
+damaging to the crown of her bonnet, brought a slight scream from Clara,
+who was frightened for the instant, made the troublesome Master Brooks
+Brooks yell and dash a dirty hand into the dress of each of the ladies who
+had the honor of the same seat, and elicited from Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame
+and her husband one of those brief but very significant marital displays
+which were no doubt afterwards to edify so many. Whether the lady had
+ascertained that fashionable people must always fall and faint under any
+sudden excitement, or whether the shock really frightened as well as
+unseated her, is a matter of no consequence: certain it is that she at that
+juncture threw up her hands and rolled up her eyes, gave one scream that
+degenerated into a groan, rolled from her seat and subsided into the bottom
+of the coach, under the feet of "H. T.," in what seemed to be a fit of some
+description. Miss Marianna, really alarmed, with the affectionate if not
+classic words, "Oh, mammy!" made a grab at that lady, clutching the back of
+her hat and tearing it from the head it crowned, while Master Brooks Brooks
+changed his yell into a howl and Mr. Brooks Cunninghame stooped down,
+terror in his face and his hands feeling around at the bottom of the
+vehicle for any portion of what had been his wife, with the affectionate
+but not politic inquiry: "Is it kilt ye are, Bridget?"
+
+Not politic?--no, certainly not! A stronger word might be applied without
+risk to the unfortunate expression. Among the changes in family polity not
+before indicated, had been an indignant throwing over of her very honest
+name of "Bridget" by the wife of the horse-contractor, and the adoption of
+"Julia" in its stead. More than one curtain-lecture had poor Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame endured, before leaving New York, on the necessity of avoiding
+any blunder in that regard, when they should be "away from home"; and he
+had not escaped without severe drill and many promises of perfection in his
+part. And now to have forgotten the adopted "Julia" and used the tell-tale
+"Bridget" at the very moment of the family's entering upon their first
+essay in fashionable watering-place life, was really a little too much for
+patience not entirely angelic.
+
+Both the poets and the romancers tell of cases in which some word of
+heart-broken affection, uttered at the instant when the death-film was
+stealing over the eyes of the beloved one, has had power to strike the
+dulled sense and call back for a moment the fleeting life when it had
+escaped far beyond the reach of any other sound. Something of the same
+character--not quite so romantic, perhaps, but quite as real,--was
+developed in the present instance. The woman may have been falling into an
+actual faint; but if so, that offensive word pierced through the gathering
+mists of insensibility, and she crawled out from the entanglement of legs
+before any effectual aid could be afforded her, and with such a look of
+contempt and hatred burning full upon her unfortunate husband that he must
+have felt for the moment as if placed directly under the lens of a
+sun-glass at focus. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame shrank into his number eleven
+patent-leathers, and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame "swatted" herself (there is no
+other word in or out of the language that will quite so well express the
+act) down on the seat with an air that implied a wish for some one's head
+being beneath her at that juncture. Her glance had not at all softened, nor
+had "H. T." ceased looking out of the window or Clara Vanderlyn (behind
+her) yet taken her handkerchief from her mouth, when the female Cunninghame
+said, in what she thought very honeyed accents:
+
+"Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, I wish you would find some other time to go and
+call me nicknames, than when I am jolted out of my seat in that way and
+a'most dead!"
+
+The stroke of policy was a fine one, and even the thick head of Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame recognized the necessity of following it up--an act which he
+performed thus gracefully and with a look intended for one of the staring
+ladies on the front seat:
+
+"Yes, mim, her name isn't Bridget at all at all, but Julia. It's only a bit
+of a way I have of jokin' wid her, mim!"
+
+This was satisfactory, of course--absolutely conclusive; and so Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame grew mollified by degrees; the redness which had come into the
+face of Miss Marianna gradually faded out; Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame
+took occasion to manifest his filial fondness by reaching over and hugging
+his mother with hands just re-coated with candy dug out of his capacious
+pocket; and the Concord coach, with its consorts, rolled and jolted and
+swayed along, up and down the mountain road to its destination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+     LANDING AT THE PROFILE HOUSE--HALSTEAD ROWAN AND
+     GYMNASTICS--HOW THAT PERSON SAW CLARA VANDERLYN AND BECAME A
+     RIVAL OF "H. T."--THE FULL MOON IN THE NOTCH--TRODDEN TOES,
+     A NAME, A VOICE, AND A RENCONTRE--MARGARET HAYLEY AND CAPT.
+     HECTOR COLES--THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN BY MOONLIGHT, AND
+     A MYSTERY.
+
+
+Spite of the sometimes rapid speed, the toil up the mountain had been long
+and tedious; and dusk was very nearly falling and the chill of the coming
+evening was sufficient to induce the drawing close of mantles and wrappers
+that only two hours before had been reckoned an incumbrance,--when the
+coaches with their loads broke out from the overhanging woods on a steep
+down-grade, the passengers caught a glimpse of Echo Lake lying like a sheet
+of molten silver under the evening calm, and the whole cortege swept down
+at a gallop and with cracking of whips, to the broad, level plateau lying
+before the Profile House in the Franconia Notch.
+
+Two of the coaches had been in advance of that to which the attention of
+the reader has been particularly directed, and still other coaches had just
+come in from Plymouth, the Glen and the Crawford; so that when they drew up
+to alight the long piazza of the Profile was filled with sojourners
+satisfying their curiosity or looking out for fresh arrivals; and coachmen,
+servants and every employee of the establishment, were busy hauling down
+from the racks and boots where they had been stowed, immense piles of
+trunks, valises and every description of baggage that had not been
+entrusted to the van yet lumbering behind. Landlord Taft and superintendent
+Jennings were alert and busy; old comers were curious as to the number and
+nature of new arrivals; new comers were glancing momentarily at the
+glorious scenery and anxiously inquiring every thing of everybody who knew
+no more of the things inquired about than did the askers themselves. All
+was charming bustle--delightful confusion: one of those peculiar scenes
+connected with summer travel and watering-place life, which furnish the
+very best of opportunities for study to the quiet observer.
+
+The coach door had been opened and all the inside passengers handed out,
+before the merry party from the roof made any attempt at getting down. Peal
+after peal of hearty laughter went up from that outside division of the
+vehicle; and evidently the party there assembled had reached the Profile
+before achieving the end of the jests and story-telling in which they had
+been engaged. They had already attracted some attention from the piazza,
+and one boarding-school miss had been appealed to by her eye-glassed swain
+in attendance, to "heah those awful vulgah fellahs!"--when the laughter
+ceased, and one of the roof-passengers made a sudden spring from that
+elevation, over the heads of half a dozen of those standing on the ground,
+and came safely to his feet with a jerk which would have laid up a less
+perfect physical man for a week and completely shaken out the false teeth
+from the mouth of any victim of a dentist.
+
+The rapid man was followed by his companions, Frank Vanderlyn included
+among the number; but they all seemed to choose the more popular mode of
+getting down, by the aid of steps and braces.
+
+"Pretty well done, Rowan!" exclaimed one of the others as he himself
+reached the ground. "Broke any thing?"
+
+"No, nothing--except," and at that moment his eye caught the forms and
+faces of Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her mother, who were standing at the
+edge of the piazza, waiting while Frank descended and made some arrangement
+for the disposition of their baggage. "H. T.," of the coach-load, was
+standing within a few feet of them, his little satchel still strapped over
+his shoulder and his eyes scarcely wandering at all from the woman whom
+they had scanned so long and well during the journey by rail. But he had
+glanced around, with the others, at the noise made by the singular descent;
+and his eye met that of the man who had been called Rowan, as the latter
+made the discovery of mother and daughter. It was but a lightning flash
+that Rowan gave or the stranger detected, but few glances of any human eye
+have ever expressed more within the same period. He evidently saw the young
+girl for the first time, at that moment; and quite as evidently he drank in
+at that one glimpse the full charm of her beauty and goodness. That was not
+all: in the one glance, too, he apparently measured her wealth and social
+position--saw and reckoned up the proud woman standing beside her--then
+took, it is probable, an introspective view of himself and his own
+surroundings, and found time to realize the utter hopelessness of that
+impulse which for the tithe of a moment he must have felt stirring within
+him.
+
+Perhaps half-a-dozen seconds had elapsed before he concluded the answer he
+had begun. "No, nothing--except--my heart!" He had begun to speak in a
+light, gay, off-hand manner: he concluded in a low, sad voice, full alike
+of music and melancholy.
+
+"H. T." had been observing him very closely during that brief space of
+time, as had nearly all the other spectators, their notice attracted by his
+reckless mode of alighting. He was apparently about thirty years of age, a
+little less than six feet high--perhaps five feet eleven; with a form
+undeniably stout, but rounded like a reed and as elastic as whalebone. His
+hands were soft and womanish in their contour, though they were rather
+large, nut-brown in color, and had evidently felt, as had his face, the
+meridian sun. His feet were almost singularly small for so large a
+man--highly arched and springy. His face and head, as he the moment after
+removed his hat, were capable of attracting attention in any company. The
+face was a little broad and heavily moulded; the cheek-bones prominent and
+the nose slightly aquiline; the eyes dark, dreamy and lazy; the brow fair,
+and above it clustering dark, short, soft hair, curled, but so delicate in
+texture that it waved like silk floss with the veriest breath. The mouth
+would have been, the observer might have thought, heavy and a little
+sensual, had it not been hidden away by the thick and curling dark
+moustache which he wore without other beard. Only one other feature need be
+named--a chin rather broad and square and showing a very slight depression
+of the bone in the centre--such as has marked a singular description of men
+for many an hundred years. It needed a second glance to see that a broad,
+heavy scar, thoroughly healed, commenced at the left cheek-bone and
+traversed below the ear until lost in the thick hair at the base of the
+neck. Such was the picture this man presented--a contradictory one in some
+respects, but evidencing great strength, power and agility, and yet more
+than a suspicion of intellectuality and refinement. A close and habitual
+observer of men does not often err in "placing" one whom he may happen to
+meet, even at first sight,--after a few seconds of careful examination; but
+the keenest might have been puzzled to decide what was that man's station
+in life, his profession, or even his character. Any one must have been in
+the main favorably impressed: beyond that point little could possibly have
+been imagined by the most daring.
+
+A small black trunk came off the top of the coach at about the time that
+"H. T.," who seemed to be bargaining for a rival at that early period, had
+concluded his inspection; and there was not much difficulty in connecting
+the name and address painted in white on the end with the appellation by
+which the stranger had the moment before been designated. That name and
+address read: "Halstead Rowan, Chicago, Illinois."
+
+Two men appeared to be travelling in company with Rowan; one a man of
+something beyond his own age--the other five or six years younger; both
+respectable but by no means affluent in appearance. All were well dressed
+and gentlemanly in aspect; but neither Rowan nor either of his companions
+gave the impression of what might be designated as the "first circles of
+society," even in the great grain-metropolis of the West.
+
+"H. T.," the observer, had fixed his eyes so closely on the male party in
+that singular meeting, that he probably lost the answering expression of
+the lady's face and did not know whether or not she had returned that
+glance of wondering interest. Something like disappointment at that lost
+opportunity may have been the cause of his biting his lip a little
+nervously as he took his way, with the rest of the new-comers, into the
+hall and reception-room, waiting opportunity for the booking of names and
+the assignment of chambers. Some of those in waiting no doubt found the
+tedium materially diminished by finding themselves, in the reception-room,
+at that close of a blazing day of July, standing or sitting with a
+decidedly grateful feeling before a quarter-of-a-cord of birchen wood,
+blazing away in the open fire-place with that peculiar warmth and hearty
+geniality so little known to this coal-burning age, but so well remembered
+by those who knew the old baronial halls of republican America in a time
+long passed away.
+
+Not many minutes after the rencontre that has been described, the crowd had
+vanished from the piazza of the Profile House, the coaches had driven away,
+the baggage was being rapidly removed within doors, and the tired and
+hungry new-comers were booked for rooms and clearing away the soil and dust
+of travel, preparatory to supper. Soon the crockery and cutlery jingled in
+the long dining-room, and the flaky tea-biscuits steamed for those who
+hurried down to catch them in their full perfection.
+
+It was a desultory supper and a somewhat hurried one, for the moonrise was
+coming--that rise of the full moon which so many had promised themselves,
+and for which, indeed, not a few of the arrivals of that evening had timed
+their visit to the mountains. Then, hunger has but little curiosity, and
+surveys and recognitions were both waited for until the broader light and
+greater leisure of the morning; and probably of the dozens of old residents
+(a week is "old residence" at a watering-place, be it remembered, and a
+fortnight confers all the privileges of the habitue)--probably of the
+dozens of old residents and new-comers who had acquaintances among the
+opposite class, not two found time or thought for seeking out familiar
+faces during that period when the sharpened appetite was so notably in the
+ascendant.
+
+"The moonlight is coming: come out, all of you who care more for scenery
+than stuffing!" said a high, shrill voice, after a time had elapsed which
+would scarcely have begun the meal under ordinary circumstances. It was an
+elderly man with white hair and white side-whiskers, an old habitue of the
+house and therefore a privileged character, who spoke, pulling out his
+watch and at once rising from his seat. He was followed by more than half
+those at table, and would have been followed especially by Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame, who had somewhere learned that fashion and a rage for
+moonlight had a mysterious connection,--but for the insatiable hunger of
+Mr. Brooks Cunninghame himself, who was engaged in mortal combat with a
+formidable piece of steak and a whole pile of biscuits, and who outraged
+Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame by declaring, sotto voce, that "he'd be
+something-or-othered if he'd lave his supper until he was done, for any
+moonlight or other something-or-othered thing in the wurruld!"--and the
+obstreperousness of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, who was up to his
+eyes in three kinds of preserves and bade fair to stick permanently fast to
+the table through the agency of those glutinous compounds.
+
+Out on the piazza and the broad plateau in front of it, the visitors at the
+Profile gathered, to see what is not often vouchsafed to the most devoted
+of nature-lovers--the rising of the full moon in the mountains. Those who
+are familiar with the Franconia Notch well know how the mountains around
+the Profile always seem to draw closer after sunset, and how the frowning
+cliffs seem to form insurmountable barriers between them and the outer
+world, making it doubtful to the bewildered thought whether there is indeed
+any egress from that cool paradise of summer--whether or not they can ride
+away at will and look again upon green fields and flashing streams and the
+faces of those they love. And they well know that moonrise there, over
+those encircling cliffs, is not the moonrise of the lower country, with the
+orb throwing its broad beams of light at once wide over the world, but an
+actual peeping down from heaven of a fair and genial spirit that deigns for
+the time to pour welcome radiance into an abode of solitude and darkness.
+The spectacle, then, is one to be sought and remembered; and as storms
+habitually beat around those mountain tops and fog and mist quite divide
+the time with fair weather in the valleys, the tourist is mad or
+emotionless who allows the cloudless full moon to come up without catching
+its smile on cheek and brow.
+
+The intense blue of the eastern sky was already gone when the anxious
+groups clustered in front of the great white caravanserai, and the stars
+began to glimmer paler in that direction. There was not a fleck of cloud,
+not a shadow of mist, to prevent the rounded orb, when it came up, flooding
+the whole gorge with the purest of liquid silver. The winds were still as
+if they waited with finger on lip for the pageant; and the shrill scream of
+a young eagle that broke out for an instant from one of the eyries under
+the brow of Eagle Cliff and then died trembling away down the valley,
+seemed like profanation. Conversation was hushed, among all that varying
+and even discordant crowd, as if there might be power in a profane word to
+check the wheeling of the courses of nature. The orient began to be flushed
+with that trembling light, and glints of it touched the dark pines on the
+brow of the cliff, a mile away. Then that light beyond the cliffs deepened
+and the dark pines grew still darker as fully relieved against it. Then at
+last, as they watched with hushed breath, a rim of silver seemed suddenly
+to have been set as an arch on the very brow of the mountain, and slowly
+the full orb rolled into view. As it heaved up, a broad, full circle of
+glittering and apparently dripping silver, it threw out the trees on the
+brow of the mountain into such bold relief as if a lightning flash had
+literally been burning behind them. There was one giant old pine, no doubt
+an hundred feet in height, so far away on the bold crest of Eagle Cliff
+that it seemed to be only a toy tree of three inches; and this was thrown
+against the very centre of the moon, every gnarled limb and pendant branch
+as plain to the eye as if it hung within a stone's throw, a dead pigmy of
+the same family shooting up its ragged point not far distant, and a tangled
+wilderness of broken trees and scraggy branches filling the remainder of
+the circle. Then, the moment after, the moon heaved slowly up beyond the
+trees, they fell back into darkness, and the broad glow streamed full into
+the faces of the gazers and flooded the whole valley with light. The great
+spectacle of the month had been exhibited to hundreds of admiring eyes, and
+the full moon of July shed its broad glory like a blessing upon the
+Franconia.
+
+It was at the moment when the pageant was just concluding and exclamations
+of pleasure breaking from a hundred lips, that "H. T." (who has not as yet
+furnished us data for any fuller revelation of his name), standing at some
+distance out on the plateau from the piazza, and stepping suddenly backward
+to observe a particular effect of the light among the trees on the cliff,
+trod upon the foot of a lady immediately behind him and nearly overthrew
+her. He turned immediately, with a word of apology, at the same time that a
+gentleman near her, who seemed to be in her immediate company, sprang to
+prevent her possible fall, venting meanwhile on the presumed awkwardness
+of the aggressor a word of ill-disguised petulance:--
+
+"You should be a little more careful, sir, I think, how you step upon
+ladies' feet and risk hurting them seriously."
+
+"I beg a thousand pardons!" was the reply. "Certainly I did not know that
+there was a lady immediately behind me, and--"
+
+The lady gave a sudden start, caught a quick glance at the speaker, and
+then recovered her equanimity so suddenly that perhaps not two of all the
+company observed the momentary agitation; while the gentleman interrupted
+the attempted apology, not too politely, with--
+
+"Is your foot much injured, Miss Hayley?"
+
+The answer made by the lady was in the negative, and in a tone that, though
+it trembled a little, proved her less petulant than her companion. But it
+is possible that "H. T.," as he has been known, did not pay that answer any
+attention whatever. As he turned he must certainly have seen the lady more
+or less distinctly in the moonlight, and yet had manifested no surprise at
+what he saw; but when the name was mentioned he gave a start that must have
+been noticeable by any acute observer. Had he really not noticed her before
+his attention was called by the mention of the name? or was the face one
+which he did not recognize while the name bore a talisman that commanded
+all his interest? Certain it is that he saw the lady now, distinctly; and
+equally certain is it that the face was the same which has met the gaze of
+the reader, a month before, on the piazza of the house at West
+Philadelphia.
+
+Margaret Hayley, in very truth, dressed so darkly that at the first glance
+her attire might almost have been taken for black, and with not even one
+ornament to sparkle in the moonbeams, while that peculiarity of her raiment
+was made more notable by a light summer scarf or "cloud," of white berlin,
+thrown over her head to guard it from the night air, in a fashion somewhat
+oriental. Her proud, statuesque figure rose erect as ever; and the same
+stately perfection of womanhood looked out from her dark eyes and beamed
+upon her pure, high brow, that had shone there before the falling of that
+blow which had so truly been the turning point of her life. The cheek may
+have been a shade thinner than a month before; and there may have been a
+shadow under the eyes, too marked for her heyday of youth and health; but
+if so the moonlight was not enough of a tell-tale to make the revelation.
+
+The gentleman who had so promptly attended to the comfort of Margaret
+Hayley, and who did not seem averse to picking up a quarrel on her behalf,
+was dark haired and dark bearded, round-faced and rather fine-looking than
+otherwise, a little above the middle height, and wearing the uniform of a
+Captain on staff service. So much the eye of "H. T." took in at once, and
+he seemed to keep his attention somewhat anxiously on the two as the moment
+after they turned away and walked back towards the piazza, as if he would
+gladly have caught some additional word conveying a knowledge of the
+officer's personality. Nothing more was said, however, that could afford
+such a clue if one he really desired; and but a little time had elapsed
+when another subject of excitement arose, calculated to interest many of
+the hundreds who had already become partially drunk with the glory of the
+moonlight.
+
+"The moon is high enough, now: let us see how the Old Man of the Mountain
+looks when his face is silvered!" said some one in the crowd; and the happy
+suggestion was at once acted upon. There were quite enough old habitues
+present to supply guides and chaperons for the new-comers; and in a moment
+fifty or more of the visitors went trooping away down the white sandy road
+through the glen and under the sweeping branches among which the moonbeams
+peeped and played so coquettishly.
+
+Two or three windings of the road, two or three slight ascents and descents
+in elevation; some one said: "Here is the best view;" and the whole
+company paused in their scattering march. A sudden break, opening upon a
+dark quiet little lake or tarn, was to be seen through the trees to the
+right; and a quarter of a mile away, hanging sheer over the gulf of more
+than two thousand feet sweeping down towards the foot of the Cannon--there,
+with the massive iron face staring full into the moonlight that touched
+nose and cheek and brow with so strange and doubtful a light that the
+unpractised eye could not trace the outlines, while the accustomed could
+see them almost as plainly as in the sunlight--there loomed the awful
+countenance of the Old Man of the Mountain. Some there were in that
+company, familiar with every changing phase of that most marvellous freak
+of nature, who thought that grand as it had before seemed to them when the
+sun was high in the heavens and the dark outline relieved against the
+bright western sky, it was yet grander then, in the still, doubtful, solemn
+moonlight.
+
+Among those who had gone down to the edge of the little Old Man's Mirror
+for this view, were two of the sterner sex who happened to be without
+ladies under charge and to be separated from any other company. Directly,
+walking near each other, they fell together and exchanged casual remarks on
+the beauty of the night and the peculiarities of different points of
+scenery. They were the two who had first seen each other at the moment of
+alighting at the Profile little more than an hour before--"H. T." of the
+initials and the lady's smashed foot, and Halstead Rowan of the gymnastic
+spring from the coach-top. The first glance had told to each that there was
+something of mark in the other; and under the peculiar circumstances of
+that night they drifted together, without introduction except such as each
+could furnish for himself, but not likely to separate again without a much
+more intimate acquaintance,--just as many other waifs and fragments,
+floating down the great stream of life, have been thrown into what seemed
+accidental collision by a chance eddy, and yet never separated again until
+each had exercised upon the other an influence materially controlling the
+whole after course of destiny.
+
+Eventually the two, both rapid walkers, had gone faster than the rest and
+become the leaders of the impromptu procession to the shrine of the Old
+Man, so that when the halt was called they were standing together and apart
+from the others, forty or fifty feet further down the glen and where they
+had perhaps a yet better view of the profile than any of the company. Both
+were dear lovers of nature, if the word "reverent" could not indeed be
+added to the appreciation of both; and standing together there, even in
+silence, the intuitive knowledge of the inner life of each seemed to bring
+them more closely together than introductions and a better knowledge of
+antecedents could possibly have done. Then the crowd tired of gazing and
+moved back towards the house, leaving the two standing together and
+probably supposing themselves alone. They were not alone, in fact; for
+under the shadow of the trees to the left, half way between the spot where
+the new friends were standing and that which had been occupied by the body
+of the visitors, were three persons continuing the same lingering gaze.
+These were the officer and two ladies who each found the support of an
+arm--Margaret Hayley and her mother, the latter of whom, it would thus
+seem, was also at the Profile under the escort of the military gentleman.
+Unobserved themselves, they had the two men in full moonlight below and
+could see them almost as well as in the broader light of day.
+
+"Who are they, Captain Coles? Anybody we know?" asked the elder lady,
+speaking so low that the sound did not creep down to the two gazers.
+
+"Both new-comers, I think," answered the military gentleman. "Yes, they
+both came in to-night; and one of them, Margaret, is the booby who stepped
+on your foot a little while ago, and whom I shall yet take occasion to kick
+before he leaves the mountains if he does not learn to keep out of people's
+way."
+
+"I beg you will not allow yourself to get into difficulty on account of
+that trifling accident, and for me!" answered Margaret Hayley, while
+something very like a shudder, not at all warranted by the words, and that
+the Captain was not keen enough to perceive, swept through her form and
+even trembled the arm that rested within his.
+
+"Difficulty? oh, no difficulty, to me, you know; and for you, Margaret,
+more willingly than any other person in the world, of course!" and Captain
+Hector Coles, confident that he had expressed himself rather felicitously,
+thought it a good time to bow around to Miss Hayley, and did so.
+
+"You are quite right, Captain Hector Coles," said Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Low
+people, who do not even know how to walk without running over others,
+should be kept at their proper distance; and of course gentlemen and
+soldiers like yourself find it not only a duty but a privilege to afford to
+us ladies that protection."
+
+This time Captain Hector Coles, immensely flattered, bowed round on the
+other side, to the elder lady.
+
+"Hark!" said Margaret Hayley, in a louder voice than either had before
+used, and a voice that had a perceptible tremor in it like that of fright.
+
+"What did you hear?" asked the Captain.
+
+"Listen--I want to hear what that man was saying."
+
+"H. T." was speaking, just below.
+
+"No, I have never been here before," he said. "Strangely enough, some of
+the greatest curiosities of the continent are neglected by just such fools
+as myself, until too old or too busy or too careworn to enjoy them."
+
+"You speak like a jolly old grandfather, and yet you are scarcely as old as
+myself," answered the rich, sonorous voice of Halstead Rowan. "Well, that
+is _your_ business. The White Mountains are no novelty to me, or any other
+mountains, I believe, North of the Isthmus."
+
+"Is there any thing finer than this, at this moment, among them all?"
+
+"No, and I doubt if there is any thing finer on earth!" was the
+enthusiastic reply. "And by the way, even _I_ have not happened to see the
+full moon on the face of the Old Man, before. It is a magnificent sight--a
+new sensation."
+
+"How long has it stood so, I wonder? Since creation?" said the voice of "H.
+T.," "or did the Flood hurl those masses of stone into so unaccountable an
+accidental position?"
+
+"Haven't the most remote idea!" answered Rowan, gayly. "I have often
+thought of it, though, when looking at the marvel in the sunlight. But I
+have never been able to get any farther back than the idea how the winds
+must have howled and the rains beaten around that immobile face, age after
+age, while whole generations of the men after whom the face is apparently
+copied as a mockery, have been catching cold and dying from a mere puff of
+air on the head or a pair of wet feet."
+
+"The eternal--the immovable!" said "H. T.," his voice so solemn and
+impressive that it was evident his words were only a faint representation
+of the inner feeling.
+
+"I know one thing that it has been, without a doubt," said Rowan. "When the
+whole country was filled with Indians of a somewhat nobler character than
+the miserable wretches that alternately beg and murder on the Western
+plains, there is not much question that they must have worshipped it as the
+face of the Great Manitou, looking down upon them in anger or in love, as
+the storm-cloud swept around it or the summer sun tinted it with an iron
+smile."
+
+Halstead Rowan was speaking unconscious poetry, as many another man of his
+disposition has done, while those who sought to make it a trade have been
+hammering their dull brains and spoiling much good paper in the mere
+stringing of rhymes bearing the same relation to poetry that an onion does
+to the bulb of a tulip! Whether his companion caught the tone from him and
+merely elaborated it into another utterance, or whether he possessed the
+fire within himself and this rencontre was only the means of bringing out
+the spark, is something not now to be decided. But he spoke words that not
+only made the other turn and gaze upon him for a moment with astonishment,
+but moved the three unseen auditors with feelings which neither could very
+well analyze. His dark face, tinted by the moonlight as the stony brow of
+the mountain was itself touched and hallowed, seemed rapt as those of the
+seers of old are sometimes said to have been; and his voice was strangely
+sweet and melodious:
+
+"To me, just now," he said, "that iron face is assuming a new shape."
+
+"The deuce it is!" answered Rowan. "Where?"
+
+"'In my mind's eye, Horatio!'" quoted the speaker, and the other seemed to
+understand something of his mood. "Do you know that face may be nothing
+more than sixty feet of strangely-shaped stone, to others; but to me, at
+this moment, it is the Spirit of the North looking sadly down over our
+fields of conflict and saying words that I almost hear. Listen, and see if
+you do not hear them, too!"
+
+How strangely earnestness sometimes impresses us, even when little else
+than madness is the motive power! Halstead Rowan, by no means a man to be
+easily moulded to the fancies of any other, found himself insensibly
+turning his ear towards the Sphynx, as if it was indeed speaking through
+the still night air!
+
+"'I am the Soul of the Nation,'" the singular voice went on, speaking as if
+for the lips of stone. "'Storms have raved around my forehead and thunders
+have shaken my base, but nothing has moved me! Scarred I may have been by
+the lightning and discolored by the beating rain, but the hand of man
+cannot touch me, and even the elements can disturb me not. I have seen ten
+thousand storms, and not one but was followed by the bright sunshine,
+because Nature was ever true to itself. Be but true to yourselves, loyal
+men of the great American Union, and the nation you love shall yet be
+throned above the reach of treason as I am throned above the touch of
+man--unapproachable in its power as I am fearful in my eternal isolation!'"
+
+Halstead Rowan had ceased looking at the Sphynx and gazed only at its
+oracle, long before the strange rhapsody concluded; and Margaret Hayley,
+supported upon the arm of Captain Hector Coles, had more than once
+shuddered, and at last leaned so heavily upon that arm as to indicate that
+she must be suddenly ill. To the startled inquiry of the Captain as to the
+cause of her trembling, she replied in words that indicated her feeling to
+have been excited by the strangely-patriotic words, and by a request to be
+taken back at once to the Profile. That request was immediately heeded, and
+the three passed on up the road, where all the other company had some time
+preceded them.
+
+But one expression more fell from the lips of the strange man, as the three
+moved away, and Margaret Hayley heard it.
+
+"Why, you must be a poet!" said the Illinoisan, when his companion had
+concluded the rhapsody.
+
+"No, I am only a lawyer, and you must not take all that we say for gospel,
+or even for poetry!" was the reply. "Come, let us go back to the house and
+imagine that we have had enough of moonlight."
+
+The two followed up the road at once and overtook the three but a moment
+after. As they passed, "H. T." recognized first the shoulder-straps of the
+officer, and then the figure of the lady upon his left arm. Turning to see
+her face more closely, his own was for a moment under the full glare of the
+moon, and Margaret Hayley had a fair opportunity to observe every feature.
+Shaded as were her own eyes, their direction could not be distinguished;
+but they really scanned the face before them with even painful earnestness,
+a low, intense sigh of disappointment and unhappiness escaping her when the
+inspection had ended. She walked back with Captain Coles and her mother to
+the door of the Profile, and left them in conversation on the moonlit
+piazza, escaping up-stairs to her own room and not leaving it again during
+the evening. What may have been her thoughts and feelings can only be
+divined from one expression which fell from her lips as she closed the door
+of her chamber and dropped unnerved upon a chair at the table:
+
+"Who can that man be? His voice, and yet not his voice! A shadow of his
+face, and yet no more like his face than like mine! Am I haunted, or has
+this trouble turned my brain and am I going mad? Another such evening would
+kill me, I think!"
+
+There was the sound of horn and harp and violin ringing through the long
+corridors of the Profile that evening; and many of those who had shared in
+the glory of the moonrise and the solemn levee of the Old Man of the
+Mountain were joining in the dance that went on in that parlor which
+appeared large enough for the drill evolutions of an entire regiment. But
+few of the new-comers joined the revel for that evening; most of them,
+fatigued at once with travel and excitement, crept away to early beds in
+order to refresh themselves against the morning; and nothing remained, of
+any interest to the progress of this narration, except Captain Hector Coles
+walking up and down the long piazza for more than an hour after Margaret
+Hayley had retired, his boot-heels ringing upon the planks with a somewhat
+ostentatious affectation of the military step, Mrs. Burton Hayley meanwhile
+leaning upon his arm, and the two holding in tones so low that no passer-by
+could catch them, a conversation which seemed to be peculiarly earnest and
+confidential.
+
+Yet there was still one occurrence of that night which cannot be passed
+over without serious injury to the character of this record for strict
+veracity. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, during a large part of the night, was in
+serious trouble which required the full exercise of her maternal
+vigilance--while Miss Marianna, deserted by her father who had
+surreptitiously smoked a short pipe in the edge of the woods and thence
+gone to bed and to sleep, wandered disconsolately round the parlor,
+dressed in more costly frippery than would have sufficed to establish two
+mantua-makers, unintroduced to any one, stared at with the naked eye and
+through eye-glasses, her freckles complimented in an undertone that she
+could not avoid hearing, the name of her dress-maker facetiously inquired
+after, and the poor girl, made miserable by being dragged by her silly
+parents to precisely the spot of all the world where she least belonged,
+suffering such torments as should only be inflicted upon the most
+unrepentant criminal.
+
+But the peculiar trouble of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame has not as yet been
+explained, and it must be so disposed of in a few words. Ill health, on the
+plea of which she had started on her "summer tour," had really attacked her
+interesting family, or at least one highly-important member of it. Master
+Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, naturally a little sharp set after his long ride
+and accustomed to regard any supper with "goodies" on the table as
+something to be clung to until the buttons of his small waistband could
+endure no farther pressure--Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, as has
+already been mentioned, had remained at the table a little beyond the
+bounds of strict prudence. In other words, he had devoured beef-steak and
+fruits, fish and milk, biscuits and pickles, tea, pickled oysters and
+sweetmeats, until even his digestive pack-horse was overloaded. Very soon
+after supper he had petitioned to be taken to bed, and then unpleasant if
+not serious symptoms had been no long time in supervening. During a large
+part of the night there were a couple of chambermaids running to and from
+that part of the building, with hot water, brandy, laudanum, foot-baths and
+other appliances for suffering small humanity; while Master Brooks Brooks
+kept doubling himself up in all imaginable attitudes and crying: "Oh,
+mommy!" in a manner calculated to wring the heart of that motherly
+person,--to make Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, who wished to sleep, growl out
+some reasonably-coarse oaths between his clenched teeth,--and to induce
+wonder on the part of people who had occasion to pass the front of the
+building or come out on the piazza, whether they did or did not keep a
+small menagerie of young bears, wolves and wild-cats in full blast on the
+second floor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+     MISS CLARA VANDERLYN AND HER PET BEARS--A MISADVENTURE AND A
+     FRIENDLY HAND IN TIME--THE QUESTION OF COURAGE--HALSTEAD
+     ROWAN AND MRS. BROOKS CUNNINGHAME ON GEOGRAPHY--THE DEAD
+     WASHINGTON, THE FLUME AND THE POOL--WITH THE PERSONAL
+     RELATIONS WEAVING AT THAT JUNCTURE.
+
+
+Breakfast was over at the Profile, on the next morning; the stages had
+rolled away for Littleton, the Crawford and Plymouth; and preparations were
+in progress for a ride of two or three wagon-loads down the glen to the
+Flume,--when "H. T.," cigar in mouth, passed out from the bar-room to the
+piazza and thence across the plateau in front, towards the billiard-room
+and ten-pin-alley, standing a hundred yards away to the right, and at the
+very bottom of the slope of the mountain. He had seen, in the dusk and
+afterwards in the moonlight of the night before, that a couple of the rough
+pets of the mountain region were sojourning at the Notch, in the shape of
+half-grown black bears, chained to stakes some twenty feet apart, with a
+dog-kennel for their joint retreat, perhaps a hundred feet from the house
+and immediately in front of it, where their antics could be discerned and
+enjoyed from the piazza and the front windows. He had seen, too, going out
+earlier that morning, that they did not appear yet old enough to be
+dangerously vicious, and that they seemed very playful for that description
+of beast. Everybody was feeding them, from early morning to dusk, with
+nuts, raisins and crackers surreptitiously taken from the table for that
+purpose; and the youngsters no doubt consumed in feeding the young Bruins,
+quite as much food as they themselves managed to devour.
+
+Just then not less than a dozen persons were surrounding the household
+favorites, feeding them, putting them through their clumsy evolutions which
+principally consisted in sitting erect or climbing a short post to get a
+nut placed on the top,--or developing the usual human propensity for
+teazing. Most of them were ladies, and among the others, as he went by at a
+short distance, he recognized Miss Clara Vanderlyn, his fellow-passenger of
+the day before,--her face rosy with the excitement of a just-accomplished
+morning walk, her bonnet on arm, and her whole countenance radiant with
+amusement as she plied the dusky pets with her pocket full of nuts and
+raisins. She seemed to have acquired a wonderful ascendancy over the beasts
+in a very brief acquaintance; for while all the others shrank from coming
+absolutely within reach, she not only fed them without fear but rubbed
+their black coats and patted their gristly noses as if they had been pet
+kittens. Two or three men were lounging near, evidently admiring the new
+lady accession to Profile society, but none claiming an acquaintance.
+
+"H. T.," who either had a propensity for ten-pins that morning,
+overbalancing the admiration of Miss Vanderlyn which he had shown the day
+before, or a still stronger attraction for company whom he knew to be at
+the alley--"H. T." was just passing on when Margaret Hayley, accompanied by
+the inevitable Captain Hector Coles, came out of the door of the
+billiard-room and advanced towards the bear-stakes. It must remain a
+mystery whether this appearance from the door did or did not make a change
+in his own necessity for exercise: suffice it to say that he stopped,
+turned partially around and joined the group who were making levee to the
+Bruins.
+
+At that moment, when Clara Vanderlyn had succeeded in luring one of the
+bears to the top of his "stool of repentance" (the short post), and was
+bending close above him, feeding and fondling what few other female hands
+dared touch,--a new actor came upon the scene, in the shape of Master
+Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, accompanying his "Mommy." He had _not_ died the
+night before as might have been expected from his surfeit, but the freckled
+appearance of his face was materially improved by a ground hue of greenish
+white which his short sickness had imparted. His careful mamma had dressed
+him for that gala-day in a complete plaid suit of blue and white, with a
+cap of the same material and a black feather; and he looked scarcely less
+ornamental than useful. Evidently, sick as he had really been, he was all
+alive and awake that morning and might be safely calculated upon for adding
+to the general comfort by prowess of mouth and fingers. And the company
+were not obliged to wait very long for proof that the scion of the house of
+Cunninghame was aware of the duties of his position and quite equal to
+them. He left the maternal hand, spite of the clutching of the latter, at
+the moment of arriving at the bear-stakes, and spying what he rightly
+judged to be a good opportunity, stepped rapidly round behind the bear,
+caught him by the stumpy tail, and gave him a sharp twitch which nearly
+threw him from the top of the post.
+
+In an instant the playful nature of the bear was gone, and with one sudden
+growl he raised his heavy paw with its sharp claws and struck full at the
+face of Miss Vanderlyn, not two feet from him. Every one present saw the
+blow, but no one seemed to have enough presence of mind or courage to
+shield her from a stroke which, falling full in her unprotected face, must
+certainly have disfigured her for life.
+
+No one--it has been said: no one of those known to be present, most of whom
+were women or children; and neither "H. T." nor Captain Hector Coles had
+yet come near enough to be of any possible service. Yet the blow did not
+reach Clara Vanderlyn. A hand and arm were suddenly dashed between the paw
+and the threatened face, with such force that while the sharp claws tore
+the skin and flesh in ribbons from the back of the hand and split the
+coat-sleeve as if it had been paper,--the bear was knocked backward off his
+perch and rolled over in a ball on the ground at the side of the kennel.
+When any of the company sufficiently recovered from their astonishment to
+glance at the face of the lucky yet unlucky preserver, they saw that it was
+that of the bluff arrival of the evening before, Halstead Rowan.
+
+With the exception of three persons, all present rushed up at once, under
+the impression that Rowan's hand must be seriously injured. One of these
+exceptions was "H. T.," who made a movement to dart forward, even from his
+distance, when he saw the blow impending, but who the instant that it had
+fallen turned and walked back towards the ten-pin alley. The second was
+Margaret Hayley, who had recognized the personality of both the
+conversationists of the previous evening, and who naturally stopped in
+blank surprise to see one of two persons whom she supposed to be intimate
+friends, turn away the moment that the other was wounded. The third was
+Captain Hector Coles, who really had no power to do otherwise than obey the
+check laid upon him by the lady's hand.
+
+All who saw knew that the injury must be severe, but it might have been the
+scratch of a pin for any effect which it seemed to produce on the
+Illinoisan. The blood was streaming profusely from the wound, but almost
+before any one saw it the other hand was inserted in a side-pocket, and a
+white handkerchief drawn thence and wrapped around the injured member.
+
+"Are you much hurt, sir?"
+
+"What a narrow escape, miss!"
+
+"Indeed, I thought his paw would injure your face terribly!"
+
+"Somebody ought to kill that boy!"
+
+These and a score of similar expressions burst from the dozen or two of
+spectators. Miss Vanderlyn had caught the young man by the sleeve of the
+coat, with perceptible nervousness in her grip, and said, with all that
+sweet smile faded from her face, and her voice trembling with anxiety:
+
+"Indeed--indeed, sir, I am very grateful to you. I should have been badly
+hurt, I fear, but for your kind aid. Pray let us do something to prevent
+your suffering so much from your generosity. I am afraid that you are very
+much injured!"
+
+"Oh, not in the least, madame--miss, perhaps I should say. Nothing but a
+scratch; and if the company at the Profile do not object to a big glove,
+none of us will be aware of the accident in a few minutes."
+
+"Trust me, sir!" said the young lady, in the same anxious tone, "_I_ shall
+be aware of your kindness so long as I live."
+
+"Pray do not mention it again!" said Rowan. "Indeed I am only too happy
+that the little affair occurred." He was telling the truth, beyond a
+question, however far he might have been from telling what they equally
+require in the courts of law--the _whole_ truth; and again for one instant
+there might have been seen sweeping over his face the same changing
+expression that had played hide-and-seek there on his first arrival the
+evening before:--admiration--regard--reverence--hope--joy; and then the
+dull shadow of recollection and hopelessness.
+
+Clara Vanderlyn, too, whether she had or had not remarked him on that
+occasion--Clara Vanderlyn saw and read his face now! Her eyes fixed for one
+moment full upon his, then drooped, and the rich blood crept up to brow,
+neck, and bosom, from which it had been expelled by the temporary fright.
+For an instant she was silent, and seemed to be studying; then she drew
+from the little reticule which hung upon her arm a card-case, took out a
+card, and handed it to Rowan, with a still more conscious blush, her old
+smile, and the words:
+
+"I am aware, sir, that this is a singular introduction, and on my part a
+painful one, as it has been the means of causing you an injury; but my
+mother and my brother will be glad to know you and to thank you better than
+I can do."
+
+"Miss Vanderlyn," said Rowan, taking the card and glancing at the name just
+as earnestly as if he had never paid any attention whatever to the register
+at the office, "you do me too much honor. I have no card in my pocket.
+Would you be kind enough to give me another of yours?"
+
+She at once handed him another card and a pencil, and he dashed down, in a
+bold, rapid, and mercantile hand, though he used the sinister member for
+the operation, the name and address which the little black trunk had before
+revealed to those who chose to read.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Rowan. Good-morning! Pray take care of your hand, or I
+shall never forgive myself!" she said, nodding to her new acquaintance, and
+turning towards the house. Rowan bowed low, said good-morning, and strolled
+away towards the ten-pin alley, apparently not more concerned by the hurt
+than if he had merely pricked his finger. He was one of those booked for
+the ride to the Flume, but he seemed to need severer exercise, and the
+moment after he might have been seen with his hand still wrapped in the
+bloody white handkerchief, bowling away at the pins with the other, and
+humming the Grand March in "Norma" as if he thought that a favorable strain
+of music to accompany the levelling of obstacles or enemies.
+
+Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, hearing the threat directed at her promising boy,
+had mustered common-sense enough to hurry him away from the scene of
+action. Captain Coles and Miss Hayley had meanwhile come up, and "H. T.,"
+turning once more before he reached the alley, reached the spot at the same
+moment. For the first time, in broad daylight, Margaret Hayley met the
+strange man face to face, and her cheek whitened--why, even she perhaps
+could not tell--at that expression or resemblance which she traced there.
+If there was any answering expression of agitation or surprise on the face
+of the man with the initials, she failed to read it, and her eyes in a
+moment sank from a survey which seemed so profitless. They were at that
+time very near each other, and Captain Coles and "H. T." not more than six
+feet apart. Their eyes met, and that indefinable something passed between
+them before another word was spoken, which includes antagonism, if not
+deadly hostility. There was no reason to believe that they had ever met
+before the preceding evening; there was no reason to believe that they
+could ever have an interest in conflict; and yet those two men were foes,
+and would remain so until one or the other should be thoroughly conquered.
+
+"A go-ahead fellow, I should not be afraid to stake my life!" said one of
+the gentlemen who had just come up, alluding to the hero of the hour and
+seeming to address any one who might choose to answer.
+
+"Ya-a-as!" slowly and doubtingly said Captain Hector Coles, caressing his
+beard and throwing almost insufferable arrogance into a manner which
+naturally had quite enough of it. "Ya-a-as, go-ahead enough, apparently,
+but not a bit of a gentleman. Rough as the bear he just knocked over, and
+looks as if he might have come from among something of the same breed!"
+
+"No, not a gentleman, probably!" said "H. T.," with a sneer in his tone
+quite as little disguised as the other's arrogance. "But he is something a
+good deal better, in my opinion, and something a good deal rarer--a _man_,
+every inch of him!"
+
+"At any rate," said another, who had not yet spoken, "I would give a
+hundred dollars to have blundered into an introduction to that splendid
+girl as he has done, even if it cost me a hand worse scratched than his."
+
+"He has _had_ worse scratches! Did you notice the scar on his cheek, coming
+away down here to the neck?" said one of the ladies who had witnessed the
+whole affair, addressing Margaret Hayley.
+
+"No--has he a scar?"
+
+"A terrible one. I think he must have been a soldier, at some time or
+other."
+
+"I believe that he has the noblest gift ever conferred by God upon
+man,--that of courage!" answered Margaret. "If he was a slave or a savage I
+could love and respect him for that, as I should despise him if he was a
+king without it!"
+
+From the depth of what a terrible wound in her own heart was the young girl
+speaking, and what a concentrated force of bitter earnest rankled in such
+words falling from her beautiful lips! Captain Hector Coles heard, but made
+no answer, as why should he, for was he not one of the country's defenders
+and a brave man by profession? "H. T." heard her, and his upper lip, under
+the shadow of his dark moustache, set down tightly upon the lower, while
+over his handsome dusky face passed an expression which might have been
+pain and might have been the crushing out of some last scruple of
+conscience that stood between him and a half-intended line of action.
+
+"Passengers for the Flume" had been the call some minutes before; and by
+the conclusion of this scene, at nine o'clock or thereabout, the wagons for
+that daily ride of inveterate Franconians were drawn up at the door. They
+were two in number, the list of riders for that fine morning being
+unusually heavy. Not coaches, that necessarily shut away a part of the
+view, but long low wagons on jacks, each with four or five cross seats, a
+heavy brake and four mettled horses--for fine weather and through the
+shaded glen roads, the safest and pleasantest of all the mountain
+conveyances. Five minutes sufficed to fill both those conveyances, with
+some thirty persons, among the number all those in whom this narration
+awakes any interest. How they were divided off or how seated is a matter of
+no consequence, except in a certain particular. Halstead Rowan managed to
+secure a seat in the same wagon with Clara Vanderlyn, though at the other
+end of the vehicle,--and in so doing found himself by the side of Mrs.
+Brooks Cunninghame and only one remove from that hopeful, Master Brooks
+Brooks. Not enjoying quite the same facilities as some of the others for
+studying that lady the night before, he had still been attracted to her at
+breakfast and found time to "cypher up" her calibre and social position to
+a most amusing nicety. Whether wildness was the normal condition of his
+character, as seemed possible, or whether his slight rencontre with the
+young bear, and the flattering conversation with a pretty girl which
+followed, had dizzied his brain a little, as was both possible and
+natural,--he was in high spirits and the very demon of mischief had taken
+possession of him. He had apparently determined to devote himself somewhat
+to the comfort of that Arch-priestess of Shoddy during the morning ride,
+and a pleasant time that elevated personage was likely to have of it!
+
+Just after leaving the breakfast table, Rowan had chanced to overhear a few
+words of conversation between Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame and one of the lady
+habitues of the house on whom she was aiming to make a tremendous
+impression; and those few words had fully revealed one of the leading
+points of the parvenu's tactics. Some one had told her, apparently, or she
+had read the statement in so-called "polite publications"--that no one
+could be fashionable, now-a-days, without having been "abroad"--_i. e._,
+without having made at least one tour in Europe. Now that Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame _had_ been abroad, at least so far as beyond the Atlantic, at
+that very early period before she left the paternal cabin, pig and
+potatoes,--seemed the most probable of allegations; but in the matter of
+actual travel, or of those substitutes for travel which may be found in a
+thorough acquaintance with geography and a close study of guide-books and
+the best travellers, the poor woman had been as guiltless, a few weeks
+before, as the most stay-at-home and illiterate of her early acquaintances.
+But she could read, which was something, and had no conscience worth
+speaking of, which was something more. Perhaps some one had told her the
+traditional story of Tom Sheridan and his father, and the wonder which the
+latter expressed that the former "could not say that he had been down into
+a coal-pit without really going there." The worthy lady, as Rowan soon
+discovered by a few desultory words, had no corresponding objection,
+provided she could _seem_ to have been anywhere; and there was little doubt
+that she had procured a guide-book or two and "read up," as Honorable
+Members very often do before making speeches on subjects of which they know
+nothing whatever,--and as snobs sometimes do in books on "Perfect
+Gentility" and the "Whole Art of Dining Out," before going into society
+which seems a little too weighty for their previous training. How well she
+had succeeded, may best be illustrated by a little of her conversation with
+the Illinoisan, who took care to introduce the subject of her "travels"
+(with what he had overheard, as a hint) very soon after the wagons rolled
+away from the Profile, and without waiting for any formal introduction.
+
+He broke the ice with the remark, equally tempting and flattering to his
+next neighbor:
+
+"You must enjoy this fine scenery very much, madam, as you have chances of
+comparison that some of us lack. You have travelled in Europe, I believe?"
+
+"Yes--yes, sir," answered the lady, a little doubtful which of the two was
+the proper answer to so profound a sentence. If she was at all nervous
+about plunging into such untried waters with a total stranger, his
+disclamatory hint of his own experiences reassured her; and besides, one of
+the ladies was on the seat immediately behind, to whom she had been
+boasting that very morning, and it would never do to abandon the ground
+once taken.
+
+"Ah, how proud you must feel, madam, of having seen so many of the wonders
+of nature!" the wretch went on. "I have never yet been able to cross the
+ocean, myself, and the conversation of foreign travellers is naturally both
+pleasant and instructive to me."
+
+"Much obliged to you, I am sure," the lady returned. Some of the
+passengers in the wagon, who had previously observed the hero of the
+morning, and thought him any thing else rather than a fool, looked twice at
+him, at this juncture, to discover what he could mean by addressing
+complimentary conversation to that compound of ignorance and vulgarity. It
+must be owned that Clara Vanderlyn, who sat on one of the back seats while
+the interlocutors were in front, believing the man in earnest, felt for the
+moment a sensation of disgust towards him and wished her card back in her
+reticule. But if she and some of the others were temporarily deceived, the
+deception was not of long continuance.
+
+The statement by Rowan that he had never been across the Atlantic, was the
+one thing necessary to reassure Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame; and that point
+settled, she felt sure of her ground.
+
+"How long since you were abroad, madam, may I ask?" he continued.
+
+"Five years," answered the lady, who no doubt felt that both her duration
+of standing in society and the accuracy of her memory would appear the
+better for a little lapse of time.
+
+"Five years, indeed? so long?" asked the scamp, with every appearance of
+interest. "And did you have your dear little boy with you all the time?"
+
+"No, my physician did not think it prudent for me to take him along of me,
+and I left him to home with the nurse," was the reply. The fact was,
+really, that at the early period named her "physician" had been a drunken
+Indian-herb doctor, the only description of medical man likely to visit the
+shanty which she yet occupied,--and that she had been (perhaps better and
+more honorably occupied than at any time after!) doing her own work without
+the hope or thought of ever employing a servant.
+
+"Dear little fellow!" said the Illinoisan, caressing the scrubbing-brush
+head of the repulsive youngster. "What a pity that he could not have gone
+with you! By the way, madam, you went by steamer, of course. Did you take
+steamer for Paris, or--or--St. Petersburgh?"
+
+By this time most of the passengers began to perceive what was coming, and
+there were symptoms of a titter in the back seats, but nothing that warned
+or disturbed the victim.
+
+"Oh, Paris, of course!" was the answer. "Dear, delightful Paris, where the
+shops was so handsome and the women wore such elegant bunnits!" (See
+guide-books.)
+
+"You landed at Paris direct from the steamer, I suppose?" asked the
+tormentor, at which question the titter really began, but still too quietly
+to put the lady on her guard.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course!" was the answer. "The tide was high, and we went right
+up." The poor woman had probably been aground, some time, on the Hudson
+Overslaugh or the Shrewsbury Flats, and supposed that nothing but low tide
+could prevent going up to Paris by steamship.
+
+"Let me see--what is the name of that river that takes you up to Paris?"
+the scamp went on, with his face contorted into a wonderful appearance of
+earnest thought. "The--the--the--which is it, now, the Danube or the
+Amazon?"
+
+"I am not very sure," answered the lady at hap-hazard, "I almost forget,
+but I think it is the Amazon--yes, I know it must be the Amazon."
+
+At about that period there was a laugh in the back part of the long wagon,
+and Clara Vanderlyn was as red in the face as if she had been committing
+some serious fault. She would unquestionably have liked to pinch that
+naughty fellow's ears, if not to box them. But the laugh did not disturb
+Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, for the young people were frolicking all the while
+and a hundred laughs might break out without one of them being directed at
+_her_. Halstead Rowan had kept his own face perfectly serene so far, but he
+evidently began to feel twitchings around the mouth which might give him
+trouble directly, and, for fear of the worst, he fired his concluding shots
+with great rapidity.
+
+"You were in London, of course?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, a good while; we took a house there, and seen the Queen, and the
+Crystal Palace--"
+
+"Let me see--the Queen lives in the Crystal Palace, doesn't she?"
+
+"Of course she does!" answered the traveller, who remembered just so much
+as that queens and palaces belonged together, and no more.
+
+More laughing at the back of the wagon, a little choking, and some stuffing
+of cambric handkerchiefs into mouths pretty or the reverse. No irreparable
+explosion as yet, though that catastrophe could not possibly be long
+deferred.
+
+"Yes--you were in London: did you go up the Pyramids?"
+
+"No, we went to 'em, but not up 'em."
+
+"But you went up the Alps, of course?--everybody goes up the Alps."
+
+"Of course we did!" and the lady really bridled. "Think we would go so far
+as that and spend so much money, and not go up that there?"
+
+The explosion was impending--there was already a rumbling in the distance,
+which should have been heeded.
+
+"How did you go up--in _what_ kind of a vessel did you say, madam?"
+
+It is to be presumed that by this time the lady was considerably confused
+even in the smattering of information from the guide-book, with which she
+had commenced; and she could not have had any moral doubt remaining that
+the Alps was a river; for she answered, without one symptom of
+consciousness in her countenance:
+
+"We went up in a steamboat, and a nasty little thing it was!"
+
+The threatened explosion had arrived. That wagon-load of people laughed,
+shrieked and roared, bent double and chuckled themselves red in the face,
+to a degree which was very discreditable to their sense of propriety and
+very bewildering to the mountain echoes. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame looked
+around to see what was the matter, and at that moment it seemed that a dim
+perception must have crept through her head that she had something to do
+with the merriment, for she reddened, bridled and grew strangely silent.
+Halstead Rowan, as she looked around,--not by any means joining in the
+laugh, had suddenly discovered that his legs were cramped from riding,
+sprung over the side of the wagon and disappeared behind a bend of the
+road, to make the rest of the short distance to the Flume House on foot.
+
+A mile further, after this novel lesson in geography had been taken, and
+the wagons drew up at the door of the Flume House, once a great
+caravanserai that rivalled any other in the mountains, then a mere
+unoccupied pendant of the all-absorbing Profile which has literally
+swallowed it. It stands at the lower end of the Franconia Notch proper, and
+the mountains fall away below it southward, so much that the feeling of
+oppressive isolation at the Profile is here lost entirely. But there is one
+charm connected with the Flume House, that can never be forgotten by those
+who have once stood there and looked eastward; and the merry occupants of
+the before-deserted piazza, that day, were not likely to be allowed to ride
+away without having that charm called to their attention, to be remembered
+ever after as one of those marvels with which Nature confounds Art and
+defies calculation.
+
+Full before them, as they looked, loomed up the peak of Mount Liberty, so
+called, as is supposed, because the curve of the crown northward has some
+indefinite resemblance to the Phrygian liberty-cap of the French
+revolution. But a sadder and more solemn resemblance was there, needing to
+be pointed out at first, but asserting itself as a strange reality
+thenceforward, in presence or in absence. It was with a thrill of awe that
+the riders, as so many had done before them and as some of them had done
+long before, recognized the form of the Dead Washington, stretched out on
+the summit of the eternal mountains that seemed almost mighty and enduring
+enough for their awful burthen. There seemed a little obscurity in the
+mouth and lips, as if the shrouding pall partially covered them; but the
+contour of the massive nose was perfect, as the rugged peak stood relieved
+against the eastern sky, and above it the godlike forehead swept up
+southward and fell away again in the very curve of the hair drawn backward
+as it would be when lying in the calm repose of death. Northward the long
+round of Mount Liberty marked the full breast, sinking at the recumbent hip
+and rising again at the bend of the massive knee; while still farther away
+and in the exact line of symmetry, one of the peaks of the Haystack group
+shot up and fell suddenly on the other side, as the drapery would do over
+the stiffened feet. Then the resemblance was complete, unmistakable, almost
+fearful; and those who looked with reverent eyes realized that the Eternal
+Hand, thousands of years ago and in a mood that would write prophecy on the
+very face of the earth instead of recording it on tables of stone, had
+throned on the tops of the northern mountains an enduring likeness of that
+man yet unborn, whose glory was to gild every peak and fill every valley
+with the brightest and purest light of heroism.
+
+Long, and with reverent silence only broken by an occasional exclamation of
+wonder, the company gazed upon that strange spectacle, more sadly
+suggestive than any other of the wonders of the American continent. The
+voice of merriment, which had been ringing so loudly but a few moments
+before, was hushed, and tears lay nearer to the surface than laughter. It
+could not be otherwise than that the spectacle, impressive always, should
+blend itself with the sorrow of a thousand hearts and the peril of a land,
+and that something of almost superstitious omen should seem to lie in the
+recognition. There were no words to syllable the great thoughts of that
+hour. How could there be? What tongue could have spoken what the heart so
+sadly reverberated to an inner sense that was subtler and better than
+hearing? "H. T.," whose tongue, as Margaret Hayley and her companions heard
+it, had so solemnly apostrophized the iron face of the Old Man of the
+Mountain in the moonlight of the night before, stood silent and with folded
+arms on the end of the piazza, his strange, dark face full of a feeling
+that seemed sad enough for death and yet determined enough for a life of
+almost terrible daring. He was alone. He seemed to have made, even
+distantly, but one acquaintance since alighting at the Profile; and that
+one acquaintance, Halstead Rowan, had not yet paid all the penalty of his
+mischief in a walk to the Flume. He had no motive to speak: perhaps under
+no circumstances could he have done so before that company and with the
+knowledge that the eyes of Margaret Hayley might be bent upon him from the
+other end of that group of gazers. But the man who had read the patriotic
+secret of the Mountain Sphynx felt the weight of that hour--who could doubt
+it? And if his lips had spoken, would not the words they uttered have been
+something like these, that have bubbled to other lips and yet been denied
+utterance, on the same spot and since the overcasting of our national sky
+by that dark cloud of war and that darker cloud of divided feeling, only to
+be rolled away in God's good time:
+
+"Yes, look upon the Dead Washington, all of you, and prepare to bear the
+image away and keep it sacred in your heart of hearts. Dead and shrouded he
+lies, whose words might perchance have had power, at this fearful day in
+our history, to still the turbulent waves of passion and make us brothers
+once more. Dead and shrouded, when the day of doom may be near, and when
+his sword, flashing at the head of the armies of the republic, might have
+blinded treason and struck terror to the heart of the rebellion. Dead and
+shrouded, to wake not at the trump of war or the call of national peril.
+Yet look down upon us from the granite mountains that bore thine image a
+thousand years ago and will bear it until the very form and feature of
+nature decay--look down upon us from the heavens that are higher and more
+enduring even than the eternal hills, and bless us with some ray of that
+courage which dared the iron rain of Princeton--of that patient endurance
+which braved the wintry snow of Valley Forge--of that honesty which bent a
+world in awe and admiration--of that self-sacrificing humility which
+thought it but duty to refuse a crown! Not in irreverence we speak, shadow
+of the great dead! Thou didst live, and we sprang into existence as a
+nation. Thou art gone, and we wander in the night and darkness of hatred,
+of strife, of murder--perhaps even totter to a fall from which there is no
+arising. If thou hast power in the eternal world, Washington who livest, so
+faintly shadowed by the Washington that is dead--save us whom the might of
+no other nation can cast down--save us from ourselves!"
+
+Hush! the fancy so reverently assumed cannot be cast off in a moment.
+Hush!--was not that low rumbling in the north which men call thunder, the
+voice of the Giant of Mount Liberty turning suddenly in his grave-clothes
+to answer the appeal? God!--if it might be so!--"Oh, for an hour of Hickory
+Jackson!" cried the agonized nation when the first paralysis fell upon our
+men in power: oh, for one moment of George Washington now!
+
+The Celt looks for the awakening of Brian Boroihme from his long sleep in
+the Wicklow mountains, falsely called his death, after the red field of
+Clontarf, and for the deliverance of Ireland from the Saxon oppressor,
+which is to follow; the German is still waiting for the sounding of that
+horn which is to start Frederick the Redbeard from his repose in the
+Kypphauser, where the faithless laid him to rest, believing that he was
+dead, after his charmed bath in the Cilician Cydnus; even the old soldiers
+who guard the mighty dust of Napoleon beneath the dome of the Invalides,
+speak of the "Midnight Review" in other words than those of Friederich
+Freiligrath and hold a dim impression that the life of Austerlitz and the
+Pyramids must linger even after St. Helena: why may not the patriot heart
+of America believe that the man who of all others best represented the full
+glory of a nation, is immortal in body as in spirit, and that the Father of
+his Country will some day dash out from the sarcophagus that holds him
+prisoner at Mount Vernon,--to shame recreancy, to hurl incapacity from
+power, and to save, in its dark hour, the fabric that his great soul loved
+and his great hand builded?
+
+No!--that awful presence lies unmoved on its bier on the peaks of the
+mountains, the blue sky the canopy of its catafalque, the waving trees the
+plumes of the warriors who guard it, and the hoarse storm wind its requiem.
+And while it so sleeps, the future of the republic, which seems to us in
+darkness, lies really in a Hand that knows no death and never changes in
+its unfaltering purpose!
+
+But the saddest as well as the sweetest things in life have an end, and the
+halt of the company at the Flume House, that morning, supplied no exception
+to the rule. Just as the wagons were once more loaded, Halstead Rowan came
+striding up, his cigar smoked out, and his face the most unconscious
+imaginable, and took the seat which he had not long before vacated. Mrs.
+Brooks Cunninghame was very busy, at that period, looking after some of the
+details of arrangement of Master Brooks Brooks' dress, which had become
+slightly disarranged; and perhaps she did not see him. Let us suppose so,
+for she certainly did not notice her late student in geography. She was a
+little red in the face, which let us also suppose to have been the effect
+of the weather and not of mortification. And so all once more in place,
+away dashed the wagons to that marvellous gap in the mountains which gives
+name to the house. The road seemed very rough and broken, the rises and
+descents grew sharper, and the forest scenery wilder. Galloping his four
+horses up a steep ascent to the left, each driver vigorously applied the
+brake as the wagons literally slid down the very sharpest bit of road
+descent to be found at the Franconia (except perhaps on some portions of
+the Bald Mountain)--a descent so sudden, and overhanging a ravine so
+frightful, that some of the handsome eyes looked larger than ever for the
+moment, all the riders involuntarily threw themselves back in the laboring
+and creaking wagons, and pretty little screams that had no affectation in
+them emancipated themselves from rosy lips and took excursions out into the
+summer air. Then thundering over a rickety wooden bridge, almost at the
+bottom of the ravine, and up another slight ascent, the wagons stopped
+under a clump of wide-spreading trees at a rough platform, and disembarked
+their passengers, leaving all to follow their will in examining that wonder
+of nature in one of her frolic moods.
+
+And what was the Flume like, to those who that day saw it for the first
+time? An irregular crack or fissure in the side of the mountain, half a
+mile long, and from ten to fifty feet in depth, such as the wedge of some
+enraged Titan might have made when he had determined to split the earth
+asunder, and used the thunder as a beetle. Whether he was frightened by the
+big oval boulder which fell into the fissure half way up, and has ever
+since hung suspended there, touching only at the points, and apparently
+ready to fall at any moment--who shall say? At all events, if he intended
+to disrupt the earth he desisted for the time; and let us be duly thankful!
+
+Walking laboriously over the broad flat stone platform at the mouth of the
+gorge, with the thin sheet of bright water straggling over it, then
+ascending the rough stairs of board that lay irregularly on either side,
+and anon climbing carefully over the mossed and slippery rocks that offered
+such precarious foot-hold, the party ascended the Flume and stood at last
+between walls of less than six feet separation, the rock rising fifty or
+sixty feet on either side, and almost as square as if cut by the chisel of
+an artificer, impassable slimy boulders piled in confusion far ahead, the
+rough little stream tumbling away through the wilderness of stones beneath,
+and a chill dampness like that of the grave striking in to the very
+life-blood of those who had been imprudent enough to tempt the mountains
+without the protection of thick garments and warm flannels. Once, a little
+white Blossom of the company, just unfolding to the June luxuriance of
+womanhood, and whose name has no interest in this narration, was tempted
+by a mischievous relative and protector to try walking a rounded and
+slippery log that bridged the chasm, a few feet above the rough rocks and
+water below; but her nerves failed and her head grew dizzy when she was
+half way across, her lip quivered and then fluttered out a little cry of
+alarm, and her mischievous tempter retraced his own steps just in time to
+catch her and keep her from an ice-cold bath and limbs bruised on the rough
+stones lying in the stream underneath.
+
+There was another log spanning the Flume, a little higher up the chasm, and
+at a very different altitude from terra firma--hanging, in fact, like a
+stout black fence-rail, not less than eighty or an hundred feet in the air.
+Encircled by the eternal dampness rising out of the Flume, it could not be
+otherwise than slimy and slippery; and only a moment before the nameless
+Blossom tempted the log below, some of the company had looked up and
+remarked with a shudder that a firm foot and cool head would be necessary
+for the man who should tread over that frail bridge with its crumbling
+bark. As if the two had some mysterious connection, the moment _after_
+Blossom's misadventure, some one heard voices in that direction and looked
+up again. Two figures stood upon the brink, and not so far away but that at
+least _some_ of the group below recognized them as "H. T." and Halstead
+Rowan, who had left the rest as they abandoned the wagons and commenced
+ascending the gorge.
+
+Among those who looked up was Margaret Hayley, and her eyes were among
+those that recognized the two figures. What those people were to her, or
+why she said "Look!" in a quick and even agitated voice, probably the young
+girl could have told quite as little as either writer or reader; but such
+was the fact, and the motion of her eyes at the moment, accompanied by the
+word, drew the regards of both Captain Hector Coles and Mrs. Burton Hayley,
+who stood beside her at the bottom of the Flume. They, too, with the
+others, heard the words and saw the action that immediately followed.
+
+Halstead Rowan had one foot thrust forward on the log, his other on the
+firm ground behind. "H. T." stood on the rock beside him, making no motion
+to cross. There was evidently a banter between them, and though they were
+probably not aware of the fact, their words were readily distinguishable
+beneath.
+
+"None of _my_ business, I suppose; but it is folly!" they heard spoken by
+the voice of "H. T."
+
+"I suppose that every thing is folly which goes out of the hum-drum track
+of every-day life!" they heard Rowan reply. "But I like folly, and so here
+goes! Will you follow me?"
+
+"Without wanting to go over?--no!" was the answer.
+
+The words had scarcely left his lips when Rowan sprang forward on the log,
+stepping lightly, but balancing himself with some care, towards the other
+side. Insensibly all who saw him held their breath. If he should be correct
+enough in his balance, who could say that the log might not be a rotten
+shell, ready to fall under the heavy weight of the stout athlete? In fact,
+he had scarcely reached the middle when the tottering fabric seemed to give
+way and come toppling down into the chasm below. Not in reality; for had it
+done so, the career of the Illinoisan, with whom we have by no means
+finished, would have been ended for all time. The startling appearance was
+created by the dislodging of a large shell of the rotten bark by his foot,
+more than half costing him his balance, and bringing out from the group
+beneath a chorus of cries that might well have disturbed what remained of
+equilibrium. One cry sounded sharper and higher than all the rest: there
+were those present who knew from whose lips it came: enough for us to say
+that it did not come from those of Margaret Hayley, whose eyes were still
+turned upward with a feeling in them very different from fear. Before the
+cry had fairly died away, the peril, whatever it might have been, was past,
+and Halstead Rowan stood on the other side of the chasm, bowing to the
+group who had been observing him, as he learned from the cries, at the
+bottom. They saw "H. T." turn and walk away at the same moment; and then,
+drawing a long breath, Margaret Hayley said, much more to herself than to
+her immediate companions:
+
+"What a thing beyond all admiration is that courage!"
+
+"Which our other friend does not seem to be troubled with in any great
+degree!" said Captain Hector Coles, finishing out the sentence with a tone
+perceptibly sneering. Margaret looked round at him with a look which might
+have been one of inquiry, then turned away her face again and said:
+
+"No, I suppose not! Not more than half the world can be demigods: the
+others must be common people, or worse!"
+
+Whether Captain Hector Coles liked the tone of the reply, or not, is
+uncertain. At all events he scowled a little and said nothing more, while
+Mrs. Burton Hayley stole a look into the face of her daughter which had no
+hypocrisy in it and was full of wonder and trouble.
+
+Five minutes afterwards the company were all again at the mouth of the
+Flume, and there Halstead Rowan, a second time the hero of the day, joined
+them. "H. T." did not make his appearance: he had struck across, the
+Illinoisan said, without waiting for him, over the almost impassable fallen
+timber and through the spruce thickets, by the cross-path to the Pool. A
+few minutes more sufficed to re-seat the group in their wagons and to
+deposit them once more at the door of the Flume House, whence they took
+their way on foot, straggling in every picturesque variety of locomotion
+towards that equally-curious pendant of the Flume which is often missed by
+those who visit the better-known wonder.
+
+The Pool lay all alone, until this somewhat numerous company came to
+disturb its solitude. A singular object indeed--an exaggeration of all the
+other mountain amphitheatre fountains, nearly round, a score or more of
+yards in diameter, with the toe of the horse-shoe scooped out of a solid
+rock thirty or forty feet in height, smoothed and rounded as if cut by
+human hands, a bright, clear stream dashing down at that point, the rocks
+further away from the toe rising broken and jagged to the height of perhaps
+an hundred feet, and the mode of approach of the passengers a jagged line
+of ricketty steps, terribly perpendicular, sloping down from that highest
+point and presenting no temptations to the decrepit or the nervous. At the
+bottom of this singular basin the water, bright and clear in the few places
+where it ran shallow over the bleached stones, but under the shadow of the
+ledge so deep as to seem black as midnight.
+
+"Nobody here!--it doesn't seem like old times!" said an elderly gentleman
+who had visited the Pool many times in other days,--as the ladies were with
+some difficulty assisted down the steps. "No boatman, and not even a boat!
+Where is Charon, I wonder?"
+
+"Oh, yes, where _is_ Merrill?" asked another. "The man with the leaky scow
+and the white muslin awning, who always charged a York shilling for
+ferrying people over to the Elysian Fields lying among the rocks and logs
+yonder."
+
+"I remember, once," said the old gentleman, "that while his lieutenant
+paddled us around under the spray of the fall yonder, and over to the steps
+which used to hang from the rocks there on the opposite side, Merrill read
+us an autograph letter from Queen Victoria, dated in the kitchen at
+Buckingham Palace while the august lady said that she was rolling
+apple-dumplings,--and also gave us a lecture on geography, in which he
+proved that this spot was the very centre of the earth, from which all
+latitude and longitude ought to be calculated."
+
+"Well, he was right in some degree," said Halstead Rowan, who stood near,
+and who fixed his regards at the same moment on Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame,
+still looking after the welfare of that interesting child. There was not
+even the suspicion of a smile upon his face as he went on, and there
+certainly was not upon the face of the lady for whose benefit the discourse
+was evidently intended. "I do not know about the latitude and longitude,
+but this Pool is certainly the centre of the earth and exactly opposite to
+China, so that a plummet, with _a line long enough_, dropped here, would be
+certain to come out somewhere on the shores of the Hoangho or the Kiangku."
+
+"Nonsense!" said one grave lady (not Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame) who did not
+appreciate the joke.
+
+"Not a bit of it, madame!" said the scamp, who thereupon turned his battery
+at once in her direction. "There is no doubt whatever of the truth of the
+statement, for I have been here myself when the defunct pig-tailed Chinamen
+came popping up, who had committed suicide by drowning themselves on the
+other side of the world, on account of the cruelty of a copper-colored
+divinity with almond eyes and feet the size and shape of the last dumpling
+in the pot, or a trifling deficiency in the rat-crop or the dog-census."
+
+"Impudence!" muttered _that_ lady, who seemed to regard the "whopper" as a
+personal insult; but the majority of the company appeared to view the
+affair in a very different light and to be rather pleased than otherwise
+with the go-ahead fellow who could walk over verbal and physical bridges
+with the same charming recklessness. It may be anticipating to say that
+there was one among them, whose face had paled when he trod the log over
+the Flume, and who could not even laugh at the light words which she
+otherwise enjoyed,--so much deep and new and strange feeling lay at the
+bottom of the interest. And it may _not_ be anticipating, in the minds of
+any who have perused the late foregoing pages with due attention, to say
+that that silent, thoughtful, observing one was Clara Vanderlyn, between
+whom and the Illinoisan there yawned a gulf of circumstance and position so
+wide and deep that no one but a madman (or what is madder still--a mad
+_woman_) could possibly have dreamed of stepping over it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+     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 has _become_ of 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 an _axe_, 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 saw a 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 gloria_ big 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 saw the 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!"
+
+"He _is_ at 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.
+
+"I _can_ swim!" 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 one realized, 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 came up, 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 in that 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 I _can_ be 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.
+
+"_I_ am 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 manipulations and 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 towards _her_, 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 steadiness of 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 had been 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 the _eyes_, 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 to look 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 unpleasant _eclaircissement_--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 did _he_ tell 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 will _not_ go back--I _will_ try the
+experiment--I _will_ win 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 very midst 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, for she 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 the
+_denouement_ that 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 sympathies of 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+     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 some degree 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 ask _you_, 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.
+
+"Than _any_ other 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? _That_ is 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 shoot _her brother_, merely because he is a fool?--Oh, no,
+Townsend--you could not think _that_! 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 you _are_
+odd 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 deuce _are_ you?"
+
+"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, employed at 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. _They_ took
+it--_I_ did 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.
+
+"I _know_ that 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.
+
+"And _that_ reason he has not, I know!" said Margaret. "The man who uttered
+the words that _I_ heard 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 is _not_
+Townsend, 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 do _that_!"
+
+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. Whither one 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 amusing to 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 home at 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; but she 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 with the 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 of
+_his_ lake 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 the
+steam 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 fate _was_ upon 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.
+
+"Oh, ma, I forgot," she said, introducing. "Mr. Townsend, of Cincinnati,
+whose acquaintance I made yesterday when he saved the poor little boy from
+drowning, at the Pool."
+
+Her eyes were fixed very closely upon the face of Townsend as she said
+these words, and so were those of Captain Hector Coles. If either saw, or
+thought that they saw, a momentary red flush pass over the dark
+countenance, coming as quickly and fading as rapidly as one of the flashes
+of the Northern Lights,--did they see any corroboration of the suspicions
+of the evening before, or was that flush merely the natural expression of a
+sensitive man whose good deeds were mentioned in his presence?
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley nodded, as she could not avoid doing under such
+circumstances, but there was very little cordiality in the nod; and there
+was something quite as lofty and uncongenial in the manner of the words
+with which she accompanied it:
+
+"I remember hearing my daughter speak of Mr. Townsend's having been made
+the means, under Providence, of preventing an accident."
+
+The ostentatious Bible yet lay upon its carved stand, oh, Mrs. Burton
+Hayley, did it not!
+
+No farther conversation followed at that moment, though there may have been
+one, and mayhap two, in that mixed boat-load of fifteen or twenty, who
+would have been glad to pursue it under more favorable auspices. Certain it
+is that the lawyer kept his gaze upon the proudly sweet face of Margaret
+Hayley, quite as steadily as propriety would by any means allow, and that
+her face answered back something more of interest, under the shade of her
+wide leghorn jockey, than either of her immediate companions might have
+been pleased to see. She was interested in her new acquaintance, beyond a
+question: was she something more? Answer the question--oh, heart of
+woman!--could it be possible that the by-gone love, once so truly a part of
+her very being, had already so faded, in one short month, that a feeling
+warmer than friendship could centre around a mere stranger of two days'
+beholding? Was that "ideal," once believed to have been found, then lost
+again, presenting itself in another and still more enticing shape, to make
+constancy a myth and womanly truth a by-word? Small data, as yet, from
+which to judge; but stranger things than this have chanced in the rolling
+years, and the faith of humanity still survived them!
+
+Out on the Lake by this time the burlesque upon a steamboat had floated,
+and the sheet of water lay under as well as around the passengers--perhaps
+a quarter of a mile in width and a mile in length, shut in on the side of
+approach by the woods, and beyond on all sides by the eternal hills. Never
+was silver jewel dotting the green bosom of nature more beautiful--never
+one more sweetly nestled away near the very heart of its mountain nurse.
+The proverbial winds of the Notch for once were still, and only a gentle
+ripple stirred the glassy surface here and there as a breath touched it
+like the skimming wing of a wild bird. The meridian sun lay lovingly on the
+side and crest of the mountain rising eastward from the edge of the water,
+touching its bald, scarred brow with ruddy gold; and if the first on the
+cliffs nodded at times, they nodded sleepily with the very expression of
+repose. Spirit of calm, delicious quiet!--was there ever a spot more truly
+sacred to thee, than Echo Lake at such moments, when a few gentle, loving
+hearts, close bound to each other and shut in from the world, are beating
+with slow pulses as the life and centre of the great mystery of nature?
+Other boat-loads than that of this July noon, have grown quiet beneath such
+a feeling, as the boatman ceased his paddling, the boat drifted lazily on,
+lips grew silent, eyes closed, and human thought floated away on a very sea
+of dreams.
+
+They had swept over, in rapt silence for the last few moments, until they
+lay beneath the very brow of the eastern mountain. Then that silence was
+broken by the boatman rising from his seat and blowing a long, steady blast
+on his six-foot tin horn, in size and shape like those used on the Western
+canals, but sadly dinted by careless use and frequent falling. The company
+were reminded, then, that they were floating on Echo Lake and no stream of
+the land of faerie. The long, low note died on the car, and an appreciable
+instant of silence followed. Then it came back from the brow of the
+mountain above, a little louder than before, and yet a little mellowed by
+distance. Another instant, and the same sound reverberated from the
+opposite hill, the back of Eagle Cliff. Were there still more echoes to be
+added to the two that had already made the place notable? Yes, a third came
+back from the range that sloped away from the head of the Lake,
+northward--a little fainter, and broken now; and then the more distant
+hills caught the sound, as if each had a right, which it jealously claimed,
+to some portion of that greeting from the human breath; and far as the eye
+could trace the blue peaks rising behind each other through the gaps
+beyond, the ear could catch a corresponding reverberation,
+fainter--fainter--fainter,--till it died away in a drowsy murmur and
+silence followed. Then the horn passed from hand to hand and from mouth to
+mouth, some of the gallants perhaps forming kisses of the touch of red lips
+which had preceded theirs; and some blew round, full strains that awakened
+admiration, and some made but a melancholy whistle which excited merry
+laughter. Among the many experiments tried upon that horn, there must have
+been some horrid discords startling the Dryads in the wooded shades up the
+mountain, where the gazers sometimes seemed to see the echo leaping from
+cliff to cliff and from bough to bough. But they soon came willingly back
+to the practised notes of the boatman; and some of the party shut their
+eyes and dreamed, as his quick, sharp peals rang merrily up among the
+hills,--of noble lord and gentle lady, hunting in the days of old, and of
+the bugle blasts of outlaws sounding through gloomy Ardennes or merry
+Sherwood. Anon he would end his strain with a long, low falling note, and
+they heard some old cathedral hymn wailing through solemn arches and
+bending the spirit to reverence and prayer. But through all that succession
+of sounds the hard, dry, practical, exigeant Present was rolled away and
+the romantic, easy Past stood in its stead; so easily does the mind, like
+the body, cast off its burthen, whenever permitted, and lie down, if only
+for a moment, upon the lap of indolence!
+
+Scarcely a word had been spoken, in the boat, for some minutes, under the
+influence of that spell of the hour. But the normal condition of humanity,
+when awake, is to keep the tongue in motion; and not even the spell of Echo
+Lake could keep that busy member still beyond the customary period.
+Comparisons of other echoes, in our own and other lands, were made, and as
+the boatman rowed on to complete the circuit of the Lake, the conversation
+became nearly general.
+
+"Echo Lake looks very smiling and quiet to-day," said one of the
+company--the same old habitue of the mountains who had commenced the
+conversation the day before with Halstead Rowan, at the Pool. "But I have
+seen it look very differently, sometimes when a gale came roaring and
+singing up through the Notch, and the saucy little thing got a black frown
+upon its face, reflected from the leaden sky and the wind-tossed trees up
+yonder. Echo is blown away, at such times, as any one would be who dared
+the perils of this sea of limited dimensions; and you would be surprised to
+know how hard the wind _can_ blow just here, and what little, tumbling,
+dangerous waves of rage the dwarf can kick up, trying to make an ocean of
+itself."
+
+"The most singular view that _I_ ever had of it," said another, "I caught
+half way up the Cannon Mountain one afternoon. It looked like a wash-bowl,
+and I had a fancy that I could toss a piece of soap into it from where I
+stood! But I knew that it must be Echo Lake, for somebody was blowing a
+horn; and I believe there has never been an hour of daylight, since
+creation, when a horn has not been blowing somewhere in the neighborhood."
+
+"There is one more point of view in which to see it," said Horace Townsend,
+who had not before joined at any length in the conversation. "I mean by
+moonlight, for any one who is part night-hawk."
+
+"Ah, have you seen it so?" asked the last speaker, with interest.
+
+"Yes--last night," answered the lawyer.
+
+"As often as I have been here," said the first old habitue, "I have never
+come down to see it by moonlight. What is it like?"
+
+"Like something that I cannot very well describe," was the answer. "You had
+better all come down and see it for yourselves, before you leave the
+Notch."
+
+"Still, you can give us some idea," pursued the old gentleman.
+
+Horace Townsend hesitated and was silent for a moment, when Margaret Hayley
+said, her eyes just then fixed full upon his: "I _think_ you can, Mr.
+Townsend, if I am not mistaken in the voice that I heard speaking for the
+Old Man of the Mountain, by the same moonlight, not many evenings ago."
+
+The dusky cheek of the lawyer was full of red blood in an instant. He had
+been overheard, then, in his half-mad rhapsody to Rowan and himself. And
+_she_ had heard him, of all women!--_she_ had spoken with such frankness,
+not to say boldness, and that frankness appreciation at least, if not
+admiration! He might have uttered something more about "taking his chances"
+then, and had full warrant for the self-gratulation!
+
+"I do not suppose that I can tell you either what I saw or felt," said
+Townsend, when that momentary flush had died away a little from his face.
+"I will try, however. I had been rolling ten-pins till past eleven, and it
+must have been midnight when I strolled down towards the Lake. I was in
+hopes that I should find no one here, for I wished to see it alone as well
+as by moonlight; and I had my wish. I saw no one and heard no one, on my
+way to the Lake or while here; and I do not suppose that any foot but my
+own pressed the damp green velvet that bordered the edge, or that any eye
+except my own and the All-seeing one that looks down over all the world at
+all midnights, saw the placid sheet lying in its solemn repose, with the
+shadows of the great cliff yonder reflected on its bosom, and here and
+there a little ripple as a puff of wind sighed through the branches, kissed
+the silver surface and passed over."
+
+The eyes of the speaker were full of humid light as he spoke, and at least
+one of the company marked the influence which seemed to be upon him--a mood
+of high imagination, sometimes seen in the ardent lovers of nature when
+revelling in their chosen study, and though less dangerous not less decided
+than the madness which habitually fell upon Saul. There was something
+fascinating in it, to all who saw and heard, even to those who held an
+intuitive dislike to the seer: what must the fascination have been to
+Margaret Hayley, who remembered one so unlike in personal appearance and
+yet so like in voice and apparently in habits of mind, loving nature so
+intently and describing it with the same fervor, while his love for _her_
+made a sacred undertone to all and completed the charm of look and word!
+
+The lawyer needed no further urging, but went on:
+
+"The little dock there, with the boats moored beside it, and the hut where
+our friend here keeps his horn and cannon,--all lay in a melancholy quiet
+which struck me like death--as if those who frequented them had gone away
+at some nightfall years ago, like the workmen who left their trowels in the
+mortar of unfinished Pompeii on the morning of its destruction,--never to
+return again and yet ever to be waited for, while the earth kept its course
+in the heavens. I was alone, and I suppose that imagination ran riot with
+me and made me partially a maniac. The hush was so awful that I dared not
+break it, even by a loud breath. I saw the Indians there, under yon
+sweeping trees to the left, whose branches bend down and almost kiss the
+water--saw an Indian canoe lying there, faces within it smeared with
+war-paint and the pointed arrow ready to twang from the bow-string. I
+expected to hear the war-whoop every instant--expected it, perhaps not in
+my human mind but in that other and more powerful mind for which we are
+none of us quite responsible. Then I saw--yes, I was sure that I saw the
+dusky shadow of a robber flitting along from pine to pine, far up on the
+side of the cliff there, silent and dangerous as death, and ready to drop
+down on the first living thing that passed beneath him. Then I saw fiery
+eyes through the branches, and thought that the panther and the catamount
+that lurked in these tangled woods two hundred years ago, divided
+possession once more with the Indians and were prowling about for some late
+banquet. I do not think that it was fear that I felt, for I would not have
+gone away if I could, any more than I could have gone away if I would; but
+it appeared to be the very silent haunt of nature in her hour of rest,
+wherewith nothing but the wild and the savage had any business; and it
+seemed impossible to throw aside the idea that even the tread of a
+civilized foot must be a sacrilege that only life could atone. Then there
+was a sudden plunge from the bushes into the water, a few yards up the
+bank, and a ripple following some large dark object swimming away towards
+the other shore. This was more real, and the feeling of awe began to pass
+away, for I knew that the swimmer must be a water-rat or otter that had
+been paying a midnight visit like myself and was now going homeward by the
+cool and refreshing marine route. That was the first noise I had heard, but
+others followed, for an owl began to hoot over yonder in the bushes and a
+young eagle--I suppose it must have been a young eagle--indulged in a
+scream from the top of the Cliff, where I believe he has a habit of
+nesting. Then the supernatural and the imaginative rolled away after they
+had held me an hour or two, and I was simply alone at two o'clock or a
+little later, beside Echo Lake, only half a mile from the bed that had been
+all that time waiting for me. I took the warning of the night-owl and the
+eagle, who no doubt intended to order me off as an intruder, and strolled
+back to the house. That is all, and perhaps quite enough of such rambling
+nonsense as it is!"
+
+"Rambling nonsense?" Whatever the other members of the company may have
+thought, evidently Margaret Hayley did not so regard it as she leaned
+anxiously forward, the presence of others apparently forgotten, her eyes
+fascinated in a sort of strange wonder by something in the face of the
+speaker, while her mind seemed not less singularly under the control of the
+utterance itself.
+
+Five minutes afterwards the parody on a steamboat touched the little wharf
+again and the company disembarked. Five minutes after that secondary period
+they separated from the close communion into which they had been
+transiently thrown during the preceding half-hour, many of them never to
+meet again in the same familiarity of intercourse, and perhaps some of
+them, though as yet inmates of the same abode, never to see each other's
+faces again in life! Such are the meetings and the partings of summer
+travel and watering-place existence, to which the nameless rhymer no less
+truly than touchingly referred when he spoke of those friendships quickly
+made and as quickly broken:
+
+    "----In hostels free to all commands
+      Save penury's and pity's;--
+
+    "In common rooms, where all have right
+      To tread with little heed or warning,
+    And where the guests of overnight
+      Are gone at early morning;--
+
+    "By tables where we sit at meat--
+      Sit, with our food almost untasted
+    Because we find some vacant seat
+      From which a friend has hasted;--
+
+    "In parlors where at eve we sit,
+      Among the music and the dancing,
+    And miss some lip of genial wit,
+      Some bright eye kindly glancing.
+
+    "--------the haunted chambers left,
+      That almost choke us as we ponder,
+    And leave _us_ quite as much bereft
+      As dearer ties and fonder."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+     CLOUD AND STORM AT THE PROFILE--SIGHTS AND SENSATIONS OF A
+     RAINY-DAY RIDE TO THE CRAWFORD--HORACE TOWNSEND AND HALSTEAD
+     ROWAN ONCE MORE TOGETHER--UNEXPECTED ARRIVALS--A CAVALCADE
+     OF MISERABLES--AN ASCENT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON, WITH
+     EQUESTRIANISM AND WAR-WHOOPS EXTRAORDINARY.
+
+
+Calms at sea are not more proverbially treacherous than pleasant mornings
+in the mountains; and long before that day closed which had opened so
+auspiciously, the heavy clouds came driving up through the Notch with the
+south-east wind. By nightfall a storm was inaugurated. Thenceforward, for
+two days, excursions to the Cannon, to Bald Mountain, to Mount Lafayette,
+or to any other of the points of scenery so plentiful in the Franconia
+Notch, and in which excursions all the visitors, however slightly
+acquainted, are more or less closely thrown into speaking intercourse with
+each other,--were things to be thought of but not attempted. The stages
+came in with smoking horses and moisture dripping alike from the hat of the
+driver and the boot of the coach; but few passengers arrived or departed.
+The bears walked sullenly their little round, or retired periodically to
+winter quarters in their narrow kennels. The valleys were filled with
+driving mist, varied by heavy down-pouring rain, and the mountains hid
+themselves sullenly from view, so that sometimes not even the brow of Eagle
+Cliff, hanging immediately over the house, could be distinguished through
+the dense clouds that swept down to the very roofs. Fires became prevalent,
+and those so fortunate as to possess rooms where the birchen wood could be
+set ablaze, remained closely sequestered there, dozing, or playing cards or
+backgammon, or once more turning over the leaves of books from which all
+the novelty had long before been extracted. Desultory groups met at meals,
+even the eaters coming down sluggishly. Some of the men patronized the
+billiard-room or the bowling-alley, but they rarely found lady partners or
+spectators, as in sunnier days. Even the hops in the parlor at evening were
+thinly attended, the weather seeming to have affected alike the nerves and
+muscles provocative of dancing, and the strings of the harp, violin and
+piano. Those who happened to possess copies of "Bleak House," and who
+remembered the marvellous phenomena of rainy weather existing at a certain
+time in and about the domain of Sir Leicester Dedlock, read the description
+over again and thought that nothing could be more beautifully applicable to
+the experience of storm-stayed sight-seers at a caravanserai among the
+mountains.
+
+During those two days of storm and sluggishness, Horace Townsend, merely an
+excursion acquaintance of the Hayleys and Captain Hector Coles, and not
+such an intimate as would be likely to be invited to backgammon or chat in
+one of their private rooms,--never once met Margaret Hayley more nearly
+than within bowing distance when passing in or out of the dining-room or
+the parlor. One or both may have desired to continue the acquaintance
+without quite so much of distant familiarity; but if so, one or both knew
+the antagonistic influences surrounding them and did not think proper to
+raise an arm for buffeting the waves of separation.
+
+There were not less than a dozen persons remaining at the Profile, who had
+the ascent of Mount Washington yet to make at an early day, and who
+intended to make it in the good old traditional way of horseback from the
+Crawford instead of acknowledging modern utility and bowing to the
+destruction of all romance by going up in carriages from the Glen. Some of
+these, beginning to be pressed for time, saw the steady rain and mist with
+impatience and found very little comfort in the assurances of the
+hotel-keepers, guides and stage-drivers, that the clouds were not likely to
+break away under a week, at least.
+
+Monday brought this feeling to a culmination, and that morning, spite of
+all predictions, the impatient dozen ordered a stage and determined to
+drive over to the Crawford; bespeaking clear weather on the morrow, or on
+the next day at farthest, for their especial accommodation. Horace
+Townsend, whether wearied by circumstances which placed him "so near and
+yet so far" in his acquaintance with Margaret Hayley, or really touched
+with the prevailing madness for forcing Mount Washington to smile when that
+great mountain wished to be sullen,--Horace Townsend joined the malcontents
+and formed one of the closely-packed stage-load that on Monday morning
+rolled off from the Profile on their way to the Crawford.
+
+The voyagers were pursued by no small number of jokes and jeers from the
+piazza, as they drove away, on the folly of plunging out into a storm to
+accomplish an impossibility. But if any one of the number felt for a moment
+sore in mind and faint-hearted, they were soon consoled. Most of them
+(mixed male and female, though the former predominating) were true
+Nature-lovers who had recognized that however Fame and Fortune sometimes
+play cruel tricks upon their most ardent votaries, the kind Mother seldom
+failed to unveil her bosom at the coming of one of her true children. They
+had faith in the future, and that faith was at once repaid in the glory of
+the present.
+
+For those who have only made the twenty-five miles of stage-ride between
+the two places, in fair weather, can have no idea of the peculiar charms of
+that day of capricious rain and floating mist. Closely shut in the
+lumbering coach, and well enveloped in shawls and dread-noughts and
+blankets, but with the windows open to allow looking back on the Franconia
+range they were leaving,--they enjoyed at intervals, during all the earlier
+portions of the ride, such splendid glimpses of cloud-land as never fall to
+the lot of mere fair-weather travellers.
+
+At times the shroud of mist which had enveloped them would roll away, as
+they ascended the high land rising from Franconia towards Bethlehem; and
+then they would have the peaks of the Franconia range flecked and dotted
+with swales and waves and crests of transparent white that seemed
+alternately to be thousands of colossal sheep lying in the mountain
+pastures,--and again great masses of the purest and softest eider-down
+which had floated there and rested, from millions of birds filling the
+whole air above. Mount Lafayette at one moment, as some of the voyagers of
+that lucky morning will well remember, seemed to be capped and crowned with
+a wreath of untrodden snow, miles in extent and hundreds of feet in
+depth--such as no mountain ever wore upon its brow as a coronet, from the
+first morning of creation.
+
+Exclamations of pleasure filled the coach, and jest and appreciative remark
+blended in pleasant proximity. "I shall always remember the air of this
+morning," said one, "as an atmosphere of bridal veils," and more than he
+treasured up the comparison as one worth remembering. "See here, Cora!"
+said another, to the only child in the coach, who nestled half asleep on
+the shoulder of her mother, pointing her attention meanwhile to a little
+pyramidal hill separate from the mountain range and at that point relieved
+against it: "See here, Cora! There is a little baby mountain!" "So there
+is!" answered Cora, with a world of drollery in her young eyes, "I wonder
+how long before it will grow to be as big as the rest of them!" Whereupon
+Cora was voted to have the best of the argument, and manhood once more
+worshipped childhood.
+
+Away past Bethlehem and along the Ammonoosuc, an exaggeration, in its
+rocks, upon all the other mountain streams, with its few inches of water
+finding way among a perfect bed of boulders, and making the mere word
+"navigation" suggest so droll an image in that connection as to draw a loud
+laugh from the whole coach-load. Then past a couple of fishermen, heedless
+of the rain, rod in hand and creel at side, standing on the boulders in the
+middle of the river and practising the mysteries of the Waltonian art,
+report alleged with more "flies" assisting than those which they carried in
+their pocket-books! Then on, with the mist again closed down heavily, past
+the White Mountain House, that once, before the days of glory of the Glen,
+supplied the only so-called "carriage-road" to the top of Washington.
+
+A mile or two more, and there was a space clear from trees on the left. As
+the coach swept up to it the mists seemed to shrink low for a moment. A
+heavy, dark line loomed on the sky, with almost the true sweep of a wide
+Gothic arch, a little sharpened at the top. "How graceful!" was the
+exclamation of one. "How high!--look!--why that is higher than any of the
+others that we have seen!" exclaimed a second. "Mount Washington," calmly
+said a habitue who caught a glimpse through the curtain from the back
+corner of the coach; and every voice joined in the cry.
+
+The habitue was right--cloud and mist had rolled away for an instant, just
+at the opportune moment, and they had caught that magnificent first near
+view of the monarch, throned amid his clouds, glorious in the grace of form
+and the awe of majesty--seeming to bridge the very space between earth and
+heaven! Some of those favored gazers will dream of that first glance, years
+hence, when they have been straining the mental vision upward, in waking
+hours, to that unattainable and dim which rises above the mists of common
+life. Some of them will throne the great mountain in their hearts, and
+stretch out pleading arms to it in remembrance, in the dark days of shame
+and sorrow,--as if the treading of their feet upon its rocky pinnacle would
+be indeed an escape from the world--as if they might become sharers,
+indeed, in the majesty of its great solitude. Some of the travellers felt
+the solemnity of the hour and the scene, that day; and there was not even a
+sneer or a word of misappreciation for the adventurous genius who quoted,
+heedless of all that made it inappropriate:
+
+    "Mount Blanc is the monarch of mountains:
+      They crowned him long ago,
+    On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
+      With a diadem of snow!"
+
+There was a brief ride remaining, then, till they rolled in over a level
+road, through thick overhanging woods, to the Crawford House in the White
+Mountain Notch. The mist had closed almost hopelessly down for the time,
+and they could only see occasional glimmers through it of the rough sides
+of old Mount Webster, dark-browed and massive as its namesake. It was only
+in the brighter air of morning that they were to take in the whole location
+and see in front, to the right, Mount Willard, wooded on the side exposed
+to view, but bald and rugged farther down the Notch, like the Cannon at
+Franconia; with Mount Jackson to the left in front, beyond it the still
+higher peaks of Mount Webster, and rising at the left in the immediate
+foreground the long wooded slopes of Mount Clinton, over which the foot of
+every pilgrim to Mount Washington from the Crawford must make its first
+ascent.
+
+The dull weather had driven almost all the visitors within doors, at the
+Crawford as at the Profile; but as the splashed coach rolled up there was
+at least one recognition--that of Halstead Rowan by Horace Townsend, the
+former, without any apparent reference to the humidity of the atmosphere,
+lying at lazy length on three chairs on the piazza and occupied with a
+cigar and a cheap novel. He had "shed" (that word seems to express the fact
+better than any other) his over-sized glove from his wounded hand, and
+seemed entirely to have recovered the use of that important member.
+
+New acquaintances become old and ripen into friendships, very soon when all
+other surroundings are totally strange; and the two men, each so odd in his
+way, greeted each other as if they had been friends for a decade instead of
+intimates of less than a week. There may have been some bond in common, in
+the guess which each could make of the thoughts and entanglements of the
+other, calculated to force that friendship forward, even if it would have
+progressed more slowly under other circumstances.
+
+The first inquiry of Townsend, as they shook each other warmly by the hand,
+was:
+
+"Been up Mount Washington yet?"
+
+"Not _this time_!" answered the other, significantly. "The fog has been
+nearly thick enough to swim in, ever since I have been here, and I do not
+know, if I had been as good a swimmer as you, Townsend, whether I should
+not have tried going up by water, as our friend Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame
+went up the Alps; but by land the thing has been impossible."
+
+"Many waiting to go up?--or do they nearly all go around to the Glen, this
+season?" was the next inquiry.
+
+"No, there are a good many sensible people left," was the reply, in the
+same tone of vivacious rattle. "Think of going up Mount Washington in a
+carriage! It is worse than making a mill-race out of Niagara, or
+approaching Jerusalem, as they will do one of these days, I suppose, amid
+the rumble and whistle of a railroad-train."
+
+"Don't undervalue your own employment!" said Townsend.
+
+"Oh, I do not," was the reply. "Railroad trains, as well as mills, are very
+good things in their places; but I suppose that a prejudice will always
+exist in favor of the fiery chariot instead of the balloon, as a means of
+making ascents into the celestial regions."
+
+Horace Townsend laughed. "But you have not yet told me how many are
+waiting, or when you are really going up."
+
+"Oh, there must be nearly or quite twenty of them, moping around the house,
+running out to look at the sky every ten minutes, and asking the clerk and
+the guides questions that they are about as fit to answer as a
+prairie-chicken to solve a problem in geometry! As to when we are going
+up--do _you_ know?"
+
+"_I_ am going up to-morrow, whether any one else goes up or not," said the
+lawyer. "And by the way, I have bespoken a clear day for that especial
+occasion."
+
+"Have you? Thank you! Then I suppose we can _all_ go up!" replied the
+Illinoisan, as if the information had been the most serious in the world.
+"By the way--how are they all, over yonder!"
+
+There was something very like a blush on the face of the questioner, and
+there was something varying very little from that phenomenon on the brown
+cheek of the other as he answered:
+
+"I have not seen much of either," (what did he mean by "either," a word
+peculiarly applying, in common parlance, to _two_?) "but I believe that
+they are well."
+
+"Still at the Profile?"
+
+"Yes, and likely to remain there, for any thing that I know to the
+contrary."
+
+"Any news of any kind? Any more accidents or startling events?"
+
+"None--yes, there is one startling event. The Brooks Cunninghames came away
+the same day that you left. Have you got the old woman here?"
+
+"Here? heaven forefend! No!" was the response. Then he added: "Why, by
+Jupiter, Townsend, you must be a wizard or in some kind of collusion with
+Meriam! See!--I'll be hanged if there is not the top of a mountain! It _is_
+clearing away! Hurrah for Mount Washington!"
+
+He darted in at once from the piazza to the office, and Townsend, who had
+not yet even registered his name as an arrival, followed him. Most of the
+other passengers from the Profile were by that time registered and
+scattered away to their rooms for sartorial renovation.
+
+A separate book was kept at the office, as usual at such places, over the
+head of each page of which was printed: "Horses for Mount Washington," and
+in which, every day, those who wished to secure horses and guides for the
+succeeding or the first favorable day, registered their names, with the
+number of animals required and how many of them were to be ridden by
+ladies. A good many queer autographs might be observed in that book and
+some of its predecessors, for there was almost always some mischievous
+clerk behind the counter, amusing himself by telling immense stories to
+some of the other initiated, just as the un-initiated were coming up to
+register their names,--about the perils of the ride and how near he or some
+other person had come to falling over precipices of indefinite thousands of
+feet. This description of jocular practice very often shook the nerves of
+young travellers at the moment of booking, even when the frightened person
+was too far committed or too shame-faced to abandon his project; and there
+is no doubt that the original collection of chirography thus secured would
+prove only less interesting, on exhibition, than the original draft of the
+Declaration of Independence, or----the Emancipation Proclamation!
+
+Several names had already been booked at hap-hazard on the day in question;
+and others of the storm-stayed, aware of the prospect of a "clearing-up,"
+were by that time flocking around the book to secure their places. To the
+collection already made were very soon added the signatures of Townsend and
+Rowan, who intended, as neither would have a lady in charge, to make a
+great part if not all the trip together, while the two friends of Rowan,
+who were also to be of the ascending party, would "pair off" in the same
+manner.
+
+This done, and supper-time approaching, Rowan, who had been lounging about
+in a sort of wet-weather box-coat undress which would have driven an
+ultra-fashionable to desperation, ran off to his room to make himself
+somewhat more presentable; while Horace Townsend, after patronizing the
+barber-shop for five minutes and providing himself with that inevitable
+cigar, stepped out once more upon the piazza to glance at the weather and
+satisfy himself how kind Mother Nature really intended to be on the morrow.
+He had but just emerged from the door when a close light carriage with two
+pairs of foaming horses--horses and carriage well covered with
+mud,--whirled around the corner of the Crawford and drew up at the door.
+The driver sprung from his seat and the carriage door was opened. Out of
+it stepped first Frank Vanderlyn, then Mrs. Vanderlyn and her daughter,
+who, as it afterwards appeared, had left the Profile after dinner and
+driven through post in that manner, under the impression that the next
+morning might after all be a fine one, and anxious (two of the three, at
+least) to join any party which would be likely to make the ascent.
+
+"Whew!" said the lawyer to himself, between two puffs of his cigar, as he
+recognized the new-comers without their seeming to be aware of his
+presence. "Here is more of the Rowan romance and there may be more ten-pins
+necessary. I wonder whether that haughty woman and her son have any idea of
+the presence here of their friend from Chicago, and whether they have
+driven at that slapping pace through the mud, especially to be in his way!
+I wonder, too, whether Rowan's room is on the front, so that he has seen
+their arrival. I have half a notion to go up and apprize him of it; and
+then I have a whole notion to let him find it out for himself, and finish
+my cigar before supper comes in to spoil it."
+
+Whatever might have been the amount of knowledge of the movements of Rowan
+possessed by the Vanderlyns, and whether in making a new entry on the books
+the old names were or were not always looked over,--certain it is that half
+an hour afterwards the lawyer found two more names booked for the
+ascent--those of "Mr. Francis Vanderlyn" and "Miss Clara Vanderlyn," the
+mother evidently not intending to expose herself to a fatigue which had
+lost its novelty, but to await their going and return at the Crawford.
+
+It was very evident, to Townsend, eventually, that Rowan did not know any
+thing of the new arrival until he came down to supper. The Vanderlyns had
+taken their places at the table, very nearly opposite the lawyer, and
+returned with a nod of pleasant recognition the bow which he felt compelled
+to give them under the circumstances. Halstead Rowan, as he came in, took a
+seat on the same side of the table with the new-comers, and it was only as
+he gave the customary glance down after he had seated himself, that he
+seemed to recognize the sudden addition to the social circle. When he did
+recognize it, the lawyer (that man seems to be eternally watching the
+other, does he not?) caught one instant's blank surprise on his face, and
+he even put up his hand to rub his eyes, as if he fancied himself dreaming;
+but the surprise seemed to fade in a moment, and he pursued his supper with
+that fine appetite which is usually vouchsafed to such physical men. He
+left the table before the Vanderlyns had finished, and apparently without
+their having observed him. Townsend rose immediately and followed him, with
+a smile upon his face of which he was himself unconscious. He saw the
+Illinoisan go into the office and do precisely what he [the lawyer] would
+have laid a heavy stake that he would do--step to the counter and look over
+the list of "Horses for Mount Washington." Then a queer expression, nearer
+to malicious pleasure than any thing the other had before seen upon his
+face, flitted over it as he recognized the names. It might have been merely
+satisfaction--it might have been defiance blended with it in equal
+proportions; but at least it seemed to be capable of translation into words
+like these, which the very lips moved as if they would utter:
+
+"So, Baltimore people, you are running yourselves into my way again, after
+I had gone off and left you alone, like a good fellow! You had better be
+poorer and less proud, or I richer; or you had better keep the distance
+which I put between us!"
+
+A few moments after he approached Townsend with a laugh of deprecation and
+invited him to another game of ten-pins, which seemed to be quite as
+necessary to him when in a good humor as when in a rage. The invitation was
+accepted, and the important contest began once more. It would have been a
+very unequal one, for Rowan had fully recovered the use of his right hand,
+but that the alleys themselves had something to say in the matter. Worse
+apologies for alleys than those of the Crawford no man ever saw; and such
+a thing as a "ten-strike" had never been recorded on the black-boards, as
+made on those long lines of uneven and floor-laid planks. Both the
+combatants had quite enough to do in getting down a "frame" with three
+balls; and for some time not a word outside of the game escaped either.
+
+Suddenly, and when he had rolled two of the three balls at the defiant
+pins, Rowan stopped short with one of the lignum-vitæ globes, of about the
+size of a human head, in his hand--twirling it the while as if it had been
+a paper balloon,--and said, in a short, curt tone:
+
+"They have come!"
+
+"Yes," answered Townsend, not pretending for a moment to be doubtful about
+the meaning of the personal pronoun. "Yes, I saw them at supper."
+
+"Going up with us to-morrow, I believe!" added the Illinoisan.
+
+"Ah, indeed, are they?" was the jesuitical inquiry of the lawyer.
+
+"Yes, and they will have good company, won't they!" was the response.
+
+Then he bowled away at the ten-pins, more energetically than ever, and with
+something in his manner and the nervous jerk of his arm, that once more
+recalled Townsend's idea of his feeling, while in the act, like shooting
+some one down a mountain precipice like a pebble-stone, or sweeping away a
+fate like a cobweb with one of those polished globes of iron wood.
+
+Only a couple of games, and then they went in to bed with a mutual reminder
+that the motto in the morning would be "to horse and away!" and that above
+all things they must be watchful against that phase of indolence vulgarly
+known as "oversleeping." The house was nearly silent, all the prospective
+riders having retired for the night, and soon slumber fell upon that hive
+of human bees wandering in search of the honey of unlaboring pleasure,
+gathered under the roof of Gibb and Hartshorne at the Crawford.
+
+Fell, but not too deeply, for that which is to be brief has a right to be
+intense; and the hours of repose were relentlessly numbered. Neither
+Townsend nor Rowan need have been anxious about waking in the morning; for
+such a blast and roar of horrible sound as swept through the corridor at
+about seven, A. M., from the big Chinese gong in the hands of an
+enthusiastic negro who probably felt that he had no other opportunity of
+making his requisite "noise in the world," would have been sufficient to
+awaken any thing short of the dead! For once, every one obeyed the summons
+while anathematizing the mode, and the breakfast-table was soon surrounded.
+
+Here, those who labored under some kind of indefinite impression that the
+summit of Mount Washington was somewhere beyond the Desert of Arabia--that
+nothing eatable or drinkable could ever be discovered on its top--and that
+the more they ate the better able they would be to endure the fatigue of
+the ascent,--made vigorous attacks on the steaks, eggs and chickens, and
+drank coffee, milk and cold water without limit. Those better advised (and
+the fact is here set down as a bit of practical experience worth
+heeding),--those who knew the painful effect of attempting to climb a
+mountain when gorged to repletion (the traveller, not the mountain--the
+mountain is always full of "gorges")--those, we say, confined themselves to
+an egg or two and a small slice of rare steak, and drank lightly.
+
+When the party one by one dropped out from breakfast, the scene in front of
+the house was at once picturesque and singular--worth remembering by those
+who shared in it or who have shared in one similar,--and worth the feeble
+attempt at verbal daguerreotype which may do something to preserve it
+against that day when the Crawford decays and Mount Washington is either
+levelled off or ascended by means of a locomotive or a dumb-waiter.
+
+More than twenty names--somewhat more than half of them belonging to
+ladies--were on the book for the ascent; and a corresponding number of
+horses were scattered over the broad open space in front of the door. All
+were saddled and bridled; but among them moved half-a-dozen guides in rough
+coats, thick boots and slouched hats, inspecting and tightening the girths,
+looking to the cruppers and bridles, and paying especial attention to the
+animals provided for the female portion of the cavalcade, for whose safety
+they ever hold themselves and are ever held by the hotel-proprietors,
+peculiarly responsible.
+
+By way of back-ground to this singular scene, under a clump of trees to the
+right walked two full-grown black bears (no mountain resort can be
+thoroughly complete without its bears!)--chained and surly, ever keeping
+their weary round and grunting out their disapprobation at being confined
+to such narrow quarters without an occasional naughty youngster for lunch.
+
+But what a spectacle was presented when the mount was ready and the riders
+had all emerged from the door of the Crawford! Were these the belles and
+beaux of previous days, captivating and being captivated by perfection of
+raiment as well as charm of face and grace of figure? If so, never had such
+a metamorphosis taken place since long before Ovid. Every man wore some
+description of slouched hat, brought in his baggage or hired in the hotel
+wardrobe,--bad, very bad, atrocious, or still worse, and each tied down
+over the ears with a thick string or a handkerchief. Coarse and old
+trowsers were turned up over heavy boots; and the roughest and coarsest of
+box-coats that could be provided were surmounted in the majority of
+instances by striped Guernsey shirts still rougher. All the dilapidated
+gloves and coarse tippets that could be mustered, with a few shawls and
+blankets, completed the equipment of a set of men who certainty looked too
+badly even for brigands and seemed the enforced victims of some hideous
+masquerade.
+
+But if the men looked badly, what shall be said of that which should have
+been the fairer portion of the cavalcade? Salvator Rosa never dreamed of
+such objects, and Hogarth would have gone stark mad in the attempt to
+depict them. Ringlets were buried under mob-caps and old woollen-hoods, and
+smothered in bad straw hats and superannuated felt jockeys, tied down in
+the same ungraceful manner as those of the men. Hoops had suddenly ceased
+to be fashionable, even in advance of the sudden Quaker collapse in the
+cities; and every shape, bulky or lank, showed in its own undisguised
+proportions--here a form of beauty, there a draped lamp-post, and yonder a
+bedizened bolster. In short, the very worst riding-dresses possible to
+achieve seemed to have been carefully gathered from all the old-clothes
+shops in the universe; and if the men were the ugliest brigands of the dark
+souled Italian painter, the women were the drollest witches that ever
+capered through the brain of the master-dramatist.
+
+And yet there were sparkling eyes showing occasionally from under those
+hideous bonnets, that perhaps looked the brighter for the contrast; and it
+is not sure that one or two of the sweet auburn curls of Clara Vanderlyn,
+which had strayed away from their confinement and lay like red gold on the
+neck of her shabby black riding-dress, could ever have shown to more
+bewitching advantage.
+
+Every one laughed at the appearance of the other, as the mount was taking
+place, and as Hartshorne, of the Crawford, who seemed to have measured the
+capabilities of every horse and calculated the weight and skill of every
+rider, called off the names from the roll-book, and gave place to each in
+turn.
+
+Of the material of the mount, it is only necessary to specify three or four
+of the horses, which have to do with the subsequent details of that
+eventful excursion. Miss Vanderlyn had a neat little black pony, apparently
+very careful in step, and an "old-stager" at ascending the mountains. Her
+brother Frank rode a tall bay, of high spirit and better action than any
+other horse on the ground. Rowan had asked Hartshorne (some of the others
+heard him, with a sensation of genuine horror) to give him the
+worst-tempered horse in the stable; and as he was known to be an old
+habitue of the mountains, he had been accommodated according to request. So
+far as could be discovered by his action, his horse, a bay of fifteen and a
+half or sixteen hands, with blood, foot and bottom, would kick, bite,
+strike, run away, shy to one side, and do every thing else wicked and
+unsafe that should taboo a horse from being ridden at all,--except stumble,
+from which latter fault he was remarkably clear. Townsend was accommodated
+with a gray mare of moderate size and a dash of Arab blood, that had been
+unused for nearly a month from having nearly broken the neck of one of the
+proprietors, on his personal allegation that he was at least a fair rider,
+and that the breaking of his own neck would be the least damage that could
+be inflicted on any member of the party.
+
+Thick morning mists still hid the tops of Mount Webster and Mount Willard,
+visible from the house, and hung amid the heavy woods of Mount Clinton,
+although the storm had really passed away with the night,--as at nine
+o'clock, all mounted, the guides took their places, one at the head of the
+cavalcade and the others scattered at intervals through it, and the whole
+line moved off up the mountain. It should be mentioned here, however, that
+Townsend (the observer again) saw during the mount the only recognition
+which took place between the two principal persons of his outside
+drama--Halstead Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn. Frank was mounting his horse,
+after having assisted his sister to her saddle, when Rowan brushed by her
+on his vicious bay, very near her and to the left. He saw their eyes meet,
+and saw Rowan bend so low that his head almost touched the neck of his
+horse. Clara Vanderlyn replied by a gesture quite as mute and quite as
+unlikely to be observed by any one not especially watchful. She nodded her
+head quickly but decidedly, and threw the roughly-gloved fingers of her
+left hand to her lips. That was all, and of course unobserved by Frank
+Vanderlyn, who may or may not have been aware that the man whom he had
+insulted was a member of the ascending party; but it was quite enough,
+beyond a doubt, to set the blood boiling in the veins of the Illinoisan
+with all the fury of the water surging up in flame and smoke in the Iceland
+Geysers.
+
+Rowan and Townsend had places assigned them near the middle of the line,
+but as the cavalcade began to move, the human demon of unrest was missing
+from his place. He was to be seen at the end of the piazza at that moment,
+talking to Hartshorne, and no doubt making a few additional inquiries as to
+the character of the amiable animal he bestrode. The lawyer called out to
+him to "Come on!" but he answered with a wave of the hand and a shout:
+
+"Go ahead! don't wait for me! I will be with you directly!"
+
+Through the thick woods of Mount Clinton they swept up, over a bridle-path
+so rough as to have made the most laborious if not the most dangerous
+walking--over great boulders of stone lying in the very path, and
+apparently impossible to get over or around--over patches of corduroy road
+utterly defying description, except to the men who isolated Fort Donelson
+and planted the Swamp Angels in the marshes of Charleston--over and through
+gutters and gulches of slippery stone and more slippery mud--but ever
+ascending at a painful acclivity. The horses breathed heavily; and their
+riders, in the thick and foggy air, did little better. They caught
+occasional glimpses through the trees, down the sudden slopes at the left,
+of the thick mist rolling below, but could see nothing else to remind them
+of the height they were attaining; and as the dense fog swept in their
+faces, and the trees dripped moisture on them when they swept beneath their
+branches, and the path grew more and more desolate and difficult, they grew
+silent, the whole cavalcade, apparently by common consent. There are
+aspects in which Nature looks and feels too solemn for the light word and
+the flippant jest; and the man who cannot be awed beyond his ordinary mood
+when standing under the edge of the sheet of Niagara, or beside the sea
+when it is lashed into resistless fury, or in gale and mist on the bleak,
+bare, desolate mountains of the North, should never insult the grand and
+the terrible by going into their presence!
+
+And yet all persons, who have true reverence in their hearts, are not
+always awed beyond themselves, even in the most impressive of situations:
+as witness, to some degree, the incidents following.
+
+They had surmounted the first acclivity, perhaps a mile from the Crawford,
+and were commencing a slight descent which made every rider look to the
+horse's feet and ride with a slight tremor,--when the stillness was
+suddenly broken in a manner which almost curdled the blood of the timid and
+needed a second reassurance for even the boldest.
+
+"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!" came from the path below, with that
+hideous power and distinctness of lungs that have chilled so many hearts
+and whitened so many faces since the white man first intruded on the
+hunting-grounds of the American Indian. A shrill, dissonant, horrible yell,
+combining the blind ferocity of the beast with the deadlier rage of man,
+such as made the poor mother clasp her babe closer to the breast when it
+rang around the block-houses of Massachusetts and New York in the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--such as less than three years ago
+proved that it was undying in the savage throat, by pealing over the
+mangled bodies and burned dwellings of the Minnesota massacres.
+
+"Good heavens!--what is that?" cried half a dozen of the ladies in a
+breath.
+
+"An Indian war-whoop, certainly!" said one of the gentlemen, his face white
+as wax at the sudden shock.
+
+"It is war time, and they tell me that the rebels yell terribly!" said one
+of the ladies. "Can it be--" but then the absurdity of the idea struck her
+and she paused.
+
+"Albert Pike was a New England man: perhaps he is here with his Arkansas
+savages!" said another, whether in jest or earnest no one could well
+discover.
+
+It was surprising how in that one instant the cavalcade had shortened its
+length--the foremost stopping and the rearmost closing up. Man _is_ a
+gregarious animal, especially when a little surprised or frightened!
+
+Perhaps Horace Townsend had been as badly startled as any of the others, at
+the first instant; but he possessed some data which the others lacked for
+discovering the source of the warlike yell.
+
+"Do not be alarmed, ladies!" he said, after an instant. "I think there is
+only one Indian uttering that horrible sound, and you may depend upon it
+that he is white and no rebel. Yes--see!--here he comes!"
+
+They had been, as already indicated, descending a quarter of a mile of most
+difficult and dangerous path, in which every rider experienced more or less
+of tremor, and over which the horses were picking their careful way as if
+they realized that human necks were in peril. At the instant when the
+attention of the company was thus directed backwards, Halstead Rowan had
+reached the top of the rise, behind, and was just giving vent to a second
+and supplemental yell which rang through the woods as if a dozen throats
+had taken part in it, and which must have been heard half way down the
+Notch.
+
+"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!"
+
+The rider was commencing the descent, too, but not precisely like the rest,
+picking his way, on a careful half-trot, half-walk; on the contrary his
+horse had his ears laid back and was going over the broken stones at such a
+gallop as he might have held on an ordinary highway! The reins seemed to be
+lying loose on his neck, and--could those horrified people believe their
+eyes?--so surely as they were threading the tangled woods of Mount Clinton,
+with thankful hearts for every rood passed over without broken necks, so
+surely Halstead Rowan, a novel description of Mazeppa unknown even to Frank
+Drew or Adah Isaacs, sat his horse in what might be called "reverse
+order," his back towards them and his face to the animal's tail!
+
+"Good heavens!" "The man is mad!" "Oh, do stop the horse!" "It is running
+away with him!" "He will be killed!"--such were the exclamations that broke
+from the party as Rowan's equestrianism was recognized--most of them from
+the female portion of the cavalcade. What would it not have been worth to
+see sweet Clara Vanderlyn's face at the moment when she first realized who
+was the reckless rider, and to know whether she cared for his welfare at
+all and whether anxiety or confidence predominated in her thought!
+
+But the rider did not pause, or seem very much in peril. His horse kept his
+feet quite as well as any of the others; and Townsend remembering the
+Comanches and the Arapahoes, was forced to believe that the wild equestrian
+must have the alleged Indian power of communicating his own will to his
+horse, and that he could ride almost anywhere and in any manner, in safety.
+
+Rowan drew the reins (which he _had_ in his hands, after all) as he came up
+with the cavalcade, and said:
+
+"I hope I did not startle any of you ladies with my Indian whoop. Upon my
+honor I did not mean to do so, if I did; for I hate practical jokes that
+cause pain, quite as much as any of the other fellows, the--gentlemen. But
+the woods tempted me, and I have not enjoyed such an opportunity for the
+use of the lungs, this many a day."
+
+"I believe some of us were a little frightened for a moment, but no harm
+done," said Horace Townsend. "But let me ask you--is not your riding just a
+little bit careless?"
+
+"Well, yes, just the very least bit in the world, perhaps, for _some_
+people!" answered the wild fellow; and Townsend fancied that he caught him
+trying, at the moment, to catch a glimpse, unseen by Frank Vanderlyn, under
+the hood of Clara, who was not very far from him. If he did make the
+attempt, he failed, for the young girl dared not or would not expose her
+face. "But come, Townsend," Rowan added, "will you not push on with me a
+little further ahead and let these slow coaches come up at their leisure?"
+
+"At _your_ rate of progress? No," laughed Townsend. "I am not a very bad
+rider, I believe, but I have never practised in a circus or on a prairie.
+Go ahead, if you are in a hurry; that is, provided you know which end is
+going foremost!"
+
+"Found another place where you will not follow me, eh, old boy!" rattled
+the Illinoisan, with a reference which the other easily understood. "Well,
+I will see you by-and-bye, then. Go along, Bay Beelzebub!" and the next
+moment, darting by the centre line and taking precedence even of the
+leading guide, in a path that was literally nothing but a three-cornered
+trough, he was to be seen ascending the next rise, his horse trotting along
+riderless, and himself springing from crag to crag beside the path, his
+hand upon the animal's back and the reins lying loose on its neck. He had
+alighted, of course, without checking the speed of the horse in any degree.
+
+But a few minutes later, and when the cavalcade had reached the top of
+Mount Clinton and was coming out from the gloom of the heavy woods into the
+partial sunshine,--they saw the odd equestrian riding over a portion of
+road that was only moderately bad, standing erect on his horse's back,
+supported by the reins and his own powers of balancing,--and heard his
+deep, cheery voice ringing out in a song that seemed as complete a medley
+as his own character. It may be permissible to put upon record one of the
+stanzas, which some of those nearest him caught and remembered:
+
+    "The heart bowed down by weight of wo--
+      When comin' thro' the rye?
+    If I had a donkey wot wouldn't go--
+      Good-bye, my love, good-bye!
+    I see them on their winding way:
+      Old clothes, old clothes to sell!
+    So let's be happy while we may--
+      Lost Isabel!"
+
+Still later, the riders were all thrown into momentary horror by coming
+upon him, as they rounded the head of a gorge near the top of Mount
+Prospect,--his horse on a walk, and himself hanging over one side,
+apparently by the heels. The impression prevailed that he must have been
+knocked senseless by a limb, in some of his pranks, and got his feet
+fatally entangled in the stirrups,--the result of which impression was that
+a sudden scream, in a woman's voice, burst out from some portion of the
+line, but so instantaneously suppressed that no one could trace it. It
+turned out that in this last operation, so far from being killed, he was
+only practising the Indian mode of hanging beside his horse, supported by
+one hand at the neck and one foot over the saddle, after the manner of the
+wild tribes of the Plains when throwing the horse as a shield between
+themselves and the shot of a pursuer!
+
+After a time, however, the reckless fellow seemed to have grown tired of
+his humor; for, as the long line crossed over the peak of Prospect to
+Monroe, and the north wind and the sun had so driven away the clouds that
+the riders began to realize the glorious prospect opening upon them on
+every hand,--he took his place in the line, next to his deserted comrade
+Townsend, sat his horse like a Christian, and joined in the bursts of
+admiration vented on all sides, with an enthusiasm which showed that the
+scenery had never palled upon him by familiarity.
+
+And what views indeed were those that burst upon them as they crossed from
+Franklin to Monroe, and that sea of which the stiffened waves were
+mountains stretched out for an hundred miles in every direction! Some there
+were, in that line, who had stood on the prouder and more storied peaks of
+Europe, and yet remembered nothing to diminish the glory of that hour. How
+the deep gorges slept full of warm sunlight, and how the dark shadows
+flitted over them, and flickered, and thinned, and faded, as one by one the
+light clouds were driven southward by the wind! With what a shudder,
+passing over the narrow ridge or back-bone connecting Monroe and Franklin,
+they looked down into "Oakes' Gulf" on the right and the "Gulf of Mexico"
+on the left, only separated by a yard of bushy rock from a descent of three
+thousand feet on one side, and by less than three yards of slippery stone
+from more than two thousand feet on the other!
+
+The path is a sort of narrow trough, rough enough, but quite as safe, and
+to those who keep it there is not the least possible danger. Indeed the
+rider, half hidden in the trough, scarcely knows the fearful narrowness of
+the bridge over which he is passing; and thousands cross this pass and
+recross it, and bring away no idea of the sensation that may be gained by a
+little imprudent hanging over the verge on either side! None of the riders
+in that cavalcade went back to their beds at the Crawford without a much
+more intimate knowledge of the capabilities of that situation; but of this
+in due time.
+
+It is impossible for any one who has never made a similar ascent, or who
+has only ascended with a much smaller number, to conceive the appearance
+made by that score of equestrians at various points when crossing the open
+but uneven peaks in the last approach to Washington. Varied in stature, sex
+and costume, and all sufficiently outre to astonish if not to
+horrify,--what views the leading riders of the line could catch at times,
+looking back at the motley line! Some half buried in the trough of the path
+or midway in a gulch, so that only the head would be visible; others
+perched on the very top of a huge boulder, ascending or descending; some
+clinging close to mane or neck as the horse scrambled up an ascent of forty
+degrees; others lying well back on the saddle when descending a declivity
+of the same suddenness. What dreams of the Alps and the Apennines there are
+in such ascents--dreams of the toilers over St. Gothard and the muleteers
+of the Pyrenees--dreams of memory pleasant to those who have such past
+experiences to look back upon, and substitutes no less pleasant to many
+who long for glances at other lands but must die with only that far-off
+glimpse of the fulness of travel which Moses caught from the hills of the
+Moabites over that inheritance of his race upon which he was never to
+enter.
+
+It yet wanted half an hour to noon, and Mount Washington towered full
+before them as they came out on the top of Franklin, by the little Lake of
+the Clouds which lay so saucily smiling to the sun and coquetting with the
+mists. The peak, a huge mass of broken and naked stone, half a mile up on
+every side and so sheer in pitch that foot-hold seemed hopeless, would have
+looked totally discouraging but for the white line of path which, winding
+around it on the north-west, showed that it must before have been achieved.
+
+Up--up--over broken and slipping stones of every size and description, from
+the dimensions of a brick-bat to those of a dining-table--stones gray and
+mossed, without one spoonful of earth to prove that the riders had not
+surmounted the whole habitable globe and lost themselves in some unnatural
+wilderness of rock! And feeling joined with sight to enhance the desolate
+fancy, for though so nearly high noon the wind blew at that dizzy height
+with the violence of a gale, and the Guernsey wrappers and the clumsy
+gloves had long before proved that the rough and homely may be more useful
+than the beautiful.
+
+Two or three hundred yards from the Tip-Top House, the rough stone walls of
+which were glooming above--the party were dismounted, the horses picketed
+by the guides, and over the broken stones and yawning fissures the
+dismounted riders struggled up, strong arms aiding weaker limbs, and much
+care necessary to prevent heedless steps that might have caused injuries
+slow of recovery. Up--up, over the little but difficult remaining
+distance--till all stood by the High Altar on the top of Mount Washington.
+
+Above the clouds, swales of which they saw sweeping by, half way down the
+mountain--above the earth, its cares and its sorrows, it seemed to them for
+the moment that they stood; and only those who have made such a pilgrimage
+can realize the glory of that hour. The mountains of Vermont
+North-westward, those of Canada North-eastward, those of Massachusetts to
+the South and the Franconia range full to the West; lakes lying like
+splashes of molten silver at their feet and rivers fluttering like blue
+silken ribbons far away; towns nestled in the gorges and hamlets glimmering
+up from the depths of the ravines; long miles of valleys filled with
+sunlight, as if the very god of day had stooped down and left them full of
+the warmth of his loving kiss; peak upon peak rising behind and beyond each
+other, and each tinted with some new and richer hue, from gold to purple
+and from sunny green to dark and sombre brown; beyond all, and on the
+extreme verge of the sight-line to the East, one long low glint of light
+that told of the far Atlantic breaking in shimmering waves on the rocky
+coast of Maine; the world so far beneath as to be a myth and an unreality,
+distance annihilated, and the clear, pure air drank in by the grateful
+lungs appearing to be a foretaste of that some day to be breathed on the
+summit of the Eternal Hills,--these were the sights and these the
+sensations amid which the dark cheek of Horace Townsend seemed touched with
+a light that did not beam upon it in the valleys below, with his eyes grown
+humid and utterance choked by intense feeling; while all the heart of
+glorious womanhood in Clara Vanderlyn fluttered up in the truest worship of
+that God who had formed the earth so beautiful; and even Halstead Rowan
+once more forgot pride, poverty, insult, and the physical exuberance which
+made either endurable, to fold his strong arms in silence, lift the innate
+reverence of his thoughts to the Eternal and the Inevitable, and vow to
+submit with childlike faith to all of triumph or humiliation that might be
+ordained in the future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+     HORACE TOWNSEND WITH A LADY IN CHARGE--AN ADVENTURE OVER THE
+     "GULF OF MEXICO"--CLARA VANDERLYN IN DEADLY PERIL--A MOMENT
+     OF HORROR--HALSTEAD ROWAN AND A DISPLAY OF THE COMANCHE
+     RIDING--TOWNSEND'S ECLIPSE--THE RETURN TO THE
+     CRAWFORD--MARGARET HAYLEY AGAIN, AND A CONVERSATION
+     OVERHEARD.
+
+
+It was perhaps two o'clock before the meetings and partings were over
+between the large party whom we have seen ascending from the Crawford, and
+the yet greater number who had come up from the Glen House by the
+belittling novelty of the mountain, the "carriage road,"--before the dinner
+at the Tip-Top House was discussed, hearty and plentiful enough, if not
+remarkably varied,--before the guides of the cavalcade had done "chaffing"
+the carriage drivers from the Glen, whom they seemed to regard very much as
+"old salts" do "fresh-water sailors,"--before every member of the party had
+viewed the magnificent scenery from every conceivable point, drank their
+fill of a beauty that might not be duplicated for years or excelled in a
+lifetime, and filled pockets and reticules equally full of all the maps and
+books that could be bought and all the geological specimens that could be
+picked up, as memorials of the visit. By that hour the warning of the
+guides was heard, reminding all that there was no more time remaining than
+would suffice to carry themselves and their tired horses back to the
+Crawford by nightfall. At once, then, the descent began--supposed, in
+advance, to be so uneventful and merely a pleasant diminished repetition of
+the experiences of the ascent.
+
+As they climbed down the broken rocks of the peak to their
+patiently-waiting horses (they would probably have waited patiently until
+they dropped with hunger, if by that means the rider and his saddle could
+have been avoided; for your mountain horse does _not_ find unalloyed
+pleasure in his occupation!)--when near the "corral," as it may be called,
+Frank Vanderlyn left his sister for a moment and stepped over to Horace
+Townsend, who was descending alone, Halstead Rowan (as usual) at some
+distance ahead and already preparing to mount and away.
+
+"Would you have any objections, sir," the young man asked, "as I believe
+that you have no lady in charge, to ride in company with my sister on the
+way down?"
+
+"Certainly not!" replied Townsend, though a little surprised at the
+salutation and request from one of the haughty Vanderlyns to whom he had
+not even been introduced. "I shall be proud of the charge, if your sister
+and yourself feel like placing so much confidence in an entire stranger."
+
+"Oh, _we_ know a gentleman when we see him!" replied the young man, not a
+little arrogantly, as it appeared to the lawyer, and with a sinister glance
+at the Illinoisan which indicated that it would have been some time before
+_he_ was entrusted with the same responsibility.
+
+"I am flattered!" said Townsend, with the bow which the speech demanded and
+yet did not deserve. "Do you remain on the top yourself?"
+
+"No," answered the young man. "But the fact is that my horse kicks. He
+kicked my sister's pony twice in coming up; and I am afraid of some trouble
+in going down, if she rides behind me. It will be better for me to drop
+into the rear of all, where the ill-tempered devil cannot do injury to any
+one."
+
+A few words of quasi-introduction and explanation between Vanderlyn, Clara
+and the lawyer followed; and Horace Townsend, who had come up the mountain
+without any lady and only in the casual companionship of a man who
+continually rode away and left him alone, found himself ready to go down it
+with the fairest member of the company in charge! Had nothing else
+intervened since the ride up from Littleton to the Profile and that long,
+steady glance of admiration which had then been bestowed upon the sweet
+face and auburn hair,--what a dangerous proximity this might have proved!
+But the human heart, expansive as it may be, has not quite the capacity of
+a stage-coach or a passenger-car; and to prevent falling in desperate love
+with one fascinating woman thrown in one's way, there is perhaps no guard
+so potent as being in real or fancied desperate love with another!
+
+Halstead Rowan and the lady whom Townsend had reason to believe the object
+of his hope and his despair, had not been flung together and apart from
+others, for one moment during the day--Mr. Frank Vanderlyn had taken
+especially good care in that respect; though the lawyer had little cause to
+doubt that if both could have had their choice of companionship, they would
+have stood side by side and without others too near, by the High Altar
+which crowned the summit of the mountain, and spoken words difficult to
+unsay again during the lifetime of either. But if he had not been alone
+with Clara Vanderlyn, there is equally little doubt that he had looked at
+her much oftener than at the most admired point of scenery on the route.
+And as Frank Vanderlyn strolled away to his horse, and Townsend, with the
+lady obviously under his charge, was preparing to mount, he saw Rowan, with
+one foot in the stirrup and the other on the ground, looking over at him
+and his companion, with the most comical expression of wonder on his face
+that could well have been compressed into the same extent of physiognomy.
+The heart of the new knight-errant, which must have been a soft one or he
+would never have labored under that weakness, smote him at the thought of
+his apparent desertion; and with a word of apology he stepped away from the
+lady and approached the dismounted amateur Comanche.
+
+"You don't mean to say that you are going to----" said the latter, and he
+nodded his head comically and yet a little pitifully towards Clara
+Vanderlyn.
+
+"Ride down with Miss Vanderlyn? Yes!" answered the lawyer.
+
+"And who the deuce asked you to do it, I should like to know?"
+
+"Her brother."
+
+"Phew-w-w!" A prolonged whistle, very characteristic and significant.
+
+Townsend, in a word, explained the affair.
+
+"All right!" said the Illinoisan. "But, look here, old fellow! You haven't
+arranged this affair yourself, eh? No meetings on a single track, you
+know!"
+
+"Not a bit of it!" laughed Townsend at the professional illustration.
+"Confidence for confidence! Have you not seen more closely than _that_?"
+
+"Yes, I thought I had!" answered Rowan. "Well, all right! Go ahead! But by
+Jupiter, if you do not take the best care of that girl, and she gets into
+any kind of a scrape by riding with a man who _can't_ ride, there will be
+somebody challenged to something else than ten-pins!"
+
+Townsend laughed and turned away. The time had been, he thought, when
+incapacity to ride would scarcely have been set down as among his
+short-comings. But every thing, even equestrianism, was to be reckoned by
+comparison!
+
+A moment after, all the party were in the saddle; and then commenced a
+descent still more laborious than the ascent, at least to the tired horses
+that groaned almost humanly as they slid down the sudden declivities, and
+to the more timid of the riders. Horace Townsend rode immediately before
+Miss Vanderlyn, a little forward of the centre of the Indian file (the only
+possible mode of riding in those narrow bridle-paths)--Rowan half-a-dozen
+further behind, then two or three others, and Frank Vanderlyn, with his
+dangerous bay, bringing up the rear.
+
+The lawyer found his fair companion all that her face had indicated, in the
+desultory conversation which sprung up between them as they made their way
+downward from the summit, descending the peak of the monarch and riding
+back over the broad top of Monroe towards Franklin. Clara Vanderlyn
+conversed genially and easily, and had evidently (in spite of some
+restrictions already suggested,) enjoyed the day with the full warmth of an
+ardent nature. She seemed an excellent horsewoman, easy and self-possessed
+in the saddle, and Townsend observed that she found leisure from the care
+of picking her way, to look back several times over her shoulder. For a
+long time he may have been undecided whether her regard was directed at her
+brother, at the extreme end of the line, or at some one in the middle
+distance. The one glance of anxiety would have been very natural: the
+other, compounded of interest only, may have been likewise natural
+enough--who can say?
+
+They were crossing Monroe to Franklin, over the narrow back-bone of land
+that has been mentioned in the ascent, and at the very point where Oakes'
+Gulf, now on the left, and the scarcely less terrible Gulf of Mexico on the
+right, narrowed the whole causeway to not much more than a dozen of
+feet,--when Townsend heard a sudden and sharp cry behind him. At that point
+the descent of the path was very precipitous, and over stones so rugged
+that the horses kept their feet with great difficulty; and in his anxiety
+to insure safe footing he had for the moment lost sight of his fair
+companion--a poor recommendation of his ability as an escort, perhaps, but
+not less true than reprehensible! At the cry he turned instantly, though he
+could not so suddenly check the course of his horse down the path without
+danger of throwing him from his feet; and as he looked around, through the
+olive brown of his cheek a deadly whiteness crept to the skin, and his
+blood stood still as it had probably never before done since the tide of
+life first surged through his veins.
+
+It has been the lot of many men to look upon a horror accomplished or so
+nearly accomplished that any reversal of the decree of fate seemed to be
+beyond hope. Such is the gaze upon the strewn dead of the battle-field,
+before the life has quite gone out from a few who are already worse than
+dead, and when the groans and the cries for "water!" to cool the lips
+parched in the last fever, have not yet entirely ceased. Such is the
+hopeless glance at the windrow of dead strewing the shore when a ship is
+going to pieces in the surf, in plain sight and yet beyond the aid of human
+hands, and when every moment is adding another to the drowned and ghastly
+subjects for the rough-coated Coroner. Such is the stony regard at the
+crushed victims of a railroad catastrophe, or the charred and blackened
+remains of those who were but a little while ago living passengers on the
+steamboat that is just burning at the water's edge. Such, even, is the
+shuddering glance at the brave and unconscious firemen who stand beneath a
+heavy wall, when that wall is surging forward and coming down in a crushing
+mass upon their very heads, with no power except a miracle of Omnipotence
+to prevent their being flattened into mere pan-cakes of flesh, and blood,
+and bone. All these, and a thousand others, are horrors accomplished or
+beyond hope of being averted; and they are enough to sicken the heart and
+brain of humanity brought into sudden familiarity with them. But perhaps
+they are not the worst--perhaps that yet unaccomplished but probable horror
+is still more terrible, because uncertainty blends with it and there is yet
+enough of hope to leaven despair. The life not yet fully forfeited, but
+going--going; the form not yet crushed out of the human semblance, but to
+be so in a moment unless that one chance intervenes; the face--especially
+if the face be that of woman, a thousand times more beautiful in the relief
+of that hideous mask of death which the gazer sees glooming behind
+it,--this is perhaps the hardest thing of all to see and not go mad.
+
+None of these conditions may have been quite fulfilled in the glance cast
+backward by Horace Townsend at that moment; but let us see how far the
+situation varied from the most terrible of requirements.
+
+Going over that back-bone in the morning, the lawyer, who chanced to be for
+the moment alone, had swung himself from his horse, leaving the animal
+standing in the trough, peered through the bushes to the right, down into
+Oakes' Gulf, and walked to the edge of the broad stone that formed the
+projection over the Gulf of Mexico. He had found that stone smooth and
+rounded, a little slippery from the almost perpetual rains and mists
+beating upon it, not more than eight to ten feet wide from the path to the
+verge, and with a perceptible slope downwards in the latter direction. He
+had thought, then, that it needed a clear head and a sure foot (both of
+which he possessed) to stand in that position or even to tread the stone at
+any distance from the path. And so thinking, he had swung himself back into
+the saddle and ridden on,--the incident, then, not worth relating--now, a
+thing of the most fearful consequence.
+
+For as he glanced back, at that sudden cry, he saw Clara Vanderlyn sitting
+her horse on the very top of that smooth plateau of stone overlooking the
+two thousand feet of the Gulf of Mexico, at what could not have been more
+than four or five feet from the awful verge, and certainly on the downward
+slope of what was an insecure footing even for the plastic foot of
+man--much more for the clumsy iron-shod hoof!
+
+What could have induced her trained pony to spring out from the path a few
+feet behind and rush into that perilous elevation, must ever remain (in the
+absence of an equine lexicon) quite as much of a mystery as it seemed at
+that moment. Perhaps it was in going down some such declivity of path as
+that before him, that he had been kicked by the vicious bay of Frank
+Vanderlyn while making the ascent, and that he had concluded to wait on
+this convenient shelf until all the rest had gone by, before he consented
+to make the passage with his fair burthen. Perhaps the movement was merely
+one of those unaccountable freaks of sullen madness in which horses as well
+as men sometimes have the habit of indulging. At all events, such was the
+situation; and the recollection of it, as thus recalled to those who were
+present, will be quite enough, as we are well aware, to set the heart
+beating most painfully. What, then, must have been the feeling of all who
+saw, and especially of that man who had promised to _protect_ the fair
+being thus placed in peril! What thoughts of the playful threat of Halstead
+Rowan must have rushed through his brain--that "if she got into any kind of
+a scrape by riding with a man who _couldn't_ ride," such and such fatal
+results would follow! Not a duel with the Illinoisan--oh, no!--but a black,
+terrible, life-long duel with his own self-reproaches and remorse for
+heedlessness and want of judgment--this would be the doom more fearful than
+a thousand personal chastisements, if danger became destruction. One clumsy
+movement of the horse's feet, one slip on the stone, and she would as
+certainly go over that dizzy precipice and fall so crushed and mangled a
+mass into the gulf below that her fragments could scarcely be distinguished
+from those of the pony she rode--as certainly as she had grace and love and
+beauty crowning her life and adding to the possible horror of her death. He
+did not know, then, how many of the cavalcade saw the situation, or how the
+blood of most who saw stood still like his own, with dread and
+apprehension.
+
+The inconceivable rapidity of human thought has been so often made a matter
+of comment, that words could but be wasted in illustrating it. It shames
+the lightning and makes sluggard light itself. All these thoughts in the
+mind of Horace Townsend scarcely consumed that time necessary to draw rein
+and turn himself round in the saddle in a quick attempt to alight, rush up
+the side of the rock and seize her horse by the bridle or swing her from
+her seat. He had no irresolution--no moment of hesitation--he only thought
+and suffered in that single instant preceding action.
+
+"For God's sake do not move! I will be there in one instant!" he said in a
+low, hoarse, intense voice that reached her like a trumpet's clang.
+
+"Oh yes--quick! quick!" he heard her reply, in a convulsive, frightened
+voice. "Oh, quick!--you don't know where I am!"
+
+Poor girl!--he _did_ know where she was, too well.
+
+She was braver than most women, or she would probably have jerked the
+bridle or frightened her horse by frantic cries, and sent him slipping with
+herself down the ravine; for the situation was a most fearful one, and
+there are few women who could have braved it without a tremor. A _man_, let
+it be remembered, if cruel enough, might have alighted and left the horse
+to its fate; but to a woman, encumbered by her long clothes, the attempt
+must have been almost certain destruction for both.
+
+Perhaps not sixty seconds had elapsed after the first cry, when the lawyer
+succeeded in checking his horse without throwing him headlong, swung his
+foot out of the stirrup, and attempted to spring to the ground. But just
+then there was a sudden rush over the rock; a wierd and unnatural sweeping
+by, something like that of the Demon Hunt in "Der Freischutz;" a cry of
+terror and fright that seemed to come from the whole line in the rear and
+fill the air with ghastly sound; a closing of the eyes on the part of the
+incapable guardian, in the full belief that the noises he heard were those
+of the accomplishment of the great horror; then sounds nearer him, and a
+jar that almost prostrated himself and the horse against which he yet
+leaned; then a wild cry of exultation and delight which seemed--God help
+his senses!--was he going mad?--to be mingled with the clapping of hands
+like that which follows a moment of intense interest at the theatre!
+
+Then silence, and the lawyer opened his eyes as suddenly as he had closed
+them. And what did he see? On the rock, nothing; in the path, ahead of him,
+Clara Vanderlyn still sitting her horse, though in a half fainting state,
+and Halstead Rowan, also on horseback, ahead of her, and with his hand
+holding her bridle!
+
+Of course Horace Townsend, at that moment of doubt whether he stood upon
+his head or his heels--whether he had gone stark mad or retained a fair
+measure of sanity--whether the earth yet revolved in its usual orbit or had
+gone wandering off into cometary space, beyond all physical laws--of
+course at that moment he could not know precisely what had occurred to
+produce that sudden and singular change; and he could only learn, the
+moment after, from those who had been on the higher ground behind at the
+moment of the peril. According to their explanations, at the moment when
+they all saw the danger with a shudder and a holding of the very breath,
+Rowan had been heard to utter a single exclamation: "Well, I swear!" (a
+rough phrase, and one that he should by no means have used; but let his
+Western life and training entitle him to some consideration)--dashed spurs
+into the side of his horse--crowded by the five or six who preceded him, in
+a path considered impassable for more than one horse at a time--and then,
+with a wild Indian cry that he apparently could not restrain, spurred up
+the side of the rock, between Clara Vanderlyn and the verge of the
+precipice, certainly where the off feet of his horse could not have been
+thirty inches from the slippery edge, and literally jerked her horse and
+herself off into the path by the impetus of his own animal outside and the
+sudden grip which he closed upon her bridle as he went by, himself coming
+down into the path ahead, and neither unseated! Miss Vanderlyn's pony had
+struck the lawyer's horse as he came down in his enforced flying leap; and
+thus were explained all the sights, sounds, and physical events of that
+apparently supernatural moment.
+
+The scene which followed, only a few moments after, when the leading
+members of the cavalcade (Clara Vanderlyn in the midst of it, supported by
+Rowan, who managed to keep near her)--the scene which followed, we say,
+when they reached a little plateau where the company had room to gather,
+will not be more easily effaced from the memory of those who were present
+than the terrible danger which had just preceded it. The overstrung nerves
+of the poor girl gave way at that point, and she dropped from her horse in
+a swoon, just as Halstead Rowan (singular coincidence!) had slipped from
+the saddle and was ready to catch her as she fell! What more natural than
+that in falling and being caught, she should have thrown her arms round the
+stout neck of the Illinoisan? And what more inevitable than that he should
+have been a considerable time in getting ready to lay her down upon the
+horse-blankets that had been suddenly pulled off and spread for her,--and
+that finally, the clinging grasp still continuing, he should have dropped
+himself on one corner of the blanket and furnished the requisite support to
+her head and shoulders?
+
+Frank Vanderlyn and those who had been farthest behind with him came up at
+that moment; and Horace Townsend, if no one else, detected the sullen frown
+that gathered on his brow as he saw his sister lying in the arms of the man
+whom he had so grossly insulted. But if he frowned he said nothing, very
+prudently; for it is indeed not sure that it would have been safe, just
+then, for an emperor, there present, to speak an ill word to the hero of
+the day.
+
+Be all this as it may, the usual authorial affidavit may be taken that
+Halstead Rowan retained Clara Vanderlyn, brother or no brother in the way,
+in his arms until some one succeeded in obtaining water from a clear
+deposit of rain among the rocks; that no one--not even one of the
+ladies--attempted to dispossess him of his newly-acquired human territory;
+that when the water had been brought, and she first gave token of the full
+return of consciousness, she did so by clasping her arms around Rowan's
+neck (of course involuntarily) and murmuring words that sounded to Townsend
+and some others near, like: "You saved me! How good and noble you are!" and
+that even under that temptation he did not kiss her, as he would probably
+have sacrificed both arms and a leg or two, but not his manliness, to do.
+
+It was a quarter of an hour after, when Miss Vanderlyn, sufficiently and
+only sufficiently recovered to ride, was placed once more in the saddle and
+the cavalcade took its way more slowly down the mountains. The scenery,
+under the western sun, was even more lovely than that of the morning, the
+mists had all rolled away from every point of the compass, and there were
+some views Franconia-wards that they had entirely missed in the ascent. But
+there was scarcely one of the company who had not been so stirred to the
+very depths of human sympathy, by the event of the preceding half-hour,
+that inanimate nature, however wondrously beautiful, was half forgotten. So
+quickly, in those summer meetings and partings, do we grow attached to
+those with whom we are temporarily associated, especially amid the
+surroundings of the sublime and beautiful,--that had that fair girl lost
+her life so strangely and sadly, not one of all who saw the accident but
+would have borne in mind through life, in addition to the inevitable horror
+of the recollection, a memory like that of losing a dear and valued friend.
+And yet many of them had never even spoken to her, and perhaps only one in
+the whole cavalcade (her brother) had known of her existence one week
+before!
+
+Even as it was, there were not a few of that line of spectators from whose
+eyes the vision of what might have been, failed to fade out with the moment
+that witnessed it. Some of them dreamed, for nights after, (or at least
+until another occurrence then impending dwarfed the recollection) not only
+of seeing the young girl sitting helpless on that perilous rock, but of
+beholding her arms raised to heaven in agony and the feet of her horse
+pawing the air, as both disappeared from sight over the precipice. Some may
+still dream of the event, in lonely night-hours following days of trouble
+and anxiety.
+
+In the new arrangements for descending the mountains, made after the
+recovery of Clara Vanderlyn, Horace Townsend was not quite discarded, but
+he could not avoid feeling that very little dependence was placed upon his
+escort. It was of course as a mere jest, but to the sensitive mind of the
+lawyer there seemed to be a dash of malicious earnest at the bottom,--that
+Rowan took the first occasion as he passed near him, immediately after the
+young girl had been removed from his arms, to give him a forcible punch in
+the ribs, with the accompanying remark:
+
+"Bah! I told you that you couldn't ride; but I had no idea that you could
+not do any better at taking care of a woman, than that!"
+
+Townsend quite forgave him that remark, jest or earnest, for he saw the new
+sparkle in his eye, remembered how likely he was to have had his mind a
+little disordered by all that sweet wealth of auburn hair lying for so many
+minutes on his breast, and formed his own opinions as to the result. If
+those opinions were favorable, well; if they were unfavorable, he was
+taking a world of trouble that did not belong to him; for there is always a
+"sweet little cherub" sitting "up aloft" to keep watch over the fortunes of
+such rattle-pates and dare-devils as Halstead Rowan--to supervise their
+getting into scrapes and out of them!
+
+But there was nothing of jest, he thought, in the air with which Clara
+Vanderlyn, when re-mounting her horse, replying to an earnest expression of
+regret that one moment of inattention on his part should have allowed her
+to be placed in serious peril,--very kindly denied that he had been guilty
+of any neglect whatever, threw the whole blame upon her horse, thanked him
+for the promptness with which he was coming to her relief when forestalled,
+but then said, looking at Rowan with a glance which came near setting that
+enthusiastic equestrian entirely wild:
+
+"It seems that I am a very difficult person to take care of; and if you
+have no objection to my having two esquires, and will allow Mr. Rowan to
+ride with me as well as yourself, and if _he_ is willing to do so, I think
+that I shall feel" (she did not say "safer", but) "a little more like
+keeping up my spirits."
+
+Frank Vanderlyn had looked somewhat sullenly on and scarcely said a word,
+since his coming up. But at this speech of his sister's he must have felt
+that the dignity of the Vanderlyn family was again in serious peril, for he
+put his mouth close to her ear and spoke some words that were heard by no
+other than herself. They could not have been very satisfactory or
+convincing, for Horace Townsend, and others as well, heard her say in
+reply:
+
+"Brother, your horse is dangerous--you said so yourself; so just be good
+enough to ride as you did before, and my friends here will take care of
+me."
+
+Whereupon the young man went back to his horse, looking a little
+discomfited and by no means in the best of humors. Such little accidents
+_will_ occur, sometimes, to mar the best-laid schemes of careful mothers or
+anxious brothers, for preserving the ultra-respectability of a family; and
+whether the origin of the intervention is in heaven or its opposite, there
+is nothing to be done in such cases but to look wronged and unhappy, as did
+Frank Vanderlyn, or smile over the accomplished mischief and pretend that
+the event is rather agreeable than otherwise, as persons of more experience
+than Frank have often had occasion to do at different periods during the
+current century.
+
+The result of all this was that Horace Townsend really rode down with Clara
+Vanderlyn in the mere capacity of an esquire, while Halstead Rowan assumed
+the spurs and the authority of the knight. The latter rode in advance of
+her, as near her bridle-rein as the roughness of the path would allow; and
+no one need to question the fact that _he_ kept his eyes on the young girl
+quite steadily enough to secure her safety! What difficulty was there in
+his doing so, when he had already proved that he could ride backward nearly
+as well as forward and that the footing of his horse was the least thought
+in his mind? They seemed to be conversing, too, a large proportion of the
+time; and there is no doubt that Halstead Rowan, carried away by the events
+of the day, uttered words that he might have long delayed or never spoken
+under other circumstances,--and that Clara Vanderlyn wore that sweet flush
+upon her face and kept that timid but happy trembling of the dewy
+under-lip, much more constantly than she had ever before done in her young
+life. Horace Townsend, who rode behind the lady, did not hear any of those
+peculiar words which passed between her and her companion; and had _we_
+heard them they would certainly not be made public in this connection.
+
+The lawyer, as has been said, rode behind; and, as has _not_ been said, he
+did so in no enviable state of feeling. He had done nothing--been accused
+of nothing--in any manner calculated to degrade him; but one casual event
+had thrown a shadow across his path, not easily recognized without some
+recollection of characteristics before developed. The reader has had
+abundant reason to believe that this man, profiting by some intelligence
+obtained in a manner not open to the outer world, of the peculiar madness
+of Margaret Hayley after that abstraction, courage,--had more or less
+firmly determined to win her through the exhibition of certain qualities
+which he believed that he possessed in a peculiar degree. One opportunity
+had been given him (that at the Pool), and he had succeeded in interesting
+her to an extent not a little flattering and hopeful; but envious fate
+could not allow a week to pass without throwing him again into
+disadvantageous comparison with a man who had no occasion whatever of
+making any exhibition of such qualities!
+
+That Margaret Hayley would yet remain for some days and perhaps weeks in
+the mountains, and that she would probably visit the Crawford before her
+departure, he had at least every reason to believe; and he had quite as
+much cause for confidence that the story of the adventure over the Gulf of
+Mexico, roundly exaggerated to place himself in a false position and to
+deify the Illinoisan, would reach her ears, whether at the Profile or the
+Crawford, through stage-drivers or migratory passengers, within the next
+forty-eight hours. This (for reasons partially hinted at and others which
+will develop themselves in due time) was precisely that state of affairs
+which he would have given more to avoid than any other that could have been
+named; and this it was that made a dark red flush of mortification rise at
+times to his dusky cheek and give an expression any thing but pleasant to
+his eyes, as he rode silently behind the two who were now so indubitably
+linked as lovers, once more over the top of Prospect and down the rugged
+declivities of Clinton. Those who have ever been placed in circumstances
+approaching to these in character, can best decide whether the lawyer was
+sulking for nothing or indulging in gloomy anticipations with quite
+sufficient reason.
+
+It was nearly sunset and the light had some time disappeared from the
+valleys lying in the shade of the western peaks, when the last stony trough
+and the last corduroy road of Mount Clinton was finally repassed, and the
+whole cavalcade, each member of it perhaps moved by the one idea of showing
+that neither horse nor rider was wearied out--broke once more into a trot
+as they caught the first glimpse of the Crawford through the trees, dashed
+merrily out from the edge of the woods, and came up in straggling but
+picturesque order to the door of the great caravanserai. The difficult ride
+of eighteen miles had been accomplished; the golden day (with its one
+drawback of momentary peril) was over; and more than half a score who had
+before only thought of the ascent of Mount Washington as a future
+possibility, suddenly found that they could look back upon it as a
+remembrance.
+
+As they rode up to the front of the Crawford, the whole end of the piazza
+was full of new-comers and late sojourners, watching the return of those
+who had preceded or followed them--an idle, listless sort of gathering,
+showing more curiosity than welcome, such as the traveller by rail or
+steamboat sees crowding every platform at the expected time of the arrival
+of a train and every pier at the hour for the coming in of a boat. Cries
+of: "All safe, eh?" "Glad to see you back again!" "Hope you had a pleasant
+day!" and "Well, how did you like Mount Washington?" broke from twenty lips
+in a moment, mingled with replies and non-replies that came simultaneously:
+"Oh, you ought to have gone up with us!" "My horse carried me like a
+bird!" (the last remark, presumably, from a fat man of two hundred and
+sixty, whom not even an elephant could have borne in that suggestively
+buoyant manner), "Never _was_ such a day for going up, in the world!"
+"Safe, eh? Yes, why not?" (that from a person, no doubt, who had really
+been prodigiously scared at some period of the ride), and the one
+inevitable pendant: "Oh, you have no idea what an adventure we have
+had!--one of the ladies came near being killed--tell you all about it
+by-and-bye," etc., etc.
+
+Horace Townsend, who had been riding the last mile very much like a man in
+a dream and really with the formal charge of Clara Vanderlyn entirely
+abandoned to her chosen protector--Horace Townsend heard all this, as if he
+heard through miles of distance or at a long period of time after the
+utterance. For his eyes were busy and they absorbed all his sensations. He
+had recognized, at the first moment of riding up, among the crowd of
+persons on the piazza, the dark, proud eyes and beautiful face and stately
+form of Margaret Hayley, leaning on the arm of that man whom he had not by
+any means learned to love since his advent in the mountains--Captain Hector
+Coles, V. A. D. C. They had waited clear weather before starting from the
+Profile, and come through that day while his party had been absent up the
+mountains: he realized all at a thought, and realized that whatever he was
+himself to endure of trial lay much nearer than he had before believed.
+Disguised and indeed disfigured as the lawyer was, in common with all the
+other members of the cavalcade, to such a degree that only observation and
+study could penetrate the masquerade,--it was not at all strange that the
+lady failed to meet his eye with an answering glance of recognition; and he
+felt rather grateful than the reverse, for the moment, that his disguise
+was so effectual. While Clara Vanderlyn, a third time within one week the
+passive heroine of the mountains, was being lifted from her saddle by half
+a dozen officious hands, and while the rest of the party were gabbling as
+they alighted,--he slipped quietly from his horse behind one corner of the
+piazza, threw his rein to one of the stable-boys, and disappeared through
+the hall, up-stairs to his chamber.
+
+He did not again make his appearance until supper was on the tables and the
+battle of knives-and-forks going on with that vigor born of mountain air.
+Most of the visitors at the house, the voyagers of the day included, were
+already seated; and among them was Clara Vanderlyn, apparently no whit the
+worse for her day's adventure, her brother at one and her mother at the
+other side. A little further down the table, on the same side, sat Halstead
+Rowan, occupying the same seat of the evening before. He had evidently
+dropped back from his familiar standing with the lady, the moment they came
+within the atmosphere of Mrs. Vanderlyn and the great republic of voices at
+the Crawford; but quite as evidently he had not yet fallen away from his
+last-won position as a hero, for his face was continually flushing, as he
+ate, with the modesty of a girl's, when the whispers and nods and pointings
+of interest and admiration were made so plain that they reached his eye and
+ear. The adventure of the day was undeniably the topic of the evening, and
+Halstead Rowan was the hero; and it may be imagined how much this knowledge
+and the inevitable corollary that some one else was _not_ the hero, added
+to the comfort of the late-comer at table.
+
+Margaret Hayley, Mrs. Burton Hayley and Captain Hector Coles were also at
+supper, but they had nearly finished when Townsend took his seat. They rose
+the moment after, and as they did so the lawyer, now once more so arrayed
+as to display his own proper person, caught the eye of Margaret. She nodded
+and smiled, yes, smiled!--in answer to his bow across the table; and he
+could almost have taken his professional oath that a quick sparkle came to
+her eye when she saw him, then died away as quickly as if compelled back by
+a strong will. Mrs. Burton Hayley did not seem to see him at all; but
+Captain Coles signified that _he_ did so, by a glance of such new-born
+contempt blended with old hatred, as he should never have wasted upon any
+one except a national enemy whom he had just defeated in arms. The party
+swept down the room, and very soon after the others whom we have noted also
+rose and disappeared, leaving Horace Townsend discussing his supper with
+what appetite he might. It may be consoling to some curious persons to know
+that that appetite was by no means contemptible, and that he did not falter
+in physique if restless unquiet and anxiety made a prey of his mind.
+
+Half an hour after, he was smoking his cigar on the piazza, none whom he
+knew within view; and he strolled out into the edge of the wood to the
+right of the house, to enjoy (if enjoyment it could be called) solitude,
+gloom and darkness. The path he followed led him eventually round in a
+circle and brought him back to the edge again, only a few yards from the
+house and near the spot where the two huge bears were moving about, dense
+black spots in the twilight. There was a rude bench beneath the trees not
+far from what might have been called their "orbit" (especially as they are
+sometimes "stars" at the menageries); and on that bench he discovered three
+figures. He was but a little distance away when he first saw them and that
+they were two ladies and a gentleman; and he was still nearer before he
+became aware that they were the Hayleys, mother and daughter, with their
+inevitable attendant and cavalier.
+
+They were in conversation, not toning it so low as if they had any
+particular anxiety against its being overheard; and yet Horace Townsend,
+much as he might have wished to know every word that came from the lips of
+at least one of the three, might have passed on without listening
+intentionally to one utterance, if he had not chanced to hear that they
+were discussing the event of the day. That fact literally chained him to
+the root of the tree near which he was standing--he was _so_ anxious to
+know what version of the affair had already been circulated and given
+credence among the three or four hundred visitors at the Crawford, and
+especially among the particular three of that number.
+
+It has before been said, we fancy, by that widely-known writer,
+"Anonymous," that listeners do not always hear any notable good of
+themselves. And Horace Townsend, in stopping to play the eaves-dropper, at
+least partially illustrated the saying. He heard a version of the Gulf of
+Mexico affair, from the lips of Captain Coles, calculated to make him, if
+he had any sensitiveness of nature and a spark of the fighting propensity,
+kill himself or the narrator.
+
+"I think I have heard enough of it," Margaret Hayley was saying, as
+Townsend came within hearing. "I really do not know that Miss Vanderlyn,
+though a pleasant girl enough, is of so much consequence that the whole
+house should go crazy over one of her little mishaps in riding."
+
+"A little mishap!" echoed the Captain. "Phew!--if I am not very much
+mistaken it was a _big_ mishap--just a hair's-breadth between saving her
+life and losing it!"
+
+"Is it possible?" said Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Why dear me, Captain
+Coles!--that is very interesting, especially if her being saved was
+providential. Did you hear the particulars, then?"
+
+"Shall we go in, mother?" asked Margaret.
+
+"No, my dear, not yet!" answered Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Captain Coles is just
+going to tell us what really happened to the young lady who was so
+mercifully spared. Go on, Captain, please."
+
+"Well, the story is a short one, though thrilling enough, egad!--to put
+into a romance!" said the Captain. "Young Waldron, that we met at the
+Profile, was one of the party, and he told me about it while you were
+dressing for supper. It appears that Miss Vanderlyn went up with her
+brother, and that something happened to his horse--it got lamed, or
+something,--so that he could not ride down with her. He was fool enough,
+then, to put her under the charge of that friend of yours, Margaret--"
+
+"Captain Coles, will you be kind enough to confine yourself to your story,
+if you must tell it, and leave _my_ name out of the question?" was the
+interruption of the young lady--no unpleasant one to the listener,--at that
+point of the narration.
+
+"Humph! I do not see that you need be so sensitive about it!" sneered back
+the Captain. "Well, then, not that friend of yours, but that man, who has
+not less than a dozen names and who lives in Philadelphia and Cincinnati
+and several other cities."
+
+"Yes, the man whose handkerchief you took out of his pocket the other
+night, in the ten-pin alley, to see whether his initials were correct!"
+again interrupted Margaret in a tone of voice not less decided than that of
+the other was taunting and arrogant.
+
+It was much too dark, under the shade of the trees, at that moment, to see
+the face of Captain Hector Coles, or he might have been discovered, even
+under his moustache, biting his lip so sharply that the blood came. An eye
+keen enough to have seen this, too, would have been able to see that Horace
+Townsend trembled like an aspen leaf, that great beads of sweat started out
+on his brown forehead, while he muttered a fierce word of anger and
+indignation that died away on the night air without reaching any human ear.
+
+Captain Hector Coles choked an instant and then went on:
+
+"He entrusted her to the care of that adventurer, who managed, before they
+had ridden a mile, to lose his way and his presence of mind at the same
+time--got her and her pony on the top of a slippery rock where there were
+ten thousand chances to one that she would fall a thousand feet over the
+precipice--and then sat on his horse, white as a sheet and too badly scared
+to attempt rescuing her, yelling like a booby for help, until that coarse
+fellow from somewhere out West came up and grasped her just as she was
+going over."
+
+What would not Horace Townsend have given for a grip of the throat of
+Captain Hector Coles at that moment? And what would he not have given to
+hear Margaret Hayley say: "I do not believe the story! The man who leaped
+into the Pool the other day, is not the booby and poltroon you would make
+him, just because you are jealous of him, Captain Hector Coles!" What, we
+say, would the listener not have given to hear _that_? Alas!--he had no
+reason to expect any such word, and no such word was spoken. Margaret
+Hayley merely rose from her seat, saying:
+
+"Now, if you have finished that rigmarole, in which nobody, I think, is in
+the least interested, we will go to the house, for I am taking cold."
+
+The others rose, and the three moved towards the house. Horace Townsend did
+not move towards the house, but in another direction, his heart on fire and
+his brain in a whirl. But as they went off he heard the Captain say,
+apparently in response to some remark of Mrs. Burton Hayley's which was not
+caught at that distance:
+
+"Of course I believe him to be a coward as well as a disreputable
+character. Any man who would flinch from _any_ exposure, especially like
+that on a mere edge of a cliff, to save life, is the basest kind of a
+coward. Such men ought to stand a little while among bullets, as _we_ have
+to do, and they would soon show themselves for what they are worth."
+
+Horace Townsend saw nothing more of either that night, or of any of the
+others with whom this narration has to do. There was no music, other than
+that of the piano, in the parlor of the Crawford, and early beds were in
+requisition. Many, who had not ascended the mountains, had ridden hard and
+long in other directions; and for the people of the Mount Washington
+cavalcade themselves--they were very tired, very much exhausted and very
+sleepy, and romance and flirtation were obliged to succumb to aching bones
+and the invitations of soft pillows. Halstead Rowan, even, did not roll a
+single game of ten-pins before he retired to his lonely
+chamber--physico-thermometrical proof of the general worn-out condition!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+     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 a lawyer, 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 that _you_ will 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 am _I_ to 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 made the 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
+a _right_ to 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
+that _you_ honored 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 I _will_ answer it,
+a little more frankly than it was put! Captain Hector Coles is not, and
+never will 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 did _not_ believe 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 every _injurious_ one 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 in
+_him_--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 a
+little 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, _you_ draw conclusions pretty rapidly!" she said, turning her eyes
+upon him curiously. "I _was_ going 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 shall _not_ go into more
+congenial associations when I leave you! There, will _that_ do?"
+
+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, a _little_ as 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
+surprise or 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 story of 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 immediate
+_mesalliance_ upon 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 of Margaret 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 not tended 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 insulted
+_him_ coming 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--_the_ opportunity 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, or was 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 ---- are _you_, Horace Townsend as you call yourself, to put in
+your remarks when _gentlemen_ are 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 with _you_!" 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 a _gentleman_," and he laid a terrible stress upon
+the word--"a _gentleman_ who 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--of the 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 of _our_ business, 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 blast wailing
+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 friends _she_ had 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 that
+one 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 bringing her 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 wish
+_I_ was 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 what _would_ you 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 have _I_, 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--for _you_,--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?--I _know_ she
+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 loved _her_, 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 barrier exists 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.
+
+"Then _my_ situation 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 ever _should_ grow 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 are _gentlemen_, 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!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+     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 than above 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 (_his_ season 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, a
+little 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 are
+_not_. 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 of _climbing_.
+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 the fact 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 them
+_below_ themselves, 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 to wean 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
+points of 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 to _them_--at least it is not so to _me_."
+
+"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 have been 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 supernaturally _ordered_, beyond a doubt: it may be _protected_, or
+quite the opposite," was the minister's smiling reply. "And I might go a
+step further and say that every man is supernaturally _upheld_, 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
+for _him_ as 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 not a 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 remaining at 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 spot more 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 be discerned, 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
+and phases 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.
+
+"No, it would be useless: the Rambler, they say, generally chooses his own
+society, and he probably would not even thank us for the invitation,"
+answered another. The strange man had by that time passed into the thicket
+bordering the edge of the schute at the right, and was seen no longer. Some
+of the pic-nickers noticed, as he passed, that he had no stick in his hands
+and that his almost invariable companion, the haversack, was missing from
+his side. But there seemed to be no occasion of commenting on so slight a
+matter, and nothing was said with reference to it.
+
+It must be confessed that among those who had not contributed in any way to
+the spreading of the miscellaneous dinner upon the ground, were two persons
+in whom this narration maintains a peculiar interest--Horace Townsend,
+lawyer, and Margaret Hayley, gentlewoman. The lady had been among the early
+visitors to the swing; and at the time of the disappearance of the Rambler
+into the thicket at the edge of the schute, she was being swept backward
+and forward in the air by that dizzying contrivance, at a rate which sent
+her loosened wealth of dark hair and her light summer drapery floating
+about in equal negligence and profusion, while the dainty white hands held
+fast to the rope with a tenacity which showed them to possess a commendable
+degree of nerve, and the trim dark gaiter enclosing her Arab foot, and the
+spotless stocking that rose above it, had both just that measure of display
+which preserved the extremest bound of delicacy and yet made the whole
+spectacle strangely bewitching. Perhaps the extraordinary light in her eye
+as she swung may have been a little influenced by one of the two pairs of
+hands that supplied the careful impelling force; for those hands certainly
+belonged to the lawyer, who had been a member of the idle section from the
+beginning, while she had wilfully attached herself to it in spite of the
+expostulations of the Captain. That gallant officer, by the way, had been
+retained among the dinner-purveyors by the wiles and the threats of a
+little dark-eyed minx from Providence, who cared no more for him than she
+did for her shoe-lace, but who would flirt with him and make him flirt with
+her, because she saw that he was arrogant, shoulder-strapped, and very much
+afraid of being seen for a moment absent from the side of Margaret Hayley.
+The Captain, who was not quite fool enough to believe that he had really
+made a military conquest of the young Yankee girl, probably objurgated her
+in his heart for her charming impudence; while Margaret, more gratified by
+the relief than she cared to make manifest, may have made private
+calculations of hugging that dear little tormentor the first moment when
+she could catch her alone.
+
+Such was the aspect of affairs--the young girl in the swing, Townsend and
+another gentleman swinging her, half a dozen merry young men and girls
+gathered around the trees or lying lazily on the grass, and the other and
+more industrious half-score kneeling and bending and squatting around the
+table-cloths at U. C. of the plateau,--when the arrangements (or
+mis-arrangements) were judged to be complete and one of the male members of
+the working-detail, a little hungry and disposed to be more than a little
+witty, made up one hand into the shape of a trumpet and bawled through it:
+
+"Oh yes,--oh yes!--know all men and several women by these presents that
+the regal banquet is spread and that those who intend to eat are required
+to eat now or ever after hold their pieces--if they can find any to hold!"
+
+A merry farce--the very incarnation of thoughtless jollity,--the dinner and
+the announcement. It rung out over the plateau, heard by all and certain to
+be heeded by all; to be succeeded the very instant after by a sound that no
+member of that company will ever forget until his dying day. A scream of
+mortal agony and terror that seemed to rise from the depths of the schute,
+nondescript in some respects, as unlike what any one then present had ever
+heard, but unmistakably human because the last sounds of every repetition
+shaped themselves into words that could be distinguished:
+
+"Help!--help!--help!"
+
+For one moment that fearful cry ceased and during that moment all was
+silence among the pic-nickers. For that instant, too, probably more than
+half the company believed that whatever the sound might be, it was the
+prank of some unscrupulous joker, hidden away in the undergrowth near the
+edge of the schute and intended to frighten the ladies out of any appetite
+for their dinner. The time of its coming, immediately following the
+dinner-call, was certainly favorable to that supposition. But when it
+commenced again, the very instant after, louder and more shrill, so
+evidently coming up from the depth below, the thought of practical jest
+vanished and every cheek grew deadly white with the certainty that some
+tragedy was being enacted near them, that human eye must be blasted by
+seeing and that human hand could probably find no power to avert.
+
+It would have seemed the most unlikely of all things, when that ambiguous
+banquet on the top of the mountain was spread, that it should never be
+eaten; and yet the fates had so destined. Old Ancæus had quite as little
+faith in the prediction of the slave whom he overworked in his vineyard,
+that he should never taste of the product of the vines; and when he held
+the cup in his hand and the red wine was bubbling to the brim, ready to
+show the audacious prophet the fallacy of his prediction, the muttered:
+"There's many a slip between the cup and the lip!" no doubt fell upon
+incredulous ears. But even then the cry rang out that called him to the
+Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, and the spirit of the warrior was higher than
+the pride of the wine-grower and the hard master. The heavy cup went
+clanging to the earth, the blood of the grape flowing out to enrich once
+more the ground from which it had been derived; and the tyrant hero rushed
+away. The slaves had a new master, thereafter; and though Ancæus may have
+supped with the gods on Olympus, on the night when the great fight was
+over, he never tasted of that wine of his vineyard which had once even been
+lifted to his lips! So tasted not the diners on that mountain in a far
+distant land from that which held Olympus, even when the feast was spread
+and the call had been made for their gathering.
+
+It is impossible to say what point of time elapsed before any member of
+that horrified company remembered the Rambler, his habits, the conversation
+of that morning, and the fact that he had only a few moments before been
+seen going in the direction from which that piteous cry was coming up. It
+is impossible to measure it, for at such moments ages of sensation pass in
+the very twinkling of an eye. Some of them did remember him, with a groan,
+and perhaps the thought was general. At all events the consternation was
+so--as general as if some one who had come away from the Crawford with them
+in life and high hope, had suddenly been stricken dead before their eyes.
+Margaret Hayley, with the frightened cry which even then shaped a feeling:
+"Oh, Mr. Townsend, what _can_ that be!" dropped from the swing and was
+caught in arms outstretched to receive her. By that time all seated around
+the table-cloths had sprung to their feet; and at once every member of the
+party, male and female, impelled by a curiosity that even overmastered
+fear, rushed down the plateau towards the edge, as if some horrible madness
+had seized all and they were about to spring off into the great chasm
+below. But before they had reached the edge all the ladies except two and
+several of the gentlemen recoiled; and it was only by degrees and under the
+compelling attraction of that still ascending cry, that some of those
+remaining could force themselves to the verge. Those who reached it at that
+moment, and those who closed up the instant after, saw enough to make
+Blondin and his brother-fools a non-necessity for the balance of their
+natural lives; and the cry from below was answered, be sure, by a cry that
+rang from every voice above when the sad spectacle met the eye.
+
+It was indeed the subject of their past fear who supplied their present
+horror; and the situation, keeping in view previous descriptions of the
+locality, may be briefly conveyed.
+
+It will be remembered that at the bend or elbow of the gulch, some thirty
+feet below, two fangs of the root of a tree stretched out partially across
+the chasm, the upper long and at some distance from the rock of the bottom,
+the other shorter and lying very near it. It will also be remembered that
+beneath both the schute stretched its long blue jagged line to the foot of
+the mountain, not less than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, with the
+air between the top and bottom looking actually blue from distance,--and
+that the schute itself was so nearly perpendicular that while any object
+falling down it would probably touch it all the way from top to bottom, it
+would go down almost with the velocity of the lightning and be rolled and
+pounded to a mere ball before it had accomplished half of the descent.
+
+On that lower fang of the root hung the Rambler--those who had seen him at
+the Crawford recognized him at once, at that short distance; and it was
+indeed from that throat so little accustomed to call for assistance from
+any mortal hand, that the terrible cries of agony and appeals for help were
+ascending. One hand grasped the root near the end, without being able to go
+nearly round it, and one leg was caught round the root farther towards the
+tree, with the bend at the knee forming a kind of hook so long as it could
+retain its tension. The other arm and leg hung down, with the body, below,
+and the long grizzled hair streamed away from the head that depended
+downward in the direction towards which it seemed to be so fatally tending.
+The face could be seen, as that was turned towards the cliff, but its
+expression could not be recognized at that distance and in the reversed
+position that it occupied. All that could be known, to any certainty, was
+that there hung a human being, evidently unable even to recover a safer
+hold upon the root, screaming for help that was hopeless, and as certain to
+make the last plunge within a space of time that could be measured by
+single minutes, or perhaps even by seconds, as the sun was certain to move
+on in its course and the earth to retain its laws of gravitation!
+
+Was there not cause, indeed, for that general cry of pitying horror from
+above, which answered the cry of agony and terror from below?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+     SUSPENSE IN DANGER, IN TWO SENSES--HORACE TOWNSEND WITH A
+     NEW THOUGHT--THE USE OF A SWING-ROPE--AN INVITATION TO
+     CAPTAIN HECTOR COLES--A FEARFUL PIECE OF AMATEUR
+     GYMNASTICS--GOING DOWN INTO THE SCHUTE--SUCCESS OR
+     FAILURE?--THE EVENT, AND MARGARET HAYLEY'S MADNESS--TWO
+     UNFORTUNATE DECLARATIONS.
+
+
+We have said that the whole body of the pic-nickers rushed up to the edge
+of the plateau, and that all, or nearly all, caught glimpses of the
+situation. Then came that cry, that shutting of the eyes and springing
+back, until only three or four, of whom Horace Townsend was one and Captain
+Hector Coles was _not_ another, remained on the verge. Margaret Hayley,
+among those who had gazed down and drawn back, remained a few feet from the
+edge, and the Captain was either so careful of her safety or so anxious to
+furnish himself with an excuse for remaining no nearer, that he caught her
+by the dress and retained his grip as if she had been some bundle of
+quartermaster's goods that he was fearful of having slip through his
+fingers! Frightened inquiries and equally frightened replies, mingled with
+moans and sobs and wringings of female hands, went round the circle thus
+scattered over the lower part of the plateau; and for a moment those noises
+made the still-ascending cries for help almost inaudible.
+
+Horace Townsend stood at the very edge, and except perhaps sharing in the
+first cry, he had not uttered one word. He no doubt understood,
+intuitively, like the rest, that the poor man must have been attempting the
+mad descent, when the undergrowth by which he held fast gave way in his
+hands, or some stone caved out beneath him, sending him headlong downward
+for a plunge of two thousand feet, from which he had only been temporarily
+stopped by striking and gripping the root of the tree as he fell. Beyond
+this, and with reference to any possibility of saving the perilled man, he
+was probably quite as much in the dark as any of the others. He stood half
+bent, his dusky cheek pale and his face strangely contorted, his hands
+clasped low as if wringing themselves surreptitiously, and the eyes beneath
+his bent brow looking into the gulf as if he was trying to peer downward
+into the eternal mystery which that man was so soon to fathom.
+
+Suddenly his face lighted. "Hush! I must speak to that man!" he said, in a
+low but intense voice, and the behest was obeyed so quickly that almost
+total silence fell upon the top of the plateau.
+
+"Hallo, below there!" he cried, as the call of agony ceased for an instant.
+
+"Help! help! oh help! came back from below.
+
+"Do you understand what I say?" again he called.
+
+"Yes!--help! help!" came feebly back.
+
+"Get that rope from the foot of the swing there, quick, some of you!" he
+cried, and his voice seemed for the time to clear from its hoarseness and
+ring like a trumpet. "Quick!--cut it away at the bottom and bring it all
+here!"
+
+Half a dozen of the young men and one or two of the ladies, delighted to
+aid in any hope of saving the perilled man (for the most thoughtless of us
+are naturally, after all, kind and averse to death and suffering), sprung
+for the rope. Two of them reached the foot of the swing ahead of the
+others, the pocket-knife of one was out in an instant, and in another
+moment they came up dragging nearly or quite an hundred feet of strong inch
+rope.
+
+"We have a rope here that will hold you: can you catch it and hold on or
+tie it around your body?" the lawyer called down again.
+
+"No!"--the pained and weakening voice came back, and then they all knew
+what had reduced that athletic and iron-gripped man to such a state that he
+could make no effort to swing himself up again. He spoke brokenly and
+feebly, but Horace Townsend and some of the others caught the words: "I
+can't catch the rope--I put my right shoulder out of joint as I fell--I
+can't hold on much longer--I shall faint with this pain--oh, can't some of
+you help me?"
+
+Then passed over the countenance of Horace Townsend one of those sweeping
+expressions which make humanity something more or less than human. It may
+have been the god stirring--it may have been the demon. No one saw it--not
+even Margaret Hayley; for when he turned nothing more was to be seen than
+that the brow was very dark, and that the lips were set grimly. The powers
+looking downward from heaven on the falling of leaves and the nesting of
+young birds may have remarked the whole expression and set it down at its
+true worth, and that will eventually be found quite sufficient. Before he
+turned he shouted, much louder and more authoritatively than he had spoken
+before, to the man hanging between life and death below:
+
+"Hold on, like a man! We _will_ do something to help you!"
+
+Then he spoke to the two young men, one of whom yet held the end of the
+rope:
+
+"Tie a big loop in that rope, quick--ten or a dozen feet from the end."
+
+They proceeded to do so, with not unskilful hands, and in that instant the
+lawyer approached Captain Hector Coles, where he stood, only a few feet
+off, still holding the dress of Margaret Hayley. He did not appear to see
+_her_ at all, but she saw _him_, and there was that upon his face which
+frightened her so that she literally gasped.
+
+"Captain Coles!" he said, "do you know what you said of me the other night
+and again the other day? There is a rope, and there is yet a chance to save
+that man. Go down, if you are as brave as you boast, and save him. Do you
+hear me?--go!"
+
+"I? Humph!" That was all the reply that the Captain, half-stupefied, could
+make to what he believed to be the words of a madman.
+
+"No, I thought not!" sneered the voice through the hard lips. With the
+words coat and vest were thrown off, and the tall, slight, athletic form
+was developed with no concealment but the shirt and the closely-girt
+trowsers. The shoes followed, and as they did so Margaret Hayley well
+remembered where and when she had before seen that disrobing. She had grown
+white as the collar and cuffs of her gray chambray; and she was so
+paralyzed with wonder, fear, anxiety, and conflicting thought, that she
+could not speak, and was on the point of falling. Yet all this time Horace
+Townsend seemed to pay her no more attention or observation than he might
+have done had she been a wooden post or a stone monument erected at the
+same point of the plateau!
+
+Not sixty seconds had elapsed after the throwing off of his outer garments,
+when the lawyer, without another word to any one, seized the rope, looked
+over the edge to see that the Rambler was still hanging to his thorn,
+lowered down the line until the loop was nearly opposite to him, then
+carried up the other end and with the volunteered assistance of one of the
+young men firmly secured it with two or three turns and as many knots,
+around the trunk of a stout sapling.
+
+All saw the movement, now, and all began to understand it; but oh, with
+what redoubled agitation was the truth realized! He was going down that
+frail rope, and into what peril! The rope fastened, he stepped forward to
+the verge, while a murmur ran round the frightened group, even coming from
+the lips of those who had never spoken to him: "Oh, don't!" Margaret Hayley
+was no longer stone: she cast one glance at the face of Captain Hector
+Coles, saw that the expression on it was every thing rather than fear or
+anxiety, then jerked away her dress from his hand and darted forward.
+
+"No--do not go!" she said, grasping the lawyer by the arm on the very
+verge.
+
+"I must!" Then for the first time he appeared to see her.
+
+"No! If I bid you stay for _my_ sake, will you do it?"
+
+"For your sake, Margaret Hayley, I would go all the quicker. Stand back,
+for God's sake!--you may fall!"
+
+She said no other word. Captain Hector Coles sprang forward and grasped her
+arm to draw her back. She jerked it away, almost angrily, and never stirred
+so far from the edge as to prevent her looking down the schute. Half a
+dozen of the others, all gentlemen, had taken the same risk of crowding to
+the edge, their very breath held; but none of them would any more have
+thought, just then, of offering to aid _her_, than of tendering the same
+support to one of the rooted saplings on the cliff. It was a fearful
+moment, but not the weakest heart on that plateau beat within the bosom of
+the white-handed Philadelphia girl!
+
+Horace Townsend threw himself down on his face as he reached the edge,
+grasped the rope and crawled over backwards in that way, descending it
+hand-over-hand. Those too far back from the edge to see, heard him call out
+to the man below as he disappeared from sight: "Hold fast like a man! I am
+coming!" Then they saw no more, and for the moment heard no more.
+
+Those who stood on the verge, and Margaret Hayley among them--saw the
+adventurous lawyer descend the rope with slow and steady care but evident
+labor, until he reached the loop opposite and nearly under the suspended
+man. Then they saw him weave his right arm into the loop until the strands
+of rope seemed to go around it three or four times, throw down his feet to
+the rock so as to raise his shoulders away from it, and commence gathering
+in the loose rope below with his left. Directly he seemed to have the end
+in his hand, and they saw him stretch the left arm as if to throw it around
+the body of the perilled man. At that moment they saw, with a horror that
+words can make no attempt at describing, that the hand of the Rambler which
+had held the end of the root gave way and the body swung to a
+perpendicular, head downward, only suspended by the hook formed of the leg.
+All, except one--that _one_--closed their eyes, confident that the leg too
+must give way and the poor climber plunge headlong, perhaps bearing down
+the would-be rescuer with him. But no!--still the body remained in that
+position for a moment, and in that moment they saw that the rope passed
+around it and the hand of the lawyer made an attempt, the success of which
+could not be seen, to tie the rope into a knot about the waist. But even at
+that instant the tension of the stiffened leg gave way and they saw the
+body plunge downwards, head first; _where_, was too sickening a horror to
+conjecture.
+
+No one saw any more--not even Margaret Hayley. With one wild cry she
+sprang back from the verge and tottered half fainting but still erect, into
+the arms of some of the other ladies who had been watching the whole scene
+through _her_.
+
+Perfect silence--the silence of untold terror and dread. Their own eyes had
+seen the Rambler plunge headlong towards the realization of that fearful
+last wish: what hope was there that the other, entangled with him, had not
+accompanied him? It must be said that for the moment no one dared look over
+the edge again, and that no one dared, during the same time, to test, by
+feeling the rope, whether any weight still remained at the end of it! The
+cast-off coat, vest, hat and shoes of the lawyer assumed the look of
+dead-men's clothes unseasonably exhibited; and each even looked upon the
+other with horror because a spectator of the same catastrophe. What must
+have been the feelings of Margaret Hayley, if, as we have had reason to
+believe, her first love had faltered in favor of a new ideal? What those of
+Captain Hector Coles when he believed that a disgusting and audacious
+rivalry had been removed at least _two thousand feet_?
+
+All this found relief when it had lasted about ten ages--in other figures,
+about two minutes and thirty seconds! The rope was seen to tremble at the
+edge, and two or three of the men gathered strength to dart forward. A head
+came up above the level, and a faint voice said:
+
+"Give me a hand, here!"
+
+A hand was given, and in one instant more the lawyer was dragged up upon
+the plateau and staggered to his feet. He was bathed in sweat, trembled
+fearfully, and his clothes were torn in many places. Personally he had
+received no injury, except that some hard object (perhaps one of the snags
+of the root) had struck him near the left temple and ploughed its way in
+such a manner that the wound would probably leave a scar there during life,
+more than half way across the forehead and up into the roots of the hair.
+Even this was shallow and the few drops of blood flowing from it wore
+already dried, so that probably the receiver had never been aware of the
+blow or its effect. Most of those things were seen afterwards--they were
+certainly not seen with this particularity at the time, for not one of the
+persons on the plateau, from Captain Hector Coles to the least interested
+of the company, saw any thing else than the proud face of Margaret Hayley
+radiant with humility, and her tall form cowering down as if to make itself
+humbler and less noticeable, as she dropped on her knees before the
+lawyer--yes, dropped on her knees!--took one of the quivering hands in both
+her own dainty white ones, covered it with kisses that some others would
+have been glad to purchase for hand or lip by mortgaging a soul, and
+literally sobbed out:
+
+"God bless and reward you!--you noblest and strangest man in the world!"
+
+It was a singular position for a proud and beautiful woman--was it
+not?--especially towards a man whose words had never given her any right to
+make so complete a surrender of her womanly reticence and dignity? Captain
+Hector Coles thought so, for he could restrain himself no longer but
+stepped to her, laid his hand upon her arm and spoke in her ear:
+
+"For shame, Margaret Hayley!"
+
+Perhaps no one else heard the words: she heard them, for she was on her
+feet in an instant, and the one word which she returned, in the very ear of
+the Captain and certainly unheard by any other, made him start back and
+redden like one of the traditional furies. He said no more, but stood
+sullen as silent. Whether Horace Townsend had not heard the flattering
+language addressed to him, or whether he had not yet recovered himself
+sufficiently from his late exertion to attempt reply, he made none, but
+seemed confused and unnerved. He did not recover until some one near him
+said:
+
+"Poor fellow!--you lost him after all!"
+
+"Lost him? no!" said the lawyer, arousing himself. "I forgot! He is
+insensible but not fatally injured. Pray pull up the rope, gently, for I
+believe that I am too weak to render you any assistance."
+
+"What!" cried two or three voices in a breath, and more than as many hands
+seized the rope. It was drawn tight--there _was_ something yet remaining
+below. As the knowledge spread among the company and they began to pull on
+the rope, such an involuntary cheer burst from nearly all their throats,
+male and female, as might have roused a man moderately insensible. But they
+produced no effect on the dead weight at the end of the line; and it was
+only after more than five minutes of severe but careful pulling, with every
+breath waiting in hushed expectation lest some sharp angle of the rock
+might at last cut off or weaken the rope, that a dark mass came up to the
+edge and the insensible form of the Rambler was landed upon the plateau by
+the hands that grasped it.
+
+He might have been dead, for all that could be judged, though there was
+really no reason to believe that he should have expired from any cause
+except fright. But he presented a most pitiful spectacle--his clothes
+fearfully torn by abrasion against the rocks in drawing up, the right arm
+hanging loosely from the shoulder, the eyes closed and teeth set as in a
+fatal spasm, and the iron-gray hair and straggling beard matted with blood
+yet flowing from a severe wound in the head that he had received either in
+falling against the rock from the root or in the perilous passage upward.
+There was no indication of breath, but he was alive, for the pulse had not
+stopped its slow movement, and there was at least a chance that he could be
+recovered.
+
+But even then, and while two or three were hurrying to the table for water
+to use in bringing back the flitting life and some of the cloths to use as
+a stretcher in bearing the body to one of the wagons,--even then the
+general attention was for the moment withdrawn. For just as the poor
+Rambler was fairly landed and the company gathering around him, while
+Margaret Hayley was yet standing close to Horace Townsend, with her eyes
+still reading that face which seemed to be a perpetual puzzle to her,--the
+brown cheek grew suddenly of a ghastly white, the whole frame trembled as
+if from the coming of a spasm, and the lawyer fell heavily forward, without
+a sign of sensation, just as he had done in the previous instance after
+rash exposure and severe exertion, at the Pool. Now, as then, reaction
+seemed to come with terrible force, unnerving the system and literally
+overmastering life.
+
+As was to be expected under such circumstances, the excitement among the
+pic-nickers redoubled when they had two insensible people instead of one,
+and one of the two the hero of so strange an adventure as that which has
+just been recorded, to look after and bring back to life. Exclamations: "He
+is dying!" "He is dead!" "He has fainted from over-exertion!" "How
+dreadful!" and half a dozen others ran round the circle. But Margaret
+Hayley did not hear or did not heed them. She was again upon her knees, for
+a very different purpose from that which had thus bowed her the moment
+before--lifting the head of matted hair upon her lap, chafing the stiffened
+hands, and uttering words that seemed to have no regard to the delicacy of
+her position or the hearing of the by-standers. Such words of unmistakable
+anxiety and fondness the insensible man might have been willing to peril
+another life to hear; and they were uttered, let it be remembered, when
+she, however the others may have been alarmed, had no idea that he was
+dying or in danger, and more as if she wished to pour out a great truth of
+her nature and be relieved of its weight, than with any other apparent
+thought in view. Oh, that ideal! Oh, love of woman, a moment checked in its
+first course, to break away again from all bounds and more than redouble
+its early madness! Oh, overweening pride of Margaret Hayley, that once had
+been her most marked characteristic, now cast away like a thing to be
+loathed and reprobated! Oh, prophet words, spoken by the sorrowing girl but
+a few hours after the bereavement of her life, now seeming to be so
+strangely fulfilled! Second love, and an abandonment that even the first
+had scarcely known, before two months of summer had made the grass green
+on the grave of the first! To what was all this tending?
+
+Captain Hector Coles saw, and writhed. His face was dark enough with
+passion to indicate that had no troublesome people and no restraining law
+stood in his path, he would have rolled that insensible form over the edge
+of the plateau, with no rope to impede its progress, and watched with
+heart-felt delight the bumping of the body from crag to crag until it was
+crushed out of all semblance of humanity at the bottom! But he said not one
+word, nor did he again attempt to interfere in the movements of Margaret.
+
+Only a moment or two, and then the eyes of the lawyer opened. He saw the
+face that was looking down into his own; and though many a man would have
+pretended weakness and insensibility a little longer, to keep such a
+position, he made an instant movement to rise and struggled to his feet
+with but slight assistance. Then the young girl fell back into the group of
+other ladies, her duty and her paroxysm of feeling both apparently over,
+and scarcely aware how much or how little the subject of her interest knew
+of her words or her actions. Nor was it sure whether the lawyer saw, as he
+staggered up from the ground, the expression which rested on the face of
+Captain Coles. Time had its task of solving both these important problems.
+
+But a few minutes after Horace Townsend's recovery had elapsed, when the
+body of the Rambler, showing yet, after every application, but faint signs
+of life, was carefully conveyed on an impromptu stretcher to one of the
+wagons--the fragments of the dinner, untasted except as some few of those
+who would have banqueted in a death-room had snatched little bits in the
+midst of the excitement, gathered up and huddled together in the
+baggage-wagon--the whole party more or less comfortably disposed in the
+conveyances, and all hurrying back to the Crawford with what speed they
+might. We say "hurrying", advisedly. It might have been natural enough that
+they should hurry down, to afford more effectual relief to the wounded and
+tortured man; but let not humanity "lay the flattering unction to its soul"
+that they lacked another and a more compelling motive! Such a story as that
+which could be woven of the events of that day, had probably never been
+told as of a late actual occurrence, inside the walls of that hostelrie,
+within the memory of man; and nearly every one, male and female, was a
+little more anxious to indulge in the relation as soon as possible, and to
+his or her own particular set of intimates, than even to succor life or
+alleviate suffering! Wonder not that newspapers are popular in the latter
+half of the nineteenth century: man himself is but a newspaper incarnated;
+and a few friends are not ill-sacrificed, much less perilled without
+advantage, when the catastrophe affords us plenty of the cheap heroism of
+the looker-on and narrator!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The providences are equally strange that give opportunity for the great
+blunders and absorbing agonies of life, with those that afford space to its
+triumphant successes and its crowning pleasures. Rooms are empty or ears
+are deaf, sometimes, that we maybe made deliriously happy; but they may
+have an equally assured mission to make us wretched beyond hope. Three days
+before, a parlor unoccupied except by themselves had afforded Horace
+Townsend and Margaret Hayley an opportunity of saying words that seemed to
+make, each a new being to the other, and that awakened hopes as wild and
+maddening as the dreams of opium could have originated. One laggard
+servant-girl with her dusting-brush, or one dawdling visitor lingering in
+the way, might have prevented all this and kept them on the distant footing
+they had before occupied. One person more, strolling down the glen below
+the Crawford at eleven o'clock on the morning following the events on the
+top of Mount Willard, might have prevented--what? Nothing, perhaps! Are not
+all these things ordered for us? And must not the event, debarred in one
+channel, have found inevitable way in another? The fatalists, who believe
+in a Deity of infinitesimal and innumerable providences, say "Yes!" and
+argue that the ripping away of a boot-sole or the scorching of the cook's
+short-cake come within the category. The people of unswayed free-will, who
+worship a Deity not over-particular as to the every-day habits of his
+creatures, say "No!" and see nothing providential in any event less
+important than the breaking out of a pestilence or the downfall of a
+nation. At which point it may be necessary to discover what connection all
+this has with the fortunes of two of the people most prominent in this
+narration.
+
+At about the hour named, that morning, Horace Townsend strolled alone down
+the glen, towards the Willey House. Great excitements are always followed
+by corresponding reaction; and the visitors at the Crawford, after the
+departure of a few gone up the great mountain, had not made a single
+collective arrangement to occupy the day. Each was thrown upon personal
+resources; and the resource of the lawyer was setting out upon a long and
+lonely morning walk, his legs being the chief actors therein, while his
+mind, to judge by the bent head and the slow step, was taking its own
+peculiar and much longer journey.
+
+Suddenly he lifted his head and came to a full stop. He was _not_ alone,
+after all! Half a mile below the house, beside the road and under the edge
+of a thick clump of woods, lay the trunk of a huge tree, some of the higher
+branches yet remaining unshorn, though trimmed by the axe. On the point of
+one of these branches, very easily ascended by the stairway of knots below,
+some eight or ten feet from the ground, rested a neat foot, while the owner
+of the figure above it, dressed in a light robe which floated around her
+with almost the softness of a cloud, had thrown off her jockey-hat (the
+object first attracting the notice of the lawyer) on the ground below, and
+was stretching up at full length to pluck a cluster of the great creamy
+blossoms of the wild northern magnolia, starring the green leaves around
+it, which had beckoned her from the path.
+
+Does the reader remember where it was that the first glimpse was caught of
+Margaret Hayley--standing on the piazza of the house at West Philadelphia,
+with one arm of Elsie Brand around her waist, but both her own hands
+employed in the attempt to force open a blush rose that had as yet but half
+blown from the bud? Roses then--the wild magnolia now: would the dainty
+white hand that had been so tenderly cruel to the flower-spirit two months
+before, only gather the blossom to pluck away its shreds one by one and
+scatter them listlessly on the ground as she walked? Or had those two
+months taught her something of the meaning of that word "suffering,"
+unknown before, and ripened and softened the proud nature that possibly
+needed such training?
+
+The lawyer stood irresolute for a moment, doubtful whether the lady would
+be pleased by his having discovered her in that somewhat girlish situation.
+Then he remembered some duty or feeling which seemed of more consequence
+than a mere momentary embarrassment, and came close to the log upon which
+she was standing, before she was aware of his presence.
+
+"Shall I help you down, Miss Hayley?"
+
+The words were simple, and they did not seem to demand that trembling of
+tone which really accompanied them. Neither did there appear to be any
+occasion for the flush of red blood which ran all over cheek and brow of
+Margaret Hayley in the moment of her first surprise. But the flush was gone
+before she had cast that inevitable look downward, which womanhood can
+never forget when caught playing the Amazon however slightly,--stepped
+lightly down the stairway of knots to the trunk and held out her hand to
+accept the offer.
+
+"See what a beautiful cluster of my favorites!" she said.
+
+"Beautiful indeed!" The lawyer was looking intently at the blossoms or at
+the hand which held them--no matter which. The lady seemed to have some
+impression of the latter, for she flushed again a little and drew back both
+hands and flowers.
+
+"And you are walking already again this morning?" she said, after a moment
+of silence which her companion did not seem disposed to break.
+
+"Yes," absently.
+
+"Already quite recovered from yesterday?" Margaret Hayley was treading upon
+dangerous ground: did she know it?
+
+They had walked on together down the road, as if by mutual consent. The
+lawyer was silent again for a time, looking away, and when he again turned
+his eyes towards her there was an earnestness in their glance and a sad
+seriousness in the whole face which denoted that he had thought much and
+resolved not a little in that moment.
+
+"Recovered from yesterday? From the slight fatigue--yes! From some other
+effects of the day?--no!"
+
+"I am sorry to hear you say so." The words dropped slowly and very
+deliberately from her lips, and her head had a wavy nod as she spoke.
+
+"You are sure of the grounds of your sorrow?"
+
+"I fear so--yes!"
+
+"Then I, too, have cause to fear!"
+
+Silence again for a moment, and they walked on, very slowly. Then Horace
+Townsend spoke again.
+
+"You are going away to the Glen House, to-morrow or the next day, are you
+not?"
+
+"I believe Captain Coles and my mother have so arranged," was the reply.
+
+"And I am going southward to Winnipiseogee to-morrow."
+
+"_You?_" The exclamation was abrupt and surprised, as if she had not before
+thought of a separation of routes. Horace Townsend heard the word and
+recognized the tone; and what the spark is to the magazine was that sudden
+monosyllable to the half-controlled heart of the man.
+
+"Margaret Hayley, we separate then to-morrow," he said. "This may be and no
+doubt will be the last time that we shall speak together without listeners.
+I have something to say that must be spoken. Will you hear me?"
+
+She caught him suddenly by the arm, with a motion like that of one warning
+or checking another on the brink of a precipice--like that she had used the
+day before under such very different circumstances,--and said:
+
+"Oh, do not!--do not!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Do not say words that must separate us instead of bringing us nearer to
+each other!"
+
+"And would _that_ grieve you?"
+
+"On my soul--yes!"
+
+Another spark to the magazine. It exploded. Horace Townsend had caught
+Margaret Hayley's hand and his eye literally flashed fire into hers, while
+his brown cheek mantled with the blood that could no longer be restrained.
+
+"I _must_ speak, Margaret Hayley, and you must listen. _I love you!_ There
+is not a thought in my mind, not a hope in my soul, that is not yours. Does
+_that_ separate us?"
+
+She did not draw away her hand, and yet it returned no answering pressure
+to his. Her head was bent down so that he could not see her face, and her
+words were very few and very sad:
+
+"I am sorry--very sorry! Yes!"
+
+"Stop!" He laid his hand upon her forehead, gently pushing back her head
+until he virtually compelled her eyes to come up to the level of his own.
+"Margaret Hayley, too little may be said as well as too much. I am going to
+say what perhaps no other man in the world _dare_ say. I love you, but that
+is not all. I cite your woman's heart and your immortal soul this moment
+before the sight of that God whose eye is looking down upon us in this
+sunshine, and I say that _you_ love _me_! You may never forgive me the
+word, but you must tell me the truth! Do you deny it?"
+
+"No!" The word was louder and clearer than any that she had spoken--louder
+and clearer than any that had been spoken during the interview. And yet it
+was not a lover's response.
+
+"You admit this, and yet you say that my opening my heart to you separates
+us instead of drawing us together. Three days ago you told me that--that
+man"--he did not mention the name of Captain Hector Coles, nor did there
+seem to be any occasion--"was not and never could be your betrothed
+husband. What tie binds you? What am I to fear? What am I to think?"
+
+"Think that what I say is true, Horace Townsend--that I love you, and yet
+that I do not love you--that your company is dearer to me, to-day, than
+that of any person on earth--that I respect you in every regard and hold
+you as one of the bravest and noblest of men--and yet that every word of
+love you utter makes it more evident that we must not meet again, and so
+separates us forever!"
+
+"What _is_ this riddle?" He asked the question in a tone of great anxiety,
+and he did not take away his eyes from the proud orbs that no longer sunk
+before them as he made the inquiry. How impossible to believe that the man
+who had but the moment before cited the heart and soul of Margaret Hayley
+before the very eye of God as a searcher of their entire truth and candor,
+could himself be guilty of deception at the same instant! And yet was he
+not? Was the riddle really so obscure to him as he pretended? Was the very
+name under which he wooed and sought to win, his own? Strange
+questions--stranger far than that he asked; and yet questions that must be
+asked and answered!
+
+"Listen, Horace Townsend!" she said after one instant of silence. "You call
+this a riddle, and you force me to read it to you. I wish you had not done
+so, but I have no choice. I would have kept you as a friend--a dear friend,
+but you would not accept the place."
+
+"Never--not for one moment!" he broke in, as if through set lips. Her hand
+was on his arm, and they were again walking listlessly on. She proceeded
+without any reference to his interruption.
+
+"I have too many words to say--words that pain me beyond measure; but you
+have forced me to them, and I must finish, even if you think me mad before
+I have done. I do not know but I _am_ mad--every thing about me sometimes
+seems to be so unreal and mocking."
+
+Horace Townsend turned at that moment and looked her sidelong in the face,
+then withdrew his glance again as if satisfied, and she went on:
+
+"I told you that Captain Hector Coles would never be nearer to me than he
+is, and he will not. I hate that man, and he knows it. But I _love
+another_!"
+
+She paused, as if she expected some outburst at this declaration; but no
+outburst came. All the effect it produced was a quick shudder through the
+arm that sustained her hand.
+
+"I love another--do you hear me? I who say that I love _you_, say that I
+love another! For more than a year, before the last two months, I was a
+betrothed bride, and never woman loved more truly than I the man who filled
+my whole ideal of manly beauty, grace and goodness. One day, two months
+ago, I found that man a _coward_. He dared not fight for his native
+land--not even for his native State when it was invaded. We
+parted--forever, as I thought; forever, as he thinks, no doubt. I have
+heard that he has gone to another land: no matter, he has left _me_, with
+my own will. Then I came to the mountains, for change of scene and for
+distraction. I met you. I was attracted to you from the first--I have grown
+more attracted day by day, until I shudder to think that I love you! Do you
+know _why_?
+
+"Because _my_ affection for _you_ has given birth to some feeble likeness
+of itself!" was the response.
+
+"No! The confession may wound your vanity, but the truth must be told.
+Every throb of my heart towards you, Horace Townsend, has been caused by
+some dim resemblance of your face to the man I once loved, and something in
+your voice that came to me like a faint echo. It is not _you_ whom I have
+been seeing and hearing, but the man who was handsomer than you, your
+superior in so many respects, and yet your inferior in that one which
+makes me worship you almost as a god--your sublime, dauntless courage when
+all others quail. Do you understand me now, and know why your words should
+never have been spoken?"
+
+"I _think_ that I understand you!" was the response, but a bitter smile,
+unseen by the lady, wreathed the moustached lip as he spoke. "And that
+other--he will come back, some day, and all except the old love will be
+forgotten, and you will marry him, of course."
+
+"Horace Townsend, you do not quite understand me, yet!" she said. "I am no
+child, to be trifled with, but a woman. I loved him, better than my own
+soul, but I cannot continue to love when I cease to respect. I shall never
+marry, while I live, unless I marry the man to whom my heart was first
+given. I thought that perhaps I might find a new ideal, some day, when we
+first parted; but I know better now. You have taught me how nearly the
+vacant place can be supplied, and yet how empty all is when the one bond is
+wanting."
+
+"And I say, again, that some day he will come back, and you will marry
+him."
+
+"Never--if he comes as he was!" was the reply. "If Heaven would work a
+miracle and give him the one thing that he lacks--bravery and
+patriotism,--even if he struck but one blow, to prove that he was no coward
+to fly before the enemies of his country,--I would go barefoot round the
+world to find him, and be his servant, his slave, if he would not forgive
+the past and make me his wife!"
+
+With the last words she had broken down almost entirely, and as she ceased
+she burst into a very passion of tears and sobs. Where was the overweening
+pride of Margaret Hayley? Gone, all gone; and yet she clung to that one
+touchstone--her husband, when the country called and he was subjected to
+the trial, must prove that he dared be patriot and soldier, or her lips
+should never speak that sacred name!
+
+"I have indeed spoken too far, and it is better that we should not meet
+again," he said, in a voice quite as low and almost as broken as her own.
+"I understand you, now: forgive me if I have caused you pain in making the
+discovery; and good-bye!"
+
+He wrung the young girl's hand almost painfully and was turning away.
+
+"You are going now? Shall I not see you again?" she asked.
+
+"No matter--I do not know--I cannot tell. I may see you at the house before
+I leave. If not, and we never meet again, God bless you, Margaret Hayley,
+the only woman I have ever loved!"
+
+He stooped suddenly and kissed her hand, then turned, drew his hat over his
+brow and walked rapidly up the road towards the Crawford. Margaret,
+oppressed by some strange feeling, could not speak. She could only look
+back and catch a last glimpse of him as he turned a bend in the road; then
+sink her face in her hands and sob aloud as if she had buried a second love
+not less dear than the first.
+
+When she returned to the house, half an hour after, Horace Townsend was
+already gone--flying away towards Littleton with four horses. Captain
+Hector Coles was in a better humor, being already advised of the fact, than
+he had exhibited at any time during the previous week. Mrs. Burton Hayley,
+when his going away was mentioned, made some appropriate remarks on the
+rashness of any person exposing himself as the young man had done the day
+before, unless he was fully prepared for death and judgment, and remarked
+that she was rather glad that so wild a person was not going over to the
+Glen with them. In both these opinions Captain Coles fully coincided.
+Margaret spoke of the departure as a very matter-of-course affair indeed,
+and did not even see the glance by which the gallant Captain intended to
+convey his full recollection of the scene on the top of Mount Willard.
+
+Next day that trio, with a dozen of others, went on to the Glen House for
+the carriage-ascent of Mount Washington.
+
+And with that announcement and a single scene following, concludes the
+somewhat long connection held by the White Mountains, their scenery and
+summer incidents, with the fortunes of the various personages figuring
+prominently in this life-history.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That scene was a very brief one and took place three days after the
+departure from the Crawford, when Margaret Hayley, her mother and Captain
+Hector Coles, had made the ascent of Washington from the Glen House by
+carriage and stood beside the High Altar that has before been mentioned.
+When Mrs. Burton Hayley was signalizing her arrival at the top by repeating
+certain passages from the big book on the carved stand, which she seemed to
+have an idea fitted that elevated point in her summer wanderings, and which
+probably might have done so if she had quoted them with any thing
+approaching to correctness. When Margaret Hayley, breathing the same air
+that Horace Townsend had breathed a few days before, and aware that she was
+doing so, joined to the rapt emotions of the place and the hour, something
+of the sad glory of human love and grief, stretching out her mental hands
+to God whose awful majesty stood before her and around her in the great
+peak lifting itself to heaven, and praying that out of darkness might some
+day come light, as once it had done on that other and more awful peak of
+Sinai. When Captain Hector Coles, above all such considerations and with a
+keen eye to his personal "main chances", fancied that another declaration
+beside the High Altar on Washington would not only be a "good thing to do"
+but a proceeding much more likely to meet with a favorable response than if
+ventured on ground of less altitude.
+
+Then and there, accordingly, Captain Hector Coles, with Mrs. Burton Hayley
+very near and the granite rocks still nearer, possessed himself suddenly of
+Margaret Hayley's white hand, drew her close to him, and murmured:
+
+"Oh, how long I have waited for this hour, Margaret! I love you. I have
+not before said the same thing in words, for a long time, but I believe
+that you must have seen and known how the old affection has still lived and
+strengthened. There have been bitter words between us, occasionally, but
+they have not affected the true feeling lying beneath, and--"
+
+"Stop, Hector Coles!" said Margaret, before he had concluded. "You say that
+there have been bitter words between us occasionally. Now let me warn you
+that no bitter word I have ever said in your hearing, has been any thing
+more than a baby's whisper to what I _will_ say if you ever dare to allude
+to this subject again!"
+
+"But, Margaret--"
+
+"No, not another word! Mother, come here!"
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley obeyed.
+
+"Mother, is it with your wish or approbation that Captain Coles has just
+made me another offer of his heart?"
+
+"Certainly it is," the Captain commenced to answer.
+
+"Stop! it was not to you I put the question, but to my mother!"
+
+"Well, my daughter--I certainly did--that is--I--"
+
+"There, you hear!" said Captain Hector Coles, triumphantly, and confident
+that the knowledge of such a maternal indorsement must work in his favor.
+
+"You did, did you?" and the right hand of Margaret went suddenly inside the
+thick shawl that wrapped her from the winds of the peak--and unseen by the
+Captain a locket--that fatal locket--glittered before the mother's eyes.
+"Will you promise, and keep that promise, that Captain Hector Coles shall
+not say one more word to me of love or marriage, while we remain together?
+If not, as God sees me you know the consequences!"
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley's face was very white at that moment, but the next she
+said: "Oh yes, I promise!" and then with a groan, grasping the surprised
+Captain by the arm: "Captain, if you do not wish to see me drop dead, leave
+that wild, mad girl to herself! She is crazy, but _I_ cannot help it!"
+
+Captain Hector Coles looked from one to the other, in added surprise, but
+found no explanation; then he muttered something that was not a second
+love-declaration; and the next moment Margaret Hayley stood alone, isolated
+as the peak that bore her, and with a heart almost as cold in the dull
+leaden weight that seemed to lie within her bosom, as the storm-beaten
+rocks of which that peak was composed.
+
+Thereafter Captain Hector Coles never spoke to her of love again!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+     THE BEARER OF A DISGRACED NAME, IN ENGLAND--A STRANGE QUEST
+     AND A STRANGE UNREST--HURRYING OVER TO IRELAND--TOO LATE FOR
+     THE PACKET--THE LITTLE DESPATCH-STEAMER--HENRY FITZMAURICE,
+     THE JOURNALIST--AN UNEXPECTED PASSAGE--THE PERIL OF THE
+     EMERALD, AND THE END OF ALL QUESTS SAVE ONE.
+
+
+Far back in the progress of this narration, when it had only reached half
+the distance to which it has now arrived, it was said of one of the
+principal persons therein involved: "Something indescribably dim and
+shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time,
+* * * motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be
+little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events
+without connection and action without explanation." The same remark will
+apply with quite as much force, at this stage, to the movements of the
+bearer of that dishonored name, in his movements on the other side of the
+Atlantic, which must now be briefly recorded in their due order.
+
+It will be remembered that the American entered his name at Liverpool, on
+the twentieth day of July, with the place of his residence attached.
+Thenceforward enough is known, through hotel and other records, to be sure
+that he spent some two weeks in London, occupying lodgings at one of the
+respectable houses of the great metropolis, but spending his time, in other
+regards, in a manner scarcely to have been expected from any previous
+knowledge of his life and antecedents. Was it the lawyer, _because_ the
+lawyer, who visited Scotland Yard the very next day after his arrival in
+London, and spent so much time with some of the leading men in charge of
+that great police-establishment, that he might have seemed to be employed
+in studying the whole English system of criminal detection? And was it the
+lawyer, _as_ the lawyer and consequently on account of his remembrance of
+past connection with the ferreting out of crime in his native land, who
+went immediately afterwards into a continuous and apparently systematic
+round of visits to the worst haunts of vice in the Modern Babel, becoming,
+sometimes in disguise and sometimes in his own proper person, but always
+more or less closely accompanied by some member of the force, the habitue
+of streets in which burglars and thieves most congregated, and of lanes in
+which receivers of stolen property, forgers and all disreputable and
+dangerous characters were known to have their places of business or their
+dens of hiding?
+
+Or was there, leaving the profession of the lawyer out of the question,
+something in the peculiar surroundings of this man--something in the
+relations of character and connection which he had allowed to grow around
+him, unfitting him for other amusements and researches in a city which he
+had never before visited, and one supplying such marvellous temptations to
+the sight-seer and the antiquarian? Or was he paying the penalty of the
+past in an unrest which left him no peace except he found it in continual
+motion and in the companionship and the study of those far more outlawed by
+statute but not more in social position than himself? Strange questions,
+again, and questions which cannot be answered, at this time, by any thing
+more than the mere suggestion.
+
+Certain it is, whatever the motive, that Westminster Abbey, with its every
+stone sacred to the memory of the great dead, seemed to present no
+attractions to him, commensurate with those of Seven Dials, sacred to every
+phase of poverty and villany; that the Houses of Parliament were ignored in
+favor of St. Giles and Bermondsey, noted for debates of a very different
+character from those heard before the occupant of the Woolsack and the
+Speaker of the Commons; and that (this seeming so peculiarly strange in a
+lawyer of admitted character and power) even the Lord Chancellor, rendering
+one of those decisions calculated to affect not only the laws of property
+in England but the whole legal system wherever the English language was
+spoken, seemed to have far less attention paid to him or his dicta, than
+was given to some gownless libel on the practice of criminal law, who could
+point out the habits and haunts of Burly Bill, the noted burglar whom he
+had lately saved from transportation by proving that he was in three
+different places at once, and neither of them the spot where the crime was
+committed,--or Snivelling Sall, reputed to be in the near companionship of
+the most successful utterer of forged notes who had so far escaped the
+clutches of the detective birds of prey. Night and day, during all those
+two weeks, he seemed to eat hastily and to sleep only as if sleep was a
+secondary necessity of nature, to be thrown overboard whenever some
+all-absorbing thought should make continual wakefulness necessary.
+
+Then the fancy (might it not be called madness?) seemed to change. He had
+either exhausted the crime of London or he had skimmed that compound until
+there was no novelty of rich villainy remaining. Without having examined
+one work of art or one antiquarian curiosity (so far as could be known),
+and certainly without having made one effort to find a footing in that
+society for which education and past associations would so well have fitted
+him,--he flitted away from London and the name of Carlton Brand was to be
+found inscribed on the books of one of the leading hotels at Manchester.
+And what did he there? Precisely what he had been doing in London, it
+appeared--nothing less and nothing more. Alternately in conversation with
+one of the detective force or with some one of the wretches whom the
+detective force was especially commissioned to bring to justice--the
+Manchester looms (not yet _all_ stopped by the dearth of cotton and the
+"fratricidal war" in America) presented no more charm to him than had been
+afforded by the high-toned and rational attractions of the metropolis. At
+times dressed with what seemed a studied disregard of the graces of person,
+and scarcely ever so arraying himself that he would have dreamed of
+presenting himself in such a guise in the midst of any respectable circle
+at home--two or three days ran him through the criminal life of Manchester.
+Then away to Birmingham, and there--but why weary with repetition when a
+succeeding fact can be so well indicated by one that has preceded it? The
+same unsettled and apparently aimless life--if not aimless, certainly with
+tendencies the most singular and unaccountable. Thence to Bristol, and from
+Bristol to Liverpool. From Liverpool, with flying haste the whole length of
+the island and over the border to Edinburgh, paying no more attention,
+apparently, to the scenes of Scottish song and story by which he dashed,
+than might have been necessary to remember the cattle-rievers and
+free-booters who had long before furnished pattern for his late
+associates,--and seeing in the old closes and wynds frowned down upon by
+Calton Hill and the Castle, only retreats in which robbers could take
+refuge without serious risk of being unearthed. Then, strangely enough,
+away southward again to Dover, with a passage-ticket for Calais taken but
+countermanded before use, indicating that Paris had been in view but that
+some sudden circumstance had made a change in the all-the-while
+inexplicable calculation. What was all this--the question arises once
+more--the following out of some clue on which the whole welfare of a life
+was believed to depend, or merely the vague and purposeless pursuit of some
+melancholy fancy furnishing the very mockery of a clue through that
+labyrinth which borders the realm of declared madness?
+
+The American had been something more than a month in England, and far away
+beyond his knowledge all the events before recorded as occurring to
+Margaret Hayley and her group of society in the White Mountains had already
+taken place,--when one afternoon, late in August, the train that dashed
+into Holyhead from Birmingham and Chester, by Anglesey and over the Menai,
+bore this exemplification of unrest as a passenger. Those who saw him
+emerge from the carriage upon the platform noticed the haste with which he
+appeared to step and the eagerness of his inquiry whether the train, which
+had been slightly delayed by an accident, was yet in time for the boat for
+Dublin. She had been gone for more than an hour, and the black smoke from
+her funnel was already fading away into a dim wreath driven rapidly
+northward before the sharp south-easter coming up the Channel. Night was
+fast falling, with indications that it would be any thing rather than a
+quiet one on that wild and turbulent bit of water lying between the two
+islands; and some of the old Welsh coastmen who yet lingered on the pier,
+when they saw the impatient man striding up and down and uttering
+imprecations on the delayed train, shrugged their shoulders with the
+remark, which he did not hear or did not choose to heed, that "_they_
+should be much obliged to any train that had kept them from taking a
+rocking in that cradle the night!"
+
+Brow knit, head bent, tread nervous and almost angry, and manifesting all
+the symptoms of anxiety and disappointment, the American traversed the
+wharf, his tall form guarded against the slight chill of the summer evening
+on the coast by a coarse gray cloak which he drew closely around him as he
+walked, thus adding to the restless stateliness of his appearance. At one
+of his turns he was sufficiently disengaged to see a man of middle height,
+dressed in a somewhat dashing civilian costume, standing at a little
+distance up the pier and conversing with two or three of the coastmen. One
+of the latter was pointing towards himself; and the moment after the
+stranger approached with a bow. He was a young man of twenty-five or
+thereabouts, side-whiskered and moustached, decidedly good-looking, with
+quite as much of the Irishman as the Englishman in his face, and seemed at
+all points a gentleman--more, that much rarer combination, especially on
+the soil of the mother island, a frank, clever fellow!
+
+"They tell me, sir," said the stranger, "that you were one of the
+passengers on that delayed train, and that you manifest some disappointment
+at missing the Dublin boat."
+
+"They are entirely correct, sir," answered the American, returning the bow.
+"I was very anxious, for particular reasons, to be in Dublin to-morrow; and
+in fact the whole object of my visiting Ireland at all, just now, may very
+probably be defeated by the accident that brought in the train that half
+hour too late."
+
+He spoke in a tone very earnest and not a little agitated. The other
+remarked the fact, but he thought himself too good a judge of character to
+suspect, as some other persons under similar circumstances might have done,
+that the anxious man was a hunted member of the swell-mob or a criminal of
+some other order, who thought it politic to get off English soil as soon as
+possible. He determined, at the second glance, that he had to do with a
+gentleman, and proceeded with the words that he had evidently intended to
+say on first accosting the delayed passenger.
+
+"You have made no arrangements for getting over, I suppose?"
+
+"None, whatever!" answered the American. "How can I, until the boat of
+to-morrow, when--when it may be too late altogether for my purpose? I was
+walking off my disappointment, a sort of thing that I have been more or
+less used to all my life!" and the other noticed that he seemed to sigh
+wearily--"walking it off before going to find a hotel and lying awake all
+night, thinking of where I ought to have been at each particular hour."
+
+"Well," said the stranger, "I had a motive not personal to myself, in
+accosting you, or I should not have taken the liberty. I am Mr. Henry
+Fitzmaurice, one of the London correspondents of the Dublin _Evening Mail_.
+I believe that I am not mistaken in supposing that I am speaking to an
+American?"
+
+"Not at all mistaken!" answered the American, pleased with a frankness so
+much more like that of his native land than he had been in the habit of
+meeting during his short sojourn abroad. "I am called Mr. Brand--Carlton
+Brand, and on ordinary occasions I am a lawyer of the city of
+Philadelphia."
+
+"That little matter over, which I should not have been able to manage under
+half an hour had I been a pure John Bull instead of two-thirds Irishman,"
+said the man who had introduced himself as Fitzmaurice, in a vivacious
+manner very well calculated to put the other at his ease--"now, not being
+either of us members of the Circumlocution Office, we will get at the gist
+of the matter at once. I am going over to Ireland to-night, or at least I
+am going to make a start in that direction, and I believe that I can manage
+to secure you a passage if you will accept one."
+
+"Certainly, and with many thanks, but how?" was the reply.
+
+"Well, I am not so sure about the thanks," said Fitzmaurice, in the same
+pleasant tone which had before won his companion. "It is going to be a wild
+night on the Channel, if I am any judge of weather, and I have crossed it
+often enough to begin to have some idea. But I _must_ cross, and so must
+you, if you can, as I understand you to say."
+
+"I must, certainly, if any thing in the shape of a vessel does so," said
+the American. "But you have not yet told me--"
+
+"No, of course not!" the newspaper man ran on. "Always expect an Irishman
+to begin his story in the middle and tell it out at each end, and you will
+not be far from the fact. Well, there are some despatches for the Lord
+Lieutenant that need to be across before noon to-morrow, as the Secretary
+for Ireland has an insane fancy, and a special train left London to make
+the connection with the steamer that has just gone. I came in it, and with
+the Queen's messenger,--with some matters that must reach the _Mail_ in
+advance of the other Dublin papers. They have a little despatch-steamer
+lying just below, and the messenger telegraphed to fire her up, from one of
+the back stations, when he found the chances against him. In an hour she
+will have a full head of steam, and before it is quite dark we shall be
+clear of the coast. I have no doubt that I can procure you a passage, and
+if you will step round with me to the wharf where she lies, I will
+certainly try the experiment. Now you have it."
+
+"And a very kind and generous thing I have at the same time!" exclaimed the
+American, warmly.
+
+"As I said before, I do not know about the generosity!" replied the
+correspondent, as they took their way around the warehouses that headed the
+packet-wharf, towards the pier below, where the despatch-boat lay. "The
+fact is that the Emerald is not much bigger than a yawl, and though she is
+a splendid little sea-boat and never has found any gale in which she could
+not outlive the biggest of the merchant steamers, she is very much of a
+cockle-shell in the way of jumping about; and people who have any
+propensity for sea-sickness, a thing a good deal worse than any ordinary
+kind of _death_, are very likely to have a little turn at it under such
+circumstances."
+
+"I have never been very much at sea, but I believe that I am beyond the
+vulgarity of sea-sickness!" was the answer; and just then they reached the
+despatch-steamer.
+
+She was indeed a little thing, as compared with the steamers which the
+American had been in the habit of seeing sent away on sea-voyages--very low
+in hull, rakish in pipe and masts, looming black in the gathering dusk of
+evening, and her bulwarks seeming so low as to present the same appearance
+of insecurity against falling overboard that a landsman's eye immediately
+perceives in a first glance at a pilot-boat. The steam was already well up
+and hissing from her escape valves, while the black smoke rolled away from
+her pipe as if it had a mission to cloud the whole port with soot and
+cinders.
+
+A few words with the Queen's messenger and an introduction to the Captain
+of the little Emerald followed; and the correspondent of the _Mail_ had not
+overrated his influence with either, for in ten minutes the lawyer was
+booked for a passage over, under government auspices. In half an hour more
+the despatch-boat steamed away; and when the deep dusk of night fell to
+shut away the Welsh coast, while the half dozen officers and their two
+passengers were trifling over a very pleasant supper with wines of
+antediluvian vintage accompanying, the Emerald was well off the Head,
+tossing about like a cork in the sea that seemed to be every moment growing
+more and more violent, but making fine weather through it all, flying like
+a race-horse, and promising, if every thing held, to land the messenger and
+her other passengers at Kingstown, at very near as early an hour in the
+morning as those touched the shore who had left Holyhead two hours before
+by the packet.
+
+The American remained long on the deck, in conversation with the newspaper
+correspondent, delighted with the cordiality of his manner and the
+extensive scope of his information, as he had before been with the
+generosity which supplied himself with a passage over at the moment of
+disappointment. The Hiberno-Englishman seemed to be equally pleased with
+his new friend, whom he found all that he had at first believed--a
+gentleman, and neither pickpocket nor madman. Mr. Fitzmaurice, still a
+young man and a subordinate, had never been in America, but he had
+something more than the ordinary newspaper stock of information about
+countries lying beyond sea, and he had the true journalist's admiration
+for the young land that has done more for journalism within fifty years
+than all the other countries of the world through all the ages. He listened
+with pleasure to the descriptions which the lawyer was equally able and
+willing to impart, of the modes in which the news-gathering operations of
+the leading American newspapers were carried on, and especially of the
+reckless exposures of correspondents on the battle-fields of the great war,
+which have all the while exhibited so much bravery and so stupendous a
+spirit of enterprise, combined with a lack of judgment equally injurious
+and deplorable.
+
+Mr. Fitzmaurice, on his part, resident in London during all the period of
+our struggle, necessarily present at most of the Parliamentary debates in
+which the good and ill feeling of Englishmen towards the United States have
+been shown in such unfavorable proportions--acquainted with most of the
+leading public men of the kingdom, and with an Irishman's rattle making the
+conveying of his impressions a thing of equal ease and pleasure,--he had
+much to say that interested the Philadelphian; and it would have been
+notable, could he have been fairly behind the curtain as to the character
+and movements of the other, to mark how the man who during two weeks
+residence in London had never stepped his foot within the Parliament
+Houses, could drink in and digest, from another's lips, the story of the
+debates which he might so easily have heard first-handed with his own ears!
+
+But as the newspaper man could know nothing of this, enough to say that the
+conversation was a pleasant one, and that hours rolled away unheeded in its
+continuance, while the little Emerald skimmed over and plunged through the
+rough waves of the Irish Channel, and while those waves grew heavier, and
+the sky darker, and the wild south-easter increased every hour in the
+violence with which it whistled through the scant rigging and sent the caps
+of the waves whirling and dashing past the adventurous little minnow of
+the steam-navy, to fall in showers of foamy spray far to leeward.
+
+It was past midnight when the young men, so strangely thrown together, so
+different in position and pursuit, but so pleasantly agreeing in all the
+amenities of social intercourse,--began to feel the demands of sleep
+overmastering the excitement of the situation, left the deck and went below
+to the berths in the little cramped cabin which had been prepared for them.
+The Queen's messenger had already retired and was sleeping so soundly in
+his four-by-seven state-room, with his despatches under his pillow, that
+nothing less than the going to pieces of the steamer or an order to start
+on a new journey could possibly have woke him. To such men, ever flying
+from one port to another, by sea and by land, bearing the lives of
+individuals and often the welfare of whole peoples in their hands, with no
+more knowledge of what they bear than has the telegraph wire of the message
+that thrills along it--to such men, habituated to excitement, hurry and
+exposure, that excitement really becomes a sort of second nature; and the
+art of sleeping on the ground, on a board, bolt upright in a chair or even
+in the saddle, is one of the accomplishments soonest learned and last
+forgotten. What are storms to them or to that other class to which
+reference has before been made--the rough Ariels of the newspaper Prospero?
+Nothing, except they cause hindrance! What is even the deepest personal
+peril by sea or land? Nothing, except because in putting a sudden period to
+the existence of the messenger it may interfere with the delivery of his
+all-important despatches!
+
+So slept the Queen's messenger, and so, after a time, in their narrow
+berths, slept the American and his new-made friend. Once falling away into
+slumber, the very motion of the vessel made that slumber more intense and
+stupefying, old Mother Nature rocking her children somewhat roughly in the
+"cradle of the deep." And of what dreamed they? Who knows? Perhaps the
+handsome and vivacious young Anglo-Irishman of the girl whose miniature he
+had accidentally displayed to the eyes of the other, filling the back case
+of his watch,--not yet his wife, but to be so some day when talent and
+energy should bring their recompense and fortune shower her favors a little
+more liberally upon him. Perhaps the Philadelphia lawyer of wrongs and
+shames in his native land, of the apparently mad quest which he seemed to
+be urging, and of possible coming days when all errors should be repaired,
+and the great stake of his life won beyond a peradventure.
+
+How long the lawyer had slept he knew not, when some change in the motion
+of the boat produced the same effect on his slumbers that is said to be
+wrought on the sleeping miller by the stoppage of the splashing water-wheel
+and the rumbling burr-stones. He had slept amidst the violent motion: he
+partially woke when there was a momentary cessation of it. In an instant
+after the vessel seemed to be struck one tremendous blow that sent a shiver
+through every plate and rivet of her iron hull--through every board and
+stanchion of her cabin-work. There are men who can remain undisturbed by
+such a sensation on shipboard, but the American was by no means one of
+them; and the fumes of sleep, partially dissipated before, rolled away
+almost as suddenly as morning mists before a brisk north-wester. He was
+broad awake to feel a hand grasping him by the shoulder, and opened his
+eyes to see Fitzmaurice standing by the berth and holding the joiner-work
+with one hand to support himself against the fearful lurches of the vessel,
+while he had employed the other in arousing the apparently slumbering man.
+
+"Get up and come out at once!" he said, his voice hoarse and agitated.
+
+"What has happened?" asked the American, springing upright in his berth and
+preparing to leap from it as men will do when such unpleasant announcements
+are made. He seemed to know, intuitively and without any instruction from
+the shock which had just startled him, that some marked peril must have
+sent the journalist down to arouse him in that melodramatic manner.
+
+"Why, we are in danger, I suppose--serious danger!" was the reply. "Do you
+not feel the change in the motion of the boat? We are in the trough of the
+sea, without steam, and as near as I can make out through the mist, driving
+on the Irish coast with more rapidity than we bargained for!"
+
+"Heavens!" was the very natural exclamation in reply, as the American
+managed with some difficulty to throw on the one or two articles of
+clothing of which he had divested himself.
+
+"I suppose that it is a bad job," the journalist continued, "and what just
+now makes me feel peculiarly bad about it is the fact that I was the means
+of inducing you to come on board, and that if any thing serious should
+happen--"
+
+"Hush! not a word of that!" said the lawyer, appreciating fully that
+chivalrous generosity which after conferring a great favor could take blame
+to itself for any peril growing out of that favor. "Hush! You have treated
+me, Mr. Fitzmaurice, with great kindness, and I hope you will believe me
+man enough not to misunderstand our relative positions in any thing that
+may occur."
+
+Fitzmaurice, who seemed to be relieved by the words, but who certainly was
+laboring under an amount of depression not incident alone to any peril in
+which he stood personally involved,--grasped his hand with something more
+than the ordinary pressure of brief acquaintance. The motion of the boat,
+alternately a roll and then a heavy plunge, had now become absolutely
+fearful, intermingled with occasional repetitions of that crashing blow
+which had started the American from his slumber; but holding fast of each
+other and of various substantial objects that fell in their course, the two
+young men reached the companion way and the deck, the journalist detailing
+meanwhile, in hasty and broken words, what he knew of the extent of the
+difficulty in which they were involved.
+
+Up to fifteen or twenty minutes before, the little Emerald, a capital
+sea-boat but possessed of but a single engine (which description of single
+engine boats, by the way, should never be allowed to make voyages by open
+sea, except under the especial pilotage of one Malthus), had been making
+good weather, though the blow had increased to a gale and the waves of the
+Irish Channel increased to such size that they seemed to be opposed to the
+Union and determined to make an eternal severance of the two islands.
+Fitzmaurice had himself awoke about an hour before, and gone upon deck
+because unable to sleep longer; and he had consequently become aware, a
+little before the American in his berth did so, of an accident to the
+vessel. One moment of cessation of the plunging roll with which she had
+been ploughing ahead of the waves breaking on her larboard quarter--a
+moment of almost perfect stillness, as if the little vessel lay moored in
+some quiet haven--then a sudden veering round and that terrible crash and
+shock of the waves under the counter, the wheel, and along the whole side,
+which told that she was lying helpless in the trough of the sea, a marine
+Samson as thoroughly disabled as if she had been shorn of all her strength
+at once by the shears of one of the Fates. A word from one of the officers,
+the moment afterwards, had told him of some disarrangement of the engine,
+consequent on the severe strain of the heavy sea upon the boat; and he had
+then been left to study out for himself the amount of peril that might be
+involved, and to observe the coolness with which officers and men devoted
+themselves to a task which might or might not be successful--which might
+terminate at any moment in one of those terrible seas breaching the little
+vessel and foundering her as if she had indeed been nothing but a
+yawl-boat! It was at this stage that he had come down and wakened his
+friend of a few hours, feeling some responsibility for his safety (as well
+as a presentiment with regard to him which he by no means expressed in
+words), and leaving the Queen's messenger to pursue his dreamless sleep
+until it should end in Kingstown harbor or at the bottom of "Davy Jones'
+locker."
+
+By the time all this had been expressed in one tenth the number of words
+here employed, they had reached the deck, and certainly the prospect there
+was any thing but one calculated to reassure either. The Emerald was
+rolling wheel-houses under, in the trough of the sea, but so far
+mysteriously relieving herself through the scuppers as it seemed impossible
+that she should do. Two men were at the wheel, but they stood necessarily
+idle. Forward were half a dozen men, holding on to keep from going
+overboard at the first lurch. Even above the roar of the storm could be
+heard the sharp clink of hammers coming up from the engine-room and each
+sounding yet one pulse-beat of Hope. The south-easter was howling with
+demoniac fury, wailing through the rigging as if singing requiems for them
+all in advance, and driving before it the thin mists that shut away any
+idea of the sky. By the light on deck and on the troubled expanse of water
+eastward it was evident that day was breaking; and it was through a
+knowledge of that fact and of the rate of speed at which they had been
+steaming and driving partially before the wind all night, that Fitzmaurice
+had made his calculation expressed below, that they must be close on the
+Irish coast, a lee-shore, in such a blow, of no pleasant character.
+
+Such was the situation--a deplorable one, as any one can readily perceive
+who has ever seen its precise parallel; yet not entirely a hopeless one,
+for they might not be so close upon the coast as had been feared, and the
+engine might yet be thrown again into gear before the little vessel
+foundered and in time to claw off from the danger lying to leeward.
+Fitzmaurice had seen the position before: the American saw it at once
+through his own eyes and from the explanations given him by the journalist.
+The moment was not favorable for conversation, in that perilous motion,
+that roar of wind and wave and that suspense of mind; and the two young
+men held none except in a few words almost shouted to each other, but stood
+far aft on the larboard quarter, waiting calmly as two men with human
+instincts could be expected to wait for--what Heaven only knew! The face of
+the Anglo-Irishman was almost thoughtlessly calm, in spite of the anxiety
+which he had so plainly expressed: that of the American was dark, his lips
+set and his brow contracted, but there was no sign of shrinking and no
+indication of that basest passion, fear! Who could believe that the man
+standing there in the gray light of morning and awaiting without one
+apparent tremor of the muscles what might be an immediate and a painful
+death, bore a name that had been so lately dishonored by the most abject
+cowardice?
+
+Suddenly there was a cry which has blanched many a cheek and made many a
+lip tremble since Noah made his first sea-voyage in the Ark: "Land on the
+starboard quarter!" followed by another and yet more startling call:
+"Breakers to leeward!"
+
+Fitzmaurice and the American both turned instantly in the direction
+indicated, as was inevitable; and then they saw that the warning cry from
+the look-out was not the result of any illusion. The daylight was rapidly
+broadening, the mist had for the moment driven away leeward; and apparently
+not more than a mile away rose a huge dark headland assuming the
+proportions of a mountain, while at its base and in the exact direction
+towards which the doomed vessel was drifting, the sea was breaking in
+wreaths of white foam over ledges of rock which seemed to be already so
+near that they must go grinding and crashing upon them before the lapse of
+five minutes. They felt that the water shoaled, too, for the plunging roll
+of the disabled steamer grew every moment more terrible, and just as the
+cry was given she was breached at the waist by a sea from which she did not
+immediately clear herself. It only needed an eye that had ever scanned
+peril by sea and shore, to know at that moment that the Emerald and all on
+board were as certainly doomed, in all human probability, as if the one had
+been already broken up and scattered along the coast in fragments and the
+others made food for fishes along the rocks of Ireland's Eye!
+
+"The Hill of Howth and the rocks at the foot of it!" cried Fitzmaurice as
+he recognized the position. "Now God help us, for they are dead to leeward,
+and if we have any accounts to settle we had better settle them rapidly!"
+
+There was little agitation in his tone, now, and there was none in that of
+the American as he replied two words. They were the last he ever spoke, to
+mortal ear. May they have been true when he awoke from his long sleep, as
+they were before he fell into it! Those two words were:
+
+"I see!"
+
+The two men were standing, as has been said, very near the larboard
+quarter. The Emerald, too, as has also been already said, was very low in
+the bulwarks, as befitted her rake and her clipper appearance. Just as the
+lawyer uttered the two words, one of the officers of the steamer came aft,
+holding on amidst the terrible roll with something of the tenacity of a
+cat, and took his place at the wheel. The mist had closed down again and
+the Hill of Howth and the breakers were both for the moment shut away.
+
+There was a jar--a creeping, trembling jar that seemed to run through the
+little steamer, from stem to stern-post, and yet no blow from the fierce
+waves and no grinding of her keel upon the dreaded rocks. It was
+life--motion--the beat of machinery once more! At that critical juncture
+the engine had moved again for the first time, and if not safety there was
+yet at least another struggle with destiny. The officer had dashed back to
+throw the steamer up into the wind, the very instant that he felt the steam
+once more rushing into the cylinder.
+
+Then followed what cannot be described, because no one living can say
+precisely what occurred. Gathering way almost in an instant from the mad
+dash of her wheels into the water, the little Emerald plunged forward as
+if for her life. She had but a hundred or two yards of vantage ground left,
+and seemed to know it. As she gathered way and the quick whirl of the wheel
+swept her head gradually round to the sea, one mighty wave, as if afraid of
+being baulked of its prey and determined upon a final effort, struck her
+under the weather bow and port wheel and sent her careening so low to
+leeward that the starboard wheel-house and even the starboard quarter-rail
+were under water. She rolled back again in an instant, triumphant over the
+great enemy, and thenceforward dashed away from the white breakers on her
+lee as if she had been merely tantalizing them with a futile prospect of
+her destruction,--to make her way safely two hours afterwards into
+Kingstown Harbor and to land the Queen's messenger (who had just then
+awoke) and the correspondent of the _Evening Mail_, only an hour later than
+the passengers by the packet had disembarked.
+
+But she did not land the American. When the steamer rolled down with her
+starboard quarter-rail under water, Fitzmaurice, standing nearest to the
+larboard quarter, called out to his companion: "Look out and hold on!" then
+clutched the bulwark with his own hands and obeyed his own injunction. But
+when the steamer righted he was alone! Whether the lawyer had missed
+footing and failed to grasp any point of support at the critical moment, or
+whether he had lost head in the dizzying motion and gone over without even
+knowing his danger,--certain it is that he had been swept overboard under
+circumstances in which the whole British navy could have done no more to
+save him than one child of ten years! Henry Fitzmaurice, missing him and
+dreading what had really occurred, thought that for one second he saw a
+human head, with the hair streaming up, away off in the yeasty water: but
+that was all. And he said, bitterly, realizing all the painful facts of the
+event, and taking to himself a thought of regret that was likely to cling
+to him while his generous heart continued to beat:
+
+"My God!--it was just as I thought! I have been the means of drowning that
+splendid fellow, after all!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few hours later, little Shelah, the barefooted daughter of one of the
+poor fishermen whose hut stood at the foot of Howth, around northward
+towards Ireland's Eye--little Shelah, who had gone down over the rocks to
+the beach when the worst of the storm was over, rushed back to the cabin
+with terror in her eyes and broken words upon her lips:
+
+"Oh, father!--there bees a man all dead and dhrownded down there by the
+rocks beyant! And he bees so handsome and so much like a rale
+gintleman!--how could he dhround? Come down and see till him, father!"
+
+The fisherman went down, and he and his rough mates removed the body and
+did their humble and ineffectual all to resuscitate a body from which the
+breath of life had long departed. Then the fisherman and his wife and his
+mates and little Shelah all mourned over the manly beauty that had been
+sacrificed, and wondered who he could possibly be, and where his kindred
+would mourn for him. It was only when Father Michael, the good old priest
+of the parish was summoned, that they could form any nearer idea of the
+personality of the drowned man. Then they knew, for Father Michael could
+read, as they could not, and he told them, from one of the cards in the
+pocket-book, that "his name had been Carlton Brand, and that he had
+belonged to Philadelphia, away over in America, where they used to be so
+free and happy, but where they were fighting, now, all the time, about the
+naygurs that didn't seem to him worth the throuble!"
+
+They buried him, with such lamentations as they might have bestowed upon
+"one of their own," in consecrated ground in a little graveyard a mile away
+from the Hill, westward; and Father Michael gave the dead man the benefit
+of a benevolent doubt as to his religion, with the remark that "there were
+good Christians over in America, and this was one of them, maybe!" uttering
+a prayer for the repose of his soul that, if it bore him no nearer to the
+Beautiful Gate, certainly left him no farther away from it, while it
+fulfilled the behest of a simple and beautiful faith! This done, and a note
+despatched to his favorite journal, giving the name and place of burial of
+the unfortunate man, Father Michael felt, as he had reason to feel, that he
+had done his whole melancholy duty.
+
+Whatever the quest of the American, it was ended: whatever had been the
+secret of his unrest, it was not a secret to the eyes that thenceforth
+watched over a destiny no longer temporal but eternal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It has been suggested that Henry Fitzmaurice, the journalist, so strangely
+thrown into the company of the Philadelphian, so much pleased with his
+manner and impressed by his conversation, and so suddenly separated from
+him by an accident which seemed to have something of his own handiwork in
+its production,--was likely to bear with him, during life, a regret born of
+that circumstance. Such being the case, it was eminently natural that in
+giving a description of the accident to the despatch-steamer and the peril
+to her passengers, on the day following, in the _Mail_, he should have
+dwelt at some length on the sad fate of Mr. Carlton Brand, the American,
+alluded in terms of warm respect to the character which had briefly fallen
+under his observation, and felicitates the far-away friends of the
+unfortunate man, on the fact already made public in the _Nation_, that the
+body had been early recovered and received tender and honorable Christian
+burial.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+     PLEASANTON'S ADVANCE ON CULPEPER--CROSSING THE
+     RAPPAHANNOCK--THE FIGHT AND THE CALAMITY OF RAWSON'S
+     CROSS-ROADS--TAKING OF CULPEPER--PLEASANTON'S VOLUNTEER
+     AIDE--TOWNSEND VERSUS COLES--THE MEETING OF TWO WHO LOVED
+     EACH OTHER--AND THE LITTLE RIDE THEY TOOK TOGETHER.
+
+
+On Sunday the thirteenth day of September, 1863, and Monday the fourteenth,
+but principally on the former day, took place that running fight which
+displayed some of the very noblest qualities of the federal cavalry shown
+during the War for the Union, and which is better entitled than otherwise
+to be designated as the Battle of Culpeper. One of the first conclusive
+indications was given in that fight, that while the rebel cavalry, which at
+the beginning of the war was certainly excellent, had been running down
+from the giving out of their trained horses, and the deterioration of the
+quality of their riders through forced conscription,--the Union cavalry, at
+first contemptible in force and inefficient in comparison to their very
+numbers, had every day been improving as fast as augmenting, until they had
+become the superiors of what the best of their foes had been at the
+beginning of the contest. War can make any thing (except perhaps statesmen)
+out of a given quantity of American material; but it can unmake as well,
+when it strains the material existing and creates a forced supply for the
+vacant places of the dead and the vanquished, out of the infirm and the
+incapable; and before the end of this conflict the lesson will have been so
+closely read as never to need a repetition.
+
+The rebels held Culpeper and the south bank of the Rappahannock, and had
+held the whole of that line for weeks, formidable in their occasional
+demonstrations, but still more formidable in what it was believed they
+_might_ do by a sudden crossing of that dividing stream at some moment
+when the Union forces should be deficient in vigilance, preoccupied, or
+otherwise embarrassed. They were to be driven back if possible, from their
+threatening front, or if not driven back, at least struck such a blow as
+would make early offensive operations on their part improbable. These were
+the intentions, so far as they can be known and judged, which led to the
+crossing of the Rappahannock at that particular juncture.
+
+At three o'clock on the morning of that Sunday which was to join with so
+many other days of battle during the rebellion in proving that "there are
+no Sabbaths in war,"--at an hour when the thick darkness preceding the dawn
+hung like a pall over the banks of the rugged stream and the hostile forces
+that fringed it on either side--the cavalry camps on the north side of the
+Rappahannock were all astir. All astir, and yet all strangely quiet, in
+comparison with the activity manifested. No mellow bugle rang out its notes
+of reveille; there was no rattle of drum or shrieking of fife; the laggard
+sleeper was awakened by a touch on the shoulder, a shake, or a quick word
+in his ear. Horses were saddled in silence; and at the commands: "Prepare
+to mount!" "Mount!" given in the lowest possible tones that could command
+attention, the drowsy blue-jacketted, yellow-trimmed troopers, all
+be-spurred and be-sabred as if equal foes to the horses they were to ride
+and the enemies they were to encounter,--vaulted lightly or swung
+themselves heavily, according to the manner of each particular man, into
+their high peaked McClellan saddles that seemed to be all that was left
+them of their old leader. The squadrons were formed as quietly and with as
+few words as had accompanied the awakening and the mounting; for if a
+surprise of the enemy's force was to take place, it was a matter of the
+highest consequence that no loud sound or careless exclamation should reach
+the ears of the wary pickets and wide-awake videttes of the rebels hugging
+close the banks on the south side of the narrow river.
+
+The preparations were at last and hastily completed, long before the gray
+dawn after the moonless night had begun to break over the Virginia hills
+lying dark and cool to the eastward. Perhaps that very morning had been
+selected for the attack because on the night before the new moon had made
+its appearance and there was no tell-tale lingerer to throw an awkward
+gleam on an accoutrement and thus tell a story meant to be concealed.
+Troopers clustered together and formed squadrons, squadrons were merged
+into regiments which in turn swelled to brigades and brigades to divisions.
+It was only then that the extensive nature of the movement, which had
+Pleasanton at the head and Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick all engaged in the
+execution, could have been conjectured even by an eye capable of peering
+through the darkness. It seemed scarcely an hour after the first awakening
+when the formation was complete and the order to "March!" given; and there
+was not even yet a gleam of red in the eastern sky when the whole command
+was in motion.
+
+This large cavalry force, under Pleasanton as we have said, was composed of
+three divisions, commanded respectively by Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick,
+all Brigadiers. The Rappahannock was crossed at as many different points,
+Buford with the First going over at Starke's Ford; Gregg, with the Second,
+at Sulphur Springs, four miles distant; and Kilpatrick, with the Third, at
+Kelly's Ford, nine miles farther down and thirteen miles distant from the
+place of crossing of the First. Stuart, the famous "Jeb," with his
+confederate cavalry, was known to be in force on the elevated ground at and
+around Culpeper Court House, with his pickets and videttes extending to the
+very edge of the Rappahannock; and a wide sweep of the Union force was
+believed to be necessary to circumvent him. Detachments of rebel troops
+were also known to hold all the prominent points between Culpeper and
+Brandy Station, where the brigades of Lomax and W. F. H. Lee were lying.
+
+Pleasanton was over the river, with all his force before broad daylight--so
+rapid and successful had been the movement. The roads were dry and in as
+good order as Virginia roads are ever allowed to be by the powers that
+preside over highways; and the force, still in the three divisions, swept
+southward as silently as iron-shod animals have the capacity for bearing
+iron-accoutred riders. Napoleon _la Petit_ had never yet succeeded in
+introducing gutta-percha scabbards for the swords of his troopers and
+gutta-percha shoes for their horses, even into the French cavalry; and the
+Yankee troops of Pleasanton had all the disadvantages of the usual rattling
+of bridle-bits, the clattering of sabres within steel scabbards, and the
+pounding of multitudinous hoofs upon the hard dry earth, the latter
+occasionally a little muffled by an inch of gray powdery dust, choking the
+riders as it made their advance less noisy.
+
+Spite of the clanking of hoof and steel, however, the advance was made with
+such silence and celerity that the greater portion of the rebel pickets on
+the southern bank of the Rappahannock were captured, while the
+remainder--here and there one scenting danger afar off and holding an
+advantage in knowledge of the roads--fled in dismay to report that the
+whole Army of the Potomac, sappers and miners, pioneers and pontoniers,
+horse, foot and dragoons, was closing in upon Culpeper.
+
+As the morning advanced and the light grew stronger, so that the danger and
+the persons of the attacking forces could at once be better distinguished,
+skirmishing commenced with that portion of the rebel force, stationed in
+more or less strength at various points and called to arms by their pickets
+being driven in upon them,--to meet and if possible check the advancing
+columns. Not long before they discovered that any effectual check to the
+forces which Pleasanton seemed to be pouring down every cross road and
+throwing out from behind every clump of woods on the roadsides, was
+impossible; and they fell back, skirmishing.
+
+At Brandy Station (droll and unfortunate name, destined to supply more bad
+jokes at the expense of the dry throats of the army than almost any other
+spot on Virginia soil), a junction of the three divisions of Union troops
+was effected; and there, while that disposition was being made, a sharp
+fight took place between the First, under Buford, and the rebel cavalry
+under Colonel Beale of the Ninth Virginia. But that struggle, though sharp,
+was only of brief continuance: out-foughten, and it must be confessed,
+outnumbered, the enemy was driven back from the Station and pursued
+vigorously.
+
+While the gallant Buford was thus occupied with the First, Gregg, with the
+Second division was making a detour to the right and pouring down his
+troopers upon Culpeper from the north by the Ridgeville road, driving
+before him upon the main body at the Court House a rebel brigade that had
+held the advance, under General Lomax (an officer whose name, we may as
+well say, apropos of the bad jokes of war-time, had caused nearly as many
+of those verbal outrages upon English, as the unfortunate Brandy Station
+itself).
+
+Kilpatrick, meanwhile, with his Third division had not been idle. (When was
+he ever known to be idle, except when others held him in check, or
+ineffective except when some other than himself misdirected his dashing
+energy?) He had swept around to the left, nearly at the same time that
+Gregg made the detour to the right, and striking the Stevensburgh road
+advanced rapidly from the east towards Culpeper and the right of the
+enemy's position, which rested on Rawson's Cross-Roads, two miles
+south-east of the Court-House. The rebels here made a stubborn resistance,
+and steel met steel and pistol-shot replied to sabre-stroke as it had not
+before done that day; but the odds were a little against them; they were
+outflanked by that incarnate "raider" of the Sussex mountains of New
+Jersey, who no doubt could trace back some drop of his blood to Johnny
+Armstrong the riever of the Scottish border, or the moss troopers of the
+Bog of Allen in Ireland; and they fell back to the town and beyond it,
+taking up new positions which they were not destined to hold much longer
+than those they had abandoned.
+
+But this brief shock of battle between the division of Kilpatrick and the
+rebels opposed to it, did not roll away from the little hamlet of Rawson's
+Cross-Roads without the enacting of one of those sad tragedies, in the
+shedding of the blood of non-combatants, which seem so much more painful
+than the wholesale but expected slaughter of the field. Near the crossing
+of the roads there stood one brick house, of two stories, the only one of
+that material in the vicinity. This house, when Kilpatrick came up, was
+occupied by the rebel sharp-shooters, partially sheltered by the thick
+walls and bringing down the federal cavalry from their saddles at every
+discharge of their deadly rifles. Such obstructions in the way of an
+advance, especially when they destroy as well as embarrass, are not apt to
+be treated with much toleration by those who have the power to sweep them
+away; and immediately when the imminence of the danger was discovered, one
+of the federal batteries was ordered up to dislodge the sharp-shooters. It
+dashed up with all the celerity that whipped and spurred and galloping
+horses could give it, halted within point-blank range, unlimbered, and sent
+shell, canister and case-shot into and through the obnoxious edifice in a
+manner and with a rapidity little calculated upon by the mason who quietly
+laid his courses of bricks for the front and side-walls, in the quiet years
+before Virginia secession. The sharp-shooters were soon silenced and
+dislodged--at least all of them who were left after the last deadly
+discharge of missiles had been poured in by the battery; and the house was
+at once occupied, when the firing ceased, by a detachment of Union cavalry
+dismounted for that service. When those men entered the half-ruined
+building they first became aware of this extraordinary and deplorable
+tragedy, in which a little blood went so far in awakening regret and
+horror. They heard cries of pain and shrieks of distress and fear, echoing
+through the building, in other accents than those which could belong to
+wounded soldiers--the tones of women! And in the cellar they found the
+painful solution of the mystery--more painful far, to them, than a hundred
+times the death and suffering under ordinary circumstances. In that cellar,
+among smoke, and blood and dust, were huddled twenty or thirty
+non-combatants, men, women and children; and in their midst lay an old man,
+quite dead and the upper part of his head half carried away by a portion of
+shell, while fallen partially across his legs was the body of his son of
+sixteen, his boyish features scarcely yet stilled in the repose of death
+from a ghastly hurt that had torn away the arm and a part of the shoulder.
+Two women lay near, one dying from a blow on the temple which had driven in
+the bones of the skull like the crushing of an egg-shell, and the other
+uttering the most heart-rending of the cries and groans under the agony of
+a crushed leg and a foot literally blown to atoms. A sad sight!--a
+harrowing spectacle, even for war-time! And how had it been occasioned?
+
+It would seem that on the approach of the cavalry and the commencement of
+fighting in the neighborhood, this party of non-combatants had crowded into
+this house--no doubt long to be known in the local traditions of the place
+as that of James Inskip,--and taken refuge in the cellar, believing that in
+it, as the only brick house in the vicinity, they would be safest from the
+missiles of the opposing forces. And so they would have been, safe enough
+beyond a doubt, had not the rebel commander, unaware of the presence of
+non-combatants in the building, or heedless of the common law of humanity
+not to expose them to unnecessary danger in any military operation,
+recklessly placed his sharp-shooters in shelter there and thus drawn the
+fire of the fatal battery. Two or three of the shells, crashing through the
+house, had fallen into the cellar and exploded in the very midst of the
+trembling skulkers in their place of fancied security,--with the sad
+results that have been recorded, and which none more deeply deplored than
+the men who had unwittingly slaughtered the aged and the helpless. Some of
+the Richmond papers told harrowing stories, a few days after, of the
+"inhuman barbarity of the dastardly Yankees who wantonly butchered those
+inoffensive men and helpless women and children in James Inskip's house at
+Rawson's Cross-Roads"; but they forgot, as newspapers on both sides of the
+sad struggle have too often done during its continuance, to add one word of
+the explanatory and extenuating circumstances!
+
+By the time that Kilpatrick, with the Third, had concluded the episode of
+Rawson's Cross-Roads and driven the opposing forces back upon the town,
+Buford, with the First, after chasing the rebel cavalry under Beale to
+moderate satisfaction, had come up from the south, and the junction of the
+three divisions was accomplished.
+
+On the elevated site of Culpeper and in the uneven streets of that old town
+which bears, like so many of its compeers, shabby recollections of English
+aristocracy that for some cause seem to suit it better than the thin
+pretence of democratic government,--there Stuart, than whom the rebellion
+has developed no more restless or more active foe of the Union cause,
+appeared determined to make a last and effectual stand. With a celerity
+worthy of his past reputation he placed sharp-shooters in houses that
+commanded the Union advance, planted batteries at advantageous positions in
+the streets, and threw up barricades of all the unemployed carts and wagons
+and all the idle timber and loose fence-rails lying about the town, in a
+manner which would have endeared him to the Parisians of the time of Louis
+Philippe. Right and left and on every hand, defending these obstructions
+and supporting the batteries, dashed his mounted "Virginia gentlemen," once
+the very Paladins of their knightly class, when Fauquier and the White
+Sulphur saw the pleasant sport of tilting at the ring in the presence of
+the bright-eyed Queens of Beauty of the Old Dominion,--now brought down to
+the level and compelled to contest the fatal advance, of a "horde of Yankee
+tailors on horseback"!
+
+General Pleasanton, the actual as well as nominal head of the Union
+advance, held his position on an eminence a short distance east of the
+town, from which an excellent view of the whole situation could be
+commanded, and whence he directed all the movements with the rapidity of a
+soldier and the coolness of a man thoroughly in confidence with himself and
+well assured of the material of his command. He had won with the same
+troops before, even when placed at disadvantage: that day he felt that the
+game was in his own hands and that he could play it rapidly and yet
+steadily. The thing which worst troubled him as from that little eminence
+he looked out from under his bent brows, over the scene which was to
+witness so short, sharp and decisive a conflict,--was the knowledge how
+seriously the stubborn resistance offered by the rebels was likely to peril
+the non-combatants in the town, and how inevitably, from the same cause,
+the old town itself, just tumble-down enough to be historical and
+picturesque, must suffer from the flying shot and shell that know so little
+mercy. He had hoped, the first surprise succeeding, to take Culpeper
+against but slight resistance; and it was no part of his plan (it never
+_is_ part of the plan of any truly brave man!) to batter the town if that
+measure could be avoided; but the balances and compensations of war are
+appreciable if not gratifying, musketry on one side is nearly sure to be
+answered in kind by the other, and artillery (when there happens to be any,
+and wo to the party without the "big guns" when the other has them at
+command!)--artillery has a very natural habit of replying to the thunderous
+defiance sent out by its hostile kinsmen. Culpeper, too well defended, was
+not the less certain to be taken, while it was the more certain to bear
+marks of the conflict that only the demolition of half its buildings could
+erase.
+
+God pity and help the residents of any town given up to the ruthless
+passions of a fierce soldiery--to plunder and rapine and murder,--after
+what is so inadequately described as "taking by _storm_"! When for the
+moment hell is let loose upon the earth, as if to teach us that if we have
+yet something of the god lingering in our fallen manhood, we have yet
+something of the arch-fiend remaining to show how we accompanied him in
+his fall. When roofs blaze because a reckless hand has dashed a torch
+therein in the very wantonness of destruction. When the golden vessels of
+the church service and the sacred little memorials of happy hours in
+boudoir and bed-room are alike torn from their places, dashed into pieces
+and ground under armed heels, as if the inanimate objects bore a share of
+the wrong of resistance and could feel a part of the suffering meted out to
+it. When murder is for the time licensed and the blood of the defender of
+his door-stone and his hearth dabbles his gray hair on one or the other of
+those sacred places, and there is no thought of punishment for the red
+hand, except as God may silently mete it in the years to come.
+When--saddest and worst of all,--the matron is outraged before the eyes of
+her bound and blaspheming husband; and young girls, the peach-bloom of
+maidenhood not yet brushed from the cheek, are torn shrieking from the arms
+that would shelter them, to be so polluted and dishonored by a ruffian
+touch that but yesterday would have seemed impossible to their dainty flesh
+as the rising up of a fiend from the lower pit to rend the white garments
+of one of the redeemed in heaven,--so polluted and dishonored that a prayer
+for the mercy of death bubbles up from the lips at the last word before
+resistance becomes insensibility.
+
+This wreck of a "storm" of human license is terrible--so terrible that the
+effects of the convulsions of nature, the tempest, the tornado and even the
+earthquake, sink into insignificance beside them. Heaven be praised that
+during the War for the Union, called by our English cousins so
+"fratricidal," we have as yet known no Badajos or even a sacking of Pekin!
+But only second to such scenes in horror and scarcely second in terror,
+have been some of those supplied when the battle issue of the two armies
+was joined near some quiet country town before lying peaceful and
+inoffensive, or when military necessity has made its houses temporary
+fortifications and its streets the points of desperate attacks and as
+desperate defences. Then what crashing of shot and shell through houses;
+what demolition of all that had before been sacred; what huddling together
+of the frightened and the defenceless who never before dreamed that, though
+war was in the land, it would break so near to _them_; what mad gathering
+of valuables and impotent preparations for flight that would be more
+dangerous than remaining; what whistling of bullets that seemed each
+billeted for a defenceless breast; what thunderous discharges of cannon
+that made every non-combatant limb quiver and every delicate cheek grow
+bloodless; what shouts in the street and cries of terror and dismay within
+doors; what trembling peeps through half-closed shutters, with an imagined
+death even in every such momentary exposure; what cowerings in cellars and
+hidings beneath piles of old lumber in garrets; what reports of defeat or
+victory to the party that was feared or favored; what claspings of children
+and ungovernable weepings of hysteria; what prayers and what execrations;
+what breakings-up and destructions of all that had been, and what
+revelations of the desolation that is to be!
+
+Such, since the breaking out of the rebellion, has been the situation of
+many a before-peaceful town, in many a State that once rested happily under
+the shadow of the Eagle's wing. And such was the situation of one fated old
+town that day, when Gregg from the north, Kilpatrick from the east and
+Buford from the south, came up almost simultaneously and their forces
+charged recklessly into the streets of Culpeper Court-House. The excitement
+and confusion in the town at once became all that we have so feebly
+endeavored to indicate--women shrieking in terror, soldiers groaning with
+their wounds, children crying from fright; and blended with these and a
+hundred other inharmonious sounds, the shouts in the street, the bugle
+calls, the hissing of bullets, the rumble of artillery wheels, the broken
+thunder of the feet of trampling horses, the occasional crash of
+half-demolished houses, and the hoarse roar of the batteries as they
+belched out their missiles of death and destruction. Culpeper, for a short
+period, was a veritable pandemonium in miniature; and no detail can add to
+the force of that brief but comprehensive description.
+
+Near the railroad bridge spanning the little stream running nearly through
+the centre of the town, the rebels had discovered a strategic point of no
+little consequence, and they had posted there a battery of several pieces,
+well served and annoying the advance of the Third division very materially.
+The battery seemed to be placed there, not only to obstruct the advance but
+to protect a train of cars just then being loaded by the rebels above, with
+munitions and other articles of consequence, preparatory to a start down
+the railroad southward. Battery D., Second New York Artillery, ordered for
+that service, ran up its sections at a gallop, unlimbered and poured in
+shot and shell, grape and canister upon the train, in such disagreeable
+rapidity as sent the half loaded cars away towards the Rapidan with all the
+speed that could be suddenly mustered. Still the battery at the bridge
+remained, firing rapidly and cutting up the head of Kilpatrick's column in
+a manner calculated to make the General gnash his teeth in indignation. The
+space to the bridge was uphill, accordingly raked downward by the rebel
+fire; the bridge itself was narrow and the footing for horses seriously
+damaged by the railroad tracks that crossed it with their switches and
+lines of slippery iron. Still it was known that that bridge must be
+cleared, at any cost, or the advance through Culpeper would be a most
+bloody one if accomplished at all. Just as Kilpatrick was about to order a
+charge of cavalry to clear that bridge and if possible capture the pieces,
+his intention seemed to be anticipated and a squadron of Stuart's cavalry
+rode down and took post, dismounted, behind the battery, in position to
+support, while three or four companies of rebel riflemen followed, ready to
+do deadly execution with their pieces against any troops attempting to
+charge, and to fall upon that force with resistless fury at the moment of
+their weakness, if the guns should be ridden over! No pleasant prospect,
+as the Sussex raider thought, and for a moment he apparently wavered in
+intention, while the battery played heavily and every instant saw one or
+more of his best troopers biting the dust of the causeway below.
+
+But this momentary indecision, whether or not it would have continued much
+longer of his own volition, was not destined to do so when the will of
+another came into play. A horseman dashed rapidly over to the spot where
+Kilpatrick was momentarily halted, from Pleasanton a few hundreds of yards
+away, running a fearful gauntlet of the enemy's fire, as he did so, from a
+battery that had just wheeled into position and opened down a narrow
+cross-street to the left,--spoke a few quick words to the General and then
+awaited the movement that was to follow. And it was not long that he or the
+commander who sent him needed to wait. The command had been: "Clear that
+bridge and take the battery, at all hazards!" and Kilpatrick only needed
+that support of his own judgment to order a charge which he would have been
+best pleased, if he could only have gone back to be a Colonel for a few
+moments, to lead in person. His eye rolled questioningly over the Third for
+a moment, and then the rapid words of command followed. Only a certain
+number of cavalry could be employed upon that dangerous service, without
+making the carnage greater by throwing the troopers literally in the way of
+each other; and it was the Second New York, Harris Light Guard, a troop
+which had already won honor on every field touched by the hoofs of their
+horses,--called out for that quick, sharp, perilous duty that every
+squadron in the command probably coveted.
+
+The gallant Second received the order with loud cheers that came nigh to
+imitating the well-known rebel fox-hunting yell, for some of their best
+fellows had fallen ingloriously and the human tiger was not only unchained
+but set on horseback. They formed column by fours with a rapidity which
+told of the fierce hunger of conflict; and when the bugles rang out the
+charge, the dusty and smoke-stained riders returned their now-useless
+carbines to their slings, drew sabres, and driving their spurs rowel deep
+into the flanks of horses that seemed almost as anxious as themselves,
+dashed forward towards the bridge. Their ringing shouts did not cease as
+they galloped on, and their sword-blades, if they grew thinner in number,
+still gleamed as brightly as ever in the sunlight, as they measured that
+narrow but fatal space, while round after round of grape and canister,
+carbine-bullets, musket-balls and rifle-shots, burst into their faces and
+mowed down their flanks as they swept on. Saddles were emptied, horses went
+down with cries of pain more fearful than any that man can utter, and brave
+men went headlong into the dust from which they would never rise again in
+life. But the progress of the charging squadron did not seem to be delayed
+a moment. The rebel gunners of the battery were reloading for yet one more
+discharge, when, just in the midst of that operation, over the bridge and
+upon them burst the head of that column which seemed as if nothing in the
+way of human missiles had power to stay it. Before the gray and begrimed
+cannoniers could withdraw their rammers the troopers were in their midst.
+Then followed that fierce cutting and thrusting of artillery swords and
+cavalry sabres, that interchange of revolver-shots and crushing of human
+bones under the feet of trampling horses, incident to the taking of any
+battery that is sharply attacked and bravely defended. A little of this,
+but still under heavy fire from behind,--and the guns were captured, with
+all their men and horses left alive.
+
+And yet the work of the Second New York in that quarter was by no means
+finished. That steady and murderous fire continued from up the street, as
+the infantry and the dismounted cavalry of the support fell back; and it
+was only by one more sweeping charge that the annoyance could be removed.
+Scarcely any one knew whence came the voice that ordered that second
+charge, but the blood of the troopers was up and they made it gallantly. In
+three minutes thereafter a broken and flying mass, far up the street, was
+all that remained of the supporting force; but a fearfully diminished
+number of the cavalrymen rode back to assist in sending the captured
+battery to the rear. We shall have occasion, presently, to know something
+more of these two charges, undoubtedly the most spirited events of a day on
+which all the Union troops and many of the rebels reflected honor upon the
+causes they supported.
+
+Immediately after the clearing of the bridge a gallant dash was made by
+Gen. Custer, the "boy general with the golden-locks" (the man who has made
+a solemn vow, it is said, never to shorten those locks until he rides
+victoriously into Richmond) leading the charge in person, with portions of
+the First Vermont and First Michigan cavalry, against a section of a
+battery, stationed nearly a quarter of a mile beyond the bridge and within
+a hundred or two yards of the front of Stuart's main body. These pieces
+were worked by as obstinate a set of gray-backs as ever rammed home a rebel
+cartridge; and the gunners, defiant of Custer's detour to the left to
+escape a direct raking fire, and apparently relying upon the main body
+lying so near them, continued to load and fire until the federal leader and
+his men were literally on the top of the pieces and fairly riding them
+under foot. Guns and caissons were taken, while the support relied upon
+seemed to be so paralyzed by the daring of the whole affair as scarcely to
+offer any resistance,--the horses hitched to the pieces, the guns limbered
+up, and the rebel gunners even forced to mount and drive their lost cannon
+to join the others in the rear!
+
+A considerable rebel force of cavalry, artillery and infantry were by this
+time in full retreat below the town, along the line of the Orange and
+Alexandria railroad; and the Fifth New York cavalry were sent in pursuit.
+The gallant troopers of the Fifth charged at a gallop the moment they came
+within sweeping distance of the foe, but the high embankment of the road
+broke the charge, and the detour necessary to make a more advantageous
+approach deprived the gallant boys of their half-won laurels and allowed
+the flying enemy to escape.
+
+While Kilpatrick was thus engaged, Buford and Gregg, with the First and
+Second, had been by no means idle. Dashing into the town, each from his
+chosen direction, the troopers of each leaped barricades and drove the
+rebels before them wherever encountered upon open ground; and a part of the
+force of either division, dismounted, skirmished from corner to corner and
+dislodged the sharp-shooters one by one from all their holes and
+hiding-places. Sometimes stubbornly resisted, at others seeming to have no
+foe worthy of their steel, the three divisions won their way through the
+old town; and the cavalry of Stuart, up to that time so often declared
+invincible, were at last driven pell-mell out of Culpeper and back to the
+momentary refuge of Pony Mountain. Even there they were again dislodged,
+the First Michigan cavalry accomplishing a feat which might have surprised
+even Halstead Rowan of this chronicle--routing a whole brigade by charging
+up a hill so steep that some of the riders slipped backwards over the tails
+of their horses, their saddles bearing them company!
+
+The town of Culpeper was finally occupied at one o'clock, P. M.; and not
+many hours after the ridge behind it and Pony Mountain were in the hands of
+the dashing cavalrymen. Retreating towards the Rapidan, they were pursued
+towards Raccoon Ford on the left and centre by Buford and Kilpatrick with
+the First and Third divisions, while Gregg, with the Second, pushed a heavy
+Rebel force before him to Rapidan Station. By nightfall the rebels had been
+driven to the north bank of the Rapidan, where both forces bivouacked that
+night in line of battle.
+
+Monday morning saw the recommencement of hostilities and the retreat of the
+rebels to the south side of the river, leaving the federal forces to hold
+the country between the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, with all the
+strategic points therein, Culpeper included. Stuart, it was said, had
+often boasted that "no Yankee force could drive _him_ from Culpeper!" and
+if such a boast was really made and afterwards so signally disproved by the
+"horde of Yankee tailors on horseback," the fact only furnishes one more
+additional proof to Benedick's declaration that he would live and die a
+bachelor, so soon followed by his marriage with Beatrice,--that humanity is
+very uncertain and that human calculations are fallible to a degree painful
+to contemplate!
+
+Such were the general features of the crossing of the Rappahannock and the
+Battle of Culpeper, one of the sharpest cavalry affairs of the war, and
+perhaps more important as illustrating the reliability to which the Union
+horse had attained from a beginning little less than contemptible, than
+from the mere military advantage gained by the movement. It now becomes
+necessary to descend to a few particulars connected with the event of the
+day, and briefly to trace the influence on the fortunes of some of the
+leading characters in this narration, exercised by the advance of General
+Pleasanton and his dashing brigadiers.
+
+It has been seen that at a certain period of that day the division of
+Kilpatrick was held temporarily in check by the rebel battery posted at the
+railroad-bridge, and that for a moment the General, aware of the necessity
+of removing the obstruction if the direct advance through Culpeper was to
+be continued, yet hesitated in ordering the charge which must be made in
+the face of such overwhelming difficulty, until a peremptory direction from
+Pleasanton left him no option in the matter. And it is to personal
+movements of that particular period that attention must at this moment be
+directed.
+
+Just when he made the discovery through his field glass of the havoc being
+wrought by the rebel battery and the momentary hesitation, Pleasanton, who
+did not happen to be in the best of humors with reference to it, was placed
+in the same situation in which Wellington for a few moments found himself
+on the day of Waterloo, when he employed the button-bagman with the blue
+umbrella under his arm, to carry some important orders. He was, in short,
+out of aide-de-camps. One by one they had been sent away to different
+points, and it so chanced, just then, that none had returned. Something
+very much like an oath muttered between the lips of the impatient veteran
+of forty, and one exclamation came out so that there was no difficulty in
+recognizing it:
+
+"Nobody here when everybody is worst wanted! I wish the d--l had the whole
+pack of them!"
+
+"Perhaps _I_ can do what you wish, General."
+
+The words came from a young man in civilian's dress--gray pants and
+broad-brimmed felt hat, but with a military suspicion in his coat of light
+blue flannel,--who stood very near the commander, his horse's bridle over
+arm and a large field glass in hand, and who had apparently been scanning
+with much interest a scene of blood in which it was neither his duty nor
+his disposition to take part.
+
+"You?" and the veteran turned upon him, with something very like a laugh on
+his lips. "You? Humph! Do you know what I want?"
+
+"Some one to carry an order, I suppose!"
+
+"Exactly! Over that causeway, to Kilpatrick at the bridge. Do you see how
+that flanking battery to the left is raking every thing, and the one in
+front is throwing beyond Kil's position? The chances are about even that
+the man who starts never gets there! Now do you wish to go?"
+
+"No objection on that account!" was the reply of the young man, who seemed
+to be on terms of very easy intimacy with the General, as indeed he was,--a
+privileged visitor, who had accompanied him in the advance, but eminently
+"unattached" and thus far neither fighting nor expected to fight.
+
+"The d--l you haven't! Well, ----, that is certainly cool, for _you_! Never
+mind--if you like a little personal taste of what war really is, take
+this," and he scribbled a few words on a slip of paper on his raised
+knee--"take this and get it to Kilpatrick as soon as you can. If you do not
+come back again, I shall send word to your family."
+
+"Oh, yes, thank you, General; but I shall come back again!" He had swung
+himself into the saddle of his gray, while Pleasanton was writing, and the
+veteran held the paper for one instant in his hand and looked into his face
+with a strange interest. What he saw there seemed to satisfy him, and he
+handed the paper with a nod. The volunteer aide-de-camp received it with a
+bow, and the next moment was flying towards the front of the Third, riding
+splendidly, running the gauntlet that has before been suggested, but
+untouched, and delivering his orders in very quick time and at emphatically
+the right moment. The important movement which immediately followed has
+already been narrated, in its bearing on the result of the day; but there
+were other effects not less important when personal destinies are taken
+into the account.
+
+Gregg, who espied something on the right, that was likely to be hidden from
+Kilpatrick until it discovered itself by unpleasant consequences, had sent
+over an aide with a word of warning; and nearly at the same moment when the
+volunteer messenger from Pleasanton reached the brigadier, the officer from
+Gregg rode rapidly up from his direction. Both delivered their messages in
+a breath, and then both fell back at a gesture from the General. The aide
+from Gregg was turning his horse to ride back again to his post, when he
+caught a glance at the somewhat strangely attired man who had come in from
+Pleasanton. From his lower garments that glance naturally went up to his
+hat, and thence, by an equally natural movement, to his face. The dark
+brows of the officer bent darker in an instant, and perhaps there was that
+in his gaze which the other _felt_, (there are those who assert that such
+things are possible), for the next instant there was an answering glance
+and another pair of brows were knitted not less decidedly. Those two men
+were serving (more or less) in the same cause, but they looked as little as
+possible like two warm-hearted comrades in arms--much more as if they would
+have been delighted to take each other by the throat and mutually exert
+that gentle pressure calculated to expel a life or two!
+
+Pleasanton was just calling out the Second to take the battery and clear
+the bridge. While he was doing so, the evil genius of one of those men
+drove them into collision. The messenger from Gregg, who wore the
+shoulder-straps and other accoutrements of a Captain on staff service, but
+with a cavalry sabre at his belt,--after the pause of a moment and while
+the other was still fixedly regarding him, spurred his horse close up to
+the side of the gray ridden by the civilian, and accosted him in a tone and
+with a general manner that he seemed to take no pains to render amiable:
+
+"What are _you_ doing here?"
+
+"On staff service, Captain. How is your head?" was the reply, with quite as
+much of sneer in the tone as the other had displayed of arrogance.
+
+"What do you call yourself just now?--'Horace Townsend' still?" was the
+Captain's next inquiry.
+
+"To most others, yes: to you, Captain Hector Coles, just now, I am--" and
+he bent his mouth so close to the ear of the other that he could have no
+difficulty in hearing him, though he spoke the last words in a hoarse
+whisper that has even escaped _us_!
+
+"I thought so, all the while!" was the reply, an expression of malignant
+joy crossing the face. "The same infernal coward--I knew it!"
+
+The face of the man who had been Horace Townsend seemed convulsed by a
+spasm of mortal agony the instant after, but it gave place almost as
+quickly to an expression of set, deadly anger, the eyes blazing and the
+cheeks livid. He leaned close to the Captain and even grasped his arm as if
+to make sure that he should not get away before he had finished his whole
+sentence.
+
+"Captain Hector Coles," he said, still in the same low, hoarse voice, but
+so near that the other could easily hear--"you called me the same name five
+or six weeks ago at the Crawford House, and I am afraid that I _proved_
+that it belonged to _you_!"
+
+"I told you that I would kill you some day for that impertinence, and I
+_will_!" was the reply of the Captain, terrible anger in his face.
+
+"No--if you kill me at all, and I do not think you will,--it will be
+because you believe me, with good reason, something more of a favorite with
+a lady whose name it is not necessary to mention, than yourself!"
+
+This insulting boast of preference and allusion to Margaret Hayley were
+quite as well understood as they needed to be. There was another livid
+cheek, just then, and a fierce answering fire in the eye which told how
+deeply the barb rankled. But before the Captain could speak, to utter words
+that must have been equally bitter and blasphemous, the civilian continued:
+
+"You challenged me for what I said at the White Mountains, Captain Hector
+Coles--you man with a swimming in the head! I refused your challenge then,
+but I accept it now. If you are not the coward you called _me_, you will
+fight me here and instantly!"
+
+"Here and now?" These were all the words that the surprised and possibly
+horrified Captain could utter.
+
+"Exactly!" was the reply, the voice still low and hoarse but rapid and
+without one indication of tremor. "I told you that I was on staff service.
+So I am. I have just brought General Kilpatrick orders from General
+Pleasanton to clear that bridge and take the battery yonder that is doing
+us so much damage. Ah! by George--there goes another of our best fellows!"
+This as a round shot came tearing into the ranks just ahead, killing one of
+the troopers and his horse. Then he resumed, in the same low rapid tone:
+"You see those New York boys forming there, to do the work. Ride with them
+and with _me_, if you DARE, Captain Hector Coles, and see who goes
+furthest! That is my duel!"
+
+"_I?_--I am on staff duty--not a mere cavalryman!" There was hesitation in
+the voice and deadly pallor on the cheek: the civilian heard the one and
+saw the other.
+
+"Refuse to go with me and fight out our quarrel in that manner," the
+excited voice went on, "and by the God who made us both, the whole army
+shall know who is the coward! More--" and again his mouth was very near to
+the ear of the other--"_she_ shall know it!"
+
+There are spells by which the fiend can always be raised, without much
+doubt, however troublesome it may be to find any means by which to lay him
+afterwards. To Captain Hector Coles there was one conjuration irresistible,
+and that had been used in the present instance. Shame before the whole army
+was nothing--it may be doubted, in fact, whether he had not known something
+of that infliction before at least a portion of the army, and survived it
+without difficulty. But shame before Margaret Hayley, after the boasts he
+had used, the underrating of others in which he had indulged, and the
+worship of physical courage which he knew to be actually a foible in her
+nature?--no, that was not to be thought of for one moment! Better wounds or
+death, out of the way of both which he had before so skilfully kept, than
+that! This reflection did not occupy many seconds, and his heavy brow was
+as black as thunder as he turned short round in the saddle and almost
+hissed at his tempter:
+
+"Come on, then, fool as well as coward, and see how long before I will
+teach you a lesson!"
+
+Horace Townsend--as he must still be called--did not say another word in
+reply. The Light Guard were by that time formed for the charge, and he
+merely said, in the hearing of all:
+
+"Come--the Captain and I are going to take a ride with the boys! Who will
+lend me a sword?"
+
+The strange demand for a moment drew general attention to him, and among
+other regards that of Kilpatrick. The idea of a civilian throwing himself
+into such a charge seemed to strike him at once, and before one of the
+orderlies could draw out his weapon and present it, the General had handed
+his, with the words:
+
+"Here is mine!--Mind that you bring it back again!"
+
+Kilpatrick unslung his sword and held up the scabbard with the blade, but
+the new volunteer merely drew out the blade with a bow and driving spurs
+into his gray dashed forward to the head of the column, Captain Hector
+Coles close beside him. Perhaps no two men ever went into battle side by
+side, with precisely the same relative feelings, since carving up men with
+the broadsword became a profession. Neither, it seems almost certain, had
+the least thought of devotion to the country, of hatred to the rebellion,
+or even of _esprit du corps_, moving him to the contest. The one was intent
+upon revenging an insult received long before, by getting the other killed
+in proving him a coward,--and may have had another but still personal
+motive: that other was equally anxious to keep up his own reputation in the
+eyes of a woman, and to get removed out of his way a man whom he believed
+to be a rival, but who was really no more in his way than Shakspeare's
+nobody who "died a' Wednesday." Both half blind with rage and hate, and
+both, therefore--let the truth be told--bad soldiers! Both following a
+petty whim or facing death as a mere experiment, and neither with the most
+distant thought of the fate that rode close behind, to protect or to slay,
+and each alike inevitably!
+
+Just then the bugle rang out, the commands "Column forward! Trot, march!
+Gallop, march! Charge!" rang out in quick succession, and away dashed the
+Second, with the results that have already been foreshadowed in the general
+account of the movement. But though armies and the various smaller bodies
+that form armies, are great aggregates of manhood, they are something more;
+and who can measure, in reading an account of that bridge so gallantly
+carried, that attack so splendidly repulsed, or that point of battle held
+against every odds, with the conclusion--"Our loss was only two hundred [or
+two thousand], in killed and wounded,"--who can measure, we ask, the amount
+of personal suffering involved in that movement and its result?--who can
+form any guess at the variety of personal adventure, depression,
+elevation, hope, fear, delirious joy and maddening horror, going to make up
+that event spoken of so flippantly as one great total?
+
+The rebel battery beyond the bridge had been throwing round shot and shell,
+as has already been observed, reaching far beyond Kilpatrick's front and
+doing heavy damage. It was inevitable that as the advance of the attacking
+column was seen, that fire should be redoubled. And before they had crossed
+half the intervening distance the rain of bullets from the supporting rebel
+riflemen began to blend with the fall of heavier projectiles, making a very
+storm of destructive missiles, more difficult for horsemen to breast than
+any opposing charge of their own weight could have been, splitting heads,
+crashing out brains, boring bodies full of holes from which the blood and
+the life went out together, and hurling horses and riders to the ground
+with such frequency that wounded men had their little remaining breath
+trampled out by their own comrades and every fallen animal formed a
+temporary barricade over which another fell and became disabled. Through
+the air around them rang the scream of shell and the shrill whistle of
+bullets, blended with the inevitable cry that rose as some bullet found a
+fatal mark, and the roar of agony when a horse was hurled desperately
+wounded and yet living to the ground. The shout with which the troopers had
+at first broken into their charge, did not die away; and it did not cease,
+in fact, until the command had done its work--until the battery was taken
+and the supports scattered by the supplementary onset; but with what sounds
+it was blent before the cavalrymen reached the rebel guns, only those who
+have listened to the same horrible confusion of noises can form the most
+distant idea. To all others the attempt at description must be as vague as
+the thought of Armageddon or the Day of Falling Mountains!
+
+If those sights and sounds cannot be described, who shall describe the
+sensations of those who then for the first time rode point-blank into the
+very face of death? Not we, certainly. The very man who has experienced
+them can tell no more, one hour after, of what existed at the time, than
+one moment's rift in a drifting cloud reveals of the starlit heaven above.
+
+What Captain Hector Coles really felt when first meeting that iron and
+leaden storm so unlike the usual accompaniments of his "staff service," may
+be guessed but can never be known. He rode on gallantly, at least for a
+time: that was quite enough.
+
+What the _ci-devant_ Horace Townsend experienced may be easily enough
+indicated, and in one word--_madness_. He was stark, raving mad! The anger
+felt a few moments before; the novelty of the position; the motion of a
+horse that bore him nobly: the sword, that was no holiday weapon but a
+thing of might and death, clasped by his unaccustomed but nervous hand; the
+shouts of fierce bravery, the groans of anguish and the scream of missiles;
+above all, the rousing for the first time of that human tiger which sleeps
+within most of us until the fit moment of awakening comes--no witches'
+cauldron on a blasted heath ever brewed such a mixture to craze a human
+brain, as that he was so suddenly drinking; and it may be said that his
+rational self knew nothing of what followed. He was riding on--it might
+have been on horseback on the solid earth, in a fiery chariot through the
+air, or on the crest of a storm-wave at sea--he could have formed no idea
+which. When he came within striking distance of the foe, he was swinging
+that heavy sword of Kilpatrick's, at something, everything, he knew not
+what, that seemed to stand in his way. Nothing appeared to hurt him,
+nothing to stop him or the gallant gray he rode. There was a red mist over
+his eyes, and the thunder of twenty judgments rang in his ears: he knew no
+more. He was mad, stark mad--so drunk with the wine of human blood and the
+fiendish joy of battle, that the powers of heaven might have looked down in
+pity on him as upon a new and better developed descendant of the original
+Cain, smiting all his brothers to a death that could not satisfy the hot
+thirst of his evil soul.
+
+Only once he seemed to be for a moment clearly conscious. It was when they
+rode full upon the battery, trampling down men and horses and sabring every
+thing that had life, but under a fire which seemed to rain from the opened
+windows of hell. He saw a man who had thus far kept at his side, recoil,
+rein his horse backward, leap over the fallen friends and foes who barred
+his flight, and dash down the track towards the bridge. He saw, and knew
+Captain Hector Coles; and in his madness he had reason enough left to shout
+"Aha! Coward! Coward!" and then the red mist closed again over his eyes and
+he fought on. He did not see what followed before the flying man reached
+the bridge--the fragment of a shell that struck him in the back and
+literally tore him in pieces, horse and rider going down and lying stone
+dead together.
+
+He could not have told, under oath, who gave the command for that
+supplemental charge upon the supporting force. And yet _his_ tongue uttered
+it, and he was in the front, still waving his sword through the red mist
+and letting it fall with demoniac force upon every thing that stood in his
+way,--when the last hope of the rebels was thus broken. He had known but
+little, most of the time: after that he knew literally nothing except that
+his fierce joy had turned to pain. As if through miles of forest he heard
+the notes of the bugles sounding the recall; and he had a dim consciousness
+of hearing the soldiers speaking of him in words that would have given him
+great pleasure had he been alive to appreciate them! Then he was back at
+the bridge. Kilpatrick was there, somebody cheered, and the General held
+out his hand to him. He tried to hand him back the sword that had done such
+good service, said: "I have brought it--back--" and spoke no more. Then and
+only then, as he fell from his blown and beaten gray, they knew that his
+first charge had a likelihood of being his last--that a Minie bullet,
+received so long before that some of the blood lay dried upon his coat,
+had passed through him from breast to back,--thank God not from back to
+breast!--so near the heart that even the surgeon could not say whether it
+had touched or missed it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+     ONCE MORE AT WEST PHILADELPHIA--SEPTEMBER AND CHANGE--LAST
+     GLIMPSES OF KITTY HOOD AND DICK COMPTON--ROBERT BRAND AND
+     HIS INVITED GUEST--THE NEWS OF DEATH--OLD ESPETH GRAEME AS A
+     SEERESS--THE DESPATCH FROM ALEXANDRIA--THE QUEST OF BRAND
+     AND MARGARET HAYLEY.
+
+
+Hurrying rapidly towards its close, this narration must become yet more
+desultory and at times even more fragmentary, than it has been in the past.
+The seven-league boots of story must be pulled on, however unwillingly, and
+many a spot that would have been lingered lovingly over at the commencement
+of the journey, cleared now with a glance and a bound. The few pages that
+remain, in fact, may justify a change in the figure, appearing more like
+lightning glimpses from railroad-car windows than connected and leisurely
+views of the whole landscape of story.
+
+September on West Philadelphia, where it seems but yesterday, though really
+three months ago, that we saw the fair June morning and inhaled the perfume
+of the sweet June roses. Those roses, the companions in life and death of
+that with which Margaret Hayley was toying on the morning when she met the
+crushing blow of her life,--had long since sighed out their last breath of
+fragrance and faded away, to be followed now by the bright green leaves
+amid which they had clustered and peeped and hidden. The waving grain
+fields which had formed so pleasant a portion of the June landscape, were
+changed as much, though less sadly. Bright golden wheat that had formed
+part of it, lay heaped in the farmer's granaries; and puffed loaves with
+crisp brown crust, made from that which had still further progressed in its
+round of usefulness to man, lay on the baker's counter. There was short
+stubble where the grain had waved, and over it the second growth of clover
+was weaving its green mantle of concealment. In the peach orchards the
+fruit hung ripe to tempt the fingers; the apples were growing more golden
+amid the masses of leaves where they coyly sheltered themselves from the
+sun; and on the garden trellises there already began to be dots of purple
+among the amber green of the grape clusters. There was less of bright,
+glossy green in the foliage--nature's summer coat had been some time worn
+and began to give tokens of the rain and wind and sun it had encountered.
+The birds sang in the branches, but their song seemed more staid and less
+sprightly, as if they too had felt the passage of the months, grown older,
+and could be playful children no more. Occasionally the long clarionet
+chirp of a locust would break out and trill and die away upon the air,
+telling of fading summer and the decline of life so sweetly and yet so
+sadly that decay became almost a glory. The mellow, golden early afternoon
+of the year, as June had been its late morning--not less beautiful,
+perhaps, but oh how immeasurably less sprightly and bewitching--how much
+more calm, sober and subduing!
+
+Nature moves onward, and humanity seldom stands still, if it does not
+outstrip the footsteps of the mother. Something of the changes that had
+fallen during the preceding three months upon that widely varied group of
+residents beyond the Schuylkill who have supplied characters to this
+narration, is already known: what remains may be briefly told at this stage
+and in the closing events soon to follow. Of those changes to Eleanor Hill,
+Nathan Bladesden and Dr. Pomeroy, directly; of those to the members of the
+Brand household, yet sooner; of those to two minor characters who will make
+no further appearance upon the stage during this life-drama, at once. Let
+that two be Dick Compton, farmer, and Kitty Hood, school-mistress. The
+latter yet managed her brood of troublesome children, who still sailed
+their vessels that had succeeded to the evanescent three-master "Snorter,
+of Philadelphia," at playtime, in the little pond before the rural
+school-house, and performed other juvenile operations by sea and shore; but
+a great change had fallen upon the merry, self-willed little girl with the
+brown eyes and the wavy brown hair. The school had a mistress, but that
+mistress had a _master_--a sort of "power behind the throne" not seldom
+managed by one sex or the other, towards all persons "in authority." No
+bickerings at the school-house door, to be afterwards forgotten in
+explanations and kisses, now. Richard Compton found his way there,
+occasionally and perhaps oftener, but he always came in at once instead of
+the school-mistress going out to meet him with a bashful down-casting of
+the eyes and a pretty flush of modesty upon the cheek; and he made so
+little concealment about the visits that he often managed them so as to
+wait until school was dismissed and then walked all the way home with her!
+If the young lovers yet had secrets, they found some other place than the
+neighborhood of the school-house door, for their utterance. And the big
+girls and the bigger boys, who used to enjoy such multitudes of sly gibes
+at the school-mistress and her "beau," had lost all their material of
+amusement. The very last attempt at jocularity in that direction had been
+some time before effectually "squelched" by the dictum of the biggest boy
+in school: "You boys, jest stop peeking at 'em! He ain't her beau no
+more--he's her husband; and you jest let 'em do what they're a mind to!"
+
+That is the fact, precisely--no less assured because approached with a
+little necessary circumlocution. Dick Compton had come back from
+Gettysburgh with the Reserves, unwounded and a hero. Carlton Brand was
+gone, and the only object of jealousy removed. And before Kitty had quite
+emerged from her "valley of humiliation" at the unfortunate slap and
+unpatriotic upbraiding, she found it too late to emerge at all. The
+wedding-day had been set and the marriage taken place, almost before she
+had any idea that such things were in immediate contemplation! Kitty Hood
+was "Mrs. Richard Compton," and that was the secret of the visits no longer
+stolen and the unabashed walking home together. Not that the visits of the
+young farmer to the school excited no commotion, now-a-days, but that the
+commotion was of a different character. All the big boys and some of the
+big girls hated him, as he strode up the aisle with his broad, hearty:
+"'Most ready to go home, Kitty?" and his proprietary taking possession of
+her with his eyes: hated him because he had to some extent come between her
+and them, and because there was a rumor that "after November he was not
+going to allow her to keep school any more." Perhaps there were good
+reasons for this resolution, into which we shall certainly make no more
+attempt to pry than was made by the big boys themselves! God's blessing on
+the young couple, with as much content in the farm-house as can well fall
+to the lot of a small indefinite number,--and with as few
+misunderstandings, coldnesses and jealousies as may be deemed necessary by
+the powers that preside over married life, to fit them for that life in
+which "they neither marry nor are given in marriage!" And so exit Mr. and
+Mrs. Richard Compton, for whom we have done all that the friend and the
+minister could do, leaving Providence and the doctor to take care of the
+remainder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That matter properly disposed of, it becomes necessary to visit the house
+of Robert Brand once more, on the morning of Friday the eighteenth day of
+September, after an absence from it of nearly the three months before
+designated. Change here, too. Besides whatever might have been wrought in
+the master of the house during that period, of which we shall be soon
+advised, there had been a marked difference wrought in the relations
+sustained by good, warm-hearted, sisterly, darling little Elsie. There had
+been no return to the house, of the old family physician, first
+expatriated, so to speak, by word of mouth, and then bull-dogged and
+threatened with the protrusion of loaded muskets from convenient windows
+and the application of the strong arms of old Elspeth Graeme who could
+handle the bull-dog. The doctor's-bill had long before been settled, and
+(let us put the whole truth upon record) spent! Then Robert Brand had been
+again seized with terrible illness and suffering, rendering a physician
+necessary; and what resource was left except the before-despised
+professional services of Dr. James Holton? None whatever. So the old man
+thought and so Elsie Brand _knew_. Result, Dr. James Holton had suddenly
+found himself, in July, the medical adviser of the Brands, and the adviser,
+mental, moral and medical, of Elsie. He had since so remained, seeming to
+do marvels at re-establishing the shattered constitution of the invalid and
+setting him once more on his natural feet, and with a pleasant prospect
+that all the difficulties were smoothed out of the way of his eventual
+union with Elsie, when a little more time and a little enlarged practice
+should make their marriage advisable. And Elsie had grown almost happy once
+more--quite happy in the regard of a good man whom she loved with all the
+warmth of the big heart in her plump little body, and yet restless, nervous
+and tearful when she thought of the brother cherished so dearly, of his
+broken love, his alienated father, his absence in a strange land, and the
+probability that she could never again lay her golden head upon his breast
+and look up into his eyes as to the noblest and most godlike of them all.
+
+At a little before noon on that September morning, a single figure was
+moving slowly backward and forward, up and down, the length of the garden
+walk in the rear of the house of Robert Brand, the trellises of the grapery
+above and on either side, for nearly the whole distance, flecking the
+autumn sunshine that fell on the walk and on the moving figure, while from
+the vines themselves peeped the thick clusters of amber fruit upon which
+the purple bloom was just beginning to throw a hint of October and luscious
+ripeness. Late flowers bloomed in the walks and borders on either side;
+occasionally a bird sent up its quiet and contented twitter from the top of
+the vine where it was tasting a premature grape; a cicala's chirp rang
+feebly out, swelled up to a volume that filled the whole garden, then died
+away again, an indefinable feeling of stillness seeming to lie in the very
+sound. The sunlight was golden, the sky perfectly cloudless, the air balmy
+and indolent; beneath the trellis and beside the walk two long rustic
+settees combined with the wooing air and beckoned to closed eyes,
+day-dreams and repose; and yet the very opposite of repose was expressed in
+the appearance and movement of that single figure.
+
+It was that of Robert Brand, three months older than we saw him in the
+early summer, far less an invalid than he had been at that time, as
+evidenced by the absence of his swathed limb and supporting cane, yet more
+broken within that period than most men break in ten twelvemonths--more
+than he had himself broken before in the same period of his severest years
+of bodily suffering. Something of the iron expression of the mouth was
+gone, and in its place were furrowed lines of suffering that the torture of
+the body could scarcely have imprinted there without the corresponding
+agony of the mind; he was more stooped in the shoulders than he had been
+when before observed; and down the side-hair that showed from beneath his
+broad hat--hair that had been fast but evenly changing from gray to white,
+there now lay great streaks of finger thickness, white as the driven snow
+and in painful contrast with the other,--such streaks as are not often made
+in hair or beard except by the pressure of terrible want, a great sorrow,
+or a month of California fever. This was not all--he walked with head
+dejectedly bent, and hands beneath the skirts of his coat; and when he
+glanced up for a moment it could be seen that his lip trembled and the eye
+had a sad, troubled expression that might have told of tears past, tears
+to come, or a feeling far too absorbing for either. Alas!--the old man was
+indeed suffering. The shame of a life had been followed by its sorrow. He
+had erred terribly in meeting the one, and paid the after penalty: how
+could he muster fortitude enough to meet the other?
+
+To him old Elspeth Graeme, large-faced, massive-framed, and powerful
+looking as of old, with a countenance no more changed during the preceding
+three months than a granite boulder in the mountains might have been
+affected by a little wind and storm during the same lapse of time. Behind
+her Carlo, who since the disappearance of his young master seemed to have
+found no one else except the old Scottish woman who could pretend to
+exercise any control over him, and who consequently had attached himself to
+her almost exclusively. The master, who was making one of his turns up the
+walk, saw her as she emerged from the house, and met her as she approached,
+with inquiry in face and voice.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Stephen has just come ben with the carriage, and the leddy is in the
+house, though the Laird kens what ye'r wantin' of her here, ava!"
+
+"Hold your tongue, woman! When I need your opinion I will ask you for it!"
+This in a tone very much like that of the Robert Brand of old, in little
+squabbles of the same character. Then with the voice much softened: "Is
+Margaret Hayley in the house, do you say?"
+
+"'Deed she is, then, and she'll just be tired of waiting for ye, as the
+lassie's gone, gin ye dinna haste a bit!"
+
+"I will come--no, ask her to step into the garden; I will see her here."
+
+"He's gettin' dafter than ever, I'm thinkin', to invite a born leddy out
+into the garden to see _him_, instead of ganging in till her as he should!"
+muttered the old serving-woman as she turned away to obey the injunction,
+and in that way satisfying, for the time, her part of the inevitable
+quarrel. The moment after the back door of the house opened again, and
+Margaret Hayley came out alone. Stately as ever in step, though perhaps a
+little slower; the charm of youth and budding womanhood in face and figure,
+with the broad sun flashing on her dark hair and seeming to crown her with
+a dusky glory; but something calmer, softer, sadder, ay, even older,
+visible in her whole appearance and manner, than could have been read there
+in that first morning of June, upon the piazza of her own house. She, too,
+had been living much within a brief period: it may be that the course of
+this narration has furnished the reader with better data for judging _how_
+much, than any that lay in the possession of Robert Brand.
+
+She approached the end of the arbor from which he was emerging, and he met
+her before she had reached it. Her face, as they met, wore an unmistakable
+expression of wonder--his an equally unmistakable one of pain. Neither
+spoke for one moment, then the old lawyer held out his hand and said:
+
+"You wonder, Margaret, why I sent for you?"
+
+"Did _you_ send, really, Mr. Brand? I thought that perhaps Stephen had made
+a mistake and that Elsie wished to see me for some reason."
+
+"No, Elsie has been absent all the morning, and may not return for an hour
+or two yet," was the reply. "_I_ sent for you. I had a reason. Old men do
+not trifle with young women, perhaps you are aware." There was that in his
+voice which displayed strong suffering and even an effort to speak. The
+young girl saw and heard, and the wonder in her eyes deepened into anxiety
+as she said:
+
+"You surprise me by something in your manner, Mr. Brand. You almost alarm
+me. Pray do not keep me in suspense. I think I am not so well able to bear
+anxiety and mystery as I used to be. Why did you send for me?"
+
+"Poor girl!" the lips of Robert Brand muttered, so low that she did not
+catch the words. Much less did she hear the two words that followed, in
+little more than a whispered groan: "Poor girl!--poor father!" Then he
+took one of the white hands in his, the eyes of the young girl deepening in
+wonder and anxiety all the while,--led her a little down the path to one of
+the rustic seats under the trellis, dropped down upon it and drew her down
+beside him, uttering a sigh, as he took his seat, like that of a person
+over-fatigued.
+
+"You loved my son." He did not look at her as he spoke the words.
+
+"Mr. Brand--I beg of you--" and then Margaret Hayley paused, her throat
+absolutely choked with that to which she could not give utterance. He did
+not seem to heed her, but went on.
+
+"You loved my son. So did I. God knows how _I_ loved him, and I believe
+that your love was as true as heaven."
+
+"Mr. Brand--for that heaven's sake, why do you say this, to kill us both? I
+cannot listen--" she rose from the seat with a start and stood before him
+as if ready to fly; but he yet retained her hand and drew her down again.
+
+"We both loved him, and yet we killed him! You drove him from you. I cast
+him off and cursed him. We killed him. He is dead!"
+
+"Dead?" The word was not a question--it was not an exclamation--it was not
+a cry of mortal agony--it was all three blended. Then she uttered no other
+word but sat as one stupefied, while he went on, his lip quivering with
+that most painful expression which has before been noticed, and his hand
+fumbling at his pocket for something that he seemed to wish to extract from
+it.
+
+"Yes, he is dead. I have known it for two hours--for two long hours I have
+known that I had _no son_." Type cannot indicate the melancholy fall of the
+last two words, and the heart-broken feeling they conveyed. "My son loved
+you, Margaret Hayley, better than he loved his old father. You loved him.
+You should have been his wife. When I knew that he was dead, I tried to
+conceal it from all until I could send for you, for I felt that it was only
+here and from my lips that you should learn the truth. Some other might
+have told you with less thought for your feelings, perhaps, than I
+who--who--who was so proud of him. I have not been rough, have I? I did not
+mean to be--I meant to be very gentle, to _you_, Margaret! See how broken I
+am!"
+
+So he was, poor old man!--broken in heart and voice, for then he gave way
+and dropped his head upon one of his failing hands, overpowered, helpless,
+little more than a child.
+
+Who shall describe the feelings of Margaret Hayley as she heard the words
+which told her of that one bereavement beyond hope--as she heard them in
+those piteous tones and from that agonized father--a father no more?
+Absence, silence, shame, separation of heart from heart upon earth, hope
+against hope and fear without a name--all were closed and finished at once
+and forever, in that one great earthquake of fact, opening and swallowing
+her world of thought--dead! Tears had not yet come--the blind agony that
+precedes them if it does not render them impossible, was just then her
+terrible portion.
+
+"How did he--when--where--you have not told me--" A child just learning to
+speak might have been making that feeble attempt at asking a connected
+question. But Robert Brand understood her, too well. His hand, again
+fumbling at his pocket, brought out that of which it had been in search,
+and his trembling fingers half opened a newspaper and put it into hers, to
+blast her sense with that greater certainty which seems to dwell in written
+or printed intelligence than in the mere utterance of the lips--to destroy
+the last lingering hope that might have remained and put the very dying
+scene before the eyes so little fitted to look upon it. A line of ink was
+drawn around part of one of the columns uppermost, and the reader had not
+even the painful respite of looking to find what she dreaded. And of course
+that paper was a copy of the _Dublin Evening Mail_, sent to Robert Brand by
+one of his distant relatives in England who had chanced to see what it
+contained--the graphic account of the drowning of Carlton Brand from the
+deck of the despatch-steamer, of the finding of the body and the burial in
+the little graveyard back of the Hill of Howth, written by that attached
+friend of a night, Henry Fitzmaurice.
+
+Margaret Hayley read through that account, every word of which seemed to
+exhaust one more drop from the life-blood at her heart,--in stony silence
+and without a motion that could have been perceived. Then the paper slid
+from her hands to the ground, she turned her head towards Robert Brand with
+that slow and undecided motion so sad to see because it indicates a
+palsying of the quick natural energies; and the instant after, that took
+place which told, better than any other action could have done, how much
+each had built upon that foundation of an expected near and dear
+relationship. Robert Brand met that hopeless gaze, reading her whole secret
+even as his own was being read. Then he opened his arms with a cry that was
+almost a scream: "My daughter!" and the poor girl fell into them and flung
+her own around his neck with the answering cry: "Father!" Both were sobbing
+then; both had found the relief of tears. And a sadder spectacle was never
+presented; for while Margaret Hayley, in the father of the man she had so
+loved, was striving to embrace something of the dead form that never could
+be embraced in reality, Robert Brand was still more truly clasping a
+shadow--trying to find his lost son who could never come to his arms again,
+in the thing which had been dearest to that son while in life!
+
+"My son is dead! Come to me; live with me; be a sister to Elsie and a
+daughter to me, or I shall never be able to bear my punishment!" sobbed the
+broken old man, his arms still around the pliant form bowed upon his
+shoulder; but there came no answer, as there needed none. Another voice
+blended with those that had before spoken, at that moment, and again old
+Elspeth Graeme stood under the trellis. But was it said a little while
+since that no change had come upon her since the fading of the roses of
+June?--certainly there had been a change startling and fearful to
+contemplate, even in the few moments elapsing since her former speech with
+her master. The rough, coarse face had assumed an expression in which
+bitter sorrow was contending with terrible anger; the bluish gray eyes
+literally blazed with such light as might have filled those of a tigress
+robbed of her young; and it would have needed no violent stretch of fancy
+to believe that she had revived one of the old traditions of her Gaelic
+race and become a mad prophetess of wrath and denunciation. Strangely
+enough, too, Carlo was again behind her, his eyes glaring upon the two
+figures that occupied the bench, and his heavy tail moving with that slow
+threatening motion which precedes the spring of the beast of prey! Was old
+Elspeth Graeme indeed a wierd woman, and had the brute changed to be her
+familiar and avenging spirit?
+
+The serving-woman held something white in her hand, but neither Robert
+Brand nor his visitor saw it. They but saw the tall form and the face
+convulsed with wild feeling; and both seemed to shrink before a presence
+mightier than themselves. The strange servitor spoke:
+
+"Robert Brand, tell me gin I heard aright! Did ye say that Carlton Brand
+was dead?"
+
+"Who called you here, woman? Yes, he is dead! He was drowned on the Irish
+coast three weeks ago," answered the bereaved father, oddly blending the
+harsh authority of the master with the feeling which really compelled him
+to make response.
+
+"Then ye had better baith be dead wi' him--the father who banned his ain
+flesh and bluid and wished that he would dee before his very eyne, and the
+fause woman who had nae mair heart than to drive him frae her like a dog!"
+
+"Woman!" broke out the master, but the interruption did not check her for
+an instant. She went on, broadening yet more in her native dialect as she
+grew yet more earnest:
+
+"Nae, ye must e'en bide my wull and tak' it, Robert Brand! It has been
+waiting here for mony a day, and I can haud it nae longer! He was my braw,
+bonnie lad, and puir auld Elsie loed him better than ye a'! I harkit till
+ye, Robert Brand, when yer curse went blawin' through the biggin like an
+east win', and I ken'd ye was sawin a fuff to reap a swirl! Ye must ban and
+dom yer ain bluid because it wad na fecht, drivin' the bairn awa frae kin
+and kintra, and noo ye hae _my_ curse to stay wi ye, sleepin' and
+wakin'--ye an' the fause beauty there that helpit ye work his dool!"
+
+"Elspeth Graeme, if you say another word to insult Miss Hayley and outrage
+me, I will forget that you are a woman and choke you where you stand!"
+cried Robert Brand, no longer able to restrain himself, starting to his
+feet and drawing Margaret to the same position, with his arm around her
+waist. But the old woman did not flinch, or pause long in her denunciation.
+
+"Nae, ye'll do naething of the kind, Robert Brand!--ye'll tak what must
+come till ye!" And indeed it looked as if the great dog behind her would
+have sprung at the throat of even the master if he had dared to lay hands
+on his strange servitor. "Ye'll tak the curse, baith o' ye, and ye'll groan
+under it until the day ye dee! Gin Carlton Brand is dead, ye murdered him,
+and his eldritch ghaist shall come back and haunt ye, by night and by day,
+in the mist o' the mountain and the crowd o' the street, till yer blastit
+under it and think auld Hornie has grippet ye by the hearts! Ye'll sing
+dool belyve, baith of ye! Auld Elsie tells ye so, and slight her if ye
+daur!"
+
+Before these last words were spoken, Margaret Hayley had slipped from the
+grasp of the old man and was on her knees upon the ground, her proud spirit
+fairly broken, her hands raised in piteous entreaty, and her lips uttering
+feebly:
+
+"Oh, we have both wronged him--I know it now. But spare me, good Elspeth,
+now when my heart is broken; and spare _him_!"
+
+But Robert Brand, as was only natural--Robert Brand, feeble as he was,
+viewed the matter in a somewhat different light. Sorrow might have
+softened him, but it had by no means entirely cured his temper; and the
+serving-woman had certainly gone to such lengths in her freedom as might
+have provoked a saint to something very much like anger. He grasped
+Margaret from her kneeling position, apparently forgetting pain and
+weakness,--set her upon the seat and poured out a volley of sound, strong
+plain-English curses upon the old woman, that had no difficulty whatever in
+being understood. Dog or no dog, it seemed probable that he might even have
+given vent to his rage in a more forcible manner, when another interruption
+occurred which somewhat changed the posture of affairs.
+
+Elsie Brand came out from the house, hat upon head, and dressed as for a
+ride. She had been taking one, in fact, with Dr. James Holton, who had
+driven her over for a call upon one of her friends; and she looked radiant
+enough to proclaim the truth that she had just left very pleasant company.
+Her plump little form as tempting and Hebe-ish as ever; her bright yellow
+hair a little "touzled" (it could not be possible that those people had
+been laying their heads too near together in the carriage as they came
+across the wood road!); and her blue eyes one flash of pleasure that had
+forgotten all the pain and sorrow in the world,--she was a strange element,
+just then, to infuse into the blending of griefs within that garden. She
+came out with hasty step, calling to Elspeth.
+
+"Elspeth! Elspeth! What keeps you so long? The boy is waiting to know if
+father has any answer." Then seeing the others: "What, Margaret here with
+father? How do you do, Margaret?" It was notable how the voice fell slowed
+and softened, in speaking the last five words, and how the light went out
+from her young eyes as she spoke. Though friends always, Margaret Hayley
+and Elsie Brand had never been the same as before to each other, since that
+painful June morning on the piazza. How could they be? But Margaret was
+softened now, and she said, "Dear Elsie!" took the little girl in her arms
+and kissed her, so that something of the past seemed to have returned.
+
+But meanwhile another incident of importance was occurring. It may have
+been noticed that Elspeth Graeme had something white in her hand when she
+came out into the garden the second time. So she had, indeed--a folded note
+addressed to Robert Brand, and with a wilderness of printing scattered over
+the edges and half the face of the envelope; but she had quite forgotten
+the fact in the sudden knowledge of the death of her young master and the
+necessity of becoming an avenging Pythoness for the occasion. Now, Elsie's
+words called the attention of the old lawyer to that something in her hand,
+and he took it from her with a motion very much like a jerk, and the words:
+
+"If you have a letter for me, why did you not give it to me instead of
+standing here raving like a bedlamite--you old fool?"
+
+"It is na a letter; it's what they ca' a telegraph, I'm thinkin'!" muttered
+the old woman, a good deal taken down from her "high horse" by this
+reminder of her delinquency, and with some sort of impression that this
+must be a sufficient apology for not being in a hurry. "Somebody else dead,
+belike!--we're a' goin' to the deevil as fast as auld Clootie can drag us,
+I ken!"
+
+It _was_ a telegraphic despatch which the old woman had delivered with such
+signal celerity, and which Robert Brand tore open with celerity of a very
+different character. He read, then read again, then his face paled, and a
+strange, startled look came into his eyes, and he put one hand to his
+forehead with the exclamation:
+
+"What _is_ all this? Am I going mad?"
+
+"What _is_ it, father?" and little Elsie pressed up to his side and took
+the despatch from his unresisting fingers. And it was she who read it aloud
+to the other wonderers, herself the most startled wonderer of all:
+
+                            ALEXANDRIA, _Sept. 17th, 1863_.
+
+     _Robert Brand, West Philadelphia_,
+
+     _Care Messrs. ----, No. -- Market St. Philadelphia_.
+
+     Your son, Carlton Brand, dangerously wounded at Culpeper.
+     Lying in hospital here. If well enough, wish you would come
+     down and see him. He does not know of this.
+
+                                                   E. H.
+
+"Well, I'll be----!"
+
+It was a plump, round oath that Robert Brand uttered--very improper under
+any circumstances, and especially so in the presence of ladies,--but about
+as natural, when all things are considered, as the air he breathed. In
+order to realize the exact position and the blind astonishment that must
+have lain in that telegraphic despatch, it is necessary to remember that
+once before he had heard of the death of the young man, from one who had
+just seen his lifeless body (Kitty Hood), and that only two hours
+afterwards his house had been visited by the enraged Dr. Pomeroy to reclaim
+a girl that the man just before dead was alleged to have stolen! Now, only
+an hour or two before, he had a second time been informed of his son's
+death at sea, and burial in Ireland, under such circumstances that mistake
+seemed to be impossible; and yet here was a telegraphic despatch quite as
+likely to be authentic if not originating in some unfeeling hoax--informing
+him that he had been nearly killed in battle, and was lying in one of the
+Virginia hospitals! At short intervals the young man seemed to die, in
+different places, and then immediately after to be alive again in other
+places, under aspects scarcely less painful and yet more embarrassing.
+There was certainly enough in all this to make the old man's brain whirl,
+and to overspread the faces of the others with such blank astonishment that
+they seemed to be little else than demented. There was one, however, not
+puzzled one whit. That was old Elspeth, who muttered, loudly enough for
+them all to hear, as she abandoned them to their fate, resigned her
+temporary position as seeress, and went back to the mundane duties of
+house-keeping:
+
+"It's not the bairn's ainsel at all that's lying down amang the naygurs
+where they're fechting. It is his double that's come bock frae the auld
+land to haunt ye! Come awa, Carlo, lad, and let them mak much of it!"
+
+There is no need to recapitulate all that followed between the three
+remaining people, surprised in such different degrees--the words in which
+little Elsie was made to understand the first intelligence, followed by her
+reading of the whole account in the Irish paper--the hopes, fears, fancies
+and wild surmises which swept through the brains and hearts of each--the
+thoughts of Robert Brand over the initials appended to the telegraphic
+despatch, which for some reason made him much more confident of its
+authenticity than he would otherwise have been, while they embarrassed him
+terribly in another direction which may or may not be guessed--the weaving
+together of three minds that had been more or less separated by conflicting
+feelings with reference to that very person, into one grand total and
+aggregate of anxiety which dwarfed all other considerations and made the
+whole outside world a blank and a nothing in comparison. All this may be
+imagined: until the perfecting of that invention by which the kaleidoscope
+is to be photographed in the moment of its revolution, it cannot be set in
+words. But the result may and must be given.
+
+"I shall go to Washington by the train, to-night," said Robert Brand, when
+the discussion had reached a certain point, with the mystery thicker than
+ever and the anxiety proportionately increasing.
+
+"You, father? Are you well enough to go?" and little Elsie looked at him
+with gratified and yet fearful surprise.
+
+"No matter, I am going!" That was enough, and Elsie knew it. Within the
+last half hour much of his old self seemed to have returned; and when he
+assumed that tone, life granted, he would go as inevitably as the
+locomotive.
+
+"I am glad to hear you say so, Mr. Brand--father!" said Margaret Hayley,
+very calmly. "It will make it much better, no doubt, for _I_ am going."
+
+"You!" This time there were two voices that uttered the word of surprise.
+
+"Yes, _I_! If Carlton Brand is lying wounded in a Virginia hospital, I know
+my duty; and if I must miss _that_, to _him_, or Heaven, henceforward, I
+shall be among the lost!" Strange, wild, mad words; but how much they
+conveyed!
+
+"God bless you, _my daughter_!" "My dear, dear _sister_!" And somehow three
+people managed to be included in one embrace immediately after. This was
+all, worth recording, that the grape trellis saw.
+
+That evening when the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore train left
+Broad and Prime, it bore Robert Brand and Margaret Hayley, going southward
+on that singular quest which might end in so sad and final a
+disappointment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+     IN THE HOSPITAL AT ALEXANDRIA--THE WOUNDED MAN AND HIS
+     NURSE--SAD OMENS--A REUNION OF THREE--BRAVE MAN OR
+     COWARD?--WHO WAS HORACE TOWNSEND?--A MYSTERY EXPLAINED--HOW
+     ELEANOR HILL WENT BACK TO DR. POMEROY'S--ONE WORD MORE OF
+     THE COMANCHE RIDER--CONCLUSION.
+
+
+Glimpses now, only glimpses--with great breaks between, which the
+imagination may fill at pleasure. Events, few in number, not less strange,
+perhaps, than those which have already occurred, but less enwrapped in
+mystery, and gradually shaping themselves towards the inevitable end.
+
+The military hospital at Alexandria. Outside, dingy and yet imposing, fit
+type of the State that held it, in the days before secession was any thing
+more than a crime in thought. Within, a wilderness of low-ceilinged rooms,
+comfortable enough but all more or less dingy like the exterior. Nine out
+of ten of them filled with cot-bedsteads arranged in long rows with aisles
+between; sacred at once to two of the most incongruous exhibitions of human
+propensity--the blood-thirsty cruelty which can kill and maim,--the angelic
+kindness which can make a dear child or brother out of the merest stranger
+and bind up the hurts of a rough, hard-handed, blaspheming ruffian, of
+blood unknown and lineage uncared for, with all that tender care which
+could be bestowed upon the gentlest and loveliest daughter of a pampered
+race when sick or disabled. One of the many places scattered over the loyal
+States and many portions of the disloyal, made terrible to recollection by
+the suffering that has been endured within them and the lives that have
+gone out as a sacrifice to the Moloch of destructive war,--but made holy
+beyond all conception, at the same time, by the patriotic bravery with
+which many of their lives have been surrendered to the great Giver for a
+glorious cause; by the patience with which agony has been endured and
+almost reckoned as pleasure for the nation's sake; and by the footsteps of
+the nobler men and if possible still nobler women of America, who have
+given up ease and comfort and domestic happiness and health and even life
+itself, to minister to those stricken down in the long conflict.
+
+No need to draw the picture: nothing of war or its sad consequences remains
+a mystery in this age and to this people. Too many eyes have looked upon
+the wards of our hospitals, the forms stretched there in waiting for death
+or recovery, the figures moving around and among them in such ministration
+as the Good Samaritan may have bestowed upon the bruised and beaten Jew of
+the parable;--too many ears have listened to the moans of suffering rising
+up continually like a long complaint to heaven, the sharp screams of agony
+under temporary pang or fearful operation, the words of content under any
+lot, blending like an undertone with all, and the words of prayer and
+Christian dependence crowning and hallowing all;--too many of the men of
+this time have seen and heard these things, and too many more may yet have
+the duty of looking upon them and listening to them, to make either wise or
+necessary the closer limning of the picture that might otherwise be
+presented. We have to do with but a little corner of the great building
+that had been made so useful in the care of the sick and wounded, just as
+this narration holds involved the interests of a poor half-dozen among the
+many millions affected by the colossal struggle.
+
+A small room, on the second floor of the building, the walls once white and
+even now scrupulously clean but dingy from smoke and use. Two windows in
+it, opening to the west, the tops shaded by paper curtains with muslin
+inside, while at the bottoms streamed in the soft September afternoon
+sunlight that lay like a glory over the Virginian woods, so fair to the eye
+but so foul and treacherous within, stretching away towards the bannered
+clouds before many hours to shroud the setting of the great luminary. Not
+one of the common rooms in which, perforce from their number, sick and
+wounded soldiers must be more or less closely huddled together,--but one
+devoted to the care of wounded officers, with four beds of iron, neatly
+made and draped, and at this time only one of them occupied.
+
+We have more than once before had occasion to notice the occupant of that
+one bed near the head of the room, with a stream of sunshine pouring in at
+the window and flooding the whole foot. We have before had occasion to
+remark that tall, slight but sinewy form distending the thin covering as it
+settled to his shape. Something of his appearance we have _not_ seen
+before--the head of hair of an indescribable mixture, half pale gold or
+light blonde and the other or outer half dark brown or black, scarcely
+seeming to belong to the same growth unless produced by some mad freak of
+nature. Nor have we before remarked the splendidly-chiselled face so pale
+and wan, the life-fluids seeming to be exhausted beneath the skin, from
+loss of blood and severe suffering. Nor yet that other anomaly--a moustache
+with the outer ends very dark, almost black, strangely relieved by a crop
+of light brown beard starting thick and short, like stubble, on the chin.
+Like this picture in some regards, unlike it in others, the occupant of
+that bed has before presented, as at this moment, an anomaly equally
+interesting and puzzling. Wherever and whenever seen, at earlier periods,
+the last time he met the gaze he was dropping from his horse, a bullet
+through the body just above the heart, a red sword slipping from his hand
+and insensibility succeeding to delirium, near the railroad-bridge and the
+captured rebel battery at Culpeper.
+
+The wounded man lay with his eyes closed and seemed to be in sleep. Beside
+the bed on a low stool and partially resting against it, was one who slept
+not--a woman. One elbow resting on the bed-clothes supporting her head, and
+the other hand holding a book in which she was reading. This was evidently
+the nurse, and yet scarcely an ordinary nurse charged with the care of all
+patients, or she could not have afforded the time for watching one
+convalescent while he slept. She, too, may have been seen before; for
+something there was in that tall and lithe form, that mass of rich silky
+brown hair, that face with its mournful eyes and painfully delicate
+features--something that, once seen, lingered like a sweet, sad dream in
+the gazer's memory. And yet here, too, if there was an identity, change had
+been very busy. The form had always been lithe--it was now thin to
+fragility; the hands had always been taper and delicate--now they were
+fleshless almost to emaciation; the face had always conveyed the thought of
+gentleness, helplessness and needful protection--now it seemed less
+helpless but more mournful, the cheeks a little sunken, and the red spot
+burning in the centre of either not a close enough semblance of ruddy
+health to deceive an eye quickened by affectionate anxiety. She was dying,
+perhaps slowly, it might be rapidly, but dying beyond a peradventure, with
+that friend or foe which has ushered more human beings into the presence of
+God than any other disease swayed as an agency by the great
+destroyer--consumption!
+
+A few moments of silence, unbroken by any sound within the room except the
+thick breathing of the sleeper: then the girl who sat at his side choked a
+moment, seemed to make violent efforts to control the coming spasm, but at
+last yielded, clapped both hands to her left side just above her heart, and
+broke into one of those terrible fits of coughing which tear away the
+system as the earthquake rives the solid ground, and which are almost as
+hard to hear as to endure. Instantly, as the spasm relaxed, she hurriedly
+drew a white handkerchief from the pocket of her dark dress and wiped her
+lips. It was replaced so suddenly that the awakened sleeper did not see
+what stained it--blood, mingled frightfully with the clear white foam.
+
+The eyes of the wounded man opened; and there was something more of himself
+that came back in the light of their warm hazel, only a little dimmed by
+suffering, and in the play of all the muscles of the face when awake. Both
+hands lay outside the bed-clothing; and as she saw the opening of his eyes
+the girl stretched out her own and took one of them with such gentleness
+and devotion as was most beautiful to behold. She seemed to be touching
+flesh that she held to be better than her own--a suggestive rarity in this
+arrogant world! Something that man had been to her, or something he had
+done for her, beyond a doubt, which made him the object of a feeling almost
+too near to idolatry. And yet what had he given her, to win so much? Not
+wealth--not love: merely true friendship, respect when others despised, and
+a little aid towards rescue when others turned away or labored to produce
+final ruin! How easily heaven may be scaled--the heaven of love and
+devotion if no height beyond,--by that consideration which costs so little,
+by that kindness which should be a duty if it even brought no recompense!
+
+"There--I have woke you! I am so sorry!" she said, as she met his eyes and
+touched his hand.
+
+"What consequence, if you have?" was his reply, in a voice low and
+somewhat feeble, while his thin hand made some poor attempt at returning
+her kind pressure. "Ever generous, Eleanor--ever thinking of others and not
+of yourself! They make angels of such people as you--do you know it?"
+
+"Angels? oh, my God, have I lived to hear that word applied to _me_?" Such
+was the answer, and the mournful eyes went reverently upward as she invoked
+the one holy Name.
+
+"Angels? yes, why not?" said the invalid. "Every light-tongued lover calls
+his mistress by that name sometime or other, and--"
+
+"Hush, Carlton Brand, hush!"
+
+Some painful chord was touched, and he appeared to understand, as well he
+might, by what word with two meanings he had lacerated a feeling. He went
+back to what he had evidently intended to say at first.
+
+"You do not think of yourself, I say. You have been coughing again."
+
+"A little."
+
+"A little? Loudly enough to wake me, and I am a sound sleeper. Eleanor
+Hill, you are nursing me, when you more need a nurse yourself. I am almost
+well, you know. You are growing thinner and your cough is worse every day."
+
+"No, Carlton, better--much better!"
+
+"Are you sure? Stop, let me see your handkerchief!" He was looking her
+steadily in the face, and she obeyed him as if in spite of her own will and
+because she had always been in the habit of doing so.
+
+"I thought so," he said. "Eleanor, you are very ill. Do not deceive
+yourself or try to deceive _me_."
+
+"Carlton Brand," she answered, returning that look, full in the eyes, and
+speaking slowly--calmly--firmly. "I am dying, and no one knows the fact
+better than myself. Thank God that the end is coming!"
+
+"Oh no, you are very ill, but not beyond hope--not dying," he attempted to
+urge as some modification of the startling confession she had made.
+
+"Yes--the whole truth may as well be told now, Carlton, since we have begun
+it. I am dying of consumption, and I hope and believe that I shall have but
+few more days left after you get well enough to leave this hospital."
+
+"Heavens!" exclaimed the wounded man. "If this is true, do you know what
+you are making of me? Little else than a murderer! I meant it for the
+best--the best for the country and yourself, when I took you away from the
+house of your--of Philip Pomeroy, and sent you into this new path of life;
+but the sleepless hours and over-exertion, the exposures to foul air and
+draughts and anxiety to which you have been subjected--oh, Eleanor, is
+_this_ what I have done?"
+
+She slid from her chair and kneeled close beside the bed, bending over
+towards him with the most affectionate interest.
+
+"Oh no," she said, no agitation in her voice. "Do you think that three
+months has done this? My family are all consumptive--my father died of the
+disease. What was done to _me_"--her voice faltered for just one moment,
+then she calmed it again by an obvious effort--"What was done to _me_, was
+done long before and by another hand."
+
+"Stop!" he interrupted her as she was evidently about to proceed. "I _must_
+say one word about _him_. Did you ever know all the reason why each of us
+feared and hated the other so much?"
+
+Merely a sad shake of the head was the negative.
+
+"I will tell you, now. I was a coward, and he knew it. You knew so much
+before, but nothing else, I believe. He was present once when I fainted at
+the very sight of blood--something that I believe I always used to do; and
+he knew of my refusing a challenge because I really dared not fight. He
+could expose and ruin me, and I feared him. I knew him to be a scoundrel in
+money affairs as well as in every other way: as a lawyer I could put my
+finger on a great crime that he had committed to win a large part of his
+fortune. He knew that I knew it, and that I would have exposed him if I
+dared. So he feared and hated _me_, and each held the other in check
+without doing more. It is time that you should know that crime: it was his
+robbing you of every dollar left you by your father, and putting them all
+into his own pocket, through the pretended machinery of that Dunderhaven
+Coal and Mining Company, of which he was President, Director and all the
+officers!"
+
+"Carlton! Carlton! can this be true, even of _him_?" asked the young girl,
+horrified at this crowning proof of a depravity beyond conception and yet
+not beyond _fact_.
+
+"It is true, every word of it, and if I had not been a wretch unfit to
+live, I would have exposed and punished him long ago. Lately I think I must
+have gone through what they call 'baptizing in fire,' and the very day I am
+able to crawl once more to Dr. Pomeroy's house, I shall force him to meet
+me in a duel or shoot him down like a dog!"
+
+"This from _you_, Carlton Brand!" The tone was very piteous.
+
+"Yes--why not?" The tone was hard and decided, for a sick man.
+
+"May heaven forgive you the thought. Now listen to me. You have been the
+dearest friend I ever had in the world. You have been better and truer to
+me than any brother; and you have done me the greatest of all favors by
+sending me here to nurse the sick and wounded, to win back something of my
+lost self-respect and close up a wasted life with a little usefulness
+before I die! But after all this I shall almost hate you--I shall not be
+able, I am afraid, to pray for you in that land I am so soon going to
+visit,--if you do not make me one solemn promise and keep it as you would
+save your own soul."
+
+There was an agonized earnest in her words and in her manner, as she thus
+spoke, kneeling there and even clasping her hands in entreaty. Carlton
+Brand looked at her for one instant with a great pity; then he said:
+
+"Eleanor Hill, if the promise is one that a man can make and a man can
+keep, I will make it and keep it!"
+
+"Then promise me neither in word nor act to harm Philip Pomeroy. Leave him
+to _me_."
+
+"To _you_, poor girl?"
+
+"To _me_! _I_ will so punish him as no man was ever punished."
+
+"_You_ punish him? _You_, feeble and dying? How?"
+
+"By going back to his house--if they will obey my last wish when the hour
+comes,--_dead_."
+
+"That _will_ be punishment enough, perhaps, even for _him_, if he is
+human!" slowly said the invalid as he took in the thought. "I promise."
+
+"God bless you!" and poor Eleanor Hill fell forward on the bed and burst
+into sobs that ended the moment after in a fit of still more violent
+coughing than that which had racked her half an hour previously. And this
+did not end like the other, but deepened and grew more hoarse until the
+white froth flew from the suffering lips, followed by a gush of blood that
+not only dyed the foam but spattered the bed-covering.
+
+"Heavens! see how you are bleeding, my poor girl! You must have help at
+once!" The face of the speaker, deadly pale and sorely agitated, told how
+bad a nurse was this choking, dying girl, in his enfeebled condition, with
+a terrible wound scarcely yet commenced healing.
+
+"No, I do not need help--I shall be better in a moment. But I agitate
+_you_, and I will go away until I have stopped coughing."
+
+Which would be, Carlton Brand thought, perhaps a few moments before she
+went into that holy presence from which the most betrayed and down-trodden
+may not be debarred! Ever weakly-loving--ever thoughtless of her own
+welfare and childishly subservient to the good of others--lacking
+self-assertion, but never wantonly sinful,--had not that strange thinker,
+yet under the influence of the fever of his wound, some right to remember
+Mary's tears, and the blessing to the "poor in heart," promised in the
+Sermon on the Mount?
+
+But there was real danger to the invalid in this agitation, and the will
+of another stepped in to remove the danger. Before the poor girl had quite
+ceased coughing, one of the physicians of the hospital, a gray-haired,
+benevolent-looking man, stood by the bedside and touched her upon the
+shoulder.
+
+"Coughing again, and so terribly! What, blood? Fie, fie!--this will never
+do!" he said. "If the sick nurse the sick, both fare badly, you know. If
+the scripture doesn't say so, it ought to. You must go away to Mrs.
+Waldron, Nellie, and keep quiet and not stir out again to-day."
+
+"Yes, Doctor," she answered, rising obediently. "Good-night, Carlton!" She
+stooped and pressed her lips to the thin hand so touchingly that the
+doctor, who could scarcely even guess the past relation between the two,
+almost felt the tears rising as he looked.
+
+"Good-night, and God bless you, Eleanor."
+
+The doctor's eyes followed her as with slow, weak steps she passed out of
+the room, her pale, mournful face with its hectic cheeks and sad eyes
+looking back to the bed for an instant as she disappeared. Then he turned
+away with a sigh--such a sigh of helpless sorrow as he had no doubt often
+heaved over the living illustrations of those two heart-breaking
+words--"fading away."
+
+"I am sorry she was here," he said, when she had gone. "I am afraid that
+she has used up strength that you needed. There are visitors to see you."
+
+"To see _me_?"
+
+"Yes--now keep as cool as possible, or I will send them away again. I hate
+mysteries and surprises; but poor Eleanor does not, and she sent for them,
+I believe."
+
+"She sent for them? She? Then they are--"
+
+"Keep still, or I will tell you no more--they are two from whom you have
+been estranged, I think--your father and--"
+
+"My sister?"
+
+"No, the lady is not your sister, I think. She is tall, dark-haired, very
+beautiful and very queenly. Is that your sister?"
+
+"No--no--that is not my sister--that is--heavens, can this be possible, or
+am I dreaming? Doctor, this agitation is hurting me worse than any presence
+could do. Send them in and trust me. I will be quiet--I will husband my
+life, for if I am not mad and you are not trifling, there may yet be
+something in the world worth living for."
+
+The doctor laid his hand on the pulse of his patient, looked for a moment
+into his face, and then left the room. The next, two stepped within it--an
+old man with gray hair rapidly changing to silver, and a woman in the very
+bloom of youth and beauty. The eyes of the wounded man were closed. What
+was he doing?--collecting strength, or looking for it where it ever abides?
+No matter. Only one instant more, and then the two were on their knees by
+the bedside, where Eleanor Hill had just been kneeling--the father with the
+thin hand in his and murmuring: "Carlton! my brave, my noble son!" and
+Margaret Hayley leaning far over the low couch and saying a thousand times
+more in one long, tender, clinging kiss, light as a snow-flake but loving
+and warm as the touch of the tropic sun,--that shunned cheek and brow and
+laid its blessing on the answering lips!
+
+Some of the words of that meeting are too sacred to be given: let them be
+imagined with the pressure of hands and the hungry glances of eyes that
+could not look enough in any space of time allotted them. But there were
+others, following close after, which may and must be given. Whole volumes
+had been spoken in a few words, and yet the book was scarcely opened,--when
+Margaret Hayley rose from her knees and bending over the bed ran those
+dainty white fingers through the strangely mottled hair on the brow of the
+invalid. Then she seemed to discover something incongruous in different
+portions of the face; and the moment after, stooping still closer down, she
+swept away the hair from the brow and scanned the texture of the skin at
+its edge. A long, narrow scar, its white gloss just relieved on the pallid
+flesh, crossed the forehead from the left temple to the centre of its apex.
+She seemed surprised and even frightened; then a look of mingled shame and
+pleasure broke over that glorious face, and she leaned close above him and
+said, compelling his eyes to look steadily into hers:
+
+"Carlton Brand, what does this mean? I know that scar and the color that
+has once covered that hair and moustache! You are Horace Townsend!"
+
+"I _was_ Horace Townsend once, for a little while, Margaret," was the
+reply. "But it won me nothing, and you see for what a stern reality I have
+given up masquerading."
+
+"And _you_ plunged into the Pool to save that drowning boy. _You_ went down
+into that dreadful schute and brought up the Rambler! _You_ spoke to the
+Old Man of the Mountain at midnight and carried me away with your words on
+Echo Lake. And _you_--heaven keep my senses when I think of it!--_you_ made
+love to me along the road down the Glen below the Crawford!
+
+"I am afraid I was guilty of all those offences!" answered the invalid,
+with something nearer to a smile of mischief glimmering from the corner of
+his eye than had shone there for many a day.
+
+"I did hear something in your voice the first night that I saw you there,
+and afterwards," Margaret Hayley went on, "which made me shudder from its
+echo of yours; and more than once I saw that in your face which won me to
+you without my knowing why. Yet all the impression wore off by degrees,
+and--only think of it!--I was nearly on the point, at one time, of
+believing that I had found a truer ideal than the one so lately lost, and
+of promising to become the wife of Horace Townsend! Think where _you_ would
+have been, you heartless deceiver, if I had fallen altogether into the trap
+and done so!"
+
+"I think I might have endured _that_ successful rivalry better than any
+other!" was the very natural reply.
+
+"And this man," said Robert Brand, standing close beside the bed, looking
+down at his son with a face in which pride and joy had mastered its great
+trouble of a few days before, and apparently speaking quite as much to
+himself as to either of his auditors--"this man, capable of such deeds of
+godlike bravery in ordinary life, and then of winning the applause of a
+whole army in the very front of battle,--I cursed and despised as a coward!
+God forgive me!--and you, my son, try to forget that ever I set myself up
+as your pitiless judge, to be punished as few fathers have ever been
+punished who yet had the sons of their love spared to them! Margaret--how
+have we both misunderstood him!"
+
+"The fault was not all yours, by any means," said the invalid. "How could
+either of you know me when I misunderstood and belied _myself_!"
+
+And in that remark--the last word uttered by Carlton Brand before he
+yielded to the exhaustion of his last hour of imprudent excitement and fell
+away to a slumber almost as profound as death, just as the old doctor
+stepped back to forbid a longer interview, and while the shadows of evening
+began to fall within the little room, and Margaret Hayley sat by his
+bedside and held his hand in hers with what was plainly a grasp never to be
+broken again during the lives of both, and Robert Brand, sitting but a
+little farther away, watched the son that had been lost and was found, with
+a deeper tenderness and a holier pride than he had ever felt when bending
+over the pillow of his sleeping childhood,--in that remark, we say, lay the
+key to all which had so affected his life, and which eventually gave cause
+for this somewhat singular and desultory narration. _He had misunderstood
+himself_; and only pain, suffering and a mental agony more painful than any
+physical death, had been able to bring himself and those who best knew him
+to a full knowledge of the truth. Only a part of that truth he knew even
+then, when he lay in the officers' ward of the Alexandria hospital: it is
+our privilege to know it all and to explain it, so far as explanation can
+be given, in a few words.
+
+Carlton Brand had been gifted, and cursed, from childhood, with an intense
+and imaginative temperament, never quite regulated or even analyzed. His
+sense of honor had been painfully delicate--his love of approbation so
+strong as to be little less than a disease. Some mishap of his weak,
+hysterical and short-lived mother, no doubt, had given him one terrible
+weakness, entirely physical, but which he believed to be mental--_he
+habitually fainted at the sight of blood_. (This fact will explain,
+parenthetically, why he fell senseless and apparently dead at that period
+in the encounter with Dick Compton when the blood gushed over the face of
+the latter from his blow; and why after each of the excitements of the Pool
+and Mount Willard he suffered in like manner, at the instant when his eyes
+met the fatal sign on the faces of the rescued.) High cultivation of the
+imaginative faculty, the habit of living too much within himself, and a
+constitutional predisposition in that direction, had made him painfully
+_nervous_--a weakness which to him, and eventually to others, assumed the
+shape of cowardice. Recklessly brave, in fact, and never troubled by that
+nervousness for one moment when his sympathies were excited and his really
+magnificent physical and gymnastic powers called into play,--that fainting
+shudder at the sight of blood had been all the while his haunting demon,
+disgracing him in his own eyes and marring a life that would otherwise have
+been very bright and pleasant. One belief had fixed itself in his mind,
+long before the period of this narration, and never afterwards (until now)
+been driven thence--that _if he should ever be brought into conflict among
+deadly weapons, this horror of blood would make him run away like a
+poltroon, disgracing himself forever and breaking the hearts of all who
+loved him_. This belief had made his commission in the Reserves a
+melancholy farce; this had placed him in the power of Dr. Philip Pomeroy
+and prevented that exposure and that punishment so richly deserved; this
+had made his life, after the breaking out of the war, one long struggle to
+avoid what he believed must be disgraceful detection. Once more, so that
+the matter which informs this whole relation may be fairly
+understood,--Carlton Brand, merely a high-strung, imaginative, nervous
+man, with the bravery of the old Paladins latent in his heart and bursting
+out occasionally in actions more trying than the facing of any battery that
+ever belched forth fire and death,--had all the while mistaken that
+nervousness for cowardice;--just as many a man who has neither heart,
+feeling nor imagination, strides through the world and stalks over the
+battle-field, wrapped in his mantle of ignorance and stolidity, believing
+himself and impressing the belief upon others, that this is indomitable
+bravery.
+
+What Carlton Brand had believed himself to be when untried--what Carlton
+Brand had proved himself to be when hatred to Captain Hector Coles and a
+despairing hope of yet winning the love of Margaret Hayley moved him to the
+trial--how thorough a contrast!--how exact an antagonism! And how many of
+us, perhaps, going backward from the glass in which we have more or less
+closely beheld our natural faces, forget, if we have ever truly read, "what
+manner of men" we are!
+
+And here another explanation must follow, as we may well believe that it
+followed between the three so strangely reunited, when rest and repose had
+worn off the first shock of meeting and made it safe for the petted invalid
+to meet another pressure from those rose-leaf lips that had forsaken all
+their pride to bend down and touch him with a penitent blessing--safe to
+speak and to hear of the many things which the parted always treasure
+against re-union. That explanation concerns the mystery of the passenger by
+the Cunarder, the American in England, and the man who under the name of
+Carlton Brand perished from the deck of the Emerald off Kingstown harbor?
+Had he a double life as well as a double nature? Or had there been some
+unaccountable personation? The latter, of course, and from causes and under
+circumstances not one whit surprising when the key is once supplied.
+
+It will be remembered that Carlton Brand, very soon after his purchase of a
+ticket for Liverpool by the Cunard steamer and his indulging that
+nervousness which he believed to be cowardice with a little shuddering
+horror at the mass of coal roaring and blazing in the furnaces of the
+government transport, early in July,--had a visiter at his rooms at the
+Fifth Avenue Hotel--Henry Thornton, of Philadelphia, a brother lawyer and
+intimate friend. It will also be remembered that the two held a long and
+confidential conversation, very little of the purport of which was then
+given. The facts, a part of them thus far concealed, were that Carlton
+Brand, flying from his disgrace, really intended to go to Europe as he had
+informed Elsie; that he made no secret of that disgrace, to Thornton; that
+the latter informed him, incidentally, of what he had heard of the summer
+plans of Margaret Hayley and her mother, whom he knew through his family;
+that the passage-ticket, lying upon the table, came under the notice of
+Thornton, inducing the information that he was also on his way to England,
+in chase of a criminal who had absconded with a large sum of money
+belonging to one of the Philadelphia banks, and whom he had means, if once
+he could overtake him, of forcing to disgorge; that Thornton half-jestingly
+proposed, remembering their partial resemblance, that if his friend had
+grown ashamed of his name, he would take that and the ticket and pursue the
+criminal with less chance of being evaded, his own cognomen being kept in
+the dark; that Brand, suddenly taken with the idea and struck with the
+facility which the use of his name by the other would furnish for creating
+the belief that he had himself gone abroad, and thus concealing his
+identity while remaining at home, adopted the suggestion and supplied his
+friend at once with name and ticket, for his travelling purposes; that it
+was Henry Thornton and not Carlton Brand who ran that mad quest about
+England, a hidden criminal always in view, and frequenting the most
+doubtful places and the most disreputable society to accomplish the object
+of his search; and that it was poor Thornton and not Carlton Brand who
+perished in the Irish Channel and met that lowly grave in the Howth
+church-yard. All this while the real owner of that name, shaving away his
+curling beard, tinging his fair skin with a very easily-obtained chemical
+preparation, dyeing black his hair and moustache and making himself up as
+nearly as possible like Thornton, under the assumed designation of Horace
+Townsend, suggested by the initials of his "double," was carrying out that
+long masquerade which we have been permitted to witness.
+
+The peculiarities which he developed in that masquerade, should by this
+time be reasonably well understood; the motives which kept him near the
+woman who had once loved him but afterwards cast him off forever, may
+easily be guessed by many a man, correspondingly situated, who has thus
+fluttered moth-like around his destroying candle; the half-maddening effect
+produced upon him by the magnificent scenery of the mountains, the displays
+of reckless courage made by Halstead Rowan and the marked admiration of
+Margaret Hayley for those displays, was no matter for surprise when such
+surroundings for such a temperament were considered; the attempt to become
+his own rival and win the woman he so wildly worshipped from himself, was
+not crazier than might have been expected from the man who could have
+exhibited all the preceding anomalies; and after Margaret had declared her
+unalterable love but her invincible determination never to marry the man
+who dared not fight for his native land,--the feeling compounded of hope
+and despair, which sent him down to the Virginia battle-fields, first as a
+mere spectator under the favor of his old friend Pleasanton and then as a
+mad Berserk running a course of warlike fury which made even gray-bearded
+veterans shudder,--this need astonish no one who has seen how human
+character changes and develops its true components in the crucible of love,
+shame and sorrow!
+
+Be sure that Margaret Hayley, too, in that day of the clearing away of
+mists and mysteries, made one explanation--not to the ears of Robert Brand,
+but to those of Carlton alone. An explanation that was really a
+confession, as it told him of the means through which the property held by
+her family (oh, how the magnificent face alternately flushed and paled when
+opening this sore wound of her pride!) had been acquired many years before.
+But be sure that all this was made a recommendation rather than a shame in
+the eyes of Carlton Brand, when he knew that from the day of his own
+dismissal her knowledge of that family stain had been used to keep Mrs.
+Burton Hayley quiet and subservient, to hold Captain Hector Coles at a safe
+distance, and to enforce what she had truly intended if _he_ should never
+honorably beckon her again to his bridal bed--a life of loneliness for his
+sake!
+
+Something that occurred a month later--in October, when nature had put on
+those gorgeous but melancholy robes of gold and purple with which in
+America she wraps herself when Proserpine is going away from Ceres to the
+darkness and desolation of winter.
+
+One day during that month a close carriage drove down the lane leading from
+the Darby road past the house of Dr. Pomeroy. It was drawn by a magnificent
+pair of horses, but they were driven much more slowly than we have once
+seen them pursuing the same course. A single figure was seated in it, with
+face at the window, when it drew up at the doctor's gate; and out of it
+stepped Nathan Bladesden, the Quaker merchant.
+
+The face was calm, as beseemed his sect, but very stern. A little changed,
+perhaps, since the early summer, with a shadow more of white dashed into
+the trim side-whiskers and one or two deeper lines upon the brow and at the
+corners of the mouth. A step, as he said a word to the driver and entered
+the gate, which comported with the stern gravity of the face and the slow
+rate at which he had been driven. Something in the whole appearance
+indicating that he had come upon a painful duty, but one that he would do
+if half the powers of both worlds should combine to prevent him.
+
+He saw no one as he approached the piazza and the closed front door; but as
+he was about to ring, a female servant came out, closed the door again
+behind her and stopped as if surprised at seeing him.
+
+"Is Doctor Philip Pomeroy at home?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," was the answer, after one instant of hesitation,--"yes, but--"
+
+"That was all I asked thee, woman!" answered the Quaker, sternly. "I came
+to see him and I must do so. Show me to him at once."
+
+The girl hesitated again, looked twice at him and once at the one open
+window of the parlor, then obeyed the behest, opened the front door,
+pointed to that leading into the parlor from the hall, and said:
+
+"He is there, Mr. Bladesden. If you _must_ see him, you had better knock,
+for he may not like to be disturbed."
+
+She went out at once, leaving the front door half open, and glancing back,
+as she passed it, at the tall, powerful man with the gray hair and
+side-whiskers, just applying his knuckles to the panel. There was something
+strange and even startled in her look, but she said no more, left him so
+and went on upon her errand.
+
+The Quaker knocked twice or three times before there was any answer from
+within. Nor was the door opened even then, but the voice of the doctor
+said: "Come in!" and he entered. Doctor Philip Pomeroy sat alone in the
+room, in a large chair, leaning far back, his arms folded tightly on his
+breast and his head so thrown forward that he looked up from beneath bent
+brows. He evidently saw his visitor and recognized him, and yet he did not
+rise or change his position. And quite a moment elapsed before he said, in
+a voice frightfully hoarse:
+
+"What do you want here, Nathan Bladesden?"
+
+"I have business with thee, Doctor Philip," was the reply.
+
+"And I do not choose to do business to-day, with any one, nor with _you_ as
+long as I live!" said the same hoarse voice.
+
+"And I choose that thee _shall_ do business to-day and with _me_!" was the
+second reply, still equable in tone but still terribly earnest.
+
+Doctor Philip Pomeroy unfolded his arms and rose slowly from his chair. The
+Quaker, as he did so and was thus thrown into a better light, saw that his
+face was haggard, that his sharp, scintillant eyes were wild, and that he
+looked years older than when he had beheld him last, four months before.
+Standing, and with one hand on the chair as if he needed support, he said:
+
+"Nathan Bladesden, I told you, the last time that you visited this house,
+never to come near it again, and I thought that you knew me too well to
+intrude again uninvited."
+
+"It is because I know thee very well indeed, that I _have_ intruded, as
+thee calls it!" answered the Quaker, with what would have been a sneer on
+another face and from other lips. "I remember the last time I came here,
+Doctor Philip, quite as well as thee does, and I promised thee some things
+then that I am quite as likely to fulfil as thee is to carry out any of thy
+threats. Besides, thee may be sure that I have business, or I should not
+have come, for thy company is not so attractive as that men of good
+character seek it of their own will!"
+
+The Quaker had no doubt expected that by that time he would break out into
+rough violence, as before; but he had misjudged. From some cause unknown he
+did not, though the wild eyes grew more than scintillant--they glared like
+those of a wild beast at once in pain and at bay. And he made no answer
+except a "Humph!" that seemed to be uttered between closed lips--half an
+expression of contempt and half a groan.
+
+Nathan Bladesden, intent upon his "business," went on.
+
+"I will not trouble thee long, Dr. Philip, but thee had better pay
+attention to what I say, for I am very much in earnest and not to be
+trifled with, to-day, as thee will discover. If thee remembers, I came here
+the last time to rescue Eleanor Hill from thy villainous hands--"
+
+"Eleanor Hill!" This was not an exclamation of surprise, but a veritable
+groaning-out of the name.
+
+"Yes, Eleanor Hill," pursued Bladesden,--"after thee had broken off my
+marriage with her by poisoning my mind against the poor girl thee had
+ruined in body and soul and I believe robbed in fortune. The morning of
+that day I had been weak, and driven away by thee: that afternoon I had
+been moved to do my duty and to take her away from the hands of a seducer
+and a scoundrel--to shelter the lamb from the wolf, though it was torn and
+bleeding--to make her my sister if I could not make her my wife."
+
+"Is that all--all? If not, go on!" groaned out the hoarse voice through the
+set teeth.
+
+"No, there is somewhat more, Dr. Philip--and that of the most consequence,"
+the Quaker continued. "When I came, the poor girl was gone--gone from thee
+as well as from me. Then I heard that she had gone among the soldiers of
+the army, doing the work of the Master and healing the sick. She was away
+from _thee_ and doing the duty of merciful woman, and I was content to wait
+until she had finished. But to-day I learned that yesterday she came back
+again."
+
+"Oh, my God!--he will kill me!" groaned the answering voice, deeper and
+more hoarse than ever. But the Quaker went mercilessly on.
+
+"No, I think that I shall not have need!" he said. "Thee is cowardly as
+well as base, and thee will obey and save thy life. I heard, I say, that
+she had come back to this house of pollution, and I have come to take her
+away. Give her up to me, at once, that I may place her where thee can never
+harm her and never even see her more, and that is all I ask of thee: refuse
+me or try to prevent my removing her, and I will take thee by the throat,
+here, now, with these hands that thee sees are strong enough to do the duty
+of the hangman--and strangle thee to death!"
+
+There was fearful intensity, very near approaching momentary madness, in
+the voice and whole manner of Nathan Bladesden, before he had concluded
+that startling speech; but if he could have looked keenly enough he might
+have seen on the face of the doctor something more terrible than any word
+he had uttered or any gesture he could make. His eyes rolled wildly with a
+glare that was only one remove from maniacy; his whole countenance was so
+fearfully contorted that he might have seemed in the last agony; and his
+frame shook to such a degree that the very chair he held jarred and
+shivered on the floor with the muscular action.
+
+"God of heaven, Nathan Bladesden!" he said, the hoarseness of his voice
+changed into a wild cry. "Are you mad, or am _I_? You know that Eleanor
+Hill came back here yesterday, and you have come to take her away from me
+to-day?"
+
+"I have come for that purpose, and I will do it, Doctor Philip," replied
+the Quaker. "Thee has my warning, and thee had better heed it. Let me see
+her at once, and then if she does not herself ask to be left with thee and
+the disgrace of thy house, thee shall see her no more, if I can prevent it,
+until the judgment!"
+
+For one moment, then, without another word, Dr. Philip Pomeroy looked at
+the speaker steadily as his own terrible situation would permit. Then he
+seemed to have arrived at some solution of a great mystery, or to have
+sprung to a desperate resolution, for he sprang forward, grasped the Quaker
+so suddenly that the latter for the moment started in the expectation of
+personal violence, dragged him to the door separating the parlor from a
+smaller one at the rear, and dashed it open, with the words:
+
+"There is Eleanor Hill! Ask her if she will go with you or remain with
+_me_!"
+
+The room was partially shaded by heavy curtains; and Nathan Bladesden,
+stepping hastily therein, did not at first see what it contained. But when
+he did so, as he did the instant after, no wonder that even his stern,
+strong nature was not quite proof against the shock, and that he recoiled
+and uttered an exclamation of affright. For Eleanor Hill was there indeed,
+but scarcely within the reach of human wish or question--coffined for the
+grave, the glossy brown hair smoothed away from a forehead on which rested
+neither the furrow of pain nor the mark of shame, the sad eyes closed in
+that long peaceful night which knows no waking from sleep until the
+resurrection morning, the thin hands folded Madonna-like upon the breast,
+and one lingering flush of the hectic rose of consumption in the centre of
+either pale cheek, to restore all her childish beauty and carry the
+flower-symbol of human love into the very domain of death.
+
+"That is Eleanor Hill--why do you not ask her the question?" Oh, what agony
+there was in that poor attempt at a taunt!
+
+"No, thee has made her what she is--thee may keep her, now!"
+
+The Quaker's words were a far bitterer taunt than that which had fallen
+from the lips of the doctor. Then he seemed to soften, went up to the
+coffin, looked steadily on the dead face for a moment, stooped and pressed
+his lips on the cold, calm brow, and said, with a strange echo of what
+Carlton Brand had uttered in the hospital but a few weeks before:
+
+"They have such people as thee in heaven, Eleanor! Farewell!"
+
+He turned away and seemed about to leave the room and the house, but the
+hand of Dr. Philip Pomeroy was again upon his arm, grasping it and holding
+him while the frame shivered with uncontrollable emotion and the broken
+voice groaned out:
+
+"Nathan Bladesden, you hate me, and perhaps you have cause. You are a cold,
+stern man, with no mercy, and my tortures must be pleasure to you. Enjoy
+them all! And if any man ever doubts the existence of hell in your
+presence, tell him that you have seen it with your own eyes in the house of
+Philip Pomeroy, when the only woman he ever loved in the world lay dead
+before him, murdered by his own hand, and a devil stood by, taunting him
+with his guilt!"
+
+"I will taunt thee no more, Doctor Philip!" fell slowly from the Quaker's
+lips. "I hate thee no longer. I pity thee. Thy Maker is dealing with thee
+now, and thy punishment is enough!"
+
+He turned away, then, and left the suffering man still within the room
+beside the dead. Once as he passed into the hall he looked back and saw
+through the still open door a dark form fall forward with a groan, the head
+against the coffin and the arms clasping it as if it had been a living
+thing.
+
+There are two endings to the story of "Faust"--that marvellous wierd
+history of human love and demoniac temptation which alike in drama and
+opera enraptures the world, and once before alluded to in this narration.
+In the older and coarser version, when the ruin is full accomplished and
+the hour of penalty full ripe, Marguerite is seen ascending heavenward,
+while Mephistopheles laughs hoarsely and points downward to the lower pit,
+whence arise blue flames and horrible discords, and into which the doomed
+Faust is seen to be dragged at the last moment by the hands of the swarming
+and gibbering monsters. In the other and yet more terrible version,
+Maguerite is seen ascending, and the laugh of the demon is heard, but it is
+only a faint, fading, mocking laugh, as even _he_ flies away and leaves the
+man accursed kneeling in hopeless agony over the dead form from which the
+pure spirit has just gone upward--condemned, not to the pit and the flame,
+but to that worse hell of living alone and without hope, racked by love
+that has come in its full force when too late, and by a remorse that will
+worse clutch at his heart-strings than all the fiends of perdition could do
+at the poor body which coffers his soul of torment. Who does not know how
+much the more dreadful is that second doom? Who does not--let him never
+tempt God and fate by making the rash experiment!
+
+Nathan Bladesden was right--even for such sins as those Doctor Philip
+Pomeroy had committed, the reckoning was fearful!
+
+Poor Eleanor Hill had been right, too, when she said: "Leave him to me! * *
+* I will so punish him as no man was ever punished!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Shall there not be one glimmer more of sunshine after the dark night and
+the storm? Thank heaven, yes!--in a far-off glance at fortunes left long in
+abeyance but not forgotten.
+
+Lying on the sofa at Mrs. Burton Hayley's, one evening when the first fires
+of winter had not long been lighted,--still taking the privilege of the
+invalid though no longer one, and making a pillow of the lap of Margaret
+Hayley, her dainty white fingers playing with his clustering golden blonde
+hair as they had erewhile done among the summer rose-leaves,--a quick,
+warm, happy kiss stolen now and again when the dignified lady, of the
+mansion was too busy with the devoutly-religious work that she was reading,
+to be horrified by such immoral practices,--lying thus, and the two talking
+of dear little Elsie's coming happiness and their own which was not to be
+much longer deferred; of the restored pride and renovated health of Robert
+Brand--quite as dear to Margaret, since that day in the garden, as to the
+son and daughter of his own blood; of the delirious joy and dreadfully
+broad Scotch of old Elspeth Graeme since the return of her "bonny bairn;"
+of poor Eleanor Hill and Captain Hector Coles, dead so differently on the
+fatal Virginian soil; of these and others, and of all the events which had
+been so strangely crowded within the compass of little more than half a
+year,--lying thus and talking thus, we say, Carlton Brand drew from his
+pocket a little fragment clipped from a newspaper, and said:
+
+"By the way, Margaret, here is something that I found in one of the
+Baltimore papers yesterday. It concerns some friends of ours, whom we may
+never meet again, but whom neither of us, I think, will ever quite forget.
+Read it."
+
+Margaret Hayley took the slip and read, what writer and reader may be
+pardoned for looking over her fair rounded shoulder and perusing at the
+same moment--this satisfactory and significant item:
+
+     MARRIED. ROWAN--VANDERLYN.--On Wednesday the 9th inst., by
+     Rev. Dr. Rushmore, Major Halstead Rowan, of the Sixth
+     Illinois cavalry, to Clara, daughter of the late Clayton
+     Vanderlyn, Esq., and Mrs. Isabella Vanderlyn, of Calvert St.
+
+"She was a sweet girl, and he was one of nature's gentlemen," said
+Margaret. "I saw enough to know how dearly they were in love with each
+other before they left the mountains; and I am glad to know that they have
+had their will, in spite of"--and here she lowered her voice, so that Mrs.
+Burton Hayley could not possibly hear her--"a proud, meddling mother and a
+brother who should have been sent back to school until he learned manners!"
+
+"Oh, Rowan told me that he was going into the army, before he left the
+Crawford," answered the happy lounger. "You see he has done so and become a
+Major, and that makes him gentleman enough even for the Vanderlyns.
+George!--what a dashing officer he must make! Some day, when I go back to
+the army--"
+
+"When _I let you_ go back, mad fellow!"
+
+"Some day I want to ride a charge with him, side by side. He was the
+boldest rider and the most daring man I ever knew."
+
+"The bravest that _I_ ever knew, except _one_!" said Margaret Hayley,
+stooping down her proud neck and for some unexplainable reason stopping for
+an instant in the middle of her speech. "And he had even the advantage of
+that _one_ in a very important respect."
+
+"And what was that, I should like to be informed, my Empress!"
+
+"He _knew it_!"
+
+
+THE END.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS.
+
+THIS CATALOGUE CONTAINS AND
+Describes the Most Popular and Best Selling Books in the World.
+
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+
+Suitable for the Parlor, Library, Sitting-Room, Railroad, Camp, Steamboat,
+Army, or Soldiers' Reading.
+
+PUBLISHED AND FOR SALE BY
+T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,
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+
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+
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+
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+
+
+MRS. EMMA D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH'S WORKS.
+
+     The Bridal Eve. Complete in one volume, paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Fatal Marriage. Complete in one volume, paper cover.
+     Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Love's Labor Won. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Gipsy's Prophecy. Complete in one vol., paper cover.
+     Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Vivia. The Secret of Power. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     India. The Pearl of Pearl River. Price $1.25; or cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     Mother-in-Law. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Two Sisters. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Three Beauties. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Wife's Victory. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Lost Heiress. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Deserted Wife. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for
+     $1.50.
+
+     Hickory Hall. By Mrs. Southworth. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Lady of the Isle. Complete in one vol., paper cover.
+     Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Missing Bride. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Retribution: A Tale of Passion. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Haunted Homestead. Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     The Curse of Clifton. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for
+     $1.50.
+
+     The Discarded Daughter. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     The Jealous Husband. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Belle of Washington. One vol., paper. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Initials. A Love Story. One vol. Price $1.25; or cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     Kate Aylesford. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Dead Secret. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Woman in Black. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     Family Pride. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Broken Engagement. By Mrs. Southworth. Price 25 cents.
+
+
+MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS' NEW WORKS.
+
+     The Wife's Secret. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Rejected Wife. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Fashion and Famine. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Heiress. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in one
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+
+     The Old Homestead. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Mary Derwent. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+
+CAROLINE LEE HENTZ'S WORKS.
+
+     Planter's Northern Bride. One volume, paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Linda. The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole. Price $1.25 in
+     paper; or $1.50 in cloth.
+
+     Robert Graham. The Sequel to, and Continuation of Linda.
+     Price $1.25 in paper; or $1.50 in cloth.
+
+     The Lost Daughter. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     bound in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Courtship and Marriage. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+     or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Rena; or, The Snow Bird. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+     or one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Marcus Warland. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     bound in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Love after Marriage. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Planter's Daughter. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+     or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Banished Son. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Helen and Arthur. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Ernest Linwood. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Courtship and Matrimony. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+     or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+
+MRS. HENRY WOOD'S BOOKS.
+
+     The Shadow of Ashlydyat. One vol., paper cover. Price One
+     Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Squire Trevlyn's Heir. One vol., paper cover. Price One
+     Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Castle's Heir. One volume, octavo, paper cover. Price
+     One Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Verner's Pride. One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price $1.00;
+     or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     A Life's Secret. Price Fifty cents; or in one vol., cloth,
+     $1.00.
+
+     The Lost Bank Note. 50 cents.
+
+     The Channings. Price 75 cents; or in one vol., cloth, $1.25.
+
+     The Mystery. Price Fifty cents; or bound in one vol., cloth,
+     $1.00.
+
+     The Runaway Match. One vol., paper cover. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Earl's Heirs. Price Fifty cents; or one vol., cloth,
+     $1.00.
+
+     Aurora Floyd. Price 50 cents; or a finer edition, in cloth,
+     for $1.25.
+
+     Better For Worse. One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price 50
+     cents.
+
+     Foggy Night at Offord. 25 cts.
+
+     William Allair. Price 25 cents.
+
+     Lawyer's Secret. Price 25 cents.
+
+
+THE GREAT NOVELS OF THE WAR.
+
+     Shoulder Straps. A novel of New York and the Army in 1862.
+     By Henry Morford, editor of the "New York Atlas." It is the
+     book for Ladies, Gentlemen, and Soldiers! Wives and Widows,
+     Fast Young Ladies, Slow Young Ladies, Married Men and
+     Bachelors, Young Ladies about to be Married, and those who
+     have no Matrimonial Prospects whatever! Stay-at-home Guards,
+     Government Officials, Army Contractors, Aldermen, Doctors,
+     Judges, Lawyers, etc. Price $1.25 in paper; or bound in one
+     volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Days of Shoddy. A Novel of the Great Rebellion of 1861.
+     By Henry Morford author of "Shoulder Straps" price $1.25 in
+     paper, or $1.50 in cloth.
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS.
+
+ILLUSTRATED OCTAVO EDITION.
+
+Pickwick Papers,                               Cloth,$2.00
+Nicholas Nickleby,                             Cloth, 2.00
+Great Expectations,                            Cloth, 2.00
+Lamplighter's Story,                           Cloth, 2.00
+Oliver Twist,                                  Cloth, 2.00
+Bleak House,                                   Cloth, 2.00
+Little Dorrit,                                 Cloth, 2.00
+Dombey and Son,                                Cloth, 2.00
+Sketches by "Boz,"                             Cloth, 2.00
+David Copperfield,                             Cloth, 2.00
+Barnaby Rudge,                                 Cloth, 2.00
+Martin Chuzzlewit,                             Cloth, 2.00
+Old Curiosity Shop,                            Cloth, 2.00
+Christmas Stories,                             Cloth, 2.00
+Dickens' New Stories,                                 2.00
+A Tale of Two Cities,                                 2.00
+American Notes and Pic-Nic Papers,             Cloth, 2.00
+
+Price of a set, in Black cloth, in 17 volumes       $32.00
+     "      "   Full Law Library style               42.00
+     "      "   Half calf, sprinkled edges           48.00
+     "      "   Half calf, marbled edges.            50.00
+     "      "   Half calf, antique                   60.00
+     "      "   Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.     60.00
+
+PEOPLE'S DUODECIMO EDITION.
+
+Pickwick Papers,                              Cloth, $1.75
+Nicholas Nickleby,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Great Expectations,                            Cloth, 1.75
+Lamplighter's Story,                           Cloth, 1.75
+David Copperfield,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Oliver Twist,                                  Cloth, 1.75
+Bleak House,                                   Cloth, 1.75
+A Tale of Two Cities,                                 1.75
+Dickens' New Stories,                                 1.75
+Little Dorrit,                                 Cloth, 1.75
+Dombey and Son,                                Cloth, 1.75
+Christmas Stories,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Sketches by "Boz,"                             Cloth, 1.75
+Barnaby Rudge,                                 Cloth, 1.75
+Martin Chuzzlewit,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Old Curiosity Shop,                            Cloth, 1.75
+Dickens' Short Stories,                               1.50
+Message from the Sea,                                 1.50
+
+Price of a set, in Black cloth, in 17 volumes       $29.00
+     "      "   Full Law Library style               35.00
+     "      "   Half calf, sprinkled edges           42.00
+     "      "   Half calf, marbled edges             44.00
+     "      "   Half calf, antique                   50.00
+     "      "   Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.     50.00
+     "      "   Full calf, antique                   60.00
+     "      "   Full calf gilt edges, backs, etc.    60.00
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED DUODECIMO EDITION.
+
+Pickwick Papers,                              Cloth, $3.00
+Tale of Two Cities,                            Cloth, 3.00
+Nicholas Nickleby,                             Cloth, 3.00
+David Copperfield,                             Cloth, 3.00
+Oliver Twist,                                  Cloth, 3.00
+Christmas Stories,                             Cloth, 3.00
+Bleak House,                                   Cloth, 3.00
+Sketches by "Boz,"                             Cloth, 3.00
+Barnaby Rudge,                                 Cloth, 3.00
+Martin Chuzzlewit,                             Cloth, 3.00
+Old Curiosity Shop,                            Cloth, 3.00
+Little Dorrit,                                 Cloth, 3.00
+Dombey and Son,                                Cloth, 3.00
+
+_Each of the above are complete in two volumes, illustrated._
+
+Great Expectations,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Lamplighter's Story,                                   1.75
+Dickens' New Stories,                                  1.50
+Message from the Sea,                                  1.50
+
+Price of a set, in Thirty volumes, bound in Black cloth, gilt backs  $45.00
+     "      "   Full Law Library style                                55.00
+     "      "   Half calf, antique                                    90.00
+     "      "   Half calf, full gilt back                             90.00
+     "      "   Full calf, antique                                   100.00
+     "      "   Full calf, gilt edges, backs etc                     100.00
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS.
+
+CHEAP EDITION, PAPER COVER.
+
+This edition is published complete in Twenty-two large octavo volumes, in
+paper cover, as follows. Price Seventy-five cents a volume.
+
+Pickwick Papers.
+Great Expectations.
+A Tale of Two Cities.
+New Years' Stories.
+Barnaby Rudge.
+Old Curiosity Shop.
+Little Dorrit.
+David Copperfield.
+Sketches by "Boz."
+Dickens' New Stories.
+American Notes.
+Somebody's Luggage.  25 cts.
+Oliver Twist.
+Lamplighter's Story.
+Dombey and Son.
+Nicholas Nickleby.
+Holiday Stories.
+Martin Chuzzlewit.
+Bleak House.
+Dickens' Short Stories.
+Message from the Sea.
+Christmas Stories.
+Pic-Nic Papers.
+Christmas Carols. 25 cents.
+
+LIBRARY OCTAVO EDITION. IN SEVEN VOLUMES.
+
+This edition is in SEVEN large octavo volumes, with a portrait on steel of
+Charles Dickens, and bound in the following various styles.
+
+Price of a set, in Black cloth, in seven volumes,      $14.00
+  "         "      Scarlet cloth, extra,                15.00
+  "         "      Law Library style,                   17.50
+  "         "      Half calf, sprinkled edges,          20.00
+  "         "      Half calf, marbled edges,            21.00
+  "         "      Half calf, antique,                  25.00
+  "         "      Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.,    25.00
+
+
+CHARLES LEVER'S WORKS.
+
+_Fine Edition, bound separately._
+
+Charles O'Malley, cloth,                         $2.00
+Harry Lorrequer, cloth,                           2.00
+Jack Hinton, cloth,                               2.00
+Davenport Dunn, cloth,                            2.00
+Tom Burke of Ours, cloth,                         2.00
+Arthur O'Leary, cloth,                            2.00
+Con Cregan, cloth,                                2.00
+Knight of Gwynne, cloth,                          2.00
+Valentine Vox, cloth,                             2.00
+Ten Thousand a Year,                              2.00
+
+
+CHARLES LEVER'S NOVELS.
+
+_All neatly done up in paper covers._
+
+Charles O'Malley,                        _Price_ 75 cts.
+Harry Lorrequer,                               75  "
+Horace Templeton,                              75  "
+Tom Burke of Ours,                             75  "
+Jack Hinton, the
+ Guardsman,                                       75  "
+Arthur O'Leary,                                75 cts.
+The Knight of Gwynne,                          75  "
+Kate O'Donoghue,                               75  "
+Con Cregan, the Irish
+ Gil Blas,                                        75  "
+Davenport Dunn,                                75  "
+
+LIBRARY EDITION.
+
+THIS EDITION is complete in FIVE large octavo volumes, containing Charles
+O'Malley, Harry Lorrequer, Horace Templeton, Tom Burke of Ours, Arthur
+O'Leary, Jack Hinton the Guardsman, The Knight of Gwynne, Kate O'Donoghue,
+etc., handsomely printed, and bound in various styles, as follows:
+
+Price of a set in Black cloth,                        $10.00
+  "         "     Scarlet cloth,                       11.00
+  "         "     Law Library sheep,                   12.50
+  "         "     Half calf, sprinkled edges,          14.00
+  "         "     Half calf, marbled edges,            15.00
+  "         "     Half calf, antique,                  20.00
+
+
+WILKIE COLLINS' GREAT WORKS.
+
+     The Dead Secret. One volume, octavo, paper cover. Price
+     fifty cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00; or a
+     fine 12mo. edition, in one vol., paper cover, in large type,
+     for $1.25, or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Crossed Path; or, Basil. Complete in one volume, paper
+     cover. Price $1.25, or bound in one volume, cloth, for
+     $1.50.
+
+     The Stolen Mask. Price 25 cents.
+
+     Hide and Seek. One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price fifty
+     cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00.
+
+     After Dark. One vol., octavo, paper, cover. Price fifty
+     cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00.
+
+     Sights a-foot; or Travels Beyond Railways. One volume,
+     octavo, paper cover. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Yellow Mask. Price 25 cts.
+
+     Sister Rose. Price 25 cents.
+
+
+COOK BOOKS
+
+     Petersons' New Cook Book; or Useful Receipts for the
+     Housewife and the uninitiated. Full of valuable receipts,
+     all original and never before published, all of which will
+     be found to be very valuable and of daily use. One vol.,
+     bound. Price $1.50.
+
+     Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book; Being her last new book. One
+     volume, bound. Price $1.50.
+
+     Widdifield's New Cook Book; or, Practical Receipts for the
+     Housewife. Cloth. Price $1.50.
+
+     Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book. By Mrs. Sarah J. Hale. One
+     volume, bound. Price $1.50.
+
+     Miss Leslie's New Receipts for Cooking. Complete in one
+     volume, bound. Price $1.50.
+
+
+MRS. HALE'S RECEIPTS.
+
+     Mrs. Hale's Receipts for the Million. Containing 4545
+     Receipts. By Mrs. Sarah J. Hale. One vol., 800 pages,
+     strongly bound. Price $1.50.
+
+
+LADIES GUIDE TO TRUE POLITENESS, etc.
+
+The Ladies Guide to True Politeness and Perfect Manners. By Miss Leslie.
+Cloth, full gilt back. Price $1.50.
+
+     The Ladies Complete Guide to Needlework and Embroidery. 113
+     Illustrations. Cloth, gilt back. Price $1.50.
+
+     Ladies Work Table Book. Plates, cloth, crimson gilt. Price
+     $1.25.
+
+
+FRANCATELLI'S FRENCH COOK.
+
+     Francatelli's Celebrated French Cook Book. The Modern Cook.
+     A Practical Guide to the Culinary Art, in all its branches;
+     comprising, in addition to English Cookery, the most
+     approved and recherché systems of French, Italian, and
+     German Cookery; adapted as well for the largest
+     establishments, as for the use of private families. By
+     CHARLES ELME FRANCATELLI, pupil to the celebrated CAREME,
+     and late Maitre-d'Hôtel and Chief Cook to her Majesty, the
+     Queen of England. With Sixty-Two Illustrations of various
+     dishes. Reprinted from the last London Edition, carefully
+     revised and considerably enlarged. Complete in one large
+     octavo volume of Six Hundred pages, strongly bound, and
+     printed on the finest paper. Price Five Dollars.
+
+
+J. A. MAITLAND'S GREAT WORKS.
+
+     The Three Cousins. By J. A. Maitland. One vol., paper. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Watchman. Complete in one large vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Wanderer. Complete in one volume, paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Diary of an Old Doctor. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25, or bound in cloth for $1.50.
+
+     The Lawyer's Story. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     bound in cloth for $1.50.
+
+     Sartaroe. A Tale of Norway. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25 or in cloth for $1.50.
+
+
+MRS. DANIELS' GREAT WORKS.
+
+     Marrying for Money. One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price
+     fifty cents; or one vol., cloth. Price $1.00.
+
+     The Poor Cousin. Price 50 cents.
+
+     Kate Walsingham. Price 50 cents.
+
+
+ALEXANDER DUMAS' WORKS.
+
+     Count of Monte-Cristo. By Alexander Dumas. Beautifully
+     illustrated. One volume, cloth, $1.50; or paper cover, for
+     $1.00.
+
+     The Conscript. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25.; or in
+     one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Camille; or the Fate of a Coquette. Only correct Translation
+     from the Original French. One volume, paper, price $1.25;
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Three Guardsmen. Price 75 cents, in paper cover, or a
+     finer edition in cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Twenty Years After. A Sequel to the "Three Guardsmen." Price
+     75 cents, in paper cover, or a finer edition, in one volume,
+     cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Bragelonne; the Son of Athos: being the continuation of
+     "Twenty Years After." Price 75 cents, in paper, or a finer
+     edition, in cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Iron Mask. Being the continuation of the "Three
+     Guardsmen." Two vols., paper cover. Price One Dollar; or in
+     one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Louise La Valliere, or, The Second Series and end of the
+     "Iron Mask." Two volumes, paper cover. Price $1.00, or in
+     one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Memoirs of a Physician. Beautifully Illustrated. Two
+     vols., paper cover. Price One Dollar; or bound in one
+     volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Queen's Necklace. A Sequel to the "Memoirs of a
+     Physician." Two vols., paper cover. Price $1.00; or in one
+     vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Six Years Later, or, Taking of the Bastile. A Continuation
+     of "The Queen's Necklace." Two vols., paper cover. Price One
+     Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Countess of Charny; or, The Fall of the French Monarchy.
+     Sequel to Six Years Later. Two vols., paper cover. Price One
+     Dollar; or in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Andree de Taverney. A Sequel to and continuation of the
+     Countess of Charny. Two volumes, paper. Price $1.00; or in
+     one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Chevalier. A Sequel to, and final end of "Andree De
+     Taverney." One vol. Price 75 cents.
+
+     The Adventures of a Marquis. Two vols., paper cover. Price
+     1.00; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Forty-Five Guardsmen. Price 75 cents, or a finer edition
+     in one volume, cloth. Price $1.50.
+
+     The Iron Hand. Price 75 cents, in paper cover, or a finer
+     edition in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Diana of Meridor. Two volumes paper cover. Price One Dollar;
+     or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Edmond Dantes. Being a Sequel to Dumas' celebrated novel of
+     the "Count of Monte-Cristo." Price 50 cts.
+
+     Annette; or, The Lady of the Pearls. A Companion to
+     "Camille." Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Fallen Angel. A Story of Love and Life in Paris. One
+     volume. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Man with Five Wives. Complete in one volume. Price 50
+     cts.
+
+     George; or, The Planter of the Isle of France. One volume.
+     Price Fifty cents.
+
+     Genevieve; or, The Chevalier of Maison Rouge. One volume.
+     Illustrated. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Mohicans of Paris. 50 cts.
+
+     Sketches in France. 50 cents.
+
+     Isabel of Bavaria. Price 50 cts.
+
+     Felina de Chambure; or, The Female Fiend. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Horrors of Paris. 50 cents.
+
+     The Twin Lieutenants. One vol. Price 75 cts.
+
+     The Corsican Brothers. 25 cts.
+
+
+FRANK E. SMEDLEY'S WORKS.
+
+     Harry Coverdale's Courtship and Marriage. One vol., paper.
+     Price $1.25; or cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Lorrimer Littlegood. By author of "Frank Fairleigh." One
+     vol., paper. Price $1.25; or cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Frank Fairleigh. One volume, cloth, $1.50; or cheap edition
+     in paper cover, for 75 cents.
+
+     Lewis Arundel. One vol., cloth. Price $1.50; or cheap
+     edition in paper cover, for 75 cents.
+
+     Fortunes and Misfortunes of Harry Racket Scapegrace. Cloth.
+     Price $1.50; or cheap edition in paper cover, for 50 cents.
+
+     Tom Racquet; and His Three Maiden Aunts. Illustrated. 50
+     cents.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+GET UP YOUR CLUBS FOR 1864!
+
+NEW AND SPLENDID PREMIUMS!
+
+PETERSON'S MAGAZINE THE BEST AND CHEAPEST IN THE WORLD!
+
+This popular Monthly contains more for the money than any Magazine in the
+world. In 1864, it will have nearly 1000 pages, 25 to 30 steel plates, 12
+colored patterns, and 900 wood engravings--and all this for only TWO
+DOLLARS A YEAR, or a dollar less than magazines of its class. Every lady
+ought to take "Peterson." In the general advance of prices, it is the ONLY
+MAGAZINE THAT HAS NOT RAISED ITS PRICES, EITHER TO SINGLE SUBSCRIBERS OR TO
+CLUBS; and is, therefore, emphatically,
+
+THE MAGAZINE FOR THE TIMES!
+
+The stories in "Peterson" are conceded to be _the best published anywhere_.
+Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, Ella Rodman, Mrs. Denison, Frank Lee Benedict, the
+author of "Susy L's Diary," T. S. Arthur, E. L. Chandler Moulton, Gabrielle
+Lee, Virginia F. Townsend, Rosalie Grey, Clara Augusta, and the author of
+"The Second Life," besides all the most popular female writers of America
+are regular contributors. In addition to the usual number of shorter
+stories, there will be given in 1864, Four Original Copy-righted Novelets,
+viz:
+
+THE MAID OF HONOR--a Story of Queen Bess,
+By ANN S. STEPHENS.
+
+THE LOST ESTATE--a Story of To-Day,
+By the author of "The Second Life."
+
+MAUD'S SUMMER AT SARATOGA,
+By FRANK LEE BENEDICT.
+
+FANNY'S FLIRTATION,
+By ELLA RODMAN.
+
+In its Illustrations also, "Peterson" is unrivaled. The publisher
+challenges a comparison between its SUPERB MEZZOTINTS AND OTHER STEEL
+ENGRAVINGS and those in other Magazines, and one at least is given in every
+number.
+
+COLORED FASHION PLATES IN ADVANCE,
+
+It is the ONLY MAGAZINE whose Fashion Plates can be relied on.
+
+Each number contains a Fashion Plate, engraved on steel, and colored--from
+Fashions later than any other Magazine gives; also, a dozen or more New
+Styles, engraved on Wood; also, a Pattern, from which a Dress, Mantilla, or
+Child's Costume can be cut, without the aid of a mantua-maker--so that each
+number, in this way, will SAVE A YEAR'S SUBSCRIPTION. The Paris, London,
+Philadelphia and New York Fashions are described, at length, each month.
+Patterns of Caps, Bonnets, Head Dresses, &c., given. Its
+
+COLORED PATTERNS IN EMBROIDERY, CROCHET, &C.
+
+The Work-Table Department of this Magazine IS WHOLLY UNRIVALED. Every
+number contains a dozen or more patterns in every variety of Fancy-work;
+Crochet, Embroidery, Knitting, Bead-work, Shell-work, Hair-work, &c., &c.,
+&c. Every month, a SUPERB COLORED PATTERN FOR SLIPPER, PURSE or CHAIR SEAT,
+&c., is given--each of which, at a retail store, would cost Fifty Cents.
+
+"OUR NEW COOK-BOOK."
+
+The Original Household Receipts of "Peterson" are quite famous. For 1864
+our "COOK-BOOK" will be continued: EVERY ONE OF THESE RECEIPTS HAS BEEN
+TESTED. This alone will be worth the price of "Peterson." Other Receipts
+for the Toilette, Sick-room, &c., &c., will be given.
+
+NEW AND FASHIONABLE MUSIC in every number. Also, Hints on Horticulture,
+Equestrianism, and all matters interesting to Ladies.
+
+TERMS:--ALWAYS IN ADVANCE.
+
+One Copy for One year,       $2.00
+Three Copies for One year,    5.00
+Five Copies for One year,    $7.50
+Eight Copies for One year.   10.00
+
+PREMIUMS FOR GETTING UP CLUBS!--Three, Five, or Eight copies, make a Club.
+To every person getting up a club an extra copy of the Magazine for 1864
+will be given.
+
+_Address, post-paid_, CHARLES J. PETERSON,
+
+No. 306 Chestnut St., Phila.
+
+All Postmasters constituted Agents; but any person may get up a club.
+Specimens sent gratuitously, if written for.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHEAPEST BOOK HOUSE IN THE WORLD.
+
+To Sutlers! Pedlars! Booksellers! News Agents! etc.
+
+T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,
+
+No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,
+
+PUBLISH THE MOST SALEABLE BOOKS IN THE WORLD
+
+AND SUPPLY ALL BOOKS AT VERY LOW RATES.
+
+The cheapest place in the world to buy or send for a stock of all kinds of
+Books, suitable for all persons whatever, for Soldiers, and for the Army,
+and for all other reading, is at the Bookselling and Publishing House of T.
+B. PETERSON & BROTHERS, Philadelphia.
+
+Any person wanting any books at all, in any quantity, from a single book to
+a dozen, a hundred, thousand, ten thousand, or larger quantity of books,
+had better send on their orders at once to the "CHEAPEST BOOKSELLING AND
+PUBLISHING HOUSE IN THE WORLD," which is at T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS, No.
+306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, who have the largest stock in the
+country, and will supply them and sell them cheaper than any other house in
+the world. We publish a large variety of Military Novels, with Illustrated
+Military covers, in colors, besides thousands of others, all of which are
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+
+Enclose one, two, five, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand
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+
+Address all orders for any books you may want at all, no matter by whom
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+Publishing and Bookselling House in the world, which is at_
+
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+
+No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,
+
+And they will be packed and sent to you within an hour after receipt of the
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Coward, by Henry Morford</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
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+</head>
+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Coward, by Henry Morford</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Coward</p>
+<p>       A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863</p>
+<p>Author: Henry Morford</p>
+<p>Release Date: July 6, 2011  [eBook #36644]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWARD***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>E-text prepared by David Edwards, Josephine Paolucci,<br />
+    and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (<a href="http://www.pgdp.net">http://www.pgdp.net</a>)<br />
+    from page images generously made available by<br />
+    Internet Archive/American Libraries<br />
+    (<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/americana">http://www.archive.org/details/americana</a>)</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" style="background-color: #ccccff;margin: 0 auto;" cellpadding="10">
+  <tr>
+    <td valign="top">
+      Note:
+    </td>
+    <td>
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
+      <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022429835">
+      http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022429835</a>
+	</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h1>THE COWARD.</h1>
+
+<h4>A NOVEL OF</h4>
+
+<h2>SOCIETY AND THE FIELD</h2>
+
+<h4>IN</h4>
+
+<h3>1863.</h3>
+
+<h2>BY HENRY MORFORD.</h2>
+
+<h4>AUTHOR OF "SHOULDER-STRAPS," "THE DAYS OF SHODDY," ETC.</h4>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+PHILADELPHIA:<br />
+T. B. PETERSON &amp; BROTHERS,<br />
+306 CHESTNUT STREET.<br />
+<br />
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by<br />
+<br />
+T. B. PETERSON &amp; BROTHERS,<br />
+<br />
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for<br />
+the Eastern<br />
+District of Pennsylvania.<br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p class="center">
+TO<br />
+THE PATRIOT PRINTERS OF AMERICA&mdash;<br />
+THE MEN WHO<br />
+HAVE FURNISHED MORE SOLDIERS<br />
+THAN ANY OTHER CLASS<br />
+IN COMPARISON WITH THE WHOLE NUMBER OF THEIR CRAFT,<br />
+TO<br />
+THE DEAD HEROES OF THE WAR FOR THE UNION<br />
+AND<br />
+THE LIVING ARMIES THAT YET BULWARK ITS HOPE,&mdash;<br />
+THIS<br />
+BLENDING OF THE FACTS AND FANCIES<br />
+OF<br />
+WAR-TIME,<br />
+IS<br />
+DEDICATED BY THEIR BROTHER-CRAFTSMAN,<br />
+<br />
+THE AUTHOR.<br />
+<br />
+<i>New York City, July, 1864.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFACE.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Some persons, taking up this work with expectations more or less elevated,
+may possibly lay it down with disappointment after perusal, because it does
+not discuss with sharp personalities, as the title may have led them to
+suppose, the conduct of some of those well-known men connected with the
+Union Army, who have disgracefully faltered on the field. But the truth is
+that the Union Army has mustered very few cowards&mdash;so few, that a
+distinguished artist, not long ago called on to draw an ideal head of one
+of that class, said: "Really it is so long since I have seen a coward, that
+I scarcely know how to go about it!" The aim of the writer, eschewing all
+such tempting personalities, and quite as carefully avoiding all dry
+didactic discussion of the theme of courage and its opposite,&mdash;has
+principally been to illustrate the tendency of many men to misunderstand
+their own characters in certain particulars, and the inevitable consequence
+of their being misunderstood by the world, in one direction or the other.
+No apology is felt to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> necessary for the length at which the scenery of
+the White Mountains, their actualities of interest and possibilities of
+danger, have been introduced into the narration; nor is it believed that
+the chain of connection with the great contest will be found the weaker
+because the glimpses given of it are somewhat more brief than in preceding
+publications of the same series. In those portions the writer has again
+occasion to acknowledge the assistance of the same capable hand which
+supplied much of the war data for both of his previous volumes.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">New York City</span>, <i>July 1st, 1864.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<h4>CHAPTER I.</h4>
+
+<p>    A June Morning of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three&mdash;Glimpses
+    of West Philadelphia&mdash;The Days before<br /> Gettysburgh&mdash;The Two on
+    the Piazza&mdash;Margaret Hayley and Elsie Brand&mdash;An Embrace and a<br />
+    Difference&mdash;Foreshadowings of Carlton Brand, Brother and
+    Lover <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_29'>29</a></span></p>
+
+<h4>CHAPTER II.</h4>
+
+    <p>The Coming of Carlton Brand&mdash;Almost a Paladin of
+    Balaclava&mdash;Brother and Sister&mdash;A Spasm of Shame&mdash;The<br />
+    Confession&mdash;The Coward&mdash;How Margaret Hayley heard Many Words
+    not intended for her&mdash;The<br /> Rupture and the Separation     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_45'>45</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER III.</h4>
+
+    <p>Kitty Hood and her School-house&mdash;Dick Compton going
+    Soldiering&mdash;A Lover's Quarrel, a bit of Jealousy, and a<br />
+    Threat&mdash;How Dick Compton met his supposed Rival&mdash;An
+    Encounter, Sudden Death, and Kitty Hood's<br /> terrible Discovery      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_61'>61</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER IV.</h4>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+    <p>The Residence of the Brands&mdash;Robert Brand and Dr.
+    Pomeroy&mdash;Radical and Copperhead&mdash;A passage-at-arms that ended<br />
+    in a Quarrel&mdash;Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper&mdash;The Shadow of
+    Shame&mdash;Father and Daughter&mdash;The<br /> falling of a parent's Curse     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_81'>81</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER V.</h4>
+
+    <p>The Birth and Blood of the Brands&mdash;Pride that came down from
+    the Crusades&mdash;Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent&mdash;How<br />
+    Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed to be
+    answered&mdash;Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a<br /> Corpus Delicti
+<span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_99'>99</a></span><br /></p>
+
+<h4>CHAPTER VI.</h4>
+
+    <p>The Residence of Dr. Pomeroy&mdash;Nathan Bladesden and Eleanor
+    Hill&mdash;A kneeling Woman and a rigid Quaker&mdash;The ruin that a<br />
+    Letter had wrought&mdash;A Parting that seemed eternal&mdash;Carlton
+    Brand alive once more, and a Glance at the <br />fatal Letter         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_120'>120</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER VII.</h4>
+
+    <p>A return to 1856&mdash;Nicholas Hill, Iron-merchant&mdash;His Death,
+    his Daughter, and his Friend&mdash;How Dr. Pomeroy became a<br />
+    Guardian and how he Discharged that duty&mdash;A ruin and an
+    awakening&mdash;The market value of Dunderhaven<br /> Stock in 1858      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_137'>137</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER VIII.</h4>
+
+    <p>What followed the revelation of Betrayal&mdash;A gleam of Hope for
+    Eleanor Hill&mdash;A relative from California, a projected Voyage<br />,
+    and a Disappointment&mdash;One more Letter&mdash;The broken thread
+    resumed&mdash;Carlton Brand's farewell,<br /> and an Elopement     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_164'>164</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER IX.</h4>
+
+   <p> Dr. Pomeroy's purposed Pursuit&mdash;A plain Quaker who used very
+    plain Language&mdash;Almost a Fight&mdash;How Mrs. Burton Hayley<br />
+    consoled her Daughter, and how Margaret revealed the Past&mdash;A
+    Compact&mdash;Dr. Pomeroy's Canine Adventure&mdash;Old<br /> Elspeth once
+    more&mdash;A Search that found Nothing.  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_174'>174</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER X.</h4>
+
+    <p>Before and after Gettysburgh&mdash;The Apathy and Despair which
+    preceded, and the Jubilation which followed&mdash;What Kitty Hood<br />
+    said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand&mdash;Brother and
+    Sister&mdash;A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel&mdash;A<br /> fire-room Visit,
+    an Interview, and a Departure for Europe  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_200'>200</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XI.</h4>
+
+   <p> Anomalies of the War for the Union&mdash;The Watering-place rush
+    of 1863&mdash;A White Mountain party disembarking at<br />
+    Littleton&mdash;Who filled the Concord coach&mdash;The
+    Vanderlyns&mdash;Shoddy on its travels&mdash;Mr.<br /> Brooks Cunninghame and
+    his Family&mdash;"H. T." and an Excitement         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_219'>219</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XII.</h4>
+
+    <p>Landing at the Profile House&mdash;Halstead Rowan and
+    Gymnastics&mdash;How that person saw Clara Vanderlyn and became a<br />
+    Rival of "H. T."&mdash;The Full Moon in the Notch&mdash;Trodden Toes, a
+    Name, a Voice, and a Rencontre&mdash;Margaret Hayley and Capt.<br />
+    Hector Coles&mdash;The Old Man of the Mountain by Moonlight, and a
+    Mystery                  <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_237'>237</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XIII.</h4>
+
+   <p> Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her Pet Bears&mdash;A misadventure and a
+    Friendly Hand in time&mdash;The question of Courage&mdash;Halstead<br />
+    Rowan and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame on Geography&mdash;The Dead
+    Washington, the Flume and the Pool&mdash;With the personal<br />
+    relations weaving at that juncture.   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_255'>255</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XIV.</h4>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span></p>
+   <p> A disaster to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame&mdash;Exit into the
+    bottom of the Pool&mdash;Nobody that could swim, and Margaret<br />
+    Hayley in Excitement&mdash;"H. T." in his element, in two
+    senses&mdash;Another Introduction and a new Hero&mdash;Scenes in the<br />
+    Profile parlor&mdash;Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn&mdash;The Insult       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_279'>279</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XV.</h4>
+
+    <p>How Halstead Rowan arranged that expected Duel&mdash;Ten-pins
+    versus bloodshed&mdash;Some anxiety about identity&mdash;The "H. T."<br />
+    initials, again&mdash;A farewell to the Brooks Cunninghames&mdash;An
+    hour on Echo Lake, with a Rhapsody and a strangely-interested<br />
+    Listener              <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_298'>298</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XVI.</h4>
+
+   <p> Cloud and Storm at the Profile&mdash;Sights and Sensations of a
+    rainy-day ride to the Crawford&mdash;Horace Townsend<br /> and Halstead
+    Rowan once more together&mdash;Unexpected Arrivals&mdash;A cavalcade of
+    Miserables&mdash;An ascent of Mount<br /> Washington, with Equestrianism
+    and War-whoops extraordinary          <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_323'>323</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XVII.</h4>
+
+    <p>Horace Townsend with a Lady in charge&mdash;An adventure over the
+    "Gulf of Mexico"&mdash;Clara Vanderlyn in deadly<br /> peril&mdash;A moment
+    of horror&mdash;Halstead Rowan and a display of the Comanche
+    riding&mdash;Townsend's eclipse&mdash;The<br /> return to the
+    Crawford&mdash;Margaret Hayley again, and a Conversation overheard   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_348'>348</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XVIII.</h4>
+
+    <p>Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley&mdash;A strange Rencontre in
+    the Parlor&mdash;Another Rencontre, equally strange<br /> but less
+    pleasant&mdash;How Clara Vanderlyn faded away from the
+    Mountains&mdash;And how the Comanche Rider<br /> "played baby" and
+    disappeared                <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_370'>370</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XIX.</h4>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A strange Character at breakfast&mdash;"The Rambler," and his
+    Antecedents&mdash;What Horace Townsend heard about<br /> Fate&mdash;Going up
+    to Pic-nic on Mount Willard&mdash;The Plateau, the Rope and the
+    Swing&mdash;Spreading the Banquet&mdash;The<br /> dinner-call and a cry which
+    answered it&mdash;A fearful situation.         <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_392'>392</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XX.</h4>
+
+    <p>Suspense in danger, in two Senses&mdash;Horace Townsend with a
+    Swing-rope&mdash;An invitation to Captain Hector<br /> Coles&mdash;A fearful
+    piece of Amateur Gymnastics&mdash;Going down into the
+    Schute&mdash;Success or Failure?&mdash;The event,<br /> and Margaret Hayley's
+    madness&mdash;Two unfortunate Declarations   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_410'>410</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XXI.</h4>
+
+    <p>The bearer of a Disgraced Name in England&mdash;A strange Quest
+    and a strange Unrest&mdash;Hurrying over to Ireland&mdash;Too<br /> late for
+    the Packet&mdash;The little Despatch-steamer&mdash;Henry Fitzmaurice,
+    the journalist&mdash;The peril of the Emerald,<br /> and the end of all
+    Quests save one   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_432'>432</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XXII.</h4>
+
+    <p>Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper&mdash;Crossing the
+    Rappahannock&mdash;The fight and the calamity of Rawson's<br />
+    Cross-Roads&mdash;Taking of Culpeper&mdash;Pleasanton's Volunteer
+    Aide&mdash;Townsend versus Coles&mdash;The meeting of<br /> Two who loved
+    each other&mdash;And the Little Ride they took together    <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_452'>452</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XXIII.</h4>
+
+   <p> Once more at West Philadelphia&mdash;September and Change&mdash;Last
+    glimpses of Kitty Hood and Dick Compton&mdash;Robert Brand<br /> and his
+    invited Guest&mdash;The news of Death&mdash;Old Elspeth Graeme as a
+    Seeress&mdash;The dispatch from Alexandria&mdash;The<br /> Quest of Brand and
+    Margaret Hayley           <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_478'>478</a></span><br />
+</p>
+<h4>CHAPTER XXIV.</h4>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+
+    <p>In the Hospital at Alexandria&mdash;The wounded Man and his
+    Nurse&mdash;Who was Horace Townsend?&mdash;A Mystery<br /> explained&mdash;How
+    Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's&mdash;One word more of the
+    Comanche Rider&mdash;Conclusion <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_490'>490</a></span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE COWARD.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">A June Morning of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three&mdash;Glimpses
+of West Philadelphia&mdash;The Days before Gettysburg&mdash;the Two on
+the Piazza&mdash;Margaret Hayley and Elsie Brand&mdash;An Embrace and
+a Difference&mdash;Foreshadowings of Carlton Brand, Brother and
+Lover.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>A wide piazza, with the columns made of such light tracery in scrolled
+plank-work that they seemed to be almost unreal and gave an appearance of
+etheriality to the whole front of the house. The piazza, flecked over with
+the golden June sunshine that stole down between the branches of the tall
+trees standing in front and shading the house, and that crept in through
+the network of twine and climbing roses clambering almost up to the roof
+from the balustrade below. The house to which the piazza adjoined, large,
+built of wood in that half Flemish and half Elizabethan style which has of
+late years been made popular through cheap books on cottage architecture
+and the illustrations in agricultural newspapers,&mdash;two and a half stories
+in height, with a double gabled front that belonged to the one, elaborate
+cornices and work over the piazza that belonged to the other, and a turret
+in the centre that belonged to neither. A wide, tall door opening from the
+piazza, and windows also opening upon it, sweeping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> down quite to the
+floor. Altogether a house which approached more nearly to the "composite"
+order of architecture so much affected by wealthy Americans, than to any
+one set down in the books by a particular designation; and yet shapely and
+imposing, and showing that if the most unimpeachable taste had not presided
+over the erection, yet wealth had been lavishly expended and all the modern
+graces and ornaments freely supplied.</p>
+
+<p>In front of the house, and sweeping down to the road that ran within a
+hundred feet, a grassed lawn lying in the lovely green of early summer,
+only broken at irregular intervals by the dozen of trees of larger and
+smaller sizes, round which the earth had been artistically made to swell so
+as to do away with any appearance of newness and create the impression that
+the roundness had been caused by the bursting of the trees farther out of
+the ground through many years of vigorous growth. Beneath one of the
+largest of the trees&mdash;a maple, with the silver sheen almost equally divided
+between its bark and its glossy leaves, a long wooden bench or settee, with
+two or three sofa-cushions thrown carelessly upon it, as if it formed at
+times a favorite lounge for a reader or a smoker. On the piazza a triad of
+chairs, irregularly placed and all unoccupied. One of the two folding doors
+leading into the halls from the piazza, wide open, as became the season,
+and the other half closed as if a single puff of summer breeze coming
+through the hall had become exhausted before closing it entirely. One of
+the windows opening from the piazza into what seemed to be the better part
+of the house, closed entirely; and the other, with the shutters "bowed" or
+half open, permitting a peep into a large parlor or sitting-room, with rich
+carpet and handsome furniture, but kept dusky under the impression (more or
+less reasonable) that thereby additional coolness would be secured.</p>
+
+<p>Near the house, on both sides, other houses of corresponding pretension
+though displaying great variety in style of architecture; and in front,
+across the wide road, still others<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> showing to the right and left, and the
+whole appearance of the immediate neighborhood evidencing that it was
+neither country nor city, but a blending of both, suburban, and a chosen
+spot for the residences of those who did business in the great city and
+wished to be near it, and who possessed means and taste to make so pleasant
+a selection. Still farther away in front, as seen between the other houses
+and shrubbery, and stretching off southward in a long rolling sweep, rich
+agricultural country, with some of the hay-crop yet ungathered, broad
+fields of grain receiving the last ripening kiss of the sun before yielding
+to the sickle or the reaping-machine, and fruit-trees already beginning to
+be golden with the apples, pears and peaches glimmering amid the leaves. A
+quiet, gentle scene, with evident wealth to gild it and perfect repose to
+lend it character; and over all the warm sun of a June morning resting like
+a benediction, and a slight shadow of golden haze in the air softening
+every object in the perspective. Occasionally a pedestrian figure moving
+slowly along one of the foot-paths that bordered the wide road; and anon a
+farm-wagon loaded with early produce and on its way to market, rumbling by
+with such a sleepy expression on the face of the driver and such lollings
+of the ears of the full-fed and lazy horses, that the episode of its
+passage rather added to than detracted from the slumberous quiet of the
+prospect.</p>
+
+<p>Then another passage, very different and not at all in keeping with any of
+the points that have before been noted. An officer in full uniform, with
+the front of his chasseur cap thrown high in defiance of the glare of the
+sunshine, spurring by on a high-stepping and fast-trotting horse, eastward
+towards the city, with such life and haste in every movement of himself and
+the animal he bestrode as to momentarily dash the whole view with unquiet.
+Then the equestrian figure out of sight and the beat of his horse's hoofs
+heard no longer; and the scene relapsing into that languor born of the June
+morning verging rapidly towards noon.</p>
+
+<p>Then a sudden sound, still more discordant with the drowsy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> peace of the
+hour than the sight of the spurring soldier, and still more painfully
+suggestive of war in the land of peace. The quick, sharp rattle of a
+snare-drum, but a little space removed, and apparently passing down one of
+the lateral roads in the neighborhood, dying away with a light tap into the
+distance a moment after, and quiet coming back again yet more markedly
+after so incongruous an interruption.</p>
+
+<p>The place, West Philadelphia, half a mile or more beyond the Schuylkill,
+not far from the line traversed beyond the bridge by the Market Street
+cars, and near the intersection of that branch of the main artery known as
+the Darby Road,&mdash;in the outer edge of that beautiful little section with
+its tall trees and plats of natural green, out of and into which the
+shrieking monsters of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad dart every hour in
+the day with freight and passengers to and from the Great West. The time,
+late in June, 1863, a few days before Gettysburg, when the long-threatened
+invasion of the North by the rebels had become for the moment an
+accomplished fact, when Lee and Ewell had crossed the Potomac, swept on
+through Upper Maryland, entered Pennsylvania, devastated the farms and
+carried away the stock of the farmers on the border, laid York under a
+contribution, burned the barracks at Carlisle, and threatened every hour to
+capture Harrisburgh and force the passage of the Susquehanna. When women
+and children, and by far too many of the able-bodied inhabitants who should
+have shown more pride if they indeed possessed no courage, had fled away
+from the Seat of Government of the Keystone State, and the public records
+were following them to prevent their falling into the hands of an enemy
+known to be destructive and revengeful, and for the moment believed to be
+irresistible. When the rebels themselves boasted that they were about to
+teach the North all the horrors of war that had fallen upon the South in
+the long contest,&mdash;and that in a few days they would water their
+cavalry-horses in the Delaware, if they did not achieve the same success at
+the very banks of the Hudson;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> and when the newspapers of New York and
+Philadelphia, for the moment completely discouraged, gave up the line of
+defence of the Susquehanna, and gravely debated, whether a check could
+indeed be made at the Delaware, with the loss of the Quaker City, or
+whether the great struggle must at last be transferred to the Hudson hills
+of New Jersey. When the Reserves were mustering in Philadelphia, and the
+Coal Regiments forming in the haunts of the sturdy miners. When the
+Pennsylvania coal-mines were to be set on fire by the invader, and left to
+burn on until all the fuel of the nation was destroyed, if the "great
+conflagration" of the whole earth did not follow as a result. When more
+placards calling for the defence of the State, were exhibited in the
+neighborhood of old Independence Hall, than had ever shown there, inviting
+the idle to amusement, in the most prosperous seasons of opera, theatre and
+concert-saloon&mdash;drums beating at every corner, brass bands blowing on every
+square, patriotic appeals and efforts to recruit on every hand, and yet the
+people apparently lying under bodily apathy or mental paralysis. When
+Governor Seymour, of New York, and Governor Parker, of New Jersey, waiving
+the political question for the moment, were calling out the troops of those
+States to the defence of Pennsylvania; and when the militia of the city of
+New York and the returned nine-months volunteers of New Jersey were showing
+themselves equally ready to respond to the call. When the Army of the
+Potomac seemed for the moment to be nothing, even for the defence of the
+North, Hooker discredited, no successor discovered, public confidence lost,
+the very darkest day of the struggle at hand, and no man able or willing to
+predict what might be the extent of disaster reached before the rolling
+back of the tide of invasion from the homes of the loyal States.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the place, the time, the surroundings, and the atmosphere (so to
+speak) of the house of the blended Flemish and Elizabethan styles of
+architecture, at West Philadelphia, of which, thus far, only the outward
+aspects have been presented.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> Yet there may be an inexcusable neglect of
+the proprieties, in presenting a house, its green lawn, shady trees, and
+even the pleasant landscape stretching away in front of it, before those
+living figures which would certainly have attracted the attention of an
+observer in advance of any of the inanimate beauties of art or nature.</p>
+
+<p>Those figures were two in number, both standing on the piazza, very near
+the trellis of climbing roses, and where the flecks of sunshine fell
+through the leaves upon them and dashed them with little dots and lines of
+moving light, as well as the floor upon which they stood. Both were
+girls&mdash;both young&mdash;both beautiful; at least each possessed that combination
+of features, form and manner, making her very pleasing to the casual
+observer, and certain to be reckoned beautiful by some one admitted to a
+closer knowledge of the spirit enshrined within. They were evidently dear
+friends; for as they stood near the trellis, and the hand of the taller of
+the two plucked a half-open rose from one of the clusters, and she
+playfully tried to coax it to a fuller opening by breathing caressingly
+upon it and separating its clinging leaves with her dainty fingers,&mdash;the
+arm of the other was around her waist, and both the trim and graceful forms
+were slightly swaying backward and forward in that pleasant, idle,
+school-girl motion which the grown woman does not easily forget until it
+has given the "fidgets" to half her elder acquaintances.</p>
+
+<p>The taller and perhaps by a year the elder&mdash;she of the rose&mdash;was the
+daughter of the mistress of that pleasant summer paradise, born to wealth
+and position, and her birth registered some two-and-twenty years before in
+the predecessor of the heavy family Bible with its golden clasps, which lay
+in state in the parlor so near her, as Margaret Hayley. She was a little
+above the average height of womanhood, and might have seemed too tall for
+grace but for the exquisite rounding of the lithe form, the matchless fall
+of a pair of sloping shoulders that could not probably be matched within a
+radius<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> of an hundred miles, the graceful carriage of a neck that would
+have been long if less elegantly poised, the beauty in shape and spring in
+motion of the Arab foot under which the water would have run as easily as
+beneath a bridge, and the supple delicacy of the long taper fingers with
+their rose-tinted nails, which seemed perfect and high-blooded enough to
+have a mission of playing among heart-strings as the fingers of others
+might do among the chords of a harp.</p>
+
+<p>In feature the young girl had quite as many claims to attention. The hair
+was very dark and very profuse&mdash;so near to black that it needed the
+sunlight before the golden shadows in the dark brown became fully
+apparent&mdash;swept plainly down on either side, in the madonna fashion, from a
+brow that was very pure, high and clear. The face was handsomely moulded,
+rather long than broad, as beseemed the figure, rather pale than ruddy,
+though with a dash of healthy color in each cheek that belied any momentary
+suspicion of ill health; the nose a little long and somewhat decided, but
+very classic in outline and finely cut at the nostril; the eyes dark&mdash;so
+dark that a careless observer would have lost their brown and called them
+black, and their expression a little reserved if not sad and even sometimes
+severe; the mouth small and well-shaped, with the lips as delicately tinted
+as the faintest blush-rose in the cluster near her, but a shade too thin
+for the exhibition of exuberant passion, and showing a slight curl of pride
+at the corners of the upper; the chin rounded, full, and forming a pleasant
+point for the eye to rest upon as it descended from the face to study the
+contour of neck and shoulders. The first appreciative glance at her was
+certain to be followed by the suppressed exclamation: "How very handsome!"
+and the second by a thought that the lips did not syllable: "How very proud
+and queenly!" It might have needed many more than a third, before the gazer
+could go to the full depth of a very marked character, and say how much of
+that queenly bearing might be ready to bend at last to the magic touch of
+the softer passions, and how much of that evident goodness and firmness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+might be employed in conveying happiness to others than herself. Among her
+peculiarities, she seemed to despise stripes, plaids, sprigs, spots, and
+the other endless varieties of color in material; and the lawn which swept
+that morning around her erect figure was of a neutral tint and as devoid of
+spot as were arms, ears and neck of any ornament in jewelry except a small
+cameo at the throat, a slight gold chain around the neck and descending to
+the bosom, and a single cluster diamond sparkling on the forefinger of the
+right-hand that was dallying with the spirit hidden among the rose-leaves.</p>
+
+<p>No more telling contrast to the tall, majestic girl could well have been
+supplied, than her neighbor and dear friend, Elsie Brand (Elspeth,
+baptismally, for reasons that will hereafter develop themselves, but always
+called Elsie by those admitted to the least intimacy.) She was at least
+four inches shorter than Miss Hayley, round and rather plump, though very
+graceful in figure, with a chubby face, ruddy cheeks, piquant nose, merry
+blue eyes, pouting red lips, full hair coming low down on the forehead and
+of that pale gold which the old Scotch poets immortalized as "yellow," in
+so many of their lays of the bardic era. Pretty, beyond question, but more
+good and attractive-looking than beautiful; and if a second look at
+Margaret Hayley would have induced an observation having reference to her
+pride, a second at Elsie Brand was certain to bring out the thought if not
+the speech: "What a charming, good little girl!" Perhaps a third, with
+persons not too severely in training for the great Olympian races of
+morality, was very likely to create such a sensation as one experiences in
+gazing at a lusciously ripe peach, having particular reference to the pulpy
+red lips with their funny pout and kissable look, and ending in a wish that
+the crimson love-apples of the modern Hesperides were not quite so
+zealously guarded.</p>
+
+<p>Elsie had not yet passed her twenty-second birthday, though she had been
+"of age" for a good many twelvemonths, in the estimation of those who had
+come near enough to her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> to feel the beating of her warm heart. Doctor
+James Holton, graduate of the Pennsylvania Medical College, and lately a
+student with one who had been a student with David Hosack, held his own
+peculiar estimation of Elsie Brand, and had almost been driven into rank
+atheism from the necessity of both holding and proving that the theory of
+our springing from one common father and mother could not possibly be
+correct, as the clay of which Elsie was made had been so very different&mdash;so
+much purer, sweeter and better&mdash;from that employed in the moulding of
+ordinary mortals!</p>
+
+<p>For some minutes the two young girls had been standing in silence, Margaret
+engaged with experiments on her opening rose and Elsie with one arm around
+her and lazily observing the operation&mdash;both apparently full of that
+indolent enjoyment born of ease, content, and the languid air of the summer
+morning. Then the little one spoke:</p>
+
+<p>"Margaret, do you know of what I have been thinking for the last two
+minutes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't any machine by which I could pry into the droll secrets of your
+brain, Elsie, my dear!" answered the taller, pleasantly, but with no smile
+upon her lips meanwhile, and apparently with all her attention yet absorbed
+in her horticultural experiment.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I tell you?" queried Elsie.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, pet, if you like!" was the reply, the tone, as well as the word
+of endearment, showing indefinably that Margaret Hayley thought of herself
+as a woman and yet of her companion (of nearly the same age) as little more
+than a child.</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking," said the little girl, "how much of character is sometimes
+shown in the action of a moment, and how very different we are."</p>
+
+<p>"Who thought your little head was so philosophical, Elsie?" answered
+Margaret, and this time she for a moment deserted her rose and looked
+around with a pleasant smile. "Well, the application of your thought to
+yourself and to me?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said the little one. "It was only about the rose. I should have
+plucked it, if I plucked it at all, and enjoyed it as it was. You are
+trying to make something else out of it, and yet show no wish to destroy
+the flower. A cruel woman&mdash;different from either of us, I hope&mdash;would
+probably be plucking off the leaves one by one and throwing them away,
+without caring how much pain she might be inflicting on the life of the
+flower, hidden away down somewhere in its heart."</p>
+
+<p>"A very pretty idea, upon my word!" said Margaret, ceasing to blow upon and
+pluck at the leaves, and turning upon her companion a countenance showing
+something like surprised admiration. "And what do you make of my character,
+Elsie, as shown by my handling of the rose?"</p>
+
+<p>"You must not be angry with me, Margaret," answered the young girl, a
+little in the spirit of deprecation. "But you see <i>I</i> should have been
+satisfied with the rose as it was, and the other would have been cruelly
+dissatisfied with it in any shape, and you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, dear? I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You showed that you were not entirely satisfied with every thing as it
+was, and that you had a little self-will leading you to force things to be
+as you chose, by trying to make that poor little flower outrun the course
+of nature and bloom before it was quite ready."</p>
+
+<p>"I think you are right, Elsie," said Margaret, nodding her head in that
+slight and repeated manner indicative of answering the mind within quite as
+much as any observation from without. "I am <i>not</i> satisfied with every
+thing in the world, Elsie. I am not cruel, I hope and believe; but I am
+sharper, harder, more requiring than you, and consequently not formed for
+half so much true happiness. I <i>do</i> feel like forcing things to be what I
+require, sometimes, and then I suppose I grow unamiable."</p>
+
+<p>"You are never any thing else than a dear good girl, with a wiser head than
+my rattle-pate, and my own sweet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> sister that is to be!" and the arm of the
+speaker went still more closely around the slight waist it encircled. A
+blush as delicately roseate as the first flushings of dawn crept over the
+more classic face that bent above her own, the lips above came down to meet
+those pouting below, and the two young girls were kissing and embracing as
+if they had been two lovers of opposite sexes but very much of one opinion
+as to the best office of the lips. Any delicately-nerved old bachelor who
+should have happened to pass in front of the house at that moment and catch
+a glimpse of the scene just then enacted on the piazza, would certainly
+have fainted away on the spot, at the idea of such a waste of the most
+delicious of "raw material."</p>
+
+<p>"You may have the rose for your lesson&mdash;you see I have not spoiled it,
+after all," said Margaret, when the kiss had been given and the rosy flush
+died away from her own cheek.</p>
+
+<p>"To give to Carlton?" asked Elsie, as she held out her hand for it.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Carlton must come after his own roses!" was the reply, with the least
+dash of pride in the curling of the upper lip.</p>
+
+<p>"And pluck them himself?" asked saucy Elsie.</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly!"</p>
+
+<p>"No matter where he finds them growing&mdash;on tree, or on cheek, or on lips!"
+continued the young girl, with a light laugh.</p>
+
+<p>For an instant the same flush rose again on the cheek of Margaret Hayley;
+then she forced it away, smiled, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly! why not? Carlton Brand kisses me, sometimes, and I have more
+than once kissed him back. What is that to you, sauce-box, when we are
+engaged to be married?"</p>
+
+<p>"What is that to me? Every thing! Joy&mdash;happiness&mdash;to know that I am going
+to have so dear a sister!" cried the little one, throwing both her arms,
+this time, around the pliant waist of Margaret and hugging her in a perfect
+transport<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> of delight, which seemed quite shared in, though more
+tranquilly, by the object of the demonstration.</p>
+
+<p>The saddest, cruellest thing in all the lyric drama is the blast of De
+Sylva's horn on Ernani's wedding morning, calling him in one instant from
+happy love to dishonor or death. Neither in romance nor in nature should
+such sudden transitions occur. Alas, for humanity! they do occur in both,
+not occasionally but habitually. The Duchess of Richmond's ball&mdash;then
+Waterloo. De Joinville springs on board his flag-ship to sail for the
+attack on Vera Cruz, in the very ball dress in which he has been dancing
+the whole night through with the republican belles at Castle Garden. The
+Pall is over every thing of earth: how sadly and how inevitably it droops
+above the Banner! No scene upon earth could have been more exquisitely
+peaceful, and few could have been lovelier, than that which surrounded and
+comprehended those two fair girls in their embrace upon the piazza. Wealth,
+youth, beauty, good feeling, happiness&mdash;all were there; and love blent with
+friendship, for was not the embrace, given by Elsie Brand and accepted by
+Margaret Hayley, both given and accepted quite as much for her brother's
+sake as her own? It was fitting, then, according to the sad fitness of
+earth, that the element of discord should enter into the peaceful and the
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>The officer spurred by, as we have seen him do, gazing only with our
+incorporeal eyes. Both the young girls, just releasing each other from
+their embrace, saw the dark cloud of war sweeping between them and the
+sunlit grain fields. Elsie Brand shuddered and drew back, as if the
+incongruity jarred her nature. Margaret Hayley instantly lifted her proud
+neck the higher, as if something in <i>her</i> nature sympathized with every
+suggestion of the struggle, and as if she was, indeed, insensibly riding on
+with the hurrying horseman.</p>
+
+<p>"And what does the shudder mean, little one?" asked Margaret, who had
+plainly distinguished it at the moment of release.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I hate war, and every thing connected with it!" was the reply, the tone
+almost petulant.</p>
+
+<p>"And I do <i>not</i> hate it, painful as it may be in many particulars," said
+Margaret. "Force and energy are the noblest developments in life. Bravery
+is the nearest possible approach to that divine character which knows no
+superior and consequently fears none."</p>
+
+<p>"Nearer to the divine than <i>love</i>?" asked the little one.</p>
+
+<p>Just for one instant, again, that roseate tint on the cheek of Margaret, as
+she said: "Nobler, if not nearer to the divine; and sorry as I must be to
+see the bloodshed caused by a civil war in my native land, I am almost glad
+that it has occurred, sometimes, as a means of rousing the sluggish pulses
+of men who would otherwise have stagnated in trade and pleasure, and
+proving that we yet possess something of the hero spirit of old."</p>
+
+<p>"And <i>I</i> am sorry for it all the while, night and day, in my prayers and in
+my dreams," answered Elsie Brand, with a sigh. "Hark!" as the tap of the
+drum came across from the lateral road before-mentioned. "There is another
+reminder of the curse, and one that comes nearer home. Do you remember,
+Margaret, that I shall soon have a brother, and you a lover, separated from
+us and in terrible danger? They say Harrisburgh must be taken, unless a
+very large body of troops can reach it at once. The Reserves will probably
+go on, to-night, and Carlton will probably accept his old commission again.
+I do want him to do his duty, Margaret, if it <i>is</i> his duty; but I hope
+that he will not think so&mdash;that he will not go away."</p>
+
+<p>"And <i>I</i> hope that he <i>will</i>!" answered Margaret, her tall form drawn up to
+its full height, and a look of stern pride upon her face that could not
+very well be mistaken.</p>
+
+<p>"To go into danger&mdash;perhaps to death?" asked Elsie, looking sadly at the
+proud Sibylline face.</p>
+
+<p>"To a thousand deaths, if necessary, rather than towards the least
+suspicion of a want of true manhood!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you do not know the trembling fear of a sister's love!" said Elsie,
+with a sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"I know a love fifty times deeper!" said Margaret, the pride still on her
+face, and yet that ever-returning flush coming up again to say that if love
+had not conquered pride it had at least divided the dominion. "Listen,
+Elsie Brand, to some words that you may as well understand now as ever.
+There is no one near to hear us, and so it is almost like speaking before
+heaven alone. I love your brother, deeply, devotedly, with all the power of
+my nature&mdash;so devotedly that if that love should be wrenched away from my
+heart by any circumstance, I know that my life would thenceforth be but one
+long, wretched mockery of existence. Happy natures like yours, Elsie, do
+not know the absolute agony that lies in such love. And yet I could give up
+that love, and my life with it, and would do so, before I would live, love,
+and yet <i>despise</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Despise?&mdash;are you speaking of Carlton&mdash;of my brother?" asked the young
+girl, apparently a little lost in the mysterious energy of her companion's
+words.</p>
+
+<p>"I said that I could <i>not</i> despise," Margaret Hayley went on. "I must not,
+or we have no future. Do you know that I should have reverenced your
+brother more, even if I did not love him better, if he had not refused the
+commission in the army tendered him at the commencement of the war? I might
+have wept, perhaps mourned&mdash;but I should have idolized. Now, I only love a
+mortal like myself, where I might have been worshipping a hero!"</p>
+
+<p>"Or sobbing over a grave!" said Elsie, with a sigh which told how easily
+she might have been brought to illustrate the word she used.</p>
+
+<p>"What then!" was the quick reply of Margaret. "The glory would have been
+his&mdash;the loss and grief would have been mine, and I could have borne them.
+But he did not choose to enter the struggle, prominent as he had once been
+in military movements. He had the excuse of business<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> and occupation, and I
+have tried to believe that he needed no other."</p>
+
+<p>"Needed?&mdash;what do you mean, Margaret?" cried Elsie Brand in a tone and with
+a movement of starting back which evidenced both pain and alarm.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a painful thing, but I must say it, to you, as I do not know that I
+could say it to him," pursued Margaret. "I mean, that I have tried to
+believe that there was no flaw in my idol&mdash;that Carlton Brand, who held
+every pulse of my woman's heart responsive to his touch&mdash;did not lack the
+one manly virtue of <i>courage</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"And would you <i>dare</i> to believe my brother&mdash;the man you have pretended to
+love&mdash;a <i>coward</i>?" There was something vexed and sharp, almost angry, in
+Elsie's tone, now, that did not promise another immediate embrace like that
+of a few moments previous. Margaret Hayley saw the expression of her face,
+but neither blenched before it nor seemed to feel any anger at the
+manifestation.</p>
+
+<p>"Elsie Brand," she said, her words slow, measured, and with a cadence that
+was somehow inexpressibly pained and mournful, "I am no school-girl, and I
+am speaking words that I mean. I know your brother to be patriotic, I know
+him to be in high health, athletic, vigorous and determined; and have
+sometimes believed that if he had possessed that one requisite, animal
+courage, he would long ago have been fighting the foes of the republic.
+Grieve as I may to part with him, I am glad you believe that he is going
+with the Reserves. He had his choice, before, and I let my own heart
+instead of my reason have sway, and did not question its propriety. But
+were he to hang back now, when his native State is invaded and every arm
+necessary to drive back the rebels from Pennsylvania soil, I should know
+that he was a coward!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't like you, Margaret Hayley, when your face looks so and you talk in
+that manner!" said the little girl. "But I will not quarrel with you.
+Carlton is going with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> Reserves, and some day when he is killed or you
+hear how he has shamed all the rest with his bravery, you will be sorry for
+the words you have just spoken!" Just then the little yellow-haired girl
+was the Sibyl, and her prophecy went upon record with the wild words of
+Margaret, to be afterwards remembered&mdash;how sadly!</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;do not be angry with me, Elsie," said Margaret, taking the hand that
+had been temporarily released. "You have no cause. I have been speaking
+against my own heart all the while, much more than against the man whom I
+truly love. I know him to be noble and true, and I will believe him brave.
+Are you satisfied? Kiss me!" and the proud, statuesque face once more lost
+its gravity, to bring back all the joyousness into the rounder and merrier
+one from which it had temporarily departed.</p>
+
+<p>The light summer jockey-hat of Elsie lay just within the door, on a chair.
+With a quick glance at the watch hidden under her waist-riband, she stepped
+within the door, threw on her hat, and was about to terminate her somewhat
+prolonged morning-call, when Margaret took it off again, dropped it into
+one of the vacant chairs, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;do not go away. You have nothing to do at home&mdash;mother has gone down
+to the city for the day, you know, and I shall be lonely. We shall have
+some lunch&mdash;you may call it dinner if it will taste any better,&mdash;very soon.
+Stay till the afternoon&mdash;cannot you do so, just as well as not?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so&mdash;no, I must see Carlton&mdash;yes, though, Carlton will be quite
+as likely to come here first as to go home, if he has arranged to go
+away&mdash;yes, I will stay if you wish it so much!" rapidly answered the little
+one.</p>
+
+<p>"That is a good girl," said Margaret Hayley, just as she might have patted
+a school hobby-de-hoy on the head. "Now run into the parlor and get the
+very nicest book you can find, draw the easy-chair out of the hall, and
+enjoy yourself the best you can for just twenty minutes, while I go down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+to the kitchen, in ma's place, and see what progress our new Dutch cook has
+been making."</p>
+
+<p>She disappeared with the words, and her injunctions were acted upon almost
+as rapidly. In half a minute Elsie had the arm-chair out of the hall, and
+an illustrated work off one of the tables in the parlor, and was prepared
+for her short period of indolent enjoyment.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">The Coming of Carlton Brand&mdash;Almost a Paladin of
+Balaklava&mdash;Brother and Sister&mdash;A Spasm of Shame&mdash;The
+Confession&mdash;The Coward&mdash;How Margaret Hayley heard Many Words
+not intended for her&mdash;The Rupture and the Separation.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Not long was the young girl, left at the close of the last chapter bodily
+ensconced in an easy-chair on the broad piazza, and mentally absorbed in
+the attractions of one of the choicest books in Margaret Hayley's
+collection, allowed to pursue her reading undisturbed. Not two minutes had
+elapsed when a horseman, riding a chestnut horse of handsome appearance and
+fine action, came rapidly up from the direction of the city, dismounted
+with the same practised grace that he had shown when in the saddle, threw
+the rein of his horse over one of the posts standing near the gate, opened
+that gate and came up the walk, without attracting the attention of the
+young lady on the piazza, or that of any other occupant of the house he was
+approaching.</p>
+
+<p>Lifting from his brow, as he approached the house, to wipe away the slight
+moisture which had gathered there even in riding, the broad-brimmed and
+low-crowned hat of light gray, which so well accorded with his loose but
+well-fitting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> suit of the same color, he gave an opportunity for studying
+the whole man, which could not well have been attained under other
+circumstances; and both narrator and reader may be excused for stopping him
+momentarily in that position, while due examination is made of his most
+striking outward peculiarities.</p>
+
+<p>He was at least five feet eleven inches in height, with a figure rather
+slight than stout, but singularly erect, sinewy, and elastic, every
+movement giving evidence that the body could not well be set to a task
+beyond its power of endurance. The foot was not very small, but
+well-shaped, and the ungloved hand which held his riding-whip was almost
+faultless in shape and color. The hat removed, a brow rather broad than
+high was seen, with a head well balanced in all the intellectual and moral
+requirements, densely covered with light, curling hair, of that peculiar
+shade which the poetical designate as "blonde" and the practical as
+"sandy." The complexion, though the cheeks were a little browned by the
+summer sun, was very fair, and that of the brow as stainless as any petted
+girl's could be. The features were nearly faultless in the Greek severity
+of their outline, the nose straight and well cut, the mouth small but with
+full curved lips, the eyes of hazel, widely set. The lower part of his face
+was effectually concealed by a luxuriant full beard and moustache, a few
+shades darker than his hair, and showing a propensity to curl on slight
+provocation. He was a decidedly handsome man of twenty-eight to thirty,
+erect, gentlemanly, dignified, and with something in his general appearance
+irresistibly reminding the spectator of the traditional appearance of those
+blonde Englishmen of good birth, who seem made to dawdle life away without
+exhibiting one of the sterner qualities of human nature, until deadly
+danger shows them to have that cool recklessness of life which charged two
+hundred years ago with Prince Rupert and ten years ago with poor Nolan. Yet
+this was the idea more likely to be formed of him and his capabilities, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+strangers and those who lacked opportunity to examine his face and manner
+closely, than by those intimately acquainted with both; for there was an
+occasional nervousness in the movement of the hands, and even of the whole
+figure, that to a close observer would have belied the first-assumed
+self-confidence; and a something drooping, tremulous, and undecided in the
+lower lip at the corners, was so well matched by a sad and even troubled
+expression that often rested like a cloud over the eyes, that the whole man
+seemed to be made into another self by them.</p>
+
+<p>Such was Carlton Brand, the brother of Elsie, about whom the tongues of the
+two young girls had wagged so unreservedly but a few minutes before. Such
+was his appearance, to the outward eye, as, hat still in hand, he
+approached the piazza. Elsie was sufficiently absorbed in her book, not to
+feel his presence; and it was not until he was close upon her that the
+young girl saw him, flung down the costly illustrated volume in her chair
+with less care than might have pleased the less impulsive owner, sprang to
+the step and seized both the occupied hands of the new-comer, with a warmth
+that showed how cordial was the affection between brother and sister, so
+widely different in appearance and indication of character.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you come here, pet?" the brother asked, as soon as his mouth was
+free from the kiss his sister tendered.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, ran across the fields half an hour ago, and intended to be back home
+by this time, only that Margaret was alone and wished me to stay; and
+besides&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;besides what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Besides, I almost knew that you would stop <i>here</i> before you went home,
+and I should see more of you before you went away, by remaining."</p>
+
+<p>Could the young girl but have seen the quick spasm of agony that just then
+passed over the face of Carlton Brand&mdash;the agitation and trembling which
+seized upon lip and hands&mdash;she might have been wiser the next moment, but
+she certainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> would not have been happier. Just for that one moment there
+seemed to be lack-lustre vacancy in the eyes, total want of self-assertion
+in face and figure, and the handsome, noble-looking man actually seemed to
+have collapsed, bowed, and sunk within himself, so that he was more an
+object of pity than of envy. But the sister's eyes were fortunately turned
+away at that instant, and she saw nothing. When she looked at him again,
+the spasm, whatever it might have been, was gone, and she only saw his
+usual self. He did not reply to her last suggestion, but asked, after an
+instant of hesitation:</p>
+
+<p>"Where is Margaret?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gone down into the kitchen for a few moments, to look after a new Dutch
+cook, but she will soon return. And so you are really going away, brother,
+and I shall be so lonesome!" and the hand of the sister sought that of the
+dearly-loved brother again, as if every moment lost without some touch of
+one who was so soon to leave her, was lost indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Even to this the brother gave no reply, but made a remark with reference to
+the rapid ripening of the grain in the wheat-fields that skirted the road
+beyond. A duller wit than that of Elsie Brand might have become aware that
+he was avoiding an unpleasant subject; and the young girl recognized the
+fact, but gave it an entirely erroneous explanation, believing that he must
+have heard some peculiarly threatening news from the scene of the invasion,
+making the peril of the troops about to leave more deadly than it would
+have been under ordinary circumstances, and that he dreaded to enter upon
+the theme at all, for fear of alarming her. As a consequence, her next
+words were a disclaimer of her own fears.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Carlton, you need not be afraid to speak of it to me. Much as I have
+dreaded your going away, I know, now, that it is your duty, when your own
+State is invaded; and I have made up my mind to bear the separation, and
+even to think of you, my own dear brother, as in danger, without saying one
+word to hold you back."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Have you?" That spasm was again upon his face, and the words were hoarse;
+but again the eye and the ear of the sister missed the recognition of any
+thing unusual.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; and so has Margaret."</p>
+
+<p>"Has she?" The spasm had not gone off his face, and the second question was
+asked even more hoarsely than the first. For some reason that the young
+girl could not understand, he turned away from her, walked down to the end
+of the piazza, and stood looking off. What he was suffering at that moment,
+with three or four of the most powerful passions known to humanity tearing
+at his heart-strings at once, none may know who have not passed through the
+same terrible ordeal which he was then enduring. There were only the fays
+who may have been playing among the green grass, and the dryads yet
+lingering among the whispering leaves of the maples, looking in at the end
+of the piazza upon his face: had they been human eyes, what of wrestling
+and struggle might they not have seen! When he turned to walk back towards
+the spot where his sister was standing in surprise not unmingled with
+alarm, his face was again calm, but it would have shown, to the observant
+eye, a calmness like that of despair. His words, too, were forced when they
+came:</p>
+
+<p>"You and Margaret both, Elsie, love me so well, I know, that you would give
+up almost any thing to please me; but I do not intend to task either of you
+too far. I am not going&mdash;that is, business detains me so that I cannot&mdash;I
+am not going to Harrisburgh."</p>
+
+<p>"Business!" Elsie Brand had never before, in her whole young life, uttered
+a word so hardly or in a tone so nearly approaching to a sneer, as she
+spoke the single word at that moment. Were the words of Margaret Hayley
+ringing in her ear, and did she find some terrible confirmation, now, of
+what had before been so impossible to believe? "Business!&mdash;what business,
+Carlton, <i>can</i> be sufficient to keep you at home when they seem to need you
+so much?"</p>
+
+<p>"What do <i>you</i> know about it?" and <i>his</i> tones were harsh<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> and almost
+menacing. "Do we ask you women to decide what we shall do, where we shall
+go, and where we shall stay?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Carlton!" and the cry seemed to come from the very heart of the young
+girl. It was perhaps the first harsh word that had ever fallen on her ear,
+aimed at her from the lips of the brother she so adored. God only knew the
+agony under which that harsh word had been wrung out, as only he could know
+the agony it might cause! The cry instantly melted the heart to which it
+appealed. Carlton Brand took the hand of his sister in his own, kissed her
+tenderly, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me, Elsie, if I spoke as I should never speak to <i>you</i>! But you do
+not know, sometimes, what moves men to harshness which they afterwards
+bitterly repent."</p>
+
+<p>"But you are not going with the regiment?" again she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No!&mdash;I have told you I was not, Elsie!" and the tone came very near to
+being a harsh one, once more.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry&mdash;very sorry, Carlton!"</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry?" and the often-recurring spasm which again passed over his
+features, could not have been unobserved by the young girl, for her own
+face seemed to reflect it. "Sorry? Are you indeed sorry that I am not going
+into&mdash;that I am not going to be absent from you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, Carlton! heaven knows I am not!" said Elsie, and the merry blue
+eyes were filled with tears. "But I think you ought to go; and you do not
+know, Carlton, how much may hang upon it. Do you love Margaret&mdash;really and
+truly love her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Love her? as my own soul!" answered Carlton Brand. He did not say "as his
+own <i>life</i>"! "Why do you ask, after all that you have known of our
+attachment and our engagement?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because, Carlton"&mdash;and the young girl, weeping the while under an impulse
+of feeling that she could scarcely herself understand, caught him by the
+arm and drew down his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> head towards her&mdash;"because I believe that if you do
+not go with the Reserves, Margaret will think that you do not do so
+because&mdash;oh, I cannot speak the word!"</p>
+
+<p>"Because what? Speak it out!" and he seemed to be nerving himself to meet
+some shock that was likely to need all his energies.</p>
+
+<p>"Because"&mdash;in a voice very low and broken&mdash;"because you are afraid to
+go&mdash;because you are a <i>coward</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Has she said as much?" and the eyes of the speaker, very sad, troubled,
+and almost wild, seemed still to have power to read the very soul of the
+young girl before him. Elsie could not speak at first, but she nodded
+twice, and never death-bell of a condemned criminal rung out more clearly
+or more frightfully on the startled air, tolling the knell of a last hope,
+than the whisper that came at last from her lips:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then God help me!" came from those of the strong man, in such a
+manifestation of agony as was painful to behold, while his hands for one
+moment clasped themselves together as if he would wring them in womanish
+weakness, then went up to his face and spread themselves as if they would
+shut it away forever from human sight. "God help me!&mdash;and you, Elsie,
+despise me if you will, but, oh, help me to keep it from <i>her</i>. I dare not
+go! I <i>am</i> a coward! If I should go into battle I should disgrace myself
+there forever, by running away at the first fire, and that would break our
+poor old father's heart!"</p>
+
+<p>"Carlton! Carlton! my poor brother!" and the hands of the young girl closed
+around one of her brother's, with so warm a pressure as proved that she did
+not think of any shame, disgrace or fault in the connection, but only as
+the announcement of some great misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Elsie, you have wrung from me the confession that I hoped never to be
+obliged to make to any one but my God. I have made it to Him, oh, how many
+times, and I almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> feel that he has forgiven me, as my fellow-men will
+never do. I have been a coward, I suppose, from my very cradle and heaven
+only knows how I have managed to conceal the terrible truth from you, all
+this while! The very sight of blood sickens me, even when it is only the
+blood of beeves in a slaughter-house. One spirt from the arm of a man when
+he is being bled sets every nerve to trembling, and sometimes sends me
+fainting to the floor. One moment among the horrible sights of battle&mdash;the
+groans, and shrieks, and crashing bullets and spouting blood of
+carnage&mdash;would drive me mad or send me flying away with the curses of my
+whole race ringing in my ears."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Carlton! my poor brother!" repeated once more, and in the same tone of
+heart-broken sympathy, was all that Elsie Brand could answer to this
+humiliation of the one to whom, perhaps, next to God, she had ever looked
+up as to His noblest human manifestation of greatness in creative power.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you see what a poor miserable wretch I am?" he went on, apparently
+forgetful that any one besides his sister might be within hearing, and she
+so absorbed in the grief and shame of the revelation that she possessed no
+more forethought. "Think of me as an officer in my regiment, and know with
+what a reddened face I must have walked the streets when we paraded,
+conscious that if suddenly called to duty&mdash;even the quelling of a mob at
+the street-corner&mdash;I should be obliged to disgrace myself at once and
+forever! Think what I have suffered since the war broke out!&mdash;commission
+after commission offered me&mdash;loving my country as I believe man never loved
+it before&mdash;and yet not daring to strike one blow in its behalf. Obliged to
+make slight excuses when others have inquired why I did not go to the
+war&mdash;obliged to wear a double face, a mask, everywhere and at all
+times&mdash;dreading detection every day, and in that detection perhaps the loss
+of my proud father's life and of the love that has made the only hope of my
+own&mdash;cursing the omen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> that unwittingly gave me the brand of the coward in
+my very name&mdash;racked and tortured thus, and yet obliged to hold an
+honorable place among my fellow-men&mdash;it has been too hard, Elsie, too hard!
+And now to lose all! If <i>she</i> has learned to suspect me&mdash;I know her brave
+heart and her proud nature&mdash;I shall lose her, the richest, noblest thing on
+earth, half grasped, to be mourned for as never man yet mourned for woman!
+Do help me, Elsie! Help me to conceal my shame&mdash;to deceive her, yes&mdash;God
+help me!&mdash;to deceive <i>her</i> before whom my very soul should be laid bare&mdash;so
+that she will not know me for the miserable wretch and coward that I am!"</p>
+
+<p>And all this while his face was wrought and contorted, at short intervals,
+by those fearful spasms of shame and mental suffering; and ever and anon
+his hands locked together and seemed to wring themselves even beyond his
+own volition. How different he looked, at that moment, from the handsome,
+noble man, in the full pride of mature adolescence, who had stepped upon
+that piazza but a few moments before!</p>
+
+<p>"I would do any thing in the world to help you, Carlton; but what <i>can</i> I
+do?" faltered the young girl, who saw no light beyond the thick, black
+cloud of shame and ruin slowly settling down on the head of her beloved
+brother.</p>
+
+<p>"Help me to conceal the truth"&mdash;he went on&mdash;"to enforce any excuse for not
+leaving the city at this moment! I know it is base and contemptible, but it
+is for a good purpose, Elsie&mdash;to save a heart that is already distracted,
+and a life that must be wrecked without it. We may never be placed in the
+same circumstances again&mdash;the war may soon be ended&mdash;if she can only be
+kept from knowing this, I may never be placed in the same peril again, and
+my whole life shall be one long proof that I am not otherwise unworthy of
+the woman I love so madly."</p>
+
+<p>"It does not need, Carlton Brand!" sounded a voice from within&mdash;a voice
+that both recognized but too well; and out of the hall came the figure of
+Margaret Hayley.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her words and her manner alike proved that she had heard all, or at least
+enough; for there was an expression of withering contempt flashing out of
+her dark eye and curling her proud lip, not easily to be borne by any
+person towards whom they were directed. There did not seem, for the moment,
+to be any thing like pity in her composition; and if there had been love
+within her heart, it appeared to have been so crushed out by one stunning
+blow that it could never bloom again any more than the wild flower ground
+beneath the heel of the wayfarer. Her head was proud, erect, haughty,
+disdainful; and one who had leisure to examine her closely would have seen
+that the nostril was opening and shutting convulsively, as if overwhelming
+passion was only suppressed by the physical act of holding the breath.
+Elsie Brand was too much dizzied and confused to be quite aware what had
+happened or what was about to happen. She merely uttered a cry of agitation
+and fright, and shrunk back alike from her brother and the woman who had
+come to be his judge. Carlton Brand saw more, with the quick eye of the
+lawyer and the sharpened perception of the lover. He realized that Margaret
+Hayley had heard his agonized and unmanly confession&mdash;that anger and scorn
+had driven away from her face the love which had so often and so pleasantly
+beamed upon him&mdash;that his doom was sealed.</p>
+
+<p>With the knowledge came back to him that manliness in demeanor of which he
+had been so sorely in need a moment before. In the presence only of his
+sister, and when pleading with her to assist in rescuing him from the pit
+of grief and shame into which he felt himself to be sinking, he had been
+humble, abject, even cowering. Now, and in the presence of the woman for
+whose softened opinion he would have given the world and almost bartered
+his hopes of heaven,&mdash;he stood erect, and if the spasm of pain did not
+entirely pass away from his face, at least it changed in its character so
+that he was a man once more.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand you, Miss Hayley," were the first words he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> spoke. "You have
+heard some words not intended for your ear. You have been <i>listening</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"If you merely mean that I have heard what was not intended for my ear, you
+certainly speak the truth, Mr. Brand," she replied, catching the formality
+of his address at once. "But if you mean that I have listened meanly, or
+even voluntarily, to words intended to be confidential, you wrong yourself,
+equally with me, in saying so. You have spoken so loudly that not only I
+but even the servants in the house could not well avoid hearing you; and
+there is not much 'listening' in hearing words almost brawled on a piazza."</p>
+
+<p>Her words were very bitter&mdash;they beseemed the lips from which they flowed.
+A man who loved her less or, who had fewer of the natural impulses of the
+gentleman than Carlton Brand, might only have thought of the taunt conveyed
+and forgotten its justice. He did not do so, but bowed at once with an air
+of respectful humility, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I beg ten thousand pardons for my hasty speech. I was mad when I made it.
+Certainly you have heard nothing but what you had a right to hear." And
+then he stood erect but silent.</p>
+
+<p>Poor little Elsie Brand could contain herself no longer. How she loved her
+brother, only the angels knew. How easily we pardon, in those of our
+kindred, what would be indelible disgrace in the characters of others, all
+close observers of humanity know too well. Little Elsie Brand was only
+acting the part of nature in espousing the cause of her own blood, and
+saying, before time enough had elapsed for any additional words between the
+two principals:</p>
+
+<p>"Margaret Hayley, I say that you are too hard with Carlton! If you had ever
+loved him, as you pretended, you would not be so! There, you have not asked
+my opinion, but you have it!"</p>
+
+<p>The words, though kindly meant, were ill-advised. Not even her brother, who
+had but a few moments before been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> imploring her assistance, thanked her
+for what she had then spoken. At least he silenced her for the time with&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You can do no good now by speaking, Elsie. It is too late. Miss Hayley has
+something more to say to me, no doubt, after what she has accidently heard;
+and I am prepared to hear it." He stood almost coolly, then, the bared head
+bent only a very little, and the face almost as calm as it was
+inexpressibly mournful. So might a convicted criminal stand, feeling
+himself innocent of wrong in intent, beaten down under a combination of
+circumstances too strong to combat, awaiting the words of his sentence, and
+yet determined that there should be something more of dignity in his
+reception of the last blow than there had ever been in any previous action
+of his life.</p>
+
+<p>Twice Margaret Hayley essayed to speak, and twice she failed in the effort.
+If she had been calmly indignant the moment before, Nature had already
+begun to take its revenge, and she was the woman again. Her proud head was
+bent a little lower, and there was a dewy moisture in the dark eyes, that
+could never be so well dried up as in being kissed away. Who knows that the
+proud woman was not really relenting&mdash;letting the old love come back in one
+overwhelming tide and sweep away all the barriers erected by indignation
+and contempt? Who knows how much of change might possibly have been
+wrought, had the next words of Carlton Brand been such as indicated his
+belief that the chain between them was not yet severed utterly? Who knows,
+indeed?&mdash;for his words were very different.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Hayley, I have waited for you to speak what I feel that you have to
+say. You have heard words that no betrothed woman, I suppose, can hear from
+her promised husband and yet retain that respect for him which should be
+the very foundation of the marriage-bond."</p>
+
+<p>"I have." The words came from her lips in tones much lower than those in
+which she had before spoken, and she did not even look at him as she
+answered.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You have heard me declare myself&mdash;I know by the face you wore but a moment
+since, that you have heard all this&mdash;what you hold to be the lowest and
+most contemptible thing on God's footstool&mdash;a <i>coward</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I have. I would rather have died on the spot than heard those words from
+the lips of the man I have&mdash;have loved!" The words still low, and some
+hesitation in those which concluded the sentence. One would almost have
+believed, at that moment, that of the two the culprit was the down-looking
+and low-voiced woman, instead of the man whose godlike presence so
+contradicted the dastardly vice he was confessing.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no defence to offer," the speaker went on. "If you have heard all
+that I believe, no further explanation is necessary. You know the worst;
+and as a proud woman, with honor unspotted and beyond suspicion, you have a
+right to pass what sentence you choose upon my&mdash;my shame, my crime, if you
+will!"</p>
+
+<p>Perfect silence for an instant, then a broken sob from Elsie, whose face
+was streaming with tears denied to both the others, and who was leaning her
+forehead against the sharp corner of one of the columns of the piazza,
+apparently that the slight physical pain thus inflicted might do something
+to still the mental agony that raged within. Then Margaret Hayley, as if
+she had passed through a long struggle but conquered at last with a triumph
+slaying her own soul, raised her head, drew in a hard breath, shook back
+one of the tresses of her dark hair which had fallen over her brow, and
+spoke:</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know, Carlton Brand&mdash;I cannot call you <i>Mr.</i> Brand again, for that
+address is mockery after what we have been to each other&mdash;do you know what
+that sentence must be, in justice to myself and to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can guess it, Margaret Hayley," was the answer, the prefix changed again
+in imitation of her, just as she a moment before had changed it in
+imitating him. The incident was a mere nothing, and yet suggestive as
+showing how closely the two seemed to study each other, and how much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> of
+real sympathy there must after all have been between them. "I can guess it,
+and I will try to bear it."</p>
+
+<p>"You can guess it&mdash;you do guess it&mdash;separation!" said Margaret in a low
+voice that she could not quite render firm.</p>
+
+<p>"I was not mistaken&mdash;I supposed as much," he answered. "You are a proud
+woman, Margaret, and you could not marry a man for whom you failed to
+entertain respect&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>am</i> a proud woman, but a woman still," said Margaret. "You whom I have
+loved so truly, can best guess the depth of my woman's nature. But I cannot
+and will not marry a man to whom I cannot look up and say: 'This man has
+the courage and the will to protect me in every peril!'"</p>
+
+<p>"Have you ever had reason to believe that I could not and would not protect
+you, if need came, against all the world?" and his eyes momentarily
+flashed, at that thought, with a light which should not have shone in the
+orbs of a coward.</p>
+
+<p>"Words are idle, Carlton Brand!" said Margaret. "There is no protection so
+sacredly due as that of a strong man to his country. You know it, and I
+know it as well. The man who knows his duty to his country and dares not do
+it, through sheer bodily fear, could not be trusted in any relation. His
+wife would not dare trust him, if she knew it; and you have opened my eyes
+but too painfully. And so, in mercy to both, all must be over between us&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, do not say that, Margaret, sister!" broke out Elsie, in a more
+faltering voice than she had ever used in pleading for herself since the
+earliest day of childhood. Margaret did not heed her, if she heard, but
+went on from the point at which she had been interrupted:</p>
+
+<p>"All is over between us, Carlton Brand, at once and forever, unless&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Unless?&mdash;what is the possibility you would yet hold out to me?" and the
+speaker showed more agitation, at that one renewed glimpse of hope, than he
+had done when battling against utter despair.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Unless you will yet obey the summons that has called you with every other
+true son of Pennsylvania to the field, and prove to me that you did not
+know yourself or that you were endeavoring to play a cruel part in
+deceiving your sister and me!"</p>
+
+<p>The face of Carlton Brand had been comparatively calm, ever since the
+coming out of Margaret. Suffer as he might, most of the suffering had been
+hidden. Now that face assumed an aspect that was really fearful to behold.
+The veins on his forehead swelled as if they would burst, his lip set hard,
+his eyes glared as if one touch might have made him a maniac, and his hands
+worked convulsively. All the symptoms of extreme terror and of a repugnance
+which no effort could overcome, were imminent in every glance and motion;
+and something of those phenomena was exhibited which we may suppose the
+Highland seer of old time to have shown, when he was carried beyond himself
+by the invisible powers, and saw battle, defeat and horrible death for
+himself or others, slowly unrolling before his spiritual sight. Elsie Brand
+shuddered and drew back to the column which had before sheltered her.
+Margaret Hayley still stood erect, though she was evidently laboring under
+suppressed excitement, and none could say what the end of this scene might
+be. It was quite a moment before Carlton Brand could command himself
+sufficiently to speak, and then he said in a low, broken voice:</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;I cannot. I cannot kill my poor gray-haired old father with the
+spectacle of the flight and disgrace of his only son."</p>
+
+<p>"And you have decided well," said Margaret. "It is a bitter thing to say,
+but I am glad that you have marked out my course as you have done.
+Think&mdash;oh heaven!" and she seemed indeed to be for the moment addressing
+the powers above instead of those regnant upon the earth&mdash;"think how near I
+came to being this man's wife and the possible mother of his children, each
+one marked with the curse set<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> upon them by their father!" No human ear
+could have heard the whisper which followed: "Enough of disgraces
+descending from parents&mdash;oh, heaven!"</p>
+
+<p>"You are right, Margaret Hayley&mdash;right!" spoke Carlton Brand, his voice
+lower, more hoarse and broken than it had been at any part of the long
+interview. "You have reminded me well of your duty and mine. The day may
+come when you will be sorry for every word that has fallen from your lips;
+but it may not. To-day you are doing right&mdash;let the future take care of
+itself. Good-bye!"</p>
+
+<p>He took the long, slender white fingers in his, and looked upon them a
+minute, the tears at last gathering in his eyes. Then, when through the
+thickening drops he could scarcely see them longer, he raised them to his
+lips, pressed a kiss upon them, dropped the hand and strode off the piazza
+and away, never once looking back as he passed down the path towards the
+gate.</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Hayley had been overstraining both heart and brain, and the
+penalty asserted itself very soon. Her discarded lover was scarcely half
+way down the path when the revulsion came, and pride for the moment broke
+down before her terrible sorrow. The proud neck bent, she stretched out her
+arms after the retreating figure, the single word, "Carlton!" came half
+whispered and half groaned through her lips, her eyes closed, and she sunk
+fainting into the arms of Elsie.</p>
+
+<p>Carlton Brand did not hear the call. A moment, and still without another
+glance at the house where he was leaving behind the happiness of a life, he
+had unloosed the splendid chestnut pawing at the gate, swung himself into
+the saddle and ridden away westward. He reeled a little in his seat as he
+rode, as a drunken man might have done&mdash;that was all the apparent
+difference between the man with a hope who had arrived half an hour before
+and the man who now departed without one.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Kitty Hood and Her School-house&mdash;Dick Compton going
+Soldiering&mdash;A Lovers' Quarrel, a bit of Jealousy, and a
+Threat&mdash;How Dick Compton met his supposed Rival&mdash;An
+Encounter, Sudden Death, and Kitty Hood's terrible
+Discovery.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>"I do not care, Dick Compton! You are a mean, good-for-nothing fellow, and
+the sooner you go away and get killed, the better. I hope I may never set
+eyes on you again, as long as I live."</p>
+
+<p>A pleasant style of address, especially from a pretty woman; and yet one to
+which a good many persons have submitted, first and last, from little
+people whom they could physically have slain with a single stroke and
+mentally discomfited with very little more trouble!</p>
+
+<p>The time of this objurgation was the same morning on which the events took
+place which have already been recorded as occurring at the residence of
+Margaret Hayley, and at a very little earlier hour than that which
+witnessed the departure of Carlton Brand from the place of his signal
+discomfiture. The place was in front of a little country-school-house
+standing half a mile from the Darby road, north-westward, and perhaps two
+miles westward from the Hayleys. The interlocutors were Richard Compton
+(already introduced as "Dick" by the flippant tongue of his companion), a
+young and well-to-do farmer of the neighborhood, about a quarter of a
+century old, perhaps some five feet nine in height, thickset,
+strong-limbed, with a round, good-humored face guiltless of beard but
+browned a good deal by exposure in the field, generally smiling and
+content, but with a spice of the bull-dog in his nature which made him
+sullen occasionally and led him always to be very fond of his own peculiar
+way;&mdash;and Kitty Hood, teacher of the district school of that particular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+section of the Keystone State, a short, round, rosy little lass, with merry
+brown eyes that only occasionally had a sterner kind of mischief in them,
+dark brown waved hair, and just the last general appearance in the world
+that a phrenologist would have selected for the necessarily calm and
+dignified life of an instructress of callow youth.</p>
+
+<p>The old weather-beaten school-house, erected perhaps fifty years before but
+not yet swept away in the prevailing rage for staring new white baby-houses
+for the instruction of children in the country, stood at the base of a
+slight wooded hill, facing southward; a fine old sycamore near the door
+holding the whole house and all its contents in flecked light and shade; a
+group of locusts not far away to the left showing a motley jumble of
+benches beneath, that were evidently the favorite lounging-place of the
+children during play-hours; and a little pond of a hundred or two feet in
+diameter, with one edge half covered with the leaves of the intrusive
+pond-lilies, and the other bordered by a juvenile wharf of stones, old
+boards and bark, supplying the youngsters with a place in which to paddle,
+sail boats and get very wet without any danger of being drowned, in summer,
+and with a reliable though limited skating-ground in winter. Its
+convenience for winter sports could only be imagined, at that season of the
+year when the wild-roses were clambering up the dingy boards of the
+inclosure, to the windows of the school-room; but its inevitable use as a
+part of the great "highway of nations" was too plainly shown by a
+circumstance which, alas!&mdash;at the same moment illustrated the vicissitudes
+of commerce and the necessity for the existence of insurance companies. A
+stately vessel of the mercantile guild, twelve inches in length but with
+the dignity of three masts and each holding spitted on it as a sail nearly
+an entire half-sheet of foolscap paper, had evidently left the little wharf
+during the morning play-hour, freighted for the Spice Islands lying up
+among the pond-lilies, but suffered the fate of many sea-going ships,
+fallen under the power of foul winds or adverse currents, and stranded on
+a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> reef of mud some paces from the shore, from which the ingenuity of her
+factors had not yet been able to release her, and where she lay "keeled
+over" in a manner equally contaminating to her white paper sails and
+unpleasant to her possible passengers. No doubt anxious eyes were meanwhile
+glancing out of the windows, between two leaves of the geography which
+detailed the perils of navigation in the East Indian archipelago, to see
+whether piratical canoes or pirogues did not put off to burn that noble
+vessel and massacre her crew, before noon should give time for any further
+efforts towards her release. Here the course of this narration painfully
+but necessarily loses sight of the good three-master "Snorter, of
+Philadelphia," as many another of the fairy barks launched by inexperienced
+youth disappears from view and is known no more forever; but let us hope
+that this particular venture was floated off at some early "spring tide" of
+play-spell, and that she "came safely to her desired haven!"</p>
+
+<p>Within the little one-story school-house, with its unpainted desks and
+benches of pine, dark with age and scarred by notch and inscription from
+the penknives of half a century of school-boys,&mdash;there was going on, at
+that moment, precisely what may be seen in any school from Windsor to
+Washoe, when the ruling power is temporarily absent. Wilkie painted not
+only from life, but from the inevitable in life, when he drew the "Village
+School in an Uproar;" for mobs have been put down by the military power and
+even savage communities have been made quiet by the exercise of
+powder-and-ball; but no force has yet been discovered that could check (and
+who would wish it to be entirely checked, after all?) the riotous mischief
+of the school-room when the terrible eye is removed! Five minutes before,
+Mistress Hood in the chair of authority, fifty heads of all hues and all
+textures had been more or less closely bent down over book and slate, and a
+low monotonous hum, something like the sleepy drone from a score of
+bee-hives, had been heard floating out on the summer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> air. Now, Mistress
+Kitty Hood had been just two minutes absent from the school-room, and a
+nice little Pandemonium was already established, that it would need some
+birchings and many strong words to annihilate. Half a dozen of the big boys
+had gathered into a knot, not far from the door, and were snickering aloud
+and pointing knowingly towards the point of interest without, with running
+comments on "Miss Hood's beau!" Three little girls, forgetting their sex,
+were playing at leap-frog between and over two of the benches, to the
+disarrangement of their short skirts and the eventual tumbling over of one
+of the benches with a loud clatter. Two or three of the larger girls were
+in close conversation, about what there is no means of knowing except that
+one of them remarked that "it was real indecent and she meant to tell her
+ma!" One boy, who was the possessor of a magnificently national
+handkerchief, had stuck it on the end of the long ruler from the mistress'
+desk, and was going through a dress parade of one, with a feeble whistle as
+music. A young brute was taking the opportunity of pinching the ear of a
+smaller boy, and making him whimper, as a punishment for some previous
+alleged injury. Another had made a pair of spectacles out of blue paper,
+and stuck them on the nose of a little girl on one of the near benches, who
+blushed so rosily that her white dress, blue spectacles and red face quite
+supplied the national colors. And still another, with cheeks marvellously
+distended, was trying whether he could, in the short space of time during
+which the mistress might be absent, manage to choke down three early
+harvest-apples without dying by strangulation or requiring any assistance
+from his companions.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the surroundings of the country school-house, and such was the
+aspect of Kitty Hood's little school-room during her temporary absence. And
+now what was the necessity which had for the moment withdrawn her from her
+charge, and what was the provocation under which the words were uttered,
+given at the commencement of this chapter?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the personal appearance of Dick Compton may go at least a little
+distance towards the explanation. As he stood kicking his foot against the
+lower step of the school-house door and listening to the words of petulance
+which his mistress so plentifully bestowed upon him, it was to be seen that
+while his coat was a sack of ordinary light summer-stuff, looking civil and
+homelike enough, his pants and cap were both gray and military, according
+to the pattern of the Reserves. Under his arm he held a bundle which might
+very easily have contained the coat necessary to make the uniform complete;
+and such was, indeed, the composition of the parcel. Dick Compton, never
+before connected with any military organization, had the night before
+determined to abandon home and the girl he loved, leave other hands to
+gather in the fast ripening harvest, intrust his favorite pair of
+farm-horses to the care of his younger brother and the hands on the farm,
+and make at least a small part of the response to the urgent call of
+Governor Curtin. He had been down to the rendezvous, to sign the roll of
+membership in the Reserves, and to get his uniform, that morning. He was to
+leave with the regiment for Harrisburgh, that evening, and it was on his
+way home to the pleasant farm-house lying a couple of miles northward and
+across the main road leading up from Market street, that he had called at
+the school-house to make his adieux to Kitty Hood, which seemed to be so
+ungraciously received.</p>
+
+<p>They were so indeed. Kitty, from the moment when Compton tapped at the door
+and called her out amid the surprised glances and then the tittering of the
+school-children&mdash;from the moment when she had observed his military cap and
+pants&mdash;had understood the whole story and put herself not only on her
+dignity but her unamiability. She had not smiled even once upon him, or
+allowed him to take her hand, though he reached out for it; and though the
+jolly round face of the school-mistress was not by any means the pattern of
+countenance that could be made stupendously awful by the greatest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> amount
+of effort, yet Kitty had done her best to be royal&mdash;not to say imperial. To
+his explanations she had been worse than the traditional
+"deaf"&mdash;insultingly interrupting; and to his asseverations that the country
+needed the heart and the arm of every true man, she had answered with that
+unromantic but unanswerable word: "fiddlestick!" She had tried wheedling,
+coaxing, scolding, every thing but crying, in the effort to make him forego
+his resolution and take off his name (supposing that he could do such a
+thing) from the roll of the Reserves. She had no doubt, and expressed
+herself to that effect, that if he went to Harrisburgh he would come back
+in a coffin, all cut up into little bits by the savages, or not come back
+at all and have his skull and bones used for a drinking cup and a few
+necklaces by the women of Secessia, or come back in a condition worse than
+either, with both legs cut off close up to the body, one arm gone and his
+skull broken in, and a pretty thing for a respectable young woman to marry!</p>
+
+<p>It was very well, for the sake of his adherence to his patriotic purpose,
+that Dick Compton had in him that dash of bull-dog tenacity to which
+allusion has before been made; for it is not every man to whom such words
+of spiteful prophesy and determined discouragement, coming from the lips of
+a pretty woman who made her own love the excuse for uttering them, would
+have been without their effect. They might as well have been uttered to one
+of the granite gods of old, as to Compton, so far as moving him to any
+change of purpose was concerned; but his temper was by no means of as good
+proof as his determination. In fact, Kitty Hood's spiteful expostulations
+very soon made him ill-natured if not angry; and by the time the
+culmination already recorded was reached, he was quite ready to say, in a
+tone corresponding to her own:</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I <i>will</i> go, Kitty Hood, whether you like it or not. I was a fool
+not to go away without walking a mile further to let you know any thing
+about it."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Nobody asked you!" was the petulant reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody <i>need</i> to ask me, next time!" was the rejoinder. "I have a right to
+be killed, if I please, and it is none of your business whether I am or
+not. A pretty world it would be, with half of it made up of women too weak
+and too cowardly to fight a cat, and the other half of men tied fast of
+their apron strings, so that they had to ask every time they wanted to go
+away, just as one of your little whelps of school-boys whines: 'Please to
+let me go out!'"</p>
+
+<p>Kitty Hood was finding a tongue quite as sharp as her own, by this time,
+and the effect was very much what is often seen in corresponding cases.
+Finding her lover growing as angry as herself, and a little more violent,
+the young school-mistress concluded that it was time to assume a less
+decided demeanor, so that if they must part they might do so without an
+absolute quarrel.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Dick," she said, after a moment of pause, "there is no use of your
+being angry about it!" Just as if she had not been showing ill-temper from
+the beginning&mdash;the minx! "Of course I cannot hold you, and do not wish to
+do so, if you prefer dressing yourself up in that ridiculous manner and
+standing up to be shot at, to remaining here with <i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't <i>prefer</i> it, you know I don't, Kitty!" said Dick, aware that his
+flank of conversation had once more been turned and himself placed in a
+false position.</p>
+
+<p>But here came an interruption. A young gentleman of seven made his
+appearance in the door of the school-room, his hands blacker than the
+proverbial ace-of-spades, his nether raiments spotted, and his face drawn
+into a most comical whimper, while his words came out between a sob and a
+hiccough:</p>
+
+<p>"Please, Miss Hood, won't you come in to Jem Stephenson? He has gone and
+upsot the inkstand all over my hands and spoilt my new trowsers!"</p>
+
+<p>"Go in and keep your seat, you young villain, or I shall flog you and Jem
+Stephenson both!" was the consoling assurance with which the "young
+villain" departed; while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> the hum from the school-room was evidently
+increasing, and the young school-mistress felt that she must indeed soon
+resume the reins of government if she was not to be permanently left
+without a realm worth ruling. But she took time to rejoin to Compton's last
+assertion.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know any thing of the kind. I say that if you thought half as much
+of me as you did of public opinion and making a show of your fine new
+clothes, you would not stir one step."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Kitty, do be reasonable&mdash;" again began Compton.</p>
+
+<p>"Look at other people&mdash;don't <i>they</i> respect the wishes of those they expect
+to marry?" the young lady went on, not heeding his last attempt.
+"See&mdash;there is Carlton Brand&mdash;who does not know that he has remained at
+home ever since the war broke out, though he could have been a Colonel and
+perhaps even a General&mdash;just because he was really in love with Margaret
+Hayley, and she did not wish him to leave her?"</p>
+
+<p>It is scarcely necessary to say, at this stage of the narration, that Miss
+Kitty Hood was "begging the question." She had never heard one word to
+indicate why Carlton Brand had not accepted his opportunities, and she
+merely mentioned the two as people of prominence in the section,
+acquaintances, and the first pair of lovers of whom she happened to think.
+But she had made a terrible blunder, as many of us do at the very moment
+when we seem to be performing the very keenest of operations. Carlton
+Brand&mdash;one of the finest-looking men to be found within a radius of an
+hundred miles, a member of one of the liberal professions, and known to be
+wealthy enough to afford indulgence in any line of life which he might
+happen to fancy&mdash;was naturally an object of envy if not of suspicion to
+hundreds of other young men who did not feel that they possessed quite the
+same advantages. Young farmers, who chanced to catch him saying a polite
+word to their sisters, looked at him through eyes not too confiding, in
+spite of the fact that not even rumor had pointed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> out a single instance in
+which he had indulged in a dishonorable amour; and those who detected him
+in glances of kindness (perhaps of admiration) towards demoiselles whom
+they had marked out as their own destined marital property, had a bad habit
+of even looking out of the corners of their eyes and scowling a little, at
+such manifestations. Carlton Brand, in all this, was only paying a very
+slight penalty for his triple advantage of wealth, position and good looks,
+while many others pay the same unpleasant toll to society for the
+possession of even one (and sometimes none) of the three favors of fortune.</p>
+
+<p>The farm-house of the Comptons and the residence of the Brands (as will be
+hereafter made apparent) lay but a very short distance apart; and the
+little house (perhaps it might with more propriety have been called a
+cottage) in which Kitty Hood had seen the light, and where she lived with
+her quiet widowed mother, was still nearer to the abode of the young
+lawyer. Though the Hoods were much more humbly circumstanced than their
+neighbors, intercourse between the two families had always been frequent,
+with a very pleasant friendship between Elsie and Kitty, and more visits of
+the young girl at the residence of the Brands, and of Carlton, accompanying
+his sister, to that of the Hoods, than at all pleased the lover and
+expectant husband of Kitty. Then the latter had a head a little giddy and a
+tongue more than a little imprudent; and she had shown the bad taste, many
+times since their tacit engagement, to draw comparisons, in the presence of
+her lover, to his disadvantage, and in favor of a man who had much better
+opportunities than the farmer for keeping his clothes unimpeachable, his
+hands unsoiled, and his cheek unbrowned. Only very imprudent people, and
+perhaps very unfeeling ones, use such words; but they are used much too
+often, ignoring the pure gold that may lie within a rough nugget, and
+preferring the mere tinsel leaf on a bit of handsome carving. Kitty Hood
+was one of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> thoughtless, and she was likely, some day, to pay the
+penalty in a manner she little anticipated.</p>
+
+<p>Within the few weeks previous, without Kitty being at all aware of the
+fact, Mr. Dick Compton had allowed himself to ruminate more than was
+healthy upon the glances he had chanced to see interchanged between Kitty
+and her "stuck-up lawyer friend," as he chose to designate him, and upon
+the continual commendations which she chose to bestow on the latter&mdash;until
+rooted personal dislike and something very near to positive jealousy, had
+been the result. Walking over towards the rendezvous that morning, if one
+shadow of hesitation on the subject of going to Harrisburgh had passed
+through the mind of the young farmer, it was caused by his dislike of
+leaving Kitty out of view, with Carlton Brand in the same near
+neighborhood. All that difficulty had been removed by the understanding
+that the lawyer was to leave at the same time and on the same service with
+himself; but when Kitty at once revived the obnoxious name with a new
+phrase of commendation, and signified that the section was not to be
+relieved of the lawyer's presence during his own absence, it is not very
+strange that the unreasonable demons of jealousy began tugging again at his
+heart-strings, and that he felt like performing some severe operation upon
+the Mordecai who sat in his gate, if he could only catch him!</p>
+
+<p>"So you have got to quoting Carlton Brand again, have you!" he responded to
+Miss Kitty's citation. "I thought I had told before that I had heard nearly
+enough of that proud puppy!"</p>
+
+<p>"'Puppy' indeed!" and Miss Kitty fired in an instant. "He's nothing of the
+kind, but a man and a gentleman, and you know it, Dick Compton!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, a <i>gentleman</i>, and that suits you to a turn, Kitty Hood!" was the
+sneering reply. "When your <i>gentlemen</i> are in the way, you think that an
+honest hard-working man is nobody."</p>
+
+<p>If ever a man spoke an unjust word to a woman (and it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> to be feared that
+a great many have been uttered since the unfortunate gift of speech was
+conferred upon the race), Dick Compton was stupidly unjust at that moment.
+For the very quarrel (it was but little else, from first to last) in which
+they were engaged, had originated in the young girl's evident anxiety for
+his safety and pleading that he would not go away and leave her, even for a
+short period! Kitty Hood felt the injustice, if he did not, and all the old
+rage came back again, in a varied form, but hotter than ever. Her eyes
+flashed, she choked for a moment, and then, before Dick Compton could be at
+all aware what was about to happen, the school-mistress drew her little
+white hand back and brought him a ringing box on the ear and cheek, that
+the latter would not be very likely to forget for a fortnight,&mdash;while she
+flashed out:</p>
+
+<p>"Dick Compton, just take that for a fool! You are not worth any honest
+woman's loving, with your mean jealousy. You can go where you please, and I
+will never speak to you again until you learn better manners than to talk
+to <i>me</i> in that manner!"</p>
+
+<p>Before the jealous lover had half recovered from the blow she stepped away
+from him and put her foot on the sill of the door, to re-enter. Compton,
+spite of the tingle in his cheek, did not quite believe in the propriety of
+parting in that manner, when he was just going to the war; and he made a
+step towards her.</p>
+
+<p>"Kitty!&mdash;oh, now, Kitty&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Keep off, Dick Compton! Good-day and good-bye, and nobody cares where you
+go or how long you stay!" was the forbidding rejoinder, as the
+school-mistress swung herself round the jamb of the door and half
+disappeared. Her blood was at fever heat: that of her lover was likely to
+be at the same pitch in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't come back, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I won't!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then I will tell you something, Kitty Hood!" and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> young man was very
+angry and very earnest when he made the threat. "If I can catch Carlton
+Brand before I go away to-night, I will just flog him till he is the
+nearest to a dead man <i>you</i> ever saw,&mdash;and see how you both like it!"</p>
+
+<p>Without another word the young farmer turned and strode round the corner of
+the school-house with his bundle and his indignation, making hasty strides
+up the hill and towards the woods that lay in the direction of his home.
+Kitty Hood saw thus much, and realized that very probably she was looking
+at him for the last time. Then she realized, too, what she had scarcely
+felt before&mdash;that she had been terribly to blame in the quarrel&mdash;that she
+might have been wrecking the happiness of a life by her ill-temper&mdash;and
+that it would never do to let poor Dick go away to the war, so angry at her
+that if killed his last thought would be upon every one else rather than
+her, and that if he returned he would never come near her again&mdash;never!
+Then poor Kitty dropped her head upon her desk, heedless of the only
+partially-hushed Pandemonium around her and the necessity of settling with
+Master Jem Stephenson, spiller of ink and others,&mdash;dropped her head upon
+her desk and sobbed loudly enough for some of the children to be quite
+aware of the fact, so that one of the little boys hazarded the remark,
+<i>sotto voce</i>: "Wonder what is the matter with her!" and a bigger one
+enlightened his ignorance with: "Why, didn't you see? Her beau has got on
+sojer clothes and is going away&mdash;stupid!"</p>
+
+<p>Only a minute or two, and then Kitty Hood could endure the struggle no
+longer. She was very unhappy and not a little penitent. She <i>could</i> not
+remain any longer in the midst of those noisy children: she <i>must</i> go home
+(or elsewhere) and see what facilities fate might yet throw in her way for
+seeing and speaking once more to her angry lover before his departure.
+Perhaps she could even find some means, still, for inducing him to remain,
+and then&mdash;&mdash;. And at that thought the school-mistress raised her head,
+informed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> her school that she had a bad headache and must go home to bed,
+and dismissed them for a half-holiday.</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon one of the larger girls, who had seen the lover go away, without
+hearing any of the parting words, and who thought that she understood all
+about the affair, remarked to one of her companions that: "That was real
+nice, and she thought all the better of Miss Hood for it!" while one of the
+larger boys, unawake as yet to any of the softer feelings, bawled out to
+his mates that: "Miss Hood was going to see her old beau off&mdash;ki-yah!" It
+is painful to be obliged to say, justifying previously-expressed
+apprehension, that even the stranded vessel was forgotten in the haste with
+which the school separated, and that all the imaginary pirates of the
+Society, the Friendly and various other islands that maintained every thing
+else rather than friendly society for sailors, had at least one day more of
+chance at her with their canoes and pirogues.</p>
+
+<p>Her scholars dismissed, Kitty Hood took time to wash and cool her eyes and
+to smooth her hair, for a moment, at the little wash-closet in one corner
+of the school-room&mdash;then flung on her light bonnet and gauzy mantle and
+took her way, walking somewhat rapidly in spite of the heat of the coming
+noon, along the path that led around the base of the hill north-westward
+towards the residence of Carlton and Elsie Brand.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Richard Compton had meanwhile been walking yet more rapidly, with his
+bundle under his arm, up the path leading over the hill, almost due north,
+and through the belt of woods discernible from the school-house. Whether
+the increasing heat of the day added to the heat of his temper is
+uncertain; but certain it is that he did not at all cool down under it. He
+had the excuse of being the party <i>last</i> ill-used, if not indeed the party
+<i>first</i> so treated. He loved Kitty Hood beyond all reason, and he was of
+course the person most likely to grow angry at her and jealous of her,
+beyond all endurance. He felt that he could not worse punish her, or better
+satisfy himself, than by carrying out his threat and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> soundly flogging
+Carlton Brand if he should once catch him under proper circumstances; he
+had no doubt whatever of his ability to flog him or "any other man," when
+he once set about the task; and while surmounting the hill, and even after
+plunging into the cool, thick, leafy woods, full of the twitter of birds
+and the fragrance of June blossoms, which should have had the power to
+soften passion in the breast of any man who held a true sympathy with
+Nature, his mental fists were clenched and his teeth set in a manner most
+threatening for any opposing force with which he might happen to be brought
+into contact.</p>
+
+<p>That "opposing force" was much nearer than the young man at the moment
+imagined. He was just emerging by the path to the main road which he was to
+cross, half a mile before reaching his own farm, when he saw a horseman
+riding rapidly up from the eastward. Intersecting the path just where it
+joined the road, was a blind road leading through the woods across toward
+the Darby, and closed at the entrance by a swinging gate. There was a low
+panel near it, and the young farmer leaped it in preference to unfastening
+the clumsy latch&mdash;finding himself, when beyond the fence, in the presence
+of Carlton Brand, who had just reined in his horse at the gate. Whatever
+there may have been in the face of the horseman at that moment, within a
+few minutes after his leaving the presence of Margaret Hayley and his
+sister, the eyes of Dick Compton were not sufficiently keen to recognize
+it. He only saw the handsome, proud-looking young lawyer, and his old
+antipathy rose, with the remembrance of the threat he had just used,
+accompanying it. Carlton Brand saw nothing more in the face of the young
+farmer than he had been accustomed to see, and accosted him as he might
+have done any other acquaintance, under the same circumstances, with a
+request for a slight service.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, Compton, is that you?&mdash;just be kind enough to throw open that gate for
+me, will you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;I'll not do any thing of the kind. If you want the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> gate open, just
+get off and open it yourself!" was the surly reply, very much to the
+astonishment of the lawyer. His face paled a little, then flushed, and he
+hesitated for an instant before he asked:</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, Richard Compton, by answering me in that manner?"</p>
+
+<p>"What I say!" answered Compton, quite as insolently as before. "You are a
+puppy, Carlton Brand, and I have half a mind to take you off that horse and
+flog you soundly, instead of opening a gate for you."</p>
+
+<p>"The d&mdash;&mdash;l you have!" was the very natural reply. "Well, Dick Compton, I
+do not know what it is all about, but you are behaving very much like a
+ruffian, to a man who has never done any thing worse to you than to treat
+you like a gentleman."</p>
+
+<p>"You lie, Carlton Brand, and you know it!" was the response.</p>
+
+<p>"I lie, do I?" and the speaker shifted a little uneasily in his saddle,
+though he made no apparent movement to alight.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you lie!" said Compton, his voice thick and hoarse with agitation and
+anger. "And if you will get off that horse I will teach you a lesson about
+meddling with other people's property, that you will remember for a
+twelvemonth."</p>
+
+<p>If Carlton Brand's face expressed intense surprise, it was certainly
+nothing more than he felt; for what the "meddling with other people's
+property" could mean, except that he might unwittingly have run across some
+interest of Compton's in the pursuit of his profession, he had no more idea
+than he could have had of the number of trees in the adjoining wood or the
+depth of soil on which his horse was standing. Yet he threw his leg at once
+over the saddle, at the last salutation, sprang to the ground, flung his
+bridle over one of the posts near the gate, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Now then!"</p>
+
+<p>In an instant and without another word, Dick Compton, who had dropped his
+bundle as the other dismounted, sprang<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> at him, fury in his face and the
+clench of determined hostility in every nerve. Probably no battle on earth
+was ever fought so singularly&mdash;the one combatant without the least cause
+for his rage, and the other not even acquainted with the accusation made
+against him. They seemed not badly matched, in physical force, though any
+connoisseur of the exclusively muscular would have considered Compton
+likely to be by far the most enduring. He was fifteen or twenty pounds the
+heavier, and fully trained by field labor; Brand two or three inches the
+taller, athletic, and a little the longer armed.</p>
+
+<p>Half a dozen blows were rapidly exchanged, before either succeeded in
+breaking the guard of the other. Then Compton managed to reach the lawyer's
+cheek, with a blow of some violence that probably stung within quite as
+much as it did without. At all events it brought a new color to his face,
+and from that instant he was cool no longer. He struck out more rapidly and
+angrily, and Compton followed his motion. In less than a minute half a
+dozen blows had reached the faces and bodies of each, and there was a
+probability that, whatever the event of the fight, both would be injured as
+well as disfigured. Suddenly, the instant after, as Compton aimed a
+well-directed blow at the throat of his antagonist, that he believed would
+entirely settle the affair, something happened, upon which he had not
+calculated. Whether his blow was entirely fended he did not know; but what
+he did know, so far as he knew any thing, was that Carlton Brand's right
+fist, dashed out with a force little less formidable than the kick of an
+iron-shod horse, struck him on the left of the nose and the cheek
+adjoining, sending a perfect gore of blood spouting over face and clothing,
+and throwing him reeling backward, stunned and half senseless, to the
+earth,&mdash;the fight over, so far as he was to bear any part in it.</p>
+
+<p>There was only a little sensation left in poor Compton at that juncture,
+but that little cried out against being beaten down in such a manner by a
+man whom he had before considered his inferior in muscular power, and whom
+he had set<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> out to flog. The bull-dog within him wished to rise and make
+another effort, but for a moment his eyes <i>would not</i> open and his head
+would not clear sufficiently for him to make any effort at regaining his
+lost perpendicular. When he thought he heard a groan and a loud "thud" on
+the ground, and he did manage to struggle to a sitting position, the sight
+that met his eyes was nearly sufficient to drive him back into his partial
+insensibility, amazement and horror being about equally compounded in the
+spectacle. Carlton Brand lay at length on the ground, his face set in a
+frightful spasm, a thin white froth issuing from the set lips, the eyes
+closed, and not even a quiver of motion in the limbs. Dick Compton sprang
+up, then, with a supernatural energy born of absolute fright, and bent over
+his prostrate antagonist. To all appearance he was dead!&mdash;dead as if he had
+been lying there for the last century! The frightened farmer put his hand
+to his temples, his pulses and his heart, and found no motion whatever.
+Then the dreadful fear took possession of him that his own last blow, which
+he remembered aiming at the throat of the other, might have taken effect
+there at the same moment when he was himself struck and prostrated&mdash;that
+some vital part of the throat might have been touched and death instantly
+ensued!</p>
+
+<p>To say that Dick Compton was frightened and even horrified at this
+unexpected issue of the pugilistic combat which he had forced, is indeed to
+put the case very mildly. He was literally paralyzed, for the moment, with
+consternation. What was his fate?&mdash;to be a homicide! And&mdash;good God!&mdash;here
+another thought took possession of him. He had left Kitty Hood at the
+school-house, only a little while before, himself angry and in a dangerous
+mood, and with his last words threatening personal violence against Carlton
+Brand! If he should be dead&mdash;and there seemed to be no hope to the
+contrary&mdash;what words of his could ever persuade the school-mistress that he
+had not entertained enough of jealousy and anger against the lawyer to
+desire his death?&mdash;and how far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> would not Kitty's evidence go in proving
+before a criminal court that he was an intentional murderer?</p>
+
+<p>Such reflections are not pleasant, to say the least! A very few of them go
+a great way in a man's life. Those who have been placed, even for one
+moment, in the belief that they have suddenly become homicides, need not be
+told how far beyond all other horrors is the feeling: those who have missed
+the sensation, may thank God with all reverence for having spared them one
+of the untold agonies which belong only to the damned!</p>
+
+<p>Dick Compton was not one of the most delicate of men, either in action or
+perception, but he was a good fellow in the main, with quite enough of
+intuition to foresee the worst perils of a situation, and with quite enough
+of presence of mind to act quickly in a desperate emergency. There was yet
+no breath or motion in the prostrate man: he would die very soon if not
+already dead: something might yet be done for him: but that something, if
+done at all, must be done at once. Besides, if death should prove to be
+real, he would himself be a little better circumstanced if found trying to
+preserve the life of his antagonist, than if discovered to have let him die
+without effort. A mile to the westward, and at the side of the very road at
+the edge of which he was standing, was the residence of one of the two
+doctors of the immediate section, and medical assistance might be procured,
+with the aid of the fallen man's horse, in a brief period.</p>
+
+<p>With this thought in mind, and in far less time after the occurrence of the
+catastrophe than it has needed to put it upon record, Dick Compton had
+unfastened the horse of Carlton Brand from the post, swung himself into the
+saddle, and was galloping away westward, a little doubtful in mind whether
+he was indeed going after a doctor or looking for a convenient gallows and
+a hangman,&mdash;and wishing, from the bottom of his soul, that he had never
+entertained quite so good an opinion of his personal prowess as that which
+had led him into such a terrible position. Once, as he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> galloped on, he
+caught sight of his new military trowsers, and found himself thinking
+whether, when they hung soldiers, they allowed them to retain their uniform
+or subjected them to the degrading alternative of the prison gray! And that
+is all, of the very peculiar reflections of Mr. Dick Compton as he sped
+away after the doctor, that needs to be put upon record.</p>
+
+<p>Kitty Hood, meanwhile, leaving the school-house perhaps ten minutes after
+her lover, had sped along the path at the base of the woods, intent on
+going over to the residence of the Brands and seeking advice, if not
+assistance, from Elsie, in her dilemma. She had quite overcome her anger,
+now, and taken into her young heart a full supply of that which very often
+follows the former&mdash;anxiety; and her feet moved as glibly, in the better
+cause of reconciliation, as her tongue had done not long before in a very
+unreasonable lovers' quarrel.</p>
+
+<p>The path she was pursuing would have led her out to the main road, which
+she must cross to reach the Brands', some half a mile further west than the
+point at which the gate gave access to the blind road through the wood. But
+there was a little spot of marshy ground before reaching the road; she
+remembered that her shoes were thin and that wet feet were disagreeable
+even in June, and as a consequence she struck into a cross path which
+intersected the blind road and would bring her out at the gate. As a
+secondary consequence, she followed that road and came out a minute after
+at the gate, to open it without observing what lay beyond, and to start
+back with a scream of affright as she saw the body of Carlton Brand lying
+on the green sward without, his face still set in that terrible contortion,
+and the rigidity of death alike in limb and feature.</p>
+
+<p>The young girl had seen but little of death, and not yet learned to regard
+it rather as a deliverance than otherwise; and in any shape it frightened
+her. How natural, then, that she should regard it with peculiar horror when
+she came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> upon it alone, by a wood-side, and in the person of an
+acquaintance equally admired and respected! But what must have been her
+feelings when, the moment after, and before she had commanded herself
+sufficiently to do more than utter that single scream of terror, she saw a
+bundle lying near the apparently dead man, saw blood staining one of his
+hands and the grass beside him, and recognized the bundle as the same she
+had seen, not half an hour before, under the arm of Richard Compton!</p>
+
+<p>If that unfortunate young man, on discovering the supposed extent of his
+mishap, had remembered the threat against the lawyer made but a little
+while before to Kitty, how did that threat spring into her mind on seeing
+the blood and recognizing the bundle! Murder, beyond a doubt, and Dick
+Compton the murderer! The two had met, accidentally, had quarrelled, had
+clenched, and in that clench her lover had forgotten all except his
+jealousy and fear of the lawyer, and had killed him outright! Oh, here was
+trouble, indeed, to which that of a few moments previous had been but the
+merest shadow! Dick would be arrested, tried, imprisoned, perhaps hung; and
+<i>she</i> would be obliged to give the fatal evidence that must seal his doom!
+Terrible indeed&mdash;most terrible!&mdash;the thought culminating in such mental
+suffering that the poor girl scarcely knew whether she was treading upon
+earth or air, as she took one more look upon the motionless form, the
+blood, and the accusing bundle that lay beside&mdash;then turned her back with a
+shudder upon all, crossed the road and hastened over the fields beyond, by
+a bye-path that would lead her to the home of the murdered man&mdash;her errand
+now, and her reason for haste, how different from what it had been when
+walking towards, the same destination but a few moments before!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">The Residence of the Brands&mdash;Robert Brand and Dr. Philip
+Pomeroy&mdash;Radical and Copperhead&mdash;A passage-at-arms that
+ended in a Quarrel&mdash;Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper&mdash;The
+Shadow of Shame&mdash;Father and Daughter&mdash;The Falling of a
+Parent's Curse.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Half a mile northward from the Market street road which has already been
+before so many times alluded to&mdash;on the north side of that road and at the
+distance of a mile westward from the Hayley residence, was located that
+before mentioned as the abode of the Brands. It was a fine old house, built
+fifty or sixty years before, but within a few years repaired and rebuilt
+with a lavish disregard of cost, a railed promenade having been added at
+the apex of the steep roof, the whole two stories of height re-enclosed,
+the windows and doors comparatively modernized, the piazzas remodelled and
+widened, and all done that the carpenter's art could well be expected to
+achieve, to add to the comfort and durability of the mansion without
+destroying the appearance of respectable age which it had already put on.
+The house stood facing southward upon nearly level ground, the lawn in
+front of good depth and thickly dotted with forest and other shade trees
+that had evidently known all the years of the building; while from the
+eastern side a narrow lane ran down to the road and afforded ingress and
+egress to carriages passing back towards the handsomely-grouped range of
+outbuildings in the rear. Adjoining this lane and behind the house was a
+large garden, with grape trellises and many of the appliances of luxury in
+horticulture.</p>
+
+<p>At the eastern end of the piazza a broad single door opened into the
+somewhat antiquated hall; and from that hall a door opened into a parlor
+fitted up with every appliance of convenience<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> that could be needed in such
+a country residence. Behind that parlor another door opened into a smaller
+apartment correspondingly fitted but with more of those belongings
+calculated to show its constant occupancy; and from that rear room still
+another door opening to the left disclosed a bed-room of comfortable
+appearance and tasteful arrangement. On the other side of the hall the
+dining and domestic apartments stretched away, while the spacious upper
+story supplied rooms to other members of the family.</p>
+
+<p>It was very evident, at a glance, that wealth presided over the modernized
+old house, and that good taste was not forgotten; and yet an impression
+could not well be avoided that there must be something of severity, and
+repugnance to ornament, conjoined with the wealth. Poverty, or even
+struggling pride, would not have afforded so much of the best: warm taste
+and lavish liberality would have supplied something more of the costly and
+the luxurious.</p>
+
+<p>In the second of the rooms mentioned&mdash;that immediately in the rear of the
+parlor, two persons were in conversation at about noon of the same day of
+the occurrences previously recorded. The one, sitting in an easy-chair with
+his right leg raised and resting upon another chair crowned with a
+pillow,&mdash;was apparently sixty-five to seventy years of age; tall, if his
+proportions could properly be judged as he sat, with a figure that must
+have been robust in its time; the hair so nearly white as to preclude any
+idea of the color which it might have worn in earlier days; the face well
+cut and even handsome for its age, though with a shade of severity in the
+firm nose and shaven lips, which under some circumstances might grow
+threatening; but any accurate judgment of his character rendered difficult,
+by the look of pain stamped upon his face by evident bodily suffering.
+Resting against a small table partially covered with bandages and
+embrocations, was a stout cane, indicating both that the invalid was in the
+habit of using a support of that character, and that he could not, even
+now, be entirely confined to his chair. Such was Robert<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> Brand, owner of
+the mansion into which we have been introduced, and father of two children
+apparently as little alike in nature as in sex&mdash;Carlton and Elsie Brand.</p>
+
+<p>The second figure was quite as well deserving of notice as the old man in
+his easy-chair. Doctor Philip Pomeroy, who was at that moment pacing up and
+down the room without any apparent cause for that violent exercise in warm
+weather, was a man in whom the acute physiognomist might have found
+something illustrated by that seemingly listless motion&mdash;something
+possessed in common by restless men, in the superior animal kingdom, and
+those bears and hyenas which seem to traverse a great many unnecessary
+miles in travelling up and down the bars of their cages, in the inferior.
+And yet the doctor could not have been called, with any propriety, an
+"animal-looking man"&mdash;it was the motion which supplied the comparison. He
+was apparently forty-five to fifty, tall and slight figured, with face
+clean shaven except a heavy dark moustache, features a little aquiline and
+decidedly sharp lips that suggested an occasional sneer and a word cutting
+like a scimetar, eyes of keen scintillant dark brown or black, and rather
+long dark straight hair through which the threads of silver began to show
+more as an ornament than a disadvantage. A very fine looking man&mdash;a man of
+undoubted power and will&mdash;a man who had evidently enjoyed the most
+favorable associations; and yet how nearly a man to be either braved or
+trusted without reserve, it might have needed Lavater's self to decide on a
+brief acquaintance. That same Lavater, if acquainted with the peculiarities
+of road turn-outs, would have decided one point, at least, from the vehicle
+that stood in the lane, near the door&mdash;no clumsy and cumbersome gig,
+weighing an indefinite number of tons and set down as the proper conveyance
+for doctors from the day when the first one grew too lazy to walk,&mdash;but a
+light, sporting-looking buggy, seated for one, and suggesting fast driving
+quite as much as the high-blooded, thorough-bred bay that champed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> his bit
+before it and stamped impatiently for the coming of his master.</p>
+
+<p>From the medical character of the visitor and the disabled appearance of
+the man in the easy-chair, it might have been concluded that the call was a
+professional one; and such was indeed the fact. An injury to the right limb
+of Robert Brand, received many years before, had a habit of asserting
+itself at uncertain periods, crippling him materially all the while, and at
+those particular times throwing him into all those agonies indifferently
+known as the pangs of neuralgia and inflammatory rheumatism. At such
+periods, the traditional character of the "gouty old Admiral" of the
+English stage, always limping and thumping a heavy cane, and nearly always
+venting words more forcible than polite, was very nearly illustrated in the
+old gentleman, his desire for active motion being generally in an inverse
+ratio to the power of movement. Dr. Pomeroy, one of the most skilful of the
+physicians of the section, and a man in very extensive practice, was always
+his medical adviser at such times, and re-directed the application of those
+warm flannels and neutralizing embrocations which constituted all that even
+science could do for the alleviation of his sufferings, and about which old
+Elspeth the housekeeper knew a good deal more, all the while, than any
+physician could possibly do. For the three days previous, Robert Brand had
+been suffering to a most painful degree, and this was the third of the
+daily visits of the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>But whatever might have been the professional character of the visit, it
+had, before the moment when our attention is called to the two
+interlocutors, lost any feature which could have marked it as such. Robert
+Brand was a patriot, almost equally warm-hearted and hot-headed in the type
+of his attachment to his country; while Dr. Pomeroy was one of those
+quasi-loyalists, popularly called "Copperheads," who have the love of
+country quite as often on their lips as the most unshrinking war-advocate
+can do, but who prefer to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> show that love by objecting to every effort made
+for the preservation of nationality, by denouncing, in every nine words out
+of ten, something done by the loyal government, while only the poor tenth
+is kept for a wail over the unfortunate character of the "civil war,"&mdash;and
+by undervaluing every success won by the Union arms, while every momentary
+advantage gained by the rebels is correspondingly magnified. He seemed to
+take particular delight, always, in tormenting the old gentleman just to
+the verge of a positive rupture without quite causing one; and just now, in
+the advance of the rebel forces into Pennsylvania, he found a golden
+opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>"Bah!" he said, in response to a strongly patriotic expression of his
+patron, which had led him to bring down one of his hands upon the disabled
+leg with a force causing a new tingle in that limb and a new expression of
+agony upon his face&mdash;"bah! All you hot-headed people, young and old, use
+just such language, all the while. It amounts to nothing, except that
+perhaps it eases your minds. Saying that 'the Union must and shall be
+preserved,' and prophesying all kinds of good things for the nation, amount
+to but very little while a set of incapables sit filling their pockets at
+Washington (more than half of them traitors, in my opinion), while the army
+is worse mismanaged than it could be if a set of school-boys led it, and
+while the enemies you affect to despise are really winning every thing and
+overrunning the whole country."</p>
+
+<p>"Out upon you, Dr. Pomeroy!" cried the old man, angrily. "You dare to call
+yourself a patriot, and talk in that manner! There are plenty of fools at
+Washington, but I would rather see fools there than traitors! If you are
+not a perfect block-head, you know that the rebels have lost twice as much
+as they have gained, within the past year, and that if the fight goes on in
+the same manner for one year more, the miserable mongrel concern will die
+of its own weakness! But you do not <i>want</i> it to die&mdash;that is just what
+ails <i>you</i>!&mdash;you would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> rather see Jeff Davis in the Capitol than any loyal
+man who would not give all the offices to your miserable broken-down
+party!"</p>
+
+<p>"And you would rather see the whole country lying in ruins, with heaps of
+dead everywhere and the few who remain starving to death in the midst of
+them, than that the country should be in any other hands than those of your
+friends who do nothing else than talk about the nigger, legislate for the
+nigger, and fight for the nigger!" answered the doctor, still continuing
+his walk, and his face showing decided temper.</p>
+
+<p>"It is false, and you know it, Philip Pomeroy!" said the invalid, with a
+motion of his hand towards the big cane, which indicated that he would have
+liked to use it by breaking it over the doctor's head.</p>
+
+<p>"It is true, and <i>you</i> know it, Robert Brand!" replied the doctor, whose
+temper seemed to return to its equanimity the moment he had succeeded in
+throwing his patient into a sufficient rage. "But you need not take so much
+pains to conceal your opinions, old gentleman! <i>I</i> don't! If the country is
+to lie under the control of men who only legislate and fight for the
+nigger, who trample upon the Constitution and fill Fort McHenry and Fort
+Lafayette and Fort Warren with better men than themselves, who do not
+happen to think and act precisely as <i>they</i> do,&mdash;why, the sooner that Jeff
+Davis, or any one else, gets possession, the better for all concerned."</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor Pomeroy, you ought to be taken and hung, with the other traitors,
+and I shouldn't much mind having a pull at the rope!" broke out the old
+man, now almost entirely beside himself with indignation.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know that!" answered the doctor, whose temper was still visibly
+improving as that of his patient grew worse. "Any of your abolition pack
+would have helped to hang every democrat, long ago, if they had only
+<i>dared</i>! The only trouble is that they did not do it while they had the
+opportunity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> Now it is too late. You daren't open the doors of your
+State-prisons any more, unless it is to let somebody <i>out</i>! And before many
+days some of you will sing a different tune&mdash;take my word for it. Some of
+you radicals, even here at Philadelphia, will try to make the Confederate
+leaders believe that you have been the truest friends of the South, all the
+while."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean, you scoundrel?" asked the old gentleman, whose harsh
+words to a man somewhat younger than himself appeared to be fully
+understood and not taken in quite the sense which they might have borne to
+other ears.</p>
+
+<p>"I mean that Lee will take Harrisburgh, and that next he will take
+Philadelphia; then&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Take Purgatory! He can never take Harrisburgh, let alone Philadelphia!"</p>
+
+<p>"He can and will take it! What is to hinder him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just what has hindered his taking Washington, any time the last two
+years&mdash;better troops than his own, and more of them."</p>
+
+<p>"Sheep before butchers'-dogs! The men of the North have never gone into the
+war at all, and they never will go. That scum which you call an army cannot
+fight the earnest and determined men of the South, and you ought to know
+it. Within a week Lee will be in Philadelphia, and then we will see about
+the change of tune!"</p>
+
+<p>"Within a week, if he dares advance, he will be eaten up by the State
+militia alone, even if the Army of the Potomac does not save them the
+trouble!" said the old man.</p>
+
+<p>"The Army of the Potomac has been good for nothing ever since Hooker
+blundered its last opportunity away at Chancellorsville!" retorted the
+physician. "The army has no confidence in <i>him</i>, and the country has no
+confidence either in him or the army. The State militia will vigorously
+stay at home, or they will behave so badly after they go out, that they had
+much better kept where nobody saw them! Oh, by the way!&mdash;" and the face of
+the doctor lit up with a new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span> expression. A sneer settled itself upon his
+well-formed lips, and there came into his scintillant eyes a gleam of
+deadly dislike which boded no good to the subject of which he was about to
+speak. He might have been only half in earnest, before, while driving the
+old man wild with his Copperhead banter; but he was certainly interested in
+what he was about to say, now!</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" asked the patient, querulously, as he saw that some new topic was
+to interlard that which had already been so unpleasant.</p>
+
+<p>"That State militia you were talking about," said the doctor. "Your son was
+expected to take up his old commission and go out with one of the
+regiments, was he not?"</p>
+
+<p>"He was not only expected to do so, but he has done so!" answered the
+father, with love and pride in his eyes. "Not all the people in the country
+are either Copperheads or cowards, doctor; and I am proud to tell you that
+if <i>I</i> am too old and too much crippled to take part in the battles of my
+country, or even to get up and break my cane over your head when you insult
+the very name of patriotism,&mdash;I have a son who when his opportunity comes
+can do the one and will do the other!"</p>
+
+<p>"When his 'opportunity' comes!" echoed the doctor, sneeringly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, his opportunity!" re-echoed the father, who felt that there was
+something invidious in the tone, though he could not read that face which
+might have given him a better clue to the character of the man with whom he
+was dealing. "My son has been too much hampered with business before, to
+accept any of the chances which have been offered him; but now that his
+native State is invaded, business is thrown by and you will find him, sir,
+keeping up the honor of the name."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph!" said the doctor, pausing in his walk and for some unexplainable
+reason going to the window and looking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> out; so that he stood with his back
+to the old gentleman. "Where is your son, now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where? Gone down to the rendezvous to take his commission, of course, as I
+understand that the troops will leave to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph!" once more said the doctor, in the same insolent tone and retaining
+his position at the window. "And yet I happen to know that your son has
+discovered some new '<i>business</i>,' (with a terribly significant emphasis on
+the last word) and that he is not going one step with the regiment."</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Pomeroy, I know better!" was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Brand, I know what I am talking about, a good deal better than you
+imagine!" sneered the doctor, who having by that time managed to get his
+face into that shape which he had no objection to being seen by his
+patient, now turned about and faced him, with his hands under the tails of
+his coat.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What</i> do you know?" was the inquiry, a little trouble blending with the
+anxiety in the face.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I will tell you, as perhaps you may as well learn the fact from me
+as from any one else," answered the doctor, his tones now very smooth, and
+his manner almost deferential, as should be the demeanor of any man towards
+his victim at the moment of stabbing him under the fifth rib. "I had
+occasion to call at the armory of the Reserves, an hour or two ago, to set
+the broken arm of one of the fellows who had taken too much Monongahela in
+anticipation of his start, and fallen down-stairs. I learned there and
+then, with some surprise and not a little grief (the father ought to have
+caught the expression of his face at that moment, and thereby measured the
+"grief" indicated!) that Mr. Carlton Brand had been down at the armory,
+alleged his <i>business</i> to be such that he could not possibly leave the
+city, and declined any further connection whatever with the regiment."</p>
+
+<p>"It is impossible!" said the father.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It is true, however, like a good many impossible things!" again sneered
+the physician. "And I have been thinking whether some others of members of
+the State militia would not be found like your amiable son&mdash;too <i>busy</i> to
+pay any attention to the defence of the State!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Pomeroy!" said the father, after one moment of almost stupefied
+silence. "Dr. Pomeroy, you have not been friends with my son for a long
+time, and I know it, though I do not know what could have caused any
+disagreement. But I do not suppose you would deliberately tell a falsehood
+about him that could be detected in half an hour; and I want to know what
+there is hidden in your words, more than you have chosen to convey."</p>
+
+<p>"You had better ask your son when he comes!" was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;I ask <i>you, now</i>, and I think you had better answer me!" said the old
+man.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then," answered the doctor, "if you insist upon it, my love for the
+young man is not so warm as to give me a great deal of pain in the telling,
+and you may know all you wish. Your son has been doubted a little, ever
+since the breaking out of the war, from his repeated refusals of positions
+in the army; and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The man who says that my son is disloyal, lies!" cried the old man,
+interrupting him. "You, or any other man!"</p>
+
+<p>"It was not on the ground of his <i>disloyalty</i> that he was suspected!"
+sneered the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"And what ground then?" asked the father, his face and his whole manner
+showing something terrible within that could be only partially suppressed.</p>
+
+<p>"The ground of his <i>cowardice</i>, since you will have it!" spoke the doctor,
+in such a tone of fiendish exultation as Mephistopheles may have used to
+Faust, at the moment of assuring him that the last hope of happiness on
+earth or pardon from heaven had been swept away in the slaughter of
+Valentine and the moral murder of Marguerite. "There is not an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> officer in
+the Reserves, who heard him refuse to join the regiment this morning, but
+believes him&mdash;yes, <i>knows</i> him, to be an arrant poltroon."</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor Philip Pomeroy, you are a liar as well as a traitor and a
+scoundrel! If I had two legs, and still was, as I am, old enough to be your
+father, you would not leave this house without broken bones! Get out of it,
+send me your bill to-morrow, or even to-day, and never let me see you set
+foot in it again while I live!"</p>
+
+<p>The face of the old man was fearful, at that juncture. In spite of the pain
+of his disabled limb, he had grasped his cane and struggled to a standing
+position, before concluding his violent words; and as he concluded, passion
+overcame all prudence, and the heavy cane went by the doctor's head,
+crashing through the window and taking its way out into the garden, at the
+same moment when his limb gave way and he sunk back into his chair with a
+groan that was almost a shriek, clutching at the bell-rope that hung near
+him and nearly tearing it from its fastenings.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Pomeroy said not another word, whatever he might have felt. He had
+dodged the flying cane, by not more than an inch, and such chances are not
+likely to improve the temper of even the most amiable. For one instant
+there was something in his face that might have threatened personal revenge
+of the violence as well as the unpardonable words, in spite of the
+difference of age: then the sneer crept over his face again, he stepped out
+through the parlor into the hall, took his hat, and the next moment was
+bowling down the lane into the road, behind his fast-trotting bay. It
+seemed likely that his last professional visit to the Brands had been paid,
+even if it had not yet been paid for!</p>
+
+<p>The terrible appeal of the master of the house to the bell-rope at his hand
+was answered the moment after by the appearance of a woman of so remarkable
+an aspect as to be worthy of quite as much attention as either of the
+personages who have before been called, in the same room, to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> reader's
+attention. Her dress was that of a housekeeper or upper servant, though the
+height of her carriage and the erectness of her figure might have stamped
+her as an empress. And in truth that figure did not need any such
+extraordinary carriage to develop it, for, as compared with the ordinary
+stature of woman, it was little else than gigantic. The man who built a
+door for Elspeth Graeme, less than six feet in the clear, subjected her to
+imminent danger of bringing up with a "bump" every time she entered it; and
+her broad, square, bony figure showed that all the power of her frame had
+not been frittered away in length. Her hands were large and masculine,
+though by no means ill-shaped, and her foot had not only the tread supposed
+to belong to that of the coarser sex, but very nearly its size. In face she
+was broad yet still longer of feature, with hair that had been light brown
+before the gray sifted itself so thickly among it as to render the color
+doubtful,&mdash;with eyes of bluish gray, a strong and somewhat coarse mouth
+with no contemptible approach to a moustache of light hairs bristling at
+the corners,&mdash;and with complexion wrinkled and browned by the exposures of
+at least sixty years, until very nearly the last trace of what had once
+been youth and womanhood was worn away and forgotten. Yet there was
+something very good and very kindly amid the rugged strength of the face;
+and while little children might at the first glance have feared the old
+woman and run away from her as a "witch," they would at the second
+certainly have crept back to her knees and depended upon a protection which
+they were certain to receive.</p>
+
+<p>It is only necessary, to say, in addition, that she was Scottish by birth
+as well as by blood and name&mdash;that she had come to this country nearly
+forty years before, when Robert Brand was a young man, and attached herself
+to the fortunes of the family because they were Scottish by blood and she
+was the very incarnation of faithful feudality&mdash;that his daughter had been
+named Elspeth (since softened to Elsie) at her earnest desire, because she
+said the name was "the bonniest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> ava" and she had herself been named after
+a noble lady who bore it, in her own land, and who had done much to give
+her that upright carriage by standing as her god-mother&mdash;and that for many
+a long year, now, she had been the working head of the Brand household,
+scarcely more so since the death of its weak, hysterical mistress, a dozen
+years before, than while she was alive and pretending to a management which
+she never understood.</p>
+
+<p>If any one person beneath that roof, more legitimately than another,
+belonged to the family and felt herself so belonging, that person was
+Elspeth Graeme; and if something of the romantic, which the stern sense of
+the father would have been slow to approve, had grown up in both his
+children, it was to the partial love of Elspeth and her stories of Scottish
+romance, poetry, history, song and superstition, carrying them away from
+prosaic America to the wimpling burns and haunted glens of the land from
+which their blood had been derived,&mdash;that such a feeling, fortunate or
+unfortunate as the future might prove, was principally to be credited.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ring, sir? Ech, Lord, the mon's deein'!" were the two very
+different exclamations made by Elspeth as she entered the room, after the
+departure of the doctor, and caught sight of the situation in which the
+master seemed to be lying.</p>
+
+<p>"No, Elspeth, I am not 'deein' as you call it," he growled out, when the
+pain of his exertion had again somewhat subsided and he could find breath
+for words. "But I wish I was! Is that cursed doctor gone?"</p>
+
+<p>"He was gettin' to his carriage the minute, and he's awa by this," answered
+the housekeeper. "But what ava has he been doin' to ye? Murderin' ye
+maybe!&mdash;they're a dolefu' uncanny set, the doctors!"</p>
+
+<p>"If you ever see that man here again, and you don't have him shot or set
+the dog on him, out of the house you go, neck and crop, the whole pack of
+you&mdash;do you hear!" was the reply to Elspeth's comment on the medical
+profession.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Just as ye say, master," said Elspeth. "I'll set Carlo at him myself, if
+ye say so; and wo but the brute will just worry him, for he does na like
+him and is unco fond of snappin' aboot his heels!"</p>
+
+<p>"Where is Elsie?" was the next question.</p>
+
+<p>"Gone over to Mistress Hayley's the mornin'. Can I do any thing for your
+leg, sir?&mdash;for the wench in the kitchen's clean daft, and I'll be wanted
+there, maybe."</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;you can do nothing. My leg is better. But send Elsie to me the moment
+she comes in."</p>
+
+<p>"Hark!" said the housekeeper, as a light foot sounded on the piazza and
+came in through the hall. "There's the lassie hersel&mdash;I ken her step among
+a thousand. I'll just send her in to you the moment she has thrawn aff her
+bonnet." And the old woman departed on her errand.</p>
+
+<p>There must have been an acuteness beyond nature, in the ears of old
+Elspeth, if she indeed knew the tread of the young girl; for her step, as
+she entered the room, was so slow, laggard and lifeless, so unlike the
+usual springing rapidity of her girlish nature, that even her lover might
+have been pardoned for failing to recognize it. It was as if some crushing
+weight fettered her limbs and bowed down her brow. And a crushing weight
+indeed rested upon her&mdash;the first unendurable grief of her young life&mdash;the
+knowledge of her only brother's shame. Robert Brand marked the slow step
+and saw the downcast head; and little as he could possibly know of the
+connection of that demeanor with the subject of his previous thought, it
+was not of that cheerful and reassuring character calculated to restore the
+lost equanimity of a man insulted in the tenderest point of his honor and
+chafed beyond human endurance. His first words were rough and peremptory:</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you move in that manner, girl, when you come to see <i>me</i>? I do not
+like it&mdash;do not let me see any more of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I was coming, father!" was poor Elsie's only answer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"So I see&mdash;at the rate of ten feet an hour! What is the matter with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing?&mdash;do not tell me that, girl! I know better, or you would never
+carry that gloomy face and move as if you were going to your grandmother's
+funeral!"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed there is nothing the matter with me, father; but there soon will
+be, if you scold me!" and the young girl, making a terrible effort to be
+cheerful, came up to his side, put her arm around his neck and pressed her
+lips to his forehead with a movement so pure and fond that it might have
+softened Nero at the moment of ordering his last wholesale murder. It
+partially disarmed the pained and querulous father. He put his arm around
+the daughter's waist, returned the pressure and seemed to be soothed for a
+moment by resting his head against the bosom that pressed close to him. But
+the demon that had been roused could only sleep thus temporarily. Directly
+he put her away, though not roughly, looked her full in the face, and
+asked:</p>
+
+<p>"Where is your brother?"</p>
+
+<p>"You know he went down to town this morning, and he has not yet come home,"
+was the reply, with an effort not by any means a successful one, to keep
+the voice from quavering. The practised ear of the father detected the
+difference between that intonation and the usual unembarrassed utterance of
+his daughter; and he naturally connected it at once with the restraint of
+her manner, and noticed an evasion in her answer that might otherwise have
+escaped him.</p>
+
+<p>"I know he has not come home," he said. "But that was not my question. You
+have been at Mrs. Hayley's where he spends quite as much of his time as
+here. Have you seen him?"</p>
+
+<p>Elsie Brand would have given the proudest feature of her personal
+adornment, at that moment, to be able to lie! She saw that some undefined
+anxiety with reference to her brother must have moved her father's repeated
+questions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> and naturally she feared the worst&mdash;that Carlton's mad words
+had indeed been overheard, and that even in that brief space of time some
+messenger of evil had travelled fast and betrayed the fatal secret. If so,
+the storm was about to burst on the devoted head of her brother, not the
+less deadly because she must bear the first brunt of its violence.
+Yes&mdash;Elsie Brand would almost have given her right hand to be able to lie
+at that moment. But her education had been as true as was her nature, and
+she managed to falter out, yet more suspiciously:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, father!"</p>
+
+<p>"And you <i>dared</i> to trifle with me, girl, when I asked you a plain
+question?" and Robert Brand grasped his daughter by the arm so forcibly
+that she nearly screamed with the violent pressure, and tears did indeed
+start to her eyes as she sobbed out&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I did not mean to trifle with you, father. I only thought&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You thought that when I asked one question, I meant another, did you?" and
+the face that looked upon her was set, hard and very stern. "You had better
+not try the experiment again, if you do not wish to suffer for it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, father!" and the young girl, enough broken before, now wept outright.
+But he stopped her, very roughly.</p>
+
+<p>"No bawling! not a whimper! Now listen to me. You have seen your brother
+since morning&mdash;since he went down to the rendezvous."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, father."</p>
+
+<p>"You saw him at Mrs. Hayley's."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, father."</p>
+
+<p>"And he came there to bid Margaret good-bye, before he went away, and you
+are such a miserable whining school-girl that you are making all this fuss
+about his absence. Is that the fact? Speak!" He still held her arm, though
+his grasp was less painful than it had been at first; and his eyes looked
+upon her with such a steady, anxious, almost fearful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> gaze, that it would
+have driven away the second temptation to falsehood, even had such a
+temptation once obtained power. There was nothing for it, at that moment,
+but to speak the truth so far as compelled.</p>
+
+<p>"No, father. Carlton is not going away." The last three words were uttered
+so low, and so tangled up among the sobs that she had not been able
+entirely to check, that they might not have been distinguishable except to
+the preternaturally acute ear of the suspicious father.</p>
+
+<p>"He is not going? Why?" The first words were harsh and loud&mdash;the last one
+was almost thunder, easily heard, if any one was listening, over the whole
+house. Before it the young girl shook like an aspen and broke out into
+fresh sobs as she attempted to answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Because&mdash;because his business will not allow&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Because he is <i>a coward!</i> Answer me that question, girl, or never speak to
+me again while you live!" Robert Brand had apparently forgotten all his
+pain and risen from his chair, still holding his daughter's arm, as he
+hurled out the interrogation and the threat. Poor Elsie saw that he knew
+all, too surely; further dissembling was useless; and she dropped upon her
+knees, that iron grasp still upon her arm, lifted up both her hands, and
+piteously moaned&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that is the reason! Oh, how did you hear it? Kill <i>me</i>, father, if
+you will, but do not kill poor Carlton! He cannot help it&mdash;indeed he
+cannot!"</p>
+
+<p>They were fearful words that immediately thereafter fell from the lips of
+Robert Brand&mdash;words that no provocation should ever tempt a father to
+utter, but words which have been plentifully showered on the heads of the
+shamed or the disobedient, by the thoughtless or the unmerciful, who
+arrogated to themselves God's power of judgment and retribution, through
+all the long ages.</p>
+
+<p>"Get up, girl, if you do not wish me to forget that you are not yourself
+the miserable hound for whom you are pleading!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, father!" broke again from the lips of the frightened girl, who did not
+move from her kneeling position.</p>
+
+<p>"Get up, I say, or I will strike you with this cane as I would a dog!"</p>
+
+<p>Elsie Brand staggered to her feet, she knew not how, but stood bowed before
+the stern judge in an attitude of pleading quite as humble and pitiful as
+that of prayer. The next words that fell upon her ears were not addressed
+to her, but seemed to be spoken for others' hearing than those who dwell in
+tenements of clay, while the voice that uttered them trembled in mingled
+grief and indignation, and the disabled frame shook as if it had been
+racked with palsy.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>My</i> son a coward! a miserable poltroon to be pointed at, spat upon, and
+whipped! <i>My</i> blood made a shame in the land, by the one whom I trusted to
+honor it! God's blackest and deepest curse&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, father! father!" broke in the young girl in a very wail of agony so
+pitiful that it must have moved any heart not calloused for the moment
+against all natural feeling, but that availed nothing to stop the impending
+curse or even to lower the voice that uttered it.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;God's deepest and blackest curse 'light upon the coward! shame, sorrow,
+and quick death! He shall have neither house, home nor family from this
+moment! I disown this bastard of my blood! I devote him to ruin and to
+perdition!"</p>
+
+<p>Few men have ever uttered, over the most criminal and degraded of the
+offspring of their own loins, so dire an imprecation; and no father, who
+has ever uttered one approaching it in horrible earnest, but is doomed here
+or hereafter to feel the bitterest weight of that curse resting upon his
+own head. Lear was clean distraught by wrongs beyond human endurance,
+before he called upon "all the stored vengeances of heaven" to fall on the
+"ingrateful top" of Goneril, and threatened both his unnatural daughters
+with "such revenges" that they should be the "terrors of the earth"; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>
+only that incipient madness clears him from the sin and leaves him human to
+demand our after pity. There can be no excuse for such paroxysms of
+remorseless anger&mdash;it is difficult to supply even a palliation. And yet
+there was something in the blood, in the past life and associations of
+Robert Brand, coming as near to offering excuse for shame and indignation
+driving to temporary madness, as could well have been offered in behalf of
+any man of his day, committing a sin of such nature. And to circumstances
+embodying these it is now necessary to revert, even at the expense of a
+temporary pause in the directness of this narration.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">The Birth and Blood of the Brands&mdash;Pride that came down from
+the Crusades&mdash;Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent&mdash;The
+Pensioners of the Revolution&mdash;How Elsie raved, and how the
+Father's Curse seemed To Be Answered&mdash;Dr. James Holton, and
+the loss of a Corpus Delicti.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound Elspeth
+Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by
+both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from
+Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even
+modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who
+claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was
+gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the
+Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who
+claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little
+less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>
+Stirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish
+and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later
+day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields
+since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards
+of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious
+hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that
+Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King
+Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that
+no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten
+that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another
+antique appellation for the sword.</p>
+
+<p>Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New
+Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly
+outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of
+Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New
+Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to
+the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long
+Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never
+rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner
+on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after
+Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the
+trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the
+patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief
+over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it
+could not be otherwise than that the ears of <i>his</i> son, Robert (the man of
+1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep
+alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor
+of the land in which his lot had been cast.</p>
+
+<p>Then had come another influence, not less potent&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> second breaking-out
+of hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brands
+was not cooled&mdash;it sprung to arms; and Robert Brand, then a young lawyer,
+taking the place of his father already invalided, assumed the sword of his
+armorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane,
+receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latter
+battle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, but
+glorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury had
+not been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained where
+brave men dared their doom.</p>
+
+<p>And yet another influence, not less potent, was still to come. Years after,
+when Carlton Brand was a child in arms, his father, then a practising
+lawyer in his native State, became identified with that most romantic and
+most picturesque body of men, of whom the present age remembers but little,
+and of whom the age to come will know nothing except as the knowledge is
+handed down from father to son, or carried forward in such desultory
+records as these&mdash;<i>The Pensioners of the Revolution</i>. At that time, not
+less on account of his spotless reputation than the crippling wound
+received in the service, he was appointed Pension Agent for the section in
+which he resided, and duly commissioned twice a year to receive from the
+War Department and pay over to the old men the somewhat scant and very
+tardy pay with which the land of Washington at last smoothed the passage to
+the grave of those who had been his companions.</p>
+
+<p>It was Robert Brand's privilege, then, to meet those men in the familiar
+intercourse of business&mdash;to listen to their tales, so often slighted by
+those wiser or less reverent, of foughten field and toilsome march, of
+cheerless camp and suffering in the wilderness, when this giant nation was
+a wilful child unjustly scourged by a tyrant mother&mdash;to find in each some
+reminder of his patriot grandfather, and some suggestion of what that
+grandfather would have been had the fortune of war spared him to go down
+into old age and senility.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered in
+the little room where the scanty pension was to be doled&mdash;each with the
+measured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularly
+as when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain of
+Princeton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one they
+gathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindly
+greetings of garrulous and failing age&mdash;with the gentle complaint, so
+patiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight of
+time, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker had
+been young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officer
+at Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters&mdash;said they&mdash;were colder than they
+are now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all long
+before gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside the
+church,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew!</p>
+
+<p>Harmless deception of age!&mdash;pleasant coloring that distance gives in time
+as well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may be
+even more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawns
+upon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they ever
+were beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxiety
+and vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have no
+power to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freighted
+with unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in the
+heavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Mary
+and Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle of
+Kisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter far
+than song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so that
+the young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before their
+return at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day is
+remembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water is
+seen,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes back
+more as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud upon
+her brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbon
+lightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirted
+with Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiff
+verging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and the
+parting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is with
+the millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only the
+moonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love are
+remembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixed
+enjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of
+grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's
+mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we
+grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long
+before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the
+rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard
+realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and
+worn away forever!</p>
+
+<p>Sitting side by side, they talked&mdash;those bent and worn and gray old men&mdash;of
+scenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and natural
+glory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarse
+fare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye of
+Washington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips that
+seldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked their honest service. Few men,
+even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile from
+the Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light of
+glorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smile
+of the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless.</p>
+
+<p>It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire that
+blazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> he told how Washington
+commended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day of
+Long Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightened
+sheep,&mdash;and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if the
+head which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Liberty
+should scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of Walter
+Thorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledge
+of faith of the Monmouth League&mdash;quivering yet with the anger which had
+brooded for more than fifty years,&mdash;as he pictured so plainly the burning
+of his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid waste
+by them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead,
+the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figure
+of the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spanned
+the road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes of
+Captain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on the
+heights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which Stephen
+Holmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations of
+that patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of New
+York, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carry
+live-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleet
+lying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands for
+the use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of the
+squadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the half
+playful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told by
+his old companions, for the five-hundredth time beyond a doubt, that he was
+suspected of a share in Arnold's treason, for not stopping the disguised
+Andre as he passed his sentinel post below West Point, before he fell into
+the hands of the three very common and insignificant men made immortal by
+one single act&mdash;Williams, Paulding and Van Wert. There would have been no
+pretence in the motion, spite of his eighty years and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> faltering limbs, had
+the speaker hazarded more than a jest against the faithfulness of the old
+man's service in the "dark day." But easiest of all was it to remember the
+story of Thomas West, wounded, and crippled from that day forth, in
+assisting to bear the wounded Lafayette from the field of Brandywine, and
+named a subaltern officer at the close of that memorable action. His was
+the seat of honor; and his was something more, even, than that measure of
+respect demanded by all and so cheerfully paid to white hairs and honorable
+scars.</p>
+
+<p>Seldom was there a voice to speak one word of disrespect or undervaluation
+in the old men's company; and though the privilege of garrulous and failing
+age was often taken, and though the story once full of life and interest
+grew sadly tedious when again and again repeated,&mdash;yet there was no pardon,
+and deserved to be none, for him who forgot that reverence due to the men
+who bore the last personal recollections of the seven-years war. Only once,
+within the experience of Robert Brand as a Pension Agent, was such
+disrespect shown; and then the punishment was so signal that there were no
+fears of the impropriety being repeated. Mart Tunison, a wealthy young
+landowner, rudely jostled old Job Marston on one occasion, and when called
+to account for the offence, snapped his fingers at the veteran as a "cursed
+old humbug, always in the way and always telling stories of battles he had
+never seen." "You are rich, they say, Mart Tunison," said the old man,
+while the younger one could not read the flash that still lived in his
+faded eye. "I <i>am</i> rich, and what is that to you, grand-daddy?" was the
+answer, with a slap of the hand on the jingling pocket. "Yes, you are rich,
+and most people do not know how you became so!" almost hissed the old man,
+little knowing how he was pointing a moral for a future day by speaking of
+the "shoddy" of that by-gone time. "I will tell all your friends, and you,
+how you got so stuffed up that you can snap your fingers in an old man's
+face! You are living on the proceeds of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> money that your Tory
+grandfather, old Tom Tunison, made by stealing cattle, when he was one of
+the Refugee Cow-Boys, and driving them over the lines to sell to the
+British, before he ran away to Nova Scotia to save his neck!" Mart Tunison,
+if he had ever before known the real origin of his wealth, which is
+doubtful,&mdash;would probably have given the best field of all his broad lands
+to prevent that revelation of the shame of his family, which afterwards
+followed him like a thing of ill-omen, to the very grave!</p>
+
+<p>There was at that time in the office of Robert Brand, a stripling youngster
+who promised very little good to the world and has probably as yet
+disappointed no one&mdash;who thought more of play than of work, of music than
+of mortgages, of Burns than Blackstone, and of a rosy-cheeked girl who came
+into the office on some little errand to the "'Squire" than of the most
+proud and stately of his male clients. Among his vices, he had a fancy for
+jingling verse; and one day when the semi-annual visit of the pensioners
+had just terminated and he had listened afresh to the same old tales of
+glory told over again in the same faltering accents that he had heard so
+many times before, his one virtue of reverence for the aged and the
+venerable rose into an idle rhyme, which may have a fit place in this
+connection, and which he called</p>
+
+
+<h4>THE PENSIONERS.</h4>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They come but twice a year,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When the pension-day rolls round,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Old men with hoary hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And their faces to the ground.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One leans upon his crutch;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And one is upright still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if he bore Time's clutch<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With an iron nerve and will.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And feeble are the steps<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That so patiently they feel;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And they kiss with trembling lips<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The old Bible and the seal;<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+<span class="i0">And they lay with care away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In wallets old and worn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The scant and tardy pay<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of a life of toil and scorn.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They love a cheerful pipe<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And a warm place in the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From an age so old and ripe<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To call memories one by one;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To tell of Arnold's crime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And of Washington's proud form<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That beamed, in battle time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">A beacon o'er the storm.&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To tell of Yorktown's day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When the closing fight was gained,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When Cornwallis went away<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And the eagle was unchained;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To show us, o'er and o'er,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The seamed and withered scars<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That many a hero bore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As his passport from the wars.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Tis pride, with these old men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To tell what they have seen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of battle-fields, again<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With their harvest bright and green:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Twill be pride, when we are old,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To say that in our youth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We heard the tales they told<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And looked on them in their truth.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">They are the last sad link<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of a race of men with ours,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who stood on ruin's brink<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And built up fair freedom's towers.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They are passing, as the foam<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From the ocean wave departs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But finding yet a home<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In heaven, and in our hearts.<br /></span><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And when the last is gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To their memory we will build<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pyramid of stone<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whose top the sun shall gild<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the name of patriot weal<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And of tyrants' bitter wrong<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall be told but in a tale<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And known but in a song.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The time then prophesied has come; though the monument then promised has
+not been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and grander
+though scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created,
+almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resources
+of wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolution
+are all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting where
+the last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out.</p>
+
+<p>Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more withered
+leaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sad
+comments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah,
+well-a-day!&mdash;poor &mdash;&mdash; is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we must
+all follow him&mdash;some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblings
+of the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end must
+come. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six&mdash;to four&mdash;to
+three&mdash;to two! Oh, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!&mdash;enough gone to
+mark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholy
+converse! And then one day there came but <i>one</i>, who looked vacantly round
+on the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself must
+once have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not then
+been written, and <i>Geoffry Dale</i> was yet to spring from the imagination or
+the memory of the dramatist and supply poor <i>Jesse Rural</i> Blake with one of
+his best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of the
+pensioners his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, and
+then the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their forms
+seemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered into
+impalpable dust. It was the most natural thing in life for Robert Brand,
+months and even years after, to turn when hearing the measured beat of an
+old man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one of
+the veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the time
+of his companions. But no&mdash;death had come to all, and as yet no
+resurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for the
+last time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away by
+the hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble country
+church-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to free
+and to cover with human glory!</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps they died in good time&mdash;before the dark hour came back again after
+a glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the last
+of the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-felt
+shame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their last
+moments with the belief that after all they might have labored and suffered
+in vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended in
+the sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels back
+through the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven of
+self-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear us
+on triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from which
+it is made was preserved through the long night of corruption and misrule,
+in the breasts of the Fathers of the Republic.</p>
+
+<p>Their children have long been old men now. Their very grandchildren begin
+to show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of the
+Revolution&mdash;the last of the men who could say that they saw and took part
+in that throe which gave birth to a nation,&mdash;tread all those who can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> even
+say that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and the
+last of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personal
+recollection is growing thin,&mdash;it may break to-morrow; and "the rest is
+silence."</p>
+
+<p>Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences and
+surroundings of his earlier life&mdash;himself a soldier when in possession of
+health and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest of
+all American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved his
+native land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the long
+struggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he had
+imbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree little
+less than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when the
+note of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippled
+frame must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he held
+one pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrance
+that he had a noble and gallant son, too busy and too much needed at home,
+thus far, to join the ranks of his country's defenders in the field, but
+ready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied the
+honor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that the
+knowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseated
+his reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partial
+insanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadow
+of excuse?</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the last chapter, and before this long explanatory episode
+intervened to break the progress of the narration, Elsie Brand, the
+agonized sister and daughter, was seen standing before her father, with
+hands clasped in agony and lips uttering agonized pleadings. But the very
+instant after, when the terrible severity of that parental curse had been
+fully rounded from the lips and that fatal evidence given that for the
+moment all natural affection had given way to impious rage and
+denunciation,&mdash;the young girl stood erect, her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> blue eyes still tearful but
+flashing anger of which they commonly seemed to be little capable, and her
+lips uttering words as determined as those of the madman, even if they were
+less furious and vindictive:</p>
+
+<p>"You may strike me if you like, but I do not care for you, now&mdash;not one
+snap of my finger! You are not my father&mdash;you are nobody's father, but a
+bad, wicked, unfeeling old man, gray headed enough to know better, and yet
+cursing your own flesh and blood as if you wished to go to perdition
+yourself and carry everybody else along with you!"</p>
+
+<p>The very audacity of this speech partially sobered the enraged man, and he
+only ejaculated in a lower but still angry tone:</p>
+
+<p>"What!"</p>
+
+<p>"What I say and what I mean!" the young girl went on, oblivious or heedless
+of any parental authority at the moment. "I do not love you&mdash;I hate and
+shudder at you! I would rather be my poor brother, a coward and disgraced
+as he may be, than his miserable father cursing him like a brute!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you dare&mdash;&mdash;" the father began to say, in a louder voice and with the
+thunder again threatening, but Elsie Brand was proving, just then, that the
+gift of heedless speech "ran in the family," and that for the moment she
+"had the floor" in the contest of denunciation.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you need not look at me in that manner!" she said, marking the
+expression of the old man's eyes and conscious that he might at any moment
+recover himself sufficiently to pour out upon her, for her unpardonable
+impudence, quite as bitter a denunciation as he had lately vented against
+her disgraced brother. "I am not afraid of your eyes, or of your tongue.
+You have turned Carlton out of doors, for a mere nothing, and I am going
+with him. I will never set foot in this house again, never, until&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>How long was the period the indignant girl intended to set for her absence,
+must ever remain in doubt, with many other things of much more consequence;
+for the sentence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> thus begun, was never completed. In at the open front
+door, through the parlor and into the room of the invalid, at that moment
+staggered Kitty Hood. The phrase descriptive of her movement is used
+advisedly and with good reason; for fright, exhaustion and the terrible
+heat of the June meridian had reduced the young school-mistress to a most
+pitiable condition. Her face was one red glow, her brow streamed with
+perspiration, and she was equally destitute of strength and out of breath.</p>
+
+<p>This strange and unannounced interruption naturally broke the unpleasant
+chain of conversation between father and daughter; and the eyes of both,
+during her moment of enforced silence to recover breath, looked upon her
+with equal wonder and alarm.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Brand!" and here the breath gave out again and she sank exhausted
+into the chair which Elsie pushed up to her.</p>
+
+<p>"You are sick? Somebody has insulted or hurt you? What <i>is</i> the matter,
+Kitty?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, no!" at last the school-mistress mustered breath to say, at short,
+jerky intervals. "Nothing ails <i>me</i>, except that I am out of breath; but
+your son, Mr. Brand."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what of <i>him</i>?" asked the old man, his tone sharp and angry and his
+brow frowning, confident that the coming information must have some
+connection with the disgraceful report of the morning&mdash;that Kitty Hood had
+only run herself out of breath in her anxiety to tell his family unwelcome
+news that they already knew too well.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sir, Mr. Carlton&mdash;your poor brother, Elsie!&mdash;is dead!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dead!" The word had two echoes&mdash;one, from the lips of Robert Brand, little
+else than a groan; and the other from poor tortured Elsie, compounded
+between groan and shriek.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, how can I tell it?" the young school-mistress went on, as fast as
+her broken breath would allow. "I found him lying dead, only a little while
+ago, by the gate, down at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> the blind-road, as I came across from school;
+and I have run all the way here to tell you!"</p>
+
+<p>"My poor brother dead! oh, Carlton!" moaned Elsie Brand; then, but an
+instant after, and before the old man had found time to speak again, the
+curse came up in connection with the bereavement and she broke out,
+hysterically: "See what you have done, father! You wished poor Carlton
+dead, and now you have your cruel wish! Oh, my poor, poor brother!"</p>
+
+<p>"Silence, girl!" spoke Robert Brand, sharply, with a not unnatural dislike
+to have the school-mistress made aware of what had so lately passed. The
+old man was terribly affected, but he managed to control himself and to
+speak with some approach to calmness.</p>
+
+<p>"You are sure, Kitty, that you saw my son lying dead?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, Mr. Brand, he was lying dead on the grass close by the gate."</p>
+
+<p>"Lying alone?" The voice of the father trembled, in spite of himself, as he
+asked the question.</p>
+
+<p>"All alone, and he could only have been dead a few moments. He looked so."</p>
+
+<p>"Was there&mdash;" and the old lawyer tried to steady his voice as he had many a
+time before done when asking equally solemn questions concerning the fate
+of other men's children&mdash;"did you see any thing to prove what killed him?
+He went away from home on horseback&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he was on horseback at Mrs. Hayley's only a little while ago," Elsie
+mustered strength to interrupt.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you see his horse?&mdash;had he fallen from it&mdash;or&mdash;" and then the voice of
+the father, who but a few moments before had believed his love for his son
+crushed out forever, entirely broke down. Heaven only knew the agony of the
+question he was attempting to put; for the thought had taken possession of
+him that that son, overwhelmed by the knowledge that he would be pointed
+out and scoffed as a poltroon, had shown his second lack of courage by
+laying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> violent hands on his own life and rushing unbidden into the
+presence of his Maker!</p>
+
+<p>"No," answered Kitty Hood, setting her teeth hard as she realized that the
+time had come when she must prove her own honesty at the possible sacrifice
+of the life of the man who had been her lover. "No, I did not see his
+horse. He had not been killed by falling from it, I am sure. He had been
+<i>murdered</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"Murdered!" Again the word was a double echo from the very dissimilar
+voices of father and daughter; the latter speaking in the terror of the
+thought, the former under the conviction that the dreadful truth was being
+revealed, and that, though the young girl did not suspect the fact, the
+crime would be found to have been <i>self</i>-murder.</p>
+
+<p>"There was blood on his face and on the grass," poor Kitty went on, "and
+there was a bundle lying close beside him, that I had seen under the arm
+of&mdash;of&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Eh, what? Under whose arm?" asked the father, in a quick voice, as the
+relation took this new turn.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard Compton's!" choked out Kitty Hood.</p>
+
+<p>"Richard Compton's!" again echoed the old man. "Why he was your&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"We were engaged to be married," cried poor Kitty, at last overwrought and
+bursting into tears. "But I must tell the truth, even if it hangs him and
+breaks my heart. He was at the school-house only a little while before; he
+was angry with Mr. Carlton, and threatened him; and I am afraid that he
+killed him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, this is dreadful!" said Elsie.</p>
+
+<p>"Dreadful indeed!" replied Robert Brand, whose own grief and horror were
+somewhat modified if not lessened by the thought in what a situation the
+honest young girl was placing herself and her lover. He reached back and
+pulled the bell-rope again, and again Elspeth Graeme made her appearance, a
+little surprised to find three persons in the room where she had before
+left but two, the third coming unannounced,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> and all three of the faces
+looking as if their owners had been summoned to execution.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell Stephen to get up the large carriage, instantly, and have it round
+within five minutes," was the order to the old woman, delivered in a quick
+and agitated voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Are ye gaein' out, sir?" was the inquiry, in reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but what is that to you, woman?"</p>
+
+<p>"Naethin', maybe, only you're clean daft if ye'r thinkin' of it, Mr. Robert
+Brand."</p>
+
+<p>"I am not only thinking of it but going to do it; and the quicker you do my
+bidding, the better."</p>
+
+<p>"Gang yer ways, then, for an uncanny, unmanageable auld ne'er-do-weel!" was
+the grumbling comment of the Scotch woman, as she prepared to obey the
+injunction. She strode half way through the parlor, then returned and fired
+another shot into the invalid's room before she finally departed: "Hech,
+but ye've been sendin' away the doctor wi' the grin on his grunzie, and
+wha' will I ca' when ye come back a' ram-feezled and done over&mdash;answer me
+that, noo!"</p>
+
+<p>Less than five minutes sufficed to bring the carriage to the door, with its
+team of well-groomed bays, and with much exertion (of which the stalwart
+Elspeth furnished no small proportion) the invalid was placed in it and so
+surrounded with cushions that he could ride with comparative ease. Elsie's
+tearful request to be allowed to accompany him in his quest of the body of
+her brother was sharply denied, with orders that both Kitty and herself
+should remain within the house until his return; and the carriage drove
+rapidly away towards the point designated by the school-mistress, while the
+housekeeper was learning the fearful tidings from the lips of the two
+girls, and uttering broken laments and raining tears down her coarse
+cheeks, over "her winsome bairn that had been sae sair wanchancie!"</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely more time than had been consumed in getting ready the vehicle
+elapsed before the carriage, driven at rapid speed, dashed up to the spot
+that had been indicated by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> Kitty, the eyes of the father looking out in
+advance with an indescribable horror, to catch the first glimpse of the
+body of a son whom he half accused himself, in his own heart, of murdering.
+A doctor's top-sulky and a saddled horse, with two men, were seen standing
+near the gate as they approached; but, strangely enough, they saw no dead
+body. One of these men, Robert Brand saw, was the young farmer, Richard
+Compton, who had been accused by Kitty of committing that terrible crime;
+the other, standing by the side of his professional sulky, was a man of
+twenty-five, of medium height, very carefully dressed, fair faced, dark
+haired and dark eyed, with features well rounded and an inexpressibly sweet
+smile about the handsome mouth, which might have made an impression, under
+proper circumstances, upon other hearts than the susceptible one of Elsie
+Brand. Dr. James Holton, as has before been said, was a young physician, in
+very moderate practice, pleasing though very quiet in manners,
+irreproachable in character (an unpopular point, as we are all well aware,
+in one of the heroes of any tale), and considered very much more eligible
+as a match by the young lady with whom his name has before been connected,
+than by the parent who was supposed to have the disposal of her hand. Dr.
+Holton, as many people believed, possessed skill enough and was
+sufficiently attentive and studious in his profession, to have run a closer
+race with the local professional autocrat, Dr. Pomeroy, than he had yet
+been able to do, but for the skilfully managed sneers and quiet
+undervaluations by which the elder had kept him from winning public
+confidence. For more than two years he had been a frequent visitor at
+Robert Brand's, received with undisguised pleasure by Elsie and treated
+with great consideration by her brother, but meeting from the respected
+head of the family that peculiar treatment which can no more be construed
+into cordiality than insult, and which says, quite as plainly as words
+could speak, "You are a respectable young man enough, and may be received
+with politeness as a visitor; but you do not amount to enough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> in the
+world, ever to become a member of my family." Quarrel as he might with Dr.
+Philip Pomeroy, the old gentleman persisted in retaining him as his medical
+adviser; and it was her knowledge of the antagonism between the two and of
+the estimation in which each was held, that had induced the housekeeper to
+make her parting suggestion of the effect which must follow his order to
+set the dog on Pomeroy if he ever again attempted to approach the house. No
+one, meanwhile, could better appreciate his own position than Dr. James
+Holton; and while well aware that he loved Elsie Brand dearly, and firmly
+believing that she held towards him an unwavering affection, he was content
+to wait until his fortunes should so improve as to make him a more eligible
+match for her, or until in some other providential manner the obstacles to
+their union might be removed.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the gentleman who approached Robert Brand's carriage door with a
+bow, the moment the coachman had reined up his horses, and while that
+gentleman was looking around with fearful anxiety for an object which his
+eyes did not discover.</p>
+
+<p>"We are in trouble about your son," he said, before the other had spoken.
+"Something very extraordinary has occurred. Have you heard&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That my son was killed and lying here? Yes. Miss Kitty Hood, the
+school-mistress, saw the body as she passed, and came to inform me."</p>
+
+<p>"Kitty Hood!" gasped Richard Compton, turning from the fence against which
+he had been leaning, and exhibiting a face nearly as white as that
+traditionally supposed to belong to a ghost.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it true?" continued the father. "If so, where is the body?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is what puzzles us," answered the physician. "Mr. Compton, here, had
+an altercation with your son&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me, Doctor, for telling the story myself," said the farmer,
+interrupting. "Altercation is not the word&mdash;it was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> a <i>fight</i>. The devil
+was in me, I suppose, and I insulted Carlton Brand like a fool, and dared
+him to get off his horse to fight me. He got off, we exchanged a few blows,
+and directly he knocked me stiff. Perhaps I hit him in some unlucky place
+at the same time&mdash;I do not know. All that I do know is, that when I got my
+senses again, he lay stiff as a poker there on the grass. I thought him
+dead or dying, and rode away on his horse for the doctor. When we got here,
+just a moment ago, the body, or Mr. Carlton Brand with the life in him&mdash;the
+Lord knows which!&mdash;was gone."</p>
+
+<p>"My son got off his horse to fight you, you say?" asked Robert Brand, in
+such a tone of interest as almost seemed to be exulting.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir," answered the farmer.</p>
+
+<p>"And actually fought you?&mdash;do not tell me a falsehood on this point, young
+man, for your life!"</p>
+
+<p>"Fought me? yes, he did more than that&mdash;<i>whipped</i> me; and I do not let
+myself be whipped every day. If I ever found strength to rise again, I was
+just going to own up beat and ask his pardon."</p>
+
+<p>From that moment, an expression of pain which had been perceptible on
+Robert Brand's face from the instant of his conversation with Dr. Pomeroy,
+changed in its character and lightened up, so to speak, if it did not
+entirely depart. "Not so total and abject a poltroon as I feared!" was his
+thought. He had not alighted from the carriage, his crippled limb making
+that step difficult; but leaning over the side of it, he saw something on
+the grass reminding him of what Kitty had alleged.</p>
+
+<p>"There is blood upon the grass&mdash;whose is it?&mdash;my son's?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Mine, every drop of it&mdash;out of my nose. See, here is the rest of it,"
+answered Dick Compton, drawing from his pocket the bloody handkerchief with
+which he had tried to improve the appearance of his countenance, while
+riding away after the doctor.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What do you make of all this, Doctor?" at length asked Robert Brand.</p>
+
+<p>"It puzzles me, of course," said the medical man. "It is strange how Mr.
+Brand should have fallen for dead, if he was not. And yet it is not likely
+that any one would have taken up the body and carried it away, if he was.
+It would seem most probable that&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That he is still alive?"</p>
+
+<p>"That his apparent death was only the result of a fit of some character,
+and that, coming to after Mr. Compton left, and missing his horse, he has
+gone homeward, or in some other direction, on foot."</p>
+
+<p>"So I should think," answered the father. "Stephen, drive me home again. If
+you should hear any thing further, Doctor&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I will do myself the honor of letting you know immediately," answered the
+young physician, with a bow and a quiet consciousness that, from stress of
+circumstances, the man whom he yet hoped to call father-in-law, had at last
+given him a tacit invitation to come to his house on <i>his</i> business.</p>
+
+<p>"And what shall I do with the horse?" asked Compton.</p>
+
+<p>"As it seems that you have been the means of forcing the rider off its
+back, if you have not killed him, I think you can do no less than to ride
+him home to Mr. Brand's stables," said the doctor.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry that I brought you here for nothing, Doctor. You don't think
+that I need to go and give myself up, eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am very <i>glad</i> that you brought me here for nothing, as it appears,
+instead of for something," answered the doctor. "No, I do not think that
+you will have occasion to give any thing up, except your bad temper and
+your propensity for fighting peaceable men along public roads. I wish you a
+very good day, Mr. Brand!" and stepping into his sulky, he drove away down
+the road to attend to some one of his limited number of patients; while the
+carriage containing Robert<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> Brand whirled rapidly home again, followed at a
+little distance by Dick Compton on Carlton Brand's horse, the fear of being
+proved a murderer somewhat lifted from his mind; his military pants
+haunting him a little less than they had done during the former ride; and
+the bundle which had at one time threatened to prove so damning an evidence
+against him, hugged up under his left arm.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">The Residence of Dr. Pomeroy&mdash;Nathan Bladesden and Eleanor
+Hill&mdash;A kneeling Woman and a rigid Quaker&mdash;The ruin that a
+Letter had wrought&mdash;A Parting that seemed eternal&mdash;Carlton
+Brand alive once more, and a Glance at the fatal Letter.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>It sometimes happens, in this world which fast people consider dull and
+slow, that events crowd themselves very closely, both as to time and space.
+Within a very limited section, in a period covering scarcely more than an
+hour, we have seen a complication of occurrences, affecting many persons,
+sufficient to occupy many hours in the recital. And yet the storehouses of
+event and circumstance have not yet been at all closely ransacked; and that
+June-day has yet much to reveal, affecting some of the persons already
+introduced, and others who have not yet come into the field of observation.</p>
+
+<p>The spot at which the conflict between Carlton Brand and Richard Compton
+occurred, it will be remembered, was at the intersection of the highway
+leading down to the Schuylkill at Market Street, by a blind road which ran
+back southwardly through the wood,&mdash;and that the request of the lawyer to
+Compton that he would open the gate admitting to that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> blind road, was made
+by the farmer the occasion of that quarrel and fight which we have seen
+terminate so singularly.</p>
+
+<p>Following that blind road half a mile through the wood, southward towards
+the Darby road, the visitor descended the little range of high land crowned
+by the wood, crossed a wide meadow with the frogs sunning themselves on the
+banks of the little brooks that ran beneath the bridges of the causeway,
+and the blackbirds singing in the low clumps of elder-bush that grew beside
+them, and found himself, on the other side, rising another slight hillock
+and at the back gate of the residence of Dr. Philip Pomeroy.</p>
+
+<p>This was a house of modern construction, and of a completeness betokening
+the wealth of the owner; standing near the crown of the hillock, with the
+garden at the back sloping away towards the meadow (a bad slope, that
+towards the north, all the agriculturists in the section averred); handsome
+shrubbery in the broad yard lying before the pillared front or south face
+of the house; and a good many fine trees of inconsiderable age, with the
+pine everywhere predominant, promising abundant shade in coming years, both
+in front and at the rear. The continuation of the blind road which crossed
+the meadow, extended past the house on the west side, immediately beside
+the pickets of the yard enclosure, and running across to the Darby road
+afforded access to both the great highways, with only short distances of
+travel, and at the price of opening an occasional gate, which merely
+answered the purpose of stretching the cramped limbs of the rider. Some
+persons, who knew the extensive practice of Dr. Pomeroy, were disposed to
+wonder that he had not located himself immediately on one of the great
+roads, with no necessity for traversing by-ways to reach them; while
+others, who better knew the peculiarities of his will, believed that his
+motive was a fancy for being comparatively isolated and a little baronial.
+Whether he really had any motive whatever in selecting the location, except
+the desire of pleasing himself, is a matter of very little consequence.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There was a light buggy, drawn by two magnificent horses, standing at a
+post in the road, very near the house, at a little after noon on that day;
+and within the house certain developments were at the same moment being
+made, so illustrative of the depth to which human depravity can descend
+when the rein is given to all base and unholy passions, that the pen of the
+narrator, who is merely attempting a feeble recital of actual occurrences
+in the real life of to-day, pauses at the task before it, the fact being so
+certain that the circumstances about to be recorded will be supposed to
+have sprung from the disorder of an unscrupulous imagination, instead of
+being the fruit of sad research and knowledge that would be avoided if such
+a thing was possible.</p>
+
+<p>The middle portion of the front of the doctor's residence, immediately over
+the somewhat narrow portico, was a sitting-room of small dimensions,
+tastily furnished; while out of it opened a little bed-room, the white
+curtains and snowy bed-drapery of which, seen in glimpses through the door,
+suggested maiden purity and peace or that bridal rest which should be quite
+as pure and holy. The sitting-room had at that moment two occupants; and
+the picture presented was such as no looker-on would have been likely to
+forget while he lived.</p>
+
+<p>Nearly in the centre of the room stood a gentleman some years past middle
+age, large framed and with large hands, tall and commanding in figure,
+unexceptionably dressed in garments betraying the Quaker cut, and with that
+air of undeniable respectability which no pretence can ever imitate,
+conveyed by every motion of the man and every fold of his garments. He was
+dark-eyed and with features a little prominent; and years had made a
+perceptible mark on the smoothness of his face, at the same time that they
+had heavily grayed his neat side-whiskers and dashed heavy masses of gray
+among the still-curling locks that clustered upon his head. A merchant or
+banker, evidently, from manner and general appearance&mdash;and one to whom the
+idea of dishonorable conduct and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> thought of a disgraced reputation
+would be alike unendurable. With a face in which sorrow seemed to be
+struggling with anger, this man stood holding a letter clenched in his
+right hand, and looking down upon something at his feet. That something was
+a woman.</p>
+
+<p>The woman was kneeling, with hands clasped in entreaty, hair shaken
+partially loose, face streaming with tears, and her whole system so shaken
+by the sobs convulsing it that the most dangerous form of hysterics might
+be very likely to follow that excitement. Even when kneeling it was to be
+observed that her figure was tall, finely moulded and upright&mdash;that her
+face was fair, pleasant, and notably handsome, though the features were too
+small, the dark eyes mournful, and the general impression created that of
+confiding helplessness very likely to degenerate into dangerous
+weakness&mdash;that her hands were long, taper and delicate, as beseemed her
+figure&mdash;that her brown hair was very full, rich, silken and glossy&mdash;and
+that she had probably numbered some five-and-twenty summers. Formed to be
+loved, protected and shielded from every harm, and certain to return for
+that love and protection the most unreserved affection and the most
+unquestioning obedience; and yet kneeling there with that upon her face
+which told a tale of the most cruel outrage quite as plainly as the
+quivering lips could speak it!</p>
+
+<p>Much has been said of the sadness of the spectacle when a strong man weeps,
+as compared to the same exhibition of feeling by a woman. It is equally sad
+when a woman is seen kneeling to any other power than that of her God! It
+seems man's province, given alike by nature and the laws of chivalry, to
+bend his proud knee in other aspects than that of devotion; and even when
+he is showing that prostration his eye may be glowing with the conscious
+pride of the future conqueror; but what except the most abject shame or the
+most overwhelming sorrow, can be shown when the delicate limb of womanhood
+kisses the green sod or the floor beneath her tread? To save by pitiful
+entreaties a perilled honor&mdash;to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> beg through blinding tears and choking
+sobs the restoration of that honor lost, that can often so easily be given
+back to her by the hands of the tyrant who will not hear her cry&mdash;to
+implore the concealment of a shame too heavy to bear&mdash;to plead for the
+forfeit life of some one dearer than the very pulses beating in her own
+bosom&mdash;to moan for the restoration of some object of love and protection,
+her babe perhaps, reft from her and her heart and her arms left alike
+empty&mdash;ay, to wail for the boon of a crust that shall chase starvation from
+the thin lips of herself or her child and keep them yet a little longer as
+clinging sufferers upon the earth,&mdash;these have been the compelling motives
+so often bending the knee of woman since the earliest day of recorded time.
+And yet not one of all the long array of unchronicled martyrs has been
+bowed under a deeper wrong than was that day made manifest, or uttered a
+more piteous appeal than that day went up to heaven!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, do not cast me off!&mdash;do not desert me, Mr. Bladesden!" wailed a voice
+that would have been marvellously sweet and tender had it not been broken
+and roughened by grief, while her poor hands wrung and agonized themselves
+in sad sympathy with the writhings of her cowering form. "Do not take away
+from me my last hope of knowing one hour of peace before they put me into
+the coffin! I am no worse to-day than I was yesterday! Oh, do pity and save
+me, even if you cannot love me any longer!"</p>
+
+<p>"I do pity thee, Eleanor Hill, and I should like to save thee if I could!"
+answered a voice rich, full and strong, with only an occasional tremor in
+its intonation, and the Quaker phraseology seeming to accord peculiarly
+with the voice as well as the general appearance of the man. "But thou hast
+deceived me, and the plain people&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, I did not deceive you, Mr. Bladesden," the poor girl interrupted.
+"Do let me speak! Do let me try if I cannot move your heart to believe that
+I have never willingly done wrong&mdash;that I have never been intentionally
+wicked!"</p>
+
+<p>"Can thee deny what is in this letter, Eleanor Hill?" asked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> the Quaker,
+his voice trembling, in spite of himself, a little more than it had before
+done. Then he added, with something very like a sob in his throat, that
+seemed strangely at variance with the general calmness of his demeanor: "I
+am rich, Eleanor&mdash;very rich, men say; and yet I would give half of all that
+I have won in these many years that have made my hair gray, if I could see
+thee lay thy hand upon thy heart and look up in my face and say: 'The man
+who writes this writes falsehood!'"</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot&mdash;oh, God, you know that I cannot, Mr. Bladesden!" sobbed the poor
+girl. "It is true in word, and yet heaven knows how false it is in spirit."</p>
+
+<p>"Thee should not appeal to heaven so much, Eleanor, and thee should rise
+from thy knees, for I will believe thee just as quickly in the one position
+as the other, and the friendly people make their yea yea and their nay nay,
+without taking the name of the Father every moment between their lips."</p>
+
+<p>Eleanor Hill managed to rise from her knees and stagger to her feet; but
+her position was not the less humble afterward, for she stood grasping the
+back of a chair with both hands for support, and with her head bowed down
+in such abject shame and humility that the change of posture seemed rather
+to have been taking on an added degradation than putting one away.</p>
+
+<p>"See, I have done as you told me to do!" she said, without looking up. "I
+would be so obedient to you, always, if you would only take me away from
+this misery and shame. Oh, why would he injure me so cruelly&mdash;me to whom he
+should have been merciful, now, if there was any mercy in his nature!"</p>
+
+<p>"Can thee say that Doctor Philip did not do right, if, as thee says, he
+wrote this letter?" asked the Quaker, keeping his eyes steadily upon the
+crouching woman, and making no motion to change the distance between them.
+"Thee had deceived me, and he knew it. He was sure, perhaps, that thee had
+not told me all, and&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I told you, months ago, when you first spoke of making me your wife, Mr.
+Bladesden," said the poor girl, with one momentary lifting of the bowed
+head and one transient flash of womanly spirit&mdash;"that I could not give you
+a whole heart&mdash;that my life had been very unfortunate, and that if I
+consented to marry you, you must promise never to ask me one question of my
+miserable past. Do you remember that I did?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thee did tell me so much, Eleanor," answered the Quaker. "But thee only
+indicated misfortune&mdash;not guilt."</p>
+
+<p>"I have <i>not</i> been guilty&mdash;I was never guilty!" spoke the girl, the
+momentary flash of womanhood not yet extinguished. "You will not let me
+appeal to heaven, Mr. Bladesden, yet I must do so once more. I call upon
+the all-seeing God to punish me with even worse grief and shame than I have
+already borne, if there has ever been one guilty wish in my mind towards
+that man or any other&mdash;if I have not been forced or deceived into every act
+which makes you despise me to-day."</p>
+
+<p>The Quaker turned away, the letter still in his hand, and walked toward the
+window. He lifted the other hand to his brow and seemed to brush away
+something that troubled him; and he yet retained that position towards the
+girl, as he said, after the pause of a moment:</p>
+
+<p>"I believe thee speaks the truth, Eleanor Hill."</p>
+
+<p>"You do believe me! Oh, thank you for that mercy, if no more!" and the poor
+girl had stepped forward, caught his disengaged hand in both hers and
+lifted it to her lips, before he could prevent her. Then something in his
+manner, as he turned, seemed to chill her again to the heart, and she fell
+back silent to the support of the chair.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe thee so far, and yet thee deceived me."</p>
+
+<p>"How <i>could</i> I tell you all, Mr. Bladesden? How <i>could</i> I publish my own
+shame? Oh, why was I ever born!" and the voice had sunk low again, and the
+spirit seemed crushed quite as completely as before.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Thee blames Dr. Philip, and yet Dr. Philip was a better friend to me than
+thee was; for thee would have allowed me to bring disgrace upon my name,
+and he would not."</p>
+
+<p>The proverbial worm turns when trodden upon. Eleanor Hill had little native
+spirit, and she had been the veriest worm of the dust throughout all that
+terrible interview; but this last deadly stab at the vitals of her faith,
+given in laudation of her destroyer, seemed too much for human endurance,
+and there was yet one spark of spirit left in the very ashes of disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>"Nathan Bladesden," she said, standing fully erect, and anger usurping the
+place of shame in her face, "I am satisfied! I will kneel to you no
+more&mdash;beg you for mercy no more! If you are base enough to defend the man
+who could write that letter, and to call his action honorable, I would
+rather crawl out into the road and beg my bread from door to door, than to
+call you husband; and I thank heaven even for that letter which has saved
+me from a worse man than Philip Pomeroy!"</p>
+
+<p>Life and society are both full of terrible struggles. Perhaps there is no
+conflict of them all, more enduring in its character, or more racking to
+those necessarily engaged in it, than that which is fought by those who
+take the Sermon on the Mount as their declared pattern, and attempt to
+carry out the principles it enunciates. To forgive when smitten is
+God-like; but, oh, how difficult for any mere man! To love an enemy is an
+injunction coming down to us from a higher and purer source than that which
+gave the philosophy once taught in the Groves of Academe; but, oh, how
+impossible for any man to do in reality, until he has been baptized with
+fire! While others have waged this conflict desultorily and in isolated
+instances, for nearly three centuries, the Quakers have waged it as a sect,
+entitling themselves alike to wonder and admiration. They have practised a
+non-resistance unaccountable to the fiery children of the world, and stark
+madness on any other supposition than that there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> is really a special
+protecting Hand over those who heed the peaceful injunction. They have
+triumphed alike in society and in savage life, when the strong hand failed
+and the maxims of worldly wisdom became powerless. And on the faces of the
+men and women of the sect, to-day&mdash;beneath the broad hat of the Friend,
+under the close gray bonnet of his wife, on brow and cheek of the Quaker
+maiden with her softly-folded hair, and even in eye and lip of the young
+man subjected to temptations which have power to fever and wreck all
+others,&mdash;in all, there is the record of a long line of men at peace with
+God, themselves, and the world, as easily read and as unmistakable as are
+the traces of toil, unrest, and consuming passion on the countenances of
+those who have fought through the world with the defiant heart and the
+strong hand. They have met despisers as well as foes, outside of their own
+charmed circle; but they have also met admirers. And to-day there are men
+who could not and who would not take up their cross of self-control and
+occasional self-denial so long and so patiently carried,&mdash;but who cannot
+and will not refuse to them the tribute of heart-felt admiration, and who
+often heave fruitless sighs towards that land of mental peace from which
+they are themselves excluded, because they neither share its blood nor know
+the tongue of its speech.</p>
+
+<p>But the Quaker has not conquered without struggling, and he has not always
+conquered at any sacrifice. Twice, the old men of the Revolution used to
+tell us, the <i>Pater Patri&aelig;</i> was known to vent words of even profane
+anger&mdash;once, when the Continental troops failed him on the day of Long
+Island, and again, when Lee disappointed his just expectations and almost
+broke his line of battle at Monmouth. These were the two great exceptions
+proving the rule of his habitual self-command and his religious purity of
+speech; and the occasional outburst of anger in the Quaker blood may be
+held to illustrate the same self-control&mdash;to prove its abiding existence by
+the weight of the shock which momentarily throws it into confusion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The face of Nathan Bladesden showed, as Eleanor Hill spoke the last words
+already recorded, a mental conflict to which he was evidently little
+accustomed. The calm cheek flushed, the smooth brow corrugated, and the
+dark eye was for the moment so nearly fierce that the purity of the Quaker
+blood might well have been doubted. And when she had finished, the lips of
+the merchant uttered words, at which words themselves and their tone the
+speaker would equally have shuddered half an hour before:</p>
+
+<p>"Doctor Philip Pomeroy is an infernal scoundrel&mdash;unfit to live! He deserves
+to be killed, and I could kill him with my own hands!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ha!" It was something like a cry of joy from the lips of the poor girl.
+"Oh, I am so glad! You know this man&mdash;you hate him&mdash;you have only been
+trying me&mdash;you&mdash;&mdash;" and her brow and cheeks glowed with excitement as she
+looked up in the Quaker's face. Then her eyes fell again, for she did not
+read there what she had been led to expect by his words. There was anger,
+but no pity; and even the anger was dying out under the strong habit of
+self-control, as rapidly as the momentary glow of a slight conflagration
+goes down under the dense volume of water poured upon it by the engine.</p>
+
+<p>"Thee mistakes me, Eleanor Hill!" he said. "I may follow the evil ways of
+the world's people so far as to hate the bad man who has ruined thee, but I
+have been speaking to thee in all earnest. I have not been 'trying thee,'
+as thee calls it. I pity thee, truly, and would help thee, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But in the only way in which you <i>could</i> help me, Nathan Bladesden, by
+lifting me out of this horrible pit in which my feet are sinking lower and
+lower every day in defiance of all my struggles and all my prayers&mdash;you
+desert me and leave me to perish. I understand you at last, and God help
+you and me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Thee knows I cannot marry thee, Eleanor Hill, after what has passed," said
+the Quaker, apologetically.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I know nothing of the kind, Nathan Bladesden!" answered the girl, no tears
+in her eyes now, and her words short and even petulant. "You have nothing
+to do with my past, any more than I with yours, to come to the truth of the
+matter! You know, in your own soul, that had you despised the malice of
+that serpent in human shape, and kept the engagement you had made with me,
+no man on earth would have owned a more faithful or a more loving wife. But
+you have cast me off, degraded me even lower than before in my own sight,
+made me kneel to you as I should only have kneeled to my Father in heaven;
+and this is the end."</p>
+
+<p>"Eleanor&mdash;" the Quaker began to say; but the girl interrupted him.</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't say another word to me! I understand you, now, and I know my
+fate. Let me have that letter, and do not speak any more in the streets, of
+the shame of a woman whom you once professed to love, than is absolutely
+necessary; and I shall never ask another favor of you in this world."</p>
+
+<p>"Eleanor Hill, thee is doubting my honor!" said the Quaker, alike
+forgetting that such idle words as "honor" were only supposed to belong to
+the "world's people," and that his voice was becoming so low and broken
+that he could scarcely make himself understood.</p>
+
+<p>"You have done more than doubt mine!" answered the girl, bitterly. "You
+have told me, in so many words, that because I had been cruelly wronged and
+outraged by a man who should have cared for me and protected me, I had no
+'honor' left. We begin to understand each other."</p>
+
+<p>A moment of silence, the girl weeping again but not convulsively as before;
+the Quaker with his hand upon his brow and his eyes hidden. How materially
+the situation had changed within a few minutes, since Eleanor Hill was
+kneeling with clasped hands and tearing out her heart with sobs. Yet
+another moment of silence, and then the merchant said:</p>
+
+<p>"I am going away, Eleanor. Has thee nothing more to say to me?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Not another word, Mr. Bladesden!" answered the girl, through her set
+teeth. The Quaker raised his head, looked at her face for one moment, and
+then slowly moved towards the door, still looking towards her. She made no
+movement, as he seemed to expect that she would do, and as it seemed
+possible that some changed action on his part might depend upon her doing.</p>
+
+<p>"Farewell, Eleanor!" The Quaker stood in the door, hat in hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-bye, Mr. Bladesden!" The girl still remained on the other side of the
+room, as if either too much stupefied or too indignant to make any nearer
+approach. The next moment Nathan Bladesden had left the room and descended
+the stairs; and within two minutes after, seated alone in the buggy, behind
+his span of fast horses, he was bowling along towards the Darby road,
+apparently driving at such speed as if he would willingly fly as fast as
+possible away from a scene where his manhood had been severely tested and
+not found proof in extremity.</p>
+
+<p>For an instant after the departure of the Quaker, Eleanor Hill stood erect
+as he had last seen her. Both hands were pressed upon her heart, and it
+might have seemed doubtful whether she had nerved herself to that position
+or lacked power to quit it. Then her eyes fell upon the letter which
+Bladesden, when she requested him to leave it, had dropped upon a chair;
+and at the sight the spell, whatever it was, gave way. The poor girl
+dropped upon her knees before another chair which stood near her, with a
+cry of such heart-breaking agony as must have moved any heart, not utterly
+calloused, that listened to it,&mdash;dashed her hand into her long, dishevelled
+hair with such a gesture as indicated that she would madly tear it out by
+the roots in handfuls, then desisted and broke out through moans and sobs
+into one of those prayers which the purists believe are seldom or never
+forgiven by the heaven to which they are addressed&mdash;a prayer for immediate
+death!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh God!&mdash;let me die! Do let me die, here and at this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> moment! I cannot
+live and be so wretched! Let me die!&mdash;oh, let me die!"</p>
+
+<p>Whether unpardonable or not, the prayer was certainly impious; for next to
+that last extremity of crime which any man commits when he dismisses his
+own life, is his crime when he becomes a suicide in heart and wish, without
+daring to use the physical force necessary for that consummation. Despair
+is cowardice; the theft of time is a sin that no amendment can repay; and
+the robbery of that time which heaven allots to a human life, whether in
+act or thought, is something over which humanity well may shudder.</p>
+
+<p>But Eleanor Hill's impious prayer had no answer&mdash;at least no answer except
+the denial found in the breath of life which still fluttered from her
+nostrils and the blood which seemed to flow in torture through the poor
+frame sympathizing with the mind within. The aspiration was scarcely yet
+dead upon her lips when there was a footfall on the floor behind her; and
+she sprung up with one wild desperate hope darting through her brain, that
+the stern judge had at last relented after leaving her presence&mdash;that he
+had proved himself capable of a great sacrifice and returned to extricate
+her feet from the pit into which she was so irretrievably sinking. But that
+hope died on the instant, another and if possible a madder one taking its
+place; for before her, as she turned, stood Carlton Brand, though so
+disfigured and changed in appearance that any one except the most intimate
+of acquaintances might have been excused for doubting his identity.</p>
+
+<p>The young lawyer had always been noted for a neatness of personal
+appearance approaching to dandyism without reaching that mark; and only an
+hour before, in face and garb, he would have attracted attention in any
+circle, from the perfection of every appointment. Now, his face was bruised
+and swollen; his eyes were bloodshot and fiery; one lappel of his coat was
+torn from the collar; his coat and his nether garments were soiled and
+dusty; his hat was crushed and out of shape; and every detail of his
+presence seemed to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> be marred in corresponding proportion. A rough
+peasant's or a highwayman's disguise for a masquerade, would scarcely have
+changed him more than he had been changed, without the least premeditation,
+by that little rencontre with Dick Compton, to which we have already been
+unbidden witnesses. Absorbed as poor Eleanor Hill was in her own situation,
+she could scarcely suppress a scream when she saw the aspect of a man who
+always appeared before her so differently; and there was fright as well as
+concern in her voice as she said:</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Carlton Brand! Good heaven!&mdash;what <i>has</i> happened to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Much, Eleanor!" answered the lawyer, dropping into a chair with every
+indication of weariness, and wiping his heated brow with a handkerchief
+which showed that it had been soiled in removing some of the grime from his
+clothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Your clothes are torn&mdash;your face is swollen! Have you been
+attacked?&mdash;beaten? Are you seriously hurt?" inquired the girl, coming close
+to him and laying her hand on his shoulder with the affectionate anxiety
+which a sister might have shown. These women have no bounds to that
+sympathy which alternately makes them angels and lures them on the road to
+be fiends; and there is probably no true woman, who had ever been wife,
+sweetheart or mother, but would forget at least one pang of her pain on the
+rack, in sympathy for some wronged and suffering person who approached her!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no!" and Carlton Brand tried to laugh and made a miserable failure of
+the attempt, with his bruised face and swollen mouth. "Do not be alarmed,
+Eleanor. I have simply been in a little encounter with one of my neighbors,
+and&mdash;I scarcely know what has happened&mdash;I believe my clothes are torn and I
+suppose that I am disfigured a little."</p>
+
+<p>"Disfigured a little! Good heaven, I should think you were!" said the girl,
+coming still closer and looking into his face. As she did so, the eyes of
+the lawyer, not too bloodshot for sight if they were for grace of aspect,
+detected the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> swollen condition of her face, the fearful redness of her
+eyes, and the various symptoms which told through what a storm of shame and
+sorrow she had lately been passing. He started to his feet at once,
+grasping her hand:</p>
+
+<p>"Eleanor, <i>you</i> are worse hurt than myself! Tell me what has happened! Has
+he been torturing you again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," answered the poor girl&mdash;"worse than torturing me! I could bear
+his personal cruelty, for I have grown used to it. But he has just made me
+lose my last hope in life, and I have nothing left me but to die!"</p>
+
+<p>"Your last hope?" echoed Carlton Brand. "What? Has Mr. Bladesden&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Bladesden has just been here," answered Eleanor Hill, choking down the
+grief and indignation that were so painfully combating each other in her
+throat, dropping her head as she had done a few minutes before in the
+presence of the merchant, and holding out in her hand the crushed letter
+which Bladesden had dropped as he left the house. "Mr. Bladesden has just
+been here, and he brought this letter to read to me. It had been sent to
+his store, and he received it this morning. You can see, after reading it,
+what hope in life he has left me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and will find it!"</p>
+
+<p>Carlton Brand had momentarily forgotten his own troubles in the evident
+anguish of the young girl, just as a few moments before she had merged all
+those sorrows in anxiety for his personal safety. He took the letter she
+handed, smoothed out the crumpled folds made in it by the grasp of anger
+and shame, and read the damning words that follow&mdash;words so black and
+dastardly that one of the fiends from the lower pit might come back to
+earth to clear away from his name the suspicion that he had ever penned
+them. A few sentences of this <i>bona fide</i> communication are necessarily
+omitted, in an interest easily understood:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="right">
+<span class="smcap">West Philadelphia</span>, <i>June &mdash;, 1863.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr. Nathan Bladesden:</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Sir:</span>&mdash;You are a merchant of respectability, as well as a
+member of the Society of Friends&mdash;a society for which I have
+the highest respect, although I do not happen to have been
+born a member of it. I should very much regret to see you
+made the victim of a designing woman, and linked for life to
+one who would bring disgrace upon your name and family.
+Report says that you are engaged to be married, or that you
+very probably may be so at an early period, to Miss Eleanor
+Hill, the ward for some years of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and who
+is still resident in the house of that medical gentleman. I
+suppose that you know very little of the early history of
+the young lady, as, if you had known, you would never have
+allowed yourself to be entangled in that manner. Her father
+left her a few thousands of dollars in property, which she
+no doubt has the reputation of still possessing, while I
+have very good reason to know that it has really all (or
+nearly all) been used up in unfortunate speculations by
+different persons to whom she intrusted it, and that she is
+little else than a beggar, except as the Doctor offers her a
+home. As to her personal character, which is the thing of
+greatest consequence at the present moment,&mdash;Miss Hill was a
+very giddy girl, and many of her friends had fears for her
+future; but none of them foresaw what would indeed be the
+issue of the unfortunate situation in which she was placed.
+I am writing this letter, as you must be aware, for no
+purposes of my own, and simply to serve an honorable man who
+seems to have been tricked and cajoled by unscrupulous
+people. As a consequence, I must ask of you as a right which
+you cannot disregard, that you will not show this letter to
+Dr. Pomeroy, who might know enough of the direction from
+which such a revelation would be likeliest to come, to
+awaken his suspicion and put him in the way of injuring me.
+This promised, I now go on to state what you will never
+cease to thank me for communicating to you, if you are the
+high-toned man of honor that I suppose. Dr. Pomeroy is well
+known to be a man of somewhat violent passions; and though I
+believe that his conduct has been nearly spotless during his
+professional career, yet there are stains against him for
+which he is probably the sorriest of men in his calmer
+moments. Miss Hill, as I have said, was giddy and
+thoughtless, if no worse; and very soon after the death of
+her father, those who happened to see her in company with
+her guardian, noticed that she paid him attentions which
+showed a very warm personal attachment, while he received
+them as a bachelor man of the world<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> could not very well
+avoid receiving such marks of regard from a young and pretty
+girl. How long this went on, I am not at liberty to say,
+even if I have any means of knowing: it is enough that, to
+my knowledge and that of more than one person with whom you
+are acquainted, the natural result followed. If there was
+any seduction, I should be puzzled to say on which side the
+art was used; but perhaps when you remember that the lady
+has, during all your acquaintance with her, (at least I
+presume so, from your continuing to visit her,) passed
+herself off on you as pure enough to be worthy of the honor
+of your hand, you may be able to form some idea whether she
+might not have been quite as much in fault as her partner in
+crime. I say "partner in crime," as I have no wish or motive
+to shelter Dr. Pomeroy. Perhaps I ought not to say more, and
+indeed my pen hesitates when I attempt to set down what I
+consider so lamentable, as well as so culpable. But I must
+go on, after going thus far. The secret of Miss Hill's
+remaining at the house of Dr. Pomeroy after her attainment
+of majority, is that a guilty attachment and connection has
+existed between them for not less than five years past,
+unsuspected by most persons who know them, but well known to
+myself and some others, at least one of whom has been the
+accidental witness of their crime. If you should think
+proper to tax her with this depravity, and she should choose
+to deny this statement, by way of convincing yourself
+whether this is a foul calumny or a bitter truth, ask her *
+* * * * * * * I hope and believe that you will take the
+warning that I have thus conveyed, and not give yourself any
+trouble to discover the writer, who does not conceal his
+name from any other motives than those which you can
+understand and approve.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span class="smcap">A True Friend.</span><br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Carlton Brand read through this precious document without speaking&mdash;a
+document not worse in motive than all other anonymous communications, any
+one of which should subject the perpetrator, if discovered, to cropped ears
+and slitted tongue,&mdash;but worse than all others of its evil kind in the
+atrocity of its surrounding circumstances, as the reader will have no
+difficulty in believing when a little additional light is shed upon the
+personality of the writer by the chapters immediately following.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">A Return To 1856&mdash;Nicholas Hill, Iron Merchant&mdash;His Death,
+his Daughter and his Friend&mdash;How Dr. Pomeroy became a
+Guardian, and how he discharged that Duty&mdash;A Ruin and an
+Awakening&mdash;The market value of Dunderhaven stock in 1858.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Seven years before 1863, and consequently in 1856, died Nicholas Hill, a
+merchant of Philadelphia, whose place of business on Market Street above
+Third had been the seat of a respectable though not remarkably extensive
+trade, for nearly a quarter of a century. His trade had been in iron and
+hardware, but the material of his stock by no means entered into his own
+composition, for he was a man somewhat noted for his quiet and retiring
+manners and a pliancy of spirit making him at times the victim of the
+unscrupulously plausible. His private fortune met with sundry serious
+drawbacks on account of this weakness, though a generally prosperous
+business enabled him to keep intact the few thousands which he had already
+won, and gradually if slowly to add to the accumulation. He had remained a
+widower since the death of his wife ten years before his own demise; and
+his pleasant though quiet little house on Locust Street, had only contained
+one member of his family besides himself, for years before his death&mdash;his
+only daughter and only child, Eleanor.</p>
+
+<p>The warmest and longest-continued friendships are very often formed by
+persons diametrically opposed in character and disposition; and the rule
+seemed to hold good in the instance under notice. A friendship formed
+several years before between the merchant and Dr. Philip Pomeroy, when the
+latter was a practising physician resident in the city proper, had never
+died out or become weakened, at least in the heart of the confiding and
+quiet dealer in iron, and there was no reason to believe that the sentiment
+had been more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> transient in the breast of the physician. Mr. Hill had been
+suffering under the incipient threats of consumption, for years, and the
+doctor had been his medical attendant, as before the death of his wife he
+had filled the same confidential relation towards that lady and the other
+members of his household. Neither personally nor by marriage had the
+merchant any near relatives in the city or its vicinity; and his retiring
+disposition was such that while he made many friends in the ordinary
+acceptation of the word, he had few who stood in that peculiar relation
+which the French, supplying a noun which has scarcely yet crept into our
+own language, designate as <i>les intimes</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It was not strange, then, that when Nicholas Hill was suddenly seized with
+hemorrhage of the lungs and brought home in an almost dying condition from
+his store, one afternoon in November, 1856, Dr. Pomeroy, who was hurriedly
+summoned to his aid, was summoned quite as much in the capacity of friend
+as in that of medical attendant. The story of life or death was soon told.
+The merchant had believed, from the moment of attack, that his day of
+probation was over; and, apart from his natural anxiety for the welfare of
+his only child, there was little tie to bind the sufferer to earth. His
+wife&mdash;his wife that day as much as she had been at any period of their
+wedded life,&mdash;had long been awaiting him, as he believed, in a better
+world; and there is something in the facility with which those quiet, good
+people, who seem never to have enjoyed existence with the fiery zest which
+tingles in finger and lip of the sons of pleasure and sorrow, give up their
+hold upon being and pass away into the infinite unknown which lies beyond
+the dark valley,&mdash;something that may well make it a matter of question
+whether theirs is not after all the golden secret of human happiness, for
+which all ages have been studying and delving.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor came, with that rapidity which was usual with him, and with
+every mark of intense interest on his face and in his general demeanor. He
+found the invalid sinking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> rapidly, and his attendants, the weeping
+Eleanor, then a handsome, promising but defectively-educated girl of near
+eighteen, and two or three of the ladies of the near neighborhood who had
+gathered in to tender their services when it was known that the merchant
+had been brought home in a dying condition. A few words from the sufferer,
+uttered in a low tone almost in the ear of the stooping physician, and then
+all the others were sent out of the room except his daughter, whose
+pleading gesture, asking to be allowed to remain within the room was not
+disregarded, but who was motioned by the doctor to take her place at the
+window, beyond supposed hearing of the words that were to pass between the
+two friends.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me the exact truth," said the low voice of Nicholas Hill, when these
+dispositions had been made. "I am prepared to hear any judgment which your
+lips may speak. There is no hope for me?&mdash;I am dying?"</p>
+
+<p>Either the doctor could not speak, or he would not. He merely bowed his
+head in a manner that the questioner well understood.</p>
+
+<p>"So I thought, from the first," said the dying man. "The life blood does
+not flow away in that manner for nothing. And I do not know that I regret
+the end, for I have lived almost as long as I could make myself useful, and
+I think I am as nearly prepared to die as poor, fallen humanity can hope to
+be."</p>
+
+<p>"I hope and believe that you are indeed prepared to die, my dear, good
+friend," answered the doctor, with feeling in his tone, and the feeble hand
+of the sufferer meanwhile within his. "I cannot hold out a false hope to
+you&mdash;you cannot live. How gladly science and friendship would both join
+hands in doing something to keep you in the world, you know; but how much
+we shall all miss you and grieve for you, you do <i>not</i> know."</p>
+
+<p>"That you will miss me, I hope," said the dying man. "But there is no
+occasion whatever to grieve for me. It is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> a peaceful end, I think, and in
+God's own good time. I have but one anxiety."</p>
+
+<p>He paused, and the doctor nodded his head towards the side of the room
+where poor Eleanor was sitting, trying to distract her own thoughts by
+looking out of the window. The father saw that he understood him, and
+pressed the hand that he held.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you have guessed rightly," he said. "My only anxiety is for the fate
+of my child. Eleanor is a good girl, but she is yet very young, and she
+will need protection."</p>
+
+<p>"She shall find it!" said the doctor, solemnly.</p>
+
+<p>The face of the dying man lit up with an expression of the sincerest
+pleasure and happiness, and his feeble grasp again pressed the hand of high
+health which lay so near his own ebbing pulse.</p>
+
+<p>"I believe you and I thank you, my friend as well as physician," he
+replied. "I have not been afraid to think of this day, as they tell me that
+so many are; and my affairs are in some degree prepared for it. I have a
+handsome property, though not a large one, and you will find a will lying
+in the private drawer of the safe at the store. With the exception of a few
+legacies to friends, a small one to yourself included&mdash;it all goes to
+Eleanor, and you will find yourself named my executor."</p>
+
+<p>"A confidence which flatters me, and which I hope I shall deserve," said
+the doctor, as the enfeebled man again paused for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>know</i> that you will," the sufferer resumed. "Thanks to my property,
+Eleanor will not be a burthen to you, except in the demand of <i>care</i>. Her
+few relatives, as you know, are distant ones, and none of them reside
+nearer than California. There will be none to interfere with you in guiding
+her aright, keeping her pure in her remaining years of girlhood, and
+watching over her until she becomes the wife of some honorable man, or in
+some other way ceases to need your protection."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I accept the charge as freely as it is given, and I will perform it as I
+would for one of my own blood!" was the solemn answer of the medical man.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew that before I asked, or I should never have asked at all!" said the
+dying man. "Eleanor, my daughter, come here."</p>
+
+<p>The young girl obeyed and knelt beside the bed, striving to restrain her
+sobs and tears. The father laid his hand on her head and gently smoothed
+the masses of dark brown hair with fingers that would so soon be beyond
+capacity for such a caress.</p>
+
+<p>"Eleanor," he said, "you are almost a woman in years, and you must be
+altogether a woman, now. I am going to leave you&mdash;I may leave you in a few
+minutes."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I know it, father!&mdash;dear, dear father! Oh, what will become of me?"
+and in spite of her efforts to restrain herself she sobbed and choked
+piteously.</p>
+
+<p>"You will be cared for, my child, not only by heaven but by kind friends;
+and you must not grieve so over what does not grieve me at all," said the
+departing parent. "Dr. Pomeroy is to be the executor of my estate, and your
+guardian. Love and obey him, my daughter, in every thing, as you would love
+and obey me if I was allowed to remain with you. Do you understand me?&mdash;do
+you promise me, Eleanor?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do understand you!&mdash;I do promise you, dear, dear father!" sobbed the
+young girl. "I will obey Dr. Philip, and try to be good all my life, so
+that I can meet you where I know that you are going to meet my mother."</p>
+
+<p>"My dear, good child!&mdash;you and the doctor have made me so happy! Kiss me
+now, Eleanor, and then let me sleep a few moments." And directly after that
+kiss of agonized love was given, he fell back upon his pillow&mdash;as if he was
+indeed dropping into a quiet sleep; but the doctor felt the hand that lay
+within his relax its pressure, one or two sighs fluttered from the
+quivering lips, while a light foam tinged with blood<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> crept up to them and
+bubbled there, and the moment after Eleanor Hill was fatherless.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the poor girl who sobbed so heart-brokenly over the corpse of one
+who had been to her the truest and kindest of parents, was not fatherless
+in that desolate sense in which the word is so often used. The ties of
+blood might be rudely broken, but did not the hand of true friendship stand
+ready to assert itself? Had not Philip Pomeroy promised the friend of
+years, that he would be father and protector to her&mdash;that he would shelter
+her with all the power given to his ripe manhood, and hold her pure as the
+very angels, so far as he had power to direct her course? No&mdash;not
+fatherless: the weeping girl, in the midst of her sobs and unfelt caresses
+over what had once been the father of her idolatry, appreciated the truth
+and was partially comforted.</p>
+
+<p>It so chanced that Dr. Pomeroy, in his domestic relations, was admirably
+placed for offering a home to the daughter of his dead friend. Marrying did
+not seem to run in the Pomeroy family, for not only was the doctor a
+confirmed bachelor, some years past middle age, but his only living sister
+had kept herself free, like him, of matrimonial chains, and presided
+pleasantly over his household under her maiden name of Miss Hester Pomeroy.
+While the removal of a young girl of eighteen to a bachelor's residence,
+without the cover of female society, might have seemed grossly improper in
+spite of the color given to it by the guardianship so lately acquired,
+there could be no impropriety whatever in her becoming the companion and to
+some extent the pupil of the bachelor's maiden sister of forty.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Pomeroy's residence was at that time within the city limits, though in
+that extreme upper section bordering on the Schuylkill; but his practice
+had been gradually extending out into the country over the river; and ideas
+long cherished, of a residence beyond the reach of the noises of the great
+city, were gradually becoming realized. At the time of the death of his
+friend, that mansion which it has just been our sad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> privilege to enter,
+was in the course of erection; and in the spring which followed he took up
+his abode within it, with his sister, his ward, and that array of domestics
+necessary for a man of his supposed wealth and somewhat expensive habits.</p>
+
+<p>It did indeed seem that Eleanor Hill was blessed among orphans if not among
+women. Her tears dried easily, as they had good cause to do. The residence
+to which she had been removed was a very handsome and even a luxurious one;
+Miss Hester Pomeroy was one of those good easy souls who neither possess
+any strength of character themselves nor envy it in others,&mdash;with an almost
+idolizing admiration of her gifted and popular brother, and a belief that
+no movement of his could be other than the best possible under the
+circumstances; and the doctor himself, a man of fine education,
+distinguished manners, admitted professional skill, and an uprightness of
+carriage which seemed to more than atone for any lack of suavity in his
+demeanor&mdash;the doctor himself appeared to be anxious, from the first, that
+no shadow of accusation should lie against his name, of inattention to the
+ward committed to his charge. From the day of her coming into his house,
+whenever his professional engagements would allow, he spent much time in
+the society of Eleanor, greatly to the delight of Miss Hester, who had
+thought herself very unattractive company and wished that her gifted
+brother had some one in the house more worthy to be his companion. He
+selected books for the young girl; brought home others; directed her
+studies into channels calculated to form her mind (at least some portions
+of it); invited the young people of the neighborhood to meet her; drove her
+out frequently; took such care of her health as he might have done of that
+of a darling daughter or an idolized sweetheart; and gave evidence that
+none could doubt, of his intention to fulfil in the most liberal and
+conscientious manner the sacred promises he had made over the death-bed of
+her father.</p>
+
+<p>To the young girl, meanwhile her surroundings became<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> Elysium. She had warm
+affections, of that clinging character which finds no difficulty in
+fastening almost anywhere if permitted time and quiet. She had little force
+of will and still less of that serpent wisdom which discerns the shadow of
+danger before that danger really approaches. She was equally good, by
+nature, and weak by disposition&mdash;formed of that material out of which good
+wives and mothers are so easily made, and which may, on the other hand, be
+fashioned so easily into the most melancholy semblance of lost womanhood.
+She was handsome, if not strictly beautiful, and the lips of her guardian,
+so strict to most others, told her so with smiles and low-breathed words.
+She was flattered by his preference, paid her deferentially in public and
+yet more unreservedly when none but themselves heard the words he
+uttered,&mdash;proud to be thus distinguished by one so attractive in appearance
+and unimpeachable in position,&mdash;bound to him by that obedience enjoined by
+her dying father, and by that strong tie of gratitude which she felt to be
+due to her willing and unrecompensed protector,&mdash;and brought into that
+close communion with his strong mind which could not fail to sway an
+unmeasured influence over her, by those studies in poetry, romance and
+philosophy which he had himself directed.</p>
+
+<p>It is an old story, and melancholy as old. Before she had been six months
+an inmate of the house of Dr. Pomeroy, Eleanor Hill loved him as madly as
+young, defenceless and untrained girlhood can love that which supplies its
+best ideal and lures it on by the most specious of pretences. Not more than
+that time had elapsed, when she would have plucked out her heart and laid
+it in his hand, had he asked it and had such an act of bodily
+self-sacrifice been possible. Less than a year, and the tale of her destiny
+was told. For weeks before, the words of her "guardian" and "father" had
+been such as ill became either relation, but not warmer, still, than the
+snared heart of the young girl craved and echoed. Then came that promise of
+the dearest tie on earth, which falls on the ear of loving woman with a
+sweeter sound than any other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> ever uttered under the sun or stars. He loved
+her&mdash;that proud, high-spirited, distinguished man, the friend of her
+father, and the man for whose hand (so he had told her, not boastingly but
+in pity, and so she had every reason to believe) the wealthiest, the most
+beautiful and the most arrogant belles of Broad Street and Girard Avenue
+had been willing to barter all their pride and all their coyness&mdash;he loved
+<i>her</i>, the poor young and comparatively portionless girl, held her worthy
+to be his wife, and was willing to share his high destiny with her!</p>
+
+<p>What marvel that the untutored heart beat faster than its wont, when that
+golden gate of paradise was opened in expectation to her eyes? What marvel
+that all the lessons of childhood, which stood between her and obedience to
+the master of her destiny, were forgotten or only remembered with
+abhorrence? What marvel that the past became a dream, the present dull and
+unendurable, and only the delirious future worth a wish or a thought? What
+marvel that one evening when the full moon of August was peeping in through
+the trees which already began to cast their shade over the new home into
+the room where the "guardian" and the "ward" were sitting alone
+together&mdash;when the air seemed balm and the earth heaven&mdash;when the
+night-sounds of late summer made a sadness that was not sorrow, and
+temptation put on the very robes of holy feeling to do its evil work&mdash;when
+the lips of the subtle, bad, unscrupulous man of the world repeated words
+as sweet as they were unmeaning, promises as hollow as they were delicious
+and prayers as bewildering as they were sacrilegious&mdash;when the heart of the
+young girl had proved traitor to her senses and all the guardian angels of
+her maidenhood had fled away and left her to a conflict for which she had
+neither wisdom nor strength&mdash;what marvel that the moment of total madness
+came to one and perhaps to both, and that before it ended Eleanor Hill lay
+upon the breast of her destroyer, a poor dishonored thing, frightened,
+delirious, half-senseless, and yet blindly happier in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> her shame than she
+had ever been while the white doves still folded their wings above her!</p>
+
+<p>We know something of ends and something of intermediary occurrences, but
+very little of beginnings. The common eye can see the oak from a tiny
+sprout to its lordship of the forest, but none may behold the first
+movement of the germ in the buried acorn. The unnatural rebellion of
+Absalom, the reckless treason of Arnold, the struggle for universal empire
+of Napoleon, all stand out boldly on the historic page, as they appeared at
+the moment of culmination; but who sees the disobedient son of David when
+he walks out into the night with the first unfilial curse upon his lips, or
+the arch-traitor of the Western Continent as he starts from his sleep with
+the first thought of his black deed creeping under his hair and curdling
+his blood, or the victor of Marengo nursing his first far-off vision of the
+dangerous glory yet to be! We can know nothing more of the beginnings of
+vice in the hearts of the great criminals of private life. It can never be
+known, until all other secrets are unveiled before the eyes of a startled
+universe, whether Dr. Pomeroy, (no imaginary character, but a personage too
+real and very slightly disguised), in this ruin wrought by his hand had
+been acting the part of an unmitigated scoundrel from the beginning, a lie
+upon his lip and mockery in his heart when he promised the dying Nicholas
+Hill protection to his helpless daughter, and every act and word of his
+intercourse with her subtly calculated to bring about the one unholy
+end,&mdash;or whether he had merely <i>permitted</i> himself, without early
+premeditation, to do the unpardonable evil which proved so convenient. For
+the welfare of the victim, it seemed a question of little consequence: for
+the credit of humanity, always enough disgraced, at best, by its robbers
+and cut-throats of the moral highway, it may be at least worth a thought.
+After events make it doubtful whether the very worst had not been intended
+and labored for from the outset; and certain it is that if there had before
+been one redeeming trait to temper the moral baseness of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> Philip Pomeroy,
+from the moment when that ruin was accomplished no obstacle of goodness
+hindered his way towards the end of the irredeemable. If he had before kept
+terms with Eleanor Hill and his own soul, he kept those terms no longer.</p>
+
+<p>The poor girl had of course no right to be happy in her new and guilty
+relation, and yet she was so for a time&mdash;almost entirely happy. She had
+been wooed and won (oh, how fearfully <i>won</i>!) under an explicit promise of
+marriage and with continual repetitions of words of respect which left her
+no room to doubt the good faith of the man who uttered them. She was more
+than a little weak, as has already been said; very unsuspicious and
+clinging in her trust; and neither wise enough to know that the man who
+respected her sufficiently to make her his wife, no insurmountable obstacle
+lying in his way, would have made her so before laying his hand on the hem
+of the garment of her purity,&mdash;or precise enough to feel that any disgrace
+had really fallen upon her, which would not be removed the moment that
+promise of marriage was fulfilled. Then, by a natural law which can be
+easily understood if it cannot be explained, the young girl a thousand
+times more deeply loved the master of her destiny because he had made
+himself entirely so; and for a time, at least, the conduct of the victor
+towards his helpless captive was full of such exquisite tenderness in
+private that she could not have found room for a regret had her heart even
+revolted at the situation in which she was placed. He did not speak of an
+immediate fulfilment of his promise of marriage&mdash;no, but he had before
+hinted that owing to certain temporary circumstances (oh, those "temporary
+circumstances"!) the hour when he could make her his own before the world
+must be yet a little delayed; and so the young heart took no fright at the
+procrastination. Good Miss Hester, meanwhile, saw nothing suspicious and
+suspected nothing improper. Perhaps she saw a deeper light of tenderness in
+the eyes of the poor betrayed girl, when they beamed upon him who should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+have been her husband; and perhaps she saw that her brother treated his
+ward with even more delicate attention than he had shown during the months
+before; but the spinster's eyes had no skill to read beneath the mask of
+either, and if she thought upon the subject at all her impressions were not
+likely to go farther than the mental remark: "How good Philip is to
+Eleanor; how obedient to him she seems to be; and how happy for both that
+he ever became her guardian and she his charge!"</p>
+
+<p>Under such circumstances the awakening, even a partial one, could not come
+otherwise than very slowly. But unless the young girl was an absolute idiot
+or utterly depraved, an awakening must come at some period or other. Though
+weak and ill-trained, Eleanor Hill was by no means an idiot; and the angels
+of heaven could look down and see that through all that had occurred there
+had been no depravity in her soul, no coarse, sensual passion in her
+nature. If she had fallen, she had been sacrificed on the altar of man's
+unscrupulous libertinism, and offering up the incense, meanwhile, of a
+good, yielding, compliant, worshipping heart. The moral perceptions may
+have been blunted, but they were not annihilated; the reason may have been
+choked and dizzied in the flood of feeling, but it was immortal and could
+not be drowned.</p>
+
+<p>Months had elapsed after the culmination of their intercourse, before the
+sense of right became strong enough and the heart bold enough, for the
+young girl to hint at the fulfilment of what had been so long delayed. The
+answer was a passionate kiss and an assurance that "only a little time more
+should elapse&mdash;just yet it would not be prudent and was in fact
+impossible." Eleanor wondered: she had not yet learned to doubt; and for a
+time she kept silent. Again, a few weeks later, and the question was
+repeated. This time a light laugh met her ear, and there was more of the
+master toying with his slave or the spoiled boy trifling with his
+play-thing, than there had been in the first instance. Still the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> promise
+was repeated, and still there were "insurmountable obstacles." Another
+interval of silence, then a third request, this time with tears, that he
+would do her the justice he had promised. To this ill-nature responded, and
+for the first time the young girl learned what a claw of pride and
+arrogance lay folded in the velvet palm of the tiger. She shrunk away
+within herself, at his first harsh word, almost believing that she must
+have committed some wrong in speaking to him of his delayed promise; and
+when he kissed her at the end of that conversation and said: "There, run
+away and do not bother me about it when I am worried and busy!" she almost
+felt&mdash;heaven help her poor, weak heart!&mdash;that that kiss was one of needed
+pardon!</p>
+
+<p>The dullest eyes will recognize at last what only the quick and accustomed
+discern at first. Eleanor Hill had been blind, but her eyes gradually
+opened,&mdash;with an agony in the first gleams of light, of which her yielding,
+compliant nature had before given little promise. Nearly two years had
+elapsed after her becoming the ward of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and more than
+one year after that fatal era in her own destiny, when the wronged girl,
+then twenty and within only twelve months of her legal majority, at last
+sounded the depths of that man's nature sufficiently to know that he had
+been inventing the existence of obstacles&mdash;that he had never intended to
+marry her, at least at any near period. At that moment of discovery a
+higher and prouder nature than hers might have been moved to personal
+upbraiding, despair and perhaps to suicide: with Eleanor Hill the only
+result was that a sense of shame, before kept in abeyance, came in and
+settled down upon her, making her more humble than angry or indignant, and
+unnerving her instead of bracing her mind anew for any conflict that might
+arise in the future. Aware, at last, of his deception, she could not quite
+believe in her guardian's utter baseness; and she still <i>hoped</i> that though
+he might demand his own time for the fulfilment of that promise which had
+won her from herself, in his own time he would render her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> that justice in
+reality so poor but to her so full of compensation for all the past.</p>
+
+<p>Would it not seem, even to one most fully acquainted with all the falsehood
+of the betrayer and all the cruelty of the torturer, that the cup of that
+man's infamy was nearly filled? And yet&mdash;sorrow that the bitter truth must
+be recorded!&mdash;not a tithe of that which was to curse him before the end,
+has yet been indicated. Slowly and surely the blackening crimes pile up,
+when the love of virtue and the fear of heaven have both faded out from the
+human heart; and who can measure the height to which those mountain masses
+of guilt may tower, after the first foundations have been laid in one
+unrepented wrong, and before the coming of that day when the criminal must
+call upon those very mountains to fall and bury him away from the wrath
+that is inevitable!</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Pomeroy came home late one evening in December, 1858. Hester had long
+been in bed, and Eleanor, as was her habit, had waited up for his return.
+Some weeks had now elapsed since her discovery of his deception, but hope
+had not yet died out, nor had all her confidence been lost in that
+affection for her which she believed underlay all the impropriety of his
+treatment. So far, except in the one particular, he had treated her with
+almost unvarying kindness; and while that pleasant status existed and hope
+had yet a little point for the clinging of her tenacious fingers, it was
+not in the nature of the young girl to despair. She met him at the door, as
+she had done on so many previous occasions, assisted him to divest himself
+of the rough wrappers by which he had been sheltered from the winter wind,
+and when at last he dropped into his cushioned chair before the grate,
+which had been kept broadly aglow to minister to his comfort, took her
+place half by his side and half at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps there was some malevolent spirit who on that occasion, before the
+glow of the winter fire, once more brought to the lips of the poor girl
+that subject always lying so near her heart&mdash;marriage. She mentioned the
+word, and for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> first time since he had given her shelter under his
+roof, Philip Pomeroy hurled an oath at her. Perhaps he had been taking wine
+somewhat too freely, in one of the tempting supper-rooms of the city; or
+some other cause may have disturbed his equanimity and brought out the
+truth of his worst nature. The reply of Eleanor Hill to this was the not
+unnatural one of a burst of tears, and that outburst may have maddened him
+still more. The truth came at last, in all its black, bitter, naked
+deformity:</p>
+
+<p>"Eleanor, you have made a fool of yourself long enough! No more of this
+whining, or it will be the worse for you! When <i>I</i> marry <i>you</i>, I shall be
+very nearly out of business; and if you have not had judgment enough to
+know that fact before, so much the worse for your common sense!"</p>
+
+<p>Eleanor Hill staggered up from her chair and cast one glance full into the
+face of her destroyer. Her eyes could read the expression that it bore,
+then, if they had never before attained the same power. There was neither
+the smile of reckless pleasantry nor the unbent lines of partial pity for
+suffering, upon that face. All was cold, hard, determined, cruel earnest,
+and the victim read at last aright what she should have been able to
+decipher more than two years before. And never the life of a dangerous
+infant heir went out beneath the choking fingers of a hired murderer, at
+midnight and in silence in one of the thick vaulted chambers of the Tower,
+more suddenly or more effectually than at that moment the last honorable
+hope of Eleanor Hill expired, strangled by the hand of that "guardian" who
+had promised beside a dying bed that he would shield and protect her as his
+own child!</p>
+
+<p>In that hard, cold face Eleanor Hill at last read her destiny. She had been
+weak, compliant and submissive, but never reconciled to her shame; and at
+that moment began her revolt.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand you at last," she said. "After all your promises, you will
+<i>not</i> marry me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Once for all&mdash;no!" was the firm reply, the cruel face not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> blenching in
+the least before that glance, mingled of pain and indignation, and so
+steadily bent upon it.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I have lived long enough in this house&mdash;too long!" broke from the
+lips of the young girl. "I will leave it to-morrow. You cannot give me back
+the thing of most value of which you have robbed me&mdash;my honor and my peace
+of mind; but my father left my property in your hands&mdash;give me back that,
+so that I may go away and hide myself where I shall never be any more
+trouble to you or to any others who know me."</p>
+
+<p>"Humph! your property!" was the reply, in so sneering a tone that even the
+unsuspicious ears of the victim caught something more in the manner than in
+the words themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I said my property&mdash;the property my father left in your hands for
+me!" answered poor Eleanor, striving to conquer the deadly depression at
+her heart and to be calm and dignified. "You have told me the truth at
+last; and I will never ask you the question again if you will give me
+enough money for my support and let me go away from this life of sin into
+which you have dragged me."</p>
+
+<p>"You want to go away, do you!" again spoke the doctor, in the same sneering
+tone. "And you expect to support yourself upon what you call 'your
+property?'"</p>
+
+<p>"I do want to go away&mdash;I must go away, Dr. Philip!" answered the victim,
+still managing to choke down the tears and sobs that were rising so
+painfully. "You have cruelly deceived a poor girl who trusted you, and we
+had better never see each other again while we live."</p>
+
+<p>"Your property, you said! Bring me that large black portfolio from the top
+of the closet yonder," was the only and strange reply. With the habit of
+her old obedience the young girl went to the place designated, found the
+pocket-book and brought it to him. He opened it, took out half a dozen
+pieces of what seemed to be bank-note paper, and handed them over to her
+without an additional word.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What are these, and what I am to do with them?" she asked, in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"They are 'your fortune' that you have been talking about, and you may do
+what you like with them if you insist upon leaving my house!" was the
+reply.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not understand you!" very naturally answered the recipient, making no
+motion to open the papers. "If these are mine, I cannot tell what to do
+with them or how much they are worth."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I can tell you their value, very easily, though I might be puzzled to
+direct you as to the other part of your anxiety!" said the doctor, with a
+scarcely-suppressed chuckle at the bottom of his sneer. "They are the scrip
+for four thousand shares in the capital stock of the Dunderhaven Coal and
+Mining Company, in which, with your consent, I invested the forty thousand
+dollars left you by your father; and their present worth is not much, as
+the company unfortunately failed about six months ago, paying a dividend of
+five-sixteenths of a cent on the dollar. The amount would be&mdash;I remember
+calculating it up at the time of the failure&mdash;just one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars."</p>
+
+<p>"And that is all the money that I have in the world!" gasped the young
+girl, tottering towards a chair.</p>
+
+<p>"Every penny, if you leave my house!" answered the model guardian. "If you
+remain in it, as I wish, and forget all the nonsense that priests and old
+women have dinned into your ears, about marriage,&mdash;your fortune is just as
+much as my own, for you shall find that there is nothing which I can afford
+to purchase for myself, that I will not just as freely purchase for you!"</p>
+
+<p>Eleanor Hill said not a word in reply. She had sunk into a chair and
+covered her face with both her hands, through the delicate fingers of which
+streamed the bright tears, while her whole frame was shaken and racked by
+the violence of her mental torture. How utterly and completely desolate she
+was at that moment! Refused the justice of marriage by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> the man for whom
+she had perilled all, and bidden no longer even to hope for that
+justice&mdash;then coldly informed that if she left the house of her betrayer
+she went away to beggary, as all the fortune left her by her father had
+been squandered by imprudence or dishonesty,&mdash;what additional blow could
+fall upon her, and what other and heavier bolt could there yet be stored
+for her in the clouds of wrath?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">What followed the revelation of Betrayal&mdash;A gleam of Hope
+for Eleanor Hill&mdash;A relative from California, a projected
+Voyage, and a Disappointment&mdash;One more Letter&mdash;The broken
+thread resumed&mdash;Carlton Brand's farewell, and a sudden
+Elopement.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Eleanor Hill should of course have left the house of her guardian, that had
+proved such a valley of poison to her girlhood, the very moment when she
+made that discovery of her final and complete betrayal. But then, strictly
+speaking, she should have left it long before; and the same compliant
+spirit that had once yielded, could yield again. Pity her who will&mdash;blame
+her who may&mdash;she bowed beneath the weight of her own helplessness and
+remained, instead of fleeing from the spot that very night and shaking off
+the dust of her feet against it, even if she begged her bread thereafter
+from door to door. Not with what she should have done, and not with what
+some others whom we have known would have done under the circumstances,
+have we to do. She remained. Not the same as she had been before&mdash;Dr.
+Philip Pomeroy knew and felt the difference; and yet submissive and
+apparently unrepining. Not the same in cheerfulness, as Miss Hester felt
+and deplored: she spoke less, seldomer went out, even when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> strongly
+tempted, and spent much more time in the solitude and silence of her own
+room.</p>
+
+<p>It is not for us to put upon record precisely what passed between the
+guardian and his ward in the months that immediately followed that
+revelation; as unfortunately at that point information otherwise complete
+and uninterrupted, is defective for a considerable interval. It is beyond
+doubt that in the breast of Eleanor Hill fear and hatred had taken the
+place of love towards the man whom she had once idolized&mdash;that the sense of
+shame weighing upon her had become every day heavier and less
+endurable&mdash;and that she would have fled away at any moment, but from the
+fact that she was utterly helpless, pecuniarily and in any capacity for
+earning her own subsistence, and that she believed in the probability of
+Dr. Philip Pomeroy putting in force the cruel threat he had made, and
+publishing her shame to the world, distorted to suit his own purposes, the
+moment she should have quitted his abode and his guardianly "protection!"</p>
+
+<p>With reference to the wishes and intentions of Dr. Philip Pomeroy himself,
+it is not much more easy to form any accurate calculation. That he did not
+wish to follow the example set him by so many unscrupulous traffickers in
+female virtue, and drive away at once from his presence the woman whose
+life he had poisoned, is only too certain. That he had no intention of
+making her legally his own by marriage, his own tongue had declared. It
+only remains to believe that he held towards the poor girl some sort of
+tiger mixture of love and hate, which would not consent to make her happy
+in the only manner which could secure that end, and which yet would not
+consent to part with her at any demand or upon any terms. Other than she
+was, to him, she could not be: as she was, she seemed to minister to some
+unholy but actual need of his nature; and he held her to himself with an
+evil tenacity which really seemed to afford a new study in psychology.
+Circumstances were close at hand, calculated to show something of the
+completeness of the net drawn around the feet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> of the young girl, even if
+they did not clearly point out the hand drawing the cord of continued
+restraint.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Hester Pomeroy died suddenly in the winter of 1860, alike guiltless
+and ignorant of the evil which had taken place under the roof which owned
+her as its mistress, regretted by her brother with as much earnest feeling
+as he had the capacity of bestowing upon so undemonstrative a relation, and
+sincerely mourned by the forced dweller beneath that roof, to whom her
+presence had been a protection in the eyes of the world, and to whose cruel
+lot she had furnished more alleviations than she had herself capacity to
+understand.</p>
+
+<p>With this death, the introduction of a mere housekeeper to take the place
+which she had so worthily filled, the additional loneliness which was
+inevitable when a hired stranger occupied her room, and the certainty that
+the last excuse of propriety for her remaining was removed,&mdash;it may be
+supposed that the struggle in the mind of the poor girl began anew, and
+raged with redoubled violence. The desire to be freed from the presence and
+the power of her destroyer had by that time grown to be an absorbing
+thought, ever present with her, and worthy of any possible sacrifice to
+give it reality. Any <i>possible</i> sacrifice: to poor Eleanor Hill, sacrifices
+which many others would have embraced without a moment's hesitation, seemed
+literal madness. The certainty of penury and the probability of open shame
+pressed her close; and she could not shake off the double fetter. Her
+tyrant would give her no release; and she succumbed to her living death
+once more.</p>
+
+<p>Months longer of weary waiting for deliverance, every spark of love died
+out from her heart, and yet soul and body alike enslaved. Oh, God of all
+the suffering!&mdash;how often has this been, with no visible hand to deliver,
+with no pen to chronicle! Months, and then came what seemed the opportunity
+of the poor girl's life.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that Nicholas Hill, at his dying hour, spoke of his
+only relatives, and even those removed by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> several degrees, residing on the
+Pacific coast. One of these, William Barnes, a distant cousin, and a man of
+forty, who owned a comfortable ranch near Sacramento, came on to the East
+in the summer of 1861, bringing his wife, and in one of his visits to
+Philadelphia casually heard of the whereabouts of the orphaned daughter of
+his relative. Within a day or two following he pursued his information by
+driving out to the Schuylkill and calling upon Eleanor, in the absence of
+the doctor as it chanced. Half an hour's conversation satisfied the
+large-hearted Californian that the young girl was unhappy, from whatever
+cause; ten minutes more drew from her the information that all the property
+left her by her father had melted away in unfortunate speculations, though
+of course they won no way towards the other and more terrible secret; and
+the next ten minutes sufficed him to offer her a home, as a relative and
+companion to his wife, at his pleasant ranch in the Golden State. Girls
+were scarce in California, he said; girls as handsome as Eleanor were
+scarce in any quarter of the globe; and if she would accept his invitation
+they would astonish all his neighbors a little, on their arrival out, while
+she could select at will among fifty stalwart fellows, with plenty of
+money, any day when she might fancy a husband.</p>
+
+<p>Here was hope&mdash;here was deliverance. How eagerly Eleanor Hill grasped at it
+can only be known by the wretch who has once been so nearly drowned that
+the last gasp was on his lip, and then found a helping hand stretched out
+for his rescue&mdash;or that other wretch who has wandered for hours over a
+trackless waste and then found a landmark at the moment when he was ready
+to lie down and die! William Barnes was to leave New York on his return to
+California within a fortnight: he would inform his wife of the arrangement,
+and she would be delighted with the thought of finding a companion; and on
+the morning of the sailing of the steamer Eleanor would appear, to fill the
+state-room already engaged.</p>
+
+<p>Somewhat to the surprise of the escaping prisoner, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> immeasurably to her
+joy, when that evening, with an expression on her lip that was nearer to
+triumph than any which had rested there during all the four years of her
+sinful slavery&mdash;Dr. Philip Pomeroy neither threatened her with poverty nor
+exposure as he had before done (perhaps because he felt that when under Mr.
+Barnes' protection the former would be beyond his power and the latter of
+little consequence in a State so far removed as California) nor even
+seriously opposed her accepting the offer made her. At last, then, the
+cruel heart had relented, her shameful dependence was at an end, and the
+reformation of her life could find its late beginning.</p>
+
+<p>Three days later came a letter from New York, from William Barnes,
+reiterating what had been said personally, and accompanied by the
+indorsement of the arrangement by Mrs. Barnes. The last shadow of doubt,
+then, was removed out of the way, and the young girl's moderate
+preparations for removal went on with new vigor. One hundred dollars in
+money was all that she asked of her guardian for these preparations, and
+that sum was accorded without hesitation or comment. On the morning of the
+sailing of the steamer she left Philadelphia by the early train, the doctor
+himself bringing her down to the depot in his carriage, and bidding her
+good-bye with a word of kind regret, and a kiss which seemed chaste enough
+for that of a brother. Her small array of baggage had preceded her, and was
+no doubt already within the hold of the vessel that was to bear her to the
+Pacific, to a renewed life, and an opportunity of gathering up the broken
+threads of lost happiness.</p>
+
+<p>The steamer, the old Northern Light, of such varying fortunes, was to sail
+at two. At half-past twelve, the carriage containing Eleanor Hill dashed
+down to the foot of Warren Street, among all that crush of carriages,
+baggage-wagons, foot-people with valises and carpet-bags, idlers,
+policemen, pickpockets, United States Mail vans, weeping women, whining
+children, and insatiate shakers of human hands, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> has attended the
+departure of every California steamer since the first ploughed her ocean
+way towards the land of gold. Mr. Barnes had promised to meet her at the
+gangway or on shipboard, but neither on the dock nor on deck could she
+discover him. One o'clock was long past, and Eleanor had grown sick at
+heart under the idea that some mistake as to the steamer must have been
+made, when from the gangway she saw a carriage drive up and her new
+protector alight from it. He was assisting out a lady who could be no other
+than his wife; and the young girl, fairly overjoyed, ran down the plank to
+meet and welcome them. The lady, who was just starting up the plank as
+Eleanor reached the foot of it, did not notice her, but continued her
+ascent: William Barnes did see her, and allowing his wife to proceed alone,
+he seized her arm and drew her hurriedly away down the pier, and beyond
+ear-shot. Eleanor noticed that his face seemed flushed, and his whole
+demeanor agitated; but she was far from being prepared for the startling
+intelligence that burst from his lips, interlarded with oaths and
+expressions of honest indignation. The generous-hearted Californian was, in
+truth, very nearly beside himself with shame and mortification. Eleanor
+could not accompany his wife and himself to California, after all! And the
+story of the disappointment, though a little mixed up with those energetic
+expressions and once interrupted by the necessity of the enraged man's
+pausing to throw into the dock a package of fruit which his wife had just
+been purchasing for her comfort on the voyage (the porter who brought it
+being very nearly included in that sacrifice to Neptune), the story, in
+spite of all these hindrances, was far too quickly told; and every word,
+after the first which revealed her fate, fell upon the heart of the poor
+girl as if it had been the blow of a hammer smiting her living flesh.</p>
+
+<p>Up to that morning&mdash;the Californian said&mdash;his wife had seemed not only
+willing to accept Eleanor's society, but highly pleased at the prospect.
+Her ticket had been bought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> and various presents selected by Mrs. Barnes'
+own hands, for the comfort of their guest on the route and in her new home.
+That morning, and not more than two hours before, the weather in the
+matrimonial horizon, never entirely reliable in the latitude of Mrs.
+Barnes, had changed entirely. On coming into the hotel from some business
+calls, among them a visit to the Post Office (though Mr. Barnes thought,
+very naturally, that the latter place could have nothing to do with the
+sudden barometric variation)&mdash;she had suddenly declared to him that "he
+might as well go down to the office and countermand the order for Miss
+Hill's ticket and save the money; as if she [Miss Hill] went to California
+with him on the steamer that day, she [Mrs. Barnes] would not stir one step
+but stay in New York." Inquiry and even demand had failed to secure any
+explanation of this strange and sudden veering of the marital weathercock;
+and expostulation and even entreaty, with full representations of the
+contemptible position in which he would be placed by any change in the
+arrangements at that hour, had failed to secure any modification of the
+sentence. She wanted no strangers in her house, or in her company on board
+ship; and she would not have any&mdash;that was flat! If Eleanor Hill went to
+California, <i>she</i> remained! A full-blown domestic quarrel, lasting with
+different degrees of gusty violence for nearly an hour, had been the
+result; and that other result had followed which nearly always follows when
+husband and wife commence discussion of any matter seriously affecting the
+feelings (or whims) of the latter&mdash;the husband had succumbed, the
+arrangement had been definitely broken off, and the state-room which the
+young girl was to have occupied was no doubt by that time in the occupancy
+of a man with a red beard, long boots, a broad hat and a gray blanket!</p>
+
+<p>Poor Eleanor Hill!&mdash;it seemed too hard, indeed&mdash;this being plunged back
+again into the pit of helpless sin and self-reproach, at every effort made
+for extrication!</p>
+
+<p>There is a legend told of the great well in the court-yard<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> of one of the
+old English castles, at the period of the Parliamentary wars, which comes
+into mind when the cruel facts of her life are remembered. Sir Hugh, the
+Cavalier, had seen his castle surprised, taken and sacked by the
+Cromwellian troopers, guided and led on by a roundhead churl who owed him
+gratitude instead of ill-service&mdash;had been wounded and made prisoner, while
+the females of his family were maltreated and the pictures that made half
+his ancestral pride stabbed and hacked in pieces by the ruffians who could
+not enough outrage the living members of his race. Then the tide of fortune
+had turned; he had once more regained his strong-hold, with manly arms
+around him, and those of his dear ones who had not perished by outrage and
+exposure, once more under his sheltering hand. Then the recreant roundhead
+neighbor fell one day into his hands, and the cruel blood of the Norman
+ancestors who had begun <i>their</i> robbery and rapine on English soil at
+Hastings, rose up in the breast of Sir Hugh and made him for the time a
+very fiend of revenge. The great well had been ruined by the corpses thrown
+into it at the sacking of the castle; and into that well, in spite of his
+struggles, he had the poor wretch lowered by his retainers, then the slight
+rope cut away and the victim left to cling to the slippery stones at the
+edge of the water thirty feet below, unable to climb them, too desperate to
+sink, and wailing out his cries for mercy, while a huge lamp, lowered by
+another rope, showed the whole terrible spectacle to the pitiless eyes that
+dared look down upon it. Then another rope was lowered by the great
+windlass, within reach of the struggling wretch, and he was allowed to
+seize hold upon it and climb a little way from the water, under the belief
+that his tyrant had at last relented and that he was to be allowed to save
+himself after that dreadful trial. Then, when he had climbed for a few feet
+from the black ooze beneath him, the rope was lowered away and the poor
+wretch again submerged, to shriek, and wail, and climb again, and to be
+again dropped back at the moment of transient hope, until the wearied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+fingers could cling and climb no longer and the life thus outraged and the
+light which had revealed that sad refinement upon cruelty went horribly out
+together! And how much less cruel was Fate, thus standing guard over the
+life of Eleanor Hill and dropping her back again into her own shame at
+every attempt which she made to escape from it or to rise above it,&mdash;than
+the grim and grizzled old Sir Hugh who had been made a human fiend by his
+past wrongs and the bandit blood of his race?</p>
+
+<p>There was genuine regret blended with the anger and shame on the honest
+face of William Barnes, as he made that confession which dashed all the
+hopes of the young girl,&mdash;that he <i>dared not</i> take her to California. But
+who shall describe the expression of hopeless sorrow and despondency which
+dwelt upon hers at that moment? Yet despondency was unwise as struggle was
+unavailing. This, too, must be borne, as a part of the penalty of&mdash;no, we
+cannot write the word "guilt"&mdash;the penalty of being unfortunate and abused!
+The Californian took the privilege of blood, to urge the acceptance of such
+a sum from his well-filled wallet as would enable her to replace the
+clothing and other articles in her trunks, then too late to remove from the
+hold of the vessel,&mdash;bade her good-bye and sprung on board just as the last
+call was given. The poor outcast mustered courage to speak to a hackman as
+the steamer moved away that she had so lately hoped was to bear her to a
+more hospitable land and a better life; and half an hour later she was
+speeding back towards Philadelphia on the Camden and Amboy boat; with
+strange thoughts running through her mind but happily finding no lodgment
+there, that under some circumstances of desertion and despair there could
+not be such a terrible crime in slipping quietly overboard and going to a
+dreamless sleep in the cool, placid water.</p>
+
+<p>Had Eleanor Hill possessed that energy the want of which has been so many
+times before deplored, she would have sought out another home, though in
+the most miserable alley<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> of the overcrowded city, before returning yet
+more disgraced to that place of misery once abandoned. But she lacked that
+energy, and perhaps her coming life was foredoomed, as the past had been.
+That night the bars of her cage closed again upon her. Dr. Philip Pomeroy
+received her in all kindness, with some expressions of pleased surprise and
+a few sharp epithets hurled at the man who could be weak enough to change
+his mind in that manner at the bidding of a woman. But there was something
+in his tone and demeanor which left the girl in doubt whether he was really
+so much surprised as he pretended; and later developments were rapidly
+approaching which made the doubt more tenable.</p>
+
+<p>Among the acquaintances formed by Eleanor Hill in the early days of her
+residence under the roof of Dr. Pomeroy, had been the family of Robert
+Brand, which the doctor visited (as he did many others in the neighborhood)
+both as friend and medical attendant. In those days she had been visited by
+Elsie Brand and her brother, and had visited them in return. Gradually all
+intimacy between Elsie and herself had ceased, as that great change, known
+only to herself and two others, affected the whole tenor of her life. But
+the friendship at that time formed with Carlton Brand had never weakened,
+and it perhaps grew the stronger from the hour when each became satisfied
+that no warmer personal interest would ever rise in the breast of the
+other. Perhaps Carlton Brand, to some extent a man of the world, and a
+close student of character by virtue of his profession, may have formed his
+opinions, long before 1861, of the relations existing between the doctor
+and his ward; but if so, he had not a thought of blame or any depreciation
+of respect for the poor girl on account of it; and during all those years,
+if he indeed harbored such suspicions, he had no means of verifying them,
+for Eleanor Hill's lips had been and remained quite as closely sealed to
+him as to others.</p>
+
+<p>Between Dr. Philip Pomeroy and the lawyer had always existed, since the
+young girl had been an inmate of the house,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> an antagonism which could not
+well be mistaken. No open rupture had taken place, in the knowledge of any
+acquaintance of either; but they never met without exchanging looks which
+told of mutual dislike and distrust. Within the three years between 1858
+and 1861 that antagonism, as even the unobservant girl could see, had
+markedly increased, so that even in his own house the doctor, when he came
+upon him, seldom addressed a word to his unwelcome guest. Had she known
+that in the investigations which followed the failure of the Dunderhaven
+Coal and Mining Company, in the later days of the great commercial crash of
+1857-8, Carlton Brand had been one of the counsel employed to prosecute
+that great swindle in which her own fortune had been swallowed up with
+hundreds of others,&mdash;had she known this, we say, she might have imagined
+some reason for this increase of dislike which was certainly not founded
+upon jealousy. But she would not have guessed, even then, one tithe of the
+causes for deadly and life-long hatred which lay between two men of
+corresponding eminence in two equally liberal professions. It is not
+possible, at this stage of the narration, to explain what were those
+causes, eventually so certain to develop themselves.</p>
+
+<p>On the eve of her attempted transit to California, of which we have already
+seen the melancholy failure, Eleanor Hill wrote but one letter of farewell,
+and that letter was addressed to Carlton Brand. On her way homeward from
+her great disappointment, she paused in the city to drop a pencil note
+written on board the steamboat; and that was also to Carlton Brand,
+informing him of her return. No reply was made to the latter note, for
+three days: then the lawyer called upon her one day during the professional
+absence of the doctor. He had been absent, at the city of New York and
+still farther eastward, for more than a week previous. He had returned from
+the commercial metropolis only the day before, and had taken the very
+earliest moment to acknowledge the reception of her missive and to express
+his sympathy in her disappointment&mdash;perhaps something more.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After a few moments of conversation on that unfortunate affair, the lawyer
+remarked that he had chanced to stop at the same hotel in New York,
+patronized by Mr. Barnes and his wife, and having some recollection of the
+face of the former, from old Philadelphia rencontres, had made the
+acquaintance of both. He had known nothing whatever of the intention of
+Eleanor to accompany them to the Pacific coast, or even that any
+relationship existed between herself and William Barnes. But Mrs. Barnes
+had "cottoned to him" a little, apparently, he had been the possessor of a
+few spare hours, and he had become her companion and escort on some of her
+shopping excursions when Mr. Barnes was otherwise employed. He had been her
+escort on the morning of the day on which she sailed, and after her return
+from the Post-office had been present at her opening of several letters,
+over one of which she fell into a storm of rage requiring an apology for
+such an exposure before a comparative stranger. As a part of that apology,
+she had handed him the letter, bearing the Philadelphia post-mark; and
+inadvertently, as he then supposed, but providentially, as he afterwards
+saw reason to believe, he had kept the letter in his hands, dropped it into
+his pocket with his newspaper, and forgotten to return it until he had
+parted from the enraged woman and left the hotel. It was only after his
+return to Philadelphia and reception of the two notes advising him of
+Eleanor's intended departure and her disappointment, that he had been able
+to connect that letter with any one in whom he possessed a personal
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>Eleanor Hill had been gradually growing paler during this recital; and she
+was chalky white and almost ready to faint, when at that stage the lawyer
+paused and handed her a letter taken from his pocket, with the inquiry, "if
+she knew that handwriting." The letter was very brief, but very expressive,
+and ran as follows&mdash;the words being faithfully copied from the shameful
+original, lying at the writer's hand at this moment:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="right">
+<span class="smcap">Philadelphia</span>, &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;, 1861.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Madam</span>:&mdash;I have accidentally learned that arrangements have
+been made by your husband and yourself, to take a young lady
+back with you to your home in California, on your return.
+When I tell you that I knew your husband and his family many
+years ago, you will understand my motive for taking part in
+what is apparently none of my business. If the report is
+true, that you do so intend, you have been shamefully
+deceived and imposed upon. The young lady, whose name I need
+not mention, has been for years the mistress of the man with
+whom she is living; and you can judge for yourself the
+policy of introducing such a person into your household. I
+have no means of judging whether your husband is or is not
+acquainted with the real character of the lady; but any
+doubt on that subject you can have no difficulty in solving
+for yourself. I have preferred to address you instead of
+him, with this warning, because in the event of his really
+being aware of all the circumstances, any communication to
+him would of course never have reached your eyes. With the
+highest esteem and regard for yourself, for your husband and
+his family, I am (only concealing my real name, for the
+present, from motives which I hope you will readily
+appreciate,) yours, obediently,</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+D. T. M.<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"My God!&mdash;yes, I know that handwriting!" sobbed Eleanor Hill, covering her
+eyes with both hands, after glancing over the precious epistle.</p>
+
+<p>"So I feared!" said Carlton Brand.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how can any man be so cruel!" continued the poor girl.</p>
+
+<p>"How could he dare to utter such a falsehood?" said the lawyer, glancing
+closely at the young girl meanwhile. Her face, that had the moment before
+been pale, was now one flush of crimson, and it seemed as if the very veins
+would burst with the pressure of shamed and indignant blood. Carlton Brand
+saw, and if he had before doubted, he doubted no longer. He spoke not
+another word. But the instant after, at last goaded beyond all endurance,
+Eleanor Hill started to her feet, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Carlton Brand, I believe that I have but one friend in the world, and you
+are that friend. I have tried to keep my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> shame from you, because I could
+not bear to forfeit your good opinion. You know all, now, but do not
+believe me guilty and wicked! That man&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not believe you guilty, Eleanor, whatever may be the errors into
+which you have been dragged by that worst devil out of torment!" he
+interrupted her.</p>
+
+<p>"Expose that man to the world, then, or kill him! Do not let my shame stand
+in the way! I can bear any thing, to see him punished as he deserves, for
+this last cruel deed!" The girl was for the moment beside herself, and she
+little thought, just then, what was the penalty she braved! It seemed that
+Carlton Brand better appreciated the peril, or that some other weighty
+consideration chained his limbs and his spirit, for his was now the flushed
+face, and he made none of those physical movements which the avenger
+inevitably assumes, even if beneath no other eye than God's, when he
+determines upon a course of action involving exposure and possible danger.
+He seemed to tremble, but not with anxiety: his was rather the quiver of
+inerti&aelig; than any nobler incitement.</p>
+
+<p>"Expose him?&mdash;kill him?" he gasped rather than said. "You do not know what
+you ask, Eleanor! I cannot!&mdash;dare not&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Dare</i> not?" echoed Eleanor Hill, her face that had ordinarily so little
+pride or courage in it, now expressing wonder not unmingled with contempt.
+For the first time, she saw the countenance of that man who had seemed to
+her almost a demi-god, convulsed with pain and shame; and the sad wonder
+that was almost pity grew in her eyes, as within a moment after, moved by
+her confidence and assured by it that he need fear no danger of betrayal,
+Carlton Brand entrusted her with the secret of that skeleton in his mental
+closet which made him powerless against the bold, unscrupulous and
+determined Philip Pomeroy. Each had the most dangerous confidence of the
+other, then; and each realized, if nothing more, a certain painful
+satisfaction in knowing that the burthen was not thenceforth to be borne
+entirely without sympathy. But to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> neither did there appear any hope of
+unravelling a villany which seemed to both so monstrous.</p>
+
+<p>All this took place in the summer of 1861, it will be remembered; and
+between that time and the period at which we have seen Eleanor Hill
+kneeling piteously before Nathan Bladesden and afterwards greeting Carlton
+Brand with such a sympathy of shame and sorrow,&mdash;nearly two years had
+elapsed. During that time Carlton Brand had seemed to gather more and more
+dislike of the physician, and, as must be confessed, more and more positive
+fear of him; while Dr. Pomeroy had more than once treated poor Eleanor with
+positive bodily indignity for daring to receive his visits at all, though
+he was the last of all her old acquaintances who kept up the least pretence
+at intimacy. Finally, for months before the June of 1863, the lawyer had
+ceased to make any visits to the house, except at times when he knew the
+doctor to be absent; and then he stayed but briefly at each infrequent
+call, while one of the female servants, who was devoted to Eleanor, had
+confidential orders from her to keep watch for the sudden coming of the
+doctor, so that this man, who seemed born to be a Paladin, could skulk away
+by one door or the other and avoid a meeting! A most pitiable exhibition,
+truly!&mdash;but the record must be made a faithful one, even in this melancholy
+instance.</p>
+
+<p>Since Eleanor Hill's return from her temporary Hegira, for a long period,
+so far as the eye could see no change had taken place in the relations
+existing between the "guardian" and his "ward." Perhaps he treated her with
+more coolness than of old; and she may have been more habitually silent,
+while she had become a virtual recluse and seldom passed beyond the doors
+of that fated dwelling. Whatever the weakness which the fact may have shown
+on her part, whatever of persistent evil on his,&mdash;the old intimacy of crime
+had been maintained, though the love once existing in the breast of the
+young girl had long changed to loathing, and there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> was every reason to
+believe that the ignobler passion urging on her destroyer had quite as long
+before become satiety.</p>
+
+<p>This up to a certain period. One day during the winter of 1862, Nathan
+Bladesden, a Quaker merchant of the city, gray-headed, eminently
+respectable and a widower, had found occasion to call at the residence of
+Dr. Pomeroy. In the host's absence he had been received by his ward; and
+the blind god, ever fantastic in his dealings, had smitten the calm, strong
+man with a feeling not to be overcome. He had called again and again,
+sometimes in the doctor's absence and sometimes when he was at home; but
+the object of his pursuit had evidently been Eleanor Hill. His visits had
+seemed to be rather pleasing than otherwise to the master of the house, who
+could not fail to see towards what they tended; and that he did see and
+approve had seemed to be evident from his entire withdrawal of himself from
+Eleanor's private society, from the time of the second visit. The poor
+girl's heart had leaped with joy, at the possibility of union with a noble
+man, that should finally remove her from her false position and make her
+past life only a sad remembrance; and those precisians may blame her who
+will, while all must sorrow for the circumstances which seemed to render
+the deception necessary,&mdash;that she had not shuddered, as she possibly
+should have done, at the idea of marriage without full confidence. Two
+months before, while April was laughing and weeping over the earth, the
+grave, unimpeachable man, who already held so much of her respect and could
+so easily induce a much warmer feeling of her nature,&mdash;had asked her to be
+his honored wife and the mistress of his handsome house in the city; and
+the harrassed girl, the goal of a life of peace once more in sight, had
+answered him that she would be his wife at any moment if he would consent
+to accept the remnant of a heart which had been cruelly tortured and to
+make no inquiries as to a past which must ever remain buried. To these
+terms the Quaker had consented; this had been Eleanor Hill's betrothal; and
+with such a redeeming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> prospect in view had her life remained, until that
+fatal day of June when the knowledge that her whole secret was betrayed
+burst upon her in the presence and the reproaches of Nathan Bladesden. What
+passed between them has already been recorded, at a stage of this narration
+antecedent to the long but necessary resum&eacute; just concluded; and we have
+seen how, only a few minutes after, Carlton Brand held in his hand the
+letter of her second denunciation, and what were his brief but burning
+words as he commenced reading.</p>
+
+<p>"Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and he will find it!"</p>
+
+<p>He read through the letter without speaking another word, though there were
+occasional convulsive twitches of his face which showed how his heart was
+stirred to indignation by the perusal.</p>
+
+<p>"You are sure, are you not?" Eleanor asked, when he had finished.</p>
+
+<p>"Just as sure as I was in the other case. The deed is the most black and
+damning that I have ever known; and if I had before been an infidel I
+should be converted by the knowledge that such an incarnate scoundrel must
+roast in torment!"</p>
+
+<p>"And what am I to do?" asked the girl, with that helpless and irresolute
+air which is so pitiable.</p>
+
+<p>"Heaven help us both! I do not know!" was the reply, with the proud head
+drooping lower on the breast than it should ever have been bowed by any
+feeling except devotion.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot remain here after this!" she said. "Can you not take me away&mdash;do
+something for me? Does the&mdash;do the same obstacles stand in your way that
+stood there two years ago?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;not the same, but worse!" answered the lawyer, bitterly. "Oh, there
+never was a child so helpless as I am at this moment. I have wealth, but I
+cannot use it for your benefit without exposing you to final and complete
+ruin in public opinion. And for myself&mdash;poor Eleanor, I pity you,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> God
+knows I do, but I pity myself still worse. I came to tell you that I am
+going away this very day,&mdash;that I shall not again set foot within my
+father's house&mdash;perhaps never again while I live,&mdash;that my spirit is
+crushed and my heart broken."</p>
+
+<p>"What has happened? tell me! The old trouble, Carlton?" asked the young
+girl, in a tone of true commiseration.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the old trouble, and worse!" was the reply, followed by a rapid
+relation of the events of the morning, and concluding with these hopeless
+words: "An hour since, I parted with the woman I loved and hoped to make my
+own. To-morrow my name may be a scoff and a by-word in the mouth of every
+man who knows me. I cannot and will not meet this shame, which is not
+hidden like your own, but will be blown abroad by the breath of thousands
+of personal acquaintances, and perhaps made the subject of jest in the
+public newspapers. Think how those who have hated and perhaps feared
+me&mdash;criminals whom I have brought to justice and thieves whom I have foiled
+in their plunderings,&mdash;will gloat over the knowledge that I can trouble
+them no more&mdash;that I have fallen lower, in the public eye, than they have
+ever been! I am going away, where no man who has ever looked upon my face
+and known it, can look upon it again!"</p>
+
+<p>The tone in which Carlton Brand spoke was one of utter despondency and
+abandonment. There was nothing of the sharp, vigorous ring of that speech
+which contains and declares a purpose: the words fell stolid and lifeless
+as hung the head and drooped the arms of the utterer in her presence with
+whom he held a sad community of disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>"I understand you, and I believe that your lot is even worse than my own!"
+said Eleanor Hill, after a moment of silence. "You do right in going away,
+and you could not help me if you stayed. Nothing can help me, I suppose. Do
+not think of me any more. I can bear what is to come, quite as well as I
+have borne all that is past!" She had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> been nodding her head mechanically
+when she commenced speaking, and at every nod it sank lower and lower until
+the face was hidden from the one friend whom she was thus losing beyond
+recall.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment there was a rapid foot on the stairway above, and the house
+servant whom Eleanor had managed to keep in her interest spoke quickly at
+the door.</p>
+
+<p>"If you please, Miss, doctor's carriage is coming through the gate from the
+Darby road. Thought you would like to know it." And as rapidly as she had
+come down, she ascended again to her employment in the attic.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Carlton, you must not be seen here, now!" exclaimed the poor girl, her
+face all fright and anxiety, and herself apparently forgotten. Something in
+that look and tone smote the heart of Carlton Brand more deeply than it had
+ever been smitten by the sorrow and disgrace of his own situation; and with
+that feeling of intense compassion a new thought was born within him.
+"Yesterday I could not have done it&mdash;to-day I can!" he muttered, so low
+that the girl could not understand his words; then he said aloud, and
+speaking very rapidly:</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot meet him, and you shall not! Throw something on your head and
+over your shoulders, quick; and come with me!"</p>
+
+<p>For one instant the young girl gazed into his face as if in doubt and
+hesitation; but the repetition of a single word decided her:</p>
+
+<p>"Quick!"</p>
+
+<p>A glow of delight and surprise that had long been a stranger to her face,
+broke over it; she ran to the little bed-room adjoining the apartment in
+which they were speaking, threw on a black-silken mantle and a sober little
+hat that hung there, and was ready in an instant. In another Carlton Brand
+had seized her arm, hurried her out of the room, down the stairs, through
+the hall and out into the garden which lay at the north side of the house
+and extended down almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> to the edge of the causeway. Dr. Pomeroy was
+driving down the lane leading from the Darby road, and was consequently on
+the opposite side of the house from the fugitives. Fugitives they may well
+have been called, though perhaps so strange an elopement had never before
+been planned&mdash;an elopement over a comparatively open country in the broad
+light of a summer noon, by two persons who held no tie of blood and no
+warmer feeling for each other than friendship, and who had not dreamed of
+such an act even five minutes before.</p>
+
+<p>But those operations the most suddenly conceived are not always the worst
+executed. Necessity, if not genius, is often a successful imitator of that
+quality. When the doctor drove up at the gate in front of the house, his
+"ward" and her new companion were just dodging out of the tall bean-poles
+and shrubbery, over the garden fence, to the edge of the meadow; by the
+time he had fairly entered the house they were on the causeway and
+partially sheltered by the elders that ran along it and fringed the bank of
+the singing brook; and long before he could have discovered the flight and
+made such inquiries of the servants as might have directed his gaze in that
+direction, the lawyer in his strangely soiled and unaccustomed attire, and
+the girl so slightly arrayed for starting out on her travels in the world,
+were within the circle of woods before mentioned, stretching northward to
+the great road leading down to the city.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Dr. Pomeroy's purposed Pursuit&mdash;A plain Quaker who used very
+plain Language&mdash;Almost a Fight&mdash;How Mrs. Burton Hayley
+consoled her Daughter, and how Margaret revealed the Past&mdash;A
+Compact&mdash;Dr. Pomeroy's Canine Adventure&mdash;Old Elspeth once
+more&mdash;A Search that found Nothing.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>It will be noticed that with the exception of the somewhat extended glance
+at the earlier fortunes of Eleanor Hill, all the occurrences thus far
+recorded, and affecting the after lives of so many different people, have
+occupied not more than two or three hours of a single June day. The Parc&aelig;
+were evidently very busy on that day of June, repaying the past and
+arranging the future; and not less than three scenes of this veritable
+history yet remain, occurring on the same day, a little later, but within
+the same space as to distance, that has been covered by those preceding.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these is that presented in the house of Dr. Pomeroy, ten
+minutes after he had entered it, and when two or three sharp inquiries
+after his "ward," whom he failed to find in her room, had elicited from one
+of the frightened servants the information not only that she had left the
+house, through the garden, with hat and mantle and in great haste,&mdash;but in
+the company of the man of all the world towards whom the medical gentleman
+entertained that deadliest hatred which would have made his drugs safe and
+reliable had he been attending him in a dangerous sickness! He might not
+have known the fact quite so soon, from any of the other servants, as he
+certainly would not have discovered the truth under a twelvemonth from the
+one who had acted as Eleanor's sentinel on the watch tower; but it chanced
+that he possessed one creature of his own, who had been in the habit of
+playing spy around the house generally and making very considerable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+additions to her wages from the "appropriation for secret service"; and
+from that open-mouthed person, who seemed to see with that organ as well as
+with the eyes, he had no difficulty in extracting all the truth that could
+be known, in an inconceivably minute fraction of time.</p>
+
+<p>The rage which broke out in the face of Dr. Philip Pomeroy and set his eyes
+ablaze, at about that period, would not have been a pleasant thing to look
+upon, for any person liable to the penalties and inflictions which that
+rage denoted. For he was a sharp, keen, calculating man, jumping to a
+conclusion with great rapidity, and seldomer missing the fact than most men
+under corresponding circumstances. Eleanor Hill was gone&mdash;had left his
+house forever, so far as her own will had any power: he knew the fact
+intuitively. She would never have dared to cross the threshold with Carlton
+Brand, knowing the hatred which he held against that man of all others, if
+she had intended to place herself again in a position where she could feel
+his displeasure. Then the doctor knew, as the reader may by this time be
+inclined to suspect, reasons why the young girl would have been much more
+likely to leave his house forever, that day, than at any previous time of
+her sojourn, if aid and protection chanced to offer themselves. They <i>had</i>
+offered themselves, in the shape of the lawyer: they had been embraced; and
+the good physician, hurling a few outward curses at the servant who had
+afforded him the intelligence, at all the other servants, at the house and
+every thing within it,&mdash;mentally included in his malediction every patient
+who had assisted in luring him away from his home that day, while such a
+spoil was being made of his "domestic happiness."</p>
+
+<p>The worst of the affair&mdash;and the doctor saw it&mdash;was that Eleanor Hill had
+attained her majority years before, and that he had no power whatever to
+compel her return, except that power still existed in the impending threat
+of public shame. But he was wronged&mdash;robbed&mdash;outraged! He would pursue the
+fugitive&mdash;find her&mdash;force her to abandon her new protection&mdash;drag<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> her by
+main force from any arm that dared to interpose! If he failed, he would
+make such a general desolation in family peace, in the quiet neighborhood
+lying beyond that side the Schuylkill, as had never been known within the
+memory of the "oldest inhabitant"&mdash;such an expos&eacute;, convulsion and general
+explosion as would put out of countenance any thing in the power of the
+advancing rebel Lee!</p>
+
+<p>All this in the two minutes following the knowledge of Eleanor's flight.
+The ostler had just led round his heated horse to the stable, before the
+discovery; and that functionary had orders shot at him from the back
+piazza, in a very loud and commanding voice, to throw the harness on
+another of his fastest trotters, and have him round at the gate in less
+than half a minute, before his double-seated buggy, on pain of being flayed
+alive with his own horse-whip. It may be supposed that under such
+incitement the stable official handled strap and buckle with unusual
+dexterity; and in very little more time than that allowed by the
+regulation, the vehicle dashed round to the gate, and the enraged owner
+stood whip in hand, ready to leap into it and urge a pursuit yet madder
+than had been the elopement. But Dr. Philip Pomeroy, having prepared to
+ride at once and with all diligence, found an unexpected hindrance, and did
+not pursue his journey until a much more advantageous start had been
+allowed to the fugitives.</p>
+
+<p>For while the doctor was preparing to spring into his vehicle, down the
+lane from the Darby road dashed the buggy and pair of Nathan Bladesden,
+which had so lately taken that direction&mdash;dashed down, driven at such speed
+as flung the fine horses into a lather of foam, and utterly belied the calm
+reputation of the Quaker merchant. Nor was there any thing of the
+deliberation of the sect in the jerk with which he brought up the flying
+team by throwing them both back upon their haunches, or the suddenness with
+which he sprang from the buggy, leaving the horses unfastened, and strode
+to the open gate.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The rencontre was most inopportune and vexatious to the doctor, to whom
+minutes just then were hours; and he may have had motives for wishing, that
+day, not to be placed beneath an eye so sharpened by age and experience.
+But Nathan Bladesden was a man of wealth and a power in the city, and not
+even Dr. Pomeroy could afford to treat him with rudeness by driving away at
+the very moment of his arrival. He smoothed his bent brows, therefore, and
+accosted him with every demonstration of interest.</p>
+
+<p>"Glad to see you, Mr. Bladesden! You seem to have been driving fast! But
+you come just in time, for I was about starting in a hurry to&mdash;to see a
+patient."</p>
+
+<p>Had Dr. Pomeroy been aware of all the circumstances connected with the
+morning call of the merchant&mdash;the shameful revelations made in the little
+room overhead&mdash;the agony of spirit in which the Quaker had forced himself
+away from the presence of Eleanor Hill, deserting her utterly and leaving
+her in such a state of suffering as made suicide very possible&mdash;and the
+continued and ever-deepening conflict which had since been going on in his
+mind, as he dashed along roads that led him nowhere, his horses foaming in
+the heat but the heat in his brain a thousand times more intense, until at
+last he had driven back determined to drag the young girl, at every hazard
+and sacrifice, from that moral pest-house which must be sure infection and
+death to her soul,&mdash;had Dr. Pomeroy known all this, we say, not even his
+hardy spirit might have been willing to brave the encounter. But he knew
+nothing, and some of the perilous consequences of ignorance followed.</p>
+
+<p>"I did not come to see <i>thee</i>, Dr. Philip," replied the Quaker to his
+salutation, passing on meanwhile towards the front door, and something
+short and choppy in his words indicating that he did not wish to open his
+mouth at full freedom. "I saw thy ward, Eleanor Hill, this morning, and I
+am going to see her again."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, you have been here to-day, then, before? And you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> are going to see her
+again, after&mdash;." It was surprising, for a man of his age and experience,
+how near he came to saying a word too much!</p>
+
+<p>"After receiving <i>thy letter</i>?&mdash;yes!" answered the Quaker, turning short
+and confronting his quondam host, the restraint on his utterance removed.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>My</i> letter? What do you mean by my letter?" Had any one told Philip
+Pomeroy, half an hour before, that there was a man living who in five words
+could change the color on his cheek, he would have reckoned the informant a
+liar and grossly insulted him. Yet so it was; and the flush, though it was
+already growing into that of defiant anger, had not been such when it began
+to rise.</p>
+
+<p>"Thee does not seem to understand me, Dr. Philip," said the Quaker, his
+words still slow and no point of the sectarian idiom lost, but each
+dropping short and curtly as if a weighty substance falling heavily. "But
+thee will understand me before I am done. Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A
+True Friend'&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You lie!" A terrible word, to be flung into the teeth of any man; and
+doubly terrible as hurled from lips then ashy white. For just one instant
+the Quaker's large hands clutched, and he might have been moved to advance
+upon his insulter and avenge Eleanor Hill, himself and all the world, by
+choking the insult from his throat. But if such a thought really moved him,
+he controlled it and merely smote on with his words.</p>
+
+<p>"Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A True Friend,' and thee shall have my
+opinion of it, before I go into that house and remove from thee, at any
+peril that may be necessary, the poor girl thee has disgraced."</p>
+
+<p>"Set a foot nearer that house, if you dare!" was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Thee is a base, miserable coward, Dr. Philip!&mdash;a scoundrel, a seducer, a
+lying slanderer, the offspring of a female dog of the cur species, a
+disgrace to thy country and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> thy profession; and if thee knows any more
+hard words that I forget, thee may put them all in on my account."</p>
+
+<p>"Nathan Bladesden, do you think that you will leave this spot alive, after
+using such words to <i>me</i>!" and the hands of Philip Pomeroy were clutching
+at his wristbands as if rolling them up to put them out of the way of
+blood! The purpose of attack was reversed: he seemed to be about to spring,
+tiger-like, at the Quaker's throat.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Thee</i> will not kill me, Dr. Philip, if I do not!" the latter said. "I am
+stronger than thee, and have a better cause. I think I will not touch thee,
+but leave thee to thy Maker, if thee keeps thy hands off; but I have made
+up my mind, if thee touches me, to beat thee until thee has no shape of a
+man&mdash;until thee is dead as yonder gate-post. If thee thinks that I will
+not, thee had better try it!"</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Pomeroy did not believe himself a poltroon, nor was he one in that
+sense relating to purely physical courage. And had there been merely
+involved a conflict with that larger, stronger and better-preserved man, in
+which one or the other might suffer severe injury and disfigurement, he
+would have carried out his thought and sprung upon him, beyond a question.
+But something in those slow dropping pellets of compressed rage falling
+from the Quaker's lips, told the medical man (seldom too angry to be subtle
+and cunning), that in the event of a struggle, and the merchant getting the
+upper hand, he would probably carry out his threat and actually beat him to
+death with those heavy fists before any human aid could interpose. And to
+be mangled into a corpse by a Quaker&mdash;bah! there was really something in
+the idea, likely to calm blood quite as hot with rage as that of Dr.
+Philip&mdash;apart from the slight objection he may have had to being hurried
+into eternity in any way, at that moment. Then another thought struck
+him&mdash;a double one: how completely the Quaker would be at fault, searching
+through the house for Eleanor Hill; and how he was himself losing time, in
+that miserable quarrel&mdash;time that could never be regained. His horse and
+buggy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> stood all the while just within the opened gate, where the ostler
+had left it and gone back to his care of the blown animal at the stable;
+and as that important reflection forced itself upon his mind, he turned his
+back short upon the Quaker, strode to his buggy, stepped into it and dashed
+away, only pausing to hurl at his tormentor this one verbal bolt:</p>
+
+<p>"You infernal, snuffling, hypocritical ruffian! I will settle with you for
+all this, when I have more time!"</p>
+
+<p>"Thee had better let the account stand as it does, Dr. Philip, if thee is
+not a fool as well as a scoundrel!" was the reply of the Quaker, but it is
+very doubtful whether the doctor heard half the words. He was already
+flying past the garden palings, at the full speed of his trotter, towards
+the causeway and the Market Street road, on his errand of reclamation and
+perhaps of vengeance. Then Nathan Bladesden pursued his way into the house,
+looking for the lost sheep, with that ill success rendered certain by
+Eleanor's flight, and that disappointment which often attends noble
+resolutions embraced one moment too late.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The second of the supplementary scenes of that day was presented in the
+parlors of the residence of Mrs. Burton Hayley&mdash;that parlor into which the
+reader had only a doubtful glance a few hours earlier, when events which
+seemed likely to affect the life-long interests of some of the residents of
+that house, were occurring on the piazza.</p>
+
+<p>Rich furniture in rosewood and purple damask; a piano of modern
+manufacture, the open bank of keys showing the soft coolness of
+mother-of-pearl; carpets of English tapestry; pier glasses that might have
+given reflection to the colonel of a Maine regiment or one of the sons of
+Anak; tables and mantels strewn but not overloaded with delicate bronzes,
+gems in porcelain and Bohemian glass, and articles of fanciful bijouterie;
+on one of the mantels&mdash;that of the front room&mdash;Cleopatra in <i>ormolu</i>
+upholding the dial of a clock with one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> hand, but with the other applying
+to her voluptuously-rounded bosom the asp so soon to put a period to all
+her connection with time;&mdash;what need of more than this to indicate the home
+in which Margaret Hayley had passed the last few years of her young life
+and approached that crisis so momentous to her future happiness? Yet one
+thing more must be noticed&mdash;the stand of rosewood elaborately carved, set
+not far from the centre of the front parlor, and bearing on it a large
+Bible in the full luxury of russet morocco and gold, with massive gold
+clasps and a heavy marker in silk and bullion dependent from amid the
+leaves,&mdash;the whole somewhat ostentatiously displayed to the sight of any
+one who first entered the room, as if to say: "There may seem to be pomps
+and vanities in this house, but any such impression would be a mistake:
+this book is the rule by which every thing within it is squared."</p>
+
+<p>On the sofa, wheeled into that corner of the luxurious parlor upon which
+the closed shutter threw the deepest and coolest shadow, lay Margaret
+Hayley, her head buried in the white pillow which some careful hand had
+brought for her, and her thrown-up hands drawing the ends of that pillow
+around her face as if she desired to shut away every sight and every sound.
+Her slight, tall figure seemed, as she lay at length, to be limp and
+unnerved; and there was that in the whole position which seemed to indicate
+that the mental energies, if not the vital ones, had recoiled after being
+cruelly overtasked, and left her alike incapable of thought and motion.</p>
+
+<p>She was not alone, for beside her sat a lady dressed in very thin and light
+but rich and rather showy summer costume, rolling backward and forward in
+her Boston rocker, waving a feather fan of such formidable dimensions that
+its manufacture must have created a sudden rise in the material immediately
+after, and talking all the while with such stately volubility as if she
+believed that the hot air of the June afternoon would be less unendurable
+if kept constantly in motion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> by the personal windmill of the tongue. This
+was Mrs. Burton Hayley, mother of Margaret, widow of the late Mr. Burton
+Hayley, railroad-contractor, snugly jointured with eight or ten thousand
+per annum, and endowed (as she herself believed, and as we will certainly
+endeavor to believe with her, in charity) with so many of those higher
+gifts and graces of a spiritual order that her wealth had become dross and
+her liberal income rather a thing to be deplored than otherwise. (It may be
+the proper place, here, to say that the gilt Bible on the stand was the
+peculiar arrangement of this lady, and the sign&mdash;if so mercantile a word
+may be applied to any thing really demanding all human respect and
+devotion&mdash;of that peculiar mental stock in trade which she was to be found
+most ready in exhibiting on all occasions.)</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burton Hayley was tall&mdash;even taller than her daughter; and her form
+had assumed, with advancing years, a fulness which the complimentary would
+have designated as "plump," the irreverent as "stout," and the vulgar as
+"fat." Her face, moulded somewhat after the same fashion as that of
+Margaret, must have been undeniably handsome in youth, though now&mdash;the
+truth must be told&mdash;it was not a specially lovable face to the acute
+observer. Her dark eyes had still kept their depths of beautiful shadow,
+and her intensely dark hair (though she had married late in girlhood and
+was now fifty) showed neither thinness nor any touch of gray. But the long
+and once classical features had become coarsened a little in the secondary
+formation of adipose particles; the possible paleness of girlhood had given
+place to a slight red flush (especially in that tropical weather) that was
+not by any means becoming to her; and there were all the while two
+conflicting expressions fighting for prominence in her face, so different
+in themselves and so really impossible of amalgamation, that the most rabid
+disciple of "miscegenation" could not have arranged a plan for blending
+them both into one. The outer expression, which seemed somehow to lie as a
+thin transparent strata over the other, indicated pious and resigned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>
+humility&mdash;that feeling which passes by the ordinary accidents and troubles
+of life as merely gentle trials of faith and of no consequence in view of
+the great truth rooted within. The second and inner, which would persist in
+obtruding itself through the transparent mask, was <i>pride</i>&mdash;pride in its
+most intense and concentrated form&mdash;pride in blood, wealth, personal
+appearance, position, every thing belonging to and going to make up that
+marvellous human compound, Mrs. Burton Hayley. The eyes were trained to be
+very subdued and decorous in their expression; but they did so want to
+flash out authority, if not arrogance! The nose was kept always (or
+generally) at the proper subservient level; but it did so itch and tingle
+for the privilege of lifting itself high in air and taking a nasal view,
+from that altitude, of all the world lying below it! It was very evident,
+to any one observing the mother after having examined the daughter's face
+in the clear light of physiognomy, that the latter had derived from her
+maternal progenitor most of that overweening pride which youth and beauty
+yet wore as a crown of glory but age might wear as something much less
+attractive,&mdash;and that she must have inherited from her dead father that
+softness, frankness, and that better-developed love-nature which toned down
+in her own all the more decided features of the mother's face and made her
+worthy of affection as well as admiration.</p>
+
+<p>As we have said, Mrs. Burton Hayley was using her tongue with great
+volubility at the moment of her introduction to the attention of the
+reader, though really the mode in which her single auditor kept her head
+buried in the pillow and drew the soft folds around her ears with both
+hands, did not indicate that desire for steady conversation which could
+have made such a continual verbal clatter a thing of necessity. There is
+the more occasion for giving Mrs. Burton Hayley her full opportunity for
+speech, as she has occasion to utter but little hereafter, in this
+connection.</p>
+
+<p>"You should be very thankful, my child, for all that has occurred," the
+voluble woman was saying. "A Power higher<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> than ourselves overrules all
+these affairs much better than we could do; and it is flying in the face of
+Providence to cry and go on over little disappointments."</p>
+
+<p>A pause of one instant, and one instant only, as if in expectation that
+some reply would be vouchsafed; and then the band was again thrown upon the
+driving-wheel&mdash;as one of the machinery-tenders in a factory might say,&mdash;and
+the human buzz-saw whirled once more.</p>
+
+<p>"I have told you, child, time and again, that you would be punished for
+setting your affections on any person who had not given evidence of a
+changed heart&mdash;a man who had not passed from death unto life, but who still
+ran after the pomps and vanities of the world&mdash;those pomps and vanities
+which religion teaches us to despise and put away from us." (Oh, Mrs.
+Burton Hayley, why did you not catch a glance, at that moment, of the room
+in which you were sitting, redolent of every luxury within the reach of any
+ordinary wealth, and of your own stately and still comely person, arrayed
+in garments the least possible like those with which people content
+themselves who have really eschewed the "pomps and vanities of the world,"
+either from conscientious humility or that other and much commoner
+motive&mdash;the lack of means to continue them!) "You should be very glad that
+you have been providentially delivered from your engagement with an
+unbeliever and a man of the world&mdash;a man without principle, I dare say, as
+you have discovered that he is without courage; and all the money there is
+in his family (and they <i>do</i> say that the Brands have not much and never
+have had much!)&mdash;all their money, I say, acquired in the disreputable
+practice of the law, so that if this thing had not happened and you had
+been left to depend for subsistence upon his fortune, you might have found
+it all melting away in a moment, as money dishonestly acquired is certain
+to do; for does not the blessed book that I try to make my rule of life,
+say, my child, that moth is certain to corrupt and thieves break through
+and steal whatever has been wrung from the widow and the orphan?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Margaret Hayley had not replied a word during the whole application of that
+verbal instrument of torture, though it seemed evident from the context
+that some conversation employing the tongues of both must have passed at an
+earlier period of the interview. She had merely writhed in body and groaned
+in spirit, as every moment told her more and more distinctly that in her
+dark hour she had no mother who could understand and sympathize with
+her&mdash;that cant phrases and pious generalizations were to be hurled against
+her at that moment when most of all she needed to be treated by that mother
+like a wearied child, drawn home to her bosom and cradled to sleep amid
+soothing words and loving kisses.</p>
+
+<p>But Margaret Hayley did something else than writhe when the accusation of
+having acquired his wealth by dishonesty was cast upon the man whom she had
+worshipped&mdash;yes, the man whom she worshipped still, in spite of the one
+terrible defect which seemed to draw an eternal line of separation between
+them. She started up from her recumbent position, her hair dishevelled, her
+eyes red with weeping, and her whole face marked and marred by the anguish
+she had been suffering,&mdash;sprang up erect at once, with all her mother's
+pride manifest in voice and gesture, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, are you a rank hypocrite, or have you neither sense nor memory?"</p>
+
+<p>A strange question, from a daughter to her mother! The reply was not quite
+so strange, and it seemed to have much more of earnest in it than any
+portion of the long tirade she had before been delivering:</p>
+
+<p>"Margaret Hayley, how <i>dare</i> you!"</p>
+
+<p>"We can dare a good many things, when we do not care whether we live or
+die!" was the reply. "And though I have loved and respected you as my
+mother, I do not know that I have ever been afraid of you. Now listen. You
+have hated Carlton Brand, ever since he first came to this house, because
+he did not treat your religious assumptions with quite as much deference as
+you considered proper. He may have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> been right, or wrong: no matter now, as
+he is out of the way! But you have hated him, and you know it&mdash;because I
+loved him&mdash;I am not ashamed to own it!&mdash;loved him with my whole soul, as I
+believed that he deserved&mdash;as any woman <i>should</i> love the man whom she
+expects to take her to his heart!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what if I did dislike him? I had a right to do that, I suppose!"
+answered the mother, her voice no longer religiously calm, but rough and
+querulous.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not interrupt me!&mdash;hear me out!" said the young girl. "You liked Hector
+Coles for a corresponding reason&mdash;because he pretended to fall into all
+your notions, and complimented you on your 'piety' and 'Christian dignity,'
+when he was all the while laughing at you behind your back. You would have
+been pleased to see me discard the man I loved, and marry the man I could
+never love while I lived,&mdash;because your own likes and dislikes were in the
+way, and because you believed that in the position of mother-in-law you
+could manage the one and could <i>not</i> manage the other."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, what else, to your mother, Miss Impertinence!" broke in the lady who
+had been so voluble.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, a great deal more!" answered Margaret, with a manner not very
+different from a sneer. "To-day, since you have known that for one spot on
+a character otherwise so noble, I have broken off all relations with
+Carlton Brand, you have done nothing but sit here and preach me Christian
+resignation in words that your own heart was as steadily denying. When a
+true mother would have tried to console, you have tortured. And you have
+ended all by alleging that Carlton Brand and his father have acquired their
+money dishonorably, because they have both been lawyers,&mdash;and that such
+money must be accursed in the hands of any one who holds it."</p>
+
+<p>"I have said so, and I have a right to say so!" echoed the mother. "You may
+let loose your ribald tongue against the author of your being, ungrateful
+girl; but the truth is from heaven, and must be told&mdash;wealth obtained in
+any manner by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> day, upon which a blessing cannot be asked at night, is
+itself accursed, and curses every one who partakes in the use of it."</p>
+
+<p>"And every dollar that has been dishonestly obtained, then, should at once
+be restored to the rightful owner, I suppose&mdash;in order to escape the
+curse?" suggested Margaret.</p>
+
+<p>"Every dollar, and at once; for, as the Bible says, the spoiler cometh as a
+thief in the night, and no one can say how soon the judgment may fall!"
+answered the mother, triumphantly and in full confidence that she had at
+last silenced her refractory child by a strictly orthodox quotation.</p>
+
+<p>"How much are we worth, mother?" was the singular question which followed
+this supposed annihilation of all argument.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you know as well as I do that we have eighty thousand in stocks and
+in bank; and this property and that at Pottsville is believed to be worth
+twenty or thirty thousand more. We are worth, as you call it, more than a
+hundred thousand, and the whole of it will be yours some day&mdash;not very long
+first, when I have gone, as I hope and trust I may say, to my reward. You
+are rich, my child, and I am glad to see that you think of these things at
+last, as you may be kept from throwing yourself away <i>again</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The voice and whole manner of the mother were much more amiable than they
+had been at any time since the rising of her daughter from the sofa; for
+nothing seemed to restore the tone of her agitated feeling like references,
+from whatever source, to her wealth and position.</p>
+
+<p>"A hundred thousand. There is not nearly enough, then!" The words were half
+muttered, but Mrs. Burton Hayley distinctly heard them. And she saw
+something on the face of the young girl which she by no means understood,
+as the latter drew from her bosom the lower ends of the gold chain
+depending there, and unclasped the back of a rather large and very thick
+locket, the front of which presented a miniature in ivory of the handsome,
+well-whiskered and pleasant-looking Mr. Burton Hayley, her deceased father.
+Though she raised the locket to her lips and kissed it reverently, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+something on the face had not changed when she took from its unsuspected
+concealment a small slip of newspaper, neatly folded and of size enough to
+contain some twenty or thirty lines of small type. The mother's eyes were
+by this time wide open with astonishment and partial fear that her daughter
+had lost her wits in the agitation of that day. The paper looked old and
+yellow. Margaret unrolled it and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, here is something that I have carried with me night and day for
+five years past. I found it at that time, when clipping old newspapers in
+the attic, for my scrap-book. I marked the date on the back&mdash;it is eighteen
+years old, and the paper was a Harrisburgh one of that time. Have you your
+glasses with you, or shall I read it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, child, are you crazy? What has that slip of paper to do with the
+subject of which we were talking?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you can tell quite as well as myself, after I read it," answered
+Margaret. And she moved nearer to the one unshuttered window of the parlor,
+to secure a better light for the small type and dingy paper, the face of
+her mother gradually changing, meanwhile, from the surprise which had
+filled it, to a whiteness which seemed born of terror. Margaret read:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<span class="smcap">Soutter and others vs. Hayley and others.</span>&mdash;This somewhat
+remarkable railroad case closed yesterday, and the complaint
+was dismissed. Judge L&mdash;&mdash;, in granting the motion for a
+dismissal, took occasion to remark that he had seldom
+performed a more painful duty. That the railroad company had
+been defrauded to the extent of not less than eighty
+thousand dollars by Burton Hayley, the contractor, was one
+of the conclusions&mdash;the learned judge said&mdash;in which all
+would unfortunately agree. But the operation had been
+managed with great skill, and legal evidence of what was
+morally certain had not been produced. He should therefore
+grant the motion, with the regret expressed, and with the
+hope that in a future prosecution the evidence which was
+certainly demanded might be forthcoming, and the defrauded
+company at least find themselves in a position to punish the
+wrong-doer. We hear it stated, upon authority which seems
+reliable, that Hayley has heretofore been known as a
+reliable man, and that he has undoubtedly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> been urged to
+steps which he must regret during his whole life, even if
+justice does not reach him, or conscience compel him to make
+restitution,&mdash;by the demands made upon him in behalf of a
+ruinously expensive family, and by evil advice which he has
+no doubt received from the same quarter. Hayley will
+probably leave Harrisburgh at once, to enjoy what may be
+left of his ill-gotten gains in some locality where his
+antecedents are less fully understood."</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burton Hayley had sunk back into her chair at the moment when Margaret
+read the first words, and she remained silent till the close. Her face was
+white, except that a single red spot burned in the very centre of either
+cheek. Her daughter looked steadily upon her for an instant after she had
+concluded. Still neither spoke. The mother's eyes had in them something of
+that baleful light shown by the orbs of a wild beast when driven to its
+corner; and they, with the crimson spotted cheeks, were not pleasant things
+to look upon. At last Margaret asked:</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever hear of this before? Was that man my father?"</p>
+
+<p>"What of it? Yes!" The words were nearer spat out than spoken. Margaret
+glanced, perhaps involuntarily, at the ostentatious Bible on its carved
+stand.</p>
+
+<p>"Was that money ever repaid to the railroad company?"</p>
+
+<p>For just one instant the lips of Mrs. Burton Hayley moved as if she was
+about to utter a falsehood little less black than the original crime had
+been. If she had for that instant intended to do so, she thought better of
+it and jerked out: "How should I know? I suppose there is no use in telling
+a lie about it, to <i>you</i>! No!"</p>
+
+<p>"So I thought!" said Margaret Hayley. "That eighty thousand dollars, then,
+has been standing for fifteen years, and the interest upon it would nearly
+double the sum. We owe that railroad company, or so many members of the
+original company as may be yet alive, not less than one hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars. We have only an hundred<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> thousand or a very little more,
+but that will be something. Of course, after what you have just said of the
+curse that clings to ill-gotten gain, you will join me in paying over every
+dollar in our possession, at once."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burton Hayley sprang up from her chair with more celerity than she had
+before exhibited. "Margaret Hayley, are you a born fool?" she almost
+screamed.</p>
+
+<p>"No, nor a born <i>hypocrite</i>!" the young girl replied. Again her eyes went
+round to the Bible, and those of the mother followed hers as if they were
+compelled by a charm. Then those of the latter drooped, and they did not
+rise again as she said, in a much lower voice:</p>
+
+<p>"You know the secret. I am in your power. But I am your mother, and it may
+be quite as well for you to be merciful to me as well as to yourself. Upon
+what terms will you give me that paper and promise never to speak of it or
+of the affair to any one without my consent?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will not give you the paper upon <i>any</i> terms!" was the answer. "That has
+been my shame and my torture for five years, and must still accompany me.
+But I will be your accomplice in crime and make the promise you require, on
+three conditions and those only. <i>First</i>, that you drop all hypocrisy when
+speaking to <i>me</i>, whatever you may do before the world. <i>Second</i>, that you
+never speak one disrespectful word of Carlton Brand, again, in my hearing.
+He is dead to me: let your hatred of him die with him, or at least let me
+hear no word of it. <i>Third</i>, that you urge no person upon me as a husband.
+Present me whom you please&mdash;throw me into any company you wish; but say not
+one word to force me into marriage with Hector Coles or any other person.
+This will not break my heart&mdash;I know it. I shall marry some time, no doubt,
+when I find the man who can supply that place in my heart which has to-day
+been left empty,&mdash;without any foible or weakness to make him an unfit match
+for my own <i>stainless</i> blood!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a bitter emphasis upon the penultimate word,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> and Mrs. Burton
+Hayley distinctly recognized it. She recognized, too, the somewhat singular
+prophecy made by a young girl on the very day of her final parting with the
+man she had loved so dearly&mdash;that <i>she would yet find another to fill her
+heart more completely</i>. Most young persons think very differently at the
+moment of the great first sorrow, believe that the vacant niche can never
+be filled, and make painful promises of hopeless lives and celibacy, to
+cancel those promises some day amid blushes of regret or peals of laughter.
+Mrs. Burton Hayley recognized the singularity then, and she may have had
+reason to recall that prophecy at another day in the near future.</p>
+
+<p>But there was yet something that she must do, to seal that treaty of which
+her daughter was the dictator. Her own compact was to be made: she made it.</p>
+
+<p>"I will do as you wish, Margaret. They are hard terms to set, to <i>your
+mother</i>; but I accept them."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then. We understand each other, now; and I hope there will
+never be another painful word between us. I will try to speak none, and for
+both our sakes I hope you will be as careful. Now leave me, please. I will
+draw to this other shutter, for I need darkness, silence and rest&mdash;yes,
+rest!"</p>
+
+<p>The closed blind left the room in almost total dusk. The mother left the
+room, stepping slowly and appearing to bear about with her a dim
+consciousness that within the past half-hour her relative position with her
+daughter had been most signally changed. Margaret Hayley threw herself once
+more on the sofa, buried her fevered brow and her dishevelled hair in the
+soft, cool, white pillow, and sought that wished-for "rest." Alas! no
+tyrant ever invented a torture-bed so full of weary turnings and agonized
+prayers for deliverance or oblivion, as the softest couch whereon young
+love, suddenly and hopelessly bereft, reaches out its arms in vain, finds
+emptiness, and falls back despairing&mdash;moaning for the lost twin of its
+soul! The agony may be all forgotten to-morrow,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> in the sunshine, and the
+intoxication of music, and the voices of friends, and the far-off dawning
+of a new passion; but oh, what is the martyrdom of to-night.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The third and last of these supplementary scenes, occurring at nearly the
+same period in the afternoon as the second, has its location at the house
+of Robert Brand, and a part of it in the same room where we have before
+seen the testy invalid while receiving the news of his son's defection and
+disgrace.</p>
+
+<p>Robert Brand was once more back in his easy-chair, his injured limb again
+propped on the pillows, and his face showing all those contortions of
+extraordinary pain likely to be induced by his imprudent ride and the
+agitation attending it. Satisfied, now, that his son was not dead, the
+tender father had again died out in him; but made aware by a succession of
+facts, which he could neither understand nor doubt, that that son, just
+characterized, even by himself, as a hopeless coward, had since that time
+been fighting, and fighting without any evidence of cowardice, in a species
+of hand-to-hand conflict likely to try the courage quite as seriously as
+the shock of any ordinary battle,&mdash;he was mentally in a state of confusion
+on the young man's account, altogether unusual with him and not a little
+painful. He did not curse any more, or at least no more of his curses were
+aimed at the head of his son.</p>
+
+<p>Poor little Elsie had been left without a hope of reconciliation between
+her father and her brother, after the hurling of that wild and wicked curse
+and the exile from his home which it involved. But the episode of the
+supposed death had made a diversion in Carlton's favor; her father had
+returned from the search for his son's body, worried and unsettled if not
+mollified; and the affectionate soul thought that the opportunity might be
+a favorable one for securing the reversal of the cruel sentence, with
+concealment from her brother that any such words had ever been uttered, and
+his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> eventual return home as if nothing painful or unpleasant had occurred.
+"Blessed are the peace-makers!" says very high authority; and most blessed
+of all are those who, like little Elsie, ignoring their own suffering and
+ill-treatment, strive to bring together the divided members of a once happy
+household!</p>
+
+<p>But the little girl was not half aware how stubborn was the material upon
+which she was trying to work, or how deeply seated was the feeling of
+mortification which had embittered the whole nature of the man who held
+cowardice to be the most unpardonable of vices.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold your tongue, girl!" was the severe reply to her suggestion that there
+might be some mistake, after all&mdash;that poor Carlton had enemies, and they
+had no doubt labored to place him in a false position&mdash;and that he would be
+sorry, to the last day he lived, if when Carlton returned home, as he
+probably would do that night if nothing serious had really happened to him,
+he should say one word to drive him away again, to leave himself without a
+son, and her without a brother. "Hold your tongue, girl! You are a little
+fool, and do not know what you are talking about. If you do not wish to
+follow your brother, you had best not meddle any more in the relations
+which I choose to establish with a son who has disgraced himself and me!"</p>
+
+<p>"But suppose poor Carlton <i>should</i> be dead, after all, father? Who knows
+but some stranger may have come by in a wagon, seen the body lying on the
+ground, picked it up and carried it away to the Coroner's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Eh! What is that you say?" For the instant Robert Brand was startled by
+the suggestion and his heart sunk as well as softened at the recurring
+thought that his son might indeed be dead. But the thought was just as
+instantaneous, how general was the objection to touching an unknown dead
+body, and how unlikely that any such course should have been adopted by
+strangers, while any acquaintance, removing the body at all, would
+certainly have brought it home to his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> own house. No&mdash;he was alive; and
+that belief was once more full in the mind of Robert Brand as he said:</p>
+
+<p>"What do I care if he <i>is</i> dead! I believe I could forgive him better, if I
+knew that he was, and that I should never again set eyes on the likeness of
+a man with the soul of a cat or a sheep! If he is alive, as I believe he
+is, let him never come near this house again if he does not wish to hear
+words said that he will remember and curse the last thing before he dies!"</p>
+
+<p>A sharp spasm of pain concluded this unhallowed utterance, and words
+followed that have no business on this page. Elsie Brand fired again, when
+she found all her pleading in vain, and broke out with:</p>
+
+<p>"You are a miserable heartless old wretch, and I have a great mind to go
+out of this house, this very moment, and never come into it again as long
+as I live, unless you send for me to come back with my brother!"</p>
+
+<p>"Go, and the quicker the better!" writhed the miserable man, in the midst
+of a spasm of pain. "If I hear one more impertinent word out of you, you
+<i>will</i> go, whether you wish to go or not, and you will never come back
+again unless you come on your knees!"</p>
+
+<p>What might have been the next word spoken by either, and whether that next
+word might not indeed have wrought the separation of father and daughter,
+no one can say. For at that moment came a fortunate interruption, in the
+sound of carriage wheels coming rapidly up the lane, and easily heard
+through the open doors&mdash;then the furious barking of a dog, the yell of a
+woman's voice, and a volley of fearful curses poured out from the rougher
+lips of a man. Elsie, alarmed, but perhaps rather glad than otherwise to
+have the threatening conversation so suddenly ended, rushed out of the
+room, through the parlor, to the front piazza, where she joined the general
+confusion with a scream of affright, hearing which, the invalid, who had
+before, more than once that day, proved how superior the mind could be to
+the disablements of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> body, hurled one more oath at the people who would
+not even allow him to suffer in quiet, started again from his chair,
+grasped his heavy cane and stumped hurriedly to the door, writhing in agony
+and half crazed with pain and vexation. There the sight which had the
+instant before met the eyes of his daughter, met his own, though the effect
+produced by it upon himself was so very different that instead of screaming
+he dropped against the lintel of the front door in a loud explosion of
+laughter.</p>
+
+<p>There was a horse and buggy in the lane, very near the gate&mdash;the horse
+unheld, rearing and squealing, but making no attempt to run away as might
+have been expected. Close beside the vehicle, a man easily recognizable as
+Dr. Philip Pomeroy, was engaged in a hand-to-hand (or is it
+hand-to-<i>mouth</i>?) conflict with Carlo, the big watch-dog, using the butt of
+his whip, the lash of it, his boots, and any other weapon of offence in his
+possession, against the determined assaults of the powerful brute that
+really seemed disposed to make a meal of the man of medicine. The doctor
+fought well, in that new revival of the sports of the Roman arena, but he
+was terribly bested (by which it is only intended to use an old word of the
+days of chivalry, and not to make an atrocious pun upon <i>beast-ed</i>;) and
+just at the moment when Robert Brand's eyes took in all the particulars of
+the scene, the human combatant, following up a temporary advantage, lunged
+ahead a little too far, lost his balance or caught his foot, and went
+headlong on the top of the dog, the contest being thereafter conducted on
+the ground and in the partial obscurity of the fence. At the same instant,
+too, the tall, bare-headed and bare-armed figure of old Elspeth Graeme
+appeared from behind the corner of the house, and the voice of that
+Caledonian servitor was heard screaming out:</p>
+
+<p>"Here, Carlo! Here, lad! coom awa, ye daft deevil! Here! here! coom awa,
+lad!"</p>
+
+<p>Elsie joined with a feeble "Here, Carlo!" from the piazza; and Robert
+Brand, if he could have found voice, would probably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> have assisted in
+calling off the dog; but Carlo, a formidable animal in size, black, with a
+few dashes of white, compounded of the Newfoundland and the Mount St.
+Bernard, with a surreptitious cross of the bull-dog (such immorality has
+been known even in canine families, to the great regret of precisian
+dog-fanciers)&mdash;Carlo had no idea whatever of "throwing up the sponge,"
+(which with a dog consists, we believe, in dropping his tail), and might
+have fought on until death, doomsday, or the loss of his teeth from old
+age, arrived to stop him&mdash;had not Elspeth closed in with a "Hech! ye born
+deevil! Ye'll aye be doin' more than ye'r tauld!" grasped the huge animal
+by the nape of the neck, and dragged him away very much as if she had been
+dealing with a kitten.</p>
+
+<p>Thus relieved, the doctor recovered his feet; but he was&mdash;as Elspeth
+described him in a communication made not long after&mdash;"a sair lookin'
+chiel!" He had lost his hat, dusted his coat, and found a sad rent in one
+leg of his nether garments, not to mention the rage which flashed in his
+eye and almost foamed from his mouth. For the first moment after the rescue
+he seemed to have a fancy for "pitching into" old Elspeth, unreasonable as
+such a course would have been after her calling off the dog and finally
+lugging him off by main force; and he did hurl after her an appellation or
+two which might have furnished a rhyme to the name of the Scottish national
+disease; but the stout serving woman quelled him with this significant
+threat, and went on her way, dragging the dog towards his kennel in the
+backyard:</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed, if ye can't keep a ceevil tongue in yer heid, I'll no be holdin'
+the tyke awa from ye a bit langer, and he'll eat ye up, I doubt!"</p>
+
+<p>At that juncture the discomfited doctor caught sight of Robert Brand and
+his daughter, in the door and on the piazza, and he strode in to them
+without further ado, whip still in hand, rage still in his face, and
+threatening enough in his manner to indicate that he intended to cowhide so
+many of the family as he could find, male and female.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Who let out that infernal dog?" was his first salutation, without first
+addressing either the old man or his daughter by name.</p>
+
+<p>"He must have broken loose, himself. Indeed, Doctor, we are so sorry&mdash;"
+began little Elsie, who had really been frightened out of her wits, and who
+had that organ unknown to the phrenologists, called Hospitality, very
+largely developed.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold your tongue, girl, and let me attend to my own business!" was the
+surly interruption of the invalid father, who had stopped laughing, and who
+had at that juncture a very low development of the corresponding organ. "We
+are not sorry at all. Dr. Pomeroy, I told you this morning, when I ordered
+you out of this house, never to come near it again; and you had better paid
+attention to the order."</p>
+
+<p>"Then <i>you</i> had that dog set loose!"</p>
+
+<p>"That is a lie!" was the response. The doctor, who had used the same
+expression in a still more offensive form, not long before, was getting the
+chalice returned to his lips at very short notice. And the old man, in
+denying the act, intended to tell the exact truth&mdash;he had not turned the
+dog loose, or set him upon the doctor, except secondarily. Some hours
+before, when the medical man had just been dismissed for the first time, he
+had told the Scottish woman that 'he would bundle her out, neck and crop,
+if she did not set the dog on that man if he ever came near the house
+again!' and she had promised to obey his orders: that was all! Carlo, a
+dear friend of his young master, had always hated the doctor, who was his
+enemy, and never passed without snapping and growling at him; and the old
+woman well knew the fact. Consequently, when she saw the buggy dashing up
+the lane, and recognized it, she had religiously kept her promise, darted
+round to the kennel, unloosed the dog and directed his attention to the
+obnoxious individual, with a "Catch him, laddie!" that sent him flying at
+the doctor's throat just as he stepped to the ground. And it was only when
+the old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> woman believed the punishment going a little too far and the
+victim likely to be eaten up in very deed, that she had interposed and
+dragged the enraged brute from his prey. All this was unknown to both
+father and daughter, who merely supposed that the dog had broken loose at
+that awkward moment; and Robert Brand's disclaimer, though a very
+uncourteous one, had the merit of truth. But the doctor, just then enraged
+beyond endurance, literally "boiled over" at the word.</p>
+
+<p>"I lie, do I?" he foamed. "If you were not a miserable cripple, I would
+horse-whip you on your own door-step, old as you are!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Doctor! oh, father!" pleaded the frightened Elsie, who did not know
+what might be coming after this.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold your tongue, girl!" again spoke Robert Brand, who still stood leaning
+against the lintel of the door. "Horsewhip me, would you, you poisoning
+Copperhead! If I could not beat out your brains with this stick, I could
+set a woman at you who would take you across her knee and spank you till
+you were flat like a pancake!"</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Pomeroy thought of the woman who had dragged off the dog, and had some
+doubts whether she could not indeed do all that her master promised. He
+seemed to have the luck, that day, to fall into the way of people sturdy of
+arm and strong of will!</p>
+
+<p>"What do you <i>want</i> here?" was the inquiry of the old man, before the
+doctor could answer again, and remembering that there might be some special
+errand upon which he had a right to come.</p>
+
+<p>"You have remembered it, have you?" was the response. "Well, then, I want
+your thief of a son! Is he in this house?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, he was a coward this morning: now he is a thief, is he? What do you
+want of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"He committed theft at my house not more than an hour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> ago; and I am going
+to find him if he is in the State. Once more&mdash;is he here?"</p>
+
+<p>"What did he steal?" asked the father with a sneer, while poor Elsie stood
+nearly fainting and yet unable to move from the spot, at that new charge
+against her brother.</p>
+
+<p>"A woman." Elsie felt relieved; the old man sneered.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I can only say that if he took away any woman belonging to <i>you</i>, he
+must have a singular taste!"</p>
+
+<p>"Robert Brand"&mdash;and the doctor spoke in a tone of low and concentrated
+passion&mdash;"once more and for the last time I ask you whether your son is in
+this house, with Eleanor Hill, my&mdash;my adopted daughter, in his company."</p>
+
+<p>"Eleanor Hill!" gasped Elsie, but no one heard her.</p>
+
+<p>"Dr. Pomeroy," answered Robert Brand, "you do not deserve any answer except
+a blow, but I will give you one. My son, as you call him, Carlton Brand, is
+not here, and will never be here again while I live, unless to be thrust
+out like a dog. How many girls he has, or where he conceals them, is none
+of my business, or <i>yours</i>! Now go, if you know when you are well off, for
+as sure as God lets me live, if I ever see you approaching this house
+again, I will shoot you from the window with my own hand."</p>
+
+<p>Something in the tone told Dr. Pomeroy that both the assertion and the
+threat were true. He turned without another word, stepped to his buggy,
+mounted into it and drove away.</p>
+
+<p>"He is alive, father&mdash;thank God!" said Elsie Brand, reverently, when the
+unwelcome visitor had disappeared and she was assisting the invalid back to
+his chair of suffering. That one assurance had been running through her
+little head, putting out all other thoughts, since the remark of the doctor
+that Carlton had been at his house not an hour before.</p>
+
+<p>"He is as dead to me as if he had been buried ten years!" was the reply of
+the implacable father, who stood in momentary peril of the grave from some
+sudden turn of his disease, and yet who had not even taken that first step
+towards preparation for the Judgment, comprised in pity and forgiveness!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Before and after Gettysburgh&mdash;The Apathy and Despair which
+preceded, and the Jubilation which followed&mdash;What Kitty Hood
+said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand&mdash;Brother and
+Sister&mdash;A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel&mdash;A fire-room
+Visit, an Interview, and a Departure for Europe.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>It was a dark day for the nation&mdash;perhaps none darker!&mdash;that day of late
+June, 1863, marked by the occurrence of the preceding events. Private
+interests, private wrongs, private sorrows seemed all to be culminating or
+laying down fearful material for culmination in the future; but those
+domestic convulsions were only a faint and feeble type of that great throe
+agitating the whole nation. That day the bravest feared, not for themselves
+but for the country they loved; and that day the miserable trucklers who
+would long before have had the republic veil its face and sink on its knees
+before the arrogance of rebellion, begging for "peace" with dishonor,
+instead of demanding and enforcing victory,&mdash;that day they experienced such
+a triumph as they had never before known and such as their narrow souls
+could scarcely appreciate. "We told you so!" rung out from the throat of
+every "conditional loyalist," as the same paltry exultation had rung many
+an age before against the unsubmitting tribunes by the mad populace when
+the Volscians threatened to devastate Rome&mdash;as it had been yelled into the
+ears of Philip Van Artevelde and his brother defenders, when Ypres and
+Bruges fell, and the fierce Earl of Flanders promised death to the burghers
+of Ghent; and there was little, except bald defiance, that loyal men could
+reply. That long-boasted "invasion of the North" had come at last; and
+there is always a disheartening effect in the drawing of war nearer to the
+doors it has heretofore spared, even as there is always a scum among any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+population, ready to cry "ruin!" and counsel "submission" or "compromise"
+when a single move in the great game of war has ended disastrously.</p>
+
+<p>A more dreary spectacle than Philadelphia presented during some of the days
+of that week, cannot very well be imagined. From Harrisburgh and many of
+the minor towns of the west and southwest of the State, the inhabitants had
+fled by thousands to other places supposed to be less easily within reach
+of the enemy; and, if in a future day of peace those who at this juncture
+took part with the rebellion should chance to be shamed with a reminder of
+the panic in Richmond, and the removal of the Confederate archives, after
+Hanover Court-House in 1862, they may very pleasantly retaliate by calling
+up the panic at Harrisburgh and the packing up of the Pennsylvania State
+records, after York and Carlisle in 1863. Hundreds of wealthy persons
+removed their valuables even to Philadelphia; and there is no guarantee
+whatever that many of them did not make a still further removal East, when
+they could do so without attracting disagreeable attention and running the
+chance of after ridicule.</p>
+
+<p>There seemed to be an impression just then, in fact, that there was no
+power whatever to check the disciplined but half-starved and desperate
+rebel hordes. Even those who did not view the affair as any matter of gloom
+or discouragement, still believed it one of heavy loss that must be
+submitted to with the best grace possible.</p>
+
+<p>One of the young Philadelphia merchants was recognized by a friend, on one
+of the very last days of June, knocking about the balls in the
+billiard-room of the Cattskill Mountain House, and questioned by him as to
+the propriety of his being away from the Quaker City at a time when so
+heavy a misfortune as the rebel advance to the Delaware seemed to be
+impending.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said the merchant, making an eight-shot at the same moment, "I do not
+see any good that I could do by staying."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And do you not believe that the rebels will reach Philadelphia?" asked the
+friend.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, I rather think they will," answered the nonchalant. "I should
+not be surprised if they should reach there to-morrow. In fact I
+telegraphed to my partner from Albany, yesterday, whenever they had taken
+Harrisburgh to pack up the most valuable of our goods and send them to New
+York."</p>
+
+<p>"And when they have taken New York?" asked the interrogator, not a little
+amused at that new system of defending valuable property and the country.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said the merchant, as he sighted another shot and made his carom
+without the tremor of a pulse&mdash;"when they take New York, as I suppose they
+will in a week or two, we shall move them to Boston, and so keep on working
+East till they drive us into Canada or the Atlantic."</p>
+
+<p>And this was not all a jest, by any means. The player had so telegraphed,
+and he more than half believed that his goods were at that time in course
+of removal, while he had no thought whatever of deserting his
+billiard-table and going down to assist in defending them. He was not
+alone, meanwhile, in his reprehensible coolness, as history will be at some
+pains to record of that extraordinary crisis.</p>
+
+<p>Philadelphia presented many strange spectacles on those days. Apart from
+the blowing of a brass band on every corner, the patrolling of every
+sidewalk by a recruiting officer with fife and drum, and the requisite
+number of human "stool-pigeons," and the exhibition of the placard before
+noted, offering every inducement in money and every plea of patriotism for
+"State defence,"&mdash;there were other and yet more marked indications of a
+period out of the common order even for war-time. The American and the
+Merchants', favorite resorts of mercantile buyers from the rural counties
+of the State, were full of guests, but they lounged in the reading and
+smoking-rooms, and had no thought of commercial transactions. Gold was
+going up, its higher rate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> marking increased fever in the pulse of the
+national patient; and yet business was almost as stagnant in the broker's
+offices of Third Street as were wholesale transactions in the heavy houses
+on Walnut and Chestnut and Market below Second. The old Tonawanda and the
+still older Saranac, lying idle at the foot of Walnut Street, their yards
+lank and bare as winter trees, and the ships waiting for freight that
+seemed to be long in coming, found a new use in illustrating the hopeless
+stagnation of the city. The theatres had nearly all closed before, and the
+last hurried its unprofitable season to an end. The red bricks of old
+Independence Hall seemed more dingy than ever; and those who glanced into
+the hall where the great Declaration was signed in Seventy-six, at the
+cracked bell and the other sad reminders of a past age and a by-gone
+patriotism, thought whether new masters would not claim those relics for
+their own, before many days, issuing a new manifesto of slavery from that
+second Cradle of Liberty, while their gaunt steeds were picketed in
+Independence Square. Men saw the sleepless eye of the clock look down from
+the old steeple, at night, with a helpless prayer, as if something of
+protection which had before lived in the sacred building was to be found no
+more; and the bell woke many a sleeper at midnight, with its slow and
+melancholy stroke, to a feeling of loss and sorrow like that which it might
+have evoked when sounding for the burial of dear friends. All day long
+crowds gathered and held their place, wearily moving to and fro, but never
+dispersing, in the open space in front of the historic pile; and "peace"
+orators, who had before been awed into silence by the threats and
+demonstrations of earlier days, once more ventured treasonable harangues to
+sections of those crowds, while the policemen scarcely found energy enough
+to disperse the hearers or arrest the disturbers. The bulletin boards were
+besieged; the newspaper offices had a demand for extras unknown to the
+oldest inhabitant of the quiet city; and the telegraph offices, busied
+alike with messages of public and private interest, had never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> before known
+such a test of their capacity since Morse first set Prometheus at his new
+occupation of a messenger. A few troops marched away, the Reserves (with
+Dick Compton in their ranks) among the number; and the New York militia
+regiments and some of the New Jersey troops passed through on their third
+campaign for "home defence;" but the public mind was not reassured. Once
+there was a rumor that McClellan had been called again to the command of
+the Army of the Potomac, or at least entrusted with the defence of the
+State, and then the general pulse for the moment beat wildly; but the
+inspiriting report died away again, the non-arrival of the morning train
+from Harrisburgh one day threw the whole city into panic, and the thought
+of successfully defending the State capital sunk lower than ever. The
+President, who had been bespoken to meet the Loyal Leagues and raise a new
+flag on Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, was too busy or too much
+discouraged, and would not come; and what heart lacked an excuse for
+sinking down when so much was threatened and so little spirit shown for
+meeting the great peril?</p>
+
+<p>This was the week preceding the Fourth; and in that week, which closed with
+the National Anniversary, what changes had taken place! The time and its
+vicissitudes seemed to be an exact offset to the hopes and the
+disappointments of the same period of 1862. Then, the Army of the Potomac
+had lain before Richmond, and the Fourth was to have seen the old flag
+waving in the rebel capital. It had really seen the little General driven
+back upon the James, and repulsed if not hopelessly defeated. The Fourth of
+1863 was to see Harrisburgh in the hands of the rebels, and the national
+cause sunken lower than it had before been since the advent of the
+secession. What did it really see? Thank God for a few such hours as those
+of the close of the Fourth, in the midst of whole centuries of loss and
+disappointment! All was changed&mdash;all was saved! Meade, a man of whom but
+few knew any thing more, a week earlier, than that he was a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> brave man, a
+good fighting General, and a brother of the overslaughed Captain Dick
+Meade, of the North Carolina&mdash;Meade had arisen in doubt and culminated in
+glory. Bloodiest and most important of all the battles of the Continent,
+Gettysburgh stood already upon the pages of the National history, soaked
+with the blood of the bravest&mdash;holy with the bravery and the energy which
+had there broken and rolled back the tide of invasion, and yet to be holier
+still as the Cemetery of the Battle-Dead of the Republic. Orators who began
+their Fourth of July addresses with only their pulses of anxiety stirred by
+the knowledge that there had been three days fighting, that Reynolds was
+killed, and that the conflict seemed to have been desperate and undecided,
+did not close them before they knew that the great victory was won, that
+Meade was to be thenceforth a name of honor in the land, that Lee and his
+hordes were in disastrous retreat, and that the "invasion of the North" was
+at an end for all the time covered by this struggle. The news of Vicksburg
+was soon to come, another crowning glory for the Fourth, though not known
+for days after, and Grant was to be a third time canonized. But just then
+there was enough without Vicksburg, and the nation might have gone mad over
+the double tidings had they come at once.</p>
+
+<p>Who, that has one drop of patriotic blood surging in his heart, can ever
+forget the reading of those "victory extras" that flew wide over the land
+on Saturday night and Sunday morning&mdash;the quavering voices of the readers,
+the reddening cheeks and flashing eyes of the hearers? Never before did so
+much seem to have been won, because never before did so much seem to have
+been perilled. And Philadelphia, that had sunken lowest in despondency of
+any of the great cities, naturally rose highest when the word of victory
+came. Bells rung, flags waved, music sounded, gas blazed like the noonday,
+processions paraded, business revived as if Trade had a human form and a
+crushing weight had suddenly been lifted from its breast, and old
+Independence Hall once more boomed its bell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> and flashed over the city its
+midnight eye of fire, as if its defiance to tyranny and treason had never
+faltered for a moment.</p>
+
+<p>It was of Gettysburgh that Kitty Hood had been reading, at her little
+cottage home near the great road, after her return from church on Sunday
+the fifth of July, when she dashed away the tears of agitation and anxiety
+that had been gathering in her eyes, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Dick Compton was right, after all, and I was a fool to try to keep him
+away! If he had obeyed me, I should have despised him now; and if he has
+not been killed in that terrible battle and lives to come home again, I
+will tell him how wrong I was, and what a ninny I made of myself, and how
+sorry I am for every word I spoke that day, and how much better I love him
+because he obeyed the call of his country instead of the poor, weak,
+miserable voice of a frightened woman!"</p>
+
+<p>And it was of Gettysburgh and the desperate fighting around Cemetery Hill
+that Robert Brand had been reading, on the same Sunday afternoon, sitting
+in the shade of his own piazza, when he hurled out these bitter words,
+which poor little Elsie heard as she lay upon the lounge in the parlor
+within:</p>
+
+<p>"This is what he has lost, the low-lived, contemptible poltroon! <i>My son</i>,
+and to shirk a great battle! He might have been dead now, and in a grave
+better than any house in which he can ever hide his miserable life; or he
+might have had something to remember and boast of all his days&mdash;that he was
+one of the Men of Gettysburgh! If I had two legs, I would go out and find
+him yet and shoot him with my own hand&mdash;the infernal cowardly cur!"</p>
+
+<p>And then the disgraced and irate father tried to forget his son and to bury
+himself in other details of the great battle.</p>
+
+<p>The sister did not reply aloud to her father's renewed objurgation. She
+merely sobbed a little and took from her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> bosom a crumpled note and read it
+over again for perhaps the fiftieth time, muttering low as she did so:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, father, father! If you knew how far you would need to go to seek poor
+Carlton and make him even more miserable than he is, and how little chance
+you have of ever seeing him again while you live&mdash;perhaps you would not
+speak so cruelly of him." Then she kissed the crumpled note again and put
+it back into her bosom, and tried to compose herself once more to that
+sleep which the tropical heat invited and her aching heart forbade.</p>
+
+<p>From the tone of that letter, it would seem that Elsie had written to her
+brother, to his place of business in the city, when fully aware of the
+unreasonable indignation which moved her father, advising him not to risk
+serious personal insult by coming home until he should again hear from
+her,&mdash;and that he had replied, from a place much farther away, informing
+her of his intention to put seas between himself and the eyes of all who
+had looked upon his disgrace. But better even this long separation&mdash;thought
+the young girl&mdash;than a return which would induce words between father and
+son, never to be forgiven or forgotten while either held life and memory.
+Years might mellow the recollection and change the feeling&mdash;years when the
+country should no longer make demands upon her children to breast the
+battle storm in her behalf, and when the eloquent voice in the halls of
+justice and the active, busy life in deeds securing the common welfare,
+might be sufficient to win new honor and blot away any recollection of that
+single sad misstep in the career of manhood. Poor, gentle, loving, faithful
+little Elsie Brand!&mdash;it may be long before we have occasion to look upon
+her again, and indeed she becomes henceforth but a comparative shadow; so
+let it be put upon record here that she seemed "faithful among the
+faithless" in practising the great lessons of hope and charity. The father
+might utter curses to be set down against his own soul in the day when
+human words as well as human actions must be called into judgment; friends
+might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> look askance and enemies gloat over the disgrace of one who had
+before stood high above them in all the details of honorable character;
+even the sweetheart, whose pulses had once beaten so close to his that the
+twin currents seemed flowing into one&mdash;even she might find some poor excuse
+of pride to falsify her by-gone boast that she loved him better than all
+the world, and let that hollow, wordy "honor" work their eternal
+separation: all this might be, but the <i>sister</i> had no such license to
+waver in the course of her affection towards one who had been fondled by
+the same hands in babyhood and drawn sustenance from the same maternal
+bosom as herself. And no treason, all this, to the truths and the
+eternities of other loves. All other relations may sooner change than that
+which binds sister and brother, whose fondness has not been tainted by some
+falsehood in blood or chilled by some wrong in education. Wife or mistress,
+yesterday cold, may be to-day throbbing with the most intense warmth of
+absorbing passion, and to-morrow chilled again by instability in herself or
+unworthiness in the object of her regard: even the mother, that tenderest
+friend of song and story and sometimes of real life, may scatter her
+affections wide among so many children that each has but the pauper's
+share, or form new ties and forget that ever the old existed. But the
+brother, if he be not the veriest libel upon that sacred name, clings with
+undying fondness to the sister; and the sister, ever faithful, clings to
+the brother "through evil and through good report," when one or even both
+may have become a scoff and a bye-word in every mouth that opens to speak
+their names. Happy those men for whom the bond has never been either frayed
+or broken: sad for those who ever look back through the long years and see
+some sunny head of childhood hiding itself beneath the falling clods of the
+church-yard, that might have nestled closer to them in after years than all
+whom they have grasped, and cherished, and chilled, and lost!</p>
+
+<p>It now becomes necessary to inquire the whereabouts of Carlton Brand, the
+subject of so much sisterly love and so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> much fatherly indignation, at that
+second period when Gettysburgh was a glorious novelty, its bloody splendors
+flashing broad over the loyal States. And those whereabouts may very
+readily be discovered. On the register of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the
+city of New York, his name had been inscribed on the Wednesday evening
+previous to Gettysburgh (the first day of July); and those among our
+readers who may have chanced to be sojourners at the Fifth Avenue during
+that week, and who will take the trouble to read over again the close and
+accurate description given of the lawyer on his first appearance in the
+presence of his sister and Margaret Hayley, in the second chapter of this
+narration, may not find much difficulty in remembering the appearance of so
+marked a man at the hotel at that period&mdash;the glances of admiration cast
+upon his handsome face and manly figure as he sat at table or moved quietly
+among the ever-changing crowd in the reading-room or down the long
+halls&mdash;the almost total silence which he maintained, seeming to have no
+acquaintances or to be anxious for escape from all conversation&mdash;his
+inquiring more than once every day at the office for letters which
+continually disappointed him&mdash;and the expression of drooping-eyed
+melancholy in face and restless unquiet in movement, which gave rise to
+many side remarks and led to many singular speculations.</p>
+
+<p>He was alone&mdash;at least alone at the hotel; and Dr. Pomeroy, if he had
+entertained any actual belief in his suggested elopement between the lawyer
+and his "ward," might easily have satisfied himself, had he followed him to
+the commercial metropolis, that no such elopement had taken place or that
+the abductor had hidden his paramour carefully away and managed to keep
+continually out of her presence.</p>
+
+<p>Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and
+action of Carlton Brand at this time; and the writer, without any wish or
+will to do so, yields to the necessity, very much as the proud man of the
+world yields to the pressure when events which he has assumed to direct
+grow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> too mighty for his hand and bear him away in their rush and
+tumult,&mdash;or as a father&mdash;to use a yet stronger and more painful
+image&mdash;submits with a groan and a prayer when the child of his dear love
+shuts the heart against him and breaks away from that tender control which
+it has been alike his duty and his pleasure to supply. Some of our mental
+children, especially when they are so real that time, place and
+circumstance cannot be made for them at will, are sadly unmanageable; and
+this instance furnishes an illustration which will be better understood at
+a later period. Acts may yet be recorded, while yet acts remain to record;
+but the heart closes, motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator
+grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of
+events without connection and actions without explanation.</p>
+
+<p>Taking up his quarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Wednesday, this man, on
+Friday, the third of July, while the city was in agonized anxiety over the
+conflicting accounts of Meade's first battle of the day before, and while
+the black frames for the Fourth of July fireworks were being erected in
+front of the City Hall in the Park, with some uncertainty in the minds of
+the workmen whether they would not be used for a pyrotechnic display over
+the death-throe of the nation,&mdash;this man, Carlton Brand, took one of the
+omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line passing the door of his hotel, alighted
+at the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway, walked down to the Bowling
+Green and entered the office of the Cunard Steamships fronting that faded
+relic of the Colonial splendors of New York. When he emerged from the
+office, fifteen minutes later, the cash-box of the British and North
+American Royal Mail Steamship Company was the richer by many broad pieces
+of American gold, and Carlton Brand bore, folded away in his wallet, one of
+those costly little pearl-white wings on which the birds of passage bear
+themselves over the Atlantic. It was evident that he was about to desert
+his country&mdash;that country for which he had before refused to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> fight,&mdash;to
+desert it at the very moment when its fate before God and the world seemed
+to hang trembling in the balance.</p>
+
+<p>Coming out from the office of the Steamship Company, apparently wooed by
+the breeze from the North River, the lawyer bent his steps in that
+direction as if intending to make the tour of the shipping at the piers and
+resume his conveyance at some point higher up the town. Past two or three
+of the piers; and the dense black smoke pouring out from the funnels of one
+of the transport steamers on the eve of departure for the South with troops
+and munitions, seemed to attract his attention. He walked down the dock and
+observed more closely the movements on and around the vessel. The black
+smoke still rolled out, and steam was hissing from the escape-valves. Heavy
+wagons were discharging boxes at the gangway, and with much puffing and
+clatter a donkey-engine was hoisting them on board. A marine stood at the
+plank, bayonetted musket on shoulder, and close behind him an officer. To
+the civil inquiry of the lawyer, how long before the steamer would sail,
+the sentry replied that she was then steaming-up and would probably leave
+within a few hours; and to a request to be allowed to come on board and see
+the arrangements of a government transport on the eve of sailing, the
+officer, after a moment's glance at the unimpeachable dress and appearance
+of the visitor, assented with the stately bow of his profession.</p>
+
+<p>It certainly seemed strange that on that blazing day, when his errand at
+the Hudson side of the city had been to inhale the cool breeze from the
+river, Carlton Brand, within a moment after stepping on board the
+transport, should have ignored all the details of decks, spars, cabins, and
+even machinery, and descended the narrow stair-ways, little more than
+ladders, leading down to those flaming intestines of the ship from which
+the hot air crept up through the companion-ways like breaths from some
+roasting and agonized monster. Yet so it was; and regardless alike of the
+heat which fevered his lips and the greasy rails upon which he soiled his
+gloves and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> risked the smirching of his spotless summer garments, the
+lawyer pressed down to the fire-room, where the stokers were sweating great
+drops of perspiration that rolled down like beads from their broiled
+foreheads&mdash;where the coal was rattling and crashing as it was thrown
+forward, then crackling and hissing at its first contact with the flame, as
+it was dashed into the midst of the sweltering furnaces. Down, until he
+stood before those mighty furnaces and caught blinding glimpses, as the
+firemen momentarily opened the doors to dash in still other tons of the
+crackling coal of what seemed little less than a ship's-cargo of the fuel,
+seething, raging and lowing in such a heat that it made the old fancy of
+the lower pit no longer a dream but a horrible present reality.</p>
+
+<p>"Terrible work for hot weather, I should think," said the lawyer, when the
+shovels were still for a moment and the great fires raged, roared and
+crackled within. He seemed to feel the necessity of saying something to do
+away with the impression of his being a sulky intruder,&mdash;and was addressing
+one of the bronzed old stokers who had paused to wipe from his grimy brow
+the sweat that was actually pouring into his eyes and blinding him.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, hot enough while we are lying at the dock," answered the stoker.</p>
+
+<p>"Why hotter now than at any other time?" asked the lawyer, who had probably
+never happened to study that peculiar philosophy, simply because he had
+never been thrown into contact with it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why? oh, Lord bless you!&mdash;because we are lying still, now, and there is no
+draught. When we are going through the water, and of course through the
+air, the motion makes a draught and we do not more than <i>half</i> roast."</p>
+
+<p>"Then it never gets <i>very</i> cool down here?" was the next inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>very</i>!" answered the fireman, sententiously. "But we never have the
+worst of these hot fires," he continued,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> answering something that had not
+been spoken but that seemed to be in the face of his auditor.</p>
+
+<p>"Who then?"</p>
+
+<p>"The passengers&mdash;at least some of them&mdash;on board any steamer that carries
+them over sea or down the coast."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean when they&mdash;when the steamers take fire and burn?" The question
+was asked in what seemed to be a hurried and troubled voice; and had not
+the reflected glow from the furnace made every thing red under its light,
+there might have been seen a face of ghastly white contrasting with the
+dark and grimy one so near.</p>
+
+<p>"No!" and the stoker laughed. "I did not mean that&mdash;only the thought of it.
+Steamers do not burn <i>very</i> often&mdash;not half so often as I should think they
+would, the way they are built, and with a whole Pennsylvania coal-mine on
+fire inside of them at once. When they do go, though, they make things
+howl! No slow burning, as there is sometimes on sailing-vessels, so that
+they can batten down the hatches and keep the fire under until there is a
+chance of help: every thing goes in a moment, and all is over in an
+hour&mdash;iron steamer or wood, very little difference."</p>
+
+<p>"Horrible!" said the lawyer. The word seemed forced from him, and there
+could not be a doubt that he was at the moment fancying some terrible
+reality.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, horrible enough!" answered the stoker. "But what I was speaking of,
+is the foolish habit that passengers have&mdash;I have seen it often in crossing
+the Atlantic&mdash;of coming down into the fire-room very soon after they start,
+and taking a look at the furnaces. A good many of them never sleep a wink
+afterwards, during the whole voyage, I believe, thinking of that mass of
+red-hot coal lying in the middle of the ship, and wondering <i>when</i> she is
+going to burn. They are fools to come down at all: if they would just keep
+out of the way they would never know how badly it looks, and then at least
+they would never be burned until their time came!"</p>
+
+<p>Just then the raging monster within seemed to demand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> more blazing food,
+and the stoker turned away to attend to his duty. Had he remained
+conversing one moment longer, he might have seen Carlton Brand totter back
+against the bulk-head of the fire-room, literally gasping for breath&mdash;then
+grapple for the railing of the stairs, and ascend the steps with the
+staggering motion of a sick or drunken man, breathing heavily and giving
+painful indications of being on the verge of falling insensible.</p>
+
+<p>When the lawyer again emerged to the air of the deck, his face was ghastly
+white, and he seemed altogether strangely altered since the moment of his
+descent into those regions of fire and grime and terrible suggestion. What
+had so changed him?&mdash;the heat, choking his lungs and preying upon a frame
+unaccustomed to it?&mdash;or had the curse of his nature again found him out, in
+the low of the furnaces and the heedless conversation of the fireman? and
+did he remember that between himself and even that flight beyond the sea
+which only could shut out from his ears the voice of contempt and the cry
+of a neglected country, there yet lay the peril of the Amazon and the
+Austria?</p>
+
+<p>This occurred on Friday the third of July; and between that day and the
+Sunday following there was nothing in the movements of the sojourner at the
+Fifth Avenue, worthy of special record. But on that Sunday afternoon,
+perhaps at the very hour when Kitty Hood, in one spot of that section of
+country which had been his old home, was glorying over her lover's having
+been at Gettysburgh,&mdash;and when Robert Brand, in another, was writhing and
+cursing over the absence of his son from the same great battle,&mdash;an
+incident took place at the hotel, apparently trivial, but which may
+subsequently be found to have exercised no slight influence on the fortunes
+of some of the different persons named in this chronicle. Unfortunately,
+again, over this little event hangs a mist and a shadow, and only slight
+glimpses can be obtained of what afterwards proved to be of such
+unsuspected importance.</p>
+
+<p>On that Sunday afternoon, at about two o'clock, Carlton<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> Brand went down
+from his room to the office of the hotel, to exchange a few words with the
+clerk, and to secure one of the battle-extras which he had just heard from
+his window cried in the street. Knots of men, guests, or passers-by, driven
+in by the pouring rain without, filled the long hall, every third holding a
+newspaper, every group in more or less animated conversation, and the one
+topic that great conflict which had just bloomed out into a great victory.
+The lawyer seemed to have company enough in his own thoughts, and did not
+join any of the groups. He secured his extra, transacted his brief business
+at the desk, and returned immediately upstairs. The moment after he had
+left the desk, a young man advanced from one of the groups near the door,
+asked a question of the clerk, was answered, overran a few pages of the
+register with eye and finger, and then passed upstairs under the guidance
+of a servant.</p>
+
+<p>Carlton Brand had already thrown off coat and boots again, and was sitting
+at the open window in dressing-gown and slippers, glancing over the
+sensation-headings of the extra which gave the particulars of the Waterloo
+of Secessia,&mdash;when there was a tap at the door. Stepping hastily thither
+and opening it, with a muttered wonder why he could not be left alone to
+his reading, a well-known figure stepped into the room and one of his
+Philadelphia bar-intimates&mdash;perhaps the nearest to a confidential friend in
+the whole profession, took him by the hand. For an instant the occupant of
+the room seemed to be displeased at the intrusion and an expression of
+annoyance flitted over his face; but old friendship was evidently too
+powerful even for shame and lacerated feeling, and the next instant he had
+cordially returned the grasp.</p>
+
+<p>The new-comer, strangely enough, bore no slight resemblance to Carlton
+Brand. We say strangely, because the lawyer was by no means such a person,
+in general appearance, as could be readily duplicated. Henry Thornton, his
+professional brother, had the same tall, lithe figure with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> evidence of
+great agility, the same mould of countenance in many respects, and with
+eyes of hazel only a shade darker than Brand's. But here the resemblance,
+which might otherwise have been extraordinary, became slighter and
+eventually disappeared. His complexion was much darker, even brown, from
+chin to forehead, indicating Southern blood or residence. His hair, curling
+a little, was of very dark brown, almost black; and his heavy moustache,
+the only beard he wore, was so nearly black as generally to pass under that
+designation. In spite of the similarity of form and feature, it may be
+imagined that these differences told very strongly on the general effect
+produced by the two men on the mere casual observer; and while there was
+that indefinable something in the face of Carlton Brand, to which attention
+has before been called, denoting intellect and true nobility of soul,
+accompanied by an occasional pitiable weakness or want of self-assertion of
+the full manhood, there was that quite as plainly to be read in the face of
+Henry Thornton, which told of dauntless courage and iron will, a brain busy
+and scheming if not even plotting, and powers which might not always be
+turned to the service of the candid, the open and the honorable. Lavater
+would have thought, looking at his face&mdash;Well for him and for the world if
+what he wills is in consonance with honor and justice, for what he wills he
+will pursue with the unfaltering courage of the lion and the untiring
+determination of the sleuth-hound!</p>
+
+<p>But Nature, giving to these two men who held no known relationship
+whatever, so striking a resemblance in some particulars and so great a
+dissimilarity in others&mdash;had not quite ended her freak of comparison. It is
+doubtful whether either was fully aware of the fact, but the similarity
+between the tones of their voices, in ordinary times, was quite as marked
+as that between certain physical features; and any person standing that day
+without the door, when the two had entered into conversation, might have
+been puzzled to know whether two persons were really speaking or one was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+carrying on a monologue. This, only at ordinary times: Thornton's voice was
+much steadier and more uniform under feeling, and it never broke into tones
+so low and melancholy as that of the other, when influenced by temporary
+depression.</p>
+
+<p>Such was Carlton Brand's visitor on that Sunday afternoon, and he it was
+who but the moment after was seated in the proffered chair near the window
+and chatting upon current topics with as much nonchalance as if he had
+merely called upon his entertainer at his little office on Sixth Street,
+Philadelphia, instead of visiting him at a hotel in a distant city.</p>
+
+<p>There was a little table standing between the two windows of the room and
+within reach of Thornton as he sat. On the table lay part of that
+miscellaneous collection of articles which every careless bachelor will
+persist in scattering about his room at the hotel; and at the edge of what
+may be called the pile lay a paper more than half unfolded, which caught
+the observant eye of the visitor. With a quick: "Will you allow me?" which
+brought an affirmative response, he reached over, took up the paper,
+unfolded it and read a receipt for a first cabin passage in the Cunard Mail
+Steamship to sail from New York to Liverpool, on the 8th July, for which
+$130.50 had been paid by Mr. Carlton Brand.</p>
+
+<p>"The Cunarder for Liverpool next Wednesday," he said, when he had finished
+running his eye over the passage-ticket.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," answered the owner, and he answered nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>A strange expression passed over the face of his interrogator&mdash;an
+expression so doubtful that even Lavater, or any other man pretending to
+read the human countenance like an open book, might have been puzzled to
+say whether it conveyed pleasure, scorn, wonder, or any one of the thousand
+different feelings whose outward show glints over our faces as often and as
+transiently as the cloud-shadows floating over the mountain woods or the
+mottled sunshine flickering over the wheat-fields. There was something
+there&mdash;something<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> which the other did not appear to notice; and with that
+fact we must be content.</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes later, Carlton Brand, through the medium of words growing out
+of the discovery of the passage-ticket, was in confidential conversation
+with Henry Thornton with reference to the disgrace which had driven him
+from home and must make him an exile for years if not forever. It may have
+been a serious weakness, towards one who had never been even on terms of
+speaking acquaintance with her, to talk to him of Margaret Hayley and to
+confess the shameful dismissal which he had received. But Henry Thornton
+knew of the Hayleys if he did not claim an acquaintance with them; he had
+it in his power to impart information of them and their probable movements
+during the summer, which the other might have found difficulty in obtaining
+through any other means; and perhaps that knowledge gave some excuse for
+reciprocal confidence. At all events that confidence was given, and it
+elicited a return of apparently equal candor. Before the separation took
+place, at the end of an interview which lasted more than an hour, a strange
+bond seemed to have been established and cemented between the two lawyers,
+very different from any which official intercourse can often rivet. That
+interview, in fact, appeared to have produced marked effects upon both, for
+while on the face of Henry Thornton, as he rose to take his farewell, there
+was a look of entire satisfaction that could not have been without a
+meaning more or less creditable,&mdash;there was in the eye of Carlton Brand
+less of that troubled expression which had been for days resting there like
+a shadow, and he breathed as if a weight had been lifted from his breast.
+To one this new satisfaction and lightness of heart may have been no false
+presage: to the other, what an omen of unsuspected evil, disaster and
+death!</p>
+
+<p>They parted at the door of the lawyer's room, with a much warmer grasp of
+the hand than that with which they had met little more than a hour before;
+and each held the palm of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> other in his for a moment, as those should
+do who have however slight a bond in common and between whom the waves of a
+whole wide ocean are so soon to roll.</p>
+
+<p>"A pleasant voyage and a happy return!" said the one, on the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>"A pleasant summer to you, wherever you are!" was the reply of the other.</p>
+
+<p>So parted, after that brief meeting, Henry Thornton and Carlton Brand. The
+bearer of that latter name, once so honored but now holding so doubtful a
+position, left New York by the Cunarder Scotia from Jersey City on
+Wednesday the 8th of July, looking his last that evening from the deck of
+his steamer, on the dim blue line of the Highlands&mdash;a fading speck of that
+native land that the fates had ordained he should never see again with his
+living eyes! And as at this moment we lose sight of him for the time, to
+trace the fortunes of others remaining on this side of the Atlantic, it may
+be well to say that his outward voyage must have been a safe and prosperous
+one, for there was duly registered as having arrived at Liverpool, on the
+twentieth of July, (a date which it may afterwards be important to
+remember) "Carlton Brand, Philadelphia."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Anomalies of the War for the Union&mdash;The Watering-place rush
+of 1863&mdash;A White-Mountain Party disembarking at
+Littleton&mdash;Who filled the Concord Coach&mdash;The
+Vanderlyns&mdash;Shoddy on its travels&mdash;Mr. Brooks Cunninghame
+and his Family&mdash;"H. T.," and an Excitement.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>The War for the Union has been unlike all other great struggles,
+throughout, in nearly every characteristic that can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> be named. Unnatural in
+its inception, the rebellion has seemed to have the power of making
+unnatural many of the details through which and in spite of which it has
+been carried forward&mdash;of changing character and subverting all ordinary
+conditions. There have been anomalies in the field: still more notable
+anomalies in society. Unflinching bravery and stubborn devotion to the
+fighting interests of the country have been found blended, in the same man,
+with pecuniary dishonesty which seemed capable of pillaging a
+death-chamber. The greatest military ability has been found conjoined with
+such inactivity and tardiness as to paralyze action and destroy public
+patience. Rapidity of movement has been discovered to be wedded to such
+Utopian want of understanding or such culpable recklessness as to make
+movement not seldom a blunder instead of a stroke of policy. Times which
+threatened disaster have brought triumph; and the preparations made to
+celebrate a victory have more than once been employed in concealing a
+defeat. All things have been mixed in estimation. The Copperhead,
+detestable on account of his view of the national duty, has yet compelled
+some portion of respect by his real or affected reverence for a perilled
+Constitution; the Radical, worthy of all credit for his active spirit and
+uncompromising position, has yet deserved contempt for a narrowness of view
+which made him almost as dangerous as disloyalty could have done; and the
+Conservative, that man of the golden mean, that hope of the nation in many
+regards, has bargained for a part of the abuse which he has received from
+either extreme, by faulting the active measures of both and offering
+meanwhile no active, practical course to supply their stead.</p>
+
+<p>But amid the general anomaly perhaps fashionable (or would-be fashionable)
+society, and the world of ease and amusement, have supplied the most
+interesting and the most astounding study of all. The status of the
+"non-productive classes" is and has been, during most of the struggle,
+literally inverted, and the conditions of costly enjoyment have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>
+changing as rapidly as if we were rioting through a carnival instead of
+breasting a rebellion. No nation ever carried on such a war as that waged
+by this loyal people; and no nation ever spent so much blood and treasure
+in accomplishing the same comparative results. Naturally, in view of the
+personal bereavement, it might have been expected that society should be
+quiet in its amusements and low-toned in all its conversation: naturally, a
+people bleeding at every pecuniary pore for the public good, might have
+been expected to diminish personal expenditure and husband those resources
+on the holding-out of which so much must eventually depend. Instead of
+this, society, with the craped banners and the muffled drums every day
+appealing to eye and ear, has grown continually louder in its tone and more
+pronounced and even blatant in its mirth; and reckless personal expenditure
+has quite kept place with any general waste that the highwaymen or
+incapables of government had power to entail. The theatre and the circus
+have never before been so full, the opera has never before been so
+generally patronized. Babylon could never have rioted more luxuriously on
+the very night before its fall, than have the people of our great cities
+dined, ridden, danced and bathed themselves in seas of costly music, any
+day since the first three months of the rebellion ended.</p>
+
+<p>Summer recreations have perhaps told quite as significant a story as any
+other feature, of the inevitable drift of society towards reckless expense
+and extravagant display. The summer resorts within the rebel territory may
+have grown desolate or deserted&mdash;the buildings of the White Sulphur and the
+Rockbridge Alum of Virginia may have been left empty or turned into
+hospitals, and Old Point may only have been visited for far other purposes
+than the meeting of the sea-breeze there in midsummer; but a very different
+fate has awaited the favorite hot-weather resorts of the North. Saratoga
+and Sharon of the chalybeates; Niagara and Trenton of the cataracts; the
+White Mountains, the Cattskills and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> Alleghanies, of the high, pure air
+and the cloud shadow; Newport, Rockaway, Long Branch and Cape May of the
+south-eastern breeze and the salt aroma,&mdash;all have been, with the exception
+of a few frightened weeks of 1861, more densely filled during the war than
+at any former period in the memory of the pleasure-seeker; and wealth and
+enjoyment have both run riot there to an extent but little in accordance
+with the sack-cloth and ashes which the observant eye saw all the while
+lying on the head of the nation itself. All this may have been
+inappropriate and a part of it painful; but the result could not well have
+been otherwise. Some, with wealth honestly earned and no capacity for the
+public service, have needed rest or distraction and there found one or the
+other. Habitual idlers and professional students of society, never
+available for any other purpose, have naturally, as ever, found there their
+best ground of personal study. Young girls have needed the experience, and
+managing mammas have quite as sorely needed those fields for matrimonial
+campaigns. Invalids have needed their real or supposed opportunity for the
+recovery of lost health. Shoddy, grown suddenly rich while remaining
+incurably ignorant and vulgar, and finding it no easy task to force its way
+into the coveted "society" in the great cities, has eagerly welcomed the
+opportunities there afforded for at least learning the rudiments of what is
+called gentility, and creeping into that miscellaneous outer circle which
+surrounds the charmed inner. Politicians have found it necessary to do, in
+such places, that particular portion of the great task of boring,
+button-holing, prying and packing which cannot be so well done either at
+the primary election or the convention as around the spring or on the
+beach&mdash;on the piazza of the Ocean House or the United States; and officers
+on furlough, who had fought enough for the time or had no intention to
+fight at all, have found no places like these for displaying jaunty uniform
+and decorated shoulder to the admiring eyes of that sex which descends from
+Athena and recognizes the cousinship of Mars.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> Add to all this the rise of
+exchange on Europe and the folly of steamship companies in charging gold
+rates for passages abroad, which have together almost checked the summer
+exodus to the Old World,&mdash;and there is no longer reason to wonder at the
+watering-place crowds and the summer gayeties which have made carnival
+throughout the loyal States and filled the wallets of enterprizing
+landlords.</p>
+
+<p>The year of grace 1863 saw an earlier beginning to the summer hegira than
+any other late year had done, as before its close it saw houses
+over-crowded, waiters overworked, and cots at a premium, from Casco to
+Cresson. The smoke had not yet rolled away from Gettysburgh when "the great
+North River travelling-trunk" began its perambulations; and by the middle
+of July everybody who was anybody (except a few in the city of New York,
+temporarily frightened or hindered by the riots) was gone from the great
+cities, and they were given over to the temporary occupancy of those
+laboring starlings who could not "get out," and the ever ebbing and flowing
+wave of transient visit.</p>
+
+<p>All this as a necessary reminder of the period and a back-ground to the
+incidents so soon to follow,&mdash;and because the course of narration, at this
+juncture, leads us for a time to one of the favorite shrines of American
+summer pilgrimage and into the whirl of that literal storm of fashion and
+curiosity which eddies and sweeps, all summer long, around the peaks of the
+White Mountains&mdash;the Alps of Eastern America.</p>
+
+<p>It was a somewhat varied as well as extensive crowd of passengers that
+disembarked from the cars of the White Mountain Railroad at Littleton, in
+sight of the head-waters of the Connecticut, about five o'clock on
+Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of July. The dog-days had begun; New York,
+Philadelphia and Boston were steaming furnaces, though partially emptied as
+we have before had occasion to notice; and those who had already visited
+them during the month, declared that neither Saratoga, the Cattskills, or
+even Lake George or Niagara, had the power to impart any coolness to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+suffering humanity. The sea-shore or the northern mountains offered the
+only alternative; and a very heavy list of passengers had come up that day
+by the Norwich and Worcester line from New York, the Boston lines falling
+in at Nashua Junction, and the Vermont Central throwing in its
+reinforcement at Wells River.</p>
+
+<p>Every portion of the loyal States (and no doubt a portion of the disloyal,
+if the truth could have been known!) had seemed to be represented in the
+crowd that thronged the platforms while fighting for a mouthful of lunch at
+Nashua Junction or crowding in to a hurried dinner at the poor substitute
+for the burned Pemigawasset House at Plymouth. There were even half a dozen
+resident Europeans&mdash;English, Scotch, with one Frenchman who snuffed
+continually, and one Spaniard who smoked in season and out of
+season&mdash;people who had no doubt rushed over to see the "American war," but
+very soon found the South too hot for comfort, in one sense or the
+other,&mdash;among the number destined to add variety to the overfilled
+caravanserais of the Franconia and White ranges. A few had dropped away at
+Weir's Landing, for a day or two on Lake Winnipiseogee, enticed by the
+pleasant loom of Centre Harbor down the bright blue water and the romantic
+figure of the Lady of the Lake on the prow of her namesake steamer; and a
+few more had left the train at Plymouth for the long coach-ride of thirty
+miles through the mountains to the Glen House, or by the southern approach
+to the Profile or the Crawford. Two or three stage-loads, too, who had but
+one thought in their pilgrimage&mdash;Mount Washington,&mdash;were bustling in for
+the immediate ride from Littleton to the Crawford; but there were still
+four heavy stage-loads&mdash;not less than forty to fifty persons&mdash;going on to
+the crowded Profile House that evening.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the occupants of one of those heavy stages, rolling away towards
+the Profile, require, for the purposes of this narration, a somewhat closer
+view than was probably taken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> of them by many of their fellow-passengers;
+and that view cannot be more appropriately taken than at this moment.</p>
+
+<p>On the back seat of that vehicle sat two ladies, with a troublesome boy of
+ten years wedged in between them as if to come the nearest possible to
+getting him out of the way. Neither paid the youngster that attention which
+would have indicated that he belonged to them or was travelling in their
+company; and indeed they had every right as well as every inclination to
+wash their hands of his relationship if they could not wash from their
+travelling-dresses the marks of his taffy-smeared fingers. The two ladies
+were evidently mother and daughter; and at least one person in the coach
+had remarked them as they came up from Concord, and seen that their sole
+chaperon and protector seemed to be a son of the one and brother of the
+other, some eighteen or twenty years of age. As he saw them then and as he
+afterwards better knew them, they may be briefly described.</p>
+
+<p>The Vanderlyns were Baltimoreans&mdash;the widow and children of a man of large
+wealth and considerable distinction, who had died three or four years
+before in that city, after having amassed a fortune by property
+speculations and subsequently filled more than one responsible office under
+the State government. They had the true Southern pride in wealth and
+position; and the hand of the daughter had already been sought, however
+ineffectually, by scions of the best families in and about the Monumental
+city. Let it be added that they belonged, whatever may have been their
+pride and arrogance as a family, to the not-too-extensive class of <i>loyal</i>
+Marylanders,&mdash;and then a better title of nobility will have been enrolled
+than any that Clayton Vanderlyn's money and former public employments had
+power to supply. The widowed mother and her children were among the few
+residents below Mason and Dixon's line who had not forgotten the pleasant
+summer days of old in the North, when Puritan and Cavalier met as friends
+and brothers; and this summer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> tour, which was to include Saratoga and
+Newport before it closed, was a result of the old recollection.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Vanderlyn, the mother, seemed forty-five, but was fine-looking and had
+evidently been handsome in her youth&mdash;with those splendid brown eyes that
+must then have sparkled so much more brilliantly than at this period, and
+that perfect wealth of chestnut hair, not yet in the least sprinkled with
+gray, which must then have been a charm and a glory. Her travelling-dress
+was very plain, but of the best materials; and every thing in her
+appearance&mdash;especially pride of look and action,&mdash;spoke of wealth, the
+habit of mingling in that indefinable but actual thing, good society, and a
+perfect consciousness of what she was and what she possessed. Those who
+looked twice upon Mrs. Vanderlyn, with keen eyes, had no difficulty in
+deciding that she might be a very pleasant acquaintance for those in her
+own "set" and whom she considered her equals,&mdash;but that she would be any
+thing but a pleasant acquaintance for those whom she despised or with whom
+she chanced to fall into feud.</p>
+
+<p>Clara Vanderlyn, the daughter, was a yet more interesting study than her
+mother; and it seemed altogether probable that the same observer before
+mentioned, and who will be hereafter more particularly introduced, coming
+up in the same car from Nashua and again thrown into near proximity in the
+coach, had read and was reading that second page of the Vanderlyn genealogy
+with peculiar care and attention. She was of middle height; slight, but
+well-rounded and evidently elastic in figure, with a clearly cut but very
+pleasant face, eyes a shade darker than Mrs. Vanderlyn's, and hair what
+that lady's had probably been twenty years before. A wonderful feature,
+indeed, was that head of hair&mdash;fine, silken, but perfectly massive in
+profusion, with more of a tendency to the wave than the curl, and of that
+rich golden chestnut or true auburn so seldom seen though so often lauded.
+At the first observation, it seemed that Clara Vanderlyn's hair was the
+great charm of her presence; but those who had the good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> fortune to be many
+hours in her company, learned that a still stronger and more abiding charm
+lay in the affability of her manners, the expression of thorough goodness
+in her whole demeanor, and the purity and sweetness of her smile. That face
+was certainly worthy of the fixed gaze which had rested upon it quite as
+often during the afternoon as delicacy permitted; and it might even have
+furnished excuse for glancing at it a moment too long, and planting blushes
+on those cheeks that the lip could have no hope of gathering.</p>
+
+<p>The third and youngest of the family, Frank Vanderlyn, did not enter into
+the group under observation, as he was at that time on the top of the coach
+with half a dozen others, enjoying the cigar which had been impossible in
+the passenger-car. But the glimpses caught of him before disembarking, may
+suffice to complete the family triad. He seemed a well-grown stripling,
+verging upon manhood, with a face distantly reminding the observer of his
+sister's, but with darker hair than either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Clara, and
+with an expression of settled hauteur upon his well-cut features, which
+very much detracted from the charm of a face that would otherwise have been
+singularly handsome. He was dressed a little too well for dusty travel, and
+wore more wealth in a single diamond in his cravat and a cluster-ring on
+the little finger of his right hand, than most young men would have been
+either able or willing to devote to such purposes of mere ornament.</p>
+
+<p>This description of the occupants of that singularly-fortunate coach may
+have very little interest beyond that of a mere catalogue; yet it must be
+continued, for Fate, that grim old auctioneer who sometimes knocks us down
+at very low prices and to odd owners, may have some necessity for a
+mercantile list of his chattels.</p>
+
+<p>The occupants of the middle seat were three in number, and they could have
+furnished any needed information as to the personality of the troublesome
+boy with the taffied fingers, who had been wedged between Clara Vanderlyn
+and her mother. All of one family&mdash;that second triad: Mr. Brooks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+Cunninghame, Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, and Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame.
+The first, a squat man of fifty-five, with a broad, coarse, beardless face,
+bad teeth and bristly gray hair just suffering under its first infliction
+of slaty-brown hair-dye. His large hands had been all day cased in kid
+gloves, spite of the heat of the weather; and his gray suit, of really fine
+material, had a sort of new look, and did not seem to be worn easily. There
+was an impression carried about by the man and disseminated at every
+movement, that another and a much shabbier suit hung immediately behind his
+bed-room door at home, and that in that he would have been easy and
+comfortable, while in the fashionable garb he was laboring under a sort of
+Sunday-clothes restraint. The second, a stout woman of fifty, with reddish
+hair, a coarse pink face, high cheek bones and pert nose, corresponding
+well with her lord in conformation, while it wore an expression of dignity
+and self-satisfaction to which the countenance of that poor man could not
+have made the least pretension. She was only a <i>little</i> overdressed, for
+travelling&mdash;her bonnet of fine straw too much of a flower-garden for her
+years, a heavy gold watch-chain with the watch prominent, a diamond
+breastpin flashing hotly, and her voluminous blue lawn of costly fabric
+partially covered by a long gray mantle which must have been recommended to
+her by some mantua-maker with a "spasm of sense." But if there was any
+restraint in the make-up of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that restraint was
+fully compensated by the gorgeousness of the general arrangement of Miss
+Marianna. That young lady of thirty, with a large mouth, sandy hair, bluish
+gray eyes and freckles, a dumpy figure and no eye-brows whatever, was
+arrayed&mdash;shade of Madame La Modiste forgive us while we pen the
+record&mdash;arrayed for that hot and dusty day of railroad and coach riding, in
+a rich pink silk flounced and braided to the extreme of the current
+fashion; with a jockey leghorn and white feather which&mdash;well, we may say
+with truth that they <i>relieved</i> her face; with a braided mantle of white
+merino that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> might have been originally designed for an opera-cloak; white
+kid gloves in a transition state; and such a profusion of gold watch, gold
+chain, enamelled bracelet, diamond cluster-breastpin, costly lace, and
+other feminine means of attracting admiration and envy, that the brain of a
+masculine relator reels among the chaos of finery and he desists in
+despair. The fourth of this family was Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame,
+<i>&aelig;tat</i> ten, wedged in between the two aristocratic representatives of the
+Vanderlyn exclusiveness, and the freckles on his coarse little face and
+hands about equally balanced by the dauby debris of more or less hardened
+taffy to which allusion has before been unavoidably made.</p>
+
+<p>This group (the fact may as well be set down in this place as at any later
+period)&mdash;this was Shoddy on its summer tour. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had
+been, a considerable number of years before, Patrick B. Cunningham; and his
+name had been scrawled, many hundreds of times, to receipts for work done
+as a petty contractor about the streets of New York City, with one horse
+and a dirt-cart, digging out cellars, and helping to cart the dirt of
+pipe-layings and excavations. Gradually he had crept up to two carts, and
+then to three. Eventually he had reached the employing of a dozen or two,
+with the bipeds that drove and the quadrupeds that drew them. By that time
+he had removed from his shanty of one story and rented a house. Then he had
+gone into ward politics and contracts with the city, at about the same
+time, and emerged into possession of a couple of brown-stone-front houses
+and a seat in the Board of Aldermen, at periods not very far apart. People
+said that the seat in the municipal board, with the "ring" performances
+(more or less clown-ish) thereunto appertaining, were made the means of
+increasing the two houses to four and of causing Mrs. Patrick B. Cunningham
+to forget the whole of her husband's first name and merely use the initials
+"P. B.," which might or might not stand for 'Pollo Belvidere. Then had come
+the war, with that golden opportunity for all who stood prepared for it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>
+Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been at that time the proprietor of some fifty or
+sixty gallant steeds used before dirt-carts, and his vigorous and patriotic
+mind had conceived the propriety of aiding the country by disposing of
+those mettled chargers as aids towards a first-class cavalry mount. He had
+sold, prospered, bought more dirt-cart and stage-horses with an admixture
+of those only to be discovered between the thills of clam-wagons, found no
+difficulty in passing them as fit for the service, through the kindness of
+a friendly inspector who only charged two dollars per head for deciding
+favorably on the quadrupeds,&mdash;sold and prospered again and yet again. Mr.
+P. B. Cunningham had accordingly found himself, three months before the
+period of this narration, the lawful proprietor of half a million, acquired
+in the most loyal manner and without for one moment wavering in his
+connection with either Tammany Hall, through which he managed the
+Democrats, or the Loyal League by which he kept in favor with the
+Republicans.</p>
+
+<p>So far Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been uninterruptedly successful&mdash;the
+monarch as well as architect of his own fortune. But at that period (the
+three months before) he had suddenly been made aware that every man has his
+fate and the end of his career of supremacy. Mrs. P. B. Cunningham had
+proved herself his fate and put a sudden end to his supremacy. That lady,
+all the while emerging, had emerged, from the dust and darkness of lower
+fortune, and become a fashionable butterfly. She had ordered him to buy a
+four-story brown-stone front, finer than any that he owned, on one of the
+up-town streets not far from <i>the</i> Avenue; and he had obeyed. She had
+ordered him to discard his old clothes, and he had obeyed again, though
+with a sincere reluctance. She had changed his name to Brooks Cunninghame,
+(observe the <i>e</i>!) her own to Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that of Mary Ann to
+Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame, and that of the male scion of the house,
+<i>&aelig;tat</i> ten as aforesaid, to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame. The
+door-plate of the new<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> house could not be arranged in accordance with the
+new programme, for door-plates had been voted vulgar and abandoned by the
+<i>creme de la creme</i>; but the family cards had been made to bear all the
+blushing honors in steel engraving and round-hand. This done, the requisite
+jewelry bought, and some other little arrangements perfected which may
+develop themselves in due time, the lady had informed Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame that both the health and the dignity of the family required
+summer recreation, and dragged him away on that tour of which we have the
+privilege of witnessing one of the progresses.</p>
+
+<p>Some reference has been made to the array, rather gorgeous than otherwise,
+of Miss Marianna, for dusty travel. A few words which had passed between
+the three heads of the family at one of the Boston hotels that morning, may
+give a little insight into the philosophy of this arrangement. Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame, yet retaining a little of the common-sense of his dirt-cart
+days, had ventured to suggest that "Mary Ann mought wear her commoner duds
+to ride in, for thim fineries 'ud be spiled before night wid the dust
+intirely;" and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, alike indignant at a suggestion so
+smacking of low life and grieved to find that her husband would persist in
+retaining a few touches of the brogue of which she had cured herself and
+her children so triumphantly,&mdash;had answered with a sort of verbal two-edged
+sword that did fatal execution on both the others:</p>
+
+<p>"Brooks Cunninghame, you'd better keep your mouth shut if you can't open it
+without letting out some of that low Irish! One would think you drove a
+dirt-cart yit! And you, my dear"&mdash;to Marianna (the mother had been "posting
+herself" in some of the phrases of "good society," as well as in some other
+things which may also yet develop themselves)&mdash;"you, my dear, put on the
+very best o' them things that you've got! Ain't we rich, I should like to
+know? We may see a good many folks to-day, in them cars, and who knows
+whether you mightn't lose a beau that'd take a fancy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> to you, if you went
+slouchin' around with your old things on? Dress up, my dear!"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had succumbed; Miss Marianna had "dressed up," as
+per order; and collective Shoddy was thus far on its way, without accident,
+towards the first halting-place in the grand tour of the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>But what of the observer who has more than once before been mentioned, and
+who sat in the corner of the front seat, half buried under the voluminous
+skirts of two ladies who have nothing whatever to do with this narration,
+but looking so steadily (people who have habitually ridden in those Concord
+coaches know that the front is another back, and that the occupants of the
+front and back seats face each other)&mdash;looking so steadily, we say, at
+every permissible opportunity, into the sweet face of Clara Vanderlyn? He
+was a man of apparently thirty years of age, rather tall and very
+vigorous-looking even if slight, with curling dark hair, almost or quite
+black, and worn short, the face finely cut and showing no beard except a
+close, full moustache of raven blackness, the complexion (brow and all, as
+could be noticed when he lifted his hat from his head, as he often did, for
+coolness) of such a dark clear brown as to mark him of Southern birth or
+blood, clothes of thin dark gray material, with a round tourist hat and a
+duster, the small hands gloved in summer silk, and the whole appearance and
+manner that of a gentleman, used to good society, and very probably
+professional. He had been reading, nearly all the way up from Worcester,
+some of the other passengers noticed&mdash;though it must be confessed that a
+part of his reading had been over the top of the book at that attractive
+large type formed by a pretty human face; and no blame is intended to be
+cast upon Clara Vanderlyn when we say that that young lady had more than
+once met the evidently admiring glance of so fine-looking a man, with the
+little tinge of color that was becoming, but without any expression upon
+her face or any thought in her mind, resenting any more than returning an
+admiration which she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> believed that she had a right to receive and any
+gentleman to pay thus respectfully. He had spoken but seldom, during the
+ride, in such a way that any person then present had heard him; but once he
+had taken (or <i>made</i>) occasion to apologize to Miss Vanderlyn and her
+mother for being thrown against their seat by the motion of the car while
+walking through it, on the rough road when coming up from Plymouth to Wells
+river; and his few words, as the lady remarked, consorted well with the
+respectability (to say the least) of his appearance. As to his personality,
+which there did not seem the slightest occasion for his wishing to
+disguise, there was a big black trunk in the baggage-wagon following behind
+the line of coaches, and a small satchel strapped over his shoulder as he
+rode; and the first bore the initials "H. T." and the direction
+"Cincinnati."</p>
+
+<p>While so much attention has been paid to the occupants of that single
+coach, leaving the others and even the noisy passengers on the roof of
+this, unnoticed, the vehicles had been buzzing and clattering along over
+the table-land lying at the foot of the mountains, past the little hamlet
+of Franconia, and nearing the mountains themselves. A glorious July evening
+it was, with the fiery air which had been so oppressive below gradually
+cooled by the approach to the presence of the monarchs, and the smoke from
+the fires in the woods playing fantastic tricks among the peaks, and
+compensating for the absence of the clouds which sometimes enveloped them.
+Not half the passengers in those four stages had ever seen the mountains
+before; and not one, even of those accustomed to such scenery, but felt the
+blood beating a little quicker as the mountain road beyond Franconia was
+reached, and they began to experience those rapid ascents, and yet more
+rapid descents, which accompany thence all the way to the Notch, with grand
+old woods overhanging, steep and sheer ravines at the side of the road that
+made the head dizzy in looking, reverential glimpses of the awful peaks of
+Lafayette and the Cannon frowning ahead,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> and of Washington, grander still,
+towering far away over the White range, and with all the other
+accompaniments of the finest mountain scenery on the Atlantic coast of the
+American continent. There was quite enough, indeed, to engage the attention
+of any except the most blas&eacute; and ennuy&eacute;e traveller, in the grandeur of the
+scenery and the excitement of being galloped in rocking, lumbering,
+four-horse coaches, down declivities of road which would have made a driver
+in any ordinary hill-country draw tight rein and creep down with a heavy
+foot on the brake.</p>
+
+<p>Not a few nervous passengers, first or last, dashing up and down the slopes
+of the White Mountain roads, have been more or less frightened, and wished
+that they could be once more on terra firma without incurring the penalty
+of a laugh at their cowardice; and in the present instance this little bit
+of locomotion was not to be allowed to pass without an adventure.</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour from the foot of the mountain the coach went rapidly up a
+sharp ascent in the road, then dashed down again at full gallop, striking
+one of those necessary nuisances known as "breakwaters" when a few yards
+from the top, with a shock that sent the coach-body leaping on its leathern
+jacks like a yawl-boat in a heavy surf, made some of the outsiders on the
+top shout and hold on merrily to keep from being whirled off into one of
+the side-ravines, and created such a state of affairs inside the vehicle,
+generally, as effectually broke up the monotony. That shock drove the head
+of Mrs. Vanderlyn back against the leathern cushions with a force seriously
+damaging to the crown of her bonnet, brought a slight scream from Clara,
+who was frightened for the instant, made the troublesome Master Brooks
+Brooks yell and dash a dirty hand into the dress of each of the ladies who
+had the honor of the same seat, and elicited from Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame
+and her husband one of those brief but very significant marital displays
+which were no doubt afterwards to edify so many. Whether the lady had
+ascertained that fashionable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> people must always fall and faint under any
+sudden excitement, or whether the shock really frightened as well as
+unseated her, is a matter of no consequence: certain it is that she at that
+juncture threw up her hands and rolled up her eyes, gave one scream that
+degenerated into a groan, rolled from her seat and subsided into the bottom
+of the coach, under the feet of "H. T.," in what seemed to be a fit of some
+description. Miss Marianna, really alarmed, with the affectionate if not
+classic words, "Oh, mammy!" made a grab at that lady, clutching the back of
+her hat and tearing it from the head it crowned, while Master Brooks Brooks
+changed his yell into a howl and Mr. Brooks Cunninghame stooped down,
+terror in his face and his hands feeling around at the bottom of the
+vehicle for any portion of what had been his wife, with the affectionate
+but not politic inquiry: "Is it kilt ye are, Bridget?"</p>
+
+<p>Not politic?&mdash;no, certainly not! A stronger word might be applied without
+risk to the unfortunate expression. Among the changes in family polity not
+before indicated, had been an indignant throwing over of her very honest
+name of "Bridget" by the wife of the horse-contractor, and the adoption of
+"Julia" in its stead. More than one curtain-lecture had poor Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame endured, before leaving New York, on the necessity of avoiding
+any blunder in that regard, when they should be "away from home"; and he
+had not escaped without severe drill and many promises of perfection in his
+part. And now to have forgotten the adopted "Julia" and used the tell-tale
+"Bridget" at the very moment of the family's entering upon their first
+essay in fashionable watering-place life, was really a little too much for
+patience not entirely angelic.</p>
+
+<p>Both the poets and the romancers tell of cases in which some word of
+heart-broken affection, uttered at the instant when the death-film was
+stealing over the eyes of the beloved one, has had power to strike the
+dulled sense and call back for a moment the fleeting life when it had
+escaped far beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> the reach of any other sound. Something of the same
+character&mdash;not quite so romantic, perhaps, but quite as real,&mdash;was
+developed in the present instance. The woman may have been falling into an
+actual faint; but if so, that offensive word pierced through the gathering
+mists of insensibility, and she crawled out from the entanglement of legs
+before any effectual aid could be afforded her, and with such a look of
+contempt and hatred burning full upon her unfortunate husband that he must
+have felt for the moment as if placed directly under the lens of a
+sun-glass at focus. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame shrank into his number eleven
+patent-leathers, and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame "swatted" herself (there is no
+other word in or out of the language that will quite so well express the
+act) down on the seat with an air that implied a wish for some one's head
+being beneath her at that juncture. Her glance had not at all softened, nor
+had "H. T." ceased looking out of the window or Clara Vanderlyn (behind
+her) yet taken her handkerchief from her mouth, when the female Cunninghame
+said, in what she thought very honeyed accents:</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, I wish you would find some other time to go and
+call me nicknames, than when I am jolted out of my seat in that way and
+a'most dead!"</p>
+
+<p>The stroke of policy was a fine one, and even the thick head of Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame recognized the necessity of following it up&mdash;an act which he
+performed thus gracefully and with a look intended for one of the staring
+ladies on the front seat:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, mim, her name isn't Bridget at all at all, but Julia. It's only a bit
+of a way I have of jokin' wid her, mim!"</p>
+
+<p>This was satisfactory, of course&mdash;absolutely conclusive; and so Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame grew mollified by degrees; the redness which had come into the
+face of Miss Marianna gradually faded out; Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame
+took occasion to manifest his filial fondness by reaching over and hugging
+his mother with hands just re-coated with candy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> dug out of his capacious
+pocket; and the Concord coach, with its consorts, rolled and jolted and
+swayed along, up and down the mountain road to its destination.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Landing at the Profile House&mdash;Halstead Rowan and
+Gymnastics&mdash;How that person saw Clara Vanderlyn and became a
+Rival of "H. T."&mdash;The Full Moon in the Notch&mdash;Trodden Toes,
+a Name, a Voice, and a Rencontre&mdash;Margaret Hayley and Capt.
+Hector Coles&mdash;The Old Man of the Mountain by Moonlight, and
+a Mystery.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Spite of the sometimes rapid speed, the toil up the mountain had been long
+and tedious; and dusk was very nearly falling and the chill of the coming
+evening was sufficient to induce the drawing close of mantles and wrappers
+that only two hours before had been reckoned an incumbrance,&mdash;when the
+coaches with their loads broke out from the overhanging woods on a steep
+down-grade, the passengers caught a glimpse of Echo Lake lying like a sheet
+of molten silver under the evening calm, and the whole cortege swept down
+at a gallop and with cracking of whips, to the broad, level plateau lying
+before the Profile House in the Franconia Notch.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the coaches had been in advance of that to which the attention of
+the reader has been particularly directed, and still other coaches had just
+come in from Plymouth, the Glen and the Crawford; so that when they drew up
+to alight the long piazza of the Profile was filled with sojourners
+satisfying their curiosity or looking out for fresh arrivals; and coachmen,
+servants and every employee of the establishment, were busy hauling down
+from the racks and boots where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> they had been stowed, immense piles of
+trunks, valises and every description of baggage that had not been
+entrusted to the van yet lumbering behind. Landlord Taft and superintendent
+Jennings were alert and busy; old comers were curious as to the number and
+nature of new arrivals; new comers were glancing momentarily at the
+glorious scenery and anxiously inquiring every thing of everybody who knew
+no more of the things inquired about than did the askers themselves. All
+was charming bustle&mdash;delightful confusion: one of those peculiar scenes
+connected with summer travel and watering-place life, which furnish the
+very best of opportunities for study to the quiet observer.</p>
+
+<p>The coach door had been opened and all the inside passengers handed out,
+before the merry party from the roof made any attempt at getting down. Peal
+after peal of hearty laughter went up from that outside division of the
+vehicle; and evidently the party there assembled had reached the Profile
+before achieving the end of the jests and story-telling in which they had
+been engaged. They had already attracted some attention from the piazza,
+and one boarding-school miss had been appealed to by her eye-glassed swain
+in attendance, to "heah those awful vulgah fellahs!"&mdash;when the laughter
+ceased, and one of the roof-passengers made a sudden spring from that
+elevation, over the heads of half a dozen of those standing on the ground,
+and came safely to his feet with a jerk which would have laid up a less
+perfect physical man for a week and completely shaken out the false teeth
+from the mouth of any victim of a dentist.</p>
+
+<p>The rapid man was followed by his companions, Frank Vanderlyn included
+among the number; but they all seemed to choose the more popular mode of
+getting down, by the aid of steps and braces.</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty well done, Rowan!" exclaimed one of the others as he himself
+reached the ground. "Broke any thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, nothing&mdash;except," and at that moment his eye caught the forms and
+faces of Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her mother, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> were standing at the
+edge of the piazza, waiting while Frank descended and made some arrangement
+for the disposition of their baggage. "H. T.," of the coach-load, was
+standing within a few feet of them, his little satchel still strapped over
+his shoulder and his eyes scarcely wandering at all from the woman whom
+they had scanned so long and well during the journey by rail. But he had
+glanced around, with the others, at the noise made by the singular descent;
+and his eye met that of the man who had been called Rowan, as the latter
+made the discovery of mother and daughter. It was but a lightning flash
+that Rowan gave or the stranger detected, but few glances of any human eye
+have ever expressed more within the same period. He evidently saw the young
+girl for the first time, at that moment; and quite as evidently he drank in
+at that one glimpse the full charm of her beauty and goodness. That was not
+all: in the one glance, too, he apparently measured her wealth and social
+position&mdash;saw and reckoned up the proud woman standing beside her&mdash;then
+took, it is probable, an introspective view of himself and his own
+surroundings, and found time to realize the utter hopelessness of that
+impulse which for the tithe of a moment he must have felt stirring within
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps half-a-dozen seconds had elapsed before he concluded the answer he
+had begun. "No, nothing&mdash;except&mdash;my heart!" He had begun to speak in a
+light, gay, off-hand manner: he concluded in a low, sad voice, full alike
+of music and melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>"H. T." had been observing him very closely during that brief space of
+time, as had nearly all the other spectators, their notice attracted by his
+reckless mode of alighting. He was apparently about thirty years of age, a
+little less than six feet high&mdash;perhaps five feet eleven; with a form
+undeniably stout, but rounded like a reed and as elastic as whalebone. His
+hands were soft and womanish in their contour, though they were rather
+large, nut-brown in color, and had evidently felt, as had his face, the
+meridian sun. His feet were almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> singularly small for so large a
+man&mdash;highly arched and springy. His face and head, as he the moment after
+removed his hat, were capable of attracting attention in any company. The
+face was a little broad and heavily moulded; the cheek-bones prominent and
+the nose slightly aquiline; the eyes dark, dreamy and lazy; the brow fair,
+and above it clustering dark, short, soft hair, curled, but so delicate in
+texture that it waved like silk floss with the veriest breath. The mouth
+would have been, the observer might have thought, heavy and a little
+sensual, had it not been hidden away by the thick and curling dark
+moustache which he wore without other beard. Only one other feature need be
+named&mdash;a chin rather broad and square and showing a very slight depression
+of the bone in the centre&mdash;such as has marked a singular description of men
+for many an hundred years. It needed a second glance to see that a broad,
+heavy scar, thoroughly healed, commenced at the left cheek-bone and
+traversed below the ear until lost in the thick hair at the base of the
+neck. Such was the picture this man presented&mdash;a contradictory one in some
+respects, but evidencing great strength, power and agility, and yet more
+than a suspicion of intellectuality and refinement. A close and habitual
+observer of men does not often err in "placing" one whom he may happen to
+meet, even at first sight,&mdash;after a few seconds of careful examination; but
+the keenest might have been puzzled to decide what was that man's station
+in life, his profession, or even his character. Any one must have been in
+the main favorably impressed: beyond that point little could possibly have
+been imagined by the most daring.</p>
+
+<p>A small black trunk came off the top of the coach at about the time that
+"H. T.," who seemed to be bargaining for a rival at that early period, had
+concluded his inspection; and there was not much difficulty in connecting
+the name and address painted in white on the end with the appellation by
+which the stranger had the moment before been designated. That name and
+address read: "Halstead Rowan, Chicago, Illinois."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Two men appeared to be travelling in company with Rowan; one a man of
+something beyond his own age&mdash;the other five or six years younger; both
+respectable but by no means affluent in appearance. All were well dressed
+and gentlemanly in aspect; but neither Rowan nor either of his companions
+gave the impression of what might be designated as the "first circles of
+society," even in the great grain-metropolis of the West.</p>
+
+<p>"H. T.," the observer, had fixed his eyes so closely on the male party in
+that singular meeting, that he probably lost the answering expression of
+the lady's face and did not know whether or not she had returned that
+glance of wondering interest. Something like disappointment at that lost
+opportunity may have been the cause of his biting his lip a little
+nervously as he took his way, with the rest of the new-comers, into the
+hall and reception-room, waiting opportunity for the booking of names and
+the assignment of chambers. Some of those in waiting no doubt found the
+tedium materially diminished by finding themselves, in the reception-room,
+at that close of a blazing day of July, standing or sitting with a
+decidedly grateful feeling before a quarter-of-a-cord of birchen wood,
+blazing away in the open fire-place with that peculiar warmth and hearty
+geniality so little known to this coal-burning age, but so well remembered
+by those who knew the old baronial halls of republican America in a time
+long passed away.</p>
+
+<p>Not many minutes after the rencontre that has been described, the crowd had
+vanished from the piazza of the Profile House, the coaches had driven away,
+the baggage was being rapidly removed within doors, and the tired and
+hungry new-comers were booked for rooms and clearing away the soil and dust
+of travel, preparatory to supper. Soon the crockery and cutlery jingled in
+the long dining-room, and the flaky tea-biscuits steamed for those who
+hurried down to catch them in their full perfection.</p>
+
+<p>It was a desultory supper and a somewhat hurried one, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> the moonrise was
+coming&mdash;that rise of the full moon which so many had promised themselves,
+and for which, indeed, not a few of the arrivals of that evening had timed
+their visit to the mountains. Then, hunger has but little curiosity, and
+surveys and recognitions were both waited for until the broader light and
+greater leisure of the morning; and probably of the dozens of old residents
+(a week is "old residence" at a watering-place, be it remembered, and a
+fortnight confers all the privileges of the habitue)&mdash;probably of the
+dozens of old residents and new-comers who had acquaintances among the
+opposite class, not two found time or thought for seeking out familiar
+faces during that period when the sharpened appetite was so notably in the
+ascendant.</p>
+
+<p>"The moonlight is coming: come out, all of you who care more for scenery
+than stuffing!" said a high, shrill voice, after a time had elapsed which
+would scarcely have begun the meal under ordinary circumstances. It was an
+elderly man with white hair and white side-whiskers, an old habitue of the
+house and therefore a privileged character, who spoke, pulling out his
+watch and at once rising from his seat. He was followed by more than half
+those at table, and would have been followed especially by Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame, who had somewhere learned that fashion and a rage for
+moonlight had a mysterious connection,&mdash;but for the insatiable hunger of
+Mr. Brooks Cunninghame himself, who was engaged in mortal combat with a
+formidable piece of steak and a whole pile of biscuits, and who outraged
+Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame by declaring, sotto voce, that "he'd be
+something-or-othered if he'd lave his supper until he was done, for any
+moonlight or other something-or-othered thing in the wurruld!"&mdash;and the
+obstreperousness of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, who was up to his
+eyes in three kinds of preserves and bade fair to stick permanently fast to
+the table through the agency of those glutinous compounds.</p>
+
+<p>Out on the piazza and the broad plateau in front of it, the visitors at the
+Profile gathered, to see what is not often<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> vouchsafed to the most devoted
+of nature-lovers&mdash;the rising of the full moon in the mountains. Those who
+are familiar with the Franconia Notch well know how the mountains around
+the Profile always seem to draw closer after sunset, and how the frowning
+cliffs seem to form insurmountable barriers between them and the outer
+world, making it doubtful to the bewildered thought whether there is indeed
+any egress from that cool paradise of summer&mdash;whether or not they can ride
+away at will and look again upon green fields and flashing streams and the
+faces of those they love. And they well know that moonrise there, over
+those encircling cliffs, is not the moonrise of the lower country, with the
+orb throwing its broad beams of light at once wide over the world, but an
+actual peeping down from heaven of a fair and genial spirit that deigns for
+the time to pour welcome radiance into an abode of solitude and darkness.
+The spectacle, then, is one to be sought and remembered; and as storms
+habitually beat around those mountain tops and fog and mist quite divide
+the time with fair weather in the valleys, the tourist is mad or
+emotionless who allows the cloudless full moon to come up without catching
+its smile on cheek and brow.</p>
+
+<p>The intense blue of the eastern sky was already gone when the anxious
+groups clustered in front of the great white caravanserai, and the stars
+began to glimmer paler in that direction. There was not a fleck of cloud,
+not a shadow of mist, to prevent the rounded orb, when it came up, flooding
+the whole gorge with the purest of liquid silver. The winds were still as
+if they waited with finger on lip for the pageant; and the shrill scream of
+a young eagle that broke out for an instant from one of the eyries under
+the brow of Eagle Cliff and then died trembling away down the valley,
+seemed like profanation. Conversation was hushed, among all that varying
+and even discordant crowd, as if there might be power in a profane word to
+check the wheeling of the courses of nature. The orient began to be flushed
+with that trembling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> light, and glints of it touched the dark pines on the
+brow of the cliff, a mile away. Then that light beyond the cliffs deepened
+and the dark pines grew still darker as fully relieved against it. Then at
+last, as they watched with hushed breath, a rim of silver seemed suddenly
+to have been set as an arch on the very brow of the mountain, and slowly
+the full orb rolled into view. As it heaved up, a broad, full circle of
+glittering and apparently dripping silver, it threw out the trees on the
+brow of the mountain into such bold relief as if a lightning flash had
+literally been burning behind them. There was one giant old pine, no doubt
+an hundred feet in height, so far away on the bold crest of Eagle Cliff
+that it seemed to be only a toy tree of three inches; and this was thrown
+against the very centre of the moon, every gnarled limb and pendant branch
+as plain to the eye as if it hung within a stone's throw, a dead pigmy of
+the same family shooting up its ragged point not far distant, and a tangled
+wilderness of broken trees and scraggy branches filling the remainder of
+the circle. Then, the moment after, the moon heaved slowly up beyond the
+trees, they fell back into darkness, and the broad glow streamed full into
+the faces of the gazers and flooded the whole valley with light. The great
+spectacle of the month had been exhibited to hundreds of admiring eyes, and
+the full moon of July shed its broad glory like a blessing upon the
+Franconia.</p>
+
+<p>It was at the moment when the pageant was just concluding and exclamations
+of pleasure breaking from a hundred lips, that "H. T." (who has not as yet
+furnished us data for any fuller revelation of his name), standing at some
+distance out on the plateau from the piazza, and stepping suddenly backward
+to observe a particular effect of the light among the trees on the cliff,
+trod upon the foot of a lady immediately behind him and nearly overthrew
+her. He turned immediately, with a word of apology, at the same time that a
+gentleman near her, who seemed to be in her immediate company, sprang to
+prevent her possible fall, venting meanwhile on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> presumed awkwardness
+of the aggressor a word of ill-disguised petulance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You should be a little more careful, sir, I think, how you step upon
+ladies' feet and risk hurting them seriously."</p>
+
+<p>"I beg a thousand pardons!" was the reply. "Certainly I did not know that
+there was a lady immediately behind me, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The lady gave a sudden start, caught a quick glance at the speaker, and
+then recovered her equanimity so suddenly that perhaps not two of all the
+company observed the momentary agitation; while the gentleman interrupted
+the attempted apology, not too politely, with&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Is your foot much injured, Miss Hayley?"</p>
+
+<p>The answer made by the lady was in the negative, and in a tone that, though
+it trembled a little, proved her less petulant than her companion. But it
+is possible that "H. T.," as he has been known, did not pay that answer any
+attention whatever. As he turned he must certainly have seen the lady more
+or less distinctly in the moonlight, and yet had manifested no surprise at
+what he saw; but when the name was mentioned he gave a start that must have
+been noticeable by any acute observer. Had he really not noticed her before
+his attention was called by the mention of the name? or was the face one
+which he did not recognize while the name bore a talisman that commanded
+all his interest? Certain it is that he saw the lady now, distinctly; and
+equally certain is it that the face was the same which has met the gaze of
+the reader, a month before, on the piazza of the house at West
+Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Hayley, in very truth, dressed so darkly that at the first glance
+her attire might almost have been taken for black, and with not even one
+ornament to sparkle in the moonbeams, while that peculiarity of her raiment
+was made more notable by a light summer scarf or "cloud," of white berlin,
+thrown over her head to guard it from the night air, in a fashion somewhat
+oriental. Her proud, statuesque<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> figure rose erect as ever; and the same
+stately perfection of womanhood looked out from her dark eyes and beamed
+upon her pure, high brow, that had shone there before the falling of that
+blow which had so truly been the turning point of her life. The cheek may
+have been a shade thinner than a month before; and there may have been a
+shadow under the eyes, too marked for her heyday of youth and health; but
+if so the moonlight was not enough of a tell-tale to make the revelation.</p>
+
+<p>The gentleman who had so promptly attended to the comfort of Margaret
+Hayley, and who did not seem averse to picking up a quarrel on her behalf,
+was dark haired and dark bearded, round-faced and rather fine-looking than
+otherwise, a little above the middle height, and wearing the uniform of a
+Captain on staff service. So much the eye of "H. T." took in at once, and
+he seemed to keep his attention somewhat anxiously on the two as the moment
+after they turned away and walked back towards the piazza, as if he would
+gladly have caught some additional word conveying a knowledge of the
+officer's personality. Nothing more was said, however, that could afford
+such a clue if one he really desired; and but a little time had elapsed
+when another subject of excitement arose, calculated to interest many of
+the hundreds who had already become partially drunk with the glory of the
+moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>"The moon is high enough, now: let us see how the Old Man of the Mountain
+looks when his face is silvered!" said some one in the crowd; and the happy
+suggestion was at once acted upon. There were quite enough old habitues
+present to supply guides and chaperons for the new-comers; and in a moment
+fifty or more of the visitors went trooping away down the white sandy road
+through the glen and under the sweeping branches among which the moonbeams
+peeped and played so coquettishly.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three windings of the road, two or three slight ascents and descents
+in elevation; some one said: "Here is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> the best view;" and the whole
+company paused in their scattering march. A sudden break, opening upon a
+dark quiet little lake or tarn, was to be seen through the trees to the
+right; and a quarter of a mile away, hanging sheer over the gulf of more
+than two thousand feet sweeping down towards the foot of the Cannon&mdash;there,
+with the massive iron face staring full into the moonlight that touched
+nose and cheek and brow with so strange and doubtful a light that the
+unpractised eye could not trace the outlines, while the accustomed could
+see them almost as plainly as in the sunlight&mdash;there loomed the awful
+countenance of the Old Man of the Mountain. Some there were in that
+company, familiar with every changing phase of that most marvellous freak
+of nature, who thought that grand as it had before seemed to them when the
+sun was high in the heavens and the dark outline relieved against the
+bright western sky, it was yet grander then, in the still, doubtful, solemn
+moonlight.</p>
+
+<p>Among those who had gone down to the edge of the little Old Man's Mirror
+for this view, were two of the sterner sex who happened to be without
+ladies under charge and to be separated from any other company. Directly,
+walking near each other, they fell together and exchanged casual remarks on
+the beauty of the night and the peculiarities of different points of
+scenery. They were the two who had first seen each other at the moment of
+alighting at the Profile little more than an hour before&mdash;"H. T." of the
+initials and the lady's smashed foot, and Halstead Rowan of the gymnastic
+spring from the coach-top. The first glance had told to each that there was
+something of mark in the other; and under the peculiar circumstances of
+that night they drifted together, without introduction except such as each
+could furnish for himself, but not likely to separate again without a much
+more intimate acquaintance,&mdash;just as many other waifs and fragments,
+floating down the great stream of life, have been thrown into what seemed
+accidental collision by a chance eddy, and yet never separated again until
+each had exercised upon the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> other an influence materially controlling the
+whole after course of destiny.</p>
+
+<p>Eventually the two, both rapid walkers, had gone faster than the rest and
+become the leaders of the impromptu procession to the shrine of the Old
+Man, so that when the halt was called they were standing together and apart
+from the others, forty or fifty feet further down the glen and where they
+had perhaps a yet better view of the profile than any of the company. Both
+were dear lovers of nature, if the word "reverent" could not indeed be
+added to the appreciation of both; and standing together there, even in
+silence, the intuitive knowledge of the inner life of each seemed to bring
+them more closely together than introductions and a better knowledge of
+antecedents could possibly have done. Then the crowd tired of gazing and
+moved back towards the house, leaving the two standing together and
+probably supposing themselves alone. They were not alone, in fact; for
+under the shadow of the trees to the left, half way between the spot where
+the new friends were standing and that which had been occupied by the body
+of the visitors, were three persons continuing the same lingering gaze.
+These were the officer and two ladies who each found the support of an
+arm&mdash;Margaret Hayley and her mother, the latter of whom, it would thus
+seem, was also at the Profile under the escort of the military gentleman.
+Unobserved themselves, they had the two men in full moonlight below and
+could see them almost as well as in the broader light of day.</p>
+
+<p>"Who are they, Captain Coles? Anybody we know?" asked the elder lady,
+speaking so low that the sound did not creep down to the two gazers.</p>
+
+<p>"Both new-comers, I think," answered the military gentleman. "Yes, they
+both came in to-night; and one of them, Margaret, is the booby who stepped
+on your foot a little while ago, and whom I shall yet take occasion to kick
+before he leaves the mountains if he does not learn to keep out of people's
+way."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I beg you will not allow yourself to get into difficulty on account of
+that trifling accident, and for me!" answered Margaret Hayley, while
+something very like a shudder, not at all warranted by the words, and that
+the Captain was not keen enough to perceive, swept through her form and
+even trembled the arm that rested within his.</p>
+
+<p>"Difficulty? oh, no difficulty, to me, you know; and for you, Margaret,
+more willingly than any other person in the world, of course!" and Captain
+Hector Coles, confident that he had expressed himself rather felicitously,
+thought it a good time to bow around to Miss Hayley, and did so.</p>
+
+<p>"You are quite right, Captain Hector Coles," said Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Low
+people, who do not even know how to walk without running over others,
+should be kept at their proper distance; and of course gentlemen and
+soldiers like yourself find it not only a duty but a privilege to afford to
+us ladies that protection."</p>
+
+<p>This time Captain Hector Coles, immensely flattered, bowed round on the
+other side, to the elder lady.</p>
+
+<p>"Hark!" said Margaret Hayley, in a louder voice than either had before
+used, and a voice that had a perceptible tremor in it like that of fright.</p>
+
+<p>"What did you hear?" asked the Captain.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen&mdash;I want to hear what that man was saying."</p>
+
+<p>"H. T." was speaking, just below.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I have never been here before," he said. "Strangely enough, some of
+the greatest curiosities of the continent are neglected by just such fools
+as myself, until too old or too busy or too careworn to enjoy them."</p>
+
+<p>"You speak like a jolly old grandfather, and yet you are scarcely as old as
+myself," answered the rich, sonorous voice of Halstead Rowan. "Well, that
+is <i>your</i> business. The White Mountains are no novelty to me, or any other
+mountains, I believe, North of the Isthmus."</p>
+
+<p>"Is there any thing finer than this, at this moment, among them all?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"No, and I doubt if there is any thing finer on earth!" was the
+enthusiastic reply. "And by the way, even <i>I</i> have not happened to see the
+full moon on the face of the Old Man, before. It is a magnificent sight&mdash;a
+new sensation."</p>
+
+<p>"How long has it stood so, I wonder? Since creation?" said the voice of "H.
+T.," "or did the Flood hurl those masses of stone into so unaccountable an
+accidental position?"</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't the most remote idea!" answered Rowan, gayly. "I have often
+thought of it, though, when looking at the marvel in the sunlight. But I
+have never been able to get any farther back than the idea how the winds
+must have howled and the rains beaten around that immobile face, age after
+age, while whole generations of the men after whom the face is apparently
+copied as a mockery, have been catching cold and dying from a mere puff of
+air on the head or a pair of wet feet."</p>
+
+<p>"The eternal&mdash;the immovable!" said "H. T.," his voice so solemn and
+impressive that it was evident his words were only a faint representation
+of the inner feeling.</p>
+
+<p>"I know one thing that it has been, without a doubt," said Rowan. "When the
+whole country was filled with Indians of a somewhat nobler character than
+the miserable wretches that alternately beg and murder on the Western
+plains, there is not much question that they must have worshipped it as the
+face of the Great Manitou, looking down upon them in anger or in love, as
+the storm-cloud swept around it or the summer sun tinted it with an iron
+smile."</p>
+
+<p>Halstead Rowan was speaking unconscious poetry, as many another man of his
+disposition has done, while those who sought to make it a trade have been
+hammering their dull brains and spoiling much good paper in the mere
+stringing of rhymes bearing the same relation to poetry that an onion does
+to the bulb of a tulip! Whether his companion caught the tone from him and
+merely elaborated it into another utterance, or whether he possessed the
+fire within himself and this rencontre was only the means of bringing out
+the spark, is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> something not now to be decided. But he spoke words that not
+only made the other turn and gaze upon him for a moment with astonishment,
+but moved the three unseen auditors with feelings which neither could very
+well analyze. His dark face, tinted by the moonlight as the stony brow of
+the mountain was itself touched and hallowed, seemed rapt as those of the
+seers of old are sometimes said to have been; and his voice was strangely
+sweet and melodious:</p>
+
+<p>"To me, just now," he said, "that iron face is assuming a new shape."</p>
+
+<p>"The deuce it is!" answered Rowan. "Where?"</p>
+
+<p>"'In my mind's eye, Horatio!'" quoted the speaker, and the other seemed to
+understand something of his mood. "Do you know that face may be nothing
+more than sixty feet of strangely-shaped stone, to others; but to me, at
+this moment, it is the Spirit of the North looking sadly down over our
+fields of conflict and saying words that I almost hear. Listen, and see if
+you do not hear them, too!"</p>
+
+<p>How strangely earnestness sometimes impresses us, even when little else
+than madness is the motive power! Halstead Rowan, by no means a man to be
+easily moulded to the fancies of any other, found himself insensibly
+turning his ear towards the Sphynx, as if it was indeed speaking through
+the still night air!</p>
+
+<p>"'I am the Soul of the Nation,'" the singular voice went on, speaking as if
+for the lips of stone. "'Storms have raved around my forehead and thunders
+have shaken my base, but nothing has moved me! Scarred I may have been by
+the lightning and discolored by the beating rain, but the hand of man
+cannot touch me, and even the elements can disturb me not. I have seen ten
+thousand storms, and not one but was followed by the bright sunshine,
+because Nature was ever true to itself. Be but true to yourselves, loyal
+men of the great American Union, and the nation you love shall yet be
+throned above the reach of treason as I am throned above the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> touch of
+man&mdash;unapproachable in its power as I am fearful in my eternal isolation!'"</p>
+
+<p>Halstead Rowan had ceased looking at the Sphynx and gazed only at its
+oracle, long before the strange rhapsody concluded; and Margaret Hayley,
+supported upon the arm of Captain Hector Coles, had more than once
+shuddered, and at last leaned so heavily upon that arm as to indicate that
+she must be suddenly ill. To the startled inquiry of the Captain as to the
+cause of her trembling, she replied in words that indicated her feeling to
+have been excited by the strangely-patriotic words, and by a request to be
+taken back at once to the Profile. That request was immediately heeded, and
+the three passed on up the road, where all the other company had some time
+preceded them.</p>
+
+<p>But one expression more fell from the lips of the strange man, as the three
+moved away, and Margaret Hayley heard it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, you must be a poet!" said the Illinoisan, when his companion had
+concluded the rhapsody.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I am only a lawyer, and you must not take all that we say for gospel,
+or even for poetry!" was the reply. "Come, let us go back to the house and
+imagine that we have had enough of moonlight."</p>
+
+<p>The two followed up the road at once and overtook the three but a moment
+after. As they passed, "H. T." recognized first the shoulder-straps of the
+officer, and then the figure of the lady upon his left arm. Turning to see
+her face more closely, his own was for a moment under the full glare of the
+moon, and Margaret Hayley had a fair opportunity to observe every feature.
+Shaded as were her own eyes, their direction could not be distinguished;
+but they really scanned the face before them with even painful earnestness,
+a low, intense sigh of disappointment and unhappiness escaping her when the
+inspection had ended. She walked back with Captain Coles and her mother to
+the door of the Profile, and left them in conversation on the moonlit
+piazza, escaping up-stairs to her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> own room and not leaving it again during
+the evening. What may have been her thoughts and feelings can only be
+divined from one expression which fell from her lips as she closed the door
+of her chamber and dropped unnerved upon a chair at the table:</p>
+
+<p>"Who can that man be? His voice, and yet not his voice! A shadow of his
+face, and yet no more like his face than like mine! Am I haunted, or has
+this trouble turned my brain and am I going mad? Another such evening would
+kill me, I think!"</p>
+
+<p>There was the sound of horn and harp and violin ringing through the long
+corridors of the Profile that evening; and many of those who had shared in
+the glory of the moonrise and the solemn levee of the Old Man of the
+Mountain were joining in the dance that went on in that parlor which
+appeared large enough for the drill evolutions of an entire regiment. But
+few of the new-comers joined the revel for that evening; most of them,
+fatigued at once with travel and excitement, crept away to early beds in
+order to refresh themselves against the morning; and nothing remained, of
+any interest to the progress of this narration, except Captain Hector Coles
+walking up and down the long piazza for more than an hour after Margaret
+Hayley had retired, his boot-heels ringing upon the planks with a somewhat
+ostentatious affectation of the military step, Mrs. Burton Hayley meanwhile
+leaning upon his arm, and the two holding in tones so low that no passer-by
+could catch them, a conversation which seemed to be peculiarly earnest and
+confidential.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there was still one occurrence of that night which cannot be passed
+over without serious injury to the character of this record for strict
+veracity. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, during a large part of the night, was in
+serious trouble which required the full exercise of her maternal
+vigilance&mdash;while Miss Marianna, deserted by her father who had
+surreptitiously smoked a short pipe in the edge of the woods and thence
+gone to bed and to sleep, wandered disconsolately round the parlor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+dressed in more costly frippery than would have sufficed to establish two
+mantua-makers, unintroduced to any one, stared at with the naked eye and
+through eye-glasses, her freckles complimented in an undertone that she
+could not avoid hearing, the name of her dress-maker facetiously inquired
+after, and the poor girl, made miserable by being dragged by her silly
+parents to precisely the spot of all the world where she least belonged,
+suffering such torments as should only be inflicted upon the most
+unrepentant criminal.</p>
+
+<p>But the peculiar trouble of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame has not as yet been
+explained, and it must be so disposed of in a few words. Ill health, on the
+plea of which she had started on her "summer tour," had really attacked her
+interesting family, or at least one highly-important member of it. Master
+Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, naturally a little sharp set after his long ride
+and accustomed to regard any supper with "goodies" on the table as
+something to be clung to until the buttons of his small waistband could
+endure no farther pressure&mdash;Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, as has
+already been mentioned, had remained at the table a little beyond the
+bounds of strict prudence. In other words, he had devoured beef-steak and
+fruits, fish and milk, biscuits and pickles, tea, pickled oysters and
+sweetmeats, until even his digestive pack-horse was overloaded. Very soon
+after supper he had petitioned to be taken to bed, and then unpleasant if
+not serious symptoms had been no long time in supervening. During a large
+part of the night there were a couple of chambermaids running to and from
+that part of the building, with hot water, brandy, laudanum, foot-baths and
+other appliances for suffering small humanity; while Master Brooks Brooks
+kept doubling himself up in all imaginable attitudes and crying: "Oh,
+mommy!" in a manner calculated to wring the heart of that motherly
+person,&mdash;to make Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, who wished to sleep, growl out
+some reasonably-coarse oaths between his clenched teeth,&mdash;and to induce
+wonder on the part of people who had occasion to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> pass the front of the
+building or come out on the piazza, whether they did or did not keep a
+small menagerie of young bears, wolves and wild-cats in full blast on the
+second floor.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her Pet Bears&mdash;A Misadventure and a
+Friendly Hand in Time&mdash;The Question of Courage&mdash;Halstead
+Rowan and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame on Geography&mdash;The Dead
+Washington, the Flume and the Pool&mdash;With the personal
+relations weaving at that juncture.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Breakfast was over at the Profile, on the next morning; the stages had
+rolled away for Littleton, the Crawford and Plymouth; and preparations were
+in progress for a ride of two or three wagon-loads down the glen to the
+Flume,&mdash;when "H. T.," cigar in mouth, passed out from the bar-room to the
+piazza and thence across the plateau in front, towards the billiard-room
+and ten-pin-alley, standing a hundred yards away to the right, and at the
+very bottom of the slope of the mountain. He had seen, in the dusk and
+afterwards in the moonlight of the night before, that a couple of the rough
+pets of the mountain region were sojourning at the Notch, in the shape of
+half-grown black bears, chained to stakes some twenty feet apart, with a
+dog-kennel for their joint retreat, perhaps a hundred feet from the house
+and immediately in front of it, where their antics could be discerned and
+enjoyed from the piazza and the front windows. He had seen, too, going out
+earlier that morning, that they did not appear yet old enough to be
+dangerously vicious, and that they seemed very playful for that description
+of beast. Everybody was feeding them, from early morning to dusk, with
+nuts, raisins<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> and crackers surreptitiously taken from the table for that
+purpose; and the youngsters no doubt consumed in feeding the young Bruins,
+quite as much food as they themselves managed to devour.</p>
+
+<p>Just then not less than a dozen persons were surrounding the household
+favorites, feeding them, putting them through their clumsy evolutions which
+principally consisted in sitting erect or climbing a short post to get a
+nut placed on the top,&mdash;or developing the usual human propensity for
+teazing. Most of them were ladies, and among the others, as he went by at a
+short distance, he recognized Miss Clara Vanderlyn, his fellow-passenger of
+the day before,&mdash;her face rosy with the excitement of a just-accomplished
+morning walk, her bonnet on arm, and her whole countenance radiant with
+amusement as she plied the dusky pets with her pocket full of nuts and
+raisins. She seemed to have acquired a wonderful ascendancy over the beasts
+in a very brief acquaintance; for while all the others shrank from coming
+absolutely within reach, she not only fed them without fear but rubbed
+their black coats and patted their gristly noses as if they had been pet
+kittens. Two or three men were lounging near, evidently admiring the new
+lady accession to Profile society, but none claiming an acquaintance.</p>
+
+<p>"H. T.," who either had a propensity for ten-pins that morning,
+overbalancing the admiration of Miss Vanderlyn which he had shown the day
+before, or a still stronger attraction for company whom he knew to be at
+the alley&mdash;"H. T." was just passing on when Margaret Hayley, accompanied by
+the inevitable Captain Hector Coles, came out of the door of the
+billiard-room and advanced towards the bear-stakes. It must remain a
+mystery whether this appearance from the door did or did not make a change
+in his own necessity for exercise: suffice it to say that he stopped,
+turned partially around and joined the group who were making levee to the
+Bruins.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment, when Clara Vanderlyn had succeeded in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> luring one of the
+bears to the top of his "stool of repentance" (the short post), and was
+bending close above him, feeding and fondling what few other female hands
+dared touch,&mdash;a new actor came upon the scene, in the shape of Master
+Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, accompanying his "Mommy." He had <i>not</i> died the
+night before as might have been expected from his surfeit, but the freckled
+appearance of his face was materially improved by a ground hue of greenish
+white which his short sickness had imparted. His careful mamma had dressed
+him for that gala-day in a complete plaid suit of blue and white, with a
+cap of the same material and a black feather; and he looked scarcely less
+ornamental than useful. Evidently, sick as he had really been, he was all
+alive and awake that morning and might be safely calculated upon for adding
+to the general comfort by prowess of mouth and fingers. And the company
+were not obliged to wait very long for proof that the scion of the house of
+Cunninghame was aware of the duties of his position and quite equal to
+them. He left the maternal hand, spite of the clutching of the latter, at
+the moment of arriving at the bear-stakes, and spying what he rightly
+judged to be a good opportunity, stepped rapidly round behind the bear,
+caught him by the stumpy tail, and gave him a sharp twitch which nearly
+threw him from the top of the post.</p>
+
+<p>In an instant the playful nature of the bear was gone, and with one sudden
+growl he raised his heavy paw with its sharp claws and struck full at the
+face of Miss Vanderlyn, not two feet from him. Every one present saw the
+blow, but no one seemed to have enough presence of mind or courage to
+shield her from a stroke which, falling full in her unprotected face, must
+certainly have disfigured her for life.</p>
+
+<p>No one&mdash;it has been said: no one of those known to be present, most of whom
+were women or children; and neither "H. T." nor Captain Hector Coles had
+yet come near enough to be of any possible service. Yet the blow did not
+reach Clara Vanderlyn. A hand and arm were suddenly dashed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> between the paw
+and the threatened face, with such force that while the sharp claws tore
+the skin and flesh in ribbons from the back of the hand and split the
+coat-sleeve as if it had been paper,&mdash;the bear was knocked backward off his
+perch and rolled over in a ball on the ground at the side of the kennel.
+When any of the company sufficiently recovered from their astonishment to
+glance at the face of the lucky yet unlucky preserver, they saw that it was
+that of the bluff arrival of the evening before, Halstead Rowan.</p>
+
+<p>With the exception of three persons, all present rushed up at once, under
+the impression that Rowan's hand must be seriously injured. One of these
+exceptions was "H. T.," who made a movement to dart forward, even from his
+distance, when he saw the blow impending, but who the instant that it had
+fallen turned and walked back towards the ten-pin alley. The second was
+Margaret Hayley, who had recognized the personality of both the
+conversationists of the previous evening, and who naturally stopped in
+blank surprise to see one of two persons whom she supposed to be intimate
+friends, turn away the moment that the other was wounded. The third was
+Captain Hector Coles, who really had no power to do otherwise than obey the
+check laid upon him by the lady's hand.</p>
+
+<p>All who saw knew that the injury must be severe, but it might have been the
+scratch of a pin for any effect which it seemed to produce on the
+Illinoisan. The blood was streaming profusely from the wound, but almost
+before any one saw it the other hand was inserted in a side-pocket, and a
+white handkerchief drawn thence and wrapped around the injured member.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you much hurt, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"What a narrow escape, miss!"</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, I thought his paw would injure your face terribly!"</p>
+
+<p>"Somebody ought to kill that boy!"</p>
+
+<p>These and a score of similar expressions burst from the dozen or two of
+spectators. Miss Vanderlyn had caught the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> young man by the sleeve of the
+coat, with perceptible nervousness in her grip, and said, with all that
+sweet smile faded from her face, and her voice trembling with anxiety:</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed&mdash;indeed, sir, I am very grateful to you. I should have been badly
+hurt, I fear, but for your kind aid. Pray let us do something to prevent
+your suffering so much from your generosity. I am afraid that you are very
+much injured!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not in the least, madame&mdash;miss, perhaps I should say. Nothing but a
+scratch; and if the company at the Profile do not object to a big glove,
+none of us will be aware of the accident in a few minutes."</p>
+
+<p>"Trust me, sir!" said the young lady, in the same anxious tone, "<i>I</i> shall
+be aware of your kindness so long as I live."</p>
+
+<p>"Pray do not mention it again!" said Rowan. "Indeed I am only too happy
+that the little affair occurred." He was telling the truth, beyond a
+question, however far he might have been from telling what they equally
+require in the courts of law&mdash;the <i>whole</i> truth; and again for one instant
+there might have been seen sweeping over his face the same changing
+expression that had played hide-and-seek there on his first arrival the
+evening before:&mdash;admiration&mdash;regard&mdash;reverence&mdash;hope&mdash;joy; and then the
+dull shadow of recollection and hopelessness.</p>
+
+<p>Clara Vanderlyn, too, whether she had or had not remarked him on that
+occasion&mdash;Clara Vanderlyn saw and read his face now! Her eyes fixed for one
+moment full upon his, then drooped, and the rich blood crept up to brow,
+neck, and bosom, from which it had been expelled by the temporary fright.
+For an instant she was silent, and seemed to be studying; then she drew
+from the little reticule which hung upon her arm a card-case, took out a
+card, and handed it to Rowan, with a still more conscious blush, her old
+smile, and the words:</p>
+
+<p>"I am aware, sir, that this is a singular introduction, and on my part a
+painful one, as it has been the means of causing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> you an injury; but my
+mother and my brother will be glad to know you and to thank you better than
+I can do."</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Vanderlyn," said Rowan, taking the card and glancing at the name just
+as earnestly as if he had never paid any attention whatever to the register
+at the office, "you do me too much honor. I have no card in my pocket.
+Would you be kind enough to give me another of yours?"</p>
+
+<p>She at once handed him another card and a pencil, and he dashed down, in a
+bold, rapid, and mercantile hand, though he used the sinister member for
+the operation, the name and address which the little black trunk had before
+revealed to those who chose to read.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Mr. Rowan. Good-morning! Pray take care of your hand, or I
+shall never forgive myself!" she said, nodding to her new acquaintance, and
+turning towards the house. Rowan bowed low, said good-morning, and strolled
+away towards the ten-pin alley, apparently not more concerned by the hurt
+than if he had merely pricked his finger. He was one of those booked for
+the ride to the Flume, but he seemed to need severer exercise, and the
+moment after he might have been seen with his hand still wrapped in the
+bloody white handkerchief, bowling away at the pins with the other, and
+humming the Grand March in "Norma" as if he thought that a favorable strain
+of music to accompany the levelling of obstacles or enemies.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, hearing the threat directed at her promising boy,
+had mustered common-sense enough to hurry him away from the scene of
+action. Captain Coles and Miss Hayley had meanwhile come up, and "H. T.,"
+turning once more before he reached the alley, reached the spot at the same
+moment. For the first time, in broad daylight, Margaret Hayley met the
+strange man face to face, and her cheek whitened&mdash;why, even she perhaps
+could not tell&mdash;at that expression or resemblance which she traced there.
+If there was any answering expression of agitation or surprise on the face
+of the man with the initials, she failed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> to read it, and her eyes in a
+moment sank from a survey which seemed so profitless. They were at that
+time very near each other, and Captain Coles and "H. T." not more than six
+feet apart. Their eyes met, and that indefinable something passed between
+them before another word was spoken, which includes antagonism, if not
+deadly hostility. There was no reason to believe that they had ever met
+before the preceding evening; there was no reason to believe that they
+could ever have an interest in conflict; and yet those two men were foes,
+and would remain so until one or the other should be thoroughly conquered.</p>
+
+<p>"A go-ahead fellow, I should not be afraid to stake my life!" said one of
+the gentlemen who had just come up, alluding to the hero of the hour and
+seeming to address any one who might choose to answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Ya-a-as!" slowly and doubtingly said Captain Hector Coles, caressing his
+beard and throwing almost insufferable arrogance into a manner which
+naturally had quite enough of it. "Ya-a-as, go-ahead enough, apparently,
+but not a bit of a gentleman. Rough as the bear he just knocked over, and
+looks as if he might have come from among something of the same breed!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not a gentleman, probably!" said "H. T.," with a sneer in his tone
+quite as little disguised as the other's arrogance. "But he is something a
+good deal better, in my opinion, and something a good deal rarer&mdash;a <i>man</i>,
+every inch of him!"</p>
+
+<p>"At any rate," said another, who had not yet spoken, "I would give a
+hundred dollars to have blundered into an introduction to that splendid
+girl as he has done, even if it cost me a hand worse scratched than his."</p>
+
+<p>"He has <i>had</i> worse scratches! Did you notice the scar on his cheek, coming
+away down here to the neck?" said one of the ladies who had witnessed the
+whole affair, addressing Margaret Hayley.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;has he a scar?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"A terrible one. I think he must have been a soldier, at some time or
+other."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe that he has the noblest gift ever conferred by God upon
+man,&mdash;that of courage!" answered Margaret. "If he was a slave or a savage I
+could love and respect him for that, as I should despise him if he was a
+king without it!"</p>
+
+<p>From the depth of what a terrible wound in her own heart was the young girl
+speaking, and what a concentrated force of bitter earnest rankled in such
+words falling from her beautiful lips! Captain Hector Coles heard, but made
+no answer, as why should he, for was he not one of the country's defenders
+and a brave man by profession? "H. T." heard her, and his upper lip, under
+the shadow of his dark moustache, set down tightly upon the lower, while
+over his handsome dusky face passed an expression which might have been
+pain and might have been the crushing out of some last scruple of
+conscience that stood between him and a half-intended line of action.</p>
+
+<p>"Passengers for the Flume" had been the call some minutes before; and by
+the conclusion of this scene, at nine o'clock or thereabout, the wagons for
+that daily ride of inveterate Franconians were drawn up at the door. They
+were two in number, the list of riders for that fine morning being
+unusually heavy. Not coaches, that necessarily shut away a part of the
+view, but long low wagons on jacks, each with four or five cross seats, a
+heavy brake and four mettled horses&mdash;for fine weather and through the
+shaded glen roads, the safest and pleasantest of all the mountain
+conveyances. Five minutes sufficed to fill both those conveyances, with
+some thirty persons, among the number all those in whom this narration
+awakes any interest. How they were divided off or how seated is a matter of
+no consequence, except in a certain particular. Halstead Rowan managed to
+secure a seat in the same wagon with Clara Vanderlyn, though at the other
+end of the vehicle,&mdash;and in so doing found himself by the side of Mrs.
+Brooks Cunninghame and only one remove from that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> hopeful, Master Brooks
+Brooks. Not enjoying quite the same facilities as some of the others for
+studying that lady the night before, he had still been attracted to her at
+breakfast and found time to "cypher up" her calibre and social position to
+a most amusing nicety. Whether wildness was the normal condition of his
+character, as seemed possible, or whether his slight rencontre with the
+young bear, and the flattering conversation with a pretty girl which
+followed, had dizzied his brain a little, as was both possible and
+natural,&mdash;he was in high spirits and the very demon of mischief had taken
+possession of him. He had apparently determined to devote himself somewhat
+to the comfort of that Arch-priestess of Shoddy during the morning ride,
+and a pleasant time that elevated personage was likely to have of it!</p>
+
+<p>Just after leaving the breakfast table, Rowan had chanced to overhear a few
+words of conversation between Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame and one of the lady
+habitues of the house on whom she was aiming to make a tremendous
+impression; and those few words had fully revealed one of the leading
+points of the parvenu's tactics. Some one had told her, apparently, or she
+had read the statement in so-called "polite publications"&mdash;that no one
+could be fashionable, now-a-days, without having been "abroad"&mdash;<i>i. e.</i>,
+without having made at least one tour in Europe. Now that Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame <i>had</i> been abroad, at least so far as beyond the Atlantic, at
+that very early period before she left the paternal cabin, pig and
+potatoes,&mdash;seemed the most probable of allegations; but in the matter of
+actual travel, or of those substitutes for travel which may be found in a
+thorough acquaintance with geography and a close study of guide-books and
+the best travellers, the poor woman had been as guiltless, a few weeks
+before, as the most stay-at-home and illiterate of her early acquaintances.
+But she could read, which was something, and had no conscience worth
+speaking of, which was something more. Perhaps some one had told her the
+traditional story of Tom Sheridan and his father, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> wonder which the
+latter expressed that the former "could not say that he had been down into
+a coal-pit without really going there." The worthy lady, as Rowan soon
+discovered by a few desultory words, had no corresponding objection,
+provided she could <i>seem</i> to have been anywhere; and there was little doubt
+that she had procured a guide-book or two and "read up," as Honorable
+Members very often do before making speeches on subjects of which they know
+nothing whatever,&mdash;and as snobs sometimes do in books on "Perfect
+Gentility" and the "Whole Art of Dining Out," before going into society
+which seems a little too weighty for their previous training. How well she
+had succeeded, may best be illustrated by a little of her conversation with
+the Illinoisan, who took care to introduce the subject of her "travels"
+(with what he had overheard, as a hint) very soon after the wagons rolled
+away from the Profile, and without waiting for any formal introduction.</p>
+
+<p>He broke the ice with the remark, equally tempting and flattering to his
+next neighbor:</p>
+
+<p>"You must enjoy this fine scenery very much, madam, as you have chances of
+comparison that some of us lack. You have travelled in Europe, I believe?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;yes, sir," answered the lady, a little doubtful which of the two was
+the proper answer to so profound a sentence. If she was at all nervous
+about plunging into such untried waters with a total stranger, his
+disclamatory hint of his own experiences reassured her; and besides, one of
+the ladies was on the seat immediately behind, to whom she had been
+boasting that very morning, and it would never do to abandon the ground
+once taken.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, how proud you must feel, madam, of having seen so many of the wonders
+of nature!" the wretch went on. "I have never yet been able to cross the
+ocean, myself, and the conversation of foreign travellers is naturally both
+pleasant and instructive to me."</p>
+
+<p>"Much obliged to you, I am sure," the lady returned.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> Some of the
+passengers in the wagon, who had previously observed the hero of the
+morning, and thought him any thing else rather than a fool, looked twice at
+him, at this juncture, to discover what he could mean by addressing
+complimentary conversation to that compound of ignorance and vulgarity. It
+must be owned that Clara Vanderlyn, who sat on one of the back seats while
+the interlocutors were in front, believing the man in earnest, felt for the
+moment a sensation of disgust towards him and wished her card back in her
+reticule. But if she and some of the others were temporarily deceived, the
+deception was not of long continuance.</p>
+
+<p>The statement by Rowan that he had never been across the Atlantic, was the
+one thing necessary to reassure Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame; and that point
+settled, she felt sure of her ground.</p>
+
+<p>"How long since you were abroad, madam, may I ask?" he continued.</p>
+
+<p>"Five years," answered the lady, who no doubt felt that both her duration
+of standing in society and the accuracy of her memory would appear the
+better for a little lapse of time.</p>
+
+<p>"Five years, indeed? so long?" asked the scamp, with every appearance of
+interest. "And did you have your dear little boy with you all the time?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my physician did not think it prudent for me to take him along of me,
+and I left him to home with the nurse," was the reply. The fact was,
+really, that at the early period named her "physician" had been a drunken
+Indian-herb doctor, the only description of medical man likely to visit the
+shanty which she yet occupied,&mdash;and that she had been (perhaps better and
+more honorably occupied than at any time after!) doing her own work without
+the hope or thought of ever employing a servant.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear little fellow!" said the Illinoisan, caressing the scrubbing-brush
+head of the repulsive youngster. "What a pity that he could not have gone
+with you! By the way,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> madam, you went by steamer, of course. Did you take
+steamer for Paris, or&mdash;or&mdash;St. Petersburgh?"</p>
+
+<p>By this time most of the passengers began to perceive what was coming, and
+there were symptoms of a titter in the back seats, but nothing that warned
+or disturbed the victim.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Paris, of course!" was the answer. "Dear, delightful Paris, where the
+shops was so handsome and the women wore such elegant bunnits!" (See
+guide-books.)</p>
+
+<p>"You landed at Paris direct from the steamer, I suppose?" asked the
+tormentor, at which question the titter really began, but still too quietly
+to put the lady on her guard.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, of course!" was the answer. "The tide was high, and we went right
+up." The poor woman had probably been aground, some time, on the Hudson
+Overslaugh or the Shrewsbury Flats, and supposed that nothing but low tide
+could prevent going up to Paris by steamship.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me see&mdash;what is the name of that river that takes you up to Paris?"
+the scamp went on, with his face contorted into a wonderful appearance of
+earnest thought. "The&mdash;the&mdash;the&mdash;which is it, now, the Danube or the
+Amazon?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not very sure," answered the lady at hap-hazard, "I almost forget,
+but I think it is the Amazon&mdash;yes, I know it must be the Amazon."</p>
+
+<p>At about that period there was a laugh in the back part of the long wagon,
+and Clara Vanderlyn was as red in the face as if she had been committing
+some serious fault. She would unquestionably have liked to pinch that
+naughty fellow's ears, if not to box them. But the laugh did not disturb
+Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, for the young people were frolicking all the while
+and a hundred laughs might break out without one of them being directed at
+<i>her</i>. Halstead Rowan had kept his own face perfectly serene so far, but he
+evidently began to feel twitchings around the mouth which might give him
+trouble directly, and, for fear of the worst, he fired his concluding shots
+with great rapidity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You were in London, of course?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, a good while; we took a house there, and seen the Queen, and the
+Crystal Palace&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Let me see&mdash;the Queen lives in the Crystal Palace, doesn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course she does!" answered the traveller, who remembered just so much
+as that queens and palaces belonged together, and no more.</p>
+
+<p>More laughing at the back of the wagon, a little choking, and some stuffing
+of cambric handkerchiefs into mouths pretty or the reverse. No irreparable
+explosion as yet, though that catastrophe could not possibly be long
+deferred.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;you were in London: did you go up the Pyramids?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, we went to 'em, but not up 'em."</p>
+
+<p>"But you went up the Alps, of course?&mdash;everybody goes up the Alps."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course we did!" and the lady really bridled. "Think we would go so far
+as that and spend so much money, and not go up that there?"</p>
+
+<p>The explosion was impending&mdash;there was already a rumbling in the distance,
+which should have been heeded.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you go up&mdash;in <i>what</i> kind of a vessel did you say, madam?"</p>
+
+<p>It is to be presumed that by this time the lady was considerably confused
+even in the smattering of information from the guide-book, with which she
+had commenced; and she could not have had any moral doubt remaining that
+the Alps was a river; for she answered, without one symptom of
+consciousness in her countenance:</p>
+
+<p>"We went up in a steamboat, and a nasty little thing it was!"</p>
+
+<p>The threatened explosion had arrived. That wagon-load of people laughed,
+shrieked and roared, bent double and chuckled themselves red in the face,
+to a degree which was very discreditable to their sense of propriety and
+very bewildering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> to the mountain echoes. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame looked
+around to see what was the matter, and at that moment it seemed that a dim
+perception must have crept through her head that she had something to do
+with the merriment, for she reddened, bridled and grew strangely silent.
+Halstead Rowan, as she looked around,&mdash;not by any means joining in the
+laugh, had suddenly discovered that his legs were cramped from riding,
+sprung over the side of the wagon and disappeared behind a bend of the
+road, to make the rest of the short distance to the Flume House on foot.</p>
+
+<p>A mile further, after this novel lesson in geography had been taken, and
+the wagons drew up at the door of the Flume House, once a great
+caravanserai that rivalled any other in the mountains, then a mere
+unoccupied pendant of the all-absorbing Profile which has literally
+swallowed it. It stands at the lower end of the Franconia Notch proper, and
+the mountains fall away below it southward, so much that the feeling of
+oppressive isolation at the Profile is here lost entirely. But there is one
+charm connected with the Flume House, that can never be forgotten by those
+who have once stood there and looked eastward; and the merry occupants of
+the before-deserted piazza, that day, were not likely to be allowed to ride
+away without having that charm called to their attention, to be remembered
+ever after as one of those marvels with which Nature confounds Art and
+defies calculation.</p>
+
+<p>Full before them, as they looked, loomed up the peak of Mount Liberty, so
+called, as is supposed, because the curve of the crown northward has some
+indefinite resemblance to the Phrygian liberty-cap of the French
+revolution. But a sadder and more solemn resemblance was there, needing to
+be pointed out at first, but asserting itself as a strange reality
+thenceforward, in presence or in absence. It was with a thrill of awe that
+the riders, as so many had done before them and as some of them had done
+long before, recognized the form of the Dead Washington, stretched out on
+the summit of the eternal mountains that seemed almost mighty and enduring
+enough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> for their awful burthen. There seemed a little obscurity in the
+mouth and lips, as if the shrouding pall partially covered them; but the
+contour of the massive nose was perfect, as the rugged peak stood relieved
+against the eastern sky, and above it the godlike forehead swept up
+southward and fell away again in the very curve of the hair drawn backward
+as it would be when lying in the calm repose of death. Northward the long
+round of Mount Liberty marked the full breast, sinking at the recumbent hip
+and rising again at the bend of the massive knee; while still farther away
+and in the exact line of symmetry, one of the peaks of the Haystack group
+shot up and fell suddenly on the other side, as the drapery would do over
+the stiffened feet. Then the resemblance was complete, unmistakable, almost
+fearful; and those who looked with reverent eyes realized that the Eternal
+Hand, thousands of years ago and in a mood that would write prophecy on the
+very face of the earth instead of recording it on tables of stone, had
+throned on the tops of the northern mountains an enduring likeness of that
+man yet unborn, whose glory was to gild every peak and fill every valley
+with the brightest and purest light of heroism.</p>
+
+<p>Long, and with reverent silence only broken by an occasional exclamation of
+wonder, the company gazed upon that strange spectacle, more sadly
+suggestive than any other of the wonders of the American continent. The
+voice of merriment, which had been ringing so loudly but a few moments
+before, was hushed, and tears lay nearer to the surface than laughter. It
+could not be otherwise than that the spectacle, impressive always, should
+blend itself with the sorrow of a thousand hearts and the peril of a land,
+and that something of almost superstitious omen should seem to lie in the
+recognition. There were no words to syllable the great thoughts of that
+hour. How could there be? What tongue could have spoken what the heart so
+sadly reverberated to an inner sense that was subtler and better than
+hearing? "H. T.," whose tongue, as Margaret Hayley and her companions heard
+it, had so solemnly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> apostrophized the iron face of the Old Man of the
+Mountain in the moonlight of the night before, stood silent and with folded
+arms on the end of the piazza, his strange, dark face full of a feeling
+that seemed sad enough for death and yet determined enough for a life of
+almost terrible daring. He was alone. He seemed to have made, even
+distantly, but one acquaintance since alighting at the Profile; and that
+one acquaintance, Halstead Rowan, had not yet paid all the penalty of his
+mischief in a walk to the Flume. He had no motive to speak: perhaps under
+no circumstances could he have done so before that company and with the
+knowledge that the eyes of Margaret Hayley might be bent upon him from the
+other end of that group of gazers. But the man who had read the patriotic
+secret of the Mountain Sphynx felt the weight of that hour&mdash;who could doubt
+it? And if his lips had spoken, would not the words they uttered have been
+something like these, that have bubbled to other lips and yet been denied
+utterance, on the same spot and since the overcasting of our national sky
+by that dark cloud of war and that darker cloud of divided feeling, only to
+be rolled away in God's good time:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, look upon the Dead Washington, all of you, and prepare to bear the
+image away and keep it sacred in your heart of hearts. Dead and shrouded he
+lies, whose words might perchance have had power, at this fearful day in
+our history, to still the turbulent waves of passion and make us brothers
+once more. Dead and shrouded, when the day of doom may be near, and when
+his sword, flashing at the head of the armies of the republic, might have
+blinded treason and struck terror to the heart of the rebellion. Dead and
+shrouded, to wake not at the trump of war or the call of national peril.
+Yet look down upon us from the granite mountains that bore thine image a
+thousand years ago and will bear it until the very form and feature of
+nature decay&mdash;look down upon us from the heavens that are higher and more
+enduring even than the eternal hills, and bless us with some ray of that
+courage which dared the iron rain of Princeton&mdash;of that patient endurance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+which braved the wintry snow of Valley Forge&mdash;of that honesty which bent a
+world in awe and admiration&mdash;of that self-sacrificing humility which
+thought it but duty to refuse a crown! Not in irreverence we speak, shadow
+of the great dead! Thou didst live, and we sprang into existence as a
+nation. Thou art gone, and we wander in the night and darkness of hatred,
+of strife, of murder&mdash;perhaps even totter to a fall from which there is no
+arising. If thou hast power in the eternal world, Washington who livest, so
+faintly shadowed by the Washington that is dead&mdash;save us whom the might of
+no other nation can cast down&mdash;save us from ourselves!"</p>
+
+<p>Hush! the fancy so reverently assumed cannot be cast off in a moment.
+Hush!&mdash;was not that low rumbling in the north which men call thunder, the
+voice of the Giant of Mount Liberty turning suddenly in his grave-clothes
+to answer the appeal? God!&mdash;if it might be so!&mdash;"Oh, for an hour of Hickory
+Jackson!" cried the agonized nation when the first paralysis fell upon our
+men in power: oh, for one moment of George Washington now!</p>
+
+<p>The Celt looks for the awakening of Brian Boroihme from his long sleep in
+the Wicklow mountains, falsely called his death, after the red field of
+Clontarf, and for the deliverance of Ireland from the Saxon oppressor,
+which is to follow; the German is still waiting for the sounding of that
+horn which is to start Frederick the Redbeard from his repose in the
+Kypphauser, where the faithless laid him to rest, believing that he was
+dead, after his charmed bath in the Cilician Cydnus; even the old soldiers
+who guard the mighty dust of Napoleon beneath the dome of the Invalides,
+speak of the "Midnight Review" in other words than those of Friederich
+Freiligrath and hold a dim impression that the life of Austerlitz and the
+Pyramids must linger even after St. Helena: why may not the patriot heart
+of America believe that the man who of all others best represented the full
+glory of a nation, is immortal in body as in spirit, and that the Father of
+his Country will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> some day dash out from the sarcophagus that holds him
+prisoner at Mount Vernon,&mdash;to shame recreancy, to hurl incapacity from
+power, and to save, in its dark hour, the fabric that his great soul loved
+and his great hand builded?</p>
+
+<p>No!&mdash;that awful presence lies unmoved on its bier on the peaks of the
+mountains, the blue sky the canopy of its catafalque, the waving trees the
+plumes of the warriors who guard it, and the hoarse storm wind its requiem.
+And while it so sleeps, the future of the republic, which seems to us in
+darkness, lies really in a Hand that knows no death and never changes in
+its unfaltering purpose!</p>
+
+<p>But the saddest as well as the sweetest things in life have an end, and the
+halt of the company at the Flume House, that morning, supplied no exception
+to the rule. Just as the wagons were once more loaded, Halstead Rowan came
+striding up, his cigar smoked out, and his face the most unconscious
+imaginable, and took the seat which he had not long before vacated. Mrs.
+Brooks Cunninghame was very busy, at that period, looking after some of the
+details of arrangement of Master Brooks Brooks' dress, which had become
+slightly disarranged; and perhaps she did not see him. Let us suppose so,
+for she certainly did not notice her late student in geography. She was a
+little red in the face, which let us also suppose to have been the effect
+of the weather and not of mortification. And so all once more in place,
+away dashed the wagons to that marvellous gap in the mountains which gives
+name to the house. The road seemed very rough and broken, the rises and
+descents grew sharper, and the forest scenery wilder. Galloping his four
+horses up a steep ascent to the left, each driver vigorously applied the
+brake as the wagons literally slid down the very sharpest bit of road
+descent to be found at the Franconia (except perhaps on some portions of
+the Bald Mountain)&mdash;a descent so sudden, and overhanging a ravine so
+frightful, that some of the handsome eyes looked larger than ever for the
+moment, all the riders involuntarily threw themselves back in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> laboring
+and creaking wagons, and pretty little screams that had no affectation in
+them emancipated themselves from rosy lips and took excursions out into the
+summer air. Then thundering over a rickety wooden bridge, almost at the
+bottom of the ravine, and up another slight ascent, the wagons stopped
+under a clump of wide-spreading trees at a rough platform, and disembarked
+their passengers, leaving all to follow their will in examining that wonder
+of nature in one of her frolic moods.</p>
+
+<p>And what was the Flume like, to those who that day saw it for the first
+time? An irregular crack or fissure in the side of the mountain, half a
+mile long, and from ten to fifty feet in depth, such as the wedge of some
+enraged Titan might have made when he had determined to split the earth
+asunder, and used the thunder as a beetle. Whether he was frightened by the
+big oval boulder which fell into the fissure half way up, and has ever
+since hung suspended there, touching only at the points, and apparently
+ready to fall at any moment&mdash;who shall say? At all events, if he intended
+to disrupt the earth he desisted for the time; and let us be duly thankful!</p>
+
+<p>Walking laboriously over the broad flat stone platform at the mouth of the
+gorge, with the thin sheet of bright water straggling over it, then
+ascending the rough stairs of board that lay irregularly on either side,
+and anon climbing carefully over the mossed and slippery rocks that offered
+such precarious foot-hold, the party ascended the Flume and stood at last
+between walls of less than six feet separation, the rock rising fifty or
+sixty feet on either side, and almost as square as if cut by the chisel of
+an artificer, impassable slimy boulders piled in confusion far ahead, the
+rough little stream tumbling away through the wilderness of stones beneath,
+and a chill dampness like that of the grave striking in to the very
+life-blood of those who had been imprudent enough to tempt the mountains
+without the protection of thick garments and warm flannels. Once, a little
+white Blossom of the company, just unfolding to the June luxuriance of
+womanhood,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> and whose name has no interest in this narration, was tempted
+by a mischievous relative and protector to try walking a rounded and
+slippery log that bridged the chasm, a few feet above the rough rocks and
+water below; but her nerves failed and her head grew dizzy when she was
+half way across, her lip quivered and then fluttered out a little cry of
+alarm, and her mischievous tempter retraced his own steps just in time to
+catch her and keep her from an ice-cold bath and limbs bruised on the rough
+stones lying in the stream underneath.</p>
+
+<p>There was another log spanning the Flume, a little higher up the chasm, and
+at a very different altitude from terra firma&mdash;hanging, in fact, like a
+stout black fence-rail, not less than eighty or an hundred feet in the air.
+Encircled by the eternal dampness rising out of the Flume, it could not be
+otherwise than slimy and slippery; and only a moment before the nameless
+Blossom tempted the log below, some of the company had looked up and
+remarked with a shudder that a firm foot and cool head would be necessary
+for the man who should tread over that frail bridge with its crumbling
+bark. As if the two had some mysterious connection, the moment <i>after</i>
+Blossom's misadventure, some one heard voices in that direction and looked
+up again. Two figures stood upon the brink, and not so far away but that at
+least <i>some</i> of the group below recognized them as "H. T." and Halstead
+Rowan, who had left the rest as they abandoned the wagons and commenced
+ascending the gorge.</p>
+
+<p>Among those who looked up was Margaret Hayley, and her eyes were among
+those that recognized the two figures. What those people were to her, or
+why she said "Look!" in a quick and even agitated voice, probably the young
+girl could have told quite as little as either writer or reader; but such
+was the fact, and the motion of her eyes at the moment, accompanied by the
+word, drew the regards of both Captain Hector Coles and Mrs. Burton Hayley,
+who stood beside her at the bottom of the Flume. They, too, with the
+others,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> heard the words and saw the action that immediately followed.</p>
+
+<p>Halstead Rowan had one foot thrust forward on the log, his other on the
+firm ground behind. "H. T." stood on the rock beside him, making no motion
+to cross. There was evidently a banter between them, and though they were
+probably not aware of the fact, their words were readily distinguishable
+beneath.</p>
+
+<p>"None of <i>my</i> business, I suppose; but it is folly!" they heard spoken by
+the voice of "H. T."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose that every thing is folly which goes out of the hum-drum track
+of every-day life!" they heard Rowan reply. "But I like folly, and so here
+goes! Will you follow me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Without wanting to go over?&mdash;no!" was the answer.</p>
+
+<p>The words had scarcely left his lips when Rowan sprang forward on the log,
+stepping lightly, but balancing himself with some care, towards the other
+side. Insensibly all who saw him held their breath. If he should be correct
+enough in his balance, who could say that the log might not be a rotten
+shell, ready to fall under the heavy weight of the stout athlete? In fact,
+he had scarcely reached the middle when the tottering fabric seemed to give
+way and come toppling down into the chasm below. Not in reality; for had it
+done so, the career of the Illinoisan, with whom we have by no means
+finished, would have been ended for all time. The startling appearance was
+created by the dislodging of a large shell of the rotten bark by his foot,
+more than half costing him his balance, and bringing out from the group
+beneath a chorus of cries that might well have disturbed what remained of
+equilibrium. One cry sounded sharper and higher than all the rest: there
+were those present who knew from whose lips it came: enough for us to say
+that it did not come from those of Margaret Hayley, whose eyes were still
+turned upward with a feeling in them very different from fear. Before the
+cry had fairly died away, the peril, whatever it might have been, was past,
+and Halstead Rowan stood on the other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> side of the chasm, bowing to the
+group who had been observing him, as he learned from the cries, at the
+bottom. They saw "H. T." turn and walk away at the same moment; and then,
+drawing a long breath, Margaret Hayley said, much more to herself than to
+her immediate companions:</p>
+
+<p>"What a thing beyond all admiration is that courage!"</p>
+
+<p>"Which our other friend does not seem to be troubled with in any great
+degree!" said Captain Hector Coles, finishing out the sentence with a tone
+perceptibly sneering. Margaret looked round at him with a look which might
+have been one of inquiry, then turned away her face again and said:</p>
+
+<p>"No, I suppose not! Not more than half the world can be demigods: the
+others must be common people, or worse!"</p>
+
+<p>Whether Captain Hector Coles liked the tone of the reply, or not, is
+uncertain. At all events he scowled a little and said nothing more, while
+Mrs. Burton Hayley stole a look into the face of her daughter which had no
+hypocrisy in it and was full of wonder and trouble.</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes afterwards the company were all again at the mouth of the
+Flume, and there Halstead Rowan, a second time the hero of the day, joined
+them. "H. T." did not make his appearance: he had struck across, the
+Illinoisan said, without waiting for him, over the almost impassable fallen
+timber and through the spruce thickets, by the cross-path to the Pool. A
+few minutes more sufficed to re-seat the group in their wagons and to
+deposit them once more at the door of the Flume House, whence they took
+their way on foot, straggling in every picturesque variety of locomotion
+towards that equally-curious pendant of the Flume which is often missed by
+those who visit the better-known wonder.</p>
+
+<p>The Pool lay all alone, until this somewhat numerous company came to
+disturb its solitude. A singular object indeed&mdash;an exaggeration of all the
+other mountain amphitheatre fountains, nearly round, a score or more of
+yards in diameter, with the toe of the horse-shoe scooped out of a solid
+rock thirty or forty feet in height, smoothed and rounded as if cut<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> by
+human hands, a bright, clear stream dashing down at that point, the rocks
+further away from the toe rising broken and jagged to the height of perhaps
+an hundred feet, and the mode of approach of the passengers a jagged line
+of ricketty steps, terribly perpendicular, sloping down from that highest
+point and presenting no temptations to the decrepit or the nervous. At the
+bottom of this singular basin the water, bright and clear in the few places
+where it ran shallow over the bleached stones, but under the shadow of the
+ledge so deep as to seem black as midnight.</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody here!&mdash;it doesn't seem like old times!" said an elderly gentleman
+who had visited the Pool many times in other days,&mdash;as the ladies were with
+some difficulty assisted down the steps. "No boatman, and not even a boat!
+Where is Charon, I wonder?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, where <i>is</i> Merrill?" asked another. "The man with the leaky scow
+and the white muslin awning, who always charged a York shilling for
+ferrying people over to the Elysian Fields lying among the rocks and logs
+yonder."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember, once," said the old gentleman, "that while his lieutenant
+paddled us around under the spray of the fall yonder, and over to the steps
+which used to hang from the rocks there on the opposite side, Merrill read
+us an autograph letter from Queen Victoria, dated in the kitchen at
+Buckingham Palace while the august lady said that she was rolling
+apple-dumplings,&mdash;and also gave us a lecture on geography, in which he
+proved that this spot was the very centre of the earth, from which all
+latitude and longitude ought to be calculated."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he was right in some degree," said Halstead Rowan, who stood near,
+and who fixed his regards at the same moment on Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame,
+still looking after the welfare of that interesting child. There was not
+even the suspicion of a smile upon his face as he went on, and there
+certainly was not upon the face of the lady for whose benefit the discourse
+was evidently intended. "I do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> not know about the latitude and longitude,
+but this Pool is certainly the centre of the earth and exactly opposite to
+China, so that a plummet, with <i>a line long enough</i>, dropped here, would be
+certain to come out somewhere on the shores of the Hoangho or the Kiangku."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense!" said one grave lady (not Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame) who did not
+appreciate the joke.</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit of it, madame!" said the scamp, who thereupon turned his battery
+at once in her direction. "There is no doubt whatever of the truth of the
+statement, for I have been here myself when the defunct pig-tailed Chinamen
+came popping up, who had committed suicide by drowning themselves on the
+other side of the world, on account of the cruelty of a copper-colored
+divinity with almond eyes and feet the size and shape of the last dumpling
+in the pot, or a trifling deficiency in the rat-crop or the dog-census."</p>
+
+<p>"Impudence!" muttered <i>that</i> lady, who seemed to regard the "whopper" as a
+personal insult; but the majority of the company appeared to view the
+affair in a very different light and to be rather pleased than otherwise
+with the go-ahead fellow who could walk over verbal and physical bridges
+with the same charming recklessness. It may be anticipating to say that
+there was one among them, whose face had paled when he trod the log over
+the Flume, and who could not even laugh at the light words which she
+otherwise enjoyed,&mdash;so much deep and new and strange feeling lay at the
+bottom of the interest. And it may <i>not</i> be anticipating, in the minds of
+any who have perused the late foregoing pages with due attention, to say
+that that silent, thoughtful, observing one was Clara Vanderlyn, between
+whom and the Illinoisan there yawned a gulf of circumstance and position so
+wide and deep that no one but a madman (or what is madder still&mdash;a mad
+<i>woman</i>) could possibly have dreamed of stepping over it.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">A Disaster To Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame&mdash;Exit into
+the Bottom of the Pool&mdash;Nobody that could Swim, and Margaret
+Hayley in Excitement&mdash;"H. T." in his element, in two
+senses&mdash;Another Introduction and a new Hero&mdash;Scenes in the
+Profile parlor&mdash;Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn&mdash;The Insult.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>"But what has <i>become</i> of the crazy old philosopher?" asked the same
+elderly gentleman who had first introduced the subject,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know!" laughed the old gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, they debated physically&mdash;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 an <i>axe</i>, 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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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 saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> a 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&mdash;the glory of the Pool has departed! <i>Sic transit gloria</i> big hole in
+the woods!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;"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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> 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&mdash;and to make various demonstrations with it, around
+the verge of the water. For a moment every one had lost sight of him&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;down&mdash;down towards the bottom with the unerring
+steadiness of a stone.</p>
+
+<p>They saw him sink, but they did not see him rise again&mdash;not even in the
+time which should have secured that result. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame uttered
+a scream when she saw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> the 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;literally
+nothing, as it appeared. All the party were ladies, except five
+men&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;unreasonably enough, of
+course&mdash;expressed something else the instant after.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, shame!&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens, ladies, what is the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sir, if you can swim, for heaven's sake try to save that boy! He has
+fallen into the Pool, there&mdash;there&mdash;" and she pointed with her hand to the
+very depth of the dark water&mdash;"and he must be at the bottom!"</p>
+
+<p>"He <i>is</i> at 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&mdash;the poor little
+fellow had been loading himself down with those tempting, fatal stones, to
+make more certain the doom that was coming!</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>can</i> swim!" 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 one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> realized, until
+he had disappeared, the whole peril he encountered.</p>
+
+<p>"He will strike the stony bottom and kill himself!" said one of the elderly
+gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;or willing to go out of
+his own nature at her command, after less than a single day's
+acquaintance&mdash;the latter feeling one not slow to awaken other and warmer
+companions in the bosom of a true woman!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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,&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;when a ripple agitated its surface, a
+white-sleeved arm came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> up, 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&mdash;both out of danger from the water, but both apparently dead alike!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> that 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&mdash;a man fresh
+from one of the great perils of disinterested benevolence.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know, sir, by what name to thank you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe I am right in calling you Miss Hayley," was the answer, in a
+voice as yet somewhat weak and tremulous.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> "My own name is Horace Townsend,
+and my business is that of a lawyer at&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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 I <i>can</i> be 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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke pleasantly, but with nothing of the rattling gayety which seemed
+to characterize his rival of the day&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> am nowhere!" he said. "I dared you over that log;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> 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&mdash;" they were at that moment a little
+apart from the others, and Rowan spoke low&mdash;"do you know where your head
+lay when you came to?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and perhaps yet more moved by some other reflections of a much more
+mixed character.</p>
+
+<p>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 manipulations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> and 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
+ennuy&eacute;e habitues of a watering place.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Peep the first.</i> 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&mdash;thinking, thinking, thinking, until her brain seemed to be in a
+whirl and all the world unreal.</p>
+
+<p><i>Peep the second.</i> 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 vit&aelig; 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Peep the third.</i> 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 towards <i>her</i>, 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 steadiness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> of his
+perpendicular or add to the respectability of his general demeanor.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> been gazing
+with undisguised admiration, for some hours the previous day, on those of
+this very Clara Vanderlyn&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 the <i>eyes</i>, especially as the lady was standing in such a
+position as to command the dancers.</p>
+
+<p>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 to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> look so harshly&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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&mdash;the same emotions of
+contending pride and abasement, hope and fear, but intensified now so that
+there could be no mistaking their import.</p>
+
+<p>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 person&aelig;. Two or three
+conditions, he thought, were already evolved: an unmistakable mutual
+interest&mdash;observation and dislike on the part of the aristocratic
+mother&mdash;to be followed by eventual discovery on the part of the weaker and
+yet more aristocratic brother&mdash;an unpleasant <i>eclaircissement</i>&mdash;coolness
+born of the very warmth underlying&mdash;a parting in pleasant dissatisfaction
+with themselves and each other&mdash;and perhaps a shadow of blended sweet and
+painful memory over the whole of two after lives!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose this is the most dishonorable action in my life&mdash;planning to
+betray confidence and take an unfair advantage. Why did <i>he</i> tell 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 will <i>not</i> go back&mdash;I <i>will</i> try the
+experiment&mdash;I <i>will</i> win that woman, if I can, under this very name, now
+that I begin to understand her weakness so well. And if I do&mdash;heavens, in
+what a situation shall I have placed her and myself! And will she ever
+forgive the deception? No matter!&mdash;let the future take care of itself."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The music was still sounding as merrily as ever, and as he re-entered the
+room a new set was forming. In the very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> midst 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Remember!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> she 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;a good enough ten-pin-alley companion,
+perhaps, but not quite the thing in a ball-room!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, brother!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;all the woman fully aroused. Her glance
+of withering contempt and scorn,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>As for Halstead Rowan&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>It is not easy to describe the scene in the parlor which followed the
+<i>denouement</i> that 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 sympathies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> of 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">How Halstead Rowan arranged that expected Duel&mdash;Ten-pins
+versus Bloodshed&mdash;Some anxiety about identity&mdash;The "H. T."
+initials, again&mdash;A farewell to the Brooks Cunninghames&mdash;An
+hour on Echo Lake, with a rhapsody and a
+strangely-interested listener.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>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 some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> degree of the broken, heaped and
+heterogeneous quality of the mountain rocks amidst which they occurred.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"You saw that, of course&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>That intended lecture was lost to the world, as so many others have been;
+for Rowan interrupted him:</p>
+
+<p>"Are you poor?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I cannot say that I am, in money!" was the surprised reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Were you ever?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;I must answer in the negative a second time. I have never been what
+the world calls poor, since I can remember."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you do not know how it feels," said the Illinoisan. "I am poor&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;well, heaven need not be particular about blessing them&mdash;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 ask <i>you</i>, because I seem to be better
+acquainted with you, after a very short time, than with any other person
+just now at the Notch."</p>
+
+<p>"Now it is coming&mdash;just what I dreaded!" said Townsend to himself; but he
+answered very differently, in a feeble attempt to stave off the trouble.</p>
+
+<p>"Than <i>any</i> other person?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hold your tongue!&mdash;you know what I mean!" was the reply. "Answer my
+question, yes or no&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I hope so&mdash;yes!" answered Townsend. "But before you take any steps in this
+matter&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Conditions already?" asked Rowan. "I thought it was to be an unconditional
+yes or no!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it is!" said Townsend, apparently satisfied that expostulation would
+after all be useless.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"But the business you wished me to do?" asked Townsend. "If it is to be
+done at all&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, confound the man!&mdash;what ails you? <i>That</i> is the business!"</p>
+
+<p>"To roll you five games of ten-pins?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"To challenge Frank Vanderlyn&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"To shoot <i>her brother</i>, merely because he is a fool?&mdash;Oh, no,
+Townsend&mdash;you could not think <i>that</i>! 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."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a lawyer and belong to Cincinnati, you said,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> observed Rowan, as
+he paused a moment to wipe his brow after thundering down half a dozen of
+the ponderous globes.</p>
+
+<p>"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),&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"You called yourself odd a little while ago, and I fancy that if you <i>are</i>
+odd 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 deuce <i>are</i> you?"</p>
+
+<p>"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 &mdash;&mdash; 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, employed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> at 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&mdash;by the way&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Humph!&mdash;yes," answered the lawyer, eying the strange compound with
+unavoidable admiration and no little wonder. "Yes, except one thing."</p>
+
+<p>"And that is about this scar?"</p>
+
+<p>"I confess that my curiosity lay in that direction!" laughed Townsend. "I
+think that scar has not been long healed&mdash;that you have been taking a turn
+in the present war."</p>
+
+<p>"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. <i>They</i> took
+it&mdash;<i>I</i> did not&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> 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&mdash;a fact which did
+not escape the quick eye of the Captain.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>know</i> that 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."</p>
+
+<p>"What motive could any one possibly have for coming to a place like this in
+disguise and with a feigned name?" asked Margaret Hayley.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Traitors?" asked the lady.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, traitors!" answered the Captain.</p>
+
+<p>"And <i>that</i> reason he has not, I know!" said Margaret. "The man who uttered
+the words that <i>I</i> heard 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!"</p>
+
+<p>"You seem strangely interested in the man!" said the Captain, his voice
+undeniably querulous.</p>
+
+<p>"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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, certainly! certainly!" was the reply, coming out between set teeth.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Townsend!"</p>
+
+<p>No motion on the part of the person addressed, or any sign that he heard
+the utterance.</p>
+
+<p>"Townsend! I say, Townsend!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Me? Oh!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you notice that?" asked the keen-witted Captain, returning to the
+charge, as a repulsed soldier should always do. "His name is <i>not</i>
+Townsend, 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!"</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Pray do not say any thing more about it! That man is nothing to me. Let us
+go back to the house."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer had thrown off his coat upon the chair behind him&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Hector Coles, you would not do <i>that</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Humph! well, he has been keen enough, it seems, to mismark his
+handkerchief too!"</p>
+
+<p>"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. Whither<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> one of them
+went, an hour or two later, may possibly be discovered at no distant period
+of this narration.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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 amusing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> to 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 home<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> at once and never bring
+him out agin into respectable society while her head was warrum."</p>
+
+<p>At the end of which exordium the berated husband not unnaturally remarked,
+in a brogue nearly as broad as it had ever been:</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Thrue for ye, Bridget!&mdash;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?&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Pat Cunningham, ye'r a coarse, miserable brute&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>A snore was the only reply. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame had secured the last
+word, according to her usual habit; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> she had only done so at the
+expense of not having her rejoinder heard by the ears for which it was
+intended.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>They were pleasant company at the meal, very!&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> the 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?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span></p><hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was nearly noon of that morning of the departures&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 of
+<i>his</i> lake for dwarfing all the travelled ones' recollections of Killarney
+and the Echo Rocks of Superior.</p>
+
+<p>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 the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+steam 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!&mdash;I must take my chances&mdash;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 fate <i>was</i> upon that stern seat, for its three
+occupants were Mrs. Burton Hayley, her daughter, and Captain Hector Coles.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, ma, I forgot," she said, introducing. "Mr. Townsend, of Cincinnati,
+whose acquaintance I made yesterday when he saved the poor little boy from
+drowning, at the Pool."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were fixed very closely upon the face of Townsend as she said
+these words, and so were those of Captain Hector Coles. If either saw, or
+thought that they saw, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> momentary red flush pass over the dark
+countenance, coming as quickly and fading as rapidly as one of the flashes
+of the Northern Lights,&mdash;did they see any corroboration of the suspicions
+of the evening before, or was that flush merely the natural expression of a
+sensitive man whose good deeds were mentioned in his presence?</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burton Hayley nodded, as she could not avoid doing under such
+circumstances, but there was very little cordiality in the nod; and there
+was something quite as lofty and uncongenial in the manner of the words
+with which she accompanied it:</p>
+
+<p>"I remember hearing my daughter speak of Mr. Townsend's having been made
+the means, under Providence, of preventing an accident."</p>
+
+<p>The ostentatious Bible yet lay upon its carved stand, oh, Mrs. Burton
+Hayley, did it not!</p>
+
+<p>No farther conversation followed at that moment, though there may have been
+one, and mayhap two, in that mixed boat-load of fifteen or twenty, who
+would have been glad to pursue it under more favorable auspices. Certain it
+is that the lawyer kept his gaze upon the proudly sweet face of Margaret
+Hayley, quite as steadily as propriety would by any means allow, and that
+her face answered back something more of interest, under the shade of her
+wide leghorn jockey, than either of her immediate companions might have
+been pleased to see. She was interested in her new acquaintance, beyond a
+question: was she something more? Answer the question&mdash;oh, heart of
+woman!&mdash;could it be possible that the by-gone love, once so truly a part of
+her very being, had already so faded, in one short month, that a feeling
+warmer than friendship could centre around a mere stranger of two days'
+beholding? Was that "ideal," once believed to have been found, then lost
+again, presenting itself in another and still more enticing shape, to make
+constancy a myth and womanly truth a by-word? Small data, as yet, from
+which to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> judge; but stranger things than this have chanced in the rolling
+years, and the faith of humanity still survived them!</p>
+
+<p>Out on the Lake by this time the burlesque upon a steamboat had floated,
+and the sheet of water lay under as well as around the passengers&mdash;perhaps
+a quarter of a mile in width and a mile in length, shut in on the side of
+approach by the woods, and beyond on all sides by the eternal hills. Never
+was silver jewel dotting the green bosom of nature more beautiful&mdash;never
+one more sweetly nestled away near the very heart of its mountain nurse.
+The proverbial winds of the Notch for once were still, and only a gentle
+ripple stirred the glassy surface here and there as a breath touched it
+like the skimming wing of a wild bird. The meridian sun lay lovingly on the
+side and crest of the mountain rising eastward from the edge of the water,
+touching its bald, scarred brow with ruddy gold; and if the first on the
+cliffs nodded at times, they nodded sleepily with the very expression of
+repose. Spirit of calm, delicious quiet!&mdash;was there ever a spot more truly
+sacred to thee, than Echo Lake at such moments, when a few gentle, loving
+hearts, close bound to each other and shut in from the world, are beating
+with slow pulses as the life and centre of the great mystery of nature?
+Other boat-loads than that of this July noon, have grown quiet beneath such
+a feeling, as the boatman ceased his paddling, the boat drifted lazily on,
+lips grew silent, eyes closed, and human thought floated away on a very sea
+of dreams.</p>
+
+<p>They had swept over, in rapt silence for the last few moments, until they
+lay beneath the very brow of the eastern mountain. Then that silence was
+broken by the boatman rising from his seat and blowing a long, steady blast
+on his six-foot tin horn, in size and shape like those used on the Western
+canals, but sadly dinted by careless use and frequent falling. The company
+were reminded, then, that they were floating on Echo Lake and no stream of
+the land of faerie. The long, low note died on the car, and an appreciable
+instant of silence followed. Then it came back from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> the brow of the
+mountain above, a little louder than before, and yet a little mellowed by
+distance. Another instant, and the same sound reverberated from the
+opposite hill, the back of Eagle Cliff. Were there still more echoes to be
+added to the two that had already made the place notable? Yes, a third came
+back from the range that sloped away from the head of the Lake,
+northward&mdash;a little fainter, and broken now; and then the more distant
+hills caught the sound, as if each had a right, which it jealously claimed,
+to some portion of that greeting from the human breath; and far as the eye
+could trace the blue peaks rising behind each other through the gaps
+beyond, the ear could catch a corresponding reverberation,
+fainter&mdash;fainter&mdash;fainter,&mdash;till it died away in a drowsy murmur and
+silence followed. Then the horn passed from hand to hand and from mouth to
+mouth, some of the gallants perhaps forming kisses of the touch of red lips
+which had preceded theirs; and some blew round, full strains that awakened
+admiration, and some made but a melancholy whistle which excited merry
+laughter. Among the many experiments tried upon that horn, there must have
+been some horrid discords startling the Dryads in the wooded shades up the
+mountain, where the gazers sometimes seemed to see the echo leaping from
+cliff to cliff and from bough to bough. But they soon came willingly back
+to the practised notes of the boatman; and some of the party shut their
+eyes and dreamed, as his quick, sharp peals rang merrily up among the
+hills,&mdash;of noble lord and gentle lady, hunting in the days of old, and of
+the bugle blasts of outlaws sounding through gloomy Ardennes or merry
+Sherwood. Anon he would end his strain with a long, low falling note, and
+they heard some old cathedral hymn wailing through solemn arches and
+bending the spirit to reverence and prayer. But through all that succession
+of sounds the hard, dry, practical, exigeant Present was rolled away and
+the romantic, easy Past stood in its stead; so easily does the mind, like
+the body, cast off its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> burthen, whenever permitted, and lie down, if only
+for a moment, upon the lap of indolence!</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely a word had been spoken, in the boat, for some minutes, under the
+influence of that spell of the hour. But the normal condition of humanity,
+when awake, is to keep the tongue in motion; and not even the spell of Echo
+Lake could keep that busy member still beyond the customary period.
+Comparisons of other echoes, in our own and other lands, were made, and as
+the boatman rowed on to complete the circuit of the Lake, the conversation
+became nearly general.</p>
+
+<p>"Echo Lake looks very smiling and quiet to-day," said one of the
+company&mdash;the same old habitue of the mountains who had commenced the
+conversation the day before with Halstead Rowan, at the Pool. "But I have
+seen it look very differently, sometimes when a gale came roaring and
+singing up through the Notch, and the saucy little thing got a black frown
+upon its face, reflected from the leaden sky and the wind-tossed trees up
+yonder. Echo is blown away, at such times, as any one would be who dared
+the perils of this sea of limited dimensions; and you would be surprised to
+know how hard the wind <i>can</i> blow just here, and what little, tumbling,
+dangerous waves of rage the dwarf can kick up, trying to make an ocean of
+itself."</p>
+
+<p>"The most singular view that <i>I</i> ever had of it," said another, "I caught
+half way up the Cannon Mountain one afternoon. It looked like a wash-bowl,
+and I had a fancy that I could toss a piece of soap into it from where I
+stood! But I knew that it must be Echo Lake, for somebody was blowing a
+horn; and I believe there has never been an hour of daylight, since
+creation, when a horn has not been blowing somewhere in the neighborhood."</p>
+
+<p>"There is one more point of view in which to see it," said Horace Townsend,
+who had not before joined at any length in the conversation. "I mean by
+moonlight, for any one who is part night-hawk."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Ah, have you seen it so?" asked the last speaker, with interest.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;last night," answered the lawyer.</p>
+
+<p>"As often as I have been here," said the first old habitue, "I have never
+come down to see it by moonlight. What is it like?"</p>
+
+<p>"Like something that I cannot very well describe," was the answer. "You had
+better all come down and see it for yourselves, before you leave the
+Notch."</p>
+
+<p>"Still, you can give us some idea," pursued the old gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>Horace Townsend hesitated and was silent for a moment, when Margaret Hayley
+said, her eyes just then fixed full upon his: "I <i>think</i> you can, Mr.
+Townsend, if I am not mistaken in the voice that I heard speaking for the
+Old Man of the Mountain, by the same moonlight, not many evenings ago."</p>
+
+<p>The dusky cheek of the lawyer was full of red blood in an instant. He had
+been overheard, then, in his half-mad rhapsody to Rowan and himself. And
+<i>she</i> had heard him, of all women!&mdash;<i>she</i> had spoken with such frankness,
+not to say boldness, and that frankness appreciation at least, if not
+admiration! He might have uttered something more about "taking his chances"
+then, and had full warrant for the self-gratulation!</p>
+
+<p>"I do not suppose that I can tell you either what I saw or felt," said
+Townsend, when that momentary flush had died away a little from his face.
+"I will try, however. I had been rolling ten-pins till past eleven, and it
+must have been midnight when I strolled down towards the Lake. I was in
+hopes that I should find no one here, for I wished to see it alone as well
+as by moonlight; and I had my wish. I saw no one and heard no one, on my
+way to the Lake or while here; and I do not suppose that any foot but my
+own pressed the damp green velvet that bordered the edge, or that any eye
+except my own and the All-seeing one that looks down over all the world at
+all midnights, saw the placid sheet lying<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> in its solemn repose, with the
+shadows of the great cliff yonder reflected on its bosom, and here and
+there a little ripple as a puff of wind sighed through the branches, kissed
+the silver surface and passed over."</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of the speaker were full of humid light as he spoke, and at least
+one of the company marked the influence which seemed to be upon him&mdash;a mood
+of high imagination, sometimes seen in the ardent lovers of nature when
+revelling in their chosen study, and though less dangerous not less decided
+than the madness which habitually fell upon Saul. There was something
+fascinating in it, to all who saw and heard, even to those who held an
+intuitive dislike to the seer: what must the fascination have been to
+Margaret Hayley, who remembered one so unlike in personal appearance and
+yet so like in voice and apparently in habits of mind, loving nature so
+intently and describing it with the same fervor, while his love for <i>her</i>
+made a sacred undertone to all and completed the charm of look and word!</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer needed no further urging, but went on:</p>
+
+<p>"The little dock there, with the boats moored beside it, and the hut where
+our friend here keeps his horn and cannon,&mdash;all lay in a melancholy quiet
+which struck me like death&mdash;as if those who frequented them had gone away
+at some nightfall years ago, like the workmen who left their trowels in the
+mortar of unfinished Pompeii on the morning of its destruction,&mdash;never to
+return again and yet ever to be waited for, while the earth kept its course
+in the heavens. I was alone, and I suppose that imagination ran riot with
+me and made me partially a maniac. The hush was so awful that I dared not
+break it, even by a loud breath. I saw the Indians there, under yon
+sweeping trees to the left, whose branches bend down and almost kiss the
+water&mdash;saw an Indian canoe lying there, faces within it smeared with
+war-paint and the pointed arrow ready to twang from the bow-string. I
+expected to hear the war-whoop every instant&mdash;expected it, perhaps not in
+my human mind but in that other and more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> powerful mind for which we are
+none of us quite responsible. Then I saw&mdash;yes, I was sure that I saw the
+dusky shadow of a robber flitting along from pine to pine, far up on the
+side of the cliff there, silent and dangerous as death, and ready to drop
+down on the first living thing that passed beneath him. Then I saw fiery
+eyes through the branches, and thought that the panther and the catamount
+that lurked in these tangled woods two hundred years ago, divided
+possession once more with the Indians and were prowling about for some late
+banquet. I do not think that it was fear that I felt, for I would not have
+gone away if I could, any more than I could have gone away if I would; but
+it appeared to be the very silent haunt of nature in her hour of rest,
+wherewith nothing but the wild and the savage had any business; and it
+seemed impossible to throw aside the idea that even the tread of a
+civilized foot must be a sacrilege that only life could atone. Then there
+was a sudden plunge from the bushes into the water, a few yards up the
+bank, and a ripple following some large dark object swimming away towards
+the other shore. This was more real, and the feeling of awe began to pass
+away, for I knew that the swimmer must be a water-rat or otter that had
+been paying a midnight visit like myself and was now going homeward by the
+cool and refreshing marine route. That was the first noise I had heard, but
+others followed, for an owl began to hoot over yonder in the bushes and a
+young eagle&mdash;I suppose it must have been a young eagle&mdash;indulged in a
+scream from the top of the Cliff, where I believe he has a habit of
+nesting. Then the supernatural and the imaginative rolled away after they
+had held me an hour or two, and I was simply alone at two o'clock or a
+little later, beside Echo Lake, only half a mile from the bed that had been
+all that time waiting for me. I took the warning of the night-owl and the
+eagle, who no doubt intended to order me off as an intruder, and strolled
+back to the house. That is all, and perhaps quite enough of such rambling
+nonsense as it is!"</p>
+
+<p>"Rambling nonsense?" Whatever the other members of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> the company may have
+thought, evidently Margaret Hayley did not so regard it as she leaned
+anxiously forward, the presence of others apparently forgotten, her eyes
+fascinated in a sort of strange wonder by something in the face of the
+speaker, while her mind seemed not less singularly under the control of the
+utterance itself.</p>
+
+<p>Five minutes afterwards the parody on a steamboat touched the little wharf
+again and the company disembarked. Five minutes after that secondary period
+they separated from the close communion into which they had been
+transiently thrown during the preceding half-hour, many of them never to
+meet again in the same familiarity of intercourse, and perhaps some of
+them, though as yet inmates of the same abode, never to see each other's
+faces again in life! Such are the meetings and the partings of summer
+travel and watering-place existence, to which the nameless rhymer no less
+truly than touchingly referred when he spoke of those friendships quickly
+made and as quickly broken:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"&mdash;&mdash;In hostels free to all commands<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Save penury's and pity's;&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"In common rooms, where all have right<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To tread with little heed or warning,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And where the guests of overnight<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Are gone at early morning;&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"By tables where we sit at meat&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Sit, with our food almost untasted<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Because we find some vacant seat<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From which a friend has hasted;&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"In parlors where at eve we sit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Among the music and the dancing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And miss some lip of genial wit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Some bright eye kindly glancing.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;the haunted chambers left,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That almost choke us as we ponder,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And leave <i>us</i> quite as much bereft<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As dearer ties and fonder."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Cloud and Storm at the Profile&mdash;Sights and Sensations of a
+Rainy-day Ride to the Crawford&mdash;Horace Townsend and Halstead
+Rowan once more together&mdash;Unexpected Arrivals&mdash;A Cavalcade
+of Miserables&mdash;An Ascent of Mount Washington, with
+Equestrianism and War-whoops Extraordinary.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Calms at sea are not more proverbially treacherous than pleasant mornings
+in the mountains; and long before that day closed which had opened so
+auspiciously, the heavy clouds came driving up through the Notch with the
+south-east wind. By nightfall a storm was inaugurated. Thenceforward, for
+two days, excursions to the Cannon, to Bald Mountain, to Mount Lafayette,
+or to any other of the points of scenery so plentiful in the Franconia
+Notch, and in which excursions all the visitors, however slightly
+acquainted, are more or less closely thrown into speaking intercourse with
+each other,&mdash;were things to be thought of but not attempted. The stages
+came in with smoking horses and moisture dripping alike from the hat of the
+driver and the boot of the coach; but few passengers arrived or departed.
+The bears walked sullenly their little round, or retired periodically to
+winter quarters in their narrow kennels. The valleys were filled with
+driving mist, varied by heavy down-pouring rain, and the mountains hid
+themselves sullenly from view, so that sometimes not even the brow of Eagle
+Cliff, hanging immediately over the house, could be distinguished through
+the dense clouds that swept down to the very roofs. Fires became prevalent,
+and those so fortunate as to possess rooms where the birchen wood could be
+set ablaze, remained closely sequestered there, dozing, or playing cards or
+backgammon, or once more turning over the leaves of books from which all
+the novelty had long before been extracted. Desultory groups<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> met at meals,
+even the eaters coming down sluggishly. Some of the men patronized the
+billiard-room or the bowling-alley, but they rarely found lady partners or
+spectators, as in sunnier days. Even the hops in the parlor at evening were
+thinly attended, the weather seeming to have affected alike the nerves and
+muscles provocative of dancing, and the strings of the harp, violin and
+piano. Those who happened to possess copies of "Bleak House," and who
+remembered the marvellous phenomena of rainy weather existing at a certain
+time in and about the domain of Sir Leicester Dedlock, read the description
+over again and thought that nothing could be more beautifully applicable to
+the experience of storm-stayed sight-seers at a caravanserai among the
+mountains.</p>
+
+<p>During those two days of storm and sluggishness, Horace Townsend, merely an
+excursion acquaintance of the Hayleys and Captain Hector Coles, and not
+such an intimate as would be likely to be invited to backgammon or chat in
+one of their private rooms,&mdash;never once met Margaret Hayley more nearly
+than within bowing distance when passing in or out of the dining-room or
+the parlor. One or both may have desired to continue the acquaintance
+without quite so much of distant familiarity; but if so, one or both knew
+the antagonistic influences surrounding them and did not think proper to
+raise an arm for buffeting the waves of separation.</p>
+
+<p>There were not less than a dozen persons remaining at the Profile, who had
+the ascent of Mount Washington yet to make at an early day, and who
+intended to make it in the good old traditional way of horseback from the
+Crawford instead of acknowledging modern utility and bowing to the
+destruction of all romance by going up in carriages from the Glen. Some of
+these, beginning to be pressed for time, saw the steady rain and mist with
+impatience and found very little comfort in the assurances of the
+hotel-keepers, guides and stage-drivers, that the clouds were not likely to
+break away under a week, at least.</p>
+
+<p>Monday brought this feeling to a culmination, and that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> morning, spite of
+all predictions, the impatient dozen ordered a stage and determined to
+drive over to the Crawford; bespeaking clear weather on the morrow, or on
+the next day at farthest, for their especial accommodation. Horace
+Townsend, whether wearied by circumstances which placed him "so near and
+yet so far" in his acquaintance with Margaret Hayley, or really touched
+with the prevailing madness for forcing Mount Washington to smile when that
+great mountain wished to be sullen,&mdash;Horace Townsend joined the malcontents
+and formed one of the closely-packed stage-load that on Monday morning
+rolled off from the Profile on their way to the Crawford.</p>
+
+<p>The voyagers were pursued by no small number of jokes and jeers from the
+piazza, as they drove away, on the folly of plunging out into a storm to
+accomplish an impossibility. But if any one of the number felt for a moment
+sore in mind and faint-hearted, they were soon consoled. Most of them
+(mixed male and female, though the former predominating) were true
+Nature-lovers who had recognized that however Fame and Fortune sometimes
+play cruel tricks upon their most ardent votaries, the kind Mother seldom
+failed to unveil her bosom at the coming of one of her true children. They
+had faith in the future, and that faith was at once repaid in the glory of
+the present.</p>
+
+<p>For those who have only made the twenty-five miles of stage-ride between
+the two places, in fair weather, can have no idea of the peculiar charms of
+that day of capricious rain and floating mist. Closely shut in the
+lumbering coach, and well enveloped in shawls and dread-noughts and
+blankets, but with the windows open to allow looking back on the Franconia
+range they were leaving,&mdash;they enjoyed at intervals, during all the earlier
+portions of the ride, such splendid glimpses of cloud-land as never fall to
+the lot of mere fair-weather travellers.</p>
+
+<p>At times the shroud of mist which had enveloped them would roll away, as
+they ascended the high land rising from Franconia towards Bethlehem; and
+then they would have the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> peaks of the Franconia range flecked and dotted
+with swales and waves and crests of transparent white that seemed
+alternately to be thousands of colossal sheep lying in the mountain
+pastures,&mdash;and again great masses of the purest and softest eider-down
+which had floated there and rested, from millions of birds filling the
+whole air above. Mount Lafayette at one moment, as some of the voyagers of
+that lucky morning will well remember, seemed to be capped and crowned with
+a wreath of untrodden snow, miles in extent and hundreds of feet in
+depth&mdash;such as no mountain ever wore upon its brow as a coronet, from the
+first morning of creation.</p>
+
+<p>Exclamations of pleasure filled the coach, and jest and appreciative remark
+blended in pleasant proximity. "I shall always remember the air of this
+morning," said one, "as an atmosphere of bridal veils," and more than he
+treasured up the comparison as one worth remembering. "See here, Cora!"
+said another, to the only child in the coach, who nestled half asleep on
+the shoulder of her mother, pointing her attention meanwhile to a little
+pyramidal hill separate from the mountain range and at that point relieved
+against it: "See here, Cora! There is a little baby mountain!" "So there
+is!" answered Cora, with a world of drollery in her young eyes, "I wonder
+how long before it will grow to be as big as the rest of them!" Whereupon
+Cora was voted to have the best of the argument, and manhood once more
+worshipped childhood.</p>
+
+<p>Away past Bethlehem and along the Ammonoosuc, an exaggeration, in its
+rocks, upon all the other mountain streams, with its few inches of water
+finding way among a perfect bed of boulders, and making the mere word
+"navigation" suggest so droll an image in that connection as to draw a loud
+laugh from the whole coach-load. Then past a couple of fishermen, heedless
+of the rain, rod in hand and creel at side, standing on the boulders in the
+middle of the river and practising the mysteries of the Waltonian art,
+report alleged with more "flies" assisting than those which they carried in
+their pocket-books! Then on, with the mist again closed down heavily,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> past
+the White Mountain House, that once, before the days of glory of the Glen,
+supplied the only so-called "carriage-road" to the top of Washington.</p>
+
+<p>A mile or two more, and there was a space clear from trees on the left. As
+the coach swept up to it the mists seemed to shrink low for a moment. A
+heavy, dark line loomed on the sky, with almost the true sweep of a wide
+Gothic arch, a little sharpened at the top. "How graceful!" was the
+exclamation of one. "How high!&mdash;look!&mdash;why that is higher than any of the
+others that we have seen!" exclaimed a second. "Mount Washington," calmly
+said a habitue who caught a glimpse through the curtain from the back
+corner of the coach; and every voice joined in the cry.</p>
+
+<p>The habitue was right&mdash;cloud and mist had rolled away for an instant, just
+at the opportune moment, and they had caught that magnificent first near
+view of the monarch, throned amid his clouds, glorious in the grace of form
+and the awe of majesty&mdash;seeming to bridge the very space between earth and
+heaven! Some of those favored gazers will dream of that first glance, years
+hence, when they have been straining the mental vision upward, in waking
+hours, to that unattainable and dim which rises above the mists of common
+life. Some of them will throne the great mountain in their hearts, and
+stretch out pleading arms to it in remembrance, in the dark days of shame
+and sorrow,&mdash;as if the treading of their feet upon its rocky pinnacle would
+be indeed an escape from the world&mdash;as if they might become sharers,
+indeed, in the majesty of its great solitude. Some of the travellers felt
+the solemnity of the hour and the scene, that day; and there was not even a
+sneer or a word of misappreciation for the adventurous genius who quoted,
+heedless of all that made it inappropriate:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Mount Blanc is the monarch of mountains:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">They crowned him long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With a diadem of snow!"<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>There was a brief ride remaining, then, till they rolled in over a level
+road, through thick overhanging woods, to the Crawford House in the White
+Mountain Notch. The mist had closed almost hopelessly down for the time,
+and they could only see occasional glimmers through it of the rough sides
+of old Mount Webster, dark-browed and massive as its namesake. It was only
+in the brighter air of morning that they were to take in the whole location
+and see in front, to the right, Mount Willard, wooded on the side exposed
+to view, but bald and rugged farther down the Notch, like the Cannon at
+Franconia; with Mount Jackson to the left in front, beyond it the still
+higher peaks of Mount Webster, and rising at the left in the immediate
+foreground the long wooded slopes of Mount Clinton, over which the foot of
+every pilgrim to Mount Washington from the Crawford must make its first
+ascent.</p>
+
+<p>The dull weather had driven almost all the visitors within doors, at the
+Crawford as at the Profile; but as the splashed coach rolled up there was
+at least one recognition&mdash;that of Halstead Rowan by Horace Townsend, the
+former, without any apparent reference to the humidity of the atmosphere,
+lying at lazy length on three chairs on the piazza and occupied with a
+cigar and a cheap novel. He had "shed" (that word seems to express the fact
+better than any other) his over-sized glove from his wounded hand, and
+seemed entirely to have recovered the use of that important member.</p>
+
+<p>New acquaintances become old and ripen into friendships, very soon when all
+other surroundings are totally strange; and the two men, each so odd in his
+way, greeted each other as if they had been friends for a decade instead of
+intimates of less than a week. There may have been some bond in common, in
+the guess which each could make of the thoughts and entanglements of the
+other, calculated to force that friendship forward, even if it would have
+progressed more slowly under other circumstances.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The first inquiry of Townsend, as they shook each other warmly by the hand,
+was:</p>
+
+<p>"Been up Mount Washington yet?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>this time</i>!" answered the other, significantly. "The fog has been
+nearly thick enough to swim in, ever since I have been here, and I do not
+know, if I had been as good a swimmer as you, Townsend, whether I should
+not have tried going up by water, as our friend Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame
+went up the Alps; but by land the thing has been impossible."</p>
+
+<p>"Many waiting to go up?&mdash;or do they nearly all go around to the Glen, this
+season?" was the next inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>"No, there are a good many sensible people left," was the reply, in the
+same tone of vivacious rattle. "Think of going up Mount Washington in a
+carriage! It is worse than making a mill-race out of Niagara, or
+approaching Jerusalem, as they will do one of these days, I suppose, amid
+the rumble and whistle of a railroad-train."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't undervalue your own employment!" said Townsend.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I do not," was the reply. "Railroad trains, as well as mills, are very
+good things in their places; but I suppose that a prejudice will always
+exist in favor of the fiery chariot instead of the balloon, as a means of
+making ascents into the celestial regions."</p>
+
+<p>Horace Townsend laughed. "But you have not yet told me how many are
+waiting, or when you are really going up."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, there must be nearly or quite twenty of them, moping around the house,
+running out to look at the sky every ten minutes, and asking the clerk and
+the guides questions that they are about as fit to answer as a
+prairie-chicken to solve a problem in geometry! As to when we are going
+up&mdash;do <i>you</i> know?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> am going up to-morrow, whether any one else goes up or not," said the
+lawyer. "And by the way, I have bespoken a clear day for that especial
+occasion."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you? Thank you! Then I suppose we can <i>all</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> go up!" replied the
+Illinoisan, as if the information had been the most serious in the world.
+"By the way&mdash;how are they all, over yonder!"</p>
+
+<p>There was something very like a blush on the face of the questioner, and
+there was something varying very little from that phenomenon on the brown
+cheek of the other as he answered:</p>
+
+<p>"I have not seen much of either," (what did he mean by "either," a word
+peculiarly applying, in common parlance, to <i>two</i>?) "but I believe that
+they are well."</p>
+
+<p>"Still at the Profile?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and likely to remain there, for any thing that I know to the
+contrary."</p>
+
+<p>"Any news of any kind? Any more accidents or startling events?"</p>
+
+<p>"None&mdash;yes, there is one startling event. The Brooks Cunninghames came away
+the same day that you left. Have you got the old woman here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here? heaven forefend! No!" was the response. Then he added: "Why, by
+Jupiter, Townsend, you must be a wizard or in some kind of collusion with
+Meriam! See!&mdash;I'll be hanged if there is not the top of a mountain! It <i>is</i>
+clearing away! Hurrah for Mount Washington!"</p>
+
+<p>He darted in at once from the piazza to the office, and Townsend, who had
+not yet even registered his name as an arrival, followed him. Most of the
+other passengers from the Profile were by that time registered and
+scattered away to their rooms for sartorial renovation.</p>
+
+<p>A separate book was kept at the office, as usual at such places, over the
+head of each page of which was printed: "Horses for Mount Washington," and
+in which, every day, those who wished to secure horses and guides for the
+succeeding or the first favorable day, registered their names, with the
+number of animals required and how many of them were to be ridden by
+ladies. A good many queer autographs might be observed in that book and
+some of its predecessors,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> for there was almost always some mischievous
+clerk behind the counter, amusing himself by telling immense stories to
+some of the other initiated, just as the un-initiated were coming up to
+register their names,&mdash;about the perils of the ride and how near he or some
+other person had come to falling over precipices of indefinite thousands of
+feet. This description of jocular practice very often shook the nerves of
+young travellers at the moment of booking, even when the frightened person
+was too far committed or too shame-faced to abandon his project; and there
+is no doubt that the original collection of chirography thus secured would
+prove only less interesting, on exhibition, than the original draft of the
+Declaration of Independence, or&mdash;&mdash;the Emancipation Proclamation!</p>
+
+<p>Several names had already been booked at hap-hazard on the day in question;
+and others of the storm-stayed, aware of the prospect of a "clearing-up,"
+were by that time flocking around the book to secure their places. To the
+collection already made were very soon added the signatures of Townsend and
+Rowan, who intended, as neither would have a lady in charge, to make a
+great part if not all the trip together, while the two friends of Rowan,
+who were also to be of the ascending party, would "pair off" in the same
+manner.</p>
+
+<p>This done, and supper-time approaching, Rowan, who had been lounging about
+in a sort of wet-weather box-coat undress which would have driven an
+ultra-fashionable to desperation, ran off to his room to make himself
+somewhat more presentable; while Horace Townsend, after patronizing the
+barber-shop for five minutes and providing himself with that inevitable
+cigar, stepped out once more upon the piazza to glance at the weather and
+satisfy himself how kind Mother Nature really intended to be on the morrow.
+He had but just emerged from the door when a close light carriage with two
+pairs of foaming horses&mdash;horses and carriage well covered with
+mud,&mdash;whirled around the corner of the Crawford and drew up at the door.
+The driver sprung from his seat and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> the carriage door was opened. Out of
+it stepped first Frank Vanderlyn, then Mrs. Vanderlyn and her daughter,
+who, as it afterwards appeared, had left the Profile after dinner and
+driven through post in that manner, under the impression that the next
+morning might after all be a fine one, and anxious (two of the three, at
+least) to join any party which would be likely to make the ascent.</p>
+
+<p>"Whew!" said the lawyer to himself, between two puffs of his cigar, as he
+recognized the new-comers without their seeming to be aware of his
+presence. "Here is more of the Rowan romance and there may be more ten-pins
+necessary. I wonder whether that haughty woman and her son have any idea of
+the presence here of their friend from Chicago, and whether they have
+driven at that slapping pace through the mud, especially to be in his way!
+I wonder, too, whether Rowan's room is on the front, so that he has seen
+their arrival. I have half a notion to go up and apprize him of it; and
+then I have a whole notion to let him find it out for himself, and finish
+my cigar before supper comes in to spoil it."</p>
+
+<p>Whatever might have been the amount of knowledge of the movements of Rowan
+possessed by the Vanderlyns, and whether in making a new entry on the books
+the old names were or were not always looked over,&mdash;certain it is that half
+an hour afterwards the lawyer found two more names booked for the
+ascent&mdash;those of "Mr. Francis Vanderlyn" and "Miss Clara Vanderlyn," the
+mother evidently not intending to expose herself to a fatigue which had
+lost its novelty, but to await their going and return at the Crawford.</p>
+
+<p>It was very evident, to Townsend, eventually, that Rowan did not know any
+thing of the new arrival until he came down to supper. The Vanderlyns had
+taken their places at the table, very nearly opposite the lawyer, and
+returned with a nod of pleasant recognition the bow which he felt compelled
+to give them under the circumstances. Halstead Rowan, as he came in, took a
+seat on the same side of the table with the new-comers, and it was only as
+he gave the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> customary glance down after he had seated himself, that he
+seemed to recognize the sudden addition to the social circle. When he did
+recognize it, the lawyer (that man seems to be eternally watching the
+other, does he not?) caught one instant's blank surprise on his face, and
+he even put up his hand to rub his eyes, as if he fancied himself dreaming;
+but the surprise seemed to fade in a moment, and he pursued his supper with
+that fine appetite which is usually vouchsafed to such physical men. He
+left the table before the Vanderlyns had finished, and apparently without
+their having observed him. Townsend rose immediately and followed him, with
+a smile upon his face of which he was himself unconscious. He saw the
+Illinoisan go into the office and do precisely what he [the lawyer] would
+have laid a heavy stake that he would do&mdash;step to the counter and look over
+the list of "Horses for Mount Washington." Then a queer expression, nearer
+to malicious pleasure than any thing the other had before seen upon his
+face, flitted over it as he recognized the names. It might have been merely
+satisfaction&mdash;it might have been defiance blended with it in equal
+proportions; but at least it seemed to be capable of translation into words
+like these, which the very lips moved as if they would utter:</p>
+
+<p>"So, Baltimore people, you are running yourselves into my way again, after
+I had gone off and left you alone, like a good fellow! You had better be
+poorer and less proud, or I richer; or you had better keep the distance
+which I put between us!"</p>
+
+<p>A few moments after he approached Townsend with a laugh of deprecation and
+invited him to another game of ten-pins, which seemed to be quite as
+necessary to him when in a good humor as when in a rage. The invitation was
+accepted, and the important contest began once more. It would have been a
+very unequal one, for Rowan had fully recovered the use of his right hand,
+but that the alleys themselves had something to say in the matter. Worse
+apologies for alleys than those of the Crawford no man ever saw; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> such
+a thing as a "ten-strike" had never been recorded on the black-boards, as
+made on those long lines of uneven and floor-laid planks. Both the
+combatants had quite enough to do in getting down a "frame" with three
+balls; and for some time not a word outside of the game escaped either.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, and when he had rolled two of the three balls at the defiant
+pins, Rowan stopped short with one of the lignum-vit&aelig; globes, of about the
+size of a human head, in his hand&mdash;twirling it the while as if it had been
+a paper balloon,&mdash;and said, in a short, curt tone:</p>
+
+<p>"They have come!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," answered Townsend, not pretending for a moment to be doubtful about
+the meaning of the personal pronoun. "Yes, I saw them at supper."</p>
+
+<p>"Going up with us to-morrow, I believe!" added the Illinoisan.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, indeed, are they?" was the jesuitical inquiry of the lawyer.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and they will have good company, won't they!" was the response.</p>
+
+<p>Then he bowled away at the ten-pins, more energetically than ever, and with
+something in his manner and the nervous jerk of his arm, that once more
+recalled Townsend's idea of his feeling, while in the act, like shooting
+some one down a mountain precipice like a pebble-stone, or sweeping away a
+fate like a cobweb with one of those polished globes of iron wood.</p>
+
+<p>Only a couple of games, and then they went in to bed with a mutual reminder
+that the motto in the morning would be "to horse and away!" and that above
+all things they must be watchful against that phase of indolence vulgarly
+known as "oversleeping." The house was nearly silent, all the prospective
+riders having retired for the night, and soon slumber fell upon that hive
+of human bees wandering in search of the honey of unlaboring pleasure,
+gathered under the roof of Gibb and Hartshorne at the Crawford.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Fell, but not too deeply, for that which is to be brief has a right to be
+intense; and the hours of repose were relentlessly numbered. Neither
+Townsend nor Rowan need have been anxious about waking in the morning; for
+such a blast and roar of horrible sound as swept through the corridor at
+about seven, <span class="smcap">a. m.</span>, from the big Chinese gong in the hands of an
+enthusiastic negro who probably felt that he had no other opportunity of
+making his requisite "noise in the world," would have been sufficient to
+awaken any thing short of the dead! For once, every one obeyed the summons
+while anathematizing the mode, and the breakfast-table was soon surrounded.</p>
+
+<p>Here, those who labored under some kind of indefinite impression that the
+summit of Mount Washington was somewhere beyond the Desert of Arabia&mdash;that
+nothing eatable or drinkable could ever be discovered on its top&mdash;and that
+the more they ate the better able they would be to endure the fatigue of
+the ascent,&mdash;made vigorous attacks on the steaks, eggs and chickens, and
+drank coffee, milk and cold water without limit. Those better advised (and
+the fact is here set down as a bit of practical experience worth
+heeding),&mdash;those who knew the painful effect of attempting to climb a
+mountain when gorged to repletion (the traveller, not the mountain&mdash;the
+mountain is always full of "gorges")&mdash;those, we say, confined themselves to
+an egg or two and a small slice of rare steak, and drank lightly.</p>
+
+<p>When the party one by one dropped out from breakfast, the scene in front of
+the house was at once picturesque and singular&mdash;worth remembering by those
+who shared in it or who have shared in one similar,&mdash;and worth the feeble
+attempt at verbal daguerreotype which may do something to preserve it
+against that day when the Crawford decays and Mount Washington is either
+levelled off or ascended by means of a locomotive or a dumb-waiter.</p>
+
+<p>More than twenty names&mdash;somewhat more than half of them belonging to
+ladies&mdash;were on the book for the ascent; and a corresponding number of
+horses were scattered over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> the broad open space in front of the door. All
+were saddled and bridled; but among them moved half-a-dozen guides in rough
+coats, thick boots and slouched hats, inspecting and tightening the girths,
+looking to the cruppers and bridles, and paying especial attention to the
+animals provided for the female portion of the cavalcade, for whose safety
+they ever hold themselves and are ever held by the hotel-proprietors,
+peculiarly responsible.</p>
+
+<p>By way of back-ground to this singular scene, under a clump of trees to the
+right walked two full-grown black bears (no mountain resort can be
+thoroughly complete without its bears!)&mdash;chained and surly, ever keeping
+their weary round and grunting out their disapprobation at being confined
+to such narrow quarters without an occasional naughty youngster for lunch.</p>
+
+<p>But what a spectacle was presented when the mount was ready and the riders
+had all emerged from the door of the Crawford! Were these the belles and
+beaux of previous days, captivating and being captivated by perfection of
+raiment as well as charm of face and grace of figure? If so, never had such
+a metamorphosis taken place since long before Ovid. Every man wore some
+description of slouched hat, brought in his baggage or hired in the hotel
+wardrobe,&mdash;bad, very bad, atrocious, or still worse, and each tied down
+over the ears with a thick string or a handkerchief. Coarse and old
+trowsers were turned up over heavy boots; and the roughest and coarsest of
+box-coats that could be provided were surmounted in the majority of
+instances by striped Guernsey shirts still rougher. All the dilapidated
+gloves and coarse tippets that could be mustered, with a few shawls and
+blankets, completed the equipment of a set of men who certainty looked too
+badly even for brigands and seemed the enforced victims of some hideous
+masquerade.</p>
+
+<p>But if the men looked badly, what shall be said of that which should have
+been the fairer portion of the cavalcade? Salvator Rosa never dreamed of
+such objects, and Hogarth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> would have gone stark mad in the attempt to
+depict them. Ringlets were buried under mob-caps and old woollen-hoods, and
+smothered in bad straw hats and superannuated felt jockeys, tied down in
+the same ungraceful manner as those of the men. Hoops had suddenly ceased
+to be fashionable, even in advance of the sudden Quaker collapse in the
+cities; and every shape, bulky or lank, showed in its own undisguised
+proportions&mdash;here a form of beauty, there a draped lamp-post, and yonder a
+bedizened bolster. In short, the very worst riding-dresses possible to
+achieve seemed to have been carefully gathered from all the old-clothes
+shops in the universe; and if the men were the ugliest brigands of the dark
+souled Italian painter, the women were the drollest witches that ever
+capered through the brain of the master-dramatist.</p>
+
+<p>And yet there were sparkling eyes showing occasionally from under those
+hideous bonnets, that perhaps looked the brighter for the contrast; and it
+is not sure that one or two of the sweet auburn curls of Clara Vanderlyn,
+which had strayed away from their confinement and lay like red gold on the
+neck of her shabby black riding-dress, could ever have shown to more
+bewitching advantage.</p>
+
+<p>Every one laughed at the appearance of the other, as the mount was taking
+place, and as Hartshorne, of the Crawford, who seemed to have measured the
+capabilities of every horse and calculated the weight and skill of every
+rider, called off the names from the roll-book, and gave place to each in
+turn.</p>
+
+<p>Of the material of the mount, it is only necessary to specify three or four
+of the horses, which have to do with the subsequent details of that
+eventful excursion. Miss Vanderlyn had a neat little black pony, apparently
+very careful in step, and an "old-stager" at ascending the mountains. Her
+brother Frank rode a tall bay, of high spirit and better action than any
+other horse on the ground. Rowan had asked Hartshorne (some of the others
+heard him, with a sensation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> of genuine horror) to give him the
+worst-tempered horse in the stable; and as he was known to be an old
+habitue of the mountains, he had been accommodated according to request. So
+far as could be discovered by his action, his horse, a bay of fifteen and a
+half or sixteen hands, with blood, foot and bottom, would kick, bite,
+strike, run away, shy to one side, and do every thing else wicked and
+unsafe that should taboo a horse from being ridden at all,&mdash;except stumble,
+from which latter fault he was remarkably clear. Townsend was accommodated
+with a gray mare of moderate size and a dash of Arab blood, that had been
+unused for nearly a month from having nearly broken the neck of one of the
+proprietors, on his personal allegation that he was at least a fair rider,
+and that the breaking of his own neck would be the least damage that could
+be inflicted on any member of the party.</p>
+
+<p>Thick morning mists still hid the tops of Mount Webster and Mount Willard,
+visible from the house, and hung amid the heavy woods of Mount Clinton,
+although the storm had really passed away with the night,&mdash;as at nine
+o'clock, all mounted, the guides took their places, one at the head of the
+cavalcade and the others scattered at intervals through it, and the whole
+line moved off up the mountain. It should be mentioned here, however, that
+Townsend (the observer again) saw during the mount the only recognition
+which took place between the two principal persons of his outside
+drama&mdash;Halstead Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn. Frank was mounting his horse,
+after having assisted his sister to her saddle, when Rowan brushed by her
+on his vicious bay, very near her and to the left. He saw their eyes meet,
+and saw Rowan bend so low that his head almost touched the neck of his
+horse. Clara Vanderlyn replied by a gesture quite as mute and quite as
+unlikely to be observed by any one not especially watchful. She nodded her
+head quickly but decidedly, and threw the roughly-gloved fingers of her
+left hand to her lips. That was all, and of course unobserved by Frank
+Vanderlyn, who may or may not have been aware<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> that the man whom he had
+insulted was a member of the ascending party; but it was quite enough,
+beyond a doubt, to set the blood boiling in the veins of the Illinoisan
+with all the fury of the water surging up in flame and smoke in the Iceland
+Geysers.</p>
+
+<p>Rowan and Townsend had places assigned them near the middle of the line,
+but as the cavalcade began to move, the human demon of unrest was missing
+from his place. He was to be seen at the end of the piazza at that moment,
+talking to Hartshorne, and no doubt making a few additional inquiries as to
+the character of the amiable animal he bestrode. The lawyer called out to
+him to "Come on!" but he answered with a wave of the hand and a shout:</p>
+
+<p>"Go ahead! don't wait for me! I will be with you directly!"</p>
+
+<p>Through the thick woods of Mount Clinton they swept up, over a bridle-path
+so rough as to have made the most laborious if not the most dangerous
+walking&mdash;over great boulders of stone lying in the very path, and
+apparently impossible to get over or around&mdash;over patches of corduroy road
+utterly defying description, except to the men who isolated Fort Donelson
+and planted the Swamp Angels in the marshes of Charleston&mdash;over and through
+gutters and gulches of slippery stone and more slippery mud&mdash;but ever
+ascending at a painful acclivity. The horses breathed heavily; and their
+riders, in the thick and foggy air, did little better. They caught
+occasional glimpses through the trees, down the sudden slopes at the left,
+of the thick mist rolling below, but could see nothing else to remind them
+of the height they were attaining; and as the dense fog swept in their
+faces, and the trees dripped moisture on them when they swept beneath their
+branches, and the path grew more and more desolate and difficult, they grew
+silent, the whole cavalcade, apparently by common consent. There are
+aspects in which Nature looks and feels too solemn for the light word and
+the flippant jest; and the man who cannot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> be awed beyond his ordinary mood
+when standing under the edge of the sheet of Niagara, or beside the sea
+when it is lashed into resistless fury, or in gale and mist on the bleak,
+bare, desolate mountains of the North, should never insult the grand and
+the terrible by going into their presence!</p>
+
+<p>And yet all persons, who have true reverence in their hearts, are not
+always awed beyond themselves, even in the most impressive of situations:
+as witness, to some degree, the incidents following.</p>
+
+<p>They had surmounted the first acclivity, perhaps a mile from the Crawford,
+and were commencing a slight descent which made every rider look to the
+horse's feet and ride with a slight tremor,&mdash;when the stillness was
+suddenly broken in a manner which almost curdled the blood of the timid and
+needed a second reassurance for even the boldest.</p>
+
+<p>"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!" came from the path below, with that
+hideous power and distinctness of lungs that have chilled so many hearts
+and whitened so many faces since the white man first intruded on the
+hunting-grounds of the American Indian. A shrill, dissonant, horrible yell,
+combining the blind ferocity of the beast with the deadlier rage of man,
+such as made the poor mother clasp her babe closer to the breast when it
+rang around the block-houses of Massachusetts and New York in the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries&mdash;such as less than three years ago
+proved that it was undying in the savage throat, by pealing over the
+mangled bodies and burned dwellings of the Minnesota massacres.</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens!&mdash;what is that?" cried half a dozen of the ladies in a
+breath.</p>
+
+<p>"An Indian war-whoop, certainly!" said one of the gentlemen, his face white
+as wax at the sudden shock.</p>
+
+<p>"It is war time, and they tell me that the rebels yell terribly!" said one
+of the ladies. "Can it be&mdash;" but then the absurdity of the idea struck her
+and she paused.</p>
+
+<p>"Albert Pike was a New England man: perhaps he is here<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> with his Arkansas
+savages!" said another, whether in jest or earnest no one could well
+discover.</p>
+
+<p>It was surprising how in that one instant the cavalcade had shortened its
+length&mdash;the foremost stopping and the rearmost closing up. Man <i>is</i> a
+gregarious animal, especially when a little surprised or frightened!</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Horace Townsend had been as badly startled as any of the others, at
+the first instant; but he possessed some data which the others lacked for
+discovering the source of the warlike yell.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not be alarmed, ladies!" he said, after an instant. "I think there is
+only one Indian uttering that horrible sound, and you may depend upon it
+that he is white and no rebel. Yes&mdash;see!&mdash;here he comes!"</p>
+
+<p>They had been, as already indicated, descending a quarter of a mile of most
+difficult and dangerous path, in which every rider experienced more or less
+of tremor, and over which the horses were picking their careful way as if
+they realized that human necks were in peril. At the instant when the
+attention of the company was thus directed backwards, Halstead Rowan had
+reached the top of the rise, behind, and was just giving vent to a second
+and supplemental yell which rang through the woods as if a dozen throats
+had taken part in it, and which must have been heard half way down the
+Notch.</p>
+
+<p>"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!"</p>
+
+<p>The rider was commencing the descent, too, but not precisely like the rest,
+picking his way, on a careful half-trot, half-walk; on the contrary his
+horse had his ears laid back and was going over the broken stones at such a
+gallop as he might have held on an ordinary highway! The reins seemed to be
+lying loose on his neck, and&mdash;could those horrified people believe their
+eyes?&mdash;so surely as they were threading the tangled woods of Mount Clinton,
+with thankful hearts for every rood passed over without broken necks, so
+surely Halstead Rowan, a novel description of Mazeppa unknown even to Frank
+Drew or Adah Isaacs, sat his horse in what might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> be called "reverse
+order," his back towards them and his face to the animal's tail!</p>
+
+<p>"Good heavens!" "The man is mad!" "Oh, do stop the horse!" "It is running
+away with him!" "He will be killed!"&mdash;such were the exclamations that broke
+from the party as Rowan's equestrianism was recognized&mdash;most of them from
+the female portion of the cavalcade. What would it not have been worth to
+see sweet Clara Vanderlyn's face at the moment when she first realized who
+was the reckless rider, and to know whether she cared for his welfare at
+all and whether anxiety or confidence predominated in her thought!</p>
+
+<p>But the rider did not pause, or seem very much in peril. His horse kept his
+feet quite as well as any of the others; and Townsend remembering the
+Comanches and the Arapahoes, was forced to believe that the wild equestrian
+must have the alleged Indian power of communicating his own will to his
+horse, and that he could ride almost anywhere and in any manner, in safety.</p>
+
+<p>Rowan drew the reins (which he <i>had</i> in his hands, after all) as he came up
+with the cavalcade, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"I hope I did not startle any of you ladies with my Indian whoop. Upon my
+honor I did not mean to do so, if I did; for I hate practical jokes that
+cause pain, quite as much as any of the other fellows, the&mdash;gentlemen. But
+the woods tempted me, and I have not enjoyed such an opportunity for the
+use of the lungs, this many a day."</p>
+
+<p>"I believe some of us were a little frightened for a moment, but no harm
+done," said Horace Townsend. "But let me ask you&mdash;is not your riding just a
+little bit careless?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, just the very least bit in the world, perhaps, for <i>some</i>
+people!" answered the wild fellow; and Townsend fancied that he caught him
+trying, at the moment, to catch a glimpse, unseen by Frank Vanderlyn, under
+the hood of Clara, who was not very far from him. If he did make the
+attempt, he failed, for the young girl dared not or would not expose her
+face. "But come, Townsend," Rowan added,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> "will you not push on with me a
+little further ahead and let these slow coaches come up at their leisure?"</p>
+
+<p>"At <i>your</i> rate of progress? No," laughed Townsend. "I am not a very bad
+rider, I believe, but I have never practised in a circus or on a prairie.
+Go ahead, if you are in a hurry; that is, provided you know which end is
+going foremost!"</p>
+
+<p>"Found another place where you will not follow me, eh, old boy!" rattled
+the Illinoisan, with a reference which the other easily understood. "Well,
+I will see you by-and-bye, then. Go along, Bay Beelzebub!" and the next
+moment, darting by the centre line and taking precedence even of the
+leading guide, in a path that was literally nothing but a three-cornered
+trough, he was to be seen ascending the next rise, his horse trotting along
+riderless, and himself springing from crag to crag beside the path, his
+hand upon the animal's back and the reins lying loose on its neck. He had
+alighted, of course, without checking the speed of the horse in any degree.</p>
+
+<p>But a few minutes later, and when the cavalcade had reached the top of
+Mount Clinton and was coming out from the gloom of the heavy woods into the
+partial sunshine,&mdash;they saw the odd equestrian riding over a portion of
+road that was only moderately bad, standing erect on his horse's back,
+supported by the reins and his own powers of balancing,&mdash;and heard his
+deep, cheery voice ringing out in a song that seemed as complete a medley
+as his own character. It may be permissible to put upon record one of the
+stanzas, which some of those nearest him caught and remembered:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The heart bowed down by weight of wo&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When comin' thro' the rye?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If I had a donkey wot wouldn't go&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Good-bye, my love, good-bye!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I see them on their winding way:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Old clothes, old clothes to sell!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So let's be happy while we may&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Lost Isabel!"<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>Still later, the riders were all thrown into momentary horror by coming
+upon him, as they rounded the head of a gorge near the top of Mount
+Prospect,&mdash;his horse on a walk, and himself hanging over one side,
+apparently by the heels. The impression prevailed that he must have been
+knocked senseless by a limb, in some of his pranks, and got his feet
+fatally entangled in the stirrups,&mdash;the result of which impression was that
+a sudden scream, in a woman's voice, burst out from some portion of the
+line, but so instantaneously suppressed that no one could trace it. It
+turned out that in this last operation, so far from being killed, he was
+only practising the Indian mode of hanging beside his horse, supported by
+one hand at the neck and one foot over the saddle, after the manner of the
+wild tribes of the Plains when throwing the horse as a shield between
+themselves and the shot of a pursuer!</p>
+
+<p>After a time, however, the reckless fellow seemed to have grown tired of
+his humor; for, as the long line crossed over the peak of Prospect to
+Monroe, and the north wind and the sun had so driven away the clouds that
+the riders began to realize the glorious prospect opening upon them on
+every hand,&mdash;he took his place in the line, next to his deserted comrade
+Townsend, sat his horse like a Christian, and joined in the bursts of
+admiration vented on all sides, with an enthusiasm which showed that the
+scenery had never palled upon him by familiarity.</p>
+
+<p>And what views indeed were those that burst upon them as they crossed from
+Franklin to Monroe, and that sea of which the stiffened waves were
+mountains stretched out for an hundred miles in every direction! Some there
+were, in that line, who had stood on the prouder and more storied peaks of
+Europe, and yet remembered nothing to diminish the glory of that hour. How
+the deep gorges slept full of warm sunlight, and how the dark shadows
+flitted over them, and flickered, and thinned, and faded, as one by one the
+light clouds were driven southward by the wind! With what a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> shudder,
+passing over the narrow ridge or back-bone connecting Monroe and Franklin,
+they looked down into "Oakes' Gulf" on the right and the "Gulf of Mexico"
+on the left, only separated by a yard of bushy rock from a descent of three
+thousand feet on one side, and by less than three yards of slippery stone
+from more than two thousand feet on the other!</p>
+
+<p>The path is a sort of narrow trough, rough enough, but quite as safe, and
+to those who keep it there is not the least possible danger. Indeed the
+rider, half hidden in the trough, scarcely knows the fearful narrowness of
+the bridge over which he is passing; and thousands cross this pass and
+recross it, and bring away no idea of the sensation that may be gained by a
+little imprudent hanging over the verge on either side! None of the riders
+in that cavalcade went back to their beds at the Crawford without a much
+more intimate knowledge of the capabilities of that situation; but of this
+in due time.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible for any one who has never made a similar ascent, or who
+has only ascended with a much smaller number, to conceive the appearance
+made by that score of equestrians at various points when crossing the open
+but uneven peaks in the last approach to Washington. Varied in stature, sex
+and costume, and all sufficiently outre to astonish if not to
+horrify,&mdash;what views the leading riders of the line could catch at times,
+looking back at the motley line! Some half buried in the trough of the path
+or midway in a gulch, so that only the head would be visible; others
+perched on the very top of a huge boulder, ascending or descending; some
+clinging close to mane or neck as the horse scrambled up an ascent of forty
+degrees; others lying well back on the saddle when descending a declivity
+of the same suddenness. What dreams of the Alps and the Apennines there are
+in such ascents&mdash;dreams of the toilers over St. Gothard and the muleteers
+of the Pyrenees&mdash;dreams of memory pleasant to those who have such past
+experiences to look back upon, and substitutes no less pleasant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> to many
+who long for glances at other lands but must die with only that far-off
+glimpse of the fulness of travel which Moses caught from the hills of the
+Moabites over that inheritance of his race upon which he was never to
+enter.</p>
+
+<p>It yet wanted half an hour to noon, and Mount Washington towered full
+before them as they came out on the top of Franklin, by the little Lake of
+the Clouds which lay so saucily smiling to the sun and coquetting with the
+mists. The peak, a huge mass of broken and naked stone, half a mile up on
+every side and so sheer in pitch that foot-hold seemed hopeless, would have
+looked totally discouraging but for the white line of path which, winding
+around it on the north-west, showed that it must before have been achieved.</p>
+
+<p>Up&mdash;up&mdash;over broken and slipping stones of every size and description, from
+the dimensions of a brick-bat to those of a dining-table&mdash;stones gray and
+mossed, without one spoonful of earth to prove that the riders had not
+surmounted the whole habitable globe and lost themselves in some unnatural
+wilderness of rock! And feeling joined with sight to enhance the desolate
+fancy, for though so nearly high noon the wind blew at that dizzy height
+with the violence of a gale, and the Guernsey wrappers and the clumsy
+gloves had long before proved that the rough and homely may be more useful
+than the beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three hundred yards from the Tip-Top House, the rough stone walls of
+which were glooming above&mdash;the party were dismounted, the horses picketed
+by the guides, and over the broken stones and yawning fissures the
+dismounted riders struggled up, strong arms aiding weaker limbs, and much
+care necessary to prevent heedless steps that might have caused injuries
+slow of recovery. Up&mdash;up, over the little but difficult remaining
+distance&mdash;till all stood by the High Altar on the top of Mount Washington.</p>
+
+<p>Above the clouds, swales of which they saw sweeping by, half way down the
+mountain&mdash;above the earth, its cares and its sorrows, it seemed to them for
+the moment that they stood;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> and only those who have made such a pilgrimage
+can realize the glory of that hour. The mountains of Vermont
+North-westward, those of Canada North-eastward, those of Massachusetts to
+the South and the Franconia range full to the West; lakes lying like
+splashes of molten silver at their feet and rivers fluttering like blue
+silken ribbons far away; towns nestled in the gorges and hamlets glimmering
+up from the depths of the ravines; long miles of valleys filled with
+sunlight, as if the very god of day had stooped down and left them full of
+the warmth of his loving kiss; peak upon peak rising behind and beyond each
+other, and each tinted with some new and richer hue, from gold to purple
+and from sunny green to dark and sombre brown; beyond all, and on the
+extreme verge of the sight-line to the East, one long low glint of light
+that told of the far Atlantic breaking in shimmering waves on the rocky
+coast of Maine; the world so far beneath as to be a myth and an unreality,
+distance annihilated, and the clear, pure air drank in by the grateful
+lungs appearing to be a foretaste of that some day to be breathed on the
+summit of the Eternal Hills,&mdash;these were the sights and these the
+sensations amid which the dark cheek of Horace Townsend seemed touched with
+a light that did not beam upon it in the valleys below, with his eyes grown
+humid and utterance choked by intense feeling; while all the heart of
+glorious womanhood in Clara Vanderlyn fluttered up in the truest worship of
+that God who had formed the earth so beautiful; and even Halstead Rowan
+once more forgot pride, poverty, insult, and the physical exuberance which
+made either endurable, to fold his strong arms in silence, lift the innate
+reverence of his thoughts to the Eternal and the Inevitable, and vow to
+submit with childlike faith to all of triumph or humiliation that might be
+ordained in the future.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Horace Townsend with a Lady in Charge&mdash;An adventure over the
+"Gulf of Mexico"&mdash;Clara Vanderlyn in deadly peril&mdash;A Moment
+of Horror&mdash;Halstead Rowan and a display of the Comanche
+riding&mdash;Townsend's eclipse&mdash;The return to the
+Crawford&mdash;Margaret Hayley again, and a Conversation
+overheard.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>It was perhaps two o'clock before the meetings and partings were over
+between the large party whom we have seen ascending from the Crawford, and
+the yet greater number who had come up from the Glen House by the
+belittling novelty of the mountain, the "carriage road,"&mdash;before the dinner
+at the Tip-Top House was discussed, hearty and plentiful enough, if not
+remarkably varied,&mdash;before the guides of the cavalcade had done "chaffing"
+the carriage drivers from the Glen, whom they seemed to regard very much as
+"old salts" do "fresh-water sailors,"&mdash;before every member of the party had
+viewed the magnificent scenery from every conceivable point, drank their
+fill of a beauty that might not be duplicated for years or excelled in a
+lifetime, and filled pockets and reticules equally full of all the maps and
+books that could be bought and all the geological specimens that could be
+picked up, as memorials of the visit. By that hour the warning of the
+guides was heard, reminding all that there was no more time remaining than
+would suffice to carry themselves and their tired horses back to the
+Crawford by nightfall. At once, then, the descent began&mdash;supposed, in
+advance, to be so uneventful and merely a pleasant diminished repetition of
+the experiences of the ascent.</p>
+
+<p>As they climbed down the broken rocks of the peak to their
+patiently-waiting horses (they would probably have waited patiently until
+they dropped with hunger, if by that means the rider and his saddle could
+have been avoided; for your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> mountain horse does <i>not</i> find unalloyed
+pleasure in his occupation!)&mdash;when near the "corral," as it may be called,
+Frank Vanderlyn left his sister for a moment and stepped over to Horace
+Townsend, who was descending alone, Halstead Rowan (as usual) at some
+distance ahead and already preparing to mount and away.</p>
+
+<p>"Would you have any objections, sir," the young man asked, "as I believe
+that you have no lady in charge, to ride in company with my sister on the
+way down?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly not!" replied Townsend, though a little surprised at the
+salutation and request from one of the haughty Vanderlyns to whom he had
+not even been introduced. "I shall be proud of the charge, if your sister
+and yourself feel like placing so much confidence in an entire stranger."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, <i>we</i> know a gentleman when we see him!" replied the young man, not a
+little arrogantly, as it appeared to the lawyer, and with a sinister glance
+at the Illinoisan which indicated that it would have been some time before
+<i>he</i> was entrusted with the same responsibility.</p>
+
+<p>"I am flattered!" said Townsend, with the bow which the speech demanded and
+yet did not deserve. "Do you remain on the top yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," answered the young man. "But the fact is that my horse kicks. He
+kicked my sister's pony twice in coming up; and I am afraid of some trouble
+in going down, if she rides behind me. It will be better for me to drop
+into the rear of all, where the ill-tempered devil cannot do injury to any
+one."</p>
+
+<p>A few words of quasi-introduction and explanation between Vanderlyn, Clara
+and the lawyer followed; and Horace Townsend, who had come up the mountain
+without any lady and only in the casual companionship of a man who
+continually rode away and left him alone, found himself ready to go down it
+with the fairest member of the company in charge! Had nothing else
+intervened since the ride up from Littleton to the Profile and that long,
+steady glance of admiration which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> had then been bestowed upon the sweet
+face and auburn hair,&mdash;what a dangerous proximity this might have proved!
+But the human heart, expansive as it may be, has not quite the capacity of
+a stage-coach or a passenger-car; and to prevent falling in desperate love
+with one fascinating woman thrown in one's way, there is perhaps no guard
+so potent as being in real or fancied desperate love with another!</p>
+
+<p>Halstead Rowan and the lady whom Townsend had reason to believe the object
+of his hope and his despair, had not been flung together and apart from
+others, for one moment during the day&mdash;Mr. Frank Vanderlyn had taken
+especially good care in that respect; though the lawyer had little cause to
+doubt that if both could have had their choice of companionship, they would
+have stood side by side and without others too near, by the High Altar
+which crowned the summit of the mountain, and spoken words difficult to
+unsay again during the lifetime of either. But if he had not been alone
+with Clara Vanderlyn, there is equally little doubt that he had looked at
+her much oftener than at the most admired point of scenery on the route.
+And as Frank Vanderlyn strolled away to his horse, and Townsend, with the
+lady obviously under his charge, was preparing to mount, he saw Rowan, with
+one foot in the stirrup and the other on the ground, looking over at him
+and his companion, with the most comical expression of wonder on his face
+that could well have been compressed into the same extent of physiognomy.
+The heart of the new knight-errant, which must have been a soft one or he
+would never have labored under that weakness, smote him at the thought of
+his apparent desertion; and with a word of apology he stepped away from the
+lady and approached the dismounted amateur Comanche.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean to say that you are going to&mdash;&mdash;" said the latter, and he
+nodded his head comically and yet a little pitifully towards Clara
+Vanderlyn.</p>
+
+<p>"Ride down with Miss Vanderlyn? Yes!" answered the lawyer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And who the deuce asked you to do it, I should like to know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Her brother."</p>
+
+<p>"Phew-w-w!" A prolonged whistle, very characteristic and significant.</p>
+
+<p>Townsend, in a word, explained the affair.</p>
+
+<p>"All right!" said the Illinoisan. "But, look here, old fellow! You haven't
+arranged this affair yourself, eh? No meetings on a single track, you
+know!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a bit of it!" laughed Townsend at the professional illustration.
+"Confidence for confidence! Have you not seen more closely than <i>that</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I thought I had!" answered Rowan. "Well, all right! Go ahead! But by
+Jupiter, if you do not take the best care of that girl, and she gets into
+any kind of a scrape by riding with a man who <i>can't</i> ride, there will be
+somebody challenged to something else than ten-pins!"</p>
+
+<p>Townsend laughed and turned away. The time had been, he thought, when
+incapacity to ride would scarcely have been set down as among his
+short-comings. But every thing, even equestrianism, was to be reckoned by
+comparison!</p>
+
+<p>A moment after, all the party were in the saddle; and then commenced a
+descent still more laborious than the ascent, at least to the tired horses
+that groaned almost humanly as they slid down the sudden declivities, and
+to the more timid of the riders. Horace Townsend rode immediately before
+Miss Vanderlyn, a little forward of the centre of the Indian file (the only
+possible mode of riding in those narrow bridle-paths)&mdash;Rowan half-a-dozen
+further behind, then two or three others, and Frank Vanderlyn, with his
+dangerous bay, bringing up the rear.</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer found his fair companion all that her face had indicated, in the
+desultory conversation which sprung up between them as they made their way
+downward from the summit, descending the peak of the monarch and riding
+back over the broad top of Monroe towards Franklin. Clara Vanderlyn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>
+conversed genially and easily, and had evidently (in spite of some
+restrictions already suggested,) enjoyed the day with the full warmth of an
+ardent nature. She seemed an excellent horsewoman, easy and self-possessed
+in the saddle, and Townsend observed that she found leisure from the care
+of picking her way, to look back several times over her shoulder. For a
+long time he may have been undecided whether her regard was directed at her
+brother, at the extreme end of the line, or at some one in the middle
+distance. The one glance of anxiety would have been very natural: the
+other, compounded of interest only, may have been likewise natural
+enough&mdash;who can say?</p>
+
+<p>They were crossing Monroe to Franklin, over the narrow back-bone of land
+that has been mentioned in the ascent, and at the very point where Oakes'
+Gulf, now on the left, and the scarcely less terrible Gulf of Mexico on the
+right, narrowed the whole causeway to not much more than a dozen of
+feet,&mdash;when Townsend heard a sudden and sharp cry behind him. At that point
+the descent of the path was very precipitous, and over stones so rugged
+that the horses kept their feet with great difficulty; and in his anxiety
+to insure safe footing he had for the moment lost sight of his fair
+companion&mdash;a poor recommendation of his ability as an escort, perhaps, but
+not less true than reprehensible! At the cry he turned instantly, though he
+could not so suddenly check the course of his horse down the path without
+danger of throwing him from his feet; and as he looked around, through the
+olive brown of his cheek a deadly whiteness crept to the skin, and his
+blood stood still as it had probably never before done since the tide of
+life first surged through his veins.</p>
+
+<p>It has been the lot of many men to look upon a horror accomplished or so
+nearly accomplished that any reversal of the decree of fate seemed to be
+beyond hope. Such is the gaze upon the strewn dead of the battle-field,
+before the life has quite gone out from a few who are already worse than
+dead, and when the groans and the cries for "water!" to cool the lips<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>
+parched in the last fever, have not yet entirely ceased. Such is the
+hopeless glance at the windrow of dead strewing the shore when a ship is
+going to pieces in the surf, in plain sight and yet beyond the aid of human
+hands, and when every moment is adding another to the drowned and ghastly
+subjects for the rough-coated Coroner. Such is the stony regard at the
+crushed victims of a railroad catastrophe, or the charred and blackened
+remains of those who were but a little while ago living passengers on the
+steamboat that is just burning at the water's edge. Such, even, is the
+shuddering glance at the brave and unconscious firemen who stand beneath a
+heavy wall, when that wall is surging forward and coming down in a crushing
+mass upon their very heads, with no power except a miracle of Omnipotence
+to prevent their being flattened into mere pan-cakes of flesh, and blood,
+and bone. All these, and a thousand others, are horrors accomplished or
+beyond hope of being averted; and they are enough to sicken the heart and
+brain of humanity brought into sudden familiarity with them. But perhaps
+they are not the worst&mdash;perhaps that yet unaccomplished but probable horror
+is still more terrible, because uncertainty blends with it and there is yet
+enough of hope to leaven despair. The life not yet fully forfeited, but
+going&mdash;going; the form not yet crushed out of the human semblance, but to
+be so in a moment unless that one chance intervenes; the face&mdash;especially
+if the face be that of woman, a thousand times more beautiful in the relief
+of that hideous mask of death which the gazer sees glooming behind
+it,&mdash;this is perhaps the hardest thing of all to see and not go mad.</p>
+
+<p>None of these conditions may have been quite fulfilled in the glance cast
+backward by Horace Townsend at that moment; but let us see how far the
+situation varied from the most terrible of requirements.</p>
+
+<p>Going over that back-bone in the morning, the lawyer, who chanced to be for
+the moment alone, had swung himself from his horse, leaving the animal
+standing in the trough, peered through the bushes to the right, down into
+Oakes' Gulf, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> walked to the edge of the broad stone that formed the
+projection over the Gulf of Mexico. He had found that stone smooth and
+rounded, a little slippery from the almost perpetual rains and mists
+beating upon it, not more than eight to ten feet wide from the path to the
+verge, and with a perceptible slope downwards in the latter direction. He
+had thought, then, that it needed a clear head and a sure foot (both of
+which he possessed) to stand in that position or even to tread the stone at
+any distance from the path. And so thinking, he had swung himself back into
+the saddle and ridden on,&mdash;the incident, then, not worth relating&mdash;now, a
+thing of the most fearful consequence.</p>
+
+<p>For as he glanced back, at that sudden cry, he saw Clara Vanderlyn sitting
+her horse on the very top of that smooth plateau of stone overlooking the
+two thousand feet of the Gulf of Mexico, at what could not have been more
+than four or five feet from the awful verge, and certainly on the downward
+slope of what was an insecure footing even for the plastic foot of
+man&mdash;much more for the clumsy iron-shod hoof!</p>
+
+<p>What could have induced her trained pony to spring out from the path a few
+feet behind and rush into that perilous elevation, must ever remain (in the
+absence of an equine lexicon) quite as much of a mystery as it seemed at
+that moment. Perhaps it was in going down some such declivity of path as
+that before him, that he had been kicked by the vicious bay of Frank
+Vanderlyn while making the ascent, and that he had concluded to wait on
+this convenient shelf until all the rest had gone by, before he consented
+to make the passage with his fair burthen. Perhaps the movement was merely
+one of those unaccountable freaks of sullen madness in which horses as well
+as men sometimes have the habit of indulging. At all events, such was the
+situation; and the recollection of it, as thus recalled to those who were
+present, will be quite enough, as we are well aware, to set the heart
+beating most painfully. What, then, must have been the feeling of all who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>
+saw, and especially of that man who had promised to <i>protect</i> the fair
+being thus placed in peril! What thoughts of the playful threat of Halstead
+Rowan must have rushed through his brain&mdash;that "if she got into any kind of
+a scrape by riding with a man who <i>couldn't</i> ride," such and such fatal
+results would follow! Not a duel with the Illinoisan&mdash;oh, no!&mdash;but a black,
+terrible, life-long duel with his own self-reproaches and remorse for
+heedlessness and want of judgment&mdash;this would be the doom more fearful than
+a thousand personal chastisements, if danger became destruction. One clumsy
+movement of the horse's feet, one slip on the stone, and she would as
+certainly go over that dizzy precipice and fall so crushed and mangled a
+mass into the gulf below that her fragments could scarcely be distinguished
+from those of the pony she rode&mdash;as certainly as she had grace and love and
+beauty crowning her life and adding to the possible horror of her death. He
+did not know, then, how many of the cavalcade saw the situation, or how the
+blood of most who saw stood still like his own, with dread and
+apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>The inconceivable rapidity of human thought has been so often made a matter
+of comment, that words could but be wasted in illustrating it. It shames
+the lightning and makes sluggard light itself. All these thoughts in the
+mind of Horace Townsend scarcely consumed that time necessary to draw rein
+and turn himself round in the saddle in a quick attempt to alight, rush up
+the side of the rock and seize her horse by the bridle or swing her from
+her seat. He had no irresolution&mdash;no moment of hesitation&mdash;he only thought
+and suffered in that single instant preceding action.</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake do not move! I will be there in one instant!" he said in a
+low, hoarse, intense voice that reached her like a trumpet's clang.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes&mdash;quick! quick!" he heard her reply, in a convulsive, frightened
+voice. "Oh, quick!&mdash;you don't know where I am!"</p>
+
+<p>Poor girl!&mdash;he <i>did</i> know where she was, too well.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She was braver than most women, or she would probably have jerked the
+bridle or frightened her horse by frantic cries, and sent him slipping with
+herself down the ravine; for the situation was a most fearful one, and
+there are few women who could have braved it without a tremor. A <i>man</i>, let
+it be remembered, if cruel enough, might have alighted and left the horse
+to its fate; but to a woman, encumbered by her long clothes, the attempt
+must have been almost certain destruction for both.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps not sixty seconds had elapsed after the first cry, when the lawyer
+succeeded in checking his horse without throwing him headlong, swung his
+foot out of the stirrup, and attempted to spring to the ground. But just
+then there was a sudden rush over the rock; a wierd and unnatural sweeping
+by, something like that of the Demon Hunt in "Der Freischutz;" a cry of
+terror and fright that seemed to come from the whole line in the rear and
+fill the air with ghastly sound; a closing of the eyes on the part of the
+incapable guardian, in the full belief that the noises he heard were those
+of the accomplishment of the great horror; then sounds nearer him, and a
+jar that almost prostrated himself and the horse against which he yet
+leaned; then a wild cry of exultation and delight which seemed&mdash;God help
+his senses!&mdash;was he going mad?&mdash;to be mingled with the clapping of hands
+like that which follows a moment of intense interest at the theatre!</p>
+
+<p>Then silence, and the lawyer opened his eyes as suddenly as he had closed
+them. And what did he see? On the rock, nothing; in the path, ahead of him,
+Clara Vanderlyn still sitting her horse, though in a half fainting state,
+and Halstead Rowan, also on horseback, ahead of her, and with his hand
+holding her bridle!</p>
+
+<p>Of course Horace Townsend, at that moment of doubt whether he stood upon
+his head or his heels&mdash;whether he had gone stark mad or retained a fair
+measure of sanity&mdash;whether the earth yet revolved in its usual orbit or had
+gone<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> wandering off into cometary space, beyond all physical laws&mdash;of
+course at that moment he could not know precisely what had occurred to
+produce that sudden and singular change; and he could only learn, the
+moment after, from those who had been on the higher ground behind at the
+moment of the peril. According to their explanations, at the moment when
+they all saw the danger with a shudder and a holding of the very breath,
+Rowan had been heard to utter a single exclamation: "Well, I swear!" (a
+rough phrase, and one that he should by no means have used; but let his
+Western life and training entitle him to some consideration)&mdash;dashed spurs
+into the side of his horse&mdash;crowded by the five or six who preceded him, in
+a path considered impassable for more than one horse at a time&mdash;and then,
+with a wild Indian cry that he apparently could not restrain, spurred up
+the side of the rock, between Clara Vanderlyn and the verge of the
+precipice, certainly where the off feet of his horse could not have been
+thirty inches from the slippery edge, and literally jerked her horse and
+herself off into the path by the impetus of his own animal outside and the
+sudden grip which he closed upon her bridle as he went by, himself coming
+down into the path ahead, and neither unseated! Miss Vanderlyn's pony had
+struck the lawyer's horse as he came down in his enforced flying leap; and
+thus were explained all the sights, sounds, and physical events of that
+apparently supernatural moment.</p>
+
+<p>The scene which followed, only a few moments after, when the leading
+members of the cavalcade (Clara Vanderlyn in the midst of it, supported by
+Rowan, who managed to keep near her)&mdash;the scene which followed, we say,
+when they reached a little plateau where the company had room to gather,
+will not be more easily effaced from the memory of those who were present
+than the terrible danger which had just preceded it. The overstrung nerves
+of the poor girl gave way at that point, and she dropped from her horse in
+a swoon, just as Halstead Rowan (singular coincidence!) had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> slipped from
+the saddle and was ready to catch her as she fell! What more natural than
+that in falling and being caught, she should have thrown her arms round the
+stout neck of the Illinoisan? And what more inevitable than that he should
+have been a considerable time in getting ready to lay her down upon the
+horse-blankets that had been suddenly pulled off and spread for her,&mdash;and
+that finally, the clinging grasp still continuing, he should have dropped
+himself on one corner of the blanket and furnished the requisite support to
+her head and shoulders?</p>
+
+<p>Frank Vanderlyn and those who had been farthest behind with him came up at
+that moment; and Horace Townsend, if no one else, detected the sullen frown
+that gathered on his brow as he saw his sister lying in the arms of the man
+whom he had so grossly insulted. But if he frowned he said nothing, very
+prudently; for it is indeed not sure that it would have been safe, just
+then, for an emperor, there present, to speak an ill word to the hero of
+the day.</p>
+
+<p>Be all this as it may, the usual authorial affidavit may be taken that
+Halstead Rowan retained Clara Vanderlyn, brother or no brother in the way,
+in his arms until some one succeeded in obtaining water from a clear
+deposit of rain among the rocks; that no one&mdash;not even one of the
+ladies&mdash;attempted to dispossess him of his newly-acquired human territory;
+that when the water had been brought, and she first gave token of the full
+return of consciousness, she did so by clasping her arms around Rowan's
+neck (of course involuntarily) and murmuring words that sounded to Townsend
+and some others near, like: "You saved me! How good and noble you are!" and
+that even under that temptation he did not kiss her, as he would probably
+have sacrificed both arms and a leg or two, but not his manliness, to do.</p>
+
+<p>It was a quarter of an hour after, when Miss Vanderlyn, sufficiently and
+only sufficiently recovered to ride, was placed once more in the saddle and
+the cavalcade took its way more slowly down the mountains. The scenery,
+under the western<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> sun, was even more lovely than that of the morning, the
+mists had all rolled away from every point of the compass, and there were
+some views Franconia-wards that they had entirely missed in the ascent. But
+there was scarcely one of the company who had not been so stirred to the
+very depths of human sympathy, by the event of the preceding half-hour,
+that inanimate nature, however wondrously beautiful, was half forgotten. So
+quickly, in those summer meetings and partings, do we grow attached to
+those with whom we are temporarily associated, especially amid the
+surroundings of the sublime and beautiful,&mdash;that had that fair girl lost
+her life so strangely and sadly, not one of all who saw the accident but
+would have borne in mind through life, in addition to the inevitable horror
+of the recollection, a memory like that of losing a dear and valued friend.
+And yet many of them had never even spoken to her, and perhaps only one in
+the whole cavalcade (her brother) had known of her existence one week
+before!</p>
+
+<p>Even as it was, there were not a few of that line of spectators from whose
+eyes the vision of what might have been, failed to fade out with the moment
+that witnessed it. Some of them dreamed, for nights after, (or at least
+until another occurrence then impending dwarfed the recollection) not only
+of seeing the young girl sitting helpless on that perilous rock, but of
+beholding her arms raised to heaven in agony and the feet of her horse
+pawing the air, as both disappeared from sight over the precipice. Some may
+still dream of the event, in lonely night-hours following days of trouble
+and anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>In the new arrangements for descending the mountains, made after the
+recovery of Clara Vanderlyn, Horace Townsend was not quite discarded, but
+he could not avoid feeling that very little dependence was placed upon his
+escort. It was of course as a mere jest, but to the sensitive mind of the
+lawyer there seemed to be a dash of malicious earnest at the bottom,&mdash;that
+Rowan took the first occasion as he passed near him, immediately after the
+young girl had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> removed from his arms, to give him a forcible punch in
+the ribs, with the accompanying remark:</p>
+
+<p>"Bah! I told you that you couldn't ride; but I had no idea that you could
+not do any better at taking care of a woman, than that!"</p>
+
+<p>Townsend quite forgave him that remark, jest or earnest, for he saw the new
+sparkle in his eye, remembered how likely he was to have had his mind a
+little disordered by all that sweet wealth of auburn hair lying for so many
+minutes on his breast, and formed his own opinions as to the result. If
+those opinions were favorable, well; if they were unfavorable, he was
+taking a world of trouble that did not belong to him; for there is always a
+"sweet little cherub" sitting "up aloft" to keep watch over the fortunes of
+such rattle-pates and dare-devils as Halstead Rowan&mdash;to supervise their
+getting into scrapes and out of them!</p>
+
+<p>But there was nothing of jest, he thought, in the air with which Clara
+Vanderlyn, when re-mounting her horse, replying to an earnest expression of
+regret that one moment of inattention on his part should have allowed her
+to be placed in serious peril,&mdash;very kindly denied that he had been guilty
+of any neglect whatever, threw the whole blame upon her horse, thanked him
+for the promptness with which he was coming to her relief when forestalled,
+but then said, looking at Rowan with a glance which came near setting that
+enthusiastic equestrian entirely wild:</p>
+
+<p>"It seems that I am a very difficult person to take care of; and if you
+have no objection to my having two esquires, and will allow Mr. Rowan to
+ride with me as well as yourself, and if <i>he</i> is willing to do so, I think
+that I shall feel" (she did not say "safer", but) "a little more like
+keeping up my spirits."</p>
+
+<p>Frank Vanderlyn had looked somewhat sullenly on and scarcely said a word,
+since his coming up. But at this speech of his sister's he must have felt
+that the dignity of the Vanderlyn family was again in serious peril, for he
+put his mouth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> close to her ear and spoke some words that were heard by no
+other than herself. They could not have been very satisfactory or
+convincing, for Horace Townsend, and others as well, heard her say in
+reply:</p>
+
+<p>"Brother, your horse is dangerous&mdash;you said so yourself; so just be good
+enough to ride as you did before, and my friends here will take care of
+me."</p>
+
+<p>Whereupon the young man went back to his horse, looking a little
+discomfited and by no means in the best of humors. Such little accidents
+<i>will</i> occur, sometimes, to mar the best-laid schemes of careful mothers or
+anxious brothers, for preserving the ultra-respectability of a family; and
+whether the origin of the intervention is in heaven or its opposite, there
+is nothing to be done in such cases but to look wronged and unhappy, as did
+Frank Vanderlyn, or smile over the accomplished mischief and pretend that
+the event is rather agreeable than otherwise, as persons of more experience
+than Frank have often had occasion to do at different periods during the
+current century.</p>
+
+<p>The result of all this was that Horace Townsend really rode down with Clara
+Vanderlyn in the mere capacity of an esquire, while Halstead Rowan assumed
+the spurs and the authority of the knight. The latter rode in advance of
+her, as near her bridle-rein as the roughness of the path would allow; and
+no one need to question the fact that <i>he</i> kept his eyes on the young girl
+quite steadily enough to secure her safety! What difficulty was there in
+his doing so, when he had already proved that he could ride backward nearly
+as well as forward and that the footing of his horse was the least thought
+in his mind? They seemed to be conversing, too, a large proportion of the
+time; and there is no doubt that Halstead Rowan, carried away by the events
+of the day, uttered words that he might have long delayed or never spoken
+under other circumstances,&mdash;and that Clara Vanderlyn wore that sweet flush
+upon her face and kept that timid but happy trembling of the dewy
+under-lip, much more constantly than she had ever before<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> done in her young
+life. Horace Townsend, who rode behind the lady, did not hear any of those
+peculiar words which passed between her and her companion; and had <i>we</i>
+heard them they would certainly not be made public in this connection.</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer, as has been said, rode behind; and, as has <i>not</i> been said, he
+did so in no enviable state of feeling. He had done nothing&mdash;been accused
+of nothing&mdash;in any manner calculated to degrade him; but one casual event
+had thrown a shadow across his path, not easily recognized without some
+recollection of characteristics before developed. The reader has had
+abundant reason to believe that this man, profiting by some intelligence
+obtained in a manner not open to the outer world, of the peculiar madness
+of Margaret Hayley after that abstraction, courage,&mdash;had more or less
+firmly determined to win her through the exhibition of certain qualities
+which he believed that he possessed in a peculiar degree. One opportunity
+had been given him (that at the Pool), and he had succeeded in interesting
+her to an extent not a little flattering and hopeful; but envious fate
+could not allow a week to pass without throwing him again into
+disadvantageous comparison with a man who had no occasion whatever of
+making any exhibition of such qualities!</p>
+
+<p>That Margaret Hayley would yet remain for some days and perhaps weeks in
+the mountains, and that she would probably visit the Crawford before her
+departure, he had at least every reason to believe; and he had quite as
+much cause for confidence that the story of the adventure over the Gulf of
+Mexico, roundly exaggerated to place himself in a false position and to
+deify the Illinoisan, would reach her ears, whether at the Profile or the
+Crawford, through stage-drivers or migratory passengers, within the next
+forty-eight hours. This (for reasons partially hinted at and others which
+will develop themselves in due time) was precisely that state of affairs
+which he would have given more to avoid than any other that could have been
+named; and this it was that made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span> a dark red flush of mortification rise at
+times to his dusky cheek and give an expression any thing but pleasant to
+his eyes, as he rode silently behind the two who were now so indubitably
+linked as lovers, once more over the top of Prospect and down the rugged
+declivities of Clinton. Those who have ever been placed in circumstances
+approaching to these in character, can best decide whether the lawyer was
+sulking for nothing or indulging in gloomy anticipations with quite
+sufficient reason.</p>
+
+<p>It was nearly sunset and the light had some time disappeared from the
+valleys lying in the shade of the western peaks, when the last stony trough
+and the last corduroy road of Mount Clinton was finally repassed, and the
+whole cavalcade, each member of it perhaps moved by the one idea of showing
+that neither horse nor rider was wearied out&mdash;broke once more into a trot
+as they caught the first glimpse of the Crawford through the trees, dashed
+merrily out from the edge of the woods, and came up in straggling but
+picturesque order to the door of the great caravanserai. The difficult ride
+of eighteen miles had been accomplished; the golden day (with its one
+drawback of momentary peril) was over; and more than half a score who had
+before only thought of the ascent of Mount Washington as a future
+possibility, suddenly found that they could look back upon it as a
+remembrance.</p>
+
+<p>As they rode up to the front of the Crawford, the whole end of the piazza
+was full of new-comers and late sojourners, watching the return of those
+who had preceded or followed them&mdash;an idle, listless sort of gathering,
+showing more curiosity than welcome, such as the traveller by rail or
+steamboat sees crowding every platform at the expected time of the arrival
+of a train and every pier at the hour for the coming in of a boat. Cries
+of: "All safe, eh?" "Glad to see you back again!" "Hope you had a pleasant
+day!" and "Well, how did you like Mount Washington?" broke from twenty lips
+in a moment, mingled with replies and non-replies that came simultaneously:
+"Oh, you ought to have gone up with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> us!" "My horse carried me like a
+bird!" (the last remark, presumably, from a fat man of two hundred and
+sixty, whom not even an elephant could have borne in that suggestively
+buoyant manner), "Never <i>was</i> such a day for going up, in the world!"
+"Safe, eh? Yes, why not?" (that from a person, no doubt, who had really
+been prodigiously scared at some period of the ride), and the one
+inevitable pendant: "Oh, you have no idea what an adventure we have
+had!&mdash;one of the ladies came near being killed&mdash;tell you all about it
+by-and-bye," etc., etc.</p>
+
+<p>Horace Townsend, who had been riding the last mile very much like a man in
+a dream and really with the formal charge of Clara Vanderlyn entirely
+abandoned to her chosen protector&mdash;Horace Townsend heard all this, as if he
+heard through miles of distance or at a long period of time after the
+utterance. For his eyes were busy and they absorbed all his sensations. He
+had recognized, at the first moment of riding up, among the crowd of
+persons on the piazza, the dark, proud eyes and beautiful face and stately
+form of Margaret Hayley, leaning on the arm of that man whom he had not by
+any means learned to love since his advent in the mountains&mdash;Captain Hector
+Coles, V. A. D. C. They had waited clear weather before starting from the
+Profile, and come through that day while his party had been absent up the
+mountains: he realized all at a thought, and realized that whatever he was
+himself to endure of trial lay much nearer than he had before believed.
+Disguised and indeed disfigured as the lawyer was, in common with all the
+other members of the cavalcade, to such a degree that only observation and
+study could penetrate the masquerade,&mdash;it was not at all strange that the
+lady failed to meet his eye with an answering glance of recognition; and he
+felt rather grateful than the reverse, for the moment, that his disguise
+was so effectual. While Clara Vanderlyn, a third time within one week the
+passive heroine of the mountains, was being lifted from her saddle by half
+a dozen officious hands, and while the rest of the party were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> gabbling as
+they alighted,&mdash;he slipped quietly from his horse behind one corner of the
+piazza, threw his rein to one of the stable-boys, and disappeared through
+the hall, up-stairs to his chamber.</p>
+
+<p>He did not again make his appearance until supper was on the tables and the
+battle of knives-and-forks going on with that vigor born of mountain air.
+Most of the visitors at the house, the voyagers of the day included, were
+already seated; and among them was Clara Vanderlyn, apparently no whit the
+worse for her day's adventure, her brother at one and her mother at the
+other side. A little further down the table, on the same side, sat Halstead
+Rowan, occupying the same seat of the evening before. He had evidently
+dropped back from his familiar standing with the lady, the moment they came
+within the atmosphere of Mrs. Vanderlyn and the great republic of voices at
+the Crawford; but quite as evidently he had not yet fallen away from his
+last-won position as a hero, for his face was continually flushing, as he
+ate, with the modesty of a girl's, when the whispers and nods and pointings
+of interest and admiration were made so plain that they reached his eye and
+ear. The adventure of the day was undeniably the topic of the evening, and
+Halstead Rowan was the hero; and it may be imagined how much this knowledge
+and the inevitable corollary that some one else was <i>not</i> the hero, added
+to the comfort of the late-comer at table.</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Hayley, Mrs. Burton Hayley and Captain Hector Coles were also at
+supper, but they had nearly finished when Townsend took his seat. They rose
+the moment after, and as they did so the lawyer, now once more so arrayed
+as to display his own proper person, caught the eye of Margaret. She nodded
+and smiled, yes, smiled!&mdash;in answer to his bow across the table; and he
+could almost have taken his professional oath that a quick sparkle came to
+her eye when she saw him, then died away as quickly as if compelled back by
+a strong will. Mrs. Burton Hayley did not seem to see him at all; but
+Captain Coles signified that <i>he</i> did so, by a glance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> of such new-born
+contempt blended with old hatred, as he should never have wasted upon any
+one except a national enemy whom he had just defeated in arms. The party
+swept down the room, and very soon after the others whom we have noted also
+rose and disappeared, leaving Horace Townsend discussing his supper with
+what appetite he might. It may be consoling to some curious persons to know
+that that appetite was by no means contemptible, and that he did not falter
+in physique if restless unquiet and anxiety made a prey of his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Half an hour after, he was smoking his cigar on the piazza, none whom he
+knew within view; and he strolled out into the edge of the wood to the
+right of the house, to enjoy (if enjoyment it could be called) solitude,
+gloom and darkness. The path he followed led him eventually round in a
+circle and brought him back to the edge again, only a few yards from the
+house and near the spot where the two huge bears were moving about, dense
+black spots in the twilight. There was a rude bench beneath the trees not
+far from what might have been called their "orbit" (especially as they are
+sometimes "stars" at the menageries); and on that bench he discovered three
+figures. He was but a little distance away when he first saw them and that
+they were two ladies and a gentleman; and he was still nearer before he
+became aware that they were the Hayleys, mother and daughter, with their
+inevitable attendant and cavalier.</p>
+
+<p>They were in conversation, not toning it so low as if they had any
+particular anxiety against its being overheard; and yet Horace Townsend,
+much as he might have wished to know every word that came from the lips of
+at least one of the three, might have passed on without listening
+intentionally to one utterance, if he had not chanced to hear that they
+were discussing the event of the day. That fact literally chained him to
+the root of the tree near which he was standing&mdash;he was <i>so</i> anxious to
+know what version of the affair had already been circulated and given
+credence among the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> three or four hundred visitors at the Crawford, and
+especially among the particular three of that number.</p>
+
+<p>It has before been said, we fancy, by that widely-known writer,
+"Anonymous," that listeners do not always hear any notable good of
+themselves. And Horace Townsend, in stopping to play the eaves-dropper, at
+least partially illustrated the saying. He heard a version of the Gulf of
+Mexico affair, from the lips of Captain Coles, calculated to make him, if
+he had any sensitiveness of nature and a spark of the fighting propensity,
+kill himself or the narrator.</p>
+
+<p>"I think I have heard enough of it," Margaret Hayley was saying, as
+Townsend came within hearing. "I really do not know that Miss Vanderlyn,
+though a pleasant girl enough, is of so much consequence that the whole
+house should go crazy over one of her little mishaps in riding."</p>
+
+<p>"A little mishap!" echoed the Captain. "Phew!&mdash;if I am not very much
+mistaken it was a <i>big</i> mishap&mdash;just a hair's-breadth between saving her
+life and losing it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it possible?" said Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Why dear me, Captain
+Coles!&mdash;that is very interesting, especially if her being saved was
+providential. Did you hear the particulars, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we go in, mother?" asked Margaret.</p>
+
+<p>"No, my dear, not yet!" answered Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Captain Coles is just
+going to tell us what really happened to the young lady who was so
+mercifully spared. Go on, Captain, please."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the story is a short one, though thrilling enough, egad!&mdash;to put
+into a romance!" said the Captain. "Young Waldron, that we met at the
+Profile, was one of the party, and he told me about it while you were
+dressing for supper. It appears that Miss Vanderlyn went up with her
+brother, and that something happened to his horse&mdash;it got lamed, or
+something,&mdash;so that he could not ride down with her. He was fool enough,
+then, to put her under the charge of that friend of yours, Margaret&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Captain Coles, will you be kind enough to confine yourself to your story,
+if you must tell it, and leave <i>my</i> name out of the question?" was the
+interruption of the young lady&mdash;no unpleasant one to the listener,&mdash;at that
+point of the narration.</p>
+
+<p>"Humph! I do not see that you need be so sensitive about it!" sneered back
+the Captain. "Well, then, not that friend of yours, but that man, who has
+not less than a dozen names and who lives in Philadelphia and Cincinnati
+and several other cities."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, the man whose handkerchief you took out of his pocket the other
+night, in the ten-pin alley, to see whether his initials were correct!"
+again interrupted Margaret in a tone of voice not less decided than that of
+the other was taunting and arrogant.</p>
+
+<p>It was much too dark, under the shade of the trees, at that moment, to see
+the face of Captain Hector Coles, or he might have been discovered, even
+under his moustache, biting his lip so sharply that the blood came. An eye
+keen enough to have seen this, too, would have been able to see that Horace
+Townsend trembled like an aspen leaf, that great beads of sweat started out
+on his brown forehead, while he muttered a fierce word of anger and
+indignation that died away on the night air without reaching any human ear.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Hector Coles choked an instant and then went on:</p>
+
+<p>"He entrusted her to the care of that adventurer, who managed, before they
+had ridden a mile, to lose his way and his presence of mind at the same
+time&mdash;got her and her pony on the top of a slippery rock where there were
+ten thousand chances to one that she would fall a thousand feet over the
+precipice&mdash;and then sat on his horse, white as a sheet and too badly scared
+to attempt rescuing her, yelling like a booby for help, until that coarse
+fellow from somewhere out West came up and grasped her just as she was
+going over."</p>
+
+<p>What would not Horace Townsend have given for a grip of the throat of
+Captain Hector Coles at that moment? And<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> what would he not have given to
+hear Margaret Hayley say: "I do not believe the story! The man who leaped
+into the Pool the other day, is not the booby and poltroon you would make
+him, just because you are jealous of him, Captain Hector Coles!" What, we
+say, would the listener not have given to hear <i>that</i>? Alas!&mdash;he had no
+reason to expect any such word, and no such word was spoken. Margaret
+Hayley merely rose from her seat, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"Now, if you have finished that rigmarole, in which nobody, I think, is in
+the least interested, we will go to the house, for I am taking cold."</p>
+
+<p>The others rose, and the three moved towards the house. Horace Townsend did
+not move towards the house, but in another direction, his heart on fire and
+his brain in a whirl. But as they went off he heard the Captain say,
+apparently in response to some remark of Mrs. Burton Hayley's which was not
+caught at that distance:</p>
+
+<p>"Of course I believe him to be a coward as well as a disreputable
+character. Any man who would flinch from <i>any</i> exposure, especially like
+that on a mere edge of a cliff, to save life, is the basest kind of a
+coward. Such men ought to stand a little while among bullets, as <i>we</i> have
+to do, and they would soon show themselves for what they are worth."</p>
+
+<p>Horace Townsend saw nothing more of either that night, or of any of the
+others with whom this narration has to do. There was no music, other than
+that of the piano, in the parlor of the Crawford, and early beds were in
+requisition. Many, who had not ascended the mountains, had ridden hard and
+long in other directions; and for the people of the Mount Washington
+cavalcade themselves&mdash;they were very tired, very much exhausted and very
+sleepy, and romance and flirtation were obliged to succumb to aching bones
+and the invitations of soft pillows. Halstead Rowan, even, did not roll a
+single game of ten-pins before he retired to his lonely
+chamber&mdash;physico-thermometrical proof of the general worn-out condition!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley&mdash;A strange Rencontre in
+the Parlor&mdash;Another Rencontre, equally strange but less
+pleasant&mdash;How Clara Vanderlyn faded away prom the
+Mountains&mdash;And how the Comanche Rider disappeared.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Good-morning, Mr. Townsend," she said; and&mdash;mingled surprise and rapture
+to the man who had heard himself so denounced in her presence the night
+before!&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>There was warm, genial, kindly pleasantry in her tone&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"What!&mdash;a compliment already!" she said, in the same tone of gayety. "But I
+forgot&mdash;you told me that you were a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> lawyer, and I believe that you all
+have a sort of license to say words that mean nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"I? How?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"By noticing me at all!" was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Very neatly turned, upon my word!&mdash;and still another repetition of the
+same compliment smuggled into it! Decidedly you must be a dangerous man in
+the presence of a jury."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me hope that <i>you</i> will not consider me so, and I shall be content
+with the other part of the reputation."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"What can you mean, Mr. Townsend?" She looked at him for a moment, as if in
+doubt, then added: "Yes, certainly!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then, to be candid&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What am <i>I</i> to 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?"</p>
+
+<p>He saw her put her left hand to her heart, when she made<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> the 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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
+a <i>right</i> to fair-dealing and no unfavorable prejudgment."</p>
+
+<p>"Fair-dealing? prejudgment?" she uttered, in a not unnatural tone of
+surprise. "Does my conduct of this morning&mdash;oh, what am I saying?&mdash;Mr.
+Townsend, I do not understand you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you cannot, until I explain," said the lawyer. "I have just said
+that <i>you</i> honored me too much, but I cannot extend that remark to some of
+your most intimate friends&mdash;Captain Coles, for instance&mdash;who may be&mdash;I hope
+you will excuse what may sound like an impertinence but is certainly not
+intended to be such&mdash;more nearly connected with yourself and your future
+plans in life than I have any right to know."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;those
+proud, magnificent eyes&mdash;were drooped to the floor.</p>
+
+<p>"By which you mean," answered the lady, "that you think it possible that
+Captain Coles is my betrothed husband."</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to say&mdash;yes!" said the lawyer, his voice again dropped very
+low.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the remark, which amounts to a direct question, is certainly a
+singular one to come from a man who has no right&mdash;even of old
+acquaintance&mdash;to make it," responded Margaret. "And yet I <i>will</i> answer it,
+a little more frankly than it was put! Captain Hector Coles is not, and
+never<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> will be, any nearer in relationship to myself than you see him
+to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry, indeed, if you heard words that should never have been
+spoken."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Had I believed them, I would not!" spoke the lady, frankly.</p>
+
+<p>"And you did <i>not</i> believe them?" Tone very intense and anxious.</p>
+
+<p>"Not one word of them!" Tone very sharp and decided.</p>
+
+<p>"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 every <i>injurious</i> one 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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shall be very happy to hear your account," she replied, "for the
+incident must at all events have been a thrilling one."</p>
+
+<p>"It was thrilling indeed, as you suppose," said the lawyer.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> "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&mdash;he felt and knew it,&mdash;not only in the danger of
+Clara Vanderlyn and the rash bravery in riding of Halstead Rowan, but in
+<i>him</i>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"And that is the whole story&mdash;a dull one, after all, I am afraid!" he said,
+not altogether candidly, perhaps, in conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You seem to have something of the legal faculty&mdash;that of sifting out truth
+from falsehood, grain from chaff!" said the lawyer, looking at her a little
+searchingly.</p>
+
+<p>"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 a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>
+little more careful in the reception of loose statements, and so I may have
+lost nothing. And now&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, <i>you</i> draw conclusions pretty rapidly!" she said, turning her eyes
+upon him curiously. "I <i>was</i> going 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?"</p>
+
+<p>"As how?" asked the lawyer, somewhat surprised.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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 shall <i>not</i> go into more
+congenial associations when I leave you! There, will <i>that</i> do?"</p>
+
+<p>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, a <i>little</i> as 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
+surprise<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> or offence in the matter, certain it is that though he did bow
+over the hand, he bowed too low&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span></p><hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;that thing most unsteady and most constantly broken
+into fragments.</p>
+
+<p>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)&mdash;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&mdash;the magnificent
+long rides down the glen and over the bridges that span the leaping and
+tumbling rock-bedded little Saco&mdash;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,"&mdash;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&mdash;<i>whither</i>?</p>
+
+<p>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 story<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> of 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 immediate
+<i>mesalliance</i> upon 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,&mdash;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&mdash;heigho, for this world of disappointments, hindrances, and
+incongruities!&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> Margaret 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;as it certainly had
+not been hinted to her by the other party in the rencontre.</p>
+
+<p>That collision had happened in this wise.</p>
+
+<p>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 not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> tended 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 insulted
+<i>him</i> coming 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&mdash;<i>the</i> opportunity of all others for a stab in a
+vital part,&mdash;he had no idea when he entered the billiard-room.</p>
+
+<p>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 &mdash;&mdash; 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:</p>
+
+<p>"Let me see&mdash;it was in one of those charges, Captain, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> was 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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who the&mdash;&mdash;." 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.</p>
+
+<p>"Who the &mdash;&mdash; are <i>you</i>, Horace Townsend as you call yourself, to put in
+your remarks when <i>gentlemen</i> are in conversation?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I beg pardon, I did not know that you were ashamed of it. I happened
+to hear Colonel D&mdash;&mdash; relate the little circumstance not long after the
+battle; and I thought, from your leaving it out, that you might possibly
+have forgotten it."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Colonel D&mdash;&mdash; lied, if he said any thing of the kind!" he foamed.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"No, I will try it with <i>you</i>!" the Captain almost shouted. "You are the
+liar&mdash;not Colonel D&mdash;&mdash;, and I will shoot you as I would a dog."</p>
+
+<p>"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 a <i>gentleman</i>," and he laid a terrible stress upon
+the word&mdash;"a <i>gentleman</i> who picks pockets."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Gentlemen! gentlemen!" expostulated one or two at that period.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Coward!" hissed the Captain. At the word a shiver seemed to go over the
+lawyer's frame, but he only replied:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What the deuce is it all about?" asked one of the gentlemen when they had
+both departed.</p>
+
+<p>"Haven't the least idea," said another. "Though, by the way, the Captain
+has a very pretty woman with him&mdash;I wonder if there should not be a lady at
+the bottom of the trouble, as usual?"</p>
+
+<p>"Seemed to be some truth in that story about getting giddy in the head, by
+the way it hit!" said a third.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't look much like cowards, either of them," said a fourth. "And, now
+that I think of it&mdash;wasn't that the name&mdash;Townsend&mdash;of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> the fellow who
+leaped into the Pool the other day over at the Profile?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't know&mdash;shouldn't wonder&mdash;well, let them fight it out as they
+please&mdash;none of <i>our</i> business, I suppose!" rejoined one of the others; and
+the party dispersed in their several directions.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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 blast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> wailing
+through the gorges and around the deserted dwellings as if sounding a
+requiem for the life and love and hope fled away.</p>
+
+<p>They left a blank&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;Clara with her gentle smile, her sweet, low
+voice and wealth of auburn hair,&mdash;the friends <i>she</i> had 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&mdash;not one but lifted up a kind thought half
+syllabled into breath, as they caught the last glimpse of the sunny
+head&mdash;"God bless her!"</p>
+
+<p>It is a rough, difficult world&mdash;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"&mdash;"keen"&mdash;"sharp"&mdash;these are the flattering adjectives to be applied
+even to the sisters we love and the daughters we cherish, while in that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span>
+one 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&mdash;the gentle, impulsive, unreasoning souls, who make the heart
+the altar upon which the first and best tribute of life is to be laid&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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 bringing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> her painfully down from her position
+in society, than he could of plucking one of the stars harmlessly from its
+place in heaven!</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and of the romance connected with her which had since been
+crowded into so brief a space.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;not even on the night when he had been so foully
+insulted by Frank Vanderlyn at the Profile.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I did not see you this morning," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"When they went away?&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"You look down-hearted! Come&mdash;that will never do for the
+mountains&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a good fellow as well as a gentleman, Townsend," he said. "I wish
+<i>I</i> was a gentleman&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"And what <i>would</i> you do?" asked the lawyer.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;only a railroad conductor! What business have <i>I</i>, 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?"</p>
+
+<p>"A woman, however," said Townsend, "who could and would learn household
+drudgery, and do it, for the sake of the man she loved&mdash;well, there is no
+use in mincing the matter&mdash;for <i>you</i>,&mdash;and think it the happiest thing she
+ever did in all her life!"</p>
+
+<p>"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;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>
+but before the latter could answer he dropped the hand and the tone of
+inquiry, and said: "Pshaw! What use in asking that question?&mdash;I <i>know</i> she
+could be happier with me than with any other man in the world, and that
+makes the affair all the more painful."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose not," replied the Illinoisan. "But then you, with your wealth
+and education&mdash;you can know nothing of such a situation except by guess;
+and so your sympathy is a little blind, after all."</p>
+
+<p>"Think so?" asked Horace Townsend. "Humph! well, old boy, confidence for
+confidence, at least a little! Look me in the face&mdash;do you see any thing
+like jest or trifling in it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, it is earnest, beyond a doubt."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;" 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&mdash;well,
+we will mention no names&mdash;the lady down at the house, the same night on
+which you chanced upon your own destiny."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," answered the Illinoisan.</p>
+
+<p>"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 loved <i>her</i>, many
+months before&mdash;that she was then engaged to be married to a very different
+person, though a man in the same profession&mdash;that I love her so madly as to
+make my life one long torture on her account&mdash;that I am throwing myself
+into her company, under circumstances that if she knew them would make her
+shrink away from me with loathing&mdash;and that such a barrier<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> exists 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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Is all that true?" asked Rowan, who had been looking at the speaking face
+with still increasing wonder.</p>
+
+<p>"Every word of it, and more!" was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Then <i>my</i> situation 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&mdash;much is achieved
+towards bringing him to resignation if not to content.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"Parting? What, are you going away already?" asked Townsend.</p>
+
+<p>"At once," answered Halstead Rowan. "I should think,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> 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&mdash;I am a baby,
+I suppose, and God knows whether I shall ever grow any older and wiser!"</p>
+
+<p>"God forbid that you ever <i>should</i> grow 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."</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"Townsend, I am going to change something besides scene&mdash;<i>life</i>! I am going
+back into the army again, not for a frolic this time, but as a profession.
+Officers are <i>gentlemen</i>, are they not, even in fashionable society?&mdash;and
+would not a pair of shoulder-straps make somebody even out of a railroad
+conductor?"</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XIX.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">A Strange Character at Breakfast&mdash;"The Rambler" and his
+Antecedents&mdash;What Horace Townsend heard about Fate&mdash;Going up
+to Pic-nic on Mount Willard&mdash;The Plateau, the Rope and the
+Swing&mdash;Spreading the Banquet&mdash;The Dinner-call and a Cry
+which answered it&mdash;A Fearful Situation</span>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He was a man evidently past fifty, with a face much wrinkled by time and
+roughened by exposure&mdash;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 than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> above 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 (<i>his</i> season 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, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span>
+little 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>So far the Rambler, according to the accounts given of him, was merely a
+harmless monomaniac&mdash;harmless even to himself, as all monomaniacs are
+<i>not</i>. 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 of <i>climbing</i>.
+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&mdash;that he had no thought of awakening
+admiration by such exhibitions,&mdash;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 the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> fact 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;<i>excitement</i>. 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!&mdash;that which will just as assuredly plunge them
+<i>below</i> themselves, in reaction!)&mdash;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 to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> wean 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!</p>
+
+<p>All this is mere speculation&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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
+points<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> of scenery immediately surrounding it, we shall have painful
+occasion to make more intimate acquaintance in this immediate connection.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You must know the mountains remarkably well," one of the gentlemen at the
+table was saying to the Rambler.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;merely as the fact, and therefore a matter of
+course.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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 to <i>them</i>&mdash;at least it is not so to <i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Ugh!" said yet another&mdash;"rather you than me! Such exposures are terrible!"
+and he shuddered at the picture his imagination had been drawing.</p>
+
+<p>"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 have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> been 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."</p>
+
+<p>"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.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" said Horace Townsend. "Domine, do you carry fatalism, or
+predestination, if you like the word any better,&mdash;so far as to believe that
+every step of a man is supernaturally protected?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is supernaturally <i>ordered</i>, beyond a doubt: it may be <i>protected</i>, or
+quite the opposite," was the minister's smiling reply. "And I might go a
+step further and say that every man is supernaturally <i>upheld</i>, when doing
+a great duty, however dangerous, so that that result may follow, whether it
+come in life or death, in success or failure&mdash;which may be eventually best
+for <i>him</i> as well as best for the interests of heaven and earth, all men
+and all time."</p>
+
+<p>"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)&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;my limbs are not quite so nimble as they once were&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;all to be wasted or made into perquisites for the
+servants by a frolic dictated a little by ennui and not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> a 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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>So much premised, nothing more need be said than that all the few persons
+connected with this relation and yet remaining<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> at 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 spot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> more 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> discerned, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> as the
+sloping stone itself. It was a dizzy thing to look down&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> phases 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and the
+call for volunteers to disarrange it more effectually with forks and
+fingers was about to be made,&mdash;when one of the gentlemen looked up suddenly
+as a shadow passed him.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I call him and ask him to take a share in our dinner?" asked one of
+the male stewards.</p>
+
+<p>"No, it would be useless: the Rambler, they say, generally chooses his own
+society, and he probably would not even thank us for the invitation,"
+answered another. The strange man had by that time passed into the thicket
+bordering the edge of the schute at the right, and was seen no longer. Some
+of the pic-nickers noticed, as he passed, that he had no stick in his hands
+and that his almost invariable companion, the haversack, was missing from
+his side. But there seemed to be no occasion of commenting on so slight a
+matter, and nothing was said with reference to it.</p>
+
+<p>It must be confessed that among those who had not contributed in any way to
+the spreading of the miscellaneous dinner upon the ground, were two persons
+in whom this narration maintains a peculiar interest&mdash;Horace Townsend,
+lawyer, and Margaret Hayley, gentlewoman. The lady had been among the early
+visitors to the swing; and at the time of the disappearance of the Rambler
+into the thicket at the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> edge of the schute, she was being swept backward
+and forward in the air by that dizzying contrivance, at a rate which sent
+her loosened wealth of dark hair and her light summer drapery floating
+about in equal negligence and profusion, while the dainty white hands held
+fast to the rope with a tenacity which showed them to possess a commendable
+degree of nerve, and the trim dark gaiter enclosing her Arab foot, and the
+spotless stocking that rose above it, had both just that measure of display
+which preserved the extremest bound of delicacy and yet made the whole
+spectacle strangely bewitching. Perhaps the extraordinary light in her eye
+as she swung may have been a little influenced by one of the two pairs of
+hands that supplied the careful impelling force; for those hands certainly
+belonged to the lawyer, who had been a member of the idle section from the
+beginning, while she had wilfully attached herself to it in spite of the
+expostulations of the Captain. That gallant officer, by the way, had been
+retained among the dinner-purveyors by the wiles and the threats of a
+little dark-eyed minx from Providence, who cared no more for him than she
+did for her shoe-lace, but who would flirt with him and make him flirt with
+her, because she saw that he was arrogant, shoulder-strapped, and very much
+afraid of being seen for a moment absent from the side of Margaret Hayley.
+The Captain, who was not quite fool enough to believe that he had really
+made a military conquest of the young Yankee girl, probably objurgated her
+in his heart for her charming impudence; while Margaret, more gratified by
+the relief than she cared to make manifest, may have made private
+calculations of hugging that dear little tormentor the first moment when
+she could catch her alone.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the aspect of affairs&mdash;the young girl in the swing, Townsend and
+another gentleman swinging her, half a dozen merry young men and girls
+gathered around the trees or lying lazily on the grass, and the other and
+more industrious half-score kneeling and bending and squatting around the
+table-cloths at U. C. of the plateau,&mdash;when the arrangements (or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span>
+mis-arrangements) were judged to be complete and one of the male members of
+the working-detail, a little hungry and disposed to be more than a little
+witty, made up one hand into the shape of a trumpet and bawled through it:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh yes,&mdash;oh yes!&mdash;know all men and several women by these presents that
+the regal banquet is spread and that those who intend to eat are required
+to eat now or ever after hold their pieces&mdash;if they can find any to hold!"</p>
+
+<p>A merry farce&mdash;the very incarnation of thoughtless jollity,&mdash;the dinner and
+the announcement. It rung out over the plateau, heard by all and certain to
+be heeded by all; to be succeeded the very instant after by a sound that no
+member of that company will ever forget until his dying day. A scream of
+mortal agony and terror that seemed to rise from the depths of the schute,
+nondescript in some respects, as unlike what any one then present had ever
+heard, but unmistakably human because the last sounds of every repetition
+shaped themselves into words that could be distinguished:</p>
+
+<p>"Help!&mdash;help!&mdash;help!"</p>
+
+<p>For one moment that fearful cry ceased and during that moment all was
+silence among the pic-nickers. For that instant, too, probably more than
+half the company believed that whatever the sound might be, it was the
+prank of some unscrupulous joker, hidden away in the undergrowth near the
+edge of the schute and intended to frighten the ladies out of any appetite
+for their dinner. The time of its coming, immediately following the
+dinner-call, was certainly favorable to that supposition. But when it
+commenced again, the very instant after, louder and more shrill, so
+evidently coming up from the depth below, the thought of practical jest
+vanished and every cheek grew deadly white with the certainty that some
+tragedy was being enacted near them, that human eye must be blasted by
+seeing and that human hand could probably find no power to avert.</p>
+
+<p>It would have seemed the most unlikely of all things, when that ambiguous
+banquet on the top of the mountain was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> spread, that it should never be
+eaten; and yet the fates had so destined. Old Anc&aelig;us had quite as little
+faith in the prediction of the slave whom he overworked in his vineyard,
+that he should never taste of the product of the vines; and when he held
+the cup in his hand and the red wine was bubbling to the brim, ready to
+show the audacious prophet the fallacy of his prediction, the muttered:
+"There's many a slip between the cup and the lip!" no doubt fell upon
+incredulous ears. But even then the cry rang out that called him to the
+Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, and the spirit of the warrior was higher than
+the pride of the wine-grower and the hard master. The heavy cup went
+clanging to the earth, the blood of the grape flowing out to enrich once
+more the ground from which it had been derived; and the tyrant hero rushed
+away. The slaves had a new master, thereafter; and though Anc&aelig;us may have
+supped with the gods on Olympus, on the night when the great fight was
+over, he never tasted of that wine of his vineyard which had once even been
+lifted to his lips! So tasted not the diners on that mountain in a far
+distant land from that which held Olympus, even when the feast was spread
+and the call had been made for their gathering.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to say what point of time elapsed before any member of
+that horrified company remembered the Rambler, his habits, the conversation
+of that morning, and the fact that he had only a few moments before been
+seen going in the direction from which that piteous cry was coming up. It
+is impossible to measure it, for at such moments ages of sensation pass in
+the very twinkling of an eye. Some of them did remember him, with a groan,
+and perhaps the thought was general. At all events the consternation was
+so&mdash;as general as if some one who had come away from the Crawford with them
+in life and high hope, had suddenly been stricken dead before their eyes.
+Margaret Hayley, with the frightened cry which even then shaped a feeling:
+"Oh, Mr. Townsend, what <i>can</i> that be!" dropped from the swing and was
+caught in arms outstretched to receive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> her. By that time all seated around
+the table-cloths had sprung to their feet; and at once every member of the
+party, male and female, impelled by a curiosity that even overmastered
+fear, rushed down the plateau towards the edge, as if some horrible madness
+had seized all and they were about to spring off into the great chasm
+below. But before they had reached the edge all the ladies except two and
+several of the gentlemen recoiled; and it was only by degrees and under the
+compelling attraction of that still ascending cry, that some of those
+remaining could force themselves to the verge. Those who reached it at that
+moment, and those who closed up the instant after, saw enough to make
+Blondin and his brother-fools a non-necessity for the balance of their
+natural lives; and the cry from below was answered, be sure, by a cry that
+rang from every voice above when the sad spectacle met the eye.</p>
+
+<p>It was indeed the subject of their past fear who supplied their present
+horror; and the situation, keeping in view previous descriptions of the
+locality, may be briefly conveyed.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that at the bend or elbow of the gulch, some thirty
+feet below, two fangs of the root of a tree stretched out partially across
+the chasm, the upper long and at some distance from the rock of the bottom,
+the other shorter and lying very near it. It will also be remembered that
+beneath both the schute stretched its long blue jagged line to the foot of
+the mountain, not less than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, with the
+air between the top and bottom looking actually blue from distance,&mdash;and
+that the schute itself was so nearly perpendicular that while any object
+falling down it would probably touch it all the way from top to bottom, it
+would go down almost with the velocity of the lightning and be rolled and
+pounded to a mere ball before it had accomplished half of the descent.</p>
+
+<p>On that lower fang of the root hung the Rambler&mdash;those who had seen him at
+the Crawford recognized him at once, at that short distance; and it was
+indeed from that throat<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> so little accustomed to call for assistance from
+any mortal hand, that the terrible cries of agony and appeals for help were
+ascending. One hand grasped the root near the end, without being able to go
+nearly round it, and one leg was caught round the root farther towards the
+tree, with the bend at the knee forming a kind of hook so long as it could
+retain its tension. The other arm and leg hung down, with the body, below,
+and the long grizzled hair streamed away from the head that depended
+downward in the direction towards which it seemed to be so fatally tending.
+The face could be seen, as that was turned towards the cliff, but its
+expression could not be recognized at that distance and in the reversed
+position that it occupied. All that could be known, to any certainty, was
+that there hung a human being, evidently unable even to recover a safer
+hold upon the root, screaming for help that was hopeless, and as certain to
+make the last plunge within a space of time that could be measured by
+single minutes, or perhaps even by seconds, as the sun was certain to move
+on in its course and the earth to retain its laws of gravitation!</p>
+
+<p>Was there not cause, indeed, for that general cry of pitying horror from
+above, which answered the cry of agony and terror from below?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XX.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Suspense in Danger, in two Senses&mdash;Horace Townsend with a
+New Thought&mdash;The use of a Swing-rope&mdash;An Invitation to
+Captain Hector Coles&mdash;A fearful piece of Amateur
+Gymnastics&mdash;Going down into the Schute&mdash;Success or
+Failure?&mdash;The Event, and Margaret Hayley's Madness&mdash;Two
+Unfortunate Declarations.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>We have said that the whole body of the pic-nickers rushed up to the edge
+of the plateau, and that all, or nearly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> all, caught glimpses of the
+situation. Then came that cry, that shutting of the eyes and springing
+back, until only three or four, of whom Horace Townsend was one and Captain
+Hector Coles was <i>not</i> another, remained on the verge. Margaret Hayley,
+among those who had gazed down and drawn back, remained a few feet from the
+edge, and the Captain was either so careful of her safety or so anxious to
+furnish himself with an excuse for remaining no nearer, that he caught her
+by the dress and retained his grip as if she had been some bundle of
+quartermaster's goods that he was fearful of having slip through his
+fingers! Frightened inquiries and equally frightened replies, mingled with
+moans and sobs and wringings of female hands, went round the circle thus
+scattered over the lower part of the plateau; and for a moment those noises
+made the still-ascending cries for help almost inaudible.</p>
+
+<p>Horace Townsend stood at the very edge, and except perhaps sharing in the
+first cry, he had not uttered one word. He no doubt understood,
+intuitively, like the rest, that the poor man must have been attempting the
+mad descent, when the undergrowth by which he held fast gave way in his
+hands, or some stone caved out beneath him, sending him headlong downward
+for a plunge of two thousand feet, from which he had only been temporarily
+stopped by striking and gripping the root of the tree as he fell. Beyond
+this, and with reference to any possibility of saving the perilled man, he
+was probably quite as much in the dark as any of the others. He stood half
+bent, his dusky cheek pale and his face strangely contorted, his hands
+clasped low as if wringing themselves surreptitiously, and the eyes beneath
+his bent brow looking into the gulf as if he was trying to peer downward
+into the eternal mystery which that man was so soon to fathom.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly his face lighted. "Hush! I must speak to that man!" he said, in a
+low but intense voice, and the behest was obeyed so quickly that almost
+total silence fell upon the top of the plateau.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Hallo, below there!" he cried, as the call of agony ceased for an instant.</p>
+
+<p>"Help! help! oh help! came back from below.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you understand what I say?" again he called.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes!&mdash;help! help!" came feebly back.</p>
+
+<p>"Get that rope from the foot of the swing there, quick, some of you!" he
+cried, and his voice seemed for the time to clear from its hoarseness and
+ring like a trumpet. "Quick!&mdash;cut it away at the bottom and bring it all
+here!"</p>
+
+<p>Half a dozen of the young men and one or two of the ladies, delighted to
+aid in any hope of saving the perilled man (for the most thoughtless of us
+are naturally, after all, kind and averse to death and suffering), sprung
+for the rope. Two of them reached the foot of the swing ahead of the
+others, the pocket-knife of one was out in an instant, and in another
+moment they came up dragging nearly or quite an hundred feet of strong inch
+rope.</p>
+
+<p>"We have a rope here that will hold you: can you catch it and hold on or
+tie it around your body?" the lawyer called down again.</p>
+
+<p>"No!"&mdash;the pained and weakening voice came back, and then they all knew
+what had reduced that athletic and iron-gripped man to such a state that he
+could make no effort to swing himself up again. He spoke brokenly and
+feebly, but Horace Townsend and some of the others caught the words: "I
+can't catch the rope&mdash;I put my right shoulder out of joint as I fell&mdash;I
+can't hold on much longer&mdash;I shall faint with this pain&mdash;oh, can't some of
+you help me?"</p>
+
+<p>Then passed over the countenance of Horace Townsend one of those sweeping
+expressions which make humanity something more or less than human. It may
+have been the god stirring&mdash;it may have been the demon. No one saw it&mdash;not
+even Margaret Hayley; for when he turned nothing more was to be seen than
+that the brow was very dark, and that the lips were set grimly. The powers
+looking downward from heaven on the falling of leaves and the nesting of
+young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> birds may have remarked the whole expression and set it down at its
+true worth, and that will eventually be found quite sufficient. Before he
+turned he shouted, much louder and more authoritatively than he had spoken
+before, to the man hanging between life and death below:</p>
+
+<p>"Hold on, like a man! We <i>will</i> do something to help you!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he spoke to the two young men, one of whom yet held the end of the
+rope:</p>
+
+<p>"Tie a big loop in that rope, quick&mdash;ten or a dozen feet from the end."</p>
+
+<p>They proceeded to do so, with not unskilful hands, and in that instant the
+lawyer approached Captain Hector Coles, where he stood, only a few feet
+off, still holding the dress of Margaret Hayley. He did not appear to see
+<i>her</i> at all, but she saw <i>him</i>, and there was that upon his face which
+frightened her so that she literally gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"Captain Coles!" he said, "do you know what you said of me the other night
+and again the other day? There is a rope, and there is yet a chance to save
+that man. Go down, if you are as brave as you boast, and save him. Do you
+hear me?&mdash;go!"</p>
+
+<p>"I? Humph!" That was all the reply that the Captain, half-stupefied, could
+make to what he believed to be the words of a madman.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I thought not!" sneered the voice through the hard lips. With the
+words coat and vest were thrown off, and the tall, slight, athletic form
+was developed with no concealment but the shirt and the closely-girt
+trowsers. The shoes followed, and as they did so Margaret Hayley well
+remembered where and when she had before seen that disrobing. She had grown
+white as the collar and cuffs of her gray chambray; and she was so
+paralyzed with wonder, fear, anxiety, and conflicting thought, that she
+could not speak, and was on the point of falling. Yet all this time Horace
+Townsend seemed to pay her no more attention or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> observation than he might
+have done had she been a wooden post or a stone monument erected at the
+same point of the plateau!</p>
+
+<p>Not sixty seconds had elapsed after the throwing off of his outer garments,
+when the lawyer, without another word to any one, seized the rope, looked
+over the edge to see that the Rambler was still hanging to his thorn,
+lowered down the line until the loop was nearly opposite to him, then
+carried up the other end and with the volunteered assistance of one of the
+young men firmly secured it with two or three turns and as many knots,
+around the trunk of a stout sapling.</p>
+
+<p>All saw the movement, now, and all began to understand it; but oh, with
+what redoubled agitation was the truth realized! He was going down that
+frail rope, and into what peril! The rope fastened, he stepped forward to
+the verge, while a murmur ran round the frightened group, even coming from
+the lips of those who had never spoken to him: "Oh, don't!" Margaret Hayley
+was no longer stone: she cast one glance at the face of Captain Hector
+Coles, saw that the expression on it was every thing rather than fear or
+anxiety, then jerked away her dress from his hand and darted forward.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;do not go!" she said, grasping the lawyer by the arm on the very
+verge.</p>
+
+<p>"I must!" Then for the first time he appeared to see her.</p>
+
+<p>"No! If I bid you stay for <i>my</i> sake, will you do it?"</p>
+
+<p>"For your sake, Margaret Hayley, I would go all the quicker. Stand back,
+for God's sake!&mdash;you may fall!"</p>
+
+<p>She said no other word. Captain Hector Coles sprang forward and grasped her
+arm to draw her back. She jerked it away, almost angrily, and never stirred
+so far from the edge as to prevent her looking down the schute. Half a
+dozen of the others, all gentlemen, had taken the same risk of crowding to
+the edge, their very breath held; but none of them would any more have
+thought, just then, of offering to aid <i>her</i>, than of tendering the same
+support to one of the rooted saplings on the cliff. It was a fearful
+moment, but not the weakest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> heart on that plateau beat within the bosom of
+the white-handed Philadelphia girl!</p>
+
+<p>Horace Townsend threw himself down on his face as he reached the edge,
+grasped the rope and crawled over backwards in that way, descending it
+hand-over-hand. Those too far back from the edge to see, heard him call out
+to the man below as he disappeared from sight: "Hold fast like a man! I am
+coming!" Then they saw no more, and for the moment heard no more.</p>
+
+<p>Those who stood on the verge, and Margaret Hayley among them&mdash;saw the
+adventurous lawyer descend the rope with slow and steady care but evident
+labor, until he reached the loop opposite and nearly under the suspended
+man. Then they saw him weave his right arm into the loop until the strands
+of rope seemed to go around it three or four times, throw down his feet to
+the rock so as to raise his shoulders away from it, and commence gathering
+in the loose rope below with his left. Directly he seemed to have the end
+in his hand, and they saw him stretch the left arm as if to throw it around
+the body of the perilled man. At that moment they saw, with a horror that
+words can make no attempt at describing, that the hand of the Rambler which
+had held the end of the root gave way and the body swung to a
+perpendicular, head downward, only suspended by the hook formed of the leg.
+All, except one&mdash;that <i>one</i>&mdash;closed their eyes, confident that the leg too
+must give way and the poor climber plunge headlong, perhaps bearing down
+the would-be rescuer with him. But no!&mdash;still the body remained in that
+position for a moment, and in that moment they saw that the rope passed
+around it and the hand of the lawyer made an attempt, the success of which
+could not be seen, to tie the rope into a knot about the waist. But even at
+that instant the tension of the stiffened leg gave way and they saw the
+body plunge downwards, head first; <i>where</i>, was too sickening a horror to
+conjecture.</p>
+
+<p>No one saw any more&mdash;not even Margaret Hayley. With<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> one wild cry she
+sprang back from the verge and tottered half fainting but still erect, into
+the arms of some of the other ladies who had been watching the whole scene
+through <i>her</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Perfect silence&mdash;the silence of untold terror and dread. Their own eyes had
+seen the Rambler plunge headlong towards the realization of that fearful
+last wish: what hope was there that the other, entangled with him, had not
+accompanied him? It must be said that for the moment no one dared look over
+the edge again, and that no one dared, during the same time, to test, by
+feeling the rope, whether any weight still remained at the end of it! The
+cast-off coat, vest, hat and shoes of the lawyer assumed the look of
+dead-men's clothes unseasonably exhibited; and each even looked upon the
+other with horror because a spectator of the same catastrophe. What must
+have been the feelings of Margaret Hayley, if, as we have had reason to
+believe, her first love had faltered in favor of a new ideal? What those of
+Captain Hector Coles when he believed that a disgusting and audacious
+rivalry had been removed at least <i>two thousand feet</i>?</p>
+
+<p>All this found relief when it had lasted about ten ages&mdash;in other figures,
+about two minutes and thirty seconds! The rope was seen to tremble at the
+edge, and two or three of the men gathered strength to dart forward. A head
+came up above the level, and a faint voice said:</p>
+
+<p>"Give me a hand, here!"</p>
+
+<p>A hand was given, and in one instant more the lawyer was dragged up upon
+the plateau and staggered to his feet. He was bathed in sweat, trembled
+fearfully, and his clothes were torn in many places. Personally he had
+received no injury, except that some hard object (perhaps one of the snags
+of the root) had struck him near the left temple and ploughed its way in
+such a manner that the wound would probably leave a scar there during life,
+more than half way across the forehead and up into the roots of the hair.
+Even this was shallow and the few drops of blood flowing from it wore
+already dried, so that probably the receiver had never been aware of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span>
+blow or its effect. Most of those things were seen afterwards&mdash;they were
+certainly not seen with this particularity at the time, for not one of the
+persons on the plateau, from Captain Hector Coles to the least interested
+of the company, saw any thing else than the proud face of Margaret Hayley
+radiant with humility, and her tall form cowering down as if to make itself
+humbler and less noticeable, as she dropped on her knees before the
+lawyer&mdash;yes, dropped on her knees!&mdash;took one of the quivering hands in both
+her own dainty white ones, covered it with kisses that some others would
+have been glad to purchase for hand or lip by mortgaging a soul, and
+literally sobbed out:</p>
+
+<p>"God bless and reward you!&mdash;you noblest and strangest man in the world!"</p>
+
+<p>It was a singular position for a proud and beautiful woman&mdash;was it
+not?&mdash;especially towards a man whose words had never given her any right to
+make so complete a surrender of her womanly reticence and dignity? Captain
+Hector Coles thought so, for he could restrain himself no longer but
+stepped to her, laid his hand upon her arm and spoke in her ear:</p>
+
+<p>"For shame, Margaret Hayley!"</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps no one else heard the words: she heard them, for she was on her
+feet in an instant, and the one word which she returned, in the very ear of
+the Captain and certainly unheard by any other, made him start back and
+redden like one of the traditional furies. He said no more, but stood
+sullen as silent. Whether Horace Townsend had not heard the flattering
+language addressed to him, or whether he had not yet recovered himself
+sufficiently from his late exertion to attempt reply, he made none, but
+seemed confused and unnerved. He did not recover until some one near him
+said:</p>
+
+<p>"Poor fellow!&mdash;you lost him after all!"</p>
+
+<p>"Lost him? no!" said the lawyer, arousing himself. "I forgot! He is
+insensible but not fatally injured. Pray pull up the rope, gently, for I
+believe that I am too weak to render you any assistance."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"What!" cried two or three voices in a breath, and more than as many hands
+seized the rope. It was drawn tight&mdash;there <i>was</i> something yet remaining
+below. As the knowledge spread among the company and they began to pull on
+the rope, such an involuntary cheer burst from nearly all their throats,
+male and female, as might have roused a man moderately insensible. But they
+produced no effect on the dead weight at the end of the line; and it was
+only after more than five minutes of severe but careful pulling, with every
+breath waiting in hushed expectation lest some sharp angle of the rock
+might at last cut off or weaken the rope, that a dark mass came up to the
+edge and the insensible form of the Rambler was landed upon the plateau by
+the hands that grasped it.</p>
+
+<p>He might have been dead, for all that could be judged, though there was
+really no reason to believe that he should have expired from any cause
+except fright. But he presented a most pitiful spectacle&mdash;his clothes
+fearfully torn by abrasion against the rocks in drawing up, the right arm
+hanging loosely from the shoulder, the eyes closed and teeth set as in a
+fatal spasm, and the iron-gray hair and straggling beard matted with blood
+yet flowing from a severe wound in the head that he had received either in
+falling against the rock from the root or in the perilous passage upward.
+There was no indication of breath, but he was alive, for the pulse had not
+stopped its slow movement, and there was at least a chance that he could be
+recovered.</p>
+
+<p>But even then, and while two or three were hurrying to the table for water
+to use in bringing back the flitting life and some of the cloths to use as
+a stretcher in bearing the body to one of the wagons,&mdash;even then the
+general attention was for the moment withdrawn. For just as the poor
+Rambler was fairly landed and the company gathering around him, while
+Margaret Hayley was yet standing close to Horace Townsend, with her eyes
+still reading that face which seemed to be a perpetual puzzle to her,&mdash;the
+brown cheek grew suddenly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> of a ghastly white, the whole frame trembled as
+if from the coming of a spasm, and the lawyer fell heavily forward, without
+a sign of sensation, just as he had done in the previous instance after
+rash exposure and severe exertion, at the Pool. Now, as then, reaction
+seemed to come with terrible force, unnerving the system and literally
+overmastering life.</p>
+
+<p>As was to be expected under such circumstances, the excitement among the
+pic-nickers redoubled when they had two insensible people instead of one,
+and one of the two the hero of so strange an adventure as that which has
+just been recorded, to look after and bring back to life. Exclamations: "He
+is dying!" "He is dead!" "He has fainted from over-exertion!" "How
+dreadful!" and half a dozen others ran round the circle. But Margaret
+Hayley did not hear or did not heed them. She was again upon her knees, for
+a very different purpose from that which had thus bowed her the moment
+before&mdash;lifting the head of matted hair upon her lap, chafing the stiffened
+hands, and uttering words that seemed to have no regard to the delicacy of
+her position or the hearing of the by-standers. Such words of unmistakable
+anxiety and fondness the insensible man might have been willing to peril
+another life to hear; and they were uttered, let it be remembered, when
+she, however the others may have been alarmed, had no idea that he was
+dying or in danger, and more as if she wished to pour out a great truth of
+her nature and be relieved of its weight, than with any other apparent
+thought in view. Oh, that ideal! Oh, love of woman, a moment checked in its
+first course, to break away again from all bounds and more than redouble
+its early madness! Oh, overweening pride of Margaret Hayley, that once had
+been her most marked characteristic, now cast away like a thing to be
+loathed and reprobated! Oh, prophet words, spoken by the sorrowing girl but
+a few hours after the bereavement of her life, now seeming to be so
+strangely fulfilled! Second love, and an abandonment that even the first
+had scarcely known, before two<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span> months of summer had made the grass green
+on the grave of the first! To what was all this tending?</p>
+
+<p>Captain Hector Coles saw, and writhed. His face was dark enough with
+passion to indicate that had no troublesome people and no restraining law
+stood in his path, he would have rolled that insensible form over the edge
+of the plateau, with no rope to impede its progress, and watched with
+heart-felt delight the bumping of the body from crag to crag until it was
+crushed out of all semblance of humanity at the bottom! But he said not one
+word, nor did he again attempt to interfere in the movements of Margaret.</p>
+
+<p>Only a moment or two, and then the eyes of the lawyer opened. He saw the
+face that was looking down into his own; and though many a man would have
+pretended weakness and insensibility a little longer, to keep such a
+position, he made an instant movement to rise and struggled to his feet
+with but slight assistance. Then the young girl fell back into the group of
+other ladies, her duty and her paroxysm of feeling both apparently over,
+and scarcely aware how much or how little the subject of her interest knew
+of her words or her actions. Nor was it sure whether the lawyer saw, as he
+staggered up from the ground, the expression which rested on the face of
+Captain Coles. Time had its task of solving both these important problems.</p>
+
+<p>But a few minutes after Horace Townsend's recovery had elapsed, when the
+body of the Rambler, showing yet, after every application, but faint signs
+of life, was carefully conveyed on an impromptu stretcher to one of the
+wagons&mdash;the fragments of the dinner, untasted except as some few of those
+who would have banqueted in a death-room had snatched little bits in the
+midst of the excitement, gathered up and huddled together in the
+baggage-wagon&mdash;the whole party more or less comfortably disposed in the
+conveyances, and all hurrying back to the Crawford with what speed they
+might. We say "hurrying", advisedly. It might have been natural enough that
+they should hurry down, to afford more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span> effectual relief to the wounded and
+tortured man; but let not humanity "lay the flattering unction to its soul"
+that they lacked another and a more compelling motive! Such a story as that
+which could be woven of the events of that day, had probably never been
+told as of a late actual occurrence, inside the walls of that hostelrie,
+within the memory of man; and nearly every one, male and female, was a
+little more anxious to indulge in the relation as soon as possible, and to
+his or her own particular set of intimates, than even to succor life or
+alleviate suffering! Wonder not that newspapers are popular in the latter
+half of the nineteenth century: man himself is but a newspaper incarnated;
+and a few friends are not ill-sacrificed, much less perilled without
+advantage, when the catastrophe affords us plenty of the cheap heroism of
+the looker-on and narrator!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The providences are equally strange that give opportunity for the great
+blunders and absorbing agonies of life, with those that afford space to its
+triumphant successes and its crowning pleasures. Rooms are empty or ears
+are deaf, sometimes, that we maybe made deliriously happy; but they may
+have an equally assured mission to make us wretched beyond hope. Three days
+before, a parlor unoccupied except by themselves had afforded Horace
+Townsend and Margaret Hayley an opportunity of saying words that seemed to
+make, each a new being to the other, and that awakened hopes as wild and
+maddening as the dreams of opium could have originated. One laggard
+servant-girl with her dusting-brush, or one dawdling visitor lingering in
+the way, might have prevented all this and kept them on the distant footing
+they had before occupied. One person more, strolling down the glen below
+the Crawford at eleven o'clock on the morning following the events on the
+top of Mount Willard, might have prevented&mdash;what? Nothing, perhaps! Are not
+all these things ordered for us? And must not the event, debarred in one
+channel, have found inevitable way in another? The fatalists,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span> who believe
+in a Deity of infinitesimal and innumerable providences, say "Yes!" and
+argue that the ripping away of a boot-sole or the scorching of the cook's
+short-cake come within the category. The people of unswayed free-will, who
+worship a Deity not over-particular as to the every-day habits of his
+creatures, say "No!" and see nothing providential in any event less
+important than the breaking out of a pestilence or the downfall of a
+nation. At which point it may be necessary to discover what connection all
+this has with the fortunes of two of the people most prominent in this
+narration.</p>
+
+<p>At about the hour named, that morning, Horace Townsend strolled alone down
+the glen, towards the Willey House. Great excitements are always followed
+by corresponding reaction; and the visitors at the Crawford, after the
+departure of a few gone up the great mountain, had not made a single
+collective arrangement to occupy the day. Each was thrown upon personal
+resources; and the resource of the lawyer was setting out upon a long and
+lonely morning walk, his legs being the chief actors therein, while his
+mind, to judge by the bent head and the slow step, was taking its own
+peculiar and much longer journey.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he lifted his head and came to a full stop. He was <i>not</i> alone,
+after all! Half a mile below the house, beside the road and under the edge
+of a thick clump of woods, lay the trunk of a huge tree, some of the higher
+branches yet remaining unshorn, though trimmed by the axe. On the point of
+one of these branches, very easily ascended by the stairway of knots below,
+some eight or ten feet from the ground, rested a neat foot, while the owner
+of the figure above it, dressed in a light robe which floated around her
+with almost the softness of a cloud, had thrown off her jockey-hat (the
+object first attracting the notice of the lawyer) on the ground below, and
+was stretching up at full length to pluck a cluster of the great creamy
+blossoms of the wild northern magnolia, starring the green leaves around
+it, which had beckoned her from the path.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Does the reader remember where it was that the first glimpse was caught of
+Margaret Hayley&mdash;standing on the piazza of the house at West Philadelphia,
+with one arm of Elsie Brand around her waist, but both her own hands
+employed in the attempt to force open a blush rose that had as yet but half
+blown from the bud? Roses then&mdash;the wild magnolia now: would the dainty
+white hand that had been so tenderly cruel to the flower-spirit two months
+before, only gather the blossom to pluck away its shreds one by one and
+scatter them listlessly on the ground as she walked? Or had those two
+months taught her something of the meaning of that word "suffering,"
+unknown before, and ripened and softened the proud nature that possibly
+needed such training?</p>
+
+<p>The lawyer stood irresolute for a moment, doubtful whether the lady would
+be pleased by his having discovered her in that somewhat girlish situation.
+Then he remembered some duty or feeling which seemed of more consequence
+than a mere momentary embarrassment, and came close to the log upon which
+she was standing, before she was aware of his presence.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I help you down, Miss Hayley?"</p>
+
+<p>The words were simple, and they did not seem to demand that trembling of
+tone which really accompanied them. Neither did there appear to be any
+occasion for the flush of red blood which ran all over cheek and brow of
+Margaret Hayley in the moment of her first surprise. But the flush was gone
+before she had cast that inevitable look downward, which womanhood can
+never forget when caught playing the Amazon however slightly,&mdash;stepped
+lightly down the stairway of knots to the trunk and held out her hand to
+accept the offer.</p>
+
+<p>"See what a beautiful cluster of my favorites!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Beautiful indeed!" The lawyer was looking intently at the blossoms or at
+the hand which held them&mdash;no matter which. The lady seemed to have some
+impression of the latter, for she flushed again a little and drew back both
+hands and flowers.</p>
+
+<p>"And you are walking already again this morning?" she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> said, after a moment
+of silence which her companion did not seem disposed to break.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," absently.</p>
+
+<p>"Already quite recovered from yesterday?" Margaret Hayley was treading upon
+dangerous ground: did she know it?</p>
+
+<p>They had walked on together down the road, as if by mutual consent. The
+lawyer was silent again for a time, looking away, and when he again turned
+his eyes towards her there was an earnestness in their glance and a sad
+seriousness in the whole face which denoted that he had thought much and
+resolved not a little in that moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Recovered from yesterday? From the slight fatigue&mdash;yes! From some other
+effects of the day?&mdash;no!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to hear you say so." The words dropped slowly and very
+deliberately from her lips, and her head had a wavy nod as she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"You are sure of the grounds of your sorrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"I fear so&mdash;yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then I, too, have cause to fear!"</p>
+
+<p>Silence again for a moment, and they walked on, very slowly. Then Horace
+Townsend spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>"You are going away to the Glen House, to-morrow or the next day, are you
+not?"</p>
+
+<p>"I believe Captain Coles and my mother have so arranged," was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"And I am going southward to Winnipiseogee to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You?</i>" The exclamation was abrupt and surprised, as if she had not before
+thought of a separation of routes. Horace Townsend heard the word and
+recognized the tone; and what the spark is to the magazine was that sudden
+monosyllable to the half-controlled heart of the man.</p>
+
+<p>"Margaret Hayley, we separate then to-morrow," he said. "This may be and no
+doubt will be the last time that we shall speak together without listeners.
+I have something to say that must be spoken. Will you hear me?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>She caught him suddenly by the arm, with a motion like that of one warning
+or checking another on the brink of a precipice&mdash;like that she had used the
+day before under such very different circumstances,&mdash;and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, do not!&mdash;do not!"</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do not say words that must separate us instead of bringing us nearer to
+each other!"</p>
+
+<p>"And would <i>that</i> grieve you?"</p>
+
+<p>"On my soul&mdash;yes!"</p>
+
+<p>Another spark to the magazine. It exploded. Horace Townsend had caught
+Margaret Hayley's hand and his eye literally flashed fire into hers, while
+his brown cheek mantled with the blood that could no longer be restrained.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>must</i> speak, Margaret Hayley, and you must listen. <i>I love you!</i> There
+is not a thought in my mind, not a hope in my soul, that is not yours. Does
+<i>that</i> separate us?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not draw away her hand, and yet it returned no answering pressure
+to his. Her head was bent down so that he could not see her face, and her
+words were very few and very sad:</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry&mdash;very sorry! Yes!"</p>
+
+<p>"Stop!" He laid his hand upon her forehead, gently pushing back her head
+until he virtually compelled her eyes to come up to the level of his own.
+"Margaret Hayley, too little may be said as well as too much. I am going to
+say what perhaps no other man in the world <i>dare</i> say. I love you, but that
+is not all. I cite your woman's heart and your immortal soul this moment
+before the sight of that God whose eye is looking down upon us in this
+sunshine, and I say that <i>you</i> love <i>me</i>! You may never forgive me the
+word, but you must tell me the truth! Do you deny it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No!" The word was louder and clearer than any that she had spoken&mdash;louder
+and clearer than any that had been spoken during the interview. And yet it
+was not a lover's response.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You admit this, and yet you say that my opening my heart to you separates
+us instead of drawing us together. Three days ago you told me that&mdash;that
+man"&mdash;he did not mention the name of Captain Hector Coles, nor did there
+seem to be any occasion&mdash;"was not and never could be your betrothed
+husband. What tie binds you? What am I to fear? What am I to think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Think that what I say is true, Horace Townsend&mdash;that I love you, and yet
+that I do not love you&mdash;that your company is dearer to me, to-day, than
+that of any person on earth&mdash;that I respect you in every regard and hold
+you as one of the bravest and noblest of men&mdash;and yet that every word of
+love you utter makes it more evident that we must not meet again, and so
+separates us forever!"</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>is</i> this riddle?" He asked the question in a tone of great anxiety,
+and he did not take away his eyes from the proud orbs that no longer sunk
+before them as he made the inquiry. How impossible to believe that the man
+who had but the moment before cited the heart and soul of Margaret Hayley
+before the very eye of God as a searcher of their entire truth and candor,
+could himself be guilty of deception at the same instant! And yet was he
+not? Was the riddle really so obscure to him as he pretended? Was the very
+name under which he wooed and sought to win, his own? Strange
+questions&mdash;stranger far than that he asked; and yet questions that must be
+asked and answered!</p>
+
+<p>"Listen, Horace Townsend!" she said after one instant of silence. "You call
+this a riddle, and you force me to read it to you. I wish you had not done
+so, but I have no choice. I would have kept you as a friend&mdash;a dear friend,
+but you would not accept the place."</p>
+
+<p>"Never&mdash;not for one moment!" he broke in, as if through set lips. Her hand
+was on his arm, and they were again walking listlessly on. She proceeded
+without any reference to his interruption.</p>
+
+<p>"I have too many words to say&mdash;words that pain me beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span> measure; but you
+have forced me to them, and I must finish, even if you think me mad before
+I have done. I do not know but I <i>am</i> mad&mdash;every thing about me sometimes
+seems to be so unreal and mocking."</p>
+
+<p>Horace Townsend turned at that moment and looked her sidelong in the face,
+then withdrew his glance again as if satisfied, and she went on:</p>
+
+<p>"I told you that Captain Hector Coles would never be nearer to me than he
+is, and he will not. I hate that man, and he knows it. But I <i>love
+another</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>She paused, as if she expected some outburst at this declaration; but no
+outburst came. All the effect it produced was a quick shudder through the
+arm that sustained her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"I love another&mdash;do you hear me? I who say that I love <i>you</i>, say that I
+love another! For more than a year, before the last two months, I was a
+betrothed bride, and never woman loved more truly than I the man who filled
+my whole ideal of manly beauty, grace and goodness. One day, two months
+ago, I found that man a <i>coward</i>. He dared not fight for his native
+land&mdash;not even for his native State when it was invaded. We
+parted&mdash;forever, as I thought; forever, as he thinks, no doubt. I have
+heard that he has gone to another land: no matter, he has left <i>me</i>, with
+my own will. Then I came to the mountains, for change of scene and for
+distraction. I met you. I was attracted to you from the first&mdash;I have grown
+more attracted day by day, until I shudder to think that I love you! Do you
+know <i>why</i>?</p>
+
+<p>"Because <i>my</i> affection for <i>you</i> has given birth to some feeble likeness
+of itself!" was the response.</p>
+
+<p>"No! The confession may wound your vanity, but the truth must be told.
+Every throb of my heart towards you, Horace Townsend, has been caused by
+some dim resemblance of your face to the man I once loved, and something in
+your voice that came to me like a faint echo. It is not <i>you</i> whom I have
+been seeing and hearing, but the man who was handsomer than you, your
+superior in so many respects, and yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> your inferior in that one which
+makes me worship you almost as a god&mdash;your sublime, dauntless courage when
+all others quail. Do you understand me now, and know why your words should
+never have been spoken?"</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>think</i> that I understand you!" was the response, but a bitter smile,
+unseen by the lady, wreathed the moustached lip as he spoke. "And that
+other&mdash;he will come back, some day, and all except the old love will be
+forgotten, and you will marry him, of course."</p>
+
+<p>"Horace Townsend, you do not quite understand me, yet!" she said. "I am no
+child, to be trifled with, but a woman. I loved him, better than my own
+soul, but I cannot continue to love when I cease to respect. I shall never
+marry, while I live, unless I marry the man to whom my heart was first
+given. I thought that perhaps I might find a new ideal, some day, when we
+first parted; but I know better now. You have taught me how nearly the
+vacant place can be supplied, and yet how empty all is when the one bond is
+wanting."</p>
+
+<p>"And I say, again, that some day he will come back, and you will marry
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"Never&mdash;if he comes as he was!" was the reply. "If Heaven would work a
+miracle and give him the one thing that he lacks&mdash;bravery and
+patriotism,&mdash;even if he struck but one blow, to prove that he was no coward
+to fly before the enemies of his country,&mdash;I would go barefoot round the
+world to find him, and be his servant, his slave, if he would not forgive
+the past and make me his wife!"</p>
+
+<p>With the last words she had broken down almost entirely, and as she ceased
+she burst into a very passion of tears and sobs. Where was the overweening
+pride of Margaret Hayley? Gone, all gone; and yet she clung to that one
+touchstone&mdash;her husband, when the country called and he was subjected to
+the trial, must prove that he dared be patriot and soldier, or her lips
+should never speak that sacred name!</p>
+
+<p>"I have indeed spoken too far, and it is better that we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span> should not meet
+again," he said, in a voice quite as low and almost as broken as her own.
+"I understand you, now: forgive me if I have caused you pain in making the
+discovery; and good-bye!"</p>
+
+<p>He wrung the young girl's hand almost painfully and was turning away.</p>
+
+<p>"You are going now? Shall I not see you again?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"No matter&mdash;I do not know&mdash;I cannot tell. I may see you at the house before
+I leave. If not, and we never meet again, God bless you, Margaret Hayley,
+the only woman I have ever loved!"</p>
+
+<p>He stooped suddenly and kissed her hand, then turned, drew his hat over his
+brow and walked rapidly up the road towards the Crawford. Margaret,
+oppressed by some strange feeling, could not speak. She could only look
+back and catch a last glimpse of him as he turned a bend in the road; then
+sink her face in her hands and sob aloud as if she had buried a second love
+not less dear than the first.</p>
+
+<p>When she returned to the house, half an hour after, Horace Townsend was
+already gone&mdash;flying away towards Littleton with four horses. Captain
+Hector Coles was in a better humor, being already advised of the fact, than
+he had exhibited at any time during the previous week. Mrs. Burton Hayley,
+when his going away was mentioned, made some appropriate remarks on the
+rashness of any person exposing himself as the young man had done the day
+before, unless he was fully prepared for death and judgment, and remarked
+that she was rather glad that so wild a person was not going over to the
+Glen with them. In both these opinions Captain Coles fully coincided.
+Margaret spoke of the departure as a very matter-of-course affair indeed,
+and did not even see the glance by which the gallant Captain intended to
+convey his full recollection of the scene on the top of Mount Willard.</p>
+
+<p>Next day that trio, with a dozen of others, went on to the Glen House for
+the carriage-ascent of Mount Washington.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And with that announcement and a single scene following, concludes the
+somewhat long connection held by the White Mountains, their scenery and
+summer incidents, with the fortunes of the various personages figuring
+prominently in this life-history.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That scene was a very brief one and took place three days after the
+departure from the Crawford, when Margaret Hayley, her mother and Captain
+Hector Coles, had made the ascent of Washington from the Glen House by
+carriage and stood beside the High Altar that has before been mentioned.
+When Mrs. Burton Hayley was signalizing her arrival at the top by repeating
+certain passages from the big book on the carved stand, which she seemed to
+have an idea fitted that elevated point in her summer wanderings, and which
+probably might have done so if she had quoted them with any thing
+approaching to correctness. When Margaret Hayley, breathing the same air
+that Horace Townsend had breathed a few days before, and aware that she was
+doing so, joined to the rapt emotions of the place and the hour, something
+of the sad glory of human love and grief, stretching out her mental hands
+to God whose awful majesty stood before her and around her in the great
+peak lifting itself to heaven, and praying that out of darkness might some
+day come light, as once it had done on that other and more awful peak of
+Sinai. When Captain Hector Coles, above all such considerations and with a
+keen eye to his personal "main chances", fancied that another declaration
+beside the High Altar on Washington would not only be a "good thing to do"
+but a proceeding much more likely to meet with a favorable response than if
+ventured on ground of less altitude.</p>
+
+<p>Then and there, accordingly, Captain Hector Coles, with Mrs. Burton Hayley
+very near and the granite rocks still nearer, possessed himself suddenly of
+Margaret Hayley's white hand, drew her close to him, and murmured:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, how long I have waited for this hour, Margaret! I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span> love you. I have
+not before said the same thing in words, for a long time, but I believe
+that you must have seen and known how the old affection has still lived and
+strengthened. There have been bitter words between us, occasionally, but
+they have not affected the true feeling lying beneath, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Stop, Hector Coles!" said Margaret, before he had concluded. "You say that
+there have been bitter words between us occasionally. Now let me warn you
+that no bitter word I have ever said in your hearing, has been any thing
+more than a baby's whisper to what I <i>will</i> say if you ever dare to allude
+to this subject again!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, Margaret&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, not another word! Mother, come here!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burton Hayley obeyed.</p>
+
+<p>"Mother, is it with your wish or approbation that Captain Coles has just
+made me another offer of his heart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly it is," the Captain commenced to answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Stop! it was not to you I put the question, but to my mother!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my daughter&mdash;I certainly did&mdash;that is&mdash;I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There, you hear!" said Captain Hector Coles, triumphantly, and confident
+that the knowledge of such a maternal indorsement must work in his favor.</p>
+
+<p>"You did, did you?" and the right hand of Margaret went suddenly inside the
+thick shawl that wrapped her from the winds of the peak&mdash;and unseen by the
+Captain a locket&mdash;that fatal locket&mdash;glittered before the mother's eyes.
+"Will you promise, and keep that promise, that Captain Hector Coles shall
+not say one more word to me of love or marriage, while we remain together?
+If not, as God sees me you know the consequences!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Burton Hayley's face was very white at that moment, but the next she
+said: "Oh yes, I promise!" and then with a groan, grasping the surprised
+Captain by the arm: "Captain, if you do not wish to see me drop dead, leave
+that wild, mad girl to herself! She is crazy, but <i>I</i> cannot help it!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Captain Hector Coles looked from one to the other, in added surprise, but
+found no explanation; then he muttered something that was not a second
+love-declaration; and the next moment Margaret Hayley stood alone, isolated
+as the peak that bore her, and with a heart almost as cold in the dull
+leaden weight that seemed to lie within her bosom, as the storm-beaten
+rocks of which that peak was composed.</p>
+
+<p>Thereafter Captain Hector Coles never spoke to her of love again!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXI.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">The Bearer of a Disgraced Name, in England&mdash;A Strange Quest
+and a Strange Unrest&mdash;Hurrying over to Ireland&mdash;Too Late for
+the Packet&mdash;The little Despatch-steamer&mdash;Henry Fitzmaurice,
+the Journalist&mdash;An Unexpected Passage&mdash;The Peril of the
+Emerald, and the end of all Quests save one</span>.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>Far back in the progress of this narration, when it had only reached half
+the distance to which it has now arrived, it was said of one of the
+principal persons therein involved: "Something indescribably dim and
+shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time,
+* * * motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be
+little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events
+without connection and action without explanation." The same remark will
+apply with quite as much force, at this stage, to the movements of the
+bearer of that dishonored name, in his movements on the other side of the
+Atlantic, which must now be briefly recorded in their due order.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that the American entered his name at Liverpool, on
+the twentieth day of July, with the place<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> of his residence attached.
+Thenceforward enough is known, through hotel and other records, to be sure
+that he spent some two weeks in London, occupying lodgings at one of the
+respectable houses of the great metropolis, but spending his time, in other
+regards, in a manner scarcely to have been expected from any previous
+knowledge of his life and antecedents. Was it the lawyer, <i>because</i> the
+lawyer, who visited Scotland Yard the very next day after his arrival in
+London, and spent so much time with some of the leading men in charge of
+that great police-establishment, that he might have seemed to be employed
+in studying the whole English system of criminal detection? And was it the
+lawyer, <i>as</i> the lawyer and consequently on account of his remembrance of
+past connection with the ferreting out of crime in his native land, who
+went immediately afterwards into a continuous and apparently systematic
+round of visits to the worst haunts of vice in the Modern Babel, becoming,
+sometimes in disguise and sometimes in his own proper person, but always
+more or less closely accompanied by some member of the force, the habitue
+of streets in which burglars and thieves most congregated, and of lanes in
+which receivers of stolen property, forgers and all disreputable and
+dangerous characters were known to have their places of business or their
+dens of hiding?</p>
+
+<p>Or was there, leaving the profession of the lawyer out of the question,
+something in the peculiar surroundings of this man&mdash;something in the
+relations of character and connection which he had allowed to grow around
+him, unfitting him for other amusements and researches in a city which he
+had never before visited, and one supplying such marvellous temptations to
+the sight-seer and the antiquarian? Or was he paying the penalty of the
+past in an unrest which left him no peace except he found it in continual
+motion and in the companionship and the study of those far more outlawed by
+statute but not more in social position than himself? Strange<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> questions,
+again, and questions which cannot be answered, at this time, by any thing
+more than the mere suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>Certain it is, whatever the motive, that Westminster Abbey, with its every
+stone sacred to the memory of the great dead, seemed to present no
+attractions to him, commensurate with those of Seven Dials, sacred to every
+phase of poverty and villany; that the Houses of Parliament were ignored in
+favor of St. Giles and Bermondsey, noted for debates of a very different
+character from those heard before the occupant of the Woolsack and the
+Speaker of the Commons; and that (this seeming so peculiarly strange in a
+lawyer of admitted character and power) even the Lord Chancellor, rendering
+one of those decisions calculated to affect not only the laws of property
+in England but the whole legal system wherever the English language was
+spoken, seemed to have far less attention paid to him or his dicta, than
+was given to some gownless libel on the practice of criminal law, who could
+point out the habits and haunts of Burly Bill, the noted burglar whom he
+had lately saved from transportation by proving that he was in three
+different places at once, and neither of them the spot where the crime was
+committed,&mdash;or Snivelling Sall, reputed to be in the near companionship of
+the most successful utterer of forged notes who had so far escaped the
+clutches of the detective birds of prey. Night and day, during all those
+two weeks, he seemed to eat hastily and to sleep only as if sleep was a
+secondary necessity of nature, to be thrown overboard whenever some
+all-absorbing thought should make continual wakefulness necessary.</p>
+
+<p>Then the fancy (might it not be called madness?) seemed to change. He had
+either exhausted the crime of London or he had skimmed that compound until
+there was no novelty of rich villainy remaining. Without having examined
+one work of art or one antiquarian curiosity (so far as could be known),
+and certainly without having made one effort to find a footing in that
+society for which education and past associations would so well have fitted
+him,&mdash;he flitted away from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span> London and the name of Carlton Brand was to be
+found inscribed on the books of one of the leading hotels at Manchester.
+And what did he there? Precisely what he had been doing in London, it
+appeared&mdash;nothing less and nothing more. Alternately in conversation with
+one of the detective force or with some one of the wretches whom the
+detective force was especially commissioned to bring to justice&mdash;the
+Manchester looms (not yet <i>all</i> stopped by the dearth of cotton and the
+"fratricidal war" in America) presented no more charm to him than had been
+afforded by the high-toned and rational attractions of the metropolis. At
+times dressed with what seemed a studied disregard of the graces of person,
+and scarcely ever so arraying himself that he would have dreamed of
+presenting himself in such a guise in the midst of any respectable circle
+at home&mdash;two or three days ran him through the criminal life of Manchester.
+Then away to Birmingham, and there&mdash;but why weary with repetition when a
+succeeding fact can be so well indicated by one that has preceded it? The
+same unsettled and apparently aimless life&mdash;if not aimless, certainly with
+tendencies the most singular and unaccountable. Thence to Bristol, and from
+Bristol to Liverpool. From Liverpool, with flying haste the whole length of
+the island and over the border to Edinburgh, paying no more attention,
+apparently, to the scenes of Scottish song and story by which he dashed,
+than might have been necessary to remember the cattle-rievers and
+free-booters who had long before furnished pattern for his late
+associates,&mdash;and seeing in the old closes and wynds frowned down upon by
+Calton Hill and the Castle, only retreats in which robbers could take
+refuge without serious risk of being unearthed. Then, strangely enough,
+away southward again to Dover, with a passage-ticket for Calais taken but
+countermanded before use, indicating that Paris had been in view but that
+some sudden circumstance had made a change in the all-the-while
+inexplicable calculation. What was all this&mdash;the question arises once
+more&mdash;the following out of some clue on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span> which the whole welfare of a life
+was believed to depend, or merely the vague and purposeless pursuit of some
+melancholy fancy furnishing the very mockery of a clue through that
+labyrinth which borders the realm of declared madness?</p>
+
+<p>The American had been something more than a month in England, and far away
+beyond his knowledge all the events before recorded as occurring to
+Margaret Hayley and her group of society in the White Mountains had already
+taken place,&mdash;when one afternoon, late in August, the train that dashed
+into Holyhead from Birmingham and Chester, by Anglesey and over the Menai,
+bore this exemplification of unrest as a passenger. Those who saw him
+emerge from the carriage upon the platform noticed the haste with which he
+appeared to step and the eagerness of his inquiry whether the train, which
+had been slightly delayed by an accident, was yet in time for the boat for
+Dublin. She had been gone for more than an hour, and the black smoke from
+her funnel was already fading away into a dim wreath driven rapidly
+northward before the sharp south-easter coming up the Channel. Night was
+fast falling, with indications that it would be any thing rather than a
+quiet one on that wild and turbulent bit of water lying between the two
+islands; and some of the old Welsh coastmen who yet lingered on the pier,
+when they saw the impatient man striding up and down and uttering
+imprecations on the delayed train, shrugged their shoulders with the
+remark, which he did not hear or did not choose to heed, that "<i>they</i>
+should be much obliged to any train that had kept them from taking a
+rocking in that cradle the night!"</p>
+
+<p>Brow knit, head bent, tread nervous and almost angry, and manifesting all
+the symptoms of anxiety and disappointment, the American traversed the
+wharf, his tall form guarded against the slight chill of the summer evening
+on the coast by a coarse gray cloak which he drew closely around him as he
+walked, thus adding to the restless stateliness of his appearance. At one
+of his turns he was sufficiently disengaged to see a man of middle height,
+dressed in a somewhat dashing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span> civilian costume, standing at a little
+distance up the pier and conversing with two or three of the coastmen. One
+of the latter was pointing towards himself; and the moment after the
+stranger approached with a bow. He was a young man of twenty-five or
+thereabouts, side-whiskered and moustached, decidedly good-looking, with
+quite as much of the Irishman as the Englishman in his face, and seemed at
+all points a gentleman&mdash;more, that much rarer combination, especially on
+the soil of the mother island, a frank, clever fellow!</p>
+
+<p>"They tell me, sir," said the stranger, "that you were one of the
+passengers on that delayed train, and that you manifest some disappointment
+at missing the Dublin boat."</p>
+
+<p>"They are entirely correct, sir," answered the American, returning the bow.
+"I was very anxious, for particular reasons, to be in Dublin to-morrow; and
+in fact the whole object of my visiting Ireland at all, just now, may very
+probably be defeated by the accident that brought in the train that half
+hour too late."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke in a tone very earnest and not a little agitated. The other
+remarked the fact, but he thought himself too good a judge of character to
+suspect, as some other persons under similar circumstances might have done,
+that the anxious man was a hunted member of the swell-mob or a criminal of
+some other order, who thought it politic to get off English soil as soon as
+possible. He determined, at the second glance, that he had to do with a
+gentleman, and proceeded with the words that he had evidently intended to
+say on first accosting the delayed passenger.</p>
+
+<p>"You have made no arrangements for getting over, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"None, whatever!" answered the American. "How can I, until the boat of
+to-morrow, when&mdash;when it may be too late altogether for my purpose? I was
+walking off my disappointment, a sort of thing that I have been more or
+less used to all my life!" and the other noticed that he seemed to sigh
+wearily&mdash;"walking it off before going to find a hotel and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span> lying awake all
+night, thinking of where I ought to have been at each particular hour."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said the stranger, "I had a motive not personal to myself, in
+accosting you, or I should not have taken the liberty. I am Mr. Henry
+Fitzmaurice, one of the London correspondents of the Dublin <i>Evening Mail</i>.
+I believe that I am not mistaken in supposing that I am speaking to an
+American?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not at all mistaken!" answered the American, pleased with a frankness so
+much more like that of his native land than he had been in the habit of
+meeting during his short sojourn abroad. "I am called Mr. Brand&mdash;Carlton
+Brand, and on ordinary occasions I am a lawyer of the city of
+Philadelphia."</p>
+
+<p>"That little matter over, which I should not have been able to manage under
+half an hour had I been a pure John Bull instead of two-thirds Irishman,"
+said the man who had introduced himself as Fitzmaurice, in a vivacious
+manner very well calculated to put the other at his ease&mdash;"now, not being
+either of us members of the Circumlocution Office, we will get at the gist
+of the matter at once. I am going over to Ireland to-night, or at least I
+am going to make a start in that direction, and I believe that I can manage
+to secure you a passage if you will accept one."</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly, and with many thanks, but how?" was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I am not so sure about the thanks," said Fitzmaurice, in the same
+pleasant tone which had before won his companion. "It is going to be a wild
+night on the Channel, if I am any judge of weather, and I have crossed it
+often enough to begin to have some idea. But I <i>must</i> cross, and so must
+you, if you can, as I understand you to say."</p>
+
+<p>"I must, certainly, if any thing in the shape of a vessel does so," said
+the American. "But you have not yet told me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"No, of course not!" the newspaper man ran on. "Always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span> expect an Irishman
+to begin his story in the middle and tell it out at each end, and you will
+not be far from the fact. Well, there are some despatches for the Lord
+Lieutenant that need to be across before noon to-morrow, as the Secretary
+for Ireland has an insane fancy, and a special train left London to make
+the connection with the steamer that has just gone. I came in it, and with
+the Queen's messenger,&mdash;with some matters that must reach the <i>Mail</i> in
+advance of the other Dublin papers. They have a little despatch-steamer
+lying just below, and the messenger telegraphed to fire her up, from one of
+the back stations, when he found the chances against him. In an hour she
+will have a full head of steam, and before it is quite dark we shall be
+clear of the coast. I have no doubt that I can procure you a passage, and
+if you will step round with me to the wharf where she lies, I will
+certainly try the experiment. Now you have it."</p>
+
+<p>"And a very kind and generous thing I have at the same time!" exclaimed the
+American, warmly.</p>
+
+<p>"As I said before, I do not know about the generosity!" replied the
+correspondent, as they took their way around the warehouses that headed the
+packet-wharf, towards the pier below, where the despatch-boat lay. "The
+fact is that the Emerald is not much bigger than a yawl, and though she is
+a splendid little sea-boat and never has found any gale in which she could
+not outlive the biggest of the merchant steamers, she is very much of a
+cockle-shell in the way of jumping about; and people who have any
+propensity for sea-sickness, a thing a good deal worse than any ordinary
+kind of <i>death</i>, are very likely to have a little turn at it under such
+circumstances."</p>
+
+<p>"I have never been very much at sea, but I believe that I am beyond the
+vulgarity of sea-sickness!" was the answer; and just then they reached the
+despatch-steamer.</p>
+
+<p>She was indeed a little thing, as compared with the steamers which the
+American had been in the habit of seeing sent away on sea-voyages&mdash;very low
+in hull, rakish in pipe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span> and masts, looming black in the gathering dusk of
+evening, and her bulwarks seeming so low as to present the same appearance
+of insecurity against falling overboard that a landsman's eye immediately
+perceives in a first glance at a pilot-boat. The steam was already well up
+and hissing from her escape valves, while the black smoke rolled away from
+her pipe as if it had a mission to cloud the whole port with soot and
+cinders.</p>
+
+<p>A few words with the Queen's messenger and an introduction to the Captain
+of the little Emerald followed; and the correspondent of the <i>Mail</i> had not
+overrated his influence with either, for in ten minutes the lawyer was
+booked for a passage over, under government auspices. In half an hour more
+the despatch-boat steamed away; and when the deep dusk of night fell to
+shut away the Welsh coast, while the half dozen officers and their two
+passengers were trifling over a very pleasant supper with wines of
+antediluvian vintage accompanying, the Emerald was well off the Head,
+tossing about like a cork in the sea that seemed to be every moment growing
+more and more violent, but making fine weather through it all, flying like
+a race-horse, and promising, if every thing held, to land the messenger and
+her other passengers at Kingstown, at very near as early an hour in the
+morning as those touched the shore who had left Holyhead two hours before
+by the packet.</p>
+
+<p>The American remained long on the deck, in conversation with the newspaper
+correspondent, delighted with the cordiality of his manner and the
+extensive scope of his information, as he had before been with the
+generosity which supplied himself with a passage over at the moment of
+disappointment. The Hiberno-Englishman seemed to be equally pleased with
+his new friend, whom he found all that he had at first believed&mdash;a
+gentleman, and neither pickpocket nor madman. Mr. Fitzmaurice, still a
+young man and a subordinate, had never been in America, but he had
+something more than the ordinary newspaper stock of information about
+countries lying beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span> sea, and he had the true journalist's admiration
+for the young land that has done more for journalism within fifty years
+than all the other countries of the world through all the ages. He listened
+with pleasure to the descriptions which the lawyer was equally able and
+willing to impart, of the modes in which the news-gathering operations of
+the leading American newspapers were carried on, and especially of the
+reckless exposures of correspondents on the battle-fields of the great war,
+which have all the while exhibited so much bravery and so stupendous a
+spirit of enterprise, combined with a lack of judgment equally injurious
+and deplorable.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Fitzmaurice, on his part, resident in London during all the period of
+our struggle, necessarily present at most of the Parliamentary debates in
+which the good and ill feeling of Englishmen towards the United States have
+been shown in such unfavorable proportions&mdash;acquainted with most of the
+leading public men of the kingdom, and with an Irishman's rattle making the
+conveying of his impressions a thing of equal ease and pleasure,&mdash;he had
+much to say that interested the Philadelphian; and it would have been
+notable, could he have been fairly behind the curtain as to the character
+and movements of the other, to mark how the man who during two weeks
+residence in London had never stepped his foot within the Parliament
+Houses, could drink in and digest, from another's lips, the story of the
+debates which he might so easily have heard first-handed with his own ears!</p>
+
+<p>But as the newspaper man could know nothing of this, enough to say that the
+conversation was a pleasant one, and that hours rolled away unheeded in its
+continuance, while the little Emerald skimmed over and plunged through the
+rough waves of the Irish Channel, and while those waves grew heavier, and
+the sky darker, and the wild south-easter increased every hour in the
+violence with which it whistled through the scant rigging and sent the caps
+of the waves whirling and dashing past the adventurous little minnow of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span>
+the steam-navy, to fall in showers of foamy spray far to leeward.</p>
+
+<p>It was past midnight when the young men, so strangely thrown together, so
+different in position and pursuit, but so pleasantly agreeing in all the
+amenities of social intercourse,&mdash;began to feel the demands of sleep
+overmastering the excitement of the situation, left the deck and went below
+to the berths in the little cramped cabin which had been prepared for them.
+The Queen's messenger had already retired and was sleeping so soundly in
+his four-by-seven state-room, with his despatches under his pillow, that
+nothing less than the going to pieces of the steamer or an order to start
+on a new journey could possibly have woke him. To such men, ever flying
+from one port to another, by sea and by land, bearing the lives of
+individuals and often the welfare of whole peoples in their hands, with no
+more knowledge of what they bear than has the telegraph wire of the message
+that thrills along it&mdash;to such men, habituated to excitement, hurry and
+exposure, that excitement really becomes a sort of second nature; and the
+art of sleeping on the ground, on a board, bolt upright in a chair or even
+in the saddle, is one of the accomplishments soonest learned and last
+forgotten. What are storms to them or to that other class to which
+reference has before been made&mdash;the rough Ariels of the newspaper Prospero?
+Nothing, except they cause hindrance! What is even the deepest personal
+peril by sea or land? Nothing, except because in putting a sudden period to
+the existence of the messenger it may interfere with the delivery of his
+all-important despatches!</p>
+
+<p>So slept the Queen's messenger, and so, after a time, in their narrow
+berths, slept the American and his new-made friend. Once falling away into
+slumber, the very motion of the vessel made that slumber more intense and
+stupefying, old Mother Nature rocking her children somewhat roughly in the
+"cradle of the deep." And of what dreamed they? Who knows? Perhaps the
+handsome and vivacious young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span> Anglo-Irishman of the girl whose miniature he
+had accidentally displayed to the eyes of the other, filling the back case
+of his watch,&mdash;not yet his wife, but to be so some day when talent and
+energy should bring their recompense and fortune shower her favors a little
+more liberally upon him. Perhaps the Philadelphia lawyer of wrongs and
+shames in his native land, of the apparently mad quest which he seemed to
+be urging, and of possible coming days when all errors should be repaired,
+and the great stake of his life won beyond a peradventure.</p>
+
+<p>How long the lawyer had slept he knew not, when some change in the motion
+of the boat produced the same effect on his slumbers that is said to be
+wrought on the sleeping miller by the stoppage of the splashing water-wheel
+and the rumbling burr-stones. He had slept amidst the violent motion: he
+partially woke when there was a momentary cessation of it. In an instant
+after the vessel seemed to be struck one tremendous blow that sent a shiver
+through every plate and rivet of her iron hull&mdash;through every board and
+stanchion of her cabin-work. There are men who can remain undisturbed by
+such a sensation on shipboard, but the American was by no means one of
+them; and the fumes of sleep, partially dissipated before, rolled away
+almost as suddenly as morning mists before a brisk north-wester. He was
+broad awake to feel a hand grasping him by the shoulder, and opened his
+eyes to see Fitzmaurice standing by the berth and holding the joiner-work
+with one hand to support himself against the fearful lurches of the vessel,
+while he had employed the other in arousing the apparently slumbering man.</p>
+
+<p>"Get up and come out at once!" he said, his voice hoarse and agitated.</p>
+
+<p>"What has happened?" asked the American, springing upright in his berth and
+preparing to leap from it as men will do when such unpleasant announcements
+are made. He seemed to know, intuitively and without any instruction from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span>
+the shock which had just startled him, that some marked peril must have
+sent the journalist down to arouse him in that melodramatic manner.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, we are in danger, I suppose&mdash;serious danger!" was the reply. "Do you
+not feel the change in the motion of the boat? We are in the trough of the
+sea, without steam, and as near as I can make out through the mist, driving
+on the Irish coast with more rapidity than we bargained for!"</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens!" was the very natural exclamation in reply, as the American
+managed with some difficulty to throw on the one or two articles of
+clothing of which he had divested himself.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose that it is a bad job," the journalist continued, "and what just
+now makes me feel peculiarly bad about it is the fact that I was the means
+of inducing you to come on board, and that if any thing serious should
+happen&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! not a word of that!" said the lawyer, appreciating fully that
+chivalrous generosity which after conferring a great favor could take blame
+to itself for any peril growing out of that favor. "Hush! You have treated
+me, Mr. Fitzmaurice, with great kindness, and I hope you will believe me
+man enough not to misunderstand our relative positions in any thing that
+may occur."</p>
+
+<p>Fitzmaurice, who seemed to be relieved by the words, but who certainly was
+laboring under an amount of depression not incident alone to any peril in
+which he stood personally involved,&mdash;grasped his hand with something more
+than the ordinary pressure of brief acquaintance. The motion of the boat,
+alternately a roll and then a heavy plunge, had now become absolutely
+fearful, intermingled with occasional repetitions of that crashing blow
+which had started the American from his slumber; but holding fast of each
+other and of various substantial objects that fell in their course, the two
+young men reached the companion way and the deck, the journalist detailing
+meanwhile, in hasty and broken words,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span> what he knew of the extent of the
+difficulty in which they were involved.</p>
+
+<p>Up to fifteen or twenty minutes before, the little Emerald, a capital
+sea-boat but possessed of but a single engine (which description of single
+engine boats, by the way, should never be allowed to make voyages by open
+sea, except under the especial pilotage of one Malthus), had been making
+good weather, though the blow had increased to a gale and the waves of the
+Irish Channel increased to such size that they seemed to be opposed to the
+Union and determined to make an eternal severance of the two islands.
+Fitzmaurice had himself awoke about an hour before, and gone upon deck
+because unable to sleep longer; and he had consequently become aware, a
+little before the American in his berth did so, of an accident to the
+vessel. One moment of cessation of the plunging roll with which she had
+been ploughing ahead of the waves breaking on her larboard quarter&mdash;a
+moment of almost perfect stillness, as if the little vessel lay moored in
+some quiet haven&mdash;then a sudden veering round and that terrible crash and
+shock of the waves under the counter, the wheel, and along the whole side,
+which told that she was lying helpless in the trough of the sea, a marine
+Samson as thoroughly disabled as if she had been shorn of all her strength
+at once by the shears of one of the Fates. A word from one of the officers,
+the moment afterwards, had told him of some disarrangement of the engine,
+consequent on the severe strain of the heavy sea upon the boat; and he had
+then been left to study out for himself the amount of peril that might be
+involved, and to observe the coolness with which officers and men devoted
+themselves to a task which might or might not be successful&mdash;which might
+terminate at any moment in one of those terrible seas breaching the little
+vessel and foundering her as if she had indeed been nothing but a
+yawl-boat! It was at this stage that he had come down and wakened his
+friend of a few hours, feeling some responsibility for his safety (as well
+as a presentiment with regard to him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span> which he by no means expressed in
+words), and leaving the Queen's messenger to pursue his dreamless sleep
+until it should end in Kingstown harbor or at the bottom of "Davy Jones'
+locker."</p>
+
+<p>By the time all this had been expressed in one tenth the number of words
+here employed, they had reached the deck, and certainly the prospect there
+was any thing but one calculated to reassure either. The Emerald was
+rolling wheel-houses under, in the trough of the sea, but so far
+mysteriously relieving herself through the scuppers as it seemed impossible
+that she should do. Two men were at the wheel, but they stood necessarily
+idle. Forward were half a dozen men, holding on to keep from going
+overboard at the first lurch. Even above the roar of the storm could be
+heard the sharp clink of hammers coming up from the engine-room and each
+sounding yet one pulse-beat of Hope. The south-easter was howling with
+demoniac fury, wailing through the rigging as if singing requiems for them
+all in advance, and driving before it the thin mists that shut away any
+idea of the sky. By the light on deck and on the troubled expanse of water
+eastward it was evident that day was breaking; and it was through a
+knowledge of that fact and of the rate of speed at which they had been
+steaming and driving partially before the wind all night, that Fitzmaurice
+had made his calculation expressed below, that they must be close on the
+Irish coast, a lee-shore, in such a blow, of no pleasant character.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the situation&mdash;a deplorable one, as any one can readily perceive
+who has ever seen its precise parallel; yet not entirely a hopeless one,
+for they might not be so close upon the coast as had been feared, and the
+engine might yet be thrown again into gear before the little vessel
+foundered and in time to claw off from the danger lying to leeward.
+Fitzmaurice had seen the position before: the American saw it at once
+through his own eyes and from the explanations given him by the journalist.
+The moment was not favorable for conversation, in that perilous motion,
+that roar of wind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span> and wave and that suspense of mind; and the two young
+men held none except in a few words almost shouted to each other, but stood
+far aft on the larboard quarter, waiting calmly as two men with human
+instincts could be expected to wait for&mdash;what Heaven only knew! The face of
+the Anglo-Irishman was almost thoughtlessly calm, in spite of the anxiety
+which he had so plainly expressed: that of the American was dark, his lips
+set and his brow contracted, but there was no sign of shrinking and no
+indication of that basest passion, fear! Who could believe that the man
+standing there in the gray light of morning and awaiting without one
+apparent tremor of the muscles what might be an immediate and a painful
+death, bore a name that had been so lately dishonored by the most abject
+cowardice?</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly there was a cry which has blanched many a cheek and made many a
+lip tremble since Noah made his first sea-voyage in the Ark: "Land on the
+starboard quarter!" followed by another and yet more startling call:
+"Breakers to leeward!"</p>
+
+<p>Fitzmaurice and the American both turned instantly in the direction
+indicated, as was inevitable; and then they saw that the warning cry from
+the look-out was not the result of any illusion. The daylight was rapidly
+broadening, the mist had for the moment driven away leeward; and apparently
+not more than a mile away rose a huge dark headland assuming the
+proportions of a mountain, while at its base and in the exact direction
+towards which the doomed vessel was drifting, the sea was breaking in
+wreaths of white foam over ledges of rock which seemed to be already so
+near that they must go grinding and crashing upon them before the lapse of
+five minutes. They felt that the water shoaled, too, for the plunging roll
+of the disabled steamer grew every moment more terrible, and just as the
+cry was given she was breached at the waist by a sea from which she did not
+immediately clear herself. It only needed an eye that had ever scanned
+peril by sea and shore, to know at that moment that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span> Emerald and all on
+board were as certainly doomed, in all human probability, as if the one had
+been already broken up and scattered along the coast in fragments and the
+others made food for fishes along the rocks of Ireland's Eye!</p>
+
+<p>"The Hill of Howth and the rocks at the foot of it!" cried Fitzmaurice as
+he recognized the position. "Now God help us, for they are dead to leeward,
+and if we have any accounts to settle we had better settle them rapidly!"</p>
+
+<p>There was little agitation in his tone, now, and there was none in that of
+the American as he replied two words. They were the last he ever spoke, to
+mortal ear. May they have been true when he awoke from his long sleep, as
+they were before he fell into it! Those two words were:</p>
+
+<p>"I see!"</p>
+
+<p>The two men were standing, as has been said, very near the larboard
+quarter. The Emerald, too, as has also been already said, was very low in
+the bulwarks, as befitted her rake and her clipper appearance. Just as the
+lawyer uttered the two words, one of the officers of the steamer came aft,
+holding on amidst the terrible roll with something of the tenacity of a
+cat, and took his place at the wheel. The mist had closed down again and
+the Hill of Howth and the breakers were both for the moment shut away.</p>
+
+<p>There was a jar&mdash;a creeping, trembling jar that seemed to run through the
+little steamer, from stem to stern-post, and yet no blow from the fierce
+waves and no grinding of her keel upon the dreaded rocks. It was
+life&mdash;motion&mdash;the beat of machinery once more! At that critical juncture
+the engine had moved again for the first time, and if not safety there was
+yet at least another struggle with destiny. The officer had dashed back to
+throw the steamer up into the wind, the very instant that he felt the steam
+once more rushing into the cylinder.</p>
+
+<p>Then followed what cannot be described, because no one living can say
+precisely what occurred. Gathering way almost in an instant from the mad
+dash of her wheels into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span> water, the little Emerald plunged forward as
+if for her life. She had but a hundred or two yards of vantage ground left,
+and seemed to know it. As she gathered way and the quick whirl of the wheel
+swept her head gradually round to the sea, one mighty wave, as if afraid of
+being baulked of its prey and determined upon a final effort, struck her
+under the weather bow and port wheel and sent her careening so low to
+leeward that the starboard wheel-house and even the starboard quarter-rail
+were under water. She rolled back again in an instant, triumphant over the
+great enemy, and thenceforward dashed away from the white breakers on her
+lee as if she had been merely tantalizing them with a futile prospect of
+her destruction,&mdash;to make her way safely two hours afterwards into
+Kingstown Harbor and to land the Queen's messenger (who had just then
+awoke) and the correspondent of the <i>Evening Mail</i>, only an hour later than
+the passengers by the packet had disembarked.</p>
+
+<p>But she did not land the American. When the steamer rolled down with her
+starboard quarter-rail under water, Fitzmaurice, standing nearest to the
+larboard quarter, called out to his companion: "Look out and hold on!" then
+clutched the bulwark with his own hands and obeyed his own injunction. But
+when the steamer righted he was alone! Whether the lawyer had missed
+footing and failed to grasp any point of support at the critical moment, or
+whether he had lost head in the dizzying motion and gone over without even
+knowing his danger,&mdash;certain it is that he had been swept overboard under
+circumstances in which the whole British navy could have done no more to
+save him than one child of ten years! Henry Fitzmaurice, missing him and
+dreading what had really occurred, thought that for one second he saw a
+human head, with the hair streaming up, away off in the yeasty water: but
+that was all. And he said, bitterly, realizing all the painful facts of the
+event, and taking to himself a thought of regret that was likely to cling
+to him while his generous heart continued to beat:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"My God!&mdash;it was just as I thought! I have been the means of drowning that
+splendid fellow, after all!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A few hours later, little Shelah, the barefooted daughter of one of the
+poor fishermen whose hut stood at the foot of Howth, around northward
+towards Ireland's Eye&mdash;little Shelah, who had gone down over the rocks to
+the beach when the worst of the storm was over, rushed back to the cabin
+with terror in her eyes and broken words upon her lips:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, father!&mdash;there bees a man all dead and dhrownded down there by the
+rocks beyant! And he bees so handsome and so much like a rale
+gintleman!&mdash;how could he dhround? Come down and see till him, father!"</p>
+
+<p>The fisherman went down, and he and his rough mates removed the body and
+did their humble and ineffectual all to resuscitate a body from which the
+breath of life had long departed. Then the fisherman and his wife and his
+mates and little Shelah all mourned over the manly beauty that had been
+sacrificed, and wondered who he could possibly be, and where his kindred
+would mourn for him. It was only when Father Michael, the good old priest
+of the parish was summoned, that they could form any nearer idea of the
+personality of the drowned man. Then they knew, for Father Michael could
+read, as they could not, and he told them, from one of the cards in the
+pocket-book, that "his name had been Carlton Brand, and that he had
+belonged to Philadelphia, away over in America, where they used to be so
+free and happy, but where they were fighting, now, all the time, about the
+naygurs that didn't seem to him worth the throuble!"</p>
+
+<p>They buried him, with such lamentations as they might have bestowed upon
+"one of their own," in consecrated ground in a little graveyard a mile away
+from the Hill, westward; and Father Michael gave the dead man the benefit
+of a benevolent doubt as to his religion, with the remark that "there were
+good Christians over in America, and this was one of them, maybe!" uttering
+a prayer for the repose of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span> soul that, if it bore him no nearer to the
+Beautiful Gate, certainly left him no farther away from it, while it
+fulfilled the behest of a simple and beautiful faith! This done, and a note
+despatched to his favorite journal, giving the name and place of burial of
+the unfortunate man, Father Michael felt, as he had reason to feel, that he
+had done his whole melancholy duty.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever the quest of the American, it was ended: whatever had been the
+secret of his unrest, it was not a secret to the eyes that thenceforth
+watched over a destiny no longer temporal but eternal.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It has been suggested that Henry Fitzmaurice, the journalist, so strangely
+thrown into the company of the Philadelphian, so much pleased with his
+manner and impressed by his conversation, and so suddenly separated from
+him by an accident which seemed to have something of his own handiwork in
+its production,&mdash;was likely to bear with him, during life, a regret born of
+that circumstance. Such being the case, it was eminently natural that in
+giving a description of the accident to the despatch-steamer and the peril
+to her passengers, on the day following, in the <i>Mail</i>, he should have
+dwelt at some length on the sad fate of Mr. Carlton Brand, the American,
+alluded in terms of warm respect to the character which had briefly fallen
+under his observation, and felicitates the far-away friends of the
+unfortunate man, on the fact already made public in the <i>Nation</i>, that the
+body had been early recovered and received tender and honorable Christian
+burial.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XXII.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper&mdash;Crossing the
+Rappahannock&mdash;The Fight and the Calamity of Rawson's
+Cross-Roads&mdash;Taking of Culpeper&mdash;Pleasanton's Volunteer
+Aide&mdash;Townsend versus Coles&mdash;The Meeting of two who Loved
+each other&mdash;And the little Ride they took together.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>On Sunday the thirteenth day of September, 1863, and Monday the fourteenth,
+but principally on the former day, took place that running fight which
+displayed some of the very noblest qualities of the federal cavalry shown
+during the War for the Union, and which is better entitled than otherwise
+to be designated as the Battle of Culpeper. One of the first conclusive
+indications was given in that fight, that while the rebel cavalry, which at
+the beginning of the war was certainly excellent, had been running down
+from the giving out of their trained horses, and the deterioration of the
+quality of their riders through forced conscription,&mdash;the Union cavalry, at
+first contemptible in force and inefficient in comparison to their very
+numbers, had every day been improving as fast as augmenting, until they had
+become the superiors of what the best of their foes had been at the
+beginning of the contest. War can make any thing (except perhaps statesmen)
+out of a given quantity of American material; but it can unmake as well,
+when it strains the material existing and creates a forced supply for the
+vacant places of the dead and the vanquished, out of the infirm and the
+incapable; and before the end of this conflict the lesson will have been so
+closely read as never to need a repetition.</p>
+
+<p>The rebels held Culpeper and the south bank of the Rappahannock, and had
+held the whole of that line for weeks, formidable in their occasional
+demonstrations, but still more formidable in what it was believed they
+<i>might</i> do by a sudden<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span> crossing of that dividing stream at some moment
+when the Union forces should be deficient in vigilance, preoccupied, or
+otherwise embarrassed. They were to be driven back if possible, from their
+threatening front, or if not driven back, at least struck such a blow as
+would make early offensive operations on their part improbable. These were
+the intentions, so far as they can be known and judged, which led to the
+crossing of the Rappahannock at that particular juncture.</p>
+
+<p>At three o'clock on the morning of that Sunday which was to join with so
+many other days of battle during the rebellion in proving that "there are
+no Sabbaths in war,"&mdash;at an hour when the thick darkness preceding the dawn
+hung like a pall over the banks of the rugged stream and the hostile forces
+that fringed it on either side&mdash;the cavalry camps on the north side of the
+Rappahannock were all astir. All astir, and yet all strangely quiet, in
+comparison with the activity manifested. No mellow bugle rang out its notes
+of reveille; there was no rattle of drum or shrieking of fife; the laggard
+sleeper was awakened by a touch on the shoulder, a shake, or a quick word
+in his ear. Horses were saddled in silence; and at the commands: "Prepare
+to mount!" "Mount!" given in the lowest possible tones that could command
+attention, the drowsy blue-jacketted, yellow-trimmed troopers, all
+be-spurred and be-sabred as if equal foes to the horses they were to ride
+and the enemies they were to encounter,&mdash;vaulted lightly or swung
+themselves heavily, according to the manner of each particular man, into
+their high peaked McClellan saddles that seemed to be all that was left
+them of their old leader. The squadrons were formed as quietly and with as
+few words as had accompanied the awakening and the mounting; for if a
+surprise of the enemy's force was to take place, it was a matter of the
+highest consequence that no loud sound or careless exclamation should reach
+the ears of the wary pickets and wide-awake videttes of the rebels hugging
+close the banks on the south side of the narrow river.</p>
+
+<p>The preparations were at last and hastily completed, long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span> before the gray
+dawn after the moonless night had begun to break over the Virginia hills
+lying dark and cool to the eastward. Perhaps that very morning had been
+selected for the attack because on the night before the new moon had made
+its appearance and there was no tell-tale lingerer to throw an awkward
+gleam on an accoutrement and thus tell a story meant to be concealed.
+Troopers clustered together and formed squadrons, squadrons were merged
+into regiments which in turn swelled to brigades and brigades to divisions.
+It was only then that the extensive nature of the movement, which had
+Pleasanton at the head and Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick all engaged in the
+execution, could have been conjectured even by an eye capable of peering
+through the darkness. It seemed scarcely an hour after the first awakening
+when the formation was complete and the order to "March!" given; and there
+was not even yet a gleam of red in the eastern sky when the whole command
+was in motion.</p>
+
+<p>This large cavalry force, under Pleasanton as we have said, was composed of
+three divisions, commanded respectively by Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick,
+all Brigadiers. The Rappahannock was crossed at as many different points,
+Buford with the First going over at Starke's Ford; Gregg, with the Second,
+at Sulphur Springs, four miles distant; and Kilpatrick, with the Third, at
+Kelly's Ford, nine miles farther down and thirteen miles distant from the
+place of crossing of the First. Stuart, the famous "Jeb," with his
+confederate cavalry, was known to be in force on the elevated ground at and
+around Culpeper Court House, with his pickets and videttes extending to the
+very edge of the Rappahannock; and a wide sweep of the Union force was
+believed to be necessary to circumvent him. Detachments of rebel troops
+were also known to hold all the prominent points between Culpeper and
+Brandy Station, where the brigades of Lomax and W. F. H. Lee were lying.</p>
+
+<p>Pleasanton was over the river, with all his force before broad daylight&mdash;so
+rapid and successful had been the movement.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span> The roads were dry and in as
+good order as Virginia roads are ever allowed to be by the powers that
+preside over highways; and the force, still in the three divisions, swept
+southward as silently as iron-shod animals have the capacity for bearing
+iron-accoutred riders. Napoleon <i>la Petit</i> had never yet succeeded in
+introducing gutta-percha scabbards for the swords of his troopers and
+gutta-percha shoes for their horses, even into the French cavalry; and the
+Yankee troops of Pleasanton had all the disadvantages of the usual rattling
+of bridle-bits, the clattering of sabres within steel scabbards, and the
+pounding of multitudinous hoofs upon the hard dry earth, the latter
+occasionally a little muffled by an inch of gray powdery dust, choking the
+riders as it made their advance less noisy.</p>
+
+<p>Spite of the clanking of hoof and steel, however, the advance was made with
+such silence and celerity that the greater portion of the rebel pickets on
+the southern bank of the Rappahannock were captured, while the
+remainder&mdash;here and there one scenting danger afar off and holding an
+advantage in knowledge of the roads&mdash;fled in dismay to report that the
+whole Army of the Potomac, sappers and miners, pioneers and pontoniers,
+horse, foot and dragoons, was closing in upon Culpeper.</p>
+
+<p>As the morning advanced and the light grew stronger, so that the danger and
+the persons of the attacking forces could at once be better distinguished,
+skirmishing commenced with that portion of the rebel force, stationed in
+more or less strength at various points and called to arms by their pickets
+being driven in upon them,&mdash;to meet and if possible check the advancing
+columns. Not long before they discovered that any effectual check to the
+forces which Pleasanton seemed to be pouring down every cross road and
+throwing out from behind every clump of woods on the roadsides, was
+impossible; and they fell back, skirmishing.</p>
+
+<p>At Brandy Station (droll and unfortunate name, destined to supply more bad
+jokes at the expense of the dry throats<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span> of the army than almost any other
+spot on Virginia soil), a junction of the three divisions of Union troops
+was effected; and there, while that disposition was being made, a sharp
+fight took place between the First, under Buford, and the rebel cavalry
+under Colonel Beale of the Ninth Virginia. But that struggle, though sharp,
+was only of brief continuance: out-foughten, and it must be confessed,
+outnumbered, the enemy was driven back from the Station and pursued
+vigorously.</p>
+
+<p>While the gallant Buford was thus occupied with the First, Gregg, with the
+Second division was making a detour to the right and pouring down his
+troopers upon Culpeper from the north by the Ridgeville road, driving
+before him upon the main body at the Court House a rebel brigade that had
+held the advance, under General Lomax (an officer whose name, we may as
+well say, apropos of the bad jokes of war-time, had caused nearly as many
+of those verbal outrages upon English, as the unfortunate Brandy Station
+itself).</p>
+
+<p>Kilpatrick, meanwhile, with his Third division had not been idle. (When was
+he ever known to be idle, except when others held him in check, or
+ineffective except when some other than himself misdirected his dashing
+energy?) He had swept around to the left, nearly at the same time that
+Gregg made the detour to the right, and striking the Stevensburgh road
+advanced rapidly from the east towards Culpeper and the right of the
+enemy's position, which rested on Rawson's Cross-Roads, two miles
+south-east of the Court-House. The rebels here made a stubborn resistance,
+and steel met steel and pistol-shot replied to sabre-stroke as it had not
+before done that day; but the odds were a little against them; they were
+outflanked by that incarnate "raider" of the Sussex mountains of New
+Jersey, who no doubt could trace back some drop of his blood to Johnny
+Armstrong the riever of the Scottish border, or the moss troopers of the
+Bog of Allen in Ireland; and they fell back to the town and beyond it,
+taking up new positions which they were not destined to hold much longer
+than those they had abandoned.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But this brief shock of battle between the division of Kilpatrick and the
+rebels opposed to it, did not roll away from the little hamlet of Rawson's
+Cross-Roads without the enacting of one of those sad tragedies, in the
+shedding of the blood of non-combatants, which seem so much more painful
+than the wholesale but expected slaughter of the field. Near the crossing
+of the roads there stood one brick house, of two stories, the only one of
+that material in the vicinity. This house, when Kilpatrick came up, was
+occupied by the rebel sharp-shooters, partially sheltered by the thick
+walls and bringing down the federal cavalry from their saddles at every
+discharge of their deadly rifles. Such obstructions in the way of an
+advance, especially when they destroy as well as embarrass, are not apt to
+be treated with much toleration by those who have the power to sweep them
+away; and immediately when the imminence of the danger was discovered, one
+of the federal batteries was ordered up to dislodge the sharp-shooters. It
+dashed up with all the celerity that whipped and spurred and galloping
+horses could give it, halted within point-blank range, unlimbered, and sent
+shell, canister and case-shot into and through the obnoxious edifice in a
+manner and with a rapidity little calculated upon by the mason who quietly
+laid his courses of bricks for the front and side-walls, in the quiet years
+before Virginia secession. The sharp-shooters were soon silenced and
+dislodged&mdash;at least all of them who were left after the last deadly
+discharge of missiles had been poured in by the battery; and the house was
+at once occupied, when the firing ceased, by a detachment of Union cavalry
+dismounted for that service. When those men entered the half-ruined
+building they first became aware of this extraordinary and deplorable
+tragedy, in which a little blood went so far in awakening regret and
+horror. They heard cries of pain and shrieks of distress and fear, echoing
+through the building, in other accents than those which could belong to
+wounded soldiers&mdash;the tones of women! And in the cellar they found the
+painful solution of the mystery&mdash;more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span> painful far, to them, than a hundred
+times the death and suffering under ordinary circumstances. In that cellar,
+among smoke, and blood and dust, were huddled twenty or thirty
+non-combatants, men, women and children; and in their midst lay an old man,
+quite dead and the upper part of his head half carried away by a portion of
+shell, while fallen partially across his legs was the body of his son of
+sixteen, his boyish features scarcely yet stilled in the repose of death
+from a ghastly hurt that had torn away the arm and a part of the shoulder.
+Two women lay near, one dying from a blow on the temple which had driven in
+the bones of the skull like the crushing of an egg-shell, and the other
+uttering the most heart-rending of the cries and groans under the agony of
+a crushed leg and a foot literally blown to atoms. A sad sight!&mdash;a
+harrowing spectacle, even for war-time! And how had it been occasioned?</p>
+
+<p>It would seem that on the approach of the cavalry and the commencement of
+fighting in the neighborhood, this party of non-combatants had crowded into
+this house&mdash;no doubt long to be known in the local traditions of the place
+as that of James Inskip,&mdash;and taken refuge in the cellar, believing that in
+it, as the only brick house in the vicinity, they would be safest from the
+missiles of the opposing forces. And so they would have been, safe enough
+beyond a doubt, had not the rebel commander, unaware of the presence of
+non-combatants in the building, or heedless of the common law of humanity
+not to expose them to unnecessary danger in any military operation,
+recklessly placed his sharp-shooters in shelter there and thus drawn the
+fire of the fatal battery. Two or three of the shells, crashing through the
+house, had fallen into the cellar and exploded in the very midst of the
+trembling skulkers in their place of fancied security,&mdash;with the sad
+results that have been recorded, and which none more deeply deplored than
+the men who had unwittingly slaughtered the aged and the helpless. Some of
+the Richmond papers told harrowing stories, a few days after, of the
+"inhuman barbarity of the dastardly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span> Yankees who wantonly butchered those
+inoffensive men and helpless women and children in James Inskip's house at
+Rawson's Cross-Roads"; but they forgot, as newspapers on both sides of the
+sad struggle have too often done during its continuance, to add one word of
+the explanatory and extenuating circumstances!</p>
+
+<p>By the time that Kilpatrick, with the Third, had concluded the episode of
+Rawson's Cross-Roads and driven the opposing forces back upon the town,
+Buford, with the First, after chasing the rebel cavalry under Beale to
+moderate satisfaction, had come up from the south, and the junction of the
+three divisions was accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>On the elevated site of Culpeper and in the uneven streets of that old town
+which bears, like so many of its compeers, shabby recollections of English
+aristocracy that for some cause seem to suit it better than the thin
+pretence of democratic government,&mdash;there Stuart, than whom the rebellion
+has developed no more restless or more active foe of the Union cause,
+appeared determined to make a last and effectual stand. With a celerity
+worthy of his past reputation he placed sharp-shooters in houses that
+commanded the Union advance, planted batteries at advantageous positions in
+the streets, and threw up barricades of all the unemployed carts and wagons
+and all the idle timber and loose fence-rails lying about the town, in a
+manner which would have endeared him to the Parisians of the time of Louis
+Philippe. Right and left and on every hand, defending these obstructions
+and supporting the batteries, dashed his mounted "Virginia gentlemen," once
+the very Paladins of their knightly class, when Fauquier and the White
+Sulphur saw the pleasant sport of tilting at the ring in the presence of
+the bright-eyed Queens of Beauty of the Old Dominion,&mdash;now brought down to
+the level and compelled to contest the fatal advance, of a "horde of Yankee
+tailors on horseback"!</p>
+
+<p>General Pleasanton, the actual as well as nominal head of the Union
+advance, held his position on an eminence a short<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span> distance east of the
+town, from which an excellent view of the whole situation could be
+commanded, and whence he directed all the movements with the rapidity of a
+soldier and the coolness of a man thoroughly in confidence with himself and
+well assured of the material of his command. He had won with the same
+troops before, even when placed at disadvantage: that day he felt that the
+game was in his own hands and that he could play it rapidly and yet
+steadily. The thing which worst troubled him as from that little eminence
+he looked out from under his bent brows, over the scene which was to
+witness so short, sharp and decisive a conflict,&mdash;was the knowledge how
+seriously the stubborn resistance offered by the rebels was likely to peril
+the non-combatants in the town, and how inevitably, from the same cause,
+the old town itself, just tumble-down enough to be historical and
+picturesque, must suffer from the flying shot and shell that know so little
+mercy. He had hoped, the first surprise succeeding, to take Culpeper
+against but slight resistance; and it was no part of his plan (it never
+<i>is</i> part of the plan of any truly brave man!) to batter the town if that
+measure could be avoided; but the balances and compensations of war are
+appreciable if not gratifying, musketry on one side is nearly sure to be
+answered in kind by the other, and artillery (when there happens to be any,
+and wo to the party without the "big guns" when the other has them at
+command!)&mdash;artillery has a very natural habit of replying to the thunderous
+defiance sent out by its hostile kinsmen. Culpeper, too well defended, was
+not the less certain to be taken, while it was the more certain to bear
+marks of the conflict that only the demolition of half its buildings could
+erase.</p>
+
+<p>God pity and help the residents of any town given up to the ruthless
+passions of a fierce soldiery&mdash;to plunder and rapine and murder,&mdash;after
+what is so inadequately described as "taking by <i>storm</i>"! When for the
+moment hell is let loose upon the earth, as if to teach us that if we have
+yet something of the god lingering in our fallen manhood, we have yet
+something of the arch-fiend remaining to show how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span> we accompanied him in
+his fall. When roofs blaze because a reckless hand has dashed a torch
+therein in the very wantonness of destruction. When the golden vessels of
+the church service and the sacred little memorials of happy hours in
+boudoir and bed-room are alike torn from their places, dashed into pieces
+and ground under armed heels, as if the inanimate objects bore a share of
+the wrong of resistance and could feel a part of the suffering meted out to
+it. When murder is for the time licensed and the blood of the defender of
+his door-stone and his hearth dabbles his gray hair on one or the other of
+those sacred places, and there is no thought of punishment for the red
+hand, except as God may silently mete it in the years to come.
+When&mdash;saddest and worst of all,&mdash;the matron is outraged before the eyes of
+her bound and blaspheming husband; and young girls, the peach-bloom of
+maidenhood not yet brushed from the cheek, are torn shrieking from the arms
+that would shelter them, to be so polluted and dishonored by a ruffian
+touch that but yesterday would have seemed impossible to their dainty flesh
+as the rising up of a fiend from the lower pit to rend the white garments
+of one of the redeemed in heaven,&mdash;so polluted and dishonored that a prayer
+for the mercy of death bubbles up from the lips at the last word before
+resistance becomes insensibility.</p>
+
+<p>This wreck of a "storm" of human license is terrible&mdash;so terrible that the
+effects of the convulsions of nature, the tempest, the tornado and even the
+earthquake, sink into insignificance beside them. Heaven be praised that
+during the War for the Union, called by our English cousins so
+"fratricidal," we have as yet known no Badajos or even a sacking of Pekin!
+But only second to such scenes in horror and scarcely second in terror,
+have been some of those supplied when the battle issue of the two armies
+was joined near some quiet country town before lying peaceful and
+inoffensive, or when military necessity has made its houses temporary
+fortifications and its streets the points of desperate attacks and as
+desperate defences. Then what crashing of shot and shell<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span> through houses;
+what demolition of all that had before been sacred; what huddling together
+of the frightened and the defenceless who never before dreamed that, though
+war was in the land, it would break so near to <i>them</i>; what mad gathering
+of valuables and impotent preparations for flight that would be more
+dangerous than remaining; what whistling of bullets that seemed each
+billeted for a defenceless breast; what thunderous discharges of cannon
+that made every non-combatant limb quiver and every delicate cheek grow
+bloodless; what shouts in the street and cries of terror and dismay within
+doors; what trembling peeps through half-closed shutters, with an imagined
+death even in every such momentary exposure; what cowerings in cellars and
+hidings beneath piles of old lumber in garrets; what reports of defeat or
+victory to the party that was feared or favored; what claspings of children
+and ungovernable weepings of hysteria; what prayers and what execrations;
+what breakings-up and destructions of all that had been, and what
+revelations of the desolation that is to be!</p>
+
+<p>Such, since the breaking out of the rebellion, has been the situation of
+many a before-peaceful town, in many a State that once rested happily under
+the shadow of the Eagle's wing. And such was the situation of one fated old
+town that day, when Gregg from the north, Kilpatrick from the east and
+Buford from the south, came up almost simultaneously and their forces
+charged recklessly into the streets of Culpeper Court-House. The excitement
+and confusion in the town at once became all that we have so feebly
+endeavored to indicate&mdash;women shrieking in terror, soldiers groaning with
+their wounds, children crying from fright; and blended with these and a
+hundred other inharmonious sounds, the shouts in the street, the bugle
+calls, the hissing of bullets, the rumble of artillery wheels, the broken
+thunder of the feet of trampling horses, the occasional crash of
+half-demolished houses, and the hoarse roar of the batteries as they
+belched out their missiles of death and destruction. Culpeper, for a short<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span>
+period, was a veritable pandemonium in miniature; and no detail can add to
+the force of that brief but comprehensive description.</p>
+
+<p>Near the railroad bridge spanning the little stream running nearly through
+the centre of the town, the rebels had discovered a strategic point of no
+little consequence, and they had posted there a battery of several pieces,
+well served and annoying the advance of the Third division very materially.
+The battery seemed to be placed there, not only to obstruct the advance but
+to protect a train of cars just then being loaded by the rebels above, with
+munitions and other articles of consequence, preparatory to a start down
+the railroad southward. Battery D., Second New York Artillery, ordered for
+that service, ran up its sections at a gallop, unlimbered and poured in
+shot and shell, grape and canister upon the train, in such disagreeable
+rapidity as sent the half loaded cars away towards the Rapidan with all the
+speed that could be suddenly mustered. Still the battery at the bridge
+remained, firing rapidly and cutting up the head of Kilpatrick's column in
+a manner calculated to make the General gnash his teeth in indignation. The
+space to the bridge was uphill, accordingly raked downward by the rebel
+fire; the bridge itself was narrow and the footing for horses seriously
+damaged by the railroad tracks that crossed it with their switches and
+lines of slippery iron. Still it was known that that bridge must be
+cleared, at any cost, or the advance through Culpeper would be a most
+bloody one if accomplished at all. Just as Kilpatrick was about to order a
+charge of cavalry to clear that bridge and if possible capture the pieces,
+his intention seemed to be anticipated and a squadron of Stuart's cavalry
+rode down and took post, dismounted, behind the battery, in position to
+support, while three or four companies of rebel riflemen followed, ready to
+do deadly execution with their pieces against any troops attempting to
+charge, and to fall upon that force with resistless fury at the moment of
+their weakness, if the guns should be ridden over! No pleasant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span> prospect,
+as the Sussex raider thought, and for a moment he apparently wavered in
+intention, while the battery played heavily and every instant saw one or
+more of his best troopers biting the dust of the causeway below.</p>
+
+<p>But this momentary indecision, whether or not it would have continued much
+longer of his own volition, was not destined to do so when the will of
+another came into play. A horseman dashed rapidly over to the spot where
+Kilpatrick was momentarily halted, from Pleasanton a few hundreds of yards
+away, running a fearful gauntlet of the enemy's fire, as he did so, from a
+battery that had just wheeled into position and opened down a narrow
+cross-street to the left,&mdash;spoke a few quick words to the General and then
+awaited the movement that was to follow. And it was not long that he or the
+commander who sent him needed to wait. The command had been: "Clear that
+bridge and take the battery, at all hazards!" and Kilpatrick only needed
+that support of his own judgment to order a charge which he would have been
+best pleased, if he could only have gone back to be a Colonel for a few
+moments, to lead in person. His eye rolled questioningly over the Third for
+a moment, and then the rapid words of command followed. Only a certain
+number of cavalry could be employed upon that dangerous service, without
+making the carnage greater by throwing the troopers literally in the way of
+each other; and it was the Second New York, Harris Light Guard, a troop
+which had already won honor on every field touched by the hoofs of their
+horses,&mdash;called out for that quick, sharp, perilous duty that every
+squadron in the command probably coveted.</p>
+
+<p>The gallant Second received the order with loud cheers that came nigh to
+imitating the well-known rebel fox-hunting yell, for some of their best
+fellows had fallen ingloriously and the human tiger was not only unchained
+but set on horseback. They formed column by fours with a rapidity which
+told of the fierce hunger of conflict; and when the bugles rang out the
+charge, the dusty and smoke-stained<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</a></span> riders returned their now-useless
+carbines to their slings, drew sabres, and driving their spurs rowel deep
+into the flanks of horses that seemed almost as anxious as themselves,
+dashed forward towards the bridge. Their ringing shouts did not cease as
+they galloped on, and their sword-blades, if they grew thinner in number,
+still gleamed as brightly as ever in the sunlight, as they measured that
+narrow but fatal space, while round after round of grape and canister,
+carbine-bullets, musket-balls and rifle-shots, burst into their faces and
+mowed down their flanks as they swept on. Saddles were emptied, horses went
+down with cries of pain more fearful than any that man can utter, and brave
+men went headlong into the dust from which they would never rise again in
+life. But the progress of the charging squadron did not seem to be delayed
+a moment. The rebel gunners of the battery were reloading for yet one more
+discharge, when, just in the midst of that operation, over the bridge and
+upon them burst the head of that column which seemed as if nothing in the
+way of human missiles had power to stay it. Before the gray and begrimed
+cannoniers could withdraw their rammers the troopers were in their midst.
+Then followed that fierce cutting and thrusting of artillery swords and
+cavalry sabres, that interchange of revolver-shots and crushing of human
+bones under the feet of trampling horses, incident to the taking of any
+battery that is sharply attacked and bravely defended. A little of this,
+but still under heavy fire from behind,&mdash;and the guns were captured, with
+all their men and horses left alive.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the work of the Second New York in that quarter was by no means
+finished. That steady and murderous fire continued from up the street, as
+the infantry and the dismounted cavalry of the support fell back; and it
+was only by one more sweeping charge that the annoyance could be removed.
+Scarcely any one knew whence came the voice that ordered that second
+charge, but the blood of the troopers was up and they made it gallantly. In
+three minutes thereafter a broken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</a></span> and flying mass, far up the street, was
+all that remained of the supporting force; but a fearfully diminished
+number of the cavalrymen rode back to assist in sending the captured
+battery to the rear. We shall have occasion, presently, to know something
+more of these two charges, undoubtedly the most spirited events of a day on
+which all the Union troops and many of the rebels reflected honor upon the
+causes they supported.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately after the clearing of the bridge a gallant dash was made by
+Gen. Custer, the "boy general with the golden-locks" (the man who has made
+a solemn vow, it is said, never to shorten those locks until he rides
+victoriously into Richmond) leading the charge in person, with portions of
+the First Vermont and First Michigan cavalry, against a section of a
+battery, stationed nearly a quarter of a mile beyond the bridge and within
+a hundred or two yards of the front of Stuart's main body. These pieces
+were worked by as obstinate a set of gray-backs as ever rammed home a rebel
+cartridge; and the gunners, defiant of Custer's detour to the left to
+escape a direct raking fire, and apparently relying upon the main body
+lying so near them, continued to load and fire until the federal leader and
+his men were literally on the top of the pieces and fairly riding them
+under foot. Guns and caissons were taken, while the support relied upon
+seemed to be so paralyzed by the daring of the whole affair as scarcely to
+offer any resistance,&mdash;the horses hitched to the pieces, the guns limbered
+up, and the rebel gunners even forced to mount and drive their lost cannon
+to join the others in the rear!</p>
+
+<p>A considerable rebel force of cavalry, artillery and infantry were by this
+time in full retreat below the town, along the line of the Orange and
+Alexandria railroad; and the Fifth New York cavalry were sent in pursuit.
+The gallant troopers of the Fifth charged at a gallop the moment they came
+within sweeping distance of the foe, but the high embankment of the road
+broke the charge, and the detour necessary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span> to make a more advantageous
+approach deprived the gallant boys of their half-won laurels and allowed
+the flying enemy to escape.</p>
+
+<p>While Kilpatrick was thus engaged, Buford and Gregg, with the First and
+Second, had been by no means idle. Dashing into the town, each from his
+chosen direction, the troopers of each leaped barricades and drove the
+rebels before them wherever encountered upon open ground; and a part of the
+force of either division, dismounted, skirmished from corner to corner and
+dislodged the sharp-shooters one by one from all their holes and
+hiding-places. Sometimes stubbornly resisted, at others seeming to have no
+foe worthy of their steel, the three divisions won their way through the
+old town; and the cavalry of Stuart, up to that time so often declared
+invincible, were at last driven pell-mell out of Culpeper and back to the
+momentary refuge of Pony Mountain. Even there they were again dislodged,
+the First Michigan cavalry accomplishing a feat which might have surprised
+even Halstead Rowan of this chronicle&mdash;routing a whole brigade by charging
+up a hill so steep that some of the riders slipped backwards over the tails
+of their horses, their saddles bearing them company!</p>
+
+<p>The town of Culpeper was finally occupied at one o'clock, <span class="smcap">p. m.</span>; and not
+many hours after the ridge behind it and Pony Mountain were in the hands of
+the dashing cavalrymen. Retreating towards the Rapidan, they were pursued
+towards Raccoon Ford on the left and centre by Buford and Kilpatrick with
+the First and Third divisions, while Gregg, with the Second, pushed a heavy
+Rebel force before him to Rapidan Station. By nightfall the rebels had been
+driven to the north bank of the Rapidan, where both forces bivouacked that
+night in line of battle.</p>
+
+<p>Monday morning saw the recommencement of hostilities and the retreat of the
+rebels to the south side of the river, leaving the federal forces to hold
+the country between the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, with all the
+strategic points<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</a></span> therein, Culpeper included. Stuart, it was said, had
+often boasted that "no Yankee force could drive <i>him</i> from Culpeper!" and
+if such a boast was really made and afterwards so signally disproved by the
+"horde of Yankee tailors on horseback," the fact only furnishes one more
+additional proof to Benedick's declaration that he would live and die a
+bachelor, so soon followed by his marriage with Beatrice,&mdash;that humanity is
+very uncertain and that human calculations are fallible to a degree painful
+to contemplate!</p>
+
+<p>Such were the general features of the crossing of the Rappahannock and the
+Battle of Culpeper, one of the sharpest cavalry affairs of the war, and
+perhaps more important as illustrating the reliability to which the Union
+horse had attained from a beginning little less than contemptible, than
+from the mere military advantage gained by the movement. It now becomes
+necessary to descend to a few particulars connected with the event of the
+day, and briefly to trace the influence on the fortunes of some of the
+leading characters in this narration, exercised by the advance of General
+Pleasanton and his dashing brigadiers.</p>
+
+<p>It has been seen that at a certain period of that day the division of
+Kilpatrick was held temporarily in check by the rebel battery posted at the
+railroad-bridge, and that for a moment the General, aware of the necessity
+of removing the obstruction if the direct advance through Culpeper was to
+be continued, yet hesitated in ordering the charge which must be made in
+the face of such overwhelming difficulty, until a peremptory direction from
+Pleasanton left him no option in the matter. And it is to personal
+movements of that particular period that attention must at this moment be
+directed.</p>
+
+<p>Just when he made the discovery through his field glass of the havoc being
+wrought by the rebel battery and the momentary hesitation, Pleasanton, who
+did not happen to be in the best of humors with reference to it, was placed
+in the same situation in which Wellington for a few moments found himself
+on the day of Waterloo, when he employed the button-bagman<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[Pg 469]</a></span> with the blue
+umbrella under his arm, to carry some important orders. He was, in short,
+out of aide-de-camps. One by one they had been sent away to different
+points, and it so chanced, just then, that none had returned. Something
+very much like an oath muttered between the lips of the impatient veteran
+of forty, and one exclamation came out so that there was no difficulty in
+recognizing it:</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody here when everybody is worst wanted! I wish the d&mdash;l had the whole
+pack of them!"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps <i>I</i> can do what you wish, General."</p>
+
+<p>The words came from a young man in civilian's dress&mdash;gray pants and
+broad-brimmed felt hat, but with a military suspicion in his coat of light
+blue flannel,&mdash;who stood very near the commander, his horse's bridle over
+arm and a large field glass in hand, and who had apparently been scanning
+with much interest a scene of blood in which it was neither his duty nor
+his disposition to take part.</p>
+
+<p>"You?" and the veteran turned upon him, with something very like a laugh on
+his lips. "You? Humph! Do you know what I want?"</p>
+
+<p>"Some one to carry an order, I suppose!"</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly! Over that causeway, to Kilpatrick at the bridge. Do you see how
+that flanking battery to the left is raking every thing, and the one in
+front is throwing beyond Kil's position? The chances are about even that
+the man who starts never gets there! Now do you wish to go?"</p>
+
+<p>"No objection on that account!" was the reply of the young man, who seemed
+to be on terms of very easy intimacy with the General, as indeed he was,&mdash;a
+privileged visitor, who had accompanied him in the advance, but eminently
+"unattached" and thus far neither fighting nor expected to fight.</p>
+
+<p>"The d&mdash;l you haven't! Well, &mdash;&mdash;, that is certainly cool, for <i>you</i>! Never
+mind&mdash;if you like a little personal taste of what war really is, take
+this," and he scribbled a few words on a slip of paper on his raised
+knee&mdash;"take this and get it to Kilpatrick as soon as you can. If you do not
+come back again, I shall send word to your family."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, thank you, General; but I shall come back again!" He had swung
+himself into the saddle of his gray, while Pleasanton was writing, and the
+veteran held the paper for one instant in his hand and looked into his face
+with a strange interest. What he saw there seemed to satisfy him, and he
+handed the paper with a nod. The volunteer aide-de-camp received it with a
+bow, and the next moment was flying towards the front of the Third, riding
+splendidly, running the gauntlet that has before been suggested, but
+untouched, and delivering his orders in very quick time and at emphatically
+the right moment. The important movement which immediately followed has
+already been narrated, in its bearing on the result of the day; but there
+were other effects not less important when personal destinies are taken
+into the account.</p>
+
+<p>Gregg, who espied something on the right, that was likely to be hidden from
+Kilpatrick until it discovered itself by unpleasant consequences, had sent
+over an aide with a word of warning; and nearly at the same moment when the
+volunteer messenger from Pleasanton reached the brigadier, the officer from
+Gregg rode rapidly up from his direction. Both delivered their messages in
+a breath, and then both fell back at a gesture from the General. The aide
+from Gregg was turning his horse to ride back again to his post, when he
+caught a glance at the somewhat strangely attired man who had come in from
+Pleasanton. From his lower garments that glance naturally went up to his
+hat, and thence, by an equally natural movement, to his face. The dark
+brows of the officer bent darker in an instant, and perhaps there was that
+in his gaze which the other <i>felt</i>, (there are those who assert that such
+things are possible), for the next instant there was an answering glance
+and another pair of brows were knitted not less decidedly. Those two men
+were serving (more or less) in the same cause, but they looked as little as
+possible like two warm-hearted comrades in arms&mdash;much more as if they would
+have been delighted to take each other by the throat and mutually exert
+that gentle pressure calculated to expel a life or two!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Pleasanton was just calling out the Second to take the battery and clear
+the bridge. While he was doing so, the evil genius of one of those men
+drove them into collision. The messenger from Gregg, who wore the
+shoulder-straps and other accoutrements of a Captain on staff service, but
+with a cavalry sabre at his belt,&mdash;after the pause of a moment and while
+the other was still fixedly regarding him, spurred his horse close up to
+the side of the gray ridden by the civilian, and accosted him in a tone and
+with a general manner that he seemed to take no pains to render amiable:</p>
+
+<p>"What are <i>you</i> doing here?"</p>
+
+<p>"On staff service, Captain. How is your head?" was the reply, with quite as
+much of sneer in the tone as the other had displayed of arrogance.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you call yourself just now?&mdash;'Horace Townsend' still?" was the
+Captain's next inquiry.</p>
+
+<p>"To most others, yes: to you, Captain Hector Coles, just now, I am&mdash;" and
+he bent his mouth so close to the ear of the other that he could have no
+difficulty in hearing him, though he spoke the last words in a hoarse
+whisper that has even escaped <i>us</i>!</p>
+
+<p>"I thought so, all the while!" was the reply, an expression of malignant
+joy crossing the face. "The same infernal coward&mdash;I knew it!"</p>
+
+<p>The face of the man who had been Horace Townsend seemed convulsed by a
+spasm of mortal agony the instant after, but it gave place almost as
+quickly to an expression of set, deadly anger, the eyes blazing and the
+cheeks livid. He leaned close to the Captain and even grasped his arm as if
+to make sure that he should not get away before he had finished his whole
+sentence.</p>
+
+<p>"Captain Hector Coles," he said, still in the same low, hoarse voice, but
+so near that the other could easily hear&mdash;"you called me the same name five
+or six weeks ago at the Crawford House, and I am afraid that I <i>proved</i>
+that it belonged to <i>you</i>!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I told you that I would kill you some day for that impertinence, and I
+<i>will</i>!" was the reply of the Captain, terrible anger in his face.</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;if you kill me at all, and I do not think you will,&mdash;it will be
+because you believe me, with good reason, something more of a favorite with
+a lady whose name it is not necessary to mention, than yourself!"</p>
+
+<p>This insulting boast of preference and allusion to Margaret Hayley were
+quite as well understood as they needed to be. There was another livid
+cheek, just then, and a fierce answering fire in the eye which told how
+deeply the barb rankled. But before the Captain could speak, to utter words
+that must have been equally bitter and blasphemous, the civilian continued:</p>
+
+<p>"You challenged me for what I said at the White Mountains, Captain Hector
+Coles&mdash;you man with a swimming in the head! I refused your challenge then,
+but I accept it now. If you are not the coward you called <i>me</i>, you will
+fight me here and instantly!"</p>
+
+<p>"Here and now?" These were all the words that the surprised and possibly
+horrified Captain could utter.</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly!" was the reply, the voice still low and hoarse but rapid and
+without one indication of tremor. "I told you that I was on staff service.
+So I am. I have just brought General Kilpatrick orders from General
+Pleasanton to clear that bridge and take the battery yonder that is doing
+us so much damage. Ah! by George&mdash;there goes another of our best fellows!"
+This as a round shot came tearing into the ranks just ahead, killing one of
+the troopers and his horse. Then he resumed, in the same low rapid tone:
+"You see those New York boys forming there, to do the work. Ride with them
+and with <i>me</i>, if you <span class="smcap">DARE</span>, Captain Hector Coles, and see who goes
+furthest! That is my duel!"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I?</i>&mdash;I am on staff duty&mdash;not a mere cavalryman!" There was hesitation in
+the voice and deadly pallor on the cheek: the civilian heard the one and
+saw the other.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Refuse to go with me and fight out our quarrel in that manner," the
+excited voice went on, "and by the God who made us both, the whole army
+shall know who is the coward! More&mdash;" and again his mouth was very near to
+the ear of the other&mdash;"<i>she</i> shall know it!"</p>
+
+<p>There are spells by which the fiend can always be raised, without much
+doubt, however troublesome it may be to find any means by which to lay him
+afterwards. To Captain Hector Coles there was one conjuration irresistible,
+and that had been used in the present instance. Shame before the whole army
+was nothing&mdash;it may be doubted, in fact, whether he had not known something
+of that infliction before at least a portion of the army, and survived it
+without difficulty. But shame before Margaret Hayley, after the boasts he
+had used, the underrating of others in which he had indulged, and the
+worship of physical courage which he knew to be actually a foible in her
+nature?&mdash;no, that was not to be thought of for one moment! Better wounds or
+death, out of the way of both which he had before so skilfully kept, than
+that! This reflection did not occupy many seconds, and his heavy brow was
+as black as thunder as he turned short round in the saddle and almost
+hissed at his tempter:</p>
+
+<p>"Come on, then, fool as well as coward, and see how long before I will
+teach you a lesson!"</p>
+
+<p>Horace Townsend&mdash;as he must still be called&mdash;did not say another word in
+reply. The Light Guard were by that time formed for the charge, and he
+merely said, in the hearing of all:</p>
+
+<p>"Come&mdash;the Captain and I are going to take a ride with the boys! Who will
+lend me a sword?"</p>
+
+<p>The strange demand for a moment drew general attention to him, and among
+other regards that of Kilpatrick. The idea of a civilian throwing himself
+into such a charge seemed to strike him at once, and before one of the
+orderlies could draw out his weapon and present it, the General had handed
+his, with the words:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Here is mine!&mdash;Mind that you bring it back again!"</p>
+
+<p>Kilpatrick unslung his sword and held up the scabbard with the blade, but
+the new volunteer merely drew out the blade with a bow and driving spurs
+into his gray dashed forward to the head of the column, Captain Hector
+Coles close beside him. Perhaps no two men ever went into battle side by
+side, with precisely the same relative feelings, since carving up men with
+the broadsword became a profession. Neither, it seems almost certain, had
+the least thought of devotion to the country, of hatred to the rebellion,
+or even of <i>esprit du corps</i>, moving him to the contest. The one was intent
+upon revenging an insult received long before, by getting the other killed
+in proving him a coward,&mdash;and may have had another but still personal
+motive: that other was equally anxious to keep up his own reputation in the
+eyes of a woman, and to get removed out of his way a man whom he believed
+to be a rival, but who was really no more in his way than Shakspeare's
+nobody who "died a' Wednesday." Both half blind with rage and hate, and
+both, therefore&mdash;let the truth be told&mdash;bad soldiers! Both following a
+petty whim or facing death as a mere experiment, and neither with the most
+distant thought of the fate that rode close behind, to protect or to slay,
+and each alike inevitably!</p>
+
+<p>Just then the bugle rang out, the commands "Column forward! Trot, march!
+Gallop, march! Charge!" rang out in quick succession, and away dashed the
+Second, with the results that have already been foreshadowed in the general
+account of the movement. But though armies and the various smaller bodies
+that form armies, are great aggregates of manhood, they are something more;
+and who can measure, in reading an account of that bridge so gallantly
+carried, that attack so splendidly repulsed, or that point of battle held
+against every odds, with the conclusion&mdash;"Our loss was only two hundred [or
+two thousand], in killed and wounded,"&mdash;who can measure, we ask, the amount
+of personal suffering involved in that movement and its result?&mdash;who can
+form<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[Pg 475]</a></span> any guess at the variety of personal adventure, depression,
+elevation, hope, fear, delirious joy and maddening horror, going to make up
+that event spoken of so flippantly as one great total?</p>
+
+<p>The rebel battery beyond the bridge had been throwing round shot and shell,
+as has already been observed, reaching far beyond Kilpatrick's front and
+doing heavy damage. It was inevitable that as the advance of the attacking
+column was seen, that fire should be redoubled. And before they had crossed
+half the intervening distance the rain of bullets from the supporting rebel
+riflemen began to blend with the fall of heavier projectiles, making a very
+storm of destructive missiles, more difficult for horsemen to breast than
+any opposing charge of their own weight could have been, splitting heads,
+crashing out brains, boring bodies full of holes from which the blood and
+the life went out together, and hurling horses and riders to the ground
+with such frequency that wounded men had their little remaining breath
+trampled out by their own comrades and every fallen animal formed a
+temporary barricade over which another fell and became disabled. Through
+the air around them rang the scream of shell and the shrill whistle of
+bullets, blended with the inevitable cry that rose as some bullet found a
+fatal mark, and the roar of agony when a horse was hurled desperately
+wounded and yet living to the ground. The shout with which the troopers had
+at first broken into their charge, did not die away; and it did not cease,
+in fact, until the command had done its work&mdash;until the battery was taken
+and the supports scattered by the supplementary onset; but with what sounds
+it was blent before the cavalrymen reached the rebel guns, only those who
+have listened to the same horrible confusion of noises can form the most
+distant idea. To all others the attempt at description must be as vague as
+the thought of Armageddon or the Day of Falling Mountains!</p>
+
+<p>If those sights and sounds cannot be described, who shall describe the
+sensations of those who then for the first time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[Pg 476]</a></span> rode point-blank into the
+very face of death? Not we, certainly. The very man who has experienced
+them can tell no more, one hour after, of what existed at the time, than
+one moment's rift in a drifting cloud reveals of the starlit heaven above.</p>
+
+<p>What Captain Hector Coles really felt when first meeting that iron and
+leaden storm so unlike the usual accompaniments of his "staff service," may
+be guessed but can never be known. He rode on gallantly, at least for a
+time: that was quite enough.</p>
+
+<p>What the <i>ci-devant</i> Horace Townsend experienced may be easily enough
+indicated, and in one word&mdash;<i>madness</i>. He was stark, raving mad! The anger
+felt a few moments before; the novelty of the position; the motion of a
+horse that bore him nobly: the sword, that was no holiday weapon but a
+thing of might and death, clasped by his unaccustomed but nervous hand; the
+shouts of fierce bravery, the groans of anguish and the scream of missiles;
+above all, the rousing for the first time of that human tiger which sleeps
+within most of us until the fit moment of awakening comes&mdash;no witches'
+cauldron on a blasted heath ever brewed such a mixture to craze a human
+brain, as that he was so suddenly drinking; and it may be said that his
+rational self knew nothing of what followed. He was riding on&mdash;it might
+have been on horseback on the solid earth, in a fiery chariot through the
+air, or on the crest of a storm-wave at sea&mdash;he could have formed no idea
+which. When he came within striking distance of the foe, he was swinging
+that heavy sword of Kilpatrick's, at something, everything, he knew not
+what, that seemed to stand in his way. Nothing appeared to hurt him,
+nothing to stop him or the gallant gray he rode. There was a red mist over
+his eyes, and the thunder of twenty judgments rang in his ears: he knew no
+more. He was mad, stark mad&mdash;so drunk with the wine of human blood and the
+fiendish joy of battle, that the powers of heaven might have looked down in
+pity on him as upon a new and better<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</a></span> developed descendant of the original
+Cain, smiting all his brothers to a death that could not satisfy the hot
+thirst of his evil soul.</p>
+
+<p>Only once he seemed to be for a moment clearly conscious. It was when they
+rode full upon the battery, trampling down men and horses and sabring every
+thing that had life, but under a fire which seemed to rain from the opened
+windows of hell. He saw a man who had thus far kept at his side, recoil,
+rein his horse backward, leap over the fallen friends and foes who barred
+his flight, and dash down the track towards the bridge. He saw, and knew
+Captain Hector Coles; and in his madness he had reason enough left to shout
+"Aha! Coward! Coward!" and then the red mist closed again over his eyes and
+he fought on. He did not see what followed before the flying man reached
+the bridge&mdash;the fragment of a shell that struck him in the back and
+literally tore him in pieces, horse and rider going down and lying stone
+dead together.</p>
+
+<p>He could not have told, under oath, who gave the command for that
+supplemental charge upon the supporting force. And yet <i>his</i> tongue uttered
+it, and he was in the front, still waving his sword through the red mist
+and letting it fall with demoniac force upon every thing that stood in his
+way,&mdash;when the last hope of the rebels was thus broken. He had known but
+little, most of the time: after that he knew literally nothing except that
+his fierce joy had turned to pain. As if through miles of forest he heard
+the notes of the bugles sounding the recall; and he had a dim consciousness
+of hearing the soldiers speaking of him in words that would have given him
+great pleasure had he been alive to appreciate them! Then he was back at
+the bridge. Kilpatrick was there, somebody cheered, and the General held
+out his hand to him. He tried to hand him back the sword that had done such
+good service, said: "I have brought it&mdash;back&mdash;" and spoke no more. Then and
+only then, as he fell from his blown and beaten gray, they knew that his
+first charge had a likelihood of being his last&mdash;that a Minie bullet,
+received so long before that some of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[Pg 478]</a></span> blood lay dried upon his coat,
+had passed through him from breast to back,&mdash;thank God not from back to
+breast!&mdash;so near the heart that even the surgeon could not say whether it
+had touched or missed it!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIII.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Once more at West Philadelphia&mdash;September and Change&mdash;Last
+glimpses of Kitty Hood and Dick Compton&mdash;Robert Brand and
+his Invited Guest&mdash;The News of Death&mdash;Old Espeth Graeme as a
+Seeress&mdash;The Despatch from Alexandria&mdash;The Quest of Brand
+and Margaret Hayley.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Hurrying rapidly towards its close, this narration must become yet more
+desultory and at times even more fragmentary, than it has been in the past.
+The seven-league boots of story must be pulled on, however unwillingly, and
+many a spot that would have been lingered lovingly over at the commencement
+of the journey, cleared now with a glance and a bound. The few pages that
+remain, in fact, may justify a change in the figure, appearing more like
+lightning glimpses from railroad-car windows than connected and leisurely
+views of the whole landscape of story.</p>
+
+<p>September on West Philadelphia, where it seems but yesterday, though really
+three months ago, that we saw the fair June morning and inhaled the perfume
+of the sweet June roses. Those roses, the companions in life and death of
+that with which Margaret Hayley was toying on the morning when she met the
+crushing blow of her life,&mdash;had long since sighed out their last breath of
+fragrance and faded away, to be followed now by the bright green leaves
+amid which they had clustered and peeped and hidden. The waving grain
+fields<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[Pg 479]</a></span> which had formed so pleasant a portion of the June landscape, were
+changed as much, though less sadly. Bright golden wheat that had formed
+part of it, lay heaped in the farmer's granaries; and puffed loaves with
+crisp brown crust, made from that which had still further progressed in its
+round of usefulness to man, lay on the baker's counter. There was short
+stubble where the grain had waved, and over it the second growth of clover
+was weaving its green mantle of concealment. In the peach orchards the
+fruit hung ripe to tempt the fingers; the apples were growing more golden
+amid the masses of leaves where they coyly sheltered themselves from the
+sun; and on the garden trellises there already began to be dots of purple
+among the amber green of the grape clusters. There was less of bright,
+glossy green in the foliage&mdash;nature's summer coat had been some time worn
+and began to give tokens of the rain and wind and sun it had encountered.
+The birds sang in the branches, but their song seemed more staid and less
+sprightly, as if they too had felt the passage of the months, grown older,
+and could be playful children no more. Occasionally the long clarionet
+chirp of a locust would break out and trill and die away upon the air,
+telling of fading summer and the decline of life so sweetly and yet so
+sadly that decay became almost a glory. The mellow, golden early afternoon
+of the year, as June had been its late morning&mdash;not less beautiful,
+perhaps, but oh how immeasurably less sprightly and bewitching&mdash;how much
+more calm, sober and subduing!</p>
+
+<p>Nature moves onward, and humanity seldom stands still, if it does not
+outstrip the footsteps of the mother. Something of the changes that had
+fallen during the preceding three months upon that widely varied group of
+residents beyond the Schuylkill who have supplied characters to this
+narration, is already known: what remains may be briefly told at this stage
+and in the closing events soon to follow. Of those changes to Eleanor Hill,
+Nathan Bladesden and Dr. Pomeroy, directly; of those to the members of the
+Brand household, yet sooner; of those to two minor characters who will make
+no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[Pg 480]</a></span> further appearance upon the stage during this life-drama, at once. Let
+that two be Dick Compton, farmer, and Kitty Hood, school-mistress. The
+latter yet managed her brood of troublesome children, who still sailed
+their vessels that had succeeded to the evanescent three-master "Snorter,
+of Philadelphia," at playtime, in the little pond before the rural
+school-house, and performed other juvenile operations by sea and shore; but
+a great change had fallen upon the merry, self-willed little girl with the
+brown eyes and the wavy brown hair. The school had a mistress, but that
+mistress had a <i>master</i>&mdash;a sort of "power behind the throne" not seldom
+managed by one sex or the other, towards all persons "in authority." No
+bickerings at the school-house door, to be afterwards forgotten in
+explanations and kisses, now. Richard Compton found his way there,
+occasionally and perhaps oftener, but he always came in at once instead of
+the school-mistress going out to meet him with a bashful down-casting of
+the eyes and a pretty flush of modesty upon the cheek; and he made so
+little concealment about the visits that he often managed them so as to
+wait until school was dismissed and then walked all the way home with her!
+If the young lovers yet had secrets, they found some other place than the
+neighborhood of the school-house door, for their utterance. And the big
+girls and the bigger boys, who used to enjoy such multitudes of sly gibes
+at the school-mistress and her "beau," had lost all their material of
+amusement. The very last attempt at jocularity in that direction had been
+some time before effectually "squelched" by the dictum of the biggest boy
+in school: "You boys, jest stop peeking at 'em! He ain't her beau no
+more&mdash;he's her husband; and you jest let 'em do what they're a mind to!"</p>
+
+<p>That is the fact, precisely&mdash;no less assured because approached with a
+little necessary circumlocution. Dick Compton had come back from
+Gettysburgh with the Reserves, unwounded and a hero. Carlton Brand was
+gone, and the only object of jealousy removed. And before Kitty had quite
+emerged from her "valley of humiliation" at the unfortunate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[Pg 481]</a></span> slap and
+unpatriotic upbraiding, she found it too late to emerge at all. The
+wedding-day had been set and the marriage taken place, almost before she
+had any idea that such things were in immediate contemplation! Kitty Hood
+was "Mrs. Richard Compton," and that was the secret of the visits no longer
+stolen and the unabashed walking home together. Not that the visits of the
+young farmer to the school excited no commotion, now-a-days, but that the
+commotion was of a different character. All the big boys and some of the
+big girls hated him, as he strode up the aisle with his broad, hearty:
+"'Most ready to go home, Kitty?" and his proprietary taking possession of
+her with his eyes: hated him because he had to some extent come between her
+and them, and because there was a rumor that "after November he was not
+going to allow her to keep school any more." Perhaps there were good
+reasons for this resolution, into which we shall certainly make no more
+attempt to pry than was made by the big boys themselves! God's blessing on
+the young couple, with as much content in the farm-house as can well fall
+to the lot of a small indefinite number,&mdash;and with as few
+misunderstandings, coldnesses and jealousies as may be deemed necessary by
+the powers that preside over married life, to fit them for that life in
+which "they neither marry nor are given in marriage!" And so exit Mr. and
+Mrs. Richard Compton, for whom we have done all that the friend and the
+minister could do, leaving Providence and the doctor to take care of the
+remainder.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>That matter properly disposed of, it becomes necessary to visit the house
+of Robert Brand once more, on the morning of Friday the eighteenth day of
+September, after an absence from it of nearly the three months before
+designated. Change here, too. Besides whatever might have been wrought in
+the master of the house during that period, of which we shall be soon
+advised, there had been a marked difference wrought in the relations
+sustained by good, warm-hearted, sisterly, darling<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[Pg 482]</a></span> little Elsie. There had
+been no return to the house, of the old family physician, first
+expatriated, so to speak, by word of mouth, and then bull-dogged and
+threatened with the protrusion of loaded muskets from convenient windows
+and the application of the strong arms of old Elspeth Graeme who could
+handle the bull-dog. The doctor's-bill had long before been settled, and
+(let us put the whole truth upon record) spent! Then Robert Brand had been
+again seized with terrible illness and suffering, rendering a physician
+necessary; and what resource was left except the before-despised
+professional services of Dr. James Holton? None whatever. So the old man
+thought and so Elsie Brand <i>knew</i>. Result, Dr. James Holton had suddenly
+found himself, in July, the medical adviser of the Brands, and the adviser,
+mental, moral and medical, of Elsie. He had since so remained, seeming to
+do marvels at re-establishing the shattered constitution of the invalid and
+setting him once more on his natural feet, and with a pleasant prospect
+that all the difficulties were smoothed out of the way of his eventual
+union with Elsie, when a little more time and a little enlarged practice
+should make their marriage advisable. And Elsie had grown almost happy once
+more&mdash;quite happy in the regard of a good man whom she loved with all the
+warmth of the big heart in her plump little body, and yet restless, nervous
+and tearful when she thought of the brother cherished so dearly, of his
+broken love, his alienated father, his absence in a strange land, and the
+probability that she could never again lay her golden head upon his breast
+and look up into his eyes as to the noblest and most godlike of them all.</p>
+
+<p>At a little before noon on that September morning, a single figure was
+moving slowly backward and forward, up and down, the length of the garden
+walk in the rear of the house of Robert Brand, the trellises of the grapery
+above and on either side, for nearly the whole distance, flecking the
+autumn sunshine that fell on the walk and on the moving figure, while from
+the vines themselves peeped the thick clusters of amber<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[Pg 483]</a></span> fruit upon which
+the purple bloom was just beginning to throw a hint of October and luscious
+ripeness. Late flowers bloomed in the walks and borders on either side;
+occasionally a bird sent up its quiet and contented twitter from the top of
+the vine where it was tasting a premature grape; a cicala's chirp rang
+feebly out, swelled up to a volume that filled the whole garden, then died
+away again, an indefinable feeling of stillness seeming to lie in the very
+sound. The sunlight was golden, the sky perfectly cloudless, the air balmy
+and indolent; beneath the trellis and beside the walk two long rustic
+settees combined with the wooing air and beckoned to closed eyes,
+day-dreams and repose; and yet the very opposite of repose was expressed in
+the appearance and movement of that single figure.</p>
+
+<p>It was that of Robert Brand, three months older than we saw him in the
+early summer, far less an invalid than he had been at that time, as
+evidenced by the absence of his swathed limb and supporting cane, yet more
+broken within that period than most men break in ten twelvemonths&mdash;more
+than he had himself broken before in the same period of his severest years
+of bodily suffering. Something of the iron expression of the mouth was
+gone, and in its place were furrowed lines of suffering that the torture of
+the body could scarcely have imprinted there without the corresponding
+agony of the mind; he was more stooped in the shoulders than he had been
+when before observed; and down the side-hair that showed from beneath his
+broad hat&mdash;hair that had been fast but evenly changing from gray to white,
+there now lay great streaks of finger thickness, white as the driven snow
+and in painful contrast with the other,&mdash;such streaks as are not often made
+in hair or beard except by the pressure of terrible want, a great sorrow,
+or a month of California fever. This was not all&mdash;he walked with head
+dejectedly bent, and hands beneath the skirts of his coat; and when he
+glanced up for a moment it could be seen that his lip trembled and the eye
+had a sad, troubled expression that might have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[Pg 484]</a></span> told of tears past, tears
+to come, or a feeling far too absorbing for either. Alas!&mdash;the old man was
+indeed suffering. The shame of a life had been followed by its sorrow. He
+had erred terribly in meeting the one, and paid the after penalty: how
+could he muster fortitude enough to meet the other?</p>
+
+<p>To him old Elspeth Graeme, large-faced, massive-framed, and powerful
+looking as of old, with a countenance no more changed during the preceding
+three months than a granite boulder in the mountains might have been
+affected by a little wind and storm during the same lapse of time. Behind
+her Carlo, who since the disappearance of his young master seemed to have
+found no one else except the old Scottish woman who could pretend to
+exercise any control over him, and who consequently had attached himself to
+her almost exclusively. The master, who was making one of his turns up the
+walk, saw her as she emerged from the house, and met her as she approached,
+with inquiry in face and voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Stephen has just come ben with the carriage, and the leddy is in the
+house, though the Laird kens what ye'r wantin' of her here, ava!"</p>
+
+<p>"Hold your tongue, woman! When I need your opinion I will ask you for it!"
+This in a tone very much like that of the Robert Brand of old, in little
+squabbles of the same character. Then with the voice much softened: "Is
+Margaret Hayley in the house, do you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"'Deed she is, then, and she'll just be tired of waiting for ye, as the
+lassie's gone, gin ye dinna haste a bit!"</p>
+
+<p>"I will come&mdash;no, ask her to step into the garden; I will see her here."</p>
+
+<p>"He's gettin' dafter than ever, I'm thinkin', to invite a born leddy out
+into the garden to see <i>him</i>, instead of ganging in till her as he should!"
+muttered the old serving-woman as she turned away to obey the injunction,
+and in that way satisfying, for the time, her part of the inevitable
+quarrel. The moment after the back door of the house opened again,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[Pg 485]</a></span> and
+Margaret Hayley came out alone. Stately as ever in step, though perhaps a
+little slower; the charm of youth and budding womanhood in face and figure,
+with the broad sun flashing on her dark hair and seeming to crown her with
+a dusky glory; but something calmer, softer, sadder, ay, even older,
+visible in her whole appearance and manner, than could have been read there
+in that first morning of June, upon the piazza of her own house. She, too,
+had been living much within a brief period: it may be that the course of
+this narration has furnished the reader with better data for judging <i>how</i>
+much, than any that lay in the possession of Robert Brand.</p>
+
+<p>She approached the end of the arbor from which he was emerging, and he met
+her before she had reached it. Her face, as they met, wore an unmistakable
+expression of wonder&mdash;his an equally unmistakable one of pain. Neither
+spoke for one moment, then the old lawyer held out his hand and said:</p>
+
+<p>"You wonder, Margaret, why I sent for you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Did <i>you</i> send, really, Mr. Brand? I thought that perhaps Stephen had made
+a mistake and that Elsie wished to see me for some reason."</p>
+
+<p>"No, Elsie has been absent all the morning, and may not return for an hour
+or two yet," was the reply. "<i>I</i> sent for you. I had a reason. Old men do
+not trifle with young women, perhaps you are aware." There was that in his
+voice which displayed strong suffering and even an effort to speak. The
+young girl saw and heard, and the wonder in her eyes deepened into anxiety
+as she said:</p>
+
+<p>"You surprise me by something in your manner, Mr. Brand. You almost alarm
+me. Pray do not keep me in suspense. I think I am not so well able to bear
+anxiety and mystery as I used to be. Why did you send for me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Poor girl!" the lips of Robert Brand muttered, so low that she did not
+catch the words. Much less did she hear the two words that followed, in
+little more than a whispered<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[Pg 486]</a></span> groan: "Poor girl!&mdash;poor father!" Then he
+took one of the white hands in his, the eyes of the young girl deepening in
+wonder and anxiety all the while,&mdash;led her a little down the path to one of
+the rustic seats under the trellis, dropped down upon it and drew her down
+beside him, uttering a sigh, as he took his seat, like that of a person
+over-fatigued.</p>
+
+<p>"You loved my son." He did not look at her as he spoke the words.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Brand&mdash;I beg of you&mdash;" and then Margaret Hayley paused, her throat
+absolutely choked with that to which she could not give utterance. He did
+not seem to heed her, but went on.</p>
+
+<p>"You loved my son. So did I. God knows how <i>I</i> loved him, and I believe
+that your love was as true as heaven."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Brand&mdash;for that heaven's sake, why do you say this, to kill us both? I
+cannot listen&mdash;" she rose from the seat with a start and stood before him
+as if ready to fly; but he yet retained her hand and drew her down again.</p>
+
+<p>"We both loved him, and yet we killed him! You drove him from you. I cast
+him off and cursed him. We killed him. He is dead!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dead?" The word was not a question&mdash;it was not an exclamation&mdash;it was not
+a cry of mortal agony&mdash;it was all three blended. Then she uttered no other
+word but sat as one stupefied, while he went on, his lip quivering with
+that most painful expression which has before been noticed, and his hand
+fumbling at his pocket for something that he seemed to wish to extract from
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, he is dead. I have known it for two hours&mdash;for two long hours I have
+known that I had <i>no son</i>." Type cannot indicate the melancholy fall of the
+last two words, and the heart-broken feeling they conveyed. "My son loved
+you, Margaret Hayley, better than he loved his old father. You loved him.
+You should have been his wife. When I knew that he was dead, I tried to
+conceal it from all until I could send for you, for I felt that it was only
+here and from my lips<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[Pg 487]</a></span> that you should learn the truth. Some other might
+have told you with less thought for your feelings, perhaps, than I
+who&mdash;who&mdash;who was so proud of him. I have not been rough, have I? I did not
+mean to be&mdash;I meant to be very gentle, to <i>you</i>, Margaret! See how broken I
+am!"</p>
+
+<p>So he was, poor old man!&mdash;broken in heart and voice, for then he gave way
+and dropped his head upon one of his failing hands, overpowered, helpless,
+little more than a child.</p>
+
+<p>Who shall describe the feelings of Margaret Hayley as she heard the words
+which told her of that one bereavement beyond hope&mdash;as she heard them in
+those piteous tones and from that agonized father&mdash;a father no more?
+Absence, silence, shame, separation of heart from heart upon earth, hope
+against hope and fear without a name&mdash;all were closed and finished at once
+and forever, in that one great earthquake of fact, opening and swallowing
+her world of thought&mdash;dead! Tears had not yet come&mdash;the blind agony that
+precedes them if it does not render them impossible, was just then her
+terrible portion.</p>
+
+<p>"How did he&mdash;when&mdash;where&mdash;you have not told me&mdash;" A child just learning to
+speak might have been making that feeble attempt at asking a connected
+question. But Robert Brand understood her, too well. His hand, again
+fumbling at his pocket, brought out that of which it had been in search,
+and his trembling fingers half opened a newspaper and put it into hers, to
+blast her sense with that greater certainty which seems to dwell in written
+or printed intelligence than in the mere utterance of the lips&mdash;to destroy
+the last lingering hope that might have remained and put the very dying
+scene before the eyes so little fitted to look upon it. A line of ink was
+drawn around part of one of the columns uppermost, and the reader had not
+even the painful respite of looking to find what she dreaded. And of course
+that paper was a copy of the <i>Dublin Evening Mail</i>, sent to Robert Brand by
+one of his distant relatives in England who had chanced to see what it
+contained&mdash;the graphic account of the drowning of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[Pg 488]</a></span> Carlton Brand from the
+deck of the despatch-steamer, of the finding of the body and the burial in
+the little graveyard back of the Hill of Howth, written by that attached
+friend of a night, Henry Fitzmaurice.</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Hayley read through that account, every word of which seemed to
+exhaust one more drop from the life-blood at her heart,&mdash;in stony silence
+and without a motion that could have been perceived. Then the paper slid
+from her hands to the ground, she turned her head towards Robert Brand with
+that slow and undecided motion so sad to see because it indicates a
+palsying of the quick natural energies; and the instant after, that took
+place which told, better than any other action could have done, how much
+each had built upon that foundation of an expected near and dear
+relationship. Robert Brand met that hopeless gaze, reading her whole secret
+even as his own was being read. Then he opened his arms with a cry that was
+almost a scream: "My daughter!" and the poor girl fell into them and flung
+her own around his neck with the answering cry: "Father!" Both were sobbing
+then; both had found the relief of tears. And a sadder spectacle was never
+presented; for while Margaret Hayley, in the father of the man she had so
+loved, was striving to embrace something of the dead form that never could
+be embraced in reality, Robert Brand was still more truly clasping a
+shadow&mdash;trying to find his lost son who could never come to his arms again,
+in the thing which had been dearest to that son while in life!</p>
+
+<p>"My son is dead! Come to me; live with me; be a sister to Elsie and a
+daughter to me, or I shall never be able to bear my punishment!" sobbed the
+broken old man, his arms still around the pliant form bowed upon his
+shoulder; but there came no answer, as there needed none. Another voice
+blended with those that had before spoken, at that moment, and again old
+Elspeth Graeme stood under the trellis. But was it said a little while
+since that no change had come upon her since the fading of the roses of
+June?&mdash;certainly there had been a change<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[Pg 489]</a></span> startling and fearful to
+contemplate, even in the few moments elapsing since her former speech with
+her master. The rough, coarse face had assumed an expression in which
+bitter sorrow was contending with terrible anger; the bluish gray eyes
+literally blazed with such light as might have filled those of a tigress
+robbed of her young; and it would have needed no violent stretch of fancy
+to believe that she had revived one of the old traditions of her Gaelic
+race and become a mad prophetess of wrath and denunciation. Strangely
+enough, too, Carlo was again behind her, his eyes glaring upon the two
+figures that occupied the bench, and his heavy tail moving with that slow
+threatening motion which precedes the spring of the beast of prey! Was old
+Elspeth Graeme indeed a wierd woman, and had the brute changed to be her
+familiar and avenging spirit?</p>
+
+<p>The serving-woman held something white in her hand, but neither Robert
+Brand nor his visitor saw it. They but saw the tall form and the face
+convulsed with wild feeling; and both seemed to shrink before a presence
+mightier than themselves. The strange servitor spoke:</p>
+
+<p>"Robert Brand, tell me gin I heard aright! Did ye say that Carlton Brand
+was dead?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who called you here, woman? Yes, he is dead! He was drowned on the Irish
+coast three weeks ago," answered the bereaved father, oddly blending the
+harsh authority of the master with the feeling which really compelled him
+to make response.</p>
+
+<p>"Then ye had better baith be dead wi' him&mdash;the father who banned his ain
+flesh and bluid and wished that he would dee before his very eyne, and the
+fause woman who had nae mair heart than to drive him frae her like a dog!"</p>
+
+<p>"Woman!" broke out the master, but the interruption did not check her for
+an instant. She went on, broadening yet more in her native dialect as she
+grew yet more earnest:</p>
+
+<p>"Nae, ye must e'en bide my wull and tak' it, Robert Brand! It has been
+waiting here for mony a day, and I can haud it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[Pg 490]</a></span> nae longer! He was my braw,
+bonnie lad, and puir auld Elsie loed him better than ye a'! I harkit till
+ye, Robert Brand, when yer curse went blawin' through the biggin like an
+east win', and I ken'd ye was sawin a fuff to reap a swirl! Ye must ban and
+dom yer ain bluid because it wad na fecht, drivin' the bairn awa frae kin
+and kintra, and noo ye hae <i>my</i> curse to stay wi ye, sleepin' and
+wakin'&mdash;ye an' the fause beauty there that helpit ye work his dool!"</p>
+
+<p>"Elspeth Graeme, if you say another word to insult Miss Hayley and outrage
+me, I will forget that you are a woman and choke you where you stand!"
+cried Robert Brand, no longer able to restrain himself, starting to his
+feet and drawing Margaret to the same position, with his arm around her
+waist. But the old woman did not flinch, or pause long in her denunciation.</p>
+
+<p>"Nae, ye'll do naething of the kind, Robert Brand!&mdash;ye'll tak what must
+come till ye!" And indeed it looked as if the great dog behind her would
+have sprung at the throat of even the master if he had dared to lay hands
+on his strange servitor. "Ye'll tak the curse, baith o' ye, and ye'll groan
+under it until the day ye dee! Gin Carlton Brand is dead, ye murdered him,
+and his eldritch ghaist shall come back and haunt ye, by night and by day,
+in the mist o' the mountain and the crowd o' the street, till yer blastit
+under it and think auld Hornie has grippet ye by the hearts! Ye'll sing
+dool belyve, baith of ye! Auld Elsie tells ye so, and slight her if ye
+daur!"</p>
+
+<p>Before these last words were spoken, Margaret Hayley had slipped from the
+grasp of the old man and was on her knees upon the ground, her proud spirit
+fairly broken, her hands raised in piteous entreaty, and her lips uttering
+feebly:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we have both wronged him&mdash;I know it now. But spare me, good Elspeth,
+now when my heart is broken; and spare <i>him</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>But Robert Brand, as was only natural&mdash;Robert Brand, feeble as he was,
+viewed the matter in a somewhat different<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[Pg 491]</a></span> light. Sorrow might have
+softened him, but it had by no means entirely cured his temper; and the
+serving-woman had certainly gone to such lengths in her freedom as might
+have provoked a saint to something very much like anger. He grasped
+Margaret from her kneeling position, apparently forgetting pain and
+weakness,&mdash;set her upon the seat and poured out a volley of sound, strong
+plain-English curses upon the old woman, that had no difficulty whatever in
+being understood. Dog or no dog, it seemed probable that he might even have
+given vent to his rage in a more forcible manner, when another interruption
+occurred which somewhat changed the posture of affairs.</p>
+
+<p>Elsie Brand came out from the house, hat upon head, and dressed as for a
+ride. She had been taking one, in fact, with Dr. James Holton, who had
+driven her over for a call upon one of her friends; and she looked radiant
+enough to proclaim the truth that she had just left very pleasant company.
+Her plump little form as tempting and Hebe-ish as ever; her bright yellow
+hair a little "touzled" (it could not be possible that those people had
+been laying their heads too near together in the carriage as they came
+across the wood road!); and her blue eyes one flash of pleasure that had
+forgotten all the pain and sorrow in the world,&mdash;she was a strange element,
+just then, to infuse into the blending of griefs within that garden. She
+came out with hasty step, calling to Elspeth.</p>
+
+<p>"Elspeth! Elspeth! What keeps you so long? The boy is waiting to know if
+father has any answer." Then seeing the others: "What, Margaret here with
+father? How do you do, Margaret?" It was notable how the voice fell slowed
+and softened, in speaking the last five words, and how the light went out
+from her young eyes as she spoke. Though friends always, Margaret Hayley
+and Elsie Brand had never been the same as before to each other, since that
+painful June morning on the piazza. How could they be? But Margaret was
+softened now, and she said, "Dear Elsie!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[Pg 492]</a></span> took the little girl in her arms
+and kissed her, so that something of the past seemed to have returned.</p>
+
+<p>But meanwhile another incident of importance was occurring. It may have
+been noticed that Elspeth Graeme had something white in her hand when she
+came out into the garden the second time. So she had, indeed&mdash;a folded note
+addressed to Robert Brand, and with a wilderness of printing scattered over
+the edges and half the face of the envelope; but she had quite forgotten
+the fact in the sudden knowledge of the death of her young master and the
+necessity of becoming an avenging Pythoness for the occasion. Now, Elsie's
+words called the attention of the old lawyer to that something in her hand,
+and he took it from her with a motion very much like a jerk, and the words:</p>
+
+<p>"If you have a letter for me, why did you not give it to me instead of
+standing here raving like a bedlamite&mdash;you old fool?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is na a letter; it's what they ca' a telegraph, I'm thinkin'!" muttered
+the old woman, a good deal taken down from her "high horse" by this
+reminder of her delinquency, and with some sort of impression that this
+must be a sufficient apology for not being in a hurry. "Somebody else dead,
+belike!&mdash;we're a' goin' to the deevil as fast as auld Clootie can drag us,
+I ken!"</p>
+
+<p>It <i>was</i> a telegraphic despatch which the old woman had delivered with such
+signal celerity, and which Robert Brand tore open with celerity of a very
+different character. He read, then read again, then his face paled, and a
+strange, startled look came into his eyes, and he put one hand to his
+forehead with the exclamation:</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>is</i> all this? Am I going mad?"</p>
+
+<p>"What <i>is</i> it, father?" and little Elsie pressed up to his side and took
+the despatch from his unresisting fingers. And it was she who read it aloud
+to the other wonderers, herself the most startled wonderer of all:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[Pg 493]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="right">
+<span class="smcap">Alexandria</span>, <i>Sept. 17th, 1863</i>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><i>Robert Brand, West Philadelphia</i>,</p>
+
+<p><i>Care Messrs. &mdash;&mdash;, No. &mdash; Market St. Philadelphia</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Your son, Carlton Brand, dangerously wounded at Culpeper.
+Lying in hospital here. If well enough, wish you would come
+down and see him. He does not know of this.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+E. H.<br />
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Well, I'll be&mdash;&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>It was a plump, round oath that Robert Brand uttered&mdash;very improper under
+any circumstances, and especially so in the presence of ladies,&mdash;but about
+as natural, when all things are considered, as the air he breathed. In
+order to realize the exact position and the blind astonishment that must
+have lain in that telegraphic despatch, it is necessary to remember that
+once before he had heard of the death of the young man, from one who had
+just seen his lifeless body (Kitty Hood), and that only two hours
+afterwards his house had been visited by the enraged Dr. Pomeroy to reclaim
+a girl that the man just before dead was alleged to have stolen! Now, only
+an hour or two before, he had a second time been informed of his son's
+death at sea, and burial in Ireland, under such circumstances that mistake
+seemed to be impossible; and yet here was a telegraphic despatch quite as
+likely to be authentic if not originating in some unfeeling hoax&mdash;informing
+him that he had been nearly killed in battle, and was lying in one of the
+Virginia hospitals! At short intervals the young man seemed to die, in
+different places, and then immediately after to be alive again in other
+places, under aspects scarcely less painful and yet more embarrassing.
+There was certainly enough in all this to make the old man's brain whirl,
+and to overspread the faces of the others with such blank astonishment that
+they seemed to be little else than demented. There was one, however, not
+puzzled one whit. That was old Elspeth, who muttered, loudly enough for
+them all to hear, as she abandoned them to their fate, resigned her
+temporary position as seeress, and went back to the mundane duties of
+house-keeping:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[Pg 494]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"It's not the bairn's ainsel at all that's lying down amang the naygurs
+where they're fechting. It is his double that's come bock frae the auld
+land to haunt ye! Come awa, Carlo, lad, and let them mak much of it!"</p>
+
+<p>There is no need to recapitulate all that followed between the three
+remaining people, surprised in such different degrees&mdash;the words in which
+little Elsie was made to understand the first intelligence, followed by her
+reading of the whole account in the Irish paper&mdash;the hopes, fears, fancies
+and wild surmises which swept through the brains and hearts of each&mdash;the
+thoughts of Robert Brand over the initials appended to the telegraphic
+despatch, which for some reason made him much more confident of its
+authenticity than he would otherwise have been, while they embarrassed him
+terribly in another direction which may or may not be guessed&mdash;the weaving
+together of three minds that had been more or less separated by conflicting
+feelings with reference to that very person, into one grand total and
+aggregate of anxiety which dwarfed all other considerations and made the
+whole outside world a blank and a nothing in comparison. All this may be
+imagined: until the perfecting of that invention by which the kaleidoscope
+is to be photographed in the moment of its revolution, it cannot be set in
+words. But the result may and must be given.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall go to Washington by the train, to-night," said Robert Brand, when
+the discussion had reached a certain point, with the mystery thicker than
+ever and the anxiety proportionately increasing.</p>
+
+<p>"You, father? Are you well enough to go?" and little Elsie looked at him
+with gratified and yet fearful surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"No matter, I am going!" That was enough, and Elsie knew it. Within the
+last half hour much of his old self seemed to have returned; and when he
+assumed that tone, life granted, he would go as inevitably as the
+locomotive.</p>
+
+<p>"I am glad to hear you say so, Mr. Brand&mdash;father!" said Margaret Hayley,
+very calmly. "It will make it much better, no doubt, for <i>I</i> am going."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[Pg 495]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You!" This time there were two voices that uttered the word of surprise.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, <i>I</i>! If Carlton Brand is lying wounded in a Virginia hospital, I know
+my duty; and if I must miss <i>that</i>, to <i>him</i>, or Heaven, henceforward, I
+shall be among the lost!" Strange, wild, mad words; but how much they
+conveyed!</p>
+
+<p>"God bless you, <i>my daughter</i>!" "My dear, dear <i>sister</i>!" And somehow three
+people managed to be included in one embrace immediately after. This was
+all, worth recording, that the grape trellis saw.</p>
+
+<p>That evening when the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore train left
+Broad and Prime, it bore Robert Brand and Margaret Hayley, going southward
+on that singular quest which might end in so sad and final a
+disappointment.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XXIV.</h2>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">In the Hospital at Alexandria&mdash;The Wounded Man and his
+Nurse&mdash;Sad Omens&mdash;A Reunion of Three&mdash;Brave Man or
+Coward?&mdash;Who was Horace Townsend?&mdash;A Mystery Explained&mdash;How
+Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's&mdash;One word more of
+the Comanche Rider&mdash;Conclusion.</span></p></div>
+
+
+<p>Glimpses now, only glimpses&mdash;with great breaks between, which the
+imagination may fill at pleasure. Events, few in number, not less strange,
+perhaps, than those which have already occurred, but less enwrapped in
+mystery, and gradually shaping themselves towards the inevitable end.</p>
+
+<p>The military hospital at Alexandria. Outside, dingy and yet imposing, fit
+type of the State that held it, in the days before secession was any thing
+more than a crime in thought. Within, a wilderness of low-ceilinged rooms,
+comfortable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[Pg 496]</a></span> enough but all more or less dingy like the exterior. Nine out
+of ten of them filled with cot-bedsteads arranged in long rows with aisles
+between; sacred at once to two of the most incongruous exhibitions of human
+propensity&mdash;the blood-thirsty cruelty which can kill and maim,&mdash;the angelic
+kindness which can make a dear child or brother out of the merest stranger
+and bind up the hurts of a rough, hard-handed, blaspheming ruffian, of
+blood unknown and lineage uncared for, with all that tender care which
+could be bestowed upon the gentlest and loveliest daughter of a pampered
+race when sick or disabled. One of the many places scattered over the loyal
+States and many portions of the disloyal, made terrible to recollection by
+the suffering that has been endured within them and the lives that have
+gone out as a sacrifice to the Moloch of destructive war,&mdash;but made holy
+beyond all conception, at the same time, by the patriotic bravery with
+which many of their lives have been surrendered to the great Giver for a
+glorious cause; by the patience with which agony has been endured and
+almost reckoned as pleasure for the nation's sake; and by the footsteps of
+the nobler men and if possible still nobler women of America, who have
+given up ease and comfort and domestic happiness and health and even life
+itself, to minister to those stricken down in the long conflict.</p>
+
+<p>No need to draw the picture: nothing of war or its sad consequences remains
+a mystery in this age and to this people. Too many eyes have looked upon
+the wards of our hospitals, the forms stretched there in waiting for death
+or recovery, the figures moving around and among them in such ministration
+as the Good Samaritan may have bestowed upon the bruised and beaten Jew of
+the parable;&mdash;too many ears have listened to the moans of suffering rising
+up continually like a long complaint to heaven, the sharp screams of agony
+under temporary pang or fearful operation, the words of content under any
+lot, blending like an undertone with all, and the words of prayer and
+Christian dependence crowning and hallowing all;&mdash;too many of the men of
+this time have seen and heard<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[Pg 497]</a></span> these things, and too many more may yet have
+the duty of looking upon them and listening to them, to make either wise or
+necessary the closer limning of the picture that might otherwise be
+presented. We have to do with but a little corner of the great building
+that had been made so useful in the care of the sick and wounded, just as
+this narration holds involved the interests of a poor half-dozen among the
+many millions affected by the colossal struggle.</p>
+
+<p>A small room, on the second floor of the building, the walls once white and
+even now scrupulously clean but dingy from smoke and use. Two windows in
+it, opening to the west, the tops shaded by paper curtains with muslin
+inside, while at the bottoms streamed in the soft September afternoon
+sunlight that lay like a glory over the Virginian woods, so fair to the eye
+but so foul and treacherous within, stretching away towards the bannered
+clouds before many hours to shroud the setting of the great luminary. Not
+one of the common rooms in which, perforce from their number, sick and
+wounded soldiers must be more or less closely huddled together,&mdash;but one
+devoted to the care of wounded officers, with four beds of iron, neatly
+made and draped, and at this time only one of them occupied.</p>
+
+<p>We have more than once before had occasion to notice the occupant of that
+one bed near the head of the room, with a stream of sunshine pouring in at
+the window and flooding the whole foot. We have before had occasion to
+remark that tall, slight but sinewy form distending the thin covering as it
+settled to his shape. Something of his appearance we have <i>not</i> seen
+before&mdash;the head of hair of an indescribable mixture, half pale gold or
+light blonde and the other or outer half dark brown or black, scarcely
+seeming to belong to the same growth unless produced by some mad freak of
+nature. Nor have we before remarked the splendidly-chiselled face so pale
+and wan, the life-fluids seeming to be exhausted beneath the skin, from
+loss of blood and severe suffering. Nor yet that other anomaly&mdash;a moustache
+with the outer ends very dark,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[Pg 498]</a></span> almost black, strangely relieved by a crop
+of light brown beard starting thick and short, like stubble, on the chin.
+Like this picture in some regards, unlike it in others, the occupant of
+that bed has before presented, as at this moment, an anomaly equally
+interesting and puzzling. Wherever and whenever seen, at earlier periods,
+the last time he met the gaze he was dropping from his horse, a bullet
+through the body just above the heart, a red sword slipping from his hand
+and insensibility succeeding to delirium, near the railroad-bridge and the
+captured rebel battery at Culpeper.</p>
+
+<p>The wounded man lay with his eyes closed and seemed to be in sleep. Beside
+the bed on a low stool and partially resting against it, was one who slept
+not&mdash;a woman. One elbow resting on the bed-clothes supporting her head, and
+the other hand holding a book in which she was reading. This was evidently
+the nurse, and yet scarcely an ordinary nurse charged with the care of all
+patients, or she could not have afforded the time for watching one
+convalescent while he slept. She, too, may have been seen before; for
+something there was in that tall and lithe form, that mass of rich silky
+brown hair, that face with its mournful eyes and painfully delicate
+features&mdash;something that, once seen, lingered like a sweet, sad dream in
+the gazer's memory. And yet here, too, if there was an identity, change had
+been very busy. The form had always been lithe&mdash;it was now thin to
+fragility; the hands had always been taper and delicate&mdash;now they were
+fleshless almost to emaciation; the face had always conveyed the thought of
+gentleness, helplessness and needful protection&mdash;now it seemed less
+helpless but more mournful, the cheeks a little sunken, and the red spot
+burning in the centre of either not a close enough semblance of ruddy
+health to deceive an eye quickened by affectionate anxiety. She was dying,
+perhaps slowly, it might be rapidly, but dying beyond a peradventure, with
+that friend or foe which has ushered more human beings into the presence of
+God than any other disease swayed as an agency by the great
+destroyer&mdash;consumption!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[Pg 499]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A few moments of silence, unbroken by any sound within the room except the
+thick breathing of the sleeper: then the girl who sat at his side choked a
+moment, seemed to make violent efforts to control the coming spasm, but at
+last yielded, clapped both hands to her left side just above her heart, and
+broke into one of those terrible fits of coughing which tear away the
+system as the earthquake rives the solid ground, and which are almost as
+hard to hear as to endure. Instantly, as the spasm relaxed, she hurriedly
+drew a white handkerchief from the pocket of her dark dress and wiped her
+lips. It was replaced so suddenly that the awakened sleeper did not see
+what stained it&mdash;blood, mingled frightfully with the clear white foam.</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of the wounded man opened; and there was something more of himself
+that came back in the light of their warm hazel, only a little dimmed by
+suffering, and in the play of all the muscles of the face when awake. Both
+hands lay outside the bed-clothing; and as she saw the opening of his eyes
+the girl stretched out her own and took one of them with such gentleness
+and devotion as was most beautiful to behold. She seemed to be touching
+flesh that she held to be better than her own&mdash;a suggestive rarity in this
+arrogant world! Something that man had been to her, or something he had
+done for her, beyond a doubt, which made him the object of a feeling almost
+too near to idolatry. And yet what had he given her, to win so much? Not
+wealth&mdash;not love: merely true friendship, respect when others despised, and
+a little aid towards rescue when others turned away or labored to produce
+final ruin! How easily heaven may be scaled&mdash;the heaven of love and
+devotion if no height beyond,&mdash;by that consideration which costs so little,
+by that kindness which should be a duty if it even brought no recompense!</p>
+
+<p>"There&mdash;I have woke you! I am so sorry!" she said, as she met his eyes and
+touched his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"What consequence, if you have?" was his reply, in a voice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[Pg 500]</a></span> low and
+somewhat feeble, while his thin hand made some poor attempt at returning
+her kind pressure. "Ever generous, Eleanor&mdash;ever thinking of others and not
+of yourself! They make angels of such people as you&mdash;do you know it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Angels? oh, my God, have I lived to hear that word applied to <i>me</i>?" Such
+was the answer, and the mournful eyes went reverently upward as she invoked
+the one holy Name.</p>
+
+<p>"Angels? yes, why not?" said the invalid. "Every light-tongued lover calls
+his mistress by that name sometime or other, and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, Carlton Brand, hush!"</p>
+
+<p>Some painful chord was touched, and he appeared to understand, as well he
+might, by what word with two meanings he had lacerated a feeling. He went
+back to what he had evidently intended to say at first.</p>
+
+<p>"You do not think of yourself, I say. You have been coughing again."</p>
+
+<p>"A little."</p>
+
+<p>"A little? Loudly enough to wake me, and I am a sound sleeper. Eleanor
+Hill, you are nursing me, when you more need a nurse yourself. I am almost
+well, you know. You are growing thinner and your cough is worse every day."</p>
+
+<p>"No, Carlton, better&mdash;much better!"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you sure? Stop, let me see your handkerchief!" He was looking her
+steadily in the face, and she obeyed him as if in spite of her own will and
+because she had always been in the habit of doing so.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought so," he said. "Eleanor, you are very ill. Do not deceive
+yourself or try to deceive <i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"Carlton Brand," she answered, returning that look, full in the eyes, and
+speaking slowly&mdash;calmly&mdash;firmly. "I am dying, and no one knows the fact
+better than myself. Thank God that the end is coming!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no, you are very ill, but not beyond hope&mdash;not dying," he attempted to
+urge as some modification of the startling confession she had made.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[Pg 501]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;the whole truth may as well be told now, Carlton, since we have begun
+it. I am dying of consumption, and I hope and believe that I shall have but
+few more days left after you get well enough to leave this hospital."</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens!" exclaimed the wounded man. "If this is true, do you know what
+you are making of me? Little else than a murderer! I meant it for the
+best&mdash;the best for the country and yourself, when I took you away from the
+house of your&mdash;of Philip Pomeroy, and sent you into this new path of life;
+but the sleepless hours and over-exertion, the exposures to foul air and
+draughts and anxiety to which you have been subjected&mdash;oh, Eleanor, is
+<i>this</i> what I have done?"</p>
+
+<p>She slid from her chair and kneeled close beside the bed, bending over
+towards him with the most affectionate interest.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh no," she said, no agitation in her voice. "Do you think that three
+months has done this? My family are all consumptive&mdash;my father died of the
+disease. What was done to <i>me</i>"&mdash;her voice faltered for just one moment,
+then she calmed it again by an obvious effort&mdash;"What was done to <i>me</i>, was
+done long before and by another hand."</p>
+
+<p>"Stop!" he interrupted her as she was evidently about to proceed. "I <i>must</i>
+say one word about <i>him</i>. Did you ever know all the reason why each of us
+feared and hated the other so much?"</p>
+
+<p>Merely a sad shake of the head was the negative.</p>
+
+<p>"I will tell you, now. I was a coward, and he knew it. You knew so much
+before, but nothing else, I believe. He was present once when I fainted at
+the very sight of blood&mdash;something that I believe I always used to do; and
+he knew of my refusing a challenge because I really dared not fight. He
+could expose and ruin me, and I feared him. I knew him to be a scoundrel in
+money affairs as well as in every other way: as a lawyer I could put my
+finger on a great crime that he had committed to win a large part of his
+fortune. He knew that I knew it, and that I would have exposed him if I
+dared. So he feared and hated <i>me</i>, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[Pg 502]</a></span> each held the other in check
+without doing more. It is time that you should know that crime: it was his
+robbing you of every dollar left you by your father, and putting them all
+into his own pocket, through the pretended machinery of that Dunderhaven
+Coal and Mining Company, of which he was President, Director and all the
+officers!"</p>
+
+<p>"Carlton! Carlton! can this be true, even of <i>him</i>?" asked the young girl,
+horrified at this crowning proof of a depravity beyond conception and yet
+not beyond <i>fact</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"It is true, every word of it, and if I had not been a wretch unfit to
+live, I would have exposed and punished him long ago. Lately I think I must
+have gone through what they call 'baptizing in fire,' and the very day I am
+able to crawl once more to Dr. Pomeroy's house, I shall force him to meet
+me in a duel or shoot him down like a dog!"</p>
+
+<p>"This from <i>you</i>, Carlton Brand!" The tone was very piteous.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;why not?" The tone was hard and decided, for a sick man.</p>
+
+<p>"May heaven forgive you the thought. Now listen to me. You have been the
+dearest friend I ever had in the world. You have been better and truer to
+me than any brother; and you have done me the greatest of all favors by
+sending me here to nurse the sick and wounded, to win back something of my
+lost self-respect and close up a wasted life with a little usefulness
+before I die! But after all this I shall almost hate you&mdash;I shall not be
+able, I am afraid, to pray for you in that land I am so soon going to
+visit,&mdash;if you do not make me one solemn promise and keep it as you would
+save your own soul."</p>
+
+<p>There was an agonized earnest in her words and in her manner, as she thus
+spoke, kneeling there and even clasping her hands in entreaty. Carlton
+Brand looked at her for one instant with a great pity; then he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Eleanor Hill, if the promise is one that a man can make and a man can
+keep, I will make it and keep it!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[Pg 503]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Then promise me neither in word nor act to harm Philip Pomeroy. Leave him
+to <i>me</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"To <i>you</i>, poor girl?"</p>
+
+<p>"To <i>me</i>! <i>I</i> will so punish him as no man was ever punished."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> punish him? <i>You</i>, feeble and dying? How?"</p>
+
+<p>"By going back to his house&mdash;if they will obey my last wish when the hour
+comes,&mdash;<i>dead</i>."</p>
+
+<p>"That <i>will</i> be punishment enough, perhaps, even for <i>him</i>, if he is
+human!" slowly said the invalid as he took in the thought. "I promise."</p>
+
+<p>"God bless you!" and poor Eleanor Hill fell forward on the bed and burst
+into sobs that ended the moment after in a fit of still more violent
+coughing than that which had racked her half an hour previously. And this
+did not end like the other, but deepened and grew more hoarse until the
+white froth flew from the suffering lips, followed by a gush of blood that
+not only dyed the foam but spattered the bed-covering.</p>
+
+<p>"Heavens! see how you are bleeding, my poor girl! You must have help at
+once!" The face of the speaker, deadly pale and sorely agitated, told how
+bad a nurse was this choking, dying girl, in his enfeebled condition, with
+a terrible wound scarcely yet commenced healing.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I do not need help&mdash;I shall be better in a moment. But I agitate
+<i>you</i>, and I will go away until I have stopped coughing."</p>
+
+<p>Which would be, Carlton Brand thought, perhaps a few moments before she
+went into that holy presence from which the most betrayed and down-trodden
+may not be debarred! Ever weakly-loving&mdash;ever thoughtless of her own
+welfare and childishly subservient to the good of others&mdash;lacking
+self-assertion, but never wantonly sinful,&mdash;had not that strange thinker,
+yet under the influence of the fever of his wound, some right to remember
+Mary's tears, and the blessing to the "poor in heart," promised in the
+Sermon on the Mount?</p>
+
+<p>But there was real danger to the invalid in this agitation,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[Pg 504]</a></span> and the will
+of another stepped in to remove the danger. Before the poor girl had quite
+ceased coughing, one of the physicians of the hospital, a gray-haired,
+benevolent-looking man, stood by the bedside and touched her upon the
+shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Coughing again, and so terribly! What, blood? Fie, fie!&mdash;this will never
+do!" he said. "If the sick nurse the sick, both fare badly, you know. If
+the scripture doesn't say so, it ought to. You must go away to Mrs.
+Waldron, Nellie, and keep quiet and not stir out again to-day."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Doctor," she answered, rising obediently. "Good-night, Carlton!" She
+stooped and pressed her lips to the thin hand so touchingly that the
+doctor, who could scarcely even guess the past relation between the two,
+almost felt the tears rising as he looked.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night, and God bless you, Eleanor."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor's eyes followed her as with slow, weak steps she passed out of
+the room, her pale, mournful face with its hectic cheeks and sad eyes
+looking back to the bed for an instant as she disappeared. Then he turned
+away with a sigh&mdash;such a sigh of helpless sorrow as he had no doubt often
+heaved over the living illustrations of those two heart-breaking
+words&mdash;"fading away."</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry she was here," he said, when she had gone. "I am afraid that
+she has used up strength that you needed. There are visitors to see you."</p>
+
+<p>"To see <i>me</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;now keep as cool as possible, or I will send them away again. I hate
+mysteries and surprises; but poor Eleanor does not, and she sent for them,
+I believe."</p>
+
+<p>"She sent for them? She? Then they are&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Keep still, or I will tell you no more&mdash;they are two from whom you have
+been estranged, I think&mdash;your father and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"My sister?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, the lady is not your sister, I think. She is tall, dark-haired, very
+beautiful and very queenly. Is that your sister?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;no&mdash;that is not my sister&mdash;that is&mdash;heavens, can this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[Pg 505]</a></span> be possible, or
+am I dreaming? Doctor, this agitation is hurting me worse than any presence
+could do. Send them in and trust me. I will be quiet&mdash;I will husband my
+life, for if I am not mad and you are not trifling, there may yet be
+something in the world worth living for."</p>
+
+<p>The doctor laid his hand on the pulse of his patient, looked for a moment
+into his face, and then left the room. The next, two stepped within it&mdash;an
+old man with gray hair rapidly changing to silver, and a woman in the very
+bloom of youth and beauty. The eyes of the wounded man were closed. What
+was he doing?&mdash;collecting strength, or looking for it where it ever abides?
+No matter. Only one instant more, and then the two were on their knees by
+the bedside, where Eleanor Hill had just been kneeling&mdash;the father with the
+thin hand in his and murmuring: "Carlton! my brave, my noble son!" and
+Margaret Hayley leaning far over the low couch and saying a thousand times
+more in one long, tender, clinging kiss, light as a snow-flake but loving
+and warm as the touch of the tropic sun,&mdash;that shunned cheek and brow and
+laid its blessing on the answering lips!</p>
+
+<p>Some of the words of that meeting are too sacred to be given: let them be
+imagined with the pressure of hands and the hungry glances of eyes that
+could not look enough in any space of time allotted them. But there were
+others, following close after, which may and must be given. Whole volumes
+had been spoken in a few words, and yet the book was scarcely opened,&mdash;when
+Margaret Hayley rose from her knees and bending over the bed ran those
+dainty white fingers through the strangely mottled hair on the brow of the
+invalid. Then she seemed to discover something incongruous in different
+portions of the face; and the moment after, stooping still closer down, she
+swept away the hair from the brow and scanned the texture of the skin at
+its edge. A long, narrow scar, its white gloss just relieved on the pallid
+flesh, crossed the forehead from the left temple to the centre of its apex.
+She seemed surprised and even frightened; then a look of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[Pg 506]</a></span> mingled shame and
+pleasure broke over that glorious face, and she leaned close above him and
+said, compelling his eyes to look steadily into hers:</p>
+
+<p>"Carlton Brand, what does this mean? I know that scar and the color that
+has once covered that hair and moustache! You are Horace Townsend!"</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>was</i> Horace Townsend once, for a little while, Margaret," was the
+reply. "But it won me nothing, and you see for what a stern reality I have
+given up masquerading."</p>
+
+<p>"And <i>you</i> plunged into the Pool to save that drowning boy. <i>You</i> went down
+into that dreadful schute and brought up the Rambler! <i>You</i> spoke to the
+Old Man of the Mountain at midnight and carried me away with your words on
+Echo Lake. And <i>you</i>&mdash;heaven keep my senses when I think of it!&mdash;<i>you</i> made
+love to me along the road down the Glen below the Crawford!</p>
+
+<p>"I am afraid I was guilty of all those offences!" answered the invalid,
+with something nearer to a smile of mischief glimmering from the corner of
+his eye than had shone there for many a day.</p>
+
+<p>"I did hear something in your voice the first night that I saw you there,
+and afterwards," Margaret Hayley went on, "which made me shudder from its
+echo of yours; and more than once I saw that in your face which won me to
+you without my knowing why. Yet all the impression wore off by degrees,
+and&mdash;only think of it!&mdash;I was nearly on the point, at one time, of
+believing that I had found a truer ideal than the one so lately lost, and
+of promising to become the wife of Horace Townsend! Think where <i>you</i> would
+have been, you heartless deceiver, if I had fallen altogether into the trap
+and done so!"</p>
+
+<p>"I think I might have endured <i>that</i> successful rivalry better than any
+other!" was the very natural reply.</p>
+
+<p>"And this man," said Robert Brand, standing close beside the bed, looking
+down at his son with a face in which pride and joy had mastered its great
+trouble of a few days before,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[Pg 507]</a></span> and apparently speaking quite as much to
+himself as to either of his auditors&mdash;"this man, capable of such deeds of
+godlike bravery in ordinary life, and then of winning the applause of a
+whole army in the very front of battle,&mdash;I cursed and despised as a coward!
+God forgive me!&mdash;and you, my son, try to forget that ever I set myself up
+as your pitiless judge, to be punished as few fathers have ever been
+punished who yet had the sons of their love spared to them! Margaret&mdash;how
+have we both misunderstood him!"</p>
+
+<p>"The fault was not all yours, by any means," said the invalid. "How could
+either of you know me when I misunderstood and belied <i>myself</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>And in that remark&mdash;the last word uttered by Carlton Brand before he
+yielded to the exhaustion of his last hour of imprudent excitement and fell
+away to a slumber almost as profound as death, just as the old doctor
+stepped back to forbid a longer interview, and while the shadows of evening
+began to fall within the little room, and Margaret Hayley sat by his
+bedside and held his hand in hers with what was plainly a grasp never to be
+broken again during the lives of both, and Robert Brand, sitting but a
+little farther away, watched the son that had been lost and was found, with
+a deeper tenderness and a holier pride than he had ever felt when bending
+over the pillow of his sleeping childhood,&mdash;in that remark, we say, lay the
+key to all which had so affected his life, and which eventually gave cause
+for this somewhat singular and desultory narration. <i>He had misunderstood
+himself</i>; and only pain, suffering and a mental agony more painful than any
+physical death, had been able to bring himself and those who best knew him
+to a full knowledge of the truth. Only a part of that truth he knew even
+then, when he lay in the officers' ward of the Alexandria hospital: it is
+our privilege to know it all and to explain it, so far as explanation can
+be given, in a few words.</p>
+
+<p>Carlton Brand had been gifted, and cursed, from childhood, with an intense
+and imaginative temperament, never quite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[Pg 508]</a></span> regulated or even analyzed. His
+sense of honor had been painfully delicate&mdash;his love of approbation so
+strong as to be little less than a disease. Some mishap of his weak,
+hysterical and short-lived mother, no doubt, had given him one terrible
+weakness, entirely physical, but which he believed to be mental&mdash;<i>he
+habitually fainted at the sight of blood</i>. (This fact will explain,
+parenthetically, why he fell senseless and apparently dead at that period
+in the encounter with Dick Compton when the blood gushed over the face of
+the latter from his blow; and why after each of the excitements of the Pool
+and Mount Willard he suffered in like manner, at the instant when his eyes
+met the fatal sign on the faces of the rescued.) High cultivation of the
+imaginative faculty, the habit of living too much within himself, and a
+constitutional predisposition in that direction, had made him painfully
+<i>nervous</i>&mdash;a weakness which to him, and eventually to others, assumed the
+shape of cowardice. Recklessly brave, in fact, and never troubled by that
+nervousness for one moment when his sympathies were excited and his really
+magnificent physical and gymnastic powers called into play,&mdash;that fainting
+shudder at the sight of blood had been all the while his haunting demon,
+disgracing him in his own eyes and marring a life that would otherwise have
+been very bright and pleasant. One belief had fixed itself in his mind,
+long before the period of this narration, and never afterwards (until now)
+been driven thence&mdash;that <i>if he should ever be brought into conflict among
+deadly weapons, this horror of blood would make him run away like a
+poltroon, disgracing himself forever and breaking the hearts of all who
+loved him</i>. This belief had made his commission in the Reserves a
+melancholy farce; this had placed him in the power of Dr. Philip Pomeroy
+and prevented that exposure and that punishment so richly deserved; this
+had made his life, after the breaking out of the war, one long struggle to
+avoid what he believed must be disgraceful detection. Once more, so that
+the matter which informs this whole relation may be fairly
+understood,&mdash;Carlton<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[Pg 509]</a></span> Brand, merely a high-strung, imaginative, nervous
+man, with the bravery of the old Paladins latent in his heart and bursting
+out occasionally in actions more trying than the facing of any battery that
+ever belched forth fire and death,&mdash;had all the while mistaken that
+nervousness for cowardice;&mdash;just as many a man who has neither heart,
+feeling nor imagination, strides through the world and stalks over the
+battle-field, wrapped in his mantle of ignorance and stolidity, believing
+himself and impressing the belief upon others, that this is indomitable
+bravery.</p>
+
+<p>What Carlton Brand had believed himself to be when untried&mdash;what Carlton
+Brand had proved himself to be when hatred to Captain Hector Coles and a
+despairing hope of yet winning the love of Margaret Hayley moved him to the
+trial&mdash;how thorough a contrast!&mdash;how exact an antagonism! And how many of
+us, perhaps, going backward from the glass in which we have more or less
+closely beheld our natural faces, forget, if we have ever truly read, "what
+manner of men" we are!</p>
+
+<p>And here another explanation must follow, as we may well believe that it
+followed between the three so strangely reunited, when rest and repose had
+worn off the first shock of meeting and made it safe for the petted invalid
+to meet another pressure from those rose-leaf lips that had forsaken all
+their pride to bend down and touch him with a penitent blessing&mdash;safe to
+speak and to hear of the many things which the parted always treasure
+against re-union. That explanation concerns the mystery of the passenger by
+the Cunarder, the American in England, and the man who under the name of
+Carlton Brand perished from the deck of the Emerald off Kingstown harbor?
+Had he a double life as well as a double nature? Or had there been some
+unaccountable personation? The latter, of course, and from causes and under
+circumstances not one whit surprising when the key is once supplied.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that Carlton Brand, very soon after his purchase of a
+ticket for Liverpool by the Cunard steamer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[Pg 510]</a></span> and his indulging that
+nervousness which he believed to be cowardice with a little shuddering
+horror at the mass of coal roaring and blazing in the furnaces of the
+government transport, early in July,&mdash;had a visiter at his rooms at the
+Fifth Avenue Hotel&mdash;Henry Thornton, of Philadelphia, a brother lawyer and
+intimate friend. It will also be remembered that the two held a long and
+confidential conversation, very little of the purport of which was then
+given. The facts, a part of them thus far concealed, were that Carlton
+Brand, flying from his disgrace, really intended to go to Europe as he had
+informed Elsie; that he made no secret of that disgrace, to Thornton; that
+the latter informed him, incidentally, of what he had heard of the summer
+plans of Margaret Hayley and her mother, whom he knew through his family;
+that the passage-ticket, lying upon the table, came under the notice of
+Thornton, inducing the information that he was also on his way to England,
+in chase of a criminal who had absconded with a large sum of money
+belonging to one of the Philadelphia banks, and whom he had means, if once
+he could overtake him, of forcing to disgorge; that Thornton half-jestingly
+proposed, remembering their partial resemblance, that if his friend had
+grown ashamed of his name, he would take that and the ticket and pursue the
+criminal with less chance of being evaded, his own cognomen being kept in
+the dark; that Brand, suddenly taken with the idea and struck with the
+facility which the use of his name by the other would furnish for creating
+the belief that he had himself gone abroad, and thus concealing his
+identity while remaining at home, adopted the suggestion and supplied his
+friend at once with name and ticket, for his travelling purposes; that it
+was Henry Thornton and not Carlton Brand who ran that mad quest about
+England, a hidden criminal always in view, and frequenting the most
+doubtful places and the most disreputable society to accomplish the object
+of his search; and that it was poor Thornton and not Carlton Brand who
+perished in the Irish Channel and met that lowly grave in the Howth
+church-yard.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[Pg 511]</a></span> All this while the real owner of that name, shaving away his
+curling beard, tinging his fair skin with a very easily-obtained chemical
+preparation, dyeing black his hair and moustache and making himself up as
+nearly as possible like Thornton, under the assumed designation of Horace
+Townsend, suggested by the initials of his "double," was carrying out that
+long masquerade which we have been permitted to witness.</p>
+
+<p>The peculiarities which he developed in that masquerade, should by this
+time be reasonably well understood; the motives which kept him near the
+woman who had once loved him but afterwards cast him off forever, may
+easily be guessed by many a man, correspondingly situated, who has thus
+fluttered moth-like around his destroying candle; the half-maddening effect
+produced upon him by the magnificent scenery of the mountains, the displays
+of reckless courage made by Halstead Rowan and the marked admiration of
+Margaret Hayley for those displays, was no matter for surprise when such
+surroundings for such a temperament were considered; the attempt to become
+his own rival and win the woman he so wildly worshipped from himself, was
+not crazier than might have been expected from the man who could have
+exhibited all the preceding anomalies; and after Margaret had declared her
+unalterable love but her invincible determination never to marry the man
+who dared not fight for his native land,&mdash;the feeling compounded of hope
+and despair, which sent him down to the Virginia battle-fields, first as a
+mere spectator under the favor of his old friend Pleasanton and then as a
+mad Berserk running a course of warlike fury which made even gray-bearded
+veterans shudder,&mdash;this need astonish no one who has seen how human
+character changes and develops its true components in the crucible of love,
+shame and sorrow!</p>
+
+<p>Be sure that Margaret Hayley, too, in that day of the clearing away of
+mists and mysteries, made one explanation&mdash;not to the ears of Robert Brand,
+but to those of Carlton<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[Pg 512]</a></span> alone. An explanation that was really a
+confession, as it told him of the means through which the property held by
+her family (oh, how the magnificent face alternately flushed and paled when
+opening this sore wound of her pride!) had been acquired many years before.
+But be sure that all this was made a recommendation rather than a shame in
+the eyes of Carlton Brand, when he knew that from the day of his own
+dismissal her knowledge of that family stain had been used to keep Mrs.
+Burton Hayley quiet and subservient, to hold Captain Hector Coles at a safe
+distance, and to enforce what she had truly intended if <i>he</i> should never
+honorably beckon her again to his bridal bed&mdash;a life of loneliness for his
+sake!</p>
+
+<p>Something that occurred a month later&mdash;in October, when nature had put on
+those gorgeous but melancholy robes of gold and purple with which in
+America she wraps herself when Proserpine is going away from Ceres to the
+darkness and desolation of winter.</p>
+
+<p>One day during that month a close carriage drove down the lane leading from
+the Darby road past the house of Dr. Pomeroy. It was drawn by a magnificent
+pair of horses, but they were driven much more slowly than we have once
+seen them pursuing the same course. A single figure was seated in it, with
+face at the window, when it drew up at the doctor's gate; and out of it
+stepped Nathan Bladesden, the Quaker merchant.</p>
+
+<p>The face was calm, as beseemed his sect, but very stern. A little changed,
+perhaps, since the early summer, with a shadow more of white dashed into
+the trim side-whiskers and one or two deeper lines upon the brow and at the
+corners of the mouth. A step, as he said a word to the driver and entered
+the gate, which comported with the stern gravity of the face and the slow
+rate at which he had been driven. Something in the whole appearance
+indicating that he had come upon a painful duty, but one that he would do
+if half the powers of both worlds should combine to prevent him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[Pg 513]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He saw no one as he approached the piazza and the closed front door; but as
+he was about to ring, a female servant came out, closed the door again
+behind her and stopped as if surprised at seeing him.</p>
+
+<p>"Is Doctor Philip Pomeroy at home?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," was the answer, after one instant of hesitation,&mdash;"yes, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"That was all I asked thee, woman!" answered the Quaker, sternly. "I came
+to see him and I must do so. Show me to him at once."</p>
+
+<p>The girl hesitated again, looked twice at him and once at the one open
+window of the parlor, then obeyed the behest, opened the front door,
+pointed to that leading into the parlor from the hall, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"He is there, Mr. Bladesden. If you <i>must</i> see him, you had better knock,
+for he may not like to be disturbed."</p>
+
+<p>She went out at once, leaving the front door half open, and glancing back,
+as she passed it, at the tall, powerful man with the gray hair and
+side-whiskers, just applying his knuckles to the panel. There was something
+strange and even startled in her look, but she said no more, left him so
+and went on upon her errand.</p>
+
+<p>The Quaker knocked twice or three times before there was any answer from
+within. Nor was the door opened even then, but the voice of the doctor
+said: "Come in!" and he entered. Doctor Philip Pomeroy sat alone in the
+room, in a large chair, leaning far back, his arms folded tightly on his
+breast and his head so thrown forward that he looked up from beneath bent
+brows. He evidently saw his visitor and recognized him, and yet he did not
+rise or change his position. And quite a moment elapsed before he said, in
+a voice frightfully hoarse:</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want here, Nathan Bladesden?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have business with thee, Doctor Philip," was the reply.</p>
+
+<p>"And I do not choose to do business to-day, with any one, nor with <i>you</i> as
+long as I live!" said the same hoarse voice.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[Pg 514]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"And I choose that thee <i>shall</i> do business to-day and with <i>me</i>!" was the
+second reply, still equable in tone but still terribly earnest.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Philip Pomeroy unfolded his arms and rose slowly from his chair. The
+Quaker, as he did so and was thus thrown into a better light, saw that his
+face was haggard, that his sharp, scintillant eyes were wild, and that he
+looked years older than when he had beheld him last, four months before.
+Standing, and with one hand on the chair as if he needed support, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"Nathan Bladesden, I told you, the last time that you visited this house,
+never to come near it again, and I thought that you knew me too well to
+intrude again uninvited."</p>
+
+<p>"It is because I know thee very well indeed, that I <i>have</i> intruded, as
+thee calls it!" answered the Quaker, with what would have been a sneer on
+another face and from other lips. "I remember the last time I came here,
+Doctor Philip, quite as well as thee does, and I promised thee some things
+then that I am quite as likely to fulfil as thee is to carry out any of thy
+threats. Besides, thee may be sure that I have business, or I should not
+have come, for thy company is not so attractive as that men of good
+character seek it of their own will!"</p>
+
+<p>The Quaker had no doubt expected that by that time he would break out into
+rough violence, as before; but he had misjudged. From some cause unknown he
+did not, though the wild eyes grew more than scintillant&mdash;they glared like
+those of a wild beast at once in pain and at bay. And he made no answer
+except a "Humph!" that seemed to be uttered between closed lips&mdash;half an
+expression of contempt and half a groan.</p>
+
+<p>Nathan Bladesden, intent upon his "business," went on.</p>
+
+<p>"I will not trouble thee long, Dr. Philip, but thee had better pay
+attention to what I say, for I am very much in earnest and not to be
+trifled with, to-day, as thee will discover. If thee remembers, I came here
+the last time to rescue Eleanor Hill from thy villainous hands&mdash;"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[Pg 515]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Eleanor Hill!" This was not an exclamation of surprise, but a veritable
+groaning-out of the name.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Eleanor Hill," pursued Bladesden,&mdash;"after thee had broken off my
+marriage with her by poisoning my mind against the poor girl thee had
+ruined in body and soul and I believe robbed in fortune. The morning of
+that day I had been weak, and driven away by thee: that afternoon I had
+been moved to do my duty and to take her away from the hands of a seducer
+and a scoundrel&mdash;to shelter the lamb from the wolf, though it was torn and
+bleeding&mdash;to make her my sister if I could not make her my wife."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all&mdash;all? If not, go on!" groaned out the hoarse voice through the
+set teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"No, there is somewhat more, Dr. Philip&mdash;and that of the most consequence,"
+the Quaker continued. "When I came, the poor girl was gone&mdash;gone from thee
+as well as from me. Then I heard that she had gone among the soldiers of
+the army, doing the work of the Master and healing the sick. She was away
+from <i>thee</i> and doing the duty of merciful woman, and I was content to wait
+until she had finished. But to-day I learned that yesterday she came back
+again."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my God!&mdash;he will kill me!" groaned the answering voice, deeper and
+more hoarse than ever. But the Quaker went mercilessly on.</p>
+
+<p>"No, I think that I shall not have need!" he said. "Thee is cowardly as
+well as base, and thee will obey and save thy life. I heard, I say, that
+she had come back to this house of pollution, and I have come to take her
+away. Give her up to me, at once, that I may place her where thee can never
+harm her and never even see her more, and that is all I ask of thee: refuse
+me or try to prevent my removing her, and I will take thee by the throat,
+here, now, with these hands that thee sees are strong enough to do the duty
+of the hangman&mdash;and strangle thee to death!"</p>
+
+<p>There was fearful intensity, very near approaching momentary madness, in
+the voice and whole manner of Nathan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[Pg 516]</a></span> Bladesden, before he had concluded
+that startling speech; but if he could have looked keenly enough he might
+have seen on the face of the doctor something more terrible than any word
+he had uttered or any gesture he could make. His eyes rolled wildly with a
+glare that was only one remove from maniacy; his whole countenance was so
+fearfully contorted that he might have seemed in the last agony; and his
+frame shook to such a degree that the very chair he held jarred and
+shivered on the floor with the muscular action.</p>
+
+<p>"God of heaven, Nathan Bladesden!" he said, the hoarseness of his voice
+changed into a wild cry. "Are you mad, or am <i>I</i>? You know that Eleanor
+Hill came back here yesterday, and you have come to take her away from me
+to-day?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have come for that purpose, and I will do it, Doctor Philip," replied
+the Quaker. "Thee has my warning, and thee had better heed it. Let me see
+her at once, and then if she does not herself ask to be left with thee and
+the disgrace of thy house, thee shall see her no more, if I can prevent it,
+until the judgment!"</p>
+
+<p>For one moment, then, without another word, Dr. Philip Pomeroy looked at
+the speaker steadily as his own terrible situation would permit. Then he
+seemed to have arrived at some solution of a great mystery, or to have
+sprung to a desperate resolution, for he sprang forward, grasped the Quaker
+so suddenly that the latter for the moment started in the expectation of
+personal violence, dragged him to the door separating the parlor from a
+smaller one at the rear, and dashed it open, with the words:</p>
+
+<p>"There is Eleanor Hill! Ask her if she will go with you or remain with
+<i>me</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>The room was partially shaded by heavy curtains; and Nathan Bladesden,
+stepping hastily therein, did not at first see what it contained. But when
+he did so, as he did the instant after, no wonder that even his stern,
+strong nature was not quite proof against the shock, and that he recoiled
+and uttered an exclamation of affright. For Eleanor Hill was there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[Pg 517]</a></span> indeed,
+but scarcely within the reach of human wish or question&mdash;coffined for the
+grave, the glossy brown hair smoothed away from a forehead on which rested
+neither the furrow of pain nor the mark of shame, the sad eyes closed in
+that long peaceful night which knows no waking from sleep until the
+resurrection morning, the thin hands folded Madonna-like upon the breast,
+and one lingering flush of the hectic rose of consumption in the centre of
+either pale cheek, to restore all her childish beauty and carry the
+flower-symbol of human love into the very domain of death.</p>
+
+<p>"That is Eleanor Hill&mdash;why do you not ask her the question?" Oh, what agony
+there was in that poor attempt at a taunt!</p>
+
+<p>"No, thee has made her what she is&mdash;thee may keep her, now!"</p>
+
+<p>The Quaker's words were a far bitterer taunt than that which had fallen
+from the lips of the doctor. Then he seemed to soften, went up to the
+coffin, looked steadily on the dead face for a moment, stooped and pressed
+his lips on the cold, calm brow, and said, with a strange echo of what
+Carlton Brand had uttered in the hospital but a few weeks before:</p>
+
+<p>"They have such people as thee in heaven, Eleanor! Farewell!"</p>
+
+<p>He turned away and seemed about to leave the room and the house, but the
+hand of Dr. Philip Pomeroy was again upon his arm, grasping it and holding
+him while the frame shivered with uncontrollable emotion and the broken
+voice groaned out:</p>
+
+<p>"Nathan Bladesden, you hate me, and perhaps you have cause. You are a cold,
+stern man, with no mercy, and my tortures must be pleasure to you. Enjoy
+them all! And if any man ever doubts the existence of hell in your
+presence, tell him that you have seen it with your own eyes in the house of
+Philip Pomeroy, when the only woman he ever loved in the world lay dead
+before him, murdered by his own hand, and a devil stood by, taunting him
+with his guilt!"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[Pg 518]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"I will taunt thee no more, Doctor Philip!" fell slowly from the Quaker's
+lips. "I hate thee no longer. I pity thee. Thy Maker is dealing with thee
+now, and thy punishment is enough!"</p>
+
+<p>He turned away, then, and left the suffering man still within the room
+beside the dead. Once as he passed into the hall he looked back and saw
+through the still open door a dark form fall forward with a groan, the head
+against the coffin and the arms clasping it as if it had been a living
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>There are two endings to the story of "Faust"&mdash;that marvellous wierd
+history of human love and demoniac temptation which alike in drama and
+opera enraptures the world, and once before alluded to in this narration.
+In the older and coarser version, when the ruin is full accomplished and
+the hour of penalty full ripe, Marguerite is seen ascending heavenward,
+while Mephistopheles laughs hoarsely and points downward to the lower pit,
+whence arise blue flames and horrible discords, and into which the doomed
+Faust is seen to be dragged at the last moment by the hands of the swarming
+and gibbering monsters. In the other and yet more terrible version,
+Maguerite is seen ascending, and the laugh of the demon is heard, but it is
+only a faint, fading, mocking laugh, as even <i>he</i> flies away and leaves the
+man accursed kneeling in hopeless agony over the dead form from which the
+pure spirit has just gone upward&mdash;condemned, not to the pit and the flame,
+but to that worse hell of living alone and without hope, racked by love
+that has come in its full force when too late, and by a remorse that will
+worse clutch at his heart-strings than all the fiends of perdition could do
+at the poor body which coffers his soul of torment. Who does not know how
+much the more dreadful is that second doom? Who does not&mdash;let him never
+tempt God and fate by making the rash experiment!</p>
+
+<p>Nathan Bladesden was right&mdash;even for such sins as those Doctor Philip
+Pomeroy had committed, the reckoning was fearful!<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[Pg 519]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Poor Eleanor Hill had been right, too, when she said: "Leave him to me! * *
+* I will so punish him as no man was ever punished!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Shall there not be one glimmer more of sunshine after the dark night and
+the storm? Thank heaven, yes!&mdash;in a far-off glance at fortunes left long in
+abeyance but not forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>Lying on the sofa at Mrs. Burton Hayley's, one evening when the first fires
+of winter had not long been lighted,&mdash;still taking the privilege of the
+invalid though no longer one, and making a pillow of the lap of Margaret
+Hayley, her dainty white fingers playing with his clustering golden blonde
+hair as they had erewhile done among the summer rose-leaves,&mdash;a quick,
+warm, happy kiss stolen now and again when the dignified lady, of the
+mansion was too busy with the devoutly-religious work that she was reading,
+to be horrified by such immoral practices,&mdash;lying thus, and the two talking
+of dear little Elsie's coming happiness and their own which was not to be
+much longer deferred; of the restored pride and renovated health of Robert
+Brand&mdash;quite as dear to Margaret, since that day in the garden, as to the
+son and daughter of his own blood; of the delirious joy and dreadfully
+broad Scotch of old Elspeth Graeme since the return of her "bonny bairn;"
+of poor Eleanor Hill and Captain Hector Coles, dead so differently on the
+fatal Virginian soil; of these and others, and of all the events which had
+been so strangely crowded within the compass of little more than half a
+year,&mdash;lying thus and talking thus, we say, Carlton Brand drew from his
+pocket a little fragment clipped from a newspaper, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"By the way, Margaret, here is something that I found in one of the
+Baltimore papers yesterday. It concerns some friends of ours, whom we may
+never meet again, but whom neither of us, I think, will ever quite forget.
+Read it."</p>
+
+<p>Margaret Hayley took the slip and read, what writer and reader may be
+pardoned for looking over her fair rounded shoulder and perusing at the
+same moment&mdash;this satisfactory and significant item:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[Pg 520]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>MARRIED. <span class="smcap">Rowan</span>&mdash;<span class="smcap">Vanderlyn</span>.&mdash;On Wednesday the 9th inst., by
+Rev. Dr. Rushmore, Major Halstead Rowan, of the Sixth
+Illinois cavalry, to Clara, daughter of the late Clayton
+Vanderlyn, Esq., and Mrs. Isabella Vanderlyn, of Calvert St.</p></div>
+
+<p>"She was a sweet girl, and he was one of nature's gentlemen," said
+Margaret. "I saw enough to know how dearly they were in love with each
+other before they left the mountains; and I am glad to know that they have
+had their will, in spite of"&mdash;and here she lowered her voice, so that Mrs.
+Burton Hayley could not possibly hear her&mdash;"a proud, meddling mother and a
+brother who should have been sent back to school until he learned manners!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Rowan told me that he was going into the army, before he left the
+Crawford," answered the happy lounger. "You see he has done so and become a
+Major, and that makes him gentleman enough even for the Vanderlyns.
+George!&mdash;what a dashing officer he must make! Some day, when I go back to
+the army&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"When <i>I let you</i> go back, mad fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>"Some day I want to ride a charge with him, side by side. He was the
+boldest rider and the most daring man I ever knew."</p>
+
+<p>"The bravest that <i>I</i> ever knew, except <i>one</i>!" said Margaret Hayley,
+stooping down her proud neck and for some unexplainable reason stopping for
+an instant in the middle of her speech. "And he had even the advantage of
+that <i>one</i> in a very important respect."</p>
+
+<p>"And what was that, I should like to be informed, my Empress!"</p>
+
+<p>"He <i>knew it</i>!"</p>
+
+
+<h4>THE END.</h4>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">[Pg i]</a></span></p>
+<h3>T. B. PETERSON &amp; BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS.</h3>
+<p class="center">
+THIS CATALOGUE CONTAINS AND<br />
+Describes the Most Popular and Best Selling Books in the World.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The Books will also be found to be the Best and Latest Publications by the
+most Popular and Celebrated Writers in the World. They are also the most
+Readable and Entertaining Books published.</p>
+
+<p>Suitable for the Parlor, Library, Sitting-Room, Railroad, Camp, Steamboat,
+Army, or Soldiers' Reading.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+PUBLISHED AND FOR SALE BY<br />
+T. B. PETERSON &amp; BROTHERS,<br />
+306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Booksellers and all others will be Supplied at very Low Rates.</p>
+
+<p>Copies of any of Petersons' Publications, or any other work or works
+Advertised, Published, or Noticed by any one at all, in any place, will be
+sent by us, Free of Postage, on receipt of Price.</p>
+
+<p>TERMS: To those with whom we have no monthly account, Cash with Order.</p>
+
+
+<h4>MRS. EMMA D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH'S WORKS.</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>The Bridal Eve.</b> Complete in one volume, paper cover. Price
+$1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Fatal Marriage.</b> Complete in one volume, paper cover.
+Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Love's Labor Won.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Gipsy's Prophecy.</b> Complete in one vol., paper cover.
+Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Vivia. The Secret of Power.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price
+$1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>India. The Pearl of Pearl River.</b> Price $1.25; or cloth,
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Mother-in-Law.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Two Sisters.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Three Beauties.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Wife's Victory.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Lost Heiress.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Deserted Wife.</b> Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Hickory Hall.</b> By Mrs. Southworth. Price 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Lady of the Isle.</b> Complete in one vol., paper cover.
+Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Missing Bride.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Retribution: A Tale of Passion.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price
+$1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Haunted Homestead.</b> Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth,
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Curse of Clifton.</b> Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Discarded Daughter.</b> Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth,
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Jealous Husband.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Belle of Washington.</b> One vol., paper. Price $1.25; or
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Initials.</b> A Love Story. One vol. Price $1.25; or cloth,
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Kate Aylesford.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Dead Secret.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Woman in Black.</b> Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth,
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Family Pride.</b> Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Broken Engagement.</b> By Mrs. Southworth. Price 25 cents.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ii" id="Page_ii">[Pg ii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS' NEW WORKS.</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>The Wife's Secret.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Rejected Wife.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Fashion and Famine.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Heiress.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in one
+vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Old Homestead.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Mary Derwent.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p></div>
+
+
+<p>CAROLINE LEE HENTZ'S WORKS.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Planter's Northern Bride.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price
+$1.25; or in cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Linda. The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole.</b> Price $1.25 in
+paper; or $1.50 in cloth.</p>
+
+<p><b>Robert Graham.</b> The Sequel to, and Continuation of Linda.
+Price $1.25 in paper; or $1.50 in cloth.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Lost Daughter.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+bound in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Courtship and Marriage.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Rena; or, The Snow Bird.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+or one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Marcus Warland.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+bound in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Love after Marriage.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Planter's Daughter.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price
+$1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Banished Son.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Helen and Arthur.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Ernest Linwood.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Courtship and Matrimony.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>MRS. HENRY WOOD'S BOOKS.</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>The Shadow of Ashlydyat.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price One
+Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Squire Trevlyn's Heir.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price One
+Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Castle's Heir.</b> One volume, octavo, paper cover. Price
+One Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Verner's Pride.</b> One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price $1.00;
+or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>A Life's Secret.</b> Price Fifty cents; or in one vol., cloth,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Lost Bank Note.</b> 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Channings.</b> Price 75 cents; or in one vol., cloth, $1.25.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Mystery.</b> Price Fifty cents; or bound in one vol., cloth,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Runaway Match.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Earl's Heirs.</b> Price Fifty cents; or one vol., cloth,
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p><b>Aurora Floyd.</b> Price 50 cents; or a finer edition, in cloth,
+for $1.25.</p>
+
+<p><b>Better For Worse.</b> One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price 50
+cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Foggy Night at Offord.</b> 25 cts.</p>
+
+<p><b>William Allair.</b> Price 25 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Lawyer's Secret.</b> Price 25 cents.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>THE GREAT NOVELS OF THE WAR.</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Shoulder Straps.</b> A novel of New York and the Army in 1862.
+By Henry Morford, editor of the "New York Atlas." It is the
+book for Ladies, Gentlemen, and Soldiers! Wives and Widows,
+Fast Young Ladies, Slow Young Ladies, Married Men and
+Bachelors, Young Ladies about to be Married, and those who
+have no Matrimonial Prospects whatever! Stay-at-home Guards,
+Government Officials, Army Contractors, Aldermen, Doctors,
+Judges, Lawyers, etc. Price $1.25 in paper; or bound in one
+volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Days of Shoddy.</b> A Novel of the Great Rebellion of 1861.
+By Henry Morford author of "Shoulder Straps" price $1.25 in
+paper, or $1.50 in cloth.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iii" id="Page_iii">[Pg iii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS.</h4>
+
+<h4>ILLUSTRATED OCTAVO EDITION.</h4>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Pickwick Papers</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, $2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Nicholas Nickleby</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Great Expectations</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Lamplighter's Story</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Oliver Twist</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Bleak House</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Little Dorrit</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Dombey and Son</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Sketches by "Boz,"</b></td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>David Copperfield</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Barnaby Rudge</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Martin Chuzzlewit</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Old Curiosity Shop</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Christmas Stories</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Dickens' New Stories</b>,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>A Tale of Two Cities</b>,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>American Notes and Pic-Nic Papers</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 2.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Price of</td><td align='left'> a set, in </td><td align='left'>Black cloth, in 17 volumes</td><td align='right'>$32.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Full Law Library style</td><td align='right'>42.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, sprinkled edges</td><td align='right'>48.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, marbled edges.</td><td align='right'>50.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, antique</td><td align='right'>60.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.</td><td align='right'>60.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h4>PEOPLE'S DUODECIMO EDITION.</h4>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Pickwick Papers</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, $1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Nicholas Nickleby</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Great Expectations</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Lamplighter's Story</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>David Copperfield</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Oliver Twist</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Bleak House</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>A Tale of Two Cities</b>,</td><td align='right'>1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Dickens' New Stories</b>,</td><td align='right'>1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Little Dorrit</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Dombey and Son</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Christmas Stories</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Sketches by "Boz,"</b></td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Barnaby Rudge</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Martin Chuzzlewit</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Old Curiosity Shop</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Dickens' Short Stories</b>,</td><td align='right'>1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Message from the Sea</b>,</td><td align='right'>1.50</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<p><br /></p>
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Price of</td><td align='left'>a set,</td><td align='left'>in Black cloth, in 17 volumes</td><td align='right'>$29.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Full Law Library style</td><td align='right'>35.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, sprinkled edges</td><td align='right'>42.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, marbled edges</td><td align='right'>44.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, antique</td><td align='right'>50.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.</td><td align='right'>50.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Full calf, antique</td><td align='right'>60.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Full calf gilt edges, backs, etc.</td><td align='right'>60.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<h4>ILLUSTRATED DUODECIMO EDITION.</h4>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Pickwick Papers</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, $3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Tale of Two Cities</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Nicholas Nickleby</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>David Copperfield</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Oliver Twist</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Christmas Stories</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Bleak House</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Sketches by "Boz,"</b></td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Barnaby Rudge</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Martin Chuzzlewit</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Old Curiosity Shop</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Little Dorrit</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Dombey and Son</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 3.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h5><i>Each of the above are complete in two volumes, illustrated.</i></h5>
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Great Expectations</b>,</td><td align='right'>Cloth, 1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Lamplighter's Story</b>,</td><td align='right'>1.75</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Dickens' New Stories</b>,</td><td align='right'>1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Message from the Sea</b>,</td><td align='right'>1.50</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+<p><br /></p>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Price of</td><td align='left'>a set,</td><td align='left'>in Thirty volumes, bound in Black cloth, gilt backs</td><td align='right'>$45.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Full Law Library style</td><td align='right'>55.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, antique</td><td align='right'>90.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, full gilt back</td><td align='right'>90.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Full calf, antique</td><td align='right'>100.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Full calf, gilt edges, backs etc</td><td align='right'>100.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS.</h3>
+
+<h4>CHEAP EDITION, PAPER COVER.</h4>
+
+<p>This edition is published complete in Twenty-two large octavo volumes, in
+paper cover, as follows. Price Seventy-five cents a volume.</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<b>Pickwick Papers.</b><br />
+<b>Great Expectations.</b><br />
+<b>A Tale of Two Cities.</b><br />
+<b>New Years' Stories.</b><br />
+<b>Barnaby Rudge.</b><br />
+<b>Old Curiosity Shop.</b><br />
+<b>Little Dorrit.</b><br />
+<b>David Copperfield.</b><br />
+<b>Sketches by "Boz."</b><br />
+<b>Dickens' New Stories.</b><br />
+<b>American Notes.</b><br />
+<b>Somebody's Luggage.</b>  25 cts.<br />
+<b>Oliver Twist.</b><br />
+<b>Lamplighter's Story.</b><br />
+<b>Dombey and Son.</b><br />
+<b>Nicholas Nickleby.</b><br />
+<b>Holiday Stories.</b><br />
+<b>Martin Chuzzlewit.</b><br />
+<b>Bleak House.</b><br />
+<b>Dickens' Short Stories.</b><br />
+<b>Message from the Sea.</b><br />
+<b>Christmas Stories.</b><br />
+<b>Pic-Nic Papers.</b><br />
+<b>Christmas Carols.</b> 25 cents.<br />
+</p>
+
+<h4>LIBRARY OCTAVO EDITION. IN SEVEN VOLUMES.</h4>
+
+<p>This edition is in SEVEN large octavo volumes, with a portrait on steel of
+Charles Dickens, and bound in the following various styles.</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Price of</td><td align='left'>a set,</td><td align='left'>in Black cloth, in seven volumes,</td><td align='right'>$14.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Scarlet cloth, extra,</td><td align='right'>15.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Law Library style,</td><td align='right'>17.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, sprinkled edges,</td><td align='right'>20.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, marbled edges,</td><td align='right'>21.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, antique,</td><td align='right'>25.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.,</td><td align='right'>25.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+<h3>CHARLES LEVER'S WORKS.</h3>
+
+<h4><i>Fine Edition, bound separately.</i></h4>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Charles O'Malley</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>$2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Harry Lorrequer</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Jack Hinton</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Davenport Dunn</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Tom Burke of Ours</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Arthur O'Leary</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Con Cregan</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Knight of Gwynne</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Valentine Vox</b>, cloth,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Ten Thousand a Year</b>,</td><td align='right'>2.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<h3>CHARLES LEVER'S NOVELS.</h3>
+
+<h4><i>All neatly done up in paper covers.</i>
+</h4>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Charles O'Malley</b>,</td><td align='right'><i>Price</i> 75 cts.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Harry Lorrequer</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 "</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Horace Templeton</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 "</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Tom Burke of Ours</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 "</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Jack Hinton, the Guardsman</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 "</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Arthur O'Leary</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 cts.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>The Knight of Gwynne</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 "</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Kate O'Donoghue</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 "</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Con Cregan, the Irish Gil Blas</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 "</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Davenport Dunn</b>,</td><td align='right'>75 "</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<h4><b>LIBRARY EDITION.</b></h4>
+
+<p>THIS EDITION is complete in FIVE large octavo volumes, containing Charles
+O'Malley, Harry Lorrequer, Horace Templeton, Tom Burke of Ours, Arthur
+O'Leary, Jack Hinton the Guardsman, The Knight of Gwynne, Kate O'Donoghue,
+etc., handsomely printed, and bound in various styles, as follows:</p>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Price of</td><td align='left'>a set</td><td align='left'>in Black cloth,</td><td align='right'>$10.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Scarlet cloth,</td><td align='right'>11.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Law Library sheep,</td><td align='right'>12.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, sprinkled edges,</td><td align='right'>14.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, marbled edges,</td><td align='right'>15.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='center'>"</td><td align='center'>"</td><td align='left'>Half calf, antique,</td><td align='right'>20.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>WILKIE COLLINS' GREAT WORKS.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>The Dead Secret.</b> One volume, octavo, paper cover. Price
+fifty cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00; or a
+fine 12mo. edition, in one vol., paper cover, in large type,
+for $1.25, or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Crossed Path; or, Basil.</b> Complete in one volume, paper
+cover. Price $1.25, or bound in one volume, cloth, for
+$1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Stolen Mask.</b> Price 25 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Hide and Seek.</b> One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price fifty
+cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00.</p>
+
+<p><b>After Dark.</b> One vol., octavo, paper, cover. Price fifty
+cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00.</p>
+
+<p><b>Sights a-foot</b>; or Travels Beyond Railways. One volume,
+octavo, paper cover. Price 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Yellow Mask.</b> Price 25 cts.</p>
+
+<p><b>Sister Rose.</b> Price 25 cents.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3>COOK BOOKS</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Petersons' New Cook Book</b>; or Useful Receipts for the
+Housewife and the uninitiated. Full of valuable receipts,
+all original and never before published, all of which will
+be found to be very valuable and of daily use. One vol.,
+bound. Price $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book</b>; Being her last new book. One
+volume, bound. Price $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Widdifield's New Cook Book</b>; or, Practical Receipts for the
+Housewife. Cloth. Price $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book.</b> By Mrs. Sarah J. Hale. One
+volume, bound. Price $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Miss Leslie's New Receipts for Cooking.</b> Complete in one
+volume, bound. Price $1.50.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>MRS. HALE'S RECEIPTS.</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Mrs. Hale's Receipts for the Million.</b> Containing 4545
+Receipts. By Mrs. Sarah J. Hale. One vol., 800 pages,
+strongly bound. Price $1.50.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>LADIES GUIDE TO TRUE POLITENESS, etc.</h4>
+
+<p><b>The Ladies Guide to True Politeness and Perfect Manners.</b> By Miss Leslie.
+Cloth, full gilt back. Price $1.50.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>The Ladies Complete Guide to Needlework and Embroidery. 113
+Illustrations.</b> Cloth, gilt back. Price $1.50.</p>
+
+<p>Ladies Work Table Book. Plates, cloth, crimson gilt. Price
+$1.25.</p></div>
+
+
+<h4>FRANCATELLI'S FRENCH COOK.</h4>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Francatelli's Celebrated French Cook Book. The Modern Cook.</b>
+A Practical Guide to the Culinary Art, in all its branches;
+comprising, in addition to English Cookery, the most
+approved and recherch&eacute; systems of French, Italian, and
+German Cookery; adapted as well for the largest
+establishments, as for the use of private families. By
+CHARLES ELME FRANCATELLI, pupil to the celebrated <span class="smcap">Careme</span>,
+and late Maitre-d'H&ocirc;tel and Chief Cook to her Majesty, the
+Queen of England. With Sixty-Two Illustrations of various
+dishes. Reprinted from the last London Edition, carefully
+revised and considerably enlarged. Complete in one large
+octavo volume of Six Hundred pages, strongly bound, and
+printed on the finest paper. Price Five Dollars.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3>J. A. MAITLAND'S GREAT WORKS.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>The Three Cousins.</b> By J. A. Maitland. One vol., paper. Price
+$1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Watchman.</b> Complete in one large vol., paper cover. Price
+$1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Wanderer.</b> Complete in one volume, paper cover. Price
+$1.25; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Diary of an Old Doctor.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price
+$1.25, or bound in cloth for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Lawyer's Story.</b> One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+bound in cloth for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Sartaroe.</b> A Tale of Norway. One vol., paper cover. Price
+$1.25 or in cloth for $1.50.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3>MRS. DANIELS' GREAT WORKS.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Marrying for Money.</b> One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price
+fifty cents; or one vol., cloth. Price $1.00.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Poor Cousin.</b> Price 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Kate Walsingham.</b> Price 50 cents.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h3>ALEXANDER DUMAS' WORKS.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Count of Monte-Cristo.</b> By Alexander Dumas. Beautifully
+illustrated. One volume, cloth, $1.50; or paper cover, for
+$1.00.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Conscript.</b> One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25.; or in
+one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Camille; or the Fate of a Coquette.</b> Only correct Translation
+from the Original French. One volume, paper, price $1.25;
+cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Three Guardsmen.</b> Price 75 cents, in paper cover, or a
+finer edition in cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Twenty Years After.</b> A Sequel to the "Three Guardsmen." Price
+75 cents, in paper cover, or a finer edition, in one volume,
+cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Bragelonne; the Son of Athos</b>: being the continuation of
+"Twenty Years After." Price 75 cents, in paper, or a finer
+edition, in cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Iron Mask.</b> Being the continuation of the "Three
+Guardsmen." Two vols., paper cover. Price One Dollar; or in
+one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Louise La Valliere</b>, or, The Second Series and end of the
+"Iron Mask." Two volumes, paper cover. Price $1.00, or in
+one vol., cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Memoirs of a Physician.</b> Beautifully Illustrated. Two
+vols., paper cover. Price One Dollar; or bound in one
+volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Queen's Necklace.</b> A Sequel to the "Memoirs of a
+Physician." Two vols., paper cover. Price $1.00; or in one
+vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Six Years Later</b>, or, Taking of the Bastile. A Continuation
+of "The Queen's Necklace." Two vols., paper cover. Price One
+Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Countess of Charny</b>; or, The Fall of the French Monarchy.
+Sequel to Six Years Later. Two vols., paper cover. Price One
+Dollar; or in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Andree de Taverney.</b> A Sequel to and continuation of the
+Countess of Charny. Two volumes, paper. Price $1.00; or in
+one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Chevalier.</b> A Sequel to, and final end of "Andree De
+Taverney." One vol. Price 75 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Adventures of a Marquis.</b> Two vols., paper cover. Price
+1.00; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Forty-Five Guardsmen.</b> Price 75 cents, or a finer edition
+in one volume, cloth. Price $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Iron Hand.</b> Price 75 cents, in paper cover, or a finer
+edition in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Diana of Meridor.</b> Two volumes paper cover. Price One Dollar;
+or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Edmond Dantes.</b> Being a Sequel to Dumas' celebrated novel of
+the "Count of Monte-Cristo." Price 50 cts.</p>
+
+<p><b>Annette; or, The Lady of the Pearls.</b> A Companion to
+"Camille." Price 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Fallen Angel.</b> A Story of Love and Life in Paris. One
+volume. Price 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Man with Five Wives.</b> Complete in one volume. Price 50
+cts.</p>
+
+<p><b>George; or, The Planter of the Isle of France.</b> One volume.
+Price Fifty cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Genevieve</b>; or, The Chevalier of Maison Rouge. One volume.
+Illustrated. Price 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Mohicans of Paris.</b> 50 cts.</p>
+
+<p><b>Sketches in France.</b> 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Isabel of Bavaria.</b> Price 50 cts.</p>
+
+<p><b>Felina de Chambure</b>; or, The Female Fiend. Price 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Horrors of Paris.</b> 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Twin Lieutenants.</b> One vol. Price 75 cts.</p>
+
+<p><b>The Corsican Brothers.</b> 25 cts.</p></div>
+
+
+<h3>FRANK E. SMEDLEY'S WORKS.</h3>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><b>Harry Coverdale's Courtship and Marriage.</b> One vol., paper.
+Price $1.25; or cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Lorrimer Littlegood.</b> By author of "Frank Fairleigh." One
+vol., paper. Price $1.25; or cloth, $1.50.</p>
+
+<p><b>Frank Fairleigh.</b> One volume, cloth, $1.50; or cheap edition
+in paper cover, for 75 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Lewis Arundel.</b> One vol., cloth. Price $1.50; or cheap
+edition in paper cover, for 75 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Fortunes and Misfortunes of Harry Racket Scapegrace.</b> Cloth.
+Price $1.50; or cheap edition in paper cover, for 50 cents.</p>
+
+<p><b>Tom Racquet</b>; and His Three Maiden Aunts. Illustrated. 50
+cents.</p></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<h4>GET UP YOUR CLUBS FOR 1864!</h4>
+
+<h3>NEW AND SPLENDID PREMIUMS!</h3>
+
+<h3>PETERSON'S MAGAZINE THE BEST AND CHEAPEST IN THE WORLD!</h3>
+
+<p>This popular Monthly contains more for the money than any Magazine in the
+world. In 1864, it will have nearly 1000 pages, 25 to 30 steel plates, 12
+colored patterns, and 900 wood engravings&mdash;and all this for only TWO
+DOLLARS A YEAR, or a dollar less than magazines of its class. Every lady
+ought to take "Peterson." In the general advance of prices, it is the ONLY
+MAGAZINE THAT HAS NOT RAISED ITS PRICES, EITHER TO SINGLE SUBSCRIBERS OR TO
+CLUBS; and is, therefore, emphatically,</p>
+
+<h4>THE MAGAZINE FOR THE TIMES!</h4>
+
+<p>The stories in "Peterson" are conceded to be <i>the best published anywhere</i>.
+Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, Ella Rodman, Mrs. Denison, Frank Lee Benedict, the
+author of "Susy L's Diary," T. S. Arthur, E. L. Chandler Moulton, Gabrielle
+Lee, Virginia F. Townsend, Rosalie Grey, Clara Augusta, and the author of
+"The Second Life," besides all the most popular female writers of America
+are regular contributors. In addition to the usual number of shorter
+stories, there will be given in 1864, <b>Four Original Copy-righted Novelets</b>,
+viz:</p>
+
+<p>
+<b>THE MAID OF HONOR&mdash;a Story of Queen Bess</b>,<br />
+By ANN S. STEPHENS.<br />
+<br />
+<b>THE LOST ESTATE&mdash;a Story of To-Day</b>,<br />
+By the author of "The Second Life."<br />
+<br />
+<b>MAUD'S SUMMER AT SARATOGA</b>,<br />
+By FRANK LEE BENEDICT.<br />
+<br />
+<b>FANNY'S FLIRTATION</b>,<br />
+By ELLA RODMAN.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>In its Illustrations also, "Peterson" is unrivaled. The publisher
+challenges a comparison between its <b>SUPERB MEZZOTINTS AND OTHER STEEL
+ENGRAVINGS</b> and those in other Magazines, and one at least is given in every
+number.</p>
+
+<h4>COLORED FASHION PLATES IN ADVANCE,</h4>
+
+<p>It is the ONLY MAGAZINE whose Fashion Plates can be relied on.</p>
+
+<p>Each number contains a Fashion Plate, engraved on steel, and colored&mdash;from
+Fashions later than any other Magazine gives; also, a dozen or more New
+Styles, engraved on Wood; also, a Pattern, from which a Dress, Mantilla, or
+Child's Costume can be cut, without the aid of a mantua-maker&mdash;so that each
+number, in this way, will SAVE A YEAR'S SUBSCRIPTION. The Paris, London,
+Philadelphia and New York Fashions are described, at length, each month.
+Patterns of Caps, Bonnets, Head Dresses, &amp;c., given. Its</p>
+
+<h4>COLORED PATTERNS IN EMBROIDERY, CROCHET, &amp;C.</h4>
+
+<p>The Work-Table Department of this Magazine IS WHOLLY UNRIVALED. Every
+number contains a dozen or more patterns in every variety of Fancy-work;
+Crochet, Embroidery, Knitting, Bead-work, Shell-work, Hair-work, &amp;c., &amp;c.,
+&amp;c. Every month, a SUPERB COLORED PATTERN FOR SLIPPER, PURSE or CHAIR SEAT,
+&amp;c., is given&mdash;each of which, at a retail store, would cost Fifty Cents.</p>
+
+<h4>"OUR NEW COOK-BOOK."</h4>
+
+<p>The Original Household Receipts of "Peterson" are quite famous. For 1864
+our "COOK-BOOK" will be continued: EVERY ONE OF THESE RECEIPTS HAS BEEN
+TESTED. This alone will be worth the price of "Peterson." Other Receipts
+for the Toilette, Sick-room, &amp;c., &amp;c., will be given.</p>
+
+<p>NEW AND FASHIONABLE MUSIC in every number. Also, Hints on Horticulture,
+Equestrianism, and all matters interesting to Ladies.</p>
+
+<p>TERMS:&mdash;ALWAYS IN ADVANCE.</p>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>One Copy for One year,</td><td align='right'>$2.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Three Copies for One year,</td><td align='right'>5.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Five Copies for One year,</td><td align='right'>$7.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Eight Copies for One year.</td><td align='right'>10.00</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>PREMIUMS FOR GETTING UP CLUBS!&mdash;Three, Five, or Eight copies, make a Club.
+To every person getting up a club an extra copy of the Magazine for 1864
+will be given.</p>
+
+<p><i>Address, post-paid</i>, CHARLES J. PETERSON,</p>
+
+<p>
+No. 306 Chestnut St., Phila.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>All Postmasters constituted Agents; but any person may get up a club.
+Specimens sent gratuitously, if written for.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<h3>CHEAPEST BOOK HOUSE IN THE WORLD.</h3>
+
+<h5>To Sutlers! Pedlars! Booksellers! News Agents! etc.</h5>
+
+<h4>T. B. PETERSON &amp; BROTHERS,</h4>
+
+<h4>No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,</h4>
+
+<h3>PUBLISH THE MOST SALEABLE BOOKS IN THE WORLD</h3>
+
+<h4>AND SUPPLY ALL BOOKS AT VERY LOW RATES.</h4>
+
+<p>The cheapest place in the world to buy or send for a stock of all kinds of
+Books, suitable for all persons whatever, for Soldiers, and for the Army,
+and for all other reading, is at the Bookselling and Publishing House of T.
+B. PETERSON &amp; BROTHERS, Philadelphia.</p>
+
+<p>Any person wanting any books at all, in any quantity, from a single book to
+a dozen, a hundred, thousand, ten thousand, or larger quantity of books,
+had better send on their orders at once to the "CHEAPEST BOOKSELLING AND
+PUBLISHING HOUSE IN THE WORLD," which is at T. B. PETERSON &amp; BROTHERS, No.
+306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, who have the largest stock in the
+country, and will supply them and sell them cheaper than any other house in
+the world. We publish a large variety of Military Novels, with Illustrated
+Military covers, in colors, besides thousands of others, all of which are
+the best selling and most popular books in the world. We have just issued a
+new and complete Catalogue, copies of which we will send gratuitously to
+all on their sending for one.</p>
+
+<p>Enclose one, two, five, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand
+dollars, or more, to us in a letter, or per express, and write what kind of
+books you wish, and they will be packed and sent to you at once, per first
+express or mail, or in any other way you may direct, just as well assorted,
+and the same as if you were on the spot, with circulars, show bills, &amp;c.,
+gratis. All we ask is to give us a trial.</p>
+
+<p>Address all orders for any books you may want at all, no matter by whom
+published, or how small or how large your order may be, to the <i>Cheapest
+Publishing and Bookselling House in the world, which is at</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">T. B. PETERSON &amp; BROTHERS,<br />
+No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And they will be packed and sent to you within an hour after receipt of the
+order, per express or railroad, or in any other way you may direct.</p>
+
+<p>Agents, Sutlers, and Pedlars wanted everywhere, to engage in the sale of
+our popular selling Books, all of which will be sold at very low rates.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWARD***</p>
+<p>******* This file should be named 36644-h.txt or 36644-h.zip *******</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Coward, by Henry Morford
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Coward
+       A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863
+
+
+Author: Henry Morford
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 6, 2011  [eBook #36644]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COWARD***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Edwards, Josephine Paolucci, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images
+generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries
+(http://www.archive.org/details/americana)
+
+
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/American Libraries. See
+      http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022429835
+
+
+
+
+
+THE COWARD.
+
+A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863.
+
+by
+
+HENRY MORFORD.
+
+Author of "Shoulder-Straps," "The Days of Shoddy," etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Philadelphia:
+T. B. Peterson & Brothers,
+306 Chestnut Street.
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
+T. B. Peterson & Brothers,
+In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United
+States, in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
+
+
+
+
+                        TO
+         THE PATRIOT PRINTERS OF AMERICA--
+                  THE MEN WHO
+            HAVE FURNISHED MORE SOLDIERS
+              THAN ANY OTHER CLASS
+    IN COMPARISON WITH THE WHOLE NUMBER OF THEIR CRAFT,
+                       TO
+        THE DEAD HEROES OF THE WAR FOR THE UNION
+                      AND
+      THE LIVING ARMIES THAT YET BULWARK ITS HOPE,--
+                      THIS
+    BLENDING OF THE FACTS AND FANCIES
+                       OF
+                    WAR-TIME,
+                       IS
+        DEDICATED BY THEIR BROTHER-CRAFTSMAN,
+
+                                          THE AUTHOR.
+
+_New York City, July, 1864._
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+Some persons, taking up this work with expectations more or less elevated,
+may possibly lay it down with disappointment after perusal, because it does
+not discuss with sharp personalities, as the title may have led them to
+suppose, the conduct of some of those well-known men connected with the
+Union Army, who have disgracefully faltered on the field. But the truth is
+that the Union Army has mustered very few cowards--so few, that a
+distinguished artist, not long ago called on to draw an ideal head of one
+of that class, said: "Really it is so long since I have seen a coward, that
+I scarcely know how to go about it!" The aim of the writer, eschewing all
+such tempting personalities, and quite as carefully avoiding all dry
+didactic discussion of the theme of courage and its opposite,--has
+principally been to illustrate the tendency of many men to misunderstand
+their own characters in certain particulars, and the inevitable consequence
+of their being misunderstood by the world, in one direction or the other.
+No apology is felt to be necessary for the length at which the scenery of
+the White Mountains, their actualities of interest and possibilities of
+danger, have been introduced into the narration; nor is it believed that
+the chain of connection with the great contest will be found the weaker
+because the glimpses given of it are somewhat more brief than in preceding
+publications of the same series. In those portions the writer has again
+occasion to acknowledge the assistance of the same capable hand which
+supplied much of the war data for both of his previous volumes.
+
+                                       NEW YORK CITY, _July 1st, 1864._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+    A June Morning of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three--Glimpses
+    of West Philadelphia--The Days before Gettysburgh--The Two on
+    the Piazza--Margaret Hayley and Elsie Brand--An Embrace and a
+    Difference--Foreshadowings of Carlton Brand, Brother and
+    Lover                                                                29
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+    The Coming of Carlton Brand--Almost a Paladin of
+    Balaclava--Brother and Sister--A Spasm of Shame--The
+    Confession--The Coward--How Margaret Hayley heard Many Words
+    not intended for her--The Rupture and the Separation                 45
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+    Kitty Hood and her School-house--Dick Compton going
+    Soldiering--A Lover's Quarrel, a bit of Jealousy, and a
+    Threat--How Dick Compton met his supposed Rival--An
+    Encounter, Sudden Death, and Kitty Hood's terrible Discovery         61
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+    The Residence of the Brands--Robert Brand and Dr.
+    Pomeroy--Radical and Copperhead--A passage-at-arms that ended
+    in a Quarrel--Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper--The Shadow of
+    Shame--Father and Daughter--The falling of a parent's Curse          81
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+    The Birth and Blood of the Brands--Pride that came down from
+    the Crusades--Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent--How
+    Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed to be
+    answered--Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a Corpus Delicti         99
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+    The Residence of Dr. Pomeroy--Nathan Bladesden and Eleanor
+    Hill--A kneeling Woman and a rigid Quaker--The ruin that a
+    Letter had wrought--A Parting that seemed eternal--Carlton
+    Brand alive once more, and a Glance at the fatal Letter             120
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+    A return to 1856--Nicholas Hill, Iron-merchant--His Death,
+    his Daughter, and his Friend--How Dr. Pomeroy became a
+    Guardian and how he Discharged that duty--A ruin and an
+    awakening--The market value of Dunderhaven Stock in 1858            137
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+    What followed the revelation of Betrayal--A gleam of Hope for
+    Eleanor Hill--A relative from California, a projected Voyage,
+    and a Disappointment--One more Letter--The broken thread
+    resumed--Carlton Brand's farewell, and an Elopement                 164
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+    Dr. Pomeroy's purposed Pursuit--A plain Quaker who used very
+    plain Language--Almost a Fight--How Mrs. Burton Hayley
+    consoled her Daughter, and how Margaret revealed the Past--A
+    Compact--Dr. Pomeroy's Canine Adventure--Old Elspeth once
+    more--A Search that found Nothing.                                  174
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+    Before and after Gettysburgh--The Apathy and Despair which
+    preceded, and the Jubilation which followed--What Kitty Hood
+    said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand--Brother and
+    Sister--A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel--A fire-room Visit,
+    an Interview, and a Departure for Europe                            200
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+    Anomalies of the War for the Union--The Watering-place rush
+    of 1863--A White Mountain party disembarking at
+    Littleton--Who filled the Concord coach--The
+    Vanderlyns--Shoddy on its travels--Mr. Brooks Cunninghame and
+    his Family--"H. T." and an Excitement                               219
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+    Landing at the Profile House--Halstead Rowan and
+    Gymnastics--How that person saw Clara Vanderlyn and became a
+    Rival of "H. T."--The Full Moon in the Notch--Trodden Toes, a
+    Name, a Voice, and a Rencontre--Margaret Hayley and Capt.
+    Hector Coles--The Old Man of the Mountain by Moonlight, and a
+    Mystery                                                             237
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+    Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her Pet Bears--A misadventure and a
+    Friendly Hand in time--The question of Courage--Halstead
+    Rowan and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame on Geography--The Dead
+    Washington, the Flume and the Pool--With the personal
+    relations weaving at that juncture.                                 255
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+    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               279
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+    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                                                            298
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+    Cloud and Storm at the Profile--Sights and Sensations of a
+    rainy-day ride to the Crawford--Horace Townsend and Halstead
+    Rowan once more together--Unexpected Arrivals--A cavalcade of
+    Miserables--An ascent of Mount Washington, with Equestrianism
+    and War-whoops extraordinary                                        323
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+    Horace Townsend with a Lady in charge--An adventure over the
+    "Gulf of Mexico"--Clara Vanderlyn in deadly peril--A moment
+    of horror--Halstead Rowan and a display of the Comanche
+    riding--Townsend's eclipse--The return to the
+    Crawford--Margaret Hayley again, and a Conversation overheard       348
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+    Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley--A strange Rencontre in
+    the Parlor--Another Rencontre, equally strange but less
+    pleasant--How Clara Vanderlyn faded away from the
+    Mountains--And how the Comanche Rider "played baby" and
+    disappeared                                                         370
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+    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.                                   392
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+    Suspense in danger, in two Senses--Horace Townsend with a
+    Swing-rope--An invitation to Captain Hector Coles--A fearful
+    piece of Amateur Gymnastics--Going down into the
+    Schute--Success or Failure?--The event, and Margaret Hayley's
+    madness--Two unfortunate Declarations                               410
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+    The bearer of a Disgraced Name in England--A strange Quest
+    and a strange Unrest--Hurrying over to Ireland--Too late for
+    the Packet--The little Despatch-steamer--Henry Fitzmaurice,
+    the journalist--The peril of the Emerald, and the end of all
+    Quests save one                                                     432
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+    Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper--Crossing the
+    Rappahannock--The fight and the calamity of Rawson's
+    Cross-Roads--Taking of Culpeper--Pleasanton's Volunteer
+    Aide--Townsend versus Coles--The meeting of Two who loved
+    each other--And the Little Ride they took together                  452
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+    Once more at West Philadelphia--September and Change--Last
+    glimpses of Kitty Hood and Dick Compton--Robert Brand and his
+    invited Guest--The news of Death--Old Elspeth Graeme as a
+    Seeress--The dispatch from Alexandria--The Quest of Brand and
+    Margaret Hayley                                                     478
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+    In the Hospital at Alexandria--The wounded Man and his
+    Nurse--Who was Horace Townsend?--A Mystery explained--How
+    Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's--One word more of the
+    Comanche Rider--Conclusion                                          490
+
+
+
+
+THE COWARD.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+     A JUNE MORNING OF EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THREE--GLIMPSES
+     OF WEST PHILADELPHIA--THE DAYS BEFORE GETTYSBURG--THE TWO ON
+     THE PIAZZA--MARGARET HAYLEY AND ELSIE BRAND--AN EMBRACE AND
+     A DIFFERENCE--FORESHADOWINGS OF CARLTON BRAND, BROTHER AND
+     LOVER.
+
+
+A wide piazza, with the columns made of such light tracery in scrolled
+plank-work that they seemed to be almost unreal and gave an appearance of
+etheriality to the whole front of the house. The piazza, flecked over with
+the golden June sunshine that stole down between the branches of the tall
+trees standing in front and shading the house, and that crept in through
+the network of twine and climbing roses clambering almost up to the roof
+from the balustrade below. The house to which the piazza adjoined, large,
+built of wood in that half Flemish and half Elizabethan style which has of
+late years been made popular through cheap books on cottage architecture
+and the illustrations in agricultural newspapers,--two and a half stories
+in height, with a double gabled front that belonged to the one, elaborate
+cornices and work over the piazza that belonged to the other, and a turret
+in the centre that belonged to neither. A wide, tall door opening from the
+piazza, and windows also opening upon it, sweeping down quite to the
+floor. Altogether a house which approached more nearly to the "composite"
+order of architecture so much affected by wealthy Americans, than to any
+one set down in the books by a particular designation; and yet shapely and
+imposing, and showing that if the most unimpeachable taste had not presided
+over the erection, yet wealth had been lavishly expended and all the modern
+graces and ornaments freely supplied.
+
+In front of the house, and sweeping down to the road that ran within a
+hundred feet, a grassed lawn lying in the lovely green of early summer,
+only broken at irregular intervals by the dozen of trees of larger and
+smaller sizes, round which the earth had been artistically made to swell so
+as to do away with any appearance of newness and create the impression that
+the roundness had been caused by the bursting of the trees farther out of
+the ground through many years of vigorous growth. Beneath one of the
+largest of the trees--a maple, with the silver sheen almost equally divided
+between its bark and its glossy leaves, a long wooden bench or settee, with
+two or three sofa-cushions thrown carelessly upon it, as if it formed at
+times a favorite lounge for a reader or a smoker. On the piazza a triad of
+chairs, irregularly placed and all unoccupied. One of the two folding doors
+leading into the halls from the piazza, wide open, as became the season,
+and the other half closed as if a single puff of summer breeze coming
+through the hall had become exhausted before closing it entirely. One of
+the windows opening from the piazza into what seemed to be the better part
+of the house, closed entirely; and the other, with the shutters "bowed" or
+half open, permitting a peep into a large parlor or sitting-room, with rich
+carpet and handsome furniture, but kept dusky under the impression (more or
+less reasonable) that thereby additional coolness would be secured.
+
+Near the house, on both sides, other houses of corresponding pretension
+though displaying great variety in style of architecture; and in front,
+across the wide road, still others showing to the right and left, and the
+whole appearance of the immediate neighborhood evidencing that it was
+neither country nor city, but a blending of both, suburban, and a chosen
+spot for the residences of those who did business in the great city and
+wished to be near it, and who possessed means and taste to make so pleasant
+a selection. Still farther away in front, as seen between the other houses
+and shrubbery, and stretching off southward in a long rolling sweep, rich
+agricultural country, with some of the hay-crop yet ungathered, broad
+fields of grain receiving the last ripening kiss of the sun before yielding
+to the sickle or the reaping-machine, and fruit-trees already beginning to
+be golden with the apples, pears and peaches glimmering amid the leaves. A
+quiet, gentle scene, with evident wealth to gild it and perfect repose to
+lend it character; and over all the warm sun of a June morning resting like
+a benediction, and a slight shadow of golden haze in the air softening
+every object in the perspective. Occasionally a pedestrian figure moving
+slowly along one of the foot-paths that bordered the wide road; and anon a
+farm-wagon loaded with early produce and on its way to market, rumbling by
+with such a sleepy expression on the face of the driver and such lollings
+of the ears of the full-fed and lazy horses, that the episode of its
+passage rather added to than detracted from the slumberous quiet of the
+prospect.
+
+Then another passage, very different and not at all in keeping with any of
+the points that have before been noted. An officer in full uniform, with
+the front of his chasseur cap thrown high in defiance of the glare of the
+sunshine, spurring by on a high-stepping and fast-trotting horse, eastward
+towards the city, with such life and haste in every movement of himself and
+the animal he bestrode as to momentarily dash the whole view with unquiet.
+Then the equestrian figure out of sight and the beat of his horse's hoofs
+heard no longer; and the scene relapsing into that languor born of the June
+morning verging rapidly towards noon.
+
+Then a sudden sound, still more discordant with the drowsy peace of the
+hour than the sight of the spurring soldier, and still more painfully
+suggestive of war in the land of peace. The quick, sharp rattle of a
+snare-drum, but a little space removed, and apparently passing down one of
+the lateral roads in the neighborhood, dying away with a light tap into the
+distance a moment after, and quiet coming back again yet more markedly
+after so incongruous an interruption.
+
+The place, West Philadelphia, half a mile or more beyond the Schuylkill,
+not far from the line traversed beyond the bridge by the Market Street
+cars, and near the intersection of that branch of the main artery known as
+the Darby Road,--in the outer edge of that beautiful little section with
+its tall trees and plats of natural green, out of and into which the
+shrieking monsters of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad dart every hour in
+the day with freight and passengers to and from the Great West. The time,
+late in June, 1863, a few days before Gettysburg, when the long-threatened
+invasion of the North by the rebels had become for the moment an
+accomplished fact, when Lee and Ewell had crossed the Potomac, swept on
+through Upper Maryland, entered Pennsylvania, devastated the farms and
+carried away the stock of the farmers on the border, laid York under a
+contribution, burned the barracks at Carlisle, and threatened every hour to
+capture Harrisburgh and force the passage of the Susquehanna. When women
+and children, and by far too many of the able-bodied inhabitants who should
+have shown more pride if they indeed possessed no courage, had fled away
+from the Seat of Government of the Keystone State, and the public records
+were following them to prevent their falling into the hands of an enemy
+known to be destructive and revengeful, and for the moment believed to be
+irresistible. When the rebels themselves boasted that they were about to
+teach the North all the horrors of war that had fallen upon the South in
+the long contest,--and that in a few days they would water their
+cavalry-horses in the Delaware, if they did not achieve the same success at
+the very banks of the Hudson; and when the newspapers of New York and
+Philadelphia, for the moment completely discouraged, gave up the line of
+defence of the Susquehanna, and gravely debated, whether a check could
+indeed be made at the Delaware, with the loss of the Quaker City, or
+whether the great struggle must at last be transferred to the Hudson hills
+of New Jersey. When the Reserves were mustering in Philadelphia, and the
+Coal Regiments forming in the haunts of the sturdy miners. When the
+Pennsylvania coal-mines were to be set on fire by the invader, and left to
+burn on until all the fuel of the nation was destroyed, if the "great
+conflagration" of the whole earth did not follow as a result. When more
+placards calling for the defence of the State, were exhibited in the
+neighborhood of old Independence Hall, than had ever shown there, inviting
+the idle to amusement, in the most prosperous seasons of opera, theatre and
+concert-saloon--drums beating at every corner, brass bands blowing on every
+square, patriotic appeals and efforts to recruit on every hand, and yet the
+people apparently lying under bodily apathy or mental paralysis. When
+Governor Seymour, of New York, and Governor Parker, of New Jersey, waiving
+the political question for the moment, were calling out the troops of those
+States to the defence of Pennsylvania; and when the militia of the city of
+New York and the returned nine-months volunteers of New Jersey were showing
+themselves equally ready to respond to the call. When the Army of the
+Potomac seemed for the moment to be nothing, even for the defence of the
+North, Hooker discredited, no successor discovered, public confidence lost,
+the very darkest day of the struggle at hand, and no man able or willing to
+predict what might be the extent of disaster reached before the rolling
+back of the tide of invasion from the homes of the loyal States.
+
+Such were the place, the time, the surroundings, and the atmosphere (so to
+speak) of the house of the blended Flemish and Elizabethan styles of
+architecture, at West Philadelphia, of which, thus far, only the outward
+aspects have been presented. Yet there may be an inexcusable neglect of
+the proprieties, in presenting a house, its green lawn, shady trees, and
+even the pleasant landscape stretching away in front of it, before those
+living figures which would certainly have attracted the attention of an
+observer in advance of any of the inanimate beauties of art or nature.
+
+Those figures were two in number, both standing on the piazza, very near
+the trellis of climbing roses, and where the flecks of sunshine fell
+through the leaves upon them and dashed them with little dots and lines of
+moving light, as well as the floor upon which they stood. Both were
+girls--both young--both beautiful; at least each possessed that combination
+of features, form and manner, making her very pleasing to the casual
+observer, and certain to be reckoned beautiful by some one admitted to a
+closer knowledge of the spirit enshrined within. They were evidently dear
+friends; for as they stood near the trellis, and the hand of the taller of
+the two plucked a half-open rose from one of the clusters, and she
+playfully tried to coax it to a fuller opening by breathing caressingly
+upon it and separating its clinging leaves with her dainty fingers,--the
+arm of the other was around her waist, and both the trim and graceful forms
+were slightly swaying backward and forward in that pleasant, idle,
+school-girl motion which the grown woman does not easily forget until it
+has given the "fidgets" to half her elder acquaintances.
+
+The taller and perhaps by a year the elder--she of the rose--was the
+daughter of the mistress of that pleasant summer paradise, born to wealth
+and position, and her birth registered some two-and-twenty years before in
+the predecessor of the heavy family Bible with its golden clasps, which lay
+in state in the parlor so near her, as Margaret Hayley. She was a little
+above the average height of womanhood, and might have seemed too tall for
+grace but for the exquisite rounding of the lithe form, the matchless fall
+of a pair of sloping shoulders that could not probably be matched within a
+radius of an hundred miles, the graceful carriage of a neck that would
+have been long if less elegantly poised, the beauty in shape and spring in
+motion of the Arab foot under which the water would have run as easily as
+beneath a bridge, and the supple delicacy of the long taper fingers with
+their rose-tinted nails, which seemed perfect and high-blooded enough to
+have a mission of playing among heart-strings as the fingers of others
+might do among the chords of a harp.
+
+In feature the young girl had quite as many claims to attention. The hair
+was very dark and very profuse--so near to black that it needed the
+sunlight before the golden shadows in the dark brown became fully
+apparent--swept plainly down on either side, in the madonna fashion, from a
+brow that was very pure, high and clear. The face was handsomely moulded,
+rather long than broad, as beseemed the figure, rather pale than ruddy,
+though with a dash of healthy color in each cheek that belied any momentary
+suspicion of ill health; the nose a little long and somewhat decided, but
+very classic in outline and finely cut at the nostril; the eyes dark--so
+dark that a careless observer would have lost their brown and called them
+black, and their expression a little reserved if not sad and even sometimes
+severe; the mouth small and well-shaped, with the lips as delicately tinted
+as the faintest blush-rose in the cluster near her, but a shade too thin
+for the exhibition of exuberant passion, and showing a slight curl of pride
+at the corners of the upper; the chin rounded, full, and forming a pleasant
+point for the eye to rest upon as it descended from the face to study the
+contour of neck and shoulders. The first appreciative glance at her was
+certain to be followed by the suppressed exclamation: "How very handsome!"
+and the second by a thought that the lips did not syllable: "How very proud
+and queenly!" It might have needed many more than a third, before the gazer
+could go to the full depth of a very marked character, and say how much of
+that queenly bearing might be ready to bend at last to the magic touch of
+the softer passions, and how much of that evident goodness and firmness
+might be employed in conveying happiness to others than herself. Among her
+peculiarities, she seemed to despise stripes, plaids, sprigs, spots, and
+the other endless varieties of color in material; and the lawn which swept
+that morning around her erect figure was of a neutral tint and as devoid of
+spot as were arms, ears and neck of any ornament in jewelry except a small
+cameo at the throat, a slight gold chain around the neck and descending to
+the bosom, and a single cluster diamond sparkling on the forefinger of the
+right-hand that was dallying with the spirit hidden among the rose-leaves.
+
+No more telling contrast to the tall, majestic girl could well have been
+supplied, than her neighbor and dear friend, Elsie Brand (Elspeth,
+baptismally, for reasons that will hereafter develop themselves, but always
+called Elsie by those admitted to the least intimacy.) She was at least
+four inches shorter than Miss Hayley, round and rather plump, though very
+graceful in figure, with a chubby face, ruddy cheeks, piquant nose, merry
+blue eyes, pouting red lips, full hair coming low down on the forehead and
+of that pale gold which the old Scotch poets immortalized as "yellow," in
+so many of their lays of the bardic era. Pretty, beyond question, but more
+good and attractive-looking than beautiful; and if a second look at
+Margaret Hayley would have induced an observation having reference to her
+pride, a second at Elsie Brand was certain to bring out the thought if not
+the speech: "What a charming, good little girl!" Perhaps a third, with
+persons not too severely in training for the great Olympian races of
+morality, was very likely to create such a sensation as one experiences in
+gazing at a lusciously ripe peach, having particular reference to the pulpy
+red lips with their funny pout and kissable look, and ending in a wish that
+the crimson love-apples of the modern Hesperides were not quite so
+zealously guarded.
+
+Elsie had not yet passed her twenty-second birthday, though she had been
+"of age" for a good many twelvemonths, in the estimation of those who had
+come near enough to her to feel the beating of her warm heart. Doctor
+James Holton, graduate of the Pennsylvania Medical College, and lately a
+student with one who had been a student with David Hosack, held his own
+peculiar estimation of Elsie Brand, and had almost been driven into rank
+atheism from the necessity of both holding and proving that the theory of
+our springing from one common father and mother could not possibly be
+correct, as the clay of which Elsie was made had been so very different--so
+much purer, sweeter and better--from that employed in the moulding of
+ordinary mortals!
+
+For some minutes the two young girls had been standing in silence, Margaret
+engaged with experiments on her opening rose and Elsie with one arm around
+her and lazily observing the operation--both apparently full of that
+indolent enjoyment born of ease, content, and the languid air of the summer
+morning. Then the little one spoke:
+
+"Margaret, do you know of what I have been thinking for the last two
+minutes?"
+
+"Haven't any machine by which I could pry into the droll secrets of your
+brain, Elsie, my dear!" answered the taller, pleasantly, but with no smile
+upon her lips meanwhile, and apparently with all her attention yet absorbed
+in her horticultural experiment.
+
+"Shall I tell you?" queried Elsie.
+
+"Certainly, pet, if you like!" was the reply, the tone, as well as the word
+of endearment, showing indefinably that Margaret Hayley thought of herself
+as a woman and yet of her companion (of nearly the same age) as little more
+than a child.
+
+"I was thinking," said the little girl, "how much of character is sometimes
+shown in the action of a moment, and how very different we are."
+
+"Who thought your little head was so philosophical, Elsie?" answered
+Margaret, and this time she for a moment deserted her rose and looked
+around with a pleasant smile. "Well, the application of your thought to
+yourself and to me?"
+
+"Oh," said the little one. "It was only about the rose. I should have
+plucked it, if I plucked it at all, and enjoyed it as it was. You are
+trying to make something else out of it, and yet show no wish to destroy
+the flower. A cruel woman--different from either of us, I hope--would
+probably be plucking off the leaves one by one and throwing them away,
+without caring how much pain she might be inflicting on the life of the
+flower, hidden away down somewhere in its heart."
+
+"A very pretty idea, upon my word!" said Margaret, ceasing to blow upon and
+pluck at the leaves, and turning upon her companion a countenance showing
+something like surprised admiration. "And what do you make of my character,
+Elsie, as shown by my handling of the rose?"
+
+"You must not be angry with me, Margaret," answered the young girl, a
+little in the spirit of deprecation. "But you see _I_ should have been
+satisfied with the rose as it was, and the other would have been cruelly
+dissatisfied with it in any shape, and you----"
+
+"Well, dear? I----"
+
+"You showed that you were not entirely satisfied with every thing as it
+was, and that you had a little self-will leading you to force things to be
+as you chose, by trying to make that poor little flower outrun the course
+of nature and bloom before it was quite ready."
+
+"I think you are right, Elsie," said Margaret, nodding her head in that
+slight and repeated manner indicative of answering the mind within quite as
+much as any observation from without. "I am _not_ satisfied with every
+thing in the world, Elsie. I am not cruel, I hope and believe; but I am
+sharper, harder, more requiring than you, and consequently not formed for
+half so much true happiness. I _do_ feel like forcing things to be what I
+require, sometimes, and then I suppose I grow unamiable."
+
+"You are never any thing else than a dear good girl, with a wiser head than
+my rattle-pate, and my own sweet sister that is to be!" and the arm of the
+speaker went still more closely around the slight waist it encircled. A
+blush as delicately roseate as the first flushings of dawn crept over the
+more classic face that bent above her own, the lips above came down to meet
+those pouting below, and the two young girls were kissing and embracing as
+if they had been two lovers of opposite sexes but very much of one opinion
+as to the best office of the lips. Any delicately-nerved old bachelor who
+should have happened to pass in front of the house at that moment and catch
+a glimpse of the scene just then enacted on the piazza, would certainly
+have fainted away on the spot, at the idea of such a waste of the most
+delicious of "raw material."
+
+"You may have the rose for your lesson--you see I have not spoiled it,
+after all," said Margaret, when the kiss had been given and the rosy flush
+died away from her own cheek.
+
+"To give to Carlton?" asked Elsie, as she held out her hand for it.
+
+"No, Carlton must come after his own roses!" was the reply, with the least
+dash of pride in the curling of the upper lip.
+
+"And pluck them himself?" asked saucy Elsie.
+
+"Certainly!"
+
+"No matter where he finds them growing--on tree, or on cheek, or on lips!"
+continued the young girl, with a light laugh.
+
+For an instant the same flush rose again on the cheek of Margaret Hayley;
+then she forced it away, smiled, and said:
+
+"Certainly! why not? Carlton Brand kisses me, sometimes, and I have more
+than once kissed him back. What is that to you, sauce-box, when we are
+engaged to be married?"
+
+"What is that to me? Every thing! Joy--happiness--to know that I am going
+to have so dear a sister!" cried the little one, throwing both her arms,
+this time, around the pliant waist of Margaret and hugging her in a perfect
+transport of delight, which seemed quite shared in, though more
+tranquilly, by the object of the demonstration.
+
+The saddest, cruellest thing in all the lyric drama is the blast of De
+Sylva's horn on Ernani's wedding morning, calling him in one instant from
+happy love to dishonor or death. Neither in romance nor in nature should
+such sudden transitions occur. Alas, for humanity! they do occur in both,
+not occasionally but habitually. The Duchess of Richmond's ball--then
+Waterloo. De Joinville springs on board his flag-ship to sail for the
+attack on Vera Cruz, in the very ball dress in which he has been dancing
+the whole night through with the republican belles at Castle Garden. The
+Pall is over every thing of earth: how sadly and how inevitably it droops
+above the Banner! No scene upon earth could have been more exquisitely
+peaceful, and few could have been lovelier, than that which surrounded and
+comprehended those two fair girls in their embrace upon the piazza. Wealth,
+youth, beauty, good feeling, happiness--all were there; and love blent with
+friendship, for was not the embrace, given by Elsie Brand and accepted by
+Margaret Hayley, both given and accepted quite as much for her brother's
+sake as her own? It was fitting, then, according to the sad fitness of
+earth, that the element of discord should enter into the peaceful and the
+beautiful.
+
+The officer spurred by, as we have seen him do, gazing only with our
+incorporeal eyes. Both the young girls, just releasing each other from
+their embrace, saw the dark cloud of war sweeping between them and the
+sunlit grain fields. Elsie Brand shuddered and drew back, as if the
+incongruity jarred her nature. Margaret Hayley instantly lifted her proud
+neck the higher, as if something in _her_ nature sympathized with every
+suggestion of the struggle, and as if she was, indeed, insensibly riding on
+with the hurrying horseman.
+
+"And what does the shudder mean, little one?" asked Margaret, who had
+plainly distinguished it at the moment of release.
+
+"I hate war, and every thing connected with it!" was the reply, the tone
+almost petulant.
+
+"And I do _not_ hate it, painful as it may be in many particulars," said
+Margaret. "Force and energy are the noblest developments in life. Bravery
+is the nearest possible approach to that divine character which knows no
+superior and consequently fears none."
+
+"Nearer to the divine than _love_?" asked the little one.
+
+Just for one instant, again, that roseate tint on the cheek of Margaret, as
+she said: "Nobler, if not nearer to the divine; and sorry as I must be to
+see the bloodshed caused by a civil war in my native land, I am almost glad
+that it has occurred, sometimes, as a means of rousing the sluggish pulses
+of men who would otherwise have stagnated in trade and pleasure, and
+proving that we yet possess something of the hero spirit of old."
+
+"And _I_ am sorry for it all the while, night and day, in my prayers and in
+my dreams," answered Elsie Brand, with a sigh. "Hark!" as the tap of the
+drum came across from the lateral road before-mentioned. "There is another
+reminder of the curse, and one that comes nearer home. Do you remember,
+Margaret, that I shall soon have a brother, and you a lover, separated from
+us and in terrible danger? They say Harrisburgh must be taken, unless a
+very large body of troops can reach it at once. The Reserves will probably
+go on, to-night, and Carlton will probably accept his old commission again.
+I do want him to do his duty, Margaret, if it _is_ his duty; but I hope
+that he will not think so--that he will not go away."
+
+"And _I_ hope that he _will_!" answered Margaret, her tall form drawn up to
+its full height, and a look of stern pride upon her face that could not
+very well be mistaken.
+
+"To go into danger--perhaps to death?" asked Elsie, looking sadly at the
+proud Sibylline face.
+
+"To a thousand deaths, if necessary, rather than towards the least
+suspicion of a want of true manhood!"
+
+"Ah, you do not know the trembling fear of a sister's love!" said Elsie,
+with a sigh.
+
+"I know a love fifty times deeper!" said Margaret, the pride still on her
+face, and yet that ever-returning flush coming up again to say that if love
+had not conquered pride it had at least divided the dominion. "Listen,
+Elsie Brand, to some words that you may as well understand now as ever.
+There is no one near to hear us, and so it is almost like speaking before
+heaven alone. I love your brother, deeply, devotedly, with all the power of
+my nature--so devotedly that if that love should be wrenched away from my
+heart by any circumstance, I know that my life would thenceforth be but one
+long, wretched mockery of existence. Happy natures like yours, Elsie, do
+not know the absolute agony that lies in such love. And yet I could give up
+that love, and my life with it, and would do so, before I would live, love,
+and yet _despise_!"
+
+"Despise?--are you speaking of Carlton--of my brother?" asked the young
+girl, apparently a little lost in the mysterious energy of her companion's
+words.
+
+"I said that I could _not_ despise," Margaret Hayley went on. "I must not,
+or we have no future. Do you know that I should have reverenced your
+brother more, even if I did not love him better, if he had not refused the
+commission in the army tendered him at the commencement of the war? I might
+have wept, perhaps mourned--but I should have idolized. Now, I only love a
+mortal like myself, where I might have been worshipping a hero!"
+
+"Or sobbing over a grave!" said Elsie, with a sigh which told how easily
+she might have been brought to illustrate the word she used.
+
+"What then!" was the quick reply of Margaret. "The glory would have been
+his--the loss and grief would have been mine, and I could have borne them.
+But he did not choose to enter the struggle, prominent as he had once been
+in military movements. He had the excuse of business and occupation, and I
+have tried to believe that he needed no other."
+
+"Needed?--what do you mean, Margaret?" cried Elsie Brand in a tone and with
+a movement of starting back which evidenced both pain and alarm.
+
+"It is a painful thing, but I must say it, to you, as I do not know that I
+could say it to him," pursued Margaret. "I mean, that I have tried to
+believe that there was no flaw in my idol--that Carlton Brand, who held
+every pulse of my woman's heart responsive to his touch--did not lack the
+one manly virtue of _courage_!"
+
+"And would you _dare_ to believe my brother--the man you have pretended to
+love--a _coward_?" There was something vexed and sharp, almost angry, in
+Elsie's tone, now, that did not promise another immediate embrace like that
+of a few moments previous. Margaret Hayley saw the expression of her face,
+but neither blenched before it nor seemed to feel any anger at the
+manifestation.
+
+"Elsie Brand," she said, her words slow, measured, and with a cadence that
+was somehow inexpressibly pained and mournful, "I am no school-girl, and I
+am speaking words that I mean. I know your brother to be patriotic, I know
+him to be in high health, athletic, vigorous and determined; and have
+sometimes believed that if he had possessed that one requisite, animal
+courage, he would long ago have been fighting the foes of the republic.
+Grieve as I may to part with him, I am glad you believe that he is going
+with the Reserves. He had his choice, before, and I let my own heart
+instead of my reason have sway, and did not question its propriety. But
+were he to hang back now, when his native State is invaded and every arm
+necessary to drive back the rebels from Pennsylvania soil, I should know
+that he was a coward!"
+
+"I don't like you, Margaret Hayley, when your face looks so and you talk in
+that manner!" said the little girl. "But I will not quarrel with you.
+Carlton is going with the Reserves, and some day when he is killed or you
+hear how he has shamed all the rest with his bravery, you will be sorry for
+the words you have just spoken!" Just then the little yellow-haired girl
+was the Sibyl, and her prophecy went upon record with the wild words of
+Margaret, to be afterwards remembered--how sadly!
+
+"No--do not be angry with me, Elsie," said Margaret, taking the hand that
+had been temporarily released. "You have no cause. I have been speaking
+against my own heart all the while, much more than against the man whom I
+truly love. I know him to be noble and true, and I will believe him brave.
+Are you satisfied? Kiss me!" and the proud, statuesque face once more lost
+its gravity, to bring back all the joyousness into the rounder and merrier
+one from which it had temporarily departed.
+
+The light summer jockey-hat of Elsie lay just within the door, on a chair.
+With a quick glance at the watch hidden under her waist-riband, she stepped
+within the door, threw on her hat, and was about to terminate her somewhat
+prolonged morning-call, when Margaret took it off again, dropped it into
+one of the vacant chairs, and said:
+
+"No--do not go away. You have nothing to do at home--mother has gone down
+to the city for the day, you know, and I shall be lonely. We shall have
+some lunch--you may call it dinner if it will taste any better,--very soon.
+Stay till the afternoon--cannot you do so, just as well as not?"
+
+"I suppose so--no, I must see Carlton--yes, though, Carlton will be quite
+as likely to come here first as to go home, if he has arranged to go
+away--yes, I will stay if you wish it so much!" rapidly answered the little
+one.
+
+"That is a good girl," said Margaret Hayley, just as she might have patted
+a school hobby-de-hoy on the head. "Now run into the parlor and get the
+very nicest book you can find, draw the easy-chair out of the hall, and
+enjoy yourself the best you can for just twenty minutes, while I go down
+to the kitchen, in ma's place, and see what progress our new Dutch cook has
+been making."
+
+She disappeared with the words, and her injunctions were acted upon almost
+as rapidly. In half a minute Elsie had the arm-chair out of the hall, and
+an illustrated work off one of the tables in the parlor, and was prepared
+for her short period of indolent enjoyment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+     THE COMING OF CARLTON BRAND--ALMOST A PALADIN OF
+     BALAKLAVA--BROTHER AND SISTER--A SPASM OF SHAME--THE
+     CONFESSION--THE COWARD--HOW MARGARET HAYLEY HEARD MANY WORDS
+     NOT INTENDED FOR HER--THE RUPTURE AND THE SEPARATION.
+
+
+Not long was the young girl, left at the close of the last chapter bodily
+ensconced in an easy-chair on the broad piazza, and mentally absorbed in
+the attractions of one of the choicest books in Margaret Hayley's
+collection, allowed to pursue her reading undisturbed. Not two minutes had
+elapsed when a horseman, riding a chestnut horse of handsome appearance and
+fine action, came rapidly up from the direction of the city, dismounted
+with the same practised grace that he had shown when in the saddle, threw
+the rein of his horse over one of the posts standing near the gate, opened
+that gate and came up the walk, without attracting the attention of the
+young lady on the piazza, or that of any other occupant of the house he was
+approaching.
+
+Lifting from his brow, as he approached the house, to wipe away the slight
+moisture which had gathered there even in riding, the broad-brimmed and
+low-crowned hat of light gray, which so well accorded with his loose but
+well-fitting suit of the same color, he gave an opportunity for studying
+the whole man, which could not well have been attained under other
+circumstances; and both narrator and reader may be excused for stopping him
+momentarily in that position, while due examination is made of his most
+striking outward peculiarities.
+
+He was at least five feet eleven inches in height, with a figure rather
+slight than stout, but singularly erect, sinewy, and elastic, every
+movement giving evidence that the body could not well be set to a task
+beyond its power of endurance. The foot was not very small, but
+well-shaped, and the ungloved hand which held his riding-whip was almost
+faultless in shape and color. The hat removed, a brow rather broad than
+high was seen, with a head well balanced in all the intellectual and moral
+requirements, densely covered with light, curling hair, of that peculiar
+shade which the poetical designate as "blonde" and the practical as
+"sandy." The complexion, though the cheeks were a little browned by the
+summer sun, was very fair, and that of the brow as stainless as any petted
+girl's could be. The features were nearly faultless in the Greek severity
+of their outline, the nose straight and well cut, the mouth small but with
+full curved lips, the eyes of hazel, widely set. The lower part of his face
+was effectually concealed by a luxuriant full beard and moustache, a few
+shades darker than his hair, and showing a propensity to curl on slight
+provocation. He was a decidedly handsome man of twenty-eight to thirty,
+erect, gentlemanly, dignified, and with something in his general appearance
+irresistibly reminding the spectator of the traditional appearance of those
+blonde Englishmen of good birth, who seem made to dawdle life away without
+exhibiting one of the sterner qualities of human nature, until deadly
+danger shows them to have that cool recklessness of life which charged two
+hundred years ago with Prince Rupert and ten years ago with poor Nolan. Yet
+this was the idea more likely to be formed of him and his capabilities, by
+strangers and those who lacked opportunity to examine his face and manner
+closely, than by those intimately acquainted with both; for there was an
+occasional nervousness in the movement of the hands, and even of the whole
+figure, that to a close observer would have belied the first-assumed
+self-confidence; and a something drooping, tremulous, and undecided in the
+lower lip at the corners, was so well matched by a sad and even troubled
+expression that often rested like a cloud over the eyes, that the whole man
+seemed to be made into another self by them.
+
+Such was Carlton Brand, the brother of Elsie, about whom the tongues of the
+two young girls had wagged so unreservedly but a few minutes before. Such
+was his appearance, to the outward eye, as, hat still in hand, he
+approached the piazza. Elsie was sufficiently absorbed in her book, not to
+feel his presence; and it was not until he was close upon her that the
+young girl saw him, flung down the costly illustrated volume in her chair
+with less care than might have pleased the less impulsive owner, sprang to
+the step and seized both the occupied hands of the new-comer, with a warmth
+that showed how cordial was the affection between brother and sister, so
+widely different in appearance and indication of character.
+
+"How did you come here, pet?" the brother asked, as soon as his mouth was
+free from the kiss his sister tendered.
+
+"Oh, ran across the fields half an hour ago, and intended to be back home
+by this time, only that Margaret was alone and wished me to stay; and
+besides----"
+
+"Well--besides what?"
+
+"Besides, I almost knew that you would stop _here_ before you went home,
+and I should see more of you before you went away, by remaining."
+
+Could the young girl but have seen the quick spasm of agony that just then
+passed over the face of Carlton Brand--the agitation and trembling which
+seized upon lip and hands--she might have been wiser the next moment, but
+she certainly would not have been happier. Just for that one moment there
+seemed to be lack-lustre vacancy in the eyes, total want of self-assertion
+in face and figure, and the handsome, noble-looking man actually seemed to
+have collapsed, bowed, and sunk within himself, so that he was more an
+object of pity than of envy. But the sister's eyes were fortunately turned
+away at that instant, and she saw nothing. When she looked at him again,
+the spasm, whatever it might have been, was gone, and she only saw his
+usual self. He did not reply to her last suggestion, but asked, after an
+instant of hesitation:
+
+"Where is Margaret?"
+
+"Gone down into the kitchen for a few moments, to look after a new Dutch
+cook, but she will soon return. And so you are really going away, brother,
+and I shall be so lonesome!" and the hand of the sister sought that of the
+dearly-loved brother again, as if every moment lost without some touch of
+one who was so soon to leave her, was lost indeed.
+
+Even to this the brother gave no reply, but made a remark with reference to
+the rapid ripening of the grain in the wheat-fields that skirted the road
+beyond. A duller wit than that of Elsie Brand might have become aware that
+he was avoiding an unpleasant subject; and the young girl recognized the
+fact, but gave it an entirely erroneous explanation, believing that he must
+have heard some peculiarly threatening news from the scene of the invasion,
+making the peril of the troops about to leave more deadly than it would
+have been under ordinary circumstances, and that he dreaded to enter upon
+the theme at all, for fear of alarming her. As a consequence, her next
+words were a disclaimer of her own fears.
+
+"Oh, Carlton, you need not be afraid to speak of it to me. Much as I have
+dreaded your going away, I know, now, that it is your duty, when your own
+State is invaded; and I have made up my mind to bear the separation, and
+even to think of you, my own dear brother, as in danger, without saying one
+word to hold you back."
+
+"Have you?" That spasm was again upon his face, and the words were hoarse;
+but again the eye and the ear of the sister missed the recognition of any
+thing unusual.
+
+"Yes; and so has Margaret."
+
+"Has she?" The spasm had not gone off his face, and the second question was
+asked even more hoarsely than the first. For some reason that the young
+girl could not understand, he turned away from her, walked down to the end
+of the piazza, and stood looking off. What he was suffering at that moment,
+with three or four of the most powerful passions known to humanity tearing
+at his heart-strings at once, none may know who have not passed through the
+same terrible ordeal which he was then enduring. There were only the fays
+who may have been playing among the green grass, and the dryads yet
+lingering among the whispering leaves of the maples, looking in at the end
+of the piazza upon his face: had they been human eyes, what of wrestling
+and struggle might they not have seen! When he turned to walk back towards
+the spot where his sister was standing in surprise not unmingled with
+alarm, his face was again calm, but it would have shown, to the observant
+eye, a calmness like that of despair. His words, too, were forced when they
+came:
+
+"You and Margaret both, Elsie, love me so well, I know, that you would give
+up almost any thing to please me; but I do not intend to task either of you
+too far. I am not going--that is, business detains me so that I cannot--I
+am not going to Harrisburgh."
+
+"Business!" Elsie Brand had never before, in her whole young life, uttered
+a word so hardly or in a tone so nearly approaching to a sneer, as she
+spoke the single word at that moment. Were the words of Margaret Hayley
+ringing in her ear, and did she find some terrible confirmation, now, of
+what had before been so impossible to believe? "Business!--what business,
+Carlton, _can_ be sufficient to keep you at home when they seem to need you
+so much?"
+
+"What do _you_ know about it?" and _his_ tones were harsh and almost
+menacing. "Do we ask you women to decide what we shall do, where we shall
+go, and where we shall stay?"
+
+"Oh, Carlton!" and the cry seemed to come from the very heart of the young
+girl. It was perhaps the first harsh word that had ever fallen on her ear,
+aimed at her from the lips of the brother she so adored. God only knew the
+agony under which that harsh word had been wrung out, as only he could know
+the agony it might cause! The cry instantly melted the heart to which it
+appealed. Carlton Brand took the hand of his sister in his own, kissed her
+tenderly, and said:
+
+"Forgive me, Elsie, if I spoke as I should never speak to _you_! But you do
+not know, sometimes, what moves men to harshness which they afterwards
+bitterly repent."
+
+"But you are not going with the regiment?" again she asked.
+
+"No!--I have told you I was not, Elsie!" and the tone came very near to
+being a harsh one, once more.
+
+"I am sorry--very sorry, Carlton!"
+
+"Sorry?" and the often-recurring spasm which again passed over his
+features, could not have been unobserved by the young girl, for her own
+face seemed to reflect it. "Sorry? Are you indeed sorry that I am not going
+into--that I am not going to be absent from you?"
+
+"Oh, no, Carlton! heaven knows I am not!" said Elsie, and the merry blue
+eyes were filled with tears. "But I think you ought to go; and you do not
+know, Carlton, how much may hang upon it. Do you love Margaret--really and
+truly love her?"
+
+"Love her? as my own soul!" answered Carlton Brand. He did not say "as his
+own _life_"! "Why do you ask, after all that you have known of our
+attachment and our engagement?"
+
+"Because, Carlton"--and the young girl, weeping the while under an impulse
+of feeling that she could scarcely herself understand, caught him by the
+arm and drew down his head towards her--"because I believe that if you do
+not go with the Reserves, Margaret will think that you do not do so
+because--oh, I cannot speak the word!"
+
+"Because what? Speak it out!" and he seemed to be nerving himself to meet
+some shock that was likely to need all his energies.
+
+"Because"--in a voice very low and broken--"because you are afraid to
+go--because you are a _coward_!"
+
+"Has she said as much?" and the eyes of the speaker, very sad, troubled,
+and almost wild, seemed still to have power to read the very soul of the
+young girl before him. Elsie could not speak at first, but she nodded
+twice, and never death-bell of a condemned criminal rung out more clearly
+or more frightfully on the startled air, tolling the knell of a last hope,
+than the whisper that came at last from her lips:
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Then God help me!" came from those of the strong man, in such a
+manifestation of agony as was painful to behold, while his hands for one
+moment clasped themselves together as if he would wring them in womanish
+weakness, then went up to his face and spread themselves as if they would
+shut it away forever from human sight. "God help me!--and you, Elsie,
+despise me if you will, but, oh, help me to keep it from _her_. I dare not
+go! I _am_ a coward! If I should go into battle I should disgrace myself
+there forever, by running away at the first fire, and that would break our
+poor old father's heart!"
+
+"Carlton! Carlton! my poor brother!" and the hands of the young girl closed
+around one of her brother's, with so warm a pressure as proved that she did
+not think of any shame, disgrace or fault in the connection, but only as
+the announcement of some great misfortune.
+
+"Yes, Elsie, you have wrung from me the confession that I hoped never to be
+obliged to make to any one but my God. I have made it to Him, oh, how many
+times, and I almost feel that he has forgiven me, as my fellow-men will
+never do. I have been a coward, I suppose, from my very cradle and heaven
+only knows how I have managed to conceal the terrible truth from you, all
+this while! The very sight of blood sickens me, even when it is only the
+blood of beeves in a slaughter-house. One spirt from the arm of a man when
+he is being bled sets every nerve to trembling, and sometimes sends me
+fainting to the floor. One moment among the horrible sights of battle--the
+groans, and shrieks, and crashing bullets and spouting blood of
+carnage--would drive me mad or send me flying away with the curses of my
+whole race ringing in my ears."
+
+"Oh, Carlton! my poor brother!" repeated once more, and in the same tone of
+heart-broken sympathy, was all that Elsie Brand could answer to this
+humiliation of the one to whom, perhaps, next to God, she had ever looked
+up as to His noblest human manifestation of greatness in creative power.
+
+"Do you see what a poor miserable wretch I am?" he went on, apparently
+forgetful that any one besides his sister might be within hearing, and she
+so absorbed in the grief and shame of the revelation that she possessed no
+more forethought. "Think of me as an officer in my regiment, and know with
+what a reddened face I must have walked the streets when we paraded,
+conscious that if suddenly called to duty--even the quelling of a mob at
+the street-corner--I should be obliged to disgrace myself at once and
+forever! Think what I have suffered since the war broke out!--commission
+after commission offered me--loving my country as I believe man never loved
+it before--and yet not daring to strike one blow in its behalf. Obliged to
+make slight excuses when others have inquired why I did not go to the
+war--obliged to wear a double face, a mask, everywhere and at all
+times--dreading detection every day, and in that detection perhaps the loss
+of my proud father's life and of the love that has made the only hope of my
+own--cursing the omen that unwittingly gave me the brand of the coward in
+my very name--racked and tortured thus, and yet obliged to hold an
+honorable place among my fellow-men--it has been too hard, Elsie, too hard!
+And now to lose all! If _she_ has learned to suspect me--I know her brave
+heart and her proud nature--I shall lose her, the richest, noblest thing on
+earth, half grasped, to be mourned for as never man yet mourned for woman!
+Do help me, Elsie! Help me to conceal my shame--to deceive her, yes--God
+help me!--to deceive _her_ before whom my very soul should be laid bare--so
+that she will not know me for the miserable wretch and coward that I am!"
+
+And all this while his face was wrought and contorted, at short intervals,
+by those fearful spasms of shame and mental suffering; and ever and anon
+his hands locked together and seemed to wring themselves even beyond his
+own volition. How different he looked, at that moment, from the handsome,
+noble man, in the full pride of mature adolescence, who had stepped upon
+that piazza but a few moments before!
+
+"I would do any thing in the world to help you, Carlton; but what _can_ I
+do?" faltered the young girl, who saw no light beyond the thick, black
+cloud of shame and ruin slowly settling down on the head of her beloved
+brother.
+
+"Help me to conceal the truth"--he went on--"to enforce any excuse for not
+leaving the city at this moment! I know it is base and contemptible, but it
+is for a good purpose, Elsie--to save a heart that is already distracted,
+and a life that must be wrecked without it. We may never be placed in the
+same circumstances again--the war may soon be ended--if she can only be
+kept from knowing this, I may never be placed in the same peril again, and
+my whole life shall be one long proof that I am not otherwise unworthy of
+the woman I love so madly."
+
+"It does not need, Carlton Brand!" sounded a voice from within--a voice
+that both recognized but too well; and out of the hall came the figure of
+Margaret Hayley.
+
+Her words and her manner alike proved that she had heard all, or at least
+enough; for there was an expression of withering contempt flashing out of
+her dark eye and curling her proud lip, not easily to be borne by any
+person towards whom they were directed. There did not seem, for the moment,
+to be any thing like pity in her composition; and if there had been love
+within her heart, it appeared to have been so crushed out by one stunning
+blow that it could never bloom again any more than the wild flower ground
+beneath the heel of the wayfarer. Her head was proud, erect, haughty,
+disdainful; and one who had leisure to examine her closely would have seen
+that the nostril was opening and shutting convulsively, as if overwhelming
+passion was only suppressed by the physical act of holding the breath.
+Elsie Brand was too much dizzied and confused to be quite aware what had
+happened or what was about to happen. She merely uttered a cry of agitation
+and fright, and shrunk back alike from her brother and the woman who had
+come to be his judge. Carlton Brand saw more, with the quick eye of the
+lawyer and the sharpened perception of the lover. He realized that Margaret
+Hayley had heard his agonized and unmanly confession--that anger and scorn
+had driven away from her face the love which had so often and so pleasantly
+beamed upon him--that his doom was sealed.
+
+With the knowledge came back to him that manliness in demeanor of which he
+had been so sorely in need a moment before. In the presence only of his
+sister, and when pleading with her to assist in rescuing him from the pit
+of grief and shame into which he felt himself to be sinking, he had been
+humble, abject, even cowering. Now, and in the presence of the woman for
+whose softened opinion he would have given the world and almost bartered
+his hopes of heaven,--he stood erect, and if the spasm of pain did not
+entirely pass away from his face, at least it changed in its character so
+that he was a man once more.
+
+"I understand you, Miss Hayley," were the first words he spoke. "You have
+heard some words not intended for your ear. You have been _listening_."
+
+"If you merely mean that I have heard what was not intended for my ear, you
+certainly speak the truth, Mr. Brand," she replied, catching the formality
+of his address at once. "But if you mean that I have listened meanly, or
+even voluntarily, to words intended to be confidential, you wrong yourself,
+equally with me, in saying so. You have spoken so loudly that not only I
+but even the servants in the house could not well avoid hearing you; and
+there is not much 'listening' in hearing words almost brawled on a piazza."
+
+Her words were very bitter--they beseemed the lips from which they flowed.
+A man who loved her less or, who had fewer of the natural impulses of the
+gentleman than Carlton Brand, might only have thought of the taunt conveyed
+and forgotten its justice. He did not do so, but bowed at once with an air
+of respectful humility, and said:
+
+"I beg ten thousand pardons for my hasty speech. I was mad when I made it.
+Certainly you have heard nothing but what you had a right to hear." And
+then he stood erect but silent.
+
+Poor little Elsie Brand could contain herself no longer. How she loved her
+brother, only the angels knew. How easily we pardon, in those of our
+kindred, what would be indelible disgrace in the characters of others, all
+close observers of humanity know too well. Little Elsie Brand was only
+acting the part of nature in espousing the cause of her own blood, and
+saying, before time enough had elapsed for any additional words between the
+two principals:
+
+"Margaret Hayley, I say that you are too hard with Carlton! If you had ever
+loved him, as you pretended, you would not be so! There, you have not asked
+my opinion, but you have it!"
+
+The words, though kindly meant, were ill-advised. Not even her brother, who
+had but a few moments before been imploring her assistance, thanked her
+for what she had then spoken. At least he silenced her for the time with--
+
+"You can do no good now by speaking, Elsie. It is too late. Miss Hayley has
+something more to say to me, no doubt, after what she has accidently heard;
+and I am prepared to hear it." He stood almost coolly, then, the bared head
+bent only a very little, and the face almost as calm as it was
+inexpressibly mournful. So might a convicted criminal stand, feeling
+himself innocent of wrong in intent, beaten down under a combination of
+circumstances too strong to combat, awaiting the words of his sentence, and
+yet determined that there should be something more of dignity in his
+reception of the last blow than there had ever been in any previous action
+of his life.
+
+Twice Margaret Hayley essayed to speak, and twice she failed in the effort.
+If she had been calmly indignant the moment before, Nature had already
+begun to take its revenge, and she was the woman again. Her proud head was
+bent a little lower, and there was a dewy moisture in the dark eyes, that
+could never be so well dried up as in being kissed away. Who knows that the
+proud woman was not really relenting--letting the old love come back in one
+overwhelming tide and sweep away all the barriers erected by indignation
+and contempt? Who knows how much of change might possibly have been
+wrought, had the next words of Carlton Brand been such as indicated his
+belief that the chain between them was not yet severed utterly? Who knows,
+indeed?--for his words were very different.
+
+"Miss Hayley, I have waited for you to speak what I feel that you have to
+say. You have heard words that no betrothed woman, I suppose, can hear from
+her promised husband and yet retain that respect for him which should be
+the very foundation of the marriage-bond."
+
+"I have." The words came from her lips in tones much lower than those in
+which she had before spoken, and she did not even look at him as she
+answered.
+
+"You have heard me declare myself--I know by the face you wore but a moment
+since, that you have heard all this--what you hold to be the lowest and
+most contemptible thing on God's footstool--a _coward_."
+
+"I have. I would rather have died on the spot than heard those words from
+the lips of the man I have--have loved!" The words still low, and some
+hesitation in those which concluded the sentence. One would almost have
+believed, at that moment, that of the two the culprit was the down-looking
+and low-voiced woman, instead of the man whose godlike presence so
+contradicted the dastardly vice he was confessing.
+
+"I have no defence to offer," the speaker went on. "If you have heard all
+that I believe, no further explanation is necessary. You know the worst;
+and as a proud woman, with honor unspotted and beyond suspicion, you have a
+right to pass what sentence you choose upon my--my shame, my crime, if you
+will!"
+
+Perfect silence for an instant, then a broken sob from Elsie, whose face
+was streaming with tears denied to both the others, and who was leaning her
+forehead against the sharp corner of one of the columns of the piazza,
+apparently that the slight physical pain thus inflicted might do something
+to still the mental agony that raged within. Then Margaret Hayley, as if
+she had passed through a long struggle but conquered at last with a triumph
+slaying her own soul, raised her head, drew in a hard breath, shook back
+one of the tresses of her dark hair which had fallen over her brow, and
+spoke:
+
+"Do you know, Carlton Brand--I cannot call you _Mr._ Brand again, for that
+address is mockery after what we have been to each other--do you know what
+that sentence must be, in justice to myself and to you?"
+
+"I can guess it, Margaret Hayley," was the answer, the prefix changed again
+in imitation of her, just as she a moment before had changed it in
+imitating him. The incident was a mere nothing, and yet suggestive as
+showing how closely the two seemed to study each other, and how much of
+real sympathy there must after all have been between them. "I can guess it,
+and I will try to bear it."
+
+"You can guess it--you do guess it--separation!" said Margaret in a low
+voice that she could not quite render firm.
+
+"I was not mistaken--I supposed as much," he answered. "You are a proud
+woman, Margaret, and you could not marry a man for whom you failed to
+entertain respect--"
+
+"I _am_ a proud woman, but a woman still," said Margaret. "You whom I have
+loved so truly, can best guess the depth of my woman's nature. But I cannot
+and will not marry a man to whom I cannot look up and say: 'This man has
+the courage and the will to protect me in every peril!'"
+
+"Have you ever had reason to believe that I could not and would not protect
+you, if need came, against all the world?" and his eyes momentarily
+flashed, at that thought, with a light which should not have shone in the
+orbs of a coward.
+
+"Words are idle, Carlton Brand!" said Margaret. "There is no protection so
+sacredly due as that of a strong man to his country. You know it, and I
+know it as well. The man who knows his duty to his country and dares not do
+it, through sheer bodily fear, could not be trusted in any relation. His
+wife would not dare trust him, if she knew it; and you have opened my eyes
+but too painfully. And so, in mercy to both, all must be over between us--"
+
+"Oh, do not say that, Margaret, sister!" broke out Elsie, in a more
+faltering voice than she had ever used in pleading for herself since the
+earliest day of childhood. Margaret did not heed her, if she heard, but
+went on from the point at which she had been interrupted:
+
+"All is over between us, Carlton Brand, at once and forever, unless----"
+
+"Unless?--what is the possibility you would yet hold out to me?" and the
+speaker showed more agitation, at that one renewed glimpse of hope, than he
+had done when battling against utter despair.
+
+"Unless you will yet obey the summons that has called you with every other
+true son of Pennsylvania to the field, and prove to me that you did not
+know yourself or that you were endeavoring to play a cruel part in
+deceiving your sister and me!"
+
+The face of Carlton Brand had been comparatively calm, ever since the
+coming out of Margaret. Suffer as he might, most of the suffering had been
+hidden. Now that face assumed an aspect that was really fearful to behold.
+The veins on his forehead swelled as if they would burst, his lip set hard,
+his eyes glared as if one touch might have made him a maniac, and his hands
+worked convulsively. All the symptoms of extreme terror and of a repugnance
+which no effort could overcome, were imminent in every glance and motion;
+and something of those phenomena was exhibited which we may suppose the
+Highland seer of old time to have shown, when he was carried beyond himself
+by the invisible powers, and saw battle, defeat and horrible death for
+himself or others, slowly unrolling before his spiritual sight. Elsie Brand
+shuddered and drew back to the column which had before sheltered her.
+Margaret Hayley still stood erect, though she was evidently laboring under
+suppressed excitement, and none could say what the end of this scene might
+be. It was quite a moment before Carlton Brand could command himself
+sufficiently to speak, and then he said in a low, broken voice:
+
+"No--I cannot. I cannot kill my poor gray-haired old father with the
+spectacle of the flight and disgrace of his only son."
+
+"And you have decided well," said Margaret. "It is a bitter thing to say,
+but I am glad that you have marked out my course as you have done.
+Think--oh heaven!" and she seemed indeed to be for the moment addressing
+the powers above instead of those regnant upon the earth--"think how near I
+came to being this man's wife and the possible mother of his children, each
+one marked with the curse set upon them by their father!" No human ear
+could have heard the whisper which followed: "Enough of disgraces
+descending from parents--oh, heaven!"
+
+"You are right, Margaret Hayley--right!" spoke Carlton Brand, his voice
+lower, more hoarse and broken than it had been at any part of the long
+interview. "You have reminded me well of your duty and mine. The day may
+come when you will be sorry for every word that has fallen from your lips;
+but it may not. To-day you are doing right--let the future take care of
+itself. Good-bye!"
+
+He took the long, slender white fingers in his, and looked upon them a
+minute, the tears at last gathering in his eyes. Then, when through the
+thickening drops he could scarcely see them longer, he raised them to his
+lips, pressed a kiss upon them, dropped the hand and strode off the piazza
+and away, never once looking back as he passed down the path towards the
+gate.
+
+Margaret Hayley had been overstraining both heart and brain, and the
+penalty asserted itself very soon. Her discarded lover was scarcely half
+way down the path when the revulsion came, and pride for the moment broke
+down before her terrible sorrow. The proud neck bent, she stretched out her
+arms after the retreating figure, the single word, "Carlton!" came half
+whispered and half groaned through her lips, her eyes closed, and she sunk
+fainting into the arms of Elsie.
+
+Carlton Brand did not hear the call. A moment, and still without another
+glance at the house where he was leaving behind the happiness of a life, he
+had unloosed the splendid chestnut pawing at the gate, swung himself into
+the saddle and ridden away westward. He reeled a little in his seat as he
+rode, as a drunken man might have done--that was all the apparent
+difference between the man with a hope who had arrived half an hour before
+and the man who now departed without one.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+     KITTY HOOD AND HER SCHOOL-HOUSE--DICK COMPTON GOING
+     SOLDIERING--A LOVERS' QUARREL, A BIT OF JEALOUSY, AND A
+     THREAT--HOW DICK COMPTON MET HIS SUPPOSED RIVAL--AN
+     ENCOUNTER, SUDDEN DEATH, AND KITTY HOOD'S TERRIBLE
+     DISCOVERY.
+
+
+"I do not care, Dick Compton! You are a mean, good-for-nothing fellow, and
+the sooner you go away and get killed, the better. I hope I may never set
+eyes on you again, as long as I live."
+
+A pleasant style of address, especially from a pretty woman; and yet one to
+which a good many persons have submitted, first and last, from little
+people whom they could physically have slain with a single stroke and
+mentally discomfited with very little more trouble!
+
+The time of this objurgation was the same morning on which the events took
+place which have already been recorded as occurring at the residence of
+Margaret Hayley, and at a very little earlier hour than that which
+witnessed the departure of Carlton Brand from the place of his signal
+discomfiture. The place was in front of a little country-school-house
+standing half a mile from the Darby road, north-westward, and perhaps two
+miles westward from the Hayleys. The interlocutors were Richard Compton
+(already introduced as "Dick" by the flippant tongue of his companion), a
+young and well-to-do farmer of the neighborhood, about a quarter of a
+century old, perhaps some five feet nine in height, thickset,
+strong-limbed, with a round, good-humored face guiltless of beard but
+browned a good deal by exposure in the field, generally smiling and
+content, but with a spice of the bull-dog in his nature which made him
+sullen occasionally and led him always to be very fond of his own peculiar
+way;--and Kitty Hood, teacher of the district school of that particular
+section of the Keystone State, a short, round, rosy little lass, with merry
+brown eyes that only occasionally had a sterner kind of mischief in them,
+dark brown waved hair, and just the last general appearance in the world
+that a phrenologist would have selected for the necessarily calm and
+dignified life of an instructress of callow youth.
+
+The old weather-beaten school-house, erected perhaps fifty years before but
+not yet swept away in the prevailing rage for staring new white baby-houses
+for the instruction of children in the country, stood at the base of a
+slight wooded hill, facing southward; a fine old sycamore near the door
+holding the whole house and all its contents in flecked light and shade; a
+group of locusts not far away to the left showing a motley jumble of
+benches beneath, that were evidently the favorite lounging-place of the
+children during play-hours; and a little pond of a hundred or two feet in
+diameter, with one edge half covered with the leaves of the intrusive
+pond-lilies, and the other bordered by a juvenile wharf of stones, old
+boards and bark, supplying the youngsters with a place in which to paddle,
+sail boats and get very wet without any danger of being drowned, in summer,
+and with a reliable though limited skating-ground in winter. Its
+convenience for winter sports could only be imagined, at that season of the
+year when the wild-roses were clambering up the dingy boards of the
+inclosure, to the windows of the school-room; but its inevitable use as a
+part of the great "highway of nations" was too plainly shown by a
+circumstance which, alas!--at the same moment illustrated the vicissitudes
+of commerce and the necessity for the existence of insurance companies. A
+stately vessel of the mercantile guild, twelve inches in length but with
+the dignity of three masts and each holding spitted on it as a sail nearly
+an entire half-sheet of foolscap paper, had evidently left the little wharf
+during the morning play-hour, freighted for the Spice Islands lying up
+among the pond-lilies, but suffered the fate of many sea-going ships,
+fallen under the power of foul winds or adverse currents, and stranded on
+a reef of mud some paces from the shore, from which the ingenuity of her
+factors had not yet been able to release her, and where she lay "keeled
+over" in a manner equally contaminating to her white paper sails and
+unpleasant to her possible passengers. No doubt anxious eyes were meanwhile
+glancing out of the windows, between two leaves of the geography which
+detailed the perils of navigation in the East Indian archipelago, to see
+whether piratical canoes or pirogues did not put off to burn that noble
+vessel and massacre her crew, before noon should give time for any further
+efforts towards her release. Here the course of this narration painfully
+but necessarily loses sight of the good three-master "Snorter, of
+Philadelphia," as many another of the fairy barks launched by inexperienced
+youth disappears from view and is known no more forever; but let us hope
+that this particular venture was floated off at some early "spring tide" of
+play-spell, and that she "came safely to her desired haven!"
+
+Within the little one-story school-house, with its unpainted desks and
+benches of pine, dark with age and scarred by notch and inscription from
+the penknives of half a century of school-boys,--there was going on, at
+that moment, precisely what may be seen in any school from Windsor to
+Washoe, when the ruling power is temporarily absent. Wilkie painted not
+only from life, but from the inevitable in life, when he drew the "Village
+School in an Uproar;" for mobs have been put down by the military power and
+even savage communities have been made quiet by the exercise of
+powder-and-ball; but no force has yet been discovered that could check (and
+who would wish it to be entirely checked, after all?) the riotous mischief
+of the school-room when the terrible eye is removed! Five minutes before,
+Mistress Hood in the chair of authority, fifty heads of all hues and all
+textures had been more or less closely bent down over book and slate, and a
+low monotonous hum, something like the sleepy drone from a score of
+bee-hives, had been heard floating out on the summer air. Now, Mistress
+Kitty Hood had been just two minutes absent from the school-room, and a
+nice little Pandemonium was already established, that it would need some
+birchings and many strong words to annihilate. Half a dozen of the big boys
+had gathered into a knot, not far from the door, and were snickering aloud
+and pointing knowingly towards the point of interest without, with running
+comments on "Miss Hood's beau!" Three little girls, forgetting their sex,
+were playing at leap-frog between and over two of the benches, to the
+disarrangement of their short skirts and the eventual tumbling over of one
+of the benches with a loud clatter. Two or three of the larger girls were
+in close conversation, about what there is no means of knowing except that
+one of them remarked that "it was real indecent and she meant to tell her
+ma!" One boy, who was the possessor of a magnificently national
+handkerchief, had stuck it on the end of the long ruler from the mistress'
+desk, and was going through a dress parade of one, with a feeble whistle as
+music. A young brute was taking the opportunity of pinching the ear of a
+smaller boy, and making him whimper, as a punishment for some previous
+alleged injury. Another had made a pair of spectacles out of blue paper,
+and stuck them on the nose of a little girl on one of the near benches, who
+blushed so rosily that her white dress, blue spectacles and red face quite
+supplied the national colors. And still another, with cheeks marvellously
+distended, was trying whether he could, in the short space of time during
+which the mistress might be absent, manage to choke down three early
+harvest-apples without dying by strangulation or requiring any assistance
+from his companions.
+
+Such were the surroundings of the country school-house, and such was the
+aspect of Kitty Hood's little school-room during her temporary absence. And
+now what was the necessity which had for the moment withdrawn her from her
+charge, and what was the provocation under which the words were uttered,
+given at the commencement of this chapter?
+
+Perhaps the personal appearance of Dick Compton may go at least a little
+distance towards the explanation. As he stood kicking his foot against the
+lower step of the school-house door and listening to the words of petulance
+which his mistress so plentifully bestowed upon him, it was to be seen that
+while his coat was a sack of ordinary light summer-stuff, looking civil and
+homelike enough, his pants and cap were both gray and military, according
+to the pattern of the Reserves. Under his arm he held a bundle which might
+very easily have contained the coat necessary to make the uniform complete;
+and such was, indeed, the composition of the parcel. Dick Compton, never
+before connected with any military organization, had the night before
+determined to abandon home and the girl he loved, leave other hands to
+gather in the fast ripening harvest, intrust his favorite pair of
+farm-horses to the care of his younger brother and the hands on the farm,
+and make at least a small part of the response to the urgent call of
+Governor Curtin. He had been down to the rendezvous, to sign the roll of
+membership in the Reserves, and to get his uniform, that morning. He was to
+leave with the regiment for Harrisburgh, that evening, and it was on his
+way home to the pleasant farm-house lying a couple of miles northward and
+across the main road leading up from Market street, that he had called at
+the school-house to make his adieux to Kitty Hood, which seemed to be so
+ungraciously received.
+
+They were so indeed. Kitty, from the moment when Compton tapped at the door
+and called her out amid the surprised glances and then the tittering of the
+school-children--from the moment when she had observed his military cap and
+pants--had understood the whole story and put herself not only on her
+dignity but her unamiability. She had not smiled even once upon him, or
+allowed him to take her hand, though he reached out for it; and though the
+jolly round face of the school-mistress was not by any means the pattern of
+countenance that could be made stupendously awful by the greatest amount
+of effort, yet Kitty had done her best to be royal--not to say imperial. To
+his explanations she had been worse than the traditional
+"deaf"--insultingly interrupting; and to his asseverations that the country
+needed the heart and the arm of every true man, she had answered with that
+unromantic but unanswerable word: "fiddlestick!" She had tried wheedling,
+coaxing, scolding, every thing but crying, in the effort to make him forego
+his resolution and take off his name (supposing that he could do such a
+thing) from the roll of the Reserves. She had no doubt, and expressed
+herself to that effect, that if he went to Harrisburgh he would come back
+in a coffin, all cut up into little bits by the savages, or not come back
+at all and have his skull and bones used for a drinking cup and a few
+necklaces by the women of Secessia, or come back in a condition worse than
+either, with both legs cut off close up to the body, one arm gone and his
+skull broken in, and a pretty thing for a respectable young woman to marry!
+
+It was very well, for the sake of his adherence to his patriotic purpose,
+that Dick Compton had in him that dash of bull-dog tenacity to which
+allusion has before been made; for it is not every man to whom such words
+of spiteful prophesy and determined discouragement, coming from the lips of
+a pretty woman who made her own love the excuse for uttering them, would
+have been without their effect. They might as well have been uttered to one
+of the granite gods of old, as to Compton, so far as moving him to any
+change of purpose was concerned; but his temper was by no means of as good
+proof as his determination. In fact, Kitty Hood's spiteful expostulations
+very soon made him ill-natured if not angry; and by the time the
+culmination already recorded was reached, he was quite ready to say, in a
+tone corresponding to her own:
+
+"Well, I _will_ go, Kitty Hood, whether you like it or not. I was a fool
+not to go away without walking a mile further to let you know any thing
+about it."
+
+"Nobody asked you!" was the petulant reply.
+
+"Nobody _need_ to ask me, next time!" was the rejoinder. "I have a right to
+be killed, if I please, and it is none of your business whether I am or
+not. A pretty world it would be, with half of it made up of women too weak
+and too cowardly to fight a cat, and the other half of men tied fast of
+their apron strings, so that they had to ask every time they wanted to go
+away, just as one of your little whelps of school-boys whines: 'Please to
+let me go out!'"
+
+Kitty Hood was finding a tongue quite as sharp as her own, by this time,
+and the effect was very much what is often seen in corresponding cases.
+Finding her lover growing as angry as herself, and a little more violent,
+the young school-mistress concluded that it was time to assume a less
+decided demeanor, so that if they must part they might do so without an
+absolute quarrel.
+
+"Well, Dick," she said, after a moment of pause, "there is no use of your
+being angry about it!" Just as if she had not been showing ill-temper from
+the beginning--the minx! "Of course I cannot hold you, and do not wish to
+do so, if you prefer dressing yourself up in that ridiculous manner and
+standing up to be shot at, to remaining here with _me_."
+
+"I don't _prefer_ it, you know I don't, Kitty!" said Dick, aware that his
+flank of conversation had once more been turned and himself placed in a
+false position.
+
+But here came an interruption. A young gentleman of seven made his
+appearance in the door of the school-room, his hands blacker than the
+proverbial ace-of-spades, his nether raiments spotted, and his face drawn
+into a most comical whimper, while his words came out between a sob and a
+hiccough:
+
+"Please, Miss Hood, won't you come in to Jem Stephenson? He has gone and
+upsot the inkstand all over my hands and spoilt my new trowsers!"
+
+"Go in and keep your seat, you young villain, or I shall flog you and Jem
+Stephenson both!" was the consoling assurance with which the "young
+villain" departed; while the hum from the school-room was evidently
+increasing, and the young school-mistress felt that she must indeed soon
+resume the reins of government if she was not to be permanently left
+without a realm worth ruling. But she took time to rejoin to Compton's last
+assertion.
+
+"I don't know any thing of the kind. I say that if you thought half as much
+of me as you did of public opinion and making a show of your fine new
+clothes, you would not stir one step."
+
+"Now, Kitty, do be reasonable--" again began Compton.
+
+"Look at other people--don't _they_ respect the wishes of those they expect
+to marry?" the young lady went on, not heeding his last attempt.
+"See--there is Carlton Brand--who does not know that he has remained at
+home ever since the war broke out, though he could have been a Colonel and
+perhaps even a General--just because he was really in love with Margaret
+Hayley, and she did not wish him to leave her?"
+
+It is scarcely necessary to say, at this stage of the narration, that Miss
+Kitty Hood was "begging the question." She had never heard one word to
+indicate why Carlton Brand had not accepted his opportunities, and she
+merely mentioned the two as people of prominence in the section,
+acquaintances, and the first pair of lovers of whom she happened to think.
+But she had made a terrible blunder, as many of us do at the very moment
+when we seem to be performing the very keenest of operations. Carlton
+Brand--one of the finest-looking men to be found within a radius of an
+hundred miles, a member of one of the liberal professions, and known to be
+wealthy enough to afford indulgence in any line of life which he might
+happen to fancy--was naturally an object of envy if not of suspicion to
+hundreds of other young men who did not feel that they possessed quite the
+same advantages. Young farmers, who chanced to catch him saying a polite
+word to their sisters, looked at him through eyes not too confiding, in
+spite of the fact that not even rumor had pointed out a single instance in
+which he had indulged in a dishonorable amour; and those who detected him
+in glances of kindness (perhaps of admiration) towards demoiselles whom
+they had marked out as their own destined marital property, had a bad habit
+of even looking out of the corners of their eyes and scowling a little, at
+such manifestations. Carlton Brand, in all this, was only paying a very
+slight penalty for his triple advantage of wealth, position and good looks,
+while many others pay the same unpleasant toll to society for the
+possession of even one (and sometimes none) of the three favors of fortune.
+
+The farm-house of the Comptons and the residence of the Brands (as will be
+hereafter made apparent) lay but a very short distance apart; and the
+little house (perhaps it might with more propriety have been called a
+cottage) in which Kitty Hood had seen the light, and where she lived with
+her quiet widowed mother, was still nearer to the abode of the young
+lawyer. Though the Hoods were much more humbly circumstanced than their
+neighbors, intercourse between the two families had always been frequent,
+with a very pleasant friendship between Elsie and Kitty, and more visits of
+the young girl at the residence of the Brands, and of Carlton, accompanying
+his sister, to that of the Hoods, than at all pleased the lover and
+expectant husband of Kitty. Then the latter had a head a little giddy and a
+tongue more than a little imprudent; and she had shown the bad taste, many
+times since their tacit engagement, to draw comparisons, in the presence of
+her lover, to his disadvantage, and in favor of a man who had much better
+opportunities than the farmer for keeping his clothes unimpeachable, his
+hands unsoiled, and his cheek unbrowned. Only very imprudent people, and
+perhaps very unfeeling ones, use such words; but they are used much too
+often, ignoring the pure gold that may lie within a rough nugget, and
+preferring the mere tinsel leaf on a bit of handsome carving. Kitty Hood
+was one of the thoughtless, and she was likely, some day, to pay the
+penalty in a manner she little anticipated.
+
+Within the few weeks previous, without Kitty being at all aware of the
+fact, Mr. Dick Compton had allowed himself to ruminate more than was
+healthy upon the glances he had chanced to see interchanged between Kitty
+and her "stuck-up lawyer friend," as he chose to designate him, and upon
+the continual commendations which she chose to bestow on the latter--until
+rooted personal dislike and something very near to positive jealousy, had
+been the result. Walking over towards the rendezvous that morning, if one
+shadow of hesitation on the subject of going to Harrisburgh had passed
+through the mind of the young farmer, it was caused by his dislike of
+leaving Kitty out of view, with Carlton Brand in the same near
+neighborhood. All that difficulty had been removed by the understanding
+that the lawyer was to leave at the same time and on the same service with
+himself; but when Kitty at once revived the obnoxious name with a new
+phrase of commendation, and signified that the section was not to be
+relieved of the lawyer's presence during his own absence, it is not very
+strange that the unreasonable demons of jealousy began tugging again at his
+heart-strings, and that he felt like performing some severe operation upon
+the Mordecai who sat in his gate, if he could only catch him!
+
+"So you have got to quoting Carlton Brand again, have you!" he responded to
+Miss Kitty's citation. "I thought I had told before that I had heard nearly
+enough of that proud puppy!"
+
+"'Puppy' indeed!" and Miss Kitty fired in an instant. "He's nothing of the
+kind, but a man and a gentleman, and you know it, Dick Compton!"
+
+"Oh, yes, a _gentleman_, and that suits you to a turn, Kitty Hood!" was the
+sneering reply. "When your _gentlemen_ are in the way, you think that an
+honest hard-working man is nobody."
+
+If ever a man spoke an unjust word to a woman (and it is to be feared that
+a great many have been uttered since the unfortunate gift of speech was
+conferred upon the race), Dick Compton was stupidly unjust at that moment.
+For the very quarrel (it was but little else, from first to last) in which
+they were engaged, had originated in the young girl's evident anxiety for
+his safety and pleading that he would not go away and leave her, even for a
+short period! Kitty Hood felt the injustice, if he did not, and all the old
+rage came back again, in a varied form, but hotter than ever. Her eyes
+flashed, she choked for a moment, and then, before Dick Compton could be at
+all aware what was about to happen, the school-mistress drew her little
+white hand back and brought him a ringing box on the ear and cheek, that
+the latter would not be very likely to forget for a fortnight,--while she
+flashed out:
+
+"Dick Compton, just take that for a fool! You are not worth any honest
+woman's loving, with your mean jealousy. You can go where you please, and I
+will never speak to you again until you learn better manners than to talk
+to _me_ in that manner!"
+
+Before the jealous lover had half recovered from the blow she stepped away
+from him and put her foot on the sill of the door, to re-enter. Compton,
+spite of the tingle in his cheek, did not quite believe in the propriety of
+parting in that manner, when he was just going to the war; and he made a
+step towards her.
+
+"Kitty!--oh, now, Kitty--"
+
+"Keep off, Dick Compton! Good-day and good-bye, and nobody cares where you
+go or how long you stay!" was the forbidding rejoinder, as the
+school-mistress swung herself round the jamb of the door and half
+disappeared. Her blood was at fever heat: that of her lover was likely to
+be at the same pitch in a moment.
+
+"You won't come back, then?"
+
+"No, I won't!"
+
+"Then I will tell you something, Kitty Hood!" and the young man was very
+angry and very earnest when he made the threat. "If I can catch Carlton
+Brand before I go away to-night, I will just flog him till he is the
+nearest to a dead man _you_ ever saw,--and see how you both like it!"
+
+Without another word the young farmer turned and strode round the corner of
+the school-house with his bundle and his indignation, making hasty strides
+up the hill and towards the woods that lay in the direction of his home.
+Kitty Hood saw thus much, and realized that very probably she was looking
+at him for the last time. Then she realized, too, what she had scarcely
+felt before--that she had been terribly to blame in the quarrel--that she
+might have been wrecking the happiness of a life by her ill-temper--and
+that it would never do to let poor Dick go away to the war, so angry at her
+that if killed his last thought would be upon every one else rather than
+her, and that if he returned he would never come near her again--never!
+Then poor Kitty dropped her head upon her desk, heedless of the only
+partially-hushed Pandemonium around her and the necessity of settling with
+Master Jem Stephenson, spiller of ink and others,--dropped her head upon
+her desk and sobbed loudly enough for some of the children to be quite
+aware of the fact, so that one of the little boys hazarded the remark,
+_sotto voce_: "Wonder what is the matter with her!" and a bigger one
+enlightened his ignorance with: "Why, didn't you see? Her beau has got on
+sojer clothes and is going away--stupid!"
+
+Only a minute or two, and then Kitty Hood could endure the struggle no
+longer. She was very unhappy and not a little penitent. She _could_ not
+remain any longer in the midst of those noisy children: she _must_ go home
+(or elsewhere) and see what facilities fate might yet throw in her way for
+seeing and speaking once more to her angry lover before his departure.
+Perhaps she could even find some means, still, for inducing him to remain,
+and then----. And at that thought the school-mistress raised her head,
+informed her school that she had a bad headache and must go home to bed,
+and dismissed them for a half-holiday.
+
+Whereupon one of the larger girls, who had seen the lover go away, without
+hearing any of the parting words, and who thought that she understood all
+about the affair, remarked to one of her companions that: "That was real
+nice, and she thought all the better of Miss Hood for it!" while one of the
+larger boys, unawake as yet to any of the softer feelings, bawled out to
+his mates that: "Miss Hood was going to see her old beau off--ki-yah!" It
+is painful to be obliged to say, justifying previously-expressed
+apprehension, that even the stranded vessel was forgotten in the haste with
+which the school separated, and that all the imaginary pirates of the
+Society, the Friendly and various other islands that maintained every thing
+else rather than friendly society for sailors, had at least one day more of
+chance at her with their canoes and pirogues.
+
+Her scholars dismissed, Kitty Hood took time to wash and cool her eyes and
+to smooth her hair, for a moment, at the little wash-closet in one corner
+of the school-room--then flung on her light bonnet and gauzy mantle and
+took her way, walking somewhat rapidly in spite of the heat of the coming
+noon, along the path that led around the base of the hill north-westward
+towards the residence of Carlton and Elsie Brand.
+
+Mr. Richard Compton had meanwhile been walking yet more rapidly, with his
+bundle under his arm, up the path leading over the hill, almost due north,
+and through the belt of woods discernible from the school-house. Whether
+the increasing heat of the day added to the heat of his temper is
+uncertain; but certain it is that he did not at all cool down under it. He
+had the excuse of being the party _last_ ill-used, if not indeed the party
+_first_ so treated. He loved Kitty Hood beyond all reason, and he was of
+course the person most likely to grow angry at her and jealous of her,
+beyond all endurance. He felt that he could not worse punish her, or better
+satisfy himself, than by carrying out his threat and soundly flogging
+Carlton Brand if he should once catch him under proper circumstances; he
+had no doubt whatever of his ability to flog him or "any other man," when
+he once set about the task; and while surmounting the hill, and even after
+plunging into the cool, thick, leafy woods, full of the twitter of birds
+and the fragrance of June blossoms, which should have had the power to
+soften passion in the breast of any man who held a true sympathy with
+Nature, his mental fists were clenched and his teeth set in a manner most
+threatening for any opposing force with which he might happen to be brought
+into contact.
+
+That "opposing force" was much nearer than the young man at the moment
+imagined. He was just emerging by the path to the main road which he was to
+cross, half a mile before reaching his own farm, when he saw a horseman
+riding rapidly up from the eastward. Intersecting the path just where it
+joined the road, was a blind road leading through the woods across toward
+the Darby, and closed at the entrance by a swinging gate. There was a low
+panel near it, and the young farmer leaped it in preference to unfastening
+the clumsy latch--finding himself, when beyond the fence, in the presence
+of Carlton Brand, who had just reined in his horse at the gate. Whatever
+there may have been in the face of the horseman at that moment, within a
+few minutes after his leaving the presence of Margaret Hayley and his
+sister, the eyes of Dick Compton were not sufficiently keen to recognize
+it. He only saw the handsome, proud-looking young lawyer, and his old
+antipathy rose, with the remembrance of the threat he had just used,
+accompanying it. Carlton Brand saw nothing more in the face of the young
+farmer than he had been accustomed to see, and accosted him as he might
+have done any other acquaintance, under the same circumstances, with a
+request for a slight service.
+
+"Ah, Compton, is that you?--just be kind enough to throw open that gate for
+me, will you?"
+
+"No--I'll not do any thing of the kind. If you want the gate open, just
+get off and open it yourself!" was the surly reply, very much to the
+astonishment of the lawyer. His face paled a little, then flushed, and he
+hesitated for an instant before he asked:
+
+"What do you mean, Richard Compton, by answering me in that manner?"
+
+"What I say!" answered Compton, quite as insolently as before. "You are a
+puppy, Carlton Brand, and I have half a mind to take you off that horse and
+flog you soundly, instead of opening a gate for you."
+
+"The d----l you have!" was the very natural reply. "Well, Dick Compton, I
+do not know what it is all about, but you are behaving very much like a
+ruffian, to a man who has never done any thing worse to you than to treat
+you like a gentleman."
+
+"You lie, Carlton Brand, and you know it!" was the response.
+
+"I lie, do I?" and the speaker shifted a little uneasily in his saddle,
+though he made no apparent movement to alight.
+
+"Yes, you lie!" said Compton, his voice thick and hoarse with agitation and
+anger. "And if you will get off that horse I will teach you a lesson about
+meddling with other people's property, that you will remember for a
+twelvemonth."
+
+If Carlton Brand's face expressed intense surprise, it was certainly
+nothing more than he felt; for what the "meddling with other people's
+property" could mean, except that he might unwittingly have run across some
+interest of Compton's in the pursuit of his profession, he had no more idea
+than he could have had of the number of trees in the adjoining wood or the
+depth of soil on which his horse was standing. Yet he threw his leg at once
+over the saddle, at the last salutation, sprang to the ground, flung his
+bridle over one of the posts near the gate, and said:
+
+"Now then!"
+
+In an instant and without another word, Dick Compton, who had dropped his
+bundle as the other dismounted, sprang at him, fury in his face and the
+clench of determined hostility in every nerve. Probably no battle on earth
+was ever fought so singularly--the one combatant without the least cause
+for his rage, and the other not even acquainted with the accusation made
+against him. They seemed not badly matched, in physical force, though any
+connoisseur of the exclusively muscular would have considered Compton
+likely to be by far the most enduring. He was fifteen or twenty pounds the
+heavier, and fully trained by field labor; Brand two or three inches the
+taller, athletic, and a little the longer armed.
+
+Half a dozen blows were rapidly exchanged, before either succeeded in
+breaking the guard of the other. Then Compton managed to reach the lawyer's
+cheek, with a blow of some violence that probably stung within quite as
+much as it did without. At all events it brought a new color to his face,
+and from that instant he was cool no longer. He struck out more rapidly and
+angrily, and Compton followed his motion. In less than a minute half a
+dozen blows had reached the faces and bodies of each, and there was a
+probability that, whatever the event of the fight, both would be injured as
+well as disfigured. Suddenly, the instant after, as Compton aimed a
+well-directed blow at the throat of his antagonist, that he believed would
+entirely settle the affair, something happened, upon which he had not
+calculated. Whether his blow was entirely fended he did not know; but what
+he did know, so far as he knew any thing, was that Carlton Brand's right
+fist, dashed out with a force little less formidable than the kick of an
+iron-shod horse, struck him on the left of the nose and the cheek
+adjoining, sending a perfect gore of blood spouting over face and clothing,
+and throwing him reeling backward, stunned and half senseless, to the
+earth,--the fight over, so far as he was to bear any part in it.
+
+There was only a little sensation left in poor Compton at that juncture,
+but that little cried out against being beaten down in such a manner by a
+man whom he had before considered his inferior in muscular power, and whom
+he had set out to flog. The bull-dog within him wished to rise and make
+another effort, but for a moment his eyes _would not_ open and his head
+would not clear sufficiently for him to make any effort at regaining his
+lost perpendicular. When he thought he heard a groan and a loud "thud" on
+the ground, and he did manage to struggle to a sitting position, the sight
+that met his eyes was nearly sufficient to drive him back into his partial
+insensibility, amazement and horror being about equally compounded in the
+spectacle. Carlton Brand lay at length on the ground, his face set in a
+frightful spasm, a thin white froth issuing from the set lips, the eyes
+closed, and not even a quiver of motion in the limbs. Dick Compton sprang
+up, then, with a supernatural energy born of absolute fright, and bent over
+his prostrate antagonist. To all appearance he was dead!--dead as if he had
+been lying there for the last century! The frightened farmer put his hand
+to his temples, his pulses and his heart, and found no motion whatever.
+Then the dreadful fear took possession of him that his own last blow, which
+he remembered aiming at the throat of the other, might have taken effect
+there at the same moment when he was himself struck and prostrated--that
+some vital part of the throat might have been touched and death instantly
+ensued!
+
+To say that Dick Compton was frightened and even horrified at this
+unexpected issue of the pugilistic combat which he had forced, is indeed to
+put the case very mildly. He was literally paralyzed, for the moment, with
+consternation. What was his fate?--to be a homicide! And--good God!--here
+another thought took possession of him. He had left Kitty Hood at the
+school-house, only a little while before, himself angry and in a dangerous
+mood, and with his last words threatening personal violence against Carlton
+Brand! If he should be dead--and there seemed to be no hope to the
+contrary--what words of his could ever persuade the school-mistress that he
+had not entertained enough of jealousy and anger against the lawyer to
+desire his death?--and how far would not Kitty's evidence go in proving
+before a criminal court that he was an intentional murderer?
+
+Such reflections are not pleasant, to say the least! A very few of them go
+a great way in a man's life. Those who have been placed, even for one
+moment, in the belief that they have suddenly become homicides, need not be
+told how far beyond all other horrors is the feeling: those who have missed
+the sensation, may thank God with all reverence for having spared them one
+of the untold agonies which belong only to the damned!
+
+Dick Compton was not one of the most delicate of men, either in action or
+perception, but he was a good fellow in the main, with quite enough of
+intuition to foresee the worst perils of a situation, and with quite enough
+of presence of mind to act quickly in a desperate emergency. There was yet
+no breath or motion in the prostrate man: he would die very soon if not
+already dead: something might yet be done for him: but that something, if
+done at all, must be done at once. Besides, if death should prove to be
+real, he would himself be a little better circumstanced if found trying to
+preserve the life of his antagonist, than if discovered to have let him die
+without effort. A mile to the westward, and at the side of the very road at
+the edge of which he was standing, was the residence of one of the two
+doctors of the immediate section, and medical assistance might be procured,
+with the aid of the fallen man's horse, in a brief period.
+
+With this thought in mind, and in far less time after the occurrence of the
+catastrophe than it has needed to put it upon record, Dick Compton had
+unfastened the horse of Carlton Brand from the post, swung himself into the
+saddle, and was galloping away westward, a little doubtful in mind whether
+he was indeed going after a doctor or looking for a convenient gallows and
+a hangman,--and wishing, from the bottom of his soul, that he had never
+entertained quite so good an opinion of his personal prowess as that which
+had led him into such a terrible position. Once, as he galloped on, he
+caught sight of his new military trowsers, and found himself thinking
+whether, when they hung soldiers, they allowed them to retain their uniform
+or subjected them to the degrading alternative of the prison gray! And that
+is all, of the very peculiar reflections of Mr. Dick Compton as he sped
+away after the doctor, that needs to be put upon record.
+
+Kitty Hood, meanwhile, leaving the school-house perhaps ten minutes after
+her lover, had sped along the path at the base of the woods, intent on
+going over to the residence of the Brands and seeking advice, if not
+assistance, from Elsie, in her dilemma. She had quite overcome her anger,
+now, and taken into her young heart a full supply of that which very often
+follows the former--anxiety; and her feet moved as glibly, in the better
+cause of reconciliation, as her tongue had done not long before in a very
+unreasonable lovers' quarrel.
+
+The path she was pursuing would have led her out to the main road, which
+she must cross to reach the Brands', some half a mile further west than the
+point at which the gate gave access to the blind road through the wood. But
+there was a little spot of marshy ground before reaching the road; she
+remembered that her shoes were thin and that wet feet were disagreeable
+even in June, and as a consequence she struck into a cross path which
+intersected the blind road and would bring her out at the gate. As a
+secondary consequence, she followed that road and came out a minute after
+at the gate, to open it without observing what lay beyond, and to start
+back with a scream of affright as she saw the body of Carlton Brand lying
+on the green sward without, his face still set in that terrible contortion,
+and the rigidity of death alike in limb and feature.
+
+The young girl had seen but little of death, and not yet learned to regard
+it rather as a deliverance than otherwise; and in any shape it frightened
+her. How natural, then, that she should regard it with peculiar horror when
+she came upon it alone, by a wood-side, and in the person of an
+acquaintance equally admired and respected! But what must have been her
+feelings when, the moment after, and before she had commanded herself
+sufficiently to do more than utter that single scream of terror, she saw a
+bundle lying near the apparently dead man, saw blood staining one of his
+hands and the grass beside him, and recognized the bundle as the same she
+had seen, not half an hour before, under the arm of Richard Compton!
+
+If that unfortunate young man, on discovering the supposed extent of his
+mishap, had remembered the threat against the lawyer made but a little
+while before to Kitty, how did that threat spring into her mind on seeing
+the blood and recognizing the bundle! Murder, beyond a doubt, and Dick
+Compton the murderer! The two had met, accidentally, had quarrelled, had
+clenched, and in that clench her lover had forgotten all except his
+jealousy and fear of the lawyer, and had killed him outright! Oh, here was
+trouble, indeed, to which that of a few moments previous had been but the
+merest shadow! Dick would be arrested, tried, imprisoned, perhaps hung; and
+_she_ would be obliged to give the fatal evidence that must seal his doom!
+Terrible indeed--most terrible!--the thought culminating in such mental
+suffering that the poor girl scarcely knew whether she was treading upon
+earth or air, as she took one more look upon the motionless form, the
+blood, and the accusing bundle that lay beside--then turned her back with a
+shudder upon all, crossed the road and hastened over the fields beyond, by
+a bye-path that would lead her to the home of the murdered man--her errand
+now, and her reason for haste, how different from what it had been when
+walking towards, the same destination but a few moments before!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+     THE RESIDENCE OF THE BRANDS--ROBERT BRAND AND DR. PHILIP
+     POMEROY--RADICAL AND COPPERHEAD--A PASSAGE-AT-ARMS THAT
+     ENDED IN A QUARREL--ELSPETH GRAEME THE HOUSEKEEPER--THE
+     SHADOW OF SHAME--FATHER AND DAUGHTER--THE FALLING OF A
+     PARENT'S CURSE.
+
+
+Half a mile northward from the Market street road which has already been
+before so many times alluded to--on the north side of that road and at the
+distance of a mile westward from the Hayley residence, was located that
+before mentioned as the abode of the Brands. It was a fine old house, built
+fifty or sixty years before, but within a few years repaired and rebuilt
+with a lavish disregard of cost, a railed promenade having been added at
+the apex of the steep roof, the whole two stories of height re-enclosed,
+the windows and doors comparatively modernized, the piazzas remodelled and
+widened, and all done that the carpenter's art could well be expected to
+achieve, to add to the comfort and durability of the mansion without
+destroying the appearance of respectable age which it had already put on.
+The house stood facing southward upon nearly level ground, the lawn in
+front of good depth and thickly dotted with forest and other shade trees
+that had evidently known all the years of the building; while from the
+eastern side a narrow lane ran down to the road and afforded ingress and
+egress to carriages passing back towards the handsomely-grouped range of
+outbuildings in the rear. Adjoining this lane and behind the house was a
+large garden, with grape trellises and many of the appliances of luxury in
+horticulture.
+
+At the eastern end of the piazza a broad single door opened into the
+somewhat antiquated hall; and from that hall a door opened into a parlor
+fitted up with every appliance of convenience that could be needed in such
+a country residence. Behind that parlor another door opened into a smaller
+apartment correspondingly fitted but with more of those belongings
+calculated to show its constant occupancy; and from that rear room still
+another door opening to the left disclosed a bed-room of comfortable
+appearance and tasteful arrangement. On the other side of the hall the
+dining and domestic apartments stretched away, while the spacious upper
+story supplied rooms to other members of the family.
+
+It was very evident, at a glance, that wealth presided over the modernized
+old house, and that good taste was not forgotten; and yet an impression
+could not well be avoided that there must be something of severity, and
+repugnance to ornament, conjoined with the wealth. Poverty, or even
+struggling pride, would not have afforded so much of the best: warm taste
+and lavish liberality would have supplied something more of the costly and
+the luxurious.
+
+In the second of the rooms mentioned--that immediately in the rear of the
+parlor, two persons were in conversation at about noon of the same day of
+the occurrences previously recorded. The one, sitting in an easy-chair with
+his right leg raised and resting upon another chair crowned with a
+pillow,--was apparently sixty-five to seventy years of age; tall, if his
+proportions could properly be judged as he sat, with a figure that must
+have been robust in its time; the hair so nearly white as to preclude any
+idea of the color which it might have worn in earlier days; the face well
+cut and even handsome for its age, though with a shade of severity in the
+firm nose and shaven lips, which under some circumstances might grow
+threatening; but any accurate judgment of his character rendered difficult,
+by the look of pain stamped upon his face by evident bodily suffering.
+Resting against a small table partially covered with bandages and
+embrocations, was a stout cane, indicating both that the invalid was in the
+habit of using a support of that character, and that he could not, even
+now, be entirely confined to his chair. Such was Robert Brand, owner of
+the mansion into which we have been introduced, and father of two children
+apparently as little alike in nature as in sex--Carlton and Elsie Brand.
+
+The second figure was quite as well deserving of notice as the old man in
+his easy-chair. Doctor Philip Pomeroy, who was at that moment pacing up and
+down the room without any apparent cause for that violent exercise in warm
+weather, was a man in whom the acute physiognomist might have found
+something illustrated by that seemingly listless motion--something
+possessed in common by restless men, in the superior animal kingdom, and
+those bears and hyenas which seem to traverse a great many unnecessary
+miles in travelling up and down the bars of their cages, in the inferior.
+And yet the doctor could not have been called, with any propriety, an
+"animal-looking man"--it was the motion which supplied the comparison. He
+was apparently forty-five to fifty, tall and slight figured, with face
+clean shaven except a heavy dark moustache, features a little aquiline and
+decidedly sharp lips that suggested an occasional sneer and a word cutting
+like a scimetar, eyes of keen scintillant dark brown or black, and rather
+long dark straight hair through which the threads of silver began to show
+more as an ornament than a disadvantage. A very fine looking man--a man of
+undoubted power and will--a man who had evidently enjoyed the most
+favorable associations; and yet how nearly a man to be either braved or
+trusted without reserve, it might have needed Lavater's self to decide on a
+brief acquaintance. That same Lavater, if acquainted with the peculiarities
+of road turn-outs, would have decided one point, at least, from the vehicle
+that stood in the lane, near the door--no clumsy and cumbersome gig,
+weighing an indefinite number of tons and set down as the proper conveyance
+for doctors from the day when the first one grew too lazy to walk,--but a
+light, sporting-looking buggy, seated for one, and suggesting fast driving
+quite as much as the high-blooded, thorough-bred bay that champed his bit
+before it and stamped impatiently for the coming of his master.
+
+From the medical character of the visitor and the disabled appearance of
+the man in the easy-chair, it might have been concluded that the call was a
+professional one; and such was indeed the fact. An injury to the right limb
+of Robert Brand, received many years before, had a habit of asserting
+itself at uncertain periods, crippling him materially all the while, and at
+those particular times throwing him into all those agonies indifferently
+known as the pangs of neuralgia and inflammatory rheumatism. At such
+periods, the traditional character of the "gouty old Admiral" of the
+English stage, always limping and thumping a heavy cane, and nearly always
+venting words more forcible than polite, was very nearly illustrated in the
+old gentleman, his desire for active motion being generally in an inverse
+ratio to the power of movement. Dr. Pomeroy, one of the most skilful of the
+physicians of the section, and a man in very extensive practice, was always
+his medical adviser at such times, and re-directed the application of those
+warm flannels and neutralizing embrocations which constituted all that even
+science could do for the alleviation of his sufferings, and about which old
+Elspeth the housekeeper knew a good deal more, all the while, than any
+physician could possibly do. For the three days previous, Robert Brand had
+been suffering to a most painful degree, and this was the third of the
+daily visits of the doctor.
+
+But whatever might have been the professional character of the visit, it
+had, before the moment when our attention is called to the two
+interlocutors, lost any feature which could have marked it as such. Robert
+Brand was a patriot, almost equally warm-hearted and hot-headed in the type
+of his attachment to his country; while Dr. Pomeroy was one of those
+quasi-loyalists, popularly called "Copperheads," who have the love of
+country quite as often on their lips as the most unshrinking war-advocate
+can do, but who prefer to show that love by objecting to every effort made
+for the preservation of nationality, by denouncing, in every nine words out
+of ten, something done by the loyal government, while only the poor tenth
+is kept for a wail over the unfortunate character of the "civil war,"--and
+by undervaluing every success won by the Union arms, while every momentary
+advantage gained by the rebels is correspondingly magnified. He seemed to
+take particular delight, always, in tormenting the old gentleman just to
+the verge of a positive rupture without quite causing one; and just now, in
+the advance of the rebel forces into Pennsylvania, he found a golden
+opportunity.
+
+"Bah!" he said, in response to a strongly patriotic expression of his
+patron, which had led him to bring down one of his hands upon the disabled
+leg with a force causing a new tingle in that limb and a new expression of
+agony upon his face--"bah! All you hot-headed people, young and old, use
+just such language, all the while. It amounts to nothing, except that
+perhaps it eases your minds. Saying that 'the Union must and shall be
+preserved,' and prophesying all kinds of good things for the nation, amount
+to but very little while a set of incapables sit filling their pockets at
+Washington (more than half of them traitors, in my opinion), while the army
+is worse mismanaged than it could be if a set of school-boys led it, and
+while the enemies you affect to despise are really winning every thing and
+overrunning the whole country."
+
+"Out upon you, Dr. Pomeroy!" cried the old man, angrily. "You dare to call
+yourself a patriot, and talk in that manner! There are plenty of fools at
+Washington, but I would rather see fools there than traitors! If you are
+not a perfect block-head, you know that the rebels have lost twice as much
+as they have gained, within the past year, and that if the fight goes on in
+the same manner for one year more, the miserable mongrel concern will die
+of its own weakness! But you do not _want_ it to die--that is just what
+ails _you_!--you would rather see Jeff Davis in the Capitol than any loyal
+man who would not give all the offices to your miserable broken-down
+party!"
+
+"And you would rather see the whole country lying in ruins, with heaps of
+dead everywhere and the few who remain starving to death in the midst of
+them, than that the country should be in any other hands than those of your
+friends who do nothing else than talk about the nigger, legislate for the
+nigger, and fight for the nigger!" answered the doctor, still continuing
+his walk, and his face showing decided temper.
+
+"It is false, and you know it, Philip Pomeroy!" said the invalid, with a
+motion of his hand towards the big cane, which indicated that he would have
+liked to use it by breaking it over the doctor's head.
+
+"It is true, and _you_ know it, Robert Brand!" replied the doctor, whose
+temper seemed to return to its equanimity the moment he had succeeded in
+throwing his patient into a sufficient rage. "But you need not take so much
+pains to conceal your opinions, old gentleman! _I_ don't! If the country is
+to lie under the control of men who only legislate and fight for the
+nigger, who trample upon the Constitution and fill Fort McHenry and Fort
+Lafayette and Fort Warren with better men than themselves, who do not
+happen to think and act precisely as _they_ do,--why, the sooner that Jeff
+Davis, or any one else, gets possession, the better for all concerned."
+
+"Doctor Pomeroy, you ought to be taken and hung, with the other traitors,
+and I shouldn't much mind having a pull at the rope!" broke out the old
+man, now almost entirely beside himself with indignation.
+
+"Oh, I know that!" answered the doctor, whose temper was still visibly
+improving as that of his patient grew worse. "Any of your abolition pack
+would have helped to hang every democrat, long ago, if they had only
+_dared_! The only trouble is that they did not do it while they had the
+opportunity. Now it is too late. You daren't open the doors of your
+State-prisons any more, unless it is to let somebody _out_! And before many
+days some of you will sing a different tune--take my word for it. Some of
+you radicals, even here at Philadelphia, will try to make the Confederate
+leaders believe that you have been the truest friends of the South, all the
+while."
+
+"What do you mean, you scoundrel?" asked the old gentleman, whose harsh
+words to a man somewhat younger than himself appeared to be fully
+understood and not taken in quite the sense which they might have borne to
+other ears.
+
+"I mean that Lee will take Harrisburgh, and that next he will take
+Philadelphia; then--"
+
+"Take Purgatory! He can never take Harrisburgh, let alone Philadelphia!"
+
+"He can and will take it! What is to hinder him?"
+
+"Just what has hindered his taking Washington, any time the last two
+years--better troops than his own, and more of them."
+
+"Sheep before butchers'-dogs! The men of the North have never gone into the
+war at all, and they never will go. That scum which you call an army cannot
+fight the earnest and determined men of the South, and you ought to know
+it. Within a week Lee will be in Philadelphia, and then we will see about
+the change of tune!"
+
+"Within a week, if he dares advance, he will be eaten up by the State
+militia alone, even if the Army of the Potomac does not save them the
+trouble!" said the old man.
+
+"The Army of the Potomac has been good for nothing ever since Hooker
+blundered its last opportunity away at Chancellorsville!" retorted the
+physician. "The army has no confidence in _him_, and the country has no
+confidence either in him or the army. The State militia will vigorously
+stay at home, or they will behave so badly after they go out, that they had
+much better kept where nobody saw them! Oh, by the way!--" and the face of
+the doctor lit up with a new expression. A sneer settled itself upon his
+well-formed lips, and there came into his scintillant eyes a gleam of
+deadly dislike which boded no good to the subject of which he was about to
+speak. He might have been only half in earnest, before, while driving the
+old man wild with his Copperhead banter; but he was certainly interested in
+what he was about to say, now!
+
+"Well?" asked the patient, querulously, as he saw that some new topic was
+to interlard that which had already been so unpleasant.
+
+"That State militia you were talking about," said the doctor. "Your son was
+expected to take up his old commission and go out with one of the
+regiments, was he not?"
+
+"He was not only expected to do so, but he has done so!" answered the
+father, with love and pride in his eyes. "Not all the people in the country
+are either Copperheads or cowards, doctor; and I am proud to tell you that
+if _I_ am too old and too much crippled to take part in the battles of my
+country, or even to get up and break my cane over your head when you insult
+the very name of patriotism,--I have a son who when his opportunity comes
+can do the one and will do the other!"
+
+"When his 'opportunity' comes!" echoed the doctor, sneeringly.
+
+"Yes, his opportunity!" re-echoed the father, who felt that there was
+something invidious in the tone, though he could not read that face which
+might have given him a better clue to the character of the man with whom he
+was dealing. "My son has been too much hampered with business before, to
+accept any of the chances which have been offered him; but now that his
+native State is invaded, business is thrown by and you will find him, sir,
+keeping up the honor of the name."
+
+"Humph!" said the doctor, pausing in his walk and for some unexplainable
+reason going to the window and looking out; so that he stood with his back
+to the old gentleman. "Where is your son, now?"
+
+"Where? Gone down to the rendezvous to take his commission, of course, as I
+understand that the troops will leave to-night."
+
+"Humph!" once more said the doctor, in the same insolent tone and retaining
+his position at the window. "And yet I happen to know that your son has
+discovered some new '_business_,' (with a terribly significant emphasis on
+the last word) and that he is not going one step with the regiment."
+
+"Dr. Pomeroy, I know better!" was the reply.
+
+"Mr. Brand, I know what I am talking about, a good deal better than you
+imagine!" sneered the doctor, who having by that time managed to get his
+face into that shape which he had no objection to being seen by his
+patient, now turned about and faced him, with his hands under the tails of
+his coat.
+
+"_What_ do you know?" was the inquiry, a little trouble blending with the
+anxiety in the face.
+
+"Well, I will tell you, as perhaps you may as well learn the fact from me
+as from any one else," answered the doctor, his tones now very smooth, and
+his manner almost deferential, as should be the demeanor of any man towards
+his victim at the moment of stabbing him under the fifth rib. "I had
+occasion to call at the armory of the Reserves, an hour or two ago, to set
+the broken arm of one of the fellows who had taken too much Monongahela in
+anticipation of his start, and fallen down-stairs. I learned there and
+then, with some surprise and not a little grief (the father ought to have
+caught the expression of his face at that moment, and thereby measured the
+"grief" indicated!) that Mr. Carlton Brand had been down at the armory,
+alleged his _business_ to be such that he could not possibly leave the
+city, and declined any further connection whatever with the regiment."
+
+"It is impossible!" said the father.
+
+"It is true, however, like a good many impossible things!" again sneered
+the physician. "And I have been thinking whether some others of members of
+the State militia would not be found like your amiable son--too _busy_ to
+pay any attention to the defence of the State!"
+
+"Dr. Pomeroy!" said the father, after one moment of almost stupefied
+silence. "Dr. Pomeroy, you have not been friends with my son for a long
+time, and I know it, though I do not know what could have caused any
+disagreement. But I do not suppose you would deliberately tell a falsehood
+about him that could be detected in half an hour; and I want to know what
+there is hidden in your words, more than you have chosen to convey."
+
+"You had better ask your son when he comes!" was the reply.
+
+"No--I ask _you, now_, and I think you had better answer me!" said the old
+man.
+
+"Well, then," answered the doctor, "if you insist upon it, my love for the
+young man is not so warm as to give me a great deal of pain in the telling,
+and you may know all you wish. Your son has been doubted a little, ever
+since the breaking out of the war, from his repeated refusals of positions
+in the army; and--"
+
+"The man who says that my son is disloyal, lies!" cried the old man,
+interrupting him. "You, or any other man!"
+
+"It was not on the ground of his _disloyalty_ that he was suspected!"
+sneered the doctor.
+
+"And what ground then?" asked the father, his face and his whole manner
+showing something terrible within that could be only partially suppressed.
+
+"The ground of his _cowardice_, since you will have it!" spoke the doctor,
+in such a tone of fiendish exultation as Mephistopheles may have used to
+Faust, at the moment of assuring him that the last hope of happiness on
+earth or pardon from heaven had been swept away in the slaughter of
+Valentine and the moral murder of Marguerite. "There is not an officer in
+the Reserves, who heard him refuse to join the regiment this morning, but
+believes him--yes, _knows_ him, to be an arrant poltroon."
+
+"Doctor Philip Pomeroy, you are a liar as well as a traitor and a
+scoundrel! If I had two legs, and still was, as I am, old enough to be your
+father, you would not leave this house without broken bones! Get out of it,
+send me your bill to-morrow, or even to-day, and never let me see you set
+foot in it again while I live!"
+
+The face of the old man was fearful, at that juncture. In spite of the pain
+of his disabled limb, he had grasped his cane and struggled to a standing
+position, before concluding his violent words; and as he concluded, passion
+overcame all prudence, and the heavy cane went by the doctor's head,
+crashing through the window and taking its way out into the garden, at the
+same moment when his limb gave way and he sunk back into his chair with a
+groan that was almost a shriek, clutching at the bell-rope that hung near
+him and nearly tearing it from its fastenings.
+
+Dr. Pomeroy said not another word, whatever he might have felt. He had
+dodged the flying cane, by not more than an inch, and such chances are not
+likely to improve the temper of even the most amiable. For one instant
+there was something in his face that might have threatened personal revenge
+of the violence as well as the unpardonable words, in spite of the
+difference of age: then the sneer crept over his face again, he stepped out
+through the parlor into the hall, took his hat, and the next moment was
+bowling down the lane into the road, behind his fast-trotting bay. It
+seemed likely that his last professional visit to the Brands had been paid,
+even if it had not yet been paid for!
+
+The terrible appeal of the master of the house to the bell-rope at his hand
+was answered the moment after by the appearance of a woman of so remarkable
+an aspect as to be worthy of quite as much attention as either of the
+personages who have before been called, in the same room, to the reader's
+attention. Her dress was that of a housekeeper or upper servant, though the
+height of her carriage and the erectness of her figure might have stamped
+her as an empress. And in truth that figure did not need any such
+extraordinary carriage to develop it, for, as compared with the ordinary
+stature of woman, it was little else than gigantic. The man who built a
+door for Elspeth Graeme, less than six feet in the clear, subjected her to
+imminent danger of bringing up with a "bump" every time she entered it; and
+her broad, square, bony figure showed that all the power of her frame had
+not been frittered away in length. Her hands were large and masculine,
+though by no means ill-shaped, and her foot had not only the tread supposed
+to belong to that of the coarser sex, but very nearly its size. In face she
+was broad yet still longer of feature, with hair that had been light brown
+before the gray sifted itself so thickly among it as to render the color
+doubtful,--with eyes of bluish gray, a strong and somewhat coarse mouth
+with no contemptible approach to a moustache of light hairs bristling at
+the corners,--and with complexion wrinkled and browned by the exposures of
+at least sixty years, until very nearly the last trace of what had once
+been youth and womanhood was worn away and forgotten. Yet there was
+something very good and very kindly amid the rugged strength of the face;
+and while little children might at the first glance have feared the old
+woman and run away from her as a "witch," they would at the second
+certainly have crept back to her knees and depended upon a protection which
+they were certain to receive.
+
+It is only necessary, to say, in addition, that she was Scottish by birth
+as well as by blood and name--that she had come to this country nearly
+forty years before, when Robert Brand was a young man, and attached herself
+to the fortunes of the family because they were Scottish by blood and she
+was the very incarnation of faithful feudality--that his daughter had been
+named Elspeth (since softened to Elsie) at her earnest desire, because she
+said the name was "the bonniest ava" and she had herself been named after
+a noble lady who bore it, in her own land, and who had done much to give
+her that upright carriage by standing as her god-mother--and that for many
+a long year, now, she had been the working head of the Brand household,
+scarcely more so since the death of its weak, hysterical mistress, a dozen
+years before, than while she was alive and pretending to a management which
+she never understood.
+
+If any one person beneath that roof, more legitimately than another,
+belonged to the family and felt herself so belonging, that person was
+Elspeth Graeme; and if something of the romantic, which the stern sense of
+the father would have been slow to approve, had grown up in both his
+children, it was to the partial love of Elspeth and her stories of Scottish
+romance, poetry, history, song and superstition, carrying them away from
+prosaic America to the wimpling burns and haunted glens of the land from
+which their blood had been derived,--that such a feeling, fortunate or
+unfortunate as the future might prove, was principally to be credited.
+
+"Did you ring, sir? Ech, Lord, the mon's deein'!" were the two very
+different exclamations made by Elspeth as she entered the room, after the
+departure of the doctor, and caught sight of the situation in which the
+master seemed to be lying.
+
+"No, Elspeth, I am not 'deein' as you call it," he growled out, when the
+pain of his exertion had again somewhat subsided and he could find breath
+for words. "But I wish I was! Is that cursed doctor gone?"
+
+"He was gettin' to his carriage the minute, and he's awa by this," answered
+the housekeeper. "But what ava has he been doin' to ye? Murderin' ye
+maybe!--they're a dolefu' uncanny set, the doctors!"
+
+"If you ever see that man here again, and you don't have him shot or set
+the dog on him, out of the house you go, neck and crop, the whole pack of
+you--do you hear!" was the reply to Elspeth's comment on the medical
+profession.
+
+"Just as ye say, master," said Elspeth. "I'll set Carlo at him myself, if
+ye say so; and wo but the brute will just worry him, for he does na like
+him and is unco fond of snappin' aboot his heels!"
+
+"Where is Elsie?" was the next question.
+
+"Gone over to Mistress Hayley's the mornin'. Can I do any thing for your
+leg, sir?--for the wench in the kitchen's clean daft, and I'll be wanted
+there, maybe."
+
+"No--you can do nothing. My leg is better. But send Elsie to me the moment
+she comes in."
+
+"Hark!" said the housekeeper, as a light foot sounded on the piazza and
+came in through the hall. "There's the lassie hersel--I ken her step among
+a thousand. I'll just send her in to you the moment she has thrawn aff her
+bonnet." And the old woman departed on her errand.
+
+There must have been an acuteness beyond nature, in the ears of old
+Elspeth, if she indeed knew the tread of the young girl; for her step, as
+she entered the room, was so slow, laggard and lifeless, so unlike the
+usual springing rapidity of her girlish nature, that even her lover might
+have been pardoned for failing to recognize it. It was as if some crushing
+weight fettered her limbs and bowed down her brow. And a crushing weight
+indeed rested upon her--the first unendurable grief of her young life--the
+knowledge of her only brother's shame. Robert Brand marked the slow step
+and saw the downcast head; and little as he could possibly know of the
+connection of that demeanor with the subject of his previous thought, it
+was not of that cheerful and reassuring character calculated to restore the
+lost equanimity of a man insulted in the tenderest point of his honor and
+chafed beyond human endurance. His first words were rough and peremptory:
+
+"Why do you move in that manner, girl, when you come to see _me_? I do not
+like it--do not let me see any more of it!"
+
+"I was coming, father!" was poor Elsie's only answer.
+
+"So I see--at the rate of ten feet an hour! What is the matter with you?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing?--do not tell me that, girl! I know better, or you would never
+carry that gloomy face and move as if you were going to your grandmother's
+funeral!"
+
+"Indeed there is nothing the matter with me, father; but there soon will
+be, if you scold me!" and the young girl, making a terrible effort to be
+cheerful, came up to his side, put her arm around his neck and pressed her
+lips to his forehead with a movement so pure and fond that it might have
+softened Nero at the moment of ordering his last wholesale murder. It
+partially disarmed the pained and querulous father. He put his arm around
+the daughter's waist, returned the pressure and seemed to be soothed for a
+moment by resting his head against the bosom that pressed close to him. But
+the demon that had been roused could only sleep thus temporarily. Directly
+he put her away, though not roughly, looked her full in the face, and
+asked:
+
+"Where is your brother?"
+
+"You know he went down to town this morning, and he has not yet come home,"
+was the reply, with an effort not by any means a successful one, to keep
+the voice from quavering. The practised ear of the father detected the
+difference between that intonation and the usual unembarrassed utterance of
+his daughter; and he naturally connected it at once with the restraint of
+her manner, and noticed an evasion in her answer that might otherwise have
+escaped him.
+
+"I know he has not come home," he said. "But that was not my question. You
+have been at Mrs. Hayley's where he spends quite as much of his time as
+here. Have you seen him?"
+
+Elsie Brand would have given the proudest feature of her personal
+adornment, at that moment, to be able to lie! She saw that some undefined
+anxiety with reference to her brother must have moved her father's repeated
+questions, and naturally she feared the worst--that Carlton's mad words
+had indeed been overheard, and that even in that brief space of time some
+messenger of evil had travelled fast and betrayed the fatal secret. If so,
+the storm was about to burst on the devoted head of her brother, not the
+less deadly because she must bear the first brunt of its violence.
+Yes--Elsie Brand would almost have given her right hand to be able to lie
+at that moment. But her education had been as true as was her nature, and
+she managed to falter out, yet more suspiciously:
+
+"Yes, father!"
+
+"And you _dared_ to trifle with me, girl, when I asked you a plain
+question?" and Robert Brand grasped his daughter by the arm so forcibly
+that she nearly screamed with the violent pressure, and tears did indeed
+start to her eyes as she sobbed out--
+
+"I did not mean to trifle with you, father. I only thought--"
+
+"You thought that when I asked one question, I meant another, did you?" and
+the face that looked upon her was set, hard and very stern. "You had better
+not try the experiment again, if you do not wish to suffer for it!"
+
+"Oh, father!" and the young girl, enough broken before, now wept outright.
+But he stopped her, very roughly.
+
+"No bawling! not a whimper! Now listen to me. You have seen your brother
+since morning--since he went down to the rendezvous."
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"You saw him at Mrs. Hayley's."
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"And he came there to bid Margaret good-bye, before he went away, and you
+are such a miserable whining school-girl that you are making all this fuss
+about his absence. Is that the fact? Speak!" He still held her arm, though
+his grasp was less painful than it had been at first; and his eyes looked
+upon her with such a steady, anxious, almost fearful gaze, that it would
+have driven away the second temptation to falsehood, even had such a
+temptation once obtained power. There was nothing for it, at that moment,
+but to speak the truth so far as compelled.
+
+"No, father. Carlton is not going away." The last three words were uttered
+so low, and so tangled up among the sobs that she had not been able
+entirely to check, that they might not have been distinguishable except to
+the preternaturally acute ear of the suspicious father.
+
+"He is not going? Why?" The first words were harsh and loud--the last one
+was almost thunder, easily heard, if any one was listening, over the whole
+house. Before it the young girl shook like an aspen and broke out into
+fresh sobs as she attempted to answer.
+
+"Because--because his business will not allow--"
+
+"Because he is _a coward!_ Answer me that question, girl, or never speak to
+me again while you live!" Robert Brand had apparently forgotten all his
+pain and risen from his chair, still holding his daughter's arm, as he
+hurled out the interrogation and the threat. Poor Elsie saw that he knew
+all, too surely; further dissembling was useless; and she dropped upon her
+knees, that iron grasp still upon her arm, lifted up both her hands, and
+piteously moaned--
+
+"Yes, that is the reason! Oh, how did you hear it? Kill _me_, father, if
+you will, but do not kill poor Carlton! He cannot help it--indeed he
+cannot!"
+
+They were fearful words that immediately thereafter fell from the lips of
+Robert Brand--words that no provocation should ever tempt a father to
+utter, but words which have been plentifully showered on the heads of the
+shamed or the disobedient, by the thoughtless or the unmerciful, who
+arrogated to themselves God's power of judgment and retribution, through
+all the long ages.
+
+"Get up, girl, if you do not wish me to forget that you are not yourself
+the miserable hound for whom you are pleading!"
+
+"Oh, father!" broke again from the lips of the frightened girl, who did not
+move from her kneeling position.
+
+"Get up, I say, or I will strike you with this cane as I would a dog!"
+
+Elsie Brand staggered to her feet, she knew not how, but stood bowed before
+the stern judge in an attitude of pleading quite as humble and pitiful as
+that of prayer. The next words that fell upon her ears were not addressed
+to her, but seemed to be spoken for others' hearing than those who dwell in
+tenements of clay, while the voice that uttered them trembled in mingled
+grief and indignation, and the disabled frame shook as if it had been
+racked with palsy.
+
+"_My_ son a coward! a miserable poltroon to be pointed at, spat upon, and
+whipped! _My_ blood made a shame in the land, by the one whom I trusted to
+honor it! God's blackest and deepest curse--"
+
+"Oh, father! father!" broke in the young girl in a very wail of agony so
+pitiful that it must have moved any heart not calloused for the moment
+against all natural feeling, but that availed nothing to stop the impending
+curse or even to lower the voice that uttered it.
+
+"--God's deepest and blackest curse 'light upon the coward! shame, sorrow,
+and quick death! He shall have neither house, home nor family from this
+moment! I disown this bastard of my blood! I devote him to ruin and to
+perdition!"
+
+Few men have ever uttered, over the most criminal and degraded of the
+offspring of their own loins, so dire an imprecation; and no father, who
+has ever uttered one approaching it in horrible earnest, but is doomed here
+or hereafter to feel the bitterest weight of that curse resting upon his
+own head. Lear was clean distraught by wrongs beyond human endurance,
+before he called upon "all the stored vengeances of heaven" to fall on the
+"ingrateful top" of Goneril, and threatened both his unnatural daughters
+with "such revenges" that they should be the "terrors of the earth"; and
+only that incipient madness clears him from the sin and leaves him human to
+demand our after pity. There can be no excuse for such paroxysms of
+remorseless anger--it is difficult to supply even a palliation. And yet
+there was something in the blood, in the past life and associations of
+Robert Brand, coming as near to offering excuse for shame and indignation
+driving to temporary madness, as could well have been offered in behalf of
+any man of his day, committing a sin of such nature. And to circumstances
+embodying these it is now necessary to revert, even at the expense of a
+temporary pause in the directness of this narration.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+     THE BIRTH AND BLOOD OF THE BRANDS--PRIDE THAT CAME DOWN FROM
+     THE CRUSADES--ROBERT BRAND AS SOLDIER AND PENSION-AGENT--THE
+     PENSIONERS OF THE REVOLUTION--HOW ELSIE RAVED, AND HOW THE
+     FATHER'S CURSE SEEMED TO BE ANSWERED--DR. JAMES HOLTON, AND
+     THE LOSS OF A CORPUS DELICTI.
+
+
+It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound Elspeth
+Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by
+both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from
+Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even
+modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who
+claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was
+gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the
+Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who
+claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little
+less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house of
+Stirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish
+and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later
+day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields
+since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards
+of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious
+hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that
+Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King
+Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that
+no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten
+that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another
+antique appellation for the sword.
+
+Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New
+Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly
+outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of
+Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New
+Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to
+the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long
+Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never
+rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner
+on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after
+Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the
+trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the
+patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief
+over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it
+could not be otherwise than that the ears of _his_ son, Robert (the man of
+1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep
+alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor
+of the land in which his lot had been cast.
+
+Then had come another influence, not less potent--the second breaking-out
+of hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brands
+was not cooled--it sprung to arms; and Robert Brand, then a young lawyer,
+taking the place of his father already invalided, assumed the sword of his
+armorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane,
+receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latter
+battle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, but
+glorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury had
+not been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained where
+brave men dared their doom.
+
+And yet another influence, not less potent, was still to come. Years after,
+when Carlton Brand was a child in arms, his father, then a practising
+lawyer in his native State, became identified with that most romantic and
+most picturesque body of men, of whom the present age remembers but little,
+and of whom the age to come will know nothing except as the knowledge is
+handed down from father to son, or carried forward in such desultory
+records as these--_The Pensioners of the Revolution_. At that time, not
+less on account of his spotless reputation than the crippling wound
+received in the service, he was appointed Pension Agent for the section in
+which he resided, and duly commissioned twice a year to receive from the
+War Department and pay over to the old men the somewhat scant and very
+tardy pay with which the land of Washington at last smoothed the passage to
+the grave of those who had been his companions.
+
+It was Robert Brand's privilege, then, to meet those men in the familiar
+intercourse of business--to listen to their tales, so often slighted by
+those wiser or less reverent, of foughten field and toilsome march, of
+cheerless camp and suffering in the wilderness, when this giant nation was
+a wilful child unjustly scourged by a tyrant mother--to find in each some
+reminder of his patriot grandfather, and some suggestion of what that
+grandfather would have been had the fortune of war spared him to go down
+into old age and senility.
+
+Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered in
+the little room where the scanty pension was to be doled--each with the
+measured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularly
+as when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain of
+Princeton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one they
+gathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindly
+greetings of garrulous and failing age--with the gentle complaint, so
+patiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight of
+time, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker had
+been young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officer
+at Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters--said they--were colder than they
+are now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all long
+before gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside the
+church,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew!
+
+Harmless deception of age!--pleasant coloring that distance gives in time
+as well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may be
+even more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawns
+upon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they ever
+were beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxiety
+and vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have no
+power to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freighted
+with unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in the
+heavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Mary
+and Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle of
+Kisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter far
+than song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so that
+the young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before their
+return at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day is
+remembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water is
+seen, and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes back
+more as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud upon
+her brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbon
+lightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirted
+with Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiff
+verging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and the
+parting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is with
+the millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only the
+moonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love are
+remembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixed
+enjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of
+grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's
+mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we
+grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long
+before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the
+rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard
+realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and
+worn away forever!
+
+Sitting side by side, they talked--those bent and worn and gray old men--of
+scenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and natural
+glory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarse
+fare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye of
+Washington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips that
+seldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked their honest service. Few men,
+even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile from
+the Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light of
+glorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smile
+of the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless.
+
+It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire that
+blazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, as he told how Washington
+commended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day of
+Long Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightened
+sheep,--and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if the
+head which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Liberty
+should scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of Walter
+Thorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledge
+of faith of the Monmouth League--quivering yet with the anger which had
+brooded for more than fifty years,--as he pictured so plainly the burning
+of his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid waste
+by them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead,
+the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figure
+of the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spanned
+the road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes of
+Captain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on the
+heights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which Stephen
+Holmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations of
+that patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of New
+York, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carry
+live-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleet
+lying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands for
+the use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of the
+squadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the half
+playful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told by
+his old companions, for the five-hundredth time beyond a doubt, that he was
+suspected of a share in Arnold's treason, for not stopping the disguised
+Andre as he passed his sentinel post below West Point, before he fell into
+the hands of the three very common and insignificant men made immortal by
+one single act--Williams, Paulding and Van Wert. There would have been no
+pretence in the motion, spite of his eighty years and faltering limbs, had
+the speaker hazarded more than a jest against the faithfulness of the old
+man's service in the "dark day." But easiest of all was it to remember the
+story of Thomas West, wounded, and crippled from that day forth, in
+assisting to bear the wounded Lafayette from the field of Brandywine, and
+named a subaltern officer at the close of that memorable action. His was
+the seat of honor; and his was something more, even, than that measure of
+respect demanded by all and so cheerfully paid to white hairs and honorable
+scars.
+
+Seldom was there a voice to speak one word of disrespect or undervaluation
+in the old men's company; and though the privilege of garrulous and failing
+age was often taken, and though the story once full of life and interest
+grew sadly tedious when again and again repeated,--yet there was no pardon,
+and deserved to be none, for him who forgot that reverence due to the men
+who bore the last personal recollections of the seven-years war. Only once,
+within the experience of Robert Brand as a Pension Agent, was such
+disrespect shown; and then the punishment was so signal that there were no
+fears of the impropriety being repeated. Mart Tunison, a wealthy young
+landowner, rudely jostled old Job Marston on one occasion, and when called
+to account for the offence, snapped his fingers at the veteran as a "cursed
+old humbug, always in the way and always telling stories of battles he had
+never seen." "You are rich, they say, Mart Tunison," said the old man,
+while the younger one could not read the flash that still lived in his
+faded eye. "I _am_ rich, and what is that to you, grand-daddy?" was the
+answer, with a slap of the hand on the jingling pocket. "Yes, you are rich,
+and most people do not know how you became so!" almost hissed the old man,
+little knowing how he was pointing a moral for a future day by speaking of
+the "shoddy" of that by-gone time. "I will tell all your friends, and you,
+how you got so stuffed up that you can snap your fingers in an old man's
+face! You are living on the proceeds of the money that your Tory
+grandfather, old Tom Tunison, made by stealing cattle, when he was one of
+the Refugee Cow-Boys, and driving them over the lines to sell to the
+British, before he ran away to Nova Scotia to save his neck!" Mart Tunison,
+if he had ever before known the real origin of his wealth, which is
+doubtful,--would probably have given the best field of all his broad lands
+to prevent that revelation of the shame of his family, which afterwards
+followed him like a thing of ill-omen, to the very grave!
+
+There was at that time in the office of Robert Brand, a stripling youngster
+who promised very little good to the world and has probably as yet
+disappointed no one--who thought more of play than of work, of music than
+of mortgages, of Burns than Blackstone, and of a rosy-cheeked girl who came
+into the office on some little errand to the "'Squire" than of the most
+proud and stately of his male clients. Among his vices, he had a fancy for
+jingling verse; and one day when the semi-annual visit of the pensioners
+had just terminated and he had listened afresh to the same old tales of
+glory told over again in the same faltering accents that he had heard so
+many times before, his one virtue of reverence for the aged and the
+venerable rose into an idle rhyme, which may have a fit place in this
+connection, and which he called
+
+
+THE PENSIONERS.
+
+    They come but twice a year,
+      When the pension-day rolls round,--
+    Old men with hoary hair
+      And their faces to the ground.
+    One leans upon his crutch;
+      And one is upright still,
+    As if he bore Time's clutch
+      With an iron nerve and will.
+
+    And feeble are the steps
+      That so patiently they feel;
+    And they kiss with trembling lips
+      The old Bible and the seal;
+    And they lay with care away,
+      In wallets old and worn,
+    The scant and tardy pay
+      Of a life of toil and scorn.
+
+    They love a cheerful pipe
+      And a warm place in the sun,
+    From an age so old and ripe
+      To call memories one by one;--
+    To tell of Arnold's crime,
+      And of Washington's proud form
+    That beamed, in battle time,
+      A beacon o'er the storm.--
+
+    To tell of Yorktown's day,
+      When the closing fight was gained,--
+    When Cornwallis went away
+      And the eagle was unchained;
+    To show us, o'er and o'er,
+      The seamed and withered scars
+    That many a hero bore,
+      As his passport from the wars.
+
+    'Tis pride, with these old men,
+      To tell what they have seen,
+    Of battle-fields, again
+      With their harvest bright and green:
+    'Twill be pride, when we are old,
+      To say that in our youth
+    We heard the tales they told
+      And looked on them in their truth.
+
+    They are the last sad link
+      Of a race of men with ours,
+    Who stood on ruin's brink
+      And built up fair freedom's towers.
+    They are passing, as the foam
+      From the ocean wave departs,
+    But finding yet a home
+      In heaven, and in our hearts.
+
+    And when the last is gone,
+      To their memory we will build
+    A pyramid of stone
+      Whose top the sun shall gild
+    When the name of patriot weal
+      And of tyrants' bitter wrong
+    Shall be told but in a tale
+      And known but in a song.
+
+The time then prophesied has come; though the monument then promised has
+not been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and grander
+though scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created,
+almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resources
+of wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolution
+are all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting where
+the last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out.
+
+Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more withered
+leaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sad
+comments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah,
+well-a-day!--poor ---- is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we must
+all follow him--some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblings
+of the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end must
+come. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six--to four--to
+three--to two! Oh, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!--enough gone to
+mark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholy
+converse! And then one day there came but _one_, who looked vacantly round
+on the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself must
+once have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not then
+been written, and _Geoffry Dale_ was yet to spring from the imagination or
+the memory of the dramatist and supply poor _Jesse Rural_ Blake with one of
+his best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of the
+pensioners his history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, and
+then the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their forms
+seemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered into
+impalpable dust. It was the most natural thing in life for Robert Brand,
+months and even years after, to turn when hearing the measured beat of an
+old man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one of
+the veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the time
+of his companions. But no--death had come to all, and as yet no
+resurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for the
+last time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away by
+the hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble country
+church-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to free
+and to cover with human glory!
+
+Perhaps they died in good time--before the dark hour came back again after
+a glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the last
+of the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-felt
+shame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their last
+moments with the belief that after all they might have labored and suffered
+in vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended in
+the sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels back
+through the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven of
+self-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear us
+on triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from which
+it is made was preserved through the long night of corruption and misrule,
+in the breasts of the Fathers of the Republic.
+
+Their children have long been old men now. Their very grandchildren begin
+to show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of the
+Revolution--the last of the men who could say that they saw and took part
+in that throe which gave birth to a nation,--tread all those who can even
+say that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and the
+last of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personal
+recollection is growing thin,--it may break to-morrow; and "the rest is
+silence."
+
+Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences and
+surroundings of his earlier life--himself a soldier when in possession of
+health and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest of
+all American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved his
+native land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the long
+struggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he had
+imbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree little
+less than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when the
+note of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippled
+frame must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he held
+one pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrance
+that he had a noble and gallant son, too busy and too much needed at home,
+thus far, to join the ranks of his country's defenders in the field, but
+ready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied the
+honor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that the
+knowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseated
+his reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partial
+insanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadow
+of excuse?
+
+At the close of the last chapter, and before this long explanatory episode
+intervened to break the progress of the narration, Elsie Brand, the
+agonized sister and daughter, was seen standing before her father, with
+hands clasped in agony and lips uttering agonized pleadings. But the very
+instant after, when the terrible severity of that parental curse had been
+fully rounded from the lips and that fatal evidence given that for the
+moment all natural affection had given way to impious rage and
+denunciation,--the young girl stood erect, her blue eyes still tearful but
+flashing anger of which they commonly seemed to be little capable, and her
+lips uttering words as determined as those of the madman, even if they were
+less furious and vindictive:
+
+"You may strike me if you like, but I do not care for you, now--not one
+snap of my finger! You are not my father--you are nobody's father, but a
+bad, wicked, unfeeling old man, gray headed enough to know better, and yet
+cursing your own flesh and blood as if you wished to go to perdition
+yourself and carry everybody else along with you!"
+
+The very audacity of this speech partially sobered the enraged man, and he
+only ejaculated in a lower but still angry tone:
+
+"What!"
+
+"What I say and what I mean!" the young girl went on, oblivious or heedless
+of any parental authority at the moment. "I do not love you--I hate and
+shudder at you! I would rather be my poor brother, a coward and disgraced
+as he may be, than his miserable father cursing him like a brute!"
+
+"Do you dare----" the father began to say, in a louder voice and with the
+thunder again threatening, but Elsie Brand was proving, just then, that the
+gift of heedless speech "ran in the family," and that for the moment she
+"had the floor" in the contest of denunciation.
+
+"Oh, you need not look at me in that manner!" she said, marking the
+expression of the old man's eyes and conscious that he might at any moment
+recover himself sufficiently to pour out upon her, for her unpardonable
+impudence, quite as bitter a denunciation as he had lately vented against
+her disgraced brother. "I am not afraid of your eyes, or of your tongue.
+You have turned Carlton out of doors, for a mere nothing, and I am going
+with him. I will never set foot in this house again, never, until----"
+
+How long was the period the indignant girl intended to set for her absence,
+must ever remain in doubt, with many other things of much more consequence;
+for the sentence thus begun, was never completed. In at the open front
+door, through the parlor and into the room of the invalid, at that moment
+staggered Kitty Hood. The phrase descriptive of her movement is used
+advisedly and with good reason; for fright, exhaustion and the terrible
+heat of the June meridian had reduced the young school-mistress to a most
+pitiable condition. Her face was one red glow, her brow streamed with
+perspiration, and she was equally destitute of strength and out of breath.
+
+This strange and unannounced interruption naturally broke the unpleasant
+chain of conversation between father and daughter; and the eyes of both,
+during her moment of enforced silence to recover breath, looked upon her
+with equal wonder and alarm.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Brand!" and here the breath gave out again and she sank exhausted
+into the chair which Elsie pushed up to her.
+
+"You are sick? Somebody has insulted or hurt you? What _is_ the matter,
+Kitty?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, no, no!" at last the school-mistress mustered breath to say, at short,
+jerky intervals. "Nothing ails _me_, except that I am out of breath; but
+your son, Mr. Brand."
+
+"Well, what of _him_?" asked the old man, his tone sharp and angry and his
+brow frowning, confident that the coming information must have some
+connection with the disgraceful report of the morning--that Kitty Hood had
+only run herself out of breath in her anxiety to tell his family unwelcome
+news that they already knew too well.
+
+"Oh, sir, Mr. Carlton--your poor brother, Elsie!--is dead!"
+
+"Dead!" The word had two echoes--one, from the lips of Robert Brand, little
+else than a groan; and the other from poor tortured Elsie, compounded
+between groan and shriek.
+
+"Oh, yes, how can I tell it?" the young school-mistress went on, as fast as
+her broken breath would allow. "I found him lying dead, only a little while
+ago, by the gate, down at the blind-road, as I came across from school;
+and I have run all the way here to tell you!"
+
+"My poor brother dead! oh, Carlton!" moaned Elsie Brand; then, but an
+instant after, and before the old man had found time to speak again, the
+curse came up in connection with the bereavement and she broke out,
+hysterically: "See what you have done, father! You wished poor Carlton
+dead, and now you have your cruel wish! Oh, my poor, poor brother!"
+
+"Silence, girl!" spoke Robert Brand, sharply, with a not unnatural dislike
+to have the school-mistress made aware of what had so lately passed. The
+old man was terribly affected, but he managed to control himself and to
+speak with some approach to calmness.
+
+"You are sure, Kitty, that you saw my son lying dead?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Mr. Brand, he was lying dead on the grass close by the gate."
+
+"Lying alone?" The voice of the father trembled, in spite of himself, as he
+asked the question.
+
+"All alone, and he could only have been dead a few moments. He looked so."
+
+"Was there--" and the old lawyer tried to steady his voice as he had many a
+time before done when asking equally solemn questions concerning the fate
+of other men's children--"did you see any thing to prove what killed him?
+He went away from home on horseback--"
+
+"Yes, he was on horseback at Mrs. Hayley's only a little while ago," Elsie
+mustered strength to interrupt.
+
+"Did you see his horse?--had he fallen from it--or--" and then the voice of
+the father, who but a few moments before had believed his love for his son
+crushed out forever, entirely broke down. Heaven only knew the agony of the
+question he was attempting to put; for the thought had taken possession of
+him that that son, overwhelmed by the knowledge that he would be pointed
+out and scoffed as a poltroon, had shown his second lack of courage by
+laying violent hands on his own life and rushing unbidden into the
+presence of his Maker!
+
+"No," answered Kitty Hood, setting her teeth hard as she realized that the
+time had come when she must prove her own honesty at the possible sacrifice
+of the life of the man who had been her lover. "No, I did not see his
+horse. He had not been killed by falling from it, I am sure. He had been
+_murdered_!"
+
+"Murdered!" Again the word was a double echo from the very dissimilar
+voices of father and daughter; the latter speaking in the terror of the
+thought, the former under the conviction that the dreadful truth was being
+revealed, and that, though the young girl did not suspect the fact, the
+crime would be found to have been _self_-murder.
+
+"There was blood on his face and on the grass," poor Kitty went on, "and
+there was a bundle lying close beside him, that I had seen under the arm
+of--of--"
+
+"Eh, what? Under whose arm?" asked the father, in a quick voice, as the
+relation took this new turn.
+
+"Richard Compton's!" choked out Kitty Hood.
+
+"Richard Compton's!" again echoed the old man. "Why he was your--"
+
+"We were engaged to be married," cried poor Kitty, at last overwrought and
+bursting into tears. "But I must tell the truth, even if it hangs him and
+breaks my heart. He was at the school-house only a little while before; he
+was angry with Mr. Carlton, and threatened him; and I am afraid that he
+killed him."
+
+"Oh, this is dreadful!" said Elsie.
+
+"Dreadful indeed!" replied Robert Brand, whose own grief and horror were
+somewhat modified if not lessened by the thought in what a situation the
+honest young girl was placing herself and her lover. He reached back and
+pulled the bell-rope again, and again Elspeth Graeme made her appearance, a
+little surprised to find three persons in the room where she had before
+left but two, the third coming unannounced, and all three of the faces
+looking as if their owners had been summoned to execution.
+
+"Tell Stephen to get up the large carriage, instantly, and have it round
+within five minutes," was the order to the old woman, delivered in a quick
+and agitated voice.
+
+"Are ye gaein' out, sir?" was the inquiry, in reply.
+
+"Yes, but what is that to you, woman?"
+
+"Naethin', maybe, only you're clean daft if ye'r thinkin' of it, Mr. Robert
+Brand."
+
+"I am not only thinking of it but going to do it; and the quicker you do my
+bidding, the better."
+
+"Gang yer ways, then, for an uncanny, unmanageable auld ne'er-do-weel!" was
+the grumbling comment of the Scotch woman, as she prepared to obey the
+injunction. She strode half way through the parlor, then returned and fired
+another shot into the invalid's room before she finally departed: "Hech,
+but ye've been sendin' away the doctor wi' the grin on his grunzie, and
+wha' will I ca' when ye come back a' ram-feezled and done over--answer me
+that, noo!"
+
+Less than five minutes sufficed to bring the carriage to the door, with its
+team of well-groomed bays, and with much exertion (of which the stalwart
+Elspeth furnished no small proportion) the invalid was placed in it and so
+surrounded with cushions that he could ride with comparative ease. Elsie's
+tearful request to be allowed to accompany him in his quest of the body of
+her brother was sharply denied, with orders that both Kitty and herself
+should remain within the house until his return; and the carriage drove
+rapidly away towards the point designated by the school-mistress, while the
+housekeeper was learning the fearful tidings from the lips of the two
+girls, and uttering broken laments and raining tears down her coarse
+cheeks, over "her winsome bairn that had been sae sair wanchancie!"
+
+Scarcely more time than had been consumed in getting ready the vehicle
+elapsed before the carriage, driven at rapid speed, dashed up to the spot
+that had been indicated by Kitty, the eyes of the father looking out in
+advance with an indescribable horror, to catch the first glimpse of the
+body of a son whom he half accused himself, in his own heart, of murdering.
+A doctor's top-sulky and a saddled horse, with two men, were seen standing
+near the gate as they approached; but, strangely enough, they saw no dead
+body. One of these men, Robert Brand saw, was the young farmer, Richard
+Compton, who had been accused by Kitty of committing that terrible crime;
+the other, standing by the side of his professional sulky, was a man of
+twenty-five, of medium height, very carefully dressed, fair faced, dark
+haired and dark eyed, with features well rounded and an inexpressibly sweet
+smile about the handsome mouth, which might have made an impression, under
+proper circumstances, upon other hearts than the susceptible one of Elsie
+Brand. Dr. James Holton, as has before been said, was a young physician, in
+very moderate practice, pleasing though very quiet in manners,
+irreproachable in character (an unpopular point, as we are all well aware,
+in one of the heroes of any tale), and considered very much more eligible
+as a match by the young lady with whom his name has before been connected,
+than by the parent who was supposed to have the disposal of her hand. Dr.
+Holton, as many people believed, possessed skill enough and was
+sufficiently attentive and studious in his profession, to have run a closer
+race with the local professional autocrat, Dr. Pomeroy, than he had yet
+been able to do, but for the skilfully managed sneers and quiet
+undervaluations by which the elder had kept him from winning public
+confidence. For more than two years he had been a frequent visitor at
+Robert Brand's, received with undisguised pleasure by Elsie and treated
+with great consideration by her brother, but meeting from the respected
+head of the family that peculiar treatment which can no more be construed
+into cordiality than insult, and which says, quite as plainly as words
+could speak, "You are a respectable young man enough, and may be received
+with politeness as a visitor; but you do not amount to enough in the
+world, ever to become a member of my family." Quarrel as he might with Dr.
+Philip Pomeroy, the old gentleman persisted in retaining him as his medical
+adviser; and it was her knowledge of the antagonism between the two and of
+the estimation in which each was held, that had induced the housekeeper to
+make her parting suggestion of the effect which must follow his order to
+set the dog on Pomeroy if he ever again attempted to approach the house. No
+one, meanwhile, could better appreciate his own position than Dr. James
+Holton; and while well aware that he loved Elsie Brand dearly, and firmly
+believing that she held towards him an unwavering affection, he was content
+to wait until his fortunes should so improve as to make him a more eligible
+match for her, or until in some other providential manner the obstacles to
+their union might be removed.
+
+Such was the gentleman who approached Robert Brand's carriage door with a
+bow, the moment the coachman had reined up his horses, and while that
+gentleman was looking around with fearful anxiety for an object which his
+eyes did not discover.
+
+"We are in trouble about your son," he said, before the other had spoken.
+"Something very extraordinary has occurred. Have you heard--"
+
+"That my son was killed and lying here? Yes. Miss Kitty Hood, the
+school-mistress, saw the body as she passed, and came to inform me."
+
+"Kitty Hood!" gasped Richard Compton, turning from the fence against which
+he had been leaning, and exhibiting a face nearly as white as that
+traditionally supposed to belong to a ghost.
+
+"Is it true?" continued the father. "If so, where is the body?"
+
+"That is what puzzles us," answered the physician. "Mr. Compton, here, had
+an altercation with your son--"
+
+"Excuse me, Doctor, for telling the story myself," said the farmer,
+interrupting. "Altercation is not the word--it was a _fight_. The devil
+was in me, I suppose, and I insulted Carlton Brand like a fool, and dared
+him to get off his horse to fight me. He got off, we exchanged a few blows,
+and directly he knocked me stiff. Perhaps I hit him in some unlucky place
+at the same time--I do not know. All that I do know is, that when I got my
+senses again, he lay stiff as a poker there on the grass. I thought him
+dead or dying, and rode away on his horse for the doctor. When we got here,
+just a moment ago, the body, or Mr. Carlton Brand with the life in him--the
+Lord knows which!--was gone."
+
+"My son got off his horse to fight you, you say?" asked Robert Brand, in
+such a tone of interest as almost seemed to be exulting.
+
+"Yes, sir," answered the farmer.
+
+"And actually fought you?--do not tell me a falsehood on this point, young
+man, for your life!"
+
+"Fought me? yes, he did more than that--_whipped_ me; and I do not let
+myself be whipped every day. If I ever found strength to rise again, I was
+just going to own up beat and ask his pardon."
+
+From that moment, an expression of pain which had been perceptible on
+Robert Brand's face from the instant of his conversation with Dr. Pomeroy,
+changed in its character and lightened up, so to speak, if it did not
+entirely depart. "Not so total and abject a poltroon as I feared!" was his
+thought. He had not alighted from the carriage, his crippled limb making
+that step difficult; but leaning over the side of it, he saw something on
+the grass reminding him of what Kitty had alleged.
+
+"There is blood upon the grass--whose is it?--my son's?" he asked.
+
+"Mine, every drop of it--out of my nose. See, here is the rest of it,"
+answered Dick Compton, drawing from his pocket the bloody handkerchief with
+which he had tried to improve the appearance of his countenance, while
+riding away after the doctor.
+
+"What do you make of all this, Doctor?" at length asked Robert Brand.
+
+"It puzzles me, of course," said the medical man. "It is strange how Mr.
+Brand should have fallen for dead, if he was not. And yet it is not likely
+that any one would have taken up the body and carried it away, if he was.
+It would seem most probable that--"
+
+"That he is still alive?"
+
+"That his apparent death was only the result of a fit of some character,
+and that, coming to after Mr. Compton left, and missing his horse, he has
+gone homeward, or in some other direction, on foot."
+
+"So I should think," answered the father. "Stephen, drive me home again. If
+you should hear any thing further, Doctor--"
+
+"I will do myself the honor of letting you know immediately," answered the
+young physician, with a bow and a quiet consciousness that, from stress of
+circumstances, the man whom he yet hoped to call father-in-law, had at last
+given him a tacit invitation to come to his house on _his_ business.
+
+"And what shall I do with the horse?" asked Compton.
+
+"As it seems that you have been the means of forcing the rider off its
+back, if you have not killed him, I think you can do no less than to ride
+him home to Mr. Brand's stables," said the doctor.
+
+"I am sorry that I brought you here for nothing, Doctor. You don't think
+that I need to go and give myself up, eh?"
+
+"I am very _glad_ that you brought me here for nothing, as it appears,
+instead of for something," answered the doctor. "No, I do not think that
+you will have occasion to give any thing up, except your bad temper and
+your propensity for fighting peaceable men along public roads. I wish you a
+very good day, Mr. Brand!" and stepping into his sulky, he drove away down
+the road to attend to some one of his limited number of patients; while the
+carriage containing Robert Brand whirled rapidly home again, followed at a
+little distance by Dick Compton on Carlton Brand's horse, the fear of being
+proved a murderer somewhat lifted from his mind; his military pants
+haunting him a little less than they had done during the former ride; and
+the bundle which had at one time threatened to prove so damning an evidence
+against him, hugged up under his left arm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+     THE RESIDENCE OF DR. POMEROY--NATHAN BLADESDEN AND ELEANOR
+     HILL--A KNEELING WOMAN AND A RIGID QUAKER--THE RUIN THAT A
+     LETTER HAD WROUGHT--A PARTING THAT SEEMED ETERNAL--CARLTON
+     BRAND ALIVE ONCE MORE, AND A GLANCE AT THE FATAL LETTER.
+
+
+It sometimes happens, in this world which fast people consider dull and
+slow, that events crowd themselves very closely, both as to time and space.
+Within a very limited section, in a period covering scarcely more than an
+hour, we have seen a complication of occurrences, affecting many persons,
+sufficient to occupy many hours in the recital. And yet the storehouses of
+event and circumstance have not yet been at all closely ransacked; and that
+June-day has yet much to reveal, affecting some of the persons already
+introduced, and others who have not yet come into the field of observation.
+
+The spot at which the conflict between Carlton Brand and Richard Compton
+occurred, it will be remembered, was at the intersection of the highway
+leading down to the Schuylkill at Market Street, by a blind road which ran
+back southwardly through the wood,--and that the request of the lawyer to
+Compton that he would open the gate admitting to that blind road, was made
+by the farmer the occasion of that quarrel and fight which we have seen
+terminate so singularly.
+
+Following that blind road half a mile through the wood, southward towards
+the Darby road, the visitor descended the little range of high land crowned
+by the wood, crossed a wide meadow with the frogs sunning themselves on the
+banks of the little brooks that ran beneath the bridges of the causeway,
+and the blackbirds singing in the low clumps of elder-bush that grew beside
+them, and found himself, on the other side, rising another slight hillock
+and at the back gate of the residence of Dr. Philip Pomeroy.
+
+This was a house of modern construction, and of a completeness betokening
+the wealth of the owner; standing near the crown of the hillock, with the
+garden at the back sloping away towards the meadow (a bad slope, that
+towards the north, all the agriculturists in the section averred); handsome
+shrubbery in the broad yard lying before the pillared front or south face
+of the house; and a good many fine trees of inconsiderable age, with the
+pine everywhere predominant, promising abundant shade in coming years, both
+in front and at the rear. The continuation of the blind road which crossed
+the meadow, extended past the house on the west side, immediately beside
+the pickets of the yard enclosure, and running across to the Darby road
+afforded access to both the great highways, with only short distances of
+travel, and at the price of opening an occasional gate, which merely
+answered the purpose of stretching the cramped limbs of the rider. Some
+persons, who knew the extensive practice of Dr. Pomeroy, were disposed to
+wonder that he had not located himself immediately on one of the great
+roads, with no necessity for traversing by-ways to reach them; while
+others, who better knew the peculiarities of his will, believed that his
+motive was a fancy for being comparatively isolated and a little baronial.
+Whether he really had any motive whatever in selecting the location, except
+the desire of pleasing himself, is a matter of very little consequence.
+
+There was a light buggy, drawn by two magnificent horses, standing at a
+post in the road, very near the house, at a little after noon on that day;
+and within the house certain developments were at the same moment being
+made, so illustrative of the depth to which human depravity can descend
+when the rein is given to all base and unholy passions, that the pen of the
+narrator, who is merely attempting a feeble recital of actual occurrences
+in the real life of to-day, pauses at the task before it, the fact being so
+certain that the circumstances about to be recorded will be supposed to
+have sprung from the disorder of an unscrupulous imagination, instead of
+being the fruit of sad research and knowledge that would be avoided if such
+a thing was possible.
+
+The middle portion of the front of the doctor's residence, immediately over
+the somewhat narrow portico, was a sitting-room of small dimensions,
+tastily furnished; while out of it opened a little bed-room, the white
+curtains and snowy bed-drapery of which, seen in glimpses through the door,
+suggested maiden purity and peace or that bridal rest which should be quite
+as pure and holy. The sitting-room had at that moment two occupants; and
+the picture presented was such as no looker-on would have been likely to
+forget while he lived.
+
+Nearly in the centre of the room stood a gentleman some years past middle
+age, large framed and with large hands, tall and commanding in figure,
+unexceptionably dressed in garments betraying the Quaker cut, and with that
+air of undeniable respectability which no pretence can ever imitate,
+conveyed by every motion of the man and every fold of his garments. He was
+dark-eyed and with features a little prominent; and years had made a
+perceptible mark on the smoothness of his face, at the same time that they
+had heavily grayed his neat side-whiskers and dashed heavy masses of gray
+among the still-curling locks that clustered upon his head. A merchant or
+banker, evidently, from manner and general appearance--and one to whom the
+idea of dishonorable conduct and the thought of a disgraced reputation
+would be alike unendurable. With a face in which sorrow seemed to be
+struggling with anger, this man stood holding a letter clenched in his
+right hand, and looking down upon something at his feet. That something was
+a woman.
+
+The woman was kneeling, with hands clasped in entreaty, hair shaken
+partially loose, face streaming with tears, and her whole system so shaken
+by the sobs convulsing it that the most dangerous form of hysterics might
+be very likely to follow that excitement. Even when kneeling it was to be
+observed that her figure was tall, finely moulded and upright--that her
+face was fair, pleasant, and notably handsome, though the features were too
+small, the dark eyes mournful, and the general impression created that of
+confiding helplessness very likely to degenerate into dangerous
+weakness--that her hands were long, taper and delicate, as beseemed her
+figure--that her brown hair was very full, rich, silken and glossy--and
+that she had probably numbered some five-and-twenty summers. Formed to be
+loved, protected and shielded from every harm, and certain to return for
+that love and protection the most unreserved affection and the most
+unquestioning obedience; and yet kneeling there with that upon her face
+which told a tale of the most cruel outrage quite as plainly as the
+quivering lips could speak it!
+
+Much has been said of the sadness of the spectacle when a strong man weeps,
+as compared to the same exhibition of feeling by a woman. It is equally sad
+when a woman is seen kneeling to any other power than that of her God! It
+seems man's province, given alike by nature and the laws of chivalry, to
+bend his proud knee in other aspects than that of devotion; and even when
+he is showing that prostration his eye may be glowing with the conscious
+pride of the future conqueror; but what except the most abject shame or the
+most overwhelming sorrow, can be shown when the delicate limb of womanhood
+kisses the green sod or the floor beneath her tread? To save by pitiful
+entreaties a perilled honor--to beg through blinding tears and choking
+sobs the restoration of that honor lost, that can often so easily be given
+back to her by the hands of the tyrant who will not hear her cry--to
+implore the concealment of a shame too heavy to bear--to plead for the
+forfeit life of some one dearer than the very pulses beating in her own
+bosom--to moan for the restoration of some object of love and protection,
+her babe perhaps, reft from her and her heart and her arms left alike
+empty--ay, to wail for the boon of a crust that shall chase starvation from
+the thin lips of herself or her child and keep them yet a little longer as
+clinging sufferers upon the earth,--these have been the compelling motives
+so often bending the knee of woman since the earliest day of recorded time.
+And yet not one of all the long array of unchronicled martyrs has been
+bowed under a deeper wrong than was that day made manifest, or uttered a
+more piteous appeal than that day went up to heaven!
+
+"Oh, do not cast me off!--do not desert me, Mr. Bladesden!" wailed a voice
+that would have been marvellously sweet and tender had it not been broken
+and roughened by grief, while her poor hands wrung and agonized themselves
+in sad sympathy with the writhings of her cowering form. "Do not take away
+from me my last hope of knowing one hour of peace before they put me into
+the coffin! I am no worse to-day than I was yesterday! Oh, do pity and save
+me, even if you cannot love me any longer!"
+
+"I do pity thee, Eleanor Hill, and I should like to save thee if I could!"
+answered a voice rich, full and strong, with only an occasional tremor in
+its intonation, and the Quaker phraseology seeming to accord peculiarly
+with the voice as well as the general appearance of the man. "But thou hast
+deceived me, and the plain people--"
+
+"Oh, no, I did not deceive you, Mr. Bladesden," the poor girl interrupted.
+"Do let me speak! Do let me try if I cannot move your heart to believe that
+I have never willingly done wrong--that I have never been intentionally
+wicked!"
+
+"Can thee deny what is in this letter, Eleanor Hill?" asked the Quaker,
+his voice trembling, in spite of himself, a little more than it had before
+done. Then he added, with something very like a sob in his throat, that
+seemed strangely at variance with the general calmness of his demeanor: "I
+am rich, Eleanor--very rich, men say; and yet I would give half of all that
+I have won in these many years that have made my hair gray, if I could see
+thee lay thy hand upon thy heart and look up in my face and say: 'The man
+who writes this writes falsehood!'"
+
+"I cannot--oh, God, you know that I cannot, Mr. Bladesden!" sobbed the poor
+girl. "It is true in word, and yet heaven knows how false it is in spirit."
+
+"Thee should not appeal to heaven so much, Eleanor, and thee should rise
+from thy knees, for I will believe thee just as quickly in the one position
+as the other, and the friendly people make their yea yea and their nay nay,
+without taking the name of the Father every moment between their lips."
+
+Eleanor Hill managed to rise from her knees and stagger to her feet; but
+her position was not the less humble afterward, for she stood grasping the
+back of a chair with both hands for support, and with her head bowed down
+in such abject shame and humility that the change of posture seemed rather
+to have been taking on an added degradation than putting one away.
+
+"See, I have done as you told me to do!" she said, without looking up. "I
+would be so obedient to you, always, if you would only take me away from
+this misery and shame. Oh, why would he injure me so cruelly--me to whom he
+should have been merciful, now, if there was any mercy in his nature!"
+
+"Can thee say that Doctor Philip did not do right, if, as thee says, he
+wrote this letter?" asked the Quaker, keeping his eyes steadily upon the
+crouching woman, and making no motion to change the distance between them.
+"Thee had deceived me, and he knew it. He was sure, perhaps, that thee had
+not told me all, and--"
+
+"I told you, months ago, when you first spoke of making me your wife, Mr.
+Bladesden," said the poor girl, with one momentary lifting of the bowed
+head and one transient flash of womanly spirit--"that I could not give you
+a whole heart--that my life had been very unfortunate, and that if I
+consented to marry you, you must promise never to ask me one question of my
+miserable past. Do you remember that I did?"
+
+"Thee did tell me so much, Eleanor," answered the Quaker. "But thee only
+indicated misfortune--not guilt."
+
+"I have _not_ been guilty--I was never guilty!" spoke the girl, the
+momentary flash of womanhood not yet extinguished. "You will not let me
+appeal to heaven, Mr. Bladesden, yet I must do so once more. I call upon
+the all-seeing God to punish me with even worse grief and shame than I have
+already borne, if there has ever been one guilty wish in my mind towards
+that man or any other--if I have not been forced or deceived into every act
+which makes you despise me to-day."
+
+The Quaker turned away, the letter still in his hand, and walked toward the
+window. He lifted the other hand to his brow and seemed to brush away
+something that troubled him; and he yet retained that position towards the
+girl, as he said, after the pause of a moment:
+
+"I believe thee speaks the truth, Eleanor Hill."
+
+"You do believe me! Oh, thank you for that mercy, if no more!" and the poor
+girl had stepped forward, caught his disengaged hand in both hers and
+lifted it to her lips, before he could prevent her. Then something in his
+manner, as he turned, seemed to chill her again to the heart, and she fell
+back silent to the support of the chair.
+
+"I believe thee so far, and yet thee deceived me."
+
+"How _could_ I tell you all, Mr. Bladesden? How _could_ I publish my own
+shame? Oh, why was I ever born!" and the voice had sunk low again, and the
+spirit seemed crushed quite as completely as before.
+
+"Thee blames Dr. Philip, and yet Dr. Philip was a better friend to me than
+thee was; for thee would have allowed me to bring disgrace upon my name,
+and he would not."
+
+The proverbial worm turns when trodden upon. Eleanor Hill had little native
+spirit, and she had been the veriest worm of the dust throughout all that
+terrible interview; but this last deadly stab at the vitals of her faith,
+given in laudation of her destroyer, seemed too much for human endurance,
+and there was yet one spark of spirit left in the very ashes of disgrace.
+
+"Nathan Bladesden," she said, standing fully erect, and anger usurping the
+place of shame in her face, "I am satisfied! I will kneel to you no
+more--beg you for mercy no more! If you are base enough to defend the man
+who could write that letter, and to call his action honorable, I would
+rather crawl out into the road and beg my bread from door to door, than to
+call you husband; and I thank heaven even for that letter which has saved
+me from a worse man than Philip Pomeroy!"
+
+Life and society are both full of terrible struggles. Perhaps there is no
+conflict of them all, more enduring in its character, or more racking to
+those necessarily engaged in it, than that which is fought by those who
+take the Sermon on the Mount as their declared pattern, and attempt to
+carry out the principles it enunciates. To forgive when smitten is
+God-like; but, oh, how difficult for any mere man! To love an enemy is an
+injunction coming down to us from a higher and purer source than that which
+gave the philosophy once taught in the Groves of Academe; but, oh, how
+impossible for any man to do in reality, until he has been baptized with
+fire! While others have waged this conflict desultorily and in isolated
+instances, for nearly three centuries, the Quakers have waged it as a sect,
+entitling themselves alike to wonder and admiration. They have practised a
+non-resistance unaccountable to the fiery children of the world, and stark
+madness on any other supposition than that there is really a special
+protecting Hand over those who heed the peaceful injunction. They have
+triumphed alike in society and in savage life, when the strong hand failed
+and the maxims of worldly wisdom became powerless. And on the faces of the
+men and women of the sect, to-day--beneath the broad hat of the Friend,
+under the close gray bonnet of his wife, on brow and cheek of the Quaker
+maiden with her softly-folded hair, and even in eye and lip of the young
+man subjected to temptations which have power to fever and wreck all
+others,--in all, there is the record of a long line of men at peace with
+God, themselves, and the world, as easily read and as unmistakable as are
+the traces of toil, unrest, and consuming passion on the countenances of
+those who have fought through the world with the defiant heart and the
+strong hand. They have met despisers as well as foes, outside of their own
+charmed circle; but they have also met admirers. And to-day there are men
+who could not and who would not take up their cross of self-control and
+occasional self-denial so long and so patiently carried,--but who cannot
+and will not refuse to them the tribute of heart-felt admiration, and who
+often heave fruitless sighs towards that land of mental peace from which
+they are themselves excluded, because they neither share its blood nor know
+the tongue of its speech.
+
+But the Quaker has not conquered without struggling, and he has not always
+conquered at any sacrifice. Twice, the old men of the Revolution used to
+tell us, the _Pater Patriae_ was known to vent words of even profane
+anger--once, when the Continental troops failed him on the day of Long
+Island, and again, when Lee disappointed his just expectations and almost
+broke his line of battle at Monmouth. These were the two great exceptions
+proving the rule of his habitual self-command and his religious purity of
+speech; and the occasional outburst of anger in the Quaker blood may be
+held to illustrate the same self-control--to prove its abiding existence by
+the weight of the shock which momentarily throws it into confusion.
+
+The face of Nathan Bladesden showed, as Eleanor Hill spoke the last words
+already recorded, a mental conflict to which he was evidently little
+accustomed. The calm cheek flushed, the smooth brow corrugated, and the
+dark eye was for the moment so nearly fierce that the purity of the Quaker
+blood might well have been doubted. And when she had finished, the lips of
+the merchant uttered words, at which words themselves and their tone the
+speaker would equally have shuddered half an hour before:
+
+"Doctor Philip Pomeroy is an infernal scoundrel--unfit to live! He deserves
+to be killed, and I could kill him with my own hands!"
+
+"Ha!" It was something like a cry of joy from the lips of the poor girl.
+"Oh, I am so glad! You know this man--you hate him--you have only been
+trying me--you----" and her brow and cheeks glowed with excitement as she
+looked up in the Quaker's face. Then her eyes fell again, for she did not
+read there what she had been led to expect by his words. There was anger,
+but no pity; and even the anger was dying out under the strong habit of
+self-control, as rapidly as the momentary glow of a slight conflagration
+goes down under the dense volume of water poured upon it by the engine.
+
+"Thee mistakes me, Eleanor Hill!" he said. "I may follow the evil ways of
+the world's people so far as to hate the bad man who has ruined thee, but I
+have been speaking to thee in all earnest. I have not been 'trying thee,'
+as thee calls it. I pity thee, truly, and would help thee, but--"
+
+"But in the only way in which you _could_ help me, Nathan Bladesden, by
+lifting me out of this horrible pit in which my feet are sinking lower and
+lower every day in defiance of all my struggles and all my prayers--you
+desert me and leave me to perish. I understand you at last, and God help
+you and me!"
+
+"Thee knows I cannot marry thee, Eleanor Hill, after what has passed," said
+the Quaker, apologetically.
+
+"I know nothing of the kind, Nathan Bladesden!" answered the girl, no tears
+in her eyes now, and her words short and even petulant. "You have nothing
+to do with my past, any more than I with yours, to come to the truth of the
+matter! You know, in your own soul, that had you despised the malice of
+that serpent in human shape, and kept the engagement you had made with me,
+no man on earth would have owned a more faithful or a more loving wife. But
+you have cast me off, degraded me even lower than before in my own sight,
+made me kneel to you as I should only have kneeled to my Father in heaven;
+and this is the end."
+
+"Eleanor--" the Quaker began to say; but the girl interrupted him.
+
+"Please don't say another word to me! I understand you, now, and I know my
+fate. Let me have that letter, and do not speak any more in the streets, of
+the shame of a woman whom you once professed to love, than is absolutely
+necessary; and I shall never ask another favor of you in this world."
+
+"Eleanor Hill, thee is doubting my honor!" said the Quaker, alike
+forgetting that such idle words as "honor" were only supposed to belong to
+the "world's people," and that his voice was becoming so low and broken
+that he could scarcely make himself understood.
+
+"You have done more than doubt mine!" answered the girl, bitterly. "You
+have told me, in so many words, that because I had been cruelly wronged and
+outraged by a man who should have cared for me and protected me, I had no
+'honor' left. We begin to understand each other."
+
+A moment of silence, the girl weeping again but not convulsively as before;
+the Quaker with his hand upon his brow and his eyes hidden. How materially
+the situation had changed within a few minutes, since Eleanor Hill was
+kneeling with clasped hands and tearing out her heart with sobs. Yet
+another moment of silence, and then the merchant said:
+
+"I am going away, Eleanor. Has thee nothing more to say to me?"
+
+"Not another word, Mr. Bladesden!" answered the girl, through her set
+teeth. The Quaker raised his head, looked at her face for one moment, and
+then slowly moved towards the door, still looking towards her. She made no
+movement, as he seemed to expect that she would do, and as it seemed
+possible that some changed action on his part might depend upon her doing.
+
+"Farewell, Eleanor!" The Quaker stood in the door, hat in hand.
+
+"Good-bye, Mr. Bladesden!" The girl still remained on the other side of the
+room, as if either too much stupefied or too indignant to make any nearer
+approach. The next moment Nathan Bladesden had left the room and descended
+the stairs; and within two minutes after, seated alone in the buggy, behind
+his span of fast horses, he was bowling along towards the Darby road,
+apparently driving at such speed as if he would willingly fly as fast as
+possible away from a scene where his manhood had been severely tested and
+not found proof in extremity.
+
+For an instant after the departure of the Quaker, Eleanor Hill stood erect
+as he had last seen her. Both hands were pressed upon her heart, and it
+might have seemed doubtful whether she had nerved herself to that position
+or lacked power to quit it. Then her eyes fell upon the letter which
+Bladesden, when she requested him to leave it, had dropped upon a chair;
+and at the sight the spell, whatever it was, gave way. The poor girl
+dropped upon her knees before another chair which stood near her, with a
+cry of such heart-breaking agony as must have moved any heart, not utterly
+calloused, that listened to it,--dashed her hand into her long, dishevelled
+hair with such a gesture as indicated that she would madly tear it out by
+the roots in handfuls, then desisted and broke out through moans and sobs
+into one of those prayers which the purists believe are seldom or never
+forgiven by the heaven to which they are addressed--a prayer for immediate
+death!
+
+"Oh God!--let me die! Do let me die, here and at this moment! I cannot
+live and be so wretched! Let me die!--oh, let me die!"
+
+Whether unpardonable or not, the prayer was certainly impious; for next to
+that last extremity of crime which any man commits when he dismisses his
+own life, is his crime when he becomes a suicide in heart and wish, without
+daring to use the physical force necessary for that consummation. Despair
+is cowardice; the theft of time is a sin that no amendment can repay; and
+the robbery of that time which heaven allots to a human life, whether in
+act or thought, is something over which humanity well may shudder.
+
+But Eleanor Hill's impious prayer had no answer--at least no answer except
+the denial found in the breath of life which still fluttered from her
+nostrils and the blood which seemed to flow in torture through the poor
+frame sympathizing with the mind within. The aspiration was scarcely yet
+dead upon her lips when there was a footfall on the floor behind her; and
+she sprung up with one wild desperate hope darting through her brain, that
+the stern judge had at last relented after leaving her presence--that he
+had proved himself capable of a great sacrifice and returned to extricate
+her feet from the pit into which she was so irretrievably sinking. But that
+hope died on the instant, another and if possible a madder one taking its
+place; for before her, as she turned, stood Carlton Brand, though so
+disfigured and changed in appearance that any one except the most intimate
+of acquaintances might have been excused for doubting his identity.
+
+The young lawyer had always been noted for a neatness of personal
+appearance approaching to dandyism without reaching that mark; and only an
+hour before, in face and garb, he would have attracted attention in any
+circle, from the perfection of every appointment. Now, his face was bruised
+and swollen; his eyes were bloodshot and fiery; one lappel of his coat was
+torn from the collar; his coat and his nether garments were soiled and
+dusty; his hat was crushed and out of shape; and every detail of his
+presence seemed to be marred in corresponding proportion. A rough
+peasant's or a highwayman's disguise for a masquerade, would scarcely have
+changed him more than he had been changed, without the least premeditation,
+by that little rencontre with Dick Compton, to which we have already been
+unbidden witnesses. Absorbed as poor Eleanor Hill was in her own situation,
+she could scarcely suppress a scream when she saw the aspect of a man who
+always appeared before her so differently; and there was fright as well as
+concern in her voice as she said:
+
+"Why, Carlton Brand! Good heaven!--what _has_ happened to you?"
+
+"Much, Eleanor!" answered the lawyer, dropping into a chair with every
+indication of weariness, and wiping his heated brow with a handkerchief
+which showed that it had been soiled in removing some of the grime from his
+clothing.
+
+"Your clothes are torn--your face is swollen! Have you been
+attacked?--beaten? Are you seriously hurt?" inquired the girl, coming close
+to him and laying her hand on his shoulder with the affectionate anxiety
+which a sister might have shown. These women have no bounds to that
+sympathy which alternately makes them angels and lures them on the road to
+be fiends; and there is probably no true woman, who had ever been wife,
+sweetheart or mother, but would forget at least one pang of her pain on the
+rack, in sympathy for some wronged and suffering person who approached her!
+
+"Oh, no!" and Carlton Brand tried to laugh and made a miserable failure of
+the attempt, with his bruised face and swollen mouth. "Do not be alarmed,
+Eleanor. I have simply been in a little encounter with one of my neighbors,
+and--I scarcely know what has happened--I believe my clothes are torn and I
+suppose that I am disfigured a little."
+
+"Disfigured a little! Good heaven, I should think you were!" said the girl,
+coming still closer and looking into his face. As she did so, the eyes of
+the lawyer, not too bloodshot for sight if they were for grace of aspect,
+detected the swollen condition of her face, the fearful redness of her
+eyes, and the various symptoms which told through what a storm of shame and
+sorrow she had lately been passing. He started to his feet at once,
+grasping her hand:
+
+"Eleanor, _you_ are worse hurt than myself! Tell me what has happened! Has
+he been torturing you again?"
+
+"Oh, yes," answered the poor girl--"worse than torturing me! I could bear
+his personal cruelty, for I have grown used to it. But he has just made me
+lose my last hope in life, and I have nothing left me but to die!"
+
+"Your last hope?" echoed Carlton Brand. "What? Has Mr. Bladesden--"
+
+"Mr. Bladesden has just been here," answered Eleanor Hill, choking down the
+grief and indignation that were so painfully combating each other in her
+throat, dropping her head as she had done a few minutes before in the
+presence of the merchant, and holding out in her hand the crushed letter
+which Bladesden had dropped as he left the house. "Mr. Bladesden has just
+been here, and he brought this letter to read to me. It had been sent to
+his store, and he received it this morning. You can see, after reading it,
+what hope in life he has left me!"
+
+"Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and will find it!"
+
+Carlton Brand had momentarily forgotten his own troubles in the evident
+anguish of the young girl, just as a few moments before she had merged all
+those sorrows in anxiety for his personal safety. He took the letter she
+handed, smoothed out the crumpled folds made in it by the grasp of anger
+and shame, and read the damning words that follow--words so black and
+dastardly that one of the fiends from the lower pit might come back to
+earth to clear away from his name the suspicion that he had ever penned
+them. A few sentences of this _bona fide_ communication are necessarily
+omitted, in an interest easily understood:
+
+
+                           WEST PHILADELPHIA, _June --, 1863._
+
+     MR. NATHAN BLADESDEN:
+
+     SIR:--You are a merchant of respectability, as well as a
+     member of the Society of Friends--a society for which I have
+     the highest respect, although I do not happen to have been
+     born a member of it. I should very much regret to see you
+     made the victim of a designing woman, and linked for life to
+     one who would bring disgrace upon your name and family.
+     Report says that you are engaged to be married, or that you
+     very probably may be so at an early period, to Miss Eleanor
+     Hill, the ward for some years of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and who
+     is still resident in the house of that medical gentleman. I
+     suppose that you know very little of the early history of
+     the young lady, as, if you had known, you would never have
+     allowed yourself to be entangled in that manner. Her father
+     left her a few thousands of dollars in property, which she
+     no doubt has the reputation of still possessing, while I
+     have very good reason to know that it has really all (or
+     nearly all) been used up in unfortunate speculations by
+     different persons to whom she intrusted it, and that she is
+     little else than a beggar, except as the Doctor offers her a
+     home. As to her personal character, which is the thing of
+     greatest consequence at the present moment,--Miss Hill was a
+     very giddy girl, and many of her friends had fears for her
+     future; but none of them foresaw what would indeed be the
+     issue of the unfortunate situation in which she was placed.
+     I am writing this letter, as you must be aware, for no
+     purposes of my own, and simply to serve an honorable man who
+     seems to have been tricked and cajoled by unscrupulous
+     people. As a consequence, I must ask of you as a right which
+     you cannot disregard, that you will not show this letter to
+     Dr. Pomeroy, who might know enough of the direction from
+     which such a revelation would be likeliest to come, to
+     awaken his suspicion and put him in the way of injuring me.
+     This promised, I now go on to state what you will never
+     cease to thank me for communicating to you, if you are the
+     high-toned man of honor that I suppose. Dr. Pomeroy is well
+     known to be a man of somewhat violent passions; and though I
+     believe that his conduct has been nearly spotless during his
+     professional career, yet there are stains against him for
+     which he is probably the sorriest of men in his calmer
+     moments. Miss Hill, as I have said, was giddy and
+     thoughtless, if no worse; and very soon after the death of
+     her father, those who happened to see her in company with
+     her guardian, noticed that she paid him attentions which
+     showed a very warm personal attachment, while he received
+     them as a bachelor man of the world could not very well
+     avoid receiving such marks of regard from a young and pretty
+     girl. How long this went on, I am not at liberty to say,
+     even if I have any means of knowing: it is enough that, to
+     my knowledge and that of more than one person with whom you
+     are acquainted, the natural result followed. If there was
+     any seduction, I should be puzzled to say on which side the
+     art was used; but perhaps when you remember that the lady
+     has, during all your acquaintance with her, (at least I
+     presume so, from your continuing to visit her,) passed
+     herself off on you as pure enough to be worthy of the honor
+     of your hand, you may be able to form some idea whether she
+     might not have been quite as much in fault as her partner in
+     crime. I say "partner in crime," as I have no wish or motive
+     to shelter Dr. Pomeroy. Perhaps I ought not to say more, and
+     indeed my pen hesitates when I attempt to set down what I
+     consider so lamentable, as well as so culpable. But I must
+     go on, after going thus far. The secret of Miss Hill's
+     remaining at the house of Dr. Pomeroy after her attainment
+     of majority, is that a guilty attachment and connection has
+     existed between them for not less than five years past,
+     unsuspected by most persons who know them, but well known to
+     myself and some others, at least one of whom has been the
+     accidental witness of their crime. If you should think
+     proper to tax her with this depravity, and she should choose
+     to deny this statement, by way of convincing yourself
+     whether this is a foul calumny or a bitter truth, ask her *
+     * * * * * * * I hope and believe that you will take the
+     warning that I have thus conveyed, and not give yourself any
+     trouble to discover the writer, who does not conceal his
+     name from any other motives than those which you can
+     understand and approve.
+
+                                             A TRUE FRIEND.
+
+
+
+Carlton Brand read through this precious document without speaking--a
+document not worse in motive than all other anonymous communications, any
+one of which should subject the perpetrator, if discovered, to cropped ears
+and slitted tongue,--but worse than all others of its evil kind in the
+atrocity of its surrounding circumstances, as the reader will have no
+difficulty in believing when a little additional light is shed upon the
+personality of the writer by the chapters immediately following.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+     A RETURN TO 1856--NICHOLAS HILL, IRON MERCHANT--HIS DEATH,
+     HIS DAUGHTER AND HIS FRIEND--HOW DR. POMEROY BECAME A
+     GUARDIAN, AND HOW HE DISCHARGED THAT DUTY--A RUIN AND AN
+     AWAKENING--THE MARKET VALUE OF DUNDERHAVEN STOCK IN 1858.
+
+
+Seven years before 1863, and consequently in 1856, died Nicholas Hill, a
+merchant of Philadelphia, whose place of business on Market Street above
+Third had been the seat of a respectable though not remarkably extensive
+trade, for nearly a quarter of a century. His trade had been in iron and
+hardware, but the material of his stock by no means entered into his own
+composition, for he was a man somewhat noted for his quiet and retiring
+manners and a pliancy of spirit making him at times the victim of the
+unscrupulously plausible. His private fortune met with sundry serious
+drawbacks on account of this weakness, though a generally prosperous
+business enabled him to keep intact the few thousands which he had already
+won, and gradually if slowly to add to the accumulation. He had remained a
+widower since the death of his wife ten years before his own demise; and
+his pleasant though quiet little house on Locust Street, had only contained
+one member of his family besides himself, for years before his death--his
+only daughter and only child, Eleanor.
+
+The warmest and longest-continued friendships are very often formed by
+persons diametrically opposed in character and disposition; and the rule
+seemed to hold good in the instance under notice. A friendship formed
+several years before between the merchant and Dr. Philip Pomeroy, when the
+latter was a practising physician resident in the city proper, had never
+died out or become weakened, at least in the heart of the confiding and
+quiet dealer in iron, and there was no reason to believe that the sentiment
+had been more transient in the breast of the physician. Mr. Hill had been
+suffering under the incipient threats of consumption, for years, and the
+doctor had been his medical attendant, as before the death of his wife he
+had filled the same confidential relation towards that lady and the other
+members of his household. Neither personally nor by marriage had the
+merchant any near relatives in the city or its vicinity; and his retiring
+disposition was such that while he made many friends in the ordinary
+acceptation of the word, he had few who stood in that peculiar relation
+which the French, supplying a noun which has scarcely yet crept into our
+own language, designate as _les intimes_.
+
+It was not strange, then, that when Nicholas Hill was suddenly seized with
+hemorrhage of the lungs and brought home in an almost dying condition from
+his store, one afternoon in November, 1856, Dr. Pomeroy, who was hurriedly
+summoned to his aid, was summoned quite as much in the capacity of friend
+as in that of medical attendant. The story of life or death was soon told.
+The merchant had believed, from the moment of attack, that his day of
+probation was over; and, apart from his natural anxiety for the welfare of
+his only child, there was little tie to bind the sufferer to earth. His
+wife--his wife that day as much as she had been at any period of their
+wedded life,--had long been awaiting him, as he believed, in a better
+world; and there is something in the facility with which those quiet, good
+people, who seem never to have enjoyed existence with the fiery zest which
+tingles in finger and lip of the sons of pleasure and sorrow, give up their
+hold upon being and pass away into the infinite unknown which lies beyond
+the dark valley,--something that may well make it a matter of question
+whether theirs is not after all the golden secret of human happiness, for
+which all ages have been studying and delving.
+
+The doctor came, with that rapidity which was usual with him, and with
+every mark of intense interest on his face and in his general demeanor. He
+found the invalid sinking rapidly, and his attendants, the weeping
+Eleanor, then a handsome, promising but defectively-educated girl of near
+eighteen, and two or three of the ladies of the near neighborhood who had
+gathered in to tender their services when it was known that the merchant
+had been brought home in a dying condition. A few words from the sufferer,
+uttered in a low tone almost in the ear of the stooping physician, and then
+all the others were sent out of the room except his daughter, whose
+pleading gesture, asking to be allowed to remain within the room was not
+disregarded, but who was motioned by the doctor to take her place at the
+window, beyond supposed hearing of the words that were to pass between the
+two friends.
+
+"Tell me the exact truth," said the low voice of Nicholas Hill, when these
+dispositions had been made. "I am prepared to hear any judgment which your
+lips may speak. There is no hope for me?--I am dying?"
+
+Either the doctor could not speak, or he would not. He merely bowed his
+head in a manner that the questioner well understood.
+
+"So I thought, from the first," said the dying man. "The life blood does
+not flow away in that manner for nothing. And I do not know that I regret
+the end, for I have lived almost as long as I could make myself useful, and
+I think I am as nearly prepared to die as poor, fallen humanity can hope to
+be."
+
+"I hope and believe that you are indeed prepared to die, my dear, good
+friend," answered the doctor, with feeling in his tone, and the feeble hand
+of the sufferer meanwhile within his. "I cannot hold out a false hope to
+you--you cannot live. How gladly science and friendship would both join
+hands in doing something to keep you in the world, you know; but how much
+we shall all miss you and grieve for you, you do _not_ know."
+
+"That you will miss me, I hope," said the dying man. "But there is no
+occasion whatever to grieve for me. It is a peaceful end, I think, and in
+God's own good time. I have but one anxiety."
+
+He paused, and the doctor nodded his head towards the side of the room
+where poor Eleanor was sitting, trying to distract her own thoughts by
+looking out of the window. The father saw that he understood him, and
+pressed the hand that he held.
+
+"Yes, you have guessed rightly," he said. "My only anxiety is for the fate
+of my child. Eleanor is a good girl, but she is yet very young, and she
+will need protection."
+
+"She shall find it!" said the doctor, solemnly.
+
+The face of the dying man lit up with an expression of the sincerest
+pleasure and happiness, and his feeble grasp again pressed the hand of high
+health which lay so near his own ebbing pulse.
+
+"I believe you and I thank you, my friend as well as physician," he
+replied. "I have not been afraid to think of this day, as they tell me that
+so many are; and my affairs are in some degree prepared for it. I have a
+handsome property, though not a large one, and you will find a will lying
+in the private drawer of the safe at the store. With the exception of a few
+legacies to friends, a small one to yourself included--it all goes to
+Eleanor, and you will find yourself named my executor."
+
+"A confidence which flatters me, and which I hope I shall deserve," said
+the doctor, as the enfeebled man again paused for a moment.
+
+"I _know_ that you will," the sufferer resumed. "Thanks to my property,
+Eleanor will not be a burthen to you, except in the demand of _care_. Her
+few relatives, as you know, are distant ones, and none of them reside
+nearer than California. There will be none to interfere with you in guiding
+her aright, keeping her pure in her remaining years of girlhood, and
+watching over her until she becomes the wife of some honorable man, or in
+some other way ceases to need your protection."
+
+"I accept the charge as freely as it is given, and I will perform it as I
+would for one of my own blood!" was the solemn answer of the medical man.
+
+"I knew that before I asked, or I should never have asked at all!" said the
+dying man. "Eleanor, my daughter, come here."
+
+The young girl obeyed and knelt beside the bed, striving to restrain her
+sobs and tears. The father laid his hand on her head and gently smoothed
+the masses of dark brown hair with fingers that would so soon be beyond
+capacity for such a caress.
+
+"Eleanor," he said, "you are almost a woman in years, and you must be
+altogether a woman, now. I am going to leave you--I may leave you in a few
+minutes."
+
+"Oh, I know it, father!--dear, dear father! Oh, what will become of me?"
+and in spite of her efforts to restrain herself she sobbed and choked
+piteously.
+
+"You will be cared for, my child, not only by heaven but by kind friends;
+and you must not grieve so over what does not grieve me at all," said the
+departing parent. "Dr. Pomeroy is to be the executor of my estate, and your
+guardian. Love and obey him, my daughter, in every thing, as you would love
+and obey me if I was allowed to remain with you. Do you understand me?--do
+you promise me, Eleanor?"
+
+"I do understand you!--I do promise you, dear, dear father!" sobbed the
+young girl. "I will obey Dr. Philip, and try to be good all my life, so
+that I can meet you where I know that you are going to meet my mother."
+
+"My dear, good child!--you and the doctor have made me so happy! Kiss me
+now, Eleanor, and then let me sleep a few moments." And directly after that
+kiss of agonized love was given, he fell back upon his pillow--as if he was
+indeed dropping into a quiet sleep; but the doctor felt the hand that lay
+within his relax its pressure, one or two sighs fluttered from the
+quivering lips, while a light foam tinged with blood crept up to them and
+bubbled there, and the moment after Eleanor Hill was fatherless.
+
+And yet the poor girl who sobbed so heart-brokenly over the corpse of one
+who had been to her the truest and kindest of parents, was not fatherless
+in that desolate sense in which the word is so often used. The ties of
+blood might be rudely broken, but did not the hand of true friendship stand
+ready to assert itself? Had not Philip Pomeroy promised the friend of
+years, that he would be father and protector to her--that he would shelter
+her with all the power given to his ripe manhood, and hold her pure as the
+very angels, so far as he had power to direct her course? No--not
+fatherless: the weeping girl, in the midst of her sobs and unfelt caresses
+over what had once been the father of her idolatry, appreciated the truth
+and was partially comforted.
+
+It so chanced that Dr. Pomeroy, in his domestic relations, was admirably
+placed for offering a home to the daughter of his dead friend. Marrying did
+not seem to run in the Pomeroy family, for not only was the doctor a
+confirmed bachelor, some years past middle age, but his only living sister
+had kept herself free, like him, of matrimonial chains, and presided
+pleasantly over his household under her maiden name of Miss Hester Pomeroy.
+While the removal of a young girl of eighteen to a bachelor's residence,
+without the cover of female society, might have seemed grossly improper in
+spite of the color given to it by the guardianship so lately acquired,
+there could be no impropriety whatever in her becoming the companion and to
+some extent the pupil of the bachelor's maiden sister of forty.
+
+Dr. Pomeroy's residence was at that time within the city limits, though in
+that extreme upper section bordering on the Schuylkill; but his practice
+had been gradually extending out into the country over the river; and ideas
+long cherished, of a residence beyond the reach of the noises of the great
+city, were gradually becoming realized. At the time of the death of his
+friend, that mansion which it has just been our sad privilege to enter,
+was in the course of erection; and in the spring which followed he took up
+his abode within it, with his sister, his ward, and that array of domestics
+necessary for a man of his supposed wealth and somewhat expensive habits.
+
+It did indeed seem that Eleanor Hill was blessed among orphans if not among
+women. Her tears dried easily, as they had good cause to do. The residence
+to which she had been removed was a very handsome and even a luxurious one;
+Miss Hester Pomeroy was one of those good easy souls who neither possess
+any strength of character themselves nor envy it in others,--with an almost
+idolizing admiration of her gifted and popular brother, and a belief that
+no movement of his could be other than the best possible under the
+circumstances; and the doctor himself, a man of fine education,
+distinguished manners, admitted professional skill, and an uprightness of
+carriage which seemed to more than atone for any lack of suavity in his
+demeanor--the doctor himself appeared to be anxious, from the first, that
+no shadow of accusation should lie against his name, of inattention to the
+ward committed to his charge. From the day of her coming into his house,
+whenever his professional engagements would allow, he spent much time in
+the society of Eleanor, greatly to the delight of Miss Hester, who had
+thought herself very unattractive company and wished that her gifted
+brother had some one in the house more worthy to be his companion. He
+selected books for the young girl; brought home others; directed her
+studies into channels calculated to form her mind (at least some portions
+of it); invited the young people of the neighborhood to meet her; drove her
+out frequently; took such care of her health as he might have done of that
+of a darling daughter or an idolized sweetheart; and gave evidence that
+none could doubt, of his intention to fulfil in the most liberal and
+conscientious manner the sacred promises he had made over the death-bed of
+her father.
+
+To the young girl, meanwhile her surroundings became Elysium. She had warm
+affections, of that clinging character which finds no difficulty in
+fastening almost anywhere if permitted time and quiet. She had little force
+of will and still less of that serpent wisdom which discerns the shadow of
+danger before that danger really approaches. She was equally good, by
+nature, and weak by disposition--formed of that material out of which good
+wives and mothers are so easily made, and which may, on the other hand, be
+fashioned so easily into the most melancholy semblance of lost womanhood.
+She was handsome, if not strictly beautiful, and the lips of her guardian,
+so strict to most others, told her so with smiles and low-breathed words.
+She was flattered by his preference, paid her deferentially in public and
+yet more unreservedly when none but themselves heard the words he
+uttered,--proud to be thus distinguished by one so attractive in appearance
+and unimpeachable in position,--bound to him by that obedience enjoined by
+her dying father, and by that strong tie of gratitude which she felt to be
+due to her willing and unrecompensed protector,--and brought into that
+close communion with his strong mind which could not fail to sway an
+unmeasured influence over her, by those studies in poetry, romance and
+philosophy which he had himself directed.
+
+It is an old story, and melancholy as old. Before she had been six months
+an inmate of the house of Dr. Pomeroy, Eleanor Hill loved him as madly as
+young, defenceless and untrained girlhood can love that which supplies its
+best ideal and lures it on by the most specious of pretences. Not more than
+that time had elapsed, when she would have plucked out her heart and laid
+it in his hand, had he asked it and had such an act of bodily
+self-sacrifice been possible. Less than a year, and the tale of her destiny
+was told. For weeks before, the words of her "guardian" and "father" had
+been such as ill became either relation, but not warmer, still, than the
+snared heart of the young girl craved and echoed. Then came that promise of
+the dearest tie on earth, which falls on the ear of loving woman with a
+sweeter sound than any other ever uttered under the sun or stars. He loved
+her--that proud, high-spirited, distinguished man, the friend of her
+father, and the man for whose hand (so he had told her, not boastingly but
+in pity, and so she had every reason to believe) the wealthiest, the most
+beautiful and the most arrogant belles of Broad Street and Girard Avenue
+had been willing to barter all their pride and all their coyness--he loved
+_her_, the poor young and comparatively portionless girl, held her worthy
+to be his wife, and was willing to share his high destiny with her!
+
+What marvel that the untutored heart beat faster than its wont, when that
+golden gate of paradise was opened in expectation to her eyes? What marvel
+that all the lessons of childhood, which stood between her and obedience to
+the master of her destiny, were forgotten or only remembered with
+abhorrence? What marvel that the past became a dream, the present dull and
+unendurable, and only the delirious future worth a wish or a thought? What
+marvel that one evening when the full moon of August was peeping in through
+the trees which already began to cast their shade over the new home into
+the room where the "guardian" and the "ward" were sitting alone
+together--when the air seemed balm and the earth heaven--when the
+night-sounds of late summer made a sadness that was not sorrow, and
+temptation put on the very robes of holy feeling to do its evil work--when
+the lips of the subtle, bad, unscrupulous man of the world repeated words
+as sweet as they were unmeaning, promises as hollow as they were delicious
+and prayers as bewildering as they were sacrilegious--when the heart of the
+young girl had proved traitor to her senses and all the guardian angels of
+her maidenhood had fled away and left her to a conflict for which she had
+neither wisdom nor strength--what marvel that the moment of total madness
+came to one and perhaps to both, and that before it ended Eleanor Hill lay
+upon the breast of her destroyer, a poor dishonored thing, frightened,
+delirious, half-senseless, and yet blindly happier in her shame than she
+had ever been while the white doves still folded their wings above her!
+
+We know something of ends and something of intermediary occurrences, but
+very little of beginnings. The common eye can see the oak from a tiny
+sprout to its lordship of the forest, but none may behold the first
+movement of the germ in the buried acorn. The unnatural rebellion of
+Absalom, the reckless treason of Arnold, the struggle for universal empire
+of Napoleon, all stand out boldly on the historic page, as they appeared at
+the moment of culmination; but who sees the disobedient son of David when
+he walks out into the night with the first unfilial curse upon his lips, or
+the arch-traitor of the Western Continent as he starts from his sleep with
+the first thought of his black deed creeping under his hair and curdling
+his blood, or the victor of Marengo nursing his first far-off vision of the
+dangerous glory yet to be! We can know nothing more of the beginnings of
+vice in the hearts of the great criminals of private life. It can never be
+known, until all other secrets are unveiled before the eyes of a startled
+universe, whether Dr. Pomeroy, (no imaginary character, but a personage too
+real and very slightly disguised), in this ruin wrought by his hand had
+been acting the part of an unmitigated scoundrel from the beginning, a lie
+upon his lip and mockery in his heart when he promised the dying Nicholas
+Hill protection to his helpless daughter, and every act and word of his
+intercourse with her subtly calculated to bring about the one unholy
+end,--or whether he had merely _permitted_ himself, without early
+premeditation, to do the unpardonable evil which proved so convenient. For
+the welfare of the victim, it seemed a question of little consequence: for
+the credit of humanity, always enough disgraced, at best, by its robbers
+and cut-throats of the moral highway, it may be at least worth a thought.
+After events make it doubtful whether the very worst had not been intended
+and labored for from the outset; and certain it is that if there had before
+been one redeeming trait to temper the moral baseness of Philip Pomeroy,
+from the moment when that ruin was accomplished no obstacle of goodness
+hindered his way towards the end of the irredeemable. If he had before kept
+terms with Eleanor Hill and his own soul, he kept those terms no longer.
+
+The poor girl had of course no right to be happy in her new and guilty
+relation, and yet she was so for a time--almost entirely happy. She had
+been wooed and won (oh, how fearfully _won_!) under an explicit promise of
+marriage and with continual repetitions of words of respect which left her
+no room to doubt the good faith of the man who uttered them. She was more
+than a little weak, as has already been said; very unsuspicious and
+clinging in her trust; and neither wise enough to know that the man who
+respected her sufficiently to make her his wife, no insurmountable obstacle
+lying in his way, would have made her so before laying his hand on the hem
+of the garment of her purity,--or precise enough to feel that any disgrace
+had really fallen upon her, which would not be removed the moment that
+promise of marriage was fulfilled. Then, by a natural law which can be
+easily understood if it cannot be explained, the young girl a thousand
+times more deeply loved the master of her destiny because he had made
+himself entirely so; and for a time, at least, the conduct of the victor
+towards his helpless captive was full of such exquisite tenderness in
+private that she could not have found room for a regret had her heart even
+revolted at the situation in which she was placed. He did not speak of an
+immediate fulfilment of his promise of marriage--no, but he had before
+hinted that owing to certain temporary circumstances (oh, those "temporary
+circumstances"!) the hour when he could make her his own before the world
+must be yet a little delayed; and so the young heart took no fright at the
+procrastination. Good Miss Hester, meanwhile, saw nothing suspicious and
+suspected nothing improper. Perhaps she saw a deeper light of tenderness in
+the eyes of the poor betrayed girl, when they beamed upon him who should
+have been her husband; and perhaps she saw that her brother treated his
+ward with even more delicate attention than he had shown during the months
+before; but the spinster's eyes had no skill to read beneath the mask of
+either, and if she thought upon the subject at all her impressions were not
+likely to go farther than the mental remark: "How good Philip is to
+Eleanor; how obedient to him she seems to be; and how happy for both that
+he ever became her guardian and she his charge!"
+
+Under such circumstances the awakening, even a partial one, could not come
+otherwise than very slowly. But unless the young girl was an absolute idiot
+or utterly depraved, an awakening must come at some period or other. Though
+weak and ill-trained, Eleanor Hill was by no means an idiot; and the angels
+of heaven could look down and see that through all that had occurred there
+had been no depravity in her soul, no coarse, sensual passion in her
+nature. If she had fallen, she had been sacrificed on the altar of man's
+unscrupulous libertinism, and offering up the incense, meanwhile, of a
+good, yielding, compliant, worshipping heart. The moral perceptions may
+have been blunted, but they were not annihilated; the reason may have been
+choked and dizzied in the flood of feeling, but it was immortal and could
+not be drowned.
+
+Months had elapsed after the culmination of their intercourse, before the
+sense of right became strong enough and the heart bold enough, for the
+young girl to hint at the fulfilment of what had been so long delayed. The
+answer was a passionate kiss and an assurance that "only a little time more
+should elapse--just yet it would not be prudent and was in fact
+impossible." Eleanor wondered: she had not yet learned to doubt; and for a
+time she kept silent. Again, a few weeks later, and the question was
+repeated. This time a light laugh met her ear, and there was more of the
+master toying with his slave or the spoiled boy trifling with his
+play-thing, than there had been in the first instance. Still the promise
+was repeated, and still there were "insurmountable obstacles." Another
+interval of silence, then a third request, this time with tears, that he
+would do her the justice he had promised. To this ill-nature responded, and
+for the first time the young girl learned what a claw of pride and
+arrogance lay folded in the velvet palm of the tiger. She shrunk away
+within herself, at his first harsh word, almost believing that she must
+have committed some wrong in speaking to him of his delayed promise; and
+when he kissed her at the end of that conversation and said: "There, run
+away and do not bother me about it when I am worried and busy!" she almost
+felt--heaven help her poor, weak heart!--that that kiss was one of needed
+pardon!
+
+The dullest eyes will recognize at last what only the quick and accustomed
+discern at first. Eleanor Hill had been blind, but her eyes gradually
+opened,--with an agony in the first gleams of light, of which her yielding,
+compliant nature had before given little promise. Nearly two years had
+elapsed after her becoming the ward of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and more than
+one year after that fatal era in her own destiny, when the wronged girl,
+then twenty and within only twelve months of her legal majority, at last
+sounded the depths of that man's nature sufficiently to know that he had
+been inventing the existence of obstacles--that he had never intended to
+marry her, at least at any near period. At that moment of discovery a
+higher and prouder nature than hers might have been moved to personal
+upbraiding, despair and perhaps to suicide: with Eleanor Hill the only
+result was that a sense of shame, before kept in abeyance, came in and
+settled down upon her, making her more humble than angry or indignant, and
+unnerving her instead of bracing her mind anew for any conflict that might
+arise in the future. Aware, at last, of his deception, she could not quite
+believe in her guardian's utter baseness; and she still _hoped_ that though
+he might demand his own time for the fulfilment of that promise which had
+won her from herself, in his own time he would render her that justice in
+reality so poor but to her so full of compensation for all the past.
+
+Would it not seem, even to one most fully acquainted with all the falsehood
+of the betrayer and all the cruelty of the torturer, that the cup of that
+man's infamy was nearly filled? And yet--sorrow that the bitter truth must
+be recorded!--not a tithe of that which was to curse him before the end,
+has yet been indicated. Slowly and surely the blackening crimes pile up,
+when the love of virtue and the fear of heaven have both faded out from the
+human heart; and who can measure the height to which those mountain masses
+of guilt may tower, after the first foundations have been laid in one
+unrepented wrong, and before the coming of that day when the criminal must
+call upon those very mountains to fall and bury him away from the wrath
+that is inevitable!
+
+Dr. Pomeroy came home late one evening in December, 1858. Hester had long
+been in bed, and Eleanor, as was her habit, had waited up for his return.
+Some weeks had now elapsed since her discovery of his deception, but hope
+had not yet died out, nor had all her confidence been lost in that
+affection for her which she believed underlay all the impropriety of his
+treatment. So far, except in the one particular, he had treated her with
+almost unvarying kindness; and while that pleasant status existed and hope
+had yet a little point for the clinging of her tenacious fingers, it was
+not in the nature of the young girl to despair. She met him at the door, as
+she had done on so many previous occasions, assisted him to divest himself
+of the rough wrappers by which he had been sheltered from the winter wind,
+and when at last he dropped into his cushioned chair before the grate,
+which had been kept broadly aglow to minister to his comfort, took her
+place half by his side and half at his feet.
+
+Perhaps there was some malevolent spirit who on that occasion, before the
+glow of the winter fire, once more brought to the lips of the poor girl
+that subject always lying so near her heart--marriage. She mentioned the
+word, and for the first time since he had given her shelter under his
+roof, Philip Pomeroy hurled an oath at her. Perhaps he had been taking wine
+somewhat too freely, in one of the tempting supper-rooms of the city; or
+some other cause may have disturbed his equanimity and brought out the
+truth of his worst nature. The reply of Eleanor Hill to this was the not
+unnatural one of a burst of tears, and that outburst may have maddened him
+still more. The truth came at last, in all its black, bitter, naked
+deformity:
+
+"Eleanor, you have made a fool of yourself long enough! No more of this
+whining, or it will be the worse for you! When _I_ marry _you_, I shall be
+very nearly out of business; and if you have not had judgment enough to
+know that fact before, so much the worse for your common sense!"
+
+Eleanor Hill staggered up from her chair and cast one glance full into the
+face of her destroyer. Her eyes could read the expression that it bore,
+then, if they had never before attained the same power. There was neither
+the smile of reckless pleasantry nor the unbent lines of partial pity for
+suffering, upon that face. All was cold, hard, determined, cruel earnest,
+and the victim read at last aright what she should have been able to
+decipher more than two years before. And never the life of a dangerous
+infant heir went out beneath the choking fingers of a hired murderer, at
+midnight and in silence in one of the thick vaulted chambers of the Tower,
+more suddenly or more effectually than at that moment the last honorable
+hope of Eleanor Hill expired, strangled by the hand of that "guardian" who
+had promised beside a dying bed that he would shield and protect her as his
+own child!
+
+In that hard, cold face Eleanor Hill at last read her destiny. She had been
+weak, compliant and submissive, but never reconciled to her shame; and at
+that moment began her revolt.
+
+"I understand you at last," she said. "After all your promises, you will
+_not_ marry me!"
+
+"Once for all--no!" was the firm reply, the cruel face not blenching in
+the least before that glance, mingled of pain and indignation, and so
+steadily bent upon it.
+
+"Then I have lived long enough in this house--too long!" broke from the
+lips of the young girl. "I will leave it to-morrow. You cannot give me back
+the thing of most value of which you have robbed me--my honor and my peace
+of mind; but my father left my property in your hands--give me back that,
+so that I may go away and hide myself where I shall never be any more
+trouble to you or to any others who know me."
+
+"Humph! your property!" was the reply, in so sneering a tone that even the
+unsuspicious ears of the victim caught something more in the manner than in
+the words themselves.
+
+"Yes, I said my property--the property my father left in your hands for
+me!" answered poor Eleanor, striving to conquer the deadly depression at
+her heart and to be calm and dignified. "You have told me the truth at
+last; and I will never ask you the question again if you will give me
+enough money for my support and let me go away from this life of sin into
+which you have dragged me."
+
+"You want to go away, do you!" again spoke the doctor, in the same sneering
+tone. "And you expect to support yourself upon what you call 'your
+property?'"
+
+"I do want to go away--I must go away, Dr. Philip!" answered the victim,
+still managing to choke down the tears and sobs that were rising so
+painfully. "You have cruelly deceived a poor girl who trusted you, and we
+had better never see each other again while we live."
+
+"Your property, you said! Bring me that large black portfolio from the top
+of the closet yonder," was the only and strange reply. With the habit of
+her old obedience the young girl went to the place designated, found the
+pocket-book and brought it to him. He opened it, took out half a dozen
+pieces of what seemed to be bank-note paper, and handed them over to her
+without an additional word.
+
+"What are these, and what I am to do with them?" she asked, in surprise.
+
+"They are 'your fortune' that you have been talking about, and you may do
+what you like with them if you insist upon leaving my house!" was the
+reply.
+
+"I do not understand you!" very naturally answered the recipient, making no
+motion to open the papers. "If these are mine, I cannot tell what to do
+with them or how much they are worth."
+
+"Oh, I can tell you their value, very easily, though I might be puzzled to
+direct you as to the other part of your anxiety!" said the doctor, with a
+scarcely-suppressed chuckle at the bottom of his sneer. "They are the scrip
+for four thousand shares in the capital stock of the Dunderhaven Coal and
+Mining Company, in which, with your consent, I invested the forty thousand
+dollars left you by your father; and their present worth is not much, as
+the company unfortunately failed about six months ago, paying a dividend of
+five-sixteenths of a cent on the dollar. The amount would be--I remember
+calculating it up at the time of the failure--just one hundred and
+twenty-five dollars."
+
+"And that is all the money that I have in the world!" gasped the young
+girl, tottering towards a chair.
+
+"Every penny, if you leave my house!" answered the model guardian. "If you
+remain in it, as I wish, and forget all the nonsense that priests and old
+women have dinned into your ears, about marriage,--your fortune is just as
+much as my own, for you shall find that there is nothing which I can afford
+to purchase for myself, that I will not just as freely purchase for you!"
+
+Eleanor Hill said not a word in reply. She had sunk into a chair and
+covered her face with both her hands, through the delicate fingers of which
+streamed the bright tears, while her whole frame was shaken and racked by
+the violence of her mental torture. How utterly and completely desolate she
+was at that moment! Refused the justice of marriage by the man for whom
+she had perilled all, and bidden no longer even to hope for that
+justice--then coldly informed that if she left the house of her betrayer
+she went away to beggary, as all the fortune left her by her father had
+been squandered by imprudence or dishonesty,--what additional blow could
+fall upon her, and what other and heavier bolt could there yet be stored
+for her in the clouds of wrath?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+     WHAT FOLLOWED THE REVELATION OF BETRAYAL--A GLEAM OF HOPE
+     FOR ELEANOR HILL--A RELATIVE FROM CALIFORNIA, A PROJECTED
+     VOYAGE, AND A DISAPPOINTMENT--ONE MORE LETTER--THE BROKEN
+     THREAD RESUMED--CARLTON BRAND'S FAREWELL, AND A SUDDEN
+     ELOPEMENT.
+
+
+Eleanor Hill should of course have left the house of her guardian, that had
+proved such a valley of poison to her girlhood, the very moment when she
+made that discovery of her final and complete betrayal. But then, strictly
+speaking, she should have left it long before; and the same compliant
+spirit that had once yielded, could yield again. Pity her who will--blame
+her who may--she bowed beneath the weight of her own helplessness and
+remained, instead of fleeing from the spot that very night and shaking off
+the dust of her feet against it, even if she begged her bread thereafter
+from door to door. Not with what she should have done, and not with what
+some others whom we have known would have done under the circumstances,
+have we to do. She remained. Not the same as she had been before--Dr.
+Philip Pomeroy knew and felt the difference; and yet submissive and
+apparently unrepining. Not the same in cheerfulness, as Miss Hester felt
+and deplored: she spoke less, seldomer went out, even when strongly
+tempted, and spent much more time in the solitude and silence of her own
+room.
+
+It is not for us to put upon record precisely what passed between the
+guardian and his ward in the months that immediately followed that
+revelation; as unfortunately at that point information otherwise complete
+and uninterrupted, is defective for a considerable interval. It is beyond
+doubt that in the breast of Eleanor Hill fear and hatred had taken the
+place of love towards the man whom she had once idolized--that the sense of
+shame weighing upon her had become every day heavier and less
+endurable--and that she would have fled away at any moment, but from the
+fact that she was utterly helpless, pecuniarily and in any capacity for
+earning her own subsistence, and that she believed in the probability of
+Dr. Philip Pomeroy putting in force the cruel threat he had made, and
+publishing her shame to the world, distorted to suit his own purposes, the
+moment she should have quitted his abode and his guardianly "protection!"
+
+With reference to the wishes and intentions of Dr. Philip Pomeroy himself,
+it is not much more easy to form any accurate calculation. That he did not
+wish to follow the example set him by so many unscrupulous traffickers in
+female virtue, and drive away at once from his presence the woman whose
+life he had poisoned, is only too certain. That he had no intention of
+making her legally his own by marriage, his own tongue had declared. It
+only remains to believe that he held towards the poor girl some sort of
+tiger mixture of love and hate, which would not consent to make her happy
+in the only manner which could secure that end, and which yet would not
+consent to part with her at any demand or upon any terms. Other than she
+was, to him, she could not be: as she was, she seemed to minister to some
+unholy but actual need of his nature; and he held her to himself with an
+evil tenacity which really seemed to afford a new study in psychology.
+Circumstances were close at hand, calculated to show something of the
+completeness of the net drawn around the feet of the young girl, even if
+they did not clearly point out the hand drawing the cord of continued
+restraint.
+
+Miss Hester Pomeroy died suddenly in the winter of 1860, alike guiltless
+and ignorant of the evil which had taken place under the roof which owned
+her as its mistress, regretted by her brother with as much earnest feeling
+as he had the capacity of bestowing upon so undemonstrative a relation, and
+sincerely mourned by the forced dweller beneath that roof, to whom her
+presence had been a protection in the eyes of the world, and to whose cruel
+lot she had furnished more alleviations than she had herself capacity to
+understand.
+
+With this death, the introduction of a mere housekeeper to take the place
+which she had so worthily filled, the additional loneliness which was
+inevitable when a hired stranger occupied her room, and the certainty that
+the last excuse of propriety for her remaining was removed,--it may be
+supposed that the struggle in the mind of the poor girl began anew, and
+raged with redoubled violence. The desire to be freed from the presence and
+the power of her destroyer had by that time grown to be an absorbing
+thought, ever present with her, and worthy of any possible sacrifice to
+give it reality. Any _possible_ sacrifice: to poor Eleanor Hill, sacrifices
+which many others would have embraced without a moment's hesitation, seemed
+literal madness. The certainty of penury and the probability of open shame
+pressed her close; and she could not shake off the double fetter. Her
+tyrant would give her no release; and she succumbed to her living death
+once more.
+
+Months longer of weary waiting for deliverance, every spark of love died
+out from her heart, and yet soul and body alike enslaved. Oh, God of all
+the suffering!--how often has this been, with no visible hand to deliver,
+with no pen to chronicle! Months, and then came what seemed the opportunity
+of the poor girl's life.
+
+It will be remembered that Nicholas Hill, at his dying hour, spoke of his
+only relatives, and even those removed by several degrees, residing on the
+Pacific coast. One of these, William Barnes, a distant cousin, and a man of
+forty, who owned a comfortable ranch near Sacramento, came on to the East
+in the summer of 1861, bringing his wife, and in one of his visits to
+Philadelphia casually heard of the whereabouts of the orphaned daughter of
+his relative. Within a day or two following he pursued his information by
+driving out to the Schuylkill and calling upon Eleanor, in the absence of
+the doctor as it chanced. Half an hour's conversation satisfied the
+large-hearted Californian that the young girl was unhappy, from whatever
+cause; ten minutes more drew from her the information that all the property
+left her by her father had melted away in unfortunate speculations, though
+of course they won no way towards the other and more terrible secret; and
+the next ten minutes sufficed him to offer her a home, as a relative and
+companion to his wife, at his pleasant ranch in the Golden State. Girls
+were scarce in California, he said; girls as handsome as Eleanor were
+scarce in any quarter of the globe; and if she would accept his invitation
+they would astonish all his neighbors a little, on their arrival out, while
+she could select at will among fifty stalwart fellows, with plenty of
+money, any day when she might fancy a husband.
+
+Here was hope--here was deliverance. How eagerly Eleanor Hill grasped at it
+can only be known by the wretch who has once been so nearly drowned that
+the last gasp was on his lip, and then found a helping hand stretched out
+for his rescue--or that other wretch who has wandered for hours over a
+trackless waste and then found a landmark at the moment when he was ready
+to lie down and die! William Barnes was to leave New York on his return to
+California within a fortnight: he would inform his wife of the arrangement,
+and she would be delighted with the thought of finding a companion; and on
+the morning of the sailing of the steamer Eleanor would appear, to fill the
+state-room already engaged.
+
+Somewhat to the surprise of the escaping prisoner, and immeasurably to her
+joy, when that evening, with an expression on her lip that was nearer to
+triumph than any which had rested there during all the four years of her
+sinful slavery--Dr. Philip Pomeroy neither threatened her with poverty nor
+exposure as he had before done (perhaps because he felt that when under Mr.
+Barnes' protection the former would be beyond his power and the latter of
+little consequence in a State so far removed as California) nor even
+seriously opposed her accepting the offer made her. At last, then, the
+cruel heart had relented, her shameful dependence was at an end, and the
+reformation of her life could find its late beginning.
+
+Three days later came a letter from New York, from William Barnes,
+reiterating what had been said personally, and accompanied by the
+indorsement of the arrangement by Mrs. Barnes. The last shadow of doubt,
+then, was removed out of the way, and the young girl's moderate
+preparations for removal went on with new vigor. One hundred dollars in
+money was all that she asked of her guardian for these preparations, and
+that sum was accorded without hesitation or comment. On the morning of the
+sailing of the steamer she left Philadelphia by the early train, the doctor
+himself bringing her down to the depot in his carriage, and bidding her
+good-bye with a word of kind regret, and a kiss which seemed chaste enough
+for that of a brother. Her small array of baggage had preceded her, and was
+no doubt already within the hold of the vessel that was to bear her to the
+Pacific, to a renewed life, and an opportunity of gathering up the broken
+threads of lost happiness.
+
+The steamer, the old Northern Light, of such varying fortunes, was to sail
+at two. At half-past twelve, the carriage containing Eleanor Hill dashed
+down to the foot of Warren Street, among all that crush of carriages,
+baggage-wagons, foot-people with valises and carpet-bags, idlers,
+policemen, pickpockets, United States Mail vans, weeping women, whining
+children, and insatiate shakers of human hands, that has attended the
+departure of every California steamer since the first ploughed her ocean
+way towards the land of gold. Mr. Barnes had promised to meet her at the
+gangway or on shipboard, but neither on the dock nor on deck could she
+discover him. One o'clock was long past, and Eleanor had grown sick at
+heart under the idea that some mistake as to the steamer must have been
+made, when from the gangway she saw a carriage drive up and her new
+protector alight from it. He was assisting out a lady who could be no other
+than his wife; and the young girl, fairly overjoyed, ran down the plank to
+meet and welcome them. The lady, who was just starting up the plank as
+Eleanor reached the foot of it, did not notice her, but continued her
+ascent: William Barnes did see her, and allowing his wife to proceed alone,
+he seized her arm and drew her hurriedly away down the pier, and beyond
+ear-shot. Eleanor noticed that his face seemed flushed, and his whole
+demeanor agitated; but she was far from being prepared for the startling
+intelligence that burst from his lips, interlarded with oaths and
+expressions of honest indignation. The generous-hearted Californian was, in
+truth, very nearly beside himself with shame and mortification. Eleanor
+could not accompany his wife and himself to California, after all! And the
+story of the disappointment, though a little mixed up with those energetic
+expressions and once interrupted by the necessity of the enraged man's
+pausing to throw into the dock a package of fruit which his wife had just
+been purchasing for her comfort on the voyage (the porter who brought it
+being very nearly included in that sacrifice to Neptune), the story, in
+spite of all these hindrances, was far too quickly told; and every word,
+after the first which revealed her fate, fell upon the heart of the poor
+girl as if it had been the blow of a hammer smiting her living flesh.
+
+Up to that morning--the Californian said--his wife had seemed not only
+willing to accept Eleanor's society, but highly pleased at the prospect.
+Her ticket had been bought and various presents selected by Mrs. Barnes'
+own hands, for the comfort of their guest on the route and in her new home.
+That morning, and not more than two hours before, the weather in the
+matrimonial horizon, never entirely reliable in the latitude of Mrs.
+Barnes, had changed entirely. On coming into the hotel from some business
+calls, among them a visit to the Post Office (though Mr. Barnes thought,
+very naturally, that the latter place could have nothing to do with the
+sudden barometric variation)--she had suddenly declared to him that "he
+might as well go down to the office and countermand the order for Miss
+Hill's ticket and save the money; as if she [Miss Hill] went to California
+with him on the steamer that day, she [Mrs. Barnes] would not stir one step
+but stay in New York." Inquiry and even demand had failed to secure any
+explanation of this strange and sudden veering of the marital weathercock;
+and expostulation and even entreaty, with full representations of the
+contemptible position in which he would be placed by any change in the
+arrangements at that hour, had failed to secure any modification of the
+sentence. She wanted no strangers in her house, or in her company on board
+ship; and she would not have any--that was flat! If Eleanor Hill went to
+California, _she_ remained! A full-blown domestic quarrel, lasting with
+different degrees of gusty violence for nearly an hour, had been the
+result; and that other result had followed which nearly always follows when
+husband and wife commence discussion of any matter seriously affecting the
+feelings (or whims) of the latter--the husband had succumbed, the
+arrangement had been definitely broken off, and the state-room which the
+young girl was to have occupied was no doubt by that time in the occupancy
+of a man with a red beard, long boots, a broad hat and a gray blanket!
+
+Poor Eleanor Hill!--it seemed too hard, indeed--this being plunged back
+again into the pit of helpless sin and self-reproach, at every effort made
+for extrication!
+
+There is a legend told of the great well in the court-yard of one of the
+old English castles, at the period of the Parliamentary wars, which comes
+into mind when the cruel facts of her life are remembered. Sir Hugh, the
+Cavalier, had seen his castle surprised, taken and sacked by the
+Cromwellian troopers, guided and led on by a roundhead churl who owed him
+gratitude instead of ill-service--had been wounded and made prisoner, while
+the females of his family were maltreated and the pictures that made half
+his ancestral pride stabbed and hacked in pieces by the ruffians who could
+not enough outrage the living members of his race. Then the tide of fortune
+had turned; he had once more regained his strong-hold, with manly arms
+around him, and those of his dear ones who had not perished by outrage and
+exposure, once more under his sheltering hand. Then the recreant roundhead
+neighbor fell one day into his hands, and the cruel blood of the Norman
+ancestors who had begun _their_ robbery and rapine on English soil at
+Hastings, rose up in the breast of Sir Hugh and made him for the time a
+very fiend of revenge. The great well had been ruined by the corpses thrown
+into it at the sacking of the castle; and into that well, in spite of his
+struggles, he had the poor wretch lowered by his retainers, then the slight
+rope cut away and the victim left to cling to the slippery stones at the
+edge of the water thirty feet below, unable to climb them, too desperate to
+sink, and wailing out his cries for mercy, while a huge lamp, lowered by
+another rope, showed the whole terrible spectacle to the pitiless eyes that
+dared look down upon it. Then another rope was lowered by the great
+windlass, within reach of the struggling wretch, and he was allowed to
+seize hold upon it and climb a little way from the water, under the belief
+that his tyrant had at last relented and that he was to be allowed to save
+himself after that dreadful trial. Then, when he had climbed for a few feet
+from the black ooze beneath him, the rope was lowered away and the poor
+wretch again submerged, to shriek, and wail, and climb again, and to be
+again dropped back at the moment of transient hope, until the wearied
+fingers could cling and climb no longer and the life thus outraged and the
+light which had revealed that sad refinement upon cruelty went horribly out
+together! And how much less cruel was Fate, thus standing guard over the
+life of Eleanor Hill and dropping her back again into her own shame at
+every attempt which she made to escape from it or to rise above it,--than
+the grim and grizzled old Sir Hugh who had been made a human fiend by his
+past wrongs and the bandit blood of his race?
+
+There was genuine regret blended with the anger and shame on the honest
+face of William Barnes, as he made that confession which dashed all the
+hopes of the young girl,--that he _dared not_ take her to California. But
+who shall describe the expression of hopeless sorrow and despondency which
+dwelt upon hers at that moment? Yet despondency was unwise as struggle was
+unavailing. This, too, must be borne, as a part of the penalty of--no, we
+cannot write the word "guilt"--the penalty of being unfortunate and abused!
+The Californian took the privilege of blood, to urge the acceptance of such
+a sum from his well-filled wallet as would enable her to replace the
+clothing and other articles in her trunks, then too late to remove from the
+hold of the vessel,--bade her good-bye and sprung on board just as the last
+call was given. The poor outcast mustered courage to speak to a hackman as
+the steamer moved away that she had so lately hoped was to bear her to a
+more hospitable land and a better life; and half an hour later she was
+speeding back towards Philadelphia on the Camden and Amboy boat; with
+strange thoughts running through her mind but happily finding no lodgment
+there, that under some circumstances of desertion and despair there could
+not be such a terrible crime in slipping quietly overboard and going to a
+dreamless sleep in the cool, placid water.
+
+Had Eleanor Hill possessed that energy the want of which has been so many
+times before deplored, she would have sought out another home, though in
+the most miserable alley of the overcrowded city, before returning yet
+more disgraced to that place of misery once abandoned. But she lacked that
+energy, and perhaps her coming life was foredoomed, as the past had been.
+That night the bars of her cage closed again upon her. Dr. Philip Pomeroy
+received her in all kindness, with some expressions of pleased surprise and
+a few sharp epithets hurled at the man who could be weak enough to change
+his mind in that manner at the bidding of a woman. But there was something
+in his tone and demeanor which left the girl in doubt whether he was really
+so much surprised as he pretended; and later developments were rapidly
+approaching which made the doubt more tenable.
+
+Among the acquaintances formed by Eleanor Hill in the early days of her
+residence under the roof of Dr. Pomeroy, had been the family of Robert
+Brand, which the doctor visited (as he did many others in the neighborhood)
+both as friend and medical attendant. In those days she had been visited by
+Elsie Brand and her brother, and had visited them in return. Gradually all
+intimacy between Elsie and herself had ceased, as that great change, known
+only to herself and two others, affected the whole tenor of her life. But
+the friendship at that time formed with Carlton Brand had never weakened,
+and it perhaps grew the stronger from the hour when each became satisfied
+that no warmer personal interest would ever rise in the breast of the
+other. Perhaps Carlton Brand, to some extent a man of the world, and a
+close student of character by virtue of his profession, may have formed his
+opinions, long before 1861, of the relations existing between the doctor
+and his ward; but if so, he had not a thought of blame or any depreciation
+of respect for the poor girl on account of it; and during all those years,
+if he indeed harbored such suspicions, he had no means of verifying them,
+for Eleanor Hill's lips had been and remained quite as closely sealed to
+him as to others.
+
+Between Dr. Philip Pomeroy and the lawyer had always existed, since the
+young girl had been an inmate of the house, an antagonism which could not
+well be mistaken. No open rupture had taken place, in the knowledge of any
+acquaintance of either; but they never met without exchanging looks which
+told of mutual dislike and distrust. Within the three years between 1858
+and 1861 that antagonism, as even the unobservant girl could see, had
+markedly increased, so that even in his own house the doctor, when he came
+upon him, seldom addressed a word to his unwelcome guest. Had she known
+that in the investigations which followed the failure of the Dunderhaven
+Coal and Mining Company, in the later days of the great commercial crash of
+1857-8, Carlton Brand had been one of the counsel employed to prosecute
+that great swindle in which her own fortune had been swallowed up with
+hundreds of others,--had she known this, we say, she might have imagined
+some reason for this increase of dislike which was certainly not founded
+upon jealousy. But she would not have guessed, even then, one tithe of the
+causes for deadly and life-long hatred which lay between two men of
+corresponding eminence in two equally liberal professions. It is not
+possible, at this stage of the narration, to explain what were those
+causes, eventually so certain to develop themselves.
+
+On the eve of her attempted transit to California, of which we have already
+seen the melancholy failure, Eleanor Hill wrote but one letter of farewell,
+and that letter was addressed to Carlton Brand. On her way homeward from
+her great disappointment, she paused in the city to drop a pencil note
+written on board the steamboat; and that was also to Carlton Brand,
+informing him of her return. No reply was made to the latter note, for
+three days: then the lawyer called upon her one day during the professional
+absence of the doctor. He had been absent, at the city of New York and
+still farther eastward, for more than a week previous. He had returned from
+the commercial metropolis only the day before, and had taken the very
+earliest moment to acknowledge the reception of her missive and to express
+his sympathy in her disappointment--perhaps something more.
+
+After a few moments of conversation on that unfortunate affair, the lawyer
+remarked that he had chanced to stop at the same hotel in New York,
+patronized by Mr. Barnes and his wife, and having some recollection of the
+face of the former, from old Philadelphia rencontres, had made the
+acquaintance of both. He had known nothing whatever of the intention of
+Eleanor to accompany them to the Pacific coast, or even that any
+relationship existed between herself and William Barnes. But Mrs. Barnes
+had "cottoned to him" a little, apparently, he had been the possessor of a
+few spare hours, and he had become her companion and escort on some of her
+shopping excursions when Mr. Barnes was otherwise employed. He had been her
+escort on the morning of the day on which she sailed, and after her return
+from the Post-office had been present at her opening of several letters,
+over one of which she fell into a storm of rage requiring an apology for
+such an exposure before a comparative stranger. As a part of that apology,
+she had handed him the letter, bearing the Philadelphia post-mark; and
+inadvertently, as he then supposed, but providentially, as he afterwards
+saw reason to believe, he had kept the letter in his hands, dropped it into
+his pocket with his newspaper, and forgotten to return it until he had
+parted from the enraged woman and left the hotel. It was only after his
+return to Philadelphia and reception of the two notes advising him of
+Eleanor's intended departure and her disappointment, that he had been able
+to connect that letter with any one in whom he possessed a personal
+interest.
+
+Eleanor Hill had been gradually growing paler during this recital; and she
+was chalky white and almost ready to faint, when at that stage the lawyer
+paused and handed her a letter taken from his pocket, with the inquiry, "if
+she knew that handwriting." The letter was very brief, but very expressive,
+and ran as follows--the words being faithfully copied from the shameful
+original, lying at the writer's hand at this moment:
+
+                                    PHILADELPHIA, ---- --, 1861.
+
+     MADAM:--I have accidentally learned that arrangements have
+     been made by your husband and yourself, to take a young lady
+     back with you to your home in California, on your return.
+     When I tell you that I knew your husband and his family many
+     years ago, you will understand my motive for taking part in
+     what is apparently none of my business. If the report is
+     true, that you do so intend, you have been shamefully
+     deceived and imposed upon. The young lady, whose name I need
+     not mention, has been for years the mistress of the man with
+     whom she is living; and you can judge for yourself the
+     policy of introducing such a person into your household. I
+     have no means of judging whether your husband is or is not
+     acquainted with the real character of the lady; but any
+     doubt on that subject you can have no difficulty in solving
+     for yourself. I have preferred to address you instead of
+     him, with this warning, because in the event of his really
+     being aware of all the circumstances, any communication to
+     him would of course never have reached your eyes. With the
+     highest esteem and regard for yourself, for your husband and
+     his family, I am (only concealing my real name, for the
+     present, from motives which I hope you will readily
+     appreciate,) yours, obediently,
+
+                                        D. T. M.
+
+"My God!--yes, I know that handwriting!" sobbed Eleanor Hill, covering her
+eyes with both hands, after glancing over the precious epistle.
+
+"So I feared!" said Carlton Brand.
+
+"Oh, how can any man be so cruel!" continued the poor girl.
+
+"How could he dare to utter such a falsehood?" said the lawyer, glancing
+closely at the young girl meanwhile. Her face, that had the moment before
+been pale, was now one flush of crimson, and it seemed as if the very veins
+would burst with the pressure of shamed and indignant blood. Carlton Brand
+saw, and if he had before doubted, he doubted no longer. He spoke not
+another word. But the instant after, at last goaded beyond all endurance,
+Eleanor Hill started to her feet, and said:
+
+"Carlton Brand, I believe that I have but one friend in the world, and you
+are that friend. I have tried to keep my shame from you, because I could
+not bear to forfeit your good opinion. You know all, now, but do not
+believe me guilty and wicked! That man--"
+
+"I do not believe you guilty, Eleanor, whatever may be the errors into
+which you have been dragged by that worst devil out of torment!" he
+interrupted her.
+
+"Expose that man to the world, then, or kill him! Do not let my shame stand
+in the way! I can bear any thing, to see him punished as he deserves, for
+this last cruel deed!" The girl was for the moment beside herself, and she
+little thought, just then, what was the penalty she braved! It seemed that
+Carlton Brand better appreciated the peril, or that some other weighty
+consideration chained his limbs and his spirit, for his was now the flushed
+face, and he made none of those physical movements which the avenger
+inevitably assumes, even if beneath no other eye than God's, when he
+determines upon a course of action involving exposure and possible danger.
+He seemed to tremble, but not with anxiety: his was rather the quiver of
+inertiae than any nobler incitement.
+
+"Expose him?--kill him?" he gasped rather than said. "You do not know what
+you ask, Eleanor! I cannot!--dare not--"
+
+"_Dare_ not?" echoed Eleanor Hill, her face that had ordinarily so little
+pride or courage in it, now expressing wonder not unmingled with contempt.
+For the first time, she saw the countenance of that man who had seemed to
+her almost a demi-god, convulsed with pain and shame; and the sad wonder
+that was almost pity grew in her eyes, as within a moment after, moved by
+her confidence and assured by it that he need fear no danger of betrayal,
+Carlton Brand entrusted her with the secret of that skeleton in his mental
+closet which made him powerless against the bold, unscrupulous and
+determined Philip Pomeroy. Each had the most dangerous confidence of the
+other, then; and each realized, if nothing more, a certain painful
+satisfaction in knowing that the burthen was not thenceforth to be borne
+entirely without sympathy. But to neither did there appear any hope of
+unravelling a villany which seemed to both so monstrous.
+
+All this took place in the summer of 1861, it will be remembered; and
+between that time and the period at which we have seen Eleanor Hill
+kneeling piteously before Nathan Bladesden and afterwards greeting Carlton
+Brand with such a sympathy of shame and sorrow,--nearly two years had
+elapsed. During that time Carlton Brand had seemed to gather more and more
+dislike of the physician, and, as must be confessed, more and more positive
+fear of him; while Dr. Pomeroy had more than once treated poor Eleanor with
+positive bodily indignity for daring to receive his visits at all, though
+he was the last of all her old acquaintances who kept up the least pretence
+at intimacy. Finally, for months before the June of 1863, the lawyer had
+ceased to make any visits to the house, except at times when he knew the
+doctor to be absent; and then he stayed but briefly at each infrequent
+call, while one of the female servants, who was devoted to Eleanor, had
+confidential orders from her to keep watch for the sudden coming of the
+doctor, so that this man, who seemed born to be a Paladin, could skulk away
+by one door or the other and avoid a meeting! A most pitiable exhibition,
+truly!--but the record must be made a faithful one, even in this melancholy
+instance.
+
+Since Eleanor Hill's return from her temporary Hegira, for a long period,
+so far as the eye could see no change had taken place in the relations
+existing between the "guardian" and his "ward." Perhaps he treated her with
+more coolness than of old; and she may have been more habitually silent,
+while she had become a virtual recluse and seldom passed beyond the doors
+of that fated dwelling. Whatever the weakness which the fact may have shown
+on her part, whatever of persistent evil on his,--the old intimacy of crime
+had been maintained, though the love once existing in the breast of the
+young girl had long changed to loathing, and there was every reason to
+believe that the ignobler passion urging on her destroyer had quite as long
+before become satiety.
+
+This up to a certain period. One day during the winter of 1862, Nathan
+Bladesden, a Quaker merchant of the city, gray-headed, eminently
+respectable and a widower, had found occasion to call at the residence of
+Dr. Pomeroy. In the host's absence he had been received by his ward; and
+the blind god, ever fantastic in his dealings, had smitten the calm, strong
+man with a feeling not to be overcome. He had called again and again,
+sometimes in the doctor's absence and sometimes when he was at home; but
+the object of his pursuit had evidently been Eleanor Hill. His visits had
+seemed to be rather pleasing than otherwise to the master of the house, who
+could not fail to see towards what they tended; and that he did see and
+approve had seemed to be evident from his entire withdrawal of himself from
+Eleanor's private society, from the time of the second visit. The poor
+girl's heart had leaped with joy, at the possibility of union with a noble
+man, that should finally remove her from her false position and make her
+past life only a sad remembrance; and those precisians may blame her who
+will, while all must sorrow for the circumstances which seemed to render
+the deception necessary,--that she had not shuddered, as she possibly
+should have done, at the idea of marriage without full confidence. Two
+months before, while April was laughing and weeping over the earth, the
+grave, unimpeachable man, who already held so much of her respect and could
+so easily induce a much warmer feeling of her nature,--had asked her to be
+his honored wife and the mistress of his handsome house in the city; and
+the harrassed girl, the goal of a life of peace once more in sight, had
+answered him that she would be his wife at any moment if he would consent
+to accept the remnant of a heart which had been cruelly tortured and to
+make no inquiries as to a past which must ever remain buried. To these
+terms the Quaker had consented; this had been Eleanor Hill's betrothal; and
+with such a redeeming prospect in view had her life remained, until that
+fatal day of June when the knowledge that her whole secret was betrayed
+burst upon her in the presence and the reproaches of Nathan Bladesden. What
+passed between them has already been recorded, at a stage of this narration
+antecedent to the long but necessary resume just concluded; and we have
+seen how, only a few minutes after, Carlton Brand held in his hand the
+letter of her second denunciation, and what were his brief but burning
+words as he commenced reading.
+
+"Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and he will find it!"
+
+He read through the letter without speaking another word, though there were
+occasional convulsive twitches of his face which showed how his heart was
+stirred to indignation by the perusal.
+
+"You are sure, are you not?" Eleanor asked, when he had finished.
+
+"Just as sure as I was in the other case. The deed is the most black and
+damning that I have ever known; and if I had before been an infidel I
+should be converted by the knowledge that such an incarnate scoundrel must
+roast in torment!"
+
+"And what am I to do?" asked the girl, with that helpless and irresolute
+air which is so pitiable.
+
+"Heaven help us both! I do not know!" was the reply, with the proud head
+drooping lower on the breast than it should ever have been bowed by any
+feeling except devotion.
+
+"I cannot remain here after this!" she said. "Can you not take me away--do
+something for me? Does the--do the same obstacles stand in your way that
+stood there two years ago?"
+
+"No--not the same, but worse!" answered the lawyer, bitterly. "Oh, there
+never was a child so helpless as I am at this moment. I have wealth, but I
+cannot use it for your benefit without exposing you to final and complete
+ruin in public opinion. And for myself--poor Eleanor, I pity you, God
+knows I do, but I pity myself still worse. I came to tell you that I am
+going away this very day,--that I shall not again set foot within my
+father's house--perhaps never again while I live,--that my spirit is
+crushed and my heart broken."
+
+"What has happened? tell me! The old trouble, Carlton?" asked the young
+girl, in a tone of true commiseration.
+
+"Yes, the old trouble, and worse!" was the reply, followed by a rapid
+relation of the events of the morning, and concluding with these hopeless
+words: "An hour since, I parted with the woman I loved and hoped to make my
+own. To-morrow my name may be a scoff and a by-word in the mouth of every
+man who knows me. I cannot and will not meet this shame, which is not
+hidden like your own, but will be blown abroad by the breath of thousands
+of personal acquaintances, and perhaps made the subject of jest in the
+public newspapers. Think how those who have hated and perhaps feared
+me--criminals whom I have brought to justice and thieves whom I have foiled
+in their plunderings,--will gloat over the knowledge that I can trouble
+them no more--that I have fallen lower, in the public eye, than they have
+ever been! I am going away, where no man who has ever looked upon my face
+and known it, can look upon it again!"
+
+The tone in which Carlton Brand spoke was one of utter despondency and
+abandonment. There was nothing of the sharp, vigorous ring of that speech
+which contains and declares a purpose: the words fell stolid and lifeless
+as hung the head and drooped the arms of the utterer in her presence with
+whom he held a sad community of disgrace.
+
+"I understand you, and I believe that your lot is even worse than my own!"
+said Eleanor Hill, after a moment of silence. "You do right in going away,
+and you could not help me if you stayed. Nothing can help me, I suppose. Do
+not think of me any more. I can bear what is to come, quite as well as I
+have borne all that is past!" She had been nodding her head mechanically
+when she commenced speaking, and at every nod it sank lower and lower until
+the face was hidden from the one friend whom she was thus losing beyond
+recall.
+
+At that moment there was a rapid foot on the stairway above, and the house
+servant whom Eleanor had managed to keep in her interest spoke quickly at
+the door.
+
+"If you please, Miss, doctor's carriage is coming through the gate from the
+Darby road. Thought you would like to know it." And as rapidly as she had
+come down, she ascended again to her employment in the attic.
+
+"Oh, Carlton, you must not be seen here, now!" exclaimed the poor girl, her
+face all fright and anxiety, and herself apparently forgotten. Something in
+that look and tone smote the heart of Carlton Brand more deeply than it had
+ever been smitten by the sorrow and disgrace of his own situation; and with
+that feeling of intense compassion a new thought was born within him.
+"Yesterday I could not have done it--to-day I can!" he muttered, so low
+that the girl could not understand his words; then he said aloud, and
+speaking very rapidly:
+
+"I cannot meet him, and you shall not! Throw something on your head and
+over your shoulders, quick; and come with me!"
+
+For one instant the young girl gazed into his face as if in doubt and
+hesitation; but the repetition of a single word decided her:
+
+"Quick!"
+
+A glow of delight and surprise that had long been a stranger to her face,
+broke over it; she ran to the little bed-room adjoining the apartment in
+which they were speaking, threw on a black-silken mantle and a sober little
+hat that hung there, and was ready in an instant. In another Carlton Brand
+had seized her arm, hurried her out of the room, down the stairs, through
+the hall and out into the garden which lay at the north side of the house
+and extended down almost to the edge of the causeway. Dr. Pomeroy was
+driving down the lane leading from the Darby road, and was consequently on
+the opposite side of the house from the fugitives. Fugitives they may well
+have been called, though perhaps so strange an elopement had never before
+been planned--an elopement over a comparatively open country in the broad
+light of a summer noon, by two persons who held no tie of blood and no
+warmer feeling for each other than friendship, and who had not dreamed of
+such an act even five minutes before.
+
+But those operations the most suddenly conceived are not always the worst
+executed. Necessity, if not genius, is often a successful imitator of that
+quality. When the doctor drove up at the gate in front of the house, his
+"ward" and her new companion were just dodging out of the tall bean-poles
+and shrubbery, over the garden fence, to the edge of the meadow; by the
+time he had fairly entered the house they were on the causeway and
+partially sheltered by the elders that ran along it and fringed the bank of
+the singing brook; and long before he could have discovered the flight and
+made such inquiries of the servants as might have directed his gaze in that
+direction, the lawyer in his strangely soiled and unaccustomed attire, and
+the girl so slightly arrayed for starting out on her travels in the world,
+were within the circle of woods before mentioned, stretching northward to
+the great road leading down to the city.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+     DR. POMEROY'S PURPOSED PURSUIT--A PLAIN QUAKER WHO USED VERY
+     PLAIN LANGUAGE--ALMOST A FIGHT--HOW MRS. BURTON HAYLEY
+     CONSOLED HER DAUGHTER, AND HOW MARGARET REVEALED THE PAST--A
+     COMPACT--DR. POMEROY'S CANINE ADVENTURE--OLD ELSPETH ONCE
+     MORE--A SEARCH THAT FOUND NOTHING.
+
+
+It will be noticed that with the exception of the somewhat extended glance
+at the earlier fortunes of Eleanor Hill, all the occurrences thus far
+recorded, and affecting the after lives of so many different people, have
+occupied not more than two or three hours of a single June day. The Parcae
+were evidently very busy on that day of June, repaying the past and
+arranging the future; and not less than three scenes of this veritable
+history yet remain, occurring on the same day, a little later, but within
+the same space as to distance, that has been covered by those preceding.
+
+The first of these is that presented in the house of Dr. Pomeroy, ten
+minutes after he had entered it, and when two or three sharp inquiries
+after his "ward," whom he failed to find in her room, had elicited from one
+of the frightened servants the information not only that she had left the
+house, through the garden, with hat and mantle and in great haste,--but in
+the company of the man of all the world towards whom the medical gentleman
+entertained that deadliest hatred which would have made his drugs safe and
+reliable had he been attending him in a dangerous sickness! He might not
+have known the fact quite so soon, from any of the other servants, as he
+certainly would not have discovered the truth under a twelvemonth from the
+one who had acted as Eleanor's sentinel on the watch tower; but it chanced
+that he possessed one creature of his own, who had been in the habit of
+playing spy around the house generally and making very considerable
+additions to her wages from the "appropriation for secret service"; and
+from that open-mouthed person, who seemed to see with that organ as well as
+with the eyes, he had no difficulty in extracting all the truth that could
+be known, in an inconceivably minute fraction of time.
+
+The rage which broke out in the face of Dr. Philip Pomeroy and set his eyes
+ablaze, at about that period, would not have been a pleasant thing to look
+upon, for any person liable to the penalties and inflictions which that
+rage denoted. For he was a sharp, keen, calculating man, jumping to a
+conclusion with great rapidity, and seldomer missing the fact than most men
+under corresponding circumstances. Eleanor Hill was gone--had left his
+house forever, so far as her own will had any power: he knew the fact
+intuitively. She would never have dared to cross the threshold with Carlton
+Brand, knowing the hatred which he held against that man of all others, if
+she had intended to place herself again in a position where she could feel
+his displeasure. Then the doctor knew, as the reader may by this time be
+inclined to suspect, reasons why the young girl would have been much more
+likely to leave his house forever, that day, than at any previous time of
+her sojourn, if aid and protection chanced to offer themselves. They _had_
+offered themselves, in the shape of the lawyer: they had been embraced; and
+the good physician, hurling a few outward curses at the servant who had
+afforded him the intelligence, at all the other servants, at the house and
+every thing within it,--mentally included in his malediction every patient
+who had assisted in luring him away from his home that day, while such a
+spoil was being made of his "domestic happiness."
+
+The worst of the affair--and the doctor saw it--was that Eleanor Hill had
+attained her majority years before, and that he had no power whatever to
+compel her return, except that power still existed in the impending threat
+of public shame. But he was wronged--robbed--outraged! He would pursue the
+fugitive--find her--force her to abandon her new protection--drag her by
+main force from any arm that dared to interpose! If he failed, he would
+make such a general desolation in family peace, in the quiet neighborhood
+lying beyond that side the Schuylkill, as had never been known within the
+memory of the "oldest inhabitant"--such an expose, convulsion and general
+explosion as would put out of countenance any thing in the power of the
+advancing rebel Lee!
+
+All this in the two minutes following the knowledge of Eleanor's flight.
+The ostler had just led round his heated horse to the stable, before the
+discovery; and that functionary had orders shot at him from the back
+piazza, in a very loud and commanding voice, to throw the harness on
+another of his fastest trotters, and have him round at the gate in less
+than half a minute, before his double-seated buggy, on pain of being flayed
+alive with his own horse-whip. It may be supposed that under such
+incitement the stable official handled strap and buckle with unusual
+dexterity; and in very little more time than that allowed by the
+regulation, the vehicle dashed round to the gate, and the enraged owner
+stood whip in hand, ready to leap into it and urge a pursuit yet madder
+than had been the elopement. But Dr. Philip Pomeroy, having prepared to
+ride at once and with all diligence, found an unexpected hindrance, and did
+not pursue his journey until a much more advantageous start had been
+allowed to the fugitives.
+
+For while the doctor was preparing to spring into his vehicle, down the
+lane from the Darby road dashed the buggy and pair of Nathan Bladesden,
+which had so lately taken that direction--dashed down, driven at such speed
+as flung the fine horses into a lather of foam, and utterly belied the calm
+reputation of the Quaker merchant. Nor was there any thing of the
+deliberation of the sect in the jerk with which he brought up the flying
+team by throwing them both back upon their haunches, or the suddenness with
+which he sprang from the buggy, leaving the horses unfastened, and strode
+to the open gate.
+
+The rencontre was most inopportune and vexatious to the doctor, to whom
+minutes just then were hours; and he may have had motives for wishing, that
+day, not to be placed beneath an eye so sharpened by age and experience.
+But Nathan Bladesden was a man of wealth and a power in the city, and not
+even Dr. Pomeroy could afford to treat him with rudeness by driving away at
+the very moment of his arrival. He smoothed his bent brows, therefore, and
+accosted him with every demonstration of interest.
+
+"Glad to see you, Mr. Bladesden! You seem to have been driving fast! But
+you come just in time, for I was about starting in a hurry to--to see a
+patient."
+
+Had Dr. Pomeroy been aware of all the circumstances connected with the
+morning call of the merchant--the shameful revelations made in the little
+room overhead--the agony of spirit in which the Quaker had forced himself
+away from the presence of Eleanor Hill, deserting her utterly and leaving
+her in such a state of suffering as made suicide very possible--and the
+continued and ever-deepening conflict which had since been going on in his
+mind, as he dashed along roads that led him nowhere, his horses foaming in
+the heat but the heat in his brain a thousand times more intense, until at
+last he had driven back determined to drag the young girl, at every hazard
+and sacrifice, from that moral pest-house which must be sure infection and
+death to her soul,--had Dr. Pomeroy known all this, we say, not even his
+hardy spirit might have been willing to brave the encounter. But he knew
+nothing, and some of the perilous consequences of ignorance followed.
+
+"I did not come to see _thee_, Dr. Philip," replied the Quaker to his
+salutation, passing on meanwhile towards the front door, and something
+short and choppy in his words indicating that he did not wish to open his
+mouth at full freedom. "I saw thy ward, Eleanor Hill, this morning, and I
+am going to see her again."
+
+"Ah, you have been here to-day, then, before? And you are going to see her
+again, after--." It was surprising, for a man of his age and experience,
+how near he came to saying a word too much!
+
+"After receiving _thy letter_?--yes!" answered the Quaker, turning short
+and confronting his quondam host, the restraint on his utterance removed.
+
+"_My_ letter? What do you mean by my letter?" Had any one told Philip
+Pomeroy, half an hour before, that there was a man living who in five words
+could change the color on his cheek, he would have reckoned the informant a
+liar and grossly insulted him. Yet so it was; and the flush, though it was
+already growing into that of defiant anger, had not been such when it began
+to rise.
+
+"Thee does not seem to understand me, Dr. Philip," said the Quaker, his
+words still slow and no point of the sectarian idiom lost, but each
+dropping short and curtly as if a weighty substance falling heavily. "But
+thee will understand me before I am done. Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A
+True Friend'--"
+
+"You lie!" A terrible word, to be flung into the teeth of any man; and
+doubly terrible as hurled from lips then ashy white. For just one instant
+the Quaker's large hands clutched, and he might have been moved to advance
+upon his insulter and avenge Eleanor Hill, himself and all the world, by
+choking the insult from his throat. But if such a thought really moved him,
+he controlled it and merely smote on with his words.
+
+"Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A True Friend,' and thee shall have my
+opinion of it, before I go into that house and remove from thee, at any
+peril that may be necessary, the poor girl thee has disgraced."
+
+"Set a foot nearer that house, if you dare!" was the reply.
+
+"Thee is a base, miserable coward, Dr. Philip!--a scoundrel, a seducer, a
+lying slanderer, the offspring of a female dog of the cur species, a
+disgrace to thy country and thy profession; and if thee knows any more
+hard words that I forget, thee may put them all in on my account."
+
+"Nathan Bladesden, do you think that you will leave this spot alive, after
+using such words to _me_!" and the hands of Philip Pomeroy were clutching
+at his wristbands as if rolling them up to put them out of the way of
+blood! The purpose of attack was reversed: he seemed to be about to spring,
+tiger-like, at the Quaker's throat.
+
+"_Thee_ will not kill me, Dr. Philip, if I do not!" the latter said. "I am
+stronger than thee, and have a better cause. I think I will not touch thee,
+but leave thee to thy Maker, if thee keeps thy hands off; but I have made
+up my mind, if thee touches me, to beat thee until thee has no shape of a
+man--until thee is dead as yonder gate-post. If thee thinks that I will
+not, thee had better try it!"
+
+Dr. Pomeroy did not believe himself a poltroon, nor was he one in that
+sense relating to purely physical courage. And had there been merely
+involved a conflict with that larger, stronger and better-preserved man, in
+which one or the other might suffer severe injury and disfigurement, he
+would have carried out his thought and sprung upon him, beyond a question.
+But something in those slow dropping pellets of compressed rage falling
+from the Quaker's lips, told the medical man (seldom too angry to be subtle
+and cunning), that in the event of a struggle, and the merchant getting the
+upper hand, he would probably carry out his threat and actually beat him to
+death with those heavy fists before any human aid could interpose. And to
+be mangled into a corpse by a Quaker--bah! there was really something in
+the idea, likely to calm blood quite as hot with rage as that of Dr.
+Philip--apart from the slight objection he may have had to being hurried
+into eternity in any way, at that moment. Then another thought struck
+him--a double one: how completely the Quaker would be at fault, searching
+through the house for Eleanor Hill; and how he was himself losing time, in
+that miserable quarrel--time that could never be regained. His horse and
+buggy stood all the while just within the opened gate, where the ostler
+had left it and gone back to his care of the blown animal at the stable;
+and as that important reflection forced itself upon his mind, he turned his
+back short upon the Quaker, strode to his buggy, stepped into it and dashed
+away, only pausing to hurl at his tormentor this one verbal bolt:
+
+"You infernal, snuffling, hypocritical ruffian! I will settle with you for
+all this, when I have more time!"
+
+"Thee had better let the account stand as it does, Dr. Philip, if thee is
+not a fool as well as a scoundrel!" was the reply of the Quaker, but it is
+very doubtful whether the doctor heard half the words. He was already
+flying past the garden palings, at the full speed of his trotter, towards
+the causeway and the Market Street road, on his errand of reclamation and
+perhaps of vengeance. Then Nathan Bladesden pursued his way into the house,
+looking for the lost sheep, with that ill success rendered certain by
+Eleanor's flight, and that disappointment which often attends noble
+resolutions embraced one moment too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The second of the supplementary scenes of that day was presented in the
+parlors of the residence of Mrs. Burton Hayley--that parlor into which the
+reader had only a doubtful glance a few hours earlier, when events which
+seemed likely to affect the life-long interests of some of the residents of
+that house, were occurring on the piazza.
+
+Rich furniture in rosewood and purple damask; a piano of modern
+manufacture, the open bank of keys showing the soft coolness of
+mother-of-pearl; carpets of English tapestry; pier glasses that might have
+given reflection to the colonel of a Maine regiment or one of the sons of
+Anak; tables and mantels strewn but not overloaded with delicate bronzes,
+gems in porcelain and Bohemian glass, and articles of fanciful bijouterie;
+on one of the mantels--that of the front room--Cleopatra in _ormolu_
+upholding the dial of a clock with one hand, but with the other applying
+to her voluptuously-rounded bosom the asp so soon to put a period to all
+her connection with time;--what need of more than this to indicate the home
+in which Margaret Hayley had passed the last few years of her young life
+and approached that crisis so momentous to her future happiness? Yet one
+thing more must be noticed--the stand of rosewood elaborately carved, set
+not far from the centre of the front parlor, and bearing on it a large
+Bible in the full luxury of russet morocco and gold, with massive gold
+clasps and a heavy marker in silk and bullion dependent from amid the
+leaves,--the whole somewhat ostentatiously displayed to the sight of any
+one who first entered the room, as if to say: "There may seem to be pomps
+and vanities in this house, but any such impression would be a mistake:
+this book is the rule by which every thing within it is squared."
+
+On the sofa, wheeled into that corner of the luxurious parlor upon which
+the closed shutter threw the deepest and coolest shadow, lay Margaret
+Hayley, her head buried in the white pillow which some careful hand had
+brought for her, and her thrown-up hands drawing the ends of that pillow
+around her face as if she desired to shut away every sight and every sound.
+Her slight, tall figure seemed, as she lay at length, to be limp and
+unnerved; and there was that in the whole position which seemed to indicate
+that the mental energies, if not the vital ones, had recoiled after being
+cruelly overtasked, and left her alike incapable of thought and motion.
+
+She was not alone, for beside her sat a lady dressed in very thin and light
+but rich and rather showy summer costume, rolling backward and forward in
+her Boston rocker, waving a feather fan of such formidable dimensions that
+its manufacture must have created a sudden rise in the material immediately
+after, and talking all the while with such stately volubility as if she
+believed that the hot air of the June afternoon would be less unendurable
+if kept constantly in motion by the personal windmill of the tongue. This
+was Mrs. Burton Hayley, mother of Margaret, widow of the late Mr. Burton
+Hayley, railroad-contractor, snugly jointured with eight or ten thousand
+per annum, and endowed (as she herself believed, and as we will certainly
+endeavor to believe with her, in charity) with so many of those higher
+gifts and graces of a spiritual order that her wealth had become dross and
+her liberal income rather a thing to be deplored than otherwise. (It may be
+the proper place, here, to say that the gilt Bible on the stand was the
+peculiar arrangement of this lady, and the sign--if so mercantile a word
+may be applied to any thing really demanding all human respect and
+devotion--of that peculiar mental stock in trade which she was to be found
+most ready in exhibiting on all occasions.)
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley was tall--even taller than her daughter; and her form
+had assumed, with advancing years, a fulness which the complimentary would
+have designated as "plump," the irreverent as "stout," and the vulgar as
+"fat." Her face, moulded somewhat after the same fashion as that of
+Margaret, must have been undeniably handsome in youth, though now--the
+truth must be told--it was not a specially lovable face to the acute
+observer. Her dark eyes had still kept their depths of beautiful shadow,
+and her intensely dark hair (though she had married late in girlhood and
+was now fifty) showed neither thinness nor any touch of gray. But the long
+and once classical features had become coarsened a little in the secondary
+formation of adipose particles; the possible paleness of girlhood had given
+place to a slight red flush (especially in that tropical weather) that was
+not by any means becoming to her; and there were all the while two
+conflicting expressions fighting for prominence in her face, so different
+in themselves and so really impossible of amalgamation, that the most rabid
+disciple of "miscegenation" could not have arranged a plan for blending
+them both into one. The outer expression, which seemed somehow to lie as a
+thin transparent strata over the other, indicated pious and resigned
+humility--that feeling which passes by the ordinary accidents and troubles
+of life as merely gentle trials of faith and of no consequence in view of
+the great truth rooted within. The second and inner, which would persist in
+obtruding itself through the transparent mask, was _pride_--pride in its
+most intense and concentrated form--pride in blood, wealth, personal
+appearance, position, every thing belonging to and going to make up that
+marvellous human compound, Mrs. Burton Hayley. The eyes were trained to be
+very subdued and decorous in their expression; but they did so want to
+flash out authority, if not arrogance! The nose was kept always (or
+generally) at the proper subservient level; but it did so itch and tingle
+for the privilege of lifting itself high in air and taking a nasal view,
+from that altitude, of all the world lying below it! It was very evident,
+to any one observing the mother after having examined the daughter's face
+in the clear light of physiognomy, that the latter had derived from her
+maternal progenitor most of that overweening pride which youth and beauty
+yet wore as a crown of glory but age might wear as something much less
+attractive,--and that she must have inherited from her dead father that
+softness, frankness, and that better-developed love-nature which toned down
+in her own all the more decided features of the mother's face and made her
+worthy of affection as well as admiration.
+
+As we have said, Mrs. Burton Hayley was using her tongue with great
+volubility at the moment of her introduction to the attention of the
+reader, though really the mode in which her single auditor kept her head
+buried in the pillow and drew the soft folds around her ears with both
+hands, did not indicate that desire for steady conversation which could
+have made such a continual verbal clatter a thing of necessity. There is
+the more occasion for giving Mrs. Burton Hayley her full opportunity for
+speech, as she has occasion to utter but little hereafter, in this
+connection.
+
+"You should be very thankful, my child, for all that has occurred," the
+voluble woman was saying. "A Power higher than ourselves overrules all
+these affairs much better than we could do; and it is flying in the face of
+Providence to cry and go on over little disappointments."
+
+A pause of one instant, and one instant only, as if in expectation that
+some reply would be vouchsafed; and then the band was again thrown upon the
+driving-wheel--as one of the machinery-tenders in a factory might say,--and
+the human buzz-saw whirled once more.
+
+"I have told you, child, time and again, that you would be punished for
+setting your affections on any person who had not given evidence of a
+changed heart--a man who had not passed from death unto life, but who still
+ran after the pomps and vanities of the world--those pomps and vanities
+which religion teaches us to despise and put away from us." (Oh, Mrs.
+Burton Hayley, why did you not catch a glance, at that moment, of the room
+in which you were sitting, redolent of every luxury within the reach of any
+ordinary wealth, and of your own stately and still comely person, arrayed
+in garments the least possible like those with which people content
+themselves who have really eschewed the "pomps and vanities of the world,"
+either from conscientious humility or that other and much commoner
+motive--the lack of means to continue them!) "You should be very glad that
+you have been providentially delivered from your engagement with an
+unbeliever and a man of the world--a man without principle, I dare say, as
+you have discovered that he is without courage; and all the money there is
+in his family (and they _do_ say that the Brands have not much and never
+have had much!)--all their money, I say, acquired in the disreputable
+practice of the law, so that if this thing had not happened and you had
+been left to depend for subsistence upon his fortune, you might have found
+it all melting away in a moment, as money dishonestly acquired is certain
+to do; for does not the blessed book that I try to make my rule of life,
+say, my child, that moth is certain to corrupt and thieves break through
+and steal whatever has been wrung from the widow and the orphan?"
+
+Margaret Hayley had not replied a word during the whole application of that
+verbal instrument of torture, though it seemed evident from the context
+that some conversation employing the tongues of both must have passed at an
+earlier period of the interview. She had merely writhed in body and groaned
+in spirit, as every moment told her more and more distinctly that in her
+dark hour she had no mother who could understand and sympathize with
+her--that cant phrases and pious generalizations were to be hurled against
+her at that moment when most of all she needed to be treated by that mother
+like a wearied child, drawn home to her bosom and cradled to sleep amid
+soothing words and loving kisses.
+
+But Margaret Hayley did something else than writhe when the accusation of
+having acquired his wealth by dishonesty was cast upon the man whom she had
+worshipped--yes, the man whom she worshipped still, in spite of the one
+terrible defect which seemed to draw an eternal line of separation between
+them. She started up from her recumbent position, her hair dishevelled, her
+eyes red with weeping, and her whole face marked and marred by the anguish
+she had been suffering,--sprang up erect at once, with all her mother's
+pride manifest in voice and gesture, and said:
+
+"Mother, are you a rank hypocrite, or have you neither sense nor memory?"
+
+A strange question, from a daughter to her mother! The reply was not quite
+so strange, and it seemed to have much more of earnest in it than any
+portion of the long tirade she had before been delivering:
+
+"Margaret Hayley, how _dare_ you!"
+
+"We can dare a good many things, when we do not care whether we live or
+die!" was the reply. "And though I have loved and respected you as my
+mother, I do not know that I have ever been afraid of you. Now listen. You
+have hated Carlton Brand, ever since he first came to this house, because
+he did not treat your religious assumptions with quite as much deference as
+you considered proper. He may have been right, or wrong: no matter now, as
+he is out of the way! But you have hated him, and you know it--because I
+loved him--I am not ashamed to own it!--loved him with my whole soul, as I
+believed that he deserved--as any woman _should_ love the man whom she
+expects to take her to his heart!"
+
+"Well, what if I did dislike him? I had a right to do that, I suppose!"
+answered the mother, her voice no longer religiously calm, but rough and
+querulous.
+
+"Do not interrupt me!--hear me out!" said the young girl. "You liked Hector
+Coles for a corresponding reason--because he pretended to fall into all
+your notions, and complimented you on your 'piety' and 'Christian dignity,'
+when he was all the while laughing at you behind your back. You would have
+been pleased to see me discard the man I loved, and marry the man I could
+never love while I lived,--because your own likes and dislikes were in the
+way, and because you believed that in the position of mother-in-law you
+could manage the one and could _not_ manage the other."
+
+"Well, what else, to your mother, Miss Impertinence!" broke in the lady who
+had been so voluble.
+
+"Oh, a great deal more!" answered Margaret, with a manner not very
+different from a sneer. "To-day, since you have known that for one spot on
+a character otherwise so noble, I have broken off all relations with
+Carlton Brand, you have done nothing but sit here and preach me Christian
+resignation in words that your own heart was as steadily denying. When a
+true mother would have tried to console, you have tortured. And you have
+ended all by alleging that Carlton Brand and his father have acquired their
+money dishonorably, because they have both been lawyers,--and that such
+money must be accursed in the hands of any one who holds it."
+
+"I have said so, and I have a right to say so!" echoed the mother. "You may
+let loose your ribald tongue against the author of your being, ungrateful
+girl; but the truth is from heaven, and must be told--wealth obtained in
+any manner by day, upon which a blessing cannot be asked at night, is
+itself accursed, and curses every one who partakes in the use of it."
+
+"And every dollar that has been dishonestly obtained, then, should at once
+be restored to the rightful owner, I suppose--in order to escape the
+curse?" suggested Margaret.
+
+"Every dollar, and at once; for, as the Bible says, the spoiler cometh as a
+thief in the night, and no one can say how soon the judgment may fall!"
+answered the mother, triumphantly and in full confidence that she had at
+last silenced her refractory child by a strictly orthodox quotation.
+
+"How much are we worth, mother?" was the singular question which followed
+this supposed annihilation of all argument.
+
+"Why, you know as well as I do that we have eighty thousand in stocks and
+in bank; and this property and that at Pottsville is believed to be worth
+twenty or thirty thousand more. We are worth, as you call it, more than a
+hundred thousand, and the whole of it will be yours some day--not very long
+first, when I have gone, as I hope and trust I may say, to my reward. You
+are rich, my child, and I am glad to see that you think of these things at
+last, as you may be kept from throwing yourself away _again_."
+
+The voice and whole manner of the mother were much more amiable than they
+had been at any time since the rising of her daughter from the sofa; for
+nothing seemed to restore the tone of her agitated feeling like references,
+from whatever source, to her wealth and position.
+
+"A hundred thousand. There is not nearly enough, then!" The words were half
+muttered, but Mrs. Burton Hayley distinctly heard them. And she saw
+something on the face of the young girl which she by no means understood,
+as the latter drew from her bosom the lower ends of the gold chain
+depending there, and unclasped the back of a rather large and very thick
+locket, the front of which presented a miniature in ivory of the handsome,
+well-whiskered and pleasant-looking Mr. Burton Hayley, her deceased father.
+Though she raised the locket to her lips and kissed it reverently, that
+something on the face had not changed when she took from its unsuspected
+concealment a small slip of newspaper, neatly folded and of size enough to
+contain some twenty or thirty lines of small type. The mother's eyes were
+by this time wide open with astonishment and partial fear that her daughter
+had lost her wits in the agitation of that day. The paper looked old and
+yellow. Margaret unrolled it and said:
+
+"Mother, here is something that I have carried with me night and day for
+five years past. I found it at that time, when clipping old newspapers in
+the attic, for my scrap-book. I marked the date on the back--it is eighteen
+years old, and the paper was a Harrisburgh one of that time. Have you your
+glasses with you, or shall I read it?"
+
+"Why, child, are you crazy? What has that slip of paper to do with the
+subject of which we were talking?"
+
+"Perhaps you can tell quite as well as myself, after I read it," answered
+Margaret. And she moved nearer to the one unshuttered window of the parlor,
+to secure a better light for the small type and dingy paper, the face of
+her mother gradually changing, meanwhile, from the surprise which had
+filled it, to a whiteness which seemed born of terror. Margaret read:
+
+     "SOUTTER AND OTHERS VS. HAYLEY AND OTHERS.--This somewhat
+     remarkable railroad case closed yesterday, and the complaint
+     was dismissed. Judge L----, in granting the motion for a
+     dismissal, took occasion to remark that he had seldom
+     performed a more painful duty. That the railroad company had
+     been defrauded to the extent of not less than eighty
+     thousand dollars by Burton Hayley, the contractor, was one
+     of the conclusions--the learned judge said--in which all
+     would unfortunately agree. But the operation had been
+     managed with great skill, and legal evidence of what was
+     morally certain had not been produced. He should therefore
+     grant the motion, with the regret expressed, and with the
+     hope that in a future prosecution the evidence which was
+     certainly demanded might be forthcoming, and the defrauded
+     company at least find themselves in a position to punish the
+     wrong-doer. We hear it stated, upon authority which seems
+     reliable, that Hayley has heretofore been known as a
+     reliable man, and that he has undoubtedly been urged to
+     steps which he must regret during his whole life, even if
+     justice does not reach him, or conscience compel him to make
+     restitution,--by the demands made upon him in behalf of a
+     ruinously expensive family, and by evil advice which he has
+     no doubt received from the same quarter. Hayley will
+     probably leave Harrisburgh at once, to enjoy what may be
+     left of his ill-gotten gains in some locality where his
+     antecedents are less fully understood."
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley had sunk back into her chair at the moment when Margaret
+read the first words, and she remained silent till the close. Her face was
+white, except that a single red spot burned in the very centre of either
+cheek. Her daughter looked steadily upon her for an instant after she had
+concluded. Still neither spoke. The mother's eyes had in them something of
+that baleful light shown by the orbs of a wild beast when driven to its
+corner; and they, with the crimson spotted cheeks, were not pleasant things
+to look upon. At last Margaret asked:
+
+"Did you ever hear of this before? Was that man my father?"
+
+"What of it? Yes!" The words were nearer spat out than spoken. Margaret
+glanced, perhaps involuntarily, at the ostentatious Bible on its carved
+stand.
+
+"Was that money ever repaid to the railroad company?"
+
+For just one instant the lips of Mrs. Burton Hayley moved as if she was
+about to utter a falsehood little less black than the original crime had
+been. If she had for that instant intended to do so, she thought better of
+it and jerked out: "How should I know? I suppose there is no use in telling
+a lie about it, to _you_! No!"
+
+"So I thought!" said Margaret Hayley. "That eighty thousand dollars, then,
+has been standing for fifteen years, and the interest upon it would nearly
+double the sum. We owe that railroad company, or so many members of the
+original company as may be yet alive, not less than one hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars. We have only an hundred thousand or a very little more,
+but that will be something. Of course, after what you have just said of the
+curse that clings to ill-gotten gain, you will join me in paying over every
+dollar in our possession, at once."
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley sprang up from her chair with more celerity than she had
+before exhibited. "Margaret Hayley, are you a born fool?" she almost
+screamed.
+
+"No, nor a born _hypocrite_!" the young girl replied. Again her eyes went
+round to the Bible, and those of the mother followed hers as if they were
+compelled by a charm. Then those of the latter drooped, and they did not
+rise again as she said, in a much lower voice:
+
+"You know the secret. I am in your power. But I am your mother, and it may
+be quite as well for you to be merciful to me as well as to yourself. Upon
+what terms will you give me that paper and promise never to speak of it or
+of the affair to any one without my consent?"
+
+"I will not give you the paper upon _any_ terms!" was the answer. "That has
+been my shame and my torture for five years, and must still accompany me.
+But I will be your accomplice in crime and make the promise you require, on
+three conditions and those only. _First_, that you drop all hypocrisy when
+speaking to _me_, whatever you may do before the world. _Second_, that you
+never speak one disrespectful word of Carlton Brand, again, in my hearing.
+He is dead to me: let your hatred of him die with him, or at least let me
+hear no word of it. _Third_, that you urge no person upon me as a husband.
+Present me whom you please--throw me into any company you wish; but say not
+one word to force me into marriage with Hector Coles or any other person.
+This will not break my heart--I know it. I shall marry some time, no doubt,
+when I find the man who can supply that place in my heart which has to-day
+been left empty,--without any foible or weakness to make him an unfit match
+for my own _stainless_ blood!"
+
+There was a bitter emphasis upon the penultimate word, and Mrs. Burton
+Hayley distinctly recognized it. She recognized, too, the somewhat singular
+prophecy made by a young girl on the very day of her final parting with the
+man she had loved so dearly--that _she would yet find another to fill her
+heart more completely_. Most young persons think very differently at the
+moment of the great first sorrow, believe that the vacant niche can never
+be filled, and make painful promises of hopeless lives and celibacy, to
+cancel those promises some day amid blushes of regret or peals of laughter.
+Mrs. Burton Hayley recognized the singularity then, and she may have had
+reason to recall that prophecy at another day in the near future.
+
+But there was yet something that she must do, to seal that treaty of which
+her daughter was the dictator. Her own compact was to be made: she made it.
+
+"I will do as you wish, Margaret. They are hard terms to set, to _your
+mother_; but I accept them."
+
+"Very well, then. We understand each other, now; and I hope there will
+never be another painful word between us. I will try to speak none, and for
+both our sakes I hope you will be as careful. Now leave me, please. I will
+draw to this other shutter, for I need darkness, silence and rest--yes,
+rest!"
+
+The closed blind left the room in almost total dusk. The mother left the
+room, stepping slowly and appearing to bear about with her a dim
+consciousness that within the past half-hour her relative position with her
+daughter had been most signally changed. Margaret Hayley threw herself once
+more on the sofa, buried her fevered brow and her dishevelled hair in the
+soft, cool, white pillow, and sought that wished-for "rest." Alas! no
+tyrant ever invented a torture-bed so full of weary turnings and agonized
+prayers for deliverance or oblivion, as the softest couch whereon young
+love, suddenly and hopelessly bereft, reaches out its arms in vain, finds
+emptiness, and falls back despairing--moaning for the lost twin of its
+soul! The agony may be all forgotten to-morrow, in the sunshine, and the
+intoxication of music, and the voices of friends, and the far-off dawning
+of a new passion; but oh, what is the martyrdom of to-night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The third and last of these supplementary scenes, occurring at nearly the
+same period in the afternoon as the second, has its location at the house
+of Robert Brand, and a part of it in the same room where we have before
+seen the testy invalid while receiving the news of his son's defection and
+disgrace.
+
+Robert Brand was once more back in his easy-chair, his injured limb again
+propped on the pillows, and his face showing all those contortions of
+extraordinary pain likely to be induced by his imprudent ride and the
+agitation attending it. Satisfied, now, that his son was not dead, the
+tender father had again died out in him; but made aware by a succession of
+facts, which he could neither understand nor doubt, that that son, just
+characterized, even by himself, as a hopeless coward, had since that time
+been fighting, and fighting without any evidence of cowardice, in a species
+of hand-to-hand conflict likely to try the courage quite as seriously as
+the shock of any ordinary battle,--he was mentally in a state of confusion
+on the young man's account, altogether unusual with him and not a little
+painful. He did not curse any more, or at least no more of his curses were
+aimed at the head of his son.
+
+Poor little Elsie had been left without a hope of reconciliation between
+her father and her brother, after the hurling of that wild and wicked curse
+and the exile from his home which it involved. But the episode of the
+supposed death had made a diversion in Carlton's favor; her father had
+returned from the search for his son's body, worried and unsettled if not
+mollified; and the affectionate soul thought that the opportunity might be
+a favorable one for securing the reversal of the cruel sentence, with
+concealment from her brother that any such words had ever been uttered, and
+his eventual return home as if nothing painful or unpleasant had occurred.
+"Blessed are the peace-makers!" says very high authority; and most blessed
+of all are those who, like little Elsie, ignoring their own suffering and
+ill-treatment, strive to bring together the divided members of a once happy
+household!
+
+But the little girl was not half aware how stubborn was the material upon
+which she was trying to work, or how deeply seated was the feeling of
+mortification which had embittered the whole nature of the man who held
+cowardice to be the most unpardonable of vices.
+
+"Hold your tongue, girl!" was the severe reply to her suggestion that there
+might be some mistake, after all--that poor Carlton had enemies, and they
+had no doubt labored to place him in a false position--and that he would be
+sorry, to the last day he lived, if when Carlton returned home, as he
+probably would do that night if nothing serious had really happened to him,
+he should say one word to drive him away again, to leave himself without a
+son, and her without a brother. "Hold your tongue, girl! You are a little
+fool, and do not know what you are talking about. If you do not wish to
+follow your brother, you had best not meddle any more in the relations
+which I choose to establish with a son who has disgraced himself and me!"
+
+"But suppose poor Carlton _should_ be dead, after all, father? Who knows
+but some stranger may have come by in a wagon, seen the body lying on the
+ground, picked it up and carried it away to the Coroner's?"
+
+"Eh! What is that you say?" For the instant Robert Brand was startled by
+the suggestion and his heart sunk as well as softened at the recurring
+thought that his son might indeed be dead. But the thought was just as
+instantaneous, how general was the objection to touching an unknown dead
+body, and how unlikely that any such course should have been adopted by
+strangers, while any acquaintance, removing the body at all, would
+certainly have brought it home to his own house. No--he was alive; and
+that belief was once more full in the mind of Robert Brand as he said:
+
+"What do I care if he _is_ dead! I believe I could forgive him better, if I
+knew that he was, and that I should never again set eyes on the likeness of
+a man with the soul of a cat or a sheep! If he is alive, as I believe he
+is, let him never come near this house again if he does not wish to hear
+words said that he will remember and curse the last thing before he dies!"
+
+A sharp spasm of pain concluded this unhallowed utterance, and words
+followed that have no business on this page. Elsie Brand fired again, when
+she found all her pleading in vain, and broke out with:
+
+"You are a miserable heartless old wretch, and I have a great mind to go
+out of this house, this very moment, and never come into it again as long
+as I live, unless you send for me to come back with my brother!"
+
+"Go, and the quicker the better!" writhed the miserable man, in the midst
+of a spasm of pain. "If I hear one more impertinent word out of you, you
+_will_ go, whether you wish to go or not, and you will never come back
+again unless you come on your knees!"
+
+What might have been the next word spoken by either, and whether that next
+word might not indeed have wrought the separation of father and daughter,
+no one can say. For at that moment came a fortunate interruption, in the
+sound of carriage wheels coming rapidly up the lane, and easily heard
+through the open doors--then the furious barking of a dog, the yell of a
+woman's voice, and a volley of fearful curses poured out from the rougher
+lips of a man. Elsie, alarmed, but perhaps rather glad than otherwise to
+have the threatening conversation so suddenly ended, rushed out of the
+room, through the parlor, to the front piazza, where she joined the general
+confusion with a scream of affright, hearing which, the invalid, who had
+before, more than once that day, proved how superior the mind could be to
+the disablements of the body, hurled one more oath at the people who would
+not even allow him to suffer in quiet, started again from his chair,
+grasped his heavy cane and stumped hurriedly to the door, writhing in agony
+and half crazed with pain and vexation. There the sight which had the
+instant before met the eyes of his daughter, met his own, though the effect
+produced by it upon himself was so very different that instead of screaming
+he dropped against the lintel of the front door in a loud explosion of
+laughter.
+
+There was a horse and buggy in the lane, very near the gate--the horse
+unheld, rearing and squealing, but making no attempt to run away as might
+have been expected. Close beside the vehicle, a man easily recognizable as
+Dr. Philip Pomeroy, was engaged in a hand-to-hand (or is it
+hand-to-_mouth_?) conflict with Carlo, the big watch-dog, using the butt of
+his whip, the lash of it, his boots, and any other weapon of offence in his
+possession, against the determined assaults of the powerful brute that
+really seemed disposed to make a meal of the man of medicine. The doctor
+fought well, in that new revival of the sports of the Roman arena, but he
+was terribly bested (by which it is only intended to use an old word of the
+days of chivalry, and not to make an atrocious pun upon _beast-ed_;) and
+just at the moment when Robert Brand's eyes took in all the particulars of
+the scene, the human combatant, following up a temporary advantage, lunged
+ahead a little too far, lost his balance or caught his foot, and went
+headlong on the top of the dog, the contest being thereafter conducted on
+the ground and in the partial obscurity of the fence. At the same instant,
+too, the tall, bare-headed and bare-armed figure of old Elspeth Graeme
+appeared from behind the corner of the house, and the voice of that
+Caledonian servitor was heard screaming out:
+
+"Here, Carlo! Here, lad! coom awa, ye daft deevil! Here! here! coom awa,
+lad!"
+
+Elsie joined with a feeble "Here, Carlo!" from the piazza; and Robert
+Brand, if he could have found voice, would probably have assisted in
+calling off the dog; but Carlo, a formidable animal in size, black, with a
+few dashes of white, compounded of the Newfoundland and the Mount St.
+Bernard, with a surreptitious cross of the bull-dog (such immorality has
+been known even in canine families, to the great regret of precisian
+dog-fanciers)--Carlo had no idea whatever of "throwing up the sponge,"
+(which with a dog consists, we believe, in dropping his tail), and might
+have fought on until death, doomsday, or the loss of his teeth from old
+age, arrived to stop him--had not Elspeth closed in with a "Hech! ye born
+deevil! Ye'll aye be doin' more than ye'r tauld!" grasped the huge animal
+by the nape of the neck, and dragged him away very much as if she had been
+dealing with a kitten.
+
+Thus relieved, the doctor recovered his feet; but he was--as Elspeth
+described him in a communication made not long after--"a sair lookin'
+chiel!" He had lost his hat, dusted his coat, and found a sad rent in one
+leg of his nether garments, not to mention the rage which flashed in his
+eye and almost foamed from his mouth. For the first moment after the rescue
+he seemed to have a fancy for "pitching into" old Elspeth, unreasonable as
+such a course would have been after her calling off the dog and finally
+lugging him off by main force; and he did hurl after her an appellation or
+two which might have furnished a rhyme to the name of the Scottish national
+disease; but the stout serving woman quelled him with this significant
+threat, and went on her way, dragging the dog towards his kennel in the
+backyard:
+
+"'Deed, if ye can't keep a ceevil tongue in yer heid, I'll no be holdin'
+the tyke awa from ye a bit langer, and he'll eat ye up, I doubt!"
+
+At that juncture the discomfited doctor caught sight of Robert Brand and
+his daughter, in the door and on the piazza, and he strode in to them
+without further ado, whip still in hand, rage still in his face, and
+threatening enough in his manner to indicate that he intended to cowhide so
+many of the family as he could find, male and female.
+
+"Who let out that infernal dog?" was his first salutation, without first
+addressing either the old man or his daughter by name.
+
+"He must have broken loose, himself. Indeed, Doctor, we are so sorry--"
+began little Elsie, who had really been frightened out of her wits, and who
+had that organ unknown to the phrenologists, called Hospitality, very
+largely developed.
+
+"Hold your tongue, girl, and let me attend to my own business!" was the
+surly interruption of the invalid father, who had stopped laughing, and who
+had at that juncture a very low development of the corresponding organ. "We
+are not sorry at all. Dr. Pomeroy, I told you this morning, when I ordered
+you out of this house, never to come near it again; and you had better paid
+attention to the order."
+
+"Then _you_ had that dog set loose!"
+
+"That is a lie!" was the response. The doctor, who had used the same
+expression in a still more offensive form, not long before, was getting the
+chalice returned to his lips at very short notice. And the old man, in
+denying the act, intended to tell the exact truth--he had not turned the
+dog loose, or set him upon the doctor, except secondarily. Some hours
+before, when the medical man had just been dismissed for the first time, he
+had told the Scottish woman that 'he would bundle her out, neck and crop,
+if she did not set the dog on that man if he ever came near the house
+again!' and she had promised to obey his orders: that was all! Carlo, a
+dear friend of his young master, had always hated the doctor, who was his
+enemy, and never passed without snapping and growling at him; and the old
+woman well knew the fact. Consequently, when she saw the buggy dashing up
+the lane, and recognized it, she had religiously kept her promise, darted
+round to the kennel, unloosed the dog and directed his attention to the
+obnoxious individual, with a "Catch him, laddie!" that sent him flying at
+the doctor's throat just as he stepped to the ground. And it was only when
+the old woman believed the punishment going a little too far and the
+victim likely to be eaten up in very deed, that she had interposed and
+dragged the enraged brute from his prey. All this was unknown to both
+father and daughter, who merely supposed that the dog had broken loose at
+that awkward moment; and Robert Brand's disclaimer, though a very
+uncourteous one, had the merit of truth. But the doctor, just then enraged
+beyond endurance, literally "boiled over" at the word.
+
+"I lie, do I?" he foamed. "If you were not a miserable cripple, I would
+horse-whip you on your own door-step, old as you are!"
+
+"Oh, Doctor! oh, father!" pleaded the frightened Elsie, who did not know
+what might be coming after this.
+
+"Hold your tongue, girl!" again spoke Robert Brand, who still stood leaning
+against the lintel of the door. "Horsewhip me, would you, you poisoning
+Copperhead! If I could not beat out your brains with this stick, I could
+set a woman at you who would take you across her knee and spank you till
+you were flat like a pancake!"
+
+Dr. Pomeroy thought of the woman who had dragged off the dog, and had some
+doubts whether she could not indeed do all that her master promised. He
+seemed to have the luck, that day, to fall into the way of people sturdy of
+arm and strong of will!
+
+"What do you _want_ here?" was the inquiry of the old man, before the
+doctor could answer again, and remembering that there might be some special
+errand upon which he had a right to come.
+
+"You have remembered it, have you?" was the response. "Well, then, I want
+your thief of a son! Is he in this house?"
+
+"Oh, he was a coward this morning: now he is a thief, is he? What do you
+want of him?"
+
+"He committed theft at my house not more than an hour ago; and I am going
+to find him if he is in the State. Once more--is he here?"
+
+"What did he steal?" asked the father with a sneer, while poor Elsie stood
+nearly fainting and yet unable to move from the spot, at that new charge
+against her brother.
+
+"A woman." Elsie felt relieved; the old man sneered.
+
+"Well, I can only say that if he took away any woman belonging to _you_, he
+must have a singular taste!"
+
+"Robert Brand"--and the doctor spoke in a tone of low and concentrated
+passion--"once more and for the last time I ask you whether your son is in
+this house, with Eleanor Hill, my--my adopted daughter, in his company."
+
+"Eleanor Hill!" gasped Elsie, but no one heard her.
+
+"Dr. Pomeroy," answered Robert Brand, "you do not deserve any answer except
+a blow, but I will give you one. My son, as you call him, Carlton Brand, is
+not here, and will never be here again while I live, unless to be thrust
+out like a dog. How many girls he has, or where he conceals them, is none
+of my business, or _yours_! Now go, if you know when you are well off, for
+as sure as God lets me live, if I ever see you approaching this house
+again, I will shoot you from the window with my own hand."
+
+Something in the tone told Dr. Pomeroy that both the assertion and the
+threat were true. He turned without another word, stepped to his buggy,
+mounted into it and drove away.
+
+"He is alive, father--thank God!" said Elsie Brand, reverently, when the
+unwelcome visitor had disappeared and she was assisting the invalid back to
+his chair of suffering. That one assurance had been running through her
+little head, putting out all other thoughts, since the remark of the doctor
+that Carlton had been at his house not an hour before.
+
+"He is as dead to me as if he had been buried ten years!" was the reply of
+the implacable father, who stood in momentary peril of the grave from some
+sudden turn of his disease, and yet who had not even taken that first step
+towards preparation for the Judgment, comprised in pity and forgiveness!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+     BEFORE AND AFTER GETTYSBURGH--THE APATHY AND DESPAIR WHICH
+     PRECEDED, AND THE JUBILATION WHICH FOLLOWED--WHAT KITTY HOOD
+     SAID AFTER THE BATTLE, AND WHAT ROBERT BRAND--BROTHER AND
+     SISTER--A GUEST AT THE FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL--A FIRE-ROOM
+     VISIT, AN INTERVIEW, AND A DEPARTURE FOR EUROPE.
+
+
+It was a dark day for the nation--perhaps none darker!--that day of late
+June, 1863, marked by the occurrence of the preceding events. Private
+interests, private wrongs, private sorrows seemed all to be culminating or
+laying down fearful material for culmination in the future; but those
+domestic convulsions were only a faint and feeble type of that great throe
+agitating the whole nation. That day the bravest feared, not for themselves
+but for the country they loved; and that day the miserable trucklers who
+would long before have had the republic veil its face and sink on its knees
+before the arrogance of rebellion, begging for "peace" with dishonor,
+instead of demanding and enforcing victory,--that day they experienced such
+a triumph as they had never before known and such as their narrow souls
+could scarcely appreciate. "We told you so!" rung out from the throat of
+every "conditional loyalist," as the same paltry exultation had rung many
+an age before against the unsubmitting tribunes by the mad populace when
+the Volscians threatened to devastate Rome--as it had been yelled into the
+ears of Philip Van Artevelde and his brother defenders, when Ypres and
+Bruges fell, and the fierce Earl of Flanders promised death to the burghers
+of Ghent; and there was little, except bald defiance, that loyal men could
+reply. That long-boasted "invasion of the North" had come at last; and
+there is always a disheartening effect in the drawing of war nearer to the
+doors it has heretofore spared, even as there is always a scum among any
+population, ready to cry "ruin!" and counsel "submission" or "compromise"
+when a single move in the great game of war has ended disastrously.
+
+A more dreary spectacle than Philadelphia presented during some of the days
+of that week, cannot very well be imagined. From Harrisburgh and many of
+the minor towns of the west and southwest of the State, the inhabitants had
+fled by thousands to other places supposed to be less easily within reach
+of the enemy; and, if in a future day of peace those who at this juncture
+took part with the rebellion should chance to be shamed with a reminder of
+the panic in Richmond, and the removal of the Confederate archives, after
+Hanover Court-House in 1862, they may very pleasantly retaliate by calling
+up the panic at Harrisburgh and the packing up of the Pennsylvania State
+records, after York and Carlisle in 1863. Hundreds of wealthy persons
+removed their valuables even to Philadelphia; and there is no guarantee
+whatever that many of them did not make a still further removal East, when
+they could do so without attracting disagreeable attention and running the
+chance of after ridicule.
+
+There seemed to be an impression just then, in fact, that there was no
+power whatever to check the disciplined but half-starved and desperate
+rebel hordes. Even those who did not view the affair as any matter of gloom
+or discouragement, still believed it one of heavy loss that must be
+submitted to with the best grace possible.
+
+One of the young Philadelphia merchants was recognized by a friend, on one
+of the very last days of June, knocking about the balls in the
+billiard-room of the Cattskill Mountain House, and questioned by him as to
+the propriety of his being away from the Quaker City at a time when so
+heavy a misfortune as the rebel advance to the Delaware seemed to be
+impending.
+
+"Oh," said the merchant, making an eight-shot at the same moment, "I do not
+see any good that I could do by staying."
+
+"And do you not believe that the rebels will reach Philadelphia?" asked the
+friend.
+
+"Well, yes, I rather think they will," answered the nonchalant. "I should
+not be surprised if they should reach there to-morrow. In fact I
+telegraphed to my partner from Albany, yesterday, whenever they had taken
+Harrisburgh to pack up the most valuable of our goods and send them to New
+York."
+
+"And when they have taken New York?" asked the interrogator, not a little
+amused at that new system of defending valuable property and the country.
+
+"Oh," said the merchant, as he sighted another shot and made his carom
+without the tremor of a pulse--"when they take New York, as I suppose they
+will in a week or two, we shall move them to Boston, and so keep on working
+East till they drive us into Canada or the Atlantic."
+
+And this was not all a jest, by any means. The player had so telegraphed,
+and he more than half believed that his goods were at that time in course
+of removal, while he had no thought whatever of deserting his
+billiard-table and going down to assist in defending them. He was not
+alone, meanwhile, in his reprehensible coolness, as history will be at some
+pains to record of that extraordinary crisis.
+
+Philadelphia presented many strange spectacles on those days. Apart from
+the blowing of a brass band on every corner, the patrolling of every
+sidewalk by a recruiting officer with fife and drum, and the requisite
+number of human "stool-pigeons," and the exhibition of the placard before
+noted, offering every inducement in money and every plea of patriotism for
+"State defence,"--there were other and yet more marked indications of a
+period out of the common order even for war-time. The American and the
+Merchants', favorite resorts of mercantile buyers from the rural counties
+of the State, were full of guests, but they lounged in the reading and
+smoking-rooms, and had no thought of commercial transactions. Gold was
+going up, its higher rate marking increased fever in the pulse of the
+national patient; and yet business was almost as stagnant in the broker's
+offices of Third Street as were wholesale transactions in the heavy houses
+on Walnut and Chestnut and Market below Second. The old Tonawanda and the
+still older Saranac, lying idle at the foot of Walnut Street, their yards
+lank and bare as winter trees, and the ships waiting for freight that
+seemed to be long in coming, found a new use in illustrating the hopeless
+stagnation of the city. The theatres had nearly all closed before, and the
+last hurried its unprofitable season to an end. The red bricks of old
+Independence Hall seemed more dingy than ever; and those who glanced into
+the hall where the great Declaration was signed in Seventy-six, at the
+cracked bell and the other sad reminders of a past age and a by-gone
+patriotism, thought whether new masters would not claim those relics for
+their own, before many days, issuing a new manifesto of slavery from that
+second Cradle of Liberty, while their gaunt steeds were picketed in
+Independence Square. Men saw the sleepless eye of the clock look down from
+the old steeple, at night, with a helpless prayer, as if something of
+protection which had before lived in the sacred building was to be found no
+more; and the bell woke many a sleeper at midnight, with its slow and
+melancholy stroke, to a feeling of loss and sorrow like that which it might
+have evoked when sounding for the burial of dear friends. All day long
+crowds gathered and held their place, wearily moving to and fro, but never
+dispersing, in the open space in front of the historic pile; and "peace"
+orators, who had before been awed into silence by the threats and
+demonstrations of earlier days, once more ventured treasonable harangues to
+sections of those crowds, while the policemen scarcely found energy enough
+to disperse the hearers or arrest the disturbers. The bulletin boards were
+besieged; the newspaper offices had a demand for extras unknown to the
+oldest inhabitant of the quiet city; and the telegraph offices, busied
+alike with messages of public and private interest, had never before known
+such a test of their capacity since Morse first set Prometheus at his new
+occupation of a messenger. A few troops marched away, the Reserves (with
+Dick Compton in their ranks) among the number; and the New York militia
+regiments and some of the New Jersey troops passed through on their third
+campaign for "home defence;" but the public mind was not reassured. Once
+there was a rumor that McClellan had been called again to the command of
+the Army of the Potomac, or at least entrusted with the defence of the
+State, and then the general pulse for the moment beat wildly; but the
+inspiriting report died away again, the non-arrival of the morning train
+from Harrisburgh one day threw the whole city into panic, and the thought
+of successfully defending the State capital sunk lower than ever. The
+President, who had been bespoken to meet the Loyal Leagues and raise a new
+flag on Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, was too busy or too much
+discouraged, and would not come; and what heart lacked an excuse for
+sinking down when so much was threatened and so little spirit shown for
+meeting the great peril?
+
+This was the week preceding the Fourth; and in that week, which closed with
+the National Anniversary, what changes had taken place! The time and its
+vicissitudes seemed to be an exact offset to the hopes and the
+disappointments of the same period of 1862. Then, the Army of the Potomac
+had lain before Richmond, and the Fourth was to have seen the old flag
+waving in the rebel capital. It had really seen the little General driven
+back upon the James, and repulsed if not hopelessly defeated. The Fourth of
+1863 was to see Harrisburgh in the hands of the rebels, and the national
+cause sunken lower than it had before been since the advent of the
+secession. What did it really see? Thank God for a few such hours as those
+of the close of the Fourth, in the midst of whole centuries of loss and
+disappointment! All was changed--all was saved! Meade, a man of whom but
+few knew any thing more, a week earlier, than that he was a brave man, a
+good fighting General, and a brother of the overslaughed Captain Dick
+Meade, of the North Carolina--Meade had arisen in doubt and culminated in
+glory. Bloodiest and most important of all the battles of the Continent,
+Gettysburgh stood already upon the pages of the National history, soaked
+with the blood of the bravest--holy with the bravery and the energy which
+had there broken and rolled back the tide of invasion, and yet to be holier
+still as the Cemetery of the Battle-Dead of the Republic. Orators who began
+their Fourth of July addresses with only their pulses of anxiety stirred by
+the knowledge that there had been three days fighting, that Reynolds was
+killed, and that the conflict seemed to have been desperate and undecided,
+did not close them before they knew that the great victory was won, that
+Meade was to be thenceforth a name of honor in the land, that Lee and his
+hordes were in disastrous retreat, and that the "invasion of the North" was
+at an end for all the time covered by this struggle. The news of Vicksburg
+was soon to come, another crowning glory for the Fourth, though not known
+for days after, and Grant was to be a third time canonized. But just then
+there was enough without Vicksburg, and the nation might have gone mad over
+the double tidings had they come at once.
+
+Who, that has one drop of patriotic blood surging in his heart, can ever
+forget the reading of those "victory extras" that flew wide over the land
+on Saturday night and Sunday morning--the quavering voices of the readers,
+the reddening cheeks and flashing eyes of the hearers? Never before did so
+much seem to have been won, because never before did so much seem to have
+been perilled. And Philadelphia, that had sunken lowest in despondency of
+any of the great cities, naturally rose highest when the word of victory
+came. Bells rung, flags waved, music sounded, gas blazed like the noonday,
+processions paraded, business revived as if Trade had a human form and a
+crushing weight had suddenly been lifted from its breast, and old
+Independence Hall once more boomed its bell and flashed over the city its
+midnight eye of fire, as if its defiance to tyranny and treason had never
+faltered for a moment.
+
+It was of Gettysburgh that Kitty Hood had been reading, at her little
+cottage home near the great road, after her return from church on Sunday
+the fifth of July, when she dashed away the tears of agitation and anxiety
+that had been gathering in her eyes, and said:
+
+"Dick Compton was right, after all, and I was a fool to try to keep him
+away! If he had obeyed me, I should have despised him now; and if he has
+not been killed in that terrible battle and lives to come home again, I
+will tell him how wrong I was, and what a ninny I made of myself, and how
+sorry I am for every word I spoke that day, and how much better I love him
+because he obeyed the call of his country instead of the poor, weak,
+miserable voice of a frightened woman!"
+
+And it was of Gettysburgh and the desperate fighting around Cemetery Hill
+that Robert Brand had been reading, on the same Sunday afternoon, sitting
+in the shade of his own piazza, when he hurled out these bitter words,
+which poor little Elsie heard as she lay upon the lounge in the parlor
+within:
+
+"This is what he has lost, the low-lived, contemptible poltroon! _My son_,
+and to shirk a great battle! He might have been dead now, and in a grave
+better than any house in which he can ever hide his miserable life; or he
+might have had something to remember and boast of all his days--that he was
+one of the Men of Gettysburgh! If I had two legs, I would go out and find
+him yet and shoot him with my own hand--the infernal cowardly cur!"
+
+And then the disgraced and irate father tried to forget his son and to bury
+himself in other details of the great battle.
+
+The sister did not reply aloud to her father's renewed objurgation. She
+merely sobbed a little and took from her bosom a crumpled note and read it
+over again for perhaps the fiftieth time, muttering low as she did so:
+
+"Oh, father, father! If you knew how far you would need to go to seek poor
+Carlton and make him even more miserable than he is, and how little chance
+you have of ever seeing him again while you live--perhaps you would not
+speak so cruelly of him." Then she kissed the crumpled note again and put
+it back into her bosom, and tried to compose herself once more to that
+sleep which the tropical heat invited and her aching heart forbade.
+
+From the tone of that letter, it would seem that Elsie had written to her
+brother, to his place of business in the city, when fully aware of the
+unreasonable indignation which moved her father, advising him not to risk
+serious personal insult by coming home until he should again hear from
+her,--and that he had replied, from a place much farther away, informing
+her of his intention to put seas between himself and the eyes of all who
+had looked upon his disgrace. But better even this long separation--thought
+the young girl--than a return which would induce words between father and
+son, never to be forgiven or forgotten while either held life and memory.
+Years might mellow the recollection and change the feeling--years when the
+country should no longer make demands upon her children to breast the
+battle storm in her behalf, and when the eloquent voice in the halls of
+justice and the active, busy life in deeds securing the common welfare,
+might be sufficient to win new honor and blot away any recollection of that
+single sad misstep in the career of manhood. Poor, gentle, loving, faithful
+little Elsie Brand!--it may be long before we have occasion to look upon
+her again, and indeed she becomes henceforth but a comparative shadow; so
+let it be put upon record here that she seemed "faithful among the
+faithless" in practising the great lessons of hope and charity. The father
+might utter curses to be set down against his own soul in the day when
+human words as well as human actions must be called into judgment; friends
+might look askance and enemies gloat over the disgrace of one who had
+before stood high above them in all the details of honorable character;
+even the sweetheart, whose pulses had once beaten so close to his that the
+twin currents seemed flowing into one--even she might find some poor excuse
+of pride to falsify her by-gone boast that she loved him better than all
+the world, and let that hollow, wordy "honor" work their eternal
+separation: all this might be, but the _sister_ had no such license to
+waver in the course of her affection towards one who had been fondled by
+the same hands in babyhood and drawn sustenance from the same maternal
+bosom as herself. And no treason, all this, to the truths and the
+eternities of other loves. All other relations may sooner change than that
+which binds sister and brother, whose fondness has not been tainted by some
+falsehood in blood or chilled by some wrong in education. Wife or mistress,
+yesterday cold, may be to-day throbbing with the most intense warmth of
+absorbing passion, and to-morrow chilled again by instability in herself or
+unworthiness in the object of her regard: even the mother, that tenderest
+friend of song and story and sometimes of real life, may scatter her
+affections wide among so many children that each has but the pauper's
+share, or form new ties and forget that ever the old existed. But the
+brother, if he be not the veriest libel upon that sacred name, clings with
+undying fondness to the sister; and the sister, ever faithful, clings to
+the brother "through evil and through good report," when one or even both
+may have become a scoff and a bye-word in every mouth that opens to speak
+their names. Happy those men for whom the bond has never been either frayed
+or broken: sad for those who ever look back through the long years and see
+some sunny head of childhood hiding itself beneath the falling clods of the
+church-yard, that might have nestled closer to them in after years than all
+whom they have grasped, and cherished, and chilled, and lost!
+
+It now becomes necessary to inquire the whereabouts of Carlton Brand, the
+subject of so much sisterly love and so much fatherly indignation, at that
+second period when Gettysburgh was a glorious novelty, its bloody splendors
+flashing broad over the loyal States. And those whereabouts may very
+readily be discovered. On the register of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the
+city of New York, his name had been inscribed on the Wednesday evening
+previous to Gettysburgh (the first day of July); and those among our
+readers who may have chanced to be sojourners at the Fifth Avenue during
+that week, and who will take the trouble to read over again the close and
+accurate description given of the lawyer on his first appearance in the
+presence of his sister and Margaret Hayley, in the second chapter of this
+narration, may not find much difficulty in remembering the appearance of so
+marked a man at the hotel at that period--the glances of admiration cast
+upon his handsome face and manly figure as he sat at table or moved quietly
+among the ever-changing crowd in the reading-room or down the long
+halls--the almost total silence which he maintained, seeming to have no
+acquaintances or to be anxious for escape from all conversation--his
+inquiring more than once every day at the office for letters which
+continually disappointed him--and the expression of drooping-eyed
+melancholy in face and restless unquiet in movement, which gave rise to
+many side remarks and led to many singular speculations.
+
+He was alone--at least alone at the hotel; and Dr. Pomeroy, if he had
+entertained any actual belief in his suggested elopement between the lawyer
+and his "ward," might easily have satisfied himself, had he followed him to
+the commercial metropolis, that no such elopement had taken place or that
+the abductor had hidden his paramour carefully away and managed to keep
+continually out of her presence.
+
+Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and
+action of Carlton Brand at this time; and the writer, without any wish or
+will to do so, yields to the necessity, very much as the proud man of the
+world yields to the pressure when events which he has assumed to direct
+grow too mighty for his hand and bear him away in their rush and
+tumult,--or as a father--to use a yet stronger and more painful
+image--submits with a groan and a prayer when the child of his dear love
+shuts the heart against him and breaks away from that tender control which
+it has been alike his duty and his pleasure to supply. Some of our mental
+children, especially when they are so real that time, place and
+circumstance cannot be made for them at will, are sadly unmanageable; and
+this instance furnishes an illustration which will be better understood at
+a later period. Acts may yet be recorded, while yet acts remain to record;
+but the heart closes, motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator
+grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of
+events without connection and actions without explanation.
+
+Taking up his quarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Wednesday, this man, on
+Friday, the third of July, while the city was in agonized anxiety over the
+conflicting accounts of Meade's first battle of the day before, and while
+the black frames for the Fourth of July fireworks were being erected in
+front of the City Hall in the Park, with some uncertainty in the minds of
+the workmen whether they would not be used for a pyrotechnic display over
+the death-throe of the nation,--this man, Carlton Brand, took one of the
+omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line passing the door of his hotel, alighted
+at the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway, walked down to the Bowling
+Green and entered the office of the Cunard Steamships fronting that faded
+relic of the Colonial splendors of New York. When he emerged from the
+office, fifteen minutes later, the cash-box of the British and North
+American Royal Mail Steamship Company was the richer by many broad pieces
+of American gold, and Carlton Brand bore, folded away in his wallet, one of
+those costly little pearl-white wings on which the birds of passage bear
+themselves over the Atlantic. It was evident that he was about to desert
+his country--that country for which he had before refused to fight,--to
+desert it at the very moment when its fate before God and the world seemed
+to hang trembling in the balance.
+
+Coming out from the office of the Steamship Company, apparently wooed by
+the breeze from the North River, the lawyer bent his steps in that
+direction as if intending to make the tour of the shipping at the piers and
+resume his conveyance at some point higher up the town. Past two or three
+of the piers; and the dense black smoke pouring out from the funnels of one
+of the transport steamers on the eve of departure for the South with troops
+and munitions, seemed to attract his attention. He walked down the dock and
+observed more closely the movements on and around the vessel. The black
+smoke still rolled out, and steam was hissing from the escape-valves. Heavy
+wagons were discharging boxes at the gangway, and with much puffing and
+clatter a donkey-engine was hoisting them on board. A marine stood at the
+plank, bayonetted musket on shoulder, and close behind him an officer. To
+the civil inquiry of the lawyer, how long before the steamer would sail,
+the sentry replied that she was then steaming-up and would probably leave
+within a few hours; and to a request to be allowed to come on board and see
+the arrangements of a government transport on the eve of sailing, the
+officer, after a moment's glance at the unimpeachable dress and appearance
+of the visitor, assented with the stately bow of his profession.
+
+It certainly seemed strange that on that blazing day, when his errand at
+the Hudson side of the city had been to inhale the cool breeze from the
+river, Carlton Brand, within a moment after stepping on board the
+transport, should have ignored all the details of decks, spars, cabins, and
+even machinery, and descended the narrow stair-ways, little more than
+ladders, leading down to those flaming intestines of the ship from which
+the hot air crept up through the companion-ways like breaths from some
+roasting and agonized monster. Yet so it was; and regardless alike of the
+heat which fevered his lips and the greasy rails upon which he soiled his
+gloves and risked the smirching of his spotless summer garments, the
+lawyer pressed down to the fire-room, where the stokers were sweating great
+drops of perspiration that rolled down like beads from their broiled
+foreheads--where the coal was rattling and crashing as it was thrown
+forward, then crackling and hissing at its first contact with the flame, as
+it was dashed into the midst of the sweltering furnaces. Down, until he
+stood before those mighty furnaces and caught blinding glimpses, as the
+firemen momentarily opened the doors to dash in still other tons of the
+crackling coal of what seemed little less than a ship's-cargo of the fuel,
+seething, raging and lowing in such a heat that it made the old fancy of
+the lower pit no longer a dream but a horrible present reality.
+
+"Terrible work for hot weather, I should think," said the lawyer, when the
+shovels were still for a moment and the great fires raged, roared and
+crackled within. He seemed to feel the necessity of saying something to do
+away with the impression of his being a sulky intruder,--and was addressing
+one of the bronzed old stokers who had paused to wipe from his grimy brow
+the sweat that was actually pouring into his eyes and blinding him.
+
+"Yes, hot enough while we are lying at the dock," answered the stoker.
+
+"Why hotter now than at any other time?" asked the lawyer, who had probably
+never happened to study that peculiar philosophy, simply because he had
+never been thrown into contact with it.
+
+"Why? oh, Lord bless you!--because we are lying still, now, and there is no
+draught. When we are going through the water, and of course through the
+air, the motion makes a draught and we do not more than _half_ roast."
+
+"Then it never gets _very_ cool down here?" was the next inquiry.
+
+"Not _very_!" answered the fireman, sententiously. "But we never have the
+worst of these hot fires," he continued, answering something that had not
+been spoken but that seemed to be in the face of his auditor.
+
+"Who then?"
+
+"The passengers--at least some of them--on board any steamer that carries
+them over sea or down the coast."
+
+"You mean when they--when the steamers take fire and burn?" The question
+was asked in what seemed to be a hurried and troubled voice; and had not
+the reflected glow from the furnace made every thing red under its light,
+there might have been seen a face of ghastly white contrasting with the
+dark and grimy one so near.
+
+"No!" and the stoker laughed. "I did not mean that--only the thought of it.
+Steamers do not burn _very_ often--not half so often as I should think they
+would, the way they are built, and with a whole Pennsylvania coal-mine on
+fire inside of them at once. When they do go, though, they make things
+howl! No slow burning, as there is sometimes on sailing-vessels, so that
+they can batten down the hatches and keep the fire under until there is a
+chance of help: every thing goes in a moment, and all is over in an
+hour--iron steamer or wood, very little difference."
+
+"Horrible!" said the lawyer. The word seemed forced from him, and there
+could not be a doubt that he was at the moment fancying some terrible
+reality.
+
+"Yes, horrible enough!" answered the stoker. "But what I was speaking of,
+is the foolish habit that passengers have--I have seen it often in crossing
+the Atlantic--of coming down into the fire-room very soon after they start,
+and taking a look at the furnaces. A good many of them never sleep a wink
+afterwards, during the whole voyage, I believe, thinking of that mass of
+red-hot coal lying in the middle of the ship, and wondering _when_ she is
+going to burn. They are fools to come down at all: if they would just keep
+out of the way they would never know how badly it looks, and then at least
+they would never be burned until their time came!"
+
+Just then the raging monster within seemed to demand more blazing food,
+and the stoker turned away to attend to his duty. Had he remained
+conversing one moment longer, he might have seen Carlton Brand totter back
+against the bulk-head of the fire-room, literally gasping for breath--then
+grapple for the railing of the stairs, and ascend the steps with the
+staggering motion of a sick or drunken man, breathing heavily and giving
+painful indications of being on the verge of falling insensible.
+
+When the lawyer again emerged to the air of the deck, his face was ghastly
+white, and he seemed altogether strangely altered since the moment of his
+descent into those regions of fire and grime and terrible suggestion. What
+had so changed him?--the heat, choking his lungs and preying upon a frame
+unaccustomed to it?--or had the curse of his nature again found him out, in
+the low of the furnaces and the heedless conversation of the fireman? and
+did he remember that between himself and even that flight beyond the sea
+which only could shut out from his ears the voice of contempt and the cry
+of a neglected country, there yet lay the peril of the Amazon and the
+Austria?
+
+This occurred on Friday the third of July; and between that day and the
+Sunday following there was nothing in the movements of the sojourner at the
+Fifth Avenue, worthy of special record. But on that Sunday afternoon,
+perhaps at the very hour when Kitty Hood, in one spot of that section of
+country which had been his old home, was glorying over her lover's having
+been at Gettysburgh,--and when Robert Brand, in another, was writhing and
+cursing over the absence of his son from the same great battle,--an
+incident took place at the hotel, apparently trivial, but which may
+subsequently be found to have exercised no slight influence on the fortunes
+of some of the different persons named in this chronicle. Unfortunately,
+again, over this little event hangs a mist and a shadow, and only slight
+glimpses can be obtained of what afterwards proved to be of such
+unsuspected importance.
+
+On that Sunday afternoon, at about two o'clock, Carlton Brand went down
+from his room to the office of the hotel, to exchange a few words with the
+clerk, and to secure one of the battle-extras which he had just heard from
+his window cried in the street. Knots of men, guests, or passers-by, driven
+in by the pouring rain without, filled the long hall, every third holding a
+newspaper, every group in more or less animated conversation, and the one
+topic that great conflict which had just bloomed out into a great victory.
+The lawyer seemed to have company enough in his own thoughts, and did not
+join any of the groups. He secured his extra, transacted his brief business
+at the desk, and returned immediately upstairs. The moment after he had
+left the desk, a young man advanced from one of the groups near the door,
+asked a question of the clerk, was answered, overran a few pages of the
+register with eye and finger, and then passed upstairs under the guidance
+of a servant.
+
+Carlton Brand had already thrown off coat and boots again, and was sitting
+at the open window in dressing-gown and slippers, glancing over the
+sensation-headings of the extra which gave the particulars of the Waterloo
+of Secessia,--when there was a tap at the door. Stepping hastily thither
+and opening it, with a muttered wonder why he could not be left alone to
+his reading, a well-known figure stepped into the room and one of his
+Philadelphia bar-intimates--perhaps the nearest to a confidential friend in
+the whole profession, took him by the hand. For an instant the occupant of
+the room seemed to be displeased at the intrusion and an expression of
+annoyance flitted over his face; but old friendship was evidently too
+powerful even for shame and lacerated feeling, and the next instant he had
+cordially returned the grasp.
+
+The new-comer, strangely enough, bore no slight resemblance to Carlton
+Brand. We say strangely, because the lawyer was by no means such a person,
+in general appearance, as could be readily duplicated. Henry Thornton, his
+professional brother, had the same tall, lithe figure with evidence of
+great agility, the same mould of countenance in many respects, and with
+eyes of hazel only a shade darker than Brand's. But here the resemblance,
+which might otherwise have been extraordinary, became slighter and
+eventually disappeared. His complexion was much darker, even brown, from
+chin to forehead, indicating Southern blood or residence. His hair, curling
+a little, was of very dark brown, almost black; and his heavy moustache,
+the only beard he wore, was so nearly black as generally to pass under that
+designation. In spite of the similarity of form and feature, it may be
+imagined that these differences told very strongly on the general effect
+produced by the two men on the mere casual observer; and while there was
+that indefinable something in the face of Carlton Brand, to which attention
+has before been called, denoting intellect and true nobility of soul,
+accompanied by an occasional pitiable weakness or want of self-assertion of
+the full manhood, there was that quite as plainly to be read in the face of
+Henry Thornton, which told of dauntless courage and iron will, a brain busy
+and scheming if not even plotting, and powers which might not always be
+turned to the service of the candid, the open and the honorable. Lavater
+would have thought, looking at his face--Well for him and for the world if
+what he wills is in consonance with honor and justice, for what he wills he
+will pursue with the unfaltering courage of the lion and the untiring
+determination of the sleuth-hound!
+
+But Nature, giving to these two men who held no known relationship
+whatever, so striking a resemblance in some particulars and so great a
+dissimilarity in others--had not quite ended her freak of comparison. It is
+doubtful whether either was fully aware of the fact, but the similarity
+between the tones of their voices, in ordinary times, was quite as marked
+as that between certain physical features; and any person standing that day
+without the door, when the two had entered into conversation, might have
+been puzzled to know whether two persons were really speaking or one was
+carrying on a monologue. This, only at ordinary times: Thornton's voice was
+much steadier and more uniform under feeling, and it never broke into tones
+so low and melancholy as that of the other, when influenced by temporary
+depression.
+
+Such was Carlton Brand's visitor on that Sunday afternoon, and he it was
+who but the moment after was seated in the proffered chair near the window
+and chatting upon current topics with as much nonchalance as if he had
+merely called upon his entertainer at his little office on Sixth Street,
+Philadelphia, instead of visiting him at a hotel in a distant city.
+
+There was a little table standing between the two windows of the room and
+within reach of Thornton as he sat. On the table lay part of that
+miscellaneous collection of articles which every careless bachelor will
+persist in scattering about his room at the hotel; and at the edge of what
+may be called the pile lay a paper more than half unfolded, which caught
+the observant eye of the visitor. With a quick: "Will you allow me?" which
+brought an affirmative response, he reached over, took up the paper,
+unfolded it and read a receipt for a first cabin passage in the Cunard Mail
+Steamship to sail from New York to Liverpool, on the 8th July, for which
+$130.50 had been paid by Mr. Carlton Brand.
+
+"The Cunarder for Liverpool next Wednesday," he said, when he had finished
+running his eye over the passage-ticket.
+
+"Yes," answered the owner, and he answered nothing more.
+
+A strange expression passed over the face of his interrogator--an
+expression so doubtful that even Lavater, or any other man pretending to
+read the human countenance like an open book, might have been puzzled to
+say whether it conveyed pleasure, scorn, wonder, or any one of the thousand
+different feelings whose outward show glints over our faces as often and as
+transiently as the cloud-shadows floating over the mountain woods or the
+mottled sunshine flickering over the wheat-fields. There was something
+there--something which the other did not appear to notice; and with that
+fact we must be content.
+
+Five minutes later, Carlton Brand, through the medium of words growing out
+of the discovery of the passage-ticket, was in confidential conversation
+with Henry Thornton with reference to the disgrace which had driven him
+from home and must make him an exile for years if not forever. It may have
+been a serious weakness, towards one who had never been even on terms of
+speaking acquaintance with her, to talk to him of Margaret Hayley and to
+confess the shameful dismissal which he had received. But Henry Thornton
+knew of the Hayleys if he did not claim an acquaintance with them; he had
+it in his power to impart information of them and their probable movements
+during the summer, which the other might have found difficulty in obtaining
+through any other means; and perhaps that knowledge gave some excuse for
+reciprocal confidence. At all events that confidence was given, and it
+elicited a return of apparently equal candor. Before the separation took
+place, at the end of an interview which lasted more than an hour, a strange
+bond seemed to have been established and cemented between the two lawyers,
+very different from any which official intercourse can often rivet. That
+interview, in fact, appeared to have produced marked effects upon both, for
+while on the face of Henry Thornton, as he rose to take his farewell, there
+was a look of entire satisfaction that could not have been without a
+meaning more or less creditable,--there was in the eye of Carlton Brand
+less of that troubled expression which had been for days resting there like
+a shadow, and he breathed as if a weight had been lifted from his breast.
+To one this new satisfaction and lightness of heart may have been no false
+presage: to the other, what an omen of unsuspected evil, disaster and
+death!
+
+They parted at the door of the lawyer's room, with a much warmer grasp of
+the hand than that with which they had met little more than a hour before;
+and each held the palm of the other in his for a moment, as those should
+do who have however slight a bond in common and between whom the waves of a
+whole wide ocean are so soon to roll.
+
+"A pleasant voyage and a happy return!" said the one, on the threshold.
+
+"A pleasant summer to you, wherever you are!" was the reply of the other.
+
+So parted, after that brief meeting, Henry Thornton and Carlton Brand. The
+bearer of that latter name, once so honored but now holding so doubtful a
+position, left New York by the Cunarder Scotia from Jersey City on
+Wednesday the 8th of July, looking his last that evening from the deck of
+his steamer, on the dim blue line of the Highlands--a fading speck of that
+native land that the fates had ordained he should never see again with his
+living eyes! And as at this moment we lose sight of him for the time, to
+trace the fortunes of others remaining on this side of the Atlantic, it may
+be well to say that his outward voyage must have been a safe and prosperous
+one, for there was duly registered as having arrived at Liverpool, on the
+twentieth of July, (a date which it may afterwards be important to
+remember) "Carlton Brand, Philadelphia."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+     ANOMALIES OF THE WAR FOR THE UNION--THE WATERING-PLACE RUSH
+     OF 1863--A WHITE-MOUNTAIN PARTY DISEMBARKING AT
+     LITTLETON--WHO FILLED THE CONCORD COACH--THE
+     VANDERLYNS--SHODDY ON ITS TRAVELS--MR. BROOKS CUNNINGHAME
+     AND HIS FAMILY--"H. T.," AND AN EXCITEMENT.
+
+
+The War for the Union has been unlike all other great struggles,
+throughout, in nearly every characteristic that can be named. Unnatural in
+its inception, the rebellion has seemed to have the power of making
+unnatural many of the details through which and in spite of which it has
+been carried forward--of changing character and subverting all ordinary
+conditions. There have been anomalies in the field: still more notable
+anomalies in society. Unflinching bravery and stubborn devotion to the
+fighting interests of the country have been found blended, in the same man,
+with pecuniary dishonesty which seemed capable of pillaging a
+death-chamber. The greatest military ability has been found conjoined with
+such inactivity and tardiness as to paralyze action and destroy public
+patience. Rapidity of movement has been discovered to be wedded to such
+Utopian want of understanding or such culpable recklessness as to make
+movement not seldom a blunder instead of a stroke of policy. Times which
+threatened disaster have brought triumph; and the preparations made to
+celebrate a victory have more than once been employed in concealing a
+defeat. All things have been mixed in estimation. The Copperhead,
+detestable on account of his view of the national duty, has yet compelled
+some portion of respect by his real or affected reverence for a perilled
+Constitution; the Radical, worthy of all credit for his active spirit and
+uncompromising position, has yet deserved contempt for a narrowness of view
+which made him almost as dangerous as disloyalty could have done; and the
+Conservative, that man of the golden mean, that hope of the nation in many
+regards, has bargained for a part of the abuse which he has received from
+either extreme, by faulting the active measures of both and offering
+meanwhile no active, practical course to supply their stead.
+
+But amid the general anomaly perhaps fashionable (or would-be fashionable)
+society, and the world of ease and amusement, have supplied the most
+interesting and the most astounding study of all. The status of the
+"non-productive classes" is and has been, during most of the struggle,
+literally inverted, and the conditions of costly enjoyment have been
+changing as rapidly as if we were rioting through a carnival instead of
+breasting a rebellion. No nation ever carried on such a war as that waged
+by this loyal people; and no nation ever spent so much blood and treasure
+in accomplishing the same comparative results. Naturally, in view of the
+personal bereavement, it might have been expected that society should be
+quiet in its amusements and low-toned in all its conversation: naturally, a
+people bleeding at every pecuniary pore for the public good, might have
+been expected to diminish personal expenditure and husband those resources
+on the holding-out of which so much must eventually depend. Instead of
+this, society, with the craped banners and the muffled drums every day
+appealing to eye and ear, has grown continually louder in its tone and more
+pronounced and even blatant in its mirth; and reckless personal expenditure
+has quite kept place with any general waste that the highwaymen or
+incapables of government had power to entail. The theatre and the circus
+have never before been so full, the opera has never before been so
+generally patronized. Babylon could never have rioted more luxuriously on
+the very night before its fall, than have the people of our great cities
+dined, ridden, danced and bathed themselves in seas of costly music, any
+day since the first three months of the rebellion ended.
+
+Summer recreations have perhaps told quite as significant a story as any
+other feature, of the inevitable drift of society towards reckless expense
+and extravagant display. The summer resorts within the rebel territory may
+have grown desolate or deserted--the buildings of the White Sulphur and the
+Rockbridge Alum of Virginia may have been left empty or turned into
+hospitals, and Old Point may only have been visited for far other purposes
+than the meeting of the sea-breeze there in midsummer; but a very different
+fate has awaited the favorite hot-weather resorts of the North. Saratoga
+and Sharon of the chalybeates; Niagara and Trenton of the cataracts; the
+White Mountains, the Cattskills and the Alleghanies, of the high, pure air
+and the cloud shadow; Newport, Rockaway, Long Branch and Cape May of the
+south-eastern breeze and the salt aroma,--all have been, with the exception
+of a few frightened weeks of 1861, more densely filled during the war than
+at any former period in the memory of the pleasure-seeker; and wealth and
+enjoyment have both run riot there to an extent but little in accordance
+with the sack-cloth and ashes which the observant eye saw all the while
+lying on the head of the nation itself. All this may have been
+inappropriate and a part of it painful; but the result could not well have
+been otherwise. Some, with wealth honestly earned and no capacity for the
+public service, have needed rest or distraction and there found one or the
+other. Habitual idlers and professional students of society, never
+available for any other purpose, have naturally, as ever, found there their
+best ground of personal study. Young girls have needed the experience, and
+managing mammas have quite as sorely needed those fields for matrimonial
+campaigns. Invalids have needed their real or supposed opportunity for the
+recovery of lost health. Shoddy, grown suddenly rich while remaining
+incurably ignorant and vulgar, and finding it no easy task to force its way
+into the coveted "society" in the great cities, has eagerly welcomed the
+opportunities there afforded for at least learning the rudiments of what is
+called gentility, and creeping into that miscellaneous outer circle which
+surrounds the charmed inner. Politicians have found it necessary to do, in
+such places, that particular portion of the great task of boring,
+button-holing, prying and packing which cannot be so well done either at
+the primary election or the convention as around the spring or on the
+beach--on the piazza of the Ocean House or the United States; and officers
+on furlough, who had fought enough for the time or had no intention to
+fight at all, have found no places like these for displaying jaunty uniform
+and decorated shoulder to the admiring eyes of that sex which descends from
+Athena and recognizes the cousinship of Mars. Add to all this the rise of
+exchange on Europe and the folly of steamship companies in charging gold
+rates for passages abroad, which have together almost checked the summer
+exodus to the Old World,--and there is no longer reason to wonder at the
+watering-place crowds and the summer gayeties which have made carnival
+throughout the loyal States and filled the wallets of enterprizing
+landlords.
+
+The year of grace 1863 saw an earlier beginning to the summer hegira than
+any other late year had done, as before its close it saw houses
+over-crowded, waiters overworked, and cots at a premium, from Casco to
+Cresson. The smoke had not yet rolled away from Gettysburgh when "the great
+North River travelling-trunk" began its perambulations; and by the middle
+of July everybody who was anybody (except a few in the city of New York,
+temporarily frightened or hindered by the riots) was gone from the great
+cities, and they were given over to the temporary occupancy of those
+laboring starlings who could not "get out," and the ever ebbing and flowing
+wave of transient visit.
+
+All this as a necessary reminder of the period and a back-ground to the
+incidents so soon to follow,--and because the course of narration, at this
+juncture, leads us for a time to one of the favorite shrines of American
+summer pilgrimage and into the whirl of that literal storm of fashion and
+curiosity which eddies and sweeps, all summer long, around the peaks of the
+White Mountains--the Alps of Eastern America.
+
+It was a somewhat varied as well as extensive crowd of passengers that
+disembarked from the cars of the White Mountain Railroad at Littleton, in
+sight of the head-waters of the Connecticut, about five o'clock on
+Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of July. The dog-days had begun; New York,
+Philadelphia and Boston were steaming furnaces, though partially emptied as
+we have before had occasion to notice; and those who had already visited
+them during the month, declared that neither Saratoga, the Cattskills, or
+even Lake George or Niagara, had the power to impart any coolness to
+suffering humanity. The sea-shore or the northern mountains offered the
+only alternative; and a very heavy list of passengers had come up that day
+by the Norwich and Worcester line from New York, the Boston lines falling
+in at Nashua Junction, and the Vermont Central throwing in its
+reinforcement at Wells River.
+
+Every portion of the loyal States (and no doubt a portion of the disloyal,
+if the truth could have been known!) had seemed to be represented in the
+crowd that thronged the platforms while fighting for a mouthful of lunch at
+Nashua Junction or crowding in to a hurried dinner at the poor substitute
+for the burned Pemigawasset House at Plymouth. There were even half a dozen
+resident Europeans--English, Scotch, with one Frenchman who snuffed
+continually, and one Spaniard who smoked in season and out of
+season--people who had no doubt rushed over to see the "American war," but
+very soon found the South too hot for comfort, in one sense or the
+other,--among the number destined to add variety to the overfilled
+caravanserais of the Franconia and White ranges. A few had dropped away at
+Weir's Landing, for a day or two on Lake Winnipiseogee, enticed by the
+pleasant loom of Centre Harbor down the bright blue water and the romantic
+figure of the Lady of the Lake on the prow of her namesake steamer; and a
+few more had left the train at Plymouth for the long coach-ride of thirty
+miles through the mountains to the Glen House, or by the southern approach
+to the Profile or the Crawford. Two or three stage-loads, too, who had but
+one thought in their pilgrimage--Mount Washington,--were bustling in for
+the immediate ride from Littleton to the Crawford; but there were still
+four heavy stage-loads--not less than forty to fifty persons--going on to
+the crowded Profile House that evening.
+
+Some of the occupants of one of those heavy stages, rolling away towards
+the Profile, require, for the purposes of this narration, a somewhat closer
+view than was probably taken of them by many of their fellow-passengers;
+and that view cannot be more appropriately taken than at this moment.
+
+On the back seat of that vehicle sat two ladies, with a troublesome boy of
+ten years wedged in between them as if to come the nearest possible to
+getting him out of the way. Neither paid the youngster that attention which
+would have indicated that he belonged to them or was travelling in their
+company; and indeed they had every right as well as every inclination to
+wash their hands of his relationship if they could not wash from their
+travelling-dresses the marks of his taffy-smeared fingers. The two ladies
+were evidently mother and daughter; and at least one person in the coach
+had remarked them as they came up from Concord, and seen that their sole
+chaperon and protector seemed to be a son of the one and brother of the
+other, some eighteen or twenty years of age. As he saw them then and as he
+afterwards better knew them, they may be briefly described.
+
+The Vanderlyns were Baltimoreans--the widow and children of a man of large
+wealth and considerable distinction, who had died three or four years
+before in that city, after having amassed a fortune by property
+speculations and subsequently filled more than one responsible office under
+the State government. They had the true Southern pride in wealth and
+position; and the hand of the daughter had already been sought, however
+ineffectually, by scions of the best families in and about the Monumental
+city. Let it be added that they belonged, whatever may have been their
+pride and arrogance as a family, to the not-too-extensive class of _loyal_
+Marylanders,--and then a better title of nobility will have been enrolled
+than any that Clayton Vanderlyn's money and former public employments had
+power to supply. The widowed mother and her children were among the few
+residents below Mason and Dixon's line who had not forgotten the pleasant
+summer days of old in the North, when Puritan and Cavalier met as friends
+and brothers; and this summer tour, which was to include Saratoga and
+Newport before it closed, was a result of the old recollection.
+
+Mrs. Vanderlyn, the mother, seemed forty-five, but was fine-looking and had
+evidently been handsome in her youth--with those splendid brown eyes that
+must then have sparkled so much more brilliantly than at this period, and
+that perfect wealth of chestnut hair, not yet in the least sprinkled with
+gray, which must then have been a charm and a glory. Her travelling-dress
+was very plain, but of the best materials; and every thing in her
+appearance--especially pride of look and action,--spoke of wealth, the
+habit of mingling in that indefinable but actual thing, good society, and a
+perfect consciousness of what she was and what she possessed. Those who
+looked twice upon Mrs. Vanderlyn, with keen eyes, had no difficulty in
+deciding that she might be a very pleasant acquaintance for those in her
+own "set" and whom she considered her equals,--but that she would be any
+thing but a pleasant acquaintance for those whom she despised or with whom
+she chanced to fall into feud.
+
+Clara Vanderlyn, the daughter, was a yet more interesting study than her
+mother; and it seemed altogether probable that the same observer before
+mentioned, and who will be hereafter more particularly introduced, coming
+up in the same car from Nashua and again thrown into near proximity in the
+coach, had read and was reading that second page of the Vanderlyn genealogy
+with peculiar care and attention. She was of middle height; slight, but
+well-rounded and evidently elastic in figure, with a clearly cut but very
+pleasant face, eyes a shade darker than Mrs. Vanderlyn's, and hair what
+that lady's had probably been twenty years before. A wonderful feature,
+indeed, was that head of hair--fine, silken, but perfectly massive in
+profusion, with more of a tendency to the wave than the curl, and of that
+rich golden chestnut or true auburn so seldom seen though so often lauded.
+At the first observation, it seemed that Clara Vanderlyn's hair was the
+great charm of her presence; but those who had the good fortune to be many
+hours in her company, learned that a still stronger and more abiding charm
+lay in the affability of her manners, the expression of thorough goodness
+in her whole demeanor, and the purity and sweetness of her smile. That face
+was certainly worthy of the fixed gaze which had rested upon it quite as
+often during the afternoon as delicacy permitted; and it might even have
+furnished excuse for glancing at it a moment too long, and planting blushes
+on those cheeks that the lip could have no hope of gathering.
+
+The third and youngest of the family, Frank Vanderlyn, did not enter into
+the group under observation, as he was at that time on the top of the coach
+with half a dozen others, enjoying the cigar which had been impossible in
+the passenger-car. But the glimpses caught of him before disembarking, may
+suffice to complete the family triad. He seemed a well-grown stripling,
+verging upon manhood, with a face distantly reminding the observer of his
+sister's, but with darker hair than either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Clara, and
+with an expression of settled hauteur upon his well-cut features, which
+very much detracted from the charm of a face that would otherwise have been
+singularly handsome. He was dressed a little too well for dusty travel, and
+wore more wealth in a single diamond in his cravat and a cluster-ring on
+the little finger of his right hand, than most young men would have been
+either able or willing to devote to such purposes of mere ornament.
+
+This description of the occupants of that singularly-fortunate coach may
+have very little interest beyond that of a mere catalogue; yet it must be
+continued, for Fate, that grim old auctioneer who sometimes knocks us down
+at very low prices and to odd owners, may have some necessity for a
+mercantile list of his chattels.
+
+The occupants of the middle seat were three in number, and they could have
+furnished any needed information as to the personality of the troublesome
+boy with the taffied fingers, who had been wedged between Clara Vanderlyn
+and her mother. All of one family--that second triad: Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame, Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, and Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame.
+The first, a squat man of fifty-five, with a broad, coarse, beardless face,
+bad teeth and bristly gray hair just suffering under its first infliction
+of slaty-brown hair-dye. His large hands had been all day cased in kid
+gloves, spite of the heat of the weather; and his gray suit, of really fine
+material, had a sort of new look, and did not seem to be worn easily. There
+was an impression carried about by the man and disseminated at every
+movement, that another and a much shabbier suit hung immediately behind his
+bed-room door at home, and that in that he would have been easy and
+comfortable, while in the fashionable garb he was laboring under a sort of
+Sunday-clothes restraint. The second, a stout woman of fifty, with reddish
+hair, a coarse pink face, high cheek bones and pert nose, corresponding
+well with her lord in conformation, while it wore an expression of dignity
+and self-satisfaction to which the countenance of that poor man could not
+have made the least pretension. She was only a _little_ overdressed, for
+travelling--her bonnet of fine straw too much of a flower-garden for her
+years, a heavy gold watch-chain with the watch prominent, a diamond
+breastpin flashing hotly, and her voluminous blue lawn of costly fabric
+partially covered by a long gray mantle which must have been recommended to
+her by some mantua-maker with a "spasm of sense." But if there was any
+restraint in the make-up of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that restraint was
+fully compensated by the gorgeousness of the general arrangement of Miss
+Marianna. That young lady of thirty, with a large mouth, sandy hair, bluish
+gray eyes and freckles, a dumpy figure and no eye-brows whatever, was
+arrayed--shade of Madame La Modiste forgive us while we pen the
+record--arrayed for that hot and dusty day of railroad and coach riding, in
+a rich pink silk flounced and braided to the extreme of the current
+fashion; with a jockey leghorn and white feather which--well, we may say
+with truth that they _relieved_ her face; with a braided mantle of white
+merino that might have been originally designed for an opera-cloak; white
+kid gloves in a transition state; and such a profusion of gold watch, gold
+chain, enamelled bracelet, diamond cluster-breastpin, costly lace, and
+other feminine means of attracting admiration and envy, that the brain of a
+masculine relator reels among the chaos of finery and he desists in
+despair. The fourth of this family was Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame,
+_aetat_ ten, wedged in between the two aristocratic representatives of the
+Vanderlyn exclusiveness, and the freckles on his coarse little face and
+hands about equally balanced by the dauby debris of more or less hardened
+taffy to which allusion has before been unavoidably made.
+
+This group (the fact may as well be set down in this place as at any later
+period)--this was Shoddy on its summer tour. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had
+been, a considerable number of years before, Patrick B. Cunningham; and his
+name had been scrawled, many hundreds of times, to receipts for work done
+as a petty contractor about the streets of New York City, with one horse
+and a dirt-cart, digging out cellars, and helping to cart the dirt of
+pipe-layings and excavations. Gradually he had crept up to two carts, and
+then to three. Eventually he had reached the employing of a dozen or two,
+with the bipeds that drove and the quadrupeds that drew them. By that time
+he had removed from his shanty of one story and rented a house. Then he had
+gone into ward politics and contracts with the city, at about the same
+time, and emerged into possession of a couple of brown-stone-front houses
+and a seat in the Board of Aldermen, at periods not very far apart. People
+said that the seat in the municipal board, with the "ring" performances
+(more or less clown-ish) thereunto appertaining, were made the means of
+increasing the two houses to four and of causing Mrs. Patrick B. Cunningham
+to forget the whole of her husband's first name and merely use the initials
+"P. B.," which might or might not stand for 'Pollo Belvidere. Then had come
+the war, with that golden opportunity for all who stood prepared for it.
+Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been at that time the proprietor of some fifty or
+sixty gallant steeds used before dirt-carts, and his vigorous and patriotic
+mind had conceived the propriety of aiding the country by disposing of
+those mettled chargers as aids towards a first-class cavalry mount. He had
+sold, prospered, bought more dirt-cart and stage-horses with an admixture
+of those only to be discovered between the thills of clam-wagons, found no
+difficulty in passing them as fit for the service, through the kindness of
+a friendly inspector who only charged two dollars per head for deciding
+favorably on the quadrupeds,--sold and prospered again and yet again. Mr.
+P. B. Cunningham had accordingly found himself, three months before the
+period of this narration, the lawful proprietor of half a million, acquired
+in the most loyal manner and without for one moment wavering in his
+connection with either Tammany Hall, through which he managed the
+Democrats, or the Loyal League by which he kept in favor with the
+Republicans.
+
+So far Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been uninterruptedly successful--the
+monarch as well as architect of his own fortune. But at that period (the
+three months before) he had suddenly been made aware that every man has his
+fate and the end of his career of supremacy. Mrs. P. B. Cunningham had
+proved herself his fate and put a sudden end to his supremacy. That lady,
+all the while emerging, had emerged, from the dust and darkness of lower
+fortune, and become a fashionable butterfly. She had ordered him to buy a
+four-story brown-stone front, finer than any that he owned, on one of the
+up-town streets not far from _the_ Avenue; and he had obeyed. She had
+ordered him to discard his old clothes, and he had obeyed again, though
+with a sincere reluctance. She had changed his name to Brooks Cunninghame,
+(observe the _e_!) her own to Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that of Mary Ann to
+Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame, and that of the male scion of the house,
+_aetat_ ten as aforesaid, to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame. The
+door-plate of the new house could not be arranged in accordance with the
+new programme, for door-plates had been voted vulgar and abandoned by the
+_creme de la creme_; but the family cards had been made to bear all the
+blushing honors in steel engraving and round-hand. This done, the requisite
+jewelry bought, and some other little arrangements perfected which may
+develop themselves in due time, the lady had informed Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame that both the health and the dignity of the family required
+summer recreation, and dragged him away on that tour of which we have the
+privilege of witnessing one of the progresses.
+
+Some reference has been made to the array, rather gorgeous than otherwise,
+of Miss Marianna, for dusty travel. A few words which had passed between
+the three heads of the family at one of the Boston hotels that morning, may
+give a little insight into the philosophy of this arrangement. Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame, yet retaining a little of the common-sense of his dirt-cart
+days, had ventured to suggest that "Mary Ann mought wear her commoner duds
+to ride in, for thim fineries 'ud be spiled before night wid the dust
+intirely;" and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, alike indignant at a suggestion so
+smacking of low life and grieved to find that her husband would persist in
+retaining a few touches of the brogue of which she had cured herself and
+her children so triumphantly,--had answered with a sort of verbal two-edged
+sword that did fatal execution on both the others:
+
+"Brooks Cunninghame, you'd better keep your mouth shut if you can't open it
+without letting out some of that low Irish! One would think you drove a
+dirt-cart yit! And you, my dear"--to Marianna (the mother had been "posting
+herself" in some of the phrases of "good society," as well as in some other
+things which may also yet develop themselves)--"you, my dear, put on the
+very best o' them things that you've got! Ain't we rich, I should like to
+know? We may see a good many folks to-day, in them cars, and who knows
+whether you mightn't lose a beau that'd take a fancy to you, if you went
+slouchin' around with your old things on? Dress up, my dear!"
+
+Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had succumbed; Miss Marianna had "dressed up," as
+per order; and collective Shoddy was thus far on its way, without accident,
+towards the first halting-place in the grand tour of the mountains.
+
+But what of the observer who has more than once before been mentioned, and
+who sat in the corner of the front seat, half buried under the voluminous
+skirts of two ladies who have nothing whatever to do with this narration,
+but looking so steadily (people who have habitually ridden in those Concord
+coaches know that the front is another back, and that the occupants of the
+front and back seats face each other)--looking so steadily, we say, at
+every permissible opportunity, into the sweet face of Clara Vanderlyn? He
+was a man of apparently thirty years of age, rather tall and very
+vigorous-looking even if slight, with curling dark hair, almost or quite
+black, and worn short, the face finely cut and showing no beard except a
+close, full moustache of raven blackness, the complexion (brow and all, as
+could be noticed when he lifted his hat from his head, as he often did, for
+coolness) of such a dark clear brown as to mark him of Southern birth or
+blood, clothes of thin dark gray material, with a round tourist hat and a
+duster, the small hands gloved in summer silk, and the whole appearance and
+manner that of a gentleman, used to good society, and very probably
+professional. He had been reading, nearly all the way up from Worcester,
+some of the other passengers noticed--though it must be confessed that a
+part of his reading had been over the top of the book at that attractive
+large type formed by a pretty human face; and no blame is intended to be
+cast upon Clara Vanderlyn when we say that that young lady had more than
+once met the evidently admiring glance of so fine-looking a man, with the
+little tinge of color that was becoming, but without any expression upon
+her face or any thought in her mind, resenting any more than returning an
+admiration which she believed that she had a right to receive and any
+gentleman to pay thus respectfully. He had spoken but seldom, during the
+ride, in such a way that any person then present had heard him; but once he
+had taken (or _made_) occasion to apologize to Miss Vanderlyn and her
+mother for being thrown against their seat by the motion of the car while
+walking through it, on the rough road when coming up from Plymouth to Wells
+river; and his few words, as the lady remarked, consorted well with the
+respectability (to say the least) of his appearance. As to his personality,
+which there did not seem the slightest occasion for his wishing to
+disguise, there was a big black trunk in the baggage-wagon following behind
+the line of coaches, and a small satchel strapped over his shoulder as he
+rode; and the first bore the initials "H. T." and the direction
+"Cincinnati."
+
+While so much attention has been paid to the occupants of that single
+coach, leaving the others and even the noisy passengers on the roof of
+this, unnoticed, the vehicles had been buzzing and clattering along over
+the table-land lying at the foot of the mountains, past the little hamlet
+of Franconia, and nearing the mountains themselves. A glorious July evening
+it was, with the fiery air which had been so oppressive below gradually
+cooled by the approach to the presence of the monarchs, and the smoke from
+the fires in the woods playing fantastic tricks among the peaks, and
+compensating for the absence of the clouds which sometimes enveloped them.
+Not half the passengers in those four stages had ever seen the mountains
+before; and not one, even of those accustomed to such scenery, but felt the
+blood beating a little quicker as the mountain road beyond Franconia was
+reached, and they began to experience those rapid ascents, and yet more
+rapid descents, which accompany thence all the way to the Notch, with grand
+old woods overhanging, steep and sheer ravines at the side of the road that
+made the head dizzy in looking, reverential glimpses of the awful peaks of
+Lafayette and the Cannon frowning ahead, and of Washington, grander still,
+towering far away over the White range, and with all the other
+accompaniments of the finest mountain scenery on the Atlantic coast of the
+American continent. There was quite enough, indeed, to engage the attention
+of any except the most blase and ennuyee traveller, in the grandeur of the
+scenery and the excitement of being galloped in rocking, lumbering,
+four-horse coaches, down declivities of road which would have made a driver
+in any ordinary hill-country draw tight rein and creep down with a heavy
+foot on the brake.
+
+Not a few nervous passengers, first or last, dashing up and down the slopes
+of the White Mountain roads, have been more or less frightened, and wished
+that they could be once more on terra firma without incurring the penalty
+of a laugh at their cowardice; and in the present instance this little bit
+of locomotion was not to be allowed to pass without an adventure.
+
+Half an hour from the foot of the mountain the coach went rapidly up a
+sharp ascent in the road, then dashed down again at full gallop, striking
+one of those necessary nuisances known as "breakwaters" when a few yards
+from the top, with a shock that sent the coach-body leaping on its leathern
+jacks like a yawl-boat in a heavy surf, made some of the outsiders on the
+top shout and hold on merrily to keep from being whirled off into one of
+the side-ravines, and created such a state of affairs inside the vehicle,
+generally, as effectually broke up the monotony. That shock drove the head
+of Mrs. Vanderlyn back against the leathern cushions with a force seriously
+damaging to the crown of her bonnet, brought a slight scream from Clara,
+who was frightened for the instant, made the troublesome Master Brooks
+Brooks yell and dash a dirty hand into the dress of each of the ladies who
+had the honor of the same seat, and elicited from Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame
+and her husband one of those brief but very significant marital displays
+which were no doubt afterwards to edify so many. Whether the lady had
+ascertained that fashionable people must always fall and faint under any
+sudden excitement, or whether the shock really frightened as well as
+unseated her, is a matter of no consequence: certain it is that she at that
+juncture threw up her hands and rolled up her eyes, gave one scream that
+degenerated into a groan, rolled from her seat and subsided into the bottom
+of the coach, under the feet of "H. T.," in what seemed to be a fit of some
+description. Miss Marianna, really alarmed, with the affectionate if not
+classic words, "Oh, mammy!" made a grab at that lady, clutching the back of
+her hat and tearing it from the head it crowned, while Master Brooks Brooks
+changed his yell into a howl and Mr. Brooks Cunninghame stooped down,
+terror in his face and his hands feeling around at the bottom of the
+vehicle for any portion of what had been his wife, with the affectionate
+but not politic inquiry: "Is it kilt ye are, Bridget?"
+
+Not politic?--no, certainly not! A stronger word might be applied without
+risk to the unfortunate expression. Among the changes in family polity not
+before indicated, had been an indignant throwing over of her very honest
+name of "Bridget" by the wife of the horse-contractor, and the adoption of
+"Julia" in its stead. More than one curtain-lecture had poor Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame endured, before leaving New York, on the necessity of avoiding
+any blunder in that regard, when they should be "away from home"; and he
+had not escaped without severe drill and many promises of perfection in his
+part. And now to have forgotten the adopted "Julia" and used the tell-tale
+"Bridget" at the very moment of the family's entering upon their first
+essay in fashionable watering-place life, was really a little too much for
+patience not entirely angelic.
+
+Both the poets and the romancers tell of cases in which some word of
+heart-broken affection, uttered at the instant when the death-film was
+stealing over the eyes of the beloved one, has had power to strike the
+dulled sense and call back for a moment the fleeting life when it had
+escaped far beyond the reach of any other sound. Something of the same
+character--not quite so romantic, perhaps, but quite as real,--was
+developed in the present instance. The woman may have been falling into an
+actual faint; but if so, that offensive word pierced through the gathering
+mists of insensibility, and she crawled out from the entanglement of legs
+before any effectual aid could be afforded her, and with such a look of
+contempt and hatred burning full upon her unfortunate husband that he must
+have felt for the moment as if placed directly under the lens of a
+sun-glass at focus. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame shrank into his number eleven
+patent-leathers, and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame "swatted" herself (there is no
+other word in or out of the language that will quite so well express the
+act) down on the seat with an air that implied a wish for some one's head
+being beneath her at that juncture. Her glance had not at all softened, nor
+had "H. T." ceased looking out of the window or Clara Vanderlyn (behind
+her) yet taken her handkerchief from her mouth, when the female Cunninghame
+said, in what she thought very honeyed accents:
+
+"Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, I wish you would find some other time to go and
+call me nicknames, than when I am jolted out of my seat in that way and
+a'most dead!"
+
+The stroke of policy was a fine one, and even the thick head of Mr. Brooks
+Cunninghame recognized the necessity of following it up--an act which he
+performed thus gracefully and with a look intended for one of the staring
+ladies on the front seat:
+
+"Yes, mim, her name isn't Bridget at all at all, but Julia. It's only a bit
+of a way I have of jokin' wid her, mim!"
+
+This was satisfactory, of course--absolutely conclusive; and so Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame grew mollified by degrees; the redness which had come into the
+face of Miss Marianna gradually faded out; Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame
+took occasion to manifest his filial fondness by reaching over and hugging
+his mother with hands just re-coated with candy dug out of his capacious
+pocket; and the Concord coach, with its consorts, rolled and jolted and
+swayed along, up and down the mountain road to its destination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+     LANDING AT THE PROFILE HOUSE--HALSTEAD ROWAN AND
+     GYMNASTICS--HOW THAT PERSON SAW CLARA VANDERLYN AND BECAME A
+     RIVAL OF "H. T."--THE FULL MOON IN THE NOTCH--TRODDEN TOES,
+     A NAME, A VOICE, AND A RENCONTRE--MARGARET HAYLEY AND CAPT.
+     HECTOR COLES--THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN BY MOONLIGHT, AND
+     A MYSTERY.
+
+
+Spite of the sometimes rapid speed, the toil up the mountain had been long
+and tedious; and dusk was very nearly falling and the chill of the coming
+evening was sufficient to induce the drawing close of mantles and wrappers
+that only two hours before had been reckoned an incumbrance,--when the
+coaches with their loads broke out from the overhanging woods on a steep
+down-grade, the passengers caught a glimpse of Echo Lake lying like a sheet
+of molten silver under the evening calm, and the whole cortege swept down
+at a gallop and with cracking of whips, to the broad, level plateau lying
+before the Profile House in the Franconia Notch.
+
+Two of the coaches had been in advance of that to which the attention of
+the reader has been particularly directed, and still other coaches had just
+come in from Plymouth, the Glen and the Crawford; so that when they drew up
+to alight the long piazza of the Profile was filled with sojourners
+satisfying their curiosity or looking out for fresh arrivals; and coachmen,
+servants and every employee of the establishment, were busy hauling down
+from the racks and boots where they had been stowed, immense piles of
+trunks, valises and every description of baggage that had not been
+entrusted to the van yet lumbering behind. Landlord Taft and superintendent
+Jennings were alert and busy; old comers were curious as to the number and
+nature of new arrivals; new comers were glancing momentarily at the
+glorious scenery and anxiously inquiring every thing of everybody who knew
+no more of the things inquired about than did the askers themselves. All
+was charming bustle--delightful confusion: one of those peculiar scenes
+connected with summer travel and watering-place life, which furnish the
+very best of opportunities for study to the quiet observer.
+
+The coach door had been opened and all the inside passengers handed out,
+before the merry party from the roof made any attempt at getting down. Peal
+after peal of hearty laughter went up from that outside division of the
+vehicle; and evidently the party there assembled had reached the Profile
+before achieving the end of the jests and story-telling in which they had
+been engaged. They had already attracted some attention from the piazza,
+and one boarding-school miss had been appealed to by her eye-glassed swain
+in attendance, to "heah those awful vulgah fellahs!"--when the laughter
+ceased, and one of the roof-passengers made a sudden spring from that
+elevation, over the heads of half a dozen of those standing on the ground,
+and came safely to his feet with a jerk which would have laid up a less
+perfect physical man for a week and completely shaken out the false teeth
+from the mouth of any victim of a dentist.
+
+The rapid man was followed by his companions, Frank Vanderlyn included
+among the number; but they all seemed to choose the more popular mode of
+getting down, by the aid of steps and braces.
+
+"Pretty well done, Rowan!" exclaimed one of the others as he himself
+reached the ground. "Broke any thing?"
+
+"No, nothing--except," and at that moment his eye caught the forms and
+faces of Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her mother, who were standing at the
+edge of the piazza, waiting while Frank descended and made some arrangement
+for the disposition of their baggage. "H. T.," of the coach-load, was
+standing within a few feet of them, his little satchel still strapped over
+his shoulder and his eyes scarcely wandering at all from the woman whom
+they had scanned so long and well during the journey by rail. But he had
+glanced around, with the others, at the noise made by the singular descent;
+and his eye met that of the man who had been called Rowan, as the latter
+made the discovery of mother and daughter. It was but a lightning flash
+that Rowan gave or the stranger detected, but few glances of any human eye
+have ever expressed more within the same period. He evidently saw the young
+girl for the first time, at that moment; and quite as evidently he drank in
+at that one glimpse the full charm of her beauty and goodness. That was not
+all: in the one glance, too, he apparently measured her wealth and social
+position--saw and reckoned up the proud woman standing beside her--then
+took, it is probable, an introspective view of himself and his own
+surroundings, and found time to realize the utter hopelessness of that
+impulse which for the tithe of a moment he must have felt stirring within
+him.
+
+Perhaps half-a-dozen seconds had elapsed before he concluded the answer he
+had begun. "No, nothing--except--my heart!" He had begun to speak in a
+light, gay, off-hand manner: he concluded in a low, sad voice, full alike
+of music and melancholy.
+
+"H. T." had been observing him very closely during that brief space of
+time, as had nearly all the other spectators, their notice attracted by his
+reckless mode of alighting. He was apparently about thirty years of age, a
+little less than six feet high--perhaps five feet eleven; with a form
+undeniably stout, but rounded like a reed and as elastic as whalebone. His
+hands were soft and womanish in their contour, though they were rather
+large, nut-brown in color, and had evidently felt, as had his face, the
+meridian sun. His feet were almost singularly small for so large a
+man--highly arched and springy. His face and head, as he the moment after
+removed his hat, were capable of attracting attention in any company. The
+face was a little broad and heavily moulded; the cheek-bones prominent and
+the nose slightly aquiline; the eyes dark, dreamy and lazy; the brow fair,
+and above it clustering dark, short, soft hair, curled, but so delicate in
+texture that it waved like silk floss with the veriest breath. The mouth
+would have been, the observer might have thought, heavy and a little
+sensual, had it not been hidden away by the thick and curling dark
+moustache which he wore without other beard. Only one other feature need be
+named--a chin rather broad and square and showing a very slight depression
+of the bone in the centre--such as has marked a singular description of men
+for many an hundred years. It needed a second glance to see that a broad,
+heavy scar, thoroughly healed, commenced at the left cheek-bone and
+traversed below the ear until lost in the thick hair at the base of the
+neck. Such was the picture this man presented--a contradictory one in some
+respects, but evidencing great strength, power and agility, and yet more
+than a suspicion of intellectuality and refinement. A close and habitual
+observer of men does not often err in "placing" one whom he may happen to
+meet, even at first sight,--after a few seconds of careful examination; but
+the keenest might have been puzzled to decide what was that man's station
+in life, his profession, or even his character. Any one must have been in
+the main favorably impressed: beyond that point little could possibly have
+been imagined by the most daring.
+
+A small black trunk came off the top of the coach at about the time that
+"H. T.," who seemed to be bargaining for a rival at that early period, had
+concluded his inspection; and there was not much difficulty in connecting
+the name and address painted in white on the end with the appellation by
+which the stranger had the moment before been designated. That name and
+address read: "Halstead Rowan, Chicago, Illinois."
+
+Two men appeared to be travelling in company with Rowan; one a man of
+something beyond his own age--the other five or six years younger; both
+respectable but by no means affluent in appearance. All were well dressed
+and gentlemanly in aspect; but neither Rowan nor either of his companions
+gave the impression of what might be designated as the "first circles of
+society," even in the great grain-metropolis of the West.
+
+"H. T.," the observer, had fixed his eyes so closely on the male party in
+that singular meeting, that he probably lost the answering expression of
+the lady's face and did not know whether or not she had returned that
+glance of wondering interest. Something like disappointment at that lost
+opportunity may have been the cause of his biting his lip a little
+nervously as he took his way, with the rest of the new-comers, into the
+hall and reception-room, waiting opportunity for the booking of names and
+the assignment of chambers. Some of those in waiting no doubt found the
+tedium materially diminished by finding themselves, in the reception-room,
+at that close of a blazing day of July, standing or sitting with a
+decidedly grateful feeling before a quarter-of-a-cord of birchen wood,
+blazing away in the open fire-place with that peculiar warmth and hearty
+geniality so little known to this coal-burning age, but so well remembered
+by those who knew the old baronial halls of republican America in a time
+long passed away.
+
+Not many minutes after the rencontre that has been described, the crowd had
+vanished from the piazza of the Profile House, the coaches had driven away,
+the baggage was being rapidly removed within doors, and the tired and
+hungry new-comers were booked for rooms and clearing away the soil and dust
+of travel, preparatory to supper. Soon the crockery and cutlery jingled in
+the long dining-room, and the flaky tea-biscuits steamed for those who
+hurried down to catch them in their full perfection.
+
+It was a desultory supper and a somewhat hurried one, for the moonrise was
+coming--that rise of the full moon which so many had promised themselves,
+and for which, indeed, not a few of the arrivals of that evening had timed
+their visit to the mountains. Then, hunger has but little curiosity, and
+surveys and recognitions were both waited for until the broader light and
+greater leisure of the morning; and probably of the dozens of old residents
+(a week is "old residence" at a watering-place, be it remembered, and a
+fortnight confers all the privileges of the habitue)--probably of the
+dozens of old residents and new-comers who had acquaintances among the
+opposite class, not two found time or thought for seeking out familiar
+faces during that period when the sharpened appetite was so notably in the
+ascendant.
+
+"The moonlight is coming: come out, all of you who care more for scenery
+than stuffing!" said a high, shrill voice, after a time had elapsed which
+would scarcely have begun the meal under ordinary circumstances. It was an
+elderly man with white hair and white side-whiskers, an old habitue of the
+house and therefore a privileged character, who spoke, pulling out his
+watch and at once rising from his seat. He was followed by more than half
+those at table, and would have been followed especially by Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame, who had somewhere learned that fashion and a rage for
+moonlight had a mysterious connection,--but for the insatiable hunger of
+Mr. Brooks Cunninghame himself, who was engaged in mortal combat with a
+formidable piece of steak and a whole pile of biscuits, and who outraged
+Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame by declaring, sotto voce, that "he'd be
+something-or-othered if he'd lave his supper until he was done, for any
+moonlight or other something-or-othered thing in the wurruld!"--and the
+obstreperousness of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, who was up to his
+eyes in three kinds of preserves and bade fair to stick permanently fast to
+the table through the agency of those glutinous compounds.
+
+Out on the piazza and the broad plateau in front of it, the visitors at the
+Profile gathered, to see what is not often vouchsafed to the most devoted
+of nature-lovers--the rising of the full moon in the mountains. Those who
+are familiar with the Franconia Notch well know how the mountains around
+the Profile always seem to draw closer after sunset, and how the frowning
+cliffs seem to form insurmountable barriers between them and the outer
+world, making it doubtful to the bewildered thought whether there is indeed
+any egress from that cool paradise of summer--whether or not they can ride
+away at will and look again upon green fields and flashing streams and the
+faces of those they love. And they well know that moonrise there, over
+those encircling cliffs, is not the moonrise of the lower country, with the
+orb throwing its broad beams of light at once wide over the world, but an
+actual peeping down from heaven of a fair and genial spirit that deigns for
+the time to pour welcome radiance into an abode of solitude and darkness.
+The spectacle, then, is one to be sought and remembered; and as storms
+habitually beat around those mountain tops and fog and mist quite divide
+the time with fair weather in the valleys, the tourist is mad or
+emotionless who allows the cloudless full moon to come up without catching
+its smile on cheek and brow.
+
+The intense blue of the eastern sky was already gone when the anxious
+groups clustered in front of the great white caravanserai, and the stars
+began to glimmer paler in that direction. There was not a fleck of cloud,
+not a shadow of mist, to prevent the rounded orb, when it came up, flooding
+the whole gorge with the purest of liquid silver. The winds were still as
+if they waited with finger on lip for the pageant; and the shrill scream of
+a young eagle that broke out for an instant from one of the eyries under
+the brow of Eagle Cliff and then died trembling away down the valley,
+seemed like profanation. Conversation was hushed, among all that varying
+and even discordant crowd, as if there might be power in a profane word to
+check the wheeling of the courses of nature. The orient began to be flushed
+with that trembling light, and glints of it touched the dark pines on the
+brow of the cliff, a mile away. Then that light beyond the cliffs deepened
+and the dark pines grew still darker as fully relieved against it. Then at
+last, as they watched with hushed breath, a rim of silver seemed suddenly
+to have been set as an arch on the very brow of the mountain, and slowly
+the full orb rolled into view. As it heaved up, a broad, full circle of
+glittering and apparently dripping silver, it threw out the trees on the
+brow of the mountain into such bold relief as if a lightning flash had
+literally been burning behind them. There was one giant old pine, no doubt
+an hundred feet in height, so far away on the bold crest of Eagle Cliff
+that it seemed to be only a toy tree of three inches; and this was thrown
+against the very centre of the moon, every gnarled limb and pendant branch
+as plain to the eye as if it hung within a stone's throw, a dead pigmy of
+the same family shooting up its ragged point not far distant, and a tangled
+wilderness of broken trees and scraggy branches filling the remainder of
+the circle. Then, the moment after, the moon heaved slowly up beyond the
+trees, they fell back into darkness, and the broad glow streamed full into
+the faces of the gazers and flooded the whole valley with light. The great
+spectacle of the month had been exhibited to hundreds of admiring eyes, and
+the full moon of July shed its broad glory like a blessing upon the
+Franconia.
+
+It was at the moment when the pageant was just concluding and exclamations
+of pleasure breaking from a hundred lips, that "H. T." (who has not as yet
+furnished us data for any fuller revelation of his name), standing at some
+distance out on the plateau from the piazza, and stepping suddenly backward
+to observe a particular effect of the light among the trees on the cliff,
+trod upon the foot of a lady immediately behind him and nearly overthrew
+her. He turned immediately, with a word of apology, at the same time that a
+gentleman near her, who seemed to be in her immediate company, sprang to
+prevent her possible fall, venting meanwhile on the presumed awkwardness
+of the aggressor a word of ill-disguised petulance:--
+
+"You should be a little more careful, sir, I think, how you step upon
+ladies' feet and risk hurting them seriously."
+
+"I beg a thousand pardons!" was the reply. "Certainly I did not know that
+there was a lady immediately behind me, and--"
+
+The lady gave a sudden start, caught a quick glance at the speaker, and
+then recovered her equanimity so suddenly that perhaps not two of all the
+company observed the momentary agitation; while the gentleman interrupted
+the attempted apology, not too politely, with--
+
+"Is your foot much injured, Miss Hayley?"
+
+The answer made by the lady was in the negative, and in a tone that, though
+it trembled a little, proved her less petulant than her companion. But it
+is possible that "H. T.," as he has been known, did not pay that answer any
+attention whatever. As he turned he must certainly have seen the lady more
+or less distinctly in the moonlight, and yet had manifested no surprise at
+what he saw; but when the name was mentioned he gave a start that must have
+been noticeable by any acute observer. Had he really not noticed her before
+his attention was called by the mention of the name? or was the face one
+which he did not recognize while the name bore a talisman that commanded
+all his interest? Certain it is that he saw the lady now, distinctly; and
+equally certain is it that the face was the same which has met the gaze of
+the reader, a month before, on the piazza of the house at West
+Philadelphia.
+
+Margaret Hayley, in very truth, dressed so darkly that at the first glance
+her attire might almost have been taken for black, and with not even one
+ornament to sparkle in the moonbeams, while that peculiarity of her raiment
+was made more notable by a light summer scarf or "cloud," of white berlin,
+thrown over her head to guard it from the night air, in a fashion somewhat
+oriental. Her proud, statuesque figure rose erect as ever; and the same
+stately perfection of womanhood looked out from her dark eyes and beamed
+upon her pure, high brow, that had shone there before the falling of that
+blow which had so truly been the turning point of her life. The cheek may
+have been a shade thinner than a month before; and there may have been a
+shadow under the eyes, too marked for her heyday of youth and health; but
+if so the moonlight was not enough of a tell-tale to make the revelation.
+
+The gentleman who had so promptly attended to the comfort of Margaret
+Hayley, and who did not seem averse to picking up a quarrel on her behalf,
+was dark haired and dark bearded, round-faced and rather fine-looking than
+otherwise, a little above the middle height, and wearing the uniform of a
+Captain on staff service. So much the eye of "H. T." took in at once, and
+he seemed to keep his attention somewhat anxiously on the two as the moment
+after they turned away and walked back towards the piazza, as if he would
+gladly have caught some additional word conveying a knowledge of the
+officer's personality. Nothing more was said, however, that could afford
+such a clue if one he really desired; and but a little time had elapsed
+when another subject of excitement arose, calculated to interest many of
+the hundreds who had already become partially drunk with the glory of the
+moonlight.
+
+"The moon is high enough, now: let us see how the Old Man of the Mountain
+looks when his face is silvered!" said some one in the crowd; and the happy
+suggestion was at once acted upon. There were quite enough old habitues
+present to supply guides and chaperons for the new-comers; and in a moment
+fifty or more of the visitors went trooping away down the white sandy road
+through the glen and under the sweeping branches among which the moonbeams
+peeped and played so coquettishly.
+
+Two or three windings of the road, two or three slight ascents and descents
+in elevation; some one said: "Here is the best view;" and the whole
+company paused in their scattering march. A sudden break, opening upon a
+dark quiet little lake or tarn, was to be seen through the trees to the
+right; and a quarter of a mile away, hanging sheer over the gulf of more
+than two thousand feet sweeping down towards the foot of the Cannon--there,
+with the massive iron face staring full into the moonlight that touched
+nose and cheek and brow with so strange and doubtful a light that the
+unpractised eye could not trace the outlines, while the accustomed could
+see them almost as plainly as in the sunlight--there loomed the awful
+countenance of the Old Man of the Mountain. Some there were in that
+company, familiar with every changing phase of that most marvellous freak
+of nature, who thought that grand as it had before seemed to them when the
+sun was high in the heavens and the dark outline relieved against the
+bright western sky, it was yet grander then, in the still, doubtful, solemn
+moonlight.
+
+Among those who had gone down to the edge of the little Old Man's Mirror
+for this view, were two of the sterner sex who happened to be without
+ladies under charge and to be separated from any other company. Directly,
+walking near each other, they fell together and exchanged casual remarks on
+the beauty of the night and the peculiarities of different points of
+scenery. They were the two who had first seen each other at the moment of
+alighting at the Profile little more than an hour before--"H. T." of the
+initials and the lady's smashed foot, and Halstead Rowan of the gymnastic
+spring from the coach-top. The first glance had told to each that there was
+something of mark in the other; and under the peculiar circumstances of
+that night they drifted together, without introduction except such as each
+could furnish for himself, but not likely to separate again without a much
+more intimate acquaintance,--just as many other waifs and fragments,
+floating down the great stream of life, have been thrown into what seemed
+accidental collision by a chance eddy, and yet never separated again until
+each had exercised upon the other an influence materially controlling the
+whole after course of destiny.
+
+Eventually the two, both rapid walkers, had gone faster than the rest and
+become the leaders of the impromptu procession to the shrine of the Old
+Man, so that when the halt was called they were standing together and apart
+from the others, forty or fifty feet further down the glen and where they
+had perhaps a yet better view of the profile than any of the company. Both
+were dear lovers of nature, if the word "reverent" could not indeed be
+added to the appreciation of both; and standing together there, even in
+silence, the intuitive knowledge of the inner life of each seemed to bring
+them more closely together than introductions and a better knowledge of
+antecedents could possibly have done. Then the crowd tired of gazing and
+moved back towards the house, leaving the two standing together and
+probably supposing themselves alone. They were not alone, in fact; for
+under the shadow of the trees to the left, half way between the spot where
+the new friends were standing and that which had been occupied by the body
+of the visitors, were three persons continuing the same lingering gaze.
+These were the officer and two ladies who each found the support of an
+arm--Margaret Hayley and her mother, the latter of whom, it would thus
+seem, was also at the Profile under the escort of the military gentleman.
+Unobserved themselves, they had the two men in full moonlight below and
+could see them almost as well as in the broader light of day.
+
+"Who are they, Captain Coles? Anybody we know?" asked the elder lady,
+speaking so low that the sound did not creep down to the two gazers.
+
+"Both new-comers, I think," answered the military gentleman. "Yes, they
+both came in to-night; and one of them, Margaret, is the booby who stepped
+on your foot a little while ago, and whom I shall yet take occasion to kick
+before he leaves the mountains if he does not learn to keep out of people's
+way."
+
+"I beg you will not allow yourself to get into difficulty on account of
+that trifling accident, and for me!" answered Margaret Hayley, while
+something very like a shudder, not at all warranted by the words, and that
+the Captain was not keen enough to perceive, swept through her form and
+even trembled the arm that rested within his.
+
+"Difficulty? oh, no difficulty, to me, you know; and for you, Margaret,
+more willingly than any other person in the world, of course!" and Captain
+Hector Coles, confident that he had expressed himself rather felicitously,
+thought it a good time to bow around to Miss Hayley, and did so.
+
+"You are quite right, Captain Hector Coles," said Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Low
+people, who do not even know how to walk without running over others,
+should be kept at their proper distance; and of course gentlemen and
+soldiers like yourself find it not only a duty but a privilege to afford to
+us ladies that protection."
+
+This time Captain Hector Coles, immensely flattered, bowed round on the
+other side, to the elder lady.
+
+"Hark!" said Margaret Hayley, in a louder voice than either had before
+used, and a voice that had a perceptible tremor in it like that of fright.
+
+"What did you hear?" asked the Captain.
+
+"Listen--I want to hear what that man was saying."
+
+"H. T." was speaking, just below.
+
+"No, I have never been here before," he said. "Strangely enough, some of
+the greatest curiosities of the continent are neglected by just such fools
+as myself, until too old or too busy or too careworn to enjoy them."
+
+"You speak like a jolly old grandfather, and yet you are scarcely as old as
+myself," answered the rich, sonorous voice of Halstead Rowan. "Well, that
+is _your_ business. The White Mountains are no novelty to me, or any other
+mountains, I believe, North of the Isthmus."
+
+"Is there any thing finer than this, at this moment, among them all?"
+
+"No, and I doubt if there is any thing finer on earth!" was the
+enthusiastic reply. "And by the way, even _I_ have not happened to see the
+full moon on the face of the Old Man, before. It is a magnificent sight--a
+new sensation."
+
+"How long has it stood so, I wonder? Since creation?" said the voice of "H.
+T.," "or did the Flood hurl those masses of stone into so unaccountable an
+accidental position?"
+
+"Haven't the most remote idea!" answered Rowan, gayly. "I have often
+thought of it, though, when looking at the marvel in the sunlight. But I
+have never been able to get any farther back than the idea how the winds
+must have howled and the rains beaten around that immobile face, age after
+age, while whole generations of the men after whom the face is apparently
+copied as a mockery, have been catching cold and dying from a mere puff of
+air on the head or a pair of wet feet."
+
+"The eternal--the immovable!" said "H. T.," his voice so solemn and
+impressive that it was evident his words were only a faint representation
+of the inner feeling.
+
+"I know one thing that it has been, without a doubt," said Rowan. "When the
+whole country was filled with Indians of a somewhat nobler character than
+the miserable wretches that alternately beg and murder on the Western
+plains, there is not much question that they must have worshipped it as the
+face of the Great Manitou, looking down upon them in anger or in love, as
+the storm-cloud swept around it or the summer sun tinted it with an iron
+smile."
+
+Halstead Rowan was speaking unconscious poetry, as many another man of his
+disposition has done, while those who sought to make it a trade have been
+hammering their dull brains and spoiling much good paper in the mere
+stringing of rhymes bearing the same relation to poetry that an onion does
+to the bulb of a tulip! Whether his companion caught the tone from him and
+merely elaborated it into another utterance, or whether he possessed the
+fire within himself and this rencontre was only the means of bringing out
+the spark, is something not now to be decided. But he spoke words that not
+only made the other turn and gaze upon him for a moment with astonishment,
+but moved the three unseen auditors with feelings which neither could very
+well analyze. His dark face, tinted by the moonlight as the stony brow of
+the mountain was itself touched and hallowed, seemed rapt as those of the
+seers of old are sometimes said to have been; and his voice was strangely
+sweet and melodious:
+
+"To me, just now," he said, "that iron face is assuming a new shape."
+
+"The deuce it is!" answered Rowan. "Where?"
+
+"'In my mind's eye, Horatio!'" quoted the speaker, and the other seemed to
+understand something of his mood. "Do you know that face may be nothing
+more than sixty feet of strangely-shaped stone, to others; but to me, at
+this moment, it is the Spirit of the North looking sadly down over our
+fields of conflict and saying words that I almost hear. Listen, and see if
+you do not hear them, too!"
+
+How strangely earnestness sometimes impresses us, even when little else
+than madness is the motive power! Halstead Rowan, by no means a man to be
+easily moulded to the fancies of any other, found himself insensibly
+turning his ear towards the Sphynx, as if it was indeed speaking through
+the still night air!
+
+"'I am the Soul of the Nation,'" the singular voice went on, speaking as if
+for the lips of stone. "'Storms have raved around my forehead and thunders
+have shaken my base, but nothing has moved me! Scarred I may have been by
+the lightning and discolored by the beating rain, but the hand of man
+cannot touch me, and even the elements can disturb me not. I have seen ten
+thousand storms, and not one but was followed by the bright sunshine,
+because Nature was ever true to itself. Be but true to yourselves, loyal
+men of the great American Union, and the nation you love shall yet be
+throned above the reach of treason as I am throned above the touch of
+man--unapproachable in its power as I am fearful in my eternal isolation!'"
+
+Halstead Rowan had ceased looking at the Sphynx and gazed only at its
+oracle, long before the strange rhapsody concluded; and Margaret Hayley,
+supported upon the arm of Captain Hector Coles, had more than once
+shuddered, and at last leaned so heavily upon that arm as to indicate that
+she must be suddenly ill. To the startled inquiry of the Captain as to the
+cause of her trembling, she replied in words that indicated her feeling to
+have been excited by the strangely-patriotic words, and by a request to be
+taken back at once to the Profile. That request was immediately heeded, and
+the three passed on up the road, where all the other company had some time
+preceded them.
+
+But one expression more fell from the lips of the strange man, as the three
+moved away, and Margaret Hayley heard it.
+
+"Why, you must be a poet!" said the Illinoisan, when his companion had
+concluded the rhapsody.
+
+"No, I am only a lawyer, and you must not take all that we say for gospel,
+or even for poetry!" was the reply. "Come, let us go back to the house and
+imagine that we have had enough of moonlight."
+
+The two followed up the road at once and overtook the three but a moment
+after. As they passed, "H. T." recognized first the shoulder-straps of the
+officer, and then the figure of the lady upon his left arm. Turning to see
+her face more closely, his own was for a moment under the full glare of the
+moon, and Margaret Hayley had a fair opportunity to observe every feature.
+Shaded as were her own eyes, their direction could not be distinguished;
+but they really scanned the face before them with even painful earnestness,
+a low, intense sigh of disappointment and unhappiness escaping her when the
+inspection had ended. She walked back with Captain Coles and her mother to
+the door of the Profile, and left them in conversation on the moonlit
+piazza, escaping up-stairs to her own room and not leaving it again during
+the evening. What may have been her thoughts and feelings can only be
+divined from one expression which fell from her lips as she closed the door
+of her chamber and dropped unnerved upon a chair at the table:
+
+"Who can that man be? His voice, and yet not his voice! A shadow of his
+face, and yet no more like his face than like mine! Am I haunted, or has
+this trouble turned my brain and am I going mad? Another such evening would
+kill me, I think!"
+
+There was the sound of horn and harp and violin ringing through the long
+corridors of the Profile that evening; and many of those who had shared in
+the glory of the moonrise and the solemn levee of the Old Man of the
+Mountain were joining in the dance that went on in that parlor which
+appeared large enough for the drill evolutions of an entire regiment. But
+few of the new-comers joined the revel for that evening; most of them,
+fatigued at once with travel and excitement, crept away to early beds in
+order to refresh themselves against the morning; and nothing remained, of
+any interest to the progress of this narration, except Captain Hector Coles
+walking up and down the long piazza for more than an hour after Margaret
+Hayley had retired, his boot-heels ringing upon the planks with a somewhat
+ostentatious affectation of the military step, Mrs. Burton Hayley meanwhile
+leaning upon his arm, and the two holding in tones so low that no passer-by
+could catch them, a conversation which seemed to be peculiarly earnest and
+confidential.
+
+Yet there was still one occurrence of that night which cannot be passed
+over without serious injury to the character of this record for strict
+veracity. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, during a large part of the night, was in
+serious trouble which required the full exercise of her maternal
+vigilance--while Miss Marianna, deserted by her father who had
+surreptitiously smoked a short pipe in the edge of the woods and thence
+gone to bed and to sleep, wandered disconsolately round the parlor,
+dressed in more costly frippery than would have sufficed to establish two
+mantua-makers, unintroduced to any one, stared at with the naked eye and
+through eye-glasses, her freckles complimented in an undertone that she
+could not avoid hearing, the name of her dress-maker facetiously inquired
+after, and the poor girl, made miserable by being dragged by her silly
+parents to precisely the spot of all the world where she least belonged,
+suffering such torments as should only be inflicted upon the most
+unrepentant criminal.
+
+But the peculiar trouble of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame has not as yet been
+explained, and it must be so disposed of in a few words. Ill health, on the
+plea of which she had started on her "summer tour," had really attacked her
+interesting family, or at least one highly-important member of it. Master
+Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, naturally a little sharp set after his long ride
+and accustomed to regard any supper with "goodies" on the table as
+something to be clung to until the buttons of his small waistband could
+endure no farther pressure--Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, as has
+already been mentioned, had remained at the table a little beyond the
+bounds of strict prudence. In other words, he had devoured beef-steak and
+fruits, fish and milk, biscuits and pickles, tea, pickled oysters and
+sweetmeats, until even his digestive pack-horse was overloaded. Very soon
+after supper he had petitioned to be taken to bed, and then unpleasant if
+not serious symptoms had been no long time in supervening. During a large
+part of the night there were a couple of chambermaids running to and from
+that part of the building, with hot water, brandy, laudanum, foot-baths and
+other appliances for suffering small humanity; while Master Brooks Brooks
+kept doubling himself up in all imaginable attitudes and crying: "Oh,
+mommy!" in a manner calculated to wring the heart of that motherly
+person,--to make Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, who wished to sleep, growl out
+some reasonably-coarse oaths between his clenched teeth,--and to induce
+wonder on the part of people who had occasion to pass the front of the
+building or come out on the piazza, whether they did or did not keep a
+small menagerie of young bears, wolves and wild-cats in full blast on the
+second floor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+     MISS CLARA VANDERLYN AND HER PET BEARS--A MISADVENTURE AND A
+     FRIENDLY HAND IN TIME--THE QUESTION OF COURAGE--HALSTEAD
+     ROWAN AND MRS. BROOKS CUNNINGHAME ON GEOGRAPHY--THE DEAD
+     WASHINGTON, THE FLUME AND THE POOL--WITH THE PERSONAL
+     RELATIONS WEAVING AT THAT JUNCTURE.
+
+
+Breakfast was over at the Profile, on the next morning; the stages had
+rolled away for Littleton, the Crawford and Plymouth; and preparations were
+in progress for a ride of two or three wagon-loads down the glen to the
+Flume,--when "H. T.," cigar in mouth, passed out from the bar-room to the
+piazza and thence across the plateau in front, towards the billiard-room
+and ten-pin-alley, standing a hundred yards away to the right, and at the
+very bottom of the slope of the mountain. He had seen, in the dusk and
+afterwards in the moonlight of the night before, that a couple of the rough
+pets of the mountain region were sojourning at the Notch, in the shape of
+half-grown black bears, chained to stakes some twenty feet apart, with a
+dog-kennel for their joint retreat, perhaps a hundred feet from the house
+and immediately in front of it, where their antics could be discerned and
+enjoyed from the piazza and the front windows. He had seen, too, going out
+earlier that morning, that they did not appear yet old enough to be
+dangerously vicious, and that they seemed very playful for that description
+of beast. Everybody was feeding them, from early morning to dusk, with
+nuts, raisins and crackers surreptitiously taken from the table for that
+purpose; and the youngsters no doubt consumed in feeding the young Bruins,
+quite as much food as they themselves managed to devour.
+
+Just then not less than a dozen persons were surrounding the household
+favorites, feeding them, putting them through their clumsy evolutions which
+principally consisted in sitting erect or climbing a short post to get a
+nut placed on the top,--or developing the usual human propensity for
+teazing. Most of them were ladies, and among the others, as he went by at a
+short distance, he recognized Miss Clara Vanderlyn, his fellow-passenger of
+the day before,--her face rosy with the excitement of a just-accomplished
+morning walk, her bonnet on arm, and her whole countenance radiant with
+amusement as she plied the dusky pets with her pocket full of nuts and
+raisins. She seemed to have acquired a wonderful ascendancy over the beasts
+in a very brief acquaintance; for while all the others shrank from coming
+absolutely within reach, she not only fed them without fear but rubbed
+their black coats and patted their gristly noses as if they had been pet
+kittens. Two or three men were lounging near, evidently admiring the new
+lady accession to Profile society, but none claiming an acquaintance.
+
+"H. T.," who either had a propensity for ten-pins that morning,
+overbalancing the admiration of Miss Vanderlyn which he had shown the day
+before, or a still stronger attraction for company whom he knew to be at
+the alley--"H. T." was just passing on when Margaret Hayley, accompanied by
+the inevitable Captain Hector Coles, came out of the door of the
+billiard-room and advanced towards the bear-stakes. It must remain a
+mystery whether this appearance from the door did or did not make a change
+in his own necessity for exercise: suffice it to say that he stopped,
+turned partially around and joined the group who were making levee to the
+Bruins.
+
+At that moment, when Clara Vanderlyn had succeeded in luring one of the
+bears to the top of his "stool of repentance" (the short post), and was
+bending close above him, feeding and fondling what few other female hands
+dared touch,--a new actor came upon the scene, in the shape of Master
+Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, accompanying his "Mommy." He had _not_ died the
+night before as might have been expected from his surfeit, but the freckled
+appearance of his face was materially improved by a ground hue of greenish
+white which his short sickness had imparted. His careful mamma had dressed
+him for that gala-day in a complete plaid suit of blue and white, with a
+cap of the same material and a black feather; and he looked scarcely less
+ornamental than useful. Evidently, sick as he had really been, he was all
+alive and awake that morning and might be safely calculated upon for adding
+to the general comfort by prowess of mouth and fingers. And the company
+were not obliged to wait very long for proof that the scion of the house of
+Cunninghame was aware of the duties of his position and quite equal to
+them. He left the maternal hand, spite of the clutching of the latter, at
+the moment of arriving at the bear-stakes, and spying what he rightly
+judged to be a good opportunity, stepped rapidly round behind the bear,
+caught him by the stumpy tail, and gave him a sharp twitch which nearly
+threw him from the top of the post.
+
+In an instant the playful nature of the bear was gone, and with one sudden
+growl he raised his heavy paw with its sharp claws and struck full at the
+face of Miss Vanderlyn, not two feet from him. Every one present saw the
+blow, but no one seemed to have enough presence of mind or courage to
+shield her from a stroke which, falling full in her unprotected face, must
+certainly have disfigured her for life.
+
+No one--it has been said: no one of those known to be present, most of whom
+were women or children; and neither "H. T." nor Captain Hector Coles had
+yet come near enough to be of any possible service. Yet the blow did not
+reach Clara Vanderlyn. A hand and arm were suddenly dashed between the paw
+and the threatened face, with such force that while the sharp claws tore
+the skin and flesh in ribbons from the back of the hand and split the
+coat-sleeve as if it had been paper,--the bear was knocked backward off his
+perch and rolled over in a ball on the ground at the side of the kennel.
+When any of the company sufficiently recovered from their astonishment to
+glance at the face of the lucky yet unlucky preserver, they saw that it was
+that of the bluff arrival of the evening before, Halstead Rowan.
+
+With the exception of three persons, all present rushed up at once, under
+the impression that Rowan's hand must be seriously injured. One of these
+exceptions was "H. T.," who made a movement to dart forward, even from his
+distance, when he saw the blow impending, but who the instant that it had
+fallen turned and walked back towards the ten-pin alley. The second was
+Margaret Hayley, who had recognized the personality of both the
+conversationists of the previous evening, and who naturally stopped in
+blank surprise to see one of two persons whom she supposed to be intimate
+friends, turn away the moment that the other was wounded. The third was
+Captain Hector Coles, who really had no power to do otherwise than obey the
+check laid upon him by the lady's hand.
+
+All who saw knew that the injury must be severe, but it might have been the
+scratch of a pin for any effect which it seemed to produce on the
+Illinoisan. The blood was streaming profusely from the wound, but almost
+before any one saw it the other hand was inserted in a side-pocket, and a
+white handkerchief drawn thence and wrapped around the injured member.
+
+"Are you much hurt, sir?"
+
+"What a narrow escape, miss!"
+
+"Indeed, I thought his paw would injure your face terribly!"
+
+"Somebody ought to kill that boy!"
+
+These and a score of similar expressions burst from the dozen or two of
+spectators. Miss Vanderlyn had caught the young man by the sleeve of the
+coat, with perceptible nervousness in her grip, and said, with all that
+sweet smile faded from her face, and her voice trembling with anxiety:
+
+"Indeed--indeed, sir, I am very grateful to you. I should have been badly
+hurt, I fear, but for your kind aid. Pray let us do something to prevent
+your suffering so much from your generosity. I am afraid that you are very
+much injured!"
+
+"Oh, not in the least, madame--miss, perhaps I should say. Nothing but a
+scratch; and if the company at the Profile do not object to a big glove,
+none of us will be aware of the accident in a few minutes."
+
+"Trust me, sir!" said the young lady, in the same anxious tone, "_I_ shall
+be aware of your kindness so long as I live."
+
+"Pray do not mention it again!" said Rowan. "Indeed I am only too happy
+that the little affair occurred." He was telling the truth, beyond a
+question, however far he might have been from telling what they equally
+require in the courts of law--the _whole_ truth; and again for one instant
+there might have been seen sweeping over his face the same changing
+expression that had played hide-and-seek there on his first arrival the
+evening before:--admiration--regard--reverence--hope--joy; and then the
+dull shadow of recollection and hopelessness.
+
+Clara Vanderlyn, too, whether she had or had not remarked him on that
+occasion--Clara Vanderlyn saw and read his face now! Her eyes fixed for one
+moment full upon his, then drooped, and the rich blood crept up to brow,
+neck, and bosom, from which it had been expelled by the temporary fright.
+For an instant she was silent, and seemed to be studying; then she drew
+from the little reticule which hung upon her arm a card-case, took out a
+card, and handed it to Rowan, with a still more conscious blush, her old
+smile, and the words:
+
+"I am aware, sir, that this is a singular introduction, and on my part a
+painful one, as it has been the means of causing you an injury; but my
+mother and my brother will be glad to know you and to thank you better than
+I can do."
+
+"Miss Vanderlyn," said Rowan, taking the card and glancing at the name just
+as earnestly as if he had never paid any attention whatever to the register
+at the office, "you do me too much honor. I have no card in my pocket.
+Would you be kind enough to give me another of yours?"
+
+She at once handed him another card and a pencil, and he dashed down, in a
+bold, rapid, and mercantile hand, though he used the sinister member for
+the operation, the name and address which the little black trunk had before
+revealed to those who chose to read.
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Rowan. Good-morning! Pray take care of your hand, or I
+shall never forgive myself!" she said, nodding to her new acquaintance, and
+turning towards the house. Rowan bowed low, said good-morning, and strolled
+away towards the ten-pin alley, apparently not more concerned by the hurt
+than if he had merely pricked his finger. He was one of those booked for
+the ride to the Flume, but he seemed to need severer exercise, and the
+moment after he might have been seen with his hand still wrapped in the
+bloody white handkerchief, bowling away at the pins with the other, and
+humming the Grand March in "Norma" as if he thought that a favorable strain
+of music to accompany the levelling of obstacles or enemies.
+
+Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, hearing the threat directed at her promising boy,
+had mustered common-sense enough to hurry him away from the scene of
+action. Captain Coles and Miss Hayley had meanwhile come up, and "H. T.,"
+turning once more before he reached the alley, reached the spot at the same
+moment. For the first time, in broad daylight, Margaret Hayley met the
+strange man face to face, and her cheek whitened--why, even she perhaps
+could not tell--at that expression or resemblance which she traced there.
+If there was any answering expression of agitation or surprise on the face
+of the man with the initials, she failed to read it, and her eyes in a
+moment sank from a survey which seemed so profitless. They were at that
+time very near each other, and Captain Coles and "H. T." not more than six
+feet apart. Their eyes met, and that indefinable something passed between
+them before another word was spoken, which includes antagonism, if not
+deadly hostility. There was no reason to believe that they had ever met
+before the preceding evening; there was no reason to believe that they
+could ever have an interest in conflict; and yet those two men were foes,
+and would remain so until one or the other should be thoroughly conquered.
+
+"A go-ahead fellow, I should not be afraid to stake my life!" said one of
+the gentlemen who had just come up, alluding to the hero of the hour and
+seeming to address any one who might choose to answer.
+
+"Ya-a-as!" slowly and doubtingly said Captain Hector Coles, caressing his
+beard and throwing almost insufferable arrogance into a manner which
+naturally had quite enough of it. "Ya-a-as, go-ahead enough, apparently,
+but not a bit of a gentleman. Rough as the bear he just knocked over, and
+looks as if he might have come from among something of the same breed!"
+
+"No, not a gentleman, probably!" said "H. T.," with a sneer in his tone
+quite as little disguised as the other's arrogance. "But he is something a
+good deal better, in my opinion, and something a good deal rarer--a _man_,
+every inch of him!"
+
+"At any rate," said another, who had not yet spoken, "I would give a
+hundred dollars to have blundered into an introduction to that splendid
+girl as he has done, even if it cost me a hand worse scratched than his."
+
+"He has _had_ worse scratches! Did you notice the scar on his cheek, coming
+away down here to the neck?" said one of the ladies who had witnessed the
+whole affair, addressing Margaret Hayley.
+
+"No--has he a scar?"
+
+"A terrible one. I think he must have been a soldier, at some time or
+other."
+
+"I believe that he has the noblest gift ever conferred by God upon
+man,--that of courage!" answered Margaret. "If he was a slave or a savage I
+could love and respect him for that, as I should despise him if he was a
+king without it!"
+
+From the depth of what a terrible wound in her own heart was the young girl
+speaking, and what a concentrated force of bitter earnest rankled in such
+words falling from her beautiful lips! Captain Hector Coles heard, but made
+no answer, as why should he, for was he not one of the country's defenders
+and a brave man by profession? "H. T." heard her, and his upper lip, under
+the shadow of his dark moustache, set down tightly upon the lower, while
+over his handsome dusky face passed an expression which might have been
+pain and might have been the crushing out of some last scruple of
+conscience that stood between him and a half-intended line of action.
+
+"Passengers for the Flume" had been the call some minutes before; and by
+the conclusion of this scene, at nine o'clock or thereabout, the wagons for
+that daily ride of inveterate Franconians were drawn up at the door. They
+were two in number, the list of riders for that fine morning being
+unusually heavy. Not coaches, that necessarily shut away a part of the
+view, but long low wagons on jacks, each with four or five cross seats, a
+heavy brake and four mettled horses--for fine weather and through the
+shaded glen roads, the safest and pleasantest of all the mountain
+conveyances. Five minutes sufficed to fill both those conveyances, with
+some thirty persons, among the number all those in whom this narration
+awakes any interest. How they were divided off or how seated is a matter of
+no consequence, except in a certain particular. Halstead Rowan managed to
+secure a seat in the same wagon with Clara Vanderlyn, though at the other
+end of the vehicle,--and in so doing found himself by the side of Mrs.
+Brooks Cunninghame and only one remove from that hopeful, Master Brooks
+Brooks. Not enjoying quite the same facilities as some of the others for
+studying that lady the night before, he had still been attracted to her at
+breakfast and found time to "cypher up" her calibre and social position to
+a most amusing nicety. Whether wildness was the normal condition of his
+character, as seemed possible, or whether his slight rencontre with the
+young bear, and the flattering conversation with a pretty girl which
+followed, had dizzied his brain a little, as was both possible and
+natural,--he was in high spirits and the very demon of mischief had taken
+possession of him. He had apparently determined to devote himself somewhat
+to the comfort of that Arch-priestess of Shoddy during the morning ride,
+and a pleasant time that elevated personage was likely to have of it!
+
+Just after leaving the breakfast table, Rowan had chanced to overhear a few
+words of conversation between Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame and one of the lady
+habitues of the house on whom she was aiming to make a tremendous
+impression; and those few words had fully revealed one of the leading
+points of the parvenu's tactics. Some one had told her, apparently, or she
+had read the statement in so-called "polite publications"--that no one
+could be fashionable, now-a-days, without having been "abroad"--_i. e._,
+without having made at least one tour in Europe. Now that Mrs. Brooks
+Cunninghame _had_ been abroad, at least so far as beyond the Atlantic, at
+that very early period before she left the paternal cabin, pig and
+potatoes,--seemed the most probable of allegations; but in the matter of
+actual travel, or of those substitutes for travel which may be found in a
+thorough acquaintance with geography and a close study of guide-books and
+the best travellers, the poor woman had been as guiltless, a few weeks
+before, as the most stay-at-home and illiterate of her early acquaintances.
+But she could read, which was something, and had no conscience worth
+speaking of, which was something more. Perhaps some one had told her the
+traditional story of Tom Sheridan and his father, and the wonder which the
+latter expressed that the former "could not say that he had been down into
+a coal-pit without really going there." The worthy lady, as Rowan soon
+discovered by a few desultory words, had no corresponding objection,
+provided she could _seem_ to have been anywhere; and there was little doubt
+that she had procured a guide-book or two and "read up," as Honorable
+Members very often do before making speeches on subjects of which they know
+nothing whatever,--and as snobs sometimes do in books on "Perfect
+Gentility" and the "Whole Art of Dining Out," before going into society
+which seems a little too weighty for their previous training. How well she
+had succeeded, may best be illustrated by a little of her conversation with
+the Illinoisan, who took care to introduce the subject of her "travels"
+(with what he had overheard, as a hint) very soon after the wagons rolled
+away from the Profile, and without waiting for any formal introduction.
+
+He broke the ice with the remark, equally tempting and flattering to his
+next neighbor:
+
+"You must enjoy this fine scenery very much, madam, as you have chances of
+comparison that some of us lack. You have travelled in Europe, I believe?"
+
+"Yes--yes, sir," answered the lady, a little doubtful which of the two was
+the proper answer to so profound a sentence. If she was at all nervous
+about plunging into such untried waters with a total stranger, his
+disclamatory hint of his own experiences reassured her; and besides, one of
+the ladies was on the seat immediately behind, to whom she had been
+boasting that very morning, and it would never do to abandon the ground
+once taken.
+
+"Ah, how proud you must feel, madam, of having seen so many of the wonders
+of nature!" the wretch went on. "I have never yet been able to cross the
+ocean, myself, and the conversation of foreign travellers is naturally both
+pleasant and instructive to me."
+
+"Much obliged to you, I am sure," the lady returned. Some of the
+passengers in the wagon, who had previously observed the hero of the
+morning, and thought him any thing else rather than a fool, looked twice at
+him, at this juncture, to discover what he could mean by addressing
+complimentary conversation to that compound of ignorance and vulgarity. It
+must be owned that Clara Vanderlyn, who sat on one of the back seats while
+the interlocutors were in front, believing the man in earnest, felt for the
+moment a sensation of disgust towards him and wished her card back in her
+reticule. But if she and some of the others were temporarily deceived, the
+deception was not of long continuance.
+
+The statement by Rowan that he had never been across the Atlantic, was the
+one thing necessary to reassure Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame; and that point
+settled, she felt sure of her ground.
+
+"How long since you were abroad, madam, may I ask?" he continued.
+
+"Five years," answered the lady, who no doubt felt that both her duration
+of standing in society and the accuracy of her memory would appear the
+better for a little lapse of time.
+
+"Five years, indeed? so long?" asked the scamp, with every appearance of
+interest. "And did you have your dear little boy with you all the time?"
+
+"No, my physician did not think it prudent for me to take him along of me,
+and I left him to home with the nurse," was the reply. The fact was,
+really, that at the early period named her "physician" had been a drunken
+Indian-herb doctor, the only description of medical man likely to visit the
+shanty which she yet occupied,--and that she had been (perhaps better and
+more honorably occupied than at any time after!) doing her own work without
+the hope or thought of ever employing a servant.
+
+"Dear little fellow!" said the Illinoisan, caressing the scrubbing-brush
+head of the repulsive youngster. "What a pity that he could not have gone
+with you! By the way, madam, you went by steamer, of course. Did you take
+steamer for Paris, or--or--St. Petersburgh?"
+
+By this time most of the passengers began to perceive what was coming, and
+there were symptoms of a titter in the back seats, but nothing that warned
+or disturbed the victim.
+
+"Oh, Paris, of course!" was the answer. "Dear, delightful Paris, where the
+shops was so handsome and the women wore such elegant bunnits!" (See
+guide-books.)
+
+"You landed at Paris direct from the steamer, I suppose?" asked the
+tormentor, at which question the titter really began, but still too quietly
+to put the lady on her guard.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course!" was the answer. "The tide was high, and we went right
+up." The poor woman had probably been aground, some time, on the Hudson
+Overslaugh or the Shrewsbury Flats, and supposed that nothing but low tide
+could prevent going up to Paris by steamship.
+
+"Let me see--what is the name of that river that takes you up to Paris?"
+the scamp went on, with his face contorted into a wonderful appearance of
+earnest thought. "The--the--the--which is it, now, the Danube or the
+Amazon?"
+
+"I am not very sure," answered the lady at hap-hazard, "I almost forget,
+but I think it is the Amazon--yes, I know it must be the Amazon."
+
+At about that period there was a laugh in the back part of the long wagon,
+and Clara Vanderlyn was as red in the face as if she had been committing
+some serious fault. She would unquestionably have liked to pinch that
+naughty fellow's ears, if not to box them. But the laugh did not disturb
+Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, for the young people were frolicking all the while
+and a hundred laughs might break out without one of them being directed at
+_her_. Halstead Rowan had kept his own face perfectly serene so far, but he
+evidently began to feel twitchings around the mouth which might give him
+trouble directly, and, for fear of the worst, he fired his concluding shots
+with great rapidity.
+
+"You were in London, of course?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, a good while; we took a house there, and seen the Queen, and the
+Crystal Palace--"
+
+"Let me see--the Queen lives in the Crystal Palace, doesn't she?"
+
+"Of course she does!" answered the traveller, who remembered just so much
+as that queens and palaces belonged together, and no more.
+
+More laughing at the back of the wagon, a little choking, and some stuffing
+of cambric handkerchiefs into mouths pretty or the reverse. No irreparable
+explosion as yet, though that catastrophe could not possibly be long
+deferred.
+
+"Yes--you were in London: did you go up the Pyramids?"
+
+"No, we went to 'em, but not up 'em."
+
+"But you went up the Alps, of course?--everybody goes up the Alps."
+
+"Of course we did!" and the lady really bridled. "Think we would go so far
+as that and spend so much money, and not go up that there?"
+
+The explosion was impending--there was already a rumbling in the distance,
+which should have been heeded.
+
+"How did you go up--in _what_ kind of a vessel did you say, madam?"
+
+It is to be presumed that by this time the lady was considerably confused
+even in the smattering of information from the guide-book, with which she
+had commenced; and she could not have had any moral doubt remaining that
+the Alps was a river; for she answered, without one symptom of
+consciousness in her countenance:
+
+"We went up in a steamboat, and a nasty little thing it was!"
+
+The threatened explosion had arrived. That wagon-load of people laughed,
+shrieked and roared, bent double and chuckled themselves red in the face,
+to a degree which was very discreditable to their sense of propriety and
+very bewildering to the mountain echoes. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame looked
+around to see what was the matter, and at that moment it seemed that a dim
+perception must have crept through her head that she had something to do
+with the merriment, for she reddened, bridled and grew strangely silent.
+Halstead Rowan, as she looked around,--not by any means joining in the
+laugh, had suddenly discovered that his legs were cramped from riding,
+sprung over the side of the wagon and disappeared behind a bend of the
+road, to make the rest of the short distance to the Flume House on foot.
+
+A mile further, after this novel lesson in geography had been taken, and
+the wagons drew up at the door of the Flume House, once a great
+caravanserai that rivalled any other in the mountains, then a mere
+unoccupied pendant of the all-absorbing Profile which has literally
+swallowed it. It stands at the lower end of the Franconia Notch proper, and
+the mountains fall away below it southward, so much that the feeling of
+oppressive isolation at the Profile is here lost entirely. But there is one
+charm connected with the Flume House, that can never be forgotten by those
+who have once stood there and looked eastward; and the merry occupants of
+the before-deserted piazza, that day, were not likely to be allowed to ride
+away without having that charm called to their attention, to be remembered
+ever after as one of those marvels with which Nature confounds Art and
+defies calculation.
+
+Full before them, as they looked, loomed up the peak of Mount Liberty, so
+called, as is supposed, because the curve of the crown northward has some
+indefinite resemblance to the Phrygian liberty-cap of the French
+revolution. But a sadder and more solemn resemblance was there, needing to
+be pointed out at first, but asserting itself as a strange reality
+thenceforward, in presence or in absence. It was with a thrill of awe that
+the riders, as so many had done before them and as some of them had done
+long before, recognized the form of the Dead Washington, stretched out on
+the summit of the eternal mountains that seemed almost mighty and enduring
+enough for their awful burthen. There seemed a little obscurity in the
+mouth and lips, as if the shrouding pall partially covered them; but the
+contour of the massive nose was perfect, as the rugged peak stood relieved
+against the eastern sky, and above it the godlike forehead swept up
+southward and fell away again in the very curve of the hair drawn backward
+as it would be when lying in the calm repose of death. Northward the long
+round of Mount Liberty marked the full breast, sinking at the recumbent hip
+and rising again at the bend of the massive knee; while still farther away
+and in the exact line of symmetry, one of the peaks of the Haystack group
+shot up and fell suddenly on the other side, as the drapery would do over
+the stiffened feet. Then the resemblance was complete, unmistakable, almost
+fearful; and those who looked with reverent eyes realized that the Eternal
+Hand, thousands of years ago and in a mood that would write prophecy on the
+very face of the earth instead of recording it on tables of stone, had
+throned on the tops of the northern mountains an enduring likeness of that
+man yet unborn, whose glory was to gild every peak and fill every valley
+with the brightest and purest light of heroism.
+
+Long, and with reverent silence only broken by an occasional exclamation of
+wonder, the company gazed upon that strange spectacle, more sadly
+suggestive than any other of the wonders of the American continent. The
+voice of merriment, which had been ringing so loudly but a few moments
+before, was hushed, and tears lay nearer to the surface than laughter. It
+could not be otherwise than that the spectacle, impressive always, should
+blend itself with the sorrow of a thousand hearts and the peril of a land,
+and that something of almost superstitious omen should seem to lie in the
+recognition. There were no words to syllable the great thoughts of that
+hour. How could there be? What tongue could have spoken what the heart so
+sadly reverberated to an inner sense that was subtler and better than
+hearing? "H. T.," whose tongue, as Margaret Hayley and her companions heard
+it, had so solemnly apostrophized the iron face of the Old Man of the
+Mountain in the moonlight of the night before, stood silent and with folded
+arms on the end of the piazza, his strange, dark face full of a feeling
+that seemed sad enough for death and yet determined enough for a life of
+almost terrible daring. He was alone. He seemed to have made, even
+distantly, but one acquaintance since alighting at the Profile; and that
+one acquaintance, Halstead Rowan, had not yet paid all the penalty of his
+mischief in a walk to the Flume. He had no motive to speak: perhaps under
+no circumstances could he have done so before that company and with the
+knowledge that the eyes of Margaret Hayley might be bent upon him from the
+other end of that group of gazers. But the man who had read the patriotic
+secret of the Mountain Sphynx felt the weight of that hour--who could doubt
+it? And if his lips had spoken, would not the words they uttered have been
+something like these, that have bubbled to other lips and yet been denied
+utterance, on the same spot and since the overcasting of our national sky
+by that dark cloud of war and that darker cloud of divided feeling, only to
+be rolled away in God's good time:
+
+"Yes, look upon the Dead Washington, all of you, and prepare to bear the
+image away and keep it sacred in your heart of hearts. Dead and shrouded he
+lies, whose words might perchance have had power, at this fearful day in
+our history, to still the turbulent waves of passion and make us brothers
+once more. Dead and shrouded, when the day of doom may be near, and when
+his sword, flashing at the head of the armies of the republic, might have
+blinded treason and struck terror to the heart of the rebellion. Dead and
+shrouded, to wake not at the trump of war or the call of national peril.
+Yet look down upon us from the granite mountains that bore thine image a
+thousand years ago and will bear it until the very form and feature of
+nature decay--look down upon us from the heavens that are higher and more
+enduring even than the eternal hills, and bless us with some ray of that
+courage which dared the iron rain of Princeton--of that patient endurance
+which braved the wintry snow of Valley Forge--of that honesty which bent a
+world in awe and admiration--of that self-sacrificing humility which
+thought it but duty to refuse a crown! Not in irreverence we speak, shadow
+of the great dead! Thou didst live, and we sprang into existence as a
+nation. Thou art gone, and we wander in the night and darkness of hatred,
+of strife, of murder--perhaps even totter to a fall from which there is no
+arising. If thou hast power in the eternal world, Washington who livest, so
+faintly shadowed by the Washington that is dead--save us whom the might of
+no other nation can cast down--save us from ourselves!"
+
+Hush! the fancy so reverently assumed cannot be cast off in a moment.
+Hush!--was not that low rumbling in the north which men call thunder, the
+voice of the Giant of Mount Liberty turning suddenly in his grave-clothes
+to answer the appeal? God!--if it might be so!--"Oh, for an hour of Hickory
+Jackson!" cried the agonized nation when the first paralysis fell upon our
+men in power: oh, for one moment of George Washington now!
+
+The Celt looks for the awakening of Brian Boroihme from his long sleep in
+the Wicklow mountains, falsely called his death, after the red field of
+Clontarf, and for the deliverance of Ireland from the Saxon oppressor,
+which is to follow; the German is still waiting for the sounding of that
+horn which is to start Frederick the Redbeard from his repose in the
+Kypphauser, where the faithless laid him to rest, believing that he was
+dead, after his charmed bath in the Cilician Cydnus; even the old soldiers
+who guard the mighty dust of Napoleon beneath the dome of the Invalides,
+speak of the "Midnight Review" in other words than those of Friederich
+Freiligrath and hold a dim impression that the life of Austerlitz and the
+Pyramids must linger even after St. Helena: why may not the patriot heart
+of America believe that the man who of all others best represented the full
+glory of a nation, is immortal in body as in spirit, and that the Father of
+his Country will some day dash out from the sarcophagus that holds him
+prisoner at Mount Vernon,--to shame recreancy, to hurl incapacity from
+power, and to save, in its dark hour, the fabric that his great soul loved
+and his great hand builded?
+
+No!--that awful presence lies unmoved on its bier on the peaks of the
+mountains, the blue sky the canopy of its catafalque, the waving trees the
+plumes of the warriors who guard it, and the hoarse storm wind its requiem.
+And while it so sleeps, the future of the republic, which seems to us in
+darkness, lies really in a Hand that knows no death and never changes in
+its unfaltering purpose!
+
+But the saddest as well as the sweetest things in life have an end, and the
+halt of the company at the Flume House, that morning, supplied no exception
+to the rule. Just as the wagons were once more loaded, Halstead Rowan came
+striding up, his cigar smoked out, and his face the most unconscious
+imaginable, and took the seat which he had not long before vacated. Mrs.
+Brooks Cunninghame was very busy, at that period, looking after some of the
+details of arrangement of Master Brooks Brooks' dress, which had become
+slightly disarranged; and perhaps she did not see him. Let us suppose so,
+for she certainly did not notice her late student in geography. She was a
+little red in the face, which let us also suppose to have been the effect
+of the weather and not of mortification. And so all once more in place,
+away dashed the wagons to that marvellous gap in the mountains which gives
+name to the house. The road seemed very rough and broken, the rises and
+descents grew sharper, and the forest scenery wilder. Galloping his four
+horses up a steep ascent to the left, each driver vigorously applied the
+brake as the wagons literally slid down the very sharpest bit of road
+descent to be found at the Franconia (except perhaps on some portions of
+the Bald Mountain)--a descent so sudden, and overhanging a ravine so
+frightful, that some of the handsome eyes looked larger than ever for the
+moment, all the riders involuntarily threw themselves back in the laboring
+and creaking wagons, and pretty little screams that had no affectation in
+them emancipated themselves from rosy lips and took excursions out into the
+summer air. Then thundering over a rickety wooden bridge, almost at the
+bottom of the ravine, and up another slight ascent, the wagons stopped
+under a clump of wide-spreading trees at a rough platform, and disembarked
+their passengers, leaving all to follow their will in examining that wonder
+of nature in one of her frolic moods.
+
+And what was the Flume like, to those who that day saw it for the first
+time? An irregular crack or fissure in the side of the mountain, half a
+mile long, and from ten to fifty feet in depth, such as the wedge of some
+enraged Titan might have made when he had determined to split the earth
+asunder, and used the thunder as a beetle. Whether he was frightened by the
+big oval boulder which fell into the fissure half way up, and has ever
+since hung suspended there, touching only at the points, and apparently
+ready to fall at any moment--who shall say? At all events, if he intended
+to disrupt the earth he desisted for the time; and let us be duly thankful!
+
+Walking laboriously over the broad flat stone platform at the mouth of the
+gorge, with the thin sheet of bright water straggling over it, then
+ascending the rough stairs of board that lay irregularly on either side,
+and anon climbing carefully over the mossed and slippery rocks that offered
+such precarious foot-hold, the party ascended the Flume and stood at last
+between walls of less than six feet separation, the rock rising fifty or
+sixty feet on either side, and almost as square as if cut by the chisel of
+an artificer, impassable slimy boulders piled in confusion far ahead, the
+rough little stream tumbling away through the wilderness of stones beneath,
+and a chill dampness like that of the grave striking in to the very
+life-blood of those who had been imprudent enough to tempt the mountains
+without the protection of thick garments and warm flannels. Once, a little
+white Blossom of the company, just unfolding to the June luxuriance of
+womanhood, and whose name has no interest in this narration, was tempted
+by a mischievous relative and protector to try walking a rounded and
+slippery log that bridged the chasm, a few feet above the rough rocks and
+water below; but her nerves failed and her head grew dizzy when she was
+half way across, her lip quivered and then fluttered out a little cry of
+alarm, and her mischievous tempter retraced his own steps just in time to
+catch her and keep her from an ice-cold bath and limbs bruised on the rough
+stones lying in the stream underneath.
+
+There was another log spanning the Flume, a little higher up the chasm, and
+at a very different altitude from terra firma--hanging, in fact, like a
+stout black fence-rail, not less than eighty or an hundred feet in the air.
+Encircled by the eternal dampness rising out of the Flume, it could not be
+otherwise than slimy and slippery; and only a moment before the nameless
+Blossom tempted the log below, some of the company had looked up and
+remarked with a shudder that a firm foot and cool head would be necessary
+for the man who should tread over that frail bridge with its crumbling
+bark. As if the two had some mysterious connection, the moment _after_
+Blossom's misadventure, some one heard voices in that direction and looked
+up again. Two figures stood upon the brink, and not so far away but that at
+least _some_ of the group below recognized them as "H. T." and Halstead
+Rowan, who had left the rest as they abandoned the wagons and commenced
+ascending the gorge.
+
+Among those who looked up was Margaret Hayley, and her eyes were among
+those that recognized the two figures. What those people were to her, or
+why she said "Look!" in a quick and even agitated voice, probably the young
+girl could have told quite as little as either writer or reader; but such
+was the fact, and the motion of her eyes at the moment, accompanied by the
+word, drew the regards of both Captain Hector Coles and Mrs. Burton Hayley,
+who stood beside her at the bottom of the Flume. They, too, with the
+others, heard the words and saw the action that immediately followed.
+
+Halstead Rowan had one foot thrust forward on the log, his other on the
+firm ground behind. "H. T." stood on the rock beside him, making no motion
+to cross. There was evidently a banter between them, and though they were
+probably not aware of the fact, their words were readily distinguishable
+beneath.
+
+"None of _my_ business, I suppose; but it is folly!" they heard spoken by
+the voice of "H. T."
+
+"I suppose that every thing is folly which goes out of the hum-drum track
+of every-day life!" they heard Rowan reply. "But I like folly, and so here
+goes! Will you follow me?"
+
+"Without wanting to go over?--no!" was the answer.
+
+The words had scarcely left his lips when Rowan sprang forward on the log,
+stepping lightly, but balancing himself with some care, towards the other
+side. Insensibly all who saw him held their breath. If he should be correct
+enough in his balance, who could say that the log might not be a rotten
+shell, ready to fall under the heavy weight of the stout athlete? In fact,
+he had scarcely reached the middle when the tottering fabric seemed to give
+way and come toppling down into the chasm below. Not in reality; for had it
+done so, the career of the Illinoisan, with whom we have by no means
+finished, would have been ended for all time. The startling appearance was
+created by the dislodging of a large shell of the rotten bark by his foot,
+more than half costing him his balance, and bringing out from the group
+beneath a chorus of cries that might well have disturbed what remained of
+equilibrium. One cry sounded sharper and higher than all the rest: there
+were those present who knew from whose lips it came: enough for us to say
+that it did not come from those of Margaret Hayley, whose eyes were still
+turned upward with a feeling in them very different from fear. Before the
+cry had fairly died away, the peril, whatever it might have been, was past,
+and Halstead Rowan stood on the other side of the chasm, bowing to the
+group who had been observing him, as he learned from the cries, at the
+bottom. They saw "H. T." turn and walk away at the same moment; and then,
+drawing a long breath, Margaret Hayley said, much more to herself than to
+her immediate companions:
+
+"What a thing beyond all admiration is that courage!"
+
+"Which our other friend does not seem to be troubled with in any great
+degree!" said Captain Hector Coles, finishing out the sentence with a tone
+perceptibly sneering. Margaret looked round at him with a look which might
+have been one of inquiry, then turned away her face again and said:
+
+"No, I suppose not! Not more than half the world can be demigods: the
+others must be common people, or worse!"
+
+Whether Captain Hector Coles liked the tone of the reply, or not, is
+uncertain. At all events he scowled a little and said nothing more, while
+Mrs. Burton Hayley stole a look into the face of her daughter which had no
+hypocrisy in it and was full of wonder and trouble.
+
+Five minutes afterwards the company were all again at the mouth of the
+Flume, and there Halstead Rowan, a second time the hero of the day, joined
+them. "H. T." did not make his appearance: he had struck across, the
+Illinoisan said, without waiting for him, over the almost impassable fallen
+timber and through the spruce thickets, by the cross-path to the Pool. A
+few minutes more sufficed to re-seat the group in their wagons and to
+deposit them once more at the door of the Flume House, whence they took
+their way on foot, straggling in every picturesque variety of locomotion
+towards that equally-curious pendant of the Flume which is often missed by
+those who visit the better-known wonder.
+
+The Pool lay all alone, until this somewhat numerous company came to
+disturb its solitude. A singular object indeed--an exaggeration of all the
+other mountain amphitheatre fountains, nearly round, a score or more of
+yards in diameter, with the toe of the horse-shoe scooped out of a solid
+rock thirty or forty feet in height, smoothed and rounded as if cut by
+human hands, a bright, clear stream dashing down at that point, the rocks
+further away from the toe rising broken and jagged to the height of perhaps
+an hundred feet, and the mode of approach of the passengers a jagged line
+of ricketty steps, terribly perpendicular, sloping down from that highest
+point and presenting no temptations to the decrepit or the nervous. At the
+bottom of this singular basin the water, bright and clear in the few places
+where it ran shallow over the bleached stones, but under the shadow of the
+ledge so deep as to seem black as midnight.
+
+"Nobody here!--it doesn't seem like old times!" said an elderly gentleman
+who had visited the Pool many times in other days,--as the ladies were with
+some difficulty assisted down the steps. "No boatman, and not even a boat!
+Where is Charon, I wonder?"
+
+"Oh, yes, where _is_ Merrill?" asked another. "The man with the leaky scow
+and the white muslin awning, who always charged a York shilling for
+ferrying people over to the Elysian Fields lying among the rocks and logs
+yonder."
+
+"I remember, once," said the old gentleman, "that while his lieutenant
+paddled us around under the spray of the fall yonder, and over to the steps
+which used to hang from the rocks there on the opposite side, Merrill read
+us an autograph letter from Queen Victoria, dated in the kitchen at
+Buckingham Palace while the august lady said that she was rolling
+apple-dumplings,--and also gave us a lecture on geography, in which he
+proved that this spot was the very centre of the earth, from which all
+latitude and longitude ought to be calculated."
+
+"Well, he was right in some degree," said Halstead Rowan, who stood near,
+and who fixed his regards at the same moment on Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame,
+still looking after the welfare of that interesting child. There was not
+even the suspicion of a smile upon his face as he went on, and there
+certainly was not upon the face of the lady for whose benefit the discourse
+was evidently intended. "I do not know about the latitude and longitude,
+but this Pool is certainly the centre of the earth and exactly opposite to
+China, so that a plummet, with _a line long enough_, dropped here, would be
+certain to come out somewhere on the shores of the Hoangho or the Kiangku."
+
+"Nonsense!" said one grave lady (not Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame) who did not
+appreciate the joke.
+
+"Not a bit of it, madame!" said the scamp, who thereupon turned his battery
+at once in her direction. "There is no doubt whatever of the truth of the
+statement, for I have been here myself when the defunct pig-tailed Chinamen
+came popping up, who had committed suicide by drowning themselves on the
+other side of the world, on account of the cruelty of a copper-colored
+divinity with almond eyes and feet the size and shape of the last dumpling
+in the pot, or a trifling deficiency in the rat-crop or the dog-census."
+
+"Impudence!" muttered _that_ lady, who seemed to regard the "whopper" as a
+personal insult; but the majority of the company appeared to view the
+affair in a very different light and to be rather pleased than otherwise
+with the go-ahead fellow who could walk over verbal and physical bridges
+with the same charming recklessness. It may be anticipating to say that
+there was one among them, whose face had paled when he trod the log over
+the Flume, and who could not even laugh at the light words which she
+otherwise enjoyed,--so much deep and new and strange feeling lay at the
+bottom of the interest. And it may _not_ be anticipating, in the minds of
+any who have perused the late foregoing pages with due attention, to say
+that that silent, thoughtful, observing one was Clara Vanderlyn, between
+whom and the Illinoisan there yawned a gulf of circumstance and position so
+wide and deep that no one but a madman (or what is madder still--a mad
+_woman_) could possibly have dreamed of stepping over it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+     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 has _become_ of 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 an _axe_, 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 saw a 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 gloria_ big 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 saw the 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!"
+
+"He _is_ at 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.
+
+"I _can_ swim!" 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 one realized, 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 came up, 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 in that 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 I _can_ be 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.
+
+"_I_ am 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 manipulations and 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
+ennuyee 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 vitae 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 towards _her_, 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 steadiness of 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 had been 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 the _eyes_, 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 to look 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 personae. 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 unpleasant _eclaircissement_--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 did _he_ tell 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 will _not_ go back--I _will_ try the
+experiment--I _will_ win 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 very midst 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, for she 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 the
+_denouement_ that 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 sympathies of 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+     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 some degree 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 ask _you_, 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.
+
+"Than _any_ other 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? _That_ is 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 shoot _her brother_, merely because he is a fool?--Oh, no,
+Townsend--you could not think _that_! 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 you _are_
+odd 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 deuce _are_ you?"
+
+"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, employed at 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. _They_ took
+it--_I_ did 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.
+
+"I _know_ that 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.
+
+"And _that_ reason he has not, I know!" said Margaret. "The man who uttered
+the words that _I_ heard 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 is _not_
+Townsend, 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 do _that_!"
+
+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. Whither one 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 amusing to 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 home at 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; but she 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 with the 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 of
+_his_ lake 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 the
+steam 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 fate _was_ upon 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.
+
+"Oh, ma, I forgot," she said, introducing. "Mr. Townsend, of Cincinnati,
+whose acquaintance I made yesterday when he saved the poor little boy from
+drowning, at the Pool."
+
+Her eyes were fixed very closely upon the face of Townsend as she said
+these words, and so were those of Captain Hector Coles. If either saw, or
+thought that they saw, a momentary red flush pass over the dark
+countenance, coming as quickly and fading as rapidly as one of the flashes
+of the Northern Lights,--did they see any corroboration of the suspicions
+of the evening before, or was that flush merely the natural expression of a
+sensitive man whose good deeds were mentioned in his presence?
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley nodded, as she could not avoid doing under such
+circumstances, but there was very little cordiality in the nod; and there
+was something quite as lofty and uncongenial in the manner of the words
+with which she accompanied it:
+
+"I remember hearing my daughter speak of Mr. Townsend's having been made
+the means, under Providence, of preventing an accident."
+
+The ostentatious Bible yet lay upon its carved stand, oh, Mrs. Burton
+Hayley, did it not!
+
+No farther conversation followed at that moment, though there may have been
+one, and mayhap two, in that mixed boat-load of fifteen or twenty, who
+would have been glad to pursue it under more favorable auspices. Certain it
+is that the lawyer kept his gaze upon the proudly sweet face of Margaret
+Hayley, quite as steadily as propriety would by any means allow, and that
+her face answered back something more of interest, under the shade of her
+wide leghorn jockey, than either of her immediate companions might have
+been pleased to see. She was interested in her new acquaintance, beyond a
+question: was she something more? Answer the question--oh, heart of
+woman!--could it be possible that the by-gone love, once so truly a part of
+her very being, had already so faded, in one short month, that a feeling
+warmer than friendship could centre around a mere stranger of two days'
+beholding? Was that "ideal," once believed to have been found, then lost
+again, presenting itself in another and still more enticing shape, to make
+constancy a myth and womanly truth a by-word? Small data, as yet, from
+which to judge; but stranger things than this have chanced in the rolling
+years, and the faith of humanity still survived them!
+
+Out on the Lake by this time the burlesque upon a steamboat had floated,
+and the sheet of water lay under as well as around the passengers--perhaps
+a quarter of a mile in width and a mile in length, shut in on the side of
+approach by the woods, and beyond on all sides by the eternal hills. Never
+was silver jewel dotting the green bosom of nature more beautiful--never
+one more sweetly nestled away near the very heart of its mountain nurse.
+The proverbial winds of the Notch for once were still, and only a gentle
+ripple stirred the glassy surface here and there as a breath touched it
+like the skimming wing of a wild bird. The meridian sun lay lovingly on the
+side and crest of the mountain rising eastward from the edge of the water,
+touching its bald, scarred brow with ruddy gold; and if the first on the
+cliffs nodded at times, they nodded sleepily with the very expression of
+repose. Spirit of calm, delicious quiet!--was there ever a spot more truly
+sacred to thee, than Echo Lake at such moments, when a few gentle, loving
+hearts, close bound to each other and shut in from the world, are beating
+with slow pulses as the life and centre of the great mystery of nature?
+Other boat-loads than that of this July noon, have grown quiet beneath such
+a feeling, as the boatman ceased his paddling, the boat drifted lazily on,
+lips grew silent, eyes closed, and human thought floated away on a very sea
+of dreams.
+
+They had swept over, in rapt silence for the last few moments, until they
+lay beneath the very brow of the eastern mountain. Then that silence was
+broken by the boatman rising from his seat and blowing a long, steady blast
+on his six-foot tin horn, in size and shape like those used on the Western
+canals, but sadly dinted by careless use and frequent falling. The company
+were reminded, then, that they were floating on Echo Lake and no stream of
+the land of faerie. The long, low note died on the car, and an appreciable
+instant of silence followed. Then it came back from the brow of the
+mountain above, a little louder than before, and yet a little mellowed by
+distance. Another instant, and the same sound reverberated from the
+opposite hill, the back of Eagle Cliff. Were there still more echoes to be
+added to the two that had already made the place notable? Yes, a third came
+back from the range that sloped away from the head of the Lake,
+northward--a little fainter, and broken now; and then the more distant
+hills caught the sound, as if each had a right, which it jealously claimed,
+to some portion of that greeting from the human breath; and far as the eye
+could trace the blue peaks rising behind each other through the gaps
+beyond, the ear could catch a corresponding reverberation,
+fainter--fainter--fainter,--till it died away in a drowsy murmur and
+silence followed. Then the horn passed from hand to hand and from mouth to
+mouth, some of the gallants perhaps forming kisses of the touch of red lips
+which had preceded theirs; and some blew round, full strains that awakened
+admiration, and some made but a melancholy whistle which excited merry
+laughter. Among the many experiments tried upon that horn, there must have
+been some horrid discords startling the Dryads in the wooded shades up the
+mountain, where the gazers sometimes seemed to see the echo leaping from
+cliff to cliff and from bough to bough. But they soon came willingly back
+to the practised notes of the boatman; and some of the party shut their
+eyes and dreamed, as his quick, sharp peals rang merrily up among the
+hills,--of noble lord and gentle lady, hunting in the days of old, and of
+the bugle blasts of outlaws sounding through gloomy Ardennes or merry
+Sherwood. Anon he would end his strain with a long, low falling note, and
+they heard some old cathedral hymn wailing through solemn arches and
+bending the spirit to reverence and prayer. But through all that succession
+of sounds the hard, dry, practical, exigeant Present was rolled away and
+the romantic, easy Past stood in its stead; so easily does the mind, like
+the body, cast off its burthen, whenever permitted, and lie down, if only
+for a moment, upon the lap of indolence!
+
+Scarcely a word had been spoken, in the boat, for some minutes, under the
+influence of that spell of the hour. But the normal condition of humanity,
+when awake, is to keep the tongue in motion; and not even the spell of Echo
+Lake could keep that busy member still beyond the customary period.
+Comparisons of other echoes, in our own and other lands, were made, and as
+the boatman rowed on to complete the circuit of the Lake, the conversation
+became nearly general.
+
+"Echo Lake looks very smiling and quiet to-day," said one of the
+company--the same old habitue of the mountains who had commenced the
+conversation the day before with Halstead Rowan, at the Pool. "But I have
+seen it look very differently, sometimes when a gale came roaring and
+singing up through the Notch, and the saucy little thing got a black frown
+upon its face, reflected from the leaden sky and the wind-tossed trees up
+yonder. Echo is blown away, at such times, as any one would be who dared
+the perils of this sea of limited dimensions; and you would be surprised to
+know how hard the wind _can_ blow just here, and what little, tumbling,
+dangerous waves of rage the dwarf can kick up, trying to make an ocean of
+itself."
+
+"The most singular view that _I_ ever had of it," said another, "I caught
+half way up the Cannon Mountain one afternoon. It looked like a wash-bowl,
+and I had a fancy that I could toss a piece of soap into it from where I
+stood! But I knew that it must be Echo Lake, for somebody was blowing a
+horn; and I believe there has never been an hour of daylight, since
+creation, when a horn has not been blowing somewhere in the neighborhood."
+
+"There is one more point of view in which to see it," said Horace Townsend,
+who had not before joined at any length in the conversation. "I mean by
+moonlight, for any one who is part night-hawk."
+
+"Ah, have you seen it so?" asked the last speaker, with interest.
+
+"Yes--last night," answered the lawyer.
+
+"As often as I have been here," said the first old habitue, "I have never
+come down to see it by moonlight. What is it like?"
+
+"Like something that I cannot very well describe," was the answer. "You had
+better all come down and see it for yourselves, before you leave the
+Notch."
+
+"Still, you can give us some idea," pursued the old gentleman.
+
+Horace Townsend hesitated and was silent for a moment, when Margaret Hayley
+said, her eyes just then fixed full upon his: "I _think_ you can, Mr.
+Townsend, if I am not mistaken in the voice that I heard speaking for the
+Old Man of the Mountain, by the same moonlight, not many evenings ago."
+
+The dusky cheek of the lawyer was full of red blood in an instant. He had
+been overheard, then, in his half-mad rhapsody to Rowan and himself. And
+_she_ had heard him, of all women!--_she_ had spoken with such frankness,
+not to say boldness, and that frankness appreciation at least, if not
+admiration! He might have uttered something more about "taking his chances"
+then, and had full warrant for the self-gratulation!
+
+"I do not suppose that I can tell you either what I saw or felt," said
+Townsend, when that momentary flush had died away a little from his face.
+"I will try, however. I had been rolling ten-pins till past eleven, and it
+must have been midnight when I strolled down towards the Lake. I was in
+hopes that I should find no one here, for I wished to see it alone as well
+as by moonlight; and I had my wish. I saw no one and heard no one, on my
+way to the Lake or while here; and I do not suppose that any foot but my
+own pressed the damp green velvet that bordered the edge, or that any eye
+except my own and the All-seeing one that looks down over all the world at
+all midnights, saw the placid sheet lying in its solemn repose, with the
+shadows of the great cliff yonder reflected on its bosom, and here and
+there a little ripple as a puff of wind sighed through the branches, kissed
+the silver surface and passed over."
+
+The eyes of the speaker were full of humid light as he spoke, and at least
+one of the company marked the influence which seemed to be upon him--a mood
+of high imagination, sometimes seen in the ardent lovers of nature when
+revelling in their chosen study, and though less dangerous not less decided
+than the madness which habitually fell upon Saul. There was something
+fascinating in it, to all who saw and heard, even to those who held an
+intuitive dislike to the seer: what must the fascination have been to
+Margaret Hayley, who remembered one so unlike in personal appearance and
+yet so like in voice and apparently in habits of mind, loving nature so
+intently and describing it with the same fervor, while his love for _her_
+made a sacred undertone to all and completed the charm of look and word!
+
+The lawyer needed no further urging, but went on:
+
+"The little dock there, with the boats moored beside it, and the hut where
+our friend here keeps his horn and cannon,--all lay in a melancholy quiet
+which struck me like death--as if those who frequented them had gone away
+at some nightfall years ago, like the workmen who left their trowels in the
+mortar of unfinished Pompeii on the morning of its destruction,--never to
+return again and yet ever to be waited for, while the earth kept its course
+in the heavens. I was alone, and I suppose that imagination ran riot with
+me and made me partially a maniac. The hush was so awful that I dared not
+break it, even by a loud breath. I saw the Indians there, under yon
+sweeping trees to the left, whose branches bend down and almost kiss the
+water--saw an Indian canoe lying there, faces within it smeared with
+war-paint and the pointed arrow ready to twang from the bow-string. I
+expected to hear the war-whoop every instant--expected it, perhaps not in
+my human mind but in that other and more powerful mind for which we are
+none of us quite responsible. Then I saw--yes, I was sure that I saw the
+dusky shadow of a robber flitting along from pine to pine, far up on the
+side of the cliff there, silent and dangerous as death, and ready to drop
+down on the first living thing that passed beneath him. Then I saw fiery
+eyes through the branches, and thought that the panther and the catamount
+that lurked in these tangled woods two hundred years ago, divided
+possession once more with the Indians and were prowling about for some late
+banquet. I do not think that it was fear that I felt, for I would not have
+gone away if I could, any more than I could have gone away if I would; but
+it appeared to be the very silent haunt of nature in her hour of rest,
+wherewith nothing but the wild and the savage had any business; and it
+seemed impossible to throw aside the idea that even the tread of a
+civilized foot must be a sacrilege that only life could atone. Then there
+was a sudden plunge from the bushes into the water, a few yards up the
+bank, and a ripple following some large dark object swimming away towards
+the other shore. This was more real, and the feeling of awe began to pass
+away, for I knew that the swimmer must be a water-rat or otter that had
+been paying a midnight visit like myself and was now going homeward by the
+cool and refreshing marine route. That was the first noise I had heard, but
+others followed, for an owl began to hoot over yonder in the bushes and a
+young eagle--I suppose it must have been a young eagle--indulged in a
+scream from the top of the Cliff, where I believe he has a habit of
+nesting. Then the supernatural and the imaginative rolled away after they
+had held me an hour or two, and I was simply alone at two o'clock or a
+little later, beside Echo Lake, only half a mile from the bed that had been
+all that time waiting for me. I took the warning of the night-owl and the
+eagle, who no doubt intended to order me off as an intruder, and strolled
+back to the house. That is all, and perhaps quite enough of such rambling
+nonsense as it is!"
+
+"Rambling nonsense?" Whatever the other members of the company may have
+thought, evidently Margaret Hayley did not so regard it as she leaned
+anxiously forward, the presence of others apparently forgotten, her eyes
+fascinated in a sort of strange wonder by something in the face of the
+speaker, while her mind seemed not less singularly under the control of the
+utterance itself.
+
+Five minutes afterwards the parody on a steamboat touched the little wharf
+again and the company disembarked. Five minutes after that secondary period
+they separated from the close communion into which they had been
+transiently thrown during the preceding half-hour, many of them never to
+meet again in the same familiarity of intercourse, and perhaps some of
+them, though as yet inmates of the same abode, never to see each other's
+faces again in life! Such are the meetings and the partings of summer
+travel and watering-place existence, to which the nameless rhymer no less
+truly than touchingly referred when he spoke of those friendships quickly
+made and as quickly broken:
+
+    "----In hostels free to all commands
+      Save penury's and pity's;--
+
+    "In common rooms, where all have right
+      To tread with little heed or warning,
+    And where the guests of overnight
+      Are gone at early morning;--
+
+    "By tables where we sit at meat--
+      Sit, with our food almost untasted
+    Because we find some vacant seat
+      From which a friend has hasted;--
+
+    "In parlors where at eve we sit,
+      Among the music and the dancing,
+    And miss some lip of genial wit,
+      Some bright eye kindly glancing.
+
+    "--------the haunted chambers left,
+      That almost choke us as we ponder,
+    And leave _us_ quite as much bereft
+      As dearer ties and fonder."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+     CLOUD AND STORM AT THE PROFILE--SIGHTS AND SENSATIONS OF A
+     RAINY-DAY RIDE TO THE CRAWFORD--HORACE TOWNSEND AND HALSTEAD
+     ROWAN ONCE MORE TOGETHER--UNEXPECTED ARRIVALS--A CAVALCADE
+     OF MISERABLES--AN ASCENT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON, WITH
+     EQUESTRIANISM AND WAR-WHOOPS EXTRAORDINARY.
+
+
+Calms at sea are not more proverbially treacherous than pleasant mornings
+in the mountains; and long before that day closed which had opened so
+auspiciously, the heavy clouds came driving up through the Notch with the
+south-east wind. By nightfall a storm was inaugurated. Thenceforward, for
+two days, excursions to the Cannon, to Bald Mountain, to Mount Lafayette,
+or to any other of the points of scenery so plentiful in the Franconia
+Notch, and in which excursions all the visitors, however slightly
+acquainted, are more or less closely thrown into speaking intercourse with
+each other,--were things to be thought of but not attempted. The stages
+came in with smoking horses and moisture dripping alike from the hat of the
+driver and the boot of the coach; but few passengers arrived or departed.
+The bears walked sullenly their little round, or retired periodically to
+winter quarters in their narrow kennels. The valleys were filled with
+driving mist, varied by heavy down-pouring rain, and the mountains hid
+themselves sullenly from view, so that sometimes not even the brow of Eagle
+Cliff, hanging immediately over the house, could be distinguished through
+the dense clouds that swept down to the very roofs. Fires became prevalent,
+and those so fortunate as to possess rooms where the birchen wood could be
+set ablaze, remained closely sequestered there, dozing, or playing cards or
+backgammon, or once more turning over the leaves of books from which all
+the novelty had long before been extracted. Desultory groups met at meals,
+even the eaters coming down sluggishly. Some of the men patronized the
+billiard-room or the bowling-alley, but they rarely found lady partners or
+spectators, as in sunnier days. Even the hops in the parlor at evening were
+thinly attended, the weather seeming to have affected alike the nerves and
+muscles provocative of dancing, and the strings of the harp, violin and
+piano. Those who happened to possess copies of "Bleak House," and who
+remembered the marvellous phenomena of rainy weather existing at a certain
+time in and about the domain of Sir Leicester Dedlock, read the description
+over again and thought that nothing could be more beautifully applicable to
+the experience of storm-stayed sight-seers at a caravanserai among the
+mountains.
+
+During those two days of storm and sluggishness, Horace Townsend, merely an
+excursion acquaintance of the Hayleys and Captain Hector Coles, and not
+such an intimate as would be likely to be invited to backgammon or chat in
+one of their private rooms,--never once met Margaret Hayley more nearly
+than within bowing distance when passing in or out of the dining-room or
+the parlor. One or both may have desired to continue the acquaintance
+without quite so much of distant familiarity; but if so, one or both knew
+the antagonistic influences surrounding them and did not think proper to
+raise an arm for buffeting the waves of separation.
+
+There were not less than a dozen persons remaining at the Profile, who had
+the ascent of Mount Washington yet to make at an early day, and who
+intended to make it in the good old traditional way of horseback from the
+Crawford instead of acknowledging modern utility and bowing to the
+destruction of all romance by going up in carriages from the Glen. Some of
+these, beginning to be pressed for time, saw the steady rain and mist with
+impatience and found very little comfort in the assurances of the
+hotel-keepers, guides and stage-drivers, that the clouds were not likely to
+break away under a week, at least.
+
+Monday brought this feeling to a culmination, and that morning, spite of
+all predictions, the impatient dozen ordered a stage and determined to
+drive over to the Crawford; bespeaking clear weather on the morrow, or on
+the next day at farthest, for their especial accommodation. Horace
+Townsend, whether wearied by circumstances which placed him "so near and
+yet so far" in his acquaintance with Margaret Hayley, or really touched
+with the prevailing madness for forcing Mount Washington to smile when that
+great mountain wished to be sullen,--Horace Townsend joined the malcontents
+and formed one of the closely-packed stage-load that on Monday morning
+rolled off from the Profile on their way to the Crawford.
+
+The voyagers were pursued by no small number of jokes and jeers from the
+piazza, as they drove away, on the folly of plunging out into a storm to
+accomplish an impossibility. But if any one of the number felt for a moment
+sore in mind and faint-hearted, they were soon consoled. Most of them
+(mixed male and female, though the former predominating) were true
+Nature-lovers who had recognized that however Fame and Fortune sometimes
+play cruel tricks upon their most ardent votaries, the kind Mother seldom
+failed to unveil her bosom at the coming of one of her true children. They
+had faith in the future, and that faith was at once repaid in the glory of
+the present.
+
+For those who have only made the twenty-five miles of stage-ride between
+the two places, in fair weather, can have no idea of the peculiar charms of
+that day of capricious rain and floating mist. Closely shut in the
+lumbering coach, and well enveloped in shawls and dread-noughts and
+blankets, but with the windows open to allow looking back on the Franconia
+range they were leaving,--they enjoyed at intervals, during all the earlier
+portions of the ride, such splendid glimpses of cloud-land as never fall to
+the lot of mere fair-weather travellers.
+
+At times the shroud of mist which had enveloped them would roll away, as
+they ascended the high land rising from Franconia towards Bethlehem; and
+then they would have the peaks of the Franconia range flecked and dotted
+with swales and waves and crests of transparent white that seemed
+alternately to be thousands of colossal sheep lying in the mountain
+pastures,--and again great masses of the purest and softest eider-down
+which had floated there and rested, from millions of birds filling the
+whole air above. Mount Lafayette at one moment, as some of the voyagers of
+that lucky morning will well remember, seemed to be capped and crowned with
+a wreath of untrodden snow, miles in extent and hundreds of feet in
+depth--such as no mountain ever wore upon its brow as a coronet, from the
+first morning of creation.
+
+Exclamations of pleasure filled the coach, and jest and appreciative remark
+blended in pleasant proximity. "I shall always remember the air of this
+morning," said one, "as an atmosphere of bridal veils," and more than he
+treasured up the comparison as one worth remembering. "See here, Cora!"
+said another, to the only child in the coach, who nestled half asleep on
+the shoulder of her mother, pointing her attention meanwhile to a little
+pyramidal hill separate from the mountain range and at that point relieved
+against it: "See here, Cora! There is a little baby mountain!" "So there
+is!" answered Cora, with a world of drollery in her young eyes, "I wonder
+how long before it will grow to be as big as the rest of them!" Whereupon
+Cora was voted to have the best of the argument, and manhood once more
+worshipped childhood.
+
+Away past Bethlehem and along the Ammonoosuc, an exaggeration, in its
+rocks, upon all the other mountain streams, with its few inches of water
+finding way among a perfect bed of boulders, and making the mere word
+"navigation" suggest so droll an image in that connection as to draw a loud
+laugh from the whole coach-load. Then past a couple of fishermen, heedless
+of the rain, rod in hand and creel at side, standing on the boulders in the
+middle of the river and practising the mysteries of the Waltonian art,
+report alleged with more "flies" assisting than those which they carried in
+their pocket-books! Then on, with the mist again closed down heavily, past
+the White Mountain House, that once, before the days of glory of the Glen,
+supplied the only so-called "carriage-road" to the top of Washington.
+
+A mile or two more, and there was a space clear from trees on the left. As
+the coach swept up to it the mists seemed to shrink low for a moment. A
+heavy, dark line loomed on the sky, with almost the true sweep of a wide
+Gothic arch, a little sharpened at the top. "How graceful!" was the
+exclamation of one. "How high!--look!--why that is higher than any of the
+others that we have seen!" exclaimed a second. "Mount Washington," calmly
+said a habitue who caught a glimpse through the curtain from the back
+corner of the coach; and every voice joined in the cry.
+
+The habitue was right--cloud and mist had rolled away for an instant, just
+at the opportune moment, and they had caught that magnificent first near
+view of the monarch, throned amid his clouds, glorious in the grace of form
+and the awe of majesty--seeming to bridge the very space between earth and
+heaven! Some of those favored gazers will dream of that first glance, years
+hence, when they have been straining the mental vision upward, in waking
+hours, to that unattainable and dim which rises above the mists of common
+life. Some of them will throne the great mountain in their hearts, and
+stretch out pleading arms to it in remembrance, in the dark days of shame
+and sorrow,--as if the treading of their feet upon its rocky pinnacle would
+be indeed an escape from the world--as if they might become sharers,
+indeed, in the majesty of its great solitude. Some of the travellers felt
+the solemnity of the hour and the scene, that day; and there was not even a
+sneer or a word of misappreciation for the adventurous genius who quoted,
+heedless of all that made it inappropriate:
+
+    "Mount Blanc is the monarch of mountains:
+      They crowned him long ago,
+    On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
+      With a diadem of snow!"
+
+There was a brief ride remaining, then, till they rolled in over a level
+road, through thick overhanging woods, to the Crawford House in the White
+Mountain Notch. The mist had closed almost hopelessly down for the time,
+and they could only see occasional glimmers through it of the rough sides
+of old Mount Webster, dark-browed and massive as its namesake. It was only
+in the brighter air of morning that they were to take in the whole location
+and see in front, to the right, Mount Willard, wooded on the side exposed
+to view, but bald and rugged farther down the Notch, like the Cannon at
+Franconia; with Mount Jackson to the left in front, beyond it the still
+higher peaks of Mount Webster, and rising at the left in the immediate
+foreground the long wooded slopes of Mount Clinton, over which the foot of
+every pilgrim to Mount Washington from the Crawford must make its first
+ascent.
+
+The dull weather had driven almost all the visitors within doors, at the
+Crawford as at the Profile; but as the splashed coach rolled up there was
+at least one recognition--that of Halstead Rowan by Horace Townsend, the
+former, without any apparent reference to the humidity of the atmosphere,
+lying at lazy length on three chairs on the piazza and occupied with a
+cigar and a cheap novel. He had "shed" (that word seems to express the fact
+better than any other) his over-sized glove from his wounded hand, and
+seemed entirely to have recovered the use of that important member.
+
+New acquaintances become old and ripen into friendships, very soon when all
+other surroundings are totally strange; and the two men, each so odd in his
+way, greeted each other as if they had been friends for a decade instead of
+intimates of less than a week. There may have been some bond in common, in
+the guess which each could make of the thoughts and entanglements of the
+other, calculated to force that friendship forward, even if it would have
+progressed more slowly under other circumstances.
+
+The first inquiry of Townsend, as they shook each other warmly by the hand,
+was:
+
+"Been up Mount Washington yet?"
+
+"Not _this time_!" answered the other, significantly. "The fog has been
+nearly thick enough to swim in, ever since I have been here, and I do not
+know, if I had been as good a swimmer as you, Townsend, whether I should
+not have tried going up by water, as our friend Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame
+went up the Alps; but by land the thing has been impossible."
+
+"Many waiting to go up?--or do they nearly all go around to the Glen, this
+season?" was the next inquiry.
+
+"No, there are a good many sensible people left," was the reply, in the
+same tone of vivacious rattle. "Think of going up Mount Washington in a
+carriage! It is worse than making a mill-race out of Niagara, or
+approaching Jerusalem, as they will do one of these days, I suppose, amid
+the rumble and whistle of a railroad-train."
+
+"Don't undervalue your own employment!" said Townsend.
+
+"Oh, I do not," was the reply. "Railroad trains, as well as mills, are very
+good things in their places; but I suppose that a prejudice will always
+exist in favor of the fiery chariot instead of the balloon, as a means of
+making ascents into the celestial regions."
+
+Horace Townsend laughed. "But you have not yet told me how many are
+waiting, or when you are really going up."
+
+"Oh, there must be nearly or quite twenty of them, moping around the house,
+running out to look at the sky every ten minutes, and asking the clerk and
+the guides questions that they are about as fit to answer as a
+prairie-chicken to solve a problem in geometry! As to when we are going
+up--do _you_ know?"
+
+"_I_ am going up to-morrow, whether any one else goes up or not," said the
+lawyer. "And by the way, I have bespoken a clear day for that especial
+occasion."
+
+"Have you? Thank you! Then I suppose we can _all_ go up!" replied the
+Illinoisan, as if the information had been the most serious in the world.
+"By the way--how are they all, over yonder!"
+
+There was something very like a blush on the face of the questioner, and
+there was something varying very little from that phenomenon on the brown
+cheek of the other as he answered:
+
+"I have not seen much of either," (what did he mean by "either," a word
+peculiarly applying, in common parlance, to _two_?) "but I believe that
+they are well."
+
+"Still at the Profile?"
+
+"Yes, and likely to remain there, for any thing that I know to the
+contrary."
+
+"Any news of any kind? Any more accidents or startling events?"
+
+"None--yes, there is one startling event. The Brooks Cunninghames came away
+the same day that you left. Have you got the old woman here?"
+
+"Here? heaven forefend! No!" was the response. Then he added: "Why, by
+Jupiter, Townsend, you must be a wizard or in some kind of collusion with
+Meriam! See!--I'll be hanged if there is not the top of a mountain! It _is_
+clearing away! Hurrah for Mount Washington!"
+
+He darted in at once from the piazza to the office, and Townsend, who had
+not yet even registered his name as an arrival, followed him. Most of the
+other passengers from the Profile were by that time registered and
+scattered away to their rooms for sartorial renovation.
+
+A separate book was kept at the office, as usual at such places, over the
+head of each page of which was printed: "Horses for Mount Washington," and
+in which, every day, those who wished to secure horses and guides for the
+succeeding or the first favorable day, registered their names, with the
+number of animals required and how many of them were to be ridden by
+ladies. A good many queer autographs might be observed in that book and
+some of its predecessors, for there was almost always some mischievous
+clerk behind the counter, amusing himself by telling immense stories to
+some of the other initiated, just as the un-initiated were coming up to
+register their names,--about the perils of the ride and how near he or some
+other person had come to falling over precipices of indefinite thousands of
+feet. This description of jocular practice very often shook the nerves of
+young travellers at the moment of booking, even when the frightened person
+was too far committed or too shame-faced to abandon his project; and there
+is no doubt that the original collection of chirography thus secured would
+prove only less interesting, on exhibition, than the original draft of the
+Declaration of Independence, or----the Emancipation Proclamation!
+
+Several names had already been booked at hap-hazard on the day in question;
+and others of the storm-stayed, aware of the prospect of a "clearing-up,"
+were by that time flocking around the book to secure their places. To the
+collection already made were very soon added the signatures of Townsend and
+Rowan, who intended, as neither would have a lady in charge, to make a
+great part if not all the trip together, while the two friends of Rowan,
+who were also to be of the ascending party, would "pair off" in the same
+manner.
+
+This done, and supper-time approaching, Rowan, who had been lounging about
+in a sort of wet-weather box-coat undress which would have driven an
+ultra-fashionable to desperation, ran off to his room to make himself
+somewhat more presentable; while Horace Townsend, after patronizing the
+barber-shop for five minutes and providing himself with that inevitable
+cigar, stepped out once more upon the piazza to glance at the weather and
+satisfy himself how kind Mother Nature really intended to be on the morrow.
+He had but just emerged from the door when a close light carriage with two
+pairs of foaming horses--horses and carriage well covered with
+mud,--whirled around the corner of the Crawford and drew up at the door.
+The driver sprung from his seat and the carriage door was opened. Out of
+it stepped first Frank Vanderlyn, then Mrs. Vanderlyn and her daughter,
+who, as it afterwards appeared, had left the Profile after dinner and
+driven through post in that manner, under the impression that the next
+morning might after all be a fine one, and anxious (two of the three, at
+least) to join any party which would be likely to make the ascent.
+
+"Whew!" said the lawyer to himself, between two puffs of his cigar, as he
+recognized the new-comers without their seeming to be aware of his
+presence. "Here is more of the Rowan romance and there may be more ten-pins
+necessary. I wonder whether that haughty woman and her son have any idea of
+the presence here of their friend from Chicago, and whether they have
+driven at that slapping pace through the mud, especially to be in his way!
+I wonder, too, whether Rowan's room is on the front, so that he has seen
+their arrival. I have half a notion to go up and apprize him of it; and
+then I have a whole notion to let him find it out for himself, and finish
+my cigar before supper comes in to spoil it."
+
+Whatever might have been the amount of knowledge of the movements of Rowan
+possessed by the Vanderlyns, and whether in making a new entry on the books
+the old names were or were not always looked over,--certain it is that half
+an hour afterwards the lawyer found two more names booked for the
+ascent--those of "Mr. Francis Vanderlyn" and "Miss Clara Vanderlyn," the
+mother evidently not intending to expose herself to a fatigue which had
+lost its novelty, but to await their going and return at the Crawford.
+
+It was very evident, to Townsend, eventually, that Rowan did not know any
+thing of the new arrival until he came down to supper. The Vanderlyns had
+taken their places at the table, very nearly opposite the lawyer, and
+returned with a nod of pleasant recognition the bow which he felt compelled
+to give them under the circumstances. Halstead Rowan, as he came in, took a
+seat on the same side of the table with the new-comers, and it was only as
+he gave the customary glance down after he had seated himself, that he
+seemed to recognize the sudden addition to the social circle. When he did
+recognize it, the lawyer (that man seems to be eternally watching the
+other, does he not?) caught one instant's blank surprise on his face, and
+he even put up his hand to rub his eyes, as if he fancied himself dreaming;
+but the surprise seemed to fade in a moment, and he pursued his supper with
+that fine appetite which is usually vouchsafed to such physical men. He
+left the table before the Vanderlyns had finished, and apparently without
+their having observed him. Townsend rose immediately and followed him, with
+a smile upon his face of which he was himself unconscious. He saw the
+Illinoisan go into the office and do precisely what he [the lawyer] would
+have laid a heavy stake that he would do--step to the counter and look over
+the list of "Horses for Mount Washington." Then a queer expression, nearer
+to malicious pleasure than any thing the other had before seen upon his
+face, flitted over it as he recognized the names. It might have been merely
+satisfaction--it might have been defiance blended with it in equal
+proportions; but at least it seemed to be capable of translation into words
+like these, which the very lips moved as if they would utter:
+
+"So, Baltimore people, you are running yourselves into my way again, after
+I had gone off and left you alone, like a good fellow! You had better be
+poorer and less proud, or I richer; or you had better keep the distance
+which I put between us!"
+
+A few moments after he approached Townsend with a laugh of deprecation and
+invited him to another game of ten-pins, which seemed to be quite as
+necessary to him when in a good humor as when in a rage. The invitation was
+accepted, and the important contest began once more. It would have been a
+very unequal one, for Rowan had fully recovered the use of his right hand,
+but that the alleys themselves had something to say in the matter. Worse
+apologies for alleys than those of the Crawford no man ever saw; and such
+a thing as a "ten-strike" had never been recorded on the black-boards, as
+made on those long lines of uneven and floor-laid planks. Both the
+combatants had quite enough to do in getting down a "frame" with three
+balls; and for some time not a word outside of the game escaped either.
+
+Suddenly, and when he had rolled two of the three balls at the defiant
+pins, Rowan stopped short with one of the lignum-vitae globes, of about the
+size of a human head, in his hand--twirling it the while as if it had been
+a paper balloon,--and said, in a short, curt tone:
+
+"They have come!"
+
+"Yes," answered Townsend, not pretending for a moment to be doubtful about
+the meaning of the personal pronoun. "Yes, I saw them at supper."
+
+"Going up with us to-morrow, I believe!" added the Illinoisan.
+
+"Ah, indeed, are they?" was the jesuitical inquiry of the lawyer.
+
+"Yes, and they will have good company, won't they!" was the response.
+
+Then he bowled away at the ten-pins, more energetically than ever, and with
+something in his manner and the nervous jerk of his arm, that once more
+recalled Townsend's idea of his feeling, while in the act, like shooting
+some one down a mountain precipice like a pebble-stone, or sweeping away a
+fate like a cobweb with one of those polished globes of iron wood.
+
+Only a couple of games, and then they went in to bed with a mutual reminder
+that the motto in the morning would be "to horse and away!" and that above
+all things they must be watchful against that phase of indolence vulgarly
+known as "oversleeping." The house was nearly silent, all the prospective
+riders having retired for the night, and soon slumber fell upon that hive
+of human bees wandering in search of the honey of unlaboring pleasure,
+gathered under the roof of Gibb and Hartshorne at the Crawford.
+
+Fell, but not too deeply, for that which is to be brief has a right to be
+intense; and the hours of repose were relentlessly numbered. Neither
+Townsend nor Rowan need have been anxious about waking in the morning; for
+such a blast and roar of horrible sound as swept through the corridor at
+about seven, A. M., from the big Chinese gong in the hands of an
+enthusiastic negro who probably felt that he had no other opportunity of
+making his requisite "noise in the world," would have been sufficient to
+awaken any thing short of the dead! For once, every one obeyed the summons
+while anathematizing the mode, and the breakfast-table was soon surrounded.
+
+Here, those who labored under some kind of indefinite impression that the
+summit of Mount Washington was somewhere beyond the Desert of Arabia--that
+nothing eatable or drinkable could ever be discovered on its top--and that
+the more they ate the better able they would be to endure the fatigue of
+the ascent,--made vigorous attacks on the steaks, eggs and chickens, and
+drank coffee, milk and cold water without limit. Those better advised (and
+the fact is here set down as a bit of practical experience worth
+heeding),--those who knew the painful effect of attempting to climb a
+mountain when gorged to repletion (the traveller, not the mountain--the
+mountain is always full of "gorges")--those, we say, confined themselves to
+an egg or two and a small slice of rare steak, and drank lightly.
+
+When the party one by one dropped out from breakfast, the scene in front of
+the house was at once picturesque and singular--worth remembering by those
+who shared in it or who have shared in one similar,--and worth the feeble
+attempt at verbal daguerreotype which may do something to preserve it
+against that day when the Crawford decays and Mount Washington is either
+levelled off or ascended by means of a locomotive or a dumb-waiter.
+
+More than twenty names--somewhat more than half of them belonging to
+ladies--were on the book for the ascent; and a corresponding number of
+horses were scattered over the broad open space in front of the door. All
+were saddled and bridled; but among them moved half-a-dozen guides in rough
+coats, thick boots and slouched hats, inspecting and tightening the girths,
+looking to the cruppers and bridles, and paying especial attention to the
+animals provided for the female portion of the cavalcade, for whose safety
+they ever hold themselves and are ever held by the hotel-proprietors,
+peculiarly responsible.
+
+By way of back-ground to this singular scene, under a clump of trees to the
+right walked two full-grown black bears (no mountain resort can be
+thoroughly complete without its bears!)--chained and surly, ever keeping
+their weary round and grunting out their disapprobation at being confined
+to such narrow quarters without an occasional naughty youngster for lunch.
+
+But what a spectacle was presented when the mount was ready and the riders
+had all emerged from the door of the Crawford! Were these the belles and
+beaux of previous days, captivating and being captivated by perfection of
+raiment as well as charm of face and grace of figure? If so, never had such
+a metamorphosis taken place since long before Ovid. Every man wore some
+description of slouched hat, brought in his baggage or hired in the hotel
+wardrobe,--bad, very bad, atrocious, or still worse, and each tied down
+over the ears with a thick string or a handkerchief. Coarse and old
+trowsers were turned up over heavy boots; and the roughest and coarsest of
+box-coats that could be provided were surmounted in the majority of
+instances by striped Guernsey shirts still rougher. All the dilapidated
+gloves and coarse tippets that could be mustered, with a few shawls and
+blankets, completed the equipment of a set of men who certainty looked too
+badly even for brigands and seemed the enforced victims of some hideous
+masquerade.
+
+But if the men looked badly, what shall be said of that which should have
+been the fairer portion of the cavalcade? Salvator Rosa never dreamed of
+such objects, and Hogarth would have gone stark mad in the attempt to
+depict them. Ringlets were buried under mob-caps and old woollen-hoods, and
+smothered in bad straw hats and superannuated felt jockeys, tied down in
+the same ungraceful manner as those of the men. Hoops had suddenly ceased
+to be fashionable, even in advance of the sudden Quaker collapse in the
+cities; and every shape, bulky or lank, showed in its own undisguised
+proportions--here a form of beauty, there a draped lamp-post, and yonder a
+bedizened bolster. In short, the very worst riding-dresses possible to
+achieve seemed to have been carefully gathered from all the old-clothes
+shops in the universe; and if the men were the ugliest brigands of the dark
+souled Italian painter, the women were the drollest witches that ever
+capered through the brain of the master-dramatist.
+
+And yet there were sparkling eyes showing occasionally from under those
+hideous bonnets, that perhaps looked the brighter for the contrast; and it
+is not sure that one or two of the sweet auburn curls of Clara Vanderlyn,
+which had strayed away from their confinement and lay like red gold on the
+neck of her shabby black riding-dress, could ever have shown to more
+bewitching advantage.
+
+Every one laughed at the appearance of the other, as the mount was taking
+place, and as Hartshorne, of the Crawford, who seemed to have measured the
+capabilities of every horse and calculated the weight and skill of every
+rider, called off the names from the roll-book, and gave place to each in
+turn.
+
+Of the material of the mount, it is only necessary to specify three or four
+of the horses, which have to do with the subsequent details of that
+eventful excursion. Miss Vanderlyn had a neat little black pony, apparently
+very careful in step, and an "old-stager" at ascending the mountains. Her
+brother Frank rode a tall bay, of high spirit and better action than any
+other horse on the ground. Rowan had asked Hartshorne (some of the others
+heard him, with a sensation of genuine horror) to give him the
+worst-tempered horse in the stable; and as he was known to be an old
+habitue of the mountains, he had been accommodated according to request. So
+far as could be discovered by his action, his horse, a bay of fifteen and a
+half or sixteen hands, with blood, foot and bottom, would kick, bite,
+strike, run away, shy to one side, and do every thing else wicked and
+unsafe that should taboo a horse from being ridden at all,--except stumble,
+from which latter fault he was remarkably clear. Townsend was accommodated
+with a gray mare of moderate size and a dash of Arab blood, that had been
+unused for nearly a month from having nearly broken the neck of one of the
+proprietors, on his personal allegation that he was at least a fair rider,
+and that the breaking of his own neck would be the least damage that could
+be inflicted on any member of the party.
+
+Thick morning mists still hid the tops of Mount Webster and Mount Willard,
+visible from the house, and hung amid the heavy woods of Mount Clinton,
+although the storm had really passed away with the night,--as at nine
+o'clock, all mounted, the guides took their places, one at the head of the
+cavalcade and the others scattered at intervals through it, and the whole
+line moved off up the mountain. It should be mentioned here, however, that
+Townsend (the observer again) saw during the mount the only recognition
+which took place between the two principal persons of his outside
+drama--Halstead Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn. Frank was mounting his horse,
+after having assisted his sister to her saddle, when Rowan brushed by her
+on his vicious bay, very near her and to the left. He saw their eyes meet,
+and saw Rowan bend so low that his head almost touched the neck of his
+horse. Clara Vanderlyn replied by a gesture quite as mute and quite as
+unlikely to be observed by any one not especially watchful. She nodded her
+head quickly but decidedly, and threw the roughly-gloved fingers of her
+left hand to her lips. That was all, and of course unobserved by Frank
+Vanderlyn, who may or may not have been aware that the man whom he had
+insulted was a member of the ascending party; but it was quite enough,
+beyond a doubt, to set the blood boiling in the veins of the Illinoisan
+with all the fury of the water surging up in flame and smoke in the Iceland
+Geysers.
+
+Rowan and Townsend had places assigned them near the middle of the line,
+but as the cavalcade began to move, the human demon of unrest was missing
+from his place. He was to be seen at the end of the piazza at that moment,
+talking to Hartshorne, and no doubt making a few additional inquiries as to
+the character of the amiable animal he bestrode. The lawyer called out to
+him to "Come on!" but he answered with a wave of the hand and a shout:
+
+"Go ahead! don't wait for me! I will be with you directly!"
+
+Through the thick woods of Mount Clinton they swept up, over a bridle-path
+so rough as to have made the most laborious if not the most dangerous
+walking--over great boulders of stone lying in the very path, and
+apparently impossible to get over or around--over patches of corduroy road
+utterly defying description, except to the men who isolated Fort Donelson
+and planted the Swamp Angels in the marshes of Charleston--over and through
+gutters and gulches of slippery stone and more slippery mud--but ever
+ascending at a painful acclivity. The horses breathed heavily; and their
+riders, in the thick and foggy air, did little better. They caught
+occasional glimpses through the trees, down the sudden slopes at the left,
+of the thick mist rolling below, but could see nothing else to remind them
+of the height they were attaining; and as the dense fog swept in their
+faces, and the trees dripped moisture on them when they swept beneath their
+branches, and the path grew more and more desolate and difficult, they grew
+silent, the whole cavalcade, apparently by common consent. There are
+aspects in which Nature looks and feels too solemn for the light word and
+the flippant jest; and the man who cannot be awed beyond his ordinary mood
+when standing under the edge of the sheet of Niagara, or beside the sea
+when it is lashed into resistless fury, or in gale and mist on the bleak,
+bare, desolate mountains of the North, should never insult the grand and
+the terrible by going into their presence!
+
+And yet all persons, who have true reverence in their hearts, are not
+always awed beyond themselves, even in the most impressive of situations:
+as witness, to some degree, the incidents following.
+
+They had surmounted the first acclivity, perhaps a mile from the Crawford,
+and were commencing a slight descent which made every rider look to the
+horse's feet and ride with a slight tremor,--when the stillness was
+suddenly broken in a manner which almost curdled the blood of the timid and
+needed a second reassurance for even the boldest.
+
+"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!" came from the path below, with that
+hideous power and distinctness of lungs that have chilled so many hearts
+and whitened so many faces since the white man first intruded on the
+hunting-grounds of the American Indian. A shrill, dissonant, horrible yell,
+combining the blind ferocity of the beast with the deadlier rage of man,
+such as made the poor mother clasp her babe closer to the breast when it
+rang around the block-houses of Massachusetts and New York in the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--such as less than three years ago
+proved that it was undying in the savage throat, by pealing over the
+mangled bodies and burned dwellings of the Minnesota massacres.
+
+"Good heavens!--what is that?" cried half a dozen of the ladies in a
+breath.
+
+"An Indian war-whoop, certainly!" said one of the gentlemen, his face white
+as wax at the sudden shock.
+
+"It is war time, and they tell me that the rebels yell terribly!" said one
+of the ladies. "Can it be--" but then the absurdity of the idea struck her
+and she paused.
+
+"Albert Pike was a New England man: perhaps he is here with his Arkansas
+savages!" said another, whether in jest or earnest no one could well
+discover.
+
+It was surprising how in that one instant the cavalcade had shortened its
+length--the foremost stopping and the rearmost closing up. Man _is_ a
+gregarious animal, especially when a little surprised or frightened!
+
+Perhaps Horace Townsend had been as badly startled as any of the others, at
+the first instant; but he possessed some data which the others lacked for
+discovering the source of the warlike yell.
+
+"Do not be alarmed, ladies!" he said, after an instant. "I think there is
+only one Indian uttering that horrible sound, and you may depend upon it
+that he is white and no rebel. Yes--see!--here he comes!"
+
+They had been, as already indicated, descending a quarter of a mile of most
+difficult and dangerous path, in which every rider experienced more or less
+of tremor, and over which the horses were picking their careful way as if
+they realized that human necks were in peril. At the instant when the
+attention of the company was thus directed backwards, Halstead Rowan had
+reached the top of the rise, behind, and was just giving vent to a second
+and supplemental yell which rang through the woods as if a dozen throats
+had taken part in it, and which must have been heard half way down the
+Notch.
+
+"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!"
+
+The rider was commencing the descent, too, but not precisely like the rest,
+picking his way, on a careful half-trot, half-walk; on the contrary his
+horse had his ears laid back and was going over the broken stones at such a
+gallop as he might have held on an ordinary highway! The reins seemed to be
+lying loose on his neck, and--could those horrified people believe their
+eyes?--so surely as they were threading the tangled woods of Mount Clinton,
+with thankful hearts for every rood passed over without broken necks, so
+surely Halstead Rowan, a novel description of Mazeppa unknown even to Frank
+Drew or Adah Isaacs, sat his horse in what might be called "reverse
+order," his back towards them and his face to the animal's tail!
+
+"Good heavens!" "The man is mad!" "Oh, do stop the horse!" "It is running
+away with him!" "He will be killed!"--such were the exclamations that broke
+from the party as Rowan's equestrianism was recognized--most of them from
+the female portion of the cavalcade. What would it not have been worth to
+see sweet Clara Vanderlyn's face at the moment when she first realized who
+was the reckless rider, and to know whether she cared for his welfare at
+all and whether anxiety or confidence predominated in her thought!
+
+But the rider did not pause, or seem very much in peril. His horse kept his
+feet quite as well as any of the others; and Townsend remembering the
+Comanches and the Arapahoes, was forced to believe that the wild equestrian
+must have the alleged Indian power of communicating his own will to his
+horse, and that he could ride almost anywhere and in any manner, in safety.
+
+Rowan drew the reins (which he _had_ in his hands, after all) as he came up
+with the cavalcade, and said:
+
+"I hope I did not startle any of you ladies with my Indian whoop. Upon my
+honor I did not mean to do so, if I did; for I hate practical jokes that
+cause pain, quite as much as any of the other fellows, the--gentlemen. But
+the woods tempted me, and I have not enjoyed such an opportunity for the
+use of the lungs, this many a day."
+
+"I believe some of us were a little frightened for a moment, but no harm
+done," said Horace Townsend. "But let me ask you--is not your riding just a
+little bit careless?"
+
+"Well, yes, just the very least bit in the world, perhaps, for _some_
+people!" answered the wild fellow; and Townsend fancied that he caught him
+trying, at the moment, to catch a glimpse, unseen by Frank Vanderlyn, under
+the hood of Clara, who was not very far from him. If he did make the
+attempt, he failed, for the young girl dared not or would not expose her
+face. "But come, Townsend," Rowan added, "will you not push on with me a
+little further ahead and let these slow coaches come up at their leisure?"
+
+"At _your_ rate of progress? No," laughed Townsend. "I am not a very bad
+rider, I believe, but I have never practised in a circus or on a prairie.
+Go ahead, if you are in a hurry; that is, provided you know which end is
+going foremost!"
+
+"Found another place where you will not follow me, eh, old boy!" rattled
+the Illinoisan, with a reference which the other easily understood. "Well,
+I will see you by-and-bye, then. Go along, Bay Beelzebub!" and the next
+moment, darting by the centre line and taking precedence even of the
+leading guide, in a path that was literally nothing but a three-cornered
+trough, he was to be seen ascending the next rise, his horse trotting along
+riderless, and himself springing from crag to crag beside the path, his
+hand upon the animal's back and the reins lying loose on its neck. He had
+alighted, of course, without checking the speed of the horse in any degree.
+
+But a few minutes later, and when the cavalcade had reached the top of
+Mount Clinton and was coming out from the gloom of the heavy woods into the
+partial sunshine,--they saw the odd equestrian riding over a portion of
+road that was only moderately bad, standing erect on his horse's back,
+supported by the reins and his own powers of balancing,--and heard his
+deep, cheery voice ringing out in a song that seemed as complete a medley
+as his own character. It may be permissible to put upon record one of the
+stanzas, which some of those nearest him caught and remembered:
+
+    "The heart bowed down by weight of wo--
+      When comin' thro' the rye?
+    If I had a donkey wot wouldn't go--
+      Good-bye, my love, good-bye!
+    I see them on their winding way:
+      Old clothes, old clothes to sell!
+    So let's be happy while we may--
+      Lost Isabel!"
+
+Still later, the riders were all thrown into momentary horror by coming
+upon him, as they rounded the head of a gorge near the top of Mount
+Prospect,--his horse on a walk, and himself hanging over one side,
+apparently by the heels. The impression prevailed that he must have been
+knocked senseless by a limb, in some of his pranks, and got his feet
+fatally entangled in the stirrups,--the result of which impression was that
+a sudden scream, in a woman's voice, burst out from some portion of the
+line, but so instantaneously suppressed that no one could trace it. It
+turned out that in this last operation, so far from being killed, he was
+only practising the Indian mode of hanging beside his horse, supported by
+one hand at the neck and one foot over the saddle, after the manner of the
+wild tribes of the Plains when throwing the horse as a shield between
+themselves and the shot of a pursuer!
+
+After a time, however, the reckless fellow seemed to have grown tired of
+his humor; for, as the long line crossed over the peak of Prospect to
+Monroe, and the north wind and the sun had so driven away the clouds that
+the riders began to realize the glorious prospect opening upon them on
+every hand,--he took his place in the line, next to his deserted comrade
+Townsend, sat his horse like a Christian, and joined in the bursts of
+admiration vented on all sides, with an enthusiasm which showed that the
+scenery had never palled upon him by familiarity.
+
+And what views indeed were those that burst upon them as they crossed from
+Franklin to Monroe, and that sea of which the stiffened waves were
+mountains stretched out for an hundred miles in every direction! Some there
+were, in that line, who had stood on the prouder and more storied peaks of
+Europe, and yet remembered nothing to diminish the glory of that hour. How
+the deep gorges slept full of warm sunlight, and how the dark shadows
+flitted over them, and flickered, and thinned, and faded, as one by one the
+light clouds were driven southward by the wind! With what a shudder,
+passing over the narrow ridge or back-bone connecting Monroe and Franklin,
+they looked down into "Oakes' Gulf" on the right and the "Gulf of Mexico"
+on the left, only separated by a yard of bushy rock from a descent of three
+thousand feet on one side, and by less than three yards of slippery stone
+from more than two thousand feet on the other!
+
+The path is a sort of narrow trough, rough enough, but quite as safe, and
+to those who keep it there is not the least possible danger. Indeed the
+rider, half hidden in the trough, scarcely knows the fearful narrowness of
+the bridge over which he is passing; and thousands cross this pass and
+recross it, and bring away no idea of the sensation that may be gained by a
+little imprudent hanging over the verge on either side! None of the riders
+in that cavalcade went back to their beds at the Crawford without a much
+more intimate knowledge of the capabilities of that situation; but of this
+in due time.
+
+It is impossible for any one who has never made a similar ascent, or who
+has only ascended with a much smaller number, to conceive the appearance
+made by that score of equestrians at various points when crossing the open
+but uneven peaks in the last approach to Washington. Varied in stature, sex
+and costume, and all sufficiently outre to astonish if not to
+horrify,--what views the leading riders of the line could catch at times,
+looking back at the motley line! Some half buried in the trough of the path
+or midway in a gulch, so that only the head would be visible; others
+perched on the very top of a huge boulder, ascending or descending; some
+clinging close to mane or neck as the horse scrambled up an ascent of forty
+degrees; others lying well back on the saddle when descending a declivity
+of the same suddenness. What dreams of the Alps and the Apennines there are
+in such ascents--dreams of the toilers over St. Gothard and the muleteers
+of the Pyrenees--dreams of memory pleasant to those who have such past
+experiences to look back upon, and substitutes no less pleasant to many
+who long for glances at other lands but must die with only that far-off
+glimpse of the fulness of travel which Moses caught from the hills of the
+Moabites over that inheritance of his race upon which he was never to
+enter.
+
+It yet wanted half an hour to noon, and Mount Washington towered full
+before them as they came out on the top of Franklin, by the little Lake of
+the Clouds which lay so saucily smiling to the sun and coquetting with the
+mists. The peak, a huge mass of broken and naked stone, half a mile up on
+every side and so sheer in pitch that foot-hold seemed hopeless, would have
+looked totally discouraging but for the white line of path which, winding
+around it on the north-west, showed that it must before have been achieved.
+
+Up--up--over broken and slipping stones of every size and description, from
+the dimensions of a brick-bat to those of a dining-table--stones gray and
+mossed, without one spoonful of earth to prove that the riders had not
+surmounted the whole habitable globe and lost themselves in some unnatural
+wilderness of rock! And feeling joined with sight to enhance the desolate
+fancy, for though so nearly high noon the wind blew at that dizzy height
+with the violence of a gale, and the Guernsey wrappers and the clumsy
+gloves had long before proved that the rough and homely may be more useful
+than the beautiful.
+
+Two or three hundred yards from the Tip-Top House, the rough stone walls of
+which were glooming above--the party were dismounted, the horses picketed
+by the guides, and over the broken stones and yawning fissures the
+dismounted riders struggled up, strong arms aiding weaker limbs, and much
+care necessary to prevent heedless steps that might have caused injuries
+slow of recovery. Up--up, over the little but difficult remaining
+distance--till all stood by the High Altar on the top of Mount Washington.
+
+Above the clouds, swales of which they saw sweeping by, half way down the
+mountain--above the earth, its cares and its sorrows, it seemed to them for
+the moment that they stood; and only those who have made such a pilgrimage
+can realize the glory of that hour. The mountains of Vermont
+North-westward, those of Canada North-eastward, those of Massachusetts to
+the South and the Franconia range full to the West; lakes lying like
+splashes of molten silver at their feet and rivers fluttering like blue
+silken ribbons far away; towns nestled in the gorges and hamlets glimmering
+up from the depths of the ravines; long miles of valleys filled with
+sunlight, as if the very god of day had stooped down and left them full of
+the warmth of his loving kiss; peak upon peak rising behind and beyond each
+other, and each tinted with some new and richer hue, from gold to purple
+and from sunny green to dark and sombre brown; beyond all, and on the
+extreme verge of the sight-line to the East, one long low glint of light
+that told of the far Atlantic breaking in shimmering waves on the rocky
+coast of Maine; the world so far beneath as to be a myth and an unreality,
+distance annihilated, and the clear, pure air drank in by the grateful
+lungs appearing to be a foretaste of that some day to be breathed on the
+summit of the Eternal Hills,--these were the sights and these the
+sensations amid which the dark cheek of Horace Townsend seemed touched with
+a light that did not beam upon it in the valleys below, with his eyes grown
+humid and utterance choked by intense feeling; while all the heart of
+glorious womanhood in Clara Vanderlyn fluttered up in the truest worship of
+that God who had formed the earth so beautiful; and even Halstead Rowan
+once more forgot pride, poverty, insult, and the physical exuberance which
+made either endurable, to fold his strong arms in silence, lift the innate
+reverence of his thoughts to the Eternal and the Inevitable, and vow to
+submit with childlike faith to all of triumph or humiliation that might be
+ordained in the future.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+     HORACE TOWNSEND WITH A LADY IN CHARGE--AN ADVENTURE OVER THE
+     "GULF OF MEXICO"--CLARA VANDERLYN IN DEADLY PERIL--A MOMENT
+     OF HORROR--HALSTEAD ROWAN AND A DISPLAY OF THE COMANCHE
+     RIDING--TOWNSEND'S ECLIPSE--THE RETURN TO THE
+     CRAWFORD--MARGARET HAYLEY AGAIN, AND A CONVERSATION
+     OVERHEARD.
+
+
+It was perhaps two o'clock before the meetings and partings were over
+between the large party whom we have seen ascending from the Crawford, and
+the yet greater number who had come up from the Glen House by the
+belittling novelty of the mountain, the "carriage road,"--before the dinner
+at the Tip-Top House was discussed, hearty and plentiful enough, if not
+remarkably varied,--before the guides of the cavalcade had done "chaffing"
+the carriage drivers from the Glen, whom they seemed to regard very much as
+"old salts" do "fresh-water sailors,"--before every member of the party had
+viewed the magnificent scenery from every conceivable point, drank their
+fill of a beauty that might not be duplicated for years or excelled in a
+lifetime, and filled pockets and reticules equally full of all the maps and
+books that could be bought and all the geological specimens that could be
+picked up, as memorials of the visit. By that hour the warning of the
+guides was heard, reminding all that there was no more time remaining than
+would suffice to carry themselves and their tired horses back to the
+Crawford by nightfall. At once, then, the descent began--supposed, in
+advance, to be so uneventful and merely a pleasant diminished repetition of
+the experiences of the ascent.
+
+As they climbed down the broken rocks of the peak to their
+patiently-waiting horses (they would probably have waited patiently until
+they dropped with hunger, if by that means the rider and his saddle could
+have been avoided; for your mountain horse does _not_ find unalloyed
+pleasure in his occupation!)--when near the "corral," as it may be called,
+Frank Vanderlyn left his sister for a moment and stepped over to Horace
+Townsend, who was descending alone, Halstead Rowan (as usual) at some
+distance ahead and already preparing to mount and away.
+
+"Would you have any objections, sir," the young man asked, "as I believe
+that you have no lady in charge, to ride in company with my sister on the
+way down?"
+
+"Certainly not!" replied Townsend, though a little surprised at the
+salutation and request from one of the haughty Vanderlyns to whom he had
+not even been introduced. "I shall be proud of the charge, if your sister
+and yourself feel like placing so much confidence in an entire stranger."
+
+"Oh, _we_ know a gentleman when we see him!" replied the young man, not a
+little arrogantly, as it appeared to the lawyer, and with a sinister glance
+at the Illinoisan which indicated that it would have been some time before
+_he_ was entrusted with the same responsibility.
+
+"I am flattered!" said Townsend, with the bow which the speech demanded and
+yet did not deserve. "Do you remain on the top yourself?"
+
+"No," answered the young man. "But the fact is that my horse kicks. He
+kicked my sister's pony twice in coming up; and I am afraid of some trouble
+in going down, if she rides behind me. It will be better for me to drop
+into the rear of all, where the ill-tempered devil cannot do injury to any
+one."
+
+A few words of quasi-introduction and explanation between Vanderlyn, Clara
+and the lawyer followed; and Horace Townsend, who had come up the mountain
+without any lady and only in the casual companionship of a man who
+continually rode away and left him alone, found himself ready to go down it
+with the fairest member of the company in charge! Had nothing else
+intervened since the ride up from Littleton to the Profile and that long,
+steady glance of admiration which had then been bestowed upon the sweet
+face and auburn hair,--what a dangerous proximity this might have proved!
+But the human heart, expansive as it may be, has not quite the capacity of
+a stage-coach or a passenger-car; and to prevent falling in desperate love
+with one fascinating woman thrown in one's way, there is perhaps no guard
+so potent as being in real or fancied desperate love with another!
+
+Halstead Rowan and the lady whom Townsend had reason to believe the object
+of his hope and his despair, had not been flung together and apart from
+others, for one moment during the day--Mr. Frank Vanderlyn had taken
+especially good care in that respect; though the lawyer had little cause to
+doubt that if both could have had their choice of companionship, they would
+have stood side by side and without others too near, by the High Altar
+which crowned the summit of the mountain, and spoken words difficult to
+unsay again during the lifetime of either. But if he had not been alone
+with Clara Vanderlyn, there is equally little doubt that he had looked at
+her much oftener than at the most admired point of scenery on the route.
+And as Frank Vanderlyn strolled away to his horse, and Townsend, with the
+lady obviously under his charge, was preparing to mount, he saw Rowan, with
+one foot in the stirrup and the other on the ground, looking over at him
+and his companion, with the most comical expression of wonder on his face
+that could well have been compressed into the same extent of physiognomy.
+The heart of the new knight-errant, which must have been a soft one or he
+would never have labored under that weakness, smote him at the thought of
+his apparent desertion; and with a word of apology he stepped away from the
+lady and approached the dismounted amateur Comanche.
+
+"You don't mean to say that you are going to----" said the latter, and he
+nodded his head comically and yet a little pitifully towards Clara
+Vanderlyn.
+
+"Ride down with Miss Vanderlyn? Yes!" answered the lawyer.
+
+"And who the deuce asked you to do it, I should like to know?"
+
+"Her brother."
+
+"Phew-w-w!" A prolonged whistle, very characteristic and significant.
+
+Townsend, in a word, explained the affair.
+
+"All right!" said the Illinoisan. "But, look here, old fellow! You haven't
+arranged this affair yourself, eh? No meetings on a single track, you
+know!"
+
+"Not a bit of it!" laughed Townsend at the professional illustration.
+"Confidence for confidence! Have you not seen more closely than _that_?"
+
+"Yes, I thought I had!" answered Rowan. "Well, all right! Go ahead! But by
+Jupiter, if you do not take the best care of that girl, and she gets into
+any kind of a scrape by riding with a man who _can't_ ride, there will be
+somebody challenged to something else than ten-pins!"
+
+Townsend laughed and turned away. The time had been, he thought, when
+incapacity to ride would scarcely have been set down as among his
+short-comings. But every thing, even equestrianism, was to be reckoned by
+comparison!
+
+A moment after, all the party were in the saddle; and then commenced a
+descent still more laborious than the ascent, at least to the tired horses
+that groaned almost humanly as they slid down the sudden declivities, and
+to the more timid of the riders. Horace Townsend rode immediately before
+Miss Vanderlyn, a little forward of the centre of the Indian file (the only
+possible mode of riding in those narrow bridle-paths)--Rowan half-a-dozen
+further behind, then two or three others, and Frank Vanderlyn, with his
+dangerous bay, bringing up the rear.
+
+The lawyer found his fair companion all that her face had indicated, in the
+desultory conversation which sprung up between them as they made their way
+downward from the summit, descending the peak of the monarch and riding
+back over the broad top of Monroe towards Franklin. Clara Vanderlyn
+conversed genially and easily, and had evidently (in spite of some
+restrictions already suggested,) enjoyed the day with the full warmth of an
+ardent nature. She seemed an excellent horsewoman, easy and self-possessed
+in the saddle, and Townsend observed that she found leisure from the care
+of picking her way, to look back several times over her shoulder. For a
+long time he may have been undecided whether her regard was directed at her
+brother, at the extreme end of the line, or at some one in the middle
+distance. The one glance of anxiety would have been very natural: the
+other, compounded of interest only, may have been likewise natural
+enough--who can say?
+
+They were crossing Monroe to Franklin, over the narrow back-bone of land
+that has been mentioned in the ascent, and at the very point where Oakes'
+Gulf, now on the left, and the scarcely less terrible Gulf of Mexico on the
+right, narrowed the whole causeway to not much more than a dozen of
+feet,--when Townsend heard a sudden and sharp cry behind him. At that point
+the descent of the path was very precipitous, and over stones so rugged
+that the horses kept their feet with great difficulty; and in his anxiety
+to insure safe footing he had for the moment lost sight of his fair
+companion--a poor recommendation of his ability as an escort, perhaps, but
+not less true than reprehensible! At the cry he turned instantly, though he
+could not so suddenly check the course of his horse down the path without
+danger of throwing him from his feet; and as he looked around, through the
+olive brown of his cheek a deadly whiteness crept to the skin, and his
+blood stood still as it had probably never before done since the tide of
+life first surged through his veins.
+
+It has been the lot of many men to look upon a horror accomplished or so
+nearly accomplished that any reversal of the decree of fate seemed to be
+beyond hope. Such is the gaze upon the strewn dead of the battle-field,
+before the life has quite gone out from a few who are already worse than
+dead, and when the groans and the cries for "water!" to cool the lips
+parched in the last fever, have not yet entirely ceased. Such is the
+hopeless glance at the windrow of dead strewing the shore when a ship is
+going to pieces in the surf, in plain sight and yet beyond the aid of human
+hands, and when every moment is adding another to the drowned and ghastly
+subjects for the rough-coated Coroner. Such is the stony regard at the
+crushed victims of a railroad catastrophe, or the charred and blackened
+remains of those who were but a little while ago living passengers on the
+steamboat that is just burning at the water's edge. Such, even, is the
+shuddering glance at the brave and unconscious firemen who stand beneath a
+heavy wall, when that wall is surging forward and coming down in a crushing
+mass upon their very heads, with no power except a miracle of Omnipotence
+to prevent their being flattened into mere pan-cakes of flesh, and blood,
+and bone. All these, and a thousand others, are horrors accomplished or
+beyond hope of being averted; and they are enough to sicken the heart and
+brain of humanity brought into sudden familiarity with them. But perhaps
+they are not the worst--perhaps that yet unaccomplished but probable horror
+is still more terrible, because uncertainty blends with it and there is yet
+enough of hope to leaven despair. The life not yet fully forfeited, but
+going--going; the form not yet crushed out of the human semblance, but to
+be so in a moment unless that one chance intervenes; the face--especially
+if the face be that of woman, a thousand times more beautiful in the relief
+of that hideous mask of death which the gazer sees glooming behind
+it,--this is perhaps the hardest thing of all to see and not go mad.
+
+None of these conditions may have been quite fulfilled in the glance cast
+backward by Horace Townsend at that moment; but let us see how far the
+situation varied from the most terrible of requirements.
+
+Going over that back-bone in the morning, the lawyer, who chanced to be for
+the moment alone, had swung himself from his horse, leaving the animal
+standing in the trough, peered through the bushes to the right, down into
+Oakes' Gulf, and walked to the edge of the broad stone that formed the
+projection over the Gulf of Mexico. He had found that stone smooth and
+rounded, a little slippery from the almost perpetual rains and mists
+beating upon it, not more than eight to ten feet wide from the path to the
+verge, and with a perceptible slope downwards in the latter direction. He
+had thought, then, that it needed a clear head and a sure foot (both of
+which he possessed) to stand in that position or even to tread the stone at
+any distance from the path. And so thinking, he had swung himself back into
+the saddle and ridden on,--the incident, then, not worth relating--now, a
+thing of the most fearful consequence.
+
+For as he glanced back, at that sudden cry, he saw Clara Vanderlyn sitting
+her horse on the very top of that smooth plateau of stone overlooking the
+two thousand feet of the Gulf of Mexico, at what could not have been more
+than four or five feet from the awful verge, and certainly on the downward
+slope of what was an insecure footing even for the plastic foot of
+man--much more for the clumsy iron-shod hoof!
+
+What could have induced her trained pony to spring out from the path a few
+feet behind and rush into that perilous elevation, must ever remain (in the
+absence of an equine lexicon) quite as much of a mystery as it seemed at
+that moment. Perhaps it was in going down some such declivity of path as
+that before him, that he had been kicked by the vicious bay of Frank
+Vanderlyn while making the ascent, and that he had concluded to wait on
+this convenient shelf until all the rest had gone by, before he consented
+to make the passage with his fair burthen. Perhaps the movement was merely
+one of those unaccountable freaks of sullen madness in which horses as well
+as men sometimes have the habit of indulging. At all events, such was the
+situation; and the recollection of it, as thus recalled to those who were
+present, will be quite enough, as we are well aware, to set the heart
+beating most painfully. What, then, must have been the feeling of all who
+saw, and especially of that man who had promised to _protect_ the fair
+being thus placed in peril! What thoughts of the playful threat of Halstead
+Rowan must have rushed through his brain--that "if she got into any kind of
+a scrape by riding with a man who _couldn't_ ride," such and such fatal
+results would follow! Not a duel with the Illinoisan--oh, no!--but a black,
+terrible, life-long duel with his own self-reproaches and remorse for
+heedlessness and want of judgment--this would be the doom more fearful than
+a thousand personal chastisements, if danger became destruction. One clumsy
+movement of the horse's feet, one slip on the stone, and she would as
+certainly go over that dizzy precipice and fall so crushed and mangled a
+mass into the gulf below that her fragments could scarcely be distinguished
+from those of the pony she rode--as certainly as she had grace and love and
+beauty crowning her life and adding to the possible horror of her death. He
+did not know, then, how many of the cavalcade saw the situation, or how the
+blood of most who saw stood still like his own, with dread and
+apprehension.
+
+The inconceivable rapidity of human thought has been so often made a matter
+of comment, that words could but be wasted in illustrating it. It shames
+the lightning and makes sluggard light itself. All these thoughts in the
+mind of Horace Townsend scarcely consumed that time necessary to draw rein
+and turn himself round in the saddle in a quick attempt to alight, rush up
+the side of the rock and seize her horse by the bridle or swing her from
+her seat. He had no irresolution--no moment of hesitation--he only thought
+and suffered in that single instant preceding action.
+
+"For God's sake do not move! I will be there in one instant!" he said in a
+low, hoarse, intense voice that reached her like a trumpet's clang.
+
+"Oh yes--quick! quick!" he heard her reply, in a convulsive, frightened
+voice. "Oh, quick!--you don't know where I am!"
+
+Poor girl!--he _did_ know where she was, too well.
+
+She was braver than most women, or she would probably have jerked the
+bridle or frightened her horse by frantic cries, and sent him slipping with
+herself down the ravine; for the situation was a most fearful one, and
+there are few women who could have braved it without a tremor. A _man_, let
+it be remembered, if cruel enough, might have alighted and left the horse
+to its fate; but to a woman, encumbered by her long clothes, the attempt
+must have been almost certain destruction for both.
+
+Perhaps not sixty seconds had elapsed after the first cry, when the lawyer
+succeeded in checking his horse without throwing him headlong, swung his
+foot out of the stirrup, and attempted to spring to the ground. But just
+then there was a sudden rush over the rock; a wierd and unnatural sweeping
+by, something like that of the Demon Hunt in "Der Freischutz;" a cry of
+terror and fright that seemed to come from the whole line in the rear and
+fill the air with ghastly sound; a closing of the eyes on the part of the
+incapable guardian, in the full belief that the noises he heard were those
+of the accomplishment of the great horror; then sounds nearer him, and a
+jar that almost prostrated himself and the horse against which he yet
+leaned; then a wild cry of exultation and delight which seemed--God help
+his senses!--was he going mad?--to be mingled with the clapping of hands
+like that which follows a moment of intense interest at the theatre!
+
+Then silence, and the lawyer opened his eyes as suddenly as he had closed
+them. And what did he see? On the rock, nothing; in the path, ahead of him,
+Clara Vanderlyn still sitting her horse, though in a half fainting state,
+and Halstead Rowan, also on horseback, ahead of her, and with his hand
+holding her bridle!
+
+Of course Horace Townsend, at that moment of doubt whether he stood upon
+his head or his heels--whether he had gone stark mad or retained a fair
+measure of sanity--whether the earth yet revolved in its usual orbit or had
+gone wandering off into cometary space, beyond all physical laws--of
+course at that moment he could not know precisely what had occurred to
+produce that sudden and singular change; and he could only learn, the
+moment after, from those who had been on the higher ground behind at the
+moment of the peril. According to their explanations, at the moment when
+they all saw the danger with a shudder and a holding of the very breath,
+Rowan had been heard to utter a single exclamation: "Well, I swear!" (a
+rough phrase, and one that he should by no means have used; but let his
+Western life and training entitle him to some consideration)--dashed spurs
+into the side of his horse--crowded by the five or six who preceded him, in
+a path considered impassable for more than one horse at a time--and then,
+with a wild Indian cry that he apparently could not restrain, spurred up
+the side of the rock, between Clara Vanderlyn and the verge of the
+precipice, certainly where the off feet of his horse could not have been
+thirty inches from the slippery edge, and literally jerked her horse and
+herself off into the path by the impetus of his own animal outside and the
+sudden grip which he closed upon her bridle as he went by, himself coming
+down into the path ahead, and neither unseated! Miss Vanderlyn's pony had
+struck the lawyer's horse as he came down in his enforced flying leap; and
+thus were explained all the sights, sounds, and physical events of that
+apparently supernatural moment.
+
+The scene which followed, only a few moments after, when the leading
+members of the cavalcade (Clara Vanderlyn in the midst of it, supported by
+Rowan, who managed to keep near her)--the scene which followed, we say,
+when they reached a little plateau where the company had room to gather,
+will not be more easily effaced from the memory of those who were present
+than the terrible danger which had just preceded it. The overstrung nerves
+of the poor girl gave way at that point, and she dropped from her horse in
+a swoon, just as Halstead Rowan (singular coincidence!) had slipped from
+the saddle and was ready to catch her as she fell! What more natural than
+that in falling and being caught, she should have thrown her arms round the
+stout neck of the Illinoisan? And what more inevitable than that he should
+have been a considerable time in getting ready to lay her down upon the
+horse-blankets that had been suddenly pulled off and spread for her,--and
+that finally, the clinging grasp still continuing, he should have dropped
+himself on one corner of the blanket and furnished the requisite support to
+her head and shoulders?
+
+Frank Vanderlyn and those who had been farthest behind with him came up at
+that moment; and Horace Townsend, if no one else, detected the sullen frown
+that gathered on his brow as he saw his sister lying in the arms of the man
+whom he had so grossly insulted. But if he frowned he said nothing, very
+prudently; for it is indeed not sure that it would have been safe, just
+then, for an emperor, there present, to speak an ill word to the hero of
+the day.
+
+Be all this as it may, the usual authorial affidavit may be taken that
+Halstead Rowan retained Clara Vanderlyn, brother or no brother in the way,
+in his arms until some one succeeded in obtaining water from a clear
+deposit of rain among the rocks; that no one--not even one of the
+ladies--attempted to dispossess him of his newly-acquired human territory;
+that when the water had been brought, and she first gave token of the full
+return of consciousness, she did so by clasping her arms around Rowan's
+neck (of course involuntarily) and murmuring words that sounded to Townsend
+and some others near, like: "You saved me! How good and noble you are!" and
+that even under that temptation he did not kiss her, as he would probably
+have sacrificed both arms and a leg or two, but not his manliness, to do.
+
+It was a quarter of an hour after, when Miss Vanderlyn, sufficiently and
+only sufficiently recovered to ride, was placed once more in the saddle and
+the cavalcade took its way more slowly down the mountains. The scenery,
+under the western sun, was even more lovely than that of the morning, the
+mists had all rolled away from every point of the compass, and there were
+some views Franconia-wards that they had entirely missed in the ascent. But
+there was scarcely one of the company who had not been so stirred to the
+very depths of human sympathy, by the event of the preceding half-hour,
+that inanimate nature, however wondrously beautiful, was half forgotten. So
+quickly, in those summer meetings and partings, do we grow attached to
+those with whom we are temporarily associated, especially amid the
+surroundings of the sublime and beautiful,--that had that fair girl lost
+her life so strangely and sadly, not one of all who saw the accident but
+would have borne in mind through life, in addition to the inevitable horror
+of the recollection, a memory like that of losing a dear and valued friend.
+And yet many of them had never even spoken to her, and perhaps only one in
+the whole cavalcade (her brother) had known of her existence one week
+before!
+
+Even as it was, there were not a few of that line of spectators from whose
+eyes the vision of what might have been, failed to fade out with the moment
+that witnessed it. Some of them dreamed, for nights after, (or at least
+until another occurrence then impending dwarfed the recollection) not only
+of seeing the young girl sitting helpless on that perilous rock, but of
+beholding her arms raised to heaven in agony and the feet of her horse
+pawing the air, as both disappeared from sight over the precipice. Some may
+still dream of the event, in lonely night-hours following days of trouble
+and anxiety.
+
+In the new arrangements for descending the mountains, made after the
+recovery of Clara Vanderlyn, Horace Townsend was not quite discarded, but
+he could not avoid feeling that very little dependence was placed upon his
+escort. It was of course as a mere jest, but to the sensitive mind of the
+lawyer there seemed to be a dash of malicious earnest at the bottom,--that
+Rowan took the first occasion as he passed near him, immediately after the
+young girl had been removed from his arms, to give him a forcible punch in
+the ribs, with the accompanying remark:
+
+"Bah! I told you that you couldn't ride; but I had no idea that you could
+not do any better at taking care of a woman, than that!"
+
+Townsend quite forgave him that remark, jest or earnest, for he saw the new
+sparkle in his eye, remembered how likely he was to have had his mind a
+little disordered by all that sweet wealth of auburn hair lying for so many
+minutes on his breast, and formed his own opinions as to the result. If
+those opinions were favorable, well; if they were unfavorable, he was
+taking a world of trouble that did not belong to him; for there is always a
+"sweet little cherub" sitting "up aloft" to keep watch over the fortunes of
+such rattle-pates and dare-devils as Halstead Rowan--to supervise their
+getting into scrapes and out of them!
+
+But there was nothing of jest, he thought, in the air with which Clara
+Vanderlyn, when re-mounting her horse, replying to an earnest expression of
+regret that one moment of inattention on his part should have allowed her
+to be placed in serious peril,--very kindly denied that he had been guilty
+of any neglect whatever, threw the whole blame upon her horse, thanked him
+for the promptness with which he was coming to her relief when forestalled,
+but then said, looking at Rowan with a glance which came near setting that
+enthusiastic equestrian entirely wild:
+
+"It seems that I am a very difficult person to take care of; and if you
+have no objection to my having two esquires, and will allow Mr. Rowan to
+ride with me as well as yourself, and if _he_ is willing to do so, I think
+that I shall feel" (she did not say "safer", but) "a little more like
+keeping up my spirits."
+
+Frank Vanderlyn had looked somewhat sullenly on and scarcely said a word,
+since his coming up. But at this speech of his sister's he must have felt
+that the dignity of the Vanderlyn family was again in serious peril, for he
+put his mouth close to her ear and spoke some words that were heard by no
+other than herself. They could not have been very satisfactory or
+convincing, for Horace Townsend, and others as well, heard her say in
+reply:
+
+"Brother, your horse is dangerous--you said so yourself; so just be good
+enough to ride as you did before, and my friends here will take care of
+me."
+
+Whereupon the young man went back to his horse, looking a little
+discomfited and by no means in the best of humors. Such little accidents
+_will_ occur, sometimes, to mar the best-laid schemes of careful mothers or
+anxious brothers, for preserving the ultra-respectability of a family; and
+whether the origin of the intervention is in heaven or its opposite, there
+is nothing to be done in such cases but to look wronged and unhappy, as did
+Frank Vanderlyn, or smile over the accomplished mischief and pretend that
+the event is rather agreeable than otherwise, as persons of more experience
+than Frank have often had occasion to do at different periods during the
+current century.
+
+The result of all this was that Horace Townsend really rode down with Clara
+Vanderlyn in the mere capacity of an esquire, while Halstead Rowan assumed
+the spurs and the authority of the knight. The latter rode in advance of
+her, as near her bridle-rein as the roughness of the path would allow; and
+no one need to question the fact that _he_ kept his eyes on the young girl
+quite steadily enough to secure her safety! What difficulty was there in
+his doing so, when he had already proved that he could ride backward nearly
+as well as forward and that the footing of his horse was the least thought
+in his mind? They seemed to be conversing, too, a large proportion of the
+time; and there is no doubt that Halstead Rowan, carried away by the events
+of the day, uttered words that he might have long delayed or never spoken
+under other circumstances,--and that Clara Vanderlyn wore that sweet flush
+upon her face and kept that timid but happy trembling of the dewy
+under-lip, much more constantly than she had ever before done in her young
+life. Horace Townsend, who rode behind the lady, did not hear any of those
+peculiar words which passed between her and her companion; and had _we_
+heard them they would certainly not be made public in this connection.
+
+The lawyer, as has been said, rode behind; and, as has _not_ been said, he
+did so in no enviable state of feeling. He had done nothing--been accused
+of nothing--in any manner calculated to degrade him; but one casual event
+had thrown a shadow across his path, not easily recognized without some
+recollection of characteristics before developed. The reader has had
+abundant reason to believe that this man, profiting by some intelligence
+obtained in a manner not open to the outer world, of the peculiar madness
+of Margaret Hayley after that abstraction, courage,--had more or less
+firmly determined to win her through the exhibition of certain qualities
+which he believed that he possessed in a peculiar degree. One opportunity
+had been given him (that at the Pool), and he had succeeded in interesting
+her to an extent not a little flattering and hopeful; but envious fate
+could not allow a week to pass without throwing him again into
+disadvantageous comparison with a man who had no occasion whatever of
+making any exhibition of such qualities!
+
+That Margaret Hayley would yet remain for some days and perhaps weeks in
+the mountains, and that she would probably visit the Crawford before her
+departure, he had at least every reason to believe; and he had quite as
+much cause for confidence that the story of the adventure over the Gulf of
+Mexico, roundly exaggerated to place himself in a false position and to
+deify the Illinoisan, would reach her ears, whether at the Profile or the
+Crawford, through stage-drivers or migratory passengers, within the next
+forty-eight hours. This (for reasons partially hinted at and others which
+will develop themselves in due time) was precisely that state of affairs
+which he would have given more to avoid than any other that could have been
+named; and this it was that made a dark red flush of mortification rise at
+times to his dusky cheek and give an expression any thing but pleasant to
+his eyes, as he rode silently behind the two who were now so indubitably
+linked as lovers, once more over the top of Prospect and down the rugged
+declivities of Clinton. Those who have ever been placed in circumstances
+approaching to these in character, can best decide whether the lawyer was
+sulking for nothing or indulging in gloomy anticipations with quite
+sufficient reason.
+
+It was nearly sunset and the light had some time disappeared from the
+valleys lying in the shade of the western peaks, when the last stony trough
+and the last corduroy road of Mount Clinton was finally repassed, and the
+whole cavalcade, each member of it perhaps moved by the one idea of showing
+that neither horse nor rider was wearied out--broke once more into a trot
+as they caught the first glimpse of the Crawford through the trees, dashed
+merrily out from the edge of the woods, and came up in straggling but
+picturesque order to the door of the great caravanserai. The difficult ride
+of eighteen miles had been accomplished; the golden day (with its one
+drawback of momentary peril) was over; and more than half a score who had
+before only thought of the ascent of Mount Washington as a future
+possibility, suddenly found that they could look back upon it as a
+remembrance.
+
+As they rode up to the front of the Crawford, the whole end of the piazza
+was full of new-comers and late sojourners, watching the return of those
+who had preceded or followed them--an idle, listless sort of gathering,
+showing more curiosity than welcome, such as the traveller by rail or
+steamboat sees crowding every platform at the expected time of the arrival
+of a train and every pier at the hour for the coming in of a boat. Cries
+of: "All safe, eh?" "Glad to see you back again!" "Hope you had a pleasant
+day!" and "Well, how did you like Mount Washington?" broke from twenty lips
+in a moment, mingled with replies and non-replies that came simultaneously:
+"Oh, you ought to have gone up with us!" "My horse carried me like a
+bird!" (the last remark, presumably, from a fat man of two hundred and
+sixty, whom not even an elephant could have borne in that suggestively
+buoyant manner), "Never _was_ such a day for going up, in the world!"
+"Safe, eh? Yes, why not?" (that from a person, no doubt, who had really
+been prodigiously scared at some period of the ride), and the one
+inevitable pendant: "Oh, you have no idea what an adventure we have
+had!--one of the ladies came near being killed--tell you all about it
+by-and-bye," etc., etc.
+
+Horace Townsend, who had been riding the last mile very much like a man in
+a dream and really with the formal charge of Clara Vanderlyn entirely
+abandoned to her chosen protector--Horace Townsend heard all this, as if he
+heard through miles of distance or at a long period of time after the
+utterance. For his eyes were busy and they absorbed all his sensations. He
+had recognized, at the first moment of riding up, among the crowd of
+persons on the piazza, the dark, proud eyes and beautiful face and stately
+form of Margaret Hayley, leaning on the arm of that man whom he had not by
+any means learned to love since his advent in the mountains--Captain Hector
+Coles, V. A. D. C. They had waited clear weather before starting from the
+Profile, and come through that day while his party had been absent up the
+mountains: he realized all at a thought, and realized that whatever he was
+himself to endure of trial lay much nearer than he had before believed.
+Disguised and indeed disfigured as the lawyer was, in common with all the
+other members of the cavalcade, to such a degree that only observation and
+study could penetrate the masquerade,--it was not at all strange that the
+lady failed to meet his eye with an answering glance of recognition; and he
+felt rather grateful than the reverse, for the moment, that his disguise
+was so effectual. While Clara Vanderlyn, a third time within one week the
+passive heroine of the mountains, was being lifted from her saddle by half
+a dozen officious hands, and while the rest of the party were gabbling as
+they alighted,--he slipped quietly from his horse behind one corner of the
+piazza, threw his rein to one of the stable-boys, and disappeared through
+the hall, up-stairs to his chamber.
+
+He did not again make his appearance until supper was on the tables and the
+battle of knives-and-forks going on with that vigor born of mountain air.
+Most of the visitors at the house, the voyagers of the day included, were
+already seated; and among them was Clara Vanderlyn, apparently no whit the
+worse for her day's adventure, her brother at one and her mother at the
+other side. A little further down the table, on the same side, sat Halstead
+Rowan, occupying the same seat of the evening before. He had evidently
+dropped back from his familiar standing with the lady, the moment they came
+within the atmosphere of Mrs. Vanderlyn and the great republic of voices at
+the Crawford; but quite as evidently he had not yet fallen away from his
+last-won position as a hero, for his face was continually flushing, as he
+ate, with the modesty of a girl's, when the whispers and nods and pointings
+of interest and admiration were made so plain that they reached his eye and
+ear. The adventure of the day was undeniably the topic of the evening, and
+Halstead Rowan was the hero; and it may be imagined how much this knowledge
+and the inevitable corollary that some one else was _not_ the hero, added
+to the comfort of the late-comer at table.
+
+Margaret Hayley, Mrs. Burton Hayley and Captain Hector Coles were also at
+supper, but they had nearly finished when Townsend took his seat. They rose
+the moment after, and as they did so the lawyer, now once more so arrayed
+as to display his own proper person, caught the eye of Margaret. She nodded
+and smiled, yes, smiled!--in answer to his bow across the table; and he
+could almost have taken his professional oath that a quick sparkle came to
+her eye when she saw him, then died away as quickly as if compelled back by
+a strong will. Mrs. Burton Hayley did not seem to see him at all; but
+Captain Coles signified that _he_ did so, by a glance of such new-born
+contempt blended with old hatred, as he should never have wasted upon any
+one except a national enemy whom he had just defeated in arms. The party
+swept down the room, and very soon after the others whom we have noted also
+rose and disappeared, leaving Horace Townsend discussing his supper with
+what appetite he might. It may be consoling to some curious persons to know
+that that appetite was by no means contemptible, and that he did not falter
+in physique if restless unquiet and anxiety made a prey of his mind.
+
+Half an hour after, he was smoking his cigar on the piazza, none whom he
+knew within view; and he strolled out into the edge of the wood to the
+right of the house, to enjoy (if enjoyment it could be called) solitude,
+gloom and darkness. The path he followed led him eventually round in a
+circle and brought him back to the edge again, only a few yards from the
+house and near the spot where the two huge bears were moving about, dense
+black spots in the twilight. There was a rude bench beneath the trees not
+far from what might have been called their "orbit" (especially as they are
+sometimes "stars" at the menageries); and on that bench he discovered three
+figures. He was but a little distance away when he first saw them and that
+they were two ladies and a gentleman; and he was still nearer before he
+became aware that they were the Hayleys, mother and daughter, with their
+inevitable attendant and cavalier.
+
+They were in conversation, not toning it so low as if they had any
+particular anxiety against its being overheard; and yet Horace Townsend,
+much as he might have wished to know every word that came from the lips of
+at least one of the three, might have passed on without listening
+intentionally to one utterance, if he had not chanced to hear that they
+were discussing the event of the day. That fact literally chained him to
+the root of the tree near which he was standing--he was _so_ anxious to
+know what version of the affair had already been circulated and given
+credence among the three or four hundred visitors at the Crawford, and
+especially among the particular three of that number.
+
+It has before been said, we fancy, by that widely-known writer,
+"Anonymous," that listeners do not always hear any notable good of
+themselves. And Horace Townsend, in stopping to play the eaves-dropper, at
+least partially illustrated the saying. He heard a version of the Gulf of
+Mexico affair, from the lips of Captain Coles, calculated to make him, if
+he had any sensitiveness of nature and a spark of the fighting propensity,
+kill himself or the narrator.
+
+"I think I have heard enough of it," Margaret Hayley was saying, as
+Townsend came within hearing. "I really do not know that Miss Vanderlyn,
+though a pleasant girl enough, is of so much consequence that the whole
+house should go crazy over one of her little mishaps in riding."
+
+"A little mishap!" echoed the Captain. "Phew!--if I am not very much
+mistaken it was a _big_ mishap--just a hair's-breadth between saving her
+life and losing it!"
+
+"Is it possible?" said Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Why dear me, Captain
+Coles!--that is very interesting, especially if her being saved was
+providential. Did you hear the particulars, then?"
+
+"Shall we go in, mother?" asked Margaret.
+
+"No, my dear, not yet!" answered Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Captain Coles is just
+going to tell us what really happened to the young lady who was so
+mercifully spared. Go on, Captain, please."
+
+"Well, the story is a short one, though thrilling enough, egad!--to put
+into a romance!" said the Captain. "Young Waldron, that we met at the
+Profile, was one of the party, and he told me about it while you were
+dressing for supper. It appears that Miss Vanderlyn went up with her
+brother, and that something happened to his horse--it got lamed, or
+something,--so that he could not ride down with her. He was fool enough,
+then, to put her under the charge of that friend of yours, Margaret--"
+
+"Captain Coles, will you be kind enough to confine yourself to your story,
+if you must tell it, and leave _my_ name out of the question?" was the
+interruption of the young lady--no unpleasant one to the listener,--at that
+point of the narration.
+
+"Humph! I do not see that you need be so sensitive about it!" sneered back
+the Captain. "Well, then, not that friend of yours, but that man, who has
+not less than a dozen names and who lives in Philadelphia and Cincinnati
+and several other cities."
+
+"Yes, the man whose handkerchief you took out of his pocket the other
+night, in the ten-pin alley, to see whether his initials were correct!"
+again interrupted Margaret in a tone of voice not less decided than that of
+the other was taunting and arrogant.
+
+It was much too dark, under the shade of the trees, at that moment, to see
+the face of Captain Hector Coles, or he might have been discovered, even
+under his moustache, biting his lip so sharply that the blood came. An eye
+keen enough to have seen this, too, would have been able to see that Horace
+Townsend trembled like an aspen leaf, that great beads of sweat started out
+on his brown forehead, while he muttered a fierce word of anger and
+indignation that died away on the night air without reaching any human ear.
+
+Captain Hector Coles choked an instant and then went on:
+
+"He entrusted her to the care of that adventurer, who managed, before they
+had ridden a mile, to lose his way and his presence of mind at the same
+time--got her and her pony on the top of a slippery rock where there were
+ten thousand chances to one that she would fall a thousand feet over the
+precipice--and then sat on his horse, white as a sheet and too badly scared
+to attempt rescuing her, yelling like a booby for help, until that coarse
+fellow from somewhere out West came up and grasped her just as she was
+going over."
+
+What would not Horace Townsend have given for a grip of the throat of
+Captain Hector Coles at that moment? And what would he not have given to
+hear Margaret Hayley say: "I do not believe the story! The man who leaped
+into the Pool the other day, is not the booby and poltroon you would make
+him, just because you are jealous of him, Captain Hector Coles!" What, we
+say, would the listener not have given to hear _that_? Alas!--he had no
+reason to expect any such word, and no such word was spoken. Margaret
+Hayley merely rose from her seat, saying:
+
+"Now, if you have finished that rigmarole, in which nobody, I think, is in
+the least interested, we will go to the house, for I am taking cold."
+
+The others rose, and the three moved towards the house. Horace Townsend did
+not move towards the house, but in another direction, his heart on fire and
+his brain in a whirl. But as they went off he heard the Captain say,
+apparently in response to some remark of Mrs. Burton Hayley's which was not
+caught at that distance:
+
+"Of course I believe him to be a coward as well as a disreputable
+character. Any man who would flinch from _any_ exposure, especially like
+that on a mere edge of a cliff, to save life, is the basest kind of a
+coward. Such men ought to stand a little while among bullets, as _we_ have
+to do, and they would soon show themselves for what they are worth."
+
+Horace Townsend saw nothing more of either that night, or of any of the
+others with whom this narration has to do. There was no music, other than
+that of the piano, in the parlor of the Crawford, and early beds were in
+requisition. Many, who had not ascended the mountains, had ridden hard and
+long in other directions; and for the people of the Mount Washington
+cavalcade themselves--they were very tired, very much exhausted and very
+sleepy, and romance and flirtation were obliged to succumb to aching bones
+and the invitations of soft pillows. Halstead Rowan, even, did not roll a
+single game of ten-pins before he retired to his lonely
+chamber--physico-thermometrical proof of the general worn-out condition!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+     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 a lawyer, 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 that _you_ will 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 am _I_ to 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 made the 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
+a _right_ to 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
+that _you_ honored 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 I _will_ answer it,
+a little more frankly than it was put! Captain Hector Coles is not, and
+never will 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 did _not_ believe 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 every _injurious_ one 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 in
+_him_--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 a
+little 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, _you_ draw conclusions pretty rapidly!" she said, turning her eyes
+upon him curiously. "I _was_ going 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 shall _not_ go into more
+congenial associations when I leave you! There, will _that_ do?"
+
+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, a _little_ as 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
+surprise or 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 story of 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 immediate
+_mesalliance_ upon 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 of Margaret 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 not tended 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 insulted
+_him_ coming 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--_the_ opportunity 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, or was 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 ---- are _you_, Horace Townsend as you call yourself, to put in
+your remarks when _gentlemen_ are 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 with _you_!" 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 a _gentleman_," and he laid a terrible stress upon
+the word--"a _gentleman_ who 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--of the 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 of _our_ business, 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 blast wailing
+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 friends _she_ had 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 that
+one 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 bringing her 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 wish
+_I_ was 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 what _would_ you 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 have _I_, 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--for _you_,--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?--I _know_ she
+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 loved _her_, 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 barrier exists 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.
+
+"Then _my_ situation 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 ever _should_ grow 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 are _gentlemen_, 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!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+     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 than above 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 (_his_ season 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, a
+little 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 are
+_not_. 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 of _climbing_.
+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 the fact 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 them
+_below_ themselves, 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 to wean 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
+points of 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 to _them_--at least it is not so to _me_."
+
+"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 have been 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 supernaturally _ordered_, beyond a doubt: it may be _protected_, or
+quite the opposite," was the minister's smiling reply. "And I might go a
+step further and say that every man is supernaturally _upheld_, 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
+for _him_ as 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 not a 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 remaining at 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 spot more 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 be discerned, 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
+and phases 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.
+
+"No, it would be useless: the Rambler, they say, generally chooses his own
+society, and he probably would not even thank us for the invitation,"
+answered another. The strange man had by that time passed into the thicket
+bordering the edge of the schute at the right, and was seen no longer. Some
+of the pic-nickers noticed, as he passed, that he had no stick in his hands
+and that his almost invariable companion, the haversack, was missing from
+his side. But there seemed to be no occasion of commenting on so slight a
+matter, and nothing was said with reference to it.
+
+It must be confessed that among those who had not contributed in any way to
+the spreading of the miscellaneous dinner upon the ground, were two persons
+in whom this narration maintains a peculiar interest--Horace Townsend,
+lawyer, and Margaret Hayley, gentlewoman. The lady had been among the early
+visitors to the swing; and at the time of the disappearance of the Rambler
+into the thicket at the edge of the schute, she was being swept backward
+and forward in the air by that dizzying contrivance, at a rate which sent
+her loosened wealth of dark hair and her light summer drapery floating
+about in equal negligence and profusion, while the dainty white hands held
+fast to the rope with a tenacity which showed them to possess a commendable
+degree of nerve, and the trim dark gaiter enclosing her Arab foot, and the
+spotless stocking that rose above it, had both just that measure of display
+which preserved the extremest bound of delicacy and yet made the whole
+spectacle strangely bewitching. Perhaps the extraordinary light in her eye
+as she swung may have been a little influenced by one of the two pairs of
+hands that supplied the careful impelling force; for those hands certainly
+belonged to the lawyer, who had been a member of the idle section from the
+beginning, while she had wilfully attached herself to it in spite of the
+expostulations of the Captain. That gallant officer, by the way, had been
+retained among the dinner-purveyors by the wiles and the threats of a
+little dark-eyed minx from Providence, who cared no more for him than she
+did for her shoe-lace, but who would flirt with him and make him flirt with
+her, because she saw that he was arrogant, shoulder-strapped, and very much
+afraid of being seen for a moment absent from the side of Margaret Hayley.
+The Captain, who was not quite fool enough to believe that he had really
+made a military conquest of the young Yankee girl, probably objurgated her
+in his heart for her charming impudence; while Margaret, more gratified by
+the relief than she cared to make manifest, may have made private
+calculations of hugging that dear little tormentor the first moment when
+she could catch her alone.
+
+Such was the aspect of affairs--the young girl in the swing, Townsend and
+another gentleman swinging her, half a dozen merry young men and girls
+gathered around the trees or lying lazily on the grass, and the other and
+more industrious half-score kneeling and bending and squatting around the
+table-cloths at U. C. of the plateau,--when the arrangements (or
+mis-arrangements) were judged to be complete and one of the male members of
+the working-detail, a little hungry and disposed to be more than a little
+witty, made up one hand into the shape of a trumpet and bawled through it:
+
+"Oh yes,--oh yes!--know all men and several women by these presents that
+the regal banquet is spread and that those who intend to eat are required
+to eat now or ever after hold their pieces--if they can find any to hold!"
+
+A merry farce--the very incarnation of thoughtless jollity,--the dinner and
+the announcement. It rung out over the plateau, heard by all and certain to
+be heeded by all; to be succeeded the very instant after by a sound that no
+member of that company will ever forget until his dying day. A scream of
+mortal agony and terror that seemed to rise from the depths of the schute,
+nondescript in some respects, as unlike what any one then present had ever
+heard, but unmistakably human because the last sounds of every repetition
+shaped themselves into words that could be distinguished:
+
+"Help!--help!--help!"
+
+For one moment that fearful cry ceased and during that moment all was
+silence among the pic-nickers. For that instant, too, probably more than
+half the company believed that whatever the sound might be, it was the
+prank of some unscrupulous joker, hidden away in the undergrowth near the
+edge of the schute and intended to frighten the ladies out of any appetite
+for their dinner. The time of its coming, immediately following the
+dinner-call, was certainly favorable to that supposition. But when it
+commenced again, the very instant after, louder and more shrill, so
+evidently coming up from the depth below, the thought of practical jest
+vanished and every cheek grew deadly white with the certainty that some
+tragedy was being enacted near them, that human eye must be blasted by
+seeing and that human hand could probably find no power to avert.
+
+It would have seemed the most unlikely of all things, when that ambiguous
+banquet on the top of the mountain was spread, that it should never be
+eaten; and yet the fates had so destined. Old Ancaeus had quite as little
+faith in the prediction of the slave whom he overworked in his vineyard,
+that he should never taste of the product of the vines; and when he held
+the cup in his hand and the red wine was bubbling to the brim, ready to
+show the audacious prophet the fallacy of his prediction, the muttered:
+"There's many a slip between the cup and the lip!" no doubt fell upon
+incredulous ears. But even then the cry rang out that called him to the
+Hunt of the Calydonian Boar, and the spirit of the warrior was higher than
+the pride of the wine-grower and the hard master. The heavy cup went
+clanging to the earth, the blood of the grape flowing out to enrich once
+more the ground from which it had been derived; and the tyrant hero rushed
+away. The slaves had a new master, thereafter; and though Ancaeus may have
+supped with the gods on Olympus, on the night when the great fight was
+over, he never tasted of that wine of his vineyard which had once even been
+lifted to his lips! So tasted not the diners on that mountain in a far
+distant land from that which held Olympus, even when the feast was spread
+and the call had been made for their gathering.
+
+It is impossible to say what point of time elapsed before any member of
+that horrified company remembered the Rambler, his habits, the conversation
+of that morning, and the fact that he had only a few moments before been
+seen going in the direction from which that piteous cry was coming up. It
+is impossible to measure it, for at such moments ages of sensation pass in
+the very twinkling of an eye. Some of them did remember him, with a groan,
+and perhaps the thought was general. At all events the consternation was
+so--as general as if some one who had come away from the Crawford with them
+in life and high hope, had suddenly been stricken dead before their eyes.
+Margaret Hayley, with the frightened cry which even then shaped a feeling:
+"Oh, Mr. Townsend, what _can_ that be!" dropped from the swing and was
+caught in arms outstretched to receive her. By that time all seated around
+the table-cloths had sprung to their feet; and at once every member of the
+party, male and female, impelled by a curiosity that even overmastered
+fear, rushed down the plateau towards the edge, as if some horrible madness
+had seized all and they were about to spring off into the great chasm
+below. But before they had reached the edge all the ladies except two and
+several of the gentlemen recoiled; and it was only by degrees and under the
+compelling attraction of that still ascending cry, that some of those
+remaining could force themselves to the verge. Those who reached it at that
+moment, and those who closed up the instant after, saw enough to make
+Blondin and his brother-fools a non-necessity for the balance of their
+natural lives; and the cry from below was answered, be sure, by a cry that
+rang from every voice above when the sad spectacle met the eye.
+
+It was indeed the subject of their past fear who supplied their present
+horror; and the situation, keeping in view previous descriptions of the
+locality, may be briefly conveyed.
+
+It will be remembered that at the bend or elbow of the gulch, some thirty
+feet below, two fangs of the root of a tree stretched out partially across
+the chasm, the upper long and at some distance from the rock of the bottom,
+the other shorter and lying very near it. It will also be remembered that
+beneath both the schute stretched its long blue jagged line to the foot of
+the mountain, not less than fifteen hundred or two thousand feet, with the
+air between the top and bottom looking actually blue from distance,--and
+that the schute itself was so nearly perpendicular that while any object
+falling down it would probably touch it all the way from top to bottom, it
+would go down almost with the velocity of the lightning and be rolled and
+pounded to a mere ball before it had accomplished half of the descent.
+
+On that lower fang of the root hung the Rambler--those who had seen him at
+the Crawford recognized him at once, at that short distance; and it was
+indeed from that throat so little accustomed to call for assistance from
+any mortal hand, that the terrible cries of agony and appeals for help were
+ascending. One hand grasped the root near the end, without being able to go
+nearly round it, and one leg was caught round the root farther towards the
+tree, with the bend at the knee forming a kind of hook so long as it could
+retain its tension. The other arm and leg hung down, with the body, below,
+and the long grizzled hair streamed away from the head that depended
+downward in the direction towards which it seemed to be so fatally tending.
+The face could be seen, as that was turned towards the cliff, but its
+expression could not be recognized at that distance and in the reversed
+position that it occupied. All that could be known, to any certainty, was
+that there hung a human being, evidently unable even to recover a safer
+hold upon the root, screaming for help that was hopeless, and as certain to
+make the last plunge within a space of time that could be measured by
+single minutes, or perhaps even by seconds, as the sun was certain to move
+on in its course and the earth to retain its laws of gravitation!
+
+Was there not cause, indeed, for that general cry of pitying horror from
+above, which answered the cry of agony and terror from below?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+     SUSPENSE IN DANGER, IN TWO SENSES--HORACE TOWNSEND WITH A
+     NEW THOUGHT--THE USE OF A SWING-ROPE--AN INVITATION TO
+     CAPTAIN HECTOR COLES--A FEARFUL PIECE OF AMATEUR
+     GYMNASTICS--GOING DOWN INTO THE SCHUTE--SUCCESS OR
+     FAILURE?--THE EVENT, AND MARGARET HAYLEY'S MADNESS--TWO
+     UNFORTUNATE DECLARATIONS.
+
+
+We have said that the whole body of the pic-nickers rushed up to the edge
+of the plateau, and that all, or nearly all, caught glimpses of the
+situation. Then came that cry, that shutting of the eyes and springing
+back, until only three or four, of whom Horace Townsend was one and Captain
+Hector Coles was _not_ another, remained on the verge. Margaret Hayley,
+among those who had gazed down and drawn back, remained a few feet from the
+edge, and the Captain was either so careful of her safety or so anxious to
+furnish himself with an excuse for remaining no nearer, that he caught her
+by the dress and retained his grip as if she had been some bundle of
+quartermaster's goods that he was fearful of having slip through his
+fingers! Frightened inquiries and equally frightened replies, mingled with
+moans and sobs and wringings of female hands, went round the circle thus
+scattered over the lower part of the plateau; and for a moment those noises
+made the still-ascending cries for help almost inaudible.
+
+Horace Townsend stood at the very edge, and except perhaps sharing in the
+first cry, he had not uttered one word. He no doubt understood,
+intuitively, like the rest, that the poor man must have been attempting the
+mad descent, when the undergrowth by which he held fast gave way in his
+hands, or some stone caved out beneath him, sending him headlong downward
+for a plunge of two thousand feet, from which he had only been temporarily
+stopped by striking and gripping the root of the tree as he fell. Beyond
+this, and with reference to any possibility of saving the perilled man, he
+was probably quite as much in the dark as any of the others. He stood half
+bent, his dusky cheek pale and his face strangely contorted, his hands
+clasped low as if wringing themselves surreptitiously, and the eyes beneath
+his bent brow looking into the gulf as if he was trying to peer downward
+into the eternal mystery which that man was so soon to fathom.
+
+Suddenly his face lighted. "Hush! I must speak to that man!" he said, in a
+low but intense voice, and the behest was obeyed so quickly that almost
+total silence fell upon the top of the plateau.
+
+"Hallo, below there!" he cried, as the call of agony ceased for an instant.
+
+"Help! help! oh help! came back from below.
+
+"Do you understand what I say?" again he called.
+
+"Yes!--help! help!" came feebly back.
+
+"Get that rope from the foot of the swing there, quick, some of you!" he
+cried, and his voice seemed for the time to clear from its hoarseness and
+ring like a trumpet. "Quick!--cut it away at the bottom and bring it all
+here!"
+
+Half a dozen of the young men and one or two of the ladies, delighted to
+aid in any hope of saving the perilled man (for the most thoughtless of us
+are naturally, after all, kind and averse to death and suffering), sprung
+for the rope. Two of them reached the foot of the swing ahead of the
+others, the pocket-knife of one was out in an instant, and in another
+moment they came up dragging nearly or quite an hundred feet of strong inch
+rope.
+
+"We have a rope here that will hold you: can you catch it and hold on or
+tie it around your body?" the lawyer called down again.
+
+"No!"--the pained and weakening voice came back, and then they all knew
+what had reduced that athletic and iron-gripped man to such a state that he
+could make no effort to swing himself up again. He spoke brokenly and
+feebly, but Horace Townsend and some of the others caught the words: "I
+can't catch the rope--I put my right shoulder out of joint as I fell--I
+can't hold on much longer--I shall faint with this pain--oh, can't some of
+you help me?"
+
+Then passed over the countenance of Horace Townsend one of those sweeping
+expressions which make humanity something more or less than human. It may
+have been the god stirring--it may have been the demon. No one saw it--not
+even Margaret Hayley; for when he turned nothing more was to be seen than
+that the brow was very dark, and that the lips were set grimly. The powers
+looking downward from heaven on the falling of leaves and the nesting of
+young birds may have remarked the whole expression and set it down at its
+true worth, and that will eventually be found quite sufficient. Before he
+turned he shouted, much louder and more authoritatively than he had spoken
+before, to the man hanging between life and death below:
+
+"Hold on, like a man! We _will_ do something to help you!"
+
+Then he spoke to the two young men, one of whom yet held the end of the
+rope:
+
+"Tie a big loop in that rope, quick--ten or a dozen feet from the end."
+
+They proceeded to do so, with not unskilful hands, and in that instant the
+lawyer approached Captain Hector Coles, where he stood, only a few feet
+off, still holding the dress of Margaret Hayley. He did not appear to see
+_her_ at all, but she saw _him_, and there was that upon his face which
+frightened her so that she literally gasped.
+
+"Captain Coles!" he said, "do you know what you said of me the other night
+and again the other day? There is a rope, and there is yet a chance to save
+that man. Go down, if you are as brave as you boast, and save him. Do you
+hear me?--go!"
+
+"I? Humph!" That was all the reply that the Captain, half-stupefied, could
+make to what he believed to be the words of a madman.
+
+"No, I thought not!" sneered the voice through the hard lips. With the
+words coat and vest were thrown off, and the tall, slight, athletic form
+was developed with no concealment but the shirt and the closely-girt
+trowsers. The shoes followed, and as they did so Margaret Hayley well
+remembered where and when she had before seen that disrobing. She had grown
+white as the collar and cuffs of her gray chambray; and she was so
+paralyzed with wonder, fear, anxiety, and conflicting thought, that she
+could not speak, and was on the point of falling. Yet all this time Horace
+Townsend seemed to pay her no more attention or observation than he might
+have done had she been a wooden post or a stone monument erected at the
+same point of the plateau!
+
+Not sixty seconds had elapsed after the throwing off of his outer garments,
+when the lawyer, without another word to any one, seized the rope, looked
+over the edge to see that the Rambler was still hanging to his thorn,
+lowered down the line until the loop was nearly opposite to him, then
+carried up the other end and with the volunteered assistance of one of the
+young men firmly secured it with two or three turns and as many knots,
+around the trunk of a stout sapling.
+
+All saw the movement, now, and all began to understand it; but oh, with
+what redoubled agitation was the truth realized! He was going down that
+frail rope, and into what peril! The rope fastened, he stepped forward to
+the verge, while a murmur ran round the frightened group, even coming from
+the lips of those who had never spoken to him: "Oh, don't!" Margaret Hayley
+was no longer stone: she cast one glance at the face of Captain Hector
+Coles, saw that the expression on it was every thing rather than fear or
+anxiety, then jerked away her dress from his hand and darted forward.
+
+"No--do not go!" she said, grasping the lawyer by the arm on the very
+verge.
+
+"I must!" Then for the first time he appeared to see her.
+
+"No! If I bid you stay for _my_ sake, will you do it?"
+
+"For your sake, Margaret Hayley, I would go all the quicker. Stand back,
+for God's sake!--you may fall!"
+
+She said no other word. Captain Hector Coles sprang forward and grasped her
+arm to draw her back. She jerked it away, almost angrily, and never stirred
+so far from the edge as to prevent her looking down the schute. Half a
+dozen of the others, all gentlemen, had taken the same risk of crowding to
+the edge, their very breath held; but none of them would any more have
+thought, just then, of offering to aid _her_, than of tendering the same
+support to one of the rooted saplings on the cliff. It was a fearful
+moment, but not the weakest heart on that plateau beat within the bosom of
+the white-handed Philadelphia girl!
+
+Horace Townsend threw himself down on his face as he reached the edge,
+grasped the rope and crawled over backwards in that way, descending it
+hand-over-hand. Those too far back from the edge to see, heard him call out
+to the man below as he disappeared from sight: "Hold fast like a man! I am
+coming!" Then they saw no more, and for the moment heard no more.
+
+Those who stood on the verge, and Margaret Hayley among them--saw the
+adventurous lawyer descend the rope with slow and steady care but evident
+labor, until he reached the loop opposite and nearly under the suspended
+man. Then they saw him weave his right arm into the loop until the strands
+of rope seemed to go around it three or four times, throw down his feet to
+the rock so as to raise his shoulders away from it, and commence gathering
+in the loose rope below with his left. Directly he seemed to have the end
+in his hand, and they saw him stretch the left arm as if to throw it around
+the body of the perilled man. At that moment they saw, with a horror that
+words can make no attempt at describing, that the hand of the Rambler which
+had held the end of the root gave way and the body swung to a
+perpendicular, head downward, only suspended by the hook formed of the leg.
+All, except one--that _one_--closed their eyes, confident that the leg too
+must give way and the poor climber plunge headlong, perhaps bearing down
+the would-be rescuer with him. But no!--still the body remained in that
+position for a moment, and in that moment they saw that the rope passed
+around it and the hand of the lawyer made an attempt, the success of which
+could not be seen, to tie the rope into a knot about the waist. But even at
+that instant the tension of the stiffened leg gave way and they saw the
+body plunge downwards, head first; _where_, was too sickening a horror to
+conjecture.
+
+No one saw any more--not even Margaret Hayley. With one wild cry she
+sprang back from the verge and tottered half fainting but still erect, into
+the arms of some of the other ladies who had been watching the whole scene
+through _her_.
+
+Perfect silence--the silence of untold terror and dread. Their own eyes had
+seen the Rambler plunge headlong towards the realization of that fearful
+last wish: what hope was there that the other, entangled with him, had not
+accompanied him? It must be said that for the moment no one dared look over
+the edge again, and that no one dared, during the same time, to test, by
+feeling the rope, whether any weight still remained at the end of it! The
+cast-off coat, vest, hat and shoes of the lawyer assumed the look of
+dead-men's clothes unseasonably exhibited; and each even looked upon the
+other with horror because a spectator of the same catastrophe. What must
+have been the feelings of Margaret Hayley, if, as we have had reason to
+believe, her first love had faltered in favor of a new ideal? What those of
+Captain Hector Coles when he believed that a disgusting and audacious
+rivalry had been removed at least _two thousand feet_?
+
+All this found relief when it had lasted about ten ages--in other figures,
+about two minutes and thirty seconds! The rope was seen to tremble at the
+edge, and two or three of the men gathered strength to dart forward. A head
+came up above the level, and a faint voice said:
+
+"Give me a hand, here!"
+
+A hand was given, and in one instant more the lawyer was dragged up upon
+the plateau and staggered to his feet. He was bathed in sweat, trembled
+fearfully, and his clothes were torn in many places. Personally he had
+received no injury, except that some hard object (perhaps one of the snags
+of the root) had struck him near the left temple and ploughed its way in
+such a manner that the wound would probably leave a scar there during life,
+more than half way across the forehead and up into the roots of the hair.
+Even this was shallow and the few drops of blood flowing from it wore
+already dried, so that probably the receiver had never been aware of the
+blow or its effect. Most of those things were seen afterwards--they were
+certainly not seen with this particularity at the time, for not one of the
+persons on the plateau, from Captain Hector Coles to the least interested
+of the company, saw any thing else than the proud face of Margaret Hayley
+radiant with humility, and her tall form cowering down as if to make itself
+humbler and less noticeable, as she dropped on her knees before the
+lawyer--yes, dropped on her knees!--took one of the quivering hands in both
+her own dainty white ones, covered it with kisses that some others would
+have been glad to purchase for hand or lip by mortgaging a soul, and
+literally sobbed out:
+
+"God bless and reward you!--you noblest and strangest man in the world!"
+
+It was a singular position for a proud and beautiful woman--was it
+not?--especially towards a man whose words had never given her any right to
+make so complete a surrender of her womanly reticence and dignity? Captain
+Hector Coles thought so, for he could restrain himself no longer but
+stepped to her, laid his hand upon her arm and spoke in her ear:
+
+"For shame, Margaret Hayley!"
+
+Perhaps no one else heard the words: she heard them, for she was on her
+feet in an instant, and the one word which she returned, in the very ear of
+the Captain and certainly unheard by any other, made him start back and
+redden like one of the traditional furies. He said no more, but stood
+sullen as silent. Whether Horace Townsend had not heard the flattering
+language addressed to him, or whether he had not yet recovered himself
+sufficiently from his late exertion to attempt reply, he made none, but
+seemed confused and unnerved. He did not recover until some one near him
+said:
+
+"Poor fellow!--you lost him after all!"
+
+"Lost him? no!" said the lawyer, arousing himself. "I forgot! He is
+insensible but not fatally injured. Pray pull up the rope, gently, for I
+believe that I am too weak to render you any assistance."
+
+"What!" cried two or three voices in a breath, and more than as many hands
+seized the rope. It was drawn tight--there _was_ something yet remaining
+below. As the knowledge spread among the company and they began to pull on
+the rope, such an involuntary cheer burst from nearly all their throats,
+male and female, as might have roused a man moderately insensible. But they
+produced no effect on the dead weight at the end of the line; and it was
+only after more than five minutes of severe but careful pulling, with every
+breath waiting in hushed expectation lest some sharp angle of the rock
+might at last cut off or weaken the rope, that a dark mass came up to the
+edge and the insensible form of the Rambler was landed upon the plateau by
+the hands that grasped it.
+
+He might have been dead, for all that could be judged, though there was
+really no reason to believe that he should have expired from any cause
+except fright. But he presented a most pitiful spectacle--his clothes
+fearfully torn by abrasion against the rocks in drawing up, the right arm
+hanging loosely from the shoulder, the eyes closed and teeth set as in a
+fatal spasm, and the iron-gray hair and straggling beard matted with blood
+yet flowing from a severe wound in the head that he had received either in
+falling against the rock from the root or in the perilous passage upward.
+There was no indication of breath, but he was alive, for the pulse had not
+stopped its slow movement, and there was at least a chance that he could be
+recovered.
+
+But even then, and while two or three were hurrying to the table for water
+to use in bringing back the flitting life and some of the cloths to use as
+a stretcher in bearing the body to one of the wagons,--even then the
+general attention was for the moment withdrawn. For just as the poor
+Rambler was fairly landed and the company gathering around him, while
+Margaret Hayley was yet standing close to Horace Townsend, with her eyes
+still reading that face which seemed to be a perpetual puzzle to her,--the
+brown cheek grew suddenly of a ghastly white, the whole frame trembled as
+if from the coming of a spasm, and the lawyer fell heavily forward, without
+a sign of sensation, just as he had done in the previous instance after
+rash exposure and severe exertion, at the Pool. Now, as then, reaction
+seemed to come with terrible force, unnerving the system and literally
+overmastering life.
+
+As was to be expected under such circumstances, the excitement among the
+pic-nickers redoubled when they had two insensible people instead of one,
+and one of the two the hero of so strange an adventure as that which has
+just been recorded, to look after and bring back to life. Exclamations: "He
+is dying!" "He is dead!" "He has fainted from over-exertion!" "How
+dreadful!" and half a dozen others ran round the circle. But Margaret
+Hayley did not hear or did not heed them. She was again upon her knees, for
+a very different purpose from that which had thus bowed her the moment
+before--lifting the head of matted hair upon her lap, chafing the stiffened
+hands, and uttering words that seemed to have no regard to the delicacy of
+her position or the hearing of the by-standers. Such words of unmistakable
+anxiety and fondness the insensible man might have been willing to peril
+another life to hear; and they were uttered, let it be remembered, when
+she, however the others may have been alarmed, had no idea that he was
+dying or in danger, and more as if she wished to pour out a great truth of
+her nature and be relieved of its weight, than with any other apparent
+thought in view. Oh, that ideal! Oh, love of woman, a moment checked in its
+first course, to break away again from all bounds and more than redouble
+its early madness! Oh, overweening pride of Margaret Hayley, that once had
+been her most marked characteristic, now cast away like a thing to be
+loathed and reprobated! Oh, prophet words, spoken by the sorrowing girl but
+a few hours after the bereavement of her life, now seeming to be so
+strangely fulfilled! Second love, and an abandonment that even the first
+had scarcely known, before two months of summer had made the grass green
+on the grave of the first! To what was all this tending?
+
+Captain Hector Coles saw, and writhed. His face was dark enough with
+passion to indicate that had no troublesome people and no restraining law
+stood in his path, he would have rolled that insensible form over the edge
+of the plateau, with no rope to impede its progress, and watched with
+heart-felt delight the bumping of the body from crag to crag until it was
+crushed out of all semblance of humanity at the bottom! But he said not one
+word, nor did he again attempt to interfere in the movements of Margaret.
+
+Only a moment or two, and then the eyes of the lawyer opened. He saw the
+face that was looking down into his own; and though many a man would have
+pretended weakness and insensibility a little longer, to keep such a
+position, he made an instant movement to rise and struggled to his feet
+with but slight assistance. Then the young girl fell back into the group of
+other ladies, her duty and her paroxysm of feeling both apparently over,
+and scarcely aware how much or how little the subject of her interest knew
+of her words or her actions. Nor was it sure whether the lawyer saw, as he
+staggered up from the ground, the expression which rested on the face of
+Captain Coles. Time had its task of solving both these important problems.
+
+But a few minutes after Horace Townsend's recovery had elapsed, when the
+body of the Rambler, showing yet, after every application, but faint signs
+of life, was carefully conveyed on an impromptu stretcher to one of the
+wagons--the fragments of the dinner, untasted except as some few of those
+who would have banqueted in a death-room had snatched little bits in the
+midst of the excitement, gathered up and huddled together in the
+baggage-wagon--the whole party more or less comfortably disposed in the
+conveyances, and all hurrying back to the Crawford with what speed they
+might. We say "hurrying", advisedly. It might have been natural enough that
+they should hurry down, to afford more effectual relief to the wounded and
+tortured man; but let not humanity "lay the flattering unction to its soul"
+that they lacked another and a more compelling motive! Such a story as that
+which could be woven of the events of that day, had probably never been
+told as of a late actual occurrence, inside the walls of that hostelrie,
+within the memory of man; and nearly every one, male and female, was a
+little more anxious to indulge in the relation as soon as possible, and to
+his or her own particular set of intimates, than even to succor life or
+alleviate suffering! Wonder not that newspapers are popular in the latter
+half of the nineteenth century: man himself is but a newspaper incarnated;
+and a few friends are not ill-sacrificed, much less perilled without
+advantage, when the catastrophe affords us plenty of the cheap heroism of
+the looker-on and narrator!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The providences are equally strange that give opportunity for the great
+blunders and absorbing agonies of life, with those that afford space to its
+triumphant successes and its crowning pleasures. Rooms are empty or ears
+are deaf, sometimes, that we maybe made deliriously happy; but they may
+have an equally assured mission to make us wretched beyond hope. Three days
+before, a parlor unoccupied except by themselves had afforded Horace
+Townsend and Margaret Hayley an opportunity of saying words that seemed to
+make, each a new being to the other, and that awakened hopes as wild and
+maddening as the dreams of opium could have originated. One laggard
+servant-girl with her dusting-brush, or one dawdling visitor lingering in
+the way, might have prevented all this and kept them on the distant footing
+they had before occupied. One person more, strolling down the glen below
+the Crawford at eleven o'clock on the morning following the events on the
+top of Mount Willard, might have prevented--what? Nothing, perhaps! Are not
+all these things ordered for us? And must not the event, debarred in one
+channel, have found inevitable way in another? The fatalists, who believe
+in a Deity of infinitesimal and innumerable providences, say "Yes!" and
+argue that the ripping away of a boot-sole or the scorching of the cook's
+short-cake come within the category. The people of unswayed free-will, who
+worship a Deity not over-particular as to the every-day habits of his
+creatures, say "No!" and see nothing providential in any event less
+important than the breaking out of a pestilence or the downfall of a
+nation. At which point it may be necessary to discover what connection all
+this has with the fortunes of two of the people most prominent in this
+narration.
+
+At about the hour named, that morning, Horace Townsend strolled alone down
+the glen, towards the Willey House. Great excitements are always followed
+by corresponding reaction; and the visitors at the Crawford, after the
+departure of a few gone up the great mountain, had not made a single
+collective arrangement to occupy the day. Each was thrown upon personal
+resources; and the resource of the lawyer was setting out upon a long and
+lonely morning walk, his legs being the chief actors therein, while his
+mind, to judge by the bent head and the slow step, was taking its own
+peculiar and much longer journey.
+
+Suddenly he lifted his head and came to a full stop. He was _not_ alone,
+after all! Half a mile below the house, beside the road and under the edge
+of a thick clump of woods, lay the trunk of a huge tree, some of the higher
+branches yet remaining unshorn, though trimmed by the axe. On the point of
+one of these branches, very easily ascended by the stairway of knots below,
+some eight or ten feet from the ground, rested a neat foot, while the owner
+of the figure above it, dressed in a light robe which floated around her
+with almost the softness of a cloud, had thrown off her jockey-hat (the
+object first attracting the notice of the lawyer) on the ground below, and
+was stretching up at full length to pluck a cluster of the great creamy
+blossoms of the wild northern magnolia, starring the green leaves around
+it, which had beckoned her from the path.
+
+Does the reader remember where it was that the first glimpse was caught of
+Margaret Hayley--standing on the piazza of the house at West Philadelphia,
+with one arm of Elsie Brand around her waist, but both her own hands
+employed in the attempt to force open a blush rose that had as yet but half
+blown from the bud? Roses then--the wild magnolia now: would the dainty
+white hand that had been so tenderly cruel to the flower-spirit two months
+before, only gather the blossom to pluck away its shreds one by one and
+scatter them listlessly on the ground as she walked? Or had those two
+months taught her something of the meaning of that word "suffering,"
+unknown before, and ripened and softened the proud nature that possibly
+needed such training?
+
+The lawyer stood irresolute for a moment, doubtful whether the lady would
+be pleased by his having discovered her in that somewhat girlish situation.
+Then he remembered some duty or feeling which seemed of more consequence
+than a mere momentary embarrassment, and came close to the log upon which
+she was standing, before she was aware of his presence.
+
+"Shall I help you down, Miss Hayley?"
+
+The words were simple, and they did not seem to demand that trembling of
+tone which really accompanied them. Neither did there appear to be any
+occasion for the flush of red blood which ran all over cheek and brow of
+Margaret Hayley in the moment of her first surprise. But the flush was gone
+before she had cast that inevitable look downward, which womanhood can
+never forget when caught playing the Amazon however slightly,--stepped
+lightly down the stairway of knots to the trunk and held out her hand to
+accept the offer.
+
+"See what a beautiful cluster of my favorites!" she said.
+
+"Beautiful indeed!" The lawyer was looking intently at the blossoms or at
+the hand which held them--no matter which. The lady seemed to have some
+impression of the latter, for she flushed again a little and drew back both
+hands and flowers.
+
+"And you are walking already again this morning?" she said, after a moment
+of silence which her companion did not seem disposed to break.
+
+"Yes," absently.
+
+"Already quite recovered from yesterday?" Margaret Hayley was treading upon
+dangerous ground: did she know it?
+
+They had walked on together down the road, as if by mutual consent. The
+lawyer was silent again for a time, looking away, and when he again turned
+his eyes towards her there was an earnestness in their glance and a sad
+seriousness in the whole face which denoted that he had thought much and
+resolved not a little in that moment.
+
+"Recovered from yesterday? From the slight fatigue--yes! From some other
+effects of the day?--no!"
+
+"I am sorry to hear you say so." The words dropped slowly and very
+deliberately from her lips, and her head had a wavy nod as she spoke.
+
+"You are sure of the grounds of your sorrow?"
+
+"I fear so--yes!"
+
+"Then I, too, have cause to fear!"
+
+Silence again for a moment, and they walked on, very slowly. Then Horace
+Townsend spoke again.
+
+"You are going away to the Glen House, to-morrow or the next day, are you
+not?"
+
+"I believe Captain Coles and my mother have so arranged," was the reply.
+
+"And I am going southward to Winnipiseogee to-morrow."
+
+"_You?_" The exclamation was abrupt and surprised, as if she had not before
+thought of a separation of routes. Horace Townsend heard the word and
+recognized the tone; and what the spark is to the magazine was that sudden
+monosyllable to the half-controlled heart of the man.
+
+"Margaret Hayley, we separate then to-morrow," he said. "This may be and no
+doubt will be the last time that we shall speak together without listeners.
+I have something to say that must be spoken. Will you hear me?"
+
+She caught him suddenly by the arm, with a motion like that of one warning
+or checking another on the brink of a precipice--like that she had used the
+day before under such very different circumstances,--and said:
+
+"Oh, do not!--do not!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Do not say words that must separate us instead of bringing us nearer to
+each other!"
+
+"And would _that_ grieve you?"
+
+"On my soul--yes!"
+
+Another spark to the magazine. It exploded. Horace Townsend had caught
+Margaret Hayley's hand and his eye literally flashed fire into hers, while
+his brown cheek mantled with the blood that could no longer be restrained.
+
+"I _must_ speak, Margaret Hayley, and you must listen. _I love you!_ There
+is not a thought in my mind, not a hope in my soul, that is not yours. Does
+_that_ separate us?"
+
+She did not draw away her hand, and yet it returned no answering pressure
+to his. Her head was bent down so that he could not see her face, and her
+words were very few and very sad:
+
+"I am sorry--very sorry! Yes!"
+
+"Stop!" He laid his hand upon her forehead, gently pushing back her head
+until he virtually compelled her eyes to come up to the level of his own.
+"Margaret Hayley, too little may be said as well as too much. I am going to
+say what perhaps no other man in the world _dare_ say. I love you, but that
+is not all. I cite your woman's heart and your immortal soul this moment
+before the sight of that God whose eye is looking down upon us in this
+sunshine, and I say that _you_ love _me_! You may never forgive me the
+word, but you must tell me the truth! Do you deny it?"
+
+"No!" The word was louder and clearer than any that she had spoken--louder
+and clearer than any that had been spoken during the interview. And yet it
+was not a lover's response.
+
+"You admit this, and yet you say that my opening my heart to you separates
+us instead of drawing us together. Three days ago you told me that--that
+man"--he did not mention the name of Captain Hector Coles, nor did there
+seem to be any occasion--"was not and never could be your betrothed
+husband. What tie binds you? What am I to fear? What am I to think?"
+
+"Think that what I say is true, Horace Townsend--that I love you, and yet
+that I do not love you--that your company is dearer to me, to-day, than
+that of any person on earth--that I respect you in every regard and hold
+you as one of the bravest and noblest of men--and yet that every word of
+love you utter makes it more evident that we must not meet again, and so
+separates us forever!"
+
+"What _is_ this riddle?" He asked the question in a tone of great anxiety,
+and he did not take away his eyes from the proud orbs that no longer sunk
+before them as he made the inquiry. How impossible to believe that the man
+who had but the moment before cited the heart and soul of Margaret Hayley
+before the very eye of God as a searcher of their entire truth and candor,
+could himself be guilty of deception at the same instant! And yet was he
+not? Was the riddle really so obscure to him as he pretended? Was the very
+name under which he wooed and sought to win, his own? Strange
+questions--stranger far than that he asked; and yet questions that must be
+asked and answered!
+
+"Listen, Horace Townsend!" she said after one instant of silence. "You call
+this a riddle, and you force me to read it to you. I wish you had not done
+so, but I have no choice. I would have kept you as a friend--a dear friend,
+but you would not accept the place."
+
+"Never--not for one moment!" he broke in, as if through set lips. Her hand
+was on his arm, and they were again walking listlessly on. She proceeded
+without any reference to his interruption.
+
+"I have too many words to say--words that pain me beyond measure; but you
+have forced me to them, and I must finish, even if you think me mad before
+I have done. I do not know but I _am_ mad--every thing about me sometimes
+seems to be so unreal and mocking."
+
+Horace Townsend turned at that moment and looked her sidelong in the face,
+then withdrew his glance again as if satisfied, and she went on:
+
+"I told you that Captain Hector Coles would never be nearer to me than he
+is, and he will not. I hate that man, and he knows it. But I _love
+another_!"
+
+She paused, as if she expected some outburst at this declaration; but no
+outburst came. All the effect it produced was a quick shudder through the
+arm that sustained her hand.
+
+"I love another--do you hear me? I who say that I love _you_, say that I
+love another! For more than a year, before the last two months, I was a
+betrothed bride, and never woman loved more truly than I the man who filled
+my whole ideal of manly beauty, grace and goodness. One day, two months
+ago, I found that man a _coward_. He dared not fight for his native
+land--not even for his native State when it was invaded. We
+parted--forever, as I thought; forever, as he thinks, no doubt. I have
+heard that he has gone to another land: no matter, he has left _me_, with
+my own will. Then I came to the mountains, for change of scene and for
+distraction. I met you. I was attracted to you from the first--I have grown
+more attracted day by day, until I shudder to think that I love you! Do you
+know _why_?
+
+"Because _my_ affection for _you_ has given birth to some feeble likeness
+of itself!" was the response.
+
+"No! The confession may wound your vanity, but the truth must be told.
+Every throb of my heart towards you, Horace Townsend, has been caused by
+some dim resemblance of your face to the man I once loved, and something in
+your voice that came to me like a faint echo. It is not _you_ whom I have
+been seeing and hearing, but the man who was handsomer than you, your
+superior in so many respects, and yet your inferior in that one which
+makes me worship you almost as a god--your sublime, dauntless courage when
+all others quail. Do you understand me now, and know why your words should
+never have been spoken?"
+
+"I _think_ that I understand you!" was the response, but a bitter smile,
+unseen by the lady, wreathed the moustached lip as he spoke. "And that
+other--he will come back, some day, and all except the old love will be
+forgotten, and you will marry him, of course."
+
+"Horace Townsend, you do not quite understand me, yet!" she said. "I am no
+child, to be trifled with, but a woman. I loved him, better than my own
+soul, but I cannot continue to love when I cease to respect. I shall never
+marry, while I live, unless I marry the man to whom my heart was first
+given. I thought that perhaps I might find a new ideal, some day, when we
+first parted; but I know better now. You have taught me how nearly the
+vacant place can be supplied, and yet how empty all is when the one bond is
+wanting."
+
+"And I say, again, that some day he will come back, and you will marry
+him."
+
+"Never--if he comes as he was!" was the reply. "If Heaven would work a
+miracle and give him the one thing that he lacks--bravery and
+patriotism,--even if he struck but one blow, to prove that he was no coward
+to fly before the enemies of his country,--I would go barefoot round the
+world to find him, and be his servant, his slave, if he would not forgive
+the past and make me his wife!"
+
+With the last words she had broken down almost entirely, and as she ceased
+she burst into a very passion of tears and sobs. Where was the overweening
+pride of Margaret Hayley? Gone, all gone; and yet she clung to that one
+touchstone--her husband, when the country called and he was subjected to
+the trial, must prove that he dared be patriot and soldier, or her lips
+should never speak that sacred name!
+
+"I have indeed spoken too far, and it is better that we should not meet
+again," he said, in a voice quite as low and almost as broken as her own.
+"I understand you, now: forgive me if I have caused you pain in making the
+discovery; and good-bye!"
+
+He wrung the young girl's hand almost painfully and was turning away.
+
+"You are going now? Shall I not see you again?" she asked.
+
+"No matter--I do not know--I cannot tell. I may see you at the house before
+I leave. If not, and we never meet again, God bless you, Margaret Hayley,
+the only woman I have ever loved!"
+
+He stooped suddenly and kissed her hand, then turned, drew his hat over his
+brow and walked rapidly up the road towards the Crawford. Margaret,
+oppressed by some strange feeling, could not speak. She could only look
+back and catch a last glimpse of him as he turned a bend in the road; then
+sink her face in her hands and sob aloud as if she had buried a second love
+not less dear than the first.
+
+When she returned to the house, half an hour after, Horace Townsend was
+already gone--flying away towards Littleton with four horses. Captain
+Hector Coles was in a better humor, being already advised of the fact, than
+he had exhibited at any time during the previous week. Mrs. Burton Hayley,
+when his going away was mentioned, made some appropriate remarks on the
+rashness of any person exposing himself as the young man had done the day
+before, unless he was fully prepared for death and judgment, and remarked
+that she was rather glad that so wild a person was not going over to the
+Glen with them. In both these opinions Captain Coles fully coincided.
+Margaret spoke of the departure as a very matter-of-course affair indeed,
+and did not even see the glance by which the gallant Captain intended to
+convey his full recollection of the scene on the top of Mount Willard.
+
+Next day that trio, with a dozen of others, went on to the Glen House for
+the carriage-ascent of Mount Washington.
+
+And with that announcement and a single scene following, concludes the
+somewhat long connection held by the White Mountains, their scenery and
+summer incidents, with the fortunes of the various personages figuring
+prominently in this life-history.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That scene was a very brief one and took place three days after the
+departure from the Crawford, when Margaret Hayley, her mother and Captain
+Hector Coles, had made the ascent of Washington from the Glen House by
+carriage and stood beside the High Altar that has before been mentioned.
+When Mrs. Burton Hayley was signalizing her arrival at the top by repeating
+certain passages from the big book on the carved stand, which she seemed to
+have an idea fitted that elevated point in her summer wanderings, and which
+probably might have done so if she had quoted them with any thing
+approaching to correctness. When Margaret Hayley, breathing the same air
+that Horace Townsend had breathed a few days before, and aware that she was
+doing so, joined to the rapt emotions of the place and the hour, something
+of the sad glory of human love and grief, stretching out her mental hands
+to God whose awful majesty stood before her and around her in the great
+peak lifting itself to heaven, and praying that out of darkness might some
+day come light, as once it had done on that other and more awful peak of
+Sinai. When Captain Hector Coles, above all such considerations and with a
+keen eye to his personal "main chances", fancied that another declaration
+beside the High Altar on Washington would not only be a "good thing to do"
+but a proceeding much more likely to meet with a favorable response than if
+ventured on ground of less altitude.
+
+Then and there, accordingly, Captain Hector Coles, with Mrs. Burton Hayley
+very near and the granite rocks still nearer, possessed himself suddenly of
+Margaret Hayley's white hand, drew her close to him, and murmured:
+
+"Oh, how long I have waited for this hour, Margaret! I love you. I have
+not before said the same thing in words, for a long time, but I believe
+that you must have seen and known how the old affection has still lived and
+strengthened. There have been bitter words between us, occasionally, but
+they have not affected the true feeling lying beneath, and--"
+
+"Stop, Hector Coles!" said Margaret, before he had concluded. "You say that
+there have been bitter words between us occasionally. Now let me warn you
+that no bitter word I have ever said in your hearing, has been any thing
+more than a baby's whisper to what I _will_ say if you ever dare to allude
+to this subject again!"
+
+"But, Margaret--"
+
+"No, not another word! Mother, come here!"
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley obeyed.
+
+"Mother, is it with your wish or approbation that Captain Coles has just
+made me another offer of his heart?"
+
+"Certainly it is," the Captain commenced to answer.
+
+"Stop! it was not to you I put the question, but to my mother!"
+
+"Well, my daughter--I certainly did--that is--I--"
+
+"There, you hear!" said Captain Hector Coles, triumphantly, and confident
+that the knowledge of such a maternal indorsement must work in his favor.
+
+"You did, did you?" and the right hand of Margaret went suddenly inside the
+thick shawl that wrapped her from the winds of the peak--and unseen by the
+Captain a locket--that fatal locket--glittered before the mother's eyes.
+"Will you promise, and keep that promise, that Captain Hector Coles shall
+not say one more word to me of love or marriage, while we remain together?
+If not, as God sees me you know the consequences!"
+
+Mrs. Burton Hayley's face was very white at that moment, but the next she
+said: "Oh yes, I promise!" and then with a groan, grasping the surprised
+Captain by the arm: "Captain, if you do not wish to see me drop dead, leave
+that wild, mad girl to herself! She is crazy, but _I_ cannot help it!"
+
+Captain Hector Coles looked from one to the other, in added surprise, but
+found no explanation; then he muttered something that was not a second
+love-declaration; and the next moment Margaret Hayley stood alone, isolated
+as the peak that bore her, and with a heart almost as cold in the dull
+leaden weight that seemed to lie within her bosom, as the storm-beaten
+rocks of which that peak was composed.
+
+Thereafter Captain Hector Coles never spoke to her of love again!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+     THE BEARER OF A DISGRACED NAME, IN ENGLAND--A STRANGE QUEST
+     AND A STRANGE UNREST--HURRYING OVER TO IRELAND--TOO LATE FOR
+     THE PACKET--THE LITTLE DESPATCH-STEAMER--HENRY FITZMAURICE,
+     THE JOURNALIST--AN UNEXPECTED PASSAGE--THE PERIL OF THE
+     EMERALD, AND THE END OF ALL QUESTS SAVE ONE.
+
+
+Far back in the progress of this narration, when it had only reached half
+the distance to which it has now arrived, it was said of one of the
+principal persons therein involved: "Something indescribably dim and
+shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time,
+* * * motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be
+little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events
+without connection and action without explanation." The same remark will
+apply with quite as much force, at this stage, to the movements of the
+bearer of that dishonored name, in his movements on the other side of the
+Atlantic, which must now be briefly recorded in their due order.
+
+It will be remembered that the American entered his name at Liverpool, on
+the twentieth day of July, with the place of his residence attached.
+Thenceforward enough is known, through hotel and other records, to be sure
+that he spent some two weeks in London, occupying lodgings at one of the
+respectable houses of the great metropolis, but spending his time, in other
+regards, in a manner scarcely to have been expected from any previous
+knowledge of his life and antecedents. Was it the lawyer, _because_ the
+lawyer, who visited Scotland Yard the very next day after his arrival in
+London, and spent so much time with some of the leading men in charge of
+that great police-establishment, that he might have seemed to be employed
+in studying the whole English system of criminal detection? And was it the
+lawyer, _as_ the lawyer and consequently on account of his remembrance of
+past connection with the ferreting out of crime in his native land, who
+went immediately afterwards into a continuous and apparently systematic
+round of visits to the worst haunts of vice in the Modern Babel, becoming,
+sometimes in disguise and sometimes in his own proper person, but always
+more or less closely accompanied by some member of the force, the habitue
+of streets in which burglars and thieves most congregated, and of lanes in
+which receivers of stolen property, forgers and all disreputable and
+dangerous characters were known to have their places of business or their
+dens of hiding?
+
+Or was there, leaving the profession of the lawyer out of the question,
+something in the peculiar surroundings of this man--something in the
+relations of character and connection which he had allowed to grow around
+him, unfitting him for other amusements and researches in a city which he
+had never before visited, and one supplying such marvellous temptations to
+the sight-seer and the antiquarian? Or was he paying the penalty of the
+past in an unrest which left him no peace except he found it in continual
+motion and in the companionship and the study of those far more outlawed by
+statute but not more in social position than himself? Strange questions,
+again, and questions which cannot be answered, at this time, by any thing
+more than the mere suggestion.
+
+Certain it is, whatever the motive, that Westminster Abbey, with its every
+stone sacred to the memory of the great dead, seemed to present no
+attractions to him, commensurate with those of Seven Dials, sacred to every
+phase of poverty and villany; that the Houses of Parliament were ignored in
+favor of St. Giles and Bermondsey, noted for debates of a very different
+character from those heard before the occupant of the Woolsack and the
+Speaker of the Commons; and that (this seeming so peculiarly strange in a
+lawyer of admitted character and power) even the Lord Chancellor, rendering
+one of those decisions calculated to affect not only the laws of property
+in England but the whole legal system wherever the English language was
+spoken, seemed to have far less attention paid to him or his dicta, than
+was given to some gownless libel on the practice of criminal law, who could
+point out the habits and haunts of Burly Bill, the noted burglar whom he
+had lately saved from transportation by proving that he was in three
+different places at once, and neither of them the spot where the crime was
+committed,--or Snivelling Sall, reputed to be in the near companionship of
+the most successful utterer of forged notes who had so far escaped the
+clutches of the detective birds of prey. Night and day, during all those
+two weeks, he seemed to eat hastily and to sleep only as if sleep was a
+secondary necessity of nature, to be thrown overboard whenever some
+all-absorbing thought should make continual wakefulness necessary.
+
+Then the fancy (might it not be called madness?) seemed to change. He had
+either exhausted the crime of London or he had skimmed that compound until
+there was no novelty of rich villainy remaining. Without having examined
+one work of art or one antiquarian curiosity (so far as could be known),
+and certainly without having made one effort to find a footing in that
+society for which education and past associations would so well have fitted
+him,--he flitted away from London and the name of Carlton Brand was to be
+found inscribed on the books of one of the leading hotels at Manchester.
+And what did he there? Precisely what he had been doing in London, it
+appeared--nothing less and nothing more. Alternately in conversation with
+one of the detective force or with some one of the wretches whom the
+detective force was especially commissioned to bring to justice--the
+Manchester looms (not yet _all_ stopped by the dearth of cotton and the
+"fratricidal war" in America) presented no more charm to him than had been
+afforded by the high-toned and rational attractions of the metropolis. At
+times dressed with what seemed a studied disregard of the graces of person,
+and scarcely ever so arraying himself that he would have dreamed of
+presenting himself in such a guise in the midst of any respectable circle
+at home--two or three days ran him through the criminal life of Manchester.
+Then away to Birmingham, and there--but why weary with repetition when a
+succeeding fact can be so well indicated by one that has preceded it? The
+same unsettled and apparently aimless life--if not aimless, certainly with
+tendencies the most singular and unaccountable. Thence to Bristol, and from
+Bristol to Liverpool. From Liverpool, with flying haste the whole length of
+the island and over the border to Edinburgh, paying no more attention,
+apparently, to the scenes of Scottish song and story by which he dashed,
+than might have been necessary to remember the cattle-rievers and
+free-booters who had long before furnished pattern for his late
+associates,--and seeing in the old closes and wynds frowned down upon by
+Calton Hill and the Castle, only retreats in which robbers could take
+refuge without serious risk of being unearthed. Then, strangely enough,
+away southward again to Dover, with a passage-ticket for Calais taken but
+countermanded before use, indicating that Paris had been in view but that
+some sudden circumstance had made a change in the all-the-while
+inexplicable calculation. What was all this--the question arises once
+more--the following out of some clue on which the whole welfare of a life
+was believed to depend, or merely the vague and purposeless pursuit of some
+melancholy fancy furnishing the very mockery of a clue through that
+labyrinth which borders the realm of declared madness?
+
+The American had been something more than a month in England, and far away
+beyond his knowledge all the events before recorded as occurring to
+Margaret Hayley and her group of society in the White Mountains had already
+taken place,--when one afternoon, late in August, the train that dashed
+into Holyhead from Birmingham and Chester, by Anglesey and over the Menai,
+bore this exemplification of unrest as a passenger. Those who saw him
+emerge from the carriage upon the platform noticed the haste with which he
+appeared to step and the eagerness of his inquiry whether the train, which
+had been slightly delayed by an accident, was yet in time for the boat for
+Dublin. She had been gone for more than an hour, and the black smoke from
+her funnel was already fading away into a dim wreath driven rapidly
+northward before the sharp south-easter coming up the Channel. Night was
+fast falling, with indications that it would be any thing rather than a
+quiet one on that wild and turbulent bit of water lying between the two
+islands; and some of the old Welsh coastmen who yet lingered on the pier,
+when they saw the impatient man striding up and down and uttering
+imprecations on the delayed train, shrugged their shoulders with the
+remark, which he did not hear or did not choose to heed, that "_they_
+should be much obliged to any train that had kept them from taking a
+rocking in that cradle the night!"
+
+Brow knit, head bent, tread nervous and almost angry, and manifesting all
+the symptoms of anxiety and disappointment, the American traversed the
+wharf, his tall form guarded against the slight chill of the summer evening
+on the coast by a coarse gray cloak which he drew closely around him as he
+walked, thus adding to the restless stateliness of his appearance. At one
+of his turns he was sufficiently disengaged to see a man of middle height,
+dressed in a somewhat dashing civilian costume, standing at a little
+distance up the pier and conversing with two or three of the coastmen. One
+of the latter was pointing towards himself; and the moment after the
+stranger approached with a bow. He was a young man of twenty-five or
+thereabouts, side-whiskered and moustached, decidedly good-looking, with
+quite as much of the Irishman as the Englishman in his face, and seemed at
+all points a gentleman--more, that much rarer combination, especially on
+the soil of the mother island, a frank, clever fellow!
+
+"They tell me, sir," said the stranger, "that you were one of the
+passengers on that delayed train, and that you manifest some disappointment
+at missing the Dublin boat."
+
+"They are entirely correct, sir," answered the American, returning the bow.
+"I was very anxious, for particular reasons, to be in Dublin to-morrow; and
+in fact the whole object of my visiting Ireland at all, just now, may very
+probably be defeated by the accident that brought in the train that half
+hour too late."
+
+He spoke in a tone very earnest and not a little agitated. The other
+remarked the fact, but he thought himself too good a judge of character to
+suspect, as some other persons under similar circumstances might have done,
+that the anxious man was a hunted member of the swell-mob or a criminal of
+some other order, who thought it politic to get off English soil as soon as
+possible. He determined, at the second glance, that he had to do with a
+gentleman, and proceeded with the words that he had evidently intended to
+say on first accosting the delayed passenger.
+
+"You have made no arrangements for getting over, I suppose?"
+
+"None, whatever!" answered the American. "How can I, until the boat of
+to-morrow, when--when it may be too late altogether for my purpose? I was
+walking off my disappointment, a sort of thing that I have been more or
+less used to all my life!" and the other noticed that he seemed to sigh
+wearily--"walking it off before going to find a hotel and lying awake all
+night, thinking of where I ought to have been at each particular hour."
+
+"Well," said the stranger, "I had a motive not personal to myself, in
+accosting you, or I should not have taken the liberty. I am Mr. Henry
+Fitzmaurice, one of the London correspondents of the Dublin _Evening Mail_.
+I believe that I am not mistaken in supposing that I am speaking to an
+American?"
+
+"Not at all mistaken!" answered the American, pleased with a frankness so
+much more like that of his native land than he had been in the habit of
+meeting during his short sojourn abroad. "I am called Mr. Brand--Carlton
+Brand, and on ordinary occasions I am a lawyer of the city of
+Philadelphia."
+
+"That little matter over, which I should not have been able to manage under
+half an hour had I been a pure John Bull instead of two-thirds Irishman,"
+said the man who had introduced himself as Fitzmaurice, in a vivacious
+manner very well calculated to put the other at his ease--"now, not being
+either of us members of the Circumlocution Office, we will get at the gist
+of the matter at once. I am going over to Ireland to-night, or at least I
+am going to make a start in that direction, and I believe that I can manage
+to secure you a passage if you will accept one."
+
+"Certainly, and with many thanks, but how?" was the reply.
+
+"Well, I am not so sure about the thanks," said Fitzmaurice, in the same
+pleasant tone which had before won his companion. "It is going to be a wild
+night on the Channel, if I am any judge of weather, and I have crossed it
+often enough to begin to have some idea. But I _must_ cross, and so must
+you, if you can, as I understand you to say."
+
+"I must, certainly, if any thing in the shape of a vessel does so," said
+the American. "But you have not yet told me--"
+
+"No, of course not!" the newspaper man ran on. "Always expect an Irishman
+to begin his story in the middle and tell it out at each end, and you will
+not be far from the fact. Well, there are some despatches for the Lord
+Lieutenant that need to be across before noon to-morrow, as the Secretary
+for Ireland has an insane fancy, and a special train left London to make
+the connection with the steamer that has just gone. I came in it, and with
+the Queen's messenger,--with some matters that must reach the _Mail_ in
+advance of the other Dublin papers. They have a little despatch-steamer
+lying just below, and the messenger telegraphed to fire her up, from one of
+the back stations, when he found the chances against him. In an hour she
+will have a full head of steam, and before it is quite dark we shall be
+clear of the coast. I have no doubt that I can procure you a passage, and
+if you will step round with me to the wharf where she lies, I will
+certainly try the experiment. Now you have it."
+
+"And a very kind and generous thing I have at the same time!" exclaimed the
+American, warmly.
+
+"As I said before, I do not know about the generosity!" replied the
+correspondent, as they took their way around the warehouses that headed the
+packet-wharf, towards the pier below, where the despatch-boat lay. "The
+fact is that the Emerald is not much bigger than a yawl, and though she is
+a splendid little sea-boat and never has found any gale in which she could
+not outlive the biggest of the merchant steamers, she is very much of a
+cockle-shell in the way of jumping about; and people who have any
+propensity for sea-sickness, a thing a good deal worse than any ordinary
+kind of _death_, are very likely to have a little turn at it under such
+circumstances."
+
+"I have never been very much at sea, but I believe that I am beyond the
+vulgarity of sea-sickness!" was the answer; and just then they reached the
+despatch-steamer.
+
+She was indeed a little thing, as compared with the steamers which the
+American had been in the habit of seeing sent away on sea-voyages--very low
+in hull, rakish in pipe and masts, looming black in the gathering dusk of
+evening, and her bulwarks seeming so low as to present the same appearance
+of insecurity against falling overboard that a landsman's eye immediately
+perceives in a first glance at a pilot-boat. The steam was already well up
+and hissing from her escape valves, while the black smoke rolled away from
+her pipe as if it had a mission to cloud the whole port with soot and
+cinders.
+
+A few words with the Queen's messenger and an introduction to the Captain
+of the little Emerald followed; and the correspondent of the _Mail_ had not
+overrated his influence with either, for in ten minutes the lawyer was
+booked for a passage over, under government auspices. In half an hour more
+the despatch-boat steamed away; and when the deep dusk of night fell to
+shut away the Welsh coast, while the half dozen officers and their two
+passengers were trifling over a very pleasant supper with wines of
+antediluvian vintage accompanying, the Emerald was well off the Head,
+tossing about like a cork in the sea that seemed to be every moment growing
+more and more violent, but making fine weather through it all, flying like
+a race-horse, and promising, if every thing held, to land the messenger and
+her other passengers at Kingstown, at very near as early an hour in the
+morning as those touched the shore who had left Holyhead two hours before
+by the packet.
+
+The American remained long on the deck, in conversation with the newspaper
+correspondent, delighted with the cordiality of his manner and the
+extensive scope of his information, as he had before been with the
+generosity which supplied himself with a passage over at the moment of
+disappointment. The Hiberno-Englishman seemed to be equally pleased with
+his new friend, whom he found all that he had at first believed--a
+gentleman, and neither pickpocket nor madman. Mr. Fitzmaurice, still a
+young man and a subordinate, had never been in America, but he had
+something more than the ordinary newspaper stock of information about
+countries lying beyond sea, and he had the true journalist's admiration
+for the young land that has done more for journalism within fifty years
+than all the other countries of the world through all the ages. He listened
+with pleasure to the descriptions which the lawyer was equally able and
+willing to impart, of the modes in which the news-gathering operations of
+the leading American newspapers were carried on, and especially of the
+reckless exposures of correspondents on the battle-fields of the great war,
+which have all the while exhibited so much bravery and so stupendous a
+spirit of enterprise, combined with a lack of judgment equally injurious
+and deplorable.
+
+Mr. Fitzmaurice, on his part, resident in London during all the period of
+our struggle, necessarily present at most of the Parliamentary debates in
+which the good and ill feeling of Englishmen towards the United States have
+been shown in such unfavorable proportions--acquainted with most of the
+leading public men of the kingdom, and with an Irishman's rattle making the
+conveying of his impressions a thing of equal ease and pleasure,--he had
+much to say that interested the Philadelphian; and it would have been
+notable, could he have been fairly behind the curtain as to the character
+and movements of the other, to mark how the man who during two weeks
+residence in London had never stepped his foot within the Parliament
+Houses, could drink in and digest, from another's lips, the story of the
+debates which he might so easily have heard first-handed with his own ears!
+
+But as the newspaper man could know nothing of this, enough to say that the
+conversation was a pleasant one, and that hours rolled away unheeded in its
+continuance, while the little Emerald skimmed over and plunged through the
+rough waves of the Irish Channel, and while those waves grew heavier, and
+the sky darker, and the wild south-easter increased every hour in the
+violence with which it whistled through the scant rigging and sent the caps
+of the waves whirling and dashing past the adventurous little minnow of
+the steam-navy, to fall in showers of foamy spray far to leeward.
+
+It was past midnight when the young men, so strangely thrown together, so
+different in position and pursuit, but so pleasantly agreeing in all the
+amenities of social intercourse,--began to feel the demands of sleep
+overmastering the excitement of the situation, left the deck and went below
+to the berths in the little cramped cabin which had been prepared for them.
+The Queen's messenger had already retired and was sleeping so soundly in
+his four-by-seven state-room, with his despatches under his pillow, that
+nothing less than the going to pieces of the steamer or an order to start
+on a new journey could possibly have woke him. To such men, ever flying
+from one port to another, by sea and by land, bearing the lives of
+individuals and often the welfare of whole peoples in their hands, with no
+more knowledge of what they bear than has the telegraph wire of the message
+that thrills along it--to such men, habituated to excitement, hurry and
+exposure, that excitement really becomes a sort of second nature; and the
+art of sleeping on the ground, on a board, bolt upright in a chair or even
+in the saddle, is one of the accomplishments soonest learned and last
+forgotten. What are storms to them or to that other class to which
+reference has before been made--the rough Ariels of the newspaper Prospero?
+Nothing, except they cause hindrance! What is even the deepest personal
+peril by sea or land? Nothing, except because in putting a sudden period to
+the existence of the messenger it may interfere with the delivery of his
+all-important despatches!
+
+So slept the Queen's messenger, and so, after a time, in their narrow
+berths, slept the American and his new-made friend. Once falling away into
+slumber, the very motion of the vessel made that slumber more intense and
+stupefying, old Mother Nature rocking her children somewhat roughly in the
+"cradle of the deep." And of what dreamed they? Who knows? Perhaps the
+handsome and vivacious young Anglo-Irishman of the girl whose miniature he
+had accidentally displayed to the eyes of the other, filling the back case
+of his watch,--not yet his wife, but to be so some day when talent and
+energy should bring their recompense and fortune shower her favors a little
+more liberally upon him. Perhaps the Philadelphia lawyer of wrongs and
+shames in his native land, of the apparently mad quest which he seemed to
+be urging, and of possible coming days when all errors should be repaired,
+and the great stake of his life won beyond a peradventure.
+
+How long the lawyer had slept he knew not, when some change in the motion
+of the boat produced the same effect on his slumbers that is said to be
+wrought on the sleeping miller by the stoppage of the splashing water-wheel
+and the rumbling burr-stones. He had slept amidst the violent motion: he
+partially woke when there was a momentary cessation of it. In an instant
+after the vessel seemed to be struck one tremendous blow that sent a shiver
+through every plate and rivet of her iron hull--through every board and
+stanchion of her cabin-work. There are men who can remain undisturbed by
+such a sensation on shipboard, but the American was by no means one of
+them; and the fumes of sleep, partially dissipated before, rolled away
+almost as suddenly as morning mists before a brisk north-wester. He was
+broad awake to feel a hand grasping him by the shoulder, and opened his
+eyes to see Fitzmaurice standing by the berth and holding the joiner-work
+with one hand to support himself against the fearful lurches of the vessel,
+while he had employed the other in arousing the apparently slumbering man.
+
+"Get up and come out at once!" he said, his voice hoarse and agitated.
+
+"What has happened?" asked the American, springing upright in his berth and
+preparing to leap from it as men will do when such unpleasant announcements
+are made. He seemed to know, intuitively and without any instruction from
+the shock which had just startled him, that some marked peril must have
+sent the journalist down to arouse him in that melodramatic manner.
+
+"Why, we are in danger, I suppose--serious danger!" was the reply. "Do you
+not feel the change in the motion of the boat? We are in the trough of the
+sea, without steam, and as near as I can make out through the mist, driving
+on the Irish coast with more rapidity than we bargained for!"
+
+"Heavens!" was the very natural exclamation in reply, as the American
+managed with some difficulty to throw on the one or two articles of
+clothing of which he had divested himself.
+
+"I suppose that it is a bad job," the journalist continued, "and what just
+now makes me feel peculiarly bad about it is the fact that I was the means
+of inducing you to come on board, and that if any thing serious should
+happen--"
+
+"Hush! not a word of that!" said the lawyer, appreciating fully that
+chivalrous generosity which after conferring a great favor could take blame
+to itself for any peril growing out of that favor. "Hush! You have treated
+me, Mr. Fitzmaurice, with great kindness, and I hope you will believe me
+man enough not to misunderstand our relative positions in any thing that
+may occur."
+
+Fitzmaurice, who seemed to be relieved by the words, but who certainly was
+laboring under an amount of depression not incident alone to any peril in
+which he stood personally involved,--grasped his hand with something more
+than the ordinary pressure of brief acquaintance. The motion of the boat,
+alternately a roll and then a heavy plunge, had now become absolutely
+fearful, intermingled with occasional repetitions of that crashing blow
+which had started the American from his slumber; but holding fast of each
+other and of various substantial objects that fell in their course, the two
+young men reached the companion way and the deck, the journalist detailing
+meanwhile, in hasty and broken words, what he knew of the extent of the
+difficulty in which they were involved.
+
+Up to fifteen or twenty minutes before, the little Emerald, a capital
+sea-boat but possessed of but a single engine (which description of single
+engine boats, by the way, should never be allowed to make voyages by open
+sea, except under the especial pilotage of one Malthus), had been making
+good weather, though the blow had increased to a gale and the waves of the
+Irish Channel increased to such size that they seemed to be opposed to the
+Union and determined to make an eternal severance of the two islands.
+Fitzmaurice had himself awoke about an hour before, and gone upon deck
+because unable to sleep longer; and he had consequently become aware, a
+little before the American in his berth did so, of an accident to the
+vessel. One moment of cessation of the plunging roll with which she had
+been ploughing ahead of the waves breaking on her larboard quarter--a
+moment of almost perfect stillness, as if the little vessel lay moored in
+some quiet haven--then a sudden veering round and that terrible crash and
+shock of the waves under the counter, the wheel, and along the whole side,
+which told that she was lying helpless in the trough of the sea, a marine
+Samson as thoroughly disabled as if she had been shorn of all her strength
+at once by the shears of one of the Fates. A word from one of the officers,
+the moment afterwards, had told him of some disarrangement of the engine,
+consequent on the severe strain of the heavy sea upon the boat; and he had
+then been left to study out for himself the amount of peril that might be
+involved, and to observe the coolness with which officers and men devoted
+themselves to a task which might or might not be successful--which might
+terminate at any moment in one of those terrible seas breaching the little
+vessel and foundering her as if she had indeed been nothing but a
+yawl-boat! It was at this stage that he had come down and wakened his
+friend of a few hours, feeling some responsibility for his safety (as well
+as a presentiment with regard to him which he by no means expressed in
+words), and leaving the Queen's messenger to pursue his dreamless sleep
+until it should end in Kingstown harbor or at the bottom of "Davy Jones'
+locker."
+
+By the time all this had been expressed in one tenth the number of words
+here employed, they had reached the deck, and certainly the prospect there
+was any thing but one calculated to reassure either. The Emerald was
+rolling wheel-houses under, in the trough of the sea, but so far
+mysteriously relieving herself through the scuppers as it seemed impossible
+that she should do. Two men were at the wheel, but they stood necessarily
+idle. Forward were half a dozen men, holding on to keep from going
+overboard at the first lurch. Even above the roar of the storm could be
+heard the sharp clink of hammers coming up from the engine-room and each
+sounding yet one pulse-beat of Hope. The south-easter was howling with
+demoniac fury, wailing through the rigging as if singing requiems for them
+all in advance, and driving before it the thin mists that shut away any
+idea of the sky. By the light on deck and on the troubled expanse of water
+eastward it was evident that day was breaking; and it was through a
+knowledge of that fact and of the rate of speed at which they had been
+steaming and driving partially before the wind all night, that Fitzmaurice
+had made his calculation expressed below, that they must be close on the
+Irish coast, a lee-shore, in such a blow, of no pleasant character.
+
+Such was the situation--a deplorable one, as any one can readily perceive
+who has ever seen its precise parallel; yet not entirely a hopeless one,
+for they might not be so close upon the coast as had been feared, and the
+engine might yet be thrown again into gear before the little vessel
+foundered and in time to claw off from the danger lying to leeward.
+Fitzmaurice had seen the position before: the American saw it at once
+through his own eyes and from the explanations given him by the journalist.
+The moment was not favorable for conversation, in that perilous motion,
+that roar of wind and wave and that suspense of mind; and the two young
+men held none except in a few words almost shouted to each other, but stood
+far aft on the larboard quarter, waiting calmly as two men with human
+instincts could be expected to wait for--what Heaven only knew! The face of
+the Anglo-Irishman was almost thoughtlessly calm, in spite of the anxiety
+which he had so plainly expressed: that of the American was dark, his lips
+set and his brow contracted, but there was no sign of shrinking and no
+indication of that basest passion, fear! Who could believe that the man
+standing there in the gray light of morning and awaiting without one
+apparent tremor of the muscles what might be an immediate and a painful
+death, bore a name that had been so lately dishonored by the most abject
+cowardice?
+
+Suddenly there was a cry which has blanched many a cheek and made many a
+lip tremble since Noah made his first sea-voyage in the Ark: "Land on the
+starboard quarter!" followed by another and yet more startling call:
+"Breakers to leeward!"
+
+Fitzmaurice and the American both turned instantly in the direction
+indicated, as was inevitable; and then they saw that the warning cry from
+the look-out was not the result of any illusion. The daylight was rapidly
+broadening, the mist had for the moment driven away leeward; and apparently
+not more than a mile away rose a huge dark headland assuming the
+proportions of a mountain, while at its base and in the exact direction
+towards which the doomed vessel was drifting, the sea was breaking in
+wreaths of white foam over ledges of rock which seemed to be already so
+near that they must go grinding and crashing upon them before the lapse of
+five minutes. They felt that the water shoaled, too, for the plunging roll
+of the disabled steamer grew every moment more terrible, and just as the
+cry was given she was breached at the waist by a sea from which she did not
+immediately clear herself. It only needed an eye that had ever scanned
+peril by sea and shore, to know at that moment that the Emerald and all on
+board were as certainly doomed, in all human probability, as if the one had
+been already broken up and scattered along the coast in fragments and the
+others made food for fishes along the rocks of Ireland's Eye!
+
+"The Hill of Howth and the rocks at the foot of it!" cried Fitzmaurice as
+he recognized the position. "Now God help us, for they are dead to leeward,
+and if we have any accounts to settle we had better settle them rapidly!"
+
+There was little agitation in his tone, now, and there was none in that of
+the American as he replied two words. They were the last he ever spoke, to
+mortal ear. May they have been true when he awoke from his long sleep, as
+they were before he fell into it! Those two words were:
+
+"I see!"
+
+The two men were standing, as has been said, very near the larboard
+quarter. The Emerald, too, as has also been already said, was very low in
+the bulwarks, as befitted her rake and her clipper appearance. Just as the
+lawyer uttered the two words, one of the officers of the steamer came aft,
+holding on amidst the terrible roll with something of the tenacity of a
+cat, and took his place at the wheel. The mist had closed down again and
+the Hill of Howth and the breakers were both for the moment shut away.
+
+There was a jar--a creeping, trembling jar that seemed to run through the
+little steamer, from stem to stern-post, and yet no blow from the fierce
+waves and no grinding of her keel upon the dreaded rocks. It was
+life--motion--the beat of machinery once more! At that critical juncture
+the engine had moved again for the first time, and if not safety there was
+yet at least another struggle with destiny. The officer had dashed back to
+throw the steamer up into the wind, the very instant that he felt the steam
+once more rushing into the cylinder.
+
+Then followed what cannot be described, because no one living can say
+precisely what occurred. Gathering way almost in an instant from the mad
+dash of her wheels into the water, the little Emerald plunged forward as
+if for her life. She had but a hundred or two yards of vantage ground left,
+and seemed to know it. As she gathered way and the quick whirl of the wheel
+swept her head gradually round to the sea, one mighty wave, as if afraid of
+being baulked of its prey and determined upon a final effort, struck her
+under the weather bow and port wheel and sent her careening so low to
+leeward that the starboard wheel-house and even the starboard quarter-rail
+were under water. She rolled back again in an instant, triumphant over the
+great enemy, and thenceforward dashed away from the white breakers on her
+lee as if she had been merely tantalizing them with a futile prospect of
+her destruction,--to make her way safely two hours afterwards into
+Kingstown Harbor and to land the Queen's messenger (who had just then
+awoke) and the correspondent of the _Evening Mail_, only an hour later than
+the passengers by the packet had disembarked.
+
+But she did not land the American. When the steamer rolled down with her
+starboard quarter-rail under water, Fitzmaurice, standing nearest to the
+larboard quarter, called out to his companion: "Look out and hold on!" then
+clutched the bulwark with his own hands and obeyed his own injunction. But
+when the steamer righted he was alone! Whether the lawyer had missed
+footing and failed to grasp any point of support at the critical moment, or
+whether he had lost head in the dizzying motion and gone over without even
+knowing his danger,--certain it is that he had been swept overboard under
+circumstances in which the whole British navy could have done no more to
+save him than one child of ten years! Henry Fitzmaurice, missing him and
+dreading what had really occurred, thought that for one second he saw a
+human head, with the hair streaming up, away off in the yeasty water: but
+that was all. And he said, bitterly, realizing all the painful facts of the
+event, and taking to himself a thought of regret that was likely to cling
+to him while his generous heart continued to beat:
+
+"My God!--it was just as I thought! I have been the means of drowning that
+splendid fellow, after all!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few hours later, little Shelah, the barefooted daughter of one of the
+poor fishermen whose hut stood at the foot of Howth, around northward
+towards Ireland's Eye--little Shelah, who had gone down over the rocks to
+the beach when the worst of the storm was over, rushed back to the cabin
+with terror in her eyes and broken words upon her lips:
+
+"Oh, father!--there bees a man all dead and dhrownded down there by the
+rocks beyant! And he bees so handsome and so much like a rale
+gintleman!--how could he dhround? Come down and see till him, father!"
+
+The fisherman went down, and he and his rough mates removed the body and
+did their humble and ineffectual all to resuscitate a body from which the
+breath of life had long departed. Then the fisherman and his wife and his
+mates and little Shelah all mourned over the manly beauty that had been
+sacrificed, and wondered who he could possibly be, and where his kindred
+would mourn for him. It was only when Father Michael, the good old priest
+of the parish was summoned, that they could form any nearer idea of the
+personality of the drowned man. Then they knew, for Father Michael could
+read, as they could not, and he told them, from one of the cards in the
+pocket-book, that "his name had been Carlton Brand, and that he had
+belonged to Philadelphia, away over in America, where they used to be so
+free and happy, but where they were fighting, now, all the time, about the
+naygurs that didn't seem to him worth the throuble!"
+
+They buried him, with such lamentations as they might have bestowed upon
+"one of their own," in consecrated ground in a little graveyard a mile away
+from the Hill, westward; and Father Michael gave the dead man the benefit
+of a benevolent doubt as to his religion, with the remark that "there were
+good Christians over in America, and this was one of them, maybe!" uttering
+a prayer for the repose of his soul that, if it bore him no nearer to the
+Beautiful Gate, certainly left him no farther away from it, while it
+fulfilled the behest of a simple and beautiful faith! This done, and a note
+despatched to his favorite journal, giving the name and place of burial of
+the unfortunate man, Father Michael felt, as he had reason to feel, that he
+had done his whole melancholy duty.
+
+Whatever the quest of the American, it was ended: whatever had been the
+secret of his unrest, it was not a secret to the eyes that thenceforth
+watched over a destiny no longer temporal but eternal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It has been suggested that Henry Fitzmaurice, the journalist, so strangely
+thrown into the company of the Philadelphian, so much pleased with his
+manner and impressed by his conversation, and so suddenly separated from
+him by an accident which seemed to have something of his own handiwork in
+its production,--was likely to bear with him, during life, a regret born of
+that circumstance. Such being the case, it was eminently natural that in
+giving a description of the accident to the despatch-steamer and the peril
+to her passengers, on the day following, in the _Mail_, he should have
+dwelt at some length on the sad fate of Mr. Carlton Brand, the American,
+alluded in terms of warm respect to the character which had briefly fallen
+under his observation, and felicitates the far-away friends of the
+unfortunate man, on the fact already made public in the _Nation_, that the
+body had been early recovered and received tender and honorable Christian
+burial.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+     PLEASANTON'S ADVANCE ON CULPEPER--CROSSING THE
+     RAPPAHANNOCK--THE FIGHT AND THE CALAMITY OF RAWSON'S
+     CROSS-ROADS--TAKING OF CULPEPER--PLEASANTON'S VOLUNTEER
+     AIDE--TOWNSEND VERSUS COLES--THE MEETING OF TWO WHO LOVED
+     EACH OTHER--AND THE LITTLE RIDE THEY TOOK TOGETHER.
+
+
+On Sunday the thirteenth day of September, 1863, and Monday the fourteenth,
+but principally on the former day, took place that running fight which
+displayed some of the very noblest qualities of the federal cavalry shown
+during the War for the Union, and which is better entitled than otherwise
+to be designated as the Battle of Culpeper. One of the first conclusive
+indications was given in that fight, that while the rebel cavalry, which at
+the beginning of the war was certainly excellent, had been running down
+from the giving out of their trained horses, and the deterioration of the
+quality of their riders through forced conscription,--the Union cavalry, at
+first contemptible in force and inefficient in comparison to their very
+numbers, had every day been improving as fast as augmenting, until they had
+become the superiors of what the best of their foes had been at the
+beginning of the contest. War can make any thing (except perhaps statesmen)
+out of a given quantity of American material; but it can unmake as well,
+when it strains the material existing and creates a forced supply for the
+vacant places of the dead and the vanquished, out of the infirm and the
+incapable; and before the end of this conflict the lesson will have been so
+closely read as never to need a repetition.
+
+The rebels held Culpeper and the south bank of the Rappahannock, and had
+held the whole of that line for weeks, formidable in their occasional
+demonstrations, but still more formidable in what it was believed they
+_might_ do by a sudden crossing of that dividing stream at some moment
+when the Union forces should be deficient in vigilance, preoccupied, or
+otherwise embarrassed. They were to be driven back if possible, from their
+threatening front, or if not driven back, at least struck such a blow as
+would make early offensive operations on their part improbable. These were
+the intentions, so far as they can be known and judged, which led to the
+crossing of the Rappahannock at that particular juncture.
+
+At three o'clock on the morning of that Sunday which was to join with so
+many other days of battle during the rebellion in proving that "there are
+no Sabbaths in war,"--at an hour when the thick darkness preceding the dawn
+hung like a pall over the banks of the rugged stream and the hostile forces
+that fringed it on either side--the cavalry camps on the north side of the
+Rappahannock were all astir. All astir, and yet all strangely quiet, in
+comparison with the activity manifested. No mellow bugle rang out its notes
+of reveille; there was no rattle of drum or shrieking of fife; the laggard
+sleeper was awakened by a touch on the shoulder, a shake, or a quick word
+in his ear. Horses were saddled in silence; and at the commands: "Prepare
+to mount!" "Mount!" given in the lowest possible tones that could command
+attention, the drowsy blue-jacketted, yellow-trimmed troopers, all
+be-spurred and be-sabred as if equal foes to the horses they were to ride
+and the enemies they were to encounter,--vaulted lightly or swung
+themselves heavily, according to the manner of each particular man, into
+their high peaked McClellan saddles that seemed to be all that was left
+them of their old leader. The squadrons were formed as quietly and with as
+few words as had accompanied the awakening and the mounting; for if a
+surprise of the enemy's force was to take place, it was a matter of the
+highest consequence that no loud sound or careless exclamation should reach
+the ears of the wary pickets and wide-awake videttes of the rebels hugging
+close the banks on the south side of the narrow river.
+
+The preparations were at last and hastily completed, long before the gray
+dawn after the moonless night had begun to break over the Virginia hills
+lying dark and cool to the eastward. Perhaps that very morning had been
+selected for the attack because on the night before the new moon had made
+its appearance and there was no tell-tale lingerer to throw an awkward
+gleam on an accoutrement and thus tell a story meant to be concealed.
+Troopers clustered together and formed squadrons, squadrons were merged
+into regiments which in turn swelled to brigades and brigades to divisions.
+It was only then that the extensive nature of the movement, which had
+Pleasanton at the head and Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick all engaged in the
+execution, could have been conjectured even by an eye capable of peering
+through the darkness. It seemed scarcely an hour after the first awakening
+when the formation was complete and the order to "March!" given; and there
+was not even yet a gleam of red in the eastern sky when the whole command
+was in motion.
+
+This large cavalry force, under Pleasanton as we have said, was composed of
+three divisions, commanded respectively by Buford, Gregg and Kilpatrick,
+all Brigadiers. The Rappahannock was crossed at as many different points,
+Buford with the First going over at Starke's Ford; Gregg, with the Second,
+at Sulphur Springs, four miles distant; and Kilpatrick, with the Third, at
+Kelly's Ford, nine miles farther down and thirteen miles distant from the
+place of crossing of the First. Stuart, the famous "Jeb," with his
+confederate cavalry, was known to be in force on the elevated ground at and
+around Culpeper Court House, with his pickets and videttes extending to the
+very edge of the Rappahannock; and a wide sweep of the Union force was
+believed to be necessary to circumvent him. Detachments of rebel troops
+were also known to hold all the prominent points between Culpeper and
+Brandy Station, where the brigades of Lomax and W. F. H. Lee were lying.
+
+Pleasanton was over the river, with all his force before broad daylight--so
+rapid and successful had been the movement. The roads were dry and in as
+good order as Virginia roads are ever allowed to be by the powers that
+preside over highways; and the force, still in the three divisions, swept
+southward as silently as iron-shod animals have the capacity for bearing
+iron-accoutred riders. Napoleon _la Petit_ had never yet succeeded in
+introducing gutta-percha scabbards for the swords of his troopers and
+gutta-percha shoes for their horses, even into the French cavalry; and the
+Yankee troops of Pleasanton had all the disadvantages of the usual rattling
+of bridle-bits, the clattering of sabres within steel scabbards, and the
+pounding of multitudinous hoofs upon the hard dry earth, the latter
+occasionally a little muffled by an inch of gray powdery dust, choking the
+riders as it made their advance less noisy.
+
+Spite of the clanking of hoof and steel, however, the advance was made with
+such silence and celerity that the greater portion of the rebel pickets on
+the southern bank of the Rappahannock were captured, while the
+remainder--here and there one scenting danger afar off and holding an
+advantage in knowledge of the roads--fled in dismay to report that the
+whole Army of the Potomac, sappers and miners, pioneers and pontoniers,
+horse, foot and dragoons, was closing in upon Culpeper.
+
+As the morning advanced and the light grew stronger, so that the danger and
+the persons of the attacking forces could at once be better distinguished,
+skirmishing commenced with that portion of the rebel force, stationed in
+more or less strength at various points and called to arms by their pickets
+being driven in upon them,--to meet and if possible check the advancing
+columns. Not long before they discovered that any effectual check to the
+forces which Pleasanton seemed to be pouring down every cross road and
+throwing out from behind every clump of woods on the roadsides, was
+impossible; and they fell back, skirmishing.
+
+At Brandy Station (droll and unfortunate name, destined to supply more bad
+jokes at the expense of the dry throats of the army than almost any other
+spot on Virginia soil), a junction of the three divisions of Union troops
+was effected; and there, while that disposition was being made, a sharp
+fight took place between the First, under Buford, and the rebel cavalry
+under Colonel Beale of the Ninth Virginia. But that struggle, though sharp,
+was only of brief continuance: out-foughten, and it must be confessed,
+outnumbered, the enemy was driven back from the Station and pursued
+vigorously.
+
+While the gallant Buford was thus occupied with the First, Gregg, with the
+Second division was making a detour to the right and pouring down his
+troopers upon Culpeper from the north by the Ridgeville road, driving
+before him upon the main body at the Court House a rebel brigade that had
+held the advance, under General Lomax (an officer whose name, we may as
+well say, apropos of the bad jokes of war-time, had caused nearly as many
+of those verbal outrages upon English, as the unfortunate Brandy Station
+itself).
+
+Kilpatrick, meanwhile, with his Third division had not been idle. (When was
+he ever known to be idle, except when others held him in check, or
+ineffective except when some other than himself misdirected his dashing
+energy?) He had swept around to the left, nearly at the same time that
+Gregg made the detour to the right, and striking the Stevensburgh road
+advanced rapidly from the east towards Culpeper and the right of the
+enemy's position, which rested on Rawson's Cross-Roads, two miles
+south-east of the Court-House. The rebels here made a stubborn resistance,
+and steel met steel and pistol-shot replied to sabre-stroke as it had not
+before done that day; but the odds were a little against them; they were
+outflanked by that incarnate "raider" of the Sussex mountains of New
+Jersey, who no doubt could trace back some drop of his blood to Johnny
+Armstrong the riever of the Scottish border, or the moss troopers of the
+Bog of Allen in Ireland; and they fell back to the town and beyond it,
+taking up new positions which they were not destined to hold much longer
+than those they had abandoned.
+
+But this brief shock of battle between the division of Kilpatrick and the
+rebels opposed to it, did not roll away from the little hamlet of Rawson's
+Cross-Roads without the enacting of one of those sad tragedies, in the
+shedding of the blood of non-combatants, which seem so much more painful
+than the wholesale but expected slaughter of the field. Near the crossing
+of the roads there stood one brick house, of two stories, the only one of
+that material in the vicinity. This house, when Kilpatrick came up, was
+occupied by the rebel sharp-shooters, partially sheltered by the thick
+walls and bringing down the federal cavalry from their saddles at every
+discharge of their deadly rifles. Such obstructions in the way of an
+advance, especially when they destroy as well as embarrass, are not apt to
+be treated with much toleration by those who have the power to sweep them
+away; and immediately when the imminence of the danger was discovered, one
+of the federal batteries was ordered up to dislodge the sharp-shooters. It
+dashed up with all the celerity that whipped and spurred and galloping
+horses could give it, halted within point-blank range, unlimbered, and sent
+shell, canister and case-shot into and through the obnoxious edifice in a
+manner and with a rapidity little calculated upon by the mason who quietly
+laid his courses of bricks for the front and side-walls, in the quiet years
+before Virginia secession. The sharp-shooters were soon silenced and
+dislodged--at least all of them who were left after the last deadly
+discharge of missiles had been poured in by the battery; and the house was
+at once occupied, when the firing ceased, by a detachment of Union cavalry
+dismounted for that service. When those men entered the half-ruined
+building they first became aware of this extraordinary and deplorable
+tragedy, in which a little blood went so far in awakening regret and
+horror. They heard cries of pain and shrieks of distress and fear, echoing
+through the building, in other accents than those which could belong to
+wounded soldiers--the tones of women! And in the cellar they found the
+painful solution of the mystery--more painful far, to them, than a hundred
+times the death and suffering under ordinary circumstances. In that cellar,
+among smoke, and blood and dust, were huddled twenty or thirty
+non-combatants, men, women and children; and in their midst lay an old man,
+quite dead and the upper part of his head half carried away by a portion of
+shell, while fallen partially across his legs was the body of his son of
+sixteen, his boyish features scarcely yet stilled in the repose of death
+from a ghastly hurt that had torn away the arm and a part of the shoulder.
+Two women lay near, one dying from a blow on the temple which had driven in
+the bones of the skull like the crushing of an egg-shell, and the other
+uttering the most heart-rending of the cries and groans under the agony of
+a crushed leg and a foot literally blown to atoms. A sad sight!--a
+harrowing spectacle, even for war-time! And how had it been occasioned?
+
+It would seem that on the approach of the cavalry and the commencement of
+fighting in the neighborhood, this party of non-combatants had crowded into
+this house--no doubt long to be known in the local traditions of the place
+as that of James Inskip,--and taken refuge in the cellar, believing that in
+it, as the only brick house in the vicinity, they would be safest from the
+missiles of the opposing forces. And so they would have been, safe enough
+beyond a doubt, had not the rebel commander, unaware of the presence of
+non-combatants in the building, or heedless of the common law of humanity
+not to expose them to unnecessary danger in any military operation,
+recklessly placed his sharp-shooters in shelter there and thus drawn the
+fire of the fatal battery. Two or three of the shells, crashing through the
+house, had fallen into the cellar and exploded in the very midst of the
+trembling skulkers in their place of fancied security,--with the sad
+results that have been recorded, and which none more deeply deplored than
+the men who had unwittingly slaughtered the aged and the helpless. Some of
+the Richmond papers told harrowing stories, a few days after, of the
+"inhuman barbarity of the dastardly Yankees who wantonly butchered those
+inoffensive men and helpless women and children in James Inskip's house at
+Rawson's Cross-Roads"; but they forgot, as newspapers on both sides of the
+sad struggle have too often done during its continuance, to add one word of
+the explanatory and extenuating circumstances!
+
+By the time that Kilpatrick, with the Third, had concluded the episode of
+Rawson's Cross-Roads and driven the opposing forces back upon the town,
+Buford, with the First, after chasing the rebel cavalry under Beale to
+moderate satisfaction, had come up from the south, and the junction of the
+three divisions was accomplished.
+
+On the elevated site of Culpeper and in the uneven streets of that old town
+which bears, like so many of its compeers, shabby recollections of English
+aristocracy that for some cause seem to suit it better than the thin
+pretence of democratic government,--there Stuart, than whom the rebellion
+has developed no more restless or more active foe of the Union cause,
+appeared determined to make a last and effectual stand. With a celerity
+worthy of his past reputation he placed sharp-shooters in houses that
+commanded the Union advance, planted batteries at advantageous positions in
+the streets, and threw up barricades of all the unemployed carts and wagons
+and all the idle timber and loose fence-rails lying about the town, in a
+manner which would have endeared him to the Parisians of the time of Louis
+Philippe. Right and left and on every hand, defending these obstructions
+and supporting the batteries, dashed his mounted "Virginia gentlemen," once
+the very Paladins of their knightly class, when Fauquier and the White
+Sulphur saw the pleasant sport of tilting at the ring in the presence of
+the bright-eyed Queens of Beauty of the Old Dominion,--now brought down to
+the level and compelled to contest the fatal advance, of a "horde of Yankee
+tailors on horseback"!
+
+General Pleasanton, the actual as well as nominal head of the Union
+advance, held his position on an eminence a short distance east of the
+town, from which an excellent view of the whole situation could be
+commanded, and whence he directed all the movements with the rapidity of a
+soldier and the coolness of a man thoroughly in confidence with himself and
+well assured of the material of his command. He had won with the same
+troops before, even when placed at disadvantage: that day he felt that the
+game was in his own hands and that he could play it rapidly and yet
+steadily. The thing which worst troubled him as from that little eminence
+he looked out from under his bent brows, over the scene which was to
+witness so short, sharp and decisive a conflict,--was the knowledge how
+seriously the stubborn resistance offered by the rebels was likely to peril
+the non-combatants in the town, and how inevitably, from the same cause,
+the old town itself, just tumble-down enough to be historical and
+picturesque, must suffer from the flying shot and shell that know so little
+mercy. He had hoped, the first surprise succeeding, to take Culpeper
+against but slight resistance; and it was no part of his plan (it never
+_is_ part of the plan of any truly brave man!) to batter the town if that
+measure could be avoided; but the balances and compensations of war are
+appreciable if not gratifying, musketry on one side is nearly sure to be
+answered in kind by the other, and artillery (when there happens to be any,
+and wo to the party without the "big guns" when the other has them at
+command!)--artillery has a very natural habit of replying to the thunderous
+defiance sent out by its hostile kinsmen. Culpeper, too well defended, was
+not the less certain to be taken, while it was the more certain to bear
+marks of the conflict that only the demolition of half its buildings could
+erase.
+
+God pity and help the residents of any town given up to the ruthless
+passions of a fierce soldiery--to plunder and rapine and murder,--after
+what is so inadequately described as "taking by _storm_"! When for the
+moment hell is let loose upon the earth, as if to teach us that if we have
+yet something of the god lingering in our fallen manhood, we have yet
+something of the arch-fiend remaining to show how we accompanied him in
+his fall. When roofs blaze because a reckless hand has dashed a torch
+therein in the very wantonness of destruction. When the golden vessels of
+the church service and the sacred little memorials of happy hours in
+boudoir and bed-room are alike torn from their places, dashed into pieces
+and ground under armed heels, as if the inanimate objects bore a share of
+the wrong of resistance and could feel a part of the suffering meted out to
+it. When murder is for the time licensed and the blood of the defender of
+his door-stone and his hearth dabbles his gray hair on one or the other of
+those sacred places, and there is no thought of punishment for the red
+hand, except as God may silently mete it in the years to come.
+When--saddest and worst of all,--the matron is outraged before the eyes of
+her bound and blaspheming husband; and young girls, the peach-bloom of
+maidenhood not yet brushed from the cheek, are torn shrieking from the arms
+that would shelter them, to be so polluted and dishonored by a ruffian
+touch that but yesterday would have seemed impossible to their dainty flesh
+as the rising up of a fiend from the lower pit to rend the white garments
+of one of the redeemed in heaven,--so polluted and dishonored that a prayer
+for the mercy of death bubbles up from the lips at the last word before
+resistance becomes insensibility.
+
+This wreck of a "storm" of human license is terrible--so terrible that the
+effects of the convulsions of nature, the tempest, the tornado and even the
+earthquake, sink into insignificance beside them. Heaven be praised that
+during the War for the Union, called by our English cousins so
+"fratricidal," we have as yet known no Badajos or even a sacking of Pekin!
+But only second to such scenes in horror and scarcely second in terror,
+have been some of those supplied when the battle issue of the two armies
+was joined near some quiet country town before lying peaceful and
+inoffensive, or when military necessity has made its houses temporary
+fortifications and its streets the points of desperate attacks and as
+desperate defences. Then what crashing of shot and shell through houses;
+what demolition of all that had before been sacred; what huddling together
+of the frightened and the defenceless who never before dreamed that, though
+war was in the land, it would break so near to _them_; what mad gathering
+of valuables and impotent preparations for flight that would be more
+dangerous than remaining; what whistling of bullets that seemed each
+billeted for a defenceless breast; what thunderous discharges of cannon
+that made every non-combatant limb quiver and every delicate cheek grow
+bloodless; what shouts in the street and cries of terror and dismay within
+doors; what trembling peeps through half-closed shutters, with an imagined
+death even in every such momentary exposure; what cowerings in cellars and
+hidings beneath piles of old lumber in garrets; what reports of defeat or
+victory to the party that was feared or favored; what claspings of children
+and ungovernable weepings of hysteria; what prayers and what execrations;
+what breakings-up and destructions of all that had been, and what
+revelations of the desolation that is to be!
+
+Such, since the breaking out of the rebellion, has been the situation of
+many a before-peaceful town, in many a State that once rested happily under
+the shadow of the Eagle's wing. And such was the situation of one fated old
+town that day, when Gregg from the north, Kilpatrick from the east and
+Buford from the south, came up almost simultaneously and their forces
+charged recklessly into the streets of Culpeper Court-House. The excitement
+and confusion in the town at once became all that we have so feebly
+endeavored to indicate--women shrieking in terror, soldiers groaning with
+their wounds, children crying from fright; and blended with these and a
+hundred other inharmonious sounds, the shouts in the street, the bugle
+calls, the hissing of bullets, the rumble of artillery wheels, the broken
+thunder of the feet of trampling horses, the occasional crash of
+half-demolished houses, and the hoarse roar of the batteries as they
+belched out their missiles of death and destruction. Culpeper, for a short
+period, was a veritable pandemonium in miniature; and no detail can add to
+the force of that brief but comprehensive description.
+
+Near the railroad bridge spanning the little stream running nearly through
+the centre of the town, the rebels had discovered a strategic point of no
+little consequence, and they had posted there a battery of several pieces,
+well served and annoying the advance of the Third division very materially.
+The battery seemed to be placed there, not only to obstruct the advance but
+to protect a train of cars just then being loaded by the rebels above, with
+munitions and other articles of consequence, preparatory to a start down
+the railroad southward. Battery D., Second New York Artillery, ordered for
+that service, ran up its sections at a gallop, unlimbered and poured in
+shot and shell, grape and canister upon the train, in such disagreeable
+rapidity as sent the half loaded cars away towards the Rapidan with all the
+speed that could be suddenly mustered. Still the battery at the bridge
+remained, firing rapidly and cutting up the head of Kilpatrick's column in
+a manner calculated to make the General gnash his teeth in indignation. The
+space to the bridge was uphill, accordingly raked downward by the rebel
+fire; the bridge itself was narrow and the footing for horses seriously
+damaged by the railroad tracks that crossed it with their switches and
+lines of slippery iron. Still it was known that that bridge must be
+cleared, at any cost, or the advance through Culpeper would be a most
+bloody one if accomplished at all. Just as Kilpatrick was about to order a
+charge of cavalry to clear that bridge and if possible capture the pieces,
+his intention seemed to be anticipated and a squadron of Stuart's cavalry
+rode down and took post, dismounted, behind the battery, in position to
+support, while three or four companies of rebel riflemen followed, ready to
+do deadly execution with their pieces against any troops attempting to
+charge, and to fall upon that force with resistless fury at the moment of
+their weakness, if the guns should be ridden over! No pleasant prospect,
+as the Sussex raider thought, and for a moment he apparently wavered in
+intention, while the battery played heavily and every instant saw one or
+more of his best troopers biting the dust of the causeway below.
+
+But this momentary indecision, whether or not it would have continued much
+longer of his own volition, was not destined to do so when the will of
+another came into play. A horseman dashed rapidly over to the spot where
+Kilpatrick was momentarily halted, from Pleasanton a few hundreds of yards
+away, running a fearful gauntlet of the enemy's fire, as he did so, from a
+battery that had just wheeled into position and opened down a narrow
+cross-street to the left,--spoke a few quick words to the General and then
+awaited the movement that was to follow. And it was not long that he or the
+commander who sent him needed to wait. The command had been: "Clear that
+bridge and take the battery, at all hazards!" and Kilpatrick only needed
+that support of his own judgment to order a charge which he would have been
+best pleased, if he could only have gone back to be a Colonel for a few
+moments, to lead in person. His eye rolled questioningly over the Third for
+a moment, and then the rapid words of command followed. Only a certain
+number of cavalry could be employed upon that dangerous service, without
+making the carnage greater by throwing the troopers literally in the way of
+each other; and it was the Second New York, Harris Light Guard, a troop
+which had already won honor on every field touched by the hoofs of their
+horses,--called out for that quick, sharp, perilous duty that every
+squadron in the command probably coveted.
+
+The gallant Second received the order with loud cheers that came nigh to
+imitating the well-known rebel fox-hunting yell, for some of their best
+fellows had fallen ingloriously and the human tiger was not only unchained
+but set on horseback. They formed column by fours with a rapidity which
+told of the fierce hunger of conflict; and when the bugles rang out the
+charge, the dusty and smoke-stained riders returned their now-useless
+carbines to their slings, drew sabres, and driving their spurs rowel deep
+into the flanks of horses that seemed almost as anxious as themselves,
+dashed forward towards the bridge. Their ringing shouts did not cease as
+they galloped on, and their sword-blades, if they grew thinner in number,
+still gleamed as brightly as ever in the sunlight, as they measured that
+narrow but fatal space, while round after round of grape and canister,
+carbine-bullets, musket-balls and rifle-shots, burst into their faces and
+mowed down their flanks as they swept on. Saddles were emptied, horses went
+down with cries of pain more fearful than any that man can utter, and brave
+men went headlong into the dust from which they would never rise again in
+life. But the progress of the charging squadron did not seem to be delayed
+a moment. The rebel gunners of the battery were reloading for yet one more
+discharge, when, just in the midst of that operation, over the bridge and
+upon them burst the head of that column which seemed as if nothing in the
+way of human missiles had power to stay it. Before the gray and begrimed
+cannoniers could withdraw their rammers the troopers were in their midst.
+Then followed that fierce cutting and thrusting of artillery swords and
+cavalry sabres, that interchange of revolver-shots and crushing of human
+bones under the feet of trampling horses, incident to the taking of any
+battery that is sharply attacked and bravely defended. A little of this,
+but still under heavy fire from behind,--and the guns were captured, with
+all their men and horses left alive.
+
+And yet the work of the Second New York in that quarter was by no means
+finished. That steady and murderous fire continued from up the street, as
+the infantry and the dismounted cavalry of the support fell back; and it
+was only by one more sweeping charge that the annoyance could be removed.
+Scarcely any one knew whence came the voice that ordered that second
+charge, but the blood of the troopers was up and they made it gallantly. In
+three minutes thereafter a broken and flying mass, far up the street, was
+all that remained of the supporting force; but a fearfully diminished
+number of the cavalrymen rode back to assist in sending the captured
+battery to the rear. We shall have occasion, presently, to know something
+more of these two charges, undoubtedly the most spirited events of a day on
+which all the Union troops and many of the rebels reflected honor upon the
+causes they supported.
+
+Immediately after the clearing of the bridge a gallant dash was made by
+Gen. Custer, the "boy general with the golden-locks" (the man who has made
+a solemn vow, it is said, never to shorten those locks until he rides
+victoriously into Richmond) leading the charge in person, with portions of
+the First Vermont and First Michigan cavalry, against a section of a
+battery, stationed nearly a quarter of a mile beyond the bridge and within
+a hundred or two yards of the front of Stuart's main body. These pieces
+were worked by as obstinate a set of gray-backs as ever rammed home a rebel
+cartridge; and the gunners, defiant of Custer's detour to the left to
+escape a direct raking fire, and apparently relying upon the main body
+lying so near them, continued to load and fire until the federal leader and
+his men were literally on the top of the pieces and fairly riding them
+under foot. Guns and caissons were taken, while the support relied upon
+seemed to be so paralyzed by the daring of the whole affair as scarcely to
+offer any resistance,--the horses hitched to the pieces, the guns limbered
+up, and the rebel gunners even forced to mount and drive their lost cannon
+to join the others in the rear!
+
+A considerable rebel force of cavalry, artillery and infantry were by this
+time in full retreat below the town, along the line of the Orange and
+Alexandria railroad; and the Fifth New York cavalry were sent in pursuit.
+The gallant troopers of the Fifth charged at a gallop the moment they came
+within sweeping distance of the foe, but the high embankment of the road
+broke the charge, and the detour necessary to make a more advantageous
+approach deprived the gallant boys of their half-won laurels and allowed
+the flying enemy to escape.
+
+While Kilpatrick was thus engaged, Buford and Gregg, with the First and
+Second, had been by no means idle. Dashing into the town, each from his
+chosen direction, the troopers of each leaped barricades and drove the
+rebels before them wherever encountered upon open ground; and a part of the
+force of either division, dismounted, skirmished from corner to corner and
+dislodged the sharp-shooters one by one from all their holes and
+hiding-places. Sometimes stubbornly resisted, at others seeming to have no
+foe worthy of their steel, the three divisions won their way through the
+old town; and the cavalry of Stuart, up to that time so often declared
+invincible, were at last driven pell-mell out of Culpeper and back to the
+momentary refuge of Pony Mountain. Even there they were again dislodged,
+the First Michigan cavalry accomplishing a feat which might have surprised
+even Halstead Rowan of this chronicle--routing a whole brigade by charging
+up a hill so steep that some of the riders slipped backwards over the tails
+of their horses, their saddles bearing them company!
+
+The town of Culpeper was finally occupied at one o'clock, P. M.; and not
+many hours after the ridge behind it and Pony Mountain were in the hands of
+the dashing cavalrymen. Retreating towards the Rapidan, they were pursued
+towards Raccoon Ford on the left and centre by Buford and Kilpatrick with
+the First and Third divisions, while Gregg, with the Second, pushed a heavy
+Rebel force before him to Rapidan Station. By nightfall the rebels had been
+driven to the north bank of the Rapidan, where both forces bivouacked that
+night in line of battle.
+
+Monday morning saw the recommencement of hostilities and the retreat of the
+rebels to the south side of the river, leaving the federal forces to hold
+the country between the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, with all the
+strategic points therein, Culpeper included. Stuart, it was said, had
+often boasted that "no Yankee force could drive _him_ from Culpeper!" and
+if such a boast was really made and afterwards so signally disproved by the
+"horde of Yankee tailors on horseback," the fact only furnishes one more
+additional proof to Benedick's declaration that he would live and die a
+bachelor, so soon followed by his marriage with Beatrice,--that humanity is
+very uncertain and that human calculations are fallible to a degree painful
+to contemplate!
+
+Such were the general features of the crossing of the Rappahannock and the
+Battle of Culpeper, one of the sharpest cavalry affairs of the war, and
+perhaps more important as illustrating the reliability to which the Union
+horse had attained from a beginning little less than contemptible, than
+from the mere military advantage gained by the movement. It now becomes
+necessary to descend to a few particulars connected with the event of the
+day, and briefly to trace the influence on the fortunes of some of the
+leading characters in this narration, exercised by the advance of General
+Pleasanton and his dashing brigadiers.
+
+It has been seen that at a certain period of that day the division of
+Kilpatrick was held temporarily in check by the rebel battery posted at the
+railroad-bridge, and that for a moment the General, aware of the necessity
+of removing the obstruction if the direct advance through Culpeper was to
+be continued, yet hesitated in ordering the charge which must be made in
+the face of such overwhelming difficulty, until a peremptory direction from
+Pleasanton left him no option in the matter. And it is to personal
+movements of that particular period that attention must at this moment be
+directed.
+
+Just when he made the discovery through his field glass of the havoc being
+wrought by the rebel battery and the momentary hesitation, Pleasanton, who
+did not happen to be in the best of humors with reference to it, was placed
+in the same situation in which Wellington for a few moments found himself
+on the day of Waterloo, when he employed the button-bagman with the blue
+umbrella under his arm, to carry some important orders. He was, in short,
+out of aide-de-camps. One by one they had been sent away to different
+points, and it so chanced, just then, that none had returned. Something
+very much like an oath muttered between the lips of the impatient veteran
+of forty, and one exclamation came out so that there was no difficulty in
+recognizing it:
+
+"Nobody here when everybody is worst wanted! I wish the d--l had the whole
+pack of them!"
+
+"Perhaps _I_ can do what you wish, General."
+
+The words came from a young man in civilian's dress--gray pants and
+broad-brimmed felt hat, but with a military suspicion in his coat of light
+blue flannel,--who stood very near the commander, his horse's bridle over
+arm and a large field glass in hand, and who had apparently been scanning
+with much interest a scene of blood in which it was neither his duty nor
+his disposition to take part.
+
+"You?" and the veteran turned upon him, with something very like a laugh on
+his lips. "You? Humph! Do you know what I want?"
+
+"Some one to carry an order, I suppose!"
+
+"Exactly! Over that causeway, to Kilpatrick at the bridge. Do you see how
+that flanking battery to the left is raking every thing, and the one in
+front is throwing beyond Kil's position? The chances are about even that
+the man who starts never gets there! Now do you wish to go?"
+
+"No objection on that account!" was the reply of the young man, who seemed
+to be on terms of very easy intimacy with the General, as indeed he was,--a
+privileged visitor, who had accompanied him in the advance, but eminently
+"unattached" and thus far neither fighting nor expected to fight.
+
+"The d--l you haven't! Well, ----, that is certainly cool, for _you_! Never
+mind--if you like a little personal taste of what war really is, take
+this," and he scribbled a few words on a slip of paper on his raised
+knee--"take this and get it to Kilpatrick as soon as you can. If you do not
+come back again, I shall send word to your family."
+
+"Oh, yes, thank you, General; but I shall come back again!" He had swung
+himself into the saddle of his gray, while Pleasanton was writing, and the
+veteran held the paper for one instant in his hand and looked into his face
+with a strange interest. What he saw there seemed to satisfy him, and he
+handed the paper with a nod. The volunteer aide-de-camp received it with a
+bow, and the next moment was flying towards the front of the Third, riding
+splendidly, running the gauntlet that has before been suggested, but
+untouched, and delivering his orders in very quick time and at emphatically
+the right moment. The important movement which immediately followed has
+already been narrated, in its bearing on the result of the day; but there
+were other effects not less important when personal destinies are taken
+into the account.
+
+Gregg, who espied something on the right, that was likely to be hidden from
+Kilpatrick until it discovered itself by unpleasant consequences, had sent
+over an aide with a word of warning; and nearly at the same moment when the
+volunteer messenger from Pleasanton reached the brigadier, the officer from
+Gregg rode rapidly up from his direction. Both delivered their messages in
+a breath, and then both fell back at a gesture from the General. The aide
+from Gregg was turning his horse to ride back again to his post, when he
+caught a glance at the somewhat strangely attired man who had come in from
+Pleasanton. From his lower garments that glance naturally went up to his
+hat, and thence, by an equally natural movement, to his face. The dark
+brows of the officer bent darker in an instant, and perhaps there was that
+in his gaze which the other _felt_, (there are those who assert that such
+things are possible), for the next instant there was an answering glance
+and another pair of brows were knitted not less decidedly. Those two men
+were serving (more or less) in the same cause, but they looked as little as
+possible like two warm-hearted comrades in arms--much more as if they would
+have been delighted to take each other by the throat and mutually exert
+that gentle pressure calculated to expel a life or two!
+
+Pleasanton was just calling out the Second to take the battery and clear
+the bridge. While he was doing so, the evil genius of one of those men
+drove them into collision. The messenger from Gregg, who wore the
+shoulder-straps and other accoutrements of a Captain on staff service, but
+with a cavalry sabre at his belt,--after the pause of a moment and while
+the other was still fixedly regarding him, spurred his horse close up to
+the side of the gray ridden by the civilian, and accosted him in a tone and
+with a general manner that he seemed to take no pains to render amiable:
+
+"What are _you_ doing here?"
+
+"On staff service, Captain. How is your head?" was the reply, with quite as
+much of sneer in the tone as the other had displayed of arrogance.
+
+"What do you call yourself just now?--'Horace Townsend' still?" was the
+Captain's next inquiry.
+
+"To most others, yes: to you, Captain Hector Coles, just now, I am--" and
+he bent his mouth so close to the ear of the other that he could have no
+difficulty in hearing him, though he spoke the last words in a hoarse
+whisper that has even escaped _us_!
+
+"I thought so, all the while!" was the reply, an expression of malignant
+joy crossing the face. "The same infernal coward--I knew it!"
+
+The face of the man who had been Horace Townsend seemed convulsed by a
+spasm of mortal agony the instant after, but it gave place almost as
+quickly to an expression of set, deadly anger, the eyes blazing and the
+cheeks livid. He leaned close to the Captain and even grasped his arm as if
+to make sure that he should not get away before he had finished his whole
+sentence.
+
+"Captain Hector Coles," he said, still in the same low, hoarse voice, but
+so near that the other could easily hear--"you called me the same name five
+or six weeks ago at the Crawford House, and I am afraid that I _proved_
+that it belonged to _you_!"
+
+"I told you that I would kill you some day for that impertinence, and I
+_will_!" was the reply of the Captain, terrible anger in his face.
+
+"No--if you kill me at all, and I do not think you will,--it will be
+because you believe me, with good reason, something more of a favorite with
+a lady whose name it is not necessary to mention, than yourself!"
+
+This insulting boast of preference and allusion to Margaret Hayley were
+quite as well understood as they needed to be. There was another livid
+cheek, just then, and a fierce answering fire in the eye which told how
+deeply the barb rankled. But before the Captain could speak, to utter words
+that must have been equally bitter and blasphemous, the civilian continued:
+
+"You challenged me for what I said at the White Mountains, Captain Hector
+Coles--you man with a swimming in the head! I refused your challenge then,
+but I accept it now. If you are not the coward you called _me_, you will
+fight me here and instantly!"
+
+"Here and now?" These were all the words that the surprised and possibly
+horrified Captain could utter.
+
+"Exactly!" was the reply, the voice still low and hoarse but rapid and
+without one indication of tremor. "I told you that I was on staff service.
+So I am. I have just brought General Kilpatrick orders from General
+Pleasanton to clear that bridge and take the battery yonder that is doing
+us so much damage. Ah! by George--there goes another of our best fellows!"
+This as a round shot came tearing into the ranks just ahead, killing one of
+the troopers and his horse. Then he resumed, in the same low rapid tone:
+"You see those New York boys forming there, to do the work. Ride with them
+and with _me_, if you DARE, Captain Hector Coles, and see who goes
+furthest! That is my duel!"
+
+"_I?_--I am on staff duty--not a mere cavalryman!" There was hesitation in
+the voice and deadly pallor on the cheek: the civilian heard the one and
+saw the other.
+
+"Refuse to go with me and fight out our quarrel in that manner," the
+excited voice went on, "and by the God who made us both, the whole army
+shall know who is the coward! More--" and again his mouth was very near to
+the ear of the other--"_she_ shall know it!"
+
+There are spells by which the fiend can always be raised, without much
+doubt, however troublesome it may be to find any means by which to lay him
+afterwards. To Captain Hector Coles there was one conjuration irresistible,
+and that had been used in the present instance. Shame before the whole army
+was nothing--it may be doubted, in fact, whether he had not known something
+of that infliction before at least a portion of the army, and survived it
+without difficulty. But shame before Margaret Hayley, after the boasts he
+had used, the underrating of others in which he had indulged, and the
+worship of physical courage which he knew to be actually a foible in her
+nature?--no, that was not to be thought of for one moment! Better wounds or
+death, out of the way of both which he had before so skilfully kept, than
+that! This reflection did not occupy many seconds, and his heavy brow was
+as black as thunder as he turned short round in the saddle and almost
+hissed at his tempter:
+
+"Come on, then, fool as well as coward, and see how long before I will
+teach you a lesson!"
+
+Horace Townsend--as he must still be called--did not say another word in
+reply. The Light Guard were by that time formed for the charge, and he
+merely said, in the hearing of all:
+
+"Come--the Captain and I are going to take a ride with the boys! Who will
+lend me a sword?"
+
+The strange demand for a moment drew general attention to him, and among
+other regards that of Kilpatrick. The idea of a civilian throwing himself
+into such a charge seemed to strike him at once, and before one of the
+orderlies could draw out his weapon and present it, the General had handed
+his, with the words:
+
+"Here is mine!--Mind that you bring it back again!"
+
+Kilpatrick unslung his sword and held up the scabbard with the blade, but
+the new volunteer merely drew out the blade with a bow and driving spurs
+into his gray dashed forward to the head of the column, Captain Hector
+Coles close beside him. Perhaps no two men ever went into battle side by
+side, with precisely the same relative feelings, since carving up men with
+the broadsword became a profession. Neither, it seems almost certain, had
+the least thought of devotion to the country, of hatred to the rebellion,
+or even of _esprit du corps_, moving him to the contest. The one was intent
+upon revenging an insult received long before, by getting the other killed
+in proving him a coward,--and may have had another but still personal
+motive: that other was equally anxious to keep up his own reputation in the
+eyes of a woman, and to get removed out of his way a man whom he believed
+to be a rival, but who was really no more in his way than Shakspeare's
+nobody who "died a' Wednesday." Both half blind with rage and hate, and
+both, therefore--let the truth be told--bad soldiers! Both following a
+petty whim or facing death as a mere experiment, and neither with the most
+distant thought of the fate that rode close behind, to protect or to slay,
+and each alike inevitably!
+
+Just then the bugle rang out, the commands "Column forward! Trot, march!
+Gallop, march! Charge!" rang out in quick succession, and away dashed the
+Second, with the results that have already been foreshadowed in the general
+account of the movement. But though armies and the various smaller bodies
+that form armies, are great aggregates of manhood, they are something more;
+and who can measure, in reading an account of that bridge so gallantly
+carried, that attack so splendidly repulsed, or that point of battle held
+against every odds, with the conclusion--"Our loss was only two hundred [or
+two thousand], in killed and wounded,"--who can measure, we ask, the amount
+of personal suffering involved in that movement and its result?--who can
+form any guess at the variety of personal adventure, depression,
+elevation, hope, fear, delirious joy and maddening horror, going to make up
+that event spoken of so flippantly as one great total?
+
+The rebel battery beyond the bridge had been throwing round shot and shell,
+as has already been observed, reaching far beyond Kilpatrick's front and
+doing heavy damage. It was inevitable that as the advance of the attacking
+column was seen, that fire should be redoubled. And before they had crossed
+half the intervening distance the rain of bullets from the supporting rebel
+riflemen began to blend with the fall of heavier projectiles, making a very
+storm of destructive missiles, more difficult for horsemen to breast than
+any opposing charge of their own weight could have been, splitting heads,
+crashing out brains, boring bodies full of holes from which the blood and
+the life went out together, and hurling horses and riders to the ground
+with such frequency that wounded men had their little remaining breath
+trampled out by their own comrades and every fallen animal formed a
+temporary barricade over which another fell and became disabled. Through
+the air around them rang the scream of shell and the shrill whistle of
+bullets, blended with the inevitable cry that rose as some bullet found a
+fatal mark, and the roar of agony when a horse was hurled desperately
+wounded and yet living to the ground. The shout with which the troopers had
+at first broken into their charge, did not die away; and it did not cease,
+in fact, until the command had done its work--until the battery was taken
+and the supports scattered by the supplementary onset; but with what sounds
+it was blent before the cavalrymen reached the rebel guns, only those who
+have listened to the same horrible confusion of noises can form the most
+distant idea. To all others the attempt at description must be as vague as
+the thought of Armageddon or the Day of Falling Mountains!
+
+If those sights and sounds cannot be described, who shall describe the
+sensations of those who then for the first time rode point-blank into the
+very face of death? Not we, certainly. The very man who has experienced
+them can tell no more, one hour after, of what existed at the time, than
+one moment's rift in a drifting cloud reveals of the starlit heaven above.
+
+What Captain Hector Coles really felt when first meeting that iron and
+leaden storm so unlike the usual accompaniments of his "staff service," may
+be guessed but can never be known. He rode on gallantly, at least for a
+time: that was quite enough.
+
+What the _ci-devant_ Horace Townsend experienced may be easily enough
+indicated, and in one word--_madness_. He was stark, raving mad! The anger
+felt a few moments before; the novelty of the position; the motion of a
+horse that bore him nobly: the sword, that was no holiday weapon but a
+thing of might and death, clasped by his unaccustomed but nervous hand; the
+shouts of fierce bravery, the groans of anguish and the scream of missiles;
+above all, the rousing for the first time of that human tiger which sleeps
+within most of us until the fit moment of awakening comes--no witches'
+cauldron on a blasted heath ever brewed such a mixture to craze a human
+brain, as that he was so suddenly drinking; and it may be said that his
+rational self knew nothing of what followed. He was riding on--it might
+have been on horseback on the solid earth, in a fiery chariot through the
+air, or on the crest of a storm-wave at sea--he could have formed no idea
+which. When he came within striking distance of the foe, he was swinging
+that heavy sword of Kilpatrick's, at something, everything, he knew not
+what, that seemed to stand in his way. Nothing appeared to hurt him,
+nothing to stop him or the gallant gray he rode. There was a red mist over
+his eyes, and the thunder of twenty judgments rang in his ears: he knew no
+more. He was mad, stark mad--so drunk with the wine of human blood and the
+fiendish joy of battle, that the powers of heaven might have looked down in
+pity on him as upon a new and better developed descendant of the original
+Cain, smiting all his brothers to a death that could not satisfy the hot
+thirst of his evil soul.
+
+Only once he seemed to be for a moment clearly conscious. It was when they
+rode full upon the battery, trampling down men and horses and sabring every
+thing that had life, but under a fire which seemed to rain from the opened
+windows of hell. He saw a man who had thus far kept at his side, recoil,
+rein his horse backward, leap over the fallen friends and foes who barred
+his flight, and dash down the track towards the bridge. He saw, and knew
+Captain Hector Coles; and in his madness he had reason enough left to shout
+"Aha! Coward! Coward!" and then the red mist closed again over his eyes and
+he fought on. He did not see what followed before the flying man reached
+the bridge--the fragment of a shell that struck him in the back and
+literally tore him in pieces, horse and rider going down and lying stone
+dead together.
+
+He could not have told, under oath, who gave the command for that
+supplemental charge upon the supporting force. And yet _his_ tongue uttered
+it, and he was in the front, still waving his sword through the red mist
+and letting it fall with demoniac force upon every thing that stood in his
+way,--when the last hope of the rebels was thus broken. He had known but
+little, most of the time: after that he knew literally nothing except that
+his fierce joy had turned to pain. As if through miles of forest he heard
+the notes of the bugles sounding the recall; and he had a dim consciousness
+of hearing the soldiers speaking of him in words that would have given him
+great pleasure had he been alive to appreciate them! Then he was back at
+the bridge. Kilpatrick was there, somebody cheered, and the General held
+out his hand to him. He tried to hand him back the sword that had done such
+good service, said: "I have brought it--back--" and spoke no more. Then and
+only then, as he fell from his blown and beaten gray, they knew that his
+first charge had a likelihood of being his last--that a Minie bullet,
+received so long before that some of the blood lay dried upon his coat,
+had passed through him from breast to back,--thank God not from back to
+breast!--so near the heart that even the surgeon could not say whether it
+had touched or missed it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+     ONCE MORE AT WEST PHILADELPHIA--SEPTEMBER AND CHANGE--LAST
+     GLIMPSES OF KITTY HOOD AND DICK COMPTON--ROBERT BRAND AND
+     HIS INVITED GUEST--THE NEWS OF DEATH--OLD ESPETH GRAEME AS A
+     SEERESS--THE DESPATCH FROM ALEXANDRIA--THE QUEST OF BRAND
+     AND MARGARET HAYLEY.
+
+
+Hurrying rapidly towards its close, this narration must become yet more
+desultory and at times even more fragmentary, than it has been in the past.
+The seven-league boots of story must be pulled on, however unwillingly, and
+many a spot that would have been lingered lovingly over at the commencement
+of the journey, cleared now with a glance and a bound. The few pages that
+remain, in fact, may justify a change in the figure, appearing more like
+lightning glimpses from railroad-car windows than connected and leisurely
+views of the whole landscape of story.
+
+September on West Philadelphia, where it seems but yesterday, though really
+three months ago, that we saw the fair June morning and inhaled the perfume
+of the sweet June roses. Those roses, the companions in life and death of
+that with which Margaret Hayley was toying on the morning when she met the
+crushing blow of her life,--had long since sighed out their last breath of
+fragrance and faded away, to be followed now by the bright green leaves
+amid which they had clustered and peeped and hidden. The waving grain
+fields which had formed so pleasant a portion of the June landscape, were
+changed as much, though less sadly. Bright golden wheat that had formed
+part of it, lay heaped in the farmer's granaries; and puffed loaves with
+crisp brown crust, made from that which had still further progressed in its
+round of usefulness to man, lay on the baker's counter. There was short
+stubble where the grain had waved, and over it the second growth of clover
+was weaving its green mantle of concealment. In the peach orchards the
+fruit hung ripe to tempt the fingers; the apples were growing more golden
+amid the masses of leaves where they coyly sheltered themselves from the
+sun; and on the garden trellises there already began to be dots of purple
+among the amber green of the grape clusters. There was less of bright,
+glossy green in the foliage--nature's summer coat had been some time worn
+and began to give tokens of the rain and wind and sun it had encountered.
+The birds sang in the branches, but their song seemed more staid and less
+sprightly, as if they too had felt the passage of the months, grown older,
+and could be playful children no more. Occasionally the long clarionet
+chirp of a locust would break out and trill and die away upon the air,
+telling of fading summer and the decline of life so sweetly and yet so
+sadly that decay became almost a glory. The mellow, golden early afternoon
+of the year, as June had been its late morning--not less beautiful,
+perhaps, but oh how immeasurably less sprightly and bewitching--how much
+more calm, sober and subduing!
+
+Nature moves onward, and humanity seldom stands still, if it does not
+outstrip the footsteps of the mother. Something of the changes that had
+fallen during the preceding three months upon that widely varied group of
+residents beyond the Schuylkill who have supplied characters to this
+narration, is already known: what remains may be briefly told at this stage
+and in the closing events soon to follow. Of those changes to Eleanor Hill,
+Nathan Bladesden and Dr. Pomeroy, directly; of those to the members of the
+Brand household, yet sooner; of those to two minor characters who will make
+no further appearance upon the stage during this life-drama, at once. Let
+that two be Dick Compton, farmer, and Kitty Hood, school-mistress. The
+latter yet managed her brood of troublesome children, who still sailed
+their vessels that had succeeded to the evanescent three-master "Snorter,
+of Philadelphia," at playtime, in the little pond before the rural
+school-house, and performed other juvenile operations by sea and shore; but
+a great change had fallen upon the merry, self-willed little girl with the
+brown eyes and the wavy brown hair. The school had a mistress, but that
+mistress had a _master_--a sort of "power behind the throne" not seldom
+managed by one sex or the other, towards all persons "in authority." No
+bickerings at the school-house door, to be afterwards forgotten in
+explanations and kisses, now. Richard Compton found his way there,
+occasionally and perhaps oftener, but he always came in at once instead of
+the school-mistress going out to meet him with a bashful down-casting of
+the eyes and a pretty flush of modesty upon the cheek; and he made so
+little concealment about the visits that he often managed them so as to
+wait until school was dismissed and then walked all the way home with her!
+If the young lovers yet had secrets, they found some other place than the
+neighborhood of the school-house door, for their utterance. And the big
+girls and the bigger boys, who used to enjoy such multitudes of sly gibes
+at the school-mistress and her "beau," had lost all their material of
+amusement. The very last attempt at jocularity in that direction had been
+some time before effectually "squelched" by the dictum of the biggest boy
+in school: "You boys, jest stop peeking at 'em! He ain't her beau no
+more--he's her husband; and you jest let 'em do what they're a mind to!"
+
+That is the fact, precisely--no less assured because approached with a
+little necessary circumlocution. Dick Compton had come back from
+Gettysburgh with the Reserves, unwounded and a hero. Carlton Brand was
+gone, and the only object of jealousy removed. And before Kitty had quite
+emerged from her "valley of humiliation" at the unfortunate slap and
+unpatriotic upbraiding, she found it too late to emerge at all. The
+wedding-day had been set and the marriage taken place, almost before she
+had any idea that such things were in immediate contemplation! Kitty Hood
+was "Mrs. Richard Compton," and that was the secret of the visits no longer
+stolen and the unabashed walking home together. Not that the visits of the
+young farmer to the school excited no commotion, now-a-days, but that the
+commotion was of a different character. All the big boys and some of the
+big girls hated him, as he strode up the aisle with his broad, hearty:
+"'Most ready to go home, Kitty?" and his proprietary taking possession of
+her with his eyes: hated him because he had to some extent come between her
+and them, and because there was a rumor that "after November he was not
+going to allow her to keep school any more." Perhaps there were good
+reasons for this resolution, into which we shall certainly make no more
+attempt to pry than was made by the big boys themselves! God's blessing on
+the young couple, with as much content in the farm-house as can well fall
+to the lot of a small indefinite number,--and with as few
+misunderstandings, coldnesses and jealousies as may be deemed necessary by
+the powers that preside over married life, to fit them for that life in
+which "they neither marry nor are given in marriage!" And so exit Mr. and
+Mrs. Richard Compton, for whom we have done all that the friend and the
+minister could do, leaving Providence and the doctor to take care of the
+remainder.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That matter properly disposed of, it becomes necessary to visit the house
+of Robert Brand once more, on the morning of Friday the eighteenth day of
+September, after an absence from it of nearly the three months before
+designated. Change here, too. Besides whatever might have been wrought in
+the master of the house during that period, of which we shall be soon
+advised, there had been a marked difference wrought in the relations
+sustained by good, warm-hearted, sisterly, darling little Elsie. There had
+been no return to the house, of the old family physician, first
+expatriated, so to speak, by word of mouth, and then bull-dogged and
+threatened with the protrusion of loaded muskets from convenient windows
+and the application of the strong arms of old Elspeth Graeme who could
+handle the bull-dog. The doctor's-bill had long before been settled, and
+(let us put the whole truth upon record) spent! Then Robert Brand had been
+again seized with terrible illness and suffering, rendering a physician
+necessary; and what resource was left except the before-despised
+professional services of Dr. James Holton? None whatever. So the old man
+thought and so Elsie Brand _knew_. Result, Dr. James Holton had suddenly
+found himself, in July, the medical adviser of the Brands, and the adviser,
+mental, moral and medical, of Elsie. He had since so remained, seeming to
+do marvels at re-establishing the shattered constitution of the invalid and
+setting him once more on his natural feet, and with a pleasant prospect
+that all the difficulties were smoothed out of the way of his eventual
+union with Elsie, when a little more time and a little enlarged practice
+should make their marriage advisable. And Elsie had grown almost happy once
+more--quite happy in the regard of a good man whom she loved with all the
+warmth of the big heart in her plump little body, and yet restless, nervous
+and tearful when she thought of the brother cherished so dearly, of his
+broken love, his alienated father, his absence in a strange land, and the
+probability that she could never again lay her golden head upon his breast
+and look up into his eyes as to the noblest and most godlike of them all.
+
+At a little before noon on that September morning, a single figure was
+moving slowly backward and forward, up and down, the length of the garden
+walk in the rear of the house of Robert Brand, the trellises of the grapery
+above and on either side, for nearly the whole distance, flecking the
+autumn sunshine that fell on the walk and on the moving figure, while from
+the vines themselves peeped the thick clusters of amber fruit upon which
+the purple bloom was just beginning to throw a hint of October and luscious
+ripeness. Late flowers bloomed in the walks and borders on either side;
+occasionally a bird sent up its quiet and contented twitter from the top of
+the vine where it was tasting a premature grape; a cicala's chirp rang
+feebly out, swelled up to a volume that filled the whole garden, then died
+away again, an indefinable feeling of stillness seeming to lie in the very
+sound. The sunlight was golden, the sky perfectly cloudless, the air balmy
+and indolent; beneath the trellis and beside the walk two long rustic
+settees combined with the wooing air and beckoned to closed eyes,
+day-dreams and repose; and yet the very opposite of repose was expressed in
+the appearance and movement of that single figure.
+
+It was that of Robert Brand, three months older than we saw him in the
+early summer, far less an invalid than he had been at that time, as
+evidenced by the absence of his swathed limb and supporting cane, yet more
+broken within that period than most men break in ten twelvemonths--more
+than he had himself broken before in the same period of his severest years
+of bodily suffering. Something of the iron expression of the mouth was
+gone, and in its place were furrowed lines of suffering that the torture of
+the body could scarcely have imprinted there without the corresponding
+agony of the mind; he was more stooped in the shoulders than he had been
+when before observed; and down the side-hair that showed from beneath his
+broad hat--hair that had been fast but evenly changing from gray to white,
+there now lay great streaks of finger thickness, white as the driven snow
+and in painful contrast with the other,--such streaks as are not often made
+in hair or beard except by the pressure of terrible want, a great sorrow,
+or a month of California fever. This was not all--he walked with head
+dejectedly bent, and hands beneath the skirts of his coat; and when he
+glanced up for a moment it could be seen that his lip trembled and the eye
+had a sad, troubled expression that might have told of tears past, tears
+to come, or a feeling far too absorbing for either. Alas!--the old man was
+indeed suffering. The shame of a life had been followed by its sorrow. He
+had erred terribly in meeting the one, and paid the after penalty: how
+could he muster fortitude enough to meet the other?
+
+To him old Elspeth Graeme, large-faced, massive-framed, and powerful
+looking as of old, with a countenance no more changed during the preceding
+three months than a granite boulder in the mountains might have been
+affected by a little wind and storm during the same lapse of time. Behind
+her Carlo, who since the disappearance of his young master seemed to have
+found no one else except the old Scottish woman who could pretend to
+exercise any control over him, and who consequently had attached himself to
+her almost exclusively. The master, who was making one of his turns up the
+walk, saw her as she emerged from the house, and met her as she approached,
+with inquiry in face and voice.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Stephen has just come ben with the carriage, and the leddy is in the
+house, though the Laird kens what ye'r wantin' of her here, ava!"
+
+"Hold your tongue, woman! When I need your opinion I will ask you for it!"
+This in a tone very much like that of the Robert Brand of old, in little
+squabbles of the same character. Then with the voice much softened: "Is
+Margaret Hayley in the house, do you say?"
+
+"'Deed she is, then, and she'll just be tired of waiting for ye, as the
+lassie's gone, gin ye dinna haste a bit!"
+
+"I will come--no, ask her to step into the garden; I will see her here."
+
+"He's gettin' dafter than ever, I'm thinkin', to invite a born leddy out
+into the garden to see _him_, instead of ganging in till her as he should!"
+muttered the old serving-woman as she turned away to obey the injunction,
+and in that way satisfying, for the time, her part of the inevitable
+quarrel. The moment after the back door of the house opened again, and
+Margaret Hayley came out alone. Stately as ever in step, though perhaps a
+little slower; the charm of youth and budding womanhood in face and figure,
+with the broad sun flashing on her dark hair and seeming to crown her with
+a dusky glory; but something calmer, softer, sadder, ay, even older,
+visible in her whole appearance and manner, than could have been read there
+in that first morning of June, upon the piazza of her own house. She, too,
+had been living much within a brief period: it may be that the course of
+this narration has furnished the reader with better data for judging _how_
+much, than any that lay in the possession of Robert Brand.
+
+She approached the end of the arbor from which he was emerging, and he met
+her before she had reached it. Her face, as they met, wore an unmistakable
+expression of wonder--his an equally unmistakable one of pain. Neither
+spoke for one moment, then the old lawyer held out his hand and said:
+
+"You wonder, Margaret, why I sent for you?"
+
+"Did _you_ send, really, Mr. Brand? I thought that perhaps Stephen had made
+a mistake and that Elsie wished to see me for some reason."
+
+"No, Elsie has been absent all the morning, and may not return for an hour
+or two yet," was the reply. "_I_ sent for you. I had a reason. Old men do
+not trifle with young women, perhaps you are aware." There was that in his
+voice which displayed strong suffering and even an effort to speak. The
+young girl saw and heard, and the wonder in her eyes deepened into anxiety
+as she said:
+
+"You surprise me by something in your manner, Mr. Brand. You almost alarm
+me. Pray do not keep me in suspense. I think I am not so well able to bear
+anxiety and mystery as I used to be. Why did you send for me?"
+
+"Poor girl!" the lips of Robert Brand muttered, so low that she did not
+catch the words. Much less did she hear the two words that followed, in
+little more than a whispered groan: "Poor girl!--poor father!" Then he
+took one of the white hands in his, the eyes of the young girl deepening in
+wonder and anxiety all the while,--led her a little down the path to one of
+the rustic seats under the trellis, dropped down upon it and drew her down
+beside him, uttering a sigh, as he took his seat, like that of a person
+over-fatigued.
+
+"You loved my son." He did not look at her as he spoke the words.
+
+"Mr. Brand--I beg of you--" and then Margaret Hayley paused, her throat
+absolutely choked with that to which she could not give utterance. He did
+not seem to heed her, but went on.
+
+"You loved my son. So did I. God knows how _I_ loved him, and I believe
+that your love was as true as heaven."
+
+"Mr. Brand--for that heaven's sake, why do you say this, to kill us both? I
+cannot listen--" she rose from the seat with a start and stood before him
+as if ready to fly; but he yet retained her hand and drew her down again.
+
+"We both loved him, and yet we killed him! You drove him from you. I cast
+him off and cursed him. We killed him. He is dead!"
+
+"Dead?" The word was not a question--it was not an exclamation--it was not
+a cry of mortal agony--it was all three blended. Then she uttered no other
+word but sat as one stupefied, while he went on, his lip quivering with
+that most painful expression which has before been noticed, and his hand
+fumbling at his pocket for something that he seemed to wish to extract from
+it.
+
+"Yes, he is dead. I have known it for two hours--for two long hours I have
+known that I had _no son_." Type cannot indicate the melancholy fall of the
+last two words, and the heart-broken feeling they conveyed. "My son loved
+you, Margaret Hayley, better than he loved his old father. You loved him.
+You should have been his wife. When I knew that he was dead, I tried to
+conceal it from all until I could send for you, for I felt that it was only
+here and from my lips that you should learn the truth. Some other might
+have told you with less thought for your feelings, perhaps, than I
+who--who--who was so proud of him. I have not been rough, have I? I did not
+mean to be--I meant to be very gentle, to _you_, Margaret! See how broken I
+am!"
+
+So he was, poor old man!--broken in heart and voice, for then he gave way
+and dropped his head upon one of his failing hands, overpowered, helpless,
+little more than a child.
+
+Who shall describe the feelings of Margaret Hayley as she heard the words
+which told her of that one bereavement beyond hope--as she heard them in
+those piteous tones and from that agonized father--a father no more?
+Absence, silence, shame, separation of heart from heart upon earth, hope
+against hope and fear without a name--all were closed and finished at once
+and forever, in that one great earthquake of fact, opening and swallowing
+her world of thought--dead! Tears had not yet come--the blind agony that
+precedes them if it does not render them impossible, was just then her
+terrible portion.
+
+"How did he--when--where--you have not told me--" A child just learning to
+speak might have been making that feeble attempt at asking a connected
+question. But Robert Brand understood her, too well. His hand, again
+fumbling at his pocket, brought out that of which it had been in search,
+and his trembling fingers half opened a newspaper and put it into hers, to
+blast her sense with that greater certainty which seems to dwell in written
+or printed intelligence than in the mere utterance of the lips--to destroy
+the last lingering hope that might have remained and put the very dying
+scene before the eyes so little fitted to look upon it. A line of ink was
+drawn around part of one of the columns uppermost, and the reader had not
+even the painful respite of looking to find what she dreaded. And of course
+that paper was a copy of the _Dublin Evening Mail_, sent to Robert Brand by
+one of his distant relatives in England who had chanced to see what it
+contained--the graphic account of the drowning of Carlton Brand from the
+deck of the despatch-steamer, of the finding of the body and the burial in
+the little graveyard back of the Hill of Howth, written by that attached
+friend of a night, Henry Fitzmaurice.
+
+Margaret Hayley read through that account, every word of which seemed to
+exhaust one more drop from the life-blood at her heart,--in stony silence
+and without a motion that could have been perceived. Then the paper slid
+from her hands to the ground, she turned her head towards Robert Brand with
+that slow and undecided motion so sad to see because it indicates a
+palsying of the quick natural energies; and the instant after, that took
+place which told, better than any other action could have done, how much
+each had built upon that foundation of an expected near and dear
+relationship. Robert Brand met that hopeless gaze, reading her whole secret
+even as his own was being read. Then he opened his arms with a cry that was
+almost a scream: "My daughter!" and the poor girl fell into them and flung
+her own around his neck with the answering cry: "Father!" Both were sobbing
+then; both had found the relief of tears. And a sadder spectacle was never
+presented; for while Margaret Hayley, in the father of the man she had so
+loved, was striving to embrace something of the dead form that never could
+be embraced in reality, Robert Brand was still more truly clasping a
+shadow--trying to find his lost son who could never come to his arms again,
+in the thing which had been dearest to that son while in life!
+
+"My son is dead! Come to me; live with me; be a sister to Elsie and a
+daughter to me, or I shall never be able to bear my punishment!" sobbed the
+broken old man, his arms still around the pliant form bowed upon his
+shoulder; but there came no answer, as there needed none. Another voice
+blended with those that had before spoken, at that moment, and again old
+Elspeth Graeme stood under the trellis. But was it said a little while
+since that no change had come upon her since the fading of the roses of
+June?--certainly there had been a change startling and fearful to
+contemplate, even in the few moments elapsing since her former speech with
+her master. The rough, coarse face had assumed an expression in which
+bitter sorrow was contending with terrible anger; the bluish gray eyes
+literally blazed with such light as might have filled those of a tigress
+robbed of her young; and it would have needed no violent stretch of fancy
+to believe that she had revived one of the old traditions of her Gaelic
+race and become a mad prophetess of wrath and denunciation. Strangely
+enough, too, Carlo was again behind her, his eyes glaring upon the two
+figures that occupied the bench, and his heavy tail moving with that slow
+threatening motion which precedes the spring of the beast of prey! Was old
+Elspeth Graeme indeed a wierd woman, and had the brute changed to be her
+familiar and avenging spirit?
+
+The serving-woman held something white in her hand, but neither Robert
+Brand nor his visitor saw it. They but saw the tall form and the face
+convulsed with wild feeling; and both seemed to shrink before a presence
+mightier than themselves. The strange servitor spoke:
+
+"Robert Brand, tell me gin I heard aright! Did ye say that Carlton Brand
+was dead?"
+
+"Who called you here, woman? Yes, he is dead! He was drowned on the Irish
+coast three weeks ago," answered the bereaved father, oddly blending the
+harsh authority of the master with the feeling which really compelled him
+to make response.
+
+"Then ye had better baith be dead wi' him--the father who banned his ain
+flesh and bluid and wished that he would dee before his very eyne, and the
+fause woman who had nae mair heart than to drive him frae her like a dog!"
+
+"Woman!" broke out the master, but the interruption did not check her for
+an instant. She went on, broadening yet more in her native dialect as she
+grew yet more earnest:
+
+"Nae, ye must e'en bide my wull and tak' it, Robert Brand! It has been
+waiting here for mony a day, and I can haud it nae longer! He was my braw,
+bonnie lad, and puir auld Elsie loed him better than ye a'! I harkit till
+ye, Robert Brand, when yer curse went blawin' through the biggin like an
+east win', and I ken'd ye was sawin a fuff to reap a swirl! Ye must ban and
+dom yer ain bluid because it wad na fecht, drivin' the bairn awa frae kin
+and kintra, and noo ye hae _my_ curse to stay wi ye, sleepin' and
+wakin'--ye an' the fause beauty there that helpit ye work his dool!"
+
+"Elspeth Graeme, if you say another word to insult Miss Hayley and outrage
+me, I will forget that you are a woman and choke you where you stand!"
+cried Robert Brand, no longer able to restrain himself, starting to his
+feet and drawing Margaret to the same position, with his arm around her
+waist. But the old woman did not flinch, or pause long in her denunciation.
+
+"Nae, ye'll do naething of the kind, Robert Brand!--ye'll tak what must
+come till ye!" And indeed it looked as if the great dog behind her would
+have sprung at the throat of even the master if he had dared to lay hands
+on his strange servitor. "Ye'll tak the curse, baith o' ye, and ye'll groan
+under it until the day ye dee! Gin Carlton Brand is dead, ye murdered him,
+and his eldritch ghaist shall come back and haunt ye, by night and by day,
+in the mist o' the mountain and the crowd o' the street, till yer blastit
+under it and think auld Hornie has grippet ye by the hearts! Ye'll sing
+dool belyve, baith of ye! Auld Elsie tells ye so, and slight her if ye
+daur!"
+
+Before these last words were spoken, Margaret Hayley had slipped from the
+grasp of the old man and was on her knees upon the ground, her proud spirit
+fairly broken, her hands raised in piteous entreaty, and her lips uttering
+feebly:
+
+"Oh, we have both wronged him--I know it now. But spare me, good Elspeth,
+now when my heart is broken; and spare _him_!"
+
+But Robert Brand, as was only natural--Robert Brand, feeble as he was,
+viewed the matter in a somewhat different light. Sorrow might have
+softened him, but it had by no means entirely cured his temper; and the
+serving-woman had certainly gone to such lengths in her freedom as might
+have provoked a saint to something very much like anger. He grasped
+Margaret from her kneeling position, apparently forgetting pain and
+weakness,--set her upon the seat and poured out a volley of sound, strong
+plain-English curses upon the old woman, that had no difficulty whatever in
+being understood. Dog or no dog, it seemed probable that he might even have
+given vent to his rage in a more forcible manner, when another interruption
+occurred which somewhat changed the posture of affairs.
+
+Elsie Brand came out from the house, hat upon head, and dressed as for a
+ride. She had been taking one, in fact, with Dr. James Holton, who had
+driven her over for a call upon one of her friends; and she looked radiant
+enough to proclaim the truth that she had just left very pleasant company.
+Her plump little form as tempting and Hebe-ish as ever; her bright yellow
+hair a little "touzled" (it could not be possible that those people had
+been laying their heads too near together in the carriage as they came
+across the wood road!); and her blue eyes one flash of pleasure that had
+forgotten all the pain and sorrow in the world,--she was a strange element,
+just then, to infuse into the blending of griefs within that garden. She
+came out with hasty step, calling to Elspeth.
+
+"Elspeth! Elspeth! What keeps you so long? The boy is waiting to know if
+father has any answer." Then seeing the others: "What, Margaret here with
+father? How do you do, Margaret?" It was notable how the voice fell slowed
+and softened, in speaking the last five words, and how the light went out
+from her young eyes as she spoke. Though friends always, Margaret Hayley
+and Elsie Brand had never been the same as before to each other, since that
+painful June morning on the piazza. How could they be? But Margaret was
+softened now, and she said, "Dear Elsie!" took the little girl in her arms
+and kissed her, so that something of the past seemed to have returned.
+
+But meanwhile another incident of importance was occurring. It may have
+been noticed that Elspeth Graeme had something white in her hand when she
+came out into the garden the second time. So she had, indeed--a folded note
+addressed to Robert Brand, and with a wilderness of printing scattered over
+the edges and half the face of the envelope; but she had quite forgotten
+the fact in the sudden knowledge of the death of her young master and the
+necessity of becoming an avenging Pythoness for the occasion. Now, Elsie's
+words called the attention of the old lawyer to that something in her hand,
+and he took it from her with a motion very much like a jerk, and the words:
+
+"If you have a letter for me, why did you not give it to me instead of
+standing here raving like a bedlamite--you old fool?"
+
+"It is na a letter; it's what they ca' a telegraph, I'm thinkin'!" muttered
+the old woman, a good deal taken down from her "high horse" by this
+reminder of her delinquency, and with some sort of impression that this
+must be a sufficient apology for not being in a hurry. "Somebody else dead,
+belike!--we're a' goin' to the deevil as fast as auld Clootie can drag us,
+I ken!"
+
+It _was_ a telegraphic despatch which the old woman had delivered with such
+signal celerity, and which Robert Brand tore open with celerity of a very
+different character. He read, then read again, then his face paled, and a
+strange, startled look came into his eyes, and he put one hand to his
+forehead with the exclamation:
+
+"What _is_ all this? Am I going mad?"
+
+"What _is_ it, father?" and little Elsie pressed up to his side and took
+the despatch from his unresisting fingers. And it was she who read it aloud
+to the other wonderers, herself the most startled wonderer of all:
+
+                            ALEXANDRIA, _Sept. 17th, 1863_.
+
+     _Robert Brand, West Philadelphia_,
+
+     _Care Messrs. ----, No. -- Market St. Philadelphia_.
+
+     Your son, Carlton Brand, dangerously wounded at Culpeper.
+     Lying in hospital here. If well enough, wish you would come
+     down and see him. He does not know of this.
+
+                                                   E. H.
+
+"Well, I'll be----!"
+
+It was a plump, round oath that Robert Brand uttered--very improper under
+any circumstances, and especially so in the presence of ladies,--but about
+as natural, when all things are considered, as the air he breathed. In
+order to realize the exact position and the blind astonishment that must
+have lain in that telegraphic despatch, it is necessary to remember that
+once before he had heard of the death of the young man, from one who had
+just seen his lifeless body (Kitty Hood), and that only two hours
+afterwards his house had been visited by the enraged Dr. Pomeroy to reclaim
+a girl that the man just before dead was alleged to have stolen! Now, only
+an hour or two before, he had a second time been informed of his son's
+death at sea, and burial in Ireland, under such circumstances that mistake
+seemed to be impossible; and yet here was a telegraphic despatch quite as
+likely to be authentic if not originating in some unfeeling hoax--informing
+him that he had been nearly killed in battle, and was lying in one of the
+Virginia hospitals! At short intervals the young man seemed to die, in
+different places, and then immediately after to be alive again in other
+places, under aspects scarcely less painful and yet more embarrassing.
+There was certainly enough in all this to make the old man's brain whirl,
+and to overspread the faces of the others with such blank astonishment that
+they seemed to be little else than demented. There was one, however, not
+puzzled one whit. That was old Elspeth, who muttered, loudly enough for
+them all to hear, as she abandoned them to their fate, resigned her
+temporary position as seeress, and went back to the mundane duties of
+house-keeping:
+
+"It's not the bairn's ainsel at all that's lying down amang the naygurs
+where they're fechting. It is his double that's come bock frae the auld
+land to haunt ye! Come awa, Carlo, lad, and let them mak much of it!"
+
+There is no need to recapitulate all that followed between the three
+remaining people, surprised in such different degrees--the words in which
+little Elsie was made to understand the first intelligence, followed by her
+reading of the whole account in the Irish paper--the hopes, fears, fancies
+and wild surmises which swept through the brains and hearts of each--the
+thoughts of Robert Brand over the initials appended to the telegraphic
+despatch, which for some reason made him much more confident of its
+authenticity than he would otherwise have been, while they embarrassed him
+terribly in another direction which may or may not be guessed--the weaving
+together of three minds that had been more or less separated by conflicting
+feelings with reference to that very person, into one grand total and
+aggregate of anxiety which dwarfed all other considerations and made the
+whole outside world a blank and a nothing in comparison. All this may be
+imagined: until the perfecting of that invention by which the kaleidoscope
+is to be photographed in the moment of its revolution, it cannot be set in
+words. But the result may and must be given.
+
+"I shall go to Washington by the train, to-night," said Robert Brand, when
+the discussion had reached a certain point, with the mystery thicker than
+ever and the anxiety proportionately increasing.
+
+"You, father? Are you well enough to go?" and little Elsie looked at him
+with gratified and yet fearful surprise.
+
+"No matter, I am going!" That was enough, and Elsie knew it. Within the
+last half hour much of his old self seemed to have returned; and when he
+assumed that tone, life granted, he would go as inevitably as the
+locomotive.
+
+"I am glad to hear you say so, Mr. Brand--father!" said Margaret Hayley,
+very calmly. "It will make it much better, no doubt, for _I_ am going."
+
+"You!" This time there were two voices that uttered the word of surprise.
+
+"Yes, _I_! If Carlton Brand is lying wounded in a Virginia hospital, I know
+my duty; and if I must miss _that_, to _him_, or Heaven, henceforward, I
+shall be among the lost!" Strange, wild, mad words; but how much they
+conveyed!
+
+"God bless you, _my daughter_!" "My dear, dear _sister_!" And somehow three
+people managed to be included in one embrace immediately after. This was
+all, worth recording, that the grape trellis saw.
+
+That evening when the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore train left
+Broad and Prime, it bore Robert Brand and Margaret Hayley, going southward
+on that singular quest which might end in so sad and final a
+disappointment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+     IN THE HOSPITAL AT ALEXANDRIA--THE WOUNDED MAN AND HIS
+     NURSE--SAD OMENS--A REUNION OF THREE--BRAVE MAN OR
+     COWARD?--WHO WAS HORACE TOWNSEND?--A MYSTERY EXPLAINED--HOW
+     ELEANOR HILL WENT BACK TO DR. POMEROY'S--ONE WORD MORE OF
+     THE COMANCHE RIDER--CONCLUSION.
+
+
+Glimpses now, only glimpses--with great breaks between, which the
+imagination may fill at pleasure. Events, few in number, not less strange,
+perhaps, than those which have already occurred, but less enwrapped in
+mystery, and gradually shaping themselves towards the inevitable end.
+
+The military hospital at Alexandria. Outside, dingy and yet imposing, fit
+type of the State that held it, in the days before secession was any thing
+more than a crime in thought. Within, a wilderness of low-ceilinged rooms,
+comfortable enough but all more or less dingy like the exterior. Nine out
+of ten of them filled with cot-bedsteads arranged in long rows with aisles
+between; sacred at once to two of the most incongruous exhibitions of human
+propensity--the blood-thirsty cruelty which can kill and maim,--the angelic
+kindness which can make a dear child or brother out of the merest stranger
+and bind up the hurts of a rough, hard-handed, blaspheming ruffian, of
+blood unknown and lineage uncared for, with all that tender care which
+could be bestowed upon the gentlest and loveliest daughter of a pampered
+race when sick or disabled. One of the many places scattered over the loyal
+States and many portions of the disloyal, made terrible to recollection by
+the suffering that has been endured within them and the lives that have
+gone out as a sacrifice to the Moloch of destructive war,--but made holy
+beyond all conception, at the same time, by the patriotic bravery with
+which many of their lives have been surrendered to the great Giver for a
+glorious cause; by the patience with which agony has been endured and
+almost reckoned as pleasure for the nation's sake; and by the footsteps of
+the nobler men and if possible still nobler women of America, who have
+given up ease and comfort and domestic happiness and health and even life
+itself, to minister to those stricken down in the long conflict.
+
+No need to draw the picture: nothing of war or its sad consequences remains
+a mystery in this age and to this people. Too many eyes have looked upon
+the wards of our hospitals, the forms stretched there in waiting for death
+or recovery, the figures moving around and among them in such ministration
+as the Good Samaritan may have bestowed upon the bruised and beaten Jew of
+the parable;--too many ears have listened to the moans of suffering rising
+up continually like a long complaint to heaven, the sharp screams of agony
+under temporary pang or fearful operation, the words of content under any
+lot, blending like an undertone with all, and the words of prayer and
+Christian dependence crowning and hallowing all;--too many of the men of
+this time have seen and heard these things, and too many more may yet have
+the duty of looking upon them and listening to them, to make either wise or
+necessary the closer limning of the picture that might otherwise be
+presented. We have to do with but a little corner of the great building
+that had been made so useful in the care of the sick and wounded, just as
+this narration holds involved the interests of a poor half-dozen among the
+many millions affected by the colossal struggle.
+
+A small room, on the second floor of the building, the walls once white and
+even now scrupulously clean but dingy from smoke and use. Two windows in
+it, opening to the west, the tops shaded by paper curtains with muslin
+inside, while at the bottoms streamed in the soft September afternoon
+sunlight that lay like a glory over the Virginian woods, so fair to the eye
+but so foul and treacherous within, stretching away towards the bannered
+clouds before many hours to shroud the setting of the great luminary. Not
+one of the common rooms in which, perforce from their number, sick and
+wounded soldiers must be more or less closely huddled together,--but one
+devoted to the care of wounded officers, with four beds of iron, neatly
+made and draped, and at this time only one of them occupied.
+
+We have more than once before had occasion to notice the occupant of that
+one bed near the head of the room, with a stream of sunshine pouring in at
+the window and flooding the whole foot. We have before had occasion to
+remark that tall, slight but sinewy form distending the thin covering as it
+settled to his shape. Something of his appearance we have _not_ seen
+before--the head of hair of an indescribable mixture, half pale gold or
+light blonde and the other or outer half dark brown or black, scarcely
+seeming to belong to the same growth unless produced by some mad freak of
+nature. Nor have we before remarked the splendidly-chiselled face so pale
+and wan, the life-fluids seeming to be exhausted beneath the skin, from
+loss of blood and severe suffering. Nor yet that other anomaly--a moustache
+with the outer ends very dark, almost black, strangely relieved by a crop
+of light brown beard starting thick and short, like stubble, on the chin.
+Like this picture in some regards, unlike it in others, the occupant of
+that bed has before presented, as at this moment, an anomaly equally
+interesting and puzzling. Wherever and whenever seen, at earlier periods,
+the last time he met the gaze he was dropping from his horse, a bullet
+through the body just above the heart, a red sword slipping from his hand
+and insensibility succeeding to delirium, near the railroad-bridge and the
+captured rebel battery at Culpeper.
+
+The wounded man lay with his eyes closed and seemed to be in sleep. Beside
+the bed on a low stool and partially resting against it, was one who slept
+not--a woman. One elbow resting on the bed-clothes supporting her head, and
+the other hand holding a book in which she was reading. This was evidently
+the nurse, and yet scarcely an ordinary nurse charged with the care of all
+patients, or she could not have afforded the time for watching one
+convalescent while he slept. She, too, may have been seen before; for
+something there was in that tall and lithe form, that mass of rich silky
+brown hair, that face with its mournful eyes and painfully delicate
+features--something that, once seen, lingered like a sweet, sad dream in
+the gazer's memory. And yet here, too, if there was an identity, change had
+been very busy. The form had always been lithe--it was now thin to
+fragility; the hands had always been taper and delicate--now they were
+fleshless almost to emaciation; the face had always conveyed the thought of
+gentleness, helplessness and needful protection--now it seemed less
+helpless but more mournful, the cheeks a little sunken, and the red spot
+burning in the centre of either not a close enough semblance of ruddy
+health to deceive an eye quickened by affectionate anxiety. She was dying,
+perhaps slowly, it might be rapidly, but dying beyond a peradventure, with
+that friend or foe which has ushered more human beings into the presence of
+God than any other disease swayed as an agency by the great
+destroyer--consumption!
+
+A few moments of silence, unbroken by any sound within the room except the
+thick breathing of the sleeper: then the girl who sat at his side choked a
+moment, seemed to make violent efforts to control the coming spasm, but at
+last yielded, clapped both hands to her left side just above her heart, and
+broke into one of those terrible fits of coughing which tear away the
+system as the earthquake rives the solid ground, and which are almost as
+hard to hear as to endure. Instantly, as the spasm relaxed, she hurriedly
+drew a white handkerchief from the pocket of her dark dress and wiped her
+lips. It was replaced so suddenly that the awakened sleeper did not see
+what stained it--blood, mingled frightfully with the clear white foam.
+
+The eyes of the wounded man opened; and there was something more of himself
+that came back in the light of their warm hazel, only a little dimmed by
+suffering, and in the play of all the muscles of the face when awake. Both
+hands lay outside the bed-clothing; and as she saw the opening of his eyes
+the girl stretched out her own and took one of them with such gentleness
+and devotion as was most beautiful to behold. She seemed to be touching
+flesh that she held to be better than her own--a suggestive rarity in this
+arrogant world! Something that man had been to her, or something he had
+done for her, beyond a doubt, which made him the object of a feeling almost
+too near to idolatry. And yet what had he given her, to win so much? Not
+wealth--not love: merely true friendship, respect when others despised, and
+a little aid towards rescue when others turned away or labored to produce
+final ruin! How easily heaven may be scaled--the heaven of love and
+devotion if no height beyond,--by that consideration which costs so little,
+by that kindness which should be a duty if it even brought no recompense!
+
+"There--I have woke you! I am so sorry!" she said, as she met his eyes and
+touched his hand.
+
+"What consequence, if you have?" was his reply, in a voice low and
+somewhat feeble, while his thin hand made some poor attempt at returning
+her kind pressure. "Ever generous, Eleanor--ever thinking of others and not
+of yourself! They make angels of such people as you--do you know it?"
+
+"Angels? oh, my God, have I lived to hear that word applied to _me_?" Such
+was the answer, and the mournful eyes went reverently upward as she invoked
+the one holy Name.
+
+"Angels? yes, why not?" said the invalid. "Every light-tongued lover calls
+his mistress by that name sometime or other, and--"
+
+"Hush, Carlton Brand, hush!"
+
+Some painful chord was touched, and he appeared to understand, as well he
+might, by what word with two meanings he had lacerated a feeling. He went
+back to what he had evidently intended to say at first.
+
+"You do not think of yourself, I say. You have been coughing again."
+
+"A little."
+
+"A little? Loudly enough to wake me, and I am a sound sleeper. Eleanor
+Hill, you are nursing me, when you more need a nurse yourself. I am almost
+well, you know. You are growing thinner and your cough is worse every day."
+
+"No, Carlton, better--much better!"
+
+"Are you sure? Stop, let me see your handkerchief!" He was looking her
+steadily in the face, and she obeyed him as if in spite of her own will and
+because she had always been in the habit of doing so.
+
+"I thought so," he said. "Eleanor, you are very ill. Do not deceive
+yourself or try to deceive _me_."
+
+"Carlton Brand," she answered, returning that look, full in the eyes, and
+speaking slowly--calmly--firmly. "I am dying, and no one knows the fact
+better than myself. Thank God that the end is coming!"
+
+"Oh no, you are very ill, but not beyond hope--not dying," he attempted to
+urge as some modification of the startling confession she had made.
+
+"Yes--the whole truth may as well be told now, Carlton, since we have begun
+it. I am dying of consumption, and I hope and believe that I shall have but
+few more days left after you get well enough to leave this hospital."
+
+"Heavens!" exclaimed the wounded man. "If this is true, do you know what
+you are making of me? Little else than a murderer! I meant it for the
+best--the best for the country and yourself, when I took you away from the
+house of your--of Philip Pomeroy, and sent you into this new path of life;
+but the sleepless hours and over-exertion, the exposures to foul air and
+draughts and anxiety to which you have been subjected--oh, Eleanor, is
+_this_ what I have done?"
+
+She slid from her chair and kneeled close beside the bed, bending over
+towards him with the most affectionate interest.
+
+"Oh no," she said, no agitation in her voice. "Do you think that three
+months has done this? My family are all consumptive--my father died of the
+disease. What was done to _me_"--her voice faltered for just one moment,
+then she calmed it again by an obvious effort--"What was done to _me_, was
+done long before and by another hand."
+
+"Stop!" he interrupted her as she was evidently about to proceed. "I _must_
+say one word about _him_. Did you ever know all the reason why each of us
+feared and hated the other so much?"
+
+Merely a sad shake of the head was the negative.
+
+"I will tell you, now. I was a coward, and he knew it. You knew so much
+before, but nothing else, I believe. He was present once when I fainted at
+the very sight of blood--something that I believe I always used to do; and
+he knew of my refusing a challenge because I really dared not fight. He
+could expose and ruin me, and I feared him. I knew him to be a scoundrel in
+money affairs as well as in every other way: as a lawyer I could put my
+finger on a great crime that he had committed to win a large part of his
+fortune. He knew that I knew it, and that I would have exposed him if I
+dared. So he feared and hated _me_, and each held the other in check
+without doing more. It is time that you should know that crime: it was his
+robbing you of every dollar left you by your father, and putting them all
+into his own pocket, through the pretended machinery of that Dunderhaven
+Coal and Mining Company, of which he was President, Director and all the
+officers!"
+
+"Carlton! Carlton! can this be true, even of _him_?" asked the young girl,
+horrified at this crowning proof of a depravity beyond conception and yet
+not beyond _fact_.
+
+"It is true, every word of it, and if I had not been a wretch unfit to
+live, I would have exposed and punished him long ago. Lately I think I must
+have gone through what they call 'baptizing in fire,' and the very day I am
+able to crawl once more to Dr. Pomeroy's house, I shall force him to meet
+me in a duel or shoot him down like a dog!"
+
+"This from _you_, Carlton Brand!" The tone was very piteous.
+
+"Yes--why not?" The tone was hard and decided, for a sick man.
+
+"May heaven forgive you the thought. Now listen to me. You have been the
+dearest friend I ever had in the world. You have been better and truer to
+me than any brother; and you have done me the greatest of all favors by
+sending me here to nurse the sick and wounded, to win back something of my
+lost self-respect and close up a wasted life with a little usefulness
+before I die! But after all this I shall almost hate you--I shall not be
+able, I am afraid, to pray for you in that land I am so soon going to
+visit,--if you do not make me one solemn promise and keep it as you would
+save your own soul."
+
+There was an agonized earnest in her words and in her manner, as she thus
+spoke, kneeling there and even clasping her hands in entreaty. Carlton
+Brand looked at her for one instant with a great pity; then he said:
+
+"Eleanor Hill, if the promise is one that a man can make and a man can
+keep, I will make it and keep it!"
+
+"Then promise me neither in word nor act to harm Philip Pomeroy. Leave him
+to _me_."
+
+"To _you_, poor girl?"
+
+"To _me_! _I_ will so punish him as no man was ever punished."
+
+"_You_ punish him? _You_, feeble and dying? How?"
+
+"By going back to his house--if they will obey my last wish when the hour
+comes,--_dead_."
+
+"That _will_ be punishment enough, perhaps, even for _him_, if he is
+human!" slowly said the invalid as he took in the thought. "I promise."
+
+"God bless you!" and poor Eleanor Hill fell forward on the bed and burst
+into sobs that ended the moment after in a fit of still more violent
+coughing than that which had racked her half an hour previously. And this
+did not end like the other, but deepened and grew more hoarse until the
+white froth flew from the suffering lips, followed by a gush of blood that
+not only dyed the foam but spattered the bed-covering.
+
+"Heavens! see how you are bleeding, my poor girl! You must have help at
+once!" The face of the speaker, deadly pale and sorely agitated, told how
+bad a nurse was this choking, dying girl, in his enfeebled condition, with
+a terrible wound scarcely yet commenced healing.
+
+"No, I do not need help--I shall be better in a moment. But I agitate
+_you_, and I will go away until I have stopped coughing."
+
+Which would be, Carlton Brand thought, perhaps a few moments before she
+went into that holy presence from which the most betrayed and down-trodden
+may not be debarred! Ever weakly-loving--ever thoughtless of her own
+welfare and childishly subservient to the good of others--lacking
+self-assertion, but never wantonly sinful,--had not that strange thinker,
+yet under the influence of the fever of his wound, some right to remember
+Mary's tears, and the blessing to the "poor in heart," promised in the
+Sermon on the Mount?
+
+But there was real danger to the invalid in this agitation, and the will
+of another stepped in to remove the danger. Before the poor girl had quite
+ceased coughing, one of the physicians of the hospital, a gray-haired,
+benevolent-looking man, stood by the bedside and touched her upon the
+shoulder.
+
+"Coughing again, and so terribly! What, blood? Fie, fie!--this will never
+do!" he said. "If the sick nurse the sick, both fare badly, you know. If
+the scripture doesn't say so, it ought to. You must go away to Mrs.
+Waldron, Nellie, and keep quiet and not stir out again to-day."
+
+"Yes, Doctor," she answered, rising obediently. "Good-night, Carlton!" She
+stooped and pressed her lips to the thin hand so touchingly that the
+doctor, who could scarcely even guess the past relation between the two,
+almost felt the tears rising as he looked.
+
+"Good-night, and God bless you, Eleanor."
+
+The doctor's eyes followed her as with slow, weak steps she passed out of
+the room, her pale, mournful face with its hectic cheeks and sad eyes
+looking back to the bed for an instant as she disappeared. Then he turned
+away with a sigh--such a sigh of helpless sorrow as he had no doubt often
+heaved over the living illustrations of those two heart-breaking
+words--"fading away."
+
+"I am sorry she was here," he said, when she had gone. "I am afraid that
+she has used up strength that you needed. There are visitors to see you."
+
+"To see _me_?"
+
+"Yes--now keep as cool as possible, or I will send them away again. I hate
+mysteries and surprises; but poor Eleanor does not, and she sent for them,
+I believe."
+
+"She sent for them? She? Then they are--"
+
+"Keep still, or I will tell you no more--they are two from whom you have
+been estranged, I think--your father and--"
+
+"My sister?"
+
+"No, the lady is not your sister, I think. She is tall, dark-haired, very
+beautiful and very queenly. Is that your sister?"
+
+"No--no--that is not my sister--that is--heavens, can this be possible, or
+am I dreaming? Doctor, this agitation is hurting me worse than any presence
+could do. Send them in and trust me. I will be quiet--I will husband my
+life, for if I am not mad and you are not trifling, there may yet be
+something in the world worth living for."
+
+The doctor laid his hand on the pulse of his patient, looked for a moment
+into his face, and then left the room. The next, two stepped within it--an
+old man with gray hair rapidly changing to silver, and a woman in the very
+bloom of youth and beauty. The eyes of the wounded man were closed. What
+was he doing?--collecting strength, or looking for it where it ever abides?
+No matter. Only one instant more, and then the two were on their knees by
+the bedside, where Eleanor Hill had just been kneeling--the father with the
+thin hand in his and murmuring: "Carlton! my brave, my noble son!" and
+Margaret Hayley leaning far over the low couch and saying a thousand times
+more in one long, tender, clinging kiss, light as a snow-flake but loving
+and warm as the touch of the tropic sun,--that shunned cheek and brow and
+laid its blessing on the answering lips!
+
+Some of the words of that meeting are too sacred to be given: let them be
+imagined with the pressure of hands and the hungry glances of eyes that
+could not look enough in any space of time allotted them. But there were
+others, following close after, which may and must be given. Whole volumes
+had been spoken in a few words, and yet the book was scarcely opened,--when
+Margaret Hayley rose from her knees and bending over the bed ran those
+dainty white fingers through the strangely mottled hair on the brow of the
+invalid. Then she seemed to discover something incongruous in different
+portions of the face; and the moment after, stooping still closer down, she
+swept away the hair from the brow and scanned the texture of the skin at
+its edge. A long, narrow scar, its white gloss just relieved on the pallid
+flesh, crossed the forehead from the left temple to the centre of its apex.
+She seemed surprised and even frightened; then a look of mingled shame and
+pleasure broke over that glorious face, and she leaned close above him and
+said, compelling his eyes to look steadily into hers:
+
+"Carlton Brand, what does this mean? I know that scar and the color that
+has once covered that hair and moustache! You are Horace Townsend!"
+
+"I _was_ Horace Townsend once, for a little while, Margaret," was the
+reply. "But it won me nothing, and you see for what a stern reality I have
+given up masquerading."
+
+"And _you_ plunged into the Pool to save that drowning boy. _You_ went down
+into that dreadful schute and brought up the Rambler! _You_ spoke to the
+Old Man of the Mountain at midnight and carried me away with your words on
+Echo Lake. And _you_--heaven keep my senses when I think of it!--_you_ made
+love to me along the road down the Glen below the Crawford!
+
+"I am afraid I was guilty of all those offences!" answered the invalid,
+with something nearer to a smile of mischief glimmering from the corner of
+his eye than had shone there for many a day.
+
+"I did hear something in your voice the first night that I saw you there,
+and afterwards," Margaret Hayley went on, "which made me shudder from its
+echo of yours; and more than once I saw that in your face which won me to
+you without my knowing why. Yet all the impression wore off by degrees,
+and--only think of it!--I was nearly on the point, at one time, of
+believing that I had found a truer ideal than the one so lately lost, and
+of promising to become the wife of Horace Townsend! Think where _you_ would
+have been, you heartless deceiver, if I had fallen altogether into the trap
+and done so!"
+
+"I think I might have endured _that_ successful rivalry better than any
+other!" was the very natural reply.
+
+"And this man," said Robert Brand, standing close beside the bed, looking
+down at his son with a face in which pride and joy had mastered its great
+trouble of a few days before, and apparently speaking quite as much to
+himself as to either of his auditors--"this man, capable of such deeds of
+godlike bravery in ordinary life, and then of winning the applause of a
+whole army in the very front of battle,--I cursed and despised as a coward!
+God forgive me!--and you, my son, try to forget that ever I set myself up
+as your pitiless judge, to be punished as few fathers have ever been
+punished who yet had the sons of their love spared to them! Margaret--how
+have we both misunderstood him!"
+
+"The fault was not all yours, by any means," said the invalid. "How could
+either of you know me when I misunderstood and belied _myself_!"
+
+And in that remark--the last word uttered by Carlton Brand before he
+yielded to the exhaustion of his last hour of imprudent excitement and fell
+away to a slumber almost as profound as death, just as the old doctor
+stepped back to forbid a longer interview, and while the shadows of evening
+began to fall within the little room, and Margaret Hayley sat by his
+bedside and held his hand in hers with what was plainly a grasp never to be
+broken again during the lives of both, and Robert Brand, sitting but a
+little farther away, watched the son that had been lost and was found, with
+a deeper tenderness and a holier pride than he had ever felt when bending
+over the pillow of his sleeping childhood,--in that remark, we say, lay the
+key to all which had so affected his life, and which eventually gave cause
+for this somewhat singular and desultory narration. _He had misunderstood
+himself_; and only pain, suffering and a mental agony more painful than any
+physical death, had been able to bring himself and those who best knew him
+to a full knowledge of the truth. Only a part of that truth he knew even
+then, when he lay in the officers' ward of the Alexandria hospital: it is
+our privilege to know it all and to explain it, so far as explanation can
+be given, in a few words.
+
+Carlton Brand had been gifted, and cursed, from childhood, with an intense
+and imaginative temperament, never quite regulated or even analyzed. His
+sense of honor had been painfully delicate--his love of approbation so
+strong as to be little less than a disease. Some mishap of his weak,
+hysterical and short-lived mother, no doubt, had given him one terrible
+weakness, entirely physical, but which he believed to be mental--_he
+habitually fainted at the sight of blood_. (This fact will explain,
+parenthetically, why he fell senseless and apparently dead at that period
+in the encounter with Dick Compton when the blood gushed over the face of
+the latter from his blow; and why after each of the excitements of the Pool
+and Mount Willard he suffered in like manner, at the instant when his eyes
+met the fatal sign on the faces of the rescued.) High cultivation of the
+imaginative faculty, the habit of living too much within himself, and a
+constitutional predisposition in that direction, had made him painfully
+_nervous_--a weakness which to him, and eventually to others, assumed the
+shape of cowardice. Recklessly brave, in fact, and never troubled by that
+nervousness for one moment when his sympathies were excited and his really
+magnificent physical and gymnastic powers called into play,--that fainting
+shudder at the sight of blood had been all the while his haunting demon,
+disgracing him in his own eyes and marring a life that would otherwise have
+been very bright and pleasant. One belief had fixed itself in his mind,
+long before the period of this narration, and never afterwards (until now)
+been driven thence--that _if he should ever be brought into conflict among
+deadly weapons, this horror of blood would make him run away like a
+poltroon, disgracing himself forever and breaking the hearts of all who
+loved him_. This belief had made his commission in the Reserves a
+melancholy farce; this had placed him in the power of Dr. Philip Pomeroy
+and prevented that exposure and that punishment so richly deserved; this
+had made his life, after the breaking out of the war, one long struggle to
+avoid what he believed must be disgraceful detection. Once more, so that
+the matter which informs this whole relation may be fairly
+understood,--Carlton Brand, merely a high-strung, imaginative, nervous
+man, with the bravery of the old Paladins latent in his heart and bursting
+out occasionally in actions more trying than the facing of any battery that
+ever belched forth fire and death,--had all the while mistaken that
+nervousness for cowardice;--just as many a man who has neither heart,
+feeling nor imagination, strides through the world and stalks over the
+battle-field, wrapped in his mantle of ignorance and stolidity, believing
+himself and impressing the belief upon others, that this is indomitable
+bravery.
+
+What Carlton Brand had believed himself to be when untried--what Carlton
+Brand had proved himself to be when hatred to Captain Hector Coles and a
+despairing hope of yet winning the love of Margaret Hayley moved him to the
+trial--how thorough a contrast!--how exact an antagonism! And how many of
+us, perhaps, going backward from the glass in which we have more or less
+closely beheld our natural faces, forget, if we have ever truly read, "what
+manner of men" we are!
+
+And here another explanation must follow, as we may well believe that it
+followed between the three so strangely reunited, when rest and repose had
+worn off the first shock of meeting and made it safe for the petted invalid
+to meet another pressure from those rose-leaf lips that had forsaken all
+their pride to bend down and touch him with a penitent blessing--safe to
+speak and to hear of the many things which the parted always treasure
+against re-union. That explanation concerns the mystery of the passenger by
+the Cunarder, the American in England, and the man who under the name of
+Carlton Brand perished from the deck of the Emerald off Kingstown harbor?
+Had he a double life as well as a double nature? Or had there been some
+unaccountable personation? The latter, of course, and from causes and under
+circumstances not one whit surprising when the key is once supplied.
+
+It will be remembered that Carlton Brand, very soon after his purchase of a
+ticket for Liverpool by the Cunard steamer and his indulging that
+nervousness which he believed to be cowardice with a little shuddering
+horror at the mass of coal roaring and blazing in the furnaces of the
+government transport, early in July,--had a visiter at his rooms at the
+Fifth Avenue Hotel--Henry Thornton, of Philadelphia, a brother lawyer and
+intimate friend. It will also be remembered that the two held a long and
+confidential conversation, very little of the purport of which was then
+given. The facts, a part of them thus far concealed, were that Carlton
+Brand, flying from his disgrace, really intended to go to Europe as he had
+informed Elsie; that he made no secret of that disgrace, to Thornton; that
+the latter informed him, incidentally, of what he had heard of the summer
+plans of Margaret Hayley and her mother, whom he knew through his family;
+that the passage-ticket, lying upon the table, came under the notice of
+Thornton, inducing the information that he was also on his way to England,
+in chase of a criminal who had absconded with a large sum of money
+belonging to one of the Philadelphia banks, and whom he had means, if once
+he could overtake him, of forcing to disgorge; that Thornton half-jestingly
+proposed, remembering their partial resemblance, that if his friend had
+grown ashamed of his name, he would take that and the ticket and pursue the
+criminal with less chance of being evaded, his own cognomen being kept in
+the dark; that Brand, suddenly taken with the idea and struck with the
+facility which the use of his name by the other would furnish for creating
+the belief that he had himself gone abroad, and thus concealing his
+identity while remaining at home, adopted the suggestion and supplied his
+friend at once with name and ticket, for his travelling purposes; that it
+was Henry Thornton and not Carlton Brand who ran that mad quest about
+England, a hidden criminal always in view, and frequenting the most
+doubtful places and the most disreputable society to accomplish the object
+of his search; and that it was poor Thornton and not Carlton Brand who
+perished in the Irish Channel and met that lowly grave in the Howth
+church-yard. All this while the real owner of that name, shaving away his
+curling beard, tinging his fair skin with a very easily-obtained chemical
+preparation, dyeing black his hair and moustache and making himself up as
+nearly as possible like Thornton, under the assumed designation of Horace
+Townsend, suggested by the initials of his "double," was carrying out that
+long masquerade which we have been permitted to witness.
+
+The peculiarities which he developed in that masquerade, should by this
+time be reasonably well understood; the motives which kept him near the
+woman who had once loved him but afterwards cast him off forever, may
+easily be guessed by many a man, correspondingly situated, who has thus
+fluttered moth-like around his destroying candle; the half-maddening effect
+produced upon him by the magnificent scenery of the mountains, the displays
+of reckless courage made by Halstead Rowan and the marked admiration of
+Margaret Hayley for those displays, was no matter for surprise when such
+surroundings for such a temperament were considered; the attempt to become
+his own rival and win the woman he so wildly worshipped from himself, was
+not crazier than might have been expected from the man who could have
+exhibited all the preceding anomalies; and after Margaret had declared her
+unalterable love but her invincible determination never to marry the man
+who dared not fight for his native land,--the feeling compounded of hope
+and despair, which sent him down to the Virginia battle-fields, first as a
+mere spectator under the favor of his old friend Pleasanton and then as a
+mad Berserk running a course of warlike fury which made even gray-bearded
+veterans shudder,--this need astonish no one who has seen how human
+character changes and develops its true components in the crucible of love,
+shame and sorrow!
+
+Be sure that Margaret Hayley, too, in that day of the clearing away of
+mists and mysteries, made one explanation--not to the ears of Robert Brand,
+but to those of Carlton alone. An explanation that was really a
+confession, as it told him of the means through which the property held by
+her family (oh, how the magnificent face alternately flushed and paled when
+opening this sore wound of her pride!) had been acquired many years before.
+But be sure that all this was made a recommendation rather than a shame in
+the eyes of Carlton Brand, when he knew that from the day of his own
+dismissal her knowledge of that family stain had been used to keep Mrs.
+Burton Hayley quiet and subservient, to hold Captain Hector Coles at a safe
+distance, and to enforce what she had truly intended if _he_ should never
+honorably beckon her again to his bridal bed--a life of loneliness for his
+sake!
+
+Something that occurred a month later--in October, when nature had put on
+those gorgeous but melancholy robes of gold and purple with which in
+America she wraps herself when Proserpine is going away from Ceres to the
+darkness and desolation of winter.
+
+One day during that month a close carriage drove down the lane leading from
+the Darby road past the house of Dr. Pomeroy. It was drawn by a magnificent
+pair of horses, but they were driven much more slowly than we have once
+seen them pursuing the same course. A single figure was seated in it, with
+face at the window, when it drew up at the doctor's gate; and out of it
+stepped Nathan Bladesden, the Quaker merchant.
+
+The face was calm, as beseemed his sect, but very stern. A little changed,
+perhaps, since the early summer, with a shadow more of white dashed into
+the trim side-whiskers and one or two deeper lines upon the brow and at the
+corners of the mouth. A step, as he said a word to the driver and entered
+the gate, which comported with the stern gravity of the face and the slow
+rate at which he had been driven. Something in the whole appearance
+indicating that he had come upon a painful duty, but one that he would do
+if half the powers of both worlds should combine to prevent him.
+
+He saw no one as he approached the piazza and the closed front door; but as
+he was about to ring, a female servant came out, closed the door again
+behind her and stopped as if surprised at seeing him.
+
+"Is Doctor Philip Pomeroy at home?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," was the answer, after one instant of hesitation,--"yes, but--"
+
+"That was all I asked thee, woman!" answered the Quaker, sternly. "I came
+to see him and I must do so. Show me to him at once."
+
+The girl hesitated again, looked twice at him and once at the one open
+window of the parlor, then obeyed the behest, opened the front door,
+pointed to that leading into the parlor from the hall, and said:
+
+"He is there, Mr. Bladesden. If you _must_ see him, you had better knock,
+for he may not like to be disturbed."
+
+She went out at once, leaving the front door half open, and glancing back,
+as she passed it, at the tall, powerful man with the gray hair and
+side-whiskers, just applying his knuckles to the panel. There was something
+strange and even startled in her look, but she said no more, left him so
+and went on upon her errand.
+
+The Quaker knocked twice or three times before there was any answer from
+within. Nor was the door opened even then, but the voice of the doctor
+said: "Come in!" and he entered. Doctor Philip Pomeroy sat alone in the
+room, in a large chair, leaning far back, his arms folded tightly on his
+breast and his head so thrown forward that he looked up from beneath bent
+brows. He evidently saw his visitor and recognized him, and yet he did not
+rise or change his position. And quite a moment elapsed before he said, in
+a voice frightfully hoarse:
+
+"What do you want here, Nathan Bladesden?"
+
+"I have business with thee, Doctor Philip," was the reply.
+
+"And I do not choose to do business to-day, with any one, nor with _you_ as
+long as I live!" said the same hoarse voice.
+
+"And I choose that thee _shall_ do business to-day and with _me_!" was the
+second reply, still equable in tone but still terribly earnest.
+
+Doctor Philip Pomeroy unfolded his arms and rose slowly from his chair. The
+Quaker, as he did so and was thus thrown into a better light, saw that his
+face was haggard, that his sharp, scintillant eyes were wild, and that he
+looked years older than when he had beheld him last, four months before.
+Standing, and with one hand on the chair as if he needed support, he said:
+
+"Nathan Bladesden, I told you, the last time that you visited this house,
+never to come near it again, and I thought that you knew me too well to
+intrude again uninvited."
+
+"It is because I know thee very well indeed, that I _have_ intruded, as
+thee calls it!" answered the Quaker, with what would have been a sneer on
+another face and from other lips. "I remember the last time I came here,
+Doctor Philip, quite as well as thee does, and I promised thee some things
+then that I am quite as likely to fulfil as thee is to carry out any of thy
+threats. Besides, thee may be sure that I have business, or I should not
+have come, for thy company is not so attractive as that men of good
+character seek it of their own will!"
+
+The Quaker had no doubt expected that by that time he would break out into
+rough violence, as before; but he had misjudged. From some cause unknown he
+did not, though the wild eyes grew more than scintillant--they glared like
+those of a wild beast at once in pain and at bay. And he made no answer
+except a "Humph!" that seemed to be uttered between closed lips--half an
+expression of contempt and half a groan.
+
+Nathan Bladesden, intent upon his "business," went on.
+
+"I will not trouble thee long, Dr. Philip, but thee had better pay
+attention to what I say, for I am very much in earnest and not to be
+trifled with, to-day, as thee will discover. If thee remembers, I came here
+the last time to rescue Eleanor Hill from thy villainous hands--"
+
+"Eleanor Hill!" This was not an exclamation of surprise, but a veritable
+groaning-out of the name.
+
+"Yes, Eleanor Hill," pursued Bladesden,--"after thee had broken off my
+marriage with her by poisoning my mind against the poor girl thee had
+ruined in body and soul and I believe robbed in fortune. The morning of
+that day I had been weak, and driven away by thee: that afternoon I had
+been moved to do my duty and to take her away from the hands of a seducer
+and a scoundrel--to shelter the lamb from the wolf, though it was torn and
+bleeding--to make her my sister if I could not make her my wife."
+
+"Is that all--all? If not, go on!" groaned out the hoarse voice through the
+set teeth.
+
+"No, there is somewhat more, Dr. Philip--and that of the most consequence,"
+the Quaker continued. "When I came, the poor girl was gone--gone from thee
+as well as from me. Then I heard that she had gone among the soldiers of
+the army, doing the work of the Master and healing the sick. She was away
+from _thee_ and doing the duty of merciful woman, and I was content to wait
+until she had finished. But to-day I learned that yesterday she came back
+again."
+
+"Oh, my God!--he will kill me!" groaned the answering voice, deeper and
+more hoarse than ever. But the Quaker went mercilessly on.
+
+"No, I think that I shall not have need!" he said. "Thee is cowardly as
+well as base, and thee will obey and save thy life. I heard, I say, that
+she had come back to this house of pollution, and I have come to take her
+away. Give her up to me, at once, that I may place her where thee can never
+harm her and never even see her more, and that is all I ask of thee: refuse
+me or try to prevent my removing her, and I will take thee by the throat,
+here, now, with these hands that thee sees are strong enough to do the duty
+of the hangman--and strangle thee to death!"
+
+There was fearful intensity, very near approaching momentary madness, in
+the voice and whole manner of Nathan Bladesden, before he had concluded
+that startling speech; but if he could have looked keenly enough he might
+have seen on the face of the doctor something more terrible than any word
+he had uttered or any gesture he could make. His eyes rolled wildly with a
+glare that was only one remove from maniacy; his whole countenance was so
+fearfully contorted that he might have seemed in the last agony; and his
+frame shook to such a degree that the very chair he held jarred and
+shivered on the floor with the muscular action.
+
+"God of heaven, Nathan Bladesden!" he said, the hoarseness of his voice
+changed into a wild cry. "Are you mad, or am _I_? You know that Eleanor
+Hill came back here yesterday, and you have come to take her away from me
+to-day?"
+
+"I have come for that purpose, and I will do it, Doctor Philip," replied
+the Quaker. "Thee has my warning, and thee had better heed it. Let me see
+her at once, and then if she does not herself ask to be left with thee and
+the disgrace of thy house, thee shall see her no more, if I can prevent it,
+until the judgment!"
+
+For one moment, then, without another word, Dr. Philip Pomeroy looked at
+the speaker steadily as his own terrible situation would permit. Then he
+seemed to have arrived at some solution of a great mystery, or to have
+sprung to a desperate resolution, for he sprang forward, grasped the Quaker
+so suddenly that the latter for the moment started in the expectation of
+personal violence, dragged him to the door separating the parlor from a
+smaller one at the rear, and dashed it open, with the words:
+
+"There is Eleanor Hill! Ask her if she will go with you or remain with
+_me_!"
+
+The room was partially shaded by heavy curtains; and Nathan Bladesden,
+stepping hastily therein, did not at first see what it contained. But when
+he did so, as he did the instant after, no wonder that even his stern,
+strong nature was not quite proof against the shock, and that he recoiled
+and uttered an exclamation of affright. For Eleanor Hill was there indeed,
+but scarcely within the reach of human wish or question--coffined for the
+grave, the glossy brown hair smoothed away from a forehead on which rested
+neither the furrow of pain nor the mark of shame, the sad eyes closed in
+that long peaceful night which knows no waking from sleep until the
+resurrection morning, the thin hands folded Madonna-like upon the breast,
+and one lingering flush of the hectic rose of consumption in the centre of
+either pale cheek, to restore all her childish beauty and carry the
+flower-symbol of human love into the very domain of death.
+
+"That is Eleanor Hill--why do you not ask her the question?" Oh, what agony
+there was in that poor attempt at a taunt!
+
+"No, thee has made her what she is--thee may keep her, now!"
+
+The Quaker's words were a far bitterer taunt than that which had fallen
+from the lips of the doctor. Then he seemed to soften, went up to the
+coffin, looked steadily on the dead face for a moment, stooped and pressed
+his lips on the cold, calm brow, and said, with a strange echo of what
+Carlton Brand had uttered in the hospital but a few weeks before:
+
+"They have such people as thee in heaven, Eleanor! Farewell!"
+
+He turned away and seemed about to leave the room and the house, but the
+hand of Dr. Philip Pomeroy was again upon his arm, grasping it and holding
+him while the frame shivered with uncontrollable emotion and the broken
+voice groaned out:
+
+"Nathan Bladesden, you hate me, and perhaps you have cause. You are a cold,
+stern man, with no mercy, and my tortures must be pleasure to you. Enjoy
+them all! And if any man ever doubts the existence of hell in your
+presence, tell him that you have seen it with your own eyes in the house of
+Philip Pomeroy, when the only woman he ever loved in the world lay dead
+before him, murdered by his own hand, and a devil stood by, taunting him
+with his guilt!"
+
+"I will taunt thee no more, Doctor Philip!" fell slowly from the Quaker's
+lips. "I hate thee no longer. I pity thee. Thy Maker is dealing with thee
+now, and thy punishment is enough!"
+
+He turned away, then, and left the suffering man still within the room
+beside the dead. Once as he passed into the hall he looked back and saw
+through the still open door a dark form fall forward with a groan, the head
+against the coffin and the arms clasping it as if it had been a living
+thing.
+
+There are two endings to the story of "Faust"--that marvellous wierd
+history of human love and demoniac temptation which alike in drama and
+opera enraptures the world, and once before alluded to in this narration.
+In the older and coarser version, when the ruin is full accomplished and
+the hour of penalty full ripe, Marguerite is seen ascending heavenward,
+while Mephistopheles laughs hoarsely and points downward to the lower pit,
+whence arise blue flames and horrible discords, and into which the doomed
+Faust is seen to be dragged at the last moment by the hands of the swarming
+and gibbering monsters. In the other and yet more terrible version,
+Maguerite is seen ascending, and the laugh of the demon is heard, but it is
+only a faint, fading, mocking laugh, as even _he_ flies away and leaves the
+man accursed kneeling in hopeless agony over the dead form from which the
+pure spirit has just gone upward--condemned, not to the pit and the flame,
+but to that worse hell of living alone and without hope, racked by love
+that has come in its full force when too late, and by a remorse that will
+worse clutch at his heart-strings than all the fiends of perdition could do
+at the poor body which coffers his soul of torment. Who does not know how
+much the more dreadful is that second doom? Who does not--let him never
+tempt God and fate by making the rash experiment!
+
+Nathan Bladesden was right--even for such sins as those Doctor Philip
+Pomeroy had committed, the reckoning was fearful!
+
+Poor Eleanor Hill had been right, too, when she said: "Leave him to me! * *
+* I will so punish him as no man was ever punished!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Shall there not be one glimmer more of sunshine after the dark night and
+the storm? Thank heaven, yes!--in a far-off glance at fortunes left long in
+abeyance but not forgotten.
+
+Lying on the sofa at Mrs. Burton Hayley's, one evening when the first fires
+of winter had not long been lighted,--still taking the privilege of the
+invalid though no longer one, and making a pillow of the lap of Margaret
+Hayley, her dainty white fingers playing with his clustering golden blonde
+hair as they had erewhile done among the summer rose-leaves,--a quick,
+warm, happy kiss stolen now and again when the dignified lady, of the
+mansion was too busy with the devoutly-religious work that she was reading,
+to be horrified by such immoral practices,--lying thus, and the two talking
+of dear little Elsie's coming happiness and their own which was not to be
+much longer deferred; of the restored pride and renovated health of Robert
+Brand--quite as dear to Margaret, since that day in the garden, as to the
+son and daughter of his own blood; of the delirious joy and dreadfully
+broad Scotch of old Elspeth Graeme since the return of her "bonny bairn;"
+of poor Eleanor Hill and Captain Hector Coles, dead so differently on the
+fatal Virginian soil; of these and others, and of all the events which had
+been so strangely crowded within the compass of little more than half a
+year,--lying thus and talking thus, we say, Carlton Brand drew from his
+pocket a little fragment clipped from a newspaper, and said:
+
+"By the way, Margaret, here is something that I found in one of the
+Baltimore papers yesterday. It concerns some friends of ours, whom we may
+never meet again, but whom neither of us, I think, will ever quite forget.
+Read it."
+
+Margaret Hayley took the slip and read, what writer and reader may be
+pardoned for looking over her fair rounded shoulder and perusing at the
+same moment--this satisfactory and significant item:
+
+     MARRIED. ROWAN--VANDERLYN.--On Wednesday the 9th inst., by
+     Rev. Dr. Rushmore, Major Halstead Rowan, of the Sixth
+     Illinois cavalry, to Clara, daughter of the late Clayton
+     Vanderlyn, Esq., and Mrs. Isabella Vanderlyn, of Calvert St.
+
+"She was a sweet girl, and he was one of nature's gentlemen," said
+Margaret. "I saw enough to know how dearly they were in love with each
+other before they left the mountains; and I am glad to know that they have
+had their will, in spite of"--and here she lowered her voice, so that Mrs.
+Burton Hayley could not possibly hear her--"a proud, meddling mother and a
+brother who should have been sent back to school until he learned manners!"
+
+"Oh, Rowan told me that he was going into the army, before he left the
+Crawford," answered the happy lounger. "You see he has done so and become a
+Major, and that makes him gentleman enough even for the Vanderlyns.
+George!--what a dashing officer he must make! Some day, when I go back to
+the army--"
+
+"When _I let you_ go back, mad fellow!"
+
+"Some day I want to ride a charge with him, side by side. He was the
+boldest rider and the most daring man I ever knew."
+
+"The bravest that _I_ ever knew, except _one_!" said Margaret Hayley,
+stooping down her proud neck and for some unexplainable reason stopping for
+an instant in the middle of her speech. "And he had even the advantage of
+that _one_ in a very important respect."
+
+"And what was that, I should like to be informed, my Empress!"
+
+"He _knew it_!"
+
+
+THE END.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS' PUBLICATIONS.
+
+THIS CATALOGUE CONTAINS AND
+Describes the Most Popular and Best Selling Books in the World.
+
+The Books will also be found to be the Best and Latest Publications by the
+most Popular and Celebrated Writers in the World. They are also the most
+Readable and Entertaining Books published.
+
+Suitable for the Parlor, Library, Sitting-Room, Railroad, Camp, Steamboat,
+Army, or Soldiers' Reading.
+
+PUBLISHED AND FOR SALE BY
+T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,
+306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.
+
+Booksellers and all others will be Supplied at very Low Rates.
+
+Copies of any of Petersons' Publications, or any other work or works
+Advertised, Published, or Noticed by any one at all, in any place, will be
+sent by us, Free of Postage, on receipt of Price.
+
+TERMS: To those with whom we have no monthly account, Cash with Order.
+
+
+MRS. EMMA D. E. N. SOUTHWORTH'S WORKS.
+
+     The Bridal Eve. Complete in one volume, paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Fatal Marriage. Complete in one volume, paper cover.
+     Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Love's Labor Won. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Gipsy's Prophecy. Complete in one vol., paper cover.
+     Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Vivia. The Secret of Power. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     India. The Pearl of Pearl River. Price $1.25; or cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     Mother-in-Law. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Two Sisters. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Three Beauties. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Wife's Victory. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Lost Heiress. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Deserted Wife. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for
+     $1.50.
+
+     Hickory Hall. By Mrs. Southworth. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Lady of the Isle. Complete in one vol., paper cover.
+     Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Missing Bride. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Retribution: A Tale of Passion. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Haunted Homestead. Price $1.25; or in one vol., cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     The Curse of Clifton. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for
+     $1.50.
+
+     The Discarded Daughter. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     The Jealous Husband. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Belle of Washington. One vol., paper. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Initials. A Love Story. One vol. Price $1.25; or cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     Kate Aylesford. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Dead Secret. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Woman in Black. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth,
+     $1.50.
+
+     Family Pride. Price $1.25 in paper; or in cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Broken Engagement. By Mrs. Southworth. Price 25 cents.
+
+
+MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS' NEW WORKS.
+
+     The Wife's Secret. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Rejected Wife. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Fashion and Famine. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Heiress. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in one
+     vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Old Homestead. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Mary Derwent. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+
+CAROLINE LEE HENTZ'S WORKS.
+
+     Planter's Northern Bride. One volume, paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Linda. The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole. Price $1.25 in
+     paper; or $1.50 in cloth.
+
+     Robert Graham. The Sequel to, and Continuation of Linda.
+     Price $1.25 in paper; or $1.50 in cloth.
+
+     The Lost Daughter. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     bound in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Courtship and Marriage. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+     or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Rena; or, The Snow Bird. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+     or one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Marcus Warland. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     bound in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Love after Marriage. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Planter's Daughter. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+     or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Banished Son. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Helen and Arthur. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Ernest Linwood. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or in
+     one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Courtship and Matrimony. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25;
+     or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+
+MRS. HENRY WOOD'S BOOKS.
+
+     The Shadow of Ashlydyat. One vol., paper cover. Price One
+     Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Squire Trevlyn's Heir. One vol., paper cover. Price One
+     Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Castle's Heir. One volume, octavo, paper cover. Price
+     One Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Verner's Pride. One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price $1.00;
+     or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     A Life's Secret. Price Fifty cents; or in one vol., cloth,
+     $1.00.
+
+     The Lost Bank Note. 50 cents.
+
+     The Channings. Price 75 cents; or in one vol., cloth, $1.25.
+
+     The Mystery. Price Fifty cents; or bound in one vol., cloth,
+     $1.00.
+
+     The Runaway Match. One vol., paper cover. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Earl's Heirs. Price Fifty cents; or one vol., cloth,
+     $1.00.
+
+     Aurora Floyd. Price 50 cents; or a finer edition, in cloth,
+     for $1.25.
+
+     Better For Worse. One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price 50
+     cents.
+
+     Foggy Night at Offord. 25 cts.
+
+     William Allair. Price 25 cents.
+
+     Lawyer's Secret. Price 25 cents.
+
+
+THE GREAT NOVELS OF THE WAR.
+
+     Shoulder Straps. A novel of New York and the Army in 1862.
+     By Henry Morford, editor of the "New York Atlas." It is the
+     book for Ladies, Gentlemen, and Soldiers! Wives and Widows,
+     Fast Young Ladies, Slow Young Ladies, Married Men and
+     Bachelors, Young Ladies about to be Married, and those who
+     have no Matrimonial Prospects whatever! Stay-at-home Guards,
+     Government Officials, Army Contractors, Aldermen, Doctors,
+     Judges, Lawyers, etc. Price $1.25 in paper; or bound in one
+     volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Days of Shoddy. A Novel of the Great Rebellion of 1861.
+     By Henry Morford author of "Shoulder Straps" price $1.25 in
+     paper, or $1.50 in cloth.
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS.
+
+ILLUSTRATED OCTAVO EDITION.
+
+Pickwick Papers,                               Cloth,$2.00
+Nicholas Nickleby,                             Cloth, 2.00
+Great Expectations,                            Cloth, 2.00
+Lamplighter's Story,                           Cloth, 2.00
+Oliver Twist,                                  Cloth, 2.00
+Bleak House,                                   Cloth, 2.00
+Little Dorrit,                                 Cloth, 2.00
+Dombey and Son,                                Cloth, 2.00
+Sketches by "Boz,"                             Cloth, 2.00
+David Copperfield,                             Cloth, 2.00
+Barnaby Rudge,                                 Cloth, 2.00
+Martin Chuzzlewit,                             Cloth, 2.00
+Old Curiosity Shop,                            Cloth, 2.00
+Christmas Stories,                             Cloth, 2.00
+Dickens' New Stories,                                 2.00
+A Tale of Two Cities,                                 2.00
+American Notes and Pic-Nic Papers,             Cloth, 2.00
+
+Price of a set, in Black cloth, in 17 volumes       $32.00
+     "      "   Full Law Library style               42.00
+     "      "   Half calf, sprinkled edges           48.00
+     "      "   Half calf, marbled edges.            50.00
+     "      "   Half calf, antique                   60.00
+     "      "   Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.     60.00
+
+PEOPLE'S DUODECIMO EDITION.
+
+Pickwick Papers,                              Cloth, $1.75
+Nicholas Nickleby,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Great Expectations,                            Cloth, 1.75
+Lamplighter's Story,                           Cloth, 1.75
+David Copperfield,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Oliver Twist,                                  Cloth, 1.75
+Bleak House,                                   Cloth, 1.75
+A Tale of Two Cities,                                 1.75
+Dickens' New Stories,                                 1.75
+Little Dorrit,                                 Cloth, 1.75
+Dombey and Son,                                Cloth, 1.75
+Christmas Stories,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Sketches by "Boz,"                             Cloth, 1.75
+Barnaby Rudge,                                 Cloth, 1.75
+Martin Chuzzlewit,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Old Curiosity Shop,                            Cloth, 1.75
+Dickens' Short Stories,                               1.50
+Message from the Sea,                                 1.50
+
+Price of a set, in Black cloth, in 17 volumes       $29.00
+     "      "   Full Law Library style               35.00
+     "      "   Half calf, sprinkled edges           42.00
+     "      "   Half calf, marbled edges             44.00
+     "      "   Half calf, antique                   50.00
+     "      "   Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.     50.00
+     "      "   Full calf, antique                   60.00
+     "      "   Full calf gilt edges, backs, etc.    60.00
+
+
+ILLUSTRATED DUODECIMO EDITION.
+
+Pickwick Papers,                              Cloth, $3.00
+Tale of Two Cities,                            Cloth, 3.00
+Nicholas Nickleby,                             Cloth, 3.00
+David Copperfield,                             Cloth, 3.00
+Oliver Twist,                                  Cloth, 3.00
+Christmas Stories,                             Cloth, 3.00
+Bleak House,                                   Cloth, 3.00
+Sketches by "Boz,"                             Cloth, 3.00
+Barnaby Rudge,                                 Cloth, 3.00
+Martin Chuzzlewit,                             Cloth, 3.00
+Old Curiosity Shop,                            Cloth, 3.00
+Little Dorrit,                                 Cloth, 3.00
+Dombey and Son,                                Cloth, 3.00
+
+_Each of the above are complete in two volumes, illustrated._
+
+Great Expectations,                             Cloth, 1.75
+Lamplighter's Story,                                   1.75
+Dickens' New Stories,                                  1.50
+Message from the Sea,                                  1.50
+
+Price of a set, in Thirty volumes, bound in Black cloth, gilt backs  $45.00
+     "      "   Full Law Library style                                55.00
+     "      "   Half calf, antique                                    90.00
+     "      "   Half calf, full gilt back                             90.00
+     "      "   Full calf, antique                                   100.00
+     "      "   Full calf, gilt edges, backs etc                     100.00
+
+
+CHARLES DICKENS' WORKS.
+
+CHEAP EDITION, PAPER COVER.
+
+This edition is published complete in Twenty-two large octavo volumes, in
+paper cover, as follows. Price Seventy-five cents a volume.
+
+Pickwick Papers.
+Great Expectations.
+A Tale of Two Cities.
+New Years' Stories.
+Barnaby Rudge.
+Old Curiosity Shop.
+Little Dorrit.
+David Copperfield.
+Sketches by "Boz."
+Dickens' New Stories.
+American Notes.
+Somebody's Luggage.  25 cts.
+Oliver Twist.
+Lamplighter's Story.
+Dombey and Son.
+Nicholas Nickleby.
+Holiday Stories.
+Martin Chuzzlewit.
+Bleak House.
+Dickens' Short Stories.
+Message from the Sea.
+Christmas Stories.
+Pic-Nic Papers.
+Christmas Carols. 25 cents.
+
+LIBRARY OCTAVO EDITION. IN SEVEN VOLUMES.
+
+This edition is in SEVEN large octavo volumes, with a portrait on steel of
+Charles Dickens, and bound in the following various styles.
+
+Price of a set, in Black cloth, in seven volumes,      $14.00
+  "         "      Scarlet cloth, extra,                15.00
+  "         "      Law Library style,                   17.50
+  "         "      Half calf, sprinkled edges,          20.00
+  "         "      Half calf, marbled edges,            21.00
+  "         "      Half calf, antique,                  25.00
+  "         "      Half calf, full gilt backs, etc.,    25.00
+
+
+CHARLES LEVER'S WORKS.
+
+_Fine Edition, bound separately._
+
+Charles O'Malley, cloth,                         $2.00
+Harry Lorrequer, cloth,                           2.00
+Jack Hinton, cloth,                               2.00
+Davenport Dunn, cloth,                            2.00
+Tom Burke of Ours, cloth,                         2.00
+Arthur O'Leary, cloth,                            2.00
+Con Cregan, cloth,                                2.00
+Knight of Gwynne, cloth,                          2.00
+Valentine Vox, cloth,                             2.00
+Ten Thousand a Year,                              2.00
+
+
+CHARLES LEVER'S NOVELS.
+
+_All neatly done up in paper covers._
+
+Charles O'Malley,                        _Price_ 75 cts.
+Harry Lorrequer,                               75  "
+Horace Templeton,                              75  "
+Tom Burke of Ours,                             75  "
+Jack Hinton, the
+ Guardsman,                                       75  "
+Arthur O'Leary,                                75 cts.
+The Knight of Gwynne,                          75  "
+Kate O'Donoghue,                               75  "
+Con Cregan, the Irish
+ Gil Blas,                                        75  "
+Davenport Dunn,                                75  "
+
+LIBRARY EDITION.
+
+THIS EDITION is complete in FIVE large octavo volumes, containing Charles
+O'Malley, Harry Lorrequer, Horace Templeton, Tom Burke of Ours, Arthur
+O'Leary, Jack Hinton the Guardsman, The Knight of Gwynne, Kate O'Donoghue,
+etc., handsomely printed, and bound in various styles, as follows:
+
+Price of a set in Black cloth,                        $10.00
+  "         "     Scarlet cloth,                       11.00
+  "         "     Law Library sheep,                   12.50
+  "         "     Half calf, sprinkled edges,          14.00
+  "         "     Half calf, marbled edges,            15.00
+  "         "     Half calf, antique,                  20.00
+
+
+WILKIE COLLINS' GREAT WORKS.
+
+     The Dead Secret. One volume, octavo, paper cover. Price
+     fifty cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00; or a
+     fine 12mo. edition, in one vol., paper cover, in large type,
+     for $1.25, or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Crossed Path; or, Basil. Complete in one volume, paper
+     cover. Price $1.25, or bound in one volume, cloth, for
+     $1.50.
+
+     The Stolen Mask. Price 25 cents.
+
+     Hide and Seek. One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price fifty
+     cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00.
+
+     After Dark. One vol., octavo, paper, cover. Price fifty
+     cents; or bound in one vol., cloth, for $1.00.
+
+     Sights a-foot; or Travels Beyond Railways. One volume,
+     octavo, paper cover. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Yellow Mask. Price 25 cts.
+
+     Sister Rose. Price 25 cents.
+
+
+COOK BOOKS
+
+     Petersons' New Cook Book; or Useful Receipts for the
+     Housewife and the uninitiated. Full of valuable receipts,
+     all original and never before published, all of which will
+     be found to be very valuable and of daily use. One vol.,
+     bound. Price $1.50.
+
+     Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book; Being her last new book. One
+     volume, bound. Price $1.50.
+
+     Widdifield's New Cook Book; or, Practical Receipts for the
+     Housewife. Cloth. Price $1.50.
+
+     Mrs. Hale's New Cook Book. By Mrs. Sarah J. Hale. One
+     volume, bound. Price $1.50.
+
+     Miss Leslie's New Receipts for Cooking. Complete in one
+     volume, bound. Price $1.50.
+
+
+MRS. HALE'S RECEIPTS.
+
+     Mrs. Hale's Receipts for the Million. Containing 4545
+     Receipts. By Mrs. Sarah J. Hale. One vol., 800 pages,
+     strongly bound. Price $1.50.
+
+
+LADIES GUIDE TO TRUE POLITENESS, etc.
+
+The Ladies Guide to True Politeness and Perfect Manners. By Miss Leslie.
+Cloth, full gilt back. Price $1.50.
+
+     The Ladies Complete Guide to Needlework and Embroidery. 113
+     Illustrations. Cloth, gilt back. Price $1.50.
+
+     Ladies Work Table Book. Plates, cloth, crimson gilt. Price
+     $1.25.
+
+
+FRANCATELLI'S FRENCH COOK.
+
+     Francatelli's Celebrated French Cook Book. The Modern Cook.
+     A Practical Guide to the Culinary Art, in all its branches;
+     comprising, in addition to English Cookery, the most
+     approved and recherche systems of French, Italian, and
+     German Cookery; adapted as well for the largest
+     establishments, as for the use of private families. By
+     CHARLES ELME FRANCATELLI, pupil to the celebrated CAREME,
+     and late Maitre-d'Hotel and Chief Cook to her Majesty, the
+     Queen of England. With Sixty-Two Illustrations of various
+     dishes. Reprinted from the last London Edition, carefully
+     revised and considerably enlarged. Complete in one large
+     octavo volume of Six Hundred pages, strongly bound, and
+     printed on the finest paper. Price Five Dollars.
+
+
+J. A. MAITLAND'S GREAT WORKS.
+
+     The Three Cousins. By J. A. Maitland. One vol., paper. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Watchman. Complete in one large vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Wanderer. Complete in one volume, paper cover. Price
+     $1.25; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Diary of an Old Doctor. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25, or bound in cloth for $1.50.
+
+     The Lawyer's Story. One volume, paper cover. Price $1.25; or
+     bound in cloth for $1.50.
+
+     Sartaroe. A Tale of Norway. One vol., paper cover. Price
+     $1.25 or in cloth for $1.50.
+
+
+MRS. DANIELS' GREAT WORKS.
+
+     Marrying for Money. One vol., octavo, paper cover. Price
+     fifty cents; or one vol., cloth. Price $1.00.
+
+     The Poor Cousin. Price 50 cents.
+
+     Kate Walsingham. Price 50 cents.
+
+
+ALEXANDER DUMAS' WORKS.
+
+     Count of Monte-Cristo. By Alexander Dumas. Beautifully
+     illustrated. One volume, cloth, $1.50; or paper cover, for
+     $1.00.
+
+     The Conscript. One vol., paper cover. Price $1.25.; or in
+     one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Camille; or the Fate of a Coquette. Only correct Translation
+     from the Original French. One volume, paper, price $1.25;
+     cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Three Guardsmen. Price 75 cents, in paper cover, or a
+     finer edition in cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Twenty Years After. A Sequel to the "Three Guardsmen." Price
+     75 cents, in paper cover, or a finer edition, in one volume,
+     cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Bragelonne; the Son of Athos: being the continuation of
+     "Twenty Years After." Price 75 cents, in paper, or a finer
+     edition, in cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Iron Mask. Being the continuation of the "Three
+     Guardsmen." Two vols., paper cover. Price One Dollar; or in
+     one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Louise La Valliere, or, The Second Series and end of the
+     "Iron Mask." Two volumes, paper cover. Price $1.00, or in
+     one vol., cloth, $1.50.
+
+     The Memoirs of a Physician. Beautifully Illustrated. Two
+     vols., paper cover. Price One Dollar; or bound in one
+     volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Queen's Necklace. A Sequel to the "Memoirs of a
+     Physician." Two vols., paper cover. Price $1.00; or in one
+     vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Six Years Later, or, Taking of the Bastile. A Continuation
+     of "The Queen's Necklace." Two vols., paper cover. Price One
+     Dollar; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Countess of Charny; or, The Fall of the French Monarchy.
+     Sequel to Six Years Later. Two vols., paper cover. Price One
+     Dollar; or in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Andree de Taverney. A Sequel to and continuation of the
+     Countess of Charny. Two volumes, paper. Price $1.00; or in
+     one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Chevalier. A Sequel to, and final end of "Andree De
+     Taverney." One vol. Price 75 cents.
+
+     The Adventures of a Marquis. Two vols., paper cover. Price
+     1.00; or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     The Forty-Five Guardsmen. Price 75 cents, or a finer edition
+     in one volume, cloth. Price $1.50.
+
+     The Iron Hand. Price 75 cents, in paper cover, or a finer
+     edition in one volume, cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Diana of Meridor. Two volumes paper cover. Price One Dollar;
+     or in one vol., cloth, for $1.50.
+
+     Edmond Dantes. Being a Sequel to Dumas' celebrated novel of
+     the "Count of Monte-Cristo." Price 50 cts.
+
+     Annette; or, The Lady of the Pearls. A Companion to
+     "Camille." Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Fallen Angel. A Story of Love and Life in Paris. One
+     volume. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Man with Five Wives. Complete in one volume. Price 50
+     cts.
+
+     George; or, The Planter of the Isle of France. One volume.
+     Price Fifty cents.
+
+     Genevieve; or, The Chevalier of Maison Rouge. One volume.
+     Illustrated. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Mohicans of Paris. 50 cts.
+
+     Sketches in France. 50 cents.
+
+     Isabel of Bavaria. Price 50 cts.
+
+     Felina de Chambure; or, The Female Fiend. Price 50 cents.
+
+     The Horrors of Paris. 50 cents.
+
+     The Twin Lieutenants. One vol. Price 75 cts.
+
+     The Corsican Brothers. 25 cts.
+
+
+FRANK E. SMEDLEY'S WORKS.
+
+     Harry Coverdale's Courtship and Marriage. One vol., paper.
+     Price $1.25; or cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Lorrimer Littlegood. By author of "Frank Fairleigh." One
+     vol., paper. Price $1.25; or cloth, $1.50.
+
+     Frank Fairleigh. One volume, cloth, $1.50; or cheap edition
+     in paper cover, for 75 cents.
+
+     Lewis Arundel. One vol., cloth. Price $1.50; or cheap
+     edition in paper cover, for 75 cents.
+
+     Fortunes and Misfortunes of Harry Racket Scapegrace. Cloth.
+     Price $1.50; or cheap edition in paper cover, for 50 cents.
+
+     Tom Racquet; and His Three Maiden Aunts. Illustrated. 50
+     cents.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+GET UP YOUR CLUBS FOR 1864!
+
+NEW AND SPLENDID PREMIUMS!
+
+PETERSON'S MAGAZINE THE BEST AND CHEAPEST IN THE WORLD!
+
+This popular Monthly contains more for the money than any Magazine in the
+world. In 1864, it will have nearly 1000 pages, 25 to 30 steel plates, 12
+colored patterns, and 900 wood engravings--and all this for only TWO
+DOLLARS A YEAR, or a dollar less than magazines of its class. Every lady
+ought to take "Peterson." In the general advance of prices, it is the ONLY
+MAGAZINE THAT HAS NOT RAISED ITS PRICES, EITHER TO SINGLE SUBSCRIBERS OR TO
+CLUBS; and is, therefore, emphatically,
+
+THE MAGAZINE FOR THE TIMES!
+
+The stories in "Peterson" are conceded to be _the best published anywhere_.
+Mrs. Ann S. Stephens, Ella Rodman, Mrs. Denison, Frank Lee Benedict, the
+author of "Susy L's Diary," T. S. Arthur, E. L. Chandler Moulton, Gabrielle
+Lee, Virginia F. Townsend, Rosalie Grey, Clara Augusta, and the author of
+"The Second Life," besides all the most popular female writers of America
+are regular contributors. In addition to the usual number of shorter
+stories, there will be given in 1864, Four Original Copy-righted Novelets,
+viz:
+
+THE MAID OF HONOR--a Story of Queen Bess,
+By ANN S. STEPHENS.
+
+THE LOST ESTATE--a Story of To-Day,
+By the author of "The Second Life."
+
+MAUD'S SUMMER AT SARATOGA,
+By FRANK LEE BENEDICT.
+
+FANNY'S FLIRTATION,
+By ELLA RODMAN.
+
+In its Illustrations also, "Peterson" is unrivaled. The publisher
+challenges a comparison between its SUPERB MEZZOTINTS AND OTHER STEEL
+ENGRAVINGS and those in other Magazines, and one at least is given in every
+number.
+
+COLORED FASHION PLATES IN ADVANCE,
+
+It is the ONLY MAGAZINE whose Fashion Plates can be relied on.
+
+Each number contains a Fashion Plate, engraved on steel, and colored--from
+Fashions later than any other Magazine gives; also, a dozen or more New
+Styles, engraved on Wood; also, a Pattern, from which a Dress, Mantilla, or
+Child's Costume can be cut, without the aid of a mantua-maker--so that each
+number, in this way, will SAVE A YEAR'S SUBSCRIPTION. The Paris, London,
+Philadelphia and New York Fashions are described, at length, each month.
+Patterns of Caps, Bonnets, Head Dresses, &c., given. Its
+
+COLORED PATTERNS IN EMBROIDERY, CROCHET, &C.
+
+The Work-Table Department of this Magazine IS WHOLLY UNRIVALED. Every
+number contains a dozen or more patterns in every variety of Fancy-work;
+Crochet, Embroidery, Knitting, Bead-work, Shell-work, Hair-work, &c., &c.,
+&c. Every month, a SUPERB COLORED PATTERN FOR SLIPPER, PURSE or CHAIR SEAT,
+&c., is given--each of which, at a retail store, would cost Fifty Cents.
+
+"OUR NEW COOK-BOOK."
+
+The Original Household Receipts of "Peterson" are quite famous. For 1864
+our "COOK-BOOK" will be continued: EVERY ONE OF THESE RECEIPTS HAS BEEN
+TESTED. This alone will be worth the price of "Peterson." Other Receipts
+for the Toilette, Sick-room, &c., &c., will be given.
+
+NEW AND FASHIONABLE MUSIC in every number. Also, Hints on Horticulture,
+Equestrianism, and all matters interesting to Ladies.
+
+TERMS:--ALWAYS IN ADVANCE.
+
+One Copy for One year,       $2.00
+Three Copies for One year,    5.00
+Five Copies for One year,    $7.50
+Eight Copies for One year.   10.00
+
+PREMIUMS FOR GETTING UP CLUBS!--Three, Five, or Eight copies, make a Club.
+To every person getting up a club an extra copy of the Magazine for 1864
+will be given.
+
+_Address, post-paid_, CHARLES J. PETERSON,
+
+No. 306 Chestnut St., Phila.
+
+All Postmasters constituted Agents; but any person may get up a club.
+Specimens sent gratuitously, if written for.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+CHEAPEST BOOK HOUSE IN THE WORLD.
+
+To Sutlers! Pedlars! Booksellers! News Agents! etc.
+
+T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,
+
+No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,
+
+PUBLISH THE MOST SALEABLE BOOKS IN THE WORLD
+
+AND SUPPLY ALL BOOKS AT VERY LOW RATES.
+
+The cheapest place in the world to buy or send for a stock of all kinds of
+Books, suitable for all persons whatever, for Soldiers, and for the Army,
+and for all other reading, is at the Bookselling and Publishing House of T.
+B. PETERSON & BROTHERS, Philadelphia.
+
+Any person wanting any books at all, in any quantity, from a single book to
+a dozen, a hundred, thousand, ten thousand, or larger quantity of books,
+had better send on their orders at once to the "CHEAPEST BOOKSELLING AND
+PUBLISHING HOUSE IN THE WORLD," which is at T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS, No.
+306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, who have the largest stock in the
+country, and will supply them and sell them cheaper than any other house in
+the world. We publish a large variety of Military Novels, with Illustrated
+Military covers, in colors, besides thousands of others, all of which are
+the best selling and most popular books in the world. We have just issued a
+new and complete Catalogue, copies of which we will send gratuitously to
+all on their sending for one.
+
+Enclose one, two, five, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, or a thousand
+dollars, or more, to us in a letter, or per express, and write what kind of
+books you wish, and they will be packed and sent to you at once, per first
+express or mail, or in any other way you may direct, just as well assorted,
+and the same as if you were on the spot, with circulars, show bills, &c.,
+gratis. All we ask is to give us a trial.
+
+Address all orders for any books you may want at all, no matter by whom
+published, or how small or how large your order may be, to the _Cheapest
+Publishing and Bookselling House in the world, which is at_
+
+T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,
+
+No. 306 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia,
+
+And they will be packed and sent to you within an hour after receipt of the
+order, per express or railroad, or in any other way you may direct.
+
+Agents, Sutlers, and Pedlars wanted everywhere, to engage in the sale of
+our popular selling Books, all of which will be sold at very low rates.
+
+
+
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