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!