Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862

by Henry Morford

CHAPTER XXVI.

Tom Leslie at Niagara—A Dash at Scenery There—A Rencontre—Dexter Ralston Once More—union Man or Rebel?—Tom Leslie Discounted.

It will be remembered that Tom Leslie, leaving Josephine Harris with a sigh of regret at Utica (those jolly fellows do sigh sometimes, after all!) went on to Niagara on the afternoon of the Fifth of July. Walter Lane Harding had promised to join him at the Cataract, early in the following week, if he could so arrange his business as to leave the city on Sunday or Monday; but just now Leslie was alone—worse alone than he ever remembered to have been at any former period of his life. Lost one night in a pass of the Apennines, with some doubts whether he should ever be able to find his way to supper and civilization, he had been lonely enough for comfort; and pacing his solitary night round as a sentinel under the frowning guns of Sebastopol, he had felt that another friendly human face would be pleasant to see and a friendly human voice something not be despised; but neither of those situations could for a moment compare with the loneliness of that summer afternoon and evening, while he was bowling along through the Genesee Valley.

The absence of the whole world is a grief, when we do not wish to be alone, but that is a grief in the general. The coming of any one person will break the spell and fill the void. But the absence of the one, immediately after earth and air have seemed to be full of the sacred presence, is grief in the particular. Only one can fill that void, and the coming of that one is for the time impossible. The company of thousands of others is then an aggravation and an insult, making the loneliness worse by contrast with the apparent companionship of all others.

Tom Leslie (this fact may have been sufficiently indicated before)—Tom Leslie was deeply, irrevocably, hopelessly in love, and he had not even taken the ordinary pains to deceive himself on the subject. He had found his destiny and submitted to it, after a long period of immunity. He had every reason to know that his regard was returned; and he had no reason to doubt, though not an explicit word had been spoken to warrant the belief—that when he asked the corresponding question of Josephine Harris, as he certainly meant to do at a very early day, her answer would be a frank and satisfactory—yes! So much for content and the future. But Tom, like many another child, had no propensity for waiting, and liked his sugar-plums now as well as to-morrow. He would have liked to give up business, ignore propriety, and have the company of the odd combination of female graces and weaknesses who had won him, all the while for the present, and afterwards by way of variety. So he felt at that moment, at least; and it was with more than one, or two, or a dozen yawns and "Heighos!" and several short naps that happened along on his travel like cities of refuge, that he managed to wear through the last hours of his journey.

But Tom Leslie, the cosmopolitan and journalist, would have been unworthy the experience through which he had passed, had he lacked the power to endure what he disliked. He could never have digested horse-beef among the Kalmucks, or stomached the rancid sour-krout of Old Haarlem, without this indispensable qualification. So, though on the night of his arrival at the Cataract he allowed the thunder of the fall to call him in vain to a view by the broken moonlight, and though he tumbled into bed within ten minutes after his late and light supper and went sullenly to sleep as if there had not been a woman in the world worth thinking of,—yet he was in quite another mood the next morning.

Niagara was unusually full for so early a period in the season, the leading houses being already crowded, though principally by transient visitors. The Fourth of July, then just passed, had been kept with unusual vigor and display, in the way of powder, fireworks and general patriotism at the International, the Cataract and all the other more popular houses—partially, no doubt, because the evil eyes from across the river began to be noticeable, and because the red-cross flag had been more conspicuously displayed at the Clifton House and on the flag-staff at the Museum at Table Rock, than in ordinary seasons.

But whatever changes might have occurred in personal and national feeling, Tom Leslie felt, as he strolled across the bridge and over Goat Island, on the morning after his arrival, that there had been no change which the human eye could perceive, in the great cataract or its surroundings, since he had looked upon it for the last time before his departure for Europe, when that narrow river supplied the northern boundary of what seemed to be a united and happy nation. Humanity is changing, inconsistent and unreliable: Nature is calm, grand, and verges on the eternal. He saw that the great American Rapid still came thundering down, "like a herd of white buffaloes with wild eyes and sea-green manes," as a graphic writer has described it; that the grand old trees with their gloomy immensity of shade and the thousands of unknown and long-forgotten names carved upon their bark, still stood as sentinels along the beaten pathways over the Island; that the thunder of the Fall still kept the whole solid mass of the Island in one creeping and trembling shudder, as if a slight earthquake was just passing, with a dull, heavy boom like that of a continuous distant cannonade, coming up in the pauses of the wind.

He saw, too, as he paid his inevitable quarter at the toll-house on the causeway, that the course of "honest industry" (i.e., that blatant humbug which eternally taxes the pockets for superfluities) had not been checked; for the usual amount of birchen-canoes, bead-caps and feather-fans with sprawled birds in the centre, were on sale under peculiarly aboriginal auspices. And that the whole race of Jehus had not relieved society by going to be killed-off in the war, he became painfully aware by the number of villainous-looking wretches armed with dilapidated whips, who beset him on the bridge and offered to convey him anywhere for something less than the mere pleasure of his company. Tom Leslie had been somewhat too familiar in other lands as well as his own, with such human vermin as those with the whips, and such fungi temptations to extravagance as those that hung from the tawny hands and beckoned from shelves and glass cases,—to pay them much attention or receive much annoyance from them; and so he passed on across the Island, to look once more upon the great English Fall and the Canada shore beyond.

Emerging from the woods upon the high bank overlooking the English rapids, the whole unequalled scene burst once more on his view, as he had patriotically tried to remember it when looking at Terni and Schaffhausen. He had carried the sight and almost the roar with him, in memory, ready to dwarf with them all that the European world could present; and so sacred seemed the thought of that wonder of nature which could form such a talisman, that the broad hat was insensibly lifted from his brow as he caught the first new glimpse, and he stood before the Fall fairly uncovered as he might have done on the crest of the Judean hills, overlooking the first-seen Jerusalem.