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.