"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.