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?"