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.