He might have been dead, for all that could be judged, though there was really no reason to believe that he should have expired from any cause except fright. But he presented a most pitiful spectacle—his clothes fearfully torn by abrasion against the rocks in drawing up, the right arm hanging loosely from the shoulder, the eyes closed and teeth set as in a fatal spasm, and the iron-gray hair and straggling beard matted with blood yet flowing from a severe wound in the head that he had received either in falling against the rock from the root or in the perilous passage upward. There was no indication of breath, but he was alive, for the pulse had not stopped its slow movement, and there was at least a chance that he could be recovered.
But even then, and while two or three were hurrying to the table for water to use in bringing back the flitting life and some of the cloths to use as a stretcher in bearing the body to one of the wagons,—even then the general attention was for the moment withdrawn. For just as the poor Rambler was fairly landed and the company gathering around him, while Margaret Hayley was yet standing close to Horace Townsend, with her eyes still reading that face which seemed to be a perpetual puzzle to her,—the brown cheek grew suddenly of a ghastly white, the whole frame trembled as if from the coming of a spasm, and the lawyer fell heavily forward, without a sign of sensation, just as he had done in the previous instance after rash exposure and severe exertion, at the Pool. Now, as then, reaction seemed to come with terrible force, unnerving the system and literally overmastering life.
As was to be expected under such circumstances, the excitement among the pic-nickers redoubled when they had two insensible people instead of one, and one of the two the hero of so strange an adventure as that which has just been recorded, to look after and bring back to life. Exclamations: "He is dying!" "He is dead!" "He has fainted from over-exertion!" "How dreadful!" and half a dozen others ran round the circle. But Margaret Hayley did not hear or did not heed them. She was again upon her knees, for a very different purpose from that which had thus bowed her the moment before—lifting the head of matted hair upon her lap, chafing the stiffened hands, and uttering words that seemed to have no regard to the delicacy of her position or the hearing of the by-standers. Such words of unmistakable anxiety and fondness the insensible man might have been willing to peril another life to hear; and they were uttered, let it be remembered, when she, however the others may have been alarmed, had no idea that he was dying or in danger, and more as if she wished to pour out a great truth of her nature and be relieved of its weight, than with any other apparent thought in view. Oh, that ideal! Oh, love of woman, a moment checked in its first course, to break away again from all bounds and more than redouble its early madness! Oh, overweening pride of Margaret Hayley, that once had been her most marked characteristic, now cast away like a thing to be loathed and reprobated! Oh, prophet words, spoken by the sorrowing girl but a few hours after the bereavement of her life, now seeming to be so strangely fulfilled! Second love, and an abandonment that even the first had scarcely known, before two months of summer had made the grass green on the grave of the first! To what was all this tending?
Captain Hector Coles saw, and writhed. His face was dark enough with passion to indicate that had no troublesome people and no restraining law stood in his path, he would have rolled that insensible form over the edge of the plateau, with no rope to impede its progress, and watched with heart-felt delight the bumping of the body from crag to crag until it was crushed out of all semblance of humanity at the bottom! But he said not one word, nor did he again attempt to interfere in the movements of Margaret.
Only a moment or two, and then the eyes of the lawyer opened. He saw the face that was looking down into his own; and though many a man would have pretended weakness and insensibility a little longer, to keep such a position, he made an instant movement to rise and struggled to his feet with but slight assistance. Then the young girl fell back into the group of other ladies, her duty and her paroxysm of feeling both apparently over, and scarcely aware how much or how little the subject of her interest knew of her words or her actions. Nor was it sure whether the lawyer saw, as he staggered up from the ground, the expression which rested on the face of Captain Coles. Time had its task of solving both these important problems.
But a few minutes after Horace Townsend's recovery had elapsed, when the body of the Rambler, showing yet, after every application, but faint signs of life, was carefully conveyed on an impromptu stretcher to one of the wagons—the fragments of the dinner, untasted except as some few of those who would have banqueted in a death-room had snatched little bits in the midst of the excitement, gathered up and huddled together in the baggage-wagon—the whole party more or less comfortably disposed in the conveyances, and all hurrying back to the Crawford with what speed they might. We say "hurrying", advisedly. It might have been natural enough that they should hurry down, to afford more effectual relief to the wounded and tortured man; but let not humanity "lay the flattering unction to its soul" that they lacked another and a more compelling motive! Such a story as that which could be woven of the events of that day, had probably never been told as of a late actual occurrence, inside the walls of that hostelrie, within the memory of man; and nearly every one, male and female, was a little more anxious to indulge in the relation as soon as possible, and to his or her own particular set of intimates, than even to succor life or alleviate suffering! Wonder not that newspapers are popular in the latter half of the nineteenth century: man himself is but a newspaper incarnated; and a few friends are not ill-sacrificed, much less perilled without advantage, when the catastrophe affords us plenty of the cheap heroism of the looker-on and narrator!
The providences are equally strange that give opportunity for the great blunders and absorbing agonies of life, with those that afford space to its triumphant successes and its crowning pleasures. Rooms are empty or ears are deaf, sometimes, that we maybe made deliriously happy; but they may have an equally assured mission to make us wretched beyond hope. Three days before, a parlor unoccupied except by themselves had afforded Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley an opportunity of saying words that seemed to make, each a new being to the other, and that awakened hopes as wild and maddening as the dreams of opium could have originated. One laggard servant-girl with her dusting-brush, or one dawdling visitor lingering in the way, might have prevented all this and kept them on the distant footing they had before occupied. One person more, strolling down the glen below the Crawford at eleven o'clock on the morning following the events on the top of Mount Willard, might have prevented—what? Nothing, perhaps! Are not all these things ordered for us? And must not the event, debarred in one channel, have found inevitable way in another? The fatalists, who believe in a Deity of infinitesimal and innumerable providences, say "Yes!" and argue that the ripping away of a boot-sole or the scorching of the cook's short-cake come within the category. The people of unswayed free-will, who worship a Deity not over-particular as to the every-day habits of his creatures, say "No!" and see nothing providential in any event less important than the breaking out of a pestilence or the downfall of a nation. At which point it may be necessary to discover what connection all this has with the fortunes of two of the people most prominent in this narration.
At about the hour named, that morning, Horace Townsend strolled alone down the glen, towards the Willey House. Great excitements are always followed by corresponding reaction; and the visitors at the Crawford, after the departure of a few gone up the great mountain, had not made a single collective arrangement to occupy the day. Each was thrown upon personal resources; and the resource of the lawyer was setting out upon a long and lonely morning walk, his legs being the chief actors therein, while his mind, to judge by the bent head and the slow step, was taking its own peculiar and much longer journey.
Suddenly he lifted his head and came to a full stop. He was not alone, after all! Half a mile below the house, beside the road and under the edge of a thick clump of woods, lay the trunk of a huge tree, some of the higher branches yet remaining unshorn, though trimmed by the axe. On the point of one of these branches, very easily ascended by the stairway of knots below, some eight or ten feet from the ground, rested a neat foot, while the owner of the figure above it, dressed in a light robe which floated around her with almost the softness of a cloud, had thrown off her jockey-hat (the object first attracting the notice of the lawyer) on the ground below, and was stretching up at full length to pluck a cluster of the great creamy blossoms of the wild northern magnolia, starring the green leaves around it, which had beckoned her from the path.