The coach door had been opened and all the inside passengers handed out, before the merry party from the roof made any attempt at getting down. Peal after peal of hearty laughter went up from that outside division of the vehicle; and evidently the party there assembled had reached the Profile before achieving the end of the jests and story-telling in which they had been engaged. They had already attracted some attention from the piazza, and one boarding-school miss had been appealed to by her eye-glassed swain in attendance, to "heah those awful vulgah fellahs!"—when the laughter ceased, and one of the roof-passengers made a sudden spring from that elevation, over the heads of half a dozen of those standing on the ground, and came safely to his feet with a jerk which would have laid up a less perfect physical man for a week and completely shaken out the false teeth from the mouth of any victim of a dentist.
The rapid man was followed by his companions, Frank Vanderlyn included among the number; but they all seemed to choose the more popular mode of getting down, by the aid of steps and braces.
"Pretty well done, Rowan!" exclaimed one of the others as he himself reached the ground. "Broke any thing?"
"No, nothing—except," and at that moment his eye caught the forms and faces of Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her mother, who were standing at the edge of the piazza, waiting while Frank descended and made some arrangement for the disposition of their baggage. "H. T.," of the coach-load, was standing within a few feet of them, his little satchel still strapped over his shoulder and his eyes scarcely wandering at all from the woman whom they had scanned so long and well during the journey by rail. But he had glanced around, with the others, at the noise made by the singular descent; and his eye met that of the man who had been called Rowan, as the latter made the discovery of mother and daughter. It was but a lightning flash that Rowan gave or the stranger detected, but few glances of any human eye have ever expressed more within the same period. He evidently saw the young girl for the first time, at that moment; and quite as evidently he drank in at that one glimpse the full charm of her beauty and goodness. That was not all: in the one glance, too, he apparently measured her wealth and social position—saw and reckoned up the proud woman standing beside her—then took, it is probable, an introspective view of himself and his own surroundings, and found time to realize the utter hopelessness of that impulse which for the tithe of a moment he must have felt stirring within him.
Perhaps half-a-dozen seconds had elapsed before he concluded the answer he had begun. "No, nothing—except—my heart!" He had begun to speak in a light, gay, off-hand manner: he concluded in a low, sad voice, full alike of music and melancholy.
"H. T." had been observing him very closely during that brief space of time, as had nearly all the other spectators, their notice attracted by his reckless mode of alighting. He was apparently about thirty years of age, a little less than six feet high—perhaps five feet eleven; with a form undeniably stout, but rounded like a reed and as elastic as whalebone. His hands were soft and womanish in their contour, though they were rather large, nut-brown in color, and had evidently felt, as had his face, the meridian sun. His feet were almost singularly small for so large a man—highly arched and springy. His face and head, as he the moment after removed his hat, were capable of attracting attention in any company. The face was a little broad and heavily moulded; the cheek-bones prominent and the nose slightly aquiline; the eyes dark, dreamy and lazy; the brow fair, and above it clustering dark, short, soft hair, curled, but so delicate in texture that it waved like silk floss with the veriest breath. The mouth would have been, the observer might have thought, heavy and a little sensual, had it not been hidden away by the thick and curling dark moustache which he wore without other beard. Only one other feature need be named—a chin rather broad and square and showing a very slight depression of the bone in the centre—such as has marked a singular description of men for many an hundred years. It needed a second glance to see that a broad, heavy scar, thoroughly healed, commenced at the left cheek-bone and traversed below the ear until lost in the thick hair at the base of the neck. Such was the picture this man presented—a contradictory one in some respects, but evidencing great strength, power and agility, and yet more than a suspicion of intellectuality and refinement. A close and habitual observer of men does not often err in "placing" one whom he may happen to meet, even at first sight,—after a few seconds of careful examination; but the keenest might have been puzzled to decide what was that man's station in life, his profession, or even his character. Any one must have been in the main favorably impressed: beyond that point little could possibly have been imagined by the most daring.
A small black trunk came off the top of the coach at about the time that "H. T.," who seemed to be bargaining for a rival at that early period, had concluded his inspection; and there was not much difficulty in connecting the name and address painted in white on the end with the appellation by which the stranger had the moment before been designated. That name and address read: "Halstead Rowan, Chicago, Illinois."
Two men appeared to be travelling in company with Rowan; one a man of something beyond his own age—the other five or six years younger; both respectable but by no means affluent in appearance. All were well dressed and gentlemanly in aspect; but neither Rowan nor either of his companions gave the impression of what might be designated as the "first circles of society," even in the great grain-metropolis of the West.
"H. T.," the observer, had fixed his eyes so closely on the male party in that singular meeting, that he probably lost the answering expression of the lady's face and did not know whether or not she had returned that glance of wondering interest. Something like disappointment at that lost opportunity may have been the cause of his biting his lip a little nervously as he took his way, with the rest of the new-comers, into the hall and reception-room, waiting opportunity for the booking of names and the assignment of chambers. Some of those in waiting no doubt found the tedium materially diminished by finding themselves, in the reception-room, at that close of a blazing day of July, standing or sitting with a decidedly grateful feeling before a quarter-of-a-cord of birchen wood, blazing away in the open fire-place with that peculiar warmth and hearty geniality so little known to this coal-burning age, but so well remembered by those who knew the old baronial halls of republican America in a time long passed away.
Not many minutes after the rencontre that has been described, the crowd had vanished from the piazza of the Profile House, the coaches had driven away, the baggage was being rapidly removed within doors, and the tired and hungry new-comers were booked for rooms and clearing away the soil and dust of travel, preparatory to supper. Soon the crockery and cutlery jingled in the long dining-room, and the flaky tea-biscuits steamed for those who hurried down to catch them in their full perfection.