TOM LESLIE AT NIAGARA--A DASH AT SCENERY THERE--A RENCONTRE--DEXTER
RALSTON ONCE MORE--UNION MAN OR REBEL?--TOM LESLIE DISCOUNTED.
It will be remembered that Tom Leslie, leaving Josephine Harris with a
sigh of regret at Utica (those jolly fellows do sigh sometimes, after
all!) went on to Niagara on the afternoon of the Fifth of July. Walter
Lane Harding had promised to join him at the Cataract, early in the
following week, if he could so arrange his business as to leave the city
on Sunday or Monday; but just now Leslie was alone--worse alone than he
ever remembered to have been at any former period of his life. Lost one
night in a pass of the Apennines, with some doubts whether he should
ever be able to find his way to supper and civilization, he had been
lonely enough for comfort; and pacing his solitary night round as a
sentinel under the frowning guns of Sebastopol, he had felt that
another friendly human face would be pleasant to see and a friendly
human voice something not be despised; but neither of those situations
could for a moment compare with the loneliness of that summer afternoon
and evening, while he was bowling along through the Genesee Valley.
The absence of the whole world is a grief, when we do not wish to be
alone, but that is a grief in the _general_. The coming of any one
person will break the spell and fill the void. But the absence of the
_one_, immediately after earth and air have seemed to be full of the
sacred presence, is grief in the _particular_. Only one can fill that
void, and the coming of that one is for the time impossible. The company
of thousands of others is then an aggravation and an insult, making the
loneliness worse by contrast with the apparent companionship of all
others.
Tom Leslie (this fact may have been sufficiently indicated before)--Tom
Leslie was deeply, irrevocably, hopelessly in love, and he had not even
taken the ordinary pains to deceive himself on the subject. He had found
his destiny and submitted to it, after a long period of immunity. He had
every reason to know that his regard was returned; and he had no reason
to doubt, though not an explicit word had been spoken to warrant the
belief--that when he asked the corresponding question of Josephine
Harris, as he certainly meant to do at a very early day, her answer
would be a frank and satisfactory--yes! So much for content and the
future. But Tom, like many another child, had no propensity for waiting,
and liked his sugar-plums _now_ as well as to-morrow. He would have
liked to give up business, ignore propriety, and have the company of the
odd combination of female graces and weaknesses who had won him, all the
while for the present, and afterwards by way of variety. So he felt at
that moment, at least; and it was with more than one, or two, or a dozen
yawns and "Heighos!" and several short naps that happened along on his
travel like cities of refuge, that he managed to wear through the last
hours of his journey.
But Tom Leslie, the cosmopolitan and journalist, would have been
unworthy the experience through which he had passed, had he lacked the
power to endure what he disliked. He could never have digested
horse-beef among the Kalmucks, or stomached the rancid sour-krout of Old
Haarlem, without this indispensable qualification. So, though on the
night of his arrival at the Cataract he allowed the thunder of the fall
to call him in vain to a view by the broken moonlight, and though he
tumbled into bed within ten minutes after his late and light supper and
went sullenly to sleep as if there had not been a woman in the world
worth thinking of,--yet he was in quite another mood the next morning.
Niagara was unusually full for so early a period in the season, the
leading houses being already crowded, though principally by transient
visitors. The Fourth of July, then just passed, had been kept with
unusual vigor and display, in the way of powder, fireworks and general
patriotism at the International, the Cataract and all the other more
popular houses--partially, no doubt, because the evil eyes from across
the river began to be noticeable, and because the red-cross flag had
been more conspicuously displayed at the Clifton House and on the
flag-staff at the Museum at Table Rock, than in ordinary seasons.
But whatever changes might have occurred in personal and national
feeling, Tom Leslie felt, as he strolled across the bridge and over Goat
Island, on the morning after his arrival, that there had been no change
which the human eye could perceive, in the great cataract or its
surroundings, since he had looked upon it for the last time before his
departure for Europe, when that narrow river supplied the northern
boundary of what seemed to be a united and happy nation. Humanity is
changing, inconsistent and unreliable: Nature is calm, grand, and verges
on the eternal. He saw that the great American Rapid still came
thundering down, "like a herd of white buffaloes with wild eyes and
sea-green manes," as a graphic writer has described it; that the grand
old trees with their gloomy immensity of shade and the thousands of
unknown and long-forgotten names carved upon their bark, still stood as
sentinels along the beaten pathways over the Island; that the thunder of
the Fall still kept the whole solid mass of the Island in one creeping
and trembling shudder, as if a slight earthquake was just passing, with
a dull, heavy boom like that of a continuous distant cannonade, coming
up in the pauses of the wind.
He saw, too, as he paid his inevitable quarter at the toll-house on the
causeway, that the course of "honest industry" (_i.e._, that blatant
humbug which eternally taxes the pockets for superfluities) had not been
checked; for the usual amount of birchen-canoes, bead-caps and
feather-fans with sprawled birds in the centre, were on sale under
peculiarly aboriginal auspices. And that the whole race of Jehus had not
relieved society by going to be killed-off in the war, he became
painfully aware by the number of villainous-looking wretches armed with
dilapidated whips, who beset him on the bridge and offered to convey him
anywhere for something less than the mere pleasure of his company. Tom
Leslie had been somewhat too familiar in other lands as well as his own,
with such human vermin as those with the whips, and such fungi
temptations to extravagance as those that hung from the tawny hands and
beckoned from shelves and glass cases,--to pay them much attention or
receive much annoyance from them; and so he passed on across the Island,
to look once more upon the great English Fall and the Canada shore
beyond.
Emerging from the woods upon the high bank overlooking the English
rapids, the whole unequalled scene burst once more on his view, as he
had patriotically tried to remember it when looking at Terni and
Schaffhausen. He had carried the sight and almost the roar with him, in
memory, ready to dwarf with them all that the European world could
present; and so sacred seemed the thought of that wonder of nature which
could form such a talisman, that the broad hat was insensibly lifted
from his brow as he caught the first new glimpse, and he stood before
the Fall fairly uncovered as he might have done on the crest of the
Judean hills, overlooking the first-seen Jerusalem.
The dark and rugged Canadian shore was full in view on the other side of
the river, with the Clifton House and the Museum glimmering brightly in
the morning sunlight, and the red-cross flag waving sluggishly from both
as if in defiance of the great nation that lay so near and yet could
not possess the little patch of land over which it floated. The
Horse-Shoe Tower stood as of old, still unconquered by the fierce rapids
striving to undermine it; and around base and balcony swarmed visitors
who seemed like pigmies not so much on account of the distance as
because they were dwarfed and belittled in the presence of the immense
and the immeasurable. All these things lay broadly in sight of the
journalist on that glorious Sunday morning, and perhaps at another time
he might have seen and attempted to describe them; but not _then_. He
for the moment failed to see what was before him, and he saw something
else not revealed to every eye.
Tom Leslie was either the master or the slave of a powerful imagination.
Some who knew him said the one, and some the other. But all agreed as to
the possession of the faculty; and it was not always that his soberest
and most conscientious relations (in type) were received without a shade
of suspicion on that account. It may have been that the loneliness of
the night before had not quite worn away, and that it left him sadder
and more impressible than usual; and it may have been that the one
element before wanting in his nature, that of earnest and undivided
human love, had changed him when it was supplied. At all events, there
was a something in that wondrous scene, that came to him that morning as
he had never before known it--something that came to him from
dream-land, and made the sight of his eyes only the exercise of a
secondary faculty. He saw, with this peculiar sight, all the features of
the scene that we have noted, and another and one strikingly unusual, in
a shipwreck in the rapids.
Two days before, on the Fourth, and in honor of the day, a knot of gay
fellows had procured an old schooner, hoisted white streamers at the
tops of her stripped masts, and sent her down the river into the rapids
from Chippewa Creek, expecting to enjoy the rare pleasure of seeing her
leap over the Falls and emerge in little fragments and splinters of
timber in the river below. Thousands had gathered on the Canadian shore,
and on Goat Island, to witness a prank never matched in audacity since
the British "guerrillas" from the other side, in the time of the
Canadian rebellion, seized the steamer "Caroline" at Schlosser, set her
on fire, and sent her down the Falls--an act which almost lit the torch
of war so effectually between the two countries, that all the waters
which overwhelmed the "Caroline" would not have been enough to quench
it.
But with reference to the old schooner, sent down from Chippewa Creek on
the Fourth of July. She had only shown that human calculations are not
infallible, even when they presage disaster. The thousands assembled to
witness the destruction, had been doomed to disappointment. The current
had swept the boat well over on the Canadian side, and there some
unknown eddy had seized and driven her between two sunken rocks, where
she lay as safe from any danger of the Falls as if she had been ten
miles below them, instead of half a mile above. She lay, bow up the
river, inclined lengthwise, as if she had been caught when shooting down
the Lachine Rapids, and the white streamers on her bare masts fluttering
out to the winds as signals of distress that would have been--ah! so
hopeless and useless with human life on board and in peril.
At the first moment of beholding the old wreck, Tom Leslie found her a
prominent feature in the spectacle, and his reflections took a shape
which may have been taken by those of many sojourners at the Falls, who
saw her during the season:
"There she lies to-day, and there she may lie for many a long month,
gradually weakening and breaking apart from the action of the rapids
surging around her, until some night when the wind comes fiercely down
the river, and heavy storms have increased the volume of water as well
as loosened the last bolt that yet holds her securely together,--then,
when there is none to witness the death-throe of wood and iron, she will
heave and labor and at last break apart. The two fragments will go
sweeping down, whirled over like playthings--touching the points of the
rocks and giving out groans and shrieks like those which precede
dissolution; then for one moment there will be a dark mass poised on the
edge of the Fall, and the next there will be one more deafening crash
added even to the thunder of the waters. A few broken splinters will go
sweeping away down the dark river, and all will be over."
But what was it that Tom Leslie saw, more than is revealed to the
natural eyes, looking on that scene when he had contemplated it for a
few moments? This and only this--but quite enough to make the memory of
that moment immortal. He saw it _applied to the human heart and human
life_. The water pouring over the Horse-shoe Fall ceased for the moment
to be the falling water of this real world, and became some weird stream
falling thunderously and in white glory through the land of dreams. The
dark misty gulf into which it poured below was not the physical abyss
over which the natural man must stand with a shudder, but the unfathomed
pit of woe and sorrow into which, in nightmare dreams, man has been ever
falling yet never destroyed, since the first visions of early childhood.
The tower ceased to be a palpable mass of wood and stone, and became
human hope and energy, with the clear blue sky of God's providence
above, beaten by storms and undermined by fierce currents every moment
threatening it with destruction, but standing yet through all. And the
old wrecked schooner above had ceased to be a mere material wreck of
plank and timber and iron--it was one of those unreal but sadder wrecks
of a human life and a human soul, stranded for the moment on the rock of
some great calamity, and eventually to be swept away and engulfed by the
inevitable.
There had been a slight veil of haze shrouding the sun for the previous
half hour; but as Tom Leslie partially awakened from his dream and
listlessly descended the stairs cut in the bank, towards the bridge
leading to the Tower, the mist rolled away, the sun broke forth in the
glory of high-noon, and out of the darkness below sprang an arch of
light that almost made the journalist, who was too old and too
world-hardened for such exhibitions, clap his hands and cry: "The
rainbow! the rainbow!" Of old he had seen the rainbow spanning the
eastern heaven when looking out at early evening from the home of his
childhood, and when the thunder-storms of summer were dying away over
the Atlantic; but here it was, a thing of arms' reach, and at his feet!
At one moment it merely glimmered up through the mist from the bed of
the river, a little broken space of the arch, and the colors dim and
indistinct; anon the sky grew brighter and the column of mist rose
higher; and now it formed more than the half circle, the top a little
above the level of the Fall,--and the blue, and gold, and green, and
orange, and purple, painted so brightly on the retina of the eye that
they seemed to be a part of the very air the observer was inhaling. How
near he stood, impressible Tom, at that moment, to the eternal
mystery!--how near to the workshop in which seem to be flashed out from
eternal forges the beauties of the sunshine and the storm! Climbing down
from the bridge to the end of the rock, leaning tremblingly over and
looking down into the misty gulf below with that Jacob's Ladder of faith
set therein--it is not strange that the journalist for one moment wished
for a line and plummet to drop into that reservoir of golden glory and
bring up some memento of what seemed so near to the celestial;--just as
one wishes, sometimes when the midnight heaven is darkest and the stars
are burning most purely there, to be able to stretch forth a hand among
the stellar lights and bring it back bathed with that radiance which is
so fearfully beautiful.
Leslie had no intention of ascending the tower that day--other days
would be his at Niagara, and something must be saved for each. Besides,
he had breakfasted lightly and an unromantic call for lunch was being
made on faculties quite as delicate as his mental perceptions. He had
accordingly just turned again and ascended the stairs to the bank in
front of the Pavilion, when the fates (ever kind to him in this regard,
as to every other true lover of nature) vouchsafed him one moment's
glimpse of a spectacle often wished for and seen but seldom. Turning for
one last glimpse as he walked away, at that instant his eye was resting
on the sharpest point of the curve of the Horse-shoe Fall, where the
volume of water is evidently deepest, and where from that depth it makes
one broad unbroken sweep of amber green as it plunges over, without one
fleck of foam to mar it. He was just scanning for an instant that calm
depth, and saying that _there_ was after all the majesty of
Niagara--there, where the great green flood approaches the awful
precipice, impelled by a resistless force from above, but unruffled and
untroubled by the approaching fate--bends gracefully and proudly at the
verge, as some dusky Antoinette might do her proud neck when the axe of
the executioner was impending--then, still without a ripple or a tremor
takes the last long plunge as Curtius may have done when the gulf was
open in the Forum and he rode down the Aventine and spurred out into
thin air to fulfil the omens of the augurs and save the perilled life of
Rome,--he was just feeling and saying this, when a dark speck appeared
at the very edge of the green. It was a log, perhaps fifteen or twenty
feet in length, over the Fall!--a mere log, nothing in another place,
but everything in the place it for that moment occupied. For one instant
he saw it hang trembling on the verge, then for another its dark
outlines were thrown into clear relief against the bright green water
with the sunshine glimmering through; and then down, down it was hurled,
rushing like an arrow's flight into the feathery foam of the broken
water below, and at last (so far as human eye could ever know) into the
blinding mist at the bottom of the cataract. What a reed upon the brook
had been that log, that might have required the strength of a dozen men
to lift it from the ground!--what is the might with which the elements
make playthings of what seem to mortal strength dense and
immoveable--even as the great Power that is equally above nature and
above man, "holdeth the mountains in the hollow of his hand, and taketh
up the isles as a very little thing!"
"By George!" said Leslie. "What a lucky dog I am! I have known a
thousand people who wished for just such a view, and I have had it all
alone, after all!" He was not in the habit of holding conversations
aloud with himself; but he had been so impressed as to speak aloud
involuntarily, in this instance.
"No, not quite alone, if you please, Mr. Leslie!" said a deep voice
behind him, and at the same instant a hand was laid upon his shoulder.
He turned, and met the powerful form and singular face of Dexter
Ralston, the Virginian.
It was not unnatural that Leslie should be surprised; and it would be
idle to say that he was not even startled at this most unexpected
meeting, remembering what he did of the last three occasions on which he
had met this man--in each instance, as he had reason to suppose, his
observation being unknown to the other. He might have been pardoned if
he even shuddered, remembering the connection which he believed Ralston
to bear towards the "red woman"; and he was too ardent a Union man, as
we have seen, not instantly to remember the ambiguous circumstances
under which he had twice seen him, and the chase after him and his
companions which had cost him so long a ride only a few days before. It
may be said, in this place, that he had heard nothing from
Superintendent Kennedy, before leaving the city, of the watch placed
upon the house and its result,--and that after the second adventure of
the house on Prince Street, and the opening of the new channel into
which his thoughts and feelings had been led by the meeting with Joe
Harris, he had not thought proper to follow up the mystery, and
consequently had no knowledge that any of the parties had left New York.
All those thoughts, and the counter one that the man before him had
really done him no harm but had once rendered him an important
service--passed through the mind of Leslie so quickly that the other
must have been a close observer to know that they were passing at all.
As a result, by the time that they became fairly confronted and Dexter
Ralston held out his hand, that of Tom Leslie met him with all apparent
frankness.
"Mr. Ralston," he said, owning a part of the truth, "really you
surprised me."
"So I suppose," said the other; "and yet I have been standing here,
leaning against one of the posts of the Pavilion, for several minutes;
and I am certainly not so small of stature as to be easily overlooked."
"No," laughed Leslie. And then he added. "But yonder is something
larger. The Falls dwarf everything, and I suppose _hide_ everything."
"Very probably," said Ralston. "Were you walking back towards the
bridge? Shall I walk with you? That is--I mean to ask--are you alone?"
"Oh yes, all alone!" said Leslie. "I am at the Cataract. And you--are
you staying here?"
"I _have_ been staying at the Clifton," answered the other, as they
strolled back across the Island. "But just now I am at the Monteagle. It
is long since we met," he added. "You have been in Europe, have you not?
I think you told me you were going, when I saw you last."
"Yes," said Leslie, "I have been in Europe again, and only came back
last spring." But he added a mental enquiry that was by no means shaped
into words: "_Did_ I say to him that I was going to Europe? or does he
keep watch of me and know my every movement, through the mysterious
agency of the woman of the Rue la Reynie Ogniard?"
"You are a newspaper man still?" asked Ralston, after a momentary
silence, as they walked on.
"Yes," said Leslie, "I am still at that drudgery, in my own way, and
shall probably never be freed from it. But you see that I do not stick
so closely to the desk as to injure my health very much! And you--excuse
my asking the question," and he tried, walking at his side though he
was, to mark closely whether the question produced any effect on the
face of the other--"but the truth is, Ralston, that I scarcely expected
to meet you in the North at the present moment. I thought you so
incarnate a Southerner, as well as a slaveholder, that you would have
been likely to join in the rebellion!"
"No, did you?" asked Ralston; and if his face changed, certainly Leslie,
close observer as he thought himself, could not detect the difference.
"Well, I must say that you put the matter plainly. You _should_ have
thought better of an old friend, and remembered that if I was a
_Virginian_ I was also and still more an _American_."
How openly and with what apparent honesty the man spoke! And how
impossible it seemed that he _could_ be uttering other words than those
of entire truth? But Tom Leslie remembered the night under the arches of
the Capitol, the stars-and-bars and the mystic circlet of the house on
Prince Street, and the mysterious words that procured admission to the
house up-town; and he had seen and heard enough of double faces not to
be _too_ sure of his ground on any man's word.
"Well, I am glad to know it," he said, in reply to Ralston's disclaimer.
"We have not too many true Union men, who have _forgotten the particular
part of the Union in which they were born, for the sake of the country
and the whole country_. I am glad to know that you are one of them." He
laid peculiar stress on the more important words of the last sentence,
and bent his eyes still more searchingly on the countenance of the
singular man before him.
"How long do you remain?" asked Ralston, as they neared the end of the
bridge.
"A few days only," answered Leslie--"perhaps a week or two. I came up to
catch the moon on the Falls."
"You should have come in time, then, and seen the eclipse," said the
Virginian.
"Aha!" said Tom Leslie to himself. "One point of information gained, if
no more! He is a little in the _habit_ of being at Niagara, for he was
here at the full moon in June and he has since been absent! One touch
inside your armor, old fellow, if no more! You were here to see the
eclipse, then?" he asked aloud of Ralston. "I tried to come myself, but
could not manage it. What was it like, if you saw it over the Falls?"
"I was staying at the Clifton House, then," said Ralston, "and I came
down to Table Rock, alone, just after midnight, and sat there from the
beginning to the end of the obscuration. You should have seen"--and here
his undeniable though repressed poetical temperament began to show
itself in his cheek and eye--"you should have seen the dull, dismal
shadow gradually creeping over the rapids as the disk grew smaller,
every flashing wave seeming to be touched with a ghastly reflection that
said: 'Daylight and moonlight are both gone forever--the last darkness
is creeping on--the end of all things is at hand.' The spray below the
cataract seemed dun and lead-colored, as if it might have been the
sulphurous smoke rolling up from a battle-field. All was splendidly
dismal, let me tell you!--such a spectacle as few men see and no man who
sees ever forgets!"
"And what was the appearance of the moon when fully obscured?" asked
Leslie, almost breathless with interest at the strangely graphic words
of the Virginian, and no longer wondering, after those words, that there
should have been a connection between the mysterious "red woman" and one
who seemed so nearly of her mental kin.
"It was _no_ moon," answered Ralston, and his dark eyes seemed to lose
all their fierceness and grow inexpressibly sad and solemn as he spoke.
"It was _no_ moon! It was a mere unreal shadow and mockery--the dead
ghost of a moon that had been, perished long ago, and embodying all the
griefs and all the sorrows that had weighed down the heart of man since
the Creation. The waters of Niagara lay beneath it, as if under a pall
that had settled over a dead world!"
"I should have liked to see it--I would have travelled a thousand miles
to see it, had I thought so far!" said Leslie, with the earnestness of a
lover of Nature under all her aspects.
"Would you?" said Ralston. "Well, it was something to see _once_: I
should scarcely like to trust the brain of the man who saw it much
oftener. I must leave you, but I hope I shall meet you again. Here boy!"
beckoning to one of the lounging hack-drivers at the hotel-end of the
bridge, "Drive me to the Monteagle. Good-bye!" and away he whirled,
leaving Leslie to look after him until out of sight, and to say to
himself as he walked up the esplanade over the rapids:
"I thought that _I_ was an oddity and a contradiction, but that fellow
can _discount_ me! I don't know half as much about him now, as I did the
first moment I saw him!"