HER room was on the ground floor of the house we mutually inhabited,
and mine directly above it, so that my opportunities for seeing her were
limited to short glimpses of her auburn head as she leaned out of the
window to close her shutters at night or open them in the morning. Yet
our chance encounter in the hall or on the walk in front, had made so
deep an impression upon my sensibilities that I was never without the
vision of her pale face set off by the aureole of reddish brown hair,
which, since my first meeting with her, had become for me the symbol of
everything beautiful, incomprehensible and strange.
For my fellow-lodger was a mystery.
I am a busy man now, but just at the time of which I speak, I had
leisure in abundance.
I was sharing with many others the unrest of the perilous days
subsequent to the raid of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry. Abraham Lincoln
had been elected President. Baltimore, where the incidents I am relating
transpired, had become the headquarters of men who secretly leagued
themselves in antagonism to the North. Men and women who felt that their
Northern brethren had grievously wronged them planned to undermine the
stability of the government. The schemes at this time were gigantic
in their conception and far-reaching in their scope and endless
ramifications.
Naturally under these conditions, a consciousness of ever-present danger
haunted every thinking mind. The candor of the outspoken was regarded
with doubt, and the reticence of the more cautious, with distrust. It
was a trying time for sensitive, impressionable natures with nothing to
do. Perhaps all this may account for the persistency with which I sat
in my open window. I was thus sitting one night--a memorable one to
me--when I heard a sharp exclamation from below, in a voice I had long
listened for.
Any utterance from those lips would have attracted my attention; but,
filled as this was with marked, if not extraordinary, emotion, I
could not fail to be roused to a corresponding degree of curiosity and
interest.
Thrusting out my head, I cast a rapid glance downward. A shutter
swinging in the wind, and the escaping figure of a man hurrying round
the corner of the street, were all that rewarded my scrutiny; though,
from the stream of light issuing from the casement beneath, I perceived
that her window, like my own, was wide open.
As I continued to watch this light, I saw her thrust out her head with
an eagerness indicative of great excitement. Peering to right and left,
she murmured some suppressed words mixed with gasps of such strong
feeling that I involuntarily called out:
“Excuse me, madam, have you been frightened in any way by the man I saw
running away from here a moment ago?”
She gave a great start and glanced up. I see her face yet--beautiful,
wonderful; so beautiful and so wonderful I have never been able to
forget it. Meeting my eye, she faltered out:
“Did you see a man running away from here? Oh, sir, if I might have a
word with you!”
I came near leaping directly to the pavement in my ardor and anxiety to
oblige her, but, remembering before it was too late that she was neither
a Juliet nor I a Romeo, I merely answered that I would be with her in a
moment and betook myself below by the less direct but safer means of the
staircase.
It was a short one and I was but a moment in descending, but that moment
was long enough for my heart to acquire a most uncomfortable throb,
and it was with anything but an air of quiet self-possession that I
approached the threshold I had never before dared to cross even in
fancy.
The door was open and I caught one glimpse of her figure before she was
aware of my presence. She was contemplating her right hand with a look
of terror, which, added to her striking personality, made her seem at
the instant a creature of alarming characteristics fully as capable of
awakening awe as devotion.
I may have given some token of the agitation her appearance awakened,
for she turned towards me with sudden vehemence.
“Oh!” she cried, with a welcoming gesture; “you are the gentleman from
up-stairs who saw a man running away from here a moment ago. Would you
know that man if you saw him again?”
“I am afraid not,” I replied. “He was only a flying figure in my eyes.”
“Oh!” she moaned, bringing her hands together in dismay. But,
immediately straightening herself, she met my regard with one as
direct as my own. “I need a friend,” she said, “and I am surrounded by
strangers.”
I made a move towards her; I did not feel myself a stranger. But how was
I to make her realize the fact?
“If there is anything I can do,” I suggested.
Her steady regard became searching.
“I have noticed you before to-night,” she declared, with a directness
devoid of every vestige of coquetry. “You seem to have qualities that
may be trusted. But the man capable of helping me needs the strongest
motives that influence humanity: courage, devotion, discretion, and a
total forgetfulness of self. Such qualifications cannot be looked for in
a stranger.”
As if with these words she dismissed me from her thoughts, she turned
her back upon me. Then, as if recollecting the courtesy due even to
strangers, she cast me an apologetic glance over her shoulder and
hurriedly added:
“I am bewildered by my loss. Leave me to the torment of my thoughts. You
can do nothing for me.”
Had there been the least evidence of falsity in her tone or the
slightest striving after effect in her look or bearing, I would have
taken her at her word and left her then and there. But the candor of
the woman and the reality of her emotion were not to be questioned, and
moved by an impulse as irresistible as it was foolhardy, I cried with
the impetuosity of my twenty-one years:
“I am ready to risk my life for you. Why, I do not know and do not care
to ask. I only know you could have found no other man so willing to do
your bidding.”
A smile, in which surprise was tempered by a feeling almost tender,
crossed her lips and immediately vanished. She shook her head as if in
deprecation of the passion my words evinced, and was about to dismiss
me, when she suddenly changed her mind and seized upon the aid I had
offered, with a fervor that roused my sense of chivalry and
deepened what might have been but a passing fancy into an active and
all-engrossing passion.
“I can read faces,” said she, “and I have read yours. You will do for me
what I cannot do for myself, but----Have you a mother living?”