LANDING AT THE PROFILE HOUSE--HALSTEAD ROWAN AND
GYMNASTICS--HOW THAT PERSON SAW CLARA VANDERLYN AND BECAME A
RIVAL OF "H. T."--THE FULL MOON IN THE NOTCH--TRODDEN TOES,
A NAME, A VOICE, AND A RENCONTRE--MARGARET HAYLEY AND CAPT.
HECTOR COLES--THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN BY MOONLIGHT, AND
A MYSTERY.
Spite of the sometimes rapid speed, the toil up the mountain had been long
and tedious; and dusk was very nearly falling and the chill of the coming
evening was sufficient to induce the drawing close of mantles and wrappers
that only two hours before had been reckoned an incumbrance,--when the
coaches with their loads broke out from the overhanging woods on a steep
down-grade, the passengers caught a glimpse of Echo Lake lying like a sheet
of molten silver under the evening calm, and the whole cortege swept down
at a gallop and with cracking of whips, to the broad, level plateau lying
before the Profile House in the Franconia Notch.
Two of the coaches had been in advance of that to which the attention of
the reader has been particularly directed, and still other coaches had just
come in from Plymouth, the Glen and the Crawford; so that when they drew up
to alight the long piazza of the Profile was filled with sojourners
satisfying their curiosity or looking out for fresh arrivals; and coachmen,
servants and every employee of the establishment, were busy hauling down
from the racks and boots where they had been stowed, immense piles of
trunks, valises and every description of baggage that had not been
entrusted to the van yet lumbering behind. Landlord Taft and superintendent
Jennings were alert and busy; old comers were curious as to the number and
nature of new arrivals; new comers were glancing momentarily at the
glorious scenery and anxiously inquiring every thing of everybody who knew
no more of the things inquired about than did the askers themselves. All
was charming bustle--delightful confusion: one of those peculiar scenes
connected with summer travel and watering-place life, which furnish the
very best of opportunities for study to the quiet observer.
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.
It was a desultory supper and a somewhat hurried one, for the moonrise was
coming--that rise of the full moon which so many had promised themselves,
and for which, indeed, not a few of the arrivals of that evening had timed
their visit to the mountains. Then, hunger has but little curiosity, and
surveys and recognitions were both waited for until the broader light and
greater leisure of the morning; and probably of the dozens of old residents
(a week is "old residence" at a watering-place, be it remembered, and a
fortnight confers all the privileges of the habitue)--probably of the
dozens of old residents and new-comers who had acquaintances among the
opposite class, not two found time or thought for seeking out familiar
faces during that period when the sharpened appetite was so notably in the
ascendant.
"The moonlight is coming: come out, all of you who care more for scenery
than stuffing!" said a high, shrill voice, after a time had elapsed which
would scarcely have begun the meal under ordinary circumstances. It was an
elderly man with white hair and white side-whiskers, an old habitue of the
house and therefore a privileged character, who spoke, pulling out his
watch and at once rising from his seat. He was followed by more than half
those at table, and would have been followed especially by Mrs. Brooks
Cunninghame, who had somewhere learned that fashion and a rage for
moonlight had a mysterious connection,--but for the insatiable hunger of
Mr. Brooks Cunninghame himself, who was engaged in mortal combat with a
formidable piece of steak and a whole pile of biscuits, and who outraged
Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame by declaring, sotto voce, that "he'd be
something-or-othered if he'd lave his supper until he was done, for any
moonlight or other something-or-othered thing in the wurruld!"--and the
obstreperousness of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, who was up to his
eyes in three kinds of preserves and bade fair to stick permanently fast to
the table through the agency of those glutinous compounds.
Out on the piazza and the broad plateau in front of it, the visitors at the
Profile gathered, to see what is not often vouchsafed to the most devoted
of nature-lovers--the rising of the full moon in the mountains. Those who
are familiar with the Franconia Notch well know how the mountains around
the Profile always seem to draw closer after sunset, and how the frowning
cliffs seem to form insurmountable barriers between them and the outer
world, making it doubtful to the bewildered thought whether there is indeed
any egress from that cool paradise of summer--whether or not they can ride
away at will and look again upon green fields and flashing streams and the
faces of those they love. And they well know that moonrise there, over
those encircling cliffs, is not the moonrise of the lower country, with the
orb throwing its broad beams of light at once wide over the world, but an
actual peeping down from heaven of a fair and genial spirit that deigns for
the time to pour welcome radiance into an abode of solitude and darkness.
The spectacle, then, is one to be sought and remembered; and as storms
habitually beat around those mountain tops and fog and mist quite divide
the time with fair weather in the valleys, the tourist is mad or
emotionless who allows the cloudless full moon to come up without catching
its smile on cheek and brow.
The intense blue of the eastern sky was already gone when the anxious
groups clustered in front of the great white caravanserai, and the stars
began to glimmer paler in that direction. There was not a fleck of cloud,
not a shadow of mist, to prevent the rounded orb, when it came up, flooding
the whole gorge with the purest of liquid silver. The winds were still as
if they waited with finger on lip for the pageant; and the shrill scream of
a young eagle that broke out for an instant from one of the eyries under
the brow of Eagle Cliff and then died trembling away down the valley,
seemed like profanation. Conversation was hushed, among all that varying
and even discordant crowd, as if there might be power in a profane word to
check the wheeling of the courses of nature. The orient began to be flushed
with that trembling light, and glints of it touched the dark pines on the
brow of the cliff, a mile away. Then that light beyond the cliffs deepened
and the dark pines grew still darker as fully relieved against it. Then at
last, as they watched with hushed breath, a rim of silver seemed suddenly
to have been set as an arch on the very brow of the mountain, and slowly
the full orb rolled into view. As it heaved up, a broad, full circle of
glittering and apparently dripping silver, it threw out the trees on the
brow of the mountain into such bold relief as if a lightning flash had
literally been burning behind them. There was one giant old pine, no doubt
an hundred feet in height, so far away on the bold crest of Eagle Cliff
that it seemed to be only a toy tree of three inches; and this was thrown
against the very centre of the moon, every gnarled limb and pendant branch
as plain to the eye as if it hung within a stone's throw, a dead pigmy of
the same family shooting up its ragged point not far distant, and a tangled
wilderness of broken trees and scraggy branches filling the remainder of
the circle. Then, the moment after, the moon heaved slowly up beyond the
trees, they fell back into darkness, and the broad glow streamed full into
the faces of the gazers and flooded the whole valley with light. The great
spectacle of the month had been exhibited to hundreds of admiring eyes, and
the full moon of July shed its broad glory like a blessing upon the
Franconia.
It was at the moment when the pageant was just concluding and exclamations
of pleasure breaking from a hundred lips, that "H. T." (who has not as yet
furnished us data for any fuller revelation of his name), standing at some
distance out on the plateau from the piazza, and stepping suddenly backward
to observe a particular effect of the light among the trees on the cliff,
trod upon the foot of a lady immediately behind him and nearly overthrew
her. He turned immediately, with a word of apology, at the same time that a
gentleman near her, who seemed to be in her immediate company, sprang to
prevent her possible fall, venting meanwhile on the presumed awkwardness
of the aggressor a word of ill-disguised petulance:--
"You should be a little more careful, sir, I think, how you step upon
ladies' feet and risk hurting them seriously."
"I beg a thousand pardons!" was the reply. "Certainly I did not know that
there was a lady immediately behind me, and--"
The lady gave a sudden start, caught a quick glance at the speaker, and
then recovered her equanimity so suddenly that perhaps not two of all the
company observed the momentary agitation; while the gentleman interrupted
the attempted apology, not too politely, with--
"Is your foot much injured, Miss Hayley?"
The answer made by the lady was in the negative, and in a tone that, though
it trembled a little, proved her less petulant than her companion. But it
is possible that "H. T.," as he has been known, did not pay that answer any
attention whatever. As he turned he must certainly have seen the lady more
or less distinctly in the moonlight, and yet had manifested no surprise at
what he saw; but when the name was mentioned he gave a start that must have
been noticeable by any acute observer. Had he really not noticed her before
his attention was called by the mention of the name? or was the face one
which he did not recognize while the name bore a talisman that commanded
all his interest? Certain it is that he saw the lady now, distinctly; and
equally certain is it that the face was the same which has met the gaze of
the reader, a month before, on the piazza of the house at West
Philadelphia.
Margaret Hayley, in very truth, dressed so darkly that at the first glance
her attire might almost have been taken for black, and with not even one
ornament to sparkle in the moonbeams, while that peculiarity of her raiment
was made more notable by a light summer scarf or "cloud," of white berlin,
thrown over her head to guard it from the night air, in a fashion somewhat
oriental. Her proud, statuesque figure rose erect as ever; and the same
stately perfection of womanhood looked out from her dark eyes and beamed
upon her pure, high brow, that had shone there before the falling of that
blow which had so truly been the turning point of her life. The cheek may
have been a shade thinner than a month before; and there may have been a
shadow under the eyes, too marked for her heyday of youth and health; but
if so the moonlight was not enough of a tell-tale to make the revelation.
The gentleman who had so promptly attended to the comfort of Margaret
Hayley, and who did not seem averse to picking up a quarrel on her behalf,
was dark haired and dark bearded, round-faced and rather fine-looking than
otherwise, a little above the middle height, and wearing the uniform of a
Captain on staff service. So much the eye of "H. T." took in at once, and
he seemed to keep his attention somewhat anxiously on the two as the moment
after they turned away and walked back towards the piazza, as if he would
gladly have caught some additional word conveying a knowledge of the
officer's personality. Nothing more was said, however, that could afford
such a clue if one he really desired; and but a little time had elapsed
when another subject of excitement arose, calculated to interest many of
the hundreds who had already become partially drunk with the glory of the
moonlight.
"The moon is high enough, now: let us see how the Old Man of the Mountain
looks when his face is silvered!" said some one in the crowd; and the happy
suggestion was at once acted upon. There were quite enough old habitues
present to supply guides and chaperons for the new-comers; and in a moment
fifty or more of the visitors went trooping away down the white sandy road
through the glen and under the sweeping branches among which the moonbeams
peeped and played so coquettishly.
Two or three windings of the road, two or three slight ascents and descents
in elevation; some one said: "Here is the best view;" and the whole
company paused in their scattering march. A sudden break, opening upon a
dark quiet little lake or tarn, was to be seen through the trees to the
right; and a quarter of a mile away, hanging sheer over the gulf of more
than two thousand feet sweeping down towards the foot of the Cannon--there,
with the massive iron face staring full into the moonlight that touched
nose and cheek and brow with so strange and doubtful a light that the
unpractised eye could not trace the outlines, while the accustomed could
see them almost as plainly as in the sunlight--there loomed the awful
countenance of the Old Man of the Mountain. Some there were in that
company, familiar with every changing phase of that most marvellous freak
of nature, who thought that grand as it had before seemed to them when the
sun was high in the heavens and the dark outline relieved against the
bright western sky, it was yet grander then, in the still, doubtful, solemn
moonlight.
Among those who had gone down to the edge of the little Old Man's Mirror
for this view, were two of the sterner sex who happened to be without
ladies under charge and to be separated from any other company. Directly,
walking near each other, they fell together and exchanged casual remarks on
the beauty of the night and the peculiarities of different points of
scenery. They were the two who had first seen each other at the moment of
alighting at the Profile little more than an hour before--"H. T." of the
initials and the lady's smashed foot, and Halstead Rowan of the gymnastic
spring from the coach-top. The first glance had told to each that there was
something of mark in the other; and under the peculiar circumstances of
that night they drifted together, without introduction except such as each
could furnish for himself, but not likely to separate again without a much
more intimate acquaintance,--just as many other waifs and fragments,
floating down the great stream of life, have been thrown into what seemed
accidental collision by a chance eddy, and yet never separated again until
each had exercised upon the other an influence materially controlling the
whole after course of destiny.
Eventually the two, both rapid walkers, had gone faster than the rest and
become the leaders of the impromptu procession to the shrine of the Old
Man, so that when the halt was called they were standing together and apart
from the others, forty or fifty feet further down the glen and where they
had perhaps a yet better view of the profile than any of the company. Both
were dear lovers of nature, if the word "reverent" could not indeed be
added to the appreciation of both; and standing together there, even in
silence, the intuitive knowledge of the inner life of each seemed to bring
them more closely together than introductions and a better knowledge of
antecedents could possibly have done. Then the crowd tired of gazing and
moved back towards the house, leaving the two standing together and
probably supposing themselves alone. They were not alone, in fact; for
under the shadow of the trees to the left, half way between the spot where
the new friends were standing and that which had been occupied by the body
of the visitors, were three persons continuing the same lingering gaze.
These were the officer and two ladies who each found the support of an
arm--Margaret Hayley and her mother, the latter of whom, it would thus
seem, was also at the Profile under the escort of the military gentleman.
Unobserved themselves, they had the two men in full moonlight below and
could see them almost as well as in the broader light of day.
"Who are they, Captain Coles? Anybody we know?" asked the elder lady,
speaking so low that the sound did not creep down to the two gazers.
"Both new-comers, I think," answered the military gentleman. "Yes, they
both came in to-night; and one of them, Margaret, is the booby who stepped
on your foot a little while ago, and whom I shall yet take occasion to kick
before he leaves the mountains if he does not learn to keep out of people's
way."
"I beg you will not allow yourself to get into difficulty on account of
that trifling accident, and for me!" answered Margaret Hayley, while
something very like a shudder, not at all warranted by the words, and that
the Captain was not keen enough to perceive, swept through her form and
even trembled the arm that rested within his.
"Difficulty? oh, no difficulty, to me, you know; and for you, Margaret,
more willingly than any other person in the world, of course!" and Captain
Hector Coles, confident that he had expressed himself rather felicitously,
thought it a good time to bow around to Miss Hayley, and did so.
"You are quite right, Captain Hector Coles," said Mrs. Burton Hayley. "Low
people, who do not even know how to walk without running over others,
should be kept at their proper distance; and of course gentlemen and
soldiers like yourself find it not only a duty but a privilege to afford to
us ladies that protection."
This time Captain Hector Coles, immensely flattered, bowed round on the
other side, to the elder lady.
"Hark!" said Margaret Hayley, in a louder voice than either had before
used, and a voice that had a perceptible tremor in it like that of fright.
"What did you hear?" asked the Captain.
"Listen--I want to hear what that man was saying."
"H. T." was speaking, just below.
"No, I have never been here before," he said. "Strangely enough, some of
the greatest curiosities of the continent are neglected by just such fools
as myself, until too old or too busy or too careworn to enjoy them."
"You speak like a jolly old grandfather, and yet you are scarcely as old as
myself," answered the rich, sonorous voice of Halstead Rowan. "Well, that
is _your_ business. The White Mountains are no novelty to me, or any other
mountains, I believe, North of the Isthmus."
"Is there any thing finer than this, at this moment, among them all?"
"No, and I doubt if there is any thing finer on earth!" was the
enthusiastic reply. "And by the way, even _I_ have not happened to see the
full moon on the face of the Old Man, before. It is a magnificent sight--a
new sensation."
"How long has it stood so, I wonder? Since creation?" said the voice of "H.
T.," "or did the Flood hurl those masses of stone into so unaccountable an
accidental position?"
"Haven't the most remote idea!" answered Rowan, gayly. "I have often
thought of it, though, when looking at the marvel in the sunlight. But I
have never been able to get any farther back than the idea how the winds
must have howled and the rains beaten around that immobile face, age after
age, while whole generations of the men after whom the face is apparently
copied as a mockery, have been catching cold and dying from a mere puff of
air on the head or a pair of wet feet."
"The eternal--the immovable!" said "H. T.," his voice so solemn and
impressive that it was evident his words were only a faint representation
of the inner feeling.
"I know one thing that it has been, without a doubt," said Rowan. "When the
whole country was filled with Indians of a somewhat nobler character than
the miserable wretches that alternately beg and murder on the Western
plains, there is not much question that they must have worshipped it as the
face of the Great Manitou, looking down upon them in anger or in love, as
the storm-cloud swept around it or the summer sun tinted it with an iron
smile."
Halstead Rowan was speaking unconscious poetry, as many another man of his
disposition has done, while those who sought to make it a trade have been
hammering their dull brains and spoiling much good paper in the mere
stringing of rhymes bearing the same relation to poetry that an onion does
to the bulb of a tulip! Whether his companion caught the tone from him and
merely elaborated it into another utterance, or whether he possessed the
fire within himself and this rencontre was only the means of bringing out
the spark, is something not now to be decided. But he spoke words that not
only made the other turn and gaze upon him for a moment with astonishment,
but moved the three unseen auditors with feelings which neither could very
well analyze. His dark face, tinted by the moonlight as the stony brow of
the mountain was itself touched and hallowed, seemed rapt as those of the
seers of old are sometimes said to have been; and his voice was strangely
sweet and melodious:
"To me, just now," he said, "that iron face is assuming a new shape."
"The deuce it is!" answered Rowan. "Where?"
"'In my mind's eye, Horatio!'" quoted the speaker, and the other seemed to
understand something of his mood. "Do you know that face may be nothing
more than sixty feet of strangely-shaped stone, to others; but to me, at
this moment, it is the Spirit of the North looking sadly down over our
fields of conflict and saying words that I almost hear. Listen, and see if
you do not hear them, too!"
How strangely earnestness sometimes impresses us, even when little else
than madness is the motive power! Halstead Rowan, by no means a man to be
easily moulded to the fancies of any other, found himself insensibly
turning his ear towards the Sphynx, as if it was indeed speaking through
the still night air!
"'I am the Soul of the Nation,'" the singular voice went on, speaking as if
for the lips of stone. "'Storms have raved around my forehead and thunders
have shaken my base, but nothing has moved me! Scarred I may have been by
the lightning and discolored by the beating rain, but the hand of man
cannot touch me, and even the elements can disturb me not. I have seen ten
thousand storms, and not one but was followed by the bright sunshine,
because Nature was ever true to itself. Be but true to yourselves, loyal
men of the great American Union, and the nation you love shall yet be
throned above the reach of treason as I am throned above the touch of
man--unapproachable in its power as I am fearful in my eternal isolation!'"
Halstead Rowan had ceased looking at the Sphynx and gazed only at its
oracle, long before the strange rhapsody concluded; and Margaret Hayley,
supported upon the arm of Captain Hector Coles, had more than once
shuddered, and at last leaned so heavily upon that arm as to indicate that
she must be suddenly ill. To the startled inquiry of the Captain as to the
cause of her trembling, she replied in words that indicated her feeling to
have been excited by the strangely-patriotic words, and by a request to be
taken back at once to the Profile. That request was immediately heeded, and
the three passed on up the road, where all the other company had some time
preceded them.
But one expression more fell from the lips of the strange man, as the three
moved away, and Margaret Hayley heard it.
"Why, you must be a poet!" said the Illinoisan, when his companion had
concluded the rhapsody.
"No, I am only a lawyer, and you must not take all that we say for gospel,
or even for poetry!" was the reply. "Come, let us go back to the house and
imagine that we have had enough of moonlight."
The two followed up the road at once and overtook the three but a moment
after. As they passed, "H. T." recognized first the shoulder-straps of the
officer, and then the figure of the lady upon his left arm. Turning to see
her face more closely, his own was for a moment under the full glare of the
moon, and Margaret Hayley had a fair opportunity to observe every feature.
Shaded as were her own eyes, their direction could not be distinguished;
but they really scanned the face before them with even painful earnestness,
a low, intense sigh of disappointment and unhappiness escaping her when the
inspection had ended. She walked back with Captain Coles and her mother to
the door of the Profile, and left them in conversation on the moonlit
piazza, escaping up-stairs to her own room and not leaving it again during
the evening. What may have been her thoughts and feelings can only be
divined from one expression which fell from her lips as she closed the door
of her chamber and dropped unnerved upon a chair at the table:
"Who can that man be? His voice, and yet not his voice! A shadow of his
face, and yet no more like his face than like mine! Am I haunted, or has
this trouble turned my brain and am I going mad? Another such evening would
kill me, I think!"
There was the sound of horn and harp and violin ringing through the long
corridors of the Profile that evening; and many of those who had shared in
the glory of the moonrise and the solemn levee of the Old Man of the
Mountain were joining in the dance that went on in that parlor which
appeared large enough for the drill evolutions of an entire regiment. But
few of the new-comers joined the revel for that evening; most of them,
fatigued at once with travel and excitement, crept away to early beds in
order to refresh themselves against the morning; and nothing remained, of
any interest to the progress of this narration, except Captain Hector Coles
walking up and down the long piazza for more than an hour after Margaret
Hayley had retired, his boot-heels ringing upon the planks with a somewhat
ostentatious affectation of the military step, Mrs. Burton Hayley meanwhile
leaning upon his arm, and the two holding in tones so low that no passer-by
could catch them, a conversation which seemed to be peculiarly earnest and
confidential.
Yet there was still one occurrence of that night which cannot be passed
over without serious injury to the character of this record for strict
veracity. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, during a large part of the night, was in
serious trouble which required the full exercise of her maternal
vigilance--while Miss Marianna, deserted by her father who had
surreptitiously smoked a short pipe in the edge of the woods and thence
gone to bed and to sleep, wandered disconsolately round the parlor,
dressed in more costly frippery than would have sufficed to establish two
mantua-makers, unintroduced to any one, stared at with the naked eye and
through eye-glasses, her freckles complimented in an undertone that she
could not avoid hearing, the name of her dress-maker facetiously inquired
after, and the poor girl, made miserable by being dragged by her silly
parents to precisely the spot of all the world where she least belonged,
suffering such torments as should only be inflicted upon the most
unrepentant criminal.
But the peculiar trouble of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame has not as yet been
explained, and it must be so disposed of in a few words. Ill health, on the
plea of which she had started on her "summer tour," had really attacked her
interesting family, or at least one highly-important member of it. Master
Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, naturally a little sharp set after his long ride
and accustomed to regard any supper with "goodies" on the table as
something to be clung to until the buttons of his small waistband could
endure no farther pressure--Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, as has
already been mentioned, had remained at the table a little beyond the
bounds of strict prudence. In other words, he had devoured beef-steak and
fruits, fish and milk, biscuits and pickles, tea, pickled oysters and
sweetmeats, until even his digestive pack-horse was overloaded. Very soon
after supper he had petitioned to be taken to bed, and then unpleasant if
not serious symptoms had been no long time in supervening. During a large
part of the night there were a couple of chambermaids running to and from
that part of the building, with hot water, brandy, laudanum, foot-baths and
other appliances for suffering small humanity; while Master Brooks Brooks
kept doubling himself up in all imaginable attitudes and crying: "Oh,
mommy!" in a manner calculated to wring the heart of that motherly
person,--to make Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, who wished to sleep, growl out
some reasonably-coarse oaths between his clenched teeth,--and to induce
wonder on the part of people who had occasion to pass the front of the
building or come out on the piazza, whether they did or did not keep a
small menagerie of young bears, wolves and wild-cats in full blast on the
second floor.