CLOUD AND STORM AT THE PROFILE--SIGHTS AND SENSATIONS OF A
RAINY-DAY RIDE TO THE CRAWFORD--HORACE TOWNSEND AND HALSTEAD
ROWAN ONCE MORE TOGETHER--UNEXPECTED ARRIVALS--A CAVALCADE
OF MISERABLES--AN ASCENT OF MOUNT WASHINGTON, WITH
EQUESTRIANISM AND WAR-WHOOPS EXTRAORDINARY.
Calms at sea are not more proverbially treacherous than pleasant mornings
in the mountains; and long before that day closed which had opened so
auspiciously, the heavy clouds came driving up through the Notch with the
south-east wind. By nightfall a storm was inaugurated. Thenceforward, for
two days, excursions to the Cannon, to Bald Mountain, to Mount Lafayette,
or to any other of the points of scenery so plentiful in the Franconia
Notch, and in which excursions all the visitors, however slightly
acquainted, are more or less closely thrown into speaking intercourse with
each other,--were things to be thought of but not attempted. The stages
came in with smoking horses and moisture dripping alike from the hat of the
driver and the boot of the coach; but few passengers arrived or departed.
The bears walked sullenly their little round, or retired periodically to
winter quarters in their narrow kennels. The valleys were filled with
driving mist, varied by heavy down-pouring rain, and the mountains hid
themselves sullenly from view, so that sometimes not even the brow of Eagle
Cliff, hanging immediately over the house, could be distinguished through
the dense clouds that swept down to the very roofs. Fires became prevalent,
and those so fortunate as to possess rooms where the birchen wood could be
set ablaze, remained closely sequestered there, dozing, or playing cards or
backgammon, or once more turning over the leaves of books from which all
the novelty had long before been extracted. Desultory groups met at meals,
even the eaters coming down sluggishly. Some of the men patronized the
billiard-room or the bowling-alley, but they rarely found lady partners or
spectators, as in sunnier days. Even the hops in the parlor at evening were
thinly attended, the weather seeming to have affected alike the nerves and
muscles provocative of dancing, and the strings of the harp, violin and
piano. Those who happened to possess copies of "Bleak House," and who
remembered the marvellous phenomena of rainy weather existing at a certain
time in and about the domain of Sir Leicester Dedlock, read the description
over again and thought that nothing could be more beautifully applicable to
the experience of storm-stayed sight-seers at a caravanserai among the
mountains.
During those two days of storm and sluggishness, Horace Townsend, merely an
excursion acquaintance of the Hayleys and Captain Hector Coles, and not
such an intimate as would be likely to be invited to backgammon or chat in
one of their private rooms,--never once met Margaret Hayley more nearly
than within bowing distance when passing in or out of the dining-room or
the parlor. One or both may have desired to continue the acquaintance
without quite so much of distant familiarity; but if so, one or both knew
the antagonistic influences surrounding them and did not think proper to
raise an arm for buffeting the waves of separation.
There were not less than a dozen persons remaining at the Profile, who had
the ascent of Mount Washington yet to make at an early day, and who
intended to make it in the good old traditional way of horseback from the
Crawford instead of acknowledging modern utility and bowing to the
destruction of all romance by going up in carriages from the Glen. Some of
these, beginning to be pressed for time, saw the steady rain and mist with
impatience and found very little comfort in the assurances of the
hotel-keepers, guides and stage-drivers, that the clouds were not likely to
break away under a week, at least.
Monday brought this feeling to a culmination, and that morning, spite of
all predictions, the impatient dozen ordered a stage and determined to
drive over to the Crawford; bespeaking clear weather on the morrow, or on
the next day at farthest, for their especial accommodation. Horace
Townsend, whether wearied by circumstances which placed him "so near and
yet so far" in his acquaintance with Margaret Hayley, or really touched
with the prevailing madness for forcing Mount Washington to smile when that
great mountain wished to be sullen,--Horace Townsend joined the malcontents
and formed one of the closely-packed stage-load that on Monday morning
rolled off from the Profile on their way to the Crawford.
The voyagers were pursued by no small number of jokes and jeers from the
piazza, as they drove away, on the folly of plunging out into a storm to
accomplish an impossibility. But if any one of the number felt for a moment
sore in mind and faint-hearted, they were soon consoled. Most of them
(mixed male and female, though the former predominating) were true
Nature-lovers who had recognized that however Fame and Fortune sometimes
play cruel tricks upon their most ardent votaries, the kind Mother seldom
failed to unveil her bosom at the coming of one of her true children. They
had faith in the future, and that faith was at once repaid in the glory of
the present.
For those who have only made the twenty-five miles of stage-ride between
the two places, in fair weather, can have no idea of the peculiar charms of
that day of capricious rain and floating mist. Closely shut in the
lumbering coach, and well enveloped in shawls and dread-noughts and
blankets, but with the windows open to allow looking back on the Franconia
range they were leaving,--they enjoyed at intervals, during all the earlier
portions of the ride, such splendid glimpses of cloud-land as never fall to
the lot of mere fair-weather travellers.
At times the shroud of mist which had enveloped them would roll away, as
they ascended the high land rising from Franconia towards Bethlehem; and
then they would have the peaks of the Franconia range flecked and dotted
with swales and waves and crests of transparent white that seemed
alternately to be thousands of colossal sheep lying in the mountain
pastures,--and again great masses of the purest and softest eider-down
which had floated there and rested, from millions of birds filling the
whole air above. Mount Lafayette at one moment, as some of the voyagers of
that lucky morning will well remember, seemed to be capped and crowned with
a wreath of untrodden snow, miles in extent and hundreds of feet in
depth--such as no mountain ever wore upon its brow as a coronet, from the
first morning of creation.
Exclamations of pleasure filled the coach, and jest and appreciative remark
blended in pleasant proximity. "I shall always remember the air of this
morning," said one, "as an atmosphere of bridal veils," and more than he
treasured up the comparison as one worth remembering. "See here, Cora!"
said another, to the only child in the coach, who nestled half asleep on
the shoulder of her mother, pointing her attention meanwhile to a little
pyramidal hill separate from the mountain range and at that point relieved
against it: "See here, Cora! There is a little baby mountain!" "So there
is!" answered Cora, with a world of drollery in her young eyes, "I wonder
how long before it will grow to be as big as the rest of them!" Whereupon
Cora was voted to have the best of the argument, and manhood once more
worshipped childhood.
Away past Bethlehem and along the Ammonoosuc, an exaggeration, in its
rocks, upon all the other mountain streams, with its few inches of water
finding way among a perfect bed of boulders, and making the mere word
"navigation" suggest so droll an image in that connection as to draw a loud
laugh from the whole coach-load. Then past a couple of fishermen, heedless
of the rain, rod in hand and creel at side, standing on the boulders in the
middle of the river and practising the mysteries of the Waltonian art,
report alleged with more "flies" assisting than those which they carried in
their pocket-books! Then on, with the mist again closed down heavily, past
the White Mountain House, that once, before the days of glory of the Glen,
supplied the only so-called "carriage-road" to the top of Washington.
A mile or two more, and there was a space clear from trees on the left. As
the coach swept up to it the mists seemed to shrink low for a moment. A
heavy, dark line loomed on the sky, with almost the true sweep of a wide
Gothic arch, a little sharpened at the top. "How graceful!" was the
exclamation of one. "How high!--look!--why that is higher than any of the
others that we have seen!" exclaimed a second. "Mount Washington," calmly
said a habitue who caught a glimpse through the curtain from the back
corner of the coach; and every voice joined in the cry.
The habitue was right--cloud and mist had rolled away for an instant, just
at the opportune moment, and they had caught that magnificent first near
view of the monarch, throned amid his clouds, glorious in the grace of form
and the awe of majesty--seeming to bridge the very space between earth and
heaven! Some of those favored gazers will dream of that first glance, years
hence, when they have been straining the mental vision upward, in waking
hours, to that unattainable and dim which rises above the mists of common
life. Some of them will throne the great mountain in their hearts, and
stretch out pleading arms to it in remembrance, in the dark days of shame
and sorrow,--as if the treading of their feet upon its rocky pinnacle would
be indeed an escape from the world--as if they might become sharers,
indeed, in the majesty of its great solitude. Some of the travellers felt
the solemnity of the hour and the scene, that day; and there was not even a
sneer or a word of misappreciation for the adventurous genius who quoted,
heedless of all that made it inappropriate:
"Mount Blanc is the monarch of mountains:
They crowned him long ago,
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
With a diadem of snow!"
There was a brief ride remaining, then, till they rolled in over a level
road, through thick overhanging woods, to the Crawford House in the White
Mountain Notch. The mist had closed almost hopelessly down for the time,
and they could only see occasional glimmers through it of the rough sides
of old Mount Webster, dark-browed and massive as its namesake. It was only
in the brighter air of morning that they were to take in the whole location
and see in front, to the right, Mount Willard, wooded on the side exposed
to view, but bald and rugged farther down the Notch, like the Cannon at
Franconia; with Mount Jackson to the left in front, beyond it the still
higher peaks of Mount Webster, and rising at the left in the immediate
foreground the long wooded slopes of Mount Clinton, over which the foot of
every pilgrim to Mount Washington from the Crawford must make its first
ascent.
The dull weather had driven almost all the visitors within doors, at the
Crawford as at the Profile; but as the splashed coach rolled up there was
at least one recognition--that of Halstead Rowan by Horace Townsend, the
former, without any apparent reference to the humidity of the atmosphere,
lying at lazy length on three chairs on the piazza and occupied with a
cigar and a cheap novel. He had "shed" (that word seems to express the fact
better than any other) his over-sized glove from his wounded hand, and
seemed entirely to have recovered the use of that important member.
New acquaintances become old and ripen into friendships, very soon when all
other surroundings are totally strange; and the two men, each so odd in his
way, greeted each other as if they had been friends for a decade instead of
intimates of less than a week. There may have been some bond in common, in
the guess which each could make of the thoughts and entanglements of the
other, calculated to force that friendship forward, even if it would have
progressed more slowly under other circumstances.
The first inquiry of Townsend, as they shook each other warmly by the hand,
was:
"Been up Mount Washington yet?"
"Not _this time_!" answered the other, significantly. "The fog has been
nearly thick enough to swim in, ever since I have been here, and I do not
know, if I had been as good a swimmer as you, Townsend, whether I should
not have tried going up by water, as our friend Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame
went up the Alps; but by land the thing has been impossible."
"Many waiting to go up?--or do they nearly all go around to the Glen, this
season?" was the next inquiry.
"No, there are a good many sensible people left," was the reply, in the
same tone of vivacious rattle. "Think of going up Mount Washington in a
carriage! It is worse than making a mill-race out of Niagara, or
approaching Jerusalem, as they will do one of these days, I suppose, amid
the rumble and whistle of a railroad-train."
"Don't undervalue your own employment!" said Townsend.
"Oh, I do not," was the reply. "Railroad trains, as well as mills, are very
good things in their places; but I suppose that a prejudice will always
exist in favor of the fiery chariot instead of the balloon, as a means of
making ascents into the celestial regions."
Horace Townsend laughed. "But you have not yet told me how many are
waiting, or when you are really going up."
"Oh, there must be nearly or quite twenty of them, moping around the house,
running out to look at the sky every ten minutes, and asking the clerk and
the guides questions that they are about as fit to answer as a
prairie-chicken to solve a problem in geometry! As to when we are going
up--do _you_ know?"
"_I_ am going up to-morrow, whether any one else goes up or not," said the
lawyer. "And by the way, I have bespoken a clear day for that especial
occasion."
"Have you? Thank you! Then I suppose we can _all_ go up!" replied the
Illinoisan, as if the information had been the most serious in the world.
"By the way--how are they all, over yonder!"
There was something very like a blush on the face of the questioner, and
there was something varying very little from that phenomenon on the brown
cheek of the other as he answered:
"I have not seen much of either," (what did he mean by "either," a word
peculiarly applying, in common parlance, to _two_?) "but I believe that
they are well."
"Still at the Profile?"
"Yes, and likely to remain there, for any thing that I know to the
contrary."
"Any news of any kind? Any more accidents or startling events?"
"None--yes, there is one startling event. The Brooks Cunninghames came away
the same day that you left. Have you got the old woman here?"
"Here? heaven forefend! No!" was the response. Then he added: "Why, by
Jupiter, Townsend, you must be a wizard or in some kind of collusion with
Meriam! See!--I'll be hanged if there is not the top of a mountain! It _is_
clearing away! Hurrah for Mount Washington!"
He darted in at once from the piazza to the office, and Townsend, who had
not yet even registered his name as an arrival, followed him. Most of the
other passengers from the Profile were by that time registered and
scattered away to their rooms for sartorial renovation.
A separate book was kept at the office, as usual at such places, over the
head of each page of which was printed: "Horses for Mount Washington," and
in which, every day, those who wished to secure horses and guides for the
succeeding or the first favorable day, registered their names, with the
number of animals required and how many of them were to be ridden by
ladies. A good many queer autographs might be observed in that book and
some of its predecessors, for there was almost always some mischievous
clerk behind the counter, amusing himself by telling immense stories to
some of the other initiated, just as the un-initiated were coming up to
register their names,--about the perils of the ride and how near he or some
other person had come to falling over precipices of indefinite thousands of
feet. This description of jocular practice very often shook the nerves of
young travellers at the moment of booking, even when the frightened person
was too far committed or too shame-faced to abandon his project; and there
is no doubt that the original collection of chirography thus secured would
prove only less interesting, on exhibition, than the original draft of the
Declaration of Independence, or----the Emancipation Proclamation!
Several names had already been booked at hap-hazard on the day in question;
and others of the storm-stayed, aware of the prospect of a "clearing-up,"
were by that time flocking around the book to secure their places. To the
collection already made were very soon added the signatures of Townsend and
Rowan, who intended, as neither would have a lady in charge, to make a
great part if not all the trip together, while the two friends of Rowan,
who were also to be of the ascending party, would "pair off" in the same
manner.
This done, and supper-time approaching, Rowan, who had been lounging about
in a sort of wet-weather box-coat undress which would have driven an
ultra-fashionable to desperation, ran off to his room to make himself
somewhat more presentable; while Horace Townsend, after patronizing the
barber-shop for five minutes and providing himself with that inevitable
cigar, stepped out once more upon the piazza to glance at the weather and
satisfy himself how kind Mother Nature really intended to be on the morrow.
He had but just emerged from the door when a close light carriage with two
pairs of foaming horses--horses and carriage well covered with
mud,--whirled around the corner of the Crawford and drew up at the door.
The driver sprung from his seat and the carriage door was opened. Out of
it stepped first Frank Vanderlyn, then Mrs. Vanderlyn and her daughter,
who, as it afterwards appeared, had left the Profile after dinner and
driven through post in that manner, under the impression that the next
morning might after all be a fine one, and anxious (two of the three, at
least) to join any party which would be likely to make the ascent.
"Whew!" said the lawyer to himself, between two puffs of his cigar, as he
recognized the new-comers without their seeming to be aware of his
presence. "Here is more of the Rowan romance and there may be more ten-pins
necessary. I wonder whether that haughty woman and her son have any idea of
the presence here of their friend from Chicago, and whether they have
driven at that slapping pace through the mud, especially to be in his way!
I wonder, too, whether Rowan's room is on the front, so that he has seen
their arrival. I have half a notion to go up and apprize him of it; and
then I have a whole notion to let him find it out for himself, and finish
my cigar before supper comes in to spoil it."
Whatever might have been the amount of knowledge of the movements of Rowan
possessed by the Vanderlyns, and whether in making a new entry on the books
the old names were or were not always looked over,--certain it is that half
an hour afterwards the lawyer found two more names booked for the
ascent--those of "Mr. Francis Vanderlyn" and "Miss Clara Vanderlyn," the
mother evidently not intending to expose herself to a fatigue which had
lost its novelty, but to await their going and return at the Crawford.
It was very evident, to Townsend, eventually, that Rowan did not know any
thing of the new arrival until he came down to supper. The Vanderlyns had
taken their places at the table, very nearly opposite the lawyer, and
returned with a nod of pleasant recognition the bow which he felt compelled
to give them under the circumstances. Halstead Rowan, as he came in, took a
seat on the same side of the table with the new-comers, and it was only as
he gave the customary glance down after he had seated himself, that he
seemed to recognize the sudden addition to the social circle. When he did
recognize it, the lawyer (that man seems to be eternally watching the
other, does he not?) caught one instant's blank surprise on his face, and
he even put up his hand to rub his eyes, as if he fancied himself dreaming;
but the surprise seemed to fade in a moment, and he pursued his supper with
that fine appetite which is usually vouchsafed to such physical men. He
left the table before the Vanderlyns had finished, and apparently without
their having observed him. Townsend rose immediately and followed him, with
a smile upon his face of which he was himself unconscious. He saw the
Illinoisan go into the office and do precisely what he [the lawyer] would
have laid a heavy stake that he would do--step to the counter and look over
the list of "Horses for Mount Washington." Then a queer expression, nearer
to malicious pleasure than any thing the other had before seen upon his
face, flitted over it as he recognized the names. It might have been merely
satisfaction--it might have been defiance blended with it in equal
proportions; but at least it seemed to be capable of translation into words
like these, which the very lips moved as if they would utter:
"So, Baltimore people, you are running yourselves into my way again, after
I had gone off and left you alone, like a good fellow! You had better be
poorer and less proud, or I richer; or you had better keep the distance
which I put between us!"
A few moments after he approached Townsend with a laugh of deprecation and
invited him to another game of ten-pins, which seemed to be quite as
necessary to him when in a good humor as when in a rage. The invitation was
accepted, and the important contest began once more. It would have been a
very unequal one, for Rowan had fully recovered the use of his right hand,
but that the alleys themselves had something to say in the matter. Worse
apologies for alleys than those of the Crawford no man ever saw; and such
a thing as a "ten-strike" had never been recorded on the black-boards, as
made on those long lines of uneven and floor-laid planks. Both the
combatants had quite enough to do in getting down a "frame" with three
balls; and for some time not a word outside of the game escaped either.
Suddenly, and when he had rolled two of the three balls at the defiant
pins, Rowan stopped short with one of the lignum-vitae globes, of about the
size of a human head, in his hand--twirling it the while as if it had been
a paper balloon,--and said, in a short, curt tone:
"They have come!"
"Yes," answered Townsend, not pretending for a moment to be doubtful about
the meaning of the personal pronoun. "Yes, I saw them at supper."
"Going up with us to-morrow, I believe!" added the Illinoisan.
"Ah, indeed, are they?" was the jesuitical inquiry of the lawyer.
"Yes, and they will have good company, won't they!" was the response.
Then he bowled away at the ten-pins, more energetically than ever, and with
something in his manner and the nervous jerk of his arm, that once more
recalled Townsend's idea of his feeling, while in the act, like shooting
some one down a mountain precipice like a pebble-stone, or sweeping away a
fate like a cobweb with one of those polished globes of iron wood.
Only a couple of games, and then they went in to bed with a mutual reminder
that the motto in the morning would be "to horse and away!" and that above
all things they must be watchful against that phase of indolence vulgarly
known as "oversleeping." The house was nearly silent, all the prospective
riders having retired for the night, and soon slumber fell upon that hive
of human bees wandering in search of the honey of unlaboring pleasure,
gathered under the roof of Gibb and Hartshorne at the Crawford.
Fell, but not too deeply, for that which is to be brief has a right to be
intense; and the hours of repose were relentlessly numbered. Neither
Townsend nor Rowan need have been anxious about waking in the morning; for
such a blast and roar of horrible sound as swept through the corridor at
about seven, A. M., from the big Chinese gong in the hands of an
enthusiastic negro who probably felt that he had no other opportunity of
making his requisite "noise in the world," would have been sufficient to
awaken any thing short of the dead! For once, every one obeyed the summons
while anathematizing the mode, and the breakfast-table was soon surrounded.
Here, those who labored under some kind of indefinite impression that the
summit of Mount Washington was somewhere beyond the Desert of Arabia--that
nothing eatable or drinkable could ever be discovered on its top--and that
the more they ate the better able they would be to endure the fatigue of
the ascent,--made vigorous attacks on the steaks, eggs and chickens, and
drank coffee, milk and cold water without limit. Those better advised (and
the fact is here set down as a bit of practical experience worth
heeding),--those who knew the painful effect of attempting to climb a
mountain when gorged to repletion (the traveller, not the mountain--the
mountain is always full of "gorges")--those, we say, confined themselves to
an egg or two and a small slice of rare steak, and drank lightly.
When the party one by one dropped out from breakfast, the scene in front of
the house was at once picturesque and singular--worth remembering by those
who shared in it or who have shared in one similar,--and worth the feeble
attempt at verbal daguerreotype which may do something to preserve it
against that day when the Crawford decays and Mount Washington is either
levelled off or ascended by means of a locomotive or a dumb-waiter.
More than twenty names--somewhat more than half of them belonging to
ladies--were on the book for the ascent; and a corresponding number of
horses were scattered over the broad open space in front of the door. All
were saddled and bridled; but among them moved half-a-dozen guides in rough
coats, thick boots and slouched hats, inspecting and tightening the girths,
looking to the cruppers and bridles, and paying especial attention to the
animals provided for the female portion of the cavalcade, for whose safety
they ever hold themselves and are ever held by the hotel-proprietors,
peculiarly responsible.
By way of back-ground to this singular scene, under a clump of trees to the
right walked two full-grown black bears (no mountain resort can be
thoroughly complete without its bears!)--chained and surly, ever keeping
their weary round and grunting out their disapprobation at being confined
to such narrow quarters without an occasional naughty youngster for lunch.
But what a spectacle was presented when the mount was ready and the riders
had all emerged from the door of the Crawford! Were these the belles and
beaux of previous days, captivating and being captivated by perfection of
raiment as well as charm of face and grace of figure? If so, never had such
a metamorphosis taken place since long before Ovid. Every man wore some
description of slouched hat, brought in his baggage or hired in the hotel
wardrobe,--bad, very bad, atrocious, or still worse, and each tied down
over the ears with a thick string or a handkerchief. Coarse and old
trowsers were turned up over heavy boots; and the roughest and coarsest of
box-coats that could be provided were surmounted in the majority of
instances by striped Guernsey shirts still rougher. All the dilapidated
gloves and coarse tippets that could be mustered, with a few shawls and
blankets, completed the equipment of a set of men who certainty looked too
badly even for brigands and seemed the enforced victims of some hideous
masquerade.
But if the men looked badly, what shall be said of that which should have
been the fairer portion of the cavalcade? Salvator Rosa never dreamed of
such objects, and Hogarth would have gone stark mad in the attempt to
depict them. Ringlets were buried under mob-caps and old woollen-hoods, and
smothered in bad straw hats and superannuated felt jockeys, tied down in
the same ungraceful manner as those of the men. Hoops had suddenly ceased
to be fashionable, even in advance of the sudden Quaker collapse in the
cities; and every shape, bulky or lank, showed in its own undisguised
proportions--here a form of beauty, there a draped lamp-post, and yonder a
bedizened bolster. In short, the very worst riding-dresses possible to
achieve seemed to have been carefully gathered from all the old-clothes
shops in the universe; and if the men were the ugliest brigands of the dark
souled Italian painter, the women were the drollest witches that ever
capered through the brain of the master-dramatist.
And yet there were sparkling eyes showing occasionally from under those
hideous bonnets, that perhaps looked the brighter for the contrast; and it
is not sure that one or two of the sweet auburn curls of Clara Vanderlyn,
which had strayed away from their confinement and lay like red gold on the
neck of her shabby black riding-dress, could ever have shown to more
bewitching advantage.
Every one laughed at the appearance of the other, as the mount was taking
place, and as Hartshorne, of the Crawford, who seemed to have measured the
capabilities of every horse and calculated the weight and skill of every
rider, called off the names from the roll-book, and gave place to each in
turn.
Of the material of the mount, it is only necessary to specify three or four
of the horses, which have to do with the subsequent details of that
eventful excursion. Miss Vanderlyn had a neat little black pony, apparently
very careful in step, and an "old-stager" at ascending the mountains. Her
brother Frank rode a tall bay, of high spirit and better action than any
other horse on the ground. Rowan had asked Hartshorne (some of the others
heard him, with a sensation of genuine horror) to give him the
worst-tempered horse in the stable; and as he was known to be an old
habitue of the mountains, he had been accommodated according to request. So
far as could be discovered by his action, his horse, a bay of fifteen and a
half or sixteen hands, with blood, foot and bottom, would kick, bite,
strike, run away, shy to one side, and do every thing else wicked and
unsafe that should taboo a horse from being ridden at all,--except stumble,
from which latter fault he was remarkably clear. Townsend was accommodated
with a gray mare of moderate size and a dash of Arab blood, that had been
unused for nearly a month from having nearly broken the neck of one of the
proprietors, on his personal allegation that he was at least a fair rider,
and that the breaking of his own neck would be the least damage that could
be inflicted on any member of the party.
Thick morning mists still hid the tops of Mount Webster and Mount Willard,
visible from the house, and hung amid the heavy woods of Mount Clinton,
although the storm had really passed away with the night,--as at nine
o'clock, all mounted, the guides took their places, one at the head of the
cavalcade and the others scattered at intervals through it, and the whole
line moved off up the mountain. It should be mentioned here, however, that
Townsend (the observer again) saw during the mount the only recognition
which took place between the two principal persons of his outside
drama--Halstead Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn. Frank was mounting his horse,
after having assisted his sister to her saddle, when Rowan brushed by her
on his vicious bay, very near her and to the left. He saw their eyes meet,
and saw Rowan bend so low that his head almost touched the neck of his
horse. Clara Vanderlyn replied by a gesture quite as mute and quite as
unlikely to be observed by any one not especially watchful. She nodded her
head quickly but decidedly, and threw the roughly-gloved fingers of her
left hand to her lips. That was all, and of course unobserved by Frank
Vanderlyn, who may or may not have been aware that the man whom he had
insulted was a member of the ascending party; but it was quite enough,
beyond a doubt, to set the blood boiling in the veins of the Illinoisan
with all the fury of the water surging up in flame and smoke in the Iceland
Geysers.
Rowan and Townsend had places assigned them near the middle of the line,
but as the cavalcade began to move, the human demon of unrest was missing
from his place. He was to be seen at the end of the piazza at that moment,
talking to Hartshorne, and no doubt making a few additional inquiries as to
the character of the amiable animal he bestrode. The lawyer called out to
him to "Come on!" but he answered with a wave of the hand and a shout:
"Go ahead! don't wait for me! I will be with you directly!"
Through the thick woods of Mount Clinton they swept up, over a bridle-path
so rough as to have made the most laborious if not the most dangerous
walking--over great boulders of stone lying in the very path, and
apparently impossible to get over or around--over patches of corduroy road
utterly defying description, except to the men who isolated Fort Donelson
and planted the Swamp Angels in the marshes of Charleston--over and through
gutters and gulches of slippery stone and more slippery mud--but ever
ascending at a painful acclivity. The horses breathed heavily; and their
riders, in the thick and foggy air, did little better. They caught
occasional glimpses through the trees, down the sudden slopes at the left,
of the thick mist rolling below, but could see nothing else to remind them
of the height they were attaining; and as the dense fog swept in their
faces, and the trees dripped moisture on them when they swept beneath their
branches, and the path grew more and more desolate and difficult, they grew
silent, the whole cavalcade, apparently by common consent. There are
aspects in which Nature looks and feels too solemn for the light word and
the flippant jest; and the man who cannot be awed beyond his ordinary mood
when standing under the edge of the sheet of Niagara, or beside the sea
when it is lashed into resistless fury, or in gale and mist on the bleak,
bare, desolate mountains of the North, should never insult the grand and
the terrible by going into their presence!
And yet all persons, who have true reverence in their hearts, are not
always awed beyond themselves, even in the most impressive of situations:
as witness, to some degree, the incidents following.
They had surmounted the first acclivity, perhaps a mile from the Crawford,
and were commencing a slight descent which made every rider look to the
horse's feet and ride with a slight tremor,--when the stillness was
suddenly broken in a manner which almost curdled the blood of the timid and
needed a second reassurance for even the boldest.
"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!" came from the path below, with that
hideous power and distinctness of lungs that have chilled so many hearts
and whitened so many faces since the white man first intruded on the
hunting-grounds of the American Indian. A shrill, dissonant, horrible yell,
combining the blind ferocity of the beast with the deadlier rage of man,
such as made the poor mother clasp her babe closer to the breast when it
rang around the block-houses of Massachusetts and New York in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--such as less than three years ago
proved that it was undying in the savage throat, by pealing over the
mangled bodies and burned dwellings of the Minnesota massacres.
"Good heavens!--what is that?" cried half a dozen of the ladies in a
breath.
"An Indian war-whoop, certainly!" said one of the gentlemen, his face white
as wax at the sudden shock.
"It is war time, and they tell me that the rebels yell terribly!" said one
of the ladies. "Can it be--" but then the absurdity of the idea struck her
and she paused.
"Albert Pike was a New England man: perhaps he is here with his Arkansas
savages!" said another, whether in jest or earnest no one could well
discover.
It was surprising how in that one instant the cavalcade had shortened its
length--the foremost stopping and the rearmost closing up. Man _is_ a
gregarious animal, especially when a little surprised or frightened!
Perhaps Horace Townsend had been as badly startled as any of the others, at
the first instant; but he possessed some data which the others lacked for
discovering the source of the warlike yell.
"Do not be alarmed, ladies!" he said, after an instant. "I think there is
only one Indian uttering that horrible sound, and you may depend upon it
that he is white and no rebel. Yes--see!--here he comes!"
They had been, as already indicated, descending a quarter of a mile of most
difficult and dangerous path, in which every rider experienced more or less
of tremor, and over which the horses were picking their careful way as if
they realized that human necks were in peril. At the instant when the
attention of the company was thus directed backwards, Halstead Rowan had
reached the top of the rise, behind, and was just giving vent to a second
and supplemental yell which rang through the woods as if a dozen throats
had taken part in it, and which must have been heard half way down the
Notch.
"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!"
The rider was commencing the descent, too, but not precisely like the rest,
picking his way, on a careful half-trot, half-walk; on the contrary his
horse had his ears laid back and was going over the broken stones at such a
gallop as he might have held on an ordinary highway! The reins seemed to be
lying loose on his neck, and--could those horrified people believe their
eyes?--so surely as they were threading the tangled woods of Mount Clinton,
with thankful hearts for every rood passed over without broken necks, so
surely Halstead Rowan, a novel description of Mazeppa unknown even to Frank
Drew or Adah Isaacs, sat his horse in what might be called "reverse
order," his back towards them and his face to the animal's tail!
"Good heavens!" "The man is mad!" "Oh, do stop the horse!" "It is running
away with him!" "He will be killed!"--such were the exclamations that broke
from the party as Rowan's equestrianism was recognized--most of them from
the female portion of the cavalcade. What would it not have been worth to
see sweet Clara Vanderlyn's face at the moment when she first realized who
was the reckless rider, and to know whether she cared for his welfare at
all and whether anxiety or confidence predominated in her thought!
But the rider did not pause, or seem very much in peril. His horse kept his
feet quite as well as any of the others; and Townsend remembering the
Comanches and the Arapahoes, was forced to believe that the wild equestrian
must have the alleged Indian power of communicating his own will to his
horse, and that he could ride almost anywhere and in any manner, in safety.
Rowan drew the reins (which he _had_ in his hands, after all) as he came up
with the cavalcade, and said:
"I hope I did not startle any of you ladies with my Indian whoop. Upon my
honor I did not mean to do so, if I did; for I hate practical jokes that
cause pain, quite as much as any of the other fellows, the--gentlemen. But
the woods tempted me, and I have not enjoyed such an opportunity for the
use of the lungs, this many a day."
"I believe some of us were a little frightened for a moment, but no harm
done," said Horace Townsend. "But let me ask you--is not your riding just a
little bit careless?"
"Well, yes, just the very least bit in the world, perhaps, for _some_
people!" answered the wild fellow; and Townsend fancied that he caught him
trying, at the moment, to catch a glimpse, unseen by Frank Vanderlyn, under
the hood of Clara, who was not very far from him. If he did make the
attempt, he failed, for the young girl dared not or would not expose her
face. "But come, Townsend," Rowan added, "will you not push on with me a
little further ahead and let these slow coaches come up at their leisure?"
"At _your_ rate of progress? No," laughed Townsend. "I am not a very bad
rider, I believe, but I have never practised in a circus or on a prairie.
Go ahead, if you are in a hurry; that is, provided you know which end is
going foremost!"
"Found another place where you will not follow me, eh, old boy!" rattled
the Illinoisan, with a reference which the other easily understood. "Well,
I will see you by-and-bye, then. Go along, Bay Beelzebub!" and the next
moment, darting by the centre line and taking precedence even of the
leading guide, in a path that was literally nothing but a three-cornered
trough, he was to be seen ascending the next rise, his horse trotting along
riderless, and himself springing from crag to crag beside the path, his
hand upon the animal's back and the reins lying loose on its neck. He had
alighted, of course, without checking the speed of the horse in any degree.
But a few minutes later, and when the cavalcade had reached the top of
Mount Clinton and was coming out from the gloom of the heavy woods into the
partial sunshine,--they saw the odd equestrian riding over a portion of
road that was only moderately bad, standing erect on his horse's back,
supported by the reins and his own powers of balancing,--and heard his
deep, cheery voice ringing out in a song that seemed as complete a medley
as his own character. It may be permissible to put upon record one of the
stanzas, which some of those nearest him caught and remembered:
"The heart bowed down by weight of wo--
When comin' thro' the rye?
If I had a donkey wot wouldn't go--
Good-bye, my love, good-bye!
I see them on their winding way:
Old clothes, old clothes to sell!
So let's be happy while we may--
Lost Isabel!"
Still later, the riders were all thrown into momentary horror by coming
upon him, as they rounded the head of a gorge near the top of Mount
Prospect,--his horse on a walk, and himself hanging over one side,
apparently by the heels. The impression prevailed that he must have been
knocked senseless by a limb, in some of his pranks, and got his feet
fatally entangled in the stirrups,--the result of which impression was that
a sudden scream, in a woman's voice, burst out from some portion of the
line, but so instantaneously suppressed that no one could trace it. It
turned out that in this last operation, so far from being killed, he was
only practising the Indian mode of hanging beside his horse, supported by
one hand at the neck and one foot over the saddle, after the manner of the
wild tribes of the Plains when throwing the horse as a shield between
themselves and the shot of a pursuer!
After a time, however, the reckless fellow seemed to have grown tired of
his humor; for, as the long line crossed over the peak of Prospect to
Monroe, and the north wind and the sun had so driven away the clouds that
the riders began to realize the glorious prospect opening upon them on
every hand,--he took his place in the line, next to his deserted comrade
Townsend, sat his horse like a Christian, and joined in the bursts of
admiration vented on all sides, with an enthusiasm which showed that the
scenery had never palled upon him by familiarity.
And what views indeed were those that burst upon them as they crossed from
Franklin to Monroe, and that sea of which the stiffened waves were
mountains stretched out for an hundred miles in every direction! Some there
were, in that line, who had stood on the prouder and more storied peaks of
Europe, and yet remembered nothing to diminish the glory of that hour. How
the deep gorges slept full of warm sunlight, and how the dark shadows
flitted over them, and flickered, and thinned, and faded, as one by one the
light clouds were driven southward by the wind! With what a shudder,
passing over the narrow ridge or back-bone connecting Monroe and Franklin,
they looked down into "Oakes' Gulf" on the right and the "Gulf of Mexico"
on the left, only separated by a yard of bushy rock from a descent of three
thousand feet on one side, and by less than three yards of slippery stone
from more than two thousand feet on the other!
The path is a sort of narrow trough, rough enough, but quite as safe, and
to those who keep it there is not the least possible danger. Indeed the
rider, half hidden in the trough, scarcely knows the fearful narrowness of
the bridge over which he is passing; and thousands cross this pass and
recross it, and bring away no idea of the sensation that may be gained by a
little imprudent hanging over the verge on either side! None of the riders
in that cavalcade went back to their beds at the Crawford without a much
more intimate knowledge of the capabilities of that situation; but of this
in due time.
It is impossible for any one who has never made a similar ascent, or who
has only ascended with a much smaller number, to conceive the appearance
made by that score of equestrians at various points when crossing the open
but uneven peaks in the last approach to Washington. Varied in stature, sex
and costume, and all sufficiently outre to astonish if not to
horrify,--what views the leading riders of the line could catch at times,
looking back at the motley line! Some half buried in the trough of the path
or midway in a gulch, so that only the head would be visible; others
perched on the very top of a huge boulder, ascending or descending; some
clinging close to mane or neck as the horse scrambled up an ascent of forty
degrees; others lying well back on the saddle when descending a declivity
of the same suddenness. What dreams of the Alps and the Apennines there are
in such ascents--dreams of the toilers over St. Gothard and the muleteers
of the Pyrenees--dreams of memory pleasant to those who have such past
experiences to look back upon, and substitutes no less pleasant to many
who long for glances at other lands but must die with only that far-off
glimpse of the fulness of travel which Moses caught from the hills of the
Moabites over that inheritance of his race upon which he was never to
enter.
It yet wanted half an hour to noon, and Mount Washington towered full
before them as they came out on the top of Franklin, by the little Lake of
the Clouds which lay so saucily smiling to the sun and coquetting with the
mists. The peak, a huge mass of broken and naked stone, half a mile up on
every side and so sheer in pitch that foot-hold seemed hopeless, would have
looked totally discouraging but for the white line of path which, winding
around it on the north-west, showed that it must before have been achieved.
Up--up--over broken and slipping stones of every size and description, from
the dimensions of a brick-bat to those of a dining-table--stones gray and
mossed, without one spoonful of earth to prove that the riders had not
surmounted the whole habitable globe and lost themselves in some unnatural
wilderness of rock! And feeling joined with sight to enhance the desolate
fancy, for though so nearly high noon the wind blew at that dizzy height
with the violence of a gale, and the Guernsey wrappers and the clumsy
gloves had long before proved that the rough and homely may be more useful
than the beautiful.
Two or three hundred yards from the Tip-Top House, the rough stone walls of
which were glooming above--the party were dismounted, the horses picketed
by the guides, and over the broken stones and yawning fissures the
dismounted riders struggled up, strong arms aiding weaker limbs, and much
care necessary to prevent heedless steps that might have caused injuries
slow of recovery. Up--up, over the little but difficult remaining
distance--till all stood by the High Altar on the top of Mount Washington.
Above the clouds, swales of which they saw sweeping by, half way down the
mountain--above the earth, its cares and its sorrows, it seemed to them for
the moment that they stood; and only those who have made such a pilgrimage
can realize the glory of that hour. The mountains of Vermont
North-westward, those of Canada North-eastward, those of Massachusetts to
the South and the Franconia range full to the West; lakes lying like
splashes of molten silver at their feet and rivers fluttering like blue
silken ribbons far away; towns nestled in the gorges and hamlets glimmering
up from the depths of the ravines; long miles of valleys filled with
sunlight, as if the very god of day had stooped down and left them full of
the warmth of his loving kiss; peak upon peak rising behind and beyond each
other, and each tinted with some new and richer hue, from gold to purple
and from sunny green to dark and sombre brown; beyond all, and on the
extreme verge of the sight-line to the East, one long low glint of light
that told of the far Atlantic breaking in shimmering waves on the rocky
coast of Maine; the world so far beneath as to be a myth and an unreality,
distance annihilated, and the clear, pure air drank in by the grateful
lungs appearing to be a foretaste of that some day to be breathed on the
summit of the Eternal Hills,--these were the sights and these the
sensations amid which the dark cheek of Horace Townsend seemed touched with
a light that did not beam upon it in the valleys below, with his eyes grown
humid and utterance choked by intense feeling; while all the heart of
glorious womanhood in Clara Vanderlyn fluttered up in the truest worship of
that God who had formed the earth so beautiful; and even Halstead Rowan
once more forgot pride, poverty, insult, and the physical exuberance which
made either endurable, to fold his strong arms in silence, lift the innate
reverence of his thoughts to the Eternal and the Inevitable, and vow to
submit with childlike faith to all of triumph or humiliation that might be
ordained in the future.