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Title: The Coward

A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863

Author: Henry Morford

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Language: English

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THE COWARD.

A NOVEL OF

SOCIETY AND THE FIELD

IN

1863.

BY HENRY MORFORD.

AUTHOR OF "SHOULDER-STRAPS," "THE DAYS OF SHODDY," ETC.

 

 

 

PHILADELPHIA:
T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,
306 CHESTNUT STREET.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by

T. B. PETERSON & BROTHERS,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for
the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania.

TO
THE PATRIOT PRINTERS OF AMERICA—
THE MEN WHO
HAVE FURNISHED MORE SOLDIERS
THAN ANY OTHER CLASS
IN COMPARISON WITH THE WHOLE NUMBER OF THEIR CRAFT,
TO
THE DEAD HEROES OF THE WAR FOR THE UNION
AND
THE LIVING ARMIES THAT YET BULWARK ITS HOPE,—
THIS
BLENDING OF THE FACTS AND FANCIES
OF
WAR-TIME,
IS
DEDICATED BY THEIR BROTHER-CRAFTSMAN,

THE AUTHOR.

New York City, July, 1864.

PREFACE.

Some persons, taking up this work with expectations more or less elevated, may possibly lay it down with disappointment after perusal, because it does not discuss with sharp personalities, as the title may have led them to suppose, the conduct of some of those well-known men connected with the Union Army, who have disgracefully faltered on the field. But the truth is that the Union Army has mustered very few cowards—so few, that a distinguished artist, not long ago called on to draw an ideal head of one of that class, said: "Really it is so long since I have seen a coward, that I scarcely know how to go about it!" The aim of the writer, eschewing all such tempting personalities, and quite as carefully avoiding all dry didactic discussion of the theme of courage and its opposite,—has principally been to illustrate the tendency of many men to misunderstand their own characters in certain particulars, and the inevitable consequence of their being misunderstood by the world, in one direction or the other. No apology is felt to be necessary for the length at which the scenery of the White Mountains, their actualities of interest and possibilities of danger, have been introduced into the narration; nor is it believed that the chain of connection with the great contest will be found the weaker because the glimpses given of it are somewhat more brief than in preceding publications of the same series. In those portions the writer has again occasion to acknowledge the assistance of the same capable hand which supplied much of the war data for both of his previous volumes.

New York City, July 1st, 1864.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

A June Morning of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three—Glimpses of West Philadelphia—The Days before
Gettysburgh—The Two on the Piazza—Margaret Hayley and Elsie Brand—An Embrace and a
Difference—Foreshadowings of Carlton Brand, Brother and Lover 29

CHAPTER II.

The Coming of Carlton Brand—Almost a Paladin of Balaclava—Brother and Sister—A Spasm of Shame—The
Confession—The Coward—How Margaret Hayley heard Many Words not intended for her—The
Rupture and the Separation 45

CHAPTER III.

Kitty Hood and her School-house—Dick Compton going Soldiering—A Lover's Quarrel, a bit of Jealousy, and a
Threat—How Dick Compton met his supposed Rival—An Encounter, Sudden Death, and Kitty Hood's
terrible Discovery 61

CHAPTER IV.

The Residence of the Brands—Robert Brand and Dr. Pomeroy—Radical and Copperhead—A passage-at-arms that ended
in a Quarrel—Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper—The Shadow of Shame—Father and Daughter—The
falling of a parent's Curse 81

CHAPTER V.

The Birth and Blood of the Brands—Pride that came down from the Crusades—Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent—How
Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed to be answered—Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a
Corpus Delicti 99

CHAPTER VI.

The Residence of Dr. Pomeroy—Nathan Bladesden and Eleanor Hill—A kneeling Woman and a rigid Quaker—The ruin that a
Letter had wrought—A Parting that seemed eternal—Carlton Brand alive once more, and a Glance at the
fatal Letter 120

CHAPTER VII.

A return to 1856—Nicholas Hill, Iron-merchant—His Death, his Daughter, and his Friend—How Dr. Pomeroy became a
Guardian and how he Discharged that duty—A ruin and an awakening—The market value of Dunderhaven
Stock in 1858 137

CHAPTER VIII.

What followed the revelation of Betrayal—A gleam of Hope for Eleanor Hill—A relative from California, a projected Voyage
, and a Disappointment—One more Letter—The broken thread resumed—Carlton Brand's farewell,
and an Elopement 164

CHAPTER IX.

Dr. Pomeroy's purposed Pursuit—A plain Quaker who used very plain Language—Almost a Fight—How Mrs. Burton Hayley
consoled her Daughter, and how Margaret revealed the Past—A Compact—Dr. Pomeroy's Canine Adventure—Old
Elspeth once more—A Search that found Nothing. 174

CHAPTER X.

Before and after Gettysburgh—The Apathy and Despair which preceded, and the Jubilation which followed—What Kitty Hood
said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand—Brother and Sister—A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—A
fire-room Visit, an Interview, and a Departure for Europe 200

CHAPTER XI.

Anomalies of the War for the Union—The Watering-place rush of 1863—A White Mountain party disembarking at
Littleton—Who filled the Concord coach—The Vanderlyns—Shoddy on its travels—Mr.
Brooks Cunninghame and his Family—"H. T." and an Excitement 219

CHAPTER XII.

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 237

CHAPTER XIII.

Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her Pet Bears—A misadventure and a Friendly Hand in time—The question of Courage—Halstead
Rowan and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame on Geography—The Dead Washington, the Flume and the Pool—With the personal
relations weaving at that juncture. 255

CHAPTER XIV.

A disaster to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame—Exit into the bottom of the Pool—Nobody that could swim, and Margaret
Hayley in Excitement—"H. T." in his element, in two senses—Another Introduction and a new Hero—Scenes in the
Profile parlor—Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn—The Insult 279

CHAPTER XV.

How Halstead Rowan arranged that expected Duel—Ten-pins versus bloodshed—Some anxiety about identity—The "H. T."
initials, again—A farewell to the Brooks Cunninghames—An hour on Echo Lake, with a Rhapsody and a strangely-interested
Listener 298

CHAPTER XVI.

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 323

CHAPTER XVII.

Horace Townsend with a Lady in charge—An adventure over the "Gulf of Mexico"—Clara Vanderlyn in deadly
peril—A moment of horror—Halstead Rowan and a display of the Comanche riding—Townsend's eclipse—The
return to the Crawford—Margaret Hayley again, and a Conversation overheard 348

CHAPTER XVIII.

Horace Townsend and Margaret Hayley—A strange Rencontre in the Parlor—Another Rencontre, equally strange
but less pleasant—How Clara Vanderlyn faded away from the Mountains—And how the Comanche Rider
"played baby" and disappeared 370

CHAPTER XIX.

A strange Character at breakfast—"The Rambler," and his Antecedents—What Horace Townsend heard about
Fate—Going up to Pic-nic on Mount Willard—The Plateau, the Rope and the Swing—Spreading the Banquet—The
dinner-call and a cry which answered it—A fearful situation. 392

CHAPTER XX.

Suspense in danger, in two Senses—Horace Townsend with a Swing-rope—An invitation to Captain Hector
Coles—A fearful piece of Amateur Gymnastics—Going down into the Schute—Success or Failure?—The event,
and Margaret Hayley's madness—Two unfortunate Declarations 410

CHAPTER XXI.

The bearer of a Disgraced Name in England—A strange Quest and a strange Unrest—Hurrying over to Ireland—Too
late for the Packet—The little Despatch-steamer—Henry Fitzmaurice, the journalist—The peril of the Emerald,
and the end of all Quests save one 432

CHAPTER XXII.

Pleasanton's advance on Culpeper—Crossing the Rappahannock—The fight and the calamity of Rawson's
Cross-Roads—Taking of Culpeper—Pleasanton's Volunteer Aide—Townsend versus Coles—The meeting of
Two who loved each other—And the Little Ride they took together 452

CHAPTER XXIII.

Once more at West Philadelphia—September and Change—Last glimpses of Kitty Hood and Dick Compton—Robert Brand
and his invited Guest—The news of Death—Old Elspeth Graeme as a Seeress—The dispatch from Alexandria—The
Quest of Brand and Margaret Hayley 478

CHAPTER XXIV.

In the Hospital at Alexandria—The wounded Man and his Nurse—Who was Horace Townsend?—A Mystery
explained—How Eleanor Hill went back to Dr. Pomeroy's—One word more of the Comanche Rider—Conclusion 490

THE COWARD.

CHAPTER I.

A June Morning of Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-three—Glimpses of West Philadelphia—The Days before Gettysburg—the Two on the Piazza—Margaret Hayley and Elsie Brand—An Embrace and a Difference—Foreshadowings of Carlton Brand, Brother and Lover.

A wide piazza, with the columns made of such light tracery in scrolled plank-work that they seemed to be almost unreal and gave an appearance of etheriality to the whole front of the house. The piazza, flecked over with the golden June sunshine that stole down between the branches of the tall trees standing in front and shading the house, and that crept in through the network of twine and climbing roses clambering almost up to the roof from the balustrade below. The house to which the piazza adjoined, large, built of wood in that half Flemish and half Elizabethan style which has of late years been made popular through cheap books on cottage architecture and the illustrations in agricultural newspapers,—two and a half stories in height, with a double gabled front that belonged to the one, elaborate cornices and work over the piazza that belonged to the other, and a turret in the centre that belonged to neither. A wide, tall door opening from the piazza, and windows also opening upon it, sweeping down quite to the floor. Altogether a house which approached more nearly to the "composite" order of architecture so much affected by wealthy Americans, than to any one set down in the books by a particular designation; and yet shapely and imposing, and showing that if the most unimpeachable taste had not presided over the erection, yet wealth had been lavishly expended and all the modern graces and ornaments freely supplied.

In front of the house, and sweeping down to the road that ran within a hundred feet, a grassed lawn lying in the lovely green of early summer, only broken at irregular intervals by the dozen of trees of larger and smaller sizes, round which the earth had been artistically made to swell so as to do away with any appearance of newness and create the impression that the roundness had been caused by the bursting of the trees farther out of the ground through many years of vigorous growth. Beneath one of the largest of the trees—a maple, with the silver sheen almost equally divided between its bark and its glossy leaves, a long wooden bench or settee, with two or three sofa-cushions thrown carelessly upon it, as if it formed at times a favorite lounge for a reader or a smoker. On the piazza a triad of chairs, irregularly placed and all unoccupied. One of the two folding doors leading into the halls from the piazza, wide open, as became the season, and the other half closed as if a single puff of summer breeze coming through the hall had become exhausted before closing it entirely. One of the windows opening from the piazza into what seemed to be the better part of the house, closed entirely; and the other, with the shutters "bowed" or half open, permitting a peep into a large parlor or sitting-room, with rich carpet and handsome furniture, but kept dusky under the impression (more or less reasonable) that thereby additional coolness would be secured.

Near the house, on both sides, other houses of corresponding pretension though displaying great variety in style of architecture; and in front, across the wide road, still others showing to the right and left, and the whole appearance of the immediate neighborhood evidencing that it was neither country nor city, but a blending of both, suburban, and a chosen spot for the residences of those who did business in the great city and wished to be near it, and who possessed means and taste to make so pleasant a selection. Still farther away in front, as seen between the other houses and shrubbery, and stretching off southward in a long rolling sweep, rich agricultural country, with some of the hay-crop yet ungathered, broad fields of grain receiving the last ripening kiss of the sun before yielding to the sickle or the reaping-machine, and fruit-trees already beginning to be golden with the apples, pears and peaches glimmering amid the leaves. A quiet, gentle scene, with evident wealth to gild it and perfect repose to lend it character; and over all the warm sun of a June morning resting like a benediction, and a slight shadow of golden haze in the air softening every object in the perspective. Occasionally a pedestrian figure moving slowly along one of the foot-paths that bordered the wide road; and anon a farm-wagon loaded with early produce and on its way to market, rumbling by with such a sleepy expression on the face of the driver and such lollings of the ears of the full-fed and lazy horses, that the episode of its passage rather added to than detracted from the slumberous quiet of the prospect.

Then another passage, very different and not at all in keeping with any of the points that have before been noted. An officer in full uniform, with the front of his chasseur cap thrown high in defiance of the glare of the sunshine, spurring by on a high-stepping and fast-trotting horse, eastward towards the city, with such life and haste in every movement of himself and the animal he bestrode as to momentarily dash the whole view with unquiet. Then the equestrian figure out of sight and the beat of his horse's hoofs heard no longer; and the scene relapsing into that languor born of the June morning verging rapidly towards noon.

Then a sudden sound, still more discordant with the drowsy peace of the hour than the sight of the spurring soldier, and still more painfully suggestive of war in the land of peace. The quick, sharp rattle of a snare-drum, but a little space removed, and apparently passing down one of the lateral roads in the neighborhood, dying away with a light tap into the distance a moment after, and quiet coming back again yet more markedly after so incongruous an interruption.

The place, West Philadelphia, half a mile or more beyond the Schuylkill, not far from the line traversed beyond the bridge by the Market Street cars, and near the intersection of that branch of the main artery known as the Darby Road,—in the outer edge of that beautiful little section with its tall trees and plats of natural green, out of and into which the shrieking monsters of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad dart every hour in the day with freight and passengers to and from the Great West. The time, late in June, 1863, a few days before Gettysburg, when the long-threatened invasion of the North by the rebels had become for the moment an accomplished fact, when Lee and Ewell had crossed the Potomac, swept on through Upper Maryland, entered Pennsylvania, devastated the farms and carried away the stock of the farmers on the border, laid York under a contribution, burned the barracks at Carlisle, and threatened every hour to capture Harrisburgh and force the passage of the Susquehanna. When women and children, and by far too many of the able-bodied inhabitants who should have shown more pride if they indeed possessed no courage, had fled away from the Seat of Government of the Keystone State, and the public records were following them to prevent their falling into the hands of an enemy known to be destructive and revengeful, and for the moment believed to be irresistible. When the rebels themselves boasted that they were about to teach the North all the horrors of war that had fallen upon the South in the long contest,—and that in a few days they would water their cavalry-horses in the Delaware, if they did not achieve the same success at the very banks of the Hudson; and when the newspapers of New York and Philadelphia, for the moment completely discouraged, gave up the line of defence of the Susquehanna, and gravely debated, whether a check could indeed be made at the Delaware, with the loss of the Quaker City, or whether the great struggle must at last be transferred to the Hudson hills of New Jersey. When the Reserves were mustering in Philadelphia, and the Coal Regiments forming in the haunts of the sturdy miners. When the Pennsylvania coal-mines were to be set on fire by the invader, and left to burn on until all the fuel of the nation was destroyed, if the "great conflagration" of the whole earth did not follow as a result. When more placards calling for the defence of the State, were exhibited in the neighborhood of old Independence Hall, than had ever shown there, inviting the idle to amusement, in the most prosperous seasons of opera, theatre and concert-saloon—drums beating at every corner, brass bands blowing on every square, patriotic appeals and efforts to recruit on every hand, and yet the people apparently lying under bodily apathy or mental paralysis. When Governor Seymour, of New York, and Governor Parker, of New Jersey, waiving the political question for the moment, were calling out the troops of those States to the defence of Pennsylvania; and when the militia of the city of New York and the returned nine-months volunteers of New Jersey were showing themselves equally ready to respond to the call. When the Army of the Potomac seemed for the moment to be nothing, even for the defence of the North, Hooker discredited, no successor discovered, public confidence lost, the very darkest day of the struggle at hand, and no man able or willing to predict what might be the extent of disaster reached before the rolling back of the tide of invasion from the homes of the loyal States.

Such were the place, the time, the surroundings, and the atmosphere (so to speak) of the house of the blended Flemish and Elizabethan styles of architecture, at West Philadelphia, of which, thus far, only the outward aspects have been presented. Yet there may be an inexcusable neglect of the proprieties, in presenting a house, its green lawn, shady trees, and even the pleasant landscape stretching away in front of it, before those living figures which would certainly have attracted the attention of an observer in advance of any of the inanimate beauties of art or nature.

Those figures were two in number, both standing on the piazza, very near the trellis of climbing roses, and where the flecks of sunshine fell through the leaves upon them and dashed them with little dots and lines of moving light, as well as the floor upon which they stood. Both were girls—both young—both beautiful; at least each possessed that combination of features, form and manner, making her very pleasing to the casual observer, and certain to be reckoned beautiful by some one admitted to a closer knowledge of the spirit enshrined within. They were evidently dear friends; for as they stood near the trellis, and the hand of the taller of the two plucked a half-open rose from one of the clusters, and she playfully tried to coax it to a fuller opening by breathing caressingly upon it and separating its clinging leaves with her dainty fingers,—the arm of the other was around her waist, and both the trim and graceful forms were slightly swaying backward and forward in that pleasant, idle, school-girl motion which the grown woman does not easily forget until it has given the "fidgets" to half her elder acquaintances.

The taller and perhaps by a year the elder—she of the rose—was the daughter of the mistress of that pleasant summer paradise, born to wealth and position, and her birth registered some two-and-twenty years before in the predecessor of the heavy family Bible with its golden clasps, which lay in state in the parlor so near her, as Margaret Hayley. She was a little above the average height of womanhood, and might have seemed too tall for grace but for the exquisite rounding of the lithe form, the matchless fall of a pair of sloping shoulders that could not probably be matched within a radius of an hundred miles, the graceful carriage of a neck that would have been long if less elegantly poised, the beauty in shape and spring in motion of the Arab foot under which the water would have run as easily as beneath a bridge, and the supple delicacy of the long taper fingers with their rose-tinted nails, which seemed perfect and high-blooded enough to have a mission of playing among heart-strings as the fingers of others might do among the chords of a harp.

In feature the young girl had quite as many claims to attention. The hair was very dark and very profuse—so near to black that it needed the sunlight before the golden shadows in the dark brown became fully apparent—swept plainly down on either side, in the madonna fashion, from a brow that was very pure, high and clear. The face was handsomely moulded, rather long than broad, as beseemed the figure, rather pale than ruddy, though with a dash of healthy color in each cheek that belied any momentary suspicion of ill health; the nose a little long and somewhat decided, but very classic in outline and finely cut at the nostril; the eyes dark—so dark that a careless observer would have lost their brown and called them black, and their expression a little reserved if not sad and even sometimes severe; the mouth small and well-shaped, with the lips as delicately tinted as the faintest blush-rose in the cluster near her, but a shade too thin for the exhibition of exuberant passion, and showing a slight curl of pride at the corners of the upper; the chin rounded, full, and forming a pleasant point for the eye to rest upon as it descended from the face to study the contour of neck and shoulders. The first appreciative glance at her was certain to be followed by the suppressed exclamation: "How very handsome!" and the second by a thought that the lips did not syllable: "How very proud and queenly!" It might have needed many more than a third, before the gazer could go to the full depth of a very marked character, and say how much of that queenly bearing might be ready to bend at last to the magic touch of the softer passions, and how much of that evident goodness and firmness might be employed in conveying happiness to others than herself. Among her peculiarities, she seemed to despise stripes, plaids, sprigs, spots, and the other endless varieties of color in material; and the lawn which swept that morning around her erect figure was of a neutral tint and as devoid of spot as were arms, ears and neck of any ornament in jewelry except a small cameo at the throat, a slight gold chain around the neck and descending to the bosom, and a single cluster diamond sparkling on the forefinger of the right-hand that was dallying with the spirit hidden among the rose-leaves.

No more telling contrast to the tall, majestic girl could well have been supplied, than her neighbor and dear friend, Elsie Brand (Elspeth, baptismally, for reasons that will hereafter develop themselves, but always called Elsie by those admitted to the least intimacy.) She was at least four inches shorter than Miss Hayley, round and rather plump, though very graceful in figure, with a chubby face, ruddy cheeks, piquant nose, merry blue eyes, pouting red lips, full hair coming low down on the forehead and of that pale gold which the old Scotch poets immortalized as "yellow," in so many of their lays of the bardic era. Pretty, beyond question, but more good and attractive-looking than beautiful; and if a second look at Margaret Hayley would have induced an observation having reference to her pride, a second at Elsie Brand was certain to bring out the thought if not the speech: "What a charming, good little girl!" Perhaps a third, with persons not too severely in training for the great Olympian races of morality, was very likely to create such a sensation as one experiences in gazing at a lusciously ripe peach, having particular reference to the pulpy red lips with their funny pout and kissable look, and ending in a wish that the crimson love-apples of the modern Hesperides were not quite so zealously guarded.

Elsie had not yet passed her twenty-second birthday, though she had been "of age" for a good many twelvemonths, in the estimation of those who had come near enough to her to feel the beating of her warm heart. Doctor James Holton, graduate of the Pennsylvania Medical College, and lately a student with one who had been a student with David Hosack, held his own peculiar estimation of Elsie Brand, and had almost been driven into rank atheism from the necessity of both holding and proving that the theory of our springing from one common father and mother could not possibly be correct, as the clay of which Elsie was made had been so very different—so much purer, sweeter and better—from that employed in the moulding of ordinary mortals!

For some minutes the two young girls had been standing in silence, Margaret engaged with experiments on her opening rose and Elsie with one arm around her and lazily observing the operation—both apparently full of that indolent enjoyment born of ease, content, and the languid air of the summer morning. Then the little one spoke:

"Margaret, do you know of what I have been thinking for the last two minutes?"

"Haven't any machine by which I could pry into the droll secrets of your brain, Elsie, my dear!" answered the taller, pleasantly, but with no smile upon her lips meanwhile, and apparently with all her attention yet absorbed in her horticultural experiment.

"Shall I tell you?" queried Elsie.

"Certainly, pet, if you like!" was the reply, the tone, as well as the word of endearment, showing indefinably that Margaret Hayley thought of herself as a woman and yet of her companion (of nearly the same age) as little more than a child.

"I was thinking," said the little girl, "how much of character is sometimes shown in the action of a moment, and how very different we are."

"Who thought your little head was so philosophical, Elsie?" answered Margaret, and this time she for a moment deserted her rose and looked around with a pleasant smile. "Well, the application of your thought to yourself and to me?"

"Oh," said the little one. "It was only about the rose. I should have plucked it, if I plucked it at all, and enjoyed it as it was. You are trying to make something else out of it, and yet show no wish to destroy the flower. A cruel woman—different from either of us, I hope—would probably be plucking off the leaves one by one and throwing them away, without caring how much pain she might be inflicting on the life of the flower, hidden away down somewhere in its heart."

"A very pretty idea, upon my word!" said Margaret, ceasing to blow upon and pluck at the leaves, and turning upon her companion a countenance showing something like surprised admiration. "And what do you make of my character, Elsie, as shown by my handling of the rose?"

"You must not be angry with me, Margaret," answered the young girl, a little in the spirit of deprecation. "But you see I should have been satisfied with the rose as it was, and the other would have been cruelly dissatisfied with it in any shape, and you——"

"Well, dear? I——"

"You showed that you were not entirely satisfied with every thing as it was, and that you had a little self-will leading you to force things to be as you chose, by trying to make that poor little flower outrun the course of nature and bloom before it was quite ready."

"I think you are right, Elsie," said Margaret, nodding her head in that slight and repeated manner indicative of answering the mind within quite as much as any observation from without. "I am not satisfied with every thing in the world, Elsie. I am not cruel, I hope and believe; but I am sharper, harder, more requiring than you, and consequently not formed for half so much true happiness. I do feel like forcing things to be what I require, sometimes, and then I suppose I grow unamiable."

"You are never any thing else than a dear good girl, with a wiser head than my rattle-pate, and my own sweet sister that is to be!" and the arm of the speaker went still more closely around the slight waist it encircled. A blush as delicately roseate as the first flushings of dawn crept over the more classic face that bent above her own, the lips above came down to meet those pouting below, and the two young girls were kissing and embracing as if they had been two lovers of opposite sexes but very much of one opinion as to the best office of the lips. Any delicately-nerved old bachelor who should have happened to pass in front of the house at that moment and catch a glimpse of the scene just then enacted on the piazza, would certainly have fainted away on the spot, at the idea of such a waste of the most delicious of "raw material."

"You may have the rose for your lesson—you see I have not spoiled it, after all," said Margaret, when the kiss had been given and the rosy flush died away from her own cheek.

"To give to Carlton?" asked Elsie, as she held out her hand for it.

"No, Carlton must come after his own roses!" was the reply, with the least dash of pride in the curling of the upper lip.

"And pluck them himself?" asked saucy Elsie.

"Certainly!"

"No matter where he finds them growing—on tree, or on cheek, or on lips!" continued the young girl, with a light laugh.

For an instant the same flush rose again on the cheek of Margaret Hayley; then she forced it away, smiled, and said:

"Certainly! why not? Carlton Brand kisses me, sometimes, and I have more than once kissed him back. What is that to you, sauce-box, when we are engaged to be married?"

"What is that to me? Every thing! Joy—happiness—to know that I am going to have so dear a sister!" cried the little one, throwing both her arms, this time, around the pliant waist of Margaret and hugging her in a perfect transport of delight, which seemed quite shared in, though more tranquilly, by the object of the demonstration.

The saddest, cruellest thing in all the lyric drama is the blast of De Sylva's horn on Ernani's wedding morning, calling him in one instant from happy love to dishonor or death. Neither in romance nor in nature should such sudden transitions occur. Alas, for humanity! they do occur in both, not occasionally but habitually. The Duchess of Richmond's ball—then Waterloo. De Joinville springs on board his flag-ship to sail for the attack on Vera Cruz, in the very ball dress in which he has been dancing the whole night through with the republican belles at Castle Garden. The Pall is over every thing of earth: how sadly and how inevitably it droops above the Banner! No scene upon earth could have been more exquisitely peaceful, and few could have been lovelier, than that which surrounded and comprehended those two fair girls in their embrace upon the piazza. Wealth, youth, beauty, good feeling, happiness—all were there; and love blent with friendship, for was not the embrace, given by Elsie Brand and accepted by Margaret Hayley, both given and accepted quite as much for her brother's sake as her own? It was fitting, then, according to the sad fitness of earth, that the element of discord should enter into the peaceful and the beautiful.

The officer spurred by, as we have seen him do, gazing only with our incorporeal eyes. Both the young girls, just releasing each other from their embrace, saw the dark cloud of war sweeping between them and the sunlit grain fields. Elsie Brand shuddered and drew back, as if the incongruity jarred her nature. Margaret Hayley instantly lifted her proud neck the higher, as if something in her nature sympathized with every suggestion of the struggle, and as if she was, indeed, insensibly riding on with the hurrying horseman.

"And what does the shudder mean, little one?" asked Margaret, who had plainly distinguished it at the moment of release.

"I hate war, and every thing connected with it!" was the reply, the tone almost petulant.

"And I do not hate it, painful as it may be in many particulars," said Margaret. "Force and energy are the noblest developments in life. Bravery is the nearest possible approach to that divine character which knows no superior and consequently fears none."

"Nearer to the divine than love?" asked the little one.

Just for one instant, again, that roseate tint on the cheek of Margaret, as she said: "Nobler, if not nearer to the divine; and sorry as I must be to see the bloodshed caused by a civil war in my native land, I am almost glad that it has occurred, sometimes, as a means of rousing the sluggish pulses of men who would otherwise have stagnated in trade and pleasure, and proving that we yet possess something of the hero spirit of old."

"And I am sorry for it all the while, night and day, in my prayers and in my dreams," answered Elsie Brand, with a sigh. "Hark!" as the tap of the drum came across from the lateral road before-mentioned. "There is another reminder of the curse, and one that comes nearer home. Do you remember, Margaret, that I shall soon have a brother, and you a lover, separated from us and in terrible danger? They say Harrisburgh must be taken, unless a very large body of troops can reach it at once. The Reserves will probably go on, to-night, and Carlton will probably accept his old commission again. I do want him to do his duty, Margaret, if it is his duty; but I hope that he will not think so—that he will not go away."

"And I hope that he will!" answered Margaret, her tall form drawn up to its full height, and a look of stern pride upon her face that could not very well be mistaken.

"To go into danger—perhaps to death?" asked Elsie, looking sadly at the proud Sibylline face.

"To a thousand deaths, if necessary, rather than towards the least suspicion of a want of true manhood!"

"Ah, you do not know the trembling fear of a sister's love!" said Elsie, with a sigh.

"I know a love fifty times deeper!" said Margaret, the pride still on her face, and yet that ever-returning flush coming up again to say that if love had not conquered pride it had at least divided the dominion. "Listen, Elsie Brand, to some words that you may as well understand now as ever. There is no one near to hear us, and so it is almost like speaking before heaven alone. I love your brother, deeply, devotedly, with all the power of my nature—so devotedly that if that love should be wrenched away from my heart by any circumstance, I know that my life would thenceforth be but one long, wretched mockery of existence. Happy natures like yours, Elsie, do not know the absolute agony that lies in such love. And yet I could give up that love, and my life with it, and would do so, before I would live, love, and yet despise!"

"Despise?—are you speaking of Carlton—of my brother?" asked the young girl, apparently a little lost in the mysterious energy of her companion's words.

"I said that I could not despise," Margaret Hayley went on. "I must not, or we have no future. Do you know that I should have reverenced your brother more, even if I did not love him better, if he had not refused the commission in the army tendered him at the commencement of the war? I might have wept, perhaps mourned—but I should have idolized. Now, I only love a mortal like myself, where I might have been worshipping a hero!"

"Or sobbing over a grave!" said Elsie, with a sigh which told how easily she might have been brought to illustrate the word she used.

"What then!" was the quick reply of Margaret. "The glory would have been his—the loss and grief would have been mine, and I could have borne them. But he did not choose to enter the struggle, prominent as he had once been in military movements. He had the excuse of business and occupation, and I have tried to believe that he needed no other."

"Needed?—what do you mean, Margaret?" cried Elsie Brand in a tone and with a movement of starting back which evidenced both pain and alarm.

"It is a painful thing, but I must say it, to you, as I do not know that I could say it to him," pursued Margaret. "I mean, that I have tried to believe that there was no flaw in my idol—that Carlton Brand, who held every pulse of my woman's heart responsive to his touch—did not lack the one manly virtue of courage!"

"And would you dare to believe my brother—the man you have pretended to love—a coward?" There was something vexed and sharp, almost angry, in Elsie's tone, now, that did not promise another immediate embrace like that of a few moments previous. Margaret Hayley saw the expression of her face, but neither blenched before it nor seemed to feel any anger at the manifestation.

"Elsie Brand," she said, her words slow, measured, and with a cadence that was somehow inexpressibly pained and mournful, "I am no school-girl, and I am speaking words that I mean. I know your brother to be patriotic, I know him to be in high health, athletic, vigorous and determined; and have sometimes believed that if he had possessed that one requisite, animal courage, he would long ago have been fighting the foes of the republic. Grieve as I may to part with him, I am glad you believe that he is going with the Reserves. He had his choice, before, and I let my own heart instead of my reason have sway, and did not question its propriety. But were he to hang back now, when his native State is invaded and every arm necessary to drive back the rebels from Pennsylvania soil, I should know that he was a coward!"

"I don't like you, Margaret Hayley, when your face looks so and you talk in that manner!" said the little girl. "But I will not quarrel with you. Carlton is going with the Reserves, and some day when he is killed or you hear how he has shamed all the rest with his bravery, you will be sorry for the words you have just spoken!" Just then the little yellow-haired girl was the Sibyl, and her prophecy went upon record with the wild words of Margaret, to be afterwards remembered—how sadly!

"No—do not be angry with me, Elsie," said Margaret, taking the hand that had been temporarily released. "You have no cause. I have been speaking against my own heart all the while, much more than against the man whom I truly love. I know him to be noble and true, and I will believe him brave. Are you satisfied? Kiss me!" and the proud, statuesque face once more lost its gravity, to bring back all the joyousness into the rounder and merrier one from which it had temporarily departed.

The light summer jockey-hat of Elsie lay just within the door, on a chair. With a quick glance at the watch hidden under her waist-riband, she stepped within the door, threw on her hat, and was about to terminate her somewhat prolonged morning-call, when Margaret took it off again, dropped it into one of the vacant chairs, and said:

"No—do not go away. You have nothing to do at home—mother has gone down to the city for the day, you know, and I shall be lonely. We shall have some lunch—you may call it dinner if it will taste any better,—very soon. Stay till the afternoon—cannot you do so, just as well as not?"

"I suppose so—no, I must see Carlton—yes, though, Carlton will be quite as likely to come here first as to go home, if he has arranged to go away—yes, I will stay if you wish it so much!" rapidly answered the little one.

"That is a good girl," said Margaret Hayley, just as she might have patted a school hobby-de-hoy on the head. "Now run into the parlor and get the very nicest book you can find, draw the easy-chair out of the hall, and enjoy yourself the best you can for just twenty minutes, while I go down to the kitchen, in ma's place, and see what progress our new Dutch cook has been making."

She disappeared with the words, and her injunctions were acted upon almost as rapidly. In half a minute Elsie had the arm-chair out of the hall, and an illustrated work off one of the tables in the parlor, and was prepared for her short period of indolent enjoyment.

CHAPTER II.

The Coming of Carlton Brand—Almost a Paladin of Balaklava—Brother and Sister—A Spasm of Shame—The Confession—The Coward—How Margaret Hayley heard Many Words not intended for her—The Rupture and the Separation.

Not long was the young girl, left at the close of the last chapter bodily ensconced in an easy-chair on the broad piazza, and mentally absorbed in the attractions of one of the choicest books in Margaret Hayley's collection, allowed to pursue her reading undisturbed. Not two minutes had elapsed when a horseman, riding a chestnut horse of handsome appearance and fine action, came rapidly up from the direction of the city, dismounted with the same practised grace that he had shown when in the saddle, threw the rein of his horse over one of the posts standing near the gate, opened that gate and came up the walk, without attracting the attention of the young lady on the piazza, or that of any other occupant of the house he was approaching.

Lifting from his brow, as he approached the house, to wipe away the slight moisture which had gathered there even in riding, the broad-brimmed and low-crowned hat of light gray, which so well accorded with his loose but well-fitting suit of the same color, he gave an opportunity for studying the whole man, which could not well have been attained under other circumstances; and both narrator and reader may be excused for stopping him momentarily in that position, while due examination is made of his most striking outward peculiarities.

He was at least five feet eleven inches in height, with a figure rather slight than stout, but singularly erect, sinewy, and elastic, every movement giving evidence that the body could not well be set to a task beyond its power of endurance. The foot was not very small, but well-shaped, and the ungloved hand which held his riding-whip was almost faultless in shape and color. The hat removed, a brow rather broad than high was seen, with a head well balanced in all the intellectual and moral requirements, densely covered with light, curling hair, of that peculiar shade which the poetical designate as "blonde" and the practical as "sandy." The complexion, though the cheeks were a little browned by the summer sun, was very fair, and that of the brow as stainless as any petted girl's could be. The features were nearly faultless in the Greek severity of their outline, the nose straight and well cut, the mouth small but with full curved lips, the eyes of hazel, widely set. The lower part of his face was effectually concealed by a luxuriant full beard and moustache, a few shades darker than his hair, and showing a propensity to curl on slight provocation. He was a decidedly handsome man of twenty-eight to thirty, erect, gentlemanly, dignified, and with something in his general appearance irresistibly reminding the spectator of the traditional appearance of those blonde Englishmen of good birth, who seem made to dawdle life away without exhibiting one of the sterner qualities of human nature, until deadly danger shows them to have that cool recklessness of life which charged two hundred years ago with Prince Rupert and ten years ago with poor Nolan. Yet this was the idea more likely to be formed of him and his capabilities, by strangers and those who lacked opportunity to examine his face and manner closely, than by those intimately acquainted with both; for there was an occasional nervousness in the movement of the hands, and even of the whole figure, that to a close observer would have belied the first-assumed self-confidence; and a something drooping, tremulous, and undecided in the lower lip at the corners, was so well matched by a sad and even troubled expression that often rested like a cloud over the eyes, that the whole man seemed to be made into another self by them.

Such was Carlton Brand, the brother of Elsie, about whom the tongues of the two young girls had wagged so unreservedly but a few minutes before. Such was his appearance, to the outward eye, as, hat still in hand, he approached the piazza. Elsie was sufficiently absorbed in her book, not to feel his presence; and it was not until he was close upon her that the young girl saw him, flung down the costly illustrated volume in her chair with less care than might have pleased the less impulsive owner, sprang to the step and seized both the occupied hands of the new-comer, with a warmth that showed how cordial was the affection between brother and sister, so widely different in appearance and indication of character.

"How did you come here, pet?" the brother asked, as soon as his mouth was free from the kiss his sister tendered.

"Oh, ran across the fields half an hour ago, and intended to be back home by this time, only that Margaret was alone and wished me to stay; and besides——"

"Well—besides what?"

"Besides, I almost knew that you would stop here before you went home, and I should see more of you before you went away, by remaining."

Could the young girl but have seen the quick spasm of agony that just then passed over the face of Carlton Brand—the agitation and trembling which seized upon lip and hands—she might have been wiser the next moment, but she certainly would not have been happier. Just for that one moment there seemed to be lack-lustre vacancy in the eyes, total want of self-assertion in face and figure, and the handsome, noble-looking man actually seemed to have collapsed, bowed, and sunk within himself, so that he was more an object of pity than of envy. But the sister's eyes were fortunately turned away at that instant, and she saw nothing. When she looked at him again, the spasm, whatever it might have been, was gone, and she only saw his usual self. He did not reply to her last suggestion, but asked, after an instant of hesitation:

"Where is Margaret?"

"Gone down into the kitchen for a few moments, to look after a new Dutch cook, but she will soon return. And so you are really going away, brother, and I shall be so lonesome!" and the hand of the sister sought that of the dearly-loved brother again, as if every moment lost without some touch of one who was so soon to leave her, was lost indeed.

Even to this the brother gave no reply, but made a remark with reference to the rapid ripening of the grain in the wheat-fields that skirted the road beyond. A duller wit than that of Elsie Brand might have become aware that he was avoiding an unpleasant subject; and the young girl recognized the fact, but gave it an entirely erroneous explanation, believing that he must have heard some peculiarly threatening news from the scene of the invasion, making the peril of the troops about to leave more deadly than it would have been under ordinary circumstances, and that he dreaded to enter upon the theme at all, for fear of alarming her. As a consequence, her next words were a disclaimer of her own fears.

"Oh, Carlton, you need not be afraid to speak of it to me. Much as I have dreaded your going away, I know, now, that it is your duty, when your own State is invaded; and I have made up my mind to bear the separation, and even to think of you, my own dear brother, as in danger, without saying one word to hold you back."

"Have you?" That spasm was again upon his face, and the words were hoarse; but again the eye and the ear of the sister missed the recognition of any thing unusual.

"Yes; and so has Margaret."

"Has she?" The spasm had not gone off his face, and the second question was asked even more hoarsely than the first. For some reason that the young girl could not understand, he turned away from her, walked down to the end of the piazza, and stood looking off. What he was suffering at that moment, with three or four of the most powerful passions known to humanity tearing at his heart-strings at once, none may know who have not passed through the same terrible ordeal which he was then enduring. There were only the fays who may have been playing among the green grass, and the dryads yet lingering among the whispering leaves of the maples, looking in at the end of the piazza upon his face: had they been human eyes, what of wrestling and struggle might they not have seen! When he turned to walk back towards the spot where his sister was standing in surprise not unmingled with alarm, his face was again calm, but it would have shown, to the observant eye, a calmness like that of despair. His words, too, were forced when they came:

"You and Margaret both, Elsie, love me so well, I know, that you would give up almost any thing to please me; but I do not intend to task either of you too far. I am not going—that is, business detains me so that I cannot—I am not going to Harrisburgh."

"Business!" Elsie Brand had never before, in her whole young life, uttered a word so hardly or in a tone so nearly approaching to a sneer, as she spoke the single word at that moment. Were the words of Margaret Hayley ringing in her ear, and did she find some terrible confirmation, now, of what had before been so impossible to believe? "Business!—what business, Carlton, can be sufficient to keep you at home when they seem to need you so much?"

"What do you know about it?" and his tones were harsh and almost menacing. "Do we ask you women to decide what we shall do, where we shall go, and where we shall stay?"

"Oh, Carlton!" and the cry seemed to come from the very heart of the young girl. It was perhaps the first harsh word that had ever fallen on her ear, aimed at her from the lips of the brother she so adored. God only knew the agony under which that harsh word had been wrung out, as only he could know the agony it might cause! The cry instantly melted the heart to which it appealed. Carlton Brand took the hand of his sister in his own, kissed her tenderly, and said:

"Forgive me, Elsie, if I spoke as I should never speak to you! But you do not know, sometimes, what moves men to harshness which they afterwards bitterly repent."

"But you are not going with the regiment?" again she asked.

"No!—I have told you I was not, Elsie!" and the tone came very near to being a harsh one, once more.

"I am sorry—very sorry, Carlton!"

"Sorry?" and the often-recurring spasm which again passed over his features, could not have been unobserved by the young girl, for her own face seemed to reflect it. "Sorry? Are you indeed sorry that I am not going into—that I am not going to be absent from you?"

"Oh, no, Carlton! heaven knows I am not!" said Elsie, and the merry blue eyes were filled with tears. "But I think you ought to go; and you do not know, Carlton, how much may hang upon it. Do you love Margaret—really and truly love her?"

"Love her? as my own soul!" answered Carlton Brand. He did not say "as his own life"! "Why do you ask, after all that you have known of our attachment and our engagement?"

"Because, Carlton"—and the young girl, weeping the while under an impulse of feeling that she could scarcely herself understand, caught him by the arm and drew down his head towards her—"because I believe that if you do not go with the Reserves, Margaret will think that you do not do so because—oh, I cannot speak the word!"

"Because what? Speak it out!" and he seemed to be nerving himself to meet some shock that was likely to need all his energies.

"Because"—in a voice very low and broken—"because you are afraid to go—because you are a coward!"

"Has she said as much?" and the eyes of the speaker, very sad, troubled, and almost wild, seemed still to have power to read the very soul of the young girl before him. Elsie could not speak at first, but she nodded twice, and never death-bell of a condemned criminal rung out more clearly or more frightfully on the startled air, tolling the knell of a last hope, than the whisper that came at last from her lips:

"Yes!"

"Then God help me!" came from those of the strong man, in such a manifestation of agony as was painful to behold, while his hands for one moment clasped themselves together as if he would wring them in womanish weakness, then went up to his face and spread themselves as if they would shut it away forever from human sight. "God help me!—and you, Elsie, despise me if you will, but, oh, help me to keep it from her. I dare not go! I am a coward! If I should go into battle I should disgrace myself there forever, by running away at the first fire, and that would break our poor old father's heart!"

"Carlton! Carlton! my poor brother!" and the hands of the young girl closed around one of her brother's, with so warm a pressure as proved that she did not think of any shame, disgrace or fault in the connection, but only as the announcement of some great misfortune.

"Yes, Elsie, you have wrung from me the confession that I hoped never to be obliged to make to any one but my God. I have made it to Him, oh, how many times, and I almost feel that he has forgiven me, as my fellow-men will never do. I have been a coward, I suppose, from my very cradle and heaven only knows how I have managed to conceal the terrible truth from you, all this while! The very sight of blood sickens me, even when it is only the blood of beeves in a slaughter-house. One spirt from the arm of a man when he is being bled sets every nerve to trembling, and sometimes sends me fainting to the floor. One moment among the horrible sights of battle—the groans, and shrieks, and crashing bullets and spouting blood of carnage—would drive me mad or send me flying away with the curses of my whole race ringing in my ears."

"Oh, Carlton! my poor brother!" repeated once more, and in the same tone of heart-broken sympathy, was all that Elsie Brand could answer to this humiliation of the one to whom, perhaps, next to God, she had ever looked up as to His noblest human manifestation of greatness in creative power.

"Do you see what a poor miserable wretch I am?" he went on, apparently forgetful that any one besides his sister might be within hearing, and she so absorbed in the grief and shame of the revelation that she possessed no more forethought. "Think of me as an officer in my regiment, and know with what a reddened face I must have walked the streets when we paraded, conscious that if suddenly called to duty—even the quelling of a mob at the street-corner—I should be obliged to disgrace myself at once and forever! Think what I have suffered since the war broke out!—commission after commission offered me—loving my country as I believe man never loved it before—and yet not daring to strike one blow in its behalf. Obliged to make slight excuses when others have inquired why I did not go to the war—obliged to wear a double face, a mask, everywhere and at all times—dreading detection every day, and in that detection perhaps the loss of my proud father's life and of the love that has made the only hope of my own—cursing the omen that unwittingly gave me the brand of the coward in my very name—racked and tortured thus, and yet obliged to hold an honorable place among my fellow-men—it has been too hard, Elsie, too hard! And now to lose all! If she has learned to suspect me—I know her brave heart and her proud nature—I shall lose her, the richest, noblest thing on earth, half grasped, to be mourned for as never man yet mourned for woman! Do help me, Elsie! Help me to conceal my shame—to deceive her, yes—God help me!—to deceive her before whom my very soul should be laid bare—so that she will not know me for the miserable wretch and coward that I am!"

And all this while his face was wrought and contorted, at short intervals, by those fearful spasms of shame and mental suffering; and ever and anon his hands locked together and seemed to wring themselves even beyond his own volition. How different he looked, at that moment, from the handsome, noble man, in the full pride of mature adolescence, who had stepped upon that piazza but a few moments before!

"I would do any thing in the world to help you, Carlton; but what can I do?" faltered the young girl, who saw no light beyond the thick, black cloud of shame and ruin slowly settling down on the head of her beloved brother.

"Help me to conceal the truth"—he went on—"to enforce any excuse for not leaving the city at this moment! I know it is base and contemptible, but it is for a good purpose, Elsie—to save a heart that is already distracted, and a life that must be wrecked without it. We may never be placed in the same circumstances again—the war may soon be ended—if she can only be kept from knowing this, I may never be placed in the same peril again, and my whole life shall be one long proof that I am not otherwise unworthy of the woman I love so madly."

"It does not need, Carlton Brand!" sounded a voice from within—a voice that both recognized but too well; and out of the hall came the figure of Margaret Hayley.

Her words and her manner alike proved that she had heard all, or at least enough; for there was an expression of withering contempt flashing out of her dark eye and curling her proud lip, not easily to be borne by any person towards whom they were directed. There did not seem, for the moment, to be any thing like pity in her composition; and if there had been love within her heart, it appeared to have been so crushed out by one stunning blow that it could never bloom again any more than the wild flower ground beneath the heel of the wayfarer. Her head was proud, erect, haughty, disdainful; and one who had leisure to examine her closely would have seen that the nostril was opening and shutting convulsively, as if overwhelming passion was only suppressed by the physical act of holding the breath. Elsie Brand was too much dizzied and confused to be quite aware what had happened or what was about to happen. She merely uttered a cry of agitation and fright, and shrunk back alike from her brother and the woman who had come to be his judge. Carlton Brand saw more, with the quick eye of the lawyer and the sharpened perception of the lover. He realized that Margaret Hayley had heard his agonized and unmanly confession—that anger and scorn had driven away from her face the love which had so often and so pleasantly beamed upon him—that his doom was sealed.

With the knowledge came back to him that manliness in demeanor of which he had been so sorely in need a moment before. In the presence only of his sister, and when pleading with her to assist in rescuing him from the pit of grief and shame into which he felt himself to be sinking, he had been humble, abject, even cowering. Now, and in the presence of the woman for whose softened opinion he would have given the world and almost bartered his hopes of heaven,—he stood erect, and if the spasm of pain did not entirely pass away from his face, at least it changed in its character so that he was a man once more.

"I understand you, Miss Hayley," were the first words he spoke. "You have heard some words not intended for your ear. You have been listening."

"If you merely mean that I have heard what was not intended for my ear, you certainly speak the truth, Mr. Brand," she replied, catching the formality of his address at once. "But if you mean that I have listened meanly, or even voluntarily, to words intended to be confidential, you wrong yourself, equally with me, in saying so. You have spoken so loudly that not only I but even the servants in the house could not well avoid hearing you; and there is not much 'listening' in hearing words almost brawled on a piazza."

Her words were very bitter—they beseemed the lips from which they flowed. A man who loved her less or, who had fewer of the natural impulses of the gentleman than Carlton Brand, might only have thought of the taunt conveyed and forgotten its justice. He did not do so, but bowed at once with an air of respectful humility, and said:

"I beg ten thousand pardons for my hasty speech. I was mad when I made it. Certainly you have heard nothing but what you had a right to hear." And then he stood erect but silent.

Poor little Elsie Brand could contain herself no longer. How she loved her brother, only the angels knew. How easily we pardon, in those of our kindred, what would be indelible disgrace in the characters of others, all close observers of humanity know too well. Little Elsie Brand was only acting the part of nature in espousing the cause of her own blood, and saying, before time enough had elapsed for any additional words between the two principals:

"Margaret Hayley, I say that you are too hard with Carlton! If you had ever loved him, as you pretended, you would not be so! There, you have not asked my opinion, but you have it!"

The words, though kindly meant, were ill-advised. Not even her brother, who had but a few moments before been imploring her assistance, thanked her for what she had then spoken. At least he silenced her for the time with—

"You can do no good now by speaking, Elsie. It is too late. Miss Hayley has something more to say to me, no doubt, after what she has accidently heard; and I am prepared to hear it." He stood almost coolly, then, the bared head bent only a very little, and the face almost as calm as it was inexpressibly mournful. So might a convicted criminal stand, feeling himself innocent of wrong in intent, beaten down under a combination of circumstances too strong to combat, awaiting the words of his sentence, and yet determined that there should be something more of dignity in his reception of the last blow than there had ever been in any previous action of his life.

Twice Margaret Hayley essayed to speak, and twice she failed in the effort. If she had been calmly indignant the moment before, Nature had already begun to take its revenge, and she was the woman again. Her proud head was bent a little lower, and there was a dewy moisture in the dark eyes, that could never be so well dried up as in being kissed away. Who knows that the proud woman was not really relenting—letting the old love come back in one overwhelming tide and sweep away all the barriers erected by indignation and contempt? Who knows how much of change might possibly have been wrought, had the next words of Carlton Brand been such as indicated his belief that the chain between them was not yet severed utterly? Who knows, indeed?—for his words were very different.

"Miss Hayley, I have waited for you to speak what I feel that you have to say. You have heard words that no betrothed woman, I suppose, can hear from her promised husband and yet retain that respect for him which should be the very foundation of the marriage-bond."

"I have." The words came from her lips in tones much lower than those in which she had before spoken, and she did not even look at him as she answered.

"You have heard me declare myself—I know by the face you wore but a moment since, that you have heard all this—what you hold to be the lowest and most contemptible thing on God's footstool—a coward."

"I have. I would rather have died on the spot than heard those words from the lips of the man I have—have loved!" The words still low, and some hesitation in those which concluded the sentence. One would almost have believed, at that moment, that of the two the culprit was the down-looking and low-voiced woman, instead of the man whose godlike presence so contradicted the dastardly vice he was confessing.

"I have no defence to offer," the speaker went on. "If you have heard all that I believe, no further explanation is necessary. You know the worst; and as a proud woman, with honor unspotted and beyond suspicion, you have a right to pass what sentence you choose upon my—my shame, my crime, if you will!"

Perfect silence for an instant, then a broken sob from Elsie, whose face was streaming with tears denied to both the others, and who was leaning her forehead against the sharp corner of one of the columns of the piazza, apparently that the slight physical pain thus inflicted might do something to still the mental agony that raged within. Then Margaret Hayley, as if she had passed through a long struggle but conquered at last with a triumph slaying her own soul, raised her head, drew in a hard breath, shook back one of the tresses of her dark hair which had fallen over her brow, and spoke:

"Do you know, Carlton Brand—I cannot call you Mr. Brand again, for that address is mockery after what we have been to each other—do you know what that sentence must be, in justice to myself and to you?"

"I can guess it, Margaret Hayley," was the answer, the prefix changed again in imitation of her, just as she a moment before had changed it in imitating him. The incident was a mere nothing, and yet suggestive as showing how closely the two seemed to study each other, and how much of real sympathy there must after all have been between them. "I can guess it, and I will try to bear it."

"You can guess it—you do guess it—separation!" said Margaret in a low voice that she could not quite render firm.

"I was not mistaken—I supposed as much," he answered. "You are a proud woman, Margaret, and you could not marry a man for whom you failed to entertain respect—"

"I am a proud woman, but a woman still," said Margaret. "You whom I have loved so truly, can best guess the depth of my woman's nature. But I cannot and will not marry a man to whom I cannot look up and say: 'This man has the courage and the will to protect me in every peril!'"

"Have you ever had reason to believe that I could not and would not protect you, if need came, against all the world?" and his eyes momentarily flashed, at that thought, with a light which should not have shone in the orbs of a coward.

"Words are idle, Carlton Brand!" said Margaret. "There is no protection so sacredly due as that of a strong man to his country. You know it, and I know it as well. The man who knows his duty to his country and dares not do it, through sheer bodily fear, could not be trusted in any relation. His wife would not dare trust him, if she knew it; and you have opened my eyes but too painfully. And so, in mercy to both, all must be over between us—"

"Oh, do not say that, Margaret, sister!" broke out Elsie, in a more faltering voice than she had ever used in pleading for herself since the earliest day of childhood. Margaret did not heed her, if she heard, but went on from the point at which she had been interrupted:

"All is over between us, Carlton Brand, at once and forever, unless——"

"Unless?—what is the possibility you would yet hold out to me?" and the speaker showed more agitation, at that one renewed glimpse of hope, than he had done when battling against utter despair.

"Unless you will yet obey the summons that has called you with every other true son of Pennsylvania to the field, and prove to me that you did not know yourself or that you were endeavoring to play a cruel part in deceiving your sister and me!"

The face of Carlton Brand had been comparatively calm, ever since the coming out of Margaret. Suffer as he might, most of the suffering had been hidden. Now that face assumed an aspect that was really fearful to behold. The veins on his forehead swelled as if they would burst, his lip set hard, his eyes glared as if one touch might have made him a maniac, and his hands worked convulsively. All the symptoms of extreme terror and of a repugnance which no effort could overcome, were imminent in every glance and motion; and something of those phenomena was exhibited which we may suppose the Highland seer of old time to have shown, when he was carried beyond himself by the invisible powers, and saw battle, defeat and horrible death for himself or others, slowly unrolling before his spiritual sight. Elsie Brand shuddered and drew back to the column which had before sheltered her. Margaret Hayley still stood erect, though she was evidently laboring under suppressed excitement, and none could say what the end of this scene might be. It was quite a moment before Carlton Brand could command himself sufficiently to speak, and then he said in a low, broken voice:

"No—I cannot. I cannot kill my poor gray-haired old father with the spectacle of the flight and disgrace of his only son."

"And you have decided well," said Margaret. "It is a bitter thing to say, but I am glad that you have marked out my course as you have done. Think—oh heaven!" and she seemed indeed to be for the moment addressing the powers above instead of those regnant upon the earth—"think how near I came to being this man's wife and the possible mother of his children, each one marked with the curse set upon them by their father!" No human ear could have heard the whisper which followed: "Enough of disgraces descending from parents—oh, heaven!"

"You are right, Margaret Hayley—right!" spoke Carlton Brand, his voice lower, more hoarse and broken than it had been at any part of the long interview. "You have reminded me well of your duty and mine. The day may come when you will be sorry for every word that has fallen from your lips; but it may not. To-day you are doing right—let the future take care of itself. Good-bye!"

He took the long, slender white fingers in his, and looked upon them a minute, the tears at last gathering in his eyes. Then, when through the thickening drops he could scarcely see them longer, he raised them to his lips, pressed a kiss upon them, dropped the hand and strode off the piazza and away, never once looking back as he passed down the path towards the gate.

Margaret Hayley had been overstraining both heart and brain, and the penalty asserted itself very soon. Her discarded lover was scarcely half way down the path when the revulsion came, and pride for the moment broke down before her terrible sorrow. The proud neck bent, she stretched out her arms after the retreating figure, the single word, "Carlton!" came half whispered and half groaned through her lips, her eyes closed, and she sunk fainting into the arms of Elsie.

Carlton Brand did not hear the call. A moment, and still without another glance at the house where he was leaving behind the happiness of a life, he had unloosed the splendid chestnut pawing at the gate, swung himself into the saddle and ridden away westward. He reeled a little in his seat as he rode, as a drunken man might have done—that was all the apparent difference between the man with a hope who had arrived half an hour before and the man who now departed without one.

CHAPTER III.

Kitty Hood and Her School-house—Dick Compton going Soldiering—A Lovers' Quarrel, a bit of Jealousy, and a Threat—How Dick Compton met his supposed Rival—An Encounter, Sudden Death, and Kitty Hood's terrible Discovery.

"I do not care, Dick Compton! You are a mean, good-for-nothing fellow, and the sooner you go away and get killed, the better. I hope I may never set eyes on you again, as long as I live."

A pleasant style of address, especially from a pretty woman; and yet one to which a good many persons have submitted, first and last, from little people whom they could physically have slain with a single stroke and mentally discomfited with very little more trouble!

The time of this objurgation was the same morning on which the events took place which have already been recorded as occurring at the residence of Margaret Hayley, and at a very little earlier hour than that which witnessed the departure of Carlton Brand from the place of his signal discomfiture. The place was in front of a little country-school-house standing half a mile from the Darby road, north-westward, and perhaps two miles westward from the Hayleys. The interlocutors were Richard Compton (already introduced as "Dick" by the flippant tongue of his companion), a young and well-to-do farmer of the neighborhood, about a quarter of a century old, perhaps some five feet nine in height, thickset, strong-limbed, with a round, good-humored face guiltless of beard but browned a good deal by exposure in the field, generally smiling and content, but with a spice of the bull-dog in his nature which made him sullen occasionally and led him always to be very fond of his own peculiar way;—and Kitty Hood, teacher of the district school of that particular section of the Keystone State, a short, round, rosy little lass, with merry brown eyes that only occasionally had a sterner kind of mischief in them, dark brown waved hair, and just the last general appearance in the world that a phrenologist would have selected for the necessarily calm and dignified life of an instructress of callow youth.

The old weather-beaten school-house, erected perhaps fifty years before but not yet swept away in the prevailing rage for staring new white baby-houses for the instruction of children in the country, stood at the base of a slight wooded hill, facing southward; a fine old sycamore near the door holding the whole house and all its contents in flecked light and shade; a group of locusts not far away to the left showing a motley jumble of benches beneath, that were evidently the favorite lounging-place of the children during play-hours; and a little pond of a hundred or two feet in diameter, with one edge half covered with the leaves of the intrusive pond-lilies, and the other bordered by a juvenile wharf of stones, old boards and bark, supplying the youngsters with a place in which to paddle, sail boats and get very wet without any danger of being drowned, in summer, and with a reliable though limited skating-ground in winter. Its convenience for winter sports could only be imagined, at that season of the year when the wild-roses were clambering up the dingy boards of the inclosure, to the windows of the school-room; but its inevitable use as a part of the great "highway of nations" was too plainly shown by a circumstance which, alas!—at the same moment illustrated the vicissitudes of commerce and the necessity for the existence of insurance companies. A stately vessel of the mercantile guild, twelve inches in length but with the dignity of three masts and each holding spitted on it as a sail nearly an entire half-sheet of foolscap paper, had evidently left the little wharf during the morning play-hour, freighted for the Spice Islands lying up among the pond-lilies, but suffered the fate of many sea-going ships, fallen under the power of foul winds or adverse currents, and stranded on a reef of mud some paces from the shore, from which the ingenuity of her factors had not yet been able to release her, and where she lay "keeled over" in a manner equally contaminating to her white paper sails and unpleasant to her possible passengers. No doubt anxious eyes were meanwhile glancing out of the windows, between two leaves of the geography which detailed the perils of navigation in the East Indian archipelago, to see whether piratical canoes or pirogues did not put off to burn that noble vessel and massacre her crew, before noon should give time for any further efforts towards her release. Here the course of this narration painfully but necessarily loses sight of the good three-master "Snorter, of Philadelphia," as many another of the fairy barks launched by inexperienced youth disappears from view and is known no more forever; but let us hope that this particular venture was floated off at some early "spring tide" of play-spell, and that she "came safely to her desired haven!"

Within the little one-story school-house, with its unpainted desks and benches of pine, dark with age and scarred by notch and inscription from the penknives of half a century of school-boys,—there was going on, at that moment, precisely what may be seen in any school from Windsor to Washoe, when the ruling power is temporarily absent. Wilkie painted not only from life, but from the inevitable in life, when he drew the "Village School in an Uproar;" for mobs have been put down by the military power and even savage communities have been made quiet by the exercise of powder-and-ball; but no force has yet been discovered that could check (and who would wish it to be entirely checked, after all?) the riotous mischief of the school-room when the terrible eye is removed! Five minutes before, Mistress Hood in the chair of authority, fifty heads of all hues and all textures had been more or less closely bent down over book and slate, and a low monotonous hum, something like the sleepy drone from a score of bee-hives, had been heard floating out on the summer air. Now, Mistress Kitty Hood had been just two minutes absent from the school-room, and a nice little Pandemonium was already established, that it would need some birchings and many strong words to annihilate. Half a dozen of the big boys had gathered into a knot, not far from the door, and were snickering aloud and pointing knowingly towards the point of interest without, with running comments on "Miss Hood's beau!" Three little girls, forgetting their sex, were playing at leap-frog between and over two of the benches, to the disarrangement of their short skirts and the eventual tumbling over of one of the benches with a loud clatter. Two or three of the larger girls were in close conversation, about what there is no means of knowing except that one of them remarked that "it was real indecent and she meant to tell her ma!" One boy, who was the possessor of a magnificently national handkerchief, had stuck it on the end of the long ruler from the mistress' desk, and was going through a dress parade of one, with a feeble whistle as music. A young brute was taking the opportunity of pinching the ear of a smaller boy, and making him whimper, as a punishment for some previous alleged injury. Another had made a pair of spectacles out of blue paper, and stuck them on the nose of a little girl on one of the near benches, who blushed so rosily that her white dress, blue spectacles and red face quite supplied the national colors. And still another, with cheeks marvellously distended, was trying whether he could, in the short space of time during which the mistress might be absent, manage to choke down three early harvest-apples without dying by strangulation or requiring any assistance from his companions.

Such were the surroundings of the country school-house, and such was the aspect of Kitty Hood's little school-room during her temporary absence. And now what was the necessity which had for the moment withdrawn her from her charge, and what was the provocation under which the words were uttered, given at the commencement of this chapter?

Perhaps the personal appearance of Dick Compton may go at least a little distance towards the explanation. As he stood kicking his foot against the lower step of the school-house door and listening to the words of petulance which his mistress so plentifully bestowed upon him, it was to be seen that while his coat was a sack of ordinary light summer-stuff, looking civil and homelike enough, his pants and cap were both gray and military, according to the pattern of the Reserves. Under his arm he held a bundle which might very easily have contained the coat necessary to make the uniform complete; and such was, indeed, the composition of the parcel. Dick Compton, never before connected with any military organization, had the night before determined to abandon home and the girl he loved, leave other hands to gather in the fast ripening harvest, intrust his favorite pair of farm-horses to the care of his younger brother and the hands on the farm, and make at least a small part of the response to the urgent call of Governor Curtin. He had been down to the rendezvous, to sign the roll of membership in the Reserves, and to get his uniform, that morning. He was to leave with the regiment for Harrisburgh, that evening, and it was on his way home to the pleasant farm-house lying a couple of miles northward and across the main road leading up from Market street, that he had called at the school-house to make his adieux to Kitty Hood, which seemed to be so ungraciously received.

They were so indeed. Kitty, from the moment when Compton tapped at the door and called her out amid the surprised glances and then the tittering of the school-children—from the moment when she had observed his military cap and pants—had understood the whole story and put herself not only on her dignity but her unamiability. She had not smiled even once upon him, or allowed him to take her hand, though he reached out for it; and though the jolly round face of the school-mistress was not by any means the pattern of countenance that could be made stupendously awful by the greatest amount of effort, yet Kitty had done her best to be royal—not to say imperial. To his explanations she had been worse than the traditional "deaf"—insultingly interrupting; and to his asseverations that the country needed the heart and the arm of every true man, she had answered with that unromantic but unanswerable word: "fiddlestick!" She had tried wheedling, coaxing, scolding, every thing but crying, in the effort to make him forego his resolution and take off his name (supposing that he could do such a thing) from the roll of the Reserves. She had no doubt, and expressed herself to that effect, that if he went to Harrisburgh he would come back in a coffin, all cut up into little bits by the savages, or not come back at all and have his skull and bones used for a drinking cup and a few necklaces by the women of Secessia, or come back in a condition worse than either, with both legs cut off close up to the body, one arm gone and his skull broken in, and a pretty thing for a respectable young woman to marry!

It was very well, for the sake of his adherence to his patriotic purpose, that Dick Compton had in him that dash of bull-dog tenacity to which allusion has before been made; for it is not every man to whom such words of spiteful prophesy and determined discouragement, coming from the lips of a pretty woman who made her own love the excuse for uttering them, would have been without their effect. They might as well have been uttered to one of the granite gods of old, as to Compton, so far as moving him to any change of purpose was concerned; but his temper was by no means of as good proof as his determination. In fact, Kitty Hood's spiteful expostulations very soon made him ill-natured if not angry; and by the time the culmination already recorded was reached, he was quite ready to say, in a tone corresponding to her own:

"Well, I will go, Kitty Hood, whether you like it or not. I was a fool not to go away without walking a mile further to let you know any thing about it."

"Nobody asked you!" was the petulant reply.

"Nobody need to ask me, next time!" was the rejoinder. "I have a right to be killed, if I please, and it is none of your business whether I am or not. A pretty world it would be, with half of it made up of women too weak and too cowardly to fight a cat, and the other half of men tied fast of their apron strings, so that they had to ask every time they wanted to go away, just as one of your little whelps of school-boys whines: 'Please to let me go out!'"

Kitty Hood was finding a tongue quite as sharp as her own, by this time, and the effect was very much what is often seen in corresponding cases. Finding her lover growing as angry as herself, and a little more violent, the young school-mistress concluded that it was time to assume a less decided demeanor, so that if they must part they might do so without an absolute quarrel.

"Well, Dick," she said, after a moment of pause, "there is no use of your being angry about it!" Just as if she had not been showing ill-temper from the beginning—the minx! "Of course I cannot hold you, and do not wish to do so, if you prefer dressing yourself up in that ridiculous manner and standing up to be shot at, to remaining here with me."

"I don't prefer it, you know I don't, Kitty!" said Dick, aware that his flank of conversation had once more been turned and himself placed in a false position.

But here came an interruption. A young gentleman of seven made his appearance in the door of the school-room, his hands blacker than the proverbial ace-of-spades, his nether raiments spotted, and his face drawn into a most comical whimper, while his words came out between a sob and a hiccough:

"Please, Miss Hood, won't you come in to Jem Stephenson? He has gone and upsot the inkstand all over my hands and spoilt my new trowsers!"

"Go in and keep your seat, you young villain, or I shall flog you and Jem Stephenson both!" was the consoling assurance with which the "young villain" departed; while the hum from the school-room was evidently increasing, and the young school-mistress felt that she must indeed soon resume the reins of government if she was not to be permanently left without a realm worth ruling. But she took time to rejoin to Compton's last assertion.

"I don't know any thing of the kind. I say that if you thought half as much of me as you did of public opinion and making a show of your fine new clothes, you would not stir one step."

"Now, Kitty, do be reasonable—" again began Compton.

"Look at other people—don't they respect the wishes of those they expect to marry?" the young lady went on, not heeding his last attempt. "See—there is Carlton Brand—who does not know that he has remained at home ever since the war broke out, though he could have been a Colonel and perhaps even a General—just because he was really in love with Margaret Hayley, and she did not wish him to leave her?"

It is scarcely necessary to say, at this stage of the narration, that Miss Kitty Hood was "begging the question." She had never heard one word to indicate why Carlton Brand had not accepted his opportunities, and she merely mentioned the two as people of prominence in the section, acquaintances, and the first pair of lovers of whom she happened to think. But she had made a terrible blunder, as many of us do at the very moment when we seem to be performing the very keenest of operations. Carlton Brand—one of the finest-looking men to be found within a radius of an hundred miles, a member of one of the liberal professions, and known to be wealthy enough to afford indulgence in any line of life which he might happen to fancy—was naturally an object of envy if not of suspicion to hundreds of other young men who did not feel that they possessed quite the same advantages. Young farmers, who chanced to catch him saying a polite word to their sisters, looked at him through eyes not too confiding, in spite of the fact that not even rumor had pointed out a single instance in which he had indulged in a dishonorable amour; and those who detected him in glances of kindness (perhaps of admiration) towards demoiselles whom they had marked out as their own destined marital property, had a bad habit of even looking out of the corners of their eyes and scowling a little, at such manifestations. Carlton Brand, in all this, was only paying a very slight penalty for his triple advantage of wealth, position and good looks, while many others pay the same unpleasant toll to society for the possession of even one (and sometimes none) of the three favors of fortune.

The farm-house of the Comptons and the residence of the Brands (as will be hereafter made apparent) lay but a very short distance apart; and the little house (perhaps it might with more propriety have been called a cottage) in which Kitty Hood had seen the light, and where she lived with her quiet widowed mother, was still nearer to the abode of the young lawyer. Though the Hoods were much more humbly circumstanced than their neighbors, intercourse between the two families had always been frequent, with a very pleasant friendship between Elsie and Kitty, and more visits of the young girl at the residence of the Brands, and of Carlton, accompanying his sister, to that of the Hoods, than at all pleased the lover and expectant husband of Kitty. Then the latter had a head a little giddy and a tongue more than a little imprudent; and she had shown the bad taste, many times since their tacit engagement, to draw comparisons, in the presence of her lover, to his disadvantage, and in favor of a man who had much better opportunities than the farmer for keeping his clothes unimpeachable, his hands unsoiled, and his cheek unbrowned. Only very imprudent people, and perhaps very unfeeling ones, use such words; but they are used much too often, ignoring the pure gold that may lie within a rough nugget, and preferring the mere tinsel leaf on a bit of handsome carving. Kitty Hood was one of the thoughtless, and she was likely, some day, to pay the penalty in a manner she little anticipated.

Within the few weeks previous, without Kitty being at all aware of the fact, Mr. Dick Compton had allowed himself to ruminate more than was healthy upon the glances he had chanced to see interchanged between Kitty and her "stuck-up lawyer friend," as he chose to designate him, and upon the continual commendations which she chose to bestow on the latter—until rooted personal dislike and something very near to positive jealousy, had been the result. Walking over towards the rendezvous that morning, if one shadow of hesitation on the subject of going to Harrisburgh had passed through the mind of the young farmer, it was caused by his dislike of leaving Kitty out of view, with Carlton Brand in the same near neighborhood. All that difficulty had been removed by the understanding that the lawyer was to leave at the same time and on the same service with himself; but when Kitty at once revived the obnoxious name with a new phrase of commendation, and signified that the section was not to be relieved of the lawyer's presence during his own absence, it is not very strange that the unreasonable demons of jealousy began tugging again at his heart-strings, and that he felt like performing some severe operation upon the Mordecai who sat in his gate, if he could only catch him!

"So you have got to quoting Carlton Brand again, have you!" he responded to Miss Kitty's citation. "I thought I had told before that I had heard nearly enough of that proud puppy!"

"'Puppy' indeed!" and Miss Kitty fired in an instant. "He's nothing of the kind, but a man and a gentleman, and you know it, Dick Compton!"

"Oh, yes, a gentleman, and that suits you to a turn, Kitty Hood!" was the sneering reply. "When your gentlemen are in the way, you think that an honest hard-working man is nobody."

If ever a man spoke an unjust word to a woman (and it is to be feared that a great many have been uttered since the unfortunate gift of speech was conferred upon the race), Dick Compton was stupidly unjust at that moment. For the very quarrel (it was but little else, from first to last) in which they were engaged, had originated in the young girl's evident anxiety for his safety and pleading that he would not go away and leave her, even for a short period! Kitty Hood felt the injustice, if he did not, and all the old rage came back again, in a varied form, but hotter than ever. Her eyes flashed, she choked for a moment, and then, before Dick Compton could be at all aware what was about to happen, the school-mistress drew her little white hand back and brought him a ringing box on the ear and cheek, that the latter would not be very likely to forget for a fortnight,—while she flashed out:

"Dick Compton, just take that for a fool! You are not worth any honest woman's loving, with your mean jealousy. You can go where you please, and I will never speak to you again until you learn better manners than to talk to me in that manner!"

Before the jealous lover had half recovered from the blow she stepped away from him and put her foot on the sill of the door, to re-enter. Compton, spite of the tingle in his cheek, did not quite believe in the propriety of parting in that manner, when he was just going to the war; and he made a step towards her.

"Kitty!—oh, now, Kitty—"

"Keep off, Dick Compton! Good-day and good-bye, and nobody cares where you go or how long you stay!" was the forbidding rejoinder, as the school-mistress swung herself round the jamb of the door and half disappeared. Her blood was at fever heat: that of her lover was likely to be at the same pitch in a moment.

"You won't come back, then?"

"No, I won't!"

"Then I will tell you something, Kitty Hood!" and the young man was very angry and very earnest when he made the threat. "If I can catch Carlton Brand before I go away to-night, I will just flog him till he is the nearest to a dead man you ever saw,—and see how you both like it!"

Without another word the young farmer turned and strode round the corner of the school-house with his bundle and his indignation, making hasty strides up the hill and towards the woods that lay in the direction of his home. Kitty Hood saw thus much, and realized that very probably she was looking at him for the last time. Then she realized, too, what she had scarcely felt before—that she had been terribly to blame in the quarrel—that she might have been wrecking the happiness of a life by her ill-temper—and that it would never do to let poor Dick go away to the war, so angry at her that if killed his last thought would be upon every one else rather than her, and that if he returned he would never come near her again—never! Then poor Kitty dropped her head upon her desk, heedless of the only partially-hushed Pandemonium around her and the necessity of settling with Master Jem Stephenson, spiller of ink and others,—dropped her head upon her desk and sobbed loudly enough for some of the children to be quite aware of the fact, so that one of the little boys hazarded the remark, sotto voce: "Wonder what is the matter with her!" and a bigger one enlightened his ignorance with: "Why, didn't you see? Her beau has got on sojer clothes and is going away—stupid!"

Only a minute or two, and then Kitty Hood could endure the struggle no longer. She was very unhappy and not a little penitent. She could not remain any longer in the midst of those noisy children: she must go home (or elsewhere) and see what facilities fate might yet throw in her way for seeing and speaking once more to her angry lover before his departure. Perhaps she could even find some means, still, for inducing him to remain, and then——. And at that thought the school-mistress raised her head, informed her school that she had a bad headache and must go home to bed, and dismissed them for a half-holiday.

Whereupon one of the larger girls, who had seen the lover go away, without hearing any of the parting words, and who thought that she understood all about the affair, remarked to one of her companions that: "That was real nice, and she thought all the better of Miss Hood for it!" while one of the larger boys, unawake as yet to any of the softer feelings, bawled out to his mates that: "Miss Hood was going to see her old beau off—ki-yah!" It is painful to be obliged to say, justifying previously-expressed apprehension, that even the stranded vessel was forgotten in the haste with which the school separated, and that all the imaginary pirates of the Society, the Friendly and various other islands that maintained every thing else rather than friendly society for sailors, had at least one day more of chance at her with their canoes and pirogues.

Her scholars dismissed, Kitty Hood took time to wash and cool her eyes and to smooth her hair, for a moment, at the little wash-closet in one corner of the school-room—then flung on her light bonnet and gauzy mantle and took her way, walking somewhat rapidly in spite of the heat of the coming noon, along the path that led around the base of the hill north-westward towards the residence of Carlton and Elsie Brand.

Mr. Richard Compton had meanwhile been walking yet more rapidly, with his bundle under his arm, up the path leading over the hill, almost due north, and through the belt of woods discernible from the school-house. Whether the increasing heat of the day added to the heat of his temper is uncertain; but certain it is that he did not at all cool down under it. He had the excuse of being the party last ill-used, if not indeed the party first so treated. He loved Kitty Hood beyond all reason, and he was of course the person most likely to grow angry at her and jealous of her, beyond all endurance. He felt that he could not worse punish her, or better satisfy himself, than by carrying out his threat and soundly flogging Carlton Brand if he should once catch him under proper circumstances; he had no doubt whatever of his ability to flog him or "any other man," when he once set about the task; and while surmounting the hill, and even after plunging into the cool, thick, leafy woods, full of the twitter of birds and the fragrance of June blossoms, which should have had the power to soften passion in the breast of any man who held a true sympathy with Nature, his mental fists were clenched and his teeth set in a manner most threatening for any opposing force with which he might happen to be brought into contact.

That "opposing force" was much nearer than the young man at the moment imagined. He was just emerging by the path to the main road which he was to cross, half a mile before reaching his own farm, when he saw a horseman riding rapidly up from the eastward. Intersecting the path just where it joined the road, was a blind road leading through the woods across toward the Darby, and closed at the entrance by a swinging gate. There was a low panel near it, and the young farmer leaped it in preference to unfastening the clumsy latch—finding himself, when beyond the fence, in the presence of Carlton Brand, who had just reined in his horse at the gate. Whatever there may have been in the face of the horseman at that moment, within a few minutes after his leaving the presence of Margaret Hayley and his sister, the eyes of Dick Compton were not sufficiently keen to recognize it. He only saw the handsome, proud-looking young lawyer, and his old antipathy rose, with the remembrance of the threat he had just used, accompanying it. Carlton Brand saw nothing more in the face of the young farmer than he had been accustomed to see, and accosted him as he might have done any other acquaintance, under the same circumstances, with a request for a slight service.

"Ah, Compton, is that you?—just be kind enough to throw open that gate for me, will you?"

"No—I'll not do any thing of the kind. If you want the gate open, just get off and open it yourself!" was the surly reply, very much to the astonishment of the lawyer. His face paled a little, then flushed, and he hesitated for an instant before he asked:

"What do you mean, Richard Compton, by answering me in that manner?"

"What I say!" answered Compton, quite as insolently as before. "You are a puppy, Carlton Brand, and I have half a mind to take you off that horse and flog you soundly, instead of opening a gate for you."

"The d——l you have!" was the very natural reply. "Well, Dick Compton, I do not know what it is all about, but you are behaving very much like a ruffian, to a man who has never done any thing worse to you than to treat you like a gentleman."

"You lie, Carlton Brand, and you know it!" was the response.

"I lie, do I?" and the speaker shifted a little uneasily in his saddle, though he made no apparent movement to alight.

"Yes, you lie!" said Compton, his voice thick and hoarse with agitation and anger. "And if you will get off that horse I will teach you a lesson about meddling with other people's property, that you will remember for a twelvemonth."

If Carlton Brand's face expressed intense surprise, it was certainly nothing more than he felt; for what the "meddling with other people's property" could mean, except that he might unwittingly have run across some interest of Compton's in the pursuit of his profession, he had no more idea than he could have had of the number of trees in the adjoining wood or the depth of soil on which his horse was standing. Yet he threw his leg at once over the saddle, at the last salutation, sprang to the ground, flung his bridle over one of the posts near the gate, and said:

"Now then!"

In an instant and without another word, Dick Compton, who had dropped his bundle as the other dismounted, sprang at him, fury in his face and the clench of determined hostility in every nerve. Probably no battle on earth was ever fought so singularly—the one combatant without the least cause for his rage, and the other not even acquainted with the accusation made against him. They seemed not badly matched, in physical force, though any connoisseur of the exclusively muscular would have considered Compton likely to be by far the most enduring. He was fifteen or twenty pounds the heavier, and fully trained by field labor; Brand two or three inches the taller, athletic, and a little the longer armed.

Half a dozen blows were rapidly exchanged, before either succeeded in breaking the guard of the other. Then Compton managed to reach the lawyer's cheek, with a blow of some violence that probably stung within quite as much as it did without. At all events it brought a new color to his face, and from that instant he was cool no longer. He struck out more rapidly and angrily, and Compton followed his motion. In less than a minute half a dozen blows had reached the faces and bodies of each, and there was a probability that, whatever the event of the fight, both would be injured as well as disfigured. Suddenly, the instant after, as Compton aimed a well-directed blow at the throat of his antagonist, that he believed would entirely settle the affair, something happened, upon which he had not calculated. Whether his blow was entirely fended he did not know; but what he did know, so far as he knew any thing, was that Carlton Brand's right fist, dashed out with a force little less formidable than the kick of an iron-shod horse, struck him on the left of the nose and the cheek adjoining, sending a perfect gore of blood spouting over face and clothing, and throwing him reeling backward, stunned and half senseless, to the earth,—the fight over, so far as he was to bear any part in it.

There was only a little sensation left in poor Compton at that juncture, but that little cried out against being beaten down in such a manner by a man whom he had before considered his inferior in muscular power, and whom he had set out to flog. The bull-dog within him wished to rise and make another effort, but for a moment his eyes would not open and his head would not clear sufficiently for him to make any effort at regaining his lost perpendicular. When he thought he heard a groan and a loud "thud" on the ground, and he did manage to struggle to a sitting position, the sight that met his eyes was nearly sufficient to drive him back into his partial insensibility, amazement and horror being about equally compounded in the spectacle. Carlton Brand lay at length on the ground, his face set in a frightful spasm, a thin white froth issuing from the set lips, the eyes closed, and not even a quiver of motion in the limbs. Dick Compton sprang up, then, with a supernatural energy born of absolute fright, and bent over his prostrate antagonist. To all appearance he was dead!—dead as if he had been lying there for the last century! The frightened farmer put his hand to his temples, his pulses and his heart, and found no motion whatever. Then the dreadful fear took possession of him that his own last blow, which he remembered aiming at the throat of the other, might have taken effect there at the same moment when he was himself struck and prostrated—that some vital part of the throat might have been touched and death instantly ensued!

To say that Dick Compton was frightened and even horrified at this unexpected issue of the pugilistic combat which he had forced, is indeed to put the case very mildly. He was literally paralyzed, for the moment, with consternation. What was his fate?—to be a homicide! And—good God!—here another thought took possession of him. He had left Kitty Hood at the school-house, only a little while before, himself angry and in a dangerous mood, and with his last words threatening personal violence against Carlton Brand! If he should be dead—and there seemed to be no hope to the contrary—what words of his could ever persuade the school-mistress that he had not entertained enough of jealousy and anger against the lawyer to desire his death?—and how far would not Kitty's evidence go in proving before a criminal court that he was an intentional murderer?

Such reflections are not pleasant, to say the least! A very few of them go a great way in a man's life. Those who have been placed, even for one moment, in the belief that they have suddenly become homicides, need not be told how far beyond all other horrors is the feeling: those who have missed the sensation, may thank God with all reverence for having spared them one of the untold agonies which belong only to the damned!

Dick Compton was not one of the most delicate of men, either in action or perception, but he was a good fellow in the main, with quite enough of intuition to foresee the worst perils of a situation, and with quite enough of presence of mind to act quickly in a desperate emergency. There was yet no breath or motion in the prostrate man: he would die very soon if not already dead: something might yet be done for him: but that something, if done at all, must be done at once. Besides, if death should prove to be real, he would himself be a little better circumstanced if found trying to preserve the life of his antagonist, than if discovered to have let him die without effort. A mile to the westward, and at the side of the very road at the edge of which he was standing, was the residence of one of the two doctors of the immediate section, and medical assistance might be procured, with the aid of the fallen man's horse, in a brief period.

With this thought in mind, and in far less time after the occurrence of the catastrophe than it has needed to put it upon record, Dick Compton had unfastened the horse of Carlton Brand from the post, swung himself into the saddle, and was galloping away westward, a little doubtful in mind whether he was indeed going after a doctor or looking for a convenient gallows and a hangman,—and wishing, from the bottom of his soul, that he had never entertained quite so good an opinion of his personal prowess as that which had led him into such a terrible position. Once, as he galloped on, he caught sight of his new military trowsers, and found himself thinking whether, when they hung soldiers, they allowed them to retain their uniform or subjected them to the degrading alternative of the prison gray! And that is all, of the very peculiar reflections of Mr. Dick Compton as he sped away after the doctor, that needs to be put upon record.

Kitty Hood, meanwhile, leaving the school-house perhaps ten minutes after her lover, had sped along the path at the base of the woods, intent on going over to the residence of the Brands and seeking advice, if not assistance, from Elsie, in her dilemma. She had quite overcome her anger, now, and taken into her young heart a full supply of that which very often follows the former—anxiety; and her feet moved as glibly, in the better cause of reconciliation, as her tongue had done not long before in a very unreasonable lovers' quarrel.

The path she was pursuing would have led her out to the main road, which she must cross to reach the Brands', some half a mile further west than the point at which the gate gave access to the blind road through the wood. But there was a little spot of marshy ground before reaching the road; she remembered that her shoes were thin and that wet feet were disagreeable even in June, and as a consequence she struck into a cross path which intersected the blind road and would bring her out at the gate. As a secondary consequence, she followed that road and came out a minute after at the gate, to open it without observing what lay beyond, and to start back with a scream of affright as she saw the body of Carlton Brand lying on the green sward without, his face still set in that terrible contortion, and the rigidity of death alike in limb and feature.

The young girl had seen but little of death, and not yet learned to regard it rather as a deliverance than otherwise; and in any shape it frightened her. How natural, then, that she should regard it with peculiar horror when she came upon it alone, by a wood-side, and in the person of an acquaintance equally admired and respected! But what must have been her feelings when, the moment after, and before she had commanded herself sufficiently to do more than utter that single scream of terror, she saw a bundle lying near the apparently dead man, saw blood staining one of his hands and the grass beside him, and recognized the bundle as the same she had seen, not half an hour before, under the arm of Richard Compton!

If that unfortunate young man, on discovering the supposed extent of his mishap, had remembered the threat against the lawyer made but a little while before to Kitty, how did that threat spring into her mind on seeing the blood and recognizing the bundle! Murder, beyond a doubt, and Dick Compton the murderer! The two had met, accidentally, had quarrelled, had clenched, and in that clench her lover had forgotten all except his jealousy and fear of the lawyer, and had killed him outright! Oh, here was trouble, indeed, to which that of a few moments previous had been but the merest shadow! Dick would be arrested, tried, imprisoned, perhaps hung; and she would be obliged to give the fatal evidence that must seal his doom! Terrible indeed—most terrible!—the thought culminating in such mental suffering that the poor girl scarcely knew whether she was treading upon earth or air, as she took one more look upon the motionless form, the blood, and the accusing bundle that lay beside—then turned her back with a shudder upon all, crossed the road and hastened over the fields beyond, by a bye-path that would lead her to the home of the murdered man—her errand now, and her reason for haste, how different from what it had been when walking towards, the same destination but a few moments before!

CHAPTER IV.

The Residence of the Brands—Robert Brand and Dr. Philip Pomeroy—Radical and Copperhead—A passage-at-arms that ended in a Quarrel—Elspeth Graeme the Housekeeper—The Shadow of Shame—Father and Daughter—The Falling of a Parent's Curse.

Half a mile northward from the Market street road which has already been before so many times alluded to—on the north side of that road and at the distance of a mile westward from the Hayley residence, was located that before mentioned as the abode of the Brands. It was a fine old house, built fifty or sixty years before, but within a few years repaired and rebuilt with a lavish disregard of cost, a railed promenade having been added at the apex of the steep roof, the whole two stories of height re-enclosed, the windows and doors comparatively modernized, the piazzas remodelled and widened, and all done that the carpenter's art could well be expected to achieve, to add to the comfort and durability of the mansion without destroying the appearance of respectable age which it had already put on. The house stood facing southward upon nearly level ground, the lawn in front of good depth and thickly dotted with forest and other shade trees that had evidently known all the years of the building; while from the eastern side a narrow lane ran down to the road and afforded ingress and egress to carriages passing back towards the handsomely-grouped range of outbuildings in the rear. Adjoining this lane and behind the house was a large garden, with grape trellises and many of the appliances of luxury in horticulture.

At the eastern end of the piazza a broad single door opened into the somewhat antiquated hall; and from that hall a door opened into a parlor fitted up with every appliance of convenience that could be needed in such a country residence. Behind that parlor another door opened into a smaller apartment correspondingly fitted but with more of those belongings calculated to show its constant occupancy; and from that rear room still another door opening to the left disclosed a bed-room of comfortable appearance and tasteful arrangement. On the other side of the hall the dining and domestic apartments stretched away, while the spacious upper story supplied rooms to other members of the family.

It was very evident, at a glance, that wealth presided over the modernized old house, and that good taste was not forgotten; and yet an impression could not well be avoided that there must be something of severity, and repugnance to ornament, conjoined with the wealth. Poverty, or even struggling pride, would not have afforded so much of the best: warm taste and lavish liberality would have supplied something more of the costly and the luxurious.

In the second of the rooms mentioned—that immediately in the rear of the parlor, two persons were in conversation at about noon of the same day of the occurrences previously recorded. The one, sitting in an easy-chair with his right leg raised and resting upon another chair crowned with a pillow,—was apparently sixty-five to seventy years of age; tall, if his proportions could properly be judged as he sat, with a figure that must have been robust in its time; the hair so nearly white as to preclude any idea of the color which it might have worn in earlier days; the face well cut and even handsome for its age, though with a shade of severity in the firm nose and shaven lips, which under some circumstances might grow threatening; but any accurate judgment of his character rendered difficult, by the look of pain stamped upon his face by evident bodily suffering. Resting against a small table partially covered with bandages and embrocations, was a stout cane, indicating both that the invalid was in the habit of using a support of that character, and that he could not, even now, be entirely confined to his chair. Such was Robert Brand, owner of the mansion into which we have been introduced, and father of two children apparently as little alike in nature as in sex—Carlton and Elsie Brand.

The second figure was quite as well deserving of notice as the old man in his easy-chair. Doctor Philip Pomeroy, who was at that moment pacing up and down the room without any apparent cause for that violent exercise in warm weather, was a man in whom the acute physiognomist might have found something illustrated by that seemingly listless motion—something possessed in common by restless men, in the superior animal kingdom, and those bears and hyenas which seem to traverse a great many unnecessary miles in travelling up and down the bars of their cages, in the inferior. And yet the doctor could not have been called, with any propriety, an "animal-looking man"—it was the motion which supplied the comparison. He was apparently forty-five to fifty, tall and slight figured, with face clean shaven except a heavy dark moustache, features a little aquiline and decidedly sharp lips that suggested an occasional sneer and a word cutting like a scimetar, eyes of keen scintillant dark brown or black, and rather long dark straight hair through which the threads of silver began to show more as an ornament than a disadvantage. A very fine looking man—a man of undoubted power and will—a man who had evidently enjoyed the most favorable associations; and yet how nearly a man to be either braved or trusted without reserve, it might have needed Lavater's self to decide on a brief acquaintance. That same Lavater, if acquainted with the peculiarities of road turn-outs, would have decided one point, at least, from the vehicle that stood in the lane, near the door—no clumsy and cumbersome gig, weighing an indefinite number of tons and set down as the proper conveyance for doctors from the day when the first one grew too lazy to walk,—but a light, sporting-looking buggy, seated for one, and suggesting fast driving quite as much as the high-blooded, thorough-bred bay that champed his bit before it and stamped impatiently for the coming of his master.

From the medical character of the visitor and the disabled appearance of the man in the easy-chair, it might have been concluded that the call was a professional one; and such was indeed the fact. An injury to the right limb of Robert Brand, received many years before, had a habit of asserting itself at uncertain periods, crippling him materially all the while, and at those particular times throwing him into all those agonies indifferently known as the pangs of neuralgia and inflammatory rheumatism. At such periods, the traditional character of the "gouty old Admiral" of the English stage, always limping and thumping a heavy cane, and nearly always venting words more forcible than polite, was very nearly illustrated in the old gentleman, his desire for active motion being generally in an inverse ratio to the power of movement. Dr. Pomeroy, one of the most skilful of the physicians of the section, and a man in very extensive practice, was always his medical adviser at such times, and re-directed the application of those warm flannels and neutralizing embrocations which constituted all that even science could do for the alleviation of his sufferings, and about which old Elspeth the housekeeper knew a good deal more, all the while, than any physician could possibly do. For the three days previous, Robert Brand had been suffering to a most painful degree, and this was the third of the daily visits of the doctor.

But whatever might have been the professional character of the visit, it had, before the moment when our attention is called to the two interlocutors, lost any feature which could have marked it as such. Robert Brand was a patriot, almost equally warm-hearted and hot-headed in the type of his attachment to his country; while Dr. Pomeroy was one of those quasi-loyalists, popularly called "Copperheads," who have the love of country quite as often on their lips as the most unshrinking war-advocate can do, but who prefer to show that love by objecting to every effort made for the preservation of nationality, by denouncing, in every nine words out of ten, something done by the loyal government, while only the poor tenth is kept for a wail over the unfortunate character of the "civil war,"—and by undervaluing every success won by the Union arms, while every momentary advantage gained by the rebels is correspondingly magnified. He seemed to take particular delight, always, in tormenting the old gentleman just to the verge of a positive rupture without quite causing one; and just now, in the advance of the rebel forces into Pennsylvania, he found a golden opportunity.

"Bah!" he said, in response to a strongly patriotic expression of his patron, which had led him to bring down one of his hands upon the disabled leg with a force causing a new tingle in that limb and a new expression of agony upon his face—"bah! All you hot-headed people, young and old, use just such language, all the while. It amounts to nothing, except that perhaps it eases your minds. Saying that 'the Union must and shall be preserved,' and prophesying all kinds of good things for the nation, amount to but very little while a set of incapables sit filling their pockets at Washington (more than half of them traitors, in my opinion), while the army is worse mismanaged than it could be if a set of school-boys led it, and while the enemies you affect to despise are really winning every thing and overrunning the whole country."

"Out upon you, Dr. Pomeroy!" cried the old man, angrily. "You dare to call yourself a patriot, and talk in that manner! There are plenty of fools at Washington, but I would rather see fools there than traitors! If you are not a perfect block-head, you know that the rebels have lost twice as much as they have gained, within the past year, and that if the fight goes on in the same manner for one year more, the miserable mongrel concern will die of its own weakness! But you do not want it to die—that is just what ails you!—you would rather see Jeff Davis in the Capitol than any loyal man who would not give all the offices to your miserable broken-down party!"

"And you would rather see the whole country lying in ruins, with heaps of dead everywhere and the few who remain starving to death in the midst of them, than that the country should be in any other hands than those of your friends who do nothing else than talk about the nigger, legislate for the nigger, and fight for the nigger!" answered the doctor, still continuing his walk, and his face showing decided temper.

"It is false, and you know it, Philip Pomeroy!" said the invalid, with a motion of his hand towards the big cane, which indicated that he would have liked to use it by breaking it over the doctor's head.

"It is true, and you know it, Robert Brand!" replied the doctor, whose temper seemed to return to its equanimity the moment he had succeeded in throwing his patient into a sufficient rage. "But you need not take so much pains to conceal your opinions, old gentleman! I don't! If the country is to lie under the control of men who only legislate and fight for the nigger, who trample upon the Constitution and fill Fort McHenry and Fort Lafayette and Fort Warren with better men than themselves, who do not happen to think and act precisely as they do,—why, the sooner that Jeff Davis, or any one else, gets possession, the better for all concerned."

"Doctor Pomeroy, you ought to be taken and hung, with the other traitors, and I shouldn't much mind having a pull at the rope!" broke out the old man, now almost entirely beside himself with indignation.

"Oh, I know that!" answered the doctor, whose temper was still visibly improving as that of his patient grew worse. "Any of your abolition pack would have helped to hang every democrat, long ago, if they had only dared! The only trouble is that they did not do it while they had the opportunity. Now it is too late. You daren't open the doors of your State-prisons any more, unless it is to let somebody out! And before many days some of you will sing a different tune—take my word for it. Some of you radicals, even here at Philadelphia, will try to make the Confederate leaders believe that you have been the truest friends of the South, all the while."

"What do you mean, you scoundrel?" asked the old gentleman, whose harsh words to a man somewhat younger than himself appeared to be fully understood and not taken in quite the sense which they might have borne to other ears.

"I mean that Lee will take Harrisburgh, and that next he will take Philadelphia; then—"

"Take Purgatory! He can never take Harrisburgh, let alone Philadelphia!"

"He can and will take it! What is to hinder him?"

"Just what has hindered his taking Washington, any time the last two years—better troops than his own, and more of them."

"Sheep before butchers'-dogs! The men of the North have never gone into the war at all, and they never will go. That scum which you call an army cannot fight the earnest and determined men of the South, and you ought to know it. Within a week Lee will be in Philadelphia, and then we will see about the change of tune!"

"Within a week, if he dares advance, he will be eaten up by the State militia alone, even if the Army of the Potomac does not save them the trouble!" said the old man.

"The Army of the Potomac has been good for nothing ever since Hooker blundered its last opportunity away at Chancellorsville!" retorted the physician. "The army has no confidence in him, and the country has no confidence either in him or the army. The State militia will vigorously stay at home, or they will behave so badly after they go out, that they had much better kept where nobody saw them! Oh, by the way!—" and the face of the doctor lit up with a new expression. A sneer settled itself upon his well-formed lips, and there came into his scintillant eyes a gleam of deadly dislike which boded no good to the subject of which he was about to speak. He might have been only half in earnest, before, while driving the old man wild with his Copperhead banter; but he was certainly interested in what he was about to say, now!

"Well?" asked the patient, querulously, as he saw that some new topic was to interlard that which had already been so unpleasant.

"That State militia you were talking about," said the doctor. "Your son was expected to take up his old commission and go out with one of the regiments, was he not?"

"He was not only expected to do so, but he has done so!" answered the father, with love and pride in his eyes. "Not all the people in the country are either Copperheads or cowards, doctor; and I am proud to tell you that if I am too old and too much crippled to take part in the battles of my country, or even to get up and break my cane over your head when you insult the very name of patriotism,—I have a son who when his opportunity comes can do the one and will do the other!"

"When his 'opportunity' comes!" echoed the doctor, sneeringly.

"Yes, his opportunity!" re-echoed the father, who felt that there was something invidious in the tone, though he could not read that face which might have given him a better clue to the character of the man with whom he was dealing. "My son has been too much hampered with business before, to accept any of the chances which have been offered him; but now that his native State is invaded, business is thrown by and you will find him, sir, keeping up the honor of the name."

"Humph!" said the doctor, pausing in his walk and for some unexplainable reason going to the window and looking out; so that he stood with his back to the old gentleman. "Where is your son, now?"

"Where? Gone down to the rendezvous to take his commission, of course, as I understand that the troops will leave to-night."

"Humph!" once more said the doctor, in the same insolent tone and retaining his position at the window. "And yet I happen to know that your son has discovered some new 'business,' (with a terribly significant emphasis on the last word) and that he is not going one step with the regiment."

"Dr. Pomeroy, I know better!" was the reply.

"Mr. Brand, I know what I am talking about, a good deal better than you imagine!" sneered the doctor, who having by that time managed to get his face into that shape which he had no objection to being seen by his patient, now turned about and faced him, with his hands under the tails of his coat.

"What do you know?" was the inquiry, a little trouble blending with the anxiety in the face.

"Well, I will tell you, as perhaps you may as well learn the fact from me as from any one else," answered the doctor, his tones now very smooth, and his manner almost deferential, as should be the demeanor of any man towards his victim at the moment of stabbing him under the fifth rib. "I had occasion to call at the armory of the Reserves, an hour or two ago, to set the broken arm of one of the fellows who had taken too much Monongahela in anticipation of his start, and fallen down-stairs. I learned there and then, with some surprise and not a little grief (the father ought to have caught the expression of his face at that moment, and thereby measured the "grief" indicated!) that Mr. Carlton Brand had been down at the armory, alleged his business to be such that he could not possibly leave the city, and declined any further connection whatever with the regiment."

"It is impossible!" said the father.

"It is true, however, like a good many impossible things!" again sneered the physician. "And I have been thinking whether some others of members of the State militia would not be found like your amiable son—too busy to pay any attention to the defence of the State!"

"Dr. Pomeroy!" said the father, after one moment of almost stupefied silence. "Dr. Pomeroy, you have not been friends with my son for a long time, and I know it, though I do not know what could have caused any disagreement. But I do not suppose you would deliberately tell a falsehood about him that could be detected in half an hour; and I want to know what there is hidden in your words, more than you have chosen to convey."

"You had better ask your son when he comes!" was the reply.

"No—I ask you, now, and I think you had better answer me!" said the old man.

"Well, then," answered the doctor, "if you insist upon it, my love for the young man is not so warm as to give me a great deal of pain in the telling, and you may know all you wish. Your son has been doubted a little, ever since the breaking out of the war, from his repeated refusals of positions in the army; and—"

"The man who says that my son is disloyal, lies!" cried the old man, interrupting him. "You, or any other man!"

"It was not on the ground of his disloyalty that he was suspected!" sneered the doctor.

"And what ground then?" asked the father, his face and his whole manner showing something terrible within that could be only partially suppressed.

"The ground of his cowardice, since you will have it!" spoke the doctor, in such a tone of fiendish exultation as Mephistopheles may have used to Faust, at the moment of assuring him that the last hope of happiness on earth or pardon from heaven had been swept away in the slaughter of Valentine and the moral murder of Marguerite. "There is not an officer in the Reserves, who heard him refuse to join the regiment this morning, but believes him—yes, knows him, to be an arrant poltroon."

"Doctor Philip Pomeroy, you are a liar as well as a traitor and a scoundrel! If I had two legs, and still was, as I am, old enough to be your father, you would not leave this house without broken bones! Get out of it, send me your bill to-morrow, or even to-day, and never let me see you set foot in it again while I live!"

The face of the old man was fearful, at that juncture. In spite of the pain of his disabled limb, he had grasped his cane and struggled to a standing position, before concluding his violent words; and as he concluded, passion overcame all prudence, and the heavy cane went by the doctor's head, crashing through the window and taking its way out into the garden, at the same moment when his limb gave way and he sunk back into his chair with a groan that was almost a shriek, clutching at the bell-rope that hung near him and nearly tearing it from its fastenings.

Dr. Pomeroy said not another word, whatever he might have felt. He had dodged the flying cane, by not more than an inch, and such chances are not likely to improve the temper of even the most amiable. For one instant there was something in his face that might have threatened personal revenge of the violence as well as the unpardonable words, in spite of the difference of age: then the sneer crept over his face again, he stepped out through the parlor into the hall, took his hat, and the next moment was bowling down the lane into the road, behind his fast-trotting bay. It seemed likely that his last professional visit to the Brands had been paid, even if it had not yet been paid for!

The terrible appeal of the master of the house to the bell-rope at his hand was answered the moment after by the appearance of a woman of so remarkable an aspect as to be worthy of quite as much attention as either of the personages who have before been called, in the same room, to the reader's attention. Her dress was that of a housekeeper or upper servant, though the height of her carriage and the erectness of her figure might have stamped her as an empress. And in truth that figure did not need any such extraordinary carriage to develop it, for, as compared with the ordinary stature of woman, it was little else than gigantic. The man who built a door for Elspeth Graeme, less than six feet in the clear, subjected her to imminent danger of bringing up with a "bump" every time she entered it; and her broad, square, bony figure showed that all the power of her frame had not been frittered away in length. Her hands were large and masculine, though by no means ill-shaped, and her foot had not only the tread supposed to belong to that of the coarser sex, but very nearly its size. In face she was broad yet still longer of feature, with hair that had been light brown before the gray sifted itself so thickly among it as to render the color doubtful,—with eyes of bluish gray, a strong and somewhat coarse mouth with no contemptible approach to a moustache of light hairs bristling at the corners,—and with complexion wrinkled and browned by the exposures of at least sixty years, until very nearly the last trace of what had once been youth and womanhood was worn away and forgotten. Yet there was something very good and very kindly amid the rugged strength of the face; and while little children might at the first glance have feared the old woman and run away from her as a "witch," they would at the second certainly have crept back to her knees and depended upon a protection which they were certain to receive.

It is only necessary, to say, in addition, that she was Scottish by birth as well as by blood and name—that she had come to this country nearly forty years before, when Robert Brand was a young man, and attached herself to the fortunes of the family because they were Scottish by blood and she was the very incarnation of faithful feudality—that his daughter had been named Elspeth (since softened to Elsie) at her earnest desire, because she said the name was "the bonniest ava" and she had herself been named after a noble lady who bore it, in her own land, and who had done much to give her that upright carriage by standing as her god-mother—and that for many a long year, now, she had been the working head of the Brand household, scarcely more so since the death of its weak, hysterical mistress, a dozen years before, than while she was alive and pretending to a management which she never understood.

If any one person beneath that roof, more legitimately than another, belonged to the family and felt herself so belonging, that person was Elspeth Graeme; and if something of the romantic, which the stern sense of the father would have been slow to approve, had grown up in both his children, it was to the partial love of Elspeth and her stories of Scottish romance, poetry, history, song and superstition, carrying them away from prosaic America to the wimpling burns and haunted glens of the land from which their blood had been derived,—that such a feeling, fortunate or unfortunate as the future might prove, was principally to be credited.

"Did you ring, sir? Ech, Lord, the mon's deein'!" were the two very different exclamations made by Elspeth as she entered the room, after the departure of the doctor, and caught sight of the situation in which the master seemed to be lying.

"No, Elspeth, I am not 'deein' as you call it," he growled out, when the pain of his exertion had again somewhat subsided and he could find breath for words. "But I wish I was! Is that cursed doctor gone?"

"He was gettin' to his carriage the minute, and he's awa by this," answered the housekeeper. "But what ava has he been doin' to ye? Murderin' ye maybe!—they're a dolefu' uncanny set, the doctors!"

"If you ever see that man here again, and you don't have him shot or set the dog on him, out of the house you go, neck and crop, the whole pack of you—do you hear!" was the reply to Elspeth's comment on the medical profession.

"Just as ye say, master," said Elspeth. "I'll set Carlo at him myself, if ye say so; and wo but the brute will just worry him, for he does na like him and is unco fond of snappin' aboot his heels!"

"Where is Elsie?" was the next question.

"Gone over to Mistress Hayley's the mornin'. Can I do any thing for your leg, sir?—for the wench in the kitchen's clean daft, and I'll be wanted there, maybe."

"No—you can do nothing. My leg is better. But send Elsie to me the moment she comes in."

"Hark!" said the housekeeper, as a light foot sounded on the piazza and came in through the hall. "There's the lassie hersel—I ken her step among a thousand. I'll just send her in to you the moment she has thrawn aff her bonnet." And the old woman departed on her errand.

There must have been an acuteness beyond nature, in the ears of old Elspeth, if she indeed knew the tread of the young girl; for her step, as she entered the room, was so slow, laggard and lifeless, so unlike the usual springing rapidity of her girlish nature, that even her lover might have been pardoned for failing to recognize it. It was as if some crushing weight fettered her limbs and bowed down her brow. And a crushing weight indeed rested upon her—the first unendurable grief of her young life—the knowledge of her only brother's shame. Robert Brand marked the slow step and saw the downcast head; and little as he could possibly know of the connection of that demeanor with the subject of his previous thought, it was not of that cheerful and reassuring character calculated to restore the lost equanimity of a man insulted in the tenderest point of his honor and chafed beyond human endurance. His first words were rough and peremptory:

"Why do you move in that manner, girl, when you come to see me? I do not like it—do not let me see any more of it!"

"I was coming, father!" was poor Elsie's only answer.

"So I see—at the rate of ten feet an hour! What is the matter with you?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?—do not tell me that, girl! I know better, or you would never carry that gloomy face and move as if you were going to your grandmother's funeral!"

"Indeed there is nothing the matter with me, father; but there soon will be, if you scold me!" and the young girl, making a terrible effort to be cheerful, came up to his side, put her arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his forehead with a movement so pure and fond that it might have softened Nero at the moment of ordering his last wholesale murder. It partially disarmed the pained and querulous father. He put his arm around the daughter's waist, returned the pressure and seemed to be soothed for a moment by resting his head against the bosom that pressed close to him. But the demon that had been roused could only sleep thus temporarily. Directly he put her away, though not roughly, looked her full in the face, and asked:

"Where is your brother?"

"You know he went down to town this morning, and he has not yet come home," was the reply, with an effort not by any means a successful one, to keep the voice from quavering. The practised ear of the father detected the difference between that intonation and the usual unembarrassed utterance of his daughter; and he naturally connected it at once with the restraint of her manner, and noticed an evasion in her answer that might otherwise have escaped him.

"I know he has not come home," he said. "But that was not my question. You have been at Mrs. Hayley's where he spends quite as much of his time as here. Have you seen him?"

Elsie Brand would have given the proudest feature of her personal adornment, at that moment, to be able to lie! She saw that some undefined anxiety with reference to her brother must have moved her father's repeated questions, and naturally she feared the worst—that Carlton's mad words had indeed been overheard, and that even in that brief space of time some messenger of evil had travelled fast and betrayed the fatal secret. If so, the storm was about to burst on the devoted head of her brother, not the less deadly because she must bear the first brunt of its violence. Yes—Elsie Brand would almost have given her right hand to be able to lie at that moment. But her education had been as true as was her nature, and she managed to falter out, yet more suspiciously:

"Yes, father!"

"And you dared to trifle with me, girl, when I asked you a plain question?" and Robert Brand grasped his daughter by the arm so forcibly that she nearly screamed with the violent pressure, and tears did indeed start to her eyes as she sobbed out—

"I did not mean to trifle with you, father. I only thought—"

"You thought that when I asked one question, I meant another, did you?" and the face that looked upon her was set, hard and very stern. "You had better not try the experiment again, if you do not wish to suffer for it!"

"Oh, father!" and the young girl, enough broken before, now wept outright. But he stopped her, very roughly.

"No bawling! not a whimper! Now listen to me. You have seen your brother since morning—since he went down to the rendezvous."

"Yes, father."

"You saw him at Mrs. Hayley's."

"Yes, father."

"And he came there to bid Margaret good-bye, before he went away, and you are such a miserable whining school-girl that you are making all this fuss about his absence. Is that the fact? Speak!" He still held her arm, though his grasp was less painful than it had been at first; and his eyes looked upon her with such a steady, anxious, almost fearful gaze, that it would have driven away the second temptation to falsehood, even had such a temptation once obtained power. There was nothing for it, at that moment, but to speak the truth so far as compelled.

"No, father. Carlton is not going away." The last three words were uttered so low, and so tangled up among the sobs that she had not been able entirely to check, that they might not have been distinguishable except to the preternaturally acute ear of the suspicious father.

"He is not going? Why?" The first words were harsh and loud—the last one was almost thunder, easily heard, if any one was listening, over the whole house. Before it the young girl shook like an aspen and broke out into fresh sobs as she attempted to answer.

"Because—because his business will not allow—"

"Because he is a coward! Answer me that question, girl, or never speak to me again while you live!" Robert Brand had apparently forgotten all his pain and risen from his chair, still holding his daughter's arm, as he hurled out the interrogation and the threat. Poor Elsie saw that he knew all, too surely; further dissembling was useless; and she dropped upon her knees, that iron grasp still upon her arm, lifted up both her hands, and piteously moaned—

"Yes, that is the reason! Oh, how did you hear it? Kill me, father, if you will, but do not kill poor Carlton! He cannot help it—indeed he cannot!"

They were fearful words that immediately thereafter fell from the lips of Robert Brand—words that no provocation should ever tempt a father to utter, but words which have been plentifully showered on the heads of the shamed or the disobedient, by the thoughtless or the unmerciful, who arrogated to themselves God's power of judgment and retribution, through all the long ages.

"Get up, girl, if you do not wish me to forget that you are not yourself the miserable hound for whom you are pleading!"

"Oh, father!" broke again from the lips of the frightened girl, who did not move from her kneeling position.

"Get up, I say, or I will strike you with this cane as I would a dog!"

Elsie Brand staggered to her feet, she knew not how, but stood bowed before the stern judge in an attitude of pleading quite as humble and pitiful as that of prayer. The next words that fell upon her ears were not addressed to her, but seemed to be spoken for others' hearing than those who dwell in tenements of clay, while the voice that uttered them trembled in mingled grief and indignation, and the disabled frame shook as if it had been racked with palsy.

"My son a coward! a miserable poltroon to be pointed at, spat upon, and whipped! My blood made a shame in the land, by the one whom I trusted to honor it! God's blackest and deepest curse—"

"Oh, father! father!" broke in the young girl in a very wail of agony so pitiful that it must have moved any heart not calloused for the moment against all natural feeling, but that availed nothing to stop the impending curse or even to lower the voice that uttered it.

"—God's deepest and blackest curse 'light upon the coward! shame, sorrow, and quick death! He shall have neither house, home nor family from this moment! I disown this bastard of my blood! I devote him to ruin and to perdition!"

Few men have ever uttered, over the most criminal and degraded of the offspring of their own loins, so dire an imprecation; and no father, who has ever uttered one approaching it in horrible earnest, but is doomed here or hereafter to feel the bitterest weight of that curse resting upon his own head. Lear was clean distraught by wrongs beyond human endurance, before he called upon "all the stored vengeances of heaven" to fall on the "ingrateful top" of Goneril, and threatened both his unnatural daughters with "such revenges" that they should be the "terrors of the earth"; and only that incipient madness clears him from the sin and leaves him human to demand our after pity. There can be no excuse for such paroxysms of remorseless anger—it is difficult to supply even a palliation. And yet there was something in the blood, in the past life and associations of Robert Brand, coming as near to offering excuse for shame and indignation driving to temporary madness, as could well have been offered in behalf of any man of his day, committing a sin of such nature. And to circumstances embodying these it is now necessary to revert, even at the expense of a temporary pause in the directness of this narration.

CHAPTER V.

The Birth and Blood of the Brands—Pride that came down from the Crusades—Robert Brand as Soldier and Pension-Agent—The Pensioners of the Revolution—How Elsie raved, and how the Father's Curse seemed To Be Answered—Dr. James Holton, and the loss of a Corpus Delicti.

It has already been indicated, in speaking of the ties which bound Elspeth Graeme to the Brand family, that they were Scots by descent as she was by both blood and birth. Robert Brand himself stood in the fourth remove from Gaelic nativity, without the spirit of his race being extinct or even modified. When Archibald Alexander, father of that William Alexander who claimed to be Earl of Stirling in the peerage of Scotland while he was gallantly fighting as a Major-General in the patriot army of the Revolution, came to America in 1740, he was accompanied by a man who claimed to hold quite as good blood as himself, though he served in little less than a menial capacity to the heir of the attainted house of Stirling. This was Malcolm Brand, of Perthshire, a member of the Scottish and elder branch of the Brands of Hertfordshire in England, who at a later day carried the two crossed swords which they had borne on their shields since the Crusades, to augment the threatening bulls, wolves and leopards of the Dacres, in the possession of that barony. It was in a victorious hand-to-hand fight with a gigantic Saracen on the field of Askalon, that Gawin de Brande, laird of Westenro in Lothian, fighting close beside King Richard, won that proud quartering of arms; and it is to be believed that no descendant of his blood, either in 1740 or in 1863, had quite forgotten that exploit or the fact that the very name of the family was only another antique appellation for the sword.

Malcolm Brand, the emigrant, was the father of a son Robert, born in New Jersey, as Archibald Alexander was the sire of William, who so proudly outdid the exploits of his elder blood, fighting under the leadership of Washington. The two young men, resident nearly together among the New Jersey hills, entered the army at the same time, and while the one rose to the dignity of a Major-General, the other shared in his combats at Long Island, Germantown and Monmouth, always fighting gallantly, but never rising beyond the grade of a first-lieutenant, and dying at last a prisoner on one of the pest-ships of the Wallabout. His son William, named after Lord Stirling and born in 1768, had of course passed as a boy through the trying period of the great contest, known that identification with the patriot cause inevitable from anxiety for a father engaged in it and grief over his lingering death by disease and privation for its sake; and it could not be otherwise than that the ears of his son, Robert (the man of 1863), should have been filled with relations calculated at once to keep alive the pride of his blood and to identify him with the glory and honor of the land in which his lot had been cast.

Then had come another influence, not less potent—the second breaking-out of hostilities against England, in the War of 1812. The blood of the Brands was not cooled—it sprung to arms; and Robert Brand, then a young lawyer, taking the place of his father already invalided, assumed the sword of his armorial bearings and fought with Scott at Chippewa and Lundy's Lane, receiving so terrible an injury in the leg, at the close of the latter battle, that he was to be a tortured cripple from that day forward, but glorying even in the disablement and the suffering, because his injury had not been met in some trivial accident of peaceful life, but sustained where brave men dared their doom.

And yet another influence, not less potent, was still to come. Years after, when Carlton Brand was a child in arms, his father, then a practising lawyer in his native State, became identified with that most romantic and most picturesque body of men, of whom the present age remembers but little, and of whom the age to come will know nothing except as the knowledge is handed down from father to son, or carried forward in such desultory records as these—The Pensioners of the Revolution. At that time, not less on account of his spotless reputation than the crippling wound received in the service, he was appointed Pension Agent for the section in which he resided, and duly commissioned twice a year to receive from the War Department and pay over to the old men the somewhat scant and very tardy pay with which the land of Washington at last smoothed the passage to the grave of those who had been his companions.

It was Robert Brand's privilege, then, to meet those men in the familiar intercourse of business—to listen to their tales, so often slighted by those wiser or less reverent, of foughten field and toilsome march, of cheerless camp and suffering in the wilderness, when this giant nation was a wilful child unjustly scourged by a tyrant mother—to find in each some reminder of his patriot grandfather, and some suggestion of what that grandfather would have been had the fortune of war spared him to go down into old age and senility.

Twice a year, as the pension day came round, one by one they gathered in the little room where the scanty pension was to be doled—each with the measured beat of his stick sounding upon the floor as he entered, regularly as when his foot had beaten time in the olden days, under the iron rain of Princeton, or on the suffering march to Valley Forge. One by one they gathered to what was their great semi-annual holiday, with the kindly greetings of garrulous and failing age—with the gentle complaint, so patiently uttered, over limbs that seemed to be bowing with the weight of time, and with the pardonable boast that it was not so when the speaker had been young, in such a winter on the Northern Lines, or with such an officer at Yorktown or Saratoga. When the winters—said they—were colder than they are now, when the men were hardier, and when the women (they had all long before gone to rest, in the family graveyard or the little plat beside the church,) were fairer far than their daughters ever grew!

Harmless deception of age!—pleasant coloring that distance gives in time as well as in the material world, so that the forms we once loved may be even more beautiful in thought than they were in reality; the grassy lawns upon which we played in childhood, greener far in memory than they ever were beneath the sun of June; and even those hours once filled with anxiety and vexation, so beguiled out of their uncomely features, that they have no power to harm us in after-thought, and almost seem to have been freighted with unalloyed happiness! There may have been a thunder-cloud rising in the heavens, that afternoon when we went boating with Harry and Tom and Mary and Susan and Alice, all the way down from Lovers' Bend to the Isle of Kisses, with music, and laughter and loving words that were sweeter far than song; and the thunder-cloud may have thickened and gathered, so that the young lovers were drenched and very dismal-looking, long before their return at evening; but be sure that forty years after, when the day is remembered, only the sunshine, the smiling faces and the flashing water is seen, and if the thunder-storm has a place in memory at all, it comes back more as a pleasure than a disappointment. Mary may have had a cloud upon her brow, that evening at the garden-gate, from the absence of a ribbon lightly promised, or the presence of a recollection how some one flirted with Julia on the evening before; and there may even have been a tiff verging far towards a lover's quarrel, before the reconciliation and the parting under the moon; but when the hair has grown gray, and Mary is with the millions sleeping in the breast of our common mother, only the moonlight, that dear last kiss, and the rapture of happy love are remembered, and that checkered hour is looked back upon as one of unmixed enjoyment. Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and worn away forever!

Sitting side by side, they talked—those bent and worn and gray old men—of scenes long matters of honored history, glorying (ah! honest and natural glory!) in having stood guard at the tent of Wayne, or shared the coarse fare of Sumter in the Southern woods, but most of all if happily the eye of Washington had chanced to beam upon them, and his lips (those lips that seldom broadly smiled) approved or thanked their honest service. Few men, even of those who fought beside him, seemed ever to have known a smile from the Father of his Country; but for those few there always beamed a light of glorious memory to which the all-repaying word and the intoxicating smile of the Great Corsican would have been empty and valueless.

It was easy, twenty or thirty years afterwards, to remember the fire that blazed in the dim eyes of old Job Marston, as he told how Washington commended him for his good conduct on the afternoon of the dreadful day of Long Island, when Sullivan's legion broke and fled like frightened sheep,—and how the veteran straightened himself upon his staff as if the head which had once borne the praise of the Joshua of American Liberty should scarcely bend even to time. Or the quivering of the hand of Walter Thorne, one of the men who bore, through every trial and danger, the pledge of faith of the Monmouth League—quivering yet with the anger which had brooded for more than fifty years,—as he pictured so plainly the burning of his father's house by the Refugees, the acres of broad land laid waste by them, the cattle driven towards the royal lines from his own homestead, the arming of his friends, the chase, the recapture, and the ghastly figure of the Refugee captain as they hung him on a spreading limb that spanned the road, a sacrifice not only for the home in ashes but to the manes of Captain Huddy, scarcely yet taken down from his oak-tree gallows on the heights of Navesink. Or the quietly felicitous chuckle with which Stephen Holmes, who had been one of "Captain Huyler's men" in the operations of that patriot marine freebooter around the shores of the lower bay of New York, detailed the success of a night attack in boats pretending to carry live-stock and oysters for sale, by which one vessel of the British fleet lying in the bay was captured, much welcome spoil fell into their hands for the use of needy families at home, and all the remaining vessels of the squadron rode uncomfortably in the bay for a long time after. Or the half playful and half indignant raising of the cane of Robert Grey, when told by his old companions, for the five-hundredth time beyond a doubt, that he was suspected of a share in Arnold's treason, for not stopping the disguised Andre as he passed his sentinel post below West Point, before he fell into the hands of the three very common and insignificant men made immortal by one single act—Williams, Paulding and Van Wert. There would have been no pretence in the motion, spite of his eighty years and faltering limbs, had the speaker hazarded more than a jest against the faithfulness of the old man's service in the "dark day." But easiest of all was it to remember the story of Thomas West, wounded, and crippled from that day forth, in assisting to bear the wounded Lafayette from the field of Brandywine, and named a subaltern officer at the close of that memorable action. His was the seat of honor; and his was something more, even, than that measure of respect demanded by all and so cheerfully paid to white hairs and honorable scars.

Seldom was there a voice to speak one word of disrespect or undervaluation in the old men's company; and though the privilege of garrulous and failing age was often taken, and though the story once full of life and interest grew sadly tedious when again and again repeated,—yet there was no pardon, and deserved to be none, for him who forgot that reverence due to the men who bore the last personal recollections of the seven-years war. Only once, within the experience of Robert Brand as a Pension Agent, was such disrespect shown; and then the punishment was so signal that there were no fears of the impropriety being repeated. Mart Tunison, a wealthy young landowner, rudely jostled old Job Marston on one occasion, and when called to account for the offence, snapped his fingers at the veteran as a "cursed old humbug, always in the way and always telling stories of battles he had never seen." "You are rich, they say, Mart Tunison," said the old man, while the younger one could not read the flash that still lived in his faded eye. "I am rich, and what is that to you, grand-daddy?" was the answer, with a slap of the hand on the jingling pocket. "Yes, you are rich, and most people do not know how you became so!" almost hissed the old man, little knowing how he was pointing a moral for a future day by speaking of the "shoddy" of that by-gone time. "I will tell all your friends, and you, how you got so stuffed up that you can snap your fingers in an old man's face! You are living on the proceeds of the money that your Tory grandfather, old Tom Tunison, made by stealing cattle, when he was one of the Refugee Cow-Boys, and driving them over the lines to sell to the British, before he ran away to Nova Scotia to save his neck!" Mart Tunison, if he had ever before known the real origin of his wealth, which is doubtful,—would probably have given the best field of all his broad lands to prevent that revelation of the shame of his family, which afterwards followed him like a thing of ill-omen, to the very grave!

There was at that time in the office of Robert Brand, a stripling youngster who promised very little good to the world and has probably as yet disappointed no one—who thought more of play than of work, of music than of mortgages, of Burns than Blackstone, and of a rosy-cheeked girl who came into the office on some little errand to the "'Squire" than of the most proud and stately of his male clients. Among his vices, he had a fancy for jingling verse; and one day when the semi-annual visit of the pensioners had just terminated and he had listened afresh to the same old tales of glory told over again in the same faltering accents that he had heard so many times before, his one virtue of reverence for the aged and the venerable rose into an idle rhyme, which may have a fit place in this connection, and which he called

THE PENSIONERS.

They come but twice a year, When the pension-day rolls round,— Old men with hoary hair And their faces to the ground. One leans upon his crutch; And one is upright still, As if he bore Time's clutch With an iron nerve and will.

And feeble are the steps That so patiently they feel; And they kiss with trembling lips The old Bible and the seal; And they lay with care away, In wallets old and worn, The scant and tardy pay Of a life of toil and scorn.

They love a cheerful pipe And a warm place in the sun, From an age so old and ripe To call memories one by one;— To tell of Arnold's crime, And of Washington's proud form That beamed, in battle time, A beacon o'er the storm.—

To tell of Yorktown's day, When the closing fight was gained,— When Cornwallis went away And the eagle was unchained; To show us, o'er and o'er, The seamed and withered scars That many a hero bore, As his passport from the wars.

'Tis pride, with these old men, To tell what they have seen, Of battle-fields, again With their harvest bright and green: 'Twill be pride, when we are old, To say that in our youth We heard the tales they told And looked on them in their truth.

They are the last sad link Of a race of men with ours, Who stood on ruin's brink And built up fair freedom's towers. They are passing, as the foam From the ocean wave departs, But finding yet a home In heaven, and in our hearts.

And when the last is gone, To their memory we will build A pyramid of stone Whose top the sun shall gild When the name of patriot weal And of tyrants' bitter wrong Shall be told but in a tale And known but in a song.

The time then prophesied has come; though the monument then promised has not been erected, and though it may never be, because a later and grander though scarce nobler struggle to preserve what was then first created, almost dwarfs the memory of the first contest and demands all the resources of wealth and art for its commemoration. The Pensioners of the Revolution are all gone, long ago, on the line of march to that great meeting where the last pension, whether of good or evil, shall be told out.

Almost every year, beneath the eye of the Pension Agent, one more withered leaf would drop from the bough where it had feebly fluttered, and sad comments be made by the survivors when they met, with: "Ah, well-a-day!—poor —— is gone!" and "Well, we are very old, and we must all follow him—some day!" with nervous shakings of the head and tremblings of the palsied hand, that told to all but themselves how soon the end must come. Thinner and thinner grew the group, reduced to six—to four—to three—to two! Oh, that sad, mournful, heart-breaking two!—enough gone to mark the coming extinction; enough still left to hold their melancholy converse! And then one day there came but one, who looked vacantly round on the empty space and seemed to remember that others than himself must once have been there, but to remember no more. The "Last Man" had not then been written, and Geoffry Dale was yet to spring from the imagination or the memory of the dramatist and supply poor Jesse Rural Blake with one of his best opportunities for throat-choking pathos; but in the last of the pensioners his history was sadly prefigured. One other lonely visit, and then the survivor was gone. All the group had dropped away. Their forms seemed to linger, long after the forms that cast them had mouldered into impalpable dust. It was the most natural thing in life for Robert Brand, months and even years after, to turn when hearing the measured beat of an old man's cane upon the floor, and look to see if the comer was not one of the veterans of Yorktown or of Trenton, yet lingering far behind the time of his companions. But no—death had come to all, and as yet no resurrection. The last pittance had been paid them, and laid away for the last time by their careful fingers; and they, too, had been laid away by the hoarding miser of human forms, in quiet graves in those humble country church-yards dotting the bosom of that land which they had helped to free and to cover with human glory!

Perhaps they died in good time—before the dark hour came back again after a glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the last of the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-felt shame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their last moments with the belief that after all they might have labored and suffered in vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended in the sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels back through the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven of self-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear us on triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from which it is made was preserved through the long night of corruption and misrule, in the breasts of the Fathers of the Republic.

Their children have long been old men now. Their very grandchildren begin to show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of the Revolution—the last of the men who could say that they saw and took part in that throe which gave birth to a nation,—tread all those who can even say that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and the last of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personal recollection is growing thin,—it may break to-morrow; and "the rest is silence."

Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences and surroundings of his earlier life—himself a soldier when in possession of health and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest of all American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved his native land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the long struggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he had imbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree little less than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when the note of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippled frame must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he held one pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrance that he had a noble and gallant son, too busy and too much needed at home, thus far, to join the ranks of his country's defenders in the field, but ready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied the honor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that the knowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseated his reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partial insanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadow of excuse?

At the close of the last chapter, and before this long explanatory episode intervened to break the progress of the narration, Elsie Brand, the agonized sister and daughter, was seen standing before her father, with hands clasped in agony and lips uttering agonized pleadings. But the very instant after, when the terrible severity of that parental curse had been fully rounded from the lips and that fatal evidence given that for the moment all natural affection had given way to impious rage and denunciation,—the young girl stood erect, her blue eyes still tearful but flashing anger of which they commonly seemed to be little capable, and her lips uttering words as determined as those of the madman, even if they were less furious and vindictive:

"You may strike me if you like, but I do not care for you, now—not one snap of my finger! You are not my father—you are nobody's father, but a bad, wicked, unfeeling old man, gray headed enough to know better, and yet cursing your own flesh and blood as if you wished to go to perdition yourself and carry everybody else along with you!"

The very audacity of this speech partially sobered the enraged man, and he only ejaculated in a lower but still angry tone:

"What!"

"What I say and what I mean!" the young girl went on, oblivious or heedless of any parental authority at the moment. "I do not love you—I hate and shudder at you! I would rather be my poor brother, a coward and disgraced as he may be, than his miserable father cursing him like a brute!"

"Do you dare——" the father began to say, in a louder voice and with the thunder again threatening, but Elsie Brand was proving, just then, that the gift of heedless speech "ran in the family," and that for the moment she "had the floor" in the contest of denunciation.

"Oh, you need not look at me in that manner!" she said, marking the expression of the old man's eyes and conscious that he might at any moment recover himself sufficiently to pour out upon her, for her unpardonable impudence, quite as bitter a denunciation as he had lately vented against her disgraced brother. "I am not afraid of your eyes, or of your tongue. You have turned Carlton out of doors, for a mere nothing, and I am going with him. I will never set foot in this house again, never, until——"

How long was the period the indignant girl intended to set for her absence, must ever remain in doubt, with many other things of much more consequence; for the sentence thus begun, was never completed. In at the open front door, through the parlor and into the room of the invalid, at that moment staggered Kitty Hood. The phrase descriptive of her movement is used advisedly and with good reason; for fright, exhaustion and the terrible heat of the June meridian had reduced the young school-mistress to a most pitiable condition. Her face was one red glow, her brow streamed with perspiration, and she was equally destitute of strength and out of breath.

This strange and unannounced interruption naturally broke the unpleasant chain of conversation between father and daughter; and the eyes of both, during her moment of enforced silence to recover breath, looked upon her with equal wonder and alarm.

"Oh, Mr. Brand!" and here the breath gave out again and she sank exhausted into the chair which Elsie pushed up to her.

"You are sick? Somebody has insulted or hurt you? What is the matter, Kitty?" she asked.

"Oh, no, no!" at last the school-mistress mustered breath to say, at short, jerky intervals. "Nothing ails me, except that I am out of breath; but your son, Mr. Brand."

"Well, what of him?" asked the old man, his tone sharp and angry and his brow frowning, confident that the coming information must have some connection with the disgraceful report of the morning—that Kitty Hood had only run herself out of breath in her anxiety to tell his family unwelcome news that they already knew too well.

"Oh, sir, Mr. Carlton—your poor brother, Elsie!—is dead!"

"Dead!" The word had two echoes—one, from the lips of Robert Brand, little else than a groan; and the other from poor tortured Elsie, compounded between groan and shriek.

"Oh, yes, how can I tell it?" the young school-mistress went on, as fast as her broken breath would allow. "I found him lying dead, only a little while ago, by the gate, down at the blind-road, as I came across from school; and I have run all the way here to tell you!"

"My poor brother dead! oh, Carlton!" moaned Elsie Brand; then, but an instant after, and before the old man had found time to speak again, the curse came up in connection with the bereavement and she broke out, hysterically: "See what you have done, father! You wished poor Carlton dead, and now you have your cruel wish! Oh, my poor, poor brother!"

"Silence, girl!" spoke Robert Brand, sharply, with a not unnatural dislike to have the school-mistress made aware of what had so lately passed. The old man was terribly affected, but he managed to control himself and to speak with some approach to calmness.

"You are sure, Kitty, that you saw my son lying dead?"

"Oh, yes, Mr. Brand, he was lying dead on the grass close by the gate."

"Lying alone?" The voice of the father trembled, in spite of himself, as he asked the question.

"All alone, and he could only have been dead a few moments. He looked so."

"Was there—" and the old lawyer tried to steady his voice as he had many a time before done when asking equally solemn questions concerning the fate of other men's children—"did you see any thing to prove what killed him? He went away from home on horseback—"

"Yes, he was on horseback at Mrs. Hayley's only a little while ago," Elsie mustered strength to interrupt.

"Did you see his horse?—had he fallen from it—or—" and then the voice of the father, who but a few moments before had believed his love for his son crushed out forever, entirely broke down. Heaven only knew the agony of the question he was attempting to put; for the thought had taken possession of him that that son, overwhelmed by the knowledge that he would be pointed out and scoffed as a poltroon, had shown his second lack of courage by laying violent hands on his own life and rushing unbidden into the presence of his Maker!

"No," answered Kitty Hood, setting her teeth hard as she realized that the time had come when she must prove her own honesty at the possible sacrifice of the life of the man who had been her lover. "No, I did not see his horse. He had not been killed by falling from it, I am sure. He had been murdered!"

"Murdered!" Again the word was a double echo from the very dissimilar voices of father and daughter; the latter speaking in the terror of the thought, the former under the conviction that the dreadful truth was being revealed, and that, though the young girl did not suspect the fact, the crime would be found to have been self-murder.

"There was blood on his face and on the grass," poor Kitty went on, "and there was a bundle lying close beside him, that I had seen under the arm of—of—"

"Eh, what? Under whose arm?" asked the father, in a quick voice, as the relation took this new turn.

"Richard Compton's!" choked out Kitty Hood.

"Richard Compton's!" again echoed the old man. "Why he was your—"

"We were engaged to be married," cried poor Kitty, at last overwrought and bursting into tears. "But I must tell the truth, even if it hangs him and breaks my heart. He was at the school-house only a little while before; he was angry with Mr. Carlton, and threatened him; and I am afraid that he killed him."

"Oh, this is dreadful!" said Elsie.

"Dreadful indeed!" replied Robert Brand, whose own grief and horror were somewhat modified if not lessened by the thought in what a situation the honest young girl was placing herself and her lover. He reached back and pulled the bell-rope again, and again Elspeth Graeme made her appearance, a little surprised to find three persons in the room where she had before left but two, the third coming unannounced, and all three of the faces looking as if their owners had been summoned to execution.

"Tell Stephen to get up the large carriage, instantly, and have it round within five minutes," was the order to the old woman, delivered in a quick and agitated voice.

"Are ye gaein' out, sir?" was the inquiry, in reply.

"Yes, but what is that to you, woman?"

"Naethin', maybe, only you're clean daft if ye'r thinkin' of it, Mr. Robert Brand."

"I am not only thinking of it but going to do it; and the quicker you do my bidding, the better."

"Gang yer ways, then, for an uncanny, unmanageable auld ne'er-do-weel!" was the grumbling comment of the Scotch woman, as she prepared to obey the injunction. She strode half way through the parlor, then returned and fired another shot into the invalid's room before she finally departed: "Hech, but ye've been sendin' away the doctor wi' the grin on his grunzie, and wha' will I ca' when ye come back a' ram-feezled and done over—answer me that, noo!"

Less than five minutes sufficed to bring the carriage to the door, with its team of well-groomed bays, and with much exertion (of which the stalwart Elspeth furnished no small proportion) the invalid was placed in it and so surrounded with cushions that he could ride with comparative ease. Elsie's tearful request to be allowed to accompany him in his quest of the body of her brother was sharply denied, with orders that both Kitty and herself should remain within the house until his return; and the carriage drove rapidly away towards the point designated by the school-mistress, while the housekeeper was learning the fearful tidings from the lips of the two girls, and uttering broken laments and raining tears down her coarse cheeks, over "her winsome bairn that had been sae sair wanchancie!"

Scarcely more time than had been consumed in getting ready the vehicle elapsed before the carriage, driven at rapid speed, dashed up to the spot that had been indicated by Kitty, the eyes of the father looking out in advance with an indescribable horror, to catch the first glimpse of the body of a son whom he half accused himself, in his own heart, of murdering. A doctor's top-sulky and a saddled horse, with two men, were seen standing near the gate as they approached; but, strangely enough, they saw no dead body. One of these men, Robert Brand saw, was the young farmer, Richard Compton, who had been accused by Kitty of committing that terrible crime; the other, standing by the side of his professional sulky, was a man of twenty-five, of medium height, very carefully dressed, fair faced, dark haired and dark eyed, with features well rounded and an inexpressibly sweet smile about the handsome mouth, which might have made an impression, under proper circumstances, upon other hearts than the susceptible one of Elsie Brand. Dr. James Holton, as has before been said, was a young physician, in very moderate practice, pleasing though very quiet in manners, irreproachable in character (an unpopular point, as we are all well aware, in one of the heroes of any tale), and considered very much more eligible as a match by the young lady with whom his name has before been connected, than by the parent who was supposed to have the disposal of her hand. Dr. Holton, as many people believed, possessed skill enough and was sufficiently attentive and studious in his profession, to have run a closer race with the local professional autocrat, Dr. Pomeroy, than he had yet been able to do, but for the skilfully managed sneers and quiet undervaluations by which the elder had kept him from winning public confidence. For more than two years he had been a frequent visitor at Robert Brand's, received with undisguised pleasure by Elsie and treated with great consideration by her brother, but meeting from the respected head of the family that peculiar treatment which can no more be construed into cordiality than insult, and which says, quite as plainly as words could speak, "You are a respectable young man enough, and may be received with politeness as a visitor; but you do not amount to enough in the world, ever to become a member of my family." Quarrel as he might with Dr. Philip Pomeroy, the old gentleman persisted in retaining him as his medical adviser; and it was her knowledge of the antagonism between the two and of the estimation in which each was held, that had induced the housekeeper to make her parting suggestion of the effect which must follow his order to set the dog on Pomeroy if he ever again attempted to approach the house. No one, meanwhile, could better appreciate his own position than Dr. James Holton; and while well aware that he loved Elsie Brand dearly, and firmly believing that she held towards him an unwavering affection, he was content to wait until his fortunes should so improve as to make him a more eligible match for her, or until in some other providential manner the obstacles to their union might be removed.

Such was the gentleman who approached Robert Brand's carriage door with a bow, the moment the coachman had reined up his horses, and while that gentleman was looking around with fearful anxiety for an object which his eyes did not discover.

"We are in trouble about your son," he said, before the other had spoken. "Something very extraordinary has occurred. Have you heard—"

"That my son was killed and lying here? Yes. Miss Kitty Hood, the school-mistress, saw the body as she passed, and came to inform me."

"Kitty Hood!" gasped Richard Compton, turning from the fence against which he had been leaning, and exhibiting a face nearly as white as that traditionally supposed to belong to a ghost.

"Is it true?" continued the father. "If so, where is the body?"

"That is what puzzles us," answered the physician. "Mr. Compton, here, had an altercation with your son—"

"Excuse me, Doctor, for telling the story myself," said the farmer, interrupting. "Altercation is not the word—it was a fight. The devil was in me, I suppose, and I insulted Carlton Brand like a fool, and dared him to get off his horse to fight me. He got off, we exchanged a few blows, and directly he knocked me stiff. Perhaps I hit him in some unlucky place at the same time—I do not know. All that I do know is, that when I got my senses again, he lay stiff as a poker there on the grass. I thought him dead or dying, and rode away on his horse for the doctor. When we got here, just a moment ago, the body, or Mr. Carlton Brand with the life in him—the Lord knows which!—was gone."

"My son got off his horse to fight you, you say?" asked Robert Brand, in such a tone of interest as almost seemed to be exulting.

"Yes, sir," answered the farmer.

"And actually fought you?—do not tell me a falsehood on this point, young man, for your life!"

"Fought me? yes, he did more than that—whipped me; and I do not let myself be whipped every day. If I ever found strength to rise again, I was just going to own up beat and ask his pardon."

From that moment, an expression of pain which had been perceptible on Robert Brand's face from the instant of his conversation with Dr. Pomeroy, changed in its character and lightened up, so to speak, if it did not entirely depart. "Not so total and abject a poltroon as I feared!" was his thought. He had not alighted from the carriage, his crippled limb making that step difficult; but leaning over the side of it, he saw something on the grass reminding him of what Kitty had alleged.

"There is blood upon the grass—whose is it?—my son's?" he asked.

"Mine, every drop of it—out of my nose. See, here is the rest of it," answered Dick Compton, drawing from his pocket the bloody handkerchief with which he had tried to improve the appearance of his countenance, while riding away after the doctor.

"What do you make of all this, Doctor?" at length asked Robert Brand.

"It puzzles me, of course," said the medical man. "It is strange how Mr. Brand should have fallen for dead, if he was not. And yet it is not likely that any one would have taken up the body and carried it away, if he was. It would seem most probable that—"

"That he is still alive?"

"That his apparent death was only the result of a fit of some character, and that, coming to after Mr. Compton left, and missing his horse, he has gone homeward, or in some other direction, on foot."

"So I should think," answered the father. "Stephen, drive me home again. If you should hear any thing further, Doctor—"

"I will do myself the honor of letting you know immediately," answered the young physician, with a bow and a quiet consciousness that, from stress of circumstances, the man whom he yet hoped to call father-in-law, had at last given him a tacit invitation to come to his house on his business.

"And what shall I do with the horse?" asked Compton.

"As it seems that you have been the means of forcing the rider off its back, if you have not killed him, I think you can do no less than to ride him home to Mr. Brand's stables," said the doctor.

"I am sorry that I brought you here for nothing, Doctor. You don't think that I need to go and give myself up, eh?"

"I am very glad that you brought me here for nothing, as it appears, instead of for something," answered the doctor. "No, I do not think that you will have occasion to give any thing up, except your bad temper and your propensity for fighting peaceable men along public roads. I wish you a very good day, Mr. Brand!" and stepping into his sulky, he drove away down the road to attend to some one of his limited number of patients; while the carriage containing Robert Brand whirled rapidly home again, followed at a little distance by Dick Compton on Carlton Brand's horse, the fear of being proved a murderer somewhat lifted from his mind; his military pants haunting him a little less than they had done during the former ride; and the bundle which had at one time threatened to prove so damning an evidence against him, hugged up under his left arm.

CHAPTER VI.

The Residence of Dr. Pomeroy—Nathan Bladesden and Eleanor Hill—A kneeling Woman and a rigid Quaker—The ruin that a Letter had wrought—A Parting that seemed eternal—Carlton Brand alive once more, and a Glance at the fatal Letter.

It sometimes happens, in this world which fast people consider dull and slow, that events crowd themselves very closely, both as to time and space. Within a very limited section, in a period covering scarcely more than an hour, we have seen a complication of occurrences, affecting many persons, sufficient to occupy many hours in the recital. And yet the storehouses of event and circumstance have not yet been at all closely ransacked; and that June-day has yet much to reveal, affecting some of the persons already introduced, and others who have not yet come into the field of observation.

The spot at which the conflict between Carlton Brand and Richard Compton occurred, it will be remembered, was at the intersection of the highway leading down to the Schuylkill at Market Street, by a blind road which ran back southwardly through the wood,—and that the request of the lawyer to Compton that he would open the gate admitting to that blind road, was made by the farmer the occasion of that quarrel and fight which we have seen terminate so singularly.

Following that blind road half a mile through the wood, southward towards the Darby road, the visitor descended the little range of high land crowned by the wood, crossed a wide meadow with the frogs sunning themselves on the banks of the little brooks that ran beneath the bridges of the causeway, and the blackbirds singing in the low clumps of elder-bush that grew beside them, and found himself, on the other side, rising another slight hillock and at the back gate of the residence of Dr. Philip Pomeroy.

This was a house of modern construction, and of a completeness betokening the wealth of the owner; standing near the crown of the hillock, with the garden at the back sloping away towards the meadow (a bad slope, that towards the north, all the agriculturists in the section averred); handsome shrubbery in the broad yard lying before the pillared front or south face of the house; and a good many fine trees of inconsiderable age, with the pine everywhere predominant, promising abundant shade in coming years, both in front and at the rear. The continuation of the blind road which crossed the meadow, extended past the house on the west side, immediately beside the pickets of the yard enclosure, and running across to the Darby road afforded access to both the great highways, with only short distances of travel, and at the price of opening an occasional gate, which merely answered the purpose of stretching the cramped limbs of the rider. Some persons, who knew the extensive practice of Dr. Pomeroy, were disposed to wonder that he had not located himself immediately on one of the great roads, with no necessity for traversing by-ways to reach them; while others, who better knew the peculiarities of his will, believed that his motive was a fancy for being comparatively isolated and a little baronial. Whether he really had any motive whatever in selecting the location, except the desire of pleasing himself, is a matter of very little consequence.

There was a light buggy, drawn by two magnificent horses, standing at a post in the road, very near the house, at a little after noon on that day; and within the house certain developments were at the same moment being made, so illustrative of the depth to which human depravity can descend when the rein is given to all base and unholy passions, that the pen of the narrator, who is merely attempting a feeble recital of actual occurrences in the real life of to-day, pauses at the task before it, the fact being so certain that the circumstances about to be recorded will be supposed to have sprung from the disorder of an unscrupulous imagination, instead of being the fruit of sad research and knowledge that would be avoided if such a thing was possible.

The middle portion of the front of the doctor's residence, immediately over the somewhat narrow portico, was a sitting-room of small dimensions, tastily furnished; while out of it opened a little bed-room, the white curtains and snowy bed-drapery of which, seen in glimpses through the door, suggested maiden purity and peace or that bridal rest which should be quite as pure and holy. The sitting-room had at that moment two occupants; and the picture presented was such as no looker-on would have been likely to forget while he lived.

Nearly in the centre of the room stood a gentleman some years past middle age, large framed and with large hands, tall and commanding in figure, unexceptionably dressed in garments betraying the Quaker cut, and with that air of undeniable respectability which no pretence can ever imitate, conveyed by every motion of the man and every fold of his garments. He was dark-eyed and with features a little prominent; and years had made a perceptible mark on the smoothness of his face, at the same time that they had heavily grayed his neat side-whiskers and dashed heavy masses of gray among the still-curling locks that clustered upon his head. A merchant or banker, evidently, from manner and general appearance—and one to whom the idea of dishonorable conduct and the thought of a disgraced reputation would be alike unendurable. With a face in which sorrow seemed to be struggling with anger, this man stood holding a letter clenched in his right hand, and looking down upon something at his feet. That something was a woman.

The woman was kneeling, with hands clasped in entreaty, hair shaken partially loose, face streaming with tears, and her whole system so shaken by the sobs convulsing it that the most dangerous form of hysterics might be very likely to follow that excitement. Even when kneeling it was to be observed that her figure was tall, finely moulded and upright—that her face was fair, pleasant, and notably handsome, though the features were too small, the dark eyes mournful, and the general impression created that of confiding helplessness very likely to degenerate into dangerous weakness—that her hands were long, taper and delicate, as beseemed her figure—that her brown hair was very full, rich, silken and glossy—and that she had probably numbered some five-and-twenty summers. Formed to be loved, protected and shielded from every harm, and certain to return for that love and protection the most unreserved affection and the most unquestioning obedience; and yet kneeling there with that upon her face which told a tale of the most cruel outrage quite as plainly as the quivering lips could speak it!

Much has been said of the sadness of the spectacle when a strong man weeps, as compared to the same exhibition of feeling by a woman. It is equally sad when a woman is seen kneeling to any other power than that of her God! It seems man's province, given alike by nature and the laws of chivalry, to bend his proud knee in other aspects than that of devotion; and even when he is showing that prostration his eye may be glowing with the conscious pride of the future conqueror; but what except the most abject shame or the most overwhelming sorrow, can be shown when the delicate limb of womanhood kisses the green sod or the floor beneath her tread? To save by pitiful entreaties a perilled honor—to beg through blinding tears and choking sobs the restoration of that honor lost, that can often so easily be given back to her by the hands of the tyrant who will not hear her cry—to implore the concealment of a shame too heavy to bear—to plead for the forfeit life of some one dearer than the very pulses beating in her own bosom—to moan for the restoration of some object of love and protection, her babe perhaps, reft from her and her heart and her arms left alike empty—ay, to wail for the boon of a crust that shall chase starvation from the thin lips of herself or her child and keep them yet a little longer as clinging sufferers upon the earth,—these have been the compelling motives so often bending the knee of woman since the earliest day of recorded time. And yet not one of all the long array of unchronicled martyrs has been bowed under a deeper wrong than was that day made manifest, or uttered a more piteous appeal than that day went up to heaven!

"Oh, do not cast me off!—do not desert me, Mr. Bladesden!" wailed a voice that would have been marvellously sweet and tender had it not been broken and roughened by grief, while her poor hands wrung and agonized themselves in sad sympathy with the writhings of her cowering form. "Do not take away from me my last hope of knowing one hour of peace before they put me into the coffin! I am no worse to-day than I was yesterday! Oh, do pity and save me, even if you cannot love me any longer!"

"I do pity thee, Eleanor Hill, and I should like to save thee if I could!" answered a voice rich, full and strong, with only an occasional tremor in its intonation, and the Quaker phraseology seeming to accord peculiarly with the voice as well as the general appearance of the man. "But thou hast deceived me, and the plain people—"

"Oh, no, I did not deceive you, Mr. Bladesden," the poor girl interrupted. "Do let me speak! Do let me try if I cannot move your heart to believe that I have never willingly done wrong—that I have never been intentionally wicked!"

"Can thee deny what is in this letter, Eleanor Hill?" asked the Quaker, his voice trembling, in spite of himself, a little more than it had before done. Then he added, with something very like a sob in his throat, that seemed strangely at variance with the general calmness of his demeanor: "I am rich, Eleanor—very rich, men say; and yet I would give half of all that I have won in these many years that have made my hair gray, if I could see thee lay thy hand upon thy heart and look up in my face and say: 'The man who writes this writes falsehood!'"

"I cannot—oh, God, you know that I cannot, Mr. Bladesden!" sobbed the poor girl. "It is true in word, and yet heaven knows how false it is in spirit."

"Thee should not appeal to heaven so much, Eleanor, and thee should rise from thy knees, for I will believe thee just as quickly in the one position as the other, and the friendly people make their yea yea and their nay nay, without taking the name of the Father every moment between their lips."

Eleanor Hill managed to rise from her knees and stagger to her feet; but her position was not the less humble afterward, for she stood grasping the back of a chair with both hands for support, and with her head bowed down in such abject shame and humility that the change of posture seemed rather to have been taking on an added degradation than putting one away.

"See, I have done as you told me to do!" she said, without looking up. "I would be so obedient to you, always, if you would only take me away from this misery and shame. Oh, why would he injure me so cruelly—me to whom he should have been merciful, now, if there was any mercy in his nature!"

"Can thee say that Doctor Philip did not do right, if, as thee says, he wrote this letter?" asked the Quaker, keeping his eyes steadily upon the crouching woman, and making no motion to change the distance between them. "Thee had deceived me, and he knew it. He was sure, perhaps, that thee had not told me all, and—"

"I told you, months ago, when you first spoke of making me your wife, Mr. Bladesden," said the poor girl, with one momentary lifting of the bowed head and one transient flash of womanly spirit—"that I could not give you a whole heart—that my life had been very unfortunate, and that if I consented to marry you, you must promise never to ask me one question of my miserable past. Do you remember that I did?"

"Thee did tell me so much, Eleanor," answered the Quaker. "But thee only indicated misfortune—not guilt."

"I have not been guilty—I was never guilty!" spoke the girl, the momentary flash of womanhood not yet extinguished. "You will not let me appeal to heaven, Mr. Bladesden, yet I must do so once more. I call upon the all-seeing God to punish me with even worse grief and shame than I have already borne, if there has ever been one guilty wish in my mind towards that man or any other—if I have not been forced or deceived into every act which makes you despise me to-day."

The Quaker turned away, the letter still in his hand, and walked toward the window. He lifted the other hand to his brow and seemed to brush away something that troubled him; and he yet retained that position towards the girl, as he said, after the pause of a moment:

"I believe thee speaks the truth, Eleanor Hill."

"You do believe me! Oh, thank you for that mercy, if no more!" and the poor girl had stepped forward, caught his disengaged hand in both hers and lifted it to her lips, before he could prevent her. Then something in his manner, as he turned, seemed to chill her again to the heart, and she fell back silent to the support of the chair.

"I believe thee so far, and yet thee deceived me."

"How could I tell you all, Mr. Bladesden? How could I publish my own shame? Oh, why was I ever born!" and the voice had sunk low again, and the spirit seemed crushed quite as completely as before.

"Thee blames Dr. Philip, and yet Dr. Philip was a better friend to me than thee was; for thee would have allowed me to bring disgrace upon my name, and he would not."

The proverbial worm turns when trodden upon. Eleanor Hill had little native spirit, and she had been the veriest worm of the dust throughout all that terrible interview; but this last deadly stab at the vitals of her faith, given in laudation of her destroyer, seemed too much for human endurance, and there was yet one spark of spirit left in the very ashes of disgrace.

"Nathan Bladesden," she said, standing fully erect, and anger usurping the place of shame in her face, "I am satisfied! I will kneel to you no more—beg you for mercy no more! If you are base enough to defend the man who could write that letter, and to call his action honorable, I would rather crawl out into the road and beg my bread from door to door, than to call you husband; and I thank heaven even for that letter which has saved me from a worse man than Philip Pomeroy!"

Life and society are both full of terrible struggles. Perhaps there is no conflict of them all, more enduring in its character, or more racking to those necessarily engaged in it, than that which is fought by those who take the Sermon on the Mount as their declared pattern, and attempt to carry out the principles it enunciates. To forgive when smitten is God-like; but, oh, how difficult for any mere man! To love an enemy is an injunction coming down to us from a higher and purer source than that which gave the philosophy once taught in the Groves of Academe; but, oh, how impossible for any man to do in reality, until he has been baptized with fire! While others have waged this conflict desultorily and in isolated instances, for nearly three centuries, the Quakers have waged it as a sect, entitling themselves alike to wonder and admiration. They have practised a non-resistance unaccountable to the fiery children of the world, and stark madness on any other supposition than that there is really a special protecting Hand over those who heed the peaceful injunction. They have triumphed alike in society and in savage life, when the strong hand failed and the maxims of worldly wisdom became powerless. And on the faces of the men and women of the sect, to-day—beneath the broad hat of the Friend, under the close gray bonnet of his wife, on brow and cheek of the Quaker maiden with her softly-folded hair, and even in eye and lip of the young man subjected to temptations which have power to fever and wreck all others,—in all, there is the record of a long line of men at peace with God, themselves, and the world, as easily read and as unmistakable as are the traces of toil, unrest, and consuming passion on the countenances of those who have fought through the world with the defiant heart and the strong hand. They have met despisers as well as foes, outside of their own charmed circle; but they have also met admirers. And to-day there are men who could not and who would not take up their cross of self-control and occasional self-denial so long and so patiently carried,—but who cannot and will not refuse to them the tribute of heart-felt admiration, and who often heave fruitless sighs towards that land of mental peace from which they are themselves excluded, because they neither share its blood nor know the tongue of its speech.

But the Quaker has not conquered without struggling, and he has not always conquered at any sacrifice. Twice, the old men of the Revolution used to tell us, the Pater Patriæ was known to vent words of even profane anger—once, when the Continental troops failed him on the day of Long Island, and again, when Lee disappointed his just expectations and almost broke his line of battle at Monmouth. These were the two great exceptions proving the rule of his habitual self-command and his religious purity of speech; and the occasional outburst of anger in the Quaker blood may be held to illustrate the same self-control—to prove its abiding existence by the weight of the shock which momentarily throws it into confusion.

The face of Nathan Bladesden showed, as Eleanor Hill spoke the last words already recorded, a mental conflict to which he was evidently little accustomed. The calm cheek flushed, the smooth brow corrugated, and the dark eye was for the moment so nearly fierce that the purity of the Quaker blood might well have been doubted. And when she had finished, the lips of the merchant uttered words, at which words themselves and their tone the speaker would equally have shuddered half an hour before:

"Doctor Philip Pomeroy is an infernal scoundrel—unfit to live! He deserves to be killed, and I could kill him with my own hands!"

"Ha!" It was something like a cry of joy from the lips of the poor girl. "Oh, I am so glad! You know this man—you hate him—you have only been trying me—you——" and her brow and cheeks glowed with excitement as she looked up in the Quaker's face. Then her eyes fell again, for she did not read there what she had been led to expect by his words. There was anger, but no pity; and even the anger was dying out under the strong habit of self-control, as rapidly as the momentary glow of a slight conflagration goes down under the dense volume of water poured upon it by the engine.

"Thee mistakes me, Eleanor Hill!" he said. "I may follow the evil ways of the world's people so far as to hate the bad man who has ruined thee, but I have been speaking to thee in all earnest. I have not been 'trying thee,' as thee calls it. I pity thee, truly, and would help thee, but—"

"But in the only way in which you could help me, Nathan Bladesden, by lifting me out of this horrible pit in which my feet are sinking lower and lower every day in defiance of all my struggles and all my prayers—you desert me and leave me to perish. I understand you at last, and God help you and me!"

"Thee knows I cannot marry thee, Eleanor Hill, after what has passed," said the Quaker, apologetically.

"I know nothing of the kind, Nathan Bladesden!" answered the girl, no tears in her eyes now, and her words short and even petulant. "You have nothing to do with my past, any more than I with yours, to come to the truth of the matter! You know, in your own soul, that had you despised the malice of that serpent in human shape, and kept the engagement you had made with me, no man on earth would have owned a more faithful or a more loving wife. But you have cast me off, degraded me even lower than before in my own sight, made me kneel to you as I should only have kneeled to my Father in heaven; and this is the end."

"Eleanor—" the Quaker began to say; but the girl interrupted him.

"Please don't say another word to me! I understand you, now, and I know my fate. Let me have that letter, and do not speak any more in the streets, of the shame of a woman whom you once professed to love, than is absolutely necessary; and I shall never ask another favor of you in this world."

"Eleanor Hill, thee is doubting my honor!" said the Quaker, alike forgetting that such idle words as "honor" were only supposed to belong to the "world's people," and that his voice was becoming so low and broken that he could scarcely make himself understood.

"You have done more than doubt mine!" answered the girl, bitterly. "You have told me, in so many words, that because I had been cruelly wronged and outraged by a man who should have cared for me and protected me, I had no 'honor' left. We begin to understand each other."

A moment of silence, the girl weeping again but not convulsively as before; the Quaker with his hand upon his brow and his eyes hidden. How materially the situation had changed within a few minutes, since Eleanor Hill was kneeling with clasped hands and tearing out her heart with sobs. Yet another moment of silence, and then the merchant said:

"I am going away, Eleanor. Has thee nothing more to say to me?"

"Not another word, Mr. Bladesden!" answered the girl, through her set teeth. The Quaker raised his head, looked at her face for one moment, and then slowly moved towards the door, still looking towards her. She made no movement, as he seemed to expect that she would do, and as it seemed possible that some changed action on his part might depend upon her doing.

"Farewell, Eleanor!" The Quaker stood in the door, hat in hand.

"Good-bye, Mr. Bladesden!" The girl still remained on the other side of the room, as if either too much stupefied or too indignant to make any nearer approach. The next moment Nathan Bladesden had left the room and descended the stairs; and within two minutes after, seated alone in the buggy, behind his span of fast horses, he was bowling along towards the Darby road, apparently driving at such speed as if he would willingly fly as fast as possible away from a scene where his manhood had been severely tested and not found proof in extremity.

For an instant after the departure of the Quaker, Eleanor Hill stood erect as he had last seen her. Both hands were pressed upon her heart, and it might have seemed doubtful whether she had nerved herself to that position or lacked power to quit it. Then her eyes fell upon the letter which Bladesden, when she requested him to leave it, had dropped upon a chair; and at the sight the spell, whatever it was, gave way. The poor girl dropped upon her knees before another chair which stood near her, with a cry of such heart-breaking agony as must have moved any heart, not utterly calloused, that listened to it,—dashed her hand into her long, dishevelled hair with such a gesture as indicated that she would madly tear it out by the roots in handfuls, then desisted and broke out through moans and sobs into one of those prayers which the purists believe are seldom or never forgiven by the heaven to which they are addressed—a prayer for immediate death!

"Oh God!—let me die! Do let me die, here and at this moment! I cannot live and be so wretched! Let me die!—oh, let me die!"

Whether unpardonable or not, the prayer was certainly impious; for next to that last extremity of crime which any man commits when he dismisses his own life, is his crime when he becomes a suicide in heart and wish, without daring to use the physical force necessary for that consummation. Despair is cowardice; the theft of time is a sin that no amendment can repay; and the robbery of that time which heaven allots to a human life, whether in act or thought, is something over which humanity well may shudder.

But Eleanor Hill's impious prayer had no answer—at least no answer except the denial found in the breath of life which still fluttered from her nostrils and the blood which seemed to flow in torture through the poor frame sympathizing with the mind within. The aspiration was scarcely yet dead upon her lips when there was a footfall on the floor behind her; and she sprung up with one wild desperate hope darting through her brain, that the stern judge had at last relented after leaving her presence—that he had proved himself capable of a great sacrifice and returned to extricate her feet from the pit into which she was so irretrievably sinking. But that hope died on the instant, another and if possible a madder one taking its place; for before her, as she turned, stood Carlton Brand, though so disfigured and changed in appearance that any one except the most intimate of acquaintances might have been excused for doubting his identity.

The young lawyer had always been noted for a neatness of personal appearance approaching to dandyism without reaching that mark; and only an hour before, in face and garb, he would have attracted attention in any circle, from the perfection of every appointment. Now, his face was bruised and swollen; his eyes were bloodshot and fiery; one lappel of his coat was torn from the collar; his coat and his nether garments were soiled and dusty; his hat was crushed and out of shape; and every detail of his presence seemed to be marred in corresponding proportion. A rough peasant's or a highwayman's disguise for a masquerade, would scarcely have changed him more than he had been changed, without the least premeditation, by that little rencontre with Dick Compton, to which we have already been unbidden witnesses. Absorbed as poor Eleanor Hill was in her own situation, she could scarcely suppress a scream when she saw the aspect of a man who always appeared before her so differently; and there was fright as well as concern in her voice as she said:

"Why, Carlton Brand! Good heaven!—what has happened to you?"

"Much, Eleanor!" answered the lawyer, dropping into a chair with every indication of weariness, and wiping his heated brow with a handkerchief which showed that it had been soiled in removing some of the grime from his clothing.

"Your clothes are torn—your face is swollen! Have you been attacked?—beaten? Are you seriously hurt?" inquired the girl, coming close to him and laying her hand on his shoulder with the affectionate anxiety which a sister might have shown. These women have no bounds to that sympathy which alternately makes them angels and lures them on the road to be fiends; and there is probably no true woman, who had ever been wife, sweetheart or mother, but would forget at least one pang of her pain on the rack, in sympathy for some wronged and suffering person who approached her!

"Oh, no!" and Carlton Brand tried to laugh and made a miserable failure of the attempt, with his bruised face and swollen mouth. "Do not be alarmed, Eleanor. I have simply been in a little encounter with one of my neighbors, and—I scarcely know what has happened—I believe my clothes are torn and I suppose that I am disfigured a little."

"Disfigured a little! Good heaven, I should think you were!" said the girl, coming still closer and looking into his face. As she did so, the eyes of the lawyer, not too bloodshot for sight if they were for grace of aspect, detected the swollen condition of her face, the fearful redness of her eyes, and the various symptoms which told through what a storm of shame and sorrow she had lately been passing. He started to his feet at once, grasping her hand:

"Eleanor, you are worse hurt than myself! Tell me what has happened! Has he been torturing you again?"

"Oh, yes," answered the poor girl—"worse than torturing me! I could bear his personal cruelty, for I have grown used to it. But he has just made me lose my last hope in life, and I have nothing left me but to die!"

"Your last hope?" echoed Carlton Brand. "What? Has Mr. Bladesden—"

"Mr. Bladesden has just been here," answered Eleanor Hill, choking down the grief and indignation that were so painfully combating each other in her throat, dropping her head as she had done a few minutes before in the presence of the merchant, and holding out in her hand the crushed letter which Bladesden had dropped as he left the house. "Mr. Bladesden has just been here, and he brought this letter to read to me. It had been sent to his store, and he received it this morning. You can see, after reading it, what hope in life he has left me!"

"Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and will find it!"

Carlton Brand had momentarily forgotten his own troubles in the evident anguish of the young girl, just as a few moments before she had merged all those sorrows in anxiety for his personal safety. He took the letter she handed, smoothed out the crumpled folds made in it by the grasp of anger and shame, and read the damning words that follow—words so black and dastardly that one of the fiends from the lower pit might come back to earth to clear away from his name the suspicion that he had ever penned them. A few sentences of this bona fide communication are necessarily omitted, in an interest easily understood:

West Philadelphia, June —, 1863.

Mr. Nathan Bladesden:

Sir:—You are a merchant of respectability, as well as a member of the Society of Friends—a society for which I have the highest respect, although I do not happen to have been born a member of it. I should very much regret to see you made the victim of a designing woman, and linked for life to one who would bring disgrace upon your name and family. Report says that you are engaged to be married, or that you very probably may be so at an early period, to Miss Eleanor Hill, the ward for some years of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and who is still resident in the house of that medical gentleman. I suppose that you know very little of the early history of the young lady, as, if you had known, you would never have allowed yourself to be entangled in that manner. Her father left her a few thousands of dollars in property, which she no doubt has the reputation of still possessing, while I have very good reason to know that it has really all (or nearly all) been used up in unfortunate speculations by different persons to whom she intrusted it, and that she is little else than a beggar, except as the Doctor offers her a home. As to her personal character, which is the thing of greatest consequence at the present moment,—Miss Hill was a very giddy girl, and many of her friends had fears for her future; but none of them foresaw what would indeed be the issue of the unfortunate situation in which she was placed. I am writing this letter, as you must be aware, for no purposes of my own, and simply to serve an honorable man who seems to have been tricked and cajoled by unscrupulous people. As a consequence, I must ask of you as a right which you cannot disregard, that you will not show this letter to Dr. Pomeroy, who might know enough of the direction from which such a revelation would be likeliest to come, to awaken his suspicion and put him in the way of injuring me. This promised, I now go on to state what you will never cease to thank me for communicating to you, if you are the high-toned man of honor that I suppose. Dr. Pomeroy is well known to be a man of somewhat violent passions; and though I believe that his conduct has been nearly spotless during his professional career, yet there are stains against him for which he is probably the sorriest of men in his calmer moments. Miss Hill, as I have said, was giddy and thoughtless, if no worse; and very soon after the death of her father, those who happened to see her in company with her guardian, noticed that she paid him attentions which showed a very warm personal attachment, while he received them as a bachelor man of the world could not very well avoid receiving such marks of regard from a young and pretty girl. How long this went on, I am not at liberty to say, even if I have any means of knowing: it is enough that, to my knowledge and that of more than one person with whom you are acquainted, the natural result followed. If there was any seduction, I should be puzzled to say on which side the art was used; but perhaps when you remember that the lady has, during all your acquaintance with her, (at least I presume so, from your continuing to visit her,) passed herself off on you as pure enough to be worthy of the honor of your hand, you may be able to form some idea whether she might not have been quite as much in fault as her partner in crime. I say "partner in crime," as I have no wish or motive to shelter Dr. Pomeroy. Perhaps I ought not to say more, and indeed my pen hesitates when I attempt to set down what I consider so lamentable, as well as so culpable. But I must go on, after going thus far. The secret of Miss Hill's remaining at the house of Dr. Pomeroy after her attainment of majority, is that a guilty attachment and connection has existed between them for not less than five years past, unsuspected by most persons who know them, but well known to myself and some others, at least one of whom has been the accidental witness of their crime. If you should think proper to tax her with this depravity, and she should choose to deny this statement, by way of convincing yourself whether this is a foul calumny or a bitter truth, ask her * * * * * * * * I hope and believe that you will take the warning that I have thus conveyed, and not give yourself any trouble to discover the writer, who does not conceal his name from any other motives than those which you can understand and approve.

A True Friend.

Carlton Brand read through this precious document without speaking—a document not worse in motive than all other anonymous communications, any one of which should subject the perpetrator, if discovered, to cropped ears and slitted tongue,—but worse than all others of its evil kind in the atrocity of its surrounding circumstances, as the reader will have no difficulty in believing when a little additional light is shed upon the personality of the writer by the chapters immediately following.

CHAPTER VII.

A Return To 1856—Nicholas Hill, Iron Merchant—His Death, his Daughter and his Friend—How Dr. Pomeroy became a Guardian, and how he discharged that Duty—A Ruin and an Awakening—The market value of Dunderhaven stock in 1858.

Seven years before 1863, and consequently in 1856, died Nicholas Hill, a merchant of Philadelphia, whose place of business on Market Street above Third had been the seat of a respectable though not remarkably extensive trade, for nearly a quarter of a century. His trade had been in iron and hardware, but the material of his stock by no means entered into his own composition, for he was a man somewhat noted for his quiet and retiring manners and a pliancy of spirit making him at times the victim of the unscrupulously plausible. His private fortune met with sundry serious drawbacks on account of this weakness, though a generally prosperous business enabled him to keep intact the few thousands which he had already won, and gradually if slowly to add to the accumulation. He had remained a widower since the death of his wife ten years before his own demise; and his pleasant though quiet little house on Locust Street, had only contained one member of his family besides himself, for years before his death—his only daughter and only child, Eleanor.

The warmest and longest-continued friendships are very often formed by persons diametrically opposed in character and disposition; and the rule seemed to hold good in the instance under notice. A friendship formed several years before between the merchant and Dr. Philip Pomeroy, when the latter was a practising physician resident in the city proper, had never died out or become weakened, at least in the heart of the confiding and quiet dealer in iron, and there was no reason to believe that the sentiment had been more transient in the breast of the physician. Mr. Hill had been suffering under the incipient threats of consumption, for years, and the doctor had been his medical attendant, as before the death of his wife he had filled the same confidential relation towards that lady and the other members of his household. Neither personally nor by marriage had the merchant any near relatives in the city or its vicinity; and his retiring disposition was such that while he made many friends in the ordinary acceptation of the word, he had few who stood in that peculiar relation which the French, supplying a noun which has scarcely yet crept into our own language, designate as les intimes.

It was not strange, then, that when Nicholas Hill was suddenly seized with hemorrhage of the lungs and brought home in an almost dying condition from his store, one afternoon in November, 1856, Dr. Pomeroy, who was hurriedly summoned to his aid, was summoned quite as much in the capacity of friend as in that of medical attendant. The story of life or death was soon told. The merchant had believed, from the moment of attack, that his day of probation was over; and, apart from his natural anxiety for the welfare of his only child, there was little tie to bind the sufferer to earth. His wife—his wife that day as much as she had been at any period of their wedded life,—had long been awaiting him, as he believed, in a better world; and there is something in the facility with which those quiet, good people, who seem never to have enjoyed existence with the fiery zest which tingles in finger and lip of the sons of pleasure and sorrow, give up their hold upon being and pass away into the infinite unknown which lies beyond the dark valley,—something that may well make it a matter of question whether theirs is not after all the golden secret of human happiness, for which all ages have been studying and delving.

The doctor came, with that rapidity which was usual with him, and with every mark of intense interest on his face and in his general demeanor. He found the invalid sinking rapidly, and his attendants, the weeping Eleanor, then a handsome, promising but defectively-educated girl of near eighteen, and two or three of the ladies of the near neighborhood who had gathered in to tender their services when it was known that the merchant had been brought home in a dying condition. A few words from the sufferer, uttered in a low tone almost in the ear of the stooping physician, and then all the others were sent out of the room except his daughter, whose pleading gesture, asking to be allowed to remain within the room was not disregarded, but who was motioned by the doctor to take her place at the window, beyond supposed hearing of the words that were to pass between the two friends.

"Tell me the exact truth," said the low voice of Nicholas Hill, when these dispositions had been made. "I am prepared to hear any judgment which your lips may speak. There is no hope for me?—I am dying?"

Either the doctor could not speak, or he would not. He merely bowed his head in a manner that the questioner well understood.

"So I thought, from the first," said the dying man. "The life blood does not flow away in that manner for nothing. And I do not know that I regret the end, for I have lived almost as long as I could make myself useful, and I think I am as nearly prepared to die as poor, fallen humanity can hope to be."

"I hope and believe that you are indeed prepared to die, my dear, good friend," answered the doctor, with feeling in his tone, and the feeble hand of the sufferer meanwhile within his. "I cannot hold out a false hope to you—you cannot live. How gladly science and friendship would both join hands in doing something to keep you in the world, you know; but how much we shall all miss you and grieve for you, you do not know."

"That you will miss me, I hope," said the dying man. "But there is no occasion whatever to grieve for me. It is a peaceful end, I think, and in God's own good time. I have but one anxiety."

He paused, and the doctor nodded his head towards the side of the room where poor Eleanor was sitting, trying to distract her own thoughts by looking out of the window. The father saw that he understood him, and pressed the hand that he held.

"Yes, you have guessed rightly," he said. "My only anxiety is for the fate of my child. Eleanor is a good girl, but she is yet very young, and she will need protection."

"She shall find it!" said the doctor, solemnly.

The face of the dying man lit up with an expression of the sincerest pleasure and happiness, and his feeble grasp again pressed the hand of high health which lay so near his own ebbing pulse.

"I believe you and I thank you, my friend as well as physician," he replied. "I have not been afraid to think of this day, as they tell me that so many are; and my affairs are in some degree prepared for it. I have a handsome property, though not a large one, and you will find a will lying in the private drawer of the safe at the store. With the exception of a few legacies to friends, a small one to yourself included—it all goes to Eleanor, and you will find yourself named my executor."

"A confidence which flatters me, and which I hope I shall deserve," said the doctor, as the enfeebled man again paused for a moment.

"I know that you will," the sufferer resumed. "Thanks to my property, Eleanor will not be a burthen to you, except in the demand of care. Her few relatives, as you know, are distant ones, and none of them reside nearer than California. There will be none to interfere with you in guiding her aright, keeping her pure in her remaining years of girlhood, and watching over her until she becomes the wife of some honorable man, or in some other way ceases to need your protection."

"I accept the charge as freely as it is given, and I will perform it as I would for one of my own blood!" was the solemn answer of the medical man.

"I knew that before I asked, or I should never have asked at all!" said the dying man. "Eleanor, my daughter, come here."

The young girl obeyed and knelt beside the bed, striving to restrain her sobs and tears. The father laid his hand on her head and gently smoothed the masses of dark brown hair with fingers that would so soon be beyond capacity for such a caress.

"Eleanor," he said, "you are almost a woman in years, and you must be altogether a woman, now. I am going to leave you—I may leave you in a few minutes."

"Oh, I know it, father!—dear, dear father! Oh, what will become of me?" and in spite of her efforts to restrain herself she sobbed and choked piteously.

"You will be cared for, my child, not only by heaven but by kind friends; and you must not grieve so over what does not grieve me at all," said the departing parent. "Dr. Pomeroy is to be the executor of my estate, and your guardian. Love and obey him, my daughter, in every thing, as you would love and obey me if I was allowed to remain with you. Do you understand me?—do you promise me, Eleanor?"

"I do understand you!—I do promise you, dear, dear father!" sobbed the young girl. "I will obey Dr. Philip, and try to be good all my life, so that I can meet you where I know that you are going to meet my mother."

"My dear, good child!—you and the doctor have made me so happy! Kiss me now, Eleanor, and then let me sleep a few moments." And directly after that kiss of agonized love was given, he fell back upon his pillow—as if he was indeed dropping into a quiet sleep; but the doctor felt the hand that lay within his relax its pressure, one or two sighs fluttered from the quivering lips, while a light foam tinged with blood crept up to them and bubbled there, and the moment after Eleanor Hill was fatherless.

And yet the poor girl who sobbed so heart-brokenly over the corpse of one who had been to her the truest and kindest of parents, was not fatherless in that desolate sense in which the word is so often used. The ties of blood might be rudely broken, but did not the hand of true friendship stand ready to assert itself? Had not Philip Pomeroy promised the friend of years, that he would be father and protector to her—that he would shelter her with all the power given to his ripe manhood, and hold her pure as the very angels, so far as he had power to direct her course? No—not fatherless: the weeping girl, in the midst of her sobs and unfelt caresses over what had once been the father of her idolatry, appreciated the truth and was partially comforted.

It so chanced that Dr. Pomeroy, in his domestic relations, was admirably placed for offering a home to the daughter of his dead friend. Marrying did not seem to run in the Pomeroy family, for not only was the doctor a confirmed bachelor, some years past middle age, but his only living sister had kept herself free, like him, of matrimonial chains, and presided pleasantly over his household under her maiden name of Miss Hester Pomeroy. While the removal of a young girl of eighteen to a bachelor's residence, without the cover of female society, might have seemed grossly improper in spite of the color given to it by the guardianship so lately acquired, there could be no impropriety whatever in her becoming the companion and to some extent the pupil of the bachelor's maiden sister of forty.

Dr. Pomeroy's residence was at that time within the city limits, though in that extreme upper section bordering on the Schuylkill; but his practice had been gradually extending out into the country over the river; and ideas long cherished, of a residence beyond the reach of the noises of the great city, were gradually becoming realized. At the time of the death of his friend, that mansion which it has just been our sad privilege to enter, was in the course of erection; and in the spring which followed he took up his abode within it, with his sister, his ward, and that array of domestics necessary for a man of his supposed wealth and somewhat expensive habits.

It did indeed seem that Eleanor Hill was blessed among orphans if not among women. Her tears dried easily, as they had good cause to do. The residence to which she had been removed was a very handsome and even a luxurious one; Miss Hester Pomeroy was one of those good easy souls who neither possess any strength of character themselves nor envy it in others,—with an almost idolizing admiration of her gifted and popular brother, and a belief that no movement of his could be other than the best possible under the circumstances; and the doctor himself, a man of fine education, distinguished manners, admitted professional skill, and an uprightness of carriage which seemed to more than atone for any lack of suavity in his demeanor—the doctor himself appeared to be anxious, from the first, that no shadow of accusation should lie against his name, of inattention to the ward committed to his charge. From the day of her coming into his house, whenever his professional engagements would allow, he spent much time in the society of Eleanor, greatly to the delight of Miss Hester, who had thought herself very unattractive company and wished that her gifted brother had some one in the house more worthy to be his companion. He selected books for the young girl; brought home others; directed her studies into channels calculated to form her mind (at least some portions of it); invited the young people of the neighborhood to meet her; drove her out frequently; took such care of her health as he might have done of that of a darling daughter or an idolized sweetheart; and gave evidence that none could doubt, of his intention to fulfil in the most liberal and conscientious manner the sacred promises he had made over the death-bed of her father.

To the young girl, meanwhile her surroundings became Elysium. She had warm affections, of that clinging character which finds no difficulty in fastening almost anywhere if permitted time and quiet. She had little force of will and still less of that serpent wisdom which discerns the shadow of danger before that danger really approaches. She was equally good, by nature, and weak by disposition—formed of that material out of which good wives and mothers are so easily made, and which may, on the other hand, be fashioned so easily into the most melancholy semblance of lost womanhood. She was handsome, if not strictly beautiful, and the lips of her guardian, so strict to most others, told her so with smiles and low-breathed words. She was flattered by his preference, paid her deferentially in public and yet more unreservedly when none but themselves heard the words he uttered,—proud to be thus distinguished by one so attractive in appearance and unimpeachable in position,—bound to him by that obedience enjoined by her dying father, and by that strong tie of gratitude which she felt to be due to her willing and unrecompensed protector,—and brought into that close communion with his strong mind which could not fail to sway an unmeasured influence over her, by those studies in poetry, romance and philosophy which he had himself directed.

It is an old story, and melancholy as old. Before she had been six months an inmate of the house of Dr. Pomeroy, Eleanor Hill loved him as madly as young, defenceless and untrained girlhood can love that which supplies its best ideal and lures it on by the most specious of pretences. Not more than that time had elapsed, when she would have plucked out her heart and laid it in his hand, had he asked it and had such an act of bodily self-sacrifice been possible. Less than a year, and the tale of her destiny was told. For weeks before, the words of her "guardian" and "father" had been such as ill became either relation, but not warmer, still, than the snared heart of the young girl craved and echoed. Then came that promise of the dearest tie on earth, which falls on the ear of loving woman with a sweeter sound than any other ever uttered under the sun or stars. He loved her—that proud, high-spirited, distinguished man, the friend of her father, and the man for whose hand (so he had told her, not boastingly but in pity, and so she had every reason to believe) the wealthiest, the most beautiful and the most arrogant belles of Broad Street and Girard Avenue had been willing to barter all their pride and all their coyness—he loved her, the poor young and comparatively portionless girl, held her worthy to be his wife, and was willing to share his high destiny with her!

What marvel that the untutored heart beat faster than its wont, when that golden gate of paradise was opened in expectation to her eyes? What marvel that all the lessons of childhood, which stood between her and obedience to the master of her destiny, were forgotten or only remembered with abhorrence? What marvel that the past became a dream, the present dull and unendurable, and only the delirious future worth a wish or a thought? What marvel that one evening when the full moon of August was peeping in through the trees which already began to cast their shade over the new home into the room where the "guardian" and the "ward" were sitting alone together—when the air seemed balm and the earth heaven—when the night-sounds of late summer made a sadness that was not sorrow, and temptation put on the very robes of holy feeling to do its evil work—when the lips of the subtle, bad, unscrupulous man of the world repeated words as sweet as they were unmeaning, promises as hollow as they were delicious and prayers as bewildering as they were sacrilegious—when the heart of the young girl had proved traitor to her senses and all the guardian angels of her maidenhood had fled away and left her to a conflict for which she had neither wisdom nor strength—what marvel that the moment of total madness came to one and perhaps to both, and that before it ended Eleanor Hill lay upon the breast of her destroyer, a poor dishonored thing, frightened, delirious, half-senseless, and yet blindly happier in her shame than she had ever been while the white doves still folded their wings above her!

We know something of ends and something of intermediary occurrences, but very little of beginnings. The common eye can see the oak from a tiny sprout to its lordship of the forest, but none may behold the first movement of the germ in the buried acorn. The unnatural rebellion of Absalom, the reckless treason of Arnold, the struggle for universal empire of Napoleon, all stand out boldly on the historic page, as they appeared at the moment of culmination; but who sees the disobedient son of David when he walks out into the night with the first unfilial curse upon his lips, or the arch-traitor of the Western Continent as he starts from his sleep with the first thought of his black deed creeping under his hair and curdling his blood, or the victor of Marengo nursing his first far-off vision of the dangerous glory yet to be! We can know nothing more of the beginnings of vice in the hearts of the great criminals of private life. It can never be known, until all other secrets are unveiled before the eyes of a startled universe, whether Dr. Pomeroy, (no imaginary character, but a personage too real and very slightly disguised), in this ruin wrought by his hand had been acting the part of an unmitigated scoundrel from the beginning, a lie upon his lip and mockery in his heart when he promised the dying Nicholas Hill protection to his helpless daughter, and every act and word of his intercourse with her subtly calculated to bring about the one unholy end,—or whether he had merely permitted himself, without early premeditation, to do the unpardonable evil which proved so convenient. For the welfare of the victim, it seemed a question of little consequence: for the credit of humanity, always enough disgraced, at best, by its robbers and cut-throats of the moral highway, it may be at least worth a thought. After events make it doubtful whether the very worst had not been intended and labored for from the outset; and certain it is that if there had before been one redeeming trait to temper the moral baseness of Philip Pomeroy, from the moment when that ruin was accomplished no obstacle of goodness hindered his way towards the end of the irredeemable. If he had before kept terms with Eleanor Hill and his own soul, he kept those terms no longer.

The poor girl had of course no right to be happy in her new and guilty relation, and yet she was so for a time—almost entirely happy. She had been wooed and won (oh, how fearfully won!) under an explicit promise of marriage and with continual repetitions of words of respect which left her no room to doubt the good faith of the man who uttered them. She was more than a little weak, as has already been said; very unsuspicious and clinging in her trust; and neither wise enough to know that the man who respected her sufficiently to make her his wife, no insurmountable obstacle lying in his way, would have made her so before laying his hand on the hem of the garment of her purity,—or precise enough to feel that any disgrace had really fallen upon her, which would not be removed the moment that promise of marriage was fulfilled. Then, by a natural law which can be easily understood if it cannot be explained, the young girl a thousand times more deeply loved the master of her destiny because he had made himself entirely so; and for a time, at least, the conduct of the victor towards his helpless captive was full of such exquisite tenderness in private that she could not have found room for a regret had her heart even revolted at the situation in which she was placed. He did not speak of an immediate fulfilment of his promise of marriage—no, but he had before hinted that owing to certain temporary circumstances (oh, those "temporary circumstances"!) the hour when he could make her his own before the world must be yet a little delayed; and so the young heart took no fright at the procrastination. Good Miss Hester, meanwhile, saw nothing suspicious and suspected nothing improper. Perhaps she saw a deeper light of tenderness in the eyes of the poor betrayed girl, when they beamed upon him who should have been her husband; and perhaps she saw that her brother treated his ward with even more delicate attention than he had shown during the months before; but the spinster's eyes had no skill to read beneath the mask of either, and if she thought upon the subject at all her impressions were not likely to go farther than the mental remark: "How good Philip is to Eleanor; how obedient to him she seems to be; and how happy for both that he ever became her guardian and she his charge!"

Under such circumstances the awakening, even a partial one, could not come otherwise than very slowly. But unless the young girl was an absolute idiot or utterly depraved, an awakening must come at some period or other. Though weak and ill-trained, Eleanor Hill was by no means an idiot; and the angels of heaven could look down and see that through all that had occurred there had been no depravity in her soul, no coarse, sensual passion in her nature. If she had fallen, she had been sacrificed on the altar of man's unscrupulous libertinism, and offering up the incense, meanwhile, of a good, yielding, compliant, worshipping heart. The moral perceptions may have been blunted, but they were not annihilated; the reason may have been choked and dizzied in the flood of feeling, but it was immortal and could not be drowned.

Months had elapsed after the culmination of their intercourse, before the sense of right became strong enough and the heart bold enough, for the young girl to hint at the fulfilment of what had been so long delayed. The answer was a passionate kiss and an assurance that "only a little time more should elapse—just yet it would not be prudent and was in fact impossible." Eleanor wondered: she had not yet learned to doubt; and for a time she kept silent. Again, a few weeks later, and the question was repeated. This time a light laugh met her ear, and there was more of the master toying with his slave or the spoiled boy trifling with his play-thing, than there had been in the first instance. Still the promise was repeated, and still there were "insurmountable obstacles." Another interval of silence, then a third request, this time with tears, that he would do her the justice he had promised. To this ill-nature responded, and for the first time the young girl learned what a claw of pride and arrogance lay folded in the velvet palm of the tiger. She shrunk away within herself, at his first harsh word, almost believing that she must have committed some wrong in speaking to him of his delayed promise; and when he kissed her at the end of that conversation and said: "There, run away and do not bother me about it when I am worried and busy!" she almost felt—heaven help her poor, weak heart!—that that kiss was one of needed pardon!

The dullest eyes will recognize at last what only the quick and accustomed discern at first. Eleanor Hill had been blind, but her eyes gradually opened,—with an agony in the first gleams of light, of which her yielding, compliant nature had before given little promise. Nearly two years had elapsed after her becoming the ward of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and more than one year after that fatal era in her own destiny, when the wronged girl, then twenty and within only twelve months of her legal majority, at last sounded the depths of that man's nature sufficiently to know that he had been inventing the existence of obstacles—that he had never intended to marry her, at least at any near period. At that moment of discovery a higher and prouder nature than hers might have been moved to personal upbraiding, despair and perhaps to suicide: with Eleanor Hill the only result was that a sense of shame, before kept in abeyance, came in and settled down upon her, making her more humble than angry or indignant, and unnerving her instead of bracing her mind anew for any conflict that might arise in the future. Aware, at last, of his deception, she could not quite believe in her guardian's utter baseness; and she still hoped that though he might demand his own time for the fulfilment of that promise which had won her from herself, in his own time he would render her that justice in reality so poor but to her so full of compensation for all the past.

Would it not seem, even to one most fully acquainted with all the falsehood of the betrayer and all the cruelty of the torturer, that the cup of that man's infamy was nearly filled? And yet—sorrow that the bitter truth must be recorded!—not a tithe of that which was to curse him before the end, has yet been indicated. Slowly and surely the blackening crimes pile up, when the love of virtue and the fear of heaven have both faded out from the human heart; and who can measure the height to which those mountain masses of guilt may tower, after the first foundations have been laid in one unrepented wrong, and before the coming of that day when the criminal must call upon those very mountains to fall and bury him away from the wrath that is inevitable!

Dr. Pomeroy came home late one evening in December, 1858. Hester had long been in bed, and Eleanor, as was her habit, had waited up for his return. Some weeks had now elapsed since her discovery of his deception, but hope had not yet died out, nor had all her confidence been lost in that affection for her which she believed underlay all the impropriety of his treatment. So far, except in the one particular, he had treated her with almost unvarying kindness; and while that pleasant status existed and hope had yet a little point for the clinging of her tenacious fingers, it was not in the nature of the young girl to despair. She met him at the door, as she had done on so many previous occasions, assisted him to divest himself of the rough wrappers by which he had been sheltered from the winter wind, and when at last he dropped into his cushioned chair before the grate, which had been kept broadly aglow to minister to his comfort, took her place half by his side and half at his feet.

Perhaps there was some malevolent spirit who on that occasion, before the glow of the winter fire, once more brought to the lips of the poor girl that subject always lying so near her heart—marriage. She mentioned the word, and for the first time since he had given her shelter under his roof, Philip Pomeroy hurled an oath at her. Perhaps he had been taking wine somewhat too freely, in one of the tempting supper-rooms of the city; or some other cause may have disturbed his equanimity and brought out the truth of his worst nature. The reply of Eleanor Hill to this was the not unnatural one of a burst of tears, and that outburst may have maddened him still more. The truth came at last, in all its black, bitter, naked deformity:

"Eleanor, you have made a fool of yourself long enough! No more of this whining, or it will be the worse for you! When I marry you, I shall be very nearly out of business; and if you have not had judgment enough to know that fact before, so much the worse for your common sense!"

Eleanor Hill staggered up from her chair and cast one glance full into the face of her destroyer. Her eyes could read the expression that it bore, then, if they had never before attained the same power. There was neither the smile of reckless pleasantry nor the unbent lines of partial pity for suffering, upon that face. All was cold, hard, determined, cruel earnest, and the victim read at last aright what she should have been able to decipher more than two years before. And never the life of a dangerous infant heir went out beneath the choking fingers of a hired murderer, at midnight and in silence in one of the thick vaulted chambers of the Tower, more suddenly or more effectually than at that moment the last honorable hope of Eleanor Hill expired, strangled by the hand of that "guardian" who had promised beside a dying bed that he would shield and protect her as his own child!

In that hard, cold face Eleanor Hill at last read her destiny. She had been weak, compliant and submissive, but never reconciled to her shame; and at that moment began her revolt.

"I understand you at last," she said. "After all your promises, you will not marry me!"

"Once for all—no!" was the firm reply, the cruel face not blenching in the least before that glance, mingled of pain and indignation, and so steadily bent upon it.

"Then I have lived long enough in this house—too long!" broke from the lips of the young girl. "I will leave it to-morrow. You cannot give me back the thing of most value of which you have robbed me—my honor and my peace of mind; but my father left my property in your hands—give me back that, so that I may go away and hide myself where I shall never be any more trouble to you or to any others who know me."

"Humph! your property!" was the reply, in so sneering a tone that even the unsuspicious ears of the victim caught something more in the manner than in the words themselves.

"Yes, I said my property—the property my father left in your hands for me!" answered poor Eleanor, striving to conquer the deadly depression at her heart and to be calm and dignified. "You have told me the truth at last; and I will never ask you the question again if you will give me enough money for my support and let me go away from this life of sin into which you have dragged me."

"You want to go away, do you!" again spoke the doctor, in the same sneering tone. "And you expect to support yourself upon what you call 'your property?'"

"I do want to go away—I must go away, Dr. Philip!" answered the victim, still managing to choke down the tears and sobs that were rising so painfully. "You have cruelly deceived a poor girl who trusted you, and we had better never see each other again while we live."

"Your property, you said! Bring me that large black portfolio from the top of the closet yonder," was the only and strange reply. With the habit of her old obedience the young girl went to the place designated, found the pocket-book and brought it to him. He opened it, took out half a dozen pieces of what seemed to be bank-note paper, and handed them over to her without an additional word.

"What are these, and what I am to do with them?" she asked, in surprise.

"They are 'your fortune' that you have been talking about, and you may do what you like with them if you insist upon leaving my house!" was the reply.

"I do not understand you!" very naturally answered the recipient, making no motion to open the papers. "If these are mine, I cannot tell what to do with them or how much they are worth."

"Oh, I can tell you their value, very easily, though I might be puzzled to direct you as to the other part of your anxiety!" said the doctor, with a scarcely-suppressed chuckle at the bottom of his sneer. "They are the scrip for four thousand shares in the capital stock of the Dunderhaven Coal and Mining Company, in which, with your consent, I invested the forty thousand dollars left you by your father; and their present worth is not much, as the company unfortunately failed about six months ago, paying a dividend of five-sixteenths of a cent on the dollar. The amount would be—I remember calculating it up at the time of the failure—just one hundred and twenty-five dollars."

"And that is all the money that I have in the world!" gasped the young girl, tottering towards a chair.

"Every penny, if you leave my house!" answered the model guardian. "If you remain in it, as I wish, and forget all the nonsense that priests and old women have dinned into your ears, about marriage,—your fortune is just as much as my own, for you shall find that there is nothing which I can afford to purchase for myself, that I will not just as freely purchase for you!"

Eleanor Hill said not a word in reply. She had sunk into a chair and covered her face with both her hands, through the delicate fingers of which streamed the bright tears, while her whole frame was shaken and racked by the violence of her mental torture. How utterly and completely desolate she was at that moment! Refused the justice of marriage by the man for whom she had perilled all, and bidden no longer even to hope for that justice—then coldly informed that if she left the house of her betrayer she went away to beggary, as all the fortune left her by her father had been squandered by imprudence or dishonesty,—what additional blow could fall upon her, and what other and heavier bolt could there yet be stored for her in the clouds of wrath?

CHAPTER VIII.

What followed the revelation of Betrayal—A gleam of Hope for Eleanor Hill—A relative from California, a projected Voyage, and a Disappointment—One more Letter—The broken thread resumed—Carlton Brand's farewell, and a sudden Elopement.

Eleanor Hill should of course have left the house of her guardian, that had proved such a valley of poison to her girlhood, the very moment when she made that discovery of her final and complete betrayal. But then, strictly speaking, she should have left it long before; and the same compliant spirit that had once yielded, could yield again. Pity her who will—blame her who may—she bowed beneath the weight of her own helplessness and remained, instead of fleeing from the spot that very night and shaking off the dust of her feet against it, even if she begged her bread thereafter from door to door. Not with what she should have done, and not with what some others whom we have known would have done under the circumstances, have we to do. She remained. Not the same as she had been before—Dr. Philip Pomeroy knew and felt the difference; and yet submissive and apparently unrepining. Not the same in cheerfulness, as Miss Hester felt and deplored: she spoke less, seldomer went out, even when strongly tempted, and spent much more time in the solitude and silence of her own room.

It is not for us to put upon record precisely what passed between the guardian and his ward in the months that immediately followed that revelation; as unfortunately at that point information otherwise complete and uninterrupted, is defective for a considerable interval. It is beyond doubt that in the breast of Eleanor Hill fear and hatred had taken the place of love towards the man whom she had once idolized—that the sense of shame weighing upon her had become every day heavier and less endurable—and that she would have fled away at any moment, but from the fact that she was utterly helpless, pecuniarily and in any capacity for earning her own subsistence, and that she believed in the probability of Dr. Philip Pomeroy putting in force the cruel threat he had made, and publishing her shame to the world, distorted to suit his own purposes, the moment she should have quitted his abode and his guardianly "protection!"

With reference to the wishes and intentions of Dr. Philip Pomeroy himself, it is not much more easy to form any accurate calculation. That he did not wish to follow the example set him by so many unscrupulous traffickers in female virtue, and drive away at once from his presence the woman whose life he had poisoned, is only too certain. That he had no intention of making her legally his own by marriage, his own tongue had declared. It only remains to believe that he held towards the poor girl some sort of tiger mixture of love and hate, which would not consent to make her happy in the only manner which could secure that end, and which yet would not consent to part with her at any demand or upon any terms. Other than she was, to him, she could not be: as she was, she seemed to minister to some unholy but actual need of his nature; and he held her to himself with an evil tenacity which really seemed to afford a new study in psychology. Circumstances were close at hand, calculated to show something of the completeness of the net drawn around the feet of the young girl, even if they did not clearly point out the hand drawing the cord of continued restraint.

Miss Hester Pomeroy died suddenly in the winter of 1860, alike guiltless and ignorant of the evil which had taken place under the roof which owned her as its mistress, regretted by her brother with as much earnest feeling as he had the capacity of bestowing upon so undemonstrative a relation, and sincerely mourned by the forced dweller beneath that roof, to whom her presence had been a protection in the eyes of the world, and to whose cruel lot she had furnished more alleviations than she had herself capacity to understand.

With this death, the introduction of a mere housekeeper to take the place which she had so worthily filled, the additional loneliness which was inevitable when a hired stranger occupied her room, and the certainty that the last excuse of propriety for her remaining was removed,—it may be supposed that the struggle in the mind of the poor girl began anew, and raged with redoubled violence. The desire to be freed from the presence and the power of her destroyer had by that time grown to be an absorbing thought, ever present with her, and worthy of any possible sacrifice to give it reality. Any possible sacrifice: to poor Eleanor Hill, sacrifices which many others would have embraced without a moment's hesitation, seemed literal madness. The certainty of penury and the probability of open shame pressed her close; and she could not shake off the double fetter. Her tyrant would give her no release; and she succumbed to her living death once more.

Months longer of weary waiting for deliverance, every spark of love died out from her heart, and yet soul and body alike enslaved. Oh, God of all the suffering!—how often has this been, with no visible hand to deliver, with no pen to chronicle! Months, and then came what seemed the opportunity of the poor girl's life.

It will be remembered that Nicholas Hill, at his dying hour, spoke of his only relatives, and even those removed by several degrees, residing on the Pacific coast. One of these, William Barnes, a distant cousin, and a man of forty, who owned a comfortable ranch near Sacramento, came on to the East in the summer of 1861, bringing his wife, and in one of his visits to Philadelphia casually heard of the whereabouts of the orphaned daughter of his relative. Within a day or two following he pursued his information by driving out to the Schuylkill and calling upon Eleanor, in the absence of the doctor as it chanced. Half an hour's conversation satisfied the large-hearted Californian that the young girl was unhappy, from whatever cause; ten minutes more drew from her the information that all the property left her by her father had melted away in unfortunate speculations, though of course they won no way towards the other and more terrible secret; and the next ten minutes sufficed him to offer her a home, as a relative and companion to his wife, at his pleasant ranch in the Golden State. Girls were scarce in California, he said; girls as handsome as Eleanor were scarce in any quarter of the globe; and if she would accept his invitation they would astonish all his neighbors a little, on their arrival out, while she could select at will among fifty stalwart fellows, with plenty of money, any day when she might fancy a husband.

Here was hope—here was deliverance. How eagerly Eleanor Hill grasped at it can only be known by the wretch who has once been so nearly drowned that the last gasp was on his lip, and then found a helping hand stretched out for his rescue—or that other wretch who has wandered for hours over a trackless waste and then found a landmark at the moment when he was ready to lie down and die! William Barnes was to leave New York on his return to California within a fortnight: he would inform his wife of the arrangement, and she would be delighted with the thought of finding a companion; and on the morning of the sailing of the steamer Eleanor would appear, to fill the state-room already engaged.

Somewhat to the surprise of the escaping prisoner, and immeasurably to her joy, when that evening, with an expression on her lip that was nearer to triumph than any which had rested there during all the four years of her sinful slavery—Dr. Philip Pomeroy neither threatened her with poverty nor exposure as he had before done (perhaps because he felt that when under Mr. Barnes' protection the former would be beyond his power and the latter of little consequence in a State so far removed as California) nor even seriously opposed her accepting the offer made her. At last, then, the cruel heart had relented, her shameful dependence was at an end, and the reformation of her life could find its late beginning.

Three days later came a letter from New York, from William Barnes, reiterating what had been said personally, and accompanied by the indorsement of the arrangement by Mrs. Barnes. The last shadow of doubt, then, was removed out of the way, and the young girl's moderate preparations for removal went on with new vigor. One hundred dollars in money was all that she asked of her guardian for these preparations, and that sum was accorded without hesitation or comment. On the morning of the sailing of the steamer she left Philadelphia by the early train, the doctor himself bringing her down to the depot in his carriage, and bidding her good-bye with a word of kind regret, and a kiss which seemed chaste enough for that of a brother. Her small array of baggage had preceded her, and was no doubt already within the hold of the vessel that was to bear her to the Pacific, to a renewed life, and an opportunity of gathering up the broken threads of lost happiness.

The steamer, the old Northern Light, of such varying fortunes, was to sail at two. At half-past twelve, the carriage containing Eleanor Hill dashed down to the foot of Warren Street, among all that crush of carriages, baggage-wagons, foot-people with valises and carpet-bags, idlers, policemen, pickpockets, United States Mail vans, weeping women, whining children, and insatiate shakers of human hands, that has attended the departure of every California steamer since the first ploughed her ocean way towards the land of gold. Mr. Barnes had promised to meet her at the gangway or on shipboard, but neither on the dock nor on deck could she discover him. One o'clock was long past, and Eleanor had grown sick at heart under the idea that some mistake as to the steamer must have been made, when from the gangway she saw a carriage drive up and her new protector alight from it. He was assisting out a lady who could be no other than his wife; and the young girl, fairly overjoyed, ran down the plank to meet and welcome them. The lady, who was just starting up the plank as Eleanor reached the foot of it, did not notice her, but continued her ascent: William Barnes did see her, and allowing his wife to proceed alone, he seized her arm and drew her hurriedly away down the pier, and beyond ear-shot. Eleanor noticed that his face seemed flushed, and his whole demeanor agitated; but she was far from being prepared for the startling intelligence that burst from his lips, interlarded with oaths and expressions of honest indignation. The generous-hearted Californian was, in truth, very nearly beside himself with shame and mortification. Eleanor could not accompany his wife and himself to California, after all! And the story of the disappointment, though a little mixed up with those energetic expressions and once interrupted by the necessity of the enraged man's pausing to throw into the dock a package of fruit which his wife had just been purchasing for her comfort on the voyage (the porter who brought it being very nearly included in that sacrifice to Neptune), the story, in spite of all these hindrances, was far too quickly told; and every word, after the first which revealed her fate, fell upon the heart of the poor girl as if it had been the blow of a hammer smiting her living flesh.

Up to that morning—the Californian said—his wife had seemed not only willing to accept Eleanor's society, but highly pleased at the prospect. Her ticket had been bought and various presents selected by Mrs. Barnes' own hands, for the comfort of their guest on the route and in her new home. That morning, and not more than two hours before, the weather in the matrimonial horizon, never entirely reliable in the latitude of Mrs. Barnes, had changed entirely. On coming into the hotel from some business calls, among them a visit to the Post Office (though Mr. Barnes thought, very naturally, that the latter place could have nothing to do with the sudden barometric variation)—she had suddenly declared to him that "he might as well go down to the office and countermand the order for Miss Hill's ticket and save the money; as if she [Miss Hill] went to California with him on the steamer that day, she [Mrs. Barnes] would not stir one step but stay in New York." Inquiry and even demand had failed to secure any explanation of this strange and sudden veering of the marital weathercock; and expostulation and even entreaty, with full representations of the contemptible position in which he would be placed by any change in the arrangements at that hour, had failed to secure any modification of the sentence. She wanted no strangers in her house, or in her company on board ship; and she would not have any—that was flat! If Eleanor Hill went to California, she remained! A full-blown domestic quarrel, lasting with different degrees of gusty violence for nearly an hour, had been the result; and that other result had followed which nearly always follows when husband and wife commence discussion of any matter seriously affecting the feelings (or whims) of the latter—the husband had succumbed, the arrangement had been definitely broken off, and the state-room which the young girl was to have occupied was no doubt by that time in the occupancy of a man with a red beard, long boots, a broad hat and a gray blanket!

Poor Eleanor Hill!—it seemed too hard, indeed—this being plunged back again into the pit of helpless sin and self-reproach, at every effort made for extrication!

There is a legend told of the great well in the court-yard of one of the old English castles, at the period of the Parliamentary wars, which comes into mind when the cruel facts of her life are remembered. Sir Hugh, the Cavalier, had seen his castle surprised, taken and sacked by the Cromwellian troopers, guided and led on by a roundhead churl who owed him gratitude instead of ill-service—had been wounded and made prisoner, while the females of his family were maltreated and the pictures that made half his ancestral pride stabbed and hacked in pieces by the ruffians who could not enough outrage the living members of his race. Then the tide of fortune had turned; he had once more regained his strong-hold, with manly arms around him, and those of his dear ones who had not perished by outrage and exposure, once more under his sheltering hand. Then the recreant roundhead neighbor fell one day into his hands, and the cruel blood of the Norman ancestors who had begun their robbery and rapine on English soil at Hastings, rose up in the breast of Sir Hugh and made him for the time a very fiend of revenge. The great well had been ruined by the corpses thrown into it at the sacking of the castle; and into that well, in spite of his struggles, he had the poor wretch lowered by his retainers, then the slight rope cut away and the victim left to cling to the slippery stones at the edge of the water thirty feet below, unable to climb them, too desperate to sink, and wailing out his cries for mercy, while a huge lamp, lowered by another rope, showed the whole terrible spectacle to the pitiless eyes that dared look down upon it. Then another rope was lowered by the great windlass, within reach of the struggling wretch, and he was allowed to seize hold upon it and climb a little way from the water, under the belief that his tyrant had at last relented and that he was to be allowed to save himself after that dreadful trial. Then, when he had climbed for a few feet from the black ooze beneath him, the rope was lowered away and the poor wretch again submerged, to shriek, and wail, and climb again, and to be again dropped back at the moment of transient hope, until the wearied fingers could cling and climb no longer and the life thus outraged and the light which had revealed that sad refinement upon cruelty went horribly out together! And how much less cruel was Fate, thus standing guard over the life of Eleanor Hill and dropping her back again into her own shame at every attempt which she made to escape from it or to rise above it,—than the grim and grizzled old Sir Hugh who had been made a human fiend by his past wrongs and the bandit blood of his race?

There was genuine regret blended with the anger and shame on the honest face of William Barnes, as he made that confession which dashed all the hopes of the young girl,—that he dared not take her to California. But who shall describe the expression of hopeless sorrow and despondency which dwelt upon hers at that moment? Yet despondency was unwise as struggle was unavailing. This, too, must be borne, as a part of the penalty of—no, we cannot write the word "guilt"—the penalty of being unfortunate and abused! The Californian took the privilege of blood, to urge the acceptance of such a sum from his well-filled wallet as would enable her to replace the clothing and other articles in her trunks, then too late to remove from the hold of the vessel,—bade her good-bye and sprung on board just as the last call was given. The poor outcast mustered courage to speak to a hackman as the steamer moved away that she had so lately hoped was to bear her to a more hospitable land and a better life; and half an hour later she was speeding back towards Philadelphia on the Camden and Amboy boat; with strange thoughts running through her mind but happily finding no lodgment there, that under some circumstances of desertion and despair there could not be such a terrible crime in slipping quietly overboard and going to a dreamless sleep in the cool, placid water.

Had Eleanor Hill possessed that energy the want of which has been so many times before deplored, she would have sought out another home, though in the most miserable alley of the overcrowded city, before returning yet more disgraced to that place of misery once abandoned. But she lacked that energy, and perhaps her coming life was foredoomed, as the past had been. That night the bars of her cage closed again upon her. Dr. Philip Pomeroy received her in all kindness, with some expressions of pleased surprise and a few sharp epithets hurled at the man who could be weak enough to change his mind in that manner at the bidding of a woman. But there was something in his tone and demeanor which left the girl in doubt whether he was really so much surprised as he pretended; and later developments were rapidly approaching which made the doubt more tenable.

Among the acquaintances formed by Eleanor Hill in the early days of her residence under the roof of Dr. Pomeroy, had been the family of Robert Brand, which the doctor visited (as he did many others in the neighborhood) both as friend and medical attendant. In those days she had been visited by Elsie Brand and her brother, and had visited them in return. Gradually all intimacy between Elsie and herself had ceased, as that great change, known only to herself and two others, affected the whole tenor of her life. But the friendship at that time formed with Carlton Brand had never weakened, and it perhaps grew the stronger from the hour when each became satisfied that no warmer personal interest would ever rise in the breast of the other. Perhaps Carlton Brand, to some extent a man of the world, and a close student of character by virtue of his profession, may have formed his opinions, long before 1861, of the relations existing between the doctor and his ward; but if so, he had not a thought of blame or any depreciation of respect for the poor girl on account of it; and during all those years, if he indeed harbored such suspicions, he had no means of verifying them, for Eleanor Hill's lips had been and remained quite as closely sealed to him as to others.

Between Dr. Philip Pomeroy and the lawyer had always existed, since the young girl had been an inmate of the house, an antagonism which could not well be mistaken. No open rupture had taken place, in the knowledge of any acquaintance of either; but they never met without exchanging looks which told of mutual dislike and distrust. Within the three years between 1858 and 1861 that antagonism, as even the unobservant girl could see, had markedly increased, so that even in his own house the doctor, when he came upon him, seldom addressed a word to his unwelcome guest. Had she known that in the investigations which followed the failure of the Dunderhaven Coal and Mining Company, in the later days of the great commercial crash of 1857-8, Carlton Brand had been one of the counsel employed to prosecute that great swindle in which her own fortune had been swallowed up with hundreds of others,—had she known this, we say, she might have imagined some reason for this increase of dislike which was certainly not founded upon jealousy. But she would not have guessed, even then, one tithe of the causes for deadly and life-long hatred which lay between two men of corresponding eminence in two equally liberal professions. It is not possible, at this stage of the narration, to explain what were those causes, eventually so certain to develop themselves.

On the eve of her attempted transit to California, of which we have already seen the melancholy failure, Eleanor Hill wrote but one letter of farewell, and that letter was addressed to Carlton Brand. On her way homeward from her great disappointment, she paused in the city to drop a pencil note written on board the steamboat; and that was also to Carlton Brand, informing him of her return. No reply was made to the latter note, for three days: then the lawyer called upon her one day during the professional absence of the doctor. He had been absent, at the city of New York and still farther eastward, for more than a week previous. He had returned from the commercial metropolis only the day before, and had taken the very earliest moment to acknowledge the reception of her missive and to express his sympathy in her disappointment—perhaps something more.

After a few moments of conversation on that unfortunate affair, the lawyer remarked that he had chanced to stop at the same hotel in New York, patronized by Mr. Barnes and his wife, and having some recollection of the face of the former, from old Philadelphia rencontres, had made the acquaintance of both. He had known nothing whatever of the intention of Eleanor to accompany them to the Pacific coast, or even that any relationship existed between herself and William Barnes. But Mrs. Barnes had "cottoned to him" a little, apparently, he had been the possessor of a few spare hours, and he had become her companion and escort on some of her shopping excursions when Mr. Barnes was otherwise employed. He had been her escort on the morning of the day on which she sailed, and after her return from the Post-office had been present at her opening of several letters, over one of which she fell into a storm of rage requiring an apology for such an exposure before a comparative stranger. As a part of that apology, she had handed him the letter, bearing the Philadelphia post-mark; and inadvertently, as he then supposed, but providentially, as he afterwards saw reason to believe, he had kept the letter in his hands, dropped it into his pocket with his newspaper, and forgotten to return it until he had parted from the enraged woman and left the hotel. It was only after his return to Philadelphia and reception of the two notes advising him of Eleanor's intended departure and her disappointment, that he had been able to connect that letter with any one in whom he possessed a personal interest.

Eleanor Hill had been gradually growing paler during this recital; and she was chalky white and almost ready to faint, when at that stage the lawyer paused and handed her a letter taken from his pocket, with the inquiry, "if she knew that handwriting." The letter was very brief, but very expressive, and ran as follows—the words being faithfully copied from the shameful original, lying at the writer's hand at this moment:

Philadelphia, —— —, 1861.

Madam:—I have accidentally learned that arrangements have been made by your husband and yourself, to take a young lady back with you to your home in California, on your return. When I tell you that I knew your husband and his family many years ago, you will understand my motive for taking part in what is apparently none of my business. If the report is true, that you do so intend, you have been shamefully deceived and imposed upon. The young lady, whose name I need not mention, has been for years the mistress of the man with whom she is living; and you can judge for yourself the policy of introducing such a person into your household. I have no means of judging whether your husband is or is not acquainted with the real character of the lady; but any doubt on that subject you can have no difficulty in solving for yourself. I have preferred to address you instead of him, with this warning, because in the event of his really being aware of all the circumstances, any communication to him would of course never have reached your eyes. With the highest esteem and regard for yourself, for your husband and his family, I am (only concealing my real name, for the present, from motives which I hope you will readily appreciate,) yours, obediently,

D. T. M.

"My God!—yes, I know that handwriting!" sobbed Eleanor Hill, covering her eyes with both hands, after glancing over the precious epistle.

"So I feared!" said Carlton Brand.

"Oh, how can any man be so cruel!" continued the poor girl.

"How could he dare to utter such a falsehood?" said the lawyer, glancing closely at the young girl meanwhile. Her face, that had the moment before been pale, was now one flush of crimson, and it seemed as if the very veins would burst with the pressure of shamed and indignant blood. Carlton Brand saw, and if he had before doubted, he doubted no longer. He spoke not another word. But the instant after, at last goaded beyond all endurance, Eleanor Hill started to her feet, and said:

"Carlton Brand, I believe that I have but one friend in the world, and you are that friend. I have tried to keep my shame from you, because I could not bear to forfeit your good opinion. You know all, now, but do not believe me guilty and wicked! That man—"

"I do not believe you guilty, Eleanor, whatever may be the errors into which you have been dragged by that worst devil out of torment!" he interrupted her.

"Expose that man to the world, then, or kill him! Do not let my shame stand in the way! I can bear any thing, to see him punished as he deserves, for this last cruel deed!" The girl was for the moment beside herself, and she little thought, just then, what was the penalty she braved! It seemed that Carlton Brand better appreciated the peril, or that some other weighty consideration chained his limbs and his spirit, for his was now the flushed face, and he made none of those physical movements which the avenger inevitably assumes, even if beneath no other eye than God's, when he determines upon a course of action involving exposure and possible danger. He seemed to tremble, but not with anxiety: his was rather the quiver of inertiæ than any nobler incitement.

"Expose him?—kill him?" he gasped rather than said. "You do not know what you ask, Eleanor! I cannot!—dare not—"

"Dare not?" echoed Eleanor Hill, her face that had ordinarily so little pride or courage in it, now expressing wonder not unmingled with contempt. For the first time, she saw the countenance of that man who had seemed to her almost a demi-god, convulsed with pain and shame; and the sad wonder that was almost pity grew in her eyes, as within a moment after, moved by her confidence and assured by it that he need fear no danger of betrayal, Carlton Brand entrusted her with the secret of that skeleton in his mental closet which made him powerless against the bold, unscrupulous and determined Philip Pomeroy. Each had the most dangerous confidence of the other, then; and each realized, if nothing more, a certain painful satisfaction in knowing that the burthen was not thenceforth to be borne entirely without sympathy. But to neither did there appear any hope of unravelling a villany which seemed to both so monstrous.

All this took place in the summer of 1861, it will be remembered; and between that time and the period at which we have seen Eleanor Hill kneeling piteously before Nathan Bladesden and afterwards greeting Carlton Brand with such a sympathy of shame and sorrow,—nearly two years had elapsed. During that time Carlton Brand had seemed to gather more and more dislike of the physician, and, as must be confessed, more and more positive fear of him; while Dr. Pomeroy had more than once treated poor Eleanor with positive bodily indignity for daring to receive his visits at all, though he was the last of all her old acquaintances who kept up the least pretence at intimacy. Finally, for months before the June of 1863, the lawyer had ceased to make any visits to the house, except at times when he knew the doctor to be absent; and then he stayed but briefly at each infrequent call, while one of the female servants, who was devoted to Eleanor, had confidential orders from her to keep watch for the sudden coming of the doctor, so that this man, who seemed born to be a Paladin, could skulk away by one door or the other and avoid a meeting! A most pitiable exhibition, truly!—but the record must be made a faithful one, even in this melancholy instance.

Since Eleanor Hill's return from her temporary Hegira, for a long period, so far as the eye could see no change had taken place in the relations existing between the "guardian" and his "ward." Perhaps he treated her with more coolness than of old; and she may have been more habitually silent, while she had become a virtual recluse and seldom passed beyond the doors of that fated dwelling. Whatever the weakness which the fact may have shown on her part, whatever of persistent evil on his,—the old intimacy of crime had been maintained, though the love once existing in the breast of the young girl had long changed to loathing, and there was every reason to believe that the ignobler passion urging on her destroyer had quite as long before become satiety.

This up to a certain period. One day during the winter of 1862, Nathan Bladesden, a Quaker merchant of the city, gray-headed, eminently respectable and a widower, had found occasion to call at the residence of Dr. Pomeroy. In the host's absence he had been received by his ward; and the blind god, ever fantastic in his dealings, had smitten the calm, strong man with a feeling not to be overcome. He had called again and again, sometimes in the doctor's absence and sometimes when he was at home; but the object of his pursuit had evidently been Eleanor Hill. His visits had seemed to be rather pleasing than otherwise to the master of the house, who could not fail to see towards what they tended; and that he did see and approve had seemed to be evident from his entire withdrawal of himself from Eleanor's private society, from the time of the second visit. The poor girl's heart had leaped with joy, at the possibility of union with a noble man, that should finally remove her from her false position and make her past life only a sad remembrance; and those precisians may blame her who will, while all must sorrow for the circumstances which seemed to render the deception necessary,—that she had not shuddered, as she possibly should have done, at the idea of marriage without full confidence. Two months before, while April was laughing and weeping over the earth, the grave, unimpeachable man, who already held so much of her respect and could so easily induce a much warmer feeling of her nature,—had asked her to be his honored wife and the mistress of his handsome house in the city; and the harrassed girl, the goal of a life of peace once more in sight, had answered him that she would be his wife at any moment if he would consent to accept the remnant of a heart which had been cruelly tortured and to make no inquiries as to a past which must ever remain buried. To these terms the Quaker had consented; this had been Eleanor Hill's betrothal; and with such a redeeming prospect in view had her life remained, until that fatal day of June when the knowledge that her whole secret was betrayed burst upon her in the presence and the reproaches of Nathan Bladesden. What passed between them has already been recorded, at a stage of this narration antecedent to the long but necessary resumé just concluded; and we have seen how, only a few minutes after, Carlton Brand held in his hand the letter of her second denunciation, and what were his brief but burning words as he commenced reading.

"Curse him! He deserves eternal perdition, and he will find it!"

He read through the letter without speaking another word, though there were occasional convulsive twitches of his face which showed how his heart was stirred to indignation by the perusal.

"You are sure, are you not?" Eleanor asked, when he had finished.

"Just as sure as I was in the other case. The deed is the most black and damning that I have ever known; and if I had before been an infidel I should be converted by the knowledge that such an incarnate scoundrel must roast in torment!"

"And what am I to do?" asked the girl, with that helpless and irresolute air which is so pitiable.

"Heaven help us both! I do not know!" was the reply, with the proud head drooping lower on the breast than it should ever have been bowed by any feeling except devotion.

"I cannot remain here after this!" she said. "Can you not take me away—do something for me? Does the—do the same obstacles stand in your way that stood there two years ago?"

"No—not the same, but worse!" answered the lawyer, bitterly. "Oh, there never was a child so helpless as I am at this moment. I have wealth, but I cannot use it for your benefit without exposing you to final and complete ruin in public opinion. And for myself—poor Eleanor, I pity you, God knows I do, but I pity myself still worse. I came to tell you that I am going away this very day,—that I shall not again set foot within my father's house—perhaps never again while I live,—that my spirit is crushed and my heart broken."

"What has happened? tell me! The old trouble, Carlton?" asked the young girl, in a tone of true commiseration.

"Yes, the old trouble, and worse!" was the reply, followed by a rapid relation of the events of the morning, and concluding with these hopeless words: "An hour since, I parted with the woman I loved and hoped to make my own. To-morrow my name may be a scoff and a by-word in the mouth of every man who knows me. I cannot and will not meet this shame, which is not hidden like your own, but will be blown abroad by the breath of thousands of personal acquaintances, and perhaps made the subject of jest in the public newspapers. Think how those who have hated and perhaps feared me—criminals whom I have brought to justice and thieves whom I have foiled in their plunderings,—will gloat over the knowledge that I can trouble them no more—that I have fallen lower, in the public eye, than they have ever been! I am going away, where no man who has ever looked upon my face and known it, can look upon it again!"

The tone in which Carlton Brand spoke was one of utter despondency and abandonment. There was nothing of the sharp, vigorous ring of that speech which contains and declares a purpose: the words fell stolid and lifeless as hung the head and drooped the arms of the utterer in her presence with whom he held a sad community of disgrace.

"I understand you, and I believe that your lot is even worse than my own!" said Eleanor Hill, after a moment of silence. "You do right in going away, and you could not help me if you stayed. Nothing can help me, I suppose. Do not think of me any more. I can bear what is to come, quite as well as I have borne all that is past!" She had been nodding her head mechanically when she commenced speaking, and at every nod it sank lower and lower until the face was hidden from the one friend whom she was thus losing beyond recall.

At that moment there was a rapid foot on the stairway above, and the house servant whom Eleanor had managed to keep in her interest spoke quickly at the door.

"If you please, Miss, doctor's carriage is coming through the gate from the Darby road. Thought you would like to know it." And as rapidly as she had come down, she ascended again to her employment in the attic.

"Oh, Carlton, you must not be seen here, now!" exclaimed the poor girl, her face all fright and anxiety, and herself apparently forgotten. Something in that look and tone smote the heart of Carlton Brand more deeply than it had ever been smitten by the sorrow and disgrace of his own situation; and with that feeling of intense compassion a new thought was born within him. "Yesterday I could not have done it—to-day I can!" he muttered, so low that the girl could not understand his words; then he said aloud, and speaking very rapidly:

"I cannot meet him, and you shall not! Throw something on your head and over your shoulders, quick; and come with me!"

For one instant the young girl gazed into his face as if in doubt and hesitation; but the repetition of a single word decided her:

"Quick!"

A glow of delight and surprise that had long been a stranger to her face, broke over it; she ran to the little bed-room adjoining the apartment in which they were speaking, threw on a black-silken mantle and a sober little hat that hung there, and was ready in an instant. In another Carlton Brand had seized her arm, hurried her out of the room, down the stairs, through the hall and out into the garden which lay at the north side of the house and extended down almost to the edge of the causeway. Dr. Pomeroy was driving down the lane leading from the Darby road, and was consequently on the opposite side of the house from the fugitives. Fugitives they may well have been called, though perhaps so strange an elopement had never before been planned—an elopement over a comparatively open country in the broad light of a summer noon, by two persons who held no tie of blood and no warmer feeling for each other than friendship, and who had not dreamed of such an act even five minutes before.

But those operations the most suddenly conceived are not always the worst executed. Necessity, if not genius, is often a successful imitator of that quality. When the doctor drove up at the gate in front of the house, his "ward" and her new companion were just dodging out of the tall bean-poles and shrubbery, over the garden fence, to the edge of the meadow; by the time he had fairly entered the house they were on the causeway and partially sheltered by the elders that ran along it and fringed the bank of the singing brook; and long before he could have discovered the flight and made such inquiries of the servants as might have directed his gaze in that direction, the lawyer in his strangely soiled and unaccustomed attire, and the girl so slightly arrayed for starting out on her travels in the world, were within the circle of woods before mentioned, stretching northward to the great road leading down to the city.

CHAPTER IX.

Dr. Pomeroy's purposed Pursuit—A plain Quaker who used very plain Language—Almost a Fight—How Mrs. Burton Hayley consoled her Daughter, and how Margaret revealed the Past—A Compact—Dr. Pomeroy's Canine Adventure—Old Elspeth once more—A Search that found Nothing.

It will be noticed that with the exception of the somewhat extended glance at the earlier fortunes of Eleanor Hill, all the occurrences thus far recorded, and affecting the after lives of so many different people, have occupied not more than two or three hours of a single June day. The Parcæ were evidently very busy on that day of June, repaying the past and arranging the future; and not less than three scenes of this veritable history yet remain, occurring on the same day, a little later, but within the same space as to distance, that has been covered by those preceding.

The first of these is that presented in the house of Dr. Pomeroy, ten minutes after he had entered it, and when two or three sharp inquiries after his "ward," whom he failed to find in her room, had elicited from one of the frightened servants the information not only that she had left the house, through the garden, with hat and mantle and in great haste,—but in the company of the man of all the world towards whom the medical gentleman entertained that deadliest hatred which would have made his drugs safe and reliable had he been attending him in a dangerous sickness! He might not have known the fact quite so soon, from any of the other servants, as he certainly would not have discovered the truth under a twelvemonth from the one who had acted as Eleanor's sentinel on the watch tower; but it chanced that he possessed one creature of his own, who had been in the habit of playing spy around the house generally and making very considerable additions to her wages from the "appropriation for secret service"; and from that open-mouthed person, who seemed to see with that organ as well as with the eyes, he had no difficulty in extracting all the truth that could be known, in an inconceivably minute fraction of time.

The rage which broke out in the face of Dr. Philip Pomeroy and set his eyes ablaze, at about that period, would not have been a pleasant thing to look upon, for any person liable to the penalties and inflictions which that rage denoted. For he was a sharp, keen, calculating man, jumping to a conclusion with great rapidity, and seldomer missing the fact than most men under corresponding circumstances. Eleanor Hill was gone—had left his house forever, so far as her own will had any power: he knew the fact intuitively. She would never have dared to cross the threshold with Carlton Brand, knowing the hatred which he held against that man of all others, if she had intended to place herself again in a position where she could feel his displeasure. Then the doctor knew, as the reader may by this time be inclined to suspect, reasons why the young girl would have been much more likely to leave his house forever, that day, than at any previous time of her sojourn, if aid and protection chanced to offer themselves. They had offered themselves, in the shape of the lawyer: they had been embraced; and the good physician, hurling a few outward curses at the servant who had afforded him the intelligence, at all the other servants, at the house and every thing within it,—mentally included in his malediction every patient who had assisted in luring him away from his home that day, while such a spoil was being made of his "domestic happiness."

The worst of the affair—and the doctor saw it—was that Eleanor Hill had attained her majority years before, and that he had no power whatever to compel her return, except that power still existed in the impending threat of public shame. But he was wronged—robbed—outraged! He would pursue the fugitive—find her—force her to abandon her new protection—drag her by main force from any arm that dared to interpose! If he failed, he would make such a general desolation in family peace, in the quiet neighborhood lying beyond that side the Schuylkill, as had never been known within the memory of the "oldest inhabitant"—such an exposé, convulsion and general explosion as would put out of countenance any thing in the power of the advancing rebel Lee!

All this in the two minutes following the knowledge of Eleanor's flight. The ostler had just led round his heated horse to the stable, before the discovery; and that functionary had orders shot at him from the back piazza, in a very loud and commanding voice, to throw the harness on another of his fastest trotters, and have him round at the gate in less than half a minute, before his double-seated buggy, on pain of being flayed alive with his own horse-whip. It may be supposed that under such incitement the stable official handled strap and buckle with unusual dexterity; and in very little more time than that allowed by the regulation, the vehicle dashed round to the gate, and the enraged owner stood whip in hand, ready to leap into it and urge a pursuit yet madder than had been the elopement. But Dr. Philip Pomeroy, having prepared to ride at once and with all diligence, found an unexpected hindrance, and did not pursue his journey until a much more advantageous start had been allowed to the fugitives.

For while the doctor was preparing to spring into his vehicle, down the lane from the Darby road dashed the buggy and pair of Nathan Bladesden, which had so lately taken that direction—dashed down, driven at such speed as flung the fine horses into a lather of foam, and utterly belied the calm reputation of the Quaker merchant. Nor was there any thing of the deliberation of the sect in the jerk with which he brought up the flying team by throwing them both back upon their haunches, or the suddenness with which he sprang from the buggy, leaving the horses unfastened, and strode to the open gate.

The rencontre was most inopportune and vexatious to the doctor, to whom minutes just then were hours; and he may have had motives for wishing, that day, not to be placed beneath an eye so sharpened by age and experience. But Nathan Bladesden was a man of wealth and a power in the city, and not even Dr. Pomeroy could afford to treat him with rudeness by driving away at the very moment of his arrival. He smoothed his bent brows, therefore, and accosted him with every demonstration of interest.

"Glad to see you, Mr. Bladesden! You seem to have been driving fast! But you come just in time, for I was about starting in a hurry to—to see a patient."

Had Dr. Pomeroy been aware of all the circumstances connected with the morning call of the merchant—the shameful revelations made in the little room overhead—the agony of spirit in which the Quaker had forced himself away from the presence of Eleanor Hill, deserting her utterly and leaving her in such a state of suffering as made suicide very possible—and the continued and ever-deepening conflict which had since been going on in his mind, as he dashed along roads that led him nowhere, his horses foaming in the heat but the heat in his brain a thousand times more intense, until at last he had driven back determined to drag the young girl, at every hazard and sacrifice, from that moral pest-house which must be sure infection and death to her soul,—had Dr. Pomeroy known all this, we say, not even his hardy spirit might have been willing to brave the encounter. But he knew nothing, and some of the perilous consequences of ignorance followed.

"I did not come to see thee, Dr. Philip," replied the Quaker to his salutation, passing on meanwhile towards the front door, and something short and choppy in his words indicating that he did not wish to open his mouth at full freedom. "I saw thy ward, Eleanor Hill, this morning, and I am going to see her again."

"Ah, you have been here to-day, then, before? And you are going to see her again, after—." It was surprising, for a man of his age and experience, how near he came to saying a word too much!

"After receiving thy letter?—yes!" answered the Quaker, turning short and confronting his quondam host, the restraint on his utterance removed.

"My letter? What do you mean by my letter?" Had any one told Philip Pomeroy, half an hour before, that there was a man living who in five words could change the color on his cheek, he would have reckoned the informant a liar and grossly insulted him. Yet so it was; and the flush, though it was already growing into that of defiant anger, had not been such when it began to rise.

"Thee does not seem to understand me, Dr. Philip," said the Quaker, his words still slow and no point of the sectarian idiom lost, but each dropping short and curtly as if a weighty substance falling heavily. "But thee will understand me before I am done. Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A True Friend'—"

"You lie!" A terrible word, to be flung into the teeth of any man; and doubly terrible as hurled from lips then ashy white. For just one instant the Quaker's large hands clutched, and he might have been moved to advance upon his insulter and avenge Eleanor Hill, himself and all the world, by choking the insult from his throat. But if such a thought really moved him, he controlled it and merely smote on with his words.

"Thee wrote me a letter, signed 'A True Friend,' and thee shall have my opinion of it, before I go into that house and remove from thee, at any peril that may be necessary, the poor girl thee has disgraced."

"Set a foot nearer that house, if you dare!" was the reply.

"Thee is a base, miserable coward, Dr. Philip!—a scoundrel, a seducer, a lying slanderer, the offspring of a female dog of the cur species, a disgrace to thy country and thy profession; and if thee knows any more hard words that I forget, thee may put them all in on my account."

"Nathan Bladesden, do you think that you will leave this spot alive, after using such words to me!" and the hands of Philip Pomeroy were clutching at his wristbands as if rolling them up to put them out of the way of blood! The purpose of attack was reversed: he seemed to be about to spring, tiger-like, at the Quaker's throat.

"Thee will not kill me, Dr. Philip, if I do not!" the latter said. "I am stronger than thee, and have a better cause. I think I will not touch thee, but leave thee to thy Maker, if thee keeps thy hands off; but I have made up my mind, if thee touches me, to beat thee until thee has no shape of a man—until thee is dead as yonder gate-post. If thee thinks that I will not, thee had better try it!"

Dr. Pomeroy did not believe himself a poltroon, nor was he one in that sense relating to purely physical courage. And had there been merely involved a conflict with that larger, stronger and better-preserved man, in which one or the other might suffer severe injury and disfigurement, he would have carried out his thought and sprung upon him, beyond a question. But something in those slow dropping pellets of compressed rage falling from the Quaker's lips, told the medical man (seldom too angry to be subtle and cunning), that in the event of a struggle, and the merchant getting the upper hand, he would probably carry out his threat and actually beat him to death with those heavy fists before any human aid could interpose. And to be mangled into a corpse by a Quaker—bah! there was really something in the idea, likely to calm blood quite as hot with rage as that of Dr. Philip—apart from the slight objection he may have had to being hurried into eternity in any way, at that moment. Then another thought struck him—a double one: how completely the Quaker would be at fault, searching through the house for Eleanor Hill; and how he was himself losing time, in that miserable quarrel—time that could never be regained. His horse and buggy stood all the while just within the opened gate, where the ostler had left it and gone back to his care of the blown animal at the stable; and as that important reflection forced itself upon his mind, he turned his back short upon the Quaker, strode to his buggy, stepped into it and dashed away, only pausing to hurl at his tormentor this one verbal bolt:

"You infernal, snuffling, hypocritical ruffian! I will settle with you for all this, when I have more time!"

"Thee had better let the account stand as it does, Dr. Philip, if thee is not a fool as well as a scoundrel!" was the reply of the Quaker, but it is very doubtful whether the doctor heard half the words. He was already flying past the garden palings, at the full speed of his trotter, towards the causeway and the Market Street road, on his errand of reclamation and perhaps of vengeance. Then Nathan Bladesden pursued his way into the house, looking for the lost sheep, with that ill success rendered certain by Eleanor's flight, and that disappointment which often attends noble resolutions embraced one moment too late.

The second of the supplementary scenes of that day was presented in the parlors of the residence of Mrs. Burton Hayley—that parlor into which the reader had only a doubtful glance a few hours earlier, when events which seemed likely to affect the life-long interests of some of the residents of that house, were occurring on the piazza.

Rich furniture in rosewood and purple damask; a piano of modern manufacture, the open bank of keys showing the soft coolness of mother-of-pearl; carpets of English tapestry; pier glasses that might have given reflection to the colonel of a Maine regiment or one of the sons of Anak; tables and mantels strewn but not overloaded with delicate bronzes, gems in porcelain and Bohemian glass, and articles of fanciful bijouterie; on one of the mantels—that of the front room—Cleopatra in ormolu upholding the dial of a clock with one hand, but with the other applying to her voluptuously-rounded bosom the asp so soon to put a period to all her connection with time;—what need of more than this to indicate the home in which Margaret Hayley had passed the last few years of her young life and approached that crisis so momentous to her future happiness? Yet one thing more must be noticed—the stand of rosewood elaborately carved, set not far from the centre of the front parlor, and bearing on it a large Bible in the full luxury of russet morocco and gold, with massive gold clasps and a heavy marker in silk and bullion dependent from amid the leaves,—the whole somewhat ostentatiously displayed to the sight of any one who first entered the room, as if to say: "There may seem to be pomps and vanities in this house, but any such impression would be a mistake: this book is the rule by which every thing within it is squared."

On the sofa, wheeled into that corner of the luxurious parlor upon which the closed shutter threw the deepest and coolest shadow, lay Margaret Hayley, her head buried in the white pillow which some careful hand had brought for her, and her thrown-up hands drawing the ends of that pillow around her face as if she desired to shut away every sight and every sound. Her slight, tall figure seemed, as she lay at length, to be limp and unnerved; and there was that in the whole position which seemed to indicate that the mental energies, if not the vital ones, had recoiled after being cruelly overtasked, and left her alike incapable of thought and motion.

She was not alone, for beside her sat a lady dressed in very thin and light but rich and rather showy summer costume, rolling backward and forward in her Boston rocker, waving a feather fan of such formidable dimensions that its manufacture must have created a sudden rise in the material immediately after, and talking all the while with such stately volubility as if she believed that the hot air of the June afternoon would be less unendurable if kept constantly in motion by the personal windmill of the tongue. This was Mrs. Burton Hayley, mother of Margaret, widow of the late Mr. Burton Hayley, railroad-contractor, snugly jointured with eight or ten thousand per annum, and endowed (as she herself believed, and as we will certainly endeavor to believe with her, in charity) with so many of those higher gifts and graces of a spiritual order that her wealth had become dross and her liberal income rather a thing to be deplored than otherwise. (It may be the proper place, here, to say that the gilt Bible on the stand was the peculiar arrangement of this lady, and the sign—if so mercantile a word may be applied to any thing really demanding all human respect and devotion—of that peculiar mental stock in trade which she was to be found most ready in exhibiting on all occasions.)

Mrs. Burton Hayley was tall—even taller than her daughter; and her form had assumed, with advancing years, a fulness which the complimentary would have designated as "plump," the irreverent as "stout," and the vulgar as "fat." Her face, moulded somewhat after the same fashion as that of Margaret, must have been undeniably handsome in youth, though now—the truth must be told—it was not a specially lovable face to the acute observer. Her dark eyes had still kept their depths of beautiful shadow, and her intensely dark hair (though she had married late in girlhood and was now fifty) showed neither thinness nor any touch of gray. But the long and once classical features had become coarsened a little in the secondary formation of adipose particles; the possible paleness of girlhood had given place to a slight red flush (especially in that tropical weather) that was not by any means becoming to her; and there were all the while two conflicting expressions fighting for prominence in her face, so different in themselves and so really impossible of amalgamation, that the most rabid disciple of "miscegenation" could not have arranged a plan for blending them both into one. The outer expression, which seemed somehow to lie as a thin transparent strata over the other, indicated pious and resigned humility—that feeling which passes by the ordinary accidents and troubles of life as merely gentle trials of faith and of no consequence in view of the great truth rooted within. The second and inner, which would persist in obtruding itself through the transparent mask, was pride—pride in its most intense and concentrated form—pride in blood, wealth, personal appearance, position, every thing belonging to and going to make up that marvellous human compound, Mrs. Burton Hayley. The eyes were trained to be very subdued and decorous in their expression; but they did so want to flash out authority, if not arrogance! The nose was kept always (or generally) at the proper subservient level; but it did so itch and tingle for the privilege of lifting itself high in air and taking a nasal view, from that altitude, of all the world lying below it! It was very evident, to any one observing the mother after having examined the daughter's face in the clear light of physiognomy, that the latter had derived from her maternal progenitor most of that overweening pride which youth and beauty yet wore as a crown of glory but age might wear as something much less attractive,—and that she must have inherited from her dead father that softness, frankness, and that better-developed love-nature which toned down in her own all the more decided features of the mother's face and made her worthy of affection as well as admiration.

As we have said, Mrs. Burton Hayley was using her tongue with great volubility at the moment of her introduction to the attention of the reader, though really the mode in which her single auditor kept her head buried in the pillow and drew the soft folds around her ears with both hands, did not indicate that desire for steady conversation which could have made such a continual verbal clatter a thing of necessity. There is the more occasion for giving Mrs. Burton Hayley her full opportunity for speech, as she has occasion to utter but little hereafter, in this connection.

"You should be very thankful, my child, for all that has occurred," the voluble woman was saying. "A Power higher than ourselves overrules all these affairs much better than we could do; and it is flying in the face of Providence to cry and go on over little disappointments."

A pause of one instant, and one instant only, as if in expectation that some reply would be vouchsafed; and then the band was again thrown upon the driving-wheel—as one of the machinery-tenders in a factory might say,—and the human buzz-saw whirled once more.

"I have told you, child, time and again, that you would be punished for setting your affections on any person who had not given evidence of a changed heart—a man who had not passed from death unto life, but who still ran after the pomps and vanities of the world—those pomps and vanities which religion teaches us to despise and put away from us." (Oh, Mrs. Burton Hayley, why did you not catch a glance, at that moment, of the room in which you were sitting, redolent of every luxury within the reach of any ordinary wealth, and of your own stately and still comely person, arrayed in garments the least possible like those with which people content themselves who have really eschewed the "pomps and vanities of the world," either from conscientious humility or that other and much commoner motive—the lack of means to continue them!) "You should be very glad that you have been providentially delivered from your engagement with an unbeliever and a man of the world—a man without principle, I dare say, as you have discovered that he is without courage; and all the money there is in his family (and they do say that the Brands have not much and never have had much!)—all their money, I say, acquired in the disreputable practice of the law, so that if this thing had not happened and you had been left to depend for subsistence upon his fortune, you might have found it all melting away in a moment, as money dishonestly acquired is certain to do; for does not the blessed book that I try to make my rule of life, say, my child, that moth is certain to corrupt and thieves break through and steal whatever has been wrung from the widow and the orphan?"

Margaret Hayley had not replied a word during the whole application of that verbal instrument of torture, though it seemed evident from the context that some conversation employing the tongues of both must have passed at an earlier period of the interview. She had merely writhed in body and groaned in spirit, as every moment told her more and more distinctly that in her dark hour she had no mother who could understand and sympathize with her—that cant phrases and pious generalizations were to be hurled against her at that moment when most of all she needed to be treated by that mother like a wearied child, drawn home to her bosom and cradled to sleep amid soothing words and loving kisses.

But Margaret Hayley did something else than writhe when the accusation of having acquired his wealth by dishonesty was cast upon the man whom she had worshipped—yes, the man whom she worshipped still, in spite of the one terrible defect which seemed to draw an eternal line of separation between them. She started up from her recumbent position, her hair dishevelled, her eyes red with weeping, and her whole face marked and marred by the anguish she had been suffering,—sprang up erect at once, with all her mother's pride manifest in voice and gesture, and said:

"Mother, are you a rank hypocrite, or have you neither sense nor memory?"

A strange question, from a daughter to her mother! The reply was not quite so strange, and it seemed to have much more of earnest in it than any portion of the long tirade she had before been delivering:

"Margaret Hayley, how dare you!"

"We can dare a good many things, when we do not care whether we live or die!" was the reply. "And though I have loved and respected you as my mother, I do not know that I have ever been afraid of you. Now listen. You have hated Carlton Brand, ever since he first came to this house, because he did not treat your religious assumptions with quite as much deference as you considered proper. He may have been right, or wrong: no matter now, as he is out of the way! But you have hated him, and you know it—because I loved him—I am not ashamed to own it!—loved him with my whole soul, as I believed that he deserved—as any woman should love the man whom she expects to take her to his heart!"

"Well, what if I did dislike him? I had a right to do that, I suppose!" answered the mother, her voice no longer religiously calm, but rough and querulous.

"Do not interrupt me!—hear me out!" said the young girl. "You liked Hector Coles for a corresponding reason—because he pretended to fall into all your notions, and complimented you on your 'piety' and 'Christian dignity,' when he was all the while laughing at you behind your back. You would have been pleased to see me discard the man I loved, and marry the man I could never love while I lived,—because your own likes and dislikes were in the way, and because you believed that in the position of mother-in-law you could manage the one and could not manage the other."

"Well, what else, to your mother, Miss Impertinence!" broke in the lady who had been so voluble.

"Oh, a great deal more!" answered Margaret, with a manner not very different from a sneer. "To-day, since you have known that for one spot on a character otherwise so noble, I have broken off all relations with Carlton Brand, you have done nothing but sit here and preach me Christian resignation in words that your own heart was as steadily denying. When a true mother would have tried to console, you have tortured. And you have ended all by alleging that Carlton Brand and his father have acquired their money dishonorably, because they have both been lawyers,—and that such money must be accursed in the hands of any one who holds it."

"I have said so, and I have a right to say so!" echoed the mother. "You may let loose your ribald tongue against the author of your being, ungrateful girl; but the truth is from heaven, and must be told—wealth obtained in any manner by day, upon which a blessing cannot be asked at night, is itself accursed, and curses every one who partakes in the use of it."

"And every dollar that has been dishonestly obtained, then, should at once be restored to the rightful owner, I suppose—in order to escape the curse?" suggested Margaret.

"Every dollar, and at once; for, as the Bible says, the spoiler cometh as a thief in the night, and no one can say how soon the judgment may fall!" answered the mother, triumphantly and in full confidence that she had at last silenced her refractory child by a strictly orthodox quotation.

"How much are we worth, mother?" was the singular question which followed this supposed annihilation of all argument.

"Why, you know as well as I do that we have eighty thousand in stocks and in bank; and this property and that at Pottsville is believed to be worth twenty or thirty thousand more. We are worth, as you call it, more than a hundred thousand, and the whole of it will be yours some day—not very long first, when I have gone, as I hope and trust I may say, to my reward. You are rich, my child, and I am glad to see that you think of these things at last, as you may be kept from throwing yourself away again."

The voice and whole manner of the mother were much more amiable than they had been at any time since the rising of her daughter from the sofa; for nothing seemed to restore the tone of her agitated feeling like references, from whatever source, to her wealth and position.

"A hundred thousand. There is not nearly enough, then!" The words were half muttered, but Mrs. Burton Hayley distinctly heard them. And she saw something on the face of the young girl which she by no means understood, as the latter drew from her bosom the lower ends of the gold chain depending there, and unclasped the back of a rather large and very thick locket, the front of which presented a miniature in ivory of the handsome, well-whiskered and pleasant-looking Mr. Burton Hayley, her deceased father. Though she raised the locket to her lips and kissed it reverently, that something on the face had not changed when she took from its unsuspected concealment a small slip of newspaper, neatly folded and of size enough to contain some twenty or thirty lines of small type. The mother's eyes were by this time wide open with astonishment and partial fear that her daughter had lost her wits in the agitation of that day. The paper looked old and yellow. Margaret unrolled it and said:

"Mother, here is something that I have carried with me night and day for five years past. I found it at that time, when clipping old newspapers in the attic, for my scrap-book. I marked the date on the back—it is eighteen years old, and the paper was a Harrisburgh one of that time. Have you your glasses with you, or shall I read it?"

"Why, child, are you crazy? What has that slip of paper to do with the subject of which we were talking?"

"Perhaps you can tell quite as well as myself, after I read it," answered Margaret. And she moved nearer to the one unshuttered window of the parlor, to secure a better light for the small type and dingy paper, the face of her mother gradually changing, meanwhile, from the surprise which had filled it, to a whiteness which seemed born of terror. Margaret read:

"Soutter and others vs. Hayley and others.—This somewhat remarkable railroad case closed yesterday, and the complaint was dismissed. Judge L——, in granting the motion for a dismissal, took occasion to remark that he had seldom performed a more painful duty. That the railroad company had been defrauded to the extent of not less than eighty thousand dollars by Burton Hayley, the contractor, was one of the conclusions—the learned judge said—in which all would unfortunately agree. But the operation had been managed with great skill, and legal evidence of what was morally certain had not been produced. He should therefore grant the motion, with the regret expressed, and with the hope that in a future prosecution the evidence which was certainly demanded might be forthcoming, and the defrauded company at least find themselves in a position to punish the wrong-doer. We hear it stated, upon authority which seems reliable, that Hayley has heretofore been known as a reliable man, and that he has undoubtedly been urged to steps which he must regret during his whole life, even if justice does not reach him, or conscience compel him to make restitution,—by the demands made upon him in behalf of a ruinously expensive family, and by evil advice which he has no doubt received from the same quarter. Hayley will probably leave Harrisburgh at once, to enjoy what may be left of his ill-gotten gains in some locality where his antecedents are less fully understood."

Mrs. Burton Hayley had sunk back into her chair at the moment when Margaret read the first words, and she remained silent till the close. Her face was white, except that a single red spot burned in the very centre of either cheek. Her daughter looked steadily upon her for an instant after she had concluded. Still neither spoke. The mother's eyes had in them something of that baleful light shown by the orbs of a wild beast when driven to its corner; and they, with the crimson spotted cheeks, were not pleasant things to look upon. At last Margaret asked:

"Did you ever hear of this before? Was that man my father?"

"What of it? Yes!" The words were nearer spat out than spoken. Margaret glanced, perhaps involuntarily, at the ostentatious Bible on its carved stand.

"Was that money ever repaid to the railroad company?"

For just one instant the lips of Mrs. Burton Hayley moved as if she was about to utter a falsehood little less black than the original crime had been. If she had for that instant intended to do so, she thought better of it and jerked out: "How should I know? I suppose there is no use in telling a lie about it, to you! No!"

"So I thought!" said Margaret Hayley. "That eighty thousand dollars, then, has been standing for fifteen years, and the interest upon it would nearly double the sum. We owe that railroad company, or so many members of the original company as may be yet alive, not less than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We have only an hundred thousand or a very little more, but that will be something. Of course, after what you have just said of the curse that clings to ill-gotten gain, you will join me in paying over every dollar in our possession, at once."

Mrs. Burton Hayley sprang up from her chair with more celerity than she had before exhibited. "Margaret Hayley, are you a born fool?" she almost screamed.

"No, nor a born hypocrite!" the young girl replied. Again her eyes went round to the Bible, and those of the mother followed hers as if they were compelled by a charm. Then those of the latter drooped, and they did not rise again as she said, in a much lower voice:

"You know the secret. I am in your power. But I am your mother, and it may be quite as well for you to be merciful to me as well as to yourself. Upon what terms will you give me that paper and promise never to speak of it or of the affair to any one without my consent?"

"I will not give you the paper upon any terms!" was the answer. "That has been my shame and my torture for five years, and must still accompany me. But I will be your accomplice in crime and make the promise you require, on three conditions and those only. First, that you drop all hypocrisy when speaking to me, whatever you may do before the world. Second, that you never speak one disrespectful word of Carlton Brand, again, in my hearing. He is dead to me: let your hatred of him die with him, or at least let me hear no word of it. Third, that you urge no person upon me as a husband. Present me whom you please—throw me into any company you wish; but say not one word to force me into marriage with Hector Coles or any other person. This will not break my heart—I know it. I shall marry some time, no doubt, when I find the man who can supply that place in my heart which has to-day been left empty,—without any foible or weakness to make him an unfit match for my own stainless blood!"

There was a bitter emphasis upon the penultimate word, and Mrs. Burton Hayley distinctly recognized it. She recognized, too, the somewhat singular prophecy made by a young girl on the very day of her final parting with the man she had loved so dearly—that she would yet find another to fill her heart more completely. Most young persons think very differently at the moment of the great first sorrow, believe that the vacant niche can never be filled, and make painful promises of hopeless lives and celibacy, to cancel those promises some day amid blushes of regret or peals of laughter. Mrs. Burton Hayley recognized the singularity then, and she may have had reason to recall that prophecy at another day in the near future.

But there was yet something that she must do, to seal that treaty of which her daughter was the dictator. Her own compact was to be made: she made it.

"I will do as you wish, Margaret. They are hard terms to set, to your mother; but I accept them."

"Very well, then. We understand each other, now; and I hope there will never be another painful word between us. I will try to speak none, and for both our sakes I hope you will be as careful. Now leave me, please. I will draw to this other shutter, for I need darkness, silence and rest—yes, rest!"

The closed blind left the room in almost total dusk. The mother left the room, stepping slowly and appearing to bear about with her a dim consciousness that within the past half-hour her relative position with her daughter had been most signally changed. Margaret Hayley threw herself once more on the sofa, buried her fevered brow and her dishevelled hair in the soft, cool, white pillow, and sought that wished-for "rest." Alas! no tyrant ever invented a torture-bed so full of weary turnings and agonized prayers for deliverance or oblivion, as the softest couch whereon young love, suddenly and hopelessly bereft, reaches out its arms in vain, finds emptiness, and falls back despairing—moaning for the lost twin of its soul! The agony may be all forgotten to-morrow, in the sunshine, and the intoxication of music, and the voices of friends, and the far-off dawning of a new passion; but oh, what is the martyrdom of to-night.

The third and last of these supplementary scenes, occurring at nearly the same period in the afternoon as the second, has its location at the house of Robert Brand, and a part of it in the same room where we have before seen the testy invalid while receiving the news of his son's defection and disgrace.

Robert Brand was once more back in his easy-chair, his injured limb again propped on the pillows, and his face showing all those contortions of extraordinary pain likely to be induced by his imprudent ride and the agitation attending it. Satisfied, now, that his son was not dead, the tender father had again died out in him; but made aware by a succession of facts, which he could neither understand nor doubt, that that son, just characterized, even by himself, as a hopeless coward, had since that time been fighting, and fighting without any evidence of cowardice, in a species of hand-to-hand conflict likely to try the courage quite as seriously as the shock of any ordinary battle,—he was mentally in a state of confusion on the young man's account, altogether unusual with him and not a little painful. He did not curse any more, or at least no more of his curses were aimed at the head of his son.

Poor little Elsie had been left without a hope of reconciliation between her father and her brother, after the hurling of that wild and wicked curse and the exile from his home which it involved. But the episode of the supposed death had made a diversion in Carlton's favor; her father had returned from the search for his son's body, worried and unsettled if not mollified; and the affectionate soul thought that the opportunity might be a favorable one for securing the reversal of the cruel sentence, with concealment from her brother that any such words had ever been uttered, and his eventual return home as if nothing painful or unpleasant had occurred. "Blessed are the peace-makers!" says very high authority; and most blessed of all are those who, like little Elsie, ignoring their own suffering and ill-treatment, strive to bring together the divided members of a once happy household!

But the little girl was not half aware how stubborn was the material upon which she was trying to work, or how deeply seated was the feeling of mortification which had embittered the whole nature of the man who held cowardice to be the most unpardonable of vices.

"Hold your tongue, girl!" was the severe reply to her suggestion that there might be some mistake, after all—that poor Carlton had enemies, and they had no doubt labored to place him in a false position—and that he would be sorry, to the last day he lived, if when Carlton returned home, as he probably would do that night if nothing serious had really happened to him, he should say one word to drive him away again, to leave himself without a son, and her without a brother. "Hold your tongue, girl! You are a little fool, and do not know what you are talking about. If you do not wish to follow your brother, you had best not meddle any more in the relations which I choose to establish with a son who has disgraced himself and me!"

"But suppose poor Carlton should be dead, after all, father? Who knows but some stranger may have come by in a wagon, seen the body lying on the ground, picked it up and carried it away to the Coroner's?"

"Eh! What is that you say?" For the instant Robert Brand was startled by the suggestion and his heart sunk as well as softened at the recurring thought that his son might indeed be dead. But the thought was just as instantaneous, how general was the objection to touching an unknown dead body, and how unlikely that any such course should have been adopted by strangers, while any acquaintance, removing the body at all, would certainly have brought it home to his own house. No—he was alive; and that belief was once more full in the mind of Robert Brand as he said:

"What do I care if he is dead! I believe I could forgive him better, if I knew that he was, and that I should never again set eyes on the likeness of a man with the soul of a cat or a sheep! If he is alive, as I believe he is, let him never come near this house again if he does not wish to hear words said that he will remember and curse the last thing before he dies!"

A sharp spasm of pain concluded this unhallowed utterance, and words followed that have no business on this page. Elsie Brand fired again, when she found all her pleading in vain, and broke out with:

"You are a miserable heartless old wretch, and I have a great mind to go out of this house, this very moment, and never come into it again as long as I live, unless you send for me to come back with my brother!"

"Go, and the quicker the better!" writhed the miserable man, in the midst of a spasm of pain. "If I hear one more impertinent word out of you, you will go, whether you wish to go or not, and you will never come back again unless you come on your knees!"

What might have been the next word spoken by either, and whether that next word might not indeed have wrought the separation of father and daughter, no one can say. For at that moment came a fortunate interruption, in the sound of carriage wheels coming rapidly up the lane, and easily heard through the open doors—then the furious barking of a dog, the yell of a woman's voice, and a volley of fearful curses poured out from the rougher lips of a man. Elsie, alarmed, but perhaps rather glad than otherwise to have the threatening conversation so suddenly ended, rushed out of the room, through the parlor, to the front piazza, where she joined the general confusion with a scream of affright, hearing which, the invalid, who had before, more than once that day, proved how superior the mind could be to the disablements of the body, hurled one more oath at the people who would not even allow him to suffer in quiet, started again from his chair, grasped his heavy cane and stumped hurriedly to the door, writhing in agony and half crazed with pain and vexation. There the sight which had the instant before met the eyes of his daughter, met his own, though the effect produced by it upon himself was so very different that instead of screaming he dropped against the lintel of the front door in a loud explosion of laughter.

There was a horse and buggy in the lane, very near the gate—the horse unheld, rearing and squealing, but making no attempt to run away as might have been expected. Close beside the vehicle, a man easily recognizable as Dr. Philip Pomeroy, was engaged in a hand-to-hand (or is it hand-to-mouth?) conflict with Carlo, the big watch-dog, using the butt of his whip, the lash of it, his boots, and any other weapon of offence in his possession, against the determined assaults of the powerful brute that really seemed disposed to make a meal of the man of medicine. The doctor fought well, in that new revival of the sports of the Roman arena, but he was terribly bested (by which it is only intended to use an old word of the days of chivalry, and not to make an atrocious pun upon beast-ed;) and just at the moment when Robert Brand's eyes took in all the particulars of the scene, the human combatant, following up a temporary advantage, lunged ahead a little too far, lost his balance or caught his foot, and went headlong on the top of the dog, the contest being thereafter conducted on the ground and in the partial obscurity of the fence. At the same instant, too, the tall, bare-headed and bare-armed figure of old Elspeth Graeme appeared from behind the corner of the house, and the voice of that Caledonian servitor was heard screaming out:

"Here, Carlo! Here, lad! coom awa, ye daft deevil! Here! here! coom awa, lad!"

Elsie joined with a feeble "Here, Carlo!" from the piazza; and Robert Brand, if he could have found voice, would probably have assisted in calling off the dog; but Carlo, a formidable animal in size, black, with a few dashes of white, compounded of the Newfoundland and the Mount St. Bernard, with a surreptitious cross of the bull-dog (such immorality has been known even in canine families, to the great regret of precisian dog-fanciers)—Carlo had no idea whatever of "throwing up the sponge," (which with a dog consists, we believe, in dropping his tail), and might have fought on until death, doomsday, or the loss of his teeth from old age, arrived to stop him—had not Elspeth closed in with a "Hech! ye born deevil! Ye'll aye be doin' more than ye'r tauld!" grasped the huge animal by the nape of the neck, and dragged him away very much as if she had been dealing with a kitten.

Thus relieved, the doctor recovered his feet; but he was—as Elspeth described him in a communication made not long after—"a sair lookin' chiel!" He had lost his hat, dusted his coat, and found a sad rent in one leg of his nether garments, not to mention the rage which flashed in his eye and almost foamed from his mouth. For the first moment after the rescue he seemed to have a fancy for "pitching into" old Elspeth, unreasonable as such a course would have been after her calling off the dog and finally lugging him off by main force; and he did hurl after her an appellation or two which might have furnished a rhyme to the name of the Scottish national disease; but the stout serving woman quelled him with this significant threat, and went on her way, dragging the dog towards his kennel in the backyard:

"'Deed, if ye can't keep a ceevil tongue in yer heid, I'll no be holdin' the tyke awa from ye a bit langer, and he'll eat ye up, I doubt!"

At that juncture the discomfited doctor caught sight of Robert Brand and his daughter, in the door and on the piazza, and he strode in to them without further ado, whip still in hand, rage still in his face, and threatening enough in his manner to indicate that he intended to cowhide so many of the family as he could find, male and female.

"Who let out that infernal dog?" was his first salutation, without first addressing either the old man or his daughter by name.

"He must have broken loose, himself. Indeed, Doctor, we are so sorry—" began little Elsie, who had really been frightened out of her wits, and who had that organ unknown to the phrenologists, called Hospitality, very largely developed.

"Hold your tongue, girl, and let me attend to my own business!" was the surly interruption of the invalid father, who had stopped laughing, and who had at that juncture a very low development of the corresponding organ. "We are not sorry at all. Dr. Pomeroy, I told you this morning, when I ordered you out of this house, never to come near it again; and you had better paid attention to the order."

"Then you had that dog set loose!"

"That is a lie!" was the response. The doctor, who had used the same expression in a still more offensive form, not long before, was getting the chalice returned to his lips at very short notice. And the old man, in denying the act, intended to tell the exact truth—he had not turned the dog loose, or set him upon the doctor, except secondarily. Some hours before, when the medical man had just been dismissed for the first time, he had told the Scottish woman that 'he would bundle her out, neck and crop, if she did not set the dog on that man if he ever came near the house again!' and she had promised to obey his orders: that was all! Carlo, a dear friend of his young master, had always hated the doctor, who was his enemy, and never passed without snapping and growling at him; and the old woman well knew the fact. Consequently, when she saw the buggy dashing up the lane, and recognized it, she had religiously kept her promise, darted round to the kennel, unloosed the dog and directed his attention to the obnoxious individual, with a "Catch him, laddie!" that sent him flying at the doctor's throat just as he stepped to the ground. And it was only when the old woman believed the punishment going a little too far and the victim likely to be eaten up in very deed, that she had interposed and dragged the enraged brute from his prey. All this was unknown to both father and daughter, who merely supposed that the dog had broken loose at that awkward moment; and Robert Brand's disclaimer, though a very uncourteous one, had the merit of truth. But the doctor, just then enraged beyond endurance, literally "boiled over" at the word.

"I lie, do I?" he foamed. "If you were not a miserable cripple, I would horse-whip you on your own door-step, old as you are!"

"Oh, Doctor! oh, father!" pleaded the frightened Elsie, who did not know what might be coming after this.

"Hold your tongue, girl!" again spoke Robert Brand, who still stood leaning against the lintel of the door. "Horsewhip me, would you, you poisoning Copperhead! If I could not beat out your brains with this stick, I could set a woman at you who would take you across her knee and spank you till you were flat like a pancake!"

Dr. Pomeroy thought of the woman who had dragged off the dog, and had some doubts whether she could not indeed do all that her master promised. He seemed to have the luck, that day, to fall into the way of people sturdy of arm and strong of will!

"What do you want here?" was the inquiry of the old man, before the doctor could answer again, and remembering that there might be some special errand upon which he had a right to come.

"You have remembered it, have you?" was the response. "Well, then, I want your thief of a son! Is he in this house?"

"Oh, he was a coward this morning: now he is a thief, is he? What do you want of him?"

"He committed theft at my house not more than an hour ago; and I am going to find him if he is in the State. Once more—is he here?"

"What did he steal?" asked the father with a sneer, while poor Elsie stood nearly fainting and yet unable to move from the spot, at that new charge against her brother.

"A woman." Elsie felt relieved; the old man sneered.

"Well, I can only say that if he took away any woman belonging to you, he must have a singular taste!"

"Robert Brand"—and the doctor spoke in a tone of low and concentrated passion—"once more and for the last time I ask you whether your son is in this house, with Eleanor Hill, my—my adopted daughter, in his company."

"Eleanor Hill!" gasped Elsie, but no one heard her.

"Dr. Pomeroy," answered Robert Brand, "you do not deserve any answer except a blow, but I will give you one. My son, as you call him, Carlton Brand, is not here, and will never be here again while I live, unless to be thrust out like a dog. How many girls he has, or where he conceals them, is none of my business, or yours! Now go, if you know when you are well off, for as sure as God lets me live, if I ever see you approaching this house again, I will shoot you from the window with my own hand."

Something in the tone told Dr. Pomeroy that both the assertion and the threat were true. He turned without another word, stepped to his buggy, mounted into it and drove away.

"He is alive, father—thank God!" said Elsie Brand, reverently, when the unwelcome visitor had disappeared and she was assisting the invalid back to his chair of suffering. That one assurance had been running through her little head, putting out all other thoughts, since the remark of the doctor that Carlton had been at his house not an hour before.

"He is as dead to me as if he had been buried ten years!" was the reply of the implacable father, who stood in momentary peril of the grave from some sudden turn of his disease, and yet who had not even taken that first step towards preparation for the Judgment, comprised in pity and forgiveness!

CHAPTER X.

Before and after Gettysburgh—The Apathy and Despair which preceded, and the Jubilation which followed—What Kitty Hood said after the Battle, and what Robert Brand—Brother and Sister—A guest at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—A fire-room Visit, an Interview, and a Departure for Europe.

It was a dark day for the nation—perhaps none darker!—that day of late June, 1863, marked by the occurrence of the preceding events. Private interests, private wrongs, private sorrows seemed all to be culminating or laying down fearful material for culmination in the future; but those domestic convulsions were only a faint and feeble type of that great throe agitating the whole nation. That day the bravest feared, not for themselves but for the country they loved; and that day the miserable trucklers who would long before have had the republic veil its face and sink on its knees before the arrogance of rebellion, begging for "peace" with dishonor, instead of demanding and enforcing victory,—that day they experienced such a triumph as they had never before known and such as their narrow souls could scarcely appreciate. "We told you so!" rung out from the throat of every "conditional loyalist," as the same paltry exultation had rung many an age before against the unsubmitting tribunes by the mad populace when the Volscians threatened to devastate Rome—as it had been yelled into the ears of Philip Van Artevelde and his brother defenders, when Ypres and Bruges fell, and the fierce Earl of Flanders promised death to the burghers of Ghent; and there was little, except bald defiance, that loyal men could reply. That long-boasted "invasion of the North" had come at last; and there is always a disheartening effect in the drawing of war nearer to the doors it has heretofore spared, even as there is always a scum among any population, ready to cry "ruin!" and counsel "submission" or "compromise" when a single move in the great game of war has ended disastrously.

A more dreary spectacle than Philadelphia presented during some of the days of that week, cannot very well be imagined. From Harrisburgh and many of the minor towns of the west and southwest of the State, the inhabitants had fled by thousands to other places supposed to be less easily within reach of the enemy; and, if in a future day of peace those who at this juncture took part with the rebellion should chance to be shamed with a reminder of the panic in Richmond, and the removal of the Confederate archives, after Hanover Court-House in 1862, they may very pleasantly retaliate by calling up the panic at Harrisburgh and the packing up of the Pennsylvania State records, after York and Carlisle in 1863. Hundreds of wealthy persons removed their valuables even to Philadelphia; and there is no guarantee whatever that many of them did not make a still further removal East, when they could do so without attracting disagreeable attention and running the chance of after ridicule.

There seemed to be an impression just then, in fact, that there was no power whatever to check the disciplined but half-starved and desperate rebel hordes. Even those who did not view the affair as any matter of gloom or discouragement, still believed it one of heavy loss that must be submitted to with the best grace possible.

One of the young Philadelphia merchants was recognized by a friend, on one of the very last days of June, knocking about the balls in the billiard-room of the Cattskill Mountain House, and questioned by him as to the propriety of his being away from the Quaker City at a time when so heavy a misfortune as the rebel advance to the Delaware seemed to be impending.

"Oh," said the merchant, making an eight-shot at the same moment, "I do not see any good that I could do by staying."

"And do you not believe that the rebels will reach Philadelphia?" asked the friend.

"Well, yes, I rather think they will," answered the nonchalant. "I should not be surprised if they should reach there to-morrow. In fact I telegraphed to my partner from Albany, yesterday, whenever they had taken Harrisburgh to pack up the most valuable of our goods and send them to New York."

"And when they have taken New York?" asked the interrogator, not a little amused at that new system of defending valuable property and the country.

"Oh," said the merchant, as he sighted another shot and made his carom without the tremor of a pulse—"when they take New York, as I suppose they will in a week or two, we shall move them to Boston, and so keep on working East till they drive us into Canada or the Atlantic."

And this was not all a jest, by any means. The player had so telegraphed, and he more than half believed that his goods were at that time in course of removal, while he had no thought whatever of deserting his billiard-table and going down to assist in defending them. He was not alone, meanwhile, in his reprehensible coolness, as history will be at some pains to record of that extraordinary crisis.

Philadelphia presented many strange spectacles on those days. Apart from the blowing of a brass band on every corner, the patrolling of every sidewalk by a recruiting officer with fife and drum, and the requisite number of human "stool-pigeons," and the exhibition of the placard before noted, offering every inducement in money and every plea of patriotism for "State defence,"—there were other and yet more marked indications of a period out of the common order even for war-time. The American and the Merchants', favorite resorts of mercantile buyers from the rural counties of the State, were full of guests, but they lounged in the reading and smoking-rooms, and had no thought of commercial transactions. Gold was going up, its higher rate marking increased fever in the pulse of the national patient; and yet business was almost as stagnant in the broker's offices of Third Street as were wholesale transactions in the heavy houses on Walnut and Chestnut and Market below Second. The old Tonawanda and the still older Saranac, lying idle at the foot of Walnut Street, their yards lank and bare as winter trees, and the ships waiting for freight that seemed to be long in coming, found a new use in illustrating the hopeless stagnation of the city. The theatres had nearly all closed before, and the last hurried its unprofitable season to an end. The red bricks of old Independence Hall seemed more dingy than ever; and those who glanced into the hall where the great Declaration was signed in Seventy-six, at the cracked bell and the other sad reminders of a past age and a by-gone patriotism, thought whether new masters would not claim those relics for their own, before many days, issuing a new manifesto of slavery from that second Cradle of Liberty, while their gaunt steeds were picketed in Independence Square. Men saw the sleepless eye of the clock look down from the old steeple, at night, with a helpless prayer, as if something of protection which had before lived in the sacred building was to be found no more; and the bell woke many a sleeper at midnight, with its slow and melancholy stroke, to a feeling of loss and sorrow like that which it might have evoked when sounding for the burial of dear friends. All day long crowds gathered and held their place, wearily moving to and fro, but never dispersing, in the open space in front of the historic pile; and "peace" orators, who had before been awed into silence by the threats and demonstrations of earlier days, once more ventured treasonable harangues to sections of those crowds, while the policemen scarcely found energy enough to disperse the hearers or arrest the disturbers. The bulletin boards were besieged; the newspaper offices had a demand for extras unknown to the oldest inhabitant of the quiet city; and the telegraph offices, busied alike with messages of public and private interest, had never before known such a test of their capacity since Morse first set Prometheus at his new occupation of a messenger. A few troops marched away, the Reserves (with Dick Compton in their ranks) among the number; and the New York militia regiments and some of the New Jersey troops passed through on their third campaign for "home defence;" but the public mind was not reassured. Once there was a rumor that McClellan had been called again to the command of the Army of the Potomac, or at least entrusted with the defence of the State, and then the general pulse for the moment beat wildly; but the inspiriting report died away again, the non-arrival of the morning train from Harrisburgh one day threw the whole city into panic, and the thought of successfully defending the State capital sunk lower than ever. The President, who had been bespoken to meet the Loyal Leagues and raise a new flag on Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, was too busy or too much discouraged, and would not come; and what heart lacked an excuse for sinking down when so much was threatened and so little spirit shown for meeting the great peril?

This was the week preceding the Fourth; and in that week, which closed with the National Anniversary, what changes had taken place! The time and its vicissitudes seemed to be an exact offset to the hopes and the disappointments of the same period of 1862. Then, the Army of the Potomac had lain before Richmond, and the Fourth was to have seen the old flag waving in the rebel capital. It had really seen the little General driven back upon the James, and repulsed if not hopelessly defeated. The Fourth of 1863 was to see Harrisburgh in the hands of the rebels, and the national cause sunken lower than it had before been since the advent of the secession. What did it really see? Thank God for a few such hours as those of the close of the Fourth, in the midst of whole centuries of loss and disappointment! All was changed—all was saved! Meade, a man of whom but few knew any thing more, a week earlier, than that he was a brave man, a good fighting General, and a brother of the overslaughed Captain Dick Meade, of the North Carolina—Meade had arisen in doubt and culminated in glory. Bloodiest and most important of all the battles of the Continent, Gettysburgh stood already upon the pages of the National history, soaked with the blood of the bravest—holy with the bravery and the energy which had there broken and rolled back the tide of invasion, and yet to be holier still as the Cemetery of the Battle-Dead of the Republic. Orators who began their Fourth of July addresses with only their pulses of anxiety stirred by the knowledge that there had been three days fighting, that Reynolds was killed, and that the conflict seemed to have been desperate and undecided, did not close them before they knew that the great victory was won, that Meade was to be thenceforth a name of honor in the land, that Lee and his hordes were in disastrous retreat, and that the "invasion of the North" was at an end for all the time covered by this struggle. The news of Vicksburg was soon to come, another crowning glory for the Fourth, though not known for days after, and Grant was to be a third time canonized. But just then there was enough without Vicksburg, and the nation might have gone mad over the double tidings had they come at once.

Who, that has one drop of patriotic blood surging in his heart, can ever forget the reading of those "victory extras" that flew wide over the land on Saturday night and Sunday morning—the quavering voices of the readers, the reddening cheeks and flashing eyes of the hearers? Never before did so much seem to have been won, because never before did so much seem to have been perilled. And Philadelphia, that had sunken lowest in despondency of any of the great cities, naturally rose highest when the word of victory came. Bells rung, flags waved, music sounded, gas blazed like the noonday, processions paraded, business revived as if Trade had a human form and a crushing weight had suddenly been lifted from its breast, and old Independence Hall once more boomed its bell and flashed over the city its midnight eye of fire, as if its defiance to tyranny and treason had never faltered for a moment.

It was of Gettysburgh that Kitty Hood had been reading, at her little cottage home near the great road, after her return from church on Sunday the fifth of July, when she dashed away the tears of agitation and anxiety that had been gathering in her eyes, and said:

"Dick Compton was right, after all, and I was a fool to try to keep him away! If he had obeyed me, I should have despised him now; and if he has not been killed in that terrible battle and lives to come home again, I will tell him how wrong I was, and what a ninny I made of myself, and how sorry I am for every word I spoke that day, and how much better I love him because he obeyed the call of his country instead of the poor, weak, miserable voice of a frightened woman!"

And it was of Gettysburgh and the desperate fighting around Cemetery Hill that Robert Brand had been reading, on the same Sunday afternoon, sitting in the shade of his own piazza, when he hurled out these bitter words, which poor little Elsie heard as she lay upon the lounge in the parlor within:

"This is what he has lost, the low-lived, contemptible poltroon! My son, and to shirk a great battle! He might have been dead now, and in a grave better than any house in which he can ever hide his miserable life; or he might have had something to remember and boast of all his days—that he was one of the Men of Gettysburgh! If I had two legs, I would go out and find him yet and shoot him with my own hand—the infernal cowardly cur!"

And then the disgraced and irate father tried to forget his son and to bury himself in other details of the great battle.

The sister did not reply aloud to her father's renewed objurgation. She merely sobbed a little and took from her bosom a crumpled note and read it over again for perhaps the fiftieth time, muttering low as she did so:

"Oh, father, father! If you knew how far you would need to go to seek poor Carlton and make him even more miserable than he is, and how little chance you have of ever seeing him again while you live—perhaps you would not speak so cruelly of him." Then she kissed the crumpled note again and put it back into her bosom, and tried to compose herself once more to that sleep which the tropical heat invited and her aching heart forbade.

From the tone of that letter, it would seem that Elsie had written to her brother, to his place of business in the city, when fully aware of the unreasonable indignation which moved her father, advising him not to risk serious personal insult by coming home until he should again hear from her,—and that he had replied, from a place much farther away, informing her of his intention to put seas between himself and the eyes of all who had looked upon his disgrace. But better even this long separation—thought the young girl—than a return which would induce words between father and son, never to be forgiven or forgotten while either held life and memory. Years might mellow the recollection and change the feeling—years when the country should no longer make demands upon her children to breast the battle storm in her behalf, and when the eloquent voice in the halls of justice and the active, busy life in deeds securing the common welfare, might be sufficient to win new honor and blot away any recollection of that single sad misstep in the career of manhood. Poor, gentle, loving, faithful little Elsie Brand!—it may be long before we have occasion to look upon her again, and indeed she becomes henceforth but a comparative shadow; so let it be put upon record here that she seemed "faithful among the faithless" in practising the great lessons of hope and charity. The father might utter curses to be set down against his own soul in the day when human words as well as human actions must be called into judgment; friends might look askance and enemies gloat over the disgrace of one who had before stood high above them in all the details of honorable character; even the sweetheart, whose pulses had once beaten so close to his that the twin currents seemed flowing into one—even she might find some poor excuse of pride to falsify her by-gone boast that she loved him better than all the world, and let that hollow, wordy "honor" work their eternal separation: all this might be, but the sister had no such license to waver in the course of her affection towards one who had been fondled by the same hands in babyhood and drawn sustenance from the same maternal bosom as herself. And no treason, all this, to the truths and the eternities of other loves. All other relations may sooner change than that which binds sister and brother, whose fondness has not been tainted by some falsehood in blood or chilled by some wrong in education. Wife or mistress, yesterday cold, may be to-day throbbing with the most intense warmth of absorbing passion, and to-morrow chilled again by instability in herself or unworthiness in the object of her regard: even the mother, that tenderest friend of song and story and sometimes of real life, may scatter her affections wide among so many children that each has but the pauper's share, or form new ties and forget that ever the old existed. But the brother, if he be not the veriest libel upon that sacred name, clings with undying fondness to the sister; and the sister, ever faithful, clings to the brother "through evil and through good report," when one or even both may have become a scoff and a bye-word in every mouth that opens to speak their names. Happy those men for whom the bond has never been either frayed or broken: sad for those who ever look back through the long years and see some sunny head of childhood hiding itself beneath the falling clods of the church-yard, that might have nestled closer to them in after years than all whom they have grasped, and cherished, and chilled, and lost!

It now becomes necessary to inquire the whereabouts of Carlton Brand, the subject of so much sisterly love and so much fatherly indignation, at that second period when Gettysburgh was a glorious novelty, its bloody splendors flashing broad over the loyal States. And those whereabouts may very readily be discovered. On the register of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the city of New York, his name had been inscribed on the Wednesday evening previous to Gettysburgh (the first day of July); and those among our readers who may have chanced to be sojourners at the Fifth Avenue during that week, and who will take the trouble to read over again the close and accurate description given of the lawyer on his first appearance in the presence of his sister and Margaret Hayley, in the second chapter of this narration, may not find much difficulty in remembering the appearance of so marked a man at the hotel at that period—the glances of admiration cast upon his handsome face and manly figure as he sat at table or moved quietly among the ever-changing crowd in the reading-room or down the long halls—the almost total silence which he maintained, seeming to have no acquaintances or to be anxious for escape from all conversation—his inquiring more than once every day at the office for letters which continually disappointed him—and the expression of drooping-eyed melancholy in face and restless unquiet in movement, which gave rise to many side remarks and led to many singular speculations.

He was alone—at least alone at the hotel; and Dr. Pomeroy, if he had entertained any actual belief in his suggested elopement between the lawyer and his "ward," might easily have satisfied himself, had he followed him to the commercial metropolis, that no such elopement had taken place or that the abductor had hidden his paramour carefully away and managed to keep continually out of her presence.

Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time; and the writer, without any wish or will to do so, yields to the necessity, very much as the proud man of the world yields to the pressure when events which he has assumed to direct grow too mighty for his hand and bear him away in their rush and tumult,—or as a father—to use a yet stronger and more painful image—submits with a groan and a prayer when the child of his dear love shuts the heart against him and breaks away from that tender control which it has been alike his duty and his pleasure to supply. Some of our mental children, especially when they are so real that time, place and circumstance cannot be made for them at will, are sadly unmanageable; and this instance furnishes an illustration which will be better understood at a later period. Acts may yet be recorded, while yet acts remain to record; but the heart closes, motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events without connection and actions without explanation.

Taking up his quarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Wednesday, this man, on Friday, the third of July, while the city was in agonized anxiety over the conflicting accounts of Meade's first battle of the day before, and while the black frames for the Fourth of July fireworks were being erected in front of the City Hall in the Park, with some uncertainty in the minds of the workmen whether they would not be used for a pyrotechnic display over the death-throe of the nation,—this man, Carlton Brand, took one of the omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line passing the door of his hotel, alighted at the corner of Fulton Street and Broadway, walked down to the Bowling Green and entered the office of the Cunard Steamships fronting that faded relic of the Colonial splendors of New York. When he emerged from the office, fifteen minutes later, the cash-box of the British and North American Royal Mail Steamship Company was the richer by many broad pieces of American gold, and Carlton Brand bore, folded away in his wallet, one of those costly little pearl-white wings on which the birds of passage bear themselves over the Atlantic. It was evident that he was about to desert his country—that country for which he had before refused to fight,—to desert it at the very moment when its fate before God and the world seemed to hang trembling in the balance.

Coming out from the office of the Steamship Company, apparently wooed by the breeze from the North River, the lawyer bent his steps in that direction as if intending to make the tour of the shipping at the piers and resume his conveyance at some point higher up the town. Past two or three of the piers; and the dense black smoke pouring out from the funnels of one of the transport steamers on the eve of departure for the South with troops and munitions, seemed to attract his attention. He walked down the dock and observed more closely the movements on and around the vessel. The black smoke still rolled out, and steam was hissing from the escape-valves. Heavy wagons were discharging boxes at the gangway, and with much puffing and clatter a donkey-engine was hoisting them on board. A marine stood at the plank, bayonetted musket on shoulder, and close behind him an officer. To the civil inquiry of the lawyer, how long before the steamer would sail, the sentry replied that she was then steaming-up and would probably leave within a few hours; and to a request to be allowed to come on board and see the arrangements of a government transport on the eve of sailing, the officer, after a moment's glance at the unimpeachable dress and appearance of the visitor, assented with the stately bow of his profession.

It certainly seemed strange that on that blazing day, when his errand at the Hudson side of the city had been to inhale the cool breeze from the river, Carlton Brand, within a moment after stepping on board the transport, should have ignored all the details of decks, spars, cabins, and even machinery, and descended the narrow stair-ways, little more than ladders, leading down to those flaming intestines of the ship from which the hot air crept up through the companion-ways like breaths from some roasting and agonized monster. Yet so it was; and regardless alike of the heat which fevered his lips and the greasy rails upon which he soiled his gloves and risked the smirching of his spotless summer garments, the lawyer pressed down to the fire-room, where the stokers were sweating great drops of perspiration that rolled down like beads from their broiled foreheads—where the coal was rattling and crashing as it was thrown forward, then crackling and hissing at its first contact with the flame, as it was dashed into the midst of the sweltering furnaces. Down, until he stood before those mighty furnaces and caught blinding glimpses, as the firemen momentarily opened the doors to dash in still other tons of the crackling coal of what seemed little less than a ship's-cargo of the fuel, seething, raging and lowing in such a heat that it made the old fancy of the lower pit no longer a dream but a horrible present reality.

"Terrible work for hot weather, I should think," said the lawyer, when the shovels were still for a moment and the great fires raged, roared and crackled within. He seemed to feel the necessity of saying something to do away with the impression of his being a sulky intruder,—and was addressing one of the bronzed old stokers who had paused to wipe from his grimy brow the sweat that was actually pouring into his eyes and blinding him.

"Yes, hot enough while we are lying at the dock," answered the stoker.

"Why hotter now than at any other time?" asked the lawyer, who had probably never happened to study that peculiar philosophy, simply because he had never been thrown into contact with it.

"Why? oh, Lord bless you!—because we are lying still, now, and there is no draught. When we are going through the water, and of course through the air, the motion makes a draught and we do not more than half roast."

"Then it never gets very cool down here?" was the next inquiry.

"Not very!" answered the fireman, sententiously. "But we never have the worst of these hot fires," he continued, answering something that had not been spoken but that seemed to be in the face of his auditor.

"Who then?"

"The passengers—at least some of them—on board any steamer that carries them over sea or down the coast."

"You mean when they—when the steamers take fire and burn?" The question was asked in what seemed to be a hurried and troubled voice; and had not the reflected glow from the furnace made every thing red under its light, there might have been seen a face of ghastly white contrasting with the dark and grimy one so near.

"No!" and the stoker laughed. "I did not mean that—only the thought of it. Steamers do not burn very often—not half so often as I should think they would, the way they are built, and with a whole Pennsylvania coal-mine on fire inside of them at once. When they do go, though, they make things howl! No slow burning, as there is sometimes on sailing-vessels, so that they can batten down the hatches and keep the fire under until there is a chance of help: every thing goes in a moment, and all is over in an hour—iron steamer or wood, very little difference."

"Horrible!" said the lawyer. The word seemed forced from him, and there could not be a doubt that he was at the moment fancying some terrible reality.

"Yes, horrible enough!" answered the stoker. "But what I was speaking of, is the foolish habit that passengers have—I have seen it often in crossing the Atlantic—of coming down into the fire-room very soon after they start, and taking a look at the furnaces. A good many of them never sleep a wink afterwards, during the whole voyage, I believe, thinking of that mass of red-hot coal lying in the middle of the ship, and wondering when she is going to burn. They are fools to come down at all: if they would just keep out of the way they would never know how badly it looks, and then at least they would never be burned until their time came!"

Just then the raging monster within seemed to demand more blazing food, and the stoker turned away to attend to his duty. Had he remained conversing one moment longer, he might have seen Carlton Brand totter back against the bulk-head of the fire-room, literally gasping for breath—then grapple for the railing of the stairs, and ascend the steps with the staggering motion of a sick or drunken man, breathing heavily and giving painful indications of being on the verge of falling insensible.

When the lawyer again emerged to the air of the deck, his face was ghastly white, and he seemed altogether strangely altered since the moment of his descent into those regions of fire and grime and terrible suggestion. What had so changed him?—the heat, choking his lungs and preying upon a frame unaccustomed to it?—or had the curse of his nature again found him out, in the low of the furnaces and the heedless conversation of the fireman? and did he remember that between himself and even that flight beyond the sea which only could shut out from his ears the voice of contempt and the cry of a neglected country, there yet lay the peril of the Amazon and the Austria?

This occurred on Friday the third of July; and between that day and the Sunday following there was nothing in the movements of the sojourner at the Fifth Avenue, worthy of special record. But on that Sunday afternoon, perhaps at the very hour when Kitty Hood, in one spot of that section of country which had been his old home, was glorying over her lover's having been at Gettysburgh,—and when Robert Brand, in another, was writhing and cursing over the absence of his son from the same great battle,—an incident took place at the hotel, apparently trivial, but which may subsequently be found to have exercised no slight influence on the fortunes of some of the different persons named in this chronicle. Unfortunately, again, over this little event hangs a mist and a shadow, and only slight glimpses can be obtained of what afterwards proved to be of such unsuspected importance.

On that Sunday afternoon, at about two o'clock, Carlton Brand went down from his room to the office of the hotel, to exchange a few words with the clerk, and to secure one of the battle-extras which he had just heard from his window cried in the street. Knots of men, guests, or passers-by, driven in by the pouring rain without, filled the long hall, every third holding a newspaper, every group in more or less animated conversation, and the one topic that great conflict which had just bloomed out into a great victory. The lawyer seemed to have company enough in his own thoughts, and did not join any of the groups. He secured his extra, transacted his brief business at the desk, and returned immediately upstairs. The moment after he had left the desk, a young man advanced from one of the groups near the door, asked a question of the clerk, was answered, overran a few pages of the register with eye and finger, and then passed upstairs under the guidance of a servant.

Carlton Brand had already thrown off coat and boots again, and was sitting at the open window in dressing-gown and slippers, glancing over the sensation-headings of the extra which gave the particulars of the Waterloo of Secessia,—when there was a tap at the door. Stepping hastily thither and opening it, with a muttered wonder why he could not be left alone to his reading, a well-known figure stepped into the room and one of his Philadelphia bar-intimates—perhaps the nearest to a confidential friend in the whole profession, took him by the hand. For an instant the occupant of the room seemed to be displeased at the intrusion and an expression of annoyance flitted over his face; but old friendship was evidently too powerful even for shame and lacerated feeling, and the next instant he had cordially returned the grasp.

The new-comer, strangely enough, bore no slight resemblance to Carlton Brand. We say strangely, because the lawyer was by no means such a person, in general appearance, as could be readily duplicated. Henry Thornton, his professional brother, had the same tall, lithe figure with evidence of great agility, the same mould of countenance in many respects, and with eyes of hazel only a shade darker than Brand's. But here the resemblance, which might otherwise have been extraordinary, became slighter and eventually disappeared. His complexion was much darker, even brown, from chin to forehead, indicating Southern blood or residence. His hair, curling a little, was of very dark brown, almost black; and his heavy moustache, the only beard he wore, was so nearly black as generally to pass under that designation. In spite of the similarity of form and feature, it may be imagined that these differences told very strongly on the general effect produced by the two men on the mere casual observer; and while there was that indefinable something in the face of Carlton Brand, to which attention has before been called, denoting intellect and true nobility of soul, accompanied by an occasional pitiable weakness or want of self-assertion of the full manhood, there was that quite as plainly to be read in the face of Henry Thornton, which told of dauntless courage and iron will, a brain busy and scheming if not even plotting, and powers which might not always be turned to the service of the candid, the open and the honorable. Lavater would have thought, looking at his face—Well for him and for the world if what he wills is in consonance with honor and justice, for what he wills he will pursue with the unfaltering courage of the lion and the untiring determination of the sleuth-hound!

But Nature, giving to these two men who held no known relationship whatever, so striking a resemblance in some particulars and so great a dissimilarity in others—had not quite ended her freak of comparison. It is doubtful whether either was fully aware of the fact, but the similarity between the tones of their voices, in ordinary times, was quite as marked as that between certain physical features; and any person standing that day without the door, when the two had entered into conversation, might have been puzzled to know whether two persons were really speaking or one was carrying on a monologue. This, only at ordinary times: Thornton's voice was much steadier and more uniform under feeling, and it never broke into tones so low and melancholy as that of the other, when influenced by temporary depression.

Such was Carlton Brand's visitor on that Sunday afternoon, and he it was who but the moment after was seated in the proffered chair near the window and chatting upon current topics with as much nonchalance as if he had merely called upon his entertainer at his little office on Sixth Street, Philadelphia, instead of visiting him at a hotel in a distant city.

There was a little table standing between the two windows of the room and within reach of Thornton as he sat. On the table lay part of that miscellaneous collection of articles which every careless bachelor will persist in scattering about his room at the hotel; and at the edge of what may be called the pile lay a paper more than half unfolded, which caught the observant eye of the visitor. With a quick: "Will you allow me?" which brought an affirmative response, he reached over, took up the paper, unfolded it and read a receipt for a first cabin passage in the Cunard Mail Steamship to sail from New York to Liverpool, on the 8th July, for which $130.50 had been paid by Mr. Carlton Brand.

"The Cunarder for Liverpool next Wednesday," he said, when he had finished running his eye over the passage-ticket.

"Yes," answered the owner, and he answered nothing more.

A strange expression passed over the face of his interrogator—an expression so doubtful that even Lavater, or any other man pretending to read the human countenance like an open book, might have been puzzled to say whether it conveyed pleasure, scorn, wonder, or any one of the thousand different feelings whose outward show glints over our faces as often and as transiently as the cloud-shadows floating over the mountain woods or the mottled sunshine flickering over the wheat-fields. There was something there—something which the other did not appear to notice; and with that fact we must be content.

Five minutes later, Carlton Brand, through the medium of words growing out of the discovery of the passage-ticket, was in confidential conversation with Henry Thornton with reference to the disgrace which had driven him from home and must make him an exile for years if not forever. It may have been a serious weakness, towards one who had never been even on terms of speaking acquaintance with her, to talk to him of Margaret Hayley and to confess the shameful dismissal which he had received. But Henry Thornton knew of the Hayleys if he did not claim an acquaintance with them; he had it in his power to impart information of them and their probable movements during the summer, which the other might have found difficulty in obtaining through any other means; and perhaps that knowledge gave some excuse for reciprocal confidence. At all events that confidence was given, and it elicited a return of apparently equal candor. Before the separation took place, at the end of an interview which lasted more than an hour, a strange bond seemed to have been established and cemented between the two lawyers, very different from any which official intercourse can often rivet. That interview, in fact, appeared to have produced marked effects upon both, for while on the face of Henry Thornton, as he rose to take his farewell, there was a look of entire satisfaction that could not have been without a meaning more or less creditable,—there was in the eye of Carlton Brand less of that troubled expression which had been for days resting there like a shadow, and he breathed as if a weight had been lifted from his breast. To one this new satisfaction and lightness of heart may have been no false presage: to the other, what an omen of unsuspected evil, disaster and death!

They parted at the door of the lawyer's room, with a much warmer grasp of the hand than that with which they had met little more than a hour before; and each held the palm of the other in his for a moment, as those should do who have however slight a bond in common and between whom the waves of a whole wide ocean are so soon to roll.

"A pleasant voyage and a happy return!" said the one, on the threshold.

"A pleasant summer to you, wherever you are!" was the reply of the other.

So parted, after that brief meeting, Henry Thornton and Carlton Brand. The bearer of that latter name, once so honored but now holding so doubtful a position, left New York by the Cunarder Scotia from Jersey City on Wednesday the 8th of July, looking his last that evening from the deck of his steamer, on the dim blue line of the Highlands—a fading speck of that native land that the fates had ordained he should never see again with his living eyes! And as at this moment we lose sight of him for the time, to trace the fortunes of others remaining on this side of the Atlantic, it may be well to say that his outward voyage must have been a safe and prosperous one, for there was duly registered as having arrived at Liverpool, on the twentieth of July, (a date which it may afterwards be important to remember) "Carlton Brand, Philadelphia."

CHAPTER XI.

Anomalies of the War for the Union—The Watering-place rush of 1863—A White-Mountain Party disembarking at Littleton—Who filled the Concord Coach—The Vanderlyns—Shoddy on its travels—Mr. Brooks Cunninghame and his Family—"H. T.," and an Excitement.

The War for the Union has been unlike all other great struggles, throughout, in nearly every characteristic that can be named. Unnatural in its inception, the rebellion has seemed to have the power of making unnatural many of the details through which and in spite of which it has been carried forward—of changing character and subverting all ordinary conditions. There have been anomalies in the field: still more notable anomalies in society. Unflinching bravery and stubborn devotion to the fighting interests of the country have been found blended, in the same man, with pecuniary dishonesty which seemed capable of pillaging a death-chamber. The greatest military ability has been found conjoined with such inactivity and tardiness as to paralyze action and destroy public patience. Rapidity of movement has been discovered to be wedded to such Utopian want of understanding or such culpable recklessness as to make movement not seldom a blunder instead of a stroke of policy. Times which threatened disaster have brought triumph; and the preparations made to celebrate a victory have more than once been employed in concealing a defeat. All things have been mixed in estimation. The Copperhead, detestable on account of his view of the national duty, has yet compelled some portion of respect by his real or affected reverence for a perilled Constitution; the Radical, worthy of all credit for his active spirit and uncompromising position, has yet deserved contempt for a narrowness of view which made him almost as dangerous as disloyalty could have done; and the Conservative, that man of the golden mean, that hope of the nation in many regards, has bargained for a part of the abuse which he has received from either extreme, by faulting the active measures of both and offering meanwhile no active, practical course to supply their stead.

But amid the general anomaly perhaps fashionable (or would-be fashionable) society, and the world of ease and amusement, have supplied the most interesting and the most astounding study of all. The status of the "non-productive classes" is and has been, during most of the struggle, literally inverted, and the conditions of costly enjoyment have been changing as rapidly as if we were rioting through a carnival instead of breasting a rebellion. No nation ever carried on such a war as that waged by this loyal people; and no nation ever spent so much blood and treasure in accomplishing the same comparative results. Naturally, in view of the personal bereavement, it might have been expected that society should be quiet in its amusements and low-toned in all its conversation: naturally, a people bleeding at every pecuniary pore for the public good, might have been expected to diminish personal expenditure and husband those resources on the holding-out of which so much must eventually depend. Instead of this, society, with the craped banners and the muffled drums every day appealing to eye and ear, has grown continually louder in its tone and more pronounced and even blatant in its mirth; and reckless personal expenditure has quite kept place with any general waste that the highwaymen or incapables of government had power to entail. The theatre and the circus have never before been so full, the opera has never before been so generally patronized. Babylon could never have rioted more luxuriously on the very night before its fall, than have the people of our great cities dined, ridden, danced and bathed themselves in seas of costly music, any day since the first three months of the rebellion ended.

Summer recreations have perhaps told quite as significant a story as any other feature, of the inevitable drift of society towards reckless expense and extravagant display. The summer resorts within the rebel territory may have grown desolate or deserted—the buildings of the White Sulphur and the Rockbridge Alum of Virginia may have been left empty or turned into hospitals, and Old Point may only have been visited for far other purposes than the meeting of the sea-breeze there in midsummer; but a very different fate has awaited the favorite hot-weather resorts of the North. Saratoga and Sharon of the chalybeates; Niagara and Trenton of the cataracts; the White Mountains, the Cattskills and the Alleghanies, of the high, pure air and the cloud shadow; Newport, Rockaway, Long Branch and Cape May of the south-eastern breeze and the salt aroma,—all have been, with the exception of a few frightened weeks of 1861, more densely filled during the war than at any former period in the memory of the pleasure-seeker; and wealth and enjoyment have both run riot there to an extent but little in accordance with the sack-cloth and ashes which the observant eye saw all the while lying on the head of the nation itself. All this may have been inappropriate and a part of it painful; but the result could not well have been otherwise. Some, with wealth honestly earned and no capacity for the public service, have needed rest or distraction and there found one or the other. Habitual idlers and professional students of society, never available for any other purpose, have naturally, as ever, found there their best ground of personal study. Young girls have needed the experience, and managing mammas have quite as sorely needed those fields for matrimonial campaigns. Invalids have needed their real or supposed opportunity for the recovery of lost health. Shoddy, grown suddenly rich while remaining incurably ignorant and vulgar, and finding it no easy task to force its way into the coveted "society" in the great cities, has eagerly welcomed the opportunities there afforded for at least learning the rudiments of what is called gentility, and creeping into that miscellaneous outer circle which surrounds the charmed inner. Politicians have found it necessary to do, in such places, that particular portion of the great task of boring, button-holing, prying and packing which cannot be so well done either at the primary election or the convention as around the spring or on the beach—on the piazza of the Ocean House or the United States; and officers on furlough, who had fought enough for the time or had no intention to fight at all, have found no places like these for displaying jaunty uniform and decorated shoulder to the admiring eyes of that sex which descends from Athena and recognizes the cousinship of Mars. Add to all this the rise of exchange on Europe and the folly of steamship companies in charging gold rates for passages abroad, which have together almost checked the summer exodus to the Old World,—and there is no longer reason to wonder at the watering-place crowds and the summer gayeties which have made carnival throughout the loyal States and filled the wallets of enterprizing landlords.

The year of grace 1863 saw an earlier beginning to the summer hegira than any other late year had done, as before its close it saw houses over-crowded, waiters overworked, and cots at a premium, from Casco to Cresson. The smoke had not yet rolled away from Gettysburgh when "the great North River travelling-trunk" began its perambulations; and by the middle of July everybody who was anybody (except a few in the city of New York, temporarily frightened or hindered by the riots) was gone from the great cities, and they were given over to the temporary occupancy of those laboring starlings who could not "get out," and the ever ebbing and flowing wave of transient visit.

All this as a necessary reminder of the period and a back-ground to the incidents so soon to follow,—and because the course of narration, at this juncture, leads us for a time to one of the favorite shrines of American summer pilgrimage and into the whirl of that literal storm of fashion and curiosity which eddies and sweeps, all summer long, around the peaks of the White Mountains—the Alps of Eastern America.

It was a somewhat varied as well as extensive crowd of passengers that disembarked from the cars of the White Mountain Railroad at Littleton, in sight of the head-waters of the Connecticut, about five o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, the 29th of July. The dog-days had begun; New York, Philadelphia and Boston were steaming furnaces, though partially emptied as we have before had occasion to notice; and those who had already visited them during the month, declared that neither Saratoga, the Cattskills, or even Lake George or Niagara, had the power to impart any coolness to suffering humanity. The sea-shore or the northern mountains offered the only alternative; and a very heavy list of passengers had come up that day by the Norwich and Worcester line from New York, the Boston lines falling in at Nashua Junction, and the Vermont Central throwing in its reinforcement at Wells River.

Every portion of the loyal States (and no doubt a portion of the disloyal, if the truth could have been known!) had seemed to be represented in the crowd that thronged the platforms while fighting for a mouthful of lunch at Nashua Junction or crowding in to a hurried dinner at the poor substitute for the burned Pemigawasset House at Plymouth. There were even half a dozen resident Europeans—English, Scotch, with one Frenchman who snuffed continually, and one Spaniard who smoked in season and out of season—people who had no doubt rushed over to see the "American war," but very soon found the South too hot for comfort, in one sense or the other,—among the number destined to add variety to the overfilled caravanserais of the Franconia and White ranges. A few had dropped away at Weir's Landing, for a day or two on Lake Winnipiseogee, enticed by the pleasant loom of Centre Harbor down the bright blue water and the romantic figure of the Lady of the Lake on the prow of her namesake steamer; and a few more had left the train at Plymouth for the long coach-ride of thirty miles through the mountains to the Glen House, or by the southern approach to the Profile or the Crawford. Two or three stage-loads, too, who had but one thought in their pilgrimage—Mount Washington,—were bustling in for the immediate ride from Littleton to the Crawford; but there were still four heavy stage-loads—not less than forty to fifty persons—going on to the crowded Profile House that evening.

Some of the occupants of one of those heavy stages, rolling away towards the Profile, require, for the purposes of this narration, a somewhat closer view than was probably taken of them by many of their fellow-passengers; and that view cannot be more appropriately taken than at this moment.

On the back seat of that vehicle sat two ladies, with a troublesome boy of ten years wedged in between them as if to come the nearest possible to getting him out of the way. Neither paid the youngster that attention which would have indicated that he belonged to them or was travelling in their company; and indeed they had every right as well as every inclination to wash their hands of his relationship if they could not wash from their travelling-dresses the marks of his taffy-smeared fingers. The two ladies were evidently mother and daughter; and at least one person in the coach had remarked them as they came up from Concord, and seen that their sole chaperon and protector seemed to be a son of the one and brother of the other, some eighteen or twenty years of age. As he saw them then and as he afterwards better knew them, they may be briefly described.

The Vanderlyns were Baltimoreans—the widow and children of a man of large wealth and considerable distinction, who had died three or four years before in that city, after having amassed a fortune by property speculations and subsequently filled more than one responsible office under the State government. They had the true Southern pride in wealth and position; and the hand of the daughter had already been sought, however ineffectually, by scions of the best families in and about the Monumental city. Let it be added that they belonged, whatever may have been their pride and arrogance as a family, to the not-too-extensive class of loyal Marylanders,—and then a better title of nobility will have been enrolled than any that Clayton Vanderlyn's money and former public employments had power to supply. The widowed mother and her children were among the few residents below Mason and Dixon's line who had not forgotten the pleasant summer days of old in the North, when Puritan and Cavalier met as friends and brothers; and this summer tour, which was to include Saratoga and Newport before it closed, was a result of the old recollection.

Mrs. Vanderlyn, the mother, seemed forty-five, but was fine-looking and had evidently been handsome in her youth—with those splendid brown eyes that must then have sparkled so much more brilliantly than at this period, and that perfect wealth of chestnut hair, not yet in the least sprinkled with gray, which must then have been a charm and a glory. Her travelling-dress was very plain, but of the best materials; and every thing in her appearance—especially pride of look and action,—spoke of wealth, the habit of mingling in that indefinable but actual thing, good society, and a perfect consciousness of what she was and what she possessed. Those who looked twice upon Mrs. Vanderlyn, with keen eyes, had no difficulty in deciding that she might be a very pleasant acquaintance for those in her own "set" and whom she considered her equals,—but that she would be any thing but a pleasant acquaintance for those whom she despised or with whom she chanced to fall into feud.

Clara Vanderlyn, the daughter, was a yet more interesting study than her mother; and it seemed altogether probable that the same observer before mentioned, and who will be hereafter more particularly introduced, coming up in the same car from Nashua and again thrown into near proximity in the coach, had read and was reading that second page of the Vanderlyn genealogy with peculiar care and attention. She was of middle height; slight, but well-rounded and evidently elastic in figure, with a clearly cut but very pleasant face, eyes a shade darker than Mrs. Vanderlyn's, and hair what that lady's had probably been twenty years before. A wonderful feature, indeed, was that head of hair—fine, silken, but perfectly massive in profusion, with more of a tendency to the wave than the curl, and of that rich golden chestnut or true auburn so seldom seen though so often lauded. At the first observation, it seemed that Clara Vanderlyn's hair was the great charm of her presence; but those who had the good fortune to be many hours in her company, learned that a still stronger and more abiding charm lay in the affability of her manners, the expression of thorough goodness in her whole demeanor, and the purity and sweetness of her smile. That face was certainly worthy of the fixed gaze which had rested upon it quite as often during the afternoon as delicacy permitted; and it might even have furnished excuse for glancing at it a moment too long, and planting blushes on those cheeks that the lip could have no hope of gathering.

The third and youngest of the family, Frank Vanderlyn, did not enter into the group under observation, as he was at that time on the top of the coach with half a dozen others, enjoying the cigar which had been impossible in the passenger-car. But the glimpses caught of him before disembarking, may suffice to complete the family triad. He seemed a well-grown stripling, verging upon manhood, with a face distantly reminding the observer of his sister's, but with darker hair than either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Clara, and with an expression of settled hauteur upon his well-cut features, which very much detracted from the charm of a face that would otherwise have been singularly handsome. He was dressed a little too well for dusty travel, and wore more wealth in a single diamond in his cravat and a cluster-ring on the little finger of his right hand, than most young men would have been either able or willing to devote to such purposes of mere ornament.

This description of the occupants of that singularly-fortunate coach may have very little interest beyond that of a mere catalogue; yet it must be continued, for Fate, that grim old auctioneer who sometimes knocks us down at very low prices and to odd owners, may have some necessity for a mercantile list of his chattels.

The occupants of the middle seat were three in number, and they could have furnished any needed information as to the personality of the troublesome boy with the taffied fingers, who had been wedged between Clara Vanderlyn and her mother. All of one family—that second triad: Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, and Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame. The first, a squat man of fifty-five, with a broad, coarse, beardless face, bad teeth and bristly gray hair just suffering under its first infliction of slaty-brown hair-dye. His large hands had been all day cased in kid gloves, spite of the heat of the weather; and his gray suit, of really fine material, had a sort of new look, and did not seem to be worn easily. There was an impression carried about by the man and disseminated at every movement, that another and a much shabbier suit hung immediately behind his bed-room door at home, and that in that he would have been easy and comfortable, while in the fashionable garb he was laboring under a sort of Sunday-clothes restraint. The second, a stout woman of fifty, with reddish hair, a coarse pink face, high cheek bones and pert nose, corresponding well with her lord in conformation, while it wore an expression of dignity and self-satisfaction to which the countenance of that poor man could not have made the least pretension. She was only a little overdressed, for travelling—her bonnet of fine straw too much of a flower-garden for her years, a heavy gold watch-chain with the watch prominent, a diamond breastpin flashing hotly, and her voluminous blue lawn of costly fabric partially covered by a long gray mantle which must have been recommended to her by some mantua-maker with a "spasm of sense." But if there was any restraint in the make-up of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that restraint was fully compensated by the gorgeousness of the general arrangement of Miss Marianna. That young lady of thirty, with a large mouth, sandy hair, bluish gray eyes and freckles, a dumpy figure and no eye-brows whatever, was arrayed—shade of Madame La Modiste forgive us while we pen the record—arrayed for that hot and dusty day of railroad and coach riding, in a rich pink silk flounced and braided to the extreme of the current fashion; with a jockey leghorn and white feather which—well, we may say with truth that they relieved her face; with a braided mantle of white merino that might have been originally designed for an opera-cloak; white kid gloves in a transition state; and such a profusion of gold watch, gold chain, enamelled bracelet, diamond cluster-breastpin, costly lace, and other feminine means of attracting admiration and envy, that the brain of a masculine relator reels among the chaos of finery and he desists in despair. The fourth of this family was Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, ætat ten, wedged in between the two aristocratic representatives of the Vanderlyn exclusiveness, and the freckles on his coarse little face and hands about equally balanced by the dauby debris of more or less hardened taffy to which allusion has before been unavoidably made.

This group (the fact may as well be set down in this place as at any later period)—this was Shoddy on its summer tour. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had been, a considerable number of years before, Patrick B. Cunningham; and his name had been scrawled, many hundreds of times, to receipts for work done as a petty contractor about the streets of New York City, with one horse and a dirt-cart, digging out cellars, and helping to cart the dirt of pipe-layings and excavations. Gradually he had crept up to two carts, and then to three. Eventually he had reached the employing of a dozen or two, with the bipeds that drove and the quadrupeds that drew them. By that time he had removed from his shanty of one story and rented a house. Then he had gone into ward politics and contracts with the city, at about the same time, and emerged into possession of a couple of brown-stone-front houses and a seat in the Board of Aldermen, at periods not very far apart. People said that the seat in the municipal board, with the "ring" performances (more or less clown-ish) thereunto appertaining, were made the means of increasing the two houses to four and of causing Mrs. Patrick B. Cunningham to forget the whole of her husband's first name and merely use the initials "P. B.," which might or might not stand for 'Pollo Belvidere. Then had come the war, with that golden opportunity for all who stood prepared for it. Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been at that time the proprietor of some fifty or sixty gallant steeds used before dirt-carts, and his vigorous and patriotic mind had conceived the propriety of aiding the country by disposing of those mettled chargers as aids towards a first-class cavalry mount. He had sold, prospered, bought more dirt-cart and stage-horses with an admixture of those only to be discovered between the thills of clam-wagons, found no difficulty in passing them as fit for the service, through the kindness of a friendly inspector who only charged two dollars per head for deciding favorably on the quadrupeds,—sold and prospered again and yet again. Mr. P. B. Cunningham had accordingly found himself, three months before the period of this narration, the lawful proprietor of half a million, acquired in the most loyal manner and without for one moment wavering in his connection with either Tammany Hall, through which he managed the Democrats, or the Loyal League by which he kept in favor with the Republicans.

So far Mr. P. B. Cunningham had been uninterruptedly successful—the monarch as well as architect of his own fortune. But at that period (the three months before) he had suddenly been made aware that every man has his fate and the end of his career of supremacy. Mrs. P. B. Cunningham had proved herself his fate and put a sudden end to his supremacy. That lady, all the while emerging, had emerged, from the dust and darkness of lower fortune, and become a fashionable butterfly. She had ordered him to buy a four-story brown-stone front, finer than any that he owned, on one of the up-town streets not far from the Avenue; and he had obeyed. She had ordered him to discard his old clothes, and he had obeyed again, though with a sincere reluctance. She had changed his name to Brooks Cunninghame, (observe the e!) her own to Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, that of Mary Ann to Miss Marianna Brooks Cunninghame, and that of the male scion of the house, ætat ten as aforesaid, to Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame. The door-plate of the new house could not be arranged in accordance with the new programme, for door-plates had been voted vulgar and abandoned by the creme de la creme; but the family cards had been made to bear all the blushing honors in steel engraving and round-hand. This done, the requisite jewelry bought, and some other little arrangements perfected which may develop themselves in due time, the lady had informed Mr. Brooks Cunninghame that both the health and the dignity of the family required summer recreation, and dragged him away on that tour of which we have the privilege of witnessing one of the progresses.

Some reference has been made to the array, rather gorgeous than otherwise, of Miss Marianna, for dusty travel. A few words which had passed between the three heads of the family at one of the Boston hotels that morning, may give a little insight into the philosophy of this arrangement. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, yet retaining a little of the common-sense of his dirt-cart days, had ventured to suggest that "Mary Ann mought wear her commoner duds to ride in, for thim fineries 'ud be spiled before night wid the dust intirely;" and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, alike indignant at a suggestion so smacking of low life and grieved to find that her husband would persist in retaining a few touches of the brogue of which she had cured herself and her children so triumphantly,—had answered with a sort of verbal two-edged sword that did fatal execution on both the others:

"Brooks Cunninghame, you'd better keep your mouth shut if you can't open it without letting out some of that low Irish! One would think you drove a dirt-cart yit! And you, my dear"—to Marianna (the mother had been "posting herself" in some of the phrases of "good society," as well as in some other things which may also yet develop themselves)—"you, my dear, put on the very best o' them things that you've got! Ain't we rich, I should like to know? We may see a good many folks to-day, in them cars, and who knows whether you mightn't lose a beau that'd take a fancy to you, if you went slouchin' around with your old things on? Dress up, my dear!"

Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had succumbed; Miss Marianna had "dressed up," as per order; and collective Shoddy was thus far on its way, without accident, towards the first halting-place in the grand tour of the mountains.

But what of the observer who has more than once before been mentioned, and who sat in the corner of the front seat, half buried under the voluminous skirts of two ladies who have nothing whatever to do with this narration, but looking so steadily (people who have habitually ridden in those Concord coaches know that the front is another back, and that the occupants of the front and back seats face each other)—looking so steadily, we say, at every permissible opportunity, into the sweet face of Clara Vanderlyn? He was a man of apparently thirty years of age, rather tall and very vigorous-looking even if slight, with curling dark hair, almost or quite black, and worn short, the face finely cut and showing no beard except a close, full moustache of raven blackness, the complexion (brow and all, as could be noticed when he lifted his hat from his head, as he often did, for coolness) of such a dark clear brown as to mark him of Southern birth or blood, clothes of thin dark gray material, with a round tourist hat and a duster, the small hands gloved in summer silk, and the whole appearance and manner that of a gentleman, used to good society, and very probably professional. He had been reading, nearly all the way up from Worcester, some of the other passengers noticed—though it must be confessed that a part of his reading had been over the top of the book at that attractive large type formed by a pretty human face; and no blame is intended to be cast upon Clara Vanderlyn when we say that that young lady had more than once met the evidently admiring glance of so fine-looking a man, with the little tinge of color that was becoming, but without any expression upon her face or any thought in her mind, resenting any more than returning an admiration which she believed that she had a right to receive and any gentleman to pay thus respectfully. He had spoken but seldom, during the ride, in such a way that any person then present had heard him; but once he had taken (or made) occasion to apologize to Miss Vanderlyn and her mother for being thrown against their seat by the motion of the car while walking through it, on the rough road when coming up from Plymouth to Wells river; and his few words, as the lady remarked, consorted well with the respectability (to say the least) of his appearance. As to his personality, which there did not seem the slightest occasion for his wishing to disguise, there was a big black trunk in the baggage-wagon following behind the line of coaches, and a small satchel strapped over his shoulder as he rode; and the first bore the initials "H. T." and the direction "Cincinnati."

While so much attention has been paid to the occupants of that single coach, leaving the others and even the noisy passengers on the roof of this, unnoticed, the vehicles had been buzzing and clattering along over the table-land lying at the foot of the mountains, past the little hamlet of Franconia, and nearing the mountains themselves. A glorious July evening it was, with the fiery air which had been so oppressive below gradually cooled by the approach to the presence of the monarchs, and the smoke from the fires in the woods playing fantastic tricks among the peaks, and compensating for the absence of the clouds which sometimes enveloped them. Not half the passengers in those four stages had ever seen the mountains before; and not one, even of those accustomed to such scenery, but felt the blood beating a little quicker as the mountain road beyond Franconia was reached, and they began to experience those rapid ascents, and yet more rapid descents, which accompany thence all the way to the Notch, with grand old woods overhanging, steep and sheer ravines at the side of the road that made the head dizzy in looking, reverential glimpses of the awful peaks of Lafayette and the Cannon frowning ahead, and of Washington, grander still, towering far away over the White range, and with all the other accompaniments of the finest mountain scenery on the Atlantic coast of the American continent. There was quite enough, indeed, to engage the attention of any except the most blasé and ennuyée traveller, in the grandeur of the scenery and the excitement of being galloped in rocking, lumbering, four-horse coaches, down declivities of road which would have made a driver in any ordinary hill-country draw tight rein and creep down with a heavy foot on the brake.

Not a few nervous passengers, first or last, dashing up and down the slopes of the White Mountain roads, have been more or less frightened, and wished that they could be once more on terra firma without incurring the penalty of a laugh at their cowardice; and in the present instance this little bit of locomotion was not to be allowed to pass without an adventure.

Half an hour from the foot of the mountain the coach went rapidly up a sharp ascent in the road, then dashed down again at full gallop, striking one of those necessary nuisances known as "breakwaters" when a few yards from the top, with a shock that sent the coach-body leaping on its leathern jacks like a yawl-boat in a heavy surf, made some of the outsiders on the top shout and hold on merrily to keep from being whirled off into one of the side-ravines, and created such a state of affairs inside the vehicle, generally, as effectually broke up the monotony. That shock drove the head of Mrs. Vanderlyn back against the leathern cushions with a force seriously damaging to the crown of her bonnet, brought a slight scream from Clara, who was frightened for the instant, made the troublesome Master Brooks Brooks yell and dash a dirty hand into the dress of each of the ladies who had the honor of the same seat, and elicited from Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame and her husband one of those brief but very significant marital displays which were no doubt afterwards to edify so many. Whether the lady had ascertained that fashionable people must always fall and faint under any sudden excitement, or whether the shock really frightened as well as unseated her, is a matter of no consequence: certain it is that she at that juncture threw up her hands and rolled up her eyes, gave one scream that degenerated into a groan, rolled from her seat and subsided into the bottom of the coach, under the feet of "H. T.," in what seemed to be a fit of some description. Miss Marianna, really alarmed, with the affectionate if not classic words, "Oh, mammy!" made a grab at that lady, clutching the back of her hat and tearing it from the head it crowned, while Master Brooks Brooks changed his yell into a howl and Mr. Brooks Cunninghame stooped down, terror in his face and his hands feeling around at the bottom of the vehicle for any portion of what had been his wife, with the affectionate but not politic inquiry: "Is it kilt ye are, Bridget?"

Not politic?—no, certainly not! A stronger word might be applied without risk to the unfortunate expression. Among the changes in family polity not before indicated, had been an indignant throwing over of her very honest name of "Bridget" by the wife of the horse-contractor, and the adoption of "Julia" in its stead. More than one curtain-lecture had poor Mr. Brooks Cunninghame endured, before leaving New York, on the necessity of avoiding any blunder in that regard, when they should be "away from home"; and he had not escaped without severe drill and many promises of perfection in his part. And now to have forgotten the adopted "Julia" and used the tell-tale "Bridget" at the very moment of the family's entering upon their first essay in fashionable watering-place life, was really a little too much for patience not entirely angelic.

Both the poets and the romancers tell of cases in which some word of heart-broken affection, uttered at the instant when the death-film was stealing over the eyes of the beloved one, has had power to strike the dulled sense and call back for a moment the fleeting life when it had escaped far beyond the reach of any other sound. Something of the same character—not quite so romantic, perhaps, but quite as real,—was developed in the present instance. The woman may have been falling into an actual faint; but if so, that offensive word pierced through the gathering mists of insensibility, and she crawled out from the entanglement of legs before any effectual aid could be afforded her, and with such a look of contempt and hatred burning full upon her unfortunate husband that he must have felt for the moment as if placed directly under the lens of a sun-glass at focus. Mr. Brooks Cunninghame shrank into his number eleven patent-leathers, and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame "swatted" herself (there is no other word in or out of the language that will quite so well express the act) down on the seat with an air that implied a wish for some one's head being beneath her at that juncture. Her glance had not at all softened, nor had "H. T." ceased looking out of the window or Clara Vanderlyn (behind her) yet taken her handkerchief from her mouth, when the female Cunninghame said, in what she thought very honeyed accents:

"Mr. Brooks Cunninghame, I wish you would find some other time to go and call me nicknames, than when I am jolted out of my seat in that way and a'most dead!"

The stroke of policy was a fine one, and even the thick head of Mr. Brooks Cunninghame recognized the necessity of following it up—an act which he performed thus gracefully and with a look intended for one of the staring ladies on the front seat:

"Yes, mim, her name isn't Bridget at all at all, but Julia. It's only a bit of a way I have of jokin' wid her, mim!"

This was satisfactory, of course—absolutely conclusive; and so Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame grew mollified by degrees; the redness which had come into the face of Miss Marianna gradually faded out; Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame took occasion to manifest his filial fondness by reaching over and hugging his mother with hands just re-coated with candy dug out of his capacious pocket; and the Concord coach, with its consorts, rolled and jolted and swayed along, up and down the mountain road to its destination.

CHAPTER XII.

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.

CHAPTER XIII.

Miss Clara Vanderlyn and her Pet Bears—A Misadventure and a Friendly Hand in Time—The Question of Courage—Halstead Rowan and Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame on Geography—The Dead Washington, the Flume and the Pool—With the personal relations weaving at that juncture.

Breakfast was over at the Profile, on the next morning; the stages had rolled away for Littleton, the Crawford and Plymouth; and preparations were in progress for a ride of two or three wagon-loads down the glen to the Flume,—when "H. T.," cigar in mouth, passed out from the bar-room to the piazza and thence across the plateau in front, towards the billiard-room and ten-pin-alley, standing a hundred yards away to the right, and at the very bottom of the slope of the mountain. He had seen, in the dusk and afterwards in the moonlight of the night before, that a couple of the rough pets of the mountain region were sojourning at the Notch, in the shape of half-grown black bears, chained to stakes some twenty feet apart, with a dog-kennel for their joint retreat, perhaps a hundred feet from the house and immediately in front of it, where their antics could be discerned and enjoyed from the piazza and the front windows. He had seen, too, going out earlier that morning, that they did not appear yet old enough to be dangerously vicious, and that they seemed very playful for that description of beast. Everybody was feeding them, from early morning to dusk, with nuts, raisins and crackers surreptitiously taken from the table for that purpose; and the youngsters no doubt consumed in feeding the young Bruins, quite as much food as they themselves managed to devour.

Just then not less than a dozen persons were surrounding the household favorites, feeding them, putting them through their clumsy evolutions which principally consisted in sitting erect or climbing a short post to get a nut placed on the top,—or developing the usual human propensity for teazing. Most of them were ladies, and among the others, as he went by at a short distance, he recognized Miss Clara Vanderlyn, his fellow-passenger of the day before,—her face rosy with the excitement of a just-accomplished morning walk, her bonnet on arm, and her whole countenance radiant with amusement as she plied the dusky pets with her pocket full of nuts and raisins. She seemed to have acquired a wonderful ascendancy over the beasts in a very brief acquaintance; for while all the others shrank from coming absolutely within reach, she not only fed them without fear but rubbed their black coats and patted their gristly noses as if they had been pet kittens. Two or three men were lounging near, evidently admiring the new lady accession to Profile society, but none claiming an acquaintance.

"H. T.," who either had a propensity for ten-pins that morning, overbalancing the admiration of Miss Vanderlyn which he had shown the day before, or a still stronger attraction for company whom he knew to be at the alley—"H. T." was just passing on when Margaret Hayley, accompanied by the inevitable Captain Hector Coles, came out of the door of the billiard-room and advanced towards the bear-stakes. It must remain a mystery whether this appearance from the door did or did not make a change in his own necessity for exercise: suffice it to say that he stopped, turned partially around and joined the group who were making levee to the Bruins.

At that moment, when Clara Vanderlyn had succeeded in luring one of the bears to the top of his "stool of repentance" (the short post), and was bending close above him, feeding and fondling what few other female hands dared touch,—a new actor came upon the scene, in the shape of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, accompanying his "Mommy." He had not died the night before as might have been expected from his surfeit, but the freckled appearance of his face was materially improved by a ground hue of greenish white which his short sickness had imparted. His careful mamma had dressed him for that gala-day in a complete plaid suit of blue and white, with a cap of the same material and a black feather; and he looked scarcely less ornamental than useful. Evidently, sick as he had really been, he was all alive and awake that morning and might be safely calculated upon for adding to the general comfort by prowess of mouth and fingers. And the company were not obliged to wait very long for proof that the scion of the house of Cunninghame was aware of the duties of his position and quite equal to them. He left the maternal hand, spite of the clutching of the latter, at the moment of arriving at the bear-stakes, and spying what he rightly judged to be a good opportunity, stepped rapidly round behind the bear, caught him by the stumpy tail, and gave him a sharp twitch which nearly threw him from the top of the post.

In an instant the playful nature of the bear was gone, and with one sudden growl he raised his heavy paw with its sharp claws and struck full at the face of Miss Vanderlyn, not two feet from him. Every one present saw the blow, but no one seemed to have enough presence of mind or courage to shield her from a stroke which, falling full in her unprotected face, must certainly have disfigured her for life.

No one—it has been said: no one of those known to be present, most of whom were women or children; and neither "H. T." nor Captain Hector Coles had yet come near enough to be of any possible service. Yet the blow did not reach Clara Vanderlyn. A hand and arm were suddenly dashed between the paw and the threatened face, with such force that while the sharp claws tore the skin and flesh in ribbons from the back of the hand and split the coat-sleeve as if it had been paper,—the bear was knocked backward off his perch and rolled over in a ball on the ground at the side of the kennel. When any of the company sufficiently recovered from their astonishment to glance at the face of the lucky yet unlucky preserver, they saw that it was that of the bluff arrival of the evening before, Halstead Rowan.

With the exception of three persons, all present rushed up at once, under the impression that Rowan's hand must be seriously injured. One of these exceptions was "H. T.," who made a movement to dart forward, even from his distance, when he saw the blow impending, but who the instant that it had fallen turned and walked back towards the ten-pin alley. The second was Margaret Hayley, who had recognized the personality of both the conversationists of the previous evening, and who naturally stopped in blank surprise to see one of two persons whom she supposed to be intimate friends, turn away the moment that the other was wounded. The third was Captain Hector Coles, who really had no power to do otherwise than obey the check laid upon him by the lady's hand.

All who saw knew that the injury must be severe, but it might have been the scratch of a pin for any effect which it seemed to produce on the Illinoisan. The blood was streaming profusely from the wound, but almost before any one saw it the other hand was inserted in a side-pocket, and a white handkerchief drawn thence and wrapped around the injured member.

"Are you much hurt, sir?"

"What a narrow escape, miss!"

"Indeed, I thought his paw would injure your face terribly!"

"Somebody ought to kill that boy!"

These and a score of similar expressions burst from the dozen or two of spectators. Miss Vanderlyn had caught the young man by the sleeve of the coat, with perceptible nervousness in her grip, and said, with all that sweet smile faded from her face, and her voice trembling with anxiety:

"Indeed—indeed, sir, I am very grateful to you. I should have been badly hurt, I fear, but for your kind aid. Pray let us do something to prevent your suffering so much from your generosity. I am afraid that you are very much injured!"

"Oh, not in the least, madame—miss, perhaps I should say. Nothing but a scratch; and if the company at the Profile do not object to a big glove, none of us will be aware of the accident in a few minutes."

"Trust me, sir!" said the young lady, in the same anxious tone, "I shall be aware of your kindness so long as I live."

"Pray do not mention it again!" said Rowan. "Indeed I am only too happy that the little affair occurred." He was telling the truth, beyond a question, however far he might have been from telling what they equally require in the courts of law—the whole truth; and again for one instant there might have been seen sweeping over his face the same changing expression that had played hide-and-seek there on his first arrival the evening before:—admiration—regard—reverence—hope—joy; and then the dull shadow of recollection and hopelessness.

Clara Vanderlyn, too, whether she had or had not remarked him on that occasion—Clara Vanderlyn saw and read his face now! Her eyes fixed for one moment full upon his, then drooped, and the rich blood crept up to brow, neck, and bosom, from which it had been expelled by the temporary fright. For an instant she was silent, and seemed to be studying; then she drew from the little reticule which hung upon her arm a card-case, took out a card, and handed it to Rowan, with a still more conscious blush, her old smile, and the words:

"I am aware, sir, that this is a singular introduction, and on my part a painful one, as it has been the means of causing you an injury; but my mother and my brother will be glad to know you and to thank you better than I can do."

"Miss Vanderlyn," said Rowan, taking the card and glancing at the name just as earnestly as if he had never paid any attention whatever to the register at the office, "you do me too much honor. I have no card in my pocket. Would you be kind enough to give me another of yours?"

She at once handed him another card and a pencil, and he dashed down, in a bold, rapid, and mercantile hand, though he used the sinister member for the operation, the name and address which the little black trunk had before revealed to those who chose to read.

"Thank you, Mr. Rowan. Good-morning! Pray take care of your hand, or I shall never forgive myself!" she said, nodding to her new acquaintance, and turning towards the house. Rowan bowed low, said good-morning, and strolled away towards the ten-pin alley, apparently not more concerned by the hurt than if he had merely pricked his finger. He was one of those booked for the ride to the Flume, but he seemed to need severer exercise, and the moment after he might have been seen with his hand still wrapped in the bloody white handkerchief, bowling away at the pins with the other, and humming the Grand March in "Norma" as if he thought that a favorable strain of music to accompany the levelling of obstacles or enemies.

Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, hearing the threat directed at her promising boy, had mustered common-sense enough to hurry him away from the scene of action. Captain Coles and Miss Hayley had meanwhile come up, and "H. T.," turning once more before he reached the alley, reached the spot at the same moment. For the first time, in broad daylight, Margaret Hayley met the strange man face to face, and her cheek whitened—why, even she perhaps could not tell—at that expression or resemblance which she traced there. If there was any answering expression of agitation or surprise on the face of the man with the initials, she failed to read it, and her eyes in a moment sank from a survey which seemed so profitless. They were at that time very near each other, and Captain Coles and "H. T." not more than six feet apart. Their eyes met, and that indefinable something passed between them before another word was spoken, which includes antagonism, if not deadly hostility. There was no reason to believe that they had ever met before the preceding evening; there was no reason to believe that they could ever have an interest in conflict; and yet those two men were foes, and would remain so until one or the other should be thoroughly conquered.

"A go-ahead fellow, I should not be afraid to stake my life!" said one of the gentlemen who had just come up, alluding to the hero of the hour and seeming to address any one who might choose to answer.

"Ya-a-as!" slowly and doubtingly said Captain Hector Coles, caressing his beard and throwing almost insufferable arrogance into a manner which naturally had quite enough of it. "Ya-a-as, go-ahead enough, apparently, but not a bit of a gentleman. Rough as the bear he just knocked over, and looks as if he might have come from among something of the same breed!"

"No, not a gentleman, probably!" said "H. T.," with a sneer in his tone quite as little disguised as the other's arrogance. "But he is something a good deal better, in my opinion, and something a good deal rarer—a man, every inch of him!"

"At any rate," said another, who had not yet spoken, "I would give a hundred dollars to have blundered into an introduction to that splendid girl as he has done, even if it cost me a hand worse scratched than his."

"He has had worse scratches! Did you notice the scar on his cheek, coming away down here to the neck?" said one of the ladies who had witnessed the whole affair, addressing Margaret Hayley.

"No—has he a scar?"

"A terrible one. I think he must have been a soldier, at some time or other."

"I believe that he has the noblest gift ever conferred by God upon man,—that of courage!" answered Margaret. "If he was a slave or a savage I could love and respect him for that, as I should despise him if he was a king without it!"

From the depth of what a terrible wound in her own heart was the young girl speaking, and what a concentrated force of bitter earnest rankled in such words falling from her beautiful lips! Captain Hector Coles heard, but made no answer, as why should he, for was he not one of the country's defenders and a brave man by profession? "H. T." heard her, and his upper lip, under the shadow of his dark moustache, set down tightly upon the lower, while over his handsome dusky face passed an expression which might have been pain and might have been the crushing out of some last scruple of conscience that stood between him and a half-intended line of action.

"Passengers for the Flume" had been the call some minutes before; and by the conclusion of this scene, at nine o'clock or thereabout, the wagons for that daily ride of inveterate Franconians were drawn up at the door. They were two in number, the list of riders for that fine morning being unusually heavy. Not coaches, that necessarily shut away a part of the view, but long low wagons on jacks, each with four or five cross seats, a heavy brake and four mettled horses—for fine weather and through the shaded glen roads, the safest and pleasantest of all the mountain conveyances. Five minutes sufficed to fill both those conveyances, with some thirty persons, among the number all those in whom this narration awakes any interest. How they were divided off or how seated is a matter of no consequence, except in a certain particular. Halstead Rowan managed to secure a seat in the same wagon with Clara Vanderlyn, though at the other end of the vehicle,—and in so doing found himself by the side of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame and only one remove from that hopeful, Master Brooks Brooks. Not enjoying quite the same facilities as some of the others for studying that lady the night before, he had still been attracted to her at breakfast and found time to "cypher up" her calibre and social position to a most amusing nicety. Whether wildness was the normal condition of his character, as seemed possible, or whether his slight rencontre with the young bear, and the flattering conversation with a pretty girl which followed, had dizzied his brain a little, as was both possible and natural,—he was in high spirits and the very demon of mischief had taken possession of him. He had apparently determined to devote himself somewhat to the comfort of that Arch-priestess of Shoddy during the morning ride, and a pleasant time that elevated personage was likely to have of it!

Just after leaving the breakfast table, Rowan had chanced to overhear a few words of conversation between Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame and one of the lady habitues of the house on whom she was aiming to make a tremendous impression; and those few words had fully revealed one of the leading points of the parvenu's tactics. Some one had told her, apparently, or she had read the statement in so-called "polite publications"—that no one could be fashionable, now-a-days, without having been "abroad"—i. e., without having made at least one tour in Europe. Now that Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame had been abroad, at least so far as beyond the Atlantic, at that very early period before she left the paternal cabin, pig and potatoes,—seemed the most probable of allegations; but in the matter of actual travel, or of those substitutes for travel which may be found in a thorough acquaintance with geography and a close study of guide-books and the best travellers, the poor woman had been as guiltless, a few weeks before, as the most stay-at-home and illiterate of her early acquaintances. But she could read, which was something, and had no conscience worth speaking of, which was something more. Perhaps some one had told her the traditional story of Tom Sheridan and his father, and the wonder which the latter expressed that the former "could not say that he had been down into a coal-pit without really going there." The worthy lady, as Rowan soon discovered by a few desultory words, had no corresponding objection, provided she could seem to have been anywhere; and there was little doubt that she had procured a guide-book or two and "read up," as Honorable Members very often do before making speeches on subjects of which they know nothing whatever,—and as snobs sometimes do in books on "Perfect Gentility" and the "Whole Art of Dining Out," before going into society which seems a little too weighty for their previous training. How well she had succeeded, may best be illustrated by a little of her conversation with the Illinoisan, who took care to introduce the subject of her "travels" (with what he had overheard, as a hint) very soon after the wagons rolled away from the Profile, and without waiting for any formal introduction.

He broke the ice with the remark, equally tempting and flattering to his next neighbor:

"You must enjoy this fine scenery very much, madam, as you have chances of comparison that some of us lack. You have travelled in Europe, I believe?"

"Yes—yes, sir," answered the lady, a little doubtful which of the two was the proper answer to so profound a sentence. If she was at all nervous about plunging into such untried waters with a total stranger, his disclamatory hint of his own experiences reassured her; and besides, one of the ladies was on the seat immediately behind, to whom she had been boasting that very morning, and it would never do to abandon the ground once taken.

"Ah, how proud you must feel, madam, of having seen so many of the wonders of nature!" the wretch went on. "I have never yet been able to cross the ocean, myself, and the conversation of foreign travellers is naturally both pleasant and instructive to me."

"Much obliged to you, I am sure," the lady returned. Some of the passengers in the wagon, who had previously observed the hero of the morning, and thought him any thing else rather than a fool, looked twice at him, at this juncture, to discover what he could mean by addressing complimentary conversation to that compound of ignorance and vulgarity. It must be owned that Clara Vanderlyn, who sat on one of the back seats while the interlocutors were in front, believing the man in earnest, felt for the moment a sensation of disgust towards him and wished her card back in her reticule. But if she and some of the others were temporarily deceived, the deception was not of long continuance.

The statement by Rowan that he had never been across the Atlantic, was the one thing necessary to reassure Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame; and that point settled, she felt sure of her ground.

"How long since you were abroad, madam, may I ask?" he continued.

"Five years," answered the lady, who no doubt felt that both her duration of standing in society and the accuracy of her memory would appear the better for a little lapse of time.

"Five years, indeed? so long?" asked the scamp, with every appearance of interest. "And did you have your dear little boy with you all the time?"

"No, my physician did not think it prudent for me to take him along of me, and I left him to home with the nurse," was the reply. The fact was, really, that at the early period named her "physician" had been a drunken Indian-herb doctor, the only description of medical man likely to visit the shanty which she yet occupied,—and that she had been (perhaps better and more honorably occupied than at any time after!) doing her own work without the hope or thought of ever employing a servant.

"Dear little fellow!" said the Illinoisan, caressing the scrubbing-brush head of the repulsive youngster. "What a pity that he could not have gone with you! By the way, madam, you went by steamer, of course. Did you take steamer for Paris, or—or—St. Petersburgh?"

By this time most of the passengers began to perceive what was coming, and there were symptoms of a titter in the back seats, but nothing that warned or disturbed the victim.

"Oh, Paris, of course!" was the answer. "Dear, delightful Paris, where the shops was so handsome and the women wore such elegant bunnits!" (See guide-books.)

"You landed at Paris direct from the steamer, I suppose?" asked the tormentor, at which question the titter really began, but still too quietly to put the lady on her guard.

"Oh, yes, of course!" was the answer. "The tide was high, and we went right up." The poor woman had probably been aground, some time, on the Hudson Overslaugh or the Shrewsbury Flats, and supposed that nothing but low tide could prevent going up to Paris by steamship.

"Let me see—what is the name of that river that takes you up to Paris?" the scamp went on, with his face contorted into a wonderful appearance of earnest thought. "The—the—the—which is it, now, the Danube or the Amazon?"

"I am not very sure," answered the lady at hap-hazard, "I almost forget, but I think it is the Amazon—yes, I know it must be the Amazon."

At about that period there was a laugh in the back part of the long wagon, and Clara Vanderlyn was as red in the face as if she had been committing some serious fault. She would unquestionably have liked to pinch that naughty fellow's ears, if not to box them. But the laugh did not disturb Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, for the young people were frolicking all the while and a hundred laughs might break out without one of them being directed at her. Halstead Rowan had kept his own face perfectly serene so far, but he evidently began to feel twitchings around the mouth which might give him trouble directly, and, for fear of the worst, he fired his concluding shots with great rapidity.

"You were in London, of course?" he asked.

"Yes, a good while; we took a house there, and seen the Queen, and the Crystal Palace—"

"Let me see—the Queen lives in the Crystal Palace, doesn't she?"

"Of course she does!" answered the traveller, who remembered just so much as that queens and palaces belonged together, and no more.

More laughing at the back of the wagon, a little choking, and some stuffing of cambric handkerchiefs into mouths pretty or the reverse. No irreparable explosion as yet, though that catastrophe could not possibly be long deferred.

"Yes—you were in London: did you go up the Pyramids?"

"No, we went to 'em, but not up 'em."

"But you went up the Alps, of course?—everybody goes up the Alps."

"Of course we did!" and the lady really bridled. "Think we would go so far as that and spend so much money, and not go up that there?"

The explosion was impending—there was already a rumbling in the distance, which should have been heeded.

"How did you go up—in what kind of a vessel did you say, madam?"

It is to be presumed that by this time the lady was considerably confused even in the smattering of information from the guide-book, with which she had commenced; and she could not have had any moral doubt remaining that the Alps was a river; for she answered, without one symptom of consciousness in her countenance:

"We went up in a steamboat, and a nasty little thing it was!"

The threatened explosion had arrived. That wagon-load of people laughed, shrieked and roared, bent double and chuckled themselves red in the face, to a degree which was very discreditable to their sense of propriety and very bewildering to the mountain echoes. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame looked around to see what was the matter, and at that moment it seemed that a dim perception must have crept through her head that she had something to do with the merriment, for she reddened, bridled and grew strangely silent. Halstead Rowan, as she looked around,—not by any means joining in the laugh, had suddenly discovered that his legs were cramped from riding, sprung over the side of the wagon and disappeared behind a bend of the road, to make the rest of the short distance to the Flume House on foot.

A mile further, after this novel lesson in geography had been taken, and the wagons drew up at the door of the Flume House, once a great caravanserai that rivalled any other in the mountains, then a mere unoccupied pendant of the all-absorbing Profile which has literally swallowed it. It stands at the lower end of the Franconia Notch proper, and the mountains fall away below it southward, so much that the feeling of oppressive isolation at the Profile is here lost entirely. But there is one charm connected with the Flume House, that can never be forgotten by those who have once stood there and looked eastward; and the merry occupants of the before-deserted piazza, that day, were not likely to be allowed to ride away without having that charm called to their attention, to be remembered ever after as one of those marvels with which Nature confounds Art and defies calculation.

Full before them, as they looked, loomed up the peak of Mount Liberty, so called, as is supposed, because the curve of the crown northward has some indefinite resemblance to the Phrygian liberty-cap of the French revolution. But a sadder and more solemn resemblance was there, needing to be pointed out at first, but asserting itself as a strange reality thenceforward, in presence or in absence. It was with a thrill of awe that the riders, as so many had done before them and as some of them had done long before, recognized the form of the Dead Washington, stretched out on the summit of the eternal mountains that seemed almost mighty and enduring enough for their awful burthen. There seemed a little obscurity in the mouth and lips, as if the shrouding pall partially covered them; but the contour of the massive nose was perfect, as the rugged peak stood relieved against the eastern sky, and above it the godlike forehead swept up southward and fell away again in the very curve of the hair drawn backward as it would be when lying in the calm repose of death. Northward the long round of Mount Liberty marked the full breast, sinking at the recumbent hip and rising again at the bend of the massive knee; while still farther away and in the exact line of symmetry, one of the peaks of the Haystack group shot up and fell suddenly on the other side, as the drapery would do over the stiffened feet. Then the resemblance was complete, unmistakable, almost fearful; and those who looked with reverent eyes realized that the Eternal Hand, thousands of years ago and in a mood that would write prophecy on the very face of the earth instead of recording it on tables of stone, had throned on the tops of the northern mountains an enduring likeness of that man yet unborn, whose glory was to gild every peak and fill every valley with the brightest and purest light of heroism.

Long, and with reverent silence only broken by an occasional exclamation of wonder, the company gazed upon that strange spectacle, more sadly suggestive than any other of the wonders of the American continent. The voice of merriment, which had been ringing so loudly but a few moments before, was hushed, and tears lay nearer to the surface than laughter. It could not be otherwise than that the spectacle, impressive always, should blend itself with the sorrow of a thousand hearts and the peril of a land, and that something of almost superstitious omen should seem to lie in the recognition. There were no words to syllable the great thoughts of that hour. How could there be? What tongue could have spoken what the heart so sadly reverberated to an inner sense that was subtler and better than hearing? "H. T.," whose tongue, as Margaret Hayley and her companions heard it, had so solemnly apostrophized the iron face of the Old Man of the Mountain in the moonlight of the night before, stood silent and with folded arms on the end of the piazza, his strange, dark face full of a feeling that seemed sad enough for death and yet determined enough for a life of almost terrible daring. He was alone. He seemed to have made, even distantly, but one acquaintance since alighting at the Profile; and that one acquaintance, Halstead Rowan, had not yet paid all the penalty of his mischief in a walk to the Flume. He had no motive to speak: perhaps under no circumstances could he have done so before that company and with the knowledge that the eyes of Margaret Hayley might be bent upon him from the other end of that group of gazers. But the man who had read the patriotic secret of the Mountain Sphynx felt the weight of that hour—who could doubt it? And if his lips had spoken, would not the words they uttered have been something like these, that have bubbled to other lips and yet been denied utterance, on the same spot and since the overcasting of our national sky by that dark cloud of war and that darker cloud of divided feeling, only to be rolled away in God's good time:

"Yes, look upon the Dead Washington, all of you, and prepare to bear the image away and keep it sacred in your heart of hearts. Dead and shrouded he lies, whose words might perchance have had power, at this fearful day in our history, to still the turbulent waves of passion and make us brothers once more. Dead and shrouded, when the day of doom may be near, and when his sword, flashing at the head of the armies of the republic, might have blinded treason and struck terror to the heart of the rebellion. Dead and shrouded, to wake not at the trump of war or the call of national peril. Yet look down upon us from the granite mountains that bore thine image a thousand years ago and will bear it until the very form and feature of nature decay—look down upon us from the heavens that are higher and more enduring even than the eternal hills, and bless us with some ray of that courage which dared the iron rain of Princeton—of that patient endurance which braved the wintry snow of Valley Forge—of that honesty which bent a world in awe and admiration—of that self-sacrificing humility which thought it but duty to refuse a crown! Not in irreverence we speak, shadow of the great dead! Thou didst live, and we sprang into existence as a nation. Thou art gone, and we wander in the night and darkness of hatred, of strife, of murder—perhaps even totter to a fall from which there is no arising. If thou hast power in the eternal world, Washington who livest, so faintly shadowed by the Washington that is dead—save us whom the might of no other nation can cast down—save us from ourselves!"

Hush! the fancy so reverently assumed cannot be cast off in a moment. Hush!—was not that low rumbling in the north which men call thunder, the voice of the Giant of Mount Liberty turning suddenly in his grave-clothes to answer the appeal? God!—if it might be so!—"Oh, for an hour of Hickory Jackson!" cried the agonized nation when the first paralysis fell upon our men in power: oh, for one moment of George Washington now!

The Celt looks for the awakening of Brian Boroihme from his long sleep in the Wicklow mountains, falsely called his death, after the red field of Clontarf, and for the deliverance of Ireland from the Saxon oppressor, which is to follow; the German is still waiting for the sounding of that horn which is to start Frederick the Redbeard from his repose in the Kypphauser, where the faithless laid him to rest, believing that he was dead, after his charmed bath in the Cilician Cydnus; even the old soldiers who guard the mighty dust of Napoleon beneath the dome of the Invalides, speak of the "Midnight Review" in other words than those of Friederich Freiligrath and hold a dim impression that the life of Austerlitz and the Pyramids must linger even after St. Helena: why may not the patriot heart of America believe that the man who of all others best represented the full glory of a nation, is immortal in body as in spirit, and that the Father of his Country will some day dash out from the sarcophagus that holds him prisoner at Mount Vernon,—to shame recreancy, to hurl incapacity from power, and to save, in its dark hour, the fabric that his great soul loved and his great hand builded?

No!—that awful presence lies unmoved on its bier on the peaks of the mountains, the blue sky the canopy of its catafalque, the waving trees the plumes of the warriors who guard it, and the hoarse storm wind its requiem. And while it so sleeps, the future of the republic, which seems to us in darkness, lies really in a Hand that knows no death and never changes in its unfaltering purpose!

But the saddest as well as the sweetest things in life have an end, and the halt of the company at the Flume House, that morning, supplied no exception to the rule. Just as the wagons were once more loaded, Halstead Rowan came striding up, his cigar smoked out, and his face the most unconscious imaginable, and took the seat which he had not long before vacated. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame was very busy, at that period, looking after some of the details of arrangement of Master Brooks Brooks' dress, which had become slightly disarranged; and perhaps she did not see him. Let us suppose so, for she certainly did not notice her late student in geography. She was a little red in the face, which let us also suppose to have been the effect of the weather and not of mortification. And so all once more in place, away dashed the wagons to that marvellous gap in the mountains which gives name to the house. The road seemed very rough and broken, the rises and descents grew sharper, and the forest scenery wilder. Galloping his four horses up a steep ascent to the left, each driver vigorously applied the brake as the wagons literally slid down the very sharpest bit of road descent to be found at the Franconia (except perhaps on some portions of the Bald Mountain)—a descent so sudden, and overhanging a ravine so frightful, that some of the handsome eyes looked larger than ever for the moment, all the riders involuntarily threw themselves back in the laboring and creaking wagons, and pretty little screams that had no affectation in them emancipated themselves from rosy lips and took excursions out into the summer air. Then thundering over a rickety wooden bridge, almost at the bottom of the ravine, and up another slight ascent, the wagons stopped under a clump of wide-spreading trees at a rough platform, and disembarked their passengers, leaving all to follow their will in examining that wonder of nature in one of her frolic moods.

And what was the Flume like, to those who that day saw it for the first time? An irregular crack or fissure in the side of the mountain, half a mile long, and from ten to fifty feet in depth, such as the wedge of some enraged Titan might have made when he had determined to split the earth asunder, and used the thunder as a beetle. Whether he was frightened by the big oval boulder which fell into the fissure half way up, and has ever since hung suspended there, touching only at the points, and apparently ready to fall at any moment—who shall say? At all events, if he intended to disrupt the earth he desisted for the time; and let us be duly thankful!

Walking laboriously over the broad flat stone platform at the mouth of the gorge, with the thin sheet of bright water straggling over it, then ascending the rough stairs of board that lay irregularly on either side, and anon climbing carefully over the mossed and slippery rocks that offered such precarious foot-hold, the party ascended the Flume and stood at last between walls of less than six feet separation, the rock rising fifty or sixty feet on either side, and almost as square as if cut by the chisel of an artificer, impassable slimy boulders piled in confusion far ahead, the rough little stream tumbling away through the wilderness of stones beneath, and a chill dampness like that of the grave striking in to the very life-blood of those who had been imprudent enough to tempt the mountains without the protection of thick garments and warm flannels. Once, a little white Blossom of the company, just unfolding to the June luxuriance of womanhood, and whose name has no interest in this narration, was tempted by a mischievous relative and protector to try walking a rounded and slippery log that bridged the chasm, a few feet above the rough rocks and water below; but her nerves failed and her head grew dizzy when she was half way across, her lip quivered and then fluttered out a little cry of alarm, and her mischievous tempter retraced his own steps just in time to catch her and keep her from an ice-cold bath and limbs bruised on the rough stones lying in the stream underneath.

There was another log spanning the Flume, a little higher up the chasm, and at a very different altitude from terra firma—hanging, in fact, like a stout black fence-rail, not less than eighty or an hundred feet in the air. Encircled by the eternal dampness rising out of the Flume, it could not be otherwise than slimy and slippery; and only a moment before the nameless Blossom tempted the log below, some of the company had looked up and remarked with a shudder that a firm foot and cool head would be necessary for the man who should tread over that frail bridge with its crumbling bark. As if the two had some mysterious connection, the moment after Blossom's misadventure, some one heard voices in that direction and looked up again. Two figures stood upon the brink, and not so far away but that at least some of the group below recognized them as "H. T." and Halstead Rowan, who had left the rest as they abandoned the wagons and commenced ascending the gorge.

Among those who looked up was Margaret Hayley, and her eyes were among those that recognized the two figures. What those people were to her, or why she said "Look!" in a quick and even agitated voice, probably the young girl could have told quite as little as either writer or reader; but such was the fact, and the motion of her eyes at the moment, accompanied by the word, drew the regards of both Captain Hector Coles and Mrs. Burton Hayley, who stood beside her at the bottom of the Flume. They, too, with the others, heard the words and saw the action that immediately followed.

Halstead Rowan had one foot thrust forward on the log, his other on the firm ground behind. "H. T." stood on the rock beside him, making no motion to cross. There was evidently a banter between them, and though they were probably not aware of the fact, their words were readily distinguishable beneath.

"None of my business, I suppose; but it is folly!" they heard spoken by the voice of "H. T."

"I suppose that every thing is folly which goes out of the hum-drum track of every-day life!" they heard Rowan reply. "But I like folly, and so here goes! Will you follow me?"

"Without wanting to go over?—no!" was the answer.

The words had scarcely left his lips when Rowan sprang forward on the log, stepping lightly, but balancing himself with some care, towards the other side. Insensibly all who saw him held their breath. If he should be correct enough in his balance, who could say that the log might not be a rotten shell, ready to fall under the heavy weight of the stout athlete? In fact, he had scarcely reached the middle when the tottering fabric seemed to give way and come toppling down into the chasm below. Not in reality; for had it done so, the career of the Illinoisan, with whom we have by no means finished, would have been ended for all time. The startling appearance was created by the dislodging of a large shell of the rotten bark by his foot, more than half costing him his balance, and bringing out from the group beneath a chorus of cries that might well have disturbed what remained of equilibrium. One cry sounded sharper and higher than all the rest: there were those present who knew from whose lips it came: enough for us to say that it did not come from those of Margaret Hayley, whose eyes were still turned upward with a feeling in them very different from fear. Before the cry had fairly died away, the peril, whatever it might have been, was past, and Halstead Rowan stood on the other side of the chasm, bowing to the group who had been observing him, as he learned from the cries, at the bottom. They saw "H. T." turn and walk away at the same moment; and then, drawing a long breath, Margaret Hayley said, much more to herself than to her immediate companions:

"What a thing beyond all admiration is that courage!"

"Which our other friend does not seem to be troubled with in any great degree!" said Captain Hector Coles, finishing out the sentence with a tone perceptibly sneering. Margaret looked round at him with a look which might have been one of inquiry, then turned away her face again and said:

"No, I suppose not! Not more than half the world can be demigods: the others must be common people, or worse!"

Whether Captain Hector Coles liked the tone of the reply, or not, is uncertain. At all events he scowled a little and said nothing more, while Mrs. Burton Hayley stole a look into the face of her daughter which had no hypocrisy in it and was full of wonder and trouble.

Five minutes afterwards the company were all again at the mouth of the Flume, and there Halstead Rowan, a second time the hero of the day, joined them. "H. T." did not make his appearance: he had struck across, the Illinoisan said, without waiting for him, over the almost impassable fallen timber and through the spruce thickets, by the cross-path to the Pool. A few minutes more sufficed to re-seat the group in their wagons and to deposit them once more at the door of the Flume House, whence they took their way on foot, straggling in every picturesque variety of locomotion towards that equally-curious pendant of the Flume which is often missed by those who visit the better-known wonder.

The Pool lay all alone, until this somewhat numerous company came to disturb its solitude. A singular object indeed—an exaggeration of all the other mountain amphitheatre fountains, nearly round, a score or more of yards in diameter, with the toe of the horse-shoe scooped out of a solid rock thirty or forty feet in height, smoothed and rounded as if cut by human hands, a bright, clear stream dashing down at that point, the rocks further away from the toe rising broken and jagged to the height of perhaps an hundred feet, and the mode of approach of the passengers a jagged line of ricketty steps, terribly perpendicular, sloping down from that highest point and presenting no temptations to the decrepit or the nervous. At the bottom of this singular basin the water, bright and clear in the few places where it ran shallow over the bleached stones, but under the shadow of the ledge so deep as to seem black as midnight.

"Nobody here!—it doesn't seem like old times!" said an elderly gentleman who had visited the Pool many times in other days,—as the ladies were with some difficulty assisted down the steps. "No boatman, and not even a boat! Where is Charon, I wonder?"

"Oh, yes, where is Merrill?" asked another. "The man with the leaky scow and the white muslin awning, who always charged a York shilling for ferrying people over to the Elysian Fields lying among the rocks and logs yonder."

"I remember, once," said the old gentleman, "that while his lieutenant paddled us around under the spray of the fall yonder, and over to the steps which used to hang from the rocks there on the opposite side, Merrill read us an autograph letter from Queen Victoria, dated in the kitchen at Buckingham Palace while the august lady said that she was rolling apple-dumplings,—and also gave us a lecture on geography, in which he proved that this spot was the very centre of the earth, from which all latitude and longitude ought to be calculated."

"Well, he was right in some degree," said Halstead Rowan, who stood near, and who fixed his regards at the same moment on Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, still looking after the welfare of that interesting child. There was not even the suspicion of a smile upon his face as he went on, and there certainly was not upon the face of the lady for whose benefit the discourse was evidently intended. "I do not know about the latitude and longitude, but this Pool is certainly the centre of the earth and exactly opposite to China, so that a plummet, with a line long enough, dropped here, would be certain to come out somewhere on the shores of the Hoangho or the Kiangku."

"Nonsense!" said one grave lady (not Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame) who did not appreciate the joke.

"Not a bit of it, madame!" said the scamp, who thereupon turned his battery at once in her direction. "There is no doubt whatever of the truth of the statement, for I have been here myself when the defunct pig-tailed Chinamen came popping up, who had committed suicide by drowning themselves on the other side of the world, on account of the cruelty of a copper-colored divinity with almond eyes and feet the size and shape of the last dumpling in the pot, or a trifling deficiency in the rat-crop or the dog-census."

"Impudence!" muttered that lady, who seemed to regard the "whopper" as a personal insult; but the majority of the company appeared to view the affair in a very different light and to be rather pleased than otherwise with the go-ahead fellow who could walk over verbal and physical bridges with the same charming recklessness. It may be anticipating to say that there was one among them, whose face had paled when he trod the log over the Flume, and who could not even laugh at the light words which she otherwise enjoyed,—so much deep and new and strange feeling lay at the bottom of the interest. And it may not be anticipating, in the minds of any who have perused the late foregoing pages with due attention, to say that that silent, thoughtful, observing one was Clara Vanderlyn, between whom and the Illinoisan there yawned a gulf of circumstance and position so wide and deep that no one but a madman (or what is madder still—a mad woman) could possibly have dreamed of stepping over it.

CHAPTER XIV.

A Disaster To Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame—Exit into the Bottom of the Pool—Nobody that could Swim, and Margaret Hayley in Excitement—"H. T." in his element, in two senses—Another Introduction and a new Hero—Scenes in the Profile parlor—Rowan and Clara Vanderlyn—The Insult.

"But what has become of the crazy old philosopher?" asked the same elderly gentleman who had first introduced the subject,—only a moment after Halstead Rowan had delivered himself of his speculations concerning the centre of the earth, China and suicide, given at the close of the last chapter.

"Oh," answered Rowan, "I was asking Jennings about him this morning, before we came away from the Profile. Did you ever hear of the mode in which the two Irishmen conducted their little debate, which ended in a couple of broken heads?"

"I do not know!" laughed the old gentleman.

"Well, they debated physically—they held what they called a little 'dishcussion wid sticks'! Poor old Merrill got into a debate with the Sheriff of Coos County, last spring a year, Jennings tells me, and he carried it on with an axe, nearly killing the official. The result of all which was that he was lugged off to jail at Wells River and the Pool is bereaved."

"Sorry that his boat is not here, at least," said the old gentleman. "We have just a nice party for circumnavigating the Pool; and I do not know that even the letter from Queen Victoria and the lecture would be so much of a bore, now that there is no danger of them."

"Couldn't manage to get up a boat, unless we improvised one out of a log," said the Illinoisan, "and that would be a little unstable, I fancy. And by the way, I think I never saw a place more dangerous-looking for a sudden tumble than that deep black pool, or one more difficult to get out of than it would prove without something afloat to depend upon. So we must give it up—the glory of the Pool has departed! Sic transit gloria big hole in the woods!"

At that moment, and when the attention of the whole company had been drawn to the peculiar depth and quality of the Pool by the last observations—an event took place which may or may not have been paralleled in the earlier history of that peculiar wonder of nature. Sambo, of those days when the negro only half ruled the great Western republic instead of ruling it altogether,—related a story about a 'coon hunt of his, in which an episode occurred at about the time when he had climbed out upon an extending limb that was supposed to have the 'coon at the end. "Just then," said Sambo, graphically—"just then I heard sumfin drap, and come to look, 'twas dis yer nigger!" The party of visitors at the Pool heard "sumfin drap" about as suddenly and unexpectedly; and when they had time to look around them, they discovered that one of their number was missing—not a very valuable member of the combination, but still one that was supposed to have the usual immortal soul and antipathy to sudden death.

There never was a troublesome boy of an age corresponding to that of Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, who did not have the propensity for climbing developed in exact proportion to the incapacity for climbing at all; and Master Brooks Brooks had not done half mischief enough that morning to be content without making another effort. As the party climbed down to the Pool, some of the members had spoken of the clearness of the water and the coolness which it was said to possess even in the heat of midsummer; and one of the ladies had extracted from her reticule one of those telescopic ring drinking-cups of Britannia which are found so convenient in touring or camping-out. Captain Hector Coles had volunteered to play Ganymede to the rest of the company, and stepping down to the edge of the Pool, balanced himself with one foot on a projecting stone, stooped down and dipped up some of the sparkling coolness, which was thereupon passed around from hand to hand and from lip to lip. That done, Master Brooks Brooks had been allowed to possess himself of the cup, very much to the disgust of the owner, but inevitably—and to make various demonstrations with it, around the verge of the water. For a moment every one had lost sight of him—his careful mother included; and during that moment he had climbed round to the western side of the Pool, on the high rocks, where he stood brandishing the cup in a series of motions which varied between mischief and idiocy. Then and there an accident, not uncommon to persons who climb to high places and are not careful of their footing there, had happened to the young scion of the baronial house of Cunninghame, who, losing balance in one of his gyrations, tumbled down some twenty or thirty feet of rock and went splash! into the Pool, just where the waters seemed deepest, darkest and most unfathomable!

Exit from view Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame, with a fair prospect, to all appearance, that he would carry out the laughable theory of Halstead Rowan, and if he ever again came to light at all, do so in a drowned condition at the antipodes. Droll enough, in a certain sense, but by no means droll in another, for that he would be drowned, even in that insignificant little puddle of water, was almost beyond doubt, and there were supposed to be maternal feelings even beneath the ridiculous finery of Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame! All heard the cry of fright that he gave in falling, and the splash as he struck the water; and at least a part of the company not only saw him disappear beneath the surface, but caught glimpses of him as he went on down—down—down towards the bottom with the unerring steadiness of a stone.

They saw him sink, but they did not see him rise again—not even in the time which should have secured that result. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame uttered a scream when she saw the boy strike the water, then yelled out: "Patsey! oh, my poor Patsey!" an exclamation entirely enigmatical as referring to a person bearing no such name,—then finally fell back into the arms of one of the old gentlemen in such a way as seriously to threaten his tumbling in after the boy, and without the least necessity for shamming nervousness to ape the "quality." She had indubitably fainted.

The situation was a peculiar one. Scarcely twenty seconds had elapsed since the boy's fall, but an hour seemed to have passed. He did not rise. It was likely that he must have been killed in the fall or struck a rock below and crushed his poor little head. Still other seconds, growing to more than a minute, and he did not rise. It was beyond doubt that he would never rise again, alive. And what could be done to save him? Nothing—literally nothing, as it appeared. All the party were ladies, except five men—Captain Hector Coles, Halstead Rowan and three others, all the latter white-haired and past the day for heroic exposure. Halstead Rowan had his wounded hand wrapped in a heavy bandage which would have disabled him in the water as thoroughly as if he had lost the limb at the elbow. For either of the old men to plunge into the Pool would have been suicide. Margaret Hayley stood beside Captain Hector Coles, the only young and unwounded man, when the accident occurred; and after one moment her eyes turned upon him with a glance that he too well understood.

"I am ashamed to say it, but I cannot swim one stroke!" he replied to that glance of half appeal and half command. The glance—unreasonably enough, of course—expressed something else the instant after.

"Oh, shame!—can nothing be done to save him?" she cried with clasped hands and in a tone that manifested quite as much of the feeling of mortification as of anxiety. At that period nearly all the women present broke out into cries of terror, as if help could be brought to the helpless by the appealing voice.

"Good heavens, ladies, what is the matter?"

It was the voice of "H. T." that spoke, and the man of the initials stood on the other side of the Pool, where he had emerged from his laborious walk over fallen trees and broken rocks from the Flume. He had his hat in his hand and was wiping the perspiration from his hot brow.

Margaret Hayley, more moved beyond herself than any of the others present (the poor mother had not yet recovered consciousness) was the first to answer; though she little thought that perhaps the destiny of a whole life was involved in the few words then to be spoken.

"Oh, sir, if you can swim, for heaven's sake try to save that boy! He has fallen into the Pool, there—there—" and she pointed with her hand to the very depth of the dark water—"and he must be at the bottom!"

"He is at the bottom, without doubt, if he has fallen in!" was the answer. "I saw him filling his pockets with bright stones, up at the Flume, and he has probably enough of them about him to keep him at the bottom till doomsday." Then, for the first time, the anxious watchers knew the reason why even in the death-struggle the body had not risen—the poor little fellow had been loading himself down with those tempting, fatal stones, to make more certain the doom that was coming!

"Can you swim, sir? I asked you if you could swim!" Margaret Hayley's voice rung across the Pool, with no little impatient petulance blended with the evident anxiety; and she seemed totally to forget, as people will forget on some occasions, that she had never been introduced to the man whom she interrogated so sharply.

"I can swim!" was the answer and the only answer. With the word he threw off his coat and kicked off the convenient Congress gaiters that enveloped his feet; and in ten seconds more he had leaped high into the air and headlong into the dark waters at the spot indicated by the hand of Margaret. So sudden had been all this, that scarcely one realized, until he had disappeared, the whole peril he encountered.

"He will strike the stony bottom and kill himself!" said one of the elderly gentlemen.

"Hot as he was, he will die with the chill, if he ever comes out!" said the second, who had medical warrant for knowing the probable consequences of such an act. Whereupon all began to realize that two deaths instead of one might be the probable event; and Margaret Hayley set her teeth hard and clasped her hands in the agonized thought that perhaps her words had driven him to the rash leap, and that he must be either that thing for which she had been so long looking, a man incarnately brave,—or willing to go out of his own nature at her command, after less than a single day's acquaintance—the latter feeling one not slow to awaken other and warmer companions in the bosom of a true woman!

After those words had been spoken, dead silence reigned except as broken by a sob of deadly anxiety from one of the ladies who could not control the fear that oppressed her. And how long that silence of oppressive anxiety lasted! It might have been a moment—it might have been five years, for any capacity of measurement given to a single member of that waiting group scattered over the rocks. Only the whilome watcher by a sick bed which might be one of death, at the instant when the crisis of disease was reached and the next minute was to decide between a life of love and usefulness and the drear silence of the grave—only the man who has lifted his faint signal of distress on a drifting wreck at sea, when a sail was in sight, the last crust eaten, and night and storm coming to end all,—only one or the other of these can realize the long agony of such moments and the eternity which can be compressed into the merest fraction of time!

They had perhaps waited sixty seconds after the disappearance of the would-be rescuer beneath the dark waters of the Pool, and already every one had given him up for lost,—when a ripple agitated its surface, a white-sleeved arm came up, then a figure bearing another. It battled wearily towards the shoaler part of the Pool, touched bottom and struggled shoreward, dropped its burthen with one glance upon it, and then toppled over—both out of danger from the water, but both apparently dead alike!

In an instant all those above had rushed down to the margin, and while some caught the drowned boy and attempted to restore the life that seemed so hopelessly fled, others, and the medical man among them, devoted more than equal anxiety to the man who appeared to have paid so dearly for his heroism. He was senseless, but his pulse still beat—the doctor discovered so much; and a fairer hand than that of the doctor sought the heart and found that the motion of that mysterious red current which bears the whole of life upon its bosom was not yet stilled forever. The hand was that of Margaret Hayley, who had drawn the head of the half-drowned man upon one knee while she kneeled on the bare stone with the other, and who seemed to feel that if that man died his blood would be upon her head and upon her soul! A dangerous position, Margaret Hayley, whether he lives or dies, for the woman who but yesterday dreamed that she kept her early love still undimmed in her heart, however the object of it might be clouded in shame and banished from her presence forever! Is that new ideal found already, and found in a man so wrapped in mystery that his very name has never yet been spoken in your presence? Fie! fie! if this is the eternity of love, about which lovers themselves have raved and poets worse raved in their behalf, any time these past five hundred years!

There is no intention of mystifying this scene, or even of prolonging it. Whatever might have been the danger, that danger was past, and the shadow of death did not loom ghastly out of it. The vigorous shaking, rolling and rubbing to which the inanimate Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame was exposed, under hands which proved themselves expert in that operation if in no other, soon restored the breath to his nostrils, though it left him a limp rag to be taken up in arms and carried away by his now recovered and half-addled mother. There was a sharp cut upon his head, and the blood flowed freely, but the wound had no depth or danger. The insensibility which had fallen upon his preserver, induced much more as was believed by the sudden chill of that ice-cold water acting upon a heated system, than even by his long exertion in recovering the little fellow's body from the bottom of the pool—this soon gave way beneath the continued rubbing bestowed upon wrists and temples, and the warmth induced by the wrapping of all the shawls and mantles in the company about his shoulders and feet. He moaned once, only a few minutes after the efforts for his resuscitation had been commenced, and a moment or two later opened his eyes and saw what face bent over him most closely. Something else than the chafing and the unaccustomed robes then sent blood to cheek and brow; and with a strength which no one had believed him to possess he sprang to his feet, to sink down again the moment after into a sitting posture but unsupported.

In that position he for the first time appeared to glance round upon the company and to recognize the whole situation. Especially his eye fell upon Captain Hector Coles, who stood at a little distance, his arms folded and nothing in his appearance indicating that he had taken any part in the labors of resuscitation, while his face looked undeniably saturnine and ill-humored. Had the mere fact that the head of a half-drowned man lay for a few moments on the knees of a lady supposed to be under his peculiar protection, so much moved the gallant warrior of the Union army, or was something more decided lying at the bottom of his observance? Perhaps words already spoken during the late progress of this narration may have indicated the state of feeling in the breast of the captain: if not, future developments will have the duty of making plain all that may be yet doubtful in that regard. At all events, something in that man's face gave to the brown cheeks of "H. T." a warmer color than they had before attained, and to his frame a strength which sent him once more to his feet, throwing off the shawls and mantles which enveloped him, and standing barefoot and in his shirt-sleeves, his hair yet plastered and dripping, his garments yet clinging to his person, the most unpicturesque of figures, and yet one of the noblest possible to employ the artist's pencil—a man fresh from one of the great perils of disinterested benevolence.

Certainly Margaret Hayley saw nothing antagonistic to romance in that tall, erect figure, half-draped though it was and shivering yet with cold and weakness. It is not impossible that the dusky brown of the face glowed with something of a sacred light, to her eyes—a subject for her waiting hero-worship, after that sad feeling of an opposite character which it had so lately been her duty to manifest. Nothing else than such an estimation could well explain, in a woman of her overweening pride, movements which took place immediately after, and which bore their fruit, at no distant day, in placing her in a position of such terrible conflict with herself that no calamity occurring beneath the waters of the Pool but might have been reckoned a mercy in comparison.

Halstead Rowan, too sure of his admiration of the conduct of his new friend to be in a hurry about expressing it, had done what his wounded hand did not prevent his doing, by springing across the stream below and bringing the discarded shoes and coat from the rock where they lay. All the rest, except poor Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, yet busy with her partially resuscitated boy, crowded round the new hero of the hour to offer their thanks and congratulations; but it was Margaret Hayley who took him by the hand as he stood, unmindful of the scowl of Captain Hector Coles that gloomed upon her, and said:

"I do not know, sir, by what name to thank you—"

"I believe I am right in calling you Miss Hayley," was the answer, in a voice as yet somewhat weak and tremulous. "My own name is Horace Townsend, and my business is that of a lawyer at—at Cincinnati." So we, like those of the company who had noticed the initials without taking the trouble to possess themselves of the whole name by the arrival-book at the office, have the blanks filled at last, and may discard the use of the two mysterious letters.

"I was only half intentionally the means, Mr. Townsend," the young girl went on, "of plunging you into a situation of danger without the least right to do so; and yet I do not know that I can be sorry for the liberty I have taken, as it may have been the cause of saving a life that would otherwise have been lost, and of my witnessing an act of disinterested generosity which I can never forget, or forget to honor, while I live."

"You do me altogether too much honor," was the reply, in a somewhat steadier voice. "I have really done nothing, except to make an exhibition of myself by my weakness. There was no danger to me in the water, for I am a good swimmer and ought to be able to dive well; but I suppose that I stayed too long under, for I could not find the little fellow at once, and the chill of the water no doubt affected me, after getting warm in climbing over those logs. That is all, and I really hope you will all forget that the unpleasant affair has occurred, as I shall certainly do after I have found a suit of dry clothes."

He spoke pleasantly, but with nothing of the rattling gayety which seemed to characterize his rival of the day—the hero of the bear-stakes; and once again while he was speaking, Margaret Hayley seemed strangely moved and partially shuddered at something in the tones of the voice. As he finished, he bowed and turned away, as if quite enough had been said, and the lady also moved away a step or two and rejoined her escort. Halstead Rowan came up with the coat and shoes, and as he dropped them on the rock at the feet of Townsend grasped his hand with his own unwounded one, with a pressure so warm and manly that it told volumes of respect and regard.

"I am nowhere!" he said. "I dared you over that log; but you have gone where I should not like to follow, and done it for something, while mine was merely a prank. And by the way—" they were at that moment a little apart from the others, and Rowan spoke low—"do you know where your head lay when you came to?"

"Hush! for heaven's sake, hush!" said Townsend, quickly and with something in his face that made the other pause instantly. The conversation, at that point, was not renewed there and then.

A portion of the company had by that time commenced ascending the steps, carrying the abated boy-nuisance and accompanying his mother. Townsend managed to draw on the discarded shoes over his wet stockings, put on his coat and accompanied the rear-guard with very slight assistance, enjoying a continued walking-bath, but no doubt consoled for any discomfort by the reflection that he had been where few men had ever plunged and come out alive,—and perhaps yet more moved by some other reflections of a much more mixed character.

An hour later, the whole party had reached the Profile House once more, and Horace Townsend, as he named himself and as we must continue to name him in deference to his own statement, was the happy possessor of a dry suit, a slight headache and an eventual nap which left him fresh as if he had bathed in the Pool as a hygienic measure. Master Brooks Brooks Cunninghame needed longer renovating, but he came round during the afternoon, with the fatal facility of those who are of no use in the world, and was quite ready for supper. And what a buzzing there was about the Profile all the afternoon, while those who had witnessed the affair at the Pool detailed it, with additions, to those who had remained at the house, and those who had not caught the name or address of the stranger ran to the book to satisfy themselves, and speculations as to his married or single state were indulged in, and the Cincinnati lawyer underwent, without his being thoroughly aware of the fact, all the mental manipulations and verbal remouldings incidental to any one who treads out of the common path, whether creditably or discreditably, among the half idle and more than half ennuyée habitues of a watering place.

One or two additional peeps at events of that afternoon must be taken, before passing on to those of the evening, which were to prove quite as momentous in some regards.

Peep the first. Margaret Hayley kept her chamber all the afternoon, pleading headache and fatigue, while Mrs. Burton Hayley and Captain Hector Coles "did" Echo Lake and talked very confidentially. A large part of that time the young girl lay on her bed, her eyes closed but by no means sleeping—thinking, thinking, thinking, until her brain seemed to be in a whirl and all the world unreal.

Peep the second. At a certain hour in the afternoon, unknown then to the other members of the Vanderlyn family but too well known to them afterwards, as the sequel proved, Halstead Rowan, rapidly improving if not indeed presuming upon his acquaintance of the morning, enticed Clara Vanderlyn away to the ten-pin alley and inducted her into the art and mystery of knocking down bilstead pins with a lignum vitæ ball, apparently to the satisfaction of that young lady, who should certainly have held herself above such an amusement of the athletic canaille. If the lady, with two hands, beat her instructor with one, he was no more than justly punished.

Peep the third. Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, walking through one of the corridors, heard two young ladies, accompanied by a gentleman, say: "Patsey! oh, my poor Patsey!" in such dolorous tones and with what seemed so meaning a look towards her, as tended to recall an unfortunate exclamation at the Pool very forcibly to her recollection, and to put her into a frame of mind the exact reverse of felicitous. This was not improved by the discovery that Mr. Brooks Cunninghame had fallen into the company of certain stage-drivers, at the bar, and had imbibed whiskey with them to an extent which rounded his brogue but did not assure the steadiness of his perpendicular or add to the respectability of his general demeanor.

And now to the event of the evening, which seemed eminently fit to close a day so full of adventure that the movements of a dozen ordinary days might have been compressed into it. Most of this, from reasons which will eventually develop themselves, is to be seen through the eyes of one who has been before called "the observer."

When Horace Townsend came out late from supper that evening, after a meal at which the succulent steaks, the flaky tea-biscuit and the sweet little mountain strawberries had not been quite so fully enjoyed as they might have been with a little additional company at table,—harp, horn and violin were again sounding in the long parlors, as they had been the evening before, and much more attention was being paid to them than when the full moon was their momentary rival. Perhaps not less than half the beauty, grace and gallantry then assembled at the Profile, were gathered under the flashing lights, dancing, promenading, flirting, and generally floating down the pleasant stream of moderate watering-place dissipation. The Russian "Redowa" was sounding from brass and string as he entered the long parlor from the hall; and among the figures sweeping proudly by to that most voluptuous of measures, he instantly recognized two whose identity could not indeed have been very well mistaken under any circumstances. The larger and coarser figure wore on one of its hands a glove several sizes too large—one, indeed, that might have been constructed by some glove-maker of the Titan period: Halstead Rowan was whirling Clara Vanderlyn lazily around in the dance.

The strange introduction of the morning, then, had already produced its effect, and the possible romance to be built out of that rescue was coming on quite as rapidly as even a sensation novelist could have anticipated. Horace Townsend, whose eyes seemed to be wandering in search of some face or figure which did not fall under their view, but who had been gazing with undisguised admiration, for some hours the previous day, on those of this very Clara Vanderlyn—Horace Townsend thought, as he saw the manly arm of Rowan spanning the pliant white-robed waist of his partner, that seldom could the old illustration of the rugged oak and the clinging ivy be better supplied,—and that if fate and fortune had set, as they too evidently seemed to have done, an eternal bar between the two, they had predestined to remain apart one couple whom the fitness of nature would certainly have joined. His frank, hearty, manly energy, deficient in some of the finer cultures and at times approaching to roughness, and her gentle, womanly tenderness, with almost too much of delicate refinement, seemed mentally to blend in the thought of the future and of the children likely to spring from such a union, as physically stood in relief and pleasing contrast the close-curled dark hair and the shower of waving gold.

Passing still further down the room, either in that quest which has before been hinted at, or in the search for a vacant seat among the male and female wall-flowers, Townsend came upon the mother of the young lady. Mrs. Vanderlyn was standing beside a centre-table, under one of the chandeliers, an illustrated book in her hand, and apparently absorbed in the contemplation of some of the engravings after Landseer and Corbould. But books have been known, many times in the history of the world, to be used for the same purpose as fans or fire-screens, (or even spectacles, for that matter), and looked over; and the lawyer felt a sudden curiosity awakened to examine the eyes, especially as the lady was standing in such a position as to command the dancers.

He was not at all disappointed in the surmise which he seemed to have formed. The haughty matron had no eyes for her book, but really had her gaze fixed, with a close pressure of the eye-balls against the brows, on her daughter and Halstead Rowan. And no one who had only seen it under more favorable circumstances, would have believed it possible that a face of such matronly comeliness could be brought to look so harshly—even vindictively. The eyes were literally fierce; and the mouth was set with a firm, hard expression which brought the full lower lip perceptibly over the upper.

Suddenly the observer saw the features relax and the whole expression change. He turned instantly and half involuntarily, and saw that a substitution had taken place in partners. Without quitting the floor, Miss Vanderlyn had accepted the proffered hand of a young Boston exquisite who was already rumored around the Notch to be the heir of a paternal half million,—and was whirling away in another polka. Rowan was gone. A second glance showed that he had not left the room, but that he stood far back in one of the corners, alone and silent, and his eyes, heedless of the amount of observation which their glance might excite, fixed in profound admiration on the beautiful girl whom he had just quitted. Then the expression of his face seemed for the moment to change, and the same emotions might have been read there that had startled at least one of the spectators the evening before at the piazza—the same emotions of contending pride and abasement, hope and fear, but intensified now so that there could be no mistaking their import.

At that stage Horace Townsend left the room, perhaps to pursue the personal search which had so far proved unavailing. He, who had himself been originally observing the young girl with such admiration, saw, or thought that he saw, the materials for a very pretty if not a very painful romance, in which the two would form the chief dramatis personæ. Two or three conditions, he thought, were already evolved: an unmistakable mutual interest—observation and dislike on the part of the aristocratic mother—to be followed by eventual discovery on the part of the weaker and yet more aristocratic brother—an unpleasant eclaircissement—coolness born of the very warmth underlying—a parting in pleasant dissatisfaction with themselves and each other—and perhaps a shadow of blended sweet and painful memory over the whole of two after lives!

Then the lawyer passed out to the piazza and paced with measured step up and down that promenade and the plateau in front, for perhaps more than half an hour. He might have been entirely absorbed in the contemplation of the possible fortunes of Chicago and Baltimore; and he might have found matter for thought much more personal to himself. At all events the starlight and the coming moon seemed to be company which he failed to find elsewhere; and even the dusky shadows of the bears, deserted by their friends of the sunshine and walking their weary rounds like sentinels, possibly supplied something denied him by humanity. His step was that of a man restless, absorbed and ill at ease; his head had fallen forward on his breast; and once, when he was so far away from the loiterers on the piazza that no ear was likely to catch his words, he muttered something that could scarcely have found an application to the persons of the drama in the parlor. That murmur ran:

"I suppose this is the most dishonorable action in my life—planning to betray confidence and take an unfair advantage. Why did he tell me so much before he went to Europe? Pshaw!" and he put his hand to his brow and walked on for a moment in silence. "I will not go back—I will try the experiment—I will win that woman, if I can, under this very name, now that I begin to understand her weakness so well. And if I do—heavens, in what a situation shall I have placed her and myself! And will she ever forgive the deception? No matter!—let the future take care of itself."

Either the stars grew less companionable, then, at the thought that some strange deceit was being wrought beneath them, or the soliloquist felt that there yet remained something worth looking after within the parlor, for he looked up at one of the windows of the second story, said: "Ah, no light there, at last!" stepped back to the piazza and once more entered the house and the dancing-room.

The music was still sounding as merrily as ever, and as he re-entered the room a new set was forming. In the very midst of those who were preparing to join it, full under the blaze of the central chandelier, stood Clara Vanderlyn. She was for the moment motionless, and he had better opportunity than before of scanning her really radiant loveliness. She wore a simple evening-dress of white, with a single wild-flower wreathed in her bright auburn hair and a single jewel of value set like a star at the apex of the forehead, confined by a delicate and almost unseen chain of gold which encircled her head. Frank Vanderlyn, in full evening-dress, was standing a few feet off, in conversation with some young men with whom he had already formed an acquaintance, and did not seem to be preparing to join the set. A hurried glance around the room did not show that either Mrs. Vanderlyn or Halstead Rowan was present.

The band struck up a schottische, and all began to take partners. At this moment Mrs. Vanderlyn came through the door-way from the hall, sweeping in with more of that pronounced haughtiness which seemed indexed by her face and carriage, than any of the visitors at the Profile had before seen her exhibit, and creating a kind of impression upon those near whom she passed, that they were suddenly taken under proprietorship. She swept very near the lawyer as he stood at the left of the door-way, and passing down the room touched her son on the arm. And the lawyer could not, if he would (which seemed not over probable) have avoided hearing the single word that she uttered, almost in Frank's ear, and in a low, concentrated tone:

"Remember!"

Frank Vanderlyn nodded, with a supercilious smile upon his face, as though he understood the direction; and the stately mother swept down the room and partially disappeared among the crowd of quiet people below.

Clara Vanderlyn stood for the moment alone, as the band struck up. Whether she had received and declined invitations to dance, or whether no one had found the temerity to offer himself with the chance of refusal, seemed doubtful, for she certainly appeared to have no partner. But as the first couple moved forward to take their places, a tall form darkened the door-way for an instant, and Halstead Rowan was again at the fair girl's side, his face literally radiant with pride and triumph. There was no word spoken at that moment, and it would seem that there must have been some previous understanding between them, for her hand was instantly placed within his arm when he offered it, and her face reflected his own with a look of gratification that any close observer could not well avoid noticing.

Both had taken a step forward to join the set, when an interruption took place of so painful a character as at once to call the attention of every one within hearing; and Horace Townsend, standing very near, had a sudden opportunity to compare the reality with his unspoken foreboding of half an hour before. Frank Vanderlyn suddenly left the group with whom he had been conversing but a few feet away, stepped up to his sister, and before either she or Rowan could have been aware of his intention, drew her hand away from the arm of her escort, and somewhat rudely placed it within his own, with a bold glance at Rowan and the words:

"Miss Clara Vanderlyn, if you wish to dance, your family would prefer that you should select a different partner from the first low-bred nobody who happens to fall in your way—a good enough ten-pin-alley companion, perhaps, but not quite the thing in a ball-room!"

"Oh, brother!"

The face of the poor girl, so foully outraged, first flushed, then whitened, and she seemed on the point of sinking to the floor with the shame of such a public insult and exposure. She might indeed have done so, under the first shock, had not the arm of Frank supported her. The next instant it was evident that all the pride of the Vanderlyns had not been exhausted before her birth, for she jerked away her arm from its compulsory refuge, and stood erect and angry—all the woman fully aroused. Her glance of withering contempt and scorn, then directed at the ill-mannered stripling who called himself her brother, was such a terrible contrast to the sweet and almost infantile smile which rested on her face in happier moments, that it would have been no difficult matter to doubt her identity.

As for Halstead Rowan—at the moment when the cruel act was done and the insulting words were spoken, he turned instantly upon the intruder, evidently failing to recognize him in the sudden blindness of his rage. His right hand, though the injured one, clenched as it might have done under the shock of an electric battery, and Townsend saw him jerk it to the level of his shoulder as if he would have struck a blow certain to cause regret for a lifetime. But he had no occasion to interpose, for the outraged girl's "Oh, brother!" came just in time to prevent the commission of the intended violence. Instantly his hand dropped; Clara Vanderlyn's expression of angry contempt, easily read under the full glare of the chandelier, chased the fierce rage from his face if it did not root out the bitterness from his heart; he bowed low to the sister, cast a glance upon the brother which he did not seem likely soon to forget; and in another moment, passing rapidly between the few who surrounded the door-way, he touched Horace Townsend forcibly upon the arm, nodded to him with a gesture which the latter readily understood as a request to follow, and the two passed out from the parlor, the hall and the house.

It is not easy to describe the scene in the parlor which followed the denouement that has been so feebly pictured. The music sounded on, but the set remained unformed and no one seemed to heed it. The room was instantly full of conversation in regard to the strange event, more or less loud in its tone. Frank Vanderlyn, calculating upon the sympathies of a company principally composed of wealthy and fashionable people, looked around him as if for approbation of what he had done, but did not appear to receive it. It was not difficult for him to read in the faces near him that the sympathies of the whole company were with the insulted person, most of the members of it, if they had no other reason for the feeling, remembering the event of the bear-stakes in the morning and thinking that if the Illinoisan was to receive any thing from the Vanderlyn family that day, it should have been gratitude instead of insult. Made painfully aware of this state of feeling, the young man paled, bit his lips, then passed rapidly out of the room and disappeared, leaving his sister still in the attitude of outraged sensibility and mortification, which she retained, uttering no word to any one and not even casting a glance around the room, until Mrs. Vanderlyn, who had apparently constituted herself the reserve force for the attack upon her daughter's dignity which Frank had so gallantly led, swept up from below and led her unresistingly away up the stair-case to their apartments.

The set was finally formed, and a few more figures were danced in the parlor of the Profile that evening; but the painful incident just recorded had dulled the sense of enjoyment, and the company thinned out and eventually dispersed to earlier beds than they might have found under other circumstances.

CHAPTER XV.